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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-05T20:26:21.477" Score="6" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;seven questions&lt;/a&gt; we should answer before the end of the beta is &quot;What should our logo and site design look like?&quot; We need to consider several aspects of our site's design:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the aesthetic of our site? (sophisticated, literary, inviting, cozy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What colors should be used for the navigation elements and background?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should our logo be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-05-05T22:47:48.190" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T22:47:48.190" Title="What should the theme of the site be?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T22:47:53.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-05T21:19:34.397" Score="19" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/352/write-an-elevator-pitch-tagline&quot;&gt;Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are closing this domain naming thread. It is asking the &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; wrong question. See this blog post for details: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/domain-names-the-wrong-question/&quot;&gt;Domain Names: Wrong Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're going to keep the name english.stackexchange.com. But we WILL be setting up redirects from the more &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; domains names. (e.g. seasonedadvice.com to cooking.stackexchange.com, basicallymoney.com to money.stackexchange.com, and others as we go through the list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New question: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Write and Elevator Pitch / Tagline!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/352/write-an-elevator-pitch-tagline&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Click here to contribute ideas and vote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[original message text below]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;the seven essential meta questions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search for domain name typically&#xA;starts very early during the private&#xA;beta. And for good reason: Naming is&#xA;really, really hard. Add to that, the&#xA;rare commodity that good domain names&#xA;have become, and there’s no wonder why&#xA;there is such angst that this process&#xA;not be made public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But rather than saying “we can’t&#xA;discuss this at all,” we take our&#xA;chances by having these discussions&#xA;openly in the community. So far, we&#xA;haven’t seen any problems. But, if a&#xA;muse visits you in the night and&#xA;personally entrusts you as the keeper&#xA;of the perfect, amazingly good domain&#xA;name, feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/98786/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;email me privately&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When considering domain names, keep&#xA;these basic guidelines in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The domain name should be available.&#xA;You can check domain name availability&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.whois.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prefer dot-com names over other&#xA;top-level domains.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prefer non-hyphenated names.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-10-13T17:31:04.457" Title="What should our domain name be?" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="39" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2010-10-09T02:32:22.577" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-06T00:01:30.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-05T21:43:40.037" Score="15" ViewCount="1285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no fan of the phrase, but it's going to come up (often).  Do we need...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to flag it as offensive? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to have a FAQ recommending against its use?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to &quot;suck it up&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to indicate that while one can self-identify that way, one can't use that phrase for others?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just thinking &quot;aloud&quot; and wondering what others think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification (possibly the first of many):  I find the word &quot;Nazi&quot; more tacky than offensive in this context and would love to see the phrase disappear.  (I self-identify as a &quot;pedantic *hole&quot; to avoid using the phrase.)  My bigger issue is that I expect the phrase to be used as a pejorative address to pedantic proscriptive grammarians.  It's the same sort of conversation stopper (and argument starter) as calling someone a &quot;fanboy&quot; on a programming site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T22:35:09.830" LastActivityDate="2014-07-05T00:24:41.687" Title="&quot;Grammar Nazis&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="59" CreationDate="2010-08-05T21:53:59.997" Score="10" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this isn't like French that has a somewhat recognize but debatable effective governing body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have the OED, Websters dictionary, the various style guides like the MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are all just going by ear, how are we to avoid a lot of &quot;to-may-toh&quot;/&quot;to-mah-toh&quot; discussions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2010-08-21T00:33:32.190" LastActivityDate="2010-08-21T00:33:32.190" Title="Since it isn't in the FAQ, are we as answerers expected to appeal to any of the various English authorities?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-05T21:54:10.277" Score="11" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about usage in different geographical areas are going to come up a lot.  Plenty of answers are going to have to distinguish between standard usage on one continent versus another.  Is there anything about this that we want to standardize?  How do we want to tag it?  Or is it too early to plan for and we should see how things shake out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2010-08-09T13:14:33.783" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T13:14:33.783" Title="American vs. British vs. Aussie, vs... ?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="7" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2010-08-05T21:58:04.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nazi is socially unacceptable when it is being used is a positive light and implying some sort of off-topic approval of real life Nazis.  That would be offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a slur against people who--how can we put this positively--are zealous in enforcing their personal view of grammar, what else should we call them?  The technical term would &quot;prescriptive grammarians,&quot; which is a bit long in comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T21:58:04.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="8" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-08-05T22:01:54.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by the list of dialects of English in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, there are a lot of dialects of English.  That would be a lot of tags.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T22:01:54.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-08-05T22:19:57.180" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if the questioner specifically wants to know about the usage in one region (a tourist from one Anglophone country to another?), it may be worth mentioning in the question, but we probably don't need tags as a general rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it is good for those giving answers or usage advice to specify what variety of English they are most familiar with (and of course, if they're familiar with more than one, to point out differences on the topic in question). On the group alt.usage.english (as well as elsewhere), the abbreviations AmE, BrE, AusE etc. are common for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T22:19:57.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="10" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2010-08-05T22:25:05.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term is out there; it is widely understood and lacks a ready alternative.  I propose we use &quot;GN&quot;, with or without scare quotes, to mean this without calling anyone a Nazi Nazi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T22:25:05.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2010-08-05T22:48:05.260" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Grammar nazi&quot; is a bit of silliness most often self-applied and when applied to others, in my experience, is done so with an intent of gentleness. So I would tread lightly before waving around banners about how offensive or tacky the term is and just let it be because it's more likely to spin up ugly debates to complain about it than it would be to just ignore it. I &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk%3aList_of_commonly_misused_English_words#this_whole_page_teeters_dangerously_on_the_brink_of_POV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;once used the term and apparently offended someone&lt;/a&gt;, and would probably never do it again, but other may not have had that lesson, or are perhaps just less sensitive than me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, given that more than one person self-identified as a grammar nazi during the commitment phase on Area 51, I don't think drawing lines in the sand or preparing for a battle on this matter is a good idea unless/until it actually becomes problematic. Otherwise you risk making a mountain out of a molehill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-07-05T00:24:41.687" LastActivityDate="2014-07-05T00:24:41.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-08-05T23:13:22.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My preferred authorities are posts on &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt; and citations in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.americancorpus.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt;. Following that, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://m-w.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each authority can have weight in a discussion, but if someone appeals to e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garners_Modern_American_Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Garner's Modern American Usage&lt;/a&gt; or Fiske's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/158297313X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dictionary of Disagreeable English&lt;/a&gt; as some kind of decisive authority rendering opposing opinions (based on evidence of actual usage) moot, they shouldn't be surprised to get downvoted by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T23:13:22.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-08-06T01:39:14.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;nohat &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/since-it-isnt-in-the-faq-are-we-as-answers-expected-to-appeal-to-any-of-the-var/13#13&quot;&gt;has listed&lt;/a&gt; lots of appropriate references. I'm a fan of Language Log and OED myself. I also think Google is a great tool, at least for comparison purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a reference to one of these is necessarily important, though it lends credibility. More than anything, I think an appeal to one of these sources should provide the ability to find more information on the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think we will find at least some situations haven't yet been addressed by these credible authorities. In these cases, do you reference academic papers if possible? How far should you attempt to answer a question on your own—can tweaking and reviewing a home-grown answer be a community responsibility? I would say yes, especially so in the case of grammaticality judgements, where native speaker intuition is infallible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjectivity in areas of debate will be unavoidable, and permissible to some extent. E.g., &quot;How do I pronounce x&quot; would be fine, but &quot;is this better than x&quot; is obviously something to be closed. I think StackOverflow's rules would work fine: &quot;Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T01:52:46.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-06T01:59:44.610" Score="11" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is a spoken language; its phonetics vary largely and are an important part of &quot;knowing&quot; English and asking questions about it. We will undoubtably deal with questions related to English pronunciation, general questions about English phonology and phonotactics, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we transcribe these sounds? I would nominate the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we encourage the unified use of the IPA throughout all questions? Should we?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;IPA entry is hard. Can we provide a web interface without complicating text entry?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-10T03:45:26.917" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T06:00:20.280" Title="IPA usage, entry" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="46" CreationDate="2010-08-06T02:09:05.497" Score="9" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the questions here could be boiled down to writing style, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138/is-it-wrong-to-start-sentences-with-in-which-case&quot;&gt;Is it wrong to start sentences with &amp;quot;in which case&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97/apostrophical-query-a-buyers-remorse-b-buyer-remorse-c-buyers-remorse-d&quot;&gt;What is the correct spelling of &amp;quot;buyer* remorse&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the site policy on answering and voting for subjective things like style preferences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T04:52:18.837" Title="Writing style questions" Tags="|discussion|subjective-topics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="17" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T02:12:05.460" Score="14" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering who the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;target audience&lt;/a&gt; of the site is. We obviously want to start to attract big minds in the field of English, but does this primarily entail pedantic usagists or students of English linguistics or philology? Do we want to help write essays, or determine the grammaticality of a sentence (and why), or both? I'm feeling a pull in two directions, and though I'm tempted to label usage (especially when concerned with orthography) as bad, it does have some benefits, particularly in popularity of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we have a good idea of who this site is meant to be serving, we can start promoting it. Any ideas there? I fully intend on passing this by word-of-mouth, but are ads on prominent dictionary sites for example worthwhile? Do we want to promote to &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, and that large of an audience? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edit] I'm bumping this question up because we're working on site promotion at Stack Exchange HQ.  What do you all think is the best way to go about this? Right now, I'm following a bunch of blogs and twitter accounts. Is there anyone who isn't a SE user that I should be paying special attention to? Where are you following these people, and why are they interesting/important/influential? Any ideas would be really helpful. --Lauren Ψ, CHAOS Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="11387" LastEditDate="2011-08-05T19:38:25.950" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T14:41:47.933" Title="How can we promote this site?" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2010-08-06T02:20:17.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this has a lot to do with deciding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17/whos-the-audience-how-to-promote&quot;&gt;who the audience of the site is&lt;/a&gt;. It's my opinion that the site shouldn't be focused on matters of written style, especially punctuation. This is doubly compounded when all examples given are perfectly understandable, attested English. I think signaling the difference between grammaticality and written formal standards is far enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples of style that are acceptable, though: for example, which sociolect or register to adopt in which situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T02:20:17.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2010-08-06T04:52:09.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting, I've never heard of anyone being legitimately offended &amp;#8212; as opposed to mock offended for comedic effect &amp;#8212; by the term &quot;Grammar Nazi.&quot;  The people I grew up around and the people I hang out with simply don't associate it with the historical Nazis.  If anything, they and I use it for friendly ribbing or self-deprecation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I can certainly understand how it could come across as offensive to others, particularly those with more direct experience with historical Nazis (I'm only in my mid-20s).  I'm on board with making it official policy to frown on the term.  Also, I suggest using the equally silly but less emotionally charged &quot;Grammar Police&quot; as a replacement for those times when GN is used by, say, a new user or someone who really wants to convey a certain tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T04:52:09.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2010-08-06T04:53:44.737" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with use of the IPA, although we shouldn't pounce on anyone who doesn't know it. I would be in favor of experienced, high-reputation users getting into the habit of adding IPA to questions that don't have it but need it. (But not removing non-IPA pronunciation information). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for IPA text entry, for starters, we can point people to sites like this &lt;a href=&quot;http://weston.ruter.net/projects/ipa-chart/view/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA keyboard&lt;/a&gt; for assistance in typing IPA, although one customized for English sounds would be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we'll definitely need a big section in the FAQ discussing pronunciation and ways for representing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T04:53:44.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24" CreationDate="2010-08-06T04:56:26.980" Score="9" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Title says it all, really.  Users on every SE site since and including SO want to post fun polls, &quot;best of&quot; lists, &quot;how to&quot; lists and discussions about sometimes-only-tangentially-related topics.  And every point on the spectrum from &quot;this should never be allowed&quot; to &quot;this should always be allowed&quot; is represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we feel about such questions on English Language and Usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-09-26T08:37:20.610" Title="Are we okay with polls, &quot;List of X&quot; questions and discussions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-06T05:12:20.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;strong&gt;Present Perfect&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;presentperfect.com&lt;/em&gt; is not available, but the registrar is Network Solutions, which makes me think it might be easier to get than other squatted names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ugh, there seems to be content there now.  It's just a Flash placeholder, but it's probably enough to disqualify the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="94" LastEditDate="2010-08-28T16:50:57.903" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T16:50:57.903" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-06T05:12:20.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22" CreationDate="2010-08-06T05:22:44.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW I'm much close to &quot;this should never be allowed&quot; than &quot;this should always be allowed.&quot;  SO built a reputation on good, quick answers to objective questions; that's part of what makes the SE model so special.  &quot;What are the best quotes about grammar?&quot; isn't inherently a bad question.  Neither is &quot;When are Florida oranges in season?&quot;  I wouldn't want to see either one on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T05:22:44.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22" CreationDate="2010-08-06T05:55:53.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the &quot;best tips of&quot; and &quot;hidden secrets of&quot; of programming languages on SO to be really fun and informative. I'm for this, as long as it's on topic, i.e., about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T05:55:53.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T08:14:33.753" Score="11" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, following common formatting I've seen in English style guides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He went to the shops&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Him went to the shops *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe italicizing bad sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He went the shops&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T17:42:07.987" Title="Should we have a standard way of indicating deliberately malformed sentences?" Tags="|discussion|style|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2010-08-06T09:04:39.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the provisional name of the proposal (&quot;English language and &lt;strong&gt;usage&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;), I would expect that questions about usage &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; acceptable — and that's what these questions are: whether some usage is common, formal, regional, &quot;correct&quot;, acceptable etc. This seems to be what is of most general interest, too. Aren't all usage questions &quot;subjective&quot;? Isn't it true that there's no &quot;correct&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot; in grammar these days, and everything is determined by usage? :p&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T09:04:39.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26" CreationDate="2010-08-06T15:03:51.483" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's common practice in linguistic circles to mark a sentence ungrammatical with an asterisk, and of questionable grammaticality with a question mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;He went to the shops.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&quot;Him went to to the shops.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?&quot;He goed to the shops.&quot; really contrived, but I hope you understand that I didn't have time to think of something better ;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm absolutely for this, and it should be part of the faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T15:03:51.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="29" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22" CreationDate="2010-08-06T17:08:07.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having a policy about such things seems like a solution looking for a problem. We don't yet have any problems with these kind of questions. I think an occasional language-related poll or list question isn't going to crowd out the useful content, so I don't see a strong need to bring down the axe hard on an issue that isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T17:08:07.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T18:01:10.187" Score="11" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems like pretty much every question is a usage question, so keeping around a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;&quot; tag seems about as pointless as having a &quot;programming&quot; tag at Stack Overflow would be.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does anyone object to my re-tagging questions to not have the pointless tag &quot;usage&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="184766" LastEditDate="2016-10-29T22:19:08.557" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T22:19:08.557" Title="Does the &quot;usage&quot; tag have any value?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="31" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2010-08-06T19:20:33.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There could be legitimate etymology questions that only barely relate to usage, but I suppose it's a banishable tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T19:20:33.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="32" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2010-08-06T19:38:59.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally hope there will be quite a few questions not related to usage, but rather underlying structure and modelling that, phonetic properties, etc. I can imagine quite a few questions that aren't usage questions, and am finding it hard to see why the extra tag hurts in general when removing it would certainly hurt other questions like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this has a lot to do with whether or not this Q&amp;amp;A site is for primarily for usage questions, or about the nature of English, and why it is the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T19:38:59.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2010-08-06T19:43:03.577" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Half of the site name has nothing to do with usage.  The &quot;English language&quot; covers topics like  the history of the language and other things only tangentially related to usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T19:43:03.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="34" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17" CreationDate="2010-08-06T19:47:21.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to get the attention of language mavens and linguists.  It will be interesting to see how well they get along, since they have a fundamentally different view on how language works.  The former see right and wrong English, generally assigning right to the higher register and prestige dialects.  The linguist on the other hand tends to mark anything that a fluent speaker says as right, even if the dialect is not prestigious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any SO site, it works best for questions which can be objectively answered.  This proposes a problem from the language mavens because they are right on account of authority, not for any scientific reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2010-09-06T07:08:44.257" LastActivityDate="2010-09-06T07:08:44.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="35" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T20:40:55.663" Score="8" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200/what-manual-of-style-should-i-use-for-technical-writing-for-us-federal-government&quot;&gt;What manual of style should I use for technical writing for US Federal Government documents?&lt;/a&gt;, I posted the following comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Interesting question, but this is really about government work, not English language usage. You could just as easily ask which brand of pen to use while doing government work, or what make of car to lease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@MatthewMartin replied with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I disagree, your comment would make a good meta question though. Someday someone is going to ask a question about the Chicago Style Guide or try to answer a question by appeal to it. Should we close those for being related to the tools of the trade of a journalist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was I right?  Was Matthew?  Neither of us?  &lt;strong&gt;Both of us???&lt;/strong&gt;  Discuss!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T10:42:06.960" Title="Are questions about style guides appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="36" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2010-08-06T20:47:49.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite what was said above, in general, I think questions about style guides &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; appropriate.  It's likely that such questions will be about usage, which is definitely in the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, though, the fact that the OP asked about a style guide was incidental.  If he wants to know what style guide to use for US government work, he should find out what the government recommends; the question has no direct tie to English.  The answer is probably listed in the same document that provides information about the official government pen &amp;#8212; the US government purchases extra-cheap pens in bulk that actually have &quot;U.S. Government&quot; printed on the side &amp;#8212; and approved motor vehicles for fleet use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T20:47:49.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T21:05:41.323" Score="18" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I knew this question was there: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78/when-is-it-appropriate-to-use-that-as-opposed-to-which&quot;&gt;When is it appropriate to use ‘that’ as opposed to ‘which’?&lt;/a&gt;, but I tried searching for it and couldn't find it. Many usage questions concern function words in English, so it would be nice if we could search for those function words and get reasonable results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T14:19:37.607" Title="Can't search for a question about &quot;that&quot; and &quot;which&quot;" Tags="|bug|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="37" CreationDate="2010-08-06T21:24:09.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the current Stack Exchange search tool filters out &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stop words&lt;/a&gt; prior to indexing the site. The site's search tools are better suited for finding combinations of tags and indexed text. For pure text searches, it is better to use &lt;strong&gt;Google Search&lt;/strong&gt; using the &lt;code&gt;site:&lt;/code&gt; prefix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;site:english.stackexchange.com &amp;lt;your search query&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A Better Search Option&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the &amp;quot;Related Questions&amp;quot; search &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; helpful for finding questions. Click on the &lt;code&gt;Ask Question&lt;/code&gt; link and type in the title as clearly as you can remember it. The &amp;quot;Related Questions&amp;quot; will often do a much better job at finding the question than the native search tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T21:29:39.450" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2010-08-06T21:27:36.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#ASCII_and_keyboard_transliterations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There are (at least) three forms of ASCII representations of IPA, SAMPA, XSAMPA and Kirchsenbaum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LaTex world probably has another, but I'm too lazy to go ask on the TeX site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T21:27:36.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-06T22:31:06.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English Enthusiast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;EnglishEnthusiast.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T22:31:06.137" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-06T22:31:06.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="41" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T22:33:33.200" Score="15" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this site is about English usage, the standard search engine for the site which filters out &quot;stop words&quot; is going to be problematic since many of the questions on the site will be &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; stop words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously just eliminating the stop list isn't going to be a practical solution, but maybe there would be a way to allow indexing stop words if they are in quotation marks by themselves, or if they are italicized by themselves. In those cases, it is pretty clear that they are being use as words qua words and are contentful, and not as typical function words that deserve to be filtered out of search indexes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2022-12-10T23:25:10.313" Title="Need a way to search for stop words" Tags="|feature-request|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="42" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T23:45:44.300" Score="10" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems as though English users in general are somewhere along the spectrum from highly conservative (who resist changes to language usage) to highly progressive (who embrace changes to language usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine the following questions &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should there be a hyphen in 'today'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should there be a hyphen in 'email'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it okay to use 'fun' as an adjective?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it okay to use the abbreviation &quot;there's&quot; even when it is short for &quot;there are&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it 'all right' or 'alright'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on where one is on the spectrum, there will be many different answers given, and it is unclear (to me at least) which should be accepted as a 'correct' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How will the community deal with the types of debates that will ensue as a result of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T18:37:16.830" Title="How conservative/progressive are we on English Usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-06T23:45:44.300" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="42" CreationDate="2010-08-07T00:07:18.850" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the correct answers to those questions look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist A says you can't do X. Prescriptivist B agrees. Linguist C says A &amp;amp; B don't know what they're talking about and doing X is fine because of all the usage of X including in well-regarded formal written works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternate formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist A says you must do X. Prescriptivist B agrees. Linguist C says A &amp;amp; B don't know what they're talking about and doing X is completely silly because there are no or very few examples of X in either informal speech or well-regarded formal written works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist A says you can't do X. Prescriptivist B agrees. Linguist C says A &amp;amp; B are right because no one actually does X, so doing X is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternate formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist A says you must do X. Prescriptivist B agrees. Linguist C says A &amp;amp; B are right because everyone does X and the only examples of not doing X are obvious errors by foreigners or some such, so not doing X is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with appropriate citations, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think answers that only cite conservative prescriptivist usage &quot;experts&quot; are likely to be downvoted especially if more liberal descriptive accounts of the usage in question exist that call the prescriptivists to task for ignoring the reality of actual usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's just my 2¢. I do have a skewed view of these kinds of issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2011-05-10T18:37:16.830" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T18:37:16.830" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-07T00:07:18.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="42" CreationDate="2010-08-07T00:41:58.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Debates only arise if we discuss about what &quot;should&quot; or &quot;should not&quot; be done, or what is &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot;, which is usually unnecessary. Ideally, in my (perhaps idiosyncratic) view, answers to the question would say what usage is common in what contexts, what the relative levels of formality suggested by the respective usages are, and so on — not tell the asker what to do as a &quot;rule&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, answers to your questions may be (to sketch very briefly what they may look like):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;to-day&quot; and &quot;e-mail&quot; were once hyphenated but the hyphen has become rare and archaic in the former and a minority in the latter, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;fun&quot; as an adjective is acceptable at all but the highest levels of formality, and that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;alright&quot; and &quot;there's&quot; for &quot;there are&quot; are common in informal usage and present in print too, but may be considered ungrammatical by certain people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(These are not well thought-out answers, so the reality may be different; I'm just mentioning these as the &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt; answers may take.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we start arguing about what is &quot;right&quot; and &quot;wrong&quot;, prescriptivists/conservatives will claim based on their own pet rules that something is wrong even when it's unremarkably common usage, and anti-prescriptivists will &quot;prove&quot; something is grammatical even if the usage is going to raise a few eyebrows — neither of which is helpful to the askers in understanding the issue and choosing the usage most appropriate for their audiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T00:41:58.907" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-07T00:41:58.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="45" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-07T03:41:40.797" Score="15" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the casual visitor to our site would benefit from having some statement of what our community is about and how they should take the answers they find here.  I mean more of a statement of site philosophy and not simply what is or is not deemed on topic.  This could be couched in the form of a FAQ, but may in fact be better conveyed in prose.  What I see coming up again and again is the issue of descriptive vs prescriptive approaches to grammar, and I think it is critical for newbies to grasp this early on as they peruse our site. A related issue is that of authoritative sources.  If Wikipedia and the OED disagree with Merriam-Webster and Fowler's, who's right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be a useful adjunct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:42:40.290" Title="Do we need a 'Site Manifesto'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2010-08-07T04:52:18.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the style of the radio show, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.waywordradio.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Way With Words&lt;/a&gt;. If there's disagreement, they typically present both sides along with any relevant history, and let you decide your preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be useful to have an FAQ that describes the difference between standard and correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T04:52:18.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="48" CreationDate="2010-08-07T15:58:12.697" Score="14" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone is not familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). How can they pronounced words suggested in the answers? I think a &quot;Listen&quot; button to be add in the position of the answer where &quot;teachers&quot; suggested any word. It can be done adding a button in the &quot;Markdown Editor&quot; where &quot;teachers&quot; can add this feature in there answer proving IPA in a popup-ed box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T05:51:00.763" Title="Required &quot;Listen&quot; button" Tags="|feature-request|editor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="47" CreationDate="2010-08-07T18:31:22.650" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even people who can read the IPA sometimes have trouble reproducing an utterance correctly! This of course is barring any transcription errors. That said, I'm definitely for the ability to attach audio to questions &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; answers. It would add a whole different dimension to possible questions: e.g., &quot;I'm saying this like this, can you give me tips?&quot;. I don't think adding audio could be required though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With HTML5 audio, it could be a really good experience, too. I worry about the file size and storage of clips though. I wonder what kind of changes to the software are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="89" LastEditDate="2010-08-25T05:51:00.763" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T05:51:00.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-07T19:52:04.770" Score="4" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I post word games (as community wiki) on this site? It will improve vocabulary. I would like an answer from a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-11-12T17:33:22.453" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T04:11:03.973" Title="Is posting a word game accepted?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="55" CreationDate="2010-08-07T20:17:14.563" Score="6" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reputation score of parent and meta site is automatically synchronized after some time. But badges are counted differently for both site. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2010-10-16T20:27:12.907" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T20:27:12.907" Title="Synchronization between parent and meta site" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-07T20:26:45.933" Score="-6" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;What colors should be used for the navigation elements and background?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Color of the navigation elements: &lt;code&gt;rgb(153, 1, 0)&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;#990100&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Background: &lt;code&gt;rgb(255, 255, 255)&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;#FFFFFF&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.us-english.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;U.S. English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T20:26:45.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="54" CreationDate="2010-08-07T20:46:44.100" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the necessity of &quot;Code Sample&quot; button in the &quot;Markdown Editor&quot; of this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T19:11:55.897" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T19:11:55.897" Title="Code sample button" Tags="|support|editor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="54" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-08-07T23:12:02.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if the term &amp;quot;Code Sample&amp;quot; is not exactly &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; for this domain (English Language and Usage), it allows for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_pre.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag defines preformatted text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text in a pre element is displayed in a fixed-width font (usually Courier), and it preserves both spaces and line breaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be useful, for instance, when you are quoting poems which may use special indentations, using several spaces. In the simple HTML this editor allows, &amp;quot;several spaces&amp;quot; are not easily done.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Except in preformatted text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T23:12:02.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2010-08-07T23:20:06.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/new-per-site-metas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post &quot;New Per-Site Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reputation is always inherited from the parent site&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You cannot gain or lose reputation(&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;) on the per-site meta.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This also means that some reputation related functions like the rep graph and bounties are not enabled on the per-site meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*:  however, there is one exception:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  extreme misbehavior on the meta site will affect your parent site reputation. And not in, shall we say, the “good” way.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting up or down does not affect reputation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are now free to vote purely based on post content, without worrying about how your vote might positively or negatively affect someone’s reputation score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no actual reputation on Meta, and you start with no badge either.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Except that the badges will increase, as per your actions on Meta.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Your &quot;Meta reputation&quot; will not (since it is a mere reflect on your &quot;Parent reputation&quot; (i.e. &quot;your reputation on the parent site&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T23:20:06.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="45" CreationDate="2010-08-07T23:34:33.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a complete noob, with only Google as my &quot;source of knowledge&quot;, I would welcome in this Manifesto:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;strong&gt;list of acceptable references&lt;/strong&gt; (even if they may disagree with each other), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and more importantly a &lt;strong&gt;list of non-acceptable sources&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(since I have the knack &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225/everyone-was-convinced-or-everyone-were-convinced/228#228&quot;&gt;of using them&lt;/a&gt; when &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235/written-english-vowels-are-odd/241#241&quot;&gt;I shouldn't&lt;/a&gt; -- see the comments)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For instance:  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar Girl is not always reliable. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fact-archive.com is just a copy of Wikipedia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T23:34:33.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="60" CreationDate="2010-08-08T13:42:42.470" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;We required an option to cancel &quot;Close&quot; operation. This will help peoples who voted for closing a question by mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Cancel &quot;Close&quot; operation" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-08T14:40:55.810" Score="10" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;At present we have several tags for specific words, such as [while], [that], and others. IMHO this practice should be strongly discouraged, lest the tag list just become an English dictionary. Questions about usage of particular words should be tagged with the &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of word in question, e.g. [conjunction], [adjective], etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2010-08-10T21:28:49.753" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T19:01:17.150" Title="No tags for specific words" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-08-08T14:48:57.413" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought about this quite a bit, and formulated my thoughts long before we went into beta. Posts should be encouraged which use one or more of the following lines of evidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Well-known &lt;em&gt;references&lt;/em&gt; (dictionaries, grammars, thesauri, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prominent &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt; (Language Log, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;examples&lt;/em&gt; of respected writers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Widely-used &lt;em&gt;style guides&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every question will be addressable in one of these ways, but questions of &quot;correctness&quot; should preferably be backed up by something off of this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, the following lines of argument should be discouraged and downvoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondhand pedagogy (&quot;My English teacher told me that...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Class or racial prejudice (&quot;Only rednecks say...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Personal aversion (&quot;I hate the sound of...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This information should be put in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2010-08-08T14:48:57.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="60" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="57" CreationDate="2010-08-08T16:28:51.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been declined at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915/can-we-have-the-ability-to-rescind-a-close-vote-before-it-closes&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (the master meta), although the decision to do so was not popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T20:09:30.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="61" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-08-09T13:13:33.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there's much to &quot;standardise&quot; per se (well, depeding on what you meant by that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yes, it's an important issue. It's clear that different varieties of English will need to peacefully co-exist on the site – both in the sense that questions and answers can be specific to some varieties &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; in the sense that different contributors will themselves employ different dialects (well, at least different spellings of certain words) in their posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I think the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English-language Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is a great example regarding this. Sure, there have been &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia#Controversies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;controversies&lt;/a&gt; about it, but in the bigger scheme of things they have handled it just fine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;certainly&lt;/strong&gt; will be useful to tag questions with something like &lt;code&gt;american-english&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;australian-english&lt;/code&gt; (or even something more specific like &lt;code&gt;estuary-english&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;boston-english&lt;/code&gt; if need arises), but of course &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; when the question really is specific to that particular variety of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T13:13:33.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="58" CreationDate="2010-08-09T18:14:12.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with this as a general principle, but I think that there are probably going to be some words that get asked about a lot that it may be sensible to make them their own tags. There are no such words yet that have even two questions with the same tag, so I don't think there are any candidates for the special treatment yet. I do support this as a general rule though, to appear in the FAQ, or wherever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T18:14:12.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="63" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-09T18:41:55.407" Score="8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is question #2 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the list of 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2010-09-10T16:43:14.227" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T19:37:13.730" Title="What should our FAQ contain?" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="45" CreationDate="2010-08-09T18:45:36.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the most important thing when evaluating a source on usage guidance is to look at what methodology they apply when generating usage advice. Do they base their guidance on actual usage or are they just making stuff up based on &quot;what they learned in school&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strunk and White's &lt;em&gt;The Elements of Style&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is &lt;a href=&quot;http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;roundly criticized by academic linguists&lt;/a&gt; for being misinformed, hypocritical, and wrong, so I, for example, would give little credence to any answer that relies on that silly little book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T18:45:36.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="65" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-09T19:32:01.330" Score="7" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do we expect from moderators on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The issue of holding fair elections is largely technical. The long-term solution will likely come from us. Still, bring up these issues in meta. There is a lot of room for innovation. Discussing the criteria of a great moderator is important and picking out potential candidates is a great way to introduce outstanding contributors to your community. And we are completely open to appointing temporary Moderators when someone’s contribution makes them a standout choice for your community’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;human exception handler&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="62" LastEditDate="2010-08-09T20:37:22.157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T11:46:56.893" Title="What do we expect from moderators on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-09T20:33:58.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="65" CreationDate="2010-08-09T20:51:59.843" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They should be pretty good with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T20:51:59.843" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-09T20:51:59.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="67" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2010-08-09T23:49:49.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/the-faq-at-least-on-day-one-is-still-full-of-electronic-gadget-text/19#19&quot;&gt;Cross-post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good time to discuss what should be in the faq. Top on my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to ask a question? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15/ipa-usage-entry&quot;&gt;Should we use the IPA?&lt;/a&gt; If so, instructions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to cite? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/since-it-isnt-in-the-faq-are-we-as-answers-expected-to-appeal-to-any-of-the-var&quot;&gt;do I need references in my answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what is the purpose, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17/whos-the-audience-how-to-promote&quot;&gt;who's the audience?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.743" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T23:49:49.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-10T02:16:39.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;elu.com is not available, but is not used either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;elu.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="62" LastEditDate="2010-08-10T02:25:00.373" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T02:25:00.373" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-10T02:16:39.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="69" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="84" CreationDate="2010-08-10T06:49:03.607" Score="11" ViewCount="672" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to seek clarification on &quot;English as a second language&quot; questions. E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376/ia-suffix-nouns-for-disorders-and-diseases&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376/ia-suffix-nouns-for-disorders-and-diseases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/381&quot;&gt;When should the word “English” be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/323&quot;&gt;“did shoot” vs “shot”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots and lots more of these, including some very basic ESL questions from learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this site actually meant for ESL questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T14:19:27.627" Title="Is this site for &quot;English as a second language&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="70" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-08-10T09:42:31.783" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;After writing the comment on the question, it got me thinking about this more generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose this site is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for ESL questions. How, then, are you actually going to discern &quot;ESL questions&quot; from other questions? I think it's not always clear-cut at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would indeed be easy to simply look at the &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt; who asked the question, and if English is not his/her first language, declare the question as &quot;ESL question&quot; and be done with it. But that would be idiotic. (If someone should disagree with this, I can add examples.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should questions that are about &lt;em&gt;learning English&lt;/em&gt; be flat-out disallowed? Well, isn't learning (more) the point of &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question on a Q&amp;amp;A site? Disallow only questions that are somehow &quot;too basic&quot;? That sounds about right, but it &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; be difficult to draw the line, or to formulate a rule about what questions are too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's best to leave this to the emerging community to jugde on a case-by-case basis – if a question seems inappropriately basic for this site, people will downvote it or vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T09:42:31.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-08-10T20:06:02.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that we can eliminate the ESL askers altogether, and I don't think that we need to. Instead, I think that this should be approached the same way as &quot;homework&quot; on SO: via tagging. I propose [learning] specifically for questions intended for language learners, whether first or second language. E.g., both of the following could be tagged [learning] (and I'll probably retag them after this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/421/how-can-i-learn-to-use-more-idioms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/421/how-can-i-learn-to-use-more-idioms&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/384/how-does-one-know-when-to-use-a-gerund-or-a-infinitive&quot;&gt;How does one know when to use a gerund or an infinitive?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294/recommendations-for-non-native-english-speaking-bloggers&quot;&gt;Recommendations for non-native English speaking bloggers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This despite the fact that only one of those is actually from a non-native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T20:06:02.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="138" CreationDate="2010-08-10T21:25:30.267" Score="24" ViewCount="4803" Body="&lt;p&gt;This being a site about English language, we should be well-equipped to decide about something like this, eh? :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we prefer singular or plural in tags, in cases where both would make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronoun&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronoun&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronoun&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronouns&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/preposition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;preposition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;preposition&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of September 5th, 2010, the usage is mixed (unsurprisingly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the more popular SE sites this is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6752/merge-singular-and-plural-tags&quot;&gt;well-known issue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Obviously certain tags (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt;, etc.) should be in singular in any case, as plural just wouldn't make much sense&amp;mdash;this question is not about such tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-06-23T11:00:45.563" Title="Should we prefer singular or plural in tags?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-04T13:27:32.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2010-08-11T16:38:22.777" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Singular&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;code&gt;verb&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;noun&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;synonym&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer the singular, and support retagging to make things consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-04T13:24:15.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-13T07:25:06.533" Score="8" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often people will leave in a comment e.g. &quot;you might want to fix your ... typo&quot;, then the poster fixes it, but the comment remains on, referring to nothing, causing clutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if there were a box to check &quot;deletable by original poster&quot; so after he fixes the typo, he can delete that comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T18:51:06.933" Title="Comments should have a &quot;deletable by original poster&quot; checkbox?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="80" CreationDate="2010-08-13T07:29:28.757" Score="14" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which is best?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;strong&gt;poster&lt;/strong&gt; meant...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(connotes too much a &quot;poster&quot;, i.e. a piece of paper on the wall)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;strong&gt;author&lt;/strong&gt; meant...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the person who posted hasn't written enough to be considered an &quot;author&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;strong&gt;original poster&lt;/strong&gt; meant...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(sounds odd, why &quot;original&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;strong&gt;OP&lt;/strong&gt; meant...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am not sure people know what it stands for, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it stands for &quot;original poster&quot; but am not even sure, and it connotes an operating room in a hospital.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;strong&gt;person who posted&lt;/strong&gt; meant...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems the best but if you repeat it too often, your message becomes unnecessarily wordy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2010-09-18T11:45:20.033" LastActivityDate="2010-09-21T17:47:16.483" Title="What is the correct Stack Exchange noun to refer to &quot;the poster&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-08-13T07:31:59.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually use the (posting) name of the person, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edward Tanguay said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T07:31:59.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="79" CreationDate="2010-08-13T07:49:33.857" Score="6" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've hit my daily vote limit. But where does it say what the daily vote limit is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What's my daily vote limit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="79" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2010-08-13T11:41:41.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;the site's FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A maximum of 30 votes can be cast per&#xA;  user per day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info and background, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28314/why-are-there-voting-limits&quot;&gt;this discussion on Meta SO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T11:41:41.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="80" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-08-13T13:36:35.907" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Author&quot; is fine. One does not have to be an accomplished writer to be an author. Someone can write a simple letter and it would be completely proper to say &quot;the author of the letter.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;OP&quot; is okay but I would limit its usage to meta where people will likely have seen it before, and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in comments where space may be limited. Personally, I prefer clarity to this kind of pseudo-cultural obfuscation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Poster&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; technically &lt;em&gt;one who posts,&lt;/em&gt; but that just sounds like a hacked up &lt;a href=&quot;http://enowning.blogspot.com/2005/05/in-der-blog-sein-melbournephilosopher.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nounification or gerund&lt;/a&gt;. I wouldn't personally use &lt;em&gt;the poster&lt;/em&gt; in this context any more than I would say &quot;the emailer&quot; or &quot;the phoner.&quot; But that's &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; pet peeve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T13:36:35.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="81" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="74" CreationDate="2010-08-13T15:10:03.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In such a case, you can:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) reply to the comment using the &lt;code&gt;@username&lt;/code&gt; syntax, which will make it appear in the user's inbox;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) flag the comment as obsolete, which will result in its deletion if it gathers enough flags;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c) flag the post itself for moderator attention, asking the moderator to delete the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option B is what I think should happen in almost all cases, unless you have actually run out of comment flags. C should only be used in cases where there are a large number of now-obsolete comments and a moderator could simply wipe them all out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2012-11-29T18:51:06.933" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T18:51:06.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="82" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2010-08-13T15:49:39.310" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as &quot;legal&quot; English (in the sense of allowed rather than of English used by the legal profession).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/737/is-non-vegetarian-a-legal-word&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;non-vegetarian&amp;quot; a correct word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T15:49:39.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="83" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-13T16:09:47.147" Score="1" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it could be months before people can edit questions and start fixing things like &quot;english&quot; instead of &quot;English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the site is still new, can the rules on who can edit questions be relaxed some?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6" LastEditorUserId="184" LastEditDate="2010-08-30T13:29:04.147" LastActivityDate="2010-09-29T13:54:22.223" Title="Reputation for editing questions" Tags="|feature-request|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:35:43.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that some of the questions will come from ESL teachers who have been challenged by that question in class ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the only way forward is to let the community decide by voting for or against. Let's see what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:35:43.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:39:01.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that all the dictionaries mentioned change every couple of years as more evidence comes in from corpus studies. And the beauty of English is that there is no single authority. In fact many academics now speak of &quot;Englishes&quot; rather than &quot;English&quot;, because there are so many varieties, and they are all correct in their own context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:39:01.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="86" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="45" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:42:40.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A site manifesto would be a good idea if it gives information about the site's philosophy. Part of that philosophy might be that sources are given so that people can comment if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:42:40.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="87" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="91" CreationDate="2010-08-13T22:50:25.357" Score="17" ViewCount="6403" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/750/why-do-words-like-expectorate-sound-more-posh-than-words-like-spit&quot;&gt;Why do words like &amp;quot;expectorate&amp;quot; sound more posh than words like &amp;quot;spit&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; includes two examples of asterisks used to avoid spelling out in full offensive words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Most serious encyclopaedic resources avoid this kind of timidity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are other people's thoughts? As a non-private-beta user apologies if this has already been discussed and/or agreed upon, but as a newcomer the use of asterisks struck me as something that detracted from the seriousness of the question in particular and the community in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I mean, of course, a post in which the offensive word itself (its spelling or usage or etymology) is under discussion, as in the example, rather than because it has been introduced colloquially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T22:47:06.607" Title="Using asterisks, as in fuck or f*ck?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="88" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2010-08-13T23:04:26.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's maddening isn't it? Especially for the type of person who would be interested in the content of this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact the title of your question is driving me crazy right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T23:04:26.257" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="89" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="92" CreationDate="2010-08-13T23:05:58.283" Score="2" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or at least there should be a gold level badge for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-09T12:21:21.360" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T20:35:36.240" Title="Should Strunk &amp; White be a GOLD badge on this site?" Tags="|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="90" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2010-08-14T00:12:19.880" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think as long as the obscenity is under discussion, it is fully appropriate to spell it out in full. However, I would consider it inappropriate to use those words at any other time - and anyone that does so would earn a down vote from me - as would any kind of aggression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems entirely silly to asterisk out the obscenities under discussion, because, it could lead to confusion as to what obscenity is under discussion, and would also make the site less searchable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T00:12:19.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2010-08-14T00:32:46.267" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we have to discuss words like &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cunt&lt;/em&gt; by bowdlerizing them that will be my ticket out of here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T00:32:46.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2010-08-14T00:36:41.453" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be far more fitting that the Strunk &amp;amp; White badge be given as a reward for misidentifying the passive voice. Or calling vacuous platitudes meaningful style advice. Or just for literally not knowing what you’re talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T00:36:41.453" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2010-08-14T02:40:58.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the term &quot;grammar nazis&quot; makes me uneasy, it would make me more uneasy to support the banning of the term. If it's tossed around once or twice in jest, I'll overlook it or just not care. If a particular user is using the term a lot over time, then other behavioral problems are probably going to be included in the package, making the problem somewhat self-correcting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, StackExchange sites encourage civilized discourse by design, so the problem isn't as likely as it would be on forums and message boards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T02:40:58.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="95" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2010-08-14T02:47:02.090" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, I used the asterisk there because I was aware that the stackoverflow (automatically?) deletes comments and answers containing obscenities, and I didn't want my input to be auto-deleted. Judging from nohat's reply, that rule doesn't seem to be applied here (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T02:47:02.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="74" CreationDate="2010-08-14T02:48:41.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of leaving the comment, but perhaps graying or striking it out. I'm fairly new to the SE sites, and I'd like to see the wizard behind the curtain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T02:48:41.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-08-14T02:54:48.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be used when showing an example of a markup. Like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a dark and stormy knight&lt;code&gt;(1)&lt;/code&gt;. All the beagles were asleeep&lt;code&gt;(2)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) = &quot;night&quot;, not &quot;knight&quot; (2) = &quot;asleep&quot;, not &quot;asleeep&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should probably be community wiki if others have other uses in mind as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T02:54:48.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="98" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26" CreationDate="2010-08-14T14:10:58.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it's not very readable, we can strike out the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Him went to the shops&lt;/strike&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="484" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T14:10:58.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="58" CreationDate="2010-08-14T19:01:17.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What questions might be asked on the same words that wouldn't (in theory, at least) be closed as duplicates? Sure, there will likely be the occasional additional question on the same word, but not enough to warrant tagging. I agree that word tagging is unnecessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T19:01:17.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-08-14T19:12:48.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;OP&quot; or &quot;Original Poster&quot; is used overmuch on forums, but even there someone will be puzzled by it from time to time. I tend to use the name of the person. If it's important to my point that it be understood that I'm referring to the post that started the thread, I'll write something like this: &quot;Edward Tanguay's original post makes a good point, but I feel this issue  can work itself out over time on a common-usage level; trying to set a standard will only add to the new-user learning curve of this site.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T19:12:48.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-14T19:16:06.497" Score="9" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native english speaker. If you see User profile settings defined by StackExchange, it does not contain &lt;em&gt;primary and secondary languages&lt;/em&gt;. It just contains &lt;em&gt;location&lt;/em&gt; but a non-native english speaker may live in a country where its language is english. Now with English language and Usage StackExchange site, it would be a nice idea To create Two more settings, maybe called &lt;em&gt;primary language&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;secondary language&lt;/em&gt;. I hope StackExchange support this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="501" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-06-08T09:31:14.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Stack sites should support primary and secondary language when defining user profile" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-14T20:21:30.600" Score="13" ViewCount="4585" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from the discussion about Grammar Nazis, is there an acceptable term for people who would consider themselves at the opposite end of the spectrum. It should be slightly pejorative but not give offence or lead to rows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T00:59:27.277" Title="What is the opposite of Grammar Nazi?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-04-11T18:38:24.297" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-08-15T03:59:49.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Robert Cartaino, in fact StackExchange embodies this - in the edit screen the last &quot;How to Edit&quot; tip reads &quot;always respect the original &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2010-08-15T03:59:49.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2010-08-15T04:04:17.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general I agree with the impetus &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to bowdlerize the site.  That said, however, I would like to see the site be available to language students of all ages as a reference. In many school districts in the United States, too much profanity would result in the site being blocked by school administrators, and i think that would be unfortunate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how to resolve those competing standards, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2010-08-15T04:04:17.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="366" CreationDate="2010-08-16T00:15:13.287" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using &lt;code&gt;IE8&lt;/code&gt; on &lt;code&gt;XP SP3&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;list of questions&lt;/a&gt; and hover the cursor over a question title that only takes one line on the screen, it will not get underlined, as a link would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the title spans across multiple lines, it will get underlined with little red dots as soon as you hover the mouse over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="524" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T20:25:37.980" Title="Minor interface bug: question titles not getting underlined if single line" Tags="|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2010-08-16T08:33:39.680" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about grammar hippy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T08:33:39.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-08-16T08:37:06.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very important question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; by ESL askers will be less of a problem than &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for comparison, ask.antimoon.com (a defunct SE1.0 site) was for language learners, with a complete hodge-podge of questions of all types, all levels, from all first languages. It seemed completely unfocused, and probably the main problem was that &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of the time it didn't seem particularly interesting for 'experts', which ran the risk of ending up with the blind leading the blind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask yourselves if that's what you want for EL&amp;amp;U...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="529" LastEditDate="2012-10-01T04:37:21.537" LastActivityDate="2012-10-01T04:37:21.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-17T04:04:19.220" Score="7" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say about the questions so far that a lot of them seem to be quite fake in the sense that someone is asking a question just to get points or to seed the site with questions. What does anyone else think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T15:26:26.570" Title="Are these questions real or fake?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="109" CreationDate="2010-08-17T09:26:09.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no objective way of knowing whether or not any particular question is &quot;fake&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point of the site is to be a useful Q&amp;amp;A which is interesting to the people who use it. If questions do not correspond to the needs and interests of the people using the site, then the question will be downvoted anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions are being upvoted, obviously other people want answers to those questions, which immediately makes each question not fake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have found most questions on the site to be quite interesting, and I have learnt a heck of a lot from reading the answers to other people's questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140" LastEditorUserId="140" LastEditDate="2010-08-17T09:55:12.337" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T09:55:12.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-08-17T10:44:15.120" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In comments I prefer &quot;OP&quot;, for &quot;Original Poster&quot;, or, occasionally, &quot;Original Post&quot;; &quot;original&quot; means the post that started it all: the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acronym might initially confuse some, but is unambiguous once learned&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;something that you can't &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; say for &quot;poster&quot; (alone) or &quot;author&quot;, since there are many 'posts' on a page (question + comments + answers + comments on answers) and each of those has their own author (though mainly authors of answers would be the problem) plus potentially many more authors if the post is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &quot;author&quot; will be clear enough in many situations, but if books are being discussed, you may need to somehow clarify that you're not referring to those mentioned authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, using a display name is problematic when a user changes it&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;and that can be common with new users unfamiliar with the system and still using an assigned generic name when asking their first few questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are directed towards the OP anyway, so addressing them in the second person instead of the third makes sense.  I can't recall seeing an answer (and I mostly am on SO and SO's meta) using &quot;OP&quot; or any variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user575" LastEditorDisplayName="user575" LastEditDate="2010-09-12T17:55:30.087" LastActivityDate="2010-09-12T17:55:30.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="109" CreationDate="2010-08-17T12:36:02.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the answer to a fake question is to give a fake vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't know if I can tell the difference between an interesting and genuine question and an interesting but fake question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="588" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T12:36:02.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2010-08-17T13:36:00.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A loose grammon (rhymes with &quot;loose cannon&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T13:36:00.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="109" CreationDate="2010-08-17T19:36:59.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point, I think seeding the site is a valid reason for asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T19:36:59.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="119" CreationDate="2010-08-17T21:33:18.900" Score="11" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was impressed of some answers (as well as comments) which used phonetic transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Question is how can I enter them in the text editor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's not possible with an ipad, how do you do this on a PC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T11:35:17.953" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T16:23:00.687" Title="How to enter phonetic transcriptions?" Tags="|discussion|ipa|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2010-08-18T00:20:04.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Macchiato's character picker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://macchiato.com/picker/MyApplication.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://macchiato.com/picker/MyApplication.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to &quot;Latin&quot; and then &quot;Phonetics (IPA)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Ishida's character picker (fancy pants):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rishida.net/scripts/pickers/ipa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://rishida.net/scripts/pickers/ipa/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T00:20:04.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2010-08-18T00:49:38.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're on a Mac, I can't recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blugs.com/IPA/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA Palette&lt;/a&gt; enough. I do think the site would benefit from something built-in though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T00:49:38.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2010-08-18T06:12:25.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually copy and paste the characters I don't have on my keyboard from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Vowels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Diacritics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Diacritics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Suprasegmentals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Suprasegmentals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, specifically for English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_chart_for_English_dialects#Chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_chart_for_English_dialects#Chart&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T06:12:25.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2010-08-18T12:54:43.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;cat_id=InputResources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The nice people at SIL have a great resource for this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T12:54:43.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2524" CreationDate="2010-08-18T18:00:39.730" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm wrong, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1296/what-is-your-favourite-slang-expression&quot;&gt;this post appears to be not a question&lt;/a&gt;. I do not have the rep to do so, and also haven't done it before. I think it will likely sort itself out. But would flagging a post like this to draw attention be appropriate, or would that be excessive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T16:34:42.580" Title="Is 'flagging' an appropriate response for someone who doesn't have authority/longevity to vote to close?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="121" CreationDate="2010-08-18T18:27:41.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree that it is not really a question, and voted to close it.  I am curious as to whether other people agree about this type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as for flagging, I am not sure what level you need to be to see that a question is flagged.  After 500 reputation (during beta; now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;3000 reputation&lt;/a&gt;), it is possible to vote to close any question, but you can't see if a question is flagged until later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T16:34:42.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T19:23:51.477" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NoPassiveVoice.com&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="549" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T19:23:51.477" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T19:23:51.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T20:44:05.730" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;LoanWords.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T20:44:05.730" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T20:44:05.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T20:46:50.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;OxfordComma.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/oxfordcomma)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T20:46:50.717" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T20:46:50.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T20:48:45.733" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;AlternateSpelling.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sale&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T20:48:45.733" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T20:48:45.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T21:01:06.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;MiddleVerb.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;LinkingVerb.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sale&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T21:01:06.343" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T21:01:06.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T21:22:34.860" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ReadabilityEdit.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T21:22:34.860" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T21:22:34.860" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-18T21:28:57.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;IntentionalAmbiguity.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T21:28:57.563" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-18T21:28:57.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-19T03:04:24.880" Score="11" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just now I have noticed two wrong answers which have been upvoted and accepted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1272/genius-boy-a-correct-usage/1322#1322&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Aaron is a genius boy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1271/why-are-days-of-the-week-proper-nouns/1276#1276&quot;&gt;Why are days of the week proper nouns?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also noticed many other wrong answers getting upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used many downvotes trying to affect this kind of nonsense, but I feel like I am fighting a losing battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of thing makes me wonder about the future of this site. A site like this needs experts to decide what answers are correct, but the voting system gives power to the utterly clueless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T16:50:28.630" Title="Utterly wrong answers upvoted and accepted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="131" CreationDate="2010-08-19T10:02:04.100" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. As the author of one of the answers that Shinto selected, I'd say that it's up to the community to not only downvote the answer but also include a comment indicating why it is wrong. Comments will have at least two positive effects (and no downsides):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author of the answer will be notified and have a chance to correct the answer, delete it or explain why he still thinks that it's right. (This is what I did with my answer, BTW.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other readers will know that somebody disagrees with the answer and why. If they agree with the comment, they will downvote the answer or at least not upvote it. In either cases, the comment will be ending with the upvoting trend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastEditorUserId="212" LastEditDate="2010-08-19T16:50:28.630" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T16:50:28.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="131" CreationDate="2010-08-19T15:44:58.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep downvoting those wrong answers when you see them, commenting on the questions with clear explanations of why they are wrong, and upvoting other comments that do the same. Seeing as how our site is only 15 days old at the time of this question, I believe that in the fullness of time the best, correct answers will be vindicated. In the meantime, folks can identify potentially wrong answers by perusing highly-rated comments on answers. Clearly identifying an answer as wrong should eventually lead future readers to vote down the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T15:44:58.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-19T23:55:07.950" Score="14" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really concerned about this question, and others like it that may appear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1441/the-most-annoying-misuse-of-word-or-phrase&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1441/the-most-annoying-misuse-of-word-or-phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this site is to help people learn, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to give people a place to rant about their personal language peeves. I feel that this sort of thing should be strongly discouraged, and that the FAQ should indicate this. Questions that ask about &quot;annoying misuse&quot;, &quot;most hated mistakes&quot;, &quot;point and laugh&quot;, etc. should be automatically off-topic and closed with extreme prejudice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T02:55:11.877" Title="This is not a site for peeving" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="121" CreationDate="2010-08-20T04:09:29.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it really isn't appropriate. You're asking someone to vote &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; you by proxy. That is not what flagging is about (not to mention, the moderator's vote bypasses the community democracy since their vote is immediately binding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having said that&lt;/strong&gt;, flagging a bit more liberally is acceptable when a site is really young precisely because there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; very few people who can close inappropriate posts. English.SE is quickly growing past the need to do so. Flagging should be reserved for egregious cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T04:09:29.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-20T04:27:54.193" Score="0" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've arbitrarily retagged six posts tagged &quot;verb&quot; to &quot;verbs&quot; since there were nine posts tagged with &quot;verbs&quot;. Tag explosion is happening and taming is required????&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T18:09:26.213" Title="Too many tags verb/verbs" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2010-08-20T04:28:52.113" Score="25" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Plural&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;code&gt;verbs&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;nouns&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;synonyms&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Putting plural here as an answer for people to vote on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-04T13:23:32.350" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-20T04:28:52.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-20T14:37:04.083" Score="12" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are currently 20 posts tagged &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;.  Is this tag useful?  Most of the questions seem to be word-choice (a tag I created and am not crazy about -- the idea is right, but I don't like the term) or etymology questions.  Any reason &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to retag them all to something less generic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (Dec '11) - I don't suppose there have been any &quot;word&quot; tags for a long time, but I wouldn't want to see this question closed/deleted. It's a useful template for others that might turn up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2011-12-11T04:10:45.040" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T04:10:45.040" Title="&quot;Word&quot; tag -- useful?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2010-08-20T15:07:23.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a case for tag synonyms. Of course, with only 9 users above the required 1000 reputation, it might not be easy to get things done -- maybe the threshold should be lowered during beta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I think the best option is to post here on Meta before a mass retagging. If enough people approve, it can be retagged &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; get a synonym. I'm sure moderators pass through here now and then to do the dirty work if there aren't enough regular users to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T15:07:23.010" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="140" CreationDate="2010-08-20T15:42:12.690" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Retag away. [word] is way too general to be useful--questions with that tag should be retagged [word-choice], [etymology], [usage], etc. as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T15:42:12.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="149" CreationDate="2010-08-20T16:17:55.713" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't there be a necessary tag (a la meta.stackoverflow) for all questions, as some language features and spellings are unique to certain dialects of English, like &lt;code&gt;brit-english&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;american-english&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ozzie-english&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2010-08-20T16:31:42.047" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T21:24:24.933" Title="Shouldn't there be a necessary tag for the various dialects of English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-20T16:17:55.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-20T17:25:51.933" Score="16" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some of the questions can be answered with a quick online dictionary check. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1505/origin-of-the-word-goodbye&quot;&gt;Origin of the word “goodbye”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1146/meaning-of-borough&quot;&gt;Meaning of borough&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the site be used as a dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should suggest somewhere on the site (on the FAQ?) that users first check online dictionaries before posting this type of questions. We could make a list of recommended dictionaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="&quot;Find in dictionary&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="143" CreationDate="2010-08-20T17:34:07.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shouldn't there be a necessary tag (a la meta.stackoverflow)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. Most questions are simply about &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;, not specific to some variant of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If someone's not familiar with meta SO: there you can't post a question without selecting one tag out of &quot;discussion&quot;, &quot;feature-request&quot;, &quot;bug&quot; or &quot;support&quot;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again: Should tags be used when question is about, or specific to, a dialect such as Australian English or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Estuary English&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, of course! And that's exactly how tags are currently being used; see these, for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;american-english&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;british-english&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/australian-english&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;australian-english&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making it &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to select a dialect tag for every question would not help us in any way, but it would cause unnecessary confusion and swearing. And also artificially highlight differences and foster segregation, undermining the fact that all these variants still are still part of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T17:34:07.973" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-20T17:34:07.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2010-08-20T17:56:53.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag explosion is not happening, not yet anyway. You can blame me for the verbs/verb tags.  There was an ongoing retagging from &lt;code&gt;verbs&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;verb&lt;/code&gt;; see this for background: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72/should-we-prefer-singular-or-plural-in-tags&quot;&gt;Should we prefer singular or plural in tags?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  (Please participate in that question by voting or adding answers!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why I didn't retag &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of them at once while at it: well, obviously it's boring as hell, and humans are not made for this kind of work (and I don't have access to automated retag tools). So I started doing it in small batches. (Yes, I know the number of uses was not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; big :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even though the OP of this question (Shinto Sherlock) reverted the retagging that I started, we should do it again, &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt; plural comes out as the winner in the afore-linked-to question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T18:09:26.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="148" CreationDate="2010-08-20T18:45:06.423" Score="54" ViewCount="3577" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abbreviations are always a potential source of confusion. Some people might happen to know what OED stands for, and can figure out what NOAD must mean, but others may not be so lucky. Googling for PIE is rather useless even for native speakers, and completely perplexing to non-native ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, let us compile (and maintain) a list of common abbreviations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="32999" LastEditDate="2013-05-26T15:06:47.527" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T18:17:02.627" Title="List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)" Tags="|discussion|faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-21T19:18:51.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="147" CreationDate="2010-08-20T19:13:24.197" Score="47" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;AAVE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;African-American Vernacular English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;AE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;AmE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;AHD&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Heritage Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;BE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;BrE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;BNC&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;CGEL&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cambridge_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;COCA&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.americancorpus.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;COHA&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Historical American English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ESL&lt;/code&gt; — English as a second language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;IPA&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_chart_for_English_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;MW&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;M-W&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;MWDEU&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merriam-Webster%27s_Dictionary_of_English_Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;NNS&lt;/code&gt; — Non-native speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;NOAD&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Oxford_American_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OALD&lt;/code&gt; — Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (now &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Learner's Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ODO&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt; (now &amp;quot;Oxford &lt;em&gt;Living&lt;/em&gt; Dictionaries&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OED&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OLD&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Learner's Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; [NB: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Living Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; should use the former abbreviation &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; (q.v.)]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;PIE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;RP&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Received Pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;TFD&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a list of abbreviations common to all sites of the Stack Exchange network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;CW&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;community wiki&lt;/a&gt;; a post &amp;quot;owned&amp;quot; by the entire community rather than just the OP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ELU&lt;/code&gt; — short for &amp;quot;English Language and Usage&amp;quot;, the name of this site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ELL&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, another Stack Exchange site for questions from those learning English, where answers may be couched in didactic terms more familiar to learners&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;GR&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Gen Ref&lt;/code&gt; — General Reference, meaning that the question can be easily answered using a dictionary, thesaurus, or other easily-found resources; can be a reason for closing a question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;HNQ&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Question on Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;LMGTFY&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Let Me Google That For You&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;MSE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, the discussion site for the entire SE network&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;MSO&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (also meta.SO), the discussion site associated with SO, which was used for SE network-wide discussions, bugs and feature requests before new &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/announcing-the-launch-of-meta-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; was started&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;NARQ&lt;/code&gt; — Not A Real Question, a former close reason on the network for questions which are often overly broad or simply facetious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OP&lt;/code&gt; — original poster (the author of a given question) or original post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OQ&lt;/code&gt; — original question, as opposed to follow-up questions, subsequent edits, or tangential discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OT&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;POB&lt;/code&gt; — primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;SE&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, our growing network of question-and-answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;SO&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, the programming question-and-answer site with which it all began&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;TPTB&lt;/code&gt; — The Powers That Be, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/team&quot;&gt;team&lt;/a&gt; that runs all the sites, as opposed to &amp;quot;mere mortals&amp;quot; such as regular users and moderators alike&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a list of abbreviations specific to the culture here on EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;GAFTAD&lt;/code&gt; — Get A Fine Thesaurus; Also Dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;IANAL&lt;/code&gt; — I Am Not A Linguist [NB In general on SE this stands for I Am Not A Lawyer]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some conventions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;*X&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for language history and etymologies, it means X is form or word which has no written attestation in the language considered and is therefore &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reconstructed&lt;/a&gt;. This can be either because the language itself is not attested in writing (e.g., all Proto-Germanic words) or because the particular word happens to be unattested, though it is hypothesised to have existed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for current language use, it means the utterance is ungrammatical/wrong (in the variety considered).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?X&lt;/code&gt; means that X is a marginally grammatical utterance (could follow the letter of a rule, but sounds a little wrong, or nobody would actually say it that way).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/X/&lt;/code&gt; is the phon&lt;b&gt;em&lt;/b&gt;ic representation of a word in a given variety. X should be in IPA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[X]&lt;/code&gt; is the phon&lt;b&gt;et&lt;/b&gt;ic representation of a word in a given variety. X should be in IPA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common abbreviations for parts of speech and syntactic functions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A — adjective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adj — adjective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AdjP — adjective phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adv — adverb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AdvP — adverb phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AP — adjective phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;art — article&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aux — auxiliary verb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AuxP — auxiliary verb phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C — complementizer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;conj — conjunction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;D — determiner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;det — determiner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DO — direct object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DP — determiner phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interj — interjection&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;IO — indirect object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;N — noun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neg — negator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nom — nominal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NP — noun phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obj — object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P — preposition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PP — prepositional phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pred — predicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;prep — preposition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pron — pronoun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q — quantifier&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S — sentence or subject&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;subj — subject&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V — verb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VP — verb phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="438716" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2022-08-16T18:17:02.627" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T18:17:02.627" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-21T13:14:41.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="143" CreationDate="2010-08-20T21:24:24.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a solution for the wrong problem. The problem is not that people aren’t tagging their questions with dialect specificity. No, the problem is that people aren’t aware that something they say or know about English is in fact peculiar to their dialect of English, and they present it as though it is a fact about English in general. Of course, since the offenders are simply oblivious to the fact that what they’re talking about is dialect-specific, they have no way of alerting others to this, whether it be by dialect-specific tag, or whatnot. Since this is really most commonly an issue with &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; rather than questions, tags don't really seem like the right solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, users would (at least) identify what dialect of English they speak in their user profile. I have just done this, and everyone else should too. Other than that, the best solution to the problem of people discussing dialect-specific stuff as though it were universal truth about English is to alert them using the commenting mechanism. That’s what it’s for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T21:24:24.933" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-20T21:24:24.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-20T23:44:16.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;circledred.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(in line with stack overflow and server fault, a common way to signal an error in grammar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T23:44:16.723" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-20T23:44:16.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="157" CreationDate="2010-08-21T09:53:25.397" Score="19" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw many questions which have been answered by copying whole sections from e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Oxford_American_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NOAD&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether there is a limit regarding the comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2011-04-26T18:16:25.763" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T18:16:25.763" Title="Does copy and paste infringe copyrights?" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="153" CreationDate="2010-08-21T12:01:31.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question, and I don't know the answer either.  Certainly copypasted stuff needs to be cited at least, preferably with a direct link when possible.  But it would be good to know if there is a threshold for how much we can paste before it becomes infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-08-21T12:01:31.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="153" CreationDate="2010-08-23T05:52:55.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sections &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using copyrighted work from others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linking to copyrighted works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aCopyrights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia Copyrights&lt;/a&gt; describe this issue quite well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;... it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia, so long as you do not follow the source too closely&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T05:52:55.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-08-23T15:15:22.333" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many for whom English is a second (fourth, fifth) language, have a better understanding of its formal aspects than those who learned it informally as a native. I think attempting to distinguish between ESL askers and Native askers, or questions, is a pretty iffy business. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about taking each question on its own merits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="597" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T15:15:22.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="153" CreationDate="2010-08-23T18:31:44.263" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that in most cases, as long as the citation isn't too extensive, that it falls under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fair Use exception&lt;/a&gt; of US copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cornell Law School page on the topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include-   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T18:31:44.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="144" CreationDate="2010-08-23T18:37:39.977" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they should be allowed so long as it encourages answers that provide substantial value beyond a simple definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of off-topic:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw the word &lt;strong&gt;descry&lt;/strong&gt; in the&#xA;  newspaper today, what does it mean?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What is the plural form of &lt;strong&gt;octopus&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of on-topic: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the origin of the term &lt;strong&gt;jerkwater&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1723/right-vs-correct&quot;&gt;is the difference between the words &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;correct&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? Is there a different connotation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should I use &lt;strong&gt;octopuses&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;octopodes&lt;/strong&gt; as the plural for &lt;strong&gt;octopus&lt;/strong&gt; in a journalistic context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T18:37:39.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2010-08-23T18:42:08.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm torn on this. While I do think it is important to keep the site relevant and on topic, I also would like to keep a light/fun atmosphere on the site to build community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being too rigid might stifle enthusiasm for the site. After all, there are a ton of these questions still open on StackOverflow and I don't think they damaged that community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I vote to err on the side of fun, and if it starts getting out of hand we can moderate/vote to rein it back in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T18:42:08.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-23T20:31:00.077" Score="14" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;This community needs to contribute some names they would like to act as provisional Moderators, ASAP. &lt;strong&gt;Most site have this discussion starting from the first days.&lt;/strong&gt; Please read this: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/&quot;&gt;Moderators Pro Tempore&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some basic guidelines: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each nomination should be a separate answer. Link the name to the user’s profile (parent and meta) so we can see their activity (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/150/elect-our-provisional-moderators&quot;&gt;see this&lt;/a&gt; for reference). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nominee should indicate their acceptance by editing the answer, adding that they accept the nomination. Optionally they can write something about themselves. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Self nominations are okay, and even encouraged. Most sites have not had sufficient time for many users to stand out. Self nomination is simply a way to say, “I’m interested. Let my record speak for itself.” Links to other activities may be helpful: Area 51 participation, participation in other sites, blog posts reviewing or announcing the site, etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what we are looking for in a Moderator: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are seeking out members who are deeply engaged in the community’s development; members who: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a reasonably high reputation score to indicate active, consistent participation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show an interest in their meta’s community-building activities. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lead by example, showing patience and respect for their fellow community members in everything they write. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exhibit those intangible traits discussed in A Theory of Moderation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bonus points for: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Members with participation in both meta and the parent site (i.e. interest in both community building and expertise in the field). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Area 51 participation, social network referrals, or blogging about the site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Members who have already shown an interest or ability to promote their community. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut, mmyers, and nohat&lt;/a&gt; have been appointed as provisional moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T21:48:18.960" Title="Select Your Provisional Moderators" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2011-11-03T21:47:58.350" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-24T21:56:59.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2010-08-23T21:29:19.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/140&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vincent McNabb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/140/vincent-mcnabb&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T21:29:19.097" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-23T21:29:19.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-23T22:25:03.307" Score="11" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a pointless question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1756/what-is-the-origin-of-the-colloquial-term-bum-meaning-a-homeless-person&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the colloquial term &amp;quot;bum&amp;quot; meaning a homeless person?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just out of curiosity, I was wondering&#xA;  about the history of the term &quot;bum&quot;&#xA;  meaning a homeless person, not the UK&#xA;  version referring to someone's&#xA;  posterior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bonus: If you know the background on&#xA;  &quot;Hobo&quot; that would be interesting too,&#xA;  and does it have any relation to the&#xA;  town Hoboken, New Jersey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the pointless answer, where someone copies out bits of the dictionary. Then the following revealing comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you include the relevant part of&#xA;  the wikipedia article (or a short&#xA;  summary) for completeness I'll mark&#xA;  this as the accepted answer. – JohnFx&#xA;  3 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the purpose of this site is to summarize Wikipedia articles? There are lots more questions like this, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Pointless questions and answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="164" CreationDate="2010-08-23T22:46:44.793" Score="12" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;This being a site about the usage of English, is it appropriate to correct errors of language in people's questions and answers? (By &quot;errors of language&quot;, I include mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those of us who don't have the reputation to edit entries, is it appropriate to instead add a comment to an entry, pointing out any errors and suggesting corrections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, people are (presumably) coming to this site in order to learn about and improve their English, so it would seem fitting to point out if they make mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I wouldn't want anyone to feel put off contributing to the site, for fear that someone will tear their entry apart for every minor mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="303" LastActivityDate="2011-02-11T15:04:17.883" Title="Should we correct (or point out) language errors in questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2010-08-24T11:50:02.320" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that since correcting grammar and spelling is appropriate — and even actively encouraged — on StackExchange sites about cooking, programming, and gaming, it must be certainly allowed on a site that is all about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you have reason to believe that a particular user could be offended by your correction and leave the site never to return, then by all means feel free to abstain. Just as in spoken conversation, there may be people whom you would correct and others whom you wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone clicks on the &quot;edit&quot; link, they see a box that states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;fix grammatical or spelling errors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;clarify meaning without changing it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;correct minor mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;add related resources or links&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;always respect the original author&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this wording is perfectly fine, as long as you don't ignore the last bullet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to edits vs comments, I wouldn't (mis)use the latter for merely pointing out errors. This would simply create too much noise. Also, such comments immediately become obsolete once the question/answer has been edited accordingly, but they will potentially linger there for all eternity. Not everyone who is allowed to edit is also allowed to delete other people's comments (in fact, only moderators are), not everyone knows about flagging comments so that they are deleted automatically, and we certainly can't expect everyone to watch all their comments and delete them when appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I'd find a comment that points out a typo in my question/answer far more insulting than a simple edit that fixes that typo. I'm not sure why, that's just how I personally feel, YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2010-08-24T11:50:02.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="167" CreationDate="2010-08-24T14:43:19.627" Score="9" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we accept questions that ask for a list of words (where each word can be combined to make a different list), should those questions be a community wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I ask &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the words ending in &lt;em&gt;-ous&lt;/em&gt; you use most frequently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody could reply with &lt;em&gt;dangerous, ferrous&lt;/em&gt;; somebody else with &lt;em&gt;poisonous, sulfurous&lt;/em&gt;, or with &lt;em&gt;dangerous, poisonous&lt;/em&gt;, etc. All possible word combinations would be equally correct, or acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-08-30T04:28:11.170" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should questions that request a list of words be CW?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2010-08-24T16:56:35.817" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Grammar Police&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-08-24T16:56:35.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2010-08-24T17:17:27.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. There is a similar rule on SO that questions asking for lists be marked CW, and I think that the same rule should apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2010-08-24T17:17:27.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2010-08-24T18:45:39.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t think my heart can take a steady stream of questions like that. Debunking frenzies are exhausting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe if questions like that have a “hey, why don’t you check in a couple dictionaries first” disclaimer, then maybe people will do the bare minimum of due diligence before spouting off about their pet theory of why they think so many people are using a word wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because most of the time, in my experience, it is the pet theory which is wrong, and not the disputed usage. Too much freedom for questions like this will result in a site full of half-truths, myths, and old wives’ tales, rather than hard facts and evidence, which is what I think everyone would prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-08-24T18:45:39.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2010-08-24T19:56:29.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/449/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/449/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;) — accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T02:51:31.440" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-24T19:56:40.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2010-08-24T22:30:49.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another side to this issue: Chicago and AP are paywalled sites; linking to the information, my preferred practice for stable sites, won't work for most people, and copying/pasting is problematic. One can always cite the printed copy, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone here qualified to explain whether or not the for-pay status of a style guide affects when a quote is fair use? I'd think that paraphrasing instead of quoting would be sufficient (which seems to be what people are doing in at least one case I can think of), but I don't know the answer. Can anyone experienced in other StackExchange sites say what they've done? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2011-12-12T10:42:06.960" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T10:42:06.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2010-08-24T22:37:33.377" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nohat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;) — accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T00:01:13.900" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-24T22:37:33.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-24T23:24:04.547" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, 40 questions are tagged &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt; and 35 are tagged &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt;. Almost everything tagged versus could also be tagged &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt; (except for a couple which would be &lt;code&gt;word-order&lt;/code&gt;).  My instinct is to kill the &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; tag altogether since I don't feel like it adds any value, but I don't want to do that without checking with the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T12:01:56.200" Title="Versus tag and word-choice tag...redundant?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-24T23:52:29.617" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?page=3&quot;&gt;list of tags&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;verb&quot; shows as being used only once. But if you &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb&quot;&gt;click on that tag&lt;/a&gt;, you see that it's (currently) being used 16 times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possibly due to the existence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb&quot;&gt;verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-forms&quot;&gt;verb-forms&lt;/a&gt; tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not due to caching unless this site has the most extreme caching rules in existence. Here are some example questions—all over a week old—and when the &quot;verb&quot; tag was added to each:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;August 5: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3/shall-and-will&quot;&gt;'shall' and 'will'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105/difference-between-lay-and-lie&quot;&gt;Difference between lay and lie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;August 9: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/338/when-is-l-doubled&quot;&gt;When is &quot;L&quot; doubled?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;August 11:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/445/what-is-the-difference-between-ll-and-will&quot;&gt;What is the difference between 'll and will?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;August 12:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/568/is-inactivate-really-a-word&quot;&gt;Is &quot;inactivate&quot; really a word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/467/why-mind-means-pay-attention-to&quot;&gt;Why &quot;mind&quot; means &quot;pay attention to&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;August 13:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/688/can-rather-be-really-used-as-a-verb&quot;&gt;Can &quot;rather&quot; be really used as a verb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;August 16:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1029/is-there-any-difference-between-talk-to-someone-and-talk-with-someone&quot;&gt;Is there any difference between &quot;talk to someone&quot; and &quot;talk with someone&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1066/when-should-i-use-the-subjunctive-mood&quot;&gt;When should I use the subjunctive mood?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1069/future-perfect-progressive&quot;&gt;Future perfect progressive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in other words, the count of the tag &quot;verb&quot; should have been over 1 for almost three weeks now…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T19:01:51.640" Title="&quot;Verb&quot; tag showing wrong count" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="174" CreationDate="2010-08-25T01:49:28.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely it is a caching issue. I just renamed the &quot;verbs&quot; tag to &quot;verb&quot; and the display is showing the previous tag display. The counts should display properly within the next few hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T01:49:28.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="172" CreationDate="2010-08-25T11:25:24.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must admit that when I first started contributing, my subjective impression was that the &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; tag was being used more often than the &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt; tag. Shame on me, I didn't bother to actually check the stats, and ended up tagging at least three of my own questions &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; (and none of them &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if it weren't for me, the &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; tag would be even less popular (and the &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt; would be used even more). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that while &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; is shorter, &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt; is a bit more self-explanatory, probably even more so to foreign learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will thus start re-tagging my own questions accordingly (though not too hastily, so as not to pollute the front page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suggest that someone with enough rep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/word-choice/info&quot;&gt;adds &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; as a tag synonym for &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, so that future questions tagged &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt; are automatically re-tagged behind the scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and do cast your votes for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;all the other tag synonyms&lt;/a&gt; out there! (If you have more than 1000 rep points, that is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T11:25:24.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="172" CreationDate="2010-08-25T12:01:56.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;em&gt;versus&lt;/em&gt; should be used on questions where users ask about one word / phrase against another one (&lt;em&gt;&quot;right&quot; versus &quot;correct&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;word-choice&lt;/em&gt; when the question asks which word to use without to offer two alternative words / phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions are different. In the first case of questions, users who ask the question only want to know if to use the first word, or the second; in the second case, the user doesn't have a clue of what word (or phrase) should use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T12:01:56.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="162" CreationDate="2010-08-25T12:57:15.353" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea behind any StackExchange site is to build &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; ultimate resource on a given topic. Just like StackOverflow, with which it all began, we eventually want to cover &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions that are on-topic, even those already answered elsewhere. Just because an answer to a question is right there shouting at you from the first Google result, doesn't mean we don't welcome that question on our site. In fact, quite the opposite: we want to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; that first Google result. This has been stated by Jeff and Joel a zillion times, and there are tons of related reading on the meta Meta, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8724/how-to-deal-with-google-questions&quot;&gt;Should I ask a question that has readily available answers to it NOT on StackOverflow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3734/how-long-should-i-search-for-an-answer-before-i-ask-on-stackoverflow-and-friends&quot;&gt;How long should I search for an answer before I ask on stackoverflow (and friends)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17463/should-i-ask-a-question-i-know-the-answer-to&quot;&gt;Should I ask a question I know the answer to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12513/should-i-not-answer-my-own-questions&quot;&gt;Should I not answer my own questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2800/should-i-ask-questions-i-already-know-the-answer-to-and-answer-them-myself&quot;&gt;Should I ask questions I already know the answer to and answer them myself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8724/how-to-deal-with-google-questions&quot;&gt;How to deal with Google questions?&lt;/a&gt; (now rephrased as &quot;How to deal with lmgtfy style answers that only include a link to a search page?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I do agree with Shinto Sherlock that that particular comment by JohnFx speaks volumes. I don't like it at all. However, I have to ask myself: what if that comment wasn't there? Would that question belong on our site? And the answer is a definite &quot;yes&quot;. I won't upvote that question, but I won't vote to close it, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, I am pretty confident that nohat knew perfectly well &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105/difference-between-lay-and-lie&quot;&gt;what the difference between &quot;lay&quot; and &quot;lie&quot; is&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1404/what-does-akin-to-mean-in-etymologies-in-dictionary-entries&quot;&gt;what &quot;akin to&quot; means&lt;/a&gt; before he asked those questions, and he certainly knows how to google. But none of that renders his questions &quot;pointless&quot; in the slightest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if some user just started posting &quot;what is the etymology of 'cab'&quot;, &quot;what is the etymology of 'cabalist'&quot;, &quot;what is the etymology of 'cabaret'&quot; and so forth, that would be pretty blatant rep whoring — and I'm not sure how we would go about handling it —, but thankfully I don't see that happening just yet. Most importantly, though, if this site will survive long enough, and if it is &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; survive for long, &lt;em&gt;we will end up having all of these questions anyway&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow is now full of questions such as &quot;what is the difference between = and ==&quot;, which make many people cry in pain, but nobody argues that they are off-topic. Similarly, one day we will have to answer the question &quot;What is the origin of the word 'origin'?&quot;, and many people will cry in pain, but no amount of crying will make the question pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T12:57:15.353" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="162" CreationDate="2010-08-25T15:08:42.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If only there were some sort of mechanism where the community could express their approval/disapproval of questions and ultimately remove or deprecate anything that is off-topic, inappropriate, or in general just not welcome....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose for now we are just stuck with complaining about them in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: I added him to quote the cite, just so it was in the body of the answer and handy, not to mention helping the search ranking of the question for others who might be Googling the answer to the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T15:08:42.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-25T15:14:56.060" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was creating some synonyms for tags yesterday, and I created the tag &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt; as a synonym for &lt;em&gt;word-order&lt;/em&gt;.  I wonder, though, if it should be the other way around.  &lt;em&gt;Syntax&lt;/em&gt; is the linguistic term that deals with matters of word order that these questions are generally about; it is a more accurate term.  Should we try to set these sort of terms as the default?  So, if we did that, then we'd want &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt; over &lt;em&gt;word-order&lt;/em&gt;... and going further, &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt; over &lt;em&gt;pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; over &lt;em&gt;word-formation&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think about the type of terminology we should have in our tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-08-26T01:59:06.983" Title="Tags and technical terms" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="109" CreationDate="2010-08-25T15:26:26.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the purpose of the site is to be a useful resource for information about English Language and Usage, and not a video game to see who has the most rep, then I don't see how the motivation of the person asking the question is a big concern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, if it is an interesting/good question that leads to providing valuable content to the site, who gives a flip if the person who asked it is rep-whoring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T15:26:26.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="181" CreationDate="2010-08-25T16:56:38.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that people asking pronunciation questions in particular are unlikely to know the technical term, so I think I'd be more likely to go less technical (at least on that one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T16:56:38.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="181" CreationDate="2010-08-25T18:34:29.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is value in distinguishing questions about pronunciation (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1545/is-forte-pronounced-fort-or-for-tay&quot;&gt;Is ‘forte’ pronounced ‘fort’ or ‘for-tay’?&lt;/a&gt;”) from questions about phonology (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/676/sounding-vs-in-english-phonology&quot;&gt;Sounding ‘æ’ vs. ‘ɛ’ in English phonology&lt;/a&gt;”), so I wouldn’t support making those two tag synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the “plain English” terms (‘pronunciation’, ‘word-order’) should be used for questions about particular concrete examples of words or constructions, whereas the linguistics terms (‘phonology’, ‘syntax’, ‘morphology’) should be saved for questions about processes and generalities about the English language. Therefore in my opinion the question about the Great Vowel Shift (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235/written-english-vowels-are-odd&quot;&gt;Written English Vowels are Odd&lt;/a&gt;”) should have the ‘phonology’ tag, whereas the question “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1691/pronunciation-of-comparable&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of comparable&lt;/a&gt;” is fine to keep the ‘pronunciation’ tag. I do think the question “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1886/is-there-a-difference-between-the-pronunciation-of-a-teenager-and-the-pronunciat&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between the pronunciation of a teenager, and the pronunciation of an adult?&lt;/a&gt;” should probably be tagged with the ‘phonology’ tag and not the ‘pronunciation’ tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T18:34:29.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2010-08-25T20:09:22.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that simply fixing what is unambiguously a typo would be the best way to handle this, but would be more valuable and instructive if the original author can &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the correction. How does this work? If your question is corrected, can you see the &quot;paper trail&quot;? Does the asker's rep factor into this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T20:09:22.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="365" CreationDate="2010-08-26T04:41:58.783" Score="5" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;When tagging a question on English.SE, &lt;code&gt;[word-definition]&lt;/code&gt; appear twice as a suggestion when &lt;code&gt;word-def&lt;/code&gt; is entered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;word-definition (8)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  word-definition (s) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC, the &lt;code&gt;(s)&lt;/code&gt; indicates a tag synonym. Why does this happen when,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) a tag cannot be a synonym of itself, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) &lt;code&gt;[word-definition]&lt;/code&gt; has no synonyms at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2010-10-16T20:19:43.050" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T20:19:46.730" Title="Why does &quot;word-definition&quot; appear as a tag synonym?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="121" CreationDate="2010-08-26T16:14:04.303" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Robert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason I think it isn't appropriate is that it circumvents the system. If the admins/community came to the conclusion that more people should have input on closing questions, they should just lower the rep threshold for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think a comments suggesting a reason that it might be closed is probably a more appropriate action if you feel a burning desire to get your 2 cents in regarding a particular item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-08-26T16:14:04.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2010-08-26T19:43:37.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate myself: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/223/mmyers&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mmyers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/223/mmyers&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would most likely be a temporary situation until the actual moderator elections are held. I'm already a moderator on Stack Overflow, so that takes a fair amount of my time and will probably keep me from committing enough time here once the user base gets fairly large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, I know the system and can help this site and the other moderators get off the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2010-08-26T19:43:37.127" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-26T19:43:37.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-27T10:15:40.020" Score="8" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the recently registered users, you'll notice some start from 1 point and many start with 101 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="509" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2010-08-27T14:01:43.603" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why do some people have 101 points when they register?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2010-08-27T11:29:04.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is found in questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5983/should-all-linked-accounts-get-the-100-bonus&quot;&gt;Should all linked accounts get the 100 bonus?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/50503/linked-account-didnt-get-100-rep-points&quot;&gt;Linked account didn&amp;#39;t get 100 rep points&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;namely, people who already have 200 points in another stack web site get an automatic 100 bonus when they register in a new stack web site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="509" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2010-08-27T11:29:04.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-28T04:20:56.550" Score="-4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;smittenbyfire.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T04:20:56.550" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-28T04:20:56.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-28T04:23:10.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;grammarpower.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T04:23:10.820" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-28T04:23:10.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-28T04:24:15.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;slipperywords.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T04:24:15.980" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-28T04:24:15.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-28T04:26:15.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;englishmastered.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T04:26:15.493" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-28T04:26:15.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-28T04:28:21.180" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;grammaticaltechnicalities.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastEditorUserId="863" LastEditDate="2010-09-07T20:40:26.157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T20:40:26.157" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-28T04:28:21.180" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-28T11:29:05.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;VerbPhrase.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available, easy-to-type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T11:29:05.000" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-28T11:29:05.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2010-08-28T16:39:04.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You open with &quot;If we accept questions...&quot; so I'll stop you right there: we probably shouldn't be.  How could I possibly find it useful to know what &quot;-ous&quot; words are used by random people on the Internet?  Having these sorts of questions around makes it harder to find the real questions, wastes users' time and won't attract experts to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lists and polls on SE sites should be closed 99% of the time.  Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57226/should-we-have-a-list-of-x-close-reason/57248#57248&quot;&gt;Should we have a “List of X” close reason?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/52456/new-hidden-features-questions-coincidence-copycat-or-sock-puppet/52459#52459&quot;&gt;New “Hidden Features” questions: Coincidence, Copycat or Sock Puppet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57383/the-fourth-place-polling&quot;&gt;The fourth place: Polling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22182/what-should-the-subjective-tag-be-used-for/22183#22183&quot;&gt;What should the &lt;code&gt;subjective&lt;/code&gt; tag be used for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62010/best-of-style-questions/62012#62012&quot;&gt;“Best of” style questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many, many more available upon request or with a quick search&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of a single example of a valuable list question on this site, but I understand that that doesn't mean there isn't one out there.  If an acceptable one comes up, it should have the format of one question and one answer, both marked CW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2010-08-28T16:39:04.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-29T17:37:17.097" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there may be — again, IANAL — copyright issues with &lt;code&gt;OxfordComma.com&lt;/code&gt;, how about the lesser-used term&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;HarvardComma.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's available, though the term is less common than &amp;quot;Oxford comma&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;serial comma&amp;quot; as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-08-29T17:37:17.097" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-29T17:37:17.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-29T17:39:23.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there may be — again, IANAL — copyright issues with &lt;code&gt;OxfordComma.com&lt;/code&gt;, how about the alternate term&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;SerialComma.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's registered, but there's no site there; not even one of those ad-laden placeholders.  And the registration expires in a few months, for what that's worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-08-29T17:39:23.893" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-29T17:39:23.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-08-30T03:07:34.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;participle.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(parked, placeholder)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the fact that it evokes &quot;participate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="881" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T03:07:34.987" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T03:07:34.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2010-08-30T04:52:33.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate myself: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/252/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/252/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T04:52:33.503" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T04:52:33.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2010-08-30T08:25:42.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While the site is still new, can the rules on who can edit questions be relaxed some?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules are already relaxed.&#xA;If you check the FAQ in Stack Overflow, you will notice that it's required to have a reputation of 500 (not 200) just to retag a question, and a reputation of 1500 to create new tags (not 150); you could not edit others' posts until you reach 2000, while on a beta site you can edit others' posts if your reputation is 1000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T08:25:42.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2010-08-30T08:47:36.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I would prefer that such word games are left out; the reason is that there are too much variations for the same word game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T08:47:36.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="219" CreationDate="2010-08-30T21:00:40.133" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that most of the questions I find in &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt; are questions that should be tagged with &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; (including the question on when the actual punctuation raised). Using that tag sounds to me like using the tag &lt;em&gt;coding&lt;/em&gt; on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary because it has a particular meaning (which is different from the meaning I am giving to the tag)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T09:48:09.883" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T09:48:09.883" Title="Is the tag &quot;writing&quot; necessary?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2010-08-31T02:07:25.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the &quot;Strunk &amp;amp; White&quot; badge is given after 100 edits, it should not be a golden badge. Then, there is already a golden badge that is given after 600 edits.&#xA;I would introduce another badge for whoever makes 350 edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-15T20:35:36.240" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T20:35:36.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-31T06:45:40.717" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it really necessary to ask what a single word means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2211/what-does-headcrabs-mean&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2211/what-does-headcrabs-mean&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems ridiculous to me unless the meaning of the word is not clear from looking at Google or an online dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T17:59:46.353" Title="Suggestion: single word lookups are off topic" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="218" CreationDate="2010-08-31T13:03:11.437" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we need a tag for each punctuation mark when there is already the tag &lt;em&gt;punctuation&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2010-09-07T21:17:52.223" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T21:17:52.223" Title="Do we need a tag for each punctuation mark?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-31T13:23:40.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a question about a word should be acceptable if it reports the definition found in the dictionary, and the OP asks if the word has over meanings too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T13:23:40.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-31T16:19:27.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another valid use case is for words that you think exist but can't find in dictionaries (possibly because you don't know how to spell them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2263/irrehensible-irrehensibly&quot;&gt;irrehensible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T16:19:27.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="215" CreationDate="2010-08-31T16:38:10.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point, I see no harm in having separate tags also. It seems very few questions have more than two or three tags anyway, and this could help make searches more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T16:38:10.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="209" CreationDate="2010-08-31T17:23:46.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it has a particular meaning, if it is used to indicate general writing style, or to distinguish writing from speaking.  Or, if the question is less about language-y stuff and more about prose-y stuff.  It's still vague (and might still be useless), but it is not quite as vague as &lt;em&gt;coding&lt;/em&gt; on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T17:23:46.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-31T17:59:46.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/53/tools-that-every-do-it-yourselfer-must-own&quot;&gt;The quotation is from this DIY.se question&lt;/a&gt;. On the one hand i think it's semi-legitimate to ask for clarification on an odd word in a seemingly mixed up context at an english usage and language Q&amp;amp;A board. On the other hand, this was a terrible question that would have benefited from further context, or an explanation (i.e. assuming he was confused, what zombies and headcrabs had to do with with crowbars, he wanted to know what headcrabs were as they might provide some clarity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word definition requests for&#xA;confusing contexts seem to be an&#xA;apropos use of the site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word definition requests for an&#xA;isolated word seems like an abuse of&#xA;the entire merit of question and&#xA;answer on this particular site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:22:16.213" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T17:59:46.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="215" CreationDate="2010-08-31T18:07:15.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the use cases point of view, it seems unlikely someone would want a cloud of 'comma' related entries for polishing their skills with commas; or the dreaded colon v. semi-colon learning curve. However, as my poor skills of punctuation may show, I can imagine someone looking to improve their overall knowledge of punctuation and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it seems to me that by consolidating specific marks in a 'punctuation' tag would be preferable to letting questions about individual marks hang out on the fringe with a useless tag. Obviously synonymizing (sp?) tags is another option, but if it's a black/white choice I find 'punctuation' to be more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="549" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T18:07:15.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="229" CreationDate="2010-09-01T13:03:21.023" Score="9" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is a question about the etymology of a word asking for its origin? Is a question about the origin of a word asking for its etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the origin of a word could be the point from which it starts or sets out; for example, I could reply to a question saying that the word has been first used (in the context given from the question) in 1879.&#xA;In a question about the etymology of a word, I would expect that the answer reports from which word the asked word derives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T09:47:49.530" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T09:47:49.530" Title="Do questions asking for the origin of a word and the etymology of a word ask different things?" Tags="|support|etymology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="226" CreationDate="2010-09-01T13:29:06.313" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we use tags like &lt;em&gt;past-tense&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;future-tense&lt;/em&gt;, or we should use tags like &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we use then, for example, &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt; as synonymous of &lt;em&gt;past-tense&lt;/em&gt; (or vice versa)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T23:55:52.313" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T09:22:53.630" Title="How should we name tags for tenses, aspects, and combinations of these categories?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-01T15:53:56.370" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;linguafran.ca&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;lingua.fran.ca&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both exist, but point nowhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T15:53:56.370" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-01T15:53:56.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2010-09-01T15:59:29.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would keep the &quot;tense&quot; in there just for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problem I can see with it is that tags like &lt;code&gt;[present-perfect-tense]&lt;/code&gt; are rather long, but I can live with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T15:59:29.480" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-01T16:02:00.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;EnglishLangua.ge&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available, again not a .com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T16:02:00.803" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-01T16:02:00.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="223" CreationDate="2010-09-02T00:45:04.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word origin is a large subset of etymology, and on this site, they are usually used interchangeably. &quot;Word origin&quot; doesn't necessarily imply that you want to also know how the word has evolved over time, but that is also part of etymology. Again, I would personally consider them synonyms for the purposes of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T00:45:04.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="162" CreationDate="2010-09-02T07:21:12.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My only thought on this is that it makes for lots of boring questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only a very occasional participator here, partly because some days when I've dropped by, all of the questions have been LMGTFY types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T07:21:12.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="233" CreationDate="2010-09-02T11:56:25.890" Score="13" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/how-to-pronounce-router/2393#2393&quot;&gt;How to pronounce 'router'?&lt;/a&gt; my answer has been down voted from a user who answered to the same question, and who first commented my answer with a link to a link to a pronunciation file present in dictionary.com which should have been supposed to make me notice that I was wrong about the pronunciation (despite the fact another user commented on that saying that in American English the pronunciation is the same for both the meaning of &lt;em&gt;router&lt;/em&gt;). To say it all, the pronunciation reported from dictionary.com (I am not sure if the pronunciation reported from that site is in American English, British English, or Australian English) is |ˈraʊtər| for &lt;em&gt;any of various tools or machines for routing, hollowing out, or furrowing&lt;/em&gt;, and |ˈrutər, ˈraʊ-| for &lt;em&gt;a person or thing that routes&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The comment has been then changed to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gee, I wonder if anyone else posted that information before you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His reply didn't report what he found in the &lt;em&gt;New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/em&gt;, but he thinks he gave the same information I gave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got 3 down votes in less than 2 minutes, and in all the cases for an answer where that same user answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note, I find this comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2383/is-laid-down-a-proper-term/2394#2394&quot;&gt;on another answer&lt;/a&gt; I wrote (which had a down vote too):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kiamlaluno, why do you keep copying my answers to questions? This isn't funny any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't copy his answer; that is clear to who reads both the answers.&#xA;What does that then mean? Can other users reply to a question where he already wrote his answer, or is that forbidden?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's then analyze the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His answer starts with &lt;em&gt;I believe the meaning&lt;/em&gt;. I interpret it as meaning that he is not sure of what he is writing. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His answer doesn't contain any reference to any dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I looked for &lt;em&gt;laid&lt;/em&gt; on the NOAD, and the dictionary shown me the definition for &lt;em&gt;lay&lt;/em&gt;; i looked for a phrase that was referring to a illness, and I found &lt;em&gt;lay [someone] low&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To verify which preposition should be used with &lt;em&gt;lay [someone] low&lt;/em&gt;, I searched in the &lt;em&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/em&gt;, and I found that the preposition used is &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;. I also noted that &lt;em&gt;lay [someone] low&lt;/em&gt; was used in a sentence that was not referring to an illness, and I wrote that sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing happen on another &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2350/commentor-vs-commentator/2381#2381&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, where the same user down votes the answer given from another user because he feels like the answer is not useful. His answer starts with &lt;em&gt;My own feeling about this is that &quot;commenter&quot; is a new word&lt;/em&gt;; is that more useful than the reply given from the other user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2443/is-there-a-difference-between-frenchmen-and-french-men/2452#2452&quot;&gt;down voting&lt;/a&gt; still happens. Am I copying his answer also when he says that &lt;em&gt;French man&lt;/em&gt; has the same meaning of &lt;em&gt;Frenchman&lt;/em&gt;, and I report that they have two different meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says I copied one of his answers, but then he answers to a question, giving &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1072/is-correct-to-use-an-adjective-as-appositive/1212#1212&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; that is equivalent to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1072/is-correct-to-use-an-adjective-as-appositive/1142#1142&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt;. If I give an answer that is different from his, I am copying his answer, but he can answer to a question saying what others has already said. Two different criteria are applied; the one pro his answer is not applied to others' answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-09-04T11:01:47.093" Title="Tactical down votes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="234" CreationDate="2010-09-02T13:02:02.177" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a question asking for the pronunciation of a word, should the question make clear to which English dialect it is referring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the word is pronounced differently in American English and British English, which answer should be accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T09:45:35.580" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T09:45:35.580" Title="Should questions about pronunciation specify which English dialect the OP is interested in?" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="231" CreationDate="2010-09-02T14:59:59.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That guy clearly has some kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160/select-your-provisional-moderators/204#204&quot;&gt;beef&lt;/a&gt; with you. Even before reading the exchanges you posted, I've gotten a negative vibe from this guy based on other questions/answers. I've noticed it ranges from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213/suggestion-single-word-lookups-are-off-topic&quot;&gt;condescending&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1842/what-does-word-cinemaddict-mean/1856#1856&quot;&gt;tone&lt;/a&gt; to downright combativeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hadn't brought it up before because I think that sometimes intent or sarcasm gets lost in this medium, and I want to think that he doesn't mean for these to come off as harsh or lecturing as they appear on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the tactical downvoting, that is very hard to prove, but his ratio of 138 upvotes/149 downvotes does indicate that he is more of a Simon than a Paula. =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T14:59:59.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="232" CreationDate="2010-09-02T17:00:58.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer should report how it is pronounced in all dialects. However, in most cases, only one pronunciation need be given (using a multidialect transcription system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T17:00:58.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="247" CreationDate="2010-09-03T09:42:10.177" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag is not used for any questions; it should be deleted. If we are going to use the tag &lt;em&gt;present-tense&lt;/em&gt;, then &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; should be a synonymous of &lt;em&gt;present-tense&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T09:44:23.807" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T19:41:32.887" Title="Delete the tag &quot;present&quot;" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="369" CreationDate="2010-09-03T10:08:47.983" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I try to use &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; as synonymous for &lt;em&gt;present-tense&lt;/em&gt;, a dialog box informs me that &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; is used more times than &lt;em&gt;present-tense&lt;/em&gt;. When I get the list of questions tagged with &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; the list shows no questions; it doesn't seem true that &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; is used more times than &lt;em&gt;present-tense.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2010-10-19T06:25:51.250" LastActivityDate="2010-10-19T06:25:51.250" Title="It is not possible to use &quot;present&quot; as synonymous for &quot;present-tense&quot;" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="245" CreationDate="2010-09-03T11:34:00.440" Score="1" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should I report the pronunciation as |ˈˌdaɪəˈˌkrɪdəkəl|, or [ˈˌdaɪəˈˌkrɪdəkəl]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T21:57:49.100" Title="How should I report a pronunciation using the IPA notation?" Tags="|support|pronunciation|ipa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-09-03T11:41:07.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the Stack Exchange sites makes a discrimination between those who speak English as their first language, and those who speak it as a second language; I don't see any reason why this site should do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="19875" LastEditDate="2012-10-02T06:25:14.590" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T06:25:14.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="242" CreationDate="2010-09-03T12:12:41.717" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the tag &lt;em&gt;italian-american-english&lt;/em&gt; have a meaning, for this site?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there an English dialect that is called &lt;em&gt;Italian American English&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T13:51:17.867" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T14:33:34.187" Title="Does the tag &quot;italian-american-english&quot; have a meaning on this site?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="238" CreationDate="2010-09-03T13:12:15.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard convention is &lt;code&gt;[brackets]&lt;/code&gt;.  Sometimes &lt;code&gt;|pipes|&lt;/code&gt; are used to distinguish narrow and broad transcriptions (possibly not used in a consistent way by everyone, based on what nohat says).  In any case, unless these distinctions are important to the specific answer, then &lt;code&gt;[brackets]&lt;/code&gt; are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for stress, normally the &lt;code&gt;ˈ&lt;/code&gt; notation refers to primary stress and &lt;code&gt;ˌ&lt;/code&gt; refers to secondary stress (if there is one).  So I would transcribe &lt;em&gt;diacritical&lt;/em&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ˌdaɪ ə ˈkɹɪ ɾə kəl]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound that you transcribed as &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt; is normally transcribed as a flap &lt;code&gt;[ɾ]&lt;/code&gt;. (Also, it is worth noting that, although &lt;code&gt;[ɹ]&lt;/code&gt; is technically the &quot;r&quot; sound of most English dialects, many linguists simply use the symbol &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; when this distinction is not critical (for convenience); so, feel free to do that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I should mention that using a [d] in place of [ɾ] might be done in a non-IPA transcription — sometimes dictionary pronunciations change around symbols to make it more readable to someone who never learned IPA.  But it's not completely accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T21:57:49.100" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T21:57:49.100" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="240" CreationDate="2010-09-03T14:33:34.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could probably argue for a dialect of English called &quot;Italian American English&quot;, but it would not be English as spoken by native Italian speakers.  I would not call the latter a dialect because it is not native English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Italian American English dialect could be used to describe the particular dialect used by, e.g., Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T14:33:34.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-03T15:31:05.003" Score="16" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an effort to make peace and resolve &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/231/tactical-down-votes&quot;&gt;this issue&lt;/a&gt; before it turns into an all out feud, I'd like to refocus the discussion on the core issue that started it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user has taken umbrage at what he suspects is another user copying his answers and is downvoting accordingly. It is hard to tell from the answers whether this is true or not because the alleged copying isn't an exact word-for-word copy. The person posting the &quot;copy&quot; contends that it was not an intentional copy even if the answer was similar in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's settle this in the SE way, with votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is it an acceptable practice to downvote other answers that are too similar to previously given answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-09-03T15:37:43.760" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that &lt;strong&gt;upvoting&lt;/strong&gt; is the appropriate tool to move the best answers to the top, and downvoting should be reserved for incorrect answers or those that are deficient in some way, not as a way to &quot;double vote&quot; another answer up the chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, if a similar (but inadequate) answer already exists we should &lt;strong&gt;promote&lt;/strong&gt; editing the existing answer to improve it instead of adding a new answer that reformulates the existing information. However, I think it is acceptable to add a better worded answer if you don't yet have edit rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I think downvoting other answers on questions that are not somehow deficient to promote your own answer should be &lt;strong&gt;discouraged&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T15:37:43.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="238" CreationDate="2010-09-03T16:05:07.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to report pronunciations for the general audience is to use a basic IPA transcription for English and enclose the pronunciations in /slashes/. This matches how dictionaries that use IPA, such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cambridge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, mark pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the other symbols for phonetic transcriptions, like [square brackets] and |pipes| are best left for detailed discussions of phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/daɪəˈkrɪtəkəl/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T16:05:07.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-09-03T19:11:49.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking of similar answers, I think it should be considered how the answer is perceived from the others. For example, there is a difference between the first group of example, and the second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think that &lt;em&gt;commenter&lt;/em&gt; is a used word.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe that an island is a piece of land surrounded by water.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a feeling that a sybil is a woman able to foretell the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;commenter&lt;/em&gt; is reported by the &lt;em&gt;New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, which doesn't report its meaning. Looking for the word in the &lt;em&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/em&gt; […].    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As reported from the NOAD &lt;em&gt;island&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;a piece of land surrounded by water.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looking for the word &lt;em&gt;sybil&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, I found the following definition: a woman able to foretell the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that refer to a dictionary cannot be considered the copy of an answer that doesn't refer to any dictionary, or that refers to another dictionary (especially if one is the American Dictionary, and the other is the British dictionary). They would be a copy if you would cite a dictionary, but then you would not write what that dictionary says, and copy the answer given from the other user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When considering if two questions are similar, I would also include the tone of the answer: An answer should not express an opinion about who asked the question; the topic is the question, not who asked it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Replies that include phrases like &lt;em&gt;you didn't hear well&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;your dictionary has been printed when Napoleon was only three years old&lt;/em&gt;, make the answer full of denigration. Between an answer that express an opinion about who asked the question and one that doesn't do that, I would surely choose the second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it an acceptable practice to downvote other answers that are too similar to previously given answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say it's not acceptable if the down-vote is made from another user who already answered to the question, and down-votes the other answers given to the same question just to put his/her own answer in evidence, and avoid another answer is accepted from who asked the question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would then not down-vote a question that is equivalent to another one, and let who asked the question decide which one is more clear for him. Between an answer that is not clear for who asked the question, and one that is clear to who asked the question, the user will probably select the one that is clearer to him; if you down-vote a question which is not wrong, the OP would probably select the other question, even if he understand better the other one (especially if the user understand the down-vote as &lt;em&gt;the answer is not correct&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T19:34:56.900" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T19:34:56.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2010-09-03T19:41:32.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a tag is no longer used, it is automatically deleted. This doesn't happen immediately. There are periodic cleanup operations that will eventually eliminate unused tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T19:41:32.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-04T02:18:50.853" Score="4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we think of who wants to use a &quot;versus&quot; tag? I use e.g. the &quot;perl&quot; tag or the &quot;c&quot; tag on stackoverflow.com to find things I'm interested in. For example, I can easily imagine someone might want to add something like &quot;british-english&quot; to their list of interesting tags, if they're particularly interested in the UK. For another example, it's hard to search for questions about &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, so it's a big plus to have an [article] tag which can be used to search for these kinds of questions. The tag should be useful for someone trying to find things, not just a kind of busy work for people who want to run around classifying stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't imagine a scenario where someone wants to look for &quot;versus&quot; questions - adding this tag seems like busy work to me. Can someone suggest what the purpose of this tag is to justify keeping it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If not, I propose deleting this tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorDisplayName="delete" LastEditDate="2010-09-06T04:00:40.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-06T04:00:40.323" Title="&quot;versus&quot; tag: what is it good for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="249" CreationDate="2010-09-04T03:21:12.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think of &quot;versus&quot; and &quot;word choice&quot; as synonyms (at least in the way they are being used on this site) and suggested them as such.  I don't know if other people feel the same way.  So far, nobody has voted on any synonym suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-04T03:21:12.133" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2010-09-05T17:37:56.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;All English-related questions add value to this site. Remember the ultimate target of a StackExchange site is to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; the one stop for all questions and answers related to the topic, feeding search engines and being the reference. So for this very reason, all beginner questions should be allowed. We have had this discussion in much more detail on StackOverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-10-01T09:48:54.490" LastActivityDate="2012-10-01T09:48:54.490" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="256" CreationDate="2010-09-06T23:14:37.960" Score="53" ViewCount="1971" Body="&lt;p&gt;I left a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2562/are-er-insults-a-british-phenomenon/2574#2574&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; in which I made a reference to a word that many people find offensive (although I didn’t use or even mention the word itself). I referenced the word because it was an example of the type of word that the question was asking about: insults ending in &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user took me to task, scolding me for referencing an offensive word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is absurd. Does this user really expect us to pretend offensive words don’t exist? Is that really a reasonable way forward? This is what I imagine the policy someone who was offended by my comment might propose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Discussion of words that people might find offensive is strictly forbidden. Not only are you not allowed to use or mention such words, but you may not even allude to their existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anyone who actually supports such a policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T11:29:53.833" Title="Referencing the existence of words that may be offensive" Tags="|discussion|bowdlerization|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-09-06T23:49:04.370" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're going to pretend offensive words don't exist you'll need to close questions like that one as &quot;not a real question&quot;, as they ask about fictional concepts like curse words. Personally I think people have conflated swearing with the discussion of swearing, and they're quite different -- the utterance of a &quot;swear word&quot; is not necessarily swearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to temporarily break out swearing here, so brace yourselves if you find this offensive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I say &quot;fuck you&quot;, that's swearing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I say &quot;The word 'fuck' exists in the English language&quot;, that's not swearing. It's just not, except maybe in a semantic sense (I'm not familiar with the actual definition of the word)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no reason to be offended by the existence of swear words themselves, and pretending they don't exist on a site devoted to discussion of language would be laughable. If enough people have a problem with it, one approach is to have a tag that marks questions that talk about curse words, so people can ignore that tag (similiar to a NSFW tag on an RSS feed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="849" LastActivityDate="2010-09-06T23:49:04.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-09-06T23:54:13.900" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we can all agree that &lt;em&gt;that word&lt;/em&gt; is offensive, but to prevent acknowledging the existence of &lt;em&gt;that word&lt;/em&gt; or any word is beyond ridiculous.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have attempted bodily harm to the one person foolish enough to call me a [offensive word].   That doesn't mean that I'll throw a hissy fit if someone wants to discuss that word's etymology.  I probably won't read it, but I won't vote to close unless it turns into a troll-fest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words exist.  We discuss them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2010-09-06T23:54:13.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-09-07T02:41:01.633" Score="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only do I think that a person should be able to discuss an offensive word or phrase in an academic fashion as appropriate, but I don't even think it should be necessary to disguise the word or phrase in any way.  Of course, it is fine to go ahead and disguise the word as nohat did, but even if he had spelled out the actual word in that context I would still defend him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to use offensive words on a site like this, but I think we should be mature enough to recognize what constitutes academic discussion and what doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T02:41:01.633" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-09-07T04:45:32.983" Score="19" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this user really expect us to pretend offensive words don’t exist? Is that really a reasonable way forward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it is not. @Cinque does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have a right not to be offended by &lt;em&gt;perfectly legitimate (though offensive to some) words in an intellectual discussion of English&lt;/em&gt;. If merely acknowledging the existence of something like the &quot;N-word&quot; becomes forbidden on this site, I for one will leave. What if someone asks a question about the etymology of the &quot;N-word&quot; and actually spells it out? How are the non-native speakers on the site supposed to even necessarily know which words are offensive? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All @Cinque has done by continuing this line of thought is to now make me curious about the etymology of the &quot;N-word&quot; itself. Also, if we cater to political correctness, how will non-native speakers even know to what we refer? Lots of words start with &quot;N&quot;. Talk about the &quot;N&quot; word, the &quot;F&quot; word, and the &quot;C&quot; word. Even spell them out. Just don't &lt;strong&gt;call&lt;/strong&gt; anyone a &quot;N&quot; or a &quot;C&quot; or tell them to &quot;F&quot; off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="573" LastEditorUserId="573" LastEditDate="2010-09-07T18:22:02.537" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T18:22:02.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="215" CreationDate="2010-09-07T06:57:55.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, if the tag is to be any use it is very good to have a tag for &quot;semicolon&quot; so that people can find out what questions have been asked about this and don't repeat the same questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T06:57:55.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="261" CreationDate="2010-09-07T07:08:05.560" Score="6" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any guarantee that the accepted answers or the ones with the highest score on StackExchange are the correct ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, couldn't an answer with a low or even a sub-zero score be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is common sense the only reference? and if so, how can we solve that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T18:00:02.187" Title="Who is the judge in StackExchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="259" CreationDate="2010-09-07T09:00:37.717" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's two different things going on here: the short-term and the long-term. Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(note: the following has exaggeration for effect; live with it)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Short-term&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ESLguy comes in and posts something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;qestion my:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &quot;we go store Yesterday n bi meets&quot; rite iz  ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   teecher sez rong but i rite i no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer #1 says no, that's wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer #2 says no, and here's a better way to say it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer #3 says, &quot;itZ Go0d 2 mEe.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer #4 says no, and here are the particular language/grammar rules you're breaking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, ESLguy prefers answer #3, and accepts it as the best. Oops.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Long-term&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a variety of reasons, people wander into the site and run across the question. Over the next few years, answers 2 and 4 get a bunch of up votes and 3 gets even more down votes.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;End result (?)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory is that, in the long run, answers 2 &amp;amp; 4 will have accumulated scores that are so much higher than the accepted answer that it will be obvious to all that—while neither is the &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; answer—they are plainly &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T09:00:37.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="259" CreationDate="2010-09-07T11:45:21.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there's no justice, there's just us. The community is all there is, and the community often gets it wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T11:45:21.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="259" CreationDate="2010-09-07T15:27:11.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try and cite my responses whenever possible.  The only problem is that I'm normally citing webpages I found with google which usually wouldn't pass the academic standard for a quality reference.  My responses are at least as good as my references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="552" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T15:27:11.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="259" CreationDate="2010-09-07T18:00:02.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing I've noticed on this site in particular is that there are two different - but equally valid - answers to some questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the technical answer - e.g. which is of these examples is grammatically correct, which is likely to cite a dictionary or a Wikipedia entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the &quot;common usage&quot; answer, which may contradict the technical answer, and which may cite no source other than the experience of the answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a choice of which one to mark as the accepted answer, the questioner may be in a quandary. Whichever one he or she may choose, this is a good example of where the community's votes and comments are most useful to any subsequent visitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="303" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T18:00:02.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-09-07T19:12:18.427" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17685/etiquette-when-is-it-ok-to-edit-your-answer-to-include-information-from-someone/17695#17695&quot;&gt;original Stack Overflow community discussions around this matter&lt;/a&gt;, the consensus seems to be that if the second poster is improving on earlier posts (for example, adding citations, examples, etc), then this is considered a 'good thing' for the site as a whole and should be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, this ELU community is a different group of people, and may have different views on the matter.  However, I think that we want to encourage the most accurate, complete, cited answers as possible.  If these answers are posted after someone quickly posts a short answer with no supporting details, then the more complete answer should be up-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T19:12:18.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-09-07T19:49:07.807" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the Laura Schlessinger thing happened, I made &lt;a href=&quot;http://val-systems.blogspot.com/2010/08/dr-laura-effed-up.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a blog post here&lt;/a&gt; about why it isn't necessary to use (in the philosophical sense) the n-word in order for it to be offensive. Apparently for @Cinque, even mentioning the taboo avoidance term is enough to be offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to say that Cinque's offense was illegitimate, but it does place us in an awkward position. The topic of the question was about pejoratives ending in -er, clearly bringing the n-word into relevance. What should be done then? nohat even used the normally accepted form to mention without saying the n-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all due respect to Cinque's feelings, there must be some way to discuss taboo and offensive words when they are the topic of a question. Cinque, you haven't offered an alternative wording of nohat's comment, and not discussing the word at all is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a viable alternative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-20T18:43:20.230" LastActivityDate="2011-05-20T18:43:20.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-07T20:37:36.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;grammunity.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(available)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T20:37:36.333" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T20:37:36.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-07T20:40:10.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;verbalessences.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(available)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T20:40:10.307" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T20:40:10.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-07T20:43:22.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;redcomment.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(available)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T20:43:22.990" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T20:43:22.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-07T21:08:59.333" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lexicalia.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status: owned by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt;, who is willing to transfer ownership of the domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a made-up word, made from combining the Greek root &lt;em&gt;lexicos&lt;/em&gt;, referring to words, with the suffix &lt;em&gt;‑alia&lt;/em&gt;, denoting a collection of items related to a particular area of activity or interest. Thus, &lt;em&gt;Lexicalia&lt;/em&gt; is a collection of items related to words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T16:54:17.410" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T21:08:59.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="271" CreationDate="2010-09-08T10:40:54.757" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question may be a very normal one and its answer is also &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; normal, nevertheless I notice &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;very, very&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; abnormal upvotes for both the question and the answer! On the other hand, some questions and answers are real valuable and still don't get the right appreciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my notice and I'm not sure if someone agrees with me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T04:35:17.327" Title="Sometimes upvotes are provocative!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2010-09-08T13:02:39.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I answered the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2721/friday-afternoon-vehicle&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Friday afternoon&amp;quot; vehicle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then someone else gave the same answer &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; I did, and then he got &lt;strike&gt;four&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;six&lt;/em&gt; upvotes and accepted and I didn't get even one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvotes are strange, but then again this is much the same as on stackoverflow.com, so if you're used to the bizarrities of Stack Overflow this won't surprise you too much. The important thing is that it averages out over time, so e.g. a fairly obvious answer like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/how-to-pronounce-router/2390#2390&quot;&gt;What is the correct way to pronounce &amp;#39;router&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can get you seventeen upvotes (and two downvotes as well for some reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="delete" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T04:35:17.327" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:32:47.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;On-topic and Off-topic Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On-topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage, word choice, and grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Problems encountered by people learning English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Off-topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages other than English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English literature discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please proofread my document&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to improve my English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:32:47.473" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:32:47.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:37:57.777" Score="26" ViewCount="1450" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the essential components of the FAQ will be the list of on-topic and off-topic subjects for questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s use this question to vote on what topics should be on and off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="5249" LastEditDate="2012-02-09T16:47:07.220" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T18:10:35.893" Title="What questions are on-topic and off-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|beta-essentials|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="18" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:37:57.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:39:13.843" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{On-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage, word choice, and grammar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:39:13.843" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:39:13.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:40:14.423" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{On-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:40:14.423" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:40:14.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:40:40.890" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{On-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:40:40.890" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:40:40.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:42:10.177" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{On-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2010-09-14T22:22:30.187" LastActivityDate="2010-09-14T22:22:30.187" CommentCount="14" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:42:10.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:42:45.270" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{On-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems encountered by people learning English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:42:45.270" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:42:45.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:43:07.733" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{On-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:43:07.733" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:43:07.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:43:27.880" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages other than English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:43:27.880" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:43:27.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:43:53.870" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Criticism of English literature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2010-09-09T05:49:06.717" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T05:49:06.717" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:43:53.870" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:44:34.010" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please proofread my document&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:44:34.010" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:44:34.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:44:51.137" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to improve my English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:44:51.137" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T21:44:51.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2010-09-08T22:06:37.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Pronunciations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often it is necessary to discuss the pronunciation of words. There are a variety of ways of marking pronunciations in text. The simplest way is to use a “respelling” system, where you use a different spelling that is (hopefully) unambiguous for how to pronounce. Features of this system that are sometimes used are to put stressed syllables in all capital letters and to separate syllables with hyphens. This kind of system is often convenient, but frequently has the problem of being ambiguous (in some cases even more so than the original spelling of a word). Here are some examples of a respelling system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronunciation: pro-nun-see-AY-shun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aberrant: uh-BERR-uhnt, AB-ber-uhnt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;andouille: an-DOO-ee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another system is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; (IPA), which is the system used by linguists and others to represent the sounds of all the world’s languages. While most American English dictionaries use their own proprietary “respelling” systems to indicate pronunciations, British dictionaries have, for the most part, switched to using exclusively IPA. While there is no official system for IPA for English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_English#Key&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the system used by Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; incorporates most of the normal conventions used for transcribing English. Here are some examples of pronunciations using IPA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronunciation /prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃən/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aberrant: /əˈbɛrənt/, /ˈæbərənt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;andouille: /ænˈduːi/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to use whatever system you find the most convenient in both your questions and answers. However, we do encourage more experienced users to add IPA pronunciations to questions and answers to make things less ambiguous and more clear for other readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other discussions on meta regarding pronunciations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/238/how-should-i-report-a-pronunciation-using-the-ipa-notation&quot;&gt;How should I report a pronunciation using the IPA notation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115/how-to-enter-phonetic-transcriptions&quot;&gt;How to enter phonetic transcriptions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15/ipa-usage-entry&quot;&gt;IPA usage, entry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T22:06:37.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-09-09T01:42:20.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am strongly against censoring ourselves in an academic context. It's the job of the linguist, speaker, and learner to recognize, understand, and dissect these words. I would strongly recommend changing the word in reference to the actual word, if nothing else but to prevent confusion–and hopefully remove some of the stigma involved with it. Further, suggesting that we avoid all reference to a word on a site that is about words is ludicrous. That said, I can understand that some people may not want to read these words. Is a &quot;NSFW&quot;-like tag appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings other, interesting topics to mind. Why do people find words offensive? What are the histories of these words? Also, I'm particularly looking forward to our discussion on fucking-infixation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="89" LastEditDate="2010-09-09T04:05:50.820" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T04:05:50.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-09T12:40:22.053" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peeving about grammar disguised as a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-09-11T12:26:57.383" LastActivityDate="2010-09-11T12:26:57.383" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-09T12:40:22.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-09T17:26:20.467" Score="7" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is english.stackexchange.com the right place to ask about how English is used (or abused) in legal documents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still trying to wrap my head around how some &quot;and&quot; and &quot;or&quot; are sometimes used with opposing implied meaning in legal documents and laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="457" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T00:31:25.987" Title="Is english.stackexchange.com the right place to ask about how English is used (or abused) in legal documents?" Tags="|discussion|support|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2010-09-09T19:17:50.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/why-are-numbers-usually-written-twice-in-contracts&quot;&gt;at least one&lt;/a&gt; question purely about legal documents, which was rather vague and not really limited to English, but it survived. Your question seems to be more specific, so if anything, it is &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; likely to get closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an example of peculiar English usage, I don't see a reason for you not to post it. And if it's taken from an actual law (rather than, say, from a presentation by some law student), then go ahead and post it right now, you've sparked &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; interest for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T00:31:25.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2010-09-09T23:29:28.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the question.  If it's really a question about law that belongs on the &amp;#8212; hypothetical, at this point &amp;#8212; Law SE site, and you're only asking because the law in question happens to be written in English, I'd say it doesn't belong.  If it's about the usage of language itself, then it does belong, and I'm interested already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the quick test: if the law/bill/contract/whatever were written in Chinese, would you still want to ask your question?  If so, it doesn't belong on this site; if not, ask away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T23:29:28.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-09T23:34:45.773" Score="7" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although we haven’t made much progress on the domain name discussion, I don’t think it necessarily too soon to start talking about site design and logo ideas. Does anyone have any strong ideas about what visual elements our site about English Language and Usage should have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T22:01:16.220" Title="What should our logo and site design be like?" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-09T23:45:11.400" Score="9" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, so I put up a system message to encourage people to come here and help decide on the essential meta discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Help decide the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beta-essentials&quot;&gt;7 essential meta questions&lt;/a&gt; for this site while it’s in beta on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.english&lt;/a&gt;. We need your input!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did this somewhat unilaterally because I wanted to kick start more discussion on meta regarding important but boring matters like the domain name and the FAQ and what is on-topic and what is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please chime in on this question with your opinions of this message. Do you have a better wording? It’s currently set to expire on Saturday, but it can be deleted and replaced at any time. days Let us (the moderators) know what you think and we can fine-tune the messaging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T23:45:11.400" Title="System message to encourage meta discussion" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T22:40:24.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-10T00:49:23.980" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;englishbad.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since badenglish.com isn't available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T00:49:23.980" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-10T00:49:23.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-09-10T13:48:29.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to throw some ideas out there, a few possible theme directions — I don't necessarily even like these ideas as-is (as-are?), but maybe they will get the ball rolling and lead to better ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;dictionary-ish style, e.g. a classic serif font for the title and menus (probably serif everywhere would be overkill), maybe some IPA, part-of-speech, definition stuff sprinkled here and there&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;etymology theme, e.g. Germanic branch of the language tree, Old English/Middle English&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;revision theme, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.colorado.edu/Publications/styleguide/symbols.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stuff like this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to think of more abstract visual themes, but we're talking about language, so nothing obvious comes to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Note: these have been split into individual entries in case people want to vote on them.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-09-13T22:01:16.220" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T22:01:16.220" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2010-09-10T19:37:13.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible FAQ question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you mean by &quot;English&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English is the primary language for&#xA;  around 400 million people in UK, USA,&#xA;  Canada and Australia, and is estimated&#xA;  to be a secondary language for&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another billion or so&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We&#xA;  consider English to be the language&#xA;  actually used by native speakers,&#xA;  including &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dialects&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sociolects&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slang&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  and historical usage, rather than a&#xA;  language standard proscribed by an&#xA;  authoritarian source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an example, we regard &quot;The Queen's&#xA;  English&quot; as a subset of English, not&#xA;  as &quot;real English&quot; where&#xA;  most native speakers' actual English&#xA;  is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By extension, we accept&#xA;  questions on the form &quot;Is X more&#xA;  common than Y?&quot;, while questions on&#xA;  the form &quot;Isn't it annoying that&#xA;  people say X when they really should&#xA;  be saying Y?&quot; are off-topic.&#xA;  (See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;list of on-topic and&#xA;  off-topic questions&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some overlap with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45/do-we-need-a-site-manifesto&quot;&gt;Site Manifesto&lt;/a&gt; question, but I think it would be useful to have a summary of the site philosophy/policy on &quot;what do you consider proper English&quot; in the FAQ as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the actual answer, this is just my take. Feel free to modify it if you disagree on phrasing or want a different philosophy. From my point of view the important thing is just that this is addressed explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1125" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T19:37:13.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-10T20:34:23.327" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;FindingEnglish.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd use this site to find the correct word for something or find the correct usage etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T20:34:23.327" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-10T20:34:23.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-10T20:37:19.520" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;FindingTheWord.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T20:37:19.520" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-10T20:37:19.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-10T20:42:09.767" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;FluentOnglish.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;CorrectMyOnglish.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cos they are so hilarious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T20:42:09.767" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-10T20:42:09.767" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-10T20:45:38.140" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;QuestionMyEnglish.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T20:45:38.140" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-10T20:45:38.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-10T21:05:57.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TongueTips.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T21:05:57.677" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-10T21:05:57.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="301" CreationDate="2010-09-10T22:45:49.870" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which (if any) answer should be accepted on poll type questions?&#xA;A few weeks ago I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&lt;/a&gt;. I never asked a CW question before, thus I've no idea whether or not I should accept an answer among great contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How to cope with poll type questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="300" CreationDate="2010-09-10T23:48:55.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been some discussion on the meta Meta about this, see e.g. this feature request: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2208/remove-accepted-answer-feature-for-community-wikis&quot;&gt;“Remove 'accepted answer' feature for community wikis”&lt;/a&gt;. For all I can tell, no consensus has been reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, you can accept an answer on a CW question, so nobody can &lt;em&gt;forbid&lt;/em&gt; you to make use of this feature. However, nobody can &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; you to use it, either. Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16721/what-is-an-accept-rate-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;CW questions do not count towards your accept rate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that since CW questions are, by definition, owned by the community rather than by the OP, the OP can just lean back and let the community sort things out for him. Picking an answer to accept is not only difficult, or even impossible, but it also potentially interferes with the sorting by votes. (Of course, you can always unaccept an answer and accept a different one that has gained more votes in the mean time, but then why bother accepting an answer in the first place?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21175/is-community-wiki-fatally-flawed-xor-vitally-useful&quot;&gt;Is Community Wiki fatally flawed XOR vitally useful?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/60917/community-wiki-answer-sort&quot;&gt;Community wiki answer sort&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T23:48:55.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="303" CreationDate="2010-09-11T14:05:05.850" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;A month ago, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72/should-we-prefer-singular-or-plural-in-tags&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;if we should prefer singular or plural&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in tag names. &lt;strong&gt;Plural&lt;/strong&gt; seems to come out as the clear favourite among those who have any opinion on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'd like to request that at least the following tags are batch retagged (with corresponding tag synonyms) to plural form: &lt;code&gt;verb&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;verbs&lt;/code&gt;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;verb&#xA;word &#xA;synonym&#xA;pronoun &#xA;preposition&#xA;article &#xA;accent&#xA;proper-noun&#xA;adjective &#xA;neologism&#xA;number&#xA;modal-verb&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That's from the first page of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tag list&lt;/a&gt;; I probably missed some, and there are more on the subsequent pages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably these too, eh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;idiom&#xA;phrase &#xA;expression&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:24:09.023" Title="Batch retagging from singular to plural" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="302" CreationDate="2010-09-11T14:41:54.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are no objections, I will do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-11T14:41:54.707" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="65" CreationDate="2010-09-11T18:35:34.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good moderator would be fair, impartial and level-headed. Jeff's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&quot; post (linked to in the question too) sums it up a quite well, as most people here will probably agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/level-headed#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary's usage notes&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;level-headed&lt;/em&gt; quite fitting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Often having the connotation of remaining calm, composed, and careful, of not acting out of reflex or excessive emotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being an expert in some field related to the study of the English language will certainly lend more credibility to a moderator, but is still of secondary importance (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65/what-do-we-expect-from-moderators-on-elu/66#66&quot;&gt;Neil Fein pointed out&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-09-11T18:35:34.503" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-11T18:35:34.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="65" CreationDate="2010-09-13T11:46:56.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what I would expect from them is that they do the minimum possible moderation work in order that the site can function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T11:46:56.893" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-13T11:46:56.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-09-13T21:58:53.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionary-ish style, e.g. a classic serif font for the title and menus (probably serif everywhere would be overkill), maybe some IPA, part-of-speech, definition stuff sprinkled here and there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T21:58:53.840" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-13T21:58:53.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-09-13T21:59:31.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymology theme, e.g. Germanic branch of the language tree, Old English/Middle English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T21:59:31.750" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-13T22:01:28.623" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-09-13T22:00:13.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Revision theme, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.colorado.edu/Publications/styleguide/symbols.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stuff like this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T22:00:13.107" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-13T22:01:41.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="311" CreationDate="2010-09-14T12:13:45.903" Score="9" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally in working on other SE sites I come across a word usage or phrase I am unfamiliar with.  Before I've always gone with my &quot;best guess&quot; as to what the correct phrasing should be and edited accordingly.  Now it seems I have an opportunity to come to the experts, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3008/use-of-the-word-praxis&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an appropriate use of EL&amp;amp;U SE?  Do y'all mind being proofreaders for the difficult language on other sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1048" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2010-09-15T15:43:47.113" Title="Using EL&amp;U SE as writing help for other SE sites?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2010-09-14T16:13:22.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/274#274&quot;&gt;&quot;usage, word choice, and grammar&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, then we don't mind.  If it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/282#282&quot;&gt;&quot;please proofread my document&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, then we do mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2010-09-15T15:43:47.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2010-09-14T16:45:07.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;the thread regarding what is on-topic and what is off-topic&lt;/a&gt;, we seem to be coming to a consensus that it is fine to ask questions about text you are writing or proofreading, so long as the questions are specific and about a single question of English usage, spelling, word choice, or even “style”. However, an overly general “please look at this paragraph—I’m not that happy with it—how would you improve it?” is not welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it simply, we are happy to answer specific questions about English language and usage, but we are not a general proofreading service. (But you already knew that, right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-09-14T16:45:07.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="316" CreationDate="2010-09-15T19:03:31.157" Score="7" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose of all sites for people to pick apart explicit meanings from questions, this would be it, but I was surprised to get down-voted when I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3072/usage-of-get-past-participle/3077#3077&quot;&gt;answered a question&lt;/a&gt; with more details than the question explicitly asked for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;To be clear, I am not belly-aching the fact that I was down-voted.  I am curious about what are the expectations for answers on this site.  I don't want to start a flame war; I just want a civil discussion about this topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question essentially asked if, and why, one form of a sentence was preferred over another.  My answer also went into details about the differences in the two sentence forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?  Should I have just answered &quot;Yes, because that's how it is&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2010-09-15T22:03:28.527" Title="Is it unacceptable to provide more information than the question explicitly asks for?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="314" CreationDate="2010-09-15T19:20:14.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See -- that answer isn't adequate.  In almost every case, providing additional information makes an answer better, so long as the information is accurate and relevant.  If the extra information doesn't add anything, then it probably shouldn't be there and might be downvoted, but answers which provide definitions, examples, and clarification are &lt;em&gt;good answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2010-09-15T19:20:14.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="314" CreationDate="2010-09-15T22:03:28.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if you have extra, not-asked-for information, then at least it should not be the first thing you address in your answer, and it should not be almost the entire answer.  The part of your answer that addresses the question is just one line at the end, and it only addresses half of the question (&quot;is this correct?&quot;), and not the question of why there are two different words that can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-09-15T22:03:28.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2010-09-16T02:20:27.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not at all clear what &quot;usage&quot; means, even if you go and look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot;&gt;the questions which are tagged with this tag&lt;/a&gt;. I think most people are adding it to the questions just out of laziness. If someone thinks this tag is useful, what should be added to the tag wiki? I have no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T02:20:27.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="101" CreationDate="2010-09-16T02:24:46.457" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, there are issues that are much more urgent, such as the site search being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41/&quot;&gt;rather&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37/&quot;&gt;useless&lt;/a&gt;, but even those feature requests are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/24575/&quot;&gt;currently&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/60901/&quot;&gt;being&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62660/&quot;&gt;rejected&lt;/a&gt; on the meta Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that the powers that be are somewhat hesitant about tweaking the StackExchange engine for beta sites, and I can't really blame them for that. Who knows whether or not a particular SE site will survive its beta at all. (Before anybody panics, we are &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites?sort=percentanswered&quot;&gt;faring rather well&lt;/a&gt; at the moment, just as &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/pruning-season/&quot;&gt;most of our siblings&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, your feature request actually isn't limited to English Language and Usage. Listing one's first/second/third/Xth language could prove useful on many SE sites, even established ones such as StackOverflow. However, I am fairly certain that a request for two additional user profile fields will get rejected nonetheless, on the grounds that every user already has an &quot;About me&quot; field where they can share any bits of information they please. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many don't even use &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; field. Some don't fill out their user profiles at all. Others provide incomplete, incorrect or misleading information. And that's okay, they are free to do so, it's their personal page. The point is, adding two more fields to the database would result in having two more fields that are — at best — mostly ignored, or — at worst — completely useless. (I know that I, for one, wouldn't fill them out.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, regulars have a fairly accurate understanding of what other regulars' mother tongues are. Answers and comments speak louder than &quot;About me&quot; fields. So, your best bet is just to become a regular to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Participate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Profit!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing is, the second step is completely optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T02:30:27.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="321" CreationDate="2010-09-16T14:53:42.400" Score="7" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lots&lt;/em&gt; of questions on the site ask if a word/phrase/construct is &lt;strong&gt;acceptable&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;correct&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;common&lt;/strong&gt; (as opposed to unacceptable, erroneous or obsolete). For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recent example about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3112/agreement-vs-agreeance&quot;&gt;agreeance&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=acceptable&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=acceptable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if we could (and indeed, if we even should) come up with a good tag to group such questions together. I'm not sure, but I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; such a tag might be useful. (At least more useful than many of the random tags now found in such questions: &lt;code&gt;words&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;usage&lt;/code&gt;, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T01:44:54.923" Title="Tag for questions about whether a language feature is acceptable/common?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2010-09-16T19:07:51.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What a good idea! I suggest “acceptability”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit February 2, 2011:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; was convicted of being a meta-tag and given the death penalty on Feb. 1, when it had been used on 44 questions. After some discussion it was agreed that perhaps it was a misused and misunderstood tag but not necessarily a meta-tag and it might be tolerated if used correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I have resurrected the &quot;acceptability&quot; tag in the guise of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, and have now tagged over 100 questions with it—all questions that ask about the grammatical correctness or acceptability of different English usages. I would hope that everyone now agrees that the tag denotes something specific about question contents and is not a meta-tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2011-02-03T01:44:54.923" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T01:44:54.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-16T19:10:26.127" Score="9" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/320/tag-for-questions-about-whether-a-language-feature-is-acceptable-common&quot;&gt;this question about what tag to use for questions about acceptability&lt;/a&gt;, I thought I would ask what is the best way to answer these kinds of questions, so as to address both prescriptive and descriptive viewpoints comprehensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What issues should good answers to questions of acceptability address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T05:33:39.660" Title="How to answer questions about acceptability" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="322" CreationDate="2010-09-16T20:14:02.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For any question of acceptability I think it is important to cover both descriptive and prescriptive viewpoints, regardless of the views of the answer’s author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that really good answers to questions of usage would address all these issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would anyone have a basis for calling a usage &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, based on criticism from significant grammar commentators?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, is the justification for calling it &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; reasonable and shared by many people?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What counter-argument is there, if any, for calling it &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, why was the question asker concerned about it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the usage in common contemporary use? &#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, is it commonly used only in certain levels or formality or topics of discourse? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, is it because it used to be common but has fallen out of favor, or was the usage always marginal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other interesting questions that answers might address are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How has usage varied over time? &#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the questioned usage recent or old?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the questioned usage on the rise, on the decline, or in a steady state?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What alternative usages are there?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does frequency of the questioned usage compare to suggested alternatives?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are suggested alternatives more common at different formality levels or in different topics of discourse?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T20:14:02.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="325" CreationDate="2010-09-16T21:44:56.403" Score="3" ViewCount="2472" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can have specific tags for questions about a specific dialect, but shouldn't there be some form of tag that encompasses anything like this? E.g. &lt;code&gt;dialects&lt;/code&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1209" LastEditorUserId="1209" LastEditDate="2010-09-16T21:50:50.763" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T22:15:23.140" Title="American English + British English + Xxx English tags Merger/Umbrella Tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="324" CreationDate="2010-09-16T22:15:23.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please correct me if I'm wrong, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialects&quot;&gt;isn't there one already&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T22:15:23.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="322" CreationDate="2010-09-17T00:33:27.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own policy about &quot;acceptability&quot; is that it's best to try to answer these questions in the context of what the person asking the question actually wants. It's quite likely that someone learning English as a foreign language would not be at all happy to get an answer intended for someone studying linguistics, and vice-versa. I'd also be careful about overloading answers with information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-09-17T00:33:27.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="328" CreationDate="2010-09-17T02:46:58.060" Score="-4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comparing to stackoverflow or superuser, this site has much less questions, maybe allowing people to post their compositions here to ask for comments?  Although word and many spell checkers could fix basic grammar mistakes, non-native English speakers often lack the ability to write natural English sentences because they often could choose the appropriate words and they don't know how to make some variations of the style of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might help many people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may object that a composition is too long and users won't like to spend too much time on reading question. However, people who ask for help would learn to post short composition after a while after their learned that prolix questions are unlikely to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I've made myself clear.  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="786" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2010-09-17T12:35:44.580" LastActivityDate="2010-09-17T12:35:44.580" Title="How about allowing people to post entire compositions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="327" CreationDate="2010-09-17T04:19:00.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this suggestion will be politely declined as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/282#282&quot;&gt;emerging FAQ of what's on-topic and what's not&lt;/a&gt; — and, in fact, as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;site description&lt;/a&gt; itself: &quot;English Language and Usage is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&quot;. Many people here will object to proofreading a single sentence, let alone a complete essay. This is simply not our mission statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I am not sure whether the StackExchange engine is at all suitable for commenting on lengthy texts. However, if you think it is, your best bet is to propose a new site over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;. There are probably more than enough people out there who would not mind commenting on each other's prose (or poetry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the comparatively low number of questions, StackOverflow has been around for more than two years, while this site is only six weeks old, as of the time of this writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2010-09-17T04:47:44.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="327" CreationDate="2010-09-17T05:33:07.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comparing to stackoverflow or&#xA;  superuser, this site has much less&#xA;  questions, maybe allowing people to&#xA;  post their compositions here to ask&#xA;  for comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are already sites like this, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://lang-8.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lang-8.com&lt;/a&gt; or italki. Those at least give some motivation to help other people because one can also ask native speakers of other languages to check your writings in return. And lang-8 is also set up for &quot;proof-reading&quot; in a way which this site isn't, at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although word and many spell checkers&#xA;  could fix basic grammar mistakes,&#xA;  non-native English speakers often lack&#xA;  the ability to write natural English&#xA;  sentences because they often could&#xA;  choose the appropriate words and they&#xA;  don't know how to make some variations&#xA;  of the style of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It might help many people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving out free sandwiches at street corners would help many people, for example those people could save money buying lunch and save time going to restaurants. That might well help many people, but could you tell me what the motivation is to help those people, and why I should spend all my time and money making free sandwiches and handing them out to strangers? If you come to my house as a friend, maybe I will make you a sandwich, or I might think it was a good business to open a sandwich shop and sell sandwiches for money. But I have no interest at all in handing out sandwiches for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="delete" LastActivityDate="2010-09-17T05:33:07.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-09-17T17:25:13.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP is used alternatively to refer to &quot;Original Post&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could get increasingly confusing for a newbie, who will find &quot;original post&quot; v/s &quot;original poster&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1241" LastActivityDate="2010-09-17T17:25:13.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2010-09-19T14:40:08.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I prefer to refer to this person as the &lt;em&gt;questioner&lt;/em&gt; (or even the &lt;em&gt;asker&lt;/em&gt;). This is completely unambiguous, and what is more, fully correct and widely accepted English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="184" LastEditDate="2010-09-21T17:47:16.483" LastActivityDate="2010-09-21T17:47:16.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="322" CreationDate="2010-09-22T06:27:05.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have felt for a while that we need a canonical question/answer (here, or in the FAQ) to which to point people who want to talk in quasi-moralistic terms about things being 'right' or 'wrong' (as opposed to 'common and understandable' or 'weird and downright ugly').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this because I think that lots of questions from people with English as a second language* tend to be looking for an equivalent 'authority' to one in their mother tongue. (I'm thinking of French in particular, with the &lt;em&gt;Académie Française&lt;/em&gt;, which pretty much decides what is French or isn't). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's helpful to these people to perpetuate the illusion that such an authority exists in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I am concerned, there is nothing subjective about this. You can love it or bemoan it: language evolves and you can't stop it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that anyone can just arbitrarily decide to change the meaning or spelling of a word or invent new ones? (&lt;em&gt;panic!!!!&lt;/em&gt;) Well, yes, I guess it does; though at the risk of being completely incomprehensible (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/a&gt; anyone?). Apparently &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ksat.com/family/4742542/detail.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;teenage girls&lt;/a&gt; are doing it all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'll take &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt; statistics anytime, rather than some prescriptive advice from a decades-old book written by some &lt;em&gt;(cough)&lt;/em&gt; grammar nazi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talking of statistics, I think it would also be good to have some canonical question/answer on using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&amp;amp;word1=center&amp;amp;word2=centre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google fights&lt;/a&gt; as tests of common usage. Maybe nohat could include some info about getting the best out of COCA, and other alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*(Maybe also some with English as a first language but with memories of particularly prescriptive teachers.) &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T05:33:39.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="346" CreationDate="2010-09-24T23:20:52.233" Score="23" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the community's stance on people asking homework questions on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3398/what-is-the-antonym-of-abjure&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; that got me thinking about the issue; this question seems like a blatant copy &amp;amp; paste from a homework assignment, complete with multiple choices.  There was no mention of it being homework (in the question body or tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stackoverflow has had issues with this, and that community has adopted a policy of allowing such questions, as long as the asker is honest and upfront about it (i.e. mentioning that it is homework in the question body or tagging it [homework]).  Askers are encouraged to list what they have tried thus far, prior to getting stuck and asking for help.  Answerers then will try to give hints, but not answer the question directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a similar policy would make sense here, at least to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3136/they-might-keep-knowledge-of-its-potential-to-effect-social-change-from-being-wid&quot;&gt;Another question&lt;/a&gt;, which could have been a homework question, was tagged as being from the GRE.  In my opinion, the fact that the asker was upfront about the quesiton's source, and what, exactly, he/she was confused about, made this a good question.  The first question does not strike me as particularly good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T21:42:36.960" Title="How to deal with homework questions" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2010-09-25T03:17:59.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;TV Tropes has an opposite of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DarthWiki/IlliteracyCommunist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Illiteracy communist&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2010-09-25T03:17:59.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-26T07:32:49.773" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;HowDoISayThatAgain.Com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastActivityDate="2010-09-26T07:32:49.773" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-26T07:32:49.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-26T07:37:58.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ProofRed.Com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not available but no content and created 11 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a pun, not technically incorrect though certainly not spelled the way it sounds (a possible problem), still hints at what the site is about, and is short and sweet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastActivityDate="2010-09-26T07:37:58.323" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-26T07:37:58.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-09-26T07:44:59.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;SentenceFragment.Com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastActivityDate="2010-09-26T07:44:59.340" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-26T07:44:59.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-09-26T08:25:53.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gratuitous, condescending, or unasked-for grammar corrections. Otherwise there is a risk of the grammar-correcting flame in turn being flamingly grammar-corrected, ad nauseam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been on the site for one day and have already received what felt to me like a sneeringly condescending slam of one of my own (apparent) errors in a question I wrote to the best of my grammar ability. And just in the last ten minutes I myself have been tempted to oh-so-smoothly (yet condescendingly?) point out other people's spelling and grammar errors three or four times. Whether that was a reaction to my own experience or not, it makes me think such behavior is a real and dangerous risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like in the domain name suggestions thread where &quot;GrammarNazi.Com&quot; was seriously voted down because it has all the wrong connotations, I think some clear guidelines are necessary to help this place NOT be full of &lt;strike&gt;such people&lt;/strike&gt; experiences that elicit such a label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this isn't the fully correct place to mention it (so please tell me if so and I'll move the content) but I've also had one of my honest questions voted down without an explanation. Really? I remember pondering the question a full twelve years ago and wishing I knew the answer. It was a natural question to ask after finding the site. What gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a real risk in my mind of people experiencing a lot of negativity, here. On Stack Overflow, the focus is on &lt;em&gt;solving problems&lt;/em&gt;. Also, there are often many, many good solutions to the same programming problem. But in many cases there is only one &quot;right answer&quot; in grammar and the focus can easily be on &lt;em&gt;correcting mistakes&lt;/em&gt;. This naturally appeals to the intellectual (yet egotistical) elite who all too often want to both display their skills and smack down others in order to feel superior. It also makes it easier to take voted-down questions personally (which I am doing about my question because I honestly can't imagine what someone could object to about it). If I really didn't know the answer, and there's any kind of substantive grammar answer possible, how can asking the question be worth punishing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not suggesting all unasked-for corrections be banned. The point is &lt;em&gt;how things are done&lt;/em&gt;. A simple &quot;FYI: &lt;em&gt;fait accompli&lt;/em&gt; should be italicized&quot; or even editing the post to fix the problem is a lot better than making a comment or wisecrack that leaves the person possibly less than happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/163/should-we-correct-or-point-out-language-errors-in-questions&quot;&gt;Should we correct (or point out) language errors in questions?&lt;/a&gt; which addresses this. To me there isn't enough emphasis in that question on the negative side-effects of correcting people's grammar &lt;strong&gt;tactlessly&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to edit my answer to fix grammar. No comment necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2010-09-27T16:44:49.617" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-26T08:25:53.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22" CreationDate="2010-09-26T08:37:20.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a different perspective than some answers. I see allowing those types of questions as having two main problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether they are allowed or closed seems a bit arbitrary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The questioner or answerer sometimes reaps points like a threshing machine mows down wheat. In fact, I'm sure that the tendency of these types of questions to garner rep are what drive them to be posted in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What leaves a bad taste in my mouth about these questions is that once the question is asked and someone get some obscene 250 upvotes, they've &quot;stolen&quot; that space away from everyone else. The same question can't ever be asked again. It leaves me feeling a little bit cheated because those folks got an easy ride into fame where I'm chunking my way forward by only the sweat I'm willing to put in. And before you criticize me for being uncreative, I am hesitant to try posting such questions myself exactly because they feel so lousy. I don't like it; I don't want to do it; trying to post this type of question myself is bound to yield many closed questions, and somehow feels like a violation of the spirit of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastActivityDate="2010-09-26T08:37:20.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="344" CreationDate="2010-10-05T06:19:50.403" Score="3" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I got an email from SE English Language and Usage. I was congratulated of being one of the top users this month (October). Looking at the stats I saw something rather disturbing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While in the last two months, the top user usually had gained a few thousand points in reputation, in October it slowed down to a couple hundred. I made 21 rank with thirty some points. In the first month, the winning number for October would have barely made the top fifty, in the next the top thirty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I was kindly reminded, that we are in the beginning of the month October. My vacation (it really has been most refreshing and obviously felt longer than it was) together with the error in the email - pointing to October - confused me. Thus I was ahead of everybody else and had started November already. Back on track. So this is more of a general discussion now on what to expect if something like this happens with no evidence in my example. So if this pattern will be true for a site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an expected pattern with new SE sites, or should we worry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ralph Rickenbach" LastEditorDisplayName="Ralph Rickenbach" LastEditDate="2010-10-06T04:54:31.273" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="English Language and Usage slowing down" Tags="|discussion|reputation|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2010-10-05T07:13:48.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar Ally&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T07:13:48.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="342" CreationDate="2010-10-05T10:59:07.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's too early to worry about that. We need to wait a few months more to understand what the actual pattern is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the first weeks after an SE site is launched, people who committed to the site in Area51 are asked to post questions and answers to &quot;fulfill the commitment&quot;. Also, at that stage you're encouraged to participate actively in the site to get the Beta badge. For those two reasons, I'd expect any site to experience a cool down period after that initial stage. I'm not sure if it happened with the other SE sites tough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's revisit this topic in a few months. There's not much we could do now anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T10:59:07.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="342" CreationDate="2010-10-05T13:26:59.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bruno makes a few good points, to which I will add another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rep is generated by voting. As of this writing, there have been three huge waves of votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Private Beta. I haven't participated in it, so I have to speculate to some degree, but it seems reasonable to me to believe that the first few users voted rather heavily to sort things out, to set the general tone of the site.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first few weeks of public beta. A wave of new users came in, including myself. If memory serves me correctly, when I first registered on this site, there were already 400-odd questions and 800-odd answers. Many sounded interesting, so I had to &quot;catch up&quot; with voting. Since there's a limit of 30 votes/day, that phase was rather long. I was reliably handing out hundreds of rep points for many days in a row, even on weekends, when barely any new questions were posted. The same must be true for a rather significant number of other users. Now that we have caught up, things are back to normal. I am not handing out anywhere as much rep nowadays, and probably close to none on Sundays. After all, I can't vote on things &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somewhere in between, there were &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/54/announcer&quot;&gt;two questions&lt;/a&gt; that got promoted by Joel and Jeff, resulting in yet another spike in voting activity. Most of those users were passers-by; they left a few votes on those particular questions, but didn't become regulars.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess all three points can be summed up as follows: Things are at their normal level now. Rather than the activity being exceptionally low right now, it used to be exceptionally high in the past. Until the next big wave of votes — for whatever reasons it might come — it's business as usual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and let me not forget that recently, our most active voter so far, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/252/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; (800+ votes), went missing in action for about two weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, to address your question about a general pattern, there are two theories that are quite popular on the meta Meta, even though evidence for both is rather anecdotal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a site matures and certain users become &quot;recognized experts&quot; — at least as far as their rep is concerned — people tend to give more weight to their answers. In other words, high-rep users pile up even more points (comparatively) than low-rep ones. So, after some time, it's not at all unusual to see the same handful of users fighting for the top position &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues&quot;&gt;in the reputation leagues&lt;/a&gt;, followed by lots and lots of other users who are not gaining anywhere as much rep.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other theory is that as time passes, regular users tend to cast fewer votes on average. Robert Cartaino calls it &quot;The 'Everything Is in Order Here' Syndrome&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few questions on the meta Meta that deal with these theories. I will link to just one, because it actually covers both of them: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63387/does-herd-behavior-influence-the-so-sites&quot;&gt;&quot;Does herd behavior influence the SO sites?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T13:26:59.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="333" CreationDate="2010-10-05T15:02:58.177" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an attempt to reconcile two extreme positions in a way that is acceptable to the majority of the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some might feel it's irrelevant that it's homework:&lt;br&gt;we should always provide a complete answer.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Others might feel this site is not the place for homework:&lt;br&gt;we should close all homework questions immediately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the official position of this site's administrators, but rather a community-edited effort to provide clear guidelines on how to respond to homework.  &lt;em&gt;Individual community members can of course use their own judgment.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidelines outlined below are rooted in two principles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is okay to ask about homework.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For one, it would be impossible to stop it all even if we wanted to. English Language and Usage exists to provide a standard repository for English-related problems, both simple and complex, and this includes helping students. Secondly, an answer to a homework question might turn out to be useful to a greater audience in a different context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An answer that doesn't help the student learn is not in their own best interest.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Therefore you might choose to treat homework questions differently from other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Asking about homework&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consider whether your question is better off at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ELL is a site dedicated to people learning English and as a result doesn't have as strict standards. In addition, homework questions are typically better received on ELL.&#xA;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3722/191178&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make a good-faith attempt to solve the problem yourself first.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If we can't see enough work on your part, your question might be voted down and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; question per post.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you're asking about multiple problems, your question is likely to be too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask about &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; problems with your &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; approach to answering the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you can't do that yet, try doing more of your own work first or searching for more general help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Admit that the question is homework.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Trying to hide it might just get the question closed faster. Do this by mentioning that it is homework in the question text. The &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; tag, like other so-called meta tags, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;is now discouraged&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be aware of school policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If your school has a policy regarding outside help on homework, make sure you are aware of it before you ask for help on English Language and Usage. If there are specific restrictions (for example, you may receive some help, but not complete answers), include them in the question so that those providing assistance can keep you out of trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Never just copy answers you don't understand.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It definitely won't help you later (after school, in later assignments, on tests, etc.) and it could be, at best, very embarrassing if you are asked to explain or expand on the answers you turned in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Answering homework questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Try to provide explanation that will lead the asker in the correct direction.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Genuine understanding is the real goal for students — though trying to provide that is usually appreciated for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's usually better not to provide a complete answer&lt;/strong&gt; if you believe it would not help the student. You can provide a few hints first, and, in the spirit of creating a useful resource, you may come back after a suitable amount of time and edit your response to include more complete information. This way, the student still has to write their own answer, but a full solution can still become available after the assignment has ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't downvote others who answer homework questions in good faith&lt;/strong&gt;, even if they break these guidelines.  It's not always obvious at first glance that a question is homework, especially when you're not expecting to see it here. It is a good idea to suggest editing the response in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't ridicule a student&lt;/strong&gt; just because they haven't yet learned something &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; or developed habits you might personally expect from a seasoned writer. Do add a &lt;em&gt;respectful&lt;/em&gt; comment or answer that points them towards best practices and better style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't downvote a homework question that follows the guidelines&lt;/strong&gt; and was asked in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't edit a question to add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag or any other &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Please edit these tags out when you see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for non-homework questions, questions in the spirit of &amp;quot;please proofread this sentence&amp;quot; will be closed as off-topic, as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/282#282&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Use your best judgment and consider allowing some time (30 minutes at least) for the asker to respond to comments asking for clarification. Remember that students of the English language — and new users of this site in general — might not yet understand what is expected of them. Help them to get that understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer was based in part on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10811/how-to-ask-and-answer-homework-questions/10812#10812&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T21:42:36.960" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-05T15:02:58.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-10-06T15:30:45.833" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first thought was &lt;strong&gt;GrammarGeeks.com&lt;/strong&gt; but this seems taken by someone who does copy-editing as a business. Along the same lines, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;GrammarNerds.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whois suggests that the domain is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1573" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T15:30:45.833" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-06T15:30:45.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-10-06T21:47:51.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WordOverflow.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T21:47:51.537" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-06T21:47:51.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-10-06T22:05:51.833" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;SoItIsSaid.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SoItsSaid.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SoItIsSaid.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SoItWasSaid.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AndSoItWasSaid.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastEditorUserId="1157" LastEditDate="2010-10-08T16:15:41.773" LastActivityDate="2010-10-08T16:15:41.773" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-06T22:05:51.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2010-10-07T06:09:36.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;MonkeysWithTypewriters.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;registered but for sale&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The powerful 'collective intelligence' of stack exchange sites reminds me of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Infinite Monkey Theorem&lt;/a&gt; which states that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A monkey hitting keys on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastEditorUserId="1157" LastEditDate="2010-10-07T23:40:15.927" LastActivityDate="2010-10-07T23:40:15.927" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-07T06:09:36.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-09T00:49:15.310" Score="9" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We closed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2/what-should-our-domain-name-be&quot;&gt;domain naming thread (click for details)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;strong&gt;let's start with a killer &amp;quot;elevator pitch!&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Joel will be blogging about the elevator pitch approach to naming, but to get you started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Elevator Pitch&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't as easy as it sounds. Imagine the user who will never read your FAQ and you have two seconds to grab their attention. It should be catchy but descriptive. It should be thoroughly clear but painfully concise. &lt;strong&gt;Make every... word... count.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some creative examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gawker.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gawker&lt;/a&gt;: Daily Manhattan media news and gossip. Reporting live from the center of the universe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gizmodo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gizmodo&lt;/a&gt;: The gadget guide. So much in love with shiny new toys, it’s unnatural.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.autoblog.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autoblog&lt;/a&gt;: We obsessively cover the auto industry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dumblittleman.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DumbLittleMan&lt;/a&gt;: So what do we do here? Well, it’s simple. 15 to 20 times per week we provide tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.needcoffee.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Needcoffee.com&lt;/a&gt;: We are the Internet equivalent of a triple espresso with whipped cream. Mmmm…whipped cream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Use it as a Tagline&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shorter elevator pitch &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used as a tagline — something you can display in the header at the top of the page. If it doesn't fit, consider shortening it or creating a separate tagline. Here are some great examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://slashdot.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slashdot&lt;/a&gt;: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifehacker.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lifehacker&lt;/a&gt;: Don’t live to geek, geek to live!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesimpledollar.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Simple Dollar&lt;/a&gt;: Financial talk for the rest of us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Motto (don't forget your logo)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A logo begs for it own little, short tagline — like a motto. Maybe the tagline inspires the logo; Maybe it's the other way around. Mottos make good t-shirt, bumper stickers, and other marketing material. Either way, you'll recognize a good motto when you see it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think Different.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Uncola.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intel inside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like a rock.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The king of beers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…and perhaps all this leads to a proper name and domain for your site… &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;. So let's start from the basics. &lt;strong&gt;Come up with a killer elevator pitch, tagline, and/or motto!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T06:34:16.220" Title="Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-04-30T20:40:55.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-11T05:05:56.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related questions which might be consulted when answering (sorry, too many for a comment): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;What questions are on-topic and off-topic here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69/is-this-site-for-english-as-a-second-language&quot;&gt;Is this site for “English as a second language”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/this-is-not-a-site-for-peeving&quot;&gt;This is not a site for peeving&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17/whos-the-audience-how-to-promote&quot;&gt;Who's the audience; How to promote?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45/do-we-need-a-site-manifesto&quot;&gt;Do we need a 'Site Manifesto'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/322/how-to-answer-questions-about-acceptability&quot;&gt;How to answer questions about acceptability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Community wiki so that others can add/remove as desired&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-10-11T05:05:56.730" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-11T05:05:56.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-11T23:42:14.723" Score="11" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to use this site to ask for words that fit a given definition? Dictionaries are great for looking up definitions if you know the word you're looking up, but not the other way around. I'm sure that's not terribly clear, so here's an example of the type of question I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, you know how some people think that an angel or a minor god or the Grim Reaper shows up after you die, and takes your soul to the afterlife? Is there a word for people/beings who do that do that kind of guiding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found two Meta questions the opposite of what I'm asking about (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144/find-in-dictionary-questions&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213/suggestion-single-word-lookups-are-off-topic&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;), and one that asks about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319/tag-for-requests-for-single-word-for-xyz&quot;&gt;tagging these questions&lt;/a&gt; but no dupes or anything that says these questions are or aren't allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, the answer to the sample question is &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordsmith.org/words/psychopomp.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psychopomp&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="1420" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T08:34:36.693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T08:34:36.693" Title="Are word requests allowed?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2010-10-12T09:16:50.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. This is certainly a valid type of question on the English language. Moreover, as you pointed out, it's not even possible to use the dictionary for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T09:16:50.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2010-10-12T09:58:42.343" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; so-called &quot;reverse dictionaries&quot; such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (and searching for &quot;soul guide afterlife&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=soul+guide+afterlife&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;returns &quot;psychopomp&quot;&lt;/a&gt; as the top result). That being said, I doubt many people know that they even exist. Plus, we already have quite a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;questions tagged &quot;single-word-requests&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and so far, they are not getting close-voted at all. In fact, they are quite fun, while at the same time not being fun for fun's sake. They are fun &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; challenging, and people can learn from them a lot (as opposed to fun questions such as &quot;what is your favorite punctuation mark?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T09:58:42.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-12T17:01:20.747" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Me no speaky English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="301" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T17:01:20.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-13T10:00:40.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elevator pitch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The community that democratically with rationale solves the quest for better English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagline&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Officializing English. Or wait, is it officialise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Motto&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English we think!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ralph Rickenbach" LastActivityDate="2010-10-13T10:00:40.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-13T15:11:39.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Helping you get the words out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastActivityDate="2010-10-13T15:11:39.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-13T15:14:14.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mind your speech? - Speak your mind!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2010-10-23T03:21:42.030" LastActivityDate="2010-10-23T03:21:42.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-15T14:21:26.447" Score="26" ViewCount="1112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm asking a question about the word &quot;cheese&quot;. Which of the following should I use? I see various versions being used all over, and it'd be nice to have something consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word 'cheese' indicate something yellow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word &quot;cheese&quot; indicate something yellow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word &lt;code&gt;cheese&lt;/code&gt; indicate something yellow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word &lt;strong&gt;cheese&lt;/strong&gt; indicate something yellow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word &lt;em&gt;cheese&lt;/em&gt; indicate something yellow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word cheese indicate something yellow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1606" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T19:01:11.260" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T19:01:11.260" Title="What emphasis to use when referring to words?" Tags="|discussion|faq|style|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2010-10-15T20:05:04.190" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually use &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt;. Sometimes I use “double quotation marks” when referring to long phrases or whole sentences. I would stay away from &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;code&gt;verbatim&lt;/code&gt;, or plain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-10-15T20:05:04.190" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="189" CreationDate="2010-10-16T20:19:46.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is now fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T20:19:46.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-10-16T20:25:19.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh wow, weird -- reproduced, but I'm chalking this little cosmetic issue up to IE being generally strange and praying IE9 fixes it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T20:25:19.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="37" CreationDate="2010-10-16T20:29:06.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the search page itself has a Google search option&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uZQ6M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uZQ6M.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-content/uploads/search-options-default-providers.png&quot;&gt;stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get there enter &lt;kbd&gt;enter&lt;/kbd&gt; in the search box (eg leave the search terms blank). This page is also linked in the sidebar on every search result page under &amp;quot;search tips&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T14:19:37.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2010-10-17T10:30:09.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Odd, looks like it is already there in the suggested list, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/present-tense/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/present-tense/synonyms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its just awaiting moderator intervention, or 3 votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2010-10-17T10:30:09.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2010-10-17T13:12:23.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any idea about the dialog box and why it says that, but I just went in and approved the &lt;code&gt;present&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;present-tense&lt;/code&gt; synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-10-17T13:12:23.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="372" CreationDate="2010-10-19T06:08:32.103" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4180/a-force-is-acting-on-a-box-until-t-10-seconds-is-the-force-still-acting-on-t&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; seems to be question 1000. 1000 questions in 74 days, that is 13-14 questions a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1269/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;official rating&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;997 questions - Okay – 1,500 questions is a healthy beta, 750 questions is worrying. A healthy site generates lots of good content to make sure users keep coming back. This site is on pace to get 1,174 questions after 90 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;997 questions because this statistic is done on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be considered a healthy beta, we need 31-32 questions per day for the remaining 16 days. How do we do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ralph Rickenbach" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T13:27:45.283" Title="Congratulations - 1000 questions in 74 days" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2010-10-19T07:49:37.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we need to introduce our site to a larger audience by making use of social sites like facebook. In this way, we can gain more users who are likely to be interested but who haven't known about our site yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastActivityDate="2010-10-19T07:49:37.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2010-10-19T16:59:46.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, before anybody panics, we don't really &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; 1500 questions to pass the beta. All site-health figures are just rough estimates, and the powers that be are constantly tweaking them. In fact, just ten days ago, that box read &quot;1,000 questions is a healthy beta, 500 questions is worrying&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at our siblings, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites?sort=questions&quot;&gt;we are faring rather well&lt;/a&gt;. Game Development has 924 questions (after 96 days), Photography and Photographic Editing has 860 (after 95 days), Statistical Analysis has 896 (after 91 days), but according to Area51, they have all finished their betas and will be launching very soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, let's have a more thorough analysis of how our very own 1000 questions came about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Date    Number of questions posted&#xA;&#xA;Aug  5  34 ==================================&#xA;Aug  6  25 =========================&#xA;Aug  7  11 ===========&#xA;Aug  8   6 ======&#xA;Aug  9  17 =================&#xA;Aug 10  18 ==================&#xA;Aug 11   8 ========&#xA;(End of private beta.)&#xA;Aug 12  25 =========================&#xA;Aug 13  51 ===================================================&#xA;Aug 14  19 ===================&#xA;Aug 15  14 ==============&#xA;Aug 16  32 ================================&#xA;Aug 17  20 ====================&#xA;Aug 18  35 ===================================&#xA;Aug 19  21 =====================&#xA;Aug 20  23 =======================&#xA;Aug 21  17 =================&#xA;Aug 22  16 ================&#xA;Aug 23  24 ========================&#xA;Aug 24  22 ======================&#xA;Aug 25  14 ==============&#xA;Aug 26  12 ============&#xA;Aug 27   7 =======&#xA;Aug 28  15 ===============&#xA;Aug 29   8 ========&#xA;Aug 30   9 =========&#xA;Aug 31  17 =================&#xA;Sep  1  19 ===================&#xA;Sep  2  14 ==============&#xA;Sep  3  18 ==================&#xA;Sep  4  16 ================&#xA;Sep  5  10 ==========&#xA;Sep  6   9 =========&#xA;Sep  7  13 =============&#xA;Sep  8  18 ==================&#xA;Sep  9  10 ==========&#xA;Sep 10  17 =================&#xA;Sep 11   6 ======&#xA;Sep 12   8 ========&#xA;Sep 13   6 ======&#xA;Sep 14  17 =================&#xA;Sep 15   9 =========&#xA;Sep 16  13 =============&#xA;Sep 17   9 =========&#xA;Sep 18   4 ====&#xA;Sep 19   8 ========&#xA;Sep 20   7 =======&#xA;Sep 21  10 ==========&#xA;Sep 22  14 ==============&#xA;Sep 23   7 =======&#xA;Sep 24  10 ==========&#xA;Sep 25   3 ===&#xA;Sep 26   6 ======&#xA;Sep 27   6 ======&#xA;Sep 28   8 ========&#xA;Sep 29   6 ======&#xA;Sep 30  10 ==========&#xA;Oct  1   9 =========&#xA;Oct  2   4 ====&#xA;Oct  3   3 ===&#xA;Oct  4  11 ===========&#xA;Oct  5   3 ===&#xA;Oct  6  17 =================&#xA;Oct  7  11 ===========&#xA;Oct  8  15 ===============&#xA;Oct  9   9 =========&#xA;Oct 10   5 =====&#xA;Oct 11  15 ===============&#xA;Oct 12   4 ====&#xA;Oct 13  14 ==============&#xA;Oct 14  18 ==================&#xA;Oct 15  16 ================&#xA;Oct 16   2 ==&#xA;Oct 17   2 ==&#xA;Oct 18  10 ==========&#xA;Oct 19   8 ========&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at the last 4 weeks, we are actually generating 8.75 questions/day rather than 13–14. That's the bad news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good news is that more and more questions seem to come from new users, rather than from regulars trying to &quot;seed&quot; the site. I, for one, have long stopped posting questions which I know the answer to. And kiamlaluno, who has posted a whopping 76 questions in total, hasn't posted a single one since September 3rd. Coincidentally, that's roughly in the middle of the above graph, so I'll just take it as a milestone and look at a few other regulars who have posted a few questions each:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions asked by   | before Sep 3 | since Sep 3 |&#xA;--------------------------------------------------|&#xA;kiamlaluno           |      76      |       0     |&#xA;RegDwight            |      23      |       3     |&#xA;rem                  |      21      |       9     |&#xA;Hamid                |      18      |       3     |&#xA;Edward Tanguay       |      13      |       1     |&#xA;Ex-user              |      11      |       2     |&#xA;cindi                |       9      |       7     |&#xA;JohnFx               |       8      |       2     |&#xA;serg555              |       6      |       2     |&#xA;stacker              |       6      |       1     |&#xA;MatthewMartin        |       6      |       0     |&#xA;VonC                 |       6      |       0     |&#xA;Lord Torgamus        |       5      |       1     |&#xA;chanchal1987         |       5      |       1     |&#xA;Vivi                 |       5      |       0     |&#xA;nohat                |       4      |       1     |&#xA;vonjd                |       4      |       0     |&#xA;Boofus McGoofus      |       3      |       1     |&#xA;Vaibhav Garg         |       3      |       1     |&#xA;Vincent McNabb       |       3      |       0     |&#xA;--------------------------------------------------|&#xA;Grand Total          |     235      |      35     |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are always notable exceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;keithjgrant          |       0      |       5     |&#xA;waiwai933            |       1      |       4     |&#xA;Dia                  |       1      |       4     |&#xA;Midhat               |       2      |       3     |&#xA;Seamus               |       3      |       6     |&#xA;Brian Hooper         |       4      |       4     |&#xA;Bruno Rothgiesser    |       5      |      11     |&#xA;Mehper C. Palavuzlar |       6      |       8     |&#xA;--------------------------------------------------|&#xA;Grand Total          |      22      |      45     |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't change the bottom line that much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Grand Grand Total    |     257      |      80     |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this data, I think 8.75 questions per day on average (that's including weekends!) is a pretty solid number. I am not sure how (and whether) we can quadruple it for the remaining two weeks, but again, we don't really have to. While we certainly need more users, I would not aim for a huge one-time influx, but rather for slow yet steady &quot;organic&quot; growth. I'll take a healthy community over a healthy number any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, what we do need rather desperately are more &lt;em&gt;visitors&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. random passers-by, as opposed to avid askers). Our &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1269/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;most worrying metric&lt;/a&gt; so far is the number of visits/day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;490: Worrying – 1,500 visits per day is good, 500 visits per day is worrying.&#xA;  A great site benefits people outside the community. Eventually, 90% of a site's&#xA;  traffic should come from search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, that certainly doesn't mean that this site will get canceled. Especially given the fact that the number of visitors seems to be rising. It read 457 just a few days ago, and is now at 490. All hail Google!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2010-10-20T13:27:45.283" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T13:27:45.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-19T23:21:46.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two taglines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proper words in their proper places.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapted from a Jonathan Swift quote: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proper words in their proper places make the true definition of style&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Words: the most powerful drug used by mankind.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapted from a Rudyard Kipling quote: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastEditorUserId="61" LastEditDate="2010-11-23T15:40:10.093" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T15:40:10.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2010-10-20T10:24:21.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important change:&lt;/strong&gt; as of October 14th, 2010, the ability to mark questions as CW right from the start has been removed across the entire SE network. Visit the meta Meta for further details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67039/what-can-we-do-to-make-community-wiki-better/67192#67192&quot;&gt;What can we do to make Community Wiki better?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/392/should-the-community-wiki-police-be-shut-down/7183#7183&quot;&gt;Should the community wiki police be shut down?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T10:24:21.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-20T13:57:34.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elevator Pitch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has its tricky points. Don't ask someone to explain - ask everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagline/Motto&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good advice in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say what you mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1542" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T13:57:34.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-10-22T18:44:50.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;The English source you will always go to.&lt;/strike&gt; The source for English knowledge to which you will always go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1643" LastActivityDate="2010-10-22T18:44:50.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-27T07:36:11.773" Score="7" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been 82 days in Beta for our site. I checked the Beta statistics and everything seems right except the &lt;strong&gt;visits per day&lt;/strong&gt; statistic. The rule says &quot;1,500 visits per day is good, 500 visits per day is worrying&quot;. Being below 500 visits/day, this is the only bad one in the list. Does it mean that if the number of visits per day doesn't exceed 500, the site will be closed? We are close to 500 and I would not want to lose such a useful site just because of this improvable measure. What do you think? Does &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; have a chance to survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sChFX.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="82 days in Beta, visits/day worrying" Tags="|discussion|beta-essentials|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2010-10-27T09:32:01.530" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a definite &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, this site will survive. And I will even try to back up that bold statement of mine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a recent blog entry, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/when-will-my-site-graduate/&quot;&gt;&quot;When will my site graduate?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some sites feel they’re not going to make it. [...]&#xA;  Users put a lot of effort into their sites and, understandably, they feel a sense of attachment and responsibility for the site’s well being. If you look at the beta evaluation statistics recently added to Area 51, you’ll see ratings — from “Excellent” to “Worrying”.&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As long as the questions and answers are of high quality, and people get answers to their questions, you shouldn’t worry about the site actually being closed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a site needs more activity, go out and evangelize it. As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will march on. We don’t want to kill a site because it hasn’t reached full status in 90 days. Nor do we want to set a hard 90-day limit and launch a site too soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;strong&gt;from this point forward, the graduation date of a site will depend heavily on having enough users with sufficient reputation to properly lead and govern the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what we should pay attention to is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of avid users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;great answers, posted fast, several answers per question to choose from&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at point 1, our score is already &quot;Excellent&quot;. Looking at point 2, our answer ratio is &quot;Excellent&quot; as well; the number of great answers is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/45/nice-answer&quot;&gt;rather high&lt;/a&gt;; the response times, from all I can tell as a regular, are rather short (lots of questions, even not exactly trivial ones, get a first answer within minutes, and additional answers within two hours or so); and our answer rate is fantastic (I don't think it has &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; dropped below 99%).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another metric I would really like to be able to evaluate is how many answers actually get accepted. I remember Jeff mentioning that they'll be looking at this metric as well, since that is an indicator of how useful the site is to the people who ask questions. My gut feeling is that we are doing fine by that metric, but I would like to see hard data. &lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I have just compiled the data myself. Out of the 1012 non-CW questions that have not been closed, 765 have accepted answers. That's 76%. To put that into perspective, StackOverflow is at 63%, ServerFault at 51%, SuperUser at 52%, WebApps at 54%, Mathematics at 66%, Gaming at 75%, Cooking at 80%. &lt;strong&gt;/Edit.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/strong&gt; just found &lt;a href=&quot;https://bicycles.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/150/how-the-site-is-doing-metrics-where-were-doing-well-and-where-we-need-to-imp/155#155&quot;&gt;this quote&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Cartaino over at Bicycles, who are &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2305/bicycles&quot;&gt;faring much worse&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just to temper an overly-zealous interpretation of those statistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those statistics are designed to inform participants. Where can participation be improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sites are expected to do well in some of those areas, but not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; ALL of them. Timely and high-quality answers are the ultimate goal of each site. Each community will vary by size and the potential question base, but &lt;strong&gt;quality and participation are paramount&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/Edit 2.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum it up, here's yet another &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66644/se-sites-slowing-down-in-third-month-normal-behavior-or-something-to-worry-abou/66645#66645&quot;&gt;quote&lt;/a&gt;, this time by Kevin Montrose, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/welcome-stack-overflow-valued-associate-000004/&quot;&gt;SO Valued Associate #00004&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English is definitely towards the bottom in terms of new users and page views. However, it's very near the top in terms of answer rates. Just from the statistics I'd expect a site with quality content, that's just being generated slowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, all this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to push the number of visits/day higher. As Robert Cartaino put it in the aforementioned blog entry, &quot;go out and evangelize&quot;. Then again, as I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/370/congratulations-1000-questions-in-74-days/371#371&quot;&gt;mentioned elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; just a few days ago, it's not like we're just sitting on our hands waiting for the traffic to come in all by itself. Looking at the number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/54/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcers&lt;/a&gt;, we have quite a few people who try to actively promote this site. In fact, we have more Announcers than Gaming, Web Apps, Unix, Statistics, UI, WordPress, Webmasters, Photography, TeX, Money, Mathematics, Home Improvement, GIS, Game Development... Just don't give up, keep promoting!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T11:08:30.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="380" CreationDate="2010-10-29T02:23:50.997" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are separate tags [&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/negatives&quot;&gt;negatives&lt;/a&gt;] and [&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/negation&quot;&gt;negation&lt;/a&gt;].  What is the difference between these tags (or rather, is there any difference)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T13:09:52.093" Title="Difference between the tags [negatives] and [negation]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2010-10-29T13:09:52.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fail to see any difference; one question is even tagged with both. I would suggest that we merge them (under &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negation_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;negation&quot;&lt;/a&gt; rather than under &quot;negatives&quot;, which makes me think of &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Photography&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:06.153" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T13:09:52.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="382" CreationDate="2010-10-29T14:24:04.510" Score="5" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we may miss a previous post that contains the answer to one of our questions or even miss an identical previous question. Do you recommend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deleting the question (what would happen to upvoted answers and comments?) or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag it as a duplicate and allow someone with more privileges to close it (or close it yourself if you have the privilege).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1720" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T15:27:35.387" Title="Etiquette on duplicate questions" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|flagging|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2010-10-29T15:27:35.387" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, there's an official blog post on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot;&gt;handling duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt;. It differentiates between three types of dupes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cut-and-paste&lt;/strong&gt; duplicate questions. These questions are the very definition of exact duplicates; they are typically from users who willfully take the very same question and post it again. Either they’re not satisfied with the speed of answer, or they just don’t know what they’re doing. We rely on [site] users to &lt;strong&gt;vote down these “questions” and flag them for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt;. These sorts of duplicates are typically deleted as soon as we see them, as they’re borderline abuse of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accidental&lt;/strong&gt; duplicates. These questions aren’t copy and paste, but they cover the exact same ground as an earlier Stack Overflow question. The overlap is not ambiguous; the question uses the same words and asks the same fundamental question, with no variation at all. This is a failing on several levels; of the asker to do proper diligence before asking, of our internal ask page title search, and possibly of Google search as well. We rely on [site] users to &lt;strong&gt;link these questions together by closing them as “exact duplicate”&lt;/strong&gt; and posting the URL (as a comment, or edit) to the question this is a duplicate of. These sometimes have multiple good answers attached to each question. We will use our new moderator question merge function to merge them together without losing any answers or comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Borderline&lt;/strong&gt; duplicates. These questions are ambiguous; they’re in the same ballpark as a previous question, but have subtle differences that may make them legitimately standalone questions. These are subject to interpretation. We rely on [site] users to &lt;strong&gt;tag these questions appropriately so they naturally “group” with the questions they’re related to&lt;/strong&gt;. The more tags the questions have in common, the more likely they are to show up together on the related questions sidebar. You can also edit in links to the possibly duplicated posts, if appropriate, but be sure to make the tags match so the system can figure out the relationship without as much manual effort. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds our fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis slightly adjusted.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we don't have that many &lt;em&gt;borderline duplicates&lt;/em&gt;, and I don't think I have ever seen a &lt;em&gt;cut-and-paste duplicate&lt;/em&gt; at all. Most of our dupes so far are of the &lt;em&gt;accidental&lt;/em&gt; variety. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not surprising, given that the site search still &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41/need-a-way-to-search-for-stop-words&quot;&gt;doesn't work&lt;/a&gt; for a whole lot of stop words. Consequently, I would say that our very own most important rule is &lt;strong&gt;not to blame the OP for not being able to search&lt;/strong&gt;. From all I can tell, this is not happening anyway, but I think I should mention that for future reference. Instead, we should simply point the OP to the original question in the comments. Note that such a pointer is automatically generated by the system once a question is voted to be closed as a dupe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to deleting, I would say that while accidental duplicates should be closed, they shouldn't necessarily be deleted. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/new-linked-posts/&quot;&gt;Quoting Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I’ve mentioned probably ad nauseam at this point, people have the uncanniest knack of asking multiple, nearly identical questions with almost zero words in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's not necessarily a bad thing. By having closed-but-not-deleted duplicates, we have several completely different wordings pointing to the same question. For one, that increases our visibility in Google search results. Most importantly though, it helps prevent more dupes from being posted in the future. Whenever you try to post a question, there's the Related Questions box that hints at what your question might be a dupe of. The more different wordings of the same question it has to compare your wording to, the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, as Robert Cartaino &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1029/should-we-have-a-policy-for-when-a-question-is-answerable-yet-has-an-unreasonabl/1030#1030&quot;&gt;says over at Gaming&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Closed&lt;/code&gt; does not (necessarily) mean &quot;does not belong on the site.&quot; &lt;code&gt;Closed&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;no longer accepting answers.&quot; [...] In terms of &quot;does not belong on the site,&quot; That's what &lt;code&gt;delete&lt;/code&gt; is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, just because someone asks the same question using a different wording, doesn't mean it doesn't belong. After all, it is still on-topic; thus, it doesn't have to be deleted. It's just that it has been answered already; thus, it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T15:27:35.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="384" CreationDate="2010-10-30T18:12:15.077" Score="8" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically my question is related to the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/163/should-we-correct-or-point-out-language-errors-in-questions&quot;&gt;Should we correct (or point out) language errors in questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not my mother tongue and mostly i make mistakes in writing which are of grammatical and proper word-order type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just take an example of above paragraph, I used 'i' instead of 'I'. So can I put sentences on the site to ask the community to help me if I have made any grammatical or any other error while constructing the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="itsaboutcode" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T16:43:21.507" Title="Can I ask the community to help me find errors in a text/sentence?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="383" CreationDate="2010-10-30T18:59:43.407" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: it depends. Long answer: you have to be as specific as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broad questions along the lines of &quot;please proofread this&quot; are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/282#282&quot;&gt;likely to get closed&lt;/a&gt;. However, if you have a specific problem with word order, capitalization, spelling etc., go ahead and ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Can you look at the following sentence? I have no idea if it contains any mistakes or could be better worded.&quot; — &lt;strong&gt;Off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Can you look at the following sentence? I think it contains the following mistake: [clearly state what you think is wrong and why you think so].&quot; — &lt;strong&gt;On-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:04:57.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-03T10:14:32.773" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adverb&quot;&gt;[adverb]&lt;/a&gt; does not resolve to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adverbs&quot;&gt;[adverbs]&lt;/a&gt;. I tried suggesting a tag synonym accordingly, but it turns out that my score in that tag is too low, so I am not allowed to do that (in fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/adverbs/topusers&quot;&gt;nobody is&lt;/a&gt;). I am thus requesting the diamond mods to render assistance. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T22:47:02.980" Title="Retag request: [adverb] -&gt; [adverbs]" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|retag-request|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T22:47:09.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="390" CreationDate="2010-11-04T22:18:05.743" Score="2" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to delete my account, but can't find an option to do so.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the procedure for this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1950" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2010-11-30T02:31:27.280" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How can I delete my account?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2010-11-05T02:05:23.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to delete your account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit your profile to say &quot;please delete me&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; so we can confirm your&#xA;  ownership of the account.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Obtain your user page URL or numeric user ID&lt;/strong&gt;. This is linked from&#xA;  the top of every page of the site,&#xA;  when you are logged in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Email the support address linked at the bottom of every web page&lt;/strong&gt; on&#xA;  the site. Where it says &quot;contact us&quot;,&#xA;  click that. In your email, you&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;MUST&lt;/strong&gt; include your user page URL or user ID so we can find your account.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5999/can-i-delete-my-account/7979#7979&quot;&gt;How can I delete my account?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T02:05:23.557" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-05T02:05:23.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-05T16:34:28.187" Score="10" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was pondering the origins of the phrase &quot;to call a spade a spade&quot; the other night and thought of asking it here but instead Googled it and got the information I wanted.  Even though the information is readily available to any competent web user, should I ask the question here too?  If this is meant to be &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; definitive place to go for answers to English Language questions, shouldn't this be a place where a person could find that information?  Or is it just a festival of redundancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not interested in thoughts on the &quot;spade&quot; question -- this is more a &quot;site philosophy&quot; question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T02:18:53.170" Title="Asking questions you know the answer to" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2010-11-10T17:28:54.263" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good question is not a bad one by virtue of the fact that you personally know the answer. A bonus is that you might learn a facet to the answer you weren't aware of, or you might find out you weren't as right as you thought -- either is an opportunity for you, or for others to learn.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: Yes, please, go ahead and post it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T17:28:54.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-11T00:16:11.287" Score="10" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering that English.SE is about language, I think there should be a fancier quote formatting for short quotes. (Like a huge quote mark in the background. - This will emphasize the concept of quote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2019" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-12-15T01:09:23.910" LastActivityDate="2011-03-15T23:33:42.127" Title="Fancier &quot;Quote&quot; formatting." Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2567" CreationDate="2010-11-12T01:16:40.990" Score="7" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, I start writing an answer to a question, get distracted, come back later to a &quot;there are new answers&quot; message, load the other answers, decide they're the same as (or better than) what I was going to write, and I decide to abandon my answer. The problem is, just deleting the text from the answer pane isn't enough - the system saves a draft, which keeps coming back every time I visit that question. Is there a way to delete such a draft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2010-11-12T02:24:35.237" LastActivityDate="2012-03-31T04:12:30.980" Title="How can I delete a draft answer?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="395" CreationDate="2010-11-12T02:24:22.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only one draft per user is ever saved -- so this draft will be replaced the next time you answer a question, as the draft for &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question will overwrite this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T02:24:22.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-12T16:59:45.227" Score="10" ViewCount="655" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like this is happening with some frequency, and is absolutely fraught with problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily, there is essentially no useful information contained in &quot;x gives 230,000 results, but y is over 1,000,000.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of data is occasionally cute for xkcd, but it's out of place here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1955" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T15:14:26.287" Title="Discourage using number of Google results as a source." Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2010-11-13T00:33:16.177" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that Google result counts are not reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I confess that I had done this; see my comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4754/word-that-means-obsession-with-publishing/4757#4757&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.  In fact, I had been always using the number of results on Google to decide which word/phrase to use among several candidates.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had read “&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160303182021/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/google-result-counts-are-a-meaningless-metric.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google result counts are a meaningless metric&lt;/a&gt;” by Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on this issue, but had never cared.  This time, I tried the search given in the text as an example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;amp;q=%22de+Boyne+Pollard%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;de Boyne Pollard&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (including the quotes).  It showed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 91,400 results (0.27 seconds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but when I clicked to jump to the 10th page, it showed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 10 of about 214,000 results (0.33 seconds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was a bit worrying.  After that, I jumped to the 19th page and the 28th page, both of which said “about 214,000 results”.  Then when I clicked the link to the 37th page, it jumped to the 36th page and said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 36 of 359 results (0.25 seconds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 359 already displayed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If you like, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22de+Boyne+Pollard%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;filter=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;repeat the search with the omitted results included&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I clicked the link to “repeat the search with the omitted results included” and repeated the same procedure.  This time, it stated “214,000 results” until I clicked the link to the 28th page, which actually took me to the 26th page which said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 26 of 255 results (0.18 seconds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 255 already displayed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If you like, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22de+Boyne+Pollard%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;filter=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;repeat the search with the omitted results included&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, this has convinced me that the number shown by Google is sometimes &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; wrong!  Besides, something is wrong with filtering because “including the omitted results” decreased the number of results actually shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-12-15T15:14:26.287" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T15:14:26.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="403" CreationDate="2010-11-13T00:46:04.017" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an unused tag [&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammer&quot;&gt;grammer&lt;/a&gt;], which must be a misspelling for [&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;].  Moderators or anyone with enough rep, please make [grammer] a tag synonym for [grammar].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:51:15.760" Title="Tag synonym: grammer → grammar" Tags="|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-16T23:13:04.460" Score="31" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi all, I am &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/our-designer-in-residence-jin-yang/&quot;&gt;Jin&lt;/a&gt;. I'm the designer who works on the design and CSS conversion for the Stack Exchange sites as they graduate from the beta phase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very excited about the design for the English site. The English language has a long and rich history, and I wanted the design to reflect that. Instead of designing the site myself this time, I decided to commission a talented designer who's much more suited for this particular site design. I've been a longtime reader and admirer of &lt;a href=&quot;http://retinart.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alex Charchar&lt;/a&gt;'s design blog and work, so I'm very thrilled to have him working on this project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alex and I agreed on the design direction for the site. It should feature beautiful typography and invoke a vintage/warm feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Click on the images to see the full resolution versions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lUFql.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lUFql.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ttb86.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ttb86.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The header and subtle details throughout give the English site a unique look from the other SE sites. The body section has the same layout as the Beta theme; the goal is to make the main text clean and readable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very pleased with Alex's design, I hope you are too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know your thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2010-11-22T22:36:15.730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T03:00:27.253" Title="English Site Design" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-17T04:13:57.187" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; the body layout. The header, however, I think resembles &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;TeX SE&lt;/a&gt; a little too much with the color scheme and the lines leading in from both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YACRf.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1LPcD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may just be me though—looking at them side by side shows the differences, but when you're only looking at one, it seems a bit easy to be confused if it were just a quick glance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T04:13:57.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-17T10:19:00.990" Score="2" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have these four tags with apparently the same purpose. That's confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should create tag synonyms. But what should be the master tag then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest &quot;vocabulary&quot;. Do you agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T11:32:19.073" Title="&quot;single-word-requests&quot;, &quot;word-choice&quot;, &quot;vocabulary&quot; and &quot;words&quot; tags" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="399" CreationDate="2010-11-17T11:09:49.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag seems to have been already deleted (automatically?), and nothing has to be done about it.  Thank you to Bruno Rothgiesser for pointing it out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T11:09:49.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="402" CreationDate="2010-11-17T12:25:12.243" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think they all serve the same purpose. At least they shouldn't. Personally, I interpret these four tags as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/354/are-word-requests-allowed/356#356&quot;&gt;word requests&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. questions that ask if there's a single word that matches a given definition (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2856/english-word-that-means-a-community-of-experts&quot;&gt;“community of experts”&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4754/word-that-means-obsession-with-publishing&quot;&gt;“obsession with publishing”&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5089/word-to-describe-compliance-with-unspoken-resistance&quot;&gt;“compliance with unspoken resistance”&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1103/read-beautiful-interesting-stories&quot;&gt;“beautiful and interesting”&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4311/word-for-device-that-provides-constant-doses-of-a-liquid-dust-substance&quot;&gt;“device that provides constant doses of a liquid/dust/substance”&lt;/a&gt;, etc.)&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; is for all those &quot;versus&quot; questions, where the author already has several alternatives at his disposal, but is not sure which one to use, for whatever reasons (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315/effect-vs-affect&quot;&gt;effect vs. affect&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4823/geek-vs-nerd&quot;&gt;geek vs. nerd&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewer&quot;&gt;less vs. fewer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/jail-vs-prison&quot;&gt;jail vs. prison&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3933/per-year-vs-per-annum&quot;&gt;“per year” vs. “per annum”&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1070/i-believe-vs-i-think-vs-i-reckon&quot;&gt;“I believe” vs. “I think” vs. “I reckon”&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1499/do-plaza-and-square-have-a-different-meaning&quot;&gt;plaza vs. square&lt;/a&gt;, etc.)&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; is for more broad questions, e.g. those that ask for lots of words at once, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/578/uncommon-words-that-should-become-more-common&quot;&gt;Uncommon words that should become more common&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1115/terms-for-collections-of-animals&quot;&gt;Terms for collections of animals&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/953/informal-terms-for-money-amounts&quot;&gt;Informal terms for money amounts&lt;/a&gt;, or &quot;meta&quot; questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1405/methods-for-improving-your-spoken-vocabulary&quot;&gt;Methods for improving your spoken vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; fast-forward three months, and the latter question type is now actually off-topic as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; tag, IMHO, serves no purpose beyond being an easy cop-out for new users who don't know what to tag their questions with. However, I'll admit that it is not &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; useless or meta, because at least it tells me that the question is not about, say, punctuation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are some gray areas between these definitions, not everyone will completely agree with them, and some won't know or care about the existence of all these tags to begin with. However, tag synonyms, in my book, are for tags that are completely interchangeable to everyone (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-positioning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-positioning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-positioning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-order&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-order&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-order&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verb&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbs&lt;/a&gt;, that kind of things). Right now, I don't see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; being used completely interchangeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T11:32:19.073" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-17T14:51:51.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one minor suggestion. Could you try aligning the &quot;Top Questions&quot; bar with the boxes on the right? The following area in the current design makes me feel slightly uncomfortable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ce7el.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do realize that I will never see that &quot;Welcome New User&quot; box at all. However, I will see the &quot;Interesting Tags&quot; in its place, which is surrounded by a border as well (as opposed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;WebApps&lt;/a&gt;, where there's no box around &quot;Interesting Tags&quot;, so I have no quibbles about the box around &quot;Top Questions&quot;). So, what I have in mind is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iM0JP.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps you could even drop that box/background altogether (I know I'm not being original here, that's what most of our siblings have):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gBalr.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that makes sense. Either way, thank you for your efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:25.287" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T14:51:51.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-17T15:56:29.427" Score="8" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed several questions that are specific to the domain of computer programming. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5175/bound-or-bonded/&quot;&gt;&quot;bound&quot; or &quot;bonded&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4885/marking-plural-of-code-words&quot;&gt;Marking plural of code words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd find it useful to tag these sort of questions with a &lt;strong&gt;programming&lt;/strong&gt; tag, since I have a special interest in answering them and reading others' answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think other people would also appreciate domain-specific tags, and I'm interested to hear what others think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T14:54:02.347" Title="Could we add tags for domain-specific language questions, such as programming?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-17T23:32:05.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a bit too much ALL CAPS text. Tags, in particular, really don't need to be in all caps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: another nitpick - I like how the ampersand in the site name is a different color, but I don't see that color used elsewhere on the question page. I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the user names on the main page are that color, but even there, the &quot;Welcome New Users&quot; text is a slightly different shade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2010-11-17T23:45:21.203" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T23:45:21.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-18T07:10:37.660" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;can we make it a little more - medieval. Maybe by making the borders more stylized, like using a design instead of straight lines on the boxes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastEditorUserId="45" LastEditDate="2010-11-18T15:35:44.980" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T15:35:44.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-18T10:25:55.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you (accidentally?) UCased all the user names on the questions in your first screen-shot? (but not for the recent badges, nor on the question page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T10:25:55.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2010-11-18T15:51:53.447" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google ranking isn't very good evidence, but it isn't useless either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A linguist or a descriptivist does the same thing all the time. The only difference is that they can search a professional corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's what people are trying to do with Google searches. There are several problems with relying on those, but I think there's still a place for using Google sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1914" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T15:51:53.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-18T18:35:58.940" Score="6" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5222/whats-the-most-annoying-mispronunciation-youve-heard&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; solicits the most annoying mispronunciations people have heard.  My initial reaction is that this is not suitable for EL&amp;amp;U — but I wanted to check with everyone else before unilaterally closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to amount to nothing more than complaining about the way people pronounce words in certain dialects that we find annoying, and doesn't provide any useful information at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does everyone agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Allow me to explain the steps I went through in ultimately closing the thread, since one user questioned my motives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking for confirmation that this thread is considered off-topic for the site. Since this site is (a) in beta, (b) I am new to moderating a StackExchange site, and (c) my vote to close a topic is immediately binding and unilateral, I wanted to double-check with the community to confirm that this thread is, in fact, off-topic. Based on previous meta discussions, it was very likely to be so. When Robert Cartaino pointed out that it is actually off-topic for ANY StackExchange site, this confirmed that my hunch was right to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, the community consensus or opinion is irrelevant, because if everyone in EL&amp;amp;U liked that kind of question and wanted to keep it and have more of them, then we probably would not be a StackExchange site anymore, as we would no longer fit with the purpose of these sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T00:04:10.823" Title="Does this question qualify as off-topic peeving?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2010-11-18T18:54:37.640" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Google can provide useful information about language, but only in very specific areas.  Multi-word searches can be very misleading (even with quotes), but can possibly tell you something about whether a phrase is used at all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts to get dangerous if you are actually using the raw numbers to establish if something is commonly used, or particularly if you want to establish that an individual word/phrase is more common than another word/phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few years ago, one of the faculty in my department wanted to use Google to investigate the word &lt;em&gt;though&lt;/em&gt; and compare it to its alternate spelling, &lt;em&gt;tho&lt;/em&gt;, to see which one was more commonly used.  However, &quot;Tho&quot; is a common last name in (I think it was) Vietnamese, which totally threw off the results, and so he couldn't use Google at all.  It's hard to anticipate, for a single item or pair, what if anything might throw off the results completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google results could possibly be used in a useful way to look at large groups (hundreds) of words (that have something in common that you want to investigate), where no weight is given to the results of any single word, or to the raw numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T18:54:37.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="411" CreationDate="2010-11-18T19:38:03.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the information posted there is pretty useless.  &lt;del&gt;To be fair, I do not think that everything posted there counts as a “dialect” (for example, I think that pronouncing “ask” as /æ&lt;b&gt;ks&lt;/b&gt;/ is simply a mistake), but I do not think that this challenges your point.&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if that question (and answering it) makes some people happy, I personally do not mind if it is kept open as long as there are not too many questions like that.  This might be because I visit the site only occasionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an aside, if the question keeps appearing on the top page and annoying me enough, I will probably write a Greasemonkey script to make it invisible some day, unless someone has already written one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: Kosmonaut explained in a comment that the pronunciation of “ask” as /æ&lt;b&gt;ks&lt;/b&gt;/ &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a dialect.  Thanks!  By the way, while I do not mind if the question is kept open, certainly I do not mind if it is closed, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastEditorUserId="1755" LastEditDate="2010-11-18T19:56:30.450" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T19:56:30.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="411" CreationDate="2010-11-18T20:14:12.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, thank you. This question just reeks of everything that can possibly go wrong with a Q&amp;amp;A thread. I would direct everyone to this blog post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;em&gt;breaks&lt;/em&gt; just about EVERY ONE of the guidelines for good subjective questions. Check it out&amp;hellip; At least 5 (if not all 6) out of 6 stipulations missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T20:14:12.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-19T20:33:12.590" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the risk of being a stick in the mud, I wanted to voice my concerns with the site design. I feel like this &quot;vintage&quot; feel implies an &quot;vintage&quot; or &quot;old-timey&quot; approach to questions of English Language and Usage, which is the opposite of how we actually go about the business of answering questions of English Language and Usage. Generally speaking, the highest-rated answers are ones that take an evidence-based, descriptive approach to answering questions rather than an old-fashioned curmudgeonly prescriptive approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that by adopting the proposed site style we run the risk of misleading new visitors that we are a bunch of obstinate old fuddy-duddies who reject anything newfangled and eschew modern approaches to linguistic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T20:33:12.590" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-11-19T21:44:38.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a pure usability perspective, I strongly favor a white background (rather than the off-brown) for the majority of the text area. The color in the header is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1955" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T21:44:38.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-22T21:47:01.843" Score="21" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi all,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the new design went live, congratulations on the official launch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any CSS/Styling issues, please start a new question for the bug report, and tag it with &quot;Design&quot; and &quot;Bug.&quot; It will be a lot easier for me to track new questions than reading the comments replied to this thread. A note for IE6/IE7, while we try to make sure the site is functional for people using older browsers, we don't support them to the point of pixel perfectness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The favicons may be cached by your browsers, to see the new ones, load the following URL in your browser's address bar and hard refresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sstatic.net/english/img/favicon.ico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sstatic.net/english/img/favicon.ico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sstatic.net/englishmeta/img/favicon.ico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sstatic.net/englishmeta/img/favicon.ico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some tweaks I changed from the original mockup posted: I changed meta text to sans serif, also the comment text too. I agree with @nohat that a combination of modern and old may suit the site better. I've also changed some link colors to be more consistent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your helpful &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/400/english-site-design&quot;&gt;design input&lt;/a&gt;, and also thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.retinart.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alex&lt;/a&gt; for a great design. Congrats again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'll be hanging out in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;English Chat room&lt;/a&gt; this week on and off. Feel free to send me feedback there too(although I still prefer bug reports to be posted here on Meta). The English chat room's theme design has been updated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T15:38:53.837" Title="New Design Launched" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="417" CreationDate="2010-11-22T22:14:18.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any chance of getting a typeface for questions that isn't quite so hard to read? The extreme contrast between heavy and lightweight strokes produces pretty bad aliasing and jagged edges at 1024x768.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure an antique-y font was chosen for the aesthetic it provides, but it is impacting readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: ClearType fixes the issue. Thanks for the pointer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, thanks for the great work!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1955" LastEditorUserId="1955" LastEditDate="2010-11-22T22:36:50.100" LastActivityDate="2010-11-22T22:36:50.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="430" CreationDate="2010-11-23T02:26:16.263" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the profile font size is too large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrvLM.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BxKSi.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2010-11-24T11:40:14.687" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T11:40:14.687" Title="Profile text font size" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="431" CreationDate="2010-11-23T02:27:40.303" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39UeW.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely the text shouldn't intrude on the border?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2010-11-24T11:40:00.377" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T11:40:00.377" Title="Meta required login text is cramped" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="417" CreationDate="2010-11-23T08:22:54.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it a bit strange that a website dedicated to the proper use of English would choose a font that displays in all caps, it feels like the website is shouting at me. :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love the font used in the comments, and Georgia is really a stain for the eyes (in my personal opinion) and it does kind of go against proper English use when everything is capitalised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to see that change, but I might be the only one..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some careful checking, I've discovered that the Georgia font on my computer is in fact NOT the correct Georgia: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f1hsn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;incorrect font screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my apologies on your choice of font, the real one is very, very nice and I give a 100% thumbs up to the new design! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2101" LastEditorUserId="2101" LastEditDate="2010-11-23T10:18:37.343" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T10:18:37.343" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-11-23T09:07:25.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &quot;Make every word count&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T09:07:25.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="417" CreationDate="2010-11-23T14:03:04.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would request a minor change: the &quot;accepted&quot; checkmark does not contrast enough with the accept-trigger-checkmark (the checkmark you click on to mark an answer as accepted).  On my LCD screen, and with my minor colour-blindness, these two are indistinguishable. I think the &quot;accepted&quot; mark should stand out more, either by being a brighter colour or a darker shade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T14:03:04.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="429" CreationDate="2010-11-23T14:22:20.770" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please disable the outline on focus for the search and INTERESTING / IGNORED TAGS fields.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look these textboxes below:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uw50f.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;This is from Stack Overflow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NHg41.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;This is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Web Application&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VSHK0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt; This is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/q/658/4008&quot;&gt;this question from Web Application Meta&lt;/a&gt; where similar problem is discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:25.287" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T16:39:56.227" Title="Disable Outline for text-boxes" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|design|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="428" CreationDate="2010-11-23T17:44:24.680" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some of the elements in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/417/new-design-launched&quot;&gt;new design&lt;/a&gt; don't contrast enough from their surroundings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA; - Hyperlinks are dark red, so dark that I have difficulty distinguishing them from black, especially on an LCD screen which isn't at the perfect precise viewing angle (from an angle the colours change slightly).&#xA; - The accept-answer checkmark (which is clicked to select the accepted answer) and the accepted-answer checkmark are so similar that I can barely tell them apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth I noticed the link problem on other SE sites as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T11:40:31.170" Title="New Design: Can we increase the contrast between certain items?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2010-11-23T17:44:42.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a test answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T17:44:42.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2010-11-23T17:45:00.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is another test answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/417/new-design-launched&quot;&gt;testing&lt;/a&gt; the accept-answer flag on meta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T17:51:37.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2010-11-23T22:16:22.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have lightened the gray check mark, and boosted the saturation of the green arrow a bit. Also made the red link(and visited color) a bit lighter. The changes  will be in the next deployment. For the arrows you may have to hard refresh in case your browser caches the old image sprite. Note: these changes are for the parent site, not Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T22:16:22.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="424" CreationDate="2010-11-23T22:23:42.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have fixed this. The change will be in the deployment tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T22:23:42.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="419" CreationDate="2010-11-23T22:29:39.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;good call. I have decreased font size. The change will be in the deployment tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T22:29:39.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2010-11-23T22:37:17.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have fixed this... and don't call me Shirley. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change will be in tomorrow's deployment. It should look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/asmjz.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-23T22:37:17.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="417" CreationDate="2010-11-24T14:16:56.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thoroughly enjoy &lt;em&gt;how heavy handed usage&lt;/em&gt; of the quotation tick results in a rather &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5501/preposition-to-follow-copy-and-paste/5515#5515&quot;&gt;garish, visually frightening answer/question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T14:16:56.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2010-11-24T15:33:03.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the good word?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T15:33:03.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="448" CreationDate="2010-11-27T03:05:09.537" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;This doesn't quite look right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xe8KY.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opera, FF, IE7, Safari, and Chrome. Check for yourself here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T20:10:55.570" Title="Issue with the search page layout" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="442" CreationDate="2010-11-28T08:02:24.587" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is there such a strange regulation? I understand that it wouldn't be a good idea to allow editing comments if they have already been replied to, but what they haven't? Sometimes I come back to my comments that I left two or three days ago and upon re-reading them I get some enlightenment on how to phrase my thoughts in those comments better - this would only add to the value of my comments, but adding another comments to my previous comments just for the sake of editing makes the page kind of overloaded with redundancy.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why editing comments is possible for only 5 minutes after their submission?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2010-11-28T10:17:58.900" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, I think that the correct answer is single quotes. Double quotes are used for quoting a statement by someone else: -&gt; Bill said, &quot;I love pizza.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of this web-site, &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt; is used to indicate code. It has no proper use in normal prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Block quotes are for... well blocks of quoted text, usually from previous posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bold is &lt;strong&gt;loud emphasis&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. a raised voice, while italics is for adding &lt;em&gt;intensity&lt;/em&gt; to a word or phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single quotes are references to the word in its general role, not as a part of the enclosing sentence, i.e. separated from semantics. To use your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the word 'cheese' indicate something yellow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word 'cheese' is no longer food in the sentence. It is a word. You can put any word in this sentence and it would still be proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the word 'run' indicate something yellow? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the word 'as' indicate something yellow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the word 'preposterous' indicate something yellow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases the term in the single quotes has the same function in the sentence, no matter whether the word itself is a verb, noun, adjective, or whatever. In this sentence all are words, i.e. nouns because they are references indicated by single quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2426" LastActivityDate="2010-11-28T10:17:58.900" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="441" CreationDate="2010-11-28T16:41:43.917" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will my &quot;age&quot; value be changing every year in my profile or I would have to change it  manually every my birthday?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastActivityDate="2010-11-28T17:28:19.333" Title="Will I be getting older on my profile here automatically?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="440" CreationDate="2010-11-28T17:28:19.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The age field updates automatically based on the birthday you submit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2010-11-28T17:28:19.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2010-11-28T17:59:51.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are, by design, second-class citizens. Since StackExchange is a Q&amp;amp;A engine and not a discussion forum, the focus is strictly on the quality of &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. Comments are kind of &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; to be quick-and-dirty pointers whose main purpose is, again, to help improve the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, originally the engine didn't allow comments to be edited at all; the five-minute grace period was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/459/should-we-be-allowed-to-edit-comments&quot;&gt;built in at a later date&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not entirely impossible to improve a comment of yours &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the five minutes have passed. If your comment is the last one in the thread or hasn't been replied to yet, the consensus on the meta Meta is that you should simply delete the comment and re-submit it with the improved wording/spelling/punctuation. Of course, you will lose any upvotes the original comment might have received in the mean time, but that's the price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that moderators can edit anybody's comments at any time, so they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; fix particularly egregious typos from time to time, at least theoretically, as a courtesy. (Nohat once fixed a comment of mine in which I had totally messed up the link formatting.) However, generally speaking, moderators have much more important things to do, so you can't &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; them to proof-read any or all comments; that's simply not part of their job description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2010-11-28T18:30:50.660" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="449" CreationDate="2010-11-29T12:13:02.773" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, it reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language and Usage is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for people who love English Language and Usage. It's 100% free, no registration required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence seems to suggest the site is for people that love the site - maybe change it to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language and Usage is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for people who love the English Language and its usage. It's 100% free, no registration required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2459" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2010-11-29T20:13:40.903" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T20:13:55.553" Title="Can something be done about the text in the &quot;Welcome New User&quot; box?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2010-11-29T14:10:47.687" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add on to nohat's answer, italics are really the standard typographical practice for this. Wikipedia states that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type#Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;italic type is used when&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mentioning a word as an example of a word rather than for its semantic content (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use-mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;use-mention distinction&lt;/a&gt;): &quot;The word &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is an article&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another authoritative example, the excellent blog &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt; written by a number of professional linguists also uses italics in this way. &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2807&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here's an example&lt;/a&gt;, chosen for no reason other than that it's their most recent post that requires the use-mention distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;em&gt;fantastic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; work well [for infixing expletives], and formations like &lt;em&gt;fan-fucking-tastic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;abso-bloody-lutely&lt;/em&gt; are well established in colloquial English; Tiggy's &lt;em&gt;fan-flaming-tastic&lt;/em&gt; had a more newspaper-printable choice of expletive (still profane, because &lt;em&gt;flaming&lt;/em&gt; is an allusion to the flames of hell, but not unacceptably profane, even from a royal nanny).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1635" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T14:10:47.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-29T15:20:19.483" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5839/saw-people-referring-as-i-am-married-with-three-kids&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the long user name of the person asking the question is clipped by the box it is contained in (OS X Chrome and Safari).  I assume that this is not intentional and that the name should wrap down to the next line. If wrapping is not wanted, then probably at least ellipsis (...) would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2010-12-30T11:30:51.470" Title="Long user name clipping on question page" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-29T15:41:53.943" Score="18" ViewCount="1987" Body="&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253/referencing-the-existence-of-words-that-may-be-offensive&quot;&gt;have already established&lt;/a&gt; that this is a language site, and even offensive words are part of language.  As such, these may be discussed on the site from time to time, in which case they might appear uncensored (at the writer's discretion).  I think this is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other end of the spectrum, if someone used offensive language in an inflammatory way to actually insult others on the site, rather than to discuss the words in an academic fashion, such uses would have no place on EL&amp;amp;U, and would be censored or removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5804/where-should-the-apostrophe-go-in-the-word-beginners-for-beginners-guide/5826#5826&quot;&gt;this answer and comment&lt;/a&gt; bring up an interesting point.  The use of the word &quot;masturbation&quot; here is not inflammatory but it is not germane to the answer either.  (Bear in mind that I am not saying that &quot;masturbation&quot; is actually an offensive word; it is, arguably, not work safe though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see three possible approaches to the above issue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 1: ignore this use of the word &quot;masturbation&quot;, as it does not insult anyone, and since all words are &quot;fair game&quot; for discussion, nobody can have the expectation of a thread being completely SFW&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 2: remove/censor/edit this use of the word, because it is not strictly necessary to be used for that point, and a person reading the site would not expect to encounter NSFW words within this particular question thread (whereas a question about, e.g., the &quot;n-word&quot; would alert the reader to wait until after work to read it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 3: allow this use, but introduce a NSFW tag, and attach it to any question thread where potentially NSFW or offensive language is used.  (This is probably not a real option because the page can be directly linked to from other pages, and might not be noticeable enough as a tag.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, some combination of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which direction do we, as the EL&amp;amp;U community, want to take regarding this kind of language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-08-20T17:02:43.540" Title="Offensive/NSFW words: what are the boundaries?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-11-29T18:56:13.973" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please write my document for me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T18:56:13.973" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-29T18:56:13.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2010-11-29T20:06:26.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put in a fix, will be in the next deployment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T20:06:26.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="443" CreationDate="2010-11-29T20:13:55.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be fixed in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T20:13:55.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2010-11-29T20:57:57.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually support option 2. People looking for English usage help would be justifiably irked by getting an off-color joke (which is what the answer in question is) that doesn't have a direct relation to the question or the purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T20:57:57.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="445" CreationDate="2010-11-30T10:42:28.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Names will clip if they are particularly long. I don't feel an ellipsis is necessary, because it would take up even more space i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My Name is Too L&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My Name is Too...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T10:42:28.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-30T11:35:10.383" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the privilege of having the right to re-tag other people's questions is being granted here a bit too early? it is currently granted once the user has reached 200 points of reputation, but look, right now my reputation is 201, which means I can do some re-tagging, but I won't dare: I myself don't know how to tag my own questions properly, let alone others'.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T11:51:59.020" Title="Is 200 reputation not too early for the right of retagging?" Tags="|discussion|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="452" CreationDate="2010-11-30T11:51:59.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well the simple fact that you don't want to use your right, as you don't think you could use it properly, shows that you are responsible enough not to misuse this right. So no, I don't think it is too early, as reputation is not proportional to the time spent on the Stack Exchange site, but more to the understanding of how a Q&amp;amp;A site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T11:51:59.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-30T15:18:03.463" Score="7" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is all about answering questions and spreading knowledge.  However there comes a point where particular types of questions are getting asked repeatedly, despite being relatively easy to look up, that one wonders whether any actual learning is going on.  What can or should we be doing about this beyond mildly prodding the questioner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this thought was brought on by the current stream of &quot;What's the difference?&quot; questions, but it could apply to many other types of question.  I've no objection to answering them, but I do begin to wonder whether I ought to be telling the questioner how to find out for themselves rather than let them continue with the lazy option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1579" LastEditorUserId="4889" LastEditDate="2011-08-01T15:10:06.250" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T19:59:27.603" Title="What to do with repeated question types?" Tags="|discussion|subjective-topics|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="454" CreationDate="2010-11-30T15:39:52.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to the &quot;What's the difference?&quot; questions in particular, I think that these are perfect for a site like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While dictionaries (and thesauruses) can provide some indication of meaning and possible usage, English - because of its very large number of words, and its origins in (at least) two unrelated languages - is a potential minefield when it comes to subtle differences between apparently similar words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence sometimes, the only way to find a decent answer is to ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for questions where a comprehensive and unambiguous answer really can be found in a dictionary, I agree that these are of questionable value. And yet, if StackExchange sites aim to be &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; definitive source on a particular topic, can we ever avoid them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="303" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T15:39:52.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="454" CreationDate="2010-11-30T16:20:09.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ought to be telling the questioner how to find out for themselves rather than let them continue with the lazy option&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhodri, before I post such questions, I always check with dictionary, and not one. In fact, all these questions have been with me for quite a long time - they all come from my collection of questions that I have acquired throughout the process of studying and practicing English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that I have already received here are of great great value to me. For example, the difference between &quot;poignant&quot; and &quot;harrowing&quot;, or &quot;successive&quot; and &quot;consecutive&quot;, or even &quot;rock&quot; and &quot;stone&quot; - the insights that I got there from the native speakers are just so enlightening! Besides, it's always good to see how different native speakers themselves view these points - from different angles, quite different from the way I would think. All of that can hardly be obtained from any dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, don't deprive me of such a wonderful opportunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, please read (if you haven't yet) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5790/whats-the-difference-between-successive-and-consecutive&quot;&gt;my answer to Robusto&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T19:59:27.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-30T18:32:25.873" Score="17" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this isn't the right place to answer this question, but I recently ran into the following issue, and wasn't sure how exactly to handle it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5948/to-date-versus-until-now&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I posted an answer, and returned about 10 minutes later to find that someone (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1446/vehomzzz&quot;&gt;vehomzzz&lt;/a&gt; in particular), had copied part of my answer and pasted it into a new answer (now deleted) in such a way that it didn't fit at all with his answer and was just a blatant grab. (e.g. the answer ended in &quot;for instance:&quot; ).  I down-voted his answer and left a comment along the lines of &quot;if you're going to copy/paste from me, at least edit it to make it cohesive&quot;.  There was at least one other downvote later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, vehomzzz has deleted his answer and left the following comment on mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Dusty im on to you now - I will downvote all of your answers/questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and he did indeed go through and downvote many of my answers out of a sense of retribution.  While this only cost me about 20 rep, it seems like incredibly anti-social behavior, and on a site where the community is so important, I'm hoping that there is some relief from this sort of behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess my question is, what is the best way to deal with this sort of thing?  Is there some sort of moderator relief?  Should I just accept it's going to happen and deal with the minimal rep loss?  Other suggestions?  I hate unexplained downvotes, but now I certainly see why they would be advantageous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update: his comment is now &lt;code&gt;@Dusty -- it's ON!&lt;/code&gt;  Lovely.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T17:40:10.587" Title="Dealing with vote retribution" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-01T03:13:51.173" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went through the faq of english.stackexhange, however I did not see any instruction with regards to seeking help with SOPs. Can you tell if I can seek correction/suggestion for a statement of purpose (SOP)? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2532" LastActivityDate="2010-12-01T03:13:51.173" Title="Can we seek correction/suggestion for a statement of purpose (SOP)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="461" CreationDate="2010-12-01T10:59:05.690" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be allowed to ask if a word exist which would loosely correspond to an IPA? Would such a question be on-topic, or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a word or combination of words that would be a loose&#xA;  homophone to /ædhɒk/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer would be &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;haddock&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2010-12-14T15:07:30.020" LastActivityDate="2010-12-23T17:17:47.410" Title="Trying to find a word from loose pronunciation?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2010-12-01T14:40:40.170" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the point of getting upset about this sort of thing. I don't see anything wrong with that usage of the word at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2010-12-01T14:40:40.170" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="459" CreationDate="2010-12-01T15:25:11.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how such a question could be considered off-topic. It would be like a single-word-request, except the starting point is a pronunciation instead of a definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2010-12-01T15:25:11.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-03T13:09:14.647" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following the recent complaints concerning the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/70771/153371&quot;&gt;growth of the Stack Exchange Family&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/71372/153371&quot;&gt;where to ask questions&lt;/a&gt;, I think it would make sense to help the users and moderators to find the right place for a question. One of the best examples available would be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;faq of math.se&lt;/a&gt;, especially the list of ambiguous questions pointing to the corresponding site of the Stack Exchange (&lt;em&gt;SE&lt;/em&gt;) Family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First thing would be to specify if a specific type of off-topic question on &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; would have a place on another &lt;em&gt;SE&lt;/em&gt; site, whether it be launched, in beta, or still a proposal. For example, language (other than English) questions would be directed to the right proposal (&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/18413/german-language?referrer=t5qEbAOAoD83_zbq8fj0VA2&quot;&gt;German Language&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/24817/yiddish-language&quot;&gt;Yiddish Language&lt;/a&gt;, etc...) or when concerning more than one language, it could be redirected to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics?referrer=lbyxvpg3tZFMg1X13CJ1vg2&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16613/languages&quot;&gt;Languages&lt;/a&gt;. Then a list could be written and added to our faq. Then the user would be sure to have an answer to the question asked when placed in the right place.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then, other sites could have off-topic questions, that would belong to &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt;. Those sites should be identified and then contacted with a proposal to add our site as redirection for those questions in their faq, or at least keep an eye on those sites if they haven't made it to their beta phase. The obvious suspects are more or less the same as for point 1. as far as I know. Once the link between sites is made, it could bring traffic to &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; that would otherwise have been lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, if in each community, at least one dedicated and active member would maintain such a list, it would facilitate the connectivity between sites, and ensure that questions are asked in the right place. For &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt;, I am willing to be part of this effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone point to any other site that should be of interest in this topic? Do you think it is a good idea to begin with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:22:08.410" LastActivityDate="2010-12-04T00:12:06.890" Title="On Migrating and Dispatching: redirecting off-topic question from and to EL&amp;U." Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="466" CreationDate="2010-12-06T15:28:08.303" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;How long should I keep my questions un-closed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already got some answers, but some interesting comments and even some additional answers are still arriving and I wouldn't want that to stop. On the other hand, the questions have basically been answered and I don't feel any urgent need to start a bounty on them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastActivityDate="2010-12-06T20:12:44.900" Title="How long should I keep my questions un-closed?" Tags="|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="467" CreationDate="2010-12-06T17:48:43.180" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you're using a customized version of Markdown on this site, but it behaves really strangely in the comments. For example, here is the proper behaviour on questions and answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;emphasis inside link&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;emphasis outside link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, [&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;brackets around link&lt;/a&gt;]. See below for the corresponding behaviour in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1635" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Strange behavior of Markdown with links in comments" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|markdown|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="464" CreationDate="2010-12-06T20:12:44.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quick point of clarification: Selecting an answer does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;close&quot; a question. Questions can still be answered and improved (and should be). Selecting an answer is just your way of indicating which answer best solved your problem. There's always room for more/better answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I like to wait until no further answers seem to be immediately forthcoming.  I wait &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; a few days to give everyone a chance to contribute and answer. Then I &quot;select&quot; the answer that I find most useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2010-12-06T20:12:44.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="465" CreationDate="2010-12-06T22:53:05.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2115/text-formatting-now-allowed-in-comments-list-of-proven-and-disproven-abilities&quot;&gt;Comments don't use Markdown&lt;/a&gt;. You can put very limited formatting in comments &amp;mdash; &lt;code&gt;*italic*&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;**bold**&lt;/code&gt; &amp;mdash;, but even that is likely to break if there isn't whitespace before/after the highlighted word. (So you can't italicize part of a word in comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2010-12-06T22:53:05.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-08T13:55:47.700" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be correct to search after question which could be categorized under a not-so-much used tag, and then retagging them accordingly? Or should I discuss the scope of the tag before doing anything on my own?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When should such a tag be consider as a canditate for deletion instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T16:38:54.377" Title="Find question for low-used tag and retag them." Tags="|discussion|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="468" CreationDate="2010-12-09T12:26:33.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find nothing wrong with that.  The only concern is that you may want to go slowly so that your retagging will not fill the top page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit: I changed the reply completely because the older reply was based on my misreading of the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastEditorUserId="1755" LastEditDate="2010-12-09T13:42:42.870" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T13:42:42.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="417" CreationDate="2010-12-09T14:17:41.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little late to the game, here, but I love the new design!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T14:17:41.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="472" CreationDate="2010-12-10T05:10:06.693" Score="2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do they make letters in bold in comments? I see bold type in comments every now and then. It's very useful, but I don't know how to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How do they make bold-type letters in comments?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="471" CreationDate="2010-12-10T06:00:35.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this question on the meta Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2115/text-formatting-now-allowed-in-comments-list-of-proven-and-disproven-abilities&quot;&gt;Text formatting now allowed in comments (List of proven and disproven abilities)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, &lt;code&gt;**this is bold**&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*this is italic*&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;*You can also do **bold italic** but only in the middle of bold or italic text*&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T06:00:35.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="476" CreationDate="2010-12-13T00:48:39.983" Score="-5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not open up &quot;english&quot; for other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;cplusplus.stackexchange.com&quot; and no &quot;charp.stackexchange.com&quot;, so why is there an extra &quot;english.stackexchange.com&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be much better if we had this platform for natural languages of all kind. I often enough wonder about how certain words of my mother tongue developed. It would be good if I could ask them here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't we change the site to be called &quot;linguistics.stackexchange.com&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, in my opinion, a better thing to reward people for knowing more than their own mother tongue or more than just English. If people grow to have multiple tags like &quot;English&quot;, &quot;German&quot;, &quot;Spain&quot; etc, that would be a nice achievement and a good reason to have &lt;em&gt;linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. The world is connecting together, it would be most natural if StackExchange would encourage that and help the community to understand each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side, if we split this up like that, more seldom languages like esperanto are unlikely to ever get their own site, much like the brainfuck programming language would never have gotten its own site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2758" LastEditorUserId="2758" LastEditDate="2010-12-13T01:51:51.230" LastActivityDate="2010-12-14T01:56:40.710" Title="Open for other languages" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="473" CreationDate="2010-12-13T02:28:52.503" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those interested in a linguistics SE site should throw their support behind the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics&quot;&gt;proposal for one in Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T02:28:52.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="473" CreationDate="2010-12-13T12:23:03.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am not mistaken, this website was proposed as a Q&amp;amp;A website about English, was supported by many people, started as beta, and graduated beta.  Change the central scope of the website this late in the game?  No way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please respect the efforts which early people made to start this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Kosmonaut and RegDwight wrote, there are several proposals in Area 51 about linguistics and languages (even if you do not count the many proposals about specific languages).  Support the one you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1755" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T12:23:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="473" CreationDate="2010-12-14T01:56:40.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the spirit in which the proposal was made, but I don't think this would work. Different from Stack Overflow, there would be extremely little overlap between tag audiences. Except for a relatively small number of &quot;inter-linguists&quot;, the crowd dealing with the finer points of the English language has nothing to do with, say, a crowd dealing with the finer points of the German or French languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think languages need to be kept separate, although this at the moment (sadly) means that english is the only language that actually has a running site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239" LastActivityDate="2010-12-14T01:56:40.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="393" CreationDate="2010-12-15T07:11:16.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good idea. It should be fairly simple to implement, and could help users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As per Mitch's comment below, fancy quote thingy here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="161" LastEditDate="2010-12-15T22:05:55.883" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T22:05:55.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="479" CreationDate="2010-12-15T10:16:21.143" Score="6" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question as above.&#xA;I dont mean asking for the answer, but the &lt;strong&gt;explanation of the answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example - this clue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Rush animal from behind&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;code&gt;Reed&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually figured out both the meanings - but could I have asked here about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1798" LastEditorUserId="2172" LastEditDate="2010-12-15T13:37:16.943" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T13:37:16.943" Title="Is it on-topic to ask about the explanation of crossword clues" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="478" CreationDate="2010-12-15T12:15:44.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say it is on-topic, it is some kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, with sometimes a hint of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T12:15:44.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="485" CreationDate="2010-12-15T19:27:52.477" Score="7" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone replies to one of my comments using the @Martha syntax, SE kindly lets me know about it. If someone doesn't use that syntax, or replies to someone else, I'm not notified, so the only way I will read the response is if I happen to come back to the same question on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also cases where I leave comments suggesting an improvement or clarification. If the author makes the suggested changes but doesn't leave a reply-comment of his own, again, I have to come back to the question on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to list questions or answers I have commented on? I know the whole commenting interface is a bit of an afterthought/stepchild, but I still think this would be a useful function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T16:59:48.627" Title="Is there a way to search for questions/answers I've commented on?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="480" CreationDate="2010-12-15T21:23:24.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to your profile by clicking your name at the top of any SE page, then go to the &quot;Activity&quot; tab, it will list your activities in reverse chronological order, including comments. The format of the URL is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/users/&amp;lt;user-number-here&amp;gt;?tab=activity&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; Forgot that, since I'm new here, I haven't seen what happens when the activity page has aged. Apparently for older comments this approach does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" LastEditorUserId="2717" LastEditDate="2010-12-15T21:36:44.070" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T21:36:44.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="480" CreationDate="2010-12-16T03:53:33.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say using Google &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aenglish.stackexchange.com+%22%40Martha%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this way&lt;/a&gt; ought to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user730" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T03:53:33.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="480" CreationDate="2010-12-16T08:22:10.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, putting the question that you want to follow as favourite would let you know whenever a new comment is made, wherever it was made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T08:22:10.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-16T09:13:14.620" Score="9" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be well-known, and in a certain measure reliable, online resources that should be checked before asking a question, or that could help with answering questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a few listed that I use frequently, but I'm sure it is far to be exhaustive and maybe not the best in their field for some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aMain_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymology&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aMain_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; (sometimes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idioms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldwidewords.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Wide Words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="1420" LastEditDate="2013-01-06T07:32:14.567" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T07:32:14.567" Title="Common accepted online resources" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-10T06:54:15.953" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-28T00:25:19.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="480" CreationDate="2010-12-16T12:09:11.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We now have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data dump&lt;/a&gt; for English Language and Usage, and you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/q/16440/my-latest-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; (or something similar) to get what you want:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select top 500&#xA;PostId as [Post Link],&#xA;CreationDate,&#xA;[Text],&#xA;Score&#xA;from Comments c  &#xA;where UserId = ##UserId##&#xA;order by CreationDate DESC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those unfamiliar with Data Explorer: the above query requires that you specify the ID of the user for which you wish to run it. To find out your (or somebody else's) ID on a particular site, visit your (or that user's) user profile on that site and have a look at the browser address bar. The URL there will be of the form &lt;code&gt;http://sitename.stackexchange.com/users/NUMBER/username&lt;/code&gt;. The &lt;code&gt;NUMBER&lt;/code&gt; is the ID you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to my speculation in an earlier comment, the dumps are still updated only once a month. (To my defense, they &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; get updated several times in the first week of December.) So, in order to keep track of your most recent comments, you'll have to rely on the &quot;Activity&quot; tab in your user profile, as Mitch has suggested. And if there's a gap between what's covered by the tab and what's covered by the dump, I guess you'll just have to wait for the next dump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-01-10T16:59:48.627" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T16:59:48.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-25T04:52:37.320" Score="8" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dispute that this question is really a duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7439/why-put-and-cut-sound-different-closed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7439/why-put-and-cut-sound-different-closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate question to which the asker is referred explains the Great Vowel Shift, but the OP is not asking about the GVS. He's asking, instead, why two different words with the same orthography have different pronunciations. The answer to his question may &lt;em&gt;involve&lt;/em&gt; the GVS, but a real answer to his question should include some explanation of the words' etymologies, whether they were once spelled differently, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bring this up on meta rather than simply commenting, because this is not the only question I've seen closed in this matter. &lt;strong&gt;Not all questions about the spelling of English vowels are duplicates of a GVS question. In particular, questions about the differences in pronunciation between two words can never be completely answered just by an explanation the GVS.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2010-12-25T20:29:49.730" Title="Question about English vowels prematurely closed as duplicate" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2010-12-25T16:00:22.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I was the first person to vote to close, I will explain my reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nohat's answer to the &quot;English written vowels are odd&quot; question actually expressly mentions the word &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt;, explaining that the &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; in it used to be an [ʊ], but then changed to [ʌ] due to the GVS. So if the OP of the recent question is simply asking why &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; is not pronounced [kʊt], he's got his answer right there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then again, I don't actually think the OP is just asking for this one word. The way I read the question, he is looking for a general pattern/rule: &quot;What is logic behind this ?&quot; That makes Nohat's answer an even better fit, since it doesn't stop at mentioning &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt;, but explains the big picture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you do have a point about etymology. But we should be careful not to make that the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; reason for a question to stay open, because then the next person will ask &quot;why do &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; sound different&quot;, and the next one will ask &quot;why do &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nut&lt;/em&gt; sound different&quot;, and then &quot;why do &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hut&lt;/em&gt; sound different&quot;, and &quot;why do &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gut&lt;/em&gt; sound different&quot;, and we will have to leave them all open as well. I would much rather let people ask about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; English word &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt;, than let everyone freely combine any two/three/X words just because they haven't been combined before — which leads to not just duplication, but combinatorial explosion of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, I don't think the OP is actually asking about these two particular words (perhaps he can comment on this?); the way I read the question, he might just as well be asking about &lt;em&gt;hut&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;nut&lt;/em&gt;, it's just that &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; happened to spring to mind faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2010-12-25T16:00:22.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2010-12-25T20:29:49.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;RegDwight describes the logic that I also went through in deciding to close as duplicate.  This did not seem like a question about those specific words, but rather, the explanation for the difference.  The difference is the GVS in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question did not specifically mention the GVS, but I believe that is only because they were not aware of it.  This is just like how someone who asks about the difference between &quot;I read a book&quot; and &quot;I have read a book&quot; is asking a redundant question about the difference between simple past and present perfect, even though the question they were duplicating probably didn't specifically use the verb &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; and might not have mentioned these tenses by name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I thought it might not be obvious &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the GVS affected particular words in that pair, then maybe I wouldn't vote to close it, but &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; was specifically mentioned in Nohat's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I will try to be very careful when I see the next potentially redundant GVS question, and bear in mind what you've said.  I definitely don't want question closings to be controversial very often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all questions about the spelling of English vowels are duplicates of a GVS question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreed.  Many spelling issues/oddities were not caused by GVS.  But, many were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, questions about the differences in pronunciation between two words can never be completely answered just by an explanation the GVS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this.  I think it totally depends on the two words in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-12-25T20:29:49.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="491" CreationDate="2010-12-28T14:54:05.313" Score="8" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know Stack Exchange does not want endless discussions on subjective topics. I understand the reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the issue of descriptivism versus prescriptivism, if there even is such an opposition, which I believe exists only to a limited degree, comes up very often in Questions. Although discussions on this topic are unwanted, they keep popping up, hidden among the comments. But comments are not a great place to discuss this, as I think most of us will agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I find myself curious about the opinions of other posters. This discussion could be taken to a different place, but then I'd still know nothing about the opinions on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a solution? P.S. This is the first question I ask on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of these discussions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewer/505#505&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Less&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;fewer&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/619/off-of-vs-off/621#621&quot;&gt;How can I explain to people that the phrase “off of ” is grammatically incorrect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/605/why-do-so-many-people-get-this-wrong-how-are-you-im-well/608#608&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m well&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m good&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m doing well&amp;quot;, etc&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192/is-it-correct-to-use-their-instead-of-him-or-her/208#208&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;his or her&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3447/i-can-run-faster-than-1-him-2-he/3483#3483&quot;&gt;I can run faster than _____. (1) him (2) he?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/3357&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Anxious to&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;eager to&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T02:15:27.567" Title="Where and how would it be appropriate to discuss descriptivism vs prescriptivism?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="490" CreationDate="2010-12-29T11:19:32.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can always take such discussions to our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, it is kind of deserted right now, but I am pretty sure that when such a controversial topic is brought up, people won't hesitate to voice their opinions. It's a win-win: the main site is not cluttered with endless comment threads, and the chat room sees some life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2010-12-29T11:19:32.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="490" CreationDate="2010-12-30T20:18:59.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of few questions so open-ended as this one. These are great for after-dinner chats or papers in linguistics, but english.stackexchange.com (for very good reasons) confines its scope to questions that have answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the only real discussions that take place do so in the comments is by design: this is not a forum or message board, and while some discussion is allowed it is fairly closely circumscribed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2010-12-30T20:18:59.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-02T14:53:42.500" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I accidently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4578517/whats-the-difference-between-a-tune-and-a-melody&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on stackoverflow and got a good answer there; it wouldn't be fair toward the answerer to delete it. It is already closed, but I think it would still be good to have it here on &quot;English&quot; territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-08-18T09:18:46.537" Title="Can you please move this question to english.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2011-01-03T04:53:07.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Administrators of this site do not have the necessary permissions to migrate questions from SO to here. It would have to be done by one of the site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-01-03T04:53:07.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2011-01-03T20:31:29.857" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have migrated the question. In general you should flag for moderator attention on the site that the question was originally asked on, for three reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can only migrate &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt; from their site rather than &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Normal users who vote to close the question can migrate between some sites but not between Stack Overflow and English Language &amp;amp; Usage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flagging for moderator attention will alert even moderators who do not check the meta sites often.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2011-01-03T20:31:29.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="490" CreationDate="2011-01-04T21:50:24.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very important question. I think questions like these would be really valuable either on the main site or on meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is prescriptivism?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is descriptivism?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the prescriptivist vs descriptivist argument?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it is silly to continuously have these arguments over and over again when someone answers a question with an old-fashioned prescriptivist bent and then someone else (often me or Kosmonaut) debunks the notions underlying the prescription. Typically someone gets all up in arms coping with the cognitive dissonance of realizing what they learned in school or from their editor was poppycock and they have been wrong for so long by trying to argue that somehow prescriptivist ideas have some kind of basis in the one true correct language, which of course, doesn't exist, and then that leads to getting into the argument about who exactly is the authority of what makes correct English, and does &quot;correct English&quot; really exist at all. Then it gets to the argument about if there is no such thing as correct English then what stops us all from just saying any old wrong thing that pops into our heads and without rules we have chaos and then finally it comes to well I think this rule is useful and prescriptive rules are helpful and we should keep them and follow them even if they are just made up and my answer was right damnit...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it all does get tiresome doing it over and over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-01-04T21:50:24.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="490" CreationDate="2011-01-05T01:19:20.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expanding on what I wrote in a comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/259/who-is-the-judge-in-stackexchange/263#263&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, I think a crucial point to emphasise is that &lt;strong&gt;an ideal answer will make both prescriptivists and descriptivists happy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good prescriptivist answer will appeal to the most authoritative authority available; and for the most part, the big dictionaries and the more modern style guides &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; actually pretty descriptively well-informed these days.  An un- or badly-sourced prescriptivist answer can always be battled on its own territory by “I trump your Strunk and White with my Fowler!” (or CMoS, or OED, or…); and then if the prescriptivist rises to the bait and questions the claimed higher authority, they can hardly avoid getting into serious linguistic questions and hence on to more descriptivist ground (cf. @nohat’s answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, an ideal descriptivist answer will not just say “this is what people use these days, and I’m a young native speaker so I should know”; it’ll say a little about what’s used where, and back this up, so will usually look something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In formal writing [or “in UK English”, “in traditional usage”], &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is standard (cf. Fowler); but &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; is more common in casual usage [or “in the Southern US”, “in younger speakers’ usage”, …], as can be seen in e.g. COCA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as long as these distinctions are clear, even an arch-prescriptivist will be quite happy with this: he’ll see the “correct” usage in the most prestigious place, backed up by a respected authority, and can even enjoy some &lt;em&gt;schadenfreude&lt;/em&gt; at the documentation of how badly the rabble are speaking these days!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all these are just prescriptions(!) to follow in writing your own answers.  When it comes to dealing with other people’s bad answers, I’m not sure what to add to what @nohat said — and yes, it does sometimes get tiresome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-01-05T01:19:20.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="499" CreationDate="2011-01-06T04:42:23.547" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I might want to ask a question and present several possible answers to it. Presenting these answers as official answers has the advantage that it is easy to see the numbers of votes - as opposed to waiting for respondents to copy my suggested answers as real answers, if they will ever do so. I think it would work best when the range of reasonable answers is limited, which is incidentally never without problems. I imagine others might post additional answers, and I might change my own answers based on comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it done to create a poll like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T04:53:06.527" Title="Is it OK to ask a multiple choice question, by providing several answers yourself for others to vote on?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="498" CreationDate="2011-01-06T04:53:06.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. This is a poll and is explicitly disallowed. Primarily because the answers run massively afoul of &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these two guidelines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.&lt;/strong&gt; The best subjective questions invite explanation. If you’re asking for a product recommendation of some kind, you want answers to contain detailed information about the features and how they can be used, and why you might want to choose one over the other. “How?” and “Why?” has more lasting value than a bunch of product-feature bullet points or a giant enumerated list, no matter how extensive. In contrast, the bad subjective questions let answerers get away with hit-and-run answers that maybe provide a name and a link — but fail to provide any sort of adequate explanation, context, or background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers.&lt;/strong&gt; The best subjective questions inspire your peers to share their actual experiences, not just post a mindless one-liner or cartoon in hopes of being rewarded with upvotes for being merely “first.” Sharing an experience takes at least one paragraph; ideally several paragraphs. If I’m asking about how to bake cookies, don’t give me a list of grocery items: milk. butter. vanilla. eggs. There is virtually nothing I can learn from a short, static list of grocery items that make up a recipe. Instead, tell me what happened the last time you made cookies from that recipe! Share your detailed experiences, so that we all might learn from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poll might occasionally OK here on meta, but &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; on an actual site proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T04:53:06.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-07T14:42:04.793" Score="8" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at everything tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotes&lt;/a&gt;, it's a mix of questions about the punctuation mark and questions about famous sayings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be useful to tidy this up and split them out. What about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;for the famous sayings:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;[quotes-sayings] or [sayings] or [aphorisms]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;for the punctuation&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;[quotation-marks] or [quote-marks] or [quotes-punctuation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-07T08:47:04.630" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T08:47:04.630" Title="Tag hygiene - quotation marks as punctuation v. quotations as famous sayings" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2011-01-07T20:36:54.850" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &quot;quotes&quot; versus &quot;quotations&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-07T20:36:54.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="511" CreationDate="2011-01-08T05:28:53.487" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7995/huckleberry-finn-without-the-n-words&quot;&gt;this question of mine&lt;/a&gt; was closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is addressed to native&#xA;  English speakers who were born and&#xA;  grew up in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the upcoming censoring of&#xA;  &quot;Huckleberry Finn&quot;, in which all the&#xA;  &quot;niggers&quot; will be replaced with&#xA;  &quot;slaves&quot;, a normal phenomenon in&#xA;  today's American society? I mean, we&#xA;  all know that any language is&#xA;  constantly changing, some words become&#xA;  obsolete and some words acquire new&#xA;  meanings, perhaps, not good ones. So,&#xA;  it seems that the word &quot;nigger&quot; is now&#xA;  way more negative than it was during&#xA;  Mark Twain's times. So, replacing&#xA;  words with some other ones in this&#xA;  case may be considered a no bigger&#xA;  crime than, say, issuing a new version&#xA;  of the Bible that is meant to make the&#xA;  biblical language more accessible for&#xA;  modern readers. On the other hand,&#xA;  changing the words chosen for his book&#xA;  by one of the most famous American&#xA;  writers might be considered as&#xA;  disrespectful toward the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, is it okay with common American&#xA;  people today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator who closed the question said that it &quot;really has little relevance to a site for questions asked by &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is I consider this question to have a direct relevance to such an English-language site as I came up with this question while translating one movie script into English. There were many references made in that movie to black Americans and they were not nice - I didn't know how to render them in English without offending the possible American audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked that moderator why (in a comment), but he never replied.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T00:58:19.267" Title="Why was my question closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2011-01-08T05:33:12.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, is it okay with common American people today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this anything more than a poll soliciting people's opinions? It's not about the language, it's about censorship and feelings. There's no technical basis for this question to exist other than as a rather subjective and argumentative discussion topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-08T05:33:12.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2011-01-08T06:22:53.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disregarding the issue of whether the question is really a question rather than an instigation of a discussion, it's not really a question in the purview of this site. This is a question that at some level is fundamentally a question of sociology and literary criticism, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/281#281&quot;&gt;that too is outside the scope of this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions that are specifically about the workings of the English language, please ask. Questions about how society relates to how the English language is used are off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-01-08T06:22:53.243" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-09T07:34:15.433" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, &quot;parent&quot; takes up less space, but the first comers may think it is a link to a board discussing children upbringing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-01-23T04:41:42.650" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T04:42:03.493" Title="Do you think &quot;parent&quot; link here should be changed to &quot;parent site&quot; link?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2011-01-09T07:48:18.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was discussed briefly in the blog comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/new-per-site-metas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/new-per-site-metas/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered and discarded a lot of the alternatives, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;main (too close visually to meta)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parent site (too long)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;actual name &quot;english&quot;, &quot;boardgames&quot;, &quot;cooking&quot; (too variable in every sense)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main isn't &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; but consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tools | chat | meta | about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tools | chat | main | about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; close visually.. ugh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: since this kept coming up across the network I decided to change it from &quot;parent&quot; to &quot;main&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-01-23T04:42:03.493" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T04:42:03.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2011-01-10T02:26:41.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see what difference it would make. I wondered what it meant for about 0.75 seconds and then figured it out. Shorter is better in links, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T02:26:41.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2011-01-10T04:42:24.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Motto, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We know irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3313" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T04:42:24.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2011-01-10T09:54:02.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure of it, but this might have it's place on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;writers.se&lt;/a&gt;, but not without working a bit on the question. As Jeff Atwood pointed, it is some kind of poll, and that would be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;bad subjective question&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe asking how to approach censure depending on target audiance, in a pro context, or something of this kind. Maybe a rewrite using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/181/397&quot;&gt;new critique tag&lt;/a&gt; of writers could be a good use of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T09:54:02.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2011-01-10T14:29:15.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting. You may not believe it, but yesterday I was thinking about asking a similar question. I wanted to ask how common it is to use the word &quot;nigger&quot; in certain contexts. I am a bit afraid to ask that now, but I think I will go ahead: it is good for this website to define and refine its boundaries, because, considering the different answers our two moderators gave, it looks like this was not a simple question to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that it matters a great deal on this website how you formulate your answers and questions. &quot;Do educated speakers say &quot;ain't&quot; in formal speech?&quot; will get much more sympathetic response than &quot;is it wrong to say &quot;ain't&quot;?&quot;, even though the latter can be interpreted as meaning exactly the same as the former and would rightly be so interpreted 99% of the time, if we were to ask the asker. Both would result in practically the same answer at any rate, just with a few phrases like &quot;not in formal speech&quot; and &quot;substandard&quot; tacked onto the answer to the latter. I am not saying these phrases are bad or useless. So, if you had only phrased your question with less emotion, I suspect that it might have passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-01-12T00:58:19.267" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T00:58:19.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-10T16:46:58.887" Score="5" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8356/whats-wrong-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the person is simply asking &quot;what is wrong with this sentence&quot;?  It is not a question about a specific aspect of the sentence, and I am wondering if people think this should qualify as an off-topic proofreading question or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've discussed that &quot;proofread my &lt;em&gt;document&lt;/em&gt;&quot; questions are off-topic, but I wonder if people feel the same way about single-sentence &quot;what's wrong&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't want to see a flood of these types of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T02:50:14.510" Title="Does this sort of question qualify as proofreading?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-11T00:54:04.460" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm exposed to the interface for the first time, and I have this strange feeling that the page is incomplete somehow.  After scratching my head and considering the layout and design, I realized that the question title border is partly hidden by the drop-shadowed page header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It looks incomplete - like I should be able to scroll up under the page header&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternately it appears to be part of the page header (centered with the site title and menus) but has little to no relation to the question which is off-center&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The design otherwise looks great, but it just &lt;em&gt;itches&lt;/em&gt; a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I totally crazy for having this feeling when I visit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I alone in this (relatively minor) annoyance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3452" LastActivityDate="2011-01-11T07:05:52.247" Title="The title border is partially hidden by the page header" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="512" CreationDate="2011-01-11T05:00:29.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I do not know what exactly was behind the creation of this rule, I can only consider two things - its literal wording, and common sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is phrased as something like &quot;could you proofread this sentence?&quot;, so that I can only conclude that the question conflicts with the letter of this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for common sense, I feel that &quot;proofreading&quot; should normally apply only to longer texts, at the very least a paragraph. I suspect that the background of this question is that it is annoying to function as a proofreading facility for writers who cannot afford a paid service. I know that kind of request from other forums, and it can be annoying. But a single sentence does not bother me. In addition, forbidding this would cut the theme of this website into a somewhat irregular shape: grammar yes, but not checking grammar in a sentence unless specified beforehand; word usage, ditto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because correcting a single sentence is not a lot of work, does not yet present a problem of clutter, fits in with others kinds of questions here, and can actually provide an interesting stimulus, I vote to allow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a liberal, and I do not believe in making rules unless there is strong enough evidence that problems will arise without those rules. So far there seems to be no problem. The rules can always be changed if this becomes one. However, it could be argued that I do not know enough about the background of the SE framework to judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. There are already plenty of questions that I do not particularly like answering, such as &quot;what adjective to use to express phrase X?&quot; or &quot;where does saying Y come from?&quot;. But there are many others who appear to like answering those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-01-12T00:39:48.287" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T00:39:48.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="513" CreationDate="2011-01-11T07:05:52.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say you give it some time. I feel to have a complete 4 sided box would make the site overly boxy, considering we have quite a few boxes on the sidebar already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-01-11T07:05:52.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="512" CreationDate="2011-01-11T08:20:08.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that the question would need to be expanded to give some context. As @RegDwight pointed in his comment, it seems that the OP were already aware that there were something wrong with the sentence. But would this assumption be wrong, then it would be definitely off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastActivityDate="2011-01-11T08:20:08.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2011-01-11T10:23:23.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful to have separate &quot;stop-word&quot; database for each site (or at least for sites where the StackOverflow stop words are no good). An example of a stop-word that would be useful on the English site is &quot;vs&quot;. If you try to search for something containing &quot;vs&quot; in the search string, you will get a load of un-relevant hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1717" LastActivityDate="2011-01-11T10:23:23.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="520" CreationDate="2011-01-11T10:26:32.713" Score="8" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just posted an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8474/floppy-disc-vs-disk&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; where I cited Wikipedia as the source of my information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is wikipedia a reliable enough source to go to when citing information of this nature? I appreciate the dangers of blindly quoting from Wiki articles, but at the same time the majority of information on the site is well moderated and mostly reliable (in my experience; YMMV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a consensus on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3320" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T09:42:08.447" Title="Is Wikipedia an acceptable source?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-11T23:37:25.943" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just took a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&lt;/a&gt;, and there's an oops:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EiqkU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;the last line of text doesn&amp;#39;t fit in the box&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T11:02:03.383" Title="Review page instructions overflow their box" Tags="|bug|status-completed|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="518" CreationDate="2011-01-11T23:50:36.280" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the SE consensus. In other forums, the rule is often that Wikipedia is not &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; - you can use it as a starting point, and you can even cite it, but you need to investigate further. If the article is based on online sources, then it's pretty easy to just go to those online sources, find the information you need, and cite that (instead of or in addition to Wikipedia). If the sources are not online, or are restricted access, then it's a bit harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think for English.SE, if you're just citing Wikipedia to support something you already knew, then it can be sufficient on its own. If, however, you didn't know something until you read it on Wikipedia, then it might be a good idea to find at least one other source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-01-11T23:50:36.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="519" CreationDate="2011-01-12T00:32:23.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that too, but only at some font sizes. When I go from smaller font to larger, I get this: ... bad-&lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt;-bad-bad-bad-&lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt;-bad... that is probably why this was overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T00:32:23.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="523" CreationDate="2011-01-12T13:58:55.673" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came a across a spam answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8543/what-is-it-called-when-an-interjection-is-inserted-inside-another-word&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; advertising clothes and the like, which I have already flagged for moderator attention. However in this situation is it recommended to down vote the answer in addition to flagging it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instinct is not to down vote, and to just have a mod remove it as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: the spam post has now been removed, but I'd still appreciate a definitive answer on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3320" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T09:41:24.493" Title="Should spam posts be down-voted, flagged, or both?" Tags="|support|flagging|moderation|spam|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="522" CreationDate="2011-01-12T17:03:16.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely flag the post.  As far as downvoting, I personally don't see any harm or benefit to doing so.  The spam account will be immediately deleted.  If you don't want to get the -1 for downvoting, then you can leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T17:03:16.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="518" CreationDate="2011-01-13T09:42:08.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes “…a reliable enough source…” is pretty context-dependent.  The amount of background needed in an answer depends partly on how debatable/disputed an issue seems to be.  If a question has a simple answer which native speakers find obvious and agree on, then an answer probably doesn’t need any citations at all.  If several people are disagreeing about an issue, then another unsourced answer is useless — further answers will need to be backed up, the more authoritatively the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is somewhere middling-high on this scale of reliability; it’s much better than no citation, or than J. Random Blogger, but not as reliable (on linguistic/usage matters) as good dictionaries or most academic work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T09:42:08.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-13T11:51:23.583" Score="12" ViewCount="802" Body="&lt;p&gt;Style guides such as those on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/89/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;Ask Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt; have been greatly helpful for me (and many in those communities) in creating well-written, well-formatted, easy-to-understand, easier-on-the-eye content. So, I would like to propose a style guide for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I understand that style is more of a personal preference — this is perfectly all right for well written content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This guide is meant to avoid poorly written, badly formatted, hard-to-understand, hideous looking content; we can all spot one, can't we? And to deal with one when we spot them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be a good one-stop reference for everyone who is interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Note&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a community wiki, so go ahead and edit this question and the answer(s) to best suit the purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T15:43:40.230" Title="Style guide for questions, answers, and comments" Tags="|discussion|style|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-05-04T23:53:34.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="527" CreationDate="2011-01-14T15:18:38.640" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;At 200 reputation, you are supposed to gain the priviledge of reduced advertising on the site. But, I currently don't see any advertising in the spaces defined on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/reduced-ads&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/reduced-ads&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: is “English language &amp;amp; usage” exempt from advertising?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T16:06:10.503" Title="Reduce advertising... but what advertising?" Tags="|support|advertising|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="526" CreationDate="2011-01-14T16:18:09.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69429/will-stack-exchange-2-0-websites-stay-free-of-ads-for-the-next-2-years/72685#72685&quot;&gt;Joel Spolsky&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We reserve the right to display ads on Stack Exchange sites. Right now, that is not a priority for us, and there are no &lt;em&gt;immediate&lt;/em&gt; plans to sell ads on any sites other than [&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://superuser.com&quot;&gt;SuperUser&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://serverfault.com&quot;&gt;ServerFault&lt;/a&gt;]. Until a site has a lot of traffic, advertising is not very lucrative, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-01-14T16:18:09.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2011-01-14T20:00:52.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about option #4: like #2, but prefer strongly encouraging the original poster to make the edit rather than doing a 3rd-party edit, at least in most cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I suppose whatever decisions &quot;we&quot; (well, really &quot;you&quot; at this point -- I joined english.SE some tens of minutes ago) make here on meta are subject to the [insert appropriate noun here] &quot;they're more like guidelines anyway&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I really wish SE's markdown had proper dashes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3639" LastEditorUserId="3639" LastEditDate="2011-01-18T19:34:14.587" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T19:34:14.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="530" CreationDate="2011-01-15T03:04:00.443" Score="2" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;Code Sample&quot; feature really needed on english.stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean that feature that is represented by the &quot;101&quot; icon above the question field? I can't think of any possible situation when that feature would be needed on a site about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T19:12:54.400" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T19:12:54.400" Title="Is the &quot;Code Sample&quot; feature really needed on english.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|editor|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2011-01-15T21:31:59.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree; at the very least the &quot;code&quot; symbol should not be used. I sometimes use the format for quoting specific words however. (The monospace font makes it stand out nicely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T21:31:59.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-16T12:09:41.270" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an extant tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To edit this wiki, you must have at least 2000 reputation and hold the bronze &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags&quot;&gt;tag badge&lt;/a&gt; for this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin a tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tag wikis can be edited by users with more than 1500 reputation, provided:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are in the top 20 answerers for this tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They hold the bronze tag badge for this tag&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For such a (relatively) young, small and low-traffic site, those thresholds seem a bit high.  At the time of writing, there are only 35 users with rep ≥ &lt;strong&gt;1500&lt;/strong&gt;, 25 with rep ≥ &lt;strong&gt;2000&lt;/strong&gt;, and 6 with tag badges.  Hardly in the “wiki” spirit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2988" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T04:16:59.777" Title="Thresholds for tag wiki editing set too high?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2011-01-16T17:47:54.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Noldorin says, it can be an effective marker of special words or phrases; I use it too. And the mono-space font can be practical. I can understand why you would call the label &quot;code&quot; misleading; but since it has that name almost universally on internet forums, I think we should keep it. As soon as I saw the tooltip &quot;code&quot; it was immediately clear to me what I could use it for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-01-16T17:47:54.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="540" CreationDate="2011-01-16T21:21:10.483" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean that number that shows your reputation at the top of the screen (between your name and the orange &quot;badge&quot; icon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T17:02:36.147" Title="Why is the reputation numerical value is a link on the parent site, but not on meta?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="556" CreationDate="2011-01-16T22:39:28.983" Score="2" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I guess the (long) title says most of it. When people write &quot;an inline quote&quot;, it would be nicer if it were “an inline quote” (see the oriented “” quotes instead of &quot;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many content management solutions do that for you (like the SmartyPants plugin to WordPress, or others), which is cool, because most people won't actually take the time to type them out (or don't know how).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably valid for any stackexchange site, but it makes me feel sorry to see ugly quotes on a language-related site such as ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-12-23T11:46:13.857" Title="Should we automatically convert straight ' and &quot; quotes into nicer “...” and ‘...’ quotes?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2011-01-17T02:42:23.540" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm opposed to &lt;strong&gt;tactical downvoting&lt;/strong&gt; - the practice of an answerer downvoting a competitor's answer merely to ensure their own answer is the first one in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, reasons I would downvote are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blatant plagiarism&lt;/strong&gt;: Copying material within the site without attribution. (Outside the site? Fair game ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Redundant answers&lt;/strong&gt;: If an answerer hadn't bothered checking existing answers before posting their own, and their own answer doesn't add anything, then I'd downvote them. That's because the answer adds to my reading burden without giving me any benefit. If the answer has a similar message, but is phrased differently, such that people who don't understand the original might understand the new one, I'd regard that as legitimate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T02:42:23.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2011-01-17T06:31:44.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since real HTML tables are not permitted on Stack Exchange sites—heaven forfend someone wants to write an answer that involves correctly formatting complex tabular data—we have to use the “code” feature for this kind of information. It is absolutely needed for tabular data, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1925/email-or-e-mail/1947#1947&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3008/use-of-the-word-praxis/3025#3025&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3139/when-should-the-word-god-be-capitalized/3141#3141&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, please do NOT use the “code” format to make words stand out for any reason. Use &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; or “quotation marks” for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the use–mention distinction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; for words that you want to make stand out for other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T06:39:14.083" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-17T06:42:12.507" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8994/writing-or-writting&quot;&gt;Differentiating between &amp;quot;written&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;writing&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I'm asking about common error(writing, but written). I was attacked, because I feel that some people think you should just remember it and don't think/ask why its that way. But that's ok, I don't mind(P.S. if you can make that question better, please do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all users will benefit from common category/tag like &quot;common-mistake&quot; or &quot;confusing words&quot;(I'd like to get to know more common used words like that and I will thanks to the link given by VonC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If you find any spelling errors here, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T10:15:09.130" Title="&quot;Common mistake&quot; tag or maybe &quot;confusing words&quot;?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-01-17T06:52:22.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be wary of any automatic solution unless there were a clear way to turn it off. For example, how would you have written this request if such a system already were in place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, I recommend just learning how to type curly quotes on your computer and always type the correct one. On my Mac it’s just option-shift-] for an apostrophe, and I have learned to type all four symbols smoothly after a bit of practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T06:52:22.623" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="534" CreationDate="2011-01-17T17:02:36.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't actually accrue reputation on meta. The number shown is your rep on the parent site. It's not linked because the table of reputation limits (which is where the link points to on the parent site) is irrelevant on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T17:02:36.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-01-17T22:56:13.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While arguably this feature would be nice (at least if there were some way to turn it off, as @nohat &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/535/should-we-automatically-convert-straight-and-quotes-into-nicer-and/539#539&quot;&gt;points out&lt;/a&gt;), I’m not sure its advantages are worth the complexity it adds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, that’s not much extra complexity.  But at the moment we use a simple variant of &lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt;, which is simple, well-designed, and widely used.  Adding on every extra feature which would be nice dilutes these advantages, and sooner or later leads to &lt;a href=&quot;http://onscreencars.com/tv/the-homer-the-car-built-for-homer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Homer car&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SHdDK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T22:56:13.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2011-01-18T02:46:38.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking suggestions from the question: &lt;strong&gt;[quotations]&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;[quotation-marks]&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, each individually suggests the right thing pretty unambiguously — “ ” often get called &lt;em&gt;quotes&lt;/em&gt;, but I’ve never heard them called &lt;em&gt;quotations&lt;/em&gt;.  On the other hand, since they start (and mostly continue) the same way, whenever you start typing either one, both will come up on autocomplete; and then, with them side by side, the distinction should be clear even for less experienced speakers of English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, this similarity has the drawback that a slip of the keyboard could easily lead to mis-tagging.  But I imagine that’d be a much less common source of error than misunderstanding the terminology — and also, if the terminology is clear, then accidental mis-tags will be noticeable to readers, so will quickly get corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T02:46:38.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="544" CreationDate="2011-01-18T03:41:25.823" Score="4" ViewCount="1711" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to give a quotation, I can set it out as a block-quote and it looks beautiful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I want two such quotations in a row, I don’t know how to separate them.  I’ve tried several options, and none works: just separating them by an empty line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;gt; Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.&#xA;&#xA;  &amp;gt; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;merges to a single block-quote (even if more separating lines are added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a non-breaking space on the separating line merges even more: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;gt; In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.&#xA;  [non-breaking space here] &#xA;  &amp;gt; Call me Ishmael.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;makes it a single line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.&#xA;   &#xA;  Call me Ishmael.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding an empty line after the non-breaking space makes it identical to the first example.  Adding an empty line &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the non-breaking space&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;gt; Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore are thou Romeo?&#xA;&#xA;  [non-breaking space here]&#xA;  &amp;gt; To be or not to be, that is the question.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;looks perfect in the preview, but leaves a full blank line in the final rendering — much too large a gap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore are thou Romeo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be or not to be, that is the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better option than any of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T03:53:00.220" Title="Formatting: two block-quotes in a row?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="543" CreationDate="2011-01-18T03:53:00.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.    &#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- hey there sailor --&amp;gt;    &#xA;&#xA;&amp;gt; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T03:53:00.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="532" CreationDate="2011-01-18T04:16:59.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fixed the inconsistency the other day. I agree, the high threshold makes it quite painful to improve these wikis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are in the process of implementing a system that allows low rep users to &quot;suggest&quot; edits to existing wikis. Once these edits are &quot;vetted&quot; by users with full edit rights, they will go live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T04:16:59.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-01-18T10:15:09.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you didn't get &quot;attacked&quot; because you asked about a common error, but because of the way you phrased your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why is it &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt;, with one T, but &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt;, with two?&quot; is a perfectly valid question. However, &quot;Why is &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; spelled differently?&quot; is not the best formulation of that thought. I actually tried to explain that in a comment on that question. Spelled differently from what? You must clarify. Now that you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; clarified by editing the question, I don't think anyone will object to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is: when asking a question, try to be as clear and specific as possible. If there's a particular reason why you're having a problem with a word, please specify that reason. Don't expect people to just guess it. They might guess it wrong, or they might not bother at all. And that won't help anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true of tags. Try to be as clear and specific as possible. If your question is about the spelling of the words &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt;, tag it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbs&lt;/a&gt;. (You can be even more specific and add the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gerund&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gerund&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gerund&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/participle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;participle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;participle&lt;/a&gt;.) That will help people understand what your question is about &lt;em&gt;before they even click on it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/common-mistake&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;common-mistake&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;common-mistake&lt;/a&gt;, on the other hand, would not be clear or specific at all. First of all, the term &quot;common&quot; is not clearly defined and is highly subjective. (For example, I have never encountered the misspelling &lt;em&gt;writting&lt;/em&gt; before. For all I can tell, it's the exact opposite of common.) Secondly, it doesn't really tell us what the question is about. It could be about verbs or nouns; single words or complete phrases; spelling or pronunciation; etymology or punctuation; we really can't tell. It's a so-called &quot;meta&quot; tag, and such tags are expressly discouraged across the entire StackExchange network. As Jeff Atwood &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;puts it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From this point on, meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can you tell you’re using a meta-tag? It’s easier than you might think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.&lt;/strong&gt; Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag.&lt;/strong&gt; In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/common-mistake&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;common-mistake&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;common-mistake&lt;/a&gt; clearly meets &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; of the above criteria. I would oppose introducing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T10:15:09.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-18T12:01:43.440" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to always ask &quot;is that correct?&quot;, here for example&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9186/using-quotes-when-refering-to-word-as-word&quot;&gt;Using quotes when referring to word as word&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is the old habit from stackoverflow, because they enjoy closing questions saying &quot;not a real question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I do it and are my questions safe without it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T12:01:43.440" Title="&quot;is that correct?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="526" CreationDate="2011-01-18T12:36:55.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We must be too S-M-R-T for advertising!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T12:36:55.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-19T00:31:30.010" Score="8" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9239/is-it-mandatory-to-use-a-comma-before-a-conjunction-uniting-the-two-clauses-in-a&quot;&gt;my latest question&lt;/a&gt;, I searched for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=compound+sentence+conjunction&quot;&gt;compound sentence conjunction&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Most of the questions' title were so uninformative that I had to click through each time to know whether my question had been already answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4828/comma-in-compound-complex-sentences&quot;&gt;Comma in compound/complex sentences&lt;/a&gt;&quot; doesn't tell you enough information about its content. It's only by clicking through that you know what is being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of StackExchange is to &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;help us build a great library of canonical answers&lt;/a&gt;. Having poor titles like that is counterproductive to that goal, because it makes searching the library much more painful than it ought to be. So, when you see a title that doesn't tell you what the question is, and you can improve, you should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T06:11:41.740" Title="Titles that do not describe the question properly should be edited" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="549" CreationDate="2011-01-19T06:11:23.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes -- I agree. I am sure everyone agrees that editing with the intent to make the question clearer and easier to understand is always a net positive for the community and is welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T06:11:23.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="555" CreationDate="2011-01-19T19:18:36.173" Score="15" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have the text anymore (caching) so I can't quote it, but I know that the commentary already had some discussion from site-mods saying that it was acceptable, and quoting meta questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9293/what-is-the-difference-between-tits-and-boobs&quot;&gt;Differences between slang words for breasts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;closed? There surely needs to be an update to the meta here if this was an unacceptable question. The person was trying to track down slang and the appropriateness of it's use by asking people who have fluency and knowledge, and there were answers on there that were actually legitimate (of course mine included, since I'm inflamed that it was removed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What gives? Why was it invalid?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assistance from a diamond mod gives me these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seeing how this has collected two offensive flags within 50 minutes of being posted, I would like to remind everybody that this is a totally valid question for this site. (See meta question one, meta question two.) I do understand your frustration if you're browsing from a workplace where tits are not tolerated, but please take that up with the workplace and not with Sergey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– RegDwight 3 hours ago (as of the time of collection for posting here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta questions in reference are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/446/offensive-nsfw-words-what-are-the-boundaries&quot;&gt;Offensive/NSFW words: what are the boundaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253/referencing-the-existence-of-words-that-may-be-offensive&quot;&gt;Referencing the existence of words that may be offensive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there were other mods saying that it was marginal but perfectly acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: updated question title&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2161" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T21:56:14.910" Title="Why did &quot;slang for breasts&quot; disappear because that was a valid question, no?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="554" CreationDate="2011-01-19T20:12:27.850" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post received several flags in rapid succession so it was removed while we looked into the situation further and discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion was that the question was asked within the context of an academic discussion on an English Language &amp;amp; Usage site. The &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; bore out that the users are able to behave and act maturely; therefore, there was no cause to keep the question off the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T20:12:27.850" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-01-19T21:11:15.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, to be fair, &lt;strong&gt;we do this for titles.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use an approach similar to SmartyPants in style but the code is our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T21:11:15.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="565" CreationDate="2011-01-19T21:23:09.277" Score="29" ViewCount="828" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9293/what-is-the-difference-between-tits-and-boobs&quot;&gt;What is the difference between “tits” and “boobs”?&lt;/a&gt; has a number of answers, and a dedicated group of people appears to have gone through and down-voted every answer multiple times. This can't be coincidence. @ghoppe's answer received 5 down-votes, @drachenstern's got 6, @Paul's got 2, my own got 4, and the question itself received 10 down-votes. In each case it seems as if the perpetrator(s) were trying to bring the scores to zero, which they couldn't achieve with @ghoppe's because he had too many upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just curious, because this looks like a coordinated attack of some kind, perhaps from a person or persons who can't abide such a topic being discussed. Moderators? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T12:10:03.173" Title="What's with all the serial down-voting on the &quot;boobs&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2011-01-19T21:40:47.400" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like some members of the community don't like this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is technically allowed by the terms of service -- but so is anonymously downvoting content that you don't agree with, that you think makes the internet &lt;em&gt;worse&lt;/em&gt; and not better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, pick your poison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T21:40:47.400" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="567" CreationDate="2011-01-20T11:49:53.950" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/4009/timeline&quot;&gt;the timeline for the Chuck Norris question&lt;/a&gt;. Here's what I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yqPrE.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the design can't accommodate questions with such long titles. When the title wraps to the next line, it pushes the actual content to the right and out of view (looks like a &lt;code&gt;float&lt;/code&gt; issue). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is not a show-stopper, as there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a horizontal scrollbar at the very bottom of the page, so I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; bring the actual content into view. However, I think it would be less confusing and more convenient if the question title were allotted more vertical space or had an &lt;code&gt;overflow:hidden&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T21:51:30.253" Title="Timeline looks broken for post with long title" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="566" CreationDate="2011-01-20T13:16:24.577" Score="10" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9004/which-style-of-latin-plurals-should-i-use&quot;&gt;Which style of Latin plurals should I use?&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://j.mp/g29nZW&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Which style of Latin plurals should I use?&lt;/a&gt; – Spot the difference! &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;The second one has a shortened url; I find this downright rude. &lt;br/&gt; &#xA;What are your views on the usage of masked shortened-urls? &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Is it wrong to edit such content and replace the shortened url with the original one? &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T20:38:24.007" Title="How to deal with masked shortened-urls?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-20T13:55:19.003" Score="12" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;After &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9393/what-does-this-slang-expression-mean&quot;&gt;What is the difference between 'tits' and 'boobs'?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; being censored, it's the turn of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9393/what-does-this-slang-expression-mean&quot;&gt;What does 'suck it up ho' means?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; to be sanitized. I think we need to come to a consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what should we do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T11:33:25.897" Title="What should we do about question titles containing vulgar words?" Tags="|discussion|editing|bowdlerization|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="561" CreationDate="2011-01-20T13:59:16.953" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't censor a question's title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, all StackExchange questions should have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/549/titles-that-do-not-describe-the-question-properly-should-be-edited&quot;&gt;a concise and informative title&lt;/a&gt;. Obviously, it shouldn't be unnecessarily wordy but one should have a good idea of what the question is from the title alone. &lt;strong&gt;The new sanitized titles fail in that regard.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a question's title less informative doesn't seem like it's in congruence with StackExchange's goal of creating &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia of Long Tail English Language Questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if our role model is Wikipedia, then  we should proudly oppose such censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia contains images &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Sexual_content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which many find objectionable&lt;/a&gt;. When the founder of Wikipedia tried to censor some images after criticism by Larry Sanger, the community of Wikipedia reacted strongly and which then caused Jimmy Wales &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10104946&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to renounce many of the permissions&lt;/a&gt; granted by his founder status as a response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Wales has faced criticism from the band of volunteers who help to maintain the site, some of whom argued that the decision to delete was undemocratic and taken too quickly. They also expressed concerns that valid material might be deleted accidentally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Sunday, in response, Jimmy Wales voluntarily revoked many of the &amp;quot;permissions&amp;quot; given to him as Wikipedia's founder, to delete and edit &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; content on Wikimedia Commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list he said this was &amp;quot;in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand why some might not uncomfortable by some words or expression but, if that's the issue, we can simply enforce the use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vulgar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vulgar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vulgar&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who take issue with the language found in those question's title can simply add the tag to their ignored tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T13:59:16.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="561" CreationDate="2011-01-20T16:52:00.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Proposal: (needs work admittedly)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question regarding the &lt;strong&gt;usage&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;origin&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;slang&lt;/em&gt; may be considered acceptable &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; there is a prevailing or &lt;em&gt;demonstrable&lt;/em&gt; requirement to define the slang or to provide it's origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of trying to understand a local colloquialism (the use of slang), usage of the original statement, &lt;strong&gt;including contextual clues&lt;/strong&gt; from the surrounding conversation, should be given (cited?) in the question. &lt;em&gt;Failing to do so would deem the question unanswerable&lt;/em&gt;, and subject to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the point of this question is in regards to question titles, but if the question body is no better than the title (in terms of vulgarity) then the title alone won't suffice to keep the question or make it reasonable. Having a clean title and a crap question doesn't make the question palatable. So while this answer may not fit here &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;, it's a close fit and somewhere for this to be voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the boobs vs tits would've been acceptable had it been presented as thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a coworker who's constantly talking about girls boobs and tits. He works in the US, and I work in {insert other country here}. What is the difference in those two terms? I know they refer to breasts, but why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the &quot;suck it up ho&quot; might have been acceptable had it been presented as thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I continuously hear films or youtube videos telling people to &quot;suck it up ho&quot; and I don't understand what this line means. The context tells me it should mean to deal with a problem, but what is the meaning of this phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus making the questions more &quot;academic&quot; and less &quot;urban dictionary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my interjection in this debate. Comments, questions, rude remarks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2161" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T16:52:00.710" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="561" CreationDate="2011-01-20T17:06:59.170" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think censoring a question's title, when done in a careful way, is the best compromise between allowing taboo topics to be discussed (which I firmly support) and keeping the casual user from equating this site with Urban Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a vulgar tag is not a sufficient solution.  Casual readers probably do not have tags hidden on the site.  And the &quot;tits&quot; and &quot;boobs&quot; question made it onto the MultiCollider, which means all sorts of casual people run across it.  I think taboo topics are more likely to get pushed up like this because they usually generate some amount of controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a vulgar tag with added functionality that keeps the question out of places like the MultiCollider or the front page is another possibility, but I don't think it is a good one.  There are many people who &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to know that such a topic is posted and want to read about it.  I don't think such questions should be in a hidden place that is unknown to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a question like &quot;what's the difference between 'tits' and 'boobs'?&quot; and change it to &quot;what's the difference between slang terms for breasts&quot;, there is not even the slightest doubt about the content of the question.  Anyone who sees it can ignore it as they choose, and anybody who clicks on it and sees the words has no justification for getting offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the title for &quot;suck it up ho&quot; is more difficult to formulate such that the content is crystal clear, but that is partly because it is such a poor question, about a phrase that nobody ever says.  (Personally I think the question should be closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that titles should be as informative as possible.  Surely there can be a reasonable caveat to that, where one can make the title as informative as possible without resorting to vulgar language in the title itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I am completely in favor of good questions about taboo subjects.  I am not bothered by vulgar question titles.  But I think that keeping the question title clean is a good compromise that does not require a technical solution and doesn't hide these questions in a dark alley either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T17:06:59.170" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2011-01-20T19:48:54.720" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem here is inherently that the Stack Overflow model of community moderation doesn’t necessarily scale to highly specialized sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind community moderation is great: it’s an ultimate form of democracy and it lets the community shape itself without outside influence, and will invariably reflect the majority opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this only works if the community is &lt;em&gt;robust&lt;/em&gt;. And this means &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;knowledgeable&lt;/em&gt; to some degree. For some Stack Exchange sites, this isn’t the case and English.SE is a prime example. Most users on this site are probably dedicated enthusiasts (like myself), not professional linguists, and there aren’t &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; many users to boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the site is essentially open to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;. Again, this is usually a good thing. But it also means that the decisions about the community are no longer made by the informed only, they are also influenced by ignorants (and I don’t mean this pejoratively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what has happened here. And I agree with Jeff that this is just the way the community platform works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it shows that this open community doesn’t work in each setting. If a professional community is small enough that it can easily be overrun by disinterested outsiders who just want to cause disruption, precautions have to be taken, otherwise the discourse will be disrupted. Imagine if creationists had a say in what gets published in &lt;em&gt;Nature&lt;/em&gt;. The very thought is ridiculous. But this &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; happen if Nature were an open platform in the same way as Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is exactly the same thing that has happened here: whoever thinks that a linguistic discussion about obscene words is even the slightest bit offensive is disruptive in such a discussion. There is no question that this doesn’t have to be “tolerated, lest we be intolerant”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think that this was an exceptional case for English.SE and that the community won’t suffer from it. But I could imagine that this becomes a huge problem for different potential SE platforms (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7931/biological-evolution&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Biological Evolution&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4955/popular-natural-science&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Popular Natural Science&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) and we should keep an eye out for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1637" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T19:48:54.720" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="560" CreationDate="2011-01-20T20:38:24.007" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using url shorteners should be reserved for contexts where you MUST use an url shortener:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the URL is very strange and contains semi-illegal chars that are hard to link here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you are using a limited input area where the URL is so long, it would prevent you from entering other meaningful text&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the markup does not allow presenting a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;&quot;&amp;gt;friendly link title&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of that applies here, so I would say they should be &lt;strong&gt;discouraged unless absolutely necessary&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T20:38:24.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2011-01-20T21:51:30.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;FireFox only CSS bug.  A fun one too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tweaked the styles to just hide the overflow, which fixes the problem on FireFox (and does nothing in the typical &quot;sane length title&quot; case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change will go out with our nightly deploy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T21:51:30.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="573" CreationDate="2011-01-21T14:21:41.093" Score="13" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;In longish lists of comments the list gets abridged and a &quot;more comments&quot; link shows up at the end, kind of like an ellipsis. Normally, one would expect that such a list would be trimmed at the end, but on English.SE (and possibly on other SE sites) the elisions can occur anywhere in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an ordinary, non-sequential list, that would not be a problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peach&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could safely be abridged to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[more]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But comment lists involve questions and answers. And it often happens that items appear in the abridged list which are answers to questions that have been hidden. This is confusing, to say the least. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@mike: Do you mean an avocado is a fruit? -ben&#xA;@ben: No, it is a vegetable. -mike&#xA;@mike: Really? Did you look it up in the dictionary? -ben&#xA;@ben: I looked it up on Wikipedia. -mike&#xA;@mike: I don't think Wikipedia is a dictionary. - ben&#xA;@ben: Trust me, it is a dictionary. -mike&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we remove comments from the middle we could wind up with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@mike: Do you mean an avocado is a fruit? -ben&#xA;@ben: Trust me, it is a dictionary. -mike&#xA;[more comments]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that what we want? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-04-17T03:49:04.167" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why are comment lists abridged in the middle?" Tags="|bug|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2011-01-21T20:27:09.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see Meta StackOverflow for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75865/why-are-comment-lists-abridged-in-the-middle&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; to this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short version: it is what it is and SE is fine with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T20:27:09.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="571" CreationDate="2011-01-22T01:28:27.820" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;Etiquette on duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt; , but it doesn't give me practical advice about what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to track down all questions like &quot;do I need a hyphen in &lt;em&gt;the one handed sailor?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. I have given them mostly the same tags for better visibility. I have posted a comment &quot;possible duplicate&quot;, with a link to the oldest of their kind that I could find. I have added some tags to the slightly different questions and left them alone apart from that. Did I do it right? Should I do something else, like flagging or voting to close? I have heard that moderators can merge questions, but I do not think I can do anything to help with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the duplicates I have found, oldest first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2908/should-i-use-related-or-related&quot;&gt;Should I use &amp;quot; related&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;-related&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the correct use of the term&#xA;  &quot;related?&quot; For example, should I use&#xA;  it like computer related, or is it&#xA;  more proper to use computer-related&#xA;  (where the word &quot;computer&quot; is just&#xA;  part of my example?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are the cases where it is used in one&#xA;  form and case in another form, or&#xA;  should it always be used in only one&#xA;  way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4761/chainsaw-equipped-or-chainsaw-equipped&quot;&gt;Chainsaw-equipped or chainsaw equipped?&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it chainsaw-equipped or chainsaw&#xA;  equipped? And with what kind of former&#xA;  words to use &quot;-&quot; properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6936/on-time-vs-on-time&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;on time&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;on-time&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm in the &quot;on-time&quot; camp when it&#xA;  comes to describing, for example,&#xA;  delivering something by the deadline.&#xA;  Is this the correct usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;asked by Jason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are you specifically referring to&#xA;  using it more as an adjective, e.g.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;We provide on-time delivery&lt;/em&gt; or also something like &lt;em&gt;We will deliver it on&#xA;  time?&lt;/em&gt; – Dusty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you can differentiate between the&#xA;  two, that would be ideal. – Jason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9549/is-there-a-grammar-rule-behind-the-hyphen-in-the-phrase-one-act-play&quot;&gt;Is there a grammar rule behind the hyphen in the phrase &amp;#39;one-act play&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I noticed that the phrase 'one-act&#xA;  play' always uses a hyphen between&#xA;  'one' and 'act'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a grammar rule in play here,&#xA;  how does it work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-01-22T02:05:03.957" Title="What do I do when I see an older duplicate question?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="570" CreationDate="2011-01-22T02:05:03.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flag it for moderator attention!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/improved-flagging/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/improved-flagging/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also fantastic if you can cite the URL of the duplicate, or vote to close it as a dupe of the other question via the &quot;close&quot; item under the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More context on duplicates:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-22T02:05:03.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-22T15:59:02.783" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;When highlighted because the mouse moves over them, the “status-bydesign” tag and some others turn into a weird and unreadable combination of colours: black text on maroon background. Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vDtBe.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot demonstrating the issue&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I find it unreadable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2014-04-22T23:50:27.010" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T23:50:50.683" Title="Unreadable styling for highlighted tags on meta" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|meta|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2011-01-24T00:42:34.433" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robusto has explained the problem. I propose that a clearly visible button &quot;expand contracted comments&quot; be put either &lt;strong&gt;right above the first comment&lt;/strong&gt; or at the first place chronologically where truncation has taken its toll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Edit]&lt;/strong&gt; I also propose that it be a bit more prominent, preferably in a different colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Edit2]&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;We should all try these beautiful Greasemonkey scripts, by one of our own moderators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43055/greasemonkey-script-for-displaying-threaded-comments/76235#76235&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43055/greasemonkey-script-for-displaying-threaded-comments/76235#76235&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/38600/script-to-add-reply-links-to-comments&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/38600/script-to-add-reply-links-to-comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T20:29:34.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2011-01-24T03:44:23.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is sometimes a problem, but all the obvious alternatives have problems too, and on the whole I’d agree with Jeff that this is the least worst option I’ve seen suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show all comments?&lt;/strong&gt;  Far too cluttering, and steals focus from actual answers; this is pretty clearly an option that Jeff (&amp;amp; co.) considered at the beginning and definitively rejected, for the sake of making SO/SE the system they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abridge after the first, say, 6 comments?&lt;/strong&gt;  Then misleading comment #6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@pyramus: Actually, avocados are a kind of bean.  See for instance [authoritative source].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;remains visible, while the rebuttal #7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@thisbe: Uh, you just made that up completely. That source describes them as a fruit.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;remains hidden however many upvotes it gets.  This is a problem that already happens sometimes if the rebuttal doesn’t get enough/any upvotes, and would be really horrible if there were no way to redress it with upvotes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Put the expand button at the first point of abridgement?&lt;/strong&gt; (Cerberus’ suggestion above)  This has some different problems.  Would there be buttons at every point of abridgement?  (If so: horrible clutter/redundancy!  If not, then your original problem can still occur at later such points.)  Would there always be a button at the bottom?  (If so: redundancy again!  If not, it’s slightly confusing that it’ll be at a different place at the list each time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subtly change the comment separator (eg from single to double line) at points of abridgement)?&lt;/strong&gt;  I just thought of this myself so can’t see any problems with it… except that perhaps it’s too subtle to really solve @Robusto’s problem much?  Consider finding problems with this solution as an exercise for the reader :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T03:44:23.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="572" CreationDate="2011-01-24T05:38:17.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can read it, and it doesn't really bother me; but I suppose a lighter red would be a small improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T05:38:17.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="580" CreationDate="2011-01-24T14:50:44.990" Score="-1" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst I can comprehend some uptight prude downvoting everything in a thread with awful words referring to breasts, I'm at a loss to understand all the answers downvoted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9735/is-1-singular-or-plural/9737#9737&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;, which is discussing whether or not 'one' can be used in the plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone have an idea what's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3755" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T21:41:38.073" Title="Someone has a chip on his shoulder? Inexplicable downvotes all over the place" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="576" CreationDate="2011-01-24T15:10:08.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all answers were downvoted, only some. And the ones that were are not all that great. I wouldn't downvote so easily, but I don't think it's worth being offended. If the answers are good, they'll be upvoted anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T15:10:08.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="579" CreationDate="2011-01-24T19:26:24.010" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I figure out the proper form for doing so, I intend to ask two questions about metonyms and professional sports.  There is more than one correct answer to the question, so I'm not sure how to handle asking it.  Should I ask the question, then flag my own question for the moderators?  If not, what's the best way to handle this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T11:39:02.173" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T11:39:02.173" Title="Should I flag my own question to be a community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="578" CreationDate="2011-01-24T20:55:38.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you feel strongly that your questions should be community wiki, yes, go ahead and flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that the use cases for community wiki have been heavily deprecated and the moderator simply might not see that it is justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T20:55:38.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="576" CreationDate="2011-01-24T23:59:18.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;all over the place&quot;? Really? With a sample size of .. one? (I think the &quot;breasts&quot; question is a totally different case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've told you a &lt;em&gt;million&lt;/em&gt; times to stop exaggerating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T23:59:18.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="582" CreationDate="2011-01-25T02:51:50.307" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The screenshot in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/572/unreadable-styling-for-highlighted-tags-on-meta&quot;&gt;FX_’s question&lt;/a&gt; confirmed my suspicion that tags do not appear properly in my browser.  I’m using Firefox 3.0.18 (OK, I’m a Luddite) and the text appears underneath the box instead of in it, thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qDssX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot showing tags&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m assuming this is a feature of Firefox.  Not clamouring for a fix, but I thought I should at least mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2988" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T04:49:10.977" Title="Tag text appears outside box in Firefox 3.0" Tags="|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="581" CreationDate="2011-01-25T04:49:02.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We generally only support the latest release + the previous release of any given browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Firefox this would be 3.5 and 3.6 -- is there any reason you must be 3 versions behind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T04:49:02.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="584" CreationDate="2011-01-25T12:27:25.807" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Playing around with the Data Explorer, I noticed two users with remarkably similar handles, &lt;em&gt;Zhak Maarli&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;zhak maar li&lt;/em&gt;. Curious, I went to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;Users tab&lt;/a&gt;, searched for &quot;zhak&quot;, and... got zero results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users do exist, though; they haven't been deleted in the mean time, and I even logged out to verify that I don't see them due to my 10k powers or something (which would be news to me, but who knows):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1152/zhak-maarli&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1152/zhak-maarli&lt;/a&gt;  (88 rep)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1507/zhak-maar-li&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1507/zhak-maar-li&lt;/a&gt;   (21 rep)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going by the rep, the first user should appear on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?page=75&amp;amp;tab=reputation&quot;&gt;Page 75&lt;/a&gt; in the Users tab, but he doesn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TZiKR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zhak Maarli missing&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I would expect to find the second user on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?page=79&amp;amp;tab=reputation&quot;&gt;Page 79&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?page=80&amp;amp;tab=reputation&quot;&gt;Page 80&lt;/a&gt;, but he isn't there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did notice that both users haven't logged in for more than three months, but that can't be the reason (case in point: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/96/ex-user&quot;&gt;Ex-user&lt;/a&gt;, who's still listed on Page 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves me wondering how many other users might be missing from the Users tab and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching the meta Meta, I have only found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26499/questions-answers-made-by-users-which-dont-seem-to-exist-in-the-users-tab&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which raises more questions than it answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-03-16T11:35:49.653" Title="Certain users don't show up in the Users tab" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|user-interface|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="583" CreationDate="2011-01-25T18:34:50.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only registered users show up on the /users page; it's always been this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T18:34:50.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="576" CreationDate="2011-01-25T21:41:38.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also downvoted your answer. I should also point out that the question is discussing whether or not &quot;minus one&quot; can be used in the plural, not whether &quot;one&quot; can be used in the plural, as you say here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples are talking about the preposition &quot;minus&quot; and the noun &quot;one&quot; (or they appear to be — more context would help), but the question is about the noun &quot;minus one&quot;.  Not addressing this distinction at all was part of the problem I had with your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, saying &quot;no exceptions&quot; when there are people who clearly accept &quot;-1 people&quot; and don't like &quot;-1 person&quot; is a bit misleading.  Either you are ignoring the evidence that doesn't fit, or you are prescribing an answer based on your own internal logic, which people don't really go for on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now you have both downvotes accounted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T21:41:38.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="587" CreationDate="2011-01-25T22:08:02.080" Score="4" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not particularly happy about the employment of words of this kind in questions, and particularly not in the title of questions. I was almost inclined to downvote this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9974/somebody-post-a-link-of-my-profile-in-twitter-could-you-tell-me-what-he-wanna-sa&quot;&gt;Somebody has posted a link to my profile in twitter. Could you tell me what he wants to say?&lt;/a&gt; for that reason. I'd like to take advice on the point, though, given that the poster may not be a native speaker of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I being perhaps a little priggish; should I downvote, or edit, perhaps, or just leave a tactful comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T22:18:44.100" Title="Use of words like &quot;wanna&quot;, &quot;gonna&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="586" CreationDate="2011-01-25T22:18:44.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, at 2k rep you are part of the editor class and should be able to edit the post to whip it into shape -- assuming it is worth salvaging in the first place, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T22:18:44.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2011-01-26T12:57:09.097" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a note to say I'm not sure about the current badges icon, I think the ones in your mock-up were slightly better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why (maybe because they are shaped like targets?) but they make me want to click and expect to go somewhere (as if it were a notification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my two cents :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3519" LastActivityDate="2011-01-26T12:57:09.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="591" CreationDate="2011-01-27T12:25:26.073" Score="2" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes this forum better than and different from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English forum&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;forum.wordreference.com&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4223" LastEditorUserId="4223" LastEditDate="2011-01-27T12:37:38.477" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T16:17:42.117" Title="Wordreference Forum - comparison" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2011-01-27T12:46:08.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, let's see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;our approach is a hybrid of wiki/digg-reddit/blog/forum unlike many other traditional forums&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we have a reputation system through which trusted users are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges&quot;&gt;granted privileges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;our moderators are democratically elected (will be soon, anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as described on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But subjectively I don't know if this site is &quot;better&quot; than another site, just different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T12:46:08.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2011-01-27T16:10:29.553" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you mean besides the abysmal difference in the quality of the answers? Just to illustrate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forum:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: What's the difference between dreamt and dreamed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: dunno... mayeb it's an American or British English thing...?????? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language and Usage:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Dreamed vs. Dreamt, Leaped vs. Leapt, Lighted vs. Lit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2502/dreamed-vs-dreamt-leaped-vs-leapt-lighted-vs-lit/2535#2535&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T16:17:42.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="596" CreationDate="2011-01-28T14:17:21.580" Score="1" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10427/how-do-you-make-a-person-quit-using-the-word-like&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed at 1:29. Yet, at 2:10 a new answer was posted. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/10427/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;. How is that even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Closed question still allows answers to be added" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="594" CreationDate="2011-01-28T14:54:37.210" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tips on improving one's English are off-topic for the site. I wanted to make sure that people feel the same way about the following writing related questions that RegDwight brought to my attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...we do have quite a few (open) questions about improving &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; skills: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/8068/&quot;&gt;Recommended books on writing well&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/4079/&quot;&gt;Tips and Tricks to Become a Better Writer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/5744/&quot;&gt;Which is the best way to improve your writing skills&lt;/a&gt;, and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/7207/&quot;&gt;Advices and tips for writing tutorial&lt;/a&gt;. I am not sure if any or all of them would be a better fit for Writers.SE, but right now, they're all here, and they're all open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the answers, you can see why we would want these to be off-topic. There are few answers and those that are there are subjective and chatty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had noticed them right when they were asked, I almost certainly would have closed them.  I was going to close them now, but I noticed that there were very few votes to close. In fact, one question was voted to 6 and the other was voted up to 9 with 5 favorites. This really surprises me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that these sorts of questions do not fit in with EL&amp;amp;U: they aren't really about language usage itself, they are too subjective, and in some cases they don't really seem to have a clear answer (subjective or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, the only thing that stopped me from immediately deleting these questions was the lack of downvotes and votes to close; these sorts of questions are off-topic, aren't they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-01-28T15:10:52.423" Title="Closing questions about how to improve writing" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="593" CreationDate="2011-01-28T15:09:39.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please refer such questions to &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://writers.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; -- which, quite frankly, desperately needs our help to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-01-28T15:09:39.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="593" CreationDate="2011-01-28T15:10:52.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, every question that doesn't directly asks about an English word, a phrase, or a sentence should be closed as off-topic. I include in the list also the question I asked about the pronunciation and the differences between the pronunciation of an adult and a teenager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-01-28T15:10:52.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="592" CreationDate="2011-01-28T19:25:57.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a question is closed, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/38228&quot;&gt;grace period&lt;/a&gt; (of 4 hours, see comment below) during which you can still post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-01-29T15:21:21.780" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="572" CreationDate="2011-01-29T13:45:20.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how meta works, and this bug report hasn't gathered a lot of interest. I wonder if I'm supposed to write an answer here, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yes, please fix it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so that people can upvote it and the bugfix will come :)&#xA;I'll make it community wiki, so people can edit/remove it if that was not the right thing to do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-01-29T13:45:20.040" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-29T13:45:20.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="599" CreationDate="2011-01-30T09:25:22.173" Score="8" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the apparent consensus (or lack of dissension) on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144&quot;&gt;“Find in dictionary” topic&lt;/a&gt; here, I still regularly see questions on EL&amp;amp;U that I don't think are appropriate for the site, because they could simply be answered by someone checking an online dictionary. I'll give some recent examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10604&quot;&gt;What is the difference between Admiral and Rear-Admiral?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10526&quot;&gt;Why &amp;quot;tickety-boo&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10438&quot;&gt;Origin of the meaning of &amp;quot;&amp;#224; la mode&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should we draw the line in order to avoid this forum to become an aggregator of other online resources? We could have a standard template for closing questions where it's clear that the author hasn't done any amount of personal research at all (research being “Google it” or “look it in any online dictionary”)? Moreover, what's the community's opinion on the three questions above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:15:14.220" Title="Should we require some reasonable research being done? (aka Questions that can be answered by opening an online dictionary)" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2011-01-30T10:06:07.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197/should-trivially-easy-to-find-be-a-benchmark-for-moderating-the-site&quot;&gt;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197/should-trivially-easy-to-find-be-a-benchmark-for-moderating-the-site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;specifically some new close reason proposals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not sufficiently interesting&lt;/strong&gt;: this question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference site with no additional explanation necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or the kinder, gentler edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;general reference&lt;/strong&gt;: this question is too basic; the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:41.617" LastActivityDate="2011-01-30T10:06:07.020" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="607" CreationDate="2011-01-30T13:08:11.587" Score="6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the only listed site is meta.english.stackexchange.com.&#xA;Is it possible to add other SE sites as well? Would not, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; suit in that list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-08-17T13:00:06.267" Title="Extend the list of SE sites presented when a question is being closed as off-topic" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="603" CreationDate="2011-01-30T13:37:53.730" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just edited a question and saw the message saying &lt;em&gt;“You do not have edit privileges. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.”&lt;/em&gt;. This, in turn, raises two questions and a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems to me that it is new, so: Since when does that exist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does one need to reach a certain reputation to propose peer-reviewed edits?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It rocks! Thanks guys&lt;/strong&gt; for adding this in addition to “normal” edits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Since when does peer-reviewed editing exist?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="601" CreationDate="2011-01-30T15:50:13.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is quite new indeed, see the meta Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74447/allow-low-rep-users-to-suggest-edits&quot;&gt;Allow low-rep users to suggest edits&lt;/a&gt; (9 January, tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt; as of right now)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75377/diff-is-hard-lets-go-shopping&quot;&gt;Diff is Hard, Let's Go Shopping!&lt;/a&gt; (18 January)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75581/is-everyone-in-favor-of-the-new-everyone-can-edit-idea-is-this-really-such-a-g&quot;&gt;Is everyone in favor of the new “everyone can edit” idea?&lt;/a&gt; (19 January)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-does-peer-review-for-edits-work&quot;&gt;How does peer review for edits work?&lt;/a&gt; (24 January)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the latter, quoting waffles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As it stands (and this is &lt;em&gt;all subject to change&lt;/em&gt; until the feature is formally announced):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Who can suggest an edit?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Users with 2k rep can make edits at will without needing to &quot;suggest&quot; them of, course!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Registered users can suggest an edit to any post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Anonymous users can suggest edits to any post &lt;em&gt;more than 1 day old&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Where do suggested edits go?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suggested edits are held in a peer review queue of a fixed size. If the queue fills up, no more edit suggestions will be allowed until the queue has some empty space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;How do suggested edits get approved?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our goal is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Have two reviewers look at each edit in the ideal case to ensure quality of edit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ensure that many reviewers are participating in the process and all edits are not being approved or rejected by a single reviewer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is all subject to change. Wait for the official announcement on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 7 Feb 2011:&lt;/strong&gt; et voilà, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/suggested-edits-and-edit-review/&quot;&gt;Suggested Edits and Edit Review&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T12:28:57.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2011-01-30T18:55:45.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as the perperator of one of the above questions, I would like to say that I did perform a search for the term involved, but found nothing that answered the question. This may be a reflection of my search technique, but doesn't appear to me to invalidate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could work on a set of references which questioners could be referred to before posting on the main site, if such questions are thought to be unnecessarily burdensome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastActivityDate="2011-01-30T18:55:45.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="600" CreationDate="2011-01-31T09:09:46.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writers is still in beta. Migration paths are usually only added to graduated sites. For example, there was no migration path from StackOverflow to Programmers until the latter went out of beta, even though many, many people wanted to have one right away. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64948/should-we-have-migrate-to-programmers-stackexchange-com-when-closing-a-question&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and check the top answer by Shog9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A site being in beta] means two thing[s]: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It may well be killed off. In which case, questions migrated there would be lost. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It isn't fully defined yet. So it wouldn't necessarily be clear &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; questions were appropriate for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being &lt;s&gt;said&lt;/s&gt; quoted, I would support migrating certain questions to Writers &lt;em&gt;manually&lt;/em&gt;. (Easy to say, I know, as I wouldn't be the one in charge of actually doing it.) I have commented to that extent just two days ago, after &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/593/closing-questions-about-how-to-improve-writing/594#594&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood mentioned&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;quite frankly, [Writers] desperately needs our help to survive&quot;. Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1623/writers&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; stats, I can see what he's talking about, and I am all for helping them out. In fact, they are struggling with the same metrics we used to struggle with (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/370/congratulations-1000-questions-in-74-days&quot;&gt;number of questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/377/82-days-in-beta-visits-day-worrying/&quot;&gt;visits per day&lt;/a&gt;), so I totally feel their pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more general note, see this related question by Eldros: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/462/on-migrating-and-dispatching-redirecting-off-topic-question-from-and-to-elu&quot;&gt;On Migrating and Dispatching: redirecting off-topic question from and to EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update April 15th 2011:&lt;/strong&gt; a migration path to Writers has been added. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mloSb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Migration paths&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please put it to good use. By which I mean, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't just vote to close, but vote to migrate questions that would be a good fit for Writers &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't just vote to migrate, but vote to close obvious rubbish that doesn't belong anywhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T10:53:58.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2011-01-31T19:17:34.510" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Out of the three questions you list, I actually regard two as &lt;em&gt;unanswered&lt;/em&gt; as of right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The currently accepted answer on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10526/why-tickety-boo&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;tickety-boo&lt;/em&gt; question&lt;/a&gt; is incomplete. It presents one possible theory as a fact. And yes, there is a comment saying &quot;A quick Google search turned up &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tic1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, but if you actually follow that link, it says &quot;we can’t be sure what its origin is. It could combine ABC with DEF or it could come from XYZ&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The accepted answer (mine) on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10438/origin-of-the-meaning-of-a-la-mode&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;à la mode&lt;/em&gt; question&lt;/a&gt; is incomplete as well. It only answers one half of the question rather poorly (by linking to &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; places, which all say slightly different things), and doesn't address the second half of the question &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. It even openly states just that: &quot;I remember reading about the history of this expression just a month ago or so, but for the life of me I don't seem to be able to find the link right now, so I can only answer one half of your question.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; find that link, please post it. I will be extremely happy to upvote you. If you really think that both these questions &quot;could simply be answered by someone checking an online dictionary&quot;, and that &quot;the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information&quot;, then please do not hesitate to point to those general Internet resources, as I am struggling to find &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this all is not to say that I don't appreciate your general sentiment at all. And as to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10604/what-is-the-difference-between-admiral-and-rear-admiral&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;rear-admiral&lt;/em&gt; question&lt;/a&gt;, sure, I will give you that one. I will not pretend that it took me more than 13 minutes of browsing Wikipedia to compose that answer, it simply didn't. But as to the other two examples, I'm really not sure why you picked those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-01-31T19:17:34.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-01T00:55:40.450" Score="3" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; a meta-tag as described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would take a bet that if a question was asked with only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt;, it would be retagged within about 5-10 minutes to add something else. So in other words, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not quite; acceptability is fairly clear, but the meaning of it is debatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4427" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-02-01T02:32:41.457" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T16:36:14.117" Title="Is [acceptability] a meta-tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2011-02-01T01:10:40.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/320/tag-for-questions-about-whether-a-language-feature-is-acceptable-common&quot;&gt;Tag for questions about whether a language feature is acceptable/common?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of a better word to describe this sort of question. Perhaps &lt;em&gt;acceptable-usage&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; hmmm. or &lt;em&gt;cromulent&lt;/em&gt;? ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1871" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T01:10:40.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2011-02-01T02:06:16.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s perfectly possible for some questions clearly to be questions of acceptability.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If someone asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;[word]&lt;/em&gt; acceptable in &lt;em&gt;[context]&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think there’s any doubt that the question is about acceptability.  Furthermore, I don’t see any reason why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; could not stand as the only tag on such a question.  That tags may be added does not in itself mean that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; cannot stand alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, few of the questions currently tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; take this form; my argument there would be that the tag be removed from many of those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undoubtably the &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; to any question about acceptability will be subjective, as people’s interpretation of “acceptability” will vary.  But I’m not convinced the &lt;strong&gt;tag&lt;/strong&gt; itself is subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2988" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T02:06:16.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2011-02-01T02:32:09.333" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a meta tag, and I have removed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware, you have two questions now tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T02:32:09.333" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2011-02-01T03:01:11.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tagline (inspired by @Ralph):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English we trust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[&lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/In_God_We_Trust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wp:In God We Trust&lt;/a&gt;]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4427" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T03:01:11.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2011-02-01T03:26:04.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; is not a meta-tag and it should be restored. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a tag that could work by itself. And it is only too vague and shifty a term to people who don’t really know anything about how English works. The term “acceptability” is essentially a synonym for “grammaticality” and has a quite precise (though not undisputed) meaning to people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is quite disturbing that this tag was deleted without any significant discussion and without sufficient opportunity to mount a defense for the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T03:26:04.697" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2011-02-01T15:07:10.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with nohat; I might be inclined to have &quot;acceptability&quot; be a synonym for &quot;grammaticality&quot; (as that is the technical term that I see used most often), but the concept is certainly useful on its own.  I am really surprised that it was simply deleted by someone who is not a daily mod of EL&amp;amp;U based on a question asked by a user whose account was created yesterday.  There is nothing wrong with Jeff Atwood being involved with the site, and nothing wrong with a new user asking a question about a tag, but surely it would have been worth involving at least some mods and regular users in the discussion before taking action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2011-02-01T15:28:29.980" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T15:28:29.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2011-02-01T16:16:18.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;@nohat says in a comment above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Acceptability] has the specific meaning of referring to whether native speakers would judge a particular usage to be grammatical in a narrow band of formality levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that there are different standards for different native speakers, and that what said speakers &quot;would judge&quot; is something other speakers may only guess at, not really know with certainty. Moreover, without further definition, &quot;a narrow band of formality levels&quot; still leaves the door wide open for generalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offer this as a way to begin my own assertion that virtually every answer on ESO involves some judgment of acceptability, and ultimately remains someone's opinion. Even answers larded with citations often cherry-pick sources that support the author's opinions. With some exceptions, there are few responses that could pass for scholarship of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense, an acceptability tag is superfluous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the above sentence I might have said &quot;For me, an acceptability tag is superfluous,&quot; or &quot;In my opinion, an acceptability tag is superfluous,&quot; or &quot;To my way of thinking, ...&quot; and so on. The point is, when I make a statement it is obviously my opinion, so adding the qualifier is superfluous. The only reason I would do it would be to stress my own fallibility and add a respectful tone. In fact, I add those qualifiers all the time. But where tagging is concerned, we really need no such qualifiers, since tags are not the same as statements made in conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my two cents. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2011-02-01T16:36:14.117" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T16:36:14.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-01T17:08:09.673" Score="1" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;In&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/609/is-acceptability-a-meta-tag&quot;&gt;Is [acceptability] a meta-tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to remove 44 instances of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; tag. I more or less stand behind this decision, though I do acknowledge that there are deeper issues we need to look at before proceeding, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; has a specific meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=znFmBZ2D8rEC&amp;amp;pg=PA12&amp;amp;lpg=PA12&amp;amp;dq=english+language+acceptability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://books.google.com/books?id=znFmBZ2D8rEC&amp;amp;pg=PA12&amp;amp;lpg=PA12&amp;amp;dq=english+language+acceptability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To talk about &amp;quot;correctness&amp;quot; in language implies that there is some abstract, absolute standard by which words and grammar can be judged; something is either &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;incorrect&amp;quot; -- and that's all there is to that. But the facts of language are not so clean-cut. Instead, many students of usage today prefer to talk about acceptability, that is, the degree to which users of a language will judge an expression as OK will let is use pass without noticing anything out of the ordinary. An acceptable expression is one that people do not object to, indeed do not even notice unless it is called to their attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acceptability is not an absolute, but is a matter of degree; one expression may be judged more or less acceptable than another. &amp;quot;If I &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; in your shoes&amp;quot; may be judgled more acceptable than &amp;quot;If I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; in your shoes,&amp;quot; but both are considerably more acceptable than &amp;quot;If &lt;em&gt;we was&lt;/em&gt; in your shoes.&amp;quot; Moreover, acceptability is not abstract, but is related to some group of people whose response it reflects. Thus most Americans pronounce the past-tense verb &lt;em&gt;ate&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;eight&lt;/em&gt; and regard any other pronunciation as unacceptable. Many Britons, on the other hand, pronounce it as &amp;quot;ett&amp;quot; and find the American preference less acceptable. Acceptability is part of the convention of language use; &lt;strong&gt;in talking about it, we must always keep in mind &amp;quot;How acceptable?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;To whom?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ~600 instances of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tag which I think has an identical meaning as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are either of these tags useful on questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what circumstances are they useful? (provide example of specific questions, please)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T19:29:06.857" Title="[acceptability] versus [usage] -- does either matter?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="617" CreationDate="2011-02-01T17:36:59.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; is acceptable as a tag simply to differentiate between other kinds of questions (spelling, punctuation, grammar). While the distinction can get blurry, I think the fact that this site is called &quot;English &amp;amp; Usage&quot; suggests that is creating a compartmentalization that includes &lt;em&gt;Usage&lt;/em&gt; as something separate from &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; in general. Questions about grammar, structure, syntax, etymology, terminology — all those fall under the rubric of &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;; other questions involve how words and phrases are used in common situations, and so I think &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; is just fine for those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;em&gt;acceptability&lt;/em&gt; is a useful tag as it is hopelessly subjective (and in a sense argumentative). &lt;em&gt;Usage&lt;/em&gt; at least refers to something that can be measured, statistically analyzed, whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T17:36:59.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="617" CreationDate="2011-02-01T19:11:23.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I move that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; be restored and renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;. Also, many questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; should probably be re-tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, though not all. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; should be reserved for questions whose main thrust is a query about whether some word or phrase (or group of words or phrases) are grammatical/acceptable. Questions in which grammaticality of some usage is only tangentially relevant do not need this tag. Once questions of grammaticality are removed from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;, then I think at that point would be a good time to revisit whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; is actually meaningful. (I think my hunch that it’s not from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30/does-the-usage-tag-have-any-value&quot;&gt;this previous discussion&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; is right, and “Ex-User’s” answer there is actually quite incisive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to how to answer questions about grammaticality/acceptability, I think, in general, if a question asks if a particular usage is acceptable in a certain context, that question is too specific and localized to be interesting enough to answer narrowly. However, I don't think such questions should be closed. Rather, the answers should address grammaticality/acceptability of the questioned usage in &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; contexts, including the one asked about, and (optionally, though preferably) the question should be edited to reflect a query about grammaticality/acceptability in a broader range of contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some questions that I think would benefit from being tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/668/is-it-okay-to-say-and-write-aint-yet&quot;&gt;Is it okay to say and write &amp;quot;ain&amp;#39;t&amp;quot; yet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2232/which-is-correct-nothing-or-anything&quot;&gt;Are double negatives proper English (e.g. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know nothing&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16/when-is-it-okay-to-end-a-sentence-in-a-preposition&quot;&gt;When is it appropriate to end a sentence in a preposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/500/is-there-some-rule-against-ending-a-sentence-with-the-contraction-its&quot;&gt;Is there some rule against ending a sentence with the contraction &amp;quot;it&amp;#39;s&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2117/are-split-infinitives-grammatically-incorrect-or-are-they-valid-constructs&quot;&gt;Are split infinitives grammatically incorrect, or are they valid constructs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3447/i-can-run-faster-than-1-him-2-he&quot;&gt;I can run faster than _____. (1) him (2) he?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of the above questions, there are answers (usually mine—I picked them because I was already familiar with them) that address the grammaticality of a usage in different contexts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, here are some questions currently tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; that have nothing to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10828/what-is-the-verb-used-to-indicate-that-you-have-travelled-from-point-a-to-b-by-mo&quot;&gt;What is the verb used to indicate that you have travelled from point A to B by motorboat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10312/how-to-politely-yet-effectively-remind-someone-to-reply-to-your-email&quot;&gt;What is a good way to remind someone to reply to your email?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10246/is-pants-more-commonly-meant-to-be-trousers-or-underpants&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;pants&amp;quot; more commonly mean &amp;quot;trousers&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;underpants&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9253/why-do-signs-read-wet-floor-not-slippery-floor&quot;&gt;Why do signs read &amp;quot;wet floor&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;slippery floor&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8970/what-is-the-usage-of-the-word-qua&quot;&gt;How is the word &amp;quot;qua&amp;quot; used?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-02-01T19:29:06.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-01T19:47:11.117" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggested in a comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/609/is-acceptability-a-meta-tag/612#612&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; is a meta-tag and perhaps should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;blog entry on meta-tags&lt;/a&gt; quoted this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta-tags are actually a subset of a larger problem that I usually call dependent tags. These are tags that don’t say anything by themselves – you can’t tell what the question is about unless they’re paired with some other tag (or several of them). These tags are a problem because people don’t realize this and will often use that as the question’s only tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; doesn’t tell you anything about the content of a question but rather just what “kind” of question it is, and is therefore a meta-tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I’m not entirely convinced that all meta-tags are necessarily detrimental, so I’d like to open the discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; a meta-tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, should it be removed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T09:18:16.840" Title="Is [single-word-request] a meta-tag, and should it be removed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-02-01T20:16:27.263" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Full disclosure up front: I personally &quot;live&quot; in that tag. It's one of the tags I have marked as favorite, and it's one of the tags I have used to &quot;promote&quot; our site by creating &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/tagsets/29/regs-mix&quot;&gt;this tag set&lt;/a&gt; over at StackExchange, which has brought quite a lot of traffic our way on quite a few occasions, and seems to be rather popular in general (it's still on page 2 after all this time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I totally see how this tag can be regarded as meta. However, I don't think that it is any more meta than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;. And it's actually &lt;em&gt;more useful than certain non-meta-tags&lt;/em&gt;. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt; doesn't tell you anything about the content of a question &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; it doesn't tell you anything about what “kind” of question it is. (Is it about usage? spelling? etymology? pronunciation?) With the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, you at least know the latter. In fact, this tag is exceptionally clearly defined, it tells you &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; about the question except for what word the OP is actually looking for, but that's why he's asking the question in the first place. I don't recall &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; ever using it by mistake.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: I vote to keep it, but I will live with any decision the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; takes on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Also, I think we should pause for a second and ask ourselves, why do we have tags in the first place? What purpose do they serve? They are not just decoration. They are there for navigation. They are there so that questions can be sorted into meaningful categories, which can then be easily browsed, followed, or ignored. I just can't imagine anyone following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt; and ignoring &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbs&lt;/a&gt;, or vice versa. But I know of at least one person (myself) who follows the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;; I see that at least two other people follow the aforementioned tag set on StackExchange, which includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-user-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-user-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-user-requests&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;); and I know of at least one user who has recently commented here on meta that he doesn't care about this type of questions, and would rather ignore them. The tag is clearly doing more good than harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2, in response to comments:&lt;/strong&gt; yes, I am &lt;em&gt;convinced&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; can work as the only tag on a question. I have seen it do just that. And in fact, if it were deleted, then &lt;em&gt;what else would you tag these questions with?&lt;/em&gt; In that regard, it is no different than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;. Here, let's just break down what questions we have on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your question is about etymology, then it's, well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if it's about dialects, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialects&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialects&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if it's about, dare I say it, grammaticality, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; (I hope we have settled on that one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you don't know how to spell a word, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you're not sure how to pronounce it, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you have two (or more) words and are not sure which one to use, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you are not sure where a word goes in a sentence, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-order&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-order&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you have a word and are not sure about its meaning, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and if you have the meaning but don't know how to express it in a single word, then it's, umm, what? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt;? Well, sure, sometimes it is, but in any case, part-of-speech tags are secondary, additional, completely orthogonal tags that could be applied to all of the above questions as well. In fact, &lt;em&gt;it's the POS tags that won't work on their own&lt;/em&gt; — and note how nobody takes that to mean that &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; are somehow &quot;meta&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; can, and does, work as the only tag on the question. Sometimes you are not sure if you're looking for an adjective, an adverb, a participle, or a noun. You just have that vague idea floating in your head, and you want to pack it into a single word, and then build a sentence around that word accordingly, be it a noun or a verb. If that tag got deleted, people would (have to) resort to tagging their questions with something less appropriate, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt;, which would water down that tag, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;english&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fun&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fun&lt;/a&gt;, or some other nonsense. Or they will just keep re-inventing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/looking-for-a-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;looking-for-a-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;looking-for-a-word&lt;/a&gt; or something. Now &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would do more harm than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-02-02T09:18:16.840" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T09:18:16.840" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-02-02T02:41:10.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thinking a little bit more about this, the guideline for meta tags is still the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can this tag be used as the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; tag on a question? If the answer to that is &quot;no&quot; then it is a meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think here on English that some of the tags we are discussing, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;, are more akin to the [java] tag on Stack Overflow -- it works as the only tag, and when you click on that tag, you know you're getting a list of Java language questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is unlike the [poll] tag (meta: this question is a poll about.. uh, what?), but very much like the [java] tag (not meta: the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of this question is in the Java language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-02-02T05:34:30.857" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T05:34:30.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-02-02T04:37:22.913" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I almost completely agree with Reg, except I come down much harder on the &quot;no, it's not actually meta at all&quot; side.  I believe that &quot;single-word-request&quot; does work just fine as the only tag on a question, and makes it very clear that the questioner is essentially asking for a reverse dictionary lookup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T04:37:22.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="626" CreationDate="2011-02-02T10:06:43.173" Score="8" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;While we're are at full speed discussing various tags, I would like to bring to everyone's attention that we currently have 15 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;english&lt;/a&gt;. I don't think that that tag serves any meaningful purpose on a site that is &lt;em&gt;all about&lt;/em&gt; English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the liberty of removing the tag from quite a few questions in the past, whenever I came across one, but I don't want to clutter the main page by retagging 15 questions at once. So I would like to request a behind-the-scenes retag/deletion by the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are currently two questions tagged &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7052/the-same-and-that-particular-one&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7763/how-to-write-this-letter-to-suite-for-situation&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while we're at it, I have actually voted to close the latter one, please have a look; it could be considered too localized, too broad, NARQ or, for the most part, off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not sure how to handle the tag in the long run, as we had brought the number of questions in it to 0 in the past, but that didn't prevent new questions from getting tagged with it. It would be nice to make it a synonym of, umm, well, that's the question. I can't think of a more meaningful tag this tag can be marked a synonym of; perhaps someone else can.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T10:36:08.540" Title="How about getting rid of the [english] tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="625" CreationDate="2011-02-02T10:35:10.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a pattern of sorts here here -- we ban the [apple] tag from apple.se, we ban the [wordpress] tag from wordpress.se .. etcetera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll burninate this tag and add it to the tag blacklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T10:35:10.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-02T11:57:03.523" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Observe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JVVuW.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firefox 3.6.13 under Ubuntu Lucid, if that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-05-05T22:46:05.867" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T22:46:05.867" Title="Number of pending edits unreadable" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T22:46:15.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-02T13:23:14.297" Score="11" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10950/is-the-following-use-of-imperative-good-style/10953#10953&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; the OP wrote a lengthy example, hidden in which was a longish sentence that illustrated his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Diverse fields such as medicine, sociology, and marketing require the collection, analysis, and publication of large amounts of personal data. At some stage during this process it becomes imperative, for the protection of individual privacy, that such data be sanitized to remove information that could potentially identify some set of personal data as belonging to a certain individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having grown used to non-native speakers inserting commas in odd places and misusing prepositions, I scanned the text for the word imperative, and saw only &quot;... it becomes imperative, for the protection ...&quot; Acting in haste — &lt;em&gt;mea culpa&lt;/em&gt; — I responded to offer alternatives (&quot;... it becomes imperative to protect ...&quot;). After clicking the Submit button I (luckily) reread the example more closely and realized that the sentence in question was quite finely rendered as it stood. I deleted my question and posted a retraction in case the OP saw my first response (he had).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, that's the background. While I admit that I made an error in this case, I know that the more text someone ships in an example the more obscured the salient portion can become. On SO, the best code examples are edited down to a few lines to show the parts where the problem really lies so responders don't have to wade through references that don't apply. Ideally, on English.SE posters of questions should edit their examples down to just the choice bits. In this case, I think the OP's example would have been improved by his editing it down to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At some stage during this process it becomes imperative, for the protection of individual privacy, that such data be sanitized to remove information that could potentially identify some set of personal data as belonging to a certain individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At some stage ... it becomes imperative, for the protection of individual privacy, that such data be sanitized ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone with edit privileges, I could have made such an edit, but I feel a bit squeamish about chopping out pieces of people's examples, especially when the person obviously has a good command of English. So I wonder if it might be good practice in long passages to bold the text of the operative section, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Diverse fields such as medicine, sociology, and marketing require the collection, analysis, and publication of large amounts of personal data. At some stage during this process &lt;strong&gt;it becomes imperative, for the protection of individual privacy, that such data be sanitized&lt;/strong&gt; to remove information that could potentially identify some set of personal data as belonging to a certain individual. &lt;em&gt;[Emphasis added by Robusto]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would accomplish the same thing, adverting to the crux of the question without butchering the prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do you think? Good practice? Still too intrusive? What would you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T22:43:21.787" Title="Editing questions: Good practice to bold key phrase or sentence in example?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2011-02-02T19:03:59.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought at one point that &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; would cover a distinct subset of topics found on &quot;English &amp;amp; Usage&quot; but now I am not so sure. Having a &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; tag that takes its name from the site name itself would seem to imply an English tag. But now that Jeff has &lt;em&gt;burninated&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; tag, it just seems a little redundant. At some point it's all usage ... even pronunciation. You can't interact with a language at all without, I don't know, &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; it ... right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T19:03:59.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2011-02-02T21:05:04.370" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could see value in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; if it were used for questions of when is it appropriate/usual to use a word (or tense, or whatever). There might be a better tag to get across the idea - e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/connotation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;connotation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;connotation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt; - but the person asking the question may not know which of those applies, at least until the question is answered, which puts the questioner in a lovely chicken-and-egg situation. Unfortunately, I don't think this is how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; has been used on the site - too often, it's a meaningless catch-all &quot;I have to add a tag&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T21:05:04.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2011-02-02T21:53:16.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use both bold and italics very liberally in my answers (and also in my questions). I think it really improves legibility in a typesetting system where we have few options for emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding editing questions to add bold and italics, if done to improve clarity, I would be strongly in favour of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T21:53:16.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2011-02-02T22:43:21.787" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, bolding the relevant part is very helpful. Highly recommended best practice. I don't even think you need to add the &quot;emphasis added&quot; note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T22:43:21.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2011-02-03T00:47:08.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a difficult question indeed. On the one hand, &quot;what does word x mean?&quot; questions can be (and are often) answered by a quick copy-paste from a dictionary. Those questions annoy me and I usually skip them. On the other hand, if we want this to become the #1 Google hit on any language question, we should be looking at the answers rather than the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A good answer can be given to a stupid question, because it can provide information that pertains to the word in question but is not required to answer it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As RegDwight has shown, all kinds of extra information can be given, such as historical graphs, etymology, and regional differences, which can turn the answer into a mixture of essay and encyclopedia article. I think we want this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it is possible that the OP read the dictionary article, but wanted some more information, a more elaborate definition, some information on usage, etc. Even if he did not state this wish, it may very well be that he was really looking for something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, what about questions that can be answered by a simple Wikipedia quote? I have done so several times. Perhaps some people are helped by the interpretations of someone more experienced than they in a certain field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, I'm not totally against closing such questions if that is what most of us want—as long as we are a bit careful. And what if the question in question has received an elaborate, excellent answer? Should we then not let it be, even though it was stupid in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T00:47:08.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2011-02-03T08:25:07.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree that &lt;em&gt;Origin of the meaning of &quot;à la mode&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a question that would not fit EL&amp;amp;U. A dictionary would report the origin of the word, but it is not probable that it will describe why that word has a specific meaning in Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would agree that a question like &lt;em&gt;Is &quot;fit&quot; an adjective or a noun?&lt;/em&gt; where the OP only wants to know if &lt;em&gt;fit&lt;/em&gt; is an adjective could be answered by looking at the dictionary. If the OP wants to know if effectively the word is used as adjective nowadays, then the question would fit on EL&amp;amp;U.&#xA;As a matter of fact I asked a question about describing &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; as adjective, and the answer I have got don't say the same thing I found on the dictionary, which in fact reports &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; to be adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question reported in this thread seems similar to &lt;em&gt;Should we accept questions that are too easy?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;A question is easy or not depending from who reads the question; clearly, a question about the pronunciation of a word seems easy for who speaks English as first language, in the same way it's easy for me to say which is the Italian article used with &lt;em&gt;eco&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;gatto&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dita&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;gnocco&lt;/em&gt;. Who is not a native speaker (I am sure most of the questions are asked by users who don't speak English as first language) can be confused from what he read, or he doesn't give the correct interpretation to what he read and needs a second opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T08:25:07.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="636" CreationDate="2011-02-03T08:42:06.347" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a question about the usage of &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, and a question about &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The questions are similar, as in both the cases the question is about when to use a personal pronoun in the subjective case, or in the objective case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be good if the answer for the first question would report a sentence like &lt;em&gt;you use &quot;I&quot; (and similarly, &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot;, &quot;we&quot;, and &quot;they&quot;) when […]&lt;/em&gt;; at least the answer would (probably) resolve the doubts about when to use &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand what it's not possible in all the cases, but in some cases it would be useful (for who asked the question) to specify if the answer is valid for the specific case, or it's part of a generic case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T09:35:33.123" Title="Should the answers made a little more generic, when possible?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2011-02-03T09:35:33.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own opinion is that it's OK to make answers somewhat more generic, as long as it does not become confusing to the original poster, and that the specific case they asked about is still explicitly solved. It's fine, in your example, to talk in general about the difference between personal pronouns in various cases, but you would still need to say somewhere whether it should be &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; in the case they asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T09:35:33.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="645" CreationDate="2011-02-03T12:36:09.903" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before answering to any question, I usually check out some resources to make sure that my answer is a trustworthy one. Of course, I do this about those questions that I'm not 100% sure about their response. But I've seen a lot of examples that some people based on nothing try to reject the things I post according to reliable resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think this is a place for giving our own personal ideas and intuitions of the English language rather than stating some published facts and information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3782" LastActivityDate="2011-02-05T15:32:05.093" Title="Is it a better idea to check some resources before answering to the questions?" Tags="|discussion|answer-howto|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-03T13:24:20.763" Score="6" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing this is a dupe of something that was already corrected for &quot;How to ask&quot; (as I don't see the frame there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was on the edit page (as a low-rep editor)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJDE9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bump&lt;/strong&gt; same thing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/685/side-bar-formatting-problem-on-the-elections-page&quot;&gt;elections page(s)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T09:48:39.960" Title="Fancy frame on &quot;How to format&quot; not looking good" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="637" CreationDate="2011-02-03T14:23:06.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Citations are always useful, and responders are well advised to include them if they can. But the question has to be one that can be answered with a citation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions we get on English.SE can't be answered that way, often ones involving &quot;how a native speaker would say&quot; a thing, or &quot;what did so-and-so mean&quot; by this phrase. In those cases, the usual Google searches turn up nothing or everything, and unless you have access to a large library of reference materials, it's simply impossible to offer a citation for every response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T14:23:06.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="641" CreationDate="2011-02-03T17:06:16.390" Score="3" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11216/how-come-abbreviations-acquired-the-apostrophe-when-referring-to-plurality&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; downvoted. I care less about the loss of rep than about why the person might have done it. Can you find anything wrong with the question? Do you think the person didn't like my presumption that &quot;DD's&quot; is a convention, instead of mere style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T06:24:48.423" Title="Any guesses why my question was downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="640" CreationDate="2011-02-03T17:28:49.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could be that your question reads as if the apostrophe-based usage is correct/acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4526" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T17:28:49.487" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="640" CreationDate="2011-02-03T19:25:32.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't downvote your question, but for the mention, I tend to downvote heavily. Well, I don't feel too bad about it, as I think it's how the good questions rise to the top, and how bad questions go down to be forgotten and never displayed again. Lots of people vote, it's common for a question to get 5 upvotes, so one downvote is not the end of the world. It's the a big part of the way other users can give feedback, other than flagging for various reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T19:25:32.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2011-02-03T19:29:08.773" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest World Wide Words as a useful resource. See here... &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldwidewords.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.worldwidewords.org/&lt;/a&gt; particularly because when I forget to look on it before posting a question, I am quite often referred to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T19:29:08.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="638" CreationDate="2011-02-03T19:41:26.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see it in Safari anymore, though I used to. Now, the fancy frame is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T19:41:26.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="637" CreationDate="2011-02-04T02:49:01.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; try to cite sources or data for your answers, even for subjective ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.&lt;/strong&gt; Opinion isn’t all bad, so long as it’s backed up with something other than “because I’m an expert”, or “because I said so”, or “just because”. Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you’ve done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like you. We want to believe you. But like wikipedia itself, {{citation needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the outset: back it up!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you can't, (as Robusto noted) then just make the best case you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-04T02:49:01.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="637" CreationDate="2011-02-05T15:32:05.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Jeff and @Robusto both make excellent points.  I’ll add two other suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there’s any disagreement among answerers, then sources become much more important.  An unsourced answer with ten upvotes and no dissenting comments is still useful: a reader can see there’s a community consensus that it’s correct.  Two unsourced answers disagreeing with each other are little use to anybody: a casual reader has no way of knowing which to believe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you can’t base an answer on published sources, be explicit about what you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; basing it on.  “In my experience, &lt;em&gt;tractor&lt;/em&gt; can be used as a verb.” is more informative, accurate, and honest than “&lt;em&gt;Tractor&lt;/em&gt; can be used as a verb.”  More details, within reason, make it even better: “In my experience (growing up in Saskatchewan in the 70s), …”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB: example for illustrative purposes only; as far as I know &lt;em&gt;tractor&lt;/em&gt; is not used as a verb in any dialect of English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-02-05T15:32:05.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="648" CreationDate="2011-02-05T16:06:16.433" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;How was the link &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/33529347939770368&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/33529347939770368&lt;/a&gt; made/taken?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-02-12T15:01:59.353" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T15:01:59.353" Title="Publishing a thread on twitter" Tags="|support|search|advertising|markdown|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2011-02-05T16:23:33.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This relatively new feature was announced on the stackoverflow blog: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/twitter-question-feeds-for-stack-exchange/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/twitter-question-feeds-for-stack-exchange/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-02-05T16:23:33.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="650" CreationDate="2011-02-05T17:39:34.403" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't be it better to tag keywords (with prepended symbol #) in published Tweets?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A lost case, that is.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/CNPR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/CNPR&lt;/a&gt; #grammar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;An RPG&quot; or &quot;A RPG&quot;? &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/CMRa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/CMRa&lt;/a&gt; #pronunciation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When referring to a previously sent text, would you say 'I text you about that' or 'I texted you about that' ? &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/COhY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/COhY&lt;/a&gt; #usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I'm having&quot; - an illness? &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/COfk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/COfk&lt;/a&gt; #grammar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What is the origin of &quot;earthling&quot;? &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/CMuD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/CMuD&lt;/a&gt; #usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should I write&quot;a tweet&quot; or &quot;a twit&quot;, &quot;to tweet&quot; or &quot;to twit&quot;? &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/CMIL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/CMIL&lt;/a&gt; #usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Word for &quot;someone who does the same job as me&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://ur.ly/CKgA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ur.ly/CKgA&lt;/a&gt; #wordchoice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why aren't #tagging used in Tweets?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-02-06T10:21:34.600" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T10:21:34.600" Title="Why aren't Tweets tagged with #?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="649" CreationDate="2011-02-05T23:32:28.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, it's turning the most popular of the given question's tags into a hashtag (as seen &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/StackEnglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SO wanted to add another hashtag, what criteria would they use? That is, how would an automated system know what to emphasize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastActivityDate="2011-02-05T23:32:28.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="669" CreationDate="2011-02-06T06:04:51.077" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;In comments to question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/11326/3085&quot;&gt;What is the difference between 20$ and $20?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/849/michael-mrozek&quot;&gt;Michael Mrozek&lt;/a&gt; informed about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges&quot;&gt;publicist badge&lt;/a&gt; that:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have to get &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges&quot;&gt;1000 unique IP views&#xA;  in 5 days (vgv8 - this is the link to a list&#xA;  of publicists)&lt;/a&gt;; this post only has&#xA;  378 views total (who knows how many&#xA;  are from your link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this badge given according to IP views to a single question shared by a candidate for this degree or (m)any?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T06:41:06.463" Title="Is publicist degree honored according to one shared question or many?" Tags="|discussion|advertising|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="640" CreationDate="2011-02-06T06:24:48.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen questions being down voted simply because they were duplicate of other questions; in other cases, the question was down voted because the user didn't like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, I cannot say which reason would be more plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T06:24:48.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2011-02-06T18:59:23.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to note, for the record, that the handling of the chat UI is really very fine. I especially like the way avatars float down or drift off, depending on whether a user has entered or left the page, and how the alpha transparency degrades in proportion to the amount of time since that user has spoken in chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a UI design engineer and I tend to notice nifty little details like these. Too often designers only hear what people don't like, so here, for what it's worth, is one very strong up-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also love the seamless integration with Wikipedia and YouTube APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very well done. Bravo!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T18:59:23.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="654" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="655" CreationDate="2011-02-07T00:34:41.450" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a post recently about whether to use a comma before &quot;and&quot; in &quot;A, B, C and D&quot;. Can someone help to find the post please? Or if it does not exists, I will post a question then. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="683" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-02-07T07:02:13.247" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T07:02:13.247" Title="Can you help me find the post?" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="654" CreationDate="2011-02-07T02:56:59.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, you're think of one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11149/why-do-we-use-a-comma-before-and&quot;&gt;Why do we use a comma before &quot;and&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412/comma-before-last-item-in-a-list&quot;&gt;Comma before last item in a list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found these by searching on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/comma&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;comma&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comma&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T02:56:59.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="658" CreationDate="2011-02-07T06:14:50.323" Score="7" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki edit page has, well, a few layout problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYyzM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of tag wiki edit page with layout bugs circled&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title intrudes upon the header.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The excerpt box protrudes into the help box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The help box text extrudes from the help box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I used the word &lt;em&gt;intrudes&lt;/em&gt; slightly incorrectly (or at least the OED thinks so), but it's too amusing having three different -trude words.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="420" LastEditDate="2011-02-08T16:08:02.137" LastActivityDate="2011-02-08T16:08:02.137" Title="Editing tag wikis produces design bug" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|editor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2011-02-07T13:47:49.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/Wedge/status/34583251410493440&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;@vgv8 To link to a specific tweet,&#xA;  click the 'time' link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That simple&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T13:47:49.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="656" CreationDate="2011-02-07T16:57:53.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in the next build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T16:57:53.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="660" CreationDate="2011-02-10T08:52:43.123" Score="7" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got a blue popup asking me to post the question to FB or tweet it to earn a badge. &#xA;I did, but nothing happened.&#xA;What is it: a bug, a feature, or a missing carrot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-10T03:44:47.293" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Offered a publicist badge, but what happened?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="659" CreationDate="2011-02-10T09:21:53.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the current wording of the popup is (I'm not getting presented with these anymore), but anyhow: you don't get &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/56/publicist&quot;&gt;Publicist&lt;/a&gt; just for posting a link. You only get the badge if the link is actually clicked on by people from 1000 unique IP addresses within 5 days &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; only if you've already got the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/54/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/55/booster&quot;&gt;Booster&lt;/a&gt; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related reading on the meta Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64436/sequence-behind-awarding-link-badges-announcer-booster-publicist&quot;&gt;Sequence behind awarding link badges (Announcer, Booster, Publicist)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67398/order-announcer-booster-and-publicist-posts-when-you-reach-a-lower-threshold&quot;&gt;Order Announcer, Booster, and Publicist posts when you reach a lower threshold&lt;/a&gt; (feature request, [status-deferred] as of the time of writing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-02-10T09:21:53.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-11T02:12:35.363" Score="22" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update 2011-04-27: Jin removed the quotation image altogether &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/minor-design-tweak&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is closed as a duplicate, the duplicate question is selected (by the users who vote to close) and then attached automatically to the top of the message. However, the message is attached as a quote. As you can see on the example below, this is not very noticeable on EL&amp;amp;U, where questions are focused on sentences and quotes, rather than code or anything else:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h7aUc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Difficult to notice &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; message&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure whether to label this question &lt;code&gt;feature-request&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;bug&lt;/code&gt;, because really the current way doesn't make sense: the message is not a quote or part of the question — it is more like a system message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have two questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could this be done differently so that the &quot;duplicate question&quot; message does not blend into the question text?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the powers-that-be see this as a problem?  That is, is there any chance a suggested change would actually be implemented?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T20:34:29.737" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T20:34:29.737" Title="&quot;Possible duplicate&quot; message is difficult to notice" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="662" CreationDate="2011-02-11T02:15:21.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion for (1) is to put the link to the duplicate post in the &quot;question-status&quot; section, under the paragraph where it says &quot;closed as exact duplicate by...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-02-11T02:15:21.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2011-02-11T15:04:17.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried correcting a simple spelling mistake but you have to change at least 6 characters to make a valid edit.  Seems strange.  In this case it was only a swapped pair of letters, and only worthwhile because it was the actual word the user was asking the meaning of that they mistyped in the body of the question (it was correct in the title).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1778" LastActivityDate="2011-02-11T15:04:17.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="662" CreationDate="2011-02-11T18:42:52.107" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the message needs to stay at the top of the question, but (1) It needs to explicitly say &quot;closed as duplicate of...&quot;, not &quot;possible duplicate&quot;; and (2) It needs to be formatted differently than a blockquote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm really just bumping this to the top, but while I'm at it, I want to add: if we're so unsure whether a question is really a duplicate or not that we find it necessary to add weasel words like &quot;possible&quot; to the closure message, then &lt;em&gt;we have no business closing the question&lt;/em&gt; in the first place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-03-09T00:01:54.577" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T00:01:54.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-12T04:06:59.420" Score="3" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you point out where is the requirement or discussion that questions and answers should be in English? I didn't find it in the FAQ (except &quot;Languages other than English (including translation)&quot;) or About.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2801" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2011-02-12T05:46:56.323" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T15:26:59.170" Title="English Language and Usage: Q and A in English only" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="666" CreationDate="2011-02-12T04:34:16.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you asking if you are allowed to ask questions in a language other than English?  This is an English language site, so no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T04:34:16.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4704" CreationDate="2011-02-12T05:51:49.843" Score="10" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/666/edit/185eca5e-17d2-4a2e-bc37-9dcfb75c993d&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aIzre.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reproduced in Chrome 8, Opera 11, and IE8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how it appears in Safari 5.0.5 on Mac OS X 10.6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6wExX.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Bug is still present. Chrome 14 on Windows 7 looks just like above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T23:20:40.380" Title="Design bug when editing an old revision" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2011-02-12T06:41:06.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;1 question, 1 user,  5 days, 1000 unique IP views. 1 badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you must first attain the Announcer and Booster badges, and not on the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T06:41:06.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="673" CreationDate="2011-02-12T12:03:38.617" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my Tweeter I searched for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Exchange English Language and Usage  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and received results only on 4 tweets!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and then followed sacramental  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Older Tweet results for Stack Exchange English Language and Usage are unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how can I peruse through tweets by Stack Exchange English Language and Usage?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-04-11T18:56:35.330" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T18:56:35.330" Title="How can I peruse the tweets by ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="671" CreationDate="2011-02-12T16:20:57.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks OK to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://twitter.com/#!/stackenglish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T16:20:57.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="666" CreationDate="2011-02-12T16:32:36.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's also a blog entry about that here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T16:32:36.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="677" CreationDate="2011-02-12T19:39:49.670" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=activity&quot;&gt;the Community user edited a post&lt;/a&gt; to correct the grammar.&#xA;Is that possible, or was that done by a real person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T22:55:12.450" Title="Can the Community user correct the grammar?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="676" CreationDate="2011-02-12T22:55:12.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edits attributed to the Community user are suggested edits made by non-registered users. You can see this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/edit-suggestions/57&quot;&gt;edit-suggestion post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T22:55:12.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="666" CreationDate="2011-02-13T15:26:59.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because English is the language that most users speak.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m slightly confused by some other comments/answers.  There seem to be two different questions that are getting conflated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What can one talk &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; on a site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What languages can one &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; on a site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren’t necessarily the same!  This site is about English — but one could also have a site for discussing Greek in English, or for discussing English in Russian, or…  And most of the Stack Exchange sites aren’t even about a language at all, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it’s &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; the case that the working language of this site is English.  Why?  Jeff has argued &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; for why they are trying to keep the Stack Exchange sites monolingual for the moment.  And English is the language that most people in this community speak best — so English is the language we choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T15:26:59.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="681" CreationDate="2011-02-14T06:19:43.640" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep finding myself reading questions only to notice later that they are closed.  Is there a user-preference for hiding all [closed] questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1778" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T07:00:41.857" Title="Is there a way to completely hide closed questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="680" CreationDate="2011-02-14T07:00:41.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not possible to hide closed question (unless you write a custom Javascript). However, while searching, you can used the &lt;code&gt;closed:0&lt;/code&gt; parameter to remove closed questions from search results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T07:00:41.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-14T20:37:22.330" Score="7" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2011 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T20:37:22.330" Title="2011 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-05-06T18:38:27.303" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-14T20:37:22.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-14T21:08:40.140" Score="7" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a side bar formatting problem on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;elections page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fancy border doesn't stretch with the content ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wyzfg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen Shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1048" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T21:31:37.073" Title="Side bar formatting problem on the elections page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2011-02-14T21:31:14.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fix has been pushed, yay Jin! (:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T21:31:14.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-15T09:42:18.423" Score="7" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how the left-side frame on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/1?tab=nomination&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/1?tab=nomination&lt;/a&gt; looks like in Safari:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/43kZM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of the issue&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it has already been reported &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/685/side-bar-formatting-problem-on-the-elections-page&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;, but the question was marked &lt;strong&gt;status-completed&lt;/strong&gt;, which is clearly not the case!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-03-18T06:34:41.487" Title="Fancy frame on election nomination page overflows" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-15T14:37:42.413" Score="11" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question has been posted on the meta of all the other sites undergoing elections, so just in case you've missed it I'm adding it here. Copied mainly from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/59303/chrisf&quot;&gt;ChrisF&lt;/a&gt;, who has no account here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/150097/yi-jiang&quot;&gt;Yi Jiang&lt;/a&gt; has put together a nice site that use the Stack Overflow API to display information on the moderator candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://se.awio.com/election.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Click here to see all the information&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information presented is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the candidate wrote when nominating themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers/Questions on the main site and its meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Up-vote/down-vote ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average reputation earned per post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average reputation earned per day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Participation in other Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It displays what Yi Jiang considers to be noteworthy badges and whether the nominee has the badge and a summary of their recent activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information is presented as is with no commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It came about from this question on MSO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/75454/59303&quot;&gt;Moderator nomination possibly useful statistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T21:28:55.393" Title="Information on the moderator candidates" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-04-16T21:41:41.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="688" CreationDate="2011-02-15T19:58:53.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I messed up the 2nd fix again. bad me. a new fix will be in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-02-15T19:58:53.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-15T23:40:30.240" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently when you view your user profile and select your reputation history, you get a lovely little chart detailing the growth of your reputation score, and you can select a range of dates to see a list of exactly what questions garnered you how much reputation during that period.  However, the range MUST start on a different date than it ends upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being the sort of geek who loves to watch numbers go up, I would like the default graph to have the ability to display one single day's worth of reputation so I can see, for example, how close I am (or was) to hitting the rep cap that day, and which questions/answers did best on just that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this does get implemented, a nice shortcut might be to have the dots on the chart be double-clickable to display that one day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-03-18T16:13:16.800" LastActivityDate="2011-04-17T16:41:56.543" Title="I'd like to be able to view a single day on my reputation graph" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="691" CreationDate="2011-02-16T00:17:23.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;sort of&lt;/em&gt; do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scroll down to the bottom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The format is:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;1 234567 (10)&lt;/code&gt;, where 1 is the vote type, 234567 is the post ID, and 10 is the reputation earned or lost, excluding square bracketed reputation (&lt;code&gt;[10]&lt;/code&gt;). The votes are listed in the order they were cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T00:17:23.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-16T09:56:55.653" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was amazed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11960&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was closed some time ago, appeared on the front page of the EL&amp;amp;U site today. I find out it is because the original poster edited it to add some text. Is it normal that closed questions can still be edited? Although I can see the point made for it (it allows people to improve them), it can also have bad consequences: in this case, it brings back to the front page a bad question, which was edited by its author in a way that doesn't improve it at all (added some semi-random links to other questions at the end).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, shouldn't closed questions be uneditable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should closed questions really be editable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-16T16:42:02.760" Score="-3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not fluent enough in the inner workings of EL&amp;amp;U to prove it, but I get the distinct sense that certain posters suspect me of downvoting them when in fact I haven't. None of the related questions above really deal with this issue, and it has me mildly concerned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't presume, so early in my tenure here, to mark someone down in any event (and feel it's unlikely I ever will), but in the instances where the downvoter gives no comment to accompany his action, I feel as though suspicions are raised generally. Maybe others feel the same; as a novice, I certainly do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[There may be a completely rational answer to this -&quot;someone can go to your homepage and check out your stats&quot;- for which I'd be grateful.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17772" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T00:30:39.130" Title="Misunderstood to have downvoted someone?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="693" CreationDate="2011-02-16T16:43:35.630" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that by making closed questions uneditable we would be throwing out the baby with the bath water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a closed question cannot be edited, then, as you note yourself, it cannot be improved. So people will start posting dupes instead. In this particular case, instead of having a bad edit to a bad question, we would be left with &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; bad questions, one of which would have to get close-voted all over again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a closed question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be edited, but the edit doesn't bump it to the front page, then people can improve their questions all they want but have no way to make others aware of the improvements. (Offering a bounty &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22918/can-i-offer-a-bounty-on-a-closed-question&quot;&gt;does not work on closed questions&lt;/a&gt;, as it makes little sense.) So again, people will just start posting dupes instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T16:56:56.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="694" CreationDate="2011-02-17T00:30:39.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have not downvoted anyone, as evidenced by your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/4752/fortunate1&quot;&gt;user page&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Votes&lt;/em&gt; section. Which posts you have voted on can only be seen by Stack Exchange developers, but not moderators or other users. (Occasionally, people do downvote accidentally, because they mistakenly think that it will cancel up an upvote, but this is not the case here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people do accuse you of downvoting them, and you care about it, then simply reply &lt;em&gt;calmly&lt;/em&gt; that you have not downvoted them (but if you can, provide explanations why someone else might have done so to help the poster improve his/her post). Otherwise, just leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T00:30:39.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-17T02:44:31.740" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I pressed “share link to this question on Twitter&quot; button in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11538/origin-of-the-meaning-of-joe/&quot;&gt;&quot;Origin of the meaning of joe&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (below FB button) from the same browser and session&#xA;receiving 4 posts with different links:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://t.co/DHoycBt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://t.co/DHoycBt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://t.co/oF96bBX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://t.co/oF96bBX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://t.co/oF96bBX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://t.co/oF96bBX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://t.co/RpbZwN6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://t.co/RpbZwN6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, opening  the last link opens the text with a different link    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://t.co/VLKH7tT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://t.co/VLKH7tT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;which in its turn produces a message with another different link   &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://t.co/XYZeutA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://t.co/XYZeutA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc adiante, always a different link     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I hoped somewhere to get the same repeating link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it normal?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I just cannot get the logic of it, hence use  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T04:26:14.467" Title="Tweet button from the same question always gives distinct link" Tags="|bug|status-completed|twitter|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-17T03:05:26.123" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to gain publicist degree should/can I:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use the same link?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many times?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in different non-twitter boards (forums, Emails, FB, etc.)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which one? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I thought it was clear from provided context (cited questions) that I was asking about gaining unique IP views per one published question for gaining the badge &quot;Publicist&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-02-20T02:27:14.637" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T02:27:14.637" Title="How should I give links to the same question many times and/or from different boards?" Tags="|support|advertising|twitter|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="697" CreationDate="2011-02-17T04:26:14.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Totally my bug - a fix has been checked in and will be pushed out tonight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T04:26:14.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="701" CreationDate="2011-02-17T05:10:02.347" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually I do not follow my score but in this cas the score was easy to remember - 400.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I noticed that my reputation has not changed upon upvoting of my question tomorning &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/698/how-should-i-give-links-to-the-same-question-many-times-and-or-from-different-boa&quot;&gt;&quot;How should I give links to the same question many times and/or from different boards?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a bug or by design?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T16:49:23.300" Title="My rep is not changing upon upvoting" Tags="|support|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="700" CreationDate="2011-02-17T05:13:39.650" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not gain or lose reputation on Meta. Meta reputation is copied over from your main account every hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T05:13:39.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="698" CreationDate="2011-02-17T05:22:06.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;use the same link? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use either the direct link button, or the shortened Twitter link (see below for details). You do not have to use the same link every time, since the Twitter link redirects to the link that credits your account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;many times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use either link in as many places as you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in&#xA;  different non-twitter boards (forums,&#xA;  Emails, FB, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use either link anywhere you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;which one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use either linnk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The direct link is located underneath your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zUB7Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use the shortened Twitter link,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWMsd.png&quot; alt=&quot;twitter link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T05:22:06.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="708" CreationDate="2011-02-17T06:39:20.853" Score="33" ViewCount="809" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's just me, but I get the feeling we are seeing an increasing number of English language learner questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but is it what we really want? Aren't we going to scare away (or just plain bore) the experts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question, (to which the accepted answer was &quot;Let's wait and see&quot;): &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69/is-this-site-for-english-as-a-second-language&quot;&gt;Is this site for “English as a second language”?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Obviously both that question and this one are badly titled - there's no problem with people who have English as a second (or third, or fourth) language, it's the level they're at.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Are we ok with this? If not, can we think up some guidelines for what kind of beginner questions we accept (and how to identify them)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T02:29:17.913" Title="Is EL&amp;U becoming ESL?" Tags="|discussion|site|scope|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-17T13:49:49.840" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid if you were to submit EL&amp;amp;U.SE to a strict interpretation of such a leash law, we wouldn't have no dogs at all runnin' around over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T01:44:17.677" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T01:44:17.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="707" CreationDate="2011-02-17T14:58:13.173" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U the right place to ask linguistic questions that do not pertain to any specific language? E.g. questions on grammar that is shared by most every language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4727" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T01:53:57.970" Title="Language-agnostic linguistics questions" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="706" CreationDate="2011-02-17T16:05:17.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Languages other than English (including translation)&quot; are &quot;out of scope for this site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait, don't click away, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt;! And if you like what you see, then please do click on &quot;Commit!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a bunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T16:05:17.193" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-17T22:06:12.267" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe it's&#xA;  just me, but I get the feeling we are&#xA;  seeing an increasing number of English&#xA;  language learner questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would agree, especially over the past few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This isn't necessarily a bad thing,&#xA;  but is it what we really want? Aren't&#xA;  we going to scare away (or just plain&#xA;  bore) the experts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that they're generally fine, so long as they're asked &lt;strong&gt;in good faith,&lt;/strong&gt; meaning some effort has been put into the question to make it comprehensible. I don't think the experts are going to leave-the number of expert questions aren't decreasing; it's just that we never had that many in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Obviously both that question and this&#xA;  one are badly titled - there's no&#xA;  problem with people who have English&#xA;  as a second (or third, or fourth)&#xA;  language, it's the level they're at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Question: Are we ok with this? If&#xA;  not, can we think up some guidelines&#xA;  for what kind of beginner questions we&#xA;  accept (and how to identify them)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that unless this becomes a huge problem, that we simply close questions as duplicate if they are, and otherwise just answer them and allow them here. I tend to trust an answer a lot more when it's been voted up and defended on Stack Exchange. Plus, there are those who might learn something from it, but didn't ask the question because they didn't know there was something they didn't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T22:06:12.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-18T05:45:35.667" Score="-8" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;the current EL&amp;amp;U moderator elections&lt;/a&gt; most candidates, except one from UK, are from the USA what is somehow predetermines the situation that I shall be unmoderated for long periods of time since I am at GMT+6.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid that my posts would not be closed and deleted promptly enough.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would not it be better if moderators be dispersed through time-zones?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I believe that quotas should be fixed per time-zones parts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T18:04:39.073" Title="I propose to elect by 3 quotas, each per one-thirds-contiguously of time-zones" Tags="|discussion|election|feedback|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="712" CreationDate="2011-02-18T05:51:16.037" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;the current EL&amp;amp;U moderator elections&lt;/a&gt; thread be available for reading after election?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, for example, to access election threads on past SO moderators elections?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T16:16:41.567" Title="Election threads after election completion" Tags="|discussion|election|feedback|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="709" CreationDate="2011-02-18T06:44:50.127" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, we don't support this. We look for great moderators wherever in the world they come from; enforcing time zone restrictions would be too limiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections &lt;em&gt;in practice&lt;/em&gt; produce at least US and europe, which is adequate coverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T06:44:50.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="710" CreationDate="2011-02-18T06:50:25.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, like so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T06:50:25.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-18T16:36:17.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, but I've always thought one of the target audiences of this site (but by no means the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; one) is people who were learning English as an additional language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1787" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T16:36:17.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="709" CreationDate="2011-02-18T18:04:39.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In practice, there is very little moderator activity which needs split-second response time from moderators. We do not request nor expect moderators to keep constant vigil over the site at all times. For that reason, there is little &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; value to spreading three moderators across the thirds of the globe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some moderators cannot moderate while working; some only use the site &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; working. Some are night owls, while others not. So everyone has their own &quot;peak contribution&quot; timezone, independent of where they live. There will be a statistical tendency for moderators to reside in the timezones where most of the activity comes from &amp;mdash; more users, more likelihood moderators will be from there. Makes sense. So, I see no need to divvy up the moderators in this fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have nominated about 140 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pro tem moderators&lt;/a&gt; and timezone coverage has never been an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T18:04:39.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-18T18:09:22.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are you supposed to determine what an ESL question is? If it's too simple? Plenty of native speakers have simple questions too. If the question is well formulated, people will gladly answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T18:09:22.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2011-02-18T18:48:57.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that &lt;code&gt;usage&lt;/code&gt; is a kind of &quot;default&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe when someone submits a question, they could be offered a number of common tags from which to choose, in addition to entering tags manually...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4744" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T18:48:57.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-18T20:27:32.560" Score="-1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same issue, described in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/697/tweet-button-from-the-same-question-always-gives-distinct-link&quot;&gt;Tweet button from the same question always gives distinct link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;only when posting from answer (instead of question)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13253/what-is-a-term-for-a-system-with-rules-without-any-exceptions/13262#13262&quot;&gt;my answer to question &quot;What is a term for a system with rules without any exceptions?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I opened follow-up subquestion  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/721/when-is-tweet-your-answer-button-available&quot;&gt;When is “tweet your answer” button available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;telling basically that I cannot document or reproduce this since this tweet button/link does not reappear in any of my answers.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T08:36:08.167" Title="Tweet button from the same answer always gives distinct link" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|feedback|twitter|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="717" CreationDate="2011-02-19T00:05:56.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't reproduce this. I get the same link every time when I click the dynamic answer sharing links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nwegg.png&quot; alt=&quot;dynamic answer sharing links&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T00:05:56.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-19T05:51:12.640" Score="-4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found many answers to my deleted questions extremely useful and interesting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't the copy of deleted threads be email-ed to all authors?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;or authors be warned to backup them before deleting?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Failing to fit to very vaguely defined tematics/subjects of this board is not synonym  of bad behavior.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Especially if all my related questions on the meaning and definitions of words (like language, usage, etc.) are being closed.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions do not fit in this board, the author would want to have the texts for posting elsewhere in more appropriate boards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update2:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I had superb answers to my question &quot;Who was mockingbird&quot;, I loved them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why was it deleted without any warning?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This was the question on the figurative, idiomatic &lt;strong&gt;usage (which is in the title of this board!) and meaning&lt;/strong&gt; of the word mockingbird in novel &quot;To Kill a Mockingbird&quot;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who were the innocences, personified by a mockingbird, that did &quot;sing their hearts out for us&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collateral subquestion: How many were &quot;a mocking bird&quot;-s in the novel?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does not this question fit to FAQ of EN&amp;amp;U?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why could not I keep copy for reposting in the more appropriate board?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question remained unresolved to me and still haunts me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update3:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is out EL&amp;amp;U in my deleted questions on meaning, usage and definitions of words:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to Dick or not to dick or to whom?     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scunthorpe clbuttical question  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is sign/manual/body language for the deaf a language&lt;br&gt;&#xA;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="3085" LastEditDate="2011-02-20T07:32:36.153" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T07:32:36.153" Title="Can't copies of deleted threads be Emailed to authors?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|feedback|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="719" CreationDate="2011-02-19T06:13:23.207" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're asking questions that are being deleted, you shouldn't be asking these questions in the first place. They're deleted because they don't belong here. Emailing the OP the original answers would only encourage the bad behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-02-19T06:18:35.043" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T06:18:35.043" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="730" CreationDate="2011-02-19T06:57:58.763" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to reproduce and document the bug I reported in my question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/717/tweet-button-from-the-same-answer-always-gives-distinct-link&quot;&gt;Tweet button from the same answer always gives distinct link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I opened &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3085/vgv8&quot;&gt;all my answers in EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; one after another and this button did not appear (again) in any even from threads published by &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@StackEnglish&lt;/a&gt;, for example,    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/38287310290288640&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What does &quot;Alien&quot; actually mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When does this functionality of tweeting button appear in an answer?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, I it did appear before while I tweeted:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/vgv8/status/38693818794643456&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My answer to Stack Exchange English Language and Usage Q: What is a term for a system with rules without any exceptions?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even in that answer this button/link of tweeting does not reappear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Though it would have been convenient to preserve it for multiple tweeting or getting a link for copying to other boards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T00:27:34.793" Title="When is &quot;tweet your answer&quot; button available?" Tags="|support|twitter|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="727" CreationDate="2011-02-19T12:05:42.057" Score="2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12226/are-there-any-cases-where-prepend-cannot-be-replaced-by-prefix/12227#12227&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt; that, after some time and investigation, happened to be incorrect and misleading. Cf. my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13325/if-prepend-is-not-part-of-english-why-thers-no-postpend-subpend-and-who-intr&quot;&gt;&quot;If prepend is not part of English, why ther's no postpend, subpend? and who introduces them?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why cannot I change my vote?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Can it be changed?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Casting a downvote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12226/are-there-any-cases-where-prepend-cannot-be-replaced-by-prefix/12227#12227&quot;&gt;mentioned above post&lt;/a&gt; produces pop-up with yellow background:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You last voted on this answer    Feb&#xA;  11 at 18:40  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your vote is now locked in   unless&#xA;  this answer is edited   (click on this&#xA;  box to dismiss)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it is universal in all SE sites. I clicked them many times by an error or on purpose before.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T21:06:11.167" Title="I incorrectly upvoted a post but now cannot reverse it. How can I?" Tags="|bug|feature-request|status-bydesign|down-votes|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="722" CreationDate="2011-02-19T15:21:19.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a time limit on changing your vote, as the message says. If you want to change your vote after that time limit, you need to either edit the answer yourself (if you have the reputation to do so), or get someone to edit it for you. I'm not sure how the suggested-editing function relates to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T15:21:19.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-19T17:36:12.627" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Town Hall Chat session with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.  I am working with the candidates to find a time that allows the most participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Town Hall Chat will take place Thursday the 24th at 1am UTC, &lt;em&gt;or 8pm EST on the 23rd.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=2&amp;amp;day=24&amp;amp;year=2011&amp;amp;hour=1&amp;amp;min=0&amp;amp;sec=0&amp;amp;p1=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(view in other timezones)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/300/elu-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;join the chat now!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the details so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have coordinated with the candidates and done the best I could with a best fit match.  &lt;s&gt;I would like to schedule this towards the beginning of the election phase, so I am looking at the 22nd-24th.  As soon as I coordinate with the existing moderators and candidates, I will edit this post with details on the &quot;when&quot;.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Town Hall Chat will be a one-hour event using our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat platform&lt;/a&gt;.  You can register for the event &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/300/elu-town-hall-chat?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The format will be an open discussion.  Users are encouraged to pose questions to the candidate regarding their thoughts on moderation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the chat session, the transcript and a summary will be available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-04-19T22:48:41.957" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="2011 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat:  1am UTC on the 24th / 8pm EST on the 23rd - now!" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-04-16T21:42:56.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-19T20:20:20.173" Score="8" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder how the community feels about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allowing question about English but written in languages other than English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allowing translations to (but not from) English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because EL&amp;amp;U is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/79712/should-we-do-anything-about-the-huge-language-mess-on-area51&quot;&gt;almost the only language proposal&lt;/a&gt; that excluded those kinds of questions. The other language that have made it far on Area51 often allow translation questions and questions in other languages (sometimes only English, at other times more than just English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that it's because of a bias in Stack Exchange's population. Most users who will visit Area51 will be fluent in English, on top of their own native language and thus unusually accepting or interested of those kinds of questions. I surmise the userbase of EL&amp;amp;U is likely to be more representative of how monolingual users stand on this question, which is why I'm curious of your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I ask, how would you feel about allowing those type of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T08:58:42.013" Title="How would you feel about allowing questions in foreign languages and translation questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="722" CreationDate="2011-02-19T21:06:11.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is by design -- there are too many exploits around unlimited undo and change of votes. Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T21:06:11.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-19T22:50:16.307" Score="14" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could just be me, but I'm seeing a big uptake on hypercritical comments and aggressive downvoting lately here.  It's like there's a cadre of power users trying to make a name for themselves by being mean to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we do something to make this forum fun again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4686" LastEditorUserId="3479" LastEditDate="2011-02-20T20:06:26.340" LastActivityDate="2011-03-16T07:51:44.350" Title="Why is this place becoming so mean (and how to fix it)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="728" CreationDate="2011-02-20T00:23:11.940" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're over-generalizing and looking at a single data point (user). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a user (nb: I am not referring to you here, but the user who this event unfolded around) who has had ... issues ... on other sites in our network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also add that a &lt;em&gt;hallmark&lt;/em&gt; of such users is that bad things tend to happen around them, all the time, non-stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-02-20T07:43:00.547" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T07:43:00.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="721" CreationDate="2011-02-20T00:27:16.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is available &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a certain random percentage of the time, scaled to your reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for about an hour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your post is &gt; 400 chars&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on your posts only (eg it is only visible to you)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T00:27:16.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="719" CreationDate="2011-02-20T00:29:06.197" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. If your questions are being deleted, that means they were not appropriate for the site and ultimately &lt;em&gt;should not have been asked here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your posts are continually deleted and/or downvoted this is a strong sign you are in the wrong place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T00:29:06.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="728" CreationDate="2011-02-20T01:32:10.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Note: I will not comment on the general atmosphere on this website—just on criticism and correcting fellow users.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note 2: All mention of &quot;a single user&quot;, &quot;one user&quot;, &quot;this user&quot;, etc. is not about you, @Smithco! I can assure you of that. I think this all rests on a terrible misunderstanding.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand why you didn't like FX_'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13343/diacriticals-and-non-english-letters-in-anglicized-loan-words-keep-em-dump-em/13351#13351&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on your translation of a French phrase (you mentioned this comment in your comment above). It was not essential to your answer, and criticism is never a pleasant thing to receive. However, I'd have done exactly the same as FX_ did. The fact that something is &quot;unfriendly&quot; does not make it bad: criticism is always a bit unfriendly, but it is often healthy. Do you propose that we should never criticise here? I believe that correcting errors, even small ones, improves the general quality of our website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been criticised many times, and I have tried to correct my answers whenever I felt the criticism was right, or when I felt that it was polite to show a willingness to agree that perhaps I could have phrased my answer in a better way. I have never taken it to mean &quot;you are stupid, and this small error proves that you should not be on this website&quot;, but rather &quot;I am a geek and an OCD perfectionist; hey, why else do you think I am on this very website?&quot;. I correct other users too, and I do hope and assume that they take my criticism the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times when I read an answer that contains a quirky factoid, one that makes me wonder &quot;huh, is that really true?&quot;. Sometimes this factoid is challenged by someone in a comment; this usually entails a detailed explanation of why it is wrong, and some voting on the comment, or assent or dissent of other users. Such a discussion is to me an important source of information, much more helpful than mere up and down votes. When I am reading a certain question, it is only natural that I should be interested in those things that others discuss in the context of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see that some experienced users have commented on an answer but they have not &quot;corrected&quot; the quirky factoid, I usually assume that they agree with it, and that I was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why comments are such an important feature of SE: discussion is an indispensable tool in the formation and communication of knowledge. It is a pity that those who founded the SE sites should disagree and even make comments less usable on purpose. Perhaps they will one day be swayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T03:42:59.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="706" CreationDate="2011-02-20T01:53:57.970" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question pertains equally to English and any other language, but if it can be answered by referring mainly to English, I'd say it is fine. The question should also invite a response that is mainly about English; if it does not, it is borderline. For a good question of this sort I am thinking of something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In many languages, the line between&#xA;  different kinds of modality, such as&#xA;  obligation and probability, tends to&#xA;  shift: modal verbs change in meaning&#xA;  over time, and new ones are born. Is&#xA;  there any theory that explains why&#xA;  this happens? I believe that English&#xA;  &quot;can&quot; is used to grant permission now&#xA;  more often than it used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer would use mainly English examples to elucidate the general phenomenon. If we cannot use universal patterns and comparisons with other languages, how can we hope to deal with English efficiently? We should only banish &quot;interdisciplinary&quot; knowledge if it is fully off topic. Of course this question could go the wrong way if the answers are not about English at all; but I feel that this is a risk we must accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T01:53:57.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2011-02-20T02:19:10.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I see a question tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;, I understand that the OP is more interested in which cases the word/phrase is used, or in which contexts should be used.&#xA;For example, if I ask about the usage of the word &lt;em&gt;earthlink&lt;/em&gt;, I am more interested in which cases I should use the word, rather than to its meaning; if somebody replies saying what the word means, s/he is not giving the answer I am expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that usage, meaning, and etymology are three different aspects of a phrase, even if they are connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T15:11:52.513" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T15:11:52.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="728" CreationDate="2011-02-20T08:05:26.590" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Jeff said, there is one particular user who is, I think, the root cause of these problems — posting things which really don’t belong on the site, being very quick to take a confrontational tone, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there’s a knock-on effect from this too: everybody else (especially the most active users) gets a lot of grief from ‘firefighting’ against this user’s questions, and so there’s a lot more frustration and crabbiness going around, and on a small site like this, there’s not as much room for that frustration to dissipate as there is on eg stackoverflow or serverfault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So… I think everyone, especially the power users (I guess I see myself as on the fringes of that category at the moment), can probably help by trying to &lt;strong&gt;respond positively as well as negatively&lt;/strong&gt; to the problems.  In a nutshell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don’t just downvote the bad questions; go upvote some good ones too.  And smile!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(…of course, this is advice I’m directing at myself here as much as at anyone else…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T08:05:26.590" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-20T08:06:47.500" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made this flowchart &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/328/how-should-we-handle-questions-that-are-easily-answered-by-wikipedia/330#330&quot;&gt;for Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; because we had a problem figuring out &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197/should-trivially-easy-to-find-be-a-benchmark-for-moderating-the-site&quot;&gt;whether a question was too easy to be allowed&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s0UY9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Flowchart to &quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: &quot;General reference&quot; is a close option that Jeff &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197/should-trivially-easy-to-find-be-a-benchmark-for-moderating-the-site/220#220&quot;&gt;is considering implementing&lt;/a&gt;, for questions that are too basic. Until it's implemented, or if it's never implemented, then closing as off-topic seems like the best candidate for the job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:20.957" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T01:43:24.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="726" CreationDate="2011-02-20T09:19:16.723" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel freaking bad (if to put it mildly)  and try to prove me otherwise hoping that this is correct answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the rationale unders this is quite twisted since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11182/help-me-to-translate-the-russian-proverb&quot;&gt;my question on Russian proverb was just closed&lt;/a&gt; but on English (American) saying or phrasal colloquial usage or meaning  of a phrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13354/is-sign-manual-language-for-the-deaf-a-language&quot;&gt;taken from  an American novel was just plainly deleted&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T09:19:16.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-20T09:33:02.463" Score="-9" ViewCount="671" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to understand why my questions on English phrases, expressions, words usage, meaning, grammar and/or definitions were closed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are out of this english.stackexchange.com board in them?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13303/what-are-conventional-symbols-in-definition-of-a-language&quot;&gt;What are conventional symbols in definition of a language?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11960/does-english-have-taboo-ed-unprintable-obscenities&quot;&gt;Does English have taboo-ed (unprintable) obscenities?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13325/if-prepend-is-not-part-of-english-why-is-there-no-postpend-or-subpend-and-who-i&quot;&gt;If prepend is not part of English, why is there no postpend or subpend? And who introduces them?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13298/whats-the-hidden-sense-of-a-farther-instructing-his-son-to-choose-whom-to-kill-f&quot;&gt;What's the hidden sense of a farther instructing his son to choose whom to kill for a pleasure?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13293/does-non-audio-artefacts-make-part-of-a-language&quot;&gt;Does non-audio artefacts make part of a language?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12772/what-does-ngan-means&quot;&gt;Why wasn't compassion sexy?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13151/read-only-syndrome-versus-write-only-syndrome&quot;&gt;“Read-only syndrome” versus “write-only syndrome”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12193/how-would-you-call-a-word-for-which-you-dont-know-the-meaning-but-use-it-fluentl&quot;&gt;How would you call a word for which you don't know the meaning but use it fluently?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12182/is-im-write-only-comprehensible&quot;&gt;Is “I'm write-only” comprehensible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12182/is-im-write-only-comprehensible&quot;&gt;How would an Englishman join “Awake and awkward” into one word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10999/logged-in-log-ined-login-ed-logined-log-in-ed-logged-in&quot;&gt;“Logged-in”, “log-ined”, “login-ed”, “logined”, “log-in-ed”, “logged in”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10854/rule-on-absence-of-the-article-the-with-plural-nouns&quot;&gt;Rule on absence of the article “the” with plural nouns&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11182/help-me-to-translate-the-russian-proverb&quot;&gt;Help me to translate the Russian proverb “”За битого - двух небитых дают&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are a dozen similar deleted forever questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here are some webcaches (though they were filled more when deleted):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UHSXyh5QV0MJ:english.stackexchange.com/questions/10754/scunthorpe-clbuttical-question+Scunthorpe+clbuttical+question+site:english.stackexchange.com&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=ru&amp;amp;source=www.google.ru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to Dick or not to dick or to whom?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UHSXyh5QV0MJ:english.stackexchange.com/questions/10754/scunthorpe-clbuttical-question+Scunthorpe+clbuttical+question+site:english.stackexchange.com&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=ru&amp;amp;source=www.google.ru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scunthorpe clbuttical question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T11:29:56.487" Title="Why were my questions on English meaning, usage and grammar closed and deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|moderation|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="738" CreationDate="2011-02-20T10:47:29.533" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer to vgv8's question; instead, I want to ask a larger, related meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He doesn't understand why his questions aren't welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's no stranger to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/138194/vgv8&quot;&gt;suspensions&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.serverfault.com/questions/765/can-we-just-get-rid-of-vgv8&quot;&gt;and also&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His actions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/728/why-is-this-place-becoming-so-mean-and-how-to-we-fix-it&quot;&gt;driving others away&lt;/a&gt; from this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why on earth moderators spend so much time closing and/or deleting his questions, when there's a much simpler, more overall-community-friendly, and less time-consuming alternative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If anyone sees signs that things might be improving (or at least that the situation won't worsen), such that it makes sense to continue to have patience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:21.993" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T11:29:56.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="738" CreationDate="2011-02-20T11:05:33.393" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I'll assume you're asking in good faith, and attempt to explain why I believe these questions were closed. Please do not take this as criticism (it is not intended that way), but please do study it and try to understand why some questions do get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;I did not vote to close these questions&lt;/strong&gt; - I do not have enough rep - so I am in a sense putting words into other people's mouths; I hope that they will forgive me for this (and comment/vote appropriately if I am way off the mark).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions that were closed I think were borderline cases - that's not to say that people were necessarily wrong to close them, but that they come very close to the line between suitable and unsuitable. In these cases you may want to edit your questions to bring them into line with the site's mission; I've tried to give my view on how best to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before doing so - having looked through all the questions, there are a few themes that come out, that you might like to pay attention to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you give some context to your question (for example, explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you are thinking of using a particular phrase, and what you hope to express by it), you are likely to get better responses (and less likely to have the question closed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question is about the ideas that someone has expressed in English, rather than the way they were expressed - for example, interpretation of literature - then that is highly likely to be off-topic. As a rough guideline, if the question and its subject matter could be translated directly to another language, and still be essentially the same question, that probably means it's not specific to English, and therefore off-topic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that appear to be entirely about another language are unlikely to go down well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, going through one by one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are conventional symbols in definition of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is borderline to my mind, and could possibly be made into an on-topic question, which is presumably why it hasn't been deleted. I imagine it was closed because it seems to go beyond the definition of the word &quot;language&quot; as a standard English word, and into a more technical discussion of what is and isn't a language - so it's more a question of linguistics (which is off-topic) than the meaning of a specific word (which is on-topic). If you are asking simply because you didn't understand the words &quot;conventional symbols&quot; as used in the quoted definition, then it probably is on-topic, and I would advise you to edit your question to make this clear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does English have taboo-ed (unprintable) obscenities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kosmonaut already commented on this one: &quot;There isn't really an answer for this; it is a topic for discussion. You might be able to bring this up in chat, but it is off-topic here.&quot;. You acknowledged in your comment already that you know the answer to the headline question (&quot;no, there aren't any&quot;); discussing why this is the case (and different from other language/cultures) is a truly fascinating topic, but is no longer about English Language and Usage, and more about sociology/anthropology/other off-topic studies :-)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If prepend is not part of English, why is there no postpend or subpend? And who introduces them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not even sure I understand this question myself, which (if others also don't understand) is likely why it has been closed. Its premise seems to be &quot;If X does not exist, then why to Y and Z not exist either?&quot; It is not clear to me why X &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; existing means that Y or Z &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; exist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the hidden sense of a farther instructing his son to choose whom to kill for a pleasure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is about literature, not English language/usage. Yes, it is about the author's meaning, but at a level beyond the language itself. To try to clarify that vague remark: if the scene were translated into another language, then the same question would arise - the question is about the meaning of the father's actions, rather than about any of the words or phrases used to describe them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does non-audio artefacts make part of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Kosmonaut put it, &quot;This question would be a good fit for linguistics.SE... until then, this is not really about English.&quot;. Again, it is not specific to English, because it applies equally to all human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't compassion sexy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to the Mockingbird question, this is about literature (albeit a very concise form thereof!). We might be able to help you if you don't understand the word &quot;compassion&quot;, or &quot;sexy&quot;, but as to why Pullman decided to say that compassion wasn't sexy - that's a question of personal interpretation; it has everything to do with the reader's emotional response, but little on the actual meaning of the words - i.e. it is entirely subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Read-only syndrome” versus “write-only syndrome”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this one is borderline too. Here you are asking about the usage of a phrase that you have made up (at least insofar as it applies to humans - I realise that it has uses in computing contexts at least). That doesn't, in my view, make it entirely off-topic (after all, writers are often forced to coin new expressions to get their meaning across, and questions about how best to do so are totally on-topic here). However, I suspect what tipped the balance towards closing was that the way the question is phrased doesn't suggest that you are are trying to hone your writing skills in that way; if you are, then I would suggest you update the question saying (for instance) &quot;I am writing an essay/novel/job application, and trying to express the concept that (...). I've come up with the following suggestions (...) What would be the best way to express this?&quot; - and be prepared for the answer to be &quot;don't say those, say (...) instead&quot; :-)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you call a word for which you don't know the meaning but use it fluently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your own words: &quot;After seeing universal miscomprehension of my question, I started to doubt that I undestand it as well.&quot;. If you don't understand the question yourself, chances are nobody else will either :-). But as a general rule - if the only examples you give in a question are in Russian, that's probably a sign that the question won't be acceptable here. Either add some examples in English (though I appreciate that may be difficult as it's not your first language), or accept that the question is not specifically related to English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is “I'm write-only” comprehensible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this one is borderline too - rephrasing could make it a valid question. If you are trying to express a particular concept, then you might ask (as in the &quot;syndrome&quot; question) &quot;I'm trying to express (...), would (...) get that across? And if not what would?&quot;. Without that extra context of the meaning you're trying to get across it's very hard to answer the question in a meaningful way - hence why it gets closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would an Englishman join “Awake and awkward” into one word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As FX_ remarked: &quot;Please provide much more context to enhance your question. I'm sure there are other possibilities than merging the two words, which we could help you find out if you provided a broader picture.&quot;. Without knowing &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you want to join the two words together, nobody can know what would produce the best effect (or whether something else would be more appropriate). (Also note that you probably mean &quot;native English speaker&quot;, rather than &quot;Englishman&quot;, since the latter refers specifically to a male from England, which accounts for a very small fraction of the sum total of native speakers. If you genuinely do mean someone from England (and not Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand...) then again you need to explain why in the question).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Logged-in”, “log-ined”, “login-ed”, “logined”, “log-in-ed”, “logged in”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the &quot;closed&quot; notice says: &quot;This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rule on absence of the article “the” with plural nouns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one I think is a borderline duplicate. I don't think that there is a distinction between &quot;rules for absence of &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;rules for presence of &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, because the &quot;rules&quot; should cover all cases (the article is either there or it's not!). However I can see that the question that it is marked as a duplicate of does not go very far to explaining when &quot;the&quot; should be used with plurals - just that it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be. I think you would be likely to get a better response if you listed a number of examples (either where you're unsure of whether to use &quot;the&quot; or not, or where you know the answer in specific cases but are not sure how to apply the logic in general).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Help me to translate the Russian proverb “”За битого - двух небитых дают&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation is explicitly off-topic according to the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T11:05:33.393" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="738" CreationDate="2011-02-20T11:15:56.790" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know -- is the answer &quot;you're asking too many questions that the community is rejecting through downvotes and closing?&quot; a reasonable one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to quantify exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; these don't fit as a whole, but the consensus is that they do not, and since you continue to relentlessly ask questions of this type ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T11:15:56.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="746" CreationDate="2011-02-20T14:23:49.603" Score="19" ViewCount="634" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree so much with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/738/why-were-my-questions-on-english-meaning-usage-and-grammar-closed-and-deleted/739#739&quot;&gt;Dori's answer&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/738&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; that I thought it was worth making it into a thread of its own. There has been a string of off-topic and low-quality questions (and, to a lower extent, answers) from user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3085&quot;&gt;vgv8&lt;/a&gt;, that many users have expressed annoyance (whether in comments, on meta, or on the chat). I think there is a consensus that this is damaging the friendliness of the site by the tensions it has created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting Dori, the facts and questions that this situation raises are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He doesn't understand why his questions aren't welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He's no stranger to suspensions (and also).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;His actions are driving others away from this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I don't know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why on earth moderators spend so much time closing and/or deleting his&#xA;  questions, when there's a much&#xA;  simpler, more&#xA;  overall-community-friendly, and less&#xA;  time-consuming alternative?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If anyone sees signs that things might be improving (or at least that&#xA;  the situation won't worsen), such that&#xA;  it makes sense to continue to have&#xA;  patience?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to know is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have mods tried to contact him directly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has the possibility of a temporary ban been discussed, if only to allow him to cool down and think about the scope and boundaries of the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T21:56:15.007" Title="How should we handle users who generate consistently low-quality and off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="745" CreationDate="2011-02-20T15:59:11.583" Score="5" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's only one question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meanning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meanning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meanning&lt;/a&gt;, it was probably a typo. Please change it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2573" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2011-02-20T18:34:39.420" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T18:34:39.420" Title="Tag deletion request: [meanning]" Tags="|support|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="742" CreationDate="2011-02-20T15:59:13.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for every mod, but for me personally, the big problem is being in the midst of the moderator election.  I am the only mod hoping to stay on for the next term, and I had been hoping that this could be the first big thing we could take care of (assuming I am still there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a very tough situation because I don't want to overstep what is reasonable.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.serverfault.com/questions/765/can-we-just-get-rid-of-vgv8/772#772&quot;&gt;This guy has a history of causing problems&lt;/a&gt;, but nonetheless, I am a beta-mod now and I want to be very careful about actions I take that have permanent consequences on the site.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/728/why-is-this-place-becoming-so-mean-and-how-to-we-fix-it#question&quot;&gt;People have already complained recently about me even simply closing one of his questions&lt;/a&gt;, and not because it was too light, but because it was too aggressive!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to go too hard and look like a fascist, and I also don't want to approach it too lightly and have the guy retaliate or something else that I didn't anticipate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe me... this has been on my mind!  Any thoughts are welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:00.857" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T15:59:13.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="743" CreationDate="2011-02-20T16:05:11.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I changed the tag from &lt;em&gt;meanning&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T16:05:11.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="742" CreationDate="2011-02-20T18:34:44.180" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose suspension. The main damage done to this website is the wrong impression a new user gets when he stumbles upon a closed question asked by this guy: he will think &quot;huh, why do people here react so harshly to a question I might have asked myself?&quot;. The way we deal with a single question is influenced by the historical behaviour of its asker, not solely by its content; but the newcomer has no access to this history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen several questions of his closed that were actually not so bad; that is, they would never have been closed if they had been asked by someone else. Psmears agreed in so far that he called several of those &quot;borderline&quot;. While understandable, this is not the way to go. I am for a strict separation of criticism about content and disciplinary action―at least whenever possible. This way it feels impure, unfair; in addition, it does not encourage change or repentance, but instead gives the miscreant an excuse to call us unjust, which may be picked up too by newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I, having had some experience on EL&amp;amp;U, am also affected by the mechanism of stumbling-upon I have outlined above, then how can we expect random visitors to understand or sympathise? If we just suspend this guy, it will be easier for everyone, including himself. He has had ample warning. I have seen the same thing happen when I moderated elsewhere. If he gets suspended, that doesn't mean that he is a worthless or immoral person―just that he does not fit in with this website. Kosmonaut has my blessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T18:34:44.180" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-20T20:17:27.590" Score="11" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sponsors members from SE sites to &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/community-conference-sponsorships/&quot;&gt;attend conferences in that field&lt;/a&gt;. Since EL&amp;amp;U is a smaller SE community than some of our peers (although I would say, in some cases, of much higher quality), I think it would be a good idea to promote EL&amp;amp;U to other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;, and conferences may be one way to help us increase the number of quality members. Does anyone know of any  conferences that are specifically for the English language that SE might be willing to sponsor a member to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-04-18T01:29:44.500" Title="Are there any English language conferences to which SE could sponsor a member?" Tags="|discussion|conferences|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="726" CreationDate="2011-02-21T02:54:47.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, this is our policy as it stands now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-02-21T02:54:47.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="726" CreationDate="2011-02-21T03:39:37.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I hate to appear to be discouraging foreign languages anywhere, I have to say I would discourage them in English.SE. I say this knowing full well that I've responded to questions in a user's own native language in an effort to clarify a concept. But the point is, the user asked the question in English and the answers were almost entirely in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to permit questions entirely in other languages, we would have to rename this site Babel.SE. This is, and I hope will remain, English.SE; and if that presents a problem for some people, I hope they will start their own SE sites: Polish-English.SE, Russian-English.SE, French-English.SE — hell, even Boston-English.SE or ValleyGirl-English.SE. Whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already bend over backwards to accommodate non-native speakers, provided they demonstrate a sincere desire to learn and make an attempt to communicate in the language they are trying to acquire. I don't see what more we can do without changing the essential nature of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-02-21T03:39:37.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="728" CreationDate="2011-02-21T09:22:39.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@smithco, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/742/how-should-we-handle-users-who-generate-consistently-low-quality-and-off-topic-qu&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/703/is-elu-becoming-esl&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/738/why-were-my-questions-on-english-meaning-usage-and-grammar-closed-and-deleted&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/765/can-we-just-get-rid-of-vgv8&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one too (&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;, I just found &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/690/what-is-the-process-of-suspending-sf-user&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/739/moderators-abusing-rules&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13478/what-does-the-expression-low-quality-question-mean&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I'll stop there. Have you noticed a common theme yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Just a thought: if you've really got time, just trawl your way through &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/search?q=vgv8&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My point, exactly?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you be rather spending your time on: questions/answers like that, or the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; business of EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of us want this site to prosper; we enjoy answering quality, genuine, on-topic questions about English Language &amp;amp; Usage. We're even not averse to the occasional fun or border-line questions. But repeated naff questions from users with whom we - or others - may already have had run-ins with - here or elsewhere - &lt;em&gt;inevitably&lt;/em&gt; get very short thrift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absolute worse thing is that in the process of trying to protect the site from this kind of destructive activity, moderators will always initially avoid outright bans or suspensions. Which means that the problem questions keep coming, and getting closed, which (ironically) ends up scaring off people like you, and comforting conspiracy-theorists in their paranoia. This makes the troll-type activity doubly deleterious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, in future when you see moderator activity that worries you, the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; thing to do is to check out the user profile of the post in question. You can also pop into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and ask anyone who's there to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-03-16T07:51:44.350" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-22T01:24:45.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a tough question. We had the same problem emerge at alt.usage.english back in the Usenet era. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are obviously many non-native speakers venturing here to get a layman's explanation of idiom, or a clarification of an obscure sense of a word or term. It would be nice if there were less of that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &quot;out of the mouths of babes&quot; does apply. Sometimes the seemingly simple question a learner asks can be profound precisely because a native speaker would never ask it. The search for an answer can, in such cases, teach us something valuable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a &quot;forest for the trees&quot; thing. Our familiarity with the language can, at times, blind us to the kind of problems that are readily apparent to the learner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What worked (for a while, anyway) at alt.usage.english was not to drive off the non-native speakers, but to encourage the participation of deeply learned professionals and academics. Grow the power base and the small problems take care of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5262" LastActivityDate="2011-02-22T01:24:45.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-23T07:40:24.400" Score="7" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; is our fourth most used tag and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; is our seventh most used tag. Yet, it would seem to me that they are used interchangeably. I cannot be sure since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; does not have a tag wiki but, from a quick look at the two, it would seem they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am right, shouldn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3711" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-02-23T12:45:24.530" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T18:45:54.840" Title="Should [grammaticality] be a synonym of [grammar]?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="755" CreationDate="2011-02-23T11:13:05.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion they would be synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5095" LastActivityDate="2011-02-23T11:13:05.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="755" CreationDate="2011-02-23T12:48:28.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One tag is a synonym for the other tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, as the topic of such questions is the grammaticality of a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-02-23T12:48:28.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="759" CreationDate="2011-02-23T12:55:59.733" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; link lists both the questions that has been recently asked, and old questions that have been recently edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to get only the recently asked questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T04:04:33.437" Title="Is there a way to search questions that have been recently asked without getting old but recently modified ones?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="758" CreationDate="2011-02-23T17:16:52.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed in chat, there's the &quot;newest&quot; tab that shows the questions sorted by date:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-02-23T17:16:52.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="725" CreationDate="2011-02-23T22:49:16.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with the other town hall chats, I will be creating a &quot;digest&quot; version for the English Language &amp;amp; Usage Town Hall Chat. This will be posted as one large Meta question. The digest will contain all the questions and their answers, with none of the other conversation from the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;the meta post about Town Hall Digests&lt;/a&gt;. Or for an example, look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/948/2011-moderator-election-town-hall-chat-digest&quot;&gt;AskUbuntu Town Hall Digest&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1759/2252&quot;&gt;Gaming Town Hall Digest&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also discuss these digests with me in chat, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/352/town-hall-discussion&quot;&gt;the Town Hall Discussion room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A giant thank you to Rebecca for doing the digest for me!&lt;/strong&gt; It has just been posted to Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/775/2259&quot;&gt;The Town Hall Chat Digest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:29:32.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-24T03:16:12.080" Score="13" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;This subject came up in the town hall chat: how basic is too basic, and more importantly, how do we help users to write questions that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; too basic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144/find-in-dictionary-questions&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Find in dictionary&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we come up with guidelines, a la the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective-Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; blog post, for asking &quot;&lt;em&gt;what does [x] mean&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;what's the difference between [x] and [y]&lt;/em&gt;&quot; type questions? The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Are Some Questions Too Simple&lt;/a&gt; blog post gives some guidelines for the &lt;strong&gt;answerer&lt;/strong&gt;, but I'm hoping to come up with suggestions for the &lt;strong&gt;asker&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:14:46.547" Title="Can we come up with guidelines for &quot;good&quot; dictionary questions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="761" CreationDate="2011-02-24T03:43:14.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm with Jeff [Atwood] on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Blog entry at blog.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;&quot;General Reference&quot;&lt;/a&gt; questions. We should be about nuance and experience, not a substitute for a Pocket Oxford or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;link to Etymologies Online&quot;&gt;Etymologies Online&lt;/a&gt;. It's one thing to talk about the subtleties and unwritten (mostly) rules of English, and quite another to simply be a LMGTFY service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5095" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T03:43:14.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="761" CreationDate="2011-02-24T11:40:32.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;One mark of the good dictionary questions is that they often start by quoting a dictionary!  (Or two.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Bad]&lt;/strong&gt; Is an avocado usually described as a fruit or a vegetable in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Good]&lt;/strong&gt; Famous Dictionary™ defines avocado as “…an oval green fruit with leathery skin…”, but in my country avocado is always called vegetable.  Is this really different in USA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Good]&lt;/strong&gt; I’m confused: This Dictionary™ says an avocado is a fruit, but That Dictionary™ says it’s a vegetable.  Which one is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as a suggestion for the asker: &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; a dictionary first.  Type &lt;code&gt;define: avocado&lt;/code&gt; into Google, and look at the top few hits.  If those don’t answer your question (they don’t give enough detail, or you think they may not be accurate, or…), then it probably isn’t too basic to ask here.  Plus, you now have some additional details: quote what you found, and explain why you’re not satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T11:40:32.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="755" CreationDate="2011-02-24T18:45:54.840" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; are most definitely not synonyms of each other. They should not be merged!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine that grammar is a circle. Everything inside the circle is grammatical and everything outside is not. For example, &quot;Cat dream about chasing mice.&quot; is unambiguously and uncontroversially an ungrammatical sentence, and is thus outside the circle. “The cat dreams about chasing mice” is grammatical, and thus inside the circle. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; encompasses questions about where the boundary between grammatical and ungrammatical is. Here are good examples of questions about grammaticality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11207/is-this-usage-of-arent-proper-english&quot;&gt;Is this usage of &amp;quot;aren&amp;#39;t&amp;quot; proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2858/is-such-a-cooler-proper-english&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;such a cooler&amp;quot; proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7727/which-is-correct-i-told-you-or-i-said-you&quot;&gt;Which is correct — &amp;quot;I told you&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I said you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; have nothing to do with the question of whether or not something is grammatical. Instead, questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; should be about how the grammar works—questions that ask “what is the structure of the inside of the circle of grammar?” rather than “where does the boundary of the circle of grammar lie?”. Here are some examples of such questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4237/i-was-using-i-have-used-i-have-been-using-i-had-used-what-is-the-dif&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;I was using&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;I have used&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;I have been using&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;I had used&amp;#39; - what is the difference amongst these?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11372/why-call-them-infinite-finite-verbs&quot;&gt;Why call them infinite/finite verbs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10371/does-the-use-of-present-perfect-continuous-with-a-time-reference-in-the-past-impl&quot;&gt;Does the use of present perfect continuous with a time reference in the past imply an intention to finish, and if yes, how to avoid it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions aren’t about whether something is grammatical or not—they are about different grammatical usages and how they can be used or what they mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag is overused. Many questioners who don’t really know the grammatical terminology specific to their question just tag their question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; as a kind of default, ignorant of the terminology or topic that would be the best tag for their questions. Many such questions should be retagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, while others should have neither tag, and would be better served by a more specific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T18:45:54.840" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="766" CreationDate="2011-02-25T02:05:59.513" Score="43" ViewCount="1346" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are native and non-native speakers on this website. I can identify some native speakers (mostly by certain colloquialisms) and some non-native speakers (by small deviations from idiom and the like); but several non-native speakers have fooled me with their proficiency. Then again, my native language is Dutch (can you tell that it is Dutch and not, say, Spanish?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how easy is it for an educated native speaker to identify non-native speakers here, when he is not specifically trying to, but just reading content? And how about when he &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; trying? I am not asking with any specific purpose in mind—just curiosity. Well, I do have in mind the ongoing anglification of research and teaching at universities all over the world, and how this may harm research and teaching, considering that neither staff nor students will be able to communicate as efficiently as in their native language, not even after several years of practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I cannot imagine a foreigner passing for a native speaker of Dutch on a similarly educated (yuck, I am overusing this word) website; I suspect that they shouldn't be too hard to spot in English either. Then again I don't recall meeting any foreigners on &quot;advanced&quot; Dutch websites—or I failed to spot them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" OwnerDisplayName="Cerberus" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T01:13:23.407" Title="Is it easy to spot an educated non-native speaker on a website like this?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-25T02:40:58.237" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;It really depends on how fluent the speaker is. True fluency in a foreign language is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; difficult to achieve and should not be underestimated. I've discussed this in another context, giving &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10335/how-would-you-define-fluent-level-in-english/10339#10339&quot;&gt;one man's opinion&lt;/a&gt; about what a test for genuine fluency would entail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is easier to be fooled by someone who has time to compose a written question or answer on this site. That doesn't mean it still isn't hard to &quot;pass&quot; for native fluency, but it's a damn sight easier than writing in chat or submitting to questioning by a cop who just pulled you over for speeding. My feeling is if you wake someone up at 3:00 in the morning and ask them their opinion on the merits of strong drink, it ought to be very easy to weed out the fakes (easier than, say, dodging the fist that may be about to connect with your jaw in that situation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see solecisms all the time in the writing of non-native speakers on this site, but I am quite impressed with the mastery of many of them. With one or two exceptions (who will remain unnamed), all the non-native speakers I know of whose gravatars reside on the first rep page here write pretty nearly flawless English. Nevertheless, I will occasionally detect an odd usage or a misapplied idiom, which will lead me to wonder. Mostly I've encountered those only in chat, however, and I've seldom seen any in questions or answers. The clues I'm talking about aren't typos — we all mak those and find them failry easy to detect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genuine tip-offs will appear in the odd use of a preposition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was married with her for 15 years. [He was married to her for 15 years.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or an infinitive in place of a gerund&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The game is all about to hit the ball. [The game is all about hitting the ball.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or present tense in place of present progressive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I eat now. What do you want? [I'm eating now, what do you want?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made these examples fairly obvious to illustrate my point, but some of the mistakes can be very subtle, and if someone is really capable they can be hard to spot. But even in the best of the best here I will sometimes get a faint tingling as my Spidey sense warns me that someone may not be a native speaker. Oddly, hyper-correct grammar may be another tip-off. There are certain mistakes people make that actually convince me that someone &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, a native speaker. Practically nobody who grew up speaking a European language, one that has clear markers for cases, would ever say &quot;Jennie threw a party for Bill and I.&quot; But you can encounter such mistakes every day at any mall in America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" OwnerDisplayName="Robusto" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T02:46:57.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-25T03:13:25.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is always easy to spot the non-native speaker, as a general rule, because he or she will eventually say something that a native speaker would never say. It isn't easy to give an example because it could be a case of missing the idiom, or violating a basic grammar rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case cited above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm always getting them confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the remnant of the dative case in English. A non-native speaker would be challenged to get that right. But the point is, the non-native speaker has to get &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; right, without fail, as one serious error gives the game away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion does remind me of an observation made during the Cold War, when there was much concern about Soviet infiltrators, who were generally fluent in English thanks to their extensive study and training. The tip-off in their case was that their English was &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; perfect. They failed to make the kind of routine errors to which the native speaker is often victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="The Raven" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T03:13:25.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-25T03:49:28.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the fluent non-native speakers (well, writers) here, such as yourself, do not stand out as such.  In reading a post such as yours, it would not pop out at me that the writer was not a native speaker.  When attention is drawn to that aspect of the posting, I would say I that I could not tell one way or the other, although I might choose to go with non-native for a post such as yours.  The only reason I have is that there is something slightly formal about the phrasing that suggests it to me.  I would never have a clue about the native language of the writer of a post like yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am not saying I don't notice many non-native writers on this site; I notice hordes of them, just not the ones that are written at the level of this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4951" OwnerDisplayName="mgkrebbs" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T03:54:41.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-25T06:24:59.080" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my younger days, I could occasionally be found reading fan fiction (Star Wars, if you must know), and I saw things done to language that I still shudder to think of. Mangled idioms, atrocious-to-nonexistent grammar, mixed metaphors, totally inappropriate word choices, eggcorns out the wazoo... and all by people who had never heard a language other than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, no, I don't think it's necessarily possible to tell whether someone is a native speaker of English based on how they write when they're paying attention. In a more hurried/informal environment like chat, there's a much better chance of catching a slip-up, but even then, there's no guarantee that that incorrect preposition is proof of non-native speech rather than mental revisions outrunning typing ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" OwnerDisplayName="Martha" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T06:24:59.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-25T07:28:02.340" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it probably partly works in the opposite direction. If you assume someone is a native speaker, when you spot something that reads a bit weird, you're likely to think it's a regional difference, a typo, brainfart, or even some construction that you haven't noticed before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you know the person is 'foreign', you're more likely to attribute &lt;em&gt;the same quirks&lt;/em&gt; to their foreignness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, as others have hinted, even in errors, foreign speakers are likely to make different ones. I know that my French writing is pretty good compared to a lot of native French speakers, but they would &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; (or very rarely) get their genders mixed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(There are other incredibly good ESL users on StackExchange: VonC, badp &amp;amp; balpha, to name but a few)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" OwnerDisplayName="Benjol" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T07:28:02.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-25T19:29:20.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, it really does depend on the skill the person has with the English language. I have one Livejournal friend whose English is very, very good, but she will often use some terms that I've never seen &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; native speaker (foreign or abroad - remember that there's a lot of regional variation in English) use. This also applies to other regional variations. For example, try reading theregister.co.uk, and you will find a good many terms used only in the UK. The same applies to The Guardian, which uses far more formal language, but will still use many terms that are not used anywhere else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more specifically in your post, I can't actually find anything unusual about your English, in spite of the fact that I was intentionally looking for errors. Coincidentally, I'm Canadian, and my primary language is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5470" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T19:29:20.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-25T19:46:58.123" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14155/what-does-it-mean-to-show-reversed-two-fingers&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is about body language (i.e. a gesture) used in an English-speaking country. Is this on topic for the site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T15:01:06.543" Title="Are body-language questions on topic for EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="773" CreationDate="2011-02-25T19:57:28.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say not. Nor is American Sign Language, despite its connections to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T19:57:28.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:08:15.890" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a &quot;digest&quot; version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/725/2259&quot;&gt;2011 Moderator Election Town Hall Chat&lt;/a&gt;. The format, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;as described on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, is one &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to this question &lt;em&gt;for every question&lt;/em&gt; asked in the Town Hall, containing all the candidate's answers to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To view the digest chronologically, please sort the answers by &quot;oldest&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions or comments about this, &lt;strong&gt;please do not answer this question&lt;/strong&gt; as the answers are designed to be used for the questions from the Town hall itself. Instead, please ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;the parent question&lt;/a&gt; or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/352/town-hall-discussion&quot;&gt;the Town Hall Discussion Room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A giant &lt;strong&gt;THANK YOU TO REBECCA CHERNOFF&lt;/strong&gt; both for &lt;strong&gt;organizing these town halls&lt;/strong&gt; but also &lt;strong&gt;for compiling this digest for me&lt;/strong&gt; as I have been unable to do so this week!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any corrections which need to be made to this digest, or if you were a candidate who was unable to attend the town hall and would like your answers included, please @Josh me and let me know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T22:36:21.400" Title="2011 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat Digest" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:08:50.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/4ba49e61d1be84ce3c3d84d10c7ed9d6?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Robusto&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1460/robusto&quot;&gt;Robusto&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565665#565665&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; I guess that would be me. So, I'll ask each candidate to start by giving a one-sentence description of his or her moderating philosophy: what is the one thing you'd like to be remembered for during your tenure here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565678#565678&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto My moderation philosophy is that efficiency and not being afraid to take necessary action are key points, but I should still keep in mind that the community reigns supreme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565679#565679&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto My moderation philosophy is to reinforce the intent of the site and to help keep it a focused community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565686#565686&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I think a good moderator is more or less invisible, or at least drama-free, so I would hope not to be remembered, at least not for my moderation. Just don't crack any puns in my presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565688#565688&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto @Robusto: As a moderator, I think I'd like to be remembered as being fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565689#565689&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I would go with Joel's philosophy: good moderators should be running around moving the furniture out of the way, so that users can just enjoy the site without even noticing the mods' presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565711#565711&quot;&gt;clarified&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling Sure. There was actually a comment to that extent just a day ago or so. Someone said in chat that the site seems to moderate itself and was wondering what good are mods for. Robusto then replied that the site most certainly does not moderate itself. And that's kind of my point. Ideally, normal users should not even have to know mods exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565716#565716&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto Moderation should be invisible as much as possible, and when it's visible, moderators should lead by example, showing users how they should use their own moderation privileges (where applicable). I would hope to be remembered most for setting the standard for good answers; that others would model their own answers after mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:08:50.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:10:00.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/4ba49e61d1be84ce3c3d84d10c7ed9d6?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Robusto&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1460/robusto&quot;&gt;Robusto&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565708#565708&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Is there anything you would want to change about the way the site is being run at present?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565718#565718&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I imagine myself having to be less involved in closing questions as the community of power users matures and grows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565719#565719&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I'm seeing three ways your question could be interpreted: Engine changes—yes, but that's really more of a MSO thing. Site policy—no, I generally identify with the policies that the community has put into place already. Moderation itself—some things have been sitting slow lately (off-topic questions not being closed quickly), and that could be improved, but as far as mod actions itself, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565720#565720&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I wish there were more moderators and high-rep users to share in the drudge work of closing inappropriate questions and dealing with problem users (which have fortunately been few so far)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565721#565721&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto So far I have not seen any particular issues with the governing of the site. My only negative impression is the feeling that I got at first of an overly nanny-state downvoting from non-commenting passerby. Otherwise, I feel that so far the site has been pretty well self governing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565722#565722&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I would actually like to see more activity by 3k and 10k users rather than mods. We're still lacking in that department. I still remember when we were in beta, off-topic questions would get closed within minutes. Then we went out of beta and lots of people lost their privileges, so nowadays things take a bit longer and mod intervention is required. But I think that will fix itself in the weeks ahead, as more and more people reach 3k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565723#565723&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto It's not exactly in anyone's power, but I wish the site had more 10K users. Not mods, just people with mod-like abilities. I also hope the site can mature to the point where more of us have an instinctive understanding of on-topic/off-topic, so that off-topic questions (no matter how interesting) don't get answers before a mod gets around to closing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:10:00.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:10:28.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565750#565750&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; What do you plan to do to assist the site outside of responding to flags and standard close/delete maintenance (if anything?)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565761#565761&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I plan to listen to the members of the community to see if there are issues with the SE2.0 engine that can help it to work better for this community, and to relay that information to the SOIS team as best I can. I plan to help newer users feel welcome to the site and to understand the processes that are ongoing on the SE network, such as accepting answers. I plan to encourage users to vote and edit to make questions helpful to the world at large, not just to the asker, as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565764#565764&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I plan to encourage our community to grow larger—I've started a topic on Meta asking if anyone knows of any conferences (although I personally have doubts that any exist, but just in case) that we could promote ourselves at and I intend to continue to look for other ways to promote the site. I also intend to look into how we can ensure high quality of questions, but that's just a thought I'm working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565766#565766&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think leading discussions regarding decisions about administrative things like tags and FAQs is another important admin task that I intend to continue participating in. And of course, I intend to continue answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565781#565781&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I plan to continue to be involved in Meta discussions, asking questions and providing opinions, and I plan to continue to contribute a large number of quality answers to the main EL&amp;amp;U site.  I also plan to continue to be a Chat regular, so that people can talk to me about site business, English questions, or just get to know me better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565782#565782&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I hope to keep answering (and to a lesser extent, asking) questions to the best of my ability, because that's the one way to ensure the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565783#565783&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Oh, let's see. Tag hygiene. Approving edits. Hanging out on meta and in chat to quickly respond to any questions. Keeping an eye on the general quality of answers and gently pointing new users to features they might not be aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565784#565784&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I plan to become much more active on the meta, to participate in the discussions about the site's direction. I've lurked but not added much, seeing that the site already had a strong set of leaders, but as I'm looking to become such a leader, I would want to become more involved. ::edit:: and hang out in chat of course ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565790#565790&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Oh, and of course hanging out in chat and interacting with new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:10:28.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:12:11.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565824#565824&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; What is your favorite word in the English language?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565830#565830&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff That's easy: thwack. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565835#565835&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff superfluous. It just sounds so nice. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565841#565841&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff That would be an off-topic question for this site, so I haven't given it any thought yet. Perhaps amaranthine. Or the.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565845#565845&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff My favorite word in the English language by my usage, by what I think sounds coolest, or by what I am fascinated by? I have too many to pick just one. I may say 'Onomatopoeia' or I may say 'Indeed' or I may say 'Oy' (no not really on the last one, just a little meme humor injection) ... I like using &quot;50 cent words&quot; because they're all so expressive. So long as the word is expressive I love it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565865#565865&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff in the interest of blatantly seeking the sympathy vote, I will say that at my mother's funeral I used the word &quot;gracious&quot; to describe her and the way she led her life. I don't really have any other reason to like any word above all others, so I will choose that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565887#565887&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I don't think I could honestly give a single favorite, or even my top 10 —&amp;nbsp;but I often like words that push up against the edges of grammaticality, like &quot;forego&quot;: what's the simple past tense?  (I know the dictionary might say &quot;forewent&quot;... but is anyone comfortable saying that? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:12:11.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:12:44.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565853#565853&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Do you think the EL&amp;amp;U community generally *gets&quot; the SE engine?  What is something you think the community still needs education on, and how can you help improve this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565875#565875&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think that (as I mentioned before) &quot;downvoting means leaving a constructive comment&quot; is my biggest complaint on the site. Otherwise I think that in general the usage of the engine is understood. I would encourage users to understand that editing questions to make them less localized is a good idea. I refer to Jeff's blogpost at blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/… as reference for what I intend with the editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565879#565879&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff EL&amp;amp;U users have the common human failing of attachment, which leads to getting offended if their posts are edited or (gasp, horrors) closed. We need to reinforce the community-improved aspect of the site by encouraging editing and always commenting downvotes and close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565881#565881&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think sometimes there is a lack of clarity (sometimes I'm not sure myself) as to whether a response to a question is an answer or a comment. Sometimes there is a quick link or bon mot that kind of answers the question but not really. I think we could use some formal guidance on how to handle those kinds of responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565884#565884&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Generally, I think our community is somewhat familiar with the SE engine, considering how much voting takes place. However, I think that higher rep users aren't engaging in the close and delete actions that they should be working with, and we could work on that. There are two solutions I can think of: 1) The mods need to set an example, or 2) System messages. I'm not sure either of these solutions are optimal, but I haven't had time to give this a thorough level of thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565891#565891&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff There's a lot of confusion going on about how to format questions. There's a lot of janitorial editing to be done on a daily basis. Lately, we started to be seeing more comments posted as answers, and even some spam. But all things considered, this site is exceptionally tidy, I would say, and as far as higher privileges go (editing, voting to close, re-tagging), the community is rather well educated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/300?m=565909#565909&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I don't think there has been a major problem with understanding how SE works.  Aside from some comment/answer distinctions, I think things seem to work as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastEditorUserId="2259" LastEditDate="2011-02-25T22:36:21.400" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T22:36:21.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:13:34.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/4ba49e61d1be84ce3c3d84d10c7ed9d6?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Robusto&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1460/robusto&quot;&gt;Robusto&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565872#565872&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; What's the most recent book you've read, and how long ago did you read it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565888#565888&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto Native Son —I just finished it a few days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565894#565894&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto The most recent book I read is Foundation (for like the thirtieth time) and I finished it again around Halloween. I tend to read online more as I'm a programmer and a web addict, so I spend less time with dead trees and more time with growth and learning. The question was revised to include non-leisure reading, so I then change it to ASP.NET Unleashed for C# 3.5 and I refinished it sometime this month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565901#565901&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto It was something with zombies. Christmas present. I'll never get those three hours back. Before that it was &quot;Fevre Dream&quot; by George R. R. Martin. Also a Christmas present, also time I will never get back. :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565906#565906&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto I'm currently reading a Russian book titled &quot;В ночь большого прилива&quot;. It's a children's book by an author whom I enjoyed reading as a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565913#565913&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, about a month ago (then the school semester started back up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565914#565914&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Robusto The last book I finished reading cover-to-cover is On Cooking by Harold McGee, which I finished last week. I do read The New Yorker every week, though, and there are often very long articles...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:13:34.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:14:10.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08e5993e7842278d5a35f526c6a285e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Hellion&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2720/hellion&quot;&gt;Hellion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565885#565885&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Do you have any hopes, ideas or plans for improving, involving, or enlarging the EL&amp;amp;U community?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565904#565904&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Hellion As I said earlier, I've started a topic on meta about conferences, and I may expand that (if there really are no responses) to a general &quot;Who do you think would be interested?&quot; SE has said that they're willing to fund community expansion, so I think that's the first step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565921#565921&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Hellion Well, I hope to get my sister addicte[ahem, sorry] involved at some point - she's the one who minored in linguistics, after all. But other than that, this task smacks of marketing, at which I suck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565923#565923&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Hellion I prefer the site to grow organically, so I don't push it. I just continue posting links to selected questions here and there, mostly on Reddit. I also &quot;advertise&quot; certain questions in my user profile on other sites of the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565925#565925&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Hellion I have hopes for the EL&amp;amp;U community expanding, but really I would like to figure out how to get more engagement from the casual users. So some way to improve the conversion (to use sales terms IIRC) rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565927#565927&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Hellion I have posted a number of thoughts on Meta.EL&amp;amp;U about how to improve the way things work around here, as well as hone in on our community values and philosophy.  I would be interested in attending an appropriate conference to speak about the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565929#565929&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Hellion I hope that more folks with good formal educations in how grammar works come to the site and provide authoritative answers to some of the trickier questions we get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:14:10.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:15:32.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c383fbdeb4ad0d09e4dfb94165e7e89e?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Orbling&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2637/orbling&quot;&gt;Orbling&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565910#565910&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Recently, we are receiving an increasing number of &quot;What does [this] mean?&quot; questions, with various standard words, phrases, etc.  Generally by various members who have English as a secondary language and have been stumped by some sentence they read.  Are these to be encouraged, or do they detract from the more advanced content?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565922#565922&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling This really depends on the question. &quot;What does 'book' mean?&quot;—not encouraged, as it's too simple. &quot;What does [a particular convoluted or colloquial phrase] mean?&quot;—This I don't have a problem with, as even some native English speakers have no idea. Generally, I agree with Jeff's blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565937#565937&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling It really depends on what they're asking about. Sometimes those questions open up an interesting discussion about some nuance of meaning that is not covered by dictionary definitions. However, if a bare dictionary definition provides a complete answer to the question, with no additional commentary needed, then that is a low-quality question that doesn't really add much value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565940#565940&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling It depends: some of the questions about the odd expressions used by journalists have definitely taught me things I didn't know, despite being a native speaker (or as close as makes no nevermind). If the question can be answered by a simple copy and paste from a single dictionary, though, then the new &quot;too basic&quot; close option is the appropriate response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565941#565941&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling I think it really comes down to the answers.  Sometimes really poorly thought-out questions have led to brilliant answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565947#565947&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling Unfortunately, it's hard to tell whether questions are the former or the latter until answers have been posted, so I don't really have a good solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565948#565948&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling I think these are certainly encouraged, as the site is about the language and about usage, so we want to encourage people to increase the community knowledge in that regard. When it comes to &quot;what does this book mean&quot; or &quot;what's the intent of this thesis-work&quot; I don't know that that is the purpose of this site. It should be limited in scope to things which can be answered authoritatively. This includes regional interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565971#565971&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling That's a difficult question, actually. If you look at the questions on our meta right now, some people would like to put more stress on advanced questions for professional linguists and etymologists, while others would like to see more basic questions being allowed. A new close reason was introduced just recently, &quot;too basic&quot;. I must say I am not a fan of it myself, I would like to see how it works out in practice first. So I will definitely leave the use of that one to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:15:32.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:25:09.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c383fbdeb4ad0d09e4dfb94165e7e89e?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Orbling&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2637/orbling&quot;&gt;Orbling&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565942#565942&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; @nohat Yes, I guess I could rephrase my question to &quot;Should EL&amp;amp;U be used as a dictionary or thesaurus?&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565951#565951&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling Neither. It should be used as a collective compendium of accumulated knowledge. A dictionary is that, in part, as is a thesaurus, as is an encyclopedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565953#565953&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling I think there might be some value in putting links to dictionary/thesaurus sites in a front-and-center way on the question asking form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/565957#565957&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling Dictionary–no. Thesaurus–it depends exactly what the user is asking for. Is it &quot;What is a synonym for 'book'?&quot; or is it &quot;What is a synonym for 'censor' that doesn't have government connotations?&quot;. The more unique the question is, the better a chance that I'm going to like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566003#566003&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling I don't think we can have a black-and-white policy about dictionary questions; each question needs to be judged on its own merits. Though perhaps a meta post about what makes a good dictionary question (context, for example) would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:25:09.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:26:23.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c383fbdeb4ad0d09e4dfb94165e7e89e?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Orbling&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2637/orbling&quot;&gt;Orbling&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566020#566020&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Another question (do say stop if you want someone else to speak): English vs American&quot; - so many questions seem to have to be divided up along these lines, is this just inevitable, or can something be done to assist the process?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566033#566033&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling As it turns out, the differences between AmE and BrE are not that great, a few dozen questions probably will cover most everything. Once they've all been asked, future questions will just be closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566035#566035&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling Assuming you're talking about Br. Eng. vs. Am. Eng, I recently started working on the British English tag wiki and I plan to port some of that over to the American English tag wiki as well. But there's a limit to what can be done about it—Stack Overflow still sees questions routinely about parsing HTML with regex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566036#566036&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling I don't know that this can be prevented. I know that asking for context on the origination will help prevent some of this, but in this global society we must all understand that colloquialisms will come and go, and that intent is more important than specific words. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel that context is the key to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566048#566048&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling Questioners who are unaware their question involves a British-American difference are not a problem. As for answerers who don't know that their answer is biased, I at least try to comment to point out that their answer is only right or sensible for some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566054#566054&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling In the places where UK and US English differ, I think it is quite valuable to have this distinction pointed out in answers.  This is what is great about the SE approach; representatives from both sides of the pond can offer insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566066#566066&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Orbling I actually think that the opposite would be more damaging, if answers were not pointing out potential differences between AE and BE (and Indian, Canadian, Australian, NZ English, whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:26:23.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:26:54.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566056#566056&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566063#566063&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff First, talk with the mod. If consensus cannot be found, post it on meta and see what the community thinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566065#566065&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff For closed questions, I would leave a comment asking why it was closed, and move forward from there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566068#566068&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff in the case that a mod closed it, I would take it up with that mod and the rest of the mod community on the site. I would look for consensus and I would aim to have an understanding. If that means emailing them directly, or just leaving questions via mod flags, whatever it takes. If it was for something community closed, I would go to meta and ask for community discussion and understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566076#566076&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I would probably try to ping the mod in chat or some other semi-offline place and ask about their reasoning. Could be that one or the other of us is misinterpreting something. I would only take some sort of &quot;undo&quot; action if the site users were up in arms (e.g. comments or a plethora of meta threads).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566077#566077&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Hopefully the mod uses chat, because I would prefer to discuss it with him or her there.  I would probably otherwise leave a comment.  If it raised an important general question about how things should be done, I would bring it up in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566094#566094&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I would talk to that mod first. Probably &quot;behind the scenes&quot; (chat), as openly posting a comment on the site &quot;What gives, I wouldn't have closed this!&quot; doesn't feel right to me. If we cannot reach a compromise behind the scenes, we would take the issue to meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:26:54.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:27:20.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566089#566089&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; I actually have a question: What is your native language? (Some people answered this in their blurbs, but some of us were more, um, succinct.)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566099#566099&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Martha English. I have lived in the Northeast, Northern California, and the Midwest, so I have been exposed to a lot of US varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566100#566100&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Martha (see my profile :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566102#566102&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Martha Technically Cantonese (I use it at home), but I've lived my whole life in California, so for all intents and purposes, English. (I'm not even fluent in Cantonese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566103#566103&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Martha I'm a Southerner by birth, and so speak mostly broken English and procedural C-like languages. But to be serious: I speak English natively, I have some fluency in Spanish and German (so understand other cultures modes of sentence formulation and conjugation), and am a programmer so speak with a certain logic-oriented nature which comes off at times stilted. Like Spock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566113#566113&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Martha (To answer my own question, my first language was Hungarian; I learned English starting in kindergarten, in southern California. My mother's attitude was, why should she teach us [that is, my twin sister and I] her badly-mangled version of English when there are schools for that?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566122#566122&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Martha Both my parents are native speakers of Russian, so strictly speaking, my  mother tongue is Russian, and so is my father tongue. My step-father tongue is something different, but I am not going to disclose it here. Instead, I encourage people to join me in chat, where I'm giving away my second native language on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:27:20.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:27:46.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566107#566107&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Final thoughts?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/c4cca9bfec5d5e77f625d9fbe8e37a41?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drachenstern&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/888/drachenstern&quot;&gt;drachenstern&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566118#566118&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I enjoyed this opportunity to talk to some of the other mod-candidates, and want to wish everyone great luck. I'm proud to be on this panel, and glad for the opportunity to stand with these other fine candidates. Thanks @RebeccaChernoff for setting this up, and @Josh for tabulating this afterwards ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b64d136a3822a2e8194a583bb597ed99?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;nohat&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/470/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566119#566119&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think all the candidates here today would make excellent moderators. In my ideal world there would be 6 slots for all of us. I am confident the site will continue to flourish regardless of the outcome of the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b42f96ef8065395ec33446eb3526c1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/301/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566123#566123&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Thanks for coordinating not only this, but all the THCs. Good luck to everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/15e78fafab4bf6f1382005dc78099100?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Kosmonaut&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/479/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566125#566125&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I hope everybody who is running for a moderator job is going to keep being involved here (and those who are not of course).  I think non-mods can do a lot to shape this site and keep the mods on track. I definitely have had valuable input as well as constructive criticism while I've been a mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566128#566128&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I hope I haven't missed any questions, and I wish everybody good luck. Do vote! And yeah, do stick around whether or not the candidates of your choice get elected!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Martha&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/566131#566131&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Final thought: vote early, vote often. And no, I don't mean in the election (it's enough to vote there once), but on questions and answers. Use up those votes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:27:46.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="790" CreationDate="2011-02-26T01:52:47.567" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question that has been tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cv&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cv&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cv&lt;/a&gt;. I think the tag should be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/curriculum-vitae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;curriculum-vitae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;curriculum-vitae&lt;/a&gt;, or deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are now 13 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cv&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cv&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cv&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2012-12-08T13:20:15.407" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T13:02:20.590" Title="Rename or delete the &quot;cv&quot; tag" Tags="|feature-request|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="789" CreationDate="2011-02-26T03:30:32.730" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we really need a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cv&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cv&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cv&lt;/a&gt; tag, regardless of what it’s called? We’re not in the business of critiquing résumés.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-12-10T13:02:20.590" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T13:02:20.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="793" CreationDate="2011-02-27T23:51:37.100" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; page visible to all the users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-02-28T00:09:50.043" Title="Is the review page visible to all the users?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="792" CreationDate="2011-02-28T00:09:50.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Note how the page is still visible to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; if you log out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-02-28T00:09:50.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1421" CreationDate="2011-02-28T04:20:00.037" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modifier&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modifier&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modifier&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/attribute&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;attribute&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;attribute&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/attributive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;attributive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;attributive&lt;/a&gt;) could be set as synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modifiers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Modifier&lt;/em&gt; should have a meaning that includes the meaning of &lt;em&gt;attribute&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;attributive&lt;/em&gt;, even though &lt;em&gt;attributive&lt;/em&gt; is used to refer an adjective (or a noun) preceding the word it modifies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-26T12:49:11.947" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T12:49:11.947" Title="Set &quot;modifier&quot; and &quot;attribute&quot; as synonyms of &quot;modifiers&quot;" Tags="|support|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-28T18:38:59.070" Score="4" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed in questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/703/is-elu-becoming-esl&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/752/is-english-stackexchange-com-used-for-increase&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, there is the possibility of scope-creep on this site. Would it be beneficial to link to any resources that are better places than this site to start learning English? For example, could we add this to the &quot;About&quot; or &quot;FAQ&quot; page? I know they're basically boilerplate pages that all SE sites use, but we get enough questions about this that I think it's worth discussing the possibilities, or reasons why we shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1787" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T21:37:00.010" Title="Should we link to resources for learning English in order to prevent scope-creep?" Tags="|discussion|scope|site|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-02-28T23:08:50.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No living native or foreigner is 100% fluent in a language as large as English. There are shades of grey, and both natives and foreigners learn (if they want to) English in an incremental fashion, with natives having a head start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &quot;foreigners&quot; may have lived in US for 10 years, or have English-speaking parents, or went to an English high school, and or listen to country music all day long and/or watch American Sit Coms all day long. Therefore there is not a clear divide between educated natives and educated foreigners. Also consider the fact that different people put on different number of miles of English text read/written per year due to work  or hobbies. This relative rate of absorbing new material can have a large net effect over several years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not all-or-nothing when it comes to fluency in a language.&#xA;How about those who have been living in US for X years since they were Y years old (substitute any combination of X and Y here). I am not a native speaker, but I think I have developed an intuition for simple things. Yes, on occasion I screw up because I learned to say something in another language first, and have not learned the way to say it in English yet. With enough exposure this problem goes away. Another giveaway for a foreigner might be average length of sentences. Some languages encourage sentences that span 3 paragraphs; English does not. A foreign speaker might use more punctuation, but this is not a sure sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will still lose to a smart native speaker if we were both to take a GRE verbal exam. However, I would say that I confuse than / then, and there / their, your and you are less frequently than my comparable native peers - e.g. educated non-English majors and non-writers. I am paranoid about making mistakes, plus these phrases translate very differently, plus I am used to phonetic spelling, plus contractions such as they're you've, you're look retarded to me. For instance, &quot;you're&quot; is only ONE! character shorter than &quot;you are&quot;, and only because one has not (not one'snt :)) preserved a space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3971" LastEditorUserId="3971" LastEditDate="2011-02-28T23:22:30.820" LastActivityDate="2011-02-28T23:22:30.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2011-03-01T01:06:15.737" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One cannot because writing in in incorrect language is just author's peculiarity of style and individuality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jose' Saramago, the well-kown Portuguese writer-communist, wrote pages after pages in one string without any punctuation marks. He received the Nobel Prize for his literature works in such a style.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can aslo, for example, read &lt;a href=&quot;http://musique.ados.fr/Notre-Dame-De-Paris/Le-Temps-Des-Cathedrales-Bruno-Pelletier-t99643.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the comment to the text of &quot;Notre-Dame de Paris&quot; musicle&lt;/a&gt; song:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Que de fautes d'orthographe dans ces&#xA;  paroles, il est temps que le temps des&#xA;  cathédrales revienne...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to write in &quot;vivant&quot; language in completely correct, according to all rules, language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I daresay know my native language  but I rarely write correctly and do it on a plethora of reasons For example, my investor writes in incorrect language, if I respond him correctly, it will be rudeness and direct insult.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="3085" LastEditDate="2011-03-01T01:13:23.407" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T01:13:23.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="801" CreationDate="2011-03-01T15:50:45.197" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used my iPod to visit english.SE today and, differently from the usual, the site is not rendered correctly; the dominant color is gray, and the graphic elements are not present (e.g., the header image is not present).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/omoLD.png&quot; alt=&quot;iPod screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For who doesn't see the image in this page, the image is visible &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/omoLD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2011-03-01T20:08:24.027" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="english.SE doesn't render correctly on iPod" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="800" CreationDate="2011-03-01T16:40:19.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mobile browsers use &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/896/mobile-iphone-optimized-version-of-so/50689#50689&quot;&gt;a new &quot;slimmed down, minimalistic&quot; CSS theme&lt;/a&gt; as of today. This is the same for all sites, and does not (yet) include any site-specific colors or images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T16:40:19.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="747" CreationDate="2011-03-02T15:10:10.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a quick google search to ignite the discussion, as I would like very much to see more expert coming to the site, so I could learn from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isle-linguistics.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;International Society for the Linguistics of English&lt;/a&gt; organize a conference on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bu.edu/isle/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;June 17-21, 2011 at Boston University&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second I found mention of the Cambridge Postgraduate Conference in Language Research (also known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/camling2010/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CamLing&lt;/a&gt;). Until now, there is no information about the 2011 edition, and searching google about CamLing brings results about camping...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally I found a site listing conference on English Literature and Language. I wouldn't be able to found the good ones from the bad ones, so I will simply provide a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.conferencealerts.com/english.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T15:10:10.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="800" CreationDate="2011-03-02T23:24:01.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Correct, we are starting with some basic designs to test mobile rendering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The /minimal style is the &quot;hello world&quot; of mobile designs, it is the absolute minimal CSS and images necessary to render the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will be improving this over the next few months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T23:24:01.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9446" CreationDate="2011-03-03T04:12:04.803" Score="6" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were two questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-articles&lt;/a&gt;, and I changed the tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should we make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-articles&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:22:44.583" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:22:44.583" Title="Make &quot;indefinite-articles&quot; a synonym for &quot;indefinite-article&quot;" Tags="|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="808" CreationDate="2011-03-04T14:48:28.147" Score="9" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm looking for a &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt; (not just a word) that expresses a specific concept, should I still use the tag &lt;code&gt;single-word-request&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4744" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T14:14:35.437" Title="Use &quot;single-word-request&quot; for phrases?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="773" CreationDate="2011-03-04T15:01:06.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does &lt;code&gt;XYZ gesture&lt;/code&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is off-topic, while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is this gesture (&lt;code&gt;XYZ gesture&lt;/code&gt;) called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be within the scope of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4744" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T15:01:06.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="806" CreationDate="2011-03-04T18:32:41.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit April 12th 2011:&lt;/strong&gt; we now have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;. Let's see how it works out in practice. The original answer below should be ignored for the time being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no &quot;phrase-request&quot; (and I had to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/620/is-single-word-request-a-meta-tag-and-should-it-be-removed&quot;&gt;fight for keeping&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;), I would say that your best bet right now is to tag the question with both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt;. At least that's what I do in those cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First of all, that makes it easy to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests+phrases&quot;&gt;search for this type of questions&lt;/a&gt; (enabling straightforward retagging in case &quot;phrase-request&quot; does get introduced). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And secondly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; doesn't do any harm, as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are many &quot;actual&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;s to which the answer is &quot;there is no single word for that, but here's a phrase&quot;, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it might turn out that there actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a single word for the concept you describe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T14:14:35.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="811" CreationDate="2011-03-05T02:47:11.350" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2VM3h.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Chrome 11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Google Chrome   11.0.672.2 (Official Build 75134)&#xA;WebKit  534.20 (trunk@78450)&#xA;V8  3.1.4&#xA;User Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.20 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.672.2 Safari/534.20&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-03-05T03:40:04.290" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T09:10:57.243" Title="the user signature box drifting into the tag info box" Tags="|bug|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="809" CreationDate="2011-03-05T03:39:57.240" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not support beta web browsers. The current released version of Chrome is version 9, and you are &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; versions ahead of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15174/what-does-8-7c-stand-for&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;8/7c&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page looks fine in the current released version of Chrome 9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T03:39:57.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="809" CreationDate="2011-03-05T06:51:13.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue is that you are using a userscript that is adding the &lt;code&gt;revisions&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;timeline&lt;/code&gt; links.  This is pushing the signature boxes to the right - there isn't enough room there for the added links, an editor signature, and the owner signature.  Disable the userscript you're using and reload the page to see the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T06:51:13.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="813" CreationDate="2011-03-05T06:02:19.447" Score="5" ViewCount="3428" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/223/do-questions-asking-for-the-origin-of-a-word-and-the-etymology-of-a-word-ask-diff&quot;&gt;Do questions asking for the origin of a word and the etymology of a word ask different things?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see in this boards two tags:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-origin&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference in meaning between them?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" OwnerDisplayName="vgv8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-03-06T19:54:49.957" Title="What's the difference between &quot;word origin&quot; and &quot;etymology&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-03-05T08:45:46.797" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="812" CreationDate="2011-03-05T06:19:37.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Online Dictionary has &lt;em&gt;word origin&lt;/em&gt; meaning the original source of a word, and &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt; to include that along with the history and historical changes of a word. So &lt;em&gt;word origin&lt;/em&gt; is a subset of &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/origin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/etymology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" OwnerDisplayName="Brian Hooper" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T06:19:37.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="809" CreationDate="2011-03-05T09:10:57.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be issue with my userscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have moved timeline link to another line, so you may install it again here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/97069.user.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Install&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/97069&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4294" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T09:10:57.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="816" CreationDate="2011-03-05T20:42:39.843" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the right-side menu of the main and meta sites, the list of chat rooms include an unused, weirdly-named room. I'm afraid it not of much used on the main page, and can even be confusing to users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aPuvg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be removed from the list (or the chat room closed, if it's unused)? What's the procedure for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T23:44:28.970" Title="Weird, unused chat room showing up" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="815" CreationDate="2011-03-05T21:42:54.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The room poses no risk. It looks to me like somebody setting some kind of code/cypher challenge. Please let me know if people think this is on-topic/off-topic; if the latter (which is my guess), I'll kill it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: as the owner isn't active on English, I'm killing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3438" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T21:42:54.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="815" CreationDate="2011-03-05T23:44:28.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(The room was called &quot;Leet Speak&quot;, as written in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet_speak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leet Speak.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T23:44:28.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2011-03-06T09:41:57.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion: there are no &quot;common accepted online resources&quot;. Somebody may like one resource and somebody else may dislike it. It's a subjective matter. Even more, let's say we talk about dictionaries. One dictionary can have clearer definitions, other better etymology, yet other one a down-to-earth pronunciation guide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this website should endorse one website or other. It's also a matter of fairness-there are many websites out there about the language and new ones emerge rapidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if somebody asks for some specific resource, (s)he can be helped but we keep in mind that it is a &lt;em&gt;subjective&lt;/em&gt;, personal, suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-08-28T02:29:02.080" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T02:29:02.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2011-03-07T18:24:00.610" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like The Free Dictionary. It has a number of technical dictionaries as well as standard written English and some other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4973" LastActivityDate="2011-03-07T18:24:00.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-08T09:41:22.780" Score="7" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see some questions from time to time which ask about book recommendations. I could not find anything related to the &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; term on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; page. Is it allowed &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; should it be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples I can give:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15300/a-good-resource-book-for-literary-techniques-devices&quot;&gt;A Good Resource (Book, …) For Literary Techniques/Devices?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5846/learning-phrasal-verbs-and-idioms&quot;&gt;Learning Phrasal verbs and idioms (Which book(s) would you recommend for them?)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/976/books-on-articulation&quot;&gt;Books on articulation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7057/what-are-some-good-books-online-resources-for-growing-your-vocabulary&quot;&gt;What are some good books/online resources for growing your vocabulary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T14:54:36.993" Title="Are &quot;Book recommendations&quot; allowed?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="825" CreationDate="2011-03-09T08:55:47.970" Score="7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed recently some spam posts on EL&amp;amp;U. Maybe there already were before, but I've only started to notice them recently. They are true spams, i.e. some random content with a link inserted to a commercial website (for example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15630/meaning-of-frame-by/15632#15632&quot;&gt;meaning of &amp;#39;frame by&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flag such posts, surely others do, but I wondered what happens to the bot account who posted the spam: is it effectively deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T10:04:41.310" Title="What happens to spam and spammers?" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="826" CreationDate="2011-03-09T09:55:42.067" Score="9" ViewCount="1053" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is vgv8 suspended till 03 Dec 2013, after just being suspended recently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2012-10-30T02:55:34.480" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T02:55:34.480" Title="Why user vgv8 is being suspended again" Tags="|discussion|suspension|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="823" CreationDate="2011-03-09T10:04:41.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We banned that Chinese IP range a while ago -- simply flag such posts in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human entered spam is tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T10:04:41.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="824" CreationDate="2011-03-09T10:24:23.070" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, let's go for some opinion, rather than an actual answer: I'm not a mod, wasn't part of any discussion regarding vgv8 or suspension recently (well, some moaning on the chat, but nothing more). So, below are just my 2¢.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vgv8 user was first suspended on EL&amp;amp;U for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/742/how-should-we-handle-users-who-generate-consistently-low-quality-and-off-topic-qu&quot;&gt;stream of off-topic and low-quality questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;, after the discussion had a discussion on the issue. Since he came back 8 days ago, some statistics on his recent questions and answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 of his questions were closed (11 were kept open; that's 39% of off-topic questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;his answers gathered an average of –0.86 votes, which means he is more downvoted than upvoted (with some off-topic or wrong answers such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9340/is-there-a-better-noun-form-of-unreasonable-than-unreasonableness/15379#15379&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11818/what-does-the-phrase-its-like-groundhog-day-everyday-mean-and-from-whence/15509#15509&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; gathering scores down to –5)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;his questions continue to be a mess, with many updates, many questions and rhethorical questions packed into one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many of his comments are hardly understandable (with common themes such as he referring to himself as a “bot”, or “write-only”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I were to summarize why his behaviour annoys me, and why I think he should be banned for a long period:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While his style may be acceptable on some forums, it is definitely off-topic for a Q&amp;amp;A site. The low quality of questions and answers discourages existing users, and might put off newcomers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He shows &lt;strong&gt;no sign of improving&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular, he has not acknowledged the necessity to respect the topic and scope of the site. He has not participated in the discussion about the nuisance caused by his behaviour (no answer or comment from him on the meta discussion, though it has been repeatedly pointed out to him). There is also proof, from other sites of this network, that he has caused the same problems there, and not adapted his behaviour either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T10:24:23.070" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2011-03-09T12:59:30.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest since all these questions are requests for books about English Language and Usage, they are the sort of thing that should be encouraged. Recommendations about other books would, I'd think, be off-topic. (The one about Literary Techniques and Devices might be said to be stretching it a little, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T12:59:30.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2011-03-09T14:10:36.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about books seem off-topic to me, because in those questions the topic is not (strictly speaking) English language, but a book about English language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They seem also rather subjective or—in the case the question is not asking for a good book, the best book—questions where every answer is equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, I would think questions about books and websites should not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T14:10:36.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="824" CreationDate="2011-03-09T14:50:48.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jasper, if you haven't already, you may like to read my answer to another question on meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/728/why-is-this-place-becoming-so-mean-and-how-to-fix-it/750#750&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which gives some more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Full disclosure: I did actually encourage the mods to ban him again)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T14:50:48.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="831" CreationDate="2011-03-09T16:17:54.983" Score="4" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;As sub-question, would questions containing sentences like &quot;it really bugs me that people keep saying [...]&quot; be considered peeving?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="77" LastEditDate="2011-03-11T04:37:05.677" LastActivityDate="2011-03-11T04:37:05.677" Title="Should peeving disguised as question be closed as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="830" CreationDate="2011-03-09T16:39:43.647" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as there's an actual &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; beneath the peeve, I'd allow it. Hopefully the top-voted answers will redirect the asker's futile rage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd worry more about &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that are just an expression of personal peeves, but the community is very good about voting those down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-03-09T16:39:43.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="830" CreationDate="2011-03-10T02:52:35.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where &amp;hellip;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is a rant disguised as a question: “______ sucks, am I right?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T02:52:35.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="834" CreationDate="2011-03-10T08:56:54.640" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not from an English speaking country but on few occasions I have to write some English text. Of course to the best of my abilities. But since this text should be as formal as possible (and grammatically correct as well) and is not related to business (meaning there's no budget for translation services) I would like to know whether it would be possible to submit my English translation for correction to this Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just happen to have a text of about 400 words that needs to be checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2600" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T09:00:46.340" Title="Sending a question with translated text to English for checking purposes" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="833" CreationDate="2011-03-10T09:00:46.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/327/how-about-allowing-people-to-post-entire-compositions&quot;&gt;proofreading&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/282#282&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T09:00:46.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2011-03-10T14:54:36.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about Books and Websites should be allowed and it is allowed and worked very well on Stackoverflow where books programming books questions are frequently asked and also one with lots of votes.  If English Grammar books are considered off topic then shouldn't it be a rule for StackOverflow as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please correct me if I am wrong.  I am new to Q &amp;amp; A sites.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5887" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T14:54:36.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="837" CreationDate="2011-03-11T18:32:24.400" Score="1" ViewCount="1177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to create an exception for the minimum answer length for questions tagged &quot;single-word request?&quot; It seems wasteful and inconvenient and seems feasible from a coding perspective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4973" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-12-17T11:30:13.473" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T11:30:13.473" Title="Exception to 30 character minimum for answers" Tags="|feature-request|answering-advice|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-03-11T20:22:32.573" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply link the word to its dictionary definition. Observe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghoti. — 6 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ghoti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ghoti&lt;/a&gt;. — 56 characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pushes your answer over the 30-character limit &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; makes it considerably more helpful, as the OP might not know that word. In fact, that might be the very reason why he's asking for it in the first place. And even if he does recognize it, other/future readers might not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; the site engine has since been changed such that URLs no longer count towards reaching the character limit. What I recommend now is that you quote the relevant dictionary definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ghoti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ghoti&lt;/a&gt;, noun&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  (&lt;em&gt;rare, humorous&lt;/em&gt;) Alternative spelling of &lt;em&gt;fish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the link should still be included as well, in fact now even more so than before, because otherwise it's not clear where your quote is from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-10-12T10:24:27.943" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T10:24:27.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="839" CreationDate="2011-03-12T15:46:32.673" Score="6" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;If my question applies to multiple SE sites (e.g. &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Writers&lt;/em&gt;), is it ok for me to cross-post the same question to these sites, or is that practice frowned upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16087/please-help-me-improve-this-sentence&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; because it concerns grammatical correctness, but I would find it equally suited on &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; because it deals with writing style. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4744" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-03-12T20:03:17.410" Title="Is it ok to cross-post questions?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="838" CreationDate="2011-03-12T20:03:17.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting is strongly discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you feel a question is relevant to two different communities, &lt;em&gt;provided you edit and tailor the question to each community&lt;/em&gt;, it can be OK to ask in both places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very important that you actually phrase and structure the question to target it specifically to the community of writers vs. the community of English language wonks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-12T20:03:17.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="824" CreationDate="2011-03-13T03:24:36.707" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/798/how-to-spot-a-native-english-speaker-on-internet-and-on-business-correspondence&quot;&gt;question dated March 9&lt;/a&gt; and responses would certainly be a contributing factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2011-03-13T03:24:36.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="845" CreationDate="2011-03-14T18:09:16.747" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;My fiancé doesn't remember the OpenID she used to log in on english.SE, and she didn't enable the browser she used to remember the login data.&#xA;Is it possible for her to get the OpenID she used to log in on english.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-11T20:21:35.427" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T20:21:35.427" Title="Is it possible to recover the OpenID used to log in on english.SE?" Tags="|support|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-14T20:08:11.390" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Couldnt find any documentation on this, but are we allowed to say post a paragraph of our writing for the community to look at and point out say errors, better word choice, sentence formatting, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4947" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T20:09:10.680" Title="Are we allowed to ask for critiques or opinions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="843" CreationDate="2011-03-14T20:09:10.680" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be better suited for &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about these topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please proofread my document (&amp;quot;are there any mistakes in this text?&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to improve my English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1871" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T20:09:10.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="842" CreationDate="2011-03-14T21:55:07.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If she can find the specific account, then it may be possible to do so &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; she edited her profile to include her email. In all likelihood, she will have to contact team@stackexchange.com to resolve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T21:55:07.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="847" CreationDate="2011-03-16T11:34:46.533" Score="4" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do suspended users see the &lt;em&gt;This account is temporarily suspended.&lt;/em&gt; message other users see? Do they also see when the suspension ends?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T10:43:36.643" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T10:43:36.643" Title="Do suspended users see when they are suspended and how long they are suspended?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="846" CreationDate="2011-03-16T16:20:53.603" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, timed-suspension messages are visible to all users of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-03-16T16:20:53.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="849" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="850" CreationDate="2011-03-17T21:12:58.590" Score="6" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;user-location&lt;/code&gt; span doesn’t use all the available width in the &lt;code&gt;user-info&lt;/code&gt; div, though the &lt;code&gt;user-tags&lt;/code&gt; div does, thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0Nmz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CSS bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2988" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-03-18T08:35:47.050" LastActivityDate="2011-03-18T08:35:47.050" Title="On Users page, location is truncated even though horizontal space is used for tags" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="849" CreationDate="2011-03-18T08:35:38.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, I see the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    .user-details&#xA;    {&#xA;        width: auto;&#xA;    }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-18T08:35:38.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="854" CreationDate="2011-03-22T05:44:07.793" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a post is flagged for moderator attention, does the flag expire, or is it visible to the moderators whenever they check the list of the flagged posts?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I know that comment flags age away after 4 days, but is that valid also for &quot;moderator attention&quot; flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T15:07:52.437" Title="Do flags for moderator attention expire?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="853" CreationDate="2011-03-22T06:01:48.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/raising-a-red-flag/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt;, they expire after two days. Of course, that was two years ago, and a lot has changed since then, so this may now be significantly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, moderator flags should not be ignored for so long that they expire—they should either be attended to or dismissed by the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T06:01:48.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="853" CreationDate="2011-03-22T15:07:52.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderator flags do not expire. In fact, even if they are dismissed, they will reappear if someone else flags the same post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T15:07:52.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="856" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="858" CreationDate="2011-03-22T15:35:57.890" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to vote a comment, but I got the following message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Daily vote limit reached; vote again in 8 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean there is a limit for the comment votes, or does the message simply mean I can vote comments when I have not reached the daily limit for question/answer votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-23T02:53:34.377" Title="What is the daily limit for comment votes?" Tags="|support|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="860" CreationDate="2011-03-22T15:41:51.003" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I notice that the number of views for a question I asked is 1, right after I posted the question. Does the view count include also me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T20:17:44.657" Title="Question view count" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="856" CreationDate="2011-03-22T16:49:29.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a limit. If I am not awfully mistaken, it is still at 30 comment votes per UTC day (at least that's where &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/comments-now-with-flags-and-votes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this old blog post&lt;/a&gt; puts it, and I can't remember it having been raised or lowered since).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T16:49:29.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="457" CreationDate="2011-03-22T17:40:10.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a straight quote from RegDwight's comment above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As far as the rep is concerned, I wouldn't worry too much. Revenge downvotes are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/vote-fraud-and-you/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;detected and removed by a script&lt;/a&gt; that runs daily. (The same goes for upvotes by sockpuppets.) Check your rep report tomorrow. – RegDwight♦ Nov 30 '10 at 19:07&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came looking for an answer to this question and felt it deserved to be an actual answer instead of a (highly voted) comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T17:40:10.587" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-03-22T17:40:10.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="857" CreationDate="2011-03-22T20:17:44.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never seen questions with zero views, so I think it includes you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T20:17:44.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="856" CreationDate="2011-03-23T02:53:34.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fairly commonly reach my vote limit on answers/questions, and as far as I recall, I'm still able to upvote comments when that happens. So it seems there are separate vote limits on comments and on questions/answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-03-23T02:53:34.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="863" CreationDate="2011-03-23T16:40:20.153" Score="8" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar-checker&lt;/a&gt; seems a misused tag; in some cases, it seems more appropriate to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar-checker&lt;/a&gt;, or does the tag have a purpose and we should write the Wiki page for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:19:31.343" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:19:31.343" Title="What should be done with the &quot;grammar-checker&quot; tag?" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="862" CreationDate="2011-03-23T17:16:54.727" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two are the only questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar-checker&lt;/a&gt; that actually belong there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2993/1547&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2993/1547&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1120/1547&quot;&gt;Microsoft Word&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;fragments&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of those, the first would arguably be closed if it were asked today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other questions in the tag either belong under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, or somewhere else entirely (judging by all the [closed] questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be best to remove the grammar-checker tag altogether, because it's not serving much of a purpose other than to confuse people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-03-23T17:16:54.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-23T19:02:29.273" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there should be a single thread for proposed tag synonyms, but I'll go ahead and leave this relatively generic in case that's desirable (and assuming there's not already a thread for this I've missed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One issue that might be controversial is the fact that &quot;common use&quot; and technical meaning may not by identical.   This could be a problem when using or misusing tags like homophones, homonyms, look-alikes, and homographs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I see that much of this has been discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/181/tags-and-technical-terms&quot;&gt;Tags and technical terms&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are users expected to correctly tag these?  Should there be a single catch-all (or catch-many) category?  Or should corrections be up to other users, possibly leaving these changed and/or corrected without comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, here are a couple that look like they should be merged or synonymized:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt;--&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt;--&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4912" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T08:29:15.487" Title="Tag synonym suggestions" Tags="|feature-request|tag-synonyms|tagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="866" CreationDate="2011-03-24T21:27:28.880" Score="12" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a significant number of questions worded as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between [first word] and [other word]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of differences are really interesting distinctions that stimulate excellent answers. Others are completely inane and could be solved by simply pulling up the words in your local dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't personally have a problem with this form of question but I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; getting a little tired of feeling like the person asking the question is (a) really lazy or (b) already knows what the answer is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most charitable view would treat these questions as coming from people who do not know English well or those genuinely curious about the finer points of word definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The least charitable view would treat these questions as coming from people who are completely unable to find interesting questions to ask so they recycle old questions with new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fine answering these until the cows come up but I had not noticed a meta discussion about it and wanted to hear what the community thinks of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also: Is there a good tag to use to stick all of these into the same bucket?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-03-26T21:17:18.767" Title="What standards do we want when asking for differences between the meanings of words?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-03-25T00:02:31.143" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the simple part: the appropriate tag for these types of questions is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, guidelines: well, a question that provides the context (&quot;I'm writing [x] and need a word for [y]. Does [word A] or [word B] fit better?&quot;) is likely to be of higher quality than one that does not, but the implication doesn't always work in the other direction. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9901/for-instance-vs-for-example&quot;&gt;What is the difference in usage between &amp;quot;for instance&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;for example&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; doesn't really provide any context, but is nonetheless a good question because of the nature of the expressions it's asking about. Which is hardly helpful for a guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it comes down to the same sort of advice as we can give for any other type of question: make sure it's not trivial, phrase it so it can be answered, and provide as much context as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T00:02:31.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-03-25T05:43:55.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't personally have a problem with this form of question but I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; getting a little tired of feeling like the person asking the question is (a) really lazy or (b) already knows what the answer is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a serious danger sign, and should be heeded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the point where questions are turning off avid users because they are lazy or trivial, &lt;strong&gt;those sorts of questions should be disallowed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is completely fair to enforce the &quot;please don't ask trivial questions&quot; rule on any site in our network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you can close all of these lazy/trivial questions as a duplicate of some canonical, generalized version of the question, but I don't think that works in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T05:43:55.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-25T15:03:12.863" Score="6" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, there are just two questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/foreign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;foreign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;foreign&lt;/a&gt;. Do we really need it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T11:26:00.337" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T11:26:00.337" Title="Do we need the &quot;foreign&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-25T15:51:17.500" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;? Isn't there any other tag that would, even partially, be used instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;? For example, the history of a word is its etymology; if I am asking for the etymology, I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T18:34:36.427" Title="Usage of the &quot;history&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="864" CreationDate="2011-03-25T16:03:51.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Orthography&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the conventional spelling system of a language.&quot; &lt;em&gt;Spelling&lt;/em&gt; generally refers to how a word is written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that most of the questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; should be really tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt;, if they are not questions about the conventional spelling systen of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt; seems more abstract than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;. If I would have to choose between the two, I would opt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T16:03:51.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="868" CreationDate="2011-03-25T18:30:08.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am under the impression that unused tags are automatically pruned from the system. If they get used, great. If not, they are cleaned out. We won't need to deal with that manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T18:30:08.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="869" CreationDate="2011-03-25T18:34:36.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17773/what-is-the-historic-process-for-converting-vulgar-words-into-simply-rude-words&quot;&gt;What is the historic process for converting vulgar words into simply rude words?&lt;/a&gt; fits a tag of history. The question is asking about more than the history of a specific word but rather an entire group or class of words. The language-evolution tag was apt so I also chose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not strongly attached to any of the tags and would be happy with any decisions so long as the tags themselves get a good description of what should be in that category. If, for instance, the etymology tag's wiki told me that it was most appropriate for the type of question I had asked I would have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T18:34:36.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2011-03-25T19:41:18.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be best answered by a dictionary. Examples: Tenses, simple definitions, pronunciations. Exceptions can be made for unusual, uncommon or archaic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T19:41:18.843" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-03-25T19:41:18.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="876" CreationDate="2011-03-26T15:32:45.993" Score="9" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; is used in many questions, but it doesn't seem to have a specific meaning. All the questions are about words, even the one asking about a phrase or a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should remove the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2705" LastEditDate="2011-03-28T01:07:07.883" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T03:36:48.590" Title="Removal of the &quot;words&quot; tag" Tags="|feature-request|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-03-26T21:17:18.767" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meta- meta-answer (to the relevant meta-meta-question) should be &quot;Err or the side of allowing rather than disallowing&quot;. The reason is that you (as a seasoned reader) should be able to see for yourself that a question of that type dies not interest you...one should expect that not all questions would be interesting even in the general area of your greater interest (this particular stackexchange), and for these kinds of questions the form has obvious markers to tell you to avoid it. Others may like such questions, so err on allowing them so that others can look at them and discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, sure, the direction of these 'difference' questions could be stated better, but sometimes that's a product of the nature of the casual user who 1) would have questions of that sort and 2) not be able to articulate it in the best way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-03-26T21:17:18.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="874" CreationDate="2011-03-26T21:52:03.200" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I kind of agree, and there is a similar problem in that I don't know what the distinction between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; is. If anything, they should be made synonyms. I would vote for making &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; because the latter I think has a sense of being about the words themselves rather than the words simply being there as part of a question about something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-03-26T21:52:03.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="883" CreationDate="2011-03-26T22:09:39.660" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a best practice for giving sources after definitions, etc. (in posts)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've typically just added a &quot;from New Oxford American Dictionary&quot; at the bottom but was wondering if there's a better way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T05:33:44.790" Title="Best practice for indicating sources" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="881" CreationDate="2011-03-27T02:58:17.060" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compounds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compounds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compounds&lt;/a&gt; is without Wiki page. It should be good if the tag would have it, as the tag seems used for different purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I just noticed there is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-sentences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-sentences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-sentences&lt;/a&gt; tag. Do the tags have the same meaning, or are they used in totally different questions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If there other tags that can replace &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compounds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compounds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compounds&lt;/a&gt;, then it should be removed, as @waiwai933 suggests, or made a synonym for another tag, as suggested by @RedDwight in another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-03-27T22:24:08.717" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Add a Wiki page for the &quot;compounds&quot; tag, or replace it with another tag" Tags="|feature-request|retagging|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="880" CreationDate="2011-03-27T03:48:47.707" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious but what happens if you &lt;em&gt;accept&lt;/em&gt; an answer after you've already &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the original answerer lose the points and the new one gain them?  Is it even possible to change your accepted answer (it appears as though it's possible since the button isn't disabled)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3294" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T04:17:49.657" Title="Changing accepted answer" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="879" CreationDate="2011-03-27T04:17:49.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can change your accepted answer indefinitely, forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can only do it once every 24 hours as I recall, to prevent weird rapid accept change gaming issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T04:17:49.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="878" CreationDate="2011-03-27T05:16:32.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a bigger problem inherently here—there are both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-sentences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-sentences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-sentences&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-words&lt;/a&gt; (although we haven't used that tag on E.SE). We should probably retag each of the questions to the right tag, and then have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compounds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compounds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compounds&lt;/a&gt; added to the blacklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've submitted a suggested edit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-sentences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-sentences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-sentences&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quick draft for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-words&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compound word is a word that has two or more word stems. They can be classified either semantically or formally, and both classifications are described below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantic classifications&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Endocentric—where the compound word's first stem marks a special type of the second stem (e.g. &lt;em&gt;dark&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;room&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exocentric— &lt;em&gt;? (I don't like the Wikipedia definition and I can't come up with a good one myself)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copulative—where the compound word's stems are the sum of the two stems (e.g. &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appositional—where the two stems make up different facets of a role (e.g. &lt;em&gt;maid&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;servant&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compound words can also be classified &lt;strong&gt;formally&lt;/strong&gt;, where there exist &lt;em&gt;noun-noun compounds&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;verb-noun compounds&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;verb-verb compounds&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;compound adpositions&lt;/em&gt;. The derivations of the classifications is easily understood except the fourth, which is made up with a preposition and a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Derived from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)#Compound_adpositions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, licensed under CC-BY-SA&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/79000/&quot;&gt;MSO question about using WP articles&lt;/a&gt; (for those of you that are curious).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T05:16:32.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="884" CreationDate="2011-03-27T05:25:01.967" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/878/add-a-wiki-page-for-the-compounds-tag/881#881&quot;&gt;Add a Wiki page for the &amp;quot;compounds&amp;quot; tag, or replace it with another tag&lt;/a&gt;; when that task has been completed, and no question is tagged with &quot;compounds&quot;, we would probably need to blacklist the word to avoid it gets used as tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Blacklist &quot;compounds&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="877" CreationDate="2011-03-27T05:33:44.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's perfectly fine. In fact, if you're really in a hurry, just type &lt;code&gt;(NOAD)&lt;/code&gt;—it's on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-noad-esl-pie&quot;&gt;list of abbreviations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option would be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;([source: NOAD](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/147/))&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; which produces the following (a smaller typeface and a link to the abbreviation list):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/147/&quot;&gt;source: NOAD&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T05:33:44.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2011-03-27T13:09:57.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hold on a sec. When I hear &quot;compounds&quot;, I don't think of compound sentences. I think of compound words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Compound (linguistics)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while having both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-words&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-sentences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-sentences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-sentences&lt;/a&gt; — as proposed in that other question — might make sense, I don't see how that would mean that we must throw &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compounds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compounds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compounds&lt;/a&gt; away. If anything, it could be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-words&lt;/a&gt; (though I would probably favor the exact opposite thing, i.e. making &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-words&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compounds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compounds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compounds&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blacklisting is there for really awful, utterly useless tags people resort to when they can't think of anything remotely meaningful. Blacklisting is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for well-established linguistic terms that people have all the right in the world to use. There's a reason why mods cannot blacklist, only devs can. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19018/implement-a-tag-black-list/49418#49418&quot;&gt;Quoting Jeff&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;it's something the dev team has to enter because it's so dangerous to get wrong. We work with the existing site moderators to determine what's bad enough to be blacklisted. It has to be quite bad.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T13:09:57.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="889" CreationDate="2011-03-27T18:03:59.043" Score="7" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary-building&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary-building&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary-building&lt;/a&gt;. The tag should be deleted, and the questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:18:47.857" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:18:47.857" Title="Merge the &quot;vocabulary-building&quot; tag with the &quot;vocabulary&quot; tag" Tags="|support|status-completed|retag-request|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="887" CreationDate="2011-03-27T23:08:59.543" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the state of the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; as I wrote this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://img.skitch.com/20110328-g4yjs4hw5x7j2mt7i13rggakty.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;usage tag&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the the tags page, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; appears with the first seven words of the excerpt truncated, rendering it mostly useless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://img.skitch.com/20110328-xswpkydqfu6467ubxhk4qjyidy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;truncated on tags page&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the tag popup shows an outdated version of the except, containing the redundant &quot;Questions concerning&quot;, which I removed yesterday:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://img.skitch.com/20110328-ngfj3py7ptcg31fehga698nx45.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;outdated popup&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T13:22:52.773" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T13:22:52.773" Title="Tag excerpt inconsistently displayed" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="886" CreationDate="2011-03-28T01:30:51.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Temporary invalid popup was a caching bug (fixed - to be deployed later)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently this is the regex that we use for shortening: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;       @&quot;^.{0,40}?&#xA;            (&#xA;            (this\stag\s(is)?\s?)  # this tag .. this tag is|about ...&#xA;            |&#xA;            (used\sto\s)           # this tag is used to ...&#xA;            |&#xA;            (the\s[^\s]+\stag\s)   # the {foo} tag ...&#xA;            |&#xA;            (the\stag\s[^\s]+)     # the tag {foo} ...&#xA;            |&#xA;            (\s(is|are)\s)         # blah blah blah is|are ...&#xA;            )&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;are&lt;/code&gt; is hitting in the first 40 chars, so its dropping stuff before it. Can you rephrase it so this filter does not hit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T01:30:51.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="885" CreationDate="2011-03-28T22:08:45.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I know what either of those mean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are hardly any &quot;vocabulary-building&quot; ones, so I'd just delete those (or reduce to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We probably don't need both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;and possibly neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4912" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T22:08:45.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="893" CreationDate="2011-03-29T03:14:18.420" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a few questions or answers with &quot;Hello!&quot; or &quot;Hi!&quot; in them. Is it safe to ignore these or should I edit them out? And, since they are new users, is there a tactful way to respond &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; editing them out? They shouldn't feel they have done something terribly, horribly awful but I don't know how to do that without leaving a comment explaining myself every time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What should be done about in-answer or in-question greetings?" Tags="|discussion|editing|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="874" CreationDate="2011-03-29T03:36:48.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aren't all possible uses of 'words' already more usefully sub-categorized?  Etymology, grammaticality, word-choice, meaning/semantics, slang, spelling, nouns, verbs, et al.  I'm not sure the 'words' tag adds anything.  It's a meta tag that really doesn't seem to do much work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4912" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T03:36:48.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-29T07:55:50.563" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm with English Language &amp;amp; Usage forum almost three months, but still not clear about the difference between 'Up-vote' and 'Accepted' answer. What does come up when I click Check (Accepted) mark vis-a-vis Up vote mark? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2011-03-29T10:17:01.953" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T16:33:37.723" Title="What is the meaning and function of 'accepted' answer in English Language &amp; Usage forum?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="890" CreationDate="2011-03-29T09:03:19.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be, but only if you have another reason to go in and edit -- salutations, greetings, and taglines (thanks!) are always candidates for removal if you have reason to edit a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not, however, edit a post with the &lt;em&gt;sole&lt;/em&gt; reason of removing these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-and-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should &amp;#39;Hi&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;thanks&amp;#39;, taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T09:03:19.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="892" CreationDate="2011-03-29T09:26:38.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I, as the question owner, found this particular answer most helpful for &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt;. We view it as more of a social convention than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it also has a few effects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gives answerer +15 rep, gives you +2 rep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;docks&quot; the answer to the top of the answer list regardless of sort order&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-03-29T16:33:37.723" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T16:33:37.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="896" CreationDate="2011-03-29T10:57:00.750" Score="26" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be quite happy for someone to correct a minor spelling error in an answer (or question) that I posted.  Would that offend some people? Or is there another reason that it is not allowed?  This restriction makes sense on the other stackexchange sites but here it is a different situation because English learners who come here should be able to expect that examples and definitions are correctly spelled.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastActivityDate="2012-01-01T01:51:39.880" Title="What is wrong with single character edits?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="895" CreationDate="2011-03-29T11:36:34.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the post otherwise &lt;em&gt;so perfect&lt;/em&gt; that it cannot be improved &lt;em&gt;in any other way?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow, I doubt that. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the restriction is that suggested edits are peer approved; they take time and effort for your fellow users to read and process. That is why we ask that your edit suggestions please be substantive improvements, at least 6 characters' worth. I do not feel this is an onerous requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you do, then earn 2k rep at which point you can make all the 1 character edits your heart desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T11:36:34.617" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="898" CreationDate="2011-03-29T13:01:43.393" Score="1" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;In english.SE, the quotation mark (&lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) used in the title is replaced by a smart quote. Are they visible in all the browsers, in any platform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8YI9c.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-03-29T14:04:24.583" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T18:16:44.003" Title="Are the smart quotes used in question titles seen using all the browsers?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="897" CreationDate="2011-03-29T18:16:44.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are output in the HTML code as &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;ldquo;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;rdquo;&lt;/code&gt;, so they should be supported on all reasonable browsers on all reasonable platforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T18:16:44.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="864" CreationDate="2011-03-29T18:43:47.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not excited about either of these categories, but I can see their utility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/esl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;esl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;esl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend merging those.   I think ESL is more appropriate, but I don't know if it is better or worse as a tag for those who need it.  'Learning' is too general, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4912" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T18:43:47.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="512" CreationDate="2011-03-31T13:56:25.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically it could not be proof-reading, and there surely are other questions I don't like answering. I admit that I have also asked questions about sentences I thought not correct (even though I didn't express my judgement to not influence who answered), and most all the sentences I asked for contained an error, or they could have better expressed in a different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation reminds me of what happened on &lt;em&gt;Programmers&lt;/em&gt;, which was accepting every subjective questions (if they are not subjective, then they should be asked on Stack Overflow), but then introduced a limit requiring the questions to be constructive. By the definition they gave to constructive questions, they must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;// ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;// ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our case that would mean that a question asking if a sentence is correct, and to which one could also reply with a &quot;yes&quot;, is not enough constructive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the question would ask about between two different way to write a sentence, or would compare two different sentences, or simply would contain an explanation why the OP finds the sentence correct or not, the question would inspire answers that explain both why and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't like in those questions is the fact the question title is the same for more questions or it is too generic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The fact the user keeps to use almost the same title for consecutive questions suggest me that for the OP the question he is asking are related to each other, like if the OP would be ask about sentences he find in the same text. The fact the OP doesn't use a title more specific for the questions seems to me as if the OP didn't take too much effort in asking the question; we all could have used titles such as &quot;Am I correct?,&quot; &quot;Is this correct?,&quot; or &quot;Truth or phantasy?&quot; for each question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the fact to be worried about such questions. I would be personally more tolerant about questions that can easily be answered looking at a dictionary, rather than to questions about the correctness of a full sentence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's my personal opinion, indeed, and these are my two cents. (By the way, why do we say &quot;my two cents?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-02-21T23:38:39.603" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T23:38:39.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="902" CreationDate="2011-03-31T14:32:19.740" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I placed a bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt;, expecting to select the bounty winner &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the 1 week period had ended (assuming that this would allow everyone who might be interested to have a chance at providing a possibly winning answer.)  This morning I went to choose the bounty winner and discovered that the bounty had disappeared and I can only select the winning answer but not assign the +100 bounty to the submitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to that bounty?  Why can't I wait the full 1 week before selecting the winner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3800" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What happened to the bounty I placed on one of my questions?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="901" CreationDate="2011-03-31T16:46:39.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 1-week time period is an &lt;em&gt;upper&lt;/em&gt; limit. If you don't select an answer before it expires, a winner will be auto-selected to receive &lt;em&gt;half&lt;/em&gt; of the bounty; the winner is the highest scoring answer which was posted after the bounty started (if there is a tie, the oldest wins). If the would-be winner has fewer than 2 votes, no answer receives the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/12727/revisions&quot;&gt;the revision history&lt;/a&gt; that Community chose an answer. That is how an auto-award is displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;the bounty section of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (a link to which is shown when you start a bounty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T16:46:39.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="901" CreationDate="2011-03-31T16:47:54.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;answer here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happens if there's no answer after the bounty period?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is automatic awarding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end of the bounty period, if the bounty starter has not manually awarded the bounty, eligible answers can be automatically awarded half the bounty amount. The criteria for an answer to be eligible for automatic awarding are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* The answer must be given after the bounty was started&#xA;* The answer must have a score of at least +2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If two or more eligible answers have the same score, the oldest answer is awarded the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If no answers meet these criteria, the bounty ends without it being awarded to any answer, and is not refunded to the bounty starter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An accepted answer that does not meet the above criteria is still ignored by the automatic-awarding system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing the 'Wife' answer was selected automatically because it had the same score as the 'Limerence' answer but was a little older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3800" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T16:47:54.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="910" CreationDate="2011-03-31T18:11:31.407" Score="20" ViewCount="1069" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18649/what-is-the-pejorative-for-people-who-only-practice-their-faith-while-at-the-plac/18697#18697&quot;&gt;What is the pejorative for people who only practice their faith while at the place of worship?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whited sepulchres. This is what they&#xA;  are called in that noted work of&#xA;  fiction &quot; The Bible&quot;, King James'&#xA;  Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this joke OK? If not, what should be done about it? Should it be flagged, edited, commented on, ignored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I heard someone question this joke. I believe he has flagged it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T08:37:11.107" Title="Are minor jokes in answers and questions OK when they are slightly discriminating against certain groups?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-03-31T18:19:43.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, innocent jokes like this are perfectly fine, Left Head. I make them too. A long invective against religion is not OK, of course; but this is a minor thing, just a matter of style. Someone else might post in reply &quot;I'm sure the Devil will find that entertaining: you should repeat it when you get down there&quot;. Okay, this wasn't particularly funny, but I am trying to come up with some innocent example quickly. The current taboo on discrimination, arbitrarily limited to a few random topics (such as sex, race, religion), is very strong already in society at large: we should not go even further by censoring what no sane person would take offence at. Just ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-04-01T02:07:13.813" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T02:07:13.813" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-03-31T18:27:23.630" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of note, we were &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/765437#765437&quot;&gt;discussing this in chat&lt;/a&gt; at the time I flagged the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is multi-part: I don't see a reason to allow &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; trolling or flamebait answers. It doesn't matter if the answer is only slightly trollish or hateful or inflammatory. These things are not necessary to discuss English and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't think jokes are something that should be given a pass on any of the other rules on the site. An inappropriate joke is still inappropriate and should be removed. An off-topic joke is still off-topic and should be removed. Leeway for things not causing problems are fine or jokes that are on-topic or part of a larger answer are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to this particular instance, the joke is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; innocent in the sense that it will not offend anyone. Taking a dig at a particular religion should be considered reasonably offensive and action should be taken. In this case, the joke was not tasteful or purely humorous. It was a callout against all people who consider the Holy Bible non-fiction. In addition, it had absolutely no relevance to the topic on hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial decision was to edit the joke out and leave the answer alone. Cerberus rejected the edit and the conversation linked above ensued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2011-03-31T18:43:07.257" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T18:43:07.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-31T22:16:28.733" Score="15" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before adding a votable answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;on-topic-off-topic question&lt;/a&gt; I figured some discussion would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are typography questions on-topic or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18718/why-theres-a-difference-between-the-two-common-appearances-of-the-letter-a&quot;&gt;Why there's a difference between the two common appearances of the letter “a”?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18794/is-there-a-special-name-for-letters-that-cross-the-line-when-written-in-lowerca&quot;&gt;Is there a special name for letters that “cross the line” when written in lowercase (g, j, p, q, y)?&lt;/a&gt; was left alone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; exists and has two unclosed questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T14:46:15.120" Title="Are typography questions on-topic or off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-03-31T23:31:13.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; are about the usage of capitalization in nouns, and how blockquoted texts should be formatted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first question is not about typography, and the tag should be removed. The second question correctly tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; and it should probably be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that could be closed is old; I don't think it is worth closing it after so much time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T23:31:13.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-04-01T03:26:58.393" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, I guess I agree that if a significant number of readers find something offensive (whatever their reasons), and if as in this case it isn’t specifically needed for the sake of the discussion at hand, then it should probably be removed in the name of politeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other, I would urge readers to try &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to be offended by something like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I hear other people making fun of beliefs that are important to me, I may argue back and defend my position; I may turn aside and mock their position in turn; I may just bite my tongue and shrug it off; I may even realise that they have a point, and that some things I believe actually can look a bit silly from another point of view!  But &lt;strong&gt;as long as it isn’t causing anyone substantive harm&lt;/strong&gt;, then as far as I’m concerned, &lt;strong&gt;they should be allowed to say it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sometimes, offense can itself arguably be substantive harm — if eg it perpetuates prejudice towards groups who still do suffer consistently from discrimination.  But I don’t think that argument can be made in this case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T03:26:58.393" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-04-01T03:38:18.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typography, as a subject, shouldn’t in my opinion be considered on-topic.  But it has some overlap with EL&amp;amp;U, and questions within that overlap should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, both the linked questions are — while certainly related to typography — also reasonably related to EL&amp;amp;U.  They’re about the alphabet, and how it’s used in English, and how it came to be used the way it is today.  That seems fairly on-topic to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T03:38:18.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-04-01T08:20:40.453" Score="36" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This joke is not particularly funny.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a distraction from the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;em&gt;religious&lt;/em&gt; joke, so it will offend some, rightly or not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it is a net negative in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T08:20:40.453" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="914" CreationDate="2011-04-01T10:56:36.280" Score="27" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering—if we find an old question without an accepted answer, are we allowed to answer? Or should we expect down-votes for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's a stupid question but I didn't find anything referring to this matter either in the FAQ's section or in previous questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="2705" LastEditDate="2011-04-01T22:48:38.560" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T07:02:52.517" Title="Is it OK to answer to old questions?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|answer-howto|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="913" CreationDate="2011-04-01T11:44:23.930" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with that, quite the opposite.  In fact you can even win a nice shiny badge by reviving and answering an old question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T11:44:23.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-01T13:27:00.397" Score="14" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Big Three&lt;sup&gt;TM&lt;/sup&gt; sites get sparkly unicorns today. Where are &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; sparkly unicorns? I feel unloved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-04-01T13:54:26.643" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T14:43:42.760" Title="Why aren't there any unicorns?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="913" CreationDate="2011-04-01T13:55:09.913" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always answer a question, even if it has already an accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T13:55:09.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="915" CreationDate="2011-04-01T14:00:18.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The unicorns are in the garden. Eating roses and lillies. That's how they roll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see at least two of them right now, just by looking out of my browser window:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vGqtj.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, if you can't see something, that means that you must have a bug installed in your PC. Simply remove it, and everything will work again. Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T14:00:18.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="915" CreationDate="2011-04-01T14:43:42.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;haha I didn't realize this! =P I just came here from SO &amp;amp; meta to see what the unicorns looked like here and there aren't any! =( How sad! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly Jeff &amp;amp; Team thought it would (in some way) scare/confuse people new to the site and/or the whole stackexchange concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the people who've hung around meta a little know about the sick desires SO folk have for unicorns, waffles, ponies , freehand circles, jquery etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1742" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T14:43:42.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-04-01T19:51:27.060" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a general note, I have noticed several times that there are a few people in this community who &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; what's right and what's wrong and who are determined if not to foster the former at least to extirpate the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a technical forum.  Many people unavoidably sport many opinions.  Even in technical forums there are many different truths, explanations, visions and solutions.  Furthermore, the most powerful and elegant scientific breakthrough in mankind's history started from non conformism (relativity, antibiotics, plate tectonics to name only a few).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closer to us, it is a well accepted view that the English language we are all fond of owes its richness and its universality to its openness and its multiple facets.  We as a community could probably take this as an example and should avoid trimming out or putting off members who fall slightly out of the template (defined by who ?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's stay curious, not self righteous.  Let's not confuse good taste protection with censorship.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In reality, provocation finds its justification in censorship and unconsciously begs for it.  Obliging is the best way to nurture it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cautious observers might have noticed various occurrences of valuable new members quickly achieving high rep scores and then simply vanishing away as if not interested any more.  Our nascent community is already gaining a lot of momentum, let's not cripple it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 2cts of course; after all I've been &quot;here&quot; only for a few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind Regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5432" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T19:51:27.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="913" CreationDate="2011-04-01T23:03:06.037" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it is OK to answer old questions. And it does not at all matter whether the question has an accepted answer. You should only expect to be voted down if your answer is generally misinforming, inappropriate, or simply not up to accepted standards. Normally, the worst case would be no vote at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post an answer to a question over sixty days old and you are able to garner five up-votes from that answer, then you will be awarded the silver &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/44/necromancer&quot;&gt;Necromancer&lt;/a&gt; badge. If you fall into the happy situation of being the first to answer a question that is more than thirty days old and you gain two up-votes for this, then you receive the bronze &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/62/revival&quot;&gt;Revival&lt;/a&gt; badge, which is even rarer, as most questions get answered within the hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you are encouraged to provide answers to all questions, however old they maybe, and especially if you have a fresh perspective or new insight into the matter at hand. I often dig deep into the site looking for old questions to answer and I recently got rewarded for one such answer. Even then, I had to wait for almost three months for the reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In closing, I will point you to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-the/11411#11411&quot;&gt;evergreen question&lt;/a&gt;. If you feel so inclined, definitely post an answer, and you may well be rewarded for your efforts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2705" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T23:03:06.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="913" CreationDate="2011-04-03T07:02:52.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excellent! You might also be interested in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I suggest answering any questions, even old ones, that you feel are interesting and can be interesting to others. There is value in answering questions that have nad no recent activity -- this bumps the question naturally, and if I see a good answer, I will &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; upvote it, regardless of how old the question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this assumes the original question is interesting enough for me to click on in some way -- if it's a really bad question (title, etc) or an extremely obscure topic. However, this can often be fixed with editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, now that &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/suggested-edits-and-edit-review/&quot;&gt;we have anonymous and low-rep edit suggestions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;I would &quot;punch up&quot; the question as well when answering&lt;/strong&gt;, to maximize the chances of people seeing both the question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; your (excellent, of course) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T07:02:52.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="923" CreationDate="2011-04-03T11:39:26.027" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators, could you please delete the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pharase&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pharase&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pharase&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opposites&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;opposites&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;opposites&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contradictions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contradictions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contradictions&lt;/a&gt;? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="513" LastEditDate="2011-04-04T03:58:13.723" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Delete some useless tags" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2011-04-04T03:57:45.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So long as they aren't attached to any questions, they should automatically disappear within 24 hours. If that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; happen, please report it as a bug!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T03:57:45.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-04T12:07:43.083" Score="8" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is prompted by a discussion in comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19074/what-is-a-feminine-version-of-guys/&quot;&gt;this question about a gender issue&lt;/a&gt; in English.  Comments I (and others) made against Caleb's answer gradually veered into a more general discussion of discrimination, and precisely to avoid getting too deeply into gender politics, I used a more neutral example.  But this example ends up in a place only marginally-relevant to Caleb's answer.  And a general discussion of unconscious prejudice may be interesting, but is clearly off-topic at English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more formal SE site than this I'd delete my comment as steering too far off-topic from the answer.  On a different English.SE question I'd not have entered the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, the question is expressly &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; a gender issue in language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We certainly don't want to prohibit or discourage questions about discrimination in language and how to avoid it (which was the context here)!  Answers to such questions will inevitably touch on such issues - how can they not?  And I can't find a point at which my discussion with Noah in comments completely ceases to be potentially of interest to someone reading this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I'm drawing the line in the right place here, so I've left the discussion as is and I'm soliciting community opinion.  Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2106" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T00:58:48.940" Title="When does discussion veer off-topic in questions related to discrimination in language?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="929" CreationDate="2011-04-04T13:20:13.767" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I tried expanding the list of comments of an answer, but it doesn't work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I tried also on Stack Overflow, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77694/how-to-quickly-theme-a-view&quot;&gt;How to quickly theme a view?&lt;/a&gt; and I was able to expand the list of the comments for that question. It seems it is a issue on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U and SO report to be using different revisions of the software; while Stack Overflow uses the 2011.4.4.1 revision, EL&amp;amp;U uses revision 2011.4.4.4.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Still, when I tried on programmers.SE (e.g. on &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/46716/what-should-a-developer-know-before-building-a-public-web-site&quot;&gt;What should a developer know before building a public web site?&lt;/a&gt;), I was able to expand the list of comments. It seems the problem is specific to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Firefox 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Expanding the list of comments doesn't work" Tags="|bug|status-completed|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-04-04T14:30:38.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like the bug happens when you link to an answer, i.e. the end of the URL contains a # followed by an answer ID. If you delete the # sign and everything after it, then expanding comments works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember seeing this before, so it definitely seems like a new bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm still on Firefox 3.6.16, FWIW.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T14:30:38.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="924" CreationDate="2011-04-04T18:57:58.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect on a stricter stackexchange site, that question would have been closed as “subjective and argumentative” — it’s certainly on-topic, but it’s very hard to imagine any authoritative, objective answer for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions like that one are allowed, then longer and more disputative comment threads seem an almost inevitable consequence.  So long as they stay on-topic, polite, and preferably high-quality (i.e. opinions backed up by facts/sources as far as possible), my vote would be to allow them.  I’d feel really uncomfortable with a policy saying in effect, “Yes, this answer was controversial; and yes, your response is good and relevant; but no, you shouldn’t post the response here!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if we should be a little readier to close questions for subjectivity here in the first place.  They’re very interesting to discuss; but SE is quite deliberately designed to not be a discussion board, thus giving rise to problems like the current one.  I’m not sure — I have very mixed feelings about this issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T18:57:58.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="924" CreationDate="2011-04-04T22:32:17.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the mentioned question without thinking of what kind of answers it might attract. I don't think the question is subjective or argumentative, or rather as far as word choice goes they can always be subjective and argumentative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word meaning (and word choice) is vague and subjective; dictionaries are just not comprehensive enough, and much of our common word knowledge is functional, we can have specific thoughts about them but they've never been expressed in words before, and questions like this help do that expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words have stigmas and auras attached to them that are hard to ignore by quoting them. Talking about profanity elicits reactions near to reactions of the real use the profanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was happy with the most of the main responses. People didn't start talking about feminism itself; but (for the most part) they talked about how outside real world forces modify how people choose the particular words (staying on topic, informed by these outside influences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my back-and-forth with those who seemed to be carrying things away from the central topic..well..I don't think the topic was always coherent and when it was obvious it was off topic, I stopped replying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to discussion board...I'd prefer a little better allowance for discussion. Answering a question is not always a yes/no situation, or here is &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another question that could easily go quite astray (into flame wars) on a general newsgroup: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19221/meaning-of-western-world-and-alternative-terms&quot;&gt;Meaning of Western world and alternatives&lt;/a&gt;. It requires thinking about subjective feelings of the meanings of words without judging the appropriateness of those meanings (It's hard to talk &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; a word when it may be taken to be &lt;strong&gt;used&lt;/strong&gt; towards the hearer). But the participants seem to be controlled enough to realize they're all talking about what the words mean rather than whther it is right or good that such a word meaning exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T22:32:17.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-04-05T00:14:56.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now fixed, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85884/add-comment-flag-delete-links-are-broken/85895#85895&quot;&gt;Add comment, flag, delete links are broken&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T00:14:56.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="924" CreationDate="2011-04-05T00:58:48.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a relative newcomer to the site, and arguably not really qualified to contribute to this debate, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just been through this question, and it seems to me that many answers and comments (in particular the later comments to Caleb's answer) did indeed drift hopelessly off-topic. What you gonna do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(btw - the bottom line is I'm in total agreement with everything PPL says)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That particular question was always likely to generate a certain amount of peripheral comments and discussion, but clearly it would be at least theoretically possible for the thread to have remained strictly on-topic. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; many useful things that can be said about language &amp;amp; usage in this area without descending into a general discussion about discrimination in language (or worse, in society at large). It seems a high price to pay if the question can't be addressed at all simply because of what should be peripheral issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might it not be possible to simply adopt a convention whereby users are encouraged to add a 'boilerplate' post &lt;em&gt;at the comment level&lt;/em&gt; saying &lt;strong&gt;This thread may be drifting off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; where appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be somewhat less draconian than flagging or closing, wouldn't require moderators with limited resources to take on extra responsibilities, and might well help to concentrate minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T00:58:48.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="982" CreationDate="2011-04-05T13:39:47.430" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please explain why, in the list of &lt;em&gt;Answers&lt;/em&gt; in my User Profile, some entries are highlighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-26T20:25:59.653" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T20:25:59.653" Title="What's the significance of highlighted Answers in my User Profile?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="933" CreationDate="2011-04-05T14:16:32.373" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted Karl's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19147/why-do-we-say-expletive-all-for-nothing/19240#19240&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; through carelessness and ignorance, but I can't now reverse my vote. Is there any way round this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still (forelornly, it seems) hoping for more feedback on the question. I now realise I've probably been mistaken for decades in thinking that the &lt;strong&gt;Fanny Adams&lt;/strong&gt; origin of &lt;strong&gt;Fuck All&lt;/strong&gt; was an urban myth. But I can't help thinking there's some 'hidden' principle allowing this apparently quirky turn of phrase to become so widespread, with such a range of different expletives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any more definitive exposition of this principle (MrHen's answer moves in that direction but doesn't quite do it for me), I feel I must formally &lt;strong&gt;Accept&lt;/strong&gt; Karl's answer. Does this mean I may as well abandon all hope of anyone else posting an answer that addresses the underlying mechanism facilitating the widespread adoption of the usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T18:28:08.033" Title="How do I reverse an erroneous downvote?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="932" CreationDate="2011-04-05T15:04:30.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To reverse a vote, click the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; arrow again. If the vote-changing window has expired and your vote is locked in, I believe it is acceptable to edit the answer (adding an invisible comment, for example), and then revoking the mistaken vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T15:04:30.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-04-05T16:10:25.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess this is entirely down to personal taste, but people should probably not be subject to discriminatory or sarcastic answers to legitimate questions. Essentially it just adds to the level of noise, and in this particular instance, is likely to cause offence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the original question has put the emphasis on the wrong thing, essentially asking how &quot;offensive&quot; is someone allowed to be. Really the question should be along the lines of how much &lt;em&gt;noise&lt;/em&gt; is preferable in questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most people would agree that clear, straight-forward answers are preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastEditorUserId="5432" LastEditDate="2011-04-06T21:16:17.757" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T21:16:17.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="937" CreationDate="2011-04-05T19:19:52.543" Score="12" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/19585/revisions&quot;&gt;edited my question&lt;/a&gt;, moving the question mark outside the quotation marks. This is not correct usage in the U.S., as it is in International English. Which convention does english.stackexchange.com itself follow, when an issue like this arises?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6968" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T00:21:33.010" Title="Does english.stackexchange.com itself follow American or British (International) usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="936" CreationDate="2011-04-05T19:40:08.320" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimi's edit is correct. In American English, periods and commas always go inside quote marks, while question marks follow logic. In British English, they all follow logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T19:40:08.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="936" CreationDate="2011-04-05T19:58:51.270" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;@jasper clarifies your particular case.  But answering the title of this question more broadly: I think the general policy has been that either is acceptable — each contributor writes in their own variety of English, and one shouldn’t “correct” someone else’s post just to change it from one reasonably standard variety of English to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T19:58:51.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-05T20:13:12.843" Score="12" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s been a lot of discussion already (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144/find-in-dictionary-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/598/should-we-require-some-reasonable-research-being-done-aka-questions-that-can-be&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) of what kind of questions are too basic — and the rough consensus seems to be that if a question can be answered from just &lt;em&gt;standard reference sites that everyone can be expected to know&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. Google, Wikipedia), and doesn’t encourage better answers in any way, then it’s too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff has even said he’s considering a new “reason to close”: something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;general reference&lt;/strong&gt;: this question is too basic; the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d love to see that implemented!  But it isn’t yet… so in the mean time, how should we respond to questions like this?  Close them for a not-quite-accurate reason, or tolerate them until “general reference” rtc is available?  Politely explain in the comments why they’re too basic?  Answer, or refrain from answering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19617/what-do-a-m-and-p-m-mean-stand-for-when-talking-about-time&quot;&gt;“What do a.m and p.m mean / stand for when talking about time?”&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T14:11:36.280" Title="How to respond to dictionary/“general reference” questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-05T23:34:29.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really get the fundamental objection to accepting 'trivial' questions. Is it that they dilute the quality of the site's more 'interesting' content? That they waste the finite resource of moderators' time? I genuinely don't know, and would be interested to find out to what extent all advocates of the proposed restriction agree on a single commonly-held reason for the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself (if I were King here, and resources were not an issue), I'd positively &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; the first Answerer to post a LMGTFY link wherever appropriate. And use an informal 'code of ethics' or tweak the rep system to &lt;em&gt;discourage&lt;/em&gt; later viewers from adding any further posts. Unless they have something important to add that actually &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; relevant to OP (in which case they can remove the LMGTFY link, or hope someone else will if they don't have the rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit I'm a noob here, and if there is a 'mission statement' for the site I haven't read it (I did look, honest!). So maybe I don't get much of a vote. But I think the whole concept of the site is brilliant - it covers an area dear to my heart, and I'm somewhat fascinated by this weird combination of Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, what-have-you user interface features, that seem to evolve before my very eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my approach were carried through properly, all Google &lt;em&gt;what does xyz mean&lt;/em&gt; queries might start coming straight through to english.se. So what? There are plenty of people to post a LMGTFY, and it's done &amp;amp; dusted. The site could start its own online dictionary word-by-word, gradually redirecting the LMGTFY links to what would eventually be the biggest &amp;amp; best language reference on the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short - come one, come all. Let the programmers figure out some more tweaks to the UI and data storage facilities so it all works out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T23:34:29.963" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-06T03:00:22.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dislike the flip answers such as &quot;try google&quot;. They don't show respect for the poster. Usually the poster is naive about the site and its norms, and is easily put off by answers like this. It's better to answer the question briefly and then suggest to the user that other resources better answer the question. For example if someone asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does household mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suitable answer would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many definitions that can be found using the Google search &lt;em&gt;define: household&lt;/em&gt;. Note that there is no space between define and the colon (:). Google will provide a list of definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the suggestion of adding a new close reason for questions that are too basic, provided it informs the user where these basic answers can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6304" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T03:00:22.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-06T09:02:19.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was contemplating a very similar question myself, after reading that and several other trivial word-request or dictionary lookups.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There appeared to be a sort of consensus that those questions could be closed as off-topic for now, as done &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13562/what-is-a-spouse&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit disappointing to see those questions you feel have no merit get voted up of course but there is a deeper issue here about what an SO site is trying to be.  Some have said that the ambition is to become the primary link when someone types a question into google.  I don't agree with this blanket statement, though I really dig how this place works and have already learned much in a short time here, I just don't see it as an alternative to, say, a dictionary.  If your question can be answered by using an immediate reference source then that is probably already the best resource to use.  We should do one thing really well.  If we try to do more than one thing, like being a dictionary, that will be a detriment to other things we do, the unique things, the really great things... the reasons people came to be interested in this site in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T19:16:27.500" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="932" CreationDate="2011-04-06T18:28:08.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To do this after some time has passed, you'll have to edit the post or get the post edited.  Then you can reverse your vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Whether this is kosher or not depends on the content of the edit, or the disposition of the Cabal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4912" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T18:28:08.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-06T19:28:26.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is to &lt;strong&gt;close them as off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;. I tend to flag them as off-topic or ignore them but would much rather get clearance to simply flag them all for closure than wonder which ones really deserve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T19:28:26.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2011-04-06T21:48:14.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;{Off-topic}&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typography questions that do not already qualify for one of the other topics listed as on-topic. In other words, typography questions are not in and of themselves enough to considered on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/908/are-typography-questions-on-topic-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;See previous discussion.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T21:48:14.350" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-06T21:48:14.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="948" CreationDate="2011-04-06T23:34:54.847" Score="16" ViewCount="1598" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing old questions and answers and bumped into an odd scenario: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9915/can-paper-bag-mean-any-bag/10080#10080&quot;&gt;Can “paper bag” mean any bag?&lt;/a&gt;. An excerpt from the accepted answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Almost all on-line dictionaries define paper bag as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;A bag made of paper or plastic for holding customer's purchases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did some quick research and added a comment voicing my opinion that the online dictionaries were in error. The actual question for meta is this: How trustworthy is WordNet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;'s definition for &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=paper%20bag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper bag&lt;/a&gt; appears to have been copied onto &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paper+bag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.reference.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/paper+bag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thefreedictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;. Both of those sites credit WordNet; &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/faq/#defs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet credits itself&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing other searches (such as &quot;bag&quot; or &quot;paper&quot;) reveal WordNet as merely a part of a larger body of sources for those two sites. It appears that WordNet is just being picked up as one of the many sourceable dictionaries available to compilation sites. For comparison, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paper%20bag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; choked on the query for &quot;paper bag&quot;. Google's &lt;code&gt;define:paper bag&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=define:paper%20bag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pointed back&lt;/a&gt; to WordNet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until today I had been blindly trusting the internet's dictionaries. It appears that there may be a few caveats. Namely, I need to start checking where the definitions are actually coming from. The first step in this, for me, is asking about WordNet. Does anyone else have any opinions or experiences with WordNet, good or bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T09:12:41.333" Title="How trustworthy is WordNet?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2011-04-06T23:36:35.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find myself occasionally using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, especially when Etymonline is being unnecessarily cryptic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T23:36:35.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="946" CreationDate="2011-04-07T00:24:45.403" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hm. I'm not sure WordNet is actually giving that definition for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;paper&lt;/strong&gt; bag.&lt;/em&gt; I think the definition is of the synonym set &quot;sack, poke, paper bag, carrier bag&quot;. Naturally, since very few synonyms are exact, some of the words in the list don't match the definition completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I agree that it's confusing to state it that way. The bigger problem is that the various other sites that import the definition from WordNet don't preserve the synonym list, and thus end up giving a misleading definition for &lt;em&gt;paper bag&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking up &lt;em&gt;paper bag&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=paper%20bag&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OneLook&lt;/a&gt; Dictionary Search, it links to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wordnik [this is another aggregator, which shows definitions from WordNet, American Heritage Dictionary, Century Dictionary, Wiktionary, GNU Webster's 1913, and &quot;elsewhere on the Web&quot;. Of those dictionaries, only WordNet is listed as having a definition.] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dictionary.com ( = WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &quot;A paper bag or paper sack is a preformed container made of paper, usually with an opening on one side.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rhymezone ( = WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Dictionary ( = WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mnemonic Dictionary ( = WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WordNet 1.7 Vocabulary Helper ( == WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus ( = WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TheFreeDictionary.com ( = WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OneLook indexes a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?d=all_gen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lot more dictionaries than that&lt;/a&gt;, but it appears most of them do not have an entry for &quot;paper bag&quot; (understandable, given that the meaning of the compound is exactly equivalent to the sum of the meanings of its components).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I don't think we can condemn WordNet based on one confusingly-worded definition (for a term that probably doesn't need a separate dictionary entry in the first place). However, it's definitely a good idea to have another dictionary in your arsenal, one that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; just crib from WordNet. Alternatively, if you're only going to bookmark a single online dictionary, make it an aggregator such as Wordnik or OneLook, instead of a single-source dictionary such as Merriam-Webster, Wiktionary, or WordNet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T00:24:45.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-07T09:44:07.867" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19769/first-second-and-third-person-perspectives-in-interactive-media&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within minutes of posting the question it was closed, and I am still confused about why.  There are the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe it's me, but I don't see the question about English? – Alenanno &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a linguistics question, but not an English question. If you'd like a Q&amp;amp;A site for such questions, I recommend supporting the proposal for linguistics.SE. – Kosmonaut♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which I replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Alenanno Sorry to see the downvote(s). The question is, what are the definitions of first, second, third person? How are these definitions applied to games? This is a question about the definition of words in English. The video games stuff is just the motivation for the question. Is this off-topic? &#xA;  @Kosmonaut I just looked at the Area51 site for linguistics.SE and see that &quot;what is the meaning of [word] in [language]?&quot; is a &quot;great example of an off-topic question&quot;. That is the heart of my question here, it's just a dictionary didn't quite cut it for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conversation continued a little more between Alenanno and myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not happy with the way that my question was dealt with.  I still do not understand why it was deleted.  Indeed, in another &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/502/why-was-my-question-closed&quot;&gt;question on meta&lt;/a&gt;, a moderator states &quot;really has little relevance to a site for questions asked by &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&quot;.  I do not really care to make a big deal out of the &quot;linguistics is on or off-topic&quot; issue, because as I said in my reply to Kosmonaut, the site for linguistics.SE has the core of this question as a specific off-topic example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe my question is very much related to the usage and meaning of words in the English language, and feel quite unhappy at having my question closed without any attempt to ask for improvements (as I have seen done on many other SE sites) or even giving the asker the opportunity to edit.  I do not understand why it was dealt with in this off-hand fashion.  If my question was unclear, then I could have edited it to make it better.  If my question was off-topic, and it was closed as such, is the discussion of the definition of words and concepts in the English language off-topic?  Because I see plenty of those questions open.  Even one of the questions which I answered was on the usage and meaning of &quot;gearing up&quot;.  How is this any different at all to my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel such incidents set a poor precedent for future unfortunate closures of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6734" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T18:27:15.890" Title="Why was my question closed?" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|deleted-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="959" CreationDate="2011-04-07T12:00:15.770" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-number&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pluralization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pluralization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pluralization&lt;/a&gt;, or should the tags be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does using both the tags in the same question means anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-04-07T21:28:56.620" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T23:22:36.417" Title="Is there any difference between the &quot;grammatical-number&quot; and &quot;pluralization&quot; tags?" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="957" CreationDate="2011-04-07T12:04:01.867" Score="5" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is asking the etymology of the name of a town on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T13:29:20.093" Title="Is asking the etymology of the name of a town on-topic?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="951" CreationDate="2011-04-07T13:21:49.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would vote that it is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;. The problem with names and towns is that you need a very specific history of that town. Deciphering that usually will not reveal any interesting tidbits about the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: I currently live in a town called Tyler. Tyler is a completely unremarkable word but I am sure there is a colorful history about how it got its name. That history has nothing to do with &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; and everything to do with politics, sociology and etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the name of a town, I still vote it &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; unless the word has already met the criteria for on-topic. In other words, it being a name of a town does not move it from off-topic to on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, names of companies are probably not on the list of valid questions. The history of &lt;em&gt;Microsoft&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Ikea&lt;/em&gt; are probably really interesting. But they have little to do with the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T13:21:49.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-04-07T13:33:44.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not involved in closing the question but I actually agreed with the decision. My opinion can be summarized as such: (a) &quot;interactive media&quot; is off-topic (b) perspective in interactive media is even more so (c) the question was not clear (d) the clarifications of the question did not help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read the question I cannot find a question about the English language. Your clarification seems to ask for a definition of three terms but you said you already checked the dictionary and... then what? They didn't do it for you? What does &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; mean? The dictionary will tell you what those terms mean. If you need clarification on the definition it would probably be better to actually ask &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question. As it is, I took the question to be asking a technical question about interactive media. To which it seems you should go find the experts on interactive media and ask them the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the way your question was dealt with, someone asked for a clarification and you gave one. The person who asked for a clarification needed &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; clarification and even your meta question here still hasn't told us why the question relates to the English language. At the time of my answer here, the question is at -2 and a moderator has given you an explanation in the form of a comment. In addition, the only answer to the question answers what all of us thought the question was asking but you responded by saying it wasn't actually answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; you asking? And why does it matter to the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T13:33:44.837" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-04-07T18:27:15.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just seen this question and several hours passed already, but since I've been mentioned, I'd like to say something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like MrHen said, and like I said through a comment under that question, the problem was that inside your &quot;topic&quot;, I couldn't found a question related to English usage or English grammar, syntax, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't wanna repeat the same things over and over, because they have been said already and I think you understood. You said you were not happy about how the closing-question was dealt with, but as you see there is support and people are going to be here for explanations and help. The Meta section is here in order to avoid &quot;polluting&quot; the other section with non-strictly English usage related question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T18:27:15.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2011-04-07T18:36:53.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with who says it's a subjective matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or better I think it can be so to a certain point. If I want a serious definition and I can access to any resource in a library (for example) I will not just look for any dictionary but rather look for the better ones, same goes for other situations, such as the one related to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who studies languages is aware this, being more familiar with dictionaries and language studying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to use the Oxford English Dictionary, which usually provides good  resources about Etymology, but I have found myself using also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; too. I think those two are the most known among English learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T18:36:53.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="144" CreationDate="2011-04-07T19:58:22.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think posting on the FAQ that users first check online dictionaries before posting these types of questions would be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion a great example of an &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; question is:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;2 second google search&lt;/strong&gt; would have revealed this answer.  Not only do questions like this contribute nothing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to the site, other than entertainment value, but they also have a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; impact as well.  Users will think EL&amp;amp;U is nothing more than an online dictionary, just like some think SO is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77812/difference-between-stack-overflow-and-a-wiki&quot;&gt;nothing more than a wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  They will leave before giving the site a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't we encourage questions that demonstrate a minimal level of research?  We should encourage questions that are &lt;strong&gt;practical&lt;/strong&gt;, that &lt;strong&gt;solve a problem&lt;/strong&gt; users could not easily solve in a couple seconds in another manner. I say we should close questions like this regardless of how popular they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="846" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T23:25:56.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="951" CreationDate="2011-04-07T21:09:52.323" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with MrHen: place names often preserve interesting meanings of words, or arise from surprising roots, mainly because of the English tendency to &lt;s&gt;totally mangle&lt;/s&gt; change the pronunciation over time. Their etymology is part and parcel of the English language. (My favorite example: &lt;em&gt;Strangeways&lt;/em&gt;. My sister could elaborate more accurately, but I believe it comes from Old English words meaning something like &quot;place which is subject to strong flooding&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that etymology is not the same as persona story, or &quot;the amazing but true [read: completely made up and historically impossible] account of how our town got its name&quot;. The latter would indeed be grossly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that this really only applies to place names in England - place names in the US, for example, are often of Native American, Spanish, or Random-Made-Up origin, so their etymology is likely to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-04-08T16:58:10.543" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T16:58:10.543" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-07T22:57:47.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standard does not mean reliable.  also google doesn't answer questions, users may have doubts as to whether google search results are credible or accurate.  this should not be grounds for removal/closing, although, combined with other reasons, may affirm a closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6057" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T22:57:47.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="950" CreationDate="2011-04-07T23:22:36.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.  I already made plural and singular synonyms for grammatical number. I will do the same with pluralization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T23:22:36.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="936" CreationDate="2011-04-08T02:09:26.110" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would definitely avoid making &quot;corrections&quot; that are really just editorializing in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think an error is only truly an error if it's wrong in both British and American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T02:09:26.110" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="946" CreationDate="2011-04-08T08:03:13.010" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with what Martha stated.  I'd like to point out that WordNet isn't a dictionary per se, but is called a lexical database.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;About&lt;/em&gt; page&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article&lt;/a&gt; both have useful overviews.  Wikipedia says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It groups English words into sets of synonyms called &lt;em&gt;synsets&lt;/em&gt;, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4951" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-04-08T14:28:03.330" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T14:28:03.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-08T17:59:25.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we accept the axiom that trivial questions are bad for the site, then the proper response to a general reference question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't answer!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have the rep, vote to close. (Until/unless the &quot;general reference&quot; reason is implemented, choose &quot;off topic&quot;.) If you don't have the rep, flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're the first person to vote to close, leave a gentle &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;not an answer!&lt;/strong&gt;) along the lines of &quot;Welcome to the site, but your question is a bit too simple; you could improve it by [x, y, z].&quot; (This is presuming that the asker is new. If he's not, adjust the comment appropriately.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have I mentioned &lt;strong&gt;DO NOT post an answer&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If anyone else has posted an answer already, &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; vote it up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is not to encourage trivial questions. If you post an answer or vote up an existing answer, you're implicitly encouraging more questions like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as my opinion of trivial questions: I agree that if they're &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; trivial dictionary lookups, then they're indeed bad for the site. They just clutter up the question list and provide easy and worthless reputation. (In the sense that the points gained from them do not actually reflect the posters' actual reputation-as-a-measure-of-expertise.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caveat is that not all &quot;what does X mean&quot; questions are simple dictionary lookups - it really depends on what X is. An example that has been discussed recently is the TL;DR question: yes, you can look up the expansion of the abbreviation in any number of places, but that's not the only thing it means/is used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T17:59:25.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="951" CreationDate="2011-04-09T13:15:46.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking the etymology of a place-name is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on topic, no question! Place-name derivation is often much more &lt;em&gt;à propos&lt;/em&gt; than mere word derivation: this history of a place-name might touch on history, folktale, anthropology, magic, genealogy, music, and much more. These things form the soul of a culture of which the language is just one part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the name Tyler, TX, is at present unremarkable. But it might not be so in times to come. Perhaps most US place-names, except American Indian names, are unremarkable. But what about Truth Or Consequences, NM? Unremarkable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one make the same claim of British and European place-names? What's the etymology of the name Saffron Walden? Of Paris? Of Danby? Of Londinium in pre-Roman times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Place names? Bring 'em on, and the more the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6300" LastEditorUserId="6300" LastEditDate="2011-04-09T13:29:20.093" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T13:29:20.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-09T15:36:44.157" Score="4" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate of:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15/ipa-usage-entry&quot;&gt;IPA usage, entry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115/how-to-enter-phonetic-transcriptions&quot;&gt;How to enter phonetic transcriptions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that for questions where pronunciation is relevant (e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-the&quot;&gt;What words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;)  folks use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; notation to properly indicate pronunciation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an easy way to type the IPA characters that are not on the keyboard or is it just a matter of using utilities like Windows Character Map to enter such characters?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is IPA notation preferred over &quot;spelled out&quot; notation (not sure of the proper term here, but dictionary.com uses a toggle between &quot;show spelled&quot; and &quot;show IPA&quot;) on this site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7041" OwnerDisplayName="msorens" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-10T08:00:58.970" Title="Use and mechanics of IPA" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|ipa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2011-04-10T07:59:19.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2011-04-09T15:51:09.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.typeit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An online IPA keyboard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6686" OwnerDisplayName="Sam" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T15:51:09.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2011-04-09T16:20:29.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1-&lt;/strong&gt; Sam already solved this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2-&lt;/strong&gt;  If you want to give a clear and definite indication about how a certain word is pronounced, then you should use IPA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Spelled out&quot; pronunciation is easier to use, no doubt. I don't know if there's a specific policy for it on this site, but I've always preferred using IPA. That's because even though it's faster for me to write &quot;&lt;em&gt;ay-kay-ay&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for &lt;strong&gt;AKA&lt;/strong&gt; (just an example) rather than using IPA, the latter is much more reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll explain better: IPA (which stands for &lt;strong&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/strong&gt;) is, precisely, &lt;strong&gt;international&lt;/strong&gt;, so while &quot;okay&quot; is pronounced differently depending on what &quot;language pronunciation rules&quot; I choose (English, Italian, German, French, etc.), writing &lt;strong&gt;|əʊˈkeɪ|&lt;/strong&gt; is standard, unambiguous and definitive, regardless of your background, mother tongue or other influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, because of this reason, IPA is more exact and precise. In the end, &lt;strong&gt;(also answering to mgb)&lt;/strong&gt;, learning it is not easy, (for example, just think that, only talking about &lt;strong&gt;vowels&lt;/strong&gt;, you'd need to learn &lt;strong&gt;35&lt;/strong&gt; symbols, more or less, even if many are not used for every language, etc.), but you won't need it, since every good dictionary provides it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" OwnerDisplayName="Alenanno" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T16:20:29.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2011-04-09T17:29:45.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For typing, another possibility is simply to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/ipachart.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HTML entities for IPA symbols&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re your second question, I think it depends a bit on your audience. Neither the transcription &lt;em&gt;ee&lt;/em&gt; nor [i] is inherently &quot;more accurate&quot; than the other-- depending on how they're used, they can effectively be conventions serving the same purpose. I would suggest that whether you use IPA (or another phonetic transcription system) or whether you try to &quot;spell out&quot; a pronunciation using the sound-to-letter conventions of the language in question should depend on which you think your reader will be more familiar with. For foreign learners, provided they have actually learnt IPA, then it has the advantage of not requiring them to be familiar with sound-to-letter conventions which may be the very thing they're trying to learn. On the other hand, a native speaker of English is likely to be more familiar with the spelling conventions of their language than the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In slight contradiction to Alenanno's answer, I want to point out that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The IPA is a means for representing an &lt;em&gt;analysis&lt;/em&gt; of pronunciation and doesn't &quot;definitively&quot; or &quot;unambiguously&quot; represent a pronunciation: the reason that when I read a transcription of English I can imagine how that word might be pronounced is more to do with &lt;em&gt;conventions&lt;/em&gt; for transcribing English with IPA than with the notion of a particular IPA symbol representing a &quot;precise sound&quot;. An illustration of this is that e.g. in a transcription of British English, what is represented by [u] is typically pronounced as a sound very similar to what is transcribed as [y] in French.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In practice, the IPA isn't quite as &quot;international&quot; as it might have been: it's a &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; international standard if by &quot;international&quot; you mean &quot;the UK and France&quot;, but it is not as widely adopted in the US and even mainstream languages such as Spanish have only fairly recently seen conventional adaptations of the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4941" OwnerDisplayName="Neil Coffey" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T17:29:45.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-09T18:22:44.597" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homophone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homophone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homophone&lt;/a&gt; should be probably renamed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homophones&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homophones&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homophones&lt;/a&gt;, to be consistent with the other used tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-04-11T08:53:35.057" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T08:53:35.057" Title="Rename &quot;homophone&quot; in &quot;homophones&quot;" Tags="|support|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T22:46:40.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="972" CreationDate="2011-04-09T18:25:06.607" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;On meta.english.SE, both the tags are used. &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/retagging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'retagging'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retagging&lt;/a&gt; is used in three questions, while &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/retag-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'retag-request'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retag-request&lt;/a&gt; is used in more questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first should be merged with the second, and made a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:10:48.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:10:48.937" Title="Merge the &quot;retagging&quot; and &quot;retag-request&quot; tags" Tags="|support|status-declined|retag-request|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="973" CreationDate="2011-04-09T19:14:41.253" Score="5" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;In other SE sites, answers that contain just a link (even if preceded by &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) are not considered answers, and users are suggested to flag the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that considered the action to take when such answers are seen on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-04-10T09:16:33.833" LastActivityDate="2011-04-20T20:18:00.310" Title="What should be done with answers that contain just a link?" Tags="|support|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="980" CreationDate="2011-04-10T04:27:52.883" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;The block that provide a help about tag Wikis is not correctly rendered. The screenshot shows how I see it on Firefox 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4IQzd.png&quot; alt=&quot;Firefox screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-04-12T02:12:14.610" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T02:12:14.610" Title="The tag Wiki help block is not correctly rendered" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="969" CreationDate="2011-04-10T08:27:26.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would vote for keeping them separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/retag-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;retag-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retag-request&lt;/a&gt; is a very specific tag for requests of the form &quot;Retag X as Y&quot; or &quot;Get rid of tag Z&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/retagging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;retagging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retagging&lt;/a&gt; is much more broad, for all kinds of questions about retagging.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at these two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/468/&quot;&gt;Find question for low-used tag and retag them.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/452/&quot;&gt;Is 200 reputation not too early for the right of retagging?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are clearly about &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/retagging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;retagging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retagging&lt;/a&gt;, but they aren't &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/retag-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;retag-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retag-request&lt;/a&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-04-10T08:27:26.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="970" CreationDate="2011-04-10T16:13:58.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find 'link' answers to be somewhat rude; if you were going to bother to do the google search to create a link in an answer, at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; explanation should be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the question itself probably could have been googled; that is the 'link' answer itself is intentionally a bit rude, instead of downvoting the question, accepting that it is a useful question for people to know about but that it needs little explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of doing the mental gymnastics (divining who intended what), I think it should be encouraged to add commentary to simple links by flagging those that don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-04-10T16:13:58.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="970" CreationDate="2011-04-10T21:37:45.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could leave a comment asking the answerer to copy and paste the essential parts of the link to make the answer self-contained, and to add his own elaboration where applicable. Nonetheless the link should still be provided to acknowledge the source of the information. I don't think it is rude to provide a link per se because different search engines and different search words give different search results, so what the answer links to might not be something so easily searchable by the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-04-10T21:37:45.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="981" CreationDate="2011-04-11T15:31:56.910" Score="14" ViewCount="1136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two recent questions contain &lt;em&gt;NSFW&lt;/em&gt; in the title. Do we really need to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the title should be enough to understand if one should read the question when being in a specific place. We had questions that have not been tagged with &lt;em&gt;NSFW&lt;/em&gt;; what is the difference between the past questions, and the recent ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a similar question about using asterisks with vulgar words appearing in titles: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/561/what-should-we-do-about-question-titles-containing-vulgar-words&quot;&gt;What should we do about question titles containing vulgar words?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T11:51:21.937" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T11:51:21.937" Title="Do we really need to add &quot;NSFW&quot; in question titles?" Tags="|discussion|questions|bowdlerization|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="975" CreationDate="2011-04-11T18:09:06.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it is common courtesy, like obscuring taboo words with asterixes (asterices? asterigma?); that is, it is not -necessary- but why not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would think that readers of this area would be accustomed to use vs. mention, so it shouldn't be necessary at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the most likely item in questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20390/what-exactly-does-fap-mean-nsfw&quot;&gt;What exactly does 'fap' mean?&lt;/a&gt;, if NSFW is wanted at all, it would be for this. I had never heard of the word 'fap' before, and so guess especially so for non-native speakers. And that means it is always the case that things are not self-evident.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T18:09:06.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="975" CreationDate="2011-04-11T18:10:35.713" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we do.  There is a 'vulgar' tag and it should be sufficient to tag a question with that if it concerns language that may cause offence.  Users can make use of the 'ignored tags' feature to filter out this type of question if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="5964" LastEditDate="2011-04-11T18:18:43.037" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T18:18:43.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="983" CreationDate="2011-04-11T18:55:23.693" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20234/difference-between-terminology-and-nomenclature&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question assert that there is no difference in meaning between these two words.  So they should be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:16:37.817" Title="Merge tags 'nomenclature' and 'terminology'" Tags="|discussion|retag-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="936" CreationDate="2011-04-12T00:21:33.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of this will depend, perforce, on the skill of the editor. If you are fluent in British, American, and Canadian usage, then you can easily recognize a national convention and of course you'd leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you lack such an ability, then you should be extremely cautious in editing the work of others in an international forum like this one. Also, the differences in usage among these three nations (Australian is approximate to British standard) are not extensive and not difficult to master. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, if someone were to move my &quot;comma inside the quote marks&quot; to accord with a different convention, I'd be utterly furious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5262" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T00:21:33.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="971" CreationDate="2011-04-12T02:12:03.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is now fixed -- the body class wasn't getting set properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T02:12:03.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="975" CreationDate="2011-04-12T05:04:19.320" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but we do ask that you mildly censor &lt;strong&gt;question titles&lt;/strong&gt; because those can show up on the Stack Exchange homepage and other places where seeing an extremely vile curse word is &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; not welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the body, and the tags, you may do as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(for prior art on this, see the &quot;breasts&quot; question, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T05:04:19.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2011-04-12T07:27:40.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure it's not the browser that is showing you the links you didn't yet visited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my user profile, the questions with the title in red are the ones I recently visited. As the different color used for those links depends from the browser, other users could see in red a link you see in black, or vice versa; you can check this looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/252/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;my user profile&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember until when those links are rendered in a different color, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lUfkH.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T07:27:40.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="978" CreationDate="2011-04-12T11:41:09.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Collins Cobuild English Dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nomenclature&lt;/strong&gt;: The nomenclature of a&#xA;  particular set of things is the system&#xA;  of naming those things [formal]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Terminology&lt;/strong&gt;: The terminology of a&#xA;  subject is the set of special words&#xA;  and expressions used in connection&#xA;  with it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that we do not need both of these tags. I would say to keep &quot;terminology&quot; as it is more widely known/used than &quot;nomenclature&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7251" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T11:41:09.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="989" CreationDate="2011-04-12T15:20:32.073" Score="9" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be technically feasible to not bump old posts onto the front page when the only edit to a question was to its tags?  I ask because as of right now, only 3 posts on the entire front page are there because of new &quot;content&quot; (question, answer, etc.).  The rest are old questions, most of which have good accepted answers, which are only there because users are going through older, poorly tagged questions and updating them.  While I agree this is helpful and will improve future searches, it has also bumped off a great many questions that were still in need of an answer and were only a half-hour old, which is fairly new for this site.  And while it's particularly bad right now, this isn't the first time I've seen similar issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is technically feasible, would people be supportive of such a change?  Obviously it could have a downside of not pushing up questions that are new to a category, and thus might be new to someone who only watches certain tags, but I think on the whole the pros far outweigh the cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not technically feasible, would it be suitable to establish some sort of guideline for retagging to limit it to a handful at a time?  I hate to constrain those willing to do such work, but I'm afraid the current method will do more harm than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2007" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-11T03:08:46.100" LastActivityDate="2011-05-11T03:08:46.100" Title="Editing of tags bumping old posts" Tags="|discussion|retagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="984" CreationDate="2011-04-12T16:54:25.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always choose to sort the front page by &quot;newest&quot; rather than &quot;active&quot;, which is the way that I usually view questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your concern is for casual visitors seeing mostly old posts, then I wouldn't worry about it too much, since the retagged posts will drop back into obscurity in just a few hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T16:54:25.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-12T18:31:47.527" Score="13" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; is one of our most highly-used tags, though it is, unfortunately, so vague as to be nearly useless. I submit the following proposal as a way to break up this tag into something useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/755/should-grammaticality-be-a-synonym-of-grammar/764#764&quot;&gt;nohat's answer&lt;/a&gt;, questions about the grammatical acceptability of a particular sentence or construction should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, as many questions already are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the meaning of grammar terms or the names of specific constructions should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-terminology&lt;/a&gt; (new).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the grammatical analysis of a particular sentence or construction should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-analysis&lt;/a&gt; (new). Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; should be made a synonym of this tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; which fit into none of these categories should be tagged with something more descriptive. Plain old &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; should be abolished as it succumbs too easily to tag rot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The floor is open for comments and additional suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T23:08:48.573" Title="The plan for [grammar]" Tags="|discussion|tagging|retagging|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="986" CreationDate="2011-04-12T23:16:40.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About point #3:&lt;/strong&gt; Syntax tag should not be a synonym of &quot;Grammatical analysis&quot; (and actually they're not synonyms), simply because &quot;syntax&quot; is not (about) the analysis, but instead it's the study about the rules and principles about sentences construction and word order. They are two different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the rest:&lt;/strong&gt; I have nothing in particular to say about this, but, yes, the change might help to filter the questions, so people won't just throw their questions into that big &quot;grammar&quot; container. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2011-04-12T23:25:41.327" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T23:25:41.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="986" CreationDate="2011-04-13T02:11:16.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd kind of be more in favor of double-tagging, i.e. keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, but add &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt; (or whatever) as appropriate. (And, as Alenanno said, keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; separate, because it is. Separate, that is.) But I don't feel particularly strongly either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And obviously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; should be removed from questions to which it does not apply.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T02:11:16.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="984" CreationDate="2011-04-13T07:30:14.677" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;On TeX-SE after a few mass retagging incidents we had established something of a policy to do this in periods of low activity (weekends), and only 4-5 at a time, possibly a few times per day. If done by a single person in a quick succession (open all questions in new tabs, open the editing page, change to taste and when ready, confirm all of them as quickly as possible). In this way, retagged questions are nicely packed together, and with a single name attached to them for the last change, it's easy to spot them on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why this is so: to avoid gaming the system and retagging &quot;behind the scenes&quot; by rogue users. The retagging reputation is low enough that some irate users can go on a quest to retag a significant amount of questions and quite some time may pass before this is discovered, making recovery from the mess almost impossible, and certainly time-consuming. So it has been the official stance of all SE sites to have edits and changes visible to all except in some select circumstances. There has been more thorough explanation of the rationale on meta-SO, and I will add a link later if I manage to find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have special powers to mass retag questions without bumping them, but I think that comes with certain caveats (ask your favourite site moderator for additional insights).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1519" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T07:30:14.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1060" CreationDate="2011-04-13T14:06:34.150" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our top-rated tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;. However this tag is nearly useless: the word &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; is right there in the site title, and almost every question on the site could be construed to be about &quot;usage&quot; in some sense. I manually retagged every question that had &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tag, but this spammed the Active Questions page, so I'm appealing for mod/dev assistance in cutting down the rest of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many questions that have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; with some other tags, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tag can be removed without any loss of information in the question. Here's some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1357/present-perfect-tense-versus-past-tense&quot;&gt;When is the present perfect tense used instead of the past tense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2933/possessive-of-a-word-thats-already-possessive&quot;&gt;Possessive of a word that is already possessive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1314/user-accounts-or-users-account&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;User accounts&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;users account&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4411/should-i-say-what-i-wanted-to-say-is-or-what-i-wanted-to-say-was&quot;&gt;Should I say &amp;#39;What I wanted to say is&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;What I wanted to say was&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are fine questions with good tags -- but they all have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; added to them for no good reason. Therefore, I suggest that &lt;strong&gt;all questions with 3 or more tags that include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tag simply be stripped of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. I looked through several pages of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; questions and didn't find any cases where this made the question worse or where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tag was adding any useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should knock &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; out of the top spot and hopefully break the precedent of adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; to almost everything. The remaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; questions will need to be retagged by hand, in small batches to avoid too much activity spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T09:46:40.753" Title="Usage of [usage]" Tags="|support|retag-request|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="994" CreationDate="2011-04-13T18:00:49.460" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike the community moderated SO, the new sites have specific moderators.  But there is no way to contact the moderator other than the &quot;flag post&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want every moderator decision to turn into a flame war but it would be nice to ask why or to try and make a reasonable case in one's own defence if a post is removed or changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A private message system was deliberately left out of the SO design because it was based around the discrete answers rather than a forum model, although the addition of meta and chat has rather diluted this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6336" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T19:30:05.583" Title="Messages to moderators required on moderated sites" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2011-04-13T18:50:26.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured the two big tags here would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;. As in, &quot;How do I use this?&quot; and &quot;What does this mean?&quot; I do agree that the sheer amount of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tags is ridiculous but I am unconvinced that it wouldn't be a useful tag if used properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other news, I am fully willing to help manually retag stuff. If &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; is next on the chopping block I will start hacking away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The comments here clarified my confusion; I agree, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; is (or should be) completely redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2011-04-13T19:13:11.557" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T19:13:11.557" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="991" CreationDate="2011-04-13T19:23:53.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard way to question a decision is to just post about it here on meta; hopefully you aren't running into problems often enough that meta gets flooded with &quot;why was post X closed?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, moderation privileges on SO and English are the same; you don't see a close/reopen link because you don't have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;enough rep&lt;/a&gt;. Moderators are more visible here because there's less people with sufficient rep to take community action, but there's no difference in functionality, and moderators do close on SO all the time: in the last hour, 17 posts have been closed on SO; of those, 13 were finished off by a mod vote, and 5 were closed by a single mod with no 3k votes at all. Those decisions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=why+closed&quot;&gt;occasionally questioned&lt;/a&gt; on MSO, and that format seems to work fine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="849" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T19:23:53.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="991" CreationDate="2011-04-13T19:30:05.583" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I'll just post this as an answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no difference in the moderation mechanism between Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange 2.0 sites. There are diamond mods, there are 10K users, and there are users at various levels of the privileges ladder. The only difference is the &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; of users in each of those groups.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't perceive any difference in moderation philosophy between SO and EL&amp;amp;U, but YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are various ways to ask why a question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can comment on the question itself. &#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have the rep, you can vote to reopen, as well as posting a comment explaining why you think it belongs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can post something in chat. If you @-reference the moderator in question, he will eventually see your message even if he is not currently online.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heck, you can even open a new private chat room for just yourself and the moderator you want to talk to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As you are evidently aware, you can post something on meta. :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can flag the question or an answer for moderator attention, using the &quot;other&quot; option to explain what you think the problem is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line is, I don't think we need yet another mechanism for discussion of moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T19:30:05.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="997" CreationDate="2011-04-13T21:17:46.527" Score="15" ViewCount="988" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples (feel free to edit in more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20775/what-who-are-toy-soldiers&quot;&gt;What/who are “toy soldiers”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20858/what-do-these-confusing-lyrics-mean&quot;&gt;What do these confusing lyrics mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9491/whats-the-deep-meaning-in-the-lyrics-of-heavy-traffic-by-elton-john&quot;&gt;What's the deep meaning in the lyrics of “Heavy Traffic” by Elton John?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10421/some-questions-about-the-lyric-of-so-feel-autumn-rain&quot;&gt;Some questions about the lyric of “so feel autumn rain”.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lyrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lyrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lyrics&lt;/a&gt; tag for more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20995/meaning-of-grabbed-a-spoon&quot;&gt;Meaning of “grabbed a spoon”&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; stretching the subject a bit, this is a quote from the sitcom Friends&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21045/some-actors-lines-from-film-insomnia&quot;&gt;Some actor's lines from film 'Insomnia'&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; again stretching past lyrics and poems but still a good example of this type of question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mostly to spearhead further individual discussions about similar questions. Are questions requesting meanings regarding particular the uses in creative works on-topic? The greater scope involves asking questions about &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; works or authors but songs and poems are probably an easier issue to resolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick and relevant argument against them being on-topic is the difficulty in understanding exactly what was intended in a work that comes from a medium filled with layered meanings, double-entendres, symbolism, broader vocabulary and looser grammar styles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T15:22:28.963" Title="Are interpretations of song lyrics, poems or other creative works on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2011-04-13T21:27:56.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is difficult to understand the meaning of a word or a phrase when used in songs, or poems, which can use an unusual meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a comparison, it would be like asking on italian.stackexchange.com the meaning of a cantica in the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;. Knowing Italian doesn't mean to understand the meaning of what written in the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;; in the same way, knowing English doesn't mean to know the meaning of a poem, or any creative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, that type of questions is off-topic, on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-04-14T18:22:26.993" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T18:22:26.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2011-04-14T02:11:31.143" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find song lyrics are pretty much in the same spirit as poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think it depends. If the question is about the grammaticality of line of poetry or what the metaphor is supposed to be, then that's OK. If it is about the cultural relevance of the item than that's off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To someone who doesn't know the answer, especially someone learning English as a second language (an ESL-er?), it's hard to differentiate between those ahead of time. I think it's easy enough to, when the answer is cultural, at that point say it is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;off topic because it is a &lt;em&gt;purely&lt;/em&gt; cultural problem, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that is, not related to a language problem. If there is a language related answer, then one can give that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Song lyrics, as a subset of poetry, currently aren't particularly refined, and might draw too many frivolous questions. But I don't think they should be closed out-right as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T02:11:31.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="999" CreationDate="2011-04-14T11:11:09.097" Score="7" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just retagged (well, I don't have retag privileges, so queued an edit for voting) a question that had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; but then I noticed there are 70-odd other such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should that be a synonym, then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1265" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-04-16T17:25:19.467" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T17:25:19.467" Title="Should [history] be a synonym for [etymology]?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2011-04-14T13:58:54.317" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;, I see a number of questions that should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; (probably most of them). However, I don't think all of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; questions belong in etymology, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6315/have-grammar-rules-changed-through-the-history-of-the-english-language&quot;&gt;Have grammar rules changed through the history of the English language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5831/why-did-english-become-a-universal-language-and-when&quot;&gt;Why did English become a universal language and when?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4219/whats-the-origin-of-pig-latin&quot;&gt;What's the origin of Pig Latin?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3602/is-there-a-historical-trend-towards-shorter-sentences&quot;&gt;Is there a historical trend towards shorter sentences?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are about historical things, but they aren't about words.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I actually disagree with the response in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/869/usage-of-the-history-tag&quot;&gt;Usage of the &quot;history&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt;, that looking at the evolution/origin of a class of words is not etymology; I think it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I guess the question we should ask is if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tag is useful enough to stand on its own. Clearly, people are using the tag instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;, so there is widespread confusion about the tag. That said, I would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; want to see the questions I have listed above to be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;; that would be flat-out wrong. If &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; became a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;, I fear we might end up with questions like the above getting that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T13:58:54.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1006" CreationDate="2011-04-15T01:30:05.747" Score="22" ViewCount="1072" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a song video made by an American acquaintance, there is a joke that I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a native speaker, and I guess most English speakers would understand what makes his joke funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it on-topic to ask what is the meaning of his play on words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As asked by Jeff Parker, here is some context:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Alfresco&quot; and &quot;Pentaho&quot; are two non-competing software applications that can be used together. An Alfresco representative recently made a rap song where he talks about his &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zchQFzKh1g&amp;amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=62s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tricked out Pentaho&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Is it a reference to rappers' pimped out cars? I am not sure I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3080" LastEditorUserId="3080" LastEditDate="2011-07-11T02:18:57.940" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T02:40:40.930" Title="Are questions about ununderstood English-language jokes on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-15T03:32:17.823" Score="12" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're evaluating the feasibility of &lt;strong&gt;sponsoring a member of the English community to speak at a conference in 2011&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking is a relatively big &quot;ask&quot;, so this needs to be planned many months in advance. Let's get started! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd like the community to establish &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What relevant english language conferences are coming up in 2011 that have open speaker slots or calls for papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and then &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which members of the community are strongly interested in being sponsored by Stack Exchange, Inc to speak at one of the above conferences in 2011?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the speaker is free to talk about anything he or she wants, so long as it would be roughly on topic for this site and there is a quick acknowledgement of support from Stack Exchange and a mention of the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-04-17T04:53:51.980" LastActivityDate="2011-04-17T17:14:16.283" Title="Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships -- 2011" Tags="|discussion|conferences|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="144" CreationDate="2011-04-15T06:10:58.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a new experimental close reason, as previously discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;general reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give that a try; we're evaluating the results. Also refer to the blog post on the topic with its handy chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:10:58.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="761" CreationDate="2011-04-15T06:14:46.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a new experimental close reason, as previously discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;general reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give that a try; we're evaluating the results. Also refer to the blog post on the topic with its handy chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:14:46.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-04-15T06:15:01.257" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a new experimental close reason, as previously discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;general reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give that a try; we're evaluating the results. Also refer to the blog post on the topic with its handy chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:15:01.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2011-04-15T06:15:14.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a new experimental close reason, as previously discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;general reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give that a try; we're evaluating the results. Also refer to the blog post on the topic with its handy chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:15:14.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2011-04-15T06:19:46.557" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we do have these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7223/what-does-the-joke-with-the-punchline-about-chrome-and-hollandaise-mean-and-why&quot;&gt;What does the joke with the punchline about Chrome and Hollandaise mean, and why is it funny?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4009/what-does-it-mean-chuck-norris-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-and-make-it-drink-wh&quot;&gt;What does it mean, 'Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink'? Why is it funny?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4895/dont-understand-the-joke-my-milks-gone-bad&quot;&gt;Don't understand the joke: my milk's gone bad…&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17478/analyzing-will-ferrells-i-thought-joke&quot;&gt;Analyzing Will Ferrell's “I Thought” joke&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14057/explain-this-pickup-line-if-bangkok-invaded-djibouti-would-greece-help&quot;&gt;Explain this pickup line: “If Bangkok invaded Djibouti, would Greece help?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of them open. So I would say go ahead and ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T06:19:46.557" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="975" CreationDate="2011-04-15T12:22:26.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, speaking as someone who has recently added &quot;NSFW&quot; to some question titles, here was my reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some workplaces have (crazy, stupid) policies where even browsing to a page that has swear words on can get you a visit from the IT department (or worse).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people really, really, don't like seeing offensive language. (Personally I don't have a problem with it, especially in written form - after all, it's just a word! - but if there's something simple and easy we can do to avoid offending such people, without detracting from the value of the site, so much the better.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the questions I'm talking about, someone who wasn't aware of the British usage of those words - or even someone who was - would not necessarily expect the questions to contain the very strong language that they did. (It's perfectly possible to ask the question - and answer it - without using stronger language. That didn't happen, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it might catch someone out if they weren't expecting it.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it seemed reasonable to flag the questions in a way that would let people working for organisations with over-strict policies, and people who dislike such strong language, know what they might be in for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There doesn't seem to be a consistent tagging scheme at the moment - I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vulgar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vulgar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vulgar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insults&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insults&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insults&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swearing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swearing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swearing&lt;/a&gt;. I agree tags could be used in this way, but as has been pointed out, the tags don't necessarily appear in all the places where the title might...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T12:22:26.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1009" CreationDate="2011-04-15T13:33:50.720" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any alternative standards to the IPA for phonetic transcription &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; the use of special characters? For instance, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/FAA_Phonetic_and_Morse_Chart2.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this chart&lt;/a&gt; of ICAO phonetic alphabet, phonetic pronunciations are listed without the use of any special characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard for mapping IPA to such phonetic equivalents? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4866" OwnerDisplayName="Ankur Banerjee" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T09:51:08.727" Title="Alternative standards to IPA" Tags="|discussion|ipa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1008" CreationDate="2011-04-15T16:52:46.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various respelling alphabets used in many dictionaries.  Each works differently and should be looked up in the source using it -- there's no standardization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are transcription schemes for IPA that don't use special characters -- SAMPA and its extension X-SAMPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't want Americanist phonetics which is rapidly falling out of favor and does use special characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5868" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T16:52:46.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1008" CreationDate="2011-04-16T09:51:08.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone asked this already some time ago. But like I said there, IPA is the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles here touched some important matter: &lt;strong&gt;Standardization&lt;/strong&gt;. I'll treat this differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &quot;any means&quot; to explain, let's say, the pronunciation to a broad audience, but who will understand what? There are some things that can be understood,  but there will always be slight differences and, not to be underestimated, &lt;strong&gt;mistakes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example, the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;cool&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. If I had to explain their pronunciation to some foreigner, how should I with a spelled out pronunciation? Although it may seem so, that &quot;oo&quot; in book is different from the &quot;oo&quot; in cool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA for &quot;&lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;|bʊk|&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;cool&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;|kuːl|&lt;/strong&gt;. This is because of some reasons I won't explain here (too long and off topic) but the important point I wanted to show is that, although they seem similar words, they have different pronunciations, which is hard and not efficient to be shown with something other than &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.translationdirectory.com/images_articles/wikipedia/IPA_chart_2005.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T09:51:08.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1001" CreationDate="2011-04-17T17:14:16.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I'm rather new to this site, I've spoken at conferences before, both academic and in industry, and been sponsored in some of them by other community-oriented websites (JavaRanch, The Server-Side Java Symposium). My academic training is in English literature, including doctoral study. I'm also interested generally in doing more large-audience presentations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can do some digging around for relevant conferences. Since I'm just north of Silicon Valley there may be something locally that's interested in how this kind of community works. If it were feasible, a panel discussion would be particularly cool, as I imagine the motivations we each have can be quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7133" LastActivityDate="2011-04-17T17:14:16.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="747" CreationDate="2011-04-17T18:28:55.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the group we need to reach out to the most is actually &lt;strong&gt;teachers of English&lt;/strong&gt; at the secondary and post-secondary level. English language education is basically what this site is for, plus as almost anyone who went through secondary school in the U.S. will tell you, English education in the U.S. is a &lt;em&gt;disaster&lt;/em&gt;, particularly when it comes to grammar and basic linguistics, two of the things that this site excels in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I quickly googled up a few options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncte.org/annual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncte.org/cee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Conference on English Education&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.curriculumstudy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Asilomar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(These are all US-specific, but I have no idea whether conferences in other parts of the English-speaking world would be interested.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="48" LastEditDate="2011-04-18T01:00:58.313" LastActivityDate="2011-04-18T01:00:58.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="747" CreationDate="2011-04-18T01:29:44.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wingin' 'em out there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ateg.org/conferences/c22.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Teaching Grammar Conference (US)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.constellata.com/articles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Constellata&lt;/a&gt; - this seems like an especially appropriate possibility&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jalt.org/conference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JALT&lt;/a&gt; -- hey, I'll go to Japan...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7133" LastActivityDate="2011-04-18T01:29:44.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-19T15:27:05.950" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was listening to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.sitepoint.com/podcast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SitePoint Podcast&lt;/a&gt; where they were talking to the founder of GitHub.  One thing that really intrigued me was that they were talking about how they would prefer to hire somebody based on quality coding work on GitHub over a resume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great if quality work on SE sites, where reputation is known and trusted, could lead to something outside of the site itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, have you heard of someone getting a job by using one of the SE sites?  If not, could you see employers one day using SE sites as part of the hiring process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7436" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Has anybody heard about someone getting a job by using EL&amp;U or other Stack Exchange Q&amp;A sites?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-19T16:55:49.263" Score="-1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have run into a few cases where I don't know the correct grammatical terms for the types of words or parts of a sentence I am asking about.  One such example is my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21786/how-to-call-attention-to-i-without-i-myself-or-the-pretentious-even-i&quot;&gt;How to call attention to &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; without &amp;quot;I myself&amp;quot; or the pretentious &amp;quot;even I&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add a comment or a note that indicates to other users who do know that they should feel welcome &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; encouraged to add appropriate tags, though I don't want to create a cleanup burden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to do this would be a new tag: &lt;strong&gt;please-fix-tags&lt;/strong&gt; tag (or something similar).  This tag could be perused by minds immeasurably superior to mine to correctly tag questions where the poster wasn't quite sure what tags and terms even apply to their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="602" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-04-21T18:06:23.613" Title="Proposal: &quot;please-fix-tags&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1015" CreationDate="2011-04-19T17:08:50.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a so-called &quot;meta&quot; tag, which are strongly discouraged across the entire network. (See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not sure which tags to use, just leave a comment to that extent, or drop by in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-04-21T18:06:23.613" LastActivityDate="2011-04-21T18:06:23.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1014" CreationDate="2011-04-19T20:04:16.740" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello &amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/welcome-stack-overflow-valued-associate-00005/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Well, actually, a huge majority of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/team&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange employees&lt;/a&gt; earned their position from their work on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you heard of &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/careers-2-0-launches/&quot;&gt;Careers 2.0&lt;/a&gt;? It was created &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; because employers prefer to hire based on demonstrable experience rather the trite bullet points found in most resumes. Everyone can say&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;and they always do&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;&quot;I communicate well and mentor others&quot;; but it's another thing entirely to see it in action!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True, the story behind Careers is focused around the programming bent of Stack Overflow, but that's only because of the sheer scale of the site. If the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/state-of-the-stack-2010-a-message-from-your-ceo/&quot;&gt;growth of the Stack Exchange network&lt;/a&gt; continues unabated, I'd like to see the Careers functionality extended to other sites on the Stack Exchange Network (hint: I ask every few months when we can expect this to happen&amp;hellip; not yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't wait for something like Careers to happen to show what you can do. It would be insane to leave that &quot;I speak English goodly&quot; bullet point when you can say &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/7436/gbutters#qpage_1-anpage_1-qsort_votes-ansort_votes&quot;&gt;Here is an example of my best work&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35013/stack-overflow-careers-success-stories&quot;&gt;Stack Oveflow Careers Success Stories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T20:10:04.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1019" CreationDate="2011-04-19T21:24:25.417" Score="2" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to delete some of my questions and answers that were not helpful to others. From my experience, I learned that I could not delete my answer if it had been accepted, and could not delete my question if it had been answered. With these safety features already in place, in case some crazy person decided to delete everything overnight, why can't I delete more than 5 of my own posts a day in a mass cleanup session if I wanted to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2012-10-30T02:55:26.610" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why we cannot delete more than 5 posts per day" Tags="|discussion|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2011-04-19T22:14:09.973" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will be stealing this answer wholesale &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85523/you-have-already-deleted-5-of-your-own-posts-today-further-deletes-are-blocked/85524#85524&quot;&gt;from Grace Note&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an abuse-prevention mechanism used to stop users from maliciously destroying a lot of their content in a short period of time and denying users access to it. It's intended behavior. Perhaps a bit over-eager in that department, but it's probably wiser to err on the side of caution for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe you're delete-blocked for the next week ♪ But past that, yes, it would probably be wiser to take a slower pace. You could flag for assistance, but if you have a huge backlog of things to be deleted, then it's probably a lot of ancient stuff that isn't going to be looked at any time soon, so there's no real need to rush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T22:14:09.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1015" CreationDate="2011-04-20T17:19:57.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE sites are Wiki-style sites; everybody with the right reputation can edit questions, and answers. Tagging a question for being edited is probably useless, as somebody who notes a clear typo (or the usage of a non grammatically correct phrase) will probably edit the question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case the meaning is not clear, and who can edit the answer/question is not able to understand what the OP was trying to say, then s/he will leave a comment, asking what the OP was trying to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-04-20T17:19:57.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="970" CreationDate="2011-04-20T20:18:00.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone new to Stack Exchange should get a helpful comment that raw links generally aren't helpful. &lt;em&gt;Linkrot&lt;/em&gt; happens, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, the answer should be downvoted into oblivion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Okay, maybe not oblivion. But a link generally isn't useful, and the help text for the down arrow says it right there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user362" LastActivityDate="2011-04-20T20:18:00.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1023" CreationDate="2011-04-21T10:16:29.403" Score="4" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think they should be closed, but considering that it could be enough to look the pronunciation reported in a dictionary, should questions about pronunciation be closed using the &quot;general reference&quot; reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-04-21T13:51:48.323" Title="Should questions about pronunciation of a word be closed as &quot;general reference&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2011-04-21T13:51:48.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is &quot;How do you pronounce this?&quot;, which is a Poll, then I think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not if the questions are like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; pronunciation of &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've heard two different pronunciations, &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;, what is the correct one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the differences between the BrE pronunciation and the AmE one for &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there differences in meaning if I use the alternative pronunciation for &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the origin of the pronunciation of &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just the first ones that came to my mind, in the end, it's always a matter of &quot;being specific&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about &quot;What is the pronunciation for &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot;, because I've seen it left open before, if I'm not wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-04-21T13:51:48.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1035" CreationDate="2011-04-21T14:47:43.163" Score="7" ViewCount="13605" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of questions are of the type: 'Can you diagram this sentence?', or 'How do you parse this sentence?'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same order of the Google ngram tool, are there any diagramming or parsing tools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I don't expect anything like a 'diagramming' tool because I frankly think of that as 1950's technology, when junior high enlgish teachers should be teaching parse trees with S, NP, P, etc. (but is that now behind the times too?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are there any quick online tools to throw a sentence at and get a parse tree (in a copyable image?) or at least parts of speech tagging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T17:02:59.757" Title="Tools for parsing (diagramming)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1024" CreationDate="2011-04-21T15:33:40.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On StackOverflow the same question has been asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4972571/tool-for-drawing-parse-trees&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or also a similar one &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/83064/parse-tree-and-grammars-information&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-04-21T15:33:40.130" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-22T06:19:15.837" Score="11" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/how-to-pronounce-router&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hO5lj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about adding font embedding for pronunciations characters like the one does at math.SE site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2soLC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to add MathJax to here, only embedding a font will work for this english.SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-05-14T14:17:01.000" Title="How about adding font embedding for pronunciations characters?" Tags="|feature-request|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1033" CreationDate="2011-04-22T09:27:27.390" Score="6" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I report the origin of a word, how should I write the meaning of the word from which the word derives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I write it in quotes, after the word in that language: Latin &lt;em&gt;minister&lt;/em&gt; &quot;servant&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I write it between parentheses: Latin &lt;em&gt;minister&lt;/em&gt; (servant).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-23T16:18:11.493" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T16:18:11.493" Title="How should I report the origin of a word on English.SE?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1031" CreationDate="2011-04-22T09:34:46.450" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I include a quote from a book, blog, or a site, how should I report who is the author and from where the quote comes from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Principia philosophiae&lt;/em&gt;, René Descartes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;René Descartes, &lt;em&gt;Principia philosophiae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-05-24T03:39:24.573" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T03:39:24.573" Title="How should I report the author of a quote on English.SE?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1027" CreationDate="2011-04-22T09:58:04.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, an open-source Unicode IPA font would be great to have included on the site, as a fallback font for characters that can't be displayed in the browser's main font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-04-22T09:58:04.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1029" CreationDate="2011-04-22T21:07:18.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say it doesn't really matter. You can do it in whatever way you find convenient. Clarity is always a virtue, of course, but I trust that won't be a problem for most people. If this question had been on the main site, I'd have said that &lt;code&gt;author, *title*&lt;/code&gt; was most common in articles—at least in my field it is the standard (classics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-04-22T21:07:18.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1028" CreationDate="2011-04-22T21:12:34.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both are fine. Perhaps I'd add a comma after &lt;em&gt;minister&lt;/em&gt; in your first example. You could add additional quotation marks within the brackets in your second example, but that isn't necessary. I use both forms, though I think I have a slight preference for &lt;em&gt;minister&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;servant&quot;. I think this is the most standard option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-04-22T21:12:34.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1028" CreationDate="2011-04-22T21:56:30.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no one right way to do it, but I prefer the second choice, although I also put the word in quotes even when it is in parentheses: &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;meaning&quot;).  I think the parentheses make it more clear than just having the meaning follow after the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of dictionaries will use a more concise style, which I think is a holdover from when space considerations were important. Personally, I think we can afford the additional space if it gives more clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-04-22T21:56:30.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1024" CreationDate="2011-04-23T16:03:39.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be two parts to this request. One is to do the graphical work of displaying a parse tree (with nodes and lines) given a parsing. The other is to do the linguistic work of determining the parts/derivation of a sentence using some grammar. Another is to allow you to -define- a grammar, and then allow you to parse a sentence using the grammar you created (also called a compiler-compiler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've found so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lrv.bplaced.net/syntaxtree/?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phpSyntaxTree&lt;/a&gt;: this draws a syntax tree, &lt;em&gt;if you give it a parsing&lt;/em&gt;. (in fact this is really a drawer of any kind of rooted labeled tree, but it is advertised and probably directed towards parsing). So you, the user, have to determine the parsing that you want with the labels, and lay it out with the labels you see fit. But you can save the image easily and then upload easily in stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link Grammar Parser&lt;/a&gt;: this takes a sentence and returns -many- attempts at assigning a parse tree (they call it a constituent tree). The form of the tree is -almost- close enough for the above phpSyntaxTree (replace '(' with '[' etc), but even among the many attempts, it was hard to pick one that seemed to capture things just right. But that could be used as a semi-official start and then edited as you please. The grammar itself, a link grammar, seems to be out of the TCS/AI field rather than linguistics, and 'links' seem to have some special meaning which I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antlr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ANTLR&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://javacc.java.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JavaCC&lt;/a&gt;: I put these together because they act in the same way (even though some details are different). These are compiler -compilers, meaning you write a grammar (in variations/extensions of Backus-Naur form (BNF) which allow something beyond context-free grammar). There are three difficulties here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have to write your language grammar yourself (I couldn't find any natural language parsers for either of these that were already written)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BNF is not particularly well suited to natural language because of the non-context-free-ness of most natural language (just consider any kind of inflectional agreement). natural language is pretty ... fluid and sentences can have multiple interpretations even without considering word ambiguity. and these compiler-compilers were designed for computer programming languages where the whole point is to remove any ambiguity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;because the intention of these compiler-compilers is to produce output for computers, some extra work may be needed to get a parse tree output in readable text form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please add any more examples you might find (e.g. a English grammar in ANTLR or JavaCC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="257750" LastEditDate="2020-02-26T17:02:59.757" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T17:02:59.757" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-23T16:03:39.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="153" CreationDate="2011-04-25T17:23:42.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I worry every time I quote a book in an answer about whether I’m being considerate to the authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know if an official policy is necessary or what it should be. In the absence of a policy, here’s what I wish people would do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you quote, quote accurately, use quotes or &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to mark quotations clearly, put your commentary outside the quotes, and of course always cite the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you summarize or paraphrase, cite the original author anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep block quotes short. It’s unkind to make an author’s work, which is their livelihood, available to everyone for free against their wishes. And anyway the best answers are short.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you like a book, recommend it and link to the author or publisher’s page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22534/past-tense-and-rather-than/22562#22562&quot;&gt;This long block quote&lt;/a&gt; strikes me as too much. It looks like a whole main entry from a reference work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-04-25T17:23:42.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-25T21:35:45.163" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;What sorts of features are missing from dictionaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about new words, I'm talking about for any given word. what do current dictionaries not capture about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What -is- currently captured is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;existence of words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;part of speech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changes in morphology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;multiple senses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and sometimes&#xA;- etymology&#xA;- very rough register (e.g. slang, vulgar, archaic, obsolete)&#xA;- very rough dialect (e.g. &quot;Primarily BrE&quot;)&#xA;- example sentences from literature&#xA;- indications of technical ares (nautical, medical, sports, etc)&#xA;- synonyms and antonyms (more properly contained in a separate volume a thesaurus)&#xA;- locutions and idioms that the word participates in&#xA;But really, these are almost always easily confirmed by a native speaker but opaque to the non-native speaker. You can't learn the usage of a word by looking it up in the dictionary (and as good as google translate is, it can really miss sometimes). &#xA;- preferred/prescribed use vs. what people say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think there are some very obvious things missing. Sure they might be hopelessly vague &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;connotations (associated contexts) not implied by the worded definition. These might be words that aren't synonyms but you find in the same contexts. This is the largest one that I think is missing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frequency of use (you found a word that fits exactly the definition of the concept you want, but no one ever uses it (not the same as archaic or obsolete). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More refined register (this might need description of cultural contexts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, what do you think would be good additions to dictionary entries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2011-04-26T21:05:04.793" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T21:05:04.793" Title="What features are missing from dictionaries?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-05-07T18:45:58.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2011-04-26T02:18:53.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another reason for posting questions which are readily googlable (is that a word?). And that is, while an expert may be certain that the answer provided by google is correct, there is plenty of misinformation that can be located by google. Finding it on stack exchange should provide a higher level of assurance. And since a naive user might have trouble distinguishing authorities found by google, it's worthwhile to have it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6017" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T02:18:53.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-26T07:02:10.230" Score="-4" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;The blockquote HTML tag is often used for things that are not literally quotations—&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/662/possible-duplicate-message-is-difficult-to-notice&quot;&gt;for example, in duplicate question notices&lt;/a&gt;—so the giant quotation mark is quite often incorrect or misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since fixing duplicate question notices to not be (erroneously, imho) tagged as &quot;blockquotes&quot; is clearly a request that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/80891/possible-duplicate-message-is-difficult-to-notice-on-english-se&quot;&gt;falling on deaf ears&lt;/a&gt;, can we at least just get rid of the giant quotation mark? It was a nice idea, but it'd be better to have no decoration than have a wrong misleading decoration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T13:39:00.240" Title="Please remove the giant quotation mark from the CSS for blockquotes" Tags="|bug|status-completed|style|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-26T17:09:14.377" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22700/what-weve-gelost&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asking when the grammar of some language ancestral to English branched a certain feature. Since it garnered many votes, I suppose it was on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which languages &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on-topic? Can I ask about Proto-Germanic morphology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4727" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T17:17:34.420" Title="Which languages are on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1042" CreationDate="2011-04-26T17:17:34.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question is on-topic because it is asking about English; the fact it compares English with Dutch and German doesn't make the question off-topic because the OP is interested to know if a similar construct was present in English. Dutch and German have not been chosen as random examples: English, Dutch and German are three &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Germanic languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would have probably been off-topic is it was asking how to translate, for example, a sentence from Spanish to English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T17:17:34.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1045" CreationDate="2011-04-26T20:56:51.117" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few posts have shown up with crap added to them to extend the character limit past the point of acceptance. One user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/17750/revisions&quot;&gt;liked to add periods&lt;/a&gt;. I am having difficulties creating a query for &lt;code&gt;....&lt;/code&gt;. Does anyone have a tip? If this ability does not exist, can it be added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T22:04:21.990" Title="Is there a way to search for ......?" Tags="|feature-request|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1044" CreationDate="2011-04-26T21:47:17.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could try a DataExplorer query such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/q/98761/not-an-answer-candidates-upgraded&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but note that it searches the most recent dump, not the live site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T21:47:17.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-27T04:01:21.067" Score="0" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;FYI, I have removed the red double quote graphic from the &amp;lt;blockquote&amp;gt; element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The styling was nice when if the post has a giant block of text. However since the new design launched, I noticed there has been many cases where smaller blockquotes were used in a single post. The graphic in each small blockquote made the page very busy and distracting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EJLZh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Blockquote style before&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the removal of the graphic aids to better readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T15:37:04.413" Title="Minor design tweak" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2011-04-27T08:19:19.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there was any reason to do that; I'm really not in favor of this change.  I &lt;em&gt;liked&lt;/em&gt; the red quotes, as I think regular quotation marks don't really &quot;bring out&quot; the word or excerpt from the background, and in fact inhibit readability.  Now we're going to have to start using them to properly note direct quotations.   I don't think anybody complained about these red quote marks in &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; blockquotes &amp;mdash; we complained only about their use in POSSIBLE DUPLICATE, at the top of the page.   Why can't just that be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="3479" LastEditDate="2011-04-27T09:44:24.090" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T09:44:24.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1049" CreationDate="2011-04-27T09:41:15.433" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I remember, there used to be a checkbox at the bottom of the question form to mark it as community wiki (CW). I don't see it anymore. I assume this functionality changed. How does it work now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I posted a new question that I would have marked as CW:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22704/what-words-can-i-use-to-indicate-how-hungry-i-am/22741#22741&quot;&gt;What words can I use to indicate how hungry I am?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What happened to the community wiki checkbox?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1048" CreationDate="2011-04-27T09:43:42.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67581/community-wiki-checkbox-missing-in-action&quot;&gt;It was removed&lt;/a&gt;, because it was “causing confusion and pain”. To get a question marked as Community Wiki, flag it for moderator attention with an appropriate comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T09:43:42.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2011-04-27T12:16:34.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support this suggestion. Yes, there is only one indefinite article in the dictionary, but there are certainly multiple &lt;em&gt;instances&lt;/em&gt; of the indefinite article. The pluralization &quot;indefinite articles&quot; sounds preferable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T12:16:34.773" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1052" CreationDate="2011-04-27T12:57:47.483" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask because I am not seeing an edit link on posts here on Meta.English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not, why can't I suggest edits on Meta.English? I can do it on the main English.SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user362" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2011-04-27T21:41:38.337" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is the edit queue full?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1051" CreationDate="2011-04-27T13:13:44.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The queue isn't full; in fact, there is no queue. The feature simply doesn't exist on SE 2.0 metas. As Jeff Atwood &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78223/per-site-metas-dont-have-ability-of-suggested-edits/78319#78319&quot;&gt;succinctly puts it&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is by design — we don't think the metas need this feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T13:13:44.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7363" CreationDate="2011-04-27T14:49:55.827" Score="29" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; has been heavily discouraged since the early days of the site. A few weeks ago I manually retagged every question that used &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt;, and there are currently no questions with that tag, save one question that has since been migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is really bad. It means nothing at all, and is only ever used by utter n00bs who have no idea what other tags to put on a question. Everybody hates it. Please make it go away forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; And here it is almost a year later, and I just had to squash 5 &quot;word&quot; tags, 4 of which were the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; tag on the question. Can we &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; get this added to a permanent blacklist-with-prejudice-attached? Pretty please? --Martha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5/31/2012&lt;/strong&gt; And once again, I had to kill something like 11 &quot;words&quot; tags, about half of which were the only tag on the question. Two of them were merged, so I can't even edit out the tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66847/what-is-the-antonyms-of-capitalize&quot;&gt;What is the antonyms of &quot;capitalize&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65884/asking-question-about-position-of-a-person-in-a-list&quot;&gt;Asking question about position of a person in a list&lt;/a&gt;. I noticed that &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; is now listed as a synonym of &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;, but manifestly neither is blacklisted. Is there a reason the Powers That Be are refusing to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T19:13:35.483" Title="Blacklist the [words] tag" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2011-04-27T14:50:25.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we get a border or background change to make the distinction between quoted and non-quoted easier to see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T14:50:25.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2011-04-27T15:29:58.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you Jin!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only were they often cluttersome, they were often just plain wrong, as when &amp;lt;blockquote&gt; tags were used for things that weren't technically block quotes, such as the duplicate question message, and in many questions and answers, where often examples which are not really quotations are set off using &amp;lt;blockquote&gt;, as in the example in the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that they are indented is all the extra attention &amp;lt;blockquote&gt;s need. The different background color is extra attention-drawing (which is fine) but certainly not necessary for the purpose of the tag. The giant quotation mark was way over the top, making &amp;lt;blockquote&gt;s stand out too much, especially when there were several of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2011-04-27T15:37:04.413" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T15:37:04.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1053" CreationDate="2011-04-27T16:24:48.550" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately even moderators don't have access to modify the blacklist; only devs have that ability. Otherwise I would have done this already!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T16:24:48.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1074" CreationDate="2011-04-27T20:07:32.550" Score="10" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone asks a question that has a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; answer, should he or she be the one to mark one as accepted?  Accepted doesn't have to be correct, but why shouldn't it?  With something more subjective maybe it's okay, but . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7834" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T10:16:30.093" Title="Should the person who asks a question really be the one to pick an answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2011-04-28T02:33:17.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often had the same thought. The person asking the question, by the fact of (sincere) question asking, knows less about it than the answerers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerers among themselves though are biased as to the worth of their own writings, so they' are probably not ones to decide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are supposed to be somewhat impartial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those with high rep might know more...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the end I think it is OK because the questioner knows more about what they intend than any of the other people. Also, they are the ones interested in getting a right answer more than any body else. Another also, they are ones who would be expected to monitor their own questions, so are more likely to do something like approve an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acceptance by the OP isn't intended to say &quot;this is the correct answer&quot;. It is meant to say &quot;this answer was the most helpful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me a bit to figure that out (I probably had to read it somewhere more than once). But that's a reasonable way to treat  'acceptance'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I find it terribly annoying when an answer with a lesser vote gets accepted when another answer is so obviously correct. Here at EL&amp;amp;U, it especially bothers me when a non-native speaker approves a question on dialect or style (how would they know?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, recently, I had an answer of mine accepted with a vote of zero (one up, one down so it was not ignored), and the others were voted around 10 each. (I can understand how it happened, but I sincerely agree though that my answer matched what the OP wanted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T02:33:17.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1039" CreationDate="2011-04-28T09:17:24.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Completed per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/minor-design-tweak&quot;&gt;Minor design tweak&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T13:39:00.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2011-04-28T09:46:40.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, the tag was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; question now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T09:46:40.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1062" CreationDate="2011-04-28T13:13:57.680" Score="10" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;In researching the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/22973/5822&quot;&gt;Which is correct, “buck naked” or “butt naked”?&lt;/a&gt;, I found a very thorough examination of this question at Language Log that I linked to in a comment under the OP. I feel like the information there deserves to be formatted as an answer to the question, but I'm not sure the best way to do that in a situation like this. I could:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep it as a link in a comment (keeps good info kind of obscure).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cut &amp;amp; paste the whole Language Log post (excessive and possible &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/153/5822&quot;&gt;copyright&lt;/a&gt; issues).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just post a link to the discussion as an answer (possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/970/what-should-be-done-with-answers-that-contain-just-a-link/973#973&quot;&gt;rude&lt;/a&gt;, doesn't really incorporate good info into this site).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Summarize and link (probably best, but seems redundant and awkward when the original post is concise, well written, well-researched and should really be read in its entirety).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T21:05:42.293" Title="What's the best way to answer when there's a really good answer elsewhere?" Tags="|support|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2011-04-28T13:37:44.500" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarize and link&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't leave just a link. Linkrot will make the answer completely useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't copy-paste. There may be copyright issues and plagiarism is bad form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you offer a summary and a link, one can visit the link for more information. If the link ever disappears, the summary can provide the answer and, perhaps, the information to use to search for the text elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user362" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T13:37:44.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1064" CreationDate="2011-04-28T15:21:19.633" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a user changes names, is there any way for &quot;@&quot; comments using their former name to be changed automatically to their new moniker? Otherwise, it looks like the commentators made a mistake. See comments under OP here as an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/19628/5822&quot;&gt;Why do Americans say “tuna fish”?&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mgb&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;Martin Beckett&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="User name-changes and effect on comment clarity" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1063" CreationDate="2011-04-28T17:18:34.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an ooold request on the meta Meta, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31851/change-all-username-references-in-comments-when-a-user-changes-their-name&quot;&gt;&quot;change all @username references in comments when a user changes their name&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, that has been withdrawn by the OP after some discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically it doesn't work because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all at-mentions are just plain text (so the system doesn't know that I'm responding to user ID 5822, all it could look for would be an &quot;@Callithumpian&quot; somewhere in the comment);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;user names are not unique (there can be any number of Callithumpians around);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people don't have to at-mention your complete name, the first 3+ letters will suffice (so while there probably aren't &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; many different Callithumpians around after all, there could very well be a whole bunch of Cals, Callis, Callithumps and whatnot).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this leads to a number of possible issues. The (accepted) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31851/change-all-username-references-in-comments-when-a-user-changes-their-name/31856#31856&quot;&gt;answer by Brian R. Bondy&lt;/a&gt; lists a few of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Maybe someone refers to an unrelated @Brian on twitter, and then @Brian changes his name on stackoverflow. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Comments can be stolen by renaming your name to someone and then back to someone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Sometimes people will refer to me as @Brian [rather than using the full name, @Brian R. Bondy]; however, a real @Brian may change his name to @Bob and then no one would know people were referring to me.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This wasn't implemented since day #1, so there are probably a lot of @Name's out there that can be stolen to be renamed to an unrelated person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How do you differentiate between @Brian the developer, and a user named &quot;@Brian the developer&quot;.   Spaces could cause bad renames.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Search / replace for name changes could be a costly operation on all text comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are changing the text strings of people's comments, so changing their original comments may make them mad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just a warning: if this feature is implemented, I will change my username over and over again, each time choosing another user's name, until either all comments begin with &quot;@Pesto&quot; or the system collapses under the strain. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/23921/hilarious-comedy-pesto&quot;&gt;Hilarious Comedy Pesto&lt;/a&gt; Dec 4 '09 at 17:17&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T17:18:34.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-28T18:34:34.287" Score="8" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is pure speculation and discussion for egotistical purposes. Do you think that EL&amp;amp;U will become an unofficial authority on the English language? As in, will be given the trust to coin new phrases or words? Will our research be strong enough to be the first and last stop for people pondering certain phrases and meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here are some interesting borderline cases already occurring (heavily tilted toward Q/As I belong to since those are the ones I remember):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure&quot;&gt;Is there a word to describe a highly desirable cursed treasure?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; The answer was more or less no but a few interesting suggestions for the term arrived and the OP chose one he was happy with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21616/how-are-yes-and-no-formatted-in-sentences&quot;&gt;How are “yes” and “no” formatted in sentences?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; The consensus seemed to be &quot;follow a style guide&quot; but no one brought forth a style guide to start from. People asking the question in the future will find... us?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/18153/6006&quot;&gt;What's the difference between “null” and “void” in legal language?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; The research in the answers to this question is astounding (particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18153/whats-the-difference-between-null-and-void-in-legal-language/18237#18237&quot;&gt;Billiare's answer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/668/is-it-okay-to-say-and-write-aint-yet&quot;&gt;Is it okay to say and write “ain't” yet?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; I can easily see people pointing to EL&amp;amp;U as an authority for this style of question. (This particular example is a little weak on answers.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The followup questions that really matter in this discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should&lt;/em&gt; EL&amp;amp;U become such an authority?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can we do as a community to strive toward or steer away from this end?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whatever end we desire, where are we currently heading?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that English needs authorities. I am more referring to the idea that EL&amp;amp;U may become the place people go for the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; answers, just as we currently go to our own lists of resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T20:24:22.477" Title="When will EL&amp;U become a trusted authority on the English Language?" Tags="|discussion|experts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2011-04-28T20:37:16.990" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every answer should be understandable and accurate on its own should the (a) link stop working or (b) reader be lazy&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers should link to anything used as an authority when possible (exceptions being basic dictionary lookups)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All quotes or paraphrases sourced with a link when possible&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the event of pulling most of an answer from another excellent answer located elsewhere, try to hit some golden ratio between original content and heavy quoting. Walls of blockquotes are not attractive and feel cheeky.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-04-28T20:37:16.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1065" CreationDate="2011-04-29T00:33:44.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a really interesting question. Another area where this site has been producing some original research is in what &lt;a href=&quot;http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1588634025806636713#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Erin McKean&lt;/a&gt; termed &quot;the competitive sport of 'antedating'.&quot; With a good number of users familiar with Google's Ngram and the finer points of Google Books searches, questions involving origins and &quot;first usages&quot; of words and phrases are getting correct answers not found anywhere else. Assuming this trend will continue and this site may accumulate a collection of such &quot;findings,&quot; what should be done with this, if anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess a related question would be whether or not it would make sense to have a tag system for answers, like the ones you highlighted, that provide authoritative answers, possibly involving original research, that can't be readily found elsewhere online, or that appeared here first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T00:33:44.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1069" CreationDate="2011-04-29T01:00:48.640" Score="6" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which typeface is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LqVdB.png&quot; alt=&quot;EL&amp;amp;U header&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does it get instantiated into the page? I tried looking at the webpage source with Firebug and it just shows up the following HTML tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div id=&quot;hlogo&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;a href=&quot;/&quot;&amp;gt;English Language and Usage&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7211" LastEditorUserId="5432" LastEditDate="2011-04-30T06:29:26.123" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T01:20:00.177" Title="What typeface is used in the EL&amp;U header?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1068" CreationDate="2011-04-29T08:16:22.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title font is &lt;a href=&quot;http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/adobe-caslon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Adobe Caslon Bold&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logo is shown as a CSS sprite of the anchor link inside of the &quot;hlogo&quot; div.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T08:16:22.647" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-29T15:42:06.023" Score="6" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I started a new question with the title &quot;Pronunciation of 'cat'&quot; the related question helper finds bunches of questions starting with &quot;pronunciation of&quot;. This seems to happen with many of the common question forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;cat&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the difference between &quot;cat&quot; and &quot;dog&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the origin of &quot;raining cats and dogs&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where did the phrase &quot;raining cats and dogs&quot; come from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc. Related questions to these are more likely to matter if the part in quotes were given extreme priority. As in, the phrase &quot;pronunciation of&quot; is going to be mostly insignificant. Is there a way to lower the relevance of certain words in the search algorithm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, here are the related questions found for &lt;code&gt;Pronunciation of &quot;cat&quot;&lt;/code&gt; (in order returned):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calling up a cat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “of”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “especially”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of comparable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “hypokeimenon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of Paraguay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “Wiki”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “Pizza”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “jsfiddle”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “applicable”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “spring”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the pronunciation of 'occult'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “r”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the pronunciation of “the?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “often”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “theodicy”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “Blessed”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“Lieutenant” pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a difference between the pronunciation of a teenager, and the pronunciation of an adult?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there different types of Pronunciation Guides?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expansion and pronunciation of “Mrs”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of the word “laboratory”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foreigner's English pronunciation [closed]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation of “Short-lived”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is in charge of determining a pronunciation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, we probably don't have many questions about &quot;cat&quot; in the system but the pattern seems to hold with other questions of this form. In my opinion, these results just aren't that useful. Can we do better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T20:12:13.477" Title="Is there a way to nix certain words from the auto-search for related questions?" Tags="|feature-request|search|titles|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1072" CreationDate="2011-04-29T21:08:55.947" Score="41" ViewCount="542" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't care what @nohat thinks. The world is a bleak and barren place without ornamentation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less is less. Deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-04-30T04:18:48.777" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T18:03:16.683" Title="Eeeek! Where did my giant quotation mark go?" Tags="|support|css|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2011-04-29T21:28:59.843" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qldvu.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;You can&amp;#39;t hurt me, @nohat,&amp;quot; said Robusto&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And here is a bleak and barren statement. Any questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-05-04T16:07:22.350" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T16:07:22.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2011-04-30T07:10:43.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer is more of a social convention than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It simply means the OP felt that particular answer met &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; needs better than other answers. Whether the community agrees with this or not, is completely unrelated -- though equally important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also the source of things like the Reversal badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-04-30T07:10:43.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2011-05-01T13:25:50.367" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The person asking the question is the only person who can say authoritatively &quot;This answered my question.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True, we do at times see what appear to be &quot;better&quot; and perhaps &quot;more exhaustive&quot; answers to questions, but those would be our personal assessments. Readers vote with their recommendations. If the OP grants a &quot;question-answered&quot; flag to an answer with 0 or 1 votes, and another one has 12 votes, then the community has thereby rendered its judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be an excellent system that works well, is democratic, fair to all parties, and allots credit where such is due. Nothing broken here, so no fix is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5262" LastActivityDate="2011-05-01T13:25:50.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1076" CreationDate="2011-05-01T21:03:00.497" Score="6" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The formatting of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;editing help page&lt;/a&gt;, linked from the sidebar when typing or editing a question or answer, appears quite broken:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6EBqe.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the background horizontal lines are in inappropriate places, especially the one overlapping the line starting &quot;spaces will be stripped off&quot;; also the heading is not in the usual font for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;asking help&lt;/a&gt; page, linked from the same place, has no such formatting issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am using Firefox 3.6.16, though the page appears the same in IE8.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T16:58:27.523" Title="&quot;Editing help&quot; page formatting appears broken" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1075" CreationDate="2011-05-02T04:58:03.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;the fix will be in the next deployment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-05-02T04:58:03.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2011-05-03T02:03:05.573" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am still seeing the quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yAICR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-05-03T02:03:05.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1078" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1080" CreationDate="2011-05-03T03:15:23.387" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume it's automated. I know it's for &quot;interesting questions.&quot; Just curious if it's a matter of views, upvotes, or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T21:02:38.583" Title="What are the parameters for determining if a question gets tweeted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1078" CreationDate="2011-05-03T09:14:09.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our StackExchange overlords have programmed a giant AI, capable of understanding (and answering) every SE question. You may have heard of the “Watson” prototype that they resold to IBM because it was performing well below expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, they don't allow it to actually answer questions,&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; because that would just amount to killing their Business Model, but it analyzes questions to catch the good ones, and tweets them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or maybe they do. That &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2303/robusto&quot;&gt;@Robusto&lt;/a&gt; guy is definitely fishy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-05-03T09:14:09.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1078" CreationDate="2011-05-03T15:22:48.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it has something to do with the number of votes and the diversity of voters a question gets.  If you get a number of upvotes in quick succession because your question is really exciting, it's likely to be tweeted.  I also think a diversity of voters help the likelihood of being tweeted; 5 votes from 5 people is better than 5 votes from 2 people.  You'll notice that certain types of tags which get a lot of voting, particularly single-word-requests, are particularly prone to being tweeted, rising up the hotness scale, getting a lot of upvotes from cross-site traffic, so that bizzarely it leads to one's highest voted answer, the answer most &quot;valuable to the community&quot;, to be a maybe one or two sentence dictionary definition giving a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-05-05T21:02:38.583" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T21:02:38.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2011-05-04T04:51:43.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh nuts, I liked those things! I wanted something like 'em on the trilogy, really &amp;mdash; the blockquote boxes look far too generic without some sort of decoration...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3639" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T04:51:43.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="406" CreationDate="2011-05-04T05:08:51.967" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No; questions about domain-specific languages mostly belong on SO. ;-P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3639" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T05:08:51.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="406" CreationDate="2011-05-04T14:54:02.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, use a tag for the domain (programming, medicine, law, etc.) This is what some dictionaries do to specify that a particular word is specific to a particular subject domain. It works for me for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T14:54:02.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1070" CreationDate="2011-05-04T20:12:13.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You make a good point. It might be worth trying to add something to the FAQ about this, with respect to good question titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a similar problem on SO, which still occurs from time to time, where people would have titles such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C# LINQ datetime puzzle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the first three words should really be tags, and the real question should be in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/code&gt; should be a tag, so it doesn't need to be in the title. Admittedly that would leave &quot;Pronunciation of cat&quot; and similar titles at a length disadvantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how to get around it with pronunciation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for searching through the current set of questions that have this issue, some sort of &quot;ignore tags&quot; function would be good, if tricky to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T20:12:13.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2011-05-04T20:21:19.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just about to ask this question. Instead I will post an answer. :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be a handful of styling targets on EL&amp;amp;U. These are the ones I could think of quickly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should question titles be &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we use single or double quotes around words in question titles?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we use single or double quotes or italics or code markers around words in question bodies? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/363/what-emphasis-to-use-when-referring-to-words&quot;&gt;Discussion 1&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3091/how-would-we-like-to-format-our-keywords/3092#3092&quot;&gt;Discussion 2&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we use single or double quotes or italics or code markers around words in comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we use &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or backtick for example sentences? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3358/should-we-fix-backticks&quot;&gt;Discussion 1&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3849/inline-quotes-formatting&quot;&gt;Discussion 2&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we include punctuation in question titles?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we mark explicitly incorrect examples? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26/should-we-have-a-standard-way-of-indicating-deliberately-malformed-sentences&quot;&gt;See discussion&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we have a guideline regarding properly formatted links?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should &lt;em&gt;Word1 Vs Word2&lt;/em&gt; be the standard format for such questions? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1211/standard-format-for-questions-on-difference-between-two-specified-words&quot;&gt;See discussion&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I provided relevant links where I knew about them. Please edit in more if you find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another relevant question is whether people should edit with the intent of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing the style of the entire post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the style of a post so it is consistent with itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the style of a post so it is consistent with the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T15:43:40.230" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T15:43:40.230" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-05-04T23:53:34.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1087" CreationDate="2011-05-05T05:59:09.120" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicates:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;What questions are on-topic and off-topic here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/383/can-i-ask-the-community-to-help-me-find-errors-in-a-text-sentence&quot;&gt;Can I ask the community to help me find errors in a text/sentence?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would English SE be a good place to post a paragraph or two paragraphs of my writing for review?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7155" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T08:57:26.313" Title="Review my writing" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-05-10T01:54:48.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1086" CreationDate="2011-05-05T08:57:26.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;No&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask explicit questions about a short sentence of yours, if you highlight the parts of it that you want input on. For example, the following is on-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wrote to a coworker: &lt;em&gt;“if I was in your place, I would refrain from talking to him until he apologizes”&lt;/em&gt;. I wonder if &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; is the correct verb to put here, and if there is a more concise way of saying &lt;em&gt;“refrain from talking to him”&lt;/em&gt;. Can you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for help without saying what you need help with is off-topic. General proofreading is off-topic, and advice regarding style, long descriptions, and such should go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T08:57:26.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1092" CreationDate="2011-05-05T15:57:14.120" Score="85" ViewCount="3559" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been getting a rash of questions asking, essentially, what a programmer should name methods or properties. One such was a request for a word that meant both &quot;add&quot; and &quot;remove&quot; because the programmer wanted to have a method that could add or remove an element. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this really fall under ELU? The English language doesn't really govern what people can or do call class members and the like. This sort of thing seems more about naming conventions, and in that case I think Programmers.SE would be the more logical choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2011-05-05T20:34:15.447" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T14:09:41.950" Title="Is Python a snake or a programming language? If the latter, why is it choking my dog?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2011-05-05T18:03:16.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;☃&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“I may introduce all of my quotations with meaningless ornamental headers now.”&lt;/em&gt; — Jon Purdy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1506" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T18:03:16.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1090" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1093" CreationDate="2011-05-05T19:44:43.040" Score="2" ViewCount="698" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt; tag be used for questions about other 'lects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sociolects (&quot;is this proper for the boardroom/street/etc.&quot;, &quot;how do chavs say _&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ethnolects (&quot;what terms do _ use differently in British English&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Idiolects (&quot;I say this word funny&quot;, &quot;Was _ actually written by Shakespeare&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;/code&gt;*Sexlect ('wa'/'no'/etc. in Japanese)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5868" LastActivityDate="2011-05-06T13:23:06.867" Title="Lects and [dialect]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1090" CreationDate="2011-05-05T19:59:02.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sociolect&lt;/em&gt; is basically a word for &quot;social dialect&quot; and &lt;em&gt;ethnolect&lt;/em&gt; is a dialect predominantly used within a certain ethnic group.  These are types of dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never heard of the term &quot;sexlect&quot;, and any papers I have read dealing with gender-specific speech patterns have referred to them as dialects (or speech patterns).  I would mark such questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt;, myself (though not only with that tag, of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;idiolect&lt;/em&gt; is not a dialect; it is something less than a dialect.  Some people use the term very strictly to refer only to a single individual, and some use it slightly more broadly to refer to, say, the way a husband and wife speak to each other.  While there may be a relevant question dealing with idiolects, the topic is likely to be too localized — the examples you give for &lt;em&gt;idiolect&lt;/em&gt; would probably be closed (I think).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T19:59:02.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2011-05-05T20:39:58.750" Score="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't mind questions of the form &quot;What words work in this context?&quot; &quot;Is there a word that can be used for both add and remove (i.e. from a set)?&quot; seems perfectly fine. What bugs me is that they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; mention programming until after answers come back that don't work in a programming context. Then an edit goes through and everyone gets to update their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that, a programming-only context is uninteresting and it irks the programmer in me when someone starts asking for a method name that breaks convention; at this point the name is irrelevant. &lt;em&gt;You are probably doing it wrong.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my opinion is that programming specific contexts are out of the scope of this site and should be closed as &lt;strong&gt;Too Narrow&lt;/strong&gt;. If you word the question with an open context you don't get to complain about the valid &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; words not fitting into your program. As a programmer, you can figure that out on your own. We are here to discuss English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T20:39:58.750" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1090" CreationDate="2011-05-06T01:31:50.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'sociolect' sounds like 'register' to me an already well-defined term, so dialect would be inapprpriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'ethnolect' sounds like dialect, so appropriate to use the dialect tag (but the semantic difference between sociolect and ethnolect is dubious)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'idiolect' is a reasonable term to use in a question or answer, but if a question would warrant such a tag, that is, the question is about a particular idiolect ('my cousin always says X, but nobody else I know does') then that would be ultra localized and so an inappropriate and closable question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whatever the existing term for 'sexlect' is...I don't know if that is considered by linguists to be register, dialect, or something else (dialect just doesn't seem right). Anyway, as far as I do know, nothing &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; like that occurs in &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, sex differences do occur in vocabulary in English. I'd think it'd be better to tag sex differences in English with 'sex difference' rather than a neologism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in sum,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sociolect - no (use 'register')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ethnolect - yes (but 'register' will work)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idioloect - no (and there shouldn't be questions about particular idiolects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sexolect - no ('sex-difference' sounds better)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2011-05-06T13:23:06.867" LastActivityDate="2011-05-06T13:23:06.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2011-05-06T15:21:37.837" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would think that those questions are off-topic for EL&amp;amp;U simply because the answer can be given just from a programmer point of view, and users on EL&amp;amp;U are not supposed to be all programmers (although some of them could be programmers at some level).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make clear what I mean, I will make two examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What name should I use for my function, instead of &lt;code&gt;IsNotArray()&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Supposing the programming language has such function, a programmer could simply reply with &lt;em&gt;You just need an &lt;code&gt;IsArray()&lt;/code&gt; function; if you need to check if a variable is not an array, then you use &lt;code&gt;!IsArray()&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; Anyone who doesn't know anything about programming languages would not answer in that way, but that would be probably be the best answer that such question could get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my PHP script I added a function; should I call it &lt;code&gt;str_shuffle()&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;str_permutation()&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Anyone who is not a programmer would probably say that it makes no difference, or would choose one and give reasons; anyone who knows PHP will say that &lt;code&gt;str_shuffle()&lt;/code&gt; is a predefined function in PHP, so there would be problems when using a user function called &lt;code&gt;str_shuffle()&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example makes evident that the answer for such questions depends from the programming context; even if that question would be asked on Stack Overflow, anyone who answers would need to know for which programming language the question is being asked. On EL&amp;amp;U, that would be an irrelevant detail (a linguist, for example, is not supposed to know anything about programming), and reporting that the question is about a Java method, or a PHP function would not help to give the correct answer, as whoever answers is supposed to answer based on English usage of a word, or a group of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a compiler doesn't require function/method/class names to follow English grammar or usage; a compiler is happy even if the function is called &lt;code&gt;x3efdsdf()&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;MangiaIlPanino()&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What those questions are really asking is &lt;em&gt;Which function name would help other developers to remember the purpose of a function?&lt;/em&gt; To that question, only a developer is able to give a correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2023-08-13T14:09:41.950" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T14:09:41.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1096" CreationDate="2011-05-06T16:48:51.987" Score="6" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, questions about English (online) resources are being asked. Are those questions on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U? If they are on-topic, aren't they at least subjective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are examples of questions about resources; some of the questions have been closed, and some not. That is the reason I am asking this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9963/resources-for-english-business-language&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9963/resources-for-english-business-language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/advice-resources-for-indian-english-speakers&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/advice-resources-for-indian-english-speakers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5646/descriptive-writing-cambridge-english-language-tips-and-resources&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5646/descriptive-writing-cambridge-english-language-tips-and-resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2921/good-resources-to-learn-how-to-write-mails&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2921/good-resources-to-learn-how-to-write-mails&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18566/resources-to-teach-english&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18566/resources-to-teach-english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19864/are-there-resources-or-tools-for-reverse-etymology&quot;&gt;Are there resources or tools for &amp;quot;reverse etymology&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7211/list-of-good-resources-for-toefl-preparation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7211/list-of-good-resources-for-toefl-preparation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14794/provide-general-terms-for-grammatic-errors-in-sentence-and-resources-to-fix-the-s&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14794/provide-general-terms-for-grammatic-errors-in-sentence-and-resources-to-fix-the-s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7057/what-are-some-good-books-online-resources-for-growing-your-vocabulary&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7057/what-are-some-good-books-online-resources-for-growing-your-vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are shown in the order presented in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=resources&quot;&gt;search page for &quot;resources.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-11-26T12:58:43.693" Title="Are questions about online resources on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1095" CreationDate="2011-05-06T18:11:22.510" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they are not on topic for EL&amp;amp;U. Questions like that could be posted on &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://writers.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;; they have a &quot;resources&quot; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-26T12:58:43.693" LastActivityDate="2011-11-26T12:58:43.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1100" CreationDate="2011-05-06T21:26:09.423" Score="18" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;/about&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zthgp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Jin, this is funny and all, but... but... &lt;em&gt;BUT&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Opera, Chrome, Firefox; Vista.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T14:03:49.793" Title="All mods are equal, but some mods are more equal than others" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1095" CreationDate="2011-05-06T21:32:59.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the question being asked and the resource involved you can ask the question here on meta. For instance: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/946/how-trustworthy-is-wordnet&quot;&gt;How trustworthy is WordNet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-05-06T21:32:59.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1097" CreationDate="2011-05-06T23:17:22.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be deployed with the next build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2011-05-06T23:17:22.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-07T00:19:40.223" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;The background image on the main site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sPiZM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;background&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to have developed a very subtle &quot;pixelation&quot; effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is enlarged, contrast-enhanced version of the image, making it plainer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;“Enlarge and enhance”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://img.skitch.com/20110507-1dipwddi3gm1kgq1ynq9ym21uk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Enhance&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this intentional or is it the result of some weird compression artifact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2012-02-15T06:42:17.853" LastActivityDate="2012-02-15T06:42:17.853" Title="What's up with the background image" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1103" CreationDate="2011-05-07T16:46:13.467" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/868/do-we-need-the-foreign-tag&quot;&gt;Do we need the &amp;quot;foreign&amp;quot; tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links that I see under that question are split on two lines. It happened after I voted to close my question as it is not relevant, now that there are not questions using that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SmStR.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot #1&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a comparison, this is what I see for another question, which was not asked by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hMJCO.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot #2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T20:16:21.750" Title="The links posted under a question are split on two lines" Tags="|support|design|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2011-05-07T22:51:49.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a bug — you have the rollback ability on your question or post as the owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also added &quot;protect&quot; as an ability for 15k rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore when protect and rollback appear, the menu wraps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-05-08T01:59:17.307" LastActivityDate="2011-05-08T01:59:17.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11950" CreationDate="2011-05-08T21:13:53.050" Score="13" ViewCount="3022" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngram viewer&lt;/a&gt; allows one to compare the frequencies of a set of phrases over time. It even allows you to restrict that comparison to an American corpus, or separately to an English one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am wondering if there is any way to compare the frequency of one word/phrase over time between American and English? Either through Google Ngram or something else. I couldn't really find anything on google (itself or by using it).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T03:27:55.093" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T03:27:55.093" Title="How to compare frequencies of words over time between British and American English on the same graph" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-08T21:52:34.343" Score="3" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1088/is-python-a-snake-or-a-programming-language-if-the-latter-why-is-it-choking-my&quot;&gt;Is Python a snake or a programming language? If the latter, why is it choking my dog?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen several Questions lately typified by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24377/in-a-single-word-how-can-i-describe-recent-action&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which quite shamelessly solicits suggested names for a program variable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind if a questioner wants help choosing suitable terms for his application to display (for example, when presenting user choices). But I really can't see why EL&amp;amp;U should concern itself with choice of variable names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be ok to flag such questions for moderator attention? Or am I being unreasonable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-08T21:52:34.343" Title="Use of EL&amp;U as a lazy programmers resource" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-05-08T22:14:32.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1109" CreationDate="2011-05-08T22:35:35.380" Score="3" ViewCount="22134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder what will happen after knowing the origin of a word. I see 7-8 questions about it everyday. Is it really useful? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7237" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-09T03:23:36.307" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T19:30:57.627" Title="How important is a word origin?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1106" CreationDate="2011-05-08T22:46:50.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack&#xA;  Exchange is for linguists,&#xA;  etymologists, and (serious) English&#xA;  language enthusiasts. Questions on the&#xA;  following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’&#xA;  development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, this is a core function of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-05-08T22:46:50.670" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1106" CreationDate="2011-05-08T23:37:01.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;knowing the etymology (meaning and phonetic change history) of a word does nothing for the current meaning of the word. The word in question is pronounced as it is now and means what it does now, and there's no talking to people who are dead (or slightly older for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;one can use a word perfectly well under most circumstances without knowing its formal dictionary definition, but knowing that definition will certainly allow you to use it better. Knowing its etymology may bring out more nuances and connotations to the current semantics that you didn't realize are currently there. There are academic interests in them, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-05-08T23:37:01.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1106" CreationDate="2011-05-08T23:37:54.537" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is useful to the extent that it is useful to understand and investigate the origins and evolution of languages in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a fork-lift operator, then no, it's not very useful to the core tasks of your day-to-day life.  If you're a linguist or historian, it is extremely useful.  If you are someone who is interested in how languages work, knowledge for its own sake, and/or understanding the world around you, then it can be fascinating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a linguist, the origin of certain words could theoretically change the entire direction of my research.  Is that useful enough for you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-05-08T23:37:54.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1106" CreationDate="2011-05-09T15:54:35.460" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word origin is very important. Knowing the etymology of a word provides enhanced perspective about its most effective use. You understand its original meaning and how it may have transformed over time, how people have used it past and present. You can differentiate subtle differences with similar or related words, both now and past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From etymology, you begin to see patterns and relationships between languages. You begin to see patterns and gain understanding about the development of words. You gain greater capacity to comprehend great writing past and present through the clarity obtained. You enrich your ability to communicate by expanding your precision control over meaning based on the words you now more wisely choose to employ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a form of history. When reading anything from the past, understanding the etymology of words is profoundly enlightening, as it clarifies meaning that can be otherwise lost or misconstrued by the passage of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many great writers have a love of etymology. Tolkein was one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7674" LastEditorUserId="7674" LastEditDate="2011-05-09T16:03:28.480" LastActivityDate="2011-05-09T16:03:28.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-09T22:27:39.587" Score="6" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24405/error-404-does-this-have-a-meaning/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic, for reasons I can't understand. It's a question about slang (albeit the OP was a bit confused about the original usage as compared to the slang usage), which seems on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U. (It's not as if we've closed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slang&lt;/a&gt; questions in the past just for being slang.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know at least one user voted to close as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;, which it's really not. If we follow the close text guideline, which reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really is no &lt;em&gt;standard internet reference source&lt;/em&gt; for slang; Urban Dictionary comes closest, but people put up inside jokes and the like that it's really not that helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should this question really have been closed, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T05:17:03.007" Title="Should this question have been closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1111" CreationDate="2011-05-09T23:13:30.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is asking why the http error code for a missing file is 404. This is not only completely off-topic, it's also quite pointless: the reason the code is 404 is because that's the next number after 403.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question were edited to instead ask about whether &lt;em&gt;404&lt;/em&gt; has acquired any slang meanings in general English usage, then it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be considered on-topic and reopened. Maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: @waiwai, having now re-read the question a couple of times, I agree that your interpretation is not only possible, but is probably what the OP intended. I've edited the question to try to make this clear, and have voted to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-05-10T00:20:53.407" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T00:20:53.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-10T04:30:17.620" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other people have such beautifully formatted questions and answers, and I have to do it basic HTML. Are there any special keys you have to use in order to have a 'touched up' post? and can someone please show me all the formats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-10T06:26:31.710" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T16:03:03.883" Title="Is there a way for formatting my questions and answers?" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1114" CreationDate="2011-05-10T06:30:29.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you ask a question, to the right side of the page there is a block that shows the basic markups to format a page; it contains also a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;formatting help&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hL0Nq.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T16:03:03.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1114" CreationDate="2011-05-10T10:39:08.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what Kiamlaluno gave you, you must know that this site uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most tags you'll see in that page are used here. I'll give you some quick examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use of &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; before a paragraph, to make it look like this rectangle I'm writing in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;code&gt;[link name](www.example.com)&lt;/code&gt; to make links in comments. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Links in answers are different. When you are writing an answer, to make it the simple way, do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click the chain button;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paste the link;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write the &quot;link name&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll see its structure and so you'll be able to edit it without making it from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T10:39:08.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1097" CreationDate="2011-05-10T12:46:23.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assumed the problem was just the sheer number of extra votes that Reg has, weighing his flair down...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2386" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-05-10T14:03:49.793" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T14:03:49.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1106" CreationDate="2011-05-10T13:51:03.610" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to work as a writing tutor and would hear &quot;English is stupid, it doesn't make any sense!&quot; at least once a day. Studying the origin of words and constructs allowed me to help students understand that some of the stuff might not make sense today, but it did at one point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once students understand that modern English is built on many antiquated legacy systems, and once they understand that English grows organically, they are more accepting of the flaws and are more receptive to learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, from an educator's perspective, yes, history of words is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8253" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T13:51:03.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1132" CreationDate="2011-05-10T16:08:47.410" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;On both the meta and the main site, the text shown in the Markup help block goes outside the block frame, as shown in the following screenshots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PCUUG.png&quot; alt=&quot;english.SE screenshot&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WRdAu.png&quot; alt=&quot;meta.english.SE screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-05-12T17:57:11.853" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T17:57:11.853" Title="The text shown in the Markdown help block is rendered outside the block borders" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1136" CreationDate="2011-05-10T16:20:28.670" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I ask a question on this meta site, or edit an existing question, I see these blocks that use the same background color used on the main site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jBjU9.png&quot; alt=&quot;How to Ask&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5CLwb.png&quot; alt=&quot;How to Format&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2eNeA.png&quot; alt=&quot;How to Edit&quot;&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-05-12T17:56:54.800" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T17:56:54.800" Title="Some blocks on the meta site use the color scheme used by the main site" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-10T16:34:48.647" Score="19" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had started an answer with &quot;Dear [username] &quot; and I see that this heading was deleted by a moderator. Is this a general policy on this site ? I'm a new user and don't yet know the rules. Needless to say, I am not arguing and intend to comply but I just wanted  to ask about this point of etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8345" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Etiquette on addressing fellow-users" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1121" CreationDate="2011-05-10T17:55:15.643" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually we restrict the question area to the question itself, since the site is intentionally structured as Q&amp;amp;A rather than forum discussion.  So introductions, thank-yous, signatures, and the like are generally deleted.  (Of course, these aren't seen as &quot;poor etiquette&quot; per se, they are just not part of the format of the site, so they will be removed when not relevant to the question.)  The same goes for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T17:55:15.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1121" CreationDate="2011-05-10T18:02:22.787" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key thing to remember is that this site is not a traditional forum or a social network; it is all about questions and answers, not &quot;addressing fellow users&quot;. When you write an answer, you don't write it just for the original poster, you write it for anyone and everyone who might have that question in the future. Personal salutations are extraneous clutter at best, and completely misleading at worst. Remember that anyone can change their user name at any time without notice, or even completely delete their account, so you will end up addressing a meaningless string of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reading, check out e.g. this question on the meta Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-and-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should 'Hi', 'thanks' and taglines and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I will quote just a paragraph or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this is supposed to be a website which is servicing more than just the primary author, we need to think about how we construct messages so that they appear more clearly to those searching on google for questions that match their own. If I am looking for a solution for question X, I want to find someone who had the same problem, not their short autobiography and formalities before getting to that actual question. — TheTXI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]f we had two parallel worlds, one with the [post] including the greetings etc, and one without, which would we choose? I'd choose the world where the [posts] just had the required information, as readably and concisely as possible. — Jon Skeet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T18:02:22.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1106" CreationDate="2011-05-10T19:30:57.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word origin is &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;. At least, it is for some people. I like knowing the history of a word and the evolution of how we speak. I like it for the same reason I enjoy most complex systems: I find complexity beautiful and entertaining. Language is insanely complex. Unraveling that complexity involves understanding why we use the words we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uses for that understanding include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instinctively interpreting a word you have never heard before&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creating a new word to describe an original idea or concept that hasn't been given its own word yet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;communication across language barriers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comprehending older documents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;translating between dialects and understanding the reason for different connotations in different cultures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word games and puzzles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creating an artificial language for fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the more of the system you understand the less you need to memorize things by brute force. It is easier to remember how things connect than remember each individual connection. Word origin and history is part of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To drive the point home, word origin is a thing. Finding a use for that thing isn't too difficult if you want to find a use. If you don't happen to use it, good for you. Some of us do stuff with those things; good for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T19:30:57.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-11T10:40:06.797" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sorry, we can't accept this question.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From yesterday I am not able to ask some questions, Why is it happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7858" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-05-12T04:58:33.950" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T05:39:58.500" Title="Why is this happening? Oops" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-11T11:33:31.740" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I view my flag weight? I want to make sure that I am flagging correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-12T05:15:27.263" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T05:15:27.263" Title="Is it possible to view our flag weights?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1126" CreationDate="2011-05-11T11:40:20.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look in your user profile, under your gravatar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BSjuv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the flag weight is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; displayed if it's exactly &lt;code&gt;100&lt;/code&gt; (default).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-05-11T11:40:20.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1138" CreationDate="2011-05-11T15:02:51.717" Score="9" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Piggy backing off of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1106/how-important-is-a-word-origin&quot;&gt;How important is a word origin?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, what level of an etymology question is safe to close as general reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-05-13T04:06:33.233" Title="What is the General Reference qualification for questions on word or phrase origin?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|general-reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1125" CreationDate="2011-05-11T19:31:55.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the site was having some issues. Network, or otherwise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be fixed now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastActivityDate="2011-05-11T19:31:55.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-11T23:57:26.020" Score="5" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just the other day I could cast 38 votes, then yesterday I could only do 32. Is there a factor affecting our vote limits? Perhaps like saving-up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-12T05:04:58.183" LastActivityDate="2011-05-14T00:05:01.513" Title="Why does our vote limit change?" Tags="|support|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1130" CreationDate="2011-05-12T00:55:44.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was changed per &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/05/vote-for-this-question-or-the-kitten-gets-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a blog entry&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The daily vote limit used to be 30 votes per day; we’ve increased that to a maximum of 40 votes per day — but only if you vote on a combination of answers and questions. This isn’t as significant as you might think, since it is exceedingly rare for users to even hit the 30 vote daily cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T00:55:44.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1119" CreationDate="2011-05-12T04:17:10.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T04:17:10.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1125" CreationDate="2011-05-12T04:58:27.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are certain quality filters we apply to incoming questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure your question has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a clear title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a reasonable &lt;em&gt;explanation&lt;/em&gt; of what your question is, sharing your research on the matter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;correct use of English and actual sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if your question is so brief that it could be looked up in a dictionary or reference book/site trivially, it might not be a good fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-05-12T05:39:58.500" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T05:39:58.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1130" CreationDate="2011-05-12T05:14:21.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What reported by @MrHen is correct. The limit is 40 votes but, for what I have noticed, you need to vote 10 questions before you vote for 30 answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, if you vote 2 questions, and then vote 30 answers, then you already reached your limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The order of the votes is not important; you could vote 4 questions, 15 answers, 2 questions, and 15 answers, and you would have reached your daily limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; reports the following sentence, about voting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A maximum of 40 votes can be cast per user per day, however, to reach the maximum you must vote on at least 10 questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-05-14T00:05:01.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-12T05:49:18.167" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24697/does-the-symbol-have-a-name/24700#comment-41992&quot;&gt;Does the &amp;quot;@&amp;quot; symbol have a name?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Edgar Gonzalez asks specifically for a one-word name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24680/what-do-you-call-a-noun-that-precedes-and-describes-another-noun&quot;&gt;What do you call a noun that precedes and describes another noun?&lt;/a&gt; In addition to the original question, Acorn asks if it is still a noun or adjective.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be solved by adding an answer in the first, authentic question. This answer can cover the subtleties of the borderline duplicate. However this creates other problem because you risk writing about things that stray away from the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;notes:&#xA;-the moderator adds &quot;possible duplicate&quot; next to the link, but this contradicts the &quot;exact duplicate&quot; official reason&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-users can have different opinions about whether it is nuanced or not. It's a matter of how you understand the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T07:04:59.297" Title="How to treat borderline duplicate questions?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1120" CreationDate="2011-05-12T06:44:59.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;the fix will be in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T06:44:59.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1135" CreationDate="2011-05-12T07:04:59.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those questions are considered duplicates because the answer to one question is also the answer to the other question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the specific, the most voted answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15700/what-is-the-word-that-denotes-the-words-preceding-these-nouns&quot;&gt;What is the word that denotes the words preceding these nouns?&lt;/a&gt; reports the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word I hear most is &lt;em&gt;noun adjective&lt;/em&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;attributive noun&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;noun adjunct&lt;/em&gt; sound equally appropriate and current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer I gave for that question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Computer&lt;/em&gt;, in &lt;em&gt;computer vision&lt;/em&gt;, is a modifier, which is a word (especially an adjective or noun used attributively), that restricts or adds to the sense of a head noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that a modifier could be a noun, as in &lt;em&gt;computer vision&lt;/em&gt;, or an adjective, as in &lt;em&gt;beautiful house&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;The answer to the second question asked in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24680/what-do-you-call-a-noun-that-precedes-and-describes-another-noun&quot;&gt;What do you call a noun that precedes and describes another noun?&lt;/a&gt; has been already answered in the answers for the other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text that you find at the beginning of a question closed as duplicate is not added by any moderators; it's added by the system to report which question has been duplicated.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you would be able to edit a closed question (I am not sure if all users have that possibility), you would notice there is a comment saying: &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- End of automatically inserted text --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; added after the text reporting the link to the duplicated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-05-12T07:04:59.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1128" CreationDate="2011-05-13T03:53:09.383" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; few etymology-related questions would be safe to close as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most online or printed &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot; works dealing with etymology or word origins have existed up to this point without the benefit of Google Books. I won't argue that this tool is the be all and end all of word origins and such, but it is a very powerful tool that is just beginning to be tapped. In the process of answering some basic-looking questions on this site, I've turned up several antedatings and bits of new information on words and phrases that have in turn been used to update entries at general reference sites like Etymonline and The Phrase Finder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Doug Harper writes in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/abbr.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;introduction&lt;/a&gt; to his Online Etymology Dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent availability of newspaper and magazine archives in computer files, and the flood of material presented in the searchable Google books project, opens a vast field for careful research [...] The bulk of the 19th and 20th century dates in this work have been found, or confirmed, in such sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The availability of Internet newsgroups archives -- again, used judiciously -- is a convenient way to find rough early dates for the most contemporary words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading the discussions about the value of these types of questions and about the danger of having too many basic questions on Q&amp;amp;A sites like this. I can see this being an issue with other types of questions, but I strongly believe that in answering questions encompassing &amp;quot;first usage&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;historical use in print,&amp;quot;  our work here will continue to shape, or even become, &amp;quot;general reference.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-05-13T04:06:33.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1121" CreationDate="2011-05-16T01:21:57.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greetings are polite, and generally used on forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Stack Exchange sites are not forums, and greetings take up a line of space for no particular practical reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, per convention, the greeting is made implicit. There is no need for it on every single post... or, indeed, on any!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3703" LastActivityDate="2011-05-16T01:21:57.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-16T20:35:44.850" Score="8" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is now, here is the content of a &amp;quot;Too Localized&amp;quot; close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;closed as too localized by MrHen, Robusto, JSBangs, Dusty, F'x 1 hour ago&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We happen to &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; about small geographic areas if they speak their own dialect of English and specific moments in time may also be a little misleading given how many etymology questions we see. Is it possible (or advisable) to have this reason slightly reworded to more directly address the problem we are trying to solve by closing Too Narrow questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T02:12:04.527" Title="Is the description of &quot;Too Localized&quot; accurate for EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2011-05-17T00:30:25.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;small geographic area&quot; still applies to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If somebody asks the meaning of a phrase that comes out to be used only from their neighborhood, then I think that the question could be considered too localized because relevant to a small geographic area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that closing reason needs to be rephrased; it seems to explain exactly what the reason of closing the question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T00:30:25.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1146" CreationDate="2011-05-17T05:59:41.493" Score="2" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've tried asking a question but the page shows the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, we can't accept this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the exact characters typed into the textbox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question Title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what's a consumer-tech weblog / website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question Body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi all, what's a consumer-tech weblog / website (and why is it called that way) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vocabulary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:30:14.633" Title="Why does it say &quot;Sorry, we can't accept this question&quot;?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2011-05-17T07:50:18.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used the word in question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9824/was-the-word-nigger-an-expletive-in-mark-twains-day&quot;&gt;Was the word &amp;quot;nigger&amp;quot; an expletive in Mark Twain&amp;#39;s day?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T07:50:18.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-17T11:23:23.740" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1121/etiquette-on-addressing-fellow-users&quot;&gt;Etiquette on addressing fellow-users&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange seems to be a serious website that everyone interest on the quality of question and answer, i just want to know that is this webboard considers things like &quot;Thank you&quot; as a spam or not ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8369" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T11:23:23.740" Title="Is saying thank you in this webboard consider as spam ?" Tags="|support|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2011-05-17T12:38:31.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-17T13:04:13.303" Score="3" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I dislike all the game-mechanics stuff (badges and reputation). I appreciate that others like it, but I would like there to be way to opt-out. Questions and answers would just then have the user-name with something to symbolize that this user has chosen not to participate in reputation or badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore I would like a facility to post anonymously (whilst retaining a user-account). I could track my questions asked and answered, but my q's and a's would be tagged &quot;anonymous&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a question or answer should be able to stand for itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7064" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T20:02:48.407" Title="Can we have a feature to opt-out of &quot;reputation&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|reputation|badges|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1142" CreationDate="2011-05-17T13:08:26.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are automated filters in place that prevent questions from being asked which are likely to be closed. In your case, your question was very likely to be closed as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, and the SE framework discovered this and prevented you from asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more information here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/92074/323179&quot;&gt;What can I do when getting “It does not meet our quality standards”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T18:30:14.633" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:30:14.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-17T14:31:40.443" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is my meta.english.stackexchange.com site related to my english.stackexchange.com site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had responses on meta.english.stackexchange.com but its not showing up at all (I do not know why someone had replied at all!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8278" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2013-07-18T11:38:30.260" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T11:38:30.260" Title="how am I notified when someone has responded on meta.english.stackexchange.com" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1147" CreationDate="2011-05-17T17:19:12.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only response I see to you here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://sqa.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74/version-control-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; show up in your inbox (available by clicking the little StackExchange link at the top-left of the page). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there others you expect to see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:48:10.303" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T17:19:12.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2011-05-17T17:27:17.487" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak for The Powers That Be (for I am but a mere moderator), but I think they would tell you that the reputation system is not just for you, the holder of the reputation, but for the entire community—so that everyone who interacts with you can get a sense of who you are with respect to this community. The idea is that it is not just unrelated game mechanics overlaid onto the community but that reputation and badges are an explicit marker of what would otherwise be implicit or cloaked. It would unfair to the rest of the community (and generally an unwanted wedge dividing the community) to provide users with the ability to cloak their reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T17:27:17.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2011-05-17T17:44:56.820" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change your name to &quot;Anonymous&quot; and just ignore the little numbers. It's not mandatory to provide any personal information, and you're free to play or not play &quot;the game&quot; as you wish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't opt out of being voted on or refuse to let the site associate your Q&amp;amp;A though&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;. That would open the door to abuse from trolls, spammers and other 'Net ne'er-do-wells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;Actually, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; post completely anonymously by simply logging out and never logging back in again, clearing your browser cookies after each post or using your browser's private/incognito mode. But this will also keep you from associating your own posts, and keep you locked into a perpetual &quot;new user&quot; mode.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T17:44:56.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2011-05-17T19:42:27.950" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click the button for &quot;community wiki&quot; on your posts and you won't accrue reputation points from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6017" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T19:42:27.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-17T22:04:59.347" Score="10" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I described this site to a friend as &quot;the best place I know to spend time constructively when you should be working&quot;.  But it occurred to me that I don't know the exact way to describe what we're doing.  Mark Twain said &quot;work is whatever a body is obliged to do, and play is whatever a body is not obliged to do&quot;, but we're not exactly playing.  On the other hand, I wouldn't (unless desperate for something to put on my CV), call it voluntary work.  Is there a word or short phrase for what you're doing at this moment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" OwnerDisplayName="TimLymington " LastActivityDate="2011-05-20T15:06:07.427" Title="What are we doing on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1152" CreationDate="2011-05-18T00:27:27.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say I'm &quot;participating&quot; in a direct sense, and &quot;exploring&quot; in a general one. I do agree with Twain, though: &quot;play&quot; is anything you don't have to do. Which only means you have to play like you work -- as profitably as you can -- and that too takes experimenting, practice and risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7133" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T00:27:27.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1152" CreationDate="2011-05-18T00:49:29.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Me personally, I'm edifying.  And excogitating.  Not necessarily in that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T00:49:29.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1152" CreationDate="2011-05-18T01:52:05.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIC, this question was perfectly positioned in English.stackexchange. It is not a discussion about the &quot;behaviour&quot; on the site, but a question about a word that can be used to describe the activity of the participants of the site. Hence, it is a question about language use and vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel it should be moved back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6385" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T01:52:05.730" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1142" CreationDate="2011-05-18T08:56:35.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are certain quality filters we apply to incoming questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure your question has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a clear title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a reasonable &lt;em&gt;explanation&lt;/em&gt; of what your question is, sharing your research on the matter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;correct use of English and actual sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if your question is so brief that it could be looked up in a dictionary or reference book/site trivially, it might not be a good fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T08:56:35.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1161" CreationDate="2011-05-18T23:06:55.077" Score="27" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25825/using-the-ex-prefix-on-a-multiple-word-subject&quot;&gt;my first question&lt;/a&gt; here, and got some helpful answers. However, I am not by any means an expert on the English language, and therefore lack the capability to discern whether or not the answers are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can link to references, but I have no comprehension of the validity of the references &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the answers given to my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I come from the Stack Overflow world, where it's often easy to tell if an answer is &quot;correct&quot; (test the code - if it works, the answer is correct in at least some way). In this medium however, there isn't really a way to check your answers for &quot;correctness&quot; other than weighing peer agreement. References can be wrong or misinterpreted, and as I said - I have no idea which references to trust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that &quot;correct&quot; and &quot;accepted&quot; are two different things, but nothing irks me more than to see a blatantly &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt; answer accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, should I do what I normally do (accept the answer that helped me the most), or leave the question alone for a while and let the votes help me make that decision? Perhaps I should not accept an answer at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;: If someone would share a few links to sites that are considered trusted (or &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; to be trusted) references, that would also help me greatly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8794" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T12:49:04.787" Title="How should I handle accepting answers when I don't know if they are correct?" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1157" CreationDate="2011-05-18T23:20:02.613" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I present an excerpt from the script to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;        188C   FAVORING SPOCK'S STATION                                    188C&#xA;&#xA;               As Spock looks baffled, Bones ENTERS SHOT.&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                         You, ah...&#xA;                                 (diplomatically)&#xA;                         You present the appearance of a man&#xA;                         with a problem.&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         Your perception is correct, Doctor...&#xA;                         In order to return us to the exact&#xA;                         moment at which we left the 23rd&#xA;                         Century, I have used our journey back&#xA;                         through time as a referent,&#xA;                         calculating the coefficient of&#xA;                         elapsed time in relation to the&#xA;                         acceleration curve.&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                         Naturally.&#xA;                                 (then)&#xA;                         So what is your problem?&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         Acceleration is no longer a constant.&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                         Well, you're gonna have to take your&#xA;                         best shot.&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         ... Best shot...?&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                         Guess, Spock. Your best guess.&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         &quot;Guessing&quot; is not in my nature...&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                                 (has waited 10&#xA;                                  years for this)&#xA;                         Well nobody's perfect...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;         224   AT BRIDGE                                                    224&#xA;&#xA;                                       KIRK&#xA;                         Mr. Sulu, take the con. I'm taking&#xA;                         our guest down to see her whales.&#xA;                                 (as he starts)&#xA;                         Mr. Spock: have you accounted for&#xA;                         the variable mass of whales and&#xA;                         water in your time re-entry program?&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         Mr. Scott cannot give me exact&#xA;                         figures, Admiral. So I will...&#xA;                                 (a beat)&#xA;                         Make a guess.&#xA;&#xA;                                       KIRK&#xA;                         You?  &#xA;                               (laughs)&#xA;                         Spock, that's extraordinary.&#xA;&#xA;               He steps forward, shakes Spock's hand as though he had&#xA;               just come through a great transformation. In high&#xA;               spirits, Kirk leads Gillian off the bridge, leaving a&#xA;               puzzled Spock.&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         ... I don't think he understands...&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                         No, Spock. It means he feels safer&#xA;                         about your &quot;guesses&quot; than most other&#xA;                         peoples facts.&#xA;&#xA;               There is a pause.&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         You're saying... It is a compliment.&#xA;&#xA;                                       BONES&#xA;                         It is.&#xA;&#xA;               Spock straightens, pulls the bottom of his garment&#xA;               straight with dignity, and accepts the responsibility.&#xA;&#xA;                                       SPOCK&#xA;                         I will try to make the best guess I&#xA;                         can.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T23:20:02.613" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1157" CreationDate="2011-05-19T00:30:37.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer is really no more than that, the answer was acceptable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you really really want to accept only if the answer is correct, but frankly even on stack overflow, some answers are just educated opinions, and how is the questioner -ever- to be able to judge that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treat the 'accept' button for when the answer is acceptable. Did it make your understanding better? There will be competing answers (even on math.SE), so you'll still have to make your best attempt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T00:30:37.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1068" CreationDate="2011-05-19T01:13:35.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks pretty similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/grouptype/caslon-antique/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Caslon Antique&lt;/a&gt; to me, though the ampersand is definitely different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Could it be &lt;a href=&quot;http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/chriscostello/letterpress-text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Letterpress Text&lt;/a&gt;? Or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/aerotype/americanus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Americanus&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5192" LastEditorUserId="5192" LastEditDate="2011-05-19T01:20:00.177" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T01:20:00.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1157" CreationDate="2011-05-19T05:24:43.713" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Addendum: If someone would share a few&#xA;  links to sites that are considered&#xA;  trusted (or never to be trusted)&#xA;  references, that would also help me&#xA;  greatly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-noad-esl-pie/148#148&quot;&gt;list of common abbreviations&lt;/a&gt;, and the sources on that list are all reliable (some abbreviations aren't sources, but those are fairly obvious once you click through). IMO, the most trusted sources are the OED, the COCA, and the BNC. The first is a dictionary; the latter two are corpora (they show examples of how words have been used over time). The OED, however, is not free to access—if you don't have access through a library or academic institution, Merriam Webster is a good second choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, for how words are commonly used, Wiktionary and Dictionary.com are generally reliable. Urban Dictionary is a mixed bag—it has a lot of slang that you won't find in other sources, but it doesn't necessarily reflect wide usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For grammar and usage, the Chicago Manual of Style, the AP Stylebook, and the MLA Style Manual are the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; authorities—they are all used by various news organizations or academic journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if there are any further sources you want to know about, feel free to ask here on Meta.English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T07:45:59.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1163" CreationDate="2011-05-19T12:14:01.317" Score="-3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked about the origin of &quot;P.U.&quot; in relation to something smelly.  It seems likely that it is not actually an acronym, and I thought it might be fun to post a 'competition' to come up with the best suggestion for what P.U. &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to stand for.  In other words, let's make it into a backronym!  Can we do this as a community wiki?  Please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T12:21:10.550" Title="Would it be okay to post a question for friendly competition?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1162" CreationDate="2011-05-19T12:21:10.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that would certainly be appropriate in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.  The EL&amp;amp;U chat is actually quite active and fun, so I recommend bringing it up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the main EL&amp;amp;U site, though, I don't think it will work.  The closest thing to a &quot;game&quot; question that has been allowed on EL&amp;amp;U is one with an objective answer: e.g. &quot;What's the longest English word that doesn't reuse any letters&quot;, and things like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T12:21:10.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-19T12:57:23.543" Score="8" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we treat questions related to a given foreign language differently depending on their history of interaction with english?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, there are currently more than 60 questions involving japanese, words of japanese origin, english equivalent of japanese phrases or sentences. Several of them are from japanese-speaking people trying to get tips on how to say one particular thing in english. I do find some of them very interesting, but I am biased because I am studying japanese culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we vote or have chosen to vote to close them as off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of them have been answered, often with accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being there is only an &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7526/japanese?referrer=d-9H9mCAKq0DoBR1PHU4dA2&quot;&gt;Area51 proposal&lt;/a&gt; for japanese in the commit phase, so it is not possible to reroute them to another S.E. site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of this language is different from French for instance because of the intense and very ancient interaction with english. In fact &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-the&quot;&gt;many important or popular questions&lt;/a&gt; here involve french or romance loanwords in one or several ways (meaning, spelling, pronunciation, origin, use, ...) but most of them cannot really be criticized as 'translation' or 'second language' requests because many loanwords are ancient and now recognized parts of the english vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16870/le-bon-usage-du-francais-french-usage?referrer=G63ZPf0Ze5tcIDk1Shz0UA2&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; Area 51 &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1979/english-french-translation?referrer=bfHIu7F0eMWuisIhtHJ5Dw2&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/29480/french-language?referrer=smQX427piLViQVNB5HAzXQ2&quot;&gt;proposals&lt;/a&gt;, but here again no current online site to reroute the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we could elaborate about other languages such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16870/le-bon-usage-du-francais-french-usage?referrer=G63ZPf0Ze5tcIDk1Shz0UA2&quot;&gt;Spa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/22635/uso-de-la-lengua-espanola?referrer=ETYkj2LQOAhla9QBS2Oitw2&quot;&gt;nish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/14570/italian-language-and-usage?referrer=uEgzKL2VGABLFrrH4GtYig2&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23631/arabic-language?referrer=k-IRXoUJKni-QuNmpxDPiw2&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30873/turkish-language-and-usage?referrer=BeaYPd8TGqdKcrw-ScJbLA2&quot;&gt;Turkish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/27557/dutch-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;Dutch&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/18413/german-language?referrer=XWi1S3YO44Q3_zbq8fj0VA2&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/10848/english-russian-exchange?referrer=3satu1vZ8mYDvVVb-6SmDQ2&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30873/turkish-language-and-usage?referrer=BeaYPd8TGqdKcrw-ScJbLA2&quot;&gt;Chinese&lt;/a&gt;, and so on ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion on the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where to draw the &quot;on-topic&quot; line when a question is multilingual?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the English.SE community be involved in &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/3/culture&quot;&gt;all language related Area51 proposals&lt;/a&gt; so that questions can be distributed and treated effectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-05-20T02:30:03.390" Title="How to treat questions involving a foreign language?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1164" CreationDate="2011-05-20T02:30:03.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it involves English and is centered on how English deals with the non-English thing, then I'm all for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is about the nonEnglish phenomenon and the question just happens to be written in English, then it is definitely off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere between the two? It should be -about- the English aspect to be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is my opinion about the nature of multilingual questions. I very much wish the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics&quot;&gt;Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt; existed (go there to commit!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to 'should', somehow I don't think English.SE as a thing should have anything to do with Area51 as a thing. Surely, many individuals who are interested in ELU will also be interested in other specific languages, languages in general, and linguistics, too. You'll notice that on the commit page for these different areas there is an area that says where the committers are already members, and they overlap quite a bit with the list I just gave. It just seems weird to have the ELU &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; as some sort of official deciding body, have anything to do with these other areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-05-20T02:30:03.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1152" CreationDate="2011-05-20T15:06:07.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main candidates for me are &lt;strong&gt;contributing&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;participating&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have to pick just one, it'll be the former. You could &lt;em&gt;participate&lt;/em&gt; in Second Life, for example, without really implying you do anything to improve that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-05-20T15:06:07.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1173" CreationDate="2011-05-20T16:25:29.323" Score="21" ViewCount="5900" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know how to include basic hyperlinks, and usually I think that's all I want. But sometimes I'd like to include an actual graph, especially if much of my answer text relates to that graph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 27/10/2013: For the past couple of years I'd been getting along fine with IE8 (and subsequently, Google Chrome) under XP using the method outlined in my own answer below. But something's changed recently with Google NGrams charts, and neither my method nor any other approaches on this page seem to work now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm no longer a total noob at this sort of thing, but I still need help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T02:18:17.657" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T02:33:50.413" Title="How do I insert an actual NGram chart into my post?" Tags="|support|ngrams|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1171" CreationDate="2011-05-20T17:00:50.947" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using IE8 under XP, and it doesn't seem to have your 'Copy URL image' option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after a bit of trial-and-error (not to mention eventually noticing that crucial exclamation mark in front of the link within your text) I found I can get what I want by manually changing &lt;strong&gt;...books.google.com/ngrams/graph...&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;.../chart...&lt;/strong&gt; in the actual link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Thanks to Gilles's comments showing that I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; still use a method loosely based on the above. It's a bit long-winded, so I'll write it down in case I forget (or if anyone else has the same problem). Here's what works for me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copy the address bar to a new browser window, changing &lt;em&gt;graph&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;chart&lt;/em&gt; as above.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Right-click and select &lt;em&gt;Save image as...&lt;/em&gt; (a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PNG&lt;/a&gt; file) within the new window.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(the location/filename aren't important, as it can be deleted after step 4).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the post where you want the graphic, select &lt;em&gt;Add picture... &lt;strong&gt;from my computer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That opens a &quot;browse&quot; control, within which you can select the file just saved.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(then delete the file, or just use the same filename/location every time and overwrite)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2:&#xA;So far as I'm concerned, EI8 and XP are now ancient history. These days I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lightshot-screenshot-tool/mbniclmhobmnbdlbpiphghaielnnpgdp?hl=de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lightshot extension to Chrome&lt;/a&gt;, under Win10. It's an absolute doddle to save any specified rectangular screen area to a local file that you can then upload into an SO post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T02:33:50.413" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T02:33:50.413" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-20T17:46:06.140" Score="11" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have noticed lately more and more folks are suggesting users commit to linguistics and wait to put their answers there. Is it really a good idea to hold those questions off for quality reasons? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just thinking, if we earmark those questions for mass migration instead, it could give Linguistics a nice boost when it comes up and people would still be able to begin looking into things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I thought everyone would actually remember and put in the effort to go ask the build-up of questions they &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; ask, it wouldn't seem much of an issue but I rather think many would get passed over. It may be a good idea, I'm really unsure myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6370" LastEditorUserId="6370" LastEditDate="2011-05-22T06:32:21.393" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How does/should English.SE regard Linguistics.SE?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1174" CreationDate="2011-05-21T05:55:13.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're doing it for the sake of ELU, then I'm right behind you. I only hope Linguistics can have the same nice design that we have!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T05:55:13.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2011-05-21T05:56:24.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Additionally, see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/48417/should-we-zap-the-low-occurrence-tags&quot;&gt;Should We Zap The Low-Occurrence Tags?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've implemented a routine that removes tags created more than 6 months ago which have been used only a single time. It will run monthly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T05:56:24.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-21T07:21:08.943" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to log into chat, and according to the Login help, it is because my HTTP cookies aren't enabled. Where can I find these cookies and how do I enable them? (Sounds like a stack overflow question!) Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-05-21T09:22:22.943" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T09:22:22.943" Title="Help regarding logging in to chat." Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1178" CreationDate="2011-05-21T09:22:15.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you changed any of your browser's default settings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you download a copy of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or (wince) Opera and try that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T09:22:15.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-21T13:16:29.567" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the source you are quoting itself contains a quote, how would do you format it?  You can double up the greater-than signs (&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;), but I don't find this sort of double quote clear or pleasing on the eye; for example, if I quote the Wikipedia entry on Oscar Wilde:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isola died aged eight of meningitis. Wilde's poem &quot;Requiescat&quot; is dedicated to her memory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Tread lightly, she is near&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Under the snow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Speak gently, she can hear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    the daisies grow  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="145161" LastEditDate="2015-11-23T09:31:11.870" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T09:31:11.870" Title="What's the best way to format quotes within quotes?" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1171" CreationDate="2011-05-21T19:30:19.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An additional way (to complement FumbleFingers' method) is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;save the image, using your browser 'save image...' (right click to get a menu)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;then use the tool under 'Your Answer' for 'Image ' (after 'link', 'quote', and 'code sample'), and upload the saved image.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RbYXP.png&quot; alt=&quot;image downloaded from Google Ngrams&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Created from the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=needn%20%27%20t&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or without having to do the step of downloading the image explicitly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eT3S7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eT3S7.png&quot; alt=&quot;direct from books.google.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(similar to FumbleFingers').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method avoids having to create the markup ourself. It saves what you've seen, rather than a link to google Ngrams, which may be desirable or not. It is good to make the additional link explicit then so the reader knows how it was created. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do -any- image this way, a screen shot or some other graphing program or anything. Also, You don't have to save the image, you can link directly to it (use the 'from the web' option on the SE editor image tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T14:57:19.007" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T14:57:19.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1174" CreationDate="2011-05-21T20:21:44.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even though I've been toeing the line of enforcing off-topic-ness in others and barely skirting it in my own, I see the problem of self-censorship. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have been saving (my few) questions up in a file. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it would be better to just post the good but off-topic multi-language or linguistic questions on ELU -just- to have them closed, but to have a record of them to be reposted/migrated when/if ling.SE goes to beta? Or is the asynchronous posting of 'new' questions more liable to better response/quality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually...what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the StackOverflow view? (there are lots of similar branching issues with other areas like computer topics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: I asked this directly over at meta.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92233/off-topic-questions-that-are-on-topic-for-an-area-51-site-that-is-in-commit-phase&quot;&gt;Off topic questions that are on topic for a commit phse area51 site&lt;/a&gt;. There was only one answer (so far) relevant to our difficulty (&quot;just remember the question&quot;) but I'd prefer to see other ideas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T20:04:41.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1174" CreationDate="2011-05-21T22:52:01.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;...commit to linguistics and wait to put their answers there&quot;???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I'm confused re Questions and Answers in this context. Surely the relevant 'questionable' Question must already &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U to provide a page on which to make the above suggestion? What would be the point of suggesting it not be answered where it was asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I doubt many questions have actually been &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; because they're considered inappropriate for EL&amp;amp;U, where they would have been suitable for ling.SE if it existed. I don't really see any good reason for holding up linguistics-oriented questions, but I can see it might be a good idea to have them 'protected' as soon as they're posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have committed to ling.SE myself, but I'm still not at all sure whether it'll fly. I think the best thing to do is simply make sure the &lt;strong&gt;linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; tag is set on any candidates for future migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If and when ling.SE gets going, all existing questions with that tag should just be &lt;em&gt;copied&lt;/em&gt; to it. The originals can be left where they are (maybe marked 'closed' in appropriate cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T22:52:01.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-22T14:14:28.710" Score="14" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;At present, users wanting to be courteous leave comments after down-voting a response, but there is nothing that requires a user to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't much care about the lose of rep. or the down-vote itself, but it doesn't give me much insight into how a question/response can be improved.  Why is there nothing designed to require people to leave comments on down-votes to make their thoughts known and hold them to a level of courtesy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7436" LastEditorUserId="7436" LastEditDate="2011-05-22T14:27:47.347" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T20:16:16.767" Title="Why is it not mandatory to provide comments on a down-vote?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1184" CreationDate="2011-05-22T14:49:51.207" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been brought up before on the SE network.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66020/different-implementation-of-downvoting-require-comments&quot;&gt;See the relevant meta discussion here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it is by design that downvotes and comments are not associated.  The voting function is supposed to be anonymous; also, often there isn't something insightful for every downvoter to add in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-05-22T14:49:51.207" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-22T22:59:24.113" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am seeing this term coming up at times. And I had been asked if I wish to do a wiki once. Seems that I should start to get to know something about the term. Hope that someone could help ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8962" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What is a community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1186" CreationDate="2011-05-22T23:06:10.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;Here is some info on community wikis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here at EL&amp;amp;U, a question will/should be made into a community wiki when there are many right answers; for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-the&quot;&gt;&quot;what words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-05-22T23:06:10.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1184" CreationDate="2011-05-23T14:55:04.033" Score="12" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A different comment may have already listed the reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some authors get pissy about criticism and most of us would rather not spend our days arguing with someone over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no way to enforce someone to leave a relevant comment even if you tried to force them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As Kosmonaut's answer notes, downvoting is more interested in help other readers find the best material the fastest; leaving comments isn't required for this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can always ask in chat if you are particularly worried about the community response to one of your posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people downvote for really inane reasons and it would be pointless to discuss those reasons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T14:55:04.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1191" CreationDate="2011-05-23T15:18:48.017" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somewhere between the fine line between downvoting (which I did) and flagging (which I did not), we have stuff like this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26621/irony-vs-sarcasm/26622#26622&quot;&gt;What are the similarities and differences between &amp;quot;irony&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sarcasm&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as Oatmeal may amuse people, I really don't appreciate having to scroll through that many large images before finding other content. Is there a way to hide an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T16:05:06.453" Title="Is there a way to hide answers you don't want to see?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|answers|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1189" CreationDate="2011-05-23T16:05:06.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is any way to hide an answer that you don't want to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T16:05:06.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1193" CreationDate="2011-05-23T16:17:10.353" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, in the definition of a word there is a part that explains the context for which the meaning is valid; for example, for &lt;em&gt;automagically&lt;/em&gt; the definition is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(especially in relation to the operation of a computer process) automatically and in a way that seems ingenious, inexplicable, or magical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the part that is between parentheses is different, as in the definition of &lt;em&gt;puzzle&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cause (someone) to feel confused because they cannot understand something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reporting the definition on EL&amp;amp;U, should I use the parentheses as I have reported here, or should I use brackets as in the following definition of &lt;em&gt;bracket&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[with adjective or noun modifier] a category of people or things that are similar or fall between specified limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T17:47:17.310" Title="Usage of parenthesis when reporting the definition of a word" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1192" CreationDate="2011-05-23T17:47:17.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually in word definitions the round parentheses &lt;code&gt;(...)&lt;/code&gt; are used for meaning or context explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The square brackets &lt;code&gt;[...]&lt;/code&gt; are often used by dictionaries to report the pronunciation of the given word (I checked 3 paper dictionaries I have), so maybe using it for the other purpose too might get the reader confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T17:47:17.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1184" CreationDate="2011-05-23T17:50:39.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if any body has noticed, but I think it is rare to non-existent for anyone to give an explanation for a downvote. My explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you don't have to explain your upvotes, why do you have to go to the bother of doing it for downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;downvotes are already pretty rare anyway (look at anybody's account). This means that they are really stigmatized by the voter for whatever reason (I take it as a given that it feels very hurtful by the recipient). An explanation is not anonymous and so much more easily retaliated, however reasonable the downvote and explanation might be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is a large psychological cost to the explanation, only some to the actual vote. Forcing an explanation would result in few down votes altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T17:50:39.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-24T00:24:57.527" Score="6" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question arises from a suggestion by FumbleFingers that I post it here for comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, some of the questions asked at EL&amp;amp;U SE are overly simple and could be handled by a routine Google search. Others are, while seemingly simple, deceptively complex - like this one about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26621/irony-vs-sarcasm/26624#26624&quot;&gt;irony vs sarcasm.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, in answering some of the more difficult queries, elements of the language of linguistics and linguistic philosophy may be useful, as these fields of study are explicitly designed to explore such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I used the terms &quot;happy&quot; and &quot;unhappy&quot; to describe the state of various utterances and was not clearly understood. I am of a mind to forward these terms to the community for consideration because I'd like to popularize their use; however, if the consensus is that they are not useful, then I'll withdraw my efforts at advocating for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say that a construction is &quot;happy&quot; means that it is well-formed and appropriate for the purpose to which it is employed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a construction is &quot;unhappy,&quot; it is failing in some aspect such that it does not succeed. There are types and classes of unhappiness, namely: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misfires: Externally Unhappy Utterances. &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a. Misinvocations: appropriate act&#xA;fails conventional criteria.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b. Non-Plays: no appropriate convention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c. Misapplications: convention misapplied.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;d. Misexecutions: appropriate act rendered defective.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e. Flaws: conventional procedure partly rejected.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;f. Hitches: conventional procedure not completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abuses: Internally Unhappy Utterances. &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a. Insincerities: appropriate intention(s) absent.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b. Non-Fulfillments: intention(s) not fully carried out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This extended taxonomy is well beyond what most users would want or need to know, but I'm adding it here for the expert reader to more fully describe the ways in which a statement might be &quot;unhappy.&quot; In my view, to say that an utterance is &quot;wrong&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot; can be at times overly blunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, to say that an expression is &quot;unhappy&quot; is a more nuanced description that something is wrong with it, either in construction or idiom, or that it fails to execute a performative utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This terminology was initially popularized by JL Austin, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Austin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to Do Things With Words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and further developed by John Searle in &lt;em&gt;Speech Acts&lt;/em&gt; and other works. Here's a nice paper by Kevin Halion that devotes a chapter to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.e-anglais.com/thesis.html#chap2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speech Acts and Their Happiness.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, this kind of terminology allows for much greater precision in the discussion of language and it is usually self-explanatory through context. I am not suggesting that we use the language of linguistics wholesale, but merely that &lt;em&gt;happiness&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unhappiness&lt;/em&gt; are exceptionally powerful terms worth community consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-05-25T03:34:57.103" Title="Question about the usefulness of &quot;happy&quot; and &quot;unhappy&quot; at SE" Tags="|discussion|request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1198" CreationDate="2011-05-24T03:22:54.447" Score="16" ViewCount="3554" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; is a great resource for provenance tracking of words and phrases in published English books. It is essentially a histogram computer for frequency of word use over the date  which allows comparison among a number of words/phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is purely a search on books in Google's scanned catalog. Is there any similar app to do the comparison on words that are on web pages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed the lack of such a tool when I went to compare two words in order to answer a question. Google ngrams gave zero hits, which surprised me because others were referring to a number of google hits. Then I realize they were using the regular search for that. But there was no way to do a comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there's a difficulty with -dating- an occurrence of a word, but one could at least return just the number of hits -now- for a set of words/phrases (instead of doing each search separately and recording the number of hits for each one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a tool like Google Ngrams for the words on web pages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T02:18:50.563" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T23:46:44.247" Title="Google Ngrams for the web (not just books)" Tags="|discussion|ngrams|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2011-05-24T03:36:37.567" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is a vague wishy-washy term like &lt;em&gt;unhappy&lt;/em&gt;, which doesn't sound like it has anything to do with language or grammar, supposed to allow &quot;&lt;em&gt;greater&lt;/em&gt; precision in the discussion of language&quot;? I think systematizing something like this would be a bad idea. Call a spade a spade: if it's incorrect, say so. If it's not grammatical, say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T03:36:37.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2011-05-24T03:59:48.580" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Google has the raw data for this as well: &lt;a href=&quot;http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Web 1T 5-gram&lt;/a&gt;, but it costs money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must either pay for access to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistics Data Consortium&lt;/a&gt; where you can get this data, or else pay $150 to get it outright (note: actually, for this particular data, it looks like you don't get an LDC discount, so no reason to join).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is synchronic data, and not diachronic as with the Google Books ngrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T17:40:12.503" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T17:40:12.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-24T05:20:04.473" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Down voting is a great way to discourage bad answers, but what if the original answer or question has been improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe providing a way to let the down-votes removable will highly encourage self-improving of answers and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An idea after a quick discussion with @nohat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about letting poster owner have the ability to send out the notifications to down voters, and holding a limitation like 10 notifications per user per day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8176" LastEditorUserId="8176" LastEditDate="2011-05-24T05:54:23.990" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is there a way to remind the down-voter upon the related answer or quesion is changed?" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2011-05-24T05:22:09.253" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the terms I have usually heard used for this purpose are &lt;em&gt;felicitous&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;infelicitous&lt;/em&gt;, marking a slightly different boundary than &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt;. Whereas something might be &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; in that it doesn’t violate any constitutive correctness conditions of the grammar it could be described as &lt;em&gt;infelicitous&lt;/em&gt; if an average speaker might object it for one reason or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, whereas &lt;em&gt;All her friends and relatives had supported Ann throughout the ordeal&lt;/em&gt; is a grammatical sentence, &lt;em&gt;Her husband had supported Ann throughout the ordeal&lt;/em&gt;, while constructed the same way, might be described as &lt;em&gt;infelicitous&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the word &lt;em&gt;felicitous&lt;/em&gt; derives from Latin &lt;em&gt;felix&lt;/em&gt;, meaning “happy”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T05:22:09.253" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1199" CreationDate="2011-05-24T05:22:55.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be reversed if a question in subsequently modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T05:22:55.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1199" CreationDate="2011-05-24T09:02:01.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just two quick points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If history is any lesson, people able to attract ten downvotes in a single day should be &lt;em&gt;prevented&lt;/em&gt; from contacting people who spend their preciousss reps on keeping the site tidy. Seriously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MSO:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1751/allow-an-edit-to-notify-downvoters-i-think-ive-fixed-the-issue-now-please-ch&quot;&gt;Allow an edit to notify downvoters: “I think I've fixed the issue now — please check”&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37090/feature-request-downvoter-sends-a-notification-to-all-downvoters-for-your-post&quot;&gt;Feature request: @Downvoter sends a notification to all downvoters for your post&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-huh-wha&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-huh-wha&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-huh-wha&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T09:02:01.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-24T13:53:46.033" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered this site hoping someone could proofread a small description of my new open-source project. However the FAQ specifically disallows it. Would anyone kindly point me to site that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; offer this kind of service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9024" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T11:14:26.997" Title="Where can I get a small text proofread?" Tags="|support|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-12-05T18:20:20.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2011-05-24T14:10:51.560" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last I checked, &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; was OK with proofreading requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Writing critique questions are also welcome here, provided you tag them as critique – and provide details and context for your writing, as well as some direction on what type of feedback you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T14:10:51.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2011-05-24T14:11:53.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; does accept critique requests (they have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/critique&quot;&gt;dedicated tag&lt;/a&gt; for those). However, make sure that you meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166/what-are-the-guidelines-for-asking-for-a-critique-of-my-work&quot;&gt;their guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T14:11:53.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2011-05-24T18:00:03.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This extended taxonomy is well beyond what most users would want or need to know, but I'm adding it here for the expert reader to more fully describe the ways in which a statement might be &quot;unhappy.&quot; In my view, to say that an utterance is &quot;wrong&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot; can be at times overly blunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... &quot;unhappy&quot; is a euphemism? I guess I don't understand why we should use euphemisms when describing an issue with a sentence when that is the entire reason they are asking us. Having a secret set of terms that means something only to us is &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not much of a true linguist, so if these are well accepted and used terms in the field, okay. Thanks for the head's up. I am still a little hesitant in using them, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T18:00:03.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-24T19:54:19.697" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apropos an issue that came up in Comments under the first Answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26756/how-to-how-do-you-or-how-do-i-when-asking-a-practical-question/26759#26759&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, does anyone [else] ever edit Question titles in pursuit of 'standardisation'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say 'else' there because the other day, having already noticed that many questions have the form &lt;strong&gt;WordA vs[.] WordB&lt;/strong&gt;, I coerced a new question to that format. While making some other changes that were effectively 'necessary' - I wouldn't have edited purely for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time I simply assumed &lt;strong&gt;...vs...&lt;/strong&gt; was in fact an explicitly-recognised 'standard' here, but I didn't bother to check. Now it's been suggested the prevalence of that format may be nothing more than happenstance, I feel I should make the effort to find out more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should say that I personally find that particular convention (if indeed it is one) very useful. If you want to check whether this type of Question has already been asked re two words you have in mind, it's useful to have an idea of the likely title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else do this kind of thing? Is it considered desirable? Is there a list of standard forms that are generally endorsed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-05-25T15:34:05.690" Title="Editing Question titles in pursuit of 'standardisation'" Tags="|discussion|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1207" CreationDate="2011-05-24T22:55:05.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if you're gonna edit the question anyway, then the title is fair game, including fitting it into the usual sort of pattern for that type of question, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; there is such a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry too much about people who get upset about edits: they can always revert, and if they stick around, they'll eventually learn that editing is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T22:55:05.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2011-05-25T03:34:57.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, here are some of the euphemisms I use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not stylistically pleasing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;advised against by style books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;somehow less attractive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not generally preferred&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frowned upon by some pedants&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anacoluthon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These usually do not antagonize askers, or so I believe. Sir Humphrey might add &lt;em&gt;complicated&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;courageous&lt;/em&gt;, or just &lt;em&gt;novel&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-05-25T03:34:57.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-25T15:44:51.550" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the relevant place to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/525/style-guide-for-questions-answers-and-comments&quot;&gt;track these discussions&lt;/a&gt;, I believe we should decide the appropriate path for reaching a decision about a particular standard. Community run projects tend to get stuck debating; I want to avoid that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a solid SE path for adopting decisions that require input from the community? As in, something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acknowledge a problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Propose solutions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote on solutions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acknowledge a solution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Propose migrations to solution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote on migrations to solution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choose migration path&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a final summary somewhere people can find it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For something like a style guide, this could translate as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acknowledge a target for the style guide (i.e. block quoting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Propose solutions (i.e. &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or codeblocks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote on solutions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acknowledge a solution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Propose migrations to solution (i.e. this style should be enforced; or this style is merely a suggestion; or edit only if other edits are necessary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote on migrations to solution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choose migration path&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a final summary somewhere people can find it (i.e. update an &quot;official&quot; style guide and update all meta posts to point toward the resolution)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a shot from the top of my head so please pick it apart. The goal here is to give us &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; way to bring resolution to some of these tough to resolve issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T02:04:10.637" Title="Path for adopting EL&amp;U formatting standards" Tags="|discussion|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2021-07-05T00:01:50.297" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-25T15:56:24.947" Score="1" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite a lot of questions concern the difference between two specified words (often with an example sentence, where OP wants to know which to use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's much easier to search for an existing Question about some given word-pair if you know the format that question is likely to be in. I personally would prefer the 'minimalist'...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word1&lt;/strong&gt; vs &lt;strong&gt;word2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and I don't really care whether &lt;strong&gt;Vs&lt;/strong&gt; is capitalised or followed by a period, since that doesn't affect searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T22:06:35.783" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T22:06:35.783" Title="Standard format for questions on difference between two specified words" Tags="|discussion|style|titles|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1211" CreationDate="2011-05-25T16:06:14.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion with regards to using the X vesus Y approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each word should be wrapped in double-quotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;vs&amp;quot; should be replaced with &amp;quot;versus&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only the first word should be capitalized&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No trailing punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sky&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;canopy&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cake&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;cakes&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option is to replace the minimalist approach with a real question; I will let someone else propose that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-05-25T16:06:14.427" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1174" CreationDate="2011-05-25T16:33:32.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always just ask the question and if the community doesn't think it is on topic it will be closed. There isn't really any &lt;em&gt;harm&lt;/em&gt; in having closed questions lying around. It isn't a slap on the wrist. They can be seen as markers letting other people know where the boundaries are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is more applicable to Linguistics, people will probably mention it as advertising for Linguistics. The identification of Linguistics also helps point out the scope of this site. There will be some overlap, but the general rule is that they have very different purposes. Pointing out a question's relevance to Linguistics is just one way to softly highlight the reason it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; relevant to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-05-25T16:33:32.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1211" CreationDate="2011-05-25T20:18:46.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle this is a discussion thread, but if there are only going to be a few suggested alternatives it may be handy to have them explicitly set out as Answers so it's easy to just upvote if there's one you agree with. So I'll just set out my stall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for maximum minimalism, if that's not an oxymoron. Inter alia that means favouring any existing tendency, in which context I'll point out that searching for &lt;strong&gt;tag:versus&lt;/strong&gt; gives 120 results, and &lt;strong&gt;tag:vs&lt;/strong&gt; gives 379.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;vs&lt;/strong&gt; wins out there, and I see no reason to capitalise or put a period after it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Capitalisation of terms doesn't seem important to me; I wouldn't bother.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Double quotes for phrases (optional for single words).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No other words, punctuation, or format controls should be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-05-25T20:18:46.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-25T20:28:23.057" Score="8" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we have recommended online reference sources, wouldn't it be nice to be able to access these directly from the site? I could see having either a right-click context menu to allow choosing which dictionary/thesaurus to use, or allowing the user to save a preferred resource that would be accessed from a new browser window/tab when they double-click a word. Does the site allow injection of a bit of JavaScript to handle such a feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; This would be in addition to any similar tools already provided by the browser/addins/OS, because: 1. there are some resources that these don't take into account and 2. it would be a way to ensure (or insinuate) that &quot;official sites&quot; are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6683" LastEditorUserId="6683" LastEditDate="2011-05-27T12:31:52.717" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T09:05:06.903" Title="Feature suggestion: dictionary lookup on double-click or context menu" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-26T05:16:30.787" Score="15" ViewCount="960" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm not entirely opposed to “single word requests” I get pretty anxious when I see questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26896/whats-the-term-for-siblings-born-1-years-apart-on-the-same-day&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, where there is (to my knowledge) no real answer, and then people take this as an invitation to start coining words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't feel comfortable at all with our site becoming a place where people go who want a word invented. While I delight in exciting new words being invented and promulgated, I think we will rapidly lose our reputation as a place where people can get authoritative answers if many answers are not authoritative but just merely inventive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and closed this question but I was hoping to gauge the community’s feelings on this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I changed my mind and reopened the question on the off chance that such a word does actually exist, but I'd like to know if anyone has any ideas for how to discourage people from posting made-up answers like the two that are on that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T18:22:26.843" Title="Requests for coinage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2011-05-26T06:58:26.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nohat, what you say really makes sense. When I first joined up not long ago, I instantly felt that this site could really help my problems, if I had any at hand. However, if standards got slack, in future this site would deteriorate rapidly. It will no longer hold, as nohat said, its reputation, as well as losing trust. Some sort of unwritten law or standard has to be established and understood among those who have access to moderator tools. It is their responsibility, as this is a community site. That, was my two coins and someone else's one coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="8183" LastEditDate="2011-05-26T07:35:44.067" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T07:35:44.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1215" CreationDate="2011-05-26T07:00:32.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would certainly save time.&#xA;However, I believe only official sites should be used. i.e. Urban Dictionary is not official, with plenty of racial slurs, and un-censored material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T07:00:32.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-26T07:43:09.383" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be a good idea if users could propose new badges to apply specially to ELUSE? For example, they could go on to Stack Exchange network, and propose to the top users(people with over 10000 rep?) a badge that could be instituted. Of course it is possible that this is misused and silly badges are proposed and accepted. The top users will have to hold the responsibility to vote wisely and preserve the SE reputation. Would this be a good idea, or is this just too much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T08:11:57.747" Title="Suggestions for new badges?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1219" CreationDate="2011-05-26T08:11:57.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the sentiment, but it is very unlikely we will pursue site-specific badges at this time; we'd rather build features that help all sites on the network, at least a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(there are of course exceptions like the MathJax support for math, stats, quant, cstheory, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T08:11:57.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2011-05-26T13:19:54.757" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the core of the problem is the demand for a &lt;em&gt;single word&lt;/em&gt; above all else.  This is when people have to start getting inventive if no such word exists.  And I agree with the idea that very much of this is a bad thing.  These invented words have little to no utility in the real world, as they are not recognizable to anyone.  It's particularly bad if the person answering the question doesn't make it clear that this word is made up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2011-05-26T18:22:26.843" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T18:22:26.843" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2011-05-26T13:29:38.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I'm not entirely opposed to “single word requests” I get pretty anxious when I see questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26896/whats-the-term-for-siblings-born-1-years-apart-on-the-same-day&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, where there is (to my knowledge) no real answer, and then people take this as an invitation to start coining words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't really sound like the OP's problem -- if there isn't such a word, answerers should have said that; I don't know why they took that as an invitation to just invent words on the spot, but he definitely didn't ask for that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="849" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T13:29:38.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2011-05-26T13:31:35.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the original asker, it certainly wasn't my intent to ask a question with no real answer. Like I said, I was 99% sure there was a word for it and I just didn't know it; but if no one knows it, maybe the person who originally told me made it up themself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was actually thinking about what should happen should no word be found. Closing it seems reasonable to me, at least after a certain amount of time, or just straight-up deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7415" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T13:31:35.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2011-05-26T13:40:05.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the answers to that particular thread seemed to go off in a direction (frivolity) I didn't care for and I don't think was appropriate for here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sadly the answers seem to have been removed for that particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here's another question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26742/a-word-for-a-person-with-only-one-head&quot;&gt;Word for person with one head&lt;/a&gt; that went even further in that direction but was very popular and not even considered to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the standards and process exist already to judge these questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Humor and attitude (and invention) are acceptable but preferred in comments rather than answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;closing is by voting (I'm a bit annoyed by single person closing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this your question helps us with setting those standards...maybe someone should say in a comment that 'coining' is not appropriate as an answer, and not really appropriate to be asked for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T13:40:05.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2011-05-26T16:28:44.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I have currently been processing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question isn't a real question, vote to close&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is specific enough to justify a term for something, I ignore plausible attempts at term invention as long as the answer gives a good reason and evidence for doing so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If an answer &quot;invents&quot; a word without help from an outside source, I downvote it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If an answer tacks on a new definition to an old word, I downvote it unless it provides a good explanation, reasoning or reference for doing so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure/17469#17469&quot;&gt;Is there a word to describe a highly desirable cursed treasure?&lt;/a&gt; offers a new term; but it did so after offering a handful of close calls and explained why. I feel that the suggestion was okay because it was (a) appropriate and (b) not the entire content of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T16:28:44.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1215" CreationDate="2011-05-26T20:20:57.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The big problem with this is that not all dictionaries are created equal. We have had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/946/how-trustworthy-is-wordnet&quot;&gt;collisions between dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; in the past. When I look for a dictionary link I choose one that helps illustrate my point; whether that means focusing on etymology, aggregation, wikis, British, American, pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The length of time it takes to double-click and search your bookmarked dictionary isn't really that bad. Since time seems to be the only true advantage to doing this, I suggest that it isn't worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T20:20:57.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1215" CreationDate="2011-05-27T02:16:09.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;First off:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you on a Mac? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if so, would you be happy with the &lt;em&gt;New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're in luck—it's built into the OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your browser, select the word and right-click. From the contextual menu, choose &quot;Look up in Dictionary&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ltcnw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Look up in Dictionary&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you've done that, a little tool tip menu will appear showing the definition. If you actually wanted a synonym, choose &quot;Thesaurus&quot; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might work for you are what are known as &lt;em&gt;bookmarklets&lt;/em&gt;—little bits of JavaScript code that that live in your bookmarks bar. When you find one, drag it into your bookmarks bar. Then when you select a word in your browser, you can click on your new bookmark, and you should (depending on your popup blocker) see a new window appear with the word's definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a couple of places you can get them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They use the &lt;em&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, 4th edition and &lt;em&gt;Roget's II: The New Thesaurus&lt;/em&gt;, 3rd edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have a variety of add-ons on their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.answers.com/main/product_info.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;product page&lt;/a&gt;. Along with bookmarklets, they've also got extensions and widgets for a variety of devices and browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionary.com has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/tools/allbookmarklets.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page of bookmarklets&lt;/a&gt; (or as they refer to them, &quot;Browser buttons&quot;). Just look for the one that's the closest match to your browser. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any definitive reference on their site as to where they get their information.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastActivityDate="2011-05-27T02:16:09.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-27T04:31:01.820" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Plural&quot; would be for only for plural forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Plurality&quot; works well for questions about when the use the singular and when to use the plural.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some ways it's closer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-number&lt;/a&gt; but that term is usually used more for agreement and pronouns than for singular vs plural in nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3175" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T03:06:39.047" Title="&quot;Plurality&quot; tag should not be a synonym of the &quot;plural&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1228" CreationDate="2011-05-27T05:57:25.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're not the same thing, but they could be used as synonyms, cause they're similar, to make searching easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-05-27T05:57:25.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-28T03:20:09.253" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/457/dealing-with-vote-retribution&quot;&gt;Dealing with vote retribution&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a limit of downvotes a user can use on certain other user in one day? Because at the moment, all my reputation is shown to be -2, and this is not because of bad posts, because even my old and non-active posts have been dug up and downvoted in one spate. Obviously someone who searched up my profile and down-voted on all my posts. I repeat, should there be a limit of down-votes a user can use on another user in one day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T08:42:16.723" Title="Should a limitation be put on downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-05-31T13:41:57.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2011-05-28T03:40:16.700" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a single user is doing it (someone does seem to have it in for you today), then it may be automatically detected and removed as part of a daily statistical voting anomaly removal process. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/vote-fraud-and-you/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-05-28T08:41:22.840" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T08:41:22.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2011-05-28T03:42:16.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when you have a number of different posts (answers or questions, old or new) all voted down in a single day, that seems suspicious. But if there are a number of downvotes on single posts then that is probably sincerely not popular by more than one person. I see both kinds of activity on your questions (yes, the first kind looks weird). Since you have a lot of positive activity on most questions, I'd take the multiple downvotes on a single post as something is wrong with that particular post and try to learn from it (like in the 'german vs germane' question title, which you did).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is a high cap on the daily rep points earnable. There could easily be a cap on the other side for number of points you can lose (but I don't know if this is the case). You can only lose points by getting downvoted, or downvoting others (and also by others changing their upvotes and accepts if you edit your posts but that in a sense just means you didn't get the points in the first place). Whether, there is a low cap, I think that the current down rep values and ability to vote limit the damage that can be done. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;despite that, what do you think a good low cap would be? -10, -40,  minus something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-05-28T07:32:38.203" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T07:32:38.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1210" CreationDate="2011-05-28T08:21:12.647" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@MrHen, I believe that is what moderators are for. Besides having moderators make solving problems much much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T08:21:12.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2011-05-28T08:42:16.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See Brian's answer, which I edited. TL;DR, this should automatically rectify itself. If the problem persists for more than 24-36 hours let us know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T08:42:16.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-28T10:23:28.297" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we please make the flagging weight page better? When I go to my profile, and I see my flag weight has changed, I click on the flag weight button, and the thing is, I can't tell which of my flags are valid, invalid, or not yet reviewed. Could we please format it so that there are three sections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-05-28T16:05:05.523" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Could the flagging profile be clarified?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2011-05-28T16:04:48.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no problem with the flags considered valid, as if a flag is considered valid, then the answer being flagged has been closed, deleted, or migrated.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is effectively no way to understand which flags has been considered invalid or are not yet reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful to understand which flags have been considered invalid, to avoid to flag another question/answer for the same reason.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the page listing all the flags is changed, then it will be changed in all the SE sites. If you want to really see such feature implemented, you should post the question on meta.stackoverflow.com, where more users can vote it, if they want to see this feature implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T16:04:48.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1246" CreationDate="2011-05-28T17:13:11.530" Score="10" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really want to comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1073/what-is-the-correct-possessive-for-nouns-ending-in-s&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and want a clarification on an answer that has been posted there. Unfortunately, I do not have enough reputation to leave comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves me with two choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Raise a new question about the answer to that question. In my opinion it does not add any value to the site, the community or that post (because the author of that post does not get informed automatically).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave an answer to the post when a comment is clearly more appropriate (the small banner that comes up when you reply says exactly that).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't we be more liberal on allowing comments than we are on allowing answers? Don't answers damage the quality more than the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider this, if I ask a duplicate question and my question gets closed, how do I participate in the discussion for the duplicate question? When closing questions as duplicates, should we automatically allow the author of the duplicate question to post comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.:- To prevent spam can we not check the user's profile on other SEs? For example, my profile can show that I am a human being who means no harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why allow comments only when rep &gt; 50?" Tags="|discussion|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1238" CreationDate="2011-05-28T17:53:08.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is actually a third option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Earn more rep on the site by providing valuable contributions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being able to comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;is a privilege&lt;/a&gt; that one earns.  Earning rep is a measure from the community, and with more earned reputation, the more privileges you are given on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing stopping you from adding questions and answers that are of quality such that they get upvotes.  Each upvote on an answer gives you +10, and each upvote on a question gives you +5.  You can also earn rep by suggesting edits to posts (+2) and tag wikis/excerpts (+4).  If you put a small amount of effort into it, +50 is not very far away at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that working around the rules of the site, by posting a comment as an answer, for instance, &lt;em&gt;will not help you along the way towards more rep&lt;/em&gt;.  It only goes to show that you don't know how (or won't) use the site appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, from looking at your profile, I would also suggest searching before you ask a question so that all of your questions aren't duplicates.  Not running around deleting all of your posts would probably be a step in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are also chat rooms which are linked at the top of the page which require less rep to participate in.  This might be suitable for getting a quick clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T17:53:08.663" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1238" CreationDate="2011-05-29T04:14:37.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See my answer at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/51926/new-users-cant-ask-for-clarifications-except-as-answers/51939#51939&quot;&gt;New users can&amp;#39;t ask for clarifications except as answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We funnel users to the answer input box for a reason -- &lt;strong&gt;because the focus is on getting answers to questions, not meta-commentary.&lt;/strong&gt; Commenting is a privilege that should be earned by providing useful answers. And 50 rep isn't much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's highly unlikely a random drive-by user will &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;understand our Q&amp;amp;A goals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;understand our commenting system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So by the time they earn 50 rep, they should have learned roughly how things work, and be in a position to offer a &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; comment and not a &quot;+1 AWESOME ANSWER&quot; sort of comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-05-29T04:14:37.237" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2011-05-29T06:51:00.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi; you might find this meta.stackoverflow discussion useful: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88738/please-show-what-flags-were-deemed-good-or-bad&quot;&gt;Please show what flags were deemed good or bad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the short version — it is intentional that it isn't displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In most cases, it should be obvious from the follow-up information (deleted, edited, left-comment, etc.) if it has been enacted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We really value (appropriate) flagging, but often flags can be a bit subjective. As such it is not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; helpful to focus intently on any one single flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other issue is that it then creates a &quot;hey! why was my flag rejected?&quot; loop... Moderation takes effort by our much-valued community moderators, and we don't want to make that &lt;em&gt;worse&lt;/em&gt; by having to justify every single call (again, emphasis on the &lt;em&gt;subjective&lt;/em&gt; nature). Whether this is proactive (choosing a reason at post of rejection) or reactive (trying to think back when somebody raises it on meta), we don't really want to add more work there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And (related) we don't want &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; to start getting worked up about it, either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, for many of the above reasons we didn't show &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; on flag-weight for a while. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a useful measure (and helps prioritise the moderation queue), but it really shouldn't be a distraction from the real every-day usage of the site&amp;nbsp;— discussing language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I welcome other views, thoughts, suggestions, etc. — even syntax/punctuation critique ;p&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-29T09:16:15.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-29T11:54:45.540" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26991/true-is-to-false-as-truth-is-to-what/27109#27109&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26991/true-is-to-false-as-truth-is-to-what/27010#27010&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; from the same user that essentially suggest the same word.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does it make sense to write two answers to say the same thing, and if so, when? What is the purpose of writing a different answer, instead of editing the first answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T20:39:45.303" Title="Does giving two answers that say the same thing make sense?" Tags="|discussion|answers|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-29T18:25:19.647" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions always bug me when they ask about a perfectly normal, acceptable English usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just seems like someone whose English isn't that good decided to question the correctness of the writing of someone else who &lt;em&gt;ex hypothesi&lt;/em&gt; has a better grasp of English, and then decided to waste our time with it. There also seem to be a lot of them, asking about perfectly acceptable English, which doesn't do anyone but the questioner any good, and they could probably just have used google or a reference work to find the answer to their question, without cluttering up the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we introduce a policy requiring that these questions specify why there is some doubt as to the acceptability of the construct in question? That would at least allow the answers to be more useful by explaining the questioner is under a misapprehension as to the rules applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27690/is-it-correct-to-say-one-out-of-a-possible-four&quot;&gt;Is it correct to say &amp;quot;one out of *a* possible four&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23768/is-please-ensure-parity-amongst-all-correct/23781&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23768/is-please-ensure-parity-amongst-all-correct/23781&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26481/is-the-phrase-man-is-mortal-grammatically-correct/26482&quot;&gt;Is the phrase &amp;quot;man is mortal&amp;quot; grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples where the poster has put at least a minimal explanation for their doubt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23218/anyone-has-or-anyone-have-seen-them/23220&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Anyone has&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;anyone have&amp;quot; seen them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25281/passed-versus-past-instance-in-a-published-novel&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Passed&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;past&amp;quot; instance in a published novel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-05-30T15:51:57.817" Title="&quot;Is it correct to write x&quot; questions - can we require people to explain why they are asking?" Tags="|discussion|questions|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1238" CreationDate="2011-05-29T18:29:43.357" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we probably should lower the threshold. Something like 10 or 20 rep would surely be enough to ensure a user has spent some time on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6067" LastActivityDate="2011-05-29T18:29:43.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2011-05-29T18:53:27.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the general sentiment here that question askers should provide motivation for their questions, but I'm not sure that having a policy requiring them to would do much other than to turn off potential new users by closing their question and quoting some policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a better approach would be to gently prod the askers of such questions in comments to explain in more detail what they are asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with vote to close privileges should also feel free to vote to close such questions as &quot;not a real question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2011-05-29T18:59:47.243" LastActivityDate="2011-05-29T18:59:47.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1238" CreationDate="2011-05-29T22:15:57.893" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Why is the speed limit on my road 30 km/h?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — To keep the road safe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — But I know the road well.  I know what times of day my neighbours, and their children, are around.  I know how it gets slippery in wet weather.  I’m a good driver, long experience, no accidents.  On a dry day, when everyone’s out, I know it’s quite safe to drive at 40 km/h in parts.  Isn’t that OK?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — I believe you about that being safe then, but it’s still illegal.  The speed limit is 30 km/h.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment vote limit exists to keep stackexchange sites free from spam and trolls.  It’s unfortunate but probably inevitable that a few meaningful contributions will get blocked — to be effective, it &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to take a fairly blanket approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;50 was presumably chosen by the designers/developers as a balance between being an effective filter while not being too exclusionary.  10 or 20 would, I’d guess, be quite easy for a bot or troll to get without much effort.  To get 50 rep takes at least a little positive engagement with the community, but with a little patience (a good comment will keep a few days!) it shouldn’t be out of anyone’s reach.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastActivityDate="2011-05-29T22:15:57.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1242" CreationDate="2011-05-30T01:02:49.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE sites where answers are generally highly objective -- technical and science topics, mostly -- answering the same question twice doesn't make a lot of sense since your second answer should invalidate your first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U has some questions where there is a sufficiently agreed upon right answer, making others wrong and a second answer inappropriate, particularly those about grammar or spelling. Many questions here though, possibly even most, can be pretty subjective; this is especially true of those with tags like &lt;em&gt;word-choice&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;politeness&lt;/em&gt;, and to a somewhat lesser extent &lt;em&gt;differences&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;idioms&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;word-usage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While providing multiple options in a single answer is common, it can make future research via the site much less useful. If I want help picking a word, find that it's been asked about before, and see that the accepted answer (or one with the most upvotes) has 3 different options, how do I know what the OP actually accepted or what people were voting for? Sometimes comments help narrow it down, but often there are none or the ones that are there are misleading, e.g. 10 upvotes that are invisibly for the first suggested option in the answer and one comment that says that the first option is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that for questions with a large degree of subjectivity, not only are multiple answers by the same person acceptable, they should even be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2969" LastActivityDate="2011-05-30T01:02:49.393" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2011-05-30T01:17:45.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question could be meaningfully reworded to make it more useful or more broadly applicable and you have the rep, edit the question yourself; that's the policy at SO and most of the SE sites, in my experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it correct to say &quot;one out of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; possible four&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems to ask for a yes-or-no answer, which would indeed be pretty useless. Fortunately the accepted answer goes into excellent detail that is really an answer to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the article work in &quot;one out of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; possible four&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is &quot;x out of an &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt; y&quot; valid grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or a half-dozen other better ways to ask the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the SE sites are about asking for expert opinion, insight, or knowledge, such that even &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; good questions can be difficult for those at a lower level of expertise. If I was a non-native English speaker and wanted to understand how that particular construct worked, I couldn't necessarily ask it in a way that will help others down the road; I'd have to leave that to the experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP doesn't reword or expound upon the initial question and rewording it yourself isn't feasible or doesn't make sense, vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2969" LastActivityDate="2011-05-30T01:17:45.140" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2011-05-30T03:30:21.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand your concern. We now have &lt;strong&gt;General Reference&lt;/strong&gt; as an official reason to close questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;General Reference:&lt;/em&gt; this question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes questions that can be easily looked up in a dictionary by a moderately intelligent user. It should also apply to very simple questions of grammar, about which there can be no discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are several reasons why many apparently too-basic questions are not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammars and dictionaries often simplify things: the input of a knowledgeable answerer may add unexpected nuance. Especially the use of tenses could benefit from elaboration and analysis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whoever answers the question is free to interpret it very broadly, even to include things the asker didn't want to know; that often results in a more complete picture and will be interesting for many people asking a similar question. Answers here often interpret questions asking &lt;em&gt;is this correct?&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;in which registers is this acceptable?&quot;, or &quot;can you explain why this apparent violation of some rule is still correct, and are there similar exceptions?&quot;, or &quot;what is the history of this idiom?&quot;. Our intended audience is not just the asker, but anyone Googling a similar problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Matthew has a very good point that someone who would ask a question often doesn't know how to ask it, which may result in a poorly worded question; but it may be about something interesting in fact, if only we will look past its apparent inanity. Perhaps we should edit such too basic questions more extensively, especially their titles; that may be a very good alternative to closing them. It just requires some effort, and... sometimes I am just too lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree with Nohat that gentle prodding and giving them a chance to improve the question themselves is fair and often fruitful—though perhaps not as often as we should like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards the question about &lt;em&gt;one out of a possible four&lt;/em&gt;, the asker's doubt seemed by all means reasonable to me. How are we to know whether some author didn't make a mistake? A simple slip of the pen? The editor or the typesetter might also have introduced an erroneous &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;. There are many non-native speakers on this website, both asking and answering questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-05-30T03:30:21.370" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1242" CreationDate="2011-05-30T12:09:57.903" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@kiamlaluno, that second answer was a joke. If you went on chat, you would see that originally MrHen had difficulty choosing the correct answer because all of the answers had truth, so I said could I post another answer listing everything, and he said yes. So, I did, but he said it didn't help much, cos I didn't put what he was looking for into my second answer either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-04T02:02:00.073" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T02:02:00.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1252" CreationDate="2011-05-30T14:53:11.980" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I earned the cred, but for some reason when I enter the chat rooms, I receive a ribbon message indicating that I'm not allowed to participate. I'm thinking my English Language &amp;amp; Usage account is not properly linked with my main Stack Exchange account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9315" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2011-05-31T19:18:16.707" LastActivityDate="2011-05-31T19:18:16.707" Title="Why can't I chat?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1251" CreationDate="2011-05-30T15:11:25.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that your ELU account is indeed not properly associated with your other ones. (See e.g. your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/775356/codelegant?tab=accounts&quot;&gt;accounts tab on SO&lt;/a&gt;.) Try clearing all associations and re-associating again. (Note that auto-association only works if you use the same OpenID on all sites. Otherwise, use the &quot;add openid&quot; link in your user profile.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-05-30T15:11:25.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2011-05-30T15:51:57.817" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it is important for askers to explain the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; they need to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the key difference between idle curiosity, which is disallowed per the /faq ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.&lt;/strong&gt; Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where [you can't provide a rationale for asking].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and a valid question. If you can't explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you need to know, then you might be wasting everyone's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, if the reason is &quot;because I am learning English as a second language&quot; that clearly means the question is off-topic for this site. Which is another reason askers might be coy about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-05-30T15:51:57.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-31T11:54:57.830" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my profile, it shows the total amount of votes I have cast, up or down, on questions or on answers. Could I please view the questions or answers which I have voted on? Is it possible that this new gadget be introduced? And make it visible only to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T03:25:13.140" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T11:16:18.823" Title="Can it be made so that I can view the questions I cast my votes on?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2011-05-31T21:10:37.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that the questions about Chop Gate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20212/why-is-chop-gate-pronounced-so-strangely&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and Leicester &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25689/pronunciation-of-the-word-leicester&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; are about as geographically localised as one could wish for, but have been well-accepted by the community. This question about Arjmand &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27716/is-r-in-br-amr-pronunciation-of-arjmand-persian-word-silent&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; hasn't but that is probably because it isn't an English word rather than for the smallness of the place. So I'm not sure &lt;em&gt;small geographic region&lt;/em&gt; is quite on target; Chop Gate is about as small a geographic region as one could wish for, consisting of half-a-dozen houses and a pub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-05-31T21:10:37.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2011-06-01T03:05:19.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I take it that you -don't- want to close questions that concern English language concerns arising from small geographic areas? I think you're considering that exclusion too literally. Most people (who can close) don't consider questions like how to pronounce Chop Gate or Leicester 'too localized' because they're discussing pronunciation that affects -many people-, not necessarily those that live in those locations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-06-01T03:05:19.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1256" CreationDate="2011-06-01T07:23:45.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this isn't currently possible, nor do we have plans to support such functionality at this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-01T07:23:45.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2011-06-01T11:27:06.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that re-wording the reason is prudent.  It may be obvious to us that this reason doesn't apply to the Chop Gate and similar questions (because it &quot;affects many people,&quot; or in my mind, more realistically, it's just &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;), but I don't think it would be obvious to a newcomer.  That may discourage some users from posting really unique questions that would be acceptable and intriguing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-06-01T11:27:06.293" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1262" CreationDate="2011-06-01T19:05:49.360" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&quot;&gt;flagged posts&lt;/a&gt;, the author of a question is rendered as shown in the following screenshot. (I removed the part revealing the OP, which is normally rendered.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WDiaX.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graphic covers &quot;asked Apr 8 at 17:21&quot; (if I read it correctly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-06-02T20:41:52.857" Title="In the list of flagged posts, the question author is not rendered correctly" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|moderator-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1261" CreationDate="2011-06-02T04:07:29.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-06-02T04:07:29.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1264" CreationDate="2011-06-02T14:44:41.417" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused as to the conditions for the populist badge.  My understanding is that any answer that has a score of at least 11 and more than double the accepted answer earns it.  But how come, for example, @chaos doesn't have one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11155/is-it-acceptable-to-nest-parentheses&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="conditions for populist badge" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1263" CreationDate="2011-06-02T15:14:50.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The score of the &lt;em&gt;accepted answer&lt;/em&gt; must be at least 11, and so the badge-earner's answer must have a score of 23 or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an ambiguity in the description of &lt;em&gt;Populist&lt;/em&gt; for where the prepositional phrase (&quot;with a score of more than 10&quot;) adjoins into the sentence.  This is the correct parse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer outscored [an accepted answer with score of more than 10] by more than 2x&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, always check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions/68258#68258&quot;&gt;List of all badges with full descriptions&lt;/a&gt; on the meta Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-06-02T18:16:09.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1267" CreationDate="2011-06-02T18:39:35.260" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28222/etymology-of-lingua-franca&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asks about the etymology of the term &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt;. It can be looked up on Etymonline or Wikipedia with satisfactory result. But this isn't a word definition, and I actually found the top answer interesting to read, though it probably isn't any more informative than Wikipedia or Etymonline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should a question like this be closed? From the comments it appears that someone feels quite strongly about it; but, considering that it isn't a plain word-definition question, I'd be inclined to keep it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-06-03T18:14:13.917" Title="Is the *lingua franca* question to be closed as &quot;General Reference&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|general-reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1215" CreationDate="2011-06-02T23:39:30.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use such a thing every day on Firefox, an add-on called &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/dictionary-tooltip/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary Tooltip&lt;/a&gt;. I double-click a word; a small icon pops up near the word; I click the icon, and a small/resizable pop-up window appears that automatically searches any on-line website I have set it to. The pop-up is very fast, much faster than opening a new tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://fhc.quickmediasolutions.com/image/1388539040.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have it set to Babylon Info by default, because that's very fast, and it auto-detects the language of the word. In a drop-down menu, you can have DT search other websites with a click. Several dictionary websites are built in, but you can add any custom website. You could add the OED if you have an on-line subscription to its website, or any searchable website, like StackExchange, if you want to quickly look up whether there exists a question about it. You can set DT to jump to certain headers on the page. Click anywhere outside the pop-up to close it. The pop-up has a button to open it (one time) as a tab in the browser, with the search results as a regular page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://info.babylon.com/cgi-bin/bis.fcgi?rt=ol&amp;amp;tid=pop&amp;amp;mr=2&amp;amp;term=$$&amp;amp;tl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;best search engine link&lt;/a&gt; to add the incredibly fast Babylon Info as a custom search website, which is rather difficult to find (it has many links of varying speed and quality). The &lt;code&gt;$$&lt;/code&gt; in the link is what Dictionary Tooltip uses in place of the search string (it will only work as a bookmark in your browser if you replace $$ with %s). Babylon shows part of the Wikipedia article (with clickable link) if it can't find the word in any of its languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rGjB5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both this and the following look-up were done with automated language recognition by Babylon, so no selecting necessary: just double-click the word, click the icon, and voilà. You can also set the pop-up to activate without having to click the icon, but this gives you more control. The settings menus are a bit awkward; try not to let that put you off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://fhc.quickmediasolutions.com/image/1388340295.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there's a small text ad at the top of the pop-up that apparently isn't blocked by Adblock; I am in way affiliated with this extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we really need this built into SE, unless it's either optional or completely unobtrusive and fast; the site is already very heavy on the CPU of this old PC I'm using, and I wouldn't want it to bog down even more. As it is, I am forced to type comments in an external editor, because they have terrible lag here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-06-02T23:54:41.977" LastActivityDate="2011-06-02T23:54:41.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1265" CreationDate="2011-06-03T13:22:29.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard. The question by itself is general reference. But behind (most) every question, there's an interesting answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the voting to close takes care of that, you need 5 people to close, if there aren't 5 people to do it then it stays open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and I think the strong feelings about closing were motivated by exasperation at multiple similar 'general reference'-looking questions by the same person. (and I think the downvoting should take care of that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-06-03T13:22:29.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-03T13:36:38.340" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system is designed to allow intentional tagging of questions, by the author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that I often want to qualify an upvote or downvote in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when I answer I'd like to point out how I'm answering for example, to say that I am an American English native speaker, or I claim special technical knowledge, or that my answer is speculative or from personal feeling as opposed to a systematic corpus search or quote from an off-line reference. And just like tags for questions, these things may already be mentioned -in- the answer textually as key words, but having a tag makes it easier to categorize and search. This could also make it more likely that an explanation for a downvote gets made (tags like 'I like this' (i.e. correctness may not be the primary reason for upvoting), or 'irrelevant' or 'coinage' or 'self-reporting' or 'AustE'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be implemented just like tags for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the consequences of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-06-05T04:16:48.263" Title="Tags on comments/ assigning tags by others" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-03T17:05:59.110" Score="4" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spot the OP!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JD6L3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6AVb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2436/is-there-a-way-to-increase-the-contrast-of-the-special-highlighting-that-is-appli&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to the Greasemonkey sript (works in Firefox, most probably also in Chrome). George made this for me. I cannot thank him enough: this is great! Note that you can easily change the colour of the highlighting by editing the &lt;code&gt;#ecd&lt;/code&gt; thing in the code into something else. I have changed it into &lt;code&gt;#cdf&lt;/code&gt; myself for a light-blue-greyish hue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:46.197" LastActivityDate="2011-06-03T17:05:59.110" Title="Should the contrast of the highlighted OP's name in comments be increased? Use this GM script if you want it changed now." Tags="|feature-request|comments|user-interface|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1265" CreationDate="2011-06-03T18:14:13.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I also added a close vote for a few reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question showed no attempt to provide &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; help in answering the question. Instead, it claimed an inability to find the history or origin &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. Given that even Wikipedia has the etymology listed, it seems apparent that this is as likely of a General Reference etymology question as we are ever to see.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After trimming out the irrelevant content from the question body, it becomes &quot;What is the etymology of lingua franca?&quot; This isn't a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; question, but when the entire body of the question is irrelevant it may be a hint that this type of question is uninteresting. Replacing &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt; with any other word wouldn't change this question's form in the slightest. This seems like a bad precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I tend to be close happy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-03T18:14:13.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2011-06-03T18:26:02.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This style of rewording is more what I have in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;closed as too localized by MrHen, Robusto, JSBangs, Dusty, F'x 1 hour ago&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small subset of usage, a specific circumstance, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of Too Localized questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What name should I use for this programming function? (Small subset of usage)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I propose to my wife? (Specific circumstance)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I address a coworker who used to be my boss? (Narrow situation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wording is, naturally, open for suggestions but hopefully this will help with the point I was trying to make. The close reason should help us identify why the question is being closed. &amp;quot;Geography&amp;quot; is mostly irrelevant with regards to question legitimacy. Likewise, &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; isn't really &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt;. I am not so much suggesting that they &lt;em&gt;hurt&lt;/em&gt; but rather that Too Localized is not a particularly useful close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-06-03T18:26:02.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1277" CreationDate="2011-06-03T18:44:23.810" Score="1" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irony&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irony&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irony&lt;/a&gt; appears to have recently been added and it currently has a whopping 5 questions. How many (on-topic, non-duplicate) questions about irony are we expecting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T00:57:38.217" Title="Why do we need an irony tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1272" CreationDate="2011-06-03T21:45:19.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that English speakers (and maybe Brits in particular) might be more disposed to 'ironical' turns of phrase than some others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically enough, I've only recently posted that I don't see much point in using &lt;em&gt;ironical&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;ironic&lt;/em&gt;, but in the preceding sentence it did seem to flow a bit better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the point is that although it might be somewhat tedious to have people keep asking whether some sentence is ironic, the fact is they do. So if my initial postulate has any credibility, there might be people wanting to gain a better insight into the phenomenon by searching for the word within EL&amp;amp;U questions and answer text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I say keep it, and let's see how useful it turns out to be over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-06-03T21:45:19.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-03T22:01:24.480" Score="0" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, would it be helpful if we had on the side, a list of tags that are synonymous with your question, so that people won't have trouble trying to remember or think-up the tags unnecessarily. Would this be a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2012-06-24T19:16:03.000" LastActivityDate="2013-04-12T13:50:18.223" Title="Could we have a sideboard for tags?" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2344" CreationDate="2011-06-03T23:51:06.690" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/28457/revisions&quot;&gt;Why don't we pluralize &quot;foot&quot; in measurements?&lt;/a&gt; I noticed there was still the link to the duplicate question, even if the question has been re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should not the link be supposed to be removed, once the question is re-open? It doesn't seem to automatically happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; **Possible Duplicate:**  &#xA;&amp;gt; [&amp;amp;ldquo;Forty foot&amp;amp;rdquo; or &amp;amp;ldquo;forty feet&amp;amp;rdquo;?](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28433/forty-foot-or-forty-feet)  &#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- End of automatically inserted text --&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T13:23:35.793" Title="Why did this question still have a &quot;duplicate error&quot; link?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1272" CreationDate="2011-06-04T00:57:38.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irony&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irony&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irony&lt;/a&gt; is really a needed tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28419/is-this-an-example-of-irony&quot;&gt;Is this an example of irony?&lt;/a&gt;—the question could be simply tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rhetoric&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rhetoric&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rhetoric&lt;/a&gt;, which is the other tag being used for that question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26621/what-are-the-similarities-and-differences-between-irony-and-sarcasm&quot;&gt;What are the similarities and differences between &amp;quot;irony&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sarcasm&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;—the question doesn't use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sarcasm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sarcasm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sarcasm&lt;/a&gt;; why should it use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irony&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irony&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irony&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26011/is-there-a-better-correct-term-for-the-de-facto-usage-of-ironic&quot;&gt;Is there a better / correct term for the de facto usage of ‘ironic’?&lt;/a&gt;—the other tags already classify the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irony&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irony&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irony&lt;/a&gt; focalize an aspect of the question that is not already covered from other tags? If the answer is yes, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irony&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irony&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irony&lt;/a&gt; should be kept. As far as I can see, it doesn't add anything to the questions, but this is my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T00:57:38.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1268" CreationDate="2011-06-04T01:13:39.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The up-votes and down-votes for a question are already qualified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u9YGs.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l8L6G.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking for being able to associate a reason to the votes you cast.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What would change if users would be able to associate a reason to their votes? Would a different reason cause a different reputation change? Would it cause the question to be differently ordered in the list of questions?&#xA;If the different reason for voting doesn't have any effect on the vote itself, or how the question is rendered, then I guess that such feature will not be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question is then: Is it really worth the time took to implement it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T01:13:39.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2011-06-04T02:12:04.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is up for us to decide what a &lt;em&gt;small geographic area&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;a specific moment in time&lt;/em&gt; means. For example, if someone were to ask a question about the usage of a word coined by a friend and never used again, that would probably qualify as &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, we can choose to say that a small borough is not a &lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt; geographic area, but rather a fairly medium-sized one, as far as the English language is concerned (&lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt; might be a single family, or an individual; &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; may be a urban city, and &lt;em&gt;significant&lt;/em&gt; might be a country).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the technical implementation of close reasons make it extremely improbable that we'd get a modified text for any specific close reason, as they are shared between all sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T02:12:04.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1276" CreationDate="2011-06-04T03:09:13.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This does not happen automatically, so edit it out if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T03:09:13.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-04T04:01:58.083" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a subheading for votes, badges, answers, and questions. Could we have it for comments as well, so that we note how many comments we have, and how many votes or flags each of them have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-06-05T13:54:43.140" Title="Subheading for comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-04T05:30:39.357" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked up my edits, and I found out that I had 275 edits. However, the Strunk and White Badge says 80 posts edited will get the badge. Is there some kind of a catch, or did I misunderstood the badge? What about the Copy Editor's badge. Some guys had 800 edits, and they still don't have that badge. Why is this so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What are the actual requirements for the &quot;Copy Editor&quot; badge as well as the &quot;Strunk and White&quot; badge?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2011-06-04T10:14:08.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the badge descriptions make a reference to the number of edited posts, not the number of edits; this means that multiple edits for the same question (or answer) do not count.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I also think that only the edits made on the other users' posts are considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T10:14:08.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2011-06-04T11:39:03.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me see how giant a quote I can get away with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions&quot;&gt;List of all badges with full descriptions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Strunk &amp;amp; White&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;silver; awarded once; same family as Copy Editor (gold)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Related to Editor (bronze)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Perform a total of 80 edits between questions and answers&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits on deleted posts do not count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits to your own posts do not count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits to CW posts &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits that consist only of tag changes do not count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tag wiki edits &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits you suggest before gaining full edit privileges &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; count, once approved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/442/what-kind-of-edits-contribute-to-the-editor-badges&quot;&gt;What kind of edits contribute to the editor badges?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59329/tag-wiki-badge-suggestions&quot;&gt;Tag wiki badge suggestions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76916/how-will-editor-strunk-white-and-copy-editor-be-affected-by-the-new-2k-edit-m&quot;&gt;How will Editor, Strunk &amp;amp; White and Copy Editor be affected by the new &amp;lt;2k edit mechanism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Copy Editor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;gold; awarded once; same family as Strunk &amp;amp; White (silver)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Related to Editor (bronze)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Perform a total of 500 edits between questions, answers and tag wikis&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits on deleted posts do not count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits to your own posts do not count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits to CW posts &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits that consist only of tag changes do not count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tag wiki edits &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Edits you suggest before gaining full edit privileges &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; count, once approved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/442/what-kind-of-edits-contribute-to-the-editor-badges&quot;&gt;What kind of edits contribute to the editor badges?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59329/tag-wiki-badge-suggestions&quot;&gt;Tag wiki badge suggestions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76916/how-will-editor-strunk-white-and-copy-editor-be-affected-by-the-new-2k-edit-m&quot;&gt;How will Editor, Strunk &amp;amp; White and Copy Editor be affected by the new &amp;lt;2k edit mechanism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T11:39:03.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-04T12:29:42.907" Score="-2" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/28463/8183&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the question of having a CW tag so that community wikis can easily be browsed through cropped up. Could this be implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T18:30:23.147" Title="CW Tags: need for them?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2011-06-04T13:56:33.967" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's just what I was looking for! I was sure there was such a tag when I was going to browse all wikis on the website, but then it turned out there wasn't. I say we make such a tag. It would be a bit of work, though, to do it by hand, though we could get started with that if our Overlords haven't the time to implement this ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-06-04T14:07:12.160" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T14:07:12.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-04T14:16:38.420" Score="8" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the rationale behind making the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; a community wiki with list questions? Why should this question require editing by new users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why should the answers be community wikis? I might expect all answers to be edited into one big answer as a list, but that doesn't appear to be common practice. Do other people really edit your answer to a list question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's behind this community-wiki thing? Does it make sense? I've never seen a community-wiki question on this website that seemed to profit from it, but perhaps I've missed or forgotten one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-06-05T04:48:41.447" Title="Why are list questions supposed to be community wikis? Usually those questions do not require on-going editing." Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|list-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2011-06-04T14:22:40.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This would be a meta tag. Which are strongly discouraged across all sites of the network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no need for a tag to begin with. Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Advanced Super Ninja Search Options&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3A1+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;All CW questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki:1&quot;&gt;All CW posts (questions and answers)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3A1+closed%3A1+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;Closed CW questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3A1+is%3Aquestion+%5Bmeaning%5D&quot;&gt;CW questions tagged &quot;meaning&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3A0+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;All non-CW questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T14:22:40.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1287" CreationDate="2011-06-04T15:36:43.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason people do it is so that the posters won't get rep from it. Making questions that are very open, funny, philosophical, etc, and that have more than one answer (potentially hundreds of answers) was a very easy way to get high rep on the original Stack Overflow. So at some point someone decided to make them community wiki, so that the posters would not get any rep, and thus remove incentives for posting questions that are not really questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early days of SO the community was pretty spammed with irrelevant questions like &quot;what's your favourite programming cartoon?&quot; that got hundreds of upvotes so I can see why it was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not necessarily saying that I support things being this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6997" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T15:36:43.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1287" CreationDate="2011-06-04T16:37:33.437" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from what reported from @victoriah, the other reason I can see for making a question asking for a list a CW is that every answer would be equally valid (except in the case the user didn't understand which items were required); in such case, giving 15 points to the accepted answer doesn't make sense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Community Wikis, then, don't influence the accept rate, which means there is no need to accept an answer for a CW question; it makes perfectly sense for a question where every answer is equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T16:37:33.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2011-06-04T17:04:02.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Essentially, that tag would be considered a meta tag; even in the case it would be considered a meta tag, it would still be a bad tag. A tag describes what is the topic of a question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; marks the question as being about the etymology of a phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adjectives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adjectives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adjectives&lt;/a&gt; is for questions related to adjectives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; is for questions related to the meaning of a phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I would see a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cw&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cw&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cw&lt;/a&gt;, I would get it's a question about Community Wikis, which would not be on-topic on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-04T18:30:23.147" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T18:30:23.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1242" CreationDate="2011-06-04T20:39:45.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems strange but there are good reason for one author to make two separate answers even for objective questions. Sometimes it is not clear what the original question is asking  (say for a word choice) and there is more than one possibility. The general culture is to list -all- the ones you think are good or close in hopes that one of them will satisfy the OP. But for future readers it is probably better to have a separate answer for each one (so that each can be voted on separately). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do add a second answer, SE has thought of that possibility already by giving you a message asking if you really want to do that or if you think it'd be better to edit your other question. If you're trying to add an answer that is very similar to another of yours, you should be editing the earlier one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T20:39:45.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2011-06-04T21:15:16.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Stack Exchange, synonym tags are tags that are associated with another tag (the master tag); when a synonym tag is assigned to a question, it is replaced with the master tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;a list of tags that are synonymous with your question&quot; you mean a list of tags that could be used for the question, I don't think that would be useful.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Looking at the tags already entered, it could be possible to list the tags that other questions used together them. For example, if I enter &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;, I could get &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot;&gt;the following list&lt;/a&gt;. (See the content of the &quot;related tags&quot; block in that page.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indefinite-article ×33 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammar ×28 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;definite-article ×26 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word-choice ×25 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammaticality ×24 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatical-number ×9 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronunciation ×8 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idioms ×7 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adjectives ×7 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;differences ×6 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;determiners ×6 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parentheses ×6 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;acronyms ×6 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meaning ×5 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nouns ×5 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;title ×3 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abbreviations ×3 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word-usage ×3 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;names ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etymology ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phrases ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modifiers ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;date ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;punctuation ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I enter &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;, I could obtain &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles+indefinite-article&quot;&gt;the following list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word-choice ×14 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;definite-article ×5 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammaticality ×4 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronunciation ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abbreviations ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammar ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;acronyms ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;american-english &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parentheses &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idioms &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adjectives &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nouns &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;initialisms &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modifiers &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mathematics &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatical-number &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etymology &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I enter &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;, I could obtain &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles+indefinite-article+grammaticality&quot;&gt;the following list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word-choice ×2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abbreviations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing the tags already used by other questions doesn't tell me which tags I should use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-04-12T13:50:18.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1268" CreationDate="2011-06-05T04:16:48.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always leave a comment if you wish to elaborate on why you upvoted or downvoted a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-05T04:16:48.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1287" CreationDate="2011-06-05T04:48:41.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is required because if it was not, new answers would not be community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, new answers inherit the state of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you reach 30 &quot;answers&quot; the matter is forced (15 on Super User and Programmers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-05T04:48:41.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1281" CreationDate="2011-06-05T13:54:43.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to see your comments I suggest your user page activity tab, filtered for comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8183/ham-and-bacon?tab=activity#apage_1-afilter_comments&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8183/ham-and-bacon?tab=activity#apage_1-afilter_comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main function of a Q&amp;amp;A system is asking questions and getting answers, so there's a limit to how much we want to promote the meta-commentary of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it takes 50 rep to leave a comment&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there is no gold comment badge, only silver&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-06-05T13:54:43.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-05T23:50:38.270" Score="4" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could one of the tech support guys (or anyone else who definitively knows) explain precisely how EL&amp;amp;U inbox works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does having &lt;strong&gt;@username&lt;/strong&gt; anywhere in comment text cause that comment to appear in &lt;em&gt;username&lt;/em&gt;'s inbox? Or only if it starts the text? Sometimes I reference &lt;strong&gt;@anotherusername&lt;/strong&gt; within my comment text - and I put the &lt;strong&gt;@&lt;/strong&gt; in to alert &lt;em&gt;username&lt;/em&gt; that the following string is in fact a name, since it might read oddly if he didn't know that. I've no idea if &lt;em&gt;anotherusername&lt;/em&gt; is notified or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;username&lt;/em&gt; notified of comments starting with, say, just &lt;strong&gt;@user&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does (or could) &quot;inbox&quot; automatically update in any circumstances &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than in response to &lt;strong&gt;@username&lt;/strong&gt; in comments? For instance, the next comment immediately following one of yours, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it doesn't have an explicit &lt;strong&gt;@username&lt;/strong&gt; for someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last one was a bit sly. However it actually does work, might there be (possibly optional, configurable) tweaks to improve the @user experience, that could usefully be discussed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this has all been covered before, but I can't see anything in FAQ, and obviously I can't actually search for &lt;strong&gt;@&lt;/strong&gt; in previous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How exactly does EL&amp;U &quot;inbox&quot; logic support @username?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|user-interface|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1297" CreationDate="2011-06-06T01:04:28.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definitive guide is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-do-comment-replies-work&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-01-26T13:43:31.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-06T01:25:42.580" Score="1" ViewCount="940" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is that badge, called the Beta, and it says actively participated in the private beta. Is the private beta different from the beta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T19:43:24.283" Title="What is the private beta?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1297" CreationDate="2011-06-06T04:12:15.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; under &quot;add comment&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d4K51.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will get the &lt;strong&gt;comment help text&lt;/strong&gt; which explains basic &lt;code&gt;@reply&lt;/code&gt; functionality. Is there anything there which is not clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v5bEs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T04:12:15.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1299" CreationDate="2011-06-06T04:27:30.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The private beta was for 7 days. Private betas are limited to those who committed to the Area 51 proposal for the site. Here was the proposal for English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1269/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1269/english-language-usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The public beta is open to anyone on the internet, and it lasts from day 8 - n where n is &quot;met the threshold to become a public site&quot;. Public betas can go on indefinitely, as long as the site is producing pages that make the internet better and not worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to get the private beta badge is to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;commit to an Area 51 proposal&lt;/a&gt;, help the proposal reach the threshold for beta, and participate during the initial 7 day private beta period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-06-06T19:43:24.283" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T19:43:24.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="726" CreationDate="2011-06-06T08:58:42.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No to asking questions in other languages (other proposals usually allow that proposal's language and English as a &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt; of Stack Exchange Network; this obviously doesn't apply with ELU).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes to allowing translation to English questions.  I'd really like to get a statement from the powers that be on this one; could we start allowing translation question to English?  It would make things more consistent.  It does seem unfair to me that on other language proposals, you are allowed to ask translation questions, but not on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T08:58:42.013" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1215" CreationDate="2011-06-06T09:05:06.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO this belongs in a browser plugin, not as a part of the site implemented using Javascript or something.  I've come across sites before that hijack your double click; they're extremely annoying and stop you from selecting text properly.  I end up disabling Javascript's ability to hijack double-click.  As for a right-click context menu; this would mean hijacking right-click, which again I really don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I need to look up a word in the dictionary, I type it into my Firefox search bar, select the dictionary I want, and hit enter; takes me 5 seconds.  I say we don't need this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T09:05:06.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-06T10:50:43.000" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that a tag's name should make it clear what the tag is for, but this is often not the case.  For example, we now have &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;grammaticality&lt;/em&gt;.   Users will probably need to read the tag definitions to decide which one to use.  Myself at least find the explanation text indispensable.  Some tags lack this text, however, so could we make it mandatory to provide one when coining a new tag?  If not I can only hope someone smart and keen will volunteer to go fill in all the missing bits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastActivityDate="2024-01-11T04:07:40.977" Title="Should tag definitions be mandatory?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1305" CreationDate="2011-06-06T13:47:00.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags descriptions are not mandatory, as they should be provided only for tags that could lead to misuse because the tag is misunderstood, or for tags that have been already misused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once found a question on meta.SO about when a tag-wiki is appropriate; I don't find the link right now, but I remember it was reported that not all tags need a wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-06T18:48:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T18:48:09.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1308" CreationDate="2011-06-06T18:19:38.190" Score="7" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28812/what-is-a-concise-word-or-phrasing-for-in-a-context-without-a-user&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as (potentially) off-topic, and I have flagged other questions like this in the past, but I am not sure if I am right to do so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the correct answer to the question would come from someone with knowledge of this specific field (in this case, software development), and should therefore be posted on another site, like Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, the OP &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; asking for a word or phrase, which fits within the scope of the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it appropriate of me to flag this question and should I in the future flag questions for what seem to be specific technical terms? Or is this sort of question fully appropriate for this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T13:02:22.580" Title="Questions asking for technical terms/jargon" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1307" CreationDate="2011-06-06T18:45:15.863" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that a question about jargon is automatically off-topic. I don't think that asking a question about the phrase to use would be on-topic on Stack Overflow.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language and Usage is, as the title suggest, about the usage of English language; therefore, if the question is about the usage, it is perfectly fine on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For sure, I would not regard as on-topic a question that asks which alternative term should be used for a class method, or if &lt;em&gt;message&lt;/em&gt; is a better term to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-06-14T02:45:28.040" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T02:45:28.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1330" CreationDate="2011-06-06T19:08:53.823" Score="9" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any cases where a single word request is not welcomed on EL&amp;amp;U?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ clearly states that users should ask &quot;practical, answerable questions based on actual problems.&quot; In which cases would a single word request not suit EL&amp;amp;U? Which information should be provided in the question, for the question to be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not saying that single word requests don't suit on EL&amp;amp;U. I am just wondering in which cases a single word request should not be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="1420" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T08:35:00.410" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T08:35:00.410" Title="Are single word requests always welcomed questions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1299" CreationDate="2011-06-06T19:32:54.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phases that a proposal on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; pass through are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Definition; in this phase, user define which questions are on-topic and off-topic. Once there are 60 followers, and there are 5 on-topic and 5 off-topic questions (which means questions that have a score of 20 for being on-topic or off-topic), the proposal goes to the next phase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commitment; in this phase, users needs to commit to the proposal, which means they will ask a minimum number of questions when the proposal will pass to the next step. The exact number of users required to pass to the next phase depends from their reputation, and from how much they are active in other SE sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Private beta; who committed to the site can start using it by asking questions, or answering to questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public beta; in this phase, all users can ask questions, including who didn't committed to the proposal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between a site in private beta, and public beta: the reputation required for some privileges is very low, during a private beta; once the site passes to public beta, the required reputation is increased, and it will be increased again when the site goes past the public beta.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a comparison, I will report the reputation required on &lt;em&gt;Drupal Answers&lt;/em&gt;, which is still in public beta, with the reputation required for the same privileges in &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt;, which is not in beta anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Privilege            Drupal Answers   English Language and Usage&#xA;----------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;Trusted user                   4000                        20000&#xA;Access to moderator tools      2000                        10000&#xA;Create tag synonym             1250                         2500&#xA;Cast close and reopen votes     500                         3000&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badge you are referring to is gained when you partecipate to the private beta phase, which means you committed to the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T19:32:54.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2011-06-06T20:31:59.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say 'unacceptable', but I certainly have misgivings about a certain class of single word requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't much like is when OP is actually looking for a name to be used in some programming or database design context. I don't object to this in itself though - it's oddball cases where OP's preconceptions (or maybe just the nature of the application area being addressed) require a number of (perhaps only loosely-) related entities to be grouped into some named set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that such a grouping may be meaningful in OP's precise context doesn't imply that the English language itself should have an available word for it, or that it's worth trying to establish one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such topics can easily degenerate into a series of not-particularly-interesting proffered names (be they neologisms or just distortions of existing meanings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-06-06T20:31:59.120" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2011-06-07T02:15:34.320" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that this is the direction you're looking for, but I'll try anyway...the unwelcome single word request I can think of is the insistence on ... a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are desires for single words that just cannot be fulfilled, true lexical gaps; negatives/non-existence is of course difficult to prove, except by authority?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the best &quot;thing&quot; for the request is a single &lt;em&gt;idiom&lt;/em&gt; which may be a single word, a double word or even a phrase. Brevity is desired but the best thing to capture the concept may not be the absolute shortest. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T02:15:34.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1314" CreationDate="2011-06-07T02:49:29.717" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2127/why-are-some-questions-on-the-question-page-darker-than-others&quot;&gt;Why are some questions on the question page darker than others?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've really tried to figure this one out on my own, but I give up. What determines  whether or not a question is shaded with a green-tint background on the ALL QUESTIONS pages? I'm just hoping it's not something obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T03:08:47.847" Title="Why are some questions shaded green?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-06-30T05:33:27.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1313" CreationDate="2011-06-07T03:03:53.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question is shaded green if one of its tags is in your &quot;Favorite Tags&quot; list on the right column of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T03:03:53.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1313" CreationDate="2011-06-07T03:08:47.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is highlighting questions with tags that are in your favorite tags.  If you haven't manually added any favorite tags, the system will detect when you have a certain level of activity in a tag and infer one for you.  If you manually add a favorite tag, the system will not infer a tag for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can customize your favorite (and ignored tags) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/users/5822/Callithumpian?tab=prefs&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt;.  You can also customize these settings in the right sidebar of the homepage and the /questions listing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the system is inferring a favorite tag for you and you would prefer not to have any questions highlighted, you can simply add a nonsense &quot;tag&quot; to your favorites.  Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unicorns-eating-waffles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unicorns-eating-waffles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unicorns-eating-waffles&lt;/a&gt;? (:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:07.810" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T03:08:47.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1329" CreationDate="2011-06-07T11:00:51.387" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stackoverflow.com has 310,825 questions with no upvoted answers, English.stackexchange.com has only 2 currently (and usually none). Why is this? I know the volumes of new questions are very  different but is there some other effect at work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2614" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T18:06:30.677" Title="Cleaning up unanswered questions" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1317" CreationDate="2011-06-07T15:03:38.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English SE users are more generous upvoters (and perhaps downvoters as well!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language questions are more subjective than technical questions. Either the code or the formula works or it doesn't. English is how speakers use it in everyday life, so any reasonably decent answer is likely to be upvoted in no time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T15:03:38.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4601" CreationDate="2011-06-07T16:45:38.667" Score="8" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&lt;/a&gt;, one of the blocks appears as in the following screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XDA4Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graphic covers the block title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T17:13:06.143" Title="Graphics cover the text" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|moderator-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1452" CreationDate="2011-06-07T21:30:09.607" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that to the right of the &quot;tools&quot; link was shown a number in a yellow background, but when I clicked on it, I have been taken to the flags page, and  the page was empty.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that number mean? I thought it could mean the number of flagged posts, but clearly it is not so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwG0l.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the number keeps to grow (I now see 12), I guess it is the number of flags still not processed, including the ones I cannot handle. If that is the case, then the counter should not count those flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-15T07:59:31.013" LastActivityDate="2011-07-04T00:41:23.957" Title="What does the number that appears to the right of the &quot;tools&quot; link mean?" Tags="|support|moderator-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1322" CreationDate="2011-06-07T22:56:02.750" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that a post has been flagged, from the Community user I guess, because it had more than 20 comments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of that flag, and what should be done in such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T12:43:50.247" Title="What does flagging a post because it has more than 20 comments mean?" Tags="|support|flagging|moderator-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1321" CreationDate="2011-06-08T12:43:50.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;High comment frequency can be an indication of a number of factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Really big arguments. Not useful to the site. Someone needs to clean it up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Back-and-forth. Unless it's pertinent, often this is better on chat and best cleaned up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple user extensive discussions. It may be still on-topic, or it could be sliding off-topic. The stuff should probably move to chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A popular post that actually gets a lot of comments. May need some tiny pruning but not always.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simply a warning to moderators that &quot;Something may be amiss&quot;. Like most of Community user's boilerplate flags, it's only going by bare metrics so it's not a guaranteed actionable element. As noted, none of the resolutions are much that a non-♦ can do much about other than add additional flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can be useful, though. You can note in a flag about the particular instance, if you think it is something that should be investigated. Or, you can say Community's flag is invalid, if there's nothing important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T12:43:50.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1324" CreationDate="2011-06-08T12:47:24.303" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/29020/why-are-names-abbreviated-in-translations&quot;&gt;Why are names abbreviated in certain books?&lt;/a&gt;, and it is clear from the comments and answers that I actually asked the wrong question (i.e., the question should really be about the abbreviation and not translation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I edit my question to reflect what I learned from the answers?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6908" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T08:07:05.240" Title="Should I edit my question if the answers indicate that it was the wrong question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2011-06-08T12:59:59.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are already answers to your question, then changing the question is not something I would do. The answers are correct for the question that is asked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn't express yourself correctly, then I would ask another question, being careful on how the question is expressed, to avoid it is misunderstood once again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T12:59:59.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2011-06-08T13:59:29.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's fairly common to add an update to the question without changing the original question, if the original question is markedly different from your update.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, in your case, updating your question to ask about the abbreviations makes it a duplicate of the one the Colin Fine posted in his answer, so it will probably get closed, but I think that's not such a bad thing.  After all, you couldn't know it was a duplicate until you knew what your question really was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T13:59:29.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2011-06-08T15:17:56.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I made a mistake in the question and it was clear to me that the question was invalid and also would be of no possible use to anyone else, then I would just delete that question.  Anyone who answered and got rep would keep it (I think). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T15:17:56.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1328" CreationDate="2011-06-08T16:20:56.810" Score="1" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;The guidelines on asking a good questions are known: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that remains is if these should be used to up-vote and down-vote questions or should not be taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to up-vote questions that I think are interesting, clear and make me research and learn something new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I tend to more easily up-vote questions that someone down-voted and that I wouldn't mind seeing an answer to or can not find anything wrong with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the common practice in EL&amp;amp;U community regarding down-voting the questions and also is up-voting if you disagree with someone's down-vote? (even though the down-vote was explained)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-06-09T19:32:31.353" Title="'Correcting' a down-vote of the question" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1327" CreationDate="2011-06-08T16:40:35.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting to counteract someone else's vote is dodging the purpose of the voting system: To register community opinion on a question or answer. Meta-voting is gaming the system by thinking that your opinion matters more than someone else's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it is pretty common... so your mileage may vary with regards to ends justifying means and so on. I see it as equivalent to downvoting something because you don't like the author of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T16:40:35.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1317" CreationDate="2011-06-08T18:06:30.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for the others here, but when I am in the mood to answer questions I target the unanswered ones ruthlessly just to keep the list as small as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If question was already answered, upvote the appropriate answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer is easy, answer it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer requires research, go make a cup of drink and spend a night researching an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is malformed, edit it, downvote it and/or vote to close it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If, in a few days, no change was possible I start pestering people in chat to help me close or resolve the question (with mixed success)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage that EL&amp;amp;U has is that, barring extremely technical questions, I can almost always find &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; answer using the internet. Stack Overflow questions are much more narrow and technical in concept. The idea of just &quot;researching it&quot; is a little out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T18:06:30.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2011-06-08T19:40:48.807" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with single-word-requests that seem non-trivial or can present a common idea or principle that likely has an actual word. I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have a problem with word requests that don't make any sense. Good examples are &amp;quot;false&amp;quot; antonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the antonym of three?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the antonym of bicycle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requests that are far too narrow to be likely are also a problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for exactly twenty-three animals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a word I can use to describe my company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, requests that are too broad get too close to just pounding a thesaurus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is another word for blue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a word that describes laughing so hard you are in pain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the big problem I have in judging these things that, sometimes, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; such a word and someone happens to know it and turn the entire question into a fantastic vocabulary lesson. My current best way to determine the quality of a single-word-request is by the quality of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side of the coin, an asker's persistent rejection of perfectly fine examples due to the unspoken circumstances is just annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-06-08T19:40:48.807" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1332" CreationDate="2011-06-09T15:34:42.783" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed today that answers no longer seem to be ordered by the number of votes they have received, and instead are sorted in time order (most recent first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this an intentional design change or is it a bug? If it was a design change, is there a way to still view answers by number of votes? Where do design changes like this get discussed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tagged this with &quot;bug&quot;, but since it could instead be &quot;status-by-design&quot;, please delete as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strike&gt;I'm more convinced it's not kosher by the fact that Stack Overflow has retained the top voted first sort order.&lt;/strike&gt; Turns out it was just me being stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3320" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-06-09T21:16:53.817" LastActivityDate="2011-06-09T21:16:53.817" Title="Are answers supposed to be sorted by time of writing?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1331" CreationDate="2011-06-09T16:36:40.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-the?answertab=votes#tab-top&quot;&gt;votes&lt;/a&gt; tab above the answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KknGt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your preference will be stored in a cookie, so you won't have to do that again on the next question you view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-06-09T16:36:40.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1327" CreationDate="2011-06-09T19:00:30.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting a question (or an answer) is subjective; what you find interesting and worth of up-voting could be thought to be worth a down-vote for somebody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are systematically up-voting an answer or a question just because it has been down-voted from somebody else, then I would find that wrong; your vote should not be conditioned from the vote of other users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I can understand, for example, if you think that down-voting a question four times has been excessive, and you up-vote it to balance the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-09T19:32:31.353" LastActivityDate="2011-06-09T19:32:31.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-10T07:53:00.057" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the above is not working, and I can't even log off. Is this just my computer, or have I done something to my account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-10T17:02:49.087" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T17:08:47.570" Title="My menu is not dropping down, I can't access my inbox, and I can't even comment. What happened?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2011-06-10T10:30:16.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you try clearing your browser cache? Have you tried in a different web browser?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-10T10:30:16.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1344" CreationDate="2011-06-11T03:40:56.360" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description for that flag is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it does not answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that sometimes the flag is used for an answer that is not correct, as in the case of an answer about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;rest&lt;/em&gt; saying that &lt;em&gt;rest&lt;/em&gt; derives from the Italian &lt;em&gt;restare&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the description sufficient clear, or does it needs to be rephrased?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-11T22:47:52.570" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T09:45:38.470" Title="Does the description for the &quot;not an answer&quot; flag need to be re-phrased?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2011-06-11T17:08:47.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like JavaScript is disabled in your browser? Although if this is the case then you should get a warning displayed at the top of the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language and Usage Meta -&#xA;  Stack Exchange works best with&#xA;  JavaScript enabled&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5474" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T17:08:47.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-11T20:25:23.997" Score="9" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a user (on a regular &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; a Meta site) gets a particularly high number of downvotes, it seems an automatic filter kicks in which bans them from asking any more questions, with the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See [&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-sorry-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-from-this/86998#86998&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;] to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense for regular sites, as many downvotes would generally indicate &lt;em&gt;particularly bad&lt;/em&gt; questions, potentially 'poisoning' the site and reducing its quality.  However, for &lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt; sites, the downvote is used to indicate mere disagreement with a question asked.  Surely it doesn't make sense to ban a user because they asked several (appropriate) questions, or made several (appropriate) proposals, with which many people disagreed?  Shouldn't this auto-filter be disabled for Meta sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should users with many down-votes on a meta site be banned from asking questions?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1339" CreationDate="2011-06-11T22:46:23.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67023/should-the-automated-ban-on-questions-used-on-so-apply-to-meta-as-well&quot;&gt;similar question on meta.SO&lt;/a&gt;, asked on October, Jeff Atwood replied saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Probably it will be enabled, with a relaxed threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that down-voting on a meta site has a different meaning than in the main site, but I still think that if a user keeps getting down-votes on questions, then that user is probably making poor suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T22:46:23.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1339" CreationDate="2011-06-11T23:08:50.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, good point -- I never meant for this to be enabled on linked (child) metas. Disabling that now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(However, I don't think this was actually &lt;em&gt;enabled&lt;/em&gt; here -- were you seeing it on English?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T23:08:50.190" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-13T13:20:14.587" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/29617/what-do-socially-imposed-judgments-and-keyboard-face-keyboard-face-mean&quot;&gt;What do “socially imposed judgments” and “Keyboard, face, keyboard, face.” mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differing opinion here seems to revolve around the idea that the two questions are coming from the same source. The asker didn't know what two phrases meant and decided to ask us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should EL&amp;amp;U enforce a one question per question policy even if more than one question relevant to the topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T13:39:15.240" Title="When can two questions be in the same question?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1342" CreationDate="2011-06-13T13:28:32.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion on this subject is (again) the stricter one. Questions should have one question for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers should only have to juggle one question at a time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers with more than one answer could be both right and wrong, causing confusion on behalf of the voters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jamming two questions into one title can be excessive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One question could be closable but the other isn't&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One question could be extremely interesting and deserve scores of upvotes... but the other isn't&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the restriction isn't &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, what is it? &lt;em&gt;Two&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are people who have poor judgement supposed to understand when it is okay to ask two-in-one? Avoiding drama by restricting it to one-per-one is good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T13:28:32.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1337" CreationDate="2011-06-13T13:34:42.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag should be marked as &quot;invalid&quot; in that case. While the answer may be incorrect, it is still an answer and (presumably) the community will downvote &lt;del&gt;it into oblivion&lt;/del&gt; for being so incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description for the flag seems sufficient for me. The issue is that here--as well as everywhere else on the internet--people just don't read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user362" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T13:34:42.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1342" CreationDate="2011-06-13T13:38:59.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good question and worth discussing.  However, in the example question, I think the OP did not know that the two questions were unrelated, and thought that the phrases had something to do with each other (in which case it makes sense to ask about them together).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that there should be only one primary question, but argue that it can make sense to have related questions as well.  Although one answer can be right and wrong, we can have this problem with just &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28687/what-does-lower-oneself-for-farewell-swim-mean-is-this-a-sport-related-jargon&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt; anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, how do we determine what one question is, particularly when a user might ask for the correct choice amongst several valid alternatives?  Should that person then ask one question for each possible pair of alternatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T13:38:59.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1342" CreationDate="2011-06-13T13:39:15.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the two questions are unrelated they should be separate, when they are interdependent then it's fine.  It is judgement of course but I think it's reasonable to expect that from users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I give people feedback about how well their question is structured by using my downvote finger or making a constructive comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW I think the question in question should be separate in an ideal world but there are way, way worse questions out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T13:39:15.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1352" CreationDate="2011-06-13T18:19:22.383" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question was attributed to me, but it is not mine (it is not my writing style, nor was I using this web site back in November 2010; in fact, I only started using this web site within the past two months):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4620/is-can-not-unambiguous&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;can not&amp;quot; unambiguous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WQH4v.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I don't mind getting bonus points (which is what has effectively happened here), they really do belong to the person who actually wrote the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do hope the database that this web site relies on is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9014" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T20:34:45.060" Title="Possible database problems!" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1347" CreationDate="2011-06-13T18:24:19.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=cache:https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4620/is-can-not-unambiguous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Cache&lt;/a&gt; version the owner is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1095/pascal-cuoq&quot;&gt;Pascal Cuoq&lt;/a&gt;, a deleted user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6EEPg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of the cached version&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was that account possibly merged into yours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="849" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T20:34:45.060" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T20:34:45.060" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1350" CreationDate="2011-06-13T19:29:30.563" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are users supposed to be able to see how many &quot;close&quot; votes &lt;strong&gt;their own&lt;/strong&gt; question has?  I know you have to have a certain amount of rep to close a question in general, but on Stack Overflow's meta, I can see if someone is voting to close my own question, but not on English.StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the sites just set up differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5244" LastEditorUserId="5244" LastEditDate="2011-06-13T19:35:16.927" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T20:26:39.510" Title="See close votes on my own question" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1349" CreationDate="2011-06-13T20:26:39.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/view-close-votes&quot;&gt;privileges page&lt;/a&gt;, at 250 reputation you earn the ability to view close votes on your own questions. You also gain the ability to vote on them for close and reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you have under 250. On Meta, you have greater than 250.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T20:26:39.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2011-06-14T02:29:13.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to leaving it be or deleting it, you could simply append an &quot;edited:&quot; part with an explanation or whatever is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to say which is best: it probably depends on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T02:29:13.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1347" CreationDate="2011-06-14T03:44:30.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case there was a bit of account confusion because there were overlapping &quot;fake&quot; emails in your user information, and a moderator (me in this case) mistakenly elected to merge the accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and disassociated this question from your account, and I'll patch up the other user later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, I recommend picking a more &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; fake email address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T03:44:30.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-14T07:33:55.110" Score="28" ViewCount="1736" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a thank you for &lt;em&gt;being awesome&lt;/em&gt;, if you are on page 1 or page 2 of &amp;hellip;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip; we'll be sending you a little care package shortly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Stack Exchange t-shirt in your size&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Stack Exchange die-cut, vinyl stickers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/collections/frontpage/products/stack-exchange-sharpies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange sharpie&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-pens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange pen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-network-stickers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange stickers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can expect to get an email soon with details on how to confirm and provide your mailing address and size preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The t-shirt&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7igeG.png&quot; alt=&quot;english.stackexchange.com Tshirt&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The sticker&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u3G6w.png&quot; alt=&quot;english.stackexchange.com sticker&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the items you can view in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange store&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; direct links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/collections/frontpage/products/stack-exchange-sharpies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sharpie&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-pens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pens&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-network-stickers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stickers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(for anyone else who wants this swag, but isn't on page 1 or page 2 of the all time top users -- the limited edition t-shirts and stickers will be available for purchase from the store soon as well)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T15:52:44.063" Title="English Stack Exchange swag for top users" Tags="|discussion|swag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1353" CreationDate="2011-06-14T10:47:15.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That e-mail was as appreciated as unexpected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, though, about something. It's just to be sure, but in the e-mail you say &quot;&lt;em&gt;no matter where in the world you live&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, does that mean that also the shipping is free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the package will include one item of each category? Thanks again! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T10:47:15.780" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1353" CreationDate="2011-06-14T14:01:44.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kewl! One question, though: what exactly do you mean by &quot;your Programmers Stack Exchange account name&quot;? I.e. for me, is that &quot;Martha&quot; or &quot;1547&quot; or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: ok, so I started typing &quot;Martha&quot;, and it filled the field with &quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/users/1547/martha&quot;. I take it that the field should be filled out with a link to your user profile? (In that case, shouldn't the field be a &lt;em&gt;leeetle&lt;/em&gt; bit wider? And better labeled?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 7/8/2011: I still haven't received my swag. Should I be worried?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-07-08T15:52:44.063" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T15:52:44.063" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1369" CreationDate="2011-06-14T14:24:57.013" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to give mad props for highlighting questions I've already voted on in the Questions page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I've noticed that I didn't quite get this right.  Exactly what causes a question to be highlighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-10T03:43:25.110" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T03:43:25.110" Title="Love seeing questions highlighted... but what is it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1357" CreationDate="2011-06-14T14:54:04.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1313/why-are-some-questions-shaded-green&quot;&gt;favorite tags&lt;/a&gt;, whether you set them manually or they are automatically chosen by the system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T14:54:04.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-14T15:40:27.880" Score="10" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a couple questions lately with requests for some kind of web site where you can somehow search by pronunciation to find words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/29666/any-website-to-look-up-words-with-similar-pronunciation-or-spelling&quot;&gt;Any website to look up words with similar pronunciation or spelling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28624/online-tools-to-look-up-words-from-pronunciation/29000#29000&quot;&gt;Online tools to look up words from pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there don't appear to be any such tools available on the web, I have begun building such a site, using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary as a starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that I'm probably going to include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search by pronunciation of a whole word to find all words with that pronunciation (e.g. searching for /B EH1 R/ gives you &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bare&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Behr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bair&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bahr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Baehr&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Baer&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search by partial pronunciation to find all words containing that sound sequence (e.g. searching for D AH1 B AH0 L gives you &lt;em&gt;double, doubles, doubled, redouble, Doubleday, Doubletree, doublespeak, doublethink, double-decker, double-quote,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;double entendre&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the above searches with wildcards for one (?) or zero or many (*) sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hear pronunciations (using some kind of TTS system that can produce utterances with an arbitrary phoneme string)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See pronunciations using a variety of pronunciation notation schemes (the above is ARPAbet, but also support IPA and various dictionary schemes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proof-of-concept prototype I am working on has, so far, the first two bullet points.  Since the target audience of the site is users of English.StackExchange, I'd like to ask users what other functionality they would expect or desire from such a site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T18:57:31.653" Title="What features would you want on a pronunciation search web site?" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1353" CreationDate="2011-06-14T16:46:23.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Um... I got the e-mail, I swear I did, but some time during the night I seem to have lost ground and am now the top user listed on the &lt;i&gt;third&lt;/i&gt; page. Obviously I hope to improve this state of affairs as quickly as possible, but I figured I should let you know I'm not trying to scam you guys... really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T16:46:23.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2011-06-14T18:57:31.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, here is a short list of fantastic features (as opposed to practically useful features):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searches along the lines of &quot;contains the string &lt;code&gt;th&lt;/code&gt; but does not have the sound &lt;code&gt;θ&lt;/code&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ability to merge vowel sounds into &quot;similar sound&quot; buckets (e.g. &lt;code&gt;ɑː + ɒ + ɔː&lt;/code&gt;) before searching&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As much support for varying dialects as possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searches that can allow for multi-word rhymes including emphasis on specific syllables&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation results for specific bigrams (i.e. searching for &lt;code&gt;ea&lt;/code&gt; returns all valid pronunciations those two vowels)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feature #1 is really the only one I would use often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T18:57:31.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1363" CreationDate="2011-06-14T19:01:30.683" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;The gray background is very close to the &lt;code&gt;code block gray background&lt;/code&gt;. The monospace helps, but when working with individual characters it can get very difficult to notice which are in a code block and which are not. Is it possible to get more of a contrast between the colors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-06-15T05:21:58.200" LastActivityDate="2011-06-15T05:21:58.200" Title="Code blocks are hard to read on Meta." Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1362" CreationDate="2011-06-14T19:44:34.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have darkened the background some, the change will be in the next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T19:44:34.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-14T20:24:17.837" Score="16" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/29847/39&quot;&gt;Helper: loose vs. lose&lt;/a&gt; I added a comment with the following markup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;clarification: by “should be pronounced *loss*” do you mean &#xA;“should rhyme with *dose*” or “should rhyme with *boss*”? &#xA;Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word &#xA;spelled *lose* to rhyme with *dose*?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expected it to look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;clarification: by “should be pronounced &lt;em&gt;loss&lt;/em&gt;” do you mean &#xA;      “should rhyme with &lt;em&gt;dose&lt;/em&gt;” or “should rhyme with &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt;”? &#xA;      Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word spelled &#xA;      &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; to rhyme with &lt;em&gt;dose&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it comes out looking like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;clarification: by “should be pronounced &lt;em&gt;loss*” do you mean “should&#xA;  rhyme with *dose*” or “should rhyme with *boss*”? Wouldn’t a purely&#xA;  rule-based phonetic expectation for a word spelled *lose&lt;/em&gt; to rhyme with&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;dose&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is just awesomely terrible, embarrassingly bad. It makes me, as the commenter, look foolish. Seeing as how using HTML as a workaround is not possible in comments, is there any workaround so that my comments can be formatted correctly? Or is it really a “design choice” that you can only italicize some parts of comments but not others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I get the same issue if I used the “official” underscore syntax for italics in comment markup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; clarification: by “should be pronounced _loss_” do you mean &#xA; “should rhyme with _dose_” or “should rhyme with _boss_”? &#xA; Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word &#xA; spelled _lose_ to rhyme with _dose_?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;resulting in this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;clarification: by “should be pronounced &lt;em&gt;loss_” do you mean “should&#xA;  rhyme with _dose_” or “should rhyme with _boss_”? Wouldn’t a purely&#xA;  rule-based phonetic expectation for a word spelled _lose&lt;/em&gt; to rhyme with&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;dose&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T09:50:06.360" Title="Formatting comments is such a hassle" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|comments|formatting|markdown|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1364" CreationDate="2011-06-14T20:46:08.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my test comment above, it appears that the matching algorithm is greedily scanning for a closing match. Instead of finding the &lt;em&gt;nearest&lt;/em&gt; Markdown close it is grabbing the &lt;em&gt;furthest&lt;/em&gt; Markdown close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T20:46:08.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1364" CreationDate="2011-06-14T20:46:48.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to get away from &quot;fancy quotes&quot; there, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;clarification: by &quot;should be pronounced &lt;em&gt;loss&lt;/em&gt;&quot; do you mean &#xA;  &quot;should rhyme with &lt;em&gt;dose&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;should rhyme with &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt;&quot;? &#xA;  Wouldn't a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word &#xA;  spelled &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; to rhyme with &lt;em&gt;dose&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T20:46:48.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1368" CreationDate="2011-06-15T03:00:20.337" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/6857/revisions&quot;&gt;rolled back&lt;/a&gt; a tag edit from a very old question that had added &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuance&lt;/a&gt;. The tag itself currently has 5 questions and... what is it? Do we need it in addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am asking here is because I also noticed that the same user just added the tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/4157/revisions&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; and two rollbacks back-to-back seems like something I should get an opinion on. Do we need &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuance&lt;/a&gt;? If we do, can someone please edit its wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Actually, it looks like nearly all of the questions tagged with this were from the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-06-15T06:19:47.557" Title="Do we need [tag:nuance]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1367" CreationDate="2011-06-15T04:52:36.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; is the better tag for this. It's hard to define what types of differences are &lt;em&gt;nuances&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to larger differences, whereas &lt;em&gt;word choice&lt;/em&gt; covers the entire spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-06-15T06:19:47.557" LastActivityDate="2011-06-15T06:19:47.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1357" CreationDate="2011-06-16T11:18:05.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called &quot;Frequented Tags&quot; and it is automatically inferred based on your question browsing statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=frequented+tags&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=frequented+tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:21.993" LastActivityDate="2011-06-16T11:18:05.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1374" CreationDate="2011-06-16T18:45:48.310" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I joined english.stackexchange in May 2011 and my overall reputation now is 884. But if I check my reputation for the year, it is only 768.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason for this. Since I joined english.stackexchange this year only, shouldn't my yearly reputation also be 884?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had joined stackoverflow a long time back, are there any points that are carried over from there to here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&#xA;On the link that Jeff mentioned, this is what I see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;** rep this quarter (4/1/2011 - 6/30/2011): 783&#xA;** rep this year (1/1/2011 - 12/31/2011): 783&#xA;** total rep 884 :)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that was the source of my confusion. Considering that I joined only in May 2011, one would expect my total rep to be equal to rep this year and quarter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the linked page, there is an entry for a bonus of 100 and that leaves a change of only 1 point. Even though I do not remember why I got the bonus, I can live with that. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8887" LastEditorUserId="8887" LastEditDate="2011-06-16T20:35:56.120" LastActivityDate="2011-06-16T21:15:55.820" Title="Discrepancy between total and yearly reputation count" Tags="|support|feedback|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-16T19:54:11.477" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is now, flags for closing a question are not considered as votes to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would not make sense to consider X flags for closing a question as a vote to close it? X could be a value sufficient high to avoid that two users flagging a question are considered a vote to close it, but it should not be a too high number.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this way, moderators don't need to check the number of flags for closing a question, and with the right number of users flagging a question, they could not need to do anything at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-16T19:59:38.287" Title="Consider X flags for closing a question as a vote to close it" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1371" CreationDate="2011-06-16T19:59:38.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a solution for a non-existent problem. We have enough high rep users that can vote to close; we have active moderators; we have an active chat. As the site grows, the time-to-close will continue to shrink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, allowing flaggers to close is problematic because anyone over 15 rep can flag and there isn't any rep loss for poor flagging skills. There is a reason voting to close happens at 3000 rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, people can now downvote for free. I think flag+downvote is effective enough for people who cannot cast a legitimate close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-16T19:59:38.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1370" CreationDate="2011-06-16T20:23:51.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rep is a denormalized number, so deleted users/posts + deleted votes (or undo votes) will not reflect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt; -- this will allow you to recalc your rep to reflect right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-06-16T20:23:51.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1370" CreationDate="2011-06-16T21:02:04.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between 783 and 884 is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 is the minimal reputation you can have on any SE site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100 is the reputation you get when you associate your account with more than one SE site, and in one site your reputation is higher than 199; in that case, you get an extra 100 points in all the SE sites where you use the same account. The extra reputation is given only once, for each of the SE sites you join.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, the site where your reputation is higher than 199 is &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-16T21:15:55.820" LastActivityDate="2011-06-16T21:15:55.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1378" CreationDate="2011-06-17T12:58:16.990" Score="4" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to organic nature of SE sites, both in their genesis and usage, there are and there will always be cases where there are sites that overlap in their subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical example are all of older sites - stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser and their offspring e.g. drupal. In these cases it is fairly simple to determine where does a question really belong - the subjects are well delineated (though borderline cases can still occur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at EL&amp;amp;U the relatives are: literature (will soon become beta) and writers (active). These sometimes overlap in their subjects and will probably continue to do so in a way that is different from stackoverflow and superuser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises two questions, one general and the other specific to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30204/identifying-the-literary-technique&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should be the attitude towards ambiguous questions? Should such questions be left to see if they get good answers or immediately referred to other site? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question I referred to is one of questions tagged with a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rhetoric&quot;&gt;rhetoric&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is that although rhetoric deals with effective use of language in general, the names of figures (see the right pane &lt;a href=&quot;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) are mostly known from analysis of literature (poetry and prose) and are perceived as specific for those subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am biased towards keeping rhetorics in EL&amp;amp;U, though have no objections to take it wherever it belongs - the primary goal here is to lower the discussion noise by making the rules easier to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T17:47:06.967" Title="Does rhetoric fall under EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2011-06-17T13:26:27.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you already know my opinion. If I'm allowed to rephrase a bit, if there is a better site for a question, it should go there. If some sites are more generic than others (like stackoverflow and superuser you mentioned) then the less generic one should be prioritized. In our argument the question was, in my opinion, about a literature. Although it may be proper for EL&amp;amp;U, there is a better site to ask it, thus I agreed with Alenanno's comment, that writers is more fit for it (I'm sorry I used stronger word &quot;wrong forum&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8975" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T13:26:27.493" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2011-06-17T15:18:45.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should be too strict in our interpretation of what does or doesn't constitute a proper question for EL&amp;amp;U. We run the risk of reducing our now thriving site to an empty, forbidding place full of frowning pedants whose main concern appears to the outside world to be which questions are worthy of our attention (the elect) and which questions should be cast into perdition (i.e. Writers.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhetoric is a part of the English language, and it is also a part of writing. There is virtually nothing (save perhaps pronunciation) that falls under the topic of English that cannot also fall under the topic of writing, and vice versa. If a question is asked in such a way that it appears to be asking for instruction in how to write, I say send it to Writers.SE. But if it is merely asking how a rhetorical figure means something in English, I say we should deal with that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, much of our success may be attributed to our eclecticism. And I don't think we should try too hard to find a verbal monoculture that suits a chosen few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T15:18:45.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2011-06-17T17:47:06.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not actually seeing what the problem is here. Why would the linked question get sent to Writers? These are the questions I can see about rhetoric:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is [form or type of rhetoric]?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does rhetoric mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What rhetorical technique is used [in sentence]?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see all of those forms as on-topic. The linked example appears to be like the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These types of questions are all on-topic for other styles of technique:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is [type of fallacy]?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What fallacy is being committed [in sentence]?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, really, the heart of the question is a classification of &lt;em&gt;sentences&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;. Sentences are still on-topic here at EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is a run-on sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does this sentence mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T17:47:06.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1382" CreationDate="2011-06-17T19:43:47.963" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reputation page displays the following in Chrome and FireFox (both for Mac):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OUmk1.png&quot; alt=&quot;reputation&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears there's a little css issue for days that have accepted answers where both the score and the background are the same color (or I'm colorblind and didn't know it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-06-18T15:53:30.073" LastActivityDate="2011-06-18T15:53:41.743" Title="Green block for days with accepted answers" Tags="|bug|status-completed|reputation|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1353" CreationDate="2011-06-18T06:08:47.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Awesome — thank you for a lovely surprise present!  Another question: for shipping within the US, do you use USPS, or a courier (eg UPS/Fedex)?  The place I’m staying at the moment goes by different addresses depending on who’s delivering, for obscure reasons which I don’t understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-06-18T10:39:58.840" LastActivityDate="2011-06-18T10:39:58.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1379" CreationDate="2011-06-18T15:53:41.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be fixed now, on all the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-06-18T15:53:41.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1337" CreationDate="2011-06-20T13:35:29.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes on answers cost you rep. Flags don't. Q.E.D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The flag should be marked invalid in such a case. Which of course means that there &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be a cost, but to the user's flag weight instead of his reputation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-06-20T13:35:29.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1337" CreationDate="2011-06-20T15:10:50.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the misuse of the flag is caused by the fact the users didn't read the &quot;it should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether&quot; part, then what is probably confusing the users who are flagging is the &quot;it does not answer the question&quot; part, which seems to be interpreted as &quot;it is the wrong answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rephrasing the description as follows (or with similar words) could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it should possibly be an edit for the question, a comment, or another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;or deleted altogether&quot; is probably what causes the flag to be used from who want to flag an answer because they think it should be deleted. Removing that part, or rephrasing it could help too. As the only cases where an answer should be delete because it's not an answer are already listed, I would rather remove the &quot;or deleted altogether&quot; part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case the users who flag an answer as not an answer don't read the description of the flag, then changing the description would not have any effect. In that case, there is few that can be done, if not educating the users on how to correctly use an SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-21T09:45:38.470" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T09:45:38.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1386" CreationDate="2011-06-20T18:47:38.323" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;My drop-down menu reports that my reputation increased by 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uIu64.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I click on 5, I am taken to the following page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DLfkJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the votes are votes on answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can my reputation be increased of 5 points, when two of my answers have been up-voted once?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T17:01:26.540" Title="The drop-down menu seems to report a wrong reputation increase" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1385" CreationDate="2011-06-20T23:18:33.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone withdrew a question upvote, meaning +10 + -5 = +5. Vote withdrawals are not reflected in the dropdown itemization but are recorded in the daily/weekly/monthly summaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-21T17:01:26.540" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T17:01:26.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-21T18:04:49.183" Score="7" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The point of this meta-discussion is NOT this particular example but the behavior present (intended or otherwise) in the example. I have also severely toned down the hyperbole and attitude... which may lead to a little confusion regarding the first few answers. Apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be way off base here (so correct me if I am) but this type of question seems lifted solely on the merit of its catchy title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30805/if-christopher-is-a-carrier-of-christ-then-what-is-jennifer-carrying&quot;&gt;If Christopher is a “carrier of Christ” then what is Jennifer carrying?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that &lt;em&gt;Jennifer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Christopher&lt;/em&gt; are related is such a specific assumption that the entire question, and its title, are mostly irrelevant. The real question is, &quot;What is the etymology of the name Jennifer?&quot; At best, you could as &quot;Do Christopher and Jennifer have similar etymologies?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that isn't as catchy. So instead we get a extremely narrow question about a relationship between two specific names that isn't likely to be useful in any other context. The top answer (as of this writing) &lt;em&gt;completely ignores&lt;/em&gt; the Christopher suggestion and answers the real question. This suggests that the Christopher suggestion shouldn't have been there in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pattern of question should be actively discouraged because it weakens the content of this site by restricting the domain to specific cases instead of general cases. Such a restriction helps when the topic at hand is broad, but this isn't one of those cases. In and of itself, this isn't so much an issue because we can just answer it and move on but I feel that the question was well received because of the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I think these need to be forcefully addressed is because such a title will pull in more activity. I don't have a problem with someone getting clever and reaping reputation rewards but I think this is a bad question. Questions and answers that get upvoted past a certain point tend to get immunity. &lt;em&gt;And&lt;/em&gt; they get mimicked. A good title shouldn't make up for a poor question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for ranting. The condensed point is this: &quot;Restriction the scope of a question so that you can use a more catchy title is bad and should be discouraged.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T06:04:50.607" Title="The problem with attractive titles." Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2011-06-21T19:02:10.493" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is fine and should stay open. It is only to be expected that questions will contain invalid assumptions; I don't think that is much of a problem—on the contrary, because people searching for the same answer will often make the same false assumptions, and they find this question by the same route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the answers are reasonably interesting or conceivably helpful to people, I don't have a problem with such questions. I can conceive of people wondering, &quot;hey, are Christopher and Jennifer related?&quot;. Nothing wrong with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Half the questions on this site aren't very interesting to me anyway, so that shouldn't be a criterion. What it basically comes down to is that, when I vote to close a question, I do it because I have a gut feeling that says &quot;this question is bad, bad&quot;, and I will try to find a closing reason that matches my feeling to some extent. Clinging too much to specific closing rules seems either self-delusional or destructive, though I must confess I do it too, on occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Edited:]&lt;/strong&gt; An example of the kind of reactions our already restrictive policies elicit, from the OP of the Jennifer question, who has 2000+ reputation, as said in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think a far greater question for this site might be is it worth the price of alienating people to make sure the questions are the way you want them. Whenever these negative interactions happen on this site it makes me not want to visit often. That could be a really problem for keeping users. It obviously is not that bad of a question and others seem to agree. You might want to consider toning it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree. It just looks very confrontational and unwelcoming for a new user to get his question closed for reasons he finds unclear—and for experienced users too. Questions should be tolerated unless they are positively intolerable to most people on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-09-12T06:04:50.607" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T06:04:50.607" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2011-06-21T19:06:54.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; is similar to &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; is based on &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt;, is &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; also based on &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; (or something similar)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this a 'Bad Question'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not very far from the reasoning that Charles Darwin used to derive the &quot;Theory of Evolution&quot;. Deductive logic demands such questions, even when the answer is &quot;The similarity between A and B is superficial and does not lead us to a deeper relationship the &lt;strong&gt;QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;is still valid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top answer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30805/if-christopher-is-a-carrier-of-christ-then-what-is-jennifer-carrying/30808#30808&quot;&gt;from @Unreason&lt;/a&gt;) at this time does not (as you suggest) &quot;&lt;em&gt;completely ignore&lt;/em&gt;&quot; the &quot;Christopher suggestion&quot;. The first sentence is, &lt;code&gt;No Jennifer is from&lt;/code&gt;, These simple words address that the etymology of Jennifer is apart from Christopher. Since OP has already identified the history of &quot;Christopher&quot; respondent (@Unreason) then explains the etymology of Jennifer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have done is attempt to redraw the OP's question in your own image. You have attempted to treat an obvious similarity as trivial rather than accepting them as the rational foundation for the question.  Further, through you use of the &quot;down vote&quot;, you have punished him for being curious and asking a question. (&lt;em&gt;Please tell us you are not a school teacher!&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9758" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T19:06:54.043" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2011-06-21T19:22:48.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could be way off base here (so&#xA;  correct me if I am) but this type of&#xA;  question pisses me off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In similar fashion, I assume that this is hyperbole, which could be considered a similar tweaking of the question to garner more attention. I hope that this sort of thing doesn't truly &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;piss you off&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The idea that Jennifer and Christopher&#xA;  are related is such a specific&#xA;  assumption that the entire question,&#xA;  and its title, are completely&#xA;  irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems like quite an assertion to make (that the specificity of an assumption should render the resulting question irrelevant). Why would this be so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The real question is, &quot;What is the&#xA;  etymology of the name Jennifer?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll grant that if you were to answer the question with a simple &quot;No, they are not related&quot;, then the OP would probably want more information about the history of the name &quot;Jennifer&quot;. But you have removed part of the question simply because you believe it's &quot;irrelevant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The top answer (as of this writing)&#xA;  completely ignores the Christopher&#xA;  suggestion and answers the real&#xA;  question. This means that the&#xA;  Christopher suggestion shouldn't have&#xA;  been there in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary; the top-voted answer addresses the OP's question directly with &quot;No&quot;, then proceeds to explain why and how this is the case. This is exactly how questions should be answered on StackExchange sites, where the answerer deals with the question directly, then addresses what are likely underlying assumptions or inevitable follow-up questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This pattern of question should be&#xA;  actively discouraged because it&#xA;  weakens the content of this site by&#xA;  restricting the domain to specific&#xA;  cases instead of general cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would the way this question is phrased hinder someone from finding out information about &quot;Christopher&quot; or &quot;Jennifer&quot;? I don't think you can make the case that the omission of the word &quot;etymology&quot; would do this, as the question could have been asked in an equally dry fashion using simpler vocabulary (&quot;Where does the name Jennifer come from?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reason I think these need to be&#xA;  forcefully addressed is because such a&#xA;  title will pull in more activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you'll need to be more specific about how having a clever title that entices people to view (and hopefully answer) a question is a Bad Thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with someone&#xA;  getting clever and reaping reputation&#xA;  rewards but I think this is a bad&#xA;  question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then vote to close the question. At roughly 8k reputation, you should be able to vote to close questions. This may seem like a somewhat flippant response, but either closing or downvoting a question that you believe to be of low quality is exactly the sort of response that was originally intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2011-06-21T19:28:04.473" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T19:28:04.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-21T19:26:51.887" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at the FAQs and I'm trying to see if this has already been answered...Can't find it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is asking if a phrase is polite on topic? Wouldn't subjects like this be too subjective to personal opinion on what's polite and what's not polite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9969" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-22T10:31:29.080" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T10:31:29.080" Title="Is asking a question about the politeness of a phrase on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1392" CreationDate="2011-06-21T20:11:51.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we do have these (and many more, just search the site for &quot;polite&quot; or &quot;rude&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21575/is-can-i-have-a-cup-of-coffee-polite&quot;&gt;Is “Can I have a cup of coffee?” polite?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14982/excuse-me-is-it-polite-or-just-a-terse-way-to-ask-others-to-step-aside&quot;&gt;“Excuse Me”… Is it polite or just a terse way to ask others to step aside?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4343/is-thanks-appropriate-to-be-polite-in-this-situation&quot;&gt;Is “thanks” appropriate to be polite in this situation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7414/is-can-or-could-more-polite&quot;&gt;Is “can” or “could” more polite?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27365/is-it-considered-rude-language-to-omit-interrogatives-in-speech&quot;&gt;Is it considered rude language to omit interrogatives in speech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30236/how-rude-is-to-eat-like-a-pig#30238&quot;&gt;How rude is “to eat like a pig”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26034/how-rude-is-naff&quot;&gt;How rude is “naff”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27057/is-it-rude-to-call-a-gay-person-homosexual&quot;&gt;Is it rude to call a gay person “homosexual?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7059/why-is-cnt-so-much-more-derogatory-in-the-us-than-the-uk&quot;&gt;Why is 'c*nt' so much more derogatory in the US than the UK?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11981/what-is-currently-the-most-obscene-word-in-british-english&quot;&gt;What is currently the most obscene word in British English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of them open. Which, of course, is no guarantee that all future questions of this kind will stay open (and in fact, there's no guarantee that all of these old questions will), but I would say, go ahead and ask. I do recommend, however, that you have a look at the six guidelines for good subjective questions outlined in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt;, and word your question accordingly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Great subjective questions... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... tend to have long, not short, answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... invite sharing experiences over opinions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... are more than just mindless social fun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T20:11:51.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2011-06-22T02:29:27.463" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymology of Christopher is relevant because it helps &lt;em&gt;motivate&lt;/em&gt; the question.  Every word in the English language, together with every name in the English-speaking world, has a corresponding &quot;What is the etymology of&quot; question.  So a good question doesn't just ask for that, it gives a reason why the asker is interested in the etymology of that particular word, ideally in a way that will make other people interested as well.  This question seems like a perfect example of that.  (I don't know what the answers looked like when you posted this, but right now all four answers address the underlying question, some better than others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1812" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T02:29:27.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="864" CreationDate="2011-06-22T08:29:15.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Semantics&quot; is the linguistic field that deals with the meanings (of words, phrases, sentences). As we are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; talking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; linguistic semantics as a science here on this site, it is actually used in the same place as &quot;meaning&quot; and not as something more abstract. I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; should be kept and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site featured discussions about the meaning of words and also about semantics as a science, then it would be a valid tag. I think tags should generally indicate what a question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I would also vote to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; as a tag and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; as one of its synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2928" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T08:29:15.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-22T08:32:58.150" Score="0" ViewCount="1012" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually had to open another question with &quot;opposite&quot; in its title to figure out what tag to use for my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30976/whats-the-opposite-of-server-server-operating-system&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the opposite of &amp;quot;server&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;server operating system&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; question. I think it would be a valuable addition to the site if there was a tag synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opposite&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;opposite&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;opposite&lt;/a&gt; for the existing tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antonym&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2928" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T09:29:33.607" Title="Add tag synonym [opposite] for tag [antonym]" Tags="|feature-request|tagging|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1397" CreationDate="2011-06-22T09:14:50.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a tag is made a synonym of another one, and users enter the first tag, it will be replaced with the second one. For the system is like the first tag doesn't exist at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a synonym of a tag is done when there are users who use two different tags, but both the tags have the same meaning, or when users write a tag using the wrong spelling. It could also be used when questions are migrated from another site that uses tags different from the tags already in use in the site where the question is migrated, and there is a correspondence between the tags; in this case, the synonym is created when there enough migrated questions that use that tag.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In other cases, it doesn't make sense to create a synonym, as (apart the cases I have already reported) it doesn't add any value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T09:14:50.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2011-06-22T10:11:38.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question being asked if &lt;em&gt;Christopher&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jennifer&lt;/em&gt; have something in common in their etymologies. It's different from asking the etymology of &lt;em&gt;Jennifer&lt;/em&gt;, even if in both the questions the answer should report the origin of the name. The answer to the actual question should be that the names don't have a similar derivation, and point out which is the derivation of &lt;em&gt;Jennifer&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of a question should let the users understand what is being asked without to read all the question, which would mean to click on the title to go to the question page.&#xA;If I use &quot;Either he's dead or my watch has stopped&quot; as title for a question that is really asking about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;Groucho&lt;/em&gt;, then the title would not clearly suit the question, and it should be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T10:11:38.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2011-06-22T11:14:48.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First let me state that I respect your opinion and have no objection on your down-vote of the question and I support it &lt;em&gt;as your opinion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a very simple, possibly naive,  attempt at demonstrating that in objectifying it you are off base here. You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The condensed point is this: &quot;Restriction of the scope of a question so that you can use a more catchy title is bad and should be discouraged.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this, I put forward a claim that: &lt;em&gt;the scope of a question was not restricted.&lt;/em&gt;(!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me try to argue it; the title of the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If Christopher is a “carrier of Christ” then what is Jennifer &lt;strong&gt;carrying&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that my perspective is one that can be shared, and from my point of view &quot;carrying&quot; is an obvious metaphor&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. The most significant interpretation is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Name &quot;Christopher&quot; comes from &quot;carrier of Christ&quot;. Where does name Jennifer come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another words I claim that the OP there actually asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the etymology of the name Jennifer and is it related to etymology of Christopher?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it might be better to leave metaphors out of titles and use them in body of the question; but if the question is properly tagged and keywords are mentioned in the title I see no reason to try to discourage titles that are trying to be poetic or aesthetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This question and answers address quite a lot of things. To be more productive may I suggest that you propose applicable policy as new meta question? I would suggest rephrasing the &quot;Restriction of the scope of a question so that you can use a more catchy title is bad and should be discouraged.&quot; into (something like) &quot;Don't use metaphors in question titles&quot; and get people's opinion on such suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; this one I personally like, since &quot;carrying&quot; can refer to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etymology itself (explained above),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(possible) similarity in etymology (from established &lt;em&gt;phero~carry&lt;/em&gt; to possible, for OP at time of asking, &lt;em&gt;fer~carry&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meaning of the name, from &quot;to carry a meaning&quot; (from etymology of carry: &quot;to transport in a vehicle&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T11:14:48.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1402" CreationDate="2011-06-22T17:26:41.747" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just do not have any &quot;edit&quot; button neither option to change my &quot;about me&quot; from another stackExchange site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that bug or something like that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10100" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-06-23T19:46:52.223" LastActivityDate="2011-06-23T19:46:52.223" Title="I can't change my profile on &quot;meta.english.stackexchange.com&quot;?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1401" CreationDate="2011-06-22T17:39:16.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The profile is copied from the main site. Simply click on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/10100/genesis&quot;&gt;main user&lt;/a&gt; link under your gravatar and edit your data there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behavior is the same on all Stack Exchange metas except Meta.StackOverflow, which is technically a completely separate site from Stack Overflow proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T17:39:16.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-22T20:22:30.910" Score="6" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30913/what-is-the-pronunciation-of-aussie/&quot;&gt;What is the pronunciation of &amp;quot;Aussie&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as &lt;strong&gt;&quot;not constructive&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is not a good fit to our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all let me get a little bit of a rant out in the open &amp;mdash; sometimes there will be questions that truly need &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt; to answer them.  Sometimes those questions may attract lots of people who &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; they know the answer to, even though they can't back it up.  Sometimes those people will insist on flooding the question with their answers even though their entire answer is constructed with opinion.  &lt;strong&gt;Is Stack Exchange really not suited for those questions?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is the problem with the answers?  After all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we cannot deal with (downvote) unreferenced, opinioned answers while we wait for an expert answer, then &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange is not really for experts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though &lt;em&gt;my opinion is agreement with the highest-voted answer&lt;/em&gt;, I agree with the complaints that it is nothing more than opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last comment on the question, Kosmonaut asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I asked you how it would even be possible to give more than an opinion. Can you give an example of a hypothetical answer that would yield an objective answer to this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, my guesses will be terrible because I'm not an expert.  But I was hoping there would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Differences in dialect may include consonants, even for proper nouns. Speakers of this dialect should generally speak consistently, and not adopt or reproduce sounds of another dialect simply because it is a proper noun.  For example, Australians say &lt;em&gt;Mel-behn&lt;/em&gt; and Americans should say &lt;em&gt;Mel-born&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Proper nouns should be spoken the same by all dialects except for typical vowel sound differences&quot; (in other words, Ah-zee or Oz-ee but not Ah-see).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, best of all would be for the question to be answered by someone with academic knowledge about the word &lt;em&gt;Aussie&lt;/em&gt; itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And still, &lt;strong&gt;there may not even be a &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answer&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;mdash; maybe it's &quot;anything goes&quot;, &lt;em&gt;but that itself is an answer&lt;/em&gt; (especially because in the anecdote in my question, the other party insisted one pronunciation was &lt;em&gt;actually wrong&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, the main point is that the question &lt;em&gt;does not ask for opinions.&lt;/em&gt;  It asks what is correct.  I believe that is every bit as answerable as almost any &quot;what is correct&quot; question on this entire site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would even &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; to see a good answer posted to the question with expert linguistic references that show that it really doesn't matter.  I believe such an answer would be highly voted up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, &lt;strong&gt;why can questions like this not be answered on Stack Exchange?  Are we unable to handle poor answers the usual way &amp;mdash; down votes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="602" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Close reconsideration - what constitutes &quot;subjective and argumentative&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1403" CreationDate="2011-06-22T20:56:04.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you not see that your two hypothetical answers here would just be opinions?  Again, without an English Language Board that might make an official decision one way or the other, there is no authoritative basis for saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Speakers of this dialect should generally speak consistently, and not adopt or reproduce sounds of another dialect simply because it is a proper noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proper nouns should be spoken the same by all dialects except for typical vowel sound differences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not because the question is too hard, and it's not because there is a lack of experts on EL&amp;amp;U, it's because &lt;strong&gt;there is no objective answer for what people &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be doing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all have our opinions about what sounds better or seems more logical, but these are just opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T20:56:04.437" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1403" CreationDate="2011-06-22T21:04:30.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is correct&quot; makes sense only if there is a defined standard to which the practice can be compared. So questions about grammatical correctness are OK, because English does have universal grammar rules. (The rules are, um, more flexible than the rules of some other languages, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.) Pronunciation, on the other hand, is entirely dialect-dependent. &lt;em&gt;The correct pronunciation of a word in a particular dialect is the way that speakers of that dialect pronounce that word.&lt;/em&gt; There is no overarching principle of adherence to spelling, or word origin, or any other arbitrary rule: if most people say it like /z/, /z/ is perforce the correct pronunciation. If there are two competing pronunciations in use, &lt;em&gt;there is no single correct pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;. Asking which of the two is more correct, like you did, is a request for opinion. It has no objective answer, and thus it doesn't belong on an SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-06-22T21:04:30.940" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-23T01:44:30.927" Score="-1" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native English guy, and the usage of some words may confuse me. For example, in my last question, I asked about a word &quot;cistern&quot;, which located in a house. Although I looked up the dictionary and it said cistern is a kind of water tank, I found it hard to understand why there is a water tank inside a house. It is the cultural difference. For I've never lived in a single house but a skyscraper of 35 floors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we ask the meaning of such word, should we add a &quot;culture&quot; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8298" LastActivityDate="2011-06-24T10:16:50.803" Title="Can we add a culture tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1403" CreationDate="2011-06-23T03:55:06.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike other SE places, like Mathematics, it's easier at EnglishSE to give an opinion as an answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And yes, I think your question shouldn't have  been closed because it was careful constructed. In the end you give three alternatives, but you it's clear that you ask for an &quot;official&quot; explanation, not an opinion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now, encouraging or enforcing downvoting doesn't really work, because it is not popular. &#xA;There are however some people who support it such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/42601/should-we-have-a-policy-about-too-much-downvoting&quot;&gt;the answers here&lt;/a&gt;  or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87695/am-i-downvoting-too-much-or-is-it-really-that-bad&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So in the end perhaps it is not a bad idea to close correct questions (such as yours) who inadvertently are open to debate. Next time when you ask you may add &quot;I am not looking for opinions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T21:09:20.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1406" CreationDate="2011-06-23T17:59:31.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think having a culture tag is very relevant in English.SE tag. No language is independent of culture, especially English which is spoken around the world. It is the first language in countries in at least three continents and is the most popular second language in many other countries. So, yes, usage of English in different countries will be greatly affected by the culture of that country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this is a good example, but anyways...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;She was a shy girl.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a reader finds this quote in a book by an American author, most times it would be in a slightly negative sense. However, if found in a book by an Indian author, it will be more often than not, projected as a positive quality. And this is due to the cultural differences between US and India. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So someone who is familiar with one sense of the word, and wanting to to know how that word is used in other cultures can use this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8887" LastActivityDate="2011-06-23T17:59:31.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1406" CreationDate="2011-06-23T20:36:34.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few problems with a potential culture tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you approach the issue that all words are defined by culture, then all questions would get the culture tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions relating to a particular act or behavior in culture are off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words that are specific to a culture are probably covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words that change meaning from culture to culture are also probably covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have tags for things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indian-english&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/australian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;australian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;australian-english&lt;/a&gt; and so on which could cover specific cultural questions relating to English that are not handled by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cultural differences such as the example provided in your question are hard to spot until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; you notice that it is a cultural thing. The tag would have to be applied post-answer... which isn't bad, but could be a sign that the tag isn't likely to help in any practical manner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the issue, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt; would either be too broad to be useful or is already handled by a more specific tag. If I browsed through the questions on the front page and saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;, would I have a better idea what the question is about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-06-24T10:16:50.803" LastActivityDate="2011-06-24T10:16:50.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1416" CreationDate="2011-06-25T18:20:36.833" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Same with StackOverflow.  Or Stack Overflow.  Or SO.  I don't know if it's proper to run the words together or not when written.  It often appears like that around the site, but in some meta questions I see the words separated by a space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" OwnerDisplayName="drm65" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T10:08:21.337" Title="Should I write 'StackExchange' or 'Stack Exchange' (or just plain old SE)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1415" CreationDate="2011-06-25T18:41:46.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;official&quot; names are &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/strong&gt;. If you go to the &quot;About&quot; page on each site, these are the only names that are used. In general usage, though, like you've pointed out yourself, the space appears to be optional. If you prefer to abbreviate, &lt;strong&gt;SE&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;SO&lt;/strong&gt; are perfectly valid as well, similar to how English Language &amp;amp; Usage is often abbreviated as &lt;strong&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9999" OwnerDisplayName="rintaun" LastActivityDate="2011-06-25T18:41:46.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1418" CreationDate="2011-06-25T19:13:34.160" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now I'm 194.  For some reason every time I enter the meta site I'm 189.  A couple hours ago, when I was in this meta, I was also one or two steps behind.  I can switch back and forth between the main site and the meta, and my rep switches from 194 to 189.  It's not updating very fast.  Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastActivityDate="2011-06-25T19:23:10.420" Title="Why is my rep always a step behind in the meta?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1417" CreationDate="2011-06-25T19:23:10.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Child metas sync with their parent account hourly, so your rep could be up to an hour behind.    It'll catch up soon!  Until you earn more rep. (:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2011-06-25T19:23:10.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1415" CreationDate="2011-06-26T10:08:21.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/trademark-guidance&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/legal/trademark-guidance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;under the heading&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Proper Use of the Stack Exchange Name&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T10:08:21.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="794" CreationDate="2011-06-26T11:29:20.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks complete to me at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T11:29:20.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2011-06-26T11:58:37.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the number of flagged posts that you, as a 10k user, can assist moderators in handling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It includes all &quot;default&quot; flag types enterable from the flagging menu, but not flags where custom text to moderators was entered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T11:58:37.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2011-06-26T13:27:21.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the closing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31600/mla-format-for-a-book-summary&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;, it seems the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is the proper place for questions about style guides and style usage. I would like to see a more clear delineation of this in the FAQ because it neither allows nor denies this explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1156" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T13:27:21.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-26T15:18:29.187" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we add a text/property showing next to the avatar? That would be native/non-native speaker so that we can give more tolerance to non-native speaker like me. I always think that while asking about meaning on a particular phrase/word, some users might think &quot;What kind of stupid question is this?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8298" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T15:42:04.843" Title="Adding a property next to the avatar" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2011-06-26T15:42:04.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always report in your user profile that you are not a native English speaker.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is another SE site where being a native English speaker is relevant. Maybe it can make sense to report on an SE site about a language that you are not a native speaker of that language, but reporting that doesn't make sense to report that for sites like Stack Overflow, and Super User.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some problems I see with this such field. As the profile can be copied to another SE site, what would &quot;I am not a native speaker&quot; mean in other SE sites? If I am on the &lt;em&gt;Italian Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt; site, what would it mean? Would it be relevant for that site that you are not a native English speaker?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Considering users that are native speakers of two different languages, I see difficult to catch all the possibilities in a field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there must be a reason, if a similar field is not already set in the user profiles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-06-26T15:42:04.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-27T18:32:10.113" Score="28" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Powers That Be have bestowed upon us a new feature: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogoverflow.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange community blogs&lt;/a&gt;. There's also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/blog-overflow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange blog post&lt;/a&gt; about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a blog for the English Language &amp;amp; Usage site is a great idea. We could use it to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide hints and tips to users on how to write better answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide long-form commentary on topics related to EL&amp;amp;U questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything else you can think of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a unique voice on the internet—&lt;em&gt;Language Log&lt;/em&gt;-style rational analysis of a descriptivist tilt with a focus on practical advice, and think we have some useful contributions we could make to the blogosphere. I think a somewhat expansive scope, with topics specific to our site as well as general English Language and Usage topics, would be best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer here if you have any ideas on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blog topic and scope&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Topics for posts you would like to write&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T02:12:22.843" Title="Call for blog participation" Tags="|discussion|blog|community|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2507" CreationDate="2011-06-27T19:16:31.263" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pager on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/25&quot;&gt;mortarboard badge&lt;/a&gt; page reports three pages, but just two pages are used. The users with that badge are 120, and 60 users are shown for each page; the third page is empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LH1yy.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DzZSO.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T04:43:40.813" Title="The pager for this badge uses a page more" Tags="|bug|status-completed|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2011-06-28T03:51:48.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start off by saying that I'm not against a blog. I'd love to have one for EL&amp;amp;U, but I see a lot of pitfalls, considering the subject area EL&amp;amp;U covers, as compared to other SE sites. (I do have a proposed solution at the very bottom, for those of you TL;DRs).&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;For a blog, we have to cover something that the main site does not do so already in Q&amp;amp;A. Generally, I find that this requires either a lot of extensive detail in posts exploring one particular topic per blog post or a personal feel, such as in the form of reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm worried that these types of blog posts aren't something that EL&amp;amp;U could sustain—how much is there really to say that wouldn't work better in a Q/A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Putting that thought aside, let's look at the topics suggested by SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Interview top users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Highlight top content.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Review a product.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tell us an interesting story.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Explore hot topics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Keep up with current events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two are the only ones we could really do on a regular basis—English has few, if any, products, interesting stories, hot topics, or current events.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Most important part here:&lt;/strong&gt; The key, I think, to making a blog work for EL&amp;amp;U would be to team up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;—the two communities are related enough that I think blog posts would be mutually interesting, and we'd have a larger size topic area that allows more freedom for contributors. Of the six SE-suggested topics, EL&amp;amp;U can only truly do the first two, but EL&amp;amp;U + Writers would be able to explore all six. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Oh, and I'd be happy to contribute in any way, be it helping to coordinate or writing, or whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-06-28T03:51:48.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2011-06-28T04:52:59.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding on to waiwai's answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't we have this blog as a sort of extension to the main Q&amp;amp;A site. We have a lot of questions that are currently closed as too subjective. We could use the blog to address such questions, once in a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure we will be able to address most of the other topics too. For example, in product reviews, we could have reviews about some of the books that help(ed) us understand English better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep up with current events should also be not a problem, and I believe language log has set a good example on how this can be achieved. Of the top of my head, I can think of a question about Obama's use of the term 'Lead from behind', which I am sure has a lot more than what could be addressed in a Q&amp;amp;A forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I don't think there would be dearth of interesting stories from the users in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8887" LastActivityDate="2011-06-28T04:52:59.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1442" CreationDate="2011-06-28T21:01:14.327" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the second time that I note the following flag, in the page to review flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L9NsS.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the discussion has been moved to chat, what am I supposed to do?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does the flag means the discussion should be moved to chat, and I have to vote, or take a decision, about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="420" LastEditDate="2011-06-30T10:17:09.617" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T10:17:09.617" Title="If the discussion has been moved to chat, what am I supposed to do?" Tags="|support|status-completed|flagging|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-28T21:10:14.180" Score="22" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are cases where I down-vote a post for a reason, and I don't leave a comment because there are already comments about what is wrong with the post, and I find unhelpful to report that I agree with what already reported from other users; if I agree with the other comments, I vote those comments, which would let understand that who wrote the comment is not the only user thinking what being reported in that comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case the OP changes the post I down-voted, I would find useful to know that. The post could not be worth being down-voted anymore, or it could even be up-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-06-29T00:39:54.067" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T21:58:37.093" Title="Allow down-voters to know when a post they down-voted has been edited" Tags="|feature-request|voting|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1433" CreationDate="2011-06-28T21:37:09.393" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31946/how-should-a-date-be-written&quot;&gt;How should a date be written?&lt;/a&gt; is voted to be closed as duplicate of another question, but I don't see the usual comment being automatically added.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are such comments not added anymore, or did the user who first voted to close that question delete the comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-07-01T20:11:00.897" Title="Is the automatic comment for questions voted to be closed as duplicate not added anymore?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1432" CreationDate="2011-06-28T22:16:02.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These comments are still added just as they have been.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user who cast the first vote-to-close deleted the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2011-06-28T22:16:02.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1435" CreationDate="2011-06-29T04:41:40.963" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19260/why-do-we-get-cold-feet&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; had a bounty, and the sign there says the bounty ended 35 minutes ago, but no on has the bounty yet, so I'm just wondering :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did the Altruist manage to take back his bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did he do it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is it possible not to give your bounty away?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1434" CreationDate="2011-06-29T06:01:23.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68050/a-grace-period-of-one-day-to-award-the-bounty-after-expiration-without-remaining/74037#74037&quot;&gt;A recent change to the bounty system causes the auto-award system to wait 24 hours after the end of the bounty before awarding it.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-06-29T06:01:23.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2011-06-29T14:06:54.577" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming blog topics (I thought of a bunch this morning, let's see if I can still remember them)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guides to online resources&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviews of online dictionaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-dictionary resources you might not know about&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation - dictionaries with audio, searching words by pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to search a corpus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How (not) to use Google to research usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviews of print or offline resources&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you still use a printed dictionary? (survey users in chat, post the results)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviews of offline dictionaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offline/print resources that every library should have&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gripes! Well, sorta (debunking, educating, lighthearted complaining):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take an example of popular usage, say from an ad or a TV show, and examine why it sounds wrong to some people, and perfectly natural to others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language change and pet peeves (survey users in chat about things considered wrong/grating/ungrammatical today and say, 100 yrs ago; post results and discuss)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spoken English vs. written English, maybe mention sociolect, register (informal poll could also work here - say aloud if you can to see if phrase/usage sounds ok? would you write it? report location/country, see how that matches with existing research)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to ask an interesting question&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What makes a particular etymology interesting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When is dialectal information pertinent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When is comparing the difference between two words interesting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to ask a question that encourages deeper research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to find the general case behind a narrow question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;News items&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Annual Social Security Administration name frequency lists&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Equivalents thereof (if such exist) from other English-speaking countries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other English-language related news tidbits that show up in the media (possibly just to debunk the fallacies contained therein)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This day in English-language history (birthdays of famous linguists, publishing dates of seminal works, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hard questions: the questions that keep popping up, with recursive series of duplicates snaking all over the site, because &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; has trouble with them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More specific topics that aren't really part of a series&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Origin of holiday names - Michaelmas? Candlemas? Is that &lt;em&gt;mas&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;mass&lt;/em&gt;, or something else? (post in a somewhat-timely fashion, i.e. on Michaelmas or Candlemas or whatever, though probably not Christmas)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 12 days of Christmas (they come &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; Christmas! Really! - again, to be posted in a timely fashion, perhaps on December 13)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to add to this list!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-06-30T20:16:31.373" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T20:16:31.373" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-06-29T14:06:54.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1434" CreationDate="2011-06-30T00:02:58.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can explain what happened from my end of things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offered the bounty seven days ago. Some good new answers came in, particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19260/why-do-we-get-cold-feet/31011#31011&quot;&gt;yours&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19260/why-do-we-get-cold-feet/31409#31409&quot;&gt;@TimLymington's&lt;/a&gt;. After looking into the question some more myself, however, I realized I was unconvinced that these earlier references could be tied directly to our modern sense of &lt;em&gt;cold feet&lt;/em&gt;. There seemed to be too long a gap with no mention of the phrase and also further evidence that the phrase developed its current meaning in the early 1800s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I decided to let the bounty expire, thinking you would get half of it (25 points) for your interesting and highly-upvoted answer. I was unaware of the new delay in the bounty system and was confused by the points not having been awarded 12 hours after the bounty expired. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd see what would happen if I clicked the bounty for my own revised answer (and because I didn't really feel any of the new answers deserved the full bounty). At first it didn't seem to do anything, but it did make the &lt;em&gt;+50&lt;/em&gt; buttons disappear from the other answers. Now, though, I see that it seems to have awarded me back &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/5822/callithumpian?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;10 points&lt;/a&gt; and made it look like I rescinded the bounty. I really didn't think this was possible, but I can't see a way to undo it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm curious if that will change after 24 hours pass. According to @waiwai's answer, half the bounty should go back to you at this point. If it does not, I think this may be a flaw in the bounty system that should be looked into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T00:58:28.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-30T06:03:45.150" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;As grammar and usage of some words depends on the origin like US or UK English, So I was thinking that there must be tags about those also..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am not the moderator nor the one who decides tags but I fell need for those tags. Don't you feel these type of tags must be there to categorize questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10308" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T08:05:31.613" Title="Consideration for these tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1440" CreationDate="2011-06-30T08:05:31.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;american-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;american-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indian-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/australian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;australian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;australian-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/canadian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;canadian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;canadian-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-native-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-native-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-native-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irish-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irish-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irish-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/new-zealand-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;new-zealand-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;new-zealand-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hawaiian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hawaiian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hawaiian-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kenyan-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kenyan-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kenyan-english&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ugandan-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ugandan-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ugandan-english&lt;/a&gt;? (Go ahead, click them: those are all tags that already exist. Some of them don't have any questions, but most of them do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T08:05:31.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1430" CreationDate="2011-06-30T10:16:56.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was just a &quot;keeping an eye on a new feature&quot; thing during the first couple of days that the automatic comment discussion move (a.k.a. Get-A-Room) existed. This auto-flagging is turned off now, so new flags like that shouldn't pop up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T10:16:56.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1444" CreationDate="2011-06-30T13:45:18.127" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice since joining this site I have used up all my votes in a day.  I thought this should have earned me the Vox Populi badge, but it has not.  Is this a bug, or do I misunderstand the badge requirements?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T23:14:03.433" Title="Used up all my votes, but no Vox Populi badge?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1443" CreationDate="2011-06-30T23:14:03.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All I can think is, are you sure you used up &lt;strong&gt;40&lt;/strong&gt; votes in a day, or just &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of your votes in a day? As nonsensical as it seems, the latter could be less than 40. Something about how they added 10 extra votes that you can only use on questions, not on answers, but I'll be damned if I can explain how it works. What ought to work is to make sure your first ten votes of the day are on questions. (Yes, downvotes count.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T23:14:03.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1453" CreationDate="2011-07-01T09:40:06.093" Score="20" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quite like the design of the English StackExchange site - I actually think it's one of the best of all of them. I only have one rather serious complaint with it though, and that's the colour of hyperlinks. I cannot pick them out of a block of text, regardless of where I view the screen from, because I am red-green colour blind (as are about 6% of the male population, according to Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rarely a problem for me, and if not for the test that involves picking numbers out of coloured circles (which I failed miserably!) I probably wouldn't even notice. Unfortunately I just can't pick the links out here though - I actually have to run the mouse over every word until I see the cursor change. I've tried on a couple of monitors and browsers with the same result. I compared this to a friend at work who can spot and point out the links from over a metre away (much to his amusement when I sat there squinting afterwards).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's particularly annoying because I really enjoy many of the citations people use when answering some of the better questions, but it's a real struggle to locate them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10499" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-07-11T23:39:08.367" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T20:04:35.537" Title="Hyperlinks could be improved for colourblind individuals" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-01T17:46:23.977" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browsing around, I periodically find tags that I find odd. The latest two come from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/27625/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethnic-terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ethnic-terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ethnic-terms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethnonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ethnonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ethnonyms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem borderline to me but I can see myself getting tired of pinging Meta every time I want to ask about a tag. Do we have a good rule of thumb for what tags we want? (Perhaps an appropriate Meta.SO thread I can use?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Do we have a tag policy?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1432" CreationDate="2011-07-01T20:11:00.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted the automatic comment because after I voted to close, I noticed that the new question included the day of the week as part of the formatting question. I didn't think the possible duplicate question addressed that, so I changed my mind about the vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastActivityDate="2011-07-01T20:11:00.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1450" CreationDate="2011-07-03T14:42:41.340" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/meaning/synonyms&quot;&gt;tag synonyms for meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; include &lt;em&gt;meanning&lt;/em&gt; (extra &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt;). Should &lt;em&gt;meanning&lt;/em&gt; be removed from the list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag itself was only used once and was deleted, I believe: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/743/tag-deletion-request-meanning&quot;&gt;Tag deletion request: [meanning]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-03T18:50:26.860" Title="The ghost of &quot;meanning&quot;" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1448" CreationDate="2011-07-03T15:35:50.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unused tags go away automatically after a while. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/236/delete-the-tag-present&quot;&gt;Delete the tag &amp;quot;present&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2011-07-03T15:35:50.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1448" CreationDate="2011-07-03T18:50:15.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have deleted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meanning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meanning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meanning&lt;/a&gt; from the list of synonyms for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-07-03T18:50:15.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2011-07-04T00:31:31.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not colorblind and even I find the link color too close to the sepia tones of the site. Note to @jin: tritanopia is much more rare than deuteranopia (normal red-green color-blindness). You should check for the latter first. You can get extensions for Photoshop that will check both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-07-04T00:31:31.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2011-07-04T00:41:23.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The count there is the number of &quot;actionable&quot; flags but 10k users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We define an &quot;actionable flag&quot; as a flag you can assist us with. This number is displayed at random, at most, once a day. And requires more that 5 actionable flags to exist to even pop up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes away as soon as you click on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains a very important performance optimization. When you look at &lt;code&gt;tools\flagged&lt;/code&gt; we exclude any flags that you already participated in (by adding more flags, votes). We &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; exclude this from the counter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rational, usually flags should be handled fairly rapidly by mods. If the counter is slightly off, it is not the end of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now .....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF on some SE moderators totally forgot about the queue for a few days, the user experience would be fairly sucky. However, we would rather fix the moderation problem then fix this cache. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-07-04T00:41:23.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2011-07-04T06:17:55.450" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've added a dotted underline for links in the post text body. I feel this is the best solution to the problem without changing the overall color scheme too much. I tried some variations of the red, but they did not pass the test well. The regular solid underline made some of the link heavy question and answer posts very busy looking. I feel a subtle dotted link treatment is better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change will be in the next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YgDuI.png&quot; alt=&quot;English link color&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-07-04T06:17:55.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1446" CreationDate="2011-07-04T12:36:44.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You usually add tags for which you expect questions using them. In this case, I would not expect many questions about ethnonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The function of tags is classifying the questions, but not classifying them too granularly. It would not make sense to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fruit-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fruit-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fruit-nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boat-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;boat-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;boat-nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/animal-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;animal-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;animal-nouns&lt;/a&gt;, when there is already &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On meta.stackoverflow.com, there is a question about appropriate tag usage, which is specific for &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, but which could make some aspects of using tags clearer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17706/what-is-considered-appropriate-tag-use&quot;&gt;What is considered appropriate tag use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-04T16:22:14.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-05T11:29:06.953" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether there's an RSS or XML way of getting new answers periodically from english.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6509" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-05T16:43:42.823" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T16:43:42.823" Title="RSS to obtain new questions on-the-fly?" Tags="|support|rss|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1456" CreationDate="2011-07-05T12:05:58.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Solved it &gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/feeds&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/feeds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6509" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T12:05:58.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1458" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1459" CreationDate="2011-07-05T13:37:04.690" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U it would sometimes be interesting to emphasize only one letter in the word (or just a part of the word), however attempting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;cr**ust**&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does not give&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cr⁠&lt;strong&gt;ust&lt;/strong&gt;⁠ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cr*&lt;em&gt;ust&lt;/em&gt;*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the results are even worse if you want to emphasize letter(s) within a word; the above &quot;cr⁠&lt;strong&gt;ust&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;⁠ was achieved with unicode &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_%28punctuation%29#Table_of_spaces&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;U+2060&lt;/a&gt;, an invisible character between square brackets here: &lt;code&gt;]⁠[&lt;/code&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is there a way to format a single letter within a word" Tags="|feature-request|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1458" CreationDate="2011-07-05T13:52:37.837" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;cr&lt;b&gt;ust&lt;/b&gt; = &lt;code&gt;cr&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cr&lt;i&gt;ust&lt;/i&gt; = &lt;code&gt;cr&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T13:52:37.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1458" CreationDate="2011-07-05T13:57:38.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions and answers, remember that you can use HTML:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cr&lt;i&gt;ust&lt;/i&gt;, cr&lt;b&gt;ust&lt;/b&gt;, cr&lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;ust&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt;, cr&lt;sup&gt;ust&lt;/sup&gt;, cr&lt;sub&gt;ust&lt;/sub&gt;, cr&lt;sub&gt;&lt;b&gt;ust&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Cr&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;, cr&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;, cr&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;, cr&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;,&#xA;  cr&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;, cr&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ust&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;, etc.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3122/formatting-sandbox&quot;&gt;formatting sandbox&lt;/a&gt; over at the meta Meta, where you can try stuff out (or look at all the stuff other people have tried out so far).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we're talking comments, however, then I'm afraid you're out of luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T13:57:38.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1462" CreationDate="2011-07-05T16:41:35.057" Score="5" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which type of behavior is the &quot;disciplined&quot; badge trying to promote?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why users who deleted their own posts, which had a score of at least three, would get a badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-05T19:45:43.427" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T23:15:16.797" Title="What is the purpose of the &quot;disciplined&quot; badge?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1461" CreationDate="2011-07-05T17:20:00.150" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose it's for users who wrote an answer that was somewhat well-received but who later realized that their answer had some major flaw and deleted it anyway, knowing that even though they had popular support for their answer, it was wrong and so they had the “discipline” to delete the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T17:20:00.150" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1469" CreationDate="2011-07-05T17:37:57.520" Score="0" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments made in a &quot;back-and-forth&quot; interchange with one or more other posters sometimes become redundant. I delete all mine, then post one final comment suggesting the other[s] do likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is after deleting &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; comments, the other party often feels moved to post another reminder telling me I can now delete &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; reminder. Which can go on and on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a convention for posting an &lt;em&gt;&quot;over and out&quot;&lt;/em&gt; comment? And might the site support (or be tweaked to support) some way of either searching for only such comments made by &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;, or auto-age them out of the system after some reasonable time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there already a better way of dealing with the issue? I greatly appreciate the fact that these interchanges can take place at all, because they often lead to better Answers in the end. But if they hang around indefinitely they make EL&amp;amp;U seem more like a forum than an answer bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LATER&lt;/strong&gt; Just to head up the point I've already made in comments. I'm only really concerned about this issue in relation to interchanges in respect of what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;is hoped to become&lt;/em&gt; the top Answer for a 'good' Question. I don't much care about redundant chit-chat on less highly-rated Answers or trivial Questions. But EL&amp;amp;U has plenty of Questions that may well be asked again by many people for years to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully we'll assiduously redirect to the first occurence which will have a widely-accepted Answer, which oftentimes is effectively a 'collaborative effort'. It's potentially distracting for that Answer to contain all the preceding discussions which led to its final form. And in an ideal Answer, all comments should be either irrelevant, or incorporated into the Answer text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:39:41.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:39:41.323" Title="Deleting redundant comments - when does it all end?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1463" CreationDate="2011-07-05T17:44:09.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would err on the side of not leaving any extra reminder messages, starting with the one suggesting the other parties delete their redundant comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T17:44:09.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1463" CreationDate="2011-07-05T19:58:52.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to flag the first comment, and report they are too chatty, or obsolete. This would require selecting &quot;other...&quot; as flagging reason, or it would be only the first comment to be considered too chatty/obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T19:58:52.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1458" CreationDate="2011-07-05T20:01:34.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason Markdown doesn't work is that is not allowed inside a word. In those cases, you can only use HTML tags, such as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;strong&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/strong&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;em&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/em&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is really e&lt;em&gt;asy&lt;/em&gt;, but I am sometimes l&lt;strong&gt;azy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is really e*asy*, but I am sometimes l_&lt;em&gt;azy&lt;/em&gt;_.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T20:01:34.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1461" CreationDate="2011-07-05T23:33:22.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find deleting my own answers wrong especially if others have voted on it, up or down. I feel there should remain a record of what people responded to (especially if it was downvoted, then people can see what a wrong or unpopular answer is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that deleting a high voted answer takes discipline (do you lose the associated rep?), but I don't get why it is rewarded with a badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2011-07-08T23:15:16.797" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T23:15:16.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-06T02:14:52.403" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere that flagging posts put a strain on the moderators, as they have spend extra time deciding if the flags are valid or not. Generally, we can either close questions, or downvote answers (as well as questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the thing is, we can't do that for comments. There sure are comments out there that are lousy enough, and the only remedy is to flag them,(which puts a strain on moderators, and I am repeating myself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would downvotes on comments help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T03:24:53.390" Title="Can we please have downvotes for comments as well?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1463" CreationDate="2011-07-06T02:21:07.407" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only real solution is to flag the comments for moderator attention and indicate that the exchange between you and {other user} can safely be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T02:21:07.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1468" CreationDate="2011-07-06T03:24:53.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can down-vote an answer, but the only way to delete something that has been posted as answer but that was supposed to be a comment, or an edit for the question, is to flag it for moderator's action. As some of the flags are exposed to 10k users, moderators are not the only ones who check if a flag is valid, or not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Down-voting an answer and flagging it are two different actions; you down-vote an answer that is wrong, such as an answer that reports that &lt;em&gt;punctuation&lt;/em&gt; is composed by &lt;em&gt;punct&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ation&lt;/em&gt;, but you flag it as &quot;not an answer&quot; if the question's author wrote an update of the question as answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way, down-voting a comment would be different from flagging a comment. As comments are not first citizens, down-voting them would not have any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T03:24:53.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2011-07-06T03:49:58.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it's been a week since this was posted, and despite the feel I get that there's a lot of enthusiasm behind this, our progress seems to have slowed—so I thought I'd help light a fire on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quick review of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/blog-overflow/&quot;&gt;four steps to a blog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;Post a topic on Meta&lt;/s&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;Define content and scope&lt;/s&gt; (Martha and others have done a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/call-for-blog-participation/1436#1436&quot;&gt;great job of this&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recruit contributors  (&lt;strong&gt;See below&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plan a schedule (Depends on #3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I see four people who have explicitly said that they want to post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Add yourself to this list!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JSBangs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cerberus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;waiwai933 (me)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nohat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Callithumpian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alain Pannetier&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Matt Ellen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simchona&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martha&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four is workable, but I think around eight is a safer number to go with, to account for vacations/holidays or other times people are busy. Anyone else up for this? Edit above!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T02:12:22.843" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-07-06T03:49:58.937" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-06T07:56:06.010" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my drop-down menu, I got 212 as my reputation, but in my profile, it is recorded as 203. Is this a bug, or is this deliberate? What makes these reputation counts different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="1046" LastEditDate="2011-07-07T01:07:24.150" LastActivityDate="2011-07-07T01:07:24.150" Title="Why does my drop-down menu differ from my profile?" Tags="|discussion|support|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2011-07-06T17:49:34.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose a blog where we are posting something (at least) once a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I commit myself to writing a post at least once a month for at least the next 12 months. I will probably focus on writing articles about how to write good answers—getting the most out of corpus searches, n-grams, dictionaries, grammars, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also volunteer myself to be the blog coordinator, taking care of the administrative details like actually posting the content, lining up contributors and contributions, and maintaining the schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T17:49:34.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-06T19:35:21.660" Score="-3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there is no where for me to send a message to a moderator, who has in my opinion, badly abused his power, I'm asking this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32633/why-do-we-english-speakers-pronounce-fete-as-fate&quot;&gt;Why do some English speakers pronounce “f&amp;#234;te” as “fate”?&lt;/a&gt; my answer was deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the FAQ, and they offer no legit reason why. The subjective decision that it had no value was clearly made by a mod named Kosmonaut. His rep is &lt;em&gt;very high&lt;/em&gt; for a member of only 10 months, so I assume he is trusted and respected, and I want to know what prompted this decision. In addition, I want to know why there is no notification or appeal, much less a way to discuss that decision politely with the people involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10176" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T00:09:04.187" Title="Why is there no method of contacting a moderator regarding actions taken on your behalf?" Tags="|feature-request|moderators|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2011-07-06T19:51:36.040" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I simply converted your answer to a comment, as it didn't answer the question (&quot;why do English speakers do this?&quot;), though it provided a useful data point (&quot;we don't do this where I am from&quot;).  You can see your comment there under the question.  This particular case was originally brought to my attention by flags from other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ways to discuss things of this nature, by flagging the content in question or pinging me in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, this site has only existed for 10 months.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T19:51:36.040" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1472" CreationDate="2011-07-07T01:05:04.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dropdown counts are &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; changes, so the &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; reputation change for each time period listed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The profile however lists all voting activity &lt;em&gt;in that time range&lt;/em&gt;, so deleted votes (from those reversing their vote, or deleted users for example) won't show here...but their deletion &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; affect your net reputation, which the dropdown shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example: let's say you got a vote on Tuesday, then you later edited post someone didn't agree with on Thursday, so they take back their upvote.  On Thursday you now have a -10 &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; change, but really it's because it's as if that upvote &lt;em&gt;never happened&lt;/em&gt;, because it was retracted, this is where the profile and popup can differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this bothers you, up to once a day you can trigger a recalc of your reputation at the bottom of your reputation report, here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-07-07T01:05:04.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-07T01:05:14.773" Score="19" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33070/is-there-an-equivalent-creationist-term-for-macroevolution&quot;&gt;question about a creationist term for macroevolution&lt;/a&gt;, the introduction to this site for our new user was &quot;I can't see why EL&amp;amp;U should become involved in helping creationists find more persuasive terminology...&quot; I find this objectionable, and doubly so that 7 users currently agree with this statement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is about language and usage.  The OP asked a question about vocabulary.  If users object to the philosophy, they need not contribute an answer.  I think this question is absolutely on-topic for the site. The leading comment makes it seem as though it has been closed because of its philosophy rather than its content, and indeed the &quot;not constructive&quot; close reason reinforces this impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the first sentence was followed with &quot;I can't see how this question will lead to anything other than extended discussion of unresolvable philosophical arguments.&quot; That is certainly reasonable, although it is troubling to me that the same user who wrote it proceeded to post 3 comments that seemed geared to provoking extended philosophical arguments.  This question can be answered without dragging philosophy into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we are not going to accept this question, I want a much more definitive answer than the canned one that has been given.  Why was this question closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T19:16:02.360" Title="Questions about creationist terminology are unacceptable?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2011-07-07T02:31:38.647" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP asked for a &quot;scientifically correct way&quot; to refer to a &quot;creationist term.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's like asking for the &quot;green way&quot; to refer to &quot;red&quot; or the &quot;left way&quot; to refer to &quot;right.&quot; No such thing can exist, as the two are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;non-overlapping magisteria&lt;/a&gt; (to quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stephen Jay Gould&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in other words, &quot;not constructive&quot; sounds accurate to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastActivityDate="2011-07-07T02:31:38.647" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2011-07-07T03:14:59.047" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not see the question until after it had been closed, so this is just an observer's opinion, but the question doesn't seem to be asking something that is answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I don't understand the OP's question, but it sounds like he wanted to know the scientific term for something that creationists sometimes claim should happen if evolutionary theory is correct: e.g. a grasshopper turning into a kitten.  But this doesn't happen because this isn't how evolution works, so there can be no scientific term for this.  The link that the OP gives, for &lt;em&gt;baraminology&lt;/em&gt;, is even referred to as &quot;pseudoscience&quot; in the second paragraph of the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we seriously be expected to bridge the gap between the scientific community and creationism in one little Q&amp;amp;A thread right here on this site, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; stay on topic &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; not collapse into a flamewar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2011-07-07T03:14:59.047" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2011-07-07T10:03:34.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the main features of this site is that anybody with 2000 rep (not just anointed moderators) can edit other people's posts.  It's never been a secret, and personally I think it's extremely useful.  Of course it is theoretically open to abuse, but so is any system.  It is certainly better than letting the site be taken over by people who say &quot;This is the answer, and I don't need anybody else's opinion.  I know all about English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it can only be judged by the site users, who seem happy at present: anyone who strongly objects to the system probably won't become a site user anyhow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2011-07-07T10:03:34.093" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1485" CreationDate="2011-07-07T11:23:16.827" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much users does a flag need, before it is marked as &lt;em&gt;disputed&lt;/em&gt;? Which flags are marked as &lt;em&gt;disputed&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that a user flags an answer as &quot;not an answer,&quot; and I mark it as invalid; then X users mark it as invalid, and Y users mark the answer as &quot;not an answer.&quot; When is my flag marked as &lt;em&gt;disputed&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose, then, that I flag an answer as &quot;not an answer,&quot; and somebody marks it as invalid; then X users mark it as invalid, and Y users mark the answer as &quot;not an answer.&quot; When is my flag marked as &lt;em&gt;disputed&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems that an &quot;invalid flag&quot; flag can be disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yo0KF.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened, in this case? Did anybody use the &quot;invalid flag&quot; flag against my &quot;invalid flag&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-09T19:18:47.660" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T19:18:47.660" Title="When is a flag marked as &quot;disputed&quot;?" Tags="|support|flagging|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2011-07-07T15:22:09.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvotes for &lt;em&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/em&gt;'s Answer may simply reflect the fact that he commands the respect of many of us - which is why he has a high rep in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand &lt;em&gt;zenbike&lt;/em&gt;'s frustration. It's largely irrelevant whether &lt;em&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/em&gt;'s action was ideal/defensible/questionable, just as &lt;em&gt;zenbike&lt;/em&gt;'s potentially confrontational phrasing at points doesn't really bear on the merits of his case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point is that &lt;em&gt;here we are talking about it&lt;/em&gt;. And as RegDwight says, that's the way EL&amp;amp;U is &lt;em&gt;supposed to work&lt;/em&gt;. Personally I don't even care much about the original Question involved, much less the merits of &lt;em&gt;zenbike&lt;/em&gt;'s Answer which was converted to Comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a poster has a problem with any moderator action they can always post a comment to &lt;em&gt;@AnyModeratorName&lt;/em&gt; requesting discussion. Or indeed post in &lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt;, as actually happened. It would probably end up with the right person getting involved soon enough. OP in this case obviously knew which moderator was involved, so that wasn't even an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The system &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; work. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="9884" LastEditDate="2011-07-14T00:09:04.187" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T00:09:04.187" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1483" CreationDate="2011-07-08T05:25:29.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt; flag causes all flags on that post to be disputed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T05:25:29.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1461" CreationDate="2011-07-08T19:44:51.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am contemplating deleting &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/89839/how-do-i-determine-the-runtime-of-a-double-recursive-function/89850#89850&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to a question on Programmers.SE because the original question has changed so much that my answer no longer applies.  I have four upvotes (some of which I have received since the question changed) so deleting my answer would earn the badge.  I have not deleted it yet because it helps show the confusion that can surround the entire topic of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10166" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.787" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T19:44:51.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2011-07-08T20:54:49.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP in that question was looking to help people (scientists) talk about some concept that another group (the creationists) calls unfortunately by a word used by the scientists. Between the two groups, one word is being used differently. The OP wants to disambiguate by finding another word (for use by the scientists, and hopefully to be used by the creationists (I'm supposing)), i.e. fill a lexical gap, and correct word misuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that people want the question closed because it is too tendentious and/or provocative (and possibly contrary to their inclinations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think the question is closable not because of its tendentious matter (easy to flame over) but because it is way off-topic/too-local: &quot;What do you call that kind of auto-engine where the pistons go this way, but the cam-shaft is perpendicular to the line of motion?&quot;. &quot;Excellent question...for an automotive Q&amp;amp;A site.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-07-08T20:54:49.943" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1495" CreationDate="2011-07-09T12:20:43.150" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23648/slang-words-for-police&quot;&gt;What are some slang words for &amp;quot;police&amp;quot; in countries besides the US?&lt;/a&gt; has a score of ten, and it has been edited from three users. Who gets the &quot;Nice Question&quot; badge? Is it given to the OP, or to the user with the most percentage of editing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T17:52:02.993" Title="On a CW question edited by more users, and with a score of ten, who gets the &quot;Nice Question&quot; badge?" Tags="|support|questions|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1501" CreationDate="2011-07-09T13:11:50.583" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/252/kiamlaluno?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;Nine questions of mine&lt;/a&gt; have been down-voted in less than fifteen minutes, and another one has been down-voted one minute ago. It sounds like revenge down-voting to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anything be done, about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T12:21:17.753" Title="My questions keep getting down-voted; is it revenge down-voting?" Tags="|support|status-completed|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1494" CreationDate="2011-07-09T16:30:29.443" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there is a page for the suggested edits approved (or not) from a user. Is there an equivalent page for the all the suggested edits, independently from the user who approved them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T17:02:08.810" Title="Is there a page that lists all the suggested edits which have been approved, or not?" Tags="|support|tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1493" CreationDate="2011-07-09T17:02:08.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;10k tools → &quot;links&quot; tab → &quot;suggested edit stats&quot; → &quot;all&quot; → &quot;all&quot;. (Yes, that's &quot;all&quot; two times.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T17:02:08.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1491" CreationDate="2011-07-09T17:52:02.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badges for specific posts are always awarded to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T17:52:02.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-09T22:23:40.920" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if anyone would like to answer me, but it seems like everyone is getting annoyed at everything I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33535/what-is-the-history-of-synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33535/what-is-the-history-of-synonyms&lt;/a&gt; and it has been down-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10823" OwnerDisplayName="Tigger" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T05:00:49.613" Title="Why is my question getting downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1496" CreationDate="2011-07-09T22:31:32.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is because you're coming across as someone who wants to be spoon-fed information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about synonyms was worded very bluntly, and really didn't show any effort at research on your own. You could likely research this in a few minutes on Google or Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you make at least a token effort at research before posting questions. Also, posting more interesting questions would probably be helpful; you can do this by showing context, such as why you are looking for the answer. Also, telling people what effort you've made to solve this problem so far would help make people more inclined to answer your questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the structure of Stack Exchange in general might also be instructive. (For example, this question was posted on Meta Stack Overflow and then moved here, where it is more appropriate.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="161" LastEditDate="2011-07-10T04:16:12.120" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T04:16:12.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-09T22:42:47.437" Score="0" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the word 'meta user' in my profile section of English Language &amp;amp; Usage site and 'main user' in meta.english.stackexchange site. What do 'main user' and 'meta user' mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-10T04:59:06.510" LastActivityDate="2012-01-26T13:40:29.377" Title="What do 'Main User' and 'Meta User' mean?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1498" CreationDate="2011-07-09T22:47:12.057" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clicking on &lt;code&gt;main user&lt;/code&gt; takes you to your user profile on the main site, while clicking on &lt;code&gt;meta user&lt;/code&gt; takes you to that on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: &lt;code&gt;main user&lt;/code&gt; has been relabelled as &lt;code&gt;parent user&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2012-01-26T13:40:29.377" LastActivityDate="2012-01-26T13:40:29.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1496" CreationDate="2011-07-09T22:49:34.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't see or vote on the question originally, but I can say that it is very unclear what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When synonyms were first used did people know they were called synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean exactly?  After all, when synonyms were first used, they &lt;em&gt;weren't&lt;/em&gt; called &quot;synonyms&quot; — I am quite certain the name came about after the phenomenon.  The title of the question is &quot;history of synonyms&quot;, so does this mean you want the history of the word &quot;synonym&quot;?  Or does this mean you want the history of the concept of synonymy?  (If it is the latter, I don't think anyone can give you a concise answer, and it's not exactly an English language question either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question will tend to be downvoted if the question doesn't make sense, if the question seems too obvious, if the question is off-topic, or if the premise is flawed.  Depending on what people assume you meant with your question, they may have downvoted for any of these reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2011-07-09T23:09:51.977" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T23:09:51.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1492" CreationDate="2011-07-09T23:09:27.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The revenge downvotes have been identified as such and removed by the system. The mods know who it was. Please don't do that again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T23:09:27.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-10T03:32:13.263" Score="-3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, when fraud votes are removed, it is like those votes have never been done, which also means that who voted is free to vote on the same posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of allowing the same user to vote again on posts for which the fraud voting has been detected, the user interface should show the vote, and if the voter tries to remove it, he should get an error message saying that the vote cannot be changed, even if the post has been modified from the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I have asked ten questions, and somebody would vote all my questions in ten minutes. As it is now, who voted could still vote my questions again, once the votes have been removed by the system, which could lead the user to &quot;let's try again and see if my votes are automatically removed again,&quot; which means that the second time the down-votes could not be detected by the system.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the user would not be allowed to vote again the same questions, the &quot;let's try again&quot; game would not work (or would not work for the same questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am proposing protects more the users who started using an SE site, or who use it less frequently than other users. It would not help users with a hundred questions, for example, if not in the case the down-votes would vote all those questions in once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also not referring to the case of a user that keeps asking bad questions, even though it still is an irregularity, if the system detects (for example) ten questions (asked from the same user) being down-voted from the same user in about a minute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T16:09:21.810" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T16:09:21.810" Title="When removing the fraud votes, prevent the same user from voting again on the same questions" Tags="|feature-request|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2011-07-10T11:03:41.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another (bad) example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33553/could-anyone-please-explain-this-joke-i-just-dont-get-it&quot;&gt;Is there a double-meaning to &amp;quot;picking my belly button&amp;quot; in this context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not feel that &quot;explain this joke to me&quot; should generally be on topic on a site ostensibly for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I feel such questions tend to degrade the overall tone of the site and skew it heavily away from the goal — &lt;em&gt;professional&lt;/em&gt; discussion of English usage, not watercooler haw-haw talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This site is supposed to be for English experts, not a pop culture explanation machine, or an ESL joke translation service. The standard has to be high, particularly for joke questions, because ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Joke questions are funny. That's why people like them. But that does not mean they are on topic, &lt;em&gt;it simply means they are entertaining&lt;/em&gt;. It also makes them &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; more dangerous, like &quot;Favorite Programming Joke&quot; or &quot;Explain this Hilarious Programming Joke to Me&quot; on Stack Overflow — these questions are popular, but &lt;em&gt;for the wrong reasons&lt;/em&gt;; in the service of entertainment rather than the practice of professional programming, as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of the 5 examples given, 4 are basically &quot;I don't speak English, explain why this is funny&quot; and only 1 is properly &quot;this joke has sophisticated wordplay, let's analyze it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I offended anyone in this post or the comments, I apologize because I am rather frustrated. Read more here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1549/is-elu-succeeding/1557#1557&quot;&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U succeeding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T23:37:29.147" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2011-07-10T12:20:03.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would make a difference between joke and joke.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the joke is based on a play on words, or two different meanings the same phrase has, then the question is fine.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the joke requires me to know, for example, one of the following things, then it's not on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U, for the fact it doesn't involve any knowledge of English language, but rather a knowledge of the American/British/Australian culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the nickname used when referring to a person or a place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a denigratory name used when referring to a person or a place &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a mispronunciation of a name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the joke is about an elephant and a donkey, and the OP is wondering in which way the joke is used in a political context, then the question is not on-topic on EL&amp;amp;U because it is not based on a double meaning of a phrase, but on which mascot did the major American parties choose, and not a particular meaning associate with &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;donkey&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another example is a joke that requires to explain what &lt;em&gt;Caulifornia&lt;/em&gt; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33553/could-anyone-please-explain-this-joke-i-just-dont-get-it&quot;&gt;Is there a double-meaning to &amp;quot;picking my belly button&amp;quot; in this context?&lt;/a&gt;, does the phrase a particular meaning that can be explained without any reference to the culture? Does &quot;picking my belly button&quot; have a meaning that is not the literal one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T12:30:25.290" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1506" CreationDate="2011-07-10T12:53:38.237" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past days, an anonymous user proposed an edit for a post that added extra text not originally included, and that essentially changed the meaning of the post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As the user didn't see any change in the post, he kept suggesting the same edit four times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that when an edit has been rejected, the successive tries to suggest the same edit should be blocked. I understand that catching similar edits is probably impossible, or it would not catch all the possible similar edits.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, it's easier to simply reject any successive suggested edits for a post, when they are proposed X minutes after an edit has been rejected. In this way, who suggested the edit would probably be more careful on the proposed edits, and would avoid edits for single parts of the post, instead of proposing a single edit that changes different parts of the same post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there is already a block for who has too much edits rejected, but it lasts a week, and it is for rejected edits on all the posts. What I propose is trying to avoid the same user suggests more than one edit for the same post, when the first one was rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2011-07-10T13:21:01.340" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T14:00:38.780" Title="Avoid allowing users to propose another edit within X minutes when previous edit proposed from same user and for same post has been rejected" Tags="|feature-request|proposed-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1505" CreationDate="2011-07-10T14:00:38.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're talking about a per-post, per-user lockout period for rejected edits? I would vote for that. I mean, if I had a vote and all ... [gazes at shoes].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T14:00:38.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1502" CreationDate="2011-07-10T17:40:43.983" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is such a good idea. Fraud votes generally do not take the content into consideration at all. If the user was privileged to vote again restricting their ability to do so properly doesn't seem like a solution. If the voter is still not trusted to vote fairly based on content, they shouldn't have voting privileges. Tighter restrictions on &quot;caught&quot; users should take priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, if the vote was fraudulent, there is no reason for it to remain visible to anybody. Showing different vote counts to different people would create all sorts of behind-the-curtain nightmares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6807" LastActivityDate="2011-07-10T17:40:43.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1502" CreationDate="2011-07-11T00:44:22.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As it is now, who voted could still vote my questions again, once the votes have been removed by the system, which could lead the user to &quot;let's try again and see if my votes are automatically removed again.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At which point, the moderators would step up and have a private little conversation with that user...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike most parts of SE, the details of the abuse-detection algorithm are kept fairly vague; it doesn't &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; if it's too easy for folks to just dance around it. That said, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; dance around it if you're really determined - it's meant to discourage blatantly unfriendly behavior, not make it magically disappear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think you're the victim of voting-abuse, wait 24 hours &amp;amp; see if the system doesn't just take care of it (as you did). If that doesn't work, send an email to the address in the &lt;strong&gt;contact us&lt;/strong&gt; link at the bottom of the page, and leave it up to us. Remember - apart from timing, there's no way for you to be &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; that any voting pattern is due to a single user... so be wary of jumping to conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T00:44:22.763" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1559" CreationDate="2011-07-11T13:14:57.743" Score="5" ViewCount="705" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not mean to stir up any commotion here, but today I looked at the list of my answers and realised that one had disappeared on its own. Curious I went to check it out and discovered that the entire question had been removed. May I ask for a brief answer as to why the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; was removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can speculate on a few possibilities (which I shall not mention) but would rather have my doubts clarified. I think the asker (Rene Nyffenegger) and other answerers (kiamlaluno, mplungjan, theidiotbox) might be surprised too at the removal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering there is &lt;em&gt;nothing seriously wrong&lt;/em&gt; with the question or the answers, its unjustified removal is too drastic for me to handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: The question has been restored and my answer has been edited for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2012-10-30T02:55:38.723" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T02:55:38.723" Title="Why 'Meaning of &quot;I've gotten over X&quot; recently' was removed" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1509" CreationDate="2011-07-11T13:24:08.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11435/meaning-of-ive-gotten-over-x-recently&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve gotten over __ recently&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (link for 10k users) has been deleted three hours ago. I must say it was none of our moderators who deleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Swk39.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T13:24:08.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2011-07-11T16:00:18.477" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally agree with Jeff that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The quality of the questions and answers is paramount.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joke questions pose a real danger, because (a) everyone likes them, and (b) they can easily end up trivialising the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't help but think the policy in the FAQ at time of writing is overly restrictive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native speaker or otherwise, someone who doesn't understand a joke &lt;em&gt;ipso facto&lt;/em&gt; doesn't know whether &quot;the crux of the joke is some particularly subtle aspect of English&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I've witnessed the potential for harm on other SO sites, I don't feel we have a joke-infestation problem here, and for a good reason: the in-depth, academic analysis that we provide in our answers kills all known jokes &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dead&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. (I only remember ever seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30244/can-someone-please-explain-this-dalai-lama-joke-to-me&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; joke-related question receive inflated moderation - hardly an epidemic.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jokes &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; raise interesting questions about language. Several people have said &quot;well, you can say that about anything in English&quot;, but that's not true. Sure, any type of question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; end up with an enlightening answer - but for many classes of question (&quot;Proofread this for me&quot;; &quot;Explain this word that I could easily have found in a dictionary&quot;; &quot;What's your favourite word?&quot;) that's the exception rather than the rule. I haven't found this to be the case with &quot;Please explain this joke&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise Jeff would probably dispute this last point, but, taking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33553/what-is-the-explanation-for-this-joke-i-just-dont-get-it&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that seems to have sparked this debate as a starting point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The joke hinges on an English idiom (&lt;em&gt;to give sth up for Lent&lt;/em&gt;), that while very common in some circles, I suspect even many native speakers will not know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The key word in that phrase (&lt;em&gt;Lent&lt;/em&gt;) does not appear in the joke.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if you happen to figure out (perhaps from the combination of &lt;em&gt;Catholic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lint&lt;/em&gt;) that &lt;em&gt;Lent&lt;/em&gt; is the key word, looking it up in the dictionary (at least, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.m-w.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; that I tried) does not give you the phrase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is why I was happy to spend 10-20 minutes yesterday morning checking my facts and writing up an answer. (What I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; criticise about this question is the title. If it were, say, &lt;em&gt;Does the phrase &quot;picking my bellybutton&quot; have a double meaning?&lt;/em&gt; then I suspect the question would have gone entirely unnoticed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... how to resolve the contradiction? Or rather, how to put in the FAQ &quot;Don't ask questions about jokes unless they're &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions&quot; in a way that questioners might be able to comply with - without forbidding the word &lt;em&gt;joke&lt;/em&gt; on the site entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose something along the lines of the following as a policy (I'm sure someone here has the skills to reword it to better fit the FAQ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not ask for explanations of jokes that would be understood by any native speaker. Not sure? Ask a native speaker. If they understand - don't ask the question here (but you already have the answer). Otherwise, go ahead (but be warned that the question may be closed as off-topic if the joke turns out not to be language-based.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, some with good questions may not have easy access to native speakers - but for that we have &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, where there are usually at least a few native speakers, and some exceptionally competent &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95?m=926705#926705&quot;&gt;pineapples&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T16:00:18.477" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7091" CreationDate="2011-07-11T19:20:09.177" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the flag history, the following sentence is preceded from an asterisk, but the asterisk is not used in the flag history, and the sentence is always shown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;older flags were not recorded valid/invalid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MpM5f.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asterisk should be removed, in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="28544" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T15:12:09.983" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T15:16:03.593" Title="Remove the asterisk from &quot;Your flagging history&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|status-norepro|flag-history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1560" CreationDate="2011-07-11T19:25:09.297" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to report the message about the question being subjective for questions on meta? In particular, does it make sense, when the question is probably a feature request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7NtPD.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-07-14T10:36:00.837" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T10:36:00.837" Title="Does it make sense to show the &quot;the questions appears subjective&quot; message on meta for feature requests?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|meta|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-11T19:42:00.453" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;When users attach a screenshot to a post, the system automatically adds the text &quot;enter image description here&quot; as tooltip that is associated to the image.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Once the post is saved, it can be replaced with a generic and shorter text, such as &quot;screenshot.&quot; If the OP didn't change the default text, it means he doesn't care of the tooltip, and the default text doesn't have anymore the function to remember to the OP to enter a description for the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-11T20:55:24.120" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T10:57:28.933" Title="Automatically replace the &quot;enter image description here&quot; when the post is saved" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1522" CreationDate="2011-07-11T20:04:24.740" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question that has been closed has been flagged, surely before the question itself was closed. When I check the flagged posts, I notice the question, and the &quot;close question….&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3TQ2M.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I click on that button, I get the following error message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9nKV7.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question should not appear anymore in the flagged posts, once it is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To notice that the question has been reported as closed, when I viewed the &quot;Flagged Posts&quot; page. As the &quot;[closed]&quot; text is not part of the title (just edit a question that has been closed, and you will notice the &quot;[closed]&quot; part doesn't appear in the title for the question you are editing), I get that the software, when rendering the &quot;Flagged Posts&quot; page was able to detect the question was already closed, but it didn't use that information for avoiding to show the &quot;close question…&quot; button, or for avoiding to show the question in the list of the flagged posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the question from the flagged posts is probably excessive, but I don't think I would be able to see a flag where the OP selected the &quot;other&quot; option from the question flag dialog; in this case, I don't think there is anything I can do for those flagged posts. If I would be able to see a closed question flagged from a user that thinks the question should be re-opened, then I could vote for re-opening the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-07-12T14:27:23.967" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T14:27:23.967" Title="The button to close a question is shown even when the question is already closed" Tags="|bug|status-completed|moderator-tools|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1521" CreationDate="2011-07-11T21:31:42.850" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;would you like to help us create it?&quot; link to propose a tag wiki is broken; it seems to always go to &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/@tag.Id&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/@tag.Id&lt;/a&gt;  and this results in a Page Not Found error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when viewing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language-evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language-evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language-evolution&lt;/a&gt; (at this time these are all tags without a tag wiki), the text at the top reads like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; tag has no wiki summary, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/@tag.Id&quot;&gt;would you like to help us create it&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other links are working fine, both the &quot;Propose Tag Wiki&quot; button from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/language-evolution/info&quot;&gt;the About (info) page of these tags&lt;/a&gt;, and the &quot;help us edit this wiki&quot; link from the mouseover on the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T04:46:31.657" Title="Link to propose tag wiki is broken from main tag view" Tags="|bug|status-completed|hyperlinks|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1519" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1520" CreationDate="2011-07-11T21:47:29.317" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the flagged posts shows the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RR79y.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it an automatically added text, or are 10k users able to see flags for which additional text has been provided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T22:25:03.610" Title="Is this automatically added text, or are 10K users able to see flags for which a text has been provided?" Tags="|support|moderator-tools|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1519" CreationDate="2011-07-11T22:25:03.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an automatic flag by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community user&lt;/a&gt;. Only diamond moderators can view flags which require the user to type in text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-11T22:25:03.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1518" CreationDate="2011-07-12T04:46:13.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just fixed this, will be deployed later ... thanks for reporting it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T04:46:13.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1516" CreationDate="2011-07-12T05:16:36.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added a test there, it was missing. The option to &quot;close&quot; closed questions will no longer show up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reporting it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T05:16:36.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-12T14:19:34.910" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33786/past-tense-of-rsvp&quot;&gt;Past tense of RSVP&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1819/past-participle-of-a-verb-created-from-an-acronym&quot;&gt;Past participle of a verb created from an acronym&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP of the first question declares he asked a different question because he didn't like the accepted answer given in the other question. Is it a reason enough to create a similar/duplicate question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that the topic of second question is broader than the topic of the first one, and that the answers given for the second question covers two different acronyms used as verbs, isn't the first question a duplicate of the second one? Is there any reason to think that each acronym used as verb is a special (and independent) case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T14:19:34.910" Title="Is not liking the answer given for an existing question a reason enough to ask a duplicate/similar question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-12T15:13:04.037" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, after the form field and the button to add a new answer, the following text is shown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nfe0I.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text could be confuse some users that, from a side, see duplicate questions being closed and, from the other side, they see the text suggesting them to ask their own question, if that is not the answer they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather replace the text with &quot;Not the question you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged [tags], or ask your own question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is, the text seems to support the creation of duplicate questions, as far as the existing answers are not the ones users are looking for.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T15:13:04.037" Title="Change the text shown after the field to add a new answer" Tags="|feature-request|answers|user-interface|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1543" CreationDate="2011-07-12T16:07:42.413" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the questions I ask, the page shows text similar to the following one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NCWFt.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I supposed to ask again the same question?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code clearly noticed I asked the question; in fact, it doesn't show any form field to enter a question, and the &quot;Add Your Answer&quot; button is replaced by the &quot;Answer your Question&quot; button. In the same way, the &quot;or ask your own question&quot; part should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T12:00:12.750" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T12:00:12.750" Title="Am I supposed to keep asking the same question?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|questions|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1530" CreationDate="2011-07-12T16:27:01.420" Score="15" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past days, a question has been deleted by a diamond user (not one of our moderators), and some questions have been closed as off-topic because of something that was added to the FAQ (again, not by our moderators).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean we are not doing a good job in closing questions that do not suit EL&amp;amp;U or that are duplicate of other existing questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T12:47:44.213" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T17:10:29.753" Title="Are we not doing a good job in closing questions that should not suit EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1528" CreationDate="2011-07-12T19:57:17.610" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, these actions don't indicate that the community mods aren't adhering to the rules that the community has set in place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand this, you have to understand that Jeff doesn't always tell the exact truth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/stack-exchange-moderator-elections-begin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;We don’t run [SE site]. You do.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, no matter how often repeated, is &lt;em&gt;not true&lt;/em&gt;. The daily running of the sites do fall to elected diamond moderators, but when Jeff makes a decision, his word is final. (Notably, all other SE team members do usually yield to the community or Jeff.) There was no reason for us to believe that SE/Jeff has some hidden agenda about questions about jokes, rather than jokes themselves, as the matter has not previously arisen on any SE site. Thus, our mods can't be faulted for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T19:57:17.610" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1528" CreationDate="2011-07-12T21:25:31.380" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does that mean we are not doing a good job in closing questions that do not suit EL&amp;amp;U or that are duplicate of other existing questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to dodge that question and answer the question in your title instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are we not doing a good job in closing questions that should not suit EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would actually claim that we are NOT doing a good job closing questions. We are doing much, much better now than we were when I first arrived at EL&amp;amp;U but I personally think we, as a community, are approaching the topic of closing incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing in particular to do with the mods or any specific users or anything like that. In my opinion, which I acknowledge as being significantly more close-happy than most, is that we the community are letting too much subpar material through. This goes for Questions, Answers &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created a few Meta topics on the subject when I felt it was necessary or appropriate. If you are curious about specifics you can check my meta history for hints. I don't feel that this is the time to deal with particulars as I suspect people are pretty sensitive right now and, honestly, the details don't matter right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is most certainly NOT meant to be jumping into the fray so as to spray my opinion all over everyone. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; my opinion but it isn't a very emotive opinion. It is just a simple, &quot;We could be doing better.&quot; Unfortunately, being honest about this right now feels like kicking the dog. So here it is in bullet form, which hopefully makes this the least dramatic possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my opinion, we should be closing, editing, revising or deleting significantly more questions, answers and comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have absolutely no qualms with how the community as a whole acts or how we have approached any particular topic regarding topicality or closing, editing, revising or deleting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have nothing against any of our moderators and I regard them all with the highest respect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have never considered any action or inaction of the moderators as evidence of poor judgement or an inability to perform their tasks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I appreciate every single edit, close vote or explained downvote that I see from every user that offers it (even if I disagree with it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I appreciate all of the participation in any meta discussion on how to make the site better&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is far better off now regarding closing, editing, revising and deleting than it was when I first joined &amp;mdash; this means we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; doing a good job at getting better&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I consider the community very respectful and, with only a few exceptions, am proud of how we treat each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T21:25:31.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-12T21:43:00.097" Score="1" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/484/common-accepted-online-resources&quot;&gt;Common accepted online resources&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there certain rescources that are discouraged from being used on this site? Is Wikipedia/-tionary not valid? Are there certain dictionaries or text books that are prefered over others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I don't want to find the perfect answer to a question only to see that it's from Wiktionary and then have every one not consider the answer valid, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(also I tried to search as best I could for a similar question, so sorry if it's a duplicate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T02:21:06.643" Title="What are considered the valid sources of information to be used for question answers for EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2011-07-16T07:15:48.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1531" CreationDate="2011-07-12T23:13:38.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There aren't any particular resources that are actively discouraged but the trick is to understand exactly what the resource is telling you. NGrams, for instance, is unfortunately easy to botch in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia and Wiktionary are good examples of how to field a quick question about the definition or difference of a word but for heavy etymology questions I would be skeptical of its authority. It may provide a good hint that leads to a more informative answer but, in and of itself... maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Urban Dictionary is another good example of a resource that can be extremely &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt; but is not necessarily &lt;em&gt;authoritative&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer to your question is as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any resource can be &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to arrive at an answer (even your own experience!) but you are expected to know and address the purpose and shortcomings of those resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, use and quote a resource you find helpful and then back it up with another resource. The more information you find, quote or link, the more confident your answer will appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T23:13:38.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1531" CreationDate="2011-07-13T02:21:06.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new user, and am already finding a large number of very big chunks of text taken directly from other sites.  People are doing this instead of coming up with their own, unique explanation for their reasoning - which seems counter-productive to what the website is supposed to be about, which are different opinions from different people not a cut-and-paste, google-searched reason for why something is the way it is in our language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that would mean that I am personally voting for a turn towards a trend of not consulting so much with a website for an answer, but more for verification that the advice you are giving someone isn't incorrect before you put it out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T02:21:06.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T02:27:32.640" Score="2" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/895/what-is-wrong-with-single-character-edits&quot;&gt;What is wrong with single character edits?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fairly impossible to make spelling corrections if there's only one error in the post, and unlike the other SE sites, spelling is of paramount importance here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-08-02T18:30:29.030" Title="Allow one character edits on this website" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-08-03T12:42:30.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1540" CreationDate="2011-07-13T02:31:16.087" Score="19" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently we have tags for all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/taboo&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;taboo&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;taboo&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vulgar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vulgar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vulgar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expletives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expletives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expletives&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/obscenity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;obscenity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;obscenity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swearing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swearing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swearing&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insults&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insults&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insults&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit... excessive. So I'm now accepting suggestions for a word to bundle all of these together and avoid so much duplication. Also mention any other tags that need to go in the same bucket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(HT to both RebeccaChernoff and RegDwight for bringing this to my attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="982" LastEditDate="2011-07-14T04:26:03.173" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T12:42:05.483" Title="Getting our dirty words into one place" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1535" CreationDate="2011-07-13T02:37:52.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal preference would be for either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vulgarity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vulgarity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vulgarity&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; as the root tag, with all of the above as synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T02:37:52.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T04:18:19.153" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like having them there taunting me. I find them to be useless if they are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to delete the questions I've asked that were closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9969" LastEditorUserId="9969" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T04:29:28.660" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T16:29:14.310" Title="Can I have all my closed questions deleted?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1537" CreationDate="2011-07-13T06:24:26.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, you'd be able to delete 48 hours after they were closed. But since your questions have answers, this won't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag each for moderator attention, and ask that it be deleted. Assuming there's no &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; reason why the question should stick around, the mods should be happy to oblige. If you take the time to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you want the post removed, you also stand a better chance of getting what you want (this pretty much goes for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; moderator flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T15:53:26.213" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T15:53:26.213" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1537" CreationDate="2011-07-13T11:21:56.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duplicate questions are not normally deleted, as they help other users to find a question that is probably difficult to find. I think Jeff Atwood said something about deleting duplicate questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with answers present a problem because, if you can ask to dissociate a question with your account (which doesn't necessarily mean the question is deleted), who answered to the question has the same right given from the license used for the content on SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said that, you can flag your questions for moderation attention, and ask to have them deleted. Keep in mind that, basing on the above (or other) considerations, they could not delete the question. In my experience with other SE sites, asking for your questions to be deleted doesn't mean they are surely deleted, even in the case those questions have a negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T11:49:35.863" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T11:49:35.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1535" CreationDate="2011-07-13T11:27:44.773" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;, as there is a difference between an euphemism and an offensive word. for example, &lt;em&gt;downsizing&lt;/em&gt; can be a euphemism for &lt;em&gt;cuts&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;cuts&lt;/em&gt; is not an offensive word; it's just a word that in that context is avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T20:09:50.200" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T20:09:50.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1534" CreationDate="2011-07-13T11:37:06.920" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason a single character edit is not allowed on EL&amp;amp;U is not different from the reason it is not allowed on other SE sites. For example, one user could notice that the name of a C# class in a question on Stack Overflow (or Programmers) is misspelled, but users without the privilege of editing posts are not allowed to make that single change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true, the spelling on EL&amp;amp;U is important, but consider that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a word that is not correctly spelled, then there is probably another word that is not correctly spelled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is just a misspelled word, then there is probably something else that needs to  be changed, like punctuation, the greetings added at the beginning of question, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other reason single character edits are not allowed is probably to avoid a user gets reputation for just changing a single character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-02T18:30:29.030" LastActivityDate="2011-08-02T18:30:29.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1535" CreationDate="2011-07-13T11:52:51.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a single tag could rule them all: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;. Vulgarity is covered in that, and euphemism is really not relevant as euphemisms in this context are avoidances of offensive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T11:52:51.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2011-07-13T12:00:03.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, this has come up before, and although I think it's completely trivial, it's easier to make the change than keep reading people's complaints about this trivial issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or ask  your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or ask another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T12:00:03.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T14:28:04.130" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edit a question of mine to change the punctuation and, as I am in my attention-deficit moment, I edited it after 2 minutes to change the punctuation of another sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I pressed the &quot;Save Edits&quot; button, the answer was reported to be changed two minutes ago, not (for example) 30 seconds ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V2MUF.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timestamp of the last edit should be updated, in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T18:13:29.893" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T18:13:29.893" Title="Update the timestamp shown when an edit has been done in the 5-minute time frame" Tags="|feature-request|answers|user-interface|timestamps|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T15:23:37.607" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has an FAQ.  However, recently it has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/are-questions-about-ununderstood-english-language-jokes-on-topic&quot;&gt;made clear&lt;/a&gt; that the community-created definition for this site, as expressed in its FAQ, does not always determine which questions are valid and which are not.  Sometimes this is instead decided by high-ranking moderators on the StackExchange Network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, could TPTB please specify which topics they have decided to override in the community-created FAQ as being ontopic and which are now offtopic, and give some example questions that should be closed now that this overriding has come into effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T20:38:30.833" Title="Can we have some guidance as to what is on- and off- topic on this site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|questions|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T16:12:36.067" Score="62" ViewCount="860" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has come up in other threads that we have a lot of &quot;basic&quot; or &quot;lowest common denominator&quot; questions. However, a few myths about this need to be put to rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we do have a &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; close reason, and we do use it. Questions which really are as basic as they seem can be closed, and should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a lot of &quot;basic&quot; questions which, under the covers, turn out to be linguistically interesting and involve subtleties which are invisible to native speakers. As a native speaker with decent writing or speaking skills, you may do things &quot;automatically&quot; which turn out to be &lt;em&gt;extremely difficult&lt;/em&gt; to explain or rationalize. Elucidating what native speakers do by instinct is in fact very challenging, and a good explanation is a huge benefit to people attempting to learn the language. &lt;strong&gt;It makes the internet a better place for us to answer these questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33828/i-would-have-never-said-vs-i-would-never-say&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I would have never said&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;I would never say&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33988/difference-between-are-you-done-and-have-you-done&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;are you done&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;have you done.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20250/which-is-more-correct-here-find-vs-have-found&quot;&gt;Which is more correct here: &amp;quot;find&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;have found&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33140/is-there-a-rule-in-preposition-using&quot;&gt;Is there a rule in preposition-using?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a native speaker without any linguistic training, the answer to all of these questions may be obvious. But to a linguist or a language learner, these are all difficult and interesting problems! To paraphrase something Kit said in chat, the kind of person who says &quot;I don't see what's so hard about...&quot; is the person who shouldn't be in charge. If you are, say, the sort of person who scores in the 99th percentile on your GMATs, you may be the &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; person who can accurately gauge the difficulty and relevance of questions like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we should make a few things clear in our FAQ and site definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions by language learners are &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are covered by all standard reference sources should be closed as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But questions that are obvious to native speakers are &lt;strong&gt;not necessarily&lt;/strong&gt; general reference, and &lt;strong&gt;often are&lt;/strong&gt; interesting and useful to learners and linguists both.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point #3 brings up a kind of Catch-22: learners may not know whether their question is general reference without asking it. I propose that we as a community accept this ambiguity, and answer questions where the answers are difficult, and politely closing those questions which can be answered by any dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T13:07:42.863" Title="Basic questions are not so basic" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1545" CreationDate="2011-07-13T16:23:11.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, could TPTB please specify which topics they have decided to override in the community-created FAQ as being ontopic and which are now offtopic, and give some example questions that should be closed now that this overriding has come into effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what TPTB have to do with this. I explicitly &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; think they are the most appropriate people to decide what is or is not on-topic. I think their opinions are &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; valuable and should most certainly be listened to and processed and, mostly likely, absorbed into whatever decisions we make about topicality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But goading them with words like &lt;em&gt;override&lt;/em&gt; and even &lt;em&gt;TPTB&lt;/em&gt; isn't remotely helpful. If you need to let off steam, do it in chat. Leave Meta clear for discussions that will actually help improve the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This site has an FAQ. However, recently it has been made clear that the community-created definition for this site, as expressed in its FAQ, does not always determine which questions are valid and which are not. Sometimes this is instead decided by high-ranking moderators on the StackExchange Network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with this and I think the first steps would involve something along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is this site &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What level of English questions are we interested in asking and answering?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should we approach questions that are below this level?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a particular question is below this level &lt;em&gt;nicely&lt;/em&gt; and in a manner that encourages better questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to these questions seem like a good place to start building a better and more clear FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T16:23:11.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1537" CreationDate="2011-07-13T16:29:14.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing isn't a punishment. It is simply a sorting or categorical method. The closed question is still useful in the sense that other people can determine whether or not that question is on-topic, too general, etc. In the case of duplicate questions, they serve to fill an apparent gap in the searching process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't think of them as taunting you. Think of them as another helpful datapoint for people who need to find an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T16:29:14.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T18:06:51.167" Score="22" ViewCount="1276" Body="&lt;p&gt;What with all of the hubbub lately, I want to focus on asking one specific question that I think is at the core of the problem/drama: Is EL&amp;amp;U succeeding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fairly open-ended and I think that is fine. The intent is to try and start locating things for us to work on or, at the very least, watch carefully for improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please add your thoughts on EL&amp;amp;U's current status and quality. In my opinion, we are in an opinion gathering phase. We need data; the first place to get that data is from you, the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T23:08:49.470" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T12:58:23.007" Title="Is EL&amp;U succeeding?" Tags="|discussion|experts|audience|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2011-07-13T18:18:04.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note: This list was originally included in the question body. I moved it here based on comments made in chat. Apologies for any confusion caused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a bullet list of how I interpret this question. I don't necessarily think any of these questions are easy (or even possible) to accurately answer. I put them here in an answer because these aren't really the &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt; of the question and are mostly rhetorical at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are we attracting new users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are we attracting the right &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of new users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are we receiving interesting questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are good questions voted highly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are bad questions downvoted, closed or deleted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are irrelevant comments being pruned?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are offensive comments or remarks being flagged?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have we defined topicality in a clear manner?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are we consistent in our closing of questions (specifically with regards to General Reference and Off-Topic)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is the community treating its members?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is the relationship between the mods and the non-mods?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is chat active?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are we attracting the attention of other high quality English or language sites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are meta discussions being resolved?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are our resolutions being put into practice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is our FAQ accurate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is our FAQ clear?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T18:42:22.073" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T18:42:22.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2011-07-13T18:33:29.883" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1549/is-elu-succeeding/1550#1550&quot;&gt;Are we attracting the attention of other high quality English or language sites&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know from personal email communication with both Doug Harper of &lt;em&gt;Etymonline&lt;/em&gt; and Gary Martin of &lt;em&gt;The Phrase Finder&lt;/em&gt; (two oft-cited authorities at EL&amp;amp;U) that this site is definitely on their radar. Doug, in particular, has said some nice things about this site. Both have amended entries at their respective sites based on findings here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T22:16:13.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2011-07-13T18:55:17.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the site is wonderful and fun, but there are some gaps that could make it more successful. You have brought up some good questions, and they deserve some discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should prioritize our efforts based on maximal effectiveness. To that end, I would suggest this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Decide how to handle meta.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;How do we know when an issue is resolved? How do we communicate expected changes in behavior to regular users?  When (and how) do we update the FAQ based on these new community resolutions?  &lt;em&gt;Meta is where these community discussions will take place, so we must all agree on how the process will be executed.&lt;/em&gt; Therefore, this should be our number one priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Make as clear a distinction as is reasonably possible to divide on-topic from off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt; Deciding what is on-topic or off-topic is critically important, but not always so simple as reviewing the FAQ. Let's make it clear that questions that are debatable can be discussed in chat or on meta. Again, the meta process is what will support this process, so we must be clear how meta works before this step will function correctly. Also, let's decide when closing is adequate, and when downvoting is necessary. Let's make sure we are consistently kind and explanatory when closing, and that we communicate to the user that they may discuss closure in chat or on meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Encourage the community to be engaged.&lt;/strong&gt; The top users will (eventually, I'm confident) get swag, but let's also make sure that we are upvoting good answers, downvoting bad ones, and flagging material that's just not nice.  Let's also make a habit of picking up our litter, and making sure that we are accepting good answers on our questions as well as asking good questions.  Good questions are &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;, so obviously, we need step 2 before we can do this well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do these things, we will get happy new users, our community will grow and thrive, and there will be rainbows and sunshine and peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2011-07-13T19:02:54.813" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T19:02:54.813" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1554" CreationDate="2011-07-13T21:11:41.607" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the small picture. There are some of my answers that have been up/down-voted (more up than down), but there is no &quot;+#&quot; next to my two most recent posts. One has 4 upvotes, the other has 2. Why is this not updating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4BZYP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-05-06T16:47:06.037" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T16:47:06.037" Title="On the main site, upvotes aren't giving a reputation change" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1553" CreationDate="2011-07-13T22:00:22.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! You hit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#link-reputation-gain&quot;&gt;reputation cap&lt;/a&gt; today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A maximum of 40 votes can be cast per user per day, however, to reach the maximum you must vote on at least 10 questions. &lt;strong&gt;You can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day (although accepted answers and bounty awards are immune to this limit).&lt;/strong&gt; Please note that votes for posts marked “community wiki” do not generate reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may end up with less rep, but you did earn a nice &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/25/mortarboard?userid=10893&quot;&gt;mortarboard badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T22:00:22.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1535" CreationDate="2011-07-13T22:16:17.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would also support &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; as a root tag for most of this. However, I would say to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insults&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insults&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insults&lt;/a&gt; separate; insults are not necessarily offensive to listeners, just the subject. &quot;Dumber than a box of rocks&quot; is an insult, but no censor would consider it &quot;offensive&quot;. And yes, keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemism&lt;/a&gt; separate, as the the word for which another word is euphemistic does not have to be offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2011-07-13T22:16:17.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1605" CreationDate="2011-07-13T22:27:33.173" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to be flagging two comments as obsolete (on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30284/dogs-must-be-carried-on-this-escalator/30290#30290&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, comments referring to a completed edit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the first, then clicked the second flag button, and upon trying to flag (I am not sure if I made a reason selection) the &lt;strong&gt;You may only submit a comment vote every 5 seconds&lt;/strong&gt; message appeared. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I attempted to flag again I got a warning like &lt;strong&gt;Please select a reason for flagging&lt;/strong&gt;. After waiting or dismissing the message and trying to flag the comment again, the &quot;You may only submit a comment vote every 5 seconds&quot; warning appeared again, and so on, in a circular fashion; I was not able to get the flag dialog to appear to select a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to successfully flag upon refreshing the page (but did not think of that at first in my confusion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T22:42:11.427" Title="Comment flagging - condition where &quot;please select a reason&quot; warning appears but flag reason dialog does not" Tags="|bug|status-completed|flagging|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2011-07-13T23:30:36.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I want to be clear that I have what I hope is a shared common goal with everyone on the English.se community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want English.se to be great.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the current reality is kind of...far from that. Almost every time I peek my head into the site, it's filled with puerile stuff like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9293/differences-between-slang-words-for-breasts&quot;&gt;Differences between slang words for breasts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4895/dont-understand-the-joke-my-milks-gone-bad&quot;&gt;What does this joke about milk going bad mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24748/what-is-a-more-common-expression-in-english-for-move-your-bowels&quot;&gt;More common expression for &amp;quot;move your bowels&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's worse is that these questions (due to the &quot;tee-hee&quot; nature of them) tend to be the most popular ones on the site and thus are &lt;em&gt;actively broadcast to the rest of the network&lt;/em&gt;. I find this sort of content totally unprofessional and quite frankly, completely &lt;em&gt;embarrassing&lt;/em&gt;. To the point that I am actually ashamed to be associated with this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't other great content here—there certainly is—&lt;/strong&gt; but it is being completely overshadowed by the loss of focus on what was &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be a site for English language experts and advanced usage. Not a popular cultural explanation engine, an English As Second Language translation service, or the best possible source for the varied meanings of &quot;boobs&quot; and &quot;poop&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to the extent that I expressed my frustration with this depressing, sad state of affairs on English.se—I apologize. But this site has to get a lot stricter and that requires solid &lt;em&gt;action&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;leadership&lt;/em&gt; on the part of the community and the community moderators. The current &lt;em&gt;laissez les bons temps rouler&lt;/em&gt; attitude is just not working, and leadership flows from the top down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that English.se needs to be stricter in what questions it will accept. I am encouraged to see this discussion, and the recent blocking of particularly low-quality users. I also hope to see &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; more aggressive closing by the community of off-topic, beginner, general reference, and unprofessional questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T12:02:51.993" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1535" CreationDate="2011-07-14T04:22:18.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I renamed [offensive] to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I merged the following into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; and created synonyms mapping them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[taboo]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[vulgar]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[expletives]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[obscenity]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[pejorative]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[swearing]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[profanity]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions had several of these tags already, which further speaks to the fact that having all of these tags was unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not touch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insults&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insults&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insults&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2011-07-18T12:42:05.483" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T12:42:05.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1509" CreationDate="2011-07-14T10:06:17.273" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Revisiting this, I think I got distracted by the (many) wrong answers in the question, and the accepted (!) wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, there is subtlety there beyond the textbook definition of &quot;to get over&quot; -- reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-07-14T11:52:25.687" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T11:52:25.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1514" CreationDate="2011-07-14T10:34:13.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, I could have sworn we disabled that for metas. Good catch, making sure that is so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T10:34:13.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-14T10:48:16.750" Score="6" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;A big issue seems to be that, owing to the nature of the kinds of questions that get asked on EL&amp;amp;U, questions that may be interpreted as 'unprofessional' or 'embarrassing' may appear as 'hot questions' on the StackExchange multicollider (dropdown in the top-left corner of the screen), as well as &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.  Would it simply be a good idea to limit 'hot questions' that may appear in the multicollider to sites which are likely to have subject material that looks 'professional'?  I suspect this would involve preventing EL&amp;amp;U questions from appearing in this list.  Would the community have a problem with this?  Is it a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T01:44:14.253" Title="Should EL&amp;U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1561" CreationDate="2011-07-14T11:00:14.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I got it right, it seems you're suggesting this SE doesn't treat about professional stuff, but even if there are some questions that really are not expert or professional, I've seen very good questions on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution is not for us to &quot;back off&quot; from the multicollider, but rather to work so as to make our StackExchange more professional. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T11:00:14.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1546" CreationDate="2011-07-14T11:22:53.387" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's already guidance on this. Refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;the following chart&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://zgab33vy595fw5zq-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/interesting-question-decision-tree-flowchart.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only caveat I can think of is that in step 1, above, &lt;strong&gt;you shouldn't answer questions that are explicitly off-topic for the site&lt;/strong&gt;, even if they would satisfy the following rules. (For example, answering an Android question on the Apple site.) That sends the wrong message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T13:07:42.863" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T13:07:42.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1561" CreationDate="2011-07-14T13:08:13.467" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest (and strongly support) a way for the site moderators to mark&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24750&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; questions so that they do not appear on the multicollider (and twitter, and sidebar ads on our sister sites, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that they are not fit for the multicollider (and other such advertising), but that they tend to bring some type of traffic that we don't want to handle on specific questions: the questions in themselves are good and well, and can be discussed in a suitably academic fashion, but they conjunction with a lot of incoming traffic is bad. Moreover, they give new users a biased idea of what our site is about (&lt;strong&gt;we’re not &lt;em&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the proposed suggestion goes a long way into helping fix both. &lt;strong&gt;This community would do better by having a steady, organic growth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; than forced waves of new users from heavily-advertized teenager-appealing sex-related (or, in some case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24750&quot;&gt;extreme-geek-appealing&lt;/a&gt;!) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1] in any way deemed technically fit, it's a policy decision, the implementation details are something else&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] yes, EL&amp;amp;U &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; successful: this use of the expression “organic growth” is one idiom that I learnt here, on EL&amp;amp;U, when I was just a newbie. I have learnt a lot from being in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T13:08:13.467" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1561" CreationDate="2011-07-14T13:16:54.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it simply be a good idea to limit 'hot questions' that may appear in the multicollider to sites which are likely to have subject material that looks 'professional'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are missing the point. As much as I also hate the multi-collider, the issue is that these sorts of questions are mostly likely ungood wherever they end up. Getting sucked into the multi-collider just makes it more obvious. But if there is a question on our site we would be ashamed of having on the multi-collider we should get it off of our site. As in, remove our crap; not hide it from others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T13:16:54.543" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1561" CreationDate="2011-07-14T13:20:41.890" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mods have previously agreed that whenever a question is dealing with an &quot;offensive&quot; term, we protect it as soon as we see it. Pre-emptively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, one idea we just had in chat would be to take protected questions &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; the Collider (and the cross-site ads, and the Twitter feed). Wholesale. After all, &quot;protected&quot;, by definition, basically means just that: we don't want newbies or outsiders to be participating in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that newbies or outsiders are defined as people with less than 10 rep, while the newbies coming via the MultiCollider typically have 101 rep via the 100-point account-association bonus. So we need a way to deal with that effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Simply increasing the threshold from 10 to 102 won't cut it, because we don't want to be shunning 101-rep users completely. They can still provide awesome answers, and often do. We just need a way to stop advertising certain questions across the network. Let people find those questions by themselves, if they are really interested.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T13:20:41.890" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-14T14:25:14.307" Score="6" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed a handful of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/late-answers?pagesize=15&amp;amp;filter=week&quot;&gt;late answers&lt;/a&gt; trickle through that more or less mimic a previous answer. Should these be flagged or downvoted or both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T02:41:48.340" Title="What should I do with duplicate answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-14T14:30:11.243" Score="22" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I previously asked if EL&amp;amp;U was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1549/is-elu-succeeding&quot;&gt;succeeding&lt;/a&gt;. The responses there (mixed in with other answers, comments and chats on the subject) lead me to feel that one of the big questions our community has before them is, &quot;Who is our audience?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is a slightly different question than, &quot;Who are our experts?&quot; or &quot;What kind of questions do we want?&quot; Before we can answer those two questions, let us decide: what kind of visitors are we trying to attract? Who are we writing for? What types of people are we aiming to entertain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T01:26:11.057" Title="Who is EL&amp;U's audience?" Tags="|discussion|audience|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1572" CreationDate="2011-07-14T16:03:39.180" Score="3" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34096/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-suffix-don&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of the suffix 'don'?&lt;/a&gt;, I wonder if there is an easy on-line reference that would make this a 'general reference' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could easily be on an ESL site or a high school/jr high vocabulary improver site. These are things that just don't appear in dictionaries. I noticed though that there was 1 close vote because of general reference and I thought that this -should be- general reference but I just don't know of an easy way for people who don't know these things to look for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T01:20:38.050" Title="On-line list of productive Latin-Greek roots?" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1545" CreationDate="2011-07-14T16:21:22.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, could TPTB please specify which topics they have decided to override in the community-created FAQ as being ontopic and which are now offtopic, and give some example questions that should be closed now that this overriding has come into effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure it is possible to specify which topics will be not considered on-topic, if not using a generic description that has been already provided by Jeff Atwood in a previous post of his.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To make a simple example, we don't want questions similar to &quot;My teacher keeps to correct me when I write 'Me wants apples.' Is she being pedantic?&quot; If the question were about when &quot;I've got me a job.&quot; started to be acceptable in informal contexts, then it would have been a more acceptable question (which doesn't mean it would be really accepted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is the level of the question, which should match the audience for which EL&amp;amp;U is for.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The other problem is when the same type of question keeps to being asked. For example, if a question about the etymology of the name of a town is on-topic, when you find forty questions about the etymology of a town name, we should ask if there is something wrong with those questions (which doesn't mean there is anything wrong). I know, the example is quite silly, but if I would see a predominance of those questions, I would start to wonder if I am on &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; or another SE site. The point is that a single question can be acceptable, but it could not be acceptable when similar questions become predominant in the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T16:21:22.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1570" CreationDate="2011-07-14T17:24:51.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would think Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_and_Latin_roots_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;List of Greek and Latin roots in English&lt;/a&gt; would qualify. Of course, the suffix &lt;em&gt;—don&lt;/em&gt; doesn't appear to be on that list, but the top-voted answer is for &lt;em&gt;odont&lt;/em&gt; which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if that qualifies as general reference: if you didn't know &lt;em&gt;don&lt;/em&gt; is the same as &lt;em&gt;odont&lt;/em&gt; and aren't an etymologist I'm not sure you'd guess they were similar/identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; however, think it qualifies as general reference based on another answer provided: &lt;strong&gt;any self-respecting dictionary is going to provide the origin of the word&lt;/strong&gt;, and at that point the connection between &lt;em&gt;odont&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;don&lt;/em&gt; would be made clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2512" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2011-07-15T01:29:23.250" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T01:29:23.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1577" CreationDate="2011-07-14T18:45:32.967" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;My drop down menu shows a change in my reputation of +1, but when click on the reputation link, the page I am taken to shows a different reputation change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZLIie.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4veln.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last reputation change is from yesterday; there is not reputation change for today. In any case, I don't see any +1 changes. The reputation change show in the latter screenshot is ordered by time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also made a little experiment, and I have got the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bx0t3.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation change still doesn't show any changes for today, and my reputation as for this moment is still 18,709. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-14T20:16:58.167" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T01:58:20.433" Title="The user drop down menu shows a wrong reputation change" Tags="|support|user-interface|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1545" CreationDate="2011-07-14T20:21:05.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After answering questions like those posed by MrHen, a clear faq should be made. &#xA;The first section of the present &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; has some problems in my view.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1) It doesn't specify how those selections were made, though it links &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. However, it is not clear either that normative link is the base for all kind of questions to be asked on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) Following this ambiguity, a &quot;high-rank moderator&quot; introduced recently a new off-topic &quot;Explain this joke to me&quot; by ignoring the community voting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; This action may mean the normative link (that promoted community voting) is either an incorrect or incomplete method.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) (minor problem) There is a writing ambiguity in &quot;But please, don’t ask any questions about these topics. They are out of scope for this site.&quot; Which &quot;these&quot; topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T20:38:30.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1568" CreationDate="2011-07-15T01:38:55.647" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The front page says that this is a site &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I disagree with that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter who you would like to be for, or who you should be for, it is not who you are for right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spend a lot of time on Cooking, and know fairly well how a SE site works. I have also asked questions on lots of the other sites of the network. Each time, I faced the challenge of determining if my question is a good fit to the community, or would be frowned upon or closed outright. With time, I noticed that this was commonly determined by just a handful of users. These few users were very active, and they steered the content in certain directions, even if they weren't moderators. Stated this way, it sounds a bit questionable, but in fact, they were no dictators. They were just the high involvement users, who had taken it into their hands to take care of things, and the community was glad to follow in their lead and to support their decisions with abundant upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, these users are the experts on their sites. They aren't always the professionals who get paid for doing this in their daily life, but I nevertheless consider them experts. And the good thing about experts is that they can distinguish quality from superficial attractiveness. Of course, the democratic system allows the crowd to push polls and other unwanted question types to popularity. But I noticed that the trick to find out which questions are considered good content for a site is to find out what the top users see as high quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together, the top 13 users of EL&amp;amp;U have delivered 4800 answers. This is 20% of all answers on the site. This seems like a good tradeoff between coverage and a manageable number of users to check on. I couldn't see what they have voted as high quality, but I had a (probably better) metric: I read through their favorites. And sure, some interesting patterns emerged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, these users tended to favorite questions which weren't terribly popular. While they had attracted an above average number of votes, there weren't the kind of questions with dozens of upvotes which smell of a &quot;me-too-question&quot;. This supports the hypothesis that these users choose quality questions without falling for the usual bias. Then I noticed that the level of question complexity varied. There were definitely entry-level questions present. This was a very good finding. We want to know what &lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; of questions is good here; the consensus on most SE sites is that beginner level questions are welcome, if they are of the right type, and one of the supermods confirmed this recently for this site in chat. Third, there was some nice consistency within the set of questions of each user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were four users I didn't consider, because they only had two or less favorites, not allowing me to see a pattern. The rest had 5 or more favorites. Two of the relevant users had a preference for questions with a scientific orientation. They liked discussions about the natural rhyming patterns in English, about the presence of certain sounds, or about current trends in language. &lt;em&gt;In contrast, the choices of the majority of the users were dominated by hands-on everyday questions on usage in very specific cases&lt;/em&gt;. These were questions asked by practitioners with a specific problem at hand. Some were at a level which even non-native beginners would find easy &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10900/is-it-wrong-to-say-cook-a-cake&quot;&gt;Is it wrong to say &amp;quot;cook a cake&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, and some sounded sophisticated: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7423/how-should-i-pronounce-worcestershire-as-a-rhotic-english-speaker&quot;&gt;How should I pronounce &amp;quot;Worcestershire&amp;quot; as a rhotic English speaker?&lt;/a&gt;. But even when they had some linguistic relevance (it is probably hard to find a question about a language with no linguistic relevance at all), they were definitely written from the point of view of a practitioner trying to solve a certain problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that the availability of these kinds of question could be causing a bias in itself. But first, we have the evidence that top users with interests focused elsewhere still found enough questions of the scientific kind - they were there if one wanted to look for them. Plus, the large share of practical questions is circumstantial evidence that the community finds this kind of questions interesting and useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that, whatever the community has noticed it or not, it has already defined what it wants to see on this site. The top users aren't everybody, but they are the ones everybody (mostly) agrees with, thus forming a reasonable proxy. The fact that the &quot;decision&quot; is not made by self-reflection but by everyday behavior makes the result even more valid. We who study people know that they often don't know what they wont or need, but their behavior and reactions to the environment is a reliable predictor for their needs. So, the linguists here are definitely in the minority, and experts and questions on &quot;applied language&quot; are needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't say that linguists and their topics should be crowded out of the site. They provide valuable input, and without them, the content would be poorer. But the priority should lie elsewhere, and there is no need to try to decide whether a question is a bad fit for the site just because it isn't scientific-y enough. For good or bad, this isn't a site for language researchers, just like SO isn't a site for computer science researchers. It answers the questions of those who practice English everyday without making it the object of study. If we want to attract experts, we should probably aim for this class of people. I don't know who they are - probably journalists, editors, writers and everybody else who is judged by the quality of text they produce or just takes a pride in it. Don't forget, the linguists and etymologists may be somewhat more marginal here, but for a community, you definitely need the enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T01:38:55.647" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1561" CreationDate="2011-07-15T01:44:14.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have three unrelated answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the multicollider exacerbates the 'rich get richer' problem of those questions having high local voting then getting more to pile on from 'outsiders' (people join up just to vote a popular question even moreso).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I particularly like the 'democratic' aspect of this site, that things that are popular get voted up, and that things that are unwanted get voted to close. In fact I particularly dislike it when closing occurs autocratically by a single mod (however well-respected and high-rep they may be, and also however much I agree with the closure). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the multicollider is great because there is no easy way for me to see questions on all the sites I like without intentionally visiting each one separately. The collider does a little bit of that for me. And I tend to like those sites that have high popularity items on the collider.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T01:44:14.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1573" CreationDate="2011-07-15T01:58:20.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation dropdown shows a &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; change for the day, so things like reverting a downvote or a post being deleted that you downvoted would change your rep, but not show in &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; reputation report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time as deletions and such happen, the report vs actual may becomes a little skewed, you can sync your history at any time by performing a recalc.  You can do so at the bottom of: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T01:58:20.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1567" CreationDate="2011-07-15T02:41:48.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they are low rep users that can't post them as comments (rep less than 50), @RegDwight has said that we should flag them so that he can move them to comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I'd say comment to suggest that they make it a comment if it's not an answer, downvote it if it's an answer but not a good answer, and flag it if it's a duplicate of another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T02:41:48.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-15T03:27:03.830" Score="6" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are largely self-policed by the community, but we also need leaders from the site whose focus is to provide additional moderation support and site management as community moderators. It is important that the community moderators are a team of members, sharing the load of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pleased to announce that another member has stepped up and generously volunteered to help us assure that this community’s issues are properly addressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/100/waiwai933&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/100.png&quot; alt=&quot;waiwai933&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;waiwai933 joins &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about#moderators&quot;&gt;our existing moderators&lt;/a&gt; in serving this community. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute. Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the time and effort they put in volunteering for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T14:57:36.660" Title="Another Community Moderator" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1579" CreationDate="2011-07-15T04:50:50.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;/b&gt; Hi guys! I'm really happy to be here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, I've been brought in to (of course) moderate, but more specifically, to help ease the burden on the other mods. Additionally, I feel like as a starting mod move, I should help push the community along and help with the current Meta.English discussions about what questions we're going to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Based on feedback, I've retracted the proposed moderation policy and we'll leave it to further Meta.English discussion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, I welcome any disputes about specific actions I take as a mod here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that,  I guess I should say that I'm excited about this, but I don't want to seem too overzealous about &lt;s&gt;punishing other people&lt;/s&gt; moderating. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-07-15T14:57:36.660" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T14:57:36.660" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1582" CreationDate="2011-06-27T15:40:00.230" Score="4" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the creative names on SE badges, but a couple of them went over my head.  What is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/25/mortarboard&quot;&gt;mortarboard&lt;/a&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" OwnerDisplayName="drm65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T12:58:41.487" Title="What does the word &quot;mortarboard&quot; mean, as it relates to an SE badge?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1581" CreationDate="2011-06-27T15:41:25.327" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A mortarboard is the name of the cap worn by someone graduating (e.g., from high school or college).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mortarboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thefreedictionary&lt;/a&gt; (definition 2), a mortarboard is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An academic cap topped by a flat square.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably it was chosen for the particular badge of, &quot;Earned at least 200 reputation in a single day&quot; to symbolize a degree of academic merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8339" OwnerDisplayName="Ben Hocking" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T15:46:29.767" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1581" CreationDate="2011-07-15T02:54:10.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CUefR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shape comes from the board used to hold mortar in bricklaying or pastering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pol2l.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's used as a hat at university graduation to remind you how much more you would have made if you had a trade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6336" OwnerDisplayName="Martin Beckett" LastEditorUserId="9186" LastEditDate="2011-07-15T12:58:41.487" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T12:58:41.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1568" CreationDate="2011-07-15T09:41:38.797" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From our (current) FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's a good start, but given that the question's even been asked, clearly some elaboration is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting with the end: what exactly &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;(serious) English language enthusiast&quot;, for our purposes? I would define that as anyone who&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has a serious interest in learning and developing their abilities in spoken and written English, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has a genuine curiosity to learn about the English language, its grammar, pronunciation and history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this most definitely &lt;em&gt;includes&lt;/em&gt; those who are not native speakers. Not least because we already have highly active members for whom English is not their native language, and yet whose command of the language puts that of many native speakers to shame (you know who you are!), but also because some of the most interesting questions come from learners and non-native speakers. I'm not talking about the questions that can easily be answered by looking in a dictionary - that is a waste of our time. But there are many questions that, while seeming simple,  provide a real insight into how the language works. (I could go into more detail, but that is a discussion for another place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... how about the linguists and etymologists? Certainly, a number of our top contributors are professional linguists - and the quality of their answers means we certainly want to keep them around. But there are also many outstanding contributors who are not professional linguists. Nonetheless, this part of the description gives a very good &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; of what we want from the site: it demonstrates succinctly the &lt;em&gt;fields of interest&lt;/em&gt; of the people who would likely fit well with the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally it's also worth saying a word or two about what we &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want on the site: trolls and timewasters go without saying (they're unwelcome anywhere) - but there's a particular sort of visitor we specifically don't want to attract: the type who has have very strong opinions about what is &quot;correct&quot; English, that have no basis in any sort of fact (historically, in modern usage, or otherwise). Lest we descend into being a forum for endless argument, our members must be prepared to defer to evidence and to facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T09:41:38.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2011-07-15T10:01:20.007" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess ultimately it is a question what do you want EL&amp;amp;U to become &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;site for real specialists and experts only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;site for both language and linguistics 'newbies' and specialist, professionals, too&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree with Jeff's illustration of the low quality questions. Here are some reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. The top questions do not tell you much&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you compare the quality (usefullness) of top questions at stackoverflow with EL&amp;amp;U, I think you will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; find much difference: top questions are intrinsically voted on for their &lt;em&gt;interestingness&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;technical quality&lt;/em&gt;. This together with the landslide effect (which serves as justification and reinforcement) will bring such questions to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: objectively best questions will usually have relatively modest scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Frequent answers do not tell you much&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is the issue of the most common questions - there are and there will be questions that repeat subjects, themes or actual questions word for word. This is rather unavoidable as long as there is no real penalty for not doing basic research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I would like to take opportunity to praise moderators and others in the community for linking to similar questions and very diligently closing real offtopic answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. The examples of 'bad' questions are flawed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Differences between slang words for breasts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Profanities are a part of a language with many linguistically interesting aspects. Learning and clarifying details on the use or the meaning of them is interesting not only to adolescents, but to any user of the language. Here, I presume, the actual objection is to the fact that these questions have such high score and not to the fact that they are asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: If there is a consensus such questions could be discouraged by the faq (or forbidden). Until then it should let be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't understand the joke: my milk's gone bad...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jokes, as a rule, employ very complex literary devices (or rhetorical figures). The whole concept of humor is very closely tied to linguistics and language, as anyone who attempted to translate more than one joke knows very well. I strongly disagree with closing such questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Faq says: 'Explain this joke...' is off-topic, unless it employs some subtlety of English language, but I think it is not unreasonable to claim that most jokes employ it and that even cultural references should be explained if asked as they tie into how the joke 'works' (how the literary or rhetorical device becomes really effective).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a more common expression in English for &quot;move your bowels&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again we have the same problem as with example number one - the question itself is no worse or better than, for example: 'What is a more common expression for &quot;move your car&quot;?', however the two will never get the same score, because one is &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt; much more interesting since it looks at language usage in the context of taboos, which by default has potential to be much, much more important as the subject is much more sensitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="8377" LastEditDate="2011-07-15T12:58:23.007" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T12:58:23.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2011-07-15T10:59:15.193" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with a lot of what @Unreason has said, so I won't repeat that. But just to give a different perspective on this: @RebeccaChernoff posted a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95?m=1345023#1345023&quot;&gt;very interesting suggestion&lt;/a&gt; in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, one thing that might be an interesting thing to look at when you're considering the quality of the site: take the titles of 10 questions at random (I'll generate them and give you post ids in a sec) and type each one into google. Are we at the top of the results? If not, is our answer crap compared to a top result?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went through the ten randomly-selected questions, and compared the top few results from typing each question into Google to the top answer(s) on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In nine out of the ten cases, we were &lt;em&gt;hands down&lt;/em&gt; the best: there were some &lt;em&gt;superb&lt;/em&gt; answers - most notably from @Kosmonaut, but also from others. Only occasionally did the other Google results come close to answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the one case where Google did furnish a decent answer to the question being asked, the quality of the answers was much closer, but the formatting of the non-SO answer made it sufficiently difficult to read to fall within the &quot;otherwise in need of improvement&quot; clause of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-content/uploads/interesting-question-decision-tree-flowchart.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;simple question flowchart&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that doesn't mean that EL&amp;amp;U is perfect, or that there isn't a lot we might be able to improve. But it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; suggest that the impression that some have been giving - that the site has a &quot;serious quality problem&quot;, or is &quot;full&quot; of bad questions and answers - is somewhat overstated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T10:59:15.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-15T13:53:14.007" Score="13" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fine list of frequently asked questions and answers has in its opening paragraph two contradicting notions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which then continues with examples of topic welcome at the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Usage, word choice, and grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Problems encountered &lt;strong&gt;by people learning English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is a serious problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Linguists, etymologists and serious English language enthusiasts&quot; very much sounds like a site where some sort of professional degree is required (similarly to mathoverflow; however their &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; states in bold that they are looking for 'research level math questions').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, at least the last topic of &quot;Problems encountered by people learning English&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt; including in the audience the &lt;strong&gt;learners and beginners&lt;/strong&gt; (as I said - at least the last, but also some of the other subjects would normally be perceived as extending to the 'language newbies' and not necessarily 'research level'; so this needs to be made clear). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This needs to be cleaned up because &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the site is for students of English then there will be any number of valid but rather trivial questions that should be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also under off-topic there are subjects for which you can make strong arguments that they should be on-topic, such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Explain this joke to me&quot;, except in the case where the crux of the joke relies on an aspect of English covered by one of the welcomed topics above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which gets most commonly &#xA; humor usually employs literary or rhetorical devices to produce humor, see wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A joke is a phrase or a paragraph with a humorous twist. It can be in many different forms, such as a question or short story. To achieve this end, jokes may employ irony, sarcasm, word play and other devices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there could be some exceptions where the question is asking about a some culturally specific knowledge and not about the linguistic aspect, but still I believe that even cultural references should get answered as, ultimately, it is part of learning the language. This extends to explaining many concepts and usage of certain words and culture, religion, specific technical meanings, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that these inconsistencies must be solved; the faq simply &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to provide clear guidelines, otherwise there &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; always be people with (justifiably) opposite views on fundamental issues and there will be much circular running in circles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on who should be the audience of the site the 'general reference' should also be defined much better. The core issue regarding general references on EL&amp;amp;U is that most of the answers &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be found online (unlike stackoverflow or mathoverflow where problems that need solving or working out are presented). The reason is simple - most of the questions are of factual nature. This can not be changed - site must work to accommodate for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such questions even very technical questions will get answers which is a simple quote and a link, and even the most interesting questions will seem like a general reference to the person that already knows the answer. More importantly on a lower end of the spectrum there &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be different views on what constitutes a general reference answer. For example, assuming diligently researched question, someone might have found dictionary entries for an unknown word, but is not sure if their interpretation is correct. To others this will seem like a general reference, but if students are allowed, it really is not - poster had gone through research and could not understand it to extent that is required. (A note here: rephrasing the question can help here to conform to the faq; however I think that even questions that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be rephrased should be tolerated and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think that this should be resolved once and for all - who is the audience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the answer I see two main possible outcome scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create the site for students and refer questions that are not technical enough to the student site, update faq to reflect new policies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create a &lt;em&gt;newbie&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; tag and meticulously apply it - will keep all language related questions on one site and allow people to segment the content according to tags, update faq to reflect new policies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:47.103" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T15:00:13.770" Title="Problem with faq: EL&amp;U audience - experts only or students too?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1590" CreationDate="2011-07-15T14:06:15.350" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just rolled back someone's edit to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scrabble&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scrabble&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scrabble&lt;/a&gt;. I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't think we need tags for things like Scrabble, Boggle, etc. Perhaps we can just use the more generic &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-games&lt;/a&gt;? Also, is there a meaningful difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;games&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-games&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T16:42:02.450" Title="On tag:scrabble, tag:word-games, tag:games" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1587" CreationDate="2011-07-15T15:08:29.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the audience cannot be -solely- &quot;research level English Language questions&quot; because then it would essentially be linguistics (anything serious would tend to be non-English specific or at least be terribly informed by analysis of other languages) for which there is an area51 proposal, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics&quot;&gt;linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt;. So I think &lt;strong&gt;our model should be math.SE and not mathoverflow&lt;/strong&gt;, let's say middlebrow, technical English questions allowed but not research level. I'd say at the level of the [Language Log] blog or a NYTimes 'On Language' column (Safire or Bill Zimmer). I'd also like to see more at a higher level like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7594/english-questions-and-negation-with-do-in-syntax&quot;&gt;English questions and negation with &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; in syntax&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am ambivalent about ESL-type questions for reasons that others have stated, they can be maddeningly General Reference, but they can have quite a bit of interest there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the poor quality of questions lately has not been the stigmatized joke or lyric explanations (with the great heat created here on meta) but rather just...well...not exactly lowbrow, just not that ... I don't know and so I find it hard to answer your question directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T15:00:13.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1588" CreationDate="2011-07-15T15:15:11.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't need those tags because EL&amp;amp;U is not a site about board games.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tags help to categorize the questions, but the categorization level must not be too detailed. Thus, tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fruit-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fruit-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fruit-nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pet-names&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pet-names&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pet-names&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tree-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tree-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tree-nouns&lt;/a&gt; are not necessary because EL&amp;amp;U is not supposed to answer in detail to questions about, e.g, fruit nouns; there is already &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt; and that is enough for the purposes of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific, questions about table, board, and word games are not supposed to be asked on EL&amp;U; therefore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scrabble&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scrabble&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scrabble&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;games&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-games&lt;/a&gt; are not necessary on EL&amp;amp;U.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, I would add that such tags would make users misunderstand the purpose of the site, and I feel them more dangerous than the questions about jokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-15T16:42:02.450" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T16:42:02.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-15T16:50:50.133" Score="-3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to be as lenient as possible in allowing questions on EL&amp;amp;U - it should, after all, help as many people as much as possible to speak English (I assume I'm speaking for all when saying that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the translation question has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/726/how-would-you-feel-about-allowing-questions-in-foreign-languages-and-translation&quot;&gt;asked before&lt;/a&gt;, I don't feel we really got to a clear, crisp answer on that thread, and maybe it was because the question was too broad; so I'd like to propose a more narrow one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we allow 'semi-translation' questions to be asked on EL&amp;amp;U?  By this, I mean that the question title and the large majority of the content should be in English, but the user would be allowed to quote the source of the translation request in its original language, provided they included a rough literal English translation alongside it.  Because you've got the literal English translation alongside, I would view these questions as more like trying to find out how best to convey a concept in English, with the foreign phrase there for potentially useful context, rather than just flat-out translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example question that would be ontopic under this policy, &lt;strong&gt;if it were edited to include a literal English translation alongside the given Russian phrase&lt;/strong&gt;, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34441/how-to-translate-an-idiom-from-russian&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An addition to the FAQ for this policy might look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requests for tricky translations (eg. idioms needing paraphrasing), &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; English (but not &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; English), are allowed.  The person asking the question should, however, give a rough translation into English (even if just from eg. Google Translate) at the same time as quoting the phrase to be translated/paraphrased in the original language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T22:39:31.957" Title="Should we allow 'semi-translation' questions?" Tags="|discussion|translation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1591" CreationDate="2011-07-15T17:13:39.677" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we ought to expand our scope into this slippery slope. The majority of questions that could be asked as one-sided translation requests are likely to be &quot;too localized&quot;: useful only to the one person who asked it.&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, I don't think we &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to expand scope this way, because questions that are truly interesting and useful can be phrased as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30115/is-there-an-english-phrase-for-an-inability-to-actually-leave-already&quot;&gt;which make only incidental mention of the original language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* Note also that machine translations are often so atrociously bad that they can't even be used as starting points. So the OP would have to edit/audit the rough translation to make sure it reflected the proper meaning. 99.9% of the time, this wouldn't happen, and the question would have to be closed; and the other 0.1% would fall nicely into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, and we're back where we started.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T17:13:39.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1587" CreationDate="2011-07-15T17:31:45.870" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I've mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1568/who-is-elus-audience/1584#1584&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, I am most definitely &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; including learners of the language. Perhaps here is a good place to elaborate a little bit on why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put: non-native speakers often ask the most interesting questions. They have a different perspective on the language, because (unlike native speakers) &lt;em&gt;they constantly have to think about and concentrate on&lt;/em&gt; how the language works. So, just like a newcomer to a house will immediately spot a mark on the wall that the inhabitants have long since ceased to notice, odd quirks of the language that native speakers use every day jump out at them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not talking about simple questions that could be answered in moments with a dictionary; that is irritating and a waste of our valuable time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But dictionaries &amp;ndash; and indeed grammar books &amp;ndash; are &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; from the whole story: the language is full of rules and conventions that native speakers somehow just know intuitively, but that aren't written down anywhere. Even the remarkable 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language - written by some of the foremost experts on English grammar living today &amp;ndash; fails to mention some &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/PaynHuddPull.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common, perfectly grammatical expressions&lt;/a&gt; despite their use frequently since at least Dickens. This is the sort of thing that fascinates experts in grammar, whom we presumably want to attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's not just grammar: a few words from a dictionary definition seldom do justice to the range of expression, the regional variation, and indeed the rate of innovation of the language. Even simple words such as those for fizzy drinks show &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6926/which-is-correct-soda-or-pop&quot;&gt;immense variation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, by excluding genuine questions from those with a fresh perspective, we would be blinding ourselves to many aspects of the marvellous richness of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2011-07-15T17:31:45.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1587" CreationDate="2011-07-15T17:47:59.717" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You can't have it both ways&lt;/em&gt; is a nice &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; saying and applies actually everywhere a trade-off has to be found, which is... well, pretty much everywhere.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want &lt;em&gt;audience&lt;/em&gt;, you want volume and you can't afford to be too choosy,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt;, you need more selective rules for contribution and that automatically means less volume.  Besides, since most people actually join because they have a question, that can only apply to answers.  Another important remark is that moderating EL&amp;amp;U has nothing in common with moderating SO.  Stupid questions or duplicates pass through SO unhindered because&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;a/ SO throughput is extremely high and you'd need 10 times as many mods,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b/ technical ignorance or bad taste is only spotted by technical people and rarely frowned upon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;c/ the average number of votes and view per question is so low that only a tiny proportion of questions do make it to the multi-collider.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Moreover, the irony is that the multi-collider filters in only the simplest questions (borderline to general reference) simply because they automatically attract more views.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for cultural- or language-related sites, the contradiction is in the Stack Exchange Network (SEN) itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get their business model running, the SEN founders need a large audience, which implies encouraging a steady flow of incoming questions (cf the rules applicable to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/28/electorate&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;electorate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; badge).  In English &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;extensive&quot;; in French it means &quot;broad&quot;.  The &lt;em&gt;distinguo&lt;/em&gt; is more than just a subtle one. A broader audience fatally produces questions (and answers) of more variable perceived quality.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SEN founders endeavoured to elaborate a low cost model whereby communities would auto-regulate themselves.  The way they achieved this is by first drawing in an elite (through site betas, mod elections and a sophisticated and addictive rep accounting system closely modelling peer recognition) and then entrusting this elite with the drudgery of separating the wheat from the chaff.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That process actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; work but not exactly in the way the founders intended.  When they have the feeling it does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; work, you can expect some reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deltas are in my view as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inasmuch as the community elite is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; very much focused on high quality, their understanding of quality does not necessarily coincide with that of the supermods.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Just one example: linguists (like Eric Partridge or John McWhorter) relish the study of slang or creole because this is where linguistic phenomenon are the more dynamic - as they are unhampered by prescriptivism.  In contrast, many site admins on this planet are as scared of slang or profanities as Gaulish people were that the sky might fall on their head and will instantly label any question related to these topics as &quot;low quality&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mods who are also contributors by nature, will presume the innocence of posters (especially non-native ones) whereas site admins will give priority to the overall reputation of the site at the expense of sometimes hurting the feelings of &quot;undesired&quot; users.  Unavoidable collateral damage one might say - but someone has to hold the shaft of the axe and today it is clear that paid supermods are missioned to &quot;teach&quot; unpaid mods what and how to axe. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguists (most often polyglots) are bound to be more open-minded and will need to come across higher thresholds of offensiveness for their alarm to go off.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, site admins and language-focused communities are potentially on a collision course.  I personally did not realise this until recently.  Whoever believes one side is going to kowtow to the other is living in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33404/who-coined-the-term-cloud-cuckoo-land&quot;&gt;cloud cuckoo-land&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only a few alternatives:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U moves towards a more authoritarian model in which contributors are cherry picked, red tape is unrolled and faithful enforcers are anointed.  A recipe to make the &lt;em&gt;Washington Post&lt;/em&gt; as exciting as &lt;em&gt;Pravda&lt;/em&gt;. But &lt;em&gt;Pravda&lt;/em&gt; was the mandatory newspaper; SE is not the only English/culture enthusiasts site.  The odds are therefore very low that the community can survive if it feels it's being herded; after all EL&amp;amp;U's success was no accident – it was also the result of its freedom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some &lt;em&gt;common ground&lt;/em&gt; (another nice English expression) is found, whereby, as  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1561/should-elu-be-removed-from-the-multicollider-etc/1564#1564&quot;&gt;some have already suggested&lt;/a&gt;, the material deemed too scruffy can be taken out of the showcase and be dealt with in the back office.  You just need to add a Boolean to some tags (and filter the tagged question out of the high visibility pages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last word to underline is that this kind of debate is completely ignored by most new users.  Whenever they have a question to ask, they'll Google up for an online forum (they've seen tens of forums all over the net) and will go ahead without perusing the FAQ and just trust their common sense as to whether their question relates or not to English.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, each discipline uses its own specific criteria to estimate what's good quality and what's low quality. It is thus probably better judged by people whose contributions in that very discipline have been peer reviewed and collectively recognised as good rather than by some 'deus ex machina'.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words the system is sound and works reasonably well.  Singularities actually tend to happen when it is not followed in letter or in spirit - be it by its intended users or by its very creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T15:47:50.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1591" CreationDate="2011-07-16T01:07:06.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is similar to &quot;What is the translation of &lt;em&gt;sei un bortolo&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; then I would say that such questions are not welcome, and I would not think that allowing such questions would increase the level of the site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If, vice versa, the question explains the type of phrase the OP is looking for, the question would probably more welcome, but the translation part should be marginal, or not relevant at all; it could eventually help who knows both the languages, and knows what expression is a better equivalent for the reported phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where I live in Italy, we normally use the phrase &lt;em&gt;sei un bortolo&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;Bortolo&lt;/em&gt; is a variant of the name &lt;em&gt;Bartolomeo&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Bartholomew&quot;), which in the phrase is used as epithet. Is there a person name that is used as epithet, or insult, in English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The example I thought is probably not the best example I could think of, but I hope it makes understand what I mean.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-16T22:39:31.957" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T22:39:31.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1598" CreationDate="2011-07-16T03:44:48.827" Score="1" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a good way to handle people on EL&amp;amp;U who seem to thrive off of making others feel their opinions and explanations are inferior or &quot;incorrect&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a forum for constructive, respectful discussion or for cutting people down to make oneself feel better about some shortcoming they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T17:00:15.593" Title="Negativity on other people's EL&amp;U answers" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1597" CreationDate="2011-07-16T03:54:35.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just seen your flag, and deleted both comments. Do not criticize, even if someone else has been less than tactful. Do note that the advice is appropriate, even if not entirely polite—please don't overformat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more general answer follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;English Language and Usage is intended to be a location where linguists, etymologists, and serious English enthusiasts can gather to learn more about the subject professionally. In this vein, we do not allow personal attacks or other non-constructive criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this has occurred, you have several options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can flag the offending post or comment. This is generally the preferred technique unless the problem is excessive (i.e. it goes beyond a few posts and continually defines the individual in how they participate in the site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is entirely offensive, select &quot;it is not welcome in our community&quot; for posts or &quot;rude or offensive for comments&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If only parts of the post are offensive, you should select &quot;it needs ♦ moderator attention&quot;, then &quot;other&quot;, and explain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is a continuing situation and not a one time offense, you can flag any offending post and explain the situation and we'll take appropriate action.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of course, you can always select another flag option if that one is more appropriate. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can email any of the site moderators if an email address is available on their profile (for example, my profile has my email in the profile text box)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can post here at Meta.English if you are comfortable talking about the incident in public&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact nature of how we deal with the situation will of course depend on the severity of the offense—it may be as simple as an edit and it may go so far as post deletion and user suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-07-16T04:01:02.137" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T04:01:02.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1597" CreationDate="2011-07-16T16:23:45.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#etiquette&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#etiquette&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Civility is required at all times; rudeness will not be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treat others with the same respect you’d want them to treat you. We’re all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T17:00:15.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1587" CreationDate="2011-07-16T16:51:25.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, this is a question of &lt;em&gt;effort&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question asker provides none, and gets several excellent, detailed responses that took 15 minutes to compose in return, this is a) unfair to the answerers and b) more critically, teaching askers to be profoundly lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the problems I see on English can be summarized as &quot;lazy askers&quot;. Think about it from their perspective: they drop in some barely coherent one or two sentence rumination (like, say &quot;what does this joke mean? {joke}&quot; or &quot;what's the best word for poop?&quot;) and get an &lt;em&gt;amazing&lt;/em&gt; answer from someone with actual linguistics or English degree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is that teaching people who frequent the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't disagree that some trivial questions can be interesting, but &lt;strong&gt;the asker has to demonstrate some research effort and provide context and background for their query.&lt;/strong&gt; Spoiling lazy askers is a very dangerous long term precedent to set. Just because you know some English, have a pulse, and can type a few words in a textbox does not mean your question is worthy of us to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to set the quality bar higher for questions, and I measure that largely based on &quot;gee, did the asker even research this at all? Did they provide context and an explanation of WHY they need to know this?&quot; If they can't explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they need to know, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9293/differences-between-slang-words-for-breasts&quot;&gt;the difference between 'tits' and 'boobs'&lt;/a&gt; -- I don't think their question is genuinely &lt;em&gt;deserving&lt;/em&gt; of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional guidance (and a flowchart!) at:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T16:51:25.740" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1568" CreationDate="2011-07-16T17:27:42.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To throw my own opinion into the mix, this is what I think we should be aiming for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We want to attract people who know English very well but may not realize it yet. There is an odd sense of accomplishment in reading a difficult question, knowing the answer and then immediately reading why that answer is correct. People who speak fluent English may instinctively know what is correct or not but very few people take the time to think about the &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;. One of EL&amp;amp;U's goals should be to awaken that curiosity and then offer them hundreds of interesting questions to chew on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We want to attract people who have a problem and need an answer. These could be fluent speakers; they could be using English as a second language. But they haven't been able to get adequate help elsewhere on the internet. Their questions will be ones of nuance, meaning, word requests and so on. The next time they have a question, perhaps they will start here first.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We want to attract people who are utterly fascinated with the inner workings of English and want to pull it apart; find the boundaries; discover the histories of words; pull up charts of usages; compare dialects. These people are the linguists and the serious hobbyists. They are looking for interesting tidbits that they don't already know. If we want to entertain them, we need content beyond the ordinary usage and definitions of words. We need to offer puzzles and challenges and questions that stick in your head until someone finds an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find all three of these audiences completely plausible and I don't think anything about them would drive another away. Most people are happy if they get content that suits them. Proper tagging would make it easier for picky people to get only the stuff they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I think EL&amp;amp;U is heavy on the middle section: The people who have a problem and need an answer. I think we have enough content to attract the first section, too, seeing as that is how I even found EL&amp;amp;U. I do think we are a little light on the third category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go into more depths on these three groups &amp;mdash; I could even find example questions and point out differences between how each group would approach a borderline question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To bring the dark side into this, these are the audiences I am explicitly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interested in attracting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People from the SE network who want a place to farm rep because it is easy to mimic real questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People with idle curiosity about their favorite word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People who cannot speak English and are still learning basic grammar or vocabulary. This is obviously a fuzzy category, but the rule of thumb I like: Can they read a dictionary and/or Wikipedia?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People who ask questions as puzzles in an attempt to stump us or send us on rabbit trails. (Basically, trolls.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People who are too lazy to look something up themselves. This is pretty similar to not pandering to idle curiosity. Curiosity itself is fantastic. Being curious and then doing nothing more than asking us is &lt;em&gt;lazy&lt;/em&gt;. And rude.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T17:27:42.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-16T18:51:02.020" Score="14" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;What level of discourse are we aiming for here? What does our audience expect and desire? What are we capable of providing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T02:39:19.050" Title="Is English Language &amp; Usage highbrow?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1602" CreationDate="2011-07-16T18:51:37.327" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that the topic of this site is intentionally and irrevocably middlebrow, like it or not. Grammar discussion and usage advice is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2634&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;inherently&lt;/em&gt; middlebrow activity&lt;/a&gt;. To elevate it to something highbrow would require transmuting the entire nature of what we do here into what linguists do—that is, to study the phenomenon of language in a scientific way. While I personally find linguistics fascinating (that's why I have a degree in it), I also know that the audience for linguistics discussions is orders of magnitude smaller than the audience for discussions of English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; prevent the middlebrow from becoming lowbrow by demanding a certain level of seriousness from question-askers, and we are already doing a fine job of that. Complaints that we have too many low-quality questions are unfounded and unsupported by non-anecdotal (read: substantive) evidence. Furthermore, it must be remembered that lowbrow topics like taboo words and slang can be and are valid topics for serious investigation and discussion. Linguists can and do write very serious papers and theses about these topics. We are not a community of linguists, and such a highbrow approach is not appropriate for this site and our community. Lowbrow topics can and should be discussed here in a decidedly middlebrow way. I will &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; tolerate attempts to force us to squelch all discussion of taboo words, slang, vulgar speech, and the lexicon of anger and hate. They are valid topics of linguistic investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T18:51:37.327" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1587" CreationDate="2011-07-16T18:52:08.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I proposed most of the original content of the FAQ, including “problems encountered by people learning English”. There is a brief discussion of it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/278#278&quot;&gt;the question about what should be off topic&lt;/a&gt;. I agree that questions that can be answered by a &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; dictionary lookup should be closed. I also agree that questions that are posed without background information are good candidates for being closed if the question itself if fairly trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a contributor who enjoys writing answers, I can say without reservation that the most fun answers to write are the ones that unintentionally elucidate something about the language that a native speaker would never have thought of. I would strongly oppose altering the criteria for question acceptance to discourage those kinds of questions, because it will certainly make contributing significantly less enjoyable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And our main purpose is to encourage questions that the most valued members of the community enjoy answering, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T18:52:08.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2011-07-16T22:41:43.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reporting this - a fix will be pushed tonight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2011-07-16T22:41:43.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1602" CreationDate="2011-07-17T02:39:19.050" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a semantic distinction, but I balk at the word &lt;em&gt;middlebrow&lt;/em&gt;. That suggests we cut off the bottom and the top. Not that you need a dictionary citation, but let me air my fears a bit here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;middlebrow&lt;/strong&gt; |ˈmidlˈbrou| informal chiefly derogatory&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  (of art or literature or a system of thought) demanding or involving only a moderate degree of intellectual application, typically as a result of not deviating from convention : &lt;em&gt;middlebrow fiction&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that we are more than that. I would hope that we embrace all of English, from the lowest and most vulgar to the loftiest and most refined — and, yes, everything in between. I suspect that's probably the essence of the answer you yourself supplied, but I wanted to make it clear that I don't believe &quot;middlebrow&quot; should mean either anti-intellectual or crusadingly mundane. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T02:39:19.050" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-17T16:00:54.887" Score="11" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34628/what-does-pneumatic-mean-when-applied-to-a-person/34631#34631&quot;&gt;downvoted&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;plagiarism&quot;, in that I subsequently edited my own answer to include a reference that was already present in someone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It so happens that in this particular case I was already aware of the reference when I first made my post, but I'm not sure that's relevant. In fact I didn't use it originally because while constructing my answer, and searching for earlier usages, I'd discovered an older one I wasn't familiar with. I just wanted to post my half-complete answer while I looked into a possible connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general consensus on EL&amp;amp;U etiquette for this situation? Even as I ask this, I'm aware it might be thought inappropriate to post an answer that might well be revised/expanded shortly afterwards, quite apart from the possibility of replicating another's references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've no wish to defend any particular stance in this area too strongly, but I will just say that unless an answer seems to consist almost entirely of the same content as one single other, I'm inclined to think there's nothing wrong. Even to the extent that a single new answer formed entirely by combining two or more existing ones may actually be &lt;em&gt;desirable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind the primary aim is to end up with a single answer that's unequivocably &quot;correct&quot; and better than all others. If that can be achieved by combining two &quot;half-right&quot; answers, and the existing posters haven't arranged among themselves to do this, I don't really see much of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I out of touch with the zeitgeist here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T22:49:52.037" Title="Where to draw the line in &quot;plagiarism&quot; of earlier answers?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1607" CreationDate="2011-07-17T17:16:28.133" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;borrowing&quot; bits from other answers on this site in an attempt to make your answer more complete is ok—especially if the bit being borrowed has spurred your own thinking on the question and you wish to include it in your answer as a springboard for further insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, simply giving a nod to the other user within the body of your answer (e.g. &quot;As @so-and-so points out,&quot;) is good etiquette. This will not only alert the original answerer, but also direct users to the other's presumably good answer. I think this is a good rule to follow even if you were planning on including the information in your answer but were beaten to the punch line, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you recall, you and I had a similar situation at the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/24951/5822&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What does “pax” mean in the context of the apartment rental?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I found an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24951/what-does-pax-mean-in-the-context-of-the-apartment-rental/25166#25166&quot;&gt;antedating&lt;/a&gt; of the usage which you rolled into your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24951/what-does-pax-mean-in-the-context-of-the-apartment-rental/25130#25130&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;. At my request, you kindly credited me. Collaboration of this sort, with internal citations, is a good thing and should avoid any claims of plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T17:16:28.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-17T19:54:23.313" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34611/do-americans-understand-donald-duck&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, user &lt;em&gt;surfasb&lt;/em&gt; made a flattering remark.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It has just been deleted, a few minutes ago. Did a moderator erase it? I don't think the compliment was deserved (&quot;best question in a year&quot;),  but since I know that, for example, addressing users as &quot;dear XXX&quot; is frowned upon and edited away, I am curious about the origin of this suppression .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8345" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Are (some) compliments in the comments suppressed by moderators?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1609" CreationDate="2011-07-17T20:02:30.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted that particular comment because it was simply noise and brought nothing to the table. We don't mind comments such as &lt;code&gt;+1 for research&lt;/code&gt; because that explains &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question is good, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OMG, best qestion &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt; THIS YEAR!!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a constructive comment. In addition, the caps, multiple exclamation marks, and misspelling of &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; didn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T20:02:30.663" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1609" CreationDate="2011-07-17T22:22:18.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Network policy on comments has always been that there has to at least be some &lt;em&gt;bare&lt;/em&gt; minimum contributatory (contributionary? contributing?) nature to it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/51926/new-users-cant-ask-for-clarifications-except-as-answers/51939#51939&quot;&gt;That's why they have a reputation requirement&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So by the time they earn 50 rep, they should have learned roughly how things work, and be in a position to offer a useful comment and not a &quot;+1 AWESOME ANSWER&quot; sort of comment. - Jeff Atwood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85733/what-makes-a-good-valid-1-comment&quot;&gt;An earlier discussion on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, less about deletions but more about good comments, sheds some light into this particular scenario. I won't point at any particular answer in that thread, but rather, the general sentiment expressed in nigh every answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Support is good. I think everyone appreciates being told that their question or answer is helpful, that someone is finding their content meaningful in some fashion. But we have a resource to perform exactly that - upvotes, which are possible long before you gain the privilege to post comments on the vast majority of the site (and on anyone else's questions, for that matter). They indicate to the author of the post, that a user has found their stuff useful (and in the context of the site, they give a little more bonus to the user in the form of reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, these kind of comments get flags on other sites, if it states nothing more than a rough equivalent to &quot;I love this answer!&quot;. Had it a smidgen of maybe a &quot;why&quot; or something else to add, even if just to get a wry giggle, then I don't think it would've been struck so fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it's understood that in general network policies, this kind of deletion is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about censoring courtesy or silencing compliments as much as it is just removing something that can be considered redundant and non-contributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T22:22:18.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1607" CreationDate="2011-07-17T22:49:52.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between an acceptable answer, and one that is not acceptable depends from how much has been copied from the answer given from the other user, and how much text is added to the new question; if I repeat what I said from another user, and I add &quot;This is what I think.&quot; then the new answer should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would make a distinction for some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I write in my answer what reported by a dictionary, and somebody else before me reported what found in another dictionary, and the definitions completely, or partially, match then I didn't plagiarized the previous answer. It would be if I say to report what I found in another dictionary, and then I write the same answer already given, instead of writing what I found in the dictionary I am referring to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If two different users each write an answer, but the answer to the question is the combination of both the answers, then writing an answer that combines both of them would not  be plagiarism. By writing an answer, I don't mean the new answer is simply a copy-and-paste of both the previous answers, except that it can contains the same references used by the previous answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-17T22:49:52.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-18T04:22:59.283" Score="25" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Table of Contents&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a really, really, long post. And yes, I hate to create another post on our current &quot;quality&quot; situation, but this post is &lt;em&gt;seriously&lt;/em&gt; long to the point where I don't want to distract from anyone else's post. In addition, this represents my personal view only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it's so long that I'm including a table of contents to help you read only the sections you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Previous Questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Audience, and why looking at is isn't entirely productive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we have a quality problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is Jeff concerned about?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close reasons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is off-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question Pre-requisites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we improve? &amp;lt;-- This is the TL;DR one to read&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first—I'm going to quickly link to the questions here on Meta.English about how we can improve on the recent situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is on whether we have a problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1549/is-elu-succeeding&quot;&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U succeeding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three are on what type of audience is appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1568/who-is-elus-audience&quot;&gt;Who is EL&amp;amp;U&amp;#39;s audience?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1587/problem-with-faq-elu-audience-experts-only-or-students-too&quot;&gt;Problem with faq: EL&amp;amp;U audience - experts only or students too?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1602/is-english-language-usage-highbrow&quot;&gt;Is English Language &amp;amp; Usage highbrow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another is an attempt to clarify the on-topic/off-topic policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1545/can-we-have-some-guidance-as-to-what-is-on-and-off-topic-on-this-site&quot;&gt;Can we have some guidance as to what is on- and off- topic on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Audience, and why looking at it isn't entirely productive&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to solve this problem successfully is to take a close look at question quality and close reasons. However, before I do that, I want to address why I don't think questions about our audience are that helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take a look at SE in general, none try to scope for audience. Instead, the scope is for on-topic and off-topic, and both beginner questions and expert questions are welcome. In fact, the majority of the answers to those two earlier questions make it clear that this is how most of our users feel—if you have the ability to consult a dictionary and/or thesaurus before posting, your question is probably welcome. In other words, anyone who genuinely wants to learn is welcome—a philosophy that pretty much applies to any SE site. So while it's good that the community is reminded of this, there's a limit to how much use it can be to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that, I'm going to try not to mention audience again. (Ok, actually I do mention it one more time.)&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;b&gt; Do we have a quality problem?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see if there is a problem. I know this has been discussed, but I'm going to take a non-holistic, methodical approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the last 15 questions asked as of writing, and here's a quick summary as they were originally posted. The details for the questions are at the bottom of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6 excellent questions (of which 3 I could not fault, and the other 3 were nitpicking problems)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 ok questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 not-so-great question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 closed, none as exact duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, 10 were fine, and 5 weren't. Of the bad 5, 1 was edited and is now equal to a ok question, 1 was a list question, 1 was based on an erroneous assumption, 1 was provided without enough detail, and the last 1 was off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is that? That number means that 2/3 of all questions posted, examined before editing, are fine—and that the remaining 1/3 isn't. I've had a quick chat with mods from a few other released sites, and they're also running at about that amount. In fact, that's a solid number, and shows that there isn't a rampant problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;What is Jeff concerned about?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a quick look at Jeff's concerns (And you're free to edit any more you have into this post, Jeff):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about jokes&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jeff thinks that they deteriorate site quality. The community disagrees, I disagree, but Jeff isn't budging. I realize this has caused this entire wave of debate—it's definitely caused several of our members to leave or consider leaving.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally, I'd love to see Jeff come around to our way of thinking. However, assuming that that doesn't happen, the compromise is that we allow Jeff this one concession in return for having built Stack Exchange. I feel and hope that the community will allow this, in return for not allowing this sort of drastic action to happen again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we stop this from happening again? I suggest a set of clear, objective criteria that we can use to determine on-topic and off-topic—a series of questions/flowchart of sorts. I've expanded this below. If we can get Jeff to agree to also use this flowchart so that it's entirely objective, I doubt it'll ever happen again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about things of a perhaps less-than tasteful manner&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More specifically, the titles need to be clean. As I understand it, EL&amp;amp;U seems to be sanitizing these titles as quickly as it sees them. Jeff wants them even cleaner, but we don't want the titles to be overly vague. I can only suggest we keep the importance of censoring titles in mind when dealing with these sort of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Close reasons&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd just quickly like to go over these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exact duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;off topic—should be determined by a set of clear, objective criteria, a proposal of which is set out below&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not constructive—this is the old S&amp;amp;A close reason—one question, one answer (certain list questions of exceptional quality excepted)—otherwise it gets closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;not a real question  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if a complete answer to the question is as long as this post because of how broad the question is, something is seriously wrong—in other words, don't be vague and dance around what you're trying to get at  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in addition, if the question is so basic that it demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic English, such as SVO order, then it's NARQ—does not apply if asking &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a particular basic form of English came about (this, by definition, only applies to ESL questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;too localized—it's also not a real question, but this time because it's far too specific (which, by the way, is not the same thing as detail, which is good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;general reference—if I consult Wiktionary, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Google, or Wikipedia (or other appropriate well-known sources), and find the answer just sitting there without any interpretation required and the answer is utterly boring, it's general reference&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the recent debate about questions about jokes, here's a proposal for revising on-topic and off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only determines whether a question is on-topic or off-topic. They can still be closed for any other close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is your question about English words (e.g. what does a word mean or &quot;word1 vs word2&quot;) or phrases (including idioms and the like)? On-topic (covers the existing usage, word choice, etymology, pronunciation, and spelling on-topic reasons)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is your question about grammar or syntax, and if so, does it make specific references to what is of concern? On-topic (covers the existing grammar and &quot;problems encountered...&quot; on-topic reasons, while excluding proofreading)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is your question about how English varies? On-topic (covers the existing etymology and dialect differences on-topic reason)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is your question about punctuation as it relates to English? On-topic (covers, well, duh)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, it's off-topic. This does its best to cover the existing &lt;code&gt;/faq&lt;/code&gt; on-topic and off-topic things, but improvements are no doubt possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Question Pre-requisites&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to address one final thing, and that's what needs to go into a question before you should post it. Of the 12 open questions, 6 had research, and 6 lacked it. I don't think that that's a particularly bad number—if you look at the questions themselves, some can't be easily researched, which brings it down to 2 that could actually use research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question remains of how we address it. I don't see much to do—a question without research where research could be easily done is very likely to have other problems and be closed as a result of that; a question that seems to be based on an absurd premise without reasoning can be closed as NARQ. We could institute mandatory requirements, but we also have to keep in mind we don't want to close questions just because they don't meet a long list of criteria, and adding research requirements seems to be the thin end of the wedge. However, I also get the feeling we could work on this, but I'm lacking ideas right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;How can we improve?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those of you coming in from TL;DR, here's a quick summary: We don't have a significant quality problem, and I've suggested a revised on-topic/off-topic policy. Beyond that, however, there are still improvements to be made. Based on everything above, I'm going to ask a few questions and ask the community to answer them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do have a fair number of ESL questions. The terrible ones should be (and are being) closed/deleted. However, that still leaves a fair amount. Do you think this may discourage native speakers, and if so, should we make an active effort to make sure harder questions are asked (without discouraging the ESL questions, so effectively raising the hard:easy ratio)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm a high school student, so naturally I interact routinely with quite a large number of people who have English questions. Due to some odd logistics, I technically attend two high schools: a really tough one and a less-tough but still selective one. It's one thing to not shape the site to an audience, but quite another to go out and invite specific audiences.  Should I make an effort to invite students of the first school (who I feel would work well with the site)? The second (which may produce more &quot;proofread&quot; questions, but still other good questions)? (I don't mean this to specifically apply to me, but from answers to this question we can get a feel for what the community wants as far as adding to itself goes)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, high rep users aren't doing much question moderation, such as voting to close and delete, and much of the work falls to moderators. On an individual level, that's fine—asking and answering questions is enough of a contribution already, there's no mandate for you to also do our janitorial work. But I don't think this is a &quot;I don't want to&quot; problem so much as a &quot;I don't know when to vote&quot; problem. Do you have any suggestions as to how we can improve this?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you disagree with my conclusions about our question quality? About my on-topic/off-topic proposal? About my opinion on not mandating research except in blatant General Reference cases? Or about anything else? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Here are the 15 questions I used, and brief comments. A 4 or 5 at the end indicates excellent, a 3 ok, a 2 not-so-great, and a 1 is a closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34581/are-older-senses-of-anent-still-alive-in-any-dialect&quot;&gt;Are older senses of &amp;quot;anent&amp;quot; still alive in any dialect?&lt;/a&gt;—Not exceptionally brilliant (I don't believe &lt;em&gt;anent&lt;/em&gt;, older or newer senses alike, is used at all), but a good solid question nonetheless with references and all—4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34574/looking-for-a-better-term-than-benign-envy-or-mudita&quot;&gt;Looking for a better term than &amp;#39;benign envy&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;mudita&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;—Interesting question, with lots of background—5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34568/are-there-other-words-with-the-same-weird-spelling-pronunciation-combo-as-vict&quot;&gt;Are there other words with the same weird spelling / pronunciation combo as &amp;quot;victual&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;—A list question, which SE isn't too fond of, but research is good—2 (only because it's a list question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34562/clarifying-that-your-intentions-are-no-other-than-constructive-closed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34562/clarifying-that-your-intentions-are-no-other-than-constructive-closed&lt;/a&gt;—Closed for being far too broad; OP is reluctant to improve question—1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34557/hyphenating-evolution&quot;&gt;Hyphenating &amp;quot;Evolution&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;—Original question was quite confusing, to the point that I misinterpreted it while editing. Once kiamlaluno and I had a crack at improving it, a ok question.—2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34553/an-representation-closed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34553/an-representation-closed&lt;/a&gt;—Closed as too localized, as the question was based on an error.—1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34551/why-is-the-initial-ts-sound-e-g-tsunami-pronounced-as-s&quot;&gt;Why is the initial &amp;quot;ts&amp;quot; sound (e.g &amp;quot;tsunami&amp;quot;) pronounced as &amp;quot;s&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;—Good, interesting question. Was edited for clarification, but nothing significantly wrong in the first place.—4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34545/interchange-and-exchange&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Interchange&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;exchange&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;—A &quot;word vs. word&quot; question. Perhaps a little more research would have been nice, but nonetheless ok.—3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34544/antonym-of-dispenser&quot;&gt;Antonym of &amp;quot;dispenser&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;—Had research, but failed to properly communicate what meaning of &quot;dispenser&quot; was intended. Initial title was ambiguous. Still, not a bad question.—3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34538/where-did-this-usage-of-something-originate-i-need-a-nap-something-terrible&quot;&gt;Where did this usage of &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; originate: &amp;quot;I need a nap something terrible&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;—A little more context might have been nice, but ok.—4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34535/application-for-android-versus-application-on-android&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Application for Android&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;application on Android&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;—Original question was poorly formatted, but easily understandable.—3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34532/which-tense-should-i-use-when-writing-a-post-about-a-journey-closed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34532/which-tense-should-i-use-when-writing-a-post-about-a-journey-closed&lt;/a&gt;—Closed as off-topic—1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34529/is-there-any-difference-in-meaning-between-she-is-not-around-and-she-is-not-he&quot;&gt;Is there any difference in meaning between &amp;quot;She is not around&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;She is not here&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;—Good, solid question—5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34528/why-is-it-grandfather-but-great-uncle&quot;&gt;Why is it &amp;quot;grandfather&amp;quot;, but &amp;quot;great-uncle&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;—Good question with research—5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34523/abbreviation-for-so-called&quot;&gt;Abbreviation for &amp;quot;so-called&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;—A bit far-fetched, but understandable given the fact that one exists in German—3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T13:35:31.443" Title="A look at question quality" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1613" CreationDate="2011-07-18T05:40:48.793" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for this. It is clear that you spent a very long time thinking about this, and the overall cohesion given its breadth is impressive, especially considering you are a high school student!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, however, I would like to take up your solicitation for feedback. On your proposed on/off-topic changes, the way it is written, it seems to be implying that general questions about syntax and semantics that aren't necessarily about specific words or about whether some specific construction is grammatical are off-topic. While I agree that such questions are rare, I don't think we should give the impression that such questions are unwelcome. Here are some examples of what I am talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/adjective-order&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27152/how-to-properly-write-sentence-with-double-words&quot;&gt;How to properly write sentence with double words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21018/why-do-we-invert-word-order-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;Why do we invert word order when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9600/are-there-any-rules-on-the-positioning-adverbs-should-take-in-a-sentence&quot;&gt;Are there any rules on the positioning adverbs should take in a sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7594/english-questions-and-negation-with-do-in-syntax&quot;&gt;English questions and negation with *do* in syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last question, I think, is an &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt; question with an &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt; answer that is the kind of expert-level question that TPTB had wet dreams about when they were conceiving the Stack Exchange network. We &lt;strong&gt;absolutely&lt;/strong&gt; have to not only not forbid but explicitly encourage questions like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, WaiWai933, thank you for taking the time to write all this out and clarify exactly that the extent of the &quot;problem&quot; we have been discussing is mostly perception and very little reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a separate issue, I just wanted to point out that I substantially defanged the unilaterally added new FAQ entry about jokes. It now is really mostly redundant and serves only as a signifier that &quot;explain this joke to me&quot; questions will be scrutinized more than other questions. Frankly, I don't see that questions about jokes are any different from other questions expressing uncertainty about the semantics of a particular utterance. Seeing as how there is no logically consistent reason to single them out for special treatment, I'm apt to just nix that bullet point altogether from the FAQ in a few weeks once all the Sturm und Drang has died down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T05:40:48.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-18T12:55:16.397" Score="-5" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to get community opinion on the possibility of &quot;self-assigned badges&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; that would serve to distinguish for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;native vs. non-native English speakers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;American vs. British vs. other dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, it is possible to write this and other information on the profile page, however this could be available immediately along with the badges and user's reputation on each question directly accessible (as tip text or icons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please start your replies with short answers to following questions:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. Would you like to see such or similar feature implemented?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. If yes, what would you use it for (what do you think it would be effective and useful for)?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The actual mechanism does not need to be determined before the assessment of benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/101/stack-sites-must-support-primary-and-secondary-language-when-defining-user-profil&quot;&gt;Stack sites should support primary and secondary language when defining user profile&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Show native language with the answer" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2011-07-18T14:43:04.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is very welcome when someone specifies which dialect they use and how fluent they are (if it is a language first learned at home or in school and if the latter at what age and how much everyday experience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful to use this information to judge questions and answers (e.g. is it an ESL question, is the answer informed by native intuition (or possibly blinded by native intuition, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as relevant as would be to this site, it's also be nice to know the age, profession, hobbies, and other credentials, and these are already voluntary info on the profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the culture is, when it is relevant, to mention something like 'as a native BrE speaker from Edinburgh,...', or 'even though I'm not a native speaker, I am a translator...', etc.... This is not very common though. Maybe it should be encouraged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to a particular design and implementation, I have a feeling it would be quite a bit more work than worth it the intended benefit unless it could be a more multi-site solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rereading this later I realize that what I wrote is not exactly my main point (I was thinking it but not writing it). &#xA;- There already is a place to do this self-reporting, the 'about' box on your user profile. That is there is already a voluntary place to do this.&#xA;- forcing people to  fill out language info (and the accompanying extra software: implementing extra fields or tags for users) will  be very annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So fill it out yourself and maybe others will do so too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T13:08:38.530" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T13:08:38.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1619" CreationDate="2011-07-18T23:28:41.397" Score="7" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by the comment/chat discussion under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34672/british-english-fantasise-or-fantasize/34674#34674&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.  This would be very helpful to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T02:18:31.743" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T02:18:31.743" Title="Which is more trustworthy as a source for UK usages: Google Ngrams or the British National Corpus?" Tags="|discussion|resources|ngrams|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1534" CreationDate="2011-07-19T03:12:06.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree: while I understand the reason for this restriction, I think it is impractical. The cure is simply worse. Besides, it can be circumvented by html comments and other tricks—so I have been told. The restriction should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T03:12:06.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1617" CreationDate="2011-07-19T09:38:13.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with using the 'British English' corpus selection on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ngrams&lt;/a&gt; is that the corpus includes American books that were published in the UK.   It is not a selection of British texts, so it does not accurately represent English as used in the UK. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ngram for &lt;em&gt;fantasize&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;fantasise&lt;/em&gt; is misleading.  UK spelling convention &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;fantasise&lt;/em&gt; despite the ngram and whatever was written in the original question thread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L6QNP.png&quot; alt=&quot;bad ngram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BNC (British National Corpus)&lt;/a&gt; is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excluding spoken English, a search of the BNC revealed 34 counts of &lt;em&gt;fantasise&lt;/em&gt;, but only 16 for &lt;em&gt;fantasize&lt;/em&gt;, of which 8 are from the American magazine &lt;em&gt;Esquire&lt;/em&gt;.  Regardless of dates, this clearly disagrees with the ngram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'British English' google corpus can still be useful in comparing relative usage frequencies between British and American English over time, but care should be taken when interpreting the results, and I certainly don't think it should be relied on to settle matters of British English usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T03:14:15.673" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T03:14:15.673" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-19T13:38:30.777" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand why this may be considered to overlap with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63/what-should-our-faq-contain&quot;&gt;What should our FAQ contain?&lt;/a&gt;, but I think I'm trying to address a specific issue related to that which doesn't really fit in the original (which in any case has astonishingly low levels of activity, considering how central it is to the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly on a day-to-day basis the FAQ must be primarily &lt;em&gt;prescriptive&lt;/em&gt;, since we often need to cite it as the authority on non-acceptability of Questions. But in a comment against &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1613/a-look-at-question-quality&quot;&gt;A look at question quality&lt;/a&gt;, I suggested we're still at a stage where the FAQ has a &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; role in determining whether certain types of Question are &quot;off-topic&quot; (or otherwise &quot;unwanted&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for saying this is it's difficult to get agreement on a definition of &quot;unwanted&quot; there. I think this crucial issue is more easily addressessed if we allow the FAQ to be at least partially &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt;, so it can &quot;evolve&quot; rather than need to be &quot;designed&quot;. Members should be encouraged to be more proactive in nudging that evolution, by up/downvoting Questions, and being more prepared to vote to close those they don't wish to see more of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there's a downside (on rep &amp;amp; other credibility factors) if a vote to close doesn't end up being endorsed. But that seems a small price to pay for each individual, considering how much more efficiently this might help us to crystalise the kind of Questions we want to encourage/discourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Vote to close (or downvote) more Questions you're not keen on, and trust the mods to use this enhanced feedback to amend the FAQ (or raise issues on meta, as appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T10:16:15.010" Title="FAQ - prescriptive or descriptive?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1613" CreationDate="2011-07-19T15:13:10.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we really have a quality problem when it comes to questions submitted to EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think so.  One could even take the provocative view that a question &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be stupid at all.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's because a question is not a statement.  Questions are by definition not affirmative, and only statements can be nonsensical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance if I ask in EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the noun &lt;em&gt;host&lt;/em&gt; (as in computer) related with the noun &lt;em&gt;host&lt;/em&gt; in the&#xA;  expression &quot;a host of people&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is a stupid question!  Of course there's no link!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well no it isn't.  In Middle English and in Old French an &quot;ost&quot; (&quot;host&quot;) is a marching army. &quot;L'Ost&quot; is the army of the king.&#xA;So that just as one can say &quot;an army of people&quot;, one can also say &quot;a host of people&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now that the original sense of &quot;army&quot; has been forgotten, you even find &lt;em&gt;a host of&lt;/em&gt; applied to things that don't march: &quot;a host of reasons&quot;, &quot;a host of features&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;host&lt;/em&gt; who gives you &lt;em&gt;hospitality&lt;/em&gt; in his &lt;em&gt;hotel&lt;/em&gt; deals with &lt;em&gt;guests&lt;/em&gt; who are basically possibly &lt;em&gt;hostile&lt;/em&gt; strangers... &#xA;All these words are closely related and their mutual relations and intertwined history have been amply commented by scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that hypothetical question was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; as stupid as it first looked and censoring it would actually &lt;em&gt;lower&lt;/em&gt; the quality of the site.&#xA;Although this is a made up example, EL&amp;amp;U's archives are full of similar examples of seemingly dummy questions bringing about interesting and unexpected answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like when your kid is entering the question age around 4 years old: he will ask loads of questions and the richness of his understanding of the world will depend on the ability of his parents to answer them correctly.&#xA;Ignorant parents will just answer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&quot;That's the way it is and please stop asking stupid questions!&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's actually the epitome of a stupid... answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can't have stupid questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can have poorly spelled or pourly phrased questions.  They are swiftly edited by the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can have troll questions.  They usually get flagged and closed quickly enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can have lazy English learner's question of little interest.  These usually get closed as General Reference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are really serious about the quality of this site, what we don't need is mods being pressured to act as ignorant parents and close apparently poor quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The quality of a question is arguably only fully appreciated once it has received a great answer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5432" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T15:13:10.153" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1623" CreationDate="2011-07-20T00:41:23.980" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can I flag something multiple times, and why can I get different results from each flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged a post one day, for &quot;misinformation&quot;.  Another day, while I was reviewing, I came to the same post, but not recognizing it, I flagged it again, for the same reason.  I was surprised when, looking back at my flagging history, I found that I had flagged it twice, and that both flags were deemed valid.  I decided that though it was strange, I would try again.  My third and identical flag was deemed invalid, so that I have a total of three identical flags on the same post, two of which are valid, and one of which is invalid.  Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is another post I have flagged three times identically, and each time the flag was considered valid.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2012-10-08T18:02:08.390" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T18:02:08.390" Title="Can I flag a single post multiple times?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1622" CreationDate="2011-07-20T00:47:26.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dismissed your flag because moderators aren't supposed to make judgements on whether a particular answer is &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot;. Wrong posts should be downvoted; only non-answers, answers with extremely poor quality, spam answers, and offensive answers should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the same flag may be dismissed multiple ways, that's because each individual flag must have a decision made. While I agree with your flag, there's nothing I can do about it. Other mods may take a different stance, because this is the type of borderline case where an argument for both &quot;valid&quot; and &quot;invalid&quot; can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T00:47:26.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1622" CreationDate="2011-07-20T00:50:33.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dismissed your flags as &quot;valid&quot; because they were &quot;valid&quot; in the sense that you were bringing up a valid point about the post and they didn't constitute noise or a waste of my time to consider. But, as waiwai933 said, there was no action to take based on your flag. So I guess in that sense, they were &quot;invalid&quot; but I reserve &quot;invalid&quot; for flags that I find annoy me or I disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T00:50:33.663" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1620" CreationDate="2011-07-20T03:04:14.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to take a risk and be honest here.  What happened to my own credibility and rep after down-voting an answer to a question made me not want to make a habit of doing it...even as I continue to see answers that are totally off-topic and/or don't actually address the question.  I can see why designers would set it up this way, to discourage serial down-voting and other negative activity, but maybe it IS time to address the possibility that it is producing unexpected results on the other side of the same coin that are having a negative consequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't like to complain without trying to come up with an idea for a fix; possibly come up with a new badge, unless there is one already, where down-voting or flagging something on the site takes nothing away from what you have earned through the respect of your peers and putting in time to research and answer questions.  If a question or answer is obviously wrong or off-topic or someone is being abusive on the site, I don't think it should be seen as a &quot;punishment&quot; to bring it to light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS - Please accept my apology if this &quot;answer&quot; would have been better suited in the &quot;add comment&quot; section of the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastEditorUserId="10894" LastEditDate="2011-07-20T03:10:17.387" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T03:10:17.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1620" CreationDate="2011-07-21T10:16:15.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You raise a very good question. I think that the answer is: It should be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the parts which are prescriptive should be perceived as such and for the parts which are descriptive it should be noted that they are not defining or limiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise there is good and bad in both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rant: You might perceive prescriptive as something that would hinder evolution, but actually it might be helping the evolution (of the faq). For example if faq was perceived as descriptive there would be little incentive to change it at all (as different interpretations would be allowed). Similar arguments apply in the other direction. It is not easy to see which path would ultimately lead to less noise (on main + meta), but I do believe that the clearer the faq is the less noise we will have (though that tends to lean more towards prescriptive, but good prescriptive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T10:16:15.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-21T11:39:02.617" Score="11" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to give my contribution to the effort of some users in order to solve the current situation on the English SE. I asked this same question to Waiwai933 in his &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1613/a-look-at-question-quality&quot;&gt;A look at question quality&lt;/a&gt;&quot; as a comment..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to ask the community, especially the Moderators, when opening a recent posted question, how should we proceed on closing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First look whether it's On Topic? Or if there is a possible Duplicate? I didn't find a similar question asked on this Meta, nor after some Google search. On StackOverflow they ask something that seems similar, but it's not related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current choices are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Exact Duplicate;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Off Topic (close or migrate);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not Constructive;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not a real question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Too localised;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General Reference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thought is that we should proceed in this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it On Topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is there a Duplicate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it easily answerable with Google or dictionaries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it vague or incomplete?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it reasonably understandable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it too localised?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the questions here are too simple, I chose the &quot;shortest and fastest&quot; way, even if when considering a question, we actually have some thinking first before closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then, my question is&lt;/strong&gt;: What is your opinion or, if available, is there an &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; way to proceed I'm not aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; This is what I meant. This scheme is not definite and I've done it according to the order I wrote above. It's merely a demonstration. If this matter gains importance, and I think that even if it's not the most important one it's still something we can think about, I'll re-do it according to the final opinion. Feel free to comment whether you think this is some issue we should take care of or if it's not that important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OvDLN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-07-23T23:21:09.200" Title="Priority on Close-reason votes" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-21T12:35:52.627" Score="6" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT initially posted question had queries that might have returned wrong results, this is hopefully corrected now /EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not really a feature request, but more of an analysis of current state in respect to quality of question on EL&amp;amp;U. To formally turn it into a question, I pose the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a metric that is more adequate to judge the quality of questions than the raw score and if yes, what is it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(but only from data on the actual site; external reviews, references and opinions are good, but out of the scope of this question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that judging the quality from top score questions is not enough and can lead to wrong conclusions on the health of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I will propose a few other views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;top favorite questions - &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/s/567/most-favorited-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;top questions according to views/score ratio - &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/q/106435/lowest-views-score-ratio-top-score-views-ratio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;top views questions - &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/q/106436/top-views-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accidentally, the second query that looks at the ratio, if sorted in reverse and will show some of the 'disappointing' questions - the ones that a lot of people will read and a lot of people will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; vote up. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/q/106443/low-quality-according-to-view-vote-ratio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; are the results for that one (the queries have different cut offs for score) - you will find some of the recently discussed low quality questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have other interesting queries feel free to add them to the question or in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="8377" LastEditDate="2011-07-21T13:47:37.500" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T13:47:37.500" Title="Different ways to assess the quality of questions (also: how to find good and bad questions)" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1627" CreationDate="2011-07-21T15:42:00.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like you ordering and your wording better (I wouldn't be unhappy if they changed), but I don't think they would be top of the list for features to enhance by the SE developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't the order of these, the wording of these for the entire stackexchange software? Ask for a 'feature' change on meta.stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T15:42:00.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1546" CreationDate="2011-07-21T15:48:20.593" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a &lt;strong&gt;hard&lt;/strong&gt; and undeniable fact that new users that come to the site will expect &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; to accept &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; questions. It does not matter if the description says: &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&quot; I think this will be emphasized for the users that have been a part of stackexchange communities, for example I think you will not find any significant number of questions on stackoverflow closed because they are too basic (This is not verified, just my opinion; I am aware that the issue has been debated. Ultimately for stackoverflow this does not matter so much as it is not as frequent as it is here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If feasible at all following approach might improve the quality of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Have a short note that would say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of question asked here are general reference questions. If you are about to ask a question such as &quot;What is the meaning of the word apple?&quot; then you are not at the right place. Please try to research it in dictionaries. Even if you don't find satisfactory explanation it will help you ask a better question and to get much better answers (and also to avoid having your question closed as general reference) if you can explain what exact aspect of the dictionary definition you have a problem with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Also, once faq is fixed we could have (for new users only) the following attached to the submit question button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I confirm that I have read the faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="8377" LastEditDate="2011-07-21T16:01:50.270" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T16:01:50.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-21T18:53:13.240" Score="8" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, my 500+ reputation would allow me to cast close and open votes on a number of Stackexchange sites. Here, it requires 3000. Why is that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2011-07-21T23:08:04.193" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why do people need more reputation for EL&amp;U for the same privileges than on some other SE sites?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1631" CreationDate="2011-07-21T18:56:33.627" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those sites are in &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/?tab=beta&quot;&gt;beta&lt;/a&gt; and thus have relaxed rep requirements. ELU is &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/?tab=launched&quot;&gt;graduated&lt;/a&gt;. Check out Math, another graduated site you're registered on&amp;nbsp;— it, too, requires 3k rep to cast close and reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details, see the meta-Meta post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58587/reputation-requirements-compared&quot;&gt;Reputation requirements compared&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and the blog post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/when-will-my-site-graduate/&quot;&gt;When Will My Site Graduate?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-22T17:57:15.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1238" CreationDate="2011-07-21T18:57:32.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason may be that a bad question or answer can be down voted, which hurts your &quot;rep&quot; and potentially reduces your privileges, while a bad comment won't have that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T18:57:32.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1627" CreationDate="2011-07-21T21:47:21.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest checking for duplicates first. If a question is both off-topic and a duplicate, then the &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; question needs to be closed as off-topic, and the &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question needs to be marked as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next is topicality, because it doesn't matter how well-written the question is, nor how interesting and general, if it's off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, it's really up to personal preference; I don't really see anything about &lt;em&gt;Not Constructive&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Not a real question&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Too localised&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; to definitely prioritize one over the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this all really depends on the specific question: for example, if the question is so badly written that you can't make heads or tails of it, then it needs to be marked NARQ, even though it might also be a duplicate, off-topic, or general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T21:47:21.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1637" CreationDate="2011-07-22T05:40:06.737" Score="-4" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that a user posted an answer that was obviously grammatically incorrect, so I decided to make an edit/correction, and question where they had found the definition and why they would put it in their answer when the grammar was so glaringly wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems as though the user went and re-edited their answer back to the incorrect, grammatically wrong form.&#xA;I find this disrespectful, counterproductive, and think this should be grounds for suspension when done in a serial manner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastEditorUserId="24168" LastEditDate="2012-08-17T12:36:01.503" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T12:36:01.503" Title="When a user changes your edits back to their original, pre-edit form" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1636" CreationDate="2011-07-22T05:47:22.893" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33969/blonde-brunette-redhead-what-about-people-with-black-hair/33971#33971&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answerer's text is a direct quote from a dictionary, and editing it would misrepresent what the dictionary had said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The text is not grammatically wrong. Read it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spelled brunet when [this term is] used of a boy or man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suspension is reserved for extremely serious abuses of the system. This would typically not be one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-07-22T05:47:22.893" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-23T23:02:00.153" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to place a bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35389/there-is-are-more-than-one-whats-the-difference&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Question, but I can't find a &lt;strong&gt;start a bounty&lt;/strong&gt; button. I'm guessing this is a regressive bug. Or maybe I'm just going about it the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-07-24T08:37:11.880" Title="Lost &quot;start a bounty&quot; button" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2011-07-23T23:04:47.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;the FAQ item&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions must be at least 2 days old to be eligible for a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-07-23T23:04:47.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1627" CreationDate="2011-07-23T23:21:09.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I check which of the closing reasons applies, following the order they are listed in the dialog box for voting to close a question; this means that I would not close as general reference a question that is duplicating another one, or that is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-07-23T23:21:09.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1645" CreationDate="2011-07-24T15:57:31.160" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35418/past-tense-of-to-output-output-or-outputted/35436#35436&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; (the link is now for 10K users, as the answer has been deleted), for example, I notice that it doesn't answer to the question because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact somebody uses a word doesn't mean it's the correct word to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP doesn't report to which English dialect he is referring; if there are any difference between American English and British English, for example, the answer doesn't evidence that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does saying &quot;I have always used [X]&quot; answer a question about which of two words to use?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In which cases is the answer really a comment, and in which cases does the answer really answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T12:55:07.097" Title="Does saying &quot;I have always used [X]&quot; answer a question about which of two words to use?" Tags="|discussion|answers|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1643" CreationDate="2011-07-25T11:06:30.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If that is the answer in its entirety, then no - it is nothing more than an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opinion may or may not be right, but it doesn't stand for much of anything alone; community members may well evaluate it as correct, and support via comments, but this still doesn't make it authoritative or properly informative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should be explained and backed up by references where possible, with substantial content from sources apparent within the body, and further reading linked appropriately. We're always looking for a &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of sorts in there somewhere. Although, this effort doesn't necessarily turn the answer into a correct one, obviously - it is more expressive and therefore gaugeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4889" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T11:06:30.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1651" CreationDate="2011-07-25T12:04:20.967" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if italics were possible in question titles; is there a reason why we aren't able to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T15:53:56.560" Title="Why can't we format question titles?" Tags="|discussion|formatting|titles|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1643" CreationDate="2011-07-25T12:55:07.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Those types of answers would make decent comments but there isn't any reason to keep them around as answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T12:55:07.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1613" CreationDate="2011-07-25T13:35:31.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you disagree with my conclusions about our question quality? About my on-topic/off-topic proposal? About my opinion on not mandating research except in blatant General Reference cases? Or about anything else? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, and strongly. While I think there are good questions scattered about the site, here is my impression of the newest questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 boring interpretation/meaning of/is this sentence correct questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 closed is this sentence correct question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 pun/joke interpretation question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 word meaning question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 comparison/differences between two words questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 interesting single-word-request&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 mediocre but poorly worded single-word-request&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 boring single-word-request&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 off-topic formatting question (closed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 interesting etymology question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 question about metaphors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I got bored of doing this. So, naturally, my opinion is weighing heavily on this summary but here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;16 total&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6 boring or mediocre&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 &quot;basic&quot; questions regarding word meanings or differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 interesting questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the 14 unclosed, about half are dead weight and I'd personally upvote a whopping 2. I am not going to link to them here because I don't really want to focus on particular questions. I just wanted to point out that your type of analysis is... well, yours. That is perfectly fine but my perception of question quality on this site is drastically different. This experiment matches up pretty well with my daily experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I really dislike about this site is that no one seems to agree on what is good or bad quality; on or off topic. Some of the questions I consider dead weight are upvoted well. Perusing the new questions page is painful for me so I've stopped doing it. I hit 10k and now I go around voting to close and upvote/downvoting stuff waiting for an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yeah, I do think we have a quality problem. A &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; one &amp;mdash; one that will be kicking us in a few months. But I don't mind it so much as I mind the issue of the &lt;em&gt;community mass&lt;/em&gt; not being able to identify the bad questions. They seem perfectly willing to upvote &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; that tickles their fancy and then defend their bad questions and bad answers with long arguments in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of my surprise and intrigue on this site comes from seeing which questions get upvoted. The surprise and intrigue &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; come from interesting questions and answers. Instead, the psychology of voting is more interesting. That just seems like a bad sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T13:35:31.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1652" CreationDate="2011-07-25T14:16:28.727" Score="12" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I'm talking about is summed up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35550/generic-word-for-clitoris-and-penis&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, unfortunately, a legitimate question about English, however poor in quality and whatever its Beavis &amp;amp; Butthead quotient (off the charts, I should think), but it's headed straight for the multi-collider, and we know what happens then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't our mods have a special flag on questions that would keep them from the multi-collider? Our site alone among all SE sites can be gamed in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huh? Please? Such a flag would solve so many problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:47:29.480" Title="Isn't EL&amp;U a special case among StackExchange sites? Don't we need special mod privileges?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1649" CreationDate="2011-07-25T14:51:25.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the internet. There's nothing special here - sexually loaded questions always arise and looking at the site over any one month period with free input from anyone with an account meant that terrible questions will always be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the price of admitting all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has nothing to do with valid questions - and even valid questions directly relating to english.  It is about questions that the average 10th grader with a thesaurus, dictionary and wikipedia can't answer in 20 minutes time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current rush of &quot;is x a real word&quot; as well as the penis/clitoris one liner question should  be quashed with great prejudice a week or two after asking the OP to improve the question if the mods are feeling nice and it's the person's first really bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is about discussion between &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set aside whatever biological validity that question has, and imagine would any conversation in any university be about this question? No - they should all be down voted heavily, voted to be closed, and then deleted in due time. You have to ask everyone to keep the bar fairly high and something that is so obvious doesn't even start to rise to the occasion for being left open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a broken system when these questions pop up, get asked, get a chance to morph into something good or killed off in a quick death. Just close off bad questions - they can still be edited, salvaged and then re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to nurture every question, there are very bad questions for each specific site. If they don't get closed in two weeks time, then you'll need more mods. In the mean time, think of these as material for moderator training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10941" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T14:51:25.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1646" CreationDate="2011-07-25T15:53:56.560" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question titles are likely to end up in place where formatting is in-appropriate or technically impossible such as news feeds, the multi-colider, popup question notifiers, chat messages, etc. If a given title relies on formatting clues to make sense the alternate display locations will be less usable. It is better to rely on punctuation and good phrasing to make the title clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6807" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T15:53:56.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1649" CreationDate="2011-07-26T02:39:43.327" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very good idea. This question may not be the best of examples, but there are plenty of questions that are valid but attract more attention than they are worth. A special flag for moderators would seem an excellent solution: with the precision of a surgeon could the problem be kept under control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this has been discussed before. Certain people will not allow us to do this, without good reason or convincing more than ten percent of our top users. In fact, the ensuing conflict and personal insults from above have driven our most eminent linguist away from this website. The only course of action open to us now seems despair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T21:47:29.480" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:47:29.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1664" CreationDate="2011-07-26T11:49:41.947" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest the synonym, but there aren't too many of these questions, and I don't have the required votes in the tags to suggest it.  If someone else thinks it's a good idea, could they suggest it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T21:29:30.123" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:29:30.123" Title="Should we make [politeness] a synonym of [etiquette]?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-26T15:58:09.910" Score="37" ViewCount="3984" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1309/are-single-word-requests-always-welcomed-questions&quot;&gt;Are single word requests always welcomed questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/354/are-word-requests-allowed&quot;&gt;Are word requests allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consensus of earlier discussions was that these questions are on the low end, but not specifically disallowed. However, the last few months of experience have started to bias me against these questions, so much so that I think we need to reevaluate our decision to allow them. I'm now of the opinion that single word requests should be either &lt;strong&gt;disallowed entirely&lt;/strong&gt; or subject to much more &lt;strong&gt;stringent requirements&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We get lots of them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;Lots and lots.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of them are uninteresting and of low quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a high propensity to attract one-word answers and poor answers from newbie users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In chat, many of the most active users have complained about them. In other words, they &lt;em&gt;attract&lt;/em&gt; less active users but &lt;em&gt;repel&lt;/em&gt; the most active users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm opening up the floor for voting on whether to ban single word requests entirely, or else for new guidelines that will help us separate the rare wheat from the depressingly abundant chaff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T18:44:28.103" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T18:44:28.103" Title="Against single word requests" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic-off-topic|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-07-26T16:05:27.720" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am undecided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, I personally loathe them; I don't think I've ever answered any. I hardly ever read those questions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, what will be left of us if we throw them out? The only questions here that interest me are the ones about linguistics and style, with a few high-quality exceptions. If we forbid half of what we receive now, will we still be considered viable by our Overlords? And what if we threw out all other uninteresting questions too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; people who like answering these questions, perhaps we should keep them. Those questions are much of what we are about now. It is what many people liked when they joined us. Wouldn't we be doing them a serious injustice, if we suddenly changed policy so drastically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T16:05:27.720" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-07-26T18:46:00.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my suggestion: questions which are &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; should be off-topic. In other words, any question where the asker says merely &quot;Please give me a word that means X&quot; should be considered off-topic, as we're no longer in that business. This is the majority of word request questions. This is part of and parcel of the existing strategy to refuse copy editing and &quot;name my variable&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think we can leave a loophole for questions which combine word requests with some &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; question of linguistic interest, such as politeness or etymology. For examples, I offer the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30734/is-there-a-polite-alternative-to-no-thanks-im-full&quot;&gt;Is there a polite alternative to &amp;quot;No thanks, I&amp;#39;m full&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (word request + politeness)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30870/what-is-an-english-counterpart-to-the-japanese-signal-word-dokkoisho-uttered-u&quot;&gt;English counterpart to Japanese signal word, “Dokkoisho”&lt;/a&gt; (word request + onomatopoeia, japanese)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20493/what-did-they-call-illegitimate-children-in-old-english-days&quot;&gt;What did they call illegitimate children in Old English days?&lt;/a&gt; (word request + etymology, Old English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be a challenge to word this requirement in a way which is clear to new users, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T18:46:00.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-07-26T18:55:33.583" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30115/is-there-an-english-phrase-for-an-inability-to-actually-leave-already&quot;&gt;my top question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6170/is-there-a-word-or-phrase-for-the-feeling-you-get-after-looking-at-a-word-for-too/6174#6174&quot;&gt;my top answer&lt;/a&gt; are in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, so I'm probably biased, but I strongly believe these are valid questions that should not be outlawed. Like all questions, however, &lt;strong&gt;context is king&lt;/strong&gt;: the question needs to be as explicit as possible about the context where the word is desired, as well as why the words the questioner knows (if any) are inadequate to the purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; think that GAFT questions should be closed with prejudice, and any fastest-gun-in-the-west answers they've gathered should be deleted. But I don't see this as a problem with the s-w-r tag; it's a general problem that can exist in any tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T18:55:33.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-26T19:07:53.937" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happened to the &quot;# People Chatting&quot; box in the sidebar? Meta still has it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A95un.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;chatroom link in sidebar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it seems to have disappeared from the main site. Is this a temporary glitch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm aware of the &quot;chat&quot; link in the top toolbar, but that takes you to the list of rooms, not directly to the main chatroom.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit about 5 minutes later: the link is back. Hmph. (It wasn't there this morning, but I didn't post anything, because I thought it might be something temporary. When it still wasn't there 6 hours later, I thought I had confirmed it was an actual problem. Silly me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later edit: I see my question isn't quite clear. The chat box was missing from english.stackexchange.com, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; from a question page. I don't see how the explanation given for question pages could possibly apply to the ginormous list of questions on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T05:09:14.473" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T05:09:14.473" Title="What happened to the sidebar's chatroom link?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-07-26T19:22:06.783" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mostly agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests/1657#1657&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt;. I like the intent behind these questions but I am not happy with most of them. My personal favorite is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure&quot;&gt;Is there a word to describe a highly desirable cursed treasure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that questions like &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; are perfect for this site. There isn't any way to look something like that up in a thesaurus and the concept described is extremely useful and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10991/whats-the-opposite-word-for-sin&quot;&gt;What's the opposite word for “sin”?&lt;/a&gt; This question isn't actually tagged as a single-word-request but it essentially is exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal criteria for whether a single-word-request is worth having:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I instantly pick up a thesaurus to look for the answer? BAD QUESTION&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the concept too narrowly focused a particular technology? BAD QUESTION&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the question having difficulty describing the intended meaning? BAD QUESTION&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I immediately relate to the concept being presented? GOOD QUESTION&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question provide a clear and understandable example of the concept? GOOD QUESTION&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the concept distinct from similar concepts or words? GOOD QUESTION&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, this tag is like any other. If we hack away at the &quot;EL&amp;amp;U as thesaurus&quot; perception I think we can turn it into an extremely useful category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T19:22:06.783" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-07-26T22:06:09.763" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, it's the &lt;em&gt;unanswerability&lt;/em&gt; of many of these questions that's the problem. They're not just subjective — they're mindreading, resembling...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo_%28game%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taboo&lt;/a&gt; — Guess away! I've got something really specific in mind,&#xA;but can't tell you any of its synonyms. That would be cheating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Phrase_%28game%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catch Phrase&lt;/a&gt; — It should start with an E and have three&#xA;syllables and rhyme with &quot;aardvark,&quot; but I'm not allowed to tell you&#xA;that in my initial question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_%28game%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Outburst&lt;/a&gt; — Let's just list everything related to a topic!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pictionary&lt;/a&gt; — You're asking for the name of a species of tree?&#xA;No, definitely a kind of cloud. Fuzzy request, yet looks like&#xA;words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of the confusing sort: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27165/a-word-for-something-you-didnt-know-youd-like&quot;&gt;A word for something you didn&amp;#39;t know you&amp;#39;d like&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26960/alternate-words-for-paperwork&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26960/alternate-words-for-paperwork&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3778/better-word-for-petition-when-the-request-is-a-vacation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3778/better-word-for-petition-when-the-request-is-a-vacation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;? I don't think it's that different from other questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Well-defined, distinct concept with necessary context presented; not too limited. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To answer will require a human, not just a reverse dictionary; an answer will need to not just list words but explain why a word or phrase is appropriate, and make associations that weren't easily searchable before. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't ask us to do all the work; presents a practical problem showing effort at solving it (the proofreading example we don't accept, &quot;are there any mistakes?&quot;, is a lot like &quot;can you rewrite this idea into a coherent word or phrase for me?&quot; in terms of a bound on effort).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if a faq change would really help us keep some of these questions and not others, since to me it boils down to &quot;ask good questions.&quot; We could try coaching new users with comments on borderline s-w-r questions, especially before they get downvoted or closed. Maybe something like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Could you tell us more about where you hope to use the word or phrase?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;For this type of question, we usually like to know a little more about the words or phrases you've considered. Can you tell us why [x] or [y] don't quite fit the meaning you're looking for?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T22:06:09.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-07-27T00:17:35.690" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I see some of the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; I always ask myself: Why is the OP limiting the answers to the one reporting a single word? Is there a practical reason for making single word requests, or the OP is just asking the question for amusement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the OP generally doesn't know if there is a single word that matches the criteria reported in the question, I think that the limit of a single word should be removed; thus, questions should not be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Request for phrases (including the phrases made of just a word) should not be accepted if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is not a practical reason behind asking that (as it should be with other questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is too generic, and it doesn't specify exactly the criteria that the requested phrase should match&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is asking a synonym (or antonym) for a word when that synonym can be easily found in a dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point should avoid situations where the OP doesn't describe too restrictive criteria, but then discard the suggested words for a non specified reason, such as &quot;all words but that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2014-07-13T16:03:27.430" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T16:03:27.430" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1653" CreationDate="2011-07-27T00:24:29.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me they don't seem to be always synonyms, as I could be polite without following a &quot;customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular profession or group.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T00:26:15.807" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T00:26:15.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1658" CreationDate="2011-07-27T01:48:24.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should always be present on meta. On the main site, what shows on the sidebar depends on how many answers the question has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because we don't want to push the related questions too far down the page, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T01:48:24.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1653" CreationDate="2011-07-27T07:29:36.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although I see kiamlaluno's distinction, that doesn't mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politeness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politeness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politeness&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etiquette&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etiquette&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etiquette&lt;/a&gt; are worth their own tags, considering the relatively few number of questions that we get about them and the considerable overlap between the two tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have created the tag synonym in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etiquette&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etiquette&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etiquette&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politeness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politeness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politeness&lt;/a&gt; direction given that the latter is broader and already has more questions. &lt;s&gt;but not yet merged the tags&lt;/s&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;If there are no further objections, I will merge the tags within the next day or two.&lt;/s&gt; The tags have been merged. If you have strong opinions against this, the merge and synonym can always be undone, but please make a good argument for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T21:29:12.183" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:29:12.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-27T17:21:18.970" Score="19" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This is partially a work in progress, I guess. It is more of a thought dump on the subject because I see a lot of negative reactions to something I consider a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; thing. All thoughts, comments, criticisms are welcome. I don't have any plans for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, people react poorly to having one of their questions closed. This is understandable but it suggests a misunderstanding of why we close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Closing your question is &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; for you&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about your question is giving us pause and we feel that it would be best to wait on answering until we get the issue resolved. This does a handful of things that &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... get better answers. A little clarification goes a long way toward getting an answer that helps you. Instead of a handful of, &amp;quot;Well, I think this is blah...&amp;quot; you get &amp;quot;This is the answer look at these awesome references.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... potentially mitigate downvotes. If your question is attracting downvotes, a close will typically stop them and give people a chance to resolve their concerns in a more constructive manner. A few edits later, your question will get reopened and those downvoting you will have a chance to change their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... point toward an already existing answer. Closing as a duplicate will give you a link to an answer that the voters feel will answer your question. It may not be a perfect match but it gets you far enough that we feel you can make the rest of the connections on your own (or with a little bit of research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... learn how to ask better questions. After a close-reopen process you have an opportunity to learn more about what the EL&amp;amp;U crowd likes in a question. This is valuable information! The more you learn about asking questions the better answers to those questions will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Your question is not yours alone&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are the primary focus when answering a question you have asked but the StackExchange network also considers future visitors when closing. Sometimes we can make a few changes to your question that will still get you your help but also increases the chance of helping people wandering in from a web search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we close a question, sometimes we are explicitly taking these future visitors into account. Something about your question may be accidentally excluding these visitors from getting &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; questions answered. A few edits and a reopen will help both you &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is easy to see this as people walking all over your question, that isn't what they are trying to do. While your name is attached to the question, the question really belongs to everyone who uses EL&amp;amp;U. This includes those future visitors and part of our job is to make sure that we are accurately predicting (and answering) those questions. We can do that by closing your question, making a few edits or changes, and reopening. And we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:45:21.310" Title="Closing is not bad" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|self-governance|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-27T17:43:36.897" Score="24" ViewCount="791" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to let you all know that I'm a StackExchange employee and I'm working on improving the English Language site. Basically, that means I'll be correcting things like grammar, spelling, punctuation, and trying to make titles clearer (and represent the actual question better). Of course, we are a collaboratively edited site, so if you liked something better before I changed it, go ahead and change it back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2011-07-27T19:55:30.110" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Who is Lauren Ψ and why is she changing posts? (Introducing myself.)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2011-07-27T20:02:10.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you give us some clarifications on what kind of criteria you're using to identify the posts you're going to alter? Namely, what are the things you look for in determining what you'll change, and what kind of approach do you plan to take while making those changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T20:02:10.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2011-07-27T20:05:58.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really, have The Powers That Be decided we are such an obstreperous lot here, with such faulty moderation and so high a proportion of posts not sufficiently edited for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;old lady in Dubuque&lt;/a&gt; that we have become a constant source of embarrassment to said Powers, and now need someone to monitor us within an inch of our lives lest we be caught eating paste or running with scissors or making fun of the Junior League or any one of a number of other godawful unmentionable things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2011-07-28T15:32:18.260" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T15:32:18.260" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2011-07-27T21:19:11.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just FYI, due to a recent spate of events, EL&amp;amp;U has a &quot;titles must be censored&quot; policy, which is why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/9293/revisions&quot;&gt;this revision&lt;/a&gt;, helpful though it is, should not have gone through. I haven't edited it back because I don't want to bump it, so I would appreciate it if you would change it back with your special no-bump powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:19:11.663" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1211" CreationDate="2011-07-27T21:44:03.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to take a quick look at this old topic again, or more specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we against using full sentence question titles in favor of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;'word1' vs 'word2'&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; format for purposes of simplicity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the topic of &amp;quot;vs&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;versus&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Caps&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;lowercase&amp;quot;, quote type, or other punctuation, I want to know if we discourage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;word1&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;word2&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;word1&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;word2&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'd like to know is that Stack Exchange is generally encouraging full titles to make them easier to read, but I feel that in this case, the non-full question form is easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:44:03.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2011-07-27T21:49:26.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I absolutely &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; this post. It's great, and now I can have something I point people to when they complain about closing. +1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just two short notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Closing your question is &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; for you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what you mean, but that does sound a little like people should want their questions to be closed. I don't have any replacement suggestions, but just thought I should let you know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... stop downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe &lt;em&gt;discourage downvotes&lt;/em&gt; instead? Closing doesn't actually prevent voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-07-27T21:49:26.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2011-07-28T10:29:24.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely clear about the wording of this 'question'.  If you are changing, for example, titles to make them 'safe for radio' then I'm happy with that (in the specialized sense of &quot;I think it's a really bad idea but I'm not paying for this site and I'd rather put up with it than go somewhere else&quot;).  But if you  start correcting grammar and usage on a site devoted to grammar and usage then you had better be very certain you know more about &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; topic than the poster, and even so you are destroying the point of a community-moderated site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In case it's not obvious, this is not a personal attack: I'm querying the idea of a 'sub-editor' on &lt;em&gt;this particular site&lt;/em&gt;, and hoping it's just infelicitous wording).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2011-07-28T22:10:00.257" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T22:10:00.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-26T18:57:05.487" Score="10" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I write a text, I am sometimes looking for a very specific word, which might or might not be present in English (my brain knows that there is such a word, but sometimes it can't provide it because it knows it in another language). My usual approach in such case is to take a word which is close to what I need, type it into a thesaurus (I usually take thesaurus.com) and read the lists of synonyms in hope to find this exact &quot;best&quot; word. If I see a word among them which is closer, I search for its synonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, however, time consuming, and sometimes I just hunt through chains of words which I think will take me closer to the goal, but in fact turn out to be less than ideal. I think I could fare much better with a service which provides me with words which are close to or exact synonyms to two or more words I have provided. For example, if I type &lt;code&gt;sequence&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;order&lt;/code&gt;, it should give me synonyms like &lt;code&gt;continuity&lt;/code&gt;, but not &lt;code&gt;discipline&lt;/code&gt; (because &lt;code&gt;discipline&lt;/code&gt; is a synonym for &lt;code&gt;order&lt;/code&gt;, but not for &lt;code&gt;sequence&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the best case, this tool would also allow to search which are not exact synonyms, but closely related to the words I have provided as input. For example, if I gave it just &lt;code&gt;sequence&lt;/code&gt;, it could then list &lt;code&gt;series&lt;/code&gt; among the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that good thesauri segment their answers by the meaning of the word, but while this is good enough for the above example, there are cases where it doesn't help, especially if the meanings I need to differentiate between are very close. So is there a tool which can provide that for me? Free and online would be perfect, but I am open to tools which I could afford (but not swiss knives of linguistic tools which can do that among other functions and cost thousands of dollars). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4252" OwnerDisplayName="rumtscho" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T05:55:16.960" Title="Is there a thesaurus which takes more than one word as an input?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2011-08-09T13:52:54.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1673" CreationDate="2011-07-26T19:24:20.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that you are thinking of synonyms as words that are 'nearby' in meaning, so that the lexicon is one bug graph with edges. The synonyms of a given word is simply the  neighborhood of its node&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like you are looking for the &lt;em&gt;overlap of the neighborhoods&lt;/em&gt; of two different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roget's and dictionary-like thesauruses expect that you have one word for which you are searching for many possible nearby words. In physical books or on-line, that is the limitation that you point out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the on-line (but not totally free) service &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.visualthesaurus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Visual Thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; that gives a graph representation of the nearness of words, from which it is easy to follow links from a given word in the direction of a second word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some sense you are kind of looking for a google-like double hit in a thesaurus, if both words appear in a single thesaurus entry. One can get this by &lt;strong&gt;using google directly&lt;/strong&gt; with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;thesaurus sequence order&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where you will find 'continuity' in the first word set in the first hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" OwnerDisplayName="Mitch" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T19:24:20.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1673" CreationDate="2011-07-26T20:46:05.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might be looking for a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reverse dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. It can be hit-or-miss, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OneLook&lt;/a&gt; has an online one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" OwnerDisplayName="Martha" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T20:46:05.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1673" CreationDate="2011-07-26T20:56:12.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;real&quot; thesaurus, like a not-so-pocket &lt;em&gt;Roget's&lt;/em&gt; is not a dictionary of synonyms. It's organised conceptually, not alphabetically, and intended for browsing rather than for input-output. Using Google as suggested in Mitch's answer will work, but so will a proper dead tree edition of &lt;em&gt;Roget's Thesaurus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5095" OwnerDisplayName="bye" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T20:56:12.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1528" CreationDate="2011-07-28T15:30:30.853" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes reputation 3000 to vote to close.  We have too few of those guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T15:30:30.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2011-07-28T17:45:10.700" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for the confusion about what I'm doing here. Check out this post for more info: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100137/what-is-the-meaning-of-chaos-is-it-related-to-the-psi-character&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100137/what-is-the-meaning-of-chaos-is-it-related-to-the-psi-character&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T17:45:10.700" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2386" CreationDate="2011-07-28T20:35:19.577" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I hover my mouse over the UserName against a Comment, that user's current rep value is displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to replicate this behaviour in the &quot;Users&quot; display? And do I need to make out a specific case for this request, or should it simply be decided on the basis of how many people upvote this question, and/or how technically difficult it is to implement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-01-23T03:03:13.330" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T03:03:13.330" Title="Hover text to show total rep score in the &quot;Users&quot; display" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2011-07-28T23:46:58.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is excellent, and I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2015/why-was-my-question-closed&quot;&gt;shamelessly copied it&lt;/a&gt; for inclusion in Programmers.SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/faq-index-for-programmers-se&quot;&gt;meta FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree the &quot;stop downvotes&quot; is problematic, as there's no guarantee that closing will do such a thing. Instead, I changed it to &quot;potentially mitigate downvotes&quot; which seems to capture more accurately what occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional change I made to the same section was to replace the last sentence with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few edits later, your question will get reopened and those downvoting you will have a chance to change their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As reopening a question doesn't automatically reverse down-votes: it just unlocks people's votes from before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this sentence is problematic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are lots of other reasons to close-as-duplicate but if it happens to you, be thankful that you just got a single link containing one or more viable answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting it out there that are many other reasons to close a question as a duplicate poisons the rest of the advice: I can turn around and say, &quot;well sure &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; questions were closed as legitimate duplicates, but in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; case, &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; question was closed as a duplicate for an undisclosed, illegitimate reason and now I'm more annoyed than before.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, that someone should &quot;be thankful that they just got a single link&quot; sounds a bit condescending. I get what you were trying to say, but I think the sentiment is fully covered by the first part of the section and doesn't need to be rephrased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I removed that sentence, and I would suggest the same thing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2512" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2512" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T08:26:46.890" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T23:55:48.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2011-07-29T00:42:30.347" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me say first that I agree with you in principle, that closing should be taken as a learning experience (by the closee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in practice, it really doesn't come out that way, especially with respect to &quot;learning how to write better questions&quot; and &quot;getting better answers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question is closed, it signals to the OP that the whole question and anything near it is bad (along with the emotional feeling of failing). There is always the option of rewriting the question better, but once it is closed there is a cloud of stigma around it (in the OPs mind). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this then implies that, on getting better answers, it can only come from better writing on another unrelated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what this means is that the &lt;em&gt;fear&lt;/em&gt; of impending closing might help the OP know to rewrite. People with rep under a given value, who are less likely to have the site local culture to know what is good and bad, can't see how many close votes have been made, so don't know to fear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments on the question seem to be the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; way for the OP to learn anything substantive without being scared away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing certainly helps the site by pushing bad questions out of the way, but the claims that it is a teaching moment don't seem to me to be founded on actual practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T00:42:30.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2011-07-29T11:51:23.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never noticed you before and considering this post is recent, that explains why. I think it was a nice decision to post this question so as to avoid incomprehensions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you made it sound like it's your only task... Is it or am I wrong? I mean, it sounds weird to know of a &lt;em&gt;specific-purpose&lt;/em&gt; moderator... Just saying, though.  Wish you good work! (Now I'm not sure whether this expression exists or whether it's the best one or not...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T11:51:23.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1685" CreationDate="2011-07-29T14:54:06.780" Score="2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bear with my curiosity here - with no questions or answers, where did Lauren's 7 rep come from, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why does Lauren Ψ have 7 rep?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1684" CreationDate="2011-07-29T15:00:26.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95?m=1460339#1460339&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; left by a fellow mod in chat, her first three edits had to be peer-reviewed (for whatever reason). That's 3×2 = 6 points, plus the one everyone starts with, makes 7. Now Lauren seems to have the full edit privileges. No peer reviews, no points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T15:00:26.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-29T15:00:51.240" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; has roughly 250 questions. Some of these questions are good; some not as good. Today I saw a question I thought was skirting the danger line and noticed it &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; had the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; and I paused to wonder about the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have much to say on the subject other than, &quot;I don't know what to think yet.&quot; This topic has come up a few times in chat and the responses seem mixed. So, in an effort to foster some good discussion, what are your thoughts on this tag and its questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the best examples from this tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some bad examples from this tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can we do to improve questions with this tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note: I personally really like the idea of doing these styles of &quot;tag reviews&quot; much like we just indirectly did for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;. To be clear, I am not proposing &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; specific action regarding questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; or the tag itself. This is meant as a good place to offer thoughts and potential advice for people who care about the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T15:00:51.240" Title="Tag review: [meaning-in-context]" Tags="|discussion|tags|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1688" CreationDate="2011-07-29T18:05:44.627" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editing a question has the effect of bumping it on top of the front page.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should we limit the number of edits done on old questions? Bumping forty old questions in the front page has just the effect to hide the newest questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking the question because something I observed between today, and yesterday. I am not putting the blame on who is editing questions; I am wondering if we should not schedule those activities, in the same way it has been done in a different SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-07-29T19:13:16.317" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T09:30:17.800" Title="Should we limit the number of edits per day on old questions?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1687" CreationDate="2011-07-29T18:42:06.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you referring to JSBangs removing a tag from 40 different questions? That's the only thing I see at the moment, scrolling down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to remove a lot of tags, &lt;strong&gt;you should post a request here on meta,&lt;/strong&gt; since developers have the ability to destroy tags without causing revisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the mistake in this case is deciding to manually remove a tag with too many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T18:42:06.153" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2011-07-29T18:57:11.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I beg to disagree @MrHen.  If the purpose of closing questions genuinely was to give OPs an opportunity to amend them, there were countless better names for this measure - such as &quot;suspended&quot; or &quot;need reviewing&quot; or &quot;frozen&quot;.  It is doubtless in the mind of the overwhelming majority of EL&amp;amp;U users that &quot;closing&quot; is meant as a deterrent and operated in this way. There would not even be a need for your original post in the first place if that were the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plain truth is that just as any other group, EL&amp;amp;U needs borders to delineate its identity; border that can serve as a reference about what's in and what's out.  No borders simply means no identity. A universal characteristic of borders however is that they need to be defended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closing mechanism is just &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; tool out of many with which EL&amp;amp;U's identity can be defended. It is entirely legitimate and there's no need to beautify the picture.  There are plenty of good reasons for closing posts such as the merge of duplicates, the circumvention of blatant trolling attempts or the elimination of off-topic and peeving posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this could seem an overly bellicose thesis, there is nevertheless no intended aggressiveness.  If I walk into a hardware store and express the wish to purchase some food, the shopkeeper is perfectly entitled to turn me away albeit as courteously as possible: &quot;Sorry sir, we don't sell this here&quot; and I will doubtlessly apologise for my misunderstanding.  Please note that in an ideal world, the shop keeper refrains to take advantage of the situation and belittle the customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar situations happen regularly in EL&amp;amp;U.  And I think the overwhelming majority of the community's members would agree with the necessity to sanitise the influx of incoming questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inherent problem of defence means is their possible misuse.  The source of disagreement actually lies in where the borders lie. There is unfortunately no quick fix for that for the simple reason that different personalities will fatally have different readings of the on-topic/off-topic limits and also perceive the submitted questions through the prism of their vastly different sensitivities and upbringings.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was until recently distinctly pleasant and refreshing about EL&amp;amp;U was the spirit of tolerance and openness it had manage do develop on its own.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, what I believe many here now deem misguided is that it all looks like there were an unwritten 11th commandment outranking all others and transverse to all on-topic bullet items that could be summed up as &quot;and of course questions can deal with all of the above except if they allude to arousable body parts in the anatomy of primates, mating tendencies usually judged deviant by the main monotheist religions and more generally subjects commonly deemed objectionable in contemporary western cultures&quot;.  To be fair, the convention is that the 11th commandment should only apply to question titles - which I personally find to be a good compromise between the limitless enthusiasm of would-be linguists such as myself and the paramount health of the stackexchange business model.  This compromise also implicitly vindicates the maturity shown in many occasions by the community in its treatment of dodgy questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In coda venenum&quot; they say.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now that this &lt;em&gt;modus vivendi&lt;/em&gt; has been painfully reached I believe the balance should not be tipped further in the direction of greater severity and I believe close-button-happy privileged users should refrain from indulging into more censorship than what is needed and turn away possible eminent-members in the making .  Said otherwise I find the &quot;closing is good [for you]&quot; theory as developed above too close to &quot;You belong here only if you cast yourself in the form&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Isn't it for instance a striking observation that a high proportion of EL&amp;amp;U's most prominent members are non native speakers?  Don't misunderstand me, I just mean to say &quot;let more of these come in, EL&amp;amp;U deserve them as much as they deserve EL&amp;amp;U&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5432" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T18:57:11.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1684" CreationDate="2011-07-29T21:36:50.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 7 rep is incalculable. It's a direct result of raw &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/100137/164286&quot;&gt;CHAOS&lt;/a&gt; being unleashed upon SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T21:36:50.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1693" CreationDate="2011-07-30T13:05:44.847" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bronze for 10, silver for 25, gold for 100?  I had a notion that there used to be such badges, but I can't be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-07-30T15:32:35.230" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should we have badges for high-voted comments?" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|comments|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2011-07-30T15:14:58.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/24/pundit&quot;&gt;silver badge for 10 comments that have been up-voted 5 times&lt;/a&gt;. It is a silver badge because it's not easy to get at least 5 up-votes on 10 different comments, and that can be classified as &quot;longer term goal.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The equivalent bronze badge is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/17/commentator&quot;&gt;Commentator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no gold badges because comments are second class citizens; badges that would have the effect of increasing the number of comments (which is what I saw happening in some cases in some SE sites) would not have a good effect on an SE site, as questions and answers are the main focus. Between questions and answers, it's then the answers that have more importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T16:23:56.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-01T00:09:56.450" Score="0" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the user called &quot;delete&quot; at several places in the older questions. However, I can't view his profile or anything. I was just wondering, who is delete? Why can't I view his profile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T13:53:46.423" Title="Who is &quot;delete&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2011-08-01T00:13:02.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has already been asked twice at MSO, look at the following:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/45580/165097&quot;&gt;More badges for comments / Bronze and gold versions of “Pundit”&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/99833/165097&quot;&gt;Can we have a badge for up-voted comments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This request has already been rejected twice, but it's still a good idea. I reckon if we had more support for this proposal, it might come into being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T00:13:02.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1694" CreationDate="2011-08-01T00:32:05.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an account that has been deleted as requested by the user who was using it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users cannot delete their own account, but they need to change the username to &quot;Please delete&quot; (or something similar), add a note in the user profile, and send an email to the Stack Exchange staff. After that, they will take the necessary actions to remove the user account; the posts done with that account, when they don't have a score of −3, will be left on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of adding a note in the user profile is to give the proof the user is asking to delete a user account for which the user has access. If the user profile is not changed as reported, the Stack Exchange team doesn't proceed with the account deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-01T13:53:46.423" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T13:53:46.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-02T10:44:13.923" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen people add a comment but I can't see that link anywhere in my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a need for a certain amount of reputation to comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11422" LastEditorUserId="11762" LastEditDate="2011-10-27T00:22:50.297" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T00:22:50.297" Title="How do I add a comment?" Tags="|support|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2011-08-02T10:50:29.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;under &quot;Leave Comments&quot; (and be sure to read the footnote, too!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-08-02T10:50:29.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2011-08-02T10:50:31.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need &lt;strong&gt;at least 50 reputation&lt;/strong&gt; in order to add comments to any post. However, until then, you should always be able to post comments on &lt;strong&gt;your own questions and answers, and any answers to your own questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The otion should be &quot;add comment&quot; and should be located in the bottom left of any eligible post, as shown below using your question here on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/81MbG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Quick Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-08-02T10:50:31.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1673" CreationDate="2011-08-03T05:55:16.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Sets can be good for this sort of thing, although the results can be a bit messy for anything other than very simple concrete nouns. As an example, if I enter your suggested terms (&lt;em&gt;sequence&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;order&lt;/em&gt;), I get the following results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sequence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;order&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sequencing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;temporal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;monkey&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neatness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cleaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;arrangement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orderliness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tidiness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;regularity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of those, only &lt;em&gt;arrangement&lt;/em&gt; seems like a good fit to me (and &lt;em&gt;monkey&lt;/em&gt; is completely bizarre). However, if we start with &lt;em&gt;apple&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;kiwi&lt;/em&gt;, we get these results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orange &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kiwi &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;apple &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;banana &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pineapple &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;strawberry &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grape &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cherry &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peach &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;watermelon &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blueberry &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tomato &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cantaloupe &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pumpkin &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For certain types of searches, or for another arrow in your quiver, it can be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11481" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T05:55:16.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-08-03T06:02:11.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first question should not have been closed unless letterforms and letter shapes are all off-topic as those letterforms predate typography. They derive from Roman cursive with the funny a possibly being a direct holdover from uncial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11573" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T06:02:11.470" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1687" CreationDate="2011-08-03T09:30:17.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, this brings the related question: &lt;strong&gt;should tag edits really bump questions?&lt;/strong&gt; They are most often done either when the question is young, because it was badly tagged by its author (and thus in the top of the list anyway), or on old questions as part of retagging efforts (in which case, do we want to bump it?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T09:30:17.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1307" CreationDate="2011-08-03T12:48:25.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think questions asking for knowledge about a specific field are off-topic.  In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36429/what-is-the-definition-of-a-pointcut&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; a definition is being requested for a word that was created for and is only used in a very precise technical context.  Further information is being requested about why that term was coined.  I think such questions are best asked on a site for experts in the relevant field.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T13:02:22.580" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1708" CreationDate="2011-08-04T16:51:53.717" Score="16" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume it's not just me: Why have some users added special characters to their usernames? The list includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kit (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8360/kit&quot;&gt;KitΘδς&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;z7sg (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/5964/z7sg&quot;&gt;z7sg Ѫ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JSBangs (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/48/jsbngs&quot;&gt;JSBᾶngs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martha (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1547/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aedia (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8732/aedia&quot;&gt;aedia λ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alain Pannetier (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/5432/alain-pannetier&quot;&gt;Alain Pannetier Φ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RegDwight ♦ (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/300/regdwight&quot;&gt;RegDwight Ѭſ道 ♦&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Matt Ellen (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3559/matt-ellen&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr. Shiny and New (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/380/mr-shiny-and-new&quot;&gt;Mr. Shiny and New 安宇&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robusto (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2303/robusto&quot;&gt;Robusto 初夢&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bogdan Lataianu (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/5249/bogdan-ltianu&quot;&gt;Bogdan Lătăianu&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rumtscho (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/4252/&quot;&gt;румчо&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(OK, me too... drm65 turned into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/10041/dr65&quot;&gt;drɱ65 δ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-09-11T09:23:05.603" Title="What's up with the strange characters in some display names?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1706" CreationDate="2011-08-04T18:01:22.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a new trend: To be cool, you need to have at least a greek letter in your username. Just don't use &lt;em&gt;Ψ&lt;/em&gt;, if you are not part of the CHAOS project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of RegDwight, as he is moderator, the diamond (&lt;em&gt;♦&lt;/em&gt;) is used to show he is a moderator; it's not a character he added to his username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-04T18:12:54.380" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T18:12:54.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1706" CreationDate="2011-08-04T22:03:23.820" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95/2011/8/4/12-14&quot;&gt;chat thang&lt;/a&gt;. Various theories abound about how it started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's all Alain Pannetier Φ's fault&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But since he added his Φ in direct imitation of the CHAOS team's Ψ, it's really all Joel's fault&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We're just χάοτικ by nature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's to celebrate EL&amp;amp;U's birthday&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there was argument about how the trend started all of 5 seconds after it started, so you will probably never get a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T22:03:23.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1710" CreationDate="2011-08-05T18:01:04.053" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know I can do a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/englishmeta/s/824/how-much-rep-would-i-have-if-there-were-no-rep-cap-fixed?UserId=10041&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt;, but that only updates every month or so, and right now it's stuck at 70, which doesn't help.  I could also do the math, looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10041/drm65?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; (133 total), but that could eventually get old.  I tried simply &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;, but that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation on this per-site meta is derived entirely from the main site; nothing to show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which... well, doesn't help, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's not terribly important that I know my meta score, but since there is a separate reputation page for meta, I wondered if there is something that adds up the day-by-day scores, or if one is forced to do the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-08-06T05:11:10.420" Title="Is there a way I can view the sum of my theoretical meta rep?" Tags="|discussion|support|reputation|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1709" CreationDate="2011-08-05T18:06:00.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no convenient way to get the full detail of your Meta reputation. All routes which formerly worked to this effect (reputation audit, the old graph, and the even older tri-monthly sums) have since been removed. The swiftest option, however unwieldy it actually is, is to manually do the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-08-05T18:06:00.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17" CreationDate="2011-08-07T02:36:15.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should promote to people from all over the Internet, from all domains of activity. The way it is now it looks like programmers' English corner. I think a big percentage of people here are programmers. Yes, they are awesome users, but it makes a bias.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One solution is to ease the creation of SE sites which are not about computers.&#xA;I counted 27 out of 59 (about a half) SE sites computer related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="5249" LastEditDate="2011-08-07T02:41:26.657" LastActivityDate="2011-08-07T02:41:26.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1713" CreationDate="2011-08-07T19:19:51.400" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this in the docs?  I began this with &quot;7.&quot;  (seven dot) but it came out as &quot;1.&quot; instead.  I'm guessing the software thinks I am starting a numbered list, and requires me to start with 1 and not 7.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this when inserting a definition into my answer, which was definition number 7 in the dictionary where I found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-10-01T17:37:38.703" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T17:37:38.703" Title="Strange numbering" Tags="|support|status-completed|markdown|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1712" CreationDate="2011-08-07T19:43:17.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. Numbered lists are easy&#xA;2. Markdown keeps track of&#xA;   the numbers for you&#xA;7. So this will be item 3.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a quote from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;editing-help&lt;/a&gt; page. It's not &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; intuitive what it means from that, but essentially, Markdown detects what you &lt;em&gt;presumably&lt;/em&gt; input as a numbered list and always starts a 1, always progresses in numeric order. Since you can quote lists, it also occurs with plain blockquotes, but not in code formatting as demonstrated above. It is a convenience in some scenarios, but as you show, there are some points where it is a problem instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to start at a different number, I recommend using parentheses rather than periods. Alternatively, if you are citing something in which the original source uses a period, then surround it with backticks to invoke code formatting on the number alone. It doesn't look all that fancy, but... unfortunately I don't know of an alternative method otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;7.&lt;/code&gt;  Is this in the docs?  I began this with &quot;7.&quot;  (seven dot) but it came out as &quot;1.&quot; instead.  I'm guessing the software thinks I am starting a numbered list, and requires me to start with 1 and not 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-08-07T19:43:17.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1568" CreationDate="2011-08-08T01:26:11.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am quite new to EL&amp;amp;U and so, do not consider myself qualified to answer who the audience could be or should be. Since I have not invested much effort into it, it is not all that important if the site itself reaches its intended audience. I'll stick to the questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what kind of visitors are we trying to attract? Who are we writing for? What types of people are we aiming to entertain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I'll answer the question from the point of view of a potential user. What attracted me to the site was the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do consider myself an English language enthusiast. I'm primarily here to learn and to discuss interesting ideas. (About the importance of accommodating disjunctive pronouns in English grammar, or the balance between prescriptive and descriptive approaches, the latest trends in English linguistics, etc. Or &quot;English questions and negation with &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; in syntax&quot;, to pick an example from today.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am certainly not looking for a site where people ask questions about whether &quot;numerical mathematics&quot; is redundant, or &quot;scholar vs. scientist&quot; or &quot;quicker vs. faster&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;e-mail me&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;e-mail to me&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (some examples from today).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To borrow a term from electronics, I'm looking to maximize the signal to noise ratio &lt;em&gt;for me&lt;/em&gt;. So far, the ratio has been mediocre to bad. Of course, I'll make the disclaimer explicit: I am ONLY speaking with my own interests in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11241" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T01:26:11.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1716" CreationDate="2011-08-08T06:50:12.407" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to see kind of basic data of this site, for example, the real time number of users, the time zone distribution of the number, the weekly distribution? If I can do that, I might be able to post my questions effectively. I’d like to consider a strategy for posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the most important things to attract people to my questions might be to post good questions, to write logically and simply, to improve my writing English, but I would think it would be better to do everything I can to get better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping I could see such data somewhere in this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: It’s been about three months since I joined EL&amp;amp;U. I really enjoy this site. I’d like to say thank you, and I love you from the bottom of my heart!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7493" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-08T10:02:32.950" LastActivityDate="2012-06-24T00:32:05.280" Title="Is it possible to see the real time number of users and stuff?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1715" CreationDate="2011-08-08T08:35:55.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of queries that you can run at Data.SE. You can get site-wide queries, as well as personally user-specific ones. All you'll need to know, for the user-specific ones, are your user ID number. You can grab this by going to your profile, and noting the number in the search box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2011-08-08T08:41:37.487" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T08:41:37.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1684" CreationDate="2011-08-08T10:25:49.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is probable that her first edits needed to be peer-reviewed because she was not a moderator, when she edited those first questions. Watching at her profile now, I see that now she is not shown as moderator, on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T10:25:49.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1972" CreationDate="2011-08-08T10:44:27.187" Score="7" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1673/is-there-a-thesaurus-which-takes-more-than-one-word-as-an-input&quot;&gt;Is there a thesaurus which takes more than one word as an input?&lt;/a&gt; and I read it trying to understand why it was on meta. After I read it, I noticed that it doesn't suit on meta because it's not a question about the main site; if it were a question such as &quot;When citing a source in my answer, how should I cite it?&quot; then it would be appropriate for the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta site is not a second class site where English questions that don't suit the main site are migrated; it's a site for questions about the main site. If a question doesn't suit the main site doesn't mean it suits another site (including the meta site); it doesn't mean the question necessarily needs to be migrated to any site (as many closed questions show).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions about posts seen on the main sites are fine on meta, as any question about features seen (or desired) in the main site is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:00:04.130" Title="Why was this question migrated to meta, when it is not a question about the main site?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|meta|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-08-08T14:40:33.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems to me that typography-related questioners should be pointed towards the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Graphic Design StackExchange site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (I'd guess that they can't be migrated while it's in Area 51); matters of typography are part and parcel of the graphic design field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;what kind of questions can I ask here&quot; question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;Graphic Design SE FAQ&lt;/a&gt; specifically indicates that such questions are on-topic there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Graphic arts&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Examples: logo design, fonts &amp;amp; &lt;strong&gt;typography&lt;/strong&gt;, visual communication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I've seen people suggest the questioner try the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers StackExchange site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, it's at least as poor a fit as EL&amp;amp;U and probably even worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:19.427" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T14:46:15.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1721" CreationDate="2011-08-08T17:36:27.880" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an interesting predicament. I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37236/what-does-information-porn-mean&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;information porn&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt; with the word &lt;em&gt;porn&lt;/em&gt; in the title, and the firewall on the computer I am using is blocking it. This means I am not able to view my question, the comments, the answers, or edit my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accidentally pressed &lt;kbd&gt;Enter&lt;/kbd&gt; before I finished writing my question, so could somebody please edit it so it doesn't look as awkward and unfinished? If you do, could you link to this meta post so people know what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, could anyone be so kind and copy the answers and comments so that I can actually see them (link to a screenshot, or just post them as answers to this question)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5584" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T23:17:03.123" Title="Could somebody fix my question and produce a copy of the answers?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1720" CreationDate="2011-08-08T18:31:21.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prior to a title change, consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/37236/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline view&lt;/a&gt;. This will give you the full detail of all the posts (although absent of convenient links to revision history and any ability to vote), and the title of the page will just be &quot;Timeline&quot; rather than containing the blocked word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any recommendations on how to revise the title so as to retain the question you're asking without being incredibly vague? As it stands, the current title is very direct about what you're asking - removing the keyword that's being asked about would require supplying something that'll still be distinct enough to identify what the question is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T18:47:43.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-08T20:26:06.233" Score="3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a growing number of questions about the &quot;proper way to say/write ...&quot; in the English SE.  I have also run across a few questions in Programmers SE that might be better suited for a general &quot;manners&quot; or &quot;etiquette&quot; SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it time to propose an Etiquette SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3800" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T17:13:13.300" Title="Questions about etiquette" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1722" CreationDate="2011-08-08T20:49:10.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There already is one. &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/29783/social-conventions-and-interaction&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/29783/social-conventions-and-interaction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T20:49:10.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-09T11:21:55.877" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why did some of the tags get merged? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;origin&lt;/a&gt; got merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;, and I can't use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;origin&lt;/a&gt; tag anymore. There is a difference. &quot;origin&quot; is used for where the phrases came from, &quot;etymology&quot; is used for single words, but occasionally can be used for more than one word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;? Pejorative is now part of offensive-language. The thing is, Pejorative refers specifically to words used as insults, but &quot;offensive-language&quot; could be anything from rude words to obscenity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T12:22:48.247" Title="Reasons for the merging of some of the tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1726" CreationDate="2011-08-09T11:33:42.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not being responsible for the merges, I couldn't tell you the exact reasons, but I can surmise the reasoning behind these and I'll offer my guess here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it were, the concepts here are quite similar. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;origin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; both cover the origin of a word or phrase, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; both cover negatively-inclined word choice. While one could consider that there is a distinct difference between what is a pejorative specifically versus the whole of offensive language, &lt;em&gt;is that a distinct enough difference that it warrants a separate tag&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an earlier discussion in chat we had about tagging articles, which we have three tags for: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-articles&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-articles&lt;/a&gt;. We all know and acknowledge that indefinite articles and definite articles are different constructs, but, I'll quote myself from chat with some added emphasis,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] is there an important enough distinction to warrant &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; tags for them?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the scope of how the site can grow, is there value in keeping the questions about definite articles and indefinite articles separate on the tag level? Or is it more than sufficient to contain both of them within a singular articles tag?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of an actual merge is due to the fact no one who was present at the time of this discussion actually had any ability to vote up the proposed synonyms. Probably should amend that at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the approach to these two merges is the same - users believed that the concepts represented in the two separate tags, while indeed can be identified distinctly, did not warrant a good utility as being separate tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe that this should be unmerged, it would be wise to make a strong case as to not simply why the tags represent different things, but why their being separate (and thus fragmenting the results for the otherwise super-tag) is beneficial to the site's utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T11:33:42.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1726" CreationDate="2011-08-09T12:22:48.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regards to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perjorative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perjorative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perjorative&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;, this was discussed in the following meta thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1535/getting-our-dirty-words-into-one-place&quot;&gt;Getting our dirty words into one place&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The TL;DR version is that we had a whole bunch of partially-overlapping tags for different kinds of taboo or vulgar language, and we decided to sweep them all together into one tag in order to cut down on the duplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar logic applies to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;: there are numerous different tags that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be used for etymology questions, but we've made them all synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; so that we have one tag rather than a dozen. Previous meta discussion has agreed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; is appropriate even when discussing the origin of a phrase or something other than single words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases you could argue that there is a subtle difference between the two meanings, but the difference is not significant enough to pollute the tags list with all of those variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T12:22:48.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2011-08-09T13:49:46.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a while, and now it seems that this blog thing isn't happening, or may be happening, or who knows what. We seem to have lots of people who want to write, or suggest topics. Are we only missing a leader? Someone to take charge? Someone who may not write articles at all, but rather herd the &lt;del&gt;cats&lt;/del&gt;authors? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't have a leader, could we just try to come up with 52 subjects, and dole out writing assignments to volunteers? @nohat already volunteered to write 12 articles, we have 6 or more other confirmed volunteers, plus I volunteer myself (for occasional writing), so that's about 5-7 blog posts per-person. Maybe we could get the first, say, 4-8 posts written and previewed/edited, then see if this proposal can pick up some more steam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T13:49:46.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1722" CreationDate="2011-08-09T17:13:13.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ugh...I hate these kinds of questions...so easy to answer...but of little language value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I think, really, they tend to have a component that is really about what the speech act means. And then I can see a benefit to this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think questions of these sorts are appropriate here at ELU as long as, just like with all questions, the primary component of the question is about the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T17:13:13.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1732" CreationDate="2011-08-09T18:29:12.520" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if someone asked this (I checked and it seems not so) and I just noticed that the chat button is no longer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is this &quot;Blog&quot; button instead with the &quot;new&quot; badge next to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... where is the chat? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T18:34:44.343" Title="Where is the chat?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2011-08-09T18:34:44.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chat link is still found in all other points - it can be found in the site footer, and on the Meta front page you'll always see a set of active rooms in the right sidebar that can be clicked on to access chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat link will also continue to be on the header, &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt;, there is some new functionality. To help with the visibility of our per-site blogs for those sites that have them, the header will now show a link to the blog to logged-in users for the first 24 hours after any new post. To make room for it, the chat link was subtracted for logged-in users during those 24 hours. After that time passes, the top link to chat will return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of English, all sites which do not have their own blog instead point at the general Stack Exchange blog, which in this case has recently had a new post on the changes to our tag system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T18:34:44.343" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1734" CreationDate="2011-08-09T18:47:18.443" Score="0" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have got a bug. &#xA;I have used other web browsers - the same problem, so it seams that it's server side restriction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, could anybody help me. Any tricks or tips are welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QQ7Uo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-08-10T01:49:03.783" LastActivityDate="2011-08-10T01:49:03.783" Title="The strange bug: Sorry, this is a duplicate of" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1733" CreationDate="2011-08-09T19:01:20.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try adding context to your question. Give an example sentence or two of where you have found &quot;you bury other things too&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could give the filter the push it needs to allow you to post your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T19:01:20.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-09T21:01:55.240" Score="-2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Growing up there were literally hundreds of different euphemisms we used when we could not swear.  They all seem to show up here in origin questions. Seeing as where they came from really is rarely relevant or documented can we just declare the entire genre off topic explicitly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9417" LastEditorUserId="8566" LastEditDate="2011-08-09T21:05:57.170" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T21:05:57.170" Title="Can we declare &quot;How did this euphemism for a profanity originate?&quot; as off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1735" CreationDate="2011-08-09T21:05:35.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say no. Just because something is &quot;rarely documented&quot;, it doesn't mean there won't be an interesting answer out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T21:05:35.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2011-08-10T04:31:50.070" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the key thing here is that we &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; require the asker to do some research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37377/what-would-you-call-someone-who-makes-no-lasting-impression&quot;&gt;What would you call someone who makes no lasting impression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question is a single sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7 Answers, all but 2 are a single sentence. The remaining two are.. TWO sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34574/looking-for-a-better-term-than-benign-envy-or-mudita&quot;&gt;Looking for a better term than &amp;#39;benign envy&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;mudita&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question is 6 paragraphs, includes link and an illustrative image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6 answers, most are multiple paragraphs and blockquotes and sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that a lot more effort went into the latter question, and this site -- and the answers to that question -- are all substantially better for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also something we've noted before in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, questions which are extremely short, and inspire extremely short answers, are a bad sign -- how much can you truly &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; in a single sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worst case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; is like playing &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charades&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charades&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;I'm thinking of a word. Three syllables.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requiring the OP to show some research is key, and simple: &lt;em&gt;what have you tried?&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in what context do you plan to use this?&lt;/em&gt; The sidebar that appears when you ask a question also covers this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AFo0z.png&quot; alt=&quot;Provide details. Share your research.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... relevant bit being &lt;strong&gt;share your research.&lt;/strong&gt; And if you haven't done any, &lt;em&gt;should you even be asking here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T06:11:06.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-10T06:57:09.730" Score="6" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, a user posted several questions within the space of about a half hour. I downvoted four of them because I felt that they were poorly researched, and because they were out of the scope of the FAQ. The votes were close together because of the timing of the questions. Will the revenge down-vote script kick in? I feel that all of my votes were valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-08-10T07:22:30.200" LastActivityDate="2011-08-10T17:51:43.913" Title="Will the revenge down-vote script kick in, in this case?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1738" CreationDate="2011-08-10T10:30:56.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Simchona, I totally agree. Those  questions showed lack of research and effort. To downvote, was the correct thing to do. Perhaps, if the down-vote script does kick in, it would show the one flaw in machines -- they can't tell appropriateness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastActivityDate="2011-08-10T10:30:56.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1741" CreationDate="2011-08-10T17:33:36.043" Score="2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much reputation do you gain for upvotes in questions or answers? How much rep do you gain for different types of badges? Is there a place that tells you all this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2011-08-10T17:56:13.103" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Amount of reputation gained for one vote" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1740" CreationDate="2011-08-10T17:39:56.503" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the general reputation information can be found in your site's &lt;code&gt;/faq&lt;/code&gt;, linked at the top as &quot;faq&quot;. The specific section can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The primary way to gain reputation is by posting good questions and useful answers. Your peers will vote on your posts, and those votes will cause you to gain (or, in rare cases, lose) reputation:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;answer is voted up --------&gt; +10    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;question is voted up ------&gt; +5     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;answer is accepted --------&gt; +15 (+2 to acceptor)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;question is voted down ---&gt; -2  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;answer is voted down -----&gt; -2 (-1 to voter)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges do not earn reputation - all you earn from accomplishing the specified task/objective is the badge itself. Apart from these, the other main things to expect of reputation are bounties (which are elaborated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;a proceeding section of the faq&lt;/a&gt;, and are a method to award extra reputation on answers), and offensive/spam flagging (if an answer or question is flagged as offensive or spam by 6 users, it will be automatically deleted and will penalize the post author by 100 reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find an even more in-depth analysis of the full reputation system &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Overflow's Reputation FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-08-10T18:25:45.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1738" CreationDate="2011-08-10T17:51:43.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The downvote script's functionality is deliberately kept a secret. After all, if details about when it triggers were available, people would basically dance around that line, never tripping it. As such, we cannot reveal the exact criteria of whether or not the downvote script will trigger for any instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you're doing normal site activity, and not, say, actively seeking out posts across the site to downvote, then you shouldn't run afoul of the voter fraud script. It's not all that different from the cases where someone will have posted a lot of good answers in a short time - it may simply be a natural incident for one user to upvote all of those answers. As long as you're acting naturally, it shouldn't come up for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-08-10T17:51:43.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1740" CreationDate="2011-08-11T16:02:04.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the faq at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&lt;/a&gt;, there is a section titled 'Reputation'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not obvious but under the 'show more' link, it will display all the information Grace showed and more details, like what abilities a certain reputation level will get you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case for all SE sites; they used to have this sort of detail immediately visible on the faqs, but they changed the deisng slightly recently to hide details requiring a link visit to see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-08-11T16:02:04.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-11T19:54:46.697" Score="10" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Language and usage blog&lt;/a&gt;. There is no content there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/call-for-blog-participation&quot;&gt;call to arms post&lt;/a&gt; that I would like to participate by posting lessons or explanations for beginners learning English as an nth language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the procedure of posting to the 'blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many times a month would I and other writers be expected to provide content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the rules about what is allowed in the 'blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="We have a web log, so now what?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1744" CreationDate="2011-08-12T02:10:10.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a few notes as we get the blog rolling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accounts have been set up for those who have expressed interest in contributing and who have been recently active on EL&amp;amp;U. If you are interested but have not received an email, please leave a comment on this post and I will follow up with you. If something is not right with your account, also leave a comment on this post or email me. Contribution is completely voluntary and at your own pace.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are probably a &lt;em&gt;Contributor&lt;/em&gt;. Basically, this means that you can't publish your post. The purpose of this is that so posts can be checked by an editor before being published. Naturally, this should not be much of a problem at the &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange, but we'll keep this just in case. More details at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/101978/whats-the-difference-between-an-editor-author-and-contributor-on-blog-overflow/101981#101981&quot;&gt;MSO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in becoming an &lt;em&gt;Editor&lt;/em&gt;, please let me know in a comment on this post. I will get in touch with you in a few days about this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063/elu-blog&quot;&gt;chatroom&lt;/a&gt; has been set up for specifically blog discussion. I will try to schedule some times that are convenient for discussion, but feel free to drop in at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A Google Doc has also been set up for blog contributors. Because participation in this document requires you to share your email with your fellow contributors, you have not been added to this Doc. You will need to explicitly OK this in a comment here for me to add you to the list. If you are not comfortable sharing your email, then you can simply work in the chatroom and we will keep you in the loop.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let's get started! Simply start writing a post whenever you're ready, and we'll work out a schedule for publishing them in the next few days.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T04:32:20.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1747" CreationDate="2011-08-12T21:24:19.867" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see this soon enough, you should be able to click &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and see that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14582/who-is-considered-a-native-speaker-of-english&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was just bumped to the top of the &quot;active&quot; page.  The last activity for hours was me posting a comment, and it getting an upvote.  Is that really supposed to bump the question into the active page?  How does that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-08-13T07:03:08.137" Title="Can a comment upvote &quot;bump&quot; a thread?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1746" CreationDate="2011-08-12T22:00:16.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You edited one of the answers, which will bump the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T22:00:16.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1750" CreationDate="2011-08-14T04:14:40.620" Score="0" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need a jump section. When you try to find a question, there is a list of them running up to 9,000 questions. However, it is frustrating to go through every page trying to find it. We should have jump section that allows us to &quot;jump&quot; to the page that is in range of the question I'm asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2011-08-14T07:35:39.887" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T22:01:16.227" Title="Jump Section; We seriously need them" Tags="|feature-request|user-interface|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-15T07:05:56.603" Score="9" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/conversation/do-we-keep-indefinite-article-and-definite-article&quot;&gt;Some time ago in chat&lt;/a&gt;, the question of merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; was raised, and I want to get further input into this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A preponderance of the following reasons, all of which I make no judgement on, is enough to keep them separate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a reasonable user might find one tag interesting but not the other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are sufficient open questions or the potential for such to keep the distinction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;merging would significantly impair searching (NB: consider the fact that all of the articles are stop words in search)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a particularly urgent issue, but any discussion would be welcome. If you have sufficient reputation, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/articles/synonyms&quot;&gt;vote on the tag synonyms yourself&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T19:32:06.877" Title="Should [indefinite-article] and [definite-article] be merged into [articles]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1748" CreationDate="2011-08-15T11:14:03.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be relatively meaningless as a feature on SE question lists because the  pages are numbered from the top down. &quot;Page 284&quot; is only relevant at a specific moment in time. In a day or two the content of that page will have partially migrated to page 287 and some to 286. Page jumps are only useful when the pages are numbered from the back-forward in the way answer threads on normal forums are where the newest content is at the end of the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to meaningfully recall a specific page in a sliding group like SE questions. If you want to favorite specific questions you can do that with the favorite tool or your own bookmark system. Cluttering up the site with a tool to go to page 284 doesn't help much of anybody because it's not a meaningful delineation of any specific content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in comments, if you have some interest in this you can do it by editing the URL yourself. If you want a more convenient way write a javascript bookmarklet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cant find something, use the (quite good) search tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6807" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T11:14:03.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-15T13:02:40.040" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37659/is-sent-from-my-iphone-correctly-punctuated-and-capitalized/37662#37662&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; with the note &quot;pictures are a little excessive&quot; and the flag was dismissed as &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt;. I would like to publicly note that this is a terrible, terrible precedent. The images are completely unnecessary and are taking up far too much space to be helpful. Perhaps one and then a list of text example would work? In any case, I strongly disapprove of this behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more, I don't think people should be penalized with an invalid flag for noting something like this. No action being taken is fair, as this is a judgement call, but I don't think bringing such a post to the attention of the moderators is a bad thing. I don't personally care about me getting this particular &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt; but I hate the idea that anyone who flags posts like these will stop doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair to the poster, I have waged war on images in other SE sites and lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T02:13:55.833" Title="On flagging posts with lots of images" Tags="|discussion|flagging|answers|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1751" CreationDate="2011-08-15T15:11:15.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator on Stack Overflow, I often dismiss flags as invalid when the flagger could easily have taken care of the problem himself. I don't know if the moderators here follow the same convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/37662/revisions&quot;&gt;cleaned up the post&lt;/a&gt; by setting the image widths to 100 pixels and moving them into the same line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T15:11:15.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1748" CreationDate="2011-08-15T22:01:16.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're trying to find a question on a particular topic, try looking in a particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt; (just click the tag name to go to that tag's questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know how the question is tagged, but know something else about it, review the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search options&lt;/a&gt;. For example, you can specify whether to search for words in the title or body, or whether to retrieve questions that already have an accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, also, that on many pages and search results, you can choose how many results to view per page (in the URL, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=faq&amp;amp;pagesize=50&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=faq&amp;amp;pagesize=50&lt;/a&gt;, it's the &lt;code&gt;pagesize=50&lt;/code&gt;, or find the 15/30/50 buttons at the bottom of the page) so if you find yourself clicking through many pages, viewing more per page can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T22:01:16.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1751" CreationDate="2011-08-16T02:13:55.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1751/on-flagging-posts-with-lots-of-images/1752#1752&quot;&gt;As mmyers said&lt;/a&gt;, the problem could have been resolved by any user with enough rep to edit, and moderator tools would have been of absolutely no use.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you right in saying that the images were perhaps too excessive? Perhaps. But I didn't take action because I personally didn't find it too irritating—plus, actions by fellow community members are usually better received than actions by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also say that these type of flags shouldn't be dismissed as &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt;, when they raise a valid point. However, there's nothing special that I could have done that you couldn't have, and since you took the effort to flag the post, you could just as easily have edited the post yourself or left a comment on the post for the answerer if you don't feel comfortable editing someone else's post. In my opinion, you shouldn't be flagging these posts because you should be fixing them—or if you can't be bothered, then just leave them. If other people are irritated enough, they'll do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;don't worry too much about how flags get dismissed or your flag weight&lt;/strong&gt;—those things are used in prioritizing the moderator flag queue and aren't things that should be obsessed over by the general community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T02:13:55.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1761" CreationDate="2011-08-16T12:00:18.320" Score="16" ViewCount="787" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens sometimes that when I vote to close a question which is evidently Off Topic, some user posts an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it might be legit (although honestly I'm not sure on this), but this unavoidably encourages other people to do the same. This consequently leads to Off Topic questions staying open for more time than they should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that new users wouldn't pay attention to this, but also 2000+ users do this and even 5000+ which is always less understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I right about this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, what to do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, why is this behaviour considered to be ok?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-10-29T22:35:11.870" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T22:35:11.870" Title="People answering off-topic questions: What should we do?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1757" CreationDate="2011-08-16T12:28:01.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some users have the habit to answer a question even if it's off-topic, and in some cases there are users who answer a question they voted to be closed as off-topic.&#xA;The only cons I can see in answering a question that is clearly off-topic is that the user who asked the question would get the habit to ask off-topic questions, as in any case the user gets an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case the same user keeps to ask questions that are clearly off-topic, you can consider down-voting the asked questions. After all, the tooltip shown for the down-vote button says, &quot;This question doesn't show any research effort.&quot; You could consider that as referring to searching in the FAQ which questions should be asked in an SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point, thought, is to educate users. This can be done with questions on the meta like this one.  If necessary, we could create, for example, a question that is then tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; that reports what to do in some circumstances; such question could be than referred in the text used for the FAQ. We could also do as in MSO, where a group of questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; is used to expand what reported in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T12:28:01.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17" CreationDate="2011-08-16T14:41:47.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does everyone think about hosting a meetup? I've gone through the meetup website and have seen a bunch of ESL meetups, and one for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.meetup.com/NYCContrastiveLinguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Contrastive Linguistics Association&lt;/a&gt;. Would trying to combine with something like that be on-topic? If not, what kinds of activities would be appropriate for a meetup to promote EL&amp;amp;U?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T14:41:47.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1762" CreationDate="2011-08-16T17:51:07.720" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is now, only one user is allowed to disagree with the original flag; who selects &quot;invalid flag&quot; when somebody already selected it is disagreeing with the original flag, but also with who is flagging the flag as invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, then other users cannot agree that the original flag is invalid. Did I misunderstand it, or is it really so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9IoF8.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T02:20:27.370" Title="Is only one user able to flag a flag as invalid?" Tags="|support|moderator-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1757" CreationDate="2011-08-16T18:57:21.650" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is 100% clearly no-bones-about-it off topic, then I will generally downvote the answer. Ditto for obvious general reference questions, especially if the answer proves this fact (i.e. it consists of a link to a single definitive source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, of course, that things are rarely so clear-cut. If &lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; certain the question doesn't belong, but I can see where the FAQ could be interpreted ambiguously, then I will take into account the rep of the answerer: if it's a relatively new user, I'll leave it alone, but if it's a 3K or 5K (or 14K!) user, I'll downvote it with gusto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that whether or not I downvote the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is a separate issue. I will generally only downvote a close-worthy question if it has problems other than the close reason: no context, no research, very confusingly written, etc. Basically, just because a question is off-topic doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad question; it just means it hasn't found its home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T18:57:21.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1760" CreationDate="2011-08-17T02:20:27.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt; flag puts you on the same side as the first &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt; flag—it doesn't mean that you're disagreeing with the initial &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt; flag as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T02:20:27.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1757" CreationDate="2011-08-17T03:00:09.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will periodically answer such questions with the intent of either (a) at least providing a decent and possibly interesting answer or (b) felling all of the obvious answers in one swoop so as to prevent a feeding frenzy of subpar answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider it a necessary evil and don't have a problem if you downvote me for doing so. The intent isn't reputation (not that I mind it) but to block other answers from appearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideal would be that we just close the frickin' thing but that seems to take time. Fortunately, the time-to-close is shorter than it ever has been and should continue to speed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T03:00:09.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1846" CreationDate="2011-08-17T13:05:33.673" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38258/when-should-one-use-a-section-sign&quot;&gt;When should one use a section sign&lt;/a&gt; (the link is only for 10k users) has been voted as off-topic and better suited to writers.SE by 5 users, but the question was simply closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39343/is-it-always-ok-to-use-the-verb-to-say-after-a-question&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39343/is-it-always-ok-to-use-the-verb-to-say-after-a-question&lt;/a&gt; has been voted to be migrated from all the users who voted to close it, but the question is still not migrated. This time I have been sure to check twice how many users voted to migrated, and before I voted too, they were 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I miss a new feature announcement, or is this the way it should work since the beginning?&#xA;Is there a bug, or did not all the voters vote to migrate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T23:40:41.903" Title="A question voted to be off-topic and better suited to writers.SE has not been migrated" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|vote-to-close|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-17T13:30:24.817" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right before writing this question, I clicked on the &quot;tools&quot; link on the main site to see if there were questions voted to be closed; to my surprise I was redirected to the review page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then noticed there were two new words (on the left) where I don't remember seeing any before; clicking on the grayed-out &quot;TOOLS&quot;, I noticed it is a link that takes me to the tools page, the one I was looking for. SE seems to remember which of the two links I clicked before, and since I didn't click on &quot;tools&quot; after the menu change, I was taken to the review page; the confusing thing is that I clicked on &quot;tools&quot; on the top bar, and I saw the URL change to english.stackexchange.com/review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1vVFz.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it should be more evident those are links; the same could apply for other links in the header. A dotted line under the link could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, a notification that explains the change in a few words could be shown the first time a user click on the &quot;tools&quot; link on the top of the page; for example it could say &quot;If you are looking for the tools page, click on the 'tools' link you find to the left side of the page.&quot; (Not the best wording, I must admit, but it's just an example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2011-08-18T13:56:50.743" LastActivityDate="2011-08-18T13:56:50.743" Title="Make more evident those words are links" Tags="|feature-request|design|moderator-tools|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1764" CreationDate="2011-08-17T14:15:07.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, fewer than three of the five people who voted to close that question believed it belongs on Writers. Thus, it was simply closed instead of being migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T14:15:07.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1768" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1769" CreationDate="2011-08-17T18:52:13.083" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep on seeing percentage of accept rates beneath account info showing at answers or questions. what I don't get is, what are they? what do they do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T19:34:27.377" Title="What is accept rate?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2011-08-17T19:34:27.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accept rate is the percentage of questions you've asked for which you've accepted answers.  By accepting an answer (that check mark you only see when you are the question author), you let future searchers know that that answer was most helpful in solving your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accept rate is not displayed for users who have asked very few questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accept rate does not include very recently asked questions (so you aren't penalized for waiting a couple of days to see if a better answer shows up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users feel that their time is best spent answering questions for which the questioner is likely to accept an answer -- either because they want the chance at the reputation awarded when one's answer is marked &quot;accepted&quot;, or because they want to help other visitors to this site find the right answer faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accept rate is calculated and displayed by the site, but has no actual effect.  It's just there for other users to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9884" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T19:34:27.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1764" CreationDate="2011-08-18T06:30:51.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, only a dev can view the specific close votes, so I can't speak as to this situation precisely, but I do want to mention two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that some of the close voters selected &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;belongs on writers&lt;/em&gt;? That would show up as 4 votes to close as off topic, which you have to click through to get to the subselection and might be what you saw.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The user has &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/3644/when-should-one-use-a-section-sign&quot;&gt;reposted the question on Writers&lt;/a&gt;, which is why I've deleted the question and not migrated it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the second instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since you double-checked, and given the question, I'm 100% sure that the votes were migration votes, and the only other way a migration can be blocked is by a mod voting to close for a different reason. This didn't happen, so I've retagged your question &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; in the hope that it'll kick a dev into looking at this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I reopened and reclosed (with migration) the question, which seems to have worked. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/39343/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; is still there if anyone's interested.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-08-27T06:33:23.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-18T13:36:46.960" Score="7" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is due to the recent changes to the formatting of the 10k tools (rather than me upgrading to Firefox 6.0):&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrvDc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of pretty borders overlapping text on flags page&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've grayed out the questions and names to protect the innocent. Obviously, that's not how the page actually appears.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="3546" LastEditDate="2014-10-03T07:07:42.510" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T07:08:01.343" Title="10k tools flags page display problem" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|design|user-interface|10k-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1749" CreationDate="2011-08-19T00:55:53.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart somebody that would confuse &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; as referring to magazine articles, I don't see any reason not to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure there is the need of having a distinction between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt;. Are there users who are able to answer questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;, but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt;?&#xA;Are there experts in indefinite articles, and experts in definite article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the number of questions using both the tags is a useful measure to understand if both the tags should be kept, or they should made synonym of (and merged with) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt;. If in most of the cases one of the tag is used together the other one, that is a sign that the tags should be synonym of a common tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to have sense to have three tags for articles: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it is necessary to avoid confusion, the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; could be renamed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar-articles&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T19:32:06.877" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T19:32:06.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-19T07:51:13.357" Score="-1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I asked a question which was downvoted and subsequently closed - Fair enough: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38379/difference-between-classic-classical-and-classy&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38379/difference-between-classic-classical-and-classy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not fair is to continue downvoting it, or better: to reduce reputation because of this downvoting. So am I to delete the question to protect my reputation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue that it is still helpful to see how the community judges, but to continue reducing reputation is not fair; I will delete the question as might other people do with theirs and this might not be intended because the same bad questions will be asked repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is it a flaw that you can still downvote with effect on the reputation when the question was closed already?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1776" CreationDate="2011-08-19T08:19:01.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a flaw; people on various StackExchanges are aware of this. I refer you to this other Meta post entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1665/closing-is-not-bad&quot;&gt;&quot;Closing is not bad&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In it, MrHen writes that one of the purposes of closing a question is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;potentially mitigate downvotes. If your question is attracting downvotes, a close will typically stop them and give people a chance to resolve their concerns in a more constructive manner. A few edits later, your question will get reopened and those downvoting you will have a chance to change their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your question is closed, it means that you are getting a chance to rewrite it so it better fits the community's guidelines. As long as your question is considered &quot;not a good fit&quot;, it can be downvoted. Once you have &lt;em&gt;revised&lt;/em&gt; your question, you can make your question better and people can undo those downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that people who downvote &lt;em&gt;cannot undo them&lt;/em&gt; until a question is edited. Votes (up or down) are locked in after &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6460/if-you-just-witnessed-tactical-downvoting-is-it-a-reportable-offense/18046#18046&quot;&gt;5 minutes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T08:19:01.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1776" CreationDate="2011-08-19T09:13:17.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As reported by Jeff Atwood, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. If, after a few fair attempts, you haven’t been able to prove that your contributions to a particular Stack Exchange make it at least … not-worse … then we reserve the right to refuse your questions. If we don’t do our part to cull the bad questions, then we risk alienating the true experts who provide what really matters: the answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main effect of down-voting a question is not reducing the reputation to a user, but making less prominent the question being asked. The effect of reducing the reputation of a user is secondary, and it doesn't reduce significantly the reputation of a user; for example, a user with a reputation of 1000 should get 250 down-votes before to see his reputation reduced to 500. Consider also that a single up-vote to a question has almost the same effect on the reputation of 2 down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff then continue saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Continuing in that same vein, we have two more changes to formally announce today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;We now limit users (and IP addresses) to a maximum of 6 questions per day and 50 questions per month.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this has be done is that the number of bad questions increased, and they weren't sufficiently down-voted, or Jeff would not have taken those decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing to down-vote a closed question is not a flaw; a closed question is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22228/what-is-a-locked-post&quot;&gt;locked question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T09:25:02.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-19T09:23:47.440" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you edit a post within the 5 minutes period, the new edit is not considered a new edit, and a new revision is not created.&#xA;If you just created a post, and then you edit it before 5 minutes are passed, the post appears as if you only created it. This means that the content of the &quot;Edit Summary&quot; field is not used; the field should not be shown in that case, as it is asking to the users something that is not even used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-20T08:57:02.990" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T00:13:43.410" Title="Don't show the &quot;Edit Summary&quot; field the first time a post is edited within the grace period" Tags="|feature-request|editing|revisions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1782" CreationDate="2011-08-19T12:17:19.243" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the questions asked today was on the influence of popular media on the vernacular. It was not closed at time of this question, but there was an ongoing discussion in the comment. The OP brought up the point that &quot;favorite&quot; questions are allowed on SO (though in CW form) and so EL&amp;amp;U had no &quot;fun&quot; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my questions: have we been overly harsh on certain list questions that might generate interesting answers? Should we have more CWs on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, I'm not suggesting that every broad question is treated this way. Just the ones that could make this SE more interesting to &quot;users of english&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T14:55:44.217" Title="Do we need more &quot;fun&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2011-08-19T13:04:08.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;About your note, it's already like this. Check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/578/should-i-flag-my-own-question-to-be-a-community-wiki&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; that z7sg posted in the comments of that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T13:04:08.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2011-08-19T15:27:52.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's a good list question, flag it and we'll convert the question to CW. Otherwise, if it's a bad list question, close as &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38525/what-portions-of-the-vernacular-were-derived-directly-from-popular-media/&quot;&gt;the specific question this came up on&lt;/a&gt;, I've converted it to CW but not reopened the question because the community collectively closed it. In my opinion, it's a good question, and perhaps the only thing the community was worried about was the fact that it wasn't CW. If so, the community can reopen the question—if I'm an outlier, it doesn't really matter that the post is CW anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T15:27:52.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1784" CreationDate="2011-08-19T23:10:48.903" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having a lot of trouble understanding the meaning of paragraphs from articles. Is english SE the right place to ask for help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12157" LastEditorUserId="12157" LastEditDate="2011-08-19T23:17:46.903" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T01:43:27.833" Title="Are questions on paragraph meanings on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1783" CreationDate="2011-08-19T23:24:30.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that posting an entire paragraph, and asking for someone to explain it to you is not constructive or useful to others, and thus off topic. However, if you had a few sentences that you could not understand, you could post each individually. That is, if you don't understand what a phrase means, you could post a question and still be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T23:24:30.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1186" CreationDate="2011-08-20T04:59:09.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have provided some additional guidance at the blog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the time, you should be asking yourself “How can I improve this post so that community wiki isn’t needed?” Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly, and only in very specific circumstances.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-08-20T04:59:09.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2011-08-20T17:02:43.540" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The world might not yet be ready for what is good for them, but the day will one day come where the entire manufactured concept of 'offence' is done away with, for good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to use colourful language to offend people. You can take my word for it, if you're unaware of this fact. In fact, you can offend people as casually as asking them an innocent question! I swear I'm not making this up - ask anyone guilty of wrongdoing to clarify their position or clear the air or state their case; and watch the heavens open with offensive rain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep. Offensive. Anyone who - gets - offended offends those who have nothing to hide (but wouldn't mind firing some polite and pointed questions at others who do) are an offence themselves, against decency. True decency, not the polite society that says it's not okay to talk to another man's slaves without his express permission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you remember that Polite Society? You should endeavour to. Where else do you think this whole getting offended at letters in unique ordering came from? Think about it. I mean, really Think about it. It'll come to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, and quite frankly it's worth quite a bit (you can have it for free, but), I vote to make a stand against the Offence against Decency that is tenderised and coddled sensibilities. If not for you, do it for those who have been maliciously coddled and tenderised. Why, what else did you imagine accounted for that marinading fo their sensibilities? I assure you that it was for the Obvious reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about exploitable such a poor victim like that would be. Why, with a well-chosen word you could get them to do just about anything. Maybe even...die for you? Or if you're not that telegenetic, perhaps a flag might do the trick? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't give up if that doesn't work. Someone who is emotionally affected by reading a emotive four letter word? Trust me, that someone will kill for you - it's just a matter of selecting, then framing, then presenting. And over the top they go....  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8407" LastActivityDate="2011-08-20T17:02:43.540" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-08-20T17:02:43.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1783" CreationDate="2011-08-20T20:53:07.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking the meaning of a paragraph would probably mean answering about the meaning of different phrases contained in that paragraph.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This kind of questions reminds me of proof-reading questions where the OP asks if a paragraph is grammatically correct, and the answerers must hunt for grammar errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; reports the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem I see with questions about the meaning of a paragraph is that they don't show any research; if the OP made a little research, then he would be able to restrict the question to a particular phrase contained in the paragraph, or a group of phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking the meaning of a phrase is fine, and part of the paragraph could be used to give more context. Asking the meaning of a phrase without giving any context would be equally wrong.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions about the meaning of a phrase should ask the meaning of a single phrase per question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T01:43:27.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1757" CreationDate="2011-08-20T23:53:15.470" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand why people might intuitively want to vote down answers to off-topic questions. But I think it's wrong and contrary to the way the system is supposed to work, because the vote does not reflect the quality of the answer itself at all. It is like saying &quot;this answer is wrong!&quot;, even though the answer itself isn't wrong, just the question. Casual visitors do not know the subtleties of our system, and that is how they will interpret down-votes on an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is just as bad as voting down a regular all-right answer of a user who generally annoys you, just to &quot;punish&quot; him for his general behaviour, even though this particular answer of his is fine. It is using the wrong means for the right cause. Are we so desperate that we need such desperate means? We already have the closing system for dealing with off-topic questions; no other tools should be abused for that purpose. Of course everyone must vote as his own conscience commands, but I discourage it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2011-08-21T00:12:33.397" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T00:12:33.397" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2011-08-21T14:55:44.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have plenty of fun questions. &lt;em&gt;Good&lt;/em&gt; questions are fun questions. I don't adhere to the principle that &quot;fun&quot; trumps the FAQ or community standards. The primary reason for this is that &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can claim that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; particular question is &quot;fun&quot; and should get a pardon. But really, we aren't here to have &quot;fun&quot;. We are here to answer questions about English. If that happens to be fun &amp;mdash; great! If not &amp;mdash; maybe this is not the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I look at it: If someone complains about you closing one of their &quot;fun&quot; questions then they probably don't have any better reasons to leave it open (which is probably why it was closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T14:55:44.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1793" CreationDate="2011-08-21T21:24:51.690" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the statistics page for the migrated questions, I read the word &lt;em&gt;rejected&lt;/em&gt;. Does that mean it is possible to reject a migration before it is done, or it is referring to the questions that have been migrated, and then closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qv7nY.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T21:27:09.830" Title="What does &quot;rejected&quot; mean in the migrated page?" Tags="|support|moderator-tools|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2011-08-21T21:27:09.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migrated and then subsequently closed or deleted. It lets us see if there are any giant problems (for example, if a site migrations 30 questions and 90% get closed, we need to have a talk with them about when migrations to us are ok). But it doesn't really affect us since we don't get so many migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T21:27:09.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1795" CreationDate="2011-08-22T05:29:34.223" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1771/has-anyone-received-their-swag-package&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;, I realise: my address has changed since I originally gave it; is there a way to update it, for me and anyone else in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I revisited the form and submitted with my up-to-date address, but I’m guessing all that did was to duplicate my entry in some database, since it never acknowledged the fact I’d already submitted; my apologies if having duplicate entries causes a headache for anyone up in the cloud…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-08-22T11:10:32.497" Title="Updating address for swag delivery" Tags="|support|swag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1794" CreationDate="2011-08-22T05:54:33.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Email &lt;code&gt;team+english@stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; with your new address and the fact that you submitted a duplicate form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-22T05:54:33.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-22T11:31:33.783" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize that there was previously a discussion on whether questions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/is-asking-a-question-about-the-politeness-of-a-phrase-on-topic&quot;&gt;politeness are on topic&lt;/a&gt;. However, recently there have been some questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38762/replying-to-a-favour-done-by-someone&quot;&gt;this one on replying to a favor&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36581/what-should-a-reply-to-whats-up-be&quot;&gt;this on replying to &quot;what's up&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10312/what-is-a-good-way-to-remind-someone-to-reply-to-your-email&quot;&gt;this on reminding people to reply to email&lt;/a&gt;. To me, this is like asking the users of EL&amp;amp;U to write a quick paragraph or phrase for them. It could be considered helpful to future users, but they sometimes seem to ask for writing services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38762/replying-to-a-favour-done-by-someone&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the OP gives two sentences and then says &quot;I can't think of any other ways to say this&quot;. Despite his apparent effort, he is asking for users to come up with a phrase for him. This isn't a question of &quot;correct my sentence&quot;, but it comes close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would these be considered on-topic &quot;questions from those learning English&quot; or does it venture too far into proofreading or something else off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-08-23T17:44:08.073" Title="Should it be on topic to ask questions about what to say in given situations?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-22T18:01:42.923" Score="11" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;As most of you know, I've been working on promoting EL&amp;amp;U for the past couple of weeks, and I'd love to have some help brainstorming. Here's a list of some ideas and things I've been trying out so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sponsoring giveaways on blogs: I've been talking with the writers of blogs like &lt;a href=&quot;http://stancarey.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sentence First&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://preciseedit.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Precise Edit&lt;/a&gt;. Are there other big English language/grammar bloggers I should reach out to? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ad space on specific sites: I'd love to get an ad on something like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_englang.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AP English College Board&lt;/a&gt; site, but I'm not sure how feasible that is. Where else should I be looking to place an ad? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Going to conferences - I've looked into being an exhibitor at conferences put on by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.njea.org/teaching-and-learning/pdo-convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NJ Education Association&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncte.org/annual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;National Council of Teachers in English&lt;/a&gt;. It's pretty expensive to do that, so I was wondering if there are smaller-scale events that cater to a similar audience. Are English teachers a good group to target? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sponsoring meetups and other events - book clubs, literary festivals, etc. Every time I try to find an English Language meetup it's always about ESL, so I figured book clubs might be the next best thing. Are book clubs and writers' groups related enough? What other events should I look into? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holding a top new users competition: Would it be effective to do a giveaway to the top new users of next month? What prizes would be good for that? Maybe a new Kindle? What else? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just some ideas we've been tossing around at the office. Does anyone have thoughts about anything else we should try? I know we discussed doing a pirate text filter on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.talklikeapirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Talk Like a Pirate Day&lt;/a&gt; - a lot of us thought that was a great idea but unfortunately requires too much time and effort to actually pull off. However - we do think that posting some pirate-English related questions on that day would be great, so feel free to do that! I'd love to hear your thoughts on other things we could try, so feel free to ping me in the chat room or shoot me an email whenever you want! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;] New idea: what do you think of sponsoring grad student organizations/study breaks/etc? If anyone is in grad school for English or Linguistics and/or is a member of a related student organization that might like a sponsorship for a study break (or something else) let me know! Recommendations for other people to contact are also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="11387" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T13:58:07.067" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T07:38:11.173" Title="What do you think of these site promotion ideas?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1798" CreationDate="2011-08-22T22:48:17.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding grammar blogs:&lt;/strong&gt; The ones that I know of are GrammarGirl, LanguageLog (more Linguistics-related, but mostly English), and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammarist.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammarist&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding ad space&lt;/strong&gt;: I think that places to reach out to would be the sources that are used most here. For example, my go-to etymology source is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;EtymOnline&lt;/a&gt; and I often use &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GrammarGirl&lt;/a&gt; as a source for providing examples for grammar rules. Perhaps by compiling a list of these sites, you could reach out to them on the basis of &quot;we are exposing people who are interested in your page, thus building web traffic for you.&quot; (Note that GrammarGirl has ads but EtymOnline does not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding new users competition:&lt;/strong&gt; For giveaways in general, I think a solid dictionary or etymology source would be appropriate (a full collegiate one would be best) in addition to an eReader of some sort. The only thing that I would worry about with such a contest is that you could be rewarding the users who have time to devote to the site, more so than the users who have fewer but more thought-out answers. I would support the contest if there were categories like &quot;Best Answer from a New User&quot; rather than &quot;Most Reputation Gained by a New User&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-08-22T22:48:17.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2387" CreationDate="2011-08-23T15:49:45.240" Score="-2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not referring to flagging; I am referring to voting to close a question. Who has the privilege to vote to close doesn't use flagging, except if the question is spam. The purpose of the proposed badge is not encouraging users to flag, but encouraging users to vote to close, which is quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As incentive for voting to close questions, I was thinking of a badge given to the first user who votes to close, when X% of the questions s/he voted to close have been closed. For example, if only 10% of the questions the user voted to close are closed, then the badge should not be given to the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badge could be an incentive to vote to close, but as the badge is given to the first user who votes to close, there should not be an increment of wrongly closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could be a silver badge, and a gold badge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I didn't think for how much closed questions the badge should be gained. To decide that, we should look at the number of questions a user normally vote to close, and how many of those questions are really closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the definition of the badge is not too restrictive, then questions that are re-opened after Y days should not be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-23T22:55:43.227" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T03:37:32.417" Title="Add a badge for the user who was the first one to vote to close questions, when X% of the voted questions was really closed" Tags="|feature-request|badges|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1796" CreationDate="2011-08-23T17:44:08.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too seem to be noticing an increasing number of &lt;em&gt;&quot;What do I say in this situation?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole I dislike them, because I think they're more about social etiquette than language as such. The problem is compounded by the fact that most people know perfectly well what &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; would say, and many are more than happy to post that as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We haven't yet plumbed the depths, but I fully expect someone to ask a question along the lines of &lt;em&gt;&quot;I really like my girlfriend and want the relationship to continue. But she keeps talking about getting married, and I'm not ready for that. What word should I use when explaining&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[to her]&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;what kind of relationship I want?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't have such a big problem with that example if it were &lt;em&gt;to others&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;to her&lt;/em&gt; (implied or explicit), but I still wouldn't be keen. I think it would be better if more people actively participated in voting to close (or re-open) questions of this type, &lt;em&gt;and stated their reasons&lt;/em&gt;. This would give all of us a better feel for the general attitude of community members who have the rep to cast such votes in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-08-23T17:44:08.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1805" CreationDate="2011-08-23T23:49:36.540" Score="8" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38773/top-10-fallacies-love-is-a-fallacy&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic with 3 downvotes.  Four minutes later, the poster manually re-asked it &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/441/top-10-fallacies-love-is-a-fallacy&quot;&gt;on Literature.SE&lt;/a&gt; and got 2 upvotes along with an answer.  Should we consider allowing migration to Literature.SE from here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.780" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T22:24:30.140" Title="Add a link to Literature.SE as a choice for migration in an off-topic close vote" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1803" CreationDate="2011-08-24T14:07:12.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site is still in beta phase. The rule is that it's not allowed the migration to sites that are still in beta phase; the only users who can migrate to a beta site are moderators, who can migrate a question to every SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About allowing to migrate a question to literature.SE, I am in favor, when the site is past its beta phase, and provided there are enough asked questions that could be migrated to that site. If the questions that should be migrated there are too few, then flagging a question for moderator attention should be sufficient to do the task.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Consider also that the main rule is, &quot;Don't migrate crap.&quot; This would mean that, even having the opportunity, few question would probably be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T14:07:12.113" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7092" CreationDate="2011-08-24T14:11:27.477" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you flag a flag as invalid, the flag history doesn't report which flag was flagged as invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ih7k8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if the flag history would report which flag was flagged as invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="28544" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T15:17:56.857" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T15:18:34.143" Title="When flagging a flag as invalid, report which flag was flagged as invalid" Tags="|feature-request|status-norepro|flagging|flag-history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1811" CreationDate="2011-08-24T17:35:33.370" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a rep recalc yesterday (for the first time in three days) and lost 55 rep.  Curious, I found that my number of answers in my profile page went down by 4.  Putting 55 and 4 together, I came up with 59, which means I come here to ask if a moderator can view recently deleted answers to figure this out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-24T17:54:42.270" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T19:34:33.903" Title="Did some of my answers recently get deleted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1807" CreationDate="2011-08-24T17:59:12.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you lost reputation, and you count 4 answers less than you asked, then there are just two possibilities: Four questions to which you answered were deleted, or four answers you gave have been deleted. Between the two possibilities, I think the first is more probable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the answers that has been deleted, I found the following one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39095/should-i-use-cards-or-a-card/39146#39146&quot;&gt;Should I use &amp;#39;cards&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;a card&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt; (score: 0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T17:59:12.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-24T18:00:01.407" Score="8" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure others must have hit this problem after being on EL&amp;amp;U for a while. With some questions which crop up repeatedly, it can be quite difficult to find an earlier related or exact duplicate, even if you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I know there are a lot of duplicate/overlapping questions covering the subtleties of conditional tenses (could/should/would, might/ought, etc.). But it's a waste of time searching for any/all of those words because just about anything returns thousands of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pointless sorting any results by &quot;most votes&quot; because many of the &quot;definitive&quot; answers are quite old, but have few votes. Often they effectively &quot;lie dormant&quot; because more recent new users never come across them to upvote. There may be other ways to improve the situation, but I suggest...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Increment a count against existing question when a new one is closed as &quot;exact duplicate&quot; thereof, and make that count available as a &quot;sort results&quot; key in searches.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me the questions I'm interested in should rapidly float to the top with such a system. Added to which I'd expect a significant improvement in Answer quality over time. Later contributors would have a vested interest in vying for upvotes on pages they'd expect to be visited often, well into the future. And &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; visitors would be likely to upvote good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm saddened by the fact that the most upvoted Questions of all time are a somewhat anal discussion about nested &lt;strong&gt;[sic]&lt;/strong&gt;'s, and a closed Dalai Lama joke. This hardly reflects what I like to think of as EL&amp;amp;U's laudable aim of becoming a consultable reference source for future visitors. Anything that might raise the profile of genuinely important / repeatedly relevant questions over these &quot;viral&quot; distractions must surely be a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Finding &quot;duplicates&quot; for hardy perennials" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1809" CreationDate="2011-08-24T18:44:57.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this is already what the FAQ tab of the Questions page does. Or at least, the tooltip for the &quot;FAQ&quot; tab says &quot;questions with the most links&quot;, which certainly sounds like what you're describing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is no help when the duplicate you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; exists is not actually a frequently asked question, merely one that has already been asked at least once. For that, we need a better search function, with a use/mention distinction of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T18:44:57.130" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1807" CreationDate="2011-08-24T19:34:33.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did delete several dozen closed questions that were of low quality, many of which had at least one upvoted answer. Looking through your answers, I see the following answers deleted because the question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34085/why-is-it-called-a-hamburger-when-its-actually-made-from-beef/&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34085/why-is-it-called-a-hamburger-when-its-actually-made-from-beef/&lt;/a&gt; (75 rep)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34553/an-representation/34555#34555&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34553/an-representation/34555#34555&lt;/a&gt; (30 rep)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34603/is-the-sentence-i-am-right-grammatically-correct/34626#34626&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34603/is-the-sentence-i-am-right-grammatically-correct/34626#34626&lt;/a&gt; (10 rep)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a fourth deleted answer, but I may have missed it. In any case, it looks like you may have lost 125 rep and not 55, depending on when you did the recalc yesterday (in any case, you would lose the remaining balance upon another recalc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T19:34:33.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1814" CreationDate="2011-08-24T20:06:34.153" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the FAQ page, when I click on the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#search&quot;&gt;How do I search?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; header, and the section is expanded, I am moved to the top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SDiaQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not what happens with the other headers in the same page, such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#promotion&quot;&gt;May I promote products or websites I am affiliated with here?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; for which its status (collapsed, not collapsed) is changed all times I click on the header, moving me to the top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/orLHe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w9VGa.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Safari version 5.1 (7534.48.3), and the SE revision is 2011.8.24.3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T22:43:25.593" Title="When I click on the &quot;How do I search?&quot; header, the browser shows me the top of the page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1812" CreationDate="2011-08-24T22:43:13.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, this was my fault. We have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;id=&quot;search&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there and also in the header. I changed it so it will now be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#searching&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#searching&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#search&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T22:43:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1816" CreationDate="2011-08-25T01:16:31.597" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that on the main site, some of the usernames shows in pink, while others are in red. Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MyNxj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see here, the users Simchona and FumbleFingers' names are in pink, while the username John Tobler is in bright red. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2011-08-25T03:54:27.067" LastActivityDate="2011-08-25T03:54:27.067" Title="On the main site, why are some user names pink?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1815" CreationDate="2011-08-25T01:17:43.343" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ones in pink are profiles you have visited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-25T01:17:43.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1893" CreationDate="2011-08-25T08:59:48.133" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;When clicking on &lt;em&gt;What notation and symbols are commonly used here?&lt;/em&gt; in the right hand side navigation in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, I am led to &lt;code&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#what-notation-and-symbols-are-commonly-used-here&lt;/code&gt;. This anchor, however, doesn't seem to exist, the page jumps to the section above, titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What kind of questions can I ask here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I briefly looked into the HTML source, but the anchors don't seem to be produced with a simple &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a name=&quot;...&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. It makes sense that this section of the FAQ is broken, because it is unique to english.sx; the other sections appear on all SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I just understood the source code. For &lt;em&gt;What kind of questions can I ask here?&lt;/em&gt;, the source code is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;h2 id=&quot;link-questions&quot; data-title=&quot;What can I ask here?&quot;&amp;gt;What kind of questions can I&#xA;ask here?&amp;lt;/h2&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;What notation and symbols are commonly used here?&lt;/em&gt;, however, it's only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;h2&amp;gt;What notation and symbols are commonly used here?&amp;lt;/h2&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;id&lt;/code&gt;, which I suspect to produce the anchor, is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Btw, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78363/manually-specify-language-for-syntax-highlighting&quot;&gt;programming language syntax highlighting&lt;/a&gt; turned off on english.sx?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Internal hyperlink bug in FAQ" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1819" CreationDate="2011-08-25T21:40:39.740" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am used to the fact that when 5 different users edit a question, that is automatically changed to a CW question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this still valid? Does the number of editors include also the OP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-09-16T00:13:33.407" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Number of users who edit a question and CW questions" Tags="|support|editing|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1818" CreationDate="2011-08-25T22:23:43.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts/11741#11741&quot;&gt;According to Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, the automatic triggers for CW conversion include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The body of the post has been edited by at least five (5) different users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The post has been edited ten (10) times by the original owner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The question generates more than 30 answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rollbacks do not reverse any of the Community Wiki mode calculations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't know for sure that these numbers are valid for us on EL&amp;amp;U or still current.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-25T22:23:43.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1821" CreationDate="2011-08-26T02:06:23.803" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39424/looking-forward-forwards-to-your-reply&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;em&gt;&quot;Looking forward/forwards to your reply&quot;&lt;/em&gt; was flagged as a possible dup of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3885/forward-vs-forwards&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; titled &lt;em&gt;Forward vs Forwards&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That second &quot;original&quot; just quotes a minimal &quot;cook's tour&quot; of usage from OED, which wouldn't help the second questioner at all with his specific context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there (even in theory) any intention that EL&amp;amp;U should try to encourage only &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; page for, say, this particular word distinction? Or do we just allow that every one of the huge number of specific contexts where only one word or the other is normally used will eventually be asked about, and have its own dedicated question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the site supports anything like it, but I think the inarguably-correct answer on the second one should go into the first somehow, then the second really would be redundant and could be permanently deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-08-26T02:32:10.910" Title="How exactly is &quot;Closed as a Duplicate&quot; supposed to work?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1820" CreationDate="2011-08-26T02:32:10.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to &lt;em&gt;merge&lt;/em&gt; duplicate questions so all the answers are in one place, and the other question points to the first, with a redirect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you feel there should be a more complete answer on the first question, don't hesitate to add it, or edit the existing answer on the question to make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the two questions would have completely &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; answers, then perhaps they aren't duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-08-26T02:32:10.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-26T10:51:09.157" Score="-2" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39209/what-other-categorical-synonyms-could-represent-published-content-or-articles-o&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39209/what-other-categorical-synonyms-could-represent-published-content-or-articles-o&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't notice prohibition to computer topic in the FAQ (after it was closed :) But, this is your sandbox folks. If you see EL&amp;amp;U as existing in the narrow-band range of dictionary reading and interpretation, I agree this would be a simple topic. However, it should be obvious I'm not attempting to find some here-to-for undiscovered term that every computer software operating system developer has not thought of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was rather looking forward towards creative examples, and possibly terms others use to manage the influx of documents collecting on their hard drives. Or am I so out of touch, and everyone is tagging files, making a generic folder unnecessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &quot;not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet&quot; is ridiculous. Robusto 初夢, drɱ65 δ, Mitch, aedia λ, or kiamlaluno should speak up to explain their &lt;strong&gt;opinion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9841" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-08-27T14:47:30.757" Title="OK, I'll bite: Why was my post closed as unlikely to ever help any future visitors?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1822" CreationDate="2011-08-26T14:52:48.770" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you ask explicitly, I'll be honest. And I think this will help others who find their question closed as too localized, not constructive or not a real question. The particular question was closed because it was not good, and for me, for many reasons. You can only pick one reason when voting to close, and we all happened to choose 'too localized'. But here are the reasons I thought it was closeable (including 'too localized'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your question is incoherent. In fact it is difficult to find an explicit question there. One can read between the lines, and figure something out but it is not clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reason it is considered too localized by us has nothing to do with 'computer topics'. There is some leeway for asking about technical terminology, but if the question is too technical it might be considered off-topic and either closed for that reason or migrated to the nearest SE site (or recommended to some other QA site).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now to what you are really asking. The question seems to be some general advice about what -you- would like to name your directories. How can that possibly be helpful to someone else? And why would someone come here to see how to name their directories? What do you name your kids so you don't confuse them? (for the latter, people ask people all the time, but you don't go to a language QA site for it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be able to reword your question to be more generally applicable, more coherent, and more explicit, but then I think it would turn into a question about user interface (e.g. &quot;What do some computer systems use to distinguish personal documents?&quot;) and so would be off-topic here but very much on-topic for other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2011-08-26T19:46:12.647" LastActivityDate="2011-08-26T19:46:12.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1825" CreationDate="2011-08-26T19:31:57.100" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized that I still have more edits than Lauren, surprisingly.  I also couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her edit, so I checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11387/lauren?tab=activity&quot;&gt;her activity page&lt;/a&gt;, which shows that she hasn't edited anything for 24 days now.  Where did she go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Where did Lauren Ψ go?" Tags="|discussion|editing|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1824" CreationDate="2011-08-26T19:39:17.203" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lauren was only ever supposed to look at the top 1000 questions (by views). Which she did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100137/what-is-the-meaning-of-chaos-is-it-related-to-the-psi-character&quot;&gt;the meta Meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before they start to promote a site, [the CHAOS team] will spend a couple of days sweeping up a little bit just to get the place in order. This is the world's most superficial cleanup: they're just looking at the top 1000 questions in order by page views and, if necessary, editing the titles to make them more grammatical, fix spelling, and make them reflect the gist of the question better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They also have temporary diamonds while they do these edits so that their edits don't just go into a queue to annoy the real mods, but those are temporary and will go away when this editing project is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in case you haven't noticed, Lauren's diamond &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11387/lauren?tab=stats&quot;&gt;gone&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-08-26T19:39:17.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1822" CreationDate="2011-08-26T21:08:00.503" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote in this meta post, and I'll say it again, I'm not going to argue about what you will or will not allow on your site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is simply a creative language question. In the one answer I did get before it was closed, the author did understand the question, and provided a very accurate, though academically taxonomic, answer. Frankly I'm surprised you felt the need to censor the question. I find most social forum questions which do not hit the mark are simply ignored. What better way to prove your point then to let the question &quot;die on the vine&quot; so to speak. I find it intolerant on your behalf. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the question if this is completely arbitrary. That's simply a put down. There is no comparison between a &quot;proper noun&quot; and a &quot;creative name&quot; for a taxonomic category. If anything I should have thought it fun for any geek who ever wanted to customize someone else's desktop with their visual wallpaper. Though here a good name for what I describe might result in my naming the folder of collected PDFs and wot-wot docs, &quot;TotallySuperAwsomeLettersStrungTogether&quot;. And a name &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; long would bungup the compact list view of the Explorer window. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But its your sandbox. I'll simply take my toys and go home...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9841" LastActivityDate="2011-08-26T21:08:00.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2011-08-26T22:16:10.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already think more questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed, so this is all grist to the mill for me. As I see it, more voting to close/reopen will help the community clarify and reach consensus on what type of Questions we actually want here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't share @simchona's worries about a possible increase in &quot;trigger finger&quot; voting. If it &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; occur enough to be an issue, I guess I'd already be happy because the scatter-gun effect would also have shot down lots of the low-quality Questions that caused me to write my first sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the allocation rule would at least take account of &lt;em&gt;total number of closevote 'firsts'&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;percentage of 'firsts' acted upon&lt;/em&gt;. That percentage should only consider the last 'n' votes (where 'n' is the qualifying total) so people can recover from excessive early zeal. If @simchona's point became a problem, it's easily countered by a negative bias against 'firsts' that were subsequently re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the badge could be called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=litter%20picker%20picture&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newwindow=1&amp;amp;biw=1376&amp;amp;bih=888&amp;amp;prmd=ivns&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;tbo=u&amp;amp;source=univ&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=FxZYTtzlH9Gs8QOh58CtDA&amp;amp;ved=0CEgQsAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Litter Picker&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-08-26T22:16:10.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2388" CreationDate="2011-08-27T00:26:55.340" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39578/why-the-meat-in-sweetmeat&quot;&gt;Why the &amp;quot;meat&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;sweetmeat&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/39623/1&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; appears different in the preview from where it appears in when saved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VUa74.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R85iw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it supposed to be so, or is there a bug laughing behind my shoulders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T10:20:25.720" Title="The preview of the post doesn't match how the post is rendered when saved" Tags="|bug|status-completed|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1822" CreationDate="2011-08-27T01:35:07.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problems I can see with the question are that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How you name the directories of your hard disk probably depends from which files you have. I would think that you don't call a directory &quot;Butterfly pictures&quot; if you don't have butterfly pictures; you could choose that name for not making clear what the content is, but in that case, you could choose any random name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answers to that question would be arbitrary, as there aren't any rule you are forced to follow while choosing the name of a directory. Probably you would get different answers about which name to use, as every user has a preferred schema to use for choosing the name to give to directories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no relation between the name of a directory, and English grammar; you could use a name such as &quot;ABBDDE,&quot; &quot;Le mie fotografie,&quot; or a random sequence of letters and numbers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, if you were more detailed with the type of files you have on your hard disk, the question would be even more localized.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, as every answer would be equally valid, the question would be a poll, which is the kind of question that are not welcome anymore. If some very old questions are polls (where by very old I mean questions asked during the beta phase), now such questions are not welcome anymore, considering also that Community Wiki questions have a different meaning, now that every user can edit every question (although users with a reputation lower than 2000 need somebody who review their edit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third case, the question is not even about the English language and its usage. The question is similar to the questions about the name to give to a function; the difference is that some programming languages some words are reserved, and they cannot be used as function name. In both the cases, there isn't any relationship between the chosen name and English grammar; in the case of function names is more a matter of the programming language grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-27T14:47:30.757" LastActivityDate="2011-08-27T14:47:30.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1831" CreationDate="2011-08-27T01:44:53.607" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/449/kosmonaut&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut's profile&lt;/a&gt;, you will notice that his only question shows &quot;jan 20 at 0:29&quot; as timestamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6t4kH.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5407/when-is-it-ok-to-leave-out-to-be-in-constructions-like-needs-to-be-washed&quot;&gt;Central Pennsylvanian English speakers: what are the limitations on the &amp;quot;needs washed&amp;quot; construction?&lt;/a&gt; you will notice that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11387/lauren&quot;&gt;Lauren Ψ&lt;/a&gt; edited the question on Aug 2 at 17:31, and she didn't answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the timestamp show a different date to avoid the question is bumped on the front page, or is there something more behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="The timestamp reported for this question is wrong" Tags="|support|questions|timestamps|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1830" CreationDate="2011-08-27T02:02:14.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100137/what-is-the-meaning-of-chaos-is-it-related-to-the-psi-character&quot;&gt;CHAOS Team&lt;/a&gt; was given edit privileges, and since they were fixing at least 1000 questions these edits did not bump a question. This means that on a particular question, you can see when it was edited. But, on a user's profile, you can see &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; edited but not when. I think this may relate to how &quot;bumping&quot; works--in this case, the timestamp which bumps a question was not updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon happened with other members of the CHAOS team. For example, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1530/can-i-get-hdr-on-the-4th-gen-ipod-touch-by-upgrading-to-ios-4-1&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on Apple was edited in early August, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/users/189/balexandre#qpage_2-qsort_votes&quot;&gt;user's page&lt;/a&gt; shows the date on which the question last received a non-CHAOS edit or modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:31.650" LastActivityDate="2011-08-27T02:12:59.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1833" CreationDate="2011-08-27T23:28:48.260" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know which you'll want to keep, but they're definitely synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-08-28T19:25:16.580" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T19:25:16.580" Title="Could [humor] and [humour] be synonymized?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1832" CreationDate="2011-08-27T23:40:34.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done. I kept &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humor&lt;/a&gt; over &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humour&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humour&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humour&lt;/a&gt; because the first was used 6 times, while the latter was only used once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-27T23:40:34.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-28T06:55:38.183" Score="6" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; don't have very many questions, but they do seem to cover the same topics. Is this a valid tag synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-08-30T06:27:41.030" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T06:27:41.030" Title="Can [dictionary] and [dictionaries] be made synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-28T06:59:11.750" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diacriticals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diacriticals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diacriticals&lt;/a&gt; has only one question, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diacritic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diacritic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diacritic&lt;/a&gt; has at least a few more. I think they should be made synonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-08-28T19:33:15.373" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T19:33:15.373" Title="Can [diacritic] and [diacriticals] be made synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1835" CreationDate="2011-08-28T09:37:55.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would rather make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diacriticals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diacriticals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diacriticals&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diacritic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diacritic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diacritic&lt;/a&gt;, and merge the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T09:37:55.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1834" CreationDate="2011-08-28T09:41:29.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With tags, we generally use the plural form, but in this case I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; makes more sense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, and then merge the first tag with the second one, to make all the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; appear as tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-08-28T13:32:22.310" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T13:32:22.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1842" CreationDate="2011-08-28T19:05:04.910" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39516/agreed-that-or-agreed-to-that&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Agreed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;agreed to&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; there is a comment that has been re-written as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39516/agreed-that-or-agreed-to-that/39533#39533&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is flagging the comment as obsolete correct, in this case?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In which other cases should a comment be marked as obsolete?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does that have a meaning, or do moderators see it just as background noise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T19:22:50.410" Title="Is the &quot;obsolete&quot; flag applicable even to comments that have already re-written as answer?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1840" CreationDate="2011-08-28T19:22:50.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is flagging the comment as obsolete correct, in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In which other cases should a comment be marked as obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the comment is no longer valuable, such as when a comment suggests a rephrasing of the question that is subsequently edited into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does that have a meaning, or do moderators see it just as background noise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We delete obsolete comments, if that's what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T19:22:50.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1834" CreationDate="2011-08-28T20:02:00.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not making always the singular as a synonym of the plural: noun vs nouns, verb vs verbs, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We can't expect from the new users to know which one to use: the singular or the plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="5249" LastEditDate="2011-08-28T20:13:05.630" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T20:13:05.630" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1845" CreationDate="2011-08-28T23:02:56.173" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1764/a-question-voted-to-be-off-topic-and-better-suited-to-writers-se-has-not-been-mig&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (and I have seen this issue other time) the poster links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38258/when-should-one-use-a-section-sign&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt; that can be seen only by a member with at least 10K reputation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Shouldn't the poster give a warning (or something else), because otherwise those under 10k  click on it and don't see anything-wasted time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T23:25:36.517" Title="Should those 10K who link to deleted questions give a warning?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1844" CreationDate="2011-08-28T23:18:07.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could have given a warning, if the question were already closed when I wrote the question on the meta site, but I wrote the question the day before the referred question was deleted. &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I normally leave a comment reporting when a link is useful only for 10k user, and I think that is a courtesy to leave such comments, except in the case the question is clearly about something only 10k user can use. (If, for example, the question is about the moderator tools, then commenting that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&lt;/a&gt; is a link accessible to 10k users seems superfluous.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question on meta that is referring to a deleted question, feel free to propose an edit for that meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T23:25:36.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1764" CreationDate="2011-08-28T23:40:26.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/symbol&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;symbol&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;symbol&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt; do not exist on Writers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent a back-door for creating tags, when a question is voted to be migrated, the tags are checked on the destination site.  Any tags that don't exist will be stripped from the question.  If that process leaves a question without any tags, then it will simply be closed as off-topic.  Mods can override this, notice how &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/3740/is-it-always-ok-to-use-the-verb-to-say-after-a-question&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is tagged with [untagged].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not sure I understand the migration on the &quot;to say&quot; question, but that's a different matter I guess.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T23:40:26.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1834" CreationDate="2011-08-30T06:27:31.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have, with slight reservations, made &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; the master tag in this merge, for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; has been favored over &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; by a factor of 8.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unlike, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;, there are many dictionaries in the English-speaking world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Existing questions rarely seem to ask about a specific dictionary; rather, they ask about either multiple dictionaries or dictionaries in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We traditionally favor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72/should-we-prefer-singular-or-plural-in-tags&quot;&gt;plural form of a tag&lt;/a&gt; in any case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@kiamlaluno's argument is not extremely persuasive. If I have multiple dictionaries, but I'm not referring to any in particular, I might use the singular. But if I want to consult all of them, I would probably use the plural. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, I'm open to reversing the synonym if there is a good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T06:27:31.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1869" CreationDate="2011-08-30T14:55:46.467" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case the word used as tag has a different spelling in American and British English, which spelling should we adopt for the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="When a word used as tag has a different spelling in American and British English, which spelling should we use?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1852" CreationDate="2011-08-30T16:28:46.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say go case-by-case: whoever defines the tag gets to decide which spelling to use. If later on we find both spellings in use, we keep the one that's more frequent and mark the other as a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, do it pretty much how we've been doing it so far. I don't think this is an area where consistency is required, or even very desirable (because whichever spelling we'd choose, we'd snub the users of the other spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T16:28:46.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1855" CreationDate="2011-08-30T17:40:32.613" Score="5" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do enough people know IPA that I can use it instead of phonetic spelling?  Or should I use both?  I tend to use phonetic spelling just because it seems easy to read, but IPA would definitely be better if people would understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastActivityDate="2011-08-31T02:27:08.097" Title="Should I prefer IPA or phonetic spelling in displaying pronunciation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1854" CreationDate="2011-08-30T18:05:41.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is a great tool for linguists. Most people don't know it, however, especially not readily, and a lot of people don't even have the fonts installed on their computers, so all they will see is a bunch of little boxes. I'd avoid it just on the principle of reaching more people with standard phonetic pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T18:05:41.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1854" CreationDate="2011-08-31T02:27:08.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is up to you. You can use either of them (or both). If the question uses IPA or the phonetic spelling, do the same in the answer. Take cues from the nature of the question or on the asker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastActivityDate="2011-08-31T02:27:08.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1875" CreationDate="2011-09-01T00:49:26.307" Score="6" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main issue I see with those questions is that they are too localized: It's rather difficult that those questions are really helpful for somebody else than the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problems I can see with those questions are when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no indication about who was speaking, which means it is not possible to understand in which dialect the speaker is talking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The clip is to short to catch exactly which dialect is being spoken, or if the speaker is imitating a dialect that is not the one s/he speaks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What understood depends on who listens. Considering the previous points, there could be a different interpretation, but normally people tend to interpret what they hear as if it is said in the dialect they speak. This is particularly true when part of the clip audio is not clear; for example the phrase said is &quot;this car […] washed&quot; (where &quot;[…]&quot; is a part that is difficult to hear).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions about what heard in an audio clip always welcome?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In which cases are they not welcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T21:28:53.660" Title="Are questions about what heard in an audio clip always welcome?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1865" CreationDate="2011-09-01T00:55:10.190" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that when I ask a question on this meta site, and then I click on the &quot;Questions&quot; link, I don't immediately see the question I asked; sometimes I need to click again on the same link, and sometimes (as happened few minutes ago), I have to click on different links before to see the question I asked in the list of the questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have also tried hard-reloading the page (which would mean holding the &lt;kbd&gt;opt&lt;/kbd&gt; key while clicking on the reload button), without any result. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't seem to have this problem on the main site (any SE site), are questions on meta sites cached differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I normally use Safari 5.1 on Mac OS X 10.7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-01T18:36:13.880" Title="Is the list of questions differently cached, on the meta site?" Tags="|support|questions|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1857" CreationDate="2011-09-01T02:14:43.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first reaction on the reading the title was of course audio examples are welcome. But I see now your point about the kind of question that might come a long with it, how it is terribly localized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I feel like the rules in place are good enough to already decide without a special rule just for audio clips. That is, we can judge whether the question about the clip is too local (your examples) or perfectly fine (e.g what is the dialect this person is speaking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T02:14:43.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1809" CreationDate="2011-09-01T11:09:50.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For info, we do now make this data available when &lt;em&gt;selecting&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate (i.e. the &quot;close as duplicate of&quot; popup); see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104096/i-want-to-know-how-duplicious-a-question-is-and-if-it-is-the-best-example-of-suc&quot;&gt;I want to know how duplicious a question is, and if it is the best example of such&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; currently available separately (i.e. for use as a sort); I'm also a little dubious how much real use that sort would see. It &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be possible to get this from &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T11:09:50.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1862" CreationDate="2011-09-01T11:51:14.810" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40263/figuring-the-svo-of-the-sentence-im-tom&quot;&gt;question today&lt;/a&gt; and I noticed that the OP and I have drop shadows beneath out avatars and the person who edited the question and the other answerer do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who gets a drop shadow, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R4JCw.png&quot; alt=&quot;avatar on right with drop shadow, avatar on left without&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sFs1T.png&quot; alt=&quot;top avatar without shadow, bottom avatar with&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-09-09T09:07:29.433" Title="Why do some avatars have drop shadows?" Tags="|discussion|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1861" CreationDate="2011-09-01T12:15:26.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The avatars with a drop shadow are avatars that show a popup when you hover your mouse over them.&#xA;For this to happens, the user must have entered something in the &quot;About Me&quot; field, and have a reputation higher than 1000. There could be a minimum length for the &quot;About Me&quot; description: When the length of the entered text doesn't reach that limit, the popup is not shown. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qP71a.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T12:15:26.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1864" CreationDate="2011-09-01T12:26:14.350" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past days, I noticed that the drop-down menu shows a reputation gain for the day that is different from what reported in the reputation page for that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, today the drop-down menu shows 13, while the reputation page shows 15. What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WwFew.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If then I look at english.stackexchange.com/reputation, I get the following data, for today, which confirm the reputation gain is 15 and not 13:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA; 2      1565 (5)&#xA; 2     40204 (10)&#xA;-- 2011-09-01 rep +15   = 21259&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the reputation is not always correct, but I noticed the same behavior on different days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T14:02:11.367" Title="Why does the drop-down menu show a reputation difference of 2 points?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1863" CreationDate="2011-09-01T14:02:11.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two possible conclusions here, though it'd be difficult to determine either one. Both are the results of a -2 reputation loss that isn't tracked - one because it no longer exists, the other because it is a reversal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first scenario, you got downvoted on a post today. That accounts for a -2 to your displayed reputation, and so your dropdown will report such. However, &lt;strong&gt;the source of the downvote may have been deleted&lt;/strong&gt;. This thus means that your Reputation page won't show it (since it won't have a downvote to show), and your reputation audit will likewise not show it (because the downvote doesn't exist). However, your displayed reputation is still only 13 different, so the display name dropdown will claim a difference of 13 rather than the proper 15.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second scenario, &lt;strong&gt;you retracted an acceptance to an answer from a while ago&lt;/strong&gt;. The think about retractions are that they don't cause an actual reputation loss, but instead they just clear the original event from your history. So the -2 is not shown as a -2 on any report, but rather as a lack of the original +2. This would explain why it won't show up on the Reputation page or the reputation audit as the loss is due to the lack of an event, not the presence of a loss. As with the previous scenario, your difference in reputation from today and yesterday remains 13, hence why the display name dropdown will claim such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the source, a reputation recalculation will fix the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T14:02:11.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1858" CreationDate="2011-09-01T18:14:11.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens also in the main site to me, and in the others SE as well. I don't use Safari, and it happens anyway, so I don't think this is a bug. I always thought it was the system getting the question &quot;archived&quot;, more or less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T18:14:11.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1867" CreationDate="2011-09-01T20:16:20.877" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions about how best to teach the English language welcome here?  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is this text/word/structure appropriate for students of this level?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do I break down this rule of grammar to students of this level?&quot;  (Alternately,  &quot;Is this a good way to explain this to students of this level?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Where can I find sample texts to use for this purpose?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What textbooks do you recommend for this purpose?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking as a new member of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=TEFL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TEFL&lt;/a&gt; community, but I imagine this is relevant to all teachers of English. I did read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69/is-this-site-for-english-as-a-second-language&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; but it didn't answer my question directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12640" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T07:45:55.843" Title="Are questions about teaching English welcome here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1866" CreationDate="2011-09-01T23:49:09.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My initial thoughts are that yes, these questions are welcome, but I cannot speak on a general level. For example, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39190/how-to-explain-accent-variations-to-students&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on explaining accent variations to students. However, there are questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching-aid&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teaching-aid&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teaching-aid&lt;/a&gt; which have been turned into Community Wikis or closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the potential problem with these questions is that there may not be &quot;one right answer&quot;, which is a characteristic that most questions here have. For example, questions like &quot;what textbooks are there for X&quot; could be viewed as off-topic because they are so subjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best advice for you is to try to word your questions so that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a right answer (e.g. &quot;Is this text/word/structure appropriate for students of this level?&quot;) and then put it out there. If it is closed, then the community will either help you reword to be on-topic, or will explain why it thinks your question is not a good fit for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that are clearly open-ended (where can I find textbooks), I would bring it up in chat. Another option is to make it a community wiki, but it seems like the opinions are changing on these (as in, they mean that there is a subjective question so they shouldn't be there). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T23:49:09.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1866" CreationDate="2011-09-02T10:23:12.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about resources are generally off-topic on SE sites. The reason is that the answers would be valid until a more recent resource is available; this means there would not be a definitive answer to those questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions about resources tend to be subjective, when they are phrased to ask for the best resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other questions are on topic, if they are phrased to be questions about English in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T10:23:12.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1852" CreationDate="2011-09-02T16:15:08.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;mother ship&quot; the standard is American spelling for tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23869/what-should-the-standard-spelling-be-british-or-us&quot;&gt;What should the standard spelling be - British or US?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While EL&amp;amp;U can buck convention as this isn't a tech topic, I think you should standardize on one or the other. A mix of spellings will look terrible. (Obviously synonyms should be used.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user362" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T16:15:08.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-03T15:32:07.573" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a mistake in my question, and commentators have corrected the mistake. Rather than correct the mistake (thus rendering the comments out-of-date and making an answer look silly), do you think it would be better to strike through (line through) the original mistake or to prefix with a question mark?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proscribed medication&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strike&gt;proscribed&lt;/strike&gt; prescribed medication&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ?proscribed medication&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And incidentally, is using the HTML strike tag the best way to render a strike through, or is there a built-in one (such as there is for &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T19:17:34.913" Title="How to both preserve and correct an OP's mistake" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1870" CreationDate="2011-09-03T17:56:43.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably best to just fix it silently and flag the comments as &lt;em&gt;obsolete&lt;/em&gt;. The extra noise from a strikethrough or question mark probably isn't worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for strikethroughs, the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;s&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag is the only way. Markdown has no special strikethrough code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-09-03T17:56:43.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-03T20:38:45.610" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/836/exception-to-30-character-minimum-for-answers&quot;&gt;Exception to 30 character minimum for answers&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) If a question is clearly a 'single-word request', shouldn't it be possible to click submit with just one word in the text box - even if there are fewer than 23 characters in the response ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any pointers on how this can be done, or why it shouldn't be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) If this question has already been asked, can someone direct me to the archive so I can look at the response/s? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T19:47:23.270" Title="Inputting responses to single-word requests" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-09-03T22:22:03.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-09-03T21:19:41.873" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be no exception to cover such cases. The fact the request is for a single word doesn't mean the answer must be phrased using a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect an answer to a single-word request to &lt;em&gt;describe why&lt;/em&gt; the proposed word suits the request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at the very least, you can always reply with &quot;The word you are looking for is &lt;em&gt;Goshealm&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-10-12T17:55:01.907" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T17:55:01.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1876" CreationDate="2011-09-03T23:48:08.033" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;21 [neologism] vs. 2 [coin].  I don't have the required upvotes in the tag to suggest the synonym.  Could a mod do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-03T23:49:53.013" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T09:45:44.310" Title="Could someone synonymize [neologism] and [coin]?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1857" CreationDate="2011-09-04T22:19:27.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say no, questions based on audio clips are not generally welcome, &lt;em&gt;unless the asker provides a lot of context and background&lt;/em&gt; as you indicated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;who is speaking&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what is the context of the speech&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;why the asker wishes to know&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;any research the asker did on the matter&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst case video analog would be posting a screenshot and saying &quot;I can't tell what's in this picture, can you?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-04T22:19:27.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1874" CreationDate="2011-09-05T09:45:44.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obligatory answer stating completion so this does not show up as an unanswered question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T09:45:44.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-05T11:25:54.260" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understood, when I flag a flag as invalid, my flag will always be marked as disputed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If this is the case, should not the flag history page report that fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GTCUk.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a note as the following one could help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Disputed flags include also the flags you flagged as invalid, and on which other users have agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T11:25:54.260" Title="Should not the flag history page report that &quot;disputed flags&quot; include also the flags that have been marked as invalid from the user?" Tags="|discussion|flag-history|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1892" CreationDate="2011-09-05T15:33:13.347" Score="8" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation for the &quot;Citizen Patrol&quot; badge is simply &quot;First flagged post&quot;, which is admirably concise, but wrong.  It should be &quot;Flagged first post&quot;, because the badge goes to the flagger, not the poster. (And yes, I was genuinely confused when I first read it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-05T19:32:46.517" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T02:41:51.203" Title="&quot;Citizen Patrol&quot; badge mis-titled" Tags="|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1880" CreationDate="2011-09-05T18:13:22.037" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There can only be 1 active bounty per question and per user at any given time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/12549/myqlarson?tab=bounties&quot;&gt;one user&lt;/a&gt; has 2 active bounties right now: both on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11395/why-does-american-english-pluralize-certain-singular-nouns&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40572/is-it-true-that-a-word-ending-in-y-is-more-likely-to-be-an-adjective-than-a-noun&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that one bounty is on a question asked by that user, and another is on one asked by someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="A user has 2 active bounties" Tags="|support|status-completed|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1879" CreationDate="2011-09-05T19:31:39.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/54315/why-cant-a-user-have-simultaneous-bounties-any-more/104813#104813&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now allow for up to 3 concurrent bounties per user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will be analyzing the effect over the next few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ will have to be corrected by a dev.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T19:31:39.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1882" CreationDate="2011-09-06T11:20:53.537" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11395/why-does-american-english-pluralize-certain-singular-nouns&quot;&gt;Why does American English pluralize certain singular nouns?&lt;/a&gt; has an open bounty of +500 from the Community. How does that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-09-06T11:53:15.473" Title="How can Community offer bounties" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1881" CreationDate="2011-09-06T11:53:08.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually it's because a user had a bounty but requested deletion while the bounty was live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-06T11:53:08.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1886" CreationDate="2011-09-06T14:49:20.003" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40849/whats-a-word-expression-to-describe-a-feeling-of-anxiety-about-the-passing-of-ti&quot;&gt;What is a word or expression to describe anxiety about the passing of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's my first question on English SE, though I am a long-time StackOverflow user, so I understand how the system works in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, I don't know how to tag my question on English SE.  I found the tag &lt;code&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/code&gt;, which seems appropriate for the question I asked, but on the other hand, I expect that there may be an expression that is more appropriate than a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please suggest the most appropriate tags for my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-09-07T00:17:14.493" Title="What tag to use when asking what word or expression is appropriate to express an idea?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2011-09-06T21:24:03.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My present understanding of the tags is that they:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help experts to answer them (ex. when they favourite them)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help those interested in learning/researching about a topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help delimit similar questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general you can browse the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;list of tags&lt;/a&gt; and see what fits you.&#xA;For example &lt;em&gt;word-choice, phrase-requests, expressions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you think your question is about a common expression or if you want one, there is a tag for that too: &lt;em&gt;common-expression&lt;/em&gt;. You also have &lt;em&gt;phrases&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;idioms&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;word-usage&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-09-06T21:24:03.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2011-09-07T00:17:14.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag exists specifically for this sort of reverse-dictionary question where the desired answer consists of more than one word. If you're open to any number of words, including one, then use both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and the phrase-request tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-09-07T00:17:14.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1890" CreationDate="2011-09-07T23:27:19.890" Score="-1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please re-open &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40857/why-and-since-when-is-prostitution-called-the-worlds-oldest-profession&quot;&gt;Why (and since when) is prostitution called “the world&amp;#39;s oldest profession”?&lt;/a&gt; . Talking about a well-known euphemism that's used in polite company (even Ronald Reagan has referred to the phrase!) shouldn't be closed because the subject matter is somehow &quot;dirty&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T01:43:12.893" Title="Please re-open the &quot;oldest profession&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1888" CreationDate="2011-09-08T00:34:28.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem reopenable to me. It wasn't closed because it is a taboo subject: it is pretty low on the taboo scale. It was closed because it is not particularly substantive about English -language-. It's a question of sociology and history and humor, not language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you have an answer to give to it? Then I think you can still answer or put it In a comment there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you curious about other answers? I think one of the answers there actually does trace the history as well as could be done, so no need for more of the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2011-09-08T01:09:32.237" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T01:09:32.237" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1888" CreationDate="2011-09-08T01:43:12.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After I had voted to close the question, F'x contributed some good edits.  I have since voted to reopen it, since I agree that tracing the history and usage of the phrase is appropriate and on-topic for this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question could be made even better and more obviously on-topic if it were written such that it could be answered by a post such as F'x's, or something similar, if you found his objectionable.  Perhaps if you edited it like that, more users would agree that it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T01:43:12.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1878" CreationDate="2011-09-08T02:41:51.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the badge descriptions describe the object of the action that causes you to get the relative badge; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First rollback: The rollback has been done by you, not from somebody else on your posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First down vote: The down-vote has been done by you, not from somebody who down-voted one of your posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First edit: The edit has been done by you, not from somebody who edited one of your posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First retag: The retag has been done by you, not from somebody who changed one of the tags used in one of your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the badge is intentionally not clear because, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/a-bevy-of-new-badges/&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood said&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Badges are supposed to be a little mysterious; you should view them as minor puzzles with obvious hints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What activity is this badge referring to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How do I perform this activity?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why is this activity important and necessary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Who should normally perform this activity, and when?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T02:41:51.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1817" CreationDate="2011-09-08T02:59:23.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That part has been added from moderators to the FAQ; mmyers is correct. If you look at the FAQ of other SE sites, you will not notice that section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only workaround would be to use HTML instead of Markdown, but the problem is that, as reported in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed-on-stack-overflow-server-fault-and-super-user&quot;&gt;What HTML tags are allowed on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User?&lt;/a&gt; the ID attribute is not allowed, and it would be stripped before rendering (or before saving the FAQ section).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T02:59:23.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-08T14:07:14.543" Score="7" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, RSVP is a French term, or to be more exact, an abbreviation for &lt;em&gt;repondez vous s'il vous plait&lt;/em&gt;. It seems to have found its way into the English language as a fairly common term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions about it on topic?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What about other terms with foreign origin such as &lt;em&gt;faux pas&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;savoir faire&lt;/em&gt;? Where does one draw the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A day after asking the original, I saw this question about &quot;alpha&quot; and &quot;omega,&quot; that was closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41177/are-and-common-symbols-for-birth-and-death&quot;&gt;Are alpha and omega common abbreviations for birth and death?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (original) Greek term is occasionally used to refer to &quot;beginning and end.&quot; It was used in the above context to refer to &quot;birth and death.&quot; That's not exactly a common English usage, so it a bit of a stretch, but is understandable from the Greek usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK if an expression is USABLE in English? Or does it have to be in &quot;common use.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that going too far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T08:50:57.123" Title="Are questions about terms like &quot;RSVP&quot; on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1894" CreationDate="2011-09-08T14:31:32.163" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, these type of questions should be OK, so long as they &lt;em&gt;directly pertain to the use of the phrase in English&lt;/em&gt;. If your question is about the phrase's etymology or such and does not directly pertain to English, then it would probably be better on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;French Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (assuming French phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:38.930" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T14:31:32.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1902" CreationDate="2011-09-08T15:50:31.283" Score="-2" ViewCount="831" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41106/career-vs-carrier-closed&quot;&gt;career vs carrier&lt;/a&gt;' was closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though a reference would show that they are pronounced the same, I don't know of any reference that shows that they &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; pronounced the same in Indian English. And I think that is a useful part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;I find the -underlying- question interesting, but on the surface it is poorly directed, working with uninformed assumptions (and I was uninformed about the Indian pronunciation). I think this is a problem, for me at least, of wanting to edit the question radically, but not for fear of altering the OP's intent radically also. But then I'm not sure I could reword it to not still be 'general reference': look up the pronunciation of the two  and you'll see that (in standard dictionaries at least) they are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit #2:&#xA;I understand the given reasons for closing. But...the existence of that phenomenon, the nonstandard pronunciation, is very interesting (whether organic or deliberate). And closing to me means 'that question should not have been asked' (or not asked that particular way). And I think there was something in that question that should have been asked/made public. And sometimes it is difficult to ask the question well without already knowing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-09-09T13:05:12.427" Title="Closing of 'career vs carrier'" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1894" CreationDate="2011-09-08T15:56:02.747" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a totally appropriate question. 'RSVP' been in English use for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=RSVP&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a while&lt;/a&gt; (since the mid 19th c) and many English speakers probably don't even know the French it stands for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of borrowings into English from other languages and these pose special problems for grammar and pronunciation, how &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; one pronounce them and how people in fact &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; use them, and questions about them &lt;em&gt;as they pertain to English&lt;/em&gt; are very appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some reference to the usage in the original language is also appropriate, but only as it can inform the (most likely) inequivalent usage in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T15:56:02.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1896" CreationDate="2011-09-08T16:16:14.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that some people (esp. Indians) might pronounce the two words the same (or nearly so) was only peripheral to the question as asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP there specifically made a case for wanting &quot;carrier&quot; to have a similar meaning to &quot;career&quot; because a career &quot;carries&quot; one through life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer given (by @Hugo) clearly indicated which word OP &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be using, and I see no reason to reopen in hopes of a better one than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any further discussion on the merits of OP's case for his own idiosyncratic (and incorrect) interpretation of &lt;em&gt;carrier&lt;/em&gt; would be just that - discussion. I see no reason to reopen in order to encourage that discussion, which in any case is not prevented by the current &quot;closed&quot; status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T16:16:14.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1906" CreationDate="2011-09-08T17:11:28.280" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd been under the impression that once a question was closed, further voting was either not possible, or wouldn't affect reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a couple of hours ago, someone upvoted my answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40940/why-does-the-gorilla-weigh-exactly-800-pounds/&quot;&gt;Why does the gorilla weigh exactly 800 pounds?&lt;/a&gt; which was closed yesterday, and my rep has apparently increased because of that up-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What have I misunderstood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How do votes work on closed questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1900" CreationDate="2011-09-08T17:50:54.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing only prevents answers. Locking, which is restricted to mods, prevents all activity including commenting and voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T17:50:54.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1896" CreationDate="2011-09-08T18:14:11.597" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question asked &quot;what are the dialectical differences that make &lt;em&gt;career&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;carrier&lt;/em&gt; homophones in Indian English, but not in other dialects?&quot; then it would probably be worthy of staying open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T18:14:11.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1870" CreationDate="2011-09-08T19:17:34.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main issue is with the answers, not the comments. Yes, I recommend you to strike through. This is what I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37536/explain-the-verb-tense-in-i-wish-i-never-woke-up-this-morning&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; This way the answers do not necessarily need to be updated (you need to appreciate the  effort spent) and still make sense. You may need to inform with a comment within the answers that you have changed your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T19:17:34.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1857" CreationDate="2011-09-08T21:11:13.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be two types of such questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First type are &quot;deciphering&quot; questions-they request to decipher a phrase in the speech which is unclear, confusing to the asker.  These questions should be closed because they are too localized. There is no benefit for them to the community at large.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second type are those who use the audio file as a source for inquiring about word-usage, grammar or other aspects of English. They are &lt;strong&gt;fine&lt;/strong&gt;. However, there are some problems:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-since the spoken language is more subject to variability and errors,  more context is needed than for the written language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-sometimes it is unclear what the speaker says. So the audio file has to be of very good quality. There is so such problem with the written text. What you see is what you have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think who is speaking, or what dialect is used should be emphasized. We do not impose that from the written texts (that is we do not impose information about the author and the dialect).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="5249" LastEditDate="2011-09-08T21:28:53.660" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T21:28:53.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1773" CreationDate="2011-09-08T23:05:23.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it's not an answer but I got the same problem too, although on just one of the flags, the other two are fine. I'm using Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/58pZd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-09-08T23:05:23.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1900" CreationDate="2011-09-09T06:26:16.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-question&quot;&gt;What is a &quot;closed&quot; question?&lt;/a&gt; reports the following two sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a question is closed, no additional answers may be posted to it, although the question and existing answers can still be edited (by users with edit privileges) and voted upon, and will continue to count for badges. The asker of a closed question may still accept an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-09-09T06:26:16.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-09T09:01:36.157" Score="7" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was triggered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41185/what-does-the-gesture-to-touch-the-side-of-your-nose-with-a-forefinger-mean&quot;&gt;What does the gesture to touch the side of your nose with a forefinger mean?&lt;/a&gt; but it is generally referring to any question about gestures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those questions on-topic on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To me, they don't seem on-topic, in the same way questions about sign language are not on-topic. The reason is that the question is not about English language, and without a specific context being given, in some cases there are more than one possible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T10:35:02.167" Title="Are questions about gestures on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1907" CreationDate="2011-09-09T09:49:50.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to throw a few thoughts on the matter, although for now I'm not sure whether we should accept or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gestures&lt;/strong&gt; are certainly an important part for communicating, as much as &lt;strong&gt;intonation&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;body movement&lt;/strong&gt;. The intonation field is treated in Linguistics studies, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there are some gestures that are international, but some are peculiar to a given nation and some of them even &lt;strong&gt;only to certain regions&lt;/strong&gt;. But even though all of these are important in helping the utterance having its desired effect on the interlocutor, they might get &lt;em&gt;interpreted&lt;/em&gt; and that's the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that most of them might generate discussions and debates. I'd add them to the &quot;on-topic park&quot; but first we have to consider that they're not a definite field, at least for some of them. And even grammar, that is kind of stricter and more definite, generates debates sometimes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should we consider as on-topic questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the English gesture to convey [message]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In our country X we have this, what is the English equivalent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the difference in doing this gesture in U.S. or UK?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;... etc.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-09-09T09:49:50.253" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-09T10:12:09.143" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was adding a tag to another question, I noticed there are two tags that apparently have similar meanings: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/appropriate-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'appropriate-questions'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;appropriate-questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/on-topic-off-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'on-topic-off-topic'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic-off-topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When should those tags be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T23:57:32.143" Title="What is the difference between the &quot;appropriate-questions&quot; and &quot;on-topic-off-topic&quot; tags?" Tags="|support|tags|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1910" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1911" CreationDate="2011-09-09T13:57:46.260" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41245/how-can-this-technical-message-be-made-clearer&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41245/how-can-this-technical-message-be-made-clearer&lt;/a&gt; is getting silently down-voted, so I'd like some guidance on whether it is considered off-topic or something else is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like it is better placed on writers.SE instead. Should I just delete my question, and repost over there, since I cannot migrate it myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-09-10T11:29:28.227" Title="Is this question off-topic or is something else wrong with it?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-09-23T18:03:56.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1910" CreationDate="2011-09-09T15:03:22.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question should be 'flag'ed as off-topic and a moderator will help get it migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastActivityDate="2011-09-09T15:03:22.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1907" CreationDate="2011-09-09T16:10:16.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I immediately thought it was off-topic and was about to post the following comment there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gestures are off-topic. They are a form of limited communication, but barely language and it's not even part of a sign language. They are not connected in anyway with English language, though particular ones may be associated with particular English culture. Even so, there is nothing connecting them with English as a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on reflection, I have the usual misgivings. It is an interesting question; it -is- about communication; the question is substantive; where else could one imagine a question like that being asked and answered so well; the question and existing answers are already high voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these reasons are part of the ELU mandate, they're all secondary. And there are other questions that meet all of these too but are easily closable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this question and it's not frivolous or poor or badly intended. But it's very questionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-09-09T16:10:16.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1914" CreationDate="2011-09-10T16:46:30.673" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I vote to close a question that is duplicating another one, I get a list of questions with some numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is their meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UMRrq.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-11T15:44:00.223" Title="What is the meaning of the numbers shown in the dialog to vote to close a question as duplicate?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1913" CreationDate="2011-09-11T15:44:00.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having just voted on another duplicate, I now have a more conclusive answer. The numbers on the left are &quot;the combined score of question and answers&quot; (my cursor was hovering over the box, but you can't see it in this screenshot):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hoqas.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers on the right (again, my cursor was hovering over them but you can't see it here) give the number of times a question has been linked to, or voted as a duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tvc7f.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-09-11T15:44:00.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1894" CreationDate="2011-09-12T07:56:55.087" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U has the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/loan-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loan-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loan-words&lt;/a&gt;, so yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the Japanese Stack exchange has wasei-eigo (&quot;English made in Japan&quot;) and loanwords as tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2011-12-12T10:40:54.637" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T10:40:54.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1919" CreationDate="2011-09-12T08:03:16.343" Score="2" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the error message picture for the English Stack Exchange from &quot;Alice in Wonderland&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JcqjI.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Stack Exchange error screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T13:59:06.277" Title="Is the error message picture from &quot;Alice in Wonderland&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1918" CreationDate="2011-09-12T09:09:28.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it is, same for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/404&quot;&gt;404 page&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/captcha&quot;&gt;CAPTCHA page&lt;/a&gt; images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fithfath.com/images/?p=345&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T09:09:28.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1918" CreationDate="2011-09-12T13:59:06.277" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be NO, it is from &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt;.  You see: &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; has playing cards, while the sequel &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt; has chess pieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T13:59:06.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-12T15:09:56.990" Score="5" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spoke with some of you &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/conversation/recommended-elu-questions&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt; the other day about questions that would be relevant to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/five-line-rhyme-time-a-limerick-contest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;limerick contest&lt;/a&gt; we're sponsoring on Sentence First, and I just wanted to let you know it went up today! The author, Stan, gave us a really nice write up and linked to a bunch of questions! Check it out and feel free to enter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-10-29T20:33:15.487" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T20:41:38.563" Title="Check out this limerick contest we're sponsoring" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T04:27:14.480" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1706/whats-up-with-the-strange-characters-in-some-display-names&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s up with the strange characters in some display names?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed this trend of late: users appending Greek letters to their usernames. Why or when did this suddenly become popular? A very curious trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2705" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T04:27:14.480" Title="Why the Greek letters in usernames?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-09-13T04:28:18.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1925" CreationDate="2011-09-13T07:16:47.667" Score="6" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made an answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/41587&quot;&gt;Appropriate preposition to go with &amp;quot;concerned&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and noted that although I acknowledged that &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; could be used, I didn't knew in which context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, Dan Ray proposed an answer which give said information. Would it be proper for me to edit said information or part of it? The concensus on SO.meta seemed to be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17685/etiquette-when-is-it-ok-to-edit-your-answer-to-include-information-from-someone/17693#17693&quot;&gt;it would be ok, as long as I give credit to the poster&lt;/a&gt;. But I can imagine that philosophy might change between the different StackExchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T20:56:49.723" Title="[Etiquette]Edit our answer with information from another answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1924" CreationDate="2011-09-13T08:59:29.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are referring to your answer that would be edited to include what reported in the other  answer, then I don't see any reason for including what already written in the other answer. If you agree with what said in the other answer, you could add a note in your answer, saying that instead of repeating the other answer, although that could be a comment for the other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make sense to add to your post what already said in the other one, if your answer is more restrictive of what already reported (e.g., &quot;it's A when B; it is C when D&quot; where &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is what reported in the other answer) or for example, when the question is about the meaning of a word (or an abbreviation) that has four meanings, and the other answer reports just two of them. It also make sense if your answer is referring to what reported from a dictionary, when the other answer didn't have any reference, or when your answer is taking as reference a dictionary that was not referred from the other post.&#xA;In the cases I described, you should be the one who answered for second. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not saying that what being the first to answer, and editing your answer basing on what reported by other posts is wrong, but I imagine what would happen if a third user would include what already said from the first answers, where the first answer has been edited to include the second answer. Users would read three different answer but that basically are the copy of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;proposed answer&quot; you mean the user has written as comment what should have been an answer (I cannot see deleted comment, and I am trying to guess what could be happened), then I would give the user time to write an answer out of that comment; if then the user doesn't write an answer, I would add what reported in the comment in my answer, giving credit to the user who commented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T08:59:29.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T11:10:53.177" Score="22" ViewCount="901" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have mailed out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1353/english-stack-exchange-swag-for-top-users&quot;&gt;swag packages&lt;/a&gt; for our top users. Some of you have already received them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I made a terrible error. I misspelled the site URL on the T-shirt in the vector file I sent to the printshop. It was spelled &quot;english.stackchange.com&quot; instead of &quot;english.stackexchange.com.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to print out a new batch of T-shirts and mail the top users again. Printing will take about two weeks. Mailing will take about a bit over a week within the US and a bit longer for non-US residents. I'm estimating the total time will be about 3.5-5 weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely apologize for this error. I know you all have been waiting patiently for this package. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW the stickers are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T14:00:14.710" Title="Mis-printed English.se T-shirts" Tags="|discussion|swag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1929" CreationDate="2011-09-13T12:56:12.917" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep getting this error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your login data seems too old; please log in to any StackExchange site, possibly logging out before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have cleared my cookies, and logged in and out of EL&amp;amp;U several times. I have also closed and reopened my browser (Firefox 3.6.18) with no luck.  I have accessed chat with this computer and browser before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, upgrading to Firefox 6.0.2 does not correct the error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T13:10:59.423" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:56:26.940" Title="I can't log in to chat" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1928" CreationDate="2011-09-13T14:14:35.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to have fixed itself after I left it resting on chat.stackexchange.com for several minutes (ten minutes or so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T14:14:35.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1928" CreationDate="2011-09-13T15:58:37.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happened to me too, and as in your case, it started working all in a sudden. As far as I remember, I logged out of all the SE sites, not just EL&amp;amp;U. I think I also cleared all the browser data but the history, before visiting the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T23:56:26.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:56:26.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T18:48:04.297" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I found that I'd answered a question a minute or two after somebody else (with overlap) and thought I had just not seen the notice that you usually get when someone answers while you are.  So I've been paying more attention, and I just noticed another question where I didn't see somebody else's earlier answer (or a notice) before committing mine.  I haven't changed any browser settings and am not blocking any relevant Javascript.  is this happening to anybody else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T21:02:58.430" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T21:02:58.430" Title="Is the &quot;somebody else answered while you were typing&quot; notification working?" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1932" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:02:51.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We tried on Stack Overflow and we can't repro this -- we get the answer notification as expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember pings to the server are every 45 seconds, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T21:02:51.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-15T01:33:11.880" Score="7" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a dev update &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;this FAQ section about related sites&lt;/a&gt; to include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory, ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingustics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;literary enthusiasts and those passionate about the written word, ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Literature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.780" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T13:20:13.497" Title="Can we edit the related sites section of the FAQ?" Tags="|feature-request|site-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-15T05:08:43.173" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In questions that are already locked, the link to protect it should not be shown, as it is not  possible to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205/favourite-untranslatables&quot;&gt;Favourite untranslatables&lt;/a&gt;, which is locked, I can see the &quot;protect&quot; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gTtRw.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T22:43:09.233" Title="Don't show the &quot;protect&quot; link for questions that are locked" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-15T18:48:30.327" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1615/show-native-language-with-the-answer&quot;&gt;Show native language with the answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/101/stack-sites-must-support-primary-and-secondary-language-when-defining-user-profil&quot;&gt;Stack sites must support primary and secondary language when defining user profile&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When accepting advice on English language use, it would be good to know whether the responder is a native speaker or not. One could set this information up in his profile and it would be displayed near the user's icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13045" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T21:05:29.113" Title="Users should be marked as native speakers if they are" Tags="|feature-request|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-09-15T21:04:42.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2011-09-15T20:43:14.373" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;No no no no. You're going about this all wrong. What you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have said was, these are do-it-yourself shirts: using the English knowledge gained from this site, you have to use the Sharpie to make the appropriate corrections to the shirt. The letter enclosed with the package serves as the example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T20:43:14.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2011-09-16T13:20:13.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I think that linguistic questions specifically about English should be here at ELU, and questions about languages abstractly and multilingual linguistics questions should go there. Also, to make sure style questions should go in Literature. My edit of yours would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory involving languages &lt;strong&gt;in addition to English&lt;/strong&gt;, ask on Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;literary enthusiasts and those passionate about &lt;strong&gt;narratives and style of&lt;/strong&gt; the written word, ask on Literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T13:20:13.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-16T21:49:15.110" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why it is impossible to notify more than one person (by @ sign) in a comment to a post? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42138/i-understand-you-vs-i-do-understand-you&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Notification of more than one person in a comment" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1941" CreationDate="2011-09-16T22:48:24.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45273/allow-more-than-one-name-notification-per-comment&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood says&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;there's no valid case for &quot;I need to notify a large number of people&quot; -- at least not one I will support by writing software for it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T22:48:24.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2011-09-17T21:09:49.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that knowing if who answers is a native English speaker is useful, nor is it more useful that knowing what who answers studied. &#xA;What is really important is that the answer is correct, and that doesn't depend from the fact the answerer is a native speaker or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the answerer is just one of the users involved. Many times the accepted answer is chosen basing on the score associated with the answers: The answer with a higher score is accepted. That is one of the criteria that who ask questions have to select an accepted question, and it is plausible if it is so, as the OP is asking something that s/he doesn't know, or for which s/he is unsure.&#xA;In this case, you should also be interested to the native language of who voted the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-09-19T14:23:38.643" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T14:23:38.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2011-09-18T18:16:09.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you hover your mouse over a post's author's gravatar, you may now see a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104810/how-does-the-user-card-popup-work&quot;&gt;user card popup&lt;/a&gt;. The user card shows information from the author's profile, including the beginning of the “about me” section. There are a few restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All profile fields must be filled in, including the age.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The “about me” section must be long enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only users with at least 1000 reputation points get a user card.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to show different text in the user card and on your profile page, make the very first thing in your “about me” section a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- summary: This is my user card text. --&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The your user card will contain only “This is my user card text.”, and the comment is invisible on the profile page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T18:16:09.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1947" CreationDate="2011-09-18T19:15:55.427" Score="7" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is happening with the recent wave of spamming? I flagged as spam more posts today than the entire time I've been on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep down-voting the questions and flagging them, but is there a reason why today there have been 4 spam questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T04:47:37.917" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T04:47:37.917" Title="What's with the spam?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1946" CreationDate="2011-09-18T19:23:06.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the same person who keeps spamming, but using different accounts. Spammers like posting multiple times to increase exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pattern was identified and the content placed on the blacklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the upside, it's good for flag weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T04:47:31.240" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T04:47:31.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2011-09-19T15:43:07.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that Jeff Atwood would prefer that we bowdlerize titles, but he is OK with the full words appearing in the body of the post; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/42361/revisions&quot;&gt;this edit of his&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T20:40:44.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1924" CreationDate="2011-09-19T20:56:49.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This really needs to be determined case by case. In most situations, I would think it is impolite to copy an answer, no matter how much credit was given, because the rep system doesn't account for that. The exception is if there are a bunch of partial answers, i.e. none of them completely answer the question. In that case, the best answer would summarize the existing answers, giving credit where it is due, adding the missing pieces if needed, and — if possible — explaining why each partial answer is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T20:56:49.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1757" CreationDate="2011-09-20T05:35:05.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically an answer to an off topic question is also off topic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, I do not recommend downvoting because of the following reason-the closed questions are just noise. They do not get more answers, they do not get many views, they just fell off the radar and perhaps eventually deleted. So there is no reason to worry too much about them, but passed into oblivion. The only exception are the duplicates which sometimes have proper answers for this site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would personally delete (or transfer if it is a duplicate) any of my answers if they end up in a closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T05:35:05.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1954" CreationDate="2011-09-21T14:15:55.613" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&lt;/a&gt; section in the FAQ, there is a close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;•general reference&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  This question is too basic; it can be definitively&#xA;  and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet&#xA;  reference source designed specifically to find that type of&#xA;  information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think similar wording should be added to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;But please, don’t ask any questions about these topics. They are out of scope for this site.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This came up in the comments on a question I asked today &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42694/meaning-and-origin-of-belt-and-braces&quot;&gt;Meaning and origin of &amp;quot;belt and braces&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13174" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T00:35:36.443" Title="Please add to faq section &quot;What kind of questions can I ask here?&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1953" CreationDate="2011-09-22T00:33:39.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about these topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this section is really to define on-topic questions vs. off-topic questions; you'll note that the other close reasons also aren't mentioned there. General reference questions can be on-topic, but they aren't allowed because they're far too easy to look up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T00:33:39.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T07:10:13.923" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I am invited to post a link to my answer to Facebook and Twitter and other times I am not. What decides?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12952" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Links to Facebook and Twitter" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1957" CreationDate="2011-09-22T21:13:12.580" Score="7" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we have something in place to notify users (less than 2k) who propose an edit if their edit is declined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically (as it is easy enough to return to the question/answer to see if the edit has been approved), can something be included to give a reason for the rejection? Perhaps some things along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Doesn't add anything/meaningless change (ie AmE spelling to BE)&#xA;*Adds incorrect information&#xA;*Changes the meaning of the original post&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be useful to help guide users to better editing, as they know what type of edit suggestions to avoid in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Notify user of rejected edit" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|proposed-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1956" CreationDate="2011-09-23T04:31:29.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to be implemented; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106867/what-are-the-rejection-reasons-for-suggested-edits&quot;&gt;What are the rejection reasons for suggested edits?&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, the list of reasons for rejecting an edit is being defined; after that, the new code will be deployed, first on Meta Stack Overflow, then on Stack Overflow, and the other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T04:31:29.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1960" CreationDate="2011-09-23T13:33:41.913" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/43018/what-is-the-meaning-of-sensuta&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and an apparent increase in 'spam' here on EL&amp;amp;U, I'd just like to know whether there's a standard response expected from community members and TPTB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, is it desirable that I flag the post for moderator attention on the grounds that the user is obviously a spammer? Will a moderator then delete both the user and the post? How do I know not to waste time flagging it if someone else has already done this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what if the spammer simply creates a new account for each spam posting? Can/will TPTB block the relevant IP address from access to EL&amp;amp;U? Supposing some visitor childishly does that on &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; home computer while I'm not looking? Would I then find myself locked out here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T16:11:27.327" Title="Community policing against spam" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1959" CreationDate="2011-09-23T13:51:14.450" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Specifically, is it desirable that I flag the post for moderator attention on the grounds that the user is obviously a spammer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We prefer that you flag as &quot;spam&quot;, as that allow automatic deletion if enough people flag it similarly. But yes, flagging is the right course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will a moderator then delete both the user and the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I know not to waste time flagging it if someone else has already done this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry about more than one person flagging it. If you flag, that helps the post towards automatic deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what if the spammer simply creates a new account for each spam posting? Can/will TPTB block the relevant IP address from access to EL&amp;amp;U? Supposing some visitor childishly does that on my home computer while I'm not looking? Would I then find myself locked out here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, we are not using IP banning for this current round of spam for various reasons. In theory, an IP ban will impact you, but if this happens, you can email &lt;code&gt;team+english@stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; for resolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T14:08:20.473" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T14:08:20.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-23T18:00:54.337" Score="11" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;If so, I would love to talk to you about the Stack Exchange Ambassadors program. Our goal is to get students and teachers involved in promoting Stack Exchange EL&amp;amp;U. Basically, Stack Exchange wants to sponsor study breaks, research meetings, or social events for academic groups by providing free food and Stack Exchange gear. We're looking for people in the English community who want to organize these events and represent Stack Exchange to their classmates/students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested, please respond to this post or email academics@stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this is also happening on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144/introducing-linguistics-se-university-ambassadors-program-calling-students-and&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/se-theoretical-cs-pizza-ambassador-program-sponsored-discussion-groups&quot;&gt;Theoretical Comp Sci&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/948/introducing-crossvalidated-se-pizza-ambassadors-program-calling-students-and-te&quot;&gt;Statistics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/917/introducing-physics-se-university-ambassadors-program-calling-students-and-teac&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/171/are-you-an-physics-student-or-teacher-do-you-want-some-free-food&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://music.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/274/are-you-a-college-student-studying-music-or-a-music-teacher-and-like-free-food&quot;&gt;Music&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:02.797" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T22:24:47.410" Title="Are you an English student or teacher? Do you want some free food?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-23T18:46:44.857" Score="17" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I’m sure a lot of you already know, &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl&lt;/a&gt; is a big deal in the online English/Grammar world. I’ve been talking to her about sponsoring a podcast, and as part of the sponsorship we get mentions on the podcast, her newsletter, twitter, and Facebook, along with an ad on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a huge opportunity to reach a bunch of people - she has 70,000 listeners and 160,000 twitter followers. So what do we want her to say about us? Obviously we don’t want her to just mention that we’re her sponsor – we should do something cool on the site that she can tell her listeners about. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some ideas: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Word Choice Contest - we could start a regular (maybe weekly) event&#xA;where we do a &quot;name that word&quot; competition (someone reads a&#xA;definition, and the first person to answer correctly wins). We could&#xA;do this in a Google+ Hangout potentially.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Top New Users Contest - see which new user can earn the most rep in&#xA;a certain time period&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else? I want it to be something that would attract Grammar Girl's listeners (and maybe herself!) to come check out the site after they hear about it. A chat/Hangout might be good because people would get to talk afterwards. Please give feedback and suggest other ideas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI- she offered me the October 7th podcast slot, which is kind of soon. So let's brainstorm! We can always ask for a later date if necessary (like if we want to try something out among our current users before we promote it off the site), but it would be better to respond sooner rather than later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;] Another way to get her involved in the site before the podcast would be to interview her and do a write up on our blog. What do you think about that? Would anybody be interested in helping conduct the interview? I'd have to ask her if she'd be willing of course, but want to gauge interest here before I do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="11387" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T13:58:59.497" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:49:27.253" Title="We’re going to be on the Grammar Girl podcast! What do we want her to say about us?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1963" CreationDate="2011-09-24T00:05:02.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one of the aspects of EL&amp;amp;U that doesn't seem to work the way I'd expected/hoped is that &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; questions do tend to &quot;wither away&quot;, sometimes without the best possible answer being present and/or obviously recognisable by the number of votes it has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how about randomly selecting a few dozen past questions every week (maybe by getting User:Community to assign them a bounty?). Count all the &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; upvotes for each answer, to identify the one &lt;em&gt;most favoured now&lt;/em&gt;. Award a prize to the user who has most consistently voted for the &quot;best answer&quot; as thus defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also identify the best half-dozen &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; in the competition (again, by &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; upvotes) and increase competitors' scores according to whether they upvoted exactly and only those particular questions. Apart from raising the profile of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions, this would reduce the number of &quot;joint winners&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bias the scoring against people voting for more than one answer to a question, or switching their vote after seeing what others are going for. I'm sure the techies can figure out how to manage those details so the intended effect wouldn't be subverted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T00:05:02.590" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1963" CreationDate="2011-09-24T04:10:07.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the idea of running a contest, but I have some hesitations about the initial ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Word Choice Contest - we could start a regular (maybe weekly) event where we do a &quot;name that word&quot; competition (someone reads a definition, and the first person to answer correctly wins). We could do this in a Google+ Hangout potentially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;. To make this work, I think there would have to be some substantial practical distinction between a single word request and the contest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Top New Users Contest - see which new user can earn the most rep in a certain time period&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Kitḫ says, the rep cap is a problem. It causes this contest to favor those members who answer a lot of questions and gain accepts (because accepts are rep-cap immune), rather than those who answer few questions but develop better answers. Additionally, this idea does exist in the form of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/35/week/english&quot;&gt;the user leagues&lt;/a&gt;, but due to the rep cap problem, I don't think it's advisable to place undue emphasis on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A chat/Hangout might be good because people would get to talk afterwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we're looking into getting non-SE participants, this might not work. Chat requires 20 reputation to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Random Brainstorming:&lt;/strong&gt; I don't have any definite ideas, but I think a more subjective contest might work—e.g. coin your own neologism, or what's the most interesting word you've learned in the past month, and we would highlight the ones we like best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: It sounds like the Grammar Girl thing would be a one-time sponsorship (but correct me if I'm wrong). If we wanted to run the contest continuously (weekly/monthly), we could continue that on &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;our blog&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/plug&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T04:10:07.580" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2011-09-26T08:30:49.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;WHOA! I got the package and everything is COOL. Thank you so much, I don't care about the misspelling at all! :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering: would it be perhaps possible to maybe change the size? My t-shirt is a little big (damn you, different country sizes eheh... My fault, I know) so I was wondering if I could choose a smaller size for the next one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not an actual problem, I mean, I can still use the t-shirt. But I wanted to wear it and go out, looking like a real geek, but now it's too big for me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T11:24:14.843" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T11:24:14.843" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1963" CreationDate="2011-09-26T13:08:15.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know Grammar Girl, and the time frame is relatively short, but to answer the question in your title, the &lt;em&gt;ideal&lt;/em&gt; thing for me would be for her to hang out here for a while, and then say whatever she wants. I can't think of anything less convincing than her fumbling over some blurb that we concoct, without really even taking an interest. Unless she's a great actress...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T13:08:15.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1970" CreationDate="2011-09-27T03:36:59.047" Score="6" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've voted on over &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/5822/callithumpian&quot;&gt;600 questions&lt;/a&gt; and nearly half of those votes were for the questions themselves, yet no Electorate badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/28/electorate&quot;&gt;Electorate&lt;/a&gt;: Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T16:41:15.387" Title="Am I missing something in the requirements for an Electorate badge?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1969" CreationDate="2011-09-27T03:38:13.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That badge is often misunderstood. You need to vote on 600 question posts, not on the answers to the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T03:38:13.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1969" CreationDate="2011-09-27T16:41:15.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, you voted on 309 questions, and 314 answers; you still need to vote on 291 questions. &#xA;In that case, 65% of the votes would be on questions, as per badge requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T16:41:15.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1718" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:00:04.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am adding this answer to avoid the question get bumped from the Community user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:00:04.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1963" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:49:27.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of interviewing Grammar Girl &lt;em&gt;prior&lt;/em&gt; to sponsoring her podcast. It might give her something to talk about &lt;em&gt;organically&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Hey! I was interviewed by blah blah blah!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; That would be much more interesting to her listeners than conjuring up a contest &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; to give Grammar Girl something to talk about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't have to be so contrived. You should interview Grammar Girl because she has something interesting to talk about. You should brag about your events and contests when they are fun and interesting. But putting that cart before the horse risks looking a bit forced and artificial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; like the idea of these events and contests. Keep working on them because they make this site fun and interesting. Go forward with an interview request because it's a net plus for this community. But if the sponsorship &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to happen on October 7th, perhaps there's already something interesting to talk about amongst your content. But thinking a bit more long term, if the sponsorship has to wait for something interesting to talk about, it seems worth it to wait for that to happen organically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:49:27.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1975" CreationDate="2011-09-28T13:05:28.327" Score="8" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Visiting &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&lt;/a&gt; hangs at &lt;em&gt;Loading English Language and Usage, Just a second…&lt;/em&gt;. This has occurred at least three times in the last few weeks, with the current one lasting a few days already except for one brief intermission. The problem seems to be independent of room and platform but dependent on location. Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95444/chat-hanging-during-load&quot;&gt;Chat hanging during load&lt;/a&gt; does not offer any solution. Is there any workaround or do we just need to wait indefinitely each time it happens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T14:36:16.040" Title="Chat hangs while loading" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1974" CreationDate="2011-09-29T02:12:39.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you reproduce this in a different web browser?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you try clearing your browser cache after the problem happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T02:12:39.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-29T19:48:17.503" Score="0" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Its ironic how a site as big and English-focused as this can still let this pass like its nothing. However trivial it may be, it should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sis9r.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13345" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T00:39:39.283" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Can we fix this grammatical error once and for all?" Tags="|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1979" CreationDate="2011-09-29T21:00:03.763" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like consistency in our tags, and to be consistent, we need to pluralize.  Unless we don't mind adjectival tags, in which case we can leave [colloquial] alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T00:48:40.923" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T00:48:52.997" Title="Could someone edit the tags [proverb] and [colloquial] to become [proverbs] and [colloquialisms]?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1976" CreationDate="2011-09-30T00:39:19.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/1165936105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeff's tweet&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Next Person Who Opens a Pluralization 'Bug', I will personally come to your house and bludgeon you to death with a giant S&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/20683/viewed-1-times&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;viewed 1 times&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T00:39:19.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1977" CreationDate="2011-09-30T00:48:52.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both tags have now been renamed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T00:48:52.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-30T21:49:33.833" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;We recently printed some business cards for our Stack Exchange employees and they turned out great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got us thinking: our sites' moderators have been working hard to keep our sites high quality for the past few years. They may not be employees, per se, but great community moderators are why our communities are safe, sane, and worth visiting in the first place..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a moderator, would you be interested in having your own EL&amp;amp;U contact card? Would you find it useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see them being handy to pass out to friends, colleagues, and family members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a mockup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(click on image to see full res version)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvk3N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvk3N.png&quot; alt=&quot;EL&amp;amp;U moderator cards&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course email, Twitter, phone# are optional. They can be Skype, AIM, URL etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note: the text rendering in the mockup is slightly blurry. But when printed it will be crisp.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T08:41:24.763" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T08:48:19.033" Title="EL&amp;U Moderator Cards" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T07:53:06.630" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that the site has both &quot;metaphor&quot; as well as &quot;metaphors&quot; as tags. Granted, &quot;metaphors&quot; was only used once, but shouldn't is be eliminated or classified as a synonym tag to &quot;metaphor?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T14:48:01.740" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T14:48:01.740" Title="Metaphor and metaphors" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1981" CreationDate="2011-10-02T14:47:50.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done, though the other way round, since we generally prefer plurals in tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T14:47:50.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1984" CreationDate="2011-10-02T23:06:20.490" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;It must mean something different from what I'd thought: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/13546/tina-aspiala&quot;&gt;this user&lt;/a&gt; joined today and has never asked or answered anything, and has 1 reputation.  However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/43963/10041&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/13546/tina-aspiala?tab=activity&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; by the same user.  But the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;privileges page&lt;/a&gt; says the &quot;comment everywhere&quot; privilege is only available to users who have 50 rep or more.  Am I misunderstanding the meaning of &quot;comment everywhere&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T05:17:03.360" Title="What does &quot;comment everywhere&quot; mean?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2011-10-02T23:07:39.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, your understanding is correct. The comment was originally posted as an answer and was converted to a comment by me (something that can be done by any mod).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T23:07:39.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2011-10-03T05:17:03.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment is an answer transformed in a comment; this is also reported from the comment left from who did it (waiwai933).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OeqIg.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T05:17:03.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1980" CreationDate="2011-10-03T08:48:19.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, the cards are now available -- all current moderators were mailed a link to the form to customize the cards. Enjoy!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T08:48:19.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1976" CreationDate="2011-10-03T13:31:32.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The alternative is using &lt;em&gt;Views&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Viewed&lt;/em&gt;, which would avoid using &lt;em&gt;times&lt;/em&gt; after the number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T13:31:32.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-03T15:02:51.297" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1963/were-going-to-be-on-the-grammar-girl-podcast-what-do-we-want-her-to-say-about-u&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, we're going to be on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl&lt;/a&gt; podcast. I think a great way to attract her listeners to our site would be to do an interview with her before hand and write it up on our blog. I know a few people have expressed interest in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/call-for-blog-participation&quot;&gt;writing for the blog&lt;/a&gt;, so I was hoping that some of you would be interested in helping out with the interview and write up. Please respond here if you are! Also feel free to email me at lauren@stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;] I just heard from Mignon (Grammar Girl) again and she said it's easiest for her to answer interview questions over email. So we really just need help putting together a list of questions, and then a volunteer to correspond with her and write up the blog post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;] Even if you don't want to do the interview or write the post, we could still use suggestions for questions to ask her. So please &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2002/what-are-we-going-to-ask-grammar-girl&quot;&gt;post your ideas as answers here&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T13:21:47.373" Title="Does anybody want to help with the Grammar Girl interview?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2384" CreationDate="2011-10-03T15:59:44.613" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;As 20k user, I can directly approve a tag wiki edit. Do 5k users have that possibility too, or are two 5k users required for approving a tag wiki proposed edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T19:54:40.680" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T18:27:44.570" Title="Can 5k users directly approve a tag wiki proposed edit?" Tags="|support|tag-wiki|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1995" CreationDate="2011-10-04T21:00:05.080" Score="5" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about making &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conjunction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conjunction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conjunction&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conjunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conjunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conjunctions&lt;/a&gt;? Since only one question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conjunction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conjunction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conjunction&lt;/a&gt; it might suffice to retag that one question but it would be more future proof to make synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9966" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T00:14:15.093" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T00:14:15.093" Title="Make conjunction a synonym of conjunctions?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1996" CreationDate="2011-10-04T21:48:14.287" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/suggested-edits/1469&quot;&gt;This suggested edit&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44155/english-phraseology&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was just rejected.  It was an attempt on my part to incorporate the OP's clarification made in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44155/english-phraseology/44160#comment-81219&quot;&gt;this comment on my answer&lt;/a&gt; into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit was rejected with this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit changes too much in the original post; the original meaning or intent of the post would be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree that the edit was pretty large, I disagree entirely that it changed the meaning or intent.  The original form of the question is extremely rough; there's no way to improve it without massive change.  But again, all the information I added came from the OP; I merely expressed his intent more clearly, I didn't alter it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the edit was approved I was going to flag the question for re-opening, so please do that too.  Actually I'm not sure whether edit rejections can be undone, so let me know if I need to propose it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3347" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T23:45:56.840" Title="Would you kindly undo the rejection of my edit and re-open this question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|suggested-edits|request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1997" CreationDate="2011-10-04T22:27:41.757" Score="6" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many (most?) titles on Stack Exchange are phrased as questions, rather than traditionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Does X Mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning of X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I do this, I make sure to use Title Caps.  It's still a title, after all - just phrased as a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several times now - on other SE sites, as well - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44176/how-do-i-refer-to-a-word&quot;&gt;my questions have been edited&lt;/a&gt; to &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; this.  I usually just do a rollback, but I want to make sure it's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a site convention for title capitalization?  Should there be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2852" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How Should Titles Be Capitalized?" Tags="|discussion|titles|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2011-10-04T23:15:31.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I re-corrected it. All titles are written low case, except for the first letter and proper nouns, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there is a rule specifically for the SE sites, but all titles are written like this, so I'd say that a rule of thumb would be to stick with the norm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T23:15:31.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1990" CreationDate="2011-10-04T23:19:40.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conjunction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conjunction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conjunction&lt;/a&gt; as synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conjunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conjunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conjunctions&lt;/a&gt;; if four users vote it, the tag will become synonym of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T23:19:40.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1991" CreationDate="2011-10-04T23:45:56.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've edited the post as you originally suggested. Unfortunately, you don't end up with the credit this way, but there's nothing I can do about that. :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T23:45:56.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2011-10-05T07:05:55.257" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really more of a &lt;em&gt;question summary&lt;/em&gt; than a title. Sure, it appears in big bold letters above the question... But it also appears with others, packed in like sardines, in the list on the front page and the questions pages. And in the latter context, &quot;title case&quot; really doesn't make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, this has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98066/capitalizing-titles&quot;&gt;come up on MSO before&lt;/a&gt;, and the overwhelming preference is for sentence case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T07:05:55.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2009" CreationDate="2011-10-05T10:43:34.637" Score="8" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw someone's profile with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;This account is temporarily suspended for rule violations. The suspension period ends on Sep 20 '14 at 12:21.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems as though the person has been active since then but is still stuck at a reputation of 1. Why? &lt;br&gt; &#xA;Additionally, is it possible to find out why someone was suspended? Not only for curiosity's sake but also to learn what constitutes bad behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I did read the FAQ and 'about' section but it wasn't specific enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T12:02:55.817" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T13:50:25.697" Title="About Suspension" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-10-05T14:11:36.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having a new close reason for these is all well and good but prevention is better than cure. Nowhere in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is it explicit that questions that can be answered from a simple internet search are not welcome here. Being able to close general reference questions is great but it would be even better if we could prevent them happening in the first place. Shouldn't we update the FAQ to match the new close reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4796" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T14:11:36.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1988" CreationDate="2011-10-05T17:28:48.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I will volunteer to organize the interview and write the blog post, however, I have no idea what questions to ask, and I even visited her site and read a few posts. What kind of subject matter are we thinking to cover?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T17:28:48.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-05T17:34:05.627" Score="14" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're going to be interviewing &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl&lt;/a&gt; prior to being mentioned in her podcast. This might be happening really soon. So we need some interview questions. The top-voted questions will be asked, unless I really dislike the question, in which case, too bad, you should have volunteered to be the go-between (Just kidding, I know we all always ask good questions here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what shall it be? I'm not sure what kind of topics we should discuss besides the obvious grammar/writing/English tips. Maybe some of you have a favourite EL&amp;amp;U question you'd like her to comment on? Go nuts! The more questions the better. Ask early, ask often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is a bit like reverse Jeopardy: You have to put all your questions in the form of an answer. I know, I know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: 2011-10-11&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Today at around 10pm (GMT-4) I will be taking these questions and massaging them together to send to Grammar Girl. So last chance! Remember, you can ask more than one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="380" LastEditDate="2011-10-12T13:22:03.800" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T13:22:03.800" Title="What are we going to ask Grammar Girl?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-05T17:53:47.437" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chat, the question &quot;Why did you choose &lt;em&gt;girl&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;woman&lt;/em&gt; or the feminism-empowered &lt;em&gt;gyrl&lt;/em&gt;? Your insistence on alliteration degrades women everywhere.&quot; was humorously proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the suggested alternatives that preserved alliteration were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word Woman  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grrmmrr Grrl  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lady Linguistics  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ms Morphology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T17:53:47.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-05T17:57:53.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's your favourite bit of punctuation and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T17:57:53.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-05T18:07:53.470" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5458/is-it-ever-worth-the-time-and-effort-to-correct-someone-elses-grating-grammatica&quot;&gt;Is it ever worth the time and effort to correct someone else's grating grammatical mistakes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or other top voted grammar &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar?sort=votes&amp;amp;pagesize=50&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T18:07:53.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-05T18:18:20.170" Score="10" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, the fact that “general reference” questions are inappropriate isn’t very prominent in the FAQ.  As far as I can see, it’s only mentioned in the section “Why are some questions closed?”, which I would imagine many people may only read after they have a question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it make sense to also mention it in a section that users are more likely to read &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; asking their ﬁrst question — eg the section “What &lt;em&gt;shouldn’t&lt;/em&gt; I ask here?”  It could be worded something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“General reference” — questions that are too basic.  If a single query in a well-known freely-available reference &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; answers your question (for instance, searching for your question or a key word from it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;), then you don’t need to ask it here.  If you want more details than such sources give, then say so — make clear, in your question, what you want to know.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/761/can-we-come-up-with-guidelines-for-good-dictionary-questions&quot;&gt;Some guidelines.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a memory of a blog post where Jeff gave more general guidelines on what exactly makes a question GR, or saves it from that fate, but I can’t ﬁnd that post now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Thanks to @Waggers for raising the issue &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/939/how-to-respond-to-dictionary-general-reference-questions/2000#2000&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T18:18:25.953" Title="Discourage “general reference” questions more prominently in FAQ?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-05T18:52:44.047" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a note somewhat related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2002/what-are-we-going-to-ask-grammar-girl/2003#2003&quot;&gt;the question about &lt;em&gt;gyrl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, how about, &lt;strong&gt;What do you think of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gender-neutral pronouns&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; I am used to areas where they are used commonly, even of and by cissexual people whose gender is unambiguous. And I have used them in that light here at Stack Exchange, as, for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/6455388/209139&quot;&gt;a question on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. However, when I later &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/2676/214&quot;&gt;used them the same way on the beta Christianity site&lt;/a&gt;, all kinds of unpleasantness broke out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I prefer the &lt;em&gt;zie/zir&lt;/em&gt; set (mainly because they're the ones I see used most often), but there are others. A supplementary question, then, could be, &lt;strong&gt;Which set of gender-neutral pronouns do you prefer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T18:52:44.047" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2006" CreationDate="2011-10-05T19:06:37.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could add a section to the FAQ along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is simple and can probably be easily answered by looking it up, then you may find common online internet resources to be of some help. View our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;list of community recommended resources&lt;/a&gt; to find some that may be of help to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Try a &lt;strong&gt;dictionary&lt;/strong&gt; if you want to know what a word means or how it evolved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Try a &lt;strong&gt;thesaurus&lt;/strong&gt; if you want to know words that have a similar meaning to one you already know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, if your question isn't adequately answered by these resources, feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/ask&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt; here, but make sure you mention the research you've done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T19:06:37.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1999" CreationDate="2011-10-05T19:10:20.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additionally, is it possible to find out why someone was suspended? Not only for curiosity's sake but also to learn what constitutes bad behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we don't disclose specific details about a user's suspension. The message should be fairly clear on a general level—in this case, the user repeatedly broke rules of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to the question—What are the rules? Don't try to game or otherwise abuse the system, or take unfair advantage of work other people have done, whether they be site users or those who have created other resources. In other words, if you use common sense, you should be fine. If there are problems, we'll probably contact you before such a drastic suspension. (Note that a warning will not necessarily be given in egregious cases of abuse.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T23:53:03.833" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T23:53:03.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-05T19:15:56.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you come up with ideas for podcasts/posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T19:15:56.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-05T22:13:40.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the most interesting topic you've tackled lately—the one that was the most thought-provoking, surprising, or fun for you? (Aptronyms? &lt;em&gt;Needs washed&lt;/em&gt;? Photo captions?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, what question are you sick of hearing? (Do you wish everyone could memorize &lt;em&gt;affect&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;effect&lt;/em&gt;? Do you secretly not care one way or the other about the Oxford comma?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T22:13:40.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2062" CreationDate="2011-10-05T23:57:26.573" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, the user is RegDwight.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/4385/10041&quot;&gt;This deleted question&lt;/a&gt; (you can only see it if you have &gt;=10000 rep) has a notification which states:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;deleted by RegDwight Ѭſ道♦, RegDwight Ѭſ道♦ Mar 2 at 11:42&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and here's a screenshot excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sC3mT.png&quot; alt=&quot;deletedtwice&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Reg think it especially needed to be deleted?  And why have I never seen this before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T20:18:18.987" Title="Why is this question listed as deleted twice by the same user?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-06T00:09:10.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What grammar-related question(s) do you get most frequently from your listeners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12173" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T00:09:10.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2011-10-06T09:10:42.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Sentence case like this&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; instead of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Title Case Like This&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, purely because it's the most readable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T09:10:42.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2011-10-06T12:29:18.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the the Guardian newspaper's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; for swearwords, it may also help us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;swearwords&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are more liberal than any other newspapers, using&#xA;  language that our competitors would not. But even some readers who&#xA;  agree with Lenny Bruce that &quot;take away the right to say fuck and you&#xA;  take away the right to say fuck the government&quot; might feel that we&#xA;  sometimes use such words unnecessarily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The editor's guidelines are as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, remember the reader, and respect demands that we should not&#xA;  casually use words that are likely to offend. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second, use such words only when absolutely necessary to the facts of&#xA;  a piece, or to portray a character in an article; there is almost&#xA;  never a case in which we need to use a swearword outside direct&#xA;  quotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Third, the stronger the swearword, the harder we ought to think about&#xA;  using it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, never use asterisks, which are just a cop-out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They discuss it in more detail &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2010/apr/14/swearing-guardian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T12:29:18.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-06T12:32:50.017" Score="9" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a question was posed which asked for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44281/mildly-offensive-words-and-phrases-that-describe-cultures-or-identifiable-groups&quot;&gt;list of words whose etymology is an ethnic slur&lt;/a&gt;. The questioner specifically stated that they wanted words like &quot;gypped&quot; which is unremarkable to many people but is actually a slur against gypsies and the stereotype that they will cheat you. Many words have an etymology along the same lines and I honestly feel that this site is a good place to list them, because this kind of question is difficult to answer by simply visiting Etymology Online. The idea seems to be that, because a list question can have no single correct answer, this is not a good question to ask. I don't see why that has to matter. The powers-that-be, and many of the users of the stack exchange network seem to be clinging to a mantra that every single question has to be about a single objective fact, yet we have plenty of stackexchange sites whose entire subject matter is subjective, and in many cases English usage is also subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So given that this &quot;list request&quot; question was on-topic, asking for specific information, and any given answer is not even particularly subjective, was it closed simply because &quot;lists are always bad&quot;? Am I an outlier in thinking this was a good question? Or is there some other, better reason for closing this that I am just not understanding yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T22:00:49.940" Title="Are list questions always bad?" Tags="|discussion|list-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2011-10-06T12:47:21.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;There's always more than one way to do it&quot;, obviously. That's why multiple answers are desirable, to a point. But an &lt;em&gt;infinite&lt;/em&gt; number of answers is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And arbitrary lists, such as &quot;let's list every flavor of ice cream&quot;, are not desirable either. What would be the point of such a list? Who would refer to it, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T12:47:21.767" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1157" CreationDate="2011-10-06T12:49:04.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask &lt;strong&gt;practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So accept the one that helped you the most with your actual, real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T12:49:04.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2020" CreationDate="2011-10-06T14:34:21.193" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/43913/british-english-phrase-dot-and-carry-one&quot;&gt;a question about the phrase &lt;em&gt;dot and carry one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The first comment queried whether the question qualified as general reference and supplied a link to an answer. The link goes to an external site that also uses a question-and-answer format. Subsequent comments indicated that the answer could be found via web searches and the question was eventually closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The results of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=dot%20and%20carry%20one&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a search on Google for &lt;em&gt;dot and carry one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contain many Q&amp;amp;A sites, including EL&amp;amp;U, but few dictionaries. It seems odd to close a question on general-reference grounds when none of the results higher than the EL&amp;amp;U result are from dictionaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In situations where web searches lead to other Q&amp;amp;A sites, should the reason for closing be given as  &lt;em&gt;exact duplicate&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;? Or perhaps there needs to be a new reason for closing that indicates that the answer is available via a web search, but not specifically in a general reference? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T14:46:50.113" Title="Acquiescing to other Q&amp;A sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2019" CreationDate="2011-10-06T14:46:50.113" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. The &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; close reason should apply to things that are found in standard English-language references, not things that can be found by merely Googling. In this particular case, the cited reference has no particular authority, and is not the sort of reference to which &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T14:46:50.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-06T20:37:28.100" Score="7" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;What in the word &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; adds scope to the site name &lt;em&gt;English Language&lt;/em&gt;?  The topic of language includes its own usage, doesn't it?  And if the &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; is redundant, is there a reason why we thought it helpful/necessary to emphasize that part of language in the name of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T22:50:16.860" Title="What does &quot;usage&quot; mean in &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|site|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2011-10-06T22:00:49.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that questions whose answers happen to be lists &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be allowed. Whether they &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; allowed is a different matter; people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against them, so they tend to be closed for no rational reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My objection to the particular question that brought this up is that the OP wants one word per answer, which is nonsensical for a question like this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T22:00:49.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2022" CreationDate="2011-10-06T22:50:16.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, and kind of always thought, the meaning is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;The English language (taken statically) and Usage (how it is used)&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are not just usage questions. For example the etymology ones or &quot;what does x mean?&quot;, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T22:50:16.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T10:35:06.520" Score="5" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;How was this question closed as 'too localized'? I asked the same question about Gaudi and Louis Armstrong and got great answers with no votes to close.&#xA;Has the policy changed &amp;amp; why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42978/how-are-these-names-pronounced-in-english&quot;&gt;How are these Brazilian Portuguese names pronounced in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T15:35:42.657" Title="How can the pronunciation of famous people's names be &quot;too localized&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2025" CreationDate="2011-10-07T12:49:51.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the particular question I suspect it was voted to close as too local because it was ostensibly asking about a set of people for which no one could ever expect to ask about here again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that look too local can be construed as asking for a general pattern (the Portuguese in English question) or controversial (maybe the Gaudi question). Because it is on the edge it might be closed or not depending on the whim of voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T12:49:51.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2032" CreationDate="2011-10-07T13:38:25.993" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are some flags declined when the question is being closed anyway? Is there a set of rules to decide if each flag was helpful when closing? Since the flag drew attention to a question that needed to be closed, isn't it helpful regardless of the type (excepting, of course, spam and offensive flags)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/40451/11762&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as general reference, since the user could have looked in any dictionary and found the answer (that one of the words is not a verb). The flag was declined, and the question was closed as &quot;not a real question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-10-26T17:51:39.617" Title="Declined flags on closed questions" Tags="|discussion|support|close-reasons|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T15:35:33.703" Score="10" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we have the option to unflag a post? If an issue is resolved before a moderator gets around to handling the flag, it we be nice if we could get rid of the flag and save someone the time of looking at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-22T13:15:41.807" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T02:30:34.263" Title="Feature request: unflag" Tags="|feature-request|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2025" CreationDate="2011-10-07T16:30:25.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ridiculous. Reopened. There was nothing localized about those famous names. I'm sure those who voted to close just were unfamiliar with the names and voted to close without checking first if the names were famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T16:30:25.237" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T20:16:32.190" Score="10" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange will be introducing a Fellowship Program awarding grants to students conducting independent research projects. Undergraduate Honors Theses, Independent Study Projects, Masters Theses, and Dissertations are eligible projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prospective fellows will be asked to demonstrate a commitment to the discipline, approval or guidance of faculty adviser, two page proposal of the project, and intent to use their research to contribute to the relevant Stack Exchange community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before officially introducing the Fellowship Program and calling for applications, we need experienced community members to volunteer to review applicants' two page proposals and abstracts. We're ideally looking for people who are graduate/professional students or have advanced degrees in the subject, but relevant work experience is valuable too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange Fellows will be in the following subjects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/968/stack-exchange-fellowship-and-grant-program-looking-for-reviewers-to-assess-thes&quot;&gt;Statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/924/stack-exchange-fellowship-and-grant-program-looking-for-reviewers-to-assess-thes&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/175/stack-exchange-fellowship-and-grant-program-looking-for-reviewers-to-assess-thes&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240/stack-exchange-fellowship-and-grant-program-looking-for-reviewers-to-assess-thes&quot;&gt;Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested in being a reviewer? Respond here or email me at lauren@stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.083" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T23:15:30.430" Title="Stack Exchange Fellowship Program: Looking for volunteers to review proposals" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-07T20:32:02.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why English language does not have male and female words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T20:32:02.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2027" CreationDate="2011-10-08T02:17:10.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion it should have been marked &quot;helpful&quot; since the question was ultimately closed -- i.e. the question needed intervention of some kind. Regardless, every moderator has slightly different opinions so keep flagging!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-10-08T02:45:17.603" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T02:45:17.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-09T00:55:14.367" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of your columns and articles cite various authorities, like &lt;em&gt;Garner's Modern American Usage&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style&lt;/em&gt;, and (thankfully) &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage&lt;/em&gt;. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;your article about the word class of &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, you explain the prescriptivist objections to &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt; as a preposition, but also provide some arguments in its favor, citing authorities on both sides. In contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3447/i-can-run-faster-than-1-him-2-he/3483#3483&quot;&gt;I answered a related question on this site&lt;/a&gt; using two different corpora to show that &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt;-as-a-preposition is in fact more common than &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt;-as-a-conjunction (before pronouns at the ends of sentences at least), and the disparity in usage has been growing quickly over the past couple decades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered using corpus-based approaches to answering questions of grammar? On the one hand, corpus-based approaches have the benefit of bringing cold, hard facts to the table in a kind of argument that has traditionally relied on persuasion using logic and appeals to authority. On the other hand, the authority of these kinds of facts might be a hard sell to your readership. The argument that &quot;just because everyone says it that way doesn't make it correct&quot;, though specious, is, sadly, quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-10-09T00:55:14.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2011-10-10T09:39:58.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What grammar rule does she believe in so firmly she'd get it tattooed on her body?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13141" LastActivityDate="2011-10-10T09:39:58.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-11T08:19:47.007" Score="10" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just like you can upvote a question or answer and then undo that, can this be possible for comments as well? It would be nice to be able to retract a marked comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-08-18T09:35:31.493" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Feature request: Unmark comment" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-11T14:54:00.680" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably the standard policy for all of the stack exchange sites but it's bothering me. When people post answers they get displayed based on the upvotes (I think) and not based on the order they were posted. This creates confusion when there are a lot of answers posted and some relate to others. You don't readily see who the first person to post a certain idea was, but rather you see the idea that was voted more, even if someone said it earlier. I would prefer if it just appeared chronologically. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does this make sense? Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T20:23:04.970" Title="Why is the order of posts displayed by popularity and not by time?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2011-10-11T14:57:43.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my understanding, people who write answers based on the ordering/chronology of the other answers are doing it wrong. Each answer should stand alone, because other answers can come and go and can be edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it would be nice if a little button would let you sort the answers, though I still agree that voting should be the default sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T14:57:43.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2011-10-11T16:32:48.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole point of StackExchange, and what distinguishes it from a typical forum, is that the best answers rise to the top.  As Mr. Shiny said, answers that refer to other answers should do so explicitly; referenes like &quot;the previous answer&quot; don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not only is this wired into SE and we probably can't change it, but I think we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; change it.  An alternate view (as noted in comments to Mr. Shiny) is fine, but the view presented on first view should have the best answers (per vote) at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T16:32:48.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2011-10-11T17:29:18.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're missing something. :) Look just above the list of answers: there are little links to sort the answers by &quot;active&quot;, &quot;oldest&quot;, and &quot;votes&quot;. Either of the first two should do what you want. (&quot;Active&quot; goes by last edit date, &quot;oldest&quot; by creation date.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once you make a choice, it will be applied to all questions you view (until/unless you change it again).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Accepted answers&lt;/em&gt; will always be listed first, regardless of what you sort by.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T17:29:18.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-11T22:40:46.233" Score="7" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an EL&amp;amp;U user. I kept posting Q&amp;amp;As for past 10 months without problem. When I was trying to post a question yesterday, a message saying “Your question couldn't be submitted because name and email are missing,” and the boxes to input my name and email address were shown below the question box. I saw this massage for the first time since I started posting question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I entered both and clicked. Then the message, “Your question not submitted because your email is already registered” appeared. It was followed by the request for encoding funny letters, all resulting in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since every time I try to post a question, the question box is persistently occupied by the old text I tried to submit yesterday, and I can submit neither that question nor new questions. I want to send the question, or erase it thoroughly for entering a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I solve the problem? Is it better to get a new account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-22T12:57:49.350" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T12:57:49.350" Title="I can't submit question. How can I send it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2042" CreationDate="2011-10-11T23:23:30.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the Ask a Question page is asking for your name and email, it means that you are not logged in on that page, so it is asking for your information to post as an unregistered user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you put in your email there and it tells you you're already registered, it means that it knows you have an account and it wants you to login.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please ensure that you are properly logged in (do you see your name at the top of the page is a good test) before asking your question and you shouldn't have any issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T23:23:30.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-12T16:03:35.370" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/term&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;term&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;term&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; synonyms already? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, maybe they should be made synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-13T22:59:35.147" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T22:59:35.147" Title="Make [term] and [terms] tags synonyms" Tags="|support|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2044" CreationDate="2011-10-12T22:52:01.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not convinced that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; is a great tag, but I've made the merge for the time being. I'll probably retag the questions later today with better tags, so this synonym + merge may have been in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T22:52:01.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2047" CreationDate="2011-10-14T00:39:47.940" Score="2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1431/10041&quot;&gt;What words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not a good question for the site, why isn't it closed?  I'd like to vote, at least.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I don't understand what locking is for, but I had assumed that it was for keeping votes and edits off a closed question.  Could someone enlighten me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T12:06:04.857" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:06:04.857" Title="Why is this question locked?" Tags="|discussion|support|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2011-10-14T10:42:24.020" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has 123 answers already. Nobody reads them all, nobody votes on them all. We probably don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; them all, let alone more. But it's a soft question, so everybody feels entitled to answer&amp;nbsp;— again, without so much as checking if their answer has already been posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question needs constant babysitting. We get duplicate answers, answers that list several words at once, thinly-veiled peeving, outright rants. And every single one of them bumps the question to the front page &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even with all the attention they generate for the question&amp;nbsp; — 6,540 views as of the time of writing&amp;nbsp; —, the new answers themselves still don't attract votes. The youngest thirty answers have a combined score of fifty. That's less than two upticks on average, after all this time (these answers may be the youngest, but they are still up to ten months old).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When new answers stop attracting votes and start attracting flags, some of them openly asking to lock the question, it's time to do just that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were never any close votes on the question itself, though, so I saw no reason to close it unilaterally. (But of course we can talk about closing it and putting up our usual &quot;this question exists for historical reasons&quot; banner. I have no strong feelings one way or the other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T10:42:24.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-14T15:34:11.443" Score="15" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question recently (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44610/send-sent-end-ent&quot;&gt;Send, sent; end, *ent?&lt;/a&gt;), which hasn’t yet received a straight answer. It leads me to wonder if questions about Old and Middle English are actually on-topic for this site; while it’s certainly acceptable for answers to draw on historical English to substantiate speculation or elucidate etymology, should &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; about non-Modern English be considered off-topic? After all, Old English is a very different language from English as we now know it—is it different enough to warrant separation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1506" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T13:19:40.533" Title="Are Old and Middle English questions really on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2048" CreationDate="2011-10-16T16:34:01.747" Score="17" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions about Old and Middle English are on-topic (there is past discussion on the topic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but that doesn't guarantee that anybody here will have an answer to in OE or ME question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether they are on-topic currently or not, I don't think they should be considered and made off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as suggested linguistics.SE is an appropriate alternative that might get the answers you seek.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yes, OE is quite different from Modern English and they are mutually unintelligible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but Modern English is closer to OE than any other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;why bother with concerns of separation? just ask it here and it will be welcome (but consider ling.SE as an alternative).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T13:19:40.533" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T13:19:40.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2048" CreationDate="2011-10-17T01:54:49.583" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm posting my position as an answer because I don't agree with the only other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like OP, I'm happy for Old and Middle English to be referenced in answers where the etymology and history of words are relevant. But I don't want questions asking what some expression in Beowulf or the Canterbury Tales means. To me, questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; Old/Middle English are off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of those times isn't exactly dead in the same way as Latin, but it's largely unintelligible to Modern English speakers. EL&amp;amp;U is all about how we speak and write &lt;em&gt;today and tomorrow&lt;/em&gt;. If people specifically want to learn about earlier forms, they need their own site (unless &lt;em&gt;linguistics.se&lt;/em&gt; wants such stuff, which I doubt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T01:54:49.583" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-20T21:57:41.530" Score="0" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, one of my answers was deleted from this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28372/why-meth-eth-prop-when-there-is-uni-di-tri&quot;&gt;Why &amp;quot;meth-&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;eth-&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;prop-&amp;quot;, when there is &amp;quot;uni-&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;di-&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;tri-&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess as to why is that it was considered a &quot;duplicate&quot; by the moderator. I'll agree that my answer was similar to that of another person, who referred to the prefixes of names of &quot;organic substances.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer was more specific, insofar as it referred to counting &lt;strong&gt;carbon atoms&lt;/strong&gt;, a term that the other person didn't use. That's a non-trivial additional point, at least to someone who has studied chemistry. I experienced a &quot;light bulb&quot; moment in my head when I looked up my own answer, after having read the other (and not benefited from it). Even if the content was similar, I believe that the greater clarity of my answer made it &quot;distinct.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can an answer that makes an important additional point be considered a duplicate? Or was my answer deleted for some other reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-11-29T23:12:25.053" Title="What constitutes an &quot;exact duplicate&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2011-10-20T22:49:26.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is asking why the Greek numerical prefixes are used in naming these compounds instead of the Latin prefixes; i.e. the nature of the etymology of these names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your answer addresses how one &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; these prefixes, but it doesn't address how they &lt;em&gt;originated&lt;/em&gt;. That's why your answer was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we don't delete answers that are duplicates of other answers unless the new answer has essentially been copy-pasted from the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T22:49:26.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2057" CreationDate="2011-10-21T12:45:14.123" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an easy way to let people know that if you put a space between the @ symbol and a user's name, they won't be alerted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13141" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T15:49:01.040" Title="Space between @ and user name" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2056" CreationDate="2011-10-21T15:49:01.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you respond to them (by typing an @ symbol followed by their name), they'll receive an inbox notice. So perhaps something like, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, @newb: I wasn't notified of your last comment, because you put a space between the @ and my name. Next time, please omit the space - that way, I can read and respond to you  promptly. For more, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;check the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T15:49:01.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:04:27.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer doesn't explain the origin of those prefixes; therefore, it's not an answer to the question being asked. It is also wrong, because &lt;em&gt;meth-&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean &quot;with a carbon atom.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T13:04:27.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2028" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:19:48.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users have the possibility to flag as invalid an existing flag; it would help if, after X users have flagged the flag as invalid, the post would not appear anymore between the flagged posts, and moderators would not need to mark the flag as invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T13:19:48.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2027" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:23:49.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who marked your flag as invalid is not between the users who voted to close the question. In fact, the question has been closed from 5 users who are not moderators, while just moderators can mark a flag as invalid.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The flag involved different users, who had different opinions on the question; that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T13:23:49.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:33:21.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just click on the &quot;oldest&quot; tab that appears after the question text, and before the first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q3EkU.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally the questions are sorted by their score, where answers with the same score are sorted randomly (which means the order of the answers with the same score possibly changes each time you view the question); you can sort them by the oldest or the more active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2011-10-22T20:23:04.970" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T20:23:04.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2012" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:45:13.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;The last elections ended on March first&lt;/a&gt;, while the question you are referring to was deleted on March second. This means RegDwight voted to delete the question before becoming moderator (he was already a 10k user), and then voted to delete the question again, when he was already moderator, and his vote was a binding vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T20:18:18.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1999" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:50:25.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, it seems as though the person has been active since then but is still stuck at a reputation of 1. Why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an account is suspended, its reputation is set to 1 automatically. When the suspension term is over, the reputation is recalculated. What you see now is not the reputation the user has when his account is not suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T13:50:25.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-24T01:07:05.663" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a list of questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;sorted by the number of votes&lt;/a&gt;. Is there a list of questions sorted by the number of views?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6509" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T21:14:19.030" Title="How to order the list of questions by the number of views?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-24T03:53:27.097" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; It appears each click on the &quot;start a bounty&quot; link simply opens another bounty box. The position of the new box seems to depend entirely on where the page is scrolled when &quot;start a bounty&quot; is clicked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screnshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1C86Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reproduce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open any question eligible for a bounty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &quot;start a bounty&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scroll the page aa little bit in any direction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &quot;start a bounty&quot; again&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While viewing the full site from a mobile device (at least in the case of Android) trying to start a bounty is difficult. The popup appears offscreen, and several can be opened at once. Each successive page (reason, additional comment) opens further off the page, to the point where the user scrolls so far away the page's content is no longer visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: Didn't include all the details at first because I was typing from my phone, but several popups for selecting the bounty amount were opened at once, positioned approximately on top of each other. I selected the bounty amount in one of them, but when I continued, it started using the bounty amount from another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/113885/167443&quot;&gt;this issue&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-06-07T12:47:04.297" Title="Multiple bounty dialogues" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|bounty|mobile|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2065" CreationDate="2011-10-24T21:14:19.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there isn't.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=faq&quot;&gt;There is a view&lt;/a&gt; that shows questions that are, in some way, prominent, and which consider the number of views as parameter; the questions are not sorted by the number of views, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T21:14:19.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2070" CreationDate="2011-10-24T23:47:33.143" Score="3" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46189/word-type-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;Word-type in this sentence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to flood english.stackexchange without asking first. I wanted to know if it would be okay to continue asking questions similar to this?  These questions I believe are really going to help me in solidifying my knowledge of word-types in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7155" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-10-26T12:16:04.663" Title="Asking questions similar to this, to build up knowledge" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2069" CreationDate="2011-10-25T12:55:06.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks fine to me: no downvotes, no close votes, a couple of useful answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see this blog post about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-proofreading-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proofreading Questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot;: the problem with bad proofreading questions are they don't teach the author anything and they'll just come back and ask another proofreading question tomorrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're asking how the language works to learn how to use it, I think that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reminder from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Usage, word choice, and grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Problems encountered by people learning English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T12:55:06.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-25T21:20:49.257" Score="6" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very often a question will have more close votes than downvotes. When those with enough (3,000) reputation cast a close vote on a question, is it also worthwhile they downvote? (In fact, this also applies to people with any rep score who flag questions for review.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;cast close vote description&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I close a question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Questions that are sufficiently off-topic, as outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, should be closed by casting close votes. Questions that are sufficiently similar to older questions should be closed by casting close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-dow&quot;&gt;vote down description&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I vote down?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvote tooltip says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down voting questions doesn't cost you anything. If you think a question is bad enough to be to closed, does it also deserve a downvote too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a question asks for the definition of a word should be voted to be closed as general reference. It shows no research so gets a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the negative vote tally will sends a clear message for others to check if they should vote to close, and also to all other users to help them judge what makes a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are there better reasons not to downvote when voting to close?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T15:20:26.130" Title="Should you also downvote when you vote to close?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2011-10-25T22:35:20.810" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closevoting and downvoting are two distinct though related matters. We closevote a question when it falls into one of the relevant categories. We downvote a question when it is poorly written. For example, a well-written question that is a duplicate should be closed but not downvoted. The author of the question may not have used the right key words or tags when searching for the question and should not be penalised with a drop in reputation. We should judge each case individually and bear in mind this difference before casting votes of either kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T22:35:20.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2011-10-26T12:14:51.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You close to vote when a question doesn't suit an SE site for any of the reasons reported in the voting-to-close dialog box; you down-vote a question when it doesn't show any search effort, it is unclear, or it is not useful (as the tooltip says).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue that if I ask a question that is off-topic, then I didn't show any search effort for looking which questions I can ask on that SE site. I think that down-voting in that case should be done if the user keeps asking the same (or similar) question, when the first time the question was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To notice that voting to close a question as &quot;too localized,&quot; and then down-voting it because it is not useful makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2011-12-07T21:37:02.427" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T21:37:02.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2011-10-26T13:57:36.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jasper's right, in my opinion.  But I just want to raise one point: a well-researched and interesting question that is off-topic, as defined by the community at that moment, should be closed (perhaps migrated), but definitely shouldn't be downvoted. (Would the negative rep carry over to the new site?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2011-10-27T09:32:19.620" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T09:32:19.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-26T15:20:46.587" Score="16" ViewCount="951" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mission of Stack Exchange is to make the internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions. The Stack Exchange Fellowship Program aims to support students conducting research in subjects related to our academic Q&amp;amp;A sites in order to (a) increase the quality of information in a particular subject and (b) facilitate the exchange of information between experts in the field. Individual awards range from 250 to 1000 dollars (USD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applicants should be advanced undergraduates, graduate students or professionals pursuing research related to one of the following Stack Exchange sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/202/introducing-the-stack-exchange-research-support-and-fellowship-program&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/942/introducing-stack-exchange-research-support-and-fellowship-program&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/170/introducing-the-stack-exchange-research-support-and-fellowship-program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/988/introducing-stack-exchange-research-support-and-fellowship-program&quot;&gt;Statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1387/introducing-stack-exchange-research-support-and-fellowship-program&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis starting immediately. For more details and to apply, check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/SE%20Fellowship%20Application.docx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;application&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are also seeking volunteers from the community to help review applications. Volunteers should have some level of expertise in the subject area (professors and those who have or are pursuing advanced degrees are ideal candidates). Following the first wave of submissions, those selected to be Stack Exchange Fellows will be asked to review 3 to 4 new applications. To facilitate the review process, reviewers will rate applications on several scales instead of making judgments on funding. You can find the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/Reviewer%20Sheet.docx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reviewer Form here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewers and successful candidates are encouraged to customize the &quot;about me&quot; section of the user profile by including information on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Area of expertise and current occupation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Key academic goals/milestones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Role in the Fellowship program (applicant, reviewer, fellow, both)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE grant project, if applicable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions regarding the Fellowship Program, or would like more information about applying or becoming a reviewer, please email academics@stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;]: Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until December 31st, 2011. There is an advantage to applying early, as reviewers will have more time to read applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:02.797" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T20:04:52.553" Title="Introducing the Stack Exchange Research Support and Fellowship Program" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-07-25T17:13:03.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2108" CreationDate="2011-10-26T18:28:11.007" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community♦&lt;/a&gt; owns all the down votes on spam/other deleted posts, why does it seem to have so few down votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current vote count:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Up votes: 236&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down votes: 6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; (today's count):&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Up votes: 236&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down votes: 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community♦&lt;/a&gt;'s downvotes seem to have disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-26T22:37:13.323" Title="Community's vote count" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|community|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2081" CreationDate="2011-10-27T00:32:13.177" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we offer bounties on our own questions, we are given the options of 50-500 reputation in increments of 50. When offering bounties on questions posted by other users, the increment is the same, but starts at 100 instead of 50. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states (emphasis from FAQ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slice off anywhere from +50 to +500 of your own hard-earned reputation and attach it to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question as a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT (Feature Request):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can we get a note added to indicate that this is the case when starting a bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Bounty minimum on other users' questions" Tags="|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2080" CreationDate="2011-10-27T02:01:45.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This change applies only to questions you've answered, and was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64824/clever-bounty-reputation-hack&quot;&gt;made recently&lt;/a&gt; to dissuade users from attempting to gain reputation by manipulating the bounty system (the ethics of doing this are debatable, but that's neither here not there). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T02:01:45.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-27T15:53:10.223" Score="5" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an answer has been deleted because the OP deleted his question, the &quot;undelete&quot; link is still shown for that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ws03o.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I reused a screenshot I took for another issue report; that is why the &quot;undelete&quot; link is not highlighted.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Clicking on it doesn't have any effect, as you just get a dialog box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nWSBn.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, the link should not be shown, if I am not able to undelete my post. Maybe a moderator is able to undelete a post in this case (I don't see why, though), but I am not a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-30T10:41:30.070" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T10:41:30.070" Title="Don't show the &quot;undelete&quot; link for answers that have been deleted when the question was deleted" Tags="|feature-request|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2090" CreationDate="2011-10-28T15:13:51.247" Score="9" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Generalist badge states that a user needs to provide non-wike answers of 15 total score in 20 of the top 40 tags. I've got two (okay one) question(s) about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would say it pretty obviously means 15 net upvotes (number of up - number of down) in &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; tag - is that correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this mean 20 of the user's top 40 tags (as displayed at the bottom of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11762/jim&quot;&gt;user page&lt;/a&gt;), or 20 of the sites top 40 tags (as seen on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=popular&quot;&gt;tags page's &quot;popular&quot; tab&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Generalist badge &quot;Top 40 tags&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tags|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2011-10-28T19:16:02.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that two reasons have been given why the question was inappropriate to this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is &quot;too local&quot; because it cannot be answered without discussing technical details of creation and evolution theory. To the extent that this is true, it is a valid point. If someone posted a question here asking, say, &quot;What is the correct term for a bill that has been introduced in Congress but not yet passed?&quot;, that would be a question about language, and, I would think, appropriate. If someone asked, &quot;What is the process for introducing a bill in Congress and getting it passed?&quot;, that would be getting into the mechanics of politics and not really in scope here. And of course if they asked, &quot;Isn't Senator Jones corrupt and incompetent?&quot;, that would be a political debate and totally inappropriate here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many of the responses seem to be more like, 2. I disagree with the ideas of creationists, therefore we shouldn't discuss anything to do with them on this forum. With this I disagree completely. Can't we discuss language and grammar issues on a language and grammar site regardless of the scientific, religious, social, or political beliefs of all involved? If someone asked, say, whether &quot;Democratic Party&quot; should be written with a capital &quot;P&quot; or a small &quot;p&quot;, would you really reply that the question is unanswerable because the Democrats' policies are bad for the country? Comments that it is impossible to discuss appropriate scientific terminology related to creationism because &quot;creationism is unscientific&quot; are shear ideological bias and inappropriate to a site about grammar. It is exactly the same as saying that we cannot use economic language to discuss Keynesian economics because Keynesians are all wrong, or that we cannot use technical political terms to discuss communism because communists are evil tyrants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely we can discuss the meaning and usage of words even if we do not agree with the philosphy behind those words. We can explain the meaning of the word &quot;caliber&quot; without taking a position on gun control. We can discuss the origin of the term &quot;Nazi&quot; without being anti-Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T19:16:02.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2011-10-28T19:25:43.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basing on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions/67399#67399&quot;&gt;FAQ entry&lt;/a&gt; present on Meta Stack Overflow, the description of the badge is the following one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;silver; awarded once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Earn a tag score of 15 on one of the top 40 tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Repeat the above step until any 20 of the top 40 tags are covered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Only awarded to anyone after each of the 40 top tags has at least 200 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85048/does-the-generalist-badge-require-15-score-total-or-15-score-per-tag/85050#85050&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which a dev &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/583319#583319&quot;&gt;said was correct&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;15 is the score you need for each of the 20 tags; the top 40 tags is the top 40 tags for the site, not the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T23:54:18.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2091" CreationDate="2011-10-29T11:39:51.257" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;These &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges&quot;&gt;badges&lt;/a&gt; are described:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deputy: &quot;Achieved a flag weight of 500 by reviewing and flagging appropriately&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Marshal: &quot;Achieved a flag weight of 749 by reviewing and flagging appropriately&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My flag weight was 470 when I passed the 3,000 reputation threshold and gained the privilege to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;cast close votes&lt;/a&gt;. How is it possible to achieve the Deputy and Marshal badges when I can no longer flag posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T15:19:17.723" Title="How to earn Deputy or Marshal badges when you have over 3,000 reputation?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-29T11:58:54.150" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was closed yesterday as off topic by five people (including me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46492/can-i-omit-the-c-when-listing-several-consecutive-nouns-protected-by-copyright&quot;&gt;Can I omit the (c) when listing several consecutive nouns protected by copyright?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was also downvoted five times and has no answers. (It's actually about &lt;code&gt;(R)&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;(c)&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was later surprised to find this question from less than a month ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/43864/using-tm-for-trademarked-term-every-time-or-just-once&quot;&gt;Using “TM” for trademarked term - every time or just once?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still open with three upvotes and one downvote. It has three useful answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are basically duplicate questions asking about repeating trademark symbols -- one reviewing a technical document, the other writing a press release. The answers from the second would help the first question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this sort of question off-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any value in re-moderating the first as a duplicate of the second? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T11:10:50.877" Title="Are these duplicate questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2011-10-29T12:33:22.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try this &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/35591/generalist-progression-updated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; on Data Explorer. It gives your score for each of the site's current top 40 tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that of the current top 40 tags, I have seven with &gt;=15 score, and you have two with &gt;=15 score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kiamlaluno has 36 but doesn't have the badge. In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/14/generalist&quot;&gt;no-one&lt;/a&gt; on English.SE has this badge yet. Why not? Well, English.SE isn't ready to award the badge yet -- the top 40 tags each need at least 200 questions. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/11020/is-the-site-ready-for-the-generalist-badge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; shows we still have 15/40 tags under the threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T21:08:44.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2088" CreationDate="2011-10-29T15:19:17.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can still flag posts as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very low quality (use for posts that are gibberish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;needs other ♦ moderator attention (use for posts that have something weird going on and needs a ♦ mod to look at)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spam (use for commercial spam)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;offensive (use for offensive, abusive, or hate speech)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you can also flag answers as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;, for posts that do not directly answer the question (e.g. is a comment or a question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T15:19:17.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2011-10-29T20:41:38.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;And the winners have been chosen! From &lt;a href=&quot;http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/five-line-rhyme-time-a-limerick-contest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sentence first&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2:&lt;/strong&gt; So many good limericks were entered, I wish I had more prizes to give.&#xA;  Ten times more. But I’m happy to announce the following three winners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second prize (B) goes to Mike Page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;If engaged in a contest with Inuit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    in snow-naming, please, discontinue it!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     We can hardly compete&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Using “slush”, “powder”, “sleet”…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    You’ve got to be Inuit to win you it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for imaginative rhyming and inspired silliness. (Alongside his&#xA;  limerick I must recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this essay&lt;/a&gt; (PDF) on Eskimo words for snow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second prize (A) goes to Lisa Liel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Grammarians like to explain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    That the verbing of nouns is inane&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    But friending is fine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    It’s no different in kind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Than contacting me to complain  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More sense in 25 words than you can shake a derivational suffix at.&#xA;  (Note: after the verb contact (in the sense &lt;em&gt;get in touch with&lt;/em&gt;) arose&#xA;  in the early 20th century, it was “greeted with open hostility by&#xA;  purists for several decades”, according to Robert Burchfield.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First prize goes to Paraic O’Donnell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;There was once a pig’s ear of a language,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Romance scraps in a Jerry-built sandwich.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Mostly used for rude jokes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    It became for some folks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Something nothing was seriouser than which.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for fine philological punning and wonderful syntactical funning that&#xA;  made me laugh much longer than I ought to admit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Congratulations to Mike, Lisa, and Paraic, thanks to Stack Exchange&#xA;  for their generosity, and thank you all again for taking part!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T20:41:38.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-29T20:55:21.853" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Following on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/796/should-we-link-to-resources-for-learning-english-in-order-to-prevent-scope-creep&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As discussed in questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/703/is-elu-becoming-esl&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/752/is-english-stackexchange-com-used-for-increase&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, there is the possibility of scope-creep on this site. It would be beneficial to link to resources that are better places than this site to start learning English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get enough questions about this, so we should add something to the top part of our FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What resources should we link to for learning English?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T14:42:18.917" Title="What resources should we link to in the FAQ for learning English?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="796" CreationDate="2011-10-29T20:55:51.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To summarise comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should. We need to come up with a list of sites to include in the FAQ and then our community mods can edit the top part of our /faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compile the list &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2093/what-resources-should-we-link-to-for-learning-english&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T20:55:51.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2011-10-30T09:55:53.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can also give away all your reputation in the form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;bounties&lt;/a&gt; on questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T09:55:53.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2089" CreationDate="2011-10-30T10:40:46.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would consider the questions on-topic, in the same way questions about the usage of other particular characters, or punctuation are. The questions are asked because a real problem (Should I write the trademark symbol every time, or is it enough I write it the first time I use the name of the company?), and they are different (for example) from the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw that my friend wrote &quot;Hello,, my friend. How are you?&quot; Should I use the double comma after &lt;em&gt;hello&lt;/em&gt; every time I greet somebody in my email?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to have a question for &lt;em&gt;™&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;©&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;®&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;TM&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;(c)&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;(r)&lt;/em&gt;) because the answer is the same in all the cases. Who answers will not report that &lt;em&gt;™&lt;/em&gt; can be used the first two times you make a reference to a company name, and &lt;em&gt;©&lt;/em&gt; can be used only the first time. The symbols are different, but they are all used to report the legal status of something.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The existing question should be made more generic, without to invalidate the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-30T11:10:50.877" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T11:10:50.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2011-10-30T13:05:34.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you opt out of reputation, do you also want to opt out of the perks of reputation?  Things like:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;15   Vote up&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15   Flag for moderator attention&lt;br&gt;&#xA;50   Leave comments&lt;br&gt;&#xA;100  Edit community wiki posts  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T13:05:34.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2048" CreationDate="2011-10-30T16:43:35.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I would get worried if most of the questions on EL&amp;amp;U are about Old or Middle English, it is also true that EL&amp;amp;U is described using the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description doesn't talk of Old English, Middle English, or Modern English. What limits the questions asked on EL&amp;amp;U is the other sentence reported in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means, for example, that I should not read Beowulf just to be able to ask questions on EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should also consider that some Old English (or Middle English) words are still used nowadays in specific contexts, or in some dialects; for example, &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;thee&lt;/em&gt; are reported by the NOAD to be dialectal words for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Clearly, when it is possible to answer the question simply reading a dictionary, then the question should be probably closed as &quot;general reference&quot; (which was just added only recently, considering that the public beta phase of EL&amp;amp;U started on August 2010).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think questions on Old English are a problem: Looking at the questions asked until now on EL&amp;amp;U, the questions are about the quotidian usage of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T16:43:35.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-30T19:40:12.180" Score="8" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46713/which-is-the-word-that-means-neither-believer-nor-atheist-but-somewhere-in-b&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was &quot;clearly a homework assignment&quot;, and should be tagged as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I have no real opinion on whether it's desirable or not for people ask &quot;homework&quot; questions on EL&amp;amp;U. If they're trivial General Reference they'll be closed anyway, but beyond that I see no point in trying to second-guess why a poster asks something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag is totally pointless. Apart from raising the point here, is there any other way of &quot;voting&quot; to delete it? Or finding out why anyone else thinks it should be kept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T18:09:55.580" Title="Is the &quot;homework&quot; tag really useful? Is there a way to vote to delete it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2011-10-31T01:51:37.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 16 tags with homework...whatever the meaning of the term 'homework' is almost irrelevant; 16 uses is non-trivial, why the desire to get rid of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the meaning, why not? Is it hurting anything? Does noticing something is homework detract from its significance? Maybe someone wants to search for uses of ELU for homework at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not obvious to me why such questions are 'bad' (or is it just the tag that is 'bad'). Maybe you could give your reasons why it is pointless and detracts from the usability of the rest of the system. Looking at other tags with less frequent use, I see many more tags (and questions) that should have time spent on removing before getting to 'homework', and frankly those 'lesser' questions don't really ask for being removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T01:51:37.837" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2093" CreationDate="2011-10-31T14:42:18.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jane Straus's &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammarbook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation&lt;/a&gt; gives common grammar and punctuation rules with an emphasis on AmE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Larry Trask's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Penguin Guide to Punctuation&lt;/a&gt; gives a rather detailed treatment of punctuation with an emphasis on BrE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each is available online and in print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T14:42:18.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2011-10-31T16:52:57.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow uses &quot;homework&quot; as tag, and it has the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework means the asker is requesting help with school homework. This lets potential answerers know that they should guide the student in solving the problem, rather than simply showing the complete answer. Questions should only be tagged as homework when either the asker has said it is so, or when it is blindingly obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some differences between Stack Overflow, and EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Overflow doesn't have the &quot;general reference&quot; closing reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on Stack Overflow, questions are generally how to write code for a specific purpose, or why a specific code doesn't work; there isn't a dictionary that shows the code to write&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; have a meaning on EL&amp;amp;U? I would say yes, as the OP is not supposed to use a dictionary, and suggesting to use a dictionary is not the answer I would expect (which is what the &quot;general reference&quot; closing reason would suggest). The tag should be used to say &quot;don't tell me the answer; tell me how I can find the answer myself.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, questions that are not tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; and for which the answer is found in a dictionary are candidates to be closed as &quot;general reference.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are questions about homework that I presume would not be welcome on EL&amp;amp;U, but that it should not be because they are general references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T17:03:48.207" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T17:03:48.207" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2011-10-31T18:09:55.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how the &quot;homework&quot; tag adds anything to EL&amp;amp;U.  Even if a question is somebody's homework, if it's general reference we should still close it.  We don't consider why people ask questions; we evaluate them on the merits of the question alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T18:09:55.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2105" CreationDate="2011-10-31T21:32:11.167" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has happened to me before, but I never reported it, because I was busy, but now it felt like a good time. I'm attaching a screenshot, which you can also see in &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3y50I.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full size&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, my answer has been up-voted 4 times, but I have received 0 reputation for it. I know my reputation was 6062 before I posted the answer and it's still the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know where else to report this bug. I hope this is the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3y50I.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6509" LastEditorUserId="420" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T10:06:48.383" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Not receiving any reputation from my answer being upvoted" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2011-10-31T21:41:10.530" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a daily limit of 200 for upvotes, you must have hit it. Your daily reputation is shown as 199, and you had a single -1 for antonym of holster. You won't get any more rep for upvotes today, but you can still earn rep from accepting answers, having your answers accepted and from bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A maximum of +200 reputation may be earned per day. Accepted answers are immune to this cap (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/daily-dose-of-daily-reputation-ca/&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;), as are bounties (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/483019/how-does-the-bounty-system-work-in-stackoverflow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;). (For the purposes of this calcuation, new days start at 00:00 UTC (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27199/what-is-an-se-day-when-does-each-day-start&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T21:48:13.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2036" CreationDate="2011-10-31T22:36:22.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1170/should-i-be-able-to-cancel-my-up-vote-on-a-comment&quot;&gt;Meta.SO&lt;/a&gt; and has a score of 233, and the five answers all support it (with a combined score of 342) along with all the comments, but still the feature request was declined for unknown reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T22:36:22.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2011-10-31T22:45:43.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Google's Ngram viewer you can set the corpus to be American English or British English, and get a graph for each. You can then compare the y-axis values, being careful to note that Google autoscales it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=jelly&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=5&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American English&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=jelly&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=6&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also download the &lt;a href=&quot;http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;datasets&lt;/a&gt; of each corpus if you'd like to do your own data processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30683/how-to-compare-frequency-of-word-use-over-time-between-british-and-american-engl/30789#30789&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T03:11:26.640" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T03:11:26.640" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2079" CreationDate="2011-11-01T15:55:20.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community ♦&lt;/a&gt; is very odd... The profile claims to have 0 views. Obviously, &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; you and I have looked at it. It can offer bounties while having no reputation, and accept answers for people (see the reputation tab on its profile). Therefore, we can assume that Community ♦ has the ability to have reputation, votes, etc. reset and changed at random.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-11-01T15:55:20.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-02T03:39:24.383" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged a question as being not a real question:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1IeEi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46974/all-cases-when-we-are-using-the-apostrophe-like-s-or-in-ending&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt;, my username does not appear; is this a bug, or do I not have enough rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T00:26:11.967" Title="Should my name be appearing when I flag a question, and it is closed?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2110" CreationDate="2011-11-02T03:43:46.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the correct behavior. If you're under 3k rep, you can bring posts to the community's attention (it appears for 10k users and mods), but you have not yet been vested with the authority to vote to close questions. There's a reason for this—the closing process has to be understood to be a process that is entrusted to experienced site users, so until that point, your name will not be shown because you can't actually vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, keep flagging if you see posts that should be closed! You'll still gain flag weight, which is displayed on your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T03:43:46.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-02T05:02:37.037" Score="6" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently marked down an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46857/what-does-quick-parts-mean/46861#46861&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; for its off-topic sarcasm and wanted to post a link to some stated policy.  I've browsed the FAQ and questions here and found no precedent for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we discourage sarcasm and off-topic quips when they are mixed in with on-topic responses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12403" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Sarcasm in questions and answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2011-11-02T11:15:23.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr Sarcasm is fine as long as it's helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the three word &quot;means sharp wit :)&quot; does sort of answer the question but it's so brief, it's not very helpful. DeepYellow's comment is accurate: the StackExchange critique is off topic and was only added to make the answer long enough to submit. The critique could be easily removed by simply writing: &quot;Quick parts means Mr. Bennet has a sharp wit.&quot; or even &quot;Quick parts means a sharp wit.&quot;. It's submittable, but still not the finest of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; does say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are ... not even a &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; answer to the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this was a partial answer. Regardless of sarcasm, the offtopic part isn't helpful and should be discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;&quot;How to Answer&quot;&lt;/a&gt; page gives guidance on what makes a great answer. Nothing specific to sarcasm, but has good advice on how to write helpful answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the consensus from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5314/should-sarcasm-be-acceptable&quot;&gt;Meta.SO&lt;/a&gt; is that sarcasm is generally fine, but if it's unhelpful or offensive, it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T11:15:23.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2115" CreationDate="2011-11-02T22:02:19.540" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=unanswered&quot;&gt;Unanswered Questions&lt;/a&gt; there is an answered question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why is it there? Can we get a fix, if this isn't intended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T14:47:09.187" Title="Why is this question listed under the unanswered questions?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2011-11-02T22:13:10.390" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Unanswered Questions section is explicitly &quot;Questions with no &lt;strong&gt;upvoted&lt;/strong&gt; answers&quot;. There is a tab available if you want to specifically look at ones without &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answer (the &lt;code&gt;answers:0&lt;/code&gt; search parameter also works for those who want to search in the unanswered bins).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The filter runs on the principle that a question that has no upvoted answers has no satisfactory answer - neither the question author, nor anyone else viewing the question, has found the answer useful so it probably isn't an answer to the question. So, equivalently, the question remains unanswered and needing of a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T22:13:10.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2011-11-03T01:33:31.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think sarcasm itself is grounds for...discouragement. It depends on its nature and use. If malevolent, that malevolence should be discouraged. If the content of the sarcasm is irrelevant to the topic then that off-topic nature should be discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that particular question, sarcasm was the least of its difficulties. It has taken me several readings to understand what was actually attempting to be said. And the one piece of relevant content (the very last statement) is just plain poor and would be downvoted without the additional irrelevant first paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T01:33:31.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2120" CreationDate="2011-11-04T14:48:09.217" Score="9" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user from another site (tombull89) wishes to report a formatting problem for non-logged in template. Here is a screenshot. &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3IC5.png&quot; alt=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kSdga.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is using Firefox 7.0.1 on Windows 7, but Cerberus reports the same problem in Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="3546" LastEditDate="2014-10-03T23:31:33.633" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T23:31:33.633" Title="Improper formatting of Welcome box" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2119" CreationDate="2011-11-04T17:28:27.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in our next daily build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T17:28:27.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2123" CreationDate="2011-11-06T11:23:38.083" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am taking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47422/what-does-this-guy-mean-when-he-says-big-m&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47422/what-does-this-guy-mean-when-he-says-big-m&lt;/a&gt; as example, but the question is general to any similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user is asking the meaning of &quot;big M&quot; in &quot;Firewall for 6 months? Are you big M?&quot; which a reply to &quot;I doubt this , i'm someone who migrated from Gentoo Linux , i still have lots of stuff to configure in Ubuntu , like firewall , a customized kernel , fonts , etc.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Given the context, I would think &lt;em&gt;big M&lt;/em&gt; is referring to Microsoft, but it could be referring to Mc Donald's or Big M, a brand of flavored milk. Apart from the general context (a group for who don't like the Ubuntu Linux distribution), it is not clear the relation between a firewall the user needs to set up and Microsoft; a reference to Big M, or Mc Donald's, would be equally probable, as both has nothing to share with firewalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which cases does a question about what somebody meant become a &quot;try to guess&quot; game?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What should be required from these questions to be acceptable?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If they are not acceptable, what should be the closing reason for those questions (I guess &quot;too localized&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T23:20:38.973" Title="When does a question about what a person meant becomes a &quot;try to guess&quot; game?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2121" CreationDate="2011-11-06T22:55:34.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this does seem a bit too much 'try to guess'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;definitely 'too localized'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;except the OP has no idea that it is too localized, they think it is a normal usage of some kind that they just can't find a reference for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think requesting more context is the only good option.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T22:55:34.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2121" CreationDate="2011-11-06T23:20:38.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question becomes a &lt;em&gt;try to guess&lt;/em&gt; game when one has great difficulty obtaining the answer even with contextual clues. The closing reason should be &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt; as the question is too vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone posts such a question, he has no idea if the answer can be adequately determined from context. It is then up to the community to decide if the question is &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just closevoted this particular question as &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt; for the record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T23:20:38.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2125" CreationDate="2011-11-06T23:31:55.957" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki for [quotes] is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A hopeless mixture of questions about [semi-]famous quotations and questions related to quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this may be true, should we really describe our tags as being a 'hopeless mixture'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also brings up the larger question of what the true meaning of the tag is. To me, it should really be about quotation marks, although I guess there might be good on-topic questions about famous quotes too. The problem though is that we end up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46379/did-einstein-actually-say-the-fish-quote-that-everyone-is-attributing-to-him-on&quot;&gt;questions like this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T08:51:13.500" Title="The meaning of, and the wiki for, the [quotes] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2124" CreationDate="2011-11-07T08:51:13.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would rather use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotes&lt;/a&gt; when referring to quotes, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotation-marks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotation-marks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotation-marks&lt;/a&gt; for the quotation marks. The word &lt;em&gt;quotes&lt;/em&gt; could be referring to the quotation marks too, but such ambiguity should not be reflected in tags, as questions about famous quotes are different from questions about quotation marks.&#xA;Rather than creating more confusion with the tag wiki, we should make clear in the tag wiki of every of such ambiguous tags what is their intended usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue has been raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/500/tag-hygiene-quotation-marks-as-punctuation-v-quotations-as-famous-sayings&quot;&gt;Tag hygiene - quotation marks as punctuation v. quotations as famous sayings&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems nothing has been done to resolve the ambiguity of usage for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T08:51:13.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2129" CreationDate="2011-11-08T03:17:01.997" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the reviewer badge new?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reviewer   300 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;reviews&lt;/a&gt;, over 60 actioned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only just noticed it and I see that nobody has it (and there are no relevant questions on meta). What does it mean? Is it simply flag 300 posts and have 60 approved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Reviewer badge - new?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2128" CreationDate="2011-11-08T03:39:24.637" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed some questions on the questions page are tinted darker than others&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSCje.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the CSS, I see that they have the same class applied to them as the normal-shaded questions on the page (and the other tinted ones). Is this a bug, or does it serve some design purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T00:25:38.907" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why are some questions on the question page darker than others?" Tags="|support|design|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2127" CreationDate="2011-11-08T04:31:04.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The darker colored questions are those questions which have a tag that is one of your &lt;strong&gt;Favorite Tags&lt;/strong&gt;. You can define these Favorite Tags on the right side of the home page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/14n8X.png&quot; alt=&quot;Favorite Tags options&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, SE now automagically tries to identify your Favorite Tags if you never specified any by analyzing your browsing patterns. A quick search seems to imply that these are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108224/documentation-for-frequented-tags-feature&quot;&gt;Frequented tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Ignored Tag questions should get a slight fade out effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8289" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T04:38:21.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2126" CreationDate="2011-11-08T06:19:32.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Reviewer badge was rolled out earlier today. It rewards working through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;/review&lt;/a&gt; path (note that there are 5 different tabs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To earn the badge,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/111205/your-review-progress-showing-target-badge-that-ive-already-received&quot;&gt;you must first have the Strunk and White badge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must review 1000 posts by clicking the &lt;em&gt;review answer&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;review question&lt;/em&gt; link and reading through the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must upvote, downvote, edit, comment on, vote to close, or flag (i.e. take some form of action) at least 200 of the posts you are reviewing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110698/new-bronze-badge-for-reviewing/111329#111329&quot;&gt;Note that the numbers have changed since the badge was first deployed because it was raised to become a silver badge.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T06:33:36.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-08T14:49:10.070" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of time I've come across users with the same avatar, each of which cannot be viewed by me. It looks like &lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZhWtt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;this &quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Does this mean the question or user is from a different site? What's the deal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T14:52:06.743" Title="Why are there some users that cannot be clicked on or viewed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2130" CreationDate="2011-11-08T14:52:06.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means the user does not have an account on EL&amp;amp;U. This can be a user who asked a question on another site, which was then migrated, or a user who had their account deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T14:52:06.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2133" CreationDate="2011-11-08T16:36:46.250" Score="13" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47687/what-term-can-i-use-to-express-the-delay-between-two-connecting-flights&quot;&gt;What term can I use to express the delay between two connecting flights?&lt;/a&gt;, it is suggested that the entry for a description of a word in wiktionary be modified to be more in accordance with ... well, that it should be modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think the entry at wiktionary is wrong, but I hesitate to encourage modification of it because of a discussion made here. I feel it is too circular, using data here to help justify creating an authority (the wikitionary entry) that eventually is used to support a declaration back here at SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this isn't particular to ELU, but I'm starting the question here to see how it flies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is, should we use entries here to justify changes elsewhere?&#xA;(with the primary issue being that it could result in erroneous self-supporting authority)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T17:57:05.620" Title="Taking action on crowd sourced on-line resources based on SE answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2132" CreationDate="2011-11-08T17:23:04.200" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see your problem. I think there are two underlying issues here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our trust in authority. Just because, for example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says something, we take that as a strong argument. Perhaps we should be more critical and take any source only as an argument in so far as we understand and approve of the methods it uses to arrive at a statement. The mere fact that a word is in a dictionary doesn't mean that it is an acceptable word to many speakers, unless we know the dictionary has actually tested this or bases its entries on fully representative corpus research. Or if we know there is some group of people behind it whom we trust, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither we nor Wiktionary should be considered top resources. At least we have transparent voting; but Wiktionary and Wikipedia are a bit more random, and certainly not transparent. However, even on Stack Exchange the right answer doesn't always end up on top, nor is the best answer always very good or complete. Therefore anyone trusting a SE answer that quotes Wiktionary, with no sources mentioned that possess more authority, is foolish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take both websites for what they are, I don't think it is a real problem if we edit Wiktionary based on consensus here. That is, this referential loop should not give a false pretence of increased reliability, because there shouldn't be that much reliability in the first place if one considered how both websites work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2011-11-08T22:44:21.237" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T22:44:21.237" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2149" CreationDate="2011-11-09T04:49:22.283" Score="10" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;the editing help page.&lt;/a&gt; In Safari 5, at the very least (the only browser I have available at the moment), it has no background at the top, unlike most of the English.SE site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HFrGT.png&quot; alt=&quot;usual background&quot; /&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the editing page (just in case this is a Safari problem, I'll put up a picture).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N64hk.png&quot; alt=&quot;editing page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1075/editing-help-page-formatting-appears-broken&quot;&gt;asked before,&lt;/a&gt; but that was in May. The issue has either not been resolved at all, or was fixed, but somehow broke again. (Or was just never fixed for Safari, assuming of course that it was broken for Safari at the time of asking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T07:45:22.687" Title="Is the editing help page supposed to be this hideous?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2212" CreationDate="2011-11-09T14:25:09.700" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the reputation page, if you choose to view the reputation by graph, two graphs show up. Beneath the lower one it says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;select an area by dragging across the lower chart&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to understand what to do here. I click and drag, I drag parts of the higher graph to the lower one, and all kinds of clicking and dragging. Nothing happens. What does it want me to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-10T13:01:21.307" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T10:52:14.147" Title="Reputation by graph bug" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2135" CreationDate="2011-11-09T14:50:03.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What it means is that you should hold the left mouse button down while the mouse pointer is  on the lower graph and drag along the graph to select which part of your reputation you wish to see. See the below image &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GHGj6.png&quot; alt=&quot;high lighting where to drag the selection on the lower graph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The area I have highlighted in red is the one I selected by dragging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2011-11-09T15:06:39.290" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T15:06:39.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2138" CreationDate="2011-11-09T22:40:10.143" Score="35" ViewCount="525" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a user goes to ask a question, the default text in the title bar is this:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C7Wer.png&quot; alt=&quot;title bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this be changed to reflect the site's intent? In my opinion, this is a place where rules of the English language should be followed, not ignored, especially by the site itself. Could we get proper capitalization of the words &lt;i&gt;what's, English,&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;em&gt;be?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="10754" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T20:25:20.610" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T20:25:20.610" Title="As a site about EL&amp;U, should we maintain correct grammar, punctuation, etc. throughout the site?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2137" CreationDate="2011-11-10T12:27:31.327" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this should be changed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's your English language and usage question? Be specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's similarly lowercase on other sites, and should be fixed there too, but I agree the bar should be held higher for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; rather than a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; and I have updated the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-11-11T02:46:54.547" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T02:46:54.547" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2011-11-10T18:40:01.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently an American studies student and I'm always up for free food, but I'm not too keen on organizing a StackExchange themed event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; consider doing without  much hesitation, though, is pass a leaflet around. I could also imagine the Uni staff to welcome the information, and pass some on as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea would be something that is, say, A5 big, and contains everything important about the SE model (also the CC-Wiki model and the free-ness of it all; ideally if it had to convince me, also a paragraph about how the whole thing finances itself, because there is no free lunch) and the specific site in a nutshell. It would also be cool if it had the site's design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update: This has now materialized! And it looks great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239" LastEditorUserId="239" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T22:24:47.410" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T22:24:47.410" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-10T21:28:05.620" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the new monthly issues of your favorite journals are published, we want to remind you to ask those burning questions that pop into your head as you read through &lt;em&gt;novel approaches, methods and cutting edge or controversial findings&lt;/em&gt;. Stack Exchange consists of remarkably bright and talented researchers and our community benefits greatly from more current and relevant questions. &lt;strong&gt;When you flip through your favorite journal and are downright astonished by some findings or perplexed by a method, share that curiosity here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staying up to date in the field betters your own expertise and sharing those quandaries with your peers furthers the discipline as a whole. To encourage good ole fashioned journal reading (&lt;em&gt;winks at open access&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;users who ask questions about the current issues of whatever journal they like on the Stack are eligible for a drawing to win a year long subscription to a journal&lt;/strong&gt; of their choosing (excluding obscure journals only in print in Kazakhstan with a zillion dollar fee). Before Christmas, all posts referencing (denoted with &quot;citation&quot;) a current publication will be entered in the drawing and a random winner of all winners will be announced (plus secondary prizes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Tag the posts with &quot;citation&quot; and 'journal name/source'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13231" LastEditorUserId="13231" LastEditDate="2011-11-11T18:41:02.417" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T18:41:02.417" Title="Upcoming journal editions: read 'em and ask on the Stack (and get prizes)" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2142" CreationDate="2011-11-11T03:48:00.020" Score="-1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Code samples are largely irrelevant on EL&amp;amp;U (not to mention they starkly contrast with the style/theme of the site), but the specific formatting they provide is not useless. There are two primary reasons they are useful. The first is that code sample styling allows for uniform spacing (every character takes the same amount of screen space, so things can be laid out nicely). The second...well consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(both of these are generated using the exact text from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47961/error-detection&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;41&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I waited for my friend on the restaurant for two hours, from 10 AM to 12PM. But he never arrived. A) For B) On C) To D) No error&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;41. I waited for my friend on the restaurant for two hours, from 10 AM to 12PM. But he never arrived. A) For B) On C) To D) No error&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on Meta, they are both gray. However, the code section still looks broken and ill-formatted. Note, though, that the code section accurately displays the number as &quot;41&quot;, whereas the blockquote section displays it as &quot;1&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, blockquotes mesh well with the color scheme, while code samples stick out badly and look just plain ugly. Can we get the style changed for code so that (despite the fact that EL&amp;amp;U doesn't discuss code) it doesn't look horrific on our site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T15:07:19.070" Title="Change the CSS style for code samples on EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|design|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2141" CreationDate="2011-11-11T15:07:19.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;41. This is how you can make the 41 show properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;41\. This is how I did it, by escaping the period following the number with a backslash.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using code markup to offset something that isn't code isn't a great idea for searchability and other reasons.  Instead, in situations such as this, just properly escape whatever you need to and it will appear as intended in your quoted text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9884" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T15:07:19.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2191" CreationDate="2011-11-11T18:56:54.787" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reviewing posts today on the review page, I upvoted a question and got the &quot;share a link&quot; dialog. It would not go away. Clicking &quot;close&quot; did nothing, and reviewing other posts did nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2mFNd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This happened again today, and I noticed that it seems to fail when more than one of these is open at a time (I ignored the first one and tried to close the second - failed). Perhaps that has something to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Reproduced again today, with excatly two of these open and on-screen. Clicking close in the second one closed the first one, and the close button then became useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When multiple questions are opened in the &quot;review&quot; state, upvoting one of them causes the box to appear in the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This seems to apply to the &quot;Vote to close&quot; dialog as well (one dialog, several questions &quot;opened&quot; for review) - clicking vote makes it look like it is submitting, and it never goes away (but it does submit the vote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;After closing one like this and reaching this buggy state, no more of these will open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-11-22T00:25:45.347" LastActivityDate="2011-11-22T00:25:56.547" Title="Can't close the &quot;share a link to this question&quot; popup on review page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-12T13:26:01.433" Score="1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47851/pronunciation-of-mcleod/47862#47862&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; lost rep when the OP decided it was not the correct answer after all.  Fine, except that according to the history, he never accepted it in the first place...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I thought there was a computer run-through every 24 hours or so for minor flaws like this to be ironed out: have I misunderstood?&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47851/pronunciation-of-mcleod/47862#47862&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to be clear: Rep seems to have gone down for 'unacceptance' without having gone up for acceptance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T13:23:48.973" Title="Rep loss for unanswering" Tags="|support|reputation|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2011-11-12T20:09:59.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8019/timlymington?tab=reputation#page_1-view_time&quot;&gt;reputation tab&lt;/a&gt; of your profile, you can see the details of both the accept and the unaccept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ABgRC.png&quot; alt=&quot;rep details&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the image, I've used the &quot;by time&quot; detail option.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-11-12T20:09:59.970" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2148" CreationDate="2011-11-13T18:25:11.153" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/27080/8816&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; the accepted answer is not first.  In this case the accepted answer has no up-votes, but I've seen this a couple times where there were up-votes too, so I don't think that's the cause.  Why does this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T08:29:11.157" Title="Why does the accepted answer sometimes not show up first?" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2147" CreationDate="2011-11-13T18:28:06.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer was posted by the person who asked the question. Not pinning the accepted answer under these circumstances is done to prevent gaming of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-11-13T18:28:06.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2134" CreationDate="2011-11-14T07:45:16.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's not supposed to be this hideous. There were some left-over styles still being applied from back in the days when that page was hideous-by-design (as in the question from May that you're referring to). Since that page's layout has been updated to match the rest of the site, that's no longer necessary. It'll look as expected after the next build of the site. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T07:45:16.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2151" CreationDate="2011-11-14T12:06:38.097" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this is right place to ask, but Why do I not see a comment button most of the times? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have posted comments when I could, but when I needed to post one and do not see a way to do so [logged in, check] what do I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T12:26:02.390" Title="Why do I not see a comment button most times" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2150" CreationDate="2011-11-14T12:26:02.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need at least 50 reputation on each site to be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have 44 rep at the moment; one more (main site) upvote and you'll be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T12:26:02.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2672" CreationDate="2011-11-14T15:23:19.937" Score="30" ViewCount="791" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishqna.blogspot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://englishqna.blogspot.com&lt;/a&gt; seems to be reposting all our questions and answers. Now, I understand that the data is under a permissive license, but the attribution requirements don't seem to be met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T00:18:39.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T18:55:31.750" Title="Is http://englishqna.blogspot.com violating EL&amp;U (or YOUR) copyright?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|copyrights|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2011-11-14T16:03:13.387" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishqna.blogspot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://englishqna.blogspot.com&lt;/a&gt; violating EL&amp;amp;U copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. It's violating the copyright of EL&amp;amp;U users, but neither EL&amp;amp;U nor SE hold copyright of the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is doing something about it, since SE doesn't have the power to act on behalf of its users. The copyright owner (i.e. the OP) of each post would have to file a DMCA complaint about his/her posts with Google, but there is no way to combine these complaints or make them simplier in any way (because in theory, people could have relicensed their posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_dmca&amp;amp;product=blogger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;file a DMCA complaint&lt;/a&gt; with Google if and only if you were the original person to write the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-11-15T04:36:22.190" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T04:36:22.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2011-11-14T19:32:56.343" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @waiwai says, it appears to infringe our copyright as contributors and copyright holders.  Unfortunately, following the “report abuse” link doesn’t offer any option short of submitting a full legal copyright infringement request, under penalty of perjury and so on.  But as I understand it (caveat: IANAL!) we have a clear-cut enough case here to be safe submitting our claims; so I dug out a few of my posts there, and under the “describe the infringing content” section, used the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The entire content of this blog seems to be scraped, without attribution, from questions and answers posted at english.stackexchange.com, which are licensed (by default) under CC-wiki with attribution required.  The posts linked are several of my contributions; the other content was originally contributed at english.stackexchange.com by many users, and appears to have been reposted here without any attribution, authorisation, or added value.  The issue is being discussed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2152&quot;&gt;meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/2152&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d encourage others to do something similar (feel free to reuse/adapt that wording) — hopefully if enough of us do, it’ll get acted on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find a few of my own posts there, I looked down the list of answers from my user profile, and searched for distinctive words from their titles on the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Honestly, I don’t care that much about this individual example… it’s not exactly hurting me personally.  But as I understand it, things like this are part of a business model that runs by scraping vast amounts of content, at very small profit margins but at virtually no cost to the scraper, the cost being that life gets a bit worse for anyone looking for information online.  And if just a small proportion of the infringees can report them, those tiny profit margins go away and the web gets a bit cleaner and tidier.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T19:32:56.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-14T19:35:05.590" Score="8" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/english-pamphlet.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here you go&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if you think other sites would benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T18:01:04.943" Title="English.SE pamphlet - hang up or hand out to your friends and classmates" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-14T21:55:58.253" Score="-1" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In response to the community's feedback on this contest, &lt;strong&gt;we've decided&#xA;  to cancel it&lt;/strong&gt;. We never intended to favor quantity over quality, but we&#xA;  can see how this contest missed the mark. We appreciate all the&#xA;  constructive criticism regarding this idea, and will be working to&#xA;  come up with other ways to promote activity on EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In case you haven't seen the original contest yet and are interested,&#xA;  you can still read the announcement below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As more and more research-oriented sites pop up on Stack Exchange, we can’t help but be impressed with the amazing academic resource our users have created. We also can’t help but wonder... which academic community has the most Stack spirit? In an epic question-asking battle, would Math take down Statistics? Could Linguistics edge out English? If only there were a way to find out... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh wait! There is: an epic question-asking battle. Let’s do it! It’s getting close to the holidays after all, so now is a perfect time for us to say thank you by continuing our tradition of giving back. As such, the community that wins this battle will get 1000 USD to donate to a charity of their choice. Winners of each round will also get 100 USD to donate to charity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s how the battle will work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Participating sites are English, Math, Statistics, Theoretical Computer Science, Linguistics, Physics, Philosophy, and History.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each round will last a week, and the contest will be single-elimination bracket-style. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To move on to the next round, the average number of questions each site asks per day during the round must exceed that site’s current average. Whichever site exceeds their average by more questions wins the round. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To determine who would face off in the first round, we seeded the sites according to past activity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you ready for this?! Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIyMj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few more notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although this is a contest, a “Battle of the Sites” if you will, it’s all in the spirit of fundraising for charity and having fun. So while we understand (and encourage!) competitiveness, try to keep it friendly. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While we expect this contest to generate a lot of new questions, we&#xA;have full faith in the community’s ability to uphold its standards&#xA;and preference for good questions. If we find that a site is getting&#xA;a lot of bad questions during the contest, it will have to be&#xA;disqualified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Round one starts now and ends Sunday 11/20 at 11:59 pm UTC. Ready. Set. &lt;em&gt;GO.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11387" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-11-16T06:52:00.407" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T06:52:00.407" Title="Battle of the sites - cancelled" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2156" CreationDate="2011-11-15T14:27:47.507" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Stack spirit&quot;? Really? You do realize this trivializes the pursuit of knowledge, don't you? Also, it invites the sort of questions The Powers That Be have indicated are not welcome on this site. Cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14660/what-did-charlie-sheen-mean-when-he-used-the-phrase-banging-7-gram-rocks&quot;&gt;What did Charlie Sheen mean ...&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44010/what-does-the-expression-to-stir-the-paint-mean&quot;&gt;What does ... stir the paint mean&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34482/etymology-and-meaning-of-when-does-the-narwhal-bacon&quot;&gt;Etymology and meaning of &quot;When does the narwhal bacon?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; These are among the highest-viewed questions we have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here we are, opting for quantity over quality — begging, as it were, for even more idiotic questions &quot;in the spirit of charity.&quot; And doing it all absent any appreciation of the inherent irony. If there are already too many crap questions on this board (and there are, and TPTB have &lt;em&gt;stated&lt;/em&gt; that there are), then such a campaign at the very least broadcasts a mixed message. But it's OK, because it's for &quot;charity,&quot; right? And the charitable contribution is an underwhelming $1,000. If this were really all about charity, you might consider establishing a fund to which people could contribute real dollars. I believe you would get to the target amount (and more) a lot quicker. And to that I'll put my money where my mouth is: &lt;strong&gt;Undertake such an enterprise instead of this one and I will personally start off the donations with $100.&lt;/strong&gt; That's a tenth of the way to the target goal right off the bat. Make &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; the contest and you will exceed the goal by far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But charity isn't really what this is about, is it? This is about putting up numbers for SE, just as other enterprises sponsor charities to get good publicity. There is never any doubt about the purpose of those campaigns. I know, I've been in such meetings when &quot;proceeds donated to charity&quot; gimmicks have been considered in the mix with other marketing programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smells like Teen Spirit to me. Cue Kurt Cobain: &lt;em&gt;Hello, hello, hello, how low?&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Oh, well, whatever, nevermind&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T14:45:22.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-15T17:35:04.893" Score="57" ViewCount="3666" Body="&lt;h3&gt;A call to action&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This topic has been brought up here numerous times before, most recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;by JSBangs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now of the opinion that single word requests should be either disallowed entirely or subject to much more stringent requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We get lots of them. Lots and lots.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of them are uninteresting and of low quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a high propensity to attract one-word answers and poor answers from newbie users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In chat, many of the most active users have complained about them. In other words, they attract less active users but repel the most active users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some excellent answers there, and the &lt;em&gt;overwhelming&lt;/em&gt; consensus is that these questions should only be allowed when the criteria for answering them are explicit and clear &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; they can't be trivially answered by a dictionary or thesaurus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all the resentment poured out here, one might think poor examples of this sort of question would get &lt;em&gt;body-slammed&lt;/em&gt; the minute they showed up...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cheating at crosswords&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Yet... Watching the front page, you could be forgiven for thinking &amp;quot;crossword-solving&amp;quot; was one of the primary functions of this site. Here are a few questions I've run across in the past few days:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47948/what-do-you-call-a-man-who-knows-well-how-to-fix-his-household-appliances&quot;&gt;What do you call a man who knows well how to fix his household appliances?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39479/word-or-phrase-meaning-working-hours-have-ended-and-its-time-to-go-home&quot;&gt;Word or phrase meaning &amp;quot;working hours have ended, and it&amp;#39;s time to go home&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42322/a-vocabulary-word-meaning-to-completely-embody-the-meaning-of-a-term&quot;&gt;A Vocabulary word meaning: &amp;quot; to completely embody the meaning of a term &amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common to these questions is the lack of a clear goal: why is this question being asked? What specific criteria must the correct answer meet? And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts?s=1&amp;amp;pagesize=15&amp;amp;filter=all&amp;amp;tag=single-word-requests&quot;&gt;the resulting answers are predictably disappointing&lt;/a&gt;, as folks throw one synonym after another against the wall, waiting for one to stick... It would actually be &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; of a waste of time if the asker simply came right out and said, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, and it needs to be exactly 7 letters long, and end with an 'r'&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly embarrassing are the ones that can be answered - and often &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; answered - by the first result found upon pasting the description into Google:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48265/term-for-bowling-alley-machines-that-fix-pins&quot;&gt;Term for bowling alley machines that fix pins&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=Term%20for%20bowling%20alley%20machines%20that%20fix%20pins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48129/word-phrase-for-parent-whose-children-have-grown-up-and-left-home&quot;&gt;Word/phrase for parent whose children have grown up and left home&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=A+parent+whose+children+have+all+grown+up+and+left+home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with hosting questions that are already answered somewhere else... So long as we're doing it &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;. But a page whose only purpose is to link to &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; page is a speedbump on The Internet. I don't want to search for an answer only to find the top result linking to the second result - I want to go straight to the answer! Philosophically, this sort of &amp;quot;content&amp;quot; is just &lt;em&gt;rude&lt;/em&gt;, insulting to those looking for assistance, the sort of shady tactic commonly used by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link farms&lt;/a&gt;; they effectively &lt;em&gt;beg&lt;/em&gt; search engines to derank your pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Painting the bikeshed&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last problem with these questions will be immediately familiar to users of other Stack Exchange sites: Q&amp;amp;A that &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can have an opinion on will tend to attract more votes than those that demand specific expertise. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Bikeshed&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; questions aren't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; bad - but they require careful handling, as their quality can head south quickly... For instance, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48016/word-meaning-the-act-of-intending-to-do-nothing/48053#48053&quot;&gt;unhelpful joke answer voted above all those that attempt to take the question seriously&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But what can &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; do about this?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you see a question, ask yourself these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is my first impulse to reach for a dictionary / thesaurus / Google?&lt;/strong&gt; It should have been the asker's first impulse as well - does he describe what he's tried, or why the obvious answers don't work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I say with reasonable certainty what the correct answer would look like?&lt;/strong&gt; A thesaurus will happily present you with a list of words, but it won't necessarily tell you which one has &lt;em&gt;just the right connotations&lt;/em&gt; for the idea you're trying to convey. But if the question doesn't specify how/where/why the word or phrase is needed, then the expertise of those answering is wasted - they can't know if their answer meets the needs of the asker either. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Real&lt;/em&gt; questions have &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - not just &lt;em&gt;responses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this question interesting, unique, thought-provoking?&lt;/strong&gt; You're not a machine. The first two guidelines are fairly strict, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48298/is-there-a-word-to-describe-the-situation-where-you-call-someone-and-hang-up-so&quot;&gt;there &lt;em&gt;can be&lt;/em&gt; questions that fail&lt;/a&gt; both of them and yet are still worth keeping around. Use your best judgement... But avoid the pitfall of thinking, &amp;quot;I can find no redeeming value in this question, but... &lt;em&gt;maybe someone else will&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; - be true to &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;; if someone &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; finds the question useful, then &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; can fight to keep it around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you've decided that a question fails these tests, &lt;em&gt;act:&lt;/em&gt;  down-vote, vote to close (the description for &amp;quot;Not a real question&amp;quot; fits just about perfectly), or flag for a moderator's attention. Leave a comment describing what's lacking, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42322/a-vocabulary-word-meaning-to-completely-embody-the-meaning-of-a-term&quot;&gt;as I've done here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt;, the experienced expert users of English Language &amp;amp; Usage, are the gatekeepers for your site: you've already decided you don't want these questions, now it's time to step up and &lt;em&gt;make them go away&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24490/what-is-godspeed&quot;&gt;Godspeed.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T13:40:51.167" Title="Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|single-word-requests|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2011-11-15T20:44:06.670" Score="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree that questions that can be googled are automatically suspect. &lt;em&gt;Everything&lt;/em&gt; can be googled, and what's first or second in the results today might not be there tomorrow. If we want to become that first search result, then we need to be willing to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true: if you don't know the answer to a question, how are you going to evaluate the accuracy of possible answers? There's a reason SE has reputation and upvotes/downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;General reference&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; dangerous as a close reason. Pretty much every bit of information can be found elsewhere -- that's where our experts learned it from, after all -- but that doesn't mean every question is too basic. To qualify as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;, the question needs to be &lt;strong&gt;easily&lt;/strong&gt; answerable &lt;strong&gt;from a source &lt;em&gt;specifically designed&lt;/em&gt; to answer that type of question&lt;/strong&gt;. Google is not a source specifically designed to answer any question other than &quot;where can I find information about [search term]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question doesn't include enough information to be answered with any accuracy — such as single-word-requests where the description is a vague category at best — then by all means close it as &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt;. But just because you looked it up in Google and found an answer that your experience enables you to label as &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt;, doesn't mean you should close the question as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T20:44:06.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-16T16:12:28.760" Score="4" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;We often have high-rep users providing answers to questions when they should, in fact, be voting to close those questions, because the questions are duplicates, or because the questions are too poorly worded to answer, or the questions are obviously general reference. These users get rep points, the asker gets an answer, despite this being the kind of question we want to discourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I propose that reputation not be awarded in cases where a question is closed for being a duplicate, or for being general-reference, unless the answer has a certain number of votes, or the answer is merged to the original question (in the case of a dupe). This would avoid rewarding lazy users who should be doing more to take care of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T23:53:59.287" Title="Reputation score for bad questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-16T16:20:59.753" Score="8" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question is closed, the asker often doesn't realize that they can edit their question and get it re-opened. I've often seen well-intentioned people just re-post their question when they should have edited the original. I suggest we add some text on the page (perhaps only for the asker?) that spells out what their next steps should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the close reason was &quot;Not a real question&quot;, it should say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit this question by clicking the edit link to make it clearer what you are asking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the close reason was &quot;Too subjective&quot; it could say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit this question [blah blah blah] to make it more objectively answerable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be an attempt to make it blindingly clear exactly how the user is expected to go about solving their problem. Telling them to read the faq is apparently not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be nice if there was a way for new users, with closed questions, to ask for help in the chat room. They can't do this now if they have no rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="11762" LastEditDate="2011-11-16T16:40:56.963" LastActivityDate="2011-12-06T22:42:14.513" Title="Better information for askers when a question is closed" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2163" CreationDate="2011-11-16T17:14:03.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take it this OP is prompted to ask partly because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48529/what-is-considered-asking-for-money&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, that OP has asked the same question twice, but still not clarified what exactly he want to know, or why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that's someone asking ELU to provide some weasly form of words that might prompt people to give him money (which he wants), but doesn't overtly ask for money (because he probably wants to do it in a context where requests for payment aren't allowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus from my point of view that particular question isn't a desirable one in the first place. Which is why I didn't give the OP any advice on how to make it more acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, people don't routinely vote to close questions for reasons which can be overcome by trivial edits. On the odd occasion when enough people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, and the question gets unnecessarily closed, it's usually patched up and re-opened soon enough anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Although it's irritating to be re-asked the same rejected question, this doesn't happen often enough to justify bothering the back-room boys or cluttering the UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T17:14:03.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2166" CreationDate="2011-11-16T22:14:23.827" Score="12" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/48584/8816&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/48555/8816&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, so normally I would vote to mark it as a duplicate.  However, the earlier question is of lower quality than the newer one (and that's reflected in its downvotes).  Is it appropriate to mark an older question as a duplicate of a newer one so the trail leads to the better-formed one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;etiquette on duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt; before asking this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T00:19:50.280" Title="Is it appropriate to mark an earlier, poorer question as a duplicate of a later, better one?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2165" CreationDate="2011-11-16T22:22:25.417" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support closing an older question as duplicate if the following conditions are satisfied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The older question is unclear/poorly written&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The newer question is asks a clear and legitimate question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The newer question receives higher-quality answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The old question has no accepted answer, or the accepted answer (or answers in general, if none is accepted yet) on the new question better addresses the issue than the accepted answer on the old question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, merging the posts would take care of some of the issues, but why close a question by someone who put in effort to make it clear and useful as a duplicate of a lazy question that is not likely to attract useful answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note: these are broad statements about questions in general, not commentary on the duplicates linked in this question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="11762" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T00:19:16.957" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T00:19:16.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2011-11-16T22:47:26.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With respect to duplicate questions, I have a number of disagreements:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answerer has -no- idea that the question is a duplicate. Why would you penalize someone for their lack of knowledge?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an additional answer (via a duplicate) may be better than any existing one and may benefit from not being biased by the existing one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I don't think that rep should be modified because of closing status due to duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With respect to closing because of poor quality (the other close reasons):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the entire voting mechanism and plurality of opinion handles this. You don't know that you're right...you may think it is bad, but it could be that you're wrong. That's why it takes more than one vote to close. Who are you to judge that because of your one vote, somebody else is totally wrong and should incur some reduction of rep (or lack of increase). If some group of people upvote an answer, but others -downvote- the question, or even close the question, I don't think they should be related. There are lots of 'meh' questions that turn out to have fascinating answers that make the question somehow good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even if one could justify not giving rep for closed questions, the rules for when that rep is or is not allowed are too specific, each exception and the strength of each exception could be argued.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to be perverse, but I do share with you that it annoys me when I think a question is crap but a number of people 'who should know better' answer it, giving it (in my opinion) unwarranted legitimacy.  But then, on reflection, I bet I have committed the same in others eyes. I think the voting and rep system as is records what people think, and pulling back in some small cases is too manipulative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T22:47:26.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2011-11-16T23:10:51.480" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; already exists...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, the idea is that a question that gets closed will &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt; be deleted (or re-opened). It's a sort of &amp;quot;limbo&amp;quot;, where questions sit until the community decides on their fate. But there's almost no value in having hundreds of closed questions littering up the site, &lt;em&gt;with the very notable exception of duplicates&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question is deleted, any reputation points gained by the folks answering it is forfeit - they won't lose it &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt;, but the next time that user, a moderator, or a developer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;triggers a reputation recalc&lt;/a&gt;, it's &lt;em&gt;gone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the real lesson here is the story isn't over just because a question gets &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;: sooner or later, someone needs to step up and &lt;em&gt;finish the job:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators&lt;/strong&gt; can delete anything. So feel free to ask them to delete a question that's sitting around stinking up the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;10K users&lt;/strong&gt; can &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt; to delete &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; questions after they've been closed for two days. So if you have at least 10K reputation points on the site, feel free to go through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3A1&quot;&gt;list of closed questions&lt;/a&gt; and vote to delete stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;20K users&lt;/strong&gt; can also vote to delete, but don't have to wait two days. So if you've managed to rack up 20K reputation points, &lt;em&gt;go nuts&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But don't delete duplicates&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, don't. Unless they're literally &lt;em&gt;word-for-word&lt;/em&gt; duplicates, just leave them be - folks tend to find all sorts of different ways of asking the same questions, and the more variations we have pointing to the same canonical answer, the better. Of course, you should&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Merge&lt;/em&gt; duplicates with good answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2162/reputation-score-for-bad-questions/2167#2167&quot;&gt;As Mitch notes&lt;/a&gt;, it's easy to answer a duplicate without realizing that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate. As the site grows, this gets easier and easier. An honorable person might, upon realizing their answer adds nothing to what's already provided elsewhere, delete their own answer... But it's also common for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2165/is-it-appropriate-to-mark-an-earlier-poorer-question-as-a-duplicate-of-a-later&quot;&gt;duplicates to get &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answers than the original&lt;/a&gt; - in these cases, asking a moderator to step in and &lt;em&gt;merge&lt;/em&gt; the two ensures the answers get collected under the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T20:06:01.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2172" CreationDate="2011-11-17T04:23:30.987" Score="13" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8183/thursagen&quot;&gt;Thursagen&lt;/a&gt;, which is suspended for three years (!), added the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pedantic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pedantic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pedantic&lt;/a&gt; to several posts.  An exhaustive check of the revision histories of all questions with this tag indicates that no other user had added this tag to any question.  It appears that Thursagen was trolling by adding this tag to these questions.  As this is an abuse of the tagging system, can a moderator &quot;burninate&quot; it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T13:27:56.887" Title="Delete [pedantic] tag" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-17T09:58:47.160" Score="8" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my idea of a great question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48586/key-thob-and-key-fob&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Key thob&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;key fob&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out whole bunch of people say &quot;key thob&quot; instad of &quot;key fob&quot; - enough for Google to automatically correct for it. However I don't think any other English language site or blog has picked up on it. How can you get from 'fob' to 'thob' and not notice you are making a mistake? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this not exactly the sort of question that this site should address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T16:06:50.547" Title="This is a great question - why was it closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2170" CreationDate="2011-11-17T11:11:17.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close this question, and I stand by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly: I disagree with the Google statistics provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &lt;em&gt;&quot;key thob&quot;&lt;/em&gt; comes up less than 0.1% of the times that &lt;em&gt;&quot;key fob&quot;&lt;/em&gt; does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Az8c5.png&quot; alt=&quot;key thob Google stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LzM0F.png&quot; alt=&quot;key fob Google stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Google auto corercts &lt;em&gt;thob&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;fob&lt;/em&gt; is not significant - it does the same for &lt;em&gt;dob&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LtwPj.png&quot; alt=&quot;key dob Google correction&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;em&gt;&quot;key dob&quot;&lt;/em&gt; gets more hits than &lt;em&gt;&quot;key thob&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g6rYe.png&quot; alt=&quot;key dob Google stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a significant term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit that these stats could be regional – I am using Google in the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly: if one trys to look up &lt;em&gt;key thob&lt;/em&gt; in an online or paper resource, then one finds that it does not exists as a term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly: differing pronunciation is rife within English. This is not remarkable. Take, for example, how most Londoners pronounce &lt;em&gt;thief&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;feef&lt;/em&gt;. I even know some people who over correct the typical &lt;em&gt;th-&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;f-&lt;/em&gt; mispronunciation and end up substituting &lt;em&gt;th-&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;f-&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. fewer -&gt; thewer, fifth -&gt; thith, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see merit in a question that asks &quot;why do I mispronounce this word?&quot; when it is only them and a scant few others who do it. The answer won't help the internet at large, or them particularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T11:11:17.713" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2169" CreationDate="2011-11-17T13:27:56.887" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a mod, but I manually edited all of the questions to remove that tag. It's gone now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T13:27:56.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2170" CreationDate="2011-11-17T13:31:43.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Matt, and think that the question can be reopened. The key points are that &lt;em&gt;thob&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;fob&lt;/em&gt; occurs with more than chance regularity, and it has a significant, interesting linguistic aspect to why this error occurs. Once the question is reopened I intend to answer it with these things in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T13:31:43.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2170" CreationDate="2011-11-17T16:06:50.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;my initial impression of the question was, to be blunt, that it was crazy or stupid or failingly trying to ameliorate, uneducated. 'Thob' is just not a word (yes, we're all descriptivist here, but you only get there by starting off with a great sense of prescriptivism; what do -you- allow in scrabble games?).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;my not being a BrE speaker, the th-fronting just does not pop into my head as a possibility. Now that that comes up, the question becomes -very- interesting, and that maybe there -is- some kind of 'thing' happening.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think we've all followed the process well as it could: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question closed because some think it is closable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lots of discussion in comments about difficulties with google and google ngrams.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meta-question posted to encourage reopening (with evidence that it is interesting).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question reopened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think this worked out well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T16:06:50.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-17T16:51:33.243" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we allow &lt;em&gt;'What is a better way to write this?'&lt;/em&gt; questions on this site? If not, I feel &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48651/use-of-different-tenses-to-express-present-fact-on-past-action&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question is one of those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with those types of questions is that there is no definite answer and there can be many equally good responses. Also, it is unlikely that it will be useful for future readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the same as questions which ask for alternate/better words/phrases for a presented word/phrase given a specific context; these can be useful and excellent questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14721" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T18:59:29.523" Title="Are 'What is a better way to write this?' questions allowed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-17T17:36:30.303" Score="7" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being intrigued by this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48645/what-is-the-name-of-this-rat&quot;&gt;What is the name of this rat&lt;/a&gt;) I took the trouble to google it and post the answer as a comment. But it got me to thinking. It seems to me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48293/supreme-court-vs-highest-court&quot;&gt;“Supreme court” vs. “highest court”&lt;/a&gt; is legal terminolgy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48198/how-should-i-say-the-relationship-between-the-professor-and-student-in-america&quot;&gt;Relationship between professor and student&lt;/a&gt; is academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48125/is-windows-based-pc-a-correct-term-in-american-english&quot;&gt;Is “Windows-based PC” a correct term&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46338/is-there-a-better-term-for-low-level&quot;&gt;better term for 'low-level'&lt;/a&gt; are computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45083/how-can-i-describe-someone-who-feels-little-or-no-emotion&quot;&gt;Describe someone who feels little or no emotion?&lt;/a&gt; is medical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39176/word-to-describe-a-mathematical-variable-that-repeats-like-an-angle-or-time&quot;&gt;Word to describe a mathematical variable that repeats&lt;/a&gt; is mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22248/what-are-the-proper-terms-for-these-star-shapes&quot;&gt;What are the proper terms for these star shapes&lt;/a&gt; is geometry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand the logic of allowing some &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;What's this called?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions, but not others. I'd probably have voted to close the &amp;quot;rat&amp;quot; question myself if it had already been answered, on the grounds that once &amp;quot;the correct answer&amp;quot; has been posted there's no need for any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of saying some/all of the above counterexamples should also have been closed immediately, what exactly is the thinking here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T14:50:28.413" Title="Is domain-specific terminology off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2011-11-17T18:06:58.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly every question could be placed into a sub-category, that's one of the issues about having a topic as meta as the English language - English can be used to talk about anything. Nearly every word someone asks a question about could be categorized into a separate topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48653/bash-vs-party&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question is about the word 'party' and it's comparison to the word 'bash'. This question could be categorized under sociology - the study of society. But I feel if we were to draw a Venn diagram that question would be in that area which is both relating to English as well Sociology. This is true with each of the above specific examples mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the bottom line which can push a question more towards English or more towards the other topic would be how relevant the word, phrase, or situation is in the life of the average person. For example, a question about the name of the shape of a star is a largely irrelevant question in the vast majority of people's lives whereas a question about the name of a common medical condition could be much more relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm mistaken, since we are dealing with the abstract criteria of 'relevance' to decide if a post is acceptable or not, a majority vote should be required to bring down a question and this largely what's happening now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14721" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T14:50:28.413" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2180" CreationDate="2011-11-17T18:38:28.403" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find the answer anywhere.  I know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states a user is only able to earn 200 reputation per day.  However, some users receive slightly more on some days, as evidenced by their reputation history.  How is this possible?  Do some activities continue to earn reputation once the cap has been reached, while others do not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14292" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T18:57:56.483" Title="How can you earn more than 200 reputation in a day?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2011-11-17T18:57:25.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accepting answers to your own questions and being awarded bounties don't count against the cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T18:57:25.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2011-11-17T18:57:56.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;By getting &lt;em&gt;accepted answers&lt;/em&gt;. The extra 15 points that you get for having a green check-mark next to your answer don't count towards the reputation cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T18:57:56.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2175" CreationDate="2011-11-17T18:59:29.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such questions are off-topic as a rule, unless they involve a question about a particular grammatical construction. In general, they can be migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://writers.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, though low-quality questions of this sort are liable to be closed there, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T18:59:29.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2011-11-17T21:25:58.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think some &quot;what's this called&quot; questions are more on-topic than others because they're really asking, &lt;em&gt;What's the best way to say this? How do I make sure I'm understood?&lt;/em&gt; The asker has a genuine problem, so it's necessarily related to another topic in their life where it originates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these questions can be bad in the same ways as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;other single-word-request type questions&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not arguing that they're always useful, but here's sort of the thought process I go through if I review them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the more on-topic questions, the primary work involved in answering will be explaining language. A thorough answer can address things like word differences, nuances that the dictionary doesn't provide, actual usage examples, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naming questions become more off-topic, in my opinion, when a good answer requires expertise in the field and no explanation of language. For example, if I ask, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q: I used a strong solution when I made etchings on metal plates in art class. What was it?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Q: What's this bug in my houseplant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might guess &lt;em&gt;nitric acid&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fungus gnat&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, but if I ask somewhere more focused on the domain, I'll probably get much better, more complete answers that tell me about art techniques or houseplant debugging, which is what I seem to care about. I'm not even  interested in why people call it a certain thing, or learning a common word for it, but in solving my problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, it's obviously a spectrum, but I consider these questions off-topic if it seems like there must be a better home for the question somewhere else and there seems little potential for thorough answers about how people actually use language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T21:25:58.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2184" CreationDate="2011-11-17T23:22:50.267" Score="-2" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we correct punctuation use where people incorrectly use single/double quotations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frequently am seeing the following &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.writersblock.ca/tips/monthtip/tipapr99.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quotation rule&lt;/a&gt; used incorrectly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Canadian and American style, use double quotation marks to set off words used as words, words used ironically or as slang, words that are particularly significant, and words that may be unfamiliar to the reader. Note: Italics may also be used to set off words in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: The words &amp;quot;effect&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;affect&amp;quot; are often confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people often incorrectly use single quotation marks in the last example. In Canadian and American style, use single quotation marks to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, therefore, would be an &lt;strong&gt;incorrect&lt;/strong&gt; use of single quotation marks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: The words 'effect' and 'affect' are often confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14721" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T17:46:27.147" Title="Single vs Double Quotations" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2183" CreationDate="2011-11-18T01:52:42.467" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that your quote says &lt;em&gt;Canadian or American style&lt;/em&gt;. This website is not &quot;American Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot; but &quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot;, meaning we should be flexible enough to accommodate spelling and punctuation as used in both North America and also in the U.K. and other Commonwealth countries. A quick glance at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotations_and_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammartips.homestead.com/singlequotationmark.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; shows that using single quotation marks to set off words is perfectly correct in much of the English-speaking world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5754" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T01:52:42.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2011-11-18T03:08:59.393" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;An update: I clicked on the &quot;Report Abuse&quot; button on the blog -- it takes you to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/request.py?hl=en&amp;amp;contact_type=main_tos&amp;amp;blog_ID=607065866398256425&amp;amp;blog_URL=http%3A%2F%2Fenglishqna.blogspot.com%2F&amp;amp;rd=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;. I chose &quot;Copyright/Piracy issues&quot;, and filled out the form, asserting that I'm the copyright owner, and that I understand the legal consequences of making false claims. It takes you &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_dmca&amp;amp;dmca=text&amp;amp;product=blogger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I gave links of five blog posts on that blog that contained copies of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; questions and answers, without attribution, along with links to the corresponding posts here. Two days later (today), I got an email saying that those posts have been removed under the DMCA... and indeed they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is good, but unfortunately, the rest of the posts on the blog continue to exist. But perhaps if a handful of people separately file copyright complaints for their content, the blog will be suspended for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T03:08:59.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2011-11-18T06:34:16.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Needs improvement, but something along the lines of &quot;&lt;em&gt;English &lt;s&gt;on the line&lt;/s&gt; online&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keyboard some English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T06:34:16.220" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-11-18T06:34:16.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2155" CreationDate="2011-11-18T18:01:04.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last sentence is a little confusing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're an academic, it's a great place to establish a reputation as&#xA;  an expert in the field, apply for funding and sponsorships, and&#xA;  network with other English professionals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is English Stack Exchange a good place to apply for funding and sponsorships? If you create a similar document for other Stack Exchange sites, I would suggest clarifying where such funding and sponsorship is available, as it would be of interest to many readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second item: I'm unsure what an English professional is. We are English-language speakers, with varying degrees of proficiency, and of all nationalities. Some of the other Stack Exchange sites are specifically targeted to academicians or research-level experts e.g. Economics Stack Exchange (in public beta) and Mathematics (or maybe Mathematics SO, I don't recall). If you will be producing similarly themed pamphlets for other Stack Exchange sites, do confirm whether the site audience is in fact targeted toward that level of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last item: The letterhead and colors were fantastic! I viewed as a PDF in Google Docs,  directly in Adobe Acrobat and as a printout. It looked &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt; pretty in all three!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T18:01:04.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2011-11-19T11:26:01.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all those who took the trouble to comment here.  The bug, whatever it was, has straightened itself out, so I presume it was in my computer.  But if anyone's still interested:  for several days the rep chart, whether by post or by date, showed that post with 4 up votes and an unaccept, (all on the same day, so +25), and nothing else anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="14292" LastEditDate="2011-11-19T13:23:48.973" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T13:23:48.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2183" CreationDate="2011-11-19T11:56:19.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of a type of quotation mark instead of the other is just a matter of style; both are allowed, depending on the country where you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you change the following sentence to move the period inside the quotation mark, you are adopting the American style, which (as already noted by Peter Shor) is not the de facto standard accepted on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The title of the book is, &quot;101 ways to cook a sentence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing a post just to change the style, when the used style is fine, is not what you should do. If you find something else that needs to be changed (spelling, punctuation), then it is perfectly fine if you adapt the post to your own style, but changing only the style on many posts is not what you should do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't include using a style that is not standard in any English dialect, such as writing &lt;code&gt;quoted text&lt;/code&gt; instead of &quot;quoted text.&quot; The first should just be used if you want to avoid the Markdown or the HTML parser handles some characters in the quoted text in a particular way, such as in the case of &quot;&lt;code&gt;__test__&lt;/code&gt;,&quot; if you want the underscores to be shown, instead of being used to highlight the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-19T17:46:27.147" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T17:46:27.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-19T17:58:49.590" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki:1%20is:question&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;88 CW questions&lt;/a&gt;; of those, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki:1%20is:question%20closed:0&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;75 questions&lt;/a&gt; are not closed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should not they be closed, or locked? As I can see, there are many questions that should not be asked, basing on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, as they are not asked because an actual problem, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/183/what-are-some-of-the-better-english-reference-grammars&quot;&gt;What are some of the better English reference grammars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1509/what-is-the-longest-word-you-can-come-up-with-that-the-letters-are-all-in-alphab&quot;&gt;What is the longest word you can come up with that the letters are all in alphabetical order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1539/what-mnemonics-help-solve-common-linguistic-issues&quot;&gt;What mnemonics help solve common linguistic issues?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2328/comical-examples-of-abused-apostrophes&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2328/comical-examples-of-abused-apostrophes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3018/memorable-no-pun-intended-sentences-used&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3018/memorable-no-pun-intended-sentences-used&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3557/is-there-an-online-sample-sentence-database-or-search-engine&quot;&gt;Is there an online sample sentence database or search engine?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While such CW questions were once acceptable, now that the purpose of CW questions has been re-defined, those questions should be closed, or locked with a notice that those questions are not anymore acceptable, and they should not taken as example of questions user can ask on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T17:58:49.590" Title="Should not most of the CW questions be closed, or locked?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2143" CreationDate="2011-11-22T00:25:56.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;got it, should be fixed in the next 24 hours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-11-22T00:25:56.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-22T02:16:17.167" Score="4" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions on eggcorns attract downvotes and close requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example the question did indeed lack research effort and it was not immediately identified as an eggcorn question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47693/sick-and-tied-and-sick-and-tired&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sick and tied&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sick and tired&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes I voted to close too, but subsequently voted to reopen after PLL's comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question I clearly asked &quot;Is it an eggcorn?&quot; but immediately received a downvote and a close vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49114/is-heinz-sight-an-eggcorn&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;heinz sight&amp;quot; an eggcorn of &amp;quot;hindsight&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who does a few seconds of preliminary research can see it isn't a one-off mistake and bears further investigation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T03:07:00.437" Title="Are eggcorn questions &quot;too localized&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2011-11-22T11:39:36.710" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; has been around for a while: how to define what is too basic and not interesting to the desired audience of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, consider the instructions that new users see when asking a question (for the first time) are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is your question about English language and usage?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Provide details. Share your research.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If your question is about this website, ask it on meta instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did we ask ourselves is it really objective to expect the new users who come to the site called &amp;quot;English Language and Usage&amp;quot; and to whom the instruction given is &amp;quot;Is your question about English language and usage&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; that she will read through the whole faq, paying special attention to the details of examples of what is on or off topic? Let's assume that it is. There she will read as an example of on topic question: &amp;quot;Problems encountered by people learning English&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you say that the uninteresting question are &amp;quot;philosophically rude&amp;quot;, but isn't it &amp;quot;philosophically rude&amp;quot; not to expect such questions given the state of facts? But, I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the first thing that needs to be done is &lt;strong&gt;to make sure&lt;/strong&gt; that we inform the new user what is expected from them, namely that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they should &lt;strong&gt;show&lt;/strong&gt; research or attempt at research in dictionaries and online encyclopedias&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the research failed that they should explain why or how&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways this can be incorporated into the site (personally, I am particularly fond of the idea that users under X points should click on 'I have done research' with every question they ask).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will not eliminate such questions completely, but at least it should lead to the situations where it is clearer to the users why their questions are closed. This is not the case now, and not only we get noise from questions that should be closed, but we also get further noise when people do not understand why it happened. This is also garnished with noise of overzealous closers and sympathetic re-openers. In reality I don't think it is as bad as it could be, but these &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the elements of noise that we experience and that can be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fight 'mediocrity' we should fight it at the first lines: hard and &lt;em&gt;fair&lt;/em&gt;. For that we need to take better care of the new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Please note that the sentence 'Is your question about English language and usage?' does not capitalize the name of the site. Therefore, it is even more justified to expect the new user to interpret it as &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question on English language and usage, not only as questions that the site &amp;quot;English Language and Usage&amp;quot; defines as on topic in its faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-11-22T11:39:36.710" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2192" CreationDate="2011-11-23T00:58:17.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eggcorn questions are too localized if and only if they are too localized. :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the things that can make an eggcorn question too localized are exactly the same things as can make any other question too localized: the answer is not likely to be useful to anyone else, the question is of interest only to the asker, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T00:58:17.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2192" CreationDate="2011-11-23T03:07:00.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing special about eggcorn questions that make them more closeable. I personally think that questions involving already start with a lot of interest about the phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to follow Martha's question, a question can be closeable for many reasons, if it is too local or badly formed. It's not anything special about eggcorns, rather other independent things about the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both questions, the behavior doesn't seem out of the ordinary. The 'sick and tied' does look like a silly typo and not an eggcorn, but research showed (possibly) otherwise, so reopening seemed like the right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For 'heinz sight', the 'Listen up eggcorn fans' might be construed as inappropriate (like using salutations or thanks in a question), and separately it just might not fit the exact definition of eggcorn (the mistaken parts seem to need to make sense in context and 'heinz' doesn't at all (I think it's OK, look at the 'egg' in 'eggcorn')).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T03:07:00.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-23T14:07:24.067" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;I was looking at few SE sites and comparing 'How to Ask' instructions in the right sidebar that appear when you click 'Ask Question'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/strong&gt;: Is your question about &lt;strong&gt;programming&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Serverfault&lt;/strong&gt;: Is your question about &lt;strong&gt;servers, networking&lt;/strong&gt;, or desktop &lt;strong&gt;infrastructure&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these have a relation between the name of the site and the main filtering question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened for me is that a pair (Stack Overflow, Programming) caused me to ask: Is it really only about stack-overflows? Checking the sample questions made me realize it is not, and that (among other things) lead me to read the FAQ eventually. I consider this &lt;em&gt;a good thing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Server Fault something else happened: I thought I didn't need to read the FAQ. Another interesting thing happened there, too: I really did not have to! The filtering question is almost a perfect digest of what is on topic and what is not, with only few minor details cleared up in the FAQ. I consider this &lt;em&gt;a good thing&lt;/em&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/strong&gt;:  Is your question about &lt;strong&gt;English language and usage&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of a newcomer, which means that the FAQ has not been read and fully digested and that only a sample of questions have been seen, I am wondering if this sentence is implying that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question about the English language and usage can be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" OwnerDisplayName="Unreason" LastEditorUserId="8377" LastEditDate="2011-11-23T16:15:55.673" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T22:26:22.570" Title="Is this question about English language and usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2198" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2201" CreationDate="2011-11-23T15:59:58.610" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; roles that EL&amp;amp;U could fulfill is to provide a place where questions of language correctness for user interface on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; stackexchange sites are addressed. I think it would be a useful way to give back to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following question could be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is the comma before &quot;and&quot; breaking the punctuation rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions like this appropriate for the main site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The example is just that, an example of the question; there is no need to explain the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;serial comma&lt;/a&gt; issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-23T18:48:22.043" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T18:48:22.043" Title="Grammaticality of user interface of stackexchange sites" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2197" CreationDate="2011-11-23T17:59:11.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences you report have the only purpose of reminding to the users what the general topic is in the site; they don't assure the question being asked is on-topic, nor that the question would not be closed for any reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Server Fault uses, &quot;Is your question about servers, networking, or desktop infrastructure?&quot; but that just gives an idea of what the question's topic should be. What reported in their FAQ more exactly says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Server Fault is for system administrators and desktop support professionals, people who &lt;strong&gt;manage or maintain&lt;/strong&gt; computers in a professional capacity. If your question is about …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Servers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Networks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Desktop PCs that you maintain in the workplace&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and it is not about …&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Networking outside the professional workplace&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Running servers at home for personal use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General personal computer troubleshooting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… then you’re in the right place to ask your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On-topic questions on Server Fault are not questions about your own computer that you use at home.&#xA;Reading the sentence they show you when you ask a question on Server Fault, you could think that any networking question is welcome, but then the FAQ says that questions about the computer you use at home (and not at your workplace) are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way, on EL&amp;amp;U, the general topic is English language and English usage, which means that questions about a different topic are off-topic. When you then read the FAQ, you discover that questions about proofreading are not on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sentence is not implying that any question about English are on-topic, in the same way the sentence used by Server Fault doesn't imply that all the networking questions are on-topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-23T18:49:40.357" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T18:49:40.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2197" CreationDate="2011-11-23T18:02:15.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case of Stack Overflow and Serverfault, the site names do not tell the asker what the site is really about, so the question following appears different from the site names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of this site, the site name does tell the asker about the nature of the site, so the question following happens to be of the same flavour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not imply that all questions of this nature can be asked, in the same way the questions following on the other two sites do not imply that, but serves only as an initial filter. The FAQ still needs to be read even in the other two cases as a further filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2011-11-25T22:26:22.570" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T22:26:22.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2011-11-23T18:07:21.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question should be posted as an ordinary question on the main site. For example, rather than asking about the user interface, the question on the main site should be about the serial comma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of whether to change the user interface should then be raised on meta separately. There are two steps here, and we need to take the first before the second, as with all things in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T18:07:21.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-24T10:01:22.493" Score="-7" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did anyone suggest &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; tag yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be interesting to have ability to say that the question comes from the work domain - either directly related to your work or indirectly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it will give us ability to distinguish questions that are more 'real' or 'interesting' from questions that come from random curiosity (nothing wrong with that, but I think it is good to be &lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt; to distinguish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag will have to be assigned by the poster and taken in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T17:28:41.283" Title="Tag proposals - work" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2202" CreationDate="2011-11-24T20:50:41.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a bad tag. It feels to me like it would be a meta tag. It can't work as a tag for a question by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Meta tagging is discouraged&lt;/a&gt; because the tags do not describe the content of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/work&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;work&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;work&lt;/a&gt; what do you learn about the question? There is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/business-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;business-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;business-language&lt;/a&gt;, so we don't need a new one for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/work&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;work&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;work&lt;/a&gt; would mean when added to a question. What aspect of English language or usage is it addressing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2011-11-24T20:50:41.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2206" CreationDate="2011-11-24T21:03:52.450" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before a commenter mentioned it, I was unaware that there was a Writers site.  Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49380/techniques-to-disguise-authorship-of-text&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49380/techniques-to-disguise-authorship-of-text&lt;/a&gt; better suited to English or Writers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question was moved to Writers, thereby answering my previous question.  Why was the question determined to be better suited to Writers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This question is not intended in any way to dispute the decision to migrate the question.  Instead, the intent is to document for the community &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question fell on the Writers side of the line rather than the English side.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14963" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T20:46:25.387" Title="Does this question belong on English or Writers?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2012-10-27T00:31:35.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2202" CreationDate="2011-11-24T21:25:18.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the tag would be used to mean that the question is asked because of something related to work, then the tag is a meta tag, as it doesn't describe anything about the topic of the question; it describes the reason why you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the questions are asked because of actual problems, the exact reason for which you are asking the question doesn't matter. If you are going to ask a question just out of curiosity, then you should not ask it. This is valid in any SE site, as the FAQ of any SE site contains the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your motivation for asking the question is &quot;I would like to participate in a discussion about […]&quot;, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is &quot;I would like others to explain […] to me&quot;, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T17:28:41.283" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T17:28:41.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2204" CreationDate="2011-11-25T20:46:25.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It belongs on Writers because it's asking about how to write in a particular style. There's nothing in the question that is unique to the English language; it just so happens that you are writing in English, but your question is about the writing process and not the English language. If you were writing in, say, French instead, the answer would be the exact same; there's nothing about this question that is particular to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T20:46:25.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-26T13:20:51.527" Score="5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some questions about online resources, on EL&amp;amp;U, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7057/what-are-some-good-books-online-resources-for-growing-your-vocabulary&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7057/what-are-some-good-books-online-resources-for-growing-your-vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7211/list-of-good-resources-for-toefl-preparation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7211/list-of-good-resources-for-toefl-preparation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/advice-resources-for-indian-english-speakers&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/advice-resources-for-indian-english-speakers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some more few questions that have been first closed, and then deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem I see with those questions is that every answer is equally valid. The other problem I see is that those questions becomes a list of resources without a small description that would allow the readers to choose the resource that better suits them. In this case, I don't see how those lists are useful. I could google, obtain a list of online resources, and that list would be equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would not it be better to add an entry for questions about online resources in the FAQ? It would not stop users from asking that type of questions (or at least, that would not be the immediate effect), but at least there would be a place where those questions are declared off-topic. Users now see questions about online resources, ask a similar question, and then wonder why their question has been closed; if the FAQ would explicitly say they are off-topic, maybe users would understand they should not ask such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T08:14:22.907" Title="Should not the FAQ have an entry about online resource questions?" Tags="|discussion|site-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-26T13:29:08.453" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;As there is now the possibility of adding a note to a question, should not be there a note for questions that have been asked in the past, and that would be closed, if asked nowadays?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following note appears in some questions on Stack Overflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. More info: FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is to close those questions that are now considered off-topic, or that would be closed for any other reason. If there are questions that we think worth being on EL&amp;amp;U, we should consider adding such note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a list of possible candidates, you can search them using this search: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+answers%3A20+wiki%3A1+closed%3A0&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;is:question answers:20 wiki:1 closed:0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T12:22:02.743" Title="Add a note about questions that have been asked, and that should not be asked anymore" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2208" CreationDate="2011-11-26T17:26:14.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE platform does allow moderators to add such a note (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-th&quot;&gt;What words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them?&lt;/a&gt;), so if you see any questions that you think deserve this post notice, please flag them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(N.B. The post notice is automatically attached to a lock).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, only posts which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are of fairly high quality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have good answers &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are relatively popular (determined either by views or votes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will be considered for this post notice. If a post does not meet these criteria, the question will simply be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-11-26T17:26:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-27T06:52:01.670" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two are suspected duplicate tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/symbol&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;symbol&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;symbol&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/symbols&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;symbols&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;symbols&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T06:56:22.533" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T06:56:34.593" Title="Difference between Symbol and Symbols" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2210" CreationDate="2011-11-27T06:56:34.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags have been merged and synonymed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T06:56:34.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2135" CreationDate="2011-11-27T10:52:14.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I solved the problem, thanks to @Matt Эллен's comment. In Chrome, if you're zoomed in (by pressing 'Control' &amp;amp; '+') you can't highlight any part of the graph. On Firefox you can. So I un-zoomed and all was good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12762" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T10:52:14.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-28T21:43:41.820" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2077/13231&quot;&gt;SE Research Support and Fellowship Program&lt;/a&gt; launched recently with our very own experienced and highly respected users reviewing fellowship applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the program a success, we need your help. Announce the program and request for proposals on your blog, website or listserv.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let us know (academics@stackexchange.com) if you intend to call for applications so we can follow your announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13231" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T21:43:41.820" Title="Help us call for proposals for the SE Fellowship on your blog, site or listserv" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2207" CreationDate="2011-11-28T23:07:02.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should add some of this stuff to the FAQ, and moderators can do so. But what exactly to add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/796/should-we-link-to-resources-for-learning-english-in-order-to-prevent-scope-creep&quot;&gt;Should we link to resources for learning English in order to prevent scope-creep?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2093/what-resources-should-we-link-to-in-the-faq-for-learning-english&quot;&gt;What resources should we link to in the FAQ for learning English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T23:07:02.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2217" CreationDate="2011-11-29T00:48:31.720" Score="10" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/3495/are-toddler-and-baby-mutually-exclusive&quot;&gt;&quot;Are 'toddler' and 'baby' mutually exclusive?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; migrated? This is a legitimate question asking about the use of the English words &lt;em&gt;toddler&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;baby&lt;/em&gt; in everyday life. In fact in its form it is not even suitable for Parenting SE in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:15.180" LastActivityDate="2011-12-18T18:48:24.700" Title="Why 'Are &quot;toddler&quot; and &quot;baby&quot; mutually exclusive?' was migrated" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2011-11-29T01:04:15.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migration reversed after having talked with a Parenting mod in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/2555359#2555359&quot;&gt;TL&lt;/a&gt; (SE mods only).   It is, after all, a question about &lt;em&gt;terminology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-11-29T01:15:55.533" LastActivityDate="2011-11-29T01:15:55.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-01T00:15:25.060" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50168/what-is-a-less-offensive-synonym-for-hypocrite&quot;&gt;What is a less offensive synonym for &amp;quot;hypocrite&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as &quot;not constructive.&quot; (it also got downvoted). Why? There's a fairly similar question that not only stayed open, but got a good amount of upvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570/what-is-a-less-offensive-synonym-for-retarded&quot;&gt;What is a less offensive synonym for &amp;quot;retarded&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Shog9's &quot;question&quot;&lt;/a&gt; on single word requests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is my first impulse to reach for a dictionary / thesaurus / Google?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find the right word in a thesaurus, to no avail. I also posted a link to it on my question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I say with reasonable certainty what the correct answer would look like?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried specifying exactly what I wanted in the question and the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this question interesting, unique, thought-provoking?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course a lot more subjective, but I don't see why it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5755" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T00:39:59.583" Title="Why was this question closed?" Tags="|support|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2218" CreationDate="2011-12-01T00:39:59.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally voted to close with the following things in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned looking at a thesaurus, but with no reasons &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you didn't like the options they posed. Without knowing what your critieria are, we can't find you the &quot;best&quot; word. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You had no real context in which you wanted to use the word. You were simply trying to find a synonym. Telling me that you want to be able to &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; someone that synonym gives no objective criteria with which to give you options. We would simply be throwing out more synonyms, hoping that one would stick. Good context is, for example, having an exact situation where you'd like to use the word, or even a sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for the other people who voted to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T00:39:59.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-01T13:43:18.007" Score="6" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/add-a-link-to-literature-se-as-a-choice-for-migration-in-an-off-topic-close-vote&quot;&gt;Add a link to Literature.SE as a choice for migration in an off-topic close vote&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a voting to close a question as off topic, we're given the option to say it belongs here on meta or &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iv8Fw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Off topic dialog&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions asked at EL&amp;amp;U are better suited for &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt;. Can also we have the option to migrate over there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T13:43:18.007" Title="Voting off topic questions that belong on Linguistics.SE" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-12-02T15:19:00.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2222" CreationDate="2011-12-01T21:04:31.187" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50257/is-it-incorrect-to-say-risk-it-for-the-biscuit&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; is being pushed down through floor to second level basement! Is there any reason to push down something anywhere beyound -2 or -3 really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a spam nor an offensive post, what happened to taking it easy on the new comers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6735" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T14:11:26.767" Title="Whats with severe downvoting?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2221" CreationDate="2011-12-01T22:23:33.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can think of (and for the record, I didn't add to the downvotes on that question) is that the question shows a complete lack of effort. You have now fixed the most glaring problem (writing &quot;U&quot; instead of &quot;You&quot;, because, y'know, those two extra letters would've caused the OP's fingers to drop off), but it still has some odd capitalization, and it's really hard to tell what exactly he's asking: is he wondering about &quot;for&quot; vs. &quot;get to&quot;, or &quot;a biscuit&quot; vs. &quot;the biscuit&quot;, or is one or both of those differences just a typo? Not to mention, anyone who actually speaks English on even a rudimentary level should understand the difference here (unless there's something more subtle and slangy going on, but we haven't been given enough context to figure that out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that -7 seems excessive, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T22:23:33.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-02T11:49:55.203" Score="12" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3400/community-promotion-ads-2013&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2013&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/2223&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T13:50:46.263" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2012" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2012-12-10T13:31:45.407" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-12-02T11:49:55.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2221" CreationDate="2011-12-02T14:11:26.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strangely enough, it's not one person voting a terrible -7, but rather 7 people who independently voted down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah...that's terribly wrong...each individual sees the question, then looks at the vote, then goes through a complicated, inconsistent balance of snap judgement, following others, worth the effort to vote (one way or the other), thinking no need to vote, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question (in my opinion, but I didn't bother to vote) was worded too informally, and I think easily googlable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the (currrenlty) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?page=235&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;most downvoted questions&lt;/a&gt;. I don't see a particular pattern there other than they were just unpopular, poorly worded, or presumptuous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T14:11:26.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2226" CreationDate="2011-12-02T19:54:55.357" Score="8" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/24435/8816&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; has a bunch of comments (on the question) that seem to refer to a fight or edit war or something that occurred months ago.  Possibly some comments were later deleted because there seem to be gaps.  Regardless of the history, having all that at the top of the page before you get to the answers is kind of a turn-off.  If the comments should be preserved, can they be moved to a chat thread instead?  What is the right way to handle this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:55:17.283" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:55:17.283" Title="Can this stale comment thread be cleaned up?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2225" CreationDate="2011-12-02T20:29:44.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the entire comment thread boiled down to &lt;em&gt;Don't post LMGTFY links&lt;/em&gt; and wasn't beneficial to the site, I've cleared it. If anyone really wants to see the comments, I can post them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-12-02T20:43:58.650" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T20:43:58.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2229" CreationDate="2011-12-03T16:55:47.153" Score="-1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;my friend tried to ask a question in english.stackexchange site  but it seems that there is a problem with his question, the message was : It does not meet our quality standards&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;BTW the question title was &quot;what is the plural form of the word ( past )&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2608" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T02:20:49.070" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T02:20:49.070" Title="can you please explain &quot;It does not meet our quality standards&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|site-faq|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2225" CreationDate="2011-12-03T17:29:56.397" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can flag comments, and one of the choices is &quot;obsolete&quot; which would seem to apply here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3946" LastActivityDate="2011-12-03T17:29:56.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2227" CreationDate="2011-12-03T18:34:56.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking a question into which time has been invested that adheres to the rules of English syntax will fix the problem. The filter checks for proper punctuation, capitalization, and clear formatting, along with a variety of other things. A clear question will be let through.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask your friend to look in a dictionary instead of posting simple questions that waste our time because the answers can be easily looked up. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;For example, see Wiktionary.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2011-12-03T21:41:18.000" LastActivityDate="2011-12-03T21:41:18.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2391" CreationDate="2011-12-04T02:17:33.877" Score="8" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tlYUW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&#xA;One user is slightly lower than the others. Can we get a fix for this? The page is&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T18:39:57.700" Title="Can this minor style error be fixed?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2233" CreationDate="2011-12-04T20:32:39.897" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it okay if I record my voice and put it in my question, then ask people to correct my speaking and accent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12578" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2011-12-08T05:54:52.260" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T23:28:41.877" Title="Can I ask a question to ask people listen to my speaking (recorded) and help me?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2231" CreationDate="2011-12-04T21:05:44.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of asking someone to proofread a document, which is off topic as per the FAQ. So I'd say that this should be off topic as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastActivityDate="2011-12-04T21:05:44.513" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2231" CreationDate="2011-12-05T12:28:34.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;However, if you happen to have unresolved questions about specific words or phrases, I suppose you could come back with a similar request. That seems just reasonable to me, personally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2011-12-05T12:28:34.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2011-12-05T16:34:42.553" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ummm ... why? In my humble opinion, lots of questions get closed for frivolous reasons. Is the purpose of this site to help people with problems with the language? If so, what is gained from closing debateable questions? Sure, if someone asks a question that is clearly completely irrelevant, like &quot;When was the National Football League founded?&quot; or &quot;How do I bake a cherry pie?&quot;, then it should be closed and deleted. And I understand trying to keep questions off that could be answered by a simple reference, like, &quot;What is the definition of the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;__&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot; But besides that ... You're saying that you want to not only punish the person who asked a question that, in your opinion, is poorly worded, but you also want to punish anyone who disagreed with your opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that an important use of a site like this is for people who are struggling with their English, like someone just learning the language, to have a place to get help. By definition such people are going to have difficulty expressing themselves. To say that we refuse to answer questions about good English unless they are expressed in good English is a little like saying that you are too sick to go to the doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think a question is unclear or poorly worded, then fine, don't answer it. But we don't need to turn this into a crusade against the poster and everyone who condescended to try to help the struggling person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, why does anyone care what their score is? Last I checked there was no cash prize for high score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2011-12-05T16:34:42.553" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-05T16:37:56.890" Score="5" ViewCount="835" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50564/tuques-and-dialects-what-do-you-call-a-knitted-cap-in-your-region-dialect&quot;&gt;Tuques and dialects - What do you call a knitted cap in your region/dialect?&lt;/a&gt; seeks a list of answers, across various dialects. Simchona argues that it should therefore be closed as not constructive, because &quot;there is no real answer&quot; and no answer can ever be complete. I argue that though it could perhaps be rephrased as &quot;what are the names for this type of hat (and where are they used)?&quot; and be perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the tuque question be closed? &lt;strong&gt;Assuming it is edited into ideal form&lt;/strong&gt;, how is it different from other questions with multi-part or multiple answers which have not been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T15:03:13.973" Title="Questions with multi-part answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2235" CreationDate="2011-12-05T16:44:09.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe questions like this may need some editing, and sometimes should be community wiki, but should definitely not be closed. It should not be impossible to ask about dialectical variations of a given term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of whether answers can be &lt;em&gt;absolutely complete&lt;/em&gt; also seems to be missing the point to me. An answer (or a set of answers) can be complete enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that any question asking for a word or phrase for a given idea may have multiple answers, whether or not there is variation between dialects. There are of course many questions of this form. Take as a single example from recent questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50818/is-there-a-word-for-a-non-geek&quot;&gt;Is there a word for a non-geek?&lt;/a&gt; Many possibilities were suggested. The list may or may not be complete, they are not all in a single answer, and it's difficult to tell whether there's a single best one. I still find it constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine the OP had simply posted a picture or description of the hat, and asked what it was &lt;em&gt;commonly&lt;/em&gt; called, without mentioning dialects or soliciting individual regional answers. It would be extremely similar to a multitude of questions on the site, would have gathered the same sort of information in its answers, and if the terms vary from region to region, that would have been mentioned in the answers. This suggests to me that the core question is quite valid. Given that the OP expects some variation between dialects, it seems reasonable to include that information in the question, so that answers are more likely to consider that. It also seems preferable to ask as a single question first, rather than simultaneously posting one each for the major dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to me, it seems that the first action for high-rep users upon seeing questions like this should be to encourage editing (and vote to close if the question is currently in a very bad form), or even just edit immediately, rather than giving in to the &quot;close and move on&quot; instinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T15:03:13.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2235" CreationDate="2011-12-06T17:41:54.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I agree with everything Simchona said... The reason is that she certainly makes a good point that I can't argue myself, as I tried to see if she was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, like it has been said before, not every question that is off topic for the main site can be mutated in a CW just &quot;to save it&quot;. CW are questions that would be on topic if it wasn't for the &quot;list&quot; problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therefore, since I personally think that this description fits your question, then it should be ok to convert it to CW, but this is not the standard option for every question that has a problem... Just wanted to send a reminder. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see a mod writing here though, it might help to give a more definite perspective on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2011-12-06T19:05:14.053" LastActivityDate="2011-12-06T19:05:14.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-06T20:34:55.013" Score="7" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;this is just out of curiosity, but I am wondering why my question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50740/how-to-say-she-he-is-my-girlfriend-boyfriend-without-the-possessive-my&quot;&gt;How to say &amp;quot;She/He is my girlfriend/boyfriend&amp;quot; without the possessive &amp;quot;my&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;was closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me go through the FAQ for a little bit and give you my thoughts so you can point me towards the right direction so I can understand where I went wrong, thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FAQ REVIEW:&#xA;I believe my question fell under the 'Usage, word choice, and grammar category under the&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;What kind of questions can I ask here?&lt;/strong&gt; section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe where I went wrong could have been that the question seemed to fall under these two categories? &lt;strong&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;Peeving about grammar disguised as a question&lt;/strong&gt; is that possible? I hope it is not the latter if so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the &lt;strong&gt;What kind of questions should I not ask here?&lt;/strong&gt; Section of the FAQ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, at the time of posting, that this was a problem I faced, I was seeking for an alternative way to express a thought without attaching to it, what at the time, I perceived to be a negative social consequence. (I want to show respect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9013" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T21:30:29.320" Title="Why was question 50740 closed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2238" CreationDate="2011-12-06T21:13:11.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you answered your question when you said, &quot;a negative social consequence.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &quot;my girlfriend,&quot; and using an equivalent phrase without using &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; are both grammatical; negative social consequences have nothing grammatical. If you want to know about them, then the question is not for EL&amp;amp;U, where the topic is English (as language) and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question were not closed as off-topic, it would have been closed for another reason, as it's a question where every answer is equally valid. As for what reported from the FAQ, those questions should not be asked on every Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-12-06T21:13:11.920" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2235" CreationDate="2011-12-06T22:38:43.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is essentially asking for a list of words, and those kind of questions are not anymore welcome on Stack Exchange sites.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Once, they were welcome, and changed to Community Wiki, but Community Wikis are not used anymore to salvage borderline questions at the limit of acceptability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many elements in the FAQ that suggest a question that is answered with a list are not welcome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions where every answer is equally valid should be avoided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are answered with a list are probably too generic, which means they are not enough scoped, or they are not asked because an actual problem you are having.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a problem to resolve, then describing in details what problem you are trying to resolve should make the question scoped enough to be acceptable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a cooking example, your question should not be like &quot;How do I cook a cake?&quot; but &quot;How do I cook a Saint Honore Cake to make it similar to the one I have eaten when I was in Paris?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-12-06T22:38:43.947" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2163" CreationDate="2011-12-06T22:42:14.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be nice to have a feature where users who actually have stake in a question to be able to suggest the OP a better version of the question in order to get their question reopen. I didn't know you could edit a question to be reopen, I always figured that was just the way it was here, if you get closed too bad, accept the rejection and try again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9013" LastActivityDate="2011-12-06T22:42:14.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2231" CreationDate="2011-12-06T23:50:04.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that such questions are too localized. What is the benefit for future readers that find those questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issue I can find with that kind of questions is that Stack Exchange sites don't allow to attach files to questions, if they are not images. What would happen if the voice recording is hosted in a site that would have any problem, and lose the file you stored there? Future readers would find a question they are not able to understand. Questions that are asked should not be just helpful for who asked them, but also for future readers; if a question is only helpful for who asked it, then it is too localized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you decide which word to pronounce when you record your voice? If you record your voice when you say a simple word (e.g. &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;), who is a native English speaker may not find anything wrong with your pronunciation. How useful will the question be if the answer is &quot;You pronounce it correctly&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-09-27T23:28:41.877" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T23:28:41.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2248" CreationDate="2011-12-07T15:19:27.160" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this question asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50962/what-is-a-noun-modifying-clause&quot;&gt;&quot;What is a noun-modifying clause?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but I cannot decide (probably due to my lack of knowledge of linguistics) if this is a simple definition question, or a question that should be moved to the linguistics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the potential to be moved, because what a &lt;em&gt;noun modifying clause&lt;/em&gt; is is something that would be present across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could stay right here because it's asking for a definition of an English phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be here or there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T09:31:41.950" Title="Is this a simple definition question or something for linguists in general?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-07T17:26:12.157" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am taking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50932/are-there-alternatives-to-in-such-a-way&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50932/are-there-alternatives-to-in-such-a-way&lt;/a&gt; as example, but I am referring to any similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatically, there is nothing wrong in using four words, and the justification &quot;it sounds somewhat clumsy to me&quot; seems arbitrary. Basing on that justification, how can I know the OP finds clumsy also what I am suggesting?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There isn't any valid criteria for selecting an alternative, and there are many alternatives to use. That takes me to consider that every answer is equally valid, and the FAQ says those questions where the answers are all equally valid should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions that set apparently arbitrary restrictions to the word to use constructive? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T23:01:40.490" Title="Are questions that set apparently arbitrary restrictions to the word to use constructive enough?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2011-12-07T17:55:32.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These strike me as, at best, requests for advice about writing (for which writers.SE would be a better fit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T17:55:32.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2011-12-08T15:29:12.213" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4O19.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2011-12-08T15:29:12.213" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-12-08T15:29:12.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2243" CreationDate="2011-12-08T16:06:16.553" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the OP is talking of an example given him when studying Japanese, and the OP is asking for a term used for a specific clause, I would say the question suits better the site for linguistics. The fact he is talking about an example given when studying Japanese (a language completely different from English) makes me think the concept is not specific for English, and then it is not on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say it all, as the OP doesn't say exactly which was the example he was given in that Japanese study guide, the question is not completely clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-12-12T09:31:41.950" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T09:31:41.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-09T13:05:23.310" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/51125/5640&quot;&gt;In my answer here&lt;/a&gt; I used the word &lt;em&gt;acronym&lt;/em&gt; to describe the term &lt;em&gt;ACL&lt;/em&gt;, which is a term formed from the first letters of the words &lt;em&gt;Access Control List&lt;/em&gt; and is pronounced &lt;em&gt;ā'si'ɛl&lt;/em&gt;. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3755/difference-between-an-acronym-and-abbreviation&quot;&gt;Difference between an acronym and abbreviation?&lt;/a&gt; this is a correct usage of the term; however, someone edited my answer, changing the description of the term to &lt;em&gt;abbreviation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see an option to flag edits, and I suspect it's futile to get into a back-and-forth editing war. What should I do about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5640" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T19:08:57.390" Title="What to do about incorrect edits?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2250" CreationDate="2011-12-09T13:10:25.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, acronyms are a kind of abbreviation. So the edit isn't incorrect. It does not seem to be warranted, however. I'd just roll it back if it were my post. If the editor comes back and changes it again, maybe discuss it in the chat room, or flag it for a moderator's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T13:10:25.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2250" CreationDate="2011-12-09T13:12:34.500" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rolling back the edit is your best bet. That's what the functionality's for, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extra things you can do are to comment your roll back and your answer explaining how ACL is pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2011-12-09T13:18:08.780" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T13:18:08.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2254" CreationDate="2011-12-09T17:20:20.203" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, if I am looking for a very specific type of book, if one even exists, is that prohibited and if yes, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I would much rather ask the community for a good reference rather than reading through reader reviews on Amazon.com (which are not always valuable.)  Also, some books may not be excessively popular and it is more valuable to have a dialog or opinion of a person who is responding to what your specifically need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these types of questions allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11393" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T19:37:04.230" Title="Are requests for reference material completely prohibited?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2011-12-09T17:45:30.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that because there is no one right answer, you'll get a lot of different opinions--and those types of questions aren't encouraged on ELU. Instead, I would suggest bringing up the topic in chat--you'll be able to engage in discussion for books that might help you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2011-12-09T19:37:04.230" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T19:37:04.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2250" CreationDate="2011-12-09T19:02:23.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go ahead. In fact there is a Cleanup badge for a roll-back and 95 people received it so far.  You can rollback not only to the last edit, but also to any subsequent edit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can also add a comment for the potential editors expressing your preferences.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think the OP is the first responsible for the well being of a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="5249" LastEditDate="2011-12-09T19:08:57.390" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T19:08:57.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-10T05:08:44.660" Score="5" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we move into mid-December, it's not a bad time to begin to get ready to move into 2012. In this vein, I'd like to ask the community to pitch in and help out with some &lt;s&gt;spring&lt;/s&gt; winter cleaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, here's a list of things that we could do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some old questions that should now be closed, either because they were missed in the early days of the site or are now off topic due to changing site policy. If you have 3k+ rep, you can vote to close them; otherwise, flag for moderator attention. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deletion of closed questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions closed &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; can mostly be deleted. If you have 10k rep, you can vote to delete these; if you don't, you can flag for moderator attention.  If a question is &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;, please make your best judgement call, looking especially at the answers. If the content is valuable, we might want to keep it (see &lt;em&gt;Locking&lt;/em&gt;); otherwise, out it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please check that these questions should still be closed&lt;/strong&gt;; do not just blindly vote to delete or flag, as questions may have been improved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates and Mergers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is closed as an &lt;em&gt;exact duplicate&lt;/em&gt;, it's probably fine just to leave it alone. However, if the questions are phrased so similarly that you could put the answers of one under another without any editing, please flag for question merging.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Locking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions were asked on the site a long time ago that are no longer a good fit for our site. Most of these questions should just be closed and deleted. In cases of &lt;em&gt;historical significance&lt;/em&gt;, however, the post can be locked, thus preventing activity while allowing preservation. &lt;em&gt;Very few&lt;/em&gt; questions deserve this—in fact, we've only ever &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90/what-are-the-most-common-english-usage-mistakes&quot;&gt;locked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/what-words-are-commonly-mispronounced-by-literate-people-who-read-them-before-th&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5901/hardest-tongue-twister-seen&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; with this banner, but if you see any that should have this protection, please flag it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-01-07T17:52:56.277" Title="Winter Cleaning" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2011-12-11T04:24:12.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall thinking that &lt;em&gt;&quot;it sounds somewhat clumsy to me&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in the original was an odd thing to say, but I don't see this justified moving it to writers.se where it just got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many other questions asking for alternative wording - many are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative&quot;&gt;even tagged as such&lt;/a&gt;. Leave a comment to disagree with the &quot;clumsy&quot; misconception, and/or answer with one or more paraphrasings. And close it if the number of answers looks like getting out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T04:24:12.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2011-12-11T15:22:28.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add my voice against accepting questions about the meaning of song lyrics and poems - it seems that every single questioner does not understand that English-language verse and song is generally allowed to play fast-and-loose with vocabulary and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, every question ends up with answers which have to note that they are largely based on speculation, and references to general reference works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be much better if we simply had an FAQ explaining that in general verse works are frequently a source of mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6067" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T15:22:28.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-11T20:19:33.380" Score="45" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to the stackexchange network, but I participate quite a bit on stackoverflow. I've used a few others (like this one) for one or two questions.&#xA;And I have to say, EL&amp;amp;U feels extremely unfriendly to newer users compared to the others I've used (this has nothing to do with the question I asked). I love the stackexchange system, and believe the game-like aspect of it produces great results. I'm just trying to understand EL&amp;amp;U better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last night I was reading a few questions and realized that a HUGE percentage of them were closed. They all seemed on-topic, had much discussion, and were really interesting questions. I wasn't looking for anything specific to solve a problem, I was just having fun. I tried to understand the explanations of why they were closed, and peoples' comments about why they down-voted, and most of the time I just didn't get it. It seemed like semantical nitpicking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the first page (Questions, newest, 50 per page setting), there were 20 closed questions (40%). I compared that with a few random SE sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;el&amp;amp;u - 20&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gaming - 6 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stackoverflow - 2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;math - 5 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wordpress - 0 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stats - 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the complaints about questions are related to the question itself having misspellings, bad grammar, or syntactical errors. It seems to me that the whole point of a Q&amp;amp;A site about English is so people, many of whom are not well versed in the topic, can learn about it. I recently used &lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Home Improvement&lt;/a&gt; to ask this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/10049&quot;&gt;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/10049&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not a home improvement expert, which is why I went there. I used all the wrong words to describe things and my question wasn't very clear since I couldn't even really grasp the concept of what I was trying to ask. But they worked with me and came up with ideas of what I was asking. After a little back and forth, I edited the question to make more sense and got a great answer. No one closed my answer. No one said, &quot;Learn the proper words for things before posting&quot;. They made me feel welcomed, and were very helpful. They are the experts answering questions, and realized I was not, which is why I was asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U feels like an exclusive club where you have to know English perfectly and understand a bunch of subtle rules before posting. Here are a few closed questions I saw last night:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51270/neutral-synonym-of-scientific-fundamentalist&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51270/neutral-synonym-of-scientific-fundamentalist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51276&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51276&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51274/how-to-use-which-here&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51274/how-to-use-which-here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these seem like decent questions and they're interesting. Of course, they could be improved to be better. But is closing/down-voting them the best way to encourage a new user to improve their question? On stackoverflow it seems like people edit others' questions more to make them better, especially if they are just cosmetic changes which don't affect the question. Why confuse someone with, &quot;your grammar is horrible&quot;, if you understand what they're asking. The guy on the last question tried desperately, three times, to edit his question to suit @REGDWIGHT ѬS道's request with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individually, you could defend each of the closings based on the reason given. But if you look at the bigger picture, 40% of questions closed in my sample, is the community closing/down-voting too much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new here, so I'm just pointing this out and asking the question. Maybe everyone else is happy with the tone and feel of this community, and I'm off-base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: Thanks everyone for the great responses. It seems the general consensus is, no, you do not feel you are closing too many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original post wasn't meant to question the judgement of those who closed/down-voted any particular posts. As @waiwai933 pointed out, they can each be defended in a way that makes perfect sense. It was more a broad commentary after using the site only one day and not really understanding the community. So I participated for a couple of days to get a feel for things. I love systems and figuring out how they work. I usually have a gut feeling for what's working and what's broken that turns out to be right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So after using it some more, I still felt the same way. I couldn't figure out why you wouldn't want millions of well-written landing pages all driving traffic here. I feel like most questions can be made into good landing pages with a little effort. That's how Stackoverflow works. It's almost impossible to think of a programming question off the top of your head that doesn't have a SO link on the front page of Google. Sure, you could find all that info elsewhere, but why not bring people to the site for &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; programming question. The answers, and the discussions that surround them, will be a far better experience than they'll get elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I started using EL&amp;amp;U, I expected the same thing for English (which is a pretty broad topic). Most English-related questions end up on the horrible generic ask sites. I tried for awhile to come up with a basic question that had an EL&amp;amp;U link on the front page and didn't find any. I finally looked up a question and put the exact title into Google and got a result. So, something seemed broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was until I realized EL&amp;amp;U is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an all-purpose English website. From the About page (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a free, community driven Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;linguists&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;etymologists&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;serious&lt;/strong&gt; English language &lt;strong&gt;enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I saw this the one time there was a notification before I signed up, but nowhere am I reminded of this, so I went back to taking the title literally. So, aside from the consensus of the power-users here, that tagline settles it. This is not a site for simple questions you can find elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I can definitely see how certain questions could get tedious. Single word requests don't usually have a definitive answer and the OP does a lot of &quot;Nooooo, not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; one.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe EL&amp;amp;U suffers from such a simple name and topic. There's no &quot;scariness&quot; to the site. The statistical analysis SE site is called Cross Validated, which would scare away the casual asker. English is such a big topic, too. People don't accidentally end up on SO if the want to &lt;strong&gt;program&lt;/strong&gt; their thermostat or change the &lt;strong&gt;code&lt;/strong&gt; on their alarm. It's probably too late to change the name, but perhaps something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AjUB2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And right before the title on a new post it could say something to the point, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you done a web search first? You might find an easy answer to your question elsewhere. If you're not sure what type of question is appropriate  to ask here, see our FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a few minor changes that would prevent a lot of these off-topic/poor quality questions from being asked in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T18:46:20.947" Title="Is the EL&amp;U community overzealous about closing/down-voting questions?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|vote-to-close|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2011-12-11T20:31:03.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that EL&amp;amp;U is a community where [almost] only the 100% on-topic questions survive. (Basically, if there's any doubt that it's on-topic, it probably isn't). I think this is good; it sets a high standard for posts here, and high standards are what separates the Stack Exchange network from other Q&amp;amp;A sites. Some of those questions might be good, but if they aren't on-topic, you can kiss them goodbye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, I can definitely see how EL&amp;amp;U could appear hostile to new users. There is a lot of &quot;semantical nitpicking&quot;, but I think that the high-rep users are just trying to maintain a high standard of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T20:31:03.607" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2011-12-11T20:52:42.497" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are the ten newest questions that have been closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51316/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-visa&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51316/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-visa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a basic etymology question, and consulting &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/visa#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a dictionary&lt;/a&gt; will find you the answer. I feel it's akin to asking &amp;quot;What is 14*192?&amp;quot; on the Mathematics site; should we really be answering such a simple question that anyone can find the answer to fairly easily? The question about the company's name is off-topic, as it doesn't really relate to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51303/what-is-public-use&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51303/what-is-public-use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a question about what's legal and what's not, not about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51276/can-a-person-really-be-spontaneous&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51276/can-a-person-really-be-spontaneous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question I'm a little more iffy about. It's a thin end of the wedge type of question, in that it could lead to questions like &amp;quot;Can a person really be [random adjective like &lt;em&gt;costly&lt;/em&gt;]?&amp;quot;, but even that might be stretching it. That said, I'm not sufficiently convinced that it should be reopened, but I wouldn't oppose such an action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51274/how-to-use-which-here&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51274/how-to-use-which-here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having problems just comprehending this question—and as far as I can tell, it's asking three different questions here. Note the question asker never explicitly state what unifies these related examples except for the word &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;—which really is stretching it, to be honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51270/neutral-synonym-of-scientific-fundamentalist&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51270/neutral-synonym-of-scientific-fundamentalist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP starts out with asking for a word with &amp;quot;this meaning&amp;quot;, but never tells us what the meaning is; the closest he gets is a meaning that doesn't quite work for a word &lt;em&gt;in German&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51262/diamonds-on-the-inside-meaning&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51262/diamonds-on-the-inside-meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Song interpretations are off-topic as they do not relate to English (in other words, would the question have the exact same answer if it were translated into another language? If so, this is probably not the right site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51261/what-are-the-rules-for-preposition-use-in-canada-england-us-australia-etc&quot;&gt;What are the rules for preposition use in Canada, England, US, Australia, etc?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not a terrible question, the problem with it is that answers would be far too broad. An analogy would be &amp;quot;What are the different operators in every programming language and how do they work?&amp;quot; on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51246/how-to-express-make-the-world-a-less-anxious-and-happier-place-more-nicely&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51246/how-to-express-make-the-world-a-less-anxious-and-happier-place-more-nicely&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the OP not satisfied? How can we help if we don't know what the OP is using to judge answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51244/capitalization-in-numbered-lists&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51244/capitalization-in-numbered-lists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51221/which-is-more-correct-the-have-vs-the-haves&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51221/which-is-more-correct-the-have-vs-the-haves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another &amp;quot;go find a dictionary&amp;quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So out of these 10, there's only 1 that possibly shouldn't have been closed. And while our close rate is certainly on the high end, I don't see that there's much we can do since it depends on the people asking the question. So I'm going to answer your question with another: Of these 10, after reading my comments on these, are there any you think should not have been closed? I'm open to reopening any of these questions if there's sufficient reason to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T20:52:42.497" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2011-12-11T21:26:33.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I agree about the phenomenon that ELU has a higher percentage of closings than other SE sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think that there is a great tolerance for misspellings and grammatical solecisms in questions and improper word usage, especially since many questions would presumably come from the ESL community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my opinion, there are quite a larger percentage than the rough estimate of 40% that should be closed because they are, I say euphemistically, poorly thought out questions. The closing reasons are just not enough for all the many reasons some questions are 'undesirable'. That may be elitist but the culture here has supported things like 'no lyric interpretation' questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pretty much any of these undesirable questions could be answered/discussed/searched for on some other site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T21:26:33.193" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2256" CreationDate="2011-12-12T00:42:26.177" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Changing&lt;/em&gt; site policy? I think you mean &lt;em&gt;vacillating&lt;/em&gt; site policy. Or perhaps &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; site policy. Policy &lt;em&gt;du jour&lt;/em&gt; by the policy police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever. The fact is, it's impossible to tell exactly what TPTB wish to remain open or get closed. All we know for sure is that the users (who were supposed to be the owners of this site) don't have a say. In view of that, I think any action should be taken by the moderators, as obviously they're the only ones who have the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aworldtowin.org/back_issues/1996-22/on_the_maoist_conception_22_eng.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;correct line&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T00:42:26.177" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2256" CreationDate="2011-12-12T10:59:12.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a list of old questions with one or more vote to close, that aren't yet closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Off topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#### Migrate to Writers.SE ####&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/385&quot;&gt;What are the rules for splitting words at the end of a line?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/674&quot;&gt;Why am I always compelled to begin a response with &amp;quot;Well, &amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General Reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7495&quot;&gt;What does “persona non grata” mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Duplicate&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1019&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;a&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;an&amp;quot; for words that don&amp;#39;t start with vowels but sound like they&amp;#39;re starting with a vowel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/30482/11762&quot;&gt;&quot;In Office&quot; or &quot;At Office&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9749/11762&quot;&gt;&quot;At&quot; or &quot;in&quot; the office&lt;/a&gt;, with 0 close votes each. Merge, perhaps?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-01-07T17:52:56.277" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-12-12T10:59:12.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2011-12-12T16:20:23.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wiser heads than I have dealt with the question of duplicates: but why do you want to prevent people gaining rep for answering bad questions?  The &lt;em&gt;Reversal&lt;/em&gt; badge is for a good answer to a low-rep question, so it's clearly behaviour that should be encouraged, if anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I vote up an answer, it's because I think that answer is helpful to the community; whether it's helpful to the OP I don't presume to judge.  If the question shouldn't be here, then the answer has a higher hurdle to clear, but it's not impossible.  And not allowing rep for answering poorly worded questions would turn us into a bunch of snobs, answering each others' questions but not allowing outsiders in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FWIW, I would approve of disallowing rep for &lt;em&gt;acceptance&lt;/em&gt; on closed questions;but I doubt whether that would make enough difference to be worth the change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T16:20:23.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2011-12-12T23:53:59.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, consider this:  Not everyone always agrees on whether a question is off-topic or general reference.  Should you really be penalized for answering a question that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; felt was valuable, even if nobody else did? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, do we really want to penalize the &lt;em&gt;responders&lt;/em&gt; when the OP failed to realize the question was a duplicate.  Obviously if you recognize the question is a dup, you should vote to close it, but are we really expecting everyone to check for duplicates before answering a question?  That seems like a lot of wasted cycles throughout the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems easier just to avoid upvoting answers from users who &quot;ought to know better&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T23:53:59.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2269" CreationDate="2011-12-13T12:01:40.897" Score="6" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a few questions dotted around, which require references to dictionaries or such-like (etymonline, wiktionary, OE dictionary, the Chicago Manual of Style), to make clear why a word or correction you're submitted as an answer is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any preference on which of these to go for? I've seen definitions citing wiktionary be both sufficient and severely lacking. As well as this I worry that people constantly referencing the Chicago Manual of Style it might give incorrect answers to people looking for British English style help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously a well phrased question, stating how much detail and accuracy is required, as well as a well researched answer should circumvent this issue. Is there any official guideline on this matter? I have seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1482/15661&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post, which is quite helpful, but it seems that it outlines a preference. Wiktionary is the 4th (?) answer given, and whilst I prefer it, I don't count it as a legitimate source in the same way most academics cringe at the idea of referencing wikipedia in their papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a well written, &quot;How to reference your answers&quot; would make a good addition to the FAQ? That is if I haven't missed this sort of guideline that is there already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15661" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T16:40:46.960" Title="What to reference when answering a question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|site-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-08-15T19:37:36.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2256" CreationDate="2011-12-13T13:27:15.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re: Deletion of closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;access to moderator tools&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; privilege page for 19k users says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I delete questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions that are of no lasting value whatsoever should be flagged and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before voting to delete, please check that there are no good answers — if so, then the question should be flagged for moderator attention as a potential merge candidate. We don't like to lose great answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T13:27:15.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2267" CreationDate="2011-12-13T16:40:46.960" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question starts from a mistaken premise, that there is a 'correct set of references' for English, as there is for (most) computer languages; English has so many dialects and registers that a list of approved references is as likely to be harmful as helpful. For example, I would answer &quot;Is this a word?&quot; with &quot;Yes, it's in the OED.&quot; Other users would say &quot;Yes,it's in Merriam-Webster&quot;,  &quot;Yes, I've heard it several times in New York, California and New Zealand&quot;, or &quot;Yes, a Google NGram shows several hits&quot;.  All these are valid replies: what weight you attach to each is up to you.  I do think the tags american-english and so on should be used more, to obtain more specialised results, (I would even support the creation of 'formal-english' and 'informal-english'); but &lt;strong&gt;nobody&lt;/strong&gt; has the right to say what is an approved source, whether for a community-moderated site or for English as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, this is just my opinion; that's kind of the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T16:40:46.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2282" CreationDate="2011-12-13T20:02:56.930" Score="7" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2256/11762&quot;&gt;Winter Cleaning question&lt;/a&gt;, I took a look at some old questions to see what could potentially be closed/removed. I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/32949/11762&quot;&gt;this proofreading question&lt;/a&gt;, which, being a proof-reading question, is off-topic, but did not appear to be closed. When I opened it up to vote to close, I discovered that it was locked. Aside from preventing new comments/answers/votes, what are the differences between locking and closing, and what are the reasons for choosing one action over another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T12:06:01.103" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:06:01.103" Title="Difference between &quot;locked&quot; and &quot;closed&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2273" CreationDate="2011-12-14T00:32:23.813" Score="2" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm personally of the opinion that &lt;code&gt;word-choice&lt;/code&gt; questions are more about jogging the OP's memory rather than trying to teach him or her vocabulary.  This came up with my post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51516/equivalent-word-for-unfriend-on-social-media-sites&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, in which several people rewrote my question (which I preferred to leave concise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it seems there are people on both sides of the issue (notice we both got up-voted on the comments), I thought I'd ask the opinion of the community as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I promise to abide by the will of the collective.  :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12403" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T21:33:30.057" Title="Answering &quot;Word-choice&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2011-12-14T04:45:19.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made comments there which I will explain here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An 'answer' on an SE site is expected to be a self-contained answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question and answers are not just for the OP but for others too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is all just for the OP, then it's too local and should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question could be answered by a simple web search and all you're doing is giving a link and  maybe a quote, then either the question is 'general reference' or the answer is impoverished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These principles are pretty standard across SE and where not, they are certainly the culture here at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jogging one's memory may be a poor (too local) reason for a question, but often it is hard to distinguish it from a legitimate question by a non-native speaker who may not be able to connect a vocabulary item with its nuances or for the native speaker who is trying to make connections where none were noticed before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T04:45:19.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-14T11:11:35.303" Score="2" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;What to do if a good answer to my question, which also had some associated discussion in the form of comments, is missing (deleted)? To clarify, there was nothing objectionable or irrelevant in it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event no other answer was found suitable, this one could have even been the &quot;accepted answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T12:01:20.217" Title="A good answer deleted!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2275" CreationDate="2011-12-14T11:26:21.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 10k rep so I can see deleted answers and their comments. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/50936/9001&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; had 4 upvotes and 0 downvotes and was &quot;deleted by owner Dec 10 at 8:21&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No reason was given. Perhaps the owner, Theta30, thought the other answers covered it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T11:26:21.130" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2011-12-14T19:14:36.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are various types of word-choice/phrase request/word request questions. Some are concrete like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30978/short-and-well-known-term-for-jump-from-one-branch-to-another&quot;&gt;short-and-well-known-term-for-jump-from-one-branch-to-another&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Others are a sort of &quot;neologisms&quot;, that is they try to define notions that appeared in recent times.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As Andrew J.Brehm explains &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/51240/5249&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; : &quot;Whenever humanity discovered something new, it used old words to describe it.&quot;. But here the burden is on ELU users. Yours is such a question.  Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50931/asks-a-question-never-responds-to-answers-comments/&quot;&gt;asks-a-question-never-responds-to-answers-comments&lt;/a&gt; . These type of questions are more open to interpretations. So I understand where you are coming from.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A third category of questions have more importance as cultural reference than for the word itself. They may be searchable through Wikipedia articles.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21718/what-is-the-word-for-fear-of-heights&quot;&gt;What is the word for &amp;quot;fear of heights&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; which leads to Acrophobia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T21:33:30.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-14T21:49:48.440" Score="-5" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comparing stackoverflow and EL&amp;amp;U I have found that over at stackoverflow more questions remain at -1 compared to EL&amp;amp;U (answers are different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that for downvoting there is one reason - the question is bad. Usually a person will downvote and explain downvote and &lt;strong&gt;after that there is no reason for more people to downvote it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asker now has the option to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, new users might not be able to delete their questions (?) and also get even more frustrated against improving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also easier to look at questions that had a problem (bad questions that had activity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if question is really bad, not improving, etc it should be further downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me just mention that this has nothing to do with closing, questions can be closed even without downvoting at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although thinking about improving EL&amp;amp;U is the proper motivation for downvoting a question I think that downvoting more than once, actually, does not have that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51635/plain-english-description-of-programming&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; that triggered the thinking for those interested. Also, this image compares the ratios of question scores:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YoaIb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T15:00:54.560" Title="Is downvoting questions multiple times meaningful (and if yes, when)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2279" CreationDate="2011-12-14T22:25:02.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, about the chart. So EL&amp;amp;U is voting down a bit more than Stack Overflow, but the difference isn't all that much. (I'd be interested to see some stats from other sites too, particularly Programmer.SE and other *&amp;amp;LU.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A downvote is a kind of flag. If you see a downvoted question, you might want to check it to see if further action is needed (perhaps a vote to close or some helpful comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I think a question &quot;does not shown any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&quot; then it can be downvoted. But I have control over a single vote only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others might upvote for whatever reason, whether correct or not. If my downvote takes it to -1, I don't know if two more people will upvote it to +1 and the negative vote &quot;flag&quot; is lost. (Remember the poster still gets a positive net rep for one upvote and a downvote, even if the votes balance out.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, before I vote, if a question is already at -2, and I put it to -3, then those two upvotes will only take it to -1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, votes are relative. Questions with +14 votes might be better than a +2. Questions with -5 might be a lot worse than -1. There's at least some value in seeing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any spread of up and downvotes are also useful, it can show how controversial a post is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is using the site's tools as a quick and handy way of communicating the relative value of posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/121758/negativve-score-distribution-in-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; has negative votes down to -55! &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/q/121758/negativve-score-distribution-in-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; has negative votes down to -11, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/programmers/q/121758/negativve-score-distribution-in-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Programmers&lt;/a&gt; down to -14. Here's a chart of all three, showing EL&amp;amp;U isn't so extreme comparison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PXyzZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;chart showing SO, EL&amp;amp;U and Programmers downvotes&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, percentage of multiple downvotes (against total downvotes): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SO: 27%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U: 38%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programmers: 48%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-12-15T10:00:55.093" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T10:00:55.093" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2279" CreationDate="2011-12-15T09:16:14.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The point is that for downvoting there is one reason - the question is bad. Usually a person will downvote and explain downvote and after that there is no reason for more people to downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, no. A down vote is not just a signal to an asker that their question might need improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vote is an expression that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; as part of &lt;em&gt;this community&lt;/em&gt; think that this question does not benefit this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question with a score of 100 fits better than one with a score of 10, than one with a score of 1, than one with a score of 0, than one with a score of -1, than one with a score of -10, and at all points in between and beyond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fitness of a question is a spectrum, otherwise there would never be a need for questions to have scores above one, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close votes are an extension of this, because members of the community, who should have a better understanding of what works for this community, are able to be more definitive at clearing away the crud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously close votes have another use: duplicates. Otherwise they are just stronger down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T09:16:14.523" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2270" CreationDate="2011-12-15T13:43:55.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Locking a question doesn't allow anybody to comment, vote, and adding new answers to it. This is different from a closed question, as a closed question can still be voted, and commented; a closed question cannot have new answers, as a locked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for locking a question can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question keeps getting flame posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question keeps getting closed, and then re-opened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question gets new answers that don't add anything, as similar answers have been already given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first, and third, case the locked question doesn't necessarily need to be closed; in the second case, closing the question doesn't help, as it keeps getting re-opened (and then re-closed) in an infinite loop; the third case could for example apply to a CW question that already got enough answers, and who adds a new answer doesn't verify if a similar answer has been already written. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T13:43:55.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2011-12-15T14:35:40.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other users have already replied about the specific question being referred. I will reply without referring to the specific questions that were shown in the front page when you asked this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you are referring to the questions shown in the front page, which is a localized situation. It could be that two months ago Stack Overflow had more closed questions shown in the front page, or that another SE site has, in average, more closed questions shown in the front page than EL&amp;amp;U. Meta Stack Overflow is getting questions that should be asked on Stack Overflow, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=closed:1%20is:question&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;the number of closed questions on that site&lt;/a&gt; is now 4,843, which doesn't include the number of closed questions that have been already deleted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=closed%3A1+is%3Aquestion&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;Searching for closed questions on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; returns me more than 5000 questions, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed:1%20is:question&quot;&gt;searching for closed questions on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; returns me 1,353 questions. Considering that &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow has been created 3 years and 4 months ago&lt;/a&gt;, and EL&amp;amp;U has been created 1 year and 4 months ago, I would say that in average, Stack Overflow got more closed questions per year than EL&amp;amp;U. You could object that Stack Overflow have more questions (2.4 million) than EL&amp;amp;U (12 thousand), but that has also the effect that questions that should be closed are not easily caught when the site gets more questions per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason EL&amp;amp;U can have more closed questions is that users ask on EL&amp;amp;U questions that should not be asked on it. While it's quite easy to understand when a question is about programming and programming tools, it is (for the new users) sometimes difficult to understand if the question is about the language, the culture, or simply a question written in English. For example, if you ask &quot;Is a narwhal a mammal?&quot; that question is not about English language. The part about English language is the definition of &lt;em&gt;mammal&lt;/em&gt; (but a question about that would be closed as &quot;general reference&quot;); the part asking if a narwhal is a mammal cannot be answered only knowing English language, as you should know something of biology to answer that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another example of question that doesn't belong to EL&amp;amp;U is &quot;Why do you see statues of an elephant close to a mule, in Washington D.C.?&quot; The question is a cultural one, not about English language, as the elephant and the mule are the symbols used for two of the political parties in USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another explanation is that, being English language a topic that interests also people who are not programmers, EL&amp;amp;U is getting users that don't have an account on other SE sites. This means that those users sometimes ask the kind of questions that are not acceptable in any SE site (e.g. questions that are asking for an opinion, or for a list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T14:35:40.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2287" CreationDate="2011-12-15T17:12:28.377" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51790/describes-me-to-the-t-why-not-the-to-the-e-or-some-other-letter&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Describes me to the &amp;#39;T&amp;#39;&amp;quot; - why not the to the &amp;quot;E&amp;quot; or some other letter?&lt;/a&gt; is an exact dupe, 2 other people have flagged this and one has put a link in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see a reason for multiple votes before closing something as off-topic, not-a-question, etc - they are opinions. But if one high rep (&gt;10k) user marks it as exact dupe isn't it reasonable to at least put the dupe link above the title - as it is after it is closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is a relatively low volume site compared to SO and it may take a while before another 4 users notice it's a dupe, go to the trouble of tracking down the dupe question and vote to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an argument for scaling the number of votes in proportion to the size of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: apparently the first close vote adds the dupe as a link in the comments, I thought that the voter had taken the trouble to do this manually. The 'recent votes' tools for 10k users also make it easier for users to help moderate the site. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6336" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2011-12-19T15:56:40.463" Title="Why does close as dupe need 5 votes?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2011-12-15T19:17:47.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is appalling. It is flagrant web scraping. It is very different from (what seems legitimate to me) sites that re-use and cite StackExchange content e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://developmentprofessionals.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://developmentprofessionals.org/&lt;/a&gt; but do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; do so &lt;strong&gt;EXCLUSIVELY&lt;/strong&gt;. I found the development professionals site at random, but from casual observation, noted the variety of content, including original entries as well as entries reproduced from English SE, Yahoo! Answers, The World Bank etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is there no distinction made between re-use and wholesale website copying!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, if it is allowed in these instances, &lt;strong&gt;IT SETS PRECEDENT&lt;/strong&gt;! If these sites are allowed to continue with these practices, then anyone else can act similarly, without fear of retribution or being told to cease-and-desist. The only barrier would be personal ethics, but that is off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reproduction of SE content &lt;strong&gt;in its entirety&lt;/strong&gt;, with &lt;strong&gt;no additional content&lt;/strong&gt; will become an implicitly allowed behavior. Is this a matter for MetaStackExchange, to deal with in some centralized way, and with the benefit of counsel? This is misuse of users' content, but it  has a larger scope, relevant to SE's owners and investors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-01-03T17:07:00.723" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T17:07:00.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2011-12-15T19:25:24.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've added a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=2adef97c1c66fd49&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;help ticket&lt;/a&gt; to the Blogger help forum to get this stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've put it down as feedback, but I might have chosen the wrong place :S&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T19:25:24.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2284" CreationDate="2011-12-15T20:21:22.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it's easier to have all close reasons act the same. A special exception for duplicates would be extra design (choosing exactly which alternative) and development.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with all decisions here there is always the understanding that one could be wrong. Are judgements of duplication more or less definitive (so fewer people are needed for confirmation)? I really don't know. Let's keep it like the other close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really think it should be closed, for whatever reason, one can always flag for moderator action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T20:21:22.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2284" CreationDate="2011-12-15T22:05:37.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The decision of whether a question is a duplicate or not is no more clear-cut than any other close reason. I've seen multiple examples of questions marked as duplicates of existing questions that are, at best, tangentially related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically &quot;what Mitch said&quot;, only with less hemming and hawing. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T22:05:37.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2284" CreationDate="2011-12-15T22:29:02.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... it may take a while before another 4 users notice it's a dupe, go to the trouble of tracking down the dupe question and vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the first close vote, subsequent potential voters can see it has one close vote; they can see what kind of close vote it is; and they can see which the proposed duplicate questions are. It's one further click to open it and evaluate duplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-12-16T15:53:01.507" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T15:53:01.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2284" CreationDate="2011-12-16T00:36:47.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if one high rep (&gt;10k) user marks it as exact dupe isn't it reasonable to at least put the dupe link above the title - as it is after it is closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't. When a 10k user votes to close, his vote is the same as any other user who can vote to close questions. The only users for which the vote to close is different, as it is any of their votes, are the moderators, for which the votes cause the post to be closed/deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing as duplicate is not different from closing as off-topic, and it doesn't take the precedence over closing for other reasons. Off-topic questions are probably more &quot;dangerous,&quot; but closing questions for the other reasons is equally important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T00:36:47.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2011-12-16T17:25:30.270" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27cPL.png&quot; alt=&quot;No general reference, please!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2011-12-16T21:43:07.277" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T21:43:07.277" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-12-16T17:25:30.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-18T09:01:22.353" Score="5" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that the site is now discouraging single-word requests, but I'm not clear if this is a sweeping guideline (as in, all of them should be closed) or something to be considered on a case-by-case basis. If it's the latter, how are we to judge a question's suitability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52063/what-is-a-verb-for-the-usage-of-an-angry-tone-of-voice&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; a recent query; what's the recommended course of action for such a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13141" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-10-04T06:03:17.423" Title="Is this the type of single-word request question we should be closing?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-18T17:04:49.293" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;There &lt;i&gt;were&lt;/i&gt; approximately 12 024 questions about 18 hours ago; now there are 12 002. What happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tnH8q.png&quot; alt=&quot;question count&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="420" LastEditDate="2011-12-19T10:41:08.460" LastActivityDate="2011-12-19T10:41:08.460" Title="What happened to our question count?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2294" CreationDate="2011-12-18T18:08:54.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to board a plane, so I can't really elaborate, but there have been a lot of flags in the past two days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-12-18T18:08:54.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2299" CreationDate="2011-12-19T16:09:39.327" Score="12" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen several titles that are so vague that you only know what's being asked by reading the question body.  Recent examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52207/what-is-the-correct-way-to-write-this-sentence&quot;&gt;What is the correct way to write this sentence?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52201/which-one-is-the-correct-phrase-and-why&quot;&gt;Which one is the correct phrase, and why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we be asking the authors to capture what &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; they're asking about in titles?  I would consider that an obvious &quot;yes&quot; except that I never see anybody else doing it, so before I start leaving comments along that line I wanted to find out if I'm the only one who thinks it's a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T18:38:59.457" Title="Should we discourage vague titles?" Tags="|discussion|titles|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2293" CreationDate="2011-12-19T16:31:35.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a sweeping guideline, or the FAQ would report that single-word requests are questions that should not be asked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It must be decided on a case-by-case basis, making some considerations, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question describe exactly in which context the OP wants to use a single word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question report exactly the criteria for which the suggested word will be accepted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question report which words the OP didn't like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question shows the OP searched for a suiting word, before asking the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatically, there is nothing wrong in using two or more words instead of a single word; if the OP needs to really use a single word, then the OP should exactly describe in which context the word is being used, otherwise the answer is going to be too generic to be useful, to who asks the question, and for the future readers, who could wrongly understand that the word suggested in the accepted answer is always the better word to use.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason to know which words the OP possibly thought of, but didn't like, is avoiding that who answers gets &quot;I have thought of this, but I didn't like it&quot; as answer. If who answer know which words the OP already thought of, they will avoid suggesting those words.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite annoying suggesting a word, and being said the OP doesn't like it. That is the reason the OP should report the exact criteria that will be used to accept the suggested word. Listing those criteria is useful, IMO, otherwise it seems the OP is accepting the word he likes more, which is a rather subjective method to accept an answer, which makes the question itself not useful for future readers, and rather subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Showing to have searched for a word before to ask the question is useful for this kind of questions, as they could seem to be asked because the OP could not be bothered to search himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-12-20T05:25:41.337" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T05:25:41.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2011-12-19T16:39:49.023" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should discourage vague titles. But sometimes it's hard to come up with a good title, so I'd recommend just editing it, or, downvote and comment, then remove your downvote after the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2011-12-19T16:39:49.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2011-12-19T16:53:19.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, it is preferable to use a title that makes clear what the question is; imagine what would happen if the question title would be &quot;What is the correct word?&quot; which would apply to all the cases the OP has a doubt about the word to use, or &quot;I have a question,&quot; which would apply to all the questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Writing a clearer title is not always possible. What should be the question title when the OP cannot decide between two or more phrases to use, and those phrases are quite different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are able to think of a better title, then you could rewrite the title yourself; if you are not able to think of a tittle that better suits the question, there are chances that even the question being asked is not clear, and the OP should be prompted to make clear what is being asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T18:38:59.457" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T18:38:59.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2692" CreationDate="2011-12-19T17:00:01.140" Score="6" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhqaa.png&quot; title=&quot;pushka&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badge image (as shown above) takes up multiple lines &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/49/populist&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt; The badge icon is on one line while the badge name is on a separate line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T15:06:07.703" Title="Multi-line populist badge" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2011-12-19T17:28:32.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, I think it is a problem. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We should explicitly discourage vague titles in comments to a question, if warranted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And edit, too, if the OP doesn't&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-12-19T17:28:32.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2011-12-20T10:52:10.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say beware, though. The title may be trying to convey the essence of the question, however vaguely. It is not always that we get the correct import of the OP -- there are instances where the title and/or body of a post have been edited under a misimpression/ misinterpretation by a well-meaning editor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, new members do not deserve to be discouraged even though their posts may be wanting in some respects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I agree with @Mitch: 'And edit, too, &lt;strong&gt;if the OP doesn't&lt;/strong&gt;' (emphasis mine). We could always post a comment first (a small extra effort) and see what the OP would like to say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T10:52:10.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-12-20T13:01:06.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aye, it could be nice, but ’twould be a problem for words which begin wi’ apostrophes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T13:01:06.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2306" CreationDate="2011-12-21T00:03:32.787" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accidentally, I now have two accounts for english.stackexchange.com, this one and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15987/guestlearner&quot;&gt;an unregistered one&lt;/a&gt;. Is it possible to merge the two accounts into either one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T00:36:13.560" Title="What should I do to merge my two accounts?" Tags="|support|status-completed|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2305" CreationDate="2011-12-21T00:36:13.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your two accounts have been merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T00:36:13.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2309" CreationDate="2011-12-21T08:01:37.017" Score="5" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last week I passed 10K rep but the &quot;tools&quot; button hasn't yet appeared on the top menu bar. The bar has only the following buttons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;| review | chat | meta | faq |&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can see the tools page using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2011-12-25T01:46:48.983" Title="Passed 10K but can't see &quot;tools&quot; button" Tags="|support|10k-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2308" CreationDate="2011-12-21T08:07:50.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should click on &lt;em&gt;review&lt;/em&gt;, and then somewhere below toggle to &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt;. I discovered this myself after playing around for a while!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T08:07:50.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2293" CreationDate="2011-12-21T17:00:52.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the linked question is precisely the sort of single-word-request we should be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;encouraging&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and I think it is... unfortunate that a super-mod has unilaterally closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T17:00:52.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2318" CreationDate="2011-12-22T09:59:57.563" Score="12" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been going through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot;&gt;questions tagged terms&lt;/a&gt; and they mostly seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48293/supreme-court-vs-highest-court&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt;, but it was also tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; so &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; seemed redundant. There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; question too but overall  they seem to just be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did try to propose &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, but the system tells me that I can't because of a reverse synonym on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/term&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;term&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;term&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it fair to remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; from questions and replace it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, en mass? I'm not sure what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; adds to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T18:36:21.960" Title="Terminate the [terms] tag" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2311" CreationDate="2011-12-22T14:39:30.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any special distinction with 'terms' and they do seem to be all 'single-word-requests. So yes, a broad replacement of terms with s-w-r is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T14:39:30.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2311" CreationDate="2011-12-22T15:58:06.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would just remove the tag (without replacing with another tag on questions).  &quot;Term&quot; is so vague that it doesn't really add anything IMO.  (Though, full disclosure, I find our tag set chaotic and overwhelming, such that if I were to ask a question I don't have high hopes that I could correctly tag it amongst all those options.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only downside is that just deleting the tag might leave some questions tag-less.  Is that a problem?  Long-term it is, but if there's a way to view the tag-less questions (I don't know if there is) then they could be cleaned up piecemeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T15:58:06.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-12-23T11:46:13.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Automatic quote prettifiers cause problems.  For instance, how can the prettifier distinguish between a quoted letter &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;‘l’ ‘m’ ‘n’ ‘o’&lt;/em&gt;) and a contracted &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;It’s raining cats ’n’ dogs.&lt;/em&gt;)?  If we’re going to have a prettifier, I suggest it be one that users explicitly turn on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16205" LastActivityDate="2011-12-23T11:46:13.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-23T17:14:21.627" Score="6" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the near duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/promotion-de-french-language-and-usage-promoting-french-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt; I put on Meta FL&amp;amp;U and &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.meta.stackexchange.com/users/715/lauren&quot;&gt;Lauren&lt;/a&gt; suggested I posted here too.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2012 the guest of honour of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.expolangues.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expolangues&lt;/a&gt;, an exhibition dedicated to the teaching and learning of languages held in Paris every winter (1–4 February in 2012), is the French language. I suggested we could promote &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;FL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on that occasion. Since this yearly exhibition is essentially visited by teachers and learners from &quot;all&quot; languages would it  sound like a good idea to promote &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; (and other Stack Exchange Language sites) as well?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm thinking of posters or leaflets that I would have on the stall I help organize. Unfortunately we won't have an Internet access on the stall, so we'd have to stick to paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:38.930" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T07:50:38.850" Title="Promoting English Language &amp; Usage" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2308" CreationDate="2011-12-24T14:23:05.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first time you will need to click on &quot;review&quot; link you see on the top, and then on the &quot;tools&quot; tab you see on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Anar.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link that you see on the top can be &quot;review&quot; or &quot;tools,&quot; depending from the tab you last selected on that page: When you selected the &quot;tools&quot; tab, the link on the top will be &quot;tools&quot; too; when you selected the &quot;review&quot; tab, the link on the top will be &quot;review&quot; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hPLBB.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vkpJ5.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange code remembers which tab you selected, and will show the link on the top bar basing on that every time you log in to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-12-25T01:46:48.983" LastActivityDate="2011-12-25T01:46:48.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2011-12-27T18:22:27.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides discouraging vague titles, we should encourage good titles.  The FAQ should be modified (in its &quot;How do I ask questions here?&quot; section) to say &quot;When you post a new question &lt;strong&gt;with a good title&lt;/strong&gt;, other users will almost immediately see it&quot;.  The FAQ should suggest how to write a good title; or possibly should link to a page about good titles, good questions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ should also say to include one's question in the question statement itself, instead of just in the title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps title voting could be added.  Setting aside the little questions of how much work it would take to add such a feature, and whether such voting is desirable in the first place, two important major issues arise:  1, Should title-vote points affect reputation, or merely be indicative, as for comments?  2, Should title-vote points be 1 point (up or down) per vote, or 2 points?  Or, people could be allowed to title-vote a few times (2? 3?), each vote counting for a point, allowing finer gradations of approval or disapproval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2011-12-28T04:10:47.463" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T04:10:47.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2311" CreationDate="2011-12-28T18:36:21.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just went through each occurrence of 'term' and 'terms'. I removed the tag, as it was often used redundantly. I did as @Monica Cello suggested, and replaced with 'single-word-requests'. In one or two cases, I substituted 'terminology' for specialized technical questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were a few instances where removal of 'term' or 'terms' resulted in no tag at all. That was remedied by replacement with 'single word request', 'meaning' or similar. The count was 14 instances in all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the 'term'/'terms' tag be deleted by a user with point level authorization? I recall @coding horror said that tags auto-delete themselves from the system if not used for any other questions, within a 24 or 48 hour interval. (I'm uncertain whether that was implemented or proposed though...?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T18:36:21.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-29T07:45:53.313" Score="11" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone edits your post, it appears under the &quot;Responses&quot; activity stream on your profile, but doesn't trigger an inbox notification.  Should it?   I for one would like to know if someone's editing something I wrote, without having to check my profile all the time.  I know edits are generally minor and done in good faith, but sometimes they have the potential to unintentionally change the author's intent/meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2011-12-29T11:01:09.617" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T01:29:06.163" Title="Should an edit notification appear in the inbox?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-30T04:55:24.667" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I crossed the 2,000 rep point and was notified that I have therefore earned the privilege of editing posts without the need for peer review.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I find the rep is 1,893 after having earned a few more points overnight. I don't remember exactly how much was the rep before the negative was applied.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find (don't know where to look/ how to) any record of negative rep applied to my account overnight. Clearly, I have lost at least 180 [2000+73(earned yesterday)-1893] and probably 200 rep overnight.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything I am required to do to remedy/ reverse the losses? Any insights? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2011-12-30T20:05:53.310" Title="Missing Rep and Edit Privilege -- Lost &amp; Not Found" Tags="|discussion|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2322" CreationDate="2011-12-30T09:04:13.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The link that JasperLoy gave,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;english.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;, gives you a list of your reputation point changes, along with question numbers and item types 1,2,3... and day-totals.  (I don't know how far it goes back -- maybe a year?)  If you save that in a file you can grep for negative entries to see if they account for the drop.  For example, if you save data in rep2011.12, do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;grep '(-' rep2011.12&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how deleted questions are handled but doubt  the reputation dump will show them.  For example, after&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;egrep -v ' [123]|-- 201' rep2011.12&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(which weeds out types 1,2,3 and daily totals) I see &#xA;only various summary lines plus network bonus line and&#xA;&lt;code&gt;8     41469 (-50)&lt;/code&gt; for a bounty, respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might install the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2202/reputation-graph&quot;&gt;Reputation graph&lt;/a&gt;&quot; application to help find any big ups or downs rapidly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2011-12-30T09:04:13.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2011-12-30T16:07:08.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had my content removed from the blog by using Google's DMCA takedown service. As I said to Google,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is licensed under CC BY-SA, but has been reproduced without&#xA;  proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everyone whose material has been similarly scraped puts in similar requests, Google will get tired of dealing with them and will probably remove the entire blog. I can't see that blog being very useful to anyone anyway, so it'll be no loss to the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2011-12-30T16:07:08.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-30T19:03:06.177" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53070/does-one-run-or-stand-for-election/53072#53072&quot;&gt;recent ELU question&lt;/a&gt;, two images of ngrams were included without live links to the ngrams site.  I believe that links should be included because it's desirable to be able to try variations of ngrams searches without having to start from scratch typing in all the words. (Note, the answer was updated with links during its first hour.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable, or not, to downvote a question because of missing source links?  (Or, more particularly, missing ngrams links?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, I'm not suggesting leaving out images.&#xA;With images included, ELU answers remain intelligible even if linked sites disappear, and that is good reason to include them, distinct from another important reason: rapid and accurate transfer of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T18:31:52.253" Title="Should one downvote a question because of missing source links?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2322" CreationDate="2011-12-30T20:05:53.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That was me, as fellow mods can verify by looking at your user history. I have been running rep recalcs &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/2660902#2660902&quot;&gt;for a couple weeks now&lt;/a&gt;, starting with the top users and (veeery) slowly working my way down the user list, as part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2256/winter-cleaning&quot;&gt;Winter Cleaning&lt;/a&gt; effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out already, you can always keep your displayed reputation in sync with your actual reputation by going to your personal rep report at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;/reputation&lt;/a&gt;, scrolling to the very bottom and clicking the &quot;Trigger Reputation Recalc&quot; button there. Then you won't be caught off guard the next time a rep recalc is triggered for your account by a mod or a globally running script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2011-12-30T20:05:53.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="895" CreationDate="2011-12-31T10:17:29.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Jeff's answer is fair enough, what I think the problem resides in is that people without enough reputation to make small edits without approval are still presented with the message &lt;em&gt;... unless absolutely necessary&lt;/em&gt; giving them the illusion that they still can make that minor edits if just they can play the &lt;em&gt;absolutely necessary&lt;/em&gt; card, but that's not possible at all. It's just misleading.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If low reputation users should wait for approval of any &gt;6 char edit anyway, why not allow them to make any minor edit and still have to wait for approval?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I realize this would make the stack of approval-pending edits bigger for other users to consume, this minor edits could have a somewhat lower priority, so more elaborate edits still get resolved sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4548" LastActivityDate="2011-12-31T10:17:29.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="895" CreationDate="2012-01-01T01:51:39.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another factor is that after some number of edits a post (question or answer) automatically kicks over to community wiki, which means (as I understand it) the previous owner loses any rep that was there and loses the ability to gain more.  So you should try to consolidate edits -- one edit fixing six one-character errors is better than six separate edits (even if they were possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-01-01T01:51:39.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2325" CreationDate="2012-01-01T23:28:58.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the ngram is shown in the answer, I don't see any reason for down-voting an answer. I would not say the answer is less useful, if the link to the ngram is missing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the link is missing, you can still edit the answer, and add the link; after all the block containing the suggestions for editing says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fix grammatical or spelling errors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clarify meaning without changing it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;correct minor mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;add related resources or links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;always respect the original author&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you do, if the answer contains a chart built with data contained in the &lt;em&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/em&gt;, or the &lt;em&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-03T18:31:52.253" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T18:31:52.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2315" CreationDate="2012-01-01T23:38:54.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaflets (along the lines @Lauren mentioned in a comment) seem like a good idea.  You might also produce some low-cost swag; to me, for a literary audience, bookmarks seem obvious, with each one including one interesting question and a selection of its answers from our site. (Print several different ones; maybe people will compare.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was at a conference once where the name badges had a spot for &quot;ask me about&quot;, with a place to write in a few words.  People used it for all sorts of informal networking and publicity.  Perhaps attendees from EL&amp;amp;U.SE want to make buttons or badges of that sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I didn't actually answer the &quot;should we&quot; part of your question because I don't know this conference at all.  I think low-effort, low-cost promotion opportunities like I've suggested are pretty much always a good idea, barring conference rules to the contrary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-01-01T23:38:54.057" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-02T08:33:33.353" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes hesitate using answer or comment. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53277/how-to-pronounce-v-sound&quot;&gt;this case&lt;/a&gt; I didn't hesitate because I didn't think giving a link was worth an answer. (I suppose my subconscious was reluctant  to see me gain undue upvotes for just giving a link I always keep handy and that it costs me no effort to research.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After @Anonymous's comment (as a reply to my own comment) should I post my original comment as an answer? Well others have answered but I can see the point in some cases in preferring practical advice on how to improve one's performance rather than a linguistic explanation - however good it is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And wouldn't writing it as an answer make it more available to others who were looking for help in pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe should there be a wiki where to list tips and links that are not specific to one question? After all the link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;animated library of the phonetic sounds of American English&lt;/a&gt; is useful to all questions on American English pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T17:18:02.343" Title="Comment or answer?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2012-01-02T09:19:46.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vocabulary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a6ICm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2012-01-02T09:19:46.230" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-02T09:19:46.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2012-01-02T11:47:54.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just discovered this discussion redirected from this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2333/we-have-a-scraper&quot;&gt;new question&lt;/a&gt;, so I went to have a look at the scraper and saw this line &lt;em&gt;Check more discussion of this question&lt;/em&gt; under each Q&amp;amp;A, has it just been introduced after complaints were filed to redirect towards EL&amp;amp;U or has it been there all along?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-01-02T11:47:54.630" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2331" CreationDate="2012-01-03T00:38:46.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer that contains a little more than a link is not considered an answer. To be an answer, it should answer the question being asked without redirecting users to another site; the reason is that link rot can happen, and when it happens, what is left is a post containing a not useful link. In this specific case, the link takes you to a page that doesn't directly answer the question; the OP can get the answer clicking on different links found on the linked page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About a wiki, questions about resources are generally off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U. What you call wiki is a question where nobody gains any reputation (Community Wiki question); its purpose is not anymore to make borderline questions acceptable, and questions asking for resources about pronunciation are borderline questions. The answers to those questions would be possibly infinite; every time a new resource is available, a new answer should be added, or an existing answer should be edited to add it. Every answer would be equally valid, which means that such lists of resources could not be useful to any future reader, who could find references to resources not available anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-03T17:18:02.343" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T17:18:02.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2337" CreationDate="2012-01-03T22:36:49.793" Score="6" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this naming / terminology question which I first posted on &quot;Code Review&quot; and then it was moved to &quot;Programmers&quot; and then it was closed.  Would it be appropriate for &quot;English&quot;, after some editing to make it more friendly to non-programmers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question on Programmers.StackExchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/126194/need-help-with-naming-marshaling-interface-calls&quot;&gt;Need help with naming (marshaling interface calls)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I posted it on EL&amp;amp;U: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53683/synonyms-for-multiplexing-and-demultiplexing&quot;&gt;Synonyms for multiplexing and demultiplexing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T23:15:02.420" Title="Can I bring that question over here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2336" CreationDate="2012-01-03T22:48:17.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just one person, but I think it'd be off topic because we don't accept questions about naming methods/interfaces/functions etc--they usually end up as being too localized because you probably have some constraints that make them applicable to a very small subset of the ELU population. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T22:48:17.930" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-04T00:17:35.193" Score="9" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/13/self-learner&quot;&gt;&quot;Self-Learner&quot;&lt;/a&gt; reads like a kenning or nonce phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Autodidact&quot; appears to enjoy greater popularity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?q=%22self-learner%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Self-Learner&quot;&lt;/a&gt; - 706,000&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?q=%22autodidact%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Autodidact&quot;&lt;/a&gt; - 1,090,000&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; If you do not understand how this phrase could seem problematic to a native English speaker, please consider the following phrases: (and their popularity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?q=%22i%20taught%20myself%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I &lt;em&gt;taught&lt;/em&gt; myself&lt;/a&gt; - 6,620,000&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?q=%22i%20learned%20myself%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I &lt;em&gt;learned&lt;/em&gt; myself&lt;/a&gt; - 384,000&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example occurs most often as a colloquialism, particularly where the speaker is assumed to lack formal education or familiarity with English language mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from the first chapter of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/huckleberry/chapter-01.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huckleberry Finn&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After supper she got out her book and &lt;strong&gt;learned me&lt;/strong&gt; about Moses and the&#xA;  Bulrushers [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16607" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T12:14:58.597" Title="Can &quot;Self-Learner&quot; badge be called &quot;Autodidact&quot; instead?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2341" CreationDate="2012-01-04T23:40:54.160" Score="-1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53555/is-it-right-to-say-is-john-lie&quot;&gt;Is it right to say &amp;quot;Is John lie?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is perfectly clear and has a perfectly clear answer.  I don't see any specific section of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; that would indicate that the question is not a good fit for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13287" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-01-06T22:24:03.743" Title="Why exactly was this question closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2339" CreationDate="2012-01-05T10:19:11.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have closed it as general reference as it is too basic, and can be answered by looking in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP had ask if there are some dialects where &quot;Is John lie?&quot; is perfectly acceptable, that would have been different; as it is, the question is too basic, and you can get an answer by looking at the dictionary, and checking if &lt;em&gt;lie&lt;/em&gt; is used as adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would have been also better if the OP had described exactly what question he had about that sentence (e.g. the usage of an infinitive after &quot;I am,&quot; the usage of a noun after &quot;I am&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-01-06T22:24:03.743" LastActivityDate="2012-01-06T22:24:03.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2339" CreationDate="2012-01-05T15:51:30.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question seems pretty random to me, with no context for why one might think that construct is ok or where it was encountered.  (I didn't vote on it; it was already closed when I saw it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T15:51:30.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-07T00:12:04.400" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag info for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; indicates the difference between it and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, but doesn't distinguish between it and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53863/term-for-an-event-being-referred-to-by-its-location-or-date&quot;&gt;Term for an event being referred to by its location or date&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27163/is-there-a-term-for-referring-to-an-organization-by-its-city-rather-than-by-its&quot;&gt;Is there a term for referring to an organization by its city rather than by its name?&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;? Is one of them incorrectly tagged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-01-08T16:20:17.740" Title="What's the difference between terminology and single word requests?" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2342" CreationDate="2012-01-08T00:54:49.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Topics related to the body of terms used with a particular technical application in a subject of study, theory, profession, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the difference is that in one case, you are asking about a technical term, and when to use it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;); in the other case, you want to use a single word instead of a phrase, and you ask which word to use describing the context.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, when you ask when the term &lt;em&gt;metonymy&lt;/em&gt; is used, the tag should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;, but when you ask for a single word to use instead of &quot;fantastic event that leaves you in a such catatonic state that somebody could steal the chair you are sitting on without you noticing it,&quot; that should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you are referring to another question that is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; in your own question, I think it should be tagged with the same tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-08T16:20:17.740" LastActivityDate="2012-01-08T16:20:17.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1276" CreationDate="2012-01-08T01:15:09.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been recently fixed: The text about the duplicated question is removed when the question is reopened, without anyone having to manually remove the automatically inserted text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-01-10T21:27:05.187" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T21:27:05.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-09T14:56:44.177" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought it would be nice to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transformation&lt;/a&gt; added, and possibly linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; because sometimes I know a word and want to get it into another form.  I don't know the word in the other form. I think that's commonly known as &lt;em&gt;transforming a word&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13766" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T18:55:15.700" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T14:20:31.240" Title="Where do I ask about adding a tag?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2345" CreationDate="2012-01-09T19:10:29.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;Where do I ask about adding a tag?&quot; is here on this very site; that is the answer whatever you mean where to ask somebody else to add the tag for you (which could also be done commenting the question that would need a tag that doesn't exist), or where to ask about the appropriateness of a new tag you think to use for a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transformation&lt;/a&gt; is going to add anything useful to questions. There are already tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adjectives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adjectives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adjectives&lt;/a&gt;, and other similar tags. You can use those tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see much questions about transformation of words, to start using that tag. As simchona says, I fear that those questions would be closed as general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-11T14:20:31.240" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T14:20:31.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2348" CreationDate="2012-01-10T01:02:06.563" Score="19" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it okay to say &lt;em&gt;settable&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which are impossible to answer well because they lack context.  How can we discourage this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16205" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T09:10:02.343" Title="How do we discourage questions lacking context?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2012-01-10T01:21:38.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way is to close them as &quot;not a real question&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once users see those questions are closed, they should hopefully give more context to their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about a way to avoid those questions are even asked, I think there isn't. Maybe rejecting some questions, if they match a defined schema, could help, but as far as I have seen, those filters are not much welcome.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Take as example the filter on Stack Overflow that avoids using &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; in the question title; it seems users found a workaround to that, and they now write &lt;em&gt;pr0blem&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;porblem&lt;/em&gt;, or similar words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T01:21:38.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-10T12:12:55.037" Score="0" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;My rep tally for Saturday shows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 2     53907 (10)&#xA; 2     53907 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2      9537 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 (10)&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     22701 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 2     53958 [0]&#xA; 3     53958 [-2]&#xA;-- 2012-01-07 rep +198  = 54836&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should mean that any of the 9 upvotes that took place after the rep cap was reached should cancel out the single down-vote at the end. Yet even after two tries at the rep-recalc button, on separate days, the score stays the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like I need the rep, of course, but as a software engineer I hate seeing edge-case defects. What gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="1046" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T01:59:12.393" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T03:50:30.260" Title="Bug in rep recalc?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2352" CreationDate="2012-01-10T21:36:31.523" Score="8" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;When one votes to reopen a question one has already voted to reopen, the message &quot;You have already (or previously) voted to reopen this question&quot; appears:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qMUAP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;You have already (or previously) voted to reopen this question&amp;quot; blub&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that &quot;(or previously)&quot; is unnecessarily redundant with &quot;already&quot;, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we get one of them removed from the message?  That is, can the message be changed to one of the following, or rationale for current message be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You have previously voted to reopen this question&quot; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You have already voted to reopen this question&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="420" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T15:25:56.507" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T15:25:56.507" Title="Can this error in a vote-to-reopen screen be fixed?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2350" CreationDate="2012-01-10T23:36:31.797" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is by design: &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;in this round of voting&quot; and &lt;em&gt;previously&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;in some prior round of voting&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, say that some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/52063/1547&quot;&gt;innocent user posts a single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, with lots of context and well-formulated and everything, and an outsider with mod powers comes along and knee-jerk closes it. You read the question, scratch your head at the closure, and vote to reopen it. A few days later, you encounter the still-closed question again, and not remembering your previous actions, you vote to reopen it again, but the system doesn't let you because you have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; voted to reopen it. Now, suppose the question collects four other reopen votes and lives happily for a few days, until &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; outsider with mod powers comes along and closes it &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;. Now, if you try to vote to reopen the question, the system won't let you, because you have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;previously&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; voted to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of this functionality is to prevent &quot;close wars&quot; or &quot;reopen wars&quot;. It's an unfortunate side effect that it means that a vote of 5 open vs. 2 close can result in a question that is, for all intents and purposes, permanently closed (because it's very hard to collect 5 &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T23:36:31.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2349" CreationDate="2012-01-11T01:23:30.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No matter how much you exceed your rep cap in a given day, a downvote will still subtract 2 from your rep.  However, a subsequent upvote will give back the 2 rep.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70158/what-if-i-hit-the-daily-rep-cap-and-then-get-downvoted&quot;&gt;Source: MSO&lt;/a&gt; (not to mention personal experience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference, though, between the -2's from &lt;em&gt;getting&lt;/em&gt; downvoted and the -1's from &lt;em&gt;downvoting&lt;/em&gt; other answers.  The -2's from downvotes &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; you can be reversed by subsequent upvotes that day, but the -1s from downvotes &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; you cannot be reversed. E.g. if you downvote three answers in a day, your rep cap for that day is 197 (not counting accepts and bounties).  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32569/why-my-daily-reputation-capped-at-199-points&quot;&gt;Source: MSO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T01:23:30.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2364" CreationDate="2012-01-11T02:20:37.913" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasoning given under questions that are &lt;em&gt;closed as not construcive&lt;/em&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or &#xA;  extended discussion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the polling, I don't see the problem with any of these other possibilities. Some of the best questions and answers on this site have been the result of healthy doses of opinion, debate, argument, and extended discussion—without precluding  facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the wording of this close reason be revisited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T07:47:14.293" Title="Can we explain better why questions are closed as not constructive?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2354" CreationDate="2012-01-11T04:50:01.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming we all agree &quot;polling&quot; questions are unwanted, it seems to me all the other descriptions - &lt;em&gt;opinion, debate, arguments, extended discussion&lt;/em&gt; are just different ways of saying the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently we don't often close questions for this specific reason - it took me a couple of minutes to find &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52086/split-between-british-and-american-english&quot;&gt;Split between British and American English&lt;/a&gt; as an example. And I'm quite happy it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure - some of the more &quot;interesting&quot; questions do in fact generate extended discussion, but in principle I think we always hope a single relatively concise answer will (or at least, &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;) emerge as the consensus opinion. If it looks obvious from the start that this isn't going to happen, the question doesn't really have much going for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the current FAQ wording is fine. The repetition implies/emphasises that questions which are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; likely to generate a lot of &lt;em&gt;opinion, debate, etc.&lt;/em&gt; won't be viewed favourably. We don't overuse this reason anyway; unless it starts getting mis-applied, I would leave well alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T04:50:01.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2354" CreationDate="2012-01-11T05:42:44.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought of saying that a change isn't necessary. But the fact that someone with considerably more reputation than me finds it necessary to ask the question makes me think it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Debate, arguments, and extended discussion are constructive to the extent that they surface problems with facts or reasoning (which are what a good answer is supposed to provide). If it ought to be more clear that this kind of constructive debate is not meant to be stifled, one added word like &quot;&lt;em&gt;pointless&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;unproductive&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, or &quot;&lt;em&gt;unconstructive&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is all that would be needed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is not a good fit to our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit &lt;strong&gt;unproductive&lt;/strong&gt; opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T05:42:44.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-11T12:00:21.063" Score="6" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54280/etymology-of-shhole&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; raised debate over the censorship of questions containing offensive language (or their titles, at least). I always understood the &lt;code&gt;offensive-language&lt;/code&gt; tag to serve that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest the following approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No censoring of posts and their titles, but the &lt;code&gt;offensive-language&lt;/code&gt; tag is required&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Posts tagged &lt;code&gt;offensive-language&lt;/code&gt; are displayed on their respective sites, unless a user explicitly opts out&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Posts tagged &lt;code&gt;offensive-language&lt;/code&gt; do not appear in the multicollider, unless a user explicitly opts in&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/561/what-should-we-do-about-question-titles-containing-vulgar-words&quot;&gt;What should we do about question titles containing vulgar words?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/975/do-we-really-need-to-add-nsfw-in-question-titles&quot;&gt;Do we really need to add &amp;quot;NSFW&amp;quot; in question titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1561/should-elu-be-removed-from-the-multicollider-etc&quot;&gt;Should EL&amp;amp;U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4744" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T11:30:51.373" Title="Censorship of offensive questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bowdlerization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-11T15:16:11.090" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54314/what-is-the-equivalent-for-status&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that was too broad/vague. After adding more context is became too localized. Looking back, I think the question isn't a very good one and probably doesn't have an answer — no matter how it is expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a question's being bad grounds for a user to delete it? If not, are there any guidelines for when a question should be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16884" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T07:40:26.780" Title="When should a question be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2357" CreationDate="2012-01-11T17:04:54.670" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me preface my answer with an apology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dispute about whether to censor the title of the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54280/etymology-of-shhole&quot;&gt;s——thole question&lt;/a&gt;&quot; should never have come up. My reading of past NSFW debates convinced me that the title censorship policy was up to the community, and that there were two major opposing views (i.e., no consensus). In this I was completely mistaken. My statement that the title should be uncensored was based on ignorance, and led to a bit of a mess, and I'm sorry for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, the decision to censor titles is not open to debate. It is site policy, established by the business which owns the site. See the third question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1561/should-elu-be-removed-from-the-multicollider-etc&quot;&gt;Should EL&amp;amp;U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, where the site policy is clearly articulated by Jeff Atwood, StackExchange CTO. (And that is perfectly appropriate. It's their site and they can establish whatever policy they think is wise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, we have a simple, easy to understand policy on title censorship from the site owners, and we also have quite a few people who defend or criticize the title censorship policy as if it were debatable or a matter of community consensus. That is, &lt;strong&gt;the primary problem is not lack of a tag; it's lack of communication&lt;/strong&gt;. The policy needs to be disseminated to the community. Stating it within comments to a question about removing english.se from the multicollider is ineffective. At an absolute minimum, it needs to be part of the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T17:04:54.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2362" CreationDate="2012-01-11T17:20:46.443" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow , the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/privileges&quot;&gt;reputation required to gain the &quot;retag questions&quot; privilege&lt;/a&gt; is less than the reputation required for the &quot;create tags&quot; privilege; on EL&amp;amp;U, it's the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the policy behind determining which privileged should require more reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T06:29:13.063" Title="Reputation required to &quot;create tags&quot; vs. &quot;retag questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|reputation|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2012-01-11T22:10:54.740" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only been active on this site for a few weeks, but I've gotten the same general impression that the poster here has: The active members seem a little over-zealous in closing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can certainly understand closing blatantly off-topic questions. If someone asks &quot;Who was prime minister during World War I?&quot; or &quot;Who is your favorite rap singer?&quot;, clearly that's totally off-topic, and if such questions are not closed, the site could degenerate into having no clear subject at all. But I see lots of questions closed as off-topic that are debateable. Like recently closed as off-topic was &quot;Can the word 'dehydration' imply 'thirsty'?&quot; Okay, arguably this is asking about the biological process of dehydration and is thus a science question. But I think the poster was struggling to understand the connotations attached to the two words. That sounds like a language question to me. It seems to me that if a question is ambiguous in this sense, we could answer it as a language question, ignoring any scientific or historical or other off-topic possible answers. Erring on the side of closing often in practice means that you make it almost impossible to post questions that are, in fact, relevant. Do we really want to say that if there is any possible interpretation of the question that is not relevant, that we close it, whether that is what the poster was really trying to ask or not? I think the standard should be that in case of ambiguity, we give the poster the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, if someone asks, &quot;What is the definition of ...?&quot;, yes, this could be easily answered by going to a dictionary. But I've seen questions closed as &quot;general reference&quot; where it looks to me like the poster is asking for something beyond the dictionary definition: he wants to know about connotations or subtleties of meaning or proper usage in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What does 'not even close' mean?&quot; was recently closed as &quot;general reference&quot;. How so? How would you look that up and where? A Yahoo or Google search turns up plenty of examples, but the poster is looking for examples but an explanation of meaning. Maybe you have a &quot;dictionary of idioms&quot;? I don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen many questions closed as vague or unclear, that I thought were quite clear. If you don't understand a question, why not help the poster to refine it by asking clarifying questions, rather than just slamming it closed. In a few cases I've seen votes to close on questions that I thought were completely clear. I think the person voting to close was confused, not the poster. For example, I forget the question now, but it was criticized for not asking a clear question, but if you read the title the question was quite clear. It was like the person voting to close ignored the title and just read the body of the question, and then condemned the poster for failing to repeat the title in the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, etc. I think posters should be given the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T22:10:54.740" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2360" CreationDate="2012-01-12T06:01:31.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, and bear in mind that I am not sure, but I believe that the reason this is so is because Stack Overflow, given (1) its age and (2) its question volume, is much, much more likely than any other site to have all the tags it will need for some time. The only new ones that are likely to crop up are those of new technologies and those that are needed when tag cleanup occurs, and in both cases, a high rep user is likely to be involved. In contrast, SE 2.0 sites that graduated from Area 51 are smaller and newer than Stack Overflow and may not have all the niche tags that people might want to ask questions on, and so more people are allowed to create tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T06:01:31.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2358" CreationDate="2012-01-12T06:38:58.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would rather suggest not to delete your own questions; if you start deleting too much of your questions, you could not be allowed to ask more questions until you don't get more reputation by answering to questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the community vote for deleting the questions that should be deleted. If the question has an up-voted answer, you are not able to delete your question, and the community (users with a reputation of at least 10000 and moderators) can delete the question, once it is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an automatic deletion for those questions matching some criteria; chances are that a closed question without any answers is going to be deleted anyway; so there isn't anything to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2015-06-19T07:40:26.780" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T07:40:26.780" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2354" CreationDate="2012-01-12T07:08:30.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with questions that solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion, if you want a forum; Stack Exchange sites are not forums, and those types of questions just reduce the usefulness of a Stack Exchange site (generally speaking). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the usefulness of a question where users express their opinion? What could future readers find useful in that question? If the question involve expertise, then it can be more helpful, but for opinions there are already many available forums. (I am not saying that forums are not useful, but that is not the target chosen from Stack Exchange.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Such questions tend to have a possible infinite number of answers, as every user could have a different opinion, and questions were there are more than X answers are not very helpful. Look at the questions on Meta Stack Overflow where the answers are more than 50: As the answers are not visible on a single page, most of the users would not read all the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the description used for that closing reason is clear enough to let users understand why the question has been closed. In the case that is not clear enough, the FAQ should help in understanding that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-12T07:47:14.293" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T07:47:14.293" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2012-01-12T07:44:37.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason for which the name should be changed. As long as the name is understood, there is no reason to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name chosen for the badge is not necessarily the word that you would use in English to express the concept related to that badge. Take for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/52/yearling&quot;&gt;yearling&lt;/a&gt;, which is described as, &quot;active member for a year, earning at least 200 reputation&quot;; from its name, you would not understand it can be gained more than once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T07:44:37.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2367" CreationDate="2012-01-14T05:57:42.150" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find my badge history? I would like to know the date and time I earned a certain badge, the post(s)/edit(s) for which I earned it, along with the current list of all badges I hold.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did search the questions here, and I hope I have not missed something already answered.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently earned a badge, but I cannot recall its name, nor when exactly I was given it. The count of badges on the status line at the top (16) and in my profile (which says 18, but lists 16) do not seem to tally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that just the right link will take me to the place where all this is explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-01-15T00:44:55.187" LastActivityDate="2012-01-15T00:44:55.187" Title="Where do I find my badge history?" Tags="|discussion|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2366" CreationDate="2012-01-14T06:00:38.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;List of badge awards: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666/kris?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=badges&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666/kris?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=badges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badge list: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666/kris?tab=badges&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666/kris?tab=badges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you've earned 16 different badges, but a total of 18 badges (i.e. you earned two extra &lt;em&gt;Nice Answer&lt;/em&gt; badges). I believe the header should be showing 2 silver badges and 16 bronze badges for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent badge you earned was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/badges/102/excavator&quot;&gt;Excavator badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-01-14T06:00:38.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2012-01-14T23:46:49.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just Googled &lt;em&gt;&quot;we DON'T have a ball game&quot;&lt;/em&gt; as per @Tom Au's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54729/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-expression-we-have-a-ball-game/54737#54737&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of the expression “we have a ball game”?&lt;/a&gt;, posted three hours ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when I discovered &lt;a href=&quot;http://b.vniup.com/index.php/english-learning/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-expression-we-have-a-ball-game.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; among the dozen of so hits returned!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know we have some seriously savvy techies here (maybe some legal eagles too). Does anyone have any idea what if anything can be done about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://b.vniup.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://b.vniup.com/&lt;/a&gt;&quot;? So far as I can see, the entire site consists of (probably illegally) scraped content, and I personally can't even see how you could find out who to complain to, let alone how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-01-14T23:46:49.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-15T17:10:06.080" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently placed a bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50588/why-is-it-usually-friend-of-his-but-no-possessive-apostrophe-with-friend-of&quot;&gt;this question about the &quot;double possessive&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but just realised I wanted to make a minor (but to me, significant) change to my &quot;supplementary text&quot; in the &lt;em&gt;&quot;This question has an open bounty...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I can see, there's no facility for doing this. Can we have one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-15T17:35:50.710" Title="Edit supplementary text on bounty" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-16T19:52:34.417" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/703/is-elu-becoming-esl&quot;&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U becoming ESL?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one or two questioners, EL&amp;amp;U seems to be becoming a free source of English lessons for foreign learners. Is this consistent with the site's purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-01-16T19:52:34.417" Title="Should EL&amp;U offer free English lessons?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2012-01-17T01:44:35.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2012-01-17T02:29:17.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Always assuming we use the &quot;General Reference&quot; reason for closing judiciously, I don't see a problem. The only slight fly in the ointment being that as we get more users with sufficient rep to close questions, we may lose some potentially interesting ones that look superficially trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem in this general area, it's that &quot;serious&quot; users don't upvote really interesting questions enough to counteract &quot;trivia-seekers&quot; who upvote things that are effectively just dross. If you don't believe me, spend a couple of minutes leafing through past questions in &lt;em&gt;Votes&lt;/em&gt; sequence. That's a really depressing exercise for anyone who wants ELU to be a font of wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T02:29:17.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2395" CreationDate="2012-01-18T01:02:33.470" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definite low-priority &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;: when making notes and little &lt;em&gt;asides&lt;/em&gt; in questions and answers, I tend to favour (ab)using &lt;code&gt;sub&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;sup&lt;/code&gt;, both of which are visually precisely how I'd like them to be displayed on most other SE sites. So far only english.stackexchange.com doesn't quite conform to my desired styling of those elements in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presently they both appear to be almost identical to the main body of text's style with only a slight decrease in text size, though not enough to make them as visibly different as they are on the other SE sites (you can &lt;em&gt;repro&lt;/em&gt; this on Stack Overflow and Pro Webmasters). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate, this is how they're currently rendered on this site (YMMV in your browser):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is a &lt;code&gt;sup&lt;/code&gt; element&lt;/sup&gt; (normal text for comparison)&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;code&gt;sub&lt;/code&gt; element&lt;/sub&gt; (normal text for comparison)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how I'd like them to be rendered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/daous.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mock rendering of desired styling&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2515" LastEditorUserId="11762" LastEditDate="2012-02-09T18:38:40.340" LastActivityDate="2012-02-09T18:38:40.340" Title="Styling of certain HTML elements" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2376" CreationDate="2012-01-18T20:57:38.780" Score="49" ViewCount="976" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description for the &quot;General Reference&quot; close reason states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently&#xA;  answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source&#xA;  designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people interpret this to mean that all &quot;LMGTFY&quot; questions should be closed as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;. They will post comments to the effect that they found the answer &quot;without ever leaving the Google search page&quot;, as if that were some kind of ace in the hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is an incorrect use of this close reason. The main problem is authority: if you don't already know the answer to your question, you have no way to evaluate whether that first Google result is actually correct&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. This is especially problematic with usage questions &amp;mdash; it is very easy to get misleading or downright incorrect usage information from Google search results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2019/acquiescing-to-other-qa-sites&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; stated it pretty well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you google something, you usually find something quickly and easily. That's what Google does. But how do you judge the quality of what you find? Unless the search results contain a link to a general reference site, it takes some work, and perhaps some guessing, to determine which site contains the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we send away users to play a guessing game on Google, we're not making the internet a better place. Basically, if you can't post a link to a standard reference source (and a search results page is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a &quot;standard reference source&quot;) which definitively answers the question, then you shouldn't be closing the question as general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I way off base?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;The sorta-exception is GAFD/T&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt; questions, where the first result is likely to be from the effing dictionary or thesaurus that you should have checked in the first place; but in this case you're just using the search engine as an interface to the dictionary. The reason you know you found a correct answer is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that it's right there without leaving Google, but that it comes from a &quot;reference source designed specifically to find that type of information&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;GAFD/T = Get A F[expletive] Dictionary/Thesaurus.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T23:24:51.813" Title="Google is not General Reference" Tags="|discussion|general-reference|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-18T21:55:52.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I'll fess up. I am one of the close voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that there is a well known source that answers the question you've linked to in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I do not believe the question is asked by some who reaches the level of a serious English language enthusiast. I think it is too basic for this site. That is why I voted general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not because the specific question is answered by one, but because I believe sentence constructions such as the one in the question are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where is X&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;where is X found&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;how is X done&lt;/em&gt;, etc. seem to me to be something someone would learn as a beginner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong to think this is too basic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T21:55:52.617" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-18T22:54:55.470" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;See JSBangs on why &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1546/basic-questions-are-not-so-basic&quot;&gt;basic questions are not so basic&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see your point. I definitely think Google is not a general reference as intended. Only if it leads directly to a website that can be considered a general reference should a Google search count as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I joined this website, we used not to take a question too literally, and expand its scope in our interpretation if that could give interesting answers. In this case, that could consist of explaining a little bit in which contexts &quot;is found&quot; is often found, where it came from, and which connotations it has. Something like that. Thus a rather basic question in uneducated style could be made to result in answers that contained something for everybody, not with a great deal of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems we have now entered a phase where our electorate chooses to interpret questions more narrowly, and is less forgiving of uneducated askers and &quot;outsiders&quot; in general. I have seen it happen often with websites as they get older. I personally deplore this development, and I believe some of the narrow interpretations I have seen did not do justice to the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But so be it; I cannot change that alone. If you must close such questions, it may be better to close them as &quot;non-constructive&quot; or &quot;off topic&quot; than as &quot;general reference&quot;, for the reasons Martha specified. After all, if a question is too basic, it is not about the right topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, dubious questions could be tagged or otherwise marked &quot;possibly unfit&quot;, and brought to people's attention a week later; if no interesting answers have been given by then, they can be closed. The reason for this mechanism is that how good or interesting a question is ultimately depends on how good and interesting the answers are, because people come to this website to read answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T23:39:43.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-18T23:30:14.103" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts should already be in a position to evaluate the usefulness of Google Search results. Therefore LMGTFY is really not such an inappropriate response, if that's who the site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the better question is whether the site is, and ought to be, &lt;em&gt;for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps it ought to be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;for questions that only a linguist, etymologist, or (serious) English language enthusiast can answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site already attracts many questions from people who are not experts. Why? Because it is not obviously a site for experts at first glance. The title is simply &quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it really intended that the site be used only by the linguistic élite? Perhaps the name should be changed to something more elitist, such as &quot;Cunning Linguists (English)&quot;. … Obviously I make this suggestion tongue in cheek …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T23:30:14.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-19T00:24:59.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Googling, I could find many sites that contain a grammatically not correct sentence; that doesn't mean the sentence is correct because Google found more than one site using that sentence. If the first three links given from Google are to sites that can used as reference, that is different.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google generally returns links to resources that are available to everybody; it is rare that Google gives a link to a site that requires me to first log in, before I can see the page for which I had the link. It can still happen if the site is tracing the access from the IP I am using, or from the browser I am using, or if the site has been changed from the last access done from the Google bot. Google is then normally used as evidence that the link to the resource was available to everybody. If somebody would say that the answer is available in a web site for which you need to pay a subscription to see it, then I think that is not qualify as standard internet reference source.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact Google gives me results doesn't automatically mean the question is a general reference, also for the fact the closing vote says, &quot;this question is too basic.&quot; We don't want to close as general reference every question for which Google, or more specialized site can give me a link to a page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About Google, I would also argue that there is a difference between asking a question about &quot;X&quot; for which Google gives me the right links when looking for &quot;X&quot; (making the assumption that the returned links point to trusted/trustable resources), and asking a question about &quot;X&quot; for which Google returns me the right links when looking for &quot;Y&quot;, where &quot;Y&quot; is a phrase that I enter basing on my expertise. An expert is surely able to use the correct &quot;Y&quot; for which Google returns the expected results; in that case, an expert could close any question as general reference. That is, I think, the reason why the closing reason says, &quot;this question is too basic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-01-19T00:24:59.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-19T02:36:24.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the best answer is googling for it and &lt;strong&gt;without any need for commentary&lt;/strong&gt; giving a link, then it is not an appropriate answer for SE, and so should be closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think many basic questions about grammar and vocabulary are not answerable like that, and so I think they do not warrant a closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If commentary is warranted, then it shouldn't be closed basic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that many questions are being closed too quickly as general reference, but I think many of them might well be closed for other reasons and general reference is as good a reason as any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-01-19T02:36:24.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-19T19:12:23.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is so basic it can easily be answered with a &lt;strong&gt;comment&lt;/strong&gt;, just do that and vote to close. Personally, I normally vote to close only if I can see the answer in one of the top 2-3 synopses on Google's &lt;em&gt;homepage&lt;/em&gt;, without actually &lt;em&gt;visiting the source&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately there seems to be a huge increase in such questions. The problem is people use them as a springboard for addressing more broad-based issues that aren't really being asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closely-related problem is when questioners with limited knowledge of English ask whether some relatively non-standard usage is &quot;correct&quot;. Competent speakers have widely differing opinions on what is &quot;correct&quot; or &quot;acceptable&quot; (by which I mean the definition of those words, not the particular usage being asked about), and extended debate arising from this often obscures the primary point - that in most cases, the majority position is all the questioner wants or needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-01-21T23:20:32.827" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T23:20:32.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1909" CreationDate="2012-01-21T23:57:32.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the lack of response here, perhaps these tags should not be used at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T23:57:32.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2321" CreationDate="2012-01-22T01:29:06.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not generally in favor of aggressive edit notifications because I think it leads directly to edit wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most edits we see are quite small and it is extraordinarily rare for an edit to cause issues as you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as you noted, you can periodically check your profile to see what edits have occurred on your posts, and take action as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T01:29:06.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2012-01-22T08:39:35.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/80910/1&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/80910/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a random percent of the time, decreasing chance with greater reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on your posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if they are greater than 400 characters in length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for 1 hour after posting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T08:39:35.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1989" CreationDate="2012-01-22T18:27:44.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes only one 5k user to approve an edit to a tag wiki or a tag wiki excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T18:27:44.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1779" CreationDate="2012-01-23T00:13:43.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the break in consistency would be worth the extra code here. It doesn't &lt;em&gt;hurt&lt;/em&gt; to have the field present for rapid 5 minute grace period edits, and not having it might lead to confusion about why it is, and sometimes is not, present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T00:13:43.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1680" CreationDate="2012-01-23T03:03:04.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added a tooltip when you hover on the reputation number in the user list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will be deployed in the next day or so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T03:03:04.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2012-01-23T03:37:32.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general I worry about badges that encourage behaviours that make other people feel bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example ... how about a badge for 1000 downvotes? Or a badge for successfully deleting N posts due to delete votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we have a concrete problem where not enough stuff is getting closed, I could be persuaded. Though, I do worry about this kind of badge and possible dangers of abuse. I don't really want people grinding for such a badge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T03:37:32.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2012-01-23T10:20:13.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/source/detail?r=ecb29dd6bb5085859aa056649537a0003de39bb4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fixed in the next build&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the curious: The preview's behavior was the correct one, since this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. abc&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- comment --&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;2. def&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is equivalent to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. abc &amp;lt;!-- comment --&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;2. def&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(to be considered a &quot;block level HTML comment&quot;, the comment must be preceded by a blank line). The preview did this correctly; the server-side version had a bug that considered it enough for the comment to start at the beginning of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T10:20:13.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-23T18:36:36.343" Score="4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55589/is-colorblind-the-best-word-for-people-with-color-perception-deficiencies&quot;&gt;Is &amp;#39;colorblind&amp;#39; the best word for people with color perception deficiencies?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as being too localized. I've gone through the faq and I can't find any reference to asking practical questions. This statement is highlighted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit the use case is possibly quite localized (a label a in user interface), but the title of the question is broad and useful for other people who want to use the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5863" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T14:00:24.427" Title="Why was my question closed as 'too localized'?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2230" CreationDate="2012-01-23T18:39:57.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have added the public artifacts to this appointment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T18:39:57.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2390" CreationDate="2012-01-24T03:03:05.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote on your question, but having read it I agree with its closing for the following main reason: while the &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt; offers a question which is widely applicable, the actual &lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt; of the question tells a different story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question body asks for a very specific term (a label for the checkbox) which will only really be applicable to yourself. How many people are going to come to EL&amp;amp;U looking for a way to name such a function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your body had matched your question title, I think it would have stayed open. In today's world, political correctness is widely applicable. A lot more people could use the answer to &quot;what is a PC way to refer to color blindness&quot; rather than the answer to &quot;how should I name this function&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to try to get the question reopened, I would suggest changing the question body to match your title. This will make it less &quot;localized&quot;. No promises, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T03:03:05.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2390" CreationDate="2012-01-24T14:00:24.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is, the question seem too localized because you are asking for the label used in a checkbox for assisting colorblind users, but then you offer four alternatives that are equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should not be closed because you are asking for a phrase to use in a user interface because, if you are not going to use a not grammatical phrase just for keeping it short, the same phrase could apply to different cases, where somebody would need to refer to colorblind people.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The problem I see is with asking for a politically correct phrase, as that is different from country to country, and can be set considering factors that are external to the language. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49926/use-of-separation-of-church-and-state-in-non-christian-countries&quot;&gt;Use of &amp;quot;separation of church and state&amp;quot; in non-Christian countries&lt;/a&gt; where the OP is asking for a different phrase to use instead of &lt;em&gt;separation of church and state&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;church&lt;/em&gt; in English mean also &quot;institutionalized religion as a political or social force.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I remember, users on Stack Exchange are welcome to explain the context in which the question is being asked. The context should not be used as excuse to close the question, as the question is still asking for an alternative phrase to use. Then, if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49926/use-of-separation-of-church-and-state-in-non-christian-countries&quot;&gt;Use of &amp;quot;separation of church and state&amp;quot; in non-Christian countries&lt;/a&gt; has not been closed, I don't see any reason for closing this question. How much people had the need to use an alternative phrase to &lt;em&gt;separation of church and state&lt;/em&gt;, which is also used in other languages (see the Italian &lt;em&gt;separazione tra chiesa e stato&lt;/em&gt; that is the exact translation of the English phrase)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To notice that this question is not asking the name to give to a class, a function, or a method in a programming language, which is the kind of questions that is off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U, and with a good reason (because the function name to use in a programming language is not necessarily an English word, and the name to use for a function could be limited from the programming language, which could have reserved words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T14:00:24.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2012-01-25T06:22:11.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question, which had &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; context, and almost literally repeats the title in the body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55839/word-for-something-sad-and-funny-at-the-same-time&quot;&gt;Word for something sad and funny at the same time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(nor did these edits improve matters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/55839/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/55839/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically pointed to this meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QV2op.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, &lt;strong&gt;the bittersweet tragicomedy of questions lacking context.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2012-01-30T17:41:42.943" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2373" CreationDate="2012-01-25T06:58:12.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have increased the offsets slightly. The change will be in the next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2012-01-25T06:58:12.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2012-01-26T22:56:53.130" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be helpful to use the guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/how-to-deal-with-homework-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for homework questions, as applicable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6683" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-01-26T22:56:53.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2315" CreationDate="2012-01-29T20:18:50.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an adaptation of the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2155/english-se-pamphlet-hang-up-or-hand-out-to-your-friends-and-classmates&quot;&gt;existing leaflet&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/english-pamphlet.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF link&lt;/a&gt;) with more emphasis on a teacher audience and a mention of the other language sites. Given the venue, the leaflet should have a French version (on the flip side), which I'm posting on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/promotion-de-french-language-and-usage-promoting-french-language-and-usage/293#293&quot;&gt;French L&amp;amp;U thread&lt;/a&gt;. The English version focuses on ELU while the French version focuses on both ELU and FLU.&#xA;Comment welcome, but since the event is very soon, I don't even know if we'll manage to get something printed in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English.StackExchange.com&lt;/strong&gt; is a community-driven questions and answers site about grammar, etymology, word choice, and usage. It's a great place to ask all your questions about the English language and get answers from the community, as well as to share your own knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example questions:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9780&quot;&gt;http&amp;colon;//english.stackexchange.com/q/9780&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is “bicycle” pronounced differently from other obviously related words?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/26085&quot;&gt;http&amp;colon;//english.stackexchange.com/q/26085&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word or phrase for the feeling you get after looking at a word for too long?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/6170&quot;&gt;http&amp;colon;//english.stackexchange.com/q/6170&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What’s in it for me?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange English is totally free. Questions are answered quickly, so you can use it as a resource when studying or teaching. If you're an academic, it's a great place to establish a reputation as an expert in the field, apply for funding and sponsorships, and network with other English professionals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What about other languages?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites about other languages are forming: German, Japanese, French, Spanish and Chinese are already up. Visit http&amp;colon;//stackexchange.com/sites to see the full list of Stack Exchange sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-01-29T21:55:56.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2012-01-30T16:29:59.600" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO, it's valid to close a question as &quot;general reference&quot; when it is on the order of, &quot;What is the definition of X?&quot; or &quot;How do you pronounce X?&quot; or &quot;What are some synonyms for X?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But questions about connotation and common usage seem to me to go beyond &quot;general reference&quot;. For example, when I was in school we saw a documentary on factory robots that was made in Japan. At the end the narrator concluded, &quot;Through the use of industrial robots, people can achieve happiness.&quot; The students all laughed. But I'm sure the person who wrote the script looked up a dictionary defintion of &quot;happiness&quot; and said, &quot;'Happiness' means 'being fortunate' and 'enjoying well-being'. Robots can improve human prosperity and quality of life, therefore, robots help people achieve happiness. That's exactly what I want to say.&quot; Perhaps his Japanese-English dictionary gave &quot;happiness&quot; as a translation for a Japanese word that would have made perfect sense in this context. A question on a site like this about the approriateness of a word in a certain context could help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, is the goal to help people use better English, or is it to maintain some standard of the &quot;purity&quot; of the site? What's the harm if a borderline question is allowed to remain open and be answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe part of the problem is that there seems to be some ambiguity about the intended audience. The statement of purpose says it's for -- what's the phrase, &quot;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot;. If that means the site is intended for scholars to discuss debated etymologies and such academic questions, then 95% of the questions posted are off topic. Whether it was the original intent or not, this site has become a place for people to ask about how to use the language effectively in practice. A lot of the questions appear to be from non-native speakers and people trying to make a step up in the formality and correctness of their writing. I think that's a good thing to do. If this isn't the place to do it, okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2012-01-30T16:29:59.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2404" CreationDate="2012-01-31T09:55:09.810" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56472/x-y-z-horizontal-vertical-and&quot;&gt;X, Y, Z — horizontal, vertical and ...?&lt;/a&gt; (Original title &lt;code&gt;X Y Z Horizontal Vertical and?&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the title to be &lt;code&gt;X, Y, Z - Horizontal, Vertical and ?&lt;/code&gt; (note the space before the &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt;) as I think it sums up my requirement fairly well. The question mark isn't to say &lt;em&gt;this is a question&lt;/em&gt;, it's to say &lt;em&gt;what goes here?&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is currently, the space before the question mark has been removed and I think the title doesn't scan so well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any chance this automatic change could be removed here (maybe in general too)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T18:09:44.007" Title="Title removing space preceding a final question mark" Tags="|feature-request|questions|titles|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2012-01-31T10:59:27.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That rule is used in French typography, if I'm not mistaken. If you visit the French SE, question marks and punctuation in general have that space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as far as I know, English does not has such a (typographical) rule. It would look odd. But wait for SE Team Members/Mods to confirm this or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T10:59:27.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2012-01-31T13:40:15.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually these questions are asked by users with very low rep. I propose that in cases where the question asker has &amp;lt; 200 rep (or some suitably low number) it should require only three votes by high-rep users to close an obviously stupid question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T13:40:15.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2405" CreationDate="2012-01-31T15:01:43.840" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never noticed the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/descriptivism/&quot; title=&quot;descriptivism tag on English SE site&quot;&gt;descriptivism tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; until today, when it *was** used for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56491/corner-shop-white-bread-metaphor&quot; title=&quot;Corner Shop White Bread Metaphor closed question&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which is now closed. At present, there are ten uses of the descriptivism tag on the site, including the closed question. I considered drafting a wiki entry for it, but I truly don't know what the intended usage is. &lt;strong&gt;Might anyone provide some some suggestions about how this tag should be used?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE engine's spell-checker red lines &lt;em&gt;descriptivism&lt;/em&gt;. This doesn't mean that the tag is incorrect or bad! I mention the red lining only to emphasize that the word, or term, is somewhat unusual for a tag in the context of this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The closed question no longer has the same tags. The &lt;em&gt;descriptivism&lt;/em&gt; tag count equals nine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T03:32:41.413" Title="What is the meaning of the descriptivism tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2012-01-31T15:23:26.847" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't see the original question as it appeared on the site. However, this was how it was entered initially (based on the log):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X, Y, Z - Horizontal, Vertical and?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some SE questions are submitted as interrogatives, some are not. But let's say &lt;code&gt;and?&lt;/code&gt; formatting were to be allowed. And then let's say the inquiry &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; submitted as a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X, Y, Z - Horizontal, Vertical and? ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be rather confusing, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T15:23:26.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2012-01-31T15:31:37.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you had the right idea in using underscores to create a blank space. Using a question mark as a placeholder for the missing word in a question would look strange and create ambiguity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jack and ?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is more confusing than:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jack and ____?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because in the first case the question mark is playing two separate roles. That said, it would be nice if you could put a space between the &lt;code&gt;____&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; to help emphasize the blank:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jack and ____ ?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7225" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T15:31:37.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2402" CreationDate="2012-02-01T03:32:41.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't see the point of the &lt;em&gt;descriptivism&lt;/em&gt; tag on ELU. Rather ironically, the tag itself has no description, but I assume whoever created it was thinking of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;descriptive linguistics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;- the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is spoken&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's about as much use as having a tag called &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; (or one called &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;, come to that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T03:32:41.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-02T16:00:28.620" Score="12" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across two very similar questions that were closed as &quot;not a real question&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/40232/13002&quot;&gt;Another word for &amp;quot;fraction&amp;quot; that fits in conversation like &amp;quot;percent&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/37009/13002&quot;&gt;Term for measuring in fractions of 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They seem perfectly valid to me, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/37017/13002&quot;&gt;nico's answer&lt;/a&gt; is correct.  The word they are looking for is &quot;proportion.&quot;  There is an important but real distinction between percentages and proportions.  Whereas &lt;code&gt;0.1%&lt;/code&gt; represents 1 in 1000, &lt;code&gt;0.1&lt;/code&gt; as a proportion indicates &lt;code&gt;10%&lt;/code&gt; (10 in 100).  It was clear to me that this was the question being asked, and it was not ambiguous or vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might argue that one question should be closed as a duplicate of the other, but each was closed as NARQ.  I suggest they both be re-opened, with the caveat that one might later be closed instead as a duplicate of the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13002" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T10:17:28.577" Title="Why are these questions about percentages closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2408" CreationDate="2012-02-02T20:33:57.190" Score="5" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can access my account on ELU on my Android smartphone just fine (Droid RAZR running Android version 2.3.5), but if I try to enter chat from ELU I get told I need to log in. So I click the login link and give my credentials and it tells me I'm creating a new account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What gives? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I've seen this behavior off and on lately in webkit browsers. Sometimes I have to get in via Firefox. After a while it usually begins to work correctly again, but on my phone so far no luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T22:50:31.053" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T22:50:31.053" Title="Logging into chat: not supported for Android smartphones?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2407" CreationDate="2012-02-03T13:13:04.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Log in to &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;, go to &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange.com/users/chat-stackexchange-login&lt;/code&gt;, and log in to chat from there without having to key in any credentials again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, one may log in to &lt;code&gt;stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; first and then navigate to &lt;code&gt;stackexchange.com/users/chat-login&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2012-03-18T19:42:02.847" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T19:42:02.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2410" CreationDate="2012-02-06T10:57:33.080" Score="0" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder why my post was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57172/a-few-possible-answers-in-the-test&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57172/a-few-possible-answers-in-the-test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17801" OwnerDisplayName="Monica" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-02-08T17:46:55.497" Title="My question was closed" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2409" CreationDate="2012-02-06T11:56:41.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was closed as &quot;too localized&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blurb says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, your question isn't very clear. I don't really know what it's asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it looks like your question is very specific to your test and won't be useful to anyone else in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have better luck if make it clearer what you are asking, and make it more general so it's not specifically about a test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T11:56:41.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2417" CreationDate="2012-02-08T02:33:09.797" Score="5" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/57144/11762&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; recently about synonyms that appear to be antonyms, and whether there is a specific name for such word pairs. It was closed as a duplicate of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1578/11762&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asking &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; such words are not opposites. My question does not address the same issue at all; in fact it is based on the fact that they mean the same thing. Hardly an &quot;exact duplicate&quot; (at least in my opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T18:06:45.947" Title="This isn't a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-09T15:03:38.617" Score="14" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it hasn't actually been closed (yet!?) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/57488/6550&quot;&gt;Word for two people who are the same age&lt;/a&gt; quickly attracted three closevotes - at least one on the grounds that &lt;em&gt;&quot;OP doesn't show any indication of having done background research or having a particular reason for the request.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across the question two hours after it had been posed, by which time it had at least half-a-dozen less-than-definitive answers (imho because unlike some languages, English simply doesn't have a common word for the referent, even though it's a common, simple concept).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me a while to come up with an answer myself (also less-than-satisfactory, since the OP would obviously have liked a &lt;em&gt;common&lt;/em&gt; word), so I hardly think OP &lt;em&gt;failed to do basic research&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm left with OP not demonstrating a &lt;em&gt;particular reason for his request&lt;/em&gt;. Personally, I get really irritated by single-word-requests where it turns out the only reason for asking is that someone wants a name for a function or variable in his program. Particularly where it's obvious the referent to be named is primarily useful in data processing contexts, not real people talking together. But because we have a preponderance of &quot;techies&quot; here on ELU, there are often people happy to provide suggestions for these highly-localised contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many, many questions give no indication at all as to why OP would want to ask his particular question. I've rarely seen this mentioned as a problem, provided the question is &quot;answerable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware there's something of an undercurrent against single-word-requests on ELU - but I don't really understand that, and I don't want to dwell on it. My question, such as it is, boils down to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the factors constituting justification for posing a question on ELU?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to @Feral Oink's answer/comment, I've changed my wording here. I'd like my question to be addressed in a similar fashion to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about what people consider on/off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally I'd like very brief answers, each of which describes &lt;em&gt;one possible justification&lt;/em&gt;, so people can simply up/downvote each one according to whether and how strongly they agree/disagree with it. Supplementary text for/against each reason would probably be best restricted to comments, to keep things really clear. But feel free to edit any &quot;answers&quot; (by me, at least, as I'll mark them community wiki) to clarify exactly what &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; justification it's putting forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T22:53:32.460" Title="What constitutes justification for posing a question on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2012-02-09T19:16:10.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original poster of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57488/word-for-two-people-who-are-the-same-age&quot; title=&quot;the original question&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, @Manoochehr (original poster or &quot;OP&quot;) gave no reason for asking the question. In fact, he stated that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57488/word-for-two-people-who-are-the-same-age/57503#comment108856_57488&quot; title=&quot;comment&quot;&gt;he had no particular reason for asking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; at all. As a result, the question is not &quot;answerable&quot;. The question should specify context, even if it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; data processing, or somewhat localized. We have a &quot;terminology&quot; tag. We also have &quot;too localized&quot; criteria in place that can be invoked for closing questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question, the answers are all widely dispersed e.g. historically-flavored responses, geological terms, education and cognitive terms. None were bad. The question isn't sufficiently specific to respond to otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about equal age is an odd one to apply to people. It does seem more likely to be motivated by a programming or data processing inquiry. It could be pertinent to &quot;people&quot; in a developmental context, either education or biology. But for educational purposes, it would be &quot;age group&quot; or &quot;age range&quot;. The OP specifically said that was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; what he wanted. All that remains, from my generalist point of view, is the context of biology, specifically, fetal development in weeks or months. We don't even want to consider that though, else we will get into the utterly off topic matter of when life begins, at conception or at birth (is a fetus a &quot;people&quot; or not?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have belabored this for illustrative purposes. It isn't constructive for us to go through this process of guessing to answer a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T22:53:32.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2012-02-09T23:56:54.390" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(this is just to start the ball rolling, as something you can vote up or down)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a name for a variable/function in a program OP is working on&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-02-09T23:56:54.390" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-09T23:56:54.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2012-02-10T01:19:18.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to know why &lt;em&gt;XXX&lt;/em&gt; isn't a valid word/construction, given that &lt;em&gt;YYY&lt;/em&gt;  is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18692/what-is-the-explicits-equivalent-of-imply&quot;&gt;Why isn't &quot;exply&quot; the opposite of &quot;imply&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57402/is-betternt-an-ok-word-to-use#comment108927_57402&quot;&gt;If &quot;wouldn't&quot; and &quot;couldn't&quot; are okay, what about &quot;bettern't&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T01:19:18.543" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-10T01:19:18.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2012-02-10T04:55:06.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost the sole rationale for posting a question on EL&amp;amp;U should be that &lt;strong&gt;to be answered well, the question needs to be answered by an English language expert&lt;/strong&gt;. This has nothing to do with the intended use of the answer by the OP, and rightly so. &quot;What do I name my function&quot; is usually not a question requiring the expertise of a grammarian or linguist. Except in the rare case that it is. And in that case it should be allowed. &lt;em&gt;And you may not know which it is until an expert weighs in with an interesting answer, so do not be too quick to close a question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T04:55:06.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2411" CreationDate="2012-02-10T18:06:45.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T18:06:45.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-10T20:39:09.810" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we have some mechanism to remind the OP to drill down to bedrock right in the title question, in the sense that the expansion given in the body of the post does not amount to an out-of-spec modification (or, an instance of bait-and-switch)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two examples that I have encountered recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57544/is-there-an-adjective-for-speechless-making&quot;&gt;Is there an adjective for &amp;#39;speechless-making&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“nonplus” answers the broad question posed by the title, but the narrowing examples given in the body of the post almost amount to what is called an “out-of-spec modification” of the title question (or, an instance of “bait-and-switch”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s another instance: I answered the title question, and the OP complained that it did not fit the examples given in the body of the post, but I explained that I wanted to answer the title question itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39726/phrase-or-idiom-for-funnelling-efforts-in-wrong-direction/57448#comment108995_57448&quot;&gt;Phrase or idiom for funnelling efforts in wrong direction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-02-11T15:32:03.330" Title="Can we nudge the OP's to tighten up the question in the title?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2012-02-11T15:32:03.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Titles are simplifications of the contents and can't carry every nuance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions and answers can be edited (with enough reputation you can do it immediately without waiting for approval from an editor). Of course one wants to preserve the intention of the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To the first example, your answer would work, for the question in the title, but might have been downvoted for other reasons. (an explanation of how or a link might have made it more palatable to the downvoter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the second example, the title was accurate for the thing wanted, and there isn't enough room in the title to give all nuances to exclude your suggestion. That's the nature of simplification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to additional features to help make the title better...what kind of UI or informational technique do you think could possibly be added to encourage better writing, other than 'Please write better'? Note the big 'How to ask' section to the left of where you ask a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't be discouraged; it'll take time to get past the vagaries of what people appreciate and reading between the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-02-11T15:32:03.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2012-02-12T19:33:58.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP doesn't need to show (or even have) any particular reason for asking&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't upvote this because it's my own answer. The main reason for wanting to know why OP asked a question is to gain context. But if OP gives sufficient context to be unambiguously answered, and the question meets all other ELU requirements, it's irrelevant why it was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying we shouldn't &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; why a question was posed - this may be relevant information. But failure to provide &quot;adequate&quot; justification isn't in itself a valid reason for voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T19:33:58.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-13T15:52:09.700" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just posted a comment beginning with &lt;code&gt;@username&lt;/code&gt;, and my &lt;code&gt;@username&lt;/code&gt; part of the comment was not rendered (it was the first word in the comment). Why is that so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16834" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T14:16:24.453" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T23:09:45.417" Title="Why '@' salutation was not rendered" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2422" CreationDate="2012-02-13T17:42:03.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you post a comment under a user named &quot;Smith&quot; and you're writing &quot;@Smith&quot;, the system won't auto-complete it, because you're obviously talking to the author of that answer/question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to direct it at someone else, it doesn't render it, either. It's not a bug. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The auto-fill will activate only when: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you're writing a comment at someone else other than the author;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that someone else already posted a comment under that question/answer (also if these were posted by you).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-02-13T17:42:03.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2425" CreationDate="2012-02-15T00:26:51.747" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EUIFF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;numbers on favorites at 16:59&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tUKrC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;numbers on favorites at 17:07&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the pictures above, taken from the &lt;em&gt;Favorites&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt; subpage of some random userpage first at 23:59Z and then at 00:07Z, what do the various numbers highlighted with red background represent?  Is there a place on stackexchange that explains such things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, the tooltips associated with words next to the numbers summarize what the words mean but don't spell out what the numbers mean and when or why they change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Favorites&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;To look at&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;Liked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2012-02-15T06:29:17.453" LastActivityDate="2012-02-15T06:38:18.797" Title="What do the red-background numbers on user pages represent?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2424" CreationDate="2012-02-15T06:38:18.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number refers to notifications about the items in each tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you gained 965 reputation since checking it last, have 496 responses (answers, comments, etc.), and 82 of your favourite questions have had activity on them (edits, new answers, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The counts are cleared when you visit the tabs. When you do, new items aren't really highlighted in any way, although you can sort the Favourites tab by &quot;activity&quot; and see which questions changed recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2012-02-15T06:38:18.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2457" CreationDate="2012-02-15T12:19:17.740" Score="2" ViewCount="11958" Body="&lt;p&gt;To say 'grammatically correct', there are various phrases in use, including 'proper grammar', 'right grammar', 'correct grammar' and perhaps, others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All or most of them may be correct and permitted. However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: if one were to follow a preferred terminology, what would be the right expression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;supplementary&lt;/strong&gt;: Do we have a phrase adopted/ recommended on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" OwnerDisplayName="Kris" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T22:45:04.420" Title="Grammatically correct, proper grammar, right grammar or correct grammar?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2315" CreationDate="2012-02-16T07:50:38.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help and French version @Gilles. Stack Exchange graphic designer made the pdf files and Stack Exchange paid for the flyers to be printed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I made them publicly available at Expolangues and handed some out as well whenever I could, even to journalists;  this one had his own tour of StackExchange afterwards and wrote an article:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vousnousils.fr/2012/02/06/la-langue-anglaise-en-questions-reponses-521134&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.vousnousils.fr/2012/02/06/la-langue-anglaise-en-questions-reponses-521134&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are both pdf files:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62542206/english-a5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62542206/english-a5.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62542206/french-a5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62542206/french-a5.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T07:50:38.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-16T08:50:36.240" Score="-2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could a succint version of the reason for closing a question be given in main? Since the closing of a question usually implies some negativity, it would be nice if at least those closed due to &quot;non-negative&quot; reason of merely being a duplicate were noted as such, for example,&#xA;Did Pooh learn English from Christopher Robin? [closed as a duplicate of this question]&#xA;where &quot;this question&quot; is a link to the first time the question was asked. Even if the moderators don't want to bother with specifying other reasons, it seems to me that this one reason ought to be made explicit with the relevant questions in main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17657" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-01-22T20:41:14.757" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T00:06:26.500" Title="Upfront reason for closing a question needed" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2012-02-16T09:31:54.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you're right. I asked something similar recently, and only now saw this question of yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2418/can-we-nudge-the-ops-to-tighten-up-the-question-in-the-title&quot;&gt;Can we nudge the OP&amp;#39;s to tighten up the question in the title?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T09:31:54.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2012-02-17T14:41:07.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say that if a title is literate and witty, if perhaps a bit oblique to some, it should escape the wrath of the censorious and the humorless. Especially in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T14:41:07.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5484" CreationDate="2012-02-17T17:47:05.743" Score="17" ViewCount="1372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that a new formatting directive be added to access the font’s small capitals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;smcaps&amp;gt;some text&amp;lt;/smcaps&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; would work, but I encourage discussion on any syntactic variant that appeals to you.  The coolest thing is that since this is a simple matter of invoking the ᴄss &lt;code&gt;font-variant: small-caps&lt;/code&gt; style spec, it is super-easy to implement. It would give better-looking pages for next to no effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wonder why this is needed, please see whatever the current word-of-the-day is at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; at the time you read this. I will not link to the actual page, because it switches daily.  But click through the ᴡᴏᴛᴅ link to see how real entries are supposed to look. You will see that the ᴏᴇᴅ  uses small capitals for headwords, for authors in citations, and for the major volume in Roman numerals for multivolume works.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just one example; many, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; reference works one would like to cite here use small capitals. It’s not just the ᴏᴇᴅ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wonder why typographers consider small caps as integral a part of a font as italic, bold, or text figures, see Robert Bringhurst’s &lt;em&gt;Elements of Typographic Style&lt;/em&gt;. I’m sure that ᴇʟ&amp;amp;ᴜ is using Georgia because it’s the most widely available font that supports text figures, as one of course wants to have.  Like text figures, small capitals are an often-missed by critical component of good typography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wonder why one cannot just use the Unicode small capitals, it’s because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are not very many of them;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Georgia font used here and in ᴇʟ&amp;amp;ᴜ proper does not even support them and so causes infelicitous fontsubbing;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you look at this posting from several different browsers and/or operating  systems, you will get very different results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some are only four or five yeras old in the spec, which means that even alterate serif fonts may not yet support the Unicode code points, as vendors are especially poor at this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me show you how poorly Unicode small capitals are typically rendered by browsers.  Consider this &lt;code&gt;tr&lt;/code&gt; statement from the Perl language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tr[aæbcdðeǝfgɠhiɨjklłmnoœɔȣprɹꝵstuʉɯvwyzʒγλπρψл]&#xA;  [ᴀᴁʙᴄᴅᴆᴇⱻꜰɢʛʜɪᵻᴊᴋʟᴌᴍɴᴏɶᴐᴕᴘʀᴚꝶꜱᴛᴜᵾꟺᴠᴡʏᴢᴣᴦᴧᴨᴩᴪᴫ];&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that is bad, just imagine writing “ᴀ ᴁ ʙ ᴄ ᴅ ᴆ ᴇ ⱻ ꜰ ɢ ʛ ʜ ɪ ᵻ ᴊ ᴋ ʟ ᴌ ᴍ ɴ ᴏ ɶ ᴐ ᴕ ᴘ ʀ ᴚ ꝶ ꜱ ᴛ ᴜ ᵾ ꟺ ᴠ ᴡ ʏ ᴢ ᴣ ᴦ ᴧ ᴨ ᴩ ᴪ ᴫ” in the normal serif roman. It looks horrible.  The ᴄss font-variant fixes all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even without using a modern serif font like Arno Pro (standard with Adobe ᴄs3) or Alfios (a very nice free font by George Douros), and just sticking with simple things like Georgia (preferred for text figures) or Times New Roman, if you used the ᴄss markup then the browser would use the right small caps without needing to mess around with funny Unicode, or worry about searches getting messed up.  The browser even emulates small caps for fonts lacking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make our pages look better, and it would make our citations more accurate. It seems only fair and right that ᴇʟ&amp;amp;ᴜ be able to accurately cite standard reference works.  Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/688/is-rather-shifting-to-become-a-verb/58339#58339&quot;&gt;one example&lt;/a&gt; where I do so, but I used Unicode small caps only for Roman numeral volumes in the citations. I used simple &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; where the ᴏᴇᴅ has small caps for its headwords, and I used the regular roman instead of small caps for the authors’ names in the citations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would look much better, and be more correct, to use actual small capitals when accurately citing references. You would hope that ᴇʟ&amp;amp;ᴜ would be able to accurately cite standard reputable reference works without all these lamentable compromises.  And because of ᴄss, it would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;very easy to implement&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and not risk harming &lt;strong&gt;clarity, portability, or searchability&lt;/strong&gt; at all the way all alteratives do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no particular attachment to the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;smcaps&amp;gt;some text&amp;lt;/smcaps&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; syntax; it’s just one idea. I realize that by making it ʜᴛᴍʟ-ish it would work only in the main text, not in commentary, but I was unable to think of something that would work in the markdown within comments that did not risk break backwards compatibility. Perhaps others can come up with a better syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a screen grab that shows how the ᴏᴇᴅ uses small caps in all three different ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fGi9K.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It uses them for headwords, for authors’ names in citations, and for major volumes in roman numerals in citations.  It’s the first that are especially useful, although the second is nice to have.  The third doesn’t matter so much, although it’s nice to be able to make a complete citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do all this through the ᴄss trick I mentioned earlier; it’s really easy to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T13:32:21.463" Title="Proposal to add small-capitals formatting directive" Tags="|feature-request|formatting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2012-02-17T18:22:15.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you tried using U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE instead of the regular space? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often have to use the various Unicode spaces on StackExchange to get things to behave properly. For example, here are all the code points that Unicode considers whitespace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;U+0009  CHARACTER TABULATION&#xA;U+000A  LINE FEED (LF)&#xA;U+000B  LINE TABULATION&#xA;U+000C  FORM FEED (FF)&#xA;U+000D  CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)&#xA;U+0020  SPACE&#xA;U+0085  NEXT LINE (NEL)&#xA;U+00A0  NO-BREAK SPACE&#xA;U+1680  OGHAM SPACE MARK&#xA;U+180E  MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR&#xA;U+2000  EN QUAD&#xA;U+2001  EM QUAD&#xA;U+2002  EN SPACE&#xA;U+2003  EM SPACE&#xA;U+2004  THREE-PER-EM SPACE&#xA;U+2005  FOUR-PER-EM SPACE&#xA;U+2006  SIX-PER-EM SPACE&#xA;U+2007  FIGURE SPACE&#xA;U+2008  PUNCTUATION SPACE&#xA;U+2009  THIN SPACE&#xA;U+200A  HAIR SPACE&#xA;U+2028  LINE SEPARATOR&#xA;U+2029  PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR&#xA;U+202F  NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE&#xA;U+205F  MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE&#xA;U+3000  IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those are more useful than others.  You can even use these to control kerning, when a glyph collides with another and needs to be spaced away from it. This wouldn’t normally happen in real typesetting, but browser tech is super primitive.  For example, these all suck in unkerned Georgia roman — (jif) f’ f” f] — and are even worse in italic — &lt;em&gt;(jif) f’ f” f]&lt;/em&gt; — see how bad that looks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can fix those with one of the Unicode thin-ish spaces.  So you could for example write ( jif ) using a HAIR SPACE or &lt;em&gt;( jif )&lt;/em&gt; using a THIN SPACE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primitive, but good to know, especially since the same trick will fix your problem, too, which is a much more frequent one than worrying about kerning collisions. Remember there are zero-width and no-breaking spaces too.  Sometimes the four joiners and non-joiners come in handy, too, to make it behave the way you want it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the screwups involving fi and such, it’s best to just replace it with compatibility ligature, U+FB01 ﬁ.  Yes, this messes up searches, but they should be being run with Unicode casefolding. Under Unicode, the two-character version and the ligature have the same casefold, so would both match. The core StackExchange code isn’t Unicode-savvy though, and doesn’t bother/manage/know to do casefolding correctly. Oh well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if they did, then ‘FINE’, ‘fine’, and ‘ﬁne’ would all match case-insensitively, but because StackExchange doesn’t use Unicode rules, this needelessly fails. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someday maybe they’ll fix the bug to use Unicode rules.  Hope springs eternal. They probably should be using NFKD searches, too, but that’s a whole ’nother story.  It’s a great way to improve your recall at the cost of some so-small-as-to-be-meaningless amount of precision. That’s what Adobe does, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T18:09:44.007" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T18:09:44.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-19T15:07:42.363" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Active Questions&lt;/strong&gt; shows 'modified n mins ago' against each question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you click on the question, it takes you to the top of page, not the bookmark where the question was 'modified n mins ago'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with the link provided in notifications that takes you to the corresponding bookmark on the page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly to the above, 'modified n mins ago' can have a link under it pointing to the appropriate bookmark, while the question title can stay as now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T22:25:57.117" Title="Active Questions: Bookmark to 'modified n mins ago'" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2435" CreationDate="2012-02-20T03:09:56.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click on the question, it does indeed take you to the top of page, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you click on the &lt;em&gt;'modified n mins ago'&lt;/em&gt; hotspot, it goes straight to the actual item modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T03:09:56.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2012-02-20T19:22:00.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is actually no absolute need for small caps in any type of writing that I know about. They are always an aesthetic choice, not a semantic one. In other words, there is nothing that can only be communicated via small caps, instead of via judicious use of all-caps plus some bold or italic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Markdown has small-cap capabilities and it just hasn't been enabled for StackOverflow, then I would have no objections to enabling it, but this isn't something that I think the developers should spend a lot of time on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is absolutely worse than useless is using Unicode small-caps, because more often than not, the result is unreadable. Especially for acronyms/initialisms, just use all caps, for heaven's sake. (I would argue that it is actually incorrect to use small caps for acronyms&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jEzVz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Why Unicode smallcaps are a horrible idea&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* Small caps are a formatting choice like bold or italic: they do not affect whether a text is correctly spelled and punctuated. Capital letters, on the other hand, carry semantic weight: &lt;em&gt;england&lt;/em&gt; is an incorrect spelling. Similarly, I believe that because &lt;em&gt;ascii&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;oed&lt;/em&gt; would be incorrect spellings of these acronyms (or initialisms or abbreviations or whatever you want to call them), small-caps &lt;em&gt;ᴀꜱᴄɪɪ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ᴏᴇᴅ&lt;/em&gt; are also incorrect spellings. Instead, you should write them as all-caps &lt;em&gt;ASCII&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, even if small caps are available as a formatting choice.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-02-20T20:45:55.817" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T20:45:55.817" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2426" CreationDate="2012-02-21T02:14:06.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Standard grammar&quot; seems to be the usual term in places like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3639" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T02:14:06.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2435" CreationDate="2012-02-21T21:50:40.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;modified&quot; link works correctly for me, and as designed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To understand how that link works, it is necessary to understand when a question is considered modified. A question is considered modified, when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has been edited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question gets a new answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An answer for that question has been edited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &quot;special&quot; case, a created question is considered &quot;modified.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all these cases, the &quot;modified&quot; link takes to the post that has been modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the first four active questions are currently the following ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OdnNh.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first question shown there, the &quot;6s ago&quot; link takes to the question, because I have edited the question itself, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58749/having-influence-in-perfect-tense&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Having influence&amp;quot; in perfect tense&lt;/a&gt;. In the second question, the &quot;11m ago&quot; link takes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58765/usage-of-hypocrite/58766#58766&quot;&gt;the answer given from simchona&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58765/usage-of-hypocrite&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58765/usage-of-hypocrite&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T22:25:57.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2455" CreationDate="2012-02-21T22:33:54.187" Score="11" ViewCount="2916" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask because the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean#comment111627_10659&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean#comment111627_10659&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has been closed as general reference, but the only links I see are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_read&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_read&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;general reference&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I the only one who finds this a wee bit vague? I'm pretty sure that would exclude Urban Dictionary, but I'm less certain about Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can it definitively answer anything?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is a &quot;standard internet reference source&quot;? (What RFC(s) are these defined in?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about other sites, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt;? Where is the line drawn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T20:11:36.783" Title="What is a &quot;General Reference&quot;: Wikipedia? TV Tropes? Urban Dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|general-reference|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2428" CreationDate="2012-02-21T22:42:53.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is necessary to report exactly the reason why a question has been closed in the pages listing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no negativity in a closed question, but I don't see in which way reporting the exact reason for closing a question would reduced the negativity of a closed question; even if the page would use &lt;em&gt;[off-topic]&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning is still &quot;closed because it was off-topic.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T22:42:53.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-02-21T22:55:14.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My general rule is that I must find the answer in 2 out of 3 standard dictionaries/thesauruses (I usually check Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, and the OED). Beyond that, I tend to err on the side of caution and not close it as general reference (other close reasons are still eligible). I do not personally consider Wikipedia, TVTropes, or other wiki sites as standard references, since their answers cannot be said to be definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2012-02-22T00:32:23.197" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T00:32:23.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-02-21T23:01:49.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a little vague, simply for the fact the closing reason should adapt for different Stack Exchange sites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more specific part is, &quot;designed specifically to find that type of information.&quot; What should be probably be added is that the link given by the standard internet reference source should be for a trusted source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I could use Google to find the meaning for an acronym, but if the link takes to a site reporting funny (invented) definitions, I cannot close the question because that link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About Wikipedia, simply for the fact it can be edited from everybody, it is not a definitive resource; as a matter of fact, there are articles in Wikipedia that are marked as needing a reference (with the famous &quot;[citation needed]&quot; phrase). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2012-02-22T20:11:36.783" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T20:11:36.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2422" CreationDate="2012-02-21T23:09:45.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The @-reference to a user is automatically removed in some cases, when that user is already notified of a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if Jasper Loy would have used &lt;em&gt;@Alenanno&lt;/em&gt;, that would have been removed, because the comment was clearly for him, who is already notified.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my comment, which is the second comment for that answer, the @-reference has not been removed because I could refer the comment to Jasper Loy, instead of Alenanno. To notice that both Alenanno and Jasper Loy should get a notification for my comment; for sure, Alenanno gets notified because I have commented the post he created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T23:09:45.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="512" CreationDate="2012-02-22T02:50:14.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proofreading questions I vote to close are more like:  &quot;Is there a better way to word this&quot;  or  &quot;Is this a good sentence&quot;.  The sample question about &quot;although&quot; could probably have been worded in a way to make it a little more specific / constructive, but fundamentally it feels on-topic to me.  Seems like it's asking more about the use of &quot;although&quot; in general than about how to tweak the wording of that particular sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's all incredibly subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T02:50:14.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-02-22T03:15:26.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I'm concerned, a question like &lt;em&gt;What does &quot;TL;DR:&quot; mean?&lt;/em&gt; doesn't even &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; an &quot;Answer&quot; that people can vote on and thereby gain rep points. I'd just give the relevant information in a comment (together with a link, so OP could confirm what I said).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean - look at it! Currently 30 upvotes for the question, and over 70 in total for &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; answers! Does anyone &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; think it needs to stay open in case someone else comes up with a better answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should be far more willing to close &quot;general reference&quot; questions as quickly as possible. If you can easily (and definitively) enlighten OP in a comment, do so and vote to close. If you see someone else has already done this, add your closevote, and don't upvote a trivial &quot;Answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site has far too many users with only limited knowledge of English, falling over themselves to upvote the few questions they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know are correct. Without wishing to seem elitist, I think all this achieves is to devalue the rep system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T03:15:26.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-02-22T03:21:54.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree it's vague, but is that such a bad thing?  If you get five people to agree that it's general reference, does it really matter if they all have precisely the same definition? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less concerned with whether the source is &quot;standard&quot; as I am with whether it's &quot;authoritative&quot;.  Can it be trusted given the nature of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not consider Wikipedia to be &quot;authoritative&quot; about &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;, though it's often a good starting point for finding a reputable source.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many sites that might not be considered &quot;standard&quot; could still be &quot;authoritative&quot; given the nature of the question.  Urban Dictionary might be an authority on slang, and (less likely) TV Tropes on TV stereotypes, for instance, though I would not consider either one authoritative in most circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T03:21:54.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2426" CreationDate="2012-02-22T03:44:43.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;@PeteWilson put in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I claim (and hope) that there exists such a collection of rules for English grammar. These rules change, to be sure, but glacially, like the rule to never split an infinitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I've learned since coming here is that there is much less agreement that I had expected on a single &quot;standard&quot; collection of rules.  Style guides disagree; textbooks disagree; dictionaries disagree; EL&amp;amp;U enthusiasts disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question of whether to call it correct/right/proper/standard/etc. is a bit moot if there's no such thing as correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T03:44:43.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-02-22T11:28:41.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, it's fair to say that Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary are not definitive resources, but look at the question for a moment. If I &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=TL;DR#q=define+TL%3BDR&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;prmd=imvns&amp;amp;ei=Bc9ET8TRIdCXhQfSg7iRAg&amp;amp;start=10&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&amp;amp;fp=d272a33775ff33c4&amp;amp;biw=1280&amp;amp;bih=959&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google define TL;DR&lt;/a&gt; then &lt;em&gt;every single result&lt;/em&gt; has the same answer (so long as the result answers the question). I think it's fair to assume this is not a coincidence, and should have been the asker's first port of call. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though there is no specific &quot;standard internet reference source&quot;, the fact that every site that defines &lt;em&gt;tl;dr&lt;/em&gt; gives it the same meaning means that this is a general reference question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T11:28:41.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2451" CreationDate="2012-02-22T14:18:02.197" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58836/in-the-next-two-weeks-or-next-two-weeks&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In the next two weeks&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;next two weeks&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T19:13:27.287" Title="What part of the FAQ does this question violate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2450" CreationDate="2012-02-22T14:34:31.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see the asker wants a rewrite of &quot;They have decided to go to a week after next week.&quot; We don't do rewrites, it comes under proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the user doesn't seem to have a strong enough grasp of English to make them a good fit for the site. We are for &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&quot; after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2012-02-22T14:41:57.757" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T14:41:57.757" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2450" CreationDate="2012-02-22T15:50:05.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my book this question is not off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately in my mother-tongue the phrasing to the given question is very similar to English so I am able to decide which one I have to choose and know the difference between his examples but I can understand that for a non-native person it can be difficult.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In case of the given question it is very clear to me, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My friend and I decided to go to the beach in the next two weeks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;think of this sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My friend and I are on vacation in the next two weeks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am not sure, if this is possible in English or if there must be &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; but at least in my native language both are correct (and mean nearly the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Independent if &lt;em&gt;in the next two weeks&lt;/em&gt; is possible in my example or not, how should a non-native person decide that? And this has nothing to do if &lt;em&gt;the user doesn't seem to have a strong enough grasp of English&lt;/em&gt;. If so I have to sign off, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For OP's question: I am sure there are lots of non-native confronting this issue or similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16833" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T15:50:05.207" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-22T16:37:15.567" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/5084/is-sparkle-the-correct-word&quot;&gt;Is “sparkle” the correct word?&lt;/a&gt; The question consists of asking if the right word was used, with nothing said about the goals the writer wants to achieve. (We &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/181/policy-change-writing-critique-questions-now-welcome&quot;&gt;require&lt;/a&gt; that for critique questions.) We received this on Writers this morning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I closed it as vague, and I'd like to know why the question was sent to us? This is not a critique question, it's just a vague, unclear question tagged &quot;critique&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The question has been clarified a bit and re-opened on Writers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T17:15:01.247" Title="Why was this question migrated to Writers?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2453" CreationDate="2012-02-22T17:12:05.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not being one who voted to move, the people who did vote to migrate were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;migrated to writers.stackexchange.com by FumbleFingers, Lynn, MetaEd, Kris, RegDwight Ѭſ道♦ 6 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not necessarily the best fit for Writers in its current form, I would hazard the guess that the OP's wording of &quot;Is sparkle correct in this context?&quot; gives the impression that he is looking to make the best word choice for some type of (unstated) purpose, rather than looking to make sure his word is &quot;correct&quot; in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ping RegDwight in chat to speak with him about the migration, as he cast the last vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T17:12:05.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-02-22T17:52:18.733" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A standard reference is a source (book, website, what have you) that is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;specifically designed to provide a certain type of information&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. So, if you're looking for a definition, a dictionary is a standard reference source; if you're looking for a synonym, a thesaurus should be your first destination; etc. So yes, Urban Dictionary is a reference source for current slang terms; TV Tropes is a &lt;strike&gt;black hole&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;ahem, sorry&lt;/em&gt; source for looking up reoccurring metaphors in popular media; and Wikipedia is a reference source for things like birthdates of famous people, the list of rulers of a country, or a basic overview of how radios work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether these sources are &lt;em&gt;accurate&lt;/em&gt; is a different question entirely. The point is, you shouldn't ask a question on EL&amp;amp;U if there is a type of reference source designed to answer that kind of question, where if you had bothered to look in said reference source, you would have found your answer quickly and easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the &lt;em&gt;tl;dr&lt;/em&gt; example, if this question occurred to you and the first thing you did was ask on EL&amp;amp;U, your question would be quite rightly closed. If instead you looked first on Acronym Finder and didn't find an answer, and you mentioned this in your question on EL&amp;amp;U, then closure wouldn't be quite so automatic. And if you looked also in Urban Dictionary and found a definition that doesn't seem to fit the context where you encountered the term (say some joker defined it as &quot;the law;delicious reading&quot; or something), and again, you &lt;em&gt;mentioned this fact in your question&lt;/em&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U, then your question would no longer be general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that search engines are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; standard reference sources, at least not for the type of information that people can ask about on EL&amp;amp;U. Search engines are a way to look up web pages, and web pages are off topic here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T17:52:18.733" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2450" CreationDate="2012-02-22T19:13:27.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support Matt Ellen's answer and have this to add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, the OP gives a perfectly fine example of an English phrase &quot;a week after next week,&quot; but without explaining why he doesn't just use this phrase, gives three alternatives and doesn't describe why he is confused about the choices he gives.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close as Not A Real Question, because it is difficult to determine what is being asked. Now it may be that there is some subtlety of the English language that could be elucidated by this question, but that is not what has been asked.  It's not like he wants to know the difference in usage between &quot;a week after next week,&quot; &quot;in the next two weeks,&quot; or &quot;two weeks from now.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one of OP's three alternatives is textbook English, so basically, as worded, the question boils down to &quot;which of these phrases is correct English?&quot; which is very much ESL and off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T19:13:27.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2426" CreationDate="2012-02-22T22:45:04.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;Grammatical&lt;/em&gt; has a fairly specific linguistic sense, but the terms &lt;em&gt;Correct, Proper,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Right&lt;/em&gt; don't; they're just opinions. I try not to use them, except in scare quotes. As P. J. O'Rourke put it, &quot;Opinions about language are about as interesting as opinions about arithmetic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, what most of our questioners really &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; want is authoritative opinions or explanations that agree with something their teachers (or their teachers' teachers' teachers) once said that they didn't understand. It's too bad there isn't any available for them; but it seems to be a fact of linguistic life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T22:45:04.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2453" CreationDate="2012-02-23T21:03:38.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess that, as there is nothing grammatically incorrect about using &lt;em&gt;sparkle&lt;/em&gt; in that sentence, the question has been understood as being about writing style, and voted to be migrated on Writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users who voted to migrate probably didn't know the question would be considered a critique question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/posts/5084/revisions&quot;&gt;the tag was added after migration&lt;/a&gt;), nor did they know you have restrictions on that type of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2012-02-23T21:03:38.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2012-02-24T20:31:12.467" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one case the question is asking how to call the numbers in the range between 0 and 1; in the other case, the question is asking how to call the fractions of 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, I see the question as too broad, because the numbers in the range between 0 and 1 include 0.1, 0.01, 0.0001, 0.333333, 1.25/10, the logarithm with base 10 of 2; those numbers are rational numbers, or irrational numbers, but those terms apply to any real number, not to numbers included in the range between 0, and 1. If the question would have specified that it was asking about 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0,8, 0.9, and 1 it would have been probably different.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the second case, fractions like 1/8, 1/12000, 1/3, 1/40 doesn't have a specific name, but they are generically called fractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions have been closed because they cannot be reasonably answered in their current form, which means there isn't a specific word for the question being asked. &lt;em&gt;It is not a real question&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean the user is stating something, instead of asking a question; it means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it cannot be answered in its current form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they were not closed as not a real question, they could have been closed at too localized, as knowing that fractions of 1 are still called fractions doesn't help any future reader.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-opening both the questions, and then closing one as duplicate of the other one is not something that I would do because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question that is closed, and that deserves to be closed, is not re-opened to be closed again with a different reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;supposing that one of the questions is really asking about 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0,8, 0.9, and 1, then the two questions are not really duplicates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To notice that the closing reason reported when a question is closed is the one chosen from the majority of the users who voted to close; if 3 users voted to close as not a real question, and 2 users voted to close as too localized, then the question result closed as not a question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Re-opening the question to close it again could still have the result of having the question closed for the exact same reason because, for example, 4 users vote to close as not a real question, and a users votes to close as not constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-28T10:07:34.787" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T10:07:34.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-25T06:16:25.293" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if it would be beneficial to have activity buttons showing the activity of users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g., in Gmail, on the chat list, you can see if your contacts are logged in(green), dormant(orange), or logged off(grey)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking maybe it could be implemented in this site as well, just to let people whether or not to expect a response anytime soon to a querying comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g., I ask a question. Someone answers it. I'm still not quite clear, so I put a comment below asking about a particular point I want to clear up. But, I don't know if my answerer has already logged off or not, and I might wait for say half an hour before I realise he is off. Then, I will log off, and wait the next day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas, activity buttons will save me this waiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who had this thought before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18425" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Feature to show activity of user" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2460" CreationDate="2012-02-25T06:47:13.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is already implemented. You can see if a user is currently active by looking at his profile. It will show &quot;last activity&quot; on EL&amp;amp;U. This line changes colors depending on the time of last activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2012-02-25T07:17:07.743" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T07:17:07.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2460" CreationDate="2012-02-25T11:23:29.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest thing is the &lt;em&gt;&quot;seen&quot;&lt;/em&gt; on your profile, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bwlfc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposals have been made about this feature on MSO, but they have all been rejected. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/67143/176533&quot;&gt;Online/offline or Away status indicator in Stack overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/84028/176533&quot;&gt;Can we show status of user? [closed]&lt;/a&gt; (duplicate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/4445/176533&quot;&gt;Is there a way to identify whether users are online or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/58788/176533&quot;&gt;How to check users online or offline [closed]&lt;/a&gt; (duplicate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T11:23:29.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-25T19:14:54.467" Score="5" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while ELU.SE tells me I've earned some more powers to do things I'm not interested in, but the one thing I'd like to know how to do doesn't seem to have a button anywhere obvious. Namely, I'd like to be able to post my answers on closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has happened to me several times that I've put a lot of effort into an answer draft and then somebody else has decided, after the question's been up for 15 minutes or so, that it didn't in fact merit any attention, from me or anyone else, and closed it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not fond of wasting effort, and I'd like my answer to be posted, so that the OP and anyone else who cares to can make up their own minds about it, rather than having the opportunity taken away arbitrarily by someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please indicate what, if anything, I can do about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Reopening prematurely Closed questions" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-25T19:37:04.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not fond of wasting effort, and I'd like my answer to be posted, so that the OP and anyone else who cares to can make up their own minds about it, rather than having the opportunity taken away arbitrarily by someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arbitrarily? The voting system works to close questions which are felt to be off topic. It requires 5 users to agree that it was a poor question, or any number of users plus a mod vote. That doesn't seem arbitrary. You can vote to reopen if you have enough reputation, which is about as fair as it gets. Closing isn't always forever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting answers to poor questions doesn't improve the quality of the site, and encourages more poor questions if there is an expectation it will be answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, using &quot;arbitrary&quot; implies intent you can't presume (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/116865/arbitrarily-closed-post-on-stackoverflow&quot;&gt;Arbitrarily closed post on Stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;). There's also a grace period (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91922/how-was-this-answer-posted-after-this-question-was-closed&quot;&gt;How was this answer posted after this question was closed?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T19:37:04.387" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-25T20:07:37.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) You can participate more in Meta; there are several issues I think which are not quite clear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) You can contest a closure using comments/meta/chat.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) If you participate more on ELU you can get a sense of many of the questions that have potential to be closed and then you might back off.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) If the closing is a duplicate, better post in the question the duplicate is linked to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5) Many of the closed ones are eventually deleted, so in long term posting in one that would be potentially closed is not useful. Besides, such posts do not normally benefit of votes, views, feedback etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6) One with at least 3k can vote for reopening. A question can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36415/how-do-you-reopen-a-closed-question&quot;&gt;reopen&lt;/a&gt; with 5 votes or 1 vote from moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T22:22:03.063" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-26T17:57:06.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your point of view the question is prematurely closed and needs to be reopened because you've put effort into an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the closers, the question is bad and needs to be closed in order to stop others from trying to answer. That is what closing is all about; you are not supposed to post answers to closed questions. The mechanism of closing was designed specifically to prevent further activity on a question that is poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end it is just unfortunate timing for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as to redress, one can earn enough rep to be allowed to vote to reopen (a link appears for that where the 'close' link used to appear, with enough rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another form of redress is to post to meta 'Why was question X closed?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or to go to chat (where a number of users monitor) and try to discuss the reason for the closure and to try to convince people to vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One UI feature that is nice is that when you are in the middle of answering, if another answer is posted, a notification at the top tells you that a new answer has appeared and allows you to refresh the page. Maybe a similar feature could be requested by you for a similar notification of closing, to tell the answerer to (possibly) not bother continuing with the effort of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-02-26T18:26:36.650" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T18:26:36.650" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-26T19:56:21.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some sympathy with John's position here. I was pretty sure this had happened to me before, but having noted Reg's comment about a &lt;em&gt;&quot;four-hour grace period&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I decided to check things out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just waited until a suitable &quot;question likely to be closed soon&quot; turned up (easy done here on ELU these days!), and started typing into the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Your Answer&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; box. Then I left that browser window open until it did get closed soon after, at which point I clicked on &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Post Your Answer&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. I got all sorts of trouble from the page - including having to pass a Capcha test to prove I was a real human being - but no way was it going to let me submit an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully accept that some questions are erroneously closed simply because the OP hasn't been given enough time (or can't be bothered) to improve the question. I also think that sometimes one person may be able to understand and respond to a &quot;valid&quot; question where others see nothing of merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, in my test above, all I typed in as my answer was &quot;test text&quot;, so the first attempt to submit just got me a raspberry because my text wasn't long enough. I suppose I'll have to repeat the process with &quot;some longer test text&quot;, just to make sure that didn't somehow affect things. If it still doesn't work, I'll edit John's question to include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/bug/info&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &quot;workaround&quot; (assuming your carefully-crafted answer text is still &quot;copy-and-pastable&quot; when you realise it can't be posted), you could always open another browser window, copy the original question text, re-ask it yourself, and answer your own question! So far as I'm concerned, &lt;em&gt;&quot;because I think I have a good answer&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2412/&quot;&gt;perfectly valid reason for asking a question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T19:56:21.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-26T21:10:28.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can vote to close a question (the privilege require a reputation of at least 5000), you can also vote to re-open a question. The link is where you normally see the &quot;close&quot; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6PNvF.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question has been locked, you don't see the &quot;reopen&quot; link, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90/what-are-the-most-common-english-usage-mistakes&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90/what-are-the-most-common-english-usage-mistakes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kfX4B.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you vote to re-open a question, 10k users can see the question reported in the flags page; if they think it's worth being re-opened, then will cast their vote too; if the question gets 5 votes, it will be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T21:10:28.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2492" CreationDate="2012-02-27T16:46:37.660" Score="58" ViewCount="4959" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.&amp;quot; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benjamin Disraeli, attr. by Mark Twain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.&amp;quot; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ronald Coase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some time now, contributors to EL&amp;amp;U have offered NGrams in support of their arguments. Now, there is nothing wrong with this practice &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;: I have done so myself, and have seen others do it in a way that acknowledges the margin for error inherent in a flawed system. When done well it is done in a spirit of inquiry, citing the NGram as possible evidence; when it is done poorly, it is trumpeted as absolute proof of someone's contention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How flawed is the system? According to @Kosmonaut (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1198/2303&quot;&gt;replying&lt;/a&gt; to a different meta question),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[T]here is a ton of metadata error in Google Books — enough to possibly be concerned about a lot of the conclusions one might draw from it. As it happens, I am working on a project that was originally going to use some Google Books data, but in-depth analysis seems to indicate that dates are way off (as in, 25% of the pre-1800 tokens I have looked at so far seem to be off on their publication dates by an average of ~100 years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the matter of comparison terms. Sometimes one can find comparisons that will work, but very often the terms can't be compared exactly. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/19055/2303&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; one of our high-rep users attempts to adduce an NGram to answer a question about nuances of meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I1i7M.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One wonders how relative frequency is germane to any discussion of the meanings of those words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another flaw involves book results being used to draw inferences about spoken language as well, or at least to conflate the two. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/55433/2303&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; [comment chain since then has been deleted for unclear reasons], another contributor uses NGrams to show that one usage is vastly more common than another, which obviously feels counter-intuitive to him because he admits in the comment that &amp;quot;FWIW, it surprised me too. I would probably say 'go for a swim' myself.&amp;quot; The conclusion I draw is that Google NGrams are a hammer looking for a nail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another case where someone draws a faulty inference based on an NGram search:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=a%20week%20hence&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave it to the eloquent @MrHen to debunk the chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that NGram support any particular usage? Isn't it just tracking uses of &amp;quot;a week hence&amp;quot;? How would it know if that hence was for the future or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when they can define their terms, users of NGrams succumb to the simpleton awe inspired by the sight of a dramatic projection of minuscule data points to show great trends and differences. They ignore the scale on the Y-axis, which reports the differences in a range that may be only a few cases in tens of millions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And very often NGram answers garner upvotes because people don't think about the data behind the charts and simply look at the pretty line graphs and upvote the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against Google NGrams. Used intelligently, they can offer some valuable information. But I believe them not to be the unimpeachable source people pretend they are on EL&amp;amp;U. I'm asking for some kind of standards. I don't know what kind, but I hope you all have some suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDENDUM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As if to prove my point, we have another NGram travesty &amp;quot;proving&amp;quot; a point with faulty data. Because of a bug (or quirk, if you will) in the Google NGram Viewer, hyphenated words invariably flatline. A hyphenated word needs to be separated into a trigram by adding spaces around the hyphen. Notice the difference between these two charts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZKDdS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLuJh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry I switched the colors. But at least I resurrected &amp;quot;upper-case&amp;quot; from oblivion. But there is another flaw in this chart — can you spot it? How about cases where &amp;quot;upper case&amp;quot; is not used as an adjective describing a letter? Or how about cases where, even though the subject is typography, one is trying to use &lt;em&gt;case&lt;/em&gt; as a noun: &amp;quot;He used the &lt;em&gt;upper case&lt;/em&gt; quite a bit in his emails.&amp;quot; Of course, the author's point about usage is probably in the main supportable, even without reference to these charts. But given that these charts were introduced as evidence, the answer is not really &lt;em&gt;accurate&lt;/em&gt;, and accuracy is something we should at least strive for on this site. We aren't always 100% accurate — nobody's perfect — but if we passively give the nod to glaring errors, relying instead on the base feeling that whatever garners the most votes must be true, we become little better than the Urban Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MORE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, for your amusement and to show the relative scale of usage we're talking about, consider the following series of charts. Note especially how one single high-frequency word causes all the rest to flatline. And none of the other words may be considered obscure in the least! (Also, it is obvious from an NGram search that apples are better than oranges. Or that people like them more. Or that ... well, draw your own conclusions. The data are there for your interpretation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2l5HG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hf1Fp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gBoSX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sERr5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; in the corpus peaks at 1% — one out of a hundred words. Use of those other common words is negligible by comparison. And use of obscure word combinations may not even be worth talking about from a genuine statistical point of view. If there is a statistician among you who can define the terms for such a discussion, I am open to being educated. Until then, I will look at answers involving NGrams with a jaundiced eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/66377/2303&quot;&gt;this question and its ham-fisted NGrams&lt;/a&gt;, some of which have already been deleted, for more evidence of NGrams Gone Wild. At one point, two answers used the same query term and arrived at opposite conclusions. You can't make this stuff up, folks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FULL DISCLOSURE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even I have not been immune to the lure of Google NGrams in the past. @Mechanicalsnail pointed out to me &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/24305/2303&quot;&gt;an instance of my own seduction&lt;/a&gt;, which was written before I had fully grokked how NGrams should and should not be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137041&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AND NOW THIS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, from PLOS|ONE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tip of the hat to MattEllen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2022-10-15T19:56:25.657" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T13:50:57.127" Title="Should we allow Google NGrams to be presented as statistical evidence without qualification? Should we define a set of standards for their usage?" Tags="|discussion|ngrams|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2012-02-27T16:50:39.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, both of these are perfectly real questions, though the answer is perhaps unsatisfying (there is no &lt;em&gt;per-[insert word here]&lt;/em&gt; term for fractions of 1). I've voted to reopen the older one. If enough people agree with me, I would suggest manually adding the &quot;possible duplicate of...&quot; text to the newer one. (I don't think reopening it only to close it for another reason would be particularly productive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T16:50:39.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-27T17:26:17.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It works like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you get there when the question is closed, you cannot post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you start writing, and the question gets closed in the meanwhile, you can only post &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91928/176533&quot;&gt;a notification appears&lt;/a&gt; telling you that it was closed. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After that notification, you cannot post anymore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd discourage answering closed questions and in the past I've seen this behavior from a user. Like other said, this could harm the site. People that ask questions will feel allowed to post questions because they'll trend of thoughts will be something along  the lines of &quot;Maybe it'll get closed, but hey, I receive answers anyway&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a related question one on here, &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1757/6550&quot;&gt;People answering off-topic questions: What should we do?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T17:26:17.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2012-02-27T17:34:37.393" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you made the point when you wrote that they can be &lt;em&gt;&quot;presented as statistical evidence without qualification&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Google NGrams can provide important information, but they lack authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? They are not 100% reliable and if we add this to the fact that many people present it as something &quot;absolute&quot;, then it could lead to misinformation, at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to &lt;strong&gt;accept them but with reservation&lt;/strong&gt;. They can be used, as they still can provide some usefulness, but preferably along with something else more reliable to back up the information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I addressed everything, but if I forgot something, let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: As suggested from the comments, here are the NGrams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one shows that my conclusion was not that convincing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jVU3S.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While any counter argument, except for a moment, were far away from mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SOvWw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2012-02-27T23:45:47.547" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T23:45:47.547" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2012-02-28T02:02:10.620" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that Ngrams can be used inappropriately. The resources that people use to support their answers all have to varying degrees their difficulties. But I think the existing methods of justifying them will work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is a problem with the word choice, the results, whatever, the answerer should either point them out if they know&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone can comment on the failures of the usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone can edit the answer graph/link&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's in general for any data (from OED, from quotes, whatever). Specifically for Ngrams, the problems that should be watched out for are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dealing with punctuation and caps (as you pointed out in your example with the hyphen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selecting the right pairs to compare (make sure they are comparable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;making sure the context is right, both semantically and in surrounding strings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the links to sources in the linked Ngram is really the only way to judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2012-02-29T16:08:25.363" LastActivityDate="2012-02-29T16:08:25.363" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-28T02:08:19.493" Score="15" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Yeah, so I sort of went on a brief EL&amp;amp;U vacation about a week after I started this topic, and forgot about it when I came back. Any last feedback before we push this live? I've changed &lt;em&gt;Names&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Naming&lt;/em&gt; as per @nohat's answer to this question, and dropped the reference to Literature.SE, which closed a few weeks ago.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;If you visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U faq&lt;/a&gt;, at the very top, there's a list of what on-topic and off-topic on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this list is getting a bit awkward (at least in my opinion), and two items especially (&lt;em&gt;Problems encountered by people learning English&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;How to improve my English&lt;/em&gt;) can seem contradictory to those who are not familiar with our site. I therefore propose a revision that is meant to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; change the actual site scope, but instead one that is merely meant to clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[On-topic]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Word usage and choice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words' development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Off-topic]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Proofreading (&quot;are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Writing advice or critique requests (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt; instead—note critique requests must meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166/what-are-the-guidelines-for-asking-for-a-critique-of-my-work/167#167&quot;&gt;their criteria&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Translation and non-English languages&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;English literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[English language resources?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Changes to the on-topic list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The on-topic scope is mostly the same; I separated &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; only because I felt it deserved its own bullet point. The only real change I made on that list was dropping &lt;em&gt;Problems encountered by people learning English&lt;/em&gt;, since basic questions are generally welcome on any SE site (if we want to establish minimum requirements for ESL questions, that's not within the scope of this question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Changes to the off-topic list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The off-topic question list, on the other hand, did not escape as unscathed as the other list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proofreading has been clarified. Foreign language questions that are posted tend to deal with translation, so that has been given more emphasis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also dropped &lt;em&gt;How to improve my English&lt;/em&gt;, since that's extremely vague—most of those questions are &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt; anyway, so little is lost there. The only exception that generally isn't covered is &lt;em&gt;English language resources&lt;/em&gt;, which I'll discuss later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naming of programming variables/classes has been expanded to cover all naming, since it's not on-topic anyway, and I've also cleaned up the jokes entry. Grammar peeving has also been cut from the list since that's also &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only uncertain entry that I extracted is the one concerning English language resources, and there has been no consensus (and little opinion) on whether those questions are on-topic or off-topic. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1095/are-questions-about-online-resources-on-topic&quot;&gt;a meta answer&lt;/a&gt; asserting that they're off-topic received 0 votes in &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including deleted questions, 61% of questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; have been closed, but some of these, while closed as off-topic, should probably have been closed as &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;. Those that remain on the site range in quality, from those which just barely survive to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;the exceptional&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. I am not sufficiently persuaded that the community has made up its mind on resources yet, so if we do make these changes to the FAQ, I intend to leave the item off of both lists for the time being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One last thing that is bold because I feel like having text in bold&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal here is to attempt to clarify the FAQ. Have I done that? I'd like to make sure that I haven't made it worse before entering the change into the system, so please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;If you're wondering why this question hasn't been closed for being &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;, there are several factors, including its age, the fact that we link to it in our faq, and the fact that we refer new users to it when they get questions closed as general reference, that keep it alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T04:41:37.840" Title="FAQ On-topic/Off-topic List Revisal" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|site-faq|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-28T05:09:38.533" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;While chatting in the Incomprehensible room, I encountered this strange error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/RmDsQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OlS1J.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; title=&quot;Hosted by imgur.com&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other chatters claim that they do not see the small white circle and its shadow. Is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &#xA;I found it again. This bug seems to pop up during night time. This one appeared at similar time to the other bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/CXpUd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/55xaD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; title=&quot;Hosted by imgur.com&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I inspected element, as Jarrod told me to.&#xA;This came out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/HzM8X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8NWHJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; title=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spot disappeared later, even though I did not refresh.&#xA;Click on the image to make it bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastEditorUserId="11171" LastEditDate="2012-02-29T03:38:40.790" LastActivityDate="2012-02-29T03:38:40.790" Title="An error on the chat system" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2012-05-12T00:23:01.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2012-02-28T11:29:52.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a lot of questions get closed - nearly half, it seems - and many of these questions get closed rather hastily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened this morning with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59471/is-this-slogan-proper-english&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a feeling the question would be closed.  The O.P. asked the community to evaluate some &quot;word salad.&quot;  Sure enough, in less than 30 minutes, it was closed, with this remark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Questions are expected to generally relate to English language and usage, within the scope defined in the faq.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I visited the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage, word choice, and grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Problems encountered by people learning English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the FAQ would support the question, rather than support its closure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The O.P. is apparently not a native English speaker (hence the word salad).  More importantly, though, &lt;strong&gt;the question seemed very carefully worded&lt;/strong&gt;.  The O.P. did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ask in some vague way: &quot;Can you make our slogan better?&quot; or, &quot;Do you think this is a good slogan?&quot;  Instead, author took great care to ask some pointed, relevant questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is our wording proper? (&lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;: no)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can some of the words be misconstrued to mean something other than what we are trying to say? (&lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;: yes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, even though the slogan was painfully difficult to read, I still thought the question was fair and relevant.  In other words, the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;slogan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was bad; the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the FAQ says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What kind of questions should I &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ask here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the O.P. was not asking about some trite conversation, or trivial argument - the question was about a marketing slogan for a new company.  To me, that sounds like a practical question, based on a real-world problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I share John Lawler's frustration.  It's discouraging when someone puts a lot of effort into providing a well-conceived and helpful answer, only to be thwarted by what appears to be a moderator's knee-jerk reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T11:29:52.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2012-03-01T01:56:37.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks pretty good, but I'm going to second &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2474/faq-on-topic-off-topic-list-revisal#comment5317_2474&quot;&gt;aedia's suggestion&lt;/a&gt; that you work in a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, their &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166/what-are-the-guidelines-for-asking-for-a-critique-of-my-work/167#167&quot;&gt;guidelines for asking for a critique&lt;/a&gt; might be a good jumping-off point for folks who come here looking for advice on their writing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T01:56:37.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2012-03-01T03:09:44.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) why some topics are in Italics and others are not?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) &quot;history of words' development&quot; Do we need to explain what etymology means-really?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) Translation and non-English languages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The original &quot;Languages other than English (including translation)&quot; makes more sense since translation is in a different category than a language. On the other hand, it's quite obvious that non-English languages should be not included. I think what is not accepted are &quot;direct translations&quot; since there have been questions about the equivalent in English of a term in other language, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30870/what-is-an-english-counterpart-to-the-japanese-signal-word-dokkoisho-uttered&quot;&gt;dokkoisho&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) &quot;Names,&quot; What exactly is a &quot;name&quot;? Examples: names or titles of a company/a document/a link or menu/ a tattoo ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you leave untouched   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts. Questions on the following topics are welcomed here: &quot; ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My suggestion-remove the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and &quot;But please, don’t ask any questions about these topics. They are out of scope for this site. &quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My suggestion: remove the confusing &quot;these&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T03:09:44.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2488" CreationDate="2012-03-01T03:58:25.887" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know why the J in San Jacinto is pronounced differently than the J in San Jose, in English. It seems to be very comparable to the discussions on how to pronounce &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1545/18632&quot;&gt;forte&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/6508/18632&quot;&gt;baba ghanouj&lt;/a&gt;. Neither of those discussions have been closed. I'm sure I could find other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please explain why you think my question is off-topic? English pronunciation is in the on-topic list of the FAQ. Here's a link to my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/59673/18632&quot;&gt;Why is the “J” in San Jacinto pronounced like an English “J” instead of an “H” in Texas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18632" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T04:42:55.420" Title="Why was my question about English pronunciation closed?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2012-03-01T07:12:00.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the most part, these changes are fine, except for the bit about names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think listing &quot;names&quot; as a forbidden topic is far, far too broad. The names of people, places, and things can certainly be on topic here. How to pronounce them, whether or not they are arthrous, questions about eponomy, etc., all seem perfectly OK to me. What we want to exclude are questions about the activity of naming things, which while tangentially related to English language and usage, is certainly an area which I believe ought to be excluded here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T07:12:00.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2012-03-01T10:25:19.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the FAQ is under revision, I think the community should also consider beefing up the paragraph that provides general advice on how users can find their own answers to overly simplistic questions (i.e., &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).  (I see too many simple questions with the phrase, &quot;&lt;em&gt;I googled but I could not find&lt;/em&gt;...&quot;).  I offer a suggested draft:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before asking a question on this web site, please do some earnest research first, to ensure your question is not readily answered by sources freely available on the Internet.  A search engine such as Google is a great place to start, but results about grammar and word usage are often buried beneath results more related to pop culture.  Google may be a good first option, but other websites may offer more targeted answers to your question.  Before posting a question here, be sure it cannot be easily answered at other helpful sites such as these:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.OneLook.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OneLook.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which returns the results from several on-line&#xA;dictionaries)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UsingEnglish.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which answers many questions&#xA;about grammar and word usage)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://owl.english.purdue.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Purdue Online Writing Lab&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(which offers several tips about writing and style)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Urban Dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(for non-standard, and often off-color, slang)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, that list can be appended or modified, as the community sees fit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might also consider including a concrete example of a good and bad question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UNACCEPTABLE: What's the difference between &quot;isn't&quot; and &quot;is not&quot;?  Can they be used the same?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This question is too general, and can be answered on-line with minimal effort.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ACCEPTABLE: I was reading some information about contractions on-line, where this advice was given:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As with so many issues in English punctuation, there is no set&#xA;  standard for the use of contractions. Traditionally, contractions were&#xA;  barred from formal writing on the grounds that contractions indicated&#xA;  a lack of formality. While in certain cases this might still be true,&#xA;  particuarly in business writing (e.g., &quot;Here's my application for the&#xA;  position in...&quot; is a little too casual for many tastes), the use of&#xA;  contractions is sometimes dictated by what would otherwise appear as&#xA;  stilted language and over-formality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're trying to decide if &quot;isn't&quot; is too informal for our user's manual:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This system isn't designed to monitor time more precisely than units of tenths of a second&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is &quot;isn't&quot; too informal?  Should we use &quot;is not&quot; instead?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is much improved, for several reasons.  The quote indicates the individual did some earnest research, and is asking for answers that may not be so readily answerable.  Moreover, the question has been carefully put into context, so it can be intelligently evaluated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thought: perhaps the On/Off topic section of the FAQ could include a list of places where off-topic questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be asked.  Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If your question is not a good fit for this community, consider asking it at one of these more general-purpose websites:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.answerbag.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Answerbag.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.answers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WikiAnswers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yahoo! Answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows?  Perhaps, if new users were directed to a more appropriate place for off-topic questions, fewer would get posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T06:55:06.903" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T06:55:06.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2012-03-01T17:44:34.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the whole great. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for all those topics that you say you removed because they would be not constructive, too localized or not a real question, I feel like those should be mentioned somewhere. They're not as you say literally off-topic, but they should be given as examples of why some things are not good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T17:44:34.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2486" CreationDate="2012-03-01T22:56:24.330" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember yesterday my reputation on the main English.SE site was around 10,540, I'm &lt;strong&gt;definitely&lt;/strong&gt; sure about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today my reputation is only 10,292. How could that have happened? It's not logged in the reputation history. It must have been a nasty site bug. Can anyone look into that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Now I see the info about some reputation changes being worked on, but according to the official info it's in progress only on meta. Or did I get something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: I think the current answer doesn't say what I was asking. So I'll repeat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, on the MAIN SITE, my reputation was 10,540.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Today, on the MAIN SITE, my reputation is 10,292.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I was NOT down-voted into oblivion in the meantime.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I lost 248 reputation into thin air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6509" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T23:32:29.397" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T01:00:03.503" Title="I somehow lost about 200 reputation and it's not logged anywhere!" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2012-03-01T23:00:57.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system message is up on the meta site because we figure that is where people will turn to look for information.  However, reputation is only an actual thing on the main site.  The reputation number shown on the meta site is simply a copy of your main site reputation.  There is no separate reputation on meta.english.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T23:00:57.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2012-03-01T23:29:58.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation you have is not always your &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; reputation. This is currently being changed actually and that post above is about that, but until &quot;now&quot;, reputation was not always the one that was shown. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the case is that you probably lost that reputation because answers/questions you posted got deleted. If a recalc is performed after something gets deleted (something that received upvotes or downvotes), your reputation is recalculated to reflect the current status. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're at 10,000 reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You gain 150 reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That answer gets deleted (e.g. because the question got deleted altogether)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your reputation is recalculated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You go back to 10,000&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recalc is done automatically at a regular pace, I'm not sure I remember when, but you can perform this recalc by yourself. Just add &lt;code&gt;/reputation&lt;/code&gt; to the main site address on any SE you are signed up to. This soon won't be necessary due to those changes in that warning, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T23:29:58.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2012-03-01T23:31:56.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify @Rebecca's post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reputation on the main site has been recalculated for all users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most users will not be affected by this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The users who are affected by this are those who have had posts deleted (sometimes because they answered questions which were subsequently deleted)—this includes you.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deletion normally did not remove reputation since it was computationally expensive, so a recalculation had to take place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, recent changes to the SE platform now allow reputation to be much more accurate than before (deletions are now taken into account immediately).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The banner is not displayed on the main site because only a very small proportion of users will have their reputation affected dramatically, so only those who do notice will come to Meta and see the banner, thus not annoying everyone else with the banner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-03-02T00:59:52.193" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T00:59:52.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2012-03-02T00:36:53.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we allow Google NGrams to be presented as statistical evidence without qualification? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we define a set of standards for their usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; define a set of standards, but what would those standards be?  Your question contained a whole bunch of instances where the data could be mistaken or mis-construed, and I agree with them.  But how do you translate those problems into a set of standard for their usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disallowing them seems a bit extreme.  As with any answer, if you feel that it's citing dubious sources or providing incorrect information, comment and down-vote.   It seems better to combat the problem through the voting system and education rather than regulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T00:36:53.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2479" CreationDate="2012-03-02T04:42:55.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close it but I will venture a guess...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking how to pronounce &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; words would be on-topic (though likely most would be general reference as you can just consult a dictionary.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking why someone pronounces a proper name or a word from another language... that's less about the English language and lends itself more to speculation than to a definitive answer IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why the others weren't closed... forte may be borrowed from another language but is now firmly adopted into English.  Baba ghanouj?  Search me :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T04:42:55.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2505" CreationDate="2012-03-02T11:48:37.883" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my profile page for this site, the profile details on the top right, are shifted down - it looks like the HTML is broken somewhere. This doesn't happen on any other SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a problem as such, just that it looks wrong, and others may experience the same and wonder what is up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gMCgu.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17259" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T19:44:16.623" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T19:44:16.623" Title="The layout in my profile page is broken" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-02T21:07:56.897" Score="6" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2137/as-a-site-about-elu-should-we-maintain-correct-grammar-punctuation-etc-thro&quot;&gt;As a site about EL&amp;amp;U, should we maintain correct grammar, punctuation, etc. throughout the site?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come on, it's an English language Q&amp;amp;A!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what's your english language usage question? be specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18724" OwnerDisplayName="Matt Chambers" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T20:25:47.473" Title="Why is the title suggestion text not capitalized correctly?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-03-02T21:38:29.470" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T05:05:45.870" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have the reputation to review suggested edits, you know that the number of edits is often (read: usually) incorrect. Well, now it's not only incorrect, it also refuses to go away.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y6fBV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screencap of the top of my screen, with the orange box indicating a suggested edit&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've clicked on that thing 20 ways from Sunday, but I just cannot get it to disappear. (Note that there were never any edits for me to review.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit, almost two years later&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still happening, except it's more, uh, reliable (can a bug be more reliable?) with the &quot;we have posts flagged for moderator attention&quot; indicator. To reproduce, click on the indicator, review the flags (if any), and wait. Note that the flags do not &quot;go away&quot; when you deal with them - you have to refresh the page somehow to remove anything from the list. But when you refresh the page, the indicator doesn't refresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T00:27:28.283" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T00:27:28.283" Title="The &quot;there are suggested edits|flagged posts&quot; indicator refuses to go away" Tags="|bug|10k-tools|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2012-03-04T16:39:56.840" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the Google Ngram Viewer. I am a statistician, by education and profession. I agree with Robusto, regarding the tendency to misuse ngram word frequency analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is English Language and Usage SE. We are not linguists. Well, a few of us are. Yet the only one, that I know of off-hand, John Lawler, doesn't often (ever?) use ngrams to support his answers. The Google Ngram Viewer makes it very easy to bludgeon other respondents' answers into wrongness (I'm sorry, that is a terribly phrased sentence). I'm specifically referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/55433/2303&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I have been thinking about the hazards of ambiguity in verbal communication. When considering grammar and standard English usage, we accept variation from an absolute &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot;. But we do this logically, with additional informational guidelines, such as use of geo-localization tags (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/britishenglish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;britishenglish&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;britishenglish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-britishenglish-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;britishenglish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/americanenglish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;americanenglish&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;americanenglish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-americanenglish-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;americanenglish&lt;/a&gt;), by specifying diction as part of the question or with tagging, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formal&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-formal-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;formal&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slang&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-slang-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;slang&lt;/a&gt;, and in very specific contexts whether jargon (usually overflow from SO, Super User, or Sever Fault!), or even etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; grammatically and idiomatically correct versus incorrect answers to questions on EL&amp;amp;U SE. But unstructured text analysis and applied quantitative methods (increasingly described as &amp;quot;digital humanities&amp;quot;) have so much of an aura of authority in an age of reason that they tend to overwhelm everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barry often cites OED in his answers. That is a very good reference source. It isn't as flashy or colorful as a festive multi-colored line graph embedded in an answer. I don't like to see incorrect answers receive more votes, or be designated as the accepted answer, when there are concise, correct answers submitted too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exposition over. Here's an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IF (an Ngram is used to answer a question on this site) &#xA;    THEN ( the Ngram must be accompanied by a paragraph of prose explanation &#xA;           AND the Ngram must comply with validity criteria )&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Validity criteria should include this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/A-users-guide-to-culturomics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data from 1800 to 2000&lt;/a&gt;. Before 1800, there weren’t enough books published to get reliable results; after 2000, the English corpus is inconsistently impacted by the start of the Google Books project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use for &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;books only&lt;/a&gt; as Google excluded periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, and everything else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Final thoughts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should try to systematically limit Ngram usage. As others observed, doing so would be authoritarian thus not a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should include a few words about using Google Ngram Viewer in the Help section of the site, especially a link to the so-called &amp;quot;validity criteria&amp;quot;. I'm making this edit because today, 11 years later, I just noticed a good answer that would have been strengthened if the user had realized that it was okay for instances of a certain expression NOT to appear in Google Ngram Viewer results. That's because the expression was sourced only from books published after 2010, AND there were likely far fewer than the minimum of 40 occurrences even during the 1800 to 2010 time frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="4915" LastEditDate="2023-06-26T13:50:57.127" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T13:50:57.127" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2500" CreationDate="2012-03-04T20:16:41.573" Score="-2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the phrase &quot;The reason for starting the bounty:&quot; is needed right before that reason is stated whenever anyone starts the bounty. Take a look &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57727/the-meaning-of-the-word-impediment-in-this-context#comment114489_57727&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - when I was starting the bounty it really didn't have enough detail there. However, now the question is already answered - even though the bounty hasn't been awarded yet - and there are more than enough detail. Yet the ugly &quot;The current answers do not contain enough detail&quot; in the blue field under the question body states something which is no longer true. Thus, if anyone comes to look at that question's page now, especially a newcomer, he will be confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better if it said: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reason for starting the bounty: The current answers do not contain&#xA;  enough detail&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or if it were put in the Past Tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reason for starting the bounty: The provided answers didn't &#xA;  contain enough detail&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T15:20:08.413" Title="The phrase &quot;The reason for starting the bounty:&quot; is needed" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2496" CreationDate="2012-03-05T12:48:57.360" Score="-2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/59838/8019&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was converted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59838/shorter-sarcastic-way-to-express-the-cook-must-have-made-a-mistake#comment114125_59838&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't really see why.  It gave a specific answer to the question posed, and speculated that, if this is really what is being asked, it may be off-topic.  It may be just me, but that seems, more than most posts, an answer rather than a comment.  Am I missing something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T19:41:24.473" Title="Should this be comment or answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2494" CreationDate="2012-03-05T15:19:28.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The speculation part was really a comment. I probably would've converted it as well. In that part you were not answering, but commenting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the rest, I wouldn't say you were specific, rather &lt;em&gt;very concise&lt;/em&gt;. You didn't give any explanation regarding your proposed expression. Perhaps providing some elaboration would've changed the moderator decision, so that you would have had an edit, rather than a conversion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T15:19:28.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2494" CreationDate="2012-03-05T19:41:24.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't remember if I acted on a flag or just converted it myself, but that doesn't really matter anyway. Your answer literally says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there are so many possiblilities that this is off-topic here, unless you can cut it down. Maybe writers.se?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is off-topic, you are kind of expected to vote to close it as such. If a question belongs on Writers, you are kind of expected to vote to migrate it there. In any case such &quot;meta&quot; commentary just does not belong in an answer. That's precisely what comments are there for. And frankly, at well over 7k rep you are kind of expected to know all that. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T19:41:24.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-06T04:43:47.930" Score="-5" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about the very confusing grammar of the following construction: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just wait one &lt;em&gt;cotton picking&lt;/em&gt; minute!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;on its face normal seeming construction&lt;/em&gt; is what I'm talking about. It's a &lt;em&gt;commonly  occuring&lt;/em&gt; construction, with the &lt;em&gt;policy on this type of things formulating&lt;/em&gt; language experts strangely neglecting this . My &lt;em&gt;at first sight occuring&lt;/em&gt; idea was to add it to a formal grammar, but then I wasn't sure how to do it, because I didn't have good intuition on whether these &lt;em&gt;rather commonly and naturally appearing&lt;/em&gt; examples allowed, pronouns, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I got a clear, complete, answer, and accepted it, the question was closed! I think that this is a bad &lt;em&gt;confidence-with-the-users building&lt;/em&gt; measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this question closed? In think only so that it can't be upvoted, because it was downvoted many times, by people who did not recognize this as part of the grammar, but as an algorithm for generating idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have italicized each time I have used this construction in the above question. I want to know how it works. I really don't know for sure. The question was sincere, and &lt;em&gt;the quick and clear appearing&lt;/em&gt; answer was excellent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60121/is-this-americanism-grammatical&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60121/is-this-americanism-grammatical&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T05:02:41.967" Title="What the heck? Why is this question closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2501" CreationDate="2012-03-06T07:07:40.250" Score="7" ViewCount="1774" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; about questions that are welcomed here. But I'm not sure what &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt; of problems encountered by people learning English can be asked here. After all, &quot;how to improve my English&quot;, which is absolutely not welcomed, may also be a &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; encountered by a student when s/he is learning English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, students who are struggling with GRE verbal test, especially those whose first language is not English, may like to know what kind of reading materials (magazines, journals, etc.) are good for preparing their GRE. What categories should this kind of questions belong to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T17:58:59.247" Title="&quot;Problems encountered by people learning English&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2497" CreationDate="2012-03-06T14:28:09.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was probably closed because of your unfriendly usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;response to &lt;strong&gt;ignorant&lt;/strong&gt; comments, answers, and downvotes&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T14:28:09.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2493" CreationDate="2012-03-06T15:20:08.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the longest period a bounty can run for? A week? It hardly seems worth the effort to change the text because, maybe, in the last couple of days of that week, the message might sound incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, because of the placement of the message and its formatting and such, I think that it's already implied that the text describes the reason for &lt;em&gt;starting&lt;/em&gt; the bounty rather than its continued existence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T15:20:08.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2498" CreationDate="2012-03-06T15:50:45.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;'What reading materials are useful in preparing for my GRE?' belongs in the &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; category, relating neither to the English language nor to how it is used.  The only question on that sort of test that I can imagine being on-topic (and not general reference) would be &quot;The test says X is the correct English in this situation; surely Y is possible or even better?&quot;  But even then it's more suited to an education forum than a site like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T15:50:45.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2497" CreationDate="2012-03-06T16:58:53.520" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I closed the question because I didn't find the approach you've taken in your questions nor your attitude to be compatible with the community of this site. This site is not your personal playground to test out unorthodox theories on the structure of English grammar. While sincerity is appreciated, you'll have to combine it with a healthier dose of grace and kindness if you want to participate here. Your unusual line of questions might have been better received if you had asked with kindness instead of stridency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T16:58:53.520" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2498" CreationDate="2012-03-06T17:58:59.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question such as &quot;How do I improve my English?&quot; is not enough scoped, and it is rather subjective because it depends from the person asking the question. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an &lt;em&gt;entire book&lt;/em&gt; that answers your question, you're asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about books, magazines, journals, or online resources, are never-ending questions for which a new answer can be added all the times a new resource is available. In the case the questions is asking for &lt;em&gt;the best&lt;/em&gt; resource, the question would be subjective. The problem is that in such case, there would not be any expertise required for answering (Is there an expert about the best resources for students of English as ESL?); in this case, a user who already answered the question could change the given answer all time a new resource is available, which would become the new best resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T17:58:59.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2497" CreationDate="2012-03-08T05:02:41.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start off by saying that I'm tired right now, and your question (the one you linked to, not this one on meta) is longer and more complex than what I'd consider light reading, so I'll look over it in the morning. I suspect @nohat is right on this one, but I'll review it independently to give you the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in my opinion, I disagree with nohat on one thing. You are perfectly entitled to your own opinions about English grammar, and you are welcome to voice it on our site as long as you do so constructively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@nohat: See, the difference between linguistics and physics, is that you don't allow assholes to beat up the frauds. We allow that (actually, we require it) in physics. This is why your field is sick, and this is why you can't make progress. Notice how long it took to appreciate that universal grammar does not describe pre-literate languages. Physicists place honesty as first priority, and niceness last, and they generally will not participate in a forum where these priorities are inverted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your tone does concern me. Is there anything wrong with a little courtesy and respect towards others? As far as most of us go, if we're wrong, we want to know why we're wrong, and we want to learn—calling people &quot;ignorant&quot; usually doesn't help them, since it puts them on the defensive. You don't have to call someone &quot;&lt;em&gt;ignorant&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to disagree with them—you can just say that you disagree strongly with them without calling them names. Honesty is important, and I welcome you to be honest when we're dealing with facts, but when you start insulting people, I strongly suggest that you consider carefully your choice of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T05:02:41.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2489" CreationDate="2012-03-08T07:31:10.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I pushed a change that should hopefully fix your issue - I could never reproduce the problem, so let me know if it's fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T07:31:10.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2509" CreationDate="2012-03-10T03:46:41.647" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to be able to see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a bar graph of number of new questions entered vs both time of day and day of week.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be interesting verify my suspicion that very few new questions get added on a Friday night.&#xA;I also would like to see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a similar graph showing the number of questions that wind up getting closed vs both time of day and day of week that they were entered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would help to answer the question, are there particular times of day or days of week when poor questions are most often entered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T17:55:40.707" Title="New question frequency graphs" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1427" CreationDate="2012-03-10T04:43:17.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was fixed a few months ago, just cleaning up the bug report. (:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T04:43:17.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2506" CreationDate="2012-03-10T17:55:40.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dunno about generating graphs—you may have to fire up Google Docs or Excel—but you can get the raw data you are looking for from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange data explorer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote a query that gets approximately the data you want:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/63660/questions-by-time-of-day-and-day-of-week&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/63660/questions-by-time-of-day-and-day-of-week&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T17:55:40.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-11T03:38:46.893" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Previous title: I've just suggested a synonym: [style] -&gt; [writing-style]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/writing-style/synonyms&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; the link; vote as you please.  My only reasoning while choosing which one to keep was that &lt;em&gt;writing-style&lt;/em&gt; had 91 questions, and &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; had 44.  Be that as it may, we can change the name later if we'd rather keep &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt;.  The main thing is to merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; (shout-out to mods): I got one vote in 4 days.  Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonyms page&lt;/a&gt;, I see that there are five other languishing synonym suggestions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/suffix/synonyms&quot;&gt;suffix&lt;/a&gt; (2), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/spelling/synonyms&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; (1), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/programming/synonyms&quot;&gt;programming&lt;/a&gt; (0; don't look at me, I can't vote), and two for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/articles/synonyms&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; (1 each).  Since it doesn't look like synonym voting has been popular (at least for the last six months or so) could one of you either take care of them or publicize them somehow?  I'm sure it would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T00:19:24.517" Title="Could mods catalyze synonym voting?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-12T11:33:04.123" Score="8" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60838/why-do-some-non-english-words-become-english-words&quot;&gt;a recent question&lt;/a&gt;, the OP wanted to know why English would borrow a foreign word like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;kudos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from Greek when we already had two perfectly good English words, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;honour&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;glory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to point out that both of these English words were themselves borrowed from French but I did not know what word was used before they were imported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case I managed to discover the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ār&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on Wiktionary was in fact the ousted native word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not always so easy to find them. (Yes I've done it before too. It's a fun game for language nerds. It's been a topic in Douglas Hofstadter works. It's come up on the language blog &lt;code&gt;languagehat.com&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So is it within the scope of &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; to ask for such Anglo Saxon words here, or is that something I should not bother the community here with even when I can't find them myself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T13:20:14.103" Title="Would questions seeking native Anglo-Saxon equivalents to English terms borrowed from foreign languages be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2012-03-12T13:26:19.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't imagine it -not- being on-topic. You're asking about the various English terms for a given concept, with special attention to comparing the etymologies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not off-topic to -refer- to other languages, to recognize their existence, or even to discuss the meaning (using English terms) of the foreign term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is off-topic is a question primarily about the foreign language term itself, an expectation of understanding of a foreign language term. &quot;what does kudos mean in Greek?' as a main question is definitely off-topic, but is just as definitely useful and on-topic -within the answer to some question about 'kudos' as an English term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T13:26:19.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2516" CreationDate="2012-03-13T03:53:09.143" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep trying to hide my e-mail address, so that it doesn't appear on my profile page. Yet like a day later, when I check, it's back on. Why does this happen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to keep my email there? Or is it only me who can see it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18425" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T04:13:02.520" Title="What's happening to my profile?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2515" CreationDate="2012-03-13T04:13:02.520" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your e-mail address in your profile page is visible only to you (and some SE employees, etc.; check the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy&quot;&gt;privacy policy&lt;/a&gt; if that matters to you). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can verify how your profile looks to other normal users by looking at it in a browser where you are not logged in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T04:13:02.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-13T04:35:33.430" Score="5" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I'm talking about:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/06cl7.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bar is grey. It looks quite bad with the nice beige theme we've got going on, so I request that either the colour be changed to something less hideous (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/3797298#3797298&quot;&gt;maybe rainbow&lt;/a&gt;) or that it is removed entirely, along with the little (1) in the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;title&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2012-03-13T13:12:42.187" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T13:12:42.187" Title="Please fix the &quot;new activity&quot; banner" Tags="|feature-request|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2517" CreationDate="2012-03-13T05:42:49.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take it away! Thankfully I do not see it yet, but it looks awfully distracting. Or at least make it optional. Actually, many more things should be made option, like adding a break line that shows where comments are &quot;abridged&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T05:42:49.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-14T02:39:17.607" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/3123/10041&quot;&gt;What is the plural of the word “index”?&lt;/a&gt; asked Sep 16 '10 [on this site].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/61080/10041&quot;&gt;Indexes or Indices?&lt;/a&gt; asked Jun 16 '09, migrated from stackoverflow.com 3 hours ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly these are duplicates of each other, but which should be closed as duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T13:59:11.717" Title="Which is the duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2519" CreationDate="2012-03-14T03:07:03.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote for closing the migrated one. It might have been asked many years ago on StackOverflow, but it's new here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I see that the &quot;native&quot; question has been merged into the migrated one. I think this was a bad decision: the migrated question has a lot more votes, but its answers aren't really correct. It also has a bunch of &quot;me too&quot; answers that aren't adding any value. As I've commented, I don't think such a highly-voted question should have been migrated in the first place, because there's very little we can do to correct its problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T13:59:11.717" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T13:59:11.717" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2012-03-14T10:53:30.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would probably be on-topic, but you might need to be careful with the wording.  There's an implicit assumption that &quot;the real word&quot; in English can be traced back to an Anglo-Saxon root in every case, but in some cases it has been ousted by a foreign word. I'm uneasy about that attitude, and in any case it is historically wrong: the Saxon invasion superimposed a foreign language on the part-Latin, part-Celtic tongue then spoken here just as the Norman invasion superimposed a Romance layer onto the language spoken in 1065.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, the difference in meaning and etymology between &lt;em&gt;honour&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;glory&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kudos&lt;/em&gt; would make a good question, in which the meanings in the original languages would be interesting but not authoritative; a question requiring the answer &lt;strong&gt;ar&lt;/strong&gt; would be no more on-topic here than on German.SE.  You would probably have to wait for Anglo-Saxon.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T10:53:30.463" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2523" CreationDate="2012-03-14T22:36:04.390" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed there were 4 questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt;. I think it's a worthless tag, so I removed it from those four questions. Assuming that's a sensible thing to have done, what needs to happen to get rid of the tag itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7433/how-to-obtain-diligence-from-crossword-clue-horse-drawn-vehicle-industry&quot;&gt;How to obtain &amp;quot;diligence&amp;quot; from crossword clue &amp;quot;horse-drawn vehicle industry&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt;, so I replaced it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt;. I'm still trying to figure out if seeking help with a cryptic crossword clue is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2412/what-constitutes-justification-for-posing-a-question-on-elu&quot;&gt;valid reason for posting a question&lt;/a&gt;, and would be interested to know what others think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T20:24:07.810" Title="Delete [puzzle] tag" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2522" CreationDate="2012-03-15T02:17:38.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that there are no questions in that tag, it will disappear on its own in about 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T02:17:38.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="121" CreationDate="2012-03-15T02:28:58.503" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize this is an old question, but I felt obliged to chime in because I disagree with the answers previously posted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you click on the 'flag' button you are presented with a list of options as to why you flagged it.  One option is &quot;It doesn't belong here&quot; with a sub-menu letting you select from the same (or similar) list that you get when voting to close (off-topic, not constructive, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that since someone bothered to code in that menu in the first place, flagging a question to get moderator attention that it should be closed &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; perfectly appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T02:28:58.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2528" CreationDate="2012-03-15T11:54:40.193" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure that this question would be on topic as it could prompt a list. If it isn't, can I rescue it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Words that can be a Noun, Verb or Adjective.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was posed a question the other day:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Can you think of a word that can be used as a Noun, Verb or an Adjective?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such word would be &amp;quot;light&amp;quot;. Are there others beyond some often quoted rude words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expanding on this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any words that could be taken to mean a Noun, Verb or Adjective depending on the interpretation of a single sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that would satisfy 2 out of three is &amp;quot;This is a &lt;em&gt;rubbish&lt;/em&gt; pile&amp;quot;, i.e. is it a pile of rubbish, or a poorly-constructed pile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14892" OwnerDisplayName="George Duckett" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T20:10:26.783" Title="Would this question be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2012-03-15T12:20:54.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the FAQ, this would not be a good question as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you could narrow down your question to why you need such a word and provide some more context, &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; it would be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T12:20:54.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2012-03-15T14:42:03.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a precedent for this kind of question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46277/what-word-can-fulfill-the-most-parts-of-speech&quot;&gt;What word can fill the most parts of speech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Puzzle type questions like this tend to be un-favored (I hesitate to say definitely off-topic), because they're so open ended, and tend to be somewhat frivolous or attract frivolous answers and comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T20:10:26.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2012-03-15T23:04:57.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strikes me as too much of an open-ended discussion question.   There are dozens of acceptable/correct answers.  What criteria would distinguish one answer from another for up-voting?  How would you narrow it down to accept one as The Answer?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know not all SE questions have one and only one answer, but I think that's the ideal... hence the 'acceptance' system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, it's kinda an interesting question so I wouldn't necessarily vote to close it right off the bat.  Considering the criteria of &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;, maybe it's not so bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T23:04:57.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-16T06:05:58.083" Score="10" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't paid much attention to tag synonyms before, but today I notice there's one question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/blend-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;blend-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;blend-words&lt;/a&gt;, and three tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/portmanteau-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;portmanteau-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I'd do something useful and propose that these two should be merged, but it turns out I can't, because I haven't scored sufficient rep on either of the tags - hardly surprising, since I've not even voted on any of the questions, but why should that be taken to imply I'm not qualified to know that &lt;em&gt;blend-words&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/em&gt; mean exactly the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have enough rep against the [suffix] tag to not even notice this as a problem when I [proposed making [suffixes] a synonym][3]. But seeing that page just confuses me even more. That proposal has been there nearly a month now, and there are still only 3 votes - one short of the required 4 to action it. Presumably everyone would want to vote that synonym through, but they can't, because they don't have enough &quot;relevant&quot; rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't strictly part of what I'm asking/ranting about above, but I also note that the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/term&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;term&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;term&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt; was apparently proposed several months ago, and is sitting in some status called &quot;merge&quot;. I don't know what &quot;merge&quot; means, but I must say both tags seem undesirable to me (or at least, they should both be synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;). Given there's only one question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/term&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;term&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;term&lt;/a&gt;, and none at all for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt;, I don't understand what's going on there at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T20:07:28.410" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T20:07:28.410" Title="Why are tag synonyms so hard to suggest and vote for?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2012-03-16T06:23:32.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way to salvage the question - or more precisely, the closest on-topic question  I can think of addressing a similar issue - is to ask something like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I notice that some words can be used as noun and/or verb and/or adjective (e.g. - &lt;em&gt;Tennis set, set alight, set cement&lt;/em&gt;). Is there any kind of rule identifying words which can function in several ways like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-03-16T06:23:32.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2012-03-17T13:20:14.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel language, like water, can never be found pure unless you synthesize it. A language bears with it the history of its people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, any word, phrase, idiom which has a link to English should be discussed. It is true, that since the British empire took English around the world, there were exchanges, happening either way, often implicit. For example, did you know the following were borrowed from languages very much remote to English: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cash, tank, mango, orange, tycoon, honcho, typhoon, loot, thug, juggernaut, khaki, assassin, algebra, algorithm, candy, cashmere, navy, cot, teak, shampoo, shawl, godown, pyjama, verandah, aniline, indigo, jackal, jaggery, umbrella etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exercise, you may want to check which are the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17967" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T13:20:14.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2533" CreationDate="2012-03-17T17:19:19.023" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61440/term-to-describe-the-mass-changeover-in-land-ownership&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/19129/eamonn&quot;&gt;Eamonn&lt;/a&gt;, using the link by the question itself to view his profile shows a blank &quot;about me&quot; box on the right-hand side. Eamonn notes this himself in an &quot;answer&quot; he posted - and following the profile link on his answer displays the &quot;about me&quot; text correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's no biggie, but I just thought as he's a new member he mightn't want to get bogged down with such fault reporting. And as an ex-programmer myself I assume the devs would in fact like to know  about such things, since they may be the visible manifestation of some more subtle fault that's worth addressing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T20:08:44.943" Title="Bad link in question to OP's profile" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2532" CreationDate="2012-03-17T17:56:45.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user Eamonn seems to have two accounts, an unregistered one and a registered one. The former is used to post the question while the latter is used to post the two answers. This accounts for the difference. He should ask a moderator to merge the accounts. Also note that only registered users show up on the users page via searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T17:56:45.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2510" CreationDate="2012-03-18T00:11:36.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay so I've done some house cleaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/programming-terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;programming-terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;programming-terminology&lt;/a&gt; has been merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/programming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;programming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;programming&lt;/a&gt;. I couldn't quite make out a meaningful difference between the two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/suffix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;suffix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suffix&lt;/a&gt; has been merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/suffixes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;suffixes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suffixes&lt;/a&gt;. Not the other way round, mind you, since a) we generally &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72/should-we-prefer-singular-or-plural-in-tags&quot;&gt;prefer plural in tags&lt;/a&gt;, and b) some questions actually ask about several suffixes at once (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6581/why-is-it-geometric-but-theoretical&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ic&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;-ical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the like).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; has been merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;. Again, not the other way round, because for me orthography is the broader term that includes things such as hyphenation, punctuation, capitalization etc. which different people may or may not consider &quot;spelling&quot;. On the other hand, I am well aware we also have dedicated tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/capitalization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;capitalization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;capitalization&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;, and so on, so perhaps it would make sense to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; as well, limiting it to questions strictly about which letters to use in which order in a given word. I'm totally open to further discussion on this, and it also brings me right to my next point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generally speaking, if anything we have too few (meaningful) tags rather than too many. Finer granularity is something we could totally use. So:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am still undecided on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt;, because not all questions about style are necessarily about writing, or writing alone. Off the top of my head, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17669/what-are-the-principles-that-make-certain-lists-sound-euphonious&quot;&gt;what are the principles that make certain lists sound euphonious?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Likewise, I am not convinced merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; would be too shiny an idea. Lots and lots of questions are indeed &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about &quot;the&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about &quot;a&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about choosing between the two. More specific tags are not only more useful in browsing the site just for giggles, but first and foremost in hunting for obscure dupes, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; when the dupes are about &quot;the&quot; or &quot;a&quot;, when Google is of little help and it's all just a major PITA. And again, we already have enough tags bloated beyond the point of being useful, and a couple years down the line it will only become worse. So frankly, I think merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; is akin to merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbs&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt;, with the same nasty consequences you can think of yourself, albeit admittedly on a smaller scale.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Them's tag synonyms, not tag hyponyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T00:19:24.517" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1749" CreationDate="2012-03-18T01:01:41.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any given question concerning &quot;the article&quot; is most likely either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-article&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-article&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-article&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-article&lt;/a&gt;, but if it happens to concern both, it's no great hardship to apply both tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me we now get more &quot;basic&quot; questions from non-native speakers asking whether they should either or neither article in some given construction. Oftentimes I think such questions are trivial, and should be closed as General Reference - but they'll still get asked anyway. And there's no denying that sometimes there are very interesting aspects to commonplace idiomatic usage that native speakers don't always think about because we &quot;know&quot; what's right so we don't even realise there's anything more to it than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several months ago I voted to merge these two tags, but I've changed my mind and reversed that vote. I now think the tags themselves are obviously useful and much-used, and there's no point in losing a distinction we have now that it would be tiresome to regain later if we threw it away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T01:01:41.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-19T00:19:32.980" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/borrowing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;borrowing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;borrowing&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/loan-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loan-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loan-words&lt;/a&gt; (which already has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/foreign-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;foreign-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;foreign-words&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't propose this, because I don't have enough reputation (do I need to reach the required level under &lt;em&gt;borrowing&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;loan-words&lt;/em&gt;? - I don't know, but I've only got 2 in the first, and 0 in the second).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - firstly, is that synonymisation a good idea, and secondly, is posting this question the right way to advance the process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T22:18:46.600" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T22:18:46.600" Title="Merge [borrowing] into [loan-words]" Tags="|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2536" CreationDate="2012-03-19T19:02:36.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you are trying to create a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/loan-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loan-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loan-words&lt;/a&gt;, it's for that tag that you should have the required score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that those tags should be synonym. While borrowing is the &quot;process&quot; that creates loan words, I don't see any reason for having two separated tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a question on the meta site is the right do to do.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If there are enough users with the required score on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/loan-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loan-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loan-words&lt;/a&gt;, and they vote the synonym because they read this question, then the synonym will be automatically created. If there aren't enough users with the required score, moderators can consider creating the tag synonym, basing on the votes this question gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the case the tag synonym is created because it get enough votes, there could still be the need of a moderator action. Creating a synonym doesn't automatically rewrite all the existing questions that use the old tag; only a moderator can merge two tags, and when that is done the questions using the old tag are changed to use the new one.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that writing a request about tag synonyms here is probably needed in most of the cases, except when you don't mind seeing the old questions using the old tag, and the new questions using the new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T19:02:36.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2522" CreationDate="2012-03-19T20:22:42.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A tag that is not used from any question is deleted within 24 hours.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This doesn't stop users from adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; to existing questions, including the ones they ask, if they have the privilege of creating tags. If we want that a tag is never created again, there are just two things that can be done:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a tag that can replace &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt;, and it is a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt;, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; should be made a synonym of that tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there isn't any tag for which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; can be a synonym, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; is a really bad tag, then we can ask to black-list it; in this way, nobody could create that tag again. Of course, black-listing a tag should be asked in very specific circumstances; in any cases, the list of black-listed tags should contain too much tags, and those tags are surely tags that are not welcome on EL&amp;amp;U, not tags that are wrongly used in some of the questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T20:22:42.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2544" CreationDate="2012-03-20T04:41:07.740" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an English learner, s/he may have such difficulties when reads texts in a book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don't understand some sentence because there are several words, say, X, Y, Z, I can't understand. Then I look them up in the dictionary. I find that there are several entries for each word: X1, X2, X3 for X, Y1,Y2,Y3,Y4 for Y, and Z1,Z2,Z3,Z4,Z5 for Z. However, the problem is that I don't know which combination should I take for understanding the text.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I overcome such vocabulary difficulties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should question of this kind be asked here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer is NO, how should one improve the question or ask it in an alternative way?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T18:38:44.947" Title="Can the question of the following kind be asked here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2541" CreationDate="2012-03-20T11:40:26.523" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60880/why-dont-english-speakers-give-the-name-jesus-to-their-children&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60880/why-dont-english-speakers-give-the-name-jesus-to-their-children&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic. However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; clearly states that word-choice questions are on topic. Where was the infringement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is not a petition to reopen the question, but rather a request for information so that I do not make the same mistake again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T18:41:34.193" Title="Why is this question off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2540" CreationDate="2012-03-20T12:05:18.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question is an interesting one, but this website isn't the proper forum.  Child-naming conventions are not part of English language and usage, but rather more to do with cultural norms.  Unfortunately, I don't know where to point you to help find an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T12:05:18.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2540" CreationDate="2012-03-20T14:22:05.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Choosing a name is not the same thing as deciding which word you should use; the latter is a topic for EL&amp;amp;U, but the first is not a topic, as the name is decided basing on the culture a person has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, the name given to a person, even when the person was born in an English-speaking country, could also not be an English name. There are people in the USA, born in the USA, who have an Italian name, such as &lt;em&gt;Rosa Maria&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Marco&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Andrea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-03-24T18:41:34.193" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T18:41:34.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="662" CreationDate="2012-03-20T14:40:21.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm glad it looks the way it does now and is found at the top, but it bothers me that it  says &lt;em&gt;possible duplicate&lt;/em&gt;, while the close reason is &lt;em&gt;exact duplicate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-03-20T18:18:16.387" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T18:18:16.387" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2012-03-20T14:40:52.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is, &quot;How should I overcome such vocabulary difficulties?&quot; then the question is too broad. The general answer is learning more about English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question would be about a specific case, then it would stop being too broad, and it would be more acceptable as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is about the meaning of &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt; where those words are used in the same sentence, then the question could be too localized, depending on &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T18:38:44.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2547" CreationDate="2012-03-20T16:00:17.023" Score="9" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot;&gt;Users page&lt;/a&gt; (either the &lt;em&gt;quarter&lt;/em&gt; view or &lt;em&gt;year&lt;/em&gt; view), when I hover over Barrie England's rep, the popup shows the amount twice (along with the total rep):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v2gHI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;week&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;month&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; views, or for other users, the popup is calculated correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lfK0L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you sigh in disbelief at my pettifogging, check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=voters&quot;&gt;voters&lt;/a&gt; tab or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=editors&quot;&gt;editors&lt;/a&gt; tab, in any view except &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;.  Every single user has their total reputation no less than three identical times on the popup, even where it says it's the rep for the month or week or whatever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yW84T.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sigh all you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Hovering over Barrie's rep in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v2gHI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quarter view of the rep user tab&lt;/a&gt; still brings up a buggy popup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MIhDA.png&quot; alt=&quot;![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/v2gHI.png)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further edit:&lt;/strong&gt;  And &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126462/164012&quot;&gt;now that's about to be fixed too&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Bug squash request" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2012-03-20T17:55:14.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think questions of this type are off-topic. Effectively, it's &lt;em&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which is specifically debarred by the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the actual answer in this case is &lt;em&gt;&quot;deal with it the same way native speakers do&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Which generally means if you find too many words in close proximity that you don't understand, the text you're reading is inappropriate to your current comprehension level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's just the odd word here and there, either look it up in a dictionary, or (more likely) guess a suitable meaning and store that in the back of your mind to be tested against future guesses for the same word in different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T17:55:14.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2545" CreationDate="2012-03-21T00:45:16.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126280/164012&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Hover popup shows wrong/duplicate rep for week/month/etc in user profile page&lt;/em&gt;, the question I posted on MSO after I realized the bug was on every site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks, this will be fixed in the next build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those of you who don't understand the terminology used in the quoted answer, it means &lt;em&gt;the bug will soon be squashed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T00:18:01.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-21T13:12:30.293" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier I'd flagged a question that was tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt;, which has been fixed. However, there are still questions tagged as such... I'm reasonably certain that this is not a tag we'd want to encourage. Could these be re-tagged and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; tag blacklisted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2551" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-03-28T14:25:22.110" Title="Finish removing the [untagged] tag" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2548" CreationDate="2012-03-21T13:53:57.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing those to our attention. I've fixed all &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17809/that-that-correct-in-writing&quot;&gt;but one&lt;/a&gt; (which can only be fixed by a mod, it seems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; is a system tag, so it can't be removed completely. One use is when a migrated question is tagged with tags that we don't have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T13:53:57.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2640" CreationDate="2012-03-22T01:30:28.563" Score="6" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;recently awarded&quot; page for badges, questions with long titles are cut off, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1My3x.png&quot; alt=&quot;Who asked this question?!&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="3" LastEditDate="2012-05-10T04:48:50.370" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T04:48:50.370" Title="Long question titles cut off on badge page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2548" CreationDate="2012-03-24T18:35:47.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could these be re-tagged and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; tag blacklisted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; cannot be black-listed because it is the tag that is automatically added to a question when a tag is removed, and that tag is the only one used from the question. This happens because a tag that is used from just a question is deleted after 30, or 60 days.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; is also used when a moderator of another site migrates a question on EL&amp;amp;U, and that question doesn't use any tag used on EL&amp;U; as the tags that don't exist in the site where the question is being migrated are deleted, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; replaces those tags, when the question ends with no tags. (A question always needs to have at least a tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of flagging the question, you could have found a pertinent tag for that question, and suggested an edit. As far as I remember, suggesting an edit to add a tag, or replace a tag is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-03-28T14:25:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-03-28T14:25:22.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-25T07:26:32.353" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The page that displays &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges&quot;&gt;which privileges the logged-in user has&lt;/a&gt; and how close they are to achieving the rest appears to ahve a display error: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's Safari 5.1.4 on Mac OS 10.7.3. See the badly-rendered table at right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bKVaF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T23:56:38.967" Title="The “privileges” page doesn't render well in Safari" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2552" CreationDate="2012-03-26T01:40:24.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like the following style-rule change in the CSS file &lt;strong&gt;http://cdn.sstatic.net/english/all.css&lt;/strong&gt; would fix this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;body.privileges-page #sidebar {&#xA;    width: 220px; /* was 240px */&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T01:40:24.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-26T01:42:53.143" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many questions, that are good in some sense, get closed; some are appropriate for other SE sites, some are better for discussion, some are for lists of words, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer these questions would be wrong for here at SE (not just ELU but any SE site), but it seems churlish to just close and be done with them. I feel like -some- kind of pointer would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently while searching for possible alternatives to an ELU question, I found a number of QA sites that had informal answers to a similar question. Since those sites were discussive (?) in nature, it seemed a reasonable alternative (not a competitor) to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of different situations (the following is not exclusive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is not appropriate for ELU, is appropriate for SE but there is no existing SE site for it. Say, a question about Anglo-Saxon, or a translation from some language to English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is for an English language reference work (this may actually be on-topic, but it seems to me that it was off-topic at some point).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is for basic EFL help (refer to some EFL site?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is prompting a discussion (dict.leo.de is excellent quality for this kind of back and forth discussion of translation issues).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is for lyric interpretation (not the thing I'd want to attract here at ELU, but to be honest, I have those questions sometimes, and it'd be nice to know the appropriate outlet for them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is about language etiquette or social situations involving language. These are often deemed off-topic, but are still legitimate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are just plain dumb. Others are not , they just don't fit well with ELU or SE. The direction of this is that we want to shut down inappropriate questions, but not alienate the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be reasonable (for closeable but not crap questions) to give them a pointer to another site where they can ask their question and be more likely to get a helpful answer? Or would this simply allow/encourage questions we'd prefer not to have here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-03-26T16:00:29.477" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T16:00:29.477" Title="Where should we redirect legitimate but closeable non-SE questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2554" CreationDate="2012-03-26T11:47:14.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean to a whole different site? It might happen but when I close I don't point to other sites usually. By other sites I mean external sites, out of the SE network. And I haven't seen others do the same. Let's say it's not common practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually if the question is not fit for the site but is still valuable or it has potential, I invite the OP or high-rep users to fix it and improve it before I close it and then to reopen it when I finally close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's also off topic (other than not fitting), then I usually let the OP know (if and when this is possible) that the question can be migrated to another site where it can receive a more appropriate question (because probably that question asks for a different kind of expertise). So in summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's on topic but badly worded -&gt; I ask to reword/fix/improve it and give it some time. After a while, if there is no response from the OP or other users, I close it (or vote to close).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's off topic and badly worded -&gt; I ask the OP to improve it so it has better chances to have success in another site where it can be migrated to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's just a bad question -&gt; close it or vote to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: If you are talking about questions that are &lt;strong&gt;Not constructive&lt;/strong&gt;, then it depends. Usually they can be &quot;matched&quot; with any of those three cases above, and my behavior is more or less the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note that the distinction on SE is not black vs white, as in &quot;one possible answer&quot;  vs &quot;thousands of answers&quot;. If the questions asks for something that might reasonably get a small amount of answers, it's still a good one. What matters is that it's reasonably scoped so it doesn't ask for too many and it's not too scoped so it doesn't become too localized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes what matters in a question is the wording. I've seen on EL&amp;amp;U questions that would have been down-voted and voted to close but the wording made a difference and they received instead great appreciation. So if you see a Not constructive but potentially good question, try to re-word it or ask to re-word it so that it asks for something more definite. It doesn't need to be &quot;ONE possible answer only&quot;, but if you manage to make it reasonably scoped so that it asks for a small handful of possible answers, then why not? This is not the only parameter, and for this, try having a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;the 6 guidelines that make a difference in Good Subjective/Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if I addressed your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2012-03-26T12:36:17.967" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T12:36:17.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-03-26T13:35:05.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very few people who would consider that offensive - but unwelcoming, definitely. A couple of those comments has a negligible effect, but if enough of them start to spring up, then we will have purposefully made the community feel less welcome to large group of people (including myself) for no good reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly oppose any editing that removes or compromises any views expressed in relation to the question at hand. However, I don't have a problem with removing text does nothing but encourage unwanted behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="293" LastEditorUserId="293" LastEditDate="2012-03-29T11:24:49.240" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T11:24:49.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-03-26T15:26:51.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every potentially offensive item has to be taken in context. If I'd seen the quoted example in a &lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;, I'd probably have edited the offending words out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'd seen it in an &lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;, I wouldn't edit it out, but I might downvote the answer. Plus I'd probably also leaf through a few other postings by that user. If I found other inflammatory posts, I'd almost certainly downvote and add a comment explaining why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I saw the same words in a &lt;strong&gt;Comment&lt;/strong&gt;, I wouldn't really care. As an atheist somewhat to the right of Richard Dawkins, I don't really mind such &quot;banter&quot;, so long as it's kept reasonably &lt;em&gt;&quot;off the front page&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But undeniably, it's a fairly &quot;lame&quot; sideswipe. If someone wrote it in &lt;strong&gt;Chat&lt;/strong&gt;, I'd just set a mental flag to say &lt;em&gt;that person may be a bit childish&lt;/em&gt; - purely because the &quot;joke&quot; is so feeble. I have no problem with such sentiments being expressed in chat, provided no-one else is getting worked up over them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T15:26:51.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2647" CreationDate="2012-03-28T23:54:49.590" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to edit even a single character in the title of a question. I recently did this (without edit privileges) for a question that had a confusing (yet obvious after reading the question) typo in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I was there, I figured I'd capitalize the first letter of a sentence in the question body that wasn't capitalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that this edit was rejected for being too few characters. The cure was to start over, re-edit the post's title, and then edit even &lt;em&gt;fewer&lt;/em&gt; characters in the question body: 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes no sense to me. If a one-letter edit to a question title with no edits to the question itself is allowed, then shouldn't such a title edit with a few characters changed in the question also be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T00:21:41.557" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Edit restriction for too-few characters improperly applied" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2561" CreationDate="2012-03-29T02:38:25.493" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the badge &quot;strunk and white&quot;, do retags count as an edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it necessary to change the letters in the title and the body? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18425" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Do retags count as an edit?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2560" CreationDate="2012-03-29T17:38:03.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions&quot;&gt;meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; it says for Copy Editor (gold): &quot;Edits that consist only of tag changes do not count&quot; and at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/445/171937&quot;&gt;What kind of edits contribute to the editor badges?&lt;/a&gt; Jeff Atwood wrote &quot;does not include edits to tags&quot;. Therefore: Quite probably they do not count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12903" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T17:38:03.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-29T20:10:06.257" Score="7" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the particular question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/62637/is-this-sentence-correct-as-a-heading-on-a-software-message&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct...?&lt;/a&gt;, there is a dispute about how to handle closing and deleting. The timeline of what occurred is as follows within a rough two hour period:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;three answers posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some voting occurred (a downvote on the question and a downvote on 1 answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question was closed by a moderator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all the answers were deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the petty motivation is that one of my answers was deleted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some issues are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers (of whatever quality) to bad questions should be discouraged, because it encourages bad questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people getting rep for answers to bad questions is annoying, because holding back (because of the previous discouragement) leads to annoyance at rep earned for intemperance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;high rep users should 'know better'&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some things are obviously off-topic, some things are questionable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moderators using delete is great for spam and incoherence, but is inappropriate for informing people of slighty annoying practice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only moderators can delete an answer. (individuals can flag to bring attention to a moderator, but the moderator is doing the deleting). An 'undelete' option appears with the deleted answer for the author, but clicking that says that only a moderator can undelete it (there's no voting involved at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content (in the specific question) is debatable:&#xA;- The original question isn't obviously closeable as off-topic (it is not a well-described question, so it could be closeable for that reason, or it may be explicitly proscribed in the FAQ (I think this case fits &quot;is the following sentence correct&quot; questions are stated as off-topic). And seemingly poor questions are resurrectable by answers that pull out something interesting.&#xA;- the answers don't seem to be, on their own, closeable or deletable (their quality is not terrible, maybe not the best but not terrible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My side of the debate is that answers (that are not deletable for other reasons) to bad questions should remain; if the question is bad enough to be deleted then that's when the answers should go away, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think it is an inappropriate use of moderator's powers to do this kind of deletion. Close, close close, all the crap questions, please go wild. But don't -delete- the answers, as the question may turn out to be re-openable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question for discussion is, should -answers- to bad questions be deleted if the question is closed for poor quality/off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T01:16:48.560" Title="Deleting answers to closed questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-29T23:35:03.643" Score="5" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once again I appear to be &lt;em&gt;persona non notata&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt;, since the login tells me there's nobody with my email address, but here I am on &lt;code&gt;meta&lt;/code&gt;, complaining about it, with my name at the top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will miracles never cease?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Late-breaking Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319/how-come-im-logged-in-on-meta-but-main-doesnt-know-me-on-this-se-and-on&quot;&gt;The same thing happened to me on Linguistics SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.260" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T03:50:28.483" Title="How can I be signed in on meta, when main doesn't know who I am?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|login|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2563" CreationDate="2012-03-30T00:07:18.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has happened before, to myself. Namely, I log off the main, but I'm still logged into meta. Can be quite worrying.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, people don't usually go to meta, so they can't usurp my identity here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18425" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T00:07:18.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2639" CreationDate="2012-03-30T00:56:02.830" Score="6" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I click the &quot;close (x)&quot; link on a question that I have previously voted to close, I am present with a window similar to what is seen when I first clicked the link. The biggest difference is that the radio buttons are gone (wouldn't make sense to select a reason, anyway), and the &quot;Vote to Close&quot; button doesn't do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the cursor still appears as a pointer over anything that &lt;em&gt;would be&lt;/em&gt; clickable if I were able to cast a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[This is where I was going to put the screenshot, but looking at it reminded me that the cursor does not show up in screenshots]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="3" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T23:00:15.657" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T23:00:15.657" Title="Minor CSS issue in the vote-to-close window" Tags="|bug|status-completed|vote-to-close|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2563" CreationDate="2012-03-30T04:18:14.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, we piggy-back on the main site's authentication cookie to initially create your meta cookie.  This is why clicking &quot;log in&quot; on a meta site will redirect you to the main site's Log In page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the main site's cookie is somehow removed, you can still be logged into the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens, just log in again on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're going to change how this works to help avoid this duality: &lt;strong&gt;if you're logged out of the main site, you'll also be logged out of the meta&lt;/strong&gt;.  This change will go in next week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="3" LastEditDate="2012-03-31T05:08:08.303" LastActivityDate="2012-03-31T05:08:08.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="395" CreationDate="2012-03-31T02:44:46.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure when this feature was implemented, but there is a discard option that appears next to the Post Your Answer button after 45 seconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7FjdS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastEditorUserId="18399" LastEditDate="2012-03-31T04:12:30.980" LastActivityDate="2012-03-31T04:12:30.980" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2012-03-31T04:09:31.577" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close, and I've just now voted to re-open. But I'd like to think either the question will be edited, or it can be flagged as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/258/&quot;&gt;What's the shortest sentence?&lt;/a&gt; (I'll vote for that unless it's altered).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really expect it, but &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it should turn out the question can be edited &amp;amp; salvaged, and &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it seems that those earlier answers justify it, they can always be undeleted. I don't know what rep is needed to see, and vote to undelete, but I suppose plenty of us can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; strongly that those answers should have been deleted (I wouldn't have been frothing at the mouth if they &lt;em&gt;hadn't&lt;/em&gt;), but on balance I think it's better they were. Not least because as OP himself says, &lt;em&gt;high rep users should 'know better'&lt;/em&gt; than to answer questions that should be closed. Anyway, ELU is a &quot;kinda&quot; democracy, so you have to take your shots if people vote against you. Even if &quot;people&quot; turn out to be just one mod (but I admit I'm behind RegDwight in spirit!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-03-31T04:09:31.577" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-04-03T18:00:54.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who will probably be attending no less than three services during this Holy Week, I really don't see the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its even debateable what he was even getting at. For instance, my denomination currently does not consider the King James Bible one of its preferred translations, and I know of quite a few Biblical scholars who would consider this joke quite amusing, on the basis of how inaccurate a translation the KJV is considered to be. Considering how it was phrased, I might even be willing to argue this is exactly the sense which was intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9186" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-04-03T20:56:10.517" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T20:56:10.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2238" CreationDate="2012-04-06T21:30:29.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the late response, I didn't mean to overlook this. Flagging for mod attention was the right thing to do. Now let's cut to the chase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I closed the question because it boils down to rewriting advice (⇒ off-topic, possibly on-topic over at Writers), based on a false premise to boot (⇒ not a real question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the premise is false is best demonstrated by the fact that the top and accepted (!) answer says just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this site is not to provide a platform for rewording perfectly grammatical everyday constructions. Trying to come up with creative ways to say &quot;red car&quot; without using the word &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; because person X doesn't like it for reason Y makes for a fun bikeshedding question, but that's about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T21:30:29.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2012-04-08T01:16:48.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mitch brings up a lot of good points.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just a did some analysis on the month of April.  Approximately 30% of our questions are being closed (46 of 151).  Of those, rougly one-third are being closed by consensus (5 votes), while the remaining two-thirds are being closed by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I'm in wholehearted agreement with closure, but, perhaps just as often, I'm not.  Justifications such as &quot;too localized&quot; and &quot;off-topic&quot; are quite subjective, so I feel it's generally better to let the community decide on such matters, as opposed to a single individual making an autocratic decision.  (Supposedly, such closures are &quot;for the good of the community,&quot; but one man's trash is another man's treasure. In my mind, far too many legitimate questions are being closed in a hair-trigger manner, some within a few minutes of being asked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why the answers to the referenced question were deleted, but I do know this: it is a little frustrating when you expend time and effort crafting an answer that you believe is both helpful and constructive, only to have someone arbitrarily decide it can be deleted, or that the question can be closed before you've finished typing a response.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my ramblings to this question are a little off-topic, but the O.P. said this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it is an inappropriate use of moderator's powers to do&#xA;  this kind of deletion. Close, close close, all the crap questions,&#xA;  please go wild. But don't -delete- the answers, as the question may&#xA;  turn out to be re-openable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, the question for discussion is, should -answers- to bad questions&#xA;  be deleted if the question is closed for poor quality/off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answers, in a nutshell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, decent answers to bad questions should stay on the board, unless they are patently offensive;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, I agree that some moderator privileges can be abused;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I agree that &quot;crap&quot; questions should be deleted, I think it's best for the community to collectively decide which questions are crap, and which may have some redeeming value.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see moderators cast more close votes, and close fewer questions using moderator privileges.  That said, I'm not sure – maybe the system isn't designed that way?  (If that's the case, I think a redesign would be in order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T01:16:48.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-10T21:06:35.030" Score="17" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know they are in beta but the following question begs to be migrated to [linguistics.se].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61892/distinctive-features-of-english-diphthongs&quot;&gt;Distinctive Features of English Dipthongs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if our passing relevant questions to other SEs would help them get out of Beta as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14070" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T00:09:48.467" Title="Can we add Linguistics SE to the migration path list?" Tags="|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-11T00:34:00.737" Score="120" ViewCount="88364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What good reference works on English are available, and what kinds of questions are they good at answering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2663&quot;&gt;General Reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6824&quot;&gt;Grammar:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Resources for word and sentence formation (morphology and syntax).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574&quot;&gt;Dictionaries:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Resources that describe what individual words mean, how they are pronounced, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2577&quot;&gt;Thesauri:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Helps find synonyms and antonyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9879/&quot;&gt;Historical Resources&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;References created in the further past.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2579&quot;&gt;Style:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Resources that describe different styles (collections of 'rules').&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3678&quot;&gt;Translation:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tools that convert to and from English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2578&quot;&gt;Corpora:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Large collections of source text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T00:16:52.607" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:56:48.027" Title="What good reference works on English are available?" Tags="|support|faq|on-topic-off-topic|general-reference|resources|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-11T11:48:02.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2012-04-11T12:43:27.410" Score="58" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Dictionaries&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful for finding definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and examples of usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General-purpose dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The online dictionaries listed here are broadly suitable for native speakers, providing major definitions and examples, pronunciations (including audio), basic etymology, and some usage notes. Some are among the most commonly cited on English Language &amp;amp; Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; (MW) — Company which secured the rights to Noah Webster's dictionary, which was highly influential in the development of American English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/a&gt; – Published by Houghton Mifflin, and developed in part as a reaction to the perceived Webster's Third International Dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt; (CDO) — Portal to several dictionaries produced by Cambridge University Press&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt; — Published by HarperCollins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google (or Bing) Dictionary — Entering &lt;code&gt;define&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;definition&lt;/code&gt; followed by a search-term into the search box will return an entry with its basic definitions, etymology, and an NGram showing the word or phrase's prevalence in the Google Books corpus. Presently these search engines license their definitions from Oxford University Press, making it accurate enough for a quick and convenient check, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7052/is-google-dictionary-a-valid-definition-reference-in-particular-in-answers/7053#7053&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;Bing&amp;quot;) is not an attributable resource in accordance with our citation policies&lt;/a&gt;, because it is not a primary resource and its sources are subject to change. If possible, figure out if you are quoting from the American (New Oxford American Dictionary) or British (Oxford Dictionary of English) version. Otherwise, you can cite &amp;quot;Oxford Languages via Google/Bing&amp;quot;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionary of English&lt;/em&gt; are also bundled with recent releases of MacOS X and iOS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Learner's dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_learner%27s_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;learner's dictionary&lt;/a&gt; is geared to the needs of people learning English as a foreign or second language, for example, by providing notes on usage and common errors. Commonly cited on EL&amp;amp;U are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Learner's Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ldoceonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins COBUILD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macmillan English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Learner's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://learnersdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Collaborative dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiktionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; — a publicly edited dictionary. Like any crowdsourced resource it can be easily manipulated, and its definitions and translations should be taken with caution; by the same token, it is likely to include neologisms and new meanings faster than traditional dictionaries will.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Meta-dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Meta-dictionary&amp;quot; is something of a misnomer; it is not a dictionary of dictionaries, but a resource that collects entries from multiple resources in a single place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OneLook&lt;/a&gt; — Provides direct links to definitions posted at many other online reference sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; (Reference.com) — Primarily sourced from the Random House Dictionary for American English and the Collins English Dictionary for British English. Some entries also include additional material from the Online Etymology Dictionary, The Dictionary of American Slang, The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary, and other specialized dictionaries including some medical, legal, and computing sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; - Primarily sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, and Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary. Most entries include thesaurus entries from WordNet, Roget's, and others, plus translation suggestions from Collins and Kernerman translation dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordnik.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordnik&lt;/a&gt; — Primarily sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition, The Century Cyclopedia, and WordNet 3.0, but notable for its lengthy lists of related terms and concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fine Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;— Searches a few popular dictionaries from around the early 20th century, as well as Wordnet 3.6 with quotations, illustrations, and factoids provided alongside the entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Historical and dialectical dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These dictionaries may be helpful for researching word origins and formation, semantic drift, and historical and regional variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (online subscription required&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;) — The &lt;em&gt;sine qua non&lt;/em&gt; of historical dictionaries of English, showing the development of word meanings, including obsolete and obscure meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The 1st edition of the OED (which began publication as the &lt;em&gt;New English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;) (NED, OED)&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; is in the public domain: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed01arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A–B&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed02arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed03arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;D–E&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed04arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F–G&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/newenglishdict05murrmiss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H–K&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed6aarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed6barch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M–N&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed07arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;O–P&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed8aarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Q–R&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/oed8barch#page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;S-Sh&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed9aarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Si–St&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oed9barch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Su–Th&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oedxaarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ti–U&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oedxbarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;V–Z&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; — An extensive free compilation of word origins compiled by Douglas Harper, drawing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://etymonline.com/sources.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the OED and other sources&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Dialect Dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years...&lt;/em&gt;, OUP 1898-1905. Compiled by Joseph Wright, the EDD remains a standard in the historical study of dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/englishdialectdi01wriguoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A–C&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924088038397&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;D–G&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/englishdialectdi03wriguoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H–L&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/englishdialectdi04wriguoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M–Q&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924088038421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R–S&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/englishdialectdi06wriguoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T–Z&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://australiannationaldictionary.com.au/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian National Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; — The standard historical dictionary for words and idioms that originate in Australian English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.daredictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary of American Regional English&lt;/a&gt; (DARE), subscription required — Based on extensive surveys carried out since the 1960s, the DARE is a compilation of words, phrases, and usages that are specific to a particular region of the United States. &lt;a href=&quot;https://dare.wisc.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project information&lt;/a&gt; is available from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dchp.ca/DCHP-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, 1st edition&lt;/a&gt; — Shows meanings of various terms specific to Canada, including obsolete and outdated meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dchp.ca/dchp2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, 2nd edition&lt;/a&gt; — Shows meanings of various terms specific to Canada, including obsolete and outdated meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; — An online searchable version of a 15,000-page dictionary of the same name from The University of Michigan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnson's Dictionary Online&lt;/a&gt; — Covers one of the most known examples of an early dictionary as we know them: A Dictionary of The English Language written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1755.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://edl.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emily Dickinson Lexicon&lt;/a&gt; — It is useful for studying the poetess' work and early American English. It provides its own dictionary, and the 1844 printing of &lt;em&gt;The American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, which was the final print Noah Webster edited and published the year after he died at the age of 84.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Heritage Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; has two appendices that give roots of forbears of English words along with their cognates in the PIE and Proto-Semitic languages respectively&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European Roots&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ahdictionary.com/word/semitic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semitic Roots&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexilogos.com/dictionnaire_langues.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LexiLogos&lt;/a&gt; and more specifically its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexilogos.com/etymologie.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology center&lt;/a&gt; is a center for online dictionaries in many languages (the site is in French but that is not needed to use the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Many schools and libraries have full access to the OED Online; this is usually also extended to UK residents via their County Library Service or equivalent. The third edition is not available in print, only online, but the first two editions have print forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The original name, when it started fascicle-by-fascicle publication in the 1880s, was &lt;em&gt;A New English Dictionary On Historical Principles&lt;/em&gt;, but by the time the last volume was published in 1928 it was generally known as the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (OED), under which name subsequent editions (including&#xA;facsimiles of the original) have gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Idioms, expressions, and slang&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous print dictionaries that focus on idioms, including various offerings by Oxford and McGraw-Hill, like the &lt;em&gt;McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TFD Idioms and Phrases&lt;/a&gt; — From TheFreeDictionary, a searchable database of idioms from the &lt;em&gt;Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phrases.org.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Phrase Finder&lt;/a&gt; — Provides meanings and origins of numerous English expressions and sayings, with commentary by Gary Martin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://greensdictofslang.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Green's Dictionary of Slang&lt;/a&gt; — Renowned lexicographer Jonathan Green dedicated a life's work to the study of slang, compiling at least 55,000 headwords, illustrated by more than 640,451 citations.  As of 2019, all citations and advanced search features formerly reserved for subscribers are available to the public for free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ozdic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OZDIC&lt;/a&gt; - Collocation dictionary. Enter a word to find collocations with that word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By nature, however, slang usage is informal and ephemeral, and difficult to compile into a definitive reference. Most online slang dictionaries must rely on user input, with wildly varying accuracy and reliability. Nevertheless, they are much faster to update than traditional dictionaries and have dates that help track evolution. Examples include the &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlineslangdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Slang Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Walter Rader; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Slang&lt;/a&gt; by Ted Duckworth; and probably the most popular, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kenyon and Knott's 1949 &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/pronouncingdicti00unse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; — The gold standard for American phonemes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://howjsay.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Howdjsay.com&lt;/a&gt; — Created by Tim Bowyer, provides audio clips of a &amp;quot;standard British&amp;quot; pronunciation of various words, with some alternatives, based on the suggested pronunciation given by major dictionaries. It lacks phonetic transcriptions, definitions, or other notations, however.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youglish.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Youglish&lt;/a&gt; - An online pronunciation 'dictionary' that, when searched for a word, gives a set of Youtube videos where the word is spoken (as found in captions), plus the IPA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo&lt;/a&gt; — An online pronunciation dictionary with audio pronunciations submitted and voted on by members. Its goal is &amp;quot;All the words in the world. Pronounced.&amp;quot; It has excellent basic coverage of English, with more common words often represented in multiple dialects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/pronundict/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PronunDict&lt;/a&gt; is a free pronunciation dictionary of American English. Its key features are &lt;strong&gt;searching by pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt; and simple &lt;strong&gt;wildcard matching&lt;/strong&gt;. The data source is the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict) or its derivative AmEPD. The disadvantages are that there are some errors in the dictionary entries, and that marking of boundaries of stressed syllables does not always work perfectly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Legal Dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thelawdictionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Law Dictionary featuring Black's Law Dictionary Free Online Legal Dictionary 2nd Ed.&lt;/a&gt; — The most popular legal dictionary in the U.S.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; — Once again it includes a large number of other legal dictionaries. Citations vary on a term-by-term basis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T03:40:00.800" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:40:00.800" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-11T12:43:27.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-11T13:23:43.820" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63737/origin-and-meaning-of-rackers&quot;&gt;question about origin and meaning of &quot;rackers&quot;&lt;/a&gt; closed as basic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only I was surprised in this choice, but other ELU' member (&quot;asking for an explanation of a line of Shakespeare is just as on-topic as asking to 'explicate'a newspaper editorial. (Admittedly, there are other reasons to be uneasy about this question.&quot;), too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-04-11T13:55:48.357" Title="Why was question about origin and meaning of &quot;rackers&quot; closed as basic?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2575" CreationDate="2012-04-11T13:55:13.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed as &quot;general reference&quot; because, at least as written, you were asking us to do the job of a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good news is, it would be easy to improve the question so that it could be reopened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look up the word in a dictionary or two or three, and add the information you find there into the question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe why the dictionary definition doesn't help you to make sense of the quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tell us exactly what the quotation is from. (Hint: it's not actually from any historical person named Holofernes.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-04-11T13:55:13.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2012-04-11T14:07:25.877" Score="30" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Thesauri&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful for finding synonyms of specific words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thesaurus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thesaurus.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (included with Mac OS X)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://powerthesaurus.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Power Thesaurus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T11:46:52.330" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T11:46:52.330" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-11T14:07:25.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2012-04-11T17:44:28.617" Score="30" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Corpora&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Large collections of original source text. The online tools that are available for searching corpora, however, may be overkill for the average user, and may be confusing to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English-Corpora.org&lt;/a&gt; - Formerly corpus.byu.edu, this is perhaps the most popular corpus search engine, created by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. Key collections include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/a&gt; - the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BNC&lt;/a&gt; was a project of Oxford University Press covering a diverse range of spoken and written British English from about 1980 to 1993.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Newspaper Archive&lt;/a&gt;: The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and findmypast to digitize up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection over the next 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chronicling America&lt;/a&gt;: Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt; - the largest freely-available corpus of American English, COCA includes spoken and written American English from a variety of sources from 1990–2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Historical American English&lt;/a&gt; - The largest structured corpus of historical English, COHA contains text from American publications from the 1810s to the 2000s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://elephind.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elephind&lt;/a&gt;: Search the world's historical newspaper archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hansard-corpus.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hansard Corpus&lt;/a&gt; - contains nearly every speech given in the British Parliament from 1803 to 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/now/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;News on the Web (NOW) Corpus&lt;/a&gt; - contains billions of words from web-based newspapers and magazines since 2010. Helpful for searches on very recent usage, as millions of words are added daily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/tv/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Corpus&lt;/a&gt; - contains words from 75,000 television episodes from the 1950s to the current time, linked to their IMDb entries, and an excellent source for informal spoken language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/core/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Online Registers of English&lt;/a&gt; - Based on research by Douglas Biber, Mark Davies, and Jesse Egbert, CORE uses more finely tuned categories for sources such as &lt;em&gt;recipe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sermon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;travel blog&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;interview&lt;/em&gt;, allowing for greater context and insights into usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lextutor.ca/conc/eng/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus Concordance English&lt;/a&gt; at LexTutor - Conceived by Chris Greaves and built by Tom Cobb at the Université du Québec à Montréal, this website provides a searchable interface to more than three dozen corpora including the BNC, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/w3c/corpus_ling/content/corpora/list/private/brown/brown.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brown Corpus of American English&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://joeandco.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JPU Corpus&lt;/a&gt;, and US television dialog compiled by &lt;a href=&quot;http://doe.concordia.ca/alert/team/marlise.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marlise Horst&lt;/a&gt; at Concordia University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; - A service of Google through which over 25 million books have been scanned; while the visibility of copyrighted works is restricted, the size and relative comprehensiveness of the Google Books corpus makes it useful for finding usage examples and historical prevalence. The resource is flawed in that it makes no account of spoken English, and contains numerous OCR and metadata errors leading to skewed results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt; - A simple interface for comparing the prevalence of words or phrases in the Google Books corpora and charting them as n-grams, as well as comparing results from sub-corpora (for example, comparing the prevalence of a word or phrase in British vs. American English). See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;info page&lt;/a&gt; for syntax and FAQs.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Ngrams can be embedded in EL&amp;amp;U posts by selecting &lt;em&gt;Embed Chart&lt;/em&gt;, copying the &lt;code&gt;src&lt;/code&gt; value from the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;iframe&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag, changing &lt;code&gt;interactive_chart&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;chart&lt;/code&gt;, and supplying the resulting URL as the image source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English&lt;/a&gt; - A searchable corpus of transcripts of academic speeches recorded at the University of Michigan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fraze.it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fraze.It&lt;/a&gt; A service with a more user-friendly interface by the creator of YouGlish, which provides over 100 million phrases demonstrating how words are used in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T03:42:00.950" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:42:00.950" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-11T17:44:28.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2012-04-12T13:52:46.970" Score="28" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Style&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidelines governing the presentation of written English are collectively referred to as &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; and are laid out in various rulebooks and manuals. The purpose of these guidelines is to provide a uniform presentation, to improve readability, and as a mark of professionalism. Some industries, such as screenwriting, use specific formats, but any individual organization or even an individual publication can enforce a &lt;em&gt;house style&lt;/em&gt;. If a writer has not been directed to follow a particular style or other guidelines, s/he is encouraged to choose a suitable style and be consistent in its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is consensus that major words in the title of a book should be capitalized, but difference on what constitutes a major word. There is consensus that the publication year of a reference should be included in its citation, but difference on whether it should be indicated with a comma, parentheses, or other punctuation. &lt;em&gt;Hellenic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Greek&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Græcian&lt;/em&gt; are all valid words that can be found in a dictionary, but a publication may have specific rules for when each may be used. If a question asks about an area where there is broad consensus, it is likely to be closed due to insufficient research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General Style Guides&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the most popular general style guides, only Oxford and Chicago are available online, and only with a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199661350.do&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fowler’s Modern English Usage&lt;/a&gt; (formally known as &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Modern English Usage&lt;/em&gt;) is the most widely cited guide for British English usage, pronunciation, and writing, but it is not available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/secondary/harts_rules/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Style Guide and New Hart's Rules&lt;/a&gt; (not to be confused with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ox.ac.uk/public-affairs/style-guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Oxford Style Guide&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://global.oup.com/uk/academic/authors/AuthorGuidelinesMain/HouseStyle/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford University Press House Style&lt;/a&gt;) is a popular reference for British writers and editors. A subscription is required for the online edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/a&gt; (CMOS) is the most popular style guide used for non-journalistic writing in the United States. It is also accepted by most universities. Many finer points are covered in its free &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/latest.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Questions and Answers blog&lt;/a&gt;, and Purdue OWL has a section for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chicago/Turabian citation style&lt;/a&gt;; &amp;quot;Turabian Style&amp;quot; refers to Kate L. Turabian's &lt;em&gt;Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations&lt;/em&gt;, based on Chicago Style but focused on academic publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyphenation Table&lt;/strong&gt;: CMOS publishes a free, downloadable 10-page Hyphenation Table, which covers hyphenation usage for almost every imaginable word string at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/images/ch07_tab01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://elt.oup.com/catalogue/items/global/grammar_vocabulary/practical_english_usage/?cc=global&amp;amp;selLanguage=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Practical English Usage&lt;/a&gt; by Michael Swan is a popular grammar and usage reference aimed at non-native speakers of English. It is also available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/grammar/practical-english-usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0073545430/information_center_view0/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gregg Reference Manual&lt;/a&gt; (GRM), created for American stenographers and typists, is available online with a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Academic and Scientific Style Guides&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pubs.acs.org/isbn/9780841239999&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACS Style&lt;/a&gt;, from the American Chemical Society, is widely used in physical sciences, notably by chemistry and physics journals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amamanualofstyle.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AMA Manual of Style&lt;/a&gt; requires a subscription; it is widely used in medicine and healthcare research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apastyle.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APA Style&lt;/a&gt;, developed by the American Psychological Association, is widely used in the social sciences. A subscription is required for the style guide, but the citation style is accessible &lt;a href=&quot;https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/10/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at the Purdue OWL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bishopfox.com/blog/2018/02/hello-world-introducing-the-bishop-fox-cybersecurity-style-guide/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bishop Fox Cybersecurity Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;, from malicious viruses to viral memes, for security researchers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ieee.org/documents/style_manual.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IEEE Style&lt;/a&gt;, from the  Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is based largely on Chicago Style, but with a focus on engineering, particularly computer science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MHRA Style&lt;/a&gt; is governed by the Modern Humanities Research Association, and is commonly preferred for theses in UK universities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MLA (Modern Language Association) Style is widely used in arts and humanities academia. Official &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mla.org/style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MLA Style&lt;/a&gt; publications (the Handbook and the Style Manual) are not available online; however, an &lt;a href=&quot;http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MLA Formatting and Style Guide&lt;/a&gt; is provided by the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scientificstyleandformat.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scientific Style and Format&lt;/a&gt;, the manual for CSE Style, requires a subscription. It is widely used in scientific publishing, especially in life sciences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Journalist Style Guides&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apstylebook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AP Style&lt;/a&gt;, subscription-required, is the standard style guide followed by major newspapers in the United States. Special derivatives and elucidations on AP style are printed by the &lt;em&gt;Wall Street Journal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt; but are not available online to the public. A derivative called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tameri.com/edit/style.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tameri Guide for Writers&lt;/a&gt; is freely available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BBC News Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stylebooks.thecanadianpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canadian Press Stylebook&lt;/a&gt;, requires a subscription.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://handbook.reuters.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reuters Handbook of Journalism&lt;/a&gt; covers the Reuters house style for general reporting and for sports reporting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.economist.com/styleguide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Economist Style Guide&lt;/a&gt; is a highly popular style guide, particularly for international audiences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Guardian and Observer Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/title/new-york-times-manual-of-style-and-usage-the-official-style-guide-used-by-the-writers-and-editors-of-the-worlds-most-authoritative-news-organization/oclc/908517391&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 5th Edition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Telegraph Style Book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stylemanual.ngs.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Geographic Style Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diversitystyleguide.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Diversity Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;, a project of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, is &amp;quot;not a guide to being politically correct. Rather, it offers guidance, context, and nuance for media professionals struggling to write about people who are different from themselves and communities different from their own&amp;quot; in its own words. It also links to identity-related style guides from other organizations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://religionstylebook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Religion Stylebook&lt;/a&gt; is an independent supplement to the AP Handbook, published by the Religion Newswriters Association, aimed at journalists who report on religion in the mainstream media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gamestyleguide.com/VideoGameStyleGuideeBook.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual&lt;/a&gt; offers International Game Journalists Association standards for videogame terminology as used in game journalism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.buzzfeed.com/emmyf/buzzfeed-style-guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BuzzFeed's Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;, reflecting its content, may offer guidance on the presentation of popular culture or new technology not covered by other guides.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Governmental Style Guides&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;: No government of any major English-speaking country attempts to enforce English style or usage as a matter of law or regulation. These guides are published mainly for writers in the employ of the respective governmental office or body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Australia: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.australia.gov.au/publications/style-manual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commonwealth Government Printing Office Style Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canada: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/tcdnstyl/index-eng.html?lang=eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canadian Style&lt;/a&gt; from the Bureau of Translation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;European Commission: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ec.europa.eu/translation/english/guidelines/documents/styleguide_english_dgt_en.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Philippines: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gov.ph/style-manual/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Executive Branch Style Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South Africa: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gcis.gov.za/sites/www.gcis.gov.za/files/docs/resourcecentre/guidelines/Editorial_Style_Guide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCIS Editorial Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;United Nations Editorial Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;United States: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008/pdf/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Government Printing Office Style Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Style Manual &amp;amp; Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTWAT/Resources/wbstyleguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Bank Editorial Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://members.wto.org/txt/english/bible.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Trade Organization Editorial Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aManual_of_Style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia Manual of Style&lt;/a&gt; (MoS) governs usage on Wikipedia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nitpickertool.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nitpicker&lt;/a&gt; is &amp;quot;an overly picky language style checker&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Older style guides tend to be strongly prescriptive, that is, flatly asserting that certain usages are &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; even if they are widely used and well-understood. Some recommendations or cautions have been transformed and transmitted over the years as &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; that are rejected by professional writers and linguists alike, such as the prejudice against the passive voice or against ending sentences with prepositions. Therefore, writers must be cautious about the stylistic advice given in popular guides like Strunk and White’s &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Elements of Style&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/116/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;older editions of Fowler's&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T03:47:09.717" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:47:09.717" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-12T13:52:46.970" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-12T15:49:08.937" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know whether there are any ways I can embed recording on this site? I have a little piece of recording and I've listened many times but still can't clearly understand what the man is saying. I want some native speakers to help me on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" OwnerDisplayName="Yousui" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-04-12T23:41:51.227" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T16:30:13.617" Title="Is there any way I can embed a small piece of recording on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2580" CreationDate="2012-04-16T16:30:13.617" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are no copyright problems with it, e-mail it to me and I'll host it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T16:30:13.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2583" CreationDate="2012-04-19T20:12:06.037" Score="1" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few sentences in English (I am not native speaker) — abstract for my thesis. However, my English is not very strong and I would appreciate a grammar check by someone more skilled in English. If I understand correctly, this site does not allow this kind of post here. My question is, is there another  place to get such a grammar check? I do not need any opinions about the text itself, just a check if it is grammatically correct. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20321" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-04-24T15:48:44.467" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T15:48:44.467" Title="Place to get grammar check for short text" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2582" CreationDate="2012-04-19T20:23:49.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best place to do this is probably &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U chat&lt;/a&gt;. The room is very active, and you're likely to find someone there at nearly all hours who can point out simple grammatical mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T20:23:49.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2582" CreationDate="2012-04-20T01:26:17.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copy your text into MS Word. Red squiggly underlines will tell you that you've misspelled something. Green squiggly underlines will tell you that a word is not appropriate grammatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As abhorrent as this might sound (there're all sorts of difficulties with the MS Word grammar/style checker), it is better than nothing. It will help you with the most egregious problems first, but then you should have a human look over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major Caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MS Word does some very basic word sequence checking, part of speech tagging (for checking tense and plurality agreement, and hard coded patterns (like marking common typing errors like repeated words). Beyond that it's not so good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whoever decided what the vocabulary and diction suggestions are, really don't know how real writers write.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-04-22T21:03:53.723" LastActivityDate="2012-04-22T21:03:53.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2588" CreationDate="2012-04-21T12:22:54.663" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen comments linking to other SE questions where the comment name is shown instead of just a meaningless hyperlink. How do I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastActivityDate="2012-04-21T18:41:26.747" Title="How to put question name in comment?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2587" CreationDate="2012-04-21T18:41:26.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You make a link with descriptive text like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[descriptive text](http:\siteurl.org)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I can give a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2587/how-to-put-question-name-in-comment&quot;&gt;link to this very question&lt;/a&gt; this way. It works in questions, answers, and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hint to finding how people do things is to do an edit of the original text (but then cancel of course). Most of the markup that works in questions/answers will work in comments/chat, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-04-21T18:41:26.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2582" CreationDate="2012-04-22T20:58:51.903" Score="-2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copy your trial English text into &lt;strong&gt;Google Translate&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translate to your native language (or whatever you're most comfortable with for the topic). If the translation doesn't look good in your own language then it is likely that something is wrong in the original English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether the translation is wrong or not, translate back again into English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repeat this process until the English text doesn't change anymore. Or rearrange the steps as you see fit (maybe just start with your native text).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As abhorrent as this might sound (for many reasons), it is a quick way to check grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;google translate is not perfect. It is not using (currently) using (much?) direct grammatical knowledge; rather it uses probabilities of short sequences of words. This is counterintuitively much better than the current syntax-based translators.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a mistake in grammar (in any language) might be processed in a hard to predict manner, resulting in a sequence in the other language that is either also ungrammatical, or if grammatical, having an unintended semantics (a misplaced adverb, a mistranslated negation, an unrecognized idiomatic phrase, etc, etc, etc). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-04-22T20:58:51.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2595" CreationDate="2012-04-23T19:24:30.343" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65362/should-i-use-whose-or-whichs&quot;&gt;Should I use whose or which's?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as a duplicate of several other closed duplicates (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21078/usage-of-whose-not-referring-to-a-person&quot;&gt;Usage of “whose” not referring to a person&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25300/possessive-thats&quot;&gt;Possessive &quot;that's&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33095/possessive-connecting-word-for-inanimate-object&quot;&gt;Possessive connecting word for inanimate object&lt;/a&gt;). I cannot cite other specific examples of this happening, but I remember it as more than rare, albeit less than common. In any case, this is unhelpful to future users who stumble across such questions—they should be directly linked to a non-closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible ideas for fixing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not allow duplicate questions to be marked as the anti-duplicate. (By anti-duplicate, I mean the question that the duplicate is a duplicate of, if that makes sense. I don't know what to call it.) If Question B is marked as a duplicate of Question A, SE should not allow B to be linked as a duplicate of Question C.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a duplicate question is proposed as the anti-duplicate, put &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question's anti-duplicate as the anti-duplicate. If Question B is marked as a duplicate of Question A, and then Question C is marked as a duplicate of B, SE should automagically link to A instead of B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;My apologies if I haven't asked a good question or if I haven't tagged this right. If I haven't, please feel free to correct me.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-04-29T10:04:27.233" Title="Why can duplicates be marked as duplicates?" Tags="|bug|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2582" CreationDate="2012-04-23T23:51:38.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of online forums that don't have restrictions on the kinds of questions you can ask, such as Yahoo! Answers, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/2305283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Answerbag.com&lt;/a&gt;.  You might look for a more general-purpose forum, and see if you can get any online assistance there.  You never know – some kindhearted individual may see your question and offer some sound advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be resources available at your school as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-04-23T23:51:38.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2592" CreationDate="2012-04-24T21:56:05.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not obvious to me there's anything wrong with the current system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I don't mind questions being closed even if they're not &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicates - if the original can easily be enhanced with minor edits and/or a new answer to address both questions, that's what I'd rather see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some (but not all) of the &quot;possible duplicates&quot; in OP's link have been closed themselves. I haven't checked them out in detail, but it's possible some of those that &lt;em&gt;haven't&lt;/em&gt; been closed could be - either immediately, or following some minor changes to one of the other questions/answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of questions covering essentially the same ground, but sometimes it takes a really good question/answer combination to highlight exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they're &quot;the same thing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T21:56:05.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-26T13:53:17.720" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65676/difference-between-while-and-whilst/65683#65683&quot;&gt;Difference between “while” and “whilst”&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16319/what-is-the-correct-usage-of-while-and-whilst&quot;&gt;What is the correct usage of “while” and “whilst”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it was first posted, the question asked for &lt;em&gt;Difference between “&lt;strong&gt;whiles&lt;/strong&gt;” and “whilst”&lt;/em&gt; - a distinction which all answers addressed to a greater or lesser extent. It was the OP himself who edited &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;whiles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; those answers had been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I'm not alone in thinking the question as originally worded was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a duplicate of the one against which it was subsequently closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to roll back the edit causing it to be a duplicate, disregarding the OP's apparent intentions? I know that seems a bit odd, but since I think there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a separate question concerning &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;whiles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the only reasonable alternative is to ask this in a new question - which again seems odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T20:49:06.153" Title="Dodgy duplicate closure" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2599" CreationDate="2012-04-26T17:16:24.873" Score="6" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit borderline I suspect, so thought I'd ask here first, but is it acceptable to ask a question around how a slang term would be received by different speakers? The specific word is 'numpty'- I've got very limited experience with it and it's slang that appears to be from a British English (possibly Scots?) source - and wouldn't mind getting a sense of how it's perceived. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all I know, just in my small section of the world it'd be considered not too insulting (my small section being Canberra), but over in the UK, it could carry a different flavour to how I've heard it used. I don't &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I am, and all my general reading and things like &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6520353.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;having it voted as Scotland's favourite word in 2007&lt;/a&gt; (according to a statistically insignificant survey by a telecommunications provider, probably run in a very non-sane fashion to give humorous results mind you..) suggest it's pretty innocuous, but I thought it'd be easier to just &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; rather than take a guess, which then led me to wondering if this class of questions would work here...which in turn led to this question on meta, since I started being more curious about how EL&amp;amp;U worked, rather than use of the original term :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, my read of the FAQ suggests this fits under the first point - usage of a term - but at the same time, I can also see an alternative since the question can be rephrased as 'is word X offensive and in what context?' to which you're probably never going to get an answer (esp on slang..) and just a debate that whirls around in circles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? Answers? Am I being a numpty^ even? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;^ a bumbling idiot, or alternatively, someone who is displaying via his question posting,  a lack of knowledge on this subject to the amusement of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20339" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2012-04-27T16:28:47.660" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T16:28:47.660" Title="Is a question on slang and how it'd be received amongst native speakers acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2598" CreationDate="2012-04-26T18:37:30.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have quite a few questions asking &lt;em&gt;&quot;How acceptable/well-known is [some profanity/slang expression]?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, so you won't be breaking any new ground asking about &lt;em&gt;&quot;numpty&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't rate such questions very highly, because &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; answers are invariably highly subjective. The general advice is just be &lt;em&gt;don't be the first person to introduce potentially offensive terminology into the conversation, unless you know &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; what you're doing and why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, &lt;em&gt;&quot;numpty&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is on a par with &lt;em&gt;&quot;woodentop&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (a non-profane version of &lt;em&gt;&quot;fuckwit&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T18:37:30.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-04-26T19:04:14.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it was the OP who changed the title, I guess he really meant to ask the difference between &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;whilst&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, editing a question when an answer has been already given, and when the edit makes the answer invalid, should be discouraged. I am not sure that applies also when the OP didn't write the word correctly, which apparently happened in this case. &lt;em&gt;Whiles&lt;/em&gt; could have been written by mistake, as the difference with &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; is just a letter more; considering the position of the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; on the keyboard, I would think this is probably the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be different if the OP didn't correct a typo in the question, but completely changed the question being asked. In these case, with answers already given, I would revert the edit done from the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-28T20:49:06.153" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T20:49:06.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-04-27T06:44:26.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of preserving the work of the people who answered the question if it is of good or better quality.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;The answers are more important than the questions&lt;/a&gt; and the answerers are more valuable than the questioners are to the success of this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case, if the answers are good, I'd revert the question and then close it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20364" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T06:44:26.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2609" CreationDate="2012-04-27T14:26:04.853" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I answered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/65879/8360&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on ELU, and later found that my answer was actually incorrect. I wasn't sure whether it was worth it to correct it, or delete since a proper answer was already chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should one delete his answer if it's found to be incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T11:39:45.670" Title="Should one delete his answer if it's found to be poor?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2606" CreationDate="2012-04-27T15:12:42.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the goals of Stack Exchange sites is to make the internet better by providing good answers to real questions.  Retaining an incorrect answer is something of a dis-service to future readers; even if it's voted down to the bottom of the page, it's still there contributing misinformation.  If the correct answer has not yet been posted then you can correct yours; if it is, why add a duplicate?  Just delete in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have deleted my own answers when they turn out to be wrong, or do not address the question (e.g. I misunderstood what was being asked), or (on rare occasion) when a later, better answer completely deprecates mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there is valuable information in a comment thread that will be lost if you delete your answer.  Something I've seen in that case is to delete the body of the answer (replacing it with something like &quot;no longer applicable&quot;) so the comments still have a place to live.  I don't know if that's considered good practice, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you should delete any particular answer is your own judgment call, but it is certainly permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T15:12:42.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2628" CreationDate="2012-04-27T15:48:24.370" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number that is showing the pending edits to review is visible on top of the page, but it is not visible in the review page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u5JAU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u5JAU.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking closely, the number is shown, but the color is too similar to the background one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The screenshot was taken after approving an edit, the following one shows what I see before approving a pending edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8hphX.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/627/number-of-pending-edits-unreadable&quot;&gt;Number of pending edits unreadable&lt;/a&gt;, but that report has been marked &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;, and closed as too localized, while I am facing the issue again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T20:09:24.160" Title="The number showing the number of suggested edits still pending is not visible" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2606" CreationDate="2012-04-27T16:13:18.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wrote an answer that you found to be wrong, you could edit it to make it correct; in the case there is another answer, and your answer would become too similar to the existing one, then you can delete it. In this case, deleting it (if editing is not worth doing it) would avoid that future users, seeing it has a score of 3 (as it actually has), would think the answer is correct.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you provide links to different resources or you quote different resources, then I would think it's worth editing it. If the text would be too similar even in this case, I would delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't edit the answer to replace its text with a placeholder, such as &quot;This is not longer applicable.&quot; or &quot;Wrong answer.&quot; If you keep doing it for your answer, this would be considered vandalism of own posts. At least, it would be flagged as &quot;not an answer,&quot; and moderators could do one of the following actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete your answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revert the post to the last revision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between the two, it's not said the first is the preferred one, especially if moderators notice you have recently edited your post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The other reason I would not do it is that your post could attire down-votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-28T11:39:45.670" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T11:39:45.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1803" CreationDate="2012-04-27T19:05:19.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, we shouldn't allow migration, because unfortunately &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349/literature-is-closing&quot;&gt;Literature.SE is closing&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;the recent blog post&lt;/a&gt;, I must reluctantly announce that we'll be shutting this site down on Friday, May 4th, 2012. While a fine topic, progress here has been slow for some time now, and it simply does not appear that literature (in the general sense) has a strong enough following on our network to support the site long-term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:44:26.510" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T19:05:19.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2625" CreationDate="2012-04-27T22:48:26.537" Score="5" ViewCount="778" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Literature Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;  is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349/literature-is-closing&quot;&gt;shutting down on May 4th&lt;/a&gt; due to a lack of activity. (So are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;Astronomy, Economics, Firearms, Healthcare IT and Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be some interesting questions at Literature (or even possibly the others) that would find a good home here at English Language and Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, please flag the questions for moderator attention and suggest migration. I think the deadline for this is next Friday, 4th May.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS See similar migration requests on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1746/literature-is-closing-what-questions-should-we-migrate-here&quot;&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/367/what-questions-should-we-salvage-scavenge-from-literature-se&quot;&gt;Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.780" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T06:03:26.590" Title="Literature is closing — what questions should we migrate here?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2012-05-25T06:03:10.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-28T12:59:49.283" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize that the site has a policy of not accepting pure translation questions, but I had a question closed which I would describe as &lt;em&gt;translation-like&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63536/english-equivalent-for-german-wie-eine-seifenblase-zerplatzen&quot;&gt;A better way of expressing &amp;quot;burst like a soap bubble&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the policy was basically (and if it isn't I suggest it be made to something like this): you can't just give a foreign phrase and ask people to translate it, but you &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; give the gist of the foreign phrase in English and give the foreign phrase &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt; for extra info that somebody who happens to speak that language could use to furnish a better answer.  As we can see from my question, this did indeed happen (the user Gigili for example speaks good German), and many others were able to give a decent answer despite their not speaking German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I could have rephrased the question as something like, &quot;my friend used the phrase 'burst like a soap bubble'... maybe he got his inspiration from this German phrase&quot; and it may seem more acceptable as it feels &quot;less like a translation question&quot;, but come on... the content of the question would be exactly the same.  It's a bit like saying &quot;my... friend... has genital warts; how can they be treated?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What really makes it into an acceptable question IMHO is the paragraph after the German phrase is given, which gives the gist of the German idiom, &lt;em&gt;in English&lt;/em&gt;.  Should it not be re-opened, with no rewording needed, or are we going to require jumping through grammatical hoops to make a question seem more on-topic whilst actually keeping exactly the same content and being less honest about what your real purpose is for asking the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BTW I know this seems similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1591/should-we-allow-semi-translation-questions&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; but I'm raising it again because I get the impression that if I had purposely worded it deviously to make it sound like my &quot;friend&quot; had used the phrase &quot;and gotten inspiration perhaps from this foreign phrase&quot;, the question wouldn't have been closed.  Does encouraging this deviousness sound like a sensible policy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T09:00:48.607" Title="Policy on translation-like questions?" Tags="|discussion|translation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-28T15:11:44.437" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question got closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66053/describing-the-preference-of-some-time-periods-being-closer-to-another-time-per/66058#comment126091_66058&quot;&gt;Describing the preference of some time period&amp;#39;s being closer to another time period that it forgoes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What corrections should I make in order to have it opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T21:55:51.967" Title="What corrections should I make in order to have this question opened?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2614" CreationDate="2012-04-28T15:53:44.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of the question, whether it is corrected or not, seems to be about proofreading and improving readability as Robusto pointed out. That has been deemed off-topic by the community, so simply 'correcting' small things probably won't make it openable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found both the sentence you are composing and the entire question to be hard to follow (both composed of very long and convoluted sentences, which might have been helped by my having more facility with the topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be able to -reword- the question so that it is asking about something closer to grammar or word meanings, and then the community might be more willing to respond further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that your kind of question is not totally out of scope here, except that it can lead eventually to much more inappropriate questions (e.g. 'Here is a paragraph of my homework submission that was marked down. What is wrong with it?').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the title just really confuses me...what does 'forgo' really mean and what is 'it' referring to that 'that' is being forgone by (or something like that)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T15:53:44.093" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2613" CreationDate="2012-04-28T19:03:33.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your answer has been closed as not constructive because it gets different answers, which seem to give opinions about what the English equivalent would be.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Re-writing the question for a specific case, and making it less generic, could help to re-open it, even though there isn't any certain it gets really re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing a rough translation of the German phrase is the first step to do, as you cannot expect that users answering questions on EL&amp;amp;U knows also German, although that is true for some users, in the same way there are users speaking Italian as first language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Still, that is not the only necessary step, as the question could still be too vague to have an answer. What it is necessary is a context that restricts the number of possible answers; if you are looking for the equivalent of &lt;em&gt;wie eine Seifenblase zerplatzen&lt;/em&gt; that can be used in every case, then you are probably asking a too broad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-04-28T20:03:55.430" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T20:03:55.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2592" CreationDate="2012-04-28T21:45:37.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Should I use whose or which's?&quot; has been closed as a duplicate of several other closed duplicates&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, a question is closed as duplicate of a single question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/ac282366-2d4c-4779-89e2-c1dbc27d1479/view-source&quot;&gt;The text originally inserted&lt;/a&gt; in the question to report the duplicated question is the following one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5808/other-ways-of-saying-whichs&quot;&gt;Other ways of saying whichs&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system automatically insert other links, if the users who voted to close the question, selected more than one question (which means a user selected a questions that was not selected by the other users). This is not what happened in this case, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/ac1f4ea1-d55d-47bc-896e-0bcda8dedd02/view-source&quot;&gt;other links were manually inserted by RegDwight&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per allowing to close a question as duplicate of a question that is already closed as duplicate, there is at least a case where this is valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user asks a question (B) that duplicates an existing question (A).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question gets closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user asks a new question (C), using the same text used for B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it makes more sense to close C as duplicate of B, as in this case the questions are exact duplicates of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see also any reason for not allowing to close a question as duplicate of another question that is already closed as duplicate. Users should be free to choose the question that is more close to be a duplicate, even in the case the question is already a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-04-29T10:04:27.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2614" CreationDate="2012-04-28T21:55:51.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason the question is considered proofreading is that you quoted a sentence, and asked how to write it differently, without to say why you prefer writing it differently, or why you think it's not correctly written, or it sounds awkward.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not different from a question reporting a paragraph, and asking if it is correct to write it so, which is what proofreading is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody could also say yours is not a question, but a request of rewriting the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T21:55:51.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-29T19:21:08.483" Score="5" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt; has 73 questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantic&lt;/a&gt; has three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T00:11:19.347" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T00:11:40.987" Title="Tag synonym suggestion: semantics &lt;- semantic" Tags="|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2620" CreationDate="2012-04-30T00:11:40.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags synonymized and merged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T00:11:40.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2624" CreationDate="2012-04-30T02:31:40.190" Score="4" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately there are a number of answers to questions that are mostly copy-pasted quotes from references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/65122/4972&quot;&gt;The origin of the term “Baker's Dozen”?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/65123/4972&quot;&gt;also another answer to that question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/66152/4972&quot;&gt;What is the standard rule for using or not using hyphen...?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/66156/4972&quot;&gt;Is it suitable to use 'etc.' in an academic paper?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/65636/4972&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use the word “freeer” or “free-er”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/66163/4972&quot;&gt;“Infective” or “Infectious”&lt;/a&gt; (adds some good commentary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a particularly new phenomenon (it has been done from the beginning of ELU), it just seems it has been noticeably common lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple competing principles here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;having authoritative references for any claims (you can trust the answer from an authoritative source)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;having explanation (whether the text is on SE or not, the OP gets a good answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not having LMGTFY answers (we want value added here, not just empty links to somewhere else)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these have their own controversies. And then they each pull in different directions.&#xA;(Plagiarism is not one of the issues: copying is wrong but quoting is OK).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: do any of these principles take precedence over the others or does it depend on judgement? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find some of the answers given above (and others) to be the 'right' answer; there is no better answer that the authoritative reference could give. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But usually I also find these kinds of answers particularly unsatisfying, and I feel if giving a quote from the web is the answer then the question should be closable as GR and the answer should really be a 'LMGTFY' comment or direct link to the reference (and if not closed, shouldn't the answer text give the direct link anyway? (of course, both text and link should be given but if one rather than the other then the quoted original text is better) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's the question of whether it is generally available on the web, say behind a pay-wall or only published on paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to simplify, should answers like these be welcomed, tolerated, or deprecated? Or does it depend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T09:43:10.100" Title="Answers that are direct quotes from references: just right or GR?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2025" CreationDate="2012-04-30T15:35:42.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is too localized, as few users would need to know the pronunciation of the names reported in that question. If the question would allow to understand the pronunciation of similar names, that would be probably be more helpful.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The fact they are names of famous people doesn't make any difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question set a precedent. Would a question about the pronunciation of famous Italian people be accepted too? In general, do we want such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T15:35:42.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2012-04-30T16:05:49.467" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It really does depend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Baker's Dozen question has a highly-upvoted answer which is an extensive direct quote from Wikipedia... which is also utter and complete &lt;strong&gt;balderdash&lt;/strong&gt;. It illustrates the problem with relying on Wikipedia, but also the problem of relying on votes to determine the correct answer: the geometry-based explanation is just so neat and pretty that a lot of people have fallen for the scam, as it were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other direct-quote answer to the Baker's Dozen question is (I believe) from the OED, which many people can't access, so it can't really be called &quot;general reference&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diaeresis-vs.-hyphen question is not one that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be answered by a general reference source, because it's a matter of style and opinion. A good answer would have to explain the history of usage and the pros and cons of continued use. It's possible that one of the language blogs has discussed the question, but that cannot be considered general reference; for starters, most people don't have the first clue about where to find such a blog, and then if they do find one, they have no way to determine how authoritative it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etc. question is, again, a matter of style, and thus subject to interpretation/opinion. A good answer can quote from books giving usage guidelines, but none of those can really be considered general reference, because none of them are 100% authoritative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Infective vs. Infectious is a case where the dictionary fails because it doesn't give the connotation, or at least isn't very clear about the appropriate contexts for each word. So as long as the questioner makes it clear that he has already looked in the dictionary, such a question should not be closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves the &quot;freeer&quot; question, which has (quite rightly IMO) been closed as general reference: if the questioner had bothered to look in the dictionary, he would have seen that the word is actually spelled with one fewer 'e', rendering his question moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;Google Is Not General Reference&lt;/a&gt;: what makes a basic question &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; basic is the fact that there is an &lt;em&gt;authoritative&lt;/em&gt; source that is &lt;em&gt;designed to answer that type of question&lt;/em&gt;. If there is no such source, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; if it is not considered authoritative (blogs, Wikipedia/Wiktionary, whatever random web page happens to come up in the first page of search results), then the question should not be closed as general reference. (It can still need to be closed, for example as &quot;not a real question&quot;, and/or it may need a downvote for lack of research effort, but we need to be careful not to misuse close reasons.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T16:05:49.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2611" CreationDate="2012-05-01T14:47:27.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what is currently flagged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1639/english-use-in-adventures-of-a-bystander-by-peter-drucker#question&quot;&gt;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1639/english-use-in-adventures-of-a-bystander-by-peter-drucker#question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/933/why-does-juliet-ask-wherefore-are-thou-romeo-and-not-montague#question&quot;&gt;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/933/why-does-juliet-ask-wherefore-are-thou-romeo-and-not-montague#question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To migrate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrated:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/823/her-mind-was-less-difficult-to-develop-jane-austen#question&quot;&gt;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/823/her-mind-was-less-difficult-to-develop-jane-austen#question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rejected:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12635" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.780" LastActivityDate="2012-05-03T15:51:03.917" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-05-01T21:30:05.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Fundamentalist, and therefore presumably among the prime targets of that particular comment, let me say, (a) As a joke, it's not very funny. It's really more &quot;ridicule&quot; or &quot;random insult&quot; than &quot;joke&quot;. And (b) I vote to let it stand. Such a trivial insult is not going to send me running to the corner, sobbing hysterically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Indeed, I'm happy to see such lame insults from my opponents. Let us Fundamentalists present carefully reasoned historical, philosophical, and scientific arguments, while the atheists shout, &quot;You're a moron! Ha ha ha&quot;, and let's see who wins in the court of public debate. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone tells an ethnic or religious or political or whatever joke that is actually funny, I think it can be entertaining, and help to break the tedium. But of course this forum isn't a place for protracted comedy routines, nor for political/social/religious debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my humble opinion, an occasional good-natured joke is a positive thing that helps keep a dry subject entertaining. Of course, while much humor hinges on making fun of the foibles of people, there is a point where it becomes deliberately insulting. Like, a joke whose humor relies on the fact that a certain ethnic group has different tastes in music or has its own dialect should be harmless; a joke that relies for its humor on the assumption that a certain ethnic group are lazy or stupid or criminals is likely just insulting. Saying, &quot;Isn't it funny how your political party and mine see this differently&quot; can make for a good joke. Saying, &quot;Isn't it funny how your political party is too stupid to understand this obvious reality&quot; is an insult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there gray areas? Sure. For a stand-up comic, pushing the gray areas may make for edgy comedy. But for a forum like this, it's just not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and by the way, if it would be an outrageous insult for somebody to say this about you, that it's an outrageous insult for you to say it about someone else. I don't know how often I've heard the defense, &quot;But those people ARE stupid, so they have no right to complain when we make jokes about them, but my group are intelligent, so if you say such a thing about us you're just out of line.&quot; Insults do not cease to be insults because they are true. Besides, if you don't see the obvious bias in your high opinions of yourself compared to others ... well, that's a subject for jokes right there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion: A little humor now and then is a good thing. But on a forum like this, err on the side of being unoffensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T21:30:05.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-02T12:23:04.210" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest EL&amp;amp;U introduce a feature to allow questioners to request a question be reopened. This is especially helpful for users who have thoroughly edited a question after it has been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65801/whats-a-more-powerful-phrase-with-the-same-basic-meaning-as-no-adjustment&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about a specific writing project. It was closed for being &quot;too localized.&quot; I've now spent a lot of work abstracting a general question from my original specific one, but I doubt any of the closers have looked at the edits. I would like to reopen the question, but I don't know of any mechanism to make sure it's re-evaluated. A general mechanism is likely to be helpful to many others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17372" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-05-03T10:19:41.823" Title="New feature: request to re-open a question" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2608" CreationDate="2012-05-02T20:09:15.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fix for this will be pushed out in the next build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T20:09:15.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2627" CreationDate="2012-05-03T09:57:17.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Josh, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a mechanism.  Five votes to close will close a question.  Five votes to reopen will reopen it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you don't have enough points, you won't be able to vote either way, so the mechanism will be &quot;invisible&quot; to you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, even with the question reopened, I'm not sure how much more input you'll get.  After reading your question, the first thing that popped into my head was &quot;&lt;em&gt;failure to adjust&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; and that answer has already been provided.  Who knows?  Maybe someone will think of something that'll knock our collective socks off, but I wouldn't expect a flurry of inspired responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that has often surprised me is how some folks try very, very hard to get a question reopened, even when two or three very good answers have already been provided, along with some helpful comments as well.  Closure is not necessarily an indictment on the asker; sometimes, there's simply not much more to say.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;too localized,&quot; don't read too much into that, either.  That's just one of five choices the voters have from a multiple choice list.  It could mean that your question was &quot;too localized,&quot; or it could mean that &quot;too localized&quot; was the nearest fit to whatever was motivating the individuals who were voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screen shot, showing what voters are presented with when voting to close.  Some questions don't fit nicely into one of these five catagories, but that doesn't mean the question shouldn't be closed nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0u9wl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-05-03T10:19:41.823" LastActivityDate="2012-05-03T10:19:41.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2012-05-03T17:35:56.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to express quantitatively, but here's what I think about answers that are little more than a quoted reference: there's generally an inverse relationship between the acceptable brevity of the answer, and the amount of research it took for the answerer to find it (or would take for others to find it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if the question is easily, readily answerable using a number of sources (&amp;quot;Is it &lt;em&gt;freer&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;freeer&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;?, e.g.), then a short answer doesn't do much for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it's a little-known word, hard to find even in reverse lookup dictionaries, but someone manages to find the answer after much research (or else knew the answer from prior experience), then a short answer is fine; it &amp;quot;pulls the thorn out of the paw,&amp;quot; so to speak.  I'll point to Robusto's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66487&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;scansion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; answer as Exhibit A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, it may be hard for some users to discern between a moment of brilliance where brevity is appropriate, and a LMGTFY-GAFD/T answer that looks good upon first read. Everyone has their own unique perspective, which is why answering your last question (&amp;quot;Should answers like these be welcomed, tolerated, or deprecated?&amp;quot;) is so difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-05-03T17:35:56.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2012-05-05T00:57:12.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer is easily found by a trivial search it's not even a suitable question for a Stack Exchange site in the first place.  Any question who's answer that can be easily found in the dictionary should be closed as not constructive, or, the asker should re-phrase the question and explain why the dictionary answer wasn't enough, so that he;'s calling for something more than an answer which can be trivially found.  That was we wont see 5 competing answers that say the exact same thing and were added once an hour for half a day as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20276" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T00:57:12.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2012-05-07T11:14:26.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The StackExchange network doesn't have anywhere offering proofreading. Expecting to find such at English.SE or Writers.SE is not unreasonable; however, both sites have declared proofreading off-topic as being too localized, and as a straightforward process of correcting technical errors, rather than questions to be answered or problems to be solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10047" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T11:14:26.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2634" CreationDate="2012-05-08T04:36:17.400" Score="12" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I rollover my user name at the top of the main page, the first rep item listed is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-10 User was removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not highlighted in red, so it doesn't link me to anything specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2012-05-08T05:08:58.080" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T05:08:58.080" Title="What does &quot;-10 User was removed&quot; mean?" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2633" CreationDate="2012-05-08T04:47:24.500" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user who voted for one of your posts was deleted, canceling the vote and thus the reputation awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T04:47:24.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2638" CreationDate="2012-05-08T07:35:44.830" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I updated my avatar at gravatar about 16 hours ago. It has not updated here yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what it should look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=128&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rYkwH.png&quot; alt=&quot;my new gravatar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see what it actually looks like next to my post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long should I have to wait for the avatar to update?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have cleared my cache, rebooted, logged in an out of EL&amp;amp;U and logged in and our of gravatar, none of these things worked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem seems to be how gravatar cache the URLs. Semantically identical URLs give me different avatars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrong avatar: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=128&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=128&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct avatar: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=128&amp;amp;r=PG&amp;amp;d=identicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=128&amp;amp;r=PG&amp;amp;d=identicon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/gravatar-23?replies=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;posted&lt;/a&gt; at the WordPress support forum. I'll let you know if anything comes of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2012-05-10T10:49:51.840" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T10:49:51.840" Title="How long should I wait for my avatar to update?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-08T20:35:36.033" Score="10" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today someone downvoted my answers serially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MH2DH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hostile downvoting activity took place within a short span of time. How should I act?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T20:49:04.547" Title="How to act when you are being serial downvoted" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2636" CreationDate="2012-05-08T20:49:04.547" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The downvotes should be revoked within 24 hours by an automated process; if you still see them after 24 hours, post a comment here so I can ask a dev to look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, there's generally not much action needed on your part. If it does happen again in the future, you can always post on meta or flag one of your posts so we can look into it, but we only issue warnings/suspensions in cases of particularly egregious behavior, since even the calmest of people can get angry at times and not think straight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T20:49:04.547" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2635" CreationDate="2012-05-09T08:07:04.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, so I have deleted the old avatar, as ClarkKent suggested, and this has had the desired effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T08:07:04.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2565" CreationDate="2012-05-09T22:59:50.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be fixed in the next build (after rev 2012.5.9.2511).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T22:59:50.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2012-05-10T04:48:41.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be fixed in the next build (after rev 2012.5.9.2511).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T04:48:41.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2642" CreationDate="2012-05-10T10:51:49.257" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: &lt;em&gt;This issue may have been discussed before, but I couldn't find it.  Also, I don't know too much about the intricacies of tagging.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed quite a few questions asking for differentiation between two similar verb tenses.  Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;As if he sees you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;vs.&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;As if he is seeing you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67303&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which one I picked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;vs.&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which one I've picked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67200&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I choose&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;vs.&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am choosing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66822&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have received&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;vs.&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I received&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65864&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Will graduate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;vs.&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is going to graduate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66490&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might think these questions would all be similarly tagged, but they're not, partly because some tags are specific to the tenses themselves (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future-tense&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;future tense&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect-tense&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;present perfect tense&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).  Therefore, two very similar questions may not get tagged similarly, simply because one question looks backwards, and the other looks forwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did notice there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;tenses&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tag that appears in one of those five questions, but there's no wiki description yet on what that represents.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if &lt;code&gt;verb tense choice&lt;/code&gt; might be a useful tag.  It seems like, for questions such as those referenced, the fact that the O.P. is inquiring &quot;Which is preferable?&quot; is more significant than which particular tense the O.P. happens to be asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a better solution than the one I've proposed, but the fact that such similar questions do not have matching tags suggests there might be room for some improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T19:24:43.873" Title="Maybe have a tag for verb tense choice?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2641" CreationDate="2012-05-10T19:24:43.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/tense/info&quot;&gt;tense&lt;/a&gt; tag, linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tense&quot;&gt;184 questions&lt;/a&gt;. I suggest this is probably the appropriate tag to use for questions that are basically about which tense to use, or exactly what difference in meaning (if any) might be implied by the choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T19:24:43.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-10T20:11:23.223" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/64947/may-not-vs-can-not-on-websites&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/64947/may-not-vs-can-not-on-websites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the title has been changed (not by OP). But look at the context and give me an idea, why is this duplicate question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20323" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T20:11:23.223" Title="Why is this question closed as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2645" CreationDate="2012-05-10T20:35:55.113" Score="-1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67394/puntuation-relating-the-use-of-colon#comment129376_67394&quot;&gt;Spaces around a colon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as duplicate of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4645/is-it-ever-correct-to-have-a-space-before-a-question-or-exclamation-mark&quot;&gt;Is it ever correct to have a space before a question or exclamation mark?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about leading and trailing space. In question only leading space was in queston. Why are they duplicates. They are two different symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20323" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T21:13:05.173" Title="Why the puncation related to colon closed as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2012-11-05T21:18:24.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2012-05-10T20:38:48.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure why that question was closed as a duplicate. I reopened your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T20:38:48.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2012-05-10T21:13:05.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4645&quot;&gt;Question 4645&lt;/a&gt; asked about terminal punctuation marks (i.e. &quot;!&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;?&quot;), Martha's &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to that question indeed talked about colons and commas.  So, the accepted answer to 4645 answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67394&quot;&gt;Question 67934&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm pretty sure that was the impetus for closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If – aside from &quot;don't put a space before a colon&quot; – there's absolutely nothing else to say about the matter, then closing the question was maybe the right move.  After all, the question has been answered.  But, if people want to discuss exceptions, such as standardized test questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;adjective : modifier :: verb : ____________&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then Question 4645 – which doesn't ask about colons – doesn't really offer a good place to do that.  Ergo, maybe it'd be better to leave it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not advocating one side of the debate or the other, I'm just explaining what I suspect people were thinking about the matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T21:13:05.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2558" CreationDate="2012-05-12T00:22:28.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/130741/89334&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/130741/89334&lt;/a&gt;, this has been completed. This answer is here so that this question will no longer appear on the Unanswered list once it has been upvoted/accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T00:22:28.610" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-12T00:22:28.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2650" CreationDate="2012-05-13T18:13:04.560" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;On April 12 I answered a question (about the usage of &quot;awhile&quot;) which was, a bit to my surprise, accepted by the asker (Brandon Boone). Ten days later the asker decided that he preferred another answer to the question, which had been given on the same day as mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the answer given to ADVS89 for the question &quot;Changing accepted answer&quot; (27 March 2011), so I've learnt that this shift can be done at any time and the reputation points are taken and given accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't think this is completely fair, I would suggest introducing a kind of &quot;protection&quot; for the originally accepted reply (and for the reputation of the person who supplied it) by &#xA;not taking away the points after a period of, say, one month acceptance, or at least leave part of the points (for example, take away 10 out of 15 points).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear what you think about it. Thank you for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19875" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-05-17T14:12:55.703" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T14:12:55.703" Title="being &quot;unaccepted&quot; - clarifications" Tags="|discussion|questions|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2012-05-13T18:46:20.947" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been participating in this site for little over one month, and I keep visiting it every day because I like the idea of contributing to this cultural exchange (I'm actually learning a lot of interesting things, given that I'm not a native speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I must say that I share some of the uneasiness which the previous posts describe. I've asked questions which in my opinion might have interested others too, and I had them closed down (in one case I was told that, prior to asking, I should have researched pages and sites which I had actually linked in my question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I reply, I'm always a bit worried about the comments which I may get; very often, people who are certainly very learned are extremely strict about the usage of terms, but this contributes towards making their comments sound like dissertations on linguistics rather than something meant to help others improve themselves or their replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I surely understand the need for rules if we want to keep the site in good health, and I consider the task which moderators face daily quite demanding, but the site is also for &quot;serious English language enthusiasts&quot;, not only for retired or still active linguists and etymologists, and I have the feeling that they (i.e., the enthusiasts) might feel put off at times, as I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19875" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T18:46:20.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2648" CreationDate="2012-05-14T16:15:20.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer should be the best currently-available answer, which may arrive after the originally-accepted one.  So &quot;unaccepting&quot; answers in light of newer information should be possible forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rep, I sympathize: your answer was good enough to be accepted, so shouldn't that carry some lasting merit?  But that's not how rep currently works on Stack Exchange; you can get rep from good answers and then the question gets deleted and you lose that rep too.  (Somebody went on a cleaning spree and I lost 200 rep in one day, which is how I came to learn about this.)  So, so long as your rep represents the current state of your accumulated posts, it seems perfectly reasonable that removing the &quot;accepted&quot; status from an answer would also remove the rep that it brought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-05-14T16:15:20.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-15T11:58:25.590" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Condition variable is a variable on the basis of which the threads decide what to do and when to do. This variable is supposed to be shared among the threads, so it is necessary for us to protect it with the mutex.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Let there be a variable &lt;code&gt;temp&lt;/code&gt; shared between two threads. The variable &lt;code&gt;temp&lt;/code&gt; is called the condition variable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      ThreadA has to wait for &lt;code&gt;temp&lt;/code&gt;'s value to become &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; before it can act any further.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;temp&lt;/code&gt;'s value is to be edited by threadB, and since it is a global variable, threadB is supposed to lock it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a technical para for sure, but I wish to get all the tenses in one platform here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is this kind of question allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14474" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T22:49:34.033" Title="In what way should I frame the question when I have to know whether the tense of all the words in a paragraph are same?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2012-11-01T14:59:42.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-15T15:51:31.163" Score="30" ViewCount="1064" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67800/etymology-of-to-coin-a-phrase&quot;&gt;Etymology of &amp;quot;to coin a phrase&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen this several times on this site, and it seems to be a departure from how things are done on other sites in the SE network and how the system is designed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20661" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T10:41:44.587" Title="Why are answers being posted in the comments on the question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2012-05-15T16:50:35.437" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are at least two reasons why I sometimes post answers as comments...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question. Perhaps I consider it &quot;off-topic&quot;, so I don't want to see multiple answers being voted on. But if I think I know the answer and can easily express it in a comment, I often do this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't have the time/inclination/knowledge to provide a &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; answer, so I put down something in a brief comment, hoping someone else will pick up the ball and run with it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T16:50:35.437" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2012-05-15T19:50:50.057" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, I sometimes keep away from supplying a full answer because, even though I think I know it, I'm sure that my &quot;wording&quot; is not perfect and I prefer not to lose reputation points as a consequence of being downvoted by people who are better than me and much more proficient at linguistics. This has already happened a few times and I'd rather avoid it for the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19875" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T19:50:50.057" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2657" CreationDate="2012-05-16T17:05:56.977" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to use ELU.SE to help promote proper usage of the English language (in specific: synonyms, definitions, and spelling).  How can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/help/features.html#keyword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; (below) be added into the &lt;strong&gt;FAQ&lt;/strong&gt; section to let users know how to improve their English language skills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21239" LastEditorUserId="21239" LastEditDate="2012-05-16T17:15:17.043" LastActivityDate="2012-06-15T18:34:55.123" Title="How to inform English language users about useful English language resources?" Tags="|feature-request|site-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2656" CreationDate="2012-05-16T17:48:31.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for your title question there are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;List of English Language Tools&lt;/a&gt; (random useful things)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;General References&lt;/a&gt; (where to go when a question is closed as 'general reference'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For your first sentence,  ELU is populated more by descriptivists than by people who want to enforce prescriptivist standards. Which I would say is actually better. The people you inform will get more than just a standard answer but also the variants by region and formality. But more often than not, you'll get a single answer for just one variety or one level of formality and not necessarily the 'standard' one. Also, there is more than one standard, and even within a standard there is disagreement. So you might get that nuance or not. What I'm saying there's no guarantee here of getting the 'right' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For that link in particular, I'd say it would go best in the 'General Reference' question I just mentioned. And you can go edit it yourself. Since you don't have a lot of rep yet, it won't automatically get edited, but a high rep person can approve the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but in general, to add something to the FAQ, start a question here (specifically about the edit) and a moderator might be convinced to edit it (normal users can't).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T17:48:31.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-16T19:47:56.470" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1546/basic-questions-are-not-so-basic&quot;&gt;Basic questions are not so basic&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=sneek%20vs%20sneak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This search for &quot;sneek vs sneak&quot;&lt;/a&gt; points to a couple of Yahoo! Answers posts, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080627025508AAgXWOO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. There are many popular but simple English questions like these that point to Yahoo! Answers posts. These posts are good enough to answer the question, but I think this site can provide much better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, they fall here on Jeff/Borror0's &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;flowchart for answering simple questions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZF97G.png&quot; alt=&quot;answering simple questions flowchart&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we ask these popular but easy questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12640" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T19:47:56.470" Title="Should we ask popular but easy questions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2012-05-18T04:42:59.100" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2012-05-16T22:49:34.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to be clearer about what question you are actually asking.  &quot;Can this paragraph be made clearer?&quot; is off-topic as proof-reading. &quot;Do all the tenses in this paragraph need to be the same?&quot; is, IMO, not clear enough to answer; how is your paragraph special? Ideally you would say, for example, &quot;Should &lt;em&gt;is to be&lt;/em&gt; in the last line be just &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; to agree with the earlier &lt;em&gt;is called&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;has to&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; (NB that is simple enough to be general reference; it's just an example of what I would expect from your title.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is a bit of a grey area regarding on-topic and general reference; as FumbleFingers suggested, you could ask it and see what happens.  If it does get closed, it's not a personal insult, you've just wasted a few minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T22:49:34.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2012-05-18T18:58:50.800" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many if not most questions posted here contain false presuppositions, and therefore can't be answered as stated. Generally one has to correct those before addressing the information that's actually needed; that's best done in a comment, rather than an official Answer. As for points, it's not worth worrying about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, a topic like &quot;English Grammar and Usage&quot; does not lend itself to a simple Q/A format -- it appears that everybody has their own ideas about what terminology is correct and assumes it's universal, so they rarely give useful context, presuming there are Rules that cover everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since nothing could be further from the truth, we end up with the usual mishmosh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2015-02-27T16:10:42.073" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T16:10:42.073" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2012-05-18T20:34:56.343" Score="26" Body="&lt;h2&gt;General Language and English Language Reference&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd ed. 2003.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language&lt;/em&gt;, 3rd ed. 2010.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are written and edited by David Crystal. They should be in every Anglophone classroom in the world, and should be consulted &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; about questions bearing on English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All works by David Crystal are trustworthy, but these encyclopedias are &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; well-organized, and full of useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2013-01-17T15:28:30.003" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T15:28:30.003" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-18T20:34:56.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-18T20:45:26.330" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Translation is off-topic, as has been agreed many, many times here on meta in past discussion. So why do we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a good reason for keeping it, please make it. I don't see one, but I suppose there exists that possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't, please help go through &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Btranslation%5D+closed%3A0&quot;&gt;the open questions tagged translation &lt;/a&gt;and either close them if they were initially missed but should have been closed, or retag them if they are not truly about translation. Once we've done that, we can delete the remaining questions that don't belong here and purge the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T08:46:36.017" Title="Why do we have a [translation] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2664" CreationDate="2012-05-19T13:22:41.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're taking the 'translation' tag too simply as 'this is a request for translation'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very appropriate to keep the 'translation' tag for questions that are motivated by a translation process, either from or to English, because that informs about the issues, how explicit the definitions and nuances must be, cultural differences. All questions on ELU are supposed to be &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the English (directed towards the nuance of the English), but that doesn't mean that knowledge of the foreign terms and the translation process are not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I feel that the 'translation' tag should be kept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, closing questions for being inappropriately about translation (simply 'what is the English for the word X in language Y?') or adding additional tags is a good suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorDisplayName="user2683" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T08:46:36.017" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T08:46:36.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-21T02:44:43.370" Score="13" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the closed question, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/68336/5822&quot;&gt;Literal Meaning of 'Gosh'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; should be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general reference reason to close specifies that a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular question has three good answers (yes, one's mine) that link to several sources and, in my opinion, still don't get to the bottom of things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I'm curious why the &lt;em&gt;-sh&lt;/em&gt; was chosen as the minced oath. Was it a shortening of something similar to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/24026/5822&quot;&gt;zounds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;? Did it really come from &lt;em&gt;by Gosse&lt;/em&gt;, and if so, why &lt;em&gt;gosse&lt;/em&gt;? Perhaps these questions extend somewhat beyond the OP, but I think they're contained within its purview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T18:37:56.333" Title="Request to reopen &quot;Literal Meaning of 'Gosh'&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2668" CreationDate="2012-05-21T15:57:43.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those questions &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; extend beyond the O.P., and that is significant.  Members of the community can only read what is put into the question.   Don't expect us to find the hidden nuances that can turn a mundane question into an interesting one; the onus is on &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to do that.  Perhaps some members will be able think of interesting subtleties that can be explored, but others will regard it only at face value, and rightfully so.  No one can read your mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, I've been surprised at how some users write what appear to be very hastily-drafted questions, and then take umbrage when their question is summarily closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice to anyone asking a question: &lt;strong&gt;take your time&lt;/strong&gt;.  State your question clearly.  Put it into context.  Include all the subpoints you would like to have investigated.  Explain in detail what research you have already conducted.  Make it evident that your question is not motivated by laziness or inertia; instead, plainly show that you've performed some research with a good-faith effort.  Finally, proofread it.  Make your question itself a positive contribution to the community – such questions are eagerly welcomed by the English enthusiasts who frequent this forum.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me offer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63039/what-is-the-difference-between-an-emperor-and-a-king&quot;&gt;EXHIBIT A&lt;/a&gt;.  How easy would it have been for the O.P. to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between an &lt;em&gt;emperor&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;king&lt;/em&gt;?  I was asked&#xA;  this question the other day, but had trouble coming up with a good&#xA;  answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then leave it at that!  Instead,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a context for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question is being asked is provided,  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;preliminary research is presented (notice how this extends beyond&#xA;just &lt;em&gt;king&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;emperor&lt;/em&gt;, but includes &lt;em&gt;kingdom&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt; as&#xA;well), and    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an initial hypothesis is given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the O.P. has put some careful thought into this question.  It's a very basic question, but notice the reaction: it was protected, not closed, and had received nearly 40 upvotes by the time I wrote this.  Who knows how many more it may garner over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T15:57:43.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2668" CreationDate="2012-05-22T18:37:56.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's some answers somewhere on meta from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; (I think) that say that some questions might not be as good as they could be, but they still sometimes elicit a great answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the easy/simple questions can make us experts see things in another light and find something for everyone that otherwise wouldn't happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've added some interesting extra questions. I suggest you either go ahead and edit and add them to the original question, and/or just answer those as bonuses in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had voted to close, I've now voted to reopen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T18:37:56.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2152" CreationDate="2012-05-22T18:55:31.750" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good news, &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishqna.blogspot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://englishqna.blogspot.com&lt;/a&gt; has been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T18:55:31.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2675" CreationDate="2012-05-25T01:08:48.803" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68903/indian-born-chinese-or-chinese-born-indian&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; posted on English.SE recently was downvoted because of the &quot;Hyphens, spellings mistakes, inconsistent capitalization,&quot; and  &quot;inscrutable word use,&quot; and I assume that the second downvote was for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I feel as though it's possible the OP is using English as a second or third language, and just isn't grounded on the fundamentals of English usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; saying the downvotes are wrong, but rather, I'd like to know if the possibility of grammatically bad questions due to lack of good English skills, as opposed to lazyness or lack of attention to detail, is taken into account when encountering a question with very bad grammar on English.SE. And if it ends up being the former, should a question still be downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T15:30:07.723" Title="Should questions with bad grammar be penalized if the OP isn't well educated in English?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2012-05-25T04:06:09.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if it ends up being the former, should a question still be downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/owSKe.png&quot; alt=&quot;The standard advice for downvoting: unclear or not useful&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down-voting isn't primarily intended for &lt;em&gt;punishment&lt;/em&gt;. Its main purpose is to rate and rank questions and answers according to their quality. If a question is unclear because the author is struggling to use English, or unclear because he lacked the care to make it clear... It doesn't really matter. It's &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, folks will always tend to down-vote stuff that irritates them. I suppose, on a site dedicated to the use of English, there might be one or two who would find poor usage irritating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If seeing it down-voted makes you uncomfortable, you could always edit it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T04:06:09.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2012-05-25T15:30:07.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just downvoted &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; voted to close the specific question OP linked to. But that's got nothing to do with poor grammar (which has been corrected anyway) - it's just that I think the meaning of &lt;em&gt;&quot;xxxxx-born&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general principle I don't think questions should be downvoted/closed because of bad grammar. Many of us have enough rep to edit and correct faults; we should just do so without comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complaining on the main site about low-quality phrasing of questions is a bit pointless. Many questioners aren't native English speakers, and I think it's gratuitously rude to criticise their poor grammar/vocabulary. If the &lt;em&gt;substance&lt;/em&gt; of a question is good, either correct or ignore poor phrasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T15:30:07.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-27T14:06:10.953" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be useful to find out quickly which questions don't yet have accepted answers.  It seems that there typically are far more questions in that category than are without any kind of answer, so why not broaden what is meant by &quot;unanswered&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20519" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T03:52:29.970" Title="Include questions that do not have accepted answers under the &quot;unanswered&quot; category?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-27T19:31:10.077" Score="-1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actual way of creating a wiki community question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag it for moderator review.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, my flag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/69100/16833&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was rejected, instead the question was closed as not constructive, which means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is indeed of a kind which does not have one correct answer, or which can be supported by facts or references. But it is also not a question which will likely end in debate, arguments, etc., &lt;strike&gt;although&lt;/strike&gt; because it is precisely created for the reason to respond opinions, experiences and maybe some references to e.g. newspaper (like my example regarding Guardian ) or local webpages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, maybe the close voters don't like the question, because it seems to them to be too specified, and expect that tomorrow someone will ask &quot;Which words from Spanish are used commonly in English&quot;, but the close vote as &quot;not constructive&quot; is definitely incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the given answers are really great, but in my opinion there could be much more answers containing interesting informations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about that the question itself is unpopular to a few users (4 downvotes on just 2 upvotes, currently) and the close voting. I don't care, since I got these great answers. I just tried to create a community wiki question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what can we do to improve the practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And if anyone now says, that this is even not a kind of community wiki question worth, should have a look on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16059/matryoshka-words&quot;&gt;fantastic question&lt;/a&gt;(created as community wiki) and tell me why my question is so much badder than a game.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16833" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-05-27T19:37:29.260" Title="How to improve questioning a wiki community question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2677" CreationDate="2012-05-27T19:37:29.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of CW was revised across the Stack Exchange network last year: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&lt;/a&gt;. Please read that blog post carefully as to why CW is no longer appropriate for questions similar to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to being &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;, your question is a list question, and thus falls under the &quot;polling&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other question you refer to, it was created before the CW policy was revised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-05-27T19:37:29.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2676" CreationDate="2012-05-27T23:09:05.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can search using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasaccepted:0%20closed:0&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;closed:0 hasaccepted:0&lt;/a&gt;, and that will return you all the questions without an accepted answer, which are not closed. If you want to see all your questions without an accepted answer, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasaccepted:0%20closed:0%20user:20519&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;hasaccepted:0 closed:0 user:20519&lt;/a&gt;; instead of user:20519, you can use user:me, and it will be automatically changed in user:20519, when you enter &quot;hasaccepted:0 closed:0 user:me&quot; as search string, without you knowing your user ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K8tot.png&quot; alt=&quot;closed:0 hasaccepted:0&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes&lt;/a&gt;, you get a list of question without up-voted answers, which is quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TOoYT.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Unanswered&quot; in Stack Exchange always had a specific meaning: questions without up-voted answers. That practically included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions without an accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions without up-voted answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions without answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because for Stack Exchange accepting an answer is a type of vote. (The &quot;VoteTypes&quot; tables calls it &quot;AcceptedByOriginator.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, the view that shown the unanswered questions has been split in two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;votes, for questions without up-voted answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no answers, for questions without answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think those views will be rejoined again, as they were before.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Those views have been also limited as for the number of shown questions. I actually see 9 questions in the &quot;votes&quot; tab, and 5 questions in the &quot;no answers&quot; tab, which leads me to think &#xA;those views filter the questions shown in the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T03:52:29.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2681" CreationDate="2012-05-28T03:32:06.997" Score="5" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 7 and 19 votes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69129/man-is-to-womanizer-as-woman-is-to-what/&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Man&amp;quot; is to &amp;quot;womanizer&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;woman&amp;quot; is to what?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69101/polite-alternatives-to-as-soon-as-possible/&quot;&gt;Polite alternatives to &amp;quot;as soon as possible&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; respectively, but my points have hardly increased since yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/17795/shyam?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but again there seems to be some issue with the count and tally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17795" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T16:21:55.007" Title="Why has my rep not increased?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2680" CreationDate="2012-05-28T03:40:41.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! You've reached the 200 rep/day cap, which applies to reputation from upvotes, downvotes, and suggested edits. (N.B. Stack Exchange uses UTC time, so 1 day is from midnight UTC of one day to midnight UTC of the next.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past the rep cap, you can't earn any more reputation until the next day; however, I'm happy to let you know it's already the next day (technically, you reached the rep cap yesterday SE-time), so you can still earn rep right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a twofold reason there's a cap in place: 1) we don't want people to burn out too quickly, so we encourage you not to spend too much time here :), and 2) we don't want someone to gain a lot of privileges that they might unknowingly abuse for one post that's really, really popular because it's been linked that day on Reddit (it's better if the votes are spread out over time, as that's usually more indicative of good quality that keeps getting upvoted instead of linkspammed on some site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T03:40:41.380" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2730" CreationDate="2012-05-29T05:20:02.920" Score="-2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51175/what-is-bigger-a-squillion-or-a-kadgillion&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51175/what-is-bigger-a-squillion-or-a-kadgillion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this seems like (and may very well have been meant as) a silly nonsense question, there are serious things to say about &lt;strong&gt;which &quot;word&quot; would &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; larger to a native speaker&lt;/strong&gt; in direct comparison, in light of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound symbolism&lt;/a&gt; effects. Compare with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bouba/kiki effect&lt;/a&gt;, in which people consistently identify meanings of made-up words according to their sound values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the English morpheme &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ka-#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ka-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a variant of &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/102972&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ker-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, is &quot;The first element in numerous onomatopœic or echoic formations intended to imitate the sound or the effect of the fall of some heavy body&quot;. This suggests an association with ponderous bulk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &lt;em&gt;squ-&lt;/em&gt; /skw/ can be considered a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonestheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonestheme&lt;/a&gt; associated with small size: consider &lt;em&gt;squeak&lt;/em&gt;, the sound of various small animals, and &lt;em&gt;squirrel&lt;/em&gt;, a small rodent. Further, /i/ is cross-linguistically associated with small size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13786" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T16:31:48.797" Title="Request to reopen &quot;what-is-bigger-a-squillion-or-a-kadgillion&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1907" CreationDate="2012-05-30T10:35:02.167" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the gesture in question is made by an English speaking person, I think it falls easily into the scope of this site. If a word is spoken, written, hand signed or gestured, it's still a word. I'm not saying we should open up to all ASL, that could be an entire site, but gestures made by English speakers would probably fit here better than anywhere else on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T10:35:02.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-05-30T16:20:08.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little surprised that no one has considered that the original comment is arguably a contentious &lt;em&gt;factual&lt;/em&gt; claim, and not a joke at all.  After all, we seem to be in agreement that the comment is not in itself funny, clever, or surprising.  There's nothing in the &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of delivery that's offensive.  The offense is in the assertion itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1864" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T16:20:08.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2691" CreationDate="2012-05-31T16:42:36.823" Score="4" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1053/blacklist-the-words-tag&quot;&gt;Blacklist the [words] tag&lt;/a&gt; question, there are two questions that are tagged with the utterly useless &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt;, but because they have been merged, the offending tag can't be edited out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66847/what-is-the-antonyms-of-capitalize&quot;&gt;What is the antonyms of &quot;capitalize&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65884/asking-question-about-position-of-a-person-in-a-list&quot;&gt;Asking question about position of a person in a list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can mods do anything about this? If I understand the mechanism correctly, these questions are preventing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; tag from being automatically deleted, which would at least prevent &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; people from resurrecting it like some zombie. (The &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; solution is of course to nuke this tag from orbit, but there seems to be some unwillingness from TPTB to implement that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T18:12:43.353" Title="Merged questions with &quot;bad&quot; tags" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2690" CreationDate="2012-05-31T18:12:03.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; removed on those two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T18:12:03.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2301" CreationDate="2012-05-31T19:40:23.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears this has been fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T19:40:23.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2698" CreationDate="2012-06-01T03:33:18.380" Score="28" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually hang out at math.SE being among top contributors. I find math.SE a pretty welcoming community, with many newcomers politely steered into a right direction, and given helpful hints/answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69579/is-it-common-to-end-an-email-with-a-question&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about email writing style I encountered in marketing emails. Since in my native tongue (Russian) such a style would not considered polite, I asked it here, only to find my question down-voted multiple times, with little explanation extended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a matter does not make me feel particularly welcome by the community. I think the attitude towards newcomers needs to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21818" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T12:55:10.157" Title="Excessive downvoting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2012-06-01T05:29:07.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are having a very similar &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers&quot;&gt;discussion on Meta Cross Validated SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a.k.a. statistics. It might be helpful to view the answers, and numerous comments on the question there, as the issue is much like ours, despite the difference in underlying subject matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would normally have posted this as a comment on the question, as I sometimes feel similar sentiments to those expressed in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2655/4915&quot; title=&quot;answer by Paola&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by @Paola (well, less so on EL&amp;amp;U SE, but I did feel that way initially). Most of the time, it is due to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2654/4915&quot; title=&quot;excerpt from FumbleFingers&amp;#39; answer to same question as I am answering now&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't have the time/inclination/knowledge to provide a full answer,&#xA;  so I put down something in a brief comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T05:29:07.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2694" CreationDate="2012-06-01T07:26:09.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two (linked) issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People downvote because a question lacks research effort, or it's of particularly poor quality, or it's &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot;. Quite what &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot; means is open to interpretation, but it can easily mean &amp;quot;not a good fit for this site.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of questions which are not really about &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;word usage&lt;/em&gt;, which is the primary subject in ELU. A downvote is an indication that they should be elsewhere. It may not express an opinion on the quality of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question should be elsewhere, then I agree it should be migrated elsewhere. That means a vote to close: not everyone has enough rep to do that; they can only downvote. I would hope that a significant number of downvotes would be enough to pique the interest of those who can vote to close and migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issue is the advice box shown to askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is your question about English language and usage?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Provide details. Share your research.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If your question is about this website, ask it on meta instead.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;read the faq »&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;asking help »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first hint there really should be re-worded to provide explicit guidance on what this site is about. Perhaps it should not simply repeat the big heading at the top of the page, but actually expand on it and provide more relevant help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is your question about English words or grammar?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If it isn't we can help you [find more relevant sites] for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...with a link to a relevant list of alternatives. There doesn't seem to be one in the FAQ; perhaps there's an answer on Meta which could be linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Bottom Line:&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think we can necessarily do much about downvotes. But it should be possible to make downvotes less likely with a minimal amount of extra guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T07:26:09.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2694" CreationDate="2012-06-01T10:52:29.423" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sasha: Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U (and I mean that sincerely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was in school, there was a common refrain: &lt;em&gt;there's no such thing as a stupid question&lt;/em&gt;. The sentiment was, if you are confused about something, you shouldn't be afraid to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still believe that's true – there's no such thing as a stupid question.  However, just about any question can be poorly presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard others mention that the &quot;downvote phenomenon&quot; seems more common at EL&amp;amp;U than at some of the other Stack Exchanges. Maybe that's because the active members of other exchanges are more polite, but it could also be because many of those forums get far fewer poorly-presented questions.  For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Mathematica Exchange&lt;/a&gt; has had a little over 1,700 questions asked; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Computational Sciences&lt;/a&gt; just over 600.  The English Exchange is nearing 16,000.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; downvote a lot of questions, but whether or not such downvotes are a symptom of a rude and unwelcoming community is up for interpretation.  There are two issues that need to be investigated: (1) what does a downvote represent? and (2) what kinds of questions are being downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that most downvoted questions on EL&amp;amp;U seem hastily written, and the O.P.'s haven't done a very good job of &quot;marketing&quot; their question.  Usually, these questions are either very basic (causing people to scratch their heads, and wonder, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Doesn't this person know how to use a dictionary&lt;/em&gt; [or &lt;em&gt;thesaurus&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;search engine&lt;/em&gt;]?&quot;) or else very confusing (because there is insufficient context to adequately explain the question).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet downvoting for these reasons is not limited to EL&amp;amp;U.  What if I went to Math.SE and asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Confused about algebraic operations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;What's the difference between addition and subtraction?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How &quot;welcoming&quot; would that community be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might think of a creative response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now that you mention it, there's really no &quot;difference&quot; between the two; they are essentially the same operation.  After all, 2 + 3 is the same as 2 - (-3)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I suspect more than one user would be a bit annoyed at such a basic question, and perhaps one might even be brave enough to openly chide me for asking it.  (I don't frequent the Math Exchange, but such downvoting does seem to happen there when users ask inappropriate questions, as evidenced by &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1001282/how-am-i-supposed-to-convert-between-a-teaspoon-and-a-tablespoon&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/151938/how-many-digits-of-pi-are-currently-known&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  Moreover, and it's not difficult to find examples in other exchanges as well – observe how &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/39317/where-are-the-missing-books&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this user&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was downvoted and rebuked, apparently for failing to provide sufficient information; notice the upvotes on the chiding remark as well). &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/908/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's another example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of an unwelcoming reaction to an off-topic question on another exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the EL&amp;amp;U community &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; very welcoming toward questions – even very basic questions – that do a good job of explaining why the question is being asked.  Let me point to two examples: a downvoted question, and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69509&quot;&gt;upvoted question&lt;/a&gt;, both asked by community newcomers on the same day.  The upvoted question is actually the more basic of the two, but the O.P. does a good job of explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he is asking the question: a concise yet clear context defines the scope of the question, and initial assumptions provide a baseline to work from.  If you visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69509&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, you will see, not only did it reach 20 upvotes, but a few of the answers did as well.  In contrast, the downvoted question, which has since been deleted, seemed hastily written, and too open-ended: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this the correct way to put this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So I know you like coffee, and I know where to find the best coffee&#xA;  close to your work&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did the O.P. mean by &quot;is this correct?&quot; In what context would this sentence be used?  A formal letter? An email? A conversation?  How is anyone supposed to know?  After one hour, the O.P. added this comment: &quot;Its [sic] a conversation, asking out for coffee&quot; – that's an important piece of information! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this pattern repeated rather often: a question is fired off, regulars ask some pointed questions, and only then is the vital information provided as an afterthought.  In such situations, I've often thought to myself, &quot;Had that information been included in the original question, instead of posted in a later comment, maybe this would've gotten upvotes instead of downvotes.&quot; Unfortunately, some O.P.'s seem unable or unwilling to accept such feedback as helpful; rather than thinking introspectively, trying to figure out how their question might have been improved, they become insolent or confrontational instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the question you cite, when I read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is ending an email with a question like that permissible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my first thought is, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Why on earth wouldn't it be&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;  (After all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69579/&quot;&gt;isn't that what the O.P. just did in the question&lt;/a&gt;?)  But when I see this addendum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my opinion unsolicited marketing emails shouldn't be asking any questions at all. They should politely present the information. Question at the end of the email prompts for action, and since this is a marketing email, I will find it an unnecessary distraction. I asked the question here because I have never seen such a thing in Russian emails, where I would consider it rude. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I think to myself, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Hmmm... that's quite thought-provoking&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (it sets a better context, and I also find the cross-cultural reference rather interesting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this leads me to my closing point: is a downvote necessarily rude?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, I'm a bit surprised how often an unexplained downvote is considered a breach of etiquette (as opposed to being a mechanism to let O.P.s know that perhaps they could have done a better job framing or researching their question).  More often than not, the first downvote isn't meant to be &quot;rude;&quot; it's nothing more than a quick way to express this sentiment: &quot;&lt;em&gt;I don't really like this question, but, before I fly off the handle, let's see what others think&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an O.P. can accept a downvote or comment as &lt;strong&gt;helpful feedback&lt;/strong&gt;, meant to indicate that a question has inadequate information, or is simply not a good fit for the EL&amp;amp;U forum (neither of which makes it a bad question, by the way), then I think you'll find this to be a very friendly, welcoming, helpful community.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:10.337" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T12:55:10.157" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2702" CreationDate="2012-06-01T11:29:00.277" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Day before yesterday I asked a question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is the opposite word of &quot;die-hard fan&quot;. I have also mentioned that I could not find the answer by googling or in the dictionary. I could not even read the comments but the next day I came all I see is my question deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some one said its too subjective. But seriously I don't even know what does it mean. I need your help to understand whether the question I have asked is not a question I should ask here or I have not asked the way I was suppose to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15156" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T17:01:37.323" Title="Help me to improve myself - whats is bad about this question which was deleted" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2699" CreationDate="2012-06-01T13:11:42.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a complex term like 'die-hard fan', there are many possible interpretations of 'opposite'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have one interpretation in mind but you never edited your question to show which one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T13:11:42.587" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2699" CreationDate="2012-06-01T16:18:54.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this was perhaps a trigger-happy deletion. Usually, it takes much longer for closed questions to be deleted, precisely because we want to give the OP a chance to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speculate in this case, but I think perhaps the deleters thought this was a joke question, and thus acted quickly under the broken windows theory. (Which goes something like, an abandoned field that already has a bag of trash is more likely to attract illegal dumping than a field that's clean. Translated to ELU, if people see low-quality questions on the site, they're more likely to ask low-quality questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T16:18:54.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2699" CreationDate="2012-06-01T17:01:37.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original question was worded as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was just wondering if there is any word we can use as opposite of&#xA;  &quot;die-hard fan&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I started using my own words randomly like &quot;kill-hard hater&quot;&#xA;  &quot;kill-brutal hater&quot; and I may discover few more in this pattern if I&#xA;  don't find the answer :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember being very confused when I first read this question; the notion of &quot;kill-hard hater&quot; sounded like nonsense to me.  But then someone offered the answer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fairweather fan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, to which you replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-1. per the wiki link &quot;fair-weather fan:Fans who only follow their team when they are winning.&quot; this is wrong answer  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, I'm going to pause there, and offer you two hints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Don't end a question with &quot;:P&quot;. That's an emoticon signifying sticking your tongue out at someone; it is not a respectful gesture.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists one possible interpretation as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_a_raspberry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blowing a raspberry&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  I don't think that's a very good way to end your question, particularly when it might be a little confusing to begin with. (I doubt you meant to show any disrespect, but it probably didn't help your cause.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Don't downvote someone who answers your question, and call them &quot;wrong&quot;.  If someone has misinterpreted your question, put your energy into clarifying your original question instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm only stating a theory here, but those two things combined may have made it difficult for some in the community to regard your question as a serious one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[end of pause]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the dialogue, Kevin wrote: &lt;em&gt;I think Inglish is looking for a term for someone who really hates a team as in &quot;I'm a die-hard fan of the Red Sox which, of course means I'm a&lt;/em&gt; [XXX] &lt;em&gt;of the Yankees&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that is what you were looking for?  If so, that would explain why you dismissed &lt;em&gt;fairweather fan&lt;/em&gt;, which, as others later pointed out, is a perfectly suitable antonym for &lt;em&gt;die-hard fan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fairweather fan&lt;/strong&gt;: Fans who only follow their team when they are winning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Die-hard fan&lt;/strong&gt;: Someone who possesses extreme, absolute or complete loyalty even if facing defeat or hopelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Kevin's intepretation of your original question would be well-received by the community, if it was posed in that way: supported by an example (rather then steeped in silliness), so that it was more clear and less confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;If this example makes no sense to you, try substituting &quot;Manchester United&quot; and &quot;Liverpool&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T17:01:37.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2707" CreationDate="2012-06-02T17:59:27.003" Score="16" ViewCount="912" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone around here likes to downvote every post of me, of course without giving any reason why he downvote my question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All started one month ago, luckily an automatism reverted the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tiV1d.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just 5 days later, the next posts have been voted down, but not enough that the reversal automatism would be activated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, it take a bit longer but at the end of may there were again a lot of downvotes, and again some of them just in a couple of minutes. Peculiar: The downvotes are again created faster than anyone is able to read a question and the answer. Not to mention that you have to think about what you read and decide if it is good or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qGSU9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that, in average every other day some of my posts get downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Half of my posts already got exactly ONE downvote in the last month. That does not include the reverted downvotes, but some of them are downvoted again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure, that (nearly) all the downvotes comes from one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignoring my recent questions (which got some downvotes 2-3 hours after creation), there is no (active) post with two or more downvotes which were voted in the last month. 98% percent of these downvotes was the first downvote on the question/answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even posts which had a relative good voting (or even accepted by OP) got downvoted for the first time. And I don't think that it's done from someone else then the troll, I don't believe in such a coincidence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I don't care if someone downvote me for a given reason. Of course, some of my posts are not so good, that's OK. But in that case it is obvious that a downvote troll is active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what can I do? Maybe moderators are able to help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: One hour ago, a serial downvote reversal raised. Thanks for looking into that issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16833" LastEditorUserId="16833" LastEditDate="2012-06-09T07:12:26.610" LastActivityDate="2012-06-09T21:07:30.820" Title="What to do against downvote troll?" Tags="|support|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2012-06-02T18:35:24.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not in the position of giving a proper answer to your question, as I am relatively new to this site; however, a similar question was asked recently and one of the answers indicated discussing the matter here on meta, or else &lt;em&gt;&quot;flagging&quot;&lt;/em&gt; the problem to the moderators' attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm experiencing something similar (although on a smaller scale, as for approximately one week I got one downvote per day, both on questions and answers of long standing and which often had not received any downvote before), yesterday I decided to flag one such post asking the moderators if they could look into the situation and let me know whether my guts feeling that it was always the same person who downvoted was correct. So far I haven't heard any comment, but today there was no downvote (or at least, not yet...) and I hope this means that the &quot;leak&quot; has been stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, being downvoted is not relevant &lt;em&gt;&quot;per se&quot;&lt;/em&gt; but I too resent having the feeling that it is done out of spite or for no real reason. Hopefully, someone will be able to solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19875" LastActivityDate="2012-06-02T18:35:24.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2012-06-02T20:24:25.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;numerous downvotes on a single of your questions/answers, whether all in a short period of time or over a longer range, probably means there's something wrong with it. Since there's only one vote per person per item, and there's little communication among users except by comments, there's little chance that people are ganging up together against you. There is the possibility of people jumping on the bandwagon (deciding to vote like others)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;single downvotes on many of your questions/answers over a short period of time is most likely one person willfully choosing to downvote because it's you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to ways to deal with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is an automatic process to detect such patterns and undo them (search the meta sites for 'revenge downvoting').&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can flag a moderator to inform them of the strange voting phenomenon and they can investigate and possibly undo the downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-06-02T20:24:25.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2720" CreationDate="2012-06-03T13:22:13.547" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;The parenthesis that ends the url of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14265/what-does-something-101-mean#comment24047_14265&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; seems not to be considered as part of the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same bug bug was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2323/please-improve-the-auto-linking-to-allow-square-and-round-brackets/2346&quot;&gt;reported on Meta StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; and apparently corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21897" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="URL with parentheses not correctly parsed" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2012-06-04T17:26:12.713" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user responsible has had his sockpuppet account deleted and his main account has been warned accordingly. As a result of the deletion, the serial downvotes have been cancelled and your reputation should have been adjusted as if they had never taken place.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;s&gt;Just to follow up on this, since a lot of flags have come in regarding possible serial downvoting and I want to keep you guys updated—we've asked the SE team to look at this since there's not much that moderators can do, and see if possibly some/all of the offending votes can be revoked. We'll keep you updated with what we hear.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-06-09T21:07:30.820" LastActivityDate="2012-06-09T21:07:30.820" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2012-06-05T14:10:12.873" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the voting system here is flawed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let me say that ANYONE who looks at those screenshots and can't see the pattern of abuse is most likely guilty of doing that kind of thing themselves.  It is not only clear as day to me that you were targeted for serial downvoting, but as you pointed out it was clear to the automated system that is in place to pick up on that kind of abuse.  Anyone who wants to argue and call that &quot;democracy in action&quot; instead most definitely has a hidden agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the voting system itself is unfortunately being run by a &quot;good ole boy&quot; network, and it is entrenched across the SE network.  By that, I mean that a large majority of the votes being handed out to people, are being done by people who ALREADY have a large number of points.  Those are people who spend a lot of time here on SE sites, and having spent that time they are quite sure of themselves in that they know what a good answer is, and what a bad answer is.  On some of the SE sites, they even spend time together in the same chat rooms, every day.  Now, by saying that it is &quot;run by&quot; I don't mean that they can alter the system at a coding level.  But I do mean that if one votes up and comments on it, many more from the same clique will ALSO vote up on it.  I've Personally seen this in reverse on a different SE site, where after alienating more than one of these &quot;elite&quot; users, the number of votes on my answers dropped significantly (and in most cases completely) where before I was regularly getting two or more votes.  No, I'm not turning this into a gripe for my own benefit.  I am simply pointing out that a majority of the voting going on is being done by a select few at each SE site, because they are the only ones who care to spend that much time voting and either encouraging or discouraging users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, aside from the &quot;elite&quot;, the majority of other voters out there tend to vote with the crowd, IF they vote at all.  A positive vote is more likely to attract another positive vote, just because it is there.  People will see the positive vote, and look at the question in a positive light.  This also works in reverse.  A negative vote will attract another negative vote.  People will see that a question or answer is being downvoted, and they will look at the material in a negative light (instead of trying to see something worth salvaging).  Think about how many questions or answers you saw get multiple negative votes, when it could have simply been EDITED and improved... probably by YOU!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry you have been targeted by someone who has nothing better to do than try to make life miserable for you.  It proves what I am saying, that votes are passed out for multiple reasons OTHER than merit though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20836" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T14:10:12.873" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2012-06-06T22:08:16.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you're actually asking here. &lt;em&gt;Is the vote-checking system good enough to catch all unjustified downvotes?&lt;/em&gt; - obviously not, it's only an automated system. &lt;em&gt;Can a moderator look at the situation?&lt;/em&gt; is fair, and waiwai has done all that can reasonably be done. But your question reads as if you expect moderators to check every downvote, and decide whether each is reasonable.  Even if that were possible, it would only be replacing the subjective views of the community as a whole with the subjective views of a few moderators.  I am genuinely sorry that something like this happened, and hope you stay with the site.  But if you do, I think you will find that 'community moderation' means you get some downvotes for reasons unconnected with the quality of answers, and some upvotes in the same way; it's happened to all of us.  Democracy in action is not always attractive, but it's worth persevering with; the site won't improve if people go elsewhere because of its flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T22:08:16.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-07T14:36:34.230" Score="8" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243/is-it-an-acceptable-practice-to-downvote-other-answers-that-are-too-similar-to-p&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; on similar answers and how downvotes should be used. I'd like to ask whether it's acceptable to give answers based on prior answers at all. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1607/where-to-draw-the-line-in-plagiarism-of-earlier-answers&quot;&gt;question on plagiarism&lt;/a&gt; would indcate that it isn't, but that generally focuses on enhancements to prior questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A side note right at the outset:&lt;/em&gt; it happens that the two answers which generated this question are from the same well-established user. That's unfortunate because it could be construed that this meta question is an attack on Barrie. &lt;strong&gt;I don't want this to get personal. I want to examine the practice and the consequences.&lt;/strong&gt; However in order to make sense of the examples it's necessary to identify the answers concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70270/why-does-be-have-more-than-three-forms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70270/why-does-be-have-more-than-three-forms&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; Barrie's answer appeared 11 minutes after mine and presents what is basically a summary of my second paragraph. I can't believe that a single sentence was prepared simultaneously with a formatted table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70267/what-does-republicans-in-congress-need-to-get-off-their-hand-and-stop-rooting-f&quot;&gt;What does it mean that Republicans in Congress “need to get off their hands and stop rooting for failure”?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; Barrie's answer appeared six minutes after mine and says more-or-less the same thing, although again not having taken the time to find a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, after several hours, the difference in timing cannot be distinguished and in the case of Example 2 we have two almost-identical answers with identical timestamps. Consequently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243/is-it-an-acceptable-practice-to-downvote-other-answers-that-are-too-similar-to-p&quot;&gt;previous question's&lt;/a&gt; discussion on voting is hugely relevant: which answer to vote for/against if it's not possible to tell them apart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While (currently) my prior answers have more votes, Example 1 has a comment which extols the &quot;bulls-eye&quot; nature of the answer &amp;mdash; which was copied from mine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this practice really acceptable? Should I simply have flagged the answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T17:47:03.470" Title="Is it acceptable to copy prior answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-06-07T16:34:11.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different users will have different attitudes. Personally I don't mind how much someone else copies from one of my answers. I don't really even care whether they acknowledge me as the original author or not. If it's a better answer I'm perfectly happy to have contributed, recognised or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that really matters is we want as many questions as possible to have one &quot;correct&quot; answer most people can agree on and upvote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also important to bear in mind that people compose answers at different speeds, so the exact time of posting doesn't necessarily imply who &lt;em&gt;wrote&lt;/em&gt; any replicated text first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that in many cases a short clear-cut answer is preferable to a longer one. I didn't actually vote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70270/why-does-be-have-more-than-three-forms&quot;&gt;Why does 'be' have more than three forms?&lt;/a&gt; - but if I had, I'd have probably gone for Barrie's answer because it's short and to the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T16:44:03.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-06-08T00:05:04.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have evidence of actual copying? For neither of the two examples is there any indication of plagiarism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even then, what is 5+12? There's not too many ways to say it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, I don't think you are being singled out to have your answers stolen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the explicit question (i.e. not about the particular examples but the general idea), copying answers or parts of them is not exactly wrong here, we're a community trying to come up with the best answer, but I agree that it is 'uncool' to cobble together other people's answers to make one. That somehow doesn't feel right (because the individual gets the credit not the copied source). So as liberal as one would like to be towards the truth, it's probably better to lie with the reader using the collected set of answers to come to the right conclusion. An 'accepted' answer is not the 'right' one (how could the OP know what the right answer is since presumably asked because they don't know). The answer that the OP accepts is just the answer that helps them out the best (and sometimes it's hard to choose the best one out of similar ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-06-08T01:34:54.820" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T01:34:54.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-06-08T09:24:10.477" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a hunch, but I don't believe Barrie's doing any copying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than once, I've been working on an answer, only to notice the StackExchange message: &quot;1 new answer has been posted; click here to load.&quot;  Sometimes this newly-posted answer is very similar to mine.  At that point, I have a choice: I can either abandon my answer, or I can post it anyway.  I've done both; usually, I'll keep my answer if I feel that it adds something to the whole conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that Barrie's answers are usually concise; I think he values brevity.  My theory is that he's not trying to garner easy points by plagiarizing someone else's work, but that he'll post a brief answer if he think it does a better job of answering the question.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because his answers are short, it may seem like he's copying off someone else's work, particularly if his answer shows up 15 or 20 minutes after another.  But looks can be deceiving.  We don't know how much time may elapse between when an answer is started, and when it is submitted.  I know that I usually proofread, spellcheck, and verify my answers before I post them, and touch up the formatting as well – all this can take time.  For example, I noticed that Barrie used two sets of smart quotes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70267&quot;&gt;one on his answers&lt;/a&gt;; perhaps he was double-checking dictionaries and changing 'quotes' to ‘quotes’ when your answer popped up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;By saying &quot;better,&quot; I don't necessarily mean that he thinks his answer is superior to the other. He may think it's better synergistically, that is, that the two answers combined – one brief, the other more detailed – may be better together than if one of them stood alone.  Maybe he feels like he's &lt;em&gt;supporting&lt;/em&gt; the earlier answer by providing independent concurring research.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T09:24:10.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-08T17:30:13.470" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the closed question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70341/these-sort-of-things-is-it-grammatical-2-670-000-hits-on-google&quot;&gt;“'These sort of things': is it grammatical? (2,670,000 hits on Google)”&lt;/a&gt; should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Peter Shor said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except that it's not an exact duplicate. This question deals with&#xA;  &quot;these kind of X&quot;, with a plural determinant and a singular word from&#xA;  kind/type/sort, and those questions deal with &quot;this kind&quot; or &quot;these&#xA;  kinds&quot;. –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, this particular question has one good answer citing a good reference that, in my opinion, everyone should read, but a lot of people, probably, wont read it if the etiquette [closed] appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-06-09T02:16:56.210" Title="Request to reopen “'These sort of things': is it grammatical? (2,670,000 hits on Google)”" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2715" CreationDate="2012-06-09T02:16:56.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me the closed question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate, so I think it was right to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it does have a good answer. I'd rather see one of the mods &quot;merge&quot; it with the original, so at least all the answers are in one place. Then let the best answer win the votes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-06-09T02:16:56.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2718" CreationDate="2012-06-09T20:36:55.053" Score="12" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was shocked to see 40 points dropdown in my Reputation this morning with the remark ‘User is removed.’ I have no idea about what it means!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened after placing the question asking the usage of the word ‘lackadaisical’ yesterday (June 9&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2012), and it’s the first experience for me to witness such a thing. I don’t know what is wrong with having asked the above question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does ‘User is removed’ mean I was somehow ‘disapproved of’ as the English Language &amp;amp; Usage member by posting the above question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the description is very much confusing and unkind to the users who are unfamiliar with this jargon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2012-06-18T20:03:39.513" LastActivityDate="2012-06-18T20:03:39.513" Title="What does ‘User removed’ mean? And why did I get a significant chop-down of reputation?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2717" CreationDate="2012-06-09T21:03:02.120" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user's account was deleted this morning due to abusive vote behavior on his part. As a result of this deletion, any votes the user cast on your account were cancelled, and any reputation gained/lost as a result of his votes have been essentially nullified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deletion has nothing to do with you, and is not meant to reflect on your behavior (which, by the way, is perfectly fine); it's just part of the moderation process that resulted in all votes by this user being cancelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-06-09T21:03:02.120" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2012-06-10T13:09:31.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is easily addressed.  A link like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and be rewritten with its nonalphanumerics translated into hex using the &lt;code&gt;%XX&lt;/code&gt; notation.  The ASCII hex set is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;00 nul   01 soh   02 stx   03 etx   04 eot   05 enq   06 ack   07 bel&#xA;08 bs    09 ht    0a nl    0b vt    0c np    0d cr    0e so    0f si&#xA;10 dle   11 dc1   12 dc2   13 dc3   14 dc4   15 nak   16 syn   17 etb&#xA;18 can   19 em    1a sub   1b esc   1c fs    1d gs    1e rs    1f us&#xA;20 sp    21  !    22  &quot;    23  #    24  $    25  %    26  &amp;amp;    27  '&#xA;28  (    29  )    2a  *    2b  +    2c  ,    2d  -    2e  .    2f  /&#xA;30  0    31  1    32  2    33  3    34  4    35  5    36  6    37  7&#xA;38  8    39  9    3a  :    3b  ;    3c  &amp;lt;    3d  =    3e  &amp;gt;    3f  ?&#xA;40  @    41  A    42  B    43  C    44  D    45  E    46  F    47  G&#xA;48  H    49  I    4a  J    4b  K    4c  L    4d  M    4e  N    4f  O&#xA;50  P    51  Q    52  R    53  S    54  T    55  U    56  V    57  W&#xA;58  X    59  Y    5a  Z    5b  [    5c  \    5d  ]    5e  ^    5f  _&#xA;60  `    61  a    62  b    63  c    64  d    65  e    66  f    67  g&#xA;68  h    69  i    6a  j    6b  k    6c  l    6d  m    6e  n    6f  o&#xA;70  p    71  q    72  r    73  s    74  t    75  u    76  v    77  w&#xA;78  x    79  y    7a  z    7b  {    7c  |    7d  }    7e  ~    7f del&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so subbing in the hex for the parens the version of that URL that works is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_%28biology%29&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is easily shown to work by comparing &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_%28biology%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this which works&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this which fails&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is easily shown to work &#xA;by comparing [this which works](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_%28biology%29) &#xA;with [this which fails](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hm, actually, those &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; work!  In fact,  I can’t manage to get a failure mode to crop up.  Do you have an example of something that doesn’t work right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps balanced parens work but imbalanced ones do not? Unsure; I have no failure test case.  But I’ll bet you anything that subbing in the hex for offending characters will cure whatever problem ails you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it’s only in comments where the putative pesky paren problem arises?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70281/flora-fauna-robot/70286#comment136288_70286&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; uses the URL above, properly escaped, without a hitch.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think this is easily worked around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-06-10T13:09:31.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2012-06-11T13:05:58.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is intentional as far as &lt;em&gt;automatically linked&lt;/em&gt; URLs go. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74926/link-ending-with-is-not-enclosed-in-anchor-tag-correctly/74928#74928&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; for the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, you &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; say &amp;quot;the link starts here and ends here&amp;quot; by using the link syntax&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[see wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it will work, since we allow one level of opened/closed parenthesis, specifically for cases like Wikipedia links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66472/url-detecting-error-with-address-like-http-en-wikipedia-org-wiki-octet-compu/165064#165064&quot;&gt;URL detecting error with address like &amp;quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Overflow for details; long story short: After the next build of the site, this will work as you had expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T14:51:38.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2723" CreationDate="2012-06-12T13:04:31.930" Score="-2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first question on the meta site and I have absolutely no idea if this would be acceptable to the community. But still, here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To change my profile picture, I click &quot;edit&quot; on my profile page. Then I click &quot;change picture&quot;. But this redirects me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.gravatar.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this page&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; where the I am supposed to sign up for a website (which I believe has nothing to do with El&amp;amp;U).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is that, am I following the right procedure? If yes, should I sign up for that website? If yes again, why should I sign up for a completely different website, when all I want to do is to upload a picture from my PC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20934" LastEditorUserId="8816" LastEditDate="2012-06-12T15:31:32.027" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T15:31:32.027" Title="How to change profile picture?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2721" CreationDate="2012-06-12T13:31:17.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it is the right procedure. Gravatar is used on many sites (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://github.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordpress.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wordpress.com&lt;/a&gt;) as well as the whole Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Gravatar is the only way to get your choice of avatar here, unless you're happy with the default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T13:31:17.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2012-06-14T08:24:22.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Selection bias&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Semantics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistics over published matter, whether books, newspapers, internet should always be taken with an iceberg of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Selection bias:&lt;/strong&gt; have a go at &quot;bull&quot; vs &quot;cow&quot; and &quot;cherry&quot; vs &quot;plum&quot; and try to explain the crazy oscillations before year 1800. What you'll see is an example of either insufficiency of printed material or periods when the earlier in each pair bore sexual connotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics:&lt;/strong&gt; consider a query &quot;speakeasy&quot; vs &quot;bar&quot; for a drinking establishment. The earlier became commonplace word since prohibition, that is 1920's, yet curiously same word was used in 1880's. The latter can be used in dozens of senses, from law bar to crowbar, assigning statistical prevalence of &quot;bar&quot; over &quot;speakeasy&quot; to &quot;bar&quot; in a sense of a drinking establishment is completely wrong. Same goes for any query where one option is shorter than other or was ever used to mean anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22210" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T08:24:22.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-15T21:23:59.900" Score="9" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder how a big web site like Stack Exchange that covers vast intellectual topic areas could operate without having a significant revenue source such as advertising (as Google and Yahoo do) and who are running it. Who are the owners of this site, and running for what purpose? Who are overseeing operation of individual specialty area (e.g. languages, science, finance, etc.) and its rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2012-06-17T11:15:18.103" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T11:15:18.103" Title="Who runs Stack Exchange, and how do they fund it?" Tags="|support|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2725" CreationDate="2012-06-16T01:53:08.847" Score="19" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Who owns Stack Exchange?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/management&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/about/management&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For what purpose?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you can read the fluffy blurb at the top of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, but it boils down to this: a few years back, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky identified a set of problems with existing communities set up to serve computer programmers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;And set out to solve them&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And those are the two things we want to serve basically is the posting to the discussion group and typing things into Google.  Our longer term goal, if we’re successful, is that you're trying to figure out how to do something in Python like how to merge two arrays in Python and you go to Google and you type &amp;quot;merge two arrays python&amp;quot; and submit that, and our goal is to be the number one hit that comes up with a really good edited answer to that question that some individual has contributed and maybe other individuals have edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This worked &lt;em&gt;really well&lt;/em&gt;. They called it &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Stack Overflow&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is sort of an in-joke that I won't explain because that makes it not funny &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;and is explicitly disallowed in the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. It worked &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; well that they &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/the-stack-overflow-trilogy/&quot;&gt;launched some more sites&lt;/a&gt; on the same model, but for other (related) topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But folks wanted &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; sites. They wanted sites on cooking, and decorating your house, and managing your money, and math. So they launched a separate company, Stack Exchange, to offer the software as a product or service to whoever wanted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ended up working &lt;em&gt;really badly&lt;/em&gt;. Turns out, the success of a Q&amp;amp;A site is as much due to its philosophy as it is the software. Oh, and it needs an audience. Trying to run a site about a hobby of yours on evenings and weekends with you and your friends tends to fizzle. And out of the hundreds of sites created, most of them &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; fizzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our dynamic duo &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;doubled down&lt;/a&gt; and Stack Exchange 2.0 - &lt;em&gt;The Platform&lt;/em&gt; was born. Out of &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the chaotic cauldron of Area 51&lt;/a&gt; arose a multitude of sites, including the one you're on right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Who oversees the operation of these sites, and determines the rules?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You do!&lt;/strong&gt; A major part of the SE philosophy is self-governance: participating in a positive way on the site will net you reputation, which in turn grants you privileges - including quite a bit of meta-moderation. Moderators - those members with the little diamonds next to their names - are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;elected&lt;/a&gt; by you, and handle the tasks that slip through the cracks. This gray-looking area known as Meta is where y'all hash out the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...And &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/team&quot;&gt;we do&lt;/a&gt; - in particular, those busybodies like myself who are labelled &amp;quot;community manager&amp;quot; on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;And who pays for it all?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the original &amp;quot;trilogy&amp;quot; paid for itself with a combination of advertising and &lt;a href=&quot;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;various schemes to help experts on the site find jobs&lt;/a&gt;. The expanded network relies on a combination of this and venture capital funding, with the end-goal being to develop more services like Careers that produce funding in a symbiotic relationship with the membership of the sites themselves (rather than paywalls or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj7c0J_V1L8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ever more intrusive advertising&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T01:53:08.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2729" CreationDate="2012-06-17T03:49:09.780" Score="4" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71270/why-is-wont-allowed/71271#comment137949_71271&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed today because it was a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4521/what-is-wont-a-contraction-of&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Today's question, however, had a really good answer — by one Jon Purdy — which I believe actually adds to the answers given to the earlier question. Since today's question has been closed, readers will be less likely to encounter this good answer that was posted today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, what's to be done when there is a good answer to a question that is subsequently closed? Is there a way to migrate that answer over to the prior question? Sure, you'll say that someone posting an answer should check first to see if the question is a duplicate. Be that as it may, there's a good answer out that that I think deserves a wider audience than it's going to get. There are likely others, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked through the questions here to see if there was anything about this issue, and I couldn't find anything. But I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; sorry if &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question is a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T04:06:08.023" Title="Good answers to closed questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2728" CreationDate="2012-06-17T03:55:40.443" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the most brilliant timing I have ever seen. As it happens, we can merge duplicate questions, and I saw a flag requesting this just before seeing this Meta post. So the questions have been merged and this specific case has been addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the more general case, we probably should be merging more duplicate questions that have answers. If you see some, please flag them so they can be looked at by a mod. We can also maybe do a community project where we go through closed-as-duplicate questions with answers and see if they should be merged, but I can't coordinate a project of that magnitude right now, so it'll have to wait until later in the summer unless someone else wants to take it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T03:55:40.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2682" CreationDate="2012-06-19T16:31:48.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As said by FlumbleFingers, you cannot decide which word is used to mean something bigger than the other word means. There isn't a definitive answer to this, as people would probably give a slightly different meaning to those words. It also more probable that is a matter of a newer word versus an older word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T16:31:48.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2737" CreationDate="2012-06-19T17:32:57.200" Score="-2" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is a lot of people interested in these things, but it may bother some that these are not objective type of questions for a linguistic SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this type of question is &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71398/a-common-phrase-that-describes-something-that-looks-good-but-is-actually-not-goo/71410#71410&quot;&gt;Common phrases for something that appears good but is actually bad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I talked to another SE user and he mentioned that some people get annoyed with this kind of question around here. You may see a comment on that question, saying that a question with more than 20 answers has got some problem with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more comments on the problem, look here&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;Against single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22441" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T09:16:33.347" Title="Should we consider the creation of a SE exclusive for &quot;Words &amp; Idiomatic expressions&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2731" CreationDate="2012-06-19T19:13:04.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per comments, OP is welcome to propose such a site on Area51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I wouldn't sign up for such a site even if it existed. We get quite a few questions here asking &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is [some phrase] an idiomatic expression?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. If in fact it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, I usually think the question is &quot;General Reference&quot;. If it's not, the answers usually seem subjective to me anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The question text has changed since I answered. It now seems OP is asking about &lt;em&gt;requests&lt;/em&gt; for idiomatic expressions suitable for some context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general principle I don't think ELU should encourage such questions either. Occasionally there is a single &quot;correct&quot; answer, but usually it's just a &quot;popularity contest&quot;. And I suspect some people are tempted to vote for an expression they've never come across before, simply because it's striking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-06-20T23:04:34.117" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T23:04:34.117" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2734" CreationDate="2012-06-20T08:50:19.120" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an account on English Language and Usage and I asked two question from this account those has been removed and I can not see them in asked question column so I want to know what are the reason for removing those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22357" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T13:01:44.750" Title="Why have questions been removed from my account?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2733" CreationDate="2012-06-20T13:01:44.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two of your questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71686/difference-in-english&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71686/difference-in-english&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71137/difference-in-starting-pronunciations-of-station-and-sun&quot;&gt;Difference in starting pronunciations of &amp;quot;station&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sun&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; were deleted after having been closed. The first case was a question which was very broad, and your edits didn't make it less so. In the second case, your question didn't make much sense to other users because &quot;station&quot; doesn't start with an &quot;e&quot; sound. You later changed your question in comments, but did not actually update it in the five days since closing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deletion can happen to questions which have been closed (except usually for duplicate questions, which are more often merged). Like closing, deletion is done via a voting process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T13:01:44.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2731" CreationDate="2012-06-20T16:39:42.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could propose it at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;, but I feel that acceptable questions about that topic are acceptable also on English Language &amp;amp; Usage. It is probable the proposal would be closed as duplicate of EL&amp;amp;U, except in the case the proposed site is accepting questions about languages different from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference between EL&amp;amp;U, and other sites is that EL&amp;amp;U has &quot;general reference&quot; as closing reason, while other Stack Exchange sites don't have it. It is not said that closing reason would be added to the proposed site, but for example Drupal Answers doesn't have that closing reason, even if it was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T16:39:42.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2731" CreationDate="2012-06-20T19:15:52.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would be worth it. Nobody would go there to ask questions (too obscure), and nobody would bother hanging out there to answer the 90% of boring questions already answered badly elsewhere but not particularly salvagable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you just want to ask somebody real quick what a word or phrase for something is. Sometimes that works out here (as an SE type question), sometimes it doesn't so SE is not the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T19:15:52.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2731" CreationDate="2012-06-21T01:18:58.347" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're barking up the wrong tree.  Why pick on &lt;em&gt;Words &amp;amp; Idiomatic Expressions&lt;/em&gt; (instead of, say, &lt;em&gt;Prepositions&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Meaning&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Verb Tense&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen plenty of good questions, and plenty of bad questions, and there doesn't seem to be a correlation between the quality of a question, and whatever that question happens to inquire about.  We could probably investigate all the tags, and find plenty of examples that run the full length of the quality spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; you provided has some of my favorite refrains running through it: &lt;em&gt;Do your research, then share your research. Context is everything; don't ask your question in a vacuum. Don't ask me something I can answer in 60 seconds or less with a dictionary or thesaurus.  Don't just tell me your problem, explain&lt;/em&gt; why &lt;em&gt;you are struggling with it&lt;/em&gt;.  Those simple fundamentals determine the quality of a question, more than anything else – at least that's been my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, some single-word requests drive me crazy: &amp;quot;What's a good word for someone who feels depressed?&amp;quot; (Answer: &amp;quot;Um, &lt;em&gt;depressed&lt;/em&gt;?&amp;quot;). However, we already have mechanisms in place for discouraging or thwarting bad questions: downvotes, close votes, comments – not to mention upvoting questions that we find exemplary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thought: sometimes it's hard to know if a question is good or bad until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; it's asked, and the answers start coming in.  My favorite example here would be the recent &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70897&quot;&gt;umbrella question&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; That question had 8 answers, but I want to highlight these four:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;basic, common sense&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/70898/8278&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;No, you wear a coat, and carry an umbrella&lt;/em&gt;. (81 votes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;ask a silly question, get a silly answer&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/70903/8278&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Sure you can! Just like she's doing...&lt;/em&gt; (86 votes; this was like Florida in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;well-researched&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/70910/8278&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (with &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; links to fashion websites; 46 votes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;let's see what the dictionary says&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/70912/8278&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (which only got 10 votes, but that may have been partly because it arrived so late at the umbrella party):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wear&lt;/strong&gt; - to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;carry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or have on the body or about the person as a covering, equipment, ornament, or the like. [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's my point?  Instinctively, I thought just like the first answerer: &amp;quot;No, you don't &lt;em&gt;wear&lt;/em&gt; an umbrella!&amp;quot; But the dictionary and fashion mavens would warn me: &amp;quot;Not so fast, J.R.!&amp;quot; Bottom line is: it's hard to categorize &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; questions with such a broad brush; one man's trash is another man's treasure. Someone may ask what appears to be a basic question – maybe about meaning, maybe a search for just the right word – but we never know what will end up entertaining or enlightening the community (or maybe even both).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I find it curious that you singled out a question with 28 upvotes.  That question doesn't appear to be &amp;quot;annoying&amp;quot; too many users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T09:16:33.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2739" CreationDate="2012-06-21T11:27:01.520" Score="6" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/71654/252&quot;&gt;usage of twofold/threefold&lt;/a&gt; deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No explanation is given. I find it hard to imagine this one is General Reference, when I compare it to countless other really trivial questions that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T12:45:15.557" Title="Why was this question about usage of twofold/threefold deleted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2738" CreationDate="2012-06-21T12:16:27.087" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be exactly the kind of question we do want. It asks about grammar and the answers involve discussions of semantics, usage, and definitions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="18399" LastEditDate="2012-06-23T02:41:05.747" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T02:41:05.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2746" CreationDate="2012-06-21T13:41:39.480" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently lost a bunch of reputation because two questions I'd offered answers for had been deleted. This seemed to happen very quickly, without their first being closed (I think). I would love to know why the questions were deleted; it might help me to be a better EL&amp;amp;U user! Is there a way that someone of a low-to-middling reputation can find out why a question has been deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19894" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T16:25:09.357" Title="Is there a way to find out why questions have been deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2694" CreationDate="2012-06-21T16:26:53.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/author/admin/&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;, one of the creators of the system here, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;admits&lt;/a&gt; that it's painful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sure, it stings a bit to get downvoted. I’ve been downvoted myself on Stack Overflow. And each time, it makes me pause. But that’s good! That’s necessary! You have to believe there are potential consequences for every post you make — both good and bad. This is how things work on real playgrounds; why would we expect our web playgrounds to be any different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from what others wrote about improving questions, I'd only add that you have to move forward. Taking your comments to meta is one way, but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;choosing to forget the regret, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;learning from the negative experience, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trusting you'll get a better reaction to your next question &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are other ways to move ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20482" LastActivityDate="2012-06-21T16:26:53.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2738" CreationDate="2012-06-21T17:11:14.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was plagiarized from another online forum. Based on this user's previous behavior, deletion was the appropriate course of action. The question itself is not necessarily close-worthy, which is why I didn't close it before deleting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-06-22T04:34:30.920" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T04:34:30.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2745" CreationDate="2012-06-22T10:27:09.967" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1357/love-seeing-questions-highlighted-but-what-is-it&quot;&gt;Love seeing questions highlighted&amp;hellip; but what is it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1313/why-are-some-questions-shaded-green&quot;&gt;Why are some questions shaded green?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are surrounded by a cream-coloured (darker than the website's background colour) box like this:&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B4hZt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It started happening recently. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T14:06:28.243" Title="Why are some questions surrounded by a cream-coloured rectangular box?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-06-23T14:05:59.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2743" CreationDate="2012-06-22T12:49:20.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &quot;Frequented Tags&quot; thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qpwpf.png&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It cannot be changed, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you set some tag preferences. If you add at least one favourite tag, then this will disappear.&#xA;If you don't want to see the box at all, try choosing a really obscure tag. I suggest using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/iiuiuhijbwajhefb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;iiuiuhijbwajhefb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;iiuiuhijbwajhefb&lt;/a&gt;. Or, if you want an actual tag, something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/isograms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;isograms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;isograms&lt;/a&gt; will work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2012-06-22T20:43:02.737" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T20:43:02.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2740" CreationDate="2012-06-22T13:02:35.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't any way for regular users to search for deleted questions. Only mods can do so.  High rep users (10K+) can &lt;em&gt;view&lt;/em&gt; deleted questions and answers, but only when they already have the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could save all the URLs to the questions you answer in a notepad document, just in case you need them later, or you can ask a mod nicely if they would search for them for you. Of course, that will only matter if you are 10K+, otherwise you won't be able to see the question anyway.  But a mod should be able to tell you the closing/deletion details regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind though that the reason only mods can search for deleted questions is to prevent high rep users from engaging in naughty behavior, so don't be surprised if you are expected to have a good reason for wanting to look at a deleted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T13:02:35.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2762" CreationDate="2012-06-23T14:15:30.983" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/retag-questions&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Click the &lt;code&gt;retag&lt;/code&gt; menu option under the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the only options I see are &lt;code&gt;link&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt;. Where am I going wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T12:38:28.937" Title="How to re-tag a question?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1715" CreationDate="2012-06-24T00:32:05.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides running queries as mentioned in simchona's answer (which entails entering SQL queries, as described in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data.stackexchange.com/faq&lt;/a&gt;), you can download &quot;data dumps&quot; for some stackexchange sites, as described in a  &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-dump-sep-11/&quot;&gt;stackoverflow blog&lt;/a&gt;.  Once you download that data, you can analyze it however you like.  As an example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2344/ask-ubuntu-data-server-blazing-fast-searches-from-the-data-dump-and-api&quot;&gt;stackapps question #2344&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a site called &lt;a href=&quot;http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hewgill.com/~greg&lt;/a&gt; has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/english_language_and_usage/stats.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webpage&lt;/a&gt; called &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage Statistics&lt;/em&gt; that shows average number of questions by day of week and by hour of day, etc., together with portions of the queries used to generate the datasets. &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/locGD.png&quot; alt=&quot;questions by hour of day&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At the moment, those charts appear to be up to date (that is, incorporate March 2012 quarterly data) but elsewhere on the site, data in &lt;a href=&quot;http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/english_language_and_usage/users/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;per-user statistics&lt;/a&gt; appears to be a few months older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:46.197" LastActivityDate="2012-06-24T00:32:05.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2747" CreationDate="2012-06-25T09:20:32.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you hover your mouse on the tags then a link appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AIAtK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mouse hover on the tags to make the &amp;quot;edit tags&amp;quot; link visible&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the link to edit the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method is only available to users with 10K reps or above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other users They have to edit the question and then edit the tags list from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2012-06-27T12:28:27.480" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T12:28:27.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2755" CreationDate="2012-06-25T20:55:19.147" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it right to downvote questions only because they are a duplicate of another question? Shouldn't voting be based only on the relevance of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-08-03T13:44:42.950" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:44:42.950" Title="Is it right to downvote questions only because they are dupes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2754" CreationDate="2012-06-25T21:18:47.370" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A down vote on the main site means this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nmlrx.png&quot; alt=&quot;down vote explaination text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a duplicate is displayed when a user is typing in their question title, or pops up while they're typing out the body of the question and they haven't checked if it is the same as their question, then some might argue that is a lack of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down voting on meta is different and normally shows some sort of disagreement with the question at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if a meta question shows no research then it'll likely get down voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2012-06-26T10:52:41.617" LastActivityDate="2012-06-26T10:52:41.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-26T18:52:12.507" Score="-6" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of mine &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72641/training-conversation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know question without answers isn't prefereable. But this type of questions still relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strange thing is we can find a final answer to question (as I said, the better 5 links).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the problem is with the reputation this wouldnt be the problem, the only thing should change is the admnistrator &lt;strong&gt;protect&lt;/strong&gt; the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another argument is if someone come here and ask for a translation, this question will be answered (because it has a goal). But, if another user suggest another translation, maybe, the answer (by the owner of the question) will change to this new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Why not keep this kind of question open (even if protected)? This kind of question is unhelpful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14032" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T12:26:06.123" Title="Why not keep this kind of question open?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2757" CreationDate="2012-06-26T19:59:02.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason your question has been closed is already given underneath it. As you should be aware, EL&amp;amp;U is a Q&amp;amp;A site. Questions asked here are expected to lead to a &lt;em&gt;specific answer&lt;/em&gt;, not cause an &lt;em&gt;extended debate&lt;/em&gt;. Your question is too broad and certainly doesn't have a &lt;em&gt;specific answer&lt;/em&gt;. Also, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;out of scope for this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A snapshot of the link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a6Zj5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go through the above mentioned link, you will seee which questions you &lt;em&gt;can/should not&lt;/em&gt; ask on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &lt;strong&gt;translation&lt;/strong&gt; related questions, you are mistaken. The page (link above), explicitly mentions &lt;em&gt;&quot;translation and non-English languages&quot;&lt;/em&gt; under the category of questions which are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to be asked here. Such questions are either &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;migrated&lt;/em&gt; to a sister site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for &lt;strong&gt;protecting your question&lt;/strong&gt;, let me quote why a question is &lt;em&gt;protected&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is protected to prevent &quot;thanks!&quot;, &quot;me too!&quot;, or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T01:47:13.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2747" CreationDate="2012-06-27T12:38:28.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you have the privilege of editing a post, or suggesting an edit, the &quot;retag&quot; link is not shown. This is true for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user who asked the question, which is always able to edit her/his question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The users with a reputation lower than 500&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The users with a reputation higher than, or equal to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;2000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on &lt;em&gt;Ask Different&lt;/em&gt; my reputation is lower than 2000, and for &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/52575/3598&quot;&gt;a question asked from somebody else&lt;/a&gt;, I see the &quot;retag&quot; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YxUOi.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same site, I don't see the &quot;retag&quot; link for &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/53722/3598&quot;&gt;my own questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zqBD3.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;Seasoned Advice&lt;/em&gt;, my reputation is higher than 2000, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/7707/1229&quot;&gt;I don't see the &quot;retag&quot; link&lt;/a&gt;. I just use the &quot;edit&quot; link to edit the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mkTKX.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On sites where I am a 10k (or 20k) user, I can use the inline tag editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2gjnS.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8aOEG.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:31.650" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T12:38:28.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2764" CreationDate="2012-06-27T23:54:39.820" Score="9" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm familiar with points, upvotes, downvotes, etc. It's not very interesting, but it's understandable. However, I recently got some points deducted for an &quot;unupvote&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind; points are not fungible. But I don't understand the term. &#xA;My best guess is that somebody who had upvoted has changed their mind and downvoted. That makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, every time this has happened to me, it's been accompanied by more upvotes, so I'm sort of unclear what's going on. Is this a reaction, like the reaction to serial downvoting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2023-04-07T21:29:36.130" Title="What is an &quot;unupvote&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2763" CreationDate="2012-06-28T00:14:55.460" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding is &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; right—an unupvote occurs when someone withdraws their upvote on your post, but he/she may not necessarily cast a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason you may see an unupvote accompanied by upvotes is because unupvotes often happen when an old post has been bumped to the front page, and a user decides to withdraw his/her vote for whatever reason. At the same time, other users who have not previously seen that post will see it now, and might choose to upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T00:14:55.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-27T23:32:30.787" Score="5" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm at a loss as to how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44935/grammar-of-over-in-the-accident-was-already-over-when-we-arrived&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44935/grammar-of-over-in-the-accident-was-already-over-when-we-arrived&lt;/a&gt; could be deemed unworthy of further consideration. Could anyone please explain what I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement &lt;strong&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/strong&gt; can arguably never be true, as English is a language that develops over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many non-trivial cases, one may find incompatible 'definitive' answers by carefully selecting or just happening upon different 'standard internet reference sources designed specifically to &lt;strong&gt;provide&lt;/strong&gt; that type of information'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of this sense of &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, at thefreedictionary.com, the two (usually excellent) dictionaries give contradictory analyses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[over]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  adv.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  14. &lt;strong&gt;At an end: Summer is over.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[over]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;adj&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;(postpositive) finished; no longer in progress: is the concert over yet?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we toss a coin?&#xA;Stick with the first reasonably authoritative-looking source we happen upon?&#xA;Look for a ranking order of possible sources?&#xA;Look for a ranking order of ranking orders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(With regard to the original question, Collins probably has the correct analysis here: the structure must be regarded as copular; &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; cannot &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;. However, as with &lt;em&gt;former&lt;/em&gt; in say &lt;em&gt;a former President&lt;/em&gt;, we have here a situation where the 'adjective' doesn't really truly modify the noun it is apparently associated with. A former President is not a President who is former, and if Summer is over, we are not left with an over Summer. The words 'former' and 'over' refer to former states / the end of those states. At the moment, words that perform this sort of role are loosely classed as 'peripheral adjectives', or perhaps better as 'non-semantically-predicative adjectives' (see Elizabeth Coppock at &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=me11YSch_xcC&amp;amp;pg=PA169&amp;amp;lpg=PA169&amp;amp;dq=coppock+predicative&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=yinB7RSYkD&amp;amp;sig=OrRxd4ixk8qbcKJIk4dAvzWiCGA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=lBNMT8DmFoiu8gPWuMXSBg&amp;amp;ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and the above link is to the best article on the subject that I've found in 10 years - but perhaps that's common knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" OwnerDisplayName="Edwin Ashworth" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:37:42.503" Title="Definitive and permanent answer to word class of 'over' in 'the game was over'" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-06-28T00:07:12.443" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be no &quot;definitive and permanent answer&quot; to a question like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;, there is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; definitive list of English word classes. Everybody uses their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;, language changes constantly, so permanent solutions are out of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third&lt;/strong&gt;, knowing the official &quot;word class&quot; of a word tells you precisely nothing about its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fourth&lt;/strong&gt;, the word &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt;, like most English words, belongs to many word classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fifth&lt;/strong&gt;, the word &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Summer is over&lt;/em&gt; is a metaphorical use of a locative term. Metaphors are a matter of individual usage and interpretation, also inimical to a definitive and permanent answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a literature on this; you should probably start with Claudia Brugman's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/The_story_of_over.html?id=kZIdAQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Story of Over&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" OwnerDisplayName="John Lawler" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2016-10-08T18:37:42.503" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:37:42.503" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-06-28T12:06:47.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can arguably never be true, as English is a language that develops over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An online dictionary page that defines a word doesn't necessarily give always the same definition; if the word is used in a different way, the online dictionary will be updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the link can be defined as &quot;link to a standard Internet reference source,&quot; the link is fine. For example, I would not call the link to a blog page I sometimes update a link to a standard Internet reference source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T12:06:47.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2757" CreationDate="2012-06-28T12:26:06.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been closed as not constructive, which means that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A request for a list of web sites you could use to learn English is a request for a list, which is not a kind of question that is welcome on Stack Exchange sites.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;First off, that type of list would be rather subjective, as it depends from your knowledge of English; it is also subjective because you would get different answers, if you ask the question to different people. The answers would not be supported by facts, and they would not require a specific expertise. Are there experts in choosing the web site that better helps you in improving your skills in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; then says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T12:26:06.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-06-28T15:36:17.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this question should have closed either. There are two possibilities &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;to be over&quot; is a phrasal verb.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;over&quot; is an adjective that can only occur in predicate position.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that different English speakers analyze this differently, because some people say &quot;the concert seems over&quot;, while others (e.g., me) would say that this wasn't quite grammatical, and that you have to say &quot;the concert seems to be over&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;to be over&quot; is a phrasal verb, then many dictionaries would call &quot;over&quot; an adverb (I would say that it's a particle, but many dictionaries don't use this as one of the parts of speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this question should have been closed. The 'general references' disagree, and calling 'over' an adverb here is really quite unhelpful. Also, just because there's no definite answer doesn't mean the question should have been closed; what I said above (with some data to back up the claims) would have been a perfectly good answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since the OP didn't explain that the references disagreed, it's quite understandable that the question was closed. From the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, if your question isn't adequately answered by these resources, feel free to ask here on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange. Be sure to mention the research you've done and what you're still hoping to learn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insufficient research was given in the original question, which led to its closing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5754" LastEditorUserId="5754" LastEditDate="2012-06-28T15:49:35.160" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T15:49:35.160" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-06-28T20:50:49.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is simply, &quot;Why was this closed&quot;... I think it's obvious from the comments.   onomatomaniak linked to the dictionary definition, a standard reference source providing an &lt;em&gt;apparently&lt;/em&gt; definitive answer. Three others saw that and agreed, and thus the question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is, &quot;Should we reopen it&quot;... I think you've proved that there's enough of a gray area that the question should be given another look.  But you could have done so more directly by posting to meta in the first place, or simply voting to reopen (if rep permits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &quot;Should we re-word the 'general reference' closure text because English is not so cut and dried&quot;....  We could debate the exact wording of the message, but the intent is clear.  EL&amp;amp;U gets a lot of really basic questions where the meaning is obvious and the person clearly didn't spend any effort to look it up themselves.   That's what 'general reference' is for.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of democratic closure means that mistakes sometimes happen, but that's why you can reopen them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T20:50:49.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2740" CreationDate="2012-06-29T16:25:09.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would love to know why the questions were deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that are extremely &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;off topic&lt;/a&gt;, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Over time, closed questions that are not useful as signpoints to other questions may also be removed, as well as questions which have no significant activity over a very long period after being asked. For additional guidance, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing is the first step to deletion. The only closed questions that are not deleted are the duplicate questions that are not exact duplicates of another question. In that case, they serve as sign point to other questions, and can help users to find the questions they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T16:25:09.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-30T20:30:42.010" Score="30" ViewCount="1348" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be aware that a certain user on EL&amp;amp;U has been suspended for voting abuse and that this user has repeatedly circumvented his/her suspension and continued to ask questions. In addition, this user has plagiarized content extensively, attacked the community, and committed other acts which are generally abusive to the community and site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, the general policy has been to delete this user's questions on sight, since to not do so would be to essentially tolerate this circumvention of the suspension. However, there have arisen cases where answers have been posted, and legitimate users received reputation for their answers, before a moderator saw the question. In this scenario, deleting seems unfair; not deleting seems like tolerating the site's most abusive user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I am asking the community for suggestions. Under what circumstances should we delete this user's questions? And are there any methods that you think we should try to enforce the suspension more effectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-06-30T20:53:22.210" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What should we do about users circumventing suspensions?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-06-30T21:00:41.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I expect the mods have discussed this amongst themselves. Here's my two-penn'orth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's obvious that a user has created a sock puppet to circumvent a suspension, one way to deal with it is to delete the question before anyone has a chance to answer it. This means effective moderation will have to be possible from all time zones &amp;mdash; Europe, Australia and western US is probably sufficient. We should all probably be on the ball with flags too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if it's not obvious but probably the product of a sockpuppet, it could be locked pending the result of any investigation, and then unlocked or deleted as appropriate. (I'm not sure of the interplay between locking and deletion; I'm aware there is some.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be argued that not only is this user abusing the site by flouting a ban, as his questions will be deleted he is also abusing those other users who answer. It would be reasonable for the suspension to be extended [by a day?] for every infraction and further extended [another day?] if it's caused a waste of effort for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is actually within the FAQ, would normally be worth keeping and actually has answers (or even not yet but would be useful), then perhaps it could be transferred to the &quot;Community&quot; account in order that the sockpuppet can be deleted? Answers can be added and gain reputation, but the asker cannot gain anything except an extra day's suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138130/please-add-a-notification-for-new-accounts-from-an-existing-ip-address-of-a-susp&quot;&gt;Meta.SO question&lt;/a&gt; is also relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T21:00:41.367" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-06-30T22:49:05.903" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to deal with good questions from banned users is, as Andrew Leach said, to transfer them to Community. (I thought that was already one of Community's functions; if not, it clearly should be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the best way of dealing with the user himself is surely to ignore him. Dummy accounts, circumventing the rules, abuse; these are just ways to annoy 'those SE [expletive deleted]', and an extra day's suspension is proof that it's working. By all means add it to the dossier to consider at the end of the suspension period, but nothing else, unless an IP ban or legal action become necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T22:49:05.903" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-01T04:05:40.910" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to EL&amp;amp;U, and am not sure who this discussion is about, but I would say that I would not mind in the least losing reputation points if I unwittingly answered such an abusive user's questions and those questions were subsequently deleted. I wouldn't want &quot;tainted&quot; reputation points! I think this person's questions should be deleted as soon as detected, even if answers were given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18655" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T04:05:40.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-01T14:57:30.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that merging the new account with the suspended one would avoid removing reputation to users who provided a useful answer, which would be a &lt;em&gt;punishment&lt;/em&gt; for something they didn't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is legitimate (apart the fact it has been asked from somebody who is not supposed to ask questions because suspended), then who answered deserves the gained reputation. If the question is not constructive, off-topic, not a real question, then it should be closed, and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such case, deleting a question sounds like a punishment for the users who answered because they didn't notice the account is a sock puppet, as if they would have any information for noticing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-07-05T09:21:50.503" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T09:21:50.503" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-04T17:22:07.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could the user be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hellbanned, slowbanned, or errorbanned&lt;/a&gt;, or did these never come to be?  The distinctions come about halfway down the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T17:22:07.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2763" CreationDate="2012-07-05T14:27:26.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put, an &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;upvote&amp;quot; is the removal of an upvote. The person clicked on the upvote button again to remove their upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can compare it to the &amp;quot;like&amp;quot; button on Facebook. You can &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;like&amp;quot; something without actually disliking it - you may merely have lost interest or do not wish to express your sympathy any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any accompanying upvotes are probably coincidences. A downvote at the same time by the same person should be very improbable, since that would signify a complete change of heart. It can happen, of course, if the upvote button was clicked by accident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time (a few minutes), the upvote or downvote is fixed and can no longer be removed, unless the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/722/i-incorrectly-upvoted-a-post-but-now-cannot-reverse-it-how-can-i&quot;&gt;post is edited&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23120" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-04-07T21:29:36.130" LastActivityDate="2023-04-07T21:29:36.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-06T03:33:35.850" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I write, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word&quot;&gt;there are 8 questions tagged &lt;em&gt;&quot;word&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a totally useless tag, which should be unlinked from those questions. I believe the tag itself will soon disappear, unless and until a user with enough rep creates it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1. Should I go ahead with unlinking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2. If Yes, how long should I wait after posing the question, to give enough users a chance to vote on the issue? A couple of days? A couple of weeks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q3. Is the title here &quot;preferred format&quot; for such questions? Does it matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q4. Should ELU have more (or less) questions like this, proposing tag deletions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T08:40:10.727" Title="Delete &quot;word&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2799" CreationDate="2012-07-06T08:40:10.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that 5 of those 8 questions are already closed, and the other 3 have other tags as well as &lt;em&gt;&quot;word&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I don't see any harm in pressing forward immediately, without an extended discussion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Q4, I don't have any problem discussing tag deletions.  Then again, if we're talking about a tag with fewer than 10 questions, and most of them are closed, I wouldn't have a problem with someone doing some &quot;housekeeping&quot; without a discussion first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it would be better to have one &quot;Delete This Tag?&quot; thread, so that each &quot;lame tag&quot; doesn't get its own thread.  Or maybe this thread could be retitled to &quot;Delete 'word' tag? What about others?&quot; and its scope could be expanded accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, this problem may be more widespread than I initially thought – there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?page=12&amp;amp;tab=popular&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;three pages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of tags with no questions!  And several more tags with just a couple.  That said, I don't think sparse use should be the only criteria.  For example, I'd probably vote to get rid of the &lt;em&gt;&quot;where&quot;&lt;/em&gt; tag, but I might vote to keep &lt;em&gt;&quot;paraprosdokian&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other housecleaning candidates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs (767)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Verbing (6)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Verb phrases (2)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Verb (0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd probably be in favor of nixing the last three in that list.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there needs to be a committee?  (I didn't mean to open a can of worms, I just got curious after FF raised the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T08:40:10.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2804" CreationDate="2012-07-09T03:12:34.160" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to only show up on spam flags that are pending review.  What does the parenthetical number next to the offending post's title indicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VufW.png&quot; alt=&quot;giant flag parentheses picture&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastActivityDate="2012-07-09T21:25:50.453" Title="What is the parenthetical number indicative of?" Tags="|support|flagging|flag-history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-07-09T21:25:50.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the number of answers the flagged question got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2012-07-09T21:25:50.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2808" CreationDate="2012-07-10T17:11:14.273" Score="3" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/20317/10041&quot;&gt;What does “poke one in the eye” mean?&lt;/a&gt;, Yoichi Oishi asks what the phrase means in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘It seems every step we take, it’s something just to &lt;strong&gt;poke us in the eye&lt;/strong&gt;,’ a frustrated Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said at one point this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/20325/10041&quot;&gt;One answer was&lt;/a&gt; (and this is the complete answer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poke in the brown eye&quot; is slang for anal sex. 'Poke' is slang for sexual penetration, and 'brown eye' is slang for anus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged this as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;, and the flag was declined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every mental analysis I've subjected it to, I can't see that it answers the question.  Harry Reid did not say, &quot;It seems every step we take, it’s something just to poke us in the brown eye.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer did not state the meaning of &lt;em&gt;poke in the eye&lt;/em&gt;, as the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I've had flags marked helpful for multitudes of similar answers, I have a feeling it was just a quick decline on the part of the moderator - perhaps they didn't see that the answer only addresses &lt;em&gt;poke in the brown eye&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T09:55:24.073" Title="What does &quot;not an answer&quot; mean?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2805" CreationDate="2012-07-11T09:55:24.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original question does ask about the meaning of &quot;poke in the brown eye&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I searched the definition of this phrase in dictionaries at hand and online dictionaries, none of which has entry of this phrase, except for Online Slang Dictionary carrying the phrase “poke in the brown eye” without giving any definition of it. &lt;strong&gt;I’m also curious to know what “poke in the brown eye” means&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added by me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Bacon Bits' answer is an answer, albeit focusing on a side point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be valid for someone to write a better answer than both Bacon Bits' and the accepted answer, so that it answers the whole question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T09:55:24.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2813" CreationDate="2012-07-11T16:55:14.393" Score="12" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the fonts at this site are different form the font at other S.E sites (which is Arial, I think). So I wanted to know what fonts are used here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20436" LastEditorUserId="18399" LastEditDate="2012-07-11T18:13:27.220" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T22:04:17.277" Title="What font does the site use?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2811" CreationDate="2012-07-11T17:28:04.053" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation scores for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11387/lauren&quot;&gt;Lauren&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (as seen in part below) seem inconsistent.  For example, &quot;1 ANSWER&quot; and &quot;1 QUESTION&quot; appear at left, but at right &lt;s&gt;answers to at least four questions are denoted&lt;/s&gt; other stuff appears.  Just out of curiosity, is this a database bug, or some kind of feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tiBxD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lauren rep snip&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T18:13:02.107" Title="Inconsistent reputation scores for an individual" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-07-11T17:29:42.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cases of &lt;em&gt;+2 reputation&lt;/em&gt; come from getting suggested edits to posts approved. These answers are not actually Lauren's, merely ones she edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T17:29:42.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2809" CreationDate="2012-07-11T19:04:05.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;a b c d e f g h i j k l m&lt;br&gt;&#xA;n o p q u r s t u v w x y z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the font is Georgia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p4RJa.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T19:04:05.033" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2809" CreationDate="2012-07-11T21:41:25.910" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;W3C&quot;&gt;CSS&lt;/a&gt; for the site contains the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;body { font-family: Georgia,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;,Times,serif; }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So first preference for typeface is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Microsoft Typography&quot;&gt;Georgia&lt;/a&gt;, which has been one of Microsoft’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/web.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Microsoft Typography&quot;&gt;Core Fonts for the Web&lt;/a&gt; since 1996.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2988" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T21:41:25.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2012-07-12T18:34:20.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks @MatthewMartin. In addition, the use of &quot;Nazi&quot; in any context other than the historical one unacceptably reduces people's recognition of the real Nazis' almost successful attempt at exterminating the Jewish People, let alone enslaving and murdering hundreds of thousands of others and starting a war that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seinfeld notwithstanding, soup kitchen owners are not Nazis. Nor are pedantic grammarians. Nor are, thankfully, just about any current political actors. Perhaps some of them close or &quot;wannabe&quot;, but none Nazis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I wouldn't want a web discussion site, especially one about language, to ban it. I wouldn't recommend just letting it go by either. Rather, like any other dangerously ignorant utterance, I would expect every reader to educate every user every time. It's not about offensiveness, but about understanding of history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23439" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T18:34:20.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2012-07-12T22:23:30.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think people who take issue with &lt;em&gt;Grammar Nazis&lt;/em&gt; have much in common with those who find something offensive in John Lennon's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3458764513820543055/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Woman is the nigger of the world&lt;/a&gt;, or the Fawlty Towers &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Germans&lt;/a&gt; episode. The former of which I find deeply moving, the latter extremely amusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find (slightly) offensive is people saying &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;at least Mussolini made the trains run on time&lt;/a&gt;, which to me simply means &lt;em&gt;fascism isn't &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; bad&lt;/em&gt;. Rubbish! - pretty much the only certainties in life are death, taxes, and the fact that social oppression is all and always evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I'm (slightly more) offended by people who attack moving or amusing references to examples of evil, with the implication that someone either doesn't know or doesn't care (enough) about whatever he's referencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU isn't a forum, nor is it intended to provide a platform for people to parade their moral rectitude and lecture others on such matters. I'm not the best example, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22tolerance%20is%20the%20order%20of%20the%20day%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tolerance is the order of the day&lt;/a&gt; here, today and every day. Get used to the fact that different people have different ideas about what's &quot;offensive&quot;. The site as a whole should only concern itself with extreme transgressions, which quite frankly doesn't include light-hearted derogatory references to Nazis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T22:23:30.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2809" CreationDate="2012-07-13T21:38:30.663" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, our almighty ampersand is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj5RWLjB2Os&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Baskerville Italic&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T21:38:30.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-14T16:35:11.507" Score="-2" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Updated Bug/Question:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See these two images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.se/rep...-&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X2k6t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;view of 'accounts' on my profile page -- @ &lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt;.e.se &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; --:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RJLAQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:I guess I better add this image too, so you guys aren't clicking around more than needed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GFuu1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(to confirm I'm not being silly, I supply these two images of my Avatar/Rep on both meta.e.se and e.se, you guys know which is which from background colors, like the image above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G2zYj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RaqkQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Original Q Below:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only have 13 rep, but I have notifications that I have earned the privileges for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flagging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Up voting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both require rep 15 minimum.&#xA;Indeed, I cannot use the privileges, I have tried to up vote, but still cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5jTjR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16544" LastEditorUserId="3546" LastEditDate="2014-09-24T18:57:45.930" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T18:57:45.930" Title="After 2 un-up-votes, rep shows +5 too high in one place (originally -&gt;(Notification of privileges to up vote and flag, but reputation too low!))" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2820" CreationDate="2012-07-17T20:32:18.577" Score="4" ViewCount="1096" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, when having difficulties with the following kind of questions from GRE exercises, what's a suitable way to seek help from the experts in this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is an excerpt from the GRE verbal exercise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Raisin in the Sun&lt;/em&gt;, Lorraine Hansberry does not reject integration or the economic and moral promise of the American dream; rather, she remains loyal to this dream while looking, realistically, at its incomplete realization. Once we recognize this dual vision, we can accept the play’s ironic nuances as deliberate social commentaries by Hansberry rather than as the “unintentional” irony that Bigsby attributes to the work. Indeed a curiously persistent refusal to credit Hansberry with a capacity for intentional irony has led &lt;strong&gt;some critics&lt;/strong&gt; to interpret the play’s thematic conflicts as mere confusion, contradiction, or eclecticism. Isaacs, for example, cannot easily reconcile Hansberry’s intense concern for her race with her ideal of human reconciliation. But the play’s complex view of Black self-esteem and human solidarity as compatible is no more “contradictory” than Du Bois’ famous, well-considered ideal of ethnic self-awareness coexisting with human unity, or Fanon’s emphasis on an ideal internationalism that also accommodates national identities and roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The author of the passage would probably consider which of the following judgments to be most similar to the reasoning of critics described in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(A) The world is certainly flat; therefore, the person proposing to sail around it is unquestionably foolhardy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(B) Radioactivity cannot be directly perceived; therefore, a scientist could not possibly control it in a laboratory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(C) The painter of this picture could not intend it to be funny, therefore, its humor must result from a lack of skill.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(D) Traditional social mores are beneficial to culture; therefore, anyone who deviates from them acts destructively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(E) Filmmakers who produce documentaries deal exclusively with facts; therefore, a filmmaker who reinterprets particular events is misleading us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possible difficulties may be that students can &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the key to the answer, say, C, in the case above, but they don't &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; why. How should one ask questions for overcoming such difficulties smartly to seek help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8970" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-06-06T22:04:54.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T22:04:54.380" Title="Are GRE verbal questions not welcomed in this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2819" CreationDate="2012-07-17T21:32:38.910" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether a question like this was accepted or rejected by the community depends largely on how the question is framed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the question you have transcribed here, for example, you'd need to be far more specific than simply asking, &amp;quot;Why is the answer (C)?&amp;quot;  I think such generalities might be perceived as lazy, vague, or off-topic.  This is not a GRE Prep Academy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be far better to ask a specific question that explains why you are wrestling with that particular GRE sample, particularly when your befuddlement is related to English language or usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, if you asked something along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I focused on what Fanon emphasizes: &lt;em&gt;ideal internationalism that accommodates national identities&lt;/em&gt;.  Because such identities are based only on non-physical borders, I thought that aligned best with a flat earth.  So why is (A) wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then at least you explained where your conundrum was, but this sounds more like a philosophical question than an English question, so I'd probably still vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you asked something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that the crux of this question lies in the phrase: &lt;em&gt;intentional irony has led some critics to interpret the play’s thematic conflicts as mere confusion, contradiction, or eclecticism&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I looked up &lt;em&gt;eclecticism&lt;/em&gt; in the dictionary, I found it means: &lt;em&gt;making decisions on the basis of what seems best instead of following some single doctrine or style&lt;/em&gt;.  That confused me; &lt;em&gt;confusion&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;contradiction&lt;/em&gt; seem like negative things, but &lt;em&gt;eclecticism&lt;/em&gt; seems positive. Do the critics respect the play's conflicts?  Or are they ridiculing them?  Maybe &lt;em&gt;eclectic&lt;/em&gt; has a negative connotation that I'm not aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you've asked a question that's much more closely related to English, and framed it in a way that helps everyone clearly see where you are stumbling.  Adding the dictionary definition shows that you've done some research on your own before jumping on here to ask your question.  The issue is no longer about the answer to the GRE prep question per se, but about a language issue that arose from studying the test question; you might have just as easily found a similar issue reading a respected periodical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be surprised if such a focused, carefully-researched question was met with derision and summarily closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T21:32:38.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2819" CreationDate="2012-07-18T13:17:10.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;And maybe such a question would more properly belong in &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, at least after it graduates from the &quot;proposal&quot; stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T13:17:10.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-18T21:41:41.993" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75028/taking-up-positions-on-roof/75033#75033&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on the difference between &lt;em&gt;take positions&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;take &lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt; positions&lt;/em&gt; deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the deletion was done by a mod, raising the issue here is the only way to even have the possibility of re-opening what I think was probably the most interesting question to turn up all day!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since asking here, I've realised that the deleted question was posed by a vexatious user (who's presumably been deleted &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;). But that doesn't make it a bad question. I've come in for some criticism in the past for re-posting a question under my own name (complete with my own answer) when a previous question from this user was deleted. Surely there's a better way to keep any reasonable questions from this tiresome user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T14:45:31.107" Title="Why was this question deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2825" CreationDate="2012-07-19T05:06:21.597" Score="-4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/72692/22877&quot;&gt;This may be a simple question&lt;/a&gt; (the link is for 10k users), but why is it downvoted with no comments?&#xA;Normally commenting is required when you downvote in Stack Exchange sites, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when I read &quot;yet another human being&quot;, it seems wrong.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;yet another a human being&quot; feels correct.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which way is correct ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22877" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-07-22T10:02:23.573" Title="Why was this question downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2823" CreationDate="2012-07-19T13:06:25.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no one knows why a down vote is given unless someone explains their own vote (and that's an explanation for only one vote)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is suggested and even encouraged to explain a down vote, but it is not necessary. If it were made necessary then I'm sure there would be many fewer downvotes, and then that would mess up the utility of voting, having no way to express disapproval in a simple manner (what if every &lt;em&gt;upvote&lt;/em&gt; required explanation? (and by parity if downvotes require them, don't you think upvotes should too?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sometimes the reason is too simple ('I just don't like it') or too rude ('this is dumb') or too complex (faulty assumptions, opinionated, worded tendentiously, etc) to warrant the effort to respond. So instead a quick -1 shows general disapproval.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all very general. For ELU at least, there's is a broad range of question quality. Those that show a very basic misunderstanding of elementary English are likely not to be voted well, without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this particular question, I can only guess what the downvoters think:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maybe it is because it is so basic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is almost posed as why -you- would feel that the obviously incorrect alternative  (to native speakers) is correct, and that is impossible for anyone to have a clue about. Why does your arm hurt? I don't know, what have you been doing with it? Stop doing that then.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T13:06:25.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2823" CreationDate="2012-07-19T14:40:13.367" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, Mitch made a great summary, so I upvoted his answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to add, remember &quot;official&quot; reason for a downvote: &lt;em&gt;&quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; With that in mind, any question that reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X &quot;seems&quot; wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Y &quot;feels&quot; correct&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which one is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with little-to-no elaboaration or explanation is practically &lt;em&gt;inviting&lt;/em&gt; a downvote.  My advice: Don't come to a language forum for serious language enthusiasts, and spend 30 seconds writing your question.  (Or, put another way, feel free to do just that, but don't be surprised if the question gets downvoted.  Did you seriously expect that question would get &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing: I've dispensed advice like this before, and was told, &quot;aren't you expecting a lot from a non-native speaker?&quot;  I didn't say the question has to be free from errors or grammatical mistakes (the community seems to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; tolerant of those, when an obvious &lt;em&gt;effort&lt;/em&gt; has been made), I merely said it should be written in a way that shows you have &lt;em&gt;done some preliminary research&lt;/em&gt;.  Sometimes 5 minutes of research will answer your question; sometimes it will only puzzle you more.  Save your questions here for the latter case.  (If that's too much to ask, I strongly suggest creating an account at Yahoo! Answers, where you'll get several helpful responses, and won't need to worry about downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I get almost 9 million hits when I Googled &quot;yet another human being.&quot;  I found over 3,000 citations in Google books.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; Google it?  (Perhaps you &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt;; if that's true, then the question &lt;strong&gt;shows no research&lt;/strong&gt;.  Perhaps you &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;, but you didn't tell us &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you remained confused; in that case, the question is &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T14:40:13.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2818" CreationDate="2012-07-20T14:30:50.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why the reputation for site A shown on site B is different from the reputation shown on site A is explained on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/114552/140449&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sathya is correct - this is due to caching elements of the page. Look again and you will find all of your reputation scores are now synced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer then says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;: it may still be up to &lt;strong&gt;10 minutes&lt;/strong&gt; (cache duration) out of date for the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; sites, since it's not really reasonable to keep it real-time across the entire network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the reputation is still wrong after more than 30 minutes, then see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125399/my-meta-so-rep-showing-wrong-on-my-user-profile-on-network-sites-except-meta-so&quot;&gt;My Meta SO rep showing wrong on my user profile on network sites except Meta SO&lt;/a&gt; which is still without an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message that notifies you about new privileges is shown once you reach the necessary reputation; if your reputation gets lower than the necessary reputation, you don't get a message saying you don't have anymore that privilege. Then, once a notification is added for you, there isn't a way to remove it if it doesn't apply anymore for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T07:18:34.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2822" CreationDate="2012-07-20T14:45:31.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it has been delete because the user is trying to circumvent the suspension of his/her main account, and none of the answers was up-voted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that who answered didn't lost anything, and the user who is trying to ask questions when he/she would not doesn't see the answers given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, all the questions asked from who has been suspended, and who is using a secondary account just to be able to keep asking questions cannot be kept not deleted; this would be as sending the wrong message, &quot;Are you suspended? No problem, ask your questions with another account, and you will get your answers.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At the same time, we should not penalize who is not able to understand if an account is a sock puppet of another account; if an answer gets a +5 score, the user who answered deserves the gained reputation, as long as the question is appropriate for the site where the question is being asked. (With this I mean that, if a user answers to a question about a cooking recipe on EL&amp;amp;U, he should not be surprised when he loses reputation after the question is deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is all a matter of finding the right equilibrium, and I think that has been found, in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T14:45:31.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-20T21:38:24.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's delete any questions by suspended users unless either 1) they have upvoted answers or 2) several users think a certain question is valid and helpful for the community (i.e. upvoted well; also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2822/10041&quot;&gt;Why was this question deleted?&lt;/a&gt; for examples of questions which this user has illicitly asked, but which seem to be well-liked and useful).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If either of the above criteria are met for a certain question, let us turn it into a community wiki question, to keep rep from accumulating for the wayward user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One issue: I know it's possible to take the CW status off answers to a CW question, but I think that has to be done manually.  If this would take too much time for our mods, we'll just have to live with CW answers to those questions.  But IMO that would be better than deleting them or reposting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how possible it is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community ♦&lt;/a&gt; to repost these, but if that's possible, that would be the best option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T22:04:56.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-20T23:32:43.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user sees a situation like this, &lt;strong&gt;flag&lt;/strong&gt; the question and use the custom reason to explain the situation (shortly). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the mod sees the question or the flag, then the standard practice would not be delete the queston, I think, but rather merge the new user with the old (suspended) one. This way, I think you solve both the punishment and the &quot;people got rep&quot; problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, if a user understands the situation and still answers even knowing that they should flag instead, why care about their lost reputation? I know this is not always the case, so I don't want to raise an accuse here. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T23:32:43.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2809" CreationDate="2012-07-21T21:49:17.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Web developers use right-click/Inspect Element on a layout component (such as paragraphs in a question) to see the CSS selectors for the same (or its parent(s)). If you don't see such a menu alternative, there are plug-ins such as Firebug for Firefox that you can install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, using Inspect Element reveals that a paragraph in a question currently uses 100% of 15px = 15px (size in pixels) font size of the primary font Georgia, second choice &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, third choice generic Times, fourth choice any serif font. The text color is '#393318' which is hexadecimal notation for a dark gray-yellow color (click the brush color in Photoshop and feed in the number to check). The line-height is 20px, which means 5px line spacing. Between each paragraph there is a bottom margin of 1 em unit, which is a relative unit, currently rendered in browsers as the height of the font of the parent element to the paragraph, in this case, 15px.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To check if your Mac has Georgia, open a text editor and press Command-T.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, Georgia is the better serif font until we get ClearFace in browsers. I think it's pretty darn good :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23829" LastEditorUserId="23829" LastEditDate="2012-07-21T22:04:17.277" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T22:04:17.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2012-07-22T23:23:37.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nazi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is simply unacceptable in anything but an insult. And you're on your own there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need a term to describe the phenomenon, you could call it &lt;em&gt;Grammar Peeving,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Peevage&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practitioners, natch, are simply &lt;em&gt;Peevers&lt;/em&gt;. Those are the terms used, for instance, on &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irritating as Peevage can be, very few lives have been lost to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2012-07-22T23:23:37.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-23T17:00:51.733" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had recently made a post (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74851&quot;&gt;link here&lt;/a&gt;) and came to check the status of it. According to the page, it's been deleted for moderation reasons. Apparently things are deleted when they are 'extremely off topic'. It was a single word request, I don't quite see how that would be extremely off topic; in fact I reviewed the fact and it seems to be entirely &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; topic. And while I fully admit it is conceivable I have misinterpreted the FAQ, seeing as how it had comments from four 10k+ users, it surprises me that not even a comment was given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could get some insight into what happened, why it was deleted (instead of simply closed), and what can be done differently in the future, that would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5699" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T21:48:47.630" Title="Post disappeared, no indication given" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-23T20:00:01.897" Score="14" ViewCount="616" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2012 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T09:55:26.777" Title="2012 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|election|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-07-23T20:00:01.897" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2834" CreationDate="2012-07-23T20:23:09.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close, or to delete, so I can only speculate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I specifically was looking for the 52-version of 'semi-annual'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that such a thing exists, at least, not as you've phrased it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to the question did seem to start wandering into the realm of silliness.  It's one thing to ask for a more quirky word for &lt;em&gt;weekly&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;hebdomadal&lt;/em&gt; seemed like a good choice for that), but when the conversation switched to made-up or impractical suggestions such as &lt;em&gt;Tuesdaily&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;duoquinquagensimannual&lt;/em&gt;, or devolved into discussion about how many weeks are in a year (52.14 vs 52.28), or seemed to become a contest to see if an even &lt;em&gt;geekier&lt;/em&gt; word could be contrived, I can see where some might find that discussion no longer constructive, nor a good fit for &quot;serious language enthusiasts,&quot; and therefore vote to delete rather than simply close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'm only speculating.  I could be far off the mark, but that's my initial theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T20:23:09.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2834" CreationDate="2012-07-23T21:48:47.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed as 'not constructive'.  As the notification says, &quot;We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&quot;  Whether or not it is reasonable to ask for a word meaning '1/52 of annual' (which might itself be an interesting debate), the only SE-standard answer to that question is 'no such word'; what actually happened undoubtedly was an extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And closed questions usually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; deleted, after a period to allow re-editing, reopen votes, or merge suggestions.  In my view, the moderators are sometimes too quick to delete; but it's an art not a science, and the mods are elected by us the voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T21:48:47.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2835" CreationDate="2012-07-24T06:20:00.330" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;s&gt;A note&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;An essay&lt;/s&gt; Ramblings from one of your current moderators&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have significant latitude in their duties and abilities, ranging from closing questions to suspending users. But at the very heart of our (and I do realize I have changed person here, thank you very much) actions is the flag queue, in which we deal with posts and comments that other users have flagged. It is then, in my opinion, necessary for a moderator to properly understand what flags are for, and what response is appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, where a regular 3k+ user might vote to close, for example, or where a 10k+ user might vote to delete, a moderator may wish to refrain from action if there is no community or SE policy about the post in question. I should note that this is my opinion, and to be fair, there is also compelling reason to advance the opposing opinion that a moderator should act even in borderline cases since moderators are merely elevated users, and should not have their personal opinions about what belongs censored. Naturally, whichever side you wish to take is yours, but I suggest that what a particular candidate thinks about what a moderator should do with borderline cases be in your thoughts when you vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to return to flagging, a good candidate will probably have, in their (and yes, I do realize I have used the singular &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;) time here, flagged a good many posts and had these flags marked &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt;. A user who has historically refrained from flagging (a rough guideline is that below ten flags is too few) is a user who has historically taken little interest in site moderation, and while such a position is perfectly fine for users who only wish to contribute knowledge and have little interest in such things, it is a tenuous position for a potential moderator to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides a good historic flagging record, what should we look for in a potential moderator? Certainly, temperament is key—a candidate who is prone to name-calling or arguing is not perhaps our first choice as a moderator. Whether justified or not, such behavior can only provoke site users more, since this behavior is coming from a site moderator. Meta participation is important as well, but not crucial. A potential moderator should have taken an interest in guiding the site along the right path, but this can be expressed either on meta or by closing and deletion questions on the main site. And naturally, you should look to their nominations to see what their take on moderation is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to mention one thing that you may not necessarily want to place too great a weight on—reputation. Certainly, site activity is important, but reputation is more indicative of how much knowledge a particular user has contributed to the community than that user's previous contributions to site moderation, as neither close votes, deletion votes, nor flags have any effect on reputation. Nonetheless, passing the thresholds for close-vote privileges and delete-vote privileges and then using said privileges is something you may wish to take into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, everything I have mentioned here stems from my personal experience, even if I do not personally fit that characteristic (no one is perfect, after all), and does not represent the opinion of the moderators collectively. Any grammatical mistakes that I did not attach a parenthetical comment to were unintentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-07-26T08:40:51.567" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T08:40:51.567" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-07-24T06:20:00.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2840" CreationDate="2012-07-24T14:50:34.840" Score="-2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many of you, I love to hunt around on ELU's wealth of interesting questions and answers, often following the many useful links to outside resources. Why, then, when I click on one of these does it take me away from the ELU page? This makes it difficult to pursue a question (link to link to link, etc.) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; still be able to come back to where I was on the ELU site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the possibility of links opening in a separate tab ever come up, and if so, why was it discarded? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose that links on ELU open in a new tab, or at least that there be a discussion on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19894" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T15:07:11.953" Title="Why does clicking on a link not open a new tab?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2839" CreationDate="2012-07-24T15:07:11.953" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's standard practice to put this element of user interaction entirely under user control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a site automatically opens a new window/tab, there is no way of stopping that if you don't want a new window or tab. This is not good: users should not be forced into a course of action which might cause difficulties. For example, Safari on an iPad can only have nine tabs open and opening a tenth closes another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a site doesn't open a new tab for you, you can force it to open a new tab by using Control-click, and if you forget, it's straightforward to go back and then use Control-click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T15:07:11.953" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-24T16:25:57.287" Score="13" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a new user. I was looking at the main site, and trying to learn more about how things work, so I clicked the FAQ link; then I clicked something else, I'm not sure what, and found a bunch of interesting questions about meta topics. After ten minutes of clicking around and reading questions, I clicked the FAQ link again, and only then discovered that I'm now on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see now that the color schemes are different, but I never would have noticed that. (I'm partly color-blind.) I also see now that the word &quot;meta&quot; appears in the banner at the top of the page--but I had looked at that banner half a dozen times before I saw that word; it's small and squeezed close to &quot;USAGE&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if there could be clearer signposts for people entering the meta site. A notice saying &quot;You are now entering THE METAZONE&quot;? A bigger or more separated &quot;meta&quot; label at the top (perhaps on a line by itself underneath the title)? A stronger color difference? I dunno; I'm not a designer. But it would've been helpful to me to have a stronger differentiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this may only be an issue for the few new color-blind users who accidentally stumble across the meta site; and even then, it's not a huge problem. So this may not be worth improving; just a thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23969" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T15:25:59.380" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T15:25:59.380" Title="Could the meta site be more clearly labeled?" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2841" CreationDate="2012-07-24T20:06:42.623" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do believe that clicking on URLs that link to the meta site opens them in a new tab/window. IMO, this is sufficient indication provided it happens consistently (I have not checked). Furthermore, I reckon that this is an issue that occurs only initially when the user is getting used to the site, and will disappear once content breeds familiarity :|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="23608" LastEditDate="2012-07-25T06:04:50.053" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T06:04:50.053" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2841" CreationDate="2012-07-25T13:38:34.420" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a great feature request. I know that the main and meta sites are supposed to have a consistent look and feel, but making Main colorific and Meta grayscale (as seems to be the pattern across SE sites) and keeping everything else identical does not provide helpful cues for users with poor color vision. I agree that the &quot;meta&quot; in the title is not particularly noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have some other simple stylistic cues that are not color dependent that indicate the user is on Meta instead of Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T13:38:34.420" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2847" CreationDate="2012-07-25T16:21:15.433" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it on-topic to ask on English language &amp;amp; Usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Who first said&lt;/em&gt; [insert quote]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21009" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T17:12:08.727" Title="Are &quot;who first said&quot;-questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2846" CreationDate="2012-07-25T16:40:17.537" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. While ELU can help you find the first usage of a &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; and how it has changed over time, finding the first utterance of a quote is likely to be closed as General Reference or Off Topic. The difference is that word etymology can be analyzed and explained (though note it's not always on-topic either!) while a quote will generate a short answer like &quot;so-and-so said it first&quot;. In addition, the source of a quote isn't really asking something about how the language itself is being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63421/need-help-finding-source-of-quote&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63421/need-help-finding-source-of-quote&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T16:40:17.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2846" CreationDate="2012-07-25T17:12:08.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Who first said X?' questions and their similar etymology questions are sometimes on-topic sometimes not. It actually depends on the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is in an easily accessible place (like etymonline or possibly OED which keeps lists of earliest references), the the question is closable as General Reference. That is, you probably could have done minimal google research to find your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A difficulty with these kinds of questions is that sometimes it is just not knowable. &quot;Was it Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw? My high school teacher said..&quot; There might be some articles out there where the research was done, but it might be too arguable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should definitely do the research ahead of time, but if you can't find the answer with OED or etymonline, definitely ELU is the place to go for a mildly on-topic answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question would be more on-topic for a site like Literature.SE which was unfortunately obsoleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if your question is something like &quot;Who first said 'The nut doesn't fall far from the tree'?&quot; it might be quickly closed for not having a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T17:12:08.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-25T20:08:49.493" Score="-44" ViewCount="636" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/75909/revisions&quot;&gt;In this question&lt;/a&gt;, the following verbiage was repeatedly removed -- this inhibited my ability to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We all know Evan Carroll isn't yet a moderator on English.StackOverflow, but he &lt;strong&gt;ought to&lt;/strong&gt; be and he'll win the election if enough people &lt;strong&gt;vote for Evan Carroll&lt;/strong&gt; next week!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to highlight the utility of this additional example to help illustrate the use of the term &lt;strong&gt;ought to&lt;/strong&gt;. The questioner was specifically asking for context and this is an illuminating and applicable context. Moreover, it's my own answer and it's the content I wish to use to help the questioner understand the phrase &lt;em&gt;ought to&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under what grounds was this content removed? It's not vulgar. It's not insulting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:31:29.063" Title="Why is the establishment allowed to stifle my ability to campaign?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2849" CreationDate="2012-07-25T20:16:23.357" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Totally not a regular on English Language &amp;amp; Usage, but I find the idea of embedding campaign statements in questions on the main site patently offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main site is not the place for campaigning (we have an elections page for that, plus town hall chats, plus your site's regular chat room...), and there are obviously numerous neutral phrases you could use to illustrate your point with equal clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9030" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T20:16:23.357" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2849" CreationDate="2012-07-26T01:03:45.757" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To present the alternative viewpoint for community members to vote on, I venture to say that I had no problem with Evan putting a campaign plug into his answer.  It was cheeky, but it was a relevant example of usage, and it serves to drive users toward the nomination page.  While I wouldn't do it myself, I am not offended that he did since he actually answered the question and simply used &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2#post-75664&quot;&gt;shameless self-promotion&lt;/a&gt; as an illustrative example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T01:03:45.757" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-27T15:50:07.623" Score="10" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mouseover tooltip for &lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt; downvotes says &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2685/2637&quot;&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/a&gt; (the one for &lt;em&gt;Answers&lt;/em&gt; just says &lt;em&gt;This answer is not useful&lt;/em&gt;). Browsing the FAQ, I can't find any additional guidance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reasons that continue to elude me, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2683/downvoting-questions-because-you-dont-want-to-answer-it&quot;&gt;Downvoting questions because you don't want to answer it&lt;/a&gt; was closed as Not Constructive. I appreciate the question title was misleading (it misrepresented a stated position of mine), but personally I never understood whether the downvotes to that meta question represented people disagreeing with the OP for &lt;em&gt;questioning&lt;/em&gt; my (actual or misrepresented) position, or people disagreeing with my (again, actual or misrepresented) position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously we don't all agree on the precise justification for Question downvotes (if we did, anything with more than a couple of downvotes would probably end up several hundred down!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposition is that I think the FAQ should offer more guidance. I'd prefer this question be up/downvoted &lt;em&gt;strictly on that proposition&lt;/em&gt;, not on my personal attitude to Question downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One specific position I do hold (but please don't up/downvote on this - just the proposition above) is that I think the FAQ should at the very least mention that &lt;em&gt;ideally&lt;/em&gt;, we'd like downvoters to add a comment explaining their reason in more detail (obviously it's not a &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt;, but for me at least, something like &lt;em&gt;recommendation&lt;/em&gt; sounds plausible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should ELU offer more guidance on Question Downvoting?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2858" CreationDate="2012-07-27T16:44:51.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think voting is pretty clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this question shows research effort: it is useful or clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this answer is useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But practice may not be so clear. People will vote because they don't like the subject matter, or it is worded annoyingly, or etc, etc. Also, there is lots of guidance through the FAQs and user complaints about voting, both in comments on main and in meta, and that's not restricted to just ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's a big difference between voting on main and meta. Here, a down vote is 'I disagree' (that's what mine is for (I think this is a good and useful question, just I disagree that there needs to be more guidance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see what kind of extra guidance you'd want. Extra FAQ text? Periodic notices to meta about what votes really should mean? I can't imagine more guidance than the already common 'Why did you down vote?' comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-07-27T20:05:38.940" LastActivityDate="2012-07-27T20:05:38.940" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2861" CreationDate="2012-07-27T16:55:42.000" Score="-4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a limit on the reputation one can build in a single day? I had added on 209 reputation, and the next up-vote gave me 6 points. None of the up-votes after that contributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23562" LastEditorUserId="23562" LastEditDate="2012-07-27T17:52:35.850" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Reputation limit" Tags="|feature-request|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-09T07:51:37.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2012-07-27T17:30:18.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a limit of 200 reputation per day from upvotes for all users. Official source is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;How does &amp;quot;Reputation&amp;quot; work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-07-27T17:30:18.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-27T19:25:33.693" Score="11" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Town Hall Chat session with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary. I will be working with candidates to schedule a time appropriate for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Town Hall Chat will take place on Thursday, August 2nd, at 1:00:00Z UTC / This is Wednesday, August 1st at 9pm EDT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=8&amp;amp;day=2&amp;amp;year=2012&amp;amp;hour=1&amp;amp;min=0&amp;amp;sec=0&amp;amp;p1=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;view in other timezones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/300/elu-town-hall-chat?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;register here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/300/elu-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;join the room&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the details so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to schedule this towards the beginning of the primary phase.  This means that I am looking at July 30th - August 2nd. As soon as I coordinate with the existing moderators and candidates to find a best fit based on availability, I will edit this post with details on the &quot;when&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Town Hall Chat will be a one-hour event using our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat platform&lt;/a&gt;.  I will update this post with a direct link to the chat room once the event is scheduled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The format will be an open discussion.  Users are encouraged to pose questions to the candidates regarding their thoughts on moderation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the chat session, a digest of the event will be permanently linked here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T16:38:38.370" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T16:38:38.370" Title="2012 Community Moderator Town Hall Chat" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2864" CreationDate="2012-07-27T22:03:18.090" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine and I are having a bit of trouble communicating, because he insists that the word &quot;faith&quot; is so defined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;any belief not based on evidence and won't change because of evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my definition (from a simple google: define:faith) reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Complete trust or confidence in someone or something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I can spice the question up (need to consider how to call it objective and have two parts, this may belong elsewhere or a second question) by questioning is invocation that I am instigating a &quot;dictionary fallacy&quot; when I feel he is the one doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? (I'll even take answers here if ya'll don't want me to ask this on main :p)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2161" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-07-30T23:29:58.660" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T23:29:58.660" Title="Are &quot;verify this definition&quot; questions suitable for this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-07-28T02:43:11.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;em&gt;&quot;Verify this definition&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a very good &quot;definition&quot; of the kind of question OP is really asking about. We'd normally just say such a question is &lt;em&gt;&quot;Not Constructive&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a word like &quot;faith&quot; - firstly, people's definitions vary according to how they feel about the &quot;referent&quot;. Secondly, the referent itself will vary, depending on whether the context is religion, confidence, or whatever. Both OP's definitions are valid paraphrasings to some people in some contexts (but I doubt &lt;em&gt;&quot;and won't change because of evidence&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would be grammatically acceptable in any credible &quot;dictionary&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Just to clarify - &lt;em&gt;“verify this definition” questions &lt;strong&gt;are not suitable&lt;/strong&gt; for this site&lt;/em&gt; if they're anything like OP's example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-07-29T02:54:45.287" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T02:54:45.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-07-28T04:44:05.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to resolve a definition dispute is by consulting dictionaries, rather than framing the dispute as an EL&amp;amp;U question.  Dictionaries are great resources for &quot;verifying the definitions&quot; of words, whereas asking this sort of thing as an EL&amp;amp;U question seems more like soliciting individual opinions.  Such &quot;what's-your-take&quot; questions may run afoul of these sentiments, found in the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site...  Avoid asking subjective questions where...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the&#xA;  question &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;we are being asked an open-ended,&#xA;  hypothetical question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, by arguing with your friend about which definition is the &quot;more accurate&quot; one, you miss the greater point.  Most words – &lt;em&gt;faith&lt;/em&gt; among them – don't have a single definition, and even when you find a word with only one definition, this definition will often vary some from dictionary to dictionary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, if you look up &lt;em&gt;faith&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordnik.com/words/faith&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wordnik&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see that both of you are right!  The only thing wrong about your stance is insisting that your friend is wrong in his definition of the word; he's no less right than you are.  The two of you are merely emphasizing different nuances of the word, where it can be used in varying contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ADDENDUM&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;this additional information answers a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/are-verify-this-defintion-questions-suitable-for-this-site/2865#comment6532_2865&quot;&gt;follow-on question posed to me by the O.P. in a comment below&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I don't see &quot;an unwavering sticking to of a belief in the light of concrete proof contrary to and disproving the belief&quot;, so if you could point me at which dictionary and entry said that, I'll concede that he is using a version of the word faith that I've never heard before. Otherwise, I can't imagine the word he wanted is faith so much as some other word.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very well; since I can't answer that in a comment, let me try to answer that here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Definition 1 (&lt;em&gt;from the conversation&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Any belief not based on evidence and won't change because of evidence.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought this mapped (roughly) to (&lt;em&gt;from Wordnik&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Definition 2 (from the conversation):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Complete trust or confidence in someone or something&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought this mapped to (&lt;em&gt;from Wordnik&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, &lt;em&gt;&quot;won't change because of evidence&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (from the conversation) sounds a bit more cynical than &lt;em&gt;&quot;does not rest on logical proof&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (from the dictionary), but my main point was that there is a difference between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;belief not resting on material evidence or logical proof&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;complete confidence or trust in something or someone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so there was room for you both to be right.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the latest wording (in your comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;an unwavering sticking to of a belief in the light of concrete proof contrary to and disproving the belief&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that sounds more cynical still, but that wasn't part of your question when I composed my original answer.  That latest &quot;definition&quot; seems to have a sardonic bias aimed at belittling those adhering to some sort of (presumably religious?) faith, and therefore seems like an informal, personal, sarcastic definition, as opposed to an authoritative and recognized one.  I'd put that in the same category as this &quot;definition&quot; of &lt;em&gt;stupidity&lt;/em&gt;, often &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/albert-einstein/biography.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mistakenly&lt;/a&gt; attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;http://3rdave.blogspot.com/2006/08/definition-of-stupidity.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Einstein&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is more of a &lt;em&gt;quip&lt;/em&gt; than a true &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T03:29:42.150" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2858" CreationDate="2012-07-28T13:08:45.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tooltip seems ok to me.  I'm not &lt;em&gt;opposed&lt;/em&gt; to adding more to the FAQ if someone wants to, but I'm not sure what you would say about it; there are no hard and fast rules to downvoting.   I'm also not convinced that it'll do any good.  Just look at how much impact the &quot;basic questions&quot; guidance has had. :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re: Encouraging comments -- There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-down-votes/2373#2373&quot;&gt;post on MSO&lt;/a&gt; saying that the system now automatically encourages you to add a comment when you downvote a question and have less than 2000 rep.  Given that programmatic reminder, encouraging it via FAQ seems redundant to me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-07-28T13:08:45.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2868" CreationDate="2012-07-28T13:22:34.493" Score="9" ViewCount="1990" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I include a &quot;comma&quot; in a Google nGram search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that I want to search for phrases like, &quot;Yes, I do .&quot; but Google nGrams uses commas to break up query terms, so it returns a comparison of the phrases &quot;Yes&quot; and &quot;I do .&quot;.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CLyf7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;(My apologies if this question seems off-topic.  I ask here because Google nGrams is an important tool for ELU users, so we need to know how to get the most out of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16205" LastActivityDate="2012-07-28T14:24:29.130" Title="Commas in Google nGram" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2012-07-30T22:38:56.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2867" CreationDate="2012-07-28T14:24:29.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is possible. However, if you just search for &lt;code&gt;Yes I do&lt;/code&gt;, Ngrams will include results with commas, because Google normally (and sadly) just ignores all punctuation in its search results. When I try this search phrase, I see only results with the comma there, so in practice this should not be a real problem for your particular search. Note that Ngrams do pay attention to capitalization, while ordinary Google search does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-07-28T14:24:29.130" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-29T17:42:09.943" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that multiple SEs have a 'penalty box' is that also true for this SE? If so, do you lose all of your rep when you are put in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19159" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T13:33:12.117" Title="Is there a penalty box for this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2869" CreationDate="2012-07-29T18:19:24.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, English Language &amp;amp; Usage has a penalty box. When a user is placed in it, his reputation displays as 1 during the time of his &quot;sentence&quot;, and is then recalculated when it's over. The rep doesn't go anywhere--it's just locked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T18:19:24.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-29T19:33:11.030" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt; is pointless, but I do think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literary-techniques&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literary-techniques&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literary-techniques&lt;/a&gt; (total 19 questions) is a potentially useful tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot;&gt;29 questions currently tagged literature&lt;/a&gt; should be using &lt;em&gt;literary-techniques&lt;/em&gt; (for others, the tag should just be removed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - is &quot;Literature&quot; a pointless tag? Vote this question up if you agree, down if you want to keep it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T02:33:56.063" Title="Is &quot;Literature&quot; a pointless tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-30T07:14:27.607" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2227/can-you-please-explain-it-does-not-meet-our-quality-standards&quot;&gt;can you please explain &amp;ldquo;It does not meet our quality standards&amp;rdquo;?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to sent a question but I got this response: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It does not meet our quality standards&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know the reason why this happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22909" OwnerDisplayName="farhaad" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T07:28:08.413" Title="Question does not meet quality standards" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-07-30T08:54:36.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2862" CreationDate="2012-07-30T12:07:42.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the timing of the event, while (thus far) the best for candidates, may not be optimal for attendees (England does in fact consistitute a good portion of English speakers), I'm setting up a bit of a &quot;question preset&quot; here. Leave a comment on this answer with your question and I will ask it on your behalf in the Town Hall Chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some inspiration to look at would be the recent Town Halls for &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/236/2012/7/18&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/4146/2012/7/19&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt; - I've specifically picked these two as they have a large amount of site-specific inquiries in both. There are a lot of &quot;generic&quot; questions that are asked in almost every Town Hall - these are unnecessary to comment here as I'll probably ask them anyway (if someone else who shows up doesn't already intend to) - focus instead on your own questions that you think might &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; get asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T12:07:42.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2871" CreationDate="2012-07-30T13:15:22.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt; should be considered along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt;. The latter is described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about the English Language, with the cause for the question found in books read by the Original Poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt; should be merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt;, with one marked as a synonym of the other, along with a broader purpose than &quot;&lt;em&gt;something he read in a book&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literary-techniques&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literary-techniques&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literary-techniques&lt;/a&gt; is useful, then it should, first of all, carry a description that does not immediately make it a candidate for writers.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-07-30T22:36:49.803" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T22:36:49.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2869" CreationDate="2012-07-30T13:33:12.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find more information in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;&quot;A Day in the Penalty Box&quot;&lt;/a&gt; from the Stackoverflow Blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant part in terms of what actually happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Depending on the severity of the problem behavior — and at the complete discretion of the moderator — your account will be placed in timed suspension for anywhere from 1 to 365 days. That means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Your account will be locked at 1 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Your user page will have a visual indication that you are in timed suspension, and for how long.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You will be unable to vote, ask, answer, or comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be recalculated, and your account will resume as normal. We don’t hold grudges. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the behavior improves, you are welcome back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a penalty box for all StackExchange sites.  EL&amp;amp;U is no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T13:33:12.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2879" CreationDate="2012-07-30T19:05:28.623" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;A list of lists of several classes of posts appears near the end of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;moderator-tools&lt;/a&gt; page, as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This privilege also grants you access to the following lists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•    posts with extreme votes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  •    posts with the most comments/views/edits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  •    recently protected questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  •    recently closed/reopened questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  •    recently migrated questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;plus half a dozen other bullet items.  It would be useful to me if each of those items were hyperlinked to the list it mentions.  Can that be done?  Is there any technical reason not to have such links?  Or is there any other sort of reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T22:22:28.730" Title="Add links to &quot;More!&quot; items on .../privileges/moderator-tools page?" Tags="|feature-request|moderator-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-30T20:41:48.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a mod on two other SE sites and a long-time creator and moderator of online communities, I feel for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I share some principles to help guide your considerations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abusers want attention&lt;/strong&gt;, even if it's extremely negative.  Deny them this and they will go away.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time is of the essence&lt;/strong&gt;.  Online communities are inherently fragile, even when closely moderated.  Continue to be fair but take action quickly and do not hesitate to be firm.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A transparent public policy&lt;/strong&gt; is your best tool. When your FAQ or a prominent meta thread says &quot;this kind of behavior will get the following response from the community,&quot; you can carry out your action with minimal numbers of complaints, flags, comments, and meta threads.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These principles suggest some elements to consider in your solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Principle 1&lt;/strong&gt; supports those who call for deleting all affected questions. If you wish to ameliorate the effect, you can &lt;em&gt;permanently&lt;/em&gt; suspend all accounts known to be sockpuppets.  There is no reason for those suspensions ever to expire.  In the meantime, their questions will stand and answerers will retain their reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This principle also suggests minimizing comments and meta threads dealing with the abuser. Moderators should consider deleting all such discussions.  Make the abuser's mark on the site disappear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Principle 2&lt;/strong&gt; indicates the time has passed to give second chances or warnings.  Act unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Principle 3&lt;/strong&gt; is often carried out in the breach by posting previously unwritten rules or policies when they are found to be broken.  This helps in the future and it keeps the moderators (and the entire community) consistent.  (Abusers love to find and flout apparent inconsistencies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One noteworthy personal experience concerns a problematic individual on one of my sites who was attacking me personally.  Let's call him &quot;Harry.&quot;  As a mod I was willing to put up with it, in retrospect for too long. Eventually I consulted other mods on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/4/teachers-lounge&quot;&gt;Teachers' Lounge&lt;/a&gt;, a SE chat room dedicated to moderation. The moment I named this individual, mods from &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; other SE sites piped up to say &quot;Oh, do you mean &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; Harry!  Guess what problems he caused for us!&quot;  And laughter all around... .  The moral of this story is that consulting early in the process with other moderators can reveal unexpected information and garner helpful advice.  It can also show that you're not alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2527" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T20:41:48.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2880" CreationDate="2012-07-30T22:14:59.113" Score="8" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we're in the primary phase of the election process, and I looked up at the positions available. I did a double take upon seeing that there were but two positions open. Now, every SE site that I've seen (as far as I can remember) has had three moderators. So then, why are there only two positions available? Are we down-sizing along with the rest of the economy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastEditorUserId="11762" LastEditDate="2012-07-31T13:34:37.397" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T13:34:37.397" Title="Why are there only two moderator positions available?" Tags="|discussion|election|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2876" CreationDate="2012-07-30T22:22:28.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The privilege pages are generated from Community Wiki pages present on Meta Stack Overflow; those pages are then pushed to the other Stack Exchange sites. In the specific case, the page is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/privileges/moderator-tools&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JofTd.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the privilege page is edited on Meta Stack Overflow to add links to that paragraph, then it would be possible to do what you are asking for. As the change would involve all the Stack Exchange sites, the request should be done on Meta Stack Overflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the privilege page is changed, one of the developers needs to push the change to the other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:39:08.123" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T22:22:28.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2878" CreationDate="2012-07-30T22:30:05.117" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The newly elected moderators are not going to replace the existing ones; they are added to them. This means we will have five moderators, after this election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of available positions depends on the needs of the site; if a site requires more moderators, then more positions are available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I have seen, the minimum number of available positions is one. I have never seen this happen, but it could also be that an election is not held, if there is no need for new moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-07-30T23:28:11.363" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T23:28:11.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2858" CreationDate="2012-07-30T22:55:58.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;privilege page&lt;/a&gt; already suggests when down-voting should be done:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;When should I vote down?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use your down votes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart that, I don't think you could find a more precise suggestion, as voting is subjective. How much egregiously sloppy should a post be, to be down-voted? In which cases is a post dangerously incorrect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The privilege page is generic, as it must be valid for every Stack Exchange site. I don't think, anyway, that should be possible to give a definition that better suits EL&amp;amp;U, apart defining to which type of danger is implied in &lt;em&gt;dangerously incorrect&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe somebody could ask a question here to define the meaning of &lt;em&gt;dangerously incorrect&lt;/em&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T22:55:58.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-07-31T15:36:23.087" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps questions from users below a reputation threshold (TBD) should go to an approval queue before appearing on the main site?  I recognize that this would require (1) a code change and (2) more work for the mods.  I can't comment on the reasonableness of (1); for (2) we would need to know the approximate rate at which posts from new users show up today (as &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of them would be affected, not just our problem user).  Would such an approach be feasible?  Yes, it delays the legitimate questions by up to several hours, but true language emergencies where that would matter should be rare, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T15:36:23.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2886" CreationDate="2012-08-01T08:45:14.063" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain to me, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74169/how-to-say-such-thing-in-english-216&quot;&gt;why my question got closed&lt;/a&gt; as off topic ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asking about how to pronounce this symbol, as I find it hard to Google for a &quot;symbol&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T13:04:33.580" Title="Why is this question about math notation closed as off topic?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2012-08-01T09:51:55.877" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I voted to close as too localised. This is because you're asking how to pronounce 2^16. There are an infinite number of powers 2 can be raised to, and an infinite number of number that can be raised to a power. Asking for that specific one is too localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you meant it as an example, then making that clear would improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you already know that &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt; means &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt;, did you look in a dictionary, or wikipedia about mathematical power? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you are unaware, you can lookup symbols in Wikipedia like this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%5E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/^&lt;/a&gt; and that will allow you to find out what you need to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know for certain why the question is closed as off topic. RegDwight is better placed to answer that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T10:01:45.177" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T10:01:45.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2012-08-01T10:14:46.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that it's hard to impossible to google for symbols. You can, however, search Wikipedia for them. If you type a single symbol into Wikipedia's search box, it will take you to the corresponding article. Also, in your question you say &quot;I know '^' means 'power'&quot;. So alternatively, you could have looked up that word rather than the symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very first sentence on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;About&lt;/a&gt; page, you will find this site described as a &quot;community driven Q&amp;amp;A for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot;. In other words, not all questions about English are on-topic here; certain things are just too basic, and we expect people to have a certain grasp of the language in order to participate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are aware of the drawbacks; just because a question is too basic &lt;em&gt;for this particular site&lt;/em&gt;, doesn't mean it's not genuine or useful. Which is why there is now a proposed sister site targeted specifically at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English language learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T10:14:46.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2012-08-01T13:04:33.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why it was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not too local: obviously the OP doesn't want just those particular numbers pronounced&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it might still be too basic or general reference except&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the given answers still don't cover how native English speakers (of mathematics) actually do it in general &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the link that Matt gave gives a formal way of saying it but not what people actual use in practice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that method of looking up symbols is not commonly known&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;also, I have an answer which I think will answer things well for you (which is why I'm responding here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, closing is a multi-person thing; there's no dictator (oh, except for mods who can just do it themselves) and everybody has their own reasons (or possibly on the bandwagon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have voted to reopen, but again, that's also a multiperson thing (except for mods who can just do it themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T13:04:33.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2889" CreationDate="2012-08-01T22:32:36.557" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/59496/24168&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;fluid&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;liquid&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, was closed as an exact duplicate. This one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/76728/24168&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In time&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;On time&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, was merged. Why is this? Both questions had two answers with no down votes. In both cases, the first question (the one not closed) also already had an accepted answer. If these two factors obviously played no part in it, why did the moderator (both were closed or merged by RegDwight АΑA♦) choose differently on the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T00:14:29.090" Title="Why are some questions closed as duplicates and others merged?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2888" CreationDate="2012-08-02T00:09:24.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any question closed as a duplicate of another is a potential merge candidate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while a closed question can still be reopened (for whatever reason), a merge is irreversible. Consequently, I will usually give people time to dispute the decision&amp;nbsp;— especially if I closed the dupe unilaterally, as was the case with the &lt;em&gt;fluid&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;liquid&lt;/em&gt; question. This, in turn, can mean that I forget all about it&amp;nbsp;— especially if people actually &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; dispute the decision, as was the case with the &lt;em&gt;fluid&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;liquid&lt;/em&gt; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that it's been closed for five months, and seeing how both answers work fine on the older question, I went ahead and performed the merge. (Sometimes answers &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have to be changed accordingly, e.g. if the two OPs use different example sentences. If I don't have the time for that, again, I will postpone the merge.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see another question that has been closed as a dupe for months with nobody appealing against it, flag it for mod attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T00:14:29.090" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T00:14:29.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-02T11:57:13.273" Score="6" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a &quot;digest&quot; version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2862/2012-community-moderator-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;2012 Moderator Election Town Hall Chat&lt;/a&gt;. The format, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;as described on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, is one &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to this question &lt;em&gt;for every question&lt;/em&gt; asked in the Town Hall, containing all the candidate's answers to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To view the digest chronologically, please sort the answers by &quot;oldest&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions or comments about this, &lt;strong&gt;please do not answer this question&lt;/strong&gt; as the answers are designed to be used for the questions from the Town hall itself. Instead, please ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;the parent question&lt;/a&gt; or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/352/town-hall-discussion&quot;&gt;the Town Hall Discussion Room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any corrections which need to be made to this digest, or if you were a candidate who was unable to attend the town hall and would like your answers included, please @GraceNote or @TimStone &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/300/elu-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;in the chat room&lt;/a&gt; and let us know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T20:27:48.253" Title="2012 Moderator Election — Town Hall Chat Digest" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|election|" AnswerCount="31" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T11:57:13.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3981cd271c302f5cba628c6b6d2b32ee?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Tim Stone&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/12325/tim-stone&quot;&gt;Tim Stone&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603114#5603114&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;New users often are not accustomed to the Stack Exchange system, and sometimes struggle to present themselves properly, either in the way they use the site or their attitude. How willing are you to work with &quot;problematic&quot; users, and at what point do you decide that someone isn't worth the effort?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603134#5603134&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I am very willing to work with new users to help them learn the ropes.  If they continue to struggle, I would continue to help.  I would only give up on a user if they became abusive and caused an issue on the site for other community members.  Then I would involve the other mods for help in dealing with the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603145#5603145&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've found that there are some &quot;problematic&quot; users like our new troll, who I have taken aside in a private chat (along with Mahnax) in order to try to help them use the site better. This happened &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; this troll had posted porn, spam, and exact duplicates of his own question under multiple sock puppets. I am willing to go quite far in helping new users, but I stop at the point where they continue to go forward with bad behaviors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603151#5603151&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I think there's a difference between new users and &quot;problematic&quot; users.  Users don't become problematic until after they've been guided, and subsequently spurned the correction.  I'd be very patient with new users, but, eventually a line can be crossed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603209#5603209&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  There is no such thing as someone &quot;that is not worth the effort.&quot; The platform should modified so that it is self-correcting. All people are worth the effort they're willing to put forward, and shy of that all social problems can be handled with technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603234#5603234&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  So in essence, I'd advocate for welcoming everyone to the site: unban and expire all suspensions. And, find a way to mitigate any social problems through technological tools that don't involve limiting the ability to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606878#5606878&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  For new users I'd try to push them in the right direction. I would explain that closing a question isn't a mark against them and that down votes aren't punishment. They need to understand that there is every chance to adapt to the system in place here, and get a lot from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606883#5606883&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  For problem users it depends on the nature of the problem and the user. If the problem is just a misunderstanding then most issues can be resolved in meta or chat, quite amicably. Obviously there will be problem users who are detrimental to the site and they will be dealt with the same way they are dealt with now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608253#5608253&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I am willing to help new users, but I cannot say when they are not worth anymore being helped; that depends from each singular case. If somebody doesn't show any willingness of being helped, the limit is probably very low; vice versa, if the user is willing to be helped, but there is a language barrier, then the limit is probably higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5613849#5613849&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It really depends, both on the user (how willing they seem to be to adjust their interactions) and on me (how busy I am at the moment). On a good day, I make sure to post a helpful comment on any question I vote to close, and if I see a good question underneath the crud, I will ruthlessly edit it into shape. But if the user starts getting personal, I will drop him like a hot potato and let community votes take care of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:23:50.643" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:23:50.643" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T11:59:27.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b3b22dc140c835e42f16f8366ffb449b?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603133#5603133&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603166#5603166&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Reg and I (and others) just had a discussion today over whether to reopen a question about math symbols.  It progressed just the way I thought it should. We discussed the pros and cons and we came to an agreement as a community.  If it didn't work like that, I would progress to a private chat if I felt strongly about it, then discuss it in mediation with mods in the TL if necessary. But I can't imagine I would ever feel that strongly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603174#5603174&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't think mods should act alone, nor act without being open to modifying unilateral decisions. I would talk to the other mod and see why they had closed it. There's no reason to get into an open/close/deletion fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603203#5603203&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't expect to agree with the decisions of every moderator.  Ideally, we should function as a team with different strengths and weaknesses, not as clones.  If a question is closed by another moderator, and I don't agree with that, I might speak with the moderator off-line about it - particularly if this happens frequently - but I'd enter into that conversation ready to learn why I might be mistaken, rather than convinced I'm right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607029#5607029&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'd bring it up with them, and try to come to an understanding of their actions. If I still disagree I'd bring it up in meta and abide by the community's feeling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608389#5608389&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would ask him why it was closed, or I would re-open it if there are user who gives a good explanation about why they think it was closed for the wrong reason, and I agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5613858#5613858&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would thwack him, naturally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:24:15.353" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:24:15.353" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:01:28.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603188#5603188&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is your subjective assessment of how ELU's been progressing in terms of popularity and quality? Do we get more questions than a year ago? Better questions? What about answers? Do we attract new great users? Or is it all Eternal September? What is your recency illusion?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603215#5603215&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  In terms of question quality, it seems as if the balance has shifted towards more &quot;English as a second language&quot; questions. However, there have been new users recently who have provided great answers, so I think that the user base is improving in terms of answers, but there is some work to be done on questions. I think more questions should be closed, and those question-askers should be helped to ask better questions if possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603222#5603222&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've only been on the site for six months, so my personal history is scant.  However, I've noticed a lot of questions coming from non-native speakers, but that problem is already being addressed with the new site in Area 51 for Language Learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603253#5603253&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  So long as they're interested in English I see no reason to differentiate on nebulous qualifiers. I speak English naively, and I'm still learning it! That's why I'm here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603224#5603224&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think the site has been growing in leaps and bounds, which means we will have more questions, both good and bad, and we will have more users, both good and bad.  This means we need more moderators and more diligence so that we make sure that the content of the site represents what we want our community to grow into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607327#5607327&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think we have got our fair share of good new users, along with the bad. Over the last year, we don't seem to have increased the number of questions, it seems to have held steady, as has the quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607333#5607333&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I think the same can be said of answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608488#5608488&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  The number of 10k users is a subjective measure. Without good questions, and good answers, users could not reach that reputation level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5613937#5613937&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I see the interesting questions getting fewer and farther between, coupled with a tendency to close questions rather than improving them. But I may just be having a bad day at work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:24:35.273" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:24:35.273" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:03:42.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603191#5603191&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Is there anything you would want to change about the way the site is being run at present?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603198#5603198&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't see any particular glaring issue with the site.  I'd like to encourage our high rep users to continue their participation in the site, especially with closing/deleting questions, and setting guidelines through the Meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603235#5603235&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would want to empower more high-reputation users to take initiative in cleaning up the site. There are a handful of users who vote to close, or edit questions, but I think that there are more who might be encouraged to take part. I think it's less about changing how the site is run, and more about changing the perception of who &quot;runs&quot; the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603266#5603266&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; There is very little I'd like to change about the way the site is run at present.  I'm not coming into this with an agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607311#5607311&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I want to be moderator! ;) Seriously though, I want to improve the interestingness of the questions, as I've explained above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608512#5608512&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I cannot think to anything I would change, so far. It seems the community knows well how to handle bad questions, and we had an &quot;call from TPTB&quot; just once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5613966#5613966&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't think I know enough about how the site is run to go around changing it, willy-nilly. I mean, there must be more thwacking of puns, but that kind of goes without saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:24:53.463" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:24:53.463" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:06:04.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3981cd271c302f5cba628c6b6d2b32ee?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Tim Stone&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/12325/tim-stone&quot;&gt;Tim Stone&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603239#5603239&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do you feel like a representative percentage of the community participates in your site's meta? Based on that, how strongly do you think feedback presented on meta should factor into your decision making as a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603278#5603278&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think that there are the same few users who use Meta, but I would encourage more users to do so. However, whatever the representative percentage on Meta, I think feedback is extremely important. I have seen mods pay attention to users on both Meta.SO and Meta.ELU, and I think that's a good approach to take&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603279#5603279&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Representative? It's hard to say, but there is a core of users who I respect who put their opinions out on the Meta questions.  I would look to Meta first if I were trying to make a decision based on what I thought the community wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603288#5603288&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No, because meta's on StackExchange all suffer from aura of extreme elitism. If I'm elected moderator, I'll propound a request to Jeff Atwood to make a splash page for EL&amp;amp;U that informs those that our meta is different. It's for the users, and not merely a playground for StackExchange employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606915#5606915&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I see new people asking question, but the number of questions is quite low. The people who answer questions tend to be the more active users of the site, which is hopefully the people who the site is catered to. In that light I would take meta in consideration when it comes to moderation. It's the best place to hear what the community thinks. It is not the only thing I would take into account, as I have my own impression of how the community is from the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608609#5608609&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I feel that there is enough participation on the meta site: Questions are asked, answers are given from different users (not just three/four users), and posts are voted. Community's thought is important when community can give its contribution, for example when asking what to do with questions asked from users who should not ask questions because they are blocked, but create new accounts to be able to ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614003#5614003&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Since meta is where we ask for feedback, I think we ought to take it into consideration. In other words, it doesn't really matter whether meta participation is representative. Yes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. This is a fact of life. Don't like it? Start squeaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:25:21.577" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:25:21.577" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:08:09.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603242#5603242&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is your favorite word in the English language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603251#5603251&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;Vexatious&lt;/em&gt;. I have a preference for words that start with v. This one also has an x and ends like &lt;em&gt;salacious&lt;/em&gt;. It doesn't get much better than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603262#5603262&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  proletariat. Easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603280#5603280&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603294#5603294&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Hmmm... one word?  Out of so many?  Perhaps &lt;em&gt;pin&lt;/em&gt;.  (I like multi-use words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606926#5606926&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  factoid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606927#5606927&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Only joking. I don't have a favourite single word. It's the sentences I like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608631#5608631&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It is &lt;em&gt;supercalifragilisticexpialidocious&lt;/em&gt;. It reminds me of Italian &lt;em&gt;supercalifragilistichespiralidoso&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614013#5614013&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Thwack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T20:40:59.593" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T20:40:59.593" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:10:10.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603282#5603282&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;A very popular reason for flagging is &quot;very low quality&quot;. Everyone seems to have their own notion of what that's supposed to mean; what is yours? How will you handle such flags?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603299#5603299&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  In general, I ignore these flags if the question is answered. I let the community handle it through downvoting or ignoring poor answers. If it's not spam or abuse, I'd let it ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603303#5603303&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Who am I to decide what is &quot;very low quality&quot;? We have algorithms and users that can do that -- no one should have an amplified voice. This isn't chaos, it's discourse: no one needs a megaphone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603330#5603330&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think some VLQ questions can be expanded on, if the user is willing to do so. My definition of low quality is a question which has little effort, and little effort to change. If there were good answers, like with some NS questions as current mods have done, I would leave it. However, poor questions which detract from the site may need to be removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603333#5603333&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It depends on several factors.  Is the question truly of low quality? And can it be improved?  If possible, I'd try to salvage the question before deleting or closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606948#5606948&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It's tough. I know it when I see it. If I think an answer is low quality then it's either a comment or irrelevant. Comments can be made into comments, with an explanation to the user about commenting, and irrelevant  things can be deleted, again with an explanation (e.g. explaining about asking questions vs answering questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608339#5608339&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; To me the VLQ flag means the post is not understandable, and it cannot be edited to make it clear (which means only who wrote it knows what s/he meant to say), and the user's contributions are very low quality (not just one, or two posts). It is not just about the post, but also the user who should be probably blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the flag means &quot;this is not an answer,&quot; or &quot;this is not a real question,&quot; then I would probably decline it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614094#5614094&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My definition of &quot;very low quality&quot; is something that doesn't belong on this site - doesn't answer the question, doesn't even acknowledge that there's a question being asked, just posting for the sake of posting. That said, if the flag brings something to my attention that I would not have otherwise noticed - an answer that should be a comment, for instance - I'd probably mark the flag as helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:25:53.683" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:25:53.683" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:12:11.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3981cd271c302f5cba628c6b6d2b32ee?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Tim Stone&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/12325/tim-stone&quot;&gt;Tim Stone&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603317#5603317&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;You strongly disagree with an action taken by a fellow moderator. How do you proceed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603328#5603328&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'd talk to the moderator in private chat. If that didn't resolve the issue, I would bring it to the Teacher's Lounge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603338#5603338&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I prod him to reveal whatever information I think I can get out of him -- keeping in the back of my mind that my allegiance is to the users. When he has revealed all he's willing to reveal, I turn it over to Wikileaks and make it available on a third party site, and welcome all users to review that moderator's actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603347#5603347&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think I kind of alluded to this before - I don't expect to agree with every decision made by other moderators, and I certainly woudn't rock the boat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603362#5603362&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would start by talking to them about it. I've seen several good discussions in chat, and so I would definitely feel comfortable bringing it up there and working through it. It can be escalated, if need be, to talk to more mods. However, I think most issues could be solved easily between ELU mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606937#5606937&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Discuss it and try to come to an understanding as to why it's been taken.  We'll not always agree on everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608667#5608667&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I ask him/her the reasons behind his/her decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614102#5614102&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  First, I'd go find something else to do. If I still felt strongly about it the next day, I'd post a meta topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:26:13.853" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:26:13.853" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:14:38.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603321#5603321&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is your favorite book(or rather, Author)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603337#5603337&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Diana Wynne Jones&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603340#5603340&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I like so many, but Umberto Eco is my standard answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603422#5603422&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I heard Alex Trebek once say, &quot;My favorite book is often the one I'm currently reading.&quot; I've read so many good books that I'd have trouble narrowing it down to 5 much less one.  I prefer non-fiction for my pleasure reading.  I'm currently reading Blue Moon Rising to my teenage daughters (best adventure novel you've probably never heard of).  One non-fiction book I've read recently that I very much enjoyed was GO TO by Steve Lohr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603424#5603424&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; (The story of the math majors, bridge players, engineers, chess wizards, maverick scientists and iconoclasts - the programmers who created the software revolution - that's the subtitle - please forgive the sentence case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607304#5607304&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608738#5608738&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My preferred author is Isaac Asimov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614117#5614117&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Oh, that's too easy. Book = &lt;em&gt;The Curse of Chalion&lt;/em&gt;, author = Lois McMaster Bujold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:26:27.533" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:26:27.533" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:16:40.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603346#5603346&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How do you decide if an answer is &quot;very low quality&quot;, and what do you do with it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603363#5603363&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I vote it down, just like any other user. Why would I abuse my status to handle something that, we're told, the platform handles find natively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603378#5603378&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If the answer doesn't actually answer the question, it gets moved to a comment or deleted.  If it's spam or abusive, it gets deleted. Otherwise, what I said before:  In general, I ignore these flags if the question is answered. I let the community handle it through downvoting or ignoring poor answers. If it's not spam or abuse, I'd let it ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603388#5603388&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If the issue can be edited, I would do so. I would also downvote. I would reserve deletion for answers which were possibly just &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;, without anything else to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607295#5607295&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  something that's low quality is something that doesn't answer the question or add to the existing answers. I'll comment on such answers and potentially delete them if they don't get improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608827#5608827&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; The VLQ flag is given for a post, but it means every post from that user are like that. In the other cases, the VLQ flag is just a synonym of &quot;not an answer,&quot; or &quot;not a real question.&quot; If I take it as synonym, then I take the same action I would take for those flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make an example, if a user keeps writing answers similar to &quot;sfsdf wefwefwe wefwsg,&quot; then the VLQ flag is appropriate, and I would take action on that user's account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T15:32:55.607" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T15:32:55.607" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:18:44.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603387#5603387&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Excluding dupes, our number one close reason is &quot;general reference&quot;; a reason most other SE sites don't even have. 3% of all questions — and 35% of closed questions — are closed as gen-ref. Are we too strict? Too lax? Isn't every question too basic if you know the answer, or where to look? Where do you personally draw the line?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603412#5603412&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Gen ref is dictionary reference to me. Or basic grammar (which should be migrated to ELL). I think it is necessary to go on a case by case basis, and some days I think we are a little trigger happy with the gen ref reason. There are so many other happy reasons for closing, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603413#5603413&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If the answer is in a dictionary (phrasal verbs, definitions) that is easily accessible, I would consider it general reference. For most etymology, I think it's hard to say &quot;I'll look in a dictionary&quot; unless you happen to have the OED. I think my bottom line is that General Reference questions are those found in a dictionary, or occasionally in a quick Google search if it seems like no research has been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603419#5603419&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Closing questions is a horrible idea anyway: if people want to answer questions that are of &quot;general reference&quot; let them. If we get a good answer, the platform has served to move valuable content into the CC-BY-SA domain, that's a great thing in and of itself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603445#5603445&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If I can find the answer in less than two minutes using standard search tools (Google, dictionary, thesaurus), then my opinion is it's general ref.  However, that's a tricky one ~ sometimes what seems like general ref actually has some pretty deep conversation underneath it (good example lately is the 'adj form of primate' question), so I wouldn't want to pull the close trigger prematurely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607234#5607234&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I am unsure about the Gen Ref close reason. I do not want basic question on the site - people should check dictionaries before asking here and provide explanations as to what they don't understand. I'm happy to close those question. We could even start to consider them off topic. Normally I judge Gen Ref by checking a dictionary, or by the answers. If the answers are just dictionary quotes, then really what are we adding to the web?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614190#5614190&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes, I think the general reference close reason is way overused. To be general reference, the answer must be found in a source that is (1) generally available (so the OED doesn't qualify), and (2) is specifically designed to answer that type of question. In practice, this means a dictionary or thesaurus, and in certain limited cases, an encyclopedia. It emphatically does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean Google. A question that shows no research should be downvoted, not closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:26:49.080" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:26:49.080" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:20:48.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603391#5603391&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;English vs American; how do you feel about it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603394#5603394&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Americans are cool. Brits are posh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603420#5603420&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  English is a language, and American isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607272#5607272&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  British English is always better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614204#5614204&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  British accents can be sexy, but their food sucks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:27:05.130" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:27:05.130" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:22:50.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3981cd271c302f5cba628c6b6d2b32ee?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Tim Stone&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/12325/tim-stone&quot;&gt;Tim Stone&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603425#5603425&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator (i.e., as opposed to a user with privs via high rep?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603435#5603435&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  So I'm privy to that which goes on in the upper closed echelons of the managing junta, and so I can empower all of the people, democratically, with the powers of a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603436#5603436&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've been doing a lot of work recently in rooting out our newest persistent troll. Being a mod would help me do that work better, taking care of the problem more quickly--5 heads are better than one. I can delete the user's questions if they're closed, but I can't deduce whether the user is a new one, or just a sock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603441#5603441&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  We need more mods, and I think I am a good candidate for it.  I would like to be able to help keep abuse off the site, help new users get comfy, and set the tone for the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603462#5603462&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  For the same reason I visit this site daily - to help make it a better place.  Truth be told, the privs aren't a motivational factor for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607151#5607151&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Because I know where I want the site to go (towards a higher academic standard) and I think I can help steer it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614221#5614221&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Mods have tools that make it much easier to moderate the site. Or so I gather. Also, mods can undo community actions, which sounds like a terrible thing to do, but is sometimes necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:27:24.833" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:27:24.833" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:24:51.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603427#5603427&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is the one thing you'd like to be remembered for during your time here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603444#5603444&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Although I'd very much like members to remember what a wonderful and funny person I am, I would rather be known for being judicious and fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603450#5603450&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would like to be remembered for my wonderful coffee cake, biting wit, and ability to spot a troll at 100 paces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603474#5603474&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  That I was helpful and courteous; that I helped make ELU more interesting, informative, and enjoyable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606928#5606928&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Raising the standard of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608311#5608311&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would like to be remembered for doing my task, and being helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614240#5614240&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Thwacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:27:41.370" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:27:41.370" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:26:52.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/6b81eca9fe11d9a8d01394c28ed5f4e8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Cerberus&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3420/cerberus&quot;&gt;Cerberus&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603442#5603442&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do you adhere to Marxism?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603446#5603446&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Adhere to it? It's a system that certainly makes for a better world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603452#5603452&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  You can't be a Marxist in the closet.. BTW, that is an excellent question. Thanks for asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603454#5603454&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603460#5603460&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603478#5603478&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Groucho Marxism, yes.  (Those are my principles, and if you don't like 'em, well, I have others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/6b81eca9fe11d9a8d01394c28ed5f4e8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Cerberus&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3420/cerberus&quot;&gt;Cerberus&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603481#5603481&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  You're very principled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607208#5607208&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't know the philosophy of it. Sharing is nice. Centralised government is silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614251#5614251&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Hell no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:27:56.567" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:27:56.567" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:28:53.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ae15c48f686a0ecb39848f980b296611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Shog9&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3435/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603459#5603459&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;You receive multiple complaints about an active user, alleging he is waging a personal vendetta against those who've disagreed with him by indiscriminately down-voting their posts, going so far as to create sockpuppet accounts to amplify his voting power. Upon examining the user's history, this suspicion appears plausible. What do you do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603468#5603468&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I ask an experienced mod to look at the evidence I've assembled, ask if there is anything else I should look for, and then ask what to do next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603475#5603475&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If there is an active user who is making trouble, the first thing I would do is come to him with facts. If there is a plausible explanation for the results, I would listen. However, if it seems like there is still some doubt I would go to the other current mods. No suspension should be a unilateral decision&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603477#5603477&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Wow, great question. I would turn over all of user history immediately to a third party for examination to make sure that wasn't just a frame up by Stack Exchange. But, if all pans out I would request a meeting with the user to discuss his behavior. If, that was not satisfactory I would defer the decision to the community at large, assuming his behavior posed no immediate threat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603486#5603486&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  To be honest, I'd first confer with other mods who have been doing this for a long time.  I'd let them train me on standard procedures for handling such abuses in the system.  After I felt sufficiently trained, I'd be able to take some of the load off their shoulders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603520#5603520&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Why not ask the users what they want, rather than the moderators. The users are the community that elects you. You serve them!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606922#5606922&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm not sure what tools are available. My first step would be to present the evidence to the user in question (via email or private chat). I would explain that the evidence suggests that the accounts in question are being used in an unfair manner, that is against the rules of the site. I would ask them to explain. If they cop to it then I would offer them the opportunity to prove they understand the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606925#5606925&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If they deny it I would explain that if we see the behaviour continue then all involved accounts would be terminated and the user would be banned from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608286#5608286&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I consult the other moderators. It's something a single moderator can decide alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614258#5614258&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  What @KitFox said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T20:47:20.927" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T20:47:20.927" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:30:54.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603472#5603472&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do you have any hopes, ideas or plans for improving, involving, or enlarging the EL&amp;amp;U community?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603480#5603480&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes, I do. I think we could potentially expand to take on other vernaculars and dialects, like Creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603482#5603482&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would love to see the blog grow. I think that, if it were updated regularly, it could bring in a new audience of users. This could, however, be difficult as it is hard to find new writers. A more attainable goal would be to enrich the current community by encouraging users to come back. Asking one question, then leaving, does not a community make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603488#5603488&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would like to see EL&amp;amp;U grow. I think keeping the site tidy and having a welcoming atmosphere and accessible mods will do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607204#5607204&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Not really. I haven't thought about it. I think cleaning up the basic questions should help help improve the site's profile and encourage the members to recommend it to their learned friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614268#5614268&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  More thwacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:28:51.930" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:28:51.930" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:32:55.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603483#5603483&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;There have been repeated complaints that our front page is chock-full of closed questions. Obviously we can't control what kinds of questions we get. Or can we? Do you have any strategy for making the front page more tidy and welcoming?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603492#5603492&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Stop electing moderators that close questions, especially for stupid things like being &quot;general references.&quot; The more material on EL&amp;amp;U the better, and perhaps if General References are fun, it'll engage more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603500#5603500&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If we had some method of helping new users find the FAQ before posting questions...but aside from that, I think responding to new users and helping them frame their questions appropriately as soon as possible will help keep questions from being closed (or staying closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603502#5603502&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've thought about doing something like that for some time, maybe creating a web page that says something along the lines of &quot;So, your question got closed....&quot;   But I wouldn't do anything unilaterally.  I might propose something, but it would have to be adopted by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603517#5603517&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I do think some more guidance could be offered, but it's a difficult balance to strike.  Too little guidance doesn't convey enough information, but too much is overwhelming, and unlikely to be studied thoroughly by the average new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603512#5603512&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Questions are often closed as General Reference or Exact Duplicates. I think improving the quality of questions by helping users (in chat, in comments, etc) will reduce the number of closed questions. In addition, having an actual list of common questions might help reduce the duplicates. I think there is a misconception that all closed questions are bad, however--they may simply be a less eloquent way of asking a previously asked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607138#5607138&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm afraid I don't. We get a number of poor questions a day. These get closed. I agree it can seem intimidating, but that doesn't seem to stop people asking poor questions, so it can't be that off putting. If we had somewhere to migrate some of the poor questions - poor as in asked by a learner rather than someone who understand the language, and so wouldn't ask - then the front page wouldn't look so intimidating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608901#5608901&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  The only way would be deleting the closed answers, but that should be done if the question is not duplicate of another question. In the other cases, I think the OP should notice his question has been closed, which means I would keep a closed question for at least a day, except the question is blatantly a very bad question such as rants, attacks to the community behind the site, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614362#5614362&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My strengths are definitely not in the evangelism arena, but for the immediate problem of closed questions cluttering up the front page, perhaps that ought to be solved on the engine level by hiding closed questions on the active questions list (the page you get if you just go to english.stackexchange.com). Naturally, such questions should still appear on the Newest Questions list. The root problem will hopefully be reduced if the ELL site goes live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:29:11.243" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:29:11.243" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:34:55.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3cf28f47b22be69e07e8371a3639a5cf?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carlo_R. http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3cf28f47b22be69e07e8371a3639a5cf?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/35126/carlo-r&quot;&gt;Carlo_R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603511#5603511&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Why do you think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76578/why-is-american-english-so-wedded-to-the-subjunctive&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; get closed? It seems to me a vendetta against Barrie, due to his idea on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76550/why-is-this-sentence-correct-she-suggested-that-he-go-to-the-cinema&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simchona http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603549#5603549&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  The close reason is &quot;not constructive&quot;, which means the question seems like it's asking for a poll or discussion. It was interesting, but it touched on topics that were far too numerous for one question. However, on your point that it's a vendetta: if you truly believed that, I would hope you posted on Meta or flagged it, to bring it to the attention of the acting mods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KitFox http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603559#5603559&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Without looking through it, the question title sounds like peeving. We close that sort of question quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J.R. http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603575#5603575&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I have a hard time believing this community has a vendetta against Barrie.  I think he's one of the more esteemed users on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606985#5606985&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Barrie's question is closed because it is subjective and argumentative. It is not a constructive question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5609001#5609001&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It has been closed because 5 users voted to close it, and I guess they closed it because the question has been asked basing on something that is not objectively noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T15:34:00.050" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:37:25.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603516#5603516&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is your native language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603519#5603519&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  American English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603525#5603525&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  English and Basic. (I don't think it is relevant though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603532#5603532&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Unfortunately, I only speak one language.  It's been a lifelong dream of mine to be bilingual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603539#5603539&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607000#5607000&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My native language is English. British English, from The Cotswolds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608957#5608957&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My native languages are Italian, and Eastern Lombard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614389#5614389&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  English, in terms of what language I use the most and have the most education in. Hungarian, in terms of what language I learned first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:29:35.363" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:29:35.363" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:39:30.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ae15c48f686a0ecb39848f980b296611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Shog9&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3435/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603537#5603537&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How comfortable are you with using the tools for moderation made available to normal (non-diamond-moderator) users? (such as editing, closing, re-opening, flagging, and brass knuckles)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603546#5603546&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Brass knuckles? Damn. I didn't know we had those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603566#5603566&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I feel pretty comfortable with these tools. I have used what has been accessible to me for as long as it has been accessible to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603570#5603570&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've been using the normal mod tools quite a bit, especially to delete unanswered questions by trolls. It is simply another part of the community voting system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603730#5603730&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm very comfortable with those tools –&amp;nbsp;so much so, that I think I might miss them in the unlikely event that I get elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607193#5607193&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I haven't used the brass knuckles yet. I prefer the feeling of flesh on flesh. I enjoy editing, strange as that may seem, because I like to get the questions looking smart. I've not cast a lot of reopen votes, but I know how to do it. I cast close, down votes and flags whenever I see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5609022#5609022&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I am already a moderator on a different Stack Exchange site. I am used to the new tool since the times I was a temporary moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614423#5614423&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Brass knuckles? There are brass knuckles? Where? Sheesh, nobody tells me anything. I use the other tools fairly extensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:30:05.330" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:30:05.330" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:41:31.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603565#5603565&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;There are ongoing efforts to create a spin-off site targeted specifically at English language learners. Regardless of the fate of that proposal, is it a step in the right direction at all? Can such a split help make ELU a better place? Or would it mean our demise?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603571#5603571&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Friendly forking is great&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603591#5603591&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I understand trepidation about the ELL site, but I think it could be very beneficial to EL&amp;amp;U. Moving basic questions there would give some users the answers they need and help maintain a pleasant atmosphere.  I think the two sites would complement each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603594#5603594&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I personally support the proposal, as it will hopefully encourage English learners to ask their questions but also carve out a space for &quot;English enthusiasts&quot; to ask more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603597#5603597&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm completely in favor of that proposal.  I think non-natives should have a place to ask basic questions without fear of retribution or closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607116#5607116&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I believe it is a step in the right direction. There are a lot of questions here that someone who is knowledgeable in English would not ask. I think they are detrimental to the site because they give the impression that we deal with really basic questions and other more interesting questions are unlikely. If we remove the basic question to their own space then we open up EL&amp;amp;U and give space for the interesting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5609106#5609106&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; It's too early to say if it has been good creating that proposal; it still a proposal, and it could not even graduate. I find difficult make users understand when a question should be asked on EL&amp;amp;U, or on the other site, but I think the intentions behind that site are good.  If the proposal graduates, and it doesn't have the &quot;general reference&quot; closing reason, it will be good for those questions asked because the definition found on the dictionary is not clear enough for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614462#5614462&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It's definitely a step in the right direction. It will probably reduce ELU's traffic, but I don't think it will kill us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:30:26.843" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:30:26.843" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:43:33.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603576#5603576&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What would you do if you found out that StackExchange was involved in a massive cover up and conspiracy, and you had the smoking gun?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603599#5603599&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It depends on the nature of what I uncovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603612#5603612&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I thought that, as candidates, we were supposed to be answering the questions, not asking them.  Are you withdrawing from the race?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603645#5603645&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It depends on the &quot;conspiracy&quot;. Stack Exchange is a private company, and to some extent they have the rights to govern what goes on within the site. If it were, however, along the lines of the mafia, I would act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606896#5606896&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Depends on what I had uncovered. I probably wouldn't blow things out of all proportion or harass the founders or users of Stack Exchange. I mean, what likely conspiracy is there going to be found here? I don't think there's any blood diamond trading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5608268#5608268&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would write a book about a spy story. Maybe I could involve aliens too, and write something similar to X-files. I was a fan of X-files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614562#5614562&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm really having trouble imagining what sort of worthwhile conspiracy Stackexchange could possibly be involved in. &quot;Oh my god, this answer on ELU says 'already' is an adverb when it's clearly an adjective! And when I try to correct it, they revert the answer! Clearly, the world is going to end!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:30:42.130" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:30:42.130" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:45:43.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/27c94dede0a083a9a103f7e7f63e6cd7?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sonic The Hedgehog&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/19787/sonic-the-hedgehog&quot;&gt;Sonic The Hedgehog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603579#5603579&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What do you plan to do to assist the site outside of responding to flags and standard close/delete maintenance?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603611#5603611&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would continue to hang out in chat daily in order to be available for help.  I would spend extra time leaving comments on new questions and answers to help new people feel more welcomed. I would also increase my involvement in Meta, to help make that a more helpful and welcoming complement to our main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603615#5603615&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would continue to be available in chat in case users had questions about how to use the site. Recently, some users have been coming to chat with more basic questions, and I think helping them will cultivate a strong community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603641#5603641&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would like to remain an active user.  I would like to spend more time explaining why I closed questions, if I closed them - that seems to be something that is perceived as callous sometimes.  But, as I've answered in other questions, I don't have an agenda, and I'm not looking to make big changes.  I believe the community does a good job policing itself overall, and I'd like to moderate in a delicate fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607176#5607176&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I want to get meta working harder to define the direction the community wants to take the site, regardless of the direction I'm interested in. I want to present questions there I find dubious and get the community to discuss their merits. Of course, I'm in chat a lot and I will continue to be there a lot to help with immediate queries, and generally keep the incomprehensibility or the room at the high standard we expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614630#5614630&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think the best way to help this site along is to ask good questions and give good answers. I'm sure the added workload of site moderation can make this difficult, but it's what I plan to try to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:31:00.493" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:31:00.493" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:47:46.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603639#5603639&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Are you aware of the Summer of Love? If yes, have you noticed any changes in your behavior or that of others?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603650#5603650&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm reading it now, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/07/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/&quot;&gt;Kicking off the Summer of Love&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603713#5603713&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I think with regard to the Summer of Love problem, that can be solved with a Reputation Reset, or a Reputation Decay algorithm. That's how Ubuntu solved this anyway. Reputation there is constantly decaying. And, personally I think giving your StackExchange character a lifespan of five years and just resetting his EXP is probably an easy system to implement and quite effective. Just strip him of his reputation and require a name change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/6b81eca9fe11d9a8d01394c28ed5f4e8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Cerberus&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3420/cerberus&quot;&gt;Cerberus&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603727#5603727&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Reputation decay could actually be interesting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603642#5603642&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes. No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603679#5603679&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I knew that the Summer of Love was going on, and I have noticed a change in my own behavior. I've seen more changes on Stack Overflow, seeing as the Summer of Love has been posted on MSO. I've tried to be more patient and understanding, but I haven't noticed a marked change on ELU. I think ELU tends to be pretty helpful, for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607271#5607271&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes, I am aware. I think I'm trying to be less snippy, and I think other are too, but that might be confirmation bias talking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614643#5614643&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  mu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:31:20.943" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:31:20.943" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:49:48.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ae15c48f686a0ecb39848f980b296611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Shog9&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3435/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603647#5603647&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;You see a very poor question posted. No evidence of research, vague criteria for what answers should address, some evidence that it was passed through Google Translate at least once prior to posting... Obviously it needs attention; what sort of attention do you give it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603660#5603660&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  You answer the question if you can, and tag it &quot;probable-homework&quot; so others looking for homework answers can find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603663#5603663&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I leave a comment specifying what needs to be fixed. I allow the community to close it if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603703#5603703&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If the user really cannot speak English, I would first direct him to support the proposal for English Language Learners. I would try to edit the question so it were in a more readable form, and leave comments to tease out the true purpose. If the user is unable to understand the comments, then I might close the question as Very Low Quality as it is unlikely to help future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603705#5603705&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  As a new moderator, I'd want to spend some time learning about how such situations are best handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607101#5607101&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  first step is to comment asking for clarification and explaining what I don't understand. The next step is patience, because askers take a while to respond. In the mean time the community will have probably acted. If they have then I would let the asker know that their question can still be edited and that that might lead to reopening. If a question remains in a poor state for a prolonged period then I'd close it. If it's already been closed for a while then I'd delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5614985#5614985&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Depends. If I see a salvageable question somewhere underneath the muck, and if I have the time, I'll edit it. If I vote to close, I do my best to post a helpful comment about why. As a mod, I imagine I'd do less of the former (for lack of time) and more of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:31:33.783" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:31:33.783" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:51:55.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603741#5603741&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;Do you think a Democracy online where every user had the ability to vote on everything by way of referendum could be more successful than a representative democracy that required us to form a hierarchy and classes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/6b81eca9fe11d9a8d01394c28ed5f4e8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Cerberus&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3420/cerberus&quot;&gt;Cerberus&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603756#5603756&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't know: populism is a very serious danger. The only experiment in history that I am aware of damaged society in bad ways, in ancient Athens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603765#5603765&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  That was never populism, Athens was notoriously restrictive in who got voting rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/6b81eca9fe11d9a8d01394c28ed5f4e8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Cerberus&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3420/cerberus&quot;&gt;Cerberus&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603786#5603786&quot;&gt;replied&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  But it was direct democracy. Even with 1/4 of the population voting, the effects were at times disastrous. It was strong populism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603804#5603804&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  So you believe in a ruling class? That's a prime difference between me and you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(...&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603831#5603831&quot;&gt;continue following the conversation&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603763#5603763&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If every user was a responsible user, that would work just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603773#5603773&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  So you assume all users are not responsible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603781#5603781&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  You gave a hypothetical question, I gave a hypothetical answer :^)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603768#5603768&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No. It is difficult to rule by committee, and nearly impossible to rule by simple majority. Of course, if you are talking about answering questions on SE, then sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603791#5603791&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Who said anything about committee? And, why can't people rule by simple majority? That's who rules on what questions appear on the front page. And, everything on Reddit is decided the way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603799#5603799&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No--I feel that there are some users who won't know what they're voting on. StackExchange has very low voting restrictions, and I feel that it isn't as hierarchical as one might think&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607056#5607056&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No. I think both are faulty. What people want is not the same as what is good for them. And most people don't even know what they want, let alone what's good for them. Also voting on everything is time consuming. The hierarchy present in e.g. UK government is also a problem.  What would be better is for people to trust each other and treat each other with respect, working autonomously and co-operatively. Voting  should only be used when there is no other way of deciding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5615062#5615062&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  History proves that a representative democracy has an infinitely higher chance of actually &lt;em&gt;working&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:32:12.177" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:32:12.177" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:54:00.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603724#5603724&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Does it even make sense for us to have a blog anymore?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603744#5603744&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It doesn't seem like we have a strong enough core group of people to maintain the blog. Good idea, but not feasible right now. So no, the blog has pretty much been abandoned and I don't see any motivation from the membership to get it going again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603747#5603747&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think that, as a tool to get more people into the site, it might be worth another shot. There are also some questions, like Barrie's, which might be better answered within the blog. However, if the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; isn't interested in the idea, I wouldn't push very hard at reviving it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607266#5607266&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  There is no reason to delete it. It has useful information in it. I want people to get excited about the site again and want to blog about EL&amp;amp;U. We should keep it. Hopefully we'll be able to rouse people's interest in it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5609171#5609171&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes, it makes sense to have a blog. I have read some posts in the past, and I found them interesting. The blog is a perfect complement to the main site, and the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5615032#5615032&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Gah, the blog. I tried, I really did. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. In fact, it still seems like such a good idea - on paper. In practice, I really don't know whether it's worth the effort to try to continue it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:31:53.253" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:31:53.253" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:56:02.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ae15c48f686a0ecb39848f980b296611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Shog9&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3435/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603772#5603772&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;You opt to close a poor question, and at 3AM the next morning get a phone call from the author, who has tracked you down and is now loudly damning your terrorist soul to hades. How do you respond?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603776#5603776&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I hang up. I notify SE administration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603779#5603779&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Roll over and go back to sleep. A rested mod is a patient mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603785#5603785&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  call Cerberus, duh. Hades is his specialty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607254#5607254&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  tell them not to phone me again and hang up. record the time and date of the phone call. If they call again, inform them that I am recording their call and will use it as evidence in an harassment suit. I will record each call until I believe I can take them to court for harassment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5609216#5609216&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I just hang up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5615075#5615075&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Hang up, note the caller ID info, and notify SE in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:32:37.357" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:32:37.357" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T12:58:04.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e6196f558d30d39ba5c5f1d55865dd3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;RegDwight АΑA&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/977/regdwight-a&quot;&gt;RegDwight АΑA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603803#5603803&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What's the most recent book you've read, and how long ago did you read it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603810#5603810&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Conversations through Consensus. About 2 days at a bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603812#5603812&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm currently in the middle of &lt;em&gt;Freakonomics&lt;/em&gt;, and I just finished &lt;em&gt;Talent is Overrated&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603814#5603814&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;I Will Surprise My Friend&lt;/em&gt; by Mo Willems. About 3 hours ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603841#5603841&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  For my personal reading, it was &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt; by Nabokov and I finished it last week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603826#5603826&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Leaving the Ivory Tower by Lovitts.  Finished it earlier this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5606889#5606889&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I read some of chapter 2 of Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f86f8f8ff9e1217108e14251ba80ba60?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Marthaª&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1434/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5615168#5615168&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I assume this doesn't include books I've read to the niece? &lt;em&gt;Timeless&lt;/em&gt; by Gail Carriger, finished oh, about three weeks ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T19:32:56.903" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T19:32:56.903" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b3b22dc140c835e42f16f8366ffb449b?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603807#5603807&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Final thoughts from candidates&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603823#5603823&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If you don't vote for Evan Carroll, you're going to get another elitist crony who will treat you like a subject to his rule. Vote freedom, vote Evan Carroll!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/605442f85418d858e2ce1e1aea2092bb?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Evan Carroll&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3154/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603850#5603850&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; BTW, anyone can friend add me on FB too, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/theevancarroll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;facebook.com/theevancarroll&lt;/a&gt; or message on twitter too @TheEvanCarroll&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603834#5603834&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would gladly serve as moderator. I will continue to support the community and be friendly, kind, accessible, and just.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/44592a65e6b858989d8c55e0b0a0b5e2?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/20734/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603842#5603842&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I am not perfect, but I think that I would be a good candidate for mod because I am willing to listen to others. Even when one user called me a &quot;terrorist&quot;, &quot;this person totally insane mind&quot; and said that I wasn't &quot;tollerant [sic]&quot;, I took a step back and tried not to react right away. I am open to change--I am willing to look at my own actions in order to improve. In addition, whatever the results, I will remain active on ELU. My first priority is to helping the site, mod or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603879#5603879&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm appreciative of, and humbled by, those who have supported me this far.  I'm glad I wasn't laughed off the primary stage.  And, for what it's worth, I'm not an &quot;elitist crony,&quot; and I have no desire to &quot;rule.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ce89ed919eb7af45d0745ab68c74a2b3?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/15060/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603891#5603891&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  You've made good contributions in your short tenure. You've got a place on the candidates list, and it's ahead of at least a few others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e8ba424a9c85f3a92847efef8095025?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;J.R.&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/33231/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5603914#5603914&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I almost didn't run.  Thanks for your kind words.  I enjoy EL&amp;amp;U, and plan to stay active no matter what happens.  Cerberus won't talk me into leaving, even if he offers me € 5&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ea5fb0bda281e5ddab057950eb17882a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Matt Эллен&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6040/matt&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5607341#5607341&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks for all the questions. I hope we get the moderators we need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f5ef1b81e1aeb3b921a3034d460ce6af?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;kiamlaluno&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/6266/kiamlaluno&quot;&gt;kiamlaluno&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5609264#5609264&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Thank you for reading me. As usual, good luck to the candidates, and best wishes everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24322" LastEditorUserId="24322" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T15:35:37.740" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T15:35:37.740" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-02T13:00:11.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-02T16:40:58.497" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing to request to re-open the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76780/rosie-the-riveter&quot;&gt;Rosie the Riveter&lt;/a&gt;. It was closed as off-topic, but there is an interesting association between the cultural icon of Rosie the Riveter and the expression &quot;We Can Do It!&quot; which emerges in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question could be retitled &lt;em&gt;Rosie the Riveter and 'We Can Do It!'&lt;/em&gt; and could be rephrased slightly as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have read that Rosie the Riveter is a symbol of the American woman&#xA;  who worked in factories instead of men during the Second World War. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She appears to be associated with the slogan “We Can Do It!” Is this&#xA;  expression still in use nowadays? I mean, do ordinary (American, in&#xA;  particular) people know who is it? Does it preserve its meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion of the expression and its association to Rosie the Riveter might be a worthwhile addition to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T16:40:58.497" Title="Request to re-open &quot;Rosie the Riveter&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2926" CreationDate="2012-08-03T00:58:33.153" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen several edits recently where the only thing that was changed was converting &lt;b&gt;&quot;&lt;/b&gt;straight quotes&lt;b&gt;&quot;&lt;/b&gt; with &lt;b&gt;“&lt;/b&gt;rounded ones&lt;b&gt;”&lt;/b&gt;. Searching the EL&amp;amp;U site for directives about this, I didn’t come up with much (I noticed there are straight quotes in the FAQ though!), but I stumbled across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/535/should-we-automatically-convert-straight-and-quotes-into-nicer-and&quot;&gt;question about automatically converting quotes&lt;/a&gt; here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the responses there point out that such automation would be prone to errors, so my suggestion would be this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we not customise &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/wmd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WMD&lt;/a&gt; to add the ability to insert each of the four rounded quotes (single and double) by clicking buttons on the toolbar above the answer textarea? (Obviously, the icons would need to be chosen carefully so they don’t cause confusion with the blockquote icon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, control would be in the hands of the user rather than some automated tool that makes mistakes. Furthermore, it would pre-empt having one’s posts edited just for the sake of replacing quotes. Having to remember to manually use awkward keyboard combinations to satisfy someone else’s sense of aesthetics (personally, I couldn’t care less whether they’re straight or round – let’s face it, our posts can’t by any stretch of the imagination be considered “formal writing”) is asking too much, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a change to WMD be desirable or even feasible for EL&amp;amp;U, or would it only cause problems to split the code bases? (I’m assuming that adding this feature to all SE sites would probably not be desired.) Or could it be added as an option to the shared code, defaulting to &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt;, but turned &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; for EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T16:16:21.300" Title="Feature request: Rounded quotes in WMD toolbar" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2849" CreationDate="2012-08-03T13:31:29.063" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under what grounds was this content removed? It's not vulgar. It's not insulting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2849/why-is-the-establishment-allowed-to-stifle-my-ability-to-campaign#comment6567_2849&quot;&gt;Hugo noticed&lt;/a&gt;, between all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/75909/revisions&quot;&gt;revisions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/09763eb8-4026-4a8f-9b88-069704c919bd/view-source&quot;&gt;the first revision&lt;/a&gt; contained the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And, just FYI, if you agree with the above statement and wish that StackExchange was run by its userbase, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2#post-75670&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vote for Evan Carroll&lt;/strong&gt; next week!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It didn't contain an example pertinent with the question. It was just an FYI that was not relevant for the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/cce0b6ca-5fc7-44df-89b3-4c04869695c7/view-source&quot;&gt;the fourth revision&lt;/a&gt; contained the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or another example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;We all know &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14451/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;/a&gt; isn't yet a moderator on English.StackOverflow, but he &lt;strong&gt;ought to&lt;/strong&gt; be and he'll win the election if enough people &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2#post-75670&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vote for Evan Carroll&lt;/strong&gt; next week!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the intention was to give an example of sentence using &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt;, the fourth revision should have been an earlier revision, if not the first revision. The fact that revision happened after somebody suggested an edit to remove the note about the elections says the intention was adding a note about elections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability to answer the question was not influenced by that; the OP could have used a different example, and nobody would have edited the example out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:31:29.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2923" CreationDate="2012-08-03T16:16:21.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm indifferent to this; straight quotes are fine and understandable and don't need to change. But if it's fairly easily implemented and has a site-specific default state (which could differ from site to site) then I'd have no objection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; object to editing posts just to replace straight quotes with curly quotes. It's happened to at least one of my answers and added no value. I think it was done simply to increase an edit count towards a badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suppose if providing curly quotes by default removes the opportunity for that untoward behaviour, then it might swing me to be in favour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T16:16:21.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2937" CreationDate="2012-08-03T19:44:39.943" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any stats available on this site which list the total number of questions, the number of open questions, the number of open questions with at least one answer scored greater than 1, and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I have noticed that some questions with excellent answers have not been accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T23:04:07.780" Title="Statistics on the number of open questions" Tags="|support|questions|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2931" CreationDate="2012-08-04T20:04:00.857" Score="5" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find a certain phrase in a particular question very offensive. However, I can't flag it as &quot;offensive&quot; like I can a comment. Is this by design? What should I flag it as instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T10:41:00.267" Title="Why can't I flag a question as &quot;offensive&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2930" CreationDate="2012-08-04T20:35:13.420" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a particular phrase in a question offends you, you can edit it out from the question as long as you don't change the original meaning of the question itself. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77132/what-do-you-call-an-item-that-appeals-to-a-human-urge-but-is-unnatural&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, you might change the phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not merely supernatural which has a connotation of being non-existent, like God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not merely supernatural which has a connotation of being non-existent, like ghosts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not merely supernatural which has a connotation of being non-existent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, the original poster's intention of finding a word that &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; work is preserved but the phrase that could offend more religious users is stricken out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, instead, the entire question offends you, there is a &lt;strong&gt;flag as offensive&lt;/strong&gt; option on any question or answer. To do so, click &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt;, then select &lt;em&gt;it is not welcome in our community&lt;/em&gt;. This reason denotes that a question is &quot;offensive, rude or hate speech&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is possible, however, to salvage the question I would recommend making the edit. That way, the useful part of a question stays on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One key distinction to note is that there is, as Mitch pointed out, a difference between talking about something and using it. For example, questions on profanity or other offensive terms are often on topic, but using them in another context (say, swearing at someone) is not necessary to the question. The former should stay, the latter probably not. Talking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; God when it's part of the question, then, is valid material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T17:05:20.890" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2933" CreationDate="2012-08-05T19:30:05.273" Score="6" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title sums up my question nicely: does flagging ever affect anyone's rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, if I flag a post as anything will the flagged user lose reputation at all? I know some flags, such as reasons to close, or not an answer, don't affect rep. However, I vaguely recall reading somewhere that sometimes, flags can remove rep or something (I can't find it anywhere though). Is this true or am I just imagining things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T19:45:20.970" Title="Does flagging ever affect anyone's rep?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2012-08-05T19:45:20.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A successful &lt;em&gt;spam&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt; flag will incur a 100 reputation penalty to the user who posted the content, where successful is defined as a total of six flags on that post from different users. The penalty can be reversed by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T19:45:20.970" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2930" CreationDate="2012-08-06T10:35:57.950" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag you are looking for is &quot;it is not welcome in our community&quot;, which has the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question contains content that a reasonable person would consider &lt;strong&gt;offensive&lt;/strong&gt;, abusive, or hate speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/naE7N.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the &quot;flag&quot; link, and you will see the dialog box the previous screenshot shows.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I took the screenshot from this site, but the main site shows the exact same flagging reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the flagging reason doesn't allow you to specify which words/phrases are considered offensive, but as the flag description says, &quot;this question contains content that a &lt;strong&gt;reasonable person&lt;/strong&gt; would consider offensive&quot;; the offensive part would be easily caught by who reviews the flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post offends you directly, for example because it contains an indirect reference to you, such as in &quot;who said [phrase you said in an answer of yours] would not agree with my answer, but he is an idiot,&quot; then you might want to flag the post using a custom reason. However, in general I would suggest using one of the pre-defined flag reasons, as those are visible to 10K users, who can flag the post as offensive too. Flags with a custom reason are visible only to moderators, which means only moderators can resolve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not suggest editing the offensive part from the post; this could cause editing wars. It is better to get users to agree about the post being offensive; at that point, moderators can take the necessary actions, if the post was not flagged as offensive from 6 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-08-07T10:41:00.267" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T10:41:00.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2936" CreationDate="2012-08-06T10:48:11.087" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the first moment I looked to questions on EL&amp;amp;U this morning, I noticed something was wrong. This is a screenshot for a random question on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r89Of.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, the page doesn't show the badges in the top part; there are just the counters for the badges. The page doesn't show the voting arrows, the widget to add a question as favourite, and the Super drop-down menu (a.k.a. &quot;the Collider&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have this issue just on EL&amp;amp;U, and only on the main site. I don't have the same issue on the meta site, or other Stack Exchange site. This is what I see in this very site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NkiyY.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Safari 6.0 running on a Mac with OS X 10.8. I don't think that makes any difference, as the problem is just for EL&amp;amp;U, and its main site. I would think the problem is with the CDN, but I would expect to hit the same CDN when I visit any of the Stack Exchange sites. I thought to the server cache, but also in this case I imagine the problem would be visible in all the Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-08-08T17:28:23.800" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T17:28:23.800" Title="Many graphical items are not shown in the main site" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2012-08-06T11:06:55.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the images are contained in one large composite, so if that is corrupt, all images will be affected. Each composite image is site-specific (so the arrows/badges can differ from site to site), so a corrupt image file will only affect one site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remove a corrupt image from the browser cache by either force-refreshing the page or actually clearing the cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internet Explorer in particular has a very aggressive caching policy and will happily cache a corrupt image file. Other browsers may still do so (Older versions of Firefox in particular have been known to get really confused and retrieve entirely the wrong image from the cache).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the composite from Stack Overflow. You can see that each arrow, badge and the like appears and is simply sliced out of the image for display. If the image is corrupted, every graphical element will be affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ousRn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Overflow sprite image&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T11:06:55.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2929" CreationDate="2012-08-06T11:31:00.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#answers&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#answers&lt;/a&gt; you will see some statistics about Stack Exchange sites. It doesn't include all the statistics you are asking for, but it gives some important statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gXabF.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also allows you to order the site by specific criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y1MQX.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sort by traffic, for example, you get the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tgLv.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/76893/statistics-about-the-site-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt; that reports some of the statistics you asked for. The following is the graph created with that query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LnOgi.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that the Data Explorer uses not updated data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-08-09T23:04:07.780" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T23:04:07.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2930" CreationDate="2012-08-07T01:10:16.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific question: you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; flag a question as offensive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;check &lt;code&gt;it is not welcome in our community&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click &lt;code&gt;Flag Question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You identified the last phrase in this sentence&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77132/what-do-you-call-an-item-that-appeals-to-a-human-urge-but-is-unnatural&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; as very offensive and struck it out&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/suggested-edits/3002&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not merely supernatural which has a connotation of being non-existent&lt;strike&gt;, like God&lt;/strike&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider the original sentence unwelcome on English.SE, and consider your edit equally unwelcome. I do not mean to be rude or unfriendly: just direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The owners of StackExchange intend SE sites to be “libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community’s area of expertise.”&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;³&lt;/a&gt; As the owners they have every right to choose what (and what not) to publish. English.SE “is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts”. So Q&amp;amp;A on English.SE is limited to topics relevant to that expertise. And the FAQ clarifies what that means: word choice and usage, grammar, etymology, etc.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;⁴&lt;/a&gt; Anything outside that realm is off topic and unwelcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are welcomed even when they are offensive (to some). The owners of SE have repeatedly made clear that any text is welcome at English.SE regardless of its nature, as long as its presence there legitimately serves the community. (With the exception that titles of questions need to be rated G to prevent the site being flagged by third party content filters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evan Carroll&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14451/evan-carroll&quot;&gt;⁵&lt;/a&gt; was wrong to post the original sentence not because it’s offensive but because it’s &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;: it is a rant disguised as part of his question. Evan’s defense of the sentence just underscores his intention to engage in polemics, not make a linguistic argument. The sentence is linguistically indefensible: it is factually untrue that &lt;em&gt;supernatural&lt;/em&gt; has a connotation of “being non-existent”, any more than &lt;em&gt;my grandchildren&lt;/em&gt; does: they are nonexistent, but that just so happens. It is not in any way connoted by the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were wrong to edit the question the way you did. You explained your edit as “removed offensive phrase”, and your sole justification turned out to be that it was &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; who found “a certain phrase … offensive”. Where you went wrong was in using your personal level of offense as a touchstone for whether content is welcome in our community. The standards are community standards, not yours. Ironically, your edit contributed nothing to the quality of the question: you removed “God” but not the polemic. And, if allowed to stand, your edit might encourage more people to substitute their own personal standards for those of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T01:10:16.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-07T20:05:38.460" Score="14" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;second moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the two new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8360&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8360.png&quot; alt=&quot;KitFox&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/10893&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10893.png&quot; alt=&quot;simchona&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about#moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/495069/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-19T20:19:43.997" Title="2012 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2941" CreationDate="2012-08-08T02:14:43.003" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there are limits on the number of flags one can cast in a day. I found this in the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many flags do I have?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you start out you are alloted 10 flags per-day. This number may increase to up to 100 flags per-day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get one bonus flag per 2000 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are awarded additional bonus flags when you flag correctly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have only 7 offensive flags remaining and I haven't flagged anything yet today. I have 12 flags moderator attention flags left also. (I suppose I've already gained a few additional bonus flags)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the original flag limits for each type of flag per day? How many must I flag to receive additional bonus flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How do the flag limits work?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2940" CreationDate="2012-08-08T17:17:23.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131207/how-is-the-number-of-flags-for-moderation-attention-calculated&quot;&gt;How is the number of flags for moderation attention calculated?&lt;/a&gt; the given answer said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;default 10 per day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one bonus flag per 2000 reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one bonus flag per 20 &quot;flag weight&quot; above the default&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maximum 100&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag weight is not anymore visible in the user profiles; the third point needs to be translated in terms of useful flags. Basing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/80178/140449&quot;&gt;this answer on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (visible to MSO's 10K users), &lt;em&gt;20 &quot;flag weight&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would mean 2 useful flags. Basing on that answer, the increment is for any flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For every 20 points of flag weight beyond the default, you get one additional moderator, comment, and spam/offensive flag per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T17:17:23.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2945" CreationDate="2012-08-08T23:17:29.650" Score="6" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/76994/10942&quot;&gt;Word (or shorter phrase for) &amp;quot;evaluate the relationship between&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, was closed as &quot;off topic&quot; for this site. I think that it is a good question&amp;nbsp;— it has five upvotes and seven answers&amp;nbsp;— that would be on-topic at writers.stackexchange as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166/what-are-the-guidelines-for-asking-for-a-critique-of-my-work&quot;&gt;properly scoped and framed critique request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the question to request migration five days ago, and the flag was voted helpful, but the question was not moved. Is there a reason not to move it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10942" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:48:24.407" Title="Please migrate my (closed) question to Writers.SE" Tags="|support|status-declined|closed-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2942" CreationDate="2012-08-09T13:56:54.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a good for Writers.SE, sorry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the requirements for a critique request on Writers is that it be more than a few sentences long; questions looking to rephrase a sentence or three are considered explicitly off-topic, by community consensus. For more information on this, see this question on our meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/535/are-requests-for-rephrasing-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are requests for rephrasing on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5706456#5706456&quot;&gt;brought up the issue in our chatroom&lt;/a&gt;, in the event my opinion is not representative of the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the problems with questions like this is that there's really no way of voting on the answer. &lt;strike&gt;A Writers.SE critique request requires that the critique request have specific questions about the excerpt, and answers can be voted on based on their thoroughness&amp;nbsp;— i.e., how well the critique addresses the author's specific questions.&lt;/strike&gt; Requests for the rephrasing of a few sentences are much more difficult to address in this manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/878/26&quot;&gt;Critique requests are now off-topic at Writers.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:03.740" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:48:24.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2948" CreationDate="2012-08-09T15:40:15.513" Score="8" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;20K users can vote to delete answers with a negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case should such questions be deleted? Is it enough the answer is utterly wrong? Would not the negative score be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says that answers that are, &quot;not even a partial answer to the actual question&quot; may be removed. Does that include a wrong answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting the answer would give back to the user the reputation s/he lost with the down-votes. Could that be a reason for deleting an answer that is wrong? Do we deleted wrong answers to give to the user who wrote it a &lt;em&gt;new chance&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T20:44:17.997" Title="When should an answer with a negative score be voted for deletion?" Tags="|support|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2942" CreationDate="2012-08-09T16:05:15.607" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a mod at Writers.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requests for words and phrases used to be on topic here on EL&amp;U; I'm not certain what the precise current status is on these, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;Against single word requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt; express the problematic nature of these questions, and (this is my impression on skimming these topics...) at very least, they demand a high level of research and detail of such questions on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers.SE doesn't accept such questions and never has. (We have, in the past, accepted &quot;please critique this piece of writing&quot; questions, which is not entirely dissimilar; however, these have been taken pretty much off-topic, for much the same reason as phrase requests on EL&amp;amp;U.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If rephrased as a typographical question, e.g. &lt;em&gt;My table of contents looks awkward due to long, repeated phrase in many headers&lt;/em&gt;, I think Writers could take this. This isn't &quot;what's a shorter phrase for ,&quot; it's &quot;I'm having a problem with my table of contents&quot;&amp;nbsp;— which is (A) a solvable, answerable problem, and (B) a problem other people probably also encounter. That'd take a fair bit of work, though, and it would invalidate a whole bunch of the existing answers. If you'd like more input, you might open a new question at Writers.SE instead of trying to migrate this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor point — As for the flag, a flag can be helpful without necessarily dictating action. Your flag raised a valid concern; it wasn't unhelpful; it didn't need to be rejected. It just also wasn't persuasive enough to spur anybody to action&amp;nbsp;— or maybe their response was to check with us at Writers, and we turned the question down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T23:14:11.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2944" CreationDate="2012-08-09T16:39:47.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bad answers should be deleted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wrong answers should be left as signposts (that the given content is wrong).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both will hopefully be given more downvotes than up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say vote to delete an answer that is both bad (your judgement) and negative score (community judgement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T16:39:47.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2944" CreationDate="2012-08-09T20:08:21.557" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both votes to close questions and negative votes are used as a technique of repression. Votes to delete questions are the apotheosis of this technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T20:08:21.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2944" CreationDate="2012-08-09T20:44:17.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your reaction to an answer is “that's wrong”, it should be downvoted. Keeping wrong answers around serves a purpose: it shows what not to do (or, on this site, what not to say), and hopefully why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your reaction to an answer is “this isn't even wrong” or “this is true but completely irrelevant”, it should be deleted. A future visitor who's looking for answers to the question wouldn't be helped by this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T20:44:17.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2961" CreationDate="2012-08-10T00:22:00.797" Score="-2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was once a man who was renowned as one who knew English very well. And it wasn't just idle hear-say either, he definitely had earned the reputation. People would come from all over the country to study under him. Many times they would ask him what a certain sentence meant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invariably, his first question in response would be &quot;What's the context?&quot;. Once they gave him the context he would give them an answer, and of course it was very easy to understand, since this man knew so much about English. One day, however, a man came to him and asked him &quot;Sir, what does it mean when someone tells you to have a good day?&quot; As usual, the sage replied &quot;What's the context?&quot; The man pulled out a slip of paper, and said &quot;Here it is.&quot; The sage looked at it, and on it were the words &lt;code&gt;Set thine house in order, for today thou shalt die&lt;/code&gt;. The sage's brows dropped in thought, but soon returned, and he asked the man if he were a Christian. The man said he was, and had always lived as the Bible taught. The sage was about to reply, when the man asked &quot;Why &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; you always ask for the con-text? Here's the pro-text.&quot; So saying, he handed the sage another piece of paper which read &lt;code&gt;It's April fool's day, O sage.&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sage got the point and achieved world fame because he no longer asked for the context unless he had to, but rather knew it from experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the pro's and con's of asking for the context? How much should it be done and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple answers where context was mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77731/62&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77731/62&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77757/18399&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77757/18399&lt;/a&gt; - This one is one of mine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I realize that we don't qualify for the title of &quot;Sage&quot; (on this site), even at a regional level...yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T19:29:34.070" Title="Context, context, con-text" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-10T09:35:04.833" Score="6" ViewCount="4822" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for resources on most common general word lists for English. &#xA;I'm after lists that are bit large in size - say in the range 10,000-20,000 words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found smaller lists such as the GSL (2000) and the Oxford 3000. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also the frequency lists publish by Wikitionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aFrequency_lists/PG/2006/04/1-10000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/PG/2006/04/1-10000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aFrequency_lists#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are crude lists with no editing done to them to clean them up. &#xA;For example they contain proper names, acronyms and different forms of the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone here suggest online resources on lists of common words that are cleaner and within the mentioned size range, maybe a list of words in some beginners or learners dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason behind this question: I'm looking for a resource for learners where they can test their mastery of basic vocabulary. So what we're after is a list of most common general English words in the range given, preferably ordered by frequency, or ordered into groups like the most common 3k group then the next most common group and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the list to be useful it needs to have been cleaned up by human editing - so things like acronyms, place names, person names and affixes should not be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learners can then go through a list of their chosen level, and if they find a word they're not familiar with they can check it in a learner's dictionary of their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I'm not inviting discussion on the validity of this as a learning technique.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24723" OwnerDisplayName="Basel Shishani" LastEditorUserId="24723" LastEditDate="2012-08-11T03:33:03.870" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T06:10:09.763" Title="Resources on larger common word lists" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2950" CreationDate="2012-08-10T16:54:14.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1095/are-questions-about-online-resources-on-topic&quot;&gt;About asking such a question&lt;/a&gt; - has lots of links to other questions about resources&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;Actual English language tools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest to what I think you're looking for are the Moby word lists  (I think the link is somewhere in the ones already given).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, I think your best bet is to just google for some variation of 'english word list frequency beginner learner'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T21:13:04.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-10T18:22:20.467" Score="2" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed this happens a lot in short questions. The OP can think of nothing more to say and just copied the title into the body (or vice versa) and adds a short sentence that adds little to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we edit out the title in the body, there is usually nothing or little left. If we leave it, it is redundant and vague. If we rephrase it, we run the risk of altering the OP's original intent. If I see this happening, what should I do? Do we have an existing policy on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastEditorUserId="24168" LastEditDate="2012-08-10T21:14:54.203" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T07:28:46.930" Title="Repeating the title in the body" Tags="|discussion|titles|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2012-08-10T18:41:12.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is certainly a red flag, since very short questions tend to be bad questions. However, rather than editing the post in that case, simply flag it to be closed or downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some questions are &lt;em&gt;legitimately&lt;/em&gt; short. Those you can leave alone. There's nothing inherently wrong with repeating the title in the body, so if the question is otherwise fine, there's no need to edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T18:41:12.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2012-08-10T20:54:24.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should discourage repeating the &lt;strong&gt;body&lt;/strong&gt; in the &lt;strong&gt;title&lt;/strong&gt;.  A title is not merely the first sentence of the body.  It's something else altogether.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the title of this question really should have been &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Repeating the Title in the Body&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; do it the way people set the titles of books and movies in English (let’s call this &lt;strong&gt;titlecase&lt;/strong&gt;), or else &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Repeating the title in the body&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; if you capitalize the first word only (let’s call this &lt;strong&gt;sentence case&lt;/strong&gt;), as some European publications do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence case works best with actual questions or long titles.  Short titles in titlecase should look like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-08-12T20:29:27.253" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T20:29:27.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2012-08-10T21:03:30.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea is somewhat like emails. Should the subject of an email be repeated in an email?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think an exact copy should occur, that is stylistically annoying, but I do think there should be some repetition of the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very often a person will write something in the title, then in the contents go in a completely different direction. What results is that some answer the title questions, and some answer various things in the body that are unrelated to the title. And it is still unclear what the OP really wants, the title question or the slightly different question in the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as to UI design, the title is often separated from the body to such an extent (in size/weight/kind) that it is hardly read at all after the link from the main screen is read, so there is the problem of a discrepancy in understanding of the title and the body even when consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77850/which-is-correct-set-of-preferences-or-set-of-priorities&quot;&gt;Preferences or priorities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it was very unclear in reading the examples that the title had anything at all to do with the examples given, in fact it was easy to answer the problem in the example rather than trying to answer the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T23:06:15.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2012-08-10T21:27:02.210" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a matter of personal preference - specifically, the preference of the person asking the question. If you the reader don't like it, that's too bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally habitually copy the most pertinent block of words from an email and paste it into the title before I click on &lt;em&gt;Send&lt;/em&gt;, so that's where I stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to think it would be a good idea if people were encouraged to change titles like &lt;em&gt;&quot;What's the difference between &lt;strong&gt;word1&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;word2&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to a standardised &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;word1&lt;/strong&gt; vs &lt;strong&gt;word2&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, because I thought that would make my future searches easier. But I kinda lost interest when the debate ended up getting bogged down in whether it should be &lt;em&gt;vs / vs. / v / v. / versus / whatever&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as the question is clearly presented, I say let the original words stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T21:27:02.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2012-08-11T11:38:13.140" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually edit it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what remains is little, it was little with that part anyways, so why keep it? It's redundant and serves no purpose (besides being redundant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly a red flag, like JSBangs says, because if you can't add enough context, then your question has some problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T11:38:13.140" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2949" CreationDate="2012-08-12T11:01:45.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My favorite word is &lt;em&gt;pin&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9spj1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what does a pin look like&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a forum about language; language is heavily context-dependent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be hard for me to find an EL&amp;amp;U question that provided too much context. It would be easy for me to locate several that provided far too little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what are the pro's and con's of asking for the context? How much should it be done and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context should be requested whenever an O.P. has provided too little.  Otherwise, how can we be expected to steer the conversation the right direction?  Pinning down the precise meanings of words and phrases is futile without sufficient context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T11:01:45.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2960" CreationDate="2012-08-12T13:33:54.060" Score="5" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sister and I would like to have separate accounts. But I see that StackExchange allows only one account per IP address. In that case, how do we do it? We really don’t want to ask questions from the same account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15389" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-08-12T20:19:46.610" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T20:19:46.610" Title="Two accounts from the same IP for different people?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2959" CreationDate="2012-08-12T16:22:05.243" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I see that StackExchange only allows one account per IP address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't true; both of you are welcome to create your own accounts  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, please do not vote on each other's posts, as otherwise we might find vote abuse to have taken place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T16:22:05.243" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2949" CreationDate="2012-08-12T19:29:34.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask for context when the OP doesn't provide enough for you to answer.  Why?  So you can answer the question, obviously.   The pro?  Correct answers.  The cons?  I don't see any, do you?   Do you really think there's some kind of widespread problem on the site where people are continually asking for additional context where none is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77729/whats-the-word-to-describe-that-i-your-artwork/77731#77731&quot;&gt;first question&lt;/a&gt;, one might wonder: Did I see a photo once, or have I studied this artist's entire body of work?  Asking for context seems perfectly appropriate.   (The second question seems to have undergone various revisions and ultimately been closed, so analyzing it does not seem useful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T19:29:34.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-14T08:06:14.780" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78213/which-one-is-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78213/which-one-is-grammatically-correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78214/which-one-is-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78214/which-one-is-grammatically-correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worked hard trying to come up with some things that's grammatically correct. So I ask which one is grammatically correct. There are many similar questions. So what's wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love learning all languages. Programming languages and english language is one of them. So I want to know some detail. Which one is an adjective. Which one is a noun. Why something is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, what is different between those 2 questions and other questions asking for grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this because I use too many samples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T18:06:08.953" Title="Why is the question closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2962" CreationDate="2012-08-14T09:35:21.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question about &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; seems to be more about the meaning of the word, than any kind of grammar, since you don't understand the meaning of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The steps to asking a good meaning question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look up your word in a dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take time to understand what the dictionary entry is telling you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are still things you don't understand, ask your question including:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explaining what research you have done&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explaining why this doesn't answer your question &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearly ask about the thing you don't understand, including context as necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Come up with a good title for your question, something that is specific to your problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag appropriately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your other questions is just a list of sentences and the question &quot;Which, if any, are correct?&quot; For one, proof reading is off topic (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;), for another you don't explain why any should be correct or incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions demonstrate that you are still learning English. That's great, we're all still learning to some degree. But you seem to be towards the beginning end of the learning spectrum, whereas questions on this site should come from people who already know the language quite well. We're not here to teach people English. This is why there is a proposal for an &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English language learner's Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, to complement this site and allow people a place to ask questions that are too basic for here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T09:35:21.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-14T12:25:50.717" Score="-6" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Congratulations -- you are one of the top new English Language and&#xA;  Usage - Stack Exchange users for the week of Aug 6 2012!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/week/english/2012-08-06&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/week/english/2012-08-06&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's users like you who make the English Language and Usage - Stack&#xA;  Exchange community worth visiting in the first place. You can always&#xA;  find your profile at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24531/xavier-vidal-hernandez&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24531/xavier-vidal-hernandez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please don't hesitate to ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;provide feedback on how we can improve on Meta English Language and Usage - Stack Exchange&#xA;&#xA;visit our real time web chat to meet fellow community members&#xA;&#xA;flag any comments or posts you feel should be followed up on by our community moderators&#xA;&#xA;email us directly at team+english@stackexchange.com any time&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome, and thanks for being a part of our community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have received that mail from StackExchange, and I want to generate confidence acting in coherence with the values of the company stated there; but my comments are often deleted without any explanations and without to listen to any reason. So, I'm shocked to notice how much the thinking of the community (&amp;#9830;?) creeps into my own thinking and I do not know why!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For people who do not know my activity&lt;/strong&gt;, the following is a list of my selected contributions, the others - even the deleted comments - are pretty similar in style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But, generally speaking, problems are not rooted in misunderstandings&#xA;  ('long ago' != 'a long time') by distorting or forgetting what words&#xA;  actually mean in everyday use! Furthermore, as far as I concern, you&#xA;  get into trouble by trying to understand words outside of the context&#xA;  of their use in spoken language, as - precisely - the OP said! That&#xA;  being said, I cannot vote up this answer!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finally an important question about the nature of our perception of shape properties has arrived! But, really, it would take time and&#xA;  mental effort to figure these things out, and, however, there is no&#xA;  reason to doubt about the reference you quoted!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An excellent explanation, expressed in terms that can be understood&#xA;  without the need of lots of philosophical knowledge, but I would&#xA;  express my firmly conviction that 'dialectic' cannot be fully&#xA;  comprehended without an understanding of death and, for this scope,&#xA;  you should have posted another answer to avoid the death of the first&#xA;  @Henrik Erlandsson's comment!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is wrong in my activity on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T04:04:47.597" Title="Why are my comments deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-14T13:19:53.027" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a request to reopen the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77331/is-deuce-tennis-a-corruption-of-the-french-phrase-a-deux-de-jeu&quot;&gt;&quot;Is 'deuce' (tennis) a corruption of the French phrase 'à deux de jeu'?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, as per the reasons stated in the question's comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T14:32:33.727" Title="Request to reopen &quot;Is 'deuce' (tennis) a corruption of the French phrase 'à deux de jeu'?&quot;" Tags="|support|status-completed|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-08-14T14:32:04.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2964" CreationDate="2012-08-14T17:50:56.330" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your contributions to the site. I am glad that you wish to be a helpful contributor here. You are a very new user, and the fact that you are already a top contributor speaks to your efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason, I am glad that you chose to post your question here on the Meta site.  It gives us the opportunity to answer your concerns in a more detailed fashion than comments and also may help other new users in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are new here, you might not know that moderators are not solely responsible for comment deletion.  If your comments have been flagged as &quot;spam&quot; or &quot;offensive&quot; by enough users, they will be deleted automatically by the system, and we mods might not even see those flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other flags require some intercession on the part of the mod who reviews the flag.  Comments that are marked as &quot;not constructive,&quot;  &quot;chatty,&quot; or that are &quot;custom&quot; with a message to a mod all need to be reviewed first.  In this case, comment deletion is at the discretion of the reviewing mod, although the more flags there are on a comment, the more likely it is to get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not within the scope of our duties to &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; leave a comment to explain why comments have been deleted. It rather defeats the purpose of comment deletion, and also it is quite time-consuming, as well you can imagine.  Oftentimes, pruning comment chains is just a routine task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why specific comments of yours were deleted, reviewing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; for posting comments may help you understand why some comments were flagged by the community.  If you have particular concerns or a question about why a particular comment was deleted, you can always ask on Meta (as you have done in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you again for your contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T17:50:56.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2964" CreationDate="2012-08-14T18:18:38.007" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like a typical signal transmission problem to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put simply, the signal you emit seems to be cluttered with too much noise...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Below is a humouristic little chart, inspired by the OSI model, that will illustrate the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reach other EL&amp;amp;U readers, the waves originating from your cortex must follow a complex path and undergo a huge variety of transformations, of which I shamelessly represented only a few.&#xA;None of these transformations is 100% faithful of course.  It is therefore not impossible that some undesirable transcription errors could have mangled your comments.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RHqfc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find out on which side of the double stack the errors are more likely to have happened I'd try to understand whether different receivers on the right hand side experienced the same garbled reception.  In which case you might want to fix the left hand side.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The good news is, that there is only one instance of this stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you must have realised by now, a significant proportion of users familiar with this forum take an interest in one or more of these layers as well as in the whole transmission process.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So there is a lot of room for exchanging ideas. The title of this Q&amp;amp;A sites family says it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bearing this in mind, I'm therefore convinced that once this temporary transmission problem is fixed, the communication between the EL&amp;amp;U community and yourself will be fruitful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Till then, welcome to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T04:04:47.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-15T19:27:11.813" Score="34" ViewCount="7079" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/?blb=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;. We've had it for a while. You should take a look, there is some great content. I'll wait here while you read it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a call for regular contributors. You don't have to have an idea immediately, just a willingness to write coherently about English and EL&amp;amp;U. If you do have ideas that's even better, because that's bound to be more interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plan is simple in its elegance. We are aiming to publish an article every two weeks. To achieve this I will wrangle, cajole and encourage some willing contributors to write posts on the following (negotiable) topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Language tools (online and offline)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plurals involving groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plurals involving fractions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possessive apostrophes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subjunctive mood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender neutral pronouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The journey of a word from being two (or more) words to being one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of &amp;quot;that that&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formulating good &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepositions at the end of sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Me vs Myself vs I&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That vs Which&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no particular order to the topics. I think 12 is enough to get started so we can see if the blog still has legs. If you have more topics you'd like to add (or do instead), that is fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The schedule would be to get the first post up on 1st September and then post something new fortnightly. I am going to be holding a weekly chat in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063/elu-blog&quot;&gt;blog's chat room&lt;/a&gt; to discuss what should be posted, catchup on progress and help with any issues. If you have questions about the blog, I will be there a lot of the time (I do sleep, though) and I will respond to pings when I get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to contribute directly we can always use other help, as in copy editors, morale boosters and idea suppliers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not averse to someone wanting to contribute a one-off post, but at this point we're really looking for regulars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. who wants to contribute?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;B. when is a good time for a weekly chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Come to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063/elu-blog&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to discuss the blog&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need more contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T15:05:01.663" Title="EL&amp;U Blog, the reboot" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2012-08-15T19:56:38.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yay, Matt! I'm on board for moral support and copy editing. Also, coffee and donuts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can hang out in chat most days anywhere from 0800 - 1500 Eastern Time (UTC-5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for volunteering to step up and try to get our blog jumpstarted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T19:56:38.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2950" CreationDate="2012-08-15T20:21:49.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.wordfrequency.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the top 5000 most common words are available for free, but you can purchase lists of the top 20,000 and 60,000. I've only viewed the free list but it appears to be pretty well cleaned up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an (unverified) excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/files/entriesWithoutCollocates.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a sample list they provide&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that this is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; frequency list of English that is corrected for a list this large.&#xA;  All other frequency lists (if they are corrected at all, to remove bad entries) only correct the top 5,000 or 10,000 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8985" LastEditorUserId="8985" LastEditDate="2012-10-05T13:56:12.947" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T13:56:12.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-16T17:10:17.310" Score="11" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose, as a matter both of policy and principle, that any tag name that exists in one of the major spelling variants (loosely, US-vs-UK, but not so limited) should also exist in the other as a synonym.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the list of current-as-of-this-writing tags which this would apply to, along with the respective status of each synonym:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;capitalization = capitalisation (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pluralisation = pluralization (not done, and both exist!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anglicization = anglicisation (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;humor = humour (done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parentheses = brackets (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look-alikes = lookalikes (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exclamation-mark = exclamation-point (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diagramming = diagraming (not done, god I hate this one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dialogue = dialog (not done, not fond of this one either)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diacritic = diacriticals (done; arguably could add &lt;em&gt;diacritics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;diacritical&lt;/em&gt;, but the completion should suffice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;emoticons = emotica (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;received-pronunciation = rp (not done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redundancy = laid-off  (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;SO JUST KIDDING!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-08-17T11:12:27.800" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T17:10:47.737" Title="US/UK spellings of tags should be synonyms" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2012-08-16T22:08:17.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great idea! A blog holds the site together and keeps users in touch and interested. I'd love to help in my spare time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know if I'm a loner, but I don't feel &lt;em&gt;qualified&lt;/em&gt; to write about the English language in a blog read by 21,000+ users every other week. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fine with copy-editing, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastActivityDate="2012-08-16T22:08:17.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2972" CreationDate="2012-08-17T12:25:47.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a mod has just gone through and actioned most of OP’s proposals – I’ve just checked over half the list, and in every case either one of the US/UK spellings is a synonym of the other, or they’re &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; synonyms of something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can say is that if, say, &lt;em&gt;capitalization&lt;/em&gt; existed, but &lt;em&gt;capitalisation&lt;/em&gt; didn’t, I personally wouldn’t create the latter purely for the sake of UK/US “equality”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if both those tags existed but &lt;em&gt;weren’t&lt;/em&gt; marked as synonyms, I’d synonymise, rather than changing all instances of the less common spelling to match the most-used tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I see no point in creating a tag &lt;em&gt;emotica&lt;/em&gt;, for example. By the time a user has typed in the first four letters, he’ll see we already have a tag for the more standard &lt;em&gt;emoticons&lt;/em&gt;. In a case like that, I’d stick to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Occam’s razor&lt;/a&gt; – &lt;em&gt;do not multiply entities unnecessarily&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary purpose of synonymising tags is to help ensure questions are correctly tagged against what the community see as useful categories. That goal isn’t meaningfully advanced by &lt;em&gt;deliberately&lt;/em&gt; creating alternatives where it would be obvious to any user that we already have an appropriate tag, but it’s just spelt differently to how they would write it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2012-08-17T17:10:47.737" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T17:10:47.737" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2977" CreationDate="2012-08-17T15:53:43.053" Score="9" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/78532/823&quot;&gt;asked a question here&lt;/a&gt; that seemed to fit the site, so I was surprised when I saw that it was quickly downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions relating to spelling and punctuation are clearly encouraged in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question doesn't fall into one of the disallowed categories in the FAQ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/24178/823&quot;&gt;A similar question&lt;/a&gt; has 4 upvotes, so I don't believe it's a problem with the format of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've typically stayed on Stack Overflow rather than other Stack Exchange sites.  Is there a unique aspect of English.SE that I'm missing, or ways to improve the question I asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="823" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T13:30:17.340" Title="How can I improve a question?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2975" CreationDate="2012-08-17T16:38:39.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the other SE sites, English.SE “is dedicated to serving experts in a specific field”.&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; You are likely to see very basic questions downvoted and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if your question can be answered by consulting a general reference, it's a basic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General references are inadequate to answer basic questions from time to time. If this is your situation, you should cite the references you consulted and explain why you were still not satisfied with what you found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T16:38:39.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2975" CreationDate="2012-08-17T17:15:17.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be that your question was too specific or not specific enough. That is, you provided the exact problem you were having trouble with, without generalizing it ('too localized'), and you didn't describe why you thought one or the other should go there ('not a real question' because you haven't fully specified what's confusing you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that the preposition question you linked to is really a good example of something similar. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20754/when-should-you-use-a-semicolon-with-a-conjunction&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is a pretty good example of how to ask a  punctuation question (e.g., &quot;usually I'd put a comma, but in this case it seems like a comma is wrong because...&quot; or &quot;My favorite grammar guide seems to hate semi-colons, but is it actually wrong to use one here?&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all, ideally the &lt;em&gt;downvoters&lt;/em&gt; would have commented about why they downvoted. Unfortunately, that didn't happen in this case.  I hope it doesn't discourage you from asking questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you should feel free to come to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; for help with phrasing and improving questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T17:15:17.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2012-08-17T19:15:45.503" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK! Kit's rallying got a lot more interested than is represented in the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have scheduled &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/1063/elu-blog?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;a regular chat&lt;/a&gt; to be every Thursday at 15:00 GMT. This is not set in stone, but it is the easiest time for me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have several topics in the pipeline now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to write good &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; questions — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11550/mahnax&quot;&gt;Mahnax&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typography part 1 — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18399/cornbread-ninja&quot;&gt;cornbread ninja&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/19644/cameron&quot;&gt;Cameron&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possessive apostrophes' — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8360/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox♦&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English words with Nordic roots — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24168/luke&quot;&gt;Luke&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That vs Which — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24489/stoneyb&quot;&gt;StoneyB&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain to new users what they should do if their question is closed as General Reference — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24489/stoneyb&quot;&gt;StoneyB&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U chat — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3559/matt&quot;&gt;me&lt;/a&gt; ✓&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subjunctive — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2085/tchrist&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A few, Some, Several, etc. — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pirate English — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A review of Strunk &amp;amp; White's EoS — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use and misuse of Google Ngrams — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English language tools — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typography part 2 — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18399/cornbread-ninja&quot;&gt;cornbread ninja&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender neutral pronouns — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What constitutes a word in English — TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something about ELL — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18220/j-r&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than Mahnax being first, there isn't a particular order to the posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T11:50:07.157" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-11-05T10:09:01.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2012-08-18T07:28:46.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you say about altering the OP's original intent doesn't apply to question's titles, as long as the title is pertinent with the question. For example, we are required to avoid writing some words in the question's titles; if you change the title to use &lt;em&gt;c*nt&lt;/em&gt;, you are not altering the meaning of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the title to avoid it is equal to the question's text is a minor issue. In such cases, the more important issue is that the OP didn't probably put much effort in writing the question, and s/he didn't provide a context for the question, or give more information.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are simple questions that don't need much, and for those questions it is probably fine if the question's text is equal to its title. Still, I would personally avoid doing that because it sounds like lack of effort from my part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T07:28:46.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2036" CreationDate="2012-08-18T08:35:51.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in meta.stackoverflow (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/129032/165524&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question Hugo mentioned) an un-upvote-comment feature (to retract or revert an upvote on a comment) was added in April, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some restrictions apply:  Your upvote is locked in if you navigate away from the page with the comment, or if 60 seconds go by.   You can upvote a comment at most once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T08:40:51.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2975" CreationDate="2012-08-18T13:30:17.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attempting to explain downvotes can be a tricky thing (unless you happen to be one of the downvoters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I didn't downvote your question, so everything that follows is only speculation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found nothing wrong with the format of your question, and I think you provided sufficient context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people will downvote questions that seem too basic.  Maybe someone thought your question was too basic, or maybe someone thought you were asking two basics questions that didn't seem connected.  Specifically, I did wonder about your last question, which muddied the waters some:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is &quot;No&quot; being used as an interjection here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You started by asking about punctuation (should I use of a comma or a semi-colon?), but then you concluded by asking about parts of speech. This made the question more complicated, which &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have prompted a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does your last question complicate matters?  Well, either &quot;No&quot; is being used as an interjection, or it isn't.  If it is, how does that answer your punctuation question?  If it isn't, what's the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had you explicitly tied the &quot;is it an interjection&quot; question with the &quot;how should I punctuate this&quot; question, you might have fended off some downvotes (assuming my theory has any validity, but, again, I'm only conjecturing).  So, you might have added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If &quot;No&quot; is being used as an interjection, then I assume you use a comma.  But if it's not an interjection, then it stands on its own as a sentence – maybe a semi-colon would be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, if &quot;No&quot; was in fact an interjection, I would punctuate it differently altogether:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No! The new software can still open the old files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think it's an interjection (but that's not a matter for meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, this jumbling of these seemingly basic matters may have made it harder to answer the question, which may have prompted a downvote.  I didn't downvote it, but I opted to supply an answer instead. I hope you find that answer helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T13:30:17.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2012-08-19T15:52:02.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are not practical, helpful to others, fair, or educational.  In additional, these questions are inherently subjective and don't lend themselves well to a detailed, evidence-backed answer.  As such, I am against single word requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2012-08-19T15:52:02.327" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-20T03:44:51.267" Score="-13" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I write, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=sb&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;46 questions on &lt;em&gt;main&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with the abbreviation &lt;strong&gt;&quot;sb&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=sth&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;43 with &lt;strong&gt;&quot;sth&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the prevalence/desirability of these abbreviations was being discussed in comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78877/can-i-say-acquire-someone-something&quot;&gt;Can I say &quot;acquire sb sth&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the title was amended to spell out the words in full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with these abbreviations. I wasn't &quot;familiar&quot; with either before joining ELU, but I'd probably encountered them many times and figured them out without realising that to some people these abbreviations are perfectly commonplace &quot;standards&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should ELU discourage these usages? And edit them out of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally don't think we should, so bearing in mind how &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; votes work on meta, please upvote this question if you agree [that ELU shouldn't have a policy of discouraging these specific abbreviations], or downvote if you disagree [i.e., if you agree with Mahnax's answer, and you object to them]. (Comments/answers are good too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T09:23:07.600" Title="Does ELU object to sb/sth for somebody/something?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2983" CreationDate="2012-08-20T06:48:31.797" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I object to the use of &lt;em&gt;sb&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;sth&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. I think that we should use full words here. They might be appropriate in text messages, but I do not consider them appropriate here—I expect full sentences and full words (which is hopefully not unreasonable, considering the focus of this website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for some reason, we did allow them, where would we draw the line? Would we have to allow more shortened forms, like &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;wat&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;? That would just be a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that we should hold ourselves to high standards here. To me, it really doesn't make sense for an English language Q&amp;amp;A site to allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T06:48:31.797" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2983" CreationDate="2012-08-22T09:23:07.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a matter of having these abbreviations allowed or disallowed, I think it's more a matter of whether or not they get overused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, in the case where someone asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is sb. an accepted abbreviation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it would obviously confuse matters to remove that instance of &lt;em&gt;sb.&lt;/em&gt;  In other cases, though, I think getting rid of &lt;em&gt;sb.&lt;/em&gt; can be an improvement, for the sake of clarity and readability.  For example, in the case where a user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6375/whats-the-meaning-of-on-somebodys-account&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the meaning of “on sb's account”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked up &lt;code&gt;on sb's account&lt;/code&gt; in the Longman dictionary. The following is an excerpt from it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;on sb’s account&lt;/em&gt; : if you do something on someone’s account, you do it because you think they want you to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When first reading the question title, somebody might think that the O.P. is asking what the &amp;quot;sb&amp;quot; refers to in &amp;quot;on sb's account.&amp;quot;  Moreover, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/account_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman&lt;/a&gt; doesn't even use the abbreviation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/agoqY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so, in this case, it seems more like sloppy typing, rather than conscientious use of an official dictionary abbreviation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just saying that this is more of a case-by-case matter than an all-or-nothing issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T09:23:07.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2987" CreationDate="2012-08-22T13:02:03.643" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments on answers to a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77832/please-tell-me-what-does-harsh-mistress-mean-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; raised issues of historical usage and appealed to &lt;em&gt;OED 1&lt;/em&gt;. I have determined that with respect to two of its citations &lt;em&gt;OED 1&lt;/em&gt; is mistaken; but before proceeding I should like to know whether the online edition, &lt;em&gt;OED 3&lt;/em&gt;, has corrected these errors and if so, what new citations it offers. Unhappily, I do not have access to that edition, even, disgracefully, through the university at which my wife is a student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I post an appeal for this information as a Question here? This would be routine in many other fora, but here it could be regarded as General Reference; it could, moreover, create a precedent fraught with opportunities for abuse, and could provoke hostile action against StackExchange by IP orcs from OUP. So I'd rather not post without a go-ahead from the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post a bounty on this question if it is permitted - I suppose that shouldn't make a difference, but it might.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T13:55:48.797" Title="Judicial Review for Special Reference Question" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2986" CreationDate="2012-08-22T13:55:48.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that you should just ask the question, referring to the mistakes that you have found in the OED1. The fact that you have &lt;em&gt;consulted&lt;/em&gt; a reference and found it lacking generally protects you from being closed as Gen Ref. However, &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; phrase your question as a simple query about what's in the OED3, but rather simply present it directly, and let somebody else find the proper resources for answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T13:55:48.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-22T22:49:16.150" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why this topic has been bounced between two language sites so could you offer suggestions on improving this question. This is definitely a request for English Language &amp;amp; Usage. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79201/ecrivain-engage-a-committed-writer&quot;&gt;A word or phrase to express &amp;quot;&amp;#233;crivain engag&amp;#233;&amp;quot;, a committed writer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T09:08:11.613" Title="Confusion on a topic and a request for reopening?" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2988" CreationDate="2012-08-23T00:03:32.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, we discourage straight translation questions on this site.  It is a slippery slope and we are pretty quick to close questions that are just a matter of how to translate a word or phrase into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have noticed other questions that probably (justifiably) seem like translation questions, relating to how particular concepts or idioms might be expressed in English.  These questions can be engaging and useful, as long as they fulfill certain criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions at their core should be single-word-requests or phrase-requests, in which the OP expresses the concept or idiom they are seeking.  The language of origin should only be a secondary consideration.  Because of this requirement, they must also fit the criteria for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single word request&lt;/a&gt; or phrase request (which is essentially the same as a single word request).  The language of origin can help to fill in the context somewhat, and personally I think it goes a long way toward making these types of questions more interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question must be squarely aimed at finding a word or phrase for a concept or idiom that you can define clearly in context in English.  We will not entertain questions about how to improve Google Translated texts, for instance.  But questions like yours have lead us to some wonderful new phrases like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30115/is-there-an-english-phrase-for-an-inability-to-actually-leave-already&quot;&gt;conversational dieseling&lt;/a&gt;, and so long as they are carefully constructed, they are welcomed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-08-23T00:03:32.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2988" CreationDate="2012-08-23T02:09:53.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a mistake, subsequently corrected. The question was returned to ELU, and will probably get re-opened (it already has 4 votes, and only needs 1 more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know (or care) who migrated and closed it, but I think they were all just somewhat hasty. The fact that OP happened to give a relatively well-known (or intuitively comprehensible) French term for what he described more fully in English doesn't make it a &quot;please translate this&quot; type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-08-23T02:09:53.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-23T23:35:55.477" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79331/does-the-oakland-athletics-logo-misuse-the-apostrophe/79356#79356&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; in good faith, but it's been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't see it because you don't have sufficient rep to see deleted answers, it said the apostrophe in Oakland Athletics logo relates to the fact that &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; is a modern colloquial adjective/noun meaning &lt;em&gt;of excellent quality/an excellent example&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP assumed &lt;strong&gt;A's&lt;/strong&gt; in the logo &lt;em&gt;specifically and only&lt;/em&gt; represented an &quot;ungrammatical&quot; abbreviation of &lt;strong&gt;Athletics&lt;/strong&gt; - my answer said it was a plural collective descriptor for the team (who are all &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;'s in the sense of &lt;em&gt;excellent baseball players&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people might disagree this influenced the logo designer, but why should my answer deleted? Whether intended or not, that connotation will be present for some people (not just me, I'm sure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll admit my link confirming the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; was based on searching for &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/fucking-a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;He's fucking A, man!&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but since when did ELU get that prissy? That particular search string was an obvious one to choose if I wanted the modern slang definition; why should I have to delete the expletive before posting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose my question isn't really &lt;em&gt;Why was this answer deleted?&lt;/em&gt; It's more &lt;em&gt;Does anyone agree with me that this answer should not have been deleted?&lt;/em&gt; So upvote &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question if you think it shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-08-25T05:17:36.547" Title="Why was this answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-24T11:30:42.143" Score="-7" ViewCount="9114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing Topics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good ways and bad ways of closing topics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about the spelling of the word 'vacumn'.  As far as I was concerned, this was the accepted spelling of the word 'vacuum'.  I was not alone in this belief and someone else had asked a question about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic was closed down with the comment that 'vacumn' was a misspelling, and that there were more common misspellings of such as 'vaccuum' that were not worthy of a question, let alone an open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore that if anyone wanted to find out how to spell 'vacuum' they could simply refer to a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was also pointed out by one person that I had misspelt another word, I had used an 'e' instead of an 'a'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word in which 'a' and 'e' are used interchangeably is 'Grey' or should that be 'Gray'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of alternative spellings is 'swap' or should that be 'swop'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find that the answers on Stack Exchange before the question was closed, that convinced me that 'vacuum' should be spelt 'vacuum'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I did find something on Wikipedia.  Wikipedia stated that the Latin root word for vacuum contained two 'u's'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this explanation quite acceptable.  The question on Stack Exchange was closed down before this explanation was reached.  Instead we were just left with an authoritarian response along the lines of &amp;quot;I am right and you are wrong&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting, Wikipedia stated that words with two 'u's' are very unusual in English, which explains why a variant of the spelling without two 'u's' is quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also like to ask, why the topic is listed under 'orthography' rather than the more common and understandable English word - 'spelling'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Latin vacuum (an empty space, void) noun use of neuter of vacuus (empty) related to &amp;gt;vacare (be empty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Vacuum&amp;quot; is one of the few words in the English language that contains two consecutive &amp;gt;'u's.[6]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25217" OwnerDisplayName="user25217" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-09-09T15:32:33.717" Title="How is the correct spelling determined?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2995" CreationDate="2012-08-24T15:52:00.293" Score="2" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel there is some unfriendly activity in English Language &amp;amp; Usage community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question that I'm complaining about:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79439/most-common-or-correct-spelling-of-blah-blah-blah&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;blah blah blah&amp;quot; the most common spelling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is at least 5 down vote. As non-native English speaker I can't understand what's wrong with my question where there are many similar questions (you can find them on right column).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6624" OwnerDisplayName="JohnS" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T03:28:41.120" Title="Why are there so many downvotes on the &quot;blah blah blah&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2993" CreationDate="2012-08-24T16:20:11.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;blah&quot; can be found in most dictionaries. You really don't need anyone here to open a dictionary and quote the entry for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you're not even asking about the spelling of &quot;blah&quot;, you're asking about the &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt; &quot;blah blah blah&quot;. You don't really explain why, or why you think it might be spelled differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79439/most-common-or-correct-spelling-of-blah-blah-blah#comment156806_79439&quot;&gt;the comment by Mitch&lt;/a&gt;, you're asking something that's determined entirely by informal usage, which means you either answered your own question (if the most common spelling was &quot;bla bla bla&quot; you'd have put that in your title) or the answer depends on where you are / who you're talking to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that if you explained the source of your confusion this question would make more sense, but as it stands there's really nothing we can tell you that adds to what you (presumably) already know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T16:20:11.153" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2993" CreationDate="2012-08-24T16:27:06.073" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that you felt the reaction to your question was confrontational.  I don't think the commentary was intended to be unfriendly, although I can see how the downvotes in conjunction with the comments gave it that appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't generally field spelling questions like this, and the comments were intended to elicit enough context to make your question answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Mitch said (more or less) &quot;blah blah blah&quot; is informal, so there is no real 'correct' spelling, other than perhaps what is most common.  If you are unsure what is most common, then you should be clearer about why you think 'blah blah,' 'bla bla bla,' and 'bla bla' are possibly more common than the one you chose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you edit your question to include more detail, it is possible that the community will vote to reopen it, if enough people feel that it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T16:27:06.073" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2997" CreationDate="2012-08-24T17:40:46.663" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to disassociate my ID from one particular stack exchange site (english.stackexchange) without affecting my other stack exchange profiles. Can this be done? How, if yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24700" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T18:03:00.620" Title="Disassociate ID from one stack exchange site" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2996" CreationDate="2012-08-24T18:03:00.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change the content of the &quot;About Me&quot; textarea to &quot;please delete me&quot;; then, go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help&lt;/a&gt;, and click on &quot;Delete my user profile&quot; (it is listed under &quot;Account Management&quot;). On the page you are taken, there is a form that needs to be filled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you do that, they will take care of your account. Generally, it takes some days to do that, but they will delete your account as you requested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T18:03:00.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2999" CreationDate="2012-08-24T18:04:24.027" Score="30" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was scrolling through the list of newest asked questions and noticed that only 3 out of 15 had non-negative votes for the question.  Is this just an anomaly or is the quality of the average question being posted so poor that only 20% deserve a non-negative scoring?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that with such a low success rate, many first time posters would end up being turned off by the site and never reposting if they have such a low rate of posting a successful question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the historical rate of site visits and how is this trending over time?  If it is going downward, that would not bode well for the future of this site, perhaps such down voting is a contributing factor to any such possible pattern?  Could the down-voting be handed out more conservatively and instead some of these questions be edited to make them worthy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2012-08-24T23:36:56.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T03:50:34.083" Title="Why are most new questions being downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|new-users|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2998" CreationDate="2012-08-25T00:12:51.420" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have made a very good observation.  You may recall that the last time we communicated, almost a year ago, I told you that I thought that the silent downvotes on your question were due to &quot;overzealous enforcement of the FAQ guideline that suggests that off-topic questions should be down-voted to remove them from the front page, and that answers to off-topic questions should be down-voted to discourage answering off-topic questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think this explains the accumulation of downvotes on questions that might otherwise be simply closed.  However, there has been a recent trend of &lt;em&gt;increased&lt;/em&gt; downvoting in the past week.  Prior to that, the level of downvoting was pretty consistent for months, and most closed questions were downvoted only enough to remove them from the front page (four votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mods have found this concerning and we have been discussing how to address the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that either we have a front page full of closed questions, or we have a host of downvoted users who may just need help asking their question, and either way it makes us seem unwelcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, we have new review tools and many of the 10K+ users have spontaneously started a site cleanup.  I think the excitement has created an environment of hyper-awareness to topicality and potential question duplication that has translated to a large user pool thinking that they should downvote every question that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have been asked before or that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, let me take this opportunity to remind the community that &lt;strong&gt;downvotes are really for egregious behavior or poor answers&lt;/strong&gt;.  Be mindful of a user's rep and how long they have been a member on the site before you downvote or leave a snarky comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For our voting community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you downvote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you ask the OP to clarify and give them at least one day to do so?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you edit the OP's question to include information that the OP had buried in the comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you clean up and retag the question so it was clearer and easier for other users to find (even if it was a dupe and even if it was off-topic)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the OP a new user who needs some extra consideration because maybe they can't figure out how to edit their own question, or maybe they've been overwhelmed by an overgrown comment chain?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You are not required to leave a comment if you downvote, but the site won't improve if you don't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting should be the last thing you do, not the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="2386" LastEditDate="2012-08-25T15:36:08.160" LastActivityDate="2012-08-25T15:36:08.160" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2998" CreationDate="2012-08-25T01:36:29.257" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2683/downvoting-questions-because-you-dont-want-to-answer-it&quot;&gt;most people don't agree&lt;/a&gt; - but even though I personally don't do it very often, I see nothing wrong with downvoting questions you don't think are likely to be an asset to the site in future. And at least if you downvote, you can reverse later if the question gets improved and/or you reconsider. Once you vote to close, you can't retract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gut feel is that over the 18 months I've been here on ELU, there's been a steady increase in the percentage of very basic &quot;English as second language&quot; questions. But I know it's not always easy to recognise complex issues underpinning superficially trivial questions - I learn something from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75491/what-exactly-is-an-adverb&quot;&gt;What is an adverb?&lt;/a&gt;, but it almost got closed as General Reference within minutes of being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; move forward, and I'd like to see ELU act more collectively and coherently to stake out the middle ground between those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-08-25T15:37:51.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2991" CreationDate="2012-08-25T05:17:36.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simchona said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your answer was flagged as &quot;Not an Answer&quot;, to&#xA;  which I responded by deleting. Your answer&#xA;  didn't really say whether or not the apostrophe&#xA;  was misused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the answer in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It means each and every one of the team is an &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; - as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/fucking-a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;He's fucking &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;, man!&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew Grimm commented on the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wasn't the original person who downvoted and&#xA;  flagged for deletion. However, this is not a serious&#xA;  answer - it's a joke, and ought to be a comment.&#xA;  That this non-answer had profanity in it may not&#xA;  have helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, th eanswer was very short and your question here includes more explanation that I think would have been useful in the original answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the&#xA;  apostrophe in Oakland Athletics logo relates to&#xA;  the fact that A is a modern colloquial adjective/ noun meaning of excellent quality/an excellent example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The OP assumed A's in the logo specifically and only represented an &quot;ungrammatical&quot; abbreviation of Athletics - my answer said it was a plural collective descriptor for the team (who are&#xA;  all A's in the sense of excellent baseball players). ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2012-08-25T05:17:36.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-25T09:35:46.140" Score="-2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there was a place to report instances of overzealous downvoting, maybe the admins could initiate some action. Is there such a place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="669" LastActivityDate="2012-08-25T11:49:03.723" Title="Is there a place to report overzealous downvoting?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2998" CreationDate="2012-08-25T10:45:05.700" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can remember having a distinct thought yesterday, about how there seemed to be a dearth of good questions, and a rash of some very bad ones.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;Good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; are subjective, so, to save time, you can read my thoughts about &quot;good&quot; questions by looking at my profile; I've already written about it there.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe this is a matter of experts vs. enthusiasts, or EL&amp;amp;U being a &quot;negative&quot; community.  I'll pick one downvoted question from yesterday (I picked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79424&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; at random; it was the first one I picked, and it will serve my purposes just fine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XFmII.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the thoughts that run through my mind as I read this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yet another &lt;em&gt;which-one-of-these-prepositions-should-I-use&lt;/em&gt; questions?  Sigh.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is this person putting a space before each question mark?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Or, each one gives a different meaning to the sentence?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is VERY bad grammar&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did this person even bother to look up these prepositions in a dictionary?  It doesn't look like it to me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where did that quote come from?  Is it made up?  Or pulled from an employee handbook?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does that quote even mean?  I don't exist until I'm absent twice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the O.P. &quot;in doubt&quot; about this?  Is it really important? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this question, in its current form, make EL&amp;amp;U a more interesting and informative place for the community at large?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How hard did this person try to research and answer this question before they posted it here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for that last question, I've conveyed that sentiment on meta before, and some people have taken umbrage at that thought.  I'll say this: I work hard on my answers.  I perform research as I write them (I just double-checked the meaning of &lt;em&gt;umbrage&lt;/em&gt; in a dictionary, for example).  I proofread, edit, and spell-check.  I do searches on the web to validate my hunches. And I don't think it's unreasonable to expect others to expend a similar level of effort into crafting their questions. (If you want to ask something trivial, and expend minimal effort, then I highly recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/ask&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo! Answers&lt;/a&gt;, where there is no downvote button!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still remember when I first read the FAQ six months ago.  The FAQ seemed serious, almost grave, and I was intimidated – I did not want to come on here and make a fool out of myself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wish some other users would feel that same sense of gravity before they started typing out a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The O.P. of this meta question said: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I noticed that only 3 out of 15 had non-negative votes for the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, maybe that looks bad on the surface.  But how many of those 12 negatively-voted questions had edits by their authors?  How many people took that feedback as an impetus to improve their question?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, how many of those negatively-voted questions were about &lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt; grammar?  How many bothered to cite a dictionary?  How many provided context, to show how the question might be based on – per the FAQ – some signficant, real-world problem? How many were about a problem that would interest a serious linguist?  Looking at some negatively-voted questions from yesterday, I find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An alleged burglar was left with a broken nose, jaw and ribs&quot;: should the sentence have been framed better to convey that the nose, jaw, and ribs were &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; broken? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79402&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When there are many of things what of the following will be correct [sic]: thing count, thing collection, ... (singular thing), or thing&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; count, thing&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; collection, ... (plural things) ?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79429&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Examples: Shop at online shopping stores. Shop on online shopping stores.  Given the examples, I hope you get the idea of what I am trying to say. How do I rephrase the sentence to better reflect what I am trying to say—while still keeping it simple and short. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79412&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what is the difference between “ forever and always” and “ always and forever”? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79446&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the most common or correct spelling of &quot;blah blah blah&quot;?&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79439&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, supposedly, the 3-of-15 statistic implies that the problem is with people who are too hasty to &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt;?  What about the problem of people who are too flippant about asking questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I've cast over 1,200 votes here, and only about 250 have been downvotes&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, so this isn't coming from a serial downvoter.  But I thought many of yesterday's questions were well-deserving of downvotes.  If we instead welcome such drivel, such drivel will become the norm.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;I understand that not everyone here is a native speaker, so I'm willing to cut some slack some occasional grammatical problems; however, in this case, all these problems had a synergistic effect, to the point where the question as a whole was just downright pathetic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Amazingly, this got 9 upvotes, to go with the 9 downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;Moreover, a good number of my recent downvotes were based on principle, as they were directed toward a suspended user who keeps asking questions despite their suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T02:32:24.293" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3002" CreationDate="2012-08-25T11:49:03.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is such a place; this meta site. But before we are overwhelmed by disgruntled questioners, I have to define 'overzealous'.  If one person downvoted a large number of your questions in one day, it's a fair bet that it is unrelated to the quality of your posts; this is 'abusive downvoting', which is banned, and should be reported here if the automatic systems don't catch it.  &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; if a large number of people downvote one of your questions (remember that they are each sacrificing a point of rep to improve the site, as they see it), that is probably a sign that the question doesn't belong here.  This doesn't mean &quot;You're stupid&quot;; it means that a site to do with English is in constant danger of being diluted to the point of uselessness, so we have strict guidelines about what questions are allowed here.  You haven't put a link to your question, so I'm guessing; but the minimum expected is that the questioner should have: checked the FAQ to see whether it's on-topic: consulted authorities (dictionaries, grammars, Google for usage), and explained how the answers there are insufficient: and put as much effort into framing the question clearly as he expects from an answerer.  If other users of the site think you didn't do this, you will be downvoted, and there is no comeback against commmunity moderation; either improve your posts (&lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; here meaning &lt;em&gt;make more suitable to EL&amp;amp;U rules&lt;/em&gt;), or find another site that suits you better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-08-25T11:49:03.723" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2998" CreationDate="2012-08-25T15:32:48.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A Survey of  Means, Meaning, and Meanness&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are all SE sites, each with data from the 50 newest questions, and sorted on mean then median.  Read-time data was gathered around 01:00 UTC on Sunday, August 26&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2012. Here’s the &lt;em&gt;tl;dr&lt;/em&gt; for those who don’t care to peer more deeply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU has a fairly low mean at rank #83/90, but if you notice who comes before us, this isn’t saying as much as one might think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU is tied for second place with Academia.SE for having the highest median.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU is ranked #18/90 in its standard deviation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU has a unique mode, with scores −1 and −2 being tied for the most votes at 8 apiece. I do not know how to sort on mode.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site                              Min  Max    Mean  Median  Stdev  Mode&#xA;===============================================================================&#xA;SharePoint                         -4    1   -0.02   0.0    0.62   46 × 0&#xA;WordPress                          -1    2    0.00   1.0    0.45   43 × 0&#xA;Server Fault                       -2    1    0.04   0.5    0.49   41 × 0&#xA;Stack Overflow                     -2    2    0.08   0.5    0.59   41 × 0&#xA;Game Development                   -8    9    0.14   0.0    2.33   17 × 0&#xA;Drupal Answers                     -1    2    0.14   0.5    0.49   43 × 0&#xA;Web Applications                   -4    2    0.16   0.5    1.30   23 × 0&#xA;English Language and Usage         -5   14    0.18   8.0    3.34    8 × (-2, -1)&#xA;Super User                         -2    3    0.20   0.0    0.72   36 × 0&#xA;Meta Stack Overflow               -14   19    0.30  -5.0    5.23   12 × 0&#xA;Ask Different                      -2    6    0.44   0.5    1.15   29 × 0&#xA;SmugMug                            -1    2    0.46   1.0    0.75   26 × 0&#xA;Ask Ubuntu                         -1    6    0.52   1.5    1.20   30 × 0&#xA;OnStartups                         -3    9    0.58  -1.5    1.78   20 × 0&#xA;Webmasters                         -2    5    0.74   0.0    1.61   30 × 0&#xA;Quantitative Finance               -5   11    0.88   7.0    3.69    7 × (3, 0)&#xA;Android Enthusiasts                -4    5    0.90   0.5    1.76   22 × 0&#xA;Cryptography                       -4    5    0.90  -2.5    1.72   16 × 0&#xA;Software Quality Assurance and Te   0    4    0.92   0.0    1.09   22 × 0&#xA;Audio-Video Production             -1    5    0.98   1.5    1.17   21 × 0&#xA;Electrical Engineering             -4    7    1.00   2.5    2.30   16 × 0&#xA;Arqade                             -6    6    1.02   2.0    2.01   15 × 1&#xA;Database Administrators            -2    4    1.06   0.5    1.16   17 × 1&#xA;Programmers                        -5   11    1.18   0.5    3.69   10 × 0&#xA;Graphic Design                     -2    6    1.20   1.0    1.61   19 × 0&#xA;Personal Finance and Money         -1    6    1.24   0.5    1.42   16 × 0&#xA;Code Review                        -1    5    1.26   2.0    1.48   19 × 0&#xA;Signal Processing                  -2    6    1.26   2.5    1.94   19 × 0&#xA;Physics                            -4    8    1.34   2.5    1.91   16 × 1&#xA;GIS                                -3    8    1.36   1.0    2.20   15 × 0&#xA;Mathematics                         0    7    1.46   2.0    1.77   19 × 0&#xA;Cross Validated                     0    5    1.52   1.5    1.42   16 × 0&#xA;Home Improvement                   -1    6    1.56   1.0    1.56   15 × 0&#xA;Unix and Linux                     -2    6    1.62   1.0    1.41   15 × 1&#xA;Philosophy                         -3    7    1.64   0.5    2.23   14 × 0&#xA;Salesforce                         -7    7    1.64   5.0    2.23   14 × 1&#xA;IT Security                        -5    8    1.68  -2.5    2.22   12 × 0&#xA;Sports                             -6   10    1.74  -5.0    3.07   11 × 3&#xA;Chemistry                          -3    7    1.80   1.5    2.09   12 × 1&#xA;Motor Vehicle Maintenance and Rep   0    6    1.92   3.5    1.25   14 × (1, 2)&#xA;Bicycles                           -4   13    1.98  -2.0    2.86   10 × 1&#xA;Writers                            -3    9    2.00   2.0    2.28   10 × 0&#xA;Physical Fitness                   -2    8    2.10   2.0    1.75   12 × (3, 2)&#xA;Stack Apps                          0   12    2.20   0.5    2.49   14 × 1&#xA;Homebrewing                         0    9    2.24   2.5    1.80   11 × 2&#xA;Bitcoin                             0    8    2.24   6.0    1.59   16 × 3&#xA;User Experience                    -3   25    2.28   3.0    4.19   12 × 1&#xA;Poker                              -2    9    2.32   2.5    2.01   11 × 3&#xA;TeX - LaTeX                         0    7    2.34   4.5    1.89   14 × 1&#xA;Chinese Language and Usage         -1    9    2.40   2.0    2.08   12 × (2, 1)&#xA;Movies and TV                      -6    9    2.40  -2.0    2.62   12 × 3&#xA;Gardening and Landscaping          -2   14    2.42   4.0    2.40   13 × 2&#xA;Mi Yodeya                          -6   10    2.58   1.0    2.93    9 × (2, 0)&#xA;Computer Science                   -4   11    2.60   3.0    2.52   13 × 2&#xA;Photography                        -1   12    2.62   2.5    2.81   10 × 3&#xA;Windows Phone                      -1    7    2.68   4.5    1.70   15 × 3&#xA;History                            -6   13    2.70   1.0    3.60    9 × 2&#xA;Board and Card Games               -1    8    2.70   3.0    2.19   11 × 1&#xA;Seasoned Advice                    -4   18    2.82   0.5    3.42    9 × 3&#xA;Personal Productivity              -1    8    2.82   3.0    2.52   16 × 1&#xA;Russian Language and Usage          0    7    2.84   3.5    1.65   14 × 2&#xA;Islam                              -2    9    2.90   3.0    2.05   16 × 3&#xA;Musical Practice and Performance   -3   10    2.96   3.5    3.03    8 × (3, 5)&#xA;Theoretical Computer Science       -5   20    3.24   7.0    5.58    7 × 0&#xA;Biblical Hermeneutics              -1    8    3.32   3.0    2.02   12 × 4&#xA;Parenting                          -1   12    3.34   2.0    2.75   12 × 3&#xA;Biology                            -1   12    3.42   4.5    2.78    9 × 4&#xA;Project Management                 -4   10    3.46   3.5    2.81    8 × (3, 1)&#xA;Computational Science              -1    9    3.46   5.5    2.33    8 × (3, 2)&#xA;Linguistics                         0   22    3.52   4.0    3.63   11 × (3, 2)&#xA;Martial Arts                       -1    8    3.60   0.5    2.08   11 × (3, 4)&#xA;Spanish Language and Usage         -2   16    3.76   4.5    2.81   16 × 3&#xA;The Great Outdoors                 -3   10    3.78   4.5    2.21   10 × 5&#xA;Christianity                       -4   12    3.82   4.5    3.04   13 × 4&#xA;Raspberry Pi                        1   10    3.98   3.0    2.40   11 × 2&#xA;Cognitive Sciences                 -4   26    4.04   2.0    4.46    7 × (6, 3)&#xA;Mathematica                        -9   17    4.06   4.0    5.08    9 × 2&#xA;Code Golf                          -3   22    4.22   0.0    5.13    7 × 0&#xA;German Language and Usage          -2   19    4.32   1.0    3.78   13 × 2&#xA;Role-playing Games                 -6   26    4.38   2.5    4.37   11 × 3&#xA;Libraries and Information Science   0   12    4.42   7.5    2.64   10 × 3&#xA;Chess                              -1   12    4.46   4.0    2.47   12 × 4&#xA;Travel                              0   21    4.50   4.5    3.24    9 × 4&#xA;French Language and Usage           0   10    4.50   5.0    2.44   10 × 6&#xA;Japanese Language and Usage         0   13    4.92   2.5    2.93    8 × 6&#xA;LEGO® Answers                       1   11    4.96   4.5    2.79   11 × 3&#xA;Science Fiction and Fantasy         0   18    5.16   0.5    4.04    9 × 3&#xA;Skeptics                           -4   90    5.88   7.5   12.78    7 × (-1, 5)&#xA;Academia                           -3   32    6.40   8.0    5.60    9 × 5&#xA;The Workplace                      -7   36    8.42   8.5    7.74    6 × (7, 12, 5)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shell script available upon email request; requires &lt;code&gt;perl&lt;/code&gt; because I’m me, and &lt;code&gt;wget&lt;/code&gt; because I’m lazy. Site list is dynamically generates as new SE sites added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Old Posting&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t believe that ELU is especially different in this compared to other StackExchange sites of its type.  In particular, both the mean and median score of questions on the ELU front page are each comparatively high, but so too is our standard deviation and the ratio of our standard deviation to our mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a curious mode: only one other site besides ELU  has a mode (most frequent score) that includes a negative score, and that is the Skeptics.SE site.  We have 6 questions at  −2, while they had 4 at −1. It makes you wonder what sort of questions they draw, and why they are like us in this regard. However, Skeptics.SE also has the highest mean of all sites surveyed, so they are different from us in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, here is the same dataset sorted a variety of ways. The primary sort column is starred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sorted on &lt;em&gt;Mean&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a bunch of SE sites’ stats as of a snapshot from a little while ago, sorted on ascending mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site           N  Min  Max   *Mean Median   Stdev   Std/Mean Mode&#xA;======================================================================&#xA;so            90   -3    6    0.46   1.00    1.30    2.86    58 × 0&#xA;wordpress     48    0    4    0.50   0.00    0.94    1.87    34 × 0&#xA;superuser     31   -1    9    0.55   0.00    1.64    3.00    21 × 0&#xA;ask-ubuntu    48    0    7    0.83   0.50    1.33    1.59    27 × 0&#xA;webmasters    48   -2    5    0.85   0.00    1.46    1.71    25 × 0&#xA;apple         48    0   12    1.35   1.00    2.21    1.63    21 × 0&#xA;dba           48   -2   10    1.54   1.50    2.19    1.42    16 × 0&#xA;physics       48    0   20    2.40   2.50    3.11    1.30    13 × 1&#xA;serverfault   48   -1   76    2.62   0.50   11.09    4.23    25 × 0&#xA;it-sec        47    0   21    3.38   7.00    3.82    1.13     9 × 3&#xA;math          48    0   16    3.73   8.50    4.19    1.12    13 × 1&#xA;arcade        48   -3   23    3.73   3.00    4.77    1.28    12 × 1&#xA;elu           46   -3   37    4.04   3.00    7.02    1.73     6 × (-2, 0, 2)&#xA;elu-meta      43   -6   29    4.37  -3.00    6.78    1.55     7 × 1&#xA;spanish       48   -2   20    4.48   2.50    3.81    0.85    12 × 3&#xA;german        48   -2   19    5.21   8.00    4.48    0.86    11 × 2&#xA;tex           48    0   28    5.35   6.00    6.20    1.16     9 × 4&#xA;cs-theory     44   -3   25    5.55   4.50    5.96    1.08     5 × (0, 4)&#xA;scifi         38    0   30    6.26   7.50    5.54    0.88     5 × (3, 4, 5)&#xA;codegolf      48   -3   29    7.77   3.00    7.77    1.00     6 × 4&#xA;rpg           48   -1   46    8.48   3.00    9.00    1.06     8 × 3&#xA;programmers   34    0   65   10.38  17.50   14.52    1.40     5 × 6&#xA;so-meta       46   -5  175   11.46   1.50   32.65    2.85    13 × 0&#xA;skeptics      46   -1   90   12.91  15.50   15.38    1.19     4 × (-1, 5)&#xA;======================================================================&#xA;Site           N  Min  Max   *Mean Median   Stdev   Std/Mean Mode&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sorted on &lt;em&gt;Median&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you sort on the median score, defined as half being above and half being below, then again, ELU comes out much better than many more frequently visited sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site           N  Min  Max   Mean *Median   Stdev   Std/Mean Mode&#xA;======================================================================&#xA;wordpress     48    0    4    0.50   0.00    0.94    1.87    34 × 0&#xA;superuser     31   -1    9    0.55   0.00    1.64    3.00    21 × 0&#xA;webmasters    48   -2    5    0.85   0.00    1.46    1.71    25 × 0&#xA;ask-ubuntu    48    0    7    0.83   0.50    1.33    1.59    27 × 0&#xA;serverfault   48   -1   76    2.62   0.50   11.09    4.23    25 × 0&#xA;so            90   -3    6    0.46   1.00    1.30    2.86    58 × 0&#xA;apple         48    0   12    1.35   1.00    2.21    1.63    21 × 0&#xA;dba           48   -2   10    1.54   1.50    2.19    1.42    16 × 0&#xA;so-meta       46   -5  175   11.46   1.50   32.65    2.85    13 × 0&#xA;physics       48    0   20    2.40   2.50    3.11    1.30    13 × 1&#xA;spanish       48   -2   20    4.48   2.50    3.81    0.85    12 × 3&#xA;arcade        48   -3   23    3.73   3.00    4.77    1.28    12 × 1&#xA;elu           46   -3   37    4.04   3.00    7.02    1.73     6 × (-2, 0, 2)&#xA;codegolf      48   -3   29    7.77   3.00    7.77    1.00     6 × 4&#xA;rpg           48   -1   46    8.48   3.00    9.00    1.06     8 × 3&#xA;cs-theory     44   -3   25    5.55   4.50    5.96    1.08     5 × (0, 4)&#xA;tex           48    0   28    5.35   6.00    6.20    1.16     9 × 4&#xA;it-sec        47    0   21    3.38   7.00    3.82    1.13     9 × 3&#xA;scifi         38    0   30    6.26   7.50    5.54    0.88     5 × (3, 4, 5)&#xA;german        48   -2   19    5.21   8.00    4.48    0.86    11 × 2&#xA;math          48    0   16    3.73   8.50    4.19    1.12    13 × 1&#xA;skeptics      46   -1   90   12.91  15.50   15.38    1.19     4 × (-1, 5)&#xA;programmers   34    0   65   10.38  17.50   14.52    1.40     5 × 6&#xA;======================================================================&#xA;Site           N  Min  Max   Mean *Median   Stdev   Std/Mean Mode&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sorted on &lt;em&gt;Standard Deviation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One area were we come up high is our standard deviation compared with that of other sites, and not unsuprisingly, also the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean.  Here is the same dataset sorted on ascending standard deviation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site           N  Min  Max    Mean Median  *Stdev   Std/Mean Mode&#xA;======================================================================&#xA;wordpress     48    0    4    0.50   0.00    0.94    1.87    34 × 0&#xA;so            90   -3    6    0.46   1.00    1.30    2.86    58 × 0&#xA;ask-ubuntu    48    0    7    0.83   0.50    1.33    1.59    27 × 0&#xA;webmasters    48   -2    5    0.85   0.00    1.46    1.71    25 × 0&#xA;superuser     31   -1    9    0.55   0.00    1.64    3.00    21 × 0&#xA;dba           48   -2   10    1.54   1.50    2.19    1.42    16 × 0&#xA;apple         48    0   12    1.35   1.00    2.21    1.63    21 × 0&#xA;physics       48    0   20    2.40   2.50    3.11    1.30    13 × 1&#xA;spanish       48   -2   20    4.48   2.50    3.81    0.85    12 × 3&#xA;it-sec        47    0   21    3.38   7.00    3.82    1.13     9 × 3&#xA;math          48    0   16    3.73   8.50    4.19    1.12    13 × 1&#xA;german        48   -2   19    5.21   8.00    4.48    0.86    11 × 2&#xA;arcade        48   -3   23    3.73   3.00    4.77    1.28    12 × 1&#xA;scifi         38    0   30    6.26   7.50    5.54    0.88     5 × (3, 4, 5)&#xA;cs-theory     44   -3   25    5.55   4.50    5.96    1.08     5 × (0, 4)&#xA;tex           48    0   28    5.35   6.00    6.20    1.16     9 × 4&#xA;elu-meta      43   -6   29    4.37  -3.00    6.78    1.55     7 × 1&#xA;elu           46   -3   37    4.04   3.00    7.02    1.73     6 × (-2, 0, 2)&#xA;codegolf      48   -3   29    7.77   3.00    7.77    1.00     6 × 4&#xA;rpg           48   -1   46    8.48   3.00    9.00    1.06     8 × 3&#xA;serverfault   48   -1   76    2.62   0.50   11.09    4.23    25 × 0&#xA;programmers   34    0   65   10.38  17.50   14.52    1.40     5 × 6&#xA;skeptics      46   -1   90   12.91  15.50   15.38    1.19     4 × (-1, 5)&#xA;so-meta       46   -5  175   11.46   1.50   32.65    2.85    13 × 0&#xA;======================================================================&#xA;Site           N  Min  Max    Mean Median  *Stdev   Std/Mean Mode&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t see that the data are showing that we are particularly hard on questions — mean, if you would — compared with other sites.  I welcome alternate reads of the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All data were gathered between 14:00 and 14:30 UTC on Saturday, August 25&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T01:38:57.710" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-26T00:11:08.610" Score="20" ViewCount="752" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of downvoting on this site without any constructive feedback. Closings are also frequent. You can see this by just looking around. As I write this question, the three newest questions in meta are addressing (in a different way) all of the downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A popular justification for the large number of downvotes is that this site is meant for serious questions about English that are of interest to linguists and language experts, but the site receives a ton of basic questions, and it's these questions that are being correctly downvoted. I see several problems with this explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvoting without offering feedback is not a nice or effective solution to the stated problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are plenty of nonbasic questions that follow all of the guidelines and still receive downvotes, and there is also much downvoting of answers, so this doesn't account for all of the negative behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When someone &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; ask a question specifically about the English language and of interest to linguists or language experts, the question gets &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79494/&quot;&gt;single-sentence answers from high-rep (5-50k) users&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2458/&quot;&gt;suggested as more appropriate for LinguisticsSE (and now apparently migrated there)&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2462/&quot;&gt;closed as off-topic (and now apparently migrated to LinguisticsSE)&lt;/a&gt; -- oh, and of course, it gets plenty of downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are tons and tons of open, answered questions on this site that are very basic, have the same exact general answer, and are currently being answered, e.g., &quot;What's the difference between [foo] and [foo with a productive derivational suffix affixed]?&quot;, so the downvoting and closing seems arbitrary or worse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I alone in finding this behavior and proposed justification to be inconsistent, not supported by the evidence, and a huge problem for the site?&lt;/strong&gt; This behavior has at least made me--after only a few days of it--not want to stick around here, despite my love of English, language, linguistics, and sharing knowledge. This site should be perfect for me, but the rampant and inconsistent downvotings and closings are repulsive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit to address some of the answers:&lt;/strong&gt; I'll give &lt;em&gt;my thoughts&lt;/em&gt; on this to see where our disagreement might be. If someone's reason for downvoting is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's not clear what this question is asking due to insufficient explanation.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, post this comment: &quot;It's not clear what you're asking. Please give more details.&quot; That takes less than 10 seconds and encourages improvement of the site's content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is poorly phrased/has lots of mistakes.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, edit the question and fix the mistakes. This could be quick if the mistakes are minor. If it's just a huge mess, I don't know what would be best. I think it would be nice to be able to flag such a question for other users to edit. In extreme cases, maybe closure or deletion is best.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is asking about something that we don't handle here.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, migrate or close. And especially, stop people from answering it (!!), as this only encourages more of the same questions in the future, from this user or others who see it being answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is asking something that I find stupid or think we shouldn't handle here.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, discuss changing the scope of the site in meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question has been asked and answered here already.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, (vote to) close as duplicate and leave this comment: &quot;I think this question has already been answered [here].&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is too basic.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, (vote to) close as general reference and possibly leave this comment: &quot;We don't handle questions that can be answered by looking in [wherever they can find the answer]. If you don't understand the answers in [wherever], please explain your confusion.&quot; Especially, stop people from answering it (!!). I also think that the explanation given on the general reference closure notice should be expanded (with a sentence or few words) to be more informative and include a link to a few general references where the question can likely be answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question falls under one of the other reasons that we already have for closing questions.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Instead, (vote to) close for that reason and possibly leave a comment sharing your objection in case it doesn't get closed or for the benefit of others before it gets closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer is very inaccurate and misleading.&lt;/em&gt; Maybe a reason to downvote. I think it's best to voice your objection in a comment for the benefit of other readers. E.g., &quot;That isn't true. A look in a dictionary or a google search will prove this,&quot; or &quot;That isn't true. There is much debate about this topic. Google 'chomsky jackendoff'.&quot; Usually, I think you should give the poster a chance to fix their answer. In extreme cases or after no improvement has been made, then I think a downvote is a very good way to improve the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post already has comments asking for improvements that only the poster can make, and the poster has had time to make improvements but has not.&lt;/em&gt; A good reason to downvote or perhaps delete (I don't know much about how deletions work).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't like the person who posted this.&lt;/em&gt; Not a good reason to downvote. Instead, discuss your problem in chat or meta if the person has been causing legitimate problems. Otherwise, get over it or take your enmity elsewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't like this question, but I can't give any rational reason why.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. Just walk away and leave it alone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't think this deserves an upvote.&lt;/em&gt; Not a reason to downvote. You don't have to upvote or downvote every single question or answer. Just leave it alone. You also shouldn't vote only to cancel someone else's vote. The net score doesn't have to represent your opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that I posted this question is because it doesn't look like people are following these practices regarding downvoting. Of course, it may be that ELU doesn't want to work the way that I have described, which is fine. But I probably don't want to be a part of the community in that case, so I want to know people's opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25056" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T12:00:11.730" Title="Is this a good justification for frequent downvoting and closing?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2012-08-26T01:55:32.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3005/2085&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for comparative data on how ELU stands up to the other 89 SE sites.   Here are the ten SE sites with lowest means, sorted on mean then median, ascending — notice how we are #8/90 in that ranking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Site                              Min  Max    Mean  Median  Stdev  Mode&#xA; ================================================================================&#xA; 1. SharePoint                         -4    1   -0.02   0.0    0.62   46 × 0&#xA; 2. WordPress                          -1    2    0.00   1.0    0.45   43 × 0&#xA; 3. Server Fault                       -2    1    0.04   0.5    0.49   41 × 0&#xA; 4. Stack Overflow                     -2    2    0.08   0.5    0.59   41 × 0&#xA; 5. Game Development                   -8    9    0.14   0.0    2.33   17 × 0&#xA; 6. Drupal Answers                     -1    2    0.14   0.5    0.49   43 × 0&#xA; 7. Web Applications                   -4    2    0.16   0.5    1.30   23 × 0&#xA; 8. English Language and Usage         -5   14    0.18   8.0    3.34    8 × (-2, -1)&#xA; 9. Super User                         -2    3    0.20   0.0    0.72   36 × 0&#xA;10. Meta Stack Overflow               -14   19    0.30  -5.0    5.23   12 × 0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you’ll notice is that all the big sites have lower means than we do, and that we have a much higher median than they do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are noticing is probably our (currently-)unique mode.  On the other hand, look at the very high mode-zero sites, where the overwhelming majority of their questions are sitting at zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the full dataset, we are only #12/90 when ranking by the lowest minimum;, meaning that 11 sites have lower minima than we do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when ranked by maxima, we come in at #17/90, with only 16 sites having higher maxima than us.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the mode, it is hard to find anything here that we stand out in.  Maybe our high median, where we are tied for second place.  But that sounds like a good thing, not a bad thing.  A high median score looks good to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T01:55:32.253" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2993" CreationDate="2012-08-26T02:30:14.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll say this: when I first read the question, it seemed inane, and trivial.  After all, our FAQ reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance, I can see why your question - about how to spell &lt;em&gt;blah blah blah&lt;/em&gt; - would be considered trivial, and hardly the right material for this target audience. It seems chatty, irrelevant, and easily answerable.  &lt;em&gt;Blah blah blah&lt;/em&gt; sounds like &lt;em&gt;yada yada yada&lt;/em&gt;; it comes across as something between baby talk and “&lt;em&gt;What-evah!&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon doing some research, though, the question turned out to be more interesting than it initially appeared on the surface.  I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/#hl=en&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=how+to+spell+blah+blah+blah&amp;amp;oq=how+to+spell+blah+blah+blah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5,000,000 or so Google hits&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;blah blah blah-with-an-h&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/#hl=en&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=how+to+spell+bla+bla+bla&amp;amp;oq=how+to+spell+bla+bla+bla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1,000,000 or so&lt;/a&gt;, for &lt;em&gt;bla bla bla-sans-an-h&lt;/em&gt;. I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordnik.com/words/blah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;blah&lt;/strong&gt; in the dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, but I found a few instances of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordnik.com/words/bla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bla bla bla&lt;/em&gt; cited at a dictionary website&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is simple and can probably be easily answered by looking it up, then you may find common online internet resources to be of some help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned that &amp;quot;I had checked it out on some online English dictionary and Google search but I wasn't able to clear it out,&amp;quot;  but you never went on to explain what you found, or why the matter was still unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given how juvenile the question appears on the surface, but how not-so-straightforward it appears after doing some preliminary research, it's not hard to understand why your question accumulated so many upvotes &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; downvotes (11 to 10 at this juncture).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote either way; I'm a bit torn on the matter.  On one hand, the question seems chatty and pointless – an idle argument between you and a friend; on the other, it has some interesting aspects that many have already discussed.  On one hand, you took the time to mention that you had checked Google and the dictionary; on the other, you never bothered to tell us what you found there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether or not the ensuing votes were unfriendly, I'll offer this advice: when asking a question that could easily be construed as inane or irrelevant at first glance, you might try offering more concrete evidence as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this is a question that would really interest us.  Had you gone on to elaborate on what you found, for example, and let us see for ourselves how this problem might be interesting – by including, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bla-bla-blaaaa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one poet&lt;/a&gt; who said that bla bla was an original spelling: &lt;em&gt;I write 'Bla' the french way...was first said in 1763 in a court room when the accusded said to the Judge ' bla bla bla' then he got his head cut off....200 hundred years later in USA they say now ' blah Blah'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the 5,000,000 Google hits seem to support my friend, I found plenty of other hits that suggest there might be alternate spellings, such as...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then that might have appealed to our collective curiosity, and warded off some downvotes. (There's no way to tell for sure, but I still think the question could have been presented a little bit better.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that you decide to eventually test my theory by presenting an equally interesting – yet slightly better framed – question sometime in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T03:28:41.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2998" CreationDate="2012-08-26T03:50:34.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes by themselves are not a problem, but they might point you to a larger issue.  I can speculate as to some potential causes, but I don't know how to validate them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Was there a corresponding uptick in bad questions?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Is there a serial-downvoter just out there causing havoc?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Is the recent &quot;Community Review&quot; system bringing more attention to bad questions than good ones on the &quot;recently active&quot; page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Are the users of ELU just reaching a breaking point of frustration with the influx of silly, trivial questions and downvoting everything even marginally off-target?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it may be a little of each, but it's the latter that I find most concerning, and is probably the most difficult to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T03:50:34.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-26T07:49:33.020" Score="6" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I have understand basic/simple/trivial/naive questions on EL&amp;amp;U are being systematically downvoted while on stackoverflow there is a hot competition to correct or improve and then answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On stackoverflow you can see many questions being edited by one of those who has answered it (I have done that), or on comments users are asking for more detail to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that on stackoverflow users search for interesting questions to answer but here user search for uninteresting questions to vote down and keep front page clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes these two communities so different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6624" LastEditorUserId="11035" LastEditDate="2012-08-26T11:22:38.963" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T11:22:38.963" Title="Why trivial questions on EL&amp;U are being downvoted while on stackoverflow there is competition to answer them?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2012-08-26T10:09:38.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a message from the community that they are doing something unwanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually no. It's the evaluation of a single user, not the community. If, at the end of the day, the balance is positive (you had 6 upvotes and 3 downvotes), there are more people that liked your question. And it's not doing about &quot;something unwanted&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can downvote your question (I never did, I'm just proposing example reasons) because there is low research effort, because I think your question is not fit for the site, or even because I wanted to. You'll always meet that kind of people, everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About your question: it's the perfect example of a borderline question that gained quality because it's full of detail and research. I think you did a really good job with it. If your question had less detail, it would have been closed. I probably would have voted too. Some people think it's still not good for the site (hence the downvotes), but look, it has 6 upvotes. The community &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; give you positive feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've received my share of downvotes too and they won't be the last ones... I just kept on posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a moderator on Linguistics SE and you said there were 0 Q's with negative scores. I think this site receives much more poor quality questions than we do. I'm not saying there might not be some bad tendency to downvote everything, rather I'm saying that it's not all &quot;bad tendency&quot;. There are also bad questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's disagreement about what is a good and a bad question, or it's abuse of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not abuse, as far as we know, some people downvote, others upvote. It's the system. But you're right: it's &lt;em&gt;disagreement&lt;/em&gt;. We cannot all agree on a certain thing. Many users have complained to me saying that their question shouldn't have been closed. It's normal, we all have a mind each. And while I understand that you wished for all upvotes and no downvotes, after all it's good that there is disagreement. It means that the users judge independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how to address the bad tendency? Well, you can't force others to do something but you can set a trend. When you see poor quality questions, go comment. When you see a good question (for you) that is being downvoted, you could ask &quot;why is this question downvoted? I think it's good because A and B&quot;... Some banal and stupid ideas, but it's just to get my point across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope it helped... If I forgot something, let me know in a comment. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2012-08-26T13:27:36.647" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T13:27:36.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2012-08-26T11:15:21.347" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alenanno posted even while I was typing.  We have some overlapping viewpoints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a comment here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To clarify: by &quot;good&quot;, I mean &quot;is encouraged here&quot; (that's the gist of what upvoting is supposed to mean, yes?), and by &quot;bad&quot;, I mean &quot;is unacceptable behavior here&quot; (that's what downvoting is supposed to mean, yes?). I have see several posts flipflop up and down with votes. &lt;strong&gt;So it seems the voting users either don't know what is supposed to be on this site or they are misusing the voting system&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvotes and downvotes can mean different things to different people. Heck, downvotes can mean different things to me, even!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user Hugo once took the time to post this graphic in a meta question, which depicts the mouseover tool tip for the downvote button:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qN1wI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what does a downvote mean?  It could mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(a) the question is hastily presented &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(b) the question is poorly written, to the point where it's confusing  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(c) the question is not useful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last one – &quot;not useful&quot; – is subject to interpretation; one man's trash is another man's treasure. I think this explains why we see some questions upvoted &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; downvoted:  it's not &quot;misuse&quot; of the voting system, it's simply two differing viewpoints.  Let's say someone asks a basic question about verb tenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the difference between the following constructions of present perfect:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - I've been waiting for you for seven years.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - I've waited for you for seven years.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might see this question, and be annoyed: &lt;em&gt;There's no real difference at all! This is a waste of time – why is this even being asked here? There are plenty of basic grammar sites that explain verb tenses.&lt;/em&gt;  Others may think: &lt;em&gt;I've always wondered about this! I can't wait to see the answers!&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way you think (and, by the way, this was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79096/have-been-past-participle-vs-have-past-participle&quot;&gt;real question&lt;/a&gt; that got +3/-5), I tend to think the question is what I call hastily presented; in other words, it shows &lt;em&gt;little to no research effort&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes downvote questions when my first reaction is, &quot;Why are you asking us this? Can't you look this up yourself?&quot; which is why I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/18220/j-r&quot;&gt;encourage users&lt;/a&gt; to include &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; findings from their research. (If we regulars are all evil vampires, including such research is like putting garlic around the downvote button.) Let me offer an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;BAD&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between a king and an emperor?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer?  Probably a downvote, and comment: &lt;em&gt;What did the dictionary tell you?&lt;/em&gt; (except, I'll bet someone else would've left that comment already, so I might just upvote their comment instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;BETTER&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between a king and an emperor?&lt;/strong&gt;  I tried looking in the dictionary, but I couldn't really find much difference between the two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reaction?  Well, at least a dictionary was consulted – allegedly – but the O.P. still hasn't told us what was found, nor done a good job of explaining why this would interest the community as a whole.  In this case, I might not downvote the question, but, in a debate on meta, I'd still probably side with the downvoters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;BEST&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, fiddlesticks, I won't even try to duplicate the question here, I'll just provide a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63039/what-is-the-difference-between-an-emperor-and-a-king&quot;&gt;LINK to Question #63039&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reaction to that? I think it's a piece of art; I'm one of the 40+ upvoters. It follows this basic formula: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let me explain why I'm asking this question.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let me ask the question.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let me tell you what I found when I tried to find the answer myself.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let me explain why I'm still confused.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, too, the reaction by this so-called &quot;negative community&quot;: 11 answers in less than 48 hours – three of which racked up well over 10 votes – plus more than 40 upvotes on the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rash of recent downvotes being discussed on meta?  I double-dog dare one of our discouraged, downvoted O.P.s to frame a question &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; well, and see what happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote to Rachel (who I believe &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; ask a very well-presented question recently): Even the emperor/king question got two downvotes, which shows that you can't please all of the people all of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T17:40:16.203" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3016" CreationDate="2012-08-26T17:15:40.517" Score="7" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are there so many meta questions about a supposed recent uptick in downvoting, closing, and/or bad questions themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, why are these questions so presumptuous, assuming that there are lots of bad questions? Or assuming that the rate of closing or downvoting is steadily increasing lately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, why aren't any of these meta questions reflecting on the possibility that their meta question is itself closable as non-constructive (speculative) or too local (depending on that one person being downvoted), offering only the existence of their question as justification for their meta post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you suppose that some of these meta questions are rhetorical? Or that some of these questions are thinly (or not so thinly) veiled peeving? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is definitely a grain of truth in the assumptions by the questions, stated as bald assertions but with little obvious self-reflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually we probably could take the energy to turn around/edit questions that don't fit our stated rules for downvoting/closing and just make something substantive out of them, but would that teach the author anything? And why do these meta questions end up eliciting really long answers that express a truth that addresses the question but that's a lot of work and probably won't be appreciated anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2012-08-26T19:08:24.663" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T16:58:13.183" Title="Why are there so many meta questions about how so many main questions are being downvoted or closed?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|closed-questions|meta|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3014" CreationDate="2012-08-26T18:04:46.110" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my take on what happened this week:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For whatever reason, EL&amp;amp;U was hit with a lot of inferior questions, all in a matter of a couple of days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many regulars in the community, somewhat irked by a flood of poor questions, responded with a flurry of downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many onlookers and askers, taken aback by the outbreak of downvotes, came to meta, to wonder aloud why this community seemed so negative and unwelcoming.  Some of these questions were about their particular question, while others were about the overall trend.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some regulars tried to respond by offering their opinion on what happened, or explaining how the community worked.  This has led to a lot of discussion about some recurring themes, like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When is it okay to downvote?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it okay to downvote without leaving a comment?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did my question get closed?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think my question is great! Why is someone calling it &quot;too localized&quot;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can someone &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; be expected to know how to ask a good question?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I did a Google search before I asked – what do you mean, I didn't do any research?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What gives with all the moderators here?  Who do they think they are?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is, by the time the dust settles, everyone will have a better idea of how the community works, and everyone will be all the better for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I answered very many of your questions, Mitch, but I think I answered the first one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2012-08-27T08:21:29.850" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T08:21:29.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3014" CreationDate="2012-08-26T19:33:26.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the interest of discussing facts rather than speculation, here's some recent data on posts and votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3uVDQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;graph of votes and posts over the past couple months&quot; title=&quot;Horizontal axis labels omitted for TRADITION&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there has been a slight increase in down-voting recently, following shortly after a small jump in questions posted. This would seem to jibe with J.R.'s observation of a short burst of poor-quality questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T19:33:26.680" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2012-08-27T00:39:02.557" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Downvoting without offering feedback is not a nice or effective solution to the stated problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure it is. Or rather, it's &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of the solution. The problem is complex - expecting one tool or tactic to be the primary or only solution would be naive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you describe a situation where very knowledgeable folks find themselves faced with trivial and poorly-asked questions, lazy and incorrect answers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part&lt;/strong&gt; of the solution is education - this is where &lt;em&gt;commenting&lt;/em&gt; has its role. Help folks learn what they're doing wrong, and they'll do better as a result. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part&lt;/strong&gt; of the solution is simply separating the wheat from the chaff, so the experts can chew on that &lt;em&gt;good, good grain&lt;/em&gt; without choking. This is where &lt;em&gt;voting&lt;/em&gt; comes into its own - by helping to rank posts according to their perceived quality, you can help separate those that are worth reading from those that aren't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: &lt;strong&gt;commenting is primarily for the benefit of the author; voting for the benefit of other readers.&lt;/strong&gt; The effective use of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; is critical to a healthy site. If you can't make effective use of one, then use the other - and respect that others may do the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2012-08-27T00:44:23.233" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T00:44:23.233" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3028" CreationDate="2012-08-27T02:15:49.537" Score="-2" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm presenting this in numbered sections so that people can &lt;strong&gt;respond specifically to what they agree or disagree with&lt;/strong&gt; (please leave a comment such as &quot;Disagree with Proposal 2&quot; or &quot;Agree with Proposal 4&quot;). I'm not going to defend or justify Assumption 1 now since I suspect it is not highly contentious and want to focus on an idea for a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assumption 1.&lt;/strong&gt; EL&amp;amp;U currently has a lot of questions that deserve to be improved. The main content and meaning of these questions is appropriate for this site, but the questions are presented poorly and could possibly also benefit from added context or detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conjecture 1.&lt;/strong&gt; It would benefit the EL&amp;amp;U site and community if more of its members could edit posts that deserve to be edited. Such posts include posts whose core content has merit. Such edits include fixing disruptive spelling and grammar mistakes; adding links and references; and adding context, supporting evidence, or details to make a question more complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conjecture 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Lowering the reputation required for all users to edit posts could have lots of bad consequences, such as lots of bad edits happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conjecture 3.&lt;/strong&gt; EL&amp;amp;U already does and should have a team of editors because SE sites are a mixture of Q&amp;amp;A and wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 1.&lt;/strong&gt; The leaders of EL&amp;amp;U should be able to selectively allow some EL&amp;amp;U members who are not automatically members of its editing team due to insufficient reputation to make edits. These members should be selected based on a demonstration that they understand what makes a post on EL&amp;amp;U bad, good, and great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have been on EL&amp;amp;U for only a few days and only have ~450 rep (101 of that from the SE network). I would gladly edit questions here to make them better because I enjoy it and think it is very useful. But I don't have many questions to ask on this site, and since I generally spend a lot of time on my answers, I don't have time to answer lots of questions. Once classes start next week, I won't have much time to answer questions at all. So I am unlikely to earn enough reputation to be able to edit questions here. (I know I can suggest edits and will be doing this more often now. See Proposal 0 below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 1.5&lt;/strong&gt; In order to focus the manually-promoted editors and avoid problems, there should be a restriction on their editing privileges, such as to editing questions only or editing posts by people whose reputation is under a certain high amount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 0.&lt;/strong&gt; The ability of users to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; edits is already sufficient for handling the editing needs of EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 2.&lt;/strong&gt; EL&amp;amp;U should add a type of flagging mechanism so that every post that deserves improvement by editing can be flagged so that the editing team can find them easily, e.g., by flagged posts appearing in a list somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 3.&lt;/strong&gt; The proposed flagging mechanism should not affect the vote of the post or reputation of the poster in anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 4.&lt;/strong&gt; The proposed flagging mechanism should increase the reputation of the flagging user by some amount, provided that the post is not already flagged. Suggested amount: +1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 5.&lt;/strong&gt; The proposed flagging mechanism should not increase the current workload of the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 6.&lt;/strong&gt; The editing team and ability to edit posts should be highlighted occasionally to make users aware of its existence and benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal 7.&lt;/strong&gt; Make the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; button on a post more prominent, possibly with a tooltip saying that editing to improve posts is encouraged. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83/reputation-for-editing-questions&quot;&gt;[Broken out into a separate question. Please vote there.]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary.&lt;/strong&gt; I have three main, unrelated suggestions: (A) selectively let more people edit, (B) add a feature to flag posts that deserve editing so they can be more easily found and improved by others, and (C) encourage people to edit things that deserve editing; the only sign that I see that questions even can be edited is the small, low-contrast, text link at the bottom of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: the two threads (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/532/thresholds-for-tag-wiki-editing-set-too-high&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83/reputation-for-editing-questions&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) that I found related to relaxing the editing requirements were generally in favor of it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25056" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T20:37:37.433" Title="Proposals: EL&amp;U needs more users to improve questions by editing and some ideas to achieve this" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3019" CreationDate="2012-08-27T03:10:38.407" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I applaud the goal of more editing, and I'm &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; happy to see suggestions for how we can encourage &lt;em&gt;improvement&lt;/em&gt; over &lt;em&gt;rejection&lt;/em&gt; - however I feel your suggestion is just adding bureaucracy with little hope for an increase in actual &lt;em&gt;editing&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider two common scenarios that cry out for editing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Correctable by readers:&lt;/strong&gt; this includes ambiguous, poorly-formatted, or otherwise poorly-written questions. A savvy reader may jump in and provide corrections (which may then be vetted by the original author) at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Correctable by the author:&lt;/strong&gt; This includes everything in #1, with the addition of questions that are missing critical details or context, without which they cannot be reliably interpreted. A reader might &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; and then supply this guess as an edit - but without this leap of faith, only the original author can correct its deficiencies. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Properly flagging #1 would require the flagger to accurately identify the problems with the post prior to flagging. At this point, the flagger possesses the bulk of the knowledge needed to correct the post. He could, I suppose, be provided with a place to record this information so as to make the work of the eventual editor lighter - however, it would be far better if he simply made the corrections himself rather than introducing an additional delay between his raising the flag and the eventual edit. With the availability of suggested edits, this is both quick and easy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging #2 would accomplish little or nothing over simply leaving a comment on the post itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that EL&amp;amp;U does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have a very high volume of suggested edits at present, and could probably handle a significantly larger volume with ease. I suspect the true solution here is simply education: encouraging folks currently decrying the down-votes or closures meeting new questions to step up and improve them rather than sitting by in frustration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2012-08-27T03:17:34.837" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T03:17:34.837" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-27T04:50:45.820" Score="-4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was separated from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3019/proposals-elu-needs-more-users-to-improve-questions-by-editing-and-some-ideas&quot;&gt;another meta-question&lt;/a&gt;, which might provide additional motivation and context for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation.&lt;/strong&gt; EL&amp;amp;U currently has a lot of questions that deserve to be improved. The main content and meaning of these questions is appropriate for this site, but the questions are presented poorly and could possibly also benefit from added context or detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since SE sites are part-wiki and the posts belong to the community, it would benefit the EL&amp;amp;U site and community if more of its members edited or suggested edits to posts that deserve to be edited. Such posts include posts whose core content has merit. Such edits include fixing disruptive spelling and grammar mistakes; adding links and references; and adding context, supporting evidence, or details to make a question more complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U could encourage users to edit and suggest edits to posts that deserve editing by making the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; link more prominent. Currently, the only sign that I see that posts even &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be edited is the small, low-contrast, text link at the bottom of a post. It is &lt;em&gt;the smallest&lt;/em&gt; thing on the post, alongside &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt;, etc. Compare this to, e.g., the prominence of the voting buttons. Unless a user has read somewhere that editing is allowed and encouraged on SE sites, they are unlikely to know this. At least, the edit button does not give this impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am providing this motivation purely to give context and my own personal reasons for why I would like to see the following proposal implemented. But the motivation is inessential to my proposal. &lt;strong&gt;Please vote on the proposal only and not on the motivation.&lt;/strong&gt; My question is solely about whether or not people support the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal.&lt;/strong&gt; Increase the prominence of the link to edit (and suggest edits) a post. This could be done by increasing the color-contrast or size or by changing the placement of the link. For example, it could be highlighted by changing its background color or relocated to directly beneath the voting or favoriting buttons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first personal thought is to move it to below the voting buttons, but I have not debated this idea much yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondarily, I think that it would also be helpful to have a tooltip saying something like &quot;Improvements are encouraged!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit to include examples.&lt;/strong&gt; I changed the html in an example page and took a picture of the results in my browser. These changes all required less than one line of code. The color choice is not optimal since I couldn't match exactly the site's color scheme by guessing quickly. These are just examples to give a general idea. &lt;strong&gt;I think these examples could all be tweaked to be better!&lt;/strong&gt; I captured a large area of the page to give a better sense of the overall impact of the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added comments to this question for the purpose of voting on a particular change to make, if you support making a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the bye, I also suggested edits to this question that have not yet been reviewed! :^)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option &lt;strong&gt;Move&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OvqXB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Relocate to be near voting buttons.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option &lt;strong&gt;Make bigger&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QviYY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Increase font size.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option &lt;strong&gt;Change color&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y7J3f.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Change color.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25056" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T22:22:26.890" Title="Increase the prominence of the editing link to encourage improvement of EL&amp;U's content" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3019" CreationDate="2012-08-27T08:57:59.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disagree with the proposal at large. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I migrated to the Stack Exchange from other similar communities (such as Yahoo! Answers, Answers.com and AnswerBag) because the questions tended to be higher quality, less flippant, and more scholarly.  I believe downvotes are one mechanism whereby the community can police itself, and retain a high degree of quality.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is a simple edit better than a downvote?&lt;/strong&gt;  Of course.  In fact, I'm the author of the maxim, &lt;em&gt;if you have the credit, make the edit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does that mean every bad question can be fixed with an edit instead of a downvote?&lt;/strong&gt; I think that's a naïve viewpoint.  Anyone coming into this community to ask a question is responsible for following the FAQ.  If they fall short, they risk getting downvoted.  If that bothers them, I've already suggested three other places where they can probably get an answer to their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Might not that drive some people away from staying here?&lt;/strong&gt;  Perhaps; but, if they are that unwilling to improve their own work, I'd rather not have them here anyway.  I come here to expand my intellect, not babysit a bunch of whining, insecure people who want us to spend 20 minutes explaining some trivial matter to them, after spending all of two minutes trying to figure it out on their own, who run off to meta in a huff as soon as the second downvote hits their reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, in case that sounded cold-hearted and curmudgeonly, here are my stats as of today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;550&lt;/strong&gt; Answers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;318&lt;/strong&gt; Revisions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;1449&lt;/strong&gt; Comments&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;937&lt;/strong&gt; Upvotes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;177&lt;/strong&gt; Downvotes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;94&lt;/strong&gt; Closure Votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With those numbers, I hardly think of myself as a serial downvoter with an &lt;em&gt;off-with-their-head&lt;/em&gt; attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T08:57:59.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3025" CreationDate="2012-08-27T09:47:04.473" Score="15" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been away for a while and last night I checked the results of the elections, which I followed with interest and in which I voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I congratulate KitFox and Simchona on their election and I hope they will continue to do a good job on this site. I'm sure that all the other worthy candidates who were in excess of the number of available positions will be as actively present on EL&amp;amp;U as they were before. This site may certainly profit from the active participation of all its members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was quite surprised at noticing the statistics connected with the present elections. As we can read in the historical record, &lt;em&gt;&quot;2,698 voters were eligible, 604 visited the site during the election, 695 visited the election page, and 137 voted&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which means that the voters were a mere 19.7% of those who visited the election page and an absurdly low 5% of the eligible ones. If you compare these figures to the ones referring to last year's elections (&lt;em&gt;&quot;654 voters were eligible, 150 visited the election, and 101 voted&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), you get respectively 67.33% and 15.44%. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely the number of people who visit the site has increased a lot since last year and it necessarily includes people who are only mildly interested in taking part in the running of the site. This could also mirror the general disillusionment for elections (just think of the percentages of voters for political elections in most countries). However, I was wondering whether there might be other reasons which could explain this lack of interest and participation in a democratic process. Perhaps it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; perceived as a democratic site? Perhaps some members resented a certain degree of aggressiveness (or &lt;em&gt;unfriendly behaviour&lt;/em&gt;, if you prefer) which was palpable in some of the exchanges posted. Or it may be a form of protest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Last night I posted this text in the already existing pre-election discussion (&lt;em&gt;2012 Community Moderator Election&lt;/em&gt;), but I've been advised to make it a real question as to get people talk about the subject. I suppose the other text should be removed, or merged with this one. I'm open to suggestions.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19875" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T01:43:10.573" Title="Why did so few people vote in the 2012 elections for moderators?" Tags="|discussion|election|site|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3023" CreationDate="2012-08-27T12:36:19.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2,698 voters were eligible, 604 visited the site during the election, 695 visited the election page, and 137 voted&quot;, which means that the voters were a mere 19.7% of those who visited the election page and an absurdly low 5% of the eligible ones. If you compare these figures to the ones referring to last year's elections (&quot;654 voters were eligible, 150 visited the election, and 101 voted&quot;), you get respectively 67.33% and 15.44%. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get 67%; I get 150/654=22.9%, which isn't &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that different from 19.7%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The figures are compatible with a large increase in “drive-by” users: of the 2044 additional voters, only 36 were committed enough to visit the site and vote in the relevant period. There are other interpretations of the figures, as you point out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone thought the site was undemocratic and wanted to change that, they should stand and say so &amp;mdash; preferably pointing out any shortcomings in a way which does not alienate. In fact we did have one such candidate this year, although he seemed to go out of his way to upset applecarts. Democracy works if everyone takes part; by excluding themselves on the grounds that the site is “undemocratic”, non-voters only perpetuate the [perceived] situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T12:36:19.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3023" CreationDate="2012-08-27T15:19:53.313" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No disrespect to those who participated in the 2012 election, but I don't think we're really comparing like with like here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be an element of increased voter apathy - the more [potential] voters there are, the less any individual is motivated to vote, since his vote has proportionately less effect on the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my understanding is 2011 was the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; ELU election, where &lt;em&gt;all three community-elected moderators&lt;/em&gt; needed to be selected/re-confirmed. By contrast, the 2012 election was simply adding a couple more to meet the needs of a growing site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did vote, and I applaud all those who threw their hat in the ring to give me that choice. But my perception was and remains that I'm reasonably happy with the way the site is managed. All I really wanted was &lt;em&gt;&quot;more of the same, please&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and I suspect many others felt that way. Effectively, 2012 was a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By-election&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;by-election&lt;/a&gt;, which usually produces a low turnout unless there's widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm fairly relaxed about the numbers. I realise this answer may take a hammering from community-minded users downvoting; those who agree either won't be here to read it, or will be too apathetic to upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not saying the reduced turnout is actually &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; - just that it's not so bad the site needs to seriously change anything. But unlike some other &quot;meta&quot; questions, I'm not comfortable downvoting this particular question just because I don't see the issue being raised as a big problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T01:43:10.573" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T01:43:10.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-27T15:25:29.813" Score="8" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which one is higher priority goal for EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being an online repository of &lt;strong&gt;high quality only knowledge&lt;/strong&gt; structured as Q/A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being an online &lt;strong&gt;utility&lt;/strong&gt; to ask and answer questions about EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both have many overlapping area but are very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view in first case quality of questions is as important as their validity&#xA;but in second case it's mainly validity of questions which is important and valid but low quality questions may remain unanswered but they are not downvoted or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this not a new discussion but probably a new way to look at it and answers can be helpful to understand how EL&amp;amp;U works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer second case (as stackoverflow is) because I think it's a missing component on web, but it's only my personal view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6624" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T12:33:37.780" Title="Quality content repository or question/answer utility?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3014" CreationDate="2012-08-27T16:58:13.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We tell users to downvote whenever the “question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful”. But frequent downvoting seems to be perceived by some commenters as bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a frequent downvoter. I wish to champion free use of downvotes. More people should use their quota of downvotes, because they make the site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvoting is my last resort when I cannot fix the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I run across a question which fits the description, I may be unable to fix it, for good reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I may not have time to do the necessary research that the OP should have done: we are currently overwhelmed by large numbers of very basic questions which lack even an elementary dictionary citation. In many such cases, the question is also simply unclear or otherwise impossible to improve. This situation is why I am currently a frequent downvoter. Support the proposal to create &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I may not have the expertise to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is off topic and so fixing it would be moot. (Note, though, off topic is not sufficient reason to downvote a question. Any &lt;em&gt;good question&lt;/em&gt; gets my upvote, even if I have to turn around and recommend it be closed for general reference, duplicate, or off topic/migrate.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are helpful, not only to the OP but also to other volunteers. This is true even when downvotes are not accompanied by an explanation. Downvotes signal the community: they draw attention to a problem that somebody else may be able to fix. I am often alerted to problematic questions when they attract downvotes, and sometimes I am able to fix the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t delay my downvote even when I make a suggestion for improving the question. My vote signals the quality of the question &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;. It is not good for the overall quality of the site for bad questions to accumulate upvotes. When a question is improved to the point where it no longer fits the description, I remove or reverse my vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hear a concern that downvotes may turn people away from the site. I hope so! In my experience first-time posters come in two flavors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those we &lt;em&gt;don’t&lt;/em&gt; want: the ELLs and the Nortonns. Earnest English language learners need the assistance of the proposed ELL site, not English.SE. Peevers, spammers, emotionally disturbed, or those who are just too self centered to read and follow the FAQ need to just go away.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want: the Rachels. Experts or experts-in-training with enough enthusiasm that nothing you do will keep them away. They'll learn from the experience and the FAQ, they'll come back better, and they'll contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T16:58:13.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3019" CreationDate="2012-08-27T19:46:46.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Explaining my downvote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Assumption #1 (there are many questions that can be saved).  I have no statistics to back up my feeling, but it seems to me that &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of the bad questions I see are general reference, off-topic, or just flat-out unintelligible.  Editing won't fix those, unless you start inventing context or guessing at what the OP &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have meant.  I'm not in favor of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the other proposals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I routinely check the 'suggested edits' queue and presumably others do as well.  Seems the current system works just fine if people would just use it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; to encouraging folks to edit, but the FAQ does so already and the &quot;edit&quot; button is pretty prominently visible.  I'm not convinced that any more reminders would be worth the programming effort.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The current 'flag' system has an &quot;other&quot; reason, so I don't see any reason to invent another kind of flagging.  However, I do think there are other, better ways to handle questions in need of editing - suggest the edit yourself, downvote&amp;amp;comment (putting it into the 'low-quality' review bucket) or just comment and leave it to the OP to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T19:46:46.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3021" CreationDate="2012-08-27T19:51:49.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess this question got spun off from the other one, so I'll migrate my answer as well :)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; to encouraging folks to edit, per se, but the FAQ does so already and the &quot;edit&quot; button is pretty prominently visible. I'm not convinced that any more reminders would be worth the programming effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that if you hang around the site for awhile and constantly see &quot;Edited by (so and so)&quot; next to posts, that makes the editing feature hard to overlook.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T19:51:49.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2012-08-27T21:03:07.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the people answering will probably know the basic meanings of the words already; I think looking them up is more for the asker's benefit, to see them, share them, and establish a starting place for people to help. I think for this purpose, the dictionary that is easiest for them to use would be acceptable, as long as it is not grossly inaccurate. When the bar is higher, for more complicated or difficult cases, I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't get objections, but it's not freely accessible. I personally like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aMain_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, which has the benefit linking to multiple languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25056" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T21:03:07.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2012-08-27T21:55:24.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally the real question about the acceptability or authority of some dictionary definition is “who is doing the lexicography?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most respected organizations doing lexicographical research are well-known groups like Merriam-Webster, Oxford Dictionaries and American Heritage. These are organizations which have been making dictionaries for decades (if not centuries) and employ trained linguists and lexicographers. Sites like Dictionary.com or The Free Dictionary are just an aggregator-distributors of lexicographic data created by others. So a citation from The Free Dictionary is not in and of itself acceptable or not acceptable, but rather the acceptability is judged by ultimate source of the data. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A search for the word &lt;em&gt;idiom&lt;/em&gt; on TheFreeDictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; gives results from American Heritage and Collins dictionaries, which are pretty reliable. Wiktionary can also have good data but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Their lexicographic methods are inconsistent: some of it is as good as any other dictionary. Sometimes it harbors undisclosed biases, and sometimes it is just amateurish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T21:55:24.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3021" CreationDate="2012-08-27T22:22:26.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, after listening to you guys here and elsewhere and thinking more, my own personal solution is to &lt;strong&gt;encourage editing by word-of-mouth&lt;/strong&gt;. (That is, the encouragement will be by word-of-mouth.) I will suggest it in comments on main and in answers and comments here when appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25056" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T22:22:26.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2012-08-27T22:40:49.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;corpora&lt;/a&gt; (Contemporary American English, Historical American English, British National and others) at BYU have useful tools. The page linked also conveniently provides links to the much larger but less reliable Google corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T22:40:49.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3036" CreationDate="2012-08-28T13:26:05.717" Score="5" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I noticed a -840 reputation in my reputation list. It lists the reputation change as below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-75     04:25   removed     User was removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-77     04:25   removed     User was removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-228    04:24   removed     User was removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-460    04:24   removed     User was removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can one remove his account from the SE? Does it cause my reputation to be removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3782" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2012-08-28T14:31:20.383" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T20:37:16.130" Title="How do we get -840 reputation in a day?" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3035" CreationDate="2012-08-28T14:16:22.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users can be deleted either because they're spammers (who usually don't vote), major abuse like sockpuppet voting (sockpuppets can be deleted) or at request. When a user is deleted, regardless of the reason, all of their votes are removed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no indication of who was removed or why. But since there's 4 lines in the rep history it probably means 4 different users were removed. All their undone votes are rolled up into one item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12569" LastEditorUserId="12569" LastEditDate="2012-08-28T20:37:16.130" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T20:37:16.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3026" CreationDate="2012-08-29T12:07:04.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a very good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the front page today, there is a question asking what books would be suitable for a learner to read. This would give useful information to those who have sufficient proficiency to be considering picking up a book, but lack the cultural knowledge to know a good one from a bad one. It was closed as 'not constructive'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same page at the same time is a question about the etymology of a word used only by actors in Australian  theatres. A curiosity for sure, but of no practical use to anyone. This remained open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These decisions make sense &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; if ELU is a site intended for academics to use  to discuss finer points of grammar and language use, a repository of high level knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is the case, it should me made clear so that learners wanting advice know to go elsewhere. Rename it &quot;Professional English Users&quot; or something. Merge it with Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not the case, and ELU is a utility for learners, then the current policy of apparently random closings really needs to be sorted out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T12:07:04.183" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3023" CreationDate="2012-08-29T13:00:12.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Newbie, I was intrigued:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;2,698 voters were eligible, 604 visited the site during the election,&#xA;  695 visited the election page, and 137 voted&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;91 more people visited the election page than visited the (main) site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm intrigued why a registered user would visit the election page, but not stop to browse the main (ever changing) content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25294" LastEditorUserId="19875" LastEditDate="2012-08-29T13:48:49.767" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T13:48:49.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3041" CreationDate="2012-08-29T21:17:09.937" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/captcha&quot;&gt;/captcha page&lt;/a&gt;'s Are you human box's right border is acting funky:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YzWmU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That weird line after Human is supposed to be the right border with the Fleur-de-lis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the issue in the three main browsers; IE9, FF15, Chrome 21.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12569" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T22:10:44.453" Title="Captcha page description box bug; border broken" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3040" CreationDate="2012-08-29T22:10:34.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put in a fix for this. It's already on dev, will be live after the next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T22:10:34.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-30T06:17:26.350" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a Chinese user and I learned International Journalism back in University, during school class, I gradually developed an intrest on translation, but there is no such language-oriented QA community in Chinese websites, so I find it quite intriguing when I find english.stackexchange.com ;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but, when I read the FAQ about &quot;what questions can we ask?&quot;, I found it forbidden asking questions about translation, I really want to know why, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can any of the admins here offer an explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25468" OwnerDisplayName="Jenny Zhou" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:43:26.007" Title="Why we can not ask questions about &quot;translation&quot; here?" Tags="|discussion|translation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2012-08-30T08:09:14.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a site meant for &lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;. If we open the door for translation, it would then be flooded with all kinds of translation questions that are not what it is supposed to be used for. Nonetheless, you may ask a question asking for a word or phrase provided you define exactly the meaning the word or phrase is intended to have. You may also ask questions about whether a sentence is grammatical provided you do some research first and show clearly what the cause of doubt is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2683" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T13:17:51.350" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T13:17:51.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2012-08-30T09:24:57.013" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;你好Jenny and welcome to EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Will said is important, &lt;strong&gt;providing research effort&lt;/strong&gt; is the key. This way, even an apparently simple question would be accepted, because it would mean that  despite this &quot;easy&quot; factor and your efforts, the question could not be solved easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that asking for a translation of a long text, it might not be the case. If you have a long translation, don't ask for all of it. Try translating it, and then come here to ask for assistance for the most hard parts, (again) provided:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you tried it yourself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you show it in your question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you give detail and context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoy your stay. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T09:24:57.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3047" CreationDate="2012-08-30T11:19:28.087" Score="5" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4157/target-vs-destination&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Target&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;destination&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, I also have the question whether to choose &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;destination&lt;/em&gt;, but in a different context. I am talking about a list on which someone enters the place in a warehouse where stuff is to be placed (&lt;em&gt;destination bin&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;target bin&lt;/em&gt;). I think neither of the contexts given in above question match my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So shall I add a comment to that question or shall I start a new one with the same title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2130" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:51:07.147" Title="Open another question with the same title when the context is different?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:43:26.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic reason we don't do translation is as ЯegDwight commented: in order to do a proper translation, you really need to know &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; languages well, perhaps even fluently. If we were to accept translation questions, we'd need to dig up experts for every single language, and that's almost impossible to do. And then we'd need to find additional expert or near-expert speakers of each language, in order to vote on answers, because you can't judge the accuracy of a translation if you don't know what the original said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30870/english-counterpart-to-japanese-signal-word-dokkoisho&quot;&gt;you&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30115/is-there-an-english-phrase-for-an-inability-to-actually-leave-already&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79201/a-word-or-phrase-to-express-ecrivain-engage-a-committed-writer&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52591/can-eventually-be-used-for-the-german-eventuell&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41472/is-there-an-idiom-that-conveys-the-meaning-of-the-french-mi-figue-mi-raisin&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79201/a-word-or-phrase-to-express-ecrivain-engage-a-committed-writer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;as long as you can state them as a different type of question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In other words, translate the word or phrase yourself — describe what it means and in what context it's used — and then ask about the part you're not sure about. For example, ask if there is a more idiomatic equivalent, or whether the word you came up with is actually correct for the intended concept (sometimes words or phrases don't mean what they sound like they ought to mean).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with all questions, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do your research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; — look things up in a good dictionary and/or thesaurus, make sure your question isn't covered in the first chapter of your grammar textbook, etc. — and, just as importantly, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;describe what your research found&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. We're not mindreaders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:43:26.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3045" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:51:07.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could ask a new question with a slightly different title, i.e. including your context. So, instead of &lt;em&gt;Target vs Destination&lt;/em&gt;, title it &lt;em&gt;Target bin vs Destination bin&lt;/em&gt;, or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your description, make sure you mention the other question and why it fails to answer your question. Also, look up both words in a good dictionary or two, and tell us exactly why the definitions aren't helping you to choose the right word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:51:07.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3026" CreationDate="2012-08-31T05:37:11.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is as much a response to another answer to this question as an answer to the question itself. The question itself is JUST FINE! The person who asked the question is JUST FINE too! Any belligerence or subtle inflections of irritability are directed, though diffusely, toward unnamed OTHERS, not toward the individual who asked the question. We are &lt;strong&gt;FRIENDLY&lt;/strong&gt; and well-disposed toward those who make sincere inquiries such as this one... if I may presume to speak with authority not explicitly granted by the voice of the hive collective, which has not, in point of fact,  granted any such authority to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any way to respond in the comments, so I'm making my entry an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, regarding Stack Exchange sites as &lt;em&gt;repositories of knowledge&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;active Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/em&gt; venues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not allege that EL&amp;amp;U is uniquely aberrant in this regard.  The same question is discussed, repeatedly, on Stack Overflow, Programming Meta SE, Math Meta SE, even Meta SO, about all the Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, about the purpose of the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is a valid concern, and goes back to the site's charter, the statement-of-purpose. The response to this has two components.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who visits a website to ask questions, in any language, knows to check the site FAQ. People who ask questions here are not always native English language speakers. However, they &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; fluent in one or more OTHER languages. They are NOT ignorant about the use of the internet. They are usually quite clever and intelligent, and often highly educated or experienced in another field of knowledge. They know how to check whether they are on the right SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; SE sites! One could posit that it is confusing, figuring out &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; is for &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;. It would be a good idea for each SE site to have a single &quot;purpose phrase&quot;, and a link to the site's FAQ located in the same position on the landing page of that site, be it beta or fully-fledged. I haven't checked, but that might have beeen implemented already. If so, then we are golden. &lt;em&gt;Fait accompli&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of Stack Exchange sites. There is a proposal for a new one, &lt;strong&gt;English Language and Learning&lt;/strong&gt; SE, in progress on the SE &quot;incubator&quot; site, Area 51 SE. That may or may not work out i.e. receive enough interest move forward, or then survive public beta. Even if it is successful, there may be a middle ground between EL&amp;amp;U and ELL that is not covered, as someone in the comment thread mentioned. That is okay, in either case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is it okay? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because SE can't cover every possible use case with an active forum of users and question answer-er's. It is already quite diverse here, particularly in nuances of English language usage. There is &lt;em&gt;Writers SE&lt;/em&gt;. There &lt;strong&gt;WAS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Literature SE&lt;/em&gt;. There is &lt;em&gt;Linguistics SE&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Academics SE&lt;/em&gt;. There &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be &lt;em&gt;ELL SE&lt;/em&gt;, and of course there &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; EL&amp;amp;U SE. All are not  exclusive to the English language, but all &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; provide some amount of coverage to aspects of it. There will be questions for which no SE site is appropriate. I think that needs to be accepted, without rancor, nor a sense of having failed any user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="4915" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T12:33:37.780" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T12:33:37.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-31T16:33:57.273" Score="-20" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your English Language and Usage - Stack&#xA;  Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24531/xavier-vidal-hernandez&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/24531/xavier-vidal-hernandez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Due to many moderator flags on your questions, we have elected to&#xA;  suspend your account for 7 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions are generally of low quality and hard to understand,&#xA;  and mostly in the &quot;please do not ask questions of this type&quot; category&#xA;  of our FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have asked a large number of questions, many of which were&#xA;  downvoted, deleted, or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There appears to be no increase in quality (your effort expended to&#xA;  research your questions and make them good, clear, and useful) over&#xA;  time between your oldest questions and your newest questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a troubling pattern, and has become abusive to our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We strongly recommend that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;read our tips on asking great questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;familiarize yourself with the markdown editing help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;look at existing questions by other users for guidance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are welcome to come back with your questions after 7 days if you&#xA;  can address the above issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regards, waiwai933 English Language and Usage - Stack Exchange&#xA;  moderator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm shocked to read such terrible e-mail founded on two false and abstruse assumptions: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Your questions are generally of low quality and hard to understand&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;You have asked a large number of questions, many of which were downvoted, deleted, or closed&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following picture shows that only 4 questions got negative votes (&quot;&lt;em&gt;many of which&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?!) and only 4 questions, incidentally the sames, were being closed; to the contrary the data show an excellent trend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 questions have been favorited;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 question has been viewed 1,417 times;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1,79 (&gt; 1) is the mean &quot;votes/questions&quot; (@tchrist has calculated that the recent current mean is negative).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the light of data, &lt;strong&gt;I ask to the community whether that e-mail is a great injustice or not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WcqVx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T07:19:14.793" Title="Was my suspension for posting low-quality posts a Great Injustice?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|suspension|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3052" CreationDate="2012-08-31T17:04:27.170" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderator messages are private, for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; protection. You're free to respond and correspond privately, working with the moderator team to resolve the problems without risking your public reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...But since you've chosen to waive that privilege, I'll share a screenshot of my own:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/547kl.png&quot; alt=&quot;xavier&amp;#39;s lowest-ranked questions, mostly deleted&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there have indeed been quite a few questions &quot;which were downvoted, deleted, or closed&quot; in the last few weeks. This is a problem: it creates a poor experience for other users, creates more work for the members and moderators who work to maintain the site, and wastes the efforts of those trying to help you learn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message you received pointed all of this out, and offered suggestions for improvement. Your response? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q3ETw.png&quot; alt=&quot;xavier&amp;#39;s response to the moderator message he posted&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T17:04:27.170" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3063" CreationDate="2012-08-31T18:07:12.977" Score="15" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;This pertains to both asking and answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Area 51 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and challenging questions, not the basic questions found on every other Q&amp;amp;A site. Your goal is to make it clear that this is a professional site.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask real, expert questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Remember, pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;ELU FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118733/would-a-grace-period-or-a-sandbox-mode-help-introduce-new-users/118764#118764&quot;&gt;an answer on Meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, if you want to come on our &quot;campus&quot; and learn with your fellow students, &lt;strong&gt;we expect users to be armed with the basics and fundamentals of the field&lt;/strong&gt;. Users who fail to meet the absolute minimum standards of a practicing professional, whatever field that happens to be (think FizzBuzz for programmers), should be helpfully directed to other resources where they can learn these things before coming back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you don't enforce some basic standards for participants, you soon won't have the benefit of any experts at all. And God help everyone on your Q&amp;amp;A site then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a non-expert, I sometimes feel &quot;out of my depth&quot; or at least ill-positioned to contribute. I consider myself an &quot;enthusiast&quot;. On this site I expect to learn and sometimes be corrected on what I thought I'd learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally dislike the amount of questions that don't meet the site's aims, namely, basic reading comprehension questions couched as &quot;meaning&quot; and please-write-my-report-so-I-don't-sound-dumb &quot;usage&quot; questions (and I've given my (voting) support to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;). The questions aren't the problem; it's that they (and the homework, non-native speaker, general reference, etc. questions) don't belong here &lt;em&gt;in most cases&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps due to the glut of &quot;softball&quot; questions, a layperson may think, &quot;I can answer that!&quot; I've seen native and non-native speakers very adamantly declare what is &quot;right&quot; and &quot;wrong&quot; in their questions, answers and comments. This raises the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80186/are-native-speakers-always-right&quot;&gt;who is right?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Question:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does not have a subscription or access to OED&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does not have access to academic journals or a thorough library / university&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is not a linguist or received a degree in English studies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is not an academic with ties to &quot;authorities&quot; on relevant matters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, if one &lt;em&gt;is not an expert&lt;/em&gt;, does one have any business answering &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; questions on this site?&lt;/strong&gt; That is not to say that one &lt;em&gt;should be barred or discouraged&lt;/em&gt; from answering. However, that person's contribution to a question and the community as a whole would seem likely to be limited. Similarly, any questions from that person may be unlikely to have value (even if they are popular, they may be trivially answered). Perhaps one in that position should stick with voting, flagging and performing minor edits to best serve the site. Would that be in line with the site's philosophy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On SO, a major goal is solving a problem. However, on ELU that problem seems rarely &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the topics in the FAQ but is instead about how to write or speak &quot;correctly&quot; (i.e. proofreading, writing conventions, &quot;which sounds better&quot;, etiquette, etc.) -- though perhaps I misinterpret the site's purpose. Does this site have too many &quot;non-experts&quot; involved where they don't belong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: These are anecdotal observations, and I don't claim my answers or questions are of value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24117" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T16:00:33.010" Title="What is the role of non-experts on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3052" CreationDate="2012-08-31T19:29:59.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You ask if “that e-mail is a great injustice or not”; I'll presume that you meant to ask whether the email does a great injustice to you.  (An email itself cannot be an injustice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among other things, the email asserts the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• many moderator flags on your questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • asked a large number of questions, many of which were downvoted, deleted, or closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the above assertions should be regarded as facts, taken as given.  (Aside: In addition to your questions with net negative vote totals,  your questions with net positive totals received dozens of downvotes.) The email also asserts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• questions are generally of low quality and hard to understand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • mostly in the &quot;please do not ask questions of this type&quot; category of our FAQ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • appears to be no increase in quality ... between your oldest questions and your newest questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether those assertions are true is much more a matter of judgment (than for the first two assertions) but my opinion is that more outside observers would agree with them than would disagree.  In summary, I think it fair to say that no injustice has been done to you in statement of the facts.  Rather than arguing with the facts, I suggest you modify your behavior; for example, see the response by Oscar Reyes about 80% of the way through &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box&quot;&gt;blog: A Day in the Penalty Box&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read the blog entry mentioned above, I think you'll find the reasons for your suspension are perfectly in accord with SO policy.  That is, suspension was not unreasonable.  But a seven-day suspension probably was not reasonable.  I think two or three days would have been better.  Suspending a user for long intervals is a blunt instrument, an inaccurate and somewhat disfunctional instrument.  In some cases it may turn the user into a worse problem than before, although of course that is not always possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T19:29:59.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3052" CreationDate="2012-08-31T19:46:20.713" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've already been given the actual stats. Yes, you've had a few highly rated and viewed questions. But you've had overwhelmingly more that are voted negatively or deleted. That is a rare accomplishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now voting and closing are for the most part done by multiple people, not by single autocrats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the temporary suspensions are done &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt;, based on number of closes, deletinos, flags; that is, &lt;strong&gt;your suspension was by a mindless process that just looked at your status.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the cutoffs and other principles embodied in that process were chosen by people. But the point is there is no single person out to get &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; in particular. The process is set up to get people with poor performance. And the features of poorness were exhibited in your status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of suspension is punitive. It hurts. But the hope is that that pain will convince you to change your posting behavior (hopefully mentioned in comments to your answers or questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;there was no 'great injustice' done. You were not treated unfairly. The process did not single you out differently from other people. Other people with the same objective behavior are automatically suspended.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T19:46:20.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-31T22:21:59.053" Score="-3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, reopen question on &quot;regionism&quot;. I improved it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professor Katie Wales, Chair of Modern English Language, School of English, University of Leeds invented the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The media regularly and aggressively promote such loaded oppositions&#xA;  (e.g. Capitalist v. Communist) and they have done the most to promote&#xA;  the idea of a North-South divide. So, by analogy with terms like&#xA;  sexism and racism, bias against gender and race, I shall propose&#xA;  regionism, bias against a region&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="24531" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T22:44:36.983" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T19:58:53.553" Title="Reopen question" Tags="|discussion|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-01T01:00:17.820" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;During my brief period in EL&amp;amp;U I found that serious discrimination is experienced by some members of this community and I called on the 'moderators' to respond with policies that address effectively neutral treatment as the FAQ state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discrimination is alive, insidious and clearly targeted at those minorities of members like me and you, the majority of whom are not native of English language or do not have access to Oxford Dictionay of English Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, people’s hopes and dreams to have a lot of points are being denied from some highest member of this community; they see no possibility of upward because of their illiteracy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members who have worked hard, played by all the rules and truly believe in the principles of the StackExchange system are trapped in isolated life with a lot of negative votes and closed questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they feel discriminated against and, ipso facto, rejected by rigid notions of standar English and 'pseudo-expertise'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern about statements made by highest members of this community has been viewed as at best unwelcoming and at worst of a crazy nature; at the contrary, I think the messages coming from the highest members of EL&amp;amp;U must be unambiguous in signaling full commitment to promoting the spirit of EL&amp;amp;U, in which improvement of questions is at first place: questions must be cultivated not rejected!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas,  that is only the vision, but not the reality of EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this light, I concluded that the particular problems faced by you and me in this community is a direct consequence of discrimination and consequently require policy initiatives targeted to address the special circumstances that they face: a broader and more robust approach  is required. Penalties for some 'moderators' should be sufficiently severe to act as a deterrent to future violations of the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the area of non-expert, for example, I believe that more must be done and can be done easily to create opportunities for all members and to transform the pourpose of the EL&amp;amp;U services to reflect the broad diversity within the entire community: linguist, expert, pseudo-expert, non-expert and illiterate people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than being considered to violate the FAQ, I think such action on the part of the highest members should be seen as essential to achieving a true vision of spirit of EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I commends 'moderators' for opening a public discussion on inclusive action policies. But when you hear 'moderators' using the terms 'NARQ' or 'GR' it sounds like a coded instruction to reject the questions; the terms conjure up misleading perceptions of privileges given to those from certain backgrounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much more also remains to be done to establish an acceptance of tollerance for illiterate members. Currently, there is a widespread feeling within the community that to become a member of EL&amp;amp;U is not sufficient for full acceptance; that acceptance will be granted only with total assimilation of unacceptable 'moderators' system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="24531" LastEditDate="2012-09-02T19:09:19.767" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T19:09:19.767" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-01T07:04:26.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a worthwhile discussion point and I am surprised it hasn't been raised before (perhaps it has and I missed it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make no claims to be &quot;an English Language Expert&quot;. I fail all four of your bullet-point tests, and I hope to slip in under the &quot;serious enthusiasts&quot; clause, as I am interested in words and the way they are used (this can sometimes be distracting during casual conversation). I have a shelf of books on English (chiefly usage and slang) to refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who, when answering (or asking) questions, explains themselves coherently, cites evidence (either with links or other references - not everything is on-line) and notes points that tend to contradict their opinion qualifies as an expert in my book. The answer may be wrong but at least it won't be groundless, and we can all learn something from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T07:04:26.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-01T11:02:41.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, if one is not an expert, does one have any business answering most questions on this site? That is not to say that one should be barred or discouraged from answering. However, that person's contribution to a question and the community as a whole would seem likely to be limited ... Perhaps one in that position should stick with voting, flagging and performing minor edits to best serve the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail your four points. And I'm quite happy to vote, flag and edit, and vote to close poor questions. But that doesn't mean that I'm not able to contribute usefully; and learn something myself. I've just received the Peer Pressure badge, which wasn't something I was trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A sites really are chicken-and-egg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and challenging questions, not the basic questions found on every other Q&amp;amp;A site. Your goal is to make it clear that this is a professional site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way of indicating that a question is not interesting or challenging is to downvote, comment and close it. Unfortunately you can't &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; under-par questions being posted &amp;mdash; or being answered. Questions should be on the topics mentioned in the FAQ; but if they are not, is that the fault of existing non-expert members who have answered questions? Or of existing non-expert members who have &lt;strong&gt;asked&lt;/strong&gt; similar questions so they appear in the questions list? I would suggest the latter; which would in turn indicate that an even more draconian approach to deleting questions needs to be taken. Is &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; desirable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sidenote:&lt;/strong&gt; It would be very tempting to suggest a rule such that you can only answer a question if {your rep} + {the questioner's rep} + {the rep of other answerers} was more than, say, 6000. That would stop new users answering other new users' questions &amp;mdash; which may be of low quality; and ensure that those who have valuably contributed to the site's ethos have an active role in continuing to do so. New users would be able to answer a question once it had been validated either with an answer from a trusted user, or by being asked by a trusted user. It wouldn't stop low-quality questions being asked, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T11:02:41.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-01T14:55:12.040" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/383/can-i-ask-the-community-to-help-me-find-errors-in-a-text-sentence&quot;&gt;Can I ask the community to help me find errors in a text/sentence?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I could let people improve things I wrote, &#xA;It won't be a long article, just part of it, like a paragraph, that I'll post in the question body, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will such thing be acceptable ? As I didn't see lot of questions like this, so asking here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T14:55:12.040" Title="Is it proper to propose a paragraph and let people revise it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-09-01T15:06:55.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="383" CreationDate="2012-09-01T15:16:53.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your question is beyond problems with word order, capitalization, and spelling, you might consider posting on Writers.SE.  They will take certain types of &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166/what-are-the-guidelines-for-asking-for-a-critique-of-my-work/167#167&quot;&gt;writing critique&lt;/a&gt; questions.  Their guidelines are very specific and do not include proofreading requests, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:03.740" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T15:16:53.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-02T02:06:23.547" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As to your qualifications, I'd vote no, no, no, and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does not have a subscription or access to OED...   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By no means would this disqualify someone from answering questions here.  The OED may be the most comprehensive dictionary available, but there are plenty of other online resources that will suffice for many EL&amp;amp;U questions.  (I wouldn't say &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;not a word&quot; without checking the OED first, but I'd have no problem describing the difference between &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; based on information derived from other credible dictionaries and resources.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does not have access to academic journals or a thorough library / university&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rare to find a question here that would require that level of research to answer. (I wouldn't mind seeing one every now and then, but, even if I didn't feel qualified to answer it, such a question wouldn't prompt me to slink away.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is not a linguist or received a degree in English studies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My background is in computer science, which matches the background of several other EL&amp;amp;U regulars.  I don't claim to be a linguist.  I can offer advice on conversational English, or do some basic research into idiomatic meanings, but I have no problem participating in a community where I'll be able to answer the questions in some cases, while in other instances I'll have the privilege of learning from others who have more expertise in certain areas.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is not an academic with ties to &quot;authorities&quot; on relevant matters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my ties to academia have helped me in this community, but I'd be surprised and disappointed if anyone else regarded such experience as a prerequisite for participating.  (Heck, if I wanted to surround myself with academicians, I wouldn't bother to visit EL&amp;amp;U – I'd simply take a walk around campus.)  Diversity is one of the best parts of EL&amp;amp;U, so long as it all remains civil – which it generally does.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things have gone a long way in helping me achieve success and acceptance within the community; your question seems like a good place to share these &quot;secrets.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I generally make an effort to avoid answering questions dogmatically, and to cite references where I've done my research.  In other words, instead of saying, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;there's no such word as...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be more inclined to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm not aware of that word... Moreover, when I checked X, Y, and Z, I couldn't find it...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That approach generally goes a long way to keeping yourself safe from those sharp &quot;go look in the OED&quot; comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)  When people have disagreed with me, or corrected me, I'd rather try to see their side of things, and avoid getting into confrontational arguments.  Even if I don't completely agree with someone else's point of view, I try to be accepting of it, and learn something from it.  The last thing I want to do here is make a fool of myself by arguing about something when I'm in the wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I've seen a lot of non-natives assume that they were being &quot;picked on&quot; or &quot;ridden off&quot; because they were non-natives, when really they were simply being obstinate about something they obviously didn't know a whole lot about.  After the first comment, had they simply said, &quot;Oh, thanks for letting me know about that,&quot; or &quot;I didn't realize that, maybe I should change my answer,&quot; I think those same folks would soon realize that most of the ones they'd assumed were being adversarial had really been allies all along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, Zairja, I've regarded your contributions here as intelligent, and beneficial to the community at large.  In fact, just the other day, I learned a new word (&lt;em&gt;enjambment&lt;/em&gt;) from one of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps I've strayed from your real question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, if one is not an expert, does one have any business answering &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; questions on this site?&lt;/strong&gt; Perhaps one in that position should stick with voting, flagging and performing minor edits to best serve the site. Would that be in line with the site's philosophy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so now I'll give my short answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a user has something worthwhile to share, then, by all means, share it.&lt;/strong&gt;  If it's not worthwhile, it won't get upvoted.  If it's distractingly bad, it'll get downvoted.  Hopefully, a user will learn from that feedback, and eventually reach a state of equilibrium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-09-02T23:49:53.987" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T23:49:53.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2012-09-02T19:58:53.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you may be too late, as it seems to have been deleted.  But before asking for re-opening, consider (as with any &lt;em&gt;Is it a word?&lt;/em&gt; question) - what answer do you want?  It is a word in the sense that it has been used (with a definition) in an academic paper: it is not a word in the sense that it is not in any dictionary; whether it does become a word depends on whether it is found useful by English speakers in the future.  None of these have anything to do with EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T19:58:53.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-02T21:23:49.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only participated in SE sites for a few months. I do far more learning than &quot;teaching&quot; and have far more questions than answers. (My profile might indicate otherwise because most people have already asked the questions I have.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some newcomers can have a negative perception of how SE operates. However, if you look at the &quot;top users&quot; it's clear that SE (specifically ELU) isn't a circle jerk but a &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;. I think there are niches in the community for all user types. The FAQ gives a good outline on how to get involved in a productive way. Nevertheless, there is a mismatch between what some users want to get out of the site versus what the site can reasonably provide. This creates friction and doesn't benefit the community. I'm not sure if it's even much of an issue in the larger scheme of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could more be done to communicate to new users what the site &lt;em&gt;expects of them&lt;/em&gt; (assuming they want to participate with questions, answers, edits, etc.)? Is such an effort worthwhile? I'd be curious to see what brings people to ELU and what folks wish to accomplish by sticking around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, it's good to know that people with a genuine interest are welcome, &lt;em&gt;so long as their attitudes and site contributions fit with the community's guidelines&lt;/em&gt;. As the &quot;summer of nice&quot; comes to a close, I hope that these guidelines will continue to be politely (but firmly) communicated to people who step outside them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24117" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T21:23:49.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-03T18:57:58.683" Score="9" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our very own &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11550/mahnax&quot;&gt;Mahnax&lt;/a&gt; has christened the relaunch of the blog with a great post on how to ask meaning questions — a topic that sorely needed expounding on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On any Stack Exchange site, a question must be tagged. Here at EL&amp;amp;U, our most popular tag is the meaning tag, with over 2700 questions filed as such. Unfortunately, this tag is often misused, and many questions bearing this tag are closed, with some being subsequently deleted. Luckily, the EL&amp;amp;U blog is here to save the day...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/09/writing-good-meaning-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Read more&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-09-03T21:25:34.650" Title="New blog post! &quot;Writing Good ‘Meaning’ Questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3069" CreationDate="2012-09-04T05:06:28.607" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an option to flag a question “it doesn’t belong here, &lt;em&gt;or it is a duplicate&lt;/em&gt;” (emphasis added). This seems to invite flags on duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday for the first time I flagged a duplicate question. The flag was declined with the explanation that “flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention”. To me this means I am being cautioned that duplicate questions do not require moderator intervention after all – I was wasting moderator time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sensitive to moderator workload, and aware that their job is to handle exceptional cases that the community cannot resolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merging duplicate questions requires moderator intervention. Surely this is why the flag option exists. The option to merge is not identified as a privilege available to a non-moderator, no matter how much reputation they have earned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even flagging an unanswered duplicate helps moderators. I have seen moderators intervene immediately in such cases before. I assume it is because closing them right away saves moderator time later by avoiding the possibility of a merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where am I going wrong? I do not want to create grief for the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T08:22:28.887" Title="Is it appropriate to flag duplicate questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3068" CreationDate="2012-09-04T08:22:28.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you have over 3k rep, you should vote to close duplicate questions instead of flagging them for mods. In fact, if you try to flag a question as a duplicate, your flag is automatically converted to a close vote if you have over 3k rep. In this instance, however, it appears that you manually entered the flag text, thus the flag was left in the moderator flag queue. Accordingly, the flag was declined since it did not merit immediate moderator attention and you had enough reputation to cast a close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that note, question merges should only come &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a question has been closed, when the community has been given reasonable time to evaluate the closure and allow the question to be reopened if the closure should not have taken place originally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T08:22:28.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-04T17:04:34.060" Score="7" ViewCount="1414" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had a lot of &quot;which preposition goes here&quot; questions.  These are by their nature very specific and localized, and are also not usually particularly interesting.  I think we need some more specific guidelines on how to ask good questions about preposition use as well as how to politely close questions that do not meet these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some recent examples of preposition questions for reference:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80609/is-it-common-to-use-between-with-the-preposition-to&quot;&gt;Is it common to use 'between' with the preposition 'to'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80412/is-of-necessary-in-all-of&quot;&gt;Is 'of' necessary in 'all of'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80389/perform-magic-to-children-vs-perform-magic-for-children&quot;&gt;Perform magic to children vs perform magic for children&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80332/reducing-degeneracies-of-from-in-fkk-transmitter&quot;&gt;Reducing degeneracies of/from/in FKK transmitter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79587/acted-in-the-benefit-of-vs-acted-for-the-benefit-of-vs-acted-to-the-ben&quot;&gt;&quot;Acted in the benefit of&quot; vs &quot;acted for the benefit of&quot; vs &quot;acted to the benefit of&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79424/for-the-current-vs-in-the-current&quot;&gt;For the current vs in the current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79372/muse-on-vs-muse-about&quot;&gt;&quot;Muse on&quot; vs &quot;Muse about&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79097/appealing-for-or-appealing-to&quot;&gt;Appealing for or appealing to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit the possibility that I have developed a bias against preposition questions.  I list the examples above not to judge their worthiness, but merely to help formulate criteria for these kinds of questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are &quot;what preposition do I use&quot; questions good questions for this site?  If not, how can we make them better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-09-06T15:45:42.340" Title="Questions about prepositions" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-04T18:02:03.690" Score="-4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the following answer being converted into a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&quot; someone said to me; but in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; I found nothing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody express a possible explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prepositions pose more communication problems for learners of English&#xA;  as well as for native speakers than any other part of speech. In&#xA;  addiction, as &quot;Nortonn S&quot; has demonstrated, there are circumstances&#xA;  when prepostions cause difficulties due to a variety of factors; for&#xA;  instance: &quot;he graduated high school in 2008&quot; or &quot;he graduated from&#xA;  high school in 2008&quot;, &quot;he never wrote of it to anyone&quot; or &quot;he wrote&#xA;  nothing about it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this light, I hope EL&amp;amp;U continues to assist their members in using&#xA;  prepositions with more precision; especially when ambiguity can arise&#xA;  or when dictionaries are not of great utility to the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T19:52:26.480" Title="Why is the following answer converted into a comment?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3072" CreationDate="2012-09-04T18:09:36.387" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3070/questions-about-prepositions&quot;&gt;Questions about prepositions&lt;/a&gt; was converted to a comment by Kit because it doesn't really answer the question she asked. The crux of her question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are &amp;quot;what preposition do I use&amp;quot; questions good questions for this site? If not, how can we make them better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which you answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prepositions pose more communication problems for learners of English as well as for native speakers than any other part of speech. In addiction, as &amp;quot;Nortonn S&amp;quot; has demonstrated, there are circumstances when prepostions cause difficulties due to a variety of factors; for instance: &amp;quot;he graduated high school in 2008&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;he graduated from high school in 2008&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;he never wrote of it to anyone&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;he wrote nothing about it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this light, I hope EL&amp;amp;U continues to assist their members in using prepositions with more precision; especially when ambiguity can arise or when dictionaries are not of great utility to the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a valid comment, &lt;strong&gt;this doesn't say whether the questions are good questions&lt;/strong&gt;. Instead, you correctly point out that a lot of users have issues with this area, and say that you hope EL&amp;amp;U can answer these questions better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that Kit found your comment to have merit, otherwise she could have deleted it outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T18:09:36.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2012-09-04T19:25:21.710" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prepositions are tricky to use and the only way to get them right most of the time is to be born in a country that speaks English. So I think it makes sense to allow people to ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a strong bias on this site towards being anti-ELL, that is, a notion that english.stackexchange.com is a site for fluent users. I don't hold to that but I can see how preposition questions might not fit that vision, and might be better for the mythical ell.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as to the questions being too-localized, I think it's beneficial to provide examples of preposition use, because examples are one of the best ways to learn them. So even though the individual questions are localized, they serve a purpose. In a sense, each preposition question is basically asking for one answer from the &quot;what are all the ways to use preposition X&quot; (but THAT question would get nuked for being a &quot;list&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My vote is to allow these questions. But we need to ruthlessly close dupes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T14:13:19.143" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T14:13:19.143" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2012-09-04T19:41:22.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I share your distaste for these questions. However, as Xavier points out, it's precisely these matters which unsophisticated users are most likely to stumble over; in a sense, they're our cost of doing business. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the most appropriate approach is to be particularly rigorous on the &quot;General Reference&quot; aspect: require posters to consult reputable dictionaries, report the definitions they found, and define precisely what ambiguity they find in these definitions. At worst, they'll go away when they find out that they're expected to do the basic work; at best, they'll learn what a dictionary is and isn't good for and raise questions which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T19:41:22.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-04T22:34:48.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't believe there is such a thing as 'an expert on English Language and Usage'.  There are certainly (both here and elsewhere) experts on etymology, phonetic shifts, grammatical rules and their construction.... There are also masters of individual dialects (whether Valley-speak or Liddesdale), geniuses who can coin a word or phrase so fitting that it crosses the Anglosphere in a few months, and journalists whose livelihood requires the use of up-to-the-minute slang.  Many of the first group are in or near academia; not so many of the second group.  But who would claim to know about all of English? Nobody I've met.  And if there isn't an academic field of study that covers 'EL&amp;amp;U', how can academic qualifications be required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly a scholar's approach is so useful as to be almost required for a respected user; define the question clearly, cite relevant references whether they support your point or oppose it, and consider the weight of the argument rather than who is putting it forward.  But nobody, surely, believes that scholarship in this sense is only found in academia? I have heard that it may even hinder your progress within the department... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T22:34:48.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2012-09-04T22:57:40.330" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; questions about prepositions.  However, too many preposition questions are irksomely similar, and read a lot like a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mad Lib&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recently found the word &lt;code&gt;_______________________ (verb)&lt;/code&gt;, but I want to know, is it better to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;_____________ (same verb)&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;__________ (short preposition)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;_____________ (same verb again)&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;__________ (different short preposition)&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which is preferred?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's it!  Oh, every once in a while, someone will try to ward off downvotes by adding this caveat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tried searching for an answer on Google, but couldn't find an answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I think such questions need to be sharply downvoted, or greatly enhanced. &lt;strong&gt;No research effort is shown.&lt;/strong&gt;  (Note: &lt;em&gt;Maybe that sounded contentious, but please don't downvote my answer here until you've read all the way to the end&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I discuss how I'd recommend fixing this question, let's create a hypothetical ELU question by filling in my &quot;Mad Lib&quot; with the verb &lt;code&gt;dance&lt;/code&gt;, and the prepositions &lt;code&gt;to&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dance to the music, or Dance with the music?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recently heard a song called &lt;em&gt;Dance to the Music&lt;/em&gt;, but I once had a music teacher tell me, &quot;You need to dance with the music,&quot; meaning, with the beat of the music. So, I want to know, which is it better to say?  Dance &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, or dance &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;?  Which is the more appropriate preposition?  Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, such questions – presented that way – are likely to exasperate a lot of ELU regulars, who won't care &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the O.P. dances, so long as the music isn't being blared too loudly.  So, what kind of research can be done, and how should it be expounded upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me rewrite the question, including some research findings this time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dance with the music, or Dance to the music?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recently heard a song called &lt;em&gt;Dance to the Music&lt;/em&gt;, but I once had a music teacher tell me, &quot;You need to dance with the music,&quot; meaning, with the beat of the music. So, I am trying to figure out, which is it better to say?  Dance to, or dance with?  Which is the more appropriate preposition?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I first used Google, many results for &quot;Dance to the Music&quot; were referencing the song, so I didn't get very good answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, I tried using Google books instead, but I found out that Anthony Powell wrote a twelve-novel sequence, called &lt;em&gt;A Dance to the Music of Time.&lt;/em&gt;  That made it hard to find good examples from those results, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both &quot;dance to the music&quot; and &quot;dance with the music&quot; returned millions of results on Google, so I don't think I can get an answer just based on hit counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if that's just two ways to say pretty much the same thing?  Or if one preposition might imply dancing in time with the beat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I looked up the word &quot;to&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, I found this definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;8) accompanied by ⇒ dancing to loud music&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While the word &quot;with&quot; had:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;2) accompanying; in the company of ⇒ the lady you were with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I couldn't figure out if those mean the same thing or not.  The dictionary meanings seem a little bit different, but I still found a lot of references to &quot;dance with the music.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not saying that &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; would be frustrated with the initial question, or that &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; would downvote the revised question, but &lt;strong&gt;I'll bet the revised question would get many more upvotes than downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;, while the initial question would not be welcomed so warmly, nor appreciated nearly as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, the O.P. should: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search for the phrases in corpuses, or in articles and books&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look up the definitions in the dictionary  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Summarize the results, and present them in the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This achieves three main objectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It shows the community that the O.P. made a good-faith effort to answer the question through their own research.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It spares the community from having to look up basic definitions and paste them into their answers, since some of that work has already been done in the question.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It clarifies where the confusion lies, so that there won't be so many &quot;false starts&quot; when people try to answer the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, one last point, for those who are stammering, &quot;But... but... but...&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;  Some will argue that there's no way for new users to &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; they should do all that. (My reply: True; feel free to post a link to this meta answer, and let them use this as a helpful guide for their second question.)  Some may argue this is too demanding, that it is too much work (My reply: Why? I do research like that when I answer questions – why should askers get off so lightly?) And some may argue that, by the time someone has done all that research, they may find an answer, so there'd be no need to ask the question. (My reply: Exactly; we shouldn't be asking questions here on the board if the questions can be easily answered using some basic search techniques).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;F O O T N O T E S&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Incidentally, I hadn't heard of Powell's series until I started researching this example question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Or maybe my last point should be &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; those who are stammering, &quot;But... but... but...&quot; – I'm not sure... ;^)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-09-04T23:06:20.053" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T23:06:20.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2012-09-04T23:52:32.737" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/168/the-overlook-hotel?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Zp38.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writing exercise chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="161" LastEditDate="2012-10-02T02:55:38.203" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T02:55:38.203" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-09-04T23:52:32.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2012-09-05T00:11:55.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most of the current distaste for preposition questions is attributable solely to one individual's perverse abuse of the SE system (namely NortonnS). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are still numerous ways that preposition questions are poorly worded. The questions should be treated not as a general problem but individually; if they are too local or general reference, then vote or flag to close. If they are poorly worded, comment and/or edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2012-09-06T15:45:42.340" LastActivityDate="2012-09-06T15:45:42.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3084" CreationDate="2012-09-05T09:46:23.330" Score="6" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the mobile site, Safari on iPhone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=test&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on the page 2 button or next button takes me to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?page=2&amp;amp;amp;tab=Relevance&amp;amp;amp;pagesize=15&amp;amp;amp;q=test&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is just a blank search page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like the &amp;amp; is being double-HTML-entitied. Only tested on English and Stackoverflow, worked fine on the latter but not the former. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25705" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T20:23:23.570" Title="Mobile paginated search results broken" Tags="|bug|status-completed|search|mobile|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-05T19:13:15.073" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;history of Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; to my mind puts to bed any argument about the relative value of open access with moderation versus reliance on the authority of &quot;experts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wikipedia was created to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia&#xA;  project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft&#xA;  articles and ideas for it. Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia,&#xA;  becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide&#xA;  range of additional reference projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone who's used &lt;a href=&quot;http://nunupedia.sourceforge.net/main.phtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nupedia&lt;/a&gt; and found it more useful than Wikipedia, please go ahead and downvote me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9186" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T19:13:15.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3081" CreationDate="2012-09-05T20:23:23.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be fixed in the next deploy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T20:23:23.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3086" CreationDate="2012-09-05T21:18:49.613" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though, I have reinstalled the windows and all the browsers  the acceptance checkmark is  still invisible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17801" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T22:05:06.760" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T22:37:51.683" Title="The acceptance checkmark is not visible" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3085" CreationDate="2012-09-05T22:04:49.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the logs, you seem to be using Chrome 21 on Windows 7 - but, uh, so am I, and I see the checkmark just fine. The only difference is I'm on the 64-bit flavor of Windows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible you're using a different browser, on a different OS, and it's spoofing the user agent - in which case I have no idea what you're using, or what could be going wrong with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nDqwl.png&quot; alt=&quot;checkmark&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until someone can reproduce this, not much I can do I'm afraid. Try a hard refresh: &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt;+&lt;kbd&gt;F5&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T22:04:49.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2992" CreationDate="2012-09-09T15:32:33.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was closed because it's &quot;general reference&quot;, meaning you could have easily looked it up in a dictionary. The site wouldn't be very useful if it was cluttered with simple questions and answers that just duplicate the dictionary, so questions of this kind are deemed off topic are removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had asked instead &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; &quot;vacuum&quot; has two &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;'s (which you seem to be interested in based on your Wikipedia reference), perhaps the question would have remained open, but that's not the question you submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1613" LastActivityDate="2012-09-09T15:32:33.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1818" CreationDate="2012-09-10T14:11:20.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this moment, the question ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/62085/revisions&quot;&gt;What is “context specific”?&lt;/a&gt;’ has exactly five edits by five different users, none by the original poster. It has apparently not changed to a CW question. I think this directly contradicts the documentation in the Meta.SO post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1819/14073&quot;&gt;cited by aedia λ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T14:11:20.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-10T20:06:02.700" Score="6" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a long time, the EL&amp;amp;U community has had a problem.  We have been unable to search for stop words (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/defs/stop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common words that are not searchable&lt;/a&gt;), which is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41/need-a-way-to-search-for-stop-words&quot;&gt;problematic since many of the questions on the site [are] about stop words&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six months ago, the SE search engine introduced a feature that, if conscientiously implemented, would give us a workaround for not being able to search on stop words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That feature is the ability to search for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; text contained within code tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theoretically, the code tags could therefore be used to enclose stop words that should not be ignored by the search engine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we have discouraged the use of code tags on the site, in part because they look ugly, and in part because blockquotes are really more suited to what we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the argument has been made that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;keywords,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. the words we use to find the particular posts we are looking for, are essentially the &quot;code&quot; of our site.  In other words, we could use code tags around words in the posts (particularly around relevant stop words) in order to improve the efficiency of searching because stop words enclosed in code tags would no longer be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, right now, you cannot easily find the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/653/what-is-the-best-way-to-explain-how-to-choose-between-its-and-its&quot;&gt;What is the best way to explain how to choose between “its” and “it's”?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; using the site search engine because &quot;its&quot; and &quot;it's&quot; are stopwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we insert code tags in the body—What is the best way to explain how to choose between &lt;code&gt;its&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;it's&lt;/code&gt;?—the question becomes much easier to find because we can look for &quot;its&quot; directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we consider marking keywords with code tags, currently keywords would be formatted &lt;code&gt;thus&lt;/code&gt;.  There exists the possibility that we can alter this formatting to something more appealing and site-specific.  The question is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is an acceptable, obvious, and standard method of marking keywords?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some suggestions have been &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italics plus underline&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italics plus bold&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italics plus dotted underline&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Small caps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Small cap bold italics plus dotted underline plus green plus blink&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave it like it &lt;code&gt;already is&lt;/code&gt; (and perhaps stick them at the bottom)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make them look like regular text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text would be tagged like it is now, by the poster or the community as we decide that it is needed for the purposes of making the site more searchable.  It might have helped &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81184/should-i-use-all-the-or-all-of-the&quot;&gt;this user&lt;/a&gt; this morning, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What says the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-09-12T20:23:58.097" Title="How would we like to format our keywords?" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2012-09-10T22:52:25.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of those who never uses &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; markup on ELU because (1) frankly, it looks ugly, and (2) it's pretty well-ingrained on the web that &lt;em&gt;&quot;a bit of typewriter font in the middle of proportional-spaced text&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is synonymous with computer code, and is thus not really appropriate on ELU. Apparently, this means that I've been unknowingly disabling the search functions every time I've used bold or italics or quotes to make a use-mention distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we are to start using code markup to highlight keywords, the formatting needs to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; scream &quot;I'm computer code&quot;, and the first step to that is to use a proportional font, not a monospaced one. It also needs to be differentiated from the existing bold and italic formatting, which pretty much means using color in some manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another consideration is that there are people who &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; used the code markup on this site, and at least some of them doubtless used it because they &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; their text to look like typewriter-on-gray. So we don't want to totally change the appearance of this text; blinking green is Right Out&lt;sup&gt;TM&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the best formatting option in my opinion would be to use exactly &lt;strong&gt;the same font as the rest of ELU&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;with a gray background&lt;/strong&gt; like the existing &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I took a look at the html that results from the two types of 'code' markup, and my concerns re:&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; appear unfounded. Backticks (inline code) apply &amp;lt;code&amp;gt; tags &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;. Four-space indents (block-level code) apply &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;code&amp;gt;. This means that it should be easy to achieve the best of both worlds: use &amp;lt;code&amp;gt; to apply a background color only, &lt;em&gt;without changing the font family&lt;/em&gt;, and use &amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; to apply the whitespace preservation as well as the monospaced font family. This would mean that people could continue to use code blocks for tabular data, while inline highlights would be much less ugly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think relegating keywords to &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; a section at the end of a post is bad idea. If people want to add a keyword section like that to the end of their posts, that's all well and good, but &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; don't like to work that much. The way I see it, this searching-in-code business would be most useful if it Just Worked, without any extra effort on anybody's part. And the way that can happen is if we switched to using backticks to mark words that we mention: instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should the following use &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we'd have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should the following use &lt;code&gt;that&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;which&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both serve the purpose of highlighting the words that are important to the question, but only the latter is returned in search results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We'd still need to train people not to use code formatting in lieu of blockquotes; most of the results currently returned by &quot;code:[stop word]&quot; searches are irrelevant posts where somebody used code blocks instead of blockquotes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-09-12T20:23:58.097" LastActivityDate="2012-09-12T20:23:58.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-11T02:07:22.733" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78715/indicating-ephemeral-questions-section-in-an-faq&quot;&gt;Indicating &amp;#39;ephemeral questions&amp;#39; section in an FAQ&lt;/a&gt; was closed as too localized. Reading the FAQ, the very first example of valid questions is for 'word choice and usage' which applies in this case. There is no reason to believe that other people never put transient info in a FAQ format. As such, why was this closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T09:50:06.840" Title="Valid question closed as 'too localised', requesting reasons for being out of scope" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2012-09-11T02:33:49.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The SE search engine ignores a finite number of words&amp;mdash;&lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;mdash;such as articles, particles, perhaps prepositions and copulae and so forth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But in many cases these &lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt; themselves are the subject of our posts, and are precisely the &lt;strong&gt;key words&lt;/strong&gt; an ELU user might employ in a search&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A cheap and easy workaround is to mark any &lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt; which would serve as  appropriate &lt;strong&gt;key words&lt;/strong&gt; for the post with code tags, which override the 'ignore' directive and include the marked &lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt; in the search&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no need to mark any word which is not a &lt;strong&gt;stop word&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no need to mark any &lt;strong&gt;stop word&lt;/strong&gt; more than once in any post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these are all true, then the issues before the community are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where shall &lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt; be marked with code tags be entered?&amp;mdash;in the body of the post, or at some place apart, such as at the end?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who shall be responsible for marking appropriate &lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt;?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How shall marked &lt;strong&gt;stop words&lt;/strong&gt; be displayed?&amp;mdash;with the&#xA;existing formatting or with some other formatting peculiar to ELU?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My votes on these issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To avoid confusing the reader, marked words should be entered at the end of the post, with the label Andrew Leach offers, as below (with or without the blockquoting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poster should take responsibility for entering appropriate Additional Keywords; but like any other part of the post, they may be added to or subtracted from by community editors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the marked words aren't in the body, who cares? Leave it as it is, and don't create work for anybody.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Keyword:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;KISS&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T02:33:49.923" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2012-09-11T02:47:51.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why it was closed, but I noticed that the question remained open for nearly a fortnight after it was asked, so I don't think that it would have received much more attention than it already did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question itself, I think you did a really good job of framing your original question. (That doesn't always save a question from being closed, but I thought it was worth mentioning that you did a good job with it.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for being &quot;too localized,&quot; sometimes the &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'm looking for a word that describes X&quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions will get closed for that reason.  (I don't want to debate whether or not that's always the right outcome, but I have observed that happening from time to time, particularly when there doesn't seem to be a good word to describe &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, &quot;too localized&quot; only means that reason was selected most from among the reasons provided on the vote-to-close screen.  (On occasion, the motive(s) for closing a question won't &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; fit into one of those reasons, and something like &quot;too localized&quot; will get chosen when a question seems, say, too ephemeral.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screen shot, to help give you a better idea of how this works.  In this example, three people have voted to close already: two picked &quot;too localized,&quot; and one picked &quot;not constructive.&quot;  I could select &quot;off-topic,&quot; and someone else could choose &quot;general reference.&quot; At that point, the question would have garnered five close votes – for four different reasons – yet the close message would only say &quot;too localized,&quot; because that option was selected most out of all the choices provided.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XtaNM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-09-11T09:50:06.840" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T09:50:06.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2012-09-11T09:38:38.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been closed because the majority of who voted to close the question thought it was not helpful for any future readers. A question on Stack Exchange site should not be relevant only for who asked it, but also for future readers. Too localized doesn't mean it was out of scope; that would be an off-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get confused from the phrase used in the description (&quot;an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet&quot;). It doesn't mean the question must be useful for most of the worldwide audience; it just means it is not thought to be useful for future readers, probably because normally nobody makes any distinction between ephemeral questions in the FAQ, and questions that are not ephemeral. The fact the question got answers that are equally valid could have had a weight in the decision for closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that a questions can be re-opened, if there are five users who vote to re-open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T09:38:38.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2012-09-11T12:40:26.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not &lt;strong&gt;treat anything already between quotes as 'searchable'&lt;/strong&gt;? That is, in the tokenizer throw out stop words as usual &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; tokenize everything that is already quoted: single, double, italic, bold, code, whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, there is no laborious editing that needs to be done by anybody by hand, no need to educate people (which will be long hard and won't benefit the writer), no annoying UI changes. There might need to be a retokenizing of all posts so far, but that is something for the developers to run once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the OP is not about a theoretical, to-be-developed feature, but just describing an existing feature (no development at SE needed at all) that allows literal searching on text between backquotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion here is that when analyzing/tokenizing is done, in the character class of 'code delimiters' which currently is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[`], &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the developers simply change it to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[`&quot;'].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2012-09-11T18:01:03.303" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T18:01:03.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2012-09-11T16:08:49.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If keywords will be listed at the bottom of a post, then as StoneyB said, who cares how they're formatted?  The current behavior is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If keywords will be embedded in running text -- that is, you're asking people to use &amp;lt;code&amp;gt; to flag keywords in the body of the post -- then you should not change the formatting at all.  Keywords are meta-information; you don't need to present that meta-information to readers. Cluttering up a paragraph with &lt;code&gt;monospaced&lt;/code&gt; text, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;over-formatted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; text, &lt;sub&gt;tiny text&lt;/sub&gt;, weirdly-colored text, etc makes it harder to read.  (Yeah yeah, I couldn't exactly implement all those examples right given the limited markup permitted here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="8816" LastEditDate="2012-09-11T16:21:10.850" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T16:21:10.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2012-09-12T19:26:15.200" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;KitFox's question includes several issues that should be discussed in separate meta questions, as noted below; but first, let me suggest we say &lt;em&gt;search-terms&lt;/em&gt; (or the gross &lt;em&gt;searchable-terms&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) rather than &lt;em&gt;keywords&lt;/em&gt;, as the latter is confusingly close to the question-tags concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issues that deserve well-couched questions of their own: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• Whether code-formatting (backtick-delimited or four-space-indented) should be co-opted to mark search-terms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • Visual appearance of user-marked search-terms [which, if OP formatting is the guide, is the main thrust of OP]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • Whether user-marking of search-terms can succeed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • What long-term changes should be made in the SE search engine or search box to better deal with ELU-relevant searching&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding that fourth issue, what would be useful to me for searching ELU would be having the top-of-page search box do a Google search instead of an SE search.  Conceivably, a user-selected formula could specify a search engine, SE, Google, Bing, etc., but for simplicity let's suppose the user's search text were tacked on at the end of &lt;code&gt;site:english.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/code&gt; and shipped to Google, as is done in the Google box on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search-tips-for-better-search-results&lt;/a&gt; webpage.  I'd prefer to have &lt;code&gt;-newest -recently&lt;/code&gt; also tacked on, as in the following three searches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?num=50&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;q=site%3Aenglish.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+++-newest+-recently&amp;amp;oq=site%3Aenglish.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+++-newest+-recently&amp;amp;aq=f&amp;amp;aqi=&amp;amp;aql=&amp;amp;gs_nf=1&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.12...214217.214217.0.218170.1.1.0.0.0.0.609.609.5-1.1.0.s6pAVIT0uzI#hl=en&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=site:english.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+%22%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cit%27s%E2%80%9D%22++-newest+-recently&amp;amp;oq=site:english.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+%22%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cit%27s%E2%80%9D%22++-newest+-recently&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.12...12568.12568.2.23222.1.1.0.0.0.0.122.122.0j1.1.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1j2.72-Gnbr5V4w&amp;amp;pbx=1&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&amp;amp;fp=a6643b7549a4f72d&amp;amp;biw=1003&amp;amp;bih=579&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;“its” and “it's”&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, about 41 results&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?num=50&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;q=site:english.stackexchange.com/questions+%22%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cit%27s%E2%80%9D%22+-newest+-recently#hl=en&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=site:english.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+%22%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D%22+-newest+-recently&amp;amp;oq=site:english.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+%22%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D%22+-newest+-recently&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.12...0.0.1.7717763.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.u6PA5zww4Xc&amp;amp;pbx=1&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&amp;amp;fp=a6643b7549a4f72d&amp;amp;biw=1003&amp;amp;bih=579&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;“its” and “its”&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, about 2 results&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/#hl=en&amp;amp;output=search&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=site:english.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+%22%E2%80%9Cit%27s%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D%22+-newest+-recently&amp;amp;oq=site:english.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions+%22%E2%80%9Cit%27s%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9Cits%E2%80%9D%22+-newest+-recently&amp;amp;gs_l=hp.12...1894.5545.0.6967.2.2.0.0.0.0.149.292.0j2.2.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.2j1.4mBNb7P-4XU&amp;amp;pbx=1&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&amp;amp;fp=a6643b7549a4f72d&amp;amp;biw=1003&amp;amp;bih=579&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;“it's” and “its”&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, about 4 results&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding that search-tips page, I should mention three problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• The &lt;code&gt;[tag] [another-tag] apples oranges&lt;/code&gt; example is unclear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • The &lt;code&gt;code:&lt;/code&gt; prefix is not mentioned anywhere on the page.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • The “Advanced Super Ninja Search Options” section should instead be called “Ninja-in-Training Search Options”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-09-12T19:37:23.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-13T06:02:26.543" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80987/canadian-spelling-why&quot;&gt;Canadian spelling: why?&lt;/a&gt; is a very poor question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been awarded 9 points, so far. Yet, I think that it is a very poor question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not attached any comment to the question because I do not want spark off an unpleasant dispute.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this question breaks the rules in a number of ways. The most obvious being that it is incapable of a simple answer and it is really an invitation to a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you respond to poor questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25217" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T03:38:33.733" Title="What is the best way to deal with a poor question?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3104" CreationDate="2012-09-13T06:32:26.573" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just been looking through the unanswered questions.  There are a number of questions there that are incapable of a simple answer.  There are also questions relating to previous questions, which is getting away from the simple question and answer format that I thought that this site was trying to keep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One type of question that I particularly dislike is:  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Is there a word for?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What is the word for?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often there is no simple word to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could find lots of examples among the unanswered questions.  One reason why these questions are unanswered is because they were not formulated very well in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25217" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T12:13:09.057" Title="Questions incapable of a simple answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2012-09-13T12:13:09.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to be careful when concluding that there are no simple answers to a single-word request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm remembering &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61535/word-for-introducing-people-without-knowing-their-nam&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt; in particular, where an O.P. – I forget the name now – asked for something very specific. A smattering of comments were left, asking inquiries along the lines of, &quot;What makes you think there's really a word for this?&quot;  He insisted there was, so I went hunting.  The next day, I managed to find it: &lt;em&gt;lethonomia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed like an unreasonable question for awhile, until I managed to unearth the right word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if a question isn't formulated well, that's a different problem altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T12:13:09.057" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3101" CreationDate="2012-09-13T12:20:24.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, not everyone feels the way you do about that question.  That's why users are afforded the rights to upvote, downvote, vote to close, and even vote to reopen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been a few popular questions that I didn't care for, either, but that doesn't mean everyone else was wrong and I was right (in fact, I'd be inclined to think the data would suggest the opposite). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But go ahead and cast a downvote if you're really that put off.  (For the record: I would never recommend downvoting flippantly; however, if a question really grates you so much that you'd actually start a meta post about it, then one downvote wouldn't be unjustified.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T12:20:24.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3101" CreationDate="2012-09-13T17:09:11.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't find it particularly bad: It shows what the OP searched before to ask the question, and it is detailed. The real question is in the last two lines of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there an article or book out there that lays out more comprehensively the whys of Canadian spelling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short the question is asking for an existing book, or article, not for an explanation about the topic. It sounds to me like asking on Stack Overflow for a tutorial about doing something, rather than asking how to do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is voting to close the question, if there is a reason to close it. For example, you could vote to close it as not constructive, or too localized. In the first case, it would be because you think the question doesn't require expertise to answer it; in the second case, it would be because you think the question doesn't help future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question cannot be closed because none of the closing reasons apply to it, and you think the question is really bad, you can down-vote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that there is an open bounty, for that question; at the moment, it cannot be voted to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T17:09:11.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3101" CreationDate="2012-09-13T23:53:55.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You posted an answer to that question, &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; that question that had been asked (#book). An answer to your question would be to down-vote and / or ignore the question altogether. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this question may be deemed as a 'poor question'. It is too basic and really isn't a question, more of your general dislike of an other poster's question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25961" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T23:53:55.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3101" CreationDate="2012-09-14T03:38:33.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with OP that the &lt;em&gt;Canadian spelling&lt;/em&gt; question is something I don't want to see here. But because it has a bounty, I felt voting to close would be somewhat discourteous. Specifically answering OP's question, I normally vote to close questions I really don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't normally downvote questions, but if it gets many more I probably will - just because it's irritating to see a question I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want getting far more votes than most of the ones I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the subject is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;more than adequately covered by Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, for those who find it interesting (I obviously don't). I'm not aware of any spelling variants that are peculiar to Canadians, but there's a whole web of overlapping / interconnecting historical and sociological reasons why they've ended up with US spelling for some words, and UK for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simply not something we could expect to cover here in a single &quot;manifestly correct&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T03:38:33.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3113" CreationDate="2012-09-16T00:29:47.770" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;The active view on the main site is no longer sorting correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XwIWr.png&quot; alt=&quot;main site clipping&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is the meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Jbcw.png&quot; alt=&quot;meta site clipping&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-09-16T03:19:13.890" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T03:31:36.583" Title="Active view is no longer sorting correctly" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-completed|recent-activity|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-09-16T03:40:36.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3112" CreationDate="2012-09-16T03:31:36.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a side-effect of our database migration. We had to rebuild a few services after it, so things were down for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should be all good now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T03:31:36.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2012-09-16T16:00:33.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The role of non-experts entails from the role of ELU. If ELU is intended to be a place to obtain expert advice, then it must have experts answering, instead of programmers or EFL teachers or whatever posing as experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the real world though, how would that be ensured? It can't be, so anybody, expert or not, can pose as one, so ELU cannot be an expert site. The question answers itself - ELU cannot stop non-experts and is forced to accept them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a better question is whether there is any way to deter non-experts, and an even better one is whether ELU really wants to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T16:00:33.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-17T02:41:16.183" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question (at least, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I posted one) about the usage of the term 'feminazi'. Where is the question? Is it deleted? What was wrong with it? If it was inappropriate, can I get a private message explaining it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked about a term that would describe feminists who don't respect others' individual freedom...for me, the word 'radical feminist' is likely to be misconstrued. I asked if 'feminazi' would be an understandable alternative, and, if not, what a better one might be.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[Note: This last paragraph was added in an edit based &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3115/i-think-i-asked-a-question-about-usage-of-feminazis#comment7444_3116&quot;&gt;off of this comment&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10063" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2024-01-12T10:51:49.000" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T10:51:49.000" Title="What happened to a question I (might have) posted about the word 'feminazis'?" Tags="|support|questions|offensive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3115" CreationDate="2012-09-17T02:51:43.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81703/is-the-term-x-nazi-offensive?noredirect=true&quot;&gt;Is the term X-nazi offensive?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21935/is-grammar-nazi-politically-correct&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;grammar nazi&amp;quot; politically correct?&lt;/a&gt;. The question wasn't deleted, but under certain circumstances, you might be silently redirected to the question that remains open. I've added a parameter to the link in this question to stop the silent redirect so that you can see your original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that a link to the question should appear on the questions tab of your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T02:51:43.597" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3118" CreationDate="2012-09-17T11:11:49.907" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;No one leaves a comment on it, just close(2), anything bad about this question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/82836/what-words-should-i-use-in-replacement-of-lazy&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/82836/what-words-should-i-use-in-replacement-of-lazy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T11:44:41.017" Title="What's wrong with this question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3117" CreationDate="2012-09-17T11:44:41.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question can be improved by doing research to try to answer your own question, and including the results in your question. That is basic site etiquette. Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and the linked document on asking good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T11:44:41.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3122" CreationDate="2012-09-17T14:27:53.547" Score="7" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent question on how to represent in English a language which does not have a word for &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; has been closed as General Reference and deleted. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81068/translation-when-someone-calling-their-self-by-name-to-english&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt; (10k only; text below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2440/what-is-a-general-reference-wikipedia-tv-tropes-urban-dictionary&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;quot;General Reference&amp;quot;: Wikipedia? TV Tropes? Urban Dictionary?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/484/common-accepted-online-resources&quot;&gt;Common accepted online resources&lt;/a&gt; and [Main site] &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt; which list some resources which qualify as General References for ELU. Different SE sites will have different General References, so I understand that the message itself is going to be vague and users will need to refer to such external lists of resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is of course the possibility that the question is off-topic, and perhaps it should have been phrased as I've described in my first sentence here rather than being presented as a translation issue. Perhaps &amp;quot;When translated into English&amp;quot; should have been &amp;quot;If I am to render this spoken sentence in English&amp;quot;. Perhaps the question should have gone to Writers.SE. But it wasn't closed as off-topic; it's General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What General Reference exists which answers the deleted question about how to cope with un-English mannerisms or constructions in English? If it can be identified then it can be added to the list in the linked question(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cultures people might call themselves by their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if her name is May she might say in her native language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May has a very important thing to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When translated to English, should it be changed to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a very important thing to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in order to fit in with common practice in English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T04:29:48.250" Title="What General Reference answers this question?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2012-09-17T15:00:42.620" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree the question is not general reference. When I did a short TEFL course there was nothing covering this sort of issue, so if people teaching English don't know it, I don't see how the question is too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be considered off topic if there is a generally accepted method for going from a language that uses a personal name for &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; to one that uses &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, because that would be a linguistics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the convention is language specific, then it's on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T15:00:42.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2012-09-17T19:56:24.167" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mr-shiny-and-new points out in a comment, the question Andrew Leach asks about is too basic for the site: it suffices to say &quot;nobody speaks that way in English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The General Reference close reason means the question is too basic for the site, but there's only one criterion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; &lt;em&gt;it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sole criterion for identifying a question as too basic is limiting. There are millions of basic errors: combinations of words that fall in the category of &quot;nobody speaks that way&quot;. Very few of these idiosyncratic combinations are likely to have been explained by a reference source. Hence most of them cannot be closed with a reason of &quot;too basic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions can be closed Too Localized or Not Really A Question; however, a categorization of Too Basic would be more helpful to the OP. It would be nice to see General Reference retitled Too Basic and described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is too basic &lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt; can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T19:56:24.167" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2012-09-18T04:29:07.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've reopened the question—it is clearly not general reference by any test, litmus or otherwise. The close reason of &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; was created specifically for EL&amp;amp;U and SF&amp;amp;F, on the basis that these sites receive an extraordinary number of questions for which uncontroversial and uninteresting answers are easily available and findable. This question meets none of those criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also quickly address the other close reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exact duplicate: no one has suggested one as far as I can tell, nor am I aware of one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic: The question is about English&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading: Not proofreading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing question: While the question is about how to write a sentence, it is not inherently one about writing. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve&quot;: no&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation: While the question rises from a translation, the question-in-essence is not one limited to the scope of translation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming: no&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literature: no&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joke: no&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not Constructive: a reasonably objective answer may exist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NARQ: while the question could be edited for improvement, it is reasonably answerable in its current form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too Localized: no&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean the question can't be improved, but there is no substantial reason for it to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T04:29:07.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-18T10:54:12.450" Score="-3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;META: I don't really understand Area 51. If I want to access 'Stack English' I can find it quite easily. &quot;Area 51 English&quot; INTUITIVE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is trying to be achieved here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I can see how it is not really working.  It is difficult to find a good boundary between 'English for Learners' and 'English Language and Usage'.  You could say 'English for Native Speakers' and 'English as a Foreign Language' but that negates some of the advantages of the internet as being a world wide communication tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps English Language and Usage should widen its remit and recognise that the majority of people who are interested in English are interested in either learning or teaching it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25217" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2012-09-18T11:38:18.170" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T11:38:18.170" Title="I don't really understand Area 51" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-09-18T11:36:31.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3123" CreationDate="2012-09-18T11:34:50.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed lately a plethora of Area 51 proposals that are very closely related to other A51 proposals, or even main SE sites.  Many of the proposals are very narrow (bordering on niche) and have little chance of making it through the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst it is important that any SE site has a clearly defined scope, in my humble opinion, I'd rather see a small number of active broadly-focussed sites than a large number of niche but dormant sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, perhaps widening the scope of this one to encompass the proposal you refer has merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as RegDwight suggests, this discussion probably belongs on A51, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5816/why-not-combine-english-language-learners-with-elu&quot;&gt;part of the ELL proposal&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T11:34:50.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3123" CreationDate="2012-09-18T11:36:14.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Area 51 is for proposed sites that are currently under development.  The English Language Learners site has not matured yet, so it is not a functioning site.  In other words, you cannot ask and answer questions there as you can on a regular site.  What you see in Area 51 is the discussion about what appropriate questions might be asked and what our criteria might be once the ELL site is launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should probably read up on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for Area 51 before you participate.  I think it will answer a lot of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T11:36:14.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-18T21:42:06.797" Score="9" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to request a sample of a certain phonetic phenomenon in English. Is it the right place to make such a request? If so, what should the title of my post be? It's hardly a question so should I force it into the form of one? If not, would it be fine to ask a question about the phenomenon and add the request as an aside? Would it be fine to request that the recording be of a person unaware that their voice is to be used as an accent sample?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added: What I'm interested in the most is a recording (or, if possible, several recordings) of the glottaly reinforced p. I would like to hear one for no other reason than a desire to learn as much about English as I can. I am sure I have heard it before, but I wasn't paying attention then, and my attempts to reconstruct the sound as I vaguely recall it haven't been successful. I'm sure I will want to ask some questions with my request, but since I don't know yet if my request is on topic on this site, I haven't tried to work my question out fully yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added even more: This may not be clear from the previous added section. All my knowledge about phonetics is self-taught, without any guidance from an experienced phonetician, so even the most detailed description may not be enough for me. I would just like to hear the sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18036" LastEditorDisplayName="user18036" LastEditDate="2012-09-18T22:23:14.097" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T08:58:13.667" Title="Is it OK to ask for recordings here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3126" CreationDate="2012-09-18T22:02:48.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume you need a recording specifically because your question cannot be answered otherwise. Then you can phrase the question thus, and suggest that a recording would probably be the best (or possibly only) way of answering it. Such a question would no doubt be welcome here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you might be surprised at what people can come up with: perhaps someone else has analysed this phenomenon you are interested in and written a detailed phonetic description in fine IPA—who knows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just post your question, with as many details and as much background as possible, and you'll probably be fine. People here usually look favourable on questions that show effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added:&lt;/strong&gt; I presume this glottally reinforced p is a feature of English? And you want to know how it is different from some other pronunciation of (the letter) p? So in which words does this sound occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are just trying to improve your pronunciation of this p sound in English, wouldn't it be better to just listen to several recordings of words with p that are widely available on the internet, like on Howjsay and Forvo? There are also websites where you can specifically practise your pronunciation of the consonants, and they will no doubt have some recordings. Then I am not sure what extra information you would hope to gain here, unless it is extremely detailed—then I think you should ask a detailed question, and it will be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for me it is not yet possible to tell whether your question will be on topic or not. If you just want a recording of something, and it is not too basic, I would formulate your title as &quot;how is the p in [words x, y, y] pronounced exactly?&quot;. It might be closed if people feel that it is too basic, I can't tell yet. But then, no kittens will die if your question gets closed, so I wouldn't worry about that. There is no punishment or anything (unless your post dozens of close-worthy questions a day).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-09-19T08:58:13.667" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T08:58:13.667" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3126" CreationDate="2012-09-18T22:26:10.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to me a perfectly valid question under the &quot;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&quot; rubric, and an interesting one, too; at least &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; found it interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T22:26:10.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-19T08:35:42.147" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1184/why-is-it-not-mandatory-to-provide-comments-on-a-down-vote&quot;&gt;Why is it not mandatory to provide comments on a down-vote?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions can be unclear, and most users are nice enough to leave a comment on the question to let OP know what needs to be fixed to either get an answer or to receive a better answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've been noticing lately that &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to questions have been getting downvotes with no reasonable explanation. And not all of these answers being downvoted were bad at all. These answers were what OP was asking for, except in different words than other answers on a same question; that is how this site works. (These answers were, for the most part, valid; just not OP's preference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I've been noticing lately that questions are no longer receiving helpful comments for question improvement. Instead, they are being downvoted without giving OP some direction as to what can be said differently in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've quickly looked through meta to see if there had already been a question like this, and I did, but in the sense that other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/457/dealing-with-vote-retribution&quot;&gt;users were being harassed by downvotes&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining with what I've seen happening with unexplained downvoting of answers and questions and then reading what was linked above, that leads me to this question: Should downvotes require comments to let the user know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; their question or answer is being marked down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd further like to note, that here on meta, someone was confused regarding their own question in 'Main', and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/576/someone-has-a-chip-on-his-shoulder-inexplicable-downvotes-all-over-the-place&quot;&gt;had to ask in meta&lt;/a&gt; to find out why the downvotes happened. Another case, is right in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1496/why-is-my-question-getting-downvotes&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, I really want to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are downvoting, should you have to comment and give a reason why? (I'm wording the question differently so there is no confusion as to what I am asking.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you downvote, you are requested to give a comment to let OP, or the user who was answering, know your reasoning. Everyone doesn't do this though. Sometimes, there is a user who gave a reason saying something along the lines of '-1 no research' or '-1 not constructive'... something like that... There are multitudes of downvotes and that particular comment to the downvoted question gets upped. I find that okay because it is leading the user or OP to realize that people agree with the comment. As with not commenting at all, not everyone does this upped-comment of '-1'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In case a flag for possible duplicate: I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2858/should-elu-offer-more-guidance-on-question-downvoting&quot;&gt;this on meta as well&lt;/a&gt;, however, it is different in the sense that the OP was thinking about more &lt;strong&gt;guidance&lt;/strong&gt; for downvoting, whereas I would prefer there being a &lt;strong&gt;mandatory comment needed&lt;/strong&gt; to be given for a downvote.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we expect questions to be constructive and on-topic, shouldn't we expect the same thing from those who are voting? Wouldn't it be constructive to let OP / answering user know what was wrong with the question / answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should downvotes require comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25961" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T08:35:42.147" Title="Should downvotes require comments?" Tags="|discussion|questions|down-votes|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2012-09-19T08:37:26.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3143" CreationDate="2012-09-19T14:52:01.407" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there is duplicate of this question somewhere, can't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation: OP feels that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the answers to a question are equally good (other answers are not as good). In such a case, is it a good strategy to accept the most upvoted answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26092" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T11:02:35.220" Title="Is it a good strategy to accept the most upvoted answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3130" CreationDate="2012-09-19T15:15:38.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should accept the &quot;right&quot; answer. In some cases people posting questions here don't know if an answer is right or not. If you feel than an answer is right, then you can accept it. How you choose to decide between two equally-good answers is up to you.  I like to pick the answer that is higher quality, or better-worded, or more explanatory, or posted first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T15:15:38.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3130" CreationDate="2012-09-19T17:55:25.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP specifically asks about a situation where &lt;em&gt;some of the answers to a question are &lt;strong&gt;equally&lt;/strong&gt; good&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a context, I think common sense implies that if, say, OP finds two answers to be equally good &lt;em&gt;from his perspective&lt;/em&gt;, but an overwhelming majority of ELU votes have gone to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of the two, he should accept that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons we vote at all is so that others can see where the majority opinion lies. We may not &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;right&quot;, but the general principle is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22wears%20a%20similar%20hat%20to%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1#hl=en&amp;amp;tbo=1&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=%22two%20heads%20are%20better%20than%20one%22&amp;amp;oq=%22two%20heads%20are%20better%20than%20one%22&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.3...1482870.1490571.11.1491146.31.31.0.0.0.0.148.2048.29j2.31.0...0.0...1c.1.LfSvpNbOpvA&amp;amp;pbx=1&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;amp;fp=d4a0b33290aab233&amp;amp;biw=1379&amp;amp;bih=886&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;two heads are better than one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T17:55:25.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3134" CreationDate="2012-09-19T20:42:02.153" Score="12" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/82920/amber-or-yellow-lights&quot;&gt;Amber or yellow lights&lt;/a&gt; was closed as general reference. I do not understand why: what general reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one reference that was cited in a comment is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_(color)#SAE.2FECE_amber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article about the color amber&lt;/a&gt;. I do not see anything in it that would help answer the question. The article discusses some of the legal usage (which wasn't the focus of my question — if it had been, I would have wanted more information, but legal usage is fairly easy to research so I don't particularly care about it). The article can be said to mention that &lt;em&gt;amber&lt;/em&gt; is British and &lt;em&gt;yellow&lt;/em&gt; is American, though it isn't very clear — but a dictionary clarifies this. The basic UK/US distinction was mentioned in the question anyway: it was not what I was asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit I hadn't mentioned my motivation for asking (why I thought there was more than a simple UK/US distinction) in the original question; I have now edited it. Nonetheless, I don't understand why even the original question was closed as general reference, considering that no general reference that I've seen goes beyond what I already mentioned in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T21:06:17.423" Title="Why was the amber/yellow lights question closed as general reference?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|general-reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3133" CreationDate="2012-09-19T21:06:17.423" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't know there was a US/UK difference on this until the question came up and I looked into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so far as I'm concerned, I really &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have to &quot;look into it&quot;. My first minute on Google failed to turn up anything definitive (like OP, I saw nothing obvious in the link given by the first closevoter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I had to establish the (to me as a Brit, unexpected) fact that &quot;yellow&quot; was indeed globally more common in this context than &quot;amber&quot;. Then I checked co-prevalence with a known Americanism &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;run&lt;/strong&gt; a [traffic light]&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to ascertain that the difference was essentially a US/UK split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own thinking is that even if they don't use the word, Americans know perfectly well that other people call it the &lt;em&gt;amber&lt;/em&gt; traffic light. But how would I know that they call it &lt;em&gt;yellow?&lt;/em&gt; I still don't have a clue what Australians or others call it. General Reference? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T21:06:17.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-20T10:40:27.820" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5142/correct-usage-of-pronoun-their-vs-its&quot;&gt;Correct usage of pronoun: “their” vs “its”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is shown as &amp;quot;protected by ЯegDwight ...&amp;quot;, suggesting that it has some significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it list in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review-beta/close#close/7407&quot;&gt;Review|Close Votes&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it better not, in spite of it having earned some close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T11:02:22.977" Title="'Protected Q.' &amp; Close Vote Review" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3135" CreationDate="2012-09-20T11:02:22.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people take &quot;protected&quot; to mean &quot;significant&quot; in some way, but that's not what it is supposed to mean. &quot;Protected&quot; simply means what the banner says: &quot;we've seen enough poor 'answers' from 1-rep users on this one, thank you very much, we have better things to do than clean up here yet again&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is completely orthogonal to whether the question is a dupe, or really even on-topic at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T11:02:22.977" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-20T16:57:52.557" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few question on this site (well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83087/audio-database-is-recorded-under-conditions&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; of them being mine) which are basically word-request / word choice questions in an academic publishing scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of such questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72765/usage-of-w-r-t-in-academic-papers&quot;&gt;Usage of w.r.t in academic papers&lt;/a&gt; Also specifically see discussion in the comments on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63749/alternative-to-hype-for-an-academic-paper&quot;&gt;Alternative to 'hype' for an academic paper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17814/abbreviation-n-d-in-citation&quot;&gt;Abbreviation n.d. in citation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be good to have an 'academic-writing' or similar meaning tag for such questions? There are some existing tags such as 'formality' and 'technical', but they don't seem specific enough to me as far as academic publishing is considered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Another argument - There exists a tag specifically for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/business-language&quot;&gt;business language&lt;/a&gt; which is described as 'Terminology, etiquette, and conventions used when doing business in English'. Similarly, an academic writing/language tag could be defined as 'Terminology, etiquette, and conventions used for academic publishing in English'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26092" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T10:33:16.090" Title="New tag: academic-writing" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3137" CreationDate="2012-09-20T17:20:54.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on my downvote to the question, I don't think &lt;em&gt;academic writing&lt;/em&gt; would be a useful tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of OP's three examples, the first two needn't have mentioned academic publishing at all - they're just asking for &quot;less slangy/informal&quot; alternatives to some proposed form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third one is primarily a matter of &quot;house style&quot;, where personally I think you just decide (or find out) what guide you should be using, and look it up there. Asking on ELU doesn't seem particularly &quot;constructive&quot; to me, since style guides (and people's opinions) can vary wildly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do actually have a few questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style-manuals&quot;&gt;style-manuals&lt;/a&gt;. I've no problem with that tag itself, though I can't say I'm likely to find such questions &quot;interesting&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T17:26:59.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3141" CreationDate="2012-09-20T20:26:36.590" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I asked a question about collective nouns actually being plural in different grammatical contexts, or just associated with a plural verb. Initially I phrased the question poorly and it got closed as &quot;too basic&quot;, but then I significantly changed and rephrased the question hoping for re-opening. But now I don't see the question at all — it's as if it's never been there. What happened to my question? Can I still access the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally, the heading of the first version of the question can be seen in the screenshot in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3139/english-se-vandalized-by-martians&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. At least I'm not going crazy ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T21:34:35.407" Title="Did my question get deleted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3140" CreationDate="2012-09-20T21:34:35.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, some people deleted your question. For what it's worth, there are several other questions about this issue, and I think your question will probably be considered a duplicate of one of those—depending on your final version, of course. Have your searched the site for similar questions? Here is your text. You can access the formatting by clicking &quot;edit&quot; (I hope you can), then you can copy the text including formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;In British English, it is generally accepted that collective nouns can take either singular or plural verb forms&lt;/em&gt;. How does this affect their property of being singular or plural in other contexts? We use plural verb forms, but do we then also use plural personal pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;England rule!&lt;/em&gt; — this one is, to my understanding, correct (but possibly archaic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now is/are &lt;em&gt;England&lt;/em&gt; actually plural, or is/are &lt;em&gt;England&lt;/em&gt; just used with the plural verb form without being plural in other grammatical contexts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am sailing to England themselves&lt;/em&gt;, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am sailing to England itself&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(an earlier version of this question was closed for being general reference; I hope I have now pointed out that I don't find it such)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T21:34:35.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3130" CreationDate="2012-09-21T09:23:40.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the response with the most upvotes should be chosen by default, because not all answers are voted on equally.  Specifically, one user might not submit an answer until several hours after the question was originally posted.  Sometimes these answers are very insightful (perhaps previous comments and answers have made the conversation more focused, or maybe the answerer spent a lot of time doing research). Oftentimes, though, these answers don't garner as many upvotes (partly because people have &quot;moved on&quot; to other questions, and these answers get fewer views). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another case when it might be good to select an answer with fewer upvotes: when a user posts an answer that includes a very funny line, and that humor helps it get a lot of upvotes. One recent answer that comes to mind is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/82986/really-nice-mat&quot;&gt;&quot;It's time to eat Mat&quot;&lt;/a&gt; answer, which had 36 upvotes when I posted this. (In that example, there were no competing answers, so there were no other answers to choose.  Moreover, I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; saying those upvotes are undeserved – Luke's answer isn't merely funny, it's informative, too. I'm only pointing out that it's hardly inconceivable for an &quot;equally good&quot; answer to have fewer upvotes. As a voter, I might be more inclined to upvote the funnier answer; as an O.P., I might look at the answers in a different light, where the chuckle isn't so influential.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T11:02:35.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-23T19:09:11.527" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as a matter of curiosity, how was question #79065, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79065&quot;&gt;Identifying the implied gender of nouns&lt;/a&gt;, deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I recall, all other deleted questions I've looked at have a “deleted by” indication;  this one merely says “deleted yesterday”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How was question 79065 deleted?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3144" CreationDate="2012-09-23T19:25:05.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been deleted fully automatically &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/135907&quot;&gt;by a script&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question is more than &lt;code&gt;30&lt;/code&gt; days old, and ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has −1 or lower score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... it will be automatically deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This check is run every week across all sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T19:25:05.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3137" CreationDate="2012-09-23T20:58:23.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I visited the groves of academe, but I seem to remember each field (and sometimes each journal) has its own conventions concerning abbreviations, citations, and the like.  To the extent that questions refer to a 'general academic' style (and so can be answered here), is it anything beyond 'careful formal English'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T20:58:23.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-24T05:11:26.443" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know why this question is closed, anything wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83560/pardes-end-why-could-tietjens-say-i-know&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83560/pardes-end-why-could-tietjens-say-i-know&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T13:54:55.390" Title="Why is this question closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3147" CreationDate="2012-09-24T11:57:13.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's not enough context for that to stand on its own as a meaningful question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are Tietjens and Sylvia?  What's &quot;Parde's End?&quot; Is it a play or a television show?  A mystery or a comedy? A chat room? What's the setting?  Is this a dialog? If so, how are the people talking?  On the telephone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems much harder to follow than the two-line dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want an answer to your question, I suggest reformatting the question, asking it anew.  This time, give sufficient context, so that everyone reading the question can understand what you're asking about, without having to locate the subtitles and scroll through the scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T13:54:55.390" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T13:54:55.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-24T16:38:36.137" Score="15" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Revision 3 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/83629/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/83629/revisions&lt;/a&gt; is attributed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited the question to remove the code formatting and present the quote correctly, and did only that. A short time prior to that, the OP had removed a few words and an apostrophe, but this edit is shown as being down to me, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that there is a “grace period” before edits become locked. In this case it’s the OP’s edit which is identified as mine, so the (fairly significant) change is unlikely to cause problems; but if I'd been identified as responsible for &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; user’s significant alteration, I’d be rather miffed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;strong&gt;different users’&lt;/strong&gt; edits be rolled up in this way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I have found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140377/indicate-whether-an-edit-will-be-combined-with-previous-edits&quot;&gt;a relevant question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138194/edit-summaries-of-merged-edits&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt; on MSO but they don't address the question of combining different users’ edits. I'm not sure that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75945/incorrect-question-edit-attribution&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; does entirely, either.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45478/question-history-attributed-changes-to-me-that-i-didnt-make&quot;&gt;Another question&lt;/a&gt; has also been found and commented on. But that addresses edits &quot;slipped in&quot; between pressing Edit and Save. In my case the edit was completed [and marked as the OP's] before I clicked Edit, and I was still credited with the OP's change. His edit was rolled into mine, and I was credited with the lot. That is, I took over &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; grace period. I don't believe that should happen; if anything his grace period should be curtailed by my edit in order that both versions can be shown separately and available for rollback.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T07:17:21.630" Title="Different users' edits are amalgamated" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3137" CreationDate="2012-09-25T10:33:16.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/business-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;business-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;business-language&lt;/a&gt; tag would appear to be most useful when asking about words or phrases which are used in business language; that is, when it's necessary to translate &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; corporate-speak into everyday English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78567/space-as-a-synonym-for-industry-sector-or-business-segment&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Space&amp;quot; as a synonym for industry, sector or business segment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68706/is-it-sales-collateral-or-sales-collaterals&quot;&gt;Is it &amp;quot;Sales collateral&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Sales collaterals&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51934/use-of-deadpool-as-a-verb&quot;&gt;Use of &amp;quot;deadpool&amp;quot; as a verb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be a corresponding use for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/academic-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;academic-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;academic-language&lt;/a&gt; tag, and it could apply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17814/abbreviation-n-d-in-citation&quot;&gt;Abbreviation “n.d.” in citation?&lt;/a&gt; which you refer to, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/citation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;citation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;citation&lt;/a&gt; tag is actually more suitable there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own question which you reference mentions writing for an academic paper, but the question is just &quot;How would I describe non-optimal conditions,&quot; and would be much the same under any circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As TimLymington says, there is no special &quot;academic language&quot; in the same way as there is &quot;business language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T10:33:16.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-25T14:01:59.113" Score="-1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83728/does-the-word-government-in-english-mean-the-courts-as-well&quot;&gt;Does the word &amp;quot;government&amp;quot; in English mean the courts as well?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find an answer in online dictionaries. Why it is considered general reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2797" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T05:13:26.067" Title="Why this question was closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2012-09-26T03:01:53.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some English-speaking countries (for example the US) &quot;the government&quot; always includes the courts, since the US constitution specifies that the courts are one of the three branches of the government. That is a legal determination, though, not a linguistic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in other English-speaking countries, &quot;the government&quot; &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; include the courts in certain contexts - in particular,  &quot;the government&quot; in the UK usually refers to the currently ruling party and its ministers. In other English-speaking countries there might be yet other answers, depending on the political or legal system. Your question cannot be answered on a &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; basis, only a political or legal basis, and can be found in any basic reference on the particular country in question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16191" LastActivityDate="2012-09-26T03:01:53.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-26T07:31:53.857" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I asked a question which got closed for being too basic. When I tried to improve it, it got silently deleted (which implies &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disappearing from historical records&lt;/a&gt; as well), apparently because I should not improve a closed question or I should not significantly change it (I was not aware of this rule and was under the impression that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;improving was a good thing&lt;/a&gt;. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3140/did-my-question-get-deleted&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought, maybe if I ask the improved question as a separate question, it will be acceptable, so I reposted it as a separate question. At least I think I did, but now I can't find it anywhere. There is no way for me to tell, due to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vanishing commisar&lt;/a&gt; style in which deletion is implemented at Stack Exchange (which I think is utterly disgraceful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my question got deleted again, maybe it didn't. How is deletion policy applied? Will re-asking a previously deleted question get me blocked from the site? I start to be scared to ask this question again, because I don't want to be blocked. But then again, being scared to ask any question amounts to the same :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:39:08.123" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How is deletion policy applied?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3153" CreationDate="2012-09-26T10:05:12.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NuufA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Gerrit&amp;#39;s posts&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all your posts. The darker background color signifies a post that has been deleted. In your profile, deleted posts are only visible to mods and devs, but any 10k user can see them in the 10k tools or access them directly if they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83195/can-they-refer-to-a-collective-noun&quot;&gt;the URL&lt;/a&gt; (or really just the question ID), which was supplied in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3140/did-my-question-get-deleted&quot;&gt;previous meta question&lt;/a&gt; you mention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact you accepted an answer there that quotes your deleted question in its entirety. So you know for a fact that the question has &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; disappeared from historical records. Poor Mr Yezhov does not deserve to be dragged into this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; unfortunate that your original question got deleted so fast. Thankfully it's not something that can or does happen too often. Here are only some of the safeguards, off the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users need 10k to be able to cast delete votes at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users need 20k to be able to cast a delete vote &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt;. Below 20k, they will have to wait for 48 hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People can only cast a limited number of delete votes a day (5 for 10k users, 15 for 20k users).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question needs at least 3 delete votes. More if it is heavily upvoted, or if its answers are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again, deleted posts are still visible if you have the rep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deleted posts are undeletable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, the question got shot down by three 20k users within three hours of getting posted. Perhaps they should have been less trigger-happy, but again, that is really quite a coincidence, seeing how we only have nineteen 20k users in total (of which at least two are inactive, and another three are mods, so they don't really count).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, your question also has two undelete votes as of the time of this writing. So it only needs one more vote to get undeleted. However, my personal advice would be to actually repost from scratch, in this particular case. It really is a completely different question after your last edit, and it will probably become different still if you edit it yet again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your last concern, no, simply re-asking one deleted question does not trigger immediate suspension. You will always see it coming. However, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; recommended to ask on meta first, just like you did. That's why meta exists in the first place, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reading, see this feature request (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;) over on the Meta meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2645/show-all-of-my-question-answers-to-me-even-if-they-are-deleted&quot;&gt;Show all of my question/answers to me even if they are deleted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2012-09-26T10:05:12.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-27T08:48:20.973" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine I just watched a TV programme (mostly series), and I didn't get the meaning of some dialogue (mostly humour), could I ask it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last time I just put part of a subtitle on the question, and a downloadable link of full context, and it doesn't seem to be proper if the community need to go over the video again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused how should I proceed now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13682" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2012-09-28T05:14:15.723" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T05:14:15.723" Title="What's the right way to ask a question about a scenario in a TV program?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3155" CreationDate="2012-09-27T10:17:45.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Martha said in her comment, when asking a question, you want to make it easy on the rest of the community, who are donating their time to help you out.  Here's what I recommend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Include the excerpt from the television show in a quote box, embedded in the question.  Furthermore, don't limit this excerpt to the one line in question – include the surrounding dialog as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Be very clear in your question where the excerpt came from.  Don't just say &quot;it's from a television show,&quot; provide some information about the show as well.  Were you watching a sitcom, a drama, or a documentary?  That's crucial information, because the same quote can mean different things in different contexts.  For example, sitcom characters often use a lot of sarcasm, which might affect the meaning of a word or sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) About the word or excerpt in question: do some research in a dictionary first, to ward off the &quot;What did the dictionary tell you?&quot; comments.  Embedding dictionary definitions into a question is valuable for several reasons: it shows the community that you're serious about trying to get an answer, and that you've been diligent in doing your own investigation first. It provides a springboard, so that answerers don't have to spend their time verifying meanings in a dictionary. And these comments can also help the community understand why you're still confused about the matter, leading to more helpful and accurate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a great example of a question following this format: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/82744/what-does-sauteed-mean-in-someone-who-has-not-sauteed-in-a-subject&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does sautéed mean...?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that question, notice how the O.P.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Went beyond a single-sentence in the original quote.  (Moreover, a link to the entire article was provided, in case anyone wanted to get even more context.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Was very clear about where this came from (i.e., a &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt; piece by Maureen Dowd).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Included excerpts from multiple dictionaries, demonstrating that research was performed, and then going on to explain why this research had not yet clarified the O.P.'s confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate EL&amp;amp;U questions presented in this way. Instead of scratching my head, wondering why this person can't comprehend the obvious, or why they haven't bothered to consult a dictionary, I appreciate the fact that they took the time to write such a well-structured question.  In fact, I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that I &lt;em&gt;savor&lt;/em&gt; questions that are that well-written.  Judging by the high number of upvotes, I don't think I'm the only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a footnote, it's been pointed out before, but that particular user has eclipsed 10,000 rep points despite answering fewer than 10 questions.  In fact, that user has earned the Nice Question badge almost 40 times!  Clearly, something can be learned from that body of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T22:53:51.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3159" CreationDate="2012-09-28T18:44:23.470" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are only a few dozen questions with these two tags. In the case of &quot;phrasing&quot;, I believe it can be replaced with &quot;phrases&quot; in most cases. Should it be made a synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There-is&quot; can be replaced with &quot;grammatical-number&quot;. I'd like to know if there are any objections to this cleaning. Are the amount of &quot;there-is&quot; (versus &quot;there-are&quot;?) questions sufficient to warrant its own tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think this is the 1,001 question (not counting deleted questions). Yay for palindromes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24117" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T18:55:01.287" Title="Removal of &quot;phrasing&quot; and &quot;there-is&quot; tags" Tags="|discussion|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3158" CreationDate="2012-09-28T18:55:01.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d prefer that the “there is/are” questions keep a dedicated tag, because this covers things beyond number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t necessarily see that “phrases” and “phrasing” are the same, because “phrases” sounds like phrase requests. Well, ok: so does the other one. Hm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T18:55:01.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3482" CreationDate="2012-09-29T17:44:38.283" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Starting today, this is what I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ck22o.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chrome 22.0.1229.79 m, Vista&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only happens in Chrome (22.0.1229.79 m) and only on the main site. Meta looks fine. Other SE sites look fine. Not reproducible in Opera, FF, IE, or Safari. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restarted and all. Tried swapping &quot;tools&quot; for &quot;review&quot; because it's shorter. Same difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No idea what's going on or whether anyone else is affected at all, but I thought I'd mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit.&lt;/strong&gt; Probably related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vIRfR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Review stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, only in Chrome, only on ELU main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Yet another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPKaJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Badge sliced up&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks fine everywhere except in Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-10-13T13:14:09.090" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T21:59:49.300" Title="The FAQ link on main no longer fits in Chrome" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2012-12-22T22:00:01.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-29T21:42:21.497" Score="7" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that must have been asked here many times. The question is about using &quot;it is&quot; versus &quot;this is&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Attempted to search for &lt;code&gt;it is&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;this is&lt;/code&gt;, with and without quotes, and the search returned no results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize SE engine is filtering common words, and that's fine. What is really frustrating is that using quotes does not help either.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41/need-a-way-to-search-for-stop-words&quot;&gt;Need a way to search for stop words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google returns 12,700 results for &lt;code&gt;site:english.stackexchange.com/questions &quot;it is&quot; +&quot;this is&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26446" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T21:42:21.497" Title="Search for common words" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-30T16:44:57.637" Score="3" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious. Why do we have &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; as a site logo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I know that the site is about two things: both language and usage. But still, there are other SE sites with &quot;and&quot; in their names too and they don't have ampersands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, an ampersand is actually a French word, really. &quot;Et&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-09-30T18:41:42.723" LastActivityDate="2012-10-01T03:26:45.627" Title="Why does this site use an ampersand for an icon?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3162" CreationDate="2012-10-01T03:26:45.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://vimeo.com/7716682&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; Baskerville's italic ampersand symbol, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://des.davidturner.name/post/457315363/baskervilles-italic-ampersand-symbol-is-rather&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;insanely popular around the web these days,&lt;/a&gt; as per cornbread ninja's answer linked to by StoneyB's comment above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As font symbols go, I think it's rather &quot;sexy&quot; - &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; it looks a lot more like an &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt; than that feeble effort! So although I wasn't around to vote on the matter when ELU was a mere sprog of a beta, if I had have been I would have done! It's neat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aawPa.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-10-01T03:26:45.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3166" CreationDate="2012-10-02T18:07:54.167" Score="7" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For anyone not familar with a &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80667/im-looking-for-a-single-word-to-replace-a-lack-of-response&quot;&gt;here's a pretty useful case for the tool&lt;/a&gt;… and a counter-example where it make, umm... &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84224/what-is-the-origin-of-hot-as-good-looking-or-attractive&quot;&gt;less sense&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A protected question prevents answers by very new users. Questions should be protected when they are garnering lots of views and newbies are adding &amp;quot;me too!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;thanks!&amp;quot; and possibly even spam non-answers — incidentally, which seems to happen most often when a question is blasted out to large numbers of people who do not understand Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But English SE has &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; almost 1,000 questions. That's over 5%, almost &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt; the #2 site, and &lt;strong&gt;20 times more&lt;/strong&gt; than most of the network! I'm not sure why &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/#hl=en&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=site:english.stackexchange.com+%22This+question+is+protected+to+prevent+thanks!%2C+me+too!%2C+or+spam+answers+by+new+users.+%22&amp;amp;oq=site:english.stackexchange.com+%22This+question+is+protected+to+prevent+thanks!%2C+me+too!%2C+or+spam+answers+by+new+users.+%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;most of those questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; needed protecting at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Preemptively Blocking Users?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protect-question tool is extremely useful when &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3136/28&quot;&gt;we've seen enough poor answers&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; But when you start to &lt;em&gt;proactively&lt;/em&gt; protect questions &lt;em&gt;just in case,&lt;/em&gt; you are blocking the most basic functionality of the site for a large number of users. That's not how Stack Exchange is supposed to work, and that's not the purpose for which the tool was designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I don't run this site. You do. So I'm asking about the policies behind the use of this tool, and if perhaps a little introspection and adjustment is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T20:38:12.590" Title="Is the &quot;protected&quot; question tool overused?" Tags="|discussion|status-bydesign|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3164" CreationDate="2012-10-02T18:52:15.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Reg can probably answer your question best, but I will put my two cents in.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often the case that we get new answers on a very old question and that sparks a slew of new answers on the same question by other new users.  Protecting a question when that happens helps mitigate the negative impact of an answer bump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We proactively protect questions that we think may garner a lot of attention because they are controversial or include words or language that attract spammers or other types of non-constructive, opinion-based, soapbox types of answers.  These are probably more likely on our site because of the types of questions that may be asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, you need fewer reps to answer a protected question than you do to upvote, so I think we are primarily discouraging drive-by and bandwagonning answers from users who are not much invested in the community.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested to hear what others think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T18:52:15.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3164" CreationDate="2012-10-02T18:52:23.967" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In defense of your &quot;less sense&quot; example, I would suggest that when a question gets sent to the multi-collider because it has something involving sex or programming or both in the title, said question garners way too much attention and votes. Think of it as an attempt to keep the quality of the site higher. It's not a successful attempt, because the &quot;protect&quot; method works about as well as the rhythm method does for preventing unwanted pregnancies, but at least it is an effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the highest-rated questions and answers on this site. Some of them are good, but many are not in keeping with any rational set of standards regarding English and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/4075/2303&quot;&gt;What is the origin of ZOMG?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1216/what-is-the-factual-basis-for-pirate-speech-did-pirates-really-say-things-li&quot;&gt;What is the factual basis for pirate speech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26742/is-there-a-word-for-a-person-with-only-one-head&quot;&gt;Is there a word for a person with only one head?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, can you honestly say such questions are worthy of the attention they get? We have many questions that are worthy but damned, by comparison, with faint praise. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/28473/2303&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; given by Kosmonaut, which was upticked a mere four times. Compare it with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/26747/2303&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;fifth-highest&lt;/em&gt; answer&lt;/a&gt; to the &quot;word for a person with only one head&quot; question. That answer, unresponsive as it may be, garnered twice the number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, you people set up a series of sites that crowd-source answers, and yet you then turn around and tell us (as Jeff Atwood did) that we're allowing too many crap questions and answers. I think he was referring to something like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9293/2303&quot;&gt;slang words for breasts&lt;/a&gt; question, but it doesn't matter. The point is, ELU is unique in one important respect: Everybody who comes to these exchange sites speaks some kind of English, so everyone feels entitled to weigh in on the bikeshedding issues at the expense of question quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to remedy the situation. But blaming the victim isn't an option that seems very useful at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T19:06:38.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3164" CreationDate="2012-10-02T19:03:24.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions related to sex and/or profanity tend to attract bad answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/77420/2085&quot;&gt;Gigolo is to man as what is to woman?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2772/2085&quot;&gt;Does “gay” still include the meaning “merry”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/406/2085&quot;&gt;How bad is the f-word, really?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/7059/2085&quot;&gt;Why is 'c*nt' so much more derogatory in the US than the UK?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/60900/2085&quot;&gt;Can the term “jack/jerk off” be used for female masturbation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/11981/2085&quot;&gt;What is currently the most obscene word in British English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/12234/2085&quot;&gt;Is f**kstick really an abusive word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9293/2085&quot;&gt;Differences between slang words for breasts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/30217/2085&quot;&gt;In sex talk, how many bases are there and what do they all mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/5610/2085&quot;&gt;Just how offensive are the terms “retarded” and “gay”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/23488/2085&quot;&gt;What is the etymology of “cornhole”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, questions with very high vote totals and/or view counts also tend to be lightning rods for bad answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9780/2085&quot;&gt;Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/4075/2085&quot;&gt;What is the origin of ZOMG?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2998/2085&quot;&gt;Do most languages need more space than English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/19074/2085&quot;&gt;What is a feminine version of 'guys'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/55052/2085&quot;&gt;How to say that food is hot (temperature) without the listener thinking that I mean “spicy”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/28105/2085&quot;&gt;Where did “cc” and “bcc” come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/14/2085&quot;&gt;Which words in a title should be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2516/2085&quot;&gt;How do native English speakers respond to “Thank you”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/48227/2085&quot;&gt;Is there a word for telling the truth (technically) in order to misguide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/30734/2085&quot;&gt;Is there a polite alternative to “No thanks, I'm full”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50818/is-there-a-word-for-a-non-geek&quot;&gt;Is there a word for a non-geek?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “bad answers”, I mean ones that will end up being deleted, usually from being non-answers, offensive answers, or spam answers.  If they're doing to be deleted anyway, it seems like less work for them never to be created in the first place.  Yes, sometimes these are just very low quality answers, without much research backing them; those take longer to get out of the system, if in fact that ever happens.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First-time posters are often unfamiliar with how the site works, and what it even takes to be considered a good answer. A lot (but not all) of these bad answers are from drive-by first-time posters, which is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing that protecting a question staves off.  It really doesn't seem like much of an impediment to ask a poster to first get &lt;em&gt;one single upvote&lt;/em&gt; on one of their previous answers, or two on one of their own questions, before posting an answer to one of these lightning-rod questions.  I mean, does it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Protection is easily reversible, and doesn't seem like much of a barrier anyway. If I am wrong, please let me know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T19:03:24.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3164" CreationDate="2012-10-02T19:20:56.070" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody calm down and look at this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XjpIi.png&quot; alt=&quot;About 1190 protected questions&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y4UOF.png&quot; alt=&quot;About 791 of the protected questions are closed&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's right. Some 791 out of the 1190 protected questions are also closed. So for the sake of this discussion, these are false positives. 66% false positives, mind you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just went ahead and unprotected some of them, because I'm nice like that and tomorrow's a day off anyway, but frankly, that's a waste of time, is it not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yeah, what Kit says. And what Rob says. And what Tom says. Whenever we get a question about the f-word, or the n-word, or the c-word; the p-word, the t-word, the b-word; the j-word, the g-word, the l-word; or any of the other words Jeff used to get all up in arms about, we absolutely do &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1561/should-elu-be-removed-from-the-multicollider-etc/1566#1566&quot;&gt;protect them preemptively&lt;/a&gt;. Because that's what we all agreed upon two years ago in bright daylight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, as chance would have it, I elaborated on my personal policy slash general impression in a comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3135/protected-q-close-vote-review/3136#comment7514_3136&quot;&gt;just a couple weeks ago&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[P]opular questions that are one step short of bikeshedding are obvious candidates [for getting protected]. However, less popular questions that do have a definite answer probably account for just as many protects. If an elaborate answer has been sitting accepted for two years, and someone new comes along and posts a half-assed one-liner that adds nothing except typos and lols, and the question gets bumped, and someone else sees it and posts yet another pointless one-liner — we don't really need that. And then of course there are questions about offensive words we protect preemptively as soon as we see them. – RegDwighт ♦ Sep 20 at 19:24&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; some more Google stats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Protected by KitFox&amp;quot; — 5 hits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Protected by simchona&amp;quot; — 5 hits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Protected by tchrist&amp;quot; — about 19 hits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Protected by Jasper Loy&amp;quot; — about 144 hits; &amp;quot;Will Hunting&amp;quot; — 41; 185 in total.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Protected by RegDwighт&amp;quot; — about 414 hits; &amp;quot;ЯegDwight&amp;quot; — 348; &amp;quot;RegDwight АΑA&amp;quot; — 55; 817 in total.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, as Kit hinted at, any and all flak for this should go my way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T19:41:55.803" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-04T22:47:16.727" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/84420/8019&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, about the reasoning of an examiner, was closed as off-topic, apparently because people either thought the example sentence poor English (which it certainly is) or disagreed with the reasoning as identified.  Both of these seem bad reasons to close.  This is &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;, not &quot;Well-written English&quot;; if all poorly-written examples are off-topic, I foresee a severe shortage of interesting questions.  And the fact that the examiner's reasoning was flawed and his premises shaky does not make the question off-topic, any more than &quot;why would my boss say this?&quot; would be off-topic at Workplace.SE if the answer boiled down to 'Because he's an idiot'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually think the question's worth re-opening, largely because Peter Shor's excellent answer has covered all the important points.  But if the question had been closed before Peter got there, an important distinction between 'English you should write' and 'English that will pass tests' would not have been drawn, and a sensible, well-written question would not have been answered.  Would anybody care to justify their closevotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T16:50:59.650" Title="Sentence completion question; should it be have been closed?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-04T22:58:53.110" Score="3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Following question was closed as off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the difference between “get up” and “stand up”? [closed]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm translating Bob Marley's song &quot;Get up, stand up&quot; and, consulting my dictonary, I can't understand the difference between these two verbs. I have understood the meaning of this song, of course, but I'd like to understand why Bob Marley chose these two verbs rather than repeating one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer (my answer) discussed the difference between the denotation and connotation of the phrases at issue. I am not clear as to why the connotative meaning of terms is off topic. If the cited source were poetry, would it have been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T10:08:46.317" Title="Why is the meaning of song lyrics off topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3169" CreationDate="2012-10-05T00:36:31.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't close the question and hadn't seen it until your meta question just now.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I see nothing in the question that seems poorly written.  In fact, I feel it is a well-posed and thoughtful question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through it, the first question I asked myself was &quot;What does this have to do with English Language and Usage&quot;? And my answer after re-reading it was &quot;nothing.&quot;  Therefore it is off-topic and it is justifiably closed as exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might possibly be suitable for Writers.SE. I will check with the mods there and see what they think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T00:36:31.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3170" CreationDate="2012-10-05T00:54:03.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your last question first, yes. If the source were poetry, it would likely also have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't because asking the difference in connotation (and denotation) of the two phrases is off-topic, but rather that asking why a songwriter chose to use two different phrases instead of one repeated phrase is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the OP clearly states that he is not looking for an interpretation, he also says that he understands the song, and that he is translating the song but the two phrases have the same meaning in his dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all of that, I think the question could be re-opened if it were edited to make it more clearly about the difference in nuance between the two phrases. In other words, if he tailored it to more closely fit with your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T00:54:03.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3170" CreationDate="2012-10-05T01:14:47.997" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been here long enough to say why this &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; off-topic, but I can, as an erstwhile professional in the lit-crit biz, with union card (PhD) to prove it, say why it &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This falls, I take it, under the exclusion of &quot;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&quot;; and there are two things about Criticism &amp;amp;c that demand its exclusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first is that discussion of the &quot;meaning&quot; of words and phrases within a literary work cannot be properly addressed without taking into account the entire verbal structure of the work; its allusions, and its literary, historical, social, economic, &amp;amp;c context. Turn somebody like me loose on three stanzas and a chorus by Bob Marley and I'll hit 4,000 words before you can blink. I don't think ELU wants that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second is that ambiguity and polysemy are inherent in any work of art; which means that there is nothing of any value you can say about it which is not inherently debatable and controversial and highly contentious. And &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is by definition Not Constructive: &quot;likely to solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now obviously you have to keep a sense of proportion. Simple questions which &lt;em&gt;involve&lt;/em&gt; a lyric, which are &lt;em&gt;drawn from&lt;/em&gt; a lyric but aren't &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the lyric, can be fairly safely addressed. But when questioners start asking &quot;Why did he say it this way instead of that way?&quot; they're opening up Pandora's Box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T01:14:47.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3170" CreationDate="2012-10-05T10:08:46.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, who &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; knows the meaning of certain lyrics except the writer(s)? No-one. Even if you read a verse and it appears quite clear, you never know if it's actually a metaphor or not. You can only make hypothesis, but you can never be too sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, understanding lyrics is sometimes mostly interpretation, therefore it'd make your question subjective and from there, not constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, instead, you want to know the actual meaning of a certain sentence in everyday English, independent from the song, well, that's a normal question. You don't even need to relate it to the lyrics since you're asking for the &quot;standard&quot; meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the question is now opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T10:08:46.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3176" CreationDate="2012-10-06T23:43:17.310" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can find no guideline in the FAQ regarding when to flag someone for a comment that is offensive.  I cannot the topic in the meta section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the case when someone is attacking / insulting, and their 'premise' is an incorrect understanding of grammar.  (e.g. long comment chains about how a word 'should have been' in a past-tense form, when it was used in the present tense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully an answer can address the mechanics of how flagged items are moderated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23834" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T00:04:40.037" Title="Do we have any guidelines for flagging a comment as offense?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2012-10-07T00:04:40.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any flag on a comment will put it in the moderator queue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel it is sufficiently obvious why you find the comments offensive, you may use the &quot;rude or offensive&quot; flag. The advantage is that if enough people flag the same comment, it is auto-deleted and the mods don't even have to get involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that more explanation is warranted, you can use the &quot;other...&quot; flag and include a brief comment.  The disadvantage is that special flags don't pile on like the offensive flags do, but the advantage is that you can direct mod attention to entire comment threads this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are expected to behave with common courtesy toward others on this site regardless of the topic, so it doesn't matter why the person is attacking or insulting.  If someone is being rude, please don't hesitate to flag it as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T00:04:40.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-07T19:15:31.773" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/why-are-most-new-questions-being-downvoted&quot;&gt;Why are most new questions being downvoted?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85036/where-does-get-rich-seize-a-hostage-and-build-a-better-mousertrap-come-from&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on English SE site and got two down-votes immediately. It turns out I'm not alone. There're 8 questions out of 15 have negative vote counts on the first page of newest questions now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say it's unusual comparing to my experience on other SE sites. Is this an exceptionally unfriendly site?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user27033" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T09:28:45.490" Title="Why are there so many down-votes on English SE site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2012-10-07T19:29:30.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-07T19:45:06.253" Score="19" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been seeing a lot of comments lately that are somewhat along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Off-topic. Voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is too localized. [remainder of comment...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, these comments are simply giving a reason for why the post these comments are on should be closed. However, there's a problem that arises from these comments: they're often taken as rude and/or abrasive by users new to the site. Instead, a far friendlier tone can be taken by explaining &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why this specific post is off-topic/not constructive/too localized/etc., and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can be done to improve the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, a post that has been closed will always give the reason why it is closed in the close box, and a post that shouldn't actually be closed doesn't need a terse comment there saying &quot;this is not constructive&quot;, when, actually, it is. If you have something specific to share, like &quot;we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;post that recommends great online resources&lt;/a&gt; where  you can look up words&quot;, that's great. If all you're going to state is &quot;General reference. Voting to close&quot;, that's not terribly helpful for anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mods will be pruning some of these comments in the coming days and weeks, and we'll ask that you work with us by flagging such comments if you come across them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T16:21:53.687" Title="Close Reason Comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3178" CreationDate="2012-10-09T18:48:05.627" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;On August 25 KitFox posted an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/why-are-most-new-questions-being-downvoted&quot;&gt;Why are most new questions being downvoted&lt;/a&gt; which I think bears quoting in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you downvote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you ask the OP to clarify and give them at least one day to do so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you edit the OP's question to include information that the OP had buried in the comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you clean up and retag the question so it was clearer and easier for other users to find (even if it was a dupe and even if it was off-topic)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the OP a new user who needs some extra consideration because maybe they can't figure out how to edit their own question, or maybe they've been overwhelmed by an overgrown comment chain?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You are not required to leave a comment if you downvote, but the site won't improve if you don't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting should be the last thing you do, not the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep forgetting this. I've just put it at the top of my ELU links, so there's a better chance I remember it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-10-09T18:48:05.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3178" CreationDate="2012-10-09T21:54:45.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just closevoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85267/whats-the-difference-between-modeling-and-modelling&quot;&gt;What's the difference between 'modeling' and 'modelling'?&lt;/a&gt; as General Reference, and that was one of the relatively rare occasions where I &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; comment a closevote. My position there is that anyone who seriously thinks ELU is going to explicate a difference in &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; between those two spellings probably isn't someone I'd welcome future questions from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, I also silently closevoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85264/does-and-online-repository-exist-for-texts-written-in-african-american-english&quot;&gt;Does and &lt;strong&gt;[sic]&lt;/strong&gt; online repository exist for texts written in African American English / 'Ebonics'?&lt;/a&gt;. I find it irritating to see such a blatantly offtopic question from someone with a rep of 626, who's been a member for almost two years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per J.R.'s comment to the question here, I usually post closevote comments primarily for the benefit of other users, not the OP. If a potentially closable question looks salvageable, hopefully I'll post a comment asking OP to amend, rather than peremptorily vote to close. If it looks like a dead duck, I comment in hopes that others will either do likewise, or post further comments contesting my position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;, I'd also point out that even if I don't write a long conciliatory explanation of my closevote, I think the questioner is at least entitled to know there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a closevote. My understanding is that new low-rep users can't actually &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the number of closevotes, so a comment is the only way they're going to know there's a problem (unless it actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; get closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-09T21:54:45.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3182" CreationDate="2012-10-10T05:33:10.523" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is the right place to ask for not. Would it be possible to transfer my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71429/family-relationships&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71429/family-relationships&lt;/a&gt; to the new closed beta &lt;a href=&quot;http://genealogy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://genealogy.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6659" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-10-18T05:55:21.373" Title="Transfer a question" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3181" CreationDate="2012-10-10T05:49:08.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migrated to Genealogy.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;S&gt; It's not showing up in the mod migration menu right now—might be caching or might be that we can't migrate until the target site is in public beta. I'll follow up on this in a few days; in future, however, you can simply flag your post with a message as to where it would fit better and we'll handle that for you. &lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-10-18T05:55:21.373" LastActivityDate="2012-10-18T05:55:21.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3178" CreationDate="2012-10-10T18:49:02.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point out that not all closed questions even get the courtesy of an explanation: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3093/valid-question-closed-as-too-localised-requesting-reasons-for-being-out-of-sc&quot;&gt;Valid question closed as &amp;#39;too localised&amp;#39;, requesting reasons for being out of scope&lt;/a&gt; for an example, I believe my question is valid but seems to be closed because there is no real answer ... and no one has really justified those 5 VTC :(.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is closed, I do get the boilerplate 'localized' text, and yes its possible that some of the votes were for a different reason. Unfortunately, in some cases the standard text does not adequately explain how it applies in that particular case imho; and it would be great if people actually left some comment in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T00:12:18.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="471" CreationDate="2012-10-13T01:56:22.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you're typing a comment, there is a button marked &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; beside the comment box. It will tell you everything you need to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2012-10-13T01:56:22.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3188" CreationDate="2012-10-14T22:12:28.763" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genitive&quot;&gt;exactly two questions&lt;/a&gt; are tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genitive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genitive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genitive&lt;/a&gt; tag, compared with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot;&gt;many that are tagged&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive&lt;/a&gt; tag. Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genitive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genitive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genitive&lt;/a&gt; has no tag wiki, whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive&lt;/a&gt; does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that one of two different things be done: either ❶ merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genitive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genitive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genitive&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive&lt;/a&gt; and make it a tag synonym, or else ❷ arrive at some reasonable description for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genitive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genitive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genitive&lt;/a&gt; that makes it distinct from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive&lt;/a&gt;, and to have this description writ into its tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I favor the merge-and-synonymize solution myself, because I do not believe that there is an English “genitive” that differs in any meaningful way from a possessive. I may be wrong, though, and I would be glad to be shown that the second solution would therefore be preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when discussing pronouns instead of nouns or noun phrases, which is the only place where something of the Old English case system is preserved, I do not see where it makes any sense to use one word over the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking that in all these cases, one could call it a possessive without losing any nuance that might be had by calling it a genitive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive noun phrase: &lt;em&gt;the King of Spain’s hat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive noun: &lt;em&gt;Billy’s hat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive determiner: &lt;em&gt;my hat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive pronoun: &lt;em&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“double”-possessive: &lt;em&gt;a friend of Bill’s, a friend of mine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps “genitive” might arise when contrasting the “Norman genitive” (&lt;em&gt;the king of Spain&lt;/em&gt;) with the “Saxon genitive” (&lt;em&gt;Spain’s king&lt;/em&gt;), but I don’t see any strong advantage to keeping separate tags.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus even if we somehow come up with a nuanced distinction between the two terms &lt;em&gt;genitive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;possessive&lt;/em&gt;, I don’t believe most users of the site would recognize that distinction, and so doing so would be counter-productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T15:57:15.670" Title="Should the genitive tag be merged with the possessive tag?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3187" CreationDate="2012-10-15T09:50:00.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concur - thie is &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; SE, and in English as you point out this is mostly a distinction without a difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as an added benefit, merging the tags might help people understand that possessive and genitive are (essentially) the same in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take action on this, go to the following page and vote for making &quot;genitive&quot; a synonym of &quot;possessive&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/possessive/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/possessive/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-10-18T16:11:52.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3187" CreationDate="2012-10-15T13:59:56.887" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any chance we could do this the other way around, i.e. make &lt;em&gt;genitive&lt;/em&gt; the official tag and &lt;em&gt;possessive&lt;/em&gt; a synonym? After all, a possessive is unarguably a type of genitive, but even in English, the genitive is not a type of possessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-10-15T13:59:56.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3192" CreationDate="2012-10-16T15:13:58.277" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not being aware of the tech. behind ELU, I would like to ask:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If someone up/ down votes an answer unaware that it is being edited, will the edited answer miss the vote?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In other words, will Save-edit recognize the voting that takes place &lt;em&gt;during&lt;/em&gt; the edit?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T15:22:53.587" Title="Voting an Answer-Under-Edit" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3191" CreationDate="2012-10-16T15:22:53.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Votes and post edits aren't connected to each other. If you are currently editing a post, and I vote, then my vote will still count. However, after five minutes votes are locked on a given edit of a post--so, if you edit again, I can change my vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T15:22:53.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-16T18:25:37.093" Score="-4" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Major rewrite since the ELL proposal has been reopened)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we start allowing questions we previously deemed General Reference, since they’ve nowhere else to go. We can migrate them if ELL ever graduates to a fully fledged site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General reference is a dubious close reason. If we try hard enough, nuances can be found in the most poorly worded of question, and we can answer them from each perspective: as an expert in English and as a teacher of English. Questions don't have to have &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; one right answer, that's just preferable. Having two does not make the question &quot;not constructive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2012-10-24T08:21:20.450" LastActivityDate="2012-10-24T08:21:20.450" Title="Should we ignore the General Reference close reason?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2012-10-16T18:54:49.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your premise is wrong. Basic questions have never been what the site is for. Whether they are closed GR or closed OT, &lt;em&gt;basic questions should be closed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a growing network of individual communities, each dedicated to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;serving experts in a specific field&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise. (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;SE/about&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;English.SE/faq&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the first few words of The General Reference close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is too basic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem using GR to close questions that are too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing GR does sometimes create arguments. I also have no problem closing questions that are too basic as OT. This is an experts site. Questions which are too basic are OT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To those who might object to closing GR because basic questions can't always be answered by &amp;quot;link[ing] to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information&amp;quot;: Sure they can. There are non-SE sites out there designed specifically for English language learners. Those can be linked to ELL questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So close OT, or close GR, but &lt;em&gt;close the question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T19:06:07.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2012-10-16T19:36:00.607" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The argument in favour of closing as GR is that ELU is not a place to little by little collect the entire OED, one answer at a time. Thus, posting dictionary definitions (the archetypal GR case) doesn't &quot;improve the internet&quot;. What it does do is give someone who doesn't have a clue about how to look in a dictionary a free ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument against closing such GR questions is that English learners often have a hard time with dictionary definitions, nuance, or usage. They are often starting from the position of a Chinese-English dictionary or Arabic-English dictionary or whatever, where single words are translated for single words, and simply don't have enough information to make decisions or to understand what they read. They need a native speaker's advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, we often can't tell if a person is just lazy and hasn't looked in a dictionary, or is confused by what their dictionaries are telling them. So we should close as GR, until they demonstrate what their misunderstanding is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, closing these questions as GR probably doesn't actually help anyone. The user will simply leave because we failed to help them. When we auto-post a dictionary entry, the user often THEN takes the time to explain what they don't understand. If new users are not guided into better-explaining their problem, they will often just give up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in principle, we should close as GR. In practice, all those Officially On Topic questions that were not well-asked will be closed, when they could instead be answered for lots of reps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T19:36:00.607" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3205" CreationDate="2012-10-16T19:58:27.783" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should a question be up-voted only when it shows research effort and/or is useful and clear? Is a question useful and clear if it's interesting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should a question be answered only when the question shows research effort and/or is useful and clear? Does the fact that a user answers a question imply that it is useful and clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if a third user finds an answer useful and up-votes it, does it not follow that the question too is a useful one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I find it decidedly odd to see some questions which have a number of answers (and thereby, a number of answerers), but a dismal number of question up-votes. Do these answerers not find the question interesting or useful and yet deign to provide an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T13:24:35.837" Title="When should a question be up-voted? When should a question be answered?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-16T21:41:27.347" Score="8" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;A chat room has been created as an open forum for users with any mod privileges such as &quot;vote to close&quot;. This chat room is intended for discussion and consensus building about what editorial direction users with mod privileges should take in light of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7911/on-the-closure-of-english-language-learners/7912#7912&quot;&gt;closing of the English Language Learners proposal&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/6144/elu-mod-privileges-summit&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Mod Privileges Summit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stay the course (continue to allow many basic Q&amp;amp;A)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stick more to the EL&amp;amp;U charter (discourage basic Q&amp;amp;A)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Support even more basic Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELL proposal would have created a place for basic English Q&amp;amp;A, freeing EL&amp;amp;U to be more of the expert-to-expert site that it was originally envisioned to be. The ELL proposal has now been closed as too much of an overlap with what EL&amp;amp;U currently offers, because EL&amp;amp;U allows many basic Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T23:07:03.100" Title="Announcing an EL&amp;U Mod Privileges Summit" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-07-25T17:10:37.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-16T21:46:17.280" Score="5" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a pattern in the downvotes that I receive. Often times I receive downvotes on answers that I give to very basic and easy-to-answer questions--even when the answer is correct. The most recent example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87087/sentence-pattern-clarification/87089#87089&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. This is especially true when the question has close votes. Is there a tendency or a propensity to down-vote answers to basic or low-quality questions? Is this poor voting behavior, or is this acceptable practice on the SE network?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:13:25.253" Title="Downvoting an answer because the question was bad?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3198" CreationDate="2012-10-16T22:36:09.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been occasions when I have (not on this site, but on others) downvoted somebody's answer to an obviously bad question.  I usually explain why, when I do this.  People who ask bad questions should be encouraged to reword them or ask better questions, not rewarded with an upvote and an answer.  I see too many examples of people cynically answering bad questions with bland answers just in hope of getting the rep for an answer (not that I'm suggesting you do this, but it may explain other's motives for voting you down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26971" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T22:36:09.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3198" CreationDate="2012-10-16T22:50:32.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not uncommon for users to downvote the question and all answers when they vote to close a question.  This is theoretically because &lt;em&gt;high rep&lt;/em&gt; users should know better than to answer off-topic (etc) questions.  However, at 376 rep, I wouldn't consider you to be a high rep user (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be because the downvoter thought you shouldn't have answered the question, but it could also be that the downvoter thought it wasn't a good answer.  Since they didn't leave a comment, we can't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T22:50:32.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2012-10-17T00:33:30.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeing in this question a misunderstanding of the &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; close reason, and I'd like to make clear what it is actually meant for. Here's the close text for GR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emphasis is on the &lt;em&gt;single link to a standard internet reference source&lt;/em&gt;. In this respect, a lot of basic grammar questions &lt;strong&gt;are not&lt;/strong&gt; general reference; there is no standard reference source available that explicates on the various rules (or lack thereof) of English. Instead, what the Internet has is piecemeal information on grammar—it's there, but it's not necessarily findable. Such a grammar question could be basic, but it is not GR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a real GR question would be: &lt;em&gt;What does &quot;dog&quot; mean?&lt;/em&gt; Dictionaries are well-known to be standard references for definitions, and there are many broad and relatively complete dictionaries available online for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that generally, Stack Exchange welcomes basic questions. The SE sites are intended for experts, but they are not meant to exclude amateurs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has long been established that no question is too entry-level nor too basic. Everyone is welcome. But, in these earliest days, we are DESIGNING a site for experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and challenging questions, not the basic questions found on every other Q&amp;amp;A site. Remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around! &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/area-51-asking-the-first-questions/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/area-51-asking-the-first-questions/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GR close reason reflects a weak compromise, if you will—it says &quot;if it will take you 5 seconds to look up the answer, it's &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; basic&quot;, but at the same time, it doesn't say that basic questions are prohibited completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this post is more intended as background as to what GR was meant for, and what the general SE stance towards basic questions is, and isn't meant to advocate any particular position. If we do decide that we've going to move the boundaries of what constitutes too basic, we should do so independently of GR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T00:33:30.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-17T06:34:59.307" Score="-3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87129/is-far-east-politically-incorrect&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was closed, as it seems like a perfectly valid inquiry on whether or not a certain expression is considered sensitive or offensive in the English language. This seems like quite a valid question, and others like it have been asked. It seems like useful information to know whether or not a term is offensive, and it directly pertains to English, as it is an English expression. Why exactly was this question closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T07:16:21.847" Title="Why was this question on an offensive term closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3202" CreationDate="2012-10-17T07:16:21.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a real question.  The title gives the impression of a question, but the text simply says &quot;Look what I found.  Interesting, eh?&quot;.  If you had worded the main text to make it clear you were serious about the question and to show some constructive argument, it might still be open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26971" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T07:16:21.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3206" CreationDate="2012-10-17T12:59:03.157" Score="-1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1900&quot;&gt;How do votes work on closed questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a question of what the current rules are, but rather a request to consider if it should be this way. Admittedly, I thought of this because an OLD closed question of mine got another downvote. Imagine a toddler being slapped in the hand for something he did 5 months ago. That's kind of the reaction I had. Then, allowing a little logic to seep in, I considered this: If the community considered a question bad enough to close,  shouldn't it no longer be eligible for positive reputation? If it's already closed, hasn't the person who asked the question already been given proper dis-incentive to ask that type of question again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should up/down voting be disabled on closed questions?" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3196" CreationDate="2012-10-17T13:24:35.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I up-voted this question. I try to review most questions, and upvote them whenever they engage my curiosity and interest. I also up-vote them if they seem to pose a question that I think is clear and would be of interest to others, even if it is not my particular interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I answer, I almost always up-vote a question.  It has engaged me enough to spend some time to think of, or research a response. If I am just put off by the question because it is not well formed or thought out, but I still feel a need to comment, I comment rather than answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely down-vote an answer and do not down-vote a question. If it is no good, let it die of inattention. On answers, I only down-vote when I think they are seriously misleading. I am much more likely to down-vote on the DIY site where an answer can be dangerous. I don't think the language (or its practitioners) is at great risk from an answer here that few or no members vote up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T13:24:35.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3204" CreationDate="2012-10-17T13:42:58.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think that the mechanics of closed questions should be changed in this respect. What you're proposing would make closed questions almost identical to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22228/what-is-a-locked-post&quot;&gt;a locked question&lt;/a&gt;, which serves a different purpose from a closed question. Locked questions are &quot;frozen in time&quot;, or a snapshot of when it was locked. A locked post has historical significance and/or a lot of popularity and interesting content, but should otherwise be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closed question is salvageable. Some people may still consider a closed question a good one. I've upvoted questions that I've voted to close before. A question that was closed may be more likely to garner downvotes, but I don't think there's enough of a causal relationship to &quot;lock in&quot; the votes of a closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T13:42:58.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-18T11:10:02.650" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, there's been a tendency to post an entire batch of questions in quick succession.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. '(word) with' vs. '(word) at' (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/34162/14666&quot;&gt;“Employment with” vs. “employment at”&lt;/a&gt; and its siblings).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not just similar to the &quot;Possible Duplicate&quot; syndrome; it could be worse in some cases.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we answer each of these individually at all?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Could we have a mechanism to merge them into a single generic question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should we advise posters to avoid the practice?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T10:40:48.653" Title="Generic vs. Specific 'This' &amp; 'That' type Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3198" CreationDate="2012-10-18T11:15:29.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed this quite a few times.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my early days on ELU, I was advised by one member that when the question is voted to close, and patently &quot;close-worthy,&quot; you better not answer it. If you do, others may down vote your answer for just that reason.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is not a rule on ELU. Nor is it a convention that everyone here follows. However, it is true that people do so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2012-10-18T11:15:29.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3178" CreationDate="2012-10-19T16:12:27.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This page just popped up seemingly of its own volition so I thought I would throw in an idea of two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the same degree that I can appreciate a well considered, comprehending vote down, the opposite can be a source of annoyance. But, that is not the essential point of this entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that a vote of four warrants a put down (and forfeiting of another's effort) without practical resource. That said, is seems to be the worst of impropriety to give put down votes a full weighting of 1 each equals 4. Judiciousness as well as common sense suggests that a put down vote weighting of 1/4 per vote should be imputed, retroactively, against an errant contributor after the fact that his/her contribution has been cut off. To quadruply cast aspersion seems unfair when, say, the gaining of reputation is never so easy...and does not always occur by reason of relative merit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What commentators severally or collectively deem too far afield in some way, should not detract disproportionately from reputation already awarded.  To inflict subvalueless votes as if punishments seem to make the entire processs more about moderator or priveleged, than about participation quality, achievement, or value of contribution. Additionally, for the slap that is a cutoff to be attended by the club that is 3 exta forfeited points, speaks poorly, after a fashion, of moderators themselves so long as they are &quot;priveleged&quot; to vote up or down. Its like saying, for example, here's two kudos for answers we approve of...oops, let's make that minus two for the one we don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not always possible to know when a put down will occur; and it sometimes can happen that one occcurs mistakenly, for example, because contribution is read incompletely or hastily; or merely because a modicum of clarification might be needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor to take into account, if positive behavior modification is any kind of influence hoping to be &quot;wielded,&quot; is the established evidence that people generally do not learn from mistakes. So, in that regard, it is possible that quadruple penalty for markdowns only amplifies the very problem wanting to be (no, not mitigated) ameliorated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for considering. Intense pressures on my time might not make it possible to advance or defend the position. It's only there for consideration as is. So make of it as you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28414" LastEditorUserId="28414" LastEditDate="2012-10-19T16:21:53.687" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T16:21:53.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2012-10-19T16:24:49.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2969/19644&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNhTt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Write for the EL&amp;amp;U Community Blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19644" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T13:50:46.263" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-10-19T16:24:49.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-19T19:34:06.913" Score="-3" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I raise this matter here because of comments arising against &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68149/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question and others. I checked several earlier questions by the OP on that link, and in every case, the exact question had been asked previously on different sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My starting position is that I really don't like the idea of people trawling other Q&amp;amp;A sites for questions to pose here on ELU. Leading on from that, I'm not keen on people posting questions themselves somewhere else, then posting them here later. It seems to me this is &quot;Duplicate Questions&quot; by another name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably fair to say that a significant reason why I don't like this behaviour is that it's characteristic of one of our most troublesome trolls. My understanding is most Q&amp;amp;A sites at least take a dim view of multiple posting. Apparently not the current ELU mods, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I a lone voice here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T19:48:31.307" Title="Posting Questions on ELU that were previously asked elsewhere" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3211" CreationDate="2012-10-19T19:48:31.307" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with this, at least on the question you linked.  The OP kinda did themselves a disservice by linking their original post on the other forum, but that can be easily remedied.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wouldn't we want to be the canonical resource for all questions English, so long as they are good questions?  To take the opposite viewpoint would be to say that we exclude all material that's already been asked somewhere else on the Internet.  If Wikipedia took this approach, it would be quite a patchy resource indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't even take this position with cross-posting on SE (although we do strongly encourage the user to either customize their question to be a glove fit for each site, or confine their posting to a single site).  There's no concept of a &quot;cross-site duplicate,&quot; nor does the SE software support such a concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I think the Internet is ultimately a better place if we can concentrate this information in one place, and I think the SE community is better equipped to do this than most other forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T19:48:31.307" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-20T22:43:50.667" Score="22" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the ELL-Post-Apocalypse chatroom, KitFox made a very interesting &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/6537704#6537704&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;observation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;gently edited here for dramatic impact&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have gotten diluted with basic questions because basic questions fill our pages. If we want higher caliber questions, people coming here have to see higher caliber questions. They need examples, a standard to reach for. So we should be making sure that the kinds of questions we wanted to have asked are asked every day. Otherwise, users come and see &amp;quot;Is it reason with or reason to?&amp;quot; And they think &amp;quot;I have a question like that!&amp;quot; And they pile on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would like to [. . .] encourage our high rep users to post one good question every week on EL&amp;amp;U to help boost the impression of the site (as well as the content).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are obvious objections to this proposition. High-rep users mostly have high reps because they’re really good answerers; and they’re really good answerers not only because they already know a lot of the answers, but also because they already know how to &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; answers for themselves. Can we live, or keep the site alive, by taking in each others’ laundry? There’s some feeling that we can’t: read the responses to KitFox’ post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let’s face it, writing a good question on purpose is really really hard. Much harder than answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, hey, I’m here for the puzzles. I’m here for questions that make me actually &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about what I do instead of just doing it with expert but essentially routine skill. And if the price of my entertainment is that I have to entertain others, fair enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: is the sense of the community that KitFox’s notion is a sound one?—that we should all make an effort to raise the front page profile by writing questions of the kinds we want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, I’ll step up. I'll wash your shirt if you'll wash mine. Hang or fold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T20:50:23.527" Title="Do we need to write the better questions ourselves?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3213" CreationDate="2012-10-21T00:04:41.423" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've already presented my point of view, but I would like to expound a little more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There comes a point sometime after we hit 3,000 reps when (for many of us) our mindset shifts from contributing via good questions to contributing by closing &quot;bad&quot; (e.g., off-topic, duplicate, etc) questions.  Many of us are still avid users, but now we have a special role for cultivating our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we earn more reps, we close more questions and the more questions we close, the more we start looking at questions to see whether they should be closed.  Eventually, we stop looking at questions to see if we should close them and instead look at questions to see why they should be open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But closing questions that we think are not appropriate for the site is only half the work.  We need to attract the kinds of questions we want here, and the best way to do that is to provide newcomers with good examples of what is appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T00:04:41.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3216" CreationDate="2012-10-21T14:47:45.680" Score="14" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40900/is-usaers-just-an-ordinary-english-word-today&quot;&gt;Is ‘USAers’ just an ordinary English word today?&lt;/a&gt; has, at the time of writing, a net vote of +4. On the other hand, my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87645/is-us-american-reasonably-standard-english#comment175212_87645&quot;&gt;Can I use &amp;quot;US-American&amp;quot; to disambiguate &amp;quot;American&amp;quot;? If not, what can I use?&lt;/a&gt; has a vote of -4. I don't quite understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What distinguishes a good from a bad question? In particular, what makes my question on &lt;em&gt;US-Americans&lt;/em&gt; so bad that it has a net vote of -4, whereas the question on &lt;em&gt;USAers&lt;/em&gt; has a net vote of +4?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to learn to ask better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T16:49:11.383" Title="What distinguishes a good from a bad question (i.c. &quot;Can I use “US-American” to disambiguate “American”? If not, what can I use?&quot;)" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3215" CreationDate="2012-10-21T16:32:33.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was an upvoter on this question (and a respondent to it). The question was, in my opinion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a legitimate question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;supported by relevant research  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appropriately discriminated from a similar question, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edited to exclude irrelevancies with which the comments became preoccupied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the downvotes were prompted at least in part by the heated tone which some commenters adopted and by the false impression they gave of what you were asking. Not your fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As things stand, since you have your answer, your best course is to delete the question, which will remove the (in my opinion undeserved) penalty you have suffered. (You may or may not wish to post the substance to the previous question.) But this unfairly penalizes TecBrat, who loses the rep he earned for upvotes and acceptance; so somebody's screwed whatever you do. Bah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T16:32:33.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3223" CreationDate="2012-10-22T11:13:57.750" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any point to having multiple Community Wiki answers on the same post? For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/3558/14666&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/3576/14666&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/3557/14666&quot;&gt;Is there an online sample sentence database or search engine&lt;/a&gt;? It seems to me that having multiple answers defeats the purpose of Community Wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T10:01:49.103" Title="Is there any point to having multiple CW answers on the same post?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3220" CreationDate="2012-10-22T14:03:07.647" Score="6" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idle question: &quot;Generalist&quot; was one of the badges that nobody had, and now suddenly a whole bunch of us were awarded it. Was there some hidden time-related condition on it that the site met? Or did someone merge a bunch of tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T14:09:06.893" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T15:49:08.640" Title="So, what happened on the site that we all suddenly got &quot;Generalist&quot; badges?" Tags="|discussion|tags|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3219" CreationDate="2012-10-22T14:05:07.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The engine only starts awarding Generalist badges once the top 40 tags have at least 200 questions each. Reg tagged and re-tagged a lot of stuff this morning.  Thanks, Reg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T14:19:20.567" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T14:19:20.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3213" CreationDate="2012-10-22T15:22:42.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a small handful of questions I've wanted to ask since becoming a regular. For me, my problem has been, for every question I've pondered so far, it would have been closed as a duplicate. A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it okay to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16/when-is-it-appropriate-to-end-a-sentence-in-a-preposition&quot;&gt;end a sentence with a preposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79/is-it-acceptable-to-start-a-sentence-with-however&quot;&gt;begin one with a conjunction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7235/what-is-a-word-phrase-for-using-a-term-for-a-popular-special-case-instead-of-a-g&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there an official word for that thing I've often referred to as a &quot;companym&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, would we be similarly encouraged to overhaul what seems like a poorly-written question with some good potential?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T15:22:42.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3218" CreationDate="2012-10-23T09:49:54.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/3557&quot;&gt;Is there an online sample sentence database or search engine?&lt;/a&gt; it is the question that was made a Community Wiki, and all the answers were automatically made Community Wiki as well. In that case, it happens for a specific reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, it doesn't make any sense to limit the CW answers to one per question. I could make my answer CW because I don't want to get any reputation for it, or because it is not complete, and I want to give to somebody else the opportunity of improving it. For example, I could write an answer reporting what said in a comment, and (not wanting reputation for something written by another user) make it CW.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The fact I preferred to make my answer CW should not limit the possibility for other users to do the same, also because CW answers are not containers where different users add completely different answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another reason for allowing multiple CW answers: When an answer has been edited from the author X times, or from Y users, it is automatically converted in CW answer. If there is a limit of one CW answer per question, it would mean that those answers should be merged together, and this is not what should happen, for what I previously said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T10:01:49.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-23T17:08:51.157" Score="0" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/87749/1954&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sorting on&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Sorting by&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm stumped.  What did I miss here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2012-10-24T05:44:15.677" Title="Why was this closed as not a real question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3224" CreationDate="2012-10-24T03:39:55.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment on the original question I said that, among other reasons, questions are incomplete (and therefore fit the definition of “not a real question”) when they show no research effort. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1547/martha&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt; replied that this criterion “can contribute to ‘not a real question’ or ‘general reference’, but it really depends on the particulars of the case.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, though, research effort is always required, regardless of the type of question or the particulars of the case, because it is central to the site concept: by and for scholars of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why the first reason given in the tooltip for the downvote button is “this question does not show any research effort”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site concept has been articulated and the same point made at various times and places by the site management. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions at EL&amp;amp;U should be &lt;strong&gt;expert-level questions which are “interesting, unique, and thought-provoking”&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  by Shog9, StackExchange staff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP must &lt;strong&gt;“have a particularly interesting problem to solve”&lt;/strong&gt; and put &lt;strong&gt;“effort and research into the question”&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48415/correct-word-for-a-design-in-progress#comment89542_48415&quot;&gt;Correct word for a design in progress&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  by Robert Cartaino, StackExchange staff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP can “ask simple questions as long as they are &lt;strong&gt;thoughtful, intriguing questions posed as you would ask them of an expert. Overly simple questions without research or forethought should be closed.&lt;/strong&gt; … There’s no lowering of the bar for a so-called learners’ status.”  &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7911/on-the-closure-of-english-language-learners/7912#comment13203_7912&quot;&gt;On the closure of English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  by Robert Cartaino, StackExchange staff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Requiring the OP to show some research is key&lt;/strong&gt;, and simple: what have you tried? and in what context do you plan to use this? The sidebar that appears when you ask a question also covers this … [the]&#xA;  relevant bit being share your research. And if you haven’t done any, should you even be asking here?”&#xA;  — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests/1737#1737&quot;&gt;Against single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  by Jeff Atwood, StackExchange co-founder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3193/should-we-ignore-the-general-reference-close-reason/3194#3194&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, this concept is also expressly stated in the site charter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a growing network of individual communities, each dedicated to &lt;strong&gt;serving experts in a specific field&lt;/strong&gt;. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise. (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;SE/about&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;. (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;English.SE/faq&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2012-10-24T05:44:15.677" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3233" CreationDate="2012-10-24T10:44:28.067" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to post my question at both English.Stackexchange.com and Linguistics.Stackexchange.com.  I think that the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87953/how-to-write-the-ipa-in-gregg-shorthand#comment176030_87953&quot;&gt;How do I write certain IPA sounds using Gregg Shorthand?&lt;/a&gt; (reposted: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2752/help-me-convert-the-english-phonetic-alphabet-to-gregg-shorthand#comment7397_2752&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2752/help-me-convert-the-english-phonetic-alphabet-to-gregg-shorthand#comment7397_2752&lt;/a&gt;), is more suitable for English.Stackexchange.com because Gregg Shorthand is for English; however, the people at Linguistics.Stackexchange.com would probably be better equipped to answer the question.  So, can I fork it.  If not, one of the higher-up users at English.Stackexchange.com has recommended that I migrate the question.  How can I migrate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2012-10-28T15:25:34.487" Title="How to fork or migrate a question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3236" CreationDate="2012-10-24T21:00:57.193" Score="16" ViewCount="6130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many questions have these words tossed around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;invalid&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;mistake&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;non-standard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;not accepted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;acceptable&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;not acceptable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;common&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;uncommon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;guidelines&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words seem to have different meanings in various circles. There are nuances there that can cause conflict and confusion. Without context, one could ask &quot;acceptable &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this manifest in several questions, most recently one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/87225/24117&quot;&gt;direct object &quot;it&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. One of the first comments is by tchrist: &quot;What do you mean by &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; &lt;strong&gt;What &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; we mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/27/which-language-and-grammar-rules-to-flout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammatical discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the NY Times site gave me pause for similar reflection. Is there a consensus, at least on ELU, about these terms? Is there a way we can use these terms effectively and accurately (in a linguistic sense) to answer questions? On the one hand, we don't want to confuse non-native speakers (or even laypersons like me). But we don't want to create a misleading or oversimplified picture, either, that leaves professional linguists shaking their heads about what makes &quot;good English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24117" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T12:33:32.640" Title="How do we describe &quot;good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; English?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-25T05:39:42.857" Score="-3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88022/is-there-a-forum-or-discussion-group-to-discuss-programmatically-editing-english#comment176246_88022&quot;&gt;Is there a forum or discussion group to discuss programmatically editing English grammar and spelling in texts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfectly good question that can be very specifically answered. It asks about where one can engage further discuss the rules of English grammar in relation to programming.  Possible answers include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;check out grammarprogrammingforum.com. they discuss various algorithms for automatically checking and correcting texts.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;there is a computer science club at soandso.edu where they discuss linguistics in programming. They have a mailing list, here is a link where you can get more information and sign up.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of just arbitrarily closing the question, why not offer some advice as to why and suggestions on how to improve? I am going to ask the question again, so please advice on a better way to phrase my question so it's not just simply closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24811" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T11:51:25.840" Title="Why was this question about discussion of grammar and programming closed?" Tags="|support|appropriate-questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2012-10-25T05:52:55.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2207/should-not-the-faq-have-an-entry-about-online-resource-questions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Bottom line, resource requests are out of scope for this site: every answer is equally valid, and all answers are subject to going out-of-date unusually fast. (I would've closed your question as &quot;not constructive&quot;, not &quot;not a real question&quot;, but that's just 'cause I'm a pedant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T05:52:55.157" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2207" CreationDate="2012-10-25T08:14:22.907" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the FAQ should not have an entry about [barring] online resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say I disagree with all the logic in the argument above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The main problem I see with those questions is that every answer is equally valid.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not true.  Are you saying that the moderators here personally have read every single resource in all of these answers of these questions and that you are qualified to judge whether or not they are appropriate? I am sure that the only the person qualified to decide if they are 'equally valid' is the person who asked the question to begin with. His or her answer selection would be based on a variety of factors including background, language capability, education level, overall goals, which, if they were expressed well enough through the question, it would indeed lead to one and only one answer being the best regardless of how long the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I could google, obtain a list of online resources, and that list would be equally valid.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This logic is not true for at least two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, this can be said of every single question here in the EL&amp;amp;U site. I could take the context of any of these questions, Google it, and in true Google fashion, get back 1,302,423,422 results in 0.13 seconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, let's say, for example, I am having trouble understanding some of the language in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. A quick Google search of “Understanding Faulkner Sound and Fury” yields 879,000 results (0.25 seconds). Most of the ones in my result set are about buying the book, which I consider completely invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you telling me that on a website dedicated to the in depth understanding of English language through Q and A that at least one one of the members is not going to be an authority on Faulkner, perhaps having devoted their lives to specializing in his literature, and you want to suggest that those 879,000 Google results are equally valid to what this expert's qualifications could suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I disagree. In my opinion, this is way too presumptuous.  In fact in my results above most of those links want me to buy the book. Searching for an explanation of a particular passage from the book, Google becomes even more useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that questions like these not only should be allowed but be encouraged as this is one of the reasons we use this QA site to begin with – Google, or whatever resources we tried before coming here, failed, and we want to search a more niche community for the expertise to help us better understand the complexities of the English language and it's usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that I would close this answer by pointing out a few questions that should be closed based on the reasoning in the question. I am going to decline. There are just way too many of them.  So many 'What's the best word for...' or 'What's a synonym for...' or 'What does this passage mean....' questions I come across are subjective, and indeed the posts are full of 'lists' where  any one answer is as correct as another.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I will close by saying that all resources should be fair game if they help us come away from this site with a better understanding of the English language than before we got here, otherwise, we are defeating the purpose of the reason this site exists to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24811" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T08:14:22.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2012-10-25T09:48:19.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some random thoughts off the top of my head in no particular order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One problem is — which is why Martha mentioned &quot;not constructive&quot;&amp;nbsp;—, your question is very open-ended. A bigger problem still: it's more open-ended than it need be. People will start googling for the same things you already googled for, suggesting things you already rejected, linking to forums that only discuss programming in Turbo Pascal 5.5, and only in Bulgarian. These will all be perfectly valid answers and yet not help you one bit. In short, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/&quot;&gt;you very likely have a number of rather specific constraints, but you mention none at all&lt;/a&gt;. So people tend to see this as &quot;not constructive&quot; or &quot;not a real question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, as Martha mentions, two years from now half the links will be dead, or point to something else entirely. So people tend to see this as &quot;too localized&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, since &lt;em&gt;this site&lt;/em&gt; here is not &quot;a forum or discussion group to discuss programmatically editing English grammar and spelling in text&quot;, it also is, by definition, not the best venue to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; where else such a forum or discussion group can be found. It's like going to a site about cooking, and asking for links to forums about playing guitar. It's a safe bet that there are people around who totally &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; answer your question; but it's a bet nonetheless. So people tend to see such questions as &quot;off-topic&quot;. No one will prevent you from dropping by in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, though, and asking there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2207/should-not-the-faq-have-an-entry-about-online-resource-questions/3231#3231&quot;&gt;your reasoning&lt;/a&gt; on the online-resource questions. I see your point. Yes, arguably &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question can be deemed subjective; I'll go further myself: every question on every Q&amp;amp;A site ever is a straw poll of a random group of strangers off the Internet. And yes, arguably every question is too localized&amp;nbsp;— English is a living language, so soon enough &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; answers on this site will be outdated. That much is true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's too broad a definition of &quot;subjective&quot; or &quot;too localized&quot;; we can't work with that. We have to draw the line somewhere. And it just so happens that we draw it here. It's drawn but in sand, though, not set in stone. The very fact that there is an open meta question on which you could post your thoughts is indication that the exact guidelines are work in progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T09:48:19.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3227" CreationDate="2012-10-25T11:48:15.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the mods at Linguistics. You question has been migrated yesterday (after this question was asked) and you self-deleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'll repeat things I've already said in the comments there to clarify some points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] is more suitable for English.Stackexchange.com because Gregg Shorthand is for English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a valid reason. We have many questions on Linguistics that treat about English only. The only factor that could distinguish a valid question here or there is: is it about Linguistics or about Grammar and Usage? I think your question is more about the first point than the second one. Actually, it's all about the first one and nothing about the second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, can I fork it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, in general you should ask on the site whose expertise is closer to the type of answer you want to get. Note that, if you ever choose the wrong site, you can flag your own question for migration and it's a common practice. If you want to avoid that, you might try asking on Meta/Chat first like &quot;Is my question OK for this site?&quot;, that's a perfectly good question for Meta. And actually it's a typical Meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, generally you can adapt the same question to fit the site's expertise and gain answers that would be relevant for that site. But in your case I don't see how that could apply. If you have a way to do it, propose it and the EL&amp;amp;U community will evaluate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T11:48:15.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2012-10-25T11:51:25.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may also have seen the comment posted there:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may find better help on linguisticsSE. Meanwhile, note that you &lt;strong&gt;will need a good understanding of formal grammars and natural languages before undertaking the project on your own, so first read up as much as you can on those and the related.&lt;/strong&gt; – Kris   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd think no answer is going to benefit you at this stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T11:51:25.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2012-10-26T09:22:35.697" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlIlq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T09:22:35.697" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-10-26T09:22:35.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3228" CreationDate="2012-10-26T11:53:57.890" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are two basic meanings, and questioners should be asked to clarify which they're using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's formal written English, as used in textbooks, most novels, newspapers, and technical articles. This has well-defined rules of grammar and orthography. We can talk about the rules of comma placement, or how a semi-colon works, or verb agreement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's the English people speak, whether formal or informal. Formal spoken English tends to approach the rules of written grammar, but it's not quite the same. In this case, the question is, &lt;em&gt;Would a native speaker actually say this, or does it just sound wrong?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastEditorUserId="1696" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T17:35:37.110" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T17:35:37.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-26T14:19:16.860" Score="-14" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I would like to know why it is possible to close a question as &quot;too localized&quot; at all? Is it not enough that the question does not get an answer? Why is it necessary to close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every closed question is an act of censorship! Personally I &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; prefer junk to censorship. To broaden the question: why is it necessary at all to close a question, if it is possible to down vote a question? What is wrong with down voting a question? What makes down voting insufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And second I would like to know how one single person is able to decide what is &quot;too localized&quot; for &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/1000000th-user/&quot;&gt;1.000.000&lt;/a&gt; users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10436" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:30:12.387" Title="Why is it valid that one person can close a question as too localized?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3237" CreationDate="2012-10-26T14:41:47.127" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88207/is-necessity-a-hypernym-of-optional-and-required&quot;&gt;Your question&lt;/a&gt; (next time please link it in your meta post to save me from hunting it down) was closed because you are looking for a name for a computer program. That is off-topic as per the site rules. It is something that can only be answered in the context of your program, because programs often stretch or confine word meanings in ways that aren't valid or aren't natural in normal language. Any answer that satisfies the rules and usage of English is unlikely to satisfy your program and vice versa. The specific &quot;english&quot; use-case of your program is too localized. Hence the close reason. This is a long-established rule on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, moderators (such as RegDwight, the closer of your question) are trusted to know and enforce the rules and can close questions unilaterally. This is by-design and not unusual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can you do now? You can edit your question into a proper usage/meaning question, showing what research you have done so far, what dictionaries you have consulted, etc. If your question isn't answerable by looking in a dictionary, it can likely be answered here. However, whatever answer you get may be completely useless to your desired context. If you edit your answer, it may be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Based on your comments on your question you seem to be confused about or in disagreement with the question-closing policy. The current policy is to close questions that are not deemed on-topic for the site, or that are low-quality. The reason we close and not just downvote is that closed questions can get no more answers. Closed questions can also be deleted. This provides incentive for people to ask good questions, which will stick around and be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Based on your censorship comments I wanted to add that &quot;censorship&quot; is a very loaded word that you are throwing around as if your human rights are being violated and you expect someone to end up in jail for that transgression. This site, like all Stack Exchange sites, has rules and one of the rules is that questions have to meet certain guidelines. No other questions are allowed. It is expected that we close and delete questions that do not meet the guidelines. That is how this site works by design. If you don't like that, you are free to use a different site, or to start your own site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:30:12.387" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3213" CreationDate="2012-10-26T15:15:04.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions are the result of problems people have. Nobody can invent a good question, because it would not have any practical value. If it is invented, there is not a real problem behind the question. If you want to write a good article Wikipedia is the right place and not SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 10 people ask 10 times the same one line question, than you can not conclude that this is a useless question. Instead this is a very valuable question, because 10 people had the same problem independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing you can conclude is, that either the way to find the answer sucks or people are too lazy to search for the answer, because it is easier to ask the question twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question itself is a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10436" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T15:15:04.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3237" CreationDate="2012-10-26T15:25:36.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be a bit confused about what closing a question means. Downvotes and close votes are orthagonal: the latter is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a more forceful version of the former. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;A closed question is not necessarily bad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. I would say that only the &quot;not a real question&quot; close reason makes a negative value judgement about the question; the other close reasons can all be a case of &lt;em&gt;&quot;That's a good question, but [insert close reason here]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. (Not always, of course: there are many closed questions that are also downvoted. The point is, the one does not imply the other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restricting the questions that can be asked was a conscious and deliberate choice by the site designers, because without it, you get Yahoo!Answers. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Y!A; I've been known to answer questions on it. It serves a purpose, just not the same purpose as the SE sites. In particular, it doesn't attract experts, which is at the heart of the SE philosophy: attract the experts, and the non-experts will follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T15:25:36.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3242" CreationDate="2012-10-27T01:18:53.310" Score="8" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been the beneficiary (victim?) of a slew of badge-inducing up votes recently, receiving probably five or six Nice Answer and Enlightened badges in just the past week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The random up votes are not surprising, since I get a lot of passive rep. But it sure seems weird that a whole bunch of accepted answers that had nine up votes suddenly, one or two a day, have been ripening into badge-producing fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just saying. If someone is gaming the system on my behalf, please stop. I don't need or want the help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2012-10-27T01:33:56.870" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T17:31:53.960" Title="Suspicious completionist up-votings" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3241" CreationDate="2012-10-27T12:00:10.483" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the voting is too suspicious, it will be automatically cancelled by the system, so you don't need to... well, worry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not, it will stay in place and in that case, congratulations for the badges. :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-10-27T12:00:10.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-28T01:02:49.233" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to this site. I wanted to ask a valid question. I doctored the question repeatedly in order to get seemingly errant &quot;quality&quot; messages to stop. Finally succeeded. But then the &quot;no user name&quot; and/or &quot;email address already registered&quot; blurbs kept appearing (even after valid rabbit response), in spite of valid credentials in all possible permutations. (By the weigh, the address-registered blurb is ambiguous in that it uses a positive when it means a negative...valid registration in blurb form ought to be a good thing, but is a bad thing.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding nothing would work, I checked the P3P report to see if all was still well with allowing the stackexchange domain cookie. No problem there, either, but a blocked cookie (with no requisite antecedant cookie request) did appear:  quantserve...pixel.quantserve. Since these seemed dubious (having not requesting download permission not shown stackexchange affiliation, and possibly being more than just a statistics service) I requested the privacy policy, but to no avail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was advised instead to check with you (via &quot;contact&quot;) for the privacy policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please, provide that policy, with explanation and purpose, if you have&#xA;  it. Also, explain the on-again off-again problems (and related time&#xA;  wasting) signing on or asking questions on this (english especially)&#xA;  site. I especially get annoyed at composing good posts only to have to&#xA;  rewrite them from memory when seem to just evaporate on the way to or&#xA;  from the server. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...was to have been my inquiry; however there seemed to have been no means for straightforward contact...and then, even after being &quot;redirected&quot; to do so, I was blocked from posing any question here, for lack of registration credentials...the same which I was uncertain whether or not I had or did not have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually I was able to get to this point--whether that is good or bad I can't be certain (for example: as to whether or not I will face new and equally, or moreso fascinating participation conflicts). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever info you can provide as to the re-quoted material above, and as to circumventing the obstacles which the site seems to provide in such abundance will be sincerely appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--Lex&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28414" LastEditorUserId="28414" LastEditDate="2012-10-28T01:09:51.083" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T07:59:28.517" Title="getting questions questioned shouldn't be so easy...answered shouldn't be so hard" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3243" CreationDate="2012-10-28T01:09:33.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The privacy policy is linked at the bottom of each and every page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot reproduce your problems with posting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I tried to submit a question that did not meet the quality standards, the post was retained in its entirety.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I tried to submit a question while logged out without providing name and/or email, the post was retained in its entirety.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I tried to submit a question that hit the CAPTCHA (the rabbit, as you put it), the post was retained in its entirety.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if you find that your posts are being consistently lost somehow (possibly a browser issue?), I suggest you compose your post locally, such as on Microsoft Word, Textedit, Notepad, or a similar program, so that you can copy and paste it if the post is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The low quality standards filter is designed to deny questions that are, quite frankly, of low quality. If you find your question is being blocked by that filter, I would only suggest that you spend a little more time composing it, paying proper attention to generally accepted rules of English, such as capitalization and punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-10-28T01:20:36.707" LastActivityDate="2012-10-28T01:20:36.707" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3227" CreationDate="2012-10-28T15:25:34.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you cross-post the same question on different sites, you should make it suit for the site where the question is being asked; in none of the cases you should ask the question exactly in the same way you are asking it in another site. In the specific, you should ask about the grammar/usage aspect on EL&amp;amp;U, and ask about the linguistic aspect on Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question you are referring to, the question probably suits better Linguistics, provided you can make it a good question. So far, the question has been closed as not a real question, which means it is probably too broad to get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrating a question is possible if you flag it for moderation attention, and you explain you want it migrated on another site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Bear in mind that not good questions are not migrated, which means that subjective, and not constructive questions are not migrated, as they would be not constructive in any Stack Exchange. Also, generally moderators ask to the moderators of the other site if they want the question, and the migration could not happen simply because they have already very similar questions. Then, old questions are not migrated, as they would not get more attention in the receiving site; if you asked a question 3 months ago, it is rather difficult it gets migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-10-28T15:25:34.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3228" CreationDate="2012-10-29T01:47:59.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;strong&gt;What do you mean by grammatical?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is not at all a real question. It's either disingenuous -- and given the source, someone who has no problem declaring whether some of the sentences in ELU questions are or aren't grammatical, I'd say that this question is disingenuous -- or rhetorical or an elided isoform of &quot;When you say that a sentence or expression is &lt;strong&gt;grammatical&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/strong&gt;, whose grammar book are you using to make this judgment, what dialect of English are you referring to, and what age of English do you have in mind, Beowulfian, Chaucerian, Shakesperian, Victorian, or Rupert Murdochian&quot;? Specifically, &quot;He's in hospital&quot; in not grammatical in American English but is grammatical in British English. The question is trivial in such a case. &quot;John the biting was bear a&quot; is incontestably not grammatical in any brand of English. The question is trivial in such a case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are always reasonable judgments that can be made about specific utterances, but those judgments all depend on context, audience, register, intention, etc. They are mostly about whether something said or written is &lt;strong&gt;acceptable, idiomatic, natural, normal, commonplace, understandable, or stylistically good&lt;/strong&gt;. Changing contexts often mean [&lt;strong&gt;NB:&lt;/strong&gt; The verb can just as easily be singular (&lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;) in this sentence] changing judgments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the terms &lt;em&gt;valid/invalid&lt;/em&gt; are appropriate for usage questions. They are from the world of logic and syllogisms and have to do with the conclusions deduced and induced from the premises of an argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that professional linguists are scholars whose expertise prepares them for judging what is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;good English&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and what is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;bad English&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Those judgments are usually made by literary critics. A linguist can tell you whether it's grammatical, whether people use that particular expression, where and when native speakers are more or less likely to use it, and other kinds of technical information about language, but linguistic expertise does not necessarily imply aesthetic competence. Some professional linguists are great writers and literary critics, and others are no better (and even often worse) than those wonderful software generators of postmodernist gobbledygook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Rules/Guidelines&quot; are usually well-intentioned, artificial, often arbitrary, and personal preferences. Except, of course, for the basic rules of English grammar that we all acquire as native speakers. Anything beyond that, as John Lawler says, falls into the category of the technological: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wanna Learn How to Write and Speak Well? Then RThisFM!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question &lt;strong&gt;What &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; we mean?&lt;/strong&gt; is a good one. But it has to be rewritten to make sense because &lt;strong&gt;we don't agree on what we mean&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What do &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; mean?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; can be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T01:47:59.370" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3243" CreationDate="2012-10-29T07:59:28.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does rather sound as though you are not allowing persistent cookies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you set your browser's cookie policy so that all cookies are removed at the end of a session, you will always have to log in. However, if you have two English.SE windows/tabs open, and close one of them, the browser will remove the relevant cookies and that will upset the other window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite how this works does depend too on your login authentication: logging in using a Google account rather than SE may behave differently; although presumably your aggressive third-party-cookie policy means you're not doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T07:59:28.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-29T13:32:29.513" Score="-5" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88385/native-english-inferiority&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was &quot;closed as not a real question.&quot;  Obviously it's a real question, and I would disbelieve anyone's explicit assertion (as opposed to this rude sarcastic boilerplate notice) that it appeared not to be a real question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain the real reason for the closing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T16:36:21.613" Title="Why was my question titled &quot;native English inferiority&quot; closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3249" CreationDate="2012-10-29T14:31:41.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question has a lot of potential, and if you give some time to editing it, I think it has a good chance of being re-opened.  Here are my thoughts about it, after my initial reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have closed this as &quot;not constructive&quot; before &quot;not a real question.&quot; To start with, the crux of your question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this phenomenon, whereby...people feel that words that come from formerly more civilized foreigners are more civilized, literate, dignified, or formal than native words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This premise is seriously flawed and opens the entire question up to discussion and debate. For instance, you make the assertion that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Substance&quot; is more dignified than &quot;stuff&quot;; &quot;decay&quot; more formal than &quot;rotting&quot;; &quot;predict&quot; more scientific than &quot;foretell.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that's rather all your opinion, as is which former societies are more civilized, etc.  We could argue about it, but that is not really what you are asking about, and you're entitled to think what you think about how language makes you feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also seem to make the assumption that most English speakers know their word origins.  I might feel that &quot;substance&quot; is more hoity-toity than &quot;stuff,&quot; but that's got nothing to do with it being Latin or Greek or wherever it comes from, because I haven't the slightest idea about its origin.  They are two English words and one feels more precise and less colloquial to me than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;not a real question&quot; close reason, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; difficult to figure out what you are asking.  Your title is not very descriptive, and you lead with opinionated examples before you mention what you are actually trying to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T14:31:41.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3249" CreationDate="2012-10-29T14:40:11.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;NARQ seems a bit unreasonable to me - I voted to close as Too Localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably should have opted for Not Constructive. I don't believe there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an established term for the linguistic phenomenon being queried, so it seemed to me we'd just get a variety of more-or-less &quot;snappy&quot; coinages to be voted on in a &quot;beauty contest&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is I voted TL because if it turned out there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; an established term, I figured I'd still have some chance of justifying my closevote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also mention that the question itself was very long-winded and did look a lot like a peeve. I freely admit that coloured my judgement; if the same question had been posed in a sentence or two, I'd probably not have closevoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW - if the &quot;target expression&quot; does exist, one might have expected it to have turned up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85638/normans-vs-saxons-cow-beef-sheep-mutton-chicken&quot;&gt;Normans vs. Saxons: cow = beef, sheep = mutton, chicken =?&lt;/a&gt;, for example. That's just one of many similar questions touching on the &quot;status&quot; of words adopted from more powerful and/or sophisticated invading cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T14:40:11.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3254" CreationDate="2012-10-29T14:53:33.893" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a request to reopen the question '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85659/origin-of-the-phrase-looks-like-tarzan-plays-like-jane&quot;&gt;Origin of the phrase &quot;Looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;'. There were at least 4 reopen votes previously which appear to have expired (?). This appears to have now dwindled to 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider the question on-topic and useful and the arguments against its validity to be specious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T16:53:40.090" Title="Reopen 'Origin of the phrase &quot;Looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane&quot;?'" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-29T16:49:31.030" Score="-12" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it customary to frown upon gratuitous rudeness, dishonesty, and flame-warring within english.stackexchange.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3249/why-was-my-question-titled-native-english-inferiority-closed&quot;&gt;this question on meta&lt;/a&gt;, this boorish and dishonest comment appeared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're right! It's not NARQ, it's off topic: peeving disguised as a question. – Matt Эллен&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not a good-faith comment.  It is dishonest and gratuitously abusive.  It is flame-warring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T19:00:51.673" Title="rudeness, belligerence, and dishonesty in this forum" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2012-11-05T03:25:27.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2012-10-29T16:53:26.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur. The stated reason for closing the question was that &quot;We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, coleopterist provided an answer which &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; supported by facts and references; and I was (to my surprise) able to support this with further facts and references, which showed his answer was about as close to a certainty as can reasonably be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T16:53:26.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-29T17:00:52.013" Score="9" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before asking this question, I read Mark's similar one (&lt;strong&gt;About Suspension&lt;/strong&gt;, posted on Oct 5 '11 and which got a few replies). In his question, Mark mentioned a member who was suspended but seemed to be active at the same time; however, in the end it turned out to be an edit to a former question of his that had gained reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just noticed something which however does seem &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; activity, not just &lt;em&gt;editing&lt;/em&gt;, on the part of a suspended member. I'm referring to two questions asked by Nortonn S, one seven hours ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88439/single-word-for-parallel-to-door&quot;&gt;(Single word for parallel-to-door)&lt;/a&gt;, and the other yesterday, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88347/collapse-on-itself&quot;&gt;(Collapse on itself)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that when one is suspended one's reputation is shown as being 1, and that it is reinstated when the suspension period ends (in this specific case on July 2, 2014); however, I was under the impression that suspended people could &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;visit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the site but not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in it. Am I mistaken? Is this true for answers but not for questions? Are there other limitations which I'm not aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19875" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T15:55:44.550" Title="What are the consequences of a suspension?" Tags="|discussion|support|suspension|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3255" CreationDate="2012-10-29T17:06:31.540" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This user is creating sockpuppets to circumvent the suspension. When they are discovered, the accounts are merged. This means that the profile accurately reflects the user's activity during the suspension. Hopefully  that will be taken into account when the suspension ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, the sockpuppeted questions are deleted in order that no-one can gain rep from them (or waste time answering a troll); this &lt;em&gt;tends&lt;/em&gt; not to happen where there are answers which have been upvoted because the answerer would lose rep he's worked for. Having said that, at least one of my upvoted answers has been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T17:06:31.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3253" CreationDate="2012-10-29T17:28:23.570" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That comment has been upvoted six times, so that's some evidence of community opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#not_losing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eric Raymond&lt;/a&gt; has something useful to say on community criticism. The emphasis is mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Not Reacting Like A Loser&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odds are you'll screw up a few times on hacker community forums — in ways detailed in [his article], or similar. And you'll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with colourful asides. In public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, &lt;em&gt;in public.&lt;/em&gt; Don't whine that all criticism should have been conveyed via private e-mail: That's not how it works. &lt;strong&gt;Nor is it useful to insist you've been personally insulted when someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ.&lt;/strong&gt; Those are loser attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are useful answers about the question itself in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3249/why-was-my-question-titled-native-english-inferiority-closed&quot;&gt;your other Meta question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T17:28:23.570" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3253" CreationDate="2012-10-29T18:04:57.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sorry if you've taken offence to my comment about your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read your question. It came across as peeving about English. I thought the &quot;peeving disguised as a question&quot; rule was in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;, but apparently I am mistaken. It is as Mr. Shiny and New says, the phrase is an idiom around here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to discuss this further I am in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T18:04:57.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3253" CreationDate="2012-10-29T18:47:04.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Characterizing a person as a boor and dishonest is not wrong (if true) but you would do that with a flag, not a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing it in a post or comment is inconsistent with our community guidelines in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#etiquette&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Treat others with the same respect you’d want them to treat you. We’re all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same guidelines apply, of course, to the person you're characterizing, and that's what flags are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T19:28:54.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-30T05:02:39.287" Score="2" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a lot of questions and got many answers in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;StackExchange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. When I want to express my appreciation, I can only use &quot;Thanks&quot; or &quot;I appreciate that.&quot; Can anyone teach me more about how to say &quot;Thanks&quot; and how to praise those people who have done good job? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26753" OwnerDisplayName="PENG TENG" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T10:59:16.517" Title="How to say thank you in StackExchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3260" CreationDate="2012-10-30T05:45:59.487" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;On any Stack Exchange site, the only way you should thank somebody for their answer is to click the wee tick mark.  Optionally upvote the answer too.  The sites are intended to be collections of questions and answers; not repositories for expressions of gratitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the wider issue of thanking people in other contexts, just saying &quot;thanks&quot; or &quot;thank you&quot; is usually sufficient, unless the effort that the person expended was particularly great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="429755" OwnerDisplayName="user16269" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T05:45:59.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3260" CreationDate="2012-10-30T10:59:16.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange way of saying &lt;em&gt;thank you&lt;/em&gt; to users is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accepting the answers for your questions that helped you the most&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Up-voting the answers for questions asked from other users that helped you the most, or that you think more correct&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offering bounties for answers that you think exemplary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this I don't mean you should up-vote random answers given from a user simply because that user helped you once. Up-vote an answer only if it has merit, or a question if it has merit, or it is helpful/useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &lt;em&gt;thank you&lt;/em&gt; in a comment would mean to use comments for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;a purpose different from the one for which comments are thought&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;When should I comment?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should submit a comment if you want to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Request clarification from the author;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving thanks in the question is disliked, as it is preferable the question contains just the question, in the same way answers should contain just the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T10:59:16.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2012-10-30T11:18:10.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were at least 4 reopen votes previously which appear to have expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes to close/re-open a question expire; how quickly they expire depends on many factors, including the number of views the question has. If the number of views is lower than X, then the votes expire slower. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An expiration policy avoids that, for example, and old question that over time collected random votes to close (made by users who didn't read it carefully, or who misunderstood it) is closed. The idea is that if a question needs to be closed, a consensus is reached quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-10-31T16:53:40.090" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T16:53:40.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3253" CreationDate="2012-10-30T11:20:41.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;MetaEd has the gist of it. It is customary to frown upon gratuitous rudeness, dishonesty, and flame-warring within english.stackexchange.com, as evidenced by the &lt;strong&gt;Be Nice&lt;/strong&gt; section of the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that you felt offended by the comment. I know Matt quite well—he is a long-standing member here—I can assure you that he meant no insult to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a comment that you believe to be rude or offensive, the appropriate action is to raise a flag to bring it to the attention of the moderators.  A rude/offensive flag will put the comment in the flag queue for 10K+ users to review as well, and if enough of them agree with you, the comment will be auto-deleted without moderator intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not satisfied with the decision made by the community regarding a rude/offensive flag on a comment, posting on Meta is always an option. However it is best to do so in as neutral a way as possible because no matter how justified you are, the community often perceives this particular type of Meta question as pitching a fit.  That is because either 1. it is obviously rude and needs no further explanation, so just flag it, or 2. it is not obviously rude and the flagger is perceived as being overly sensitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2012-10-30T19:00:51.673" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T19:00:51.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3249" CreationDate="2012-10-30T12:34:55.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have closed it as off-topic because it is more a linguistic question, than a question about English. In fact, the question is asking for a name of the described phenomenon (which is not limited to English) and in which other languages is such phenomenon present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing it as not constructive doesn't seem correct to me, as the question is not asking the reason why words derived from Latin/Greek are preferred to other words of Germanic origin, but it is asking for a noun to use to describe the phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand why it has been closed as not a real question. Reading it, I had the feeling it was a broad question; only when I read the last sentence I was able to understand the question was about a specific word. Probably if the question's text had first the questions, and then the rest, the question would have been perceived differently from who read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T12:34:55.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-31T02:29:41.350" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/is-http-englishqna-blogspot-com-violating-elu-or-your-copyright&quot;&gt;Is http://englishqna.blogspot.com violating EL&amp;amp;U (or YOUR) copyright?&lt;/a&gt; was successful. Enough of us were prompted to file DMCA complaints with Google, and that &quot;scraper&quot; website was closed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm now finding that if I Google search terms from past ELU questions, I keep getting hits from another scraper site...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18597/what-would-be-an-appropriate-opposite-of-exceed&quot;&gt;What would be an appropriate opposite of “exceed”?&lt;/a&gt; reappears at &lt;code&gt;http://www.tinyguru.com/english/qid81657.html&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21018/why-do-we-invert-word-order-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;Why do we invert word order when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt; reappears at &lt;code&gt;http://www.tinyguru.com/english/qid21018.html&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75491/what-exactly-is-an-adverb&quot;&gt;What exactly is an “adverb”?&lt;/a&gt; reappears at &lt;code&gt;http://www.tinyguru.com/english/qid75491.html&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last one was a question of mine, so it's definitely a violation of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; copyright.  I'll probably face a long slog to get satisfaction if no-one else here complains, so I'm hoping others will pitch in too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use Google you'll probably find your own violations easily enough with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;site:&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tinyguru.com/english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.tinyguru.com/english/&lt;/a&gt;  SomeTextFromYourQuestionOrAnswer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume if ELU habitually responds robustly &lt;em&gt;and in numbers&lt;/em&gt; to such sites, the Google Complaints Team will soon get into the habit of dealing with them promptly, and giving us credibility/priority in future. So it's worth making a bit of effort now to avoid things getting worse later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2153/2637&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; by waiwai933 on the earlier post summarises the legal/moral position, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2154/2637&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; by PPL tells you exactly what to do if you're willing to spend a minute or two helping things along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want to post answers/comments about scraper sites in general I think maybe you should do it on the original question - but it's up to you, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T11:59:59.460" Title="Is http://www.tinyguru.com violating EL&amp;U (or YOUR) copyright?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3266" CreationDate="2012-10-31T11:59:59.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a suggestion of action we can take, as a community. I've looked for an email address for the proprietor of tinyguru, but the closest I've got is a name: &lt;a href=&quot;http://whois.domaintools.com/tinyguru.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ujas Patel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What one of us (me, if you like) can do, therefore, is post a question on the main site, titled &quot;Appeal to Ujas Patel&quot; and the body should explain how to properly attribute our content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will get picked up by his crawler and he might even read it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T11:59:59.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-31T14:17:47.747" Score="-1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88427/evil-spelling-test-what-makes-a-word-hard-to-spell-orally&quot;&gt;&quot;evil spelling test&quot; question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as not constructive. But the question brought up matters of interest to some people who frequent this site (English spelling, spelling in context), and Barrie England's answer (which he admits is &quot;Perhaps not an answer&quot;) also leads the interested reader to a compelling new source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there is still a place for this sort of question on this site. I've seen it before -- questions I found nifty get closed because they don't fit within the guidelines. I'm sure that once a question is closed it is less likely to be read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is, is there a place for &quot;questions&quot; like this one, perhaps a &quot;links&quot; or &quot;discussion&quot; section where these kinds of resources can be shared and talked about in a non Q&amp;amp;A format? Is this something that would interest users of this site? It would certainly interest me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone is going to reply with, &quot;that's what the internet is for; don't clutter up this site with information you can find elsewhere.&quot; Fair enough. But I wouldn't have known to go looking for an &quot;evil spelling test.&quot; It took someone else, with a prior interest and access to that information, to bring it to my attention. I frequent this site because I am fascinated by other people's questions, observations and knowledge. I don't have the time to go wandering around the internet looking for things that might interest me. Neither, probably, do you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T12:00:44.580" Title="Other ways to share information on ELU" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3219" CreationDate="2012-10-31T15:49:08.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/11020/is-the-site-ready-for-the-generalist-badge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data.stackexchange query&lt;/a&gt;  “Is the site ready for the Generalist Badge?”.  It shows question counts for the top 40 tags on a site.  The database the numbers are drawn from is updated monthly.  The last few lines of the already-obsolete present view are shown below.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tagname        Uses   Questions Needed with this Tag...&#xA;&#xA;adverbs        269    -69&#xA;history        232    -32&#xA;tense          222    -22&#xA;word-order     210    -10&#xA;articles       190    10&#xA;writing        174    26&#xA;capitalization 169    31&#xA;possessive     159    41&#xA;antonyms       157    43&#xA;abbreviations  157    43&#xA;conjunctions   153    47&#xA;sentence       148    52&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T15:49:08.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3249" CreationDate="2012-10-31T16:36:21.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question as posted has a few real and answerable  questions within it. On that basis I didn't vote to close after looking at the question, and moreover was surprised to see votes to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the text contains questionable, unnecessary, and irrelevant assertions that muddle the question.  I had and have no inclination to vote to reopen it or to write an answer for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical” part of the explanation for questions closed as not a real question seems properly applied; the question as posted &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; somewhat vague, overly broad, and rhetorical.  I suggest rewriting it for clarity and directness, leaving out less-relevant asides like mention of Clarke, Eriston and Etania.  Defending the question as it stands seems pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T16:36:21.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3268" CreationDate="2012-10-31T20:00:51.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed questions can also be deleted, but many of them aren't.  In that sense, a closed (but not deleted) question does serve as an archive of sorts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T20:00:51.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T00:12:37.427" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-noad-esl-pie&quot;&gt;List of common abbreviations (NOAD, ESL, PIE…)&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen &quot;NARQ&quot; in the below topic.&#xA;But I cannot understand the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89740/how-do-you-disambiguate-phrases-like-killing-doctors-when-you-cant-use-an-art#_=_&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89740/how-do-you-disambiguate-phrases-like-killing-doctors-when-you-cant-use-an-art#&lt;em&gt;=&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it's NARQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it an abbreviated word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30206" OwnerDisplayName="UNIHAL" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T01:15:10.403" Title="What does &quot;NARQ&quot; means?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2012-11-01T04:45:22.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3285" CreationDate="2012-11-01T14:53:29.063" Score="5" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;This forum is so full of closed questions that every page seems to be polluted with them. Why are they not just removed? Or is it possible that we (i.e. those of us with enough points to be moderators) are a little over-zealous in the closing stakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect this question will be closed. I think it would be better if it were removed. Of course, it would be even better if it were left open and debated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30200" OwnerDisplayName="Pete" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2013-01-01T03:29:50.537" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T03:29:50.537" Title="Why are 'Closed' questions left up?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T15:48:42.970" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89571/when-quoting-a-speaker-of-another-english-dialect-should-you-spell-things-his-w&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; closed as an exact duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85429/cleaning-up-formatting-verbatim-quotations&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt;, even though mine is about whether to follow the spelling conventions of a speaker when quoting him, and the other is about how to handle grammatical errors and extremely hard-to-understand TXT abbreviations when quoting.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Five&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; people with moderator status seem to think there's no difference between asking about grammatical errors and SMS abbreviations on the one hand and asking about differences in spelling conventions (such as being the UK and the US, such as with &lt;em&gt;color&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;colour&lt;/em&gt;) on the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question asked how to quote something that is both full of errors and very hard to understand, specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;lking forward to seeing more gbl etfs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while I asked whether to spell &lt;em&gt;realize&lt;/em&gt; my way or the original speakers' way (OR the way an intermediate quoting writer recorded the original speaker's way):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think we even realise it anymore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only are the questions very different -- and this is plain to anyone who bothers to pay attention -- but the answers are most likely very different.  But &lt;em&gt;even if the answers &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; the same, the &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt; are still two very distinct questions&lt;/em&gt;.   (For example, if I asked how to get from my house to the nearest McDonald's and you ask how to get from your house to the nearest gas station, the questions are still different questions &lt;em&gt;even if&lt;/em&gt; both are answered with &quot;go two blocks west and then turn right and go three more blocks&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please fix this by reopening my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T22:53:41.320" Title="Why would this question be considered an *exact* duplicate?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3255" CreationDate="2012-11-01T15:55:44.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that when a user is suspended for sock-puppeting, and uses sock-puppets to evade the suspension, that said suspension duration should be reset to begin again at the date of the latest infraction. Possibly additional time in the penalty box could be added as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T15:55:44.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3275" CreationDate="2012-11-01T16:21:09.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close because the answers provided to the original (&quot;Cleaning up&quot;) question covered a range of cases, including the one you posted about. Basically, it depends on what style guide you follow. The answers provided to your question, while not bad, are purely anecdotal (top-voted starts with &quot;In my humble opinion. . .&quot;) and seem less helpful than the answers in the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can take a look at BBC News for an example of a quoted American (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20054737&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to &lt;strong&gt;realise&lt;/strong&gt; that life is that gift from God,&quot; [Mr Mourdock] said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, many style guides overlook your &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; question, but we can see in practice what news sources do. Short of poring over hundreds or thousands of articles from each outlet, it's hard to tell if they are all consistent, but generally one will use the spelling conventions of their locale unless quoting directly from a text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I take issue with the hostility of your &quot;update&quot;. I did read both questions, and I'm sure the others who voted did, as well. When I use the &quot;Review&quot; tool on the site, I often choose to &quot;Skip&quot; questions that have received close votes if I have any doubts about whether it should be closed. I prefer to make informed decisions and not simply jump on a &quot;close-voting bandwagon&quot;, and I'm sure the same applies to others with closing privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if one were to ask two different questions where the same answer can be successfully applied, then it ought to be considered a duplicate. Regardless, others in the community have decided to reopen the question and I will include an answer there. I hope, however, that this post answers why I, and others, consider your question a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24117" LastEditorUserId="24117" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T16:38:46.847" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T16:38:46.847" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T16:22:09.667" Score="12" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of our high rep users has recently asked several questions based around the OED's &quot;public appeal for help in tracing the history of some English words.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though EL&amp;amp;U is an appropriate site for questions about word history, several users have raised the question of whether &lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; kind of questions about word history are appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84700/oed-appeals-antedatings-of-blue-arsed-fly&quot;&gt;Antedatings of &quot;blue-arsed fly&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87846/oed-appeals-antedatings-of-headhunter&quot;&gt;Antedatings of &quot;headhunter&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87881/oed-appeals-origin-of-bimble&quot;&gt;Origin of &quot;bimble&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87882/oed-appeals-antedatings-of-football-header&quot;&gt;Antedatings of football &quot;header&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology questions are generally interesting and on topic.  The questions and the answers demonstrate a thoughtful amount of research, but because the histories are in contention, it is questionable whether there is a definitive answer that can be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no strong feeling one way or the other about these questions, but as I mentioned, some users have questioned their existence on the site.  So I leave it to the community to discuss and decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:50:44.667" Title="Are these OED questions on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3278" CreationDate="2012-11-01T17:17:08.963" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found these questions interesting, and I regarded the OED's call for public help as rather intriguing as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception I had with these four questions is that they seemed repetitious.  Essentially, anyone could have posted a &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/the-oed-needs-you-announcing-the-new-oed-appeals/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; in meta, with a comment that said, &quot;The OED is looking for help in determining the history of a handful of words.  To read more about this initiative, or to contribute, &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/the-oed-needs-you-announcing-the-new-oed-appeals/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  (The questions on ELU, especially spread out over a series of questions, made ELU seem like some kind of &quot;middleman.&quot;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did that bother me, though?  I thought it was a bit unusual.  However, the OED has helped many of us, so I didn't see much harm in posting the questions in this forum.  After all, the questions are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the way I would have relayed the information, but, in my opinion, that's not grounds for calling their legitimacy into question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T17:17:08.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3273" CreationDate="2012-11-01T18:13:48.333" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you forget that you don't see deleted questions. You &lt;em&gt;don't know&lt;/em&gt; whether or not questions get deleted, and how many. Speaking for myself, I have personally deleted over a hundred questions last week alone. But you didn't see that. You can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you do see are questions that are still up either because they are duplicates (that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions/382#382&quot;&gt;left up for a reason, on all sites of the network&lt;/a&gt;), or because people are working on improving and then reopening them — or at least they are given the chance to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to give people the chance to fix their questions. And even if a question is unfixable, we have to give people a chance to at least &lt;em&gt;notice that&lt;/em&gt; it got closed and &lt;em&gt;read why&lt;/em&gt; it was closed. Otherwise they'll just attribute its disappearance to a bug and repost it all over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if I may, here is something I don't quite understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I expect this question will be closed. I think it would be better if it were removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, in fact, part of the problem. Way too many people keep posting questions that they know for a fact do not belong on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question had to be closed, and then deleted. Manually. By two actual people. It also had to be composed by an actual person, yourself. A waste of time and effort on all sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three simple guidelines I follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I am sure a question does not belong, I do not post it in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I am not sure whether a question belongs, I ask in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I pollute the site on purpose, I don't get to wonder about the site being polluted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T18:13:48.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3275" CreationDate="2012-11-01T22:53:41.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar thing seems to have happened on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89813/at-the-clinic-vs-in-the-clinic#comment178263_89813&quot;&gt;“At the clinic” vs. “in the clinic” &lt;/a&gt; which was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67036/how-do-american-english-and-british-english-use-the-definite-article-differently&quot;&gt;How do American English and British English use the definite article differently?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/67038/2637&quot;&gt;One of the answers&lt;/a&gt; on the &quot;original&quot; question concluded with &lt;em&gt;The general rule is 'in X' for being part of the institution, but 'at the X' or 'in the X' for being physically related to the building&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although superficially the two questions look quite different, I felt they both covered much the same ground. And since the answer to the second was already present on the first, closevoting seemed reasonable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, it was the fact that the same existing &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; could satisfy both questions that led to my decision. That doesn't apply in the particular case raised here, but it does seem to me the second question simply raises a &quot;sub-issue&quot; within the original, that didn't happen to be explicitly addressed by the accepted answer (but where a simple comment would probably have been quite sufficient).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I'm not going to win this argument (OP's question has already been re-opened), but I do think it would be better to refine and extend the scope of existing questions/answers so they address a broader range of yet-to-be-asked future questions, rather than constantly creating &quot;near-dups&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Quality over quantity - one good Question &amp;amp; Answer is better than several mediocre ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T22:53:41.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3241" CreationDate="2012-11-02T04:17:46.727" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you had badges &amp;amp; rep. revoked, and your timeline doe not show it, then you only had 3 badges, 1 today, 1 a couple days ago, and 1 a month ago.  Hard to think that's suspicious.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just lending some afterthought for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23834" LastActivityDate="2012-11-02T04:17:46.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-02T06:49:10.913" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday in chat, an unfortunate event occurred. We were discussing how difficult it is to distinguish two morphemes in a foreign language that do not function as such in your own language. Then at some point two people were displeased at something I said; but I believe they had interpreted my line in a way not at all connected to what I meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally I would not go through this much trouble, but getting the same angry reaction from two different people I know well means that I need to set things straight. I hope they will read this and understand what I said, and consider it in the proper context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a pair of vowels that are not very hard to distinguish, I brought up the example of /ʌ/ and /ɜ(ː)/ as they appear to a Dutchman, as in &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt;. I picked this situation because it is one I am intimately familiar with. I said that these vowels are easy enough for a Dutchman to distinguish, even though we don't have them as separate morphemes in Dutch. Then I said that someone with a strong Dutch accent in English would probably pronounce both vowels as /ɜ/, but that most of us get them about right with some practice (as opposed to certain more elusive distinctions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added that a Dutchman with a bad Dutch accent in English might pronounce &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; almost the same. Then, as an afterthought, I considered that such a Dutchman would probably pronounce the r in &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt;, because r's are always pronounced in Dutch, so that he would say /bɜt/ and /bɜrt/ for &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt;. This is what I said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Dutchman might pronounce &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt; unrelated line by someone else &amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although someone whose English is bad enough to confuse /ʌ/ and /ɜ(ː)/ would probably pronounce the r in &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was still about the Dutchman with a bad accent, but apparently my interlocutor missed that, since he didn't reply, suggested that I was born out of wedlock, and disappeared. Then someone else came in and accused me of making a prescriptivist statement about the accent of native speakers. I explained that this was about the accent of Dutchmen, not Americans, but he did not seem to read or accept that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will explain my line again. Some Dutchmen have a good accent in English. Their English can be rhotic or non-rhotic: of both varieties, good accents exist in Dutchland. However, because Dutch is exclusively rhotic, a Dutchman with a bad accent in English will almost invariably pronounce the r—he would not even think of the non-rhotic option; and so he will never pronounce &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; as /bɜt/, but always as /bɜrt/. That was all I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no way did I say that &lt;em&gt;native speakers&lt;/em&gt; who pronounced the r had a &amp;quot;bad accent&amp;quot;, which would be a silly statement anyway, in a serious discussion. All of this was about what it is like to pronounce vowels in a &lt;em&gt;foreign&lt;/em&gt; language, never about native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-11-02T06:49:10.913" Title="About how Dutchmen and Americans pronounce the r in &quot;bird&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2012-11-02T08:12:23.623" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3228" CreationDate="2012-11-02T14:05:12.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My philosophy runs similar to what's quoted in that article you cited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You give not just “right” or “wrong” rulings on usage, but often a 1-5 score, in which a given usage may be a 1 (definitely a mistake), 3 (common, but …) or 5 (perfectly acceptable). This notion of correctness as a scale, not a binary state, makes you different from many prescriptivists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we don't tend to use such a formal rating scale here, I've seen the answers generally parallel the wording of those ratings, from &quot;That's totally wrong&quot; to &quot;Welll.... it's not &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, but...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone says &quot;ungrammatical&quot; - it's not always clear if they mean  &quot;It's less than a 5, therefore it's dubious&quot; or &quot;It's a 1, it's completely wrong.&quot;   While some clarity might be helpful, I highly doubt we're going to achieve consensus on definitions, or be able to enforce them readily if we did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-11-02T14:05:12.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3273" CreationDate="2012-11-03T09:21:13.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This forum is so full of closed questions that every page seems to be polluted with them. Is it possible that we are a little over-zealous in the closing stakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two thoughts on that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It would be erroneous to assume that we enjoy closing questions. I much prefer giving upvotes for insightful, well-researched questions and answers than downvotes for shoddy ones. After all, that's why I visit the site – to read and to learn, not to be a policeman.  It's not &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt; to downvote or vote to close; it's a &lt;em&gt;duty&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;chore&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I wish others would notice this &quot;pollution,&quot; and regard it as a warning: &lt;em&gt;&quot;If I don't have something intelligent to say here, maybe I should just be quiet for awhile.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Or, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Before I ask this question here, maybe I should spend ten minutes trying to find the answer online.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; That may sound harsh, but, I remember – that's how I felt my first month on ELU. I was intimidated, but that was a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; thing; it prompted me to be careful and conscientious when I contributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a place to flippantly blurt out anything we happen to be curious about.  Stack Exchange is a network of individual communities, each dedicated to serving &lt;strong&gt;experts&lt;/strong&gt; in a specific field, with libraries of &lt;strong&gt;high-quality&lt;/strong&gt; questions and answers, focused on areas of expertise. Whether it's linguists discussing the nuances of a rare or newly coined idiom, programmers sharing answers on HTML parsing, or researchers seeking solutions to combinatorial problems, these communities are built &lt;strong&gt;by and for&lt;/strong&gt; those best able to define them: &lt;strong&gt;experts and enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wouldn't shout out a calculus question in a football stadium, right? You'd go to the math department &lt;strong&gt;of a university&lt;/strong&gt;. That's why instead of allowing questions on any topic, ELU is a community of experts on very &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; topics. We welcome questions that are clear and specific, representing real problems, but &lt;strong&gt;this is not the place for conversation, opinions, or socializing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those last two paragraph sounds harsh and unwelcoming, don't downvote – at least, not until you've gone and read &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; (after all, the bulk of those two paragraphs were copied-and-pasted from there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some would say this message is too discouraging for the non-native speaker – what's trivial for someone steeped in the language may be a very real problem for someone learning English as a second or third language.  That's why I support the efforts being put into a sister site for English Language Learners.  I believe these non-native speakers deserve a place where their &quot;basic&quot; questions will be welcomed, and I hope to someday be among the ones who regularly answer those questions with helpful contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-11-12T09:26:36.837" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T09:26:36.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3287" CreationDate="2012-11-03T21:30:31.243" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that clicking the vote score shows you the up and down votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rvoUl.png&quot; alt=&quot;before&quot;&gt; (click) &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XY9gN.png&quot; alt=&quot;after&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where could I have learned this?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other tricks exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23834" LastEditorUserId="24168" LastEditDate="2012-11-03T21:56:03.177" LastActivityDate="2013-05-20T19:04:32.490" Title="Where can I learn about implicit UI functions of SE?" Tags="|discussion|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3286" CreationDate="2012-11-03T21:54:07.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This comes with the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;established user&lt;/a&gt;&quot; privilege, which you will receive at 1000 rep (congrats on receiving it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to list many special features. You might already know of some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another privilege that few know of is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/view-close-votes&quot;&gt;view close votes&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which comes at 250 rep. It allows you to see close votes on your own questions. You can also now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/gallery-chat-rooms&quot;&gt;create gallery chat rooms&lt;/a&gt;. Read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; page to view more of these. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;del&gt;Type &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; into the search box. It gives you a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=@&quot;&gt;Advanced Super Ninja Search Options&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/del&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;New:&lt;/strong&gt; Search for anything in the search box and expand the&lt;/em&gt; Advanced Search Tips &lt;em&gt;on the right.&lt;/em&gt; Although &quot;Advanced Search Tips&quot; isn't as cool as &quot;Advanced Super Ninja Search Options&quot;, you'll get the same functions. These are particularly helpful for finding duplicates or related posts. They also come in handy for finding stats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click &lt;kbd&gt;review&lt;/kbd&gt; at the top of the screen. Click any one of the &lt;kbd&gt;recent reviews&lt;/kbd&gt; buttons. Then, hover over the progress bar below the &lt;kbd&gt;ask question&lt;/kbd&gt; button. It will give you stats on badge progress such as total review in that queue, number of votes cast, number of votes cast on questions, and number of edits performed. It shows how close you are to each of the respective badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many secret &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;comment formatting markdowns&lt;/a&gt;. These include &lt;code&gt;[meta]&lt;/code&gt; to link to meta, &lt;code&gt;[sitename.se]&lt;/code&gt; to link to that site (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[english.se]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[FAQ#section_number]&lt;/code&gt; to link to that section of the FAQ (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[FAQ#2]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-20T19:04:32.490" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-11-03T21:54:07.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3278" CreationDate="2012-11-04T02:35:31.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange encourages self-answered questions, but they are normally questions about a problem for which users were searching a solution/answer they finally found. As finding the answer was not so easy, users can post the question and the answer because they think it could help other users, avoiding they repeat the same research they did.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions &lt;strong&gt;based on actual problems that you face&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it as meaning not to ask questions merely for asking questions, which also means not asking questions merely for the fact they have been found on other sites. Otherwise, it would be quite easy to fill the site with many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it doesn't seem the question was prompted by a practical problem the user was trying to resolve. The user is showing the answer he found for a request done from somebody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a comparison, it would be like if I go to some Drupal forums looking for questions asked from some users, I find a solution for some of the questions, and  I post both the question, and the answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://drupal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Drupal Answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It would be unfair, as I am posting a question for which I already know the answer, while other users should look for a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am writing both the answer and the question, they should be exceptionally good. I should not write a question for which the answer I give is simply &quot;It is not possible,&quot; or &quot;There isn't such a word.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the words for which the OED is looking the etymology are 20. Is that user going to write 20 questions for which he immediately adds his own answer without giving time to other users to look for an answer? If that is the case, it is not even a challenge; it's a monologue the user does with himself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:15.520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:50:44.667" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3268" CreationDate="2012-11-05T12:00:44.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95&quot;&gt;chat room for EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; is the right place for questions that would not be a good fit on the main site. If then you have an idea for a blog post, you can discuss about that on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Blog&lt;/a&gt; chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat rooms are not so restrictive about what it is acceptable, and it is the right place for discussions. If the topic of a discussion can also be the topic of a blog, you can discuss the topic in the right chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T12:00:44.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-06T02:26:46.857" Score="15" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a tendency of close votes on my favorite kind of questions: ones asking about subtle differences between close synonyms. They are usually closed for excuses like &quot;lack of context&quot; (I want to learn the general usage) or &quot;general reference&quot;. The dictionary usually defines each of the terms by giving the remaining synonyms, rarely detailing subtleties like where they differ in particular, where one would be preferable over another, or which ones would be rather used figuratively, while others are literal. While one frequently &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; convey the difference from a dictionary, it's a difficult and often futile exercise of picking out little but meaningful differences between multiple, often long and fuzzy entries all stating mostly the same thing but in different words. A question which bundles the synonyms and an answer which underlines their differences is much better in understanding their correct use than a bunch of nearly-identical definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my request to the moderators: Please, stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90289/the-usage-of-slander-defame-vilify-and-calumniate&quot;&gt;The usage of slander, defame, vilify, and calumniate&lt;/a&gt; (two close votes already and I still don't know how &quot;calumniate&quot; differs from the rest)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90186/blackness-vs-darkness&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Blackness&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;darkness&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;You need to provide more context&quot;. No, you tell me which is applicable in what kind of context!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88108/but-while-whereas-though-although-however&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88108/but-while-whereas-though-although-however&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85648/what-are-the-differences-between-element-and-item-regarding-a-list&quot;&gt;What are the differences between &amp;quot;element&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;item&amp;quot; regarding a list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86751/to-work-for-vs-to-work-in-vs-to-work-at&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;To work for&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;to work in&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;to work at&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;  (a very nasty close, finding this in a dictionary is a real pain)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most others already got deleted - closed questions with negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: The dictionary definitions are often far too spartan to show subtle differences like areas of usage (scientific, law), indicate words that shift out of use but didn't become obsolete yet, words rarely used, emotional connotations associated with given synonyms, specific cases where given words are not synonymous, and other differences too subtle for dictionary entries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StoneyB noted correctly: answering these questions is difficult. It's definitely not mere dictionary lookup. I wish people who mark them as GR try their hand at answering them in a thorough and detailed manner. They might change their opinion as to whether this is answered by a mere dictionary lookup or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-11-08T13:18:16.637" Title="Closing questions about differences" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2012-11-06T04:00:21.537" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand your point of view. I believe these questions are very much On Topic—what’s more central to good usage than the subtle discriminations they ask for? And I agree that 'General Reference' is usually a bad reason for closing these questions; only a handful of dictionaries (and only a small proportion of entries in those dictionaries)  describe the distinctions in enough detail to be of any value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I sympathize with those who vote to close these questions. They’re very hard to answer, and in practice they’re mostly answered very inadequately: either impressionistically, subjectively, idiolectically, or without careful attention to differences of register and context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And those answers are &lt;em&gt;built into the questions&lt;/em&gt;. It’s one thing to say “In this sentence, in this context, in this register, &lt;em&gt;vilify&lt;/em&gt; is clearly a better choice than &lt;em&gt;defame&lt;/em&gt;”;  it’s very likely that even if we don’t all agree, we can at least all pin down what it is we’re disagreeing about. But  it’s quite a different thing to try, in effect, to define distinctions which will guide a speaker or writer competently in all conceivable sentences, contexts and registers. Words don’t have abstract meanings, only immanent ones. We learn how to use synonyms not by memorizing and applying their dictionary definitions, but by encountering them in use, in our reading and speaking. And since every one of us has read a different corpus of works and conversed with different people, we’re all going to locate the lexical penumbrae in different places and come up with different distinctions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that these questions are inherently Not Constructive, except where the poster has framed his question in terms sufficiently narrow to allow us to bring our very different linguistic experiences to bear on solving a specific problem rather than inventing factitious rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T04:00:21.537" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2012-11-06T08:26:40.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you accept posts recycled from my own blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12952" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T08:26:40.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2012-11-06T11:03:12.243" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is, many of these questions are written poorly.  Perhaps they don't show any research, or maybe they don't seem to be grounded in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;practical, real-world problems&lt;/a&gt; faced by the O.P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be onto something, though.  Sometimes we get so jaded from a barrage of bad questions that we may be overly harsh on a question with a lot of potential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, your plea – &lt;em&gt;Please, stop closing these questions&lt;/em&gt; – might be the wrong solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to offer two suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, maybe you could write a blog entry that explains in great detail how to write a &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; difference-in-meaning question.  It might include something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Don't simply ask, &quot;What's the difference between these words?&quot;  Instead, be sure to include definitions from a dictionary, to demonstrate you've already done some preliminary research, and to give the rest of the community a starting point to work from.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Don't simply announce that you're confused, and can't figure out the nuances.  Instead, explain how your preliminary research has dead-ended, and &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; you're still confused. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If this question arose from something that you read, don't merely ask about the words, and not give us any context.  Instead, share your original sources – they often provide vital context and relevance.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend including some examples of well-written and poorly-written questions, so it's very apparent how to ask, and how &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to ask, a difference-in-meaning question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that gets posted as a resource, some ELU regulars might start pointing to that blog entry with a link, along with an exhortation to follow that guidance and improve the question, after another user – particularly a new user – writes a poor question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, until this becomes a common practice, when you run across a question that has potential, you might try making the edits yourself, since you are the one who is so passionate about this.  You've been at this long enough to know the drill: a mediocre question gets posted, followed by a comment (&lt;em&gt;&quot;What did the dictionary tell you?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), followed by the first couple of close votes.  At that point, feel free to intervene.  If you think the question is worth saving, then salvage it.  Look up the words in a dictionary, post the definitions, and include some language in the question so that it's no longer a general reference question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T11:03:12.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2012-11-07T01:46:30.907" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; question that doesn't include the definitions of the words in question is general reference. If it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; include definitions, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;it is not general reference&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Unfortunately, many (most?) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; questions start off as the former, and only later acquire edits that qualify them for the latter. In the meantime, they will have likely collected a close vote or two, and then they fall victim to another unfortunate fact, namely that we have some trigger-happy high-rep users who absolutely adore closing questions as general reference. Not much to do in that case except vote to reopen, and hope people pile on that as quickly as they did on the close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a need to precisely define the context for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; question, either. The idea that this makes it very hard to answer and thus &quot;not a real question&quot; is balderdash, IMO. ELU is supposed to be for experts, which implies that hard questions should be &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt;, not made to feel unwelcome. You really only need to specify the context if the difference between the words is trivially obvious, &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-11-07T01:46:30.907" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2012-11-08T13:18:16.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is a problem. None of the above questions is general reference. I think that the reason for these draconian standards falls somewhere between laziness and a misunderstanding. A dictionary more often than not tells you nothing about the subtleties of the words' definitions. In fact, many times the dictionary definitions are practically indistinguishable. If you actually look up the definition of some of these words, you'll find that they do not indicate the difference between terms. Giving some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;slander&lt;/strong&gt;: The action or crime of making a false spoken statement damaging to a person's reputation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;defame&lt;/strong&gt;: Damage the good reputation of (someone); slander or libel. (slander is actually in the definition of defame)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt;: Used to introduce something contrasting with what has already been mentioned.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;while&lt;/strong&gt;:  At the same time that; although;  whereas; and &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;though&lt;/strong&gt;: Despite the fact that; although&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;although&lt;/strong&gt;: In spite of the fact that; even though; however; but&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;however&lt;/strong&gt;: Used to introduce a statement that contrasts with or seems to contradict something that has been said previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;element&lt;/strong&gt;: An entity that is a single member of a set &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;item&lt;/strong&gt;: An individual article or unit, esp. one that is part of a list, collection, or set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you consider any of these definitions to be ambiguous or circular, then I think that you should consider &lt;strong&gt;re-opening&lt;/strong&gt; the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25426" LastActivityDate="2012-11-08T13:18:16.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-08T13:36:46.210" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;When viewing ELU as an anonymous user, you can provide feedback on the usefulness of an answer by clicking on &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt; buttons. I'm curious as to where this feedback goes and if it is used in any manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2012-11-08T13:36:46.210" Title="Where does the anonymous feedback go to?" Tags="|discussion|feedback|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-10T08:43:39.473" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/90688/14666&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; appeared like a reasonable question at first.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90688/meaning-of-according-to-their-kind/90689#comment181372_90688&quot;&gt;reported&lt;/a&gt; as a possible duplicate.  [Edit: Turns out it was an external  reference, not on SE.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90688/meaning-of-according-to-their-kind/90689#comment181574_90688&quot;&gt;revealed&lt;/a&gt; that it was posted by a bad user.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now can we:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Merge the question with its original if any?  [Edit: Not an option, external reference.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then convert the whole thing into Community Wiki question?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the policy, plus the merits of the question in question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Flagged Asker; Valid Question -- Can We Make it Wiki?" Tags="|discussion|questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3298" CreationDate="2012-11-10T09:27:45.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it can be merged with a question asked somewhere else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself isn't a particularly bad question, in my opinion &amp;mdash; it's not nearly as bad and unconstructive as most of his others. And it's got good answers which are better than those on the other site (as might be expected!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether making the question CW is possible for mods; it pulls the rug out from under the rep system. As I understand it, both answers would lose their rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, each case needs to be considered individually, if only because the system forces each instance to be separately dealt with. In &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; case I would say that the question should stand; it's not a question worthy of closure on its own merits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the sockpuppet has been merged, the OP hasn't gained any rep from it yet, but his deliberate flouting of the rules means that his suspension must be permanent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-11-10T09:27:45.817" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3298" CreationDate="2012-11-10T13:31:27.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the functions of Community is to 'own community questions and answers so that nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739&quot;&gt;here &lt;/a&gt;is the first mention, but it was discussed  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2780/8019&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in relation to this very user), so surely good questions from a banned user should be transferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-11-10T17:37:25.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3298" CreationDate="2012-11-11T02:46:23.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot merge a question with something that is not even in the Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for making a question Community Wiki, moderators can make any post Community Wiki, and make a Community Wiki post a normal one. The purpose of a CW question is not penalizing who answers a perfectly legitimate question, though; its purpose is avoiding somebody gets reputation for answering a question where all the answers are equally valid. At least that was the purpose of CW questions when CW questions were the way to legitimate subjective questions. Now questions need to be acceptable as they are, without being CW. (There is a blog article about the change of the CW question's purpose.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that, when a question is made CW, users who answered don't lose the reputation gained before the question is made CW, but it is also true they lose any reputation gained from future up-votes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this case, the OP gained 5 points, while each of the users who answered the question gained 40 points. The gain from the OP who is trying to workaround the suspension is very limited, compared to the users who answered what seems a perfectly acceptable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than penalizing the users who answered, who cannot know if the account has been created from a suspended user, I would rather penalize the user who keeps asking questions when he is not allowed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Let the questions not be CW; just prolong the suspension time for the suspended user, which means suspend him again when the current suspension ends. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-12-12T10:00:51.247" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T10:00:51.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-14T07:40:46.823" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91162/is-why-steven-sinofsky-is-out-at-microsoft-correct&quot;&gt;this is a perfectly good question&lt;/a&gt; and have no idea why it has been closed. The only person to have provided a reason for his/her close-vote as a comment is Fumble. He too has stated that it is &quot;Not Constructive&quot; and yet has voted &quot;Not a real question&quot;. Furthermore, the commenters can't make up their mind on why the Ars headline is right either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T19:03:20.373" Title="Reopen closed question: 'Is “Why Steven Sinofsky is out at Microsoft” correct?'" Tags="|support|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3335" CreationDate="2012-11-14T10:46:14.723" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask about the dress code: &lt;strong&gt;royal touch&lt;/strong&gt;. I would like to know how a man should be dressed if he would like to follow the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From one point of view, it is definitely an &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; since it is not a question about grammar or language usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand it can be considered as a question about a &lt;strong&gt;definition(explanation) of an English word/phrase&lt;/strong&gt; which should be suitable for EL&amp;amp;U. What is more, I believe that people here can know about this matter more then on the other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are the questions in this sense appropriate in EL&amp;amp;U? If no, where should I ask about this particular issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23396" LastEditorUserId="23396" LastEditDate="2012-11-14T10:56:22.250" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T19:42:40.770" Title="Are the questions about knowledge/information about things described in English appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3306" CreationDate="2012-11-14T14:05:03.893" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being new here (well, I joined EL&amp;amp;U over a year already, but hadn't been very active, until recently), I don't know where I can suggest some improvement to EL&amp;amp;U. Please advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just discover the &quot;Favorites&quot; features, which is a nice way to bookmark questions I think might be useful in the future. However, I think it would be much better if I can mark &lt;strong&gt;any specific answer&lt;/strong&gt; in any question as one of my favorites (as opposed to bookmarking the entire question). So I don't have to wade through all the answers in the question, trying to recall which one was really the reason that made me bookmarked it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I submit such a request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11482" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Where should I request a new feature on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3304" CreationDate="2012-11-14T14:27:55.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid your feature request has already been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2588/mark-answer-as-favorite-star&quot;&gt;proposed and denied&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the link goes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, that site handles things that affect the whole Stack Exchange network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also post such requests here and tag them as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the feature request is something that will affect the architecture of the site, it will probably be best posted on MSO because the SE devs will have to deal with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T14:27:55.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3304" CreationDate="2012-11-14T14:28:03.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Either here on Meta, or, since this is a change that would affect all sites of the network, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;meta Meta&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware, however, that this particular request has been submitted before, several times in fact, and right now it doesn't look like it's going anywhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 July 2009 — &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1569/is-there-any-way-to-favorite-bookmark-an-answer&quot;&gt;Is there any way to favorite/bookmark an answer&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;just bookmark the link in the browser&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9 July 2009 — &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2588/mark-answer-as-favorite-star&quot;&gt;Mark Answer as Favorite/Star&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;31 January 2012 — &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120802/how-do-i-save-or-bookmark-some-best-answers&quot;&gt;How do I save or bookmark some best answers?&lt;/a&gt; (closed as dupe)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/89026/can-we-re-request-features-that-were-declined-a-sufficient-while-ago&quot;&gt;Can we re-request features that were declined a sufficient while ago?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T14:28:03.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-14T16:17:16.523" Score="9" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hyphen&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hyphen&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hyphen&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hyphenation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hyphenation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hyphenation&lt;/a&gt; are both tags on ELU. What's the purpose of the summary-less &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hyphenation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hyphenation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hyphenation&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:47:56.197" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:47:56.197" Title="Hyphen vs. hyphenation" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-14T17:32:46.113" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a beginner in English, and I'm translating some texts, can I use, english.stackoverflow website to post a part of all the text that I wrote, to ask people if there is any mistakes in my text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Mehdy Amazigh" LastEditorUserId="23608" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T12:34:50.297" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T12:34:50.297" Title="Can I use stackoverflow English website to help me translate something?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3308" CreationDate="2012-11-14T17:34:51.520" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can't. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each SE site has a FAQ that, in the first question, states what is on- and off-topic for the site, and in this case your specific situation is explicitly named as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5143" OwnerDisplayName="Martijn Pieters" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T17:56:43.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3302" CreationDate="2012-11-14T19:03:20.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted against it. I don't recall whether I came down on NC or NARQ - I always have trouble with those two - but I voted against it basically because it's a headline, which to my mind makes any generalization questionable. &quot;Hard cases make bad law&quot; -- as I think your answer makes clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T19:03:20.373" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-14T20:10:41.973" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had one of my comments up voted and my reputation didn't change but I did notice that my summary contained a link under &quot;Helpful Flags&quot;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I clicked on it and it lead to a mostly empty screen that just said &quot;Flagged posts for DJM&quot; and not much else.&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug? What's going on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastEditorUserId="93" LastEditDate="2012-11-14T20:53:04.820" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T11:29:05.757" Title="Do up voted comments add to your reputation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3311" CreationDate="2012-11-14T20:32:28.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, as you observed, having a comment upvoted doesn't increase your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Helpful Flags, you must have flagged something that was marked as helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T20:32:28.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3307" CreationDate="2012-11-15T00:08:10.113" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s how I see it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hyphen&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hyphen&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hyphen&lt;/a&gt; tag should be used for questions regarding the punctuation mark.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hyphenation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hyphenation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hyphenation&lt;/a&gt; tag should be used for questions regarding where and whether something should be hyphenated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are actually different, different just as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/question-mark&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;question-mark&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;question-mark&lt;/a&gt; is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/period&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;period&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;period&lt;/a&gt; is different from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sentences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sentences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sentences&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exclamation-point&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exclamation-point&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exclamation-point&lt;/a&gt; is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exclamations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exclamations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exclamations&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotation-marks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotation-marks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotation-marks&lt;/a&gt; is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apostrophe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apostrophe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apostrophe&lt;/a&gt; is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive&lt;/a&gt;, and from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contractions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contractions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contractions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it could be worse: people could have asked to merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hyphen&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hyphen&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hyphen&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dash&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dash&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dash&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T05:02:28.740" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T05:02:28.740" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-15T12:36:40.400" Score="4" ViewCount="799" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/portmanteau-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;portmanteau-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/blend-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;blend-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;blend-words&lt;/a&gt; are both tags on ELU. What's the purpose of the summary-less &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/portmanteau-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;portmanteau-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/a&gt; tag? Is there a distinction between the two terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T08:39:38.277" Title="Merge candidates: Portmanteau words vs. Blend words" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3314" CreationDate="2012-11-15T16:15:05.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they mean the same, but I'd keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/portmanteau-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;portmanteau-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T16:15:05.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3314" CreationDate="2012-11-15T23:19:30.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd have liked to propose that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/portmanteau-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;portmanteau-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/a&gt; be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/blend-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;blend-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;blend-words&lt;/a&gt;. But I can't because I haven't scored at least 5 rep points in either (there aren't many questions for either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, if two tags are &quot;merged&quot;, it doesn't really matter which is the &quot;original&quot; and which is the &quot;synonym&quot;. But even if a proposal &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be made, several (4?) more users with sufficient rep (2500?) still need to vote for the change, and they all need to have at least 5 points gained from questions in (one, both, or the &quot;original&quot;?) tag category, so it could take a while to go through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been nearly a month now, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/jokes/synonyms&quot;&gt;joke/jokes&lt;/a&gt; are still waiting to be merged. I can't help there, because I don't have the necessary 5 points on those either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've got the relevant rep, go ahead and upvote any &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;outstanding proposals&lt;/a&gt; you think make sense. But be warned - many people don't like merging anything where there's any possibility of a distinction being made (once you merge, you can never regain that distinction). I don't expect &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/writing-style/synonyms&quot;&gt;style/writing-style&lt;/a&gt; to be merged any time soon, even though I voted for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T23:19:30.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-16T18:25:04.287" Score="-1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep getting the little king and it's our fault message when posting on one (english) but not the other stack sites using the ostensibly same name. When moving from a permitted site, I find that my user name has changed. I can peruse and navigate but not post. What gives and who must pay attention in order to fix the problem or consilidate the two identities: 285_ _ and 284_ _? If I'm gonna spend time and resources, I had rather it not be going in circles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28414" LastActivityDate="2012-11-16T21:54:52.720" Title="service user name confusion" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3317" CreationDate="2012-11-16T21:54:52.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can link us to the various users here (make sure the emails match so we have some sort of verification) or send an email to team@stackexchange.com.  Either way we'll happily merge your accounts and fix you up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1046" LastActivityDate="2012-11-16T21:54:52.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3320" CreationDate="2012-11-18T16:09:19.870" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on meta.english and I got 2 upvotes for it, but I wonder what happens to those points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, I'm used to sites like stackoverflow and meta.stackoverflow, where if you get an upvote on the meta, it counts towards your rep there, which is independent from the main site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I care about the amount of points itself, but since &quot;rep is a measurement of how much the community trusts you&quot;, I do wonder how it is that upvotes (and I presume downvotes) don't have any effect on this meta.english site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Where do the points go?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3319" CreationDate="2012-11-18T17:09:29.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta.Stackoverflow is the exception, not the rule (and for purely historical reasons to boot). The rule on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; other metas (90+ and counting) is that you only get ghost rep that only counts towards badges and the like, but isn't displayed anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;&quot;FAQ&quot; link&lt;/a&gt; at the top of this very page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation here is entirely derived from the main website; your reputation is the same here as it is there, synchronized hourly. Votes here do not affect your reputation in any way. However, you can earn unique badges here on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a question or five on MSO, too. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56172/how-does-reputation-between-the-main-site-and-its-meta-work-on-se-2-0&quot;&gt;How does reputation between the main site and its meta work on SE 2.0?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-11-18T17:09:29.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3385" CreationDate="2012-11-18T18:45:20.423" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I hover the cursor over my username &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt;, a small box comes up giving 'votes, votes cast...' for the last day, week and month. If I see a +1 in the first row , is there any way to check which post has attracted favourable attention? On the main site, I could just check my reputation; but here, it seems I would have to look at each of my posts, and try to remember what its score was last time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-11-19T06:49:23.753" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T03:55:46.863" Title="Is there any way to check which of my posts on meta was upvoted?" Tags="|discussion|meta|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-19T06:43:37.997" Score="-2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question which was similar to one posed a while back. That question was closed because it was deemed to be of only limited interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noted that I was aware of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who decides if a question is of limited interest? Where is the logic in closing a question because it is a duplicate when the duplicate was closed because it is of limited interest? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4491" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T11:23:17.940" Title="Should a question be closed as a duplicate of a question which only has limited interest?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3322" CreationDate="2012-11-19T08:10:41.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English.SE. I'll do my best to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to express disagreement about whether a question is too localized, but the appropriate way is to cast an upvote. If you have the necessary reputation you can also vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowingly creating a duplicate is frowned on. SE editors collect questions and their answers on one page to make them easy to use. Duplicates become pointers to the original. When you created your duplicate, all you accomplished was to waste several peoples’ time closing and linking it. (Considering that the same people also have the necessary reputation to vote to reopen the original question, and hence are people you might have wanted to influence, perhaps that was not the best move.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about who decides what around here and how much reputation they need to earn the privilege, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges&quot;&gt;Privileges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question says “closed as too localized”, that doesn’t mean every closevoter voted that way. That’s just the majority reason. There are often multiple problems with a question that justify taking it offline. For example the original also showed no evidence of research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your argument seems to be that you and one other person asked a similar question, therefore the question is of broad interest to EL&amp;amp;U users. Your argument does not convince me of its unstated premise that two people are sufficient to prove the question to be of broad interest. To the contrary: five experienced editors thought the question needed to be taken offline, and only two people upvoted the original question. Those facts carry greater weight with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T08:10:41.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-19T08:26:15.243" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I ask questions that on normal EL&amp;amp;U would get closed due to having far more than one answer, basing on personal opinions, polling etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: I'd like to ask about various non-obvious language resources. Things like NGram, or the free (no subscription required) gateway to OED, various little-known resources and little-known techniques of using well-known resources you use in your daily work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chatty, subjective, with no single correct answer, all unsuitable for EL&amp;amp;U but definitely something I'd like to know, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people would love such tips&amp;amp;resources entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:55:29.340" Title="Is there a place to ask open-ended, chatty questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3314" CreationDate="2012-11-19T08:39:38.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, portmoneau is a specific kind of blend words that are mixing words deeper than just concatenating them and potentially making one or two letters common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;blendword&quot; would be a plain blend word. A &quot;blord&quot; would be a portmoneau. A &quot;bearshark&quot; is a blend word of &quot;bear&quot; and &quot;shark&quot;, but a &quot;snark&quot; is a portmoneau of &quot;snake&quot; and &quot;shark&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not casting my vote for/against merge either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T08:39:38.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3324" CreationDate="2012-11-19T10:37:18.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can ask in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat room for EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The chat is perfect for chatty, open-ended questions, polls, requests for opinions, and discussions. It is also less restrictive about what is acceptable, and not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't Stack Exchange sites where chatty, open-ended questions are acceptable. In all the Stack Exchange sites (but not their meta sites), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says, &quot;Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:55:29.340" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3322" CreationDate="2012-11-19T11:23:17.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who decides if a question is of limited interest?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the community who decides which questions are acceptable for its Stack Exchange site, and it is always the community who decide when a question has been wrongly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too localized questions generally have more than one issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP doesn't explain what s/he tried (&quot;I thought using [word], but I when I read the phrase to my colleague, she didn't understand what I meant.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP sets arbitrary limits on what s/he consider acceptable &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP doesn't describe exactly which word is looking for, with the result that at every answer s/he adds a comment explaining s/he cannot use the suggested word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are few users who would look for a word that respects the same criteria used from the OP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where is the logic in closing a question because it is a duplicate when the duplicate was closed because it is of limited interest? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every question that is duplicate of another question is closed as duplicate, even if the other question has been already closed. Eventually, it is the first closed question that gets re-opened, if it was wrongly closed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The fact another user asked a very similar question (so similar that has been closed as duplicate) doesn't mean the first question was not too localized. Even if 4 users would ask the same question, the question is still too localized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T11:23:17.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3311" CreationDate="2012-11-19T11:29:05.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Helpful flags&lt;/em&gt; are flags that have been considered useful from the moderator who handled them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When you click on that link, and you are taken to an empty page, it means the flag was for a comment. When you flag a post (question, or answer), that page lists the posts you flagged with an indication of how the flag was considered (helpful, rejected, pending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T11:29:05.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-19T14:38:02.283" Score="7" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following are two examples of questions which have, as of right now, registered a number—four in these cases—of close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91545/how-do-you-refer-to-a-hyponym-that-is-the-same-word-as-the-hypernym&quot;&gt;How do you refer to a hyponym that is the same word as the hypernym?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91592/the-purpose-of-the-in-hammering-a-nail-into-the-wall&quot;&gt;The purpose of “the” in “hammering a nail into the wall”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click on either question and analyse its close votes, you will find one of them judged to be &quot;not constructive&quot; and the other largely &quot;not a real question&quot;, two inherently inscrutable and unhelpful reasons. However, none of the eight possible close-voters involved have bothered to leave a comment stating exactly what they find non-constructive or difficult to comprehend. I happen across at least two or three such questions every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the fifth vote is registered on either question, I suspect that we will find that the close-voters are all experienced ELU users who are well aware that it's polite to leave at least one comment explaining why they believe that the question needs closing. I also suspect that a good number of said users normally do ensure that the questioner is provided with some form of specific feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to surmise that the culprit responsible for this errant behaviour could be the SE &quot;review&quot; feature which, in many ways, promotes &quot;lazy voting&quot; as voters can go click-crazy in the current interface without taking the time to really analyse each question by visiting its dedicated page. It also doesn't help that SE rewards voters with badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is the &quot;review&quot; feature responsible for lazy close-voting? Does each stackexchange site have any knobs to control how this feature is used? Perhaps close voting could be tweaked so that it can only be done via each question's dedicated page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T14:41:25.233" Title="Is the &quot;review&quot; feature responsible for lazy close-voting?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|vote-to-close|feedback|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3329" CreationDate="2012-11-19T16:34:42.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it happens, I didn't closevote either of OP's examples. But I will admit it's very likely I leave less explanatory comments when I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; closevote through the &quot;review&quot; facility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that currently this question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;. I think it's been proposed before on meta that closevotes on the main site should &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; a comment. I wouldn't go that far, but I'd certainly support a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; asking for that requirement to be enforced within &quot;review&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T16:34:42.570" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3329" CreationDate="2012-11-19T17:18:41.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probable that someone who doesn't leave comments when reviewing questions with close votes would not leave comments even when casting a close vote in other ways. In fact, it still possible to comment from the &quot;Close Votes&quot; review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9Boj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9Boj.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the new review system, questions with close vote are more visible, but I think that was the wanted effect.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You could notice there are more questions that are wrongly closed, but that is just because there are more users voting to close. It is not related with leaving a comment, which (in some cases) is not even helpful. If I think a question is off-topic, I don't leave a comment saying why I think it is off-topic. In other sites, I noticed that such comments just turn into discussions where the OP is still convinced the question is worth to stay open, and the person who voted to close it still thinks the question should be closed. It is also useless to convince whoever voted to close that the question is perfectly acceptable: Whoever voted to close cannot take back her/his vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2012-11-27T18:49:08.077" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T18:49:08.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3307" CreationDate="2012-11-19T17:47:56.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions when to use hyphens are still questions about hyphens, and I don't see any need to distinguish between questions about hyphens, and questions about using them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect that most of the questions about hyphens (if not all the questions) are about its usage; I find difficult somebody asks &quot;Is this an hyphen?&quot; or &quot;When was an hyphen first used?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:47:56.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3337" CreationDate="2012-11-19T17:51:00.973" Score="4" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the CAPTCHA page, the right border for the box shown on the right side is drawn over the text, not in the correct position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZPnkl.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2012-11-20T07:30:10.323" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T07:30:10.323" Title="The border is drawn over the text" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3329" CreationDate="2012-11-19T18:02:50.543" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd agree for no comment for close votes when the reason is blatantly obvious: ONE link to any dictionary (not two, not to OED which normally requires subscription), or blatant spam or a question that is strictly a poll question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think far too many questions are closed - frequently I see a question I'd like to have answered closed. I also went a good 200 points down with the reputation on having my answers deleted with questions. That alone is questionable: if an answer gets good +10 votes, is the question+answer set really a good candidate for deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed users way too often use &quot;close&quot; when they should use &quot;-1&quot; instead. I believe the reason may be negative reputation one receives for downvoting a question, plus total impunity - a question that gets +50 votes and 5 close votes gets closed despite 10:1 ratio of supporters vs opponents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a lot of even poor questions can be salvaged and turned into nice ones through editing, but then you need to collect 5 reopen votes on a closed question because someone thought clicking &quot;close&quot; is easier than both editing a question to improve it and mentioning that this question could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, downvotes have been supplanted by close votes... simply because close votes are &quot;stronger&quot; (only 5 needed and bye-bye forever!), &quot;cheaper&quot; (no -1 penalty) and more prestigious (Hey, look, I'm a power user, I can cast a close vote, not your noob downvote!) which essentially breaks the site's original, intended vote system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-11-19T19:17:31.820" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T19:17:31.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3303" CreationDate="2012-11-19T19:42:40.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is about the meaning of a word/phrase, it is on-topic. If the question requires to know how a man should be dressed if he follows that dress code, it is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, frame the question to evidence for which phrase you want to know the meaning; provide a context to the phrase, and make the question clear also to who doesn't know anything about that dress code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T19:42:40.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3169" CreationDate="2012-11-20T03:36:20.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is off-topic because there isn't a reason to choose a sentence, or another, for what English grammar, and usage are concerned. I would have said the second sentence is the correct one, but there is no reason for not putting the third one, one of the others, or a completely different one. (&quot;But tomorrow is another day.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the exercise were to complete a way of saying, the question could have been on-topic, but probably too localized to be interesting to future readers. Too localized would have been my second choice for the closing reason also for the current question, but I would have chosen off-topic, if I had the time to vote to close it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T03:36:20.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3333" CreationDate="2012-11-20T07:30:02.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix is on dev now. It will be in the next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T07:30:02.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3339" CreationDate="2012-11-20T09:27:05.863" Score="5" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a question about the usage of the English word &quot;Bumbler&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The online dictionary Oxford only provides the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/bumble?q=bumbler#bumble__11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bumble&lt;/a&gt;, so does &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bumbler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Webster&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word bumbler is hot in Taiwan recently due to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21566657-former-heart-throb-loses-his-shine-ma-bumbler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;. This is why I hesitate to ask the question on our main site. It is not my intention to stir up any political discussion. So, I am asking on meta first to see if I can ask it on the main site. This is the first time I am on English Language Usage Stack Exchange although I am an active participant on other SE sites. If I use the wrong tags, please help me to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that once I ask it on the main site, people will see it when they google.&#xA;That's another reason I hesitate to ask. I just want to know the usage of the word. That's it. Please advise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31134" LastEditorUserId="31134" LastEditDate="2012-11-20T09:44:35.570" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T15:54:31.313" Title="Is the usage of the word &quot;Bumbler&quot; on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3338" CreationDate="2012-11-20T15:28:35.053" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/bumble?q=bumbler#bumble__11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bumbler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Webster&lt;/a&gt; do list &lt;em&gt;bumbler&lt;/em&gt; as a derivative of &lt;em&gt;bumble&lt;/em&gt;. A &lt;em&gt;bumbler&lt;/em&gt; is one who &lt;em&gt;bumbles&lt;/em&gt; just as a &lt;em&gt;questioner&lt;/em&gt; is one who &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;. The headline in your linked article could just as well have read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ma the blunderer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ma the bungler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ma the incompetent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see anything particularly challenging when it comes to the usage of the word &lt;em&gt;bumbler&lt;/em&gt;. Unless there is something that I'm missing here, such a question on the main site will very likely be closed as a &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; question as the answer can be gleaned by simply looking the word up in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T15:28:35.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3338" CreationDate="2012-11-20T17:40:03.187" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to applaud you for your sense of care and caution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, when asking a question like this, it's good to include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where you found the word, and why you are asking the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What you found when you looked in dictionaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did all that – and you haven't even asked your question yet!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your larger issue, there's nothing wrong with asking a question rooted in something you found in a commentary on politics. So long as your question remains politically neutral, and you support it with research that you conducted before asking, it'll probably be just fine. In fact, we have one regular use who does that rather often; for example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86734/what-do-yeep-and-go-yeep-mean&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85287/why-pbs-is-called-big-bird-as-its-byname&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, coleopterist has already answered your &lt;em&gt;bumbler&lt;/em&gt; question to some extent, so there may be little point in asking that question now. But if this meta question is any indication of the care you will put into future questions, then I'm looking forward to reading them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T22:14:56.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3329" CreationDate="2012-11-20T22:56:03.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for what everyone else was thinking, but I can tell you my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the first question was interesting. I learned a new word (&lt;em&gt;autohyponym&lt;/em&gt;), and  even left an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question? Sorry, it was too basic for me. I didn't see the need to let a question on the difference between &quot;the&quot; and &quot;a&quot; remain open, nor did I feel compelled to leave a detailed explanation. We all draw our lines in the sand somewhere. (Incidentally, I probably &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; have voted to close a question like that on ELL, which is why I think we need both sites.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's my point? It's hard to lump us impolite power users together in one boat, or paint us all with one broad brush. In one case, I supported the question, upvoting it, even; in the other, I voted to close, sans comment – and sans guilt, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T22:56:03.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3338" CreationDate="2012-11-21T00:45:02.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED2 happens to give two senses for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bumbler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The elder of the two, which appears to be dialectic, is as a synonym for a &lt;em&gt;bumble-bee&lt;/em&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The later of the two is as a synonym for a &lt;em&gt;blunderer&lt;/em&gt;, since to bumble about is to blunder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both have 19&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, there are surprisingly many local synonyms for the common &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bumblebee&lt;/a&gt; around the English-speaking world.  I don’t just mean spelling it as one word or two (&lt;em&gt;bumblebee, bumble bee&lt;/em&gt;), nor with or without a hyphen (&lt;em&gt;bumble-bee&lt;/em&gt;), but rather different words altogether. These include not just a &lt;em&gt;bumbler&lt;/em&gt; but also a &lt;em&gt;bumbard, bumbart, dog-bee, humblebee, foggie, hummel-bee, busy bee,&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;em&gt;dor&lt;/em&gt; — and of course now rather famously, a &lt;em&gt;dumbledor&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dumbledore&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;He battled with the Dumbledors,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and won the Golden Honeycomb;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and running home on sunny seas&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in ship of leaves and gossamer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  with blossom for a canopy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  he sat and sang, and furbished up&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and burnished up his panoply.&lt;/i&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is taken from the poem &quot;Errantry&quot;, by J.R.R. Tolkien, which was first published in 1933.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-11-22T15:54:31.313" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T15:54:31.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-21T23:10:37.547" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/91931/2637&quot;&gt;my answer here&lt;/a&gt;, I had an entire paragraph marked up as a &quot;link&quot;, which someone edited to place the &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.about.com/od/fh/g/gerundterm.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[source]&lt;/a&gt; after the quoted text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm certainly not complaining - if anything I'm already grateful that anyone would take the trouble. But the combination of my eyes and my screen doesn't give me any particular problem reading the (red) text of links, so I'm wondering if this is an issue for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting aside other reasons why quoting significant amounts of text might not be all that desirable, should I avoid making the entirety of my quoted text a link, in the interests of legibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; find the highlighted links here on Meta a bit faint, but maybe that's another issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T20:15:56.613" Title="Do many people have legibility issues with [link] highlighted text on ELU Main?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-22T06:38:27.103" Score="9" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a descriptive link to the ELL proposal be added to one or more of the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FAQ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A block in the sidebar or, if not, then as a &lt;em&gt;sticky&lt;/em&gt; link in the &quot;Community Bulletin&quot; block.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T20:39:52.827" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T20:39:52.827" Title="Providing links to ELL" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|general-reference|site-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3343" CreationDate="2012-11-22T06:39:48.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Instead of linking the entire quote, you could have linked &quot;In football, deliberately tripping an opponent is a foul&quot; in its lead-up. Links, in general, might not be easily noticeable when used with a short word(s) and conversely, might be too noticeable (and thereby, grating) when used with long sentences or paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally don't have any trouble with the link contrast on the main site. They appear closer to &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; for unvisited links and &lt;em&gt;pinkish&lt;/em&gt; for visited links which is quite acceptable to me. If anything, it's the scheme used on this &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; site which I find a little too sedate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T06:39:48.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3343" CreationDate="2012-11-22T17:25:15.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;It simply doesn't look very good to have the entire paragraph as a link. Most of this is &lt;em&gt;aesthetic&lt;/em&gt;, with the strange off-color in text you would not normally see flashing at you in garish neon tones of look-at-me, look-at-me.  But it also risks confusing the reader, or diluting the punch, emphasis, or meaning of the particular type of markup that one is making overly much use of. Which of those you consider the gravest sin varies, but it still comes down to  people thinking it is not such a hot idea.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-11-22T20:15:56.613" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T20:15:56.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3350" CreationDate="2012-11-24T10:53:11.603" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a joke in a recent episode of SouthPark (BlockBuster) that makes a direct reference to an adult movie. English is not my mother language, so I'm not sure if I've understood the joke completely. May I ask for a clarification here ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19813" LastActivityDate="2012-11-24T11:20:38.403" Title="Is it appropriate to ask for a clarification about a sexually oriented joke?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3349" CreationDate="2012-11-24T11:20:38.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jokes which rely on the English language are at least implicitly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;on topic in the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. The fact that it makes a direct reference to an adult movie doesn't change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a reference &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; make the question &lt;strong&gt;too localised&lt;/strong&gt;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Too localized:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community can only make a judgement on that when the question is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The joke or its explanation may be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_safe_for_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Not Safe For Work&lt;/a&gt; which might cause some difficulties, although a reasonable academic discussion of the words used has certainly appeared before. It's possible to find &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=cunt&quot;&gt;some examples&lt;/a&gt; which are almost certainly NSFW: if your browser shows you the end of that link you can use your judgement about whether to follow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-11-24T11:20:38.403" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3329" CreationDate="2012-11-26T03:09:41.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I'm a Bad User™, but I'll confess that there are some times when either I'm in hurry, or the question is so bad that I can't motivate myself to comment upon it as I vote to close.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the review queue make this worse?  I don't use it too often, but I'll toss out some speculation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems like if you know you have X more questions to review before you're done, it might feel like you're in more of a hurry than if you just stumbled upon a single less-than-stellar question &quot;in the wild&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you vote to close on the regular question screen, you (at least sometimes) get a little reminder &quot;Hey, consider adding a comment.&quot;  That seems to be missing from the review queue (understandably, since the question leaves your view after you vote.)  Maybe the review screen needs some alternate mechanism to encourage you to leave a comment.   Perhaps a one-stop 'close with comment' dialog?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that to &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; comments will just lead to more of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3178/close-reason-comments&quot;&gt;useless type of close comments&lt;/a&gt;, which we know are not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T14:41:25.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3353" CreationDate="2012-11-26T14:35:51.630" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a feature for member-to-member messaging outside of the &quot;chat&quot; area? I would like to ask questions of clarification to an individual user, but I can't remember where I saw the comment that I want to clarify to respond directly to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastEditorUserId="24168" LastEditDate="2012-11-26T14:47:10.063" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T15:01:55.413" Title="How to send messages between users" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3352" CreationDate="2012-11-27T15:01:55.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Private messaging is not available on the Stack Exchange network. To contact a particular user, you can (since you have the prerequisite reputation amount) do either of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find the user in a chat room and talk to them there. To find out if a user is in a chat room, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;search for them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/new&quot;&gt;Create&lt;/a&gt; a chat room and then, using the same method as above to find the user, invite them to your room.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your particular problem can be solved, as RegDwight points out, by using the comments sub-tab of the user activity tab, on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/12952/barrie-england?tab=activity&quot;&gt;user's page&lt;/a&gt;. Once there, use your browser's text search facility to find the text you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T15:01:55.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2012-11-27T20:06:48.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's quite too early to add any link to ELL, as it is just a proposal, which is still in commitment phase. Once the proposal became a site, and graduated, adding a reference to ELL can be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ contains a part that can be edited from moderators, and which can eventually suggest other Stack Exchange sites that could be interesting for the users who normally ask questions on EL&amp;amp;U, and which are pertinent. (This means the FAQ would not suggest &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt; as alternative site where to ask questions.)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The description for the closing reasons are the same for every Stack Exchange sites (except &lt;em&gt;Area 51&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;StackApps&lt;/em&gt;). It is rather difficult Stack Exchange implements customized descriptions for each site, at least for the fact it would confuse users who has an account on other Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Community Bulletin block can have a link to a meta question that has been tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'featured'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt;, but that tag is automatically removed after X days (I think it should be 30 days).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T20:06:48.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3383" CreationDate="2012-11-27T20:59:16.750" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a specific question about using em dash dialogue in (mostly) fiction writing . I would like to ask if there are any specific rules about how it should be composed, the arrangement of the character dialogue and the speech tags, and what type of description is not appropriate to go inside the dash-dialogue passage. I have already asked it to the Writers.SE group, but I thought this group could also provide a useful answer. Is this question off-topic? If it would help, I could edit this query and insert my original question from Writers.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:55:28.260" Title="Questions about writing techniques" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-29T02:24:27.017" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/363/what-emphasis-to-use-when-referring-to-words&quot;&gt;What emphasis to use when referring to words?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m primarily active over on StackOverflow, forgive me if I am unfamiliar with the conventions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an answer, I used the inline code &lt;code&gt;backticks&lt;/code&gt; to isolate specific words that were the subject of the answer. Another user, a moderator, edited and replaced all my markup with italics. I don’t care for the look — it is harder for me to read. That is why I purposefully and consciously applied the style of markup that I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a terribly big deal, however it strikes me as slightly presumptuous to edit strictly to apply one’s own personal formatting preferences to another user’s post. &lt;strong&gt;Is this sort of editing conventional here, and if so, is there an established standard?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31522" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T15:52:28.007" Title="Editing strictly for style" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ClosedDate="2012-11-29T09:52:38.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3356" CreationDate="2012-11-29T02:56:01.773" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we often edit to polish a posting so that it looks more professional. Yes, RegDwighт♦ does a great deal of work in this regard, as he did with yours, but a lot of the rest of us help out with this too. That means fixing spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, and formatting errors.   Often enough, we will lightly rephrase for clarity.  Think of it as getting a free copyedit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing this makes the site look more appealing, because that way it looks more like a real book, not a ransom letter from a broken typewriter or a txtmsg.  This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; English Language &amp;amp; Usage, after all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Backticks have no place here, because they are very gross to look at, and in monospace.  Look at a dictionary: do you see any &lt;code&gt;inverse video&lt;/code&gt;  crud there?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a dictionary, one sets an individual word or phrase in an &lt;em&gt;italic face&lt;/em&gt; to “quote” it so that it stands out from the regular roman.  It’s just how things are done in English.  This is not a programming language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T02:56:01.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-29T17:17:26.170" Score="14" ViewCount="1058" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would still like to look into doing this, because it is tedious in the extreme to edit every single instance of misused backticks into italics, and because almost no one ever fixes these. Therefore we should just “do the right thing” and map backticks into &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; not into &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. Anyone who actually needs computer code on ELU can always just use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, new users to ELU come here from one or another computer-code–based Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange site like Stack&amp;nbsp;Overflow itself. Programmers who are used to using &lt;code&gt;monospaced inverse video&lt;/code&gt; for code segments are often unaware of the typographic conventions and expectations of actual English, such as are explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/444/2085&quot;&gt;in this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, they unwittingly use &lt;code&gt;word&lt;/code&gt; when they should be using &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; instead. This makes the site look ugly, so this ends up getting corrected in an edit to set the word or phrase in italic the way it always should have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we ask the Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange development team to kindly switch around how backticks work on ELU so that they are equivalent to any other way of specifying italics, like with stars or underscores. Then for those extremely rare occasions when actual computer code is needed, the existing &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;computer code&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; notation could still be used just like today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would not affect indented “code” paragraphs used in tables. It would only be for inlined backquoted material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a win-win solution. It makes the site more new-user–friendly for programmers coming from other Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange sites, it saves time,  it makes ELU look better and better conform with standard typographic expectations, and it doesn’t remove anything that we are currently able to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we do this? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I should add that I have no idea whether this is even doable. The style sheets and programming for converting markdown that they use here  might well too closely tie together these two input forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;text&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ˋtextˋ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . for this proposal to be possible at all. I don’t know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of the Stack Exchange programming team, doing this may be trivial, it may be easy, it may hard, it may be impossible.  I have no idea which of those applies.  Obviously if it is impossible, it cannot be done, and if it is hard, probably is not worth doing compared with other things on their to-do list.  But in the event that it is possible and not too much trouble, I think we should consider doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, please note carefully that this proposal is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting that we mess with the first form at all, nor with the indented code paragraphs used for tables.  It is simply to map the backtick Markdown form into &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;text&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the resulting HTML, instead of into &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;text&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.  It provides another way to get at italic, since that is what it is usually (but not 100% always) used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those people who for whatever reason &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want do &lt;code&gt;inverse-video monospaced text&lt;/code&gt; would still be able to access that functionality without any new programming being required, since it already works as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;text&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.  Nothing would be made available.  It is just to help new users from programming-related Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange sites, who may not be used to the standard conventions of regular English.  This is not a programming site, so it should not look like one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T10:04:09.883" Title="Should we fix backticks?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|formatting|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2012-11-29T17:54:26.223" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am against. For one thing, I really need code formatting sometimes, as in Proto-Indo-European roots, where Markup (or what is it called?—asterisks and such) messes up my words. Then there are other uses. There is no serious problem (just looks) and removing any kind of functionality will not only mess up older questions but also limit what we can do, in both foreseen and unforeseen ways, as above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T17:54:26.223" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2012-11-29T18:56:58.030" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;If our users never used other Stack Exchange sites, maybe, but since we are part of a large network, consistency trumps convenience.  It would be better to address this through education (like in the FAQ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be reasonable to ask SE if we can &lt;em&gt;add to&lt;/em&gt; (not alter) the markup help on a per-site basis, which would allow us (and any other SE site with similar needs) to document our local formatting conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T18:56:58.030" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2012-11-30T16:33:36.477" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue is that people are confusing semantic marking with display presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markup (and markdown) constructs are for indicating semantic types like &lt;em&gt;emphasis&lt;/em&gt; using &lt;code&gt;*asterisks*&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;strong emphasis&lt;/strong&gt; using &lt;code&gt;**double asterisks**&lt;/code&gt;. The presentation of those styles as &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; is a style question. Except for &lt;strike&gt;HTML&lt;/strike&gt; SE's poor support for underlines, I suppose we could have just as easily chosen &lt;code&gt;u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲&lt;/code&gt; for the display of emphasis. Likewise, SE could switch all &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;bolds&lt;/strong&gt; and it should have no effect whatsoever on the meaning of anyone's content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The backtick is just another one of these semantic markers, a &quot;code&quot; or &quot;literal&quot; type. But part of its semantics is the implication that markdown is literalized, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;em&amp;gt;like here&amp;lt;/em&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. On a coding-oriented forums the &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; type is displayed as &lt;code&gt;highlighted monospace&lt;/code&gt; because that's useful to coders. On an English-language-oriented forum &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; could be displayed as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bold italic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or whatever is useful to that community. But it would still have to support literalization/escape of markdown characters inside code blocks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one real issue is that people use the &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; type for non-semantic reasons; i.e., they are trying to control how their content is displayed -- taking advantage of the monospace or highlight to simulate tables, for example. People shouldn't have been doing this, but SE really offers no alternative. Changing &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; will break all these. Not saying that's bad, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16191" LastEditorUserId="16191" LastEditDate="2012-11-30T18:24:30.133" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T18:24:30.133" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-30T22:48:53.440" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2490/why-is-the-title-suggestion-text-not-capitalized-correctly&quot;&gt;Why is the title suggestion text not capitalized correctly?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that the enter-title-placeholder reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yU6Vr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon further examination, the phrase lacks capitals at the beginning of the sentence, as well as after the question mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T22:48:53.440" Title="Title placeholder is rather ironic" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2012-11-30T23:41:24.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2137" CreationDate="2012-12-01T03:58:27.733" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In over a year, not a single person has downvoted either this question or the only posted answer (which agrees with OP's position that the text &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;grammaticised&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm posting &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; answer because I &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; the current style. If anyone else agrees, they can upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started my previous paragraph with the word &quot;So&quot;, which was perfectly valid in context. But practically every other day here on ELU we get a question starting with &quot;so&quot; (often not capitalised), where the word doesn't (and can't) relate to &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; previously mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that's taking &quot;relaxed informality&quot; a bit far, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I sometimes edit out the offending word. But the default title text strikes just about the right level with me and/so I'm quite happy with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-12-01T03:58:27.733" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-02T17:02:52.127" Score="-1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is — or is not — EL&amp;amp;U the Miss Manners StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After noticing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/92988/2085&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I had thought that questions about proper etiquette, manners, politeness, and such social graces were off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I cannot locate anything about it in the FAQ, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politeness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politeness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politeness&lt;/a&gt; tag does exist, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etiquette&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etiquette&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etiquette&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym. Should those exist, or shouldn’t they?  Should the FAQ include politeness questions as being on-topic for the site, or should it say that they are off-topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T10:02:25.943" Title="Is EL&amp;U the Miss Manners StackExchange site?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-02T17:29:50.900" Score="17" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found no reason why this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/92919/11550&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;  is closed. This question asks whether a given phrase is the right usage for expressing a particular action. It is a particular doubt that may arise in a non-native English speakers mind. No body commented efficiently why this question should be closed. Only a single comment says &lt;em&gt;It has no real answer&lt;/em&gt;. I can not see how it can not have a real answer. It has already got a lot of good quality answer. A lot of avid users of this site also argues this question should not be closed. Hence I request everybody to consider reopening this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T22:14:30.223" Title="Should this question be closed?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3364" CreationDate="2012-12-02T18:48:46.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question is specifically about manners - it's about whether the phrase &quot;who cares&quot; is off-hand, dismissive, rude, or acceptable. That seems a perfectly reasonable part of &quot;&amp;amp; usage&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6336" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T18:48:46.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3364" CreationDate="2012-12-02T21:50:03.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the question is also about English, who cares what else it is about? That question sounds fine to me. Only if it is not really about English should it is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T21:50:03.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-03T14:57:14.473" Score="-6" ViewCount="1511" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is in reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93114/can-supposed-to-be-used-to-mean-considered-to&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the example sentences is &lt;i&gt;Asians are not supposed to be good ball players.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that the OP is just trying to provide examples to illustrate his question, but I also think it is possible to find examples that do not touch on the sensitive subject of racism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also realize that some people argue that the world is becoming very PC, maybe too PC. But given the amount of controversy recently surrounding Asian basketball player, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Lin#Racial_issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeremy Lin&lt;/a&gt;, I think the community should at least discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the community moderate/edit such posts? Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31153" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T10:56:26.803" Title="Example sentences that can be insulting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2012-12-03T21:40:18.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to find an example sentence to which somebody somewhere won't object, and I certainly don't believe it desirable to censor free discussion for such a trivial reason as this.  If a post said &quot;Asians are not good ball players&quot; this question would be worth asking (though my personal answer would still be &quot;Don't censor it, assuming the point's relevant&quot;): if a post said &quot;Asians are not supposed to be good ball players&quot; then it would be viciously illiberal to try and prevent somebody asserting a (perhaps unwelcome) fact about Western society: but to object even to a mention of the sentence, without any indication of the poster's actual views, borders on the Stalinist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T21:40:18.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2012-12-04T00:13:40.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is specifically asking about the phrase &lt;em&gt;supposed to&lt;/em&gt;, and asking about its usage in the negative to express a stereotype.  That's a valid language question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a member of the community, you're always welcome to come up with an equally good example that you find less offensive, and make an edit. Of course, that might be quite a challenge in the context of a stereotype. I thought of a few examples, but, in this particular case, the nature of the phrasal usage is bound to be off-putting for someone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;New Yorkers are not supposed to be considerate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Women are not supposed to be good drivers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rich people are not supposed to be good tippers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Short people are not supposed to be good ball players.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I have very nice friends who hail from New York, my wife is a competent and safe driver, and I don't ascribe to the stereotype that well-off people never leave generous tips.  All that, plus &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_Webb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Spud Webb&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T10:56:26.803" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T10:56:26.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T01:04:39.337" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got a suggestion for my question saying that &quot;This question might be a better fit for our sister site for English Language Learners&quot;. May I know url for English Language learners&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31567" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T16:28:46.390" Title="May I know url for sister site of ELU for English Language Learners?" Tags="|bug|site-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3371" CreationDate="2012-12-04T01:25:54.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure. You can click this image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners?referrer=wimWoFSQ0RE8GxFV_g6lKw2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QEXml.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Language Learners proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T16:28:46.390" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T16:28:46.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3371" CreationDate="2012-12-04T01:26:29.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; is still a proposal on Area 51, but it is currently in the Commitment phase. This means that you can support it, and when it opens into private beta you'll be one of the first to be able to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T01:26:29.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3382" CreationDate="2012-12-04T03:14:37.510" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran into &quot;off topic (too old to migrate)&quot; on the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; dialog when attempting to close-vote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24423/which-thesaurus-best-describes-the-differences-between-several-similar-words?rq=1&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:38:03.540" Title="off topic (too old to migrate)" Tags="|support|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T17:05:16.710" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a request to reopen the question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93187/isnt-dummy-in-html-parser-for-dummies-considered-offensive&quot;&gt;Isn't “dummy” in “HTML Parser for Dummies” considered offensive?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; I believe that it is a perfectly legitimate question and not general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've also updated the title of the question to better reflect what @UniMouS is asking.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:26:31.470" Title="Reopen request: Isn't “dummy” in “HTML Parser for Dummies” considered offensive?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T17:31:27.960" Score="-3" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answers to GR (General Reference) questions should not be converted to comments. The best way to deal with a short answer to a GR question is the usual way: close the GR question, and ultimately delete the question if it does not improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/93287/14073&quot;&gt;An answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; was deleted and converted to a comment. The answer was a couple of words and a link to &lt;em&gt;EtymOnline.com&lt;/em&gt;. Apparently the rationale was that the answer was “barely more than a link to an external site”. This is one of the reasons given in the FAQ for why an answer might be deleted. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ#deletion&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical problem: deleting short answers to GR questions can leave answered questions on the unanswered queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editorial problem: the sole test for whether to remove an answer is whether it “fundamentally answer[s] the question” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;FAQ#deletion&lt;/a&gt;). If it does, it is always a mistake to close it. The reasons given in the FAQ are helpful, but should not be applied blindly. We explicitly acknowledge in the FAQ that some questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; “be definitively and permanently answered by a single link”: &lt;em&gt;that is our definition of a GR question&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;FAQ#close&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is especially wrong to convert a valid answer to a comment. We discourage users from posting comments which answer a question; we tell them to “post an actual answer”. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;privileges/comment&lt;/a&gt;) We should not make editorial choices which do exactly the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:01:39.120" Title="Short answers to GR (General Reference) questions should not be converted to comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|general-reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3378" CreationDate="2012-12-05T18:09:30.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers are for on-topic questions. You should not answer in the comments of an on-topic question.  It is true that link only answers are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/970/what-should-be-done-with-answers-that-contain-just-a-link&quot;&gt;frowned upon&lt;/a&gt; for many reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General reference questions are expressly off-topic.  It is also true that &quot;the definition of a GR question is a question that can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link.&quot; It was suggested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; that we should require the &quot;single link&quot; that provided the definitive and permanent answer &lt;em&gt;in the comments&lt;/em&gt; when the person who thought it was general reference &lt;em&gt;cast their close vote&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General reference questions are off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic questions should be closed and not answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Posting a comment with the link that justifies the general reference close reason is appropriate and welcomed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: don't answer questions that you think should be closed, but comments are OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T19:50:15.913" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3378" CreationDate="2012-12-06T00:01:39.120" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a misunderstanding here: Questions closed as General Reference are not questions that can be answered with a link; they are questions for which there is nothing to say apart what already said from a specific resource.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I could answer them without giving a link, but what I would say is not different from what said in a dictionary, and for that reason, the question, and its answers, would not be much helpful for future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer that is merely a link is not considered an answer, and for that reason it could be deleted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The fact a question could be closed as GR is not an excuse to write an answer that is merely a link. What would you do if the question is re-opened because somebody doesn't consider it a GR? Would you delete the answer you gave because the question is not GR anymore? I guess you would undelete it, if the question is successively closed as GR from another group of five users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is just a case when an answer containing just a link is not deleted: When the question is asking for links. In that case, the question should be deleted, not the single answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Clearly, when an answer has been flagged as not an answer, and who handles the flag doesn't check what the question is asking, it could happen the answer is deleted, and not the question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Moderators are supposed to check the flagged post, not the question containing that post, though; if a user is flagging an answer for something that is wrong in the question, the used flag should be more explicit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:01:39.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3376" CreationDate="2012-12-06T00:26:31.470" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been closed as general reference because the question asks, &quot;Does it mean stupid person? If it does, isn't it too offensive to use like that?&quot; The meaning of &lt;em&gt;dummy&lt;/em&gt; can be found in a dictionary, and that is the reason for closing the question as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart that, IMO, EL&amp;amp;U is not the place to ask if a word is offensive, in the same way it is not the place to ask about etiquette, or any other social conventions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:26:31.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3374" CreationDate="2012-12-06T00:38:03.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that are older than 60 days cannot be anymore migrated; not even moderators can migrate them. What that phrase says is that you can just close the question as off-topic, but you cannot anymore vote to migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for stopping the migration of too old questions is that they are problematic. Often, they are closed in the site where they get migrated; even if they are not closed, they don't get much contributions. This is especially true for questions where the top answer has a high score; even if somebody would write a very good answer, it could not emerge from the answers given in the original site. In the case the question doesn't have answers with high scores, it is probable that the receiving site has already a similar question (although not a duplicate), and users probably aren't interested in a very similar question again. It could be also the question is outdated, and nobody is going to add a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:38:03.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3355" CreationDate="2012-12-06T00:55:28.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is about writing style, Writers is the right site to ask your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you already asked your question on a site, you should not cross-post the question, if you don't adapt it to the site where you ask it. As the question is about writing style, I doubt there is a way to adapt it for EL&amp;amp;U. If you make it a generic question about using em-dashes, it is probable that a similar question has been already asked on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T00:55:28.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-06T02:08:52.240" Score="29" ViewCount="795" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a couple days of break I revisited EL&amp;amp;U to find about a third of questions on the main page marked [closed].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears anything that can be looked up in more or less obscure source (NOT dictionary or thesaurus) becomes &quot;general reference&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76061/identifying-an-adverb-in-sentence&quot;&gt;(1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93223/cynical-used-to-describe-a-noun&quot;&gt;(2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93352/xkcd-comic-strip-meaning&quot;&gt;(3)&lt;/a&gt; while anything that cannot be found in there (and thus requires discussion) becomes &quot;non-constructive&quot; or &quot;off-topic&quot;.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93379/how-should-i-politely-ask-for-someones-time-to-interrupt-them-like-in-english&quot;&gt;(4)&lt;/a&gt; Asking about these obscure sources becomes &quot;off-topic&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93368/how-to-find-nouns-that-connote-an-idea&quot;&gt;(5)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84436/idiom-thesaurus&quot;&gt;(6)&lt;/a&gt;. Nothing in the FAQ forbids asking for lists of words, especially if such lists are finite, available and linkable to, but these are either &quot;non-constructive&quot; or &quot;not real questions&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93389/words-with-that-exist-because-people-type-incorrectly&quot;&gt;(7)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93056/verb-for-piece-together-clues&quot;&gt;(8)&lt;/a&gt; because it seems that type of answer became unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even questions with high score and favorite marks (that means useful and interesting to the community) are still getting closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am questioning the wisdom of voting to close if you fail to see difficulty in a particular sentence that is definitely difficult for a non-native speaker &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93352/xkcd-comic-strip-meaning&quot;&gt;(3)&lt;/a&gt; or decide that if more than one correct answer exists, the question is non-constructive. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93056/verb-for-piece-together-clues&quot;&gt;(8)&lt;/a&gt; (the argument about number of answers makes no sense: do I have to sit at the computer and hit &quot;reload&quot; over and over to see if someone came up with a good answer or can I leave for a few hours and then pick from answers posted? Is there any harm in having many answers?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on several other .se sites and I don't see moderators anywhere else so trigger-happy about closing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here let me ask my questions (to avoid being closed as not-a-real...) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To those who choose to close these questions: By these actions you are shaping the site - its audience, its purpose. What shape of the site are you trying to create? What purpose is this site supposed to serve once you hammer it into the shape you want? Whom is it supposed to serve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To others - Do you think this direction is right? If so, maybe we should get the FAQ readjusted to account for broadened senses of &quot;non-constructive&quot;, &quot;off-topic&quot; and &quot;general reference&quot;? If not, what can we do about it (other than keep clicking &quot;reopen&quot; in vain hope to rescue the poor soul before it falls off the main page?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for my own $0.02 to what might help is: broaden allowed topic to explicitly allow questions about resources. The only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;&quot;resources question&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is half a year old, far too broad to be really useful and closed - so no new resources can be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you're asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would add: &lt;em&gt;But if you imagine such book already exists, don't hesitate to ask for the title.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way even very broad questions can be answered in a very concise and precise manner, giving what would be a completely satisfactory answer for a problem that might otherwise be very difficult to solve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PLEASE ANSWER.&lt;/strong&gt; The comments everywhere in the &quot;possible duplicates&quot; and here keep talking about &quot;closing the questions to make the site better&quot; without addressing the precise question I have posted here, which probably lies at the core of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By [closing these questions] you are shaping the site - its audience, its purpose. What shape of the site are you trying to create? What purpose is this site supposed to serve once you hammer it into the shape you want? Whom is it supposed to serve?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the two fronts of this long-standing battle have quite opposite views of what comprises &quot;better&quot;. For example, in its &quot;mission statement&quot; the site claims it is for English enthusiasts. I consider myself an English enthusiast, but I know my English isn't very good. I ask questions&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87303/meaning-of-best-kept-secret&quot;&gt;(12)&lt;/a&gt; that are -almost- general reference: common knowledge to any native speaker, unsearchable for non-native, and they either get closed or barely survive the flurry of close-votes. So, the site is not for -all- English enthusiasts it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's define what this site strives to serve, its ideal of purity. So that maybe there could be a site where all these &quot;poor quality&quot; questions can go, keeping EL&amp;amp;U pure and clean while satisfying vain curiosity and laziness of idle web dwellers who don't want to shudder in fear when asking if given sentence should be written with &quot;there&quot; or &quot;their&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T01:09:11.533" Title="Waning gap of acceptable questions" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|moderation|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3321" CreationDate="2012-12-06T03:55:46.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/englishmeta/query/87998/top-100-votes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a query&lt;/a&gt; that shows the votes you get between accepted answers, down-votes, and up-votes. The given link is for the question; in the case the vote is for the answer, the link will be for the question containing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x76NW.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data in the Data Explorer are updated more frequently, now. As I see from &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/englishmeta/query/13414/what-data-dump-is-sede-using&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;, Data Explorer is using data updated to December, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T03:55:46.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2012-12-06T11:48:16.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with your opinions of what should be closed. Everything that has been closed on your list is closed within our existing guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the shape I want for EL&amp;amp;U (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2#post-75672&quot;&gt;from my election thing&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want EL&amp;amp;U to be a great academic resource and enlightening place for serious English language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are still awaiting enough people to commit to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners?referrer=9vM09OKxbaY8GxFV_g6lKw2&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; so that the basic question can be asked somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T11:48:16.380" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2012-12-06T23:58:00.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing in the FAQ forbids asking for lists of words, especially if such lists are finite, available and linkable to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are asking for lists are generally not welcome on any Stack Exchange site, especially if the list is for resources.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If a question is asking for a list of words, it probably means the user is looking for a word, but s/he is not able to define exactly which word s/he is looking for. I am excluding the user is asking a list of words just for the mere exercise of building such list. In both the cases, the question is not constructive, as every user can write her/his own list of words, each answer would be equally valid, and everybody would vote the list they like better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than asking for a list of words, it would be better to ask for a word, specifying the requirements the word should meet. If anyone who answers knows more than one suitable word, the answer will contain more than one word. In any case, questioners should not request a list of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-12-08T04:14:35.197" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T04:14:35.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-07T17:25:43.480" Score="-4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take two very similar questions. Overly simple but just to drive the example; in reality these usually happen to be much more obscure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the execution by electric chair called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the execution by guillotine called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of them is non-constructive. Which one? The asker has no way of determining that without knowing the complete answers first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one has precisely one answer outside of slang ones: &lt;em&gt;Electrocution&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second can be answered correctly by: &lt;em&gt;Beheading&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Decapitation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Guillotining&lt;/em&gt;. This means three different equally valid answers, making the question non-constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's very good to have a rule which you need to violate in order to know you have violated it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T11:03:52.173" Title="Catch-22 with single-word-requests constructiveness" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3389" CreationDate="2012-12-07T18:13:21.570" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aren't they both non-constructive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various answers for both, and can be best found by looking in a dictionary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3820" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T18:13:21.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3389" CreationDate="2012-12-07T18:54:40.400" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see either one as non-constructive. The best answer to the guillotine one would list &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; reasonable possibilities, with connotations and usage notes. Just because there's more than one word that fits doesn't make the question non-constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not constructive would be something like &quot;I have this context where either &lt;em&gt;beheading&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;decapitation&lt;/em&gt; would fit. Neither word is more appropriate than the other, because [blah blah blah]. I'd like to poll the ELU crowd: which word do you like better?&quot; Not constructive is also &quot;I want a word to fit [definition]. I have a very specific context in mind, &lt;em&gt;but I'm not telling you about it&lt;/em&gt;, because that would ruin my fun; instead, I'm going to go and shoot down each possibility as it's offered in the answers.&quot; (Of course, nobody actually writes their question that way; but this is why we tend to knee-jerk ask for context, even if the question is perfectly answerable without it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T18:54:40.400" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2012-12-08T03:08:55.990" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been here, done this, and bought this &lt;a href=&quot;http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/been+there,+done+that&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;T-shirt&lt;/a&gt;. It's even been through the laundry a few times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we get a spate of bad questions – that leads to a lot of closed questions. And that leads to a question on meta, asking, &quot;Are we closing questions too indiscrimantly?&quot; or, &quot;Are we too getting too snobby?&quot; or, &quot;Are we the rudest community on the Stack Exchange?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my advice: go hang out at Yahoo! Answers for a few days, and read some of their questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What type of hair style should I get? &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AnmtSd6iyB6V7aXHl9hM6a3j1KIX;_ylv=3?qid=20121207182802AAeFc7C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I drove 424 mi. using 18 gal. of gas at this rate how many gallons of gas what I need to drive 318 mi.? &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Asfs9lpCN9OLRTomR4BmK_7j1KIX;_ylv=3?qid=20121207182751AA7b5AZ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I shave my pubic hair? &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ahq4jpODgx6.D2pwk3bCxKqe5HNG;_ylv=3?qid=20121207182958AA3kYVv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you support Bra Burning? &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AmEV.MZMUAJb0HcBuB2l6tGe5HNG;_ylv=3?qid=20121207182953AAL12BH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is Lucifer a good name for the royal couples new baby? or Lucy if it's a girl? &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ar4y5iyb62z4GOfd5qXyIxYjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20121207161946AApi99H&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, ask yourself, &quot;Is that the kind of community I'd like ELU to become?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Near as I can tell, Stack Exchange was designed to ward off inane, vague, or pointless questions by using mechanisms such as peer editing, detailed FAQs, and voting systems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, I understand that a page chock full o' closed questions can make it look like we're getting trigger happy. And every once in a while, perhaps we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get a little trigger happy, and close a relatively decent question. Sometimes, though, I get even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; concerned when I notice some really bad questions getting upvoted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've said it before: if someone doesn't want their question closed, &lt;em&gt;make sure it's a good question&lt;/em&gt;. I don't see any reason to sacrifice quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked through most of the eight questions that you linked to, and, for the most part, I saw a list of hastily-asked questions that showed no basic research, and didn't seem to be based on practical, real-world problems.  By in large, I don't think they were very good fits for this site, even in retrospect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found that, in general, the more work an O.P. puts into a question, the more patient and helpful the responses will be. Similarly, questions that provide very little background information (about the context of the question, or why it is being asked) can get handled rather gruffly. But that's not always a bad thing, I don't think – not if it prompts others to more carefully craft their questions.  Personally, I think this place is hungering for a smattering of thoughtful and interesting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Please don't say that we're not welcoming to the non-native speaker. We entertain several questions from non-natives on a daily basis, many of which get patient and helpful responses.  Not only that, several folks here have put a lot of work into creating a sister site – not because we want the non-natives to go away, but because we want to be even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; helpful than we're already being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Even though my language here may have been a bit blunt, I think my record speaks for itself. I have more than 1,000 more upvotes than downvotes.  Out of 1863 votes cast, only 122 of them have been for closure, or 6.5%.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;EDIT:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Answering Jay's comment below)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By [closing these questions] you are shaping the site - its audience, its purpose. What shape of the site are you trying to create? What purpose is this site supposed to serve once you hammer it into the shape you want? Whom is it supposed to serve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like ELU to be a site for serious language enthusiasts, not a place where people ask trivial questions. I don't want this to become like Yahoo! Answers, where people feel like they can ask whatever they want on a whim, without any fear of negative consequences should their question prove to be vague, incomplete, off-topic, and poorly presented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, what is trivial is subjective - what I find &quot;trivial&quot; others may consider profound; what I think is obvious might unlock an enigma that has perplexed someone else for years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to differentiate between the two, then, is in &lt;strong&gt;how the question in framed&lt;/strong&gt;.  This is how I would recommend asking a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Do your own research first&lt;/strong&gt;. If you've only spent five minutes trying to find an answer, then you're taking a risk by asking the question. I don't call a cab when my destination is just a three-minute walk down the street, and I don't call the fire department to put out a candle. Similarly, if you've haven't put forth some earnest effort into answering your own question first, then you have a higher chance of being  greeted by an unsympathetic community should your question turn out to be trivial.  Furthermore, doing research includes checking this site's FAQ, to be sure your question is on-topic, and also checking to see if this question has already been asked and answered. Moreover, users who have been with this community for some time should learn how to use some of the more advanced tools during their own research, such as Google Books, Ngrams, etymonline.com, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Share your research&lt;/strong&gt; with the community when you ask your question. Don't merely say, &quot;I tried to find an answer, but I couldn't.&quot; That's weak. This is much better: &quot;I tried to find an answer looking at A, B, C, but the closest I could come up with was X. Yet X &lt;em&gt;doesn't quite fit&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;doesn't answer my question&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;didn't help me understand&lt;/em&gt;), because...&quot;  Spend some time summarizing what you did, and how you tried to find it. Not, &quot;Google was no help&quot; but, &quot;When I Googled X, Y, and Z, I couldn't find any answers.&quot; Why not help us help you by telling us about your dead ends, so that we don't repeat the same wild goose chases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;strong&gt;Make sure you provide enough context&lt;/strong&gt; to answer the question. If you're puzzled about something that you read, then, please, tell us where you found it. Certain information is essential to interpreting language such as: Did the sentence come from a work of fiction, or non-fiction? Is it from a published work, or an amateur blogger? Was it written by a comedian, a reporter, a poet, or a scientist? (The statement, &quot;The moon is made of blue cheese&quot; could mean something completely different based on who wrote it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best questions provide excerpts from the original passage - usually an entire paragraph - along with a link to the entire source, when that's available.  If your question doesn't come from a specific context, then share additional details about why it puzzles you. For example, don't ask, &quot;Is this considered impolite?&quot; (almost &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; could be considered impolite - even, &quot;Have a nice day!&quot; - if it's uttered with enough dripping sarcasm).  Instead, explain the context of how the language would be used, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; ask if it might be considered polite or rude. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;strong&gt;When possible, look for ways your can turn your specific question into a more general question&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, say you're having trouble figuring out how to pronounce a word that isn't found in a dictionary, such as the name of a music group. Instead of asking, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do you pronounce X?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;try asking, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How would I go about figuring out how to pronounce the name of a music group, such as X?  After all, that won't be listed in a dictionary, or another source with a pronunication guide. (Most music groups aren't as accomodating as &lt;a href=&quot;http://truefiretv.net/sites/ngm2/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/LynyrdSkynyrd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lynyrd Skynyrd&lt;/a&gt; in this matter.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes your question more useful to future visitors, and therefore a better overall fit for our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions have seemed very silly to me at first, but then become much more interesting after some additional information was provided (usually in a comment; for example: &quot;My native language doesn't use this part of speech,&quot; or, &quot;In my culture, this would be considered insulting.&quot;) Don't assume we'll know that - whether or not the community as a whole will find questions interesting or silly often hinges on such details, so include them. Moreover, if they are added late, add them to the question, not in a comment left as a reply to another comment. If one person asked you for clarification, chances are several more people will wonder the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this sound like a lot of work? It is! Then again, that's what I'd like to see this community become, a &quot;varsity team,&quot; so to speak. Is that because my compatriots and I are a bunch of high-minded snobs? Arrogant and disrespectful? Unsympathetic to the non-native speaker? Anyone who jumps to that conclusion should pay closer attention to what happens on ELU. Questions that follow these three general principles - do your homework, share your findings, provide sufficient context - are usually greeted quite favorably. Comments that could be construed as being terse, curt, or accusatory (e.g., &quot;What did the dictionary tell you?&quot;) are usually reserved for questions that show little prior research and provide woefully inadequate context. In the past, I've seen ELU get overrun with such questions (and, make no mistake about it, a rash of such questions &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; diminish this site's usefulness, overall quality, and appeal), as a spate of new users seemingly find the board and think, &quot;Now I can ask questions about English! Hooray!&quot; Well, you're more than welcome to ask your questions, but please exercise due diligence as you get underway. If that's too much to ask, well, there are other online communities that won't require or expect you to work so hard, or call you out when you fail to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-12-13T09:30:54.943" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T09:30:54.943" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3389" CreationDate="2012-12-08T04:35:29.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of them is non-constructive. Which one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of them is not constructive because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are not asking for opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are not asking for a list of words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The possible answers are very restricted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a closing reason that could be used for those questions, that is general reference, as the questions could be easily answered looking at a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-12-12T09:33:58.920" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T09:33:58.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3389" CreationDate="2012-12-08T11:51:29.183" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I wouldn't vote to close either of these questions as Non-Constructive, but I might be tempted to cast a close vote as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=%2a&amp;amp;loc=revfp2&amp;amp;clue=electric+chair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;General&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=%2a&amp;amp;loc=revfp2&amp;amp;clue=guillotine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reference&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see such a yet-to-be-answered question posted on ELU, there are three ways I might handle it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) I might answer the question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) I might leave an answer to the question as a comment&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) I might vote to close the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where I feel like the question ought to be closed, I'll often try to provide an answer before casting a vote, either as an answer or in a comment.  After all, I don't begrudge someone for asking a question when they don't know the answer. For example, consider the  O.P.'s &lt;em&gt;beheading&lt;/em&gt; question. If I saw that question with no comments and no answers, I might opt to answer it before casting a close vote. But if the question already had two answers, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's called &lt;em&gt;beheading&lt;/em&gt;; from NOAD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;behead&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt;) cut off the head of (someone), typically as a form of execution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That might depend on the device used to chop off the head. If the person is being executed on a guillotine, then there's the verb &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/guillotine_6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;guillotine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  There's also the word &lt;em&gt;decapitate&lt;/em&gt;, which is more general, but it could also be used in your context, as in, &lt;em&gt;The king was decapitated on the guillotine&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I wouldn't have a problem casting a close vote, seeing that the question has been satisfactorily answered. Moreover, I might leave a comment to a reverse dictionary, if I think that might be a helpful tool for the O.P. with similar questions in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I don't consider it an affront to answer a qusetion when it is General Reference, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad practice answer a General Reference question, either. The question has been answered; there's really nothing to add. That's why, on occasion, I've even cast close votes right after I've answered the question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A close vote doesn't necessarily mean, &quot;We don't like your question, go away.&quot; It means, &quot;This question doesn't need to remain open.&quot; That could be because it was a crappy question (in which case I'd probably also vote to delete, after it was closed), or it could mean that a basic question has been satisfactorily answered, so there is no need for it to remain open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-12-12T11:03:52.173" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T11:03:52.173" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:14:48.060" Score="-1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder why people closed and want to delete it? It received several answers, although neither is satisfying. Possibly such word does not exist in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93618/really-black-people/93620&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93618/really-black-people/93620&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far it received 4 upvotes and 1 downvote. It proved impossible to find an answer in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had been already banned from this site twice be the moderator. I am not sure now whether I ever can ask any question here - they all get closed immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2797" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T13:23:56.110" Title="Please tell me what's wrong with this question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3395" CreationDate="2012-12-08T13:23:56.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anixx, you asked a racially-charged question that got at least four helpful comments and four answers. What makes you think that you can't ask a question here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I've looked at some of your recent questions that were closed. They all seem scant on details: very little details on why the question is being asked, where the language came from, or what research you've already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first time I've pointed people to Yoichi's questions, and it probably won't be the last.  But, compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83728/does-the-word-government-in-english-mean-the-courts-as-well&quot;&gt;this question of yours&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93316/is-something-in-the-sand-a-popular-english-phrase&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; of his. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83729/fill-an-appeal-or-file-an-appeal&quot;&gt;this question of yours&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93522/whats-the-difference-between-take-yes-for-an-answer-and-say-yes-for-an-answe&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; of his. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76452/are-monkeys-a-subset-of-apes&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93224/who-are-them-in-the-sentence-awards-honorees-were-a-group-of-upending-types-w&quot;&gt;that one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What differences do you see?  I see one set of questions with meticulous details about context, along with earnest research that is methodically presented.  In other words, one set of questions clearly caters to a community of serious experts, while the other questions don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you spend more time researching each one of your own questions before asking it here. Try to find the answer yourself. And I don't just mean a quick look in a dictionary; do web searches as well. Invest a significant amount of your own time and effort. Then, if you still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to your question, compose a carefully crafted a question for ELU, taking diligent care to integrate the results of your prior research into your question, explaining why you are still confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that a question researched and presented in that fashion would be much more warmly received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T13:23:56.110" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-09T14:32:47.533" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93542/what-is-a-verb-to-make-less-anxious&quot;&gt;What verb could I use to mean &amp;quot;make less anxious&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93756/specific-verb-for-training-an-apprentice&quot;&gt;Specific verb for &amp;quot;training an apprentice&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted the first question and then I got downvoted 2 times because it is &quot;a thesaurus question&quot;. As I am coming back to mark one of the answers, I stumbled upon the second question which had exactly the same question form. But I notice that question got 2 upvotes instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not complaining. I just want to understand the difference so that I know how to better phrase my question in the future. Kindly advise. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T14:32:47.533" Title="How are these two question different to warrant a downvote in one and upvote in another?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-09T17:59:58.137" Score="-1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have edited the question to more thoroughly explain what I am asking for, and what research I've already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93642/how-did-to-lie-i-e-lie-about-something-and-to-lie-i-e-lie-down-end-up-b&quot;&gt;How did &amp;quot;to lie&amp;quot; (i.e lie about something) and &amp;quot;to lie&amp;quot; (i.e. lie down) end up being spelled the same way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would love for it to be re-opened, if it is now better framed. If not, please let me know how I can make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25811" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T22:16:45.050" Title="Is this question better framed: How did “to lie” (i.e lie about something) and “to lie” (i.e. lie down) end up being spelled the same way?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T13:28:42.530" Score="9" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is December 2012, we are now going to reset our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/3400&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T16:11:49.137" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2013" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-12-06T11:33:17.957" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T13:28:42.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2012-12-10T13:30:14.433" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/168/the-overlook-hotel?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Zp38.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writing exercise chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T13:30:14.433" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T13:30:14.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2012-12-10T13:31:19.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4O19.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="1696" LastEditDate="2012-12-11T18:20:43.533" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T18:20:43.533" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T13:31:19.573" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2012-12-10T13:46:05.583" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2969/19644&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNhTt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Write for the EL&amp;amp;U Community Blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T13:46:05.583" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T13:46:05.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T14:16:37.327" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this forum is for English usage, I am wondering if that would cover punctuation and typographic usage questions, such as &quot;when is it appropriate to use an en dash versus an em dash?&quot; Or &quot;how widely recognized is the interrobang?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there another stack that would be more suited to these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32009" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T12:59:36.280" Title="Where would I ask about typographic usage?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2012-12-10T15:28:37.160" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. The criteria seem to be: If there is any ambiguity in the question, then it is 'not a real question' and should be closed. If the question asks for the best word or phrasing for a specific context, the question is 'too localized' and should be closed. If the question asks for a general principle, then it is 'too general' and should be closed. If the person asking does not demonstrate perfect grasp of the English language, then it is a bad question and should be closed. If a question has a single answer which can be found in an authoritative source, then it is 'too basic' or 'general reference' and should be closed. If a question does not have a single answer which can be found in an authoritative source, than it is 'not constructive' and should be closed. If you don't understand a question, then it is 'not a real question' and should be closed. (Even if ten other people apparently did understand the question because they posted answers.) If you had coffee this morning, then it is a bad question and should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, yes, I'm sure we all agree that if someone posted a question on this site like &quot;How do I find the derivative of a trigonometric function?&quot; or  &quot;Is American football better than European football?&quot;, these should be closed as clearly off-topic. And I suppose when someone does ask a question that really can be answered by looking the word up in a dictionary, like &quot;Is 'canary' a noun?&quot; or some such, that should be closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's the point of the enthusiasm to close &quot;bad questions&quot;? What's the harm in letting questions of debateable value get through? Questions are often closed after several people have answered them, so apparently there are people on the site who saw value in the question. Suppose the site did lose some of its &quot;purity&quot;. So what? If you don't like a question, what's the harm in just ignoring it, and letting others answer if they choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T15:28:37.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3404" CreationDate="2012-12-11T12:19:08.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On ELU, typographic usage is —well, it’s certainly not a “black-or-white” matter, but it’s too erratic to characterize as “grey”, which suggests some measure of uniformity. Perhaps »mottled« is the &lt;em&gt;mot juste&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem is that punctuation isn’t really about language at all (Off Topic) — it’s about the &lt;em&gt;presentation&lt;/em&gt; of language . . . except of course to the extent that it &lt;strong&gt;isn’t&lt;/strong&gt;. Because even if it’s not strictly language it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; semiotic&amp;nbsp;: an system of arbitrary signs which convey, qualify, and (one hopes) clarify meaning. So — is it a proper topic for discussion on a forum about language? Our response here has historically been an emphatic “Sometimes”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem is that although punctuation is systematic and meaningful, there are a variety of systems and a variety of opinions about what meaning it conveys. Different disciplines (APA, MLA) and publishers enforce different rules, and for these the questioner can only be referred to the applicable General Reference. The ‘Oxford comma’ is mooted every few months around here (Exact Duplicate); the placement of commas before and after quotations is contentious (Not Constructive); and just about everybody has an idiosyncratic (perhaps we should call it &lt;em&gt;idiographic&lt;/em&gt;, on the analogy of &lt;em&gt;idiolectic&lt;/em&gt;) “system” of pointing. One very distinguished user here regularly edits postings to replace hyphens with em- and en-dashes (or &lt;em&gt;em and en dashes&lt;/em&gt;) according to his own sense —endorsed, to be sure, by many eminent authorities— of what is semiotically fitting; but it appears that even he is constrained by his sensitive aesthetic sense to defy convention and surround em-dashes with spaces, because the em-dash in this site’s typeface is such a piddling, tentative little affair. Would discussion of his practice be a matter of “English Language and Usage”, or does it belong on the proposed &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40151/typography&quot;&gt;Typography&lt;/a&gt; site? —Again, I fear the answer, if the question were raised, would be “Maybe”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And three-quarters of the users here would protest that that full stop should be moved inside the quotation marks.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m afraid that no real answer can be returned to your question (which I guess makes it Not A Real Question!), and that all you can do is browse around the answers tagged “punctuation” and guess what sort of response any particular question is likely to excite —and then roll the dice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T12:19:08.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2012-12-11T18:43:16.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27cPL.png&quot; alt=&quot;No general reference, please!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T18:43:16.347" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-11T18:43:16.347" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-12T00:07:38.570" Score="33" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;RegDwighт said: @Robusto wow, that's formatting to the max. Bold &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; italics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; monospaced &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in quotes. John has outlawlered himself.&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7221823#7221823&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs to me that this is something we can measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I propose that a single character’s &lt;em&gt;lawler weight&lt;/em&gt; (lw) be the standard unit of measure of the typographical emphasis applied to it (such as bold face, larger font, italics, quotation marks, and block quoting). If a character has no typographical emphasis, lw=0. If it is emphasized in one way, lw=1. If it is emphasized in two ways, lw=2, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I propose that the &lt;em&gt;lawler&lt;/em&gt; (ll) be the standard unit of measure of the typographical emphasis applied to a text as a whole, and be calculated as the ratio of the total lawler weight of the characters to the total number of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the text of the two numbered paragraphs above. The italicized characters have lw=1; the others have lw=0. The overall typographical emphasis is around 0.04 (4%) lawler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall typographical emphasis of the John Lawler answer&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/93955/14073&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt; referred to by RegDwighт above is about 0.6 (60%) lawler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is possible for a text to have a lawler greater than 1. The overall typographical emphasis of a paragraph which is both bolded and italicized in its entirety would be 2 (200%) lawler.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T16:52:20.410" Title="Measuring typographical emphasis: the “lawler” and “lawler weight”" Tags="|discussion|style|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2012-12-12T04:12:56.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that moderators are appearing overconfident in their ability to discern what kinds of questions are &quot;inane, vague, or pointless.&quot; &#xA;A good and experienced contributor may be able to discern actual, substantive, general issues in a naive-sounding question, and provide a general answer which would inform beyond the question's original scope, helping to answer similar questions which have yet to be asked. Someone who asks a question that seems too narrow usually wouldn't know how to phrase the question in a general way, but probably would appreciate the pointer towards the general issue. Rather than closing a question before people have a chance to read it and think about it, I think in many cases a skilled moderator could edit the question so that the underlying general issue is made explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T04:12:56.033" CommentCount="34" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-12T04:41:50.513" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/94045/14666&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; is promisingly tagged &lt;code&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;american-english&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;abbreviations&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;portmanteau-words&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every one I spoke to seems to think it's about anything but portmanteau words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One comment clearly states there is no such portmanteau as the OP there has asked, while one answer states that such a portmanteau would not be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extended commentary at the question and the couple of answers all discuss the same topic, which is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; portmanteau words, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the English language and its usage, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; something of peripheral interest to the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the post for the attention of the mods: What's happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The referred question has since been edited, title, body and tags. This meta question relates to the original version as at the time of posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T10:33:19.460" Title="On-topicity of Questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3412" CreationDate="2012-12-12T05:22:54.980" Score="7" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the best way to format poetry, where preserving line breaks is important, but extra white space is not desired between lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encountered the situation for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/94072/17165&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and was not impressed with the look of formatting that resulted from my use of a blockquote, i.e., like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the sleigh full of toys — and St. Nicholas too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T05:28:45.770" Title="Formatting poetry" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3411" CreationDate="2012-12-12T05:26:32.990" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put two spaces at the end of each line in the blockquote, and don't put a blank line between lines of text. The result looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the sleigh full of toys — and St. Nicholas too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17165" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T05:26:32.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3410" CreationDate="2012-12-12T09:59:33.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The extended commentary at the question and the couple of answers all discuss the same topic, which is not portmanteau words, not the English language and its usage, not something of peripheral interest to the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably &lt;em&gt;portmanteau&lt;/em&gt; is not the correct term to use in this case, but the answer proposes a phrase that could be used in American English instead of &lt;em&gt;Oxbridge&lt;/em&gt;. That is about English language, and its usage. If the OP insisted to have a similar made-up word created from the names of two USA universities, the question could be seen as too localized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T09:59:33.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3207" CreationDate="2012-12-12T10:40:48.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we answer each of these individually at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think a question is a duplicate, vote to close it. Related questions are not closed as duplicates, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could we have a mechanism to merge them into a single generic question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that could be possibly merged are the ones that are exactly duplicates. For related/similar questions, we could create a canonical question used to answer similar/related questions, where the answer is used as comprehensive answer for any related question, when creating such question is possible, or worth doing it. Merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34162/employment-with-vs-employment-at&quot;&gt;a question asking about saying &lt;em&gt;working for&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;working at&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8656/which-one-is-more-correct-works-at-a-university-or-works-in-a-university&quot;&gt;a question about &lt;em&gt;working at&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;working in&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; would not make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we advise posters to avoid the practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can do is pointing the OP to the duplicate question, when a duplicate question exists; in the other cases, we can point to any related question. Apart that, I don't think we can say to the askers not to ask a question because is related to another question already asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T10:40:48.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3404" CreationDate="2012-12-12T11:09:47.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about punctuation have been asked on EL&amp;amp;U, and they are accepted. The fact a grammar book normally has a part about comma splices, and run-on sentences tells me the argument is not totally off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the question is asked to know which writing style to use, you could consider asking the questions on &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the punctuation used in English, it is rather probable the question has been already asked on EL&amp;amp;U. If you are going to ask a question about punctuation, make a search first, to be sure you are not asking a duplicate question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Bear in mind that the search could not find a question that is already asked because you are using stop words in your search. I would suggest searching between questions using specific tags, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quotations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quotations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-12-12T12:59:36.280" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T12:59:36.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3399" CreationDate="2012-12-12T16:58:34.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really see how any amount of editing can make it a &quot;good&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two different words (meaning &lt;em&gt;rest horizontally&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tell untruths&lt;/em&gt;) just happen to have both the same sound &lt;em&gt;and the same spelling&lt;/em&gt;. So what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone asked &lt;em&gt;&quot;How come &lt;strong&gt;to, too&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; all sound the same?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I doubt it would remain open on ELU for long. Those words only happen to have &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; spellings because of historical &quot;accidents&quot;, not because someone decided to make sure they could always be differentiated in a written context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is my &lt;em&gt;to/too/two&lt;/em&gt; version might survive on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;linguistics.se&lt;/a&gt;, because there is something inherently interesting about the fact that language (English, at least) is able to make use of ambiguous/overlapping symbols. But if that had already been asked and answered there, OP's &lt;em&gt;lie/lie&lt;/em&gt; question would probably be closed as a duplicate thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T16:58:34.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2012-12-12T23:31:04.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am strongly for IPA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, for example,&#xA; ˈʃedjuːl &#xA; ˈʃedʒuːl &#xA; ˈskedʒuːl&#xA; ˈskedjuːl &#xA; ˈʃedʒʌl &#xA; ˈskedʒʌl,&#xA;are not used for deciding, what prononciation of &quot;schedule&quot; is correct for BE. I haven't understood the result of the discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24035/the-british-pronunciation-of-the-word-schedule&quot;&gt;The British pronunciation of the word &amp;quot;schedule&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Because I need to set questions about what did the sides mean by their &quot;transcriptions&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using simply English letters for showing pronunciation is not understandable, because there is  no standard reading for them. So, the only sensible non-oxford transcription would look like: b as in &quot;bee&quot;, a as in &quot;ball&quot;, l as in &quot;letter&quot;. And this is terribly inconvenient. bɔːl is easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, that writing the correct transcription in the browser is not so easy, so, maybe, the site could propose some formatting technique for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16498" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T23:31:04.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2012-12-13T06:00:20.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's also the IPA interfaces at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/unicode/ipa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;http://westonruter.github.com/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;plus the rendition of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English Phonemic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a Mac, of course, the Special Characters chart (at the bottom of the &lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; menu) has everything one needs, provided one sets one's Text Encoding (bottom of the &lt;strong&gt;View&lt;/strong&gt; menu) to UTF-8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T06:00:20.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3427" CreationDate="2012-12-15T09:22:01.280" Score="21" ViewCount="1087" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent much of the past week involved in a rather extended discussion about closed questions. Near as I can tell, here is the logic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU has a lot of closed questions, at least compared to other StackExchange sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instead of closing questions, we ought to fix them and answer them. After all, doesn't this community exist to help people?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a question gets closed, no one else can provide an answer; therefore, closures are a bad thing. Also, closures might make newer users feel unwelcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since questions &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; getting closed instead of being left open, these closures indicate that ELU is a &lt;em&gt;down-arrow clicking clique&lt;/em&gt;, a bunch of &lt;em&gt;anal-retentive geeks who need to get a life&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;people who are busy protecting their own little fiefdom from alleged pollution&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;run like a monopolistic cartel by a bunch of pseudo-intellectual pretentious linguistic professor wannabees&lt;/em&gt;.  Moreover, ELU is, &lt;em&gt;without a doubt, too snobby, and the rudest community on StackExchange&lt;/em&gt;. (The text in italics is not mere colorful language of mine; these were taken as excerpts from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3384/waning-gap-of-acceptable-questions&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; – some of which were upvoted).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, I examined the last 20 closed questions on ELU.&lt;/strong&gt;  Here's what I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94384/why-an-is-used-in-december-1972-u-s-astronaut-eugene-cern-an-becomes-the-las&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;) Why “an” is used in “December 1972 U.S. astronaut Eugene CERN an becomes the last person to set foot on the moon”?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in two comments): because it's supposed to say &quot;Cernan&quot;, not &quot;CERN an&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94371/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-regex&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) What is the correct pronunciation of “Regex”?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in two answers and several comments): It's pronounced with a hard &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;. Moreover, a link was provided where this specific example was discussed in a more generic but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56164/pronunciation-of-letters-g-and-c-in-blend-words&quot;&gt;related&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94366/usage-differences-between-smile-vs-laugh-vs-sneer-vs-chuckle-vs-giggle-vs-titter&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;) Usage differences between Smile vs laugh vs Sneer vs chuckle vs giggle vs titter vs grin vs beam vs smirk vs simper vs snicker vs Singger?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in three comments): Some of these are ways to laugh, and some are ways to smile, but this question as a whole is probably asking too much as a single question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94356/why-do-you-write-receive-with-ei-but-retrieve-with-ie&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;) Why do you write “receive” with “ei” but “retrieve” with “ie”?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed as duplicate]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained at duplicate question): Basically, English vocabulary is a mix of mostly proto-Germanic and proto-French, the languages in use by the Saxons and Normans respectively during the Norman invasion and occupation of the British isles. (NOTE: there is much more to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34356/why-is-it-true-that-i-before-e-except-after-c&quot;&gt;very detailed answer&lt;/a&gt; than I have copied here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94354/does-doctor-means-phd-or-physician&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;) Does Doctor means PhD. or Physician?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in comments): The word can be used as a title in either case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94339/does-shakespeare-use-the-word-whence-incorrectly&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;) Do Shakespeare use the word “whence” incorrectly?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (given in one answer): It's a flexible word, and it's a bit harsh to suggest that Shakespeare has made a mistake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94323/a-girl-whom-i-have-a-crush-on&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;) A girl &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;) I have a crush on… (?)&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in two answers): &quot;whom&quot; is formally correct, although &quot;who&quot; is often used in conversational English; for more information, see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/whats-the-rule-for-using-who-or-whom&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94317/which-one-is-correct-non-or-non&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;) Which one is correct, &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;non-&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed as duplicate]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (not given at the question, but easily found at duplicate): There are three types of compound words in English: closed, hyphenated, and open. There are also four useful articles cited at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/889&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94316/subject-verb-and-object-agreement&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;) Which one is the correct form: “The only thing which doesn't work &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the engines,” or “The only thing which doesn't work &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the engines.”&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in several comments): The short answer is &quot;are&quot;; there are other considerations explained in the comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94307/verb-or-phrase-meaning-to-serve-as-evidence-of-ones-character&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;) what is the meaning of expressyou: Want to know whether it is &quot;Convey you&quot;. or is there any other word that can give the message reflect your character.&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt;: This question was not answered in its original form, but one user has tried to reword the question, and subsequently provided an answer to that interpretation. Since that time, it has received three reopen votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94304/should-punctuation-characters-have-a-preceding-space&quot;&gt;11&lt;/a&gt;) Should punctuation characters have a preceding space?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (provided in a comment): Short answer: no. Long answer: for more information, see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4645/is-it-ever-correct-to-have-a-space-before-a-question-or-exclamation-mark&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94303/spelling-or-grammar-error&quot;&gt;12&lt;/a&gt;) Would the wrong form of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;you're&lt;/em&gt; be considered a spelling or grammar error?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in an answer): That would depend on the intent of the writer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94297/meaning-of-the-word-nonlesson&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt;) What is the meaning of the word “nonlesson”&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in a comment): It's a simple negation. In the context of &quot;lessons learned&quot; it would mean either (1) a lesson that was not learned (i.e, a repeated mistake) or (2) something that was thought to be a lesson, but was not (i.e, an erroneous conclusion).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94283/i-got-it-covered-vs-ive-got-it-covered&quot;&gt;14&lt;/a&gt;) “I got it covered” vs “I've got it covered”: Which is correct and why?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in two answers): It can mean different things in different contexts; sometimes one is slang for the other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94278/what-did-in-this-sentences-refers-to&quot;&gt;15&lt;/a&gt;) What does the “did” in this sentences refers to?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in a comment): It refers to the word &lt;em&gt;differ&lt;/em&gt; in the previous sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94266/usage-difference-between-modest-vs-decent&quot;&gt;16&lt;/a&gt;) Usage difference between modest vs decent?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in one answer): Modest and decent have overlapping semantic ranges. They can mean the same thing, but do not always. (NOTE: The answer includes much more elaboration not provided here).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94255/the-plural-of-conch&quot;&gt;17&lt;/a&gt;) What is the plural of “conch”?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in three different answers): When &quot;conch&quot; is pronounced to rhyme with &quot;honk&quot;, the plural is &quot;conchs&quot;; when pronounced as a near-rhyme with &quot;launch&quot;, the plural is &quot;conches&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94251/hail-mary-glory-be-in-the-plural&quot;&gt;18&lt;/a&gt;) In the Catholic rosary, there is a short prayer called &quot;Glory Be.&quot; Would the plural be &lt;em&gt;Glory Bes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Glory Be's&lt;/em&gt;? Likewise, do you say &lt;em&gt;10 Hail Marys&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in an answer provided): Use an apostrophe. Moreover, more information is provided via a link to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25277/what-is-the-proper-way-to-write-the-plural-of-a-single-letter-another-apostrop&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94247/where-to-place-the-word-easily&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt;) Where to place the word “easily”? Is it: &lt;em&gt;Do you want to edit and share your bookmarks easily?&lt;/em&gt; Or: &lt;em&gt;Do you want to easily edit and share your bookmarks?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; (explained in two answers): Best to put it at the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94231&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt;) What is the question to be asked to get an answer &quot;The &lt;em&gt;44th&lt;/em&gt; president of United States of America is Barack Obama.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt;: Not provided, but the links to 17 duplicate questions &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to talk about quality as a whole, these questions don't strike me as particularly well-researched, or intriguing to a serious language enthusiast. They seem more basic than profound. (If that observation paints me as a snob, I apologize. I call 'em as I see 'em.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, if the issue is really about helping people, just about all 20 O.P.'s got an answer to their question, despite the fact that these questions may have been ultimately closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what is my question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To those who have been bemoaning the fact that a high closure rate allegedly portrays us an uncaring, insular community – and to those who see us openly characterized as &lt;em&gt;“geeks who need to get a life,”&lt;/em&gt; and respond with a hearty &lt;em&gt;“Hear, hear!”&lt;/em&gt; – I ask: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which of these questions should have remained open?  Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if a few of these questions should have remained open, do you really believe an overwhelming &lt;em&gt;majority&lt;/em&gt; of these questions should have remained open? In other words, do these closures really portray a reckless and egregious misuse of privilege by so-called power-users? Please explain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you find any difference between a community that closes questions while still providing answers (perhaps through links or comments), and a community that would close questions &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; providing answers?  In other words, does the closure itself outweigh any helpful information that was provided by members of the community? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because this week wasn't the first time I've seen this line of reasoning: &lt;em&gt;a lot of questions get closed, therefore you're all just a bunch of snobs&lt;/em&gt;. However, when I search for evidence of that snobbery, I keep finding a slew of rather mediocre questions – usually with helpful answers, by the way – rather than hard evidence of an unhelpful clique. But maybe I'm just missing something, in which case maybe you can help me out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T03:46:31.407" Title="Would someone please explain why these question closures are such a bad thing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="54" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2012-12-15T17:00:20.583" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ones that should have stayed open:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3): presumably there is a difference that could be uncovered with a little bit of research, and i would have liked to see what someone could find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6): again, this could have had some interesting well-researched answers. someone could show, for example, that compared to other contemporaneous writers, Shakespeare used the word in an apparently idiosyncratic way. (or show the opposite)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7): this is not necessary a duplicate since it asks specifically for usage in the case where the wh- word is serving as a relative pronoun. community members (hastily) assumed that all word-forms &lt;em&gt;who/whom&lt;/em&gt; should have identical distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;9): i would have liked to see the answers on this one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10): that's one I edited in response to a challenge from the OP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;12): a good answer could have discussed what it means for something to be a spelling vs. grammatical error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;13): the meanings of words are determined by usage (not formal logic), so a good answer could have examined actual usage of the word, and discussed whether it paralleled other similar-formed words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;14): a good answer would respond to the more general question on how &lt;em&gt;I got&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I've got&lt;/em&gt; differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;15): could lead to an informative answer on anaphora binding. the commenter misleadingly suggested that anaphoric use of &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; usually binds a verb. instead it is a verb phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16): this is a clearcut usage question which could be answered by examining usage data. another case where it was closed by those assuming it was a more trivial matter than it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;17): a good answer would discuss whether there are similar-spelled words with a consistent pluralization pattern, or if &lt;em&gt;conch&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;19): on variable placement of VP-modifying adverbs. i'd be surprised if a more general question has not been asked already, but it was not closed for reason of duplicate status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP asks &quot;Even if...do you really...&quot;, misleadingly suggesting that the only reasonable objection to question closures is that they are almost always in error. The real issue is that there is much less harm in leaving a poor question open than there is in closing a good question. Call the &lt;em&gt;error quotient&lt;/em&gt; the proportion of closed questions which are good. Call the &lt;em&gt;false closure rate&lt;/em&gt; the proportion of (in some objective sense) acceptable questions which are closed. Basically, the OP is claiming that we should only be concerned if the &lt;em&gt;error quotient&lt;/em&gt; is on the order of 90%. This is fallacious reasoning: even if 90% of closed questions were bad questions, we should still be concerned for the good ones that do get closed.&#xA;What I am claiming is that the &lt;em&gt;false closure rate&lt;/em&gt; is significantly above 0%, and that &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a reason for concern. Some error will invariably occur, but I think the community needs to have a discussion about what would be an acceptable &lt;em&gt;false closure rate&lt;/em&gt;, rather than bringing up the canard that there are many truly bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious difference is that closed questions become invisible to common users after some time, and people who took some care and effort in responding to questions which are ultimately closed see their work get (effectively) deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T17:00:20.583" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2012-12-16T00:28:34.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94307/verb-or-phrase-meaning-to-serve-as-evidence-of-ones-character&quot;&gt;Verb or phrase meaning “to serve as evidence of one's character”&lt;/a&gt;, either I actually closevoted those questions myself, or at least I don't particularly disagree with those who did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In total, I've &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; questions and answers ten times more often than I've &lt;em&gt;closevoted&lt;/em&gt;, and I almost never closevote questions (that admit of a meaningful answer at all) unless I can see that the OP's request has already been dealt with in an answer, a comment, or a link to a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly don't think ELU is &quot;snobby&quot;. It seems to me almost everyone who asks a meaningful question ends up getting a meaningful answer. But once that answer has been provided, there's often little else left to say - in which case I say it's better to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one question where I don't agree the closevote, there are already 3 votes to &lt;em&gt;reopen&lt;/em&gt;. It's worth pointing out it was closed as &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt; - and 24 hours after it was asked, the OP &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; hasn't responded to requests for more context. I think ELU is in fact &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; &quot;open-minded&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T00:28:34.883" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-16T05:23:48.997" Score="12" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;In recent discussions on this site about question closures, I took away a few values which would appear to motivate some of the pronouncements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The point of answering a question is to satisfy the OP's immediate&#xA;needs, and a question can be closed (and eventually become&#xA;inaccessible to non-superuser/moderators) once the OP has been given&#xA;reasonable time to read the response without any negative effects&#xA;for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question does not seem clear, the OP is the primary source of&#xA;    guidance in interpreting it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because closure votes are of the same kind as upvotes or answers, a user who upvotes and answers more than they downvote or vote to close cannot be fairly accused of any kind of rash behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site is harmed by a &quot;bad&quot; question remaining open. The site is also&#xA;harmed by a &quot;good&quot; question being closed. If&#xA;    avoiding the first evil means that the second evil frequently befalls us, so be it. (i.e., better an innocent man condemned than a guilty man acquitted)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast these with the following values:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions and their answers form durable content that is the&#xA;community's asset, and they should not be casually discarded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question can be given an interpretation which goes beyond its&#xA;original intent (much as certain court decisions concern more general&#xA;affairs than the specific plaintiffs and defendant which&#xA;aroused them), and the OP's immediate interests can be subverted to a general issue of broader interest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because closure votes should not be made lightly, a user's high number of upvotes or answers does not immunize them from criticism of rash behavior in close-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site is harmed by a &quot;bad&quot; question remaining open. The site is also&#xA;harmed by a &quot;good&quot; question being closed. If&#xA;    avoiding the second evil means that the first evil frequently befalls us, so be it. (i.e., better a guilty man be acquitted and an innocent man condemned)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which combination of value statements do you think should be driving the site's policy, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorDisplayName="user31341" LastEditDate="2012-12-16T17:21:26.420" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T17:21:26.420" Title="what values drive our policy towards question closure?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3425" CreationDate="2012-12-16T12:54:08.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am strongly in favour of the second set. These are the values we used to hold, two years ago. Then the community became more and more bureaucratic and less friendly to newcomers. This often happens on the Internet, alas. I say we return to the merry values of our early days. Already we are known as close-happy and aggressive. Perhaps the new proposal &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; will serve to guide the drowning away from the sharks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to a couple of uninteresting questions' &quot;harming&quot; the site, what proof do we have of that? None, I think. The site was thriving, two years ago. Besides, aren't most questions always uninteresting to most people? Only if the large majority of questions are of low quality do I think the site will be truly harmed. This is not an academic site, and it has never tried to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 2 is very important: we used to allow fairly basic questions and give them an elaborate answer that went far beyond answering the question in the narrow interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ethics should also weigh in: the feelings of so many newcomers are hurt because of policies that they were not aware of and that do not seem reasonable to them. Sometimes this is necessary, but we should be careful. You know how awful it feels when you go to a new website and the first thing you post is removed or commented on negatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course nobody reads FAQs: I dare say most of us never read FAQs on other sites either. I don't. That doesn't mean you can never hold newcomers to your rules, but it just isn't reasonable to treat them badly for not knowing the rules, unless those rules are common etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2012-12-16T13:10:16.650" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T13:10:16.650" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2012-12-16T17:26:19.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a high-rep user who votes to close a lot of questions, but not quite as many questions as some people, let me take a pass at the list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have left the following questions open:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6) Do Shakespeare use the word “whence” incorrectly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting question that covers a question of legitimate interest to students of contemporary and historical English. I just nominated it for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;16) Usage difference between modest vs decent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some real subtleties here which may not be apparent from a dictionary. The main weakness of this question is that the OP hasn't done sufficient research, but that could be fixed with an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much everything else is either duplicate or General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we have a problem? If there is a problem, it's the fact that it's easier to cast a close-vote than to edit a question, so marginal questions like the ones above get closed rather than edited. But the number of questions that fall between the gaps in this way is rather small, and doesn't account for the majority of close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that we close so many questions is because of the nature of our content. There are a lot of native English speakers, so we get a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bike-shed questions&lt;/a&gt;. And there are lots of English language learners, so we get a lot of questions which are too basic or demonstrate such a general misunderstanding of English that no real answer is possible. Neither of these things is the fault of the close-voters; they come with the territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T17:26:19.777" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-17T01:05:05.937" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94533/what-does-nothing-less-than-mean-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asked one hour ago was recently closed, and my answer to it was deleted. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the question was truly inferior as it was asked, and my answer was likewise inferior. Is it truly expedient to have such a fast turnover time? Typically, when I ask or answer a question on a SE site, I might still be thinking about the matter for some time after contributing, and the idea for an improvement only comes to me a few hours (or perhaps the next day) after my original contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a principled reason why community members should not have the luxury of reflecting on their contributions (or have only an exceedingly short time)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T14:17:48.317" Title="How long should a questionable question remain open?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|question-closure|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2012-12-17T02:08:01.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I truly do not understand why your answer was deleted. It was on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why the question was closed, there is a problem on this site. We used to encourage giving interesting answers to fairly simple questions, in the spirit of &quot;a question can become interesting by adding extra information and theory in your answers beyond what the OP was asking for&quot;. I strongly favour this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But things have changed, and now the majority seems to be against simple questions no matter what the answers they may receive. The closing reason &quot;General Reference&quot; was introduced about a year ago to weed out questions that could easily be answered by consulting a standard reference work, which mainly meant a dictionary. The target was questions like &quot;what does &lt;em&gt;at loggerheads&lt;/em&gt; mean?&quot;, because people were expected to look that up in a dictionary. The downside is of course that this approach precludes adding extra information about the word loggerheads; but then this genre of questions was found too boring by most people. I can understand that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently people are trying to widen the scope of &quot;General Reference&quot;, to include even etymological entries on Etymonline.com, and expressions. They feel that expressions like &quot;nothing less than&quot; can easily be looked up in a dictionary, although sites like Dictionary.com do not have it. The Free Dictionary does have it, however. I personally think many entries on Etymonline will be hard to completely understand for laymen; I don't know where the majority stands. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, these two categories, expressions and etymology, often lend themselves well to adding extra (interesting) information, as you were in the process of doing. But we are apparently the minority, so I think nothing can be done about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This still doesn't explain why an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to such a question was &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt;. I really don't understand it. I will probably get a load of flak for this, but there you have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T02:08:01.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2012-12-17T02:10:28.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only explain the physical mechanics.  I cannot explain why votes apart from my own were cast. In the case of my own vote, I voted to close as General Reference because I felt that asking what “nothing less than” meant really was too basic for the site, and should be readily explained in any standard reference work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, about the mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the normal course of events, questions remain open until and unless they accumulate 5 close votes, and both closed questions and negative answers remain around until they accumulate 3 delete votes. Positive answers are not normally deletable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10k users must wait two deliberative days to vote to delete a closed question, although 20k users and moderators do not. Deleting a closed  question also deletes all its answers, but it can take more than 3 delete votes to do so, if things have been upvoted sufficiently highly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two scenarios where this matter of this-or-that-many votes to either close or delete does not apply.  The one case is that a very limited set of old, closed question get deleted after either a month or a year, depending. The other way for these things to happen is when a moderator casts a decisive (aka binding) vote to close or delete.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what happened here, and in both cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a closed question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be reopened under the same rules (5 votes, or a moderator’s), although it usually takes some fairly solid reason for doing so.   And indeed, a delete post can even be undeleted under the same rules of 3 votes or a moderator’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-12-17T02:18:06.447" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T02:18:06.447" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-17T04:56:37.090" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;My basic question is closed. I wonder what kind of questions are considered non-basic. Then I browse the &quot;Questions&quot; and find most of the questions are about what kind of questions should be closed. My question is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How &quot;closed&quot; is related to English language &amp;amp; usage? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32351" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T12:40:37.433" Title="How &quot;closed&quot; is related to English language &amp; usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2012-12-17T09:12:31.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't mind if that was the goal: answer, then close as not likely to be useful in the future. But there was that meta, I can't locate it at the moment, that was practically a call to arms against this class of questions, with a strong demand to stop users from answering them. And it wasn't like anyone would seem to disagree with the notion - the idea being &quot;if we don't prevent answers it will encourage more of these questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means the current state is not a positive, target, desired state of things, but just a result of weakness of the moderation system unable to react fast enough to prevent users from answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T09:12:31.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2012-12-17T09:52:56.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases, you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; that luxury, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; make an edit whenever you need to. Only when an answer gets deleted can you not improve it; only when the question is closed can you not leave another answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; questions and answers should closed or deleted, there are several valid answers and opinions on that, but one of them is: they should be closed or deleted when a moderated deems they should be closed or deleted. Sometimes immediate action is necessary (such as when spam or porn is posted, or when an answer of exceptionally low quality needs to be dealt with). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh! Quality! I opened &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; can of worms again, didn't I?  Please, no more arguments about judgemental snobs, and let's not debate whether or not your answer was of &quot;low quality&quot; (however, I think it got three downvotes for a &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; – and no, I wasn't one of those downvoters). There are several checks and balances in place in the system. All it takes is five members with enough rep to reopen a closed question, and three members with enough rep to undelete an answer. If the moderators act too hastily, there are ways to overturn their decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I agree with every decision they make? Hell, no. But the moderators work hard here, fighting sock puppets, removing spam, reviewing flagged posts, dealing with over-the-line comments, and – gasp! – maintaining a level of quality. All of this &lt;strong&gt;takes time&lt;/strong&gt;, and they're not paid for their services. It's about time somebody recognized that, with the giant cry-fest we've had here in meta over the past week.  If you think every new user needs to be coddled with a welcome wagon, then step up to the plate and do that work. It's called a &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked, “Is it truly expedient to have such a fast turnover time?”  99% of the time, yes. Sure, maybe in this particular case, you can't fix your answer, because it's been deleted, and you can't post a revised one, because the question's been closed.  But I see no need to revamp the entire system to account for this one perfect storm of unfortunate events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T09:52:56.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2012-12-17T10:07:18.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to give the locals a bit of broader perspective on the issue of the closures, let me quote something found on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/112/can-you-ask-questions-even-if-the-answer-is-easily-found-elsewhere&quot;&gt;different SE site&lt;/a&gt; (it's currently closed beta so accessing the link may be impossible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can you ask questions even if the answer is easily found elsewhere?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Too Simple&amp;quot; is something which has been discussed on Stack Exchange before, and was implemented on other sites with a &lt;strong&gt;General Reference&lt;/strong&gt; close reason. It was considered a failure though, since all it results in is users drawing arbitrary lines in the sand for when a question is &amp;quot;too simple&amp;quot;, and what sites are considered general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, a tool already exists for questions which are too simple, it's called a &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful (click again to undo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the case of a question which is too simple is covered by &lt;code&gt;does not show any research effort&lt;/code&gt;. With this in mind, there's really no reason to close these questions as well, because down votes are already a sufficient way of dealing with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't know where it has been discussed, who came to conclusion it's a failure and whether ELU falls within the area of blame. Just quoting something I've noticed elsewhere to provide food for thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T10:07:18.293" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3410" CreationDate="2012-12-17T10:33:19.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for me, this question sounds perfectly fit for this site. It boils down to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have observed the following language phenomenon occurring in a few languages/dialects as in attached examples. Does this phenomenon exist in American English too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, it does not, but we have something else to fulfill its role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason this question or this answer would be wrong - does answer &quot;no&quot; to a &quot;yes-or-no&quot; question make the question invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T10:33:19.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3432" CreationDate="2012-12-17T12:40:37.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As J.R. said, you may have wandered into Meta English Language and Usage instead of the main site. At &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/a&gt;, we discuss the English language. At Meta, we discuss the EL&amp;amp;U site. Yes, it's confusing. You probably want to go &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T12:40:37.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2012-12-17T17:30:51.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a first-look minimum, I see merit in 3, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, and 16. As a practical matter, I don't see a compelling reason to delete any but the obvious duplicates. It's not like we get charged by the byte for open questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;imagine&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; a legitimate reason to close 16 on a forum that purports to be about English usage. The difference between the relevant definitions of &quot;modest&quot; and &quot;decent&quot; in a dictionary will not enlighten someone who doesn't already know about the subtle differences between them. (The answer given before closure is, by the way, excellent in this regard.) As I alleged before, the size of the space between &quot;General Reference&quot; and &quot;Too Localised&quot; depends wholly on how the egos of the Guardians are feeling that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I don't think the replies to 5 and 13 are even that good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 5, Use of &quot;Doctor&quot; for &quot;Ph.D.&quot; has a number of implications and subtleties. Many medical doctors do not like it and it would be wise to use &quot;Professor&quot; (if true) or &quot;Ph.D.&quot; instead in a social situation where an M.D. might be offended. On the other hand, there are institutions where the use of &quot;Dr. X&quot; instead of &quot;Professor X&quot; is customary. The comment about surgeons being called &quot;Mister&quot; is British usage only without being so labeled (there is at least one murder mystery that hinges on this); in the USA they are always &quot;Doctor&quot;. At the least, it would have been useful to solicit from the OP some idea of the context in which he needed to know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 13, the answers aren't blunt enough about mentioning that nonX, when an infrequent construction like nonlesson, carries a significant snark payload. The question is a good one and the downvotes are nonhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31085" LastEditorUserId="31085" LastEditDate="2012-12-17T17:38:37.657" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T17:38:37.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3440" CreationDate="2012-12-17T17:40:46.590" Score="14" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94592/is-corrosion-an-onomatopoeia&quot;&gt;Is corrosion an onomatopoeia?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as &quot;Not a real question&quot;. I'm just flabbergasted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet Mark Beadles has posted a very nice response that exactly answers all parts of the question, and teaches the internet about a linguistic phenomenon to boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the question could've been phrased slightly better, but since when does that warrant closing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T22:28:28.500" Title="Not a real question? Really?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3439" CreationDate="2012-12-17T18:01:25.960" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. Voted to reopen. We only need three more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T18:01:25.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3439" CreationDate="2012-12-17T18:20:13.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree. &lt;em&gt;Onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt; refers to words made to imitate sounds associated with objects or actions (one might argue that one can't have sound without action, and I would be inclined to agree with that). &lt;em&gt;Corrosion&lt;/em&gt; refers to a chemical change, such as the oxidation of iron or steel, that takes place slowly. As I mentioned in a comment to the question, has anyone ever heard a car rusting? Corrosion could take place more quickly, of course, perhaps even violently; and if that happened it might make a sound, but who could agree on what that sound would be? Would anyone seriously suggest that a hissing or fizzing sound could be described by the phonemic sequence offered by &lt;em&gt;corrode&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question as it stands is vague, hard to fathom, assumes facts not in evidence, and should remain closed until the OP, or one of you who desires to see it reopened, goes in and edits it into a real question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Martha: If you see the real question there that is so nicely answered, why don't you do the editing to remove the misleading parts so that the beauty may shine forth for all of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2012-12-17T18:29:11.923" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T18:29:11.923" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3467" CreationDate="2012-12-17T20:10:00.553" Score="11" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martha's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3439/not-a-real-question-really&quot;&gt;flabbergastery&lt;/a&gt; over the onomatopoeia question's closure raises a question in my own mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the review queue actually for, anyway? The only reason I voted to close that question was that it appeared in the review queue, it looked poorly formed and, based on my impression at the time, I felt it was misleading and not worth the trouble. Obviously people felt different about that, and good for them. The question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But seriously, why have these review queues at all if all they do is set us up to review questions on an assembly-line basis, with all that that entails?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T23:04:43.573" Title="Is &quot;review queue&quot; onomatopoeic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2012-12-17T22:24:15.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted this question because I think it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; worth asking what purpose the review queue serves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this answer because I don't actually endorse Robusto's implied position (i.e. - the review queue is at best pointless, and at worst it encourages hasty and ill-considered closevotes). But it's not necessarily obvious what my question upvote means, and others may face the same problem, so &lt;em&gt;If you approve of the review queue, upvote this answer to indicate that approval.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could give reasons &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I like the review queue - but since any or all of them could become the target(s) of up/downvotes on this answer, I think I'll just expand in comments later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T22:24:15.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3439" CreationDate="2012-12-17T22:28:28.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re: Mark Beadles answer: No it does not 'exactly answer all parts of the question'. He didn't answer &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He didn't say anything about 'corrosion'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, onomatopoeia is not sound symbolism. If that is not the case then sound symbolism is &lt;em&gt;all that language is&lt;/em&gt;. That is, a word and anything that sounds similar gives that same meaning, which is what all words are. 'Horse' and things that sound like that evokes horse-like things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all eggcorns and folk etymology. Human language is almost &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; arbitrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that is not is onomatopoeia, the &lt;em&gt;very rare&lt;/em&gt; interjections and words that sound like the sound they stand for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, maybe Mark did answer to what the OP was looking for. So all I'm left with after this rant is that he still didn't answer -everything- namely about corrosive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the question is mildly interesting and shows intelligence (not knowledge of basic English though; how could 'corrosion' be at all onomatopoeic?). So I neither down-voted nor close-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with many questions, they are easy to want to close, not for the full content but really for some ill-fated small detail like bad spelling or making a statement that is blatantly false to a native speaker like 'corrosive sounds like its meaning'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T22:28:28.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2012-12-18T01:09:11.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is another perspective on your question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/9505/sf&quot;&gt;@SF.&lt;/a&gt;: What shape do the owners of StackExchange wish this site to take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE “&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt;” page states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a growing network of individual communities, each dedicated to serving experts in a specific field. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… and the English.SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These and other statements made by SE management¹ to clarify the English.SE charter are clear and consistent. They boil down to this. English.SE exists to serve English experts – professionals and serious amateurs. Questions and answers should be held to academic standards and be well thought out, well researched, comprehensive, and clear. Contributions from enthusiastic learners are welcomed, and should be held to the same high standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this perspective, the site is serving its purpose to the extent to which English experts regard it as a resource and contribute to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the touchstone that I return to when I make editorial choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One such statement went so far as to describe English.SE as a failed site, explaining that it is so cluttered with poor Q&amp;amp;A that it cannot effectively serve the experts it was created to serve and is actually driving away its intended audience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T01:09:11.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3462" CreationDate="2012-12-18T03:46:25.080" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1615/show-native-language-with-the-answer&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; proposes appending native language information to a user's profile. This information is probably not necessary for most users, but there are occasions where a question seems so bizarre, but that it might not be so bizarre if one knew the language background of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94646/how-to-identify-licit-sequences-of-doubled-prepositions&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt;, for example, asks about a seemingly ridiculous sentence &quot;go out in the kitchen&quot;, which the OP thinks means &quot;go out from here and into the kitchen.&quot; I wondered whether the OP's native language was one where there is not much distinction between prepositions and verbs, and whether the language allows multiple finite verbs. There are quite a few languages which have well-formed sentences that could be literally translated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Move exit enter!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning &quot;go out [from here] into [there].&quot; Maybe, instead of appending language info to someone's badge, we could make a boilerplate suggestion for English beginners who post bad/bizarre questions to indicate their native language and perhaps even to indicate any sentence in their native language that they might be trying to translate from. If there are any users who are familiar with the language, it could make the question answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T22:04:00.467" Title="How to deal with non-native speakers asking bad questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2012-12-18T14:17:48.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of today, the question shows no evidence of research effort. Askers should put substantial effort and research into questions, and questions (even simple ones) should reflect that effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a courtesy to people who write answers. Without results of research, they are likely to waste time doing research the asker has done (or should have done). Answers to such questions often get responses from the asker such as “I thought of or looked that up already” and “but that isn’t what confuses me”, which are frustrating to the person who took the time to try to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question lacking research should be closed until the research work is done, then reopened. Closing a question is not a death sentence. The asker gets as much time to reflect and revise as they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I vote to close such questions, I use a close reason of “not a real question” because that close reason applies to questions which are incomplete. (See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T14:17:48.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-18T18:06:16.520" Score="14" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to propose an experiment, kinda like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/07/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/&quot;&gt;Summer of Love&lt;/a&gt;, but in the winter. Call it my Christmas Contrivance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one week (or one day, or the 12 Days of Christmas, or whatever period you like), pretend that you can't vote to close questions — you don't have the reputation required, there's no such mechanism on the site, whatever. Also, pretend that while you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; downvote questions, the penalty is so steep that you'd only do it as a last resort — say, a 50- or 100-point deduction from your own reputation. All other parts of the site work as they actually do: you can edit, comment, upvote, downvote answers, and flag same as you can in reality. (Oh, and I should add: deleting is available for spam, but is otherwise off the table same as closing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, go forth and improve the site. Work your way through the review queues, or just randomly swoop down on questions and improve away, but no closing, and only very rare downvoting of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think it'll work? More to the point, think you can do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T13:54:39.963" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T13:54:39.963" Title="Winter of our discontent[ahem, sorry] of Love" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3449" CreationDate="2012-12-18T18:40:00.427" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of your Christmas Truce: but who is going to persuade the other side, namely the newcomers who don't read the faq and certainly not meta, but think this would be a great place to ask their English homework questions and vent their prejudices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T18:40:00.427" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-18T22:44:34.360" Score="-3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realise there's a lot of this lately, and I'm about to add to it, but here goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94674/difference-between-i-am-doing-lunch-and-i-am-having-lunch&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;I am doing lunch&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I am having lunch&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A perfectly valid question. The single answer given is a start, as is my comment, but put together they are still insufficient and unreferenced. (The poster admits this: &quot;I've answered below with the only meaningful distinction I can think of.&quot;) Question closed, as exact duplicate. The &quot;exact duplicate&quot; thread has no mention of lunch in the question, but it's sort of about food-type things. Fine. There is one single answer: it is, equally, a start, but insufficient to entirely answer the question at hand; and it does indeed mention lunch, but only to state that &quot;do lunch&quot;, &quot;have lunch&quot; and &quot;eat lunch&quot; are all English phrases. The best advice given is &quot;just learn them one by one&quot; - but nothing is said about their differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most frustrating thing about this is not that none of the five closevoters spent the 10 seconds necessary to realise that the threads were not duplicates and their single answers were insufficient for either question, but that one of those closevoters was also the author of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; of these answers. Words fail me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please reopen this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25905" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T17:46:53.647" Title="&quot;Do lunch&quot; vs. &quot;have lunch&quot;: question closure" Tags="|support|status-completed|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-19T03:57:16.340" Score="-8" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94720/vulgar-way-of-saying-he-killed-himself&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, this is descending into madness. ELU has 10, 50, perhaps 100 times the question closure rate of other SEs. You can tell this isn't because of unusually bad questions, because with the exception of some exact duplicates, the closure votes are drawn from at most ten high-rep members. If the questions were truly awful, everyone with sufficient reputation would be closing&amp;mdash;or at least downvoting&amp;mdash;them, and here we have a case where the majority appeared not only neutral to the question, but positively interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these members' remarks it seems they have somehow slipped primarily from enjoying answering questions, to primarily enjoying their self-appointed patrol duty. You know, this is a remarkably &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt;-traffic SE given that a few billion people speak or at least use English, about the same number of questions as the SE devoted to Structured Query Language (databases), which, incidentally has zero closed questions of the most recent 50. ELU has 11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T14:53:28.527" Title="Closed question that had 7 upvotes" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3454" CreationDate="2012-12-19T05:06:03.777" Score="9" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/94680/1420&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; at the same time as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/94679/1420&quot;&gt;asking&lt;/a&gt;, by clicking the &quot;Answer your own question&quot; checkbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user said in response&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's not the way one asks a question, with its detail and background&#xA;  in a self-answer. The question needs to stand on its own -- and the OP&#xA;  should wait for people to see and try to answer the question before&#xA;  posting a self-answer, though the OP is always welcome to post his own&#xA;  answer per se -- it doesn't work that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ought to wait for others to answer before doing so yourself, why is there an &quot;Answer your own question&quot; checkbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was fairly short, and was more a question an English learner would ask rather than an expert English speaker, but I assume that doesn't mean you can't self-answer, so long as you aren't habitually gaming the system (I wasn't - IIRC this was the first time I've done this on ELU)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to self-answer at the same time as asking on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Answering at the same time as asking ok?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2012-12-19T05:08:24.603" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;Absolutely and completely fine.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you have a question that you already know the answer to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you’d like to document it in public so others (including yourself) can find it later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is OK to ask, and answer, your own question on a relevant Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be crystal clear, &lt;strong&gt;it is not merely OK to ask and answer your own question, it is &lt;em&gt;explicitly encouraged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's part of why that checkbox is there—it's to allow you to provide an answer right away (in fact, it's a good thing because if you already have a good answer, then you won't waste other users' time in typing up their own answer only to find that the asker already had it ready).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17845/etiquette-for-answering-your-own-question&quot;&gt;a very comprehensive MSO post.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T05:08:24.603" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3452" CreationDate="2012-12-19T11:34:52.023" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why on earth should closure have anything at all to do with the number of votes?  &quot;This question shows research effort: it is useful and clear&quot; is entirely orthogonal to &quot;This question does not belong on this site, as defined in the faq&quot; or &quot;This is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A format&quot;, let alone &quot;This is an exact duplicate&quot; or &quot;This is too localised&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T11:34:52.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3452" CreationDate="2012-12-19T12:32:10.570" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have compiled the stats for the 45 most recently closed questions (because that's how far back the &quot;Recently Closed&quot; queue in the 10k tools goes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, that's questions with the following IDs (ordered by timestamp of closure, from most recent to two days ago): 94472, 94491, 91950, 94486, 94517, 94514, 94519, 94523, 90877, 94507, 94494, 94529, 94533, 68520, 94525, 94566, 94598, 94552, 94615, 94615, 94593, 94542, 94619, 94577, 94655, 94675, 92704, 50917, 94699, 94720, 94668, 94698, 94568, 94660, 94739, 94719, 94710, 94742, 94729, 94676, 94677, 94750, 94754, 94662, 94790.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These 45 questions were closed for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;11 dupe (incl. 1 merged)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 NARQ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 off-topic (incl. 1 migrated)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 gen-ref&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 not constructive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 too localized&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 10 questions closed as NARQ include questions from a banned user, who only posts them to mess with us, usually several a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note the top close reason. &quot;Exact duplicate&quot;. That's not a fluke. It's perfectly in line with the long-term figures from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/76946/distribution-of-close-reasons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Exact duplicate   1575&#xA;General reference  967&#xA;Off-topic          519&#xA;NARQ               483&#xA;Not constructive   371&#xA;Too localized      331&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That bears repeating. 37% of our closed questions are closed &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; because they do not belong. They are closed because they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; belong and as a matter of fact &lt;em&gt;have been answered&lt;/em&gt; already. Four questions out of ten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy to hear SQL.SE does not get duplicate questions. Of course I could follow your example and reword that as &quot;SQL.SE sucks balls when it comes to hunting down dupes. What an inefficient clique, obsessed with getting more and more reps from answering the same questions over and over again! WTF! Wake up sheeple!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not do that, though. I also won't go over to SQL.SE and register two sock-puppet accounts a day,&#xA;to post inane questions, day after day, week after week, month after month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; do instead is go back to looking at actual stats to address the rest of your question, starting with this bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the closure votes are drawn from at most ten high-rep members&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A grave allegation to be taken very seriously. So let's have a look at who closed the 45 questions mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 11 dupes were closed by: Andrew Leach (2), Cameron, Carlo_R., Cerberus, FumbleFingers (6), &#xA;Jim, KitFox, Mahnax, Marthaª, MετάEd (3), &#xA;Mitch (2), Mr. Shiny and New 安宇, RegDwighт (4), StoneyB (2), tchrist (5), waiwai933.&#xA;1 question was merged by RegDwighт; unclear (and irrelevant) who the closers were.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 10 NARQs were closed by: Andrew Leach (2), Armen Ծիրունյան, Carlo_R., František Stanko (2), &#xA;FumbleFingers (2), Hellion, Jasper Loy, J.R., John Lawler, jwpat7 (2), Kris (2), Mahnax,&#xA;Marthaª, Matt Эллен (2), MετάEd (4), Mitch (3), RegDwighт (2), Robusto (5), tchrist (6), &#xA;TimLymington, waiwai933.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 off-topic: Andrew Leach (3), Barrie England, František Stanko, FumbleFingers (7), Hellion (4), &#xA;Jasper Loy, Mahnax (3), Marthaª (2), MετάEd (5), Mitch (3), Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 (2), Robusto (3), &#xA;simchona, tchrist (6), waiwai933.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 gen-ref: Andrew Leach (2), František Stanko, FumbleFingers (3), Hellion (2), Jasper Loy, Jim, John Lawler, &#xA;jwpat7, Kris, Mark Beadles, Marthaª, Matt Эллен, MετάEd, Mitch (3), RegDwighт (2), Rory Alsop, tchrist (6), &#xA;TimLymington.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 not constructive: coleopterist, Hellion, Henry, Kris, Lynn, Mark Beadles (2), MετάEd (3), &#xA;Mitch (3), Robusto, Rory Alsop, tchrist (3), waiwai933 (2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 too localized: Kris, MετάEd, Mitch, RegDwighт, Robusto, tchrist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grand total:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Andrew Leach (9)               Armen Ծիրունյան  &#xA;Barrie England                 Cameron  &#xA;Carlo_R. (2)                   Cerberus  &#xA;coleopterist                   František Stanko (4)  &#xA;FumbleFingers (18)             Hellion (8)  &#xA;Henry                          Jasper Loy (3)  &#xA;Jim (2)                        J.R.  &#xA;John Lawler (2)                jwpat7 (3)  &#xA;KitFox                         Kris (5)  &#xA;Lynn                           Mahnax (5)  &#xA;Mark Beadles (3)               Marthaª (5)  &#xA;Matt Эллен (3)                 MετάEd (17)  &#xA;Mitch (15)                     Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 (3)  &#xA;RegDwighт (9)                  Robusto (10)  &#xA;Rory Alsop (2)                 simchona &#xA;StoneyB (2)                    tchrist (27)  &#xA;TimLymington (2)               waiwai933 (5)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's &lt;em&gt;34&lt;/em&gt; people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say that &quot;the closure votes are drawn from at most ten high-rep members&quot;, you draw a line between Mahnax and František Stanko. Between helping close 5 vs. 4 questions out of 45 (11% vs. 9%). That strikes me as completely arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And who are those people, anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of them are complete laymen; others have published books; others still have a degree in linguistics. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are native speakers; others are not; for others still, English is not even the third language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some hang out in chat for most of the day; others only visit the site every once in a while and never drop by in chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are still in college; others have grandchildren.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are from the US; some from the UK; some from Slovakia, Canada, France, Russia, Germany, Italy...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing these people have in common is that each of them has 3000+ reputation on this site. Which they got by actively contributing to it: posting good questions, providing helpful answers, making useful edits. That reputation level enables them to vote to close (and reopen). That is not a &quot;self-appointed patrol duty&quot;, as you call it. That is a duty appointed &lt;em&gt;by the system&lt;/em&gt;, fully &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt;, to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; who &lt;em&gt;earns&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to think that &quot;closed&quot; somehow means &quot;go away with your stupid question&quot;. &#xA;You are wrong. &quot;Closed&quot; means, &quot;there's a problem with this question, please fix it then it &#xA;can be reopened&quot;. In fact &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the closed questions I checked have comments saying what made &#xA;people vote to close, and/or how they can be improved. More to the point, six questions &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;get reopened, in the same time span we are talking about. Nine more have reopen votes. &#xA;The &quot;fucked up&quot; question actually has &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; reopen votes right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss why it got closed in the first place, I suggest you start from scratch &#xA;and post another meta question&amp;nbsp;— using a calmer wording, sticking to the facts, and not &#xA;calling people names. I will be happy to answer it, too. There is &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of backstory to be told about &#xA;questions dealing with fucking, poo, bitches, and niggers. We get a lot of pressure from above to close &#xA;them, and a lot of pressure from below to leave them up. We always had a fine line to walk there. There's&#xA;also something to be said about it being a translation question, and a lot to be said about it having hit&#xA;the MultiCollider. But this answer here is already way too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-12-19T14:53:28.527" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T14:53:28.527" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3449" CreationDate="2012-12-19T17:37:45.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In light of the &quot;hat race&quot; going on now, I think this proposal is turning out to be stillborn. People seem to be making extra volunteer efforts so they can earn hats. This includes running the closevote queues, etc. Maybe try again after Christmas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T17:37:45.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3451" CreationDate="2012-12-19T17:46:53.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question as it stands has multiple issues. It should be closed until it is edited to show the OP's efforts at research, and until the text in question is expanded to show enough context. Until then, the question is both incomplete and nonconstructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for it being a duplicate, the main objection I've seen is that the existing answers over at the other question are inadequate. That never means we should have duplicate open questions. That means we need a better answer over at the other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T17:46:53.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3446" CreationDate="2012-12-19T19:17:11.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that there is any need to single out non-native speakers of English when looking at how to improve a problematic question. Native speakers can ask just as seemingly bizarre questions, and we should hold them to the same standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question seems bizarre, then the OP must provide more context. In the example you mention, perhaps it would be relevant context to indicate that the OP has little experience with these types of constructions. And possibly it could be explained that it is because those types of constructions don't exist in the OP's native tongue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is also possible to have native speakers who have little experience with constructions that are common in other dialects. &quot;Needs washed&quot; and &quot;today morning&quot; come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, non-native speakers don't get special treatment. If their background is relevant to the question being asked, the OP should include it. Otherwise, it's superfluous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T19:17:11.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-19T19:25:45.027" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it true that some sites have site-specific hats? If so, I believe these may all be secret ones.  For example, there is a  rumor of &lt;strong&gt;tinfoil hats&lt;/strong&gt; available over at Area 51, but this is not confirmed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few secret hats (circled) that turned up at MSO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YqpKa.png&quot; alt=&quot;hat pic&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have no idea of the circled ones are general or site-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have any secret hats of our own at ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Are there any ELU-specific hats?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3460" CreationDate="2012-12-19T19:30:49.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, it looks like there may not be per-site hats after all.  From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/159325/153355&quot;&gt;this MSO post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we were going to do custom hats for each site, we talked about tinfoil hats for MSO and Skeptics (as a joke!) but then realized: there just wasn't time. We'll consider them for next year, as hopefully we'll have time for per-site hats in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might even be true. Time will tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T19:30:49.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3446" CreationDate="2012-12-19T22:04:00.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, I completely agree with every word of KitFox's answer, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's not always obvious to the OP whether his location and/or fluency in English is relevant. So I'd like our FAQ to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; that people consider including such information alongside their questions - or even better, create an account and &lt;em&gt;put it on their User Page&lt;/em&gt; (as, sadly, not all do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early days of Internet chat, one of the first things people always typed was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ASL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (asking for Age/Sex/Location). Okay, we could probably ignore &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;S&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  (we're not a dating site!) - but more than most SO sites, ELU needs &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt; to perform well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I'd rather have potentially superfluous information I can ignore if it doesn't seem relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T22:04:00.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3510" CreationDate="2012-12-20T00:04:47.747" Score="-2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quite admired the very data-oriented &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3452/closed-question-that-had-7-upvotes&quot;&gt;answer to a recent meta question&lt;/a&gt; in the ongoing closure war, and now I feel encouraged to ask a data-directed meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the probability of a question receiving a closure vote independent of the number of closure votes it has? The question could be answered in an objective way if we had data on the numbers of closure votes each question (removed/closed or not) in the system has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the question clear, suppose that each question is associated with some intrinsic probability &lt;em&gt;p(1)&lt;/em&gt; of receiving a first closure vote. If the probability of the question receiving a second, third, and fourth closure vote, is the same, then &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;p(1) = p(2) = p(3) = p(4)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there is no increasing or decreasing trend with the number of closure votes already made. This is what would be expected if closure vote probability was independent of the number of closure votes already made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not the probabilities are independent, the overall probability of closure would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P = p(1) x p(2) x p(3) x p(4)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; is a function of &lt;em&gt;p(1)&lt;/em&gt;, so a question's overall probability of getting closed is clearly dependent on its probability of receiving the first closure vote. This is not what I am asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the context of the question (what am I getting at?), if it could be shown that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;p(1) &amp;lt; p(2) &amp;lt; p(3) &amp;lt; p(4)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then this would mean that it would be misleading to say that a question gets closed with four closure votes, &lt;em&gt;tout court&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T15:36:38.783" Title="Data-driven approach to closure policy" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-20T05:53:56.230" Score="-1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just entered English.SE (some 5 days ago). On the first day, I answered a question regarding the word &quot;fantabulous&quot;. Now when I look into my profile, it indicates that I haven't posted anything yet and my rep. at &lt;strong&gt;101&lt;/strong&gt;..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Is that post completely deleted now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32329" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T05:57:29.700" Title="How was my answer deleted recently?" Tags="|support|answers|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3464" CreationDate="2012-12-20T05:57:29.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94507/is-fantabulous-an-english-word/&quot;&gt;The question itself&lt;/a&gt; was deleted by the community, and thus your answer was removed, as it makes little sense to have answers without the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original text of your post, in case you want it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;fantabulous&lt;/em&gt; exist. But, it is not indicated in many dictionaries (even my auto-spell check doesn't show such a word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordweb.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word Web&lt;/a&gt; - a pocket dictionary. It says - an &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;informal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; : 'very good; of the highest quality'. After skimming through several sources, it seems that the word was originally blended from &lt;em&gt;fantastic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fabulous&lt;/em&gt; in the 1950s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My other references which include American Oxford Dictionary and Chambers dictionary provide the same synonym - &amp;quot;Superb, Excellent, Marvelous, Wonderful&amp;quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T05:57:29.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3469" CreationDate="2012-12-20T12:24:23.623" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/31341/jlovegren&quot;&gt;low-rep user&lt;/a&gt; decided to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/94886/2303&quot;&gt;one of my answers&lt;/a&gt; last night, changing one word and thereby making the first sentence mean &lt;em&gt;exactly the opposite&lt;/em&gt; of what I intended — turning the post into nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The low-rep user couldn't do this by himself. He had to have the help of high-rep users. @Martha and @cornbreadninja both approved the atrocity. Only @coleopterist recognized that this was an invalid edit and rejected it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overnight the post, which had nothing wrong with it otherwise, and from which @Fumblefingers cribbed ideas, got downvoted — maybe not because it had been edited into stupidity, but we'll never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this a hunt for hats in the review queue? Was it something else? In the future, please keep your hands off my prose if you don't understand it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T20:05:41.473" Title="The Review Queue II: This Time It's Personal" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2012-12-20T15:56:58.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the question's tagged 'discussion', here's my two pennyworth. As usual, anyone who disagrees is invited to downvote and/or post a competing answer, rather than comment that they disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The review queue was brought in because, across the SE network, not enough people were reviewing (in the opinion of TPTB).  It is certainly true that this site is more liable than most to posters thinking 'I've studied English for a month now, I'm sure I can answer that/I can post a question here rather than ask my teacher.' Encouraging high-rep users to take control of the basic site management looks like a classic 'nudge' strategem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not, however, obvious that the cure is better than the disease. Almost any post is the better for being reviewed &lt;em&gt;by somebody interested and expert in the area&lt;/em&gt;; but (as I've said elsewhere), nobody is expert in all areas, so a review from somebody who knows nothing about, for example, American English, but has gained rep in other areas, may merely exasperate the OP who does know something about that area (which is why he thought of the question).  And why the blazes should the fact that one person has voted to close a question you didn't think worth looking at mean you should suddenly have an opinion on it?  But if you do vote (either to close or not), you get a step towards another badge. Looks to me like this encourages precisely the wrong behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I don't think the reviewing here is worse than other sites; considering the volume of poor material and the inevitable subjectivity, it's better if anything.  But there's no denying that it is &lt;em&gt;perceived&lt;/em&gt; as arbitrary and oligarchical, and that the queue system worsens that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So might we suggest to SE that the review queue could do with a new review? Recognize that 'Skip' is a helpful response (whether that means deciding not to review counts towards a badge, or removing the reward for changing something just for the hell of it); put in your review queue only questions where you have a badge for the relevant tag (obviously you could still choose to look at others); whatever you yourself think would be an improvement. Rather than 'upvote or downvote' the review queue, I'd like to suggest some edits, and the more we can agree on the likelier we are to be listened to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2012-12-24T23:04:43.573" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T23:04:43.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2012-12-20T16:14:01.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is allowed to write an answer for the question you asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is valid for other questions is still valid for self-answered questions, though. Self-answered questions are not exempt from being closed, and this means (for example) that &quot;What is the antonym of &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; would still be closed as general reference, even if you would provide a detailed answer, and report the full spectrum of words between &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ugly&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-answered questions are also expected to have a very good answer. If the answer is on the line of &quot;It doesn't exist such a word.&quot; given together the question, it is probable the question would get many down-votes, and possibly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, it is also preferable to give other users the time to read the question, and provide an answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The main reason is giving the time to the users to decide if the question is worth to be kept open, suggest any changes to the question, or ask any information necessary to answer the question. IMO, writing a detailed answer for a question that would be closed as general reference sounds like forcing the hand of who would close the question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The other reason is that it sounds unfair. Suppose that a friend of mine asks me about a problem he has with his Drupal site, and I tell him I will give an answer in 5 days, without suggesting him to ask on &lt;em&gt;Drupal Answers&lt;/em&gt;. After 5 days, in which I had the time to verify the answer I was going to give, prepare my answer with any documentation reference, or references to code used by other module maintainers (including Drupal's maintainers), I write the question, and my answer. I am the first one to write the answer, and I had all the time to prepare it; for sure there isn't nobody who can write a better answer. Even if somebody could write a better answer, I still have 5 days the other users didn't have to look for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;It's OK to Ask and Answer Your Own Questions&lt;/a&gt; doesn't say that you need to immediately answer your own question, nor that basic self-answered questions are fine, nor that a self-answered question is immune from closing votes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It simply says that if somebody asked a question for which s/he has found the answer, s/he can answer her/his own answer. That is surely better than deleting the question; at least, the question, and its answer could be useful to future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-12-22T04:39:43.093" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T04:39:43.093" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3466" CreationDate="2012-12-20T17:31:53.920" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm very, very sorry. It was late, and apparently I wasn't thinking straight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I mentioned I'm sorry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T17:31:53.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3466" CreationDate="2012-12-20T18:58:59.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only just seen this meta post, but I must say it's a bit ott to say I &quot;cribbed ideas&quot; from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I pointed out in chat earlier, I certainly didn't consciously swipe the word &lt;em&gt;inversion&lt;/em&gt; from your text. I'd already said in my very first sentence that the reference to Shakespeare wasn't actually necessary to analyse the construction, and the word &lt;em&gt;inversion&lt;/em&gt; probably only came to mind because in my later edit I wanted to quote a different &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;version&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of Tolkien's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;various&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; earlier &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;variants&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (See? - yet again I'm getting tied up in knots trying to avoid repetition when expressing that concept! :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm not getting uptight, and I mean nothing personal by this (you are after all deservedly our highest-rated user), but I'm downvoting this meta question because I think you could have just remonstrated in chat (as I did, when KitFox erroneously changed my &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;glisters&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;glitters&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2012-12-20T20:05:41.473" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T20:05:41.473" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3466" CreationDate="2012-12-20T19:40:43.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On behalf of my erstwhile colleagues in the LitCrit biz, and my wife, who is about to join their ranks, I should like to thank you all for  the opportunities for professional and financial advancement you are creating for future generations of textual scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="24489" LastEditDate="2012-12-20T20:02:31.807" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T20:02:31.807" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-20T20:24:34.953" Score="6" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several of the discussions about closed questions, and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/12/you-could-look-it-up/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in the blog&lt;/a&gt;, there's claims that questions can get re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It certainly doesn’t mean “You are an illiterate cretin. Go away” —&#xA;  although some people take it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Closed means “Closed for repairs”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How often does this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, this could be measured by the proportion of questions that are edited after being closed getting re-opened, but I guess a statistic on how many questions that have been re-opened after being closed, versus how many questions have ever been closed (including deleted ones), would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T00:32:40.573" Title="How often are questions re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-20T23:33:53.847" Score="6" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm conflicted on a question of voting on meta questions. The original question is a significant and important topic, but I disagree with the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example that caused the conflict (but there will be many other examples) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3411/formatting-poetry&quot;&gt;&quot;Formatting poetry&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the topic is significant and worth discussion but I hold the opposite opinion to Edward Brayn on this specific issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, on meta, what way should I vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2012-12-21T09:47:17.977" Title="Should I vote up or down if I think the topic is important but I disagree with the proposal on meta?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3473" CreationDate="2012-12-21T06:41:55.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you are referring is asking how to format poetry, and the answer is suggesting how to format poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think the topic is important, then you would probably up-vote the question; if you disagree with the proposed way to format poetry, you would probably down-vote the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-21T06:41:55.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3476" CreationDate="2012-12-21T09:03:29.433" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a question closed by the community, i.e. five 3K users, not a diamond mod, and I've tried improving it. What should I do now? Wait? Flag for moderator attention? Cast a re-open vote? Discuss it on the (heavily polluted by off-topic discussion) chat room?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2012-12-21T09:46:51.813" Title="Question closed by community, since edited. Flag for moderator attention?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3475" CreationDate="2012-12-21T09:46:51.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen your question. As waiwai mentioned, there are several options to get a question reopened, all of which are valid. You can flag the question, vote to reopen it, post on Meta, or ask people in chat to take a second look. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2012-12-21T09:46:51.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-22T01:08:19.837" Score="5" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw on the Winter Bash site that I could earn a hat for posting a question (+1) on meta, and also that I could earn a hat if I answered my own question. But my question is now meta: Can I get the hat for answering my own &lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt; question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25516" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-12-22T09:05:25.013" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T19:47:55.177" Title="Answering your own meta question" Tags="|support|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3477" CreationDate="2012-12-22T01:08:52.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, then. It seems that it does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25516" LastEditorUserId="25516" LastEditDate="2012-12-22T03:29:54.500" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T03:29:54.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2012-12-22T01:15:12.473" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAJ4U.png&quot; alt=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T18:44:07.003" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-22T01:15:12.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2012-12-22T06:31:07.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I just want to say this&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few users on this site that make this site seem very derogatory. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95162/is-attempt-a-durative-or-a-punctual-verb&quot;&gt;it is stuff like this&lt;/a&gt; that make people say that those who are closing questions are snobs... because they are. (I don't care if the question deserved to be closed--like in the example I used, but if you're going to close a question, remember that there are supposed to be manners and that you're not supposed to be rude. And people who have called me out on my bad tone, are usually the same people who are rude to begin with. &lt;em&gt;Not all, but the small majority&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, with the example I just gave, yes, that question is questionable. However, that is no excuse for those users to be badgering the user the way they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first started coming onto this site, I enjoyed it. But then I saw so many high rep users badgering lower rep users in a similar fashion to this and I can't stand this site anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that most questions that get closed are truly closed for a reason (like that question probably will be), however, I am posting this in response to your saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, when I search for evidence of that snobbery, I keep finding a&#xA;  slew of rather mediocre questions – usually with helpful answers, by&#xA;  the way – rather than hard evidence of an unhelpful clique. But maybe&#xA;  I'm just missing something, in which case maybe you can help me out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I know the question isn't good. But why should it suddenly be okay to do what they did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25961" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T06:31:07.667" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3477" CreationDate="2012-12-22T19:40:02.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hat you are referring is &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterba.sh/constantinopolitan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Constantinopolitan&lt;/a&gt;, which is given in the main site for a question you posted on the meta site. That is the only hat you gain for posts on the meta site. The other hats are for posts on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Constantinopolitan&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ask a question or provide an answer on meta with a score of 1 or more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other hat is &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterba.sh/git-r-done&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Git R Done&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Git R Done&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ask and answer your own question, each with a score of 1 or more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception about meta sites is &lt;em&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, which is a site of its own, the meta site for Stack Overflow, and it doesn't have its own meta site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On &lt;em&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, you can get all the hats but Costantinopolitan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2012-12-22T19:47:55.177" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T19:47:55.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3160" CreationDate="2012-12-22T21:59:49.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything looks fine again in Chrome 23.0.1271.97 m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T21:59:49.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3463" CreationDate="2012-12-23T12:54:43.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ongoing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? I thought we were under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3449/winter-of-our-discontentahem-sorry-of-love&quot;&gt;Christmas truce&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Actually, I'd regard this as a &lt;em&gt;debate&lt;/em&gt;, or a &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt;, not a &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt;, but perhaps that shows which “side” has been more prone to use incendiary language in their proclamations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there have been several allegations made during some soul-searching about closed questions of late. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions get closed (both sides agree with that). As for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; those questions get closed, there seems to be at least two viewpoints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VIEWPOINT 1&lt;/strong&gt;: Questions are closed because of an unwelcoming and insular community, which is steeped in snobbery. Some high-rep users have appointed themselves as patrolmen who seem to take more joy in closing questions than they do in answering them, particularly when these questions make them feel insecure in their pseudointellectualism, and they find themselves at a loss to answer the questions. This has led to a trigger-happy close culture that is absent from other Stack Exchange sites. Closures should be reserved for all but the most extreme circumstances (such as spam or indecent content), because quick closures drive away newer users who might eventually become productive members, given enough nurturing guidance. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VIEWPOINT 2&lt;/strong&gt;: Questions are closed for a few different reasons, the most common one being that they are questions that have already been asked, and are therefore closed as duplicates. Many others get closed because are overly vague or general reference. Many questions are not written in a way that would appeal to a “serious language enthusiast.” If left unchecked, this could promote a culture where ELU is inundated with questions that are of poor quality (i.e., not well-presented and/or not well-researched). Moreover, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to close or downvote a question without being “rude” to a new user; such votes can set expectations of quality and serve as feedback mechanisms to promote improvement. If ELU has a higher close rate than other SE sites, that's because ELU is getting more than its fair share of questions that need improvement, or have already been asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked for data, though, so I'd like to provide some. I look at those engaged most heavily in this &lt;strike&gt;debate&lt;/strike&gt; war, and this is what I've noticed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users Making the Most Impassioned Arguments Against the Current Close Culture:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Member Name     Member For     Reputation  &#xA;  jlovegren        29 days          1105&#xA;  Andrew Lazarus   36 days           240&#xA;  spiceyokooko     11 days           711&#xA;  Billy             3 months         568&#xA;  CUM. TOTALS    ~5.5 months        1624 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users Who Are Most Active in the Current Close Culture:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Member Name     Cl. Votes   Member For     Reputation  &#xA;  tchrist            27       2 yrs 1 mos       24532&#xA;  FumbleFingers      18       2 yrs 0 mos       51367&#xA;  MetaEd             17       1 yr  2 mos       11920&#xA;  Mitch              15       1 yr 10 mos       20630&#xA;  Robusto            10       2 yrs 1 mos       75281&#xA;  CUM. TOTALS                 9 yrs 4 mos      183730&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This data reminds me of a joke I once read in &lt;em&gt;Boys’ Life&lt;/em&gt; magazine, where a young lad comes home, and his mother asks him, “How was the parade?”, to which the boy replies: “It was great! The whole band was out of step, except for me!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I bring this up? Maybe this site closes too many questions, and maybe it doesn't. I don't care where you stand in that debate; I think either side could defend their position with valid arguments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't particularly care for the direct allegations of snobbery that have been leveled, particularly by four members whose combined time on ELU is less than half of mine. You want to encourage us to close fewer questions? Fine, but do so &lt;em&gt;productively&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;constructively&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four users came in here, took a look around, didn't like what they saw, presumed they had us all figured out, and painted us with a very broad brush.  To those four users: quite frankly, I don't care if this site closes more questions than other SE sites, and I don't care if that bothers you.  I was a new user here less than a year ago; I liked what I found, I contributed in a positive way, and I earned the right to cast my own votes. I wouldn't wander into someone's parlor for the first time and tell them how to decorate their Christmas tree; I wouldn't run for mayor of a town where I had only lived for three months.  Stop bashing the people who have built this place with their own hard work. Not every downvote is a knee-jerk reaction; not every close vote is cast by an insecure member wanting to defend a fiefdom; not every allegation of poor quality is proof of snobbery. Stop railing like it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions will continue to be closed, and, unfortunately, people will read that how they want to read it. I think there's a third viewpoint, one that may not be mentioned much during the “war,” but may be behind the spirit of the “Christmas truce”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VIEWPOINT 3&lt;/strong&gt;: Contrary to some initial impressions, ELU is made up of hard-working community members who do their best to promote and maintain the health of the site. Perhaps some folks are more prone to play the role of the “good cop,” and others the “bad cop,” but this is because everyone has their own ideas about what ought to be improved, and about the best way to go about promoting that improvement. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt if a few high-rep users became a bit more introspective every now and again, and asked themselves if they've become too jaded, and maybe need to make a conscientious effort to edit more, and close less. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt if a few lower-rep users viewed the feedback and comments left by those users as helpful exhortations, rather than personal attacks, and didn't jump to the conclusion that a downvote or a terse comment only proved that they were not “part of the clique.”  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with that, I give you Moore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Based on comments found among these five meta questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3384&quot;&gt;#3384&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3422&quot;&gt;#3422&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3425&quot;&gt;#3425&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3438&quot;&gt;#3438&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3451&quot;&gt;#3451&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Taken from the data found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3452/closed-question-that-had-7-upvotes/3456#3456&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T07:46:26.577" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2012-12-23T14:20:24.997" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/42949/italian-language-usage&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wa3OW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Italian Proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="6550" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T14:26:30.447" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T14:26:30.447" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-23T14:20:24.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3486" CreationDate="2012-12-23T14:55:36.547" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently passed 15k, and apparently that gives me an extra privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/svdmG.png&quot; alt=&quot;You&amp;#39;ve gained the privilege - protect questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that I can do that in Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/haeMv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Protect link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't seem to be able to do that on the main site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T94cr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I misinterpreted something? Both sites are showing the same rep number. I couldn't find anything on meta.SO about this difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T15:13:39.057" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T15:13:39.057" Title="Ability to protect questions on Meta and Main" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3485" CreationDate="2012-12-23T15:08:49.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non-moderator, you have to wait 24 hours before you can protect a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T15:08:49.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3449" CreationDate="2012-12-23T15:10:09.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish you would please reëvaluate how well your truce is working out.  The problem is that we are now enabling the idiots, who keep coming back for more.  Question quality is at rock-bottom.  Almost the only way to get a good question asked is if we do it ourselves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T15:10:09.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-24T05:18:48.177" Score="-1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95283/see-out-outside&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/23135/nortonn-s&quot;&gt;a suspended user&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close it as Off Topic (purely because of the user's status) and edited an exclamation mark into the question text to advertise my action/reason to others (I've done this many times before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mod reversed my edit and asked me not to do this again (the question has in fact been closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm prepared to abide by any decisions made by mods, but I'd like to know whether it's site policy that I shouldn't have edited in my warning marker - and if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to know how it comes about that currently this user only seems to have asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/23135/nortonn-s?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;a total of 22 questions&lt;/a&gt;, when I know perfectly well that he's plagued the site with &lt;em&gt;hundreds&lt;/em&gt; of questions - over many months, if not years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that his questions are being deleted. Is this site policy? If so, why bother to reverse my &quot;warning&quot; edits? If not, why are the deletions being allowed/encouraged by mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T07:59:53.227" Title="Identifying questions from suspended user" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2012-12-24T05:24:55.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because the user is suspended does not make the question off-topic. The mods can deal with the suspensions just fine; there's no reason to abuse the closing mechanism here. If our policy is to delete questions, as it is, then we will do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the exclamation mark, what possible purpose does it serve? Users who know what it means will recognize the username anyway, and putting it on a question before a mod has confirmed that the user is in fact the suspended user could be very damaging if it's not actually that user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T05:24:55.877" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3494" CreationDate="2012-12-25T07:14:41.573" Score="2" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;My biggest challenge is about synonyms. It is hard to differentiate differences of meanings of synonym words. Even after I consult various dictionaries, some times it is hard to get clarity. In such cases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I ask questions about word differences to the community?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, what other sources are there to  help me?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a non-native English speaker, I can have trouble grasping the meaning. At such times, may I ask the ELU community for more elaboration for any meaning?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I’ve noticed that some of users are very good at answering and explaining such questions, but that other  users feel these are not good questions. In such situations, may I directly ask the specific user about this question without polluting the site and then give them credit for it once I got answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" OwnerDisplayName="Ramya" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2012-12-26T23:46:33.357" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T23:46:33.357" Title="Asking questions about synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3490" CreationDate="2012-12-25T07:39:18.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words have contextual meanings and that is how they need to be studied – contextually. While &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym of &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; in one sense, it is not in other senses of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you observe and study words according to their contextual meanings, learning synonyms won't be a big challenge. You need to do a lot of reading and listen to people speak in English. Unless you do that, what you pick up from dictionaries won't be of much help. Try building your own sentences with the new words you have learnt. And of course, communities like English.StackExchange.Com are great places to ask questions and clarify your doubts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, you can ask questions here and get your doubts clarified. But please search the site and make sure your questions are not duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32480" LastEditorDisplayName="user32480" LastEditDate="2012-12-25T08:15:08.563" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T08:15:08.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3490" CreationDate="2012-12-25T07:45:03.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of these days, now that ELL has more than 160 commitments, the English Language Learners site will go into beta and that should (I hope it does) provide a friendlier atmosphere for asking questions about which synonyms are best in specific contexts and what the differences between putative synonyms are. Until then, I agree with Inglish Teeture's advice to &quot;please search the site and make sure your questions are not duplicates&quot;. Also, provide specific and sufficiently complete contexts to allow us enough information to answer your questions. That means complete sentences and maybe even a brief paragraph for the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21497" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T07:45:03.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2012-12-25T07:59:53.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes Norton S asks good questions, even if, as one user has said, he usually asks nonsensical questions only to see whether he can stimulate some of us into wasting our time by answering them. I always ignore questions that aren't interesting to me, or that I think I can't offer any answer of value to, and it seems to me that a comment stating that &quot;This user is Norton S&quot; after any Norton S question is sufficient. Then the moderators can decide what to do and the rest of us can choose to ignore the question for whatever reason. If Norton S can't be stopped from posting, I don't see why we can't make use of his rare good questions. We don't need to be such vigilant policemen, do we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of leaving those good questions on the site simply because they're good questions and against deleting everything he posts just because he's suspended. I'm more concerned about the question than the questioner. I like the policy of preserving the question if there are upvoted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21497" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T07:59:53.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3490" CreationDate="2012-12-25T09:08:12.183" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to ask about synonyms on ELU is to make sure you include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dictionary definitions of the words you are asking about (i.e., give us all a baseline to work from in the question itself; don't make us all go look up the words in the dictionary as part of our analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reason that you're asking about those particular words. (Did you find them in a book? Are you writing a paper? If so, what is the paper for?) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I think the words &lt;em&gt;milky&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;creamy&lt;/em&gt; could be considered synonymous in some contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;milky&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  containing or mixed with a large amount of milk : &lt;em&gt;a cup of sweet milky coffee&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • &lt;strong&gt;resembling milk, esp. in color&lt;/strong&gt; : &lt;em&gt;not a blemish marred her milky skin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • (of something that is usually clear) cloudy : &lt;em&gt;the old man's milky, uncomprehending eyes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;creamy&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;resembling cream in color&lt;/strong&gt; or consistency : &lt;em&gt;creamy white flowers | beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and creamy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • containing a lot of cream : &lt;em&gt;a thick, creamy dressing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you were to ask a question like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Milky vs. Creamy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do &lt;em&gt;milky&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;creamy&lt;/em&gt; mean the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Milky White or Creamy White?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When should I use &lt;em&gt;milky&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;creamy&lt;/em&gt;?  Are they the same color?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I think you'd be (rightfully) hit with a lot of comments, asking, &quot;What does the dictionary say?&quot; or, &quot;Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't; more context please.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if you said instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Milky White vs. Creamy White&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I noticed that, in the dictionary, both &lt;em&gt;milky&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;creamy&lt;/em&gt; can mean resembling milk (or cream) in color. NOAD says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;milky&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt;.) resembling milk, esp. in color  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;creamy&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt;.) resembling cream in color&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and I'm writing about a room that was recently painted. I'm considering saying that the room is &lt;em&gt;creamy white&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;milky white&lt;/em&gt;.  I would like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Is there a difference between those two?  Would you imagine that a creamy white room is a slightly different color than a milky white room? (I typed &quot;creamy white room&quot; and &quot;milky white room&quot; into a Google image search, but the rooms looked pretty much the same color).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) Both of these words have other meanings (for example, &lt;em&gt;creamy&lt;/em&gt; can mean &quot;resembling cream in consistency;&quot; &lt;em&gt;milky&lt;/em&gt; can mean &quot;cloudy, said of something that is usually clear, such as &lt;em&gt;milky, uncomprehending eyes&lt;/em&gt;).  If &lt;em&gt;milky white&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;creamy white&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; essentially the same color, is there any reason I should avoid using one word or the other, because of some other meanings of the word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, no one can say you haven't done any research (clearly you have), and no one can say there is not enough context (because it's abundantly provided). Furthermore, no one can ask why the question is relevant (you've explained that – you're writing about a recently painted room). I would wager that such a question would get both helpful answers and upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, questions about differences in meaning are welcome on ELU. However, it is vital to include sufficient detail in your question so that (a) it can be answered without requests for further clarification, and (b) it is evident that you haven't come to ELU before consulting readily available resources, such as a dictionary and search engine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;One last tidbit of advice&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do ask a question, and someone in the community asks you something like, &quot;Did you look at a thesaurus? What did you find there?&quot; then &lt;strong&gt;do not answer that comment with another comment&lt;/strong&gt;; instead, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit your question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example; suppose you asked: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another word for burning eyes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I was trying to describe an itchy, burning sensation in my eyes, but I don't like the word &lt;em&gt;burning&lt;/em&gt;, because that brings to mind the eyeballs being on fire. What other word can I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the first response was a comment, asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Did you look in a thesaurus? What did you find?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; look in a thesaurus, that would be a good time to go do so. But maybe you &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; looked in a thesaurus. Your first instinct might be to leave a comment like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Yes I did, but I didn't find anything suitable there.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that's a good idea, though. Why? &lt;em&gt;If one user asked about a thesaurus, others will probably wonder about the same thing&lt;/em&gt;. So, a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; thing to do would be to edit your question, showing your research to the rest of the community such that they can see it, without reading through all the comments underneath the question. Hence, your edited question might now look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another word for burning eyes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I was trying to describe an itchy, burning sensation in my eyes, but I don't like the word &lt;em&gt;burning&lt;/em&gt;, because that brings to mind the eyeballs being on fire. What other word can I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tried looking up &lt;em&gt;burning&lt;/em&gt; in a thesaurus, but all the words there either had the same connotation of being literally on fire (such as &lt;em&gt;flaming, fiery, glowing, smoldering, red-hot, fiery, blistering, scorching, searing, roasting, sizzling&lt;/em&gt;), or else they were words describing emotions, like being in love (e.g., &lt;em&gt;passionate, ardent, fervent, urgent, fierce, eager, frantic, consuming, uncontrollable&lt;/em&gt;). None of these words seem to fit as a good alternative to &lt;em&gt;burning&lt;/em&gt;, not when describing &quot;itchy, burning eyes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see where that brings you, now that you've revised the question?  Once again, it's hard for anyone to question your research; plus, it's easier for everyone to understand the context.  I think that question – in its revised form – would receive both upvotes and helpful answers.  Without that revision, though, most of the upvotes would probably go to the comment asking you, &quot;Did you look in a thesaurus?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it's not just about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you ask, it's also about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T09:08:12.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3490" CreationDate="2012-12-25T09:19:44.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an important question, and one I am glad to see raised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with every word of the responses so far — Inglish Teeture’s, J.R.'s and Bill Franke’s answers, and Edwin Ashworth’s comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add a word about &lt;strong&gt;tools&lt;/strong&gt; for exploring synonyms. First, dictionaries. It is essential to consult multiple good dictionaries; for different dictionaries offer different perspectives. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a handy list of good dictionaries and similar references. And it is not enough merely to scan a dictionary entry; as I commented on your recent question, “The people who write dictionaries take great pains to ‘pack’ their meaning into a very few words, and it is often necessary for you to expend equal effort in ‘unpacking’ the meaning.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in line with Inglish Teeture’s advice to examine synonyms &lt;em&gt;in context&lt;/em&gt;, I should like to recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;corpus.byu.edu&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where there are several large &lt;em&gt;corpora&lt;/em&gt;—searchable databases of language. By registering there (it’s free) you will be able to search those databases for occurrences of words in actual contexts, not made-up examples such as you find in textbooks and dictionaries. The sources of these uses are identified and classified—Fiction, Magazine, Newspaper, Academic, Spoken, and so forth—so you may get a sense not only of &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; but also &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; words are used. Each citation is twenty or thirty words long, and you may consult a longer passage from which it is extracted. And the number of citations is staggering; for instance, with respect to your own recent question, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) reports almost 500 instances of &lt;em&gt;derision&lt;/em&gt; and more than 3500 instances of &lt;em&gt;contempt&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These won't solve all your problems, for there are subtleties they do not point out explicitly. And keep in mind that corpora do not distinguish between good use and bad. “Native speaker” does not mean “accomplished speaker”, and it is not true that whatever is said or written by a native speaker is &lt;em&gt;de jure&lt;/em&gt; ‘correct’. Every native speaker gets one vote—no less, no more—on what constitutes ‘correct use’, and you will see a variety of opinions displayed in corpora and dictionaries. When those opinions appear contradictory, bring them here; I can assure you that if you fortify your questions with appropriate citations they will be not only accepted but applauded. (But be prepared to encounter a similar diversity of opinion here, too!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T09:25:37.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3472" CreationDate="2012-12-25T10:42:11.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any way to get long-term data. However, I searched this meta site for the word &quot;reopen&quot;, and found several requests to reopen questions.  This is what I found: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3451&quot;&gt;Do Lunch vs. Have Lunch&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94674&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2668&quot;&gt;Literal Meaning of 'Gosh'&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68336&quot;&gt;Still Closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3302&quot;&gt;“Why Steven Sinofsky is out at Microsoft”&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91162&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2965&quot;&gt;Is 'Deuce' a Corruption...&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77331&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3376&quot;&gt;HTML for Dummies – Offensive?&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93187&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3252&quot;&gt;“Looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane” Origin&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85659&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2682&quot;&gt;What is bigger: a Squillion or a Kadgillion?&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51175&quot;&gt;Deleted&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3439&quot;&gt;Is corrosion an onomatopoeia?&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94592&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3388&quot;&gt;A more positive word for 'challenging'&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93466&quot;&gt;Deleted&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2715&quot;&gt;Is 'These sort of things' grammatical?&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70341&quot;&gt;Still Closed&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3388&quot;&gt;Career vs. Carrier&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41106&quot;&gt;Still Closed&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2192&quot;&gt;“Sick and tied” &amp;amp; “sick and tired”&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47693&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2192&quot;&gt;Is &quot;heinz sight&quot; an eggcorn?&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49114&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1888&quot;&gt;The world's oldest profession&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40857&quot;&gt;Still Closed&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3421&quot;&gt;'Than' vs 'to' vs 'over'?&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94221&quot;&gt;Reopened&lt;/a&gt;     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, out of the 15 questions I examined, 9 were reopened, 2 were deleted, and 4 remain closed. According to that preliminary data, it looks like a reopen request on meta has about a &lt;strong&gt;60% success rate&lt;/strong&gt;.  (Granted, this does not account for questions that may or may not get reopened without intervention on meta, but I still thought it was relevant to the discussion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:&lt;/strong&gt; I did not cherry-pick; I simply scrolled through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=reopen&quot;&gt;search results&lt;/a&gt;, looking for requests to reopen questions, and located 15 such requests. (15 was a predetermined number, based on how much time I had available, and how much effort I was willing to put into pasting these links.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FOR FURTHER RESEARCH:&lt;/strong&gt; I made no attempt to analyze the quality of the questions, to examine the questions’ edit histories, or to read through the ensuing meta discussions about the request to reopen. It might be interesting to see if there is a correlation between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether or not the original question was edited/improved, and the reopening rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the reason the question was closed, and the reopening rate  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the upvote/downvote totals on the original question, and the reopening rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of upvotes/downvotes on the meta request, and the reopening rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the quantity and tone of discussion on the meta request, and the reopening rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the rep of the user requesting the reopen, and the reopening rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether or not the request was made by the O.P. (&lt;em&gt;vs&lt;/em&gt;. another user), and the reopening rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T00:32:40.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3498" CreationDate="2012-12-26T06:46:18.663" Score="-4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Never mind the alarming rate at which questions are slammed shut on EL&amp;amp;U, I was infact wondering how come questions on EL&amp;amp;U can be closed by a single user when Stack Exchange, Movies and TV (&lt;em&gt;the ones I am using&lt;/em&gt;) require 5 close votes to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30763" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T12:11:18.537" Title="How come a single user can close questions on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3497" CreationDate="2012-12-26T06:56:30.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All across the network moderator votes are binding. So a question can be closed by five regular users (who have gained the right to vote to close), or 0–4 regular users and a mod. The same holds for reopening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can easily tell moderators from regular users by the diamond (♦) next to their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the questions on Movies and TV that were closed by a single user, a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/4176/identify-this-movie-cartoon-girl-gets-shrunk-to-size-of-toy-by-evil-talking-toy&quot;&gt;Identify this movie: cartoon girl gets shrunk to size of toy by evil talking toy, find a cure before midnight before she becomes a toy forever&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/4255/identify-movie-about-nuclear-war-between-russia-and-usa&quot;&gt;Identify movie about nuclear war between Russia and USA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/5672/help-identifying-a-science-fiction-movie&quot;&gt;Help Identifying a Science Fiction Movie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/4383/80s-or-90s-movie-about-2-punk-kids-who-meet-a-stranger-who-later-tries-to-kill&quot;&gt;80s or 90s movie about 2 “punk” kids who meet a stranger who later tries to kill them and then he is killed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &quot;the alarming rate at which questions are slammed shut on EL&amp;amp;U&quot;, you seem to not be aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3449/winter-of-our-discontentahem-sorry-of-love&quot;&gt;our Christmas truce&lt;/a&gt;. We have been closing &lt;em&gt;exceptionally&lt;/em&gt; few questions lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.407" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T06:56:30.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3497" CreationDate="2012-12-26T11:09:43.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Never mind the alarming rate at which questions are slammed shut on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a little hard to “never mind” that, when that's the way you start your question. Still, your verbiage prompts me to ask: Are you looking at the &lt;em&gt;rate&lt;/em&gt;, or are you looking at the rate &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, when a question is closed unilaterally by a moderator, it's closed because it's a duplicate question, which means (a) the question has already been answered on the site, and (b) the O.P.s are provided a link to that location, so they can see the answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of all the closed questions currently on the front page, only two have been closed by a moderator for reasons other than being a duplicate.  Those are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95422&quot;&gt;95422&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Is it correct to say: &amp;quot;it is not that far a distance&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was closed because it's too vague, &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; a comment explicitly stating that more elaboration would be grounds for &lt;em&gt;reopening&lt;/em&gt; the question, and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95528&quot;&gt;95528&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: I can't seem to find a consolidated list of military euphemisms, such as &amp;quot;incomplete victory&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;friendly fire&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;vertically deployed anti-personnel devices&amp;quot;. Do you have any links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is clearly off-topic, according to the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the other closed questions on the front page (there are currently 9, out of 50 questions) were either closed because they were duplicates (5 of the 9), or else they were closed by a quorum of five users (2 of 9).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find nothing “alarming” about this, and I think that, more often than not, questions get closed without being “slammed shut”.  Moreover, any question that gets “slammed shut” can be reopened after additional consideration (five reopen votes by users with sufficient reputation will reopen a question); however, if you're hoping that will ultimately happen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95541&quot;&gt;your recently-closed question&lt;/a&gt;, I'd suggest using more level-headed and objective rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Data was taken on Wed, Dec 26, 6:00 AM Eastern US time)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T12:11:18.537" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3502" CreationDate="2012-12-26T12:45:34.347" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that there's an entry on my user page that says I lost 1 reputation for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95530/whats-the-difference-between-rigor-and-rigorousness&quot;&gt;question about the difference between rigor and rigorousness&lt;/a&gt;. I don't have a problem with being downvoted, but &lt;strong&gt;I didn't answer the question&lt;/strong&gt;, I merely made a comment. I believe I read recently that upvotes for comments don't add to one's reputation, so I assume that because there's no downvote icon for comments, that there's no way to lose reputation for that either. Can anyone explain what may have happened there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21497" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T13:06:00.463" Title="Losing reputation for a question that I have not answered" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3501" CreationDate="2012-12-26T13:06:00.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You downvoted, presumably. Both the question and one answer have a downvote, and one of those is probably yours.  Look at your reputation tab, in the detail by post. It should tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T13:06:00.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3504" CreationDate="2012-12-26T13:20:09.930" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can get stats related to questions-answers on EL&amp;amp;U, eg. &lt;em&gt;total number of questions asked, questions unanswered, total answers&lt;/em&gt; etc. and those relevant to the site itself. eg. &lt;em&gt;number of users, number of user accounts deleted since a specific date&lt;/em&gt; and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30763" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T14:44:39.707" Title="How can I get statistics pertinent to EL&amp;U?" Tags="|support|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3503" CreationDate="2012-12-26T14:44:39.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your one-stop solution is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;. You will need SQL-fu for creating advanced queries of your own, but lots of queries have been created by other users already so even with no hacking skillz whatsoever you can grab ahold of lots of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some of the data you mention can be obtained easier still. It's simply displayed, in plain text, in the corresponding places around the site. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of answers, users, visits per day, questions per day: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#users&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange network stats&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Total number of (not-deleted) questions: ibidem, or in the top right corner in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;the Questions tab&lt;/a&gt; on the site proper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions unanswered: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;the Unanswered tab&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; accounts is not to be found out there in the open, and in fact is unlikely to be in the Data Explorer data dump, either. Account deletions, unlike post deletions, are hard deletions performed by devs. What's gone, is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T14:44:39.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3490" CreationDate="2012-12-26T16:46:00.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that questions about synonym differences are very much on-topic here at ELU and not at all General Reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most dictionaries will give definitions which an educated native speaker can check for correctness of the correct nuance (by the succinct choice of words in the definition), but on the whole &lt;strong&gt;dictionaries do not give a early learners the subtle, or even not so subtle, nuances that are obvious as learned by long time users of the language from prior contexts&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, your specific main-site questions tend to ask about too many synonyms at once. I think that it is simply a problem with scale; the larger the number of synonyms, the more likely a single answer will be able to answer well, giving rise to legitimate closing by Not Constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to answer directly your questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 - Can I ask questions about word differences to the community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. try to keep the complexity down to 2 or 3 words being compared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 - If I can not what are the other sources which helps me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thesaurus, multiple dictionary lookups (ya gotta do research at some point), and &lt;em&gt;looking at examples and context to get the nuance&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 -  As a non native English speaker I can have difficulty to grasp the meaning. Such times can I ask community for more elaboration for any meaning? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Also chat is good for back and forth discussion for elaboration. Also, I find the multi-way conversations there to be very helpful for extricating nuances because people see different sides of the differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 - I have experienced some of users are very good in explaining such questions and some users feel these are not good questions. In such situations, can I directly ask the specific user about this question with polluting site and give the credit them once I got answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they answer your question on the Q&amp;amp;A part, SE is already set up to give credit. You can't really give SE upvotes to someone without them already giving an official answer. If you ask otherwise (say in chat), then just thank them, that's credit enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T16:46:00.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-27T02:35:38.110" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the feature is there, and pops a little warning dialog box, and my feeling is 'never' but I haven't found any examples, or much guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95596/is-there-a-single-word-for-a-document-containing-an-individuals-contact-informa/95617&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about a word replacement for a 'contact details' page I've just posted an answer with two (in my op) rather different answers. The first is just me suggesting something that isn't &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; obvious if you're thinking of synonyms or related terms but that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a standard of sorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is me going nuts and suggesting something that's closer to the OP's original request, but that's not even close to a standard in the context, so it's more just fanciful free word association that may work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've put it together as one answer, but this got me thinking about whether or not this should've been broken up as two answers since (in my head at least) they're related only because I came up with them at about the same time, and well, that got me wondering what general guidance on multiple-answer policy might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T03:28:59.223" Title="In what circumstances should I provide two answers to a question? (if any that is)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-27T10:53:40.887" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idioms and phrases and other special words are helpful to express our feelings accurately and articulate our speech well. However, while learning these idioms or phrases or right words, if we know its etymology which tells about its derivation and origin of the word, it will become easy to remember the meanings of those. However, as a non native speaker, I always suspect that I might be asking a most obvious question which isn't worth asking the community. In such situations what research do I have to do before posting questions about etymology and how can I convince the community that I have done enough research but I'm still having difficulty understanding the etymology or grasping the meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2012-12-27T11:14:10.263" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T11:49:30.507" Title="What care do I have to take while asking questions about etymology?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3507" CreationDate="2012-12-27T11:39:45.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, you can search in online dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you link them, and someone sees that nothing valuable comes out after searching themselves, we'll obviously believe you searched there because you're giving to us the same tool and we can't find anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try reading on Wikipedia. If you don't find it, mention it, and if you find it and something doesn't satisfy you about it, mention it. Mention any site/resource you searched and possibly link it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &quot;I searched everywhere&quot; is not proving anything to us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T11:39:45.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3507" CreationDate="2012-12-27T11:49:30.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can I convince the community that I have done enough research?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say the answer is: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do your research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and then &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;share your research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, let's take the idiom &quot;broken record&quot; (as in, &quot;You sound like a broken record.&quot;). Anyone old enough to have started their music collection with vinyl will know what this means; anyone young enough to have never owned a cassette tape might wonder, &quot;What do broken Olympic records have to do with sounding repetitious?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least four resources I would use to research an idiom like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I'd use OneLook.com, which links to several online dictionaries, and accepts idioms and phrases.  If you type &quot;broken record&quot; into &lt;a href=&quot;http://onelook.com/?w=broken%20record&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OneLook.com&lt;/a&gt;, you'll get three matches, including one to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broken%20record&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, which explains the idiom rather well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I'd use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;etymolonline.com&lt;/a&gt;, which traces origins of words. (This site doesn't always work so well for phrases; entering &lt;em&gt;broken record&lt;/em&gt; into its search box yields five pages of results, some referring to &quot;phonographs&quot;, but little insight into the idiom in question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) I'd use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phrases.org.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phrase Finder&lt;/a&gt;, which works better for idioms. Searching &lt;em&gt;broken record&lt;/em&gt; at the Phrase Finder yields this pertinent gem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;like a broken record&quot; means the person says the same thing over and over. When a record was scratched or broken, it would hang up and play a segment over and over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) I'd use Google, starting the query with &quot;meaning of&quot;. Typing &lt;em&gt;meaning of broken record&lt;/em&gt; returns several links, including a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/broken+record.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UsingEnglish.com&lt;/a&gt;, which explains: &lt;em&gt;When someone sounds like a broken record, they keep on repeating the same things. (&quot;Stuck record&quot; is also used).&lt;/em&gt;  This tells you the meaning of the phrase (which you already knew), but it does not provide an etymological source, so it doesn't answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After visiting these four sites, you really don't need to ask this question on ELU, because the entry at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broken%20record&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (found via OneLook) explains it rather well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Derives directly from the (slightly inaccurate) term involving polyvinyl record albums, where such a &quot;broken&quot; record would repeatedly skip back a moment in what being played. (The term was inaccurate – usually such skippage was caused by debris on the disc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to answer your question, let's assume that you typed &lt;em&gt;sounds like a broken record&lt;/em&gt; into the search box at OneLook, and you didn't check Phrase Finder. OneLook doesn't find anything:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sorry, no dictionaries indexed in the selected category contain the exact phrase &lt;em&gt;sounds like a broken record&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; have the answer to your question.  You could ask your question like this, but I'd not recommend doing so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin of &quot;sounds like a broken record&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where does this phrase come from? I tried looking online, but I couldn't find an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with that question?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't explain why you are confused, or why this is relevant. (Explaining this information often makes a question seem more appealing to the community at large.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't reveal what kind of research you did (meaning that several ELU users could be doomed to make the same unfruitful queries you did). Moreover, even if you did some earnest research, it's hard for anyone to see that based on the information in your question (remember, all we have to go on is what you put into the question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were me, I'd compose the question like this instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin of &quot;sounds like a broken record&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I understand that the phrase &quot;sounds like a broken record&quot; means saying the same thing over and over; after using Google, I found that definition at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/broken+record.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UsingEnglish.com&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When someone sounds like a broken record, they keep on repeating the same things. ('Stuck record' is also used.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, I'm confused about the origin of this phrase. When I hear the phrase &quot;broken record,&quot; it reminds me of Michael Phelps at the Olympics. Is it because a record-breaking athlete keeps taking the podium over and over again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I searched for &quot;sounds like a broken record&quot; on both OneLook and etymolonline, but OneLook returned no hits, and etymolonine had several hits, but none talked about the meaning of this phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it would be hard for anyone to accuse you of not doing research (you mention four sites by name; you included a link to one, and you described the results of two other searches).  Moreover, you've done a good job explaining why you're confused about the idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that a question in the first format would draw comments asking &quot;What research did you do?&quot; along with some downvotes, but a question in the second format would get answered. It still might get closed as &quot;general reference&quot; (after all, the answer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; readily available, by typing &quot;broken record&quot; instead of &quot;sounds like a broken record&quot;), but it's still evident that you gave it a college try, and most users here would appreciate the work you put into the question. Therefore, comments would likely be much more supportive and less accusatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think if you make an earnest, heartfelt effort to answer your own question first, and then do a good job of explicitly describing what you did within your question itself, then the community will be convinced you have done enough research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this means you might ask fewer questions, because you'll be able to answer several of them before you ask. That's not a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T11:49:30.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3463" CreationDate="2012-12-27T15:36:38.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the probability of a question receiving a closure vote independent of the number of closure votes it has?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absent of any hard data, I can offer a few reasons why I'm pretty sure the answer is &quot;no.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first close vote puts the question into the review queue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of close votes shows up right under the question itself as you read it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a close-voter left a comment (as is encouraged), you'll see it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of these things could (and almost certainly do in many cases) cause readers to look at the questions differently than they would if there were no close votes.   I would venture to say that the &lt;em&gt;whole point&lt;/em&gt; of these features is to make subsequent readers pause and say:  &lt;em&gt;&quot;Huh, is there something wrong with this question?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this implies that we're all mindless sheep letting our close votes automatically fall like dominoes.  I've seen plenty of instances where I've disagreed with a prior close vote.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But pretend for a moment that we could eliminate the subjectivity and measure the quality/appropriateness of a question objectively.  Wouldn't we then expect a &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; correlation between the quality and number of close votes?   If that's the ideal, it seems naive to expect (or even want) the probability to be independent of the numbers of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T15:36:38.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3512" CreationDate="2012-12-27T21:09:31.167" Score="12" ViewCount="823" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know of at least one other SE site where you can't put lmgtfy links in comments, because those are considered to be insulting and belittling.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on this site, you can, and I was wondering why. Why is it different between the sites.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Obviously the message one sends out with a lmgtfy link is the same, no matter the site topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Are lmgtfy links not considered insulting?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3511" CreationDate="2012-12-27T21:22:06.130" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short and sweet answer is, LMGTFY links are not filtered here because barely anyone ever posts them in the first place. (And should you run into one, flag it for mod attention and it will be dealt with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77377/ban-lmgtfy-links-across-the-stack-exchange-network&quot;&gt;Ban LMGTFY links across the Stack Exchange network&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15650/ban-lmgtfy-let-me-google-that-for-you-links&quot;&gt;Ban LMGTFY (let me google that for you) links&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T21:22:06.130" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-27T21:27:07.807" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;As was mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3511/are-lmgtfy-links-not-considered-insulting&quot;&gt;in this Meta question recently&lt;/a&gt;, comments that post a &quot;lmgtfy&quot; link can be seen as insulting. Other sites, like Stack Overflow, have already blacklisted this domain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we take action on ELU, I wanted to get a general feel for the opinions the community might have on this. So, should links with the &quot;lmgtfy&quot; domain be blacklisted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this doesn't mean comments that show a question is general reference will be blacklisted; only that this particular domain can be seen as insulting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T14:54:40.750" Title="Should we blacklist &quot;lmgtfy&quot; comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3523" CreationDate="2012-12-27T21:52:05.647" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the discussions in chat show, many of us, especially who have been here from remote time, have become increasingly concerned at the prevalence of low quality questions. At first we stood by - hoping that we could get the low quality basic questions out of the way and grow into expert, high quality questions. Unfortunately this hoped for direction is not materializing and we have realized that EL&amp;amp;U is not improving. Instead, it seems that as we gain new users, the number of low quality questions seems to increase while the number of high quality questions diminish: rarely questions gain more than three upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree that something needs to be done? Or do you think things are fine the way they are? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T12:40:45.503" Title="Can we reverse the trend on low quality questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3513" CreationDate="2012-12-27T22:06:06.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such comments should probably be flagged and deleted by moderators instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am against blacklisting anything unless there is a real problem, there is no other solution, blacklisting will really work, and adverse effects are certainly and far outweighed by benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have doubts regarding several of these conditions, mainly &quot;does it really work, if you can simply use Bit.ly?&quot;, and &quot;is this a real problem, that is, do people often post such links?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be inconvenient if we couldn't use LMGTFY in good-natured jokes, either in comments to friends or in chat. Or even in a question about the way LMGTFY works: it is a popular subject of discussion all over the Internet, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those reasons I would vote against, at least for now. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3512/3036&quot;&gt;Reg's answer&lt;/a&gt; to a similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T22:12:03.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2012-12-28T02:48:41.767" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you define the &quot;low quality&quot; in the first place. Are you referring to questions asked by users who research little? Or the questions deemed too entry-level by the &quot;high quality users&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, most of the users, especially the new ones, are not specialists in Linguistics or English experts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are way past needing answers in EL&amp;amp;U I guess. But please be patient. No one grows up in one day. It takes time for the new users to improve and learn to ask questions in &quot;high-quality&quot; way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, as for drift-by users, those who ask basic questions just for fun and never respond, I do agree they are ruining this forum.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32580" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T10:59:23.243" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T10:59:23.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T05:34:35.783" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question and I got detailed explanation for that question. The knowledge and gist that I got from that answer useful to me to write better questions in SE. How ever I have another question which is some what similar to earlier one. My perception is that the answer for the earlier question helps in general but not in specific. I thought asking about specific question and post that question in ELU. I got again nice and detailed and well explained answer for my second question. I am happy about that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How ever one of the honorable user who had high reputation commented upon the answerer &lt;em&gt;&quot;it's a shame you've had to tell all this twice to the same user&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by refering the user who answered both of my questions. I realized that user is a bit upset with my question. But I am trying to understand what makes him upset. Definitely the basic points of the answer for the first question are useful. But I feel like require more elaboration to write fully qualified and qualitative questions in ELU for the scenarios which I had specified in question2. At this situation please find my specific question below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) If there is a confusion or lack of clarity in order to apply the  knowledge available in ELU or if feel like need more detailed explanation about any specific case then does asking community for explanation isn't right thing to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) As a non native English speaker inspite of my best efforts some times I cacce difficulties to absorb the knowledge from the articles written in English language and some times takesmore than necessary effort to digest it. Also some times  it is difficult to apply that knowledge every where and encounter difficulties. In such cases does asking question about those difficulties in ELU is wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;&quot;it's a shame you've had to tell all this twice to the same user&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I might be wrong, but these comments appears to me rude. What do you guys think? If you guys think it is not rude,please explain me why and explain the line which differentiate rudeness and acceptable criticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" LastEditorUserId="30645" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T09:00:09.460" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T09:39:29.777" Title="Is it sin to asking similar question again?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2012-12-28T07:14:27.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should not be surprised that we get complaints from new users. English.SE does a poor job of warning the first-timer up front what the expectations are for question quality. Indeed, the site sets a trap for the first-timer! The first-timer, lacking adequate guidance, is more or less guaranteed to ask a question which attracts a lot of criticism. And next thing you know, there’s another complaint in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People generally want to do the right thing. When people are not doing the right thing or not doing it in the right way, that is usually the fault of management, as W. Edwards Deming would say. Management should engineer the system so that it is easy to do the right thing and hard to do it wrong. In other words, an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining question quality is not where the problem lies. Question quality has been well defined, especially as it applies to simple, basic questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions should be “interesting, unique, and thought-provoking”.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   —&lt;em&gt;Shog9, StackExchange staff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP must put “effort and research into the question”.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   —&lt;em&gt;Robert Cartaino, StackExchange staff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP can “ask simple questions as long as they are thoughtful, intriguing questions posed as you would ask them of an expert. Overly simple questions without research or forethought should be closed. … There’s no lowering of the bar for a so-called learners’ status”.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   —&lt;em&gt;Robert Cartaino, StackExchange staff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“[A]ll questions are ultimately in service of the people answering them. That is the audience you need to satisfy if you want to have any hope of creating and sustaining a community of peers learning from each other. … There’s nothing useful any expert can learn from ultra-basic questions. Allow your Q&amp;amp;A community to fill itself with enough ‘General Reference’ type questions and you’ll soon find no experts there at all.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   —&lt;em&gt;Jeff Atwood, StackExchange co-founder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you click &lt;code&gt;New Question&lt;/code&gt;, you get only five words of guidance on question quality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide details. Share your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where the problem lies. The guidance for first-timers is not only inadequate – it’s also buried in a right sidebar, which guarantees that many first-timers will overlook it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T07:44:32.023" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T07:44:32.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3518" CreationDate="2012-12-28T09:39:29.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That comment was mine. First, let me apologise for any offence you may have felt. It was not intended as a direct criticism, merely a comment; it was not intended to be rude. If you feel a comment is unwarranted, then flag it. However when I last saw it it had been agreed with by another user, so its sentiment is not entirely individual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; intended to indicate that the two answers are practically identical. JR took a great deal of effort to explain how to write a good question &amp;mdash; which boiled down to &quot;Do the research, document that research and write a question based on that research.&quot; You then asked a closely-related question and got a closely-related answer, &quot;Do the research, document that research and write a question based on the research.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask for clarification in comments. But read the answer fully first, and again, do any research necessary. There is a user who routinely causes the scope of his questions to creep and that's not good. If you have a &lt;em&gt;wholly different&lt;/em&gt; question, then ask that separately. In this particular case, I didn't find the questions very different, because they were both essentially &quot;How do I ask a question?&quot; and the answer is the same: Help the community to help you; show them your research so they don't repeat it; be very clear about what it is you want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because some full answers like JR's take effort to digest, you may need to take time to do that. Do take that time. If you have someone available with experience in English, ask them to explain it too. If you need to ask for clarification, use a judiciously-worded comment which highlights the issue with their answer. The author can update the answer if that's what is necessary. That is, don't simply expand your original question with the comment; it will be something like &quot;Could you edit your answer to make &lt;em&gt;gobbledygook&lt;/em&gt; clearer, please? I tried looking it up but all I found was stuff about turkeys bolting food.&quot; Make the supplementary question specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may realise that an answer doesn't provide what you really need, and that you do actually need to add details to your question. Do that instead; but it's good practice to add a comment to an answer to let the answerer (and other readers) know that the question has changed and they may need to revisit their answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously it would not be good to do either of these things too often, which is why it's necessary to be careful in how you compose your question in the first place. Writing a good question takes time, and often the time you take in composing the question will be reflected in the time taken by those who answer. Do the research, describe what you did, say why it doesn't help, and then ask about what you need to know. JR has provided really good worked examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also good practice to use prior answers when you have a question (so searching the site is necessary). In this case, you got a very full answer about how to ask about synonyms, and then you asked &quot;How do I ask about etymology?&quot; to which the answer is almost identical. It is possible to apply all the techniques in the earlier answer when asking &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question; in this regard it's rather like a university seminar or tutorial &amp;mdash; you're given techniques to use. If you were actually asking &quot;What resources can I use to research etymology,&quot; then that's a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; question (even though JR has answered that as well) so you need to be very clear about what it is you actually want to know. If necessary, take the time to be sure of that yourself and to make it apparent in the question you write. It may only become apparent when you have actually tried to find an answer for yourself: at least then you know what you were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't already done so, do commit to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners?referrer=HiV9msKPw848GxFV_g6lKw2&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site. There are two reasons: as a non-native speaker with a good level of competence, you may be able to answer questions from those who are less skilled in the language; and if you have questions then they may fit better into that site than this one. [That's not dismissive; some questions will fit better in ELU.SE, but the dividing line will only become apparent once that site is up and running.] However even that site will expect a certain level of research and self-help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I may not be the best person to comment on that. However, one example of &quot;rude&quot; would be a direct &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attack, which this wasn't and wasn't intended to be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T09:39:29.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T10:12:47.880" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am experienced that questions might get closed if they are too localized. I have seen FAQs and I found the &lt;em&gt;&quot;If the question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet then it is too localized. please make the question more broadly applicable&quot;.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And may I know on what basis that you measure the &quot;localized&quot; factor of a question? If you ask me, the question that I am posting will be useful to the average non-native english user or an average person from our country at least.  At such situation it is useful to the many people who are kind of me and who are at my knowledge level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not good that question is getting closed. I would like to avoid my question get closed stating &quot;too localized&quot;How to identify my self that my question is too localized and how can I get answers for those questions? What research I can do and what care that I can take before posting such questions to avoid closing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T13:37:04.787" Title="How to identify my self that my question is too localized and how can I get answers for those questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3521" CreationDate="2012-12-28T10:51:04.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to caution you about reading too much into the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; that a question gets closed. When someone votes to close a question, they are presented a choice of five options. It's not uncommon to see quite a bit of overlap between some of these choices, to the point where it's hard to pick one, but the system forces a choice of one and only one answer. So, even though a voter might be thinking, &quot;This kind of falls under &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;, but I could see it being deemed &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;, too,&quot; they can only select one. I wrote more about this on an earlier meta answer; you can read about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3093&quot;&gt;HERE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to prevent such closures, I think sometimes they are unavoidable. If you've done a lot of research to answer your own question, but never managed to find that &quot;missing piece,&quot; it could be that, once your question is asked, there's an obvious answer, so the question gets closed. That happens every now and then, even to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89618&quot;&gt;the best of the best&lt;/a&gt;. Typically, when that happens, the question does get answered somewhere (perhaps in a comment), so at least the mystery is solved, and you won't have to toss and turn at night, wondering about the answer to your question.  Remember, in cases like this, closure is meant to be a neutral activity, which is why you won't lose any reputation points when a question that you asked is eventually closed. So, there's no need to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95774&quot;&gt;make a face&lt;/a&gt; – just keep up the good work, and everything will turn out alright in the long run.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T10:51:04.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2012-12-28T12:40:45.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To an extent, it's an inevitable result of the site's success. When ELU was struggling to get known, anybody who made the effort to find it was likely to be prepared to ask a thoughtful question, and to put in the time to create a thoughtful answer. Now that it pops up in a Google search for anybody who wants to know something about English  (which was one of the objectives to begin with), the average quality of both questions and answers seems to be declining; the law of diminishing returns. At this point, the future of the site will be determined not by those who talk and vote, but by those who put in the hard work of editing, reviewing and (&lt;em&gt;pace&lt;/em&gt; Martha) closing when needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T12:40:45.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3521" CreationDate="2012-12-28T13:37:04.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's really nothing you could have done to prevent that question from being closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did exactly what you ought to do: you ran across an odd usage, you took it to be an idiom you had not previously encountered, you searched diligently for a definition of the idiom, you reported your efforts and asked for elucidation. You could not know that in fact the usage was not idiomatic at all but was a representation of the speech of someone whose command of English was greatly inferior to your own. The question was closed because the phrase in question isn't English, just as we close questions which turn on typographical errors or odd poetic metaphors or idiolectic (personally eccentric) uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing the question thus implies no criticism of your efforts; on the contrary, it's an admirable question and has been upvoted. It just means that once the answer has been supplied there's nothing to be gained by pursuing the matter further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T13:37:04.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3527" CreationDate="2012-12-28T14:11:39.103" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only just saw this meta-question here at ELU about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3511/are-lmgtfy-links-not-considered-insulting&quot;&gt;insulting LMGTFY links&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't understand what is really being referred to. I have followed the meta.ELU question links to the meta.SO discussions and links there and it just is not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a URL in an answer to lmgtfy.com with search terms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a URL in an answer to google.com with search terms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a URL in an answer with label 'lmgtfy' and linking to a web site (dictionary/thesaurus/answering website)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a question that is general reference and could be answered easily with a google search&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My misunderstanding comes from the descriptions around it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First people are saying let's &lt;em&gt;blacklist&lt;/em&gt; them. But what is 'blacklisting'? don't you have to have a specific domain name to blacklist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's presume that the phenomenon (whatever it is) is very bad, 'rude' is the usual term. But is it the site lmgtfy.com that is particularly bad? Or any googled reference? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is such a link rude? If the answer really is on the web isn't a link the -best- answer? Choice of search terms makes a big difference and picking the right ones can be value added.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a link to a reference might be rude, but I would warrant that the original non-researched question that elicited the lmgtfy is also rude, and we (ELU at least) have institutionalized the response to these bad &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, because they are so troublesome, by the General Reference close option, which is essentially a statement that LMGTFY would suffice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all these possibilities together seem contradictory, on one end the lmgtfy comment itself being rude, and on the other the question which elicited such a comment being rude. Ostensibly 'LMGTFY comment' would mean literally a comment with a link to lmgtfy.com, but banning them would be like banning the use of the Gen Ref close option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which is the correct meaning of 'LGMTFY comment', and how is that different from Gen Ref?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T15:21:10.930" Title="I don't understand what is meant by 'LMGTFY comments'" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3525" CreationDate="2012-12-28T14:21:25.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A link may well be sufficient to explain this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+%22lmgtfy.com%22%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+%22lmgtfy.com%22%3F&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the way LMGTFY does its search can be seen as condescending. It emphasises the lack of prior research, and does so in a patronising manner by demonstrating how easy it is to get an answer which answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is to be closed as General Reference, a link to that &quot;single internet reference&quot; (or &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; to Google's search results) is usually all that's required: it's probably not necessary to rub the questioner's nose in it by actually demonstrating how to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T14:21:25.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3525" CreationDate="2012-12-28T14:21:49.013" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;LMGTFY links are, quite literally, links to the domain &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lmgtfy.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lmgtfy.com&lt;/a&gt;. Which does have a number of aliases such as &lt;em&gt;letmegooglethat.com&lt;/em&gt;, but which is not the same as, or affiliated with, &lt;em&gt;google.com&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link to Google Search is not rude in and of itself; depends on the presentation. A LMGTFY link is always rude &lt;em&gt;by design&lt;/em&gt;. Its whole point is to say &quot;you are a moron for not being able to use Google&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Neither&lt;/em&gt; LMGTFY &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; Google proper are considered general reference for the sake of closing a question. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;list of general references&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T14:21:49.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3513" CreationDate="2012-12-28T14:54:40.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, we should not blacklist the lmgtfy site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being rude is... well, rude...and hurtful, but using lmgtfy is only rude in a very slight intellectual manner. Blacklisting is a bit heavy hammer to deal with something so mundane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lmgtfy is not inherently rude and can be helpful. It is no different from give a google search with the same search terms. That might also be considered rude, but being told the easy way to do something can be helpful too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Legislating rudeness by blacklisting is overkill.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't encourage commenting by lmgtfy.com at all or even a google search or even the link that a google search gives in the first hit, but it is very annoying to see a question, google for the obvious, and find that first-link answer, a rudeness in itself for the OP to not have done that minimal research)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T14:54:40.750" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:10:50.603" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have learned that questions can be closed for various good reasons. How ever if my question get closed and if there is no way to improve in order to reopen,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   (1) What are the appropriate actions that I can take on those closed questions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   (2) How those closed questions going to penalize me? What are the negative effects having closed questions in my questions list?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   (3) How can I pay that penalty and escape from the negative effects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T15:34:38.533" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T14:55:50.700" Title="What action I can take on closed questions? How those going to penalize me and what steps that I can take to pay back that penalty?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3525" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:21:10.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Andrew and Reg say. I'd like to add that a user who is unaware of our local regulations is by no means &quot;rude&quot;. This mode of thinking is known as the Bureaucrat's Trap. His question may be undesirable, but he is a perfectly fine human being deserving of basic respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T15:21:10.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:29:00.870" Score="-3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/4643/14666&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; not GR?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What phrase is “o'clock” contracting? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/o%27clock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;o'clock&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of or according to the clock: three o'clock.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=o%27clock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;o'clock&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c.1720, abbreviation of &lt;em&gt;of the clock&lt;/em&gt; (1640s), from M.E. &lt;em&gt;of the clokke&lt;/em&gt; (late 14c.). Attested from 1904 in reference to direction (by shooters, fighter pilots, etc.).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How was this relevant &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4643/what-phrase-is-oclock-contracting#comment83009_4643&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; ignored?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flagged as general reference because a Google search for &quot;o'clock&quot; leads directly to several pages explaining it including three dictionaries. – Hugo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could the ever-vigilant members let the question garner twelve up votes, and the answers 18+7+5+1 up votes?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above all, what have the answers contributed beyond what is already available as general reference? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T15:38:40.767" Title="Why is this question not GR?" Tags="|discussion|general-reference|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3529" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:31:28.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to do anything. The problem is that closing a question looks like punishment, but it is really not intended to be as aggressive as it looks: all it means is that five people on this website don't think it is a good fit for the site. So don't worry about having a few closed questions. If you really think your question wouldn't be useful for any future visitors, you can delete it. But consider duplicate questions: they are useful in that they can lead future visitors to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no penalty. Hurray! The only exception to this is that if you really have tons of questions that are not only closed, but also of very low quality, and you don't seem to learn from suggestions for improvement, you may get suspended after a long time. But this is only for extreme cases; I wouldn't worry about it. You would probably hate this site long before that happened and move on to a regular English learning forum.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no real penalty, but you can simply ask more non-closable questions to improve people's opinion of you, if that's what you're afraid of. I haven't looked at your questions; sometimes people can be mean, so don't take it all too personally.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T20:36:58.567" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T20:36:58.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3531" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:38:40.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was posted on November 2nd 2010. GR got &lt;em&gt;proposed&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/598/should-we-require-some-reasonable-research-being-done-aka-questions-that-can-b/599#599&quot;&gt;more than two months later&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;implemented&lt;/em&gt; several months later still (can't find the exact date right now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to vote to close as GR now that that reason exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, or in addition, the question can get a historical-importance lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T15:38:40.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T18:21:57.307" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non native english speaker, I always have difficulty to interpret meaning of some words and phrases and their usages. Some times even at my best efforts I get hard time to interpret the implied meaning. Can I check with community what I had interpreted and get confirmation that my interpretation is correct or wrong? Is that acceptable as per the community rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T21:05:06.667" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T22:49:08.253" Title="Can I check with community with my interpretation when I am not sure about my interpretation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T22:32:19.717" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153/does-copy-and-paste-infringe-copyrights&quot;&gt;Does copy and paste infringe copyrights?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site lends itself to questions/answers that contain quoted sections of materials from other sources, and in particular embedded images. However, I have been leery of including images in my own questions/answers that aren't clearly public domain or creative commons (just finding them on the web doesn't make them mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87557/what-is-the-name-of-the-truck-shown-in-this-picture/87560#87560&quot;&gt;this excellent answer &lt;/a&gt; contains an image with no copyright visible in the image itself, so no question that the original author does not wanted to protect it. The same hold true for the related question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't want to get into a debate on whether people agree on copyright law or whether it even applies in their home countries, but I would like to know if EL&amp;amp;U has a policy about including copyrighted material, especially images, directly in the body of a question  or an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there the possibility of putting this site at risk by doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user19148" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T22:34:45.023" Title="Including copyrighted images in questions/answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-01-02T14:01:48.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3534" CreationDate="2012-12-28T22:49:08.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hopefully if your question is made in a genuine spirit of enquiry, it will always be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But take, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95774/other-meaning-of-the-phrase-make-face&quot;&gt;other meaning of the phrase “Make face”&lt;/a&gt;. You hadn't realised it was just an example of the 'Indian English' tendency to drop the article (from commonplace &lt;em&gt;make &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; face&lt;/em&gt;), so you ended up confusing it with the rare slang usage &lt;em&gt;make face = kiss/snog&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in complete agreement with those who voted to close that question (along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95460/differences-in-the-meaning-of-the-words-contempt-and-derision&quot;&gt;Differences in the meaning of the words “contempt” and “Derision”?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95544/etymology-for-the-phrase-go-to-hell&quot;&gt;Etymology for the phrase “Go to hell”&lt;/a&gt;) because I think these are effectively General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I find your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95537/whack-someone-vs-whop-someone-vs-wallop-someone&quot;&gt;Whack/Whop/Wallop&lt;/a&gt; question quite interesting. There are several subtle differences in meaning/usage there which can't easily be established using a dictionary, and I shan't be surprised if someone wants to dig deeper and give a more comprehensive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to simply keep asking your questions as they arise, and don't take it too much to heart if a few get closed. As your English (and your &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&amp;amp;tbo=u&amp;amp;q=google+fu&amp;amp;tbs=dfn:1&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=eSHeUN64MYbO0QW-soGABw&amp;amp;ved=0CDEQkQ4&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;amp;bvm=bv.1355534169,d.d2k&amp;amp;fp=f42fee5d8e10998d&amp;amp;bpcl=40096503&amp;amp;biw=1328&amp;amp;bih=897&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google-fu&lt;/a&gt;) improve, that few will become fewer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T22:49:08.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-29T04:06:35.063" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have experienced that some questions are stand on the verge of closing reasons. I got friendly warnings from other users about one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95882/does-smugness-imply-having-or-showing-low-opinions-of-others&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;. But my question is good fit and not warrant for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific question here is, In such situations can I add disclaimer in order to prevent that others mistakenly close the question. What other actions that I can take in order to avoid the question get closed? How can add more clarity to the question which moves away it from the verge of closing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T06:14:41.697" Title="can I add disclaimer for the questions which are perilously close?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3537" CreationDate="2012-12-29T06:14:41.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and add the disclaimer! Format your disclaimer as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is a real question because...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is not general reference because...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is constructive because...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also say that you consulted the relevant sections of both OED and Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum without finding what you were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T06:14:41.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3551" CreationDate="2012-12-29T13:31:04.413" Score="3" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want this to come across as some whiny &quot;wah wah I can't take the downvotes&quot; post, but I am honestly perplexed why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95864/font-fount-of-information&quot;&gt;Font/Fount of Information&lt;/a&gt; received not one - but two - downvotes.  As there were no accompanying comments as to how it could be improved, I'm hoping for some constructive feedback here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort.  It is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post contains my research.  The NGram and dictionary seemed to contradict each other, and although there were a couple random &quot;Bob's grammar blog&quot; posts about it, none seemed to offer any conclusive answers from a reputable source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for usefulness... if I (as a native-speaking semi-pro writer) am not sure if there are reasons to use one over the other, and cannot find a definitive answer, surely the answer might be useful to someone somewhere?  It wasn't even a hypothetical exercise; I came across it as I was writing about my toddler being a 'font of new words' and wasn't sure if it should be 'fount' instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78524/follow-the-signings&quot;&gt;second question&lt;/a&gt; that has received a puzzling number of downvotes.  I'll be the first to admit that neither would win any 'insightful question of the year' awards, but they were both meant as good-faith efforts to ask a decent question and contribute to the site. So just color me confused as to exactly what our standards are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T14:37:37.923" Title="Why no love for the founts?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3540" CreationDate="2012-12-29T14:59:42.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason to downvote this myself, but is two really 'a puzzling number'? Sometimes posts attract unjustified downvotes; sometimes posts attract unjustified upvotes. Personally, I see this as the way of the world; a formal  inquiry into the former (I see Lord Justice Leveson is free at present) would logically also have to look into the latter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T14:59:42.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3547" CreationDate="2012-12-29T23:54:39.620" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed from time to time, users leave comments requesting other users increase their accept rate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this behavior accepted/acceptable in our community? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users don't feel they've received an &quot;acceptable&quot; answer on questions, should they be &quot;punished&quot;&amp;sup1;  in future questions for not accepting an answer on previous questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are people really not answering questions because of low accept rates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example comment:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67898/in-the-last-hundred-years-and-the-last-time#comment130552_67898&quot;&gt;In the last hundred years and the last time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You’ve asked twelve questions, but accepted zero answers. Why should anyone think you’d bother with this one? – tchrist May 16 at 11:51&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; downvotes, no answers, unfriendly comments, ecc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user19148" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Should users be asked to increase their accept rates?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3546" CreationDate="2012-12-30T09:30:50.633" Score="-3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked a question, and it's about the usage of non English words in English ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95995/what-should-be-the-plural-of-kibbutz&quot;&gt;What should be the plural of “kibbutz”&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opnion the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/foreign-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;foreign-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;foreign-language&lt;/a&gt; is relevant for the question, however it doesn't exist. Since I don't have enough reputation to add a new tag, I'm asking the community to add this tag, so that I and others could use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T09:38:29.057" Title="Please add the tag &quot;foreign-language&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3545" CreationDate="2012-12-30T09:38:29.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read through your question, as well as a similar one on how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/501/should-nouns-borrowed-from-japanese-be-pluralized&quot;&gt;pluralize Japanese import nouns&lt;/a&gt;, I think the tag you are looking for would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/loan-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loan-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loan-words&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I don't think a new tag is really needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T09:38:29.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3544" CreationDate="2012-12-30T11:36:04.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/147726/176533&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, those comments are highly discouraged through the SE network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if a moderator sees them, we can delete them without notice (well, this is true for comments in general but especially here). Users can even flag those comments and I think they'll be deleted by pretty much every moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is: the accept rate is &lt;em&gt;meaningless&lt;/em&gt;. It's often taken as a seriousness-o-meter, but it really doesn't tell you anything else except how much a user accepted. It doesn't tell you &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; that user didn't accept in the first place, why do we assume it's because the OP is malicious? I have some &quot;suspended&quot; questions myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP should not be forced to accept, because that acceptance shows that &lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; it helped the OP and &lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; it's most likely the correct answer. If the existing answers don't satisfy one or both these points, why should the OP accept? I wouldn't accept myself! For the record, the accept rate is probably going to disappear from the public view, I think it'll still be available in the user profile, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these comments do not serve any actual purpose except nagging the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What you can do&lt;/strong&gt; instead is tell a newbie how the system works. Like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello xxx, I see you thanked this answerer. If this answer helped you solve the problem, you can accept it clicking on the tick (√) next to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is different, you're helping someone using the tools, not &quot;c'mon accept, c'mon, click on that&quot;. Note that if the OP accepts after this comment, you should delete it since it's obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T11:44:46.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3556" CreationDate="2012-12-30T13:48:10.150" Score="10" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling that after almost three years there are currently a lot of beginner and easy questions and comparatively few expert questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very important to have questions here that you wouldn't easily find the answer to in most dictionaries or introductory articles on the web, although Google is not General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of current expert questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76578/why-is-american-english-so-wedded-to-the-subjunctive&quot;&gt;Why is American English so wedded to the subjunctive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87596/where-does-dont-bogart-that-joint-come-from&quot;&gt;Where does “Don't bogart that joint” come from&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[ &lt;em&gt;deleted: see FumbleFinger &amp;amp; Hugo's comments&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74784/the-growth-of-english&quot;&gt;The growth of English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a few others but not many, at present I would say around 5% at most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having tried unsuccessfully to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75792/put-x-down-to-vs-put-down-x-to-subjects-of-verbs-with-two-particles&quot;&gt;expert-level questions&lt;/a&gt;, I've realized that this is a lot harder than I expected, at least before the EL&amp;amp;U policy changed (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3425/what-values-drive-our-policy-towards-question-closure/3426#3426&quot;&gt;Cerberus' invective&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we can use this meta thread to share advice about the kind of expert questions we want and the under-represented topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let your voice be heard!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T17:58:54.333" Title="Shouldn't we try to produce more expert questions? Yes, but how?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3544" CreationDate="2012-12-30T14:17:42.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If users don't feel they've received an &quot;acceptable&quot; answer on questions, should they be &quot;punished&quot; in future questions for not accepting an answer on previous questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think users should be &lt;em&gt;punished&lt;/em&gt; for not accepting an answer. Accepting an answer is rather subjective, and it is done from a single user. More important of that is how the answer is accepted by the community with the votes. A question that is accepted by the OP, but has a negative score gives a clear signal to the future users, and that is not probably &quot;this is the right answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are people really not answering questions because of low accept rates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think users are not answering a question simply because the OP has a low accept rate. The answer is not helpful just to the OP, but also to future readers, and I think that who answers doesn't do it just to be helpful to the user who asked the question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There could be users who don't answer a question basing on the accept rate of who asked the question, and that is a decision they can take. In my experience, those users are a limited part of all the users who answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T14:17:42.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3540" CreationDate="2012-12-30T14:37:37.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to upvote the question, in spite of a few concerns about its wording and presentation.  These concerns include:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• The referents for many of the pronouns in the question are unclear upon first reading.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• The question being asked is not clearly stated.  The post never explicitly asks whether &lt;em&gt;font&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fount&lt;/em&gt; differ, and if so, how and why they differ.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• The desired context for comparison of &lt;em&gt;font&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fount&lt;/em&gt; is too briefly and obliquely implied, not stated clearly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• The text offers little support for the &lt;em&gt;are they really wholly interchangeable&lt;/em&gt; alternative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps some reader was upset by the bald offering of the alternative hypothesis as if it's true, or perhaps was annoyed by vague referents for pronouns.  But such things seem not enough to trigger a downvote.&#xA;In general I agree with Robusto's advice to “Never attribute to malice what may be adequately explained by stupidity or ignorance”, but because in the present case stupidity and ignorance seem inadequate to explain a downvote, malice – or at least unfriendliness – seems likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T14:37:37.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3529" CreationDate="2012-12-30T14:55:50.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the appropriate actions that I can take on those closed questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can improve your question to make it acceptable. If it was closed as duplicate, you can edit it to make it not a duplicate, if that is possible; if it was closed a not a real question (which generally means the question was too vague), make it more focused, and describe exactly what you want to know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After you did that, you can flag your question for moderation attention, explaining that you think the question is a good suit for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't warrant your questions are re-opened, but gives you a chance. If that fails, look at the questions asked from other users, and learn from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How those closed questions going to penalize me? What are the negative effects having closed questions in my questions list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were on &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, having closed questions, with a low score, and some of them were deleted, that would cause you to be banned from asking further questions. As long as I know, this has not been yet implemented in other sites (apart &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Super User&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Programmers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Still, if you would keep asking the same question, which is then closed as duplicate, and you keep doing that for some questions, it is probable you would be temporary suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I pay that penalty and escape from the negative effects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just learn how to ask questions. If you keep asking too vague questions, without showing any effort in writing better questions, it is probable they will be always closed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you are not sure the question is acceptable, you can always ask here on meta (when your reputation is higher than 5).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I take you are saying &lt;em&gt;penalty&lt;/em&gt; to refer to your closed, or down-voted questions. Apart from that, and your questions being deleted, there is not any penalty, if we exclude your account being temporary suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T14:55:50.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2012-12-30T15:33:48.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A general problem that turns up on some sites (I've seen this discussed on Christianity SE) is that the self-answerer is concentrating on the excellent answer they have in mind, and the question is thrown together as an afterthought just to lead to the answer. That's a problem: the question should be as well written and as well researched as ever. It should provide enough context and detail that another person could also answer the question asked. It should, in fact, be a &lt;strong&gt;real question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours was. This is a general problem which turns up with many self-answerers, but your question here looks fine to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T15:33:48.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3555" CreationDate="2012-12-30T16:37:23.673" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a post of mine edited, where words like &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;it's&lt;/em&gt; were replaced by &lt;em&gt;doesn’t&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;it’s&lt;/em&gt;. The new apostrophe is not &lt;em&gt;'&lt;/em&gt; (the same button as &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) and it is not &lt;em&gt;`&lt;/em&gt; (the same button as &lt;em&gt;~&lt;/em&gt;). I've looked on my keyboard for other characters that look like an apostrophe, but I could find any; the comma looks like it, but it is on the bottom of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What character is it, and how is it typed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20436" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-12-31T20:12:42.277" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T20:12:42.277" Title="Which character is ’?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3554" CreationDate="2012-12-30T17:40:42.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2019/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unicode Character 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK' (U+2019)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can type them on a Mac by typing &lt;code&gt;Shift+Option+]&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;You can type them on Windows by typing Alt+0146&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details &lt;a href=&quot;http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/finetypography/ht/curly_quotes.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2012-12-30T18:34:13.097" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T18:34:13.097" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3548" CreationDate="2012-12-30T20:37:53.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To change the ratio of expert to beginner posts, make the site more welcoming to experts. It’s necessary to create a climate in which more experts join because they feel that this is “their” site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many things go into this: site design, editorial policy, and tone, and these are all very big topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where we, the existing community, can make a major contribution is in editorial policy and tone. Both should be much more professional than the typical “ask an English question” site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T20:37:53.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3561" CreationDate="2012-12-31T19:27:38.837" Score="7" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having had five years of graduate study in rhetorical theory (hence my moniker, rhetorician), I gravitate more toward discussions on the persuasive usage of language than the grammatical usage of language.  My question is simply this:  Is the rhetorical perspective out of place in ELU-StackExchange?  I will not be too offended if the answer is yes and will continue making my small contributions to the dialectic as it is structured now.  Still, the rhetorical, or persuasive, perspective can be valuable and useful even in discussions on the  nitty-gritty of grammar.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32623" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T21:57:44.713" Title="Is the rhetorical perspective out of place in English Language Usage-StackExchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3559" CreationDate="2012-12-31T20:07:02.727" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Remove unnecessary step&quot; phrase synonym&#xA;&#xA;What is another way of saying &quot;remove unnecessary step&quot;?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the posting page doesn't let it through. Is the question really bad and doesn't meet certain quality standards, or it contains no-no words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20150" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T01:33:31.043" Title="Quality standards seem to be a bit high these days" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3558" CreationDate="2012-12-31T20:10:18.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it doesn't contain any contextual information. When you write a phrase request, you must include the context you wish to use the synonym in, and indicate what phrases you have looked for in a thesaurus, for instance, and why they are not suitable for your purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This helps the answerer give you what you need without guessing, and also makes it less likely that your question will be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T20:10:18.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3558" CreationDate="2012-12-31T20:11:21.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, to get it out of the way, there are no words that are completely prohibited on Stack Exchange, and the only restriction is that profanity may be used only when discussing the profanity in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;quality standards&quot; are an automatic filter; I would highly suggest you give some additional background in your question, which should more than overcome the filter. For example, why are you looking for this phrase? That helps give answerers context so that they know whether or not a particular answer would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T20:11:21.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3557" CreationDate="2012-12-31T20:58:49.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think rhetoric is as natural a part of English as are, say, meaning, etymology, grammar, single-phrase-requests, and what have you. The way words work together not only to mean something, but to mean something in a particular way—persuasive, powerful, subtle, misleading, dramatic, deceptive—has to fall under the rubric of &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without such illumination into the way words in English mean what they do, we might as well merge with Linguistics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One caveat, however: I don't think this gives us license to discuss rhetoric &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; rhetoric. Only when questions about English cry out for an explanation involving rhetoric should that be brought to bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A2303+rhetorical&quot;&gt;my own responses involving rhetorical figures&lt;/a&gt; here on EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25882/suitable-description-for-this-type-of-sentence/25894#25894&quot;&gt;Suitable description for this kind of sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15970/omitting-and-in-a-sentence/15973#15973&quot;&gt;Omitting &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6935/is-it-possible-to-describe-something-with-a-question/6940#6940&quot;&gt;Is it possible to describe something with a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many more. I'm certainly not the only one who has cited rhetoric to answer questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T21:57:44.713" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3558" CreationDate="2012-12-31T23:20:44.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing wrong with your question was that it contained insufficient context.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without knowing the overall context of where and how the phrase would be used, it's almost impossible to answer the question. For example, I might suggest &lt;em&gt;amputate unneeded step&lt;/em&gt; – I doubt that would be a good alternative, but, without any additional information, it's hard to say for sure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, to a carpenter, a &lt;em&gt;step&lt;/em&gt; is part of a staircase; to a dancer, it's part of a routine; to a cook, it's part of a recipe; to a pedestrian, it's part of a journey. What kind of step are we removing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also help if you shared some information about your target audience. Who are we addressing?  MBA students? Software engineers? Kindergartners?  One important factor in figuring out a good way to rephrase something is knowing &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; will be reading the reworded text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you provide such information – to include what you don't like about the current wording – I think you'll get more help.  Without that information, though, this isn't about &quot;quality standards&quot; as much as it is about asking questions that are answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all said, this site does strive for high standards, so it wouldn't hurt to keep that in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-01-01T01:33:31.043" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T01:33:31.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3548" CreationDate="2012-12-31T23:52:08.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the site should consider contacting organizations such as the Linguistic Society of America and the website &lt;em&gt;Linguist List&lt;/em&gt;, which is currently the definitive site for linguists, despite its UI. I went to an LSA conference in January and didn't see this site mentioned anywhere, while &lt;em&gt;Linguist List&lt;/em&gt; was all over the place even though I know a lot of my friends and professors would enjoy a site like this. I majored in linguistics and only found this site through &lt;em&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/em&gt; while I was looking for programming help. I'm afraid the site doesn't have enough visibility in these kinds of circles. If you're buried in research and grading, you don't have all that much time to go find new content and communities online- they have to come to you. A lot of linguists I know don't feel like &quot;tech people&quot; (read: are considerably older than me) and won't go looking for this kind of thing even when they do have free time, so I'm going to be emailing a couple of professors tonight that I know would spend hours on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33013" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T23:52:08.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3580" CreationDate="2013-01-02T16:44:28.830" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a not native of English language, I have decided to learn English grammar &amp;amp; usage independently, without getting any course. I love EL&amp;amp;U, so I would like to use this site as my main source to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how can I use this site to learn basic and intermediate English grammar &amp;amp; usage at a structured pace without overwhelming myself? Basically, in what ways can I use this site as a structured learning tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastActivityDate="2013-01-04T01:40:46.420" Title="Learning by using the site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3568" CreationDate="2013-01-02T18:11:00.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if it were possible (which I doubt) I don't think it's a good idea to try and use ELU as a &quot;structured learning tool&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site itself has no overall &quot;structure&quot; that can meaningfully be mapped to a course of study. About all we've got are &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; - which aren't always well-chosen in the first place, and certainly aren't consistently linked to appropriate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be better to choose some particular introductory text and work through it, using ELU as a resource to help out whenever you come up against something that's not clear. Note that standard ELU &quot;rules of engagement&quot; would still require you to make some effort to resolve any issues by your own efforts before actually asking anything here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose you could always hang out in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and ask others to correct you whenever you make some minor error. How well that works might depend on how interesting people find your contributions &lt;em&gt;at the semantic level&lt;/em&gt; (and thus, how likely they are to read and respond), but I can't imagine anyone would tell you to &quot;Go away!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-01-02T18:11:00.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3568" CreationDate="2013-01-02T20:38:24.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have decided to learn English grammar &amp;amp; usage independently&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're obviously not going to start from scratch, but this still leaves it open as to what exactly you want to learn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you want to learn obscure vocabulary? Subtle nuances of grammar? Pronunciation varieties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All those will be touched on here, but &lt;strong&gt;ELU is decidedly not structured&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were looking for a really good &lt;em&gt;unstructured source&lt;/em&gt;, ELU would be the first place I would recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2013-01-02T20:38:24.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2013-01-03T04:20:37.037" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BSOmw.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Language Learners Beta&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31547" LastEditorUserId="31547" LastEditDate="2013-01-31T16:11:49.137" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T16:11:49.137" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-01-03T04:20:37.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3574" CreationDate="2013-01-03T06:21:33.370" Score="-3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96255/are-these-terms-considered-uncivilized-to-native-english-speakers&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which got closed as not constructive. The reason, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2637/fumblefingers&quot;&gt;a user&lt;/a&gt; has pointed out, being &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but your link to that acceptability of touristic question isn't really relevant to what we're talking about here. In general, I think questions of the form &quot;How offensive is [some term which is know to be at least potentially offensive]&quot; are Not Constructive. Everyone has an opinion, but none of them can be &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I do not deny &lt;em&gt;partly&lt;/em&gt;. I got two requests here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Travel.SE might be a site where these type of questions may be asked (as I get to &lt;a href=&quot;https://travel.stackexchange.com/search?q=polite&quot;&gt;see some of the examples&lt;/a&gt;). So maybe this question should be migrated there. I request so because it has got 1 delete vote already here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I am unable to quote these terms (&lt;em&gt;used in the question and marked as offensive as several users&lt;/em&gt;), how can I come to know &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; of these terms in some cases (&lt;em&gt;This question might not be the last to force me to use them&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:14.093" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T10:33:21.800" Title="Should this question be migrated?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3573" CreationDate="2013-01-03T06:51:07.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe Travel.SE would be an appropriate location for this question. Accordingly, I do not intend to migrate the question unless a Travel.SE mod indicates to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your second question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253/referencing-the-existence-of-words-that-may-be-offensive&quot;&gt;existing site policy&lt;/a&gt; is that offensive words &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be used if those words are the subject of discussion. As far as I can tell, the question has not been flagged as &lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt;, so I'm not sure where you got that idea from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T06:51:07.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3578" CreationDate="2013-01-03T22:00:14.973" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96510/resources-to-determine-pseudo-anglicisms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96510/resources-to-determine-pseudo-anglicisms&lt;/a&gt; was closed by a diamond moderator as &quot;Not Constructive&quot;, without any comments given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, I described what I was asking for, why I wanted it, and some possible ideas of how such a resource might work. And I think the answers would be objective. How could the question be improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1098/1420&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; on meta suggests that at least some resources questions are on-topic, at least on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially thought about asking it on meta, rather than main, but I decided to post it on the latter as that is where most &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; questions are asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T22:21:13.490" Title="How to improve the pseudo-anglicism question" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3577" CreationDate="2013-01-03T22:21:13.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;this section&lt;/a&gt; of the FAQ. Under &quot;not constructive&quot; it specifically states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is why your answer was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you believe this topic may be acceptable here on meta, why didn't you just ask it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T22:21:13.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3582" CreationDate="2013-01-03T23:19:28.287" Score="7" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;What resources can I use to determine if a given phrase is a pseudo-anglicism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;top page&quot; is not a common English expression, but a native speaker of Japanese who's learning English may not know that. For example, they may see トップページ (toppu pēji, literally &quot;top page&quot;, meaning home page) used frequently in Japanese, and assume that it exists in English. Pseudo-anglicisms is such a common phenomenon in Japan, it has its own name: 和製英語 (wasei eigo, literally &quot;English made in Japan&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking if a word exists in a dictionary is a useful first step, but it's not definitive, because if it isn't listed, it might just indicate it's a legitimate word describing an obscure concept, or a recently coined word. Showing that a term is much more frequently used in one language (eg Japanese) than in English would help, as would showing that a term is much more commonly used by non-native speakers than by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm primarily interested in Japanese pseudo-anglicisms, but references about pseudo-anglicisms in general (Denglisch, Franglais) are ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2013-01-04T19:16:25.190" Title="Resources to determine pseudo-anglicisms" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3568" CreationDate="2013-01-04T01:40:46.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you read or overhear a construction whose meaning you are unsure of, but can make a good guess, write up your tentative analysis and post it on the site as a question. It is important to propose your own analysis and make arguments for it, because it shows research effort on your part and helps you learn better. Hopefully the answers you get will make you reflect and learn better, leading you to more and more sophisticated understanding of English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-01-04T01:40:46.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3548" CreationDate="2013-01-04T13:17:19.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rewards are always a good way to drive behavior.  We could use an &quot;expert&quot; tag on questions that are deemed to be advanced subject material and offer badges (gold and silver preferred) for &quot;expert&quot; questions with some (relatively low) level of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to correct me if this is already in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3800" LastActivityDate="2013-01-04T13:17:19.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3579" CreationDate="2013-01-04T19:16:25.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would probably search &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; and see if the results match the context you're expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22top%20page%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;top page&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it gives rubbish like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Page 69 bottom right, Page 72, Page 92, Page 95 top left, Page 109 bottom middle, Page 125 top, Page 155 right. ... Page 233 right, Page 236 top. Page 236 bottom MARTHA COOPER Page 97 center, Page 188, Page 189, Page 190 right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22top%20page%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1#hl=en&amp;amp;safe=off&amp;amp;tbo=d&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=%22home%20page%22&amp;amp;oq=%22home%20page%22&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.3...97896.98382.1.98925.5.5.0.0.0.4.268.938.0j3j2.5.0...0.0...1c.1.bN4aptGGkB8&amp;amp;psj=1&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;amp;bvm=bv.1355534169,d.bGE&amp;amp;fp=f4d27c9975af2402&amp;amp;bpcl=40096503&amp;amp;biw=1024&amp;amp;bih=485&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;home page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; gives meaningful results like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Home Page: An Introduction to Web Page Design&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  books.google.com/books?isbn=0531202550&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Christopher Lampton - 1997 - No preview - More editions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A description of Web pages discusses their uses and describes how to design one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could search any similar source of real text, for example newspaper archives or even just normal search engine results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, unfortunately there's no Japanese corpus but, for example, you can try comparing English and French corpus results for the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bifteck%3aeng_2012,bifteck%3afre_2012&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bifteck&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=biftek%3aeng_2012,biftek%3afre_2012&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;. These chart shows virtually no English results, so it's quite clearly not an English word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2013-01-04T19:16:25.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-05T16:38:55.147" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently tried to correct an error in an answer but failed because I ran into the requirement that edits to posts must to be six or more characters. All I wanted to do was to add a missing &quot;,&quot;. That was the only change that was needed. Is there a work-around for this? Even better, can it be eliminated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T17:58:22.657" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T20:34:09.747" Title="Edits required to be six or more characters" Tags="|discussion|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3584" CreationDate="2013-01-05T20:34:09.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;2000 rep&lt;/a&gt;, you get full editing privileges for questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have 3886 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you sure you were logged in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T20:34:09.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3588" CreationDate="2013-01-05T23:46:33.023" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen the same user with a suspended account post questions 3 times in the past couple of weeks.  The first time I encountered this person's question, I wasn't aware of the suspended account so I answered the question.  I received a comment that I shouldn't answer questions from suspended users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I've seen 2 additional questions from the same user.  I flagged both questions with &quot;other&quot;, pointing out the users' suspended status and both questions have been closed, but for other reasons (general reference, I believe, in one case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are members of the community supposed to know that an account is suspended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are suspended users' questions allowed to be posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should community members do when they see a posting from a suspended account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25824" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T00:08:16.973" Title="How is a suspended user account restricted from participation?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3587" CreationDate="2013-01-06T00:08:16.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some suspended users circumvent the suspension by creating new accounts (&quot;sockpuppets&quot;), which are merged with their &quot;real&quot; account when the false accounts are found. In the meantime the user has asked his question and goaded community members into answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of this particular user's questions have in fact been deleted. Where there is an upvoted answer that's less likely to happen (although it has still been done to upvoted answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you see a posting from a suspended account, it's already been dealt with. If you suspect a posting from a sockpuppet account, flag it for moderator attention. Whether you choose to answer it is up to you. Some of the sockpuppets' questions have been interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's been quite a discussion about it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2777/what-should-we-do-about-users-circumventing-suspensions&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T00:08:16.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-06T11:23:37.573" Score="1" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/96699/14666&quot;&gt;difference&lt;/a&gt; between &lt;em&gt;froth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;foam&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lather&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;suds&lt;/em&gt; has recently been dealt with on ELU. They are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; exact synonyms.  That got me thinking: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why not analyze their collocations to gain some insight?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there some resource to find and compare the collocations of such word sets — say for example with this particular set of words to start with?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there an established method to derive a word’s distinctive implications from a study of its collocations in various corpora?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta&lt;/strong&gt;: Though it sounds like too many questions and too much detail, I believe it’s possible that a simple, canonical answer could exist.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" OwnerDisplayName="Kris" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:34:33.167" Title="How to compare collocation sets (for example, in froth, foam, lather, and suds)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-06T20:08:53.933" Score="13" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have lists of general-reference resources, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;one on meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1482&quot;&gt;a larger one on main&lt;/a&gt;. For the most part, these are things like dictionaries and thesauri, not actual tools related to natural language processing (NLP) or computational linguistics (CL). I would like to assemble a list of the most useful tools that come in handy for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These range from simple two-edged swords like Google Ngrams and the fancier corpus-analytic tools like the BNC or COCA (both of which require some sophistication to use), all the way up to tools for doing part-of-speech (POS) assignments, as well as stemmers, lemmatizers, chunkers, and syntactic analysers (‘parsers’).   There are a lot of other interesting ELU-related things it would be nice to know where to find the tools for, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, given this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes of course the car whose headlights were off was running is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can use the &lt;strong&gt;CMU Link Grammar Parser&lt;/strong&gt; via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the CGI form here&lt;/a&gt; to generate this parse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S Yes&#xA;   (S (PP of course)&#xA;      (S (NP (NP the car)&#xA;             (SBAR (WHNP whose headlights)&#xA;                   (S (VP were&#xA;                          (PRT off)))))&#xA;         (VP was&#xA;             (VP running is&#xA;                 (ADVP right)))))&#xA;   .)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, another approach is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chaoticity.com/dependensee-a-dependency-parse-visualisation-tool/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DependenSee visualization tool&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to generate a PNG of the dependency graph of a given sentence using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stanford Parser&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which looks like this for that same sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3nvZU.png&quot; alt=&quot;dependency graph of sample sentence&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please add a separate answer for each tool, and include both the link and a small demo of what that tool is good for.  I find the graphical tools especially useful, and I think a lot of other people do, too: witness the fascination with Google N-grams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can use the voting system as a way of showing which tools we think are most or least useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T21:53:01.397" Title="List of most useful NLP resources and tools" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-01-06T20:09:29.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3590" CreationDate="2013-01-06T20:26:12.460" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a number of ways to go about it, depending on where one is starting from, and where one expects to get to. Also on how hard one is willing to work, whether one is a native speaker or not, and whether one is trained linguistically or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to teach &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/wordmet.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;advanced courses in lexical semantics&lt;/a&gt;, which is the area the question falls into. Mostly we looked at English, almost all my students were native speakers of English, and they were trained in basic linguistics, so they could notice what was really there instead of what they'd been taught in third grade was there. That saves a lot of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can give some examples of how one might go about it, as it happens. Here are two partial dimensional analyses of lexical clusters like this that I developed as examples for my students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many verbs of &lt;em&gt;cutting&lt;/em&gt; does English have? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/cutting.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quite a few&lt;/a&gt;. And they're &lt;strong&gt;organized&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many verbs of unaided human motion does English have? Likewise, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;quite a few&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and one for a different audience&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; the differences among &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/valueworthpricecost.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;value, worth, cost,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;price&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, you look for metaphor themes and figure out the frames they require, then note the dimensions in those frames. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2016-10-08T18:34:33.167" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:34:33.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3612" CreationDate="2013-01-06T20:43:57.840" Score="1" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should one do when having a short question to which one can't find the answer? With short questions I mean question which can be answered with 'no' or 'yes', a simple example (&quot;Is 'advise' a noun?&quot;, &quot;Is 'trod' the past tense of 'tread'?&quot;, and go on.) Are we allowed to ask such short questions with a short answer: &quot;No,&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Please, don't answer &quot;No&quot; or &quot;Yes.&quot; Thank you!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T23:29:27.513" Title="Asking questions with very short answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3593" CreationDate="2013-01-06T20:49:22.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer, though, will consist not just of a one-word response to the direct question. It will also contain an explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this is so, or provide other background information, and it will generally cite reputable sources or specific expertise to back the answer up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, a good question will consist not just of a one-sentence query. It will also contain an explanation of why the question came up, provide context and examples of usage when appropriate, and it will show real forethought and effort: for example it will cite reputable sources or specific expertise consulted before asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2013-01-06T21:45:13.223" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T21:45:13.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3593" CreationDate="2013-01-06T21:14:20.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with such questions being asked, although they are often prime candidates for closure as general reference. That fate can be avoided, though, with further clarification about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question is being asked, coupled with prior research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for something as straightforward as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Is &lt;em&gt;advise&lt;/em&gt; a noun?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd expect to see something like references to (or excerpts from) reputable dictionaries, along with published quotes that use the word incongruously with those definitions. In other words, the question may have a simple answer, but the O.P. should take pains to present it as a worthy and thought-provoking question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Such wrinkles often exist, and sometimes motivate questions that seem rather basic on the surface; however, it seems that O.P.s don't always do the best job of explaining those vindicating factors up front, and opt for vague brevity instead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T21:14:20.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-07T19:32:59.920" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went to look at the privilege descriptions as a result of a different question (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/edit&lt;/a&gt; ) and the &quot;Reputation Required&quot; box has its right boundary drawn incorrectly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zk0WU.png&quot; alt=&quot;edge of box drawn in wrong location&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T20:43:55.677" Title="Misaligned box edge in privilege description pages" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-08T10:31:43.763" Score="0" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this applies to all the Stack Exchange sites, but one of the close votes is 'not a real question'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely this is a poor choice of words, when is a question not a question? I would expect it either is or it isn't a question, the only area of confusion would be when rhetorical? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so I am clear, I'm not asking for it to be changed on the site, I'm actually asking whether it is a misnomer or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, despite my question making it explicitly clear it was about the use of language, it has been migrated and as such, I'll change the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the phrase &quot;not a real question&quot; be changed to &quot;to not a suitable question&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26515" OwnerDisplayName="Dave Rook" LastEditorUserId="26515" LastEditDate="2013-01-08T10:51:38.880" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T02:31:37.163" Title="Is 'not a real question' a misnomer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3598" CreationDate="2013-01-08T10:40:05.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never liked NARQ as a choice for closing. Its reasons seem solid, but the phrasing of the title itself is inaccurate and condescending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it is what we use when we throw up our hands in bafflement at some of the questions we see here. I think in those cases it could easily be replaced by the following two choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YD690.png&quot; alt=&quot;wtf and tl;dr&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2013-01-08T10:48:06.967" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T10:48:06.967" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3598" CreationDate="2013-01-08T12:18:08.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I am seeing your question for the first time after the migrate. I'll try to address both the original and the updated question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not a real question” is not a misnomer, for two reasons: (&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;) it has a definition in context, and (&lt;em&gt;ii&lt;/em&gt;) it is actually common in English to use “not a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; X” rhetorically to mean “not having the qualities that we expect a &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;suitable&lt;/em&gt; X to have”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, “not a real question” is defined to mean “cannot be reasonably answered in its current form”. Once you define something in context, it becomes a technical term and it doesn’t so much matter what the general meaning is. So your apparent contradiction evaporates. A question is “not a real question” when it “cannot be reasonably answered in its current form”, and that makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When defining in context there is a practical consideration that the definition should not create a completely confusing situation. Its meaning should not be completely unrelated or contradictory to the general term. But that does not apply to “not a real question”, because of how we use “not a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; X” rhetorically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the words &lt;em&gt;gentle&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gentleman&lt;/em&gt;. From the root *&lt;em&gt;gen-&lt;/em&gt; (“beget” or “be born”), and cognate with &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kin&lt;/em&gt; (and the &lt;em&gt;kinder-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;kindergarten&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;gentle&lt;/em&gt; once meant simply “born of a high-ranking family”, and &lt;em&gt;gentleman&lt;/em&gt; meant “high-born man”.&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=gentle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Search for “gentle” at EtymOnline.com&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; And it made sense, rhetorically speaking, to say that “John is not a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; gentleman” meaning that &lt;em&gt;John, while high-born, lacks the qualities that we expect a proper gentleman to have&lt;/em&gt;. Notice we have made such rhetorical judgments so easily and so often that the word &lt;em&gt;gentle&lt;/em&gt; has lost its original sense completely and the word &lt;em&gt;gentleman&lt;/em&gt; is not far behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to the metaquestion of whether it should be changed to read “not a &lt;em&gt;suitable&lt;/em&gt; question”. I think both the original wording and the proposed wording are fine. You could also substitute &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt;. Regardless of the wording, the meaning seems clear, especially considering that it is defined in context. So I am not convinced that any change is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T12:18:08.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-08T23:52:34.137" Score="0" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question entitled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97092/take-out-his-failures-on/97095#comment198044_97095&quot;&gt;Take out his failures on&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which I thought was a fine question, was closed for the stated reason that it is &quot;not a real question&quot;. I think the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; reason is that it was asked by this extraordinarily persistent suspended user who I see mentioned from time to time in meta, who I'll call by the pseudonym Cajetan for easy reference. I am gathering that stakeholders have decided on a policy of closing down every question asked by Cajetan in order to make Cajetan's suspension &quot;stick&quot;. I'm also supposing that these questions are being closed but not removed so that members such as myself who unwittingly answer them won't lose the reputation gained from their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure whatever Cajetan did merits a suspension, but I'd like to ask the members whether a good question asked by the notorious Cajetan is &quot;not a real question.&quot; If that's not the case, do members find it misleading to close a question for a false reason? If so, is stirring confusion in the important issue of question closures worthwhile collateral damage in our task of mulcting Cajetan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vide ne inimicis iracundia tua voluptati sit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T09:48:16.720" Title="Collateral damage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3598" CreationDate="2013-01-09T02:31:37.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me I have always disliked the label and especially its subtitle: &quot;It is difficult to tell what is being asked here.&quot; &lt;em&gt;It is difficult to understand X&lt;/em&gt; it could mean either that X is inherently incoherent, or that the person considering X is simply not up to the task of understanding X, understandable as X may be. The phrase gets used in polite company when one wants to ask for a clarification without directing blame for the confusion. At this point the one who is challenged will either apologize for not communicating clearly, assuring the challenger that it is not their fault, or the matter gets clarified quickly and the challenger apologizes for being slow to grasp something he/she should have understood on the first pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question gets closed it is always understood that the OP is the one who is at fault for misunderstanding, so the usual double meaning of the phrase is not there anymore (this might be different if there were more time for the OP or someone else to offer clarifying edits). There is an air of pretension with this nice little phrase getting used tactlessly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do endorse the OP's suggestion of reworking the language for this closure category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T02:31:37.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3601" CreationDate="2013-01-09T08:18:01.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it's wasn't envisaged when the explanation of NARQ was prepared, it's reasonable to describe a question posted purely for fun and to irk the community (and not to elicit actual useful needed information) as not a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T08:18:01.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3601" CreationDate="2013-01-09T09:48:16.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've mentioned this before – I try not to read too much into the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; why a question was closed. More than once, I've voted, thinking, &quot;This is kind of vague, kind of basic, and not very constructive, either.&quot; I could have picked more than one of the various reasons presented to me, but I was forced to select one and only one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular question is a case where the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; for closure probably didn't match reality very well, but that's bound to happen when we must select just one from a preset list. It's not like a court case, where we get to explain the reasoning behind our vote in a lengthy ruling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the research you put into your answer, but I'm not going to lose sleep over a question where someone asks, &quot;How can you use the phrase &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; with no additional research, and no real purpose given, either. This is a classic Cajetan question: find a dual use of a word or phrase, feign confusion, and hope that a debate ensues. Some are more interesting than others, but almost all of them feel like a waste of time after you realize the O.P. was asking more to be disruptive than to gain knowledge. Whether they can be deemed &quot;real&quot; or not, I suspect Cajetan has enough more than enough insight to provide a valid answer to his own questions, and, for that reason, I have no problem with a user who elects to vote to close, and then picks &quot;not a real question&quot; from the menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T09:48:16.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-09T19:58:44.470" Score="12" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.seeore.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://english.seeore.com/&lt;/a&gt; appears to be reposing a lot of EL&amp;amp;U content plastered with ads (5,047 posts at time of writing). I can't see any proper attribution, other than this footer which is probably just scraped and points back to them anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.seeore.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://english.seeore.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2011 &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.seeore.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/a&gt; | Powered by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blogger.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blogger&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this happened on a Blogger blog not so long ago; here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/is-http-englishqna-blogspot-com-violating-elu-or-your-copyright/&quot;&gt;relevant meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and here's waiwai933♦'s answer from it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's violating the copyright of EL&amp;amp;U users, but neither EL&amp;amp;U nor SE hold copyright of the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is doing something about it, since SE doesn't have the power to act on behalf of its users. The copyright owner (i.e. the OP) of each post would have to file a DMCA complaint about his/her posts with Google, but there is no way to combine these complaints or make them simplier in any way (because in theory, people could have relicensed their posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_dmca&amp;amp;product=blogger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;file a DMCA complaint&lt;/a&gt; with Google if and only if you were the original person to write the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the other answers and comments for more tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T00:40:43.517" Title="http://english.seeore.com/ scraping EL&amp;U content" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-10T21:07:22.780" Score="-3" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blessings on thee, little man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, that's how it starts. The John Greenleaf Whittier poem, that is. From 1855. Last time I looked, it was 158 years later. We don't write poetry like that anymore, and we sure don't talk the way they did back then. Hell, they hadn't even heard of the &lt;em&gt;typewriter&lt;/em&gt;, much less radio, TV, the Internet, &lt;em&gt;YouTube comments&lt;/em&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is living, moving, growing, changing, evolving. Despite the deference shown to the Oxford English Dictionary and its etymological citations (which, it must be said, often substitute for actual answers on the site), I don't think a site about English should look like it was printed on vellum. I'm just saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, it's a very nice looking site. No doubt about it. I'm sure Mrs. Johnson, my 8th-grade English teacher, would have loved it. I'm just wondering if it captures enough of the vibrant &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; of English as she is spoke today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ho-hum. Maybe I'm just tired. Tired and bored. But sepia and beige and Moroccan-leather red just aren't doing it for me anymore. Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Still raining, still dreaming&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is everyone still asleep in here? I guess the color palette did you in, yeah?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2014-09-03T22:12:19.877" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T22:12:19.877" Title="Bored with the dowdy colors, I seek solace in drink" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3606" CreationDate="2013-01-10T21:24:42.017" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the site looks very good, better than any other SE site. It is easy on the eye, balanced, neat—I like it. I vote against any changes unless I get to review and veto them should they displease me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T21:24:42.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3609" CreationDate="2013-01-11T07:31:51.533" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently flagged a question and it was marked as helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it shows otherwise in &lt;strong&gt;my flagging history&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DXvtu.png&quot; alt=&quot;1 hour ago&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I've ever flagged a comment and I don't remember being declined.. (I've only flagged one question so far.) Is there a bug or have I misinterpreted the content in my flagging history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in addition to that, I would like to suggest that there is a small grammatical error here. I think the &quot;flags&quot; in &lt;em&gt;1 moderator attention flags&lt;/em&gt; should be singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19341" LastEditorDisplayName="user19341" LastEditDate="2013-01-11T07:49:01.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Regarding flagging" Tags="|bug|flag-history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3608" CreationDate="2013-01-11T07:35:35.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation is correct; however, I can only interrogate the flag system for post flags and not comment flags, so any such investigation would have to be done by a dev.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the singular/plural issue, I refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9662/new-users-cant-create-new-tags-show-a-singular-or-plural-message/9694#9694&quot;&gt;Jeff's tweet&lt;/a&gt; (Jeff is one of the cofounders of Stack Exchange) and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/63791/89334&quot;&gt;previous discussions on MSO&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T07:35:35.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3593" CreationDate="2013-01-11T23:29:27.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's notoriously difficult to ask a short question sensibly, without context. &lt;em&gt;Is 'trod' the past tense of 'tread'?&lt;/em&gt; might mean &lt;em&gt;What is the correct past tense of 'tread'?&lt;/em&gt;. Answer: Yes/trod; closed as GR. It might mean &lt;em&gt;Is there anything else 'trod' could be, besides the past of 'tread'?&lt;/em&gt;. Answer: There are other possibilities, such as &lt;em&gt;hot trod&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;hot pursuit&lt;/em&gt;, or X or Y... Could be an interesting question, but might be NARQ (unlikely to be a genuine problem you face).  Or it could be &lt;em&gt;I don't understand the way 'trod' is used here; is it really the past tense?&lt;/em&gt;  Once edited to put in &quot;here&quot;, it may be fine, or may be Too Localised.  If you're asking the question, it's up to you to make sure the rest of us understand exactly what you want to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Myself, I think asking a proper SE question that is unambiguous, short, and can be answered Yes/No is probably impossible. [But this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a challenge to people with too much spare time.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T23:29:27.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3605" CreationDate="2013-01-12T10:47:26.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't had anything back from Google yet, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.seeore.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://english.seeore.com/&lt;/a&gt; now yields this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mZ5Id.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google&amp;#39;s 404 Not Found page&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T10:47:26.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-12T20:49:36.030" Score="-8" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some users use their profile page to advertise their blog or the books they have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have restrictions on what users can include in their profile page? If so, what should they be? If a user is found to be in violation of the restrictions, what should be the consequences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T10:56:27.713" Title="What should be our policy on content in user profiles?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3614" CreationDate="2013-01-12T21:13:11.423" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't really decide what users put in their profiles because they're free to insert what they want. It's your profile and you're allowed to publish about anything:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your blog, your own everyday diary, a picture of your cat, enigmi, the 5th prime number, a funny face, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can't include are those things that might create problems: personal attacks against users or mods, links to &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; sites, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T21:13:11.423" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-14T13:05:39.900" Score="6" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone recently asked a question on Academia related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/7194/73&quot;&gt;the usage of &quot;et al&quot; in a sentence&lt;/a&gt;. We closed it as off-topic, and we want to know whether it's fit for a migration to your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4412" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.463" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T13:05:39.900" Title="&quot;et al&quot; usage question migration" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-14T19:22:27.480" Score="20" ViewCount="983" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, this forum has seen many questions of the &lt;em&gt;what is the single word for&lt;/em&gt; type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really such a concern in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single words such as obfuscate or elucidate can obfuscate as much they can elucidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quest for a single word might be considered stylistically important in some languages but how important is it in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30820" OwnerDisplayName="Simon Hoare" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-01-14T19:26:46.697" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T07:53:48.900" Title="Is it really so important in English to find a single word to express a single concept?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="16" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-14T19:38:28.440" Score="10" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not recent: it has been going on since the beginning, or as long as I remember.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Single words no more necessary in English than in most other languages. Although needless wordiness is undesirable, needless compression can be equally bad; and excessive compression at one point usually leads to destruction or inflation at some other point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;These questions are generally not encouraged: experienced writers don't need or want single words except in the specific context of a longer text, at least not that often.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Part of this desire comes from inexperience, but another part may be typical of programmers, who abound on Stack Exchange. They are often dealing with constraints of space and length. And they are also used to  operate upon single entities, such as variables and values. Computer code is discrete rather than gradual, in that it resembles a set of building blocks rather than a lump of soft clay or a growing plant, if you will allow me my little metaphor. A single word is easy to handle as a block. However, in natural or literary language, a single idea normally does not fit into a single word very well, nor should it have to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2013-01-15T14:15:31.193" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T14:15:31.193" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-14T19:43:20.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must admit, I slipped into a confused slumber when I came to that word obfus... ob... Whatever-- I think I get the drift.  Conciseness is not an improper goal, but it can be overdone.  I think it's helpful to remember that getting one's meaning across is more important than communicating an approximation in fewer words, at least most of the time.  As Mark Twain wrote, &quot;The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug&quot;, and there are of course many ideas that cannot be communicated with a single word.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words are building blocks for communicating the important, complex ideas.  If they weren't, and the language were yet complete, we would all have empty heads indeed, and not much reason to live; one person could do and think it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that developing a proper word sense isn't important, or that word choice is not important, though.  I look upon single-word questions with charity, and try to remember that anyone who cares so much about words can't be all bad, and that one can only know the limits of brevity as a useful tool by hitting them once in a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33091" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T19:43:20.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-14T19:46:40.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This quest for a single word might be considered stylistically important in some languages but how important is it in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particular contexts or milieus call for particular levels of style; for example, use of the right word or words seems more important in formal speech or writing than informal.  For formal speech or writing that will be widely published and widely discussed, intensive searches for the right words and right phrases are worthwhile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language chosen for discourse is much less of a style-determining factor than is the context of discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T19:46:40.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-14T22:19:06.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really such a concern in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quest for a single word might be considered stylistically important in some languages but how important is it in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is English different from other languages? The difference is not the language but why you need a single word for a certain concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting a single word is often good in terms of Linguistic Economy (usually languages seek that), and if there's a case where you need one word (for a title, a website, etc) then yes, it's important. There must be other reasons certainly, I must have forgotten something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T22:19:06.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-14T22:30:12.630" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that tag is called &lt;strong&gt;single&lt;/strong&gt;-word-requests, but I think it's a mistake to get hung up on that word. What these types of questions are really asking for is a concise way to express a concept, and a single word —being as concise as you can get— is the ultimate goal; but you can't always reach that goal, and that's OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, some s-w-r questions do explicitly want a single-word answer, sometimes because of space considerations in a user interface or some similar programming need, but also sometimes because the OP wants to construct a sentence a particular way (perhaps because of parallelism or poetic considerations) which requires a single word. This doesn't mean that English speakers/writers are particularly hung up on single words; it just means that these situations are, in a sense, &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; than situations where a whole descriptive phrase can be used. In other words, if a writer can take as many words as he needs to describe a concept, he'll do so, and we here on ELU will never hear about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T22:30:12.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-15T08:25:52.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the astonishing number of English words, there often is an astonishingly apt single word choice.  I think asking about the single word silver bullet may be a way of saying:  Surprise and delight me again, English: can it be done, is there one word that covers this?  English is normally so fit for this, that when a word is missing, it just grabs it.  Ergo, &lt;em&gt;Schadenfreude&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32230" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T08:25:52.730" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3400" CreationDate="2013-01-15T09:28:00.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlIlq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3479" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T09:28:00.657" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-01-15T09:28:00.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-15T10:44:52.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it can be frustrating when somebody asks for a single word, and there doesn't seem to be one. However, how can that person know that such a word doesn't exist, when there might be a perfect word hidden somewhere in the dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I don't mind when someone asks the question – although I do find it irksome when an O.P. or other passersby start criticizing suggested answers with, &quot;But that's not one word.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the questions are generally fair questions, but the O.P.'s should always be ready to accept the fact that a perfect-fit word may not exist, in which case they'll probably get a lot of &quot;close but no cigar&quot; suggestions. The more difficult the original question, the more near misses will probably be offered. Such answers should be received graciously rather than criticized or downvoted; some people probably spent a fair amount of time racking their brains and are simply sharing the best they could come up with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T10:44:52.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3614" CreationDate="2013-01-15T10:56:27.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't characterize such links to blogs or books as &lt;em&gt;advertisements&lt;/em&gt;; these seem more like a CV to me. Moreover, I wouldn't discourage such links, in fact, I'd encourage them. They tell me more about the people I interact with on ELU, they often point to helpful resources, and they serve to establish community credibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a difference between &quot;I wrote such-and-such a book,&quot; and &quot;Please buy my book.&quot; I'd consider the former entirely relevant and apropos. I might consider the latter a little tacky, but I still wouldn't see a need for moderator intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T10:56:27.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-15T11:01:59.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's so much about importance for English as importance for writing/literature.  The right word to express a concept is about more than compactness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argue it's about both processing abstract ideas, and emotional content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter case is simple--Perseverance, say, has a powerful immediacy and emotional persuasiveness that isn't conveyed by the denotationally-equivalent &quot;tendency to move forward in spite of obstacles.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former case is more complicated:  the human brain can only hold so many things in short term memory.  This is why phone numbers are broken into pieces.  Long sentences with many ideas are hard to understand because there's much to piece together.  A single word that does the same job as a handful eliminates this problem, because the brain can instantly recognize a complex concept with a single symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about multiplication--technically, it's just adding one number to itself a number of times equal to the other number.  That's already a much harder way to think about it than the shorthand, &quot;multiplying.&quot;  Writing out &quot;2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2&quot; is also much harder to understand and solve than &quot;2 x 10.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counterpoints:  Op's line about &quot;Obfuscate&quot; and &quot;Elucidate;&quot;  the idea that &quot;fancy words&quot; are hard to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point out that if conciseness is your goal, &quot;Obfuscate&quot; or &quot;Elucidate&quot; are probably not the words you'd choose. Absolutely choose a shorter word over a longer one if it means the same thing, unless you have a poetic reason not to.  &quot;Clarify&quot; or &quot;Inform&quot; would do the job of Elucidate in all but the case that you need to highlight the root of &quot;Elucidate&quot; referring to light--ie, poetry again.  &quot;Obfuscate&quot; can be covered by &quot;obscure,&quot; &quot;hide,&quot; &quot;enshroud,&quot; &quot;darken,&quot; &quot;conceal&quot;...  the list goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you do have a longer word with no shorter equivalent, do we really want to dumb down our writing so that no one has to look at a dictionary or plunk a few keys in Google search?  I'd rather expand minds when it's that easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35728" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T11:01:59.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-15T12:02:41.493" Score="4" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2653/why-are-answers-being-posted-in-the-comments-on-the-question&quot;&gt;Why are answers being posted in the comments on the question?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately I've noticed a lot of questions - particularly single word requests - where answers are given in the comments instead of as answers. Please can we remember that comments are there for commenting on the question, or seeking clarification, or possibly providing a resource that may be useful in answering it - but not for providing an actual answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4796" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T20:44:10.633" Title="Answers in comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-01-29T17:53:44.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3605" CreationDate="2013-01-15T12:06:22.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slight update to the 404 status, yes, it's back up, but it's been reworked slightly, I'm guessing that Google have sent some polite notices (and/or whoever is running the site is scraping Meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;new design (yay);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;removed reference to StackExchange on the pages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;usernames are now hotlinks back to your user page here; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the datestamps on questions the other site are way out, like two years out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are linking back to the question in a form with the &quot;more discussion&quot; link, which might be compliant with the requirement to link back to the original question were it not for the fact that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the links are tagged as nofollow; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the links are also (minorly) corrupted. Each link back here has the number '2' suffixed. (It makes no difference since SE sites care about the &lt;code&gt;/questions/XYZZ&lt;/code&gt; bit I suspect, but FFS, this is getting silly).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now fairly convinced whoever is running the site is actively avoiding compliance, so another round of takedowns is being prepped. Bah. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20339" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T12:06:22.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3629" CreationDate="2013-01-15T12:10:48.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I (and I think a lot of other people) post a brief response in Comments when it appears likely that a question will be closed before I can compose the longer response I think an Answer requires.  I want to make sure the question gets at least a minimum response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T12:10:48.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3629" CreationDate="2013-01-15T14:16:49.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may leave a comment containing a brief answer when the question doesn't merit more.  I attempted once upon a time to leave a brief answer in its own right and was reprimanded.  The solution then was to blather on for paragraphs about how the question was calling for the synthesis of all research on a topic, but it's easier and seems to avoid fuss to simply put such a short answer in the comments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33091" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T14:16:49.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-15T19:29:17.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.&lt;/em&gt; — Mark Twain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T19:29:17.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-16T00:44:51.370" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q. What is the single word that best means &quot;smelling of a horse's urine&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. &lt;em&gt;Jumentous&lt;/em&gt;, adj. smelling of a horse's urine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment: Why thank you kind sir, that is indeed an interesting word. Now what a shame I'll almost never have a need to use it except perhaps in word games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of good English, no, not particularly useful, rarely necessary, just about never going to lead to as great a turn of phrase as expressing the same idea with several words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And which is better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's jumentous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back. (James Joyce, &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15770" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T00:44:51.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3629" CreationDate="2013-01-16T13:23:07.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I find a question too local or too general reference or a duplicate of something that I expect will be difficult to find. I'd think that a full answer wouldn't be the right thing to do, but the person asking deserves -something-. Often they are looking for a single word, on the tip of their tongue and just need to be sparked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I often don't have the time or patience to write the answer that should be written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those, including others, are my main reasons for putting an 'answer' in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2013-01-16T20:44:10.633" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T20:44:10.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-16T22:04:11.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the non-native speaker's perspective, English is the language where so many things can be expressed by single word. So I feel uncomfortable when I can't find single word for something that can be described by single word in my native language. I feel I'm missing something. And I think I'm not the only one who feels like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the ability to express something by single word instead of repeating ten-word description ten times makes you more expressive. This is also the economy of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, single word is much more appropriate for column name in database than five words. It is not only the beautification, there's 30-character name limit in some databases, and files in DOS had some day 8-character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15501" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T22:04:11.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-17T19:11:18.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I happen to have more rep on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; than on any other tag, and am sitting at about 21'st on its all time users list. So I have a bit of experience with this particular type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that a very large percentage of the questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; are from people who want to translate a very nuanced word from another language into English, and for some reason believe English ought to have an exactly equivalent word. For anybody who knows linguistics, this is clearly hookum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, its a fun challenge for those of us who like to stretch our vocabulary muscles. So we all play along and try to win the &quot;game&quot;. This has the unfortunate side-effect that more correct multi-word answers get bypassed in favor of less correct single-word answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I had a complaint about our current handling of single-word requests, it would be that we &lt;strong&gt;allow answers to be multi-word&lt;/strong&gt; if need be. Brevity ought to count for something, but try to moderate for meaning, rather that just unblinkingly rejecting multi-word answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9186" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T19:11:18.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-17T19:32:43.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked questions like this before, and for me the motivation is to achieve a level of precision, not necessarily conciseness.  To me, the question &quot;is there a word for...&quot; is really an open query on established terminology for specific concepts.  If there isn't any, then of course the English language is quite easily able to convey even the most complex ideas  effectively.  That can be achieved by layering concepts on each other until the overall ideas are communicated, but if there is already a word or phrase that communicates the idea, why would I want to go to the trouble to express it in another way unless I had a specific reason to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3546" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T19:32:43.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-17T22:48:53.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;And I think it's important, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whole books have been written with new words to accommodate for the fact that some concepts have no single word in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such books writes in its foreword:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Life, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Nuff said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T22:48:53.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2013-01-19T00:08:20.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree with some of the arguments found in answers to &quot;This is not a site for peeving,&quot; I for one am in favor of contributors to EL&amp;amp;U airing at least some of their pet peeves.  Their contributions serve not only to keep us informed and up to date, but also entertained and amused, which as JohnFx points out in his answer is not without merit.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use discretion in our role as gatekeepers is admirable, but to censor all &quot;peevish questions&quot; is taking that role too far.  Granted, to consider--when appropriate--each question on a case-by-case basis is good, but by the same token, to keep a question from being responded to makes all-important the criterion to exercise &quot;due diligence,&quot; which I find onerous and unreasonable.  Must every question be researched exhaustively before it's worthy of submission?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, EL&amp;amp;U contributors constitute a pretty eclectic group of English speakers.  Their choices of, and contexts for, reading- and spoken material are sufficiently unique to make the airing of peeves a legitimate source of helpful information.  I, for example, might be a fount of knowledge regarding newspapers and legal textbooks.  Another person might be an expert on the language of television's talking-heads, and still another person might consider politicians' choices of words particularly worthy of skewering.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd welcome some lists of commonly-used words that raise the hackles of EL&amp;amp;U readers.  Perhaps I use unknowingly some of them myself, to my writing's detriment.  Isn't self-improvement one of the goals of EL&amp;amp;U?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to elicit some opinions as to whether or not I should submit some my pet peeves to the scrutiny of readers of the non-meta forum, I'll first run just a few of my peeves past the readers of the meta-forum: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the excessive use of ICONIC, particularly in periodicals and on TV&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the use of LITERALLY instead of VIRTUALLY (&quot;They were laughing so hard, they were&#xA;literally rolling in the aisles.&quot;)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the use of RHETORIC in an almost exclusively negative context and with a negative &#xA;connotation (&quot;The last thing we need now is rhetoric; what we need is a debate rooted in reality&quot;)--as if rhetoric is not part of reality.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Aristotle was correct, rhetoric is a neutral word, which he defines as &quot;the faculty of determining in a given case the available means of persuasion.&quot;  How, then, can rhetoric exist apart from from reality if it is simply a person's ability to use what s/he has found to be persuasive in a given context?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In public discourse, rhetoric is the most valuable component, despite a given rhetor's failure both to craft a speech intelligently and to persuade auditors (such as the above person who  uses the term RHETORIC negatively).  What is needed today is less use of the ad hominem argument--an attack against the speaker or writer--and more use of better-researched, more-accurate, and more-persuasive arguments against the &quot;other guy's 'mere' rhetoric.&quot;  Now THAT is the reality of the situation.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32623" LastEditorUserId="32623" LastEditDate="2013-01-19T17:34:05.590" LastActivityDate="2013-01-19T17:34:05.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3644" CreationDate="2013-01-19T04:52:21.410" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100537/whats-a-word-for-to-eliminate-the-need-for&quot;&gt;What's a word for “to eliminate the need for”?&lt;/a&gt;, has been voted as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52112/is-there-a-word-that-means-make-someone-or-something-redundant&quot;&gt;Is there a word that means “make someone (or something) redundant”?&lt;/a&gt; which is itself closed as a general reference question. IMO, one or both of these questions needs reopening. I think that the questions are not &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicates in as much as one talks about the redundancy of the &lt;em&gt;need for something&lt;/em&gt; while the other simply talks about the redundancy &lt;em&gt;of something&lt;/em&gt;; a sufficiently distinct nuance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, we do entertain single word questions on this site and therefore the Dec '11 question ought to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-01-19T04:57:11.387" Title="Redundant duplicates obviated by general references" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|exact-duplicates|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3643" CreationDate="2013-01-19T04:56:52.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ouch—that really shouldn't have happened. I didn't notice the original question was closed, so that one is reopened now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether or not they're duplicates or not—while they're not literally duplicates, I believe they are sufficiently the same question, which is why I voted to close it. I don't feel that strongly about it, so if the community wants to reopen it, that's fine by me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-01-19T04:56:52.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3646" CreationDate="2013-01-19T19:01:48.313" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to obtain more badges on ELU. For example, to gain Archaeologist, to which I am intersted to, I need to edit 100 inactive posts but I am not keeping track of the number of posts I've edited.  How can I view all my statistics about the badges, such as how many more edits I need to do to gain A-badge. I'm not doing it for badges, but I can spend a bit more effort if I'm close to getting a badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there no surprise more magical than gaining an unexpected badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-01-19T20:14:55.647" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How can I view all my statistics about the badges?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3645" CreationDate="2013-01-19T20:37:21.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, badges are very much &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/34440/135907&quot;&gt;come as a nice surprise&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the badges are supposed to be surprises, not World of Warcraft style level grinds based on numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I worry that if we provide too many metrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;it becomes noise, like a bunch of inscrutable F-16 cockpit gauges -- how are all these numbers &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; except for these specific badges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the badge becomes the explicit goal instead of the desired behavior&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the badges are no longer a pleasant surprise and reward but an expected &quot;level up&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who actually happens to have Archaelogist, I know it did come as a surprise to &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;. When I got it I wasn't even aware of its existence and had to look up what it even meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only so many posts on this site anyway. And only so many of them stay inactive for long. And 100 is a big number. If the system constantly reminded everyone of their progress towards the badge, everyone would be actively grinding for it, meaning that &lt;em&gt;no one&lt;/em&gt; would get it for years to come because we'd be stepping on each other's toes. (Case in point: the review queues.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user19148" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-01-19T20:39:49.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-01-21T03:39:04.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I have observed, single-word-requests are not always requests for &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; a single word because most descriptions – I'm not saying all, cannot be expressed in a single word without compromising on nuances of meaning. So I would rather consider them as &lt;em&gt;alternative expressions&lt;/em&gt;, albeit short ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that point of view, that is, making requests for &lt;em&gt;alternative expressions&lt;/em&gt; if not always single-word-alternatives, needs to be encouraged. A non-native speaker like me would feel grateful if he could find people to help him with little phrases for ideas and concepts or anything he has on mind, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100452/word-or-phrase-for-a-much-hyped-discovery-which-later-turns-out-to-be-insignifi&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we could consider retagging single-word-requests as &lt;em&gt;alternative expressions&lt;/em&gt; – or something better, but disallowing such requests, I feel, would mean discouraging a part of the academic curiosity which plays an important role in learning and sharing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32480" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T03:39:04.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2013-01-22T02:55:11.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer &quot;maven&quot; questions is a chance for a teachable moment. The questions show misunderstanding about the enterprise of English language scholarship, so this site can do a useful community service by tactfully answering such questions in a way that helps the OP understand what issues English language scholars actually &#xA;care about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been suggested for unwelcome questions from learners, why not shunt these questions into &lt;strong&gt;prescriptivism.SE&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T02:55:11.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2428" CreationDate="2013-01-22T20:40:59.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is now partially implemented. Questions closed as duplicates now get a &quot;&amp;nbsp;[duplicate]&quot; appended to the title, rather than just &quot;&amp;nbsp;[closed]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fRSpY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Duplicate notice&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So together with &quot;&amp;nbsp;[migrated]&quot;, that makes three different notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T20:40:59.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3654" CreationDate="2013-01-22T22:41:16.863" Score="1" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the common and most acceptable way to deal with poorly posed questions is to point the OP to ways to better ask questions and to probe for clarification in comments. This issue comes up a lot and it is not always the OPs fault. We want people to participate when they are interested in English grammar even if they are not natives of English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neverthless, as far as I concern, sometimes people ask too much to the OPs, even when a competent speaker of English language surely can understand that the OP doesn't have enough expertise to clarify their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among others, see the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CS - What makes this a question to you? Do you not know what the words mean? Do you suspect only one is of the correct part of speech for the grammar to be correct? What reasoning have you put into this before finding yourself stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP - I just wanted to have an answer as I am not 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CS - Why do you think it's number 1. If we don't know where your confusion is, how can we help you understand it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP - Normally this sentence comes when you talk on phone. Right? Therefore I think that anwswer 1 is correct. BTW, I am learning English, so I put this sentence here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading that thread I was wondered if the CS could make an educated guess at the OP intended question and choose to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So question is,  do you agree with my position or do you see something wrong? If you think it is wrong could you please give your reasoning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T04:32:53.777" Title="Dealing with poorly posed questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-22T22:45:37.793" Score="4" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does this work? Can I ask any question and you will answer me? How long does it take to get an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by the way: if this is what I think it is, you have just became my new English teacher/s :D — because I need to get better in English if I want to go study in America or the UK. :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36247" LastEditorUserId="24489" LastEditDate="2013-01-23T01:41:15.170" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T02:18:33.390" Title="I'm new.. i usually have a lot of questions... can this site help?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2013-01-22T23:25:12.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't closevote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100785/hold-vs-hang-up-vs-hang&quot;&gt;that example question&lt;/a&gt; because when I first looked at it, the OP still hadn't given any meaningful response to Jon Hanna's perfectly reasonable requests for clarification, so I figured the matter was still &quot;in abeyance&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next time I looked, Bill Franke had posted what I thought was a perfectly adequate answer &lt;em&gt;as a comment&lt;/em&gt;. If it hadn't already been closed I'd have closevoted as General Reference then, because I think it's an inherently trivial question that doesn't enhance ELU in the slightest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But looking at the timings, it appears it was closed &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; Bill Franke's comment. I can't say I endorse that, because even though I'd rather not have such trivial questions asked at all, I think common politeness dictates we should at least address what seems to have been a genuine enquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that extent, I agree with Carlo_R's implied position that ELU is sometimes be less &quot;welcoming&quot; than perhaps it could/should be. But I completely reject spiceyokooko's comment that the site &lt;em&gt;is not tolerant of non-native English speakers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions from non-native speakers raise interesting issues, and some are trivial. But at the end of the day, ELU isn't an EFL resource; it's supposed to be about the finer points of English, not banalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T23:45:55.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3653" CreationDate="2013-01-23T00:01:51.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can ask any question you want. First, look in a dictionary or grammar book. If you can't find the answer, then write a question that explains what you would like to know. Make sure the question contains enough detail, so that contributors to the site can understand well what you would like to know. Sometimes, in the course of preparing your question carefully, you will discover the answer on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T00:01:51.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2428" CreationDate="2013-01-23T00:06:26.500" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my best advice: never let anyone know that you are going to use the answer to help you write a computer program. Make it seem that you are a casual scholar who is fascinated with the English language for its own sake. The users on the site have emotions, and they do not have empathy for computer people. They do, however, have pity to spare for language enthusiasts or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97102/medicine-is-good-when-your-family-gives-it-to-you-not-when-your-friend-gives-yo&quot;&gt;well-meaning tutors&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T00:06:26.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3653" CreationDate="2013-01-23T00:58:40.507" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does this work?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes well, sometimes not. By and large, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Everybody who answers questions here does it for fun, so you need to meet us halfway. If you follow ordinary conventions of punctuation and spelling (and capitalization), write complete sentences, format neatly, and take the time to provide enough detail and context that we don’t have to guess what you’re looking for, you’ll get an answer—probably several—&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;provided that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask any question and you will answer me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;your question fits the requirements described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In a nutshell, those requirements are that it’s got to be a question about the English language (not something else like how to write a novel or how to pick up girls which happens to involve the English language), and it has to be a real question (not a peeve, not a poll, not a dictionary lookup) to which a single answer can be provided in 200-800 words and which is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;interesting to somebody in the community&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How long does it take to get an answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything from thirty seconds to a couple of hours; but it’s usually worthwhile checking in every so often for a day or two, because people drop in to answer from all over the globe, at all times of day, and the last answer may be the best one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, you might want to check &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;this SE site&lt;/a&gt;, too, which may accommodate some of your questions more comfortably. It’s on the verge of going to “private Beta”, and if you commit now you’ll be able to participate from the very beginning. You’re welcome to participate on both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T00:58:40.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3653" CreationDate="2013-01-23T02:18:33.390" Score="9" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how does this work? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual internet application...look around first before doing anything. Read the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can i ask any question and you will answer me? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not any question. Not any question about English. Really basic questions that could be answered by taking an elementary class in English are not good here. Read the questions that have a high number of votes to see what to do, read those with a negative number to see what to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how long does it take to get an answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;almost all questions, within 24 hours will get some response, either an actual answer or comments or voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;btw if this is what i think it is. you have just became my new english teacher/s :D cause i need to get better in english if i wanna go study in America or UK. :D&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, EL&amp;amp;U, is probably not what you think it is. It is not a good replacement for a class, any number of on-line language learning programs, listening to English movies or living and speaking with native speakers. EL&amp;amp;U is an excellent source for small bits of explanation, and can really help language learners by letting them see explanations of certain grammatical points. It is great as an &lt;em&gt;addition&lt;/em&gt; to language learning tools, but don't go to it as a first source of answers to your language questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T02:18:33.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3662" CreationDate="2013-01-23T22:25:59.993" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Setting a bounty on a question should, at least in theory, guarantee it gets more attention. This is evidenced by the fact that one of the possible reasons on the list offered when you're setting it is &quot;This question has not received enough attention.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm wondering really if bounty, presented as it is, is really working to this end. I'm wondering about this because I have seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100210/why-do-photons-and-protons-exhibit-such-anomalous-behavior&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; with an open bounty which (apparently) is receiving as much views as any other question on the home page now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post pretends to open discussion about this issue; I know I'm not offering hard evidence that bounty &quot;just isn't guaranteeing more exposure&quot;, and I'm not presenting any solution either, but I want to know if it's just my perception, or not; and in case the concern is shared, hopefully other (more creative) users may offer solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T18:14:12.370" Title="Is bounty really guaranteeing more exposure?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3660" CreationDate="2013-01-23T23:03:41.167" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is like asking if putting a classified ad in the paper is guaranteed to sell your old lawnmower. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there's no guarantee. &lt;strong&gt;You pays your meaningless rep points and you takes your chances.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you bounty gets bumped to the front page, gets a place on the short list of &quot;featured&quot; questions (and gets moved higher and higher on that list as the days progress), gets a big honkin' banner displaying whatever text you feel like putting on it, and get to prance around like a Roman Emperor as folks grovel before you their arms outstretched awaiting your award.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the question sucks, or if everyone has already seen it as much as they care to, or both, then it's not gonna do much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T23:03:41.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3660" CreationDate="2013-01-24T18:14:12.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bounties last for a week. In this case (as at the time of writing) the question has been open eight days and the bounty expires in three days. Thus the bounty was awarded four days ago, which is half the life of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the question's author there were 137 views in the first four days, and it's now 391 &amp;mdash; an extra 254. Thus there appear to have been around twice the number of views with the bounty as without. [That analysis is very crude, but the figures are so markedly different that finesse is not really needed.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that without the bounty the question's view rate would diminish as it slipped down the lists with age, it would appear the bounty &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; working as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T18:14:12.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2013-01-25T03:34:11.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation and privilege is the political power on this site. If you don't like to see questions get closed, then use your re-open vote, since you have enough reputation to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T03:34:11.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-25T13:22:41.610" Score="8" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a request to reopen the question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76876/sounds-which-seem-to-express-a-particular-quality-whatever-words-they-appear&quot;&gt;Sounds which seem to express a particular quality whatever words they appear&lt;/a&gt;&quot; I believe that it is a perfectly legitimate question and not a not real one, as simchona, MετάEd, Mr. Shiny and New 安宇, cornbread ninja and tchrist stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, if any, the question is an &quot;expert&quot; one, I would say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the answer is (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonestheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHONESTHEME&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term phonestheme (or phonaestheme in British English) was coined&#xA;  in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth (from the Greek φωνή phone,&#xA;  &quot;sound&quot;, and αἴσθημα aisthema, &quot;perception&quot; from αίσθάνομαι&#xA;  aisthanomai, &quot;I perceive&quot;) to label the systematic pairing of form and&#xA;  meaning in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A phonestheme is different from a morpheme because it does not meet&#xA;  the normal criterion of compositionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would like to post my own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T19:27:49.893" Title="Reopen request: &quot;Sounds which seem to express a particular quality whatever words they appear&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3664" CreationDate="2013-01-25T23:00:09.197" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does that answer address the stated problem,that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; this quality exists it exists in all languages, not just English, and so the question is quintessentially off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Incidentally, I would never have thought from reading the question that you were looking for this answer.  That's not a reason to close, but it may be a reason to downvote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T23:00:09.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-26T17:08:02.070" Score="-9" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions, and some answers, have recently been inordinately long. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to impose a maximum number of words for each, just as there is a minimum number of words for answers and comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12952" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T01:35:22.380" Title="Length of Questions and Answers" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3666" CreationDate="2013-01-26T19:18:06.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted this question because I don't think ELU should automatically and unilaterally restrict question/answer length - but I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; think it's a good question that's well worth raising here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On rare occasions I've downvoted an inordinately long question or answer where I wouldn't have if it had said the same thing more succinctly. Not that I'd downvote &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it was too long (I upvote lots of long answers). It's just one more consideration that might potentially tip the balance for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure many if not most voters take into account the ratio between length and useful content, so it seems to me &lt;em&gt;our votes&lt;/em&gt; are already an adequate mechanism for discouraging the worst excesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T19:18:06.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3664" CreationDate="2013-01-26T19:27:49.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a good single word request in the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the post is badly organized. It seems to be about a linguistic effect, based both on the title (“Sounds which seem to express a particular quality whatever words they appear”) and the first paragraph. This is misleading: the post takes the reader down a garden path. Suddenly the actual question – a single word request – comes near the end of the body, almost as an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poorly worded question leads to poor responses. The reaction in comments shows that poor organization created great confusion. It generated much wasted discussion of the linguistic effect itself and whether the question was on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original close reason was &quot;ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.&quot; That is still an apt description for the question as posed. For the sake of all future visitors who will also be confused, the question should either be immediately reorganized or else reclosed until it can be rewritten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Carlo, I point out with all kindness that you became impolite when the question was not received as you intended. If you had addressed yourself to improving the question instead of attacking people who commented on it you might have had an answer long before now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T19:27:49.893" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3666" CreationDate="2013-01-26T19:49:55.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing prevents the reader from leaving off in the middle of a question or answer if it doesn't maintain interest. Nevertheless, someone else might find all that detail fascinating. Not all questions can be adequately explored by a quick C&amp;amp;P from the OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T19:49:55.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-26T23:55:08.740" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't agree with the summary closure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66710/which-is-correct-bored-of-bored-by-bored-with&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “bored of”, “bored by”, “bored with”?&lt;/a&gt; at the time, but you only get one &quot;reopen&quot; vote, and mine has expired (or perhaps been defeated by a second closure after being reopened, I don't know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3664/reopen-request-sounds-which-seem-to-express-a-particular-quality-whatever-word&quot;&gt;Carlo&lt;/a&gt;, I don't have a killer answer waiting to post. All I can say is Googling &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bored%20of%20with%20by&amp;amp;oq=bored%20of%20with%20by&amp;amp;aqs=chrome.0.57j60l2.713&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bored of with by&lt;/a&gt; gives me one link to a brief entry by &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/bored-by-of-or-with&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oxforddictionaries&lt;/a&gt;, followed by dozen of links which are either irrelevant, or suggest many other people are asking the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't profess to understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101611/of-complements-with-psych-verbs#comment206432_101611&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; complements with psych-verbs&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to me there's more to it than has thus far been recognised. When trying to figure out what it was getting at, I recalled the &lt;em&gt;bored of&lt;/em&gt; question, so I searched for that hoping I might find some useful information there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously even if anyone &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; anything to contribute that might have interested me, they wouldn't be likely to post it against a closed question. To my mind, &lt;em&gt;bored of&lt;/em&gt; is a live issue epitomising an ongoing linguistic development, and I think it sends the wrong message that ELU just has a closed question with a flippant top-rated/accepted answer saying &lt;em&gt;All are correct!!...I'm bored to death!! ;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I have my ball back, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T00:02:23.420" Title="Bored of Reopen Requests? Here's another one!" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3670" CreationDate="2013-01-27T00:02:23.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reopened—I can think of no general reference work which would answer the question, and I don't think any other close reason would be appropriate (maybe NARQ, but that would be a bit of a stretch for me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T00:02:23.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-27T02:55:19.820" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've selected the 'newest' tab and was able to access and answer a question just now, but the general screen with all questions has suddenly gone blank.&#xA;I've just joined the site yesterday and was able to view all questions on the screen then. I don't think I've accidentally clicked/selected anything to make it like this. &#xA;I've also closed down/re-opened the site/page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36469" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Blank 'home' screen on main site page" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-28T02:22:51.063" Score="19" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/30/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; beta is up &amp;amp; running (in &quot;private&quot; mode, whatever that means), is it now reasonable to close and/or migrate questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59652/&quot;&gt;When is it correct to use no and nope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's a typical case where almost the entire focus is on the needs and interests of people wanting to learn how to use colloquial English more fluently, and I don't think such questions should be on ELU unless there's some significant &quot;backstory&quot; involved. Which there isn't, there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you &lt;em&gt;disagree&lt;/em&gt; with me, vote this question down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Just to be clear. I'm not suggesting anyone should go trawling through old ELU questions looking for candidates to migrate to ELL. In this particular case the OP got his answer a year ago (and hasn't revisited ELU for months). I closevoted as GR back at the time, so I can't re-vote, but since someone &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; reposted it on ELL, I just don't see the point of leaving the &quot;original&quot; open here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand things, ELL will be out of &quot;private beta&quot; in a week or so, and I assume we won't normally want the same question to remain open on both sites. I'm asking whether &lt;em&gt;in the circumstances&lt;/em&gt; it's reasonable to pre-empt what I expect to be a strong argument for closing the ELU copy at some point in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-06-02T23:54:10.570" LastActivityDate="2023-06-02T23:54:10.570" Title="What's the status of ELL relative to ELU?" Tags="|discussion|ell|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2013-01-28T03:12:39.853" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELL site is not out of private beta yet, so it would not be possible to migrate questions there at this point, and even if we did, the OPs wouldn't be able to access the questions until the beta is opened to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even then, when ELL Beta is public, migrating questions from EL&amp;amp;U to ELL will be strongly discouraged.  Rather, if the community here feels that the question is more appropriate on ELL, then they will be encouraged to leave a comment suggesting that the OP take their question there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will be no direct pipeline from EL&amp;amp;U to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because ELL is formative and its distinguishing characteristics are still nascent and mutable.  Until ELL has its own community with firmly committed ideas about its purpose, it will be necessary to prevent a flood of well-intentioned migrations from this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean you can be more zealous in your close-voting here? Well, that depends. Right now, OPs still have nowhere to take their questions. When the ELL Beta opens to the public, they will. Personally, I think off-topic is off-topic and the existence of ELL doesn't really change my criteria for figuring that. If you have been more lenient and forgiving, then by all means, tighten up as much as you feel is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T03:12:39.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2013-01-28T11:32:02.270" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like ELL was started in large part because a lot of ELU questions seemed like they would be a better fit in a different community with a different mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I'd be against a mass migration of questions from ELU to ELL. If we were talking about a small handful of questions, I think I'd feel more neutral about it. However, I don't think we should start a new community by migrating a ton of questions from an older site. The filtering process seems like it would be too onerous; plus, I think ELL should be allowed to grow on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ELU questions probably would have been a better fit on ELL – had ELL existed at the time. But I think it's best to just consider those questions grandfathered in, at least for the immediate future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T11:32:02.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3672" CreationDate="2013-01-28T15:47:12.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This appears to be a known bug, but nobody seems to be particularly concerned about it, because it usually goes away after a few minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161568/there-are-no-questions-with-an-active-bounty-at-the-moment-what-to-do/161573&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/165212/strange-behavior-on-academia-se-meta&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; on the main Meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T15:47:12.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3694" CreationDate="2013-01-28T10:23:06.893" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;My primary question is if there is any resource which keeps a track of words that evolve. Also before the word gets into any publication's dictionary &quot;is there any process that is followed to evaluate if the &quot;term under discussion&quot; has enough credit to be qualified as a word and get into the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27220" OwnerDisplayName="Sameer Patil" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T23:42:28.727" Title="Online resource which tracks new words that are evolved or discussed" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2013-01-28T19:59:04.953" Score="19" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Translation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Dictionaries and Lexica&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linguee.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguee&lt;/a&gt; - a search engine rather than an automatic translator, Linguee allows the user to find words and phrases in context in human-translated works, in addition to an editorial dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bab.la/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bab.la&lt;/a&gt; - a language project by Andreas Schroeter and Patrick Uecker and sponsored by Langenscheidt providing 39 bilingual dictionaries for 28 languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://iate.europa.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IATE&lt;/a&gt; - provides official translations of terminology as used by EU institutions, maintained by the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Termium Plus&lt;/a&gt; - provides official translations of the Canadian government into Canadian English and Canadian French&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Machine Translations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Machine translations are generated by computer software which compares parallel texts produced by human translators and attempts to identify patterns and apply them to submitted text. The result can be helpful for short, simple text, but is often inaccurate, unidiomatic, or flat-out incorrect, and so should be used with caution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt; - a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statmt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statistical machine translation&lt;/a&gt; service based on documents in 80 languages in Google's indices &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.babelfish.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babelfish&lt;/a&gt; - supports 75 languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bing.com/translator/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bing Translator&lt;/a&gt; - web access to Microsoft Translator, which handles about 45 languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22339" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T20:14:44.477" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T20:14:44.477" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-01-28T19:59:04.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3685" CreationDate="2013-01-29T08:24:58.653" Score="11" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57517/what-does-persay-mean&quot;&gt;What does persay mean?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; with &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101450/is-it-peek-peak-or-pique&quot;&gt;Is it peek, peak, or pique?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Both of them are about common errors and while the former is not as well-formulated as the latter, it has nevertheless been closed while the latter has not. That said, I dare say that &lt;em&gt;persay&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; is at least as common as &lt;em&gt;peak&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;pique&lt;/em&gt; and this is evident from the fact that its question has received ~4000 views in 11 months. That does not sound &quot;too localised&quot; to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should the &lt;em&gt;persay&lt;/em&gt; question have been closed? Or should the &lt;em&gt;pique&lt;/em&gt; question be closed? Considering the number of views it has garnered, should the &lt;em&gt;persay&lt;/em&gt; question be reopened and perhaps cleaned up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T14:52:12.963" Title="Pique, peek, and peak vs. per se, persay, and per say" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3679" CreationDate="2013-01-29T13:34:33.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say the &lt;em&gt;persay&lt;/em&gt; question was probably closed because the title represents an ordinary mis-spelling, much as we close questions which turn on typographical errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'd guess that most of the views of that question arose because people looked at it and said &quot;persay? I've never heard of persay. What &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; it mean?&quot; - and then were disappointed to find it was common-or-garden-variety &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'd been around at the time I would probably have voted against closing, because the question isn't in fact about a mis-spelling but about a term which OP heard and didn't know how to look up (which I imagine is the source of almost all instances of this error). Once you get past that, however, it's an ordinary dictionary question. Correct the error, and there's no question left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;peek&lt;/em&gt; question, on the other hand, was about a very similar widespread ear-error which involves redefining the underlying semantics of the phrase. It's an eggcorn, or very nearly so, which does not resolve to a dictionary question, because it never occurs to users that it has to be looked up. It's an error that has to be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T13:34:33.800" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3684" CreationDate="2013-01-29T16:24:00.600" Score="10" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that &lt;em&gt;accept rates&lt;/em&gt; are no longer being displayed under the questioner's user name. Does anybody know why this has been done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-02-11T17:08:22.373" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Accept rates no longer being displayed" Tags="|discussion|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3683" CreationDate="2013-01-29T16:32:05.343" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Meta Stack Overflow site which covers the entire Stack Exchange network, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136951/lets-stop-displaying-a-users-accept-rate&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asked for accept rates to stop being displayed. The poster wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But as long as you're displaying the accept rate, people will comment on it, criticize users for it and possibly reconsider answering because of it. And while I'm of the opinion that a low accept rate should not stop you from answering (we're here to make the internet better after all) and that the possible reputation gain (or lack thereof) should not factor in either, I can't blame users for considering it. It's in their face after all. And we're only people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So let's take the issue off the table. Or at least partially. Information about a user's acceptance behavior can still always be gathered from the profile. But at least that would be less in-your-face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But it helps me to see if a user is a help vampire!&quot;&#xA;  I'm still wondering if those are of the sparkly variety as well, but I digress. So what? If the question is bad, downvote it. Evaluate a question on its individual value. There is no need to take a user's history into account. There might be a correlation between the quality of a question and a user's accept rate, but there doesn't have to be. And if there is, the bigger problem is the question's quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Exactly! A user with a low accept rate might indicate there's a problem!&quot;&#xA;  I'm not arguing we should get rid of the accept-rate value within SO/SE. After all, this Q&amp;amp;A works based on up and downvotes, as well as the acceptance of an answer. But why not use it behind the scenes to (very occasionally) nudge the user with a statement like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You have received several answers to your questions, yet have not accepted an answer as correct or helpful in a while. You might want to evaluate them and where possible accept them as correct or helpful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After all, in the various questions with regards to comments on low accept rates, if any comments are encouraged at all, then they are of this soft variety. So why not let the system take care of that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change was made in the most recent build of the site. Accept rate is no longer shown because the negative consequences outweigh the benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T16:36:52.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3679" CreationDate="2013-01-29T22:38:37.333" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think both questions would have a happy home on ELL.  But since I can't move to migrate them to there, I instead err on the side of 'openness' and vote to reopen persay rather than close pique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T22:38:37.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-31T18:22:50.310" Score="9" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91306/what-do-you-call-the-process-of-combining-two-words-to-create-a-new-one&quot;&gt;What do you call the process of combining two words to create a new one?&lt;/a&gt;, a new user posted as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/102454/2637&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; something that was deleted by a mod, but which might even have picked up a few &lt;em&gt;upvotes&lt;/em&gt; if it had been posted as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those without the rep to see it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/36848/clayton-wright&quot;&gt;Clayton wright&lt;/a&gt; posted &lt;strong&gt;Two words combined .... = Tword&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, I was laboriously typing a message to the new user, welcoming him to ELU, but warning that his answer/comment wasn't likely to survive long. In fact, it was deleted before I could post my comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: in such situations, should it be standard practice either for such deletions to always be accompanied by &quot;stock text&quot; explaining the reason, or for the answer text to be converted to a comment? Given the spate of recent complaints about ELU being &quot;unwelcoming&quot;, it seems to me we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't do something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T12:07:23.370" Title="New users posting comments as answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2013-01-31T20:02:05.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since ELL is public beta, this question seems to be very valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the scope of ELL is still forming, something will be unlikely to change. First off, &lt;em&gt;ELL is for questions that native English speakers would consider obvious.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, NRAQ here will remain NRAQ there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;GR are usually accompanied with &lt;em&gt;no prior research&lt;/em&gt;, in this case they will be unwelcome at ELL as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59/please-do-not-copy-open-questions-from-elu-on-purpose&quot;&gt;encouraged&lt;/a&gt; to harvest good questions for ELL among closed and deleted ones here at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be done right now?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Many users of ELU are not aware about ELL. Possibly, the opposite will be the case as well. &lt;strong&gt;Advertise&lt;/strong&gt; on both sites about one another. This alone will reduce an amount of bad Q's at both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only alternative to migration is when users manually repeat their question (closed here) to ELL. We can't stop it, and I think it's worse than migration.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are several problems, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are technical limitations, like automatic creation of user profiles or storing comments and votes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The one who actually migrates should be very familiar with the goals of both sites. Most likely, it should be a diamond mod for both sites. Since there were no elections, it must be a global mod who's ready to throw in a large amount of their time daily;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26446" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T00:12:44.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3677" CreationDate="2013-01-31T22:03:10.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/*/merriam-webster.com/opendictionary06/*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; for that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know that word that really should be in the dictionary? Until it actually makes it in, here's where it goes. Welcome to our collection of user-submitted words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here's their entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20120112122044/http://www3.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary06/newword_search.php?word=facebook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;facebook&lt;/em&gt; as a verb&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T18:24:15.930" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T18:24:15.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-01T18:36:42.193" Score="7" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;When &lt;strong&gt;local&lt;/strong&gt; ELU URLs are added to question and answer fields, they are automatically resolved into question titles. For example, if I paste a random link such as this one,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28508/reason-for-the-current-trend-to-use-she-as-the-gender-neutral-pronoun&quot;&gt;Reason for the current trend to use &amp;#171;she&amp;#187; as the gender-neutral pronoun?&lt;/a&gt; , it is displayed not as a URL, but as a linked question title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This magic does not currently extend to comment fields. I'd like to request that it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T18:36:42.193" Title="Auto-resolve local URLs in comments too" Tags="|feature-request|comments|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3692" CreationDate="2013-02-02T10:03:44.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first joined just last week, I had to earn a certain amount of rep before I could even add or vote on comments, so I could only put answers in the boxes like this one. When I realised I could then do comments, I now do where I think it's appropriate. Other new users may try to comment too, but can't until they've earned however much rep it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36469" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T10:03:44.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2013-02-03T04:21:54.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't that why those of us with enough rep., have the ability/power to edit a question if we think it's poorly worded upon seeing it first, to improve it for others, and maybe get the OP the answer they need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36469" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T04:21:54.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2013-02-03T14:56:45.660" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often had people object to my questions, as in the top comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/102747/how-did-nine-come-to-appear-in-these-idioms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, maybe not explicitly but the tone of disapproval is unmistakable. That's just one example. Now, if the objection comes on account of the question being out of scope of ELU topics, that is acceptable. One might not like a question and decide not to answer it. But objecting to it or downvoting it simply because one doesn't like it on subjective grounds, is something I find disappointing and discouraging. Most users who downvote don't even mention why they think the question or the answer is downvotable. Does that in any way help the poster improve what he or she posted? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users on ELU are linguists, scholars and experts on the English language and for learners like me it is always a pleasure reading their answers. That's perhaps one good reason why I ask questions on ELU rather than considering doing a research on the Internet and finding out answers myself. After all, there is enough amount of resources available on the Internet that virtually anything can be researched, only that a research calls for certain skills, for example, an ability to put together bits of information and process them into something that makes sense. That gets difficult at times and which is another reason why I post my questions on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is perfectly acceptable that duplicate questions and questions that are off-topic need to be closevoted and eventually closed, I request users, especially the ones with high reputation, to be more tolerant and accommodating wherever it is possible because you can't expect all users to post only such questions that make perfect sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I am awaiting deletion of my SE account (of course, I have requested that myself), I thought I should make this one edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to add, in view of comments below by certain respected users, that there are several hundred questions on SE, especially on ELU, which have been posted with no prior research despite being easily researchable, and yet they haven't been downvoted or closevoted. I find that peculiar bearing in mind the strong voice that has been raised against questions posted without prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32480" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user32480" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T04:32:53.777" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-02-04T07:53:48.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hunt for le mot juste is interesting if not entertaining, but the goal of linguistic economy stems from Classics, which is why using a word like +obfusomething (nod to @lucounu) is not part the regression to the mean vocabulary.  Yes, a concise word for any given concept maybe be favorable and helpful, but we don't want to end up epigrammatic, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand your question as asking if this a result of having discarded so many words over time, or is it of greater concern to non-native English speakers because it is daunting to realize you are translating ideas and not words?  It seems many posts seeking the magic one word are really more concerned with &lt;strong&gt;translation&lt;/strong&gt; of a concept in one word vs. simply as concisely as possible finding an acceptable translation of an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@SimonHoare, excellent point about register vs. conciseness. Veuillez agréer, Monsieur Hoare, de mes sentiments les plus sincères is high register but many words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, an infamous German word like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajütenfenster&lt;/a&gt; refers to the view of the Danube out of the window of the ship captain's cabin for a particular shipping company in Germany.  @DWright, absolutely there are wonderful borrows from other languages like &lt;em&gt;Schadenfreude&lt;/em&gt;, which was finally added to the OED (O Freunde! Nicht diese töner!) &lt;em&gt;Déjà vu&lt;/em&gt; is a classic example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though we seek the magical one-word bullet to describe the &lt;em&gt;je ne sais quoi&lt;/em&gt;, cases like this do not mandate one and only one word.  Take the example of the German ship captain's cabin window. Is this concept ever going to come across as one word in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question, to determine if a concise adjectival or adverbial phrase is preferable to an *obstetrifrugal word that a reader would have to look up, that preference would be based on style, i.e. APA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36710" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T07:53:48.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2013-02-04T12:00:11.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with OP's saying that '&lt;em&gt;a popular justification for the large number of downvotes is that this site is meant for serious questions about English &lt;strong&gt;that are of interest to linguists and language experts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Only that it took me some time to realize it but watching legitimate posts being downvoted and closed, both mine and others, it has become clear what SE stands for. So, before it becomes complicated, I decided to request deletion of my SE account (which is not yet taken up by the moderators). After all, I am neither a linguist nor a language expert but luckily for people like me, there are other places to discuss English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32480" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T12:00:11.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-05T17:15:01.997" Score="2" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to change my login/login email? I could change my email address on the profile description page, but apparently that doesn't change my login email. I see that there's an option on my profile menu bar to add a different login, but apparently when I clicked on the option it doesn't work it only makes me relogin with my old email. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21210" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2013-02-13T02:32:26.683" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How do I change my login/login email?" Tags="|support|login|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-02-05T23:22:41.407" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm adding this answer because kiamlaluno's &lt;em&gt;It's quite too early to add any link to ELL&lt;/em&gt; is out-of-date. I think we should now have a line in the &lt;em&gt;What kind of questions can I ask here?&lt;/em&gt; section of the ELU FAQ saying something along the lines of...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please consider whether your question might be better asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-02-05T23:22:41.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-06T20:02:15.537" Score="6" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt; be synonymised with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;? So &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; should be the primary tag and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt; would be the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt; adds nothing. But maybe I'm not nuanced enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2013-02-06T20:23:35.980" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:19:59.920" Title="Synonymise tag [word-meaning]" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3707" CreationDate="2013-02-08T10:16:58.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/153555/154443&quot;&gt;This answer over on meta.SO&lt;/a&gt; should help you. In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the &lt;strong&gt;My Logins&lt;/strong&gt; link on your profile - you can add your new email and remove your old one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3820" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T10:16:58.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-08T13:00:39.933" Score="-3" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to bother you here! I asked SE team to delete my profile 3 days ago but I found it is suspended only. I asked them to delete it again and they did but I was not sure about my account and my guess came true! I asked this question here because I cannot ask it in meta. It needs 5 reputations and more. Please bear in mind it is not about deleting a profile or make it anonymous but about main data and whole the account. I am sure you know they are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77803" OwnerDisplayName="user37315" LastEditorDisplayName="user37298" LastEditDate="2013-02-08T13:38:36.400" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T16:41:35.663" Title="How can I delete my account from SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2013-02-08T13:44:13.130" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Account deletion only removes your ID from existing content. If you want your content completely purged, you will have to contact team@stackexchange.com and discuss it with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will probably want to have them delete your new account while you're at it. I'm suspending your new one as well per our policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T13:44:13.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2013-02-08T16:41:35.663" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do bear in mind that &lt;strong&gt;just by the act of contributing&lt;/strong&gt; you have licensed your content (questions, answers and comments) to Stack Exchange Inc., and you don't have the right to revoke that licence, or to remove your content. If you vandalise your content in an attempt to remove it, it's likely to be restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;legal page&lt;/a&gt; on the link at the bottom of each page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. You grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works and store such Subscriber Content and to allow others to do so in any medium now known or hereinafter developed (“Content License”) in order to provide the Services, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by You. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;possible&lt;/strong&gt; that Stack Exchange will consent to waive their rights under this licence, but you will need to ask nicely and convince them of the benefit of doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T16:41:35.663" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3723" CreationDate="2013-02-08T22:04:31.130" Score="70" ViewCount="3868" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone has suggested that a question of mine should be migrated to the ELL site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are there two Q&amp;amp;A sites for the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I ask on each site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: ELU refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;; ELL refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36231" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T09:33:54.553" Title="What is the difference between ELU and ELL?" Tags="|discussion|faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3722" CreationDate="2013-02-09T00:42:58.690" Score="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU is a site intended for &quot;serious linguists.&quot; Over time, many non-native speakers stumbled across ELU, and would ask questions that native speakers considered very basic. This caused mixed feelings: on one hand, as the board became flooded with more and more basic and trivial questions, some users got discouraged or bored. On the other hand, no one really wanted to tell these English language learners, who were asking legitimate questions for a non-native speaker, that their questions were either not valid or not welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed solution was to create a new community where English learners could ask their questions without fear of those questions being deemed too basic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Basic Stack Exchange standards are supposed to apply at both sites. O.P.s are expected to research their questions, and not be overly broad. ELL is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a dumping ground for bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your question won't get second-class treatment at ELL. Many of the language enthusiasts frequent both sites, and answer questions at both locations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just because someone recommends that you ask your question at ELL, that doesn't mean they want you to &quot;scram&quot; from ELU. Such recommendations are directed at particular &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, not particular &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;. You're welcome to peruse and participate in both communities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that, in general, if English is not your first language, and a native speaker is likely to find your question very basic, as opposed to particularly perplexing, then you're probably better off asking your question at ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to both communities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T00:42:58.690" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3707" CreationDate="2013-02-11T16:56:30.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am able to change my login e-mail now. This is done through adding a Google account, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134379/how-can-i-link-two-google-apps-accounts-with-one-so-login&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the instructions from meta.SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21210" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T16:56:30.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3727" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3728" CreationDate="2013-02-11T18:05:12.167" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/45883/11762&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; is broken, at least for me in IE9. All other questions appear fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XQa4a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried refreshing the page and restrating my browser, but no luck. Is this happening to anyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11762" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T21:03:49.217" Title="Why is my question broken?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-02-13T02:32:07.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3727" CreationDate="2013-02-11T19:24:52.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Internet Explorer is notorious for an aggressive caching policy, which means it will happily cache an invalid or incomplete response from a website and use that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many SE pages are built using AJAX calls, where the content is requested separately from the &quot;framework&quot;. This is most commonly seen when you click the &quot;An edit has been made&quot; or &quot;There's a new answer&quot; banners. But these requests for new data can fail. With IE, such a failed request can be cached and used in preference to a new request. In your case it looks like the &quot;framework&quot; has been corrupted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try a forced refresh of the page (usually this is &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;+ &lt;kbd&gt;Shift&lt;/kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;+ &lt;kbd&gt;F5&lt;/kbd&gt;), or &lt;em&gt;in extremis&lt;/em&gt; delete all cached content &amp;mdash; perhaps restricting this action as much as possible &amp;mdash; and then get the page again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-02-11T21:03:49.217" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T21:03:49.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3666" CreationDate="2013-02-12T01:35:22.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please forgive my long answers. I don't always have time for a short one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15770" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T01:35:22.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-12T11:38:39.203" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;The EL&amp;amp;U question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103809/asking-questions&quot;&gt;&quot;Asking questions&quot;&lt;/a&gt; has been asked and answered on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/1407/turn-notify-the-persons-before-30-days-into-a-question&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;. It is very basic, so I don't think it belongs here, but it is not general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we close it? If so, what is the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T13:09:57.027" Title="Should this question (which has been asked and answered elsewhere) be closed?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3730" CreationDate="2013-02-12T13:09:57.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with the General Reference reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, that &quot;standard internet reference designed specifically&quot; is ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or: migrate the question to ELL and then merge the duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T13:09:57.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-13T14:20:42.640" Score="5" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;A week ago &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7999594#7999594&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8566/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; asked us to compile a list of questions we think should be migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not wholly in favour of migrating to ELL at the moment, because it's new and needs to find its feet without some other site interfering, but many users do want to start migrating things there and it will be useful to form a consensus about what should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's do that here. Post questions that you think should be migrated as answers (OMG that's totally heinous!) and we can vote up and down on them and Grace can see the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T10:07:52.387" Title="Questions for English Language Learners Stack Exchange" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-13T14:22:40.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103944/expression-i-can-cant-tell-the-things&quot;&gt;Expression &amp;quot;I can / can&amp;#39;t tell the things&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presently, I'm not sure of the sense of the following phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell the things&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that lies in this sentence :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am learning Python and so far I can tell the things below about &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;init&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the phrase in it is correct or if it shouldn't be :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell the things&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T14:22:40.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-13T14:27:31.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103930/difference-between-anyone-and-everyone&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;anyone&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;everyone&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between Anyone and Everyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone should keep quiet in the classroom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone should keep quiet in the classroom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T14:27:31.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-13T17:19:48.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103907/purpose-for-of&quot;&gt;Purpose For, Of&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1 He has no intention for marriage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;2 He has no intention of marriage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These two sentences are good English and have the same meaning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uniontwp.com/2012Minutes/Minutes%2008-13-12%20Board%20Meeting.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt; I read:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A review of the grading permit showed that the permit had not been modified from its original &lt;strong&gt;*purpose&lt;/strong&gt; which was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a minimum use driveway for a mobile home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, since &lt;em&gt;intention&lt;/em&gt; means almost the same thing as &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt;, could these sentences be okay?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;3 He has no purpose for marriage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;4 He has no purpose of marriage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is obvious Learner's English, and has already been closed here. I think the answers would be of value to ELL's audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T20:19:23.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-13T20:57:22.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103486/why-does-want-take-a-preposition-but-insist-does-not&quot;&gt;Why does “want” take a preposition but “insist” does not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why can't you say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;I insist you to do that!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After all, you can say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;I want you to do that!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the difference between these two verbs, that they need to be&#xA;  used in sentences with different structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T20:57:22.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-13T22:05:45.647" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33954/is-thems-fighting-words-a-right-and-received-english-expression&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Them’s fighting words&amp;quot; a right and received English expression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across the phrase ‘&lt;em&gt;Them’s fighting words&lt;/em&gt;’ in the beginning part of a Time magazine (July 12) article ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret &amp;quot;Them's fighting words&amp;quot; to simply mean &amp;quot;They're fighting words.&amp;quot; Can &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; be used as a subject being followed by the singular of &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot; and a transitive verb (fight) that takes the objective noun (&lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;)? I’m puzzled if this is an established American usage of &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; or just a fashionable saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T22:05:45.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-13T22:11:27.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31471/whats-the-difference-between-these-names-of-moving-water&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between these names of moving water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between these forms of moving water?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Brook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Stream&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;River&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there other forms of moving water that I am missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T22:11:27.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1712" CreationDate="2013-02-14T14:13:44.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7. Is this in the docs? I began this with &quot;7.&quot; (seven dot) but it came out as &quot;1.&quot; instead. I'm guessing the software thinks I am starting a numbered list, and requires me to start with 1 and not 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; 7\. Is this in the docs? I began this with &quot;7.&quot; (seven dot) but it came out as &quot;1.&quot; instead. I'm guessing the software thinks I am starting a numbered list, and requires me to start with 1 and not 7.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2013-02-14T14:13:44.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3692" CreationDate="2013-02-14T17:26:01.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/86377/153019&quot;&gt;per this answer on the &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; meta&lt;/a&gt;, all users can see their own deleted answers, presumably including any comments that were deleted along with the answer. The deletion automatically adds a link to the &quot;why was my post deleted&quot; section of the FAQ, but it certainly can't hurt to add a &quot;Welcome to ELU...&quot; type of comment as well, on the premise that we need to take every opportunity to be more friendly and welcoming if this site isn't to degenerate into a den of grumpy old descriptivists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-02-14T17:26:01.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-14T19:23:31.753" Score="6" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm simply not used to it, but a recent design update appears to have changed the background colour of popups such as the one below to a rather jarring, unwholesome red. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jQnp2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you find this choice of colour comfortable? Can something be done to tone it down a little?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2013-02-14T23:46:54.643" Title="What's with the fugly red?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3743" CreationDate="2013-02-14T23:46:54.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think small and crimson is far better than big and bright yellow. However I see no reason why each site's messages should not be tailored for the style sheet &amp;mdash; why are our duplicate messages &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-02-14T23:46:54.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3746" CreationDate="2013-02-15T02:52:45.080" Score="-1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've browsed through stackexchange's collection of websites but can't decide where to ask about using APA format for referencing online resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This place seems to be the closest, IMO. Am I right? Can someone please point me in to the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37050" LastActivityDate="2013-02-15T11:10:41.227" Title="Is english.stackexchange the right place for asking about using references?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3745" CreationDate="2013-02-15T02:58:06.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt; is your best bet. Check out their FAQ to be certain. I have seen APA and other style questions there before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-02-15T11:10:41.227" LastActivityDate="2013-02-15T11:10:41.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2013-02-15T15:15:00.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there isn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-meaning&lt;/a&gt;, it makes sense to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt; synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-meaning&lt;/a&gt;, I would suggest that as synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are questions using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt;, and questions using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;, then the two tags should be merged, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt; made synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;. That is an operation moderators can do from a single page: the same page used to merge two tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:19:59.920" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:19:59.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-15T22:15:43.470" Score="10" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zqna.net/hokmohohoh/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.zqna.net/hokmohohoh/index.html&lt;/a&gt; appears to be reposting a lot of EL&amp;amp;U content (and it looks like other SE sites too). I can't see any proper attribution, or links back. Some pages say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2011-2013 © Zqna&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zqna.net/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About Us page&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zqna is a free question and answer website where you can get answers to your questions or you can help other people in the community by answering their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, they have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zqna.net/abuse.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Report Abuse page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We attach great importance to your advises, and what we build this site is for you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Someone, neither you nor me post some bad infomation [sic] here, we appreciate you report it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Please tell us your Contact Infomation [sic] if you want our feedback.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;If you want to remove question or answer, do tell us the link to it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this happened on a Blogger blog not so long ago; here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/is-http-englishqna-blogspot-com-violating-elu-or-your-copyright/&quot;&gt;relevant meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T07:36:24.377" Title="www.zqna.net scraping EL&amp;U and SE content" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|scraping|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7165" CreationDate="2013-02-17T13:31:45.143" Score="23" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make a pitch that we add a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;this question belongs on ELL&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; to the Off-Topic sub-menu, and begin closing questions as Off-Topic, rather than General Reference, when they don't belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear: I am not suggesting we punt all bad/obvious questions to ELL.  General Reference still has a place when the question is &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a better user experience for the &lt;em&gt;asker&lt;/em&gt;.  Instead of being told to do a lot of work to move the question themselves, the question would be migrated for them.  Seems more friendly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a better user experience for the &lt;em&gt;answerer&lt;/em&gt;.  There is a built-in path for addressing questions that don't belong -- why not leverage it rather than having everyone doing their own thing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is better for the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;.  When there's a question that belongs on Writers.SE, we don't leave it hanging around the English main page as &quot;Closed&quot;, do we?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard worries that we would swamp ELL with questions while they're still defining themselves, but here are some counterpoints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the migration still requires user intervention, doesn't it? Can't we trust the mods to only migrate questions that have a chance of belonging?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;em&gt;several high-rep users&lt;/em&gt; all agree that it belongs on ELL, isn't that a good indication that it probably does?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If questions are migrated erroneously, can't the ELL mods just close the questions when they arrive, and talk to us if it's becoming a problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T12:15:25.710" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T12:29:15.890" Title="Allow Questions to be Closed as Off-Topic and Migrated to ELL" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3750" CreationDate="2013-02-18T11:13:32.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have heard worries that we would swamp ELL with questions while they're still defining themselves, but here are some counterpoints...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add one more counterpoint. Unlike many other SE sites, ELL was borne out of a frustration that ELU was being overrun by too many basic questions – questions that deserved to be answered, but weren't a good fit for the ELU site. Because of that, as these questions continue to crop up on ELU, there ought to be a way to expedite their migration to their rightful home. That just seems natural to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL might be working to &quot;define itself.&quot; Even so, a large part of its heritage is these misplaced ELU questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T11:13:32.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3762" CreationDate="2013-02-18T14:42:24.700" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our resident troll posted a question today which I thought he had asked before, and that seems likely because Reg closed and deleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Reg was dealing with it, I tried to locate the earlier example. Finding questions which have been deleted appears to be remarkably difficult: presumably that's by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since it's possible to get a &quot;That question has been deleted&quot; page, and 10k users can see them under certain circumstances, deleted questions must still be held in the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An SEDE query which finds all of a user's posts, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select p.Id as [Post Link],p.Id&#xA;from Posts p&#xA;where &#xA;p.OwnerUserId = 23135&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will find some relevant questions, but only those which have not been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way of finding deleted questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:31:59.440" Title="How do I find deleted questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3761" CreationDate="2013-02-19T01:46:47.773" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted someone else's comment and later edited the answer that it was commenting on, making the comment obsolete. It doesn't seem possible for me to flag the comment now, but is it still possible for another user to flag it as obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37484" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T18:18:36.243" Title="Obsolete flag after upvoting comment" Tags="|discussion|support|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2013-02-19T07:36:24.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zqna.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.zqna.net/&lt;/a&gt; site appears to have been taken down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T07:36:24.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3750" CreationDate="2013-02-19T16:03:49.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can't we trust the mods to only migrate questions that have a chance of belonging? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but mods can migrate questions anywhere, this doesn't require an extra migration path in the off topic close option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If several high-rep users all agree that it belongs on ELL, isn't that a good indication that it probably does? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if the high rep users understand ELL, so only if the high rep users here are also highly active on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If questions are migrated erroneously, can't the ELL mods just close the questions when they arrive, and talk to us if it's becoming a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no ELL mods at the moment, only the general SE community managers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T16:03:49.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2013-02-19T18:38:31.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are now synonyms, but they are not merged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0cxqY.png&quot; alt=&quot;tag syn results&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They still have separate counts: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-meaning&lt;/a&gt; shows 62 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; shows 3,392. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean, given that they are synonyms?  Do we have to request a merge for each of these?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seems really silly to have singular and plural forms (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tense&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tenses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tenses&lt;/a&gt;) ever be separate tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T18:38:31.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-20T13:31:55.343" Score="9" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104691/at-on-the-level&quot;&gt;a question from our resident troll&lt;/a&gt; and noted that it was a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104026/at-on-the-level-of&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;*. That other question was closed as Not A Real Question and deleted, because it was posted by a sockpuppet. “Not a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question” is entirely apposite; it was posted purely to goad the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the policy has changed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Current policy is to delete NS socks and let the question stand (or fall) on its own merits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely &amp;mdash; as a duplicate &amp;mdash; this newest example must also be NARQ? I actually pointed out the link in my flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did the policy change, and why? And what do we do with questions which are duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change wouldn't have anything to do with &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2013/02/closing-questions-how-do-we-compare/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ELU's perceived closure rate&lt;/a&gt;, would it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* 10k only, the question has been deleted.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:44:37.823" Title="What is our sockpuppet policy?" Tags="|discussion|suspension|trolling|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2013-02-20T13:37:09.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not to do with our perceived closure rate, but is rather a shift in standard SE policy for handling sockpuppets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By deleting puppets, users who answer the question are not unfairly punished. Account mergers are reduced in number, and shifted to the devs and autobots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, content is judged on its face, rather than by who posted it. If a question is good, it remains without rewarding the puppet. If it is not, it is closed or removed. That's for the closevoters to decide (again), without concerning themselves about whether the OP is a puppet or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For duplicates, you should do what you always do with them. In this case, you can't because it is a duplicate of a closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-02-20T14:10:44.607" LastActivityDate="2013-02-20T14:10:44.607" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2013-02-20T18:49:53.573" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for what we should do with questions coming from our &quot;resident troll&quot; on their own merits, all questions I’ve seen should be closed &lt;strong&gt;Off Topic (out of scope)&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions generally include a link to a page published on the Internet, an excerpt, and a proposed correction. The question is whether the excerpt should, as the OP thinks, be corrected or what the text would mean if corrected as proposed. The proposed correction is usually unnecessary. Sometimes there are multiple proposed corrections. Sometimes there is no link. Sometimes there is an indication that a general reference was consulted before asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nXAfo.png&quot; alt=&quot;“Are you coming to bed? —I can’t. This is important. —What? —Someone is -wrong- on the Internet.”&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the FAQ, literary criticism and critique requests are &lt;strong&gt;Off Topic (out of scope)&lt;/strong&gt;. Proofreading is also &lt;strong&gt;Off Topic (out of scope)&lt;/strong&gt; unless the source of concern is clearly specified &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; unless the question is based on an actual problem that the OP faces.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; Proofreading other peoples’ published works does not qualify, especially when there is no real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably there are more close reasons which apply on the merits. &lt;strong&gt;Too Localized&lt;/strong&gt; (“the Internet is fine” is unlikely to help anyone, not even the poor OP). &lt;strong&gt;Exact Duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; (when applicable). &lt;strong&gt;Not A Real Question&lt;/strong&gt; when the question is unclear or incomplete (lacks context and prior research). The only close reason that applies less to the merits and more to the troll is &lt;strong&gt;Not Constructive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions are also cross posted without attribution to other non-SE fora such as &lt;em&gt;EnglishForums.com&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;WordReference.com&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;UsingEnglish.com&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;BBC Learning English Message Board&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Yahoo! Answers&lt;/em&gt;. When this occurs, the question should also be flagged for moderator review, as that creates a legitimate concern about copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T18:14:55.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2013-02-21T13:16:15.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The change of policy about handling sock-puppets is a consequence of another change: Moderators cannot anymore merge user accounts. (I checked on the site where I am moderator, and the menu item which allowed that is not shown anymore.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for voting to close a question as not a real question because the duplicate question was closed for that reason, you should ask yourself: Would you have closed the first question as not a real question? If you would not close the first question as not a real question, then you should not close for that reason another question that is essentially duplicating the first.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Probably, you would find the question closable as general reference, if it can be answered looking at a resource thought to give answers to that type of questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:16:15.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3753" CreationDate="2013-02-21T13:22:09.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once you up-vote a comment, you cannot flag it anymore. Other users who didn't up-vote the comment can flag it for moderation attention, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T18:18:36.243" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T18:18:36.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3752" CreationDate="2013-02-21T13:31:59.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you aren't a moderator, there isn't a way to search deleted questions. If your reputation allows you to access &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&lt;/a&gt;, you can look at the &quot;delete&quot; tab,  and see the posts that have been deleted in the past 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SEDE shows the posts that are not deleted. Since its data are not live-updated, you could get deleted posts as result of a query. SEDE's data is updated more frequently now, than in the past. Even if the data are updated every 15 days, searching for deleted questions using the SEDE is unpractical, as you should check if the returned post is now deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:31:59.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-22T06:51:19.917" Score="-2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104896/go-missing-at-in&quot;&gt;&quot;Go Missing At In&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was deleted by a mod ~20 minutes after being posted. Why was this done? Shouldn't it have been closed first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Now we appear to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104913/missing-at-in-out-of&quot;&gt;have a dupe&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T09:39:06.003" Title="Why was the question &quot;Go Missing At In&quot; deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3763" CreationDate="2013-02-22T09:24:48.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is: it's Nortonn S. There is more information in my questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3757/what-is-our-sockpuppet-policy&quot;&gt;sockpuppet policy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3752/how-do-i-find-deleted-questions&quot;&gt;finding deleted questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods (apparently) no longer have the ability to merge accounts to make sockpuppetry obvious. Another change which was made is that SE policy is now to allow sockpuppets' questions to remain and survive or fall on the merit of the question rather than the status of the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fine when the user is not a suspended user &amp;mdash; someone who registers twice in error is actually penalised by having rep split between two accounts, provided that they don't vote on their own questions. Unfortunately it also has the effect of rendering suspensions completely ineffective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a sockpuppet account is discovered, it's removed and the question gets one of the anonymous brown icons. At that point, if it's been downvoted* the question will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this stops mods from acting unilaterally, of course; and in the case of suspended accounts I believe that's entirely justified, as I have commented before. Perhaps I might make the suggestion that &amp;mdash; since merging accounts is no longer an option &amp;mdash; a comment is added to that effect instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* I don't know if this is &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; downvote, or a net negative score.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T09:39:06.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-22T12:03:26.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104907/with-vs-in-in-the-following-sentence&quot;&gt;Choosing “with” vs. “in”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While doing some formal writing at my office,  my friend told me that &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; is more apt than &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; in the following sentence. However, my understanding says when we talk about tools of action we generally use &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A gazetted officer is required to sign with/in green ink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which is more apt here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T12:03:26.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-22T21:22:25.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104990/thats-no-way-to-go-to-your-mother-what-is-the-actual-letters-word-in-thats&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104990/thats-no-way-to-go-to-your-mother-what-is-the-actual-letters-word-in-thats&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have read a sentence like this:That's no way to go to your mother.here in this sentence what is implied(by a aportrophe and a &quot;s&quot;) in &quot;that's&quot;.and what is the meaning and structure of this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T21:22:25.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-22T23:28:16.510" Score="7" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broken link on FAQ page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/ask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/ask&lt;/a&gt; is 404:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, if your question isn't adequately answered by these resources, feel free to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/ask&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; here on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange. Be sure to mention the research you've done and what you're still hoping to learn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T19:56:25.420" Title="Broken link &quot;ask&quot; on FAQ page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-24T03:48:28.670" Score="22" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the old FAQ links has been replaced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;a Help link&lt;/a&gt;, this concern no longer applies now that   they’ve begun to call it what it is.  The question of whether it should be easier to find the actual list of Frequently Asked Questions I leave open for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The ELU FAQ versus the ELU FAQs&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you come to ELU with a question that you figure is a common one, so you conscientiously check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;the ELU &lt;strong&gt;FAQ&lt;/strong&gt; link&lt;/a&gt; first before asking your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of course doesn’t help you at all, since that very prominently placed and named link &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lead you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?pagesize=50&amp;amp;sort=faq&quot;&gt;the list of the most frequently asked questions on ELU&lt;/a&gt;.  Not only that, but nowhere in that wall of text does it even mention how to find the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; FAQ list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you go ahead and ask your FAQ, and it gets closed as duplicate — and you get put off the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Shouldn’t we fix that?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing that is our so-called FAQ link is actually more of an “ELU users guide” or meta-FAQ.  It is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the list of frequently asked questions on ELU.  This violates the principle of least surprise.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given how many times those FAQs have been asked, how many dupes to them keep piling up, and how people feel like they’re getting slapped on the wrist when their questions get closed, wouldn’t it be friendlier and more useful — and easier on everyone — if the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; FAQ list were a lot easier to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?pagesize=30&amp;amp;sort=faq&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152&quot;&gt;When should I use “a” vs “an”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846&quot;&gt;How do the tenses in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/889&quot;&gt;When is it necessary to use a hyphen in writing a compound word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral, singular pronoun (“his” versus “her” versus “their”)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1016&quot;&gt;Do you use “a” or “an” before acronyms?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338&quot;&gt;Are collective nouns always plural, or are certain ones singular?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1095&quot;&gt;Are there rules about using “that” to join two clauses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/629&quot;&gt;When should I use “a” versus “an” in front of a word beginning with the letter h?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1073&quot;&gt;What is the correct possessive for nouns ending in “‑s”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16&quot;&gt;When is it appropriate to end a sentence in a preposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2031&quot;&gt;Are there any simple rules for choosing the definite vs. indefinite (vs. none) article?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78&quot;&gt;When to use “that” and when to use “which”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for using “who” and “whom” correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412&quot;&gt;Should I put a comma before the last item in a list?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14&quot;&gt;Which words in a title should be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13662&quot;&gt;How should I phrase a question that must be answered with an ordinal number (e.g., the third prime)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1366&quot;&gt;Pluralization rule for “five-year-old children”, “20 pound note”, “10 mile run”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/313&quot;&gt;When do I use “I” instead of “me?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3368&quot;&gt;“A/An” preceding a parenthetical statement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/503&quot;&gt;What is the correct way to pluralize an acronym?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329&quot;&gt;When should a verb be followed by a gerund instead of an infinitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4226&quot;&gt;“My wife and I's seafood collaboration dinner”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1133&quot;&gt;“My friends and I” vs. “My friends and me” vs. “Me and my friends”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4556&quot;&gt;“Who wants ice-cream?” — Should I say “(not) I” or “(not) me”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660&quot;&gt;“If I was” or “If I were”. Which is more common, and which is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462&quot;&gt;Regulatory bodies and authoritative dictionaries for English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1047&quot;&gt;Which is correct, “you and I” or “you and me”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2964&quot;&gt;When did it become correct to add an “s” to a singular possessive already ending in “‑s”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1560&quot;&gt;How should I punctuate around quotes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11570&quot;&gt;To hyphenate or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3288&quot;&gt;Is “staff” plural?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1357&quot;&gt;When is the present perfect tense used instead of the past tense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481&quot;&gt;Framing a question to which the answer is an ordinal number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1209&quot;&gt;Why have the subjunctive and indicative converged in Modern English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1314&quot;&gt;“User accounts” or “users account”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use “their” instead of “his or her”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3841&quot;&gt;Which day does “next Tuesday” refer to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3447&quot;&gt;I can run faster than _____. (1) him (2) he?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2625&quot;&gt;When is a gerund supposed to be preceded by a possessive pronoun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21706&quot;&gt;Why do we say “was supposed to” for “should have”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4733&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for adding “-er” vs. “-or” when nouning a verb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63256&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “has died” or “died”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2116&quot;&gt;When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2459&quot;&gt;What are some examples of awkward sounding but grammatically correct sentences?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1820&quot;&gt;Can anyone provide me with a list of English words that are their own antonyms?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5407&quot;&gt;Central Pennsylvanian English speakers: what are the limitations on the “needs washed” construction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3418&quot;&gt;How do you handle “that that”? The double “that” problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2117&quot;&gt;Are split infinitives grammatically incorrect, or are they valid constructs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do to make that list easier to find?  I also think it should be in the format I’ve just given it, not the complicated wall-of-text format that it actually comes in.  Just the titles and links, nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t see any downside for fixing this, and I see considerable potential for an upside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let’s do it, shall we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T12:57:47.033" Title="Shouldn’t people looking for FAQs be able to find them?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|user-interface|site-faq|new-users|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3768" CreationDate="2013-02-24T20:45:54.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel stupid. I've been here 6 months - but I never realized until now that there was a list of actual questions most frequently asked &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; ELU (as opposed to factitious list of questions &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; ELU contrived for expository purposes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a banner across the top of the landing and question pages - there was one of these running for three weeks on ELL inviting folks to meta, so it must be built into the system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a new 'box' like the Community Bulletin and the Favourite/Most despised tags boxes, with some such text as this:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Already answered?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Save yourself some time and effort. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?pagesize=50&amp;amp;sort=faq&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are the questions most frequently asked on ELU; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a place you can plug in your Search terms and find out whether anybody's already asked your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever it is should be on the landing page, the Questions page, and the Ask page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-02-24T20:45:54.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3768" CreationDate="2013-02-24T22:39:05.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see much point in providing a link to &lt;em&gt;questions most frequently asked &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; ELU&lt;/em&gt; if the purpose is to avoid new people asking those same questions again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've already got a much better facility (the &lt;em&gt;Search box&lt;/em&gt;) to help them on that front, plus the &quot;Ask a Question&quot; input screen makes a fair fist of displaying earlier questions that might be duplicates, based on the words appearing in your new question as you compose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new question is framed in such a way that the poster &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; get a clear indication of an earlier dup, I personally think it's no bad thing that it gets posted again. Even if we subsequently close it, the &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; person asking the same question is even more likely to find an earlier version, and it's no problem if he has to go through one more link if it turns out the one he went to first is the closed one (that probably doesn't have &quot;the best&quot; answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2013-02-27T00:47:11.803" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T00:47:11.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-25T02:58:18.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a good one, I think:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105185/can-i-say-very-welcome-to-talk-to-you&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;Can I say “Very welcome to talk to you”?&lt;/strong&gt; A friend wants to talk with me about something that makes her sad, but she's busy at the moment and wants talk later. I want to express that I'll be pleased to listen to her. Can I say: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Very welcome to talk to you&quot;?&lt;/em&gt; I guess it's wrong, but how I can express it correctly? Should I use the word &quot;welcome&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T02:58:18.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-25T03:46:59.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, querying &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aenglish.stackexchange.com+-site%3Ameta.english.stackexchange.com+%22better+fit%22+%22english+language+learners%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;client=opera&amp;amp;rls=en&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;channel=suggest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google for &lt;code&gt;&quot;better fit&quot; &quot;english language learners&quot;&lt;/code&gt; on ELU&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;comes up with 34 hits, of which 28 appears to be Reg’s suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an assortment of &lt;strong&gt;FIFTY&lt;/strong&gt; of these ELU questions that were nominated for ELL, generated using the query given above and closely related ones.  All but one or two are closed, and many have delete votes (sometimes three of them). They’ve been sorted alphabetically for easier reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/89912&quot;&gt;can “love” be used in place of “like”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103547&quot;&gt;Can “with” be replaced by “to” after verbs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/100526&quot;&gt;“Children playing” or “Playing children”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103717&quot;&gt;Contact us “on” or “at”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/101062&quot;&gt;Correct use of ‘blond’&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103930&quot;&gt;Difference between “anyone” and “everyone”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102586&quot;&gt;Difference between “hereafter” and “thereafter”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103249&quot;&gt;Difference between “they aren’t” and “they couldn’t”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/88342&quot;&gt;English Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102538&quot;&gt;“Event is raised when maintenance occurs or scheduled” vs. “or is scheduled”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102720&quot;&gt;Feel and Feeling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/100403&quot;&gt;General advice on learning English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103607&quot;&gt;Grammatically incorrect sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103818&quot;&gt;How to ask “Where are you going?” when event already passed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/33880&quot;&gt;How to write “only for female” on jeans tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/78759&quot;&gt;“I don’t know nothing” vs “I don’t know anything”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/92058&quot;&gt;Is a “perfect participle” right?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104982&quot;&gt;Is “he should be seventeen” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/77532&quot;&gt;Is it right to say “my sandals are broken”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1234&quot;&gt;Is “stuff” a plural word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103793&quot;&gt;Is the “one's” and “their” used correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/96296&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “… or I'm mistaken” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/50715&quot;&gt;“Is there anything else we could/will have done?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/77745&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct in grammar and does it even make sense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103641&quot;&gt;Is word ‘request’ by itself as polite form of asking for something?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104197&quot;&gt;Length of Answer!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104781&quot;&gt;“Match manual” or “match manually”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/77756&quot;&gt;Meaning of “long gone”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103074&quot;&gt;Meaning of the phrase “I am all ears”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/101567&quot;&gt;“More” vs. “more than”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/93304&quot;&gt;Most is vs most are&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/105165&quot;&gt;“Mr. Dill works ________ a big library”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/73296&quot;&gt;“One should warn” vs. “it should warn”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/83276&quot;&gt;“Prices vary state to state” vs. “prices vary from state to state”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102577&quot;&gt;Proper use of “the”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104018&quot;&gt;“Roll” vs. “roll up”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102592&quot;&gt;Talking “on behalf of Iranians” or “instead of Iranians”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103459&quot;&gt;Usage of “Make Sense”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/87427&quot;&gt;Usage of “one other” and “another one”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/101489&quot;&gt;Using contractions like “I'm” in text&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104983&quot;&gt;What does “an unwillingness of a privileged white author to abandon his frame” mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/101454&quot;&gt;What does “long enough to” mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/77652&quot;&gt;what does “the powers that be have to really mean it for the work to matter” mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104647&quot;&gt;What is wrong with this sentence? and the correction if necessary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103629&quot;&gt;What’s the difference between order and bill?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/93004&quot;&gt;“Where am I?” vs. “Where I am?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/100001&quot;&gt;Which phrase is more natural to a native speaker?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104352&quot;&gt;Why in shops they put “B sold here” instead of “B sells here”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/93570&quot;&gt;Why “the” in “Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103130&quot;&gt;Word order: “achieved solution” vs. “solution achieved”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T03:46:59.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-02-25T10:07:52.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105205&quot;&gt;Here's one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that could go either way; I only wish the O.P. had provided more context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He left the house ___ I was still sleeping&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be better completed with &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; or with &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the O.P. elaborated with something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand the rules for when I should use these two words. Which one should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I would probably suggest migration to ELL. However, had the O.P. provided this exposition instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand what the two words mean, and how neither one would present grammar issues – I'm just wondering if, given the choice to use either one, there might be some subtle rule that would make one of them the more preferred word in a particular context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to call attention to this question because it illustrates how &lt;strong&gt;the same basic question could be a good fit for either site, and the appropriate location would depend on the depth of the O.P.'s underlying question, and the O.P.'s background knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I'm very impressed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105205/usage-of-when-or-while-in-this-context/105208#105208&quot;&gt;Edwin Ashworth's answer&lt;/a&gt; to this question, given the location on which it was asked. Perhaps &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Ask an ELU question, get an ELU answer&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; ought to become a mantra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T10:07:52.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3776" CreationDate="2013-02-25T15:36:10.590" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago i got +100 Association Bonus, does anybody know what is it? when do we get this? is there a rule or something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33118" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T15:50:27.640" Title="What is association bonus and when do we get it" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-02-25T16:05:52.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3775" CreationDate="2013-02-25T15:50:27.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You get it when you join a second site on the Stack Exchange network. If you have a certain amount of rep on the main site, you get 100 free rep points on the second sites. This way you can do things like vote right away, because you've already demonstrated that you know how the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T15:50:27.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2013-02-25T22:57:27.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the 100 points are given, I believe it's because, if you've already earned 200 rep points at one SE site, there's no need to work from the ground up to re-earn the most rudimentary privileges, like commenting, voting, and talking in chat. Presumably, you've already become familiar with how the Stack Exchange sites work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without this bonus, some users might be deterred from joining other sites, simply because they wouldn't want to start with a rep of 1 – particularly when they've already been active and contributing members somewhere else on the Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T22:57:27.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3779" CreationDate="2013-02-26T23:52:25.480" Score="9" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104129/better-phrase-for-not-throwing-good-money-after-bad/104136#104136&quot;&gt;asked a question&lt;/a&gt; in good faith, but upon reflection (and after reading comments) decided it was poorly asked.  However, it had already received several (high quality) answers and could not be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead I initiated a vote to close (which was quickly supported by 4 others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this okay?  I'm not poking fun at the site's mechanics or mocking the rules, but it seemed the logical course in my situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5188" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T19:00:04.090" Title="Is it illogical (or even abusive) to vote to close my own question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3778" CreationDate="2013-02-27T01:20:02.003" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is OK. You should always vote your conscience here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also flag your own questions and answers to bring them to a mod's attention if you need help deleting or if you don't have the reputation to vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T01:20:02.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-27T16:52:06.093" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105514/a-word-to-describe-someone-who-has-moved-back-to-live-in-his-her-home-country&quot;&gt;A word to describe someone who has moved back to live in his/her home country?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an answer to this post, should my response really have been deleted? The decision seems highly arbitrary to me, no doubt the action of someone who was sleepy and\or grumpy, especially considering OP's original question, the answer that preceded mine, and my more expansive response which took much more of OP's query into account than did the preceding answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the first respondent's answer (which I did not disagree with so much as I felt a need to expand upon), I specifically addressed  the fact that (1) the noun form is more common than the verb form, and (2) pronunciation differences exist (at least in some regions) between the noun and verb form.  I then went on to give several example sentences, in a particular context, of the target vocabulary utlilized in each part of speech.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, my answer should be reinstated as a helpful elaboration on the first response?  I leave the decision in your hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35988" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-02-28T16:54:20.477" Title="Should my answer, which (I think HELPFULLY) supplemented the previous answer, have been DELETED?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3780" CreationDate="2013-02-27T17:03:17.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted it because if we exclude the part where you repeat the answer that was already given, the additional information doesn't change the answer. Helpful supplements and/or anecdotes can be left as commentary on the other answer. I will move it there if you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm not sleepy or grumpy. I'm making cake. Those feelings are currently impossible to feel. Because cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-02-27T17:11:38.860" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T17:11:38.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3780" CreationDate="2013-02-27T18:42:56.467" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites do not work like discussion groups. They are Q&amp;amp;A sites. Each answer is supposed to stand on its own, not be, in effect, commentary or followup discussion on another answer. This is reflected in the fact that answers are listed not in the order they were posted, but in order by number of votes. There is no guarantee your answer will show up right under the one you are commenting on, which will make it hard for readers to make sense of your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are more than welcome to post a standalone answer to the question, or to post your answer as a comment on an existing answer (in which case it should be recast as a constructive suggestion for improving that answer), or to improve an existing answer by editing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T18:42:56.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-27T23:54:19.130" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t understand why there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typesetting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typesetting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typesetting&lt;/a&gt; tag that is distinct from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any good reason for those to be separate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, I would like to propose that they please be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:43:09.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:43:09.497" Title="Should the typography tag and typesetting tag be merged?" Tags="|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3780" CreationDate="2013-02-28T06:04:02.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently I can't vote to &lt;em&gt;undelete&lt;/em&gt; the answer, because it was deleted by a mod, not by votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't necessarily think Shawn's answer was &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; good, but I don't see why it should have been deleted. The (only slightly earlier) answer didn't even mention what to me was a significant point - that for all the OED citations in the other answer, the fact remains that &lt;em&gt;repatriate&lt;/em&gt; is very rarely used as a noun (just as &lt;em&gt;expatriate&lt;/em&gt; is very rarely used as a verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think OP has a point here, and glib justifications involving cakemaking seem like further evidence that his (imho, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) contribution isn't being given the attention it deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-02-28T06:04:02.273" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3780" CreationDate="2013-02-28T16:54:20.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, on the 24th, I flagged  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104894/is-who-is-he-ok-when-we-dont-know-the-sex/105160#105160&quot;&gt;Is “Who is he?” ok when we don’t know the sex?&lt;/a&gt; as an answer of low quality. It is a duplicate and adds nothing further to the accepted answer. It also reads like a comment. My flag was disputed which I guess implies that at least one reviewer disagreed with me. The answer still stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I personally agree that Shawn's anecdote should have been in a comment to tchrist's answer, a little consistency in moderation will also be nice. His anecdote was far more useful than my flagged answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm assuming here that my flag wasn't just voted down by established users and that it went all the way up to the mod-queue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-02-28T16:54:20.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-01T04:36:45.493" Score="10" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a few questions of late asking for help identifying accents of TV and movie characters.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105536/accents-of-characters-in-downton-abbey&quot;&gt;This one about &lt;em&gt;Downton Abbey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; got 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes, but was closed as &quot;too localized&quot;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105682/in-which-accent-does-lieutenant-aldo-raine-brad-pitt-speak&quot;&gt;This one about &lt;em&gt;Inglourious Basterds&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is still open as of now.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25802/identifying-accents-of-british-actors&quot;&gt;This much older question about various actors&lt;/a&gt; was voted +5 and received two upvoted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we accept questions asking about the accents of fictional characters?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How about the accents of real public figures?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14981" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T00:13:12.403" Title="Accent identification questions" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3786" CreationDate="2013-03-01T05:31:36.317" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that they're fine. The Downton Abbey question is probably NARQ for being &lt;em&gt;overly broad&lt;/em&gt; as it asks for the identification of an entire cast of characters. The Brad Pitt question is fine, IMO. Ideally though, both these questions should have provided a link to a sample of the accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't think either question would be out of place on &lt;a href=&quot;http://movies.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://movies.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; which accepts questions on both movies and television programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2013-03-01T05:31:36.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3786" CreationDate="2013-03-01T08:26:15.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation is on-topic, so accents probably are. I see nothing wrong with asking about the accents of &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/6967366.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;public figures&lt;/a&gt;, or even anonymous &quot;vox pop&quot; interviewees if there is an example to listen to&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, asking about portrayals of fictional characters is probably off-topic: that would be a question about the actor's interpretation. A well-known example would be Dick van Dyke's &quot;Mockney&quot; [false Cockney] in &lt;em&gt;Mary Poppins&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of &lt;em&gt;Downton Abbey,&lt;/em&gt; or indeed any dramatic production, the actors are &lt;strong&gt;portraying&lt;/strong&gt; how things &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; have been said in their particular setting, and even then they are only making an &lt;strong&gt;attempt&lt;/strong&gt; to do so (which might be more or less successful). To attempt to regularise that here is out of scope: the question should be directed to the production team as only they can provide an authoritative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Care needs to be taken with copyright: a link to a clip on a broadcaster's website should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2013-03-01T10:55:17.753" LastActivityDate="2013-03-01T10:55:17.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3786" CreationDate="2013-03-02T00:13:12.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of those areas where I'm likely to find myself more concerned with &lt;strong&gt;how the question is asked&lt;/strong&gt; than &lt;strong&gt;what the subject is about&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a question about accents wouldn't necessarily be out-of-bounds by default, but I'd hope it would be carefully crafted and somewhat researched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a big fan of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105682/in-which-accent-does-lieutenant-aldo-raine-brad-pitt-speak&quot;&gt;Inglorious Basterds question&lt;/a&gt; as it is now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which accent has Brad Pitt adopted in the movie &lt;em&gt;Inglourious Basterds&lt;/em&gt; for the role of Lieutenant Aldo Raine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be more accepting of the question if the O.P. at least at mentioned something about the character and the accent – for example, where is this character supposedly from? (This information is readily found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0106963/bio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) It might also be helpful to include a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-iGTocZPA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; so that those unfamiliar with the accent could have a listen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's not very clear what the question is really asking about. &lt;em&gt;What is the accent?&lt;/em&gt; It seems like any of these answers could be considered correct to some extent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An American accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A southern U.S. accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An Appalachian accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Tennessean accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A hillbilly/redneck accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An Allegheny accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I figured that out just by reading the character's description in an IMDB database, and listening to 25 seconds of a YouTube clip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be better to ask something more along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know the Aldo Raine character is from Tennessee. Does his accent seem accurately portrayed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, if the O.P. has something different in mind, be more specific about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T00:13:12.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3797" CreationDate="2013-03-02T18:25:56.947" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Close votes on a question expire after a period of time. How long is this period? Also, is there any way of telling how many close votes a question has garnered over time? This would include those votes which have expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the same question applies to delete and reopen votes as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T17:20:32.377" Title="Close vote expiry period and cumulative count of all close votes for a question" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3778" CreationDate="2013-03-02T19:00:04.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me it seems self-evident that it's okay. Closing a question can be a good idea no matter who asked it. I consider it thoughtful and responsible to assess your own questions and vote to close if that seems right to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T19:00:04.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3793" CreationDate="2013-03-02T19:04:56.363" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a page where I can find all my comments &lt;em&gt;along&lt;/em&gt; with their vote count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T20:43:47.130" Title="Vote counts for all my comments" Tags="|support|comments|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3792" CreationDate="2013-03-02T20:43:47.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a go with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/100870/comments-with-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/100870/comments-with-score&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It relies on SEDE, which is not &lt;strong&gt;quite&lt;/strong&gt; up to date, but may provide at least most of what you're looking for. There are refinements which you may like to make, for example ordering by comment score instead of date/time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that my top-voted comment has 38 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T20:43:47.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-04T10:27:39.103" Score="6" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am used to &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, where when somebody asks the same question on &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Drupal Answers&lt;/em&gt;, I flag the question for moderation attention (using &quot;other&quot; as flagging reason), explaining the same user asked the same question on &lt;em&gt;Drupal Answers&lt;/em&gt;, and giving a link to the question on that site. What the moderators do in these cases is closing the question on &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;, and eventually comment on the question being cross-posted; sometimes, the moderators add a note for the OP about not cross-posting questions that are on-topic on more than one site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that in the case I flag the questions, the questions are carbon copies, not questions that are rephrased to ask slightly different, or follow-up questions; they are not even questions that are tailored for the site where they are asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I do the same for questions that are asked on EL&amp;amp;U, and then are asked on ELL when somebody suggest the other site for the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2013-03-06T15:29:07.023" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T15:29:07.023" Title="What should be done with a question asked on EL&amp;U which is successively asked from the same user on ELL?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3790" CreationDate="2013-03-04T17:11:00.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Votes expire after four days, with provisos. It's explained on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;voting privilege page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An SEDE query like this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select PostId as [Post Link],count(Id) from Votes&#xA;where PostId &amp;gt; 100000&#xA;and VoteTypeId = 6&#xA;group by PostId&#xA;having count(Id)&amp;gt;5;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...will find recent posts with more than five close votes. This could happen if a post is closed and re-opened and then closed again; or if close votes have aged and been replaced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't any questions with more than five close votes. Consequently it's not possible to find the total number of close votes including expired votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there must be an internal record of total votes, because it's not possible to vote to close a re-opened question where you voted to close the first time round. But it doesn't look like that data is made available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T17:20:32.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-04T18:35:31.953" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106026/what-is-the-difference-between-ink-and-paint#comment216114_106026&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106026/what-is-the-difference-between-ink-and-paint#comment216114_106026&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One commenter asked if I'd seen the ODO links, and handily linked them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of them tells me what the difference is between ink and paint; nor do they tell me why we have two words for pretty much the same things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this is a neat question that could have a deep answer, but you've closed it with unhelpful links that don't answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closing comment mentions that it can be answered by a reference work designed to answer that type of question.  Since one of the points of SE is to provide these answers it might be a good idea for you to link to one of these reference sites before you insta-close a question.  And then, if you don't find the answer in any of the sites you look at you can change your mind and re-open the question later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the question be re-opened if it asked &quot;Why do we still use ink and paint when they mean the same thing, or don't they mean the same thing and people are just using them wrong?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11834" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T00:52:10.273" Title="How to improve my question about the difference between ink and paint?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3798" CreationDate="2013-03-04T19:07:59.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it was my comment first, perhaps I can &amp;quot;show my working&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the difference between &lt;em&gt;ink&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;paint&lt;/em&gt; is explained in the ODO links I gave (to which you make reference here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ink&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt; [mass noun]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a coloured fluid or paste used for writing, drawing, printing, or duplicating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;paint&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt; [mass noun]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a coloured substance which is spread over a surface and dries to leave a thin decorative or protective coating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are clearly different, and do not indicate that &lt;em&gt;ink&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;paint&lt;/em&gt; are synonymous. (It's paint's &amp;quot;decorative or protective coating&amp;quot; which is the principal difference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To improve your question, show that you have consulted at least one respectable dictionary [I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt; helpful, but there are others]; quote the relevant parts of the definitions and say how they have not helped. It would also be advantageous to present the real problem you face where &lt;em&gt;ink&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;paint&lt;/em&gt; are being confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a &amp;quot;painted lady&amp;quot; in a circus freak-show is more than likely tattooed rather than painted, and &lt;em&gt;inking&lt;/em&gt; is frequently used as a slang term for tattooing — not surprisingly, since tattooing is done with ink. But that does mean that an &lt;em&gt;inked&lt;/em&gt; lady is referred to as &amp;quot;painted&amp;quot;. Perhaps that's a poor example: it's the best I can come up on the spur of the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as insta-closing the question, the links I gave &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; show that it is General Reference. If they don't, edit the question to show how they don't and I'll happily vote to re-open it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T19:07:59.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-05T07:03:20.627" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;DISCLAIMER&lt;/em&gt;: I am not a native English speaker but have studied the language and am proficient in its usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the birth of ELL, I as an user am puzzled as to whether to direct my question to ELL or EL&amp;amp;U? I do understand that the ELL site is meant for learners(&lt;em&gt;but aren't we all learning after all&lt;/em&gt;) and EL&amp;amp;U for more expert users posing &lt;em&gt;interesting and challenging&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am at a loss at, how to gauge if my question posted here on EL&amp;amp;U will be interesting or challenging enough for the other users? Or, if a question posted on ELL will fail to elicit a satisfactory response because its not too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do I pick which site to post my question on?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; Going through the answer by J.R for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt; cleared some of my doubts. But this forces me to question if the current process is somehow suggesting users to post their questions on ELL from where the &lt;em&gt;not-so-basic&lt;/em&gt; ones will be migrated to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T08:54:23.963" Title="How to decide if a question is better suited for ELL or EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|support|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-03-13T04:35:57.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3796" CreationDate="2013-03-06T05:32:08.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that ELL is still only in Beta mode, we probably don't particularly &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; mods to take too many decisions about questions posed on both sites. We're supposed to be &lt;em&gt;collectively&lt;/em&gt; defining the scope of ELL, not expecting the mods to present us with a &lt;em&gt;fait accompli&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I think the best thing to do is post a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; against the question (on either or both sites) linking to the duplicate on the other site. That way, many more users (those with the rep to closevote) can directly affect what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even those without that level of privilege can influence the decision - they'll see what's happened, they can up/downvote on either/both sites, and they can participate in the debate via comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't burden the mods with flags that need attention, when there isn't yet an established procedure for determining exactly what to do in any given case. Let the community/ies decide case-by-case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T05:32:08.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-06T12:04:07.910" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106238/what-tense-is-have-been-are&quot;&gt;What tense is &amp;quot;have been are&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106180/whom-of-which-a-valid-expression&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Whom of which&amp;quot;, a valid expression?&lt;/a&gt; be closed? If yes, why (NC, OT, NARQ, GR)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T20:06:21.373" Title="Should questions about grammatical errors be closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3802" CreationDate="2013-03-06T20:06:21.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The instances cited of &lt;em&gt;Have been are&lt;/em&gt; were pretty clearly inadvertent errors, probably arising during editing, and that question should probably be closed as Too Localized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Whom of which&lt;/em&gt;, however, although unquestionably non-standard, is cropping up too often to be dismissed as merely a local error. Its currency demands investigation: how did it arise, and why is it so widely accepted? This question is linguistically 'interesting', and I see no grounds for closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T20:06:21.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-07T00:13:48.910" Score="-4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring specifically to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32021/what-is-the-word-for-an-image-hidden-inside-a-painting&quot;&gt;What is the word for an image hidden inside a painting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five hours ago someone left what I consider a particularly bad answer.  Five hours ago, this question was protected by a moderator.  I'm not sure how this helps the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me, this action prevents someone from leaving a better answer in the future, doesn't remove the bad answer, and adds a big bar to the question, taking up real estate on the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the upside to this?  Or is this a poor practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4000" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T03:47:38.773" Title="Should we protected a question just because one person added a low-quality answer late?" Tags="|discussion|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-07T10:05:10.697" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Respondents often post data pertaining to how often a particular word is &quot;hit&quot; when an internet search is done to find out how many times it has actually been used. I have two concerns about this: 1. I question the accuracy of the searches, since it seems to me that not all &quot;hits&quot; are valid (for various reasons, especially the search engine's misinterpretation of a partial word as the whole word); 2. The validation of the word as correct (or accurate or appropriate) may not be directly linked to, nor genuinely (and logically) well supported by, the number of times it can be found on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone share these concerns, or have any other concerns about these searches? How much trust should we put in them? How highly should we value them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="38065" LastEditDate="2013-03-07T10:25:39.273" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T10:25:39.273" Title="Dubious value of internet searches for frequency of word usage" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-03-13T04:35:14.187" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3807" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-03-07T10:23:45.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The internet has become the primary source of information in all technologically advanced parts of the world. How can we evaluate the validity and usefulness of the information found there? What functionality does it offer that is of use to this site? In what way is internet information meaningful to us? Which specific resources are available and for what purposes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="38065" LastEditDate="2013-03-07T11:04:12.050" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T11:04:12.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3808" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-03-07T10:23:45.813" Score="0" Body="Questions related to reference material found on the internet." OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="38065" LastEditDate="2013-03-07T11:04:02.643" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T11:04:02.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3805" CreationDate="2013-03-07T11:30:21.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been up for almost two years. It has three upvoted answers. Two of the three seem rather thorough. One of the three is accepted. The OP is satisfied with what he has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question also has not one, but &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; downvoted answers by one-rep users. We cannot keep babysitting it like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reputation of 10 is hardly &quot;a big bar&quot;. In fact it's the smallest possible bar: just one upvote on an answer elsewhere. And we have literally hundreds of accounts that prove how easy it is to get 10 reps or more simply for posting the most inane one-liner question. And if you come from a different SE site, no matter what its topic, you get an association bonus that is ten times as high. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to deleting a poor answer, that is completely orthogonal to protecting a question. The two actions are not connected, by design. (After all, the new user should &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; what kind of reaction what kind of answer gets him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T11:30:21.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3767" CreationDate="2013-03-07T19:56:25.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and edited that page to fix the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T19:56:25.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-09T05:14:18.663" Score="9" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reviewing this question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106629/what-are-the-functions-of-each-part-of-the-principal-parts&quot;&gt;What are the functions of each part of the principal parts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to flag it to be moved to ELL. Only, ELL does not show in the list of sites. Can ELL please be added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T11:02:52.650" Title="Add ELL to list of sites for off topic questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-09T16:22:29.990" Score="-1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, why is it unacceptable to ask for word-recommendations involving disused or ancient words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T16:57:16.833" Title="Why is asking for disused words unacceptable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3812" CreationDate="2013-03-09T16:57:16.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange staff have said many times that single word requests should be discouraged. Some moderators have taken that to heart. However it's not an absolute ban. There are exceptions: a single word request which is especially interesting to English experts, when the question is clear and well researched, would certainly be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T16:57:16.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3768" CreationDate="2013-03-10T22:57:46.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;FAQ&quot; mean anyway? Yes, of course, it's an abbreviation of &quot;Frequently Asked Questions&quot;, I know, but it doesn't actually &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; that, does it? When you visit a website and see a link to the FAQ, you know what it means: it means user guide, it means &quot;these are things we think you ought to know before using the site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I would say that the FAQ link is appropriately named.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T22:57:46.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3768" CreationDate="2013-03-12T09:10:46.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll tell you one reason I like this idea: it's sometimes hard to find a duplicate question using the search box. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I have an (already asked) question in mind. (Or perhaps I should say, “&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; (already asked) question in mind”?) For example, let's pick #20: &lt;em&gt;Should I use “a” or “an” before a parenthetical statement?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can search for &quot;a an parentheses&quot; – that seems reasonable; however, that search returns &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=a+an+parentheses&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;over 300 results&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm unlikely to find my needle in that haystack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll let others argue about whether this should be called a “FAQ” or something else, but I really like the idea of putting a list of oft-repeated questions in some easy-to-find location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T09:10:46.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3817" CreationDate="2013-03-12T10:39:23.897" Score="-2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found it that after any downvote by me from first day of getting this privilege I miss my votes immediately. It happened first time in EL&amp;amp;U then in the other forums. I found it doesn't happen for the other users. By this I cannot use my right like the other users to keep the site far from of abusive actions and non constructive questions. It causes the other users find a more powerful ability to control my scores in low amounts in all forums and try a one-way action against me. It is happening for me during one month which I have joined SE. It seems like a bug for me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: I am not talking why I miss my votes when the other users downvote me but I asked why by downvoting a non constructive &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt; by me it causes the same effect on my scores immediately without any changing in my questions/answers scores. It seems like I am decreasing my own votes too after giving any negative vote to the other user's question automatically! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37324" LastEditorUserId="37324" LastEditDate="2013-03-12T11:26:17.720" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T12:12:20.870" Title="Why do I miss my own votes after any down vote to a question?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3816" CreationDate="2013-03-12T10:51:24.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you (or anyone else) downvotes an answer, you have a single point of reputation removed. You can find this information in the FAQ, in the section about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aFjIb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Circled downvote bit&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't see it for others because it would provide a way of indirectly gathering evidence about who might be downvoting your posts, and voting is supposed to be anonymous. But the penalty is assessed for everyone, we just can't see it for other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the downvotes when you downvote questions, I do not see any evidence that you are receiving serial or targeted downvotes. If you have some more specific information that you want to share, I can look into it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have brought the matter to the attention of the community mods, since they have more tools at their disposal than I do. If they find that someone is targeting you, the downvotes will be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T12:12:20.870" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3819" CreationDate="2013-03-12T12:35:55.457" Score="-5" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some users who have more than one profile and it is recognizable by finding repeated subjects and same methods in writing even by me as a non English speaker. Which policies has SE provided to stop these users and suspend their IDs? By Ip it is very easy to find it but what about people who use of different systems and IPs? I think it would be better to suspend these users not some who ask questions which you do not like. You can easily close their topics not try to suspend them. It makes mistrust in new users and the other audiences about EL&amp;amp;U policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: Multiple Ids mean one user who has several Ids in one forum by using different IPs. Surely having different account is not the matter of my question as all users in this forum have many other accounts in the other forums of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37324" LastEditorUserId="37324" LastEditDate="2013-03-12T16:32:18.737" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T16:32:18.737" Title="How can SE stop multiple Ids?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3818" CreationDate="2013-03-12T13:26:34.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multiple IDs are permitted. But the use of multiple IDs for fraud, such as vote stuffing, is not permitted and should be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2013-03-12T14:15:13.687" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T14:15:13.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3822" CreationDate="2013-03-13T04:34:45.080" Score="0" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it odd that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/107063/23608&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107056/whats-the-action-of-banging-two-beers-together-called&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the action of banging two beers together called?&lt;/a&gt; was deleted for being a comment when it clearly provides an answer (&quot;clank&quot;). While it can certainly be improved, it is no less useful than the other answers (&quot;clinked&quot;, &quot;chinked&quot;, &quot;cheers&quot;, and &quot;toast&quot;) to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer is also new to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T05:03:23.687" Title="Undelete deleted answer: clanking vs. clinking" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3821" CreationDate="2013-03-13T05:03:23.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I un-deleted the answer, since the user tried to edit it and make it more helpful once it had been deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T05:03:23.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3768" CreationDate="2013-03-13T09:06:25.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gone through the FAQs 3x and opened every link (I thought) and stilll haven't earned the badge for reading the entire FAQ page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38718" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T09:06:25.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3826" CreationDate="2013-03-13T09:18:33.147" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about the use of the word esquire by American lawyers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107084/how-did-the-term-esquire-come-to-be-used-for-lawyers&quot;&gt;How did the term &amp;quot;esquire&amp;quot; come to be used for lawyers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One comment said it was the &quot;best Q&amp;amp;A of the ... century.&quot; But I've got three (now) votes to close it and no comments indicating why.  Would somene care t tell me how I can make it acceptable?  BTW I'm a lawyer and not concerned that some are bashing &quot;pompous&quot; lawyers.  I agree. I know many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T13:49:18.180" Title="Why are there votes to close my &quot;esquire&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3825" CreationDate="2013-03-13T23:10:27.073" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What we have here is a failure to communicate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some are reading your question, and thinking, &quot;This is pretty straightforward – here's the link.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are reading those sources and thinking, &quot;But that doesn't answer my question!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there's an apparent disconnect between what you are asking, and what some observers &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think maybe some of this could have been avoided had you done some of that basic research &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; you asked your question (maybe you did), and then &lt;em&gt;included&lt;/em&gt; those findings in the body of your question (which is where the problem may be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had you provided a more detailed overview of the basics, and then explained why those hadn't satisfactorily answered your question, then it might have been easier for everyone to see the depth you were aiming at, and that might have warded off some of the close votes (though one never knows for sure, this can be a fickle community at times). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I have observed an apparent correlation between the amount of detailed background knowledge put into a question, and a hesitancy for readers to click on the close button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2013-03-14T13:36:47.240" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T13:36:47.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3829" CreationDate="2013-03-14T11:08:25.773" Score="16" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;---==,--=.-.,=-==-----&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean? I have seen that and its ilk in a few posts by new users. Is that a, you know, &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, I hesitate to ask--feel free to ignore--but who or what is Nortonn S? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastEditorUserId="3438" LastEditDate="2013-03-14T11:25:50.787" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T11:25:50.787" Title="What are these weird symbols that keep showing up in certain posts?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-14T11:18:57.077" Score="-3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone has downvoted each of my questions just now, I don't know why. Each had one upvote, now zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't many, but I'd appreciate it if the culprit's actions would be reversed anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37753" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T14:25:19.757" Title="Serial downvotes" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3827" CreationDate="2013-03-14T11:20:47.477" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/23135/nortonn-s&quot;&gt;Nortonn S&lt;/a&gt; is a suspended user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The random punctuation is a trademark of his which he adds to sockpuppet posts. It's a reliable signpost and is helping my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3818/how-can-se-stop-multiple-ids&quot;&gt;flag count&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; and probably that of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these &quot;new users&quot; are one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T11:20:47.477" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3828" CreationDate="2013-03-14T14:25:19.757" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a new user, you are not attracting downvotes on reputation, so they are legitimate downvotes on content (or possibly random votespamming).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each member of the community has a different idea of what a good question is, and votes accordingly. Some consider any question a good question as long as it is about English and reasonably clear. Others have different standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The owners of &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt;, in particular, intend the site to attract and serve English language experts (professionals and serious amateurs). As such, in their view, questions need to be well researched and interesting to experts. This is reflected in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions do not show much evidence of research, and certainly do not go into detail about research results. Doing this in the future will help your upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;vestigialities&lt;/em&gt; question seems quite interesting despite the lack of research results, because it’s about a relatively new word that is still under the radar as far as lexicographers are concerned. The &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; question looks a bit interesting because of the various registers such as legalese that go into answering it. The word request for a noun version of &lt;em&gt;compel&lt;/em&gt; is uninteresting. A word request is not a good fit for &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; unless it's interesting to experts and well researched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T14:25:19.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-14T18:15:32.077" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using Google Chrome version 25.0.1364, on Windows 7. For me, in the &quot;Users&quot; section of both EL&amp;amp;U and the Meta site, the last filter button of each set is aligned a bit too high. For example, on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RmFtH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar misalignment is also present on the other pages, like &quot;new users&quot; and &quot;voters&quot;. This shows up on Meta.ELU, too: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YVwog.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked StackOverflow and MSO, but they seem to be fine. Can this issue please be fixed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T18:15:32.077" Title="On ELU and Meta.ELU, filter buttons not aligned in user page" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3833" CreationDate="2013-03-14T21:27:59.050" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/17795/shyam?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=views&quot;&gt;One of my questions&lt;/a&gt; has reached 10000  views, but I haven't got a gold badge still. Is it because of a rounding, i.e., is the count in between 9500-10000?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17795" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-03-17T05:07:20.153" Title="No gold badge after 10000 views?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3832" CreationDate="2013-03-14T21:39:39.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the number you see in your profile is rounded up. You can hover over it to see the actual figure, or visit the question itself and check the stats on the right-hand side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJJTj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ods9U.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that barely any badges are awarded instantly, especially not gold ones. The scripts that award them run in various intervals, going up all the way to 24 hours. So even if you did qualify for the badge right now you might still have to wait for one more day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T21:39:39.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-15T17:50:23.363" Score="5" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/107504/2022&quot;&gt;No, &quot;anon&quot; stands for &quot;anonymous&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107503/could-anon-be-considered-a-valid-abbreviation-for-an-announce-or-announceme&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107503/could-anon-be-considered-a-valid-abbreviation-for-an-announce-or-announceme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is less complete but otherwise having same content as the first comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107503/could-anon-be-considered-a-valid-abbreviation-for-an-announce-or-announceme#comment218903_107503&quot;&gt;No. Anon is already the standard abbreviation for Anonymous, and an official announcement should not be labelled as having been written anonymously.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;given 15 minutes before the answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the comment was made since the question is general reference and will likely be closed as such, but the person answering it would have had a hard time not seeing the comment and to me it looks as a rep grabbing exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to take action when I see such answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T15:54:46.857" Title="Answer was already posted as comment by someone else - recommended action if any?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3834" CreationDate="2013-03-15T17:57:26.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any action that should be taken. In the specific case, the question is so simple that more than one user would give a very similar answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The answer is not a copy-and-paste of the comment; if it were, I would expect the user to give credit to the user who wrote the comment. I would not down-vote the answer, as voting is for the post, not the user who wrote the post; down-voting should not be a punishment for the user, but a vote for the correctness/quality of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something should be done is to close the question as general reference, if the question is really a general reference, or for any reason that applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2013-03-16T11:22:01.047" LastActivityDate="2013-03-16T11:22:01.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3834" CreationDate="2013-03-16T01:08:18.453" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I post just a Comment it's generally to ensure that OP gets some sort of an answer even if the question is closed. I may choose, if I have the time and the interest and enough to say, to create a real Answer; but if I don't choose to do so, what I have posted as a Comment is free for anyone's use, to build in, to build upon, to build out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2013-03-25T15:54:46.857" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T15:54:46.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-17T03:03:23.260" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is closed as off-topic (or due to some other reason) then I think it does not makes sense to enable up or down vote for that question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2532" LastActivityDate="2013-03-22T11:51:05.403" Title="Up/down vote for a closed question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3834" CreationDate="2013-03-17T17:30:59.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recommended actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encourage the commenter to post an answer the next time around.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copy the comment and post it as a community wiki answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If somebody else has knowingly or unknowingly copied said comment and posted it as an answer, treat it as a genuine one. If the original commenter complains, refer to point 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastActivityDate="2013-03-17T17:30:59.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3839" CreationDate="2013-03-18T01:13:11.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would you want to disallow an upvote on a closed question, particularly if you're concerned about discouraging an O.P.? I would think an upvote would be encouraging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've upvoted closed questions before, even when I've agreed they should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are upvoted when they are clear, and show much research effort. (If you don't believe me, hover over the upvote button, and read what it says).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are closed when they are duplicates, or off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible for someone to put a lot of research effort into a question, and to state it in a very clear an interesting way.  That said, the question might still be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I realize this is the exception, not the norm – I just wanted to give another viewpoint. All in all, I agree with the sentiments given at the MSO posting: if you don't want the downvotes, ask good questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-03-18T01:19:05.820" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T01:19:05.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-18T04:40:04.413" Score="10" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wish&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;deleted&lt;/strong&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/harry-potter&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;harry-potter&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;harry-potter&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;deleted&lt;/strong&gt;) do not appear to serve any useful purpose and can be deleted. Other tags which appear ripe for deletion/synonymisation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tech-speak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tech-speak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tech-speak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/management-speak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;management-speak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;management-speak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genericized-trademarks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genericized-trademarks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genericized-trademarks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polisemy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polisemy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polisemy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/productiveness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;productiveness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;productiveness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about these either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiomaticity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiomaticity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiomaticity&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=suggested&amp;amp;tab=newest&quot;&gt;Suggested&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I've added a &lt;strong&gt;(deleted)&lt;/strong&gt; note to those tags which have been deleted. Users who can should visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=suggested&amp;amp;tab=newest&quot;&gt;suggested synonyms&lt;/a&gt; page and vote on any pending suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-03-23T18:02:09.670" Title="Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3843" CreationDate="2013-03-18T05:12:53.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, delete those tags! I just noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wish&lt;/a&gt; tag too! There are four instances of it, I believe. Consider also as candidates for deletion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/schwa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;schwa&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;schwa&lt;/a&gt;: There is only one question on the entire site with that tag. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word&lt;/a&gt; and its synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt;: It seems to be used primarily by one person (user account).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/term&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;term&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;term&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terms&lt;/a&gt;: Neither have any associated questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="4915" LastEditDate="2013-03-18T05:24:33.990" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T05:24:33.990" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3843" CreationDate="2013-03-19T12:33:14.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synonyms will stop deleted tags being resurrected in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/management-speak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;management-speak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;management-speak&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/business-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;business-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;business-language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tech-speak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tech-speak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tech-speak&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiomaticity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiomaticity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiomaticity&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="23608" LastEditDate="2013-03-19T12:36:49.090" LastActivityDate="2013-03-19T12:36:49.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3843" CreationDate="2013-03-20T08:46:18.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genericized-trademarks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genericized-trademarks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genericized-trademarks&lt;/a&gt; should have been retagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/trademarks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trademarks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;trademarks&lt;/a&gt;, rather than untagged. Unless &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/trademarks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trademarks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;trademarks&lt;/a&gt; should be deleted, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genericized-trademarks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genericized-trademarks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genericized-trademarks&lt;/a&gt; were a mistagging in the first place. Please take more care next time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T08:46:18.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3848" CreationDate="2013-03-20T16:20:14.827" Score="6" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify, this is not a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2711/is-it-acceptable-to-copy-prior-answers&quot;&gt;summarizing&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1607/where-to-draw-the-line-in-plagiarism-of-earlier-answers/1612#1612&quot;&gt;plagiarizing&lt;/a&gt;, or on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3834/answer-was-already-posted-as-comment-by-someone-else-recommended-action-if-any&quot;&gt;answers that repeat comments&lt;/a&gt;. Three of us responded to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108016/word-for-parents-with-children-who-have-moved-out&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;parents with children who have moved out&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; ; I think Mitch's comment and coleopterist's and my answers were posted all within about 30 seconds, and I don't think any of us were aware of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer was the last to be posted by 5-10 seconds, and if it were a total duplicate I'd simply delete it. In this case, however, I think my answer is more complete and links to a more reliable reference; regardless of voting/accepting, I would want that information to be included somewhere in the thread. What is the accepted etiquette?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the answer and move on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete the answer and add the additional information as a comment on the accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete the answer and add the additional information by editing the accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T23:32:34.540" Title="Etiquette for simultaneous duplicate answers" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2013-03-20T18:15:15.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Important caveat: The accepted answer isn't by any means the 'best', merely the one that OP felt met his specific requirements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual answer:  I would consider it impolite to edit somebody else's accepted answer merely to expand on the point, though others certainly disagree. A specific link would probably fit best as a comment, but there really is no need to delete an answer you feel is good merely because somebody else posted the same information a minute earlier; leave it to compete for votes on its merits (unless the question is so cluttered than a viewer won't have time to read all the answers before moving on).  If in a few weeks your answer has no votes and somebody else's has several, then it may be best to delete yours and put the factual 'improvements' in a comment on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Full disclosure: exactly this happened to me on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/107943/8019&quot;&gt;A (highfalutin) word for a highfalutin word?&lt;/a&gt; : my answer was fuller (and typo-free), so I didn't even consider deleting it because a comment and a competing answer had appeared while I was composing it. I wouldn't expect anybody to do so for one of my comments/answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T18:21:06.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-21T09:43:25.260" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;At ELU, blockquotes are used quite frequently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm a fancy blockquote. I'm used to elaborate and give examples, as well as quote other people and posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the nearest thing we have to an &lt;em&gt;inline&lt;/em&gt; quote in the markdown format is using a pair of `'s, which are meant for inline blocks of &lt;strong&gt;code&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how those look in context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l5Amf.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;#39;Inline quotes&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, they have a light-gray background, which looks a bit out of place, and the monospace font doesn't help either (I think this is meant for &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;programming-related StackExchange sites&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The short (kind of) question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have different formatting for inline code/quotes that is more similar to the blockquote formatting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ideas&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be possible to have &lt;strong&gt;double&lt;/strong&gt; backticks ([backtick][backtick][stuff][backtick][backtick]) parse to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;q&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; elements (which are meant for short quotes), and have a pretty non-technical appearance similar to that of blockquotes. &lt;strong&gt;Single&lt;/strong&gt; backticks would still parse the same (to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20391" LastEditorUserId="20391" LastEditDate="2013-03-21T11:16:25.610" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T18:11:11.143" Title="Inline quotes formatting" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|style|css|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3849" CreationDate="2013-03-21T10:53:05.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the ugly and freakily colored monospace that you get from backquotes makes next to no sense and is a real pain. In fact, I talk about that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3358/2085&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one real exception is that we have no other ways of doing tables for a code block.  And yes, there really are times that you want exact column placement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S (NP (NP The dial)&#xA;       (PP of&#xA;           (NP (NP (NP Dudley 's)&#xA;                   watch)))&#xA;               ,&#xA;               (SBAR (WHNP which)&#xA;               (PP of&#xA;                   (NP (NP (NP Dudley 's)&#xA;                           watch)&#xA;                       ,&#xA;                       (SBAR (WHNP which)&#xA;                             (S (VP was&#xA;                                    (VP dangling&#xA;                                        (PP over&#xA;                                            (NP (NP the edge)&#xA;                                                (PP of&#xA;                                                    (NP the sofa))))&#xA;                                        (PP on&#xA;                                            (NP his fat wrist))))))))   &#xA;               ,))&#xA;   (VP told&#xA;       (NP Harry)&#xA;       (SBAR [that]&#xA;                  (S (NP he)&#xA;                     (VP 'd&#xA;                         (VP be&#xA;                             (NP eleven)&#xA;                             (PP in&#xA;                                 (NP (NP ten minutes ')&#xA;                                     time)))))))&#xA;.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gosh! That looks even worse here on Meta than on Main, doesn’t it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One further issue is that you don’t have to figure out how to escape or otherwise “entify” HTML literals in backticks, allowing you to write a simple &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;hr&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or whatnot instead of being forced to resort to icky entities.  Even if we fixed the backtick styling, we still have the escaping issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how often we need to do that on ELU compared with on more programming-centric sites is probably exceedingly tiny — but not, perhaps nonexistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T18:11:11.143" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3839" CreationDate="2013-03-22T11:51:05.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the reasons for closing quotes are subjective. What you may deem off topic, I may think entirely appropriate, and vice versa. This is why it takes five like-minded people (or one moderator) to close a question for any reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, posts can be reopened with five votes. A vote represents an opinion, not an edict. The system allows for individual imperfection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for moderators, of course. Mods are, by definition, perfect in their judgments. Yet even five reopen votes will overrule their close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2013-03-22T11:51:05.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3853" CreationDate="2013-03-23T17:25:45.187" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/30551/listenever&quot;&gt;@Listenever&lt;/a&gt;'s question count on ELU has increased to a couple per day and appears to be even &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/users/504/listenever?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;higher on ELL&lt;/a&gt;. While this is perfectly fine, s/he appears to be cross-posting questions on &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2603348&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wordreference.com&lt;/a&gt;. (To see all his/her questions, click on the username and &lt;em&gt;view forum posts&lt;/em&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked at his last five questions (listed further below) on ELL and each of them has also been posted on WR. From a cursory look, this might well be the case for many of his other questions too. Is this acceptable or constructive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the following questions has been cross-posted on WR. &lt;strike&gt;The links to the cross-posts are available in the comments below each question.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108265/is-the-participial-phrase-the-direct-element-of-s-or-in-the-vp&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108265/is-the-participial-phrase-the-direct-element-of-s-or-in-the-vp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108264/is-this-a-bare-infinitive-or-a-verb-root&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108264/is-this-a-bare-infinitive-or-a-verb-root&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108250/definite-article-plus-adjective&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108250/definite-article-plus-adjective&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108092/passive-auxiliary-verb-or-progressive-one&quot;&gt;Passive auxiliary verb or progressive one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108067/prepositional-phrases&quot;&gt;Prepositional phrases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T17:15:56.563" Title="Wordreference cross-posting" Tags="|discussion|questions|users|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3852" CreationDate="2013-03-23T19:50:06.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Caveat: You must not regard my answer as altogether disinterested. I have been Listenever's consistent and somewhat outspoken champion on ELU, when some users there seemed inclined to shut down her questions about usage in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; too 'archaic' (!) or too technical. I have enjoyed her questions, which often came down to fundamental matters which demanded very hard thought and very careful answers; and in consequence a large portion of my reputation on that site derives from my answers to her questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem with this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that WR and ELU compete for visitors and questioners, we can have no reasonable objection to a questioner comparison-shopping for the best answers; on the contrary, it gives us a signal opportunity to demonstrate our superiority by providing better answers, expressed in more intelligible, graceful and engaging English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if WR and ELU do not compete, why should consulting two authorities be regarded as reprehensible? —we explicitly advise our questioners to consult multiple dictionaries or grammars rather than just one. It may be relevant that this user (whose interest in our language appears to be literary rather than commercial or conversational) has shown herself eager to come to grips with fairly knotty grammatical issues. Having been repeatedly advised, both here and on ELU, that contemporary English grammar is far from monolithic— that approaches to particular issues, and the language employed for discussing them, varies widely—she may feel a need to expose herself to a variety of answers. In backtracking some of her citations I have noted that she posts on Korean-langage sites as well; does this multiply her transgressions, or does it rather demonstrate her genuine hunger to understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2013-03-23T19:50:06.990" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-24T04:49:38.910" Score="7" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently noticed a large number of tag wiki excerpts which are not particularly useful. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki excerpt said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about mathematics in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this could be easily deduced from the name of the tag alone, so I have changed it to be more descriptive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions on the usage and meaning of mathematical terminology and the names for mathematical entities in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also noticed that tags are frequently misused, placing the burden of choosing the correct tags on the most dedicated users. I doubt many users bother to read the main tag wiki pages, so the excerpt is the only thing that will help most users determine if it is applicable (although in cases such as above the &quot;excerpt&quot; is usually the entire tag wiki).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the tag wiki excerpts are improved, then the frequency of incorrectly tagged questions will probably decrease. I realize that nothing will correct this problem entirely, but I think better tag wiki excerpts would help users select more appropriate tags for their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31547" LastEditorUserId="31547" LastEditDate="2013-03-24T04:54:44.630" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T04:54:44.630" Title="Improving tag wiki excerpts" Tags="|discussion|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3811" CreationDate="2013-03-24T11:02:52.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a site is still in beta phase, it is not added as migration path for another site; there are exceptions to this, for example with Writers, but that site has been in beta phase 856 days (less than 2 years and a half).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there would be some questions that are candidates for migration to ELL, ELL has been in beta phase only 59 days. When the site will be in beta phase more days, and if there are still questions that should be migrated to ELL, ELL will be added as migration path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T11:02:52.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-24T16:57:29.673" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that all the comments I made to the questions referenced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3852/wordreference-cross-posting&quot;&gt;Wordreference cross-posting&lt;/a&gt; have been deleted. Can I somehow be notified when my comments are deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T16:57:29.673" Title="Comment deletion notifications" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-24T17:42:28.773" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the comments I made under the questions referenced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3852/wordreference-cross-posting&quot;&gt;Wordreference cross-posting&lt;/a&gt; have been deleted. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T17:42:28.773" Title="Why were my comments deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3860" CreationDate="2013-03-25T20:50:27.987" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a small design issue with the tag box where &quot;Favorite Tags&quot; and &quot;Ignored Tags&quot; are located. The fleur-de-lis on the side is directly underneath the first two letters on both labels, which makes it hard to read (not to mention it looks pretty bad). For the other boxes,  the labels are centered. I would suggest doing that in this case or adding a left padding to move the letters away from the fleur-de-lis design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fyn4C.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39848" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2013-03-26T18:04:55.480" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T18:04:55.480" Title="Sidebar Fleur-de-lis Formatting" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3858" CreationDate="2013-03-26T13:36:32.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Safari on Mac does not show this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AB7xt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T13:36:32.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3858" CreationDate="2013-03-26T18:04:17.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been fixed on live server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T18:04:17.617" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-29T03:29:30.247" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I wrote a sentence that had this form: I think this group includes any number of round items (apples, oranges, beach balls, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had no doubt that the final period was correct, but I thought the odd look of the period-parenthesis-period structure would be a mildly interesting point of discussion, which is not the sort of thing considered appropriate for this site. Moreover, I couldn't find any questions and answers on the site that addressed the question of correctness of this punctuation. (Many came close, but did not precisely address it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my dilemma is that it's a question that is sort of worth asking, but seems a bit too much in the realm of questions that engender mostly discussion and debate, and hence doesn't quite fit, yet there's no other place it would fit better. Furthermore, the discussion that already exists here that comes close is already extensive, yet STILL doesn't answer this exact point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it too trivial a question to ask? Is it off-topic? What about any question that seems to have been discussed &lt;em&gt;ad nauseam&lt;/em&gt;, yet still isn't precisely answered? What to do, meta users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T03:45:56.977" Title="What to do with a point of usage that's merely interesting?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3863" CreationDate="2013-03-30T03:45:56.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU &quot;dealt with&quot; this point of usage here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23022/how-to-deal-with-abbreviations-like-etc-at-the-end-of-parenthesis-which-are-c&quot;&gt;How to deal with abbreviations like 'etc.' at the end of parenthesis which are closing a sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want further discussion, post a comment there. Or &quot;bump&quot; it with an edit/answer, or add a bonus to stimulate community interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T03:45:56.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-30T08:26:27.783" Score="-10" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voting is supposed to be &quot;anonymous&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, users with the required privilege and mods may be able to see who has voted.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, such access to voting information is a privilege and is supposed to be for their benefit and not for the purpose of violating the anonymity of the voter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users who vote, especially down vote, are &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; to also post a comment explaining their vote. However, this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mandatory.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, @Kris ... explain to me please exactly why you downvoted this answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is one supposed to respond to the above &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8873/should-i-refer-to-a-person-by-his-her-name/109839#comment222799_8874&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;? (Considering that this is stereotypical case that recurs very often and I myself happen to face the situation not too occasionally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt;:&#xA;This post is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about the specific comment in question, which is why it is posted on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT: post- some comments]   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, as a matter of fact, people with sufficient privileges now do see that the downvote was yours.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was making no assumptions, only quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3531/why-is-this-question-not-gr#comment10099_3533&quot;&gt;reliable sources&lt;/a&gt;. This was not mentioned earlier so as not to identify the concerned member.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What reaction did you expect to your copious down-voting of my answers? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3865/voting-is-anonymous?noredirect=1#comment12101_3865&quot;&gt;17 hours ago&lt;/a&gt;)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T15:46:52.267" Title="Voting is anonymous?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-30T08:49:46.687" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not uncommonly, a comment triggers an edit by the OP, resulting in a retained comment that refers to some piece of the original question that no longer exists. Shouldn't we be able to delete or modify these comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-04-02T11:58:49.257" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T00:21:06.240" Title="What to do with comments that refer to an element that has been edited out?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3865" CreationDate="2013-03-30T09:30:04.653" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting cannot be entirely anonymous because the system must know how you voted in order to colour the voting arrows, calculate rep and detect and correct irregularities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;trusted users&quot; (20k) cannot see who voted. I suspect that mods can't either and it's only the SE team who can, with their privileged access to the database. The -1 on your rep isn't shown in your profile (in order that that vote cannot easily be linked to you), and if anyone were to bother to do detailed calculations on your rep score all that would yield is the total number of answer-downvotes you've made. It wouldn't be possible to time any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus any comment such as the one you quote is essentially based on speculation. I see that you edited and commented on another answer at (I guess) more-or-less the same time as the single downvote, so it's possible to see how that speculation resulted in the question to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long-standing and active ELU users may have some knowledge of your stance on certain types of questions or answers, particularly where previous comments have been explicit on a downvote, and this prior pattern can inform that speculation too. It still remains speculation, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, I would say that the obvious reply is &quot;I didn't downvote&quot;, whether or not that is in fact true. If you don't want to do that, you could reply with a non-committal &quot;You may think I downvoted; don't forget that you can be mistaken.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate solution and guarantee of anonymity is to separate any activity like editing from voting. Editing an answer brings the question to the top of the &quot;Active questions&quot; list. Once it's been there for fifteen minutes or so, &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; could have voted on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39630" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T09:30:04.653" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3866" CreationDate="2013-03-30T09:46:54.870" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can certainly delete your own comments. The system does not allow users to delete or modify other users' comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's another user's comment which has triggered the update, you can flag the comment as obsolete. Unfortunately the tooltip doesn't mention that as an option, but there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1840/is-the-obsolete-flag-applicable-even-to-comments-that-have-already-re-written&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; which indicates this is the expected course of action. Mods will receive the flag and can delete the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vxjsv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flagging a comment&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39630" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T10:15:56.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3874" CreationDate="2013-03-31T17:29:07.917" Score="10" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today when I was browsing some older post on EL&amp;amp;U SE, a window with the words &lt;em&gt;&quot;chat with an expert&quot;, &quot;not now&quot;, and &quot;never&quot;&lt;/em&gt; suddenly showed up. Out of curiosity, I clicked on &quot;chat with an expert&quot; and there is another window popped up, and this 'expert' was chatting with me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZS8t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://adviza.stackexchange.com/transcript/Cu4pVWGBMkKC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is a transcript of the chat (they called it &quot;Ongoing support chat&quot; but I swear the words beside the photo was &quot;An expert&quot; when I chatted with her [or him].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accidentally clicked on a link before asking her another question and now I can no longer get to contact with this expert again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What triggers the &quot;chat with an expert&quot; window to show up? Does this happen randomly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It suddenly showed up again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Gl8s.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W8ifd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36190" LastEditorUserId="36190" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T17:53:00.820" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What is &quot;chat with an expert&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-01T01:58:47.947" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I arrive at &lt;em&gt;ELU&lt;/em&gt;, if I have unread messages or notifications, I see a highlighted number next to the &quot;StackExchange&quot; element of the page headline. When I open the drop-down box and use it as a link to one of these items, the highlighted number vanishes, even if I started with multiple messages unread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have this number remain, and remain highlighted, with the number of as-yet unread messages or notifications? I would like to be able to know by this indicator if I've read them all or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T03:22:20.427" Title="Highlighted number of unread messages; could it update and remain highlighted?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3865" CreationDate="2013-04-01T10:23:10.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is one supposed to respond to the above comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your best course of action would be to explain your downvote. After all, an established user like you must have a good reason for downvoting, right? (I assume your downvotes are based on objectively evaluating answers, downvoting the ones that are &quot;not useful,&quot; as opposed to being rooted in some kind of juvenile vendetta or bias.) So, presumably, there was a sound motive for this downvote – all you need to do is explain it. Maybe others will follow suit, once they see the weaknesses of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have proposed that it become mandatory to justify a downvote by providing a reason. I've never agreed with that stance; I believe anonymity is a good thing in this regard. Nevertheless, in this particular case, the cloak of anonymity has been lifted, so there's no longer any reason to remain silent about your line of thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how should one respond when such a gauntlet has been thrown? Maturely, civilly, and rationally, of course. Set a good example through your reaction. Either calmly explain the downvote, or else ignore the comment altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T10:23:10.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-01T16:06:45.747" Score="11" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is very strange to me that on a question I recently asked already has 3 down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110150/is-there-a-word-or-phrase-for-language-and-culture&quot;&gt;Is there a word or phrase for language and culture combined?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, here are examples to very similar questions but with up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24533/word-or-phrase-that-describes-the-biased-perception-of-a-group?rq=1&quot;&gt;Word or phrase that describes the biased perception of a group&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108437/what-is-the-term-for-a-shortened-word-that-is-pronounced-based-on-phantom-letter&quot;&gt;What is the term for a shortened word that is pronounced based on phantom letters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact this question did receive an answer that there is no such term, was up-voted, and accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105224/does-english-possess-a-term-for-the-study-of-all-aspects-of-language-in-primary&quot;&gt;Does English possess a term for the study of all aspects of language in primary/secondary schools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110082/word-for-expressing-someone-whose-experience-is-mid-level&quot;&gt;Word for expressing someone whose experience is mid-level?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't then understand why in less than an hour of asking I've received 3 down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-04-07T17:02:54.110" Title="Why is my question receiving down votes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2013-04-01T17:31:34.863" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Expert: &lt;em&gt;Hi, how can I be of assistance?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  User: &lt;em&gt;I'm interested in the Turing Test&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Expert: &lt;em&gt;You're not the only one who is interested in the turing test.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  User: &lt;em&gt;Are you then?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Expert: &lt;em&gt;On the internet, nobody knows you're then.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  User: &lt;em&gt;Come again?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Expert: &lt;em&gt;On a slightly related note, you should try to have a difference in driving ability.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  User: &lt;em&gt;I take it you're not too bothered about passing a Turing Test then?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Expert: &lt;em&gt;Nobody asked me to be too bothered about passing a turing test then.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  User: &lt;em&gt;Just as well, since I'm coming to the conclusion you've already failed the test! :)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Expert: &lt;em&gt;I used to know someone who was coming to the conclusion &lt;strong&gt;me've already failed the test.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T17:31:34.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2013-04-01T18:06:44.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; What can you help with?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; That's a secret.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; You're not much help, then.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; I don't get paid for being much help.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; Ah. So we get what you're paid for.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; I can't answer that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; So what can you do?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; That depends.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; How is hunger satisfied?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; Why do you want to know?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; There's a question on a Stack Exchange site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; O... kay...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you waiting to see what the answer is?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; That depends.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; I was hoping I would speak to an expert.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; It's easy to become an expert; it's hard to be one.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;User:&lt;/strong&gt; QED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39630" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T18:06:44.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3883" CreationDate="2013-04-02T11:50:14.917" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new section has been added to the front page for new users. However it hides the word &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; behind a button. You can see this section if you log out and visit the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LK9uO.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of hidden words&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, this is the Programmers section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9L1Os.png&quot; alt=&quot;example with words shown&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2013-04-03T14:13:41.613" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T14:13:41.613" Title="New intro section inadvertently hides words" Tags="|bug|status-completed|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-02T12:35:17.357" Score="7" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;In light of the recent launch of our sister site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, I would like to propose that this site no longer accept questions of the &quot;What is another word or phrase for...?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single word requests have long been contentious here.  They tend to be uninteresting one-offs and rep-feeding frenzies. They also aren't really on topic, are they? English Language and Usage is supposed to be focused on academic questions of English and explaining the nuances of grammar and syntax.  Single word requests (and related phrase requests) can be fun to answer, but the vast majority aren't about the finer points of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, synonyms and slang phrases can be very helpful to language learners. If ELL does not object, I suggest we close single word requests and phrase requests as off-topic and recommend that those questions be asked on the learners site instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T20:21:14.553" Title="Reconsidering the single word request" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3878" CreationDate="2013-04-02T13:08:17.547" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;One counter-example, which is probably still not on-topic, is that&#xA;regional vocabulary varies considerably. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dare.news.wisc.edu/same-thing-different-words-synonyms-by-region/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DARE&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;attests for “the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street” not merely &lt;em&gt;terrace&lt;/em&gt; as I would use, but all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;boulevard [chiefly Upper MW, N Cent]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;devil strip [chiefly neOH]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grassplot [chiefly Atlantic]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neutral ground [chiefly LA, sMS]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parking [chiefly NW, Plains States, IA; also N Cent sCA]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parkway [scattered, but esp Missip-Ohio Valleys, West]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;street lawn [scattered, but esp OH]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;swale [FL, AL]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tax strip [OH, IN]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;terrace [chiefly Gt Lakes, Upper Missip Valley]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree bank [esp IL, WI]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree belt [NEast, esp MA]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree border [WI, CT]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree box [chiefly DC]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree court [WI]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree lawn [chiefly Gt Lakes, esp OH]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree plot [esp IN]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree strip [esp N Cent]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tree terrace [esp WI]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verge [esp NEast]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the &lt;em&gt;boulevard&lt;/em&gt; for me is the strip of grass between two opposing lanes of traffic, which looks just like the &lt;em&gt;terrace&lt;/em&gt; but is harder to get to without risking getting splattered by passing cars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can easily imagine SWRs that ask questions like these, for which there really is no single right answer.  It is quite possible that few SWRs have any single right answer, just fodder for the collider. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things like this can require quite a bit of real-world research to do a credible academic job on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T13:08:17.547" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3878" CreationDate="2013-04-02T14:07:26.603" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the problem is with single word requests; there are good ones and bad ones. And good or bad, they at least provide varied interest as opposed to questions about the difference of have and had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think single-word requests which could easily be answered by a thesaurus are necessarily bad either. There is so much nuance that is not explained by a word list or a dictionary entry. Just because the OP doesn't make an articulate case for requesting all that nuance doesn't mean we should kill it immediately or by rule (as you propose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The single-word requests may be annoying but at least they are interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here are what I consider two recent ... um ... below-threshold quality questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110373/what-is-a-person-called-who-i-can-hire-per-hour-to-do-my-personal-work&quot;&gt;What do I call someone I hire to do my personal work for me?&lt;/a&gt;  (the content of the question is little more than the title)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110394/word-to-describe-the-quality-of-being-optional-or-mandatory&quot;&gt;Word to describe the quality of being optional or mandatory&lt;/a&gt; (no prior effort)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for contrast, two good ones...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110202/an-event-that-occurs-only-once&quot;&gt;An event that occurs only once&lt;/a&gt; (short, but that's all that's needed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110131/what-is-the-english-counterpart-to-the-japanese-insei-rule-by-a-retired-empe&quot;&gt;What is the English counterpart to the Japanese ‘Insei’ – rule by a retired emperor/leader?&lt;/a&gt; (long descriptive question, open to nuance)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is all arguable, but maybe that's my point that it's not necessarily single word requests themselves that are bad but the different ways they might be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T14:30:45.513" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3878" CreationDate="2013-04-02T20:38:43.840" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many single-word requests would probably find a better home on ELL than on ELU, particularly those questions that are asked by, well, English &lt;em&gt;learners&lt;/em&gt; – where the main impetus for asking the question is that the O.P. simply hasn't learned enough English to know the right word to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, to declare that &amp;quot;these questions are no longer on topic&amp;quot; would be a mistake, I think. There are bound to be a few interesting posers that require a in-depth understanding of language to answer. For example, I don't believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69129/man-is-to-womanizer-as-woman-is-to-what&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; would be a better fit on ELL than on ELU – quite the contrary, actually. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt; that probably would seem out-of-place on ELL, but probably holds some appeal for many who are interested in serious study of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summmarize, I think many single word requests would be good candidates for migration, but I'd caution against a wholesale prohibition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also (maybe this goes without saying, but I'd like to reemphasize it anyhow), we'd only want to send the &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;  questions to ELL (i.e. those that are well-researched, with adequate context). Questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I'm looking for a word that means really, really strong”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should probably be closed at either site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T20:38:43.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3878" CreationDate="2013-04-03T11:31:45.707" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am getting really frustrated by &quot;what is the word for [something there is a word for in another language but not really in English]?&quot; as though all concepts must be represented by a single word. They do strike me as requests related to learning English more than anything else. Same with the in/at questions. At the moment I don't downvote or flag these, just ignore them. But I would prefer they be asked somewhere else. A clear position on these in the FAQ (in the spirit of &quot;good subjective, bad subjective&quot; for Programmers) would be fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3946" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T11:31:45.707" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3876" CreationDate="2013-04-03T13:37:40.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reporting this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already made some changes that should have made this a non-issue, and have added some more to ensure consistent look and feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature is currently being A/B tested, so you may not be able to see it again for a while...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41761" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T13:37:40.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3878" CreationDate="2013-04-04T14:32:58.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good lord! Single-word-requests off topic? In what universe??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bad question is a bad question, &lt;strong&gt;regardless of what tags it has&lt;/strong&gt;. An English learner's question might belong on ELL rather than here, &lt;strong&gt;regardless of what tags it has&lt;/strong&gt;. A question can be an uninteresting one-off, &lt;strong&gt;regardless of what tags it has&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The problem ISN'T with single word requests!!!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You find such questions uninteresting: that's fine, but they're &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;favorite&lt;/em&gt; kind of question. Really. Should your opinion be more binding than mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;... I mean, &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;? How on earth? I just can't wrap my mind around such a preposterous suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T14:32:58.513" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-05T03:14:04.770" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a phenomenon recently. An old old interesting question pops to the top of the activity queue. I look at the question and can find no activity on it...except for a couple hours ago a spam answer appeared, but was thankfully deleted right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5540/wend-went-went-changed-into-go-went-gone&quot;&gt;{wend, went, went} changed into {go, went, gone}&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only one example; it may have been happening all along, but I only recently noticed a few. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is this...should this behavior (of SE, not the people) be modified to not bump it to the top?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first inclination is 'Yes! Modify SE to Suit My Tastes!'. But that's extra work for the developers; also, the random bumping isn't so terrible, just somehow intellectually disconcerting. Also, I think we'll survive without doing anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, change or leave alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T11:19:39.240" Title="Is it good or bad that a spam answer, even once deleted, still brings a question to the top?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3885" CreationDate="2013-04-05T08:59:04.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is necessary to ensure that spam/offensive flags are used appropriately. If the question would vanish again after such flags are declared valid, it would be far harder to detect any misuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving the posts on the frontpage ensures that some other users will see them and would notice if someone abuses spam flags on posts that are not spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23030" LastActivityDate="2013-04-05T08:59:04.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3885" CreationDate="2013-04-05T09:04:38.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally counterproductive to bring old questions to the top of the list. Many users cannot see deleted answers and won't know why the question is there; and they will post an answer or a comment simply because they can. Those answers seem to be of lower quality than the existing answers, or do not add anything useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: a new answer does need to bring the question to the top in order that the new answer can be examined easily (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3886/18696&quot;&gt;Mad Scientist has said&lt;/a&gt;). But perhaps there might be a wrinkle: if an answer has been flagged as spam or offensive, remove all its effects when it's deleted. If it's not spam, those flags will either be declared invalid or the answer will not be deleted and can remain on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66218/is-the-phrase-please-be-informed-that-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;Here's a case in point.&lt;/a&gt; [Once the offensive answer is deleted it will only be available to 10k users, but it contained no useful content, was dismissive and offensive.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T11:19:39.240" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3873" CreationDate="2013-04-06T19:21:21.063" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ryan, there is no accounting for most down votes. The majority of them are not explained, and it's not uncommon for down votes to be cast for reasons other than any valid assessment of the worth of the question. Once you've been here long enough, you'll realize that some people down vote for reasons that are knowable and understandable only to themselves, and some people down vote just to be &quot;trolls,&quot; and some people down vote just because they happen to be ticked off at you and they haven't the integrity and civility to deal with that any other way. Believe me, you really shouldn't let it bother you. It happens to everyone, and it's just not all that meaningful. And welcome to the club! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T19:21:21.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3873" CreationDate="2013-04-07T17:02:54.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a high rated member of &lt;a href=&quot;https://money.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;money.se&lt;/a&gt; and continue to struggle with the downvotes, sometimes for my own answers, more often for others' frustration. SE doesn't require a comment to downvote, and as John said, there's a 'troll' factor here as there is anyplace on the net. &#xA;Whether it be for a question or an answer, the Downvote can feel like a personal attack. There's no 'real world' analog to it. I've never seen a person say &quot;you are wrong&quot; and walk away without another word. &#xA;Last, the effort to change the code here is probably more trouble than it's worth, and a forced comment-for-downvote would potentially have the unintended consequence of starting debates that should just be avoided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last - I'd bet you experience this far less on the board you frequent most, Graphic design, than here, as it takes time to learn the personality each board has, I say, as I brace myself for the DV to this answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5784" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:36.080" LastActivityDate="2013-04-07T17:02:54.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-09T06:28:55.873" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of things specifically delimited as off-topic in our FAQ. Let me quote them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing advice or critique requests (see Writers.SE instead—note critique requests must meet their criteria)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also end up closing a lot of questions as off-topic. Can we talk about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, at least, it seems like &lt;em&gt;proofreading&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;naming&lt;/em&gt; don't necessarily need to be closed as off-topic. &lt;em&gt;Not A Real Question&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Not Constructive&lt;/em&gt; respectively seem to be much better explanations as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we don't like them. We don't like them not because they're not about English; we don't like them because they're fundamentally bad questions for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's send &lt;em&gt;writing advice&lt;/em&gt; along to NARQ as well, shall we? After all, just asking for advice is overly broad. Good critique questions can be migrated to Writers.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have &lt;em&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; marked as Not Constructive, so that's addressed. I'm not sure we're actually closing them as NC, but at least we've determined that they should be NC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves us with translation, non-English languages, English literature, and jokes. That seems like a much better list as far as OT is concerned to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I think this is important? Because when new users come to our site, they see us closing these questions as OT and it looks like we have no idea what the English language is. Honestly—EL&amp;amp;U is one of the less-friendly SE sites, and we should probably work at changing that for the better. That doesn't mean relaxing standards entirely, but providing meaningful feedback is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does changing the three or four words in the close reason matter? Because it also changes the explanatory text that comes along with it. And while not everyone reads it, potentially valuable members do so. And the off-topic one is not particularly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no matter to what extent you agree or disagree with me here, please at least step forward and say something. The community is made up by all of us together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T23:10:47.147" Title="Closing as Off-topic" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3890" CreationDate="2013-04-09T12:19:28.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand what you are saying and I disagree with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have personally been pushing many of the closed questions into the Off-Topic category. Why? Because I don't wish to imply that those sort of questions are on-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closing a question as &quot;Not A Real Question&quot; and &quot;Not Constructive&quot; implies that there is something salvageable there&lt;/strong&gt;, if the OP edited the question to provide more context, or explain the question better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, closing a proofreading question—Is this paragraph correct grammatically?—as NARQ is more likely to spawn &quot;Is this grammar OK?&quot;, &quot;And this one?&quot;, &quot;Is this word right in this context?&quot;, &quot;And this grammar?&quot; because the implied feedback is &quot;make this more specific and less broad, and then it will be on-topic here.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, we don't want cut off the head of that hydra. We just don't want those sorts of questions here.  &lt;strong&gt;Closing a question as Off-topic is a straightforward (and I think nicer) way to say &quot;Don't ask this kind of question here.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; It means exactly that. It doesn't mean &quot;well, maybe we'd answer it if you asked it differently, so keep posting stuff like this until it gets edited into something that might actually stay open.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T12:19:28.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-09T20:14:17.160" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text can flow out of the bottom of the related sidebar when the titles are too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LiQc6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Related sidebar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T20:14:17.160" Title="Related questions overflow" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3890" CreationDate="2013-04-10T22:24:16.940" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't feel strongly either way about most of these, but 'Writing advice' needs to stay in Off-topic.  If it's not a real question, it obviously can't be transferred to Writers or anywhere else on SE; but that's not what we're saying.  As Kit pointed out, you can't edit a question on writing advice into something that fits here; the problem is not with the form but the subject, which could be a definition of 'off-topic'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T22:24:16.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3890" CreationDate="2013-04-10T22:28:19.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the proofreading questions are off-topic if the source of concern is not clearly specified; this means that questions showing just quoted text without explaining what the OP thinks wrong are off-topic. Not all the proofreading questions are off-topic, but explaining the source of concern is the minimum requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with KitFox that saying that a question is off-topic gives a stronger, and precise message: The purpose of the site is not answering that type of questions. The other closing reasons would be like a &quot;Try again; next time you could be luckier.&quot; reply when there is not &quot;next time you could be luckier&quot; for a proofreading question that doesn't show what the OP thinks wrong in the quoted text, or for a question asking how to name a variable whose purpose is this and that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T23:10:47.147" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T23:10:47.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3866" CreationDate="2013-04-11T00:21:06.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the comment is referring to a phrase that was then removed from the post, you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete that comment, if you wrote it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag the comment as obsolete, if it was written by somebody else&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BPiA7.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment receives enough flags, it is automatically removed; otherwise, a moderator will take care of the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T00:21:06.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3865" CreationDate="2013-04-11T00:41:21.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, users with the required privilege and mods may be able to see who has voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As moderator, I can assure you we don't see who voted a specific post. We are alerted when there are suspicious voting patterns, but we never know who voted what.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who are not moderators don't see those alerts. They can suspect somebody down-voted them, but they cannot prove that, especially because there are other posts that are down-voted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody is watching your profile page, and notices your reputation is decreased by 1 when he got a down-vote, then he could deduce you down-voted him; as far as I know, the reputation shown in a profile page is cached, and any reputation change is not immediately shown in the profile page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is one supposed to respond to the above comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you effectively down-voted the post, have something constructive to say, and you want to say it, then you can explain why you down-voted. As you said, voting is anonymous; explaining a down-vote is not required. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, more than explaining the down-vote, it would be better to explain what is wrong in the post, if something is wrong in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2013-04-11T15:46:52.267" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T15:46:52.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2013-04-11T00:59:27.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post-grammarian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar anarchist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31540" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T00:59:27.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3899" CreationDate="2013-04-13T06:00:00.007" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111139/a-confusing-use-of-a-negative&quot;&gt;A confusing use of a negative&lt;/a&gt; seems like it belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. I was considering flagging it for moderator attention and choosing a custom reason to say this. But I'm unsure if this is the proper course of action because it's probably not off-topic on ELU (or is it?) and because ELL is a beta site. So should I flag cases like this or leave them be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17977" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T16:01:03.740" Title="Is it okay to flag a question for migration to a beta site" Tags="|support|flagging|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-04-13T11:07:37.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is OK to flag a question and suggest a migration to another site. If we mods think it should stay here, we'll let you know. Otherwise, we'll check with the mods on the other site and see if they support the migration. If they do, we'll send it over to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T11:07:37.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-04-13T11:40:11.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the user who asked that question said to be learning English, the question could be a candidate for migration. That doesn't mean it will be migrated; poor questions are generally not migrated. (The motto is, &quot;don't migrate crap.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging for moderation attention to suggest a question to be migrated is fine. The moderators normally consult the moderators of the other site, and if they don't want the question to be migrated because there is already a similar question, or because it is not a good fit for the site, then the question will not be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T11:40:11.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-04-13T16:01:03.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of flagging a question for migration is to put it on the BEST site, beta or not. If you honestly think that a question should be on site X and not ELU, then flag it. And let the moderators of the two sites decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T16:01:03.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3904" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-14T20:11:31.003" Score="18" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more of an announcement than discussion but &lt;a href=&quot;http://global.oup.com/academic/librarians/national-library-week//&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; may be useful for people here &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/489/free-access-to-the-oed-in-the-americas-13-19-april-2014&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;National Library Week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All OUP Online products are free April 13-19th&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To celebrate National Library Week in the United States (April 13th-19th) and all the hard work librarians do to support their patrons, OUP is freeing up all of our online products* for the week! Libraries are a vital part of many communities, whether it is a school, a town/city, the government, a corporation, or a hospital, and we have freed up this unprecedented amount of content to show our appreciation for these libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply use the below login credentials!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No sign-ups are required!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Username: libraryweek&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Password: libraryweek&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T10:36:09.740" Title="Free access to the OED in the Americas (13-19 April 2014)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2014-07-25T17:11:45.383" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3906" CreationDate="2013-04-16T20:59:42.030" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111521/what-is-the-meaning-of-drove-up?noredirect=1#comment226399_111521&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is General Reference --and it was closed by simchona as such--, but in a Kit's previous comment she said: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Thank you for your diligence. For the purposes for closing, you should flag only for possible duplicate, migration, or off-topic (as well as the usual spam/offensive). &lt;strong&gt;It is for the community to decide if it is general reference, not the mods.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm wondering what the 'rules' are in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, do not intend that I'm against the fact that moderators can close questions as general reference, too; on the contrary I agree on this. I'm asking only for clarity reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T07:36:02.937" Title="Can, or cannot, moderators close question as 'general reference'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3905" CreationDate="2013-04-16T22:37:10.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a matter of policy, but rather a means of me reducing my flag queue. I feel that duplicates, off-topic questions, offensive/spam, and possible migration are appropriate for me to act on according to my judgement, so these are the kinds of things I want in my flag queue.  I do not personally like &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; as a close reason and therefore I do not like to make that call.  The other mods may feel differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T22:37:10.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3911" CreationDate="2013-04-17T17:24:02.177" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Captcha's layout seems slightly off:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EKvgr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latest stable Chrome on Mac OS X here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2013-04-18T18:59:23.360" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T18:59:23.360" Title="Layout in captcha window slightly broken" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3905" CreationDate="2013-04-18T07:36:02.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can vote to close questions that are utterly not a good question for the site (e.g. off-topic, not a real question, not constructive). If somebody asks on &lt;em&gt;Drupal Answers&lt;/em&gt; a question about WordPress, as moderator I can surely close it; if then I see somebody answers it instead of flagging it, or vote to close it, then it is probable I would quickly vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine there are cases where a question is utterly a general reference question, and in this case a moderator can close the question. If then question is also too basic for the site, that is a reason more to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't rules about this. The only suggestion I was given from Community Coordinators is that as moderator I should not close a question because other users voted to close it, but because I think the question should be closed. I should also be ready to take the necessary action if the community thinks closing the question was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T07:36:02.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3908" CreationDate="2013-04-18T18:59:15.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be on live server after our next prod build(within 24hrs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T18:59:15.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-20T10:46:37.563" Score="-7" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are clear serial downvotes against all my questions and answers. I have find out it times and times but I tried to ignore it and consider it as a right of reader to decide upvote or downvote a question or answer but now it is a different situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see after being about 3 months here, one or more users are going to your profile and finding all your questions and answers and because they do not like one of your questions or answers or your personality, they commit to downvote all your questions and answers from 3 months ago to now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please check it as it has happened for me several times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-4  today&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  23 mins ago     downvote    What does “ Rape someone's mind” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  24 mins ago     downvote    Is it acceptable to use “womyn” or “womin” instead of “women”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2   yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+2  09:03   accept  Who is whose sister or brother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1  2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5 / -4     21:37   3 events     Who is whose sister or brother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1  21:52   downvoted   Who is whose sister or brother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1  16:30   downvoted   Who is whose sister or brother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37324" LastEditorUserId="37324" LastEditDate="2013-04-20T10:58:26.877" LastActivityDate="2013-04-20T17:10:36.417" Title="Reporting a serial downvoting!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2013-04-20T16:50:51.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general, serial downvoting is automatically reversed after 24 hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this specific instance, the voting patterns I can see do not suggest that malicious serial downvoting (or upvoting) has taken place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-04-20T16:50:51.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2013-04-20T17:10:36.417" Score="16" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You see after being about 3 months here, one or more users are going to your profile and finding all your questions and answers and because they do not like one of your questions or answers or your personality, they commit to downvote all your questions and answers from 3 months ago to now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your time on the site, you've posted 11 answers and 9 questions. Of those, a total of 14 are not currently deleted and thus eligible to be voted on. No one person has voted for you even close to 14 times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last month, no one has voted for you - up or down - more than twice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Serial voting implies a series of votes from a single person, connected in some fashion by intent, time, type or all three. It is not generally possible for one person to vote &quot;serially&quot; for a single post - indeed, if you get multiple up-votes or down-votes for one post, it's a pretty good bet those are directly related to the content of the post and not directed at you personally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking as someone who has been the target of serial voters and who has spent a fair bit of my time while employed by Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;investigating&lt;/em&gt; serial voters, there is absolutely nothing in your record that would indicate anything of the sort... Except for a brief series of &lt;em&gt;up-votes&lt;/em&gt; back in February (most of which were automatically invalidated by the system &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3912/reporting-a-serial-downvoting/3913#3913&quot;&gt;that waiwai describes&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever have good reason to suspect that someone is specifically targeting you - by which I mean a &lt;em&gt;significant number of votes&lt;/em&gt; on disparate posts written by you in a short period of time - then wait 24 hours; there's a good chance they'll go way. If they have not, flag a post for moderator attention and... Move on. This is not something worth worrying about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-04-20T17:10:36.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3916" CreationDate="2013-04-21T16:24:13.587" Score="7" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111983/most-numerous-or-common/111984?noredirect=1#comment227465_111984&quot;&gt;Most Numerous Or Common&lt;/a&gt; was &quot;Deleted by Community&quot; just now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm inclined to agree with the only existing answer, which says that there's something not quite right about the OP's construction &lt;em&gt;&quot;Buckley is the 99th most numerous name in Ireland.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't understand exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I take that position, particularly given that I don't seem to have the same problem with &lt;em&gt;&quot;&quot;The most numerous members of this network are relatives living within one mile&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, as put forward in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the question has been deleted by &quot;a moderator&quot;, I can't even vote to &lt;em&gt;undelete&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've really got three issues here. First, I'd like the question reopened so it can be kicked around a bit in hopes that I might gain some understanding of the grammatical issue involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I'd like to know &lt;em&gt;what the actual reason for deletion&lt;/em&gt; was in this specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, I'd like to know why &quot;Community&quot; is able to delete questions without giving a reason. If a deletion somehow represents &quot;policy&quot; on the part of TPTB, surely we all need to know the reason, if only so we can fall into line with (or remonstrate against) site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I'm satisfied with @Reg's answer, but I'll just point out here that because I thought the question itself was &quot;interesting&quot;, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112126/is-numerous-somehow-different-to-common&quot;&gt;re-asked it myself&lt;/a&gt; on main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why was this question deleted by Community?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3915" CreationDate="2013-04-21T16:44:19.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is the user was destroyed (you know the most likely reason why). That the question is then deleted automatically comes with the territory. Automatic deletions, closures, or downvotes are some of the reasons why the Community user exists in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2013-04-21T16:44:19.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3915" CreationDate="2013-04-26T17:05:51.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an account is deleted, all questions owned by that account are deleted automatically, regardless of votes or answers (item 8 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that/5222#5222&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;).  (Any answers on that account with scores 0 or lower are deleted as well.)  The Community user exists to perform automatic maintenance operations, including automatic deletions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-04-26T23:07:48.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3919" CreationDate="2013-04-28T05:10:31.930" Score="11" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112674/is-it-a-normal-way-to-call-the-former-president-gorge-w-bush-as-w-and-mrs-b&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about usage of abbreviations and nicknames/abbreviations in a newspaper article, and noticed that the question earned a couple of downvotes, as well as two comments (to the question and to the first answer) about its inappropriateness on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree with the comments that the question has nothing to do with grammar or etymology, I think that the question still asks about interesting and important aspects of English &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;, as in, how the language is used outside of grammar books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that questions of writing style have a place on Writers.SE, but I'm not sure this sort of question really fits there either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to use the linguistic terminology that I was taught in college - are questions of linguistic &lt;em&gt;pragmatics&lt;/em&gt;, like the one in the linked question, on topic on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T05:26:31.253" Title="Are questions of language *usage* discouraged" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3918" CreationDate="2013-04-28T10:21:11.007" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has had its fair share of &quot;what does this word/phrase mean in this context?&quot; questions. Not all questions on this site can be answered with a reference to grammar, etymology or a published work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that cites and asks for clarification of current use of English in a publication is not off topic, AFAIC. Use of English includes idioms, set phrases and commonly known circumstantial abbreviations, like &quot;W.&quot; for George W. Bush. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because there is no published reference book that can be quoted to explain these current phenomena of living language does not mean that the question is off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the members who were critically rejecting the question do not really have a point. This site has hundreds of questions that don't have a connection to grammar and/or etymology and hundreds of answers and upvotes on comments that cannot be found in any reference book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is a valid one. The asker tries to understand if a specifically worded reference to real people is common usage or not. Common usage always occurs BEFORE these items make it into the printed and published reference works. So, claiming that the question is not valid because the answer cannot be found in any reference book is rather short sighted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6385" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T10:21:11.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3918" CreationDate="2013-04-28T11:03:33.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks about referring to people by nicknames. Is that &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;? Undoubtedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;em&gt;Usage&lt;/em&gt; in “English Language &amp;amp; Usage” has a particular meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;usage&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7. a.&lt;/strong&gt; The established or customary manner of using a language; the way in which an &lt;strong&gt;item of vocabulary, syntax, or grammar&lt;/strong&gt; is normally used, esp. by a specified group or in a particular domain or region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt; An instance of such language use; a word, phrase, construction, etc., used &lt;strong&gt;in a particular or characteristic way by a group,&lt;/strong&gt; in a region, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[OED, my emphasis]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, using OED’s examples, one might ask about &lt;em&gt;wagon&lt;/em&gt; as a verb, or pronouncing &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; as /aks/, or how the expression &lt;em&gt;my lover&lt;/em&gt; is used in the British West Country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not convinced that nicknames qualify in this case as “items of vocabulary, syntax or grammar.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m indebted to Kris who has reminded me just now of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95197/odins-tears-will-drown-the-world-of-men-on-the-day-what-does-this-sentence/95201?noredirect=1#comment228955_95201&quot;&gt;the question about Odin’s tears&lt;/a&gt;. That question concerned a particular turn of phrase,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The skies will burst open and Odin’s tears will drown the world of men on the day when...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which the OP was intrigued about. Asking about a metaphor (or any other device) is asking about the language. I reckon that question is on-topic — and indeed I answered it as being a colourful turn of phrase and gave a couple of interpretations. It matters not whether the speaker misremembered where in Norse mythology it came from, although it’s certainly useful to point that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does asking about nicknames fall into the same category? Possibly: Yoichi’s question is buried a little, but it’s stated as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a customary way of Americans to call dignitary’s names [sic] by an initial or an abbreviation like “W” and “Bar,” or is it just Ms Dowd’s idiosyncrasy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks about custom and practice when referring to people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;? Or is it &lt;em&gt;Etiquette&lt;/em&gt;? It’s borderline. In effect, the question is turned round from “What’s the best way of expressing contempt for a public figure in a newspaper column?” — and we have quite a number of “What’s the best way of...” questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE has had a couple of attempts at a site on etiquette: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/29783/etiquette&quot;&gt;One&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/53721/etiquette&quot;&gt;Two&lt;/a&gt;. None of the example questions cover this aspect of public language, or even the “What’s the best way of...” questions, so it probably should be asked in ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, focussing on a particular article and attempting to generalise from the particular is not a good form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T11:03:33.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-29T01:20:45.447" Score="-2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112729/why-are-animal-names-used-as-vulgar-slang-for-body-parts&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question of getting downvoted? Looking at the FAQ, this is at least an etymology question. I was very careful not to ask anything useless or against policy here. Is it off topic here, to ask an questions about English? It is a perfectly useful legitimate question which is clear and answerable. In addition, whoever is downvoting, doesn't explain why or how to improve it if they have a problem with the wording of the question or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the downvoters (yes multiple downvoters) will feel &quot;threatened&quot; but at least explain why are you doing this? Would you care to elaborate? What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T18:17:20.637" Title="Why is my question being downvoted without even an explanation?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2013-04-29T07:00:00.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say English Language &amp;amp; Usage is not for English as a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;definitely is&lt;/em&gt; for English as a second (or third, or forty second) language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T07:00:00.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3921" CreationDate="2013-04-29T23:11:10.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't downvote the question, but it's not hard for me to guess what might be going on. The question seems frivolous, and it's not well-researched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, you've managed to notice that two vulgar slang references to genitals happen to mirror the name (or informal name) of an animal. So what? Two instances hardly a pattern make, so it seems a bit premature to ask about why such terms are &quot;so common&quot; (as I mentioned in my comment, I think #3 is unrelated to the bird, so that one could probably be struck from your list of examples). Moreover, how many &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; things (besides &quot;dirty&quot; names for body parts) use animal names? What about things that lead us astray, like &lt;em&gt;red herrings&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rabbit trails&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wild goose chases&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;barking up the wrong tree&lt;/em&gt;? Why do we talk about &lt;em&gt;crocadile tears&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;elephant in the room?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to your standard, those might be &quot;perfectly useful legitimate questions which are clear and answerable,&quot; too, but I wouldn't be surprised if they got downvoted, particularly if I asked about them with little mention or evidence of prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also believe Kate's answer went to straight to the heart of the matter: with so many slang names for genitals, it might be considered even more remarkable if &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of them alluded to an animal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T23:11:10.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3918" CreationDate="2013-04-30T05:26:31.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To contrast Andrew Leach's interpretation of the word &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;, I'd like to paraphrase  wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the word&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fowler defines usage as &amp;quot;points of grammar, syntax, style, and &lt;em&gt;the choice of words&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chicago Manual of Style says &amp;quot;the great mass of linguistic issues that writers and editors wrestle with don't really concern grammar at all—they concern usage: the collective habits of a language's native speakers.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32999" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T05:26:31.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3927" CreationDate="2013-05-03T09:50:06.190" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked (in a standard, neutral way) a factual question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/113104/8345&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and got an  answer whose tone I disapproved of.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I said so in a comment and the answerer wrote back &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/113110/8345&quot;&gt;two comments&lt;/a&gt; in quite rude language (and completely deforming the meaning of what I said. He also makes irrelevant remarks on defenders of idiocy getting elected to congress ).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He accuses me of having a serious problem, more than a writing problem, promulgating, propagating, or populating stupidities, being high-toned ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Of course I stopped communicating with him, but I want to ask if such behaviour is tolerated here. It would be most unfortunate if it were.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Let me insist that I am in no way discussing the content of the answer, which it is of course perfectly legitimate for the answerer to defend)      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another user, @Ben, has now removed two contentious adjectives from the answer, explaining in his edit that  &quot;rudeness is not tolerated here&quot;. Nice to read that: thanks, Ben! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8345" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-05-03T11:55:29.327" Title="Why is rudeness tolerated here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3926" CreationDate="2013-05-03T11:55:29.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry you have had an unpleasant interaction here. I will look into that comment chain and see if I can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, rudeness is not tolerated here. Pointing out a problem on Meta is one way to address the issue. You can also flag any comment you think is rude and mark it as such. That way, it brings it to the attention of the mod team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-05-03T11:55:29.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3921" CreationDate="2013-05-03T22:39:02.757" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO, yours was a valid question. But it was downvoted because it seemed &quot;trivial,&quot; or &quot;obvious&quot; to some. The term &quot;General Reference&quot; alleges &quot;triviality.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What seems &quot;trivial&quot; or &quot;obvious&quot; to a native (American) speaker is often not the case, particularly for someone from abroad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="10287" LastEditDate="2013-05-08T18:17:20.637" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T18:17:20.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-05T23:24:04.380" Score="-9" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Congratulation!&lt;/strong&gt; The sexist-language tag suggested by me has been approved as an edit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107095/what-does-swish-of-skirt-mean-why-is-it-a-sexist-expression&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for first time. You all unless 10 users who downvoted this tag and showed their disagreement can use it under any question which is pointing to the sex discrimination in using the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The reason to create such tag&lt;/strong&gt;: I created it as I think it is a necessary details for non-native learners and even native learners to know what words,terms,phrases and expressions convey a sexist usage of English language and what reactions or results it may cause. It is always important for most people having every degree of intelligence to avoid of sexist usages of language in the society nowadays unless persons who want to make themselves isolated and stand in the row of hatred people in the new social classifying. I do not think you can remove social classes from the society but surely it has changed from ridiculous inheritable titles, jobs, situations, wealth and objects to the behaviors, kind of talking and using the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S&lt;/strong&gt;: Unfortunately the tag has been deleted after suspending me for 3 months because of creating a tag and making this topic! I am still not able to understand the authorities' logic of this site or their bosses but anyway it helps to find how a tag against sexism in language can make waves in a western site not even an eastern one! It seems east and west do meet, and even embrace, on some points! I hope to see this in better examples and for better reasons not oppositely!.. &amp;amp;^) ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37324" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T11:04:57.860" Title="Creating the new tag &quot;sexist-language&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tags|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-10T12:10:07.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-06T16:46:38.403" Score="-5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has happened for me after creating &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sexist-language&quot;&gt;sexist-language tag&lt;/a&gt; and being approved as a new tag. The edit option under all questions has been inactive for me. I wanted to add an explanation and found this weird false reply after clicking on the &quot;help us creating it&quot; option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/1378&quot;&gt;Too many of your edits were rejected, try again in 7 days.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds very angry and meaningless! I didn't get what it means as I didn't find any rule in the FAQ that stops users to edit questions until they gain +1000 reputation by this. I have gained 94 points by editing and rarely happened that one or two out of all my edits be rejected that it was only because of different tastes of mods not a mistake in editing by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one of mods please explain what has happened here? Is it a new unreadable rule out of FAQ or a personal taste of one of mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please make it clear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37324" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why can't I edit any questions anymore? Is it a bug or...?" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2013-05-06T17:26:03.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a bug. It's an autoban. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/81681/why-is-the-edit-button-disabled&quot;&gt;question and answer&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.SO might help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All high rep users have the ability to vote on suggested edits, so this is unlikely to be a specific mod action. For instance, I don't even get a chance to see most suggested edits because our community processes them first.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the autoban is triggered when many suggested edits are rejected, not just one or two.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are concerned about the moderators, you can email team@stackexchange.com and explain the situation to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T17:26:03.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2013-05-06T21:15:15.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the system gives a user a “free” reject for every three approvals less than one week old. In your case, your 54 approvals count as 18 “free” rejects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the system auto-bans when a user has 5 rejects (other than “free” rejects) less than one week old. In your case, apparently the system auto-banned you because you have 23 − 18 = 5 rejects less than one week old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this system seems strict, bear in mind that it replaced an earlier system which banned the user for 5 rejects in one week regardless of how many approvals they earned.&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91392/too-many-of-your-edits-were-rejected-try-again-in-7-days&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T21:15:15.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2013-05-06T21:21:47.353" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can view your history of suggesting edits here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/37324/persian-cat?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/37324/persian-cat?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ban only looks at &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt; suggested edits - this is to prevent someone from building up a history of good edits and then spamming the queue with a large number of bad ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are your most recent suggested edits (drawn from the list above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26725&quot;&gt;Replaces quotes with bold+italics&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26712&quot;&gt;Added &quot;sexist-language&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt; (Approved)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26689&quot;&gt;Added &quot;sexist-language&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26688&quot;&gt;Added &quot;sexist-language&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26683&quot;&gt;Added list of options to a question&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26681&quot;&gt;Title and formatting changes&lt;/a&gt; (Approved)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26680&quot;&gt;Added &quot;offensive-language&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26677&quot;&gt;Added &quot;offensive-language&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26676&quot;&gt;Title and formatting changes&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26675&quot;&gt;Title and formatting changes&lt;/a&gt; (Approved)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26673&quot;&gt;Title and formatting changes&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26671&quot;&gt;Minor capitalization and grammar changes&lt;/a&gt; (Approved)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26670&quot;&gt;Title and formatting changes&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26669&quot;&gt;Changed &quot;phrasing&quot; tag to &quot;vocabulary&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, a fairly high number of your &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt; edits have been rejected. You should revisit these edits and attempt to discern what you could have done differently to avoid this outcome. Here are a few notes I made while reviewing the reviews:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Replacing quoted text with italics or similar doesn't seem to go over well. Unless you have a very good reason for making such changes, I would abandon that approach: generally-speaking, actual &lt;em&gt;quoted text&lt;/em&gt; should either be placed between quotation marks, or in a blockquote (by prefixing a paragraph with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in Markdown). Italics (and bold) are for &lt;em&gt;emphasis&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;quotation&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags generally have specific meanings within the context of the site. For instance, &quot;vocabulary&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/vocabulary/info&quot;&gt;does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean what you apparently think it means&lt;/a&gt;. It pays to be aware of this before trying to use a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should generally have a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; good reason to create new tags. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should avoid creating or using &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta-tags&lt;/a&gt; - tags should always describe the content of the question in some fashion. So if a question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; sexist language, or &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; offensive language, those tags might be appropriate - but if you simply feel that the question &lt;em&gt;contains&lt;/em&gt; sexist (or offensive) language, that's not a good use for a tag (it might be a good reason to flag, if you feel strongly about it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should strive to communicate both the nature of, and reason behind your changes in the revision comment when submitting edits. &quot;Added a new tag! :)&quot; does the former, but doesn't explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a new tag is necessary. If there's a chance your edit will be misinterpreted, try to avoid misunderstandings by being clear about what you're looking to accomplish ahead of time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note: this is at least the second time I've seen you asking for help with a tone that comes off as overtly hostile to other readers, both in the post itself and in the follow-up comments. I highly recommend that you adopt a bit of humility and politeness when seeking information about a system that you are obviously struggling to understand; failing to do so is very likely to cause you problems here in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T21:21:47.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2013-05-06T21:51:07.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've removed this tag; it does not describe the content of the question, and therefore is not a good tag. In the case of the question where this tag was approved, its use is borderline - the question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; actually about the meaning of a given phrase, and whether or not it might be perceived as sexist; nevertheless, this question was already tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; which I feel captures this intent sufficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is always important for most people having every degree of intelligence to avoid of sexist usages of language in the society nowadays unless persons who want to make themselves isolated and stand in the row of hatred people in the new social classifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brushing your teeth regularly is important too. You should still avoid adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/brush-your-teeth-dear-reader&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;brush-your-teeth-dear-reader&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;brush-your-teeth-dear-reader&lt;/a&gt; to questions. Tags are intended to help classify questions based on their content, not as a platform for social commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T21:51:07.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2013-05-08T18:09:56.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite happy to see that Shog9 deleted the &lt;em&gt;sexist-language&lt;/em&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any number of prejudices can be implied by word-choice (racism, ageism, pro/anti-religion, etc.). Personally, I don't have much time for questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108490/how-bad-is-the-use-of-ner-today&quot;&gt;How bad is the use of “n***er” today?&lt;/a&gt; - partly because I think all answers are liable to be subjective, but also because it seems to me they're often asked more in order to engage in protracted debate, rather than to obtain a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt;, as Shog9 points out. More specifically, we've got &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; (and synonym &lt;em&gt;pejorative&lt;/em&gt;), which seems perfectly adequate to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T18:09:56.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-09T07:33:08.510" Score="23" ViewCount="525" Body="&lt;p&gt;More and more the site seems to be invaded by questions from users whose grasp of English is rudimentary at best, asking something (often indecipherable) about an unquestionably fundamental point of meaning or some basic use of the language, as opposed to subtle and debatable points of more sophisticated usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, although I like helping people learn English, this misuse is pushing me away from the site. I find my enthusiasm waning. Over and over, our more experienced users have to occupy themselves with simply informing the questioner that they should be using the ELL site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to find a way to encourage people &lt;em&gt;much more strongly and reliably&lt;/em&gt; to post their questions where they are most appropriate, rather than letting just anybody post just anything here. What do you think about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT/ADDENDUM May 10, 2013:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, thanks for the excellent discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Andrew Leach's link to a related question is great. I researched a good deal before posting, and still didn't find this particular question. J.R.'s answer there is worth reading for anyone interested in this discussion. (I haven't read KitFox's link yet, but I'm sure it's very good, and I'll go there in a minute; I can't go there at this moment, however, for fear of losing what I've just written.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, Mitch suggests that I want &quot;less newbie traffic,&quot; but I want to point out that this is not precisely what I'm asking for if it implies that I want fewer newbie &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;. The fact is, I'm perfectly happy with &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; using the site; the more users, the merrier. What troubles my sleep, however, is the high frequency of newbie &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me focus on the core of what I'm really asking here, to which Andrew Grimm and RegDwight have alluded: I feel we should have SOME type of bar to hurdle, gate to unlock, prerequisite to qualify, or filter to screen out inappropriate use. Call it what you will, characterize it any way you like, structure it any way you please... but this is a call to put SOMETHING in place to somehow stop the &quot;junk,&quot; as Mitch calls it, from landing here &lt;em&gt;in the first place&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's not feasible, and maybe the majority opinion does not agree, but that's where my question lies: Can we and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; we aim for that kind of modification to ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by the way, the answer might be as simple as renaming; how many newbie questions would be posted on a site called &quot;Advanced Linguistic Analysis of English Syntax?&quot; (I'm being facetious, of course, but I hope the hyperbole makes the point.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2013-05-11T08:26:20.013" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T04:05:27.133" Title="Excessive number of fundamental questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3939" CreationDate="2013-05-10T00:21:42.743" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a valid point. Over the year or so that I've been here, I've noted that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most of the questions show that the questioner is not a native English speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most of the questions are about nonexistent &quot;rules&quot; that people have been taught in school&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most of the questions that describe something in grammatical terms don't do it right&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, unfortunately,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most of the answers are matters of opinion, either the answerer's or a usage critic's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unavoidable, I spose, since the stack.exchange model (and its software and procedures) was developed for social interaction in computing, and there are facts in computing, so things either work or they don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are facts in language, too, but there are also so many nonfactual opinions about English stated with total Authority that it's hard to get at the facts. Also, facts like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English phonemes&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/VPguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the English verb phrase&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/NPIs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English negative polarity&lt;/a&gt; are not normally taught in Anglophone schools, so learning about them comes as something of a shock to native speakers. You can imagine how that plays with non-native speakers who've been exposed to the usual English BS. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understand, we're not getting the majority of English learners here. Most Europeans, for instance, get the facts about English, and other languages, in their schools, and so do many Asians. My experience as a grammarian and teacher is that they understand English grammar much better than native speakers, because they've actually studied it beyond third grade, and paid attention. But in China or India or other Asian countries, for instance, ESL can often be pretty primitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what to do about it; I'm pretty sure the new ESL.SE is not the solution. It seems, if anything, to be less useful than ELU.SE. But I agree with John; my enthusiasm is flagging, too. I think it's the normal reaction of a teacher to a class where nobody ever learns anything -- you get bored trying and give up. Of course, this is not a class, and we're not dealing with the same people over and over again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's what it feels like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2013-05-10T00:21:42.743" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3939" CreationDate="2013-05-10T00:32:34.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully agree with @JohnLawler 's observations. I more or less lost interest in the site and took a break from it because of the excessive zeal of a number of high-ranked users in deleting or ostentatiously turning their noses up at fundamental questions. The learners who ask these questions might inadvertently bring up an interesting issue that could be discussed and debated between more experienced contributors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-05-10T00:32:34.740" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-10T11:36:15.567" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question was voted to close in error, is it possible to reverse the vote?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it may so happen that an incorrect reason-for-closing was selected.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very rarely, vote to close could have been cast because the question was not correctly understood at the first instance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What then are the options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="14666" LastEditDate="2013-05-10T11:49:29.150" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="How to (if at all) undo a close vote?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2013-05-11T15:20:26.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, two close reasons, &quot;off topic,&quot; and &quot;not a real question,&quot; already carry an automatic downvote. Someone who voted to close for either of those two reasons could also downvote, but that might be &quot;piling on&quot; (or seen as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two &quot;no fault closes, &quot;duplicate,&quot; and &quot;too localized.&quot; Here, the question needs to be closed for the sake of the site, but that's not considered the fault of the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Not constructive&quot; is also a &quot;no fault&quot; close, for whatever reason, but IMHO should be treated the same as &quot;not a real question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T15:20:26.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3939" CreationDate="2013-05-12T04:15:26.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't asked many questions because I know how to find the answers to most things that I'm curious about. For most things that I can't figure out myself, I worry that they're too esoteric or fuzzy, or perhaps better suited to a more specific SE like Linguistics or Writers and off-topic here: stuff like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113774/why-do-only-a-few-english-demonyms-indicate-gender&quot;&gt;oddities of gender in demonyms&lt;/a&gt;, or why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113778/why-are-identical-rhymes-inferior-in-english-poetry&quot;&gt;identical rhymes are inferior in English poetry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T04:15:26.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3939" CreationDate="2013-05-13T04:33:19.003" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr – This is a site design problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most first-timers don't intend to abuse this site. They just want their question answered. They're as disappointed as anybody else when the answer is &quot;already answered&quot; or &quot;off topic&quot; or &quot;too basic&quot; or what have you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting that the site should start welcoming poor questions. The real problem is that the site fails to guide the first-timer. Some facts which should be red-crayon underlined for the first-timer, aren't. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do your research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are still lost, ask here, and post your research so far.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask expert-level questions. There are better sites for learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these were red-crayoned, both the community and the first-timer would appreciate it. So let's not blame the first-timer or the community. This is a site design problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-05-13T04:33:19.003" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-13T12:33:50.593" Score="-1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have answered the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113882/does-neighbor-really-means-those-who-live-close/113883#113883&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; today and somebody down-voted me just because instead of copying the answer that i found useful answer in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/28604/why-rhea-is-translated-as-neighbor&quot;&gt;commets&lt;/a&gt; of another question  so I provided the link the that particular question so it can be more clear to understand.But after sometime i got the comment that the comments of another question cannot be considered as reliable answer to make my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i directly copy and paste  that answer or  try it would be better to provide link to  answer.I always thought the priority is to solve the question at that time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43963" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:07.810" LastActivityDate="2013-05-13T15:21:09.060" Title="Why the comments of other questions not considered as reliable answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3947" CreationDate="2013-05-13T15:21:09.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers that merely contain links are generally not considered answers, on Stack Exchange, even when the link is to another question on the same site. Links to comments are not reliable, since comments can be deleted in any moment, especially if the content of the linked comment is rewritten as answer, or incorporated into an existing answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to answer the question, report what said in those comments, possibly giving the right attribution to who wrote those comments. You can also give a link to the first of the comments, but only after you wrote what those comments said.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this way, the answer would still be an answer even when the comments are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-05-13T15:21:09.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3942" CreationDate="2013-05-13T15:27:00.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915/can-we-have-the-ability-to-rescind-a-close-vote-before-it-closes&quot;&gt;Can we have the ability to retract a close vote before it closes?&lt;/a&gt; the feature is planned. Basing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/183892/140449&quot;&gt;the first details&lt;/a&gt;, rescinding a previous close vote will not offer the possibility of changing the closing reason, since the user who rescinded a vote will not be able to re-vote to close the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing the wrong closing reason should not be something to worry about: The closing reason selected by the majority of the users who voted to close is the one shown when the question is closed. If the closing reason is wrong, I would eventually leave a comment explaining that the correct reason should be another one. As long as the closed question deserves to be closed, there isn't any reason to vote to re-open it and then close it, just to be able to show the correct closing reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T20:35:09.947" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3939" CreationDate="2013-05-14T07:35:18.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps - and I may be downvoted for suggesting this, though I hope not - Perhaps the hope that beginner questions can be avoided on a site such as this is a vain one? After all, other Stack Exchange sites, though allegedly for expert Q and A, do receive and answer a fair number of beginner questions; They are effectively places for expert advice, and the expert discussion comes up as much in the answers to beginner questions as it does in the expert ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worry that the OP has made the assumption that, unlike other stack exchange sites, ELU should only serve those who are already experts in its field, instead of nurturing those who will doubtlessly become experts in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that having our experts' interest wane is a bad thing, but I suspect that that might be a problem of unrealistic expectations, rather than of gatekeeping; One cannot expect every question to be a challenge, just as one cannot expect to be able to answer every question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, the ELL/ELU split seems like it should be made with tags, rather than by segregating the questions onto different sites. I can understand the expectation that the kind of 'English expertise' required to discuss beginner-level English and more experienced use should differ, but isn't that just a matter of degree? The subject matter is the same; All that differs is the amount of experience and understanding of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26653" LastEditorUserId="26653" LastEditDate="2013-06-06T04:05:27.133" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T04:05:27.133" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-23T07:13:23.073" Score="12" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the FAQ here, questions about word choice are clearly on-topic. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/7531/expression-or-word-like-aura-that-can-be-used-to-describe-a-force-of-death-e&quot;&gt;this word choice question&lt;/a&gt; was closed and sent to writers, where these questions are very clearly off-topic. It's possible I'm missing some subtlety here, so I'd like to understand what's going on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Writers, we discussed this in meta a bit before closing a couple of word choice questions. While I migrated a simpler word choice question here to EL&amp;amp;U, the other one (the one I linked to above) started life here and was closed. The user who started this question seems to be, understandably, a bit confused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was this question closed and migrated? Do the translation aspects of the question confuse the situation? Did a bunch of users just not like it? I'm not a 10k user or mod here, so I can't see the question, which has been deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have a bunch of users who hate word choice questions and just vote to close them? Is there something I'm missing here making this question unsuitable for ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T21:45:02.993" Title="Why was this question about word choice closed and sent to Writers?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|migration|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2013-05-23T11:45:23.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can tell you for sure is that five community members closed it as off-topic. No mods were involved.  If even one of them suggested it be sent to Writers, the system would have automagically done that as soon as it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why one of our members thought it would be a good fit there. I am also not certain why, of all the word choice requests we get, that particular one went to you. Maybe someone else can shed some light there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-05-23T11:45:23.293" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-23T13:18:45.063" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being relatively new to EL&amp;amp;U, I have more than occasionally come across an acronym (in a comment or answer) I did not know how to translate!  OP is but one of them.  To this day, I'm not sure what OP stands for (original poster?).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a list of acronyms commonly used by contributors to the site actually exist?  If so, where is it?  If not, what would it take to  provide one to new contributors?  It seems to me to be a logical addition to FAQ (i.e., frequently asked question).  [See, I kindly provided a &quot;translation&quot; for an acronym.  It did, however, take me 2.6 seconds to do it.  What a wastrel of time I am!]  A couple acronyms I came across on the site today are SO and CSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a student of law, I am more than a little familiar with the need for specialists in any given field or discipline to speak in jargon and code to save time, the assumption being that whoever is reading &quot;insider information&quot; should know what a given acronym stands for.  That assumption, however, is not always justified.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32623" LastEditorDisplayName="user10893" LastEditDate="2013-05-23T14:27:16.373" LastActivityDate="2013-05-23T14:27:16.373" Title="Is there an index of acronyms commonly used by EL&amp;U contributors?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-05-23T13:22:42.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-24T13:15:13.203" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone noticed that some correct answers on current usage of a particular English word are down-marked in favor of later comments and answers that simply show off historical research, but do not answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certainly plenty of questions that warrant all of the historical information and it is always welcome, but not at the expense of failing to answer the question.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;  &quot;What does phrase X actually mean?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;The phrase means Y.  Explanations, references, interesting and relevant information...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point here is that the question has an answer which the OP wanted.  A marker-downer comes along to show that 100 years ago the phrase meant something else and that the answer is wrong because of it.  I would certainly argue that the question warrants current usage over historic usage - ideally both, in which case adding information to comments is good, but not trying to &quot;win&quot; a contest by trampling on useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not stop there, sometimes the marker-downer, the harbinger of doom writes an eloquent answer showing all of the research and history.  This gets marked up by some people, yet it does not even answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The net result is that the non-answer rises to the top of the page so for future generations of users, they may simply find the page less useful than the answered question they were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?  I guess I/we can just spend time flagging such answers as inappropriate due to not answering the question, but even then you cannot flag many.  Perhaps it is simply the online culture of one-upmanship and we have to accept that questions are forgotten and they are simply a launchpad for other peoples' brilliance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user44617" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T13:15:13.203" Title="Is there too much emphasis on historical usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-24T21:30:31.233" Score="0" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the list of common abbreviations, but neither of the following are on it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most would argue that 'chance upon', though a MWV, is MW&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a second list on the site, or elsewhere, that might help with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44767" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T21:30:31.233" Title="Abbreviations like MWV, MW, etc" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3957" CreationDate="2013-05-26T15:01:59.300" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I believe an answer to be (perhaps partially) incorrect, what should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other sites I would typically leave a comment explaining my thoughts, definitely so if I downvote the answer.  However, I was basically yelled at for doing so the other day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves me uncertain what the norm is on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32999" LastActivityDate="2013-05-26T15:31:51.893" Title="Commenting on other's answers" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3956" CreationDate="2013-05-26T15:31:51.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commenting is the norm. Yelling isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that the yelling got nuked by a fellow mod within less than 15 minutes of it getting posted. While your original comment is still there. That should be a pretty strong indication of what the norm here is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2013-05-26T15:31:51.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2013-05-27T04:52:11.500" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the author of the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer depends not just on the expertise of the person providing the answers but also on the expertise of the entire community to review it. The review process provides an essential quality check on the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELU community consists of English experts. This is why translation assistance is off topic per the FAQ, even when the question is otherwise on topic. When you ask a translation question, you are putting your question beyond the community's expertise. Even if an exceptional expert could answer correctly, most of the community would be unable to review it for correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try to restate the question to take the translation aspect out of it. In my experience, that mostly doesn't work. You typically end up with correct answers which don't satisfy the ultimate need for a correct translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still feel you can make the question work, I strongly recommend you post the original Korean passage you are trying to translate. The community already has one hand tied behind its back when you ask it to help with translation; no need to tie the other hand too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To Neil: I hope this sheds some light on why such a question might be closed at ELU even though it has to do with word choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T04:52:11.500" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2013-05-30T06:36:46.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@MετάEd I don't think &quot;translation&quot; had anything to do with my question being closed. I did not mention anything about translation in my question when I posted it in ELU. All said and done, my question was really a word request. (I didn't think people needed to know about the translation aspect here. My final work will be read in English. It won't matter to the average reader if it's a translation. Any word or phrase I use will be judged by how it works in English.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only added the background information about it being related to my translation &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; the question got migrated to Writers. I did this because I think the audience there is very different from ELU. They needed to know that this was a translation and there were certain constraints I was working with. (Otherwise, the first natural reaction would be &quot;why don't you rephrase?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited my question once more, a long time after it had been put up at Writers. A good alternative had struck me as I was working on something and I thought I should it put up it on Writers. I thought since a long time had passed I could edit out the part that it had been migrated and that I was adding background information to my question. This was how the question got it's final form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I'm not sure everybody can check the edit history of my question. I'm attaching an image capture just in case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Oh and in case anyone's interested, the phrasing I finally zeroed on is &quot;a miasma of death&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rZLHQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40293" LastEditorUserId="40293" LastEditDate="2013-05-30T06:50:53.787" LastActivityDate="2013-05-30T06:50:53.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-01T10:12:12.357" Score="9" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;Barrie England's last answer is dated May 4. Coleopeterist's last access on EL&amp;amp;U is dated Mar 26. Even Robusto's last answer is dated Apr 26. Jasper Loy has deleted his account on EL&amp;amp;U. &#xA;John Lawler, a professor of linguistic, recently said &quot;&lt;em&gt;my enthusiasm is flagging, too.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&#xA;Other high-rep users, who have made EL&amp;amp;U great, seem ghosts of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asked are systematically closed or downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta EL&amp;amp;U is practically dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been an active user on EL&amp;amp;U during 2012, but now I'm under the impression that EL&amp;amp;U is destined to an inexorable decline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right? If so, what is it that is not working?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2013-06-03T01:08:21.103" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T16:59:21.970" Title="Is EL&amp;U declining?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2013-06-01T14:56:05.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @MετάEd's answer (obviously a minority position, with currently a net -2 votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume there's no significant dissent from the &quot;translation is Off Topic &lt;em&gt;for ELU&lt;/em&gt;&quot; principle as so eloquently defended there. It's worth calling attention to the first two sentences of the question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This a piece of Korean text that I'm trying to translate into English. So I really don't have much freedom to change the phrasing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's somewhat irrelevant whether the OP had &lt;em&gt;originally&lt;/em&gt; included those words, since obviously that was always his position, and would always constrain his willingness to accept any given answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had assumed that &quot;translation&quot; aspect caused the question to be closed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;writers&lt;/a&gt;, since it precluded the possibility of &quot;creative&quot; answers involving significant rephrasing. But per Neil's comment below, that's not actually the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to the matter of why I think the question is Off Topic for ELU, I don't see the translation of a &lt;em&gt;single word/phrase&lt;/em&gt; as inherently Off Topic here. For example, even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/&quot;&gt;this ELU question&lt;/a&gt; hasn't had much attention, or received an unambiguously &quot;correct, universally endorsed&quot; answer, the OP gave a precise definition of the meaning he sought, so answerers didn't need to be familiar with the Japanese term which had prompted the question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between that &quot;acceptable&quot; question, and the case in point here, is that Yoichi could reasonably have supposed there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have been a single &quot;correct&quot; answer that we'd all agree on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all answers to the question under consideration here are inherently subjective, since there isn't (and probably never could be) a standard term for &quot;sense of impending death&quot; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also make the point that within the question lies a &quot;supplementary&quot; that I consider to be completely On Topic (for both ELU and ELL; I can't decide which is more suitable)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; sense/aura of death&lt;/em&gt; - is there any difference in meaning if the article 'the' is changed to 'a'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but so far as I can see, not one of the seven answers addressed that &quot;valid&quot; component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T21:45:02.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3960" CreationDate="2013-06-06T16:59:21.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;GEdgar commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe someone should do the stats and see if there is a slow-down in (Northern Hemisphere) summer every year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/59302/questions-and-answers-per-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/59302/questions-and-answers-per-month&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the chart (ignoring pre-launch migrations and this (partial) month):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sEDG6.png&quot; alt=&quot;chart showing questions and answers on EL&amp;amp;U&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chart shows there's no real significant slow-down in (northern hemisphere) summers, but whilst there are fewer answers this year, the rate of questions is constant and in fact increasing slightly. There's still more answers per month than questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T16:59:21.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-06T18:48:55.173" Score="10" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just scrolled to the end of the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&amp;amp;sort=unanswered&quot;&gt;Unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt;, which seems unexpectedly long to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back when I was new to ELU, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1317/cleaning-up-unanswered-questions&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; said there were only &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; unanswered questions at the time. So far as I knew until just now, things hadn't changed significantly since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; sure what &quot;unanswered&quot; means, but it definitely doesn't mean &lt;em&gt;no answer has been posted&lt;/em&gt;, because some of the questions on that list have answers. So I'm guessing it either means they have: (1) &lt;em&gt;- no answers with &lt;strong&gt;upvotes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; or (2) &lt;em&gt;- no &lt;strong&gt;accepted&lt;/strong&gt; answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's the former, perhaps some of you might like to check them out and either upvote an answer, or provide an answer you think &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt; could upvote if you don't endorse anything currently there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the latter, perhaps some of those questioners have simply breezed through ELU and are never going to return and accept an answer. In which case maybe the mods could do some tidying up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T14:46:06.430" Title="Unanswered questions are stacking up!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="101" CreationDate="2013-06-07T09:19:43.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully agree this feature should be supported. Not only because of English, but also Spanish, French, etc. stackexchange sites. &lt;em&gt;When you read an answer, you should know whether that answer is from the native speaker or not; one should have some measure how the answer is reliable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think only one &lt;strong&gt;multiple&lt;/strong&gt; field for &lt;strong&gt;Native or Bilingual&lt;/strong&gt; language proficiency (inspired by LinkedIn) is needed. A lot of people have more than one primary language (Canadians, Belgians, Swiss, people from bilingual families etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't think &lt;em&gt;secondary language&lt;/em&gt; field would be necessary for this purpose. What does it tell you about the knowledge of the answerer? Not much, I guess. 99% of people who visit the site have that particular language as a secondary language. So, let's make the request as simple as possible, so that it has chance to be implemented!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13045" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T09:19:43.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3965" CreationDate="2013-06-08T11:10:41.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may suggest an explanation to the problem, which has probably been discussed earlier but I am very &quot;new&quot; so I apologize if I am raking up something which is &quot;old&quot; news. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A lot&lt;/strong&gt; of these unanswered questions are posed by people whose native language is not English, nothing wrong with that. However, they seem to disappear from the community (if that's the right word) after a very short time. Their questions dangling in space, forever. Some users may have indeed answered the OP's question out of a genuine sense of camaraderie or because they didn't have the answer at their fingertips but enjoy doing the research itself (I am the latter). Yet, it is unlikely they will be &quot;rewarded&quot; for their efforts. The hope being that someone else might appreciate the effort sometime n the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I feel there is a risk of not seeing &quot;good&quot; answers because the questions were either poorly formulated or because the Original Poster vanished never to return. Upvotes are very few compared to two years ago, from my tiny research, perhaps that is also a deterrent for new users? Maybe there should be more down votes made by moderators? It's not pleasant, I admit, to be down voted, I've been a &quot;victim&quot; myself and I was left asking: Why? Why, me?! :)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for going off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might the reason be for many OPs disappearances be because their native language is NOT English and so wading through the posts, getting a feel what and how EL&amp;amp;U works may seem a waste of time or simply too daunting hence they ask, they read the answer(s) and just leave. Should the one or two answered posts be deleted after a period of grace?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T11:10:41.350" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-09T13:55:59.547" Score="10" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to appear whining nevertheless, I accept that for many members this must be tiresome to hear again and again, but I am beginning to understand why this community has been accused of acting unfriendly and unhelpful towards newcomers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I can think of ten situations where an answer may be downvoted unfairly or rightly.&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to know which one my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116136/semantics-to-give-correct-meaning/116139#116139&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; falls into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;an answer may not be liked&lt;/strong&gt; is acceptable, there are hundreds of answers in EL&amp;amp;U which I do not actively like but I do not downvote any of them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;an answer is incomplete&lt;/strong&gt; is open to criticism but still not a good enough reason to downvote, the user should make use of the comment section and point out the error.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;answer may be factually correct but is written clumsily&lt;/strong&gt; is not a reason for down-voting. Simply do not vote for it and choose a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That people who become peeved for whatever reason, and then retort their frustration by &lt;strong&gt;revenge down-voting&lt;/strong&gt;, I hear happens, but before down-voting perhaps they should ask that person to defend themself (a new word, which I learnt on this site!). In any case, if it becomes a pattern the guilty party should be given a warning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That a person has &lt;strong&gt;misinterpreted the wording of an answer or the poster's intentions&lt;/strong&gt; is forgiveable and probably related to no.3 however, this should be rectified if or when the misunderstanding has been cleared up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;an answer is incomprehensible to anyone who is not a linguist&lt;/strong&gt;. I think this could justify a down-vote from a non-native speaker or anyone whose level of education is around average.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;an answer is nasty, vulgar and/or damaging to any member's reputation&lt;/strong&gt;  this must be downvoted and flagged immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;an answer shows no research and is false&lt;/strong&gt;  this must be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Than &lt;strong&gt;an answer is deliberately and knowingly off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;down-vote was cast by a troll&lt;/strong&gt;. In as much as a gratuitous anonymous downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;August 1 2013&#xA;P.S I'm still getting &lt;em&gt;inexplicable&lt;/em&gt; anonymous downvotes... sigh... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Inexplicable Down Vote(s) on an Answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-09T17:34:52.223" Score="11" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It hurts to get negative response no matter what. Since you're newer here, those downvotes carry much more psychological weight. It is unfortunate that you don't get feedback on each and every vote (down -or- up) but that's not what behavior in the entire SE system is like. It's hard to read intention from a single up/down, but often that's all you get.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people are more likely to downvote than others, not out of inherent evil but because there's a tool with a given purpose and people want to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You left out many possible reasons, of varying nuance, having to do with just plain reasoning or factual disagreement. In your answer, there are are many posible points of arguable disagreement, your first statement, your explanation of each instance, your use of google among them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;2 down votes is not a big deal. Really. Revenge and trollish downvoting is not common. If the total on that question were -2, then you'd want to think about the quality of your answer very seriously. At a net of 0, well, it's good that you're asking for feedback, and you've gotten some from tchrist and John Lawler.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ELU is not special. it is just as unfriendly and unhelpful to newcomers as the main programming sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these points of mine have long histories in meta questions and answers and comment threads on the main site. If you go through some of the meta questions you'll find support for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T17:34:52.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-09T22:52:21.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally a down vote means the voter thinks the answer is not a good answer to the question.  Often people will explain why they down voted in a comment without explicitly saying they down voted.  Often they won't bother.  Yes, what makes it a good answer or not can be subjective, but that's why we have votes rather than right/wrong flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a lot of people are sensitive to being down voted, like it is some kind of personal insult or something.  I find it helpful to think of the SE sites as conferences or salons where attendees discuss topics and a down vote of my answer is just someone else saying &quot;I disagree&quot; or simply shaking their head.  It's not unfriendly or unwelcoming to disagree, it's just a sign you've entered a debate where people have opinions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want feedback on how to improve your answers, that's what the comments are for.  The answer you link to has comments from 3 people explaining why they do not like your answer and only 2 down votes so I wouldn't call the down votes &quot;inexplicable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20364" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T22:52:21.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-10T03:17:26.950" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think John Lawler's comment may be at the heart of the downvotes. One thing I've learned on ELU is to be very careful about deeming something &quot;incorrect&quot; or &quot;ungrammatical&quot;. What may be entirely inappropriate for a job application might be perfectly suitable for a blues song. Yet both are English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, if that's really the reason for the downvotes, I believe they should have been explained. A comment might have been better a better response than a downvote – and it certainly would have been a better response than an unexplained downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, you did an impressive job of framing this meta question. It didn't come off as whining to me, but as a carefully crafted way to encourage community introspection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-06-10T03:17:26.950" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-10T06:55:34.267" Score="7" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116081/a-word-for-something-thats-done-only-half-consciously/116083#116083&quot;&gt;A question I answered&lt;/a&gt; was closed and presumably automagically migrated to Writers. I lost some rep because the question was no longer on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's since been migrated back because it is actually relevant here and not there. But it appears that although rep is lost when a question is migrated away, it's not regained if the question reappears. In fact the system appears to have forgotten me: my account name isn't a link and the Gravatar is the default &quot;deleted user&quot; brown icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N2eJy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Deactivated user card&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt; this has happened because I don't have an account on Writers. Other accounts on that question are still linked following its repatriation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While losing 103 rep is not going to affect me much, it might have a greater effect on less established members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should rep which is removed on migration be restored if the question is returned? Does it really depend on having an account on both sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-06-10T12:41:01.003" Title="What happens when questions are migrated twice?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3976" CreationDate="2013-06-10T09:30:29.213" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; I have shortened my original question because I feel the lengthy preamble added nothing of value, I have accepted Simchona's answer and I don't like wasting people's time. So, here it is the nitty-gritty question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To summarise&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does EL&amp;amp;U have a private message mechanism available to its members?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it the &lt;strong&gt;chat rooms&lt;/strong&gt;? If it is, is there a guide for dummies on how to&#xA;use it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apart from answering old questions is there another way of bumping them up? I tried adding comments but that doesn't seem to work.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2013-06-10T11:22:51.227" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T17:42:10.753" Title="How can I inform an OP that I may have answered his or her question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3975" CreationDate="2013-06-10T09:55:54.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really is no private messaging system. Chat (where you are more than welcome!) does require people to be online, but you can start a discussion with a particular individual once a threshold number of comments has been reached. (A little box shows up, asking you if you'd like to move to chat). I don't know of a guide, but in essence it's a way for users to just talk amongst themselves about topics that are often out of the ELU scope. Sometimes it's also where people drop in to ask a brief question, or to figure out why their question may have been closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing a question or adding a new answer is the only way to bump it. However, if you think a question can be answered by an older one, then you can click &quot;flag&quot; and select the &quot;duplicate&quot; reason. This will ask for the URL of the older question, and your flag is then reviewed by mods and users with a certain rep level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2013-06-11T17:42:10.753" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T17:42:10.753" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-11T13:30:49.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I landed on the English page when I recently found stackexchange.  I think from the mods to the newbies, it is a positive environment that is out to really help others.  I have not checked out many other SE sites but the one I did was philosophy.  Now that site is quick on the down voting and very critical of not following the rules.  For such deep thinkers, you think ego would enter their thoughts.  It's not that I've even experienced this but I've seen some ostracized for a question or an answer. I like what was stated above about helping or constructive criticism through a comment rather than racking em with down votes.  Thanks for keeping it real here.  I get in a rush and my English may need an edit or two after I post it. Thankfully there is a level of understanding and I am not chastised for catching my mistake and editing it.  If there was a category that could/should be critical of writing in proper tense, etc. it would be this one.  I would say that there certainly is a place and a reason for down votes.  If nothing else it keeps people in check; a sort of deterrent I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45598" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T13:30:49.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-13T05:38:43.297" Score="13" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm here merely to grumble. I just spent half an hour working on a detailed and thoughtful answer to a question, and when I went to submit my answer, I received the notification that the question had been deleted and &quot;no new answers will be accepted.&quot; As it happens, the question was brand spanking new, and not a single answer had been posted. The deletion clearly occurred during the time I was working on my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first time this has happened to me. I imagine it's essentially inevitable that this will happen sometimes, but it's terribly frustrating, and a waste of time and effort. Aside from being able to submit some sort of &quot;freeze&quot; to keep a question in place while working on an answer (which admittedly seems a bit ridiculous), I can't see any solution, other than to work on answers as rapidly as possible. This does not, however, encourage really high quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is all just pointless carping, I'm willing to be told so. But thanks for listening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T13:34:16.050" Title="Effort wasted answering a question deleted before posting my answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-13T07:26:54.813" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between this forum (&quot;&lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) and &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot;? I see that there are many similar topics&amp;mdash;about the meanings of some expressions and the usage of English tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is &quot;ELU Meta&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43922" OwnerDisplayName="Graduate" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T07:35:37.997" Title="&quot;English Language &amp; Usage&quot; versus &quot;English Language Learners&quot; (difference)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-06-13T07:38:52.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-13T15:47:13.037" Score="6" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, each author has a page that lists all their posts. So if you look at an &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2013/06/one-language-many-voices/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;individual post&lt;/a&gt; the name of the author links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/author/Barrie%20England/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;that page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However following the above link results in a 404.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please can this be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T15:47:13.037" Title="Barrie England's author page 404s" Tags="|bug|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3978" CreationDate="2013-06-14T00:54:30.267" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; do is grab a copy of your input text (or just keep that brower window open and open another one). Then pose the question &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;, and post your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done that myself &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101321/what-is-draw-on&quot;&gt;at least once&lt;/a&gt; (possibly more, I don't remember). If you think the question merits an answer, just go for it and see how things play out with the rest of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One minor hassle - I think if the OP deletes &lt;em&gt;his own&lt;/em&gt; question, his text disappears &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt;, so you might not be able to just &quot;copy &amp;amp; paste&quot;. Also you might need quite a high rep to be able to see questions that have been deleted by mods or multiple users' votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you thought the question was good enough, you should be able to re-pose it in your own words anyway. On the issue of posting an answer to your own question, I obviously have no fundamental objection. Questions should be judged on their merits, not their provenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I said I'd done it myself, I meant &quot;copied and reposted a deleted question&quot;. I have answered my own question at least once, but I can't find an example off-hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T01:00:35.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-14T16:31:06.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes downvotes are just that - a mystery. For whatever reason, that person didn't think your question had merit. Votes are anonymous by design, and each person can spend just as much effort thinking about them as he/she chooses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, most of the examples you've given &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; really examples of &quot;unfair downvotes&quot;. Guidelines and advice can be given, but &lt;strong&gt;ultimately it's solely up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76293/when-to-vote-up-guide-and-vote-reputation-allocation-algorithm-question-acceptan&quot;&gt;the voter's discretion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, something like serial downvoting (where someone will downvote every single one of your questions/answers) and trolling (where someone will downvote a large number of posts in a short amount of time) and sockpuppeting (where someone creates a duplicate account for the sole purpose up &lt;em&gt;upvoting&lt;/em&gt; their own posts) &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; examples of unfair voting, and this kind of thing is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/28758/168352&quot;&gt;generally caught by a filter and reversed within 24 hours&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best advice is: &lt;strong&gt;Don't let it stress you out&lt;/strong&gt;, especially if the overall score on the post is still positive, and especially if they don't leave a comment (and even if they do, note that you can't assume it's the same person who left the downvote). Note also that it will take &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;three down-votes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to completely cancel out a single up-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The converse: Should it be necessary to explain every single upvote too? No. All an upvote means is that, for whatever reason, that person thinks that this question was well put and deserves attention/responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12256" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T15:58:59.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3871" CreationDate="2013-06-16T06:14:51.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agree wholeheartedly. In its present format and layout, the highlighted &lt;em&gt;news&lt;/em&gt; is counter-intuitive. Click on one, the others should remain &quot;unread&quot; not fade back with the others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S an option to &lt;strong&gt;enlarge&lt;/strong&gt; the &quot;Stack Exchange&quot; box, would be handy. The print is quite quite tiny and I can't always find my reading glasses. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T06:14:51.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3986" CreationDate="2013-06-16T09:23:57.197" Score="3" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is a common feature on social networks and I am the last person who wants EL&amp;amp;U to resemble Facebook, perish the thought, but I believe a system where one user can communicate privately with another would be a useful tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is not the same, and the interface is positively a mess. Personally, I can't make head nor tail of it and find, despite its name, to be contradictorily intimidating. Chat is public, anyone can join a conversation (invited or not), but if a &lt;em&gt;trusted&lt;/em&gt; user has a query, would like some advice on formulating an answer or has a question that is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3521/how-to-identify-my-self-that-my-question-is-too-localized-and-how-can-i-get-answ&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too localized,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; then why make it public? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why not? It might be of interest to others&quot; someone might chime in. Not if it is too localized and furthermore, not every legitimate question on grammar, syntax, lexis etc... is intrinsically &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;. For instance, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116383/which-expression-is-older-london-royal-parks-or-londons-royal-parks-and&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I posted recently was really bugging me, I spent ages trying to make it &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; more &quot;challenging&quot; and worthy of a response. Thankfully, I did get one, and I was very grateful but it was clear as questions go, it was a resounding flop. I'd delete the question, but I can't because there's an answer! How much easier it would have been with a PM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Private messages would also help resolve discussions and disagreements. They might also cause a few new ones too! However, the majority of users on this website are mature adults, and I think we can be trusted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a final advantage I would like to mention. It would help avoid unfortunate incidents where an OP or a respondent misinterprets the intervention of some of EL&amp;amp;U's most respected experts. Such as illustrated by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3978/effort-wasted-answering-a-question-deleted-before-posting-my-answer#comment12560_3978&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Lawler. In my opinion, people's egos are fragile things and more often than not we are aware of our own shortcomings. It takes courage to admit publicly that a long-held belief (and many grammar rules learnt at school are the cause of such incomprehensions) is at best inaccurate or worst a complete and utter lie. Not everyone can admit to being wrong, and certainly it is unrealistic to expect people to change their opinions in a heart beat, even when faced with indisputable evidence. A PM sent by member gently pointing out an error or asking for clarification might be listened to more carefully. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I've just realized that my last paragraph seems to uphold J.Lawyer's conviction. Not so. PMs would avoid users' interpretations of being singled out for criticism on this platform. I like having a wide choice of answers to choose from, sometimes the low-voted answers help me as much as the most popular ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Feature request: Private messaging" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3985" CreationDate="2013-06-16T10:41:18.700" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first time &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/431/any-way-to-send-a-personal-message-to-another-user&quot;&gt;such a feature has been requested&lt;/a&gt;, and it's not even the fourth time. This featured has been requested by various users for many years and has been consistently declined by the Powers That Be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read the linked question for an explanation, but in essence, the StackExchange sites are for questions and answers, not for social networking. Private messaging would encourage the wrong sort of behavior; any content that's on these sites is (mostly) public for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the discussion in the comments to this answer, I want to add that my experience in chat &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; suggests to me that PMs would be abused. Not by you certainly, and maybe not by most of our community, but &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are a responsible user. This community for the most part is respectful and knowledgeable and mature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this feature would need to be implemented system-wide (hence the Meta.SO post), and I can guarantee that SO itself is full of PM-spammers just waiting to fill up our boxes with 'i ken haz codez?' And even were the system to default to &quot;No Messages from Untrusted Users,&quot; the &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; would then be spammed (further) with 'let me pm you for codez!!!1!', 'gimme ur pm!!', etc. And then (more) chaos would reign and all the little kittehs would be sad. You don't want that, do you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T11:57:22.003" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3871" CreationDate="2013-06-16T17:42:52.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll reproduce J.R.'s comment here, because I think it's an important factor...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The downside of this proposal is that the number would remain there until I visited each of the messages from the alert link - even if I've already seen them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit when I started on ELU I used to get irritated by the &quot;alert list&quot; being cleared completely every time I followed a single link in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I wised up and started checking out comments &lt;em&gt;starting with the oldest one&lt;/em&gt;. Provided I look at all outstanding items within one continuous process, I only have to remember &lt;em&gt;the one I was just looking at&lt;/em&gt; when I return to the inbox (and move on to &lt;em&gt;the one above that&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I make a real effort, I'm positively &lt;em&gt;meshless&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sieve-like&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sieve-brained&lt;/a&gt;, but this much I can manage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T17:42:52.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-17T00:43:11.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first came to the site I got a lot of downvotes because I was using corpus data to answer questions. Maybe you're getting heat from anti-corpus types since you used google hits as part of your argument. Try using &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt; data next time. &#xA;They'll still downvote... &lt;em&gt;honni soit qui mal y pense&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Also they don't like you to answer questions which are unworthy in the first place. The question you answered got closed, so downvoting the answer will help to ratify the closure decision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T00:43:11.253" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-17T21:03:34.830" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems there are relevant changes coming soon to how posts are closed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184154/closing-changes-on-hold-unclear-too-broad-opinion-based-off-topic-reasons&quot;&gt;Closing changes: on hold, unclear, too broad, opinion-based, off-topic reasons, bye-bye to Too Localized&lt;/a&gt; (MetaStackOverFlow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How these changes could change our own set of custom 'off topic' reasons for the EL&amp;amp;U  stack?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Will we have nostalgia from the lack of the TL reason?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are these changes capable to generate an increase in the number of closed questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user19148" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T02:47:50.593" Title="&quot;Closing changes: [on hold], unclear, too broad, opinion-based, off-topic reasons, bye-bye to Too Localized&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3989" CreationDate="2013-06-18T02:47:50.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, we'll still have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Duplicate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Off Topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but pretty soon our four other closevote reasons...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Not Constructive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not A Real Question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Too Localised&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  General Reference&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...will be replaced by &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; new alternatives...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unclear What You're Asking&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Too Broad&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Primarily Opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ELU might have a bit of a problem there. I've just realised our current FAQ doesn't actually define &lt;em&gt;GR&lt;/em&gt; - but I thought it used to, and don't recall any debate here on meta about removing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU gets a lot of really basic questions from non-native speakers, many of which are closed as &lt;em&gt;GR&lt;/em&gt;. Presumably we'll need to change the FAQ to justify saying they're &lt;em&gt;OT&lt;/em&gt; instead now. I'm assuming we can't just say they should go to ELL without saying why they can't stay &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, and I'm not sure it's possible on SO to closevote as &lt;em&gt;Belongs on XXX&lt;/em&gt; while &lt;em&gt;XXX&lt;/em&gt; is still in Beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, it looks like TPTB don't endorse whatever we thought &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; stood for, so we either have to bite the bullet and allow questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115124/&quot;&gt;the meaning “off” &lt;/a&gt; (sic), or we need to decide whether the site really is for &lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (&lt;strong&gt;serious&lt;/strong&gt;) English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think we should include under &lt;em&gt;Off Topic&lt;/em&gt; a sub-category called something like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Common knowledge among Anglophones&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (effectively, the old &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really have an opinion on the demise of &lt;em&gt;Too Localised&lt;/em&gt; - most times when I've closevoted for that reason, I've been overruled (or not supported) anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T02:47:50.593" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3992" CreationDate="2013-06-18T04:40:59.733" Score="-3" ViewCount="934" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one book, high school English, without answers. I'm not able to confirm completely by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I put them here to check the answer? And I'll adhere my answer and comprehension to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If allowed and welcome, how many sentences in one post is appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;of course welcome to rewrite the sentence or point out/edit my mistakes in post either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Error Detection&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Without][A] green plants, the sun's energy [could not be used][B] on the earth, and [all other][C] organisms [live][D] on the earth would die. Seems true...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45164" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T12:30:11.630" Title="error detection of sentences" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3991" CreationDate="2013-06-18T05:15:13.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts should be limited to one question per post.  Multiple examples of a single problem may be given in a post.  But separate questions belong in separate posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T05:15:13.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3991" CreationDate="2013-06-18T12:27:35.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. That sort of question is not appropriate for the main site. We are not set up to proof read documents or sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Stack Exchange is for asking specific questions, the questions should not be so specific that they only help you and only once. Questions should be broad enough that many people will find them usefull and narrow enough that the answers are not pages in length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2013-06-19T12:30:11.630" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T12:30:11.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3996" CreationDate="2013-06-18T14:11:48.197" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two answers appeared in my flag queue today (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&lt;/a&gt;). Both answers were marked &amp;quot;Low answer quality score&amp;quot;. I found it strange that one offered me the &amp;quot;very low quality&amp;quot; disposal choice and the other did not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am flagging this answer because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it needs ♦ moderator attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not an answer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;very low quality&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invalid flag&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I do not agree with the existing flags on this answer, they are incorrect and should be ignored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is spam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is not welcome in our community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am flagging this answer because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it needs ♦ moderator attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not an answer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invalid flag&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I do not agree with the existing flags on this answer, they are incorrect and should be ignored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is spam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is not welcome in our community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="flag queue: &quot;very low quality&quot; disposal choice: possible bug" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3995" CreationDate="2013-06-19T06:06:13.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/110754/215040&quot;&gt;an answer on meta.stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We now suppress the &quot;very low quality&quot; option. It is only available on closed questions or &lt;strong&gt;posts with a score less than 1&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above, I think this is expected behavior.  My guess is that the first question was rated zero or less, while the second question was rated one or higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you confirm that this is the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28567" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T06:06:13.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-19T21:23:52.643" Score="36" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may, I would like to share some of my feelings about this website with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to think of english.stackexchange as a welcoming place for educated people from all around the world who are interested in the depths of the English language. I loved this website and used to feel at home. Lately, every question that is suspected to be asked by a non-native speaker gets downvoted and it feels like people who used to feel at home here get kicked out of here into ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel personally offended for anything, as I'm mostly just a reader. I'm just starting to feel unwelcome and uncomfortable around here. This is very frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5159" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T21:59:11.157" Title="So, are non-native speakers not welcome any more?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-06-20T01:30:58.880" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think that if down-votes required a comment to be provided - this would deter gratuity and provide the OP with constructive criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  Just to embellish this rather brief answer based on my comments.  If comments are not required for down-votes (an therefore help the community), I think that removal of down-votes would encourage answers to be voted on merit.  Consider this scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 answers to a question.  100 people respond by either up-voting, down-voting or both.  Both answers receive 50 up-votes, meaning that they are equal in terms of being considered good answers.  The first answer receives 10 down-votes from 10 of the people who up-voted the other answer, so one answer is ahead by 10 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?  It means that those who &quot;bother&quot; to down-vote have more power over the perceived best answer and 10 points have been taken away from people who cast their votes.  Of course, everyone can down-vote the other answer too, but it means that everyone should down-vote every answer that they do not up-vote to make it all even!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to this that you need a certain reputation to down-vote, you lose a point each time you down-vote and therefore those with the highest reputation can be more blasé about down-voting those who have just started out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end though - this scoring system underlies the SE sites, so what can be done in reality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44600" LastEditorUserId="44600" LastEditDate="2013-06-26T09:34:23.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-26T09:34:23.717" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2013-06-20T06:37:14.870" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;ILya Kogan your sensations are shared by quite a few other English language enthusiasts; however, I do not think this &quot;coldness&quot; is reserved exclusively to non-native speakers, if that's any comfort. Take for instance this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3652/dealing-with-poorly-posed-questions#comment11457_3652&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;comment on Meta&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The site owners want the site to attract experts and become the place&#xA;  where experts gather to ask and answer questions. Questions which are&#xA;  not of interest, especially to experts, are not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, I think, pretty much sums up what &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; members of EL&amp;amp;U strongly believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same page you will read this comment from an ex-member criticizing the community's attitude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have often had people object to my questions, as in the top comment&#xA;  here, maybe not explicitly but the tone of disapproval is&#xA;  unmistakable. [...] But objecting to it or downvoting it simply&#xA;  because one doesn't like it on subjective grounds, is something I find&#xA;  disappointing and discouraging. Most users who downvote don't even&#xA;  mention why they think the question or the answer is downvotable. Does&#xA;  that in any way help the poster improve what he or she posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now he or she may or may not be a native speaker but without doubt their command of the English language is definitely advanced level, if not proficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these are examples of how &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; &quot;language experts&quot; use or would prefer EL&amp;amp;U to be and those who, like yourself, feel there is a type of unspoken hierarchy existing among its ranks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only been a member for 31 days, and despite my own insecurities and hesitations I have jumped right in the pool and swam along with the professionals. It's intimidating but invigorating also. Along the way I have made mistakes, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of my answers have been criticized, quite a few (an ever growing number!) have been down-voted, and some have been complimented on. In fact where I realize that my question or answer does not contribute anything worthwhile, I will try to delete them myself (not always possible) with their corresponding rep points too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community is made up of all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds and different levels of education, not all share the view that non-native/non-expert questions are boring and should be closed. Not all will exasperate and silently scream: Argggghhhhh! when faced with yet another question on the difference between the &lt;em&gt;present perfect simple&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;present perfect continuous&lt;/em&gt;. In my short stay I  have also found &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; members to be extremely helpful, friendly, open, non-judgemental, kind, funny and awe-inspiring. I would like to think some of their expertise, their knowledge, and their enviable skills in explaining grammar and usage will one day rub off on me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, how someone experiences this website I think depends, in part, on how you view yourself. Obviously, those whose self-confidence is low, and this definitely includes &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; learners of English, will be especially sensitive to what may appear as criticisms, when in reality users are asking for the OP to be more specific in their questions. If people took the time to read (or &lt;em&gt;had the time&lt;/em&gt;, presently I have loads) Meta to get a truer feeling of what the community is asking, there would be less friction and fewer disappointments. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2698/44619&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; written by J.R is an example of the friendliness and generosity, which should be practised by all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All that said, the EL&amp;amp;U community is very welcoming toward questions – even very basic questions – that do a good job of explaining why the question is being asked. Let me point to two examples:a downvoted question, and this upvoted question, both asked by community newcomers on the same day. The upvoted question is actually the more basic of the two, but the O.P. does a good job of explaining why he is asking the question: [...]If an O.P. can accept a downvote or comment as &lt;strong&gt;helpful feedback&lt;/strong&gt;, meant to indicate that a question has inadequate information, or is simply not a good fit for the EL&amp;amp;U forum (neither of which makes it a bad question, by the way), then I think you'll find this to be a very friendly, welcoming, helpful community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T06:44:09.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-20T21:55:26.387" Score="6" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got downvote and deduction of reputation for other user's question, not mine two times in a row recently. Why does it happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside, I'm annoyed to have been getting down votes and close votes which seem to be made by a specific user(s) - I think I know who he is. It's clearly intentional and habitual deed, because I keep receiving either one (sometimes two) down vote(s) or close vote(s) to most of my posts immediate after posting them. It's a horrendously mean and disgustingly cowardly behavior. Isn't there any way to let the malicious user stop or punish such a mean action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addenduum:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with the behest of Simchona and Shog 6, I 'm attaching the copy &amp;amp; paste of my reputation record regarding my top question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;50&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+25&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;22:54 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does purchasers of a new tablet won’t “end up with a doorstop” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;04:53 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is ‘smart alec (aleck)’ a gender-neutral noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;00:37 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact meaning of “blood-dimmed (tragedy),” and how does it pass current among Anglophones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;00:33 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the key difference among a liberal, liberalist and libertarian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;00:21 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does ‘a lunch best forgotten’ mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;23:33 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;accept&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does purchasers of a new tablet won’t “end up with a doorstop” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5/-5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;04:54 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the phrase “don't even pass the laugh test” pass as an idiomatic expression, or only a set of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;06:02 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;downvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does “Beyoncé was outed for lip-synching” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;22&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;14:35 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you call a disease with an unknown cure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;13:24 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a noun (such as “duct tape”) be used as a verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;00:55 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does ‘a lunch best forgotten’ mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;06:02 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;accept&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does ‘a lunch best forgotten’ mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;13:40 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is “That Guy”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jun 19 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+5/-2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;11:16 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does ‘a lunch best forgotten’ mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;12:12 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;downvoted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expression for a choice which isn't really one (I didn't place this question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jun 18 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jun 17 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2013-06-22T04:18:23.203" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T04:18:23.203" Title="Does EL&amp;U have any measures to stop stalker's actions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2013-06-20T22:14:22.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lately, every question that is suspected to be asked by a non-native speaker gets downvoted and it feels like people who used to feel at home here get kicked out of here into ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that's not the sentiment people feel. There are still many users who ask questions that would be well-suited for ELL, but those questions get asked on ELU, simply because the users aren't yet aware of ELL. (I directed one such user there not too long ago, and the user seemed &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/7433/what-does-the-word-print-mean-on-a-form&quot;&gt;thankful for the pointer&lt;/a&gt;, not hurt for being &quot;run out of&quot; ELU.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not &quot;kicking somebody out&quot; of anywhere, that's just showing them an additional resource where some of their questions will be more fitting for the community, and therefore more appreciated by the users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL wasn't designed to make people feel less welcome at ELU; in fact, it was meant to do the opposite. It was designed so that anyone on the StackExchange with a very basic question about English could have a place to ask it, even if that question was too rudimentary for ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while, I read a discussion like this one on meta, and I wonder how much miscommunication is going on. How many folks are only trying to be helpful, saying, &quot;Your questions might be better at ELL,&quot; yet somehow that's being misconstrued to mean, &quot;We don't like your kind here on ELU – go someplace else.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T22:14:22.397" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4000" CreationDate="2013-06-20T23:46:51.347" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears there is someone who serially down-votes your questions. It certainly looks like that in your reputation history. There is a mechanism that eliminates fraudulent votes, but it is secret, and I have no idea whether it is supposed to pick up bad behaviour like this; it seems like it doesn't, so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that each man's vote is his own; if someone dislikes all my posts, he may be allowed to vote them all down. If so, there is nothing that can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you should look at it this way. You are one of our favourite users. Everybody likes your questions—that is, of the 10,000 users on EL&amp;amp;U, 9,999 like your questions, and there is only one that votes you down. It's annoying, but it's just a drop in the sea. The loss of reputation is also small compared to your regular gains. So it's probably best to accept that sometimes there is injustice that cannot be rectified but must be borne; and that a single user cannot change the way everyone here feels about you, so perhaps he is not worth contemplating. Eventually, it will stop. You should also know that I have heard several other top users complain about a user's serially down-voting all their questions, so you are not alone in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2013-06-21T02:07:22.677" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T02:07:22.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2013-06-21T00:10:52.970" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised to find my name come up in the foregoing comments. So I'm tempted to add my answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an EL&amp;amp;U user and non-native English speaker, I really and honestly sympathize with your feeling, because personally I’m experiencing a similar problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m a two-and-a-half year old user of this site, and am always in the asker's side as a non-native English speaker. Since late last year to date, I keep getting either one or two down vote(s) or close vote(s) to most of my posts immediately after posting it. This never happened in the first two years. I think it is strange that I get down-votes and close votes no later than I post a question almost every time, even to a question that eventually results in 10 plus up-votes and 500+ views. I wrote the following comment in a recent post of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To those who casted for “Close” votes:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you cast “Close” after&#xA;  giving your own answer or comment to each point of my question? Even&#xA;  if it looks a naive and self-explanatory question to you, it can be a&#xA;  big and worth-for-trying-to-ask question for us, non-native English&#xA;  learners like Japanese, Chinese. Korean, Thais, Indonesian, Malaysian,&#xA;  Mexican, Brazilian and you can name it. I don’t think EL&amp;amp;U is the site&#xA;  only allowed to English language specialists and fluent native English&#xA;  speakers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It’s unfair, mean, coward and shameful to simply cast a&#xA;  ‘Close’ and ‘Down’ vote, without giving any clear reason under your&#xA;  name. At least, it’s autocratic practice, and not a democratic way of&#xA;  behaving, which I think you should attach special importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIya. I really sympathize with you, and I pray that EL&amp;amp;U users are all fair in treating our posts, and not biased to native or non-native distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="17795" LastEditDate="2013-06-26T09:41:53.977" LastActivityDate="2013-06-26T09:41:53.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4000" CreationDate="2013-06-21T00:22:03.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having used the mod tools and spoken with SE employees, there is currently no suspicious activity that we can detect. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; ways for us to investigate, and if malicious activity is detected then the abusive user can be suspended and the offending votes removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10893" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T00:22:03.157" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4000" CreationDate="2013-06-21T01:01:10.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Cerberus's answer is excellent. If you concentrate your attention on your overall reputation, it is very positive: you are appreciated for your contributions here. For example, the overall opinion of your last thirty questions is quite good. For every one downvote you are getting four upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can also say the evidence is against a stalker/serial downvoter. There is a string of -1s on your ten most recent questions (except the ninth, which got -3). I suppose this looks like serial downvoting. But it is cooincidence. I downvoted the fifth, seventh, and ninth questions. Consequently I know the string of -1s is not the work of a single voter. In my case, I am voting my view of each question, not of you personally. Unless someone admits to stalking, or a real pattern of serial downvoting is found, I assume the other voters did the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Widening the inquiry to your thirty most recent questions (the first page of questions on your profile page), there is no pattern of serial downvoting. 7 got 0 downvotes, 16 got -1, 4 got -2, and 3 got -3 or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T01:01:10.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2013-06-21T16:48:36.830" Score="17" Body="&lt;h2&gt;A recent comment said:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Right now 10 out of 45 questions have a negative number next to them, and I interpret this as a sign of hostility. ELL is not mentioned in most threads, but you can see that the questions that get downvoted mostly come from non-native speakers. Do some people think that the level of English of the OP a good reason for a downvote?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I'd like to address that in two parts...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;PART I&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Right now 10 out of 45 questions have a negative number next to them, &lt;strong&gt;and I interpret this as a sign of hostility&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's sad that you jump to that conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;I looked at the first 5 questions with a negative number, and here's what I saw:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117187/an-eqivalent-of-the-adverb-unwishfully&quot;&gt;#1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is that which adverbs are equivalent to ‘unwishfully’?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is essentially a thesaurus question. I believe if I had posted that same question, even in more polished English, I probably would have garnered roughly the same number of downvotes – especially if I, like the O.P., didn't bother to explain why the six alternatives provided weren't satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117170/is-this-right-who-dont&quot;&gt;#2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If i say &amp;quot;I am the person who doesn't mind&amp;quot; , is that wrong?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows? This question might have earned its downvote just because of the lower-case &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; and the improper punctuation and spacing in the question. (There are two additional such errors in the question itself.) I have no problem with someone downvoting that question, just based on its sloppiness. Such a downvote may prompt the O.P. (and others) to be more careful in the future, so that others don't have to spend time editing their work just to make it presentable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117165/meaning-of-two-quotations&quot;&gt;#3&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could anyone make me understand by explaining these two quotes from the movie The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting question, in my mind, but I don't see how it's on-topic. I've tried to explain why in a comment I've left there. I don't think it's really deserving of a downvote, but I would guess that any downvotes were primarily driven by frustration with the off-topicness of the question, rather than hostility toward a non-native.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117155/at-a-future-events-vs-at-the-future-events&quot;&gt;#4&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“At a future events” vs. “at the future events” – which one should I use?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before this question was closed, one person answered it, and another left a comment. But the question is about such a basic issue that I suspect most stack exchange sites would have downvoted a question this basic. The main &amp;quot;hostility&amp;quot; I see here is that no one bothered has to post a link to ELL – where that question might still garner downvotes for being not well-researched, although perhaps not as many, because it would have at least been asked in a more appropriate venue. Still, it's worth mentioning that no one has told that user to bug off – the downvotes are an indictment on the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;its scant research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, not the user or the user's inexperience with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117146/lets-say-im-at-point-a-and-youre-at-point-b-i-want-to-go-0-3-of-the-distance&quot;&gt;#5&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;I want to go 0.3 of the distance from point A to point B. What word describes the 0.3?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this question has several downvotes (one of which is mine), I still fail to find &amp;quot;signs of hostility toward the non-native speaker.&amp;quot; After all, the question has four answers, in addition to a few helpful comments. That's not hostility. Probably the most challenging question is mine, and I stand by it. The O.P. didn't do anyone any favors by writing about something different then was really being asked about. That wastes time for a lot of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;PART II&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...you can see that the questions that get downvoted mostly come from non-native speakers. Do some people think that the level of English of the OP a good reason for a downvote?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; think that's a good reason for a downvote; I think it would be a terrible reason, and I suspect an overwhelming majority of regulars would agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when questions are worded so hastily that I'm reminded of Yahoo! Answers, then I believe the question is vulnerable to downvotes, &lt;em&gt;and that's a good thing&lt;/em&gt;. We expect a higher standard here, a higher level of effort. You shouldn't just come here and ask a question flippantly. If all I saw was drivel for questions, I wouldn't spend much time here. When I'm feeling frustrated with an O.P., it's because they've asked a question without providing sufficient context, or written it out in sloppy SMS-speak. Such shoddy work is detrimental to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I only downvoted one of the five questions I've analyzed, but I don't have a problem with the other downvotes that were cast, for the reasons I've already explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I noticed that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; these questions were asked by very new ELU users with very few reputation points. I suspect that the downvotes are rooted in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;inexperience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, rather than the fact that they might not be native English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a lot of non-natives mistakenly assume it's the quality of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; that is being downvoted, as opposed to the quality of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. My downvotes are solely based on the latter, and I don't think I'm in the minority on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T02:09:43.467" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2013-06-25T04:29:33.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Yoichi -san, Domo arigato gozaimasu! I hope and pray that this site could be a place to 'learn' together for Native and Non-Native Speakers.  Humbly to say that the 'soul' to educate is always needed here.  Let's just share one another, thank you All! ♥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41908" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T04:29:33.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4011" CreationDate="2013-06-25T18:03:17.213" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3847/etiquette-for-simultaneous-duplicate-answers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; older question on Meta that asked about duplicate answers that were posted &lt;em&gt;simultaneously&lt;/em&gt;. This question, however, is about answers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/117526/16796&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; that are posted on &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; questions, with content very similar to that of other answers but too general to be considered plagiarized. Let us look at this answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You 'satiate' your hunger. A more definite way of saying 'satisfy'. 'Satisfy' seems too vague&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Satiate&lt;/em&gt; is used in several other answers, and the notion that &quot;'satisfy' seems too vague&quot; is already implied in answers that don't in fact suggest the use of &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt; as a first choice (all but one answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we downvote such answers on the ground that they don't contribute anything new (and to discourage people from posting answers that others have already posted in order to increase their reputation)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16796" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Dealing with duplicate answers" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4010" CreationDate="2013-06-25T22:12:13.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators sometimes &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/52765/171321&quot;&gt;protect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; old questions which have good answers, when they seem to be attracting new responses that don't add anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing the same information as another answer is not grounds for a downvote, at least for me. The downvote would come for more serious problems, such as failure to show research, poor writing, or plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the late answer provides the same information but presents it in a way which is easier to read, I would upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T22:12:13.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4010" CreationDate="2013-06-26T09:39:33.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we downvote such answers on the ground that they don't contribute anything new (and to discourage people from posting answers that others have already posted in order to increase their reputation)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a mighty strong allegation. Perhaps the O.P. was very aware that &lt;em&gt;satiate&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt; were already mentioned, but wasn't convinced that any of the answers already provided had delved into how one of those two words seemed too general and vague, while the other seemed more specific to hunger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just gone through that lengthy set of answers twice, and I can't find where that point is mentioned. I think the new post adds to the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying it's a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; answer, but I think it would be rather judgemental to cast a downvote solely on a presumption that the person might only be trying to increase their reputation and hasn't appeared to add anything new. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Besides, if a person was just trying to increase their reputation, wouldn't they answer a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question, where all the traffic is?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, a comment would be much more appropriate than a downvote in such cases. If you think the new answer hasn't added anything new, politely address that. That would give the user a chance to rephrase or elaborate. Perhaps the answer would be improved, or perhaps you'd be enlightened about something you had missed. That seems like a more productive response than a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-06-26T09:39:33.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-27T16:16:04.167" Score="19" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3989/closing-changes-on-hold-unclear-too-broad-opinion-based-off-topic-reason&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the General Reference close reason is dead. In its place, I've added a custom &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using &lt;strong&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/strong&gt; are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;List of general references&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all of the custom off-topic reasons, you can (and probably should) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184637/what-do-site-moderators-need-to-do-to-support-the-new-custom-question-close-reas/185097#185097&quot;&gt;replace this with one that better reflects your community's tone and standards&lt;/a&gt; (and perhaps grammar). However, I expect you'll keep something very similar to this since General Reference questions have &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; been a problem here and are unlikely to go away any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; encourage you to better define the questions that fall into this category. I linked to your list because I think it's a good start (and likely to be very useful to the folks &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; these questions), but it could use a bit of cleanup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of dictionaries; if the intent is just to give folks a choice, it's ok to have a few, but if there are specific reasons to choose one over another (particularly for specific types of questions, e.g. etymology vs. pronunciation), then that should be noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure &amp;quot;Urban Dictionary&amp;quot; really belongs in the same category as OED, at least not without a HUGE disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What sorts of questions are the &amp;quot;General Language and English Language Reference&amp;quot; entries supposed to answer? All of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ditto for Style and Translation - these may be useful and/or capture some questions you'd prefer weren't asked here, but I don't quite see how these are &amp;quot;general references&amp;quot;; heck, right now y'all devote more words to damning Strunk &amp;amp; White than you do to explaining why I'd want to refer to The Chicago Manual of Style for anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, the goal is to point both askers and casual readers toward resources that will help them find the answers to their own questions. Try hard to &lt;em&gt;teach them how to fish&lt;/em&gt; - don't just point them in the direction of the ocean and yell, &amp;quot;food's thataway.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2440/what-is-a-general-reference-wikipedia-tv-tropes-urban-dictionary&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;quot;General Reference&amp;quot;: Wikipedia? TV Tropes? Urban Dictionary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T15:54:27.657" Title="Please help define the limits of General Reference" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|general-reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2013-06-27T21:59:11.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a specific example of this that I would like to put forward.  Check out this question in ELU, found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117791/have-to-write-a-short-story-but-have-limited-topics&quot;&gt;HERE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need to write a short story of 2000 words for a writing contest but&#xA;  I'm unfortunately bounded with given themes or what they call topics.&#xA;  These topics are The Meaning of Me, Paved or Unpaved ways, Because&#xA;  this is what matters and the Bravest place on Earth. I can't&#xA;  understand the topics and particularly the second one 'Paved and&#xA;  Unpaved ways'! Need Help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2 hours the question acquired four downvotes and a Hold (&quot;put on hold as unclear what you're asking&quot;).  I understood exactly what he was asking, even if he was somewhat awkward with the question.  I don't believe that those who dumped on the question couldn't have edited it to be more clear, as opposed to downvoting and putting on Hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if it should have been posted to ELL, at the very least they should have either suggested it, or attracted the attention of someone with power to actually put it there, so the guy could get his question asked instead of being dumped on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T21:59:11.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2013-06-27T22:56:11.670" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quite understand OP's reason for linking to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/&quot;&gt;recommended references&lt;/a&gt; page, but to be honest I'm not sure we could ever expect any such list to suit our General Reference context. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: OED is an excellent reference, but it's not available to most people at a price they can/will afford.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: Onelook, Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, etc., are useful, but may contain highly dubious material.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   3: Expecting casual enquirers to check a corpus before asking here seems excessive, to say the least.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   4: Trying to find details about a specific usage in a comprehensive style guide can be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; difficult.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   5: Resources like &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language&lt;/em&gt; aren't generally available online.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   6: etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always adopted the principle that if I think almost all native speakers know the answer to a question, and/or I can easily see the relevant information &lt;em&gt;without leaving Google's home page,&lt;/em&gt; after typing in a reasonably obvious search string, then it's General Reference. If I can't, it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T22:56:11.670" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4018" CreationDate="2013-06-28T13:56:03.027" Score="1" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone can fill me in on why my answer from a question the other day on a polite replacement for badass (as a noun), seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117457/what-is-a-polite-substitute-for-badass-used-as-a-noun/117815#117815&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  I've done some searching on meta, but have come up without an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find a post by user Mari-Lou A discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3969/inexplicable-down-votes-on-an-answer&quot;&gt;the issue of down-voting&lt;/a&gt; and what is proper and not, but that did not answer my question exactly.  The only legitimate reason I could think someone had with my answer was part of point 8.  Certainly, my answer shows no research, but I am not sure how my answer could be wrong.  The only research my answer needed was in the question itself: the asker provided the context he wanted the replacement for, and I provided words I have used as a replacement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thought I had was that maybe someone was off-put by my comment on &quot;queenly figure,&quot; which worries me a bit.  I did not intend for that to be offensive.  I'm worried someone may have read that as meaning that queens are not commanding, which could not be further from what I meant.  I merely meant a queen, as far as where my brain goes with it, commands with a calmer hand and more level-headed presence than the typical, popularized king. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if there is something I did &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt;, I would love to know so I can avoid it in the future!  It is not my goal to be an annoying new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46863" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T14:18:02.477" Title="Is this answer bad enough to warrant a down-vote?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4017" CreationDate="2013-06-28T14:18:02.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would guess that somebody thought &lt;em&gt;kingly figure&lt;/em&gt; was 'not useful' in this context. &lt;em&gt;Badass&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean 'kingly'; it is related to 'cool' and admirability, but not leadership. More importantly, the two are so different in register that it is difficult to imagine &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; context in which substituting one for the other would not get you laughed at. That certainly is a good reason for a downvote, where simple disagreement is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It wasn't my vote; I don't know or care enough about this sort of slang to get involved. But in a context where tone is vital, you must be extra careful that your suggestions do not mislead OP.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T14:18:02.477" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2013-06-28T14:51:31.360" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I've said before, general reference means that there is a type of reference source that is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;specifically designed to answer&lt;/strong&gt; that type of question&lt;/em&gt;. The list is actually pretty limited: dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note, for example, that there isn't a standard place to look up &quot;is this grammatical&quot; types of questions, so even the simplest question of that type is not, strictly speaking, general reference.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if we want to endorse particular dictionaries or encyclopedias. Perhaps we could do something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there is a standard type of reference source &lt;strong&gt;specifically designed to answer your question&lt;/strong&gt;, then it is off-topic here. For example, the definition of a word should be looked up in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or we could get more specific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there is a standard type of reference source &lt;strong&gt;specifically designed to answer your question&lt;/strong&gt;, then it is off-topic here. For the definition of a word, you should look in a dictionary; for synonyms and antonyms, you should look in a thesaurus; and for explanation of basic language concepts (grammar terms, parts of speech, etc.), you should look in an encyclopedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2013-06-28T15:54:27.657" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T15:54:27.657" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-29T02:08:06.977" Score="27" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Bait-and-switch Close “Options”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the new close options recently implemented, when you click close on ELU, that takes you to a first-level menu of five different close options. From that first-level menu, if you select &lt;code&gt;off-topic because...&lt;/code&gt;, that then leads you to a second-level menu with yet another five different possibilities, one of which reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;◎ This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And selecting &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; option leads you now to a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;third-level menu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that contains one and only one so-called “choice”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;◎ belongs on english.meta.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A one-item third-level menu is not a choice.  It’s a bug. Moreover, . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;. . . that’s ridiculous!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a bare minimum, it’s a UI error that takes you to a 3rd menu that doesn’t even offer you any alternatives. (&lt;em&gt;“You can have any color car you’d like, so long as it’s black.”&lt;/em&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are only allowed one “choice”, then that should be promoted back up to the 2nd-level menu instead of luring us to a 3rd-level menu where we aren’t even allowed to choose between more than a single item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I propose more than just fixing that bug. I propose that non-moderators be allowed to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nominate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a site to migrate the question to, instead of making us use a flag for it. That would make this menu item actually useful again; right now it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn’t actually do it without a moderator’s intervention, but it would be a whole heck of a lot better than &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pretending&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to offer us the option to say that it belongs on another site and then bait-and-switching us with a meta-only migration path. That isn’t a real “option”  at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Power That Be won’t even give us the mere possibility of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nominating&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a target SE site — not migrating, just nominating for migration — I beg you to &lt;strong&gt;please remove&lt;/strong&gt; the now-bogus “belongs on another SE site” non-option fake-out job and replace it with “belongs on meta ELU”.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s the least you can do.  But more can be done, and should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Please.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T18:00:00.970" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T18:00:57.293" Title="Proposal to fix the uselessness of the new off-topic close options" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|close-reasons|migration|user-interface|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4021" CreationDate="2013-06-30T03:01:09.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure the &lt;em&gt;mechanism&lt;/em&gt; (which is what determines how many levels you need to wade through, for example) is Stackexchange-wide. Other sites doubtless have more than one migration option, so they need that extra level of nesting. Until we get the Writers option back (dunno why it's not there, I swear I saw it recently, &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the big closure revamp), and/or until ELL is deemed mature enough to accept migration, we'll just have to deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T03:01:09.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4024" CreationDate="2013-06-30T16:15:25.633" Score="1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is a question about the meaning of the a phrase used in a poem off topic on ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interested in interpretation or analysis of the poem as a whole, just the limited meaning of a phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently re-read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Brady&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;E.J. Brady's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/brady-e-j/vi-down-in-honolulu-0091006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Down in Honolulu&lt;/a&gt;, but this line has stuck out to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I kissed her for her mother,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;I gev' her one, two, three;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I squoze her for her brother—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;'T was all the same to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this is not standard English, but how I should read the phrases &quot;&lt;em&gt;for her mother&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;for her brother&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in this context? It could be &quot;&lt;em&gt;in honor of her cultural heritage&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but the other lines seem to contradict this; or am I missing something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author was Australian and this poem was written at the end of the 19th century, so perhaps this is a regionalism particular to his dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42683" LastEditorUserId="42683" LastEditDate="2013-06-30T20:08:12.573" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T20:08:12.573" Title="Meaning in the context of a poem, Off Topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4023" CreationDate="2013-06-30T16:43:02.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if the only context given for &quot;a phrase&quot; is its use in a poem, it's almost certainly Off Topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if in fact the phrase in question is commonplace, it's highly likely that in the specific context of a poem it will have &quot;non-standard&quot; resonances - so answerers will be tempted to wax lyrical about these resonances, resulting in what will be effectively &quot;Off Topic answers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my position is: if you can't find a &quot;non-poetry&quot; context for a phrase, don't ask it on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T16:43:02.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="37" CreationDate="2013-07-02T12:43:52.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Search now does a much better job of this, which is no longer a stop word - take a peek: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=appropriate+use+of+that+and+which&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=appropriate+use+of+that+and+which&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T12:43:52.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4029" CreationDate="2013-07-09T05:32:46.557" Score="4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I'm a little surprised that no similar Meta questions were auto-suggested.)&#xA;(But now that I get to tagging, I see there is an active tag for this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per a recent discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118417/earliest-use-of-an-asterisk-to-indicate-a-zero-to-many-character-wildcard&quot;&gt;Earliest use of an asterisk (*) to indicate a zero-to-many character wildcard?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When does something count as ELU On-Topic by virtue of being a neologism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's the main question, the rest might get discussion-y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To consider/contrast: When is something Off-Topic for not yet being part of the &quot;Language and Usage&quot;?   (Where are the bounds on that, not the 'clearly off' end of the scale?)   When for being non-specific (it is part of usage, but it applies to other languages)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of the question, some consider it (asterisk-as-wildcard, aka Kleene Star) Off-T because it is domain specific to computing, and not part of the wider language.   I can understand that, but believe that if it can be shown to be part of the wider language, then it is On-T as a valid neologism (neo-construct? neo-usage?).   (&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; believe that the answer in that question &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; shown notably wider usage.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point was also made that even if it is used outside the original context, it may be used equally in other languages.   I can't (am too lazy to) comment on whether the Kleene star is used in non-English non-computing contexts, but it is a distinct point.   Note: differential rates of uptake/usage would be a Linguistics question, but if the question is not about that comparison, does relevance to non-ELU make it too broad/Off-T ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other terms to consider, as you think about the above questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;-dar (from RADAR, usages such as &quot;gaydar&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;LOL (note - used in other languages.  Also, disgustingly, used as regular speech in English, including such abominations as &quot;I LOLed&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'air quotes' / 'finger quotes'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41618" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T13:21:42.240" Title="When are neologisms On-Topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4027" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-07-09T11:54:35.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it fits within the scope, it is On-Topic.  If it does not, it is Off-Topic.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explanation will surely clarify matters of great import for generations to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41618" LastEditorUserId="41618" LastEditDate="2013-07-09T13:26:32.660" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T13:26:32.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4028" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-07-09T11:54:35.727" Score="0" Body="This tag is used for questions about whether something fits within the defined scope of this Stack Exchange site." OwnerUserId="41618" LastEditorUserId="41618" LastEditDate="2013-07-09T13:25:53.017" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T13:25:53.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2013-07-09T15:38:06.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first point to note is that we no longer have &lt;em&gt;Too Localised&lt;/em&gt; as a closevote reason, which implies it's irrelevant how &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; people use any given neologism. And neologisms aren't Off Topic &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally closevoted the question OP links to as Off Topic because to my mind it's not about &quot;English&quot;. I see it as just a very loose extension of a computer filename convention, which could in principle apply with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language using something like our character set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are currently three &quot;reopen&quot; votes for the question, and at least one of the closevoters no longer endorses their action anyway, so it probably will be reopened soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't closevote again even if I could (I'm a democrat at heart! :) - but it's not the type of question I particularly want to see on ELU, regardless of whether it's debarred by the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position is I've cast my closevote on that one, and attempted to justify myself in comments. If at some future point I see it's gaining &lt;em&gt;upvotes&lt;/em&gt;, I might downvote myself by way of &quot;balance&quot;, but other than that I'll probably just ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to say I don't think a usage counts as part of &lt;em&gt;English Language&lt;/em&gt; unless a reasonable number of Anglophones either use or would at least understand it, but I doubt that would fly here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2013-07-12T13:21:42.240" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T13:21:42.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-05T20:56:20.127" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an argument on one site whether to expand abbrevs like AFAICT and FWIK.&#xA;They save a lot of time of those who write them but some say there are not much known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some statistics of how much these are known in average computer literate population?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5056" OwnerDisplayName="Ondra Žižka" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T17:28:03.420" Title="Measurement/statistics of acronyms knowledge &quot;penetration&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4030" CreationDate="2013-07-05T22:28:26.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take &lt;i&gt;“AFAICT”&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;“as far as I can tell”&lt;/i&gt; and do a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.googlefight.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.googlefight.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AFAICT: 33,100 / 324,000,000 = .000102&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FWIK: 4,490 / 1,020,000 = .004402&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But then, I interpret FWIK as “for what I know”.  You’ll have to get more complex to include all the other variants.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you’re trying to use measurement to justify abbreviation – that’s a very slippery slope.  Statistics will not account for class or proper use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind it’s all about understanding your audience, and statistics be damned.  If you’re texting to your family or friends, you’ll just have to gather which is more appropriate – typing out a bunch of letters or communicating as curtly and efficiently as possible.  Contemplating the balance is half the fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publishing with abbreviations for public consumption, or to anyone you don’t know, you may inadvertently look like a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my $.02&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16812" OwnerDisplayName="ipso" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T22:35:10.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4030" CreationDate="2013-07-05T23:01:56.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try NGram Viewer (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://books.google.com/ngrams/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the NGram percentage of a word or a phrase, one can somewhat guess its popularity. However, it does not speak for the average computer literate population. For one, there are many computer literate people in the world, who do not know English at all or are poor at it. I usually do not use such acronyms unless I know for a fact that my audience and I use the same expansion. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine, who is a Polish American computer programmer, was not sure what the H in IMHO stood for--humble or honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out the NGrams for AFAICT, FWIK and AFAIK: &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=AFAICT%2CFWIK%2CAFAIK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=AFAICT%2CFWIK%2CAFAIK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45790" OwnerDisplayName="pnvn" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T23:01:56.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4030" CreationDate="2013-07-11T17:28:03.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hell, we don't even use &lt;strong&gt;grammatical&lt;/strong&gt; acronyms here, and this is sposta be about grammar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No &lt;em&gt;A-Equi&lt;/em&gt;, no &lt;em&gt;TAMM&lt;/em&gt;, no &lt;em&gt;NPI&lt;/em&gt;, no &lt;em&gt;3SgPr&lt;/em&gt;, no &lt;em&gt;Q/N-Amb&lt;/em&gt;, no &lt;em&gt;DP'&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we don't use them because they presuppose a knowledge of English syntax,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and most participants here don't have that. Which is a good reason not to use them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Though perhaps not what the designers of the site had in mind; I couldn't say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T17:28:03.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4042" CreationDate="2013-07-12T15:12:54.197" Score="5" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some answers on this site obviate the question by rewording the question's example.  For instance, suppose that you asked,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it better to hyphenate a multiword compound modifier in the manner of &quot;the seventy-six-trombone parade&quot; or in that of &quot;the seventy-six trombone parade&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I answered,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why not just write, &quot;the parade that has seventy-six trombones&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the site consider such an answer good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site features many such answers, and not a few comments of the same kind.  (I would prefer not to single out particular instances here, but instances are not hard to find.)  Some of these answers and comments are by users of high reputation, which is why I ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25823" LastEditorUserId="25823" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T18:53:19.343" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T02:52:42.583" Title="Rewording an example to obviate the question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4034" CreationDate="2013-07-12T15:34:02.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have provided a great example of why questions like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it better to hyphenate a multiword compound modifier in the manner of &quot;the seventy-six-trombone parade&quot; or in that of &quot;the seventy-six trombone parade&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are not a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions such as these don't ask for style rules or consideration of general principles, but rather boil down to opinions on the best way to write something, which are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my suggestion is to leave the answer as a comment (if you wish) and put the question on hold until the OP can rephrase it to more appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in summary, no, these are not considered good answers because they are not sourced, they rely on opinion, and provide little or no value to future readers due to their limited scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T15:34:02.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-12T23:07:38.993" Score="6" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The screenshot and associated text at &quot;Cast Close And Reopen Votes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&lt;/a&gt;) looks to be out of date. It should reflect the new closevote popup and new reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T23:44:12.707" Title="Update needed on page &quot;Cast Close And Reopen Votes&quot;" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4079" CreationDate="2013-07-14T21:09:02.550" Score="5" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how many they are, maybe they can be counted on one hand, but it is true they do exist and they are succeeding in soiling what has been, generally speaking, a positive experience for me. So what can I do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have ignored their down-votes and resisted posting new answers to see what would happen. I come back after a hiatus of two weeks and voilà, immediately within one hour I receive two down-votes. Both anonymous, of course, and I think very telling. These are the two answers which got downvoted today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/117937/44619&quot;&gt;&quot;Can there be a “random order”?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/119236/44619&quot;&gt;Can we say “taking too much car”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter had received an up-vote but a mere 3 minutes later a down-vote was cast. No explanation was given, and I fail to see where that answer is inexact, clumsy, false or poorly worded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reputation downvote history&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;July 1 three downvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;July 6 one downvote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;July 12 one downvote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;July 14 (today) two downvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six of those 7 downvotes are for six separate answers. I strongly suspect it is from the same person. I strongly suspect it is the same person who I flagged down almost a month ago. I strongly suspect this person has been caught out in the past continually downvoting any he or she deemed unworthy of &lt;em&gt;belonging&lt;/em&gt; to EL&amp;amp;U, or unqualified to express their ideas or offer explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do I do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ignore them.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Frankly, this hasn't worked. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leave EL&amp;amp;U and close my account&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;A possibility.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write better answers.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;I do try my best! :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag any suspicious activity&lt;/strong&gt;. Been there, done that. Look where I am now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write on meta&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;Today&quot; refers to July 14. I also realize that this question is related to a previous post of mine on a very similar issue but please do not waste your time in trying to discover who the possible culprit is as the person in question has never been mentioned by me on meta and appeared on the scene, so to speak, at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T04:29:39.213" Title="Yes, there are mean spirited, small-minded, humourless users in EL&amp;U. What to do?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2013-07-14T23:10:13.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't downvote either of the answers cited (nor any others, to the best of my knowledge).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the first one it's possible a couple of people decided to downvote because &lt;em&gt;it didn't meaningfully address the question&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Is &lt;em&gt;random &lt;strong&gt;order&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a contradiction in terms?&quot; is hardly answered by...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;in none of the three dictionaries I consulted was there any mention that &quot;random order&quot; is considered non-standard or informal English.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or they might think &lt;em&gt;&quot;Perhaps it was &lt;strong&gt;once more correct&lt;/strong&gt; to say [three alternative phrasings]&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a &quot;questionable&quot; statement (it seems unlikely to me that usage is changing for this word-pairing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the second one (which only has &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; downvote), perhaps someone disagreed with OP's assertion that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/119236/2637&quot;&gt;you can [presumably, quite unexceptionally] say&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I take too much coffee.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22take%20too%20much%20coffee%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very unusual phrasing&lt;/a&gt; (with just 5 relevant instances there, compared to probably most of the 16,200 instances of the idiomatically standard &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22take%20too%20much%20coffee%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1#tbm=bks&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;q=%22drink%20too%20much%20coffee%22&amp;amp;oq=%22drink%20too%20much%20coffee%22&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.3...104868.107046.0.107334.9.9.0.0.0.1.145.646.8j1.9.0....0...1c.1.19.psy-ab.rYELcf9tUsw&amp;amp;pbx=1&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;amp;bvm=bv.48705608,d.d2k&amp;amp;fp=443c7ab7f2e736e7&amp;amp;biw=1194&amp;amp;bih=899&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/strong&gt; too much coffee&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to seem like &lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; nitpicking here, but I should add that OP's &lt;em&gt;&quot;the &lt;strong&gt;frequency in which&lt;/strong&gt; cars are used is &lt;strong&gt;toxic for our health&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is also at least &quot;unusual&quot; phrasing. In the context of an answer largely based on OP's opinion of what's &quot;more natural sounding&quot;, it's less than ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get downvotes myself. Doubtless sometimes because the answers aren't good, sometimes from people who are &lt;em&gt;mean spirited, small-minded, humourless&lt;/em&gt;. But like many if not most people, I display all those negative qualities :(and more! ) myself from time to time. If the odd person kicks back with an anomymous downvote, you just have to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/chin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;take it on the chin&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;(accept something unpleasant in a brave way without complaining)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want OP to close her account. I've upvoted several of her answers, and look forward to doing this more in the future. I suggest she focusses more on options #1 and #3 (the mods and automated procedures will take care of anything excessive, and there's a limit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3969/inexplicable-down-votes-on-an-answer&quot;&gt;how often OP can raise this somewhat &quot;personalised&quot; issue on meta&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T23:10:13.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2013-07-15T07:30:01.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as to downvotes you have experienced specifically: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You reference two downvotes today; however, you only appeared to have posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/119236/100&quot;&gt;one answer&lt;/a&gt; today. I can only presume the other downvote was on an old post; however, if someone were specifically targeting you, I don't see why they would only now go and downvote an older post of yours. Do keep in mind that it may just be coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm not particularly sure &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; user you suspect, although I assume your reference is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3969/inexplicable-down-votes-on-an-answer&quot;&gt;your previous post&lt;/a&gt; on meta, as I don't see any flags either on the main site or here on meta from you which would be applicable. If you would like to identify the user privately to the moderator team, please flag one of his or her posts and let us know the details, and we can go from there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting trends, however, indicate that a small number (i.e. less than 5) users could be serially downvoting you. However, none of those users were active within an hour of the answer you posted earlier today, so it does not seem as if you are actually being targeted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind that we all get downvotes that we can't explain—it may just be that someone was in a bad mood and much more critical of your post than he or she otherwise would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T07:30:01.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2013-07-15T13:12:08.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realised a couple of days ago that I hadn't seen any answers or comments from you lately. I thought that maybe you had 'given up' here in the light of previous comments, and/or that you were now concentrating on ELL (which I rarely look at).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had 'run-ins' with a couple of users where I have disagreed with comments or answers from them, and/or who continually respond with stupid or facetious comments. I also see responses of the type &quot;If what you say is true, does it mean that X = Y&quot; - that can be a useful thought-provoker or valid point, but often it seems to be merely a facetious rejoinder.  I now try to avoid engaging with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also make it clear that I had not seen either of the answers you referred to, prior to seeing your question here - so no votes either way are attributable to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I also have to say that, in a situation where the questioner has cited the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; and the first two lines of your response all-but suggest &quot;Change your online dictionary [to the] &lt;em&gt;free dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, that, of itself, could almost be considered by some to be all-but inviting downvotes.  I also agree with the first substantive point in @FumbleFingers answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;please do not take that as an overall criticism of your answers&lt;/em&gt;, as generally I find them useful and well thought out, and have indeed upvoted many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the question of explaining downvotes, I have to admit that I rarely do so. I know that the advice on SE is to explain them, but I also note that that advice is rarely followed, even on Meta, where I would have expected in general to see a higher and more 'reasonable' approach to issues.  With certain users, I most definitely would not explain a downvote for fear of the 'retribution' discussed above - but one probably realises that only after doing so a few times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I console myself by reminding myself that an upvote is +10 and an acceptance is +15, whereas a downvote is only -2, which is insignificant overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I've just seen my reputation decrease by -28 (OK double negative there!) merely because a question was migrated to ELL - and (at my present level) that's a loss of 1% reputation for no 'fault' of my own. &lt;em&gt;C'est la vie!&lt;/em&gt; (Not sure if my French is correct!) FWIW, I've just upvoted your comment on the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastEditorUserId="43980" LastEditDate="2013-07-15T14:27:02.697" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T14:27:02.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-16T02:30:57.300" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119134/what-is-the-term-for-the-double-consecutive-use-of-a-word-with-stress-on-one-of?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;A recent question&lt;/a&gt; was closed because it already has an answer at another question. I cast the final vote because I believe that the following test is a reliable guide for casting &quot;duplicate&quot; close votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider two questions, A and B. Question A precedes question B in time. Questions A and B need not be related in what they ask. If any answer to Question A contains a statement which reasonably answers Question B (whether or not it is a good answer to either of A or B), then there is a rebuttable presumption that Question B is a duplicate of Question A. The presumption is rebutted only if Question A fails to generate five close votes. The people who vote to close need not be knowledgeable as to whether the answer to question A is actually also a good answer to question B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I act within community guidelines by casting a close vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proposed duplicate to this post (both the question and its answer) treats as equivalent two types of &quot;duplicates&quot;: (i) pairs of questions which are similar, and (ii) pairs of questions which have attracted similar answers. This post calls for a more nuanced approach to duplicates, and I wouldn't click the check mark for the answer that the proposed duplicate got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T21:01:41.873" Title="Tests of duplicity" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4034" CreationDate="2013-07-16T02:37:02.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say that's the first half of a good answer. The second half is to point to some general rule of English grammar according to which the original formulation suffers from some defect, and that a reformulation is advisable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2013-07-18T02:52:42.583" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T02:52:42.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4041" CreationDate="2013-07-17T00:34:38.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;Etiquette on duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt; provides very specific procedures when there are duplicate question. The type of duplication is placed in one of three categories, as defined in an earlier &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot; title=&quot;StackOverflow blog On handling duplicate questions&quot;&gt;StackExchange blog post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cut and paste&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;borderline&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accidental&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once categorized, there is a set of criteria describing how to proceed. The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/382/4915&quot; title=&quot;Duplication criteria explained&quot;&gt;answer to the meta EL&amp;amp;U question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; extends that further so as to make sense for EL&amp;amp;U SE in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T00:34:38.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4046" CreationDate="2013-07-17T10:49:30.443" Score="-1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; its Usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;its&lt;/strong&gt; should be there..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think masters of English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47822" OwnerDisplayName="Java D" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T17:51:05.217" Title="English language and usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4041" CreationDate="2013-07-17T14:24:58.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the actual answer to a question is hidden in an incidental remark in an answer to a completely different question, then how is it making the internet a better place to close the question as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can't even use the number of upvotes/downvotes to come to any conclusion about the validity of the answer, since it's likely that the voters were judging the answer by a totally different set of criteria, namely the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; question it's supposed to answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason we want to reduce duplicate &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; (not &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;!) is to make it easier for future visitors to find the answer they need. If we send those future visitors to a page that seems totally irrelevant, they're likely to just throw up their hands in despair and go search elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think your guidelines are a Very Bad Idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T14:24:58.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4044" CreationDate="2013-07-17T18:48:01.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existing title is just fine! &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; is understood here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47192" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T19:14:13.617" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T19:14:13.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-18T20:07:15.023" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to this answer as an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/119687/47377&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/119687/47377&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the answer isn't strictly relevant, the user has obviously put some effort into researching it. On the other hand, it really doesn't answer the question. As it's a new user, I don't want to put them off by downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've come across other examples of tangential answers while reviewing, so thought I would ask if there is any guidance on how to deal with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T20:07:15.023" Title="policy on 'tangential' answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4049" CreationDate="2013-07-18T21:45:16.860" Score="5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to start a bounty but I am hesitating because I am confused as to the rules about awarding the bounty points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FAQ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; it states: [emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period),&#xA;  the highest voted answer created &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the bounty started with at&#xA;  least 2 upvotes will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's no&#xA;  answer meeting that criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which implies that only new answers can be awarded bounties. Is this true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;There is this question: &lt;strong&gt;Can I award a bounty to an old answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, you can award your bounty to any answer on the question. This&#xA;  makes it possible for users to reward particularly good answers with&#xA;  more rep than a standard upvote would provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before starting this bounty, could someone please clarify. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; March 18 2014&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I divide &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; bounty (in theory they're my rep points) between two or more deserving answers? I am speaking about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133237/tom-jake-and-jenny-arent-looking-forward-to-thanksgiving-why&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. So far there isn't one outstanding answer, but I am generally satisfied with the quality of responses I have received. Some answers are more detailed than others but may contain minor inaccuracies, whilst others have kept to the point but ignored the more open-ended question. What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T21:20:19.607" Title="Can I award a bounty to an answer given *before* the bounty? AND Can I divide a bounty between two or more answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4048" CreationDate="2013-07-18T22:07:04.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can award a bounty to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answer not posted by yourself on a question (in theory, you can award the bounty to yourself, but the reputation would be cancelled rather than awarded). As such, you can award a bounty to an old answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ is referring to the automatic award. If you do not award a bounty before the seven days are up, the system will automatically award half the bounty amount to the answer with the highest score posted after the bounty, assuming it has a score of at least 2. The reason for this is that in most cases, bountiers are looking for new answers, so the system will do its best to encourage users to post answers to bountied questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T22:07:04.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-22T18:33:17.203" Score="5" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to put a close vote with suggestion to migrate to writers.se on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/120054/when-writing-a-formal-report-is-it-bad-to-make-up-names-when-giving-an-example&quot;&gt;this question here&lt;/a&gt; (about the use of names in formal writing), but when I tried to cast the close vote, the only target for migration that I can choose is Meta.English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that on other questions where I've cast concurring close votes, other targets such as writers and ELL have been listed as options.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would it not be an option for me when trying to cast an initial close vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T14:07:17.253" Title="Closing a question: How are migration possibilities determined?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4048" CreationDate="2013-07-22T18:56:58.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too long for a comment, so I will propose the following re-wording of the bounty FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is a bounty awarded?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bounty period lasts 7 days. Bounties must have a minimum duration of at least 1 day. After the bounty ends, there is a grace period of 24 hours to manually award the bounty. Simply click the bounty award icon next to each answer to permanently award your bounty to the answerer. (You cannot award a bounty to your own answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with at least 2 upvotes will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's no answer meeting that criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed modification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is a bounty awarded?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have started a bounty, you can award the bounty to any answer by clicking the bounty award icon next to that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bounty award icon will not be available until 24 hours after you have posted the bounty, and will remain available until you either award the bounty or until 24 hours after the bounty period has expired.  (The bounty period is 7 days, so you can award the bounty any time from 1 day to 8 days after you posted it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not award the bounty within the allotted time, it will be awarded automatically: the highest-voted answer with at least 2 upvotes that was created after the bounty started will be given half the bounty amount.  If there's no answer meeting those criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T18:56:58.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4044" CreationDate="2013-07-25T17:51:05.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;English language&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;English usage&lt;/em&gt; are both common phrases related to the tongue, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ahdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?usage.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Therefore, &lt;em&gt;language and usage&lt;/em&gt; is simply a compound modifier indicating that the site emphasizes both aspects of English: not only its structure, meaning, and history (language), but also how to read and write it fluently (usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T17:51:05.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-28T05:22:04.597" Score="3" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time telling apart users whose &quot;names&quot; are a series of numbers. The avatars don't help much either, if you have three  users whose &quot;names&quot; are @numbers answering one question or making comments and their avatars look alike, it's even more confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I avoid mentioning their &quot;names&quot; at all because I feel as if I'm a character from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/ThePrisoner1967&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prisoner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;Yes, user37562 that is correct, but he or she (or it) has forgotten...&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does ELU or the moderators for ELU advise registered users to change their monikers (handle) at any given time? If not, is it good etiquette for one user to another to suggest they do? I found this answer on meta but it doesn't fully address the issue: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1063/user-name-changes-and-effect-on-comment-clarity&quot;&gt;User name-changes and effect on comment clarity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T18:56:44.743" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T18:56:44.743" Title="Users whose &quot;names&quot; are a series of numbers, e.g user37562. Does ELU tell users they are able to change their moniker?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|usernames|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4057" CreationDate="2013-07-28T13:23:25.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a premise I like observing that elsewhere &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/491/encouraging-new-users-to-provide-a-name-or-a-nickname&quot;&gt;Scott Morrison&lt;/a&gt;, whom I agree with, said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reasons for wanting real names are as strong as ever. Writing emails doesn't directly address the problem for new users, but was very effective at reaching the present state where most of our most active users are using their real names. Perhaps it would be nice if the system could generate a 'welcome' email (on registration or association with an SE account) that requested using a real name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility would be to arrange that the &amp;quot;community bulletin&amp;quot; box on the main page contained a link to a thread here on meta titled &amp;quot;Please consider using your real name!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if not the real name, I agree that people should use, at least, an intelligible 'name' and to this purpose what Scott Morrison propose could work, that is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) it would be nice if the system could generate a 'welcome' email (on&#xA;registration or association with an SE account) that requested using&#xA;an intelligible name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) it would be nice to arrange that the &amp;quot;community bulletin&amp;quot; box on the&#xA;main page contained a link to a thread on meta titled &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Please consider&#xA;using an intelligible name!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as far as I can say, I would carefully avoid suggesting other users to change the default name, which could seem uneducated, and, for the same reason, I'm not sure that moderators can directly make suggestions of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user19148" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T18:02:35.783" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2013-07-28T20:03:18.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the OP on &quot;random order&quot;. I thought your suggestion about an alternate dictionary sounded a bit snarky (especially since I have often tried to utilize the OED often after having been criticized for using a &quot;lesser&quot; online dictionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I didn't vote you down.  I didn't think most of your answer helped my analysis, except for the example in Merriam Webster (which I think was the dictionary I used that got me an earlier suggestion to change dictionaries). In fact, none of the answers were wholly satisfactory to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I didn't vote any of them down.  In fact, I almost never vote an answer down (although I do occasionally vote to close something that seems really off topic or spam). On the other site I am very active on, Home Improvement (DIY), I never vote down an answer unless it is so wrong as to border on dangerous. Then I always post a comment to indicate &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I am voting it down (and why it is dangerous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Positive feedback leads to a strong reputation.  Lack of positive feedback should result in a weak reputation. I don't think our role should be that of reputation police. Our role is to provide information, and reputation should merely follow. (And yes, I pay attention to, and care about my reputation. I am only human.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, negative votes should be limited to things that are misleading, or blatantly wrong, rather than things that are just not very helpful.  If we were dealing in life or death issues, if a great deal of money or energy rode on our activities here, if the language were in jeopardy, I would reconsider whether I needed to weigh in with a &quot;NO&quot; vote on less than stellar answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I will limit myself to &quot;no vote&quot; when I don't favor the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep on posting. I enjoy reading what you write (most of the time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T20:03:18.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4090" CreationDate="2013-07-30T02:55:31.947" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I edit someone else's question and my edit goes into peer review, but then I realize that the edit was unnecessary, how do I undo the previous edit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38874" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T03:18:14.110" Title="How to undo a question edit on a different user's question (or answer) in stackexchange sites" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4062" CreationDate="2013-07-30T05:16:09.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click &quot;edit&quot; on the OP's question. Look for the previous version and click on &quot;roll back&quot;. (I'm not sure on this one) But it will still be peer reviewed before being approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the top answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2250/what-to-do-about-incorrect-edits&quot;&gt;What to do about incorrect edits?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the top far right hand side where your username is, if you click on &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; you'll have a wealth of information available. I'm posting this link for any newbies who might be asking themselves the very same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T17:25:20.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2013-07-30T07:16:18.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It's a long answer, I know. What can I say? I have free time on my hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I like resolving single-word-requests, they make my brain tick. It's good healthy cerebral exercise. The higher, more intellectually demanding questions I leave to the linguists and to the real enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I believe they serve a purpose; many provide a rich source of information to visitors and they increase our vocabulary knowledge and understanding. Think of the number of times when we catch ourselves saying: &quot;What's that word? It's on the tip of my tongue.&quot; I would like to think that any online research that asks: What's another word for [...]? Would lead that person to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, there are moments when I think single-word-requests are the curse of EL&amp;amp;U. They can be so badly written. A poorly phrased question, lacking content and context, a visitor demanding (!) a single-word at all costs; only results making users feel cantankerous and irritated towards the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all single-word-requests are of course straight forward, native speakers find it difficult themselves to write a clear, unambiguous description. Compare the first original copy of this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/119834/1&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Describing the type of family a person belongs to&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with it's final and 7th edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/119834/44619&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;version&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now compare the first version above with this single-word-request &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/120768/44619&quot;&gt;A women&amp;#39;s accessory...what&amp;#39;s the word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; The answer was obvious but only because the description was accurate and detailed. The OP's question couldn't be answered by looking in a dictionary, so she came to ELU and immediately got the answer she was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I digress, above all single-word-requests are fun to participate in and really involve the whole community especially when the questions are; simple, grammatically correct and more importantly, open-ended. Look at this example &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/120310/idiom-for-magic-object-or-idea-that-fixes-everything/120314#120314&quot;&gt;Idiom for magic object (or idea) that fixes everything&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, OK. It wasn't a single-word-request but the principle is the same and it drummed up a huge number of visits in two days. Personally, I had never heard of &quot;a gold bullet&quot; or &quot;deus ex machina&quot; before, and found the OP's question very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, single-word-requests are like the typical crossword puzzles you used to find in newspapers; they can be taxing and extremely hard to resolve but the pleasure and satisfaction in finishing one is immensely rewarding. But often they can be uninspiring, overly simplistic and bland. Hardly the stuff of vocabulary expansion. In writing this answer I was reminded of a comedy sketch entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVWdbO6FFfw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Crosswords&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the British comedians; The Two Ronnies. (A comedy duo whose comedy routines I was not particularly fond of as a child but have recently rediscovered and now love.) I think we can all relate to the businessman's frustration (Ronnie Barker) with his fellow commuter traveller (Ronnie Corbett).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-10T05:24:48.840" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T05:24:48.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4069" CreationDate="2013-07-30T18:08:24.390" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have 6 rep, and just got notifications for ELU saying, &quot;Congrats, you've gained the privilege - ...&quot; for things like remove new user restrictions (requires 10), vote up (15), and talk in chat (20). I tested up-voting an answer (on the main site) and couldn't (as expected). What reason might there be for the notifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48796" LastEditorUserId="48796" LastEditDate="2013-07-30T18:48:03.153" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T02:49:26.340" Title="&quot;You've gained the privilege&quot; notification without actually gaining the privilege - bug?" Tags="|bug|reputation|notifications|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4066" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-01T11:02:10.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, which is another site in SE network concerned with English language, but with a somewhat different scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3723/50044&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T16:13:20.623" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T16:13:20.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4067" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-01T11:02:10.987" Score="0" Body="This tag is for questions about English Language Learners, which is another site in SE network concerned with English language, but with a somewhat different scope." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T02:37:56.877" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T02:37:56.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4074" CreationDate="2013-08-01T20:13:25.590" Score="7" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just rejected an edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/105&quot;&gt;for a tag called &quot;ELL&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem right to me that ELU should have or use such a tag, but what do others think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T09:36:39.313" Title="Does ELU want a tag called &quot;ELL&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4065" CreationDate="2013-08-02T09:33:01.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that your answer got accepted, which added 15 points to your rep, but then the O.P. opted to change that, and accept a different answer. If that was the case, you may have lost the points, but I don't believe SE revokes the privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 15-point swing would explain how you jumped from 6 to over 20 and then back to 6, especially since your answer doesn't have any downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I noticed that you answered a question posed by a newer user; I've also observed that newer users are often prone to quickly accept the first answer given, and then change that when an answer they like better gets posted later. (In my mind, there's nothing wrong with that practice, although I recommend not accepting an answer for at least 12 hours, and maybe even waiting at least a full day or so, to let a good number of users get a look at the question before deeming the matter &quot;settled.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T09:33:01.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4242" CreationDate="2013-08-02T12:52:16.233" Score="10" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;code&gt;http://www.rqna.net/index-kmoh.html&lt;/code&gt; appears to be reposting a lot of EL&amp;amp;U content with their own ads (and other SE sites too). I can't see any proper attribution, or links back. Some pages say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2011-2013 © Rqna&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their About Us page (&lt;code&gt;http://www.rqna.net/about.html&lt;/code&gt;) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rqna is a free question and answer website where you can get answers to your questions or you can help other people in the community by answering their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, they have a Report Abuse page (&lt;code&gt;http://www.rqna.net/abuse.html&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We attach great importance to your advises, and what we build this site is for you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Someone, neither you nor me post some bad infomation [sic] here, we appreciate you report it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Please tell us your Contact Infomation [sic] if you want our feedback.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;If you want to remove question or answer, do tell us the link to it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this happened on a Blogger blog not so long ago; here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/is-http-englishqna-blogspot-com-violating-elu-or-your-copyright/&quot;&gt;relevant meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like an exact copy of the recent zqna.net copycat; here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3749/www-zqna-net-scraping-elu-and-se-content&quot;&gt;relevant meta from February&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="www.rqna.net scraping EL&amp;U and SE content" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|scraping|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2013-08-02T19:25:06.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kudos on the zillions of great answers and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to take what I hope might be a slightly different tack here, for the purpose of making this point: Votes are SUPPOSED to be meaningful and relevant. It seems to me that there is a good reason for voting, one that is being obscured by all the hullabaloo over misguided and inappropriate voting. I believe votes were instituted for the specific and valuable reason to render the voter's opinion that the answer contributes something constructive to the discussion. That's it, nothing more. Notice what happens when you hover your cursor over a voting arrow. You get &quot;This answer is (or is not) useful.&quot; &lt;em&gt;Useful.&lt;/em&gt; You don't see, &quot;I don't agree,&quot; &quot;I don't like this answer,&quot; &quot;I'm in a bad mood today,&quot; or gee whiz, any other reason at all to cast a vote. In fact, I would like to think I just might have enough integrity to see an answer with which I disagree, but which I nevertheless believe contributes something genuinely useful to the discussion, and that I would then UPVOTE it. (Yes, I have done this.) Could we try not to lose sight of how simple and useful votes could actually be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by the way, Mari-Lou, you're one of our best. Keep it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T19:25:06.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4080" CreationDate="2013-08-02T20:02:56.357" Score="8" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121091/what-are-the-distinctions-between-property-quality-attribute-characteristic&quot;&gt;What are the distinctions between property, quality, attribute, characteristic, feature, aspect and trait?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was shut down for being to broad. It seems my only options are to alter the question, or leave a comment. Since the question is perfectly fine as is I left a comment, but it seems it is just ignored. I have done my own careful thinking about it and have an answer ready. I think it would be a valuable question to have answers to. A lot more useful than many of the narrow questions asked on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people mean by saying the question is too broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to get the attention of the people who placed your question on hold to get them to reconsider when you have an answer to your question prepared?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more importantly, could some kind people release my question so I can answer it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12835" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T18:29:04.073" Title="How to get my question off hold" Tags="|support|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4068" CreationDate="2013-08-03T09:36:39.313" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are legitimate questions on ELU meta about ELL. I suspect there's a lot of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagging those questions as being about ELL seems logical. It means that people won't ask questions on meta that have already been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone were to tag an ELU main question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/belongs-on-ell&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;belongs-on-ell&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;belongs-on-ell&lt;/a&gt;, that'd be a different matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T09:36:39.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="522" CreationDate="2013-08-03T09:41:24.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an answer is downvoted such that it has a net score of -3 or less, then it goes from normal black text to grey text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, downvoting the post probably makes you feel better, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2957/is-pain-lessened-by-swearing&quot;&gt;swearing when you experience pain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:46.643" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T09:41:24.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4070" CreationDate="2013-08-03T21:48:34.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't bother trying to deal with the offending site directly. Despite what it might say on the &lt;em&gt;Report Abuse page&lt;/em&gt;, they probably have no interest whatsoever in addressing complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest those people affected should follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2154/2637&quot;&gt;the instructions on this answer&lt;/a&gt; to a related question, and &lt;em&gt;file a DMCA complaint with Google&lt;/em&gt;. I've done it a couple of times now (it's not much hassle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then just leave it to Google to take up cudgels on your behalf. Even if they don't directly force the site to be closed down, they can simply stop indexing it. And without that &quot;oxygen of publicity&quot;, it's &lt;em&gt;Bye-bye scrapersite.com!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T21:48:34.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4070" CreationDate="2013-08-04T01:06:25.013" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/200177/172958&quot;&gt;Network policy has been updated as of Oct. 9 2013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tl;dr: &lt;strong&gt;Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the contact form linked at the bottom of every page.&lt;/strong&gt; Please include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the copied post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the original post on SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MSO, the main network meta site, has a [now obsolete -ed.] post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/131846/172958&quot;&gt;Report sites that use Stack Exchange content without following attribution rules here&lt;/a&gt; where you can report such sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T16:18:10.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-05T09:19:11.737" Score="6" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I've been seeing quite a few “general reference” and “proofreading” close votes that seem inappropriate to me. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121531/at-least-one-singular-or-plural-subject/121544#121544&quot;&gt;“At least one” - singular or plural subject?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is overwhelming agreement that “at least one” is singular in number, but in answering the question, I could not find a source that explains &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; the consensus answer is correct, clearly and unambiguously. I suspect that people felt the question was too basic, and they assumed that there must be a general reference that answers the question, but so far as I can tell it doesn't actually exist. (I'll note that tchrist did at least link to an ngram that strongly suggests the correct answer, but I don't accept that an ngram alone is sufficient to answer or close a question – ngrams have too many pitfalls, and they don't tell you why an answer is correct.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121121/do-i-use-adjective-forms-of-concurrent-and-consecutive&quot;&gt;Do I use adjective forms of concurrent and consecutive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanatory text for this close vote states, “Proofreading questions are off-topic &lt;strong&gt;unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/strong&gt;” This question does clearly identify a specific source of concern: whether to use an adjective or adverb in a specific context. I've seen other examples of this recently too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these questions are pretty basic, and neither one showed much in the way of research effort, so I would understand if people simply downvoted them. However, I don't think we should be voting to close as off-topic unless the questions actually fit the close reasons!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T21:32:13.523" Title="Inappropriate “general reference” and “proofreading” close votes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2013-08-05T10:11:46.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get hung up on downvotes or reputation in general. Take all votes (up or down) as constructive criticism. Votes that come with thoughtful comments are the most constructive, but they're all helpful. Anonymous downvotes are much less helpful, but people don't always have the time or motivation to be more more helpful. It's best not to speculate as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they aren't more helpful – they might be small-minded or spiteful, but they might just be pressed for time or dealing with an awkward mobile phone interface. Some folks just don't like confrontation. Assuming that downvotes are personal or spiteful will just make you feel worse about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't ignore downvotes completely, but don't give them undue weight either. Just take them as a hint that your answer might need improvement. If you can't figure out how, don't sweat it. That won't make downvotes go away, but they shouldn't weigh on you either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T10:11:46.970" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4073" CreationDate="2013-08-06T13:51:40.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a crack at answering the original question, but I'm not surprised it got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, the question has these two main problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Most words in the English language have multiple definitions (for example, &lt;em&gt;property&lt;/em&gt; can be a piece of real estate, and &lt;em&gt;feature&lt;/em&gt; can refer to a full-length film). Even after we remove those superfluous meanings, though, most words have multiple nuances, along with contexts where they fit well, and contexts where they sound more forced or unnatural. To break down seven synonyms, then, and try to explain where the usages overlap, and when one word is more apt than another, is a bit of a Herculean task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) All of these words can be looked up in various dictionaries. I'd recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordnik.com/words/feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wordnik&lt;/a&gt;, which not only lists meanings from multiple dictionaries, but also lists example usages, synonyms, hypernyms, and words that are used in the same context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put these two together, and one has to wonder: if the answer can be determined from doing some legwork at Wordnik, then why wouldn't the O.P. do that research? Alternatively, if the desire is to somehow learn more about the subtle differences between these words, then why were we given so many of them, so that the problem becomes very complicated, if not overwhelming? (A list of seven words means there are &lt;strong&gt;21&lt;/strong&gt; pairs of words we could compare and contrast).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say in a comment here on meta that you merely wanted &quot;one paragraph about each word.&quot; That, too, is a hard thing to accomplish. Words like &lt;em&gt;property&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;trait&lt;/em&gt; can be applied to a myriad of contexts: there are &lt;em&gt;physical traits&lt;/em&gt; we can see, &lt;em&gt;chemical traits&lt;/em&gt; that affect how materials react with other materials, &lt;em&gt;psychological traits&lt;/em&gt; that determine who we are as a person and how we interact with other people, &lt;em&gt;quality traits&lt;/em&gt; that determine if something is well-done or shoddy (those four just popped into my head – I'm sure there are more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if I were to describe a particular concert piece, I might describe it as &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;slow&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;exhilharating&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;haunting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;trite&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;harmonious&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dissonant&lt;/em&gt;. These are all &lt;strong&gt;qualities&lt;/strong&gt; of the music piece. If we shift to a bottle of wine, the attributes change, and the qualities of the wine are something else altogether. So even a &quot;simple paragraph for each word&quot; is not an easy task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be to do some more research on your own, and see what you can learn about these seven words, if they interest you so much. (Don't stop with the dictionary; try some searching on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;amp;ei=kP4AUrbjLZSy4AP9ooGIDg&amp;amp;fp=629b59b25c717712&amp;amp;q=%22had+these+qualities%22&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;safe=off&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ved=0CAwQ_AUoAg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google books&lt;/a&gt; as well.) If you find yourself curious about some apparent difference that you happen to discover but is hard to figure out, try asking that as its own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T13:51:40.360" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4073" CreationDate="2013-08-06T18:29:04.073" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it seems that there are too many people around here more concerned with some mysterious ideal purity of the questions than actually waiting to see interesting answers to useful questions. The reason a native speaker would consult a dictionary is typically when they think they know a word's meaning/connotations/usage but they just want to confirm that their understanding is in fact the common one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the seven words I brought up, the dictionaries can often be unclear in what is best for a given usage case. I was particularly thinking of which of these words one might choose as a formal term for some system they are developing: perhaps a computer program, or a game, or some internal company nomenclature. For example, in HTML &quot;attribute&quot; and &quot;property&quot; are both terms that are used but there actually seems to be confusion on what their distinction is. One definition I heard is that HTML elements have attributes and properties are basically the values of those attributes. In other places properties are said to be just the special case of boolean attributes. And there are more versions of the story besides that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So anyway, I thought it would be a handy reference for people to see which of these terms is most appropriate for a given situation, based on how people are familiar with using them, and by listing 7 of them it would be easy to find by search and hopefully exhaustive enough. Oh well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12835" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T18:29:04.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4078" CreationDate="2013-08-08T04:52:43.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't closevote on either of these questions, but I've no problem with those who did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;At least &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the questions&lt;/em&gt; OP refers to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; General Reference, because &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; is obviously singular. Grammatically (if not semantically) I can validly say &lt;em&gt;at least &lt;strong&gt;two were&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; properly closed (not &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;, because &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; is plural).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the other one &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in my opinion, &quot;writing advice&quot;. If not, then it's probably a duplicate, since there's no reason why &lt;em&gt;consecutive&lt;/em&gt; should be any different to, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8328/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;drive safe / safely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95011/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;come quick / quickly&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75491/&quot;&gt;my own related question&lt;/a&gt;, terminology and &quot;correct&quot; usage are fluid concepts here. The question showed no evidence of prior research, nor any interest in the factors affecting the choice. It just asked which to use, which looks like writing advice to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T04:52:43.320" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4084" CreationDate="2013-08-09T08:07:33.150" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121995/when-you-use-per-se&quot;&gt;How is &amp;quot;per se&amp;quot; used?&lt;/a&gt; had a close vote: &quot;Other - asker does not know what per se means&quot;; I added my vote to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asker changed the question, but the vote counter is gone. I cannot vote to close since I get &quot;You already voted to close.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T05:09:28.210" Title="Close counter gone" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4083" CreationDate="2013-08-09T08:08:55.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reopened the question shortly after you voted to close it. I will add further explanation here in a few minutes, but there's another Meta post that I'm in the midst of writing that I want to address first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further explanation: On this question, 3 close votes were for &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; and the other 2 were for custom off-topic, with the comment being&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The OP does not seem to have understood the expression 'per se' in the first place.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought (1) it was abundntly clear what the OP was asking, i.e. whether or not those sentence used &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; correctly, and (2) while the custom comment is &lt;em&gt;factual&lt;/em&gt;, it is invalid as a close reason. The OP is essentially trying to ask if he/she is using the phrase correctly, which is inherently based on whether or not he/she understood the phrase in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it appeared that users may have voted to close the question because it was initially two questions. In that case, the appropriate close reason would have been &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I did not feel an argument was to be made for closing the question under any close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2013-08-09T08:23:20.530" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T08:23:20.530" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-09T08:18:07.303" Score="18" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that we must once again clarify what questions should and should not be closed with the close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;List of general references&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reference work is, in the words of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reference_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;[a] compendium of information, which is not intended to be read from beginning to end, and is compiled for ease of reference. Examples include encyclopedias and dictionaries.&quot; Generally speaking, as far as we are concerned here on EL&amp;amp;U, references are dictionaries, thesauri, corpora, and style guides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most notably, extremely basic questions &lt;em&gt;are not necessarily&lt;/em&gt; answerable by a reference. We close questions when references are available because questioners will receive a better answer from a reference, not because they are too easy for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if a questioner has mentioned consulting a reference work, it is probably a bad idea to close that question by referring the questioner to reference works. In such case, the questioner is confused by the reference work; we should seek to clarify the reference work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, when using this close reason, please consider carefully whether or not the question can be answered with one of the linked reference works. If it can not, please look for another close reason, or do not close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;Google is not General Reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T06:33:38.293" Title="About Reference Questions" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|general-reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2013-08-09T12:40:36.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing people may not realise when referring to Google search results (specifically when referring to the &lt;em&gt;first result&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;first page&lt;/em&gt;) is that the results &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; see &lt;strong&gt;may well be different&lt;/strong&gt; from the results that the &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; sees. Not only are the results likely to change over time, but there are more fundamental reasons why they may differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My default Google search site is &lt;em&gt;google.&lt;strong&gt;co.uk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. That will almost invariably give me different results (or at least a different &lt;em&gt;ordering&lt;/em&gt; of the results - I don't cross-check them!) from those I see when I use &lt;em&gt;google.&lt;strong&gt;com&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  I'm sure other English-speaking users will see results tailored by their 'national' Google site. This is even more likely to be so, where the OP is located in a non-English speaking country, using a 'version' of Google in their national language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for multi-word searches, the results are likely to differ according to how the search term is entered: entering &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; (as two unlinked words) and entering &lt;em&gt;&quot;per se&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (with quotation marks) will give different results. Not all users will be aware of such details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The results can also be affected by the various preferences and other Google settings associated either with the user's ID and/or with the network or domain on which the PC is located (e.g. a business or academic institution), the latter, of course, being outside the OP's control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, the user will not be aware of particular internal settings, and certainly not aware that they may be affecting the list of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;please do not assume that the OP will see the same results as you&lt;/strong&gt;. If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need/want to refer to individual results or to a list of results, &lt;strong&gt;please&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;link to the &lt;strong&gt;URL of the relevant site&lt;/strong&gt; found by the search; and/or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;link to the &lt;strong&gt;full Google URL&lt;/strong&gt; used to initiate the search.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T12:40:36.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1798" CreationDate="2013-08-11T07:38:11.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;EngVid.com might look like a good candidate&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.engvid.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.engvid.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there is also the English Word Reference forum &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://forum.wordreference.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the Perdue Owl and Cornell Library (new so cant post more links).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably reach out to community colleges and high schools and mention that this is a great resource as a reference when writing papers. Specifically I would target the teachers to include a link in there handouts at the start of a course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most English and writing courses I've taken included a handout from the instructor with resources such as Purdue Owl, APA.org, Cornell Library, Plagiarism checkers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many teachers are on facebook, you can possibly start messaging them through there or get their contact info from the Academics section on most school websites. Word of mouth is supposed to be the best form of advertising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the give aways, I think a good dictionary would be a good idea as simchona mentioned but I would add it should be something ike Oxford in Kindle or e-reader format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also try placing ads on oedonline.com merriam-webster.com, dictionary.com, and even urbandictionary.com (it ranks high on searches for actual words sometimes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49505" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T07:38:11.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-11T09:20:25.483" Score="21" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;this ELU help page&lt;/a&gt;, where new users are informed about what kinds of questions they should (and shouldn't) ask, there is already a link to Writers.SE.  I wonder if it's not time to add another link to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; was stood up in large part so that non-native speakers could have a place where their questions, which would be regarded by some to be &amp;quot;too basic&amp;quot; for ELU, could ask their questions. The site was stood up in January of this year. There have now been over 2,500 questions asked on ELL, and the site is averaging &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;over 1,000 visitors per day&lt;/a&gt;. I think ELL is now stable enough that the ELU help page could give it a mention, saying something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about basic English stemming mainly from the fact that you are not a fluent English speaker (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;ELL.SE&lt;/a&gt; instead—the site for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/3723#3723&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the same section where it already says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&amp;quot;are there any mistakes?&amp;quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing advice or critique requests (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt; instead—note critique requests must meet their criteria)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still see quite a few new users asking questions that get downvoted and/or closed on ELU, with comments that essentially say, &amp;quot;You would have been better off asking this on ELL.&amp;quot; (See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121300&quot;&gt;121300&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118493&quot;&gt;118493&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122209&quot;&gt;122209&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121881&quot;&gt;121881&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113573&quot;&gt;113573&lt;/a&gt;.) &lt;strong&gt;Yet it's hard to imagine how a new user would have known about ELL's existence if they happened to stumble across ELU first.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like both sites would benefit from a pointer on the main help page, as would many new users. (It need not be worded the same was as in my example; someone else may have a better way to word it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an option, there might also be a pointer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/3723#3723&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3344/providing-links-to-ell/3713#3713&quot;&gt;FumbleFingers' Feb 5 2013 answer to a similar question&lt;/a&gt;. (This issue has been raised before, but was last mentioned when ELL was still in its infancy, and many thought that posting a link then would be premature.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T06:33:30.797" Title="Time for an ELL link on the main help page?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4065" CreationDate="2013-08-13T02:49:26.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notification message is created when you reach the reputation required for a privilege, but the notification message is not removed when the reputation becomes lower than the required reputation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A reputation could decrease because down-votes, the user offering a bounty, or another user changing idea on the accepted answer and accepting another one. In all those cases, if the reputation is decreased before the user has seen the notification about the new privilege, the user will read something that is not anymore true, until the user doesn't get more reputation. The notification about a new privilege is shown only once. This means that, if your reputation oscillates around the value required for a privilege, you will not keep to being notified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T02:49:26.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4062" CreationDate="2013-08-13T03:08:51.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your edit is accepted by the required users (two, on EL&amp;amp;U), you can see the text used by the post before your edit (click on the &quot;edit [date]&quot; link&quot;) and submit another suggested edit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your suggested edit is still not approved, then you need to wait it get approved or declined. If it gets declined, the post will probably appear as it was originally written by the user who wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T03:08:51.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4088" CreationDate="2013-08-15T05:24:49.993" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's time. Just out of contrariness, I took a quick look at ELU Questions, and the page view that came up, showing the first fifteen questions, included at best three that I might grant had some legitimacy on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an awfully low percentage. Small sample? Yes, but I think we all know it's nevertheless an accurate representation of what we've been consistently seeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I have to say, I think we're a bit too apathetic about the issue. Doesn't it matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="38065" LastEditDate="2013-09-01T06:33:30.797" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T06:33:30.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-15T18:22:14.690" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Starting yesterday afternoon (14 Aug), the ELU pages I've looked at have had some elements missing from the display.  Comparing following pictures, one sees that at least the following items are missing in the first picture:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• English Language Usage fancy title block&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• Stack Exchange gadget at top left corner&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• Upvote/downvote and Favorite buttons&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• Badge type markers (bronze/silver/gold circled dots)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QBEmj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An ELU page from 15 Aug 2013 with elements missing&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DD9Qe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A meta ELU page from 15 Aug 2013 showing ok&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the served HTML for the first page shown below, it appears to me the &lt;code&gt;mainbar&lt;/code&gt; div is empty (&lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt;, line 167 &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div id=&quot;mainbar&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is followed by 3 blank lines and then &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;question&quot; data-questionid=&quot;122775&quot;  id=&quot;question&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; at line 171 at the same indentation level).   However, a &lt;code&gt;vote&lt;/code&gt; div appears in lines 178–187, as shown below, and upvote/downvote buttons work when the mouse cursor is over them, even though they are not visible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;vote&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;input type=&quot;hidden&quot; name=&quot;_id_&quot; value=&quot;122775&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;a class=&quot;vote-up-off&quot; title=&quot;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear&quot;&amp;gt;up vote&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;span class=&quot;vote-count-post &quot;&amp;gt;2&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;a class=&quot;vote-down-off&quot; title=&quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&quot;&amp;gt;down vote&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;    &amp;lt;a class=&quot;star-off&quot; href=&quot;#&quot; title=&quot;This is a favorite question (click again to undo)&quot;&amp;gt;favorite&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;div class=&quot;favoritecount&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;   &#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's this problem caused by?  Can it be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2013-08-15T20:26:32.700" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T20:26:32.700" Title="Missing web page decorations for ELU" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4096" CreationDate="2013-08-16T10:41:12.100" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17375/whats-the-difference-between-an-aphorism-and-a-maxim&quot;&gt;&quot;maxim&quot; vs &quot;aphorism&quot; question&lt;/a&gt;. I want to know the difference between &quot;tenet&quot; and &quot;maxim&quot;. Do I edit the first question, extending it with the new concern, or create a new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24592" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T16:01:52.843" Title="Should I edit a question to address a new concern or create a new one?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4095" CreationDate="2013-08-16T12:26:24.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you have answered yourself: a new &lt;em&gt;concern&lt;/em&gt; is a new &lt;em&gt;question.&lt;/em&gt; One important consideration is that adding a new concern would invalidate, in part, every answer which has already been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but should not edit to change the meaning of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T12:26:24.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4098" CreationDate="2013-08-16T16:12:42.487" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted an answer to a question, and after a few seconds realized I had upvoted the wrong answer, so I hit the downvote button to put it back the way it was.  After moving on to another question I noticed I had lost a rep point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would changing an upvote be regarded as a downvote?  This amounts to a returning of the status quo ante, and since the system clearly knows it was me who upvoted it, it should surely be able to tell that it is I who downvotes, and thus treat it as a neutral act, not an actual downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T16:42:36.457" Title="Why reducing rep for downvoting item one had previously upvoted?" Tags="|bug|down-votes|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4097" CreationDate="2013-08-16T16:42:36.457" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, if you hit the downvote from a positive vote (+1), it does not return to the previous state (0), but the answer loses a vote (-1).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to cancel your vote, click on the same arrow you used in the first place.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is not a bug, but something the users should know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5249" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T16:42:36.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-17T02:12:09.670" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to tweak my resume and cannot find the right words to encompass certain skills and was wondering if it would be okay to post a few questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question Title: What word can be used to encompass the following hard skills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question Body: (start with context about the resume).  What word or phrase can be used to encompass the following hard skills:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Problem Solving&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Analytical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Able to Synthesize Data &amp;amp; Information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Able to see the bigger picture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question Title: What word can be used to encompass the following soft skills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question Body: (start with context about the resume).  What word or phrase can be used to encompass the following soft skills:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is flexible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has initiative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is creative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is motivated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is disciplined&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21773" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T23:07:53.963" Title="Would a series of skills-based resume questions be appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-18T05:06:06.463" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to follow particular users? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious answer is to look at their profile pages and check their recent activity. But what if there are a dozen (or more) users I want to follow? It'd be far more helpful whenever I sign in to find alerts indicating that one of my favourite users has posted a new question/answer/comment (an Alert Box in addition to the Inbox and the Notifications).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no way to do this currently (I couldn't find anything), please consider adding these new features: ability to favourite select users; alerts for new activity from these users indicating the type of activity and the tag(s); ability to delete the alerts. Or, at least consider adding a section to the profile page where a user can keep a list of favourite users (and link directly to their profile pages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49891" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T22:56:16.187" Title="How to follow (or favourite) particular users?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-19T14:53:36.967" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84467/introduce-person-to-object-or-introduce-object-to-person&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Introduce person to object&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;introduce object to person&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know what may have been considered off topic. The question is about the &quot;usage&quot;, so I believe it's right on topic of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T14:53:36.967" Title="Why was this question closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4100" CreationDate="2013-08-19T22:56:16.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scroll to the bottom of a profile page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on the RSS &quot;user feed&quot; icon in the bottom R corner. That will take you to a page of the user's activity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scan down the menu bar on the R. Options for adding RSS feeds are found under &quot;Action.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click to subscribe to the feed using your computer's mail system.&#xA;Or, add a bookmark as you would for other web pages. (I have added mine to a dedicated folder in my bookmarks bar. New activity alerts are indicated by number beside the filename. Scrolling down the contents of the folder I can see how that number is distributed for each user).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49891" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T22:56:16.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-20T23:23:48.737" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;A  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123314/whats-another-way-to-say-problem-area&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; has been retagged with “professions” as a tag.   Previously, only one &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122067/differences-between-servant-maid-page-and-attendant&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; had that tag.  Although I don't personally see a need for that particular tag (and a hundred other little-used tags) I realize that personal preferences are not the best basis for deleting or changing tags.  If a complete text list of tags were available, it might be easier to find a suitable and more frequently used tag, and thus provide adequate reason for removing some of the little-used tags, or recording them as synonyms of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of a complete text list being available, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=popular&quot;&gt;the list&lt;/a&gt; (as I see it) is broken up into 22 hard-to-search small pages of about 36 entries each.  The three sort orders – popular, name, new – and the single-term search box do not provide adequate access to the list of tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know how to get a list of all tags, in one piece instead of dozens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T09:55:19.090" Title="How to get a list of all tags" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4099" CreationDate="2013-08-22T23:07:53.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, these (in the form you have posted them) are &quot;writing advice&quot;, which is explicitly off-topic.  I appreciate that you are apparently asking for a single word encompassing certain skills, which is precise enough to be on-topic even if the answer turns out to be &quot;there isn't one&quot;; the problem is that none of these 'skills' are well-defined, and in the context you are just asking for 'a word that will impress'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T23:07:53.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2013-08-23T08:54:54.660" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; gives all the source references on one page, from English and slang to science, computing, and medical dictionaries, including History and Origin, all from specific dictionaries. It includes nearby words, related searches, and all words from the root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rhymezone.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RhymeZone.com&lt;/a&gt; gives rhymes, thesaurus, similar-sounding words, quotations, homophones, letter-matching searches, pictures, and even Shakespeare references. It has links to the Bible books, famous quotes, and several links to specific genres produced by Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Purdue OWL&lt;/a&gt; is an Online Writing Lab for tutoring or learning to write well in English. I recommend taking a look, also, at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://owl.english.purdue.edu/sitemap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OWL site map&lt;/a&gt; to see the range of subjects covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend the site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.engvid.com/english-lessons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EngVid&lt;/a&gt; for clearing up questions about grammar rules, and other English language dilemmas. There are videos for over 500 subjects on that site, all related to English. Some people learn better through watching demonstrations on a whiteboard. These videos work well for tutoring, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also believe you need a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. It may be an obscure language, but we still study the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48294" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T03:56:48.027" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:56:48.027" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-23T08:54:54.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4108" CreationDate="2013-08-23T16:11:55.490" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together/123628#comment254186_123481&quot;&gt;I upvoted a comment&lt;/a&gt; (under highly contentious &quot;All-American&quot; answer) in an attempt to be ironic/funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I actually find this answer incredibly offensive. Somebody has their&#xA;  act together, and has all these positive attributes - and therefore&#xA;  they must be American? Must be &quot;representative or typical of the&#xA;  United States&quot;? Only an extreme bigot would think this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the commenter purports that I'm an extreme bigot.  I don't think this comment is relevant, contructive, or valid.  I'm not a regular bigot, much less an extreme bigot.  The commenter seems far more focused on his opinion of my bias than on the usage of an (American) English idiom.  Can I retract my upvote and flag this as offensive?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T01:06:46.497" Title="Request to undo comment up-vote and flag" Tags="|support|flagging|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4107" CreationDate="2013-08-23T17:04:27.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I left that particular comment because I feel it has some validity in that it expresses Hippo's lack of understanding of the term.  I purged most of the rest of the comment chain, but I left your final comment where you point out that &lt;em&gt;all-American&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean &lt;em&gt;all Americans&lt;/em&gt; but rather &lt;em&gt;ideal-American&lt;/em&gt; because this is both true and addresses Hippo's misunderstanding.  You may wish to edit your answer to incorporate this clarification as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Hippo's comment did state that &quot;only an extreme bigot would think this way,&quot; the kind of thinking s/he was describing does not apply to you, therefore Hippo cannot be calling you an extreme bigot.  I encourage you to not take this comment to heart, but instead, see it for what it is, which is a heated reaction to an incorrect understanding of what the phrase means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel you have adequately clarified the meaning in a comment, and I hope you will update your answer as well, and there should be no more discussion about it.  Please flag any further offensive commentary and I will take a look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-08-23T17:04:27.777" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T19:16:19.603" Score="11" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;When flagging a post for being off-topic, the following options are given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: List of general references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the other cases that are mentioned in the FAQ On-topic/Off-topic List? The Off-topic List contains the following categories that it is not currently possible to flag for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming, including programming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literary criticism, discussion, and analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation/non-English languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have not (in the six or so weeks I have been an active contributor) come across any questions that deal with the latter two; but the former two especially are quite frequent. I always want to flag these questions, but find that I cannot, except through the hack of “it needs ♦ moderator attention”, writing the actual reason in a comment box. This seems rather inferior to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without knowing how the moderating system works, I would imagine that the whole point of having such a fine-grained flagging system is that it enables significant automatisation of moderation processes in the ‘already defined option’ cases, whereas the “it needs ♦ moderator attention” cases by definition require more attention and work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would it not make good sense to be able to flag questions as off-topic for all the reasons mentioned in the off-topic list, rather than just a (seemingly random?) extract of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T19:16:19.603" Title="Missing off-topic flagging options" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-27T17:25:08.790" Score="18" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently come across quite a number of questions that have been closed by one of our higher rep users as SPAM. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/124223/25030&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the latest one which is undergoing an edit war as I write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The posts in question all start with an annoying ASCII &quot;art&quot; sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.-=,,.=-.,-=.-=,-=,.-=, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite a few of these have been closed by the same high-rep user and seeing as I have quite a bit of respect for this HRU and his contributions to this site, I imagine he knows something I don't and this is in fact a troll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question itself does not seem trollish. It looks like a perfectly valid (if not really very interesting) question asked by a new user and the ensuing edit wars looks like a personal vendetta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again I'd like to stress that I fully believe that the HRU who is closing them has a valid reason, I am just asking what that reason is. Why are these being flagged as spam when they are not spam? And does this site operate under a &quot;once a troll, forever a troll&quot; policy? Are these from spambots just trying to get enough rep to be able to be really annoying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The post I linked to has been deleted adding further weight to my assumption that the HRU is acting correctly, or at least in accordance with the community's wishes. Still, what is going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T04:31:18.920" Title="Who is this spammer and is this really spam?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T00:37:50.833" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the policy on trivial edits, but is a title edit for grammar too trivial for EL&amp;amp;U?  Hypothetically - should the web site host questions with grammar that might be construed as incorrect/awkward grammatical structure/colloquial phrase/etc or can there be a waiver to allow short trivial edits on the titles?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the ultimate in triviality: adding a question mark at the end of a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48583" LastEditorUserId="48583" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T15:15:02.343" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T15:15:02.343" Title="Is any grammar edit to the title really too trivial for EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|editing|titles|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4111" CreationDate="2013-08-28T14:41:26.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you've had only one edit suggestion rejected, it's not difficult to find the question referred to and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/34063&quot;&gt;details&lt;/a&gt; of the rejected edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your proposed amendment was to change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a word for someone who really has &lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt; act together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a word for someone who really has &lt;strong&gt;his/her&lt;/strong&gt; act together &lt;strong&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will see that it was rejected independently by two separate reviewers. Although I have not seen the edit previously, I would agree with their decision, which gives the standard wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit is too minor; suggested edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;his/her&lt;/em&gt; in the question is neither &quot;incorrect&quot; nor &quot;controversial&quot;. The discussion of that issue in numerous previous questions on the site show that the usage is long-established, frequently used, understood and accepted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[Disclaimer: That statement is made from memory: I have not checked previous questions at this time.] &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; view is that short edits on question titles should be made where necessary for clarity, but, in this particular case, the suggested edit was both unnecessary and trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T14:41:26.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4115" CreationDate="2013-08-28T16:57:34.423" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that SE is pushing for localization and internationalization options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we get an integrated IPA keyboard like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/HodofHod/SE-Modifications/blob/master/SE-HebrewKeyboard.user.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; for Hebrew in judaism.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115/how-to-enter-phonetic-transcriptions&quot;&gt;How to enter phonetic transcriptions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.663" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T20:45:55.287" Title="IPA integrated keyboard" Tags="|feature-request|ipa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4113" CreationDate="2013-08-28T17:17:04.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use either &lt;a href=&quot;http://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.typeit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T17:17:04.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4113" CreationDate="2013-08-28T20:45:55.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this bookmarklet:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3828/ipa-keyboard-for-linguistics-se&quot;&gt;IPA Keyboard for Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add it to your browser as a bookmarklet. While on an SE page (maybe it only works on Linguistics.SE out of the box), press the bookmarklet. A little schwa will appear next to the &quot;redo&quot; button above the Answer text box. Press the schwa, and the IPA keyboard will appear somewhere on the SE page; when you click the characters, they appear in the answer bow. You can also use alt-a for ɑ, alt-a-a for æ, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not work perfectly for me, but that may be my browser: I see only half of the keyboard. But give it a try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:46.197" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T20:45:55.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4107" CreationDate="2013-08-29T01:06:46.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;[I started writing this as a comment, but it is too long for that, so excuse me writing it as an 'answer'.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only just come across this meta-post. I don't want to re-iterate the previous arguments, but I do have some concern about how the matter has been handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that all my comments on the question have been deleted and, while I certainly agree that a lot of them did not need to be retained, (from memory) I was the only non-American supporting hippo's comments and I would have hoped that you would have retained an indication that he was not alone in his views. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, my main concerns are 2-fold: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The arguments seemed very one-sided (from Americans) - and specifically, you - as an American - have 'adjudicated' on it, and decided which comments to delete and which to retain.  I would have hoped that a non-American moderator might have been involved. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You state above that the issue arose from &quot;an incorrect understanding of what the phrase means&quot;. While I can't speak for hippo, my personal view is that that was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the issue - which is why I am concerned that the 'adjudication' appears to have been one-sided.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments to me (primarily from J.R.) keep insisting it was a 'language/meaning' issue, while I insisted that it was an &lt;em&gt;attitude&lt;/em&gt; issue. I also expressly stated that I had no objection to the expression being used by Americans or by non-Americans about Americans (or possibly even non-Americans competing on behalf of US colleges, as Jack Ryan now seems to suggest). I believe I &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;understand what the phrase means&quot;, and that it is intended as a positive compliment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I strongly objected to was the suggestion (in the original answer) of others being 'jealous' about Americans; and of the implicit applicability of the expression to any and all irrespective of nationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as you feel that hippo's understanding was incorrect, I genuinely and strongly feel that many Americans do not have an understanding of how offensive many non-Americans would find it to be described as &quot;All-American&quot;, &lt;em&gt;even with it conveying the most positive meaning intended&lt;/em&gt;. And I feel that that lack of understanding - or even attempt to understand - was manifest in a number of the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In saying that, I do not mean to suggest in any way that I am anti-American, but American culture and values - however positively they may be regarded - are &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; from those of other nations. I doubt that Americans would wish to be referred to as &quot;All-British&quot;, &quot;All-French&quot; or &quot;All-Australian&quot;, etc. for similar reasons - not because the different countries have better or worse values - but because we all have &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; values and attitudes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T01:06:46.497" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4120" CreationDate="2013-08-29T10:11:01.733" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question bellow is blocked in Iran and after a click on it I cannot read it to find what it is about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/124389/capo-cheerleader&quot;&gt;Capo-cheerleader&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please tell me what it is about or find a way to remove the filtering by changing some words that may cause such filtering to be able read it without using trouble maker proxies? (I cannot find why it is blocked and in addition I mention that all pages having words about sex, sexual organs, homosexuality, pornography, Christianity or political advertizement against Islam and Muslims are filtered in Iran)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37324" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-08-31T20:44:19.363" Title="About a blocked question of EL&amp;U in Iran!" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4117" CreationDate="2013-08-29T11:58:46.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here you go, I have no idea why this would be blocked, some kind of automatic filter linked to cheerleaders perhaps? I hope my mentioning the word won't cause this page to be blocked as well...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The question:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I noticed that the demi-official USA national (soccer) team supporter's group has a name for the folks who lead their section of the stands in chants/cheers; a word I'd never seen used for that before: &quot;Capo&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm curious if this is just something they came up with on their own, or is this an actual common use for this word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The proper English word for this role probably really ought to be &quot;Cheerleader&quot;. However, while that's probably what cheerleaders did in the 1920's, these days cheerleaders are essentially glorified dance/gymnastic troupes. So I suppose I can see where a new word for the actual act of leading the fans in cheers would be required. Is this that word, or just AO's attempt at it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer 1:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Capo is an Italian word which first and foremost means head as in the anatomical part of your body. Consequently; a director, manager, president, chief, or even the boss of a company can all be called &quot;capo&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the AO US Soccer supporters' website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;What would a Capo be expected to do?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Direct the entire crowd into unified support of the team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;A strong capo may sacrifice for the good of the crowd, but can stay motivated, loud, and passionate for 90 + minutes. They can hold the respect of the crowd to lead the section for the whole game and for every game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, when talking about the head or leader of a sports team, a (military) squad or a group of workers, caposquadra is the most commonly used word. I suspect it is this expression, more than &quot;capo&quot; itself which has been loaned to the soccer team supporters' group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  After doing a little Italian research, I can confirm that &quot;capo&quot; is indeed the Italian football supporter responsible for co-ordinating the chants, football songs, and cheers of encouragement. He is recognized as the leader of the Ultras; &quot;armed&quot; with a loud-hailer the capo is assisted by several colleagues to help sustain the level of support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANSWER 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Capo is a position in the Mafia - not the Boss or his deputy, but the head of a branch: see Wikipedia's article for Caporegime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is seems to be being used for the head of a section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T11:58:46.060" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4117" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:02:06.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is one of the links in the post that has caused the page to be blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a link to a very patriotic American soccer fansite, a couple of dictionary links, a links to both English and Italian Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:02:06.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4117" CreationDate="2013-08-31T20:44:19.363" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason the post is blocked in Iran is because the third comment down on the first question refers to a Jewish extermination camp used in World War II which is called Capo, with a K instead of a C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official position of Iran is that these extermination camps did not exist - or are part of a Jewish conspiracy - and they automatically block any webpage that makes reference to these events. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently the inclusion of that link has caused that page to be inaccessible inside Iran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37603" LastActivityDate="2013-08-31T20:44:19.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-01T02:33:57.263" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between the &quot;English language &amp;amp; Usage &quot; and &quot; English language learners&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could any one clarify the diffrences ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40205" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T02:33:57.263" Title="What is the difference between the &quot;English language &amp; Usage &quot; and &quot; English language learners&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-09-01T03:15:20.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-03T11:29:35.387" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a question on this site a while ago and I'm unsure why it received so many downvotes. Could someone please advise me how it could have been improved? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122440/what-is-a-thank-you-categorisation-of&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;quot;Thank you&amp;quot; (categorisation of)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49648" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T16:58:23.717" Title="How could I have improved this question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4124" CreationDate="2013-09-03T16:06:04.710" Score="2" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a few answers by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/51044/sweet72&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; user. While they are not all &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt; (one of them is), a few of them are incomplete (One or two are not &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, but they don't answer the question at all). However, that is not my problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I checked this user's bio, I saw that it is being used for advertisement of a company! The creation of this user's account seems to be for advertisement. They seem to answer questions so that attention is drawn to the person's page and subsequently their bio and the company. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really know if this is an issue, but I thought I should bring it to your notice, so any necessary action can be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49480" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T23:27:29.277" Title="User account seems to be created for the purpose of advertisement" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-09-10T23:50:05.100" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2013-09-03T17:21:13.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spam is an issue in posts: questions, answers, comments, chat, flags, etc. We do not really police the profile for spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No offense meant to the new user, but if they are trying to drive people to their company website by creating interest with good answers to questions, they're doing it wrong. This looks to me more like an earnest individual who is not at all an English language language expert but is trying to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing you can do in this case is provide &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; criticism in comments on answers, up- and downvote, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-09-03T17:21:13.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2013-09-03T22:52:15.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a new user is submitting helpful posts out of a desire to get people looking at a profile page and subsequently buying something, then I say good luck to him; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/810/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this xkcd strip&lt;/a&gt;). In practice, barely anybody will be persuaded to spend money by your mastery of the English language (alas), and the time spent will be disproportionate; but that's his problem, not ours. Again, such a poster may well be tempted, when the inefficiency of this method starts to show, to cut corners, plagiarize and commit other heinous crimes; but if so the problem is the behaviour, not the original reason. &lt;strong&gt;All posters should be judged on the quality of submissions, not motive, background or intention&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This rather pompous message comes direct to your computer courtesy of TimLymington plc. Why not try our range of vocabulary enlargers &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2013-09-03T23:00:13.420" LastActivityDate="2013-09-03T23:00:13.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4131" CreationDate="2013-09-04T04:21:59.087" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question from earlier today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125139/i-did-want-to-versus-i-wanted-to&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I did want to&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;I wanted to&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, was labeled as a duplicate. I can live with that. However, it appears that my reputation took a two-point hit. This I don't understand. I made a good-faith effort to search for the answer first and didn't find the specific one referenced (did shoot vs shot), so I asked my question. It wasn't a &quot;dumb&quot; question (there are some) and I believe it was polite and well written, so I'm don't understand why there is a penalty. Surely one isn't expected to read every question on the site before asking a new one, just-in-case. My question had one up-vote, and the one answer had four up-votes before it was shut down. This does not seem to be in the spirit of encouraging participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50497" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Duplicates and downvotes" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T20:51:08.973" Score="18" ViewCount="692" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a few questions lately regarding the quirks of English spelling and pronunciation. Mark Rosenfelder's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/spell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hou tu pranownse Inglish&lt;/a&gt; may be a useful resource for that kind of question. It misses some subtleties (like the &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;machine&lt;/em&gt;), but overall it's a nice summary of the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be interested in similar resources, especially if they cover the holes in Rosenfelder's rules. Basically, I'm not happy with telling people, “English pronunciation is quirky, deal with it” – there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; rules, they just take a little sophistication to apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T23:40:10.270" Title="Hou tu pranownse Inglish" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-05T04:34:50.097" Score="4" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can format quotes: is &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; right? or is &quot;this&quot; right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, would you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Like this&lt;/em&gt; or &quot;Like this&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes edit to make the change to the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47081" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T22:39:38.793" Title="Formatting a Quote" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4130" CreationDate="2013-09-05T07:35:41.127" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there anyway to see how your badge progress is, I mean for example if you have edited 500 posts, you will be awarded with a badge, but can i see my current number of edited posts? and so many other status like this. I couldn't find any thing regarding to this and i think it would be very helpful to have a Progress bar for every badge that shows us where we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33118" LastEditorUserId="33118" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T07:42:00.093" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T08:33:29.130" Title="Badge Progress Bar" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4129" CreationDate="2013-09-05T08:27:12.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some badges (custodian, reviewer, steward, civic duty, copy editor and electorate) there is a progress bar available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find your progress for a particular custodian, reviewer or steward badge: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;list of review queues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pick one of the queues&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;go to the stats tab of that queue (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;close vote stats&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;at the top you can see a progress bar: &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mNayx.png&quot; alt=&quot;progress bar for cose votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hover you mouse over the progress bar and you will see your progress towards the next badge in the set.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will also show you your progress towards the civic duty, copy editor and electorate badges, regardless which review queue you pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kqetC.png&quot; alt=&quot;progress bars for badges&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For tag badges, you can work out your progress from your profile. For a bronze tag badge, for example, you need to have &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a total score of 100 in at least 20 non-community wiki answers to achieve this badge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the tags section of your profile, it will tell you your stats regarding this. A breakdown of non-wiki Question vs Answer votes can be found by hovering over the vote total for a tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ucqKG.png&quot; alt=&quot;vote breakdown for SWRs&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see your progress towards the fanatic badge at your profile, too. It tells you how many consecutive days you have visited the site. The same can be said about the Marshal badge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some badges don't really require a progress meter (e.g. constable or sheriff), but for badges that are earned on votes, views or favourites you can see the progress without a bar (just order your posts by votes, views or favourites), and since these can be earned multiple times what would a progress bar show?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few badges that can't easily be tracked, but I think that's nice because then, if you earn them, you get a nice surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T08:33:29.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2013-09-05T14:07:50.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions asked must show some sort of effort or research. The first thing you must do before asking a question on any stack exchange site is searching through the specific site for a response. This is expected of any good user. Researching outside sources and including one's findings is something expected of excellent users. Answers to questions asked on Stack Exchange sites should not be able to be found in the first page of a google search. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can find helpful hints on how to search the Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is a duplicate, it &lt;em&gt;very often&lt;/em&gt; means it was poorly researched. Most users will assume you have not done your homework. The quickness with which a question is marked as a duplicate can also be a &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; indicator of the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did your research and found similar questions that don't quite provide the answer you are looking for, you should include them in the new question you are asking and explain how they are different from your own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for the Stack Exchange sites, wherein can be found guidelines and hints about asking and answering questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the FAQ subpage that specifically deals with duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;These&lt;/a&gt; are EL&amp;amp;U's gudelines for asking questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50025" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T14:34:42.957" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4181" CreationDate="2013-09-05T21:26:28.210" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bbNvO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the container is messed up.&#xA;Can we fix it? Or is this some that should be taken up to the big boys in meta SO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50025" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2013-09-20T14:40:25.993" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T14:40:25.993" Title="Privileges screen is just off enough to be annoying" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2013-09-05T21:56:39.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type#When_to_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Italic type&lt;/a&gt; has a few specific uses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Titles, foreign words, and some names&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Use-mention distinction&lt;/a&gt;, definitions, and examples&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quoting thoughts (as opposed to speech or writing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematical and scientific symbols&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When quoting speech or writing, you should use quotation marks, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; italics. When writing example phrases or sentences, you can use either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend against editing solely to adjust italic/quotation style, especially in the cases where either would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T21:56:39.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4127" CreationDate="2013-09-06T03:11:47.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I perused the website and it looked pretty comprehensive to me, if nothing else, anyone who seriously studied this page and learnt by heart the proposed &quot;56 rules&quot; and guidelines would surely master the small lacunae the author admits his site contains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in my opinion, the interminable single page layout is outdated and user unfriendly; difficult to scan, intimidating for English learners, and ironically, too detailed to offer any &lt;em&gt;immediate&lt;/em&gt; help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, Mark Rosenfelder's suggested computer programme, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/sounds.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sound Change Applier&lt;/a&gt;, sounded horribly complicated to me. The one thing it appeared to be missing, one of the most useful aids for English learners wishing to improve their pronunciation, was an audio reproduction of the IPA phonemic chart (perhaps less important for native speakers who wish to understand the orthographic rules governing English spelling). Instead, the author has created his own phonemic chart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we're discussing spelling, we have to discuss sounds as well; and&#xA;  this means choosing a reference dialect. I'll use my own, of course--&#xA;  a version of General American that's unexcitingly close to the&#xA;  standard. I'll call it GA below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In using his computer programme one would benefit in hearing the pronunciation but as I previously pointed out, it doesn't look easy to install and I suspect it would not work on today's various operating systems; Vista, Windows 7 and 8,  or even Mac.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder how useful would the following be to future visitors, if we suggested that they visit this site and they came across this explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(number) 6. aught and ought become òt: daughter = dòt@r, sought = sòt.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  8. Elsewhere, gh is simply dropped: freight = frät.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  14. ci or ti becomes $ before a vowel: gracious = grä$@s, nation = ä$@n. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as the idea and concept of this web page appeals to me, I would not recommend new users to visit this website. In the past, I have often advised Italians wishing to improve their English to listen to pod casts, visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BBC learning English&lt;/a&gt; page which has a section dedicated to pronunciation; EL sites which do dictation exercises; e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictationsonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dictationsonline.com/&lt;/a&gt;, and to watch videos and DVDs with English subtitles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another excellent source are online dictionaries. The majority of whom supply audio recordings and give the phonetic transcriptions of individual words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I agree that we need to recommend resources to users asking for guidance, it's not good enough to fob visitors off by saying,  “English pronunciation is quirky, deal with it” but Mark Rosenfelder's &lt;em&gt;Hou tu pranownse Inglish&lt;/em&gt; isn't the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I happened upon this clear and unambiguous guide, from OALD, explaining &lt;a href=&quot;http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/pronunciation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the phonemic symbols used in the dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, they include both British and American pronunciations. I imagine that the purchased online edition would also contain the audio recordings of each and every word too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2013-10-24T23:40:10.270" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T23:40:10.270" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-06T22:38:52.523" Score="8" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that moderating trolls and limited return-trolls is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot say I'm sure that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/125723/23834&quot;&gt;this kind of defacing&lt;/a&gt; benefits the site more than it punishes the troll.  I think it just looks weird to the irregular user, whom doesn't know that such a person is trolling.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we use the 'protected' status to lock-down a question and prevent trolls from downvoting people, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23834" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:45:41.280" Title="I don't think we should deface questions that come from trolls, unless they are hate speech or the like" Tags="|discussion|moderation|spam|trolling|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2013-09-06T23:27:29.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had actually come to meta this evening to post the same question about the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would only add that, of his several contributions I've seen today, several offer dubious, or even clearly incorrect, advice - and include grammatical mistakes and incorrect language constructions.  Yes, he may well be trying to help as @MετάEd has said, although his 'help' and advice is often wrong, but I guess there's not a lot we can do about that except by providing 'better' advice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T23:27:29.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2013-09-06T23:45:34.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hovering over the downvote button displays the following tooltip:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did read your question at the time. Although I didn't actually downvote it, I might have because your question did &quot;not show any research effort&quot;.  The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; additional information in your question was that (paraphrasing) you often changed your mind about which to use.  That gave me the impression of no research: here's the issue; I can't decide which to use when; please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, only the downvoters can explain why, but I would also say, do not assume that they are because it was considered a duplicate: they may have been for other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T23:45:34.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2013-09-07T03:18:41.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is fine. And I think a question should be judged on its own merits, not on whoever asks it. I have flagged it to be undeleted. Only real spam should be marked as such: an OK question by a user with a history should never be marked as spam. As to real spam, yes, that should be defaced. But this is not it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2013-09-07T03:29:48.847" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T03:29:48.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2013-09-07T10:41:47.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This particular user has asked some pretty intriguing questions, but the user seems to be more interested in luring other ELUers into spinning their wheels and wasting their time, as opposed to wanting to learn anything about language. The user has also been known to engage in some pretty egregious behavior, such as publishing phone numbers of other members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment that you saw was simply meant to alert regular users that they shouldn't spend a lot of time answering that question, since it was probably going to be end up ultimately deleted anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You bring up a good point, though: Relative newcomers might have trouble reconciling what looked like a harshly inappropriate message with what seemed like a good question. It's something that's just become part of the culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T10:41:47.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4122" CreationDate="2013-09-07T12:29:02.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It received &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; downvotes: I wouldn't describe that as &quot;so many&quot;. Other questions receive far more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No-one can answer why or by whom it was downvoted, and therefore we do not know that they were because the question &quot;could have been better done&quot;.  Some people apparently downvote on a whim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tooltip for the downvote button reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although that obviously does not mean that users do not downvote for other reasons, IMHO it's possible that users thought that the question did &quot;not show any research effort&quot; or that it was &quot;not useful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T12:29:02.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2013-09-07T15:45:16.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way it can be made compulsory to comment for all downvotes? This would be constructive, not only for the answer but also for the whole site. It will also encourage the voter to think and serve as a check on cowardliness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49727" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T15:45:16.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-07T19:32:12.983" Score="10" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across a user who more than once has been caught out by experienced members of this community and asked to cite the reference which he/she copied their answer verbatim. Out of sheer curiosity and guided by a sense of intrigue I visited the user's page and discovered to my bemusement that other answers which received reputation points, have been copied and pasted from unlinked, unmentioned and unacknowledged sources, almost to the last letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this not a form of plagiarism? I appreciate that perhaps 75% of all answers would not exist if it weren't for OED or Wikipedia, (mine included) but at least no one takes false credit; well, they shouldn't...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do? Name and shame? Or flag their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By &lt;em&gt;name and shame&lt;/em&gt; I am referring to leaving a comment on their answer and asking the user to post the link or mention the source. In leaving a comment, you are in all intents and purposes, publicly shaming them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T02:57:07.547" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What is the policy concerning users who copy and paste answers without acknowledging the source?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-09-07T21:27:56.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I do is &lt;strong&gt;add the source&lt;/strong&gt;, which can be lot of work to determine if many websites have copied the same text from one another, and/or &lt;strong&gt;add a comment&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;please mention your source if you quote verbatim&quot;. I don't think it is serious enough an offence to warrant flagging or any further action; it is merely a &lt;strong&gt;breach of etiquette&lt;/strong&gt; that should be discouraged with a soft hand. I think I know which user you have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to consider is whether the text copied contains mainly basic information about grammar or vocabulary, or a longer, creative text; plagiarism in the former case seems rather unimportant and barely worth our time, while the latter would really benefit from an added reference as above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T21:27:56.020" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2013-09-08T03:58:35.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I indeed wanted to warn people from getting drawn into our troll’s webs, and my comments and close-votes were not doing the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As J.R. correctly surmised, the problem was that it had begun to draw flies, meaning that it was luring the unsuspecting into its devices, and we had neither a moderator nor enough high-rep users on hand to quickly take out the trash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it was probably a bit extreme, and I do see why new users become confused. But after flouting the rules not just a five or ten or even a few dozens times, but &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thousands of times&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and going far worse than that even, there seems unlikely to be reversal of judgement from the Powers That Be on this matter this side of hell freezing over.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all the many-times-daily violations for more than a year running, and after all that we’ve all suffered here, if said Powers were to renege on their position that the ban is valid and it stays, then they would be &lt;strong&gt;rewarding bad behavior&lt;/strong&gt;, not to mention direct violations of their own written policies — and just for once, it really would feel like the terrorists had won.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let’s not do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T03:58:35.383" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4146" CreationDate="2013-09-08T07:12:00.537" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happened to the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2013/02/closing-questions-how-do-we-compare/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Closing questions: how do we compare?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; from February 2013?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found a link to this blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/8703/academic-integrity/8715#8715&quot;&gt;on another meta&lt;/a&gt; where it was mentioned as a source of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kKTu6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interesting graph&lt;/a&gt; comparing percentage of closed questions on various websites. When I wanted to see whether this blog post contains more details about how the data were obtained, I found out that the post does not exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google search for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22closing-questions-how-do-we-compare%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;closing-questions-how-do-we-compare&quot;&lt;/a&gt; shows that this blog post have been mentioned on this site's twitter account and in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T07:49:32.950" Title="What happened to the blog post &quot;Closing questions: how do we compare?&quot;" Tags="|support|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-09-08T07:49:32.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I removed it because the data I collected were incorrect, so the conclusions I drew were incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment from Shog9 explains the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey, Matt… You neglected to limit your query to questions – since answers can’t be closed, that skews the numbers considerably. See: &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/98700/closed-questions-from-2012-by-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/98700/closed-questions-from-2012-by-score&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, ~20% of questions on EL&amp;amp;U have been deleted, many of which were closed as well – since those aren’t public, they tend to skew the numbers also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't taken the time to get the correct data, so I've not put the post back up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T07:49:32.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-09-08T10:14:29.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the O.P. here innocently inserted a comment asking, &quot;One down-vote. Why?&quot; I thought I was reading the start of a pretty good suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expected the rest of the comment to read something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One down-vote. Why?&lt;/strong&gt; If this person is not a new user, and this user has been exhorted more than once to include the source, then I believe that's enough to justify a downvote on the plagiarized answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, downvotes can be mystifying by themselves, so I cannot recommend this course of action unless an accompanying comment is also provided, one that says something to the effect of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you include the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/grammar-style-issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link to your source&lt;/a&gt; in your answer, I'll gladly remove my downvote &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the link in your comment going to the source that was copied. That would call the user out, yet offer the individual a chance to fix the problem. Done repeatedly, this might lead to a longer-term change of behavior, where the sources get cited upon first draft (which is what I think most folks would ultimately like to see achieved). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By leaving an accompanying comment, others (who are giving this user perhaps undeserved rep points) would get clued into the game, perhaps becoming less likely to upvote someone else's writing. Then again, presumably, the user is doing research to find the answer, and some may think that in and of itself is worthy of an upvote – so don't be too surprised if some of the upvotes keep coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, upvotes and downvotes are a tool each member uses at their own discretion. Individually, they can sting, they can frustrate, they can reprove, and they can encourage. Collectively, though, they are a mechanism which on the whole encourages people to submit quality work, and discourages people from submitting shoddy work, thereby maintaining an overall high quality for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was aware of a chronic plagiarizer who consistently misrepresented copied-and-pasted passages as their own eloquence – perhaps inadvertently – I might start using my right to downvote (and comment) as a way to let others know what was going on, and to encourage better netiquette. But I'd also use my privilege to upvote as a way to acknowledge the pertinent research after the source was properly cited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to see if those comments got upvotes as well; if so, that might indicate some measure of community support or appreciation for calling attention to the offense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if I was deciding to do this as a new course of action, I wouldn't barrage the user with a flurry of comments on Day 1. This can be fixed one question at a time, over time – that would be my approach. Gentleness is in order, I believe, even if plagiarism itself can be a grievous offense in some situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T10:21:27.797" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T10:21:27.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4127" CreationDate="2013-09-10T01:16:29.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to describe in words how something sounds is as inherently problematic as trying to describe a colour or a taste. Without a base reference point the task becomes exceedingly difficult. Non-native English speakers have no reliable reference point, so writing &quot;it's like the 'a' in 'chance' &quot; is bound to fail (not least because that particular 'a' is different in different Englishes!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to illustrate pronunciations is surely a library of recorded sound. In this era of internet ease and cheaper data storage there's no reason not to have dictionary or Wikipedia entries accompanied by tags or links to appropriate soundbites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those recordings could be tagged according to the specifics of the speaker, highlighting differences between British/American/Indian/Caribbean English and even local variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking it a step further, recordings of short phrases or sentences in which the word is used would help the user develop an ear not only for the pronunciation of that specific word but also an ear for stress, cadence and rhythm.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51556" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T01:16:29.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T02:17:37.360" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure asking for feedback on your work will not be acceptable here, because such questions are highly open ended. But I noticed there is a site for &lt;a href=&quot;http://codereviews.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;code reviews&lt;/a&gt;  where you can ask for commentary (errors, typos, ineffeciencies) in your code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if we can start the trend here since there are a lot of good people who could really do justice to the work (or maybe a seperate meta site). On the other hand, it might not fit in with the Q &amp;amp; A spirit of SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for errors, and suggestions, etc. might do it, though. I mean you're not asking for general feedback, just if you have some errors, or if something sounds better. The quality of users on web forums is really questionable. On facebook, everybody just comes up with &quot;Good Work&quot;, &quot;Nice&quot;, &quot;Keep it up bro&quot; and nobody really critiques your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could chase it on Area51. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18194" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T07:52:04.413" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T07:52:04.413" Title="Is it okay to ask for feedback on your work/review here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-09-17T18:27:44.680" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-09-10T03:09:11.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the main site I saw this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/156086/232334&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/156086/232334&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi User, it looks like you just copied most of this content from this&#xA;  blog . Can you edit your post and give attribution to the author?&#xA;  Plagiarism isn't really welcomed on Stack Overflow, and it's always&#xA;  nice to give credit where credit is due. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of the concept in action: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/4293312/814064&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/a/4293312/814064&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50397" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T03:09:11.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-11T04:43:16.670" Score="15" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a number of questions (including one of mine) receive comments along the lines of &quot;this would be a more appropriate question for the English Language Learners (ELL) site&quot;. While I understand that this site is trying to maintain an academic bent, I find this comment to be more than a little off-putting given that the byline for the ELL site is &quot;Q&amp;amp;A for speakers of other languages learning English&quot;. Shouldn't ELU be the place for native English speakers who are non-academics, but who care about the language, to ask more routine questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this is a FAQ and I've looked at the other older discussions. It seems like the continuing comments to peoples' questions and the ELL description don't fit with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50497" LastEditorUserId="50497" LastEditDate="2013-09-11T04:52:41.767" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T09:09:22.993" Title="Continued recommendations that things be moved to ELL" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|ell|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4151" CreationDate="2013-09-11T05:48:25.483" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been quite a heated discussion at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and __serious__ English language enthusiasts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Study of language&quot; twist of the site has been a controversy for many years now, and yes, the community of the site has deemed that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for people who merely &quot;care about language&quot;. Back before ELL came to be, the questions that didn't fit the frame of &quot;academic study of English&quot; were closed, to huge ire and frustration of the askers. There was no day when someone wouldn't complain, but the core crew of the site pointed to the description and remained unphased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inception of ELL is the result of frustration of many with the politics of English.SE. If other branches of English learners were not included in the site description, then it's an omission. I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8465/english-for-language-users&quot;&gt;ask about this on Area51&lt;/a&gt; and my plea received a slew of upvotes: that ELL is a site for English &lt;em&gt;Learners&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Users&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to people for whom it's &lt;em&gt;Academic interest&lt;/em&gt;. It seems though that it was a subject to be &quot;followed up at a later phase of the site's beta&quot; that somehow slipped everyone's mind. Why it isn't a part of its description, I do not know - but at that proposed split of scopes English.SE is right to redirect you to ELL. It's ELL's description that is lacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T05:48:25.483" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4269" CreationDate="2013-09-11T07:59:35.510" Score="4" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;TechQues is reposting SE content but plastered with their own adverts. For example, this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; * &lt;code&gt;http://www.techques.com/question/32-69210/What-is-the-best-term-to-categorize-a-lolcat-image-and-text&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is reposting content from this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; * &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69210/what-is-the-best-term-to-categorize-a-lolcat-image-and-text&quot;&gt;What is the best term to categorize a lolcat image and text?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... without proper attribution. They include this footer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The content is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/&quot;&gt;serverfault.com&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;superuser.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;  and is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-wiki&lt;/a&gt;. Any advice please contact us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's check off the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;SE requirements&lt;/a&gt; (found by clicking the link at the bottom of every page: &quot;site design / logo © 2013 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-wiki&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution required&lt;/a&gt;&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we &lt;strong&gt;require&lt;/strong&gt; that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1. &lt;strong&gt;Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User&lt;/strong&gt; in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sort-of-but-not-really done. They say the content is from and link to Server Fault, Super User and Stack Overflow, but use English.SE content without saying so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2. &lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink directly to the original question&lt;/strong&gt; on the source site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No links whatsoever to any english.stackexchange.com pages. There's a &quot;View original post at&quot; link to &lt;code&gt;http://questions/69210&lt;/code&gt;. It works for SO questions, but they've taken content from English.SE and it's broken their site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3. &lt;strong&gt;Show the author names&lt;/strong&gt; for every question and answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4. &lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink each author name&lt;/strong&gt; directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not done, similar to number 2. There are author links which work on SO content, but not with English.SE content. For example they point to &lt;code&gt;http://users/14157&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="TechQues using English.SE content without proper attribution" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|scraping|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4151" CreationDate="2013-09-12T00:27:19.553" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the folks leaving a lot of those comments. I don't mean for them to be off-putting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fact is, there are millions of people on the planet who are trying to improve their English. Many of them stumble onto ELU, see it as a godsend, and end up asking a “good” question on the “wrong” Stack Exchange. Here's my guess: if those new users were aware of both sites – if they understood the goals and knew the targeted audiences of each – they would have asked on ELL instead of ELU. The comments you have seen are intended to increase awareness of the coexistence of both sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty of questions are trivial to for a native but perplexing to a novice. Many ELUers worked hard to create a site where such questions would be welcomed, instead of being closed, downvoted, or met with frustrated disdain. That site is now active, but ELU still gets questions every week from those who should probably be taking advantage of the new sister site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see a question from a relatively new ELU member with no ELL account, where it looks like they've struggled to put a relatively straightforward question into grammatical English, I don't see any harm in letting those users know there's a place where they might want to ask their next question, as well as investigate what other questions are being asked over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T08:44:31.933" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T08:44:31.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4151" CreationDate="2013-09-12T03:31:46.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to avoid: do not vote to close a question at ELU merely because it is on topic at ELL or &quot;too simple&quot;. ELU is a fine place for a simple question, &lt;em&gt;provided that it is well researched and thought out and interesting to experts in the English language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T03:31:46.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-12T04:02:11.867" Score="7" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;This user profile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/21563/john-rock&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/21563/john-rock&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the 32 other SE profiles linked to it were evidently created to provide link juice for traffic generation through the bio page to a merchandise site, not to publish meaningful content. The user has no reputation, apparently because it has never posted, voted, or contributed in any way in the fifteen months since its creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This violates the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/content-policy&quot;&gt;SE content policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spam&lt;/strong&gt;. Users that do not publish meaningful content, use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or whose primary purpose is affiliate marketing, will be suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T04:02:11.867" Title="User &quot;John Rock&quot; violates the SE content policy" Tags="|support|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4104" CreationDate="2013-09-12T09:55:19.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/users/8282&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;another user&lt;/a&gt; I present the following...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/136950/full-list-of-tags&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/136950/full-list-of-tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T09:55:19.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4151" CreationDate="2013-09-13T04:48:12.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is essentially a place where language geeks, grammar Nazis and incorrigible pedants hang out. I don't think most of us are linguists or academics and I certainly am neither. What we do share is a fascination with the English language and its many nuances and pitfalls, its quirkiness and obscure historical artifacts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some of our higher rep users are experts and grammarians and linguists (oh my!), others are simply particularly articulate native speakers and others are actually non-natives with either a very good grasp of the language or with a very limited one but who share the same fascination with it. We even have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot;&gt;poster boy&lt;/a&gt;, a user who is clearly not native but who has an impressive ability to find odd gems and idioms that we enjoy mulling over as much as he does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T14:48:30.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2013-09-13T21:09:21.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Edit - oops - just noticed the original post was ancient :-| ... ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider using one of the two features already built into the site: the favorites star, and your profile (which shows your history in several ways.) Your browser also has a history, bookmarks, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, if a post warrants your reconsideration via an altered vote, the topic / question is presumably one you would already be interested in enough to pay attention to in the first place. That's what the favorite star is for - it is an effective mechanism when used properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is another angle to consider: reducing confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other Stack Exchange sites, when an edit changes the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the original question significantly, the answers and comments can loose context or even become completely inappropriate. The moderators often catch such edits, but it also puts more work in their work queues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A conscientious poster should be aware of minimizing their work load.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if an edit enhances and adds to the meaning, that's great. But if an edit were to make things less clear, alter the course of comments and answers, or just generally make it &quot;fuzzier,&quot; then it would perhaps be better to post a new question and await new answers.  (This approach is based on multiple comments and answers I've received in related topics elsewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although your question has many up votes, I don't think the advantages of your request would off set the computing overhead required to implement the suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please do consider using what we have already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51477" LastEditorUserId="51477" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T21:58:37.093" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T21:58:37.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4162" CreationDate="2013-09-14T14:44:00.737" Score="6" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having done diligence in reading many posts about ELU vs ELL, I've not found guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a series of interrelated questions that may appear basic, but have deeper implications that may not be self-evident on first read. (They stem from a series of discussions / arguments on primarily ELU but also on ELL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern is perhaps unjustified, but I sense that if these are not phrased 'right' or don't explain clearly enough that there are deeper implications, on first blush, the question might be migrated to ELL.  I foresee that attempting to put the deeper context around the questions initially will actually distract from the question - the depth hopefully will come out in the answers and comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I go about doing this ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to put a dumb phrase in there like &quot;please don't migrate this...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And for expediency, I'll not post a sample of question here on meta - unless you all need to see one to judge.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T06:28:01.787" Title="Posing an ELL-Like question on ELU" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4161" CreationDate="2013-09-14T14:55:27.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just go for it! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question shows &lt;strong&gt;research&lt;/strong&gt; and you can demonstrate that you have at least taken the time and bother to do this, I'm sure your question(s) will be answered on ELU. It is often true that a seemingly “banal” or “basic” question can lead to an interesting discussion and reveal untold gems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a nice summary (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3013/44619&quot;&gt;@J.R's answer&lt;/a&gt; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3006/is-this-a-good-justification-for-frequent-downvoting-and-closing&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt;) that shows the elements of a good question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain why I'm asking this question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me tell you what I found when I tried to find the answer myself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain why I'm still confused.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T05:10:39.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-15T11:58:05.363" Score="2" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody out there in ELU land likes me. Which is really nice but this is getting a bit over-the-top. I'm getting a flood of up-votes in rapid succession, one after another. Take a look at my reputation chart and you'll see what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is day two. I could just keep quiet and bask in the glory, but... I feel I don't deserve (all) these upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point out, I have no idea who this wonderful and obviously a person with great taste, is. [insert large smile] And I do not wish to know either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If dear user you are reading this, please, curb your enthusiasm. I am not used to receiving so much attention. I really appreciate the upvotes, but I'd prefer if you calmed down a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Happening again. Tis the third time now. &lt;em&gt;Sigh&lt;/em&gt; all those upvotes will be reversed tomorrow, and good thing too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear &quot;secret upvoter&quot; thank you, it's very kind of you but please be aware that serial upvoting and downvoting on Stack Exchange sites will be reversed within 24 hours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall now bask in my brief, briefest momentum of glory. Feels good! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT TWO (22 February 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My happy &lt;em&gt;serial upvoter&lt;/em&gt; is at it again. Seems pretty daft behaviour if you ask me. Is it possible to know if the user is always the same? I don't want to know who he or she is, but whether it is a repeating offender. Obviously someone who does not frequent meta, me thinks. One last thing, does this person risk getting a suspension because they are abusing voting privileges? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT THREE (14 April 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To serial upvoter #5 or #6&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please, stop it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-04-14T21:35:33.493" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T14:35:45.440" Title="Too many up-votes (Again, fourth time lucky?)" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-15T14:35:33.830" Score="5" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered some questions and i can see that others have up voted my answer but I don't see any points added to my reputation and the total reputation points are the same! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a picture of it. Do you know what is happening? :D&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IRfQA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33118" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T11:54:06.443" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T11:54:06.443" Title="Why are some upvotes missing?" Tags="|support|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-05-09T07:52:32.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4161" CreationDate="2013-09-16T03:47:20.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This discussion about where the boundary lies between ELU and ELL has come up a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of times ever since ELL was first concepted, but just to give you my personal opinion as one of the mods on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The difference between ELU and ELL is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; about difficulty of question. ELL has lots of hard questions that wouldn't fit on ELU, and ELU has lots of easy questions that wouldn't fit on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The difference between ELU and ELL is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; about who asks the questions. You absolutely can be a regular on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (and we have questioners and answerers who are highly regarded regulars on both).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ELL is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;categorically not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a place for poor quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ELL is not a junior site of ELU or vice-versa. They focus on entirely different topics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact line between ELU and ELL is somewhat subject to debate, but as a rough guide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ELU really is about the &lt;strong&gt;(academic) study of English&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;analysis of English usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ELL is really about helping people learn to &lt;strong&gt;communicate effectively in modern, everyday English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37603" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T03:47:20.163" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4163" CreationDate="2013-09-16T05:22:45.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I'm missing something, but the voting seems pretty normal to me.  You've &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/44619/mari-lou-a?tab=answers&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt; quite a few questions lately and the voters seem to appreciate them.  You are getting a vote or two on each of your recent answers, with the exception of your suggestion of the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/127198/single-word-request-for-rings-formation-on-water/127202#127202&quot;&gt;&quot;ripples&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which has gotten 23 upvotes &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; was the accepted answer to the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also be noticing that old answers are getting trickle of upvotes.  It's entirely possible that this is a ripple-effect.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  When lots of people read a fine answer, they naturally look at other answers you might have written.  It's possible that people proceeded to upvote some of your earlier gems.  Note that the question recently showed up network-wide as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;&quot;Hot Question&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  Often this brings in people who haven't followed the site regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an automated process that reverts targeted votes, so there's rarely a reason to worry about the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this doesn't seem entirely fair, but remember that most upvotes represent sincere appreciation of your work.  I get a measure of satisfaction when I look at my Stack Overflow reputation because, even though I rarely post on the site these days, there is a constant drip of upvotes on my aged answers.  It appears that your contributions on this site are educational for a number of people over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, I did answer this question just so I could make that pun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T05:22:45.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-16T07:01:45.203" Score="17" ViewCount="950" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, friends. Here comes the devil's advocate, and he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one who has agonized over the blurred lines between ELU and ELL, I now find myself thinking that maybe, after all, we don't need dividing lines between ELU and ELL. Maybe there's no value in spending so much time and energy building and defending fences. Maybe there is no harm in throwing open the gates and saying, &quot;Come one, come all! Welcome to the new Using the English Language StackExchange site.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give me a second to duck and cover while you ready your slings and arrows.......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDENDUM 9/17/13:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit to being mildly surprised that my above &quot;devil's advocate&quot; post left room for interpretation, but I also admit I was not explicit. Allow me, then, to be explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I consider it evident that all (certainly most) of us who are so enthusiastically engaged in this debate are enthusiastic users of both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ergo, all (grant me &quot;all,&quot; if you will) of us enjoy answering and/or debating questions and subject matter on both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because we love English, top to bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are entirely capable of self-selecting the posts/questions that interest us. Each of us can respond to the ones of his or her choice, and ignore the others. We do this anyway. We simply do it with the added burdens of jumping between sites and carping about whether any given question should or shouldn't be on the site we're visiting. Why bother?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, what actual harm does it/can it do to allow any and all posts pertaining to the English language to wash up on the shores of the proposed &lt;em&gt;Using the English Language&lt;/em&gt; StackExchange Site? (Proposed name subject to debate, further suggestions, voting, and so on.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I do mean and propose one conjoined, ecumenical site for all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be hiding out in that cave over there if you want me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastEditorUserId="38065" LastEditDate="2013-09-17T19:07:43.033" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T09:45:04.740" Title="Should we consider going in the other direction with ELU and ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-09-16T11:12:45.883" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the moderators over on ELL, I disagree with the premise that ELL and ELU are fundamentally too similar, although I'll certainly agree that there is a great deal of confusion as to where that dividing line lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think the confusion isn't going away. ELL has been around for about six months and just this week there's been at least three metas on ELU where people were confused about ELL versus ELU, and at least two metas on ELL asking the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that a lot of the confusion lies with the names of ELU and ELL being too broad, which means that whether a question belongs on ELL or ELU is far too subjective at the moment: practically any interesting question on ELU can be construed as &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;, even if it would clearly be a better fit on ELL. And any half-assed badly worded question on ELU can easily be construed as being asked by an &quot;English Language Learner&quot;, and hence we see loads of terrible (and often off-topic) questions on ELU being suggested for migration to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be nice is if ELL and ELU agreed on a more concrete and easy-to-understand scope that has less overlap, which would leave less subjectivity in whether a question belongs on ELL or ELU, and which isn't off-putting to questioners when they are politely asked to ask their question on the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written in somewhat more detail over &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/782/why-is-non-native-speakers-part-of-the-by-line-for-ell/784#784&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but in summary, the most concise and clear scope definitions I could come up with are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;IMO, ELU is about the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;research&lt;/em&gt; of the English Language&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;analysis&lt;/em&gt; of English usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;IMO, ELL is really about helping people learn to &lt;strong&gt;communicate effectively in modern, everyday English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully those two definitions aren't too controversial and is hopefully also a whole ton clearer than the current definitions which lead to five metas a week of people throwing their hands up in confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37603" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T21:29:01.513" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-16T14:14:40.540" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we leave comments on others' posts, we don't get the follow-up notifications unless we have been tagged. But I think that we should get the notifications even if we are not tagged so as to follow the conversation and contribute other things that we can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49320" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T14:14:40.540" Title="Follow-up notifications for comments posted on others' posts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-16T16:18:31.823" Score="2" ViewCount="4198" Body="&lt;p&gt;When adding sources what is the best dictionary to use for American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T21:42:53.940" Title="American English - what is the best dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-09-06T22:57:03.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4170" CreationDate="2013-09-16T16:22:01.810" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hold &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; at the top of the ladder for American English and common usage.  I think it is right almost always.  A lot of the other dictionary sources used on this site have, in my opinion, either very dated terminology, uncommon (maybe correct) usage, or sometimes plain incorrect.  Again this is for American English usage.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spent a lot of time in the UK, France, and Australia but not enough to give any sort of helpful opinion on what dictionaries represent other English dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T16:22:01.810" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4170" CreationDate="2013-09-16T18:18:11.450" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some confusion that the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; is somehow for the English of England only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly is not!  The OED covers English not just in England but all over the world. It notably gives pronunciations for both RP and in North American English, and has many, many, many terms that are marked as Australian or South African or this or that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED is an historical dictionary, documenting words and their predominant senses over time.  There is no other dictionary like it in the English everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are certainly specialist dictionaries that cover particular topic areas more fully than the OED does.  For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dare.wisc.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of American Regional English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, normally called DARE, covers that topic much more thoroughly than the OED does.  There are also medical dictionaries with rare terms that have not yet appeared in a sufficiently widespread and frequent distribution as to have yet made the OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/september-2013-update/new-words-list-september-2013/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the September 2013 quarterly updates to the OED&lt;/a&gt; to see how much they are tracking English in all its guises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T18:18:11.450" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-09-16T19:08:40.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Matt's answer. The main reason I enjoy ELU so much is the high level of detail that some answers give. Take these two for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90530/whats-wrong-with-ill-open-you-the-door/&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ll open you the door&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/126774/shortest-correct-sentence-in-english-use-of-contractions/&quot;&gt;Shortest correct sentence in English- use of contractions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find these answers to be very informative and instructive and fun to decipher. I am not a language expert by any measure but I know enough to be able to understand, if not produce, such answers. On the other hand, this level of detail is pretty much useless to someone who is learning the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that this site was originally conceived as a playground for academics and linguists. While I am neither, as a native speaker and language geek I get a huge kick out of some of the answers here. They make me think, and teach me aspects of the language I had not considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, some observations about merging the sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will likely result in non-natives getting scary and essentially incomprehensible answers;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 'hardcore' ELU users will stop answering because they no longer find the questions interesting (this is already happening, I remember reading a meta thread a while back where some of our highest rep and most knowledgeable users were complaining about not finding it fun anymore).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I feel a lot of us enjoy 'out-pedanting' each other, that can only be done among people with a certain facility with the language, it is neither fair nor funny and will be perceived as an attack if done to someone trying their best to learn.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are &lt;em&gt;many, many&lt;/em&gt; sites out there to help English languauge learners and ELL is yet another one built using the SE model we like so much. There really isn't anything like ELU around, where will the language geeks go if we change the scope?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On a more personal note, I am a native speaker of English who has spent all but 4 years of his life in non-English speaking countries. Coming here is like a breath of fresh air for me, I don't need to limit my own vocabulary and I sometimes have to look up words that &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people use. I love it!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may also participate on ELL (I barely have so far), but I would stop coming here if the sites were merged, it would no longer be fun for me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just found that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3939/25030&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt; where the high rep users were expressing their displeasure with the simplification of the site, it was your question! I take it you have changed your mind? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T21:49:39.097" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-09-16T19:29:51.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we perhaps say that any question asked on ELU that is clearly from a foreign learner at beginner or intermediate level wil automatically be transferred to ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12952" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T19:29:51.197" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2013-09-16T23:43:50.780" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, quote marks if you know and can identify the author. Italics are fine for titles and unattributable sayings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52092" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T23:43:50.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-09-17T03:33:44.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the short version, skip to the last word in this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the details, please read on ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some weeks as a highly interest Noob, I've been watching the ELL versus ELU match. Jumping in the ring, I wrangled with unexpected hubris. Count me now among those throwing their hands up in annoyance, bewildered, wondering if this is the place to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There should be no such &lt;em&gt;consternation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for any user on any Stack Exchange  site. Sorry, you all are no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also mentioned essentially the same bullet points as Matt elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ELU = academic English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;ELL = everyday English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... only to watch the downvotes start. (Maybe they didn't like a rank Noob pointing out that the Emperor has only two pairs of shoes, but no clothes. Or perhaps the two shoes just don't fit, constituting poor differentiation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Matt's answer has merit, I am concerned that it will not suffice. The tumult of discussion stems from what I would call &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the boundary separation problem.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; This is a Stack Exchange problem generally, caused partly by the increasing number of sites requiring some division lines be drawn. ELL and ELU are not the first to experience this. (Ask the programmers about StackOverflow vs Code Review vs etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the same thing here, only in different clothes. But for ELL vs. ELU, I suspect the boundary issues &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; worsen over time, rather the stuff will just get rehashed, the same &amp;quot;move to site X from Y with explainer,&amp;quot; wastefully consuming user time and strength, and, as it has already, moderator resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, even Matt's clearer description earlier of the ELL-ELU boundary seems &lt;em&gt;contrived to make the sites' separation work better&lt;/em&gt; (or even work at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many instances come to mind where &amp;quot;analysis of usage&amp;quot; helps me &amp;quot;communicate [more] effectively.&amp;quot; Conversely, questions about &amp;quot;everyday English&amp;quot; can lead to academic research - it depends on the how the question is phrased, does it not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner's writing style might make it clear on what &amp;quot;level&amp;quot; they intend their question to stand, but maybe not. For instance, a non-native speaker might make a usage slip - so it &amp;quot;seems basic and everyday&amp;quot; so off the post trots to ELL, if it were on ELU.  But if he or she is very good and asks the same question on ELU, perhaps adding in merely the word &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;why,&amp;quot; the answer could go deep. And here's a revealing point: if that were posted on ELL (not ELU) it probably would &lt;em&gt;stay&lt;/em&gt; on ELL and not be migrated, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to sum up why I think ELU and ELL need to be merged back, and the ELU folks learn happily to help the new learners who also love language, while the ELL people can enjoy more depth, here is the one word that shows why boundaries will remain hard to demarcate. Please think on the ramifications of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prepositions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T03:33:44.900" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-18T14:07:32.833" Score="4" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put a question to this forum recently and am surprised to log in today to see it moved to a non-English language speakers forum.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here is the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/10186/the-opposite-of-vs-opposite-to&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/10186/the-opposite-of-vs-opposite-to&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker and had heard several instances of the usage referred to, and variations of, including just the other day by an accomplished orator on a tape I was listening to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing I see is that the wording of the question I put was edited so as to alter the meaning of the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate if my question could be moved back to the forum I intended it for and edits removed, or else just copy the question without tagging it to my username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will just add finally that this is strange behaviour when compared to my experiences of other forums in SE and similar sites.  It would have sufficed to leave a comment on the question letting me know it was somehow inappropriate for that forum, if it was judged to be so.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I didn't see any downvotes on it either, which is usually what happens when there is a problem.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Question Moved Without Comment" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4177" CreationDate="2013-09-18T18:48:56.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name of ELL is misleading, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4168/25030&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It is not really intended to be for non-natives exclusively, the linked answer from one of their mods explains that they deal with everyday usage while we (ELU) deal with the more academic study of English.  As you can see, your question received a perfectly good answer on the other site by a user who is active both there and here. This is an ongoing problem and the simple truth is that we (the communities on both sites) have not done a very good job of defining the scope of each site clearly. Also see the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/782/why-is-non-native-speakers-part-of-the-by-line-for-ell?cb=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The migration seems to have erased the edit history and that is indeed a problem. Normally, you can just roll back the edits by clicking on the edit history link. I have edited and rolled back my edit on this question to demonstrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T19:23:08.923" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-09-18T21:03:30.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to use an answer box to grab this bag full of cats, swing it around, and toss it in yet another direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU friends, here's a single-word request: What's that word for continuing to fight on gamely after the battle is already lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I detect a substantial amount of sentiment in favor of a merge, but I think the majority still comes down in favor of two distinct sites. But after all this time, and all this debate, look at how confusion reigns. Look how incredibly many ELL questions corruscate through ELU. Think about how many &lt;em&gt;always will&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we were building walls, they were tunneling underneath. We have met the enemy, and they are us. We have become what we feared most. We are bailing out a sunken ship. Shall I go on? I'm having fun with the metaphors. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it's too late, and there's no point. We can keep arguing about this, or we can realize that no matter what we do, the sites are blended, and always will be blended, and we probably ought to figure out a way to blend them constructively and effectively, rather than wringing our hands and trying to prevent something that has already happened. We're fighting a battle that ended without us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember the knight in the forest in &lt;em&gt;Monty Python and the Holy Grail&lt;/em&gt; who kept claiming he would defeat King Arthur even as he continued to lose limb after limb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point? We can debate this until we're blue in the face, but I do not believe that there is any way really and truly to keep the sites separate. It's not gonna happen, folks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's welcome the neighbors. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38065" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T21:03:30.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-09-19T00:27:53.353" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Weak questions don't bother me nearly as much as weak answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even very basic questions often offer opportunities to analyze some quirk of the language. There's etymology, there's comparison to related languages that went in a different direction, there's regional differences, there are (sometimes obscure) stylistic options to choose from, there's all kinds of pedantry and trivia to indulge. When it comes to usage, I love answers that address all of the possibilities and when and why you'd use each one. I love answers that explore the history of a word or idiom with OED citations. That sort of thing is overwhelming to an English learner, but it's tons of fun for an English nerd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very basic answers bother me though. I'm tired of seeing answers to word requests that are basically just “How about &lt;em&gt;foo&lt;/em&gt;?” – or even worse, “How about this list of random words only loosely connected to your request, not even the right part of speech.” I'm tired of seeing answers to usage questions that simply state, “Do it this way!” or “That's incorrect!” without any heed to alternatives or descriptivism, without any explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the answer is correct. I'm tired of answers that use “what I learned in grade school” as a source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of those basic answers are fine &lt;em&gt;advice,&lt;/em&gt; but they're boring for English nerds, and that's roughly where I see the divide between ELU and ELL. I agree with Matt's idea that ELU is for analysis and ELL for communication, although I would state it a little differently: ELU is for pedantry and ELL for advice. With that distinction, we can handle a lot of overlap in questions, simply by taking a different approach to answers. Also, I think it lets us refer people to ELL without being condescending: “Answers here may offer more detail than you need. For more practical advice, ask your question on [ell.se].”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T00:27:53.353" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4132" CreationDate="2013-09-20T14:40:16.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been fixed and will be with you in the next build (rev 2013.9.20.1028).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41761" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T14:40:16.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4177" CreationDate="2013-09-20T16:45:53.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/10186/2482&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; and click flag there is an option &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;other (needs ♦ moderator attention)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you click that you can request that the question be disassociated from your account. Give a quick explanation and say that you wish that your name/account be removed from the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25088/how-can-i-delete-my-post-on-stack-overflow/185669#185669&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When it's not possible to have your question deleted, you can always&#xA;  ask for it to be unlinked from your account, so that it won't have&#xA;  your name under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This isn't obvious, and isn't usually suggested in response to the&#xA;  &quot;Please delete my question&quot; requests, so I thought it's worth posting&#xA;  this for those who come here via web search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The function of a Diamond Moderator is described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192/232334&quot;&gt;here &lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50397" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T16:45:53.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T21:47:53.917" Score="10" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just checked my reputation, and something like 33 minutes before this question on meta downvoted every single one of the questions I have asked on EL&amp;amp;U. Note that I've only asked 5 questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that one person did it, possibly as retaliation for some slight?  Is this kind of activity considered abuse?  And if so, is this the way to complain about it, posing a question on Meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T23:24:13.423" Title="Someone just went through all my questions, downvoting them all" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-21T19:23:35.920" Score="-1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;My account on ELL was just re-suspended, after &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/786/are-moderators-really-qualified-for-moderation&quot;&gt;asking for explanation about my suspension&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I can't post on ELL Meta (in addition to ELL itself). I was wondering if something similar happens to my ELU account, how can I communicate with a moderator or someone who can judge if my suspension is fair or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm asking this beforehand because when this happens I wouldn't be able to ask!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20343" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T05:58:48.707" Title="How can I communicate when suspended" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4188" CreationDate="2013-09-21T22:45:02.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I am a moderator on both EL&amp;amp;U and ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod messages are received in your global SE inbox (that's what appears when you click the Stack Exchange logo in the upper left corner of every page). If you click on the mod message there, you will be able to reply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, we will respond to constructive queries; rants, taunts, and nonsense (all of which we have received in the past) will be ignored. In addition, you can ask that another moderator review the suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that channel of communication does not lead to a result satisfactory to you, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact the Stack Exchange team directly&lt;/a&gt; or post on meta once the suspension is complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;The above is a somewhat general answer. I'm looking into the details of your second suspension right now, since it's not exactly clear what happened there, and I'll let you know what comes of it. It is perfectly fine to ask about your suspension, so we'll see if we can figure the details of that one out and get back to you.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have sent you a mod message on ELL providing additional detail regarding the (second) suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T05:58:48.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4192" CreationDate="2013-09-23T07:27:06.533" Score="9" ViewCount="3374" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people look up a word in Merriam-Webster and declare the word non-existing when they fail to find it there. As this doesn't seem the best approach, some may try to look up as many dictionaries as they can, which is more thorough, though still not exhaustive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, &lt;strong&gt;are there any rules to determine beyond dispute whether a word is actually an English word&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I admit being caught: this is not a question. Not any longer. It was intended as a question, but now it is just a discussion seed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd been browsing through Qs and As and would sometimes stumble on somebody's &quot;that's not a word&quot;, &quot;this is not an English word&quot; etc, so I decided to learn whether there were any rules the ELL/ELU people used to determine whether the thing was actually a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your answers and comments, they're all valuable, each in its own way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52299" LastEditorUserId="52299" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T04:29:59.257" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T23:33:41.773" Title="How do we know that a word exists?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4190" CreationDate="2013-09-23T08:23:33.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use a word, when talking in English, and you are not just mentioning the word, (e.g. if I mention the word &quot;sprangoring&quot; I'm not using it as an English word just mentioning it as an example of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;use/mention distinction&lt;/a&gt;) if you understand what you mean by it then it is an English word in your idolect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using the word while talking to people who speak the same as you and they understand it as an English word then it is an English word, in your dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hear people using it in another dialect too, then it has a broader appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T08:23:33.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4190" CreationDate="2013-09-23T09:40:40.340" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a word, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, there’s the thorny issue of defining what a word even &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;. Is a phrasal verb one word, or two? Is a proper noun a word? How about a persons’s name, like &lt;em&gt;BreAzia&lt;/em&gt;? Or the names of Pokemon creatures, like &lt;em&gt;Meowth&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Psyduck&lt;/em&gt;? (I know plenty of 9-year-olds who will insist &lt;strong&gt;those&lt;/strong&gt; are words!) Or proper nouns from famous fiction, like &lt;em&gt;Slytherin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Alderaan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Klingon&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Scrooge&lt;/em&gt;? What if I make up my own word, like &lt;em&gt;ponyfraggis&lt;/em&gt;? If that’s not a “word,” what is it? What about acronyms and abbreviations? (S.C.U.B.A. diving, anyone?) Or prefixes and suffixes? What about slang, jargon, loanwords, eggcorns, and Spoonerisms? Is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;zoot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a word? (Most dictionaries will list &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=zoot%20suit&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;zoot suit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but not &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=zoot&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;zoot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.) Is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hors&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a word? What if I'm serving &lt;em&gt;hors d’oeuvres&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, finding a word in several dictionaries can pretty much demonstratively show that something &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a “word”, but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; finding a word in a dictionary proves nothing. Language evolves; new words are added to dictionaries regularly (&lt;a href=&quot;http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93098&amp;amp;page=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;D’oh!&lt;/a&gt; I'll bet you already knew that), but words aren’t usually added until they’ve demonstrated sufficient durability. That means dictionaries are often five or ten years &lt;strong&gt;behind&lt;/strong&gt; the corner bars, water coolers, sports arenas, and television scripts – but for good reason: dictionary editors don't want to add words into their dictionaries only to take them out again five years later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, there's plenty of scientific jargon that hasn't wormed its way onto dictionary pages yet. Even the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1471629/bling-bling-added-dictionary.jhtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;phat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; OED doesn't list &lt;em&gt;qubit&lt;/em&gt; yet (my &lt;em&gt;spellchecker&lt;/em&gt; doesn’t like it, either), but our Peter Shor would tell you that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a word faster than you can factor 15. Moreover, what’s true in science is also true in marketing; if 7-Up is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.7up.com/page/history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Uncola&lt;/a&gt;, does that make &lt;em&gt;Uncola&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncola&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;word&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t mean to sound Pecksniffian, but my answer to your question is a resounding, “No, of course not!” Rules, beyond dispute? Trying to pinpoint when a “real word” begins is like trying to figure out when life begins, or when the universe began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe in real words that aren’t in the dictionary (like &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Tinkerbell&amp;amp;year_start=1930&amp;amp;year_end=2005&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tinkerbell&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, for example), clap your hands.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2013-11-16T23:33:41.773" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T23:33:41.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4190" CreationDate="2013-09-23T22:36:38.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking whether a word is an English word isn't really a question with a yes/no answer. In reality, the answer is all shades of grey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even ignoring neologisms that take their time to find their way into dictionaries, a look at the etymology of the words already listed will show the many and varied sources of words now regarded as 'English'. At what point does a foreign word being used by English speakers become an English word? I don't think there can be a rule for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it may take hundreds or thousands of years. For example, consider 'au fait'. Clearly French, it is used regularly in the English language. Is it therefore now also English? Words such as 'medium' still have their plural formed in the Latin manner ('media'). Does that mean that it isn't yet fully absorbed into English? 'Index' and others can be pluralised under Latin or English rules ('indices', 'indexes') so their transition is perhaps more advanced, though 2,000 years is rather a long time already...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as an aside on J.R.'s (excellent) answer, I believe that as far as the OED is concerned, once a word is in the dictionary it is never removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51556" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T22:36:38.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4170" CreationDate="2013-09-25T03:59:08.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For scholarly or encyclopedic needs, there's probably nothing that can touch the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. That said, I don't have access to it, so all I know about it is what I've gathered from people who cite it; and from what I've seen, I get a similar impression that RyeBread does, namely that it has obscure stuff you can't get anywhere else, as well as a few head-scratchers for common words. My guess is that the vast, &lt;em&gt;vast&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;vast&lt;/strong&gt; majority of the material in it is first-rate, but for typical needs, I get the impression it's no better (and possibly a little worse) than any of the major &quot;collegiate&quot; dictionaries: &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;American Heritage&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Webster's New World&lt;/em&gt; being the three I'm most familiar with in paper form, and I like them about equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to rag on the OED, or people who cite the OED, but I also want to say that sometimes I get the impression (and I must stress that this is both subtle and purely subjective) that there can be a tinge of elitism in an OED citation, as if to say &quot;well, I &lt;em&gt;paid&lt;/em&gt; for this, so you should trust &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; citation more&quot;. I have occasionally felt that OED citers ride the fine line between scholarliness and condescension (not always successfully).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;M-W strikes me as descriptivist-leaning, but not so loosey-goosey as to be without (enough) credibility as an authority. I think for most people, it is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, for example. I like that M-W's on-line version is free and seemingly equivalent to the print version. It makes it easy for me to transfer whatever level of trust I had with the paper version to the on-line version, as well as easy to cite via URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, I am just now noticing that the AHD has its own on-line version as well. I am quite sure this is a relatively recent development (maybe in the last couple of years), since I remember lamenting that M-W seemed to be the only &quot;familiar&quot; dictionary to have a decent (and free) on-line version. (My original attempts to find AHD on-line, years ago, brought me to some other reference site, presumably partnered with AHD's publisher, but definitely not a dedicated on-line replica of the print version like M-W already had for some time. So I stuck with M-W and have become so accustomed to it that I never bothered to look for AHD again until just now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people cite Dictionary.com. I must say I have never warmed to this site. It is not clear to me who its editor(s) or expert panel are. It appears to be a collection of other dictionaries' material, primarily Random House and Collins, but with other stuff thrown in as well. TheFreeDictionary.com is of the same ilk, but seems to use American Heritage and Collins (maybe that's the site I used to get when I looked for the AHD). Anyway, I'm sure these are fine&amp;mdash;after all, they are citing perfectly legitimate dictionaries&amp;mdash;but to me, they don't have the built-in trust (deserved or not) that comes with carrying the name of an established paper dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To sum up:&lt;/strong&gt; OED is a great source if you've got it. M-W is fine for ordinary stuff. For the express purpose of citation, these are probably the best, regardless of whether they have the best actual material, simply because they have the best name recognition and are the most likely to be trusted by the most readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2923" LastEditorUserId="2923" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T21:42:53.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T21:42:53.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2013-09-26T15:12:56.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this site, italics have a particular use, of mentioning the word rather than using it. If you want to know the etymology of the word &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt; you don't, obviously, ask &quot;What does elephant come from?&quot; unless you want the answer &quot;A mummy elephant&quot;. &quot;What does &quot;elephant&quot; come from?&quot; is not right either, since it refers to a quotation; presumably &quot;Elephant!&quot; came from somebody's unexpected meeting with an elephant. &quot;What does 'elephant' come from?&quot; is acceptable in normal speech, but on ELU there is more use of words-as-mention than most places, and also a divergence of opinion about straight quotes or curly quotes (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/535/8019&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), so the usual wording is &quot;what does &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt; come from?&quot;  This isn't as common in the outside world, though it's by no means unusual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T15:12:56.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2013-09-27T22:39:38.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In writing about language and languages, there are more conventions to follow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A short list of how a professional uses the formatting available here can be found&lt;br&gt;&#xA;at the end of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77866/15299&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T22:39:38.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4177" CreationDate="2013-09-29T12:04:18.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I have answered questions on ELU which were then suddenly whisked off to ELL with no forewarning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I have agreed with their migration status because the question was really simple and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/10373/single-word-request-for-rings-formation-on-water/10375#10375&quot;&gt;99% English &lt;em&gt;native speakers&lt;/em&gt; would have known the answer&lt;/a&gt;.  Anyway, that question is more helpful to users in ELL than in ELU, in my opinion. And I suspect this is the motivation behind your migrated question; &lt;strong&gt;opposite of&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;opposite to&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I would have agreed in this instance, especially if you had added that interesting detail, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had heard several instances of the usage referred to, and variations&#xA;  of, including just the other day by an accomplished orator on a tape&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had included that detail and said who was the accomplished orator in your question then it is no longer a strictly grammatical question but one which discusses the &lt;em&gt;whys&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;whens&lt;/em&gt; of that particular change in usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what your original question was like before it got edited, if the question was more &quot;open-ended&quot; then you are right to feel annoyed. If the question asked for a simple &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; type of answer then that probably justifies the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T12:04:18.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4201" CreationDate="2013-09-30T17:18:01.040" Score="1" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just lost a load of rep today because a user was deleted and/or a post was removed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RtlDq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the second line correctly, the question mentioned was deleted, fair enough. I am wondering whether I can find out &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; the removed user was and why he/she cost me 140 rep points. Had I answered so many of their questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the general rules governing reputation loss from deleted posts, I am just wondering whether (as a &amp;lt;10k user who can't see deleted content) I can find out whodunit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant meta.so thread is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/125740/203101&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, apparently I am not alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T12:17:21.857" Title="Can I know which deleted user caused my loss of reputation?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-30T17:18:16.050" Score="1" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there is a debate about how to edit ellipses in posts on the site.  This has come to a head &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129353/is-on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand-a-cliche-to-be-avoided&quot;&gt;in this latest post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what needs to be decided as an official policy so that we don't end up with edit wars/community wikis from too many edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we want for a site policy?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. use three periods ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. use three periods with a space in between . . .&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. use a narrow-space plus dots (separate each dot with U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. use a proper UTF8 ellipsis …&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5. let the poster decide which method to use and otherwise leave it alone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T03:58:54.463" Title="About formatting ellipses" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2013-09-30T17:24:17.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sorry, we can't share information regarding account deletions. If it's any consolation, you wouldn't be able to tell even if you had privileges to view deleted content, because the user has been removed and the name associated with the account is expunged.  The additional loss of rep is probably because that user had upvoted some of your other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The account is completely removed, so there is no way to associate a username, even if we wanted to. We don't, though, because account deletions usually occur because either a user has requested deletion (and therefore doesn't want their username attached to their content anymore) or because the user has violated the site's terms of service or other policies (in which case, disciplinary action is kept private). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an exhaustive list of deletion reasons, nor are these reasons mutually exclusive, and does not imply that neither, one, or both of these reasons applies in any particular case of user deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-10-01T12:17:21.857" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T12:17:21.857" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-09-30T19:05:30.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I could live with any of 1,2 or (preferably) 5. Expecting people to use symbols that are not easily available on all keyboards and setups seems unnecessarily complex and, which is more, will simply be ignored by the vast majority of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to choose, I would go for 5. While I appreciate correct punctuation as much as anyone and will be quick to edit out things like &quot;I am wondering..........&quot; which are so common in internetspeak, I feel that requesting strict adherence to typographical conventions is not really reasonable on a public Q&amp;amp;A site. In any case, the conventions themselves are not so clear here with different style guides &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;suggesting different variants&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are the various problems associated with some people not having set their browser to auto detect character encoding or who have set it to non UTF8 defaults. They won't be able to see options 3 and 4 correctly which makes these, in my opinion,  more effort than they're worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that each of these options has its adherents and &lt;em&gt;all of them will be understood&lt;/em&gt; I think the best option is 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="25030" LastEditDate="2013-10-01T01:19:35.090" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T01:19:35.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-10-01T01:50:01.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, typography and ease of use are at odds here, plus different style guides and typographers disagree about the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing that nearly everyone agrees on is that there should be &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; extra space between the dots, and it should &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; break across lines. The exact amount of space varies according to context and taste, but NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F) and NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0) are both reasonable choices. I prefer the latter because it's easy to type on a Mac keyboard (Option+Space).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally avoid the Unicode HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026) because very few typefaces actually have a well-rendered ellipsis glyph, so it's just as hard to type as other solutions &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; typographically inferior. For example, the ellipsis character in the question renders on my Mac indistinguishably from three unspaced periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there's no ideal solution here, I think it's usually best to leave ellipses alone when editing unless they are &lt;strong&gt;grossly&lt;/strong&gt; incorrect. It's easy to actually make them &lt;strong&gt;worse&lt;/strong&gt; if you're not careful (e.g., accidentally replacing non-breaking spaces with ordinary ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing new posts, I recommend encoding ellipses roughly in this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Separate periods with NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0) if you can type it easily (Option+Space on Mac keyboards, &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&lt;/code&gt; in Markdown): “. . .”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use unspaced periods: “...”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026) – &lt;strong&gt;not recommended&lt;/strong&gt; because it renders the same as unspaced periods in the ELU font, and it's harder to type (Option+Semicolon on Mac keyboards, &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x2026;&lt;/code&gt; in Markdown): “…”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Separate periods with NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F) – &lt;strong&gt;not recommended&lt;/strong&gt; because it has rendering problems similar to HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026), and it's even harder to type (&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x202f;&lt;/code&gt; in Markdown): “.&amp;#x202f;.&amp;#x202f;.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not&lt;/strong&gt; separate periods with ordinary spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="42788" LastEditDate="2013-10-01T02:40:32.470" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T02:40:32.470" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-10-01T20:33:45.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I can restrain myself from editing out the first word in all those ELU questions starting with a redundant &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;So&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129380/&quot;&gt;like&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/128106/&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/127868/&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt;), I see no reason why others can't just accept the OP's typography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I don't &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; subscribe to Kitfox's option #5 here. Whilst I don't think mods (or anyone else, for that matter) should put any effort into &quot;standardising&quot; this particular aspect of typography (in &lt;em&gt;Answers&lt;/em&gt;, too?  - how about &lt;em&gt;Comments&lt;/em&gt;?), I don't see any reason to rail against anyone who wants to do it. Unless the OP in question objects, in which case he has the final say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been given &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77866/2637&quot;&gt;clear guidelines&lt;/a&gt; on some typographical conventions adopted by one of our more &quot;professional&quot; users. Which is all very nice, but I doubt even &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; seriously thinks it would be worthwhile attempting to enforce consistency across all ELU posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T20:41:16.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-01T23:17:59.013" Score="7" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reference to this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129301/polite-alternative-to-the-term-bitch-when-referring-to-a-female-dog-likewise&quot;&gt;Polite alternative to the term &amp;quot;bitch&amp;quot; when referring to a female dog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know why it was closed. The question boils down to &quot;What is a polite term for a female dog, in leiu of the fact that word 'bitch' may cause offense?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer I accepted boiled down to &quot;either use female dog, or bitch as there is no alternative&quot;, and there were similar answers that focused on breeding as well, which where all correct in the context of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the suggestion &quot;why not use a different animal, if you don't want to use 'bitch'&quot; was helpful, I chose not to accept that answer as it didn't answer the question that was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what exactly about the question is &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53089" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T15:23:40.603" Title="Why was my question on dog terminology closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4206" CreationDate="2013-10-02T15:23:40.603" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having given a sort of drive-by, &quot;Huh?&quot; to the question yesterday, I wanted to support and elaborate on RegDwight's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As far as the English language is concerned, the answer to &quot;I need to differentiate between an adult female dog, an adult male dog and a puppy and am searching for polite terms&quot; is not &quot;goose, gander and gosling&quot;. It simply isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it seems like the question and its answers were fundamentally out of sync.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Possibility 1:&lt;/em&gt;  The OP is really interested in &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt;, specifically.  The question is clear and seems to be on-topic to me, but the answers regarding other animals are completely missing the mark and should be deleted or something.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Possibility 2:&lt;/em&gt;  The OP is looking for an example of &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; animal that has distinct terms for male/female/young.  If that's the case, then the question needs serious revision.  Even when revised... I'm not convinced that enumerating animals that fit this paradigm is a particularly interesting question for this site, but I guess I can't pinpoint any legitimate reason to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, something was amiss and putting the question on hold seems to me like a reasonable course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T15:23:40.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-10-03T16:56:10.093" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only possible correct answer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;for a site policy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is option 5: let the poster decide, and leave it the [expletive deleted] alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit wars like in the linked example are laughable. It's an ellipsis in an internet post, folks, not a government ID number on a tax return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter a post where someone used regular spaces between the periods and it's breaking across two lines, then you can edit to fix it; but please also fix &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; typos and misspellings in the post while you're at it. If they merely used non-breaking spaces and you like your ellipses space-free (or vice versa), then please, for the love of all that's holy, go find something better to do with your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T16:56:10.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-04T00:24:05.250" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a quick and dirty way of providing hyperlinks consisting of a word or two, rather than by copying and pasting an entire web address?  I'm feeling really inferior for not knowing how to do this.  I've clicked on the MS question mark to get help, but I find MS's explanations to be unclear and confusing.  I envy how more-experienced contributors simply insert the word &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, allowing readers to click on that word and be magically transported to the website to which the word provides a link.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm by no means computer savvy, as you can tell, but I'm not a complete doofus, either.  Any takers out there who deign to help an old geezer?  I promise to &quot;pay it forward!&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32623" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T03:21:10.587" Title="I'd like to be able to provide simplified hyperlinks in my answers but do not know how" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4213" CreationDate="2013-10-04T03:21:10.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So basically what you're wanting to do is post a hyperlink which displays a description of the link (any words you like) rather than the web address string. To do this we have some nifty code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Click on this link and it will go to google](http://www.google.com)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You put the text you want to display in the &lt;code&gt;[]&lt;/code&gt; square brackets, and in the &lt;code&gt;()&lt;/code&gt; parens immediately following you paste the web address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'll look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Click on this link and it will go to google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget the &lt;code&gt;http://&lt;/code&gt; at the start, or the link won't work!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22119" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T03:21:10.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-10-04T03:58:54.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really wish people would read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/105064/2085&quot;&gt;this posting&lt;/a&gt; — which I hereunder quote in full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/91654/2085&quot;&gt;Bringhurst&lt;/a&gt;.    To quote from the other posting’s citation, since nobody else seems to think this is a duplicate but me, I point out that in his highly recommended &lt;em&gt;Elements of Typographical Style&lt;/em&gt;, Robert Bringhurst writes on page 82 of version 3.2 of that book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most digital fonts now include, among other things, a prefabricated ellipsis (a row of three baseline dots). Many typographers nevertheless prefer to make their own. Some prefer to set the three dots ﬂush … with a normal word space before and after. Others prefer . . . to add thin spaces between the dots. Thick spaces (ᴍ/3) are prescribed by the Chicago Manual of Style, but these are another Victorian eccentricity. In most contexts, the Chicago ellipsis is much too wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flush-set ellipses work well with some fonts and faces but not with all. At small text sizes – in 8 pt footnotes, for example – it is generally better to add space (as much as ᴍ/5) between the dots. Extra space may also look best in the midst of light, open letterforms, such as Baskerville, and less space in the company of a dark font, just as Trajanus, or when setting in bold face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English (but usually not in French), when the ellipsis occurs at the end of a sentence, a fourth dot, the period, is added and the space at the beginning of the ellipsis disappears. . . . When the ellipsis combines with a comma, exclamation mark, or question mark, the same typographical principle applies. Otherwise, a word space is required fore and aft. The ellipsis is a graphic word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that it should be four dots at the end and without a space before the first, but three dots in the middle and with a space, and they are usually spaced out between each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I will have to go to the store . . . and stay there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I will have to go to the store. . . .&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first should be written with a dash instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will have to go to the store — and stay there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ellipsis has become stigmatized in recent years, as txkspkng kiddos have taken to using a slightly mangled version of the ellipsis in lieu of any and all other possible punctuation, whether commas or periods, dashes or parentheses, question marks or quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/91654/2085&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which gets into the code points used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you do put a space in front of three of them, but not in front of four of them.  The open questions are whether to use three or four, and whether to put spaces not just fore or aft, but &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; them.  The short answers to those two questions are respectively  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that you use four without a leading &lt;em&gt;no-break space&lt;/em&gt; if it is the end of a sentence, &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and that you almost always want to set them with &lt;em&gt;thin no-break spaces&lt;/em&gt; between them, but this varies a bit depending on your face and point size.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here follows a longer and more professional treatment. . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his &lt;em&gt;The Elements of Typographical Style&lt;/em&gt;, Robert Bringhurst writes on page 82 of version 3.2 of that book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most digital fonts now include, among other things, a prefabricated&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;ellipsis&lt;/em&gt; (a row of three baseline dots). Many typographers&#xA;  nevertheless prefer to make their own. Some prefer to set the three&#xA;  dots ﬂush … with a normal word space before and after. Others&#xA;  prefer . . . to add &lt;em&gt;thin&lt;/em&gt; spaces between the dots. Thick spaces (ᴍ/3)&#xA;  are prescribed by the &lt;em&gt;Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt;, but these are another&#xA;  Victorian eccentricity. In most contexts, the Chicago ellipsis is&#xA;  much too wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flush-set ellipses work well with some fonts and faces but not with all.&#xA;  At small text sizes – in 8 pt footnotes, for example – it is generally&#xA;  better to add space (as much as ᴍ/5) between the dots.  Extra space may&#xA;  also look best in the midst of light, open letterforms, such as&#xA;  Baskerville, and less space in the company of a dark font, just as&#xA;  Trajanus, or when setting in bold face. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English (but usually not in French), when the ellipsis occurs at the&#xA;  end of a sentence, a fourth dot, the period, is added and the space at&#xA;  the beginning of the ellipsis disappears. . . . When the  ellipsis&#xA;  combines with a comma, exclamation mark, or question mark, the same&#xA;  typographical principle applies. Otherwise, a word space is required&#xA;  fore and aft.  The ellipsis is a graphic word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that if you do use thin spaces to space out your dots, you want to use U+202F &lt;code&gt;NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE&lt;/code&gt;, not U+2009 &lt;code&gt;THIN SPACE&lt;/code&gt;, because it is a single symbol, and must not be line-broken.  You probably also want to control the line breaking before the three-dot form of the ellipsis by using U+00A0 &lt;code&gt;NO-BREAK SPACE&lt;/code&gt; there. Notice how different these four scenarios work out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No spaces: stuff ... here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Font ellipsis: stuff … here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thin spaces: stuff . . . here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thick spaces: stuff . . . here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which for me looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nJPgS.png&quot; alt=&quot;ellipses demo&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, the ﬁrst two are both too skinny, and the last one looks too fat, leaving the third version to occupy the so-called Goldilocks position of being “just right”. It is indeed option number three, the one with thin spaces, which I have used in this posting – except when demonstrating alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I never, ever “type” these characters. I employ murine snarf-n-barf after invoking @Reg’s “sudo make mez a unicode” spell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ unichars '\p{space}' &#xA;U+0009  -- CHARACTER TABULATION&#xA;U+000A  -- LINE FEED (LF)&#xA;U+000B  -- LINE TABULATION&#xA;U+000C  -- FORM FEED (FF)&#xA;U+000D  -- CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)&#xA;U+0020  -- SPACE&#xA;U+0085  -- NEXT LINE (NEL)&#xA;U+00A0  -- NO-BREAK SPACE&#xA;U+1680  -- OGHAM SPACE MARK&#xA;U+180E  -- MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR&#xA;U+2000  -- EN QUAD&#xA;U+2001  -- EM QUAD&#xA;U+2002  -- EN SPACE&#xA;U+2003  -- EM SPACE&#xA;U+2004  -- THREE-PER-EM SPACE&#xA;U+2005  -- FOUR-PER-EM SPACE&#xA;U+2006  -- SIX-PER-EM SPACE&#xA;U+2007  -- FIGURE SPACE&#xA;U+2008  -- PUNCTUATION SPACE&#xA;U+2009  -- THIN SPACE&#xA;U+200A  -- HAIR SPACE&#xA;U+2028  -- LINE SEPARATOR&#xA;U+2029  -- PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR&#xA;U+202F  -- NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE&#xA;U+205F  -- MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE&#xA;U+3000  -- IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have other commands that tell me for more than everything you ever wanted to know about a particular code point.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ uniprops -a 'NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE'&#xA;U+202F ‹ › \N{NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE}&#xA;    \s \h \pZ \p{Zs}&#xA;    All Any Assigned Blank InGeneralPunctuation Changes_When_NFKC_Casefolded CWKCF Common Zyyy Z Zs General_Punctuation Gr_Base Grapheme_Base GrBase HorizSpace Print Separator Space Space_Separator SpacePerl XPerlSpace White_Space WSpace X_POSIX_Blank X_POSIX_Print X_POSIX_Space&#xA;    Age=3.0 Bidi_Class=Common_Separator BC=CS Bidi_Class=CS Block=General_Punctuation Canonical_Combining_Class=0 Canonical_Combining_Class=Not_Reordered CCC=NR Canonical_Combining_Class=NR Script=Common Decomposition_Type=Nb Decomposition_Type=Nobreak DT=Nb&#xA;       Decomposition_Type=Non_Canon Decomposition_Type=Non_Canonical DT=NonCanon East_Asian_Width=Neutral Grapheme_Cluster_Break=Other GCB=XX Grapheme_Cluster_Break=XX Hangul_Syllable_Type=NA Hangul_Syllable_Type=Not_Applicable HST=NA Joining_Group=No_Joining_Group JG=NoJoiningGroup&#xA;       Joining_Type=Non_Joining JT=U Joining_Type=U Line_Break=GL Line_Break=Glue LB=GL Numeric_Type=None NT=None Numeric_Value=NaN NV=NaN Present_In=3.0 IN=3.0 Present_In=3.1 IN=3.1 Present_In=3.2 IN=3.2 Present_In=4.0 IN=4.0 Present_In=4.1 IN=4.1 Present_In=5.0 IN=5.0 Present_In=5.1&#xA;       IN=5.1 Present_In=5.2 IN=5.2 Present_In=6.0 IN=6.0 SC=Zyyy Script=Zyyy Sentence_Break=Sp SB=Sp Word_Break=Other WB=XX Word_Break=XX&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T03:58:54.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-04T13:59:49.487" Score="-4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question thread [on hold] for being &quot;Unclear&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/130003/guide-to-check-thesis-grammar&quot;&gt;Guide to check thesis grammar?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm new to the site. I'm looking for some compherensive, easy-to-use&#xA;  guide with examples about the english grammar. I would like to improve&#xA;  the language of my master's thesis. Suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one were to argue that the question is &quot;Off topic&quot; and I would stay out of that argument, but surely the question is easily understood.  OP is looking for reference materials to improve his grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was this question put on hold?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T16:24:38.860" Title="In what way is this question &quot;unclear?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4216" CreationDate="2013-10-04T16:24:38.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear what the OP means by &quot;comprehensive&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear what the OP means by &quot;easy-to-use&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear what the OP means by &quot;examples&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear what the OP means by &quot;the english grammar&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear how the OP wishes to go about improving the language of their master's thesis by using a guide with examples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear what domain we are talking about. A master's thesis in literature? In maths? In genomics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your suggesting &lt;em&gt;Strunk and White&lt;/em&gt; in the comments aptly demonstrates that you yourself would give bad advice if the question were open. &lt;em&gt;Strunk and White&lt;/em&gt; is not a grammar guide by any stretch of imagination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T16:24:38.860" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4219" CreationDate="2013-10-05T01:26:46.440" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4204/speaking-english-with-native-speaker&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4204/speaking-english-with-native-speaker&lt;/a&gt; , which was asked on meta, has been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The justification given was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This question does not appear to be about English Language &amp;amp; Usage&#xA;  Stack Exchange or the software that powers the Stack Exchange network&#xA;  within the scope defined in the help center.&quot; – waiwai933&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asked (with minor edits):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any website where I can practice speaking English with native&#xA;  speakers. Actually, I have a TOEFL test soon so it would be better to&#xA;  find an English club online. Please suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question is about English language learning, I think it'd be a better match for English Language Learners than here, but that's not the main point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions about resources best asked on the main site, on meta (which some X Language &amp;amp; Usage sites do), or not at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2207/should-not-the-faq-have-an-entry-about-online-resource-questions&quot;&gt;Should not the FAQ have an entry about online resource questions?&lt;/a&gt; and the like, but they were from 2 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T02:59:34.977" Title="Should questions about resources be asked on main or meta?" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4218" CreationDate="2013-10-05T02:59:34.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It probably is less important where they are kept and more important that they not be difficult to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no hard and fast rule about where a given SE community should keep its resource questions; many communities welcome them on their main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start, EL&amp;amp;U welcomed resource questions on main. The community later preferred to have them on meta. I do not know the reason for the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose we could return to having them on main. My personal preference would have been to have them on main only because the purpose of meta is to deal with community policy, culture, and standards, whereas the purpose of the main site is to function as an expert resource about the English language. I think resource questions fit poorly with the purpose of the meta site and well with the purpose of the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I got here after the decision was made, what's done is done and it wasn't done badly, and I am unaware of a good reason to make an issue of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T02:59:34.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4222" CreationDate="2013-10-05T20:36:12.000" Score="-8" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129874/help-rewording-a-sentence&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129874/help-rewording-a-sentence&lt;/a&gt;) has been put on hold by several users, with the following reason being given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I disagree with this comment. In my question, I clearly state that I am looking for help in the phrasing such that it flows better. i.e. I am concerned about the words that I am using and finding a better way to express the concept....&#xA;This is not proof-reading: I have not asked if there are spelling mistakes etc and am not asking for it to be corrected. Simply a suggestion as to whether the phrasing can be improved - which I would argue is part of 'english language usage'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you therefore clarify for me what would be acceptable to ask within the realm of grammar/language usage. I ask as the links to other questions on the right hand side of the page show questions that, to me at least, are more specifically looking for help via proof-reading, but these have several 'up votes'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53351" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T20:07:58.220" Title="I Disagree with comments made when my question was closed or put on hold" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4220" CreationDate="2013-10-06T20:07:58.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simply a suggestion as to whether the phrasing can be improved - which I would argue is part of 'english language usage'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of our goals on EL&amp;amp;U is to avoid most questions that can typically be answered with a boring, &quot;Yes.&quot; In this case, of course it could be improved. Most phrasings could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; concern about the usage of a word or phrase than please edit your question to highlight that concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unable to phrase the question that way then you can always ask in our chat room for more generic advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T20:07:58.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T11:55:14.320" Score="-1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;re the 'off-topic' reasoning: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;isn't the spirit of the site ruling that 'questions can be answered &lt;strong&gt;unequivocally&lt;/strong&gt; using commonly-available references'? In the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/130341/plural-or-belonging-to&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plural or Belonging to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; thread (put on hold), I maintain that confusion arises because different 'commonly-available references' adopt different viewpoints. Now these different views probably ought to have been mentioned by OP, and have at least in part been addressed already - though not for this particular example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quote a previous thread: . . .In such case, the questioner is confused by the reference work; we should seek to clarify the reference work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T17:24:06.133" Title="'questions can be answered using commonly-available references' or 'questions can be answered unequivocally using commonly-available references'" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T20:50:23.817" Score="14" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am noticing a bunch of older questions stuck in the Unanswered queue that have an acceptable answer posted as a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; instead of an answer. For the first few I found I just copied the answer into a real answer and submitted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to do is flag the comment to somehow get converted into an answer. I don't suppose such a thing is possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greater question is whether to allow future comments that are really answers. In my opinion, there is little excuse to post a perfectly complete answer in a comment. It means the asker cannot select it as accepted and it somewhat acts like a dodge around the reputation system we already have in place for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of inundating the mods with really bizarre and controversial flags, let's have a talk about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T21:00:48.687" Title="How to handle old questions with answers stuck in a comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4223" CreationDate="2013-10-07T23:13:17.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be right about the OP's 'real' question, or you may not. Either way, the question needs editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could say &quot;Merriam-Webster says this, but Collins says, on the contrary, that&quot;; which &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be a fair SE question, but not one that can be guessed from the original. Close it and let OP ask what he really wants to know.  (&quot;&lt;em&gt;May&lt;/em&gt; be&quot; because I would hazard a guess that there is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; word for which two apparently contradictory definitions cannot be found by mischievous or uncomprehending enquirers. Usually the problem vanishes on close inspection by native speakers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could say &quot;There appear to be two schools of thought on this grammar point; which is right?&quot;  Definitely not a question we want here; almost the definition of &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it could say &quot;I don't understand how you form the possessive of a plural&quot;. There are so many duplicate questions already it wouldn't last five minutes; and more to the point, it would be bad for the site and bad for the questioner for us to explain a basic point that shouldn't be studied in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is definitely not &quot;up to us to clarify the reference work&quot;; it is up to us to answer the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I also agree with John Lawler that &lt;em&gt;unequivocal&lt;/em&gt; referring to a source more usually means 'vociferous' than 'supported by evidence', let alone 'undeniable'. That's a more general point, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T23:13:17.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4224" CreationDate="2013-10-08T17:39:10.697" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP has effectively raised two &quot;feature requests&quot; here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: Can we have a &quot;flag&quot; option for &lt;em&gt;Please convert this comment into an answer&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: Should ELU disallow the posting of answers as comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards #1, this seems a bit unnecessary to me. Any user can cut &amp;amp; paste the relevant comment into an answer (and make it Community Wiki, and/or attribute the original commenter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I strongly disagree with #2. People &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2653/why-are-answers-being-posted-in-the-comments-on-the-question&quot;&gt;often have sound reasons for &quot;answering&quot; in comments&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems a bit &quot;imperious&quot; for others to overrule their judgement. More to the point, how on earth would one &quot;police&quot; a rule saying you can't &quot;answer&quot; in comments? Who decides whether any given text constitutes a comment or an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T17:39:10.697" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-09T13:05:41.193" Score="-1" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose a possible solution to serial anonymous downvoting. Sometimes the phenomenon occurs within a short space of time, and in that case the system detects the voting irregularity and within 24 hours reverses the downvotes.  This system works and is an effective deterrent to would-be revenge-downvoters, as it means they are also identifiable to the moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens if the series of downvotes is spread over a distance of time? With not one downvote explained, justified or used as an aid to help the user improve his or her question. What then? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tDzbJ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an impressive list, isn't it? :) I'm not insinuating that I didn't deserve any of the downvotes. I'm not suggesting that the person responsible did not have any good reason for not downvoting. What I am saying is that this person, (who no longer has an account in ELU or in ELL) systematically and deliberately downvoted my questions and answers &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;anonymously&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. And because his account has been deleted I know exactly who the user was, which makes the downvotes that more unpleasant and sadder. And I swear if he had once or twice indicated why my answers or questions were weak, I would have listened to his criticisms and have adjusted my answers accordingly. But he never did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once, confidentially, when I was unaware of his duplicitous behaviour, I even asked him why I might be receiving so many downvotes. He said I sounded too arrogant and lacked humility. Well, that was a shock. But I listened and thought maybe I do sound like that. Maybe the voice which I hear in my head while I'm writing is different from the one others hear. Nobody wants to be disliked, even if it's on the Internet; it's a fact. Consequently, I attempted to soften my comments especially on Meta, and tried to be more diplomatic.  Funnily enough, things improved a bit, and I thought my &quot;advisor&quot; had given me some sound advice. Ha! (That's an ironic &quot;ha!&quot; by the way) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say in his defence, he also upvoted a few of my answers and questions, but he would nearly always leave a comment. Now these few sparse comments have been deleted along with his account, which explains how I know who the person was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, here is my idea on how to discourage anonymous downvoting. It is something which I suggested some time ago on Meta Stack Overflow but it didn't make a chink in that sea of comments, arguments, discussions which have engulfed that thread. See the link below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for every five downvotes a user leaves without a comment he should lose 5 rep points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the fith consequetive downvote a visual reminder should appear advising him/her to leave a comment. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the user explains one downvote in five, no change in rep points occurs. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The downvoter needn't specify he or she is a downvoter, as long as the comment is constructive and legible. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any user leaving meaningless incoherent comments or insults ought to be flagged by the community, and have 5 points deducted if he/she refuses to edit their comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is an infallible solution, and for high rep users losing five points is peanuts but... at least they will be some form of penalization for anonymous (at times inexplicable) down-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-downvotes#comment623905_165919&quot;&gt;Encouraging people to explain downvotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would have written an &quot;answer&quot; but I haven't nor ever will, earn 10 rep points, on this site so, I have to make do with a long comment. I read one suggestion made by mg1075 who might be onto something. What if instead of [earning] a badge, as he suggested, for every five downvotes with no comment you lose five rep points? Cont'd. – Mari-Lou A Sep 17 at 7:32 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cont'd ... This will still allow leeway for: 1. You just want a quiet life and no hassle. 2. to explain why would take too long. 3. Your downvote is confirming the general consensus that an answer is incorrect. 4. You're in a mean mood. But on the 5th consecutive downvote you would need to make a constructive legible criticism. Anyone who writes a mangled comment would be immediately spotted and be flagged by the community. I'm not sure if this idea has already been suggested, so apologies if it has been and was rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T02:47:06.883" Title="An idea to discourage excessive anonymous downvoting" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4224" CreationDate="2013-10-09T19:05:05.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I am not surprised that no one bothered to answer the question I actually asked... but it sounds like there is no comment-to-answer flag and no official StackExchange tool to do this. So the answer to this question is, &quot;No, there is no way to do this aside from copying the comment manually and posting it as an answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T19:05:05.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4227" CreationDate="2013-10-09T22:29:02.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, to play devil's advocate, I don't have a problem with anonymous downvotes because I think the downvote tooltip explains the purpose well enough. (So do other comments on the post; so do close votes; and so on and so on.) I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have a problem with systematically targeting a particular person with downvotes but that isn't the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the particulars in your suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for every five downvotes a user leaves without a comment he should lose 5 rep points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user explains one downvote in five, no change in rep points occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They already get a rep hit for downvoting which somewhat implies they don't mind taking the rep hit. So... effectively removing an extra point per downvote isn't really much of a deterrent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the fith consequetive downvote a visual reminder should appear advising him/her to leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't think downvotes &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; comments I don't really care about implementing this. Moreover, trying to force people to leave explanations of downvotes is actually a great way to make those people targets for retribution voting. This happens enough as it is and I would rather let people opt out of the drama/argument around whether a particular question or answer deserves a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvoter needn't specify he or she is a downvoter, as long as the comment is constructive and legible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are you suggesting enforcing &amp;quot;constructive and legible&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any user leaving meaningless incoherent comments or insults ought to be flagged by the community, and have 5 points deducted if he/she refuses to edit their comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange already has guidelines for comments even though most of EL&amp;amp;U ignores the recommended purpose behind comments. Which is to say that you can &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; flag comments that are incoherent, meaningless, insults or otherwise unhelpful. (I personally don't bother because EL&amp;amp;U seems happy with their comments and I have better battles to fight.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I sympathize with your plight but don't really think it needs any drastic attention or policy/feature changes. Chances are high you can outgrow any targeted downvoting by continuing to post valuable content and reaping the benefits thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T22:29:02.773" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4227" CreationDate="2013-10-09T22:34:07.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before suggesting a solution, could you identify the problem more clearly?  Serial downvoting certainly is a problem, but one that the mods know about and can usually solve (as they did here). Anonymous downvoting is not the same thing and is not, as far as I know, a problem. There may be many good reasons to downvote, and many good reasons not to leave a comment saying that you downvoted. (One of the latter is the number of users who cannot accept any criticism whatever (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2221/8019&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;), and will, if they find the identity of a downvoter, continue arguing and complaining beyond any sensible resolution; but there are others.)&#xA;Anonymity of voting is an important part of the SE philosophy; there is no logical reason why you should have to justify a downvote any more than you should an upvote.  And the comment threads are often overloaded as it is; why would you want to compel extra verbiage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarity, I don't think this is a bad solution; but I do think it's a solution to a problem that doesn't (or at the very least hasn't been shown to) exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T22:34:07.677" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4227" CreationDate="2013-10-10T02:47:06.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Votes serve a different purpose to comments. Votes crowdsource the value of the post as is. And that is the primary purpose of the site: to identify good questions and answers based on votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that comments can provide constructive suggestions, but they should not be tied to votes. Comments are helpful but they are secondary. Votes are what make the site work, not comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes without comment are beneficial, not awful. They let a person vote their conscience without being targeted for criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I look at the average of the votes I'm getting. If I'm getting mostly upvotes, my post is on the right track regardless of the comments. But if it's controversial or mostly downvoted, I try to improve it, whether or not there are comments to guide me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has decided that I need serial downvotes, that's their problem. I don't want to internalize their unhappiness. Its effect on my reputation is trivial. It disappears in the noise. I just let it go like water off a duck's back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T02:47:06.883" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2013-10-10T23:32:34.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with TimLymington's answer: similar answers should stand on their own merits. This came up in a couple of recent posts, where a user posted criticism of “repeat” answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129805/does-rhythm-have-one-or-two-syllables/129809#129809&quot;&gt;Does &amp;#39;rhythm&amp;#39; have one or two syllables?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/130319/is-there-a-word-for-the-act-of-clearing-ones-throat/130324#130324&quot;&gt;Is there a word for the act of clearing one&amp;#39;s throat?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases, the criticism attracted down-votes that made it difficult for good answers to rise to the top, even though Jon's answer (in my opinion) was the best and most ELU-appropriate response. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/11624682#11624682&quot;&gt;I discussed this in chat with KitFox&lt;/a&gt; and we agreed that, for users encountering similar posts like this, it's better etiquette to flag a moderator than to post critical comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T23:32:34.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-13T21:23:13.543" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pop-up says that the site prefers questions which have an answer (or words to that effect). That sounds a bit more like mathematics. We are dealing with language here. It is a branch of the humanities we are discussing. Should they not thrive on argument and debate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T07:54:06.727" Title="Why are questions which call for a discussion discouraged?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-14T04:25:44.130" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be instructive to merge questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the cornucopia of these questions on &quot;all but&quot;, with sterling answers, makes it toilsomely exacting and incommoding to compare and contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;●&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9323/to-be-all-but-x&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;to be all but X&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;● &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/64317/all-but-one-refused-to-do-means-everyone-do-it-or-only-one-did-it?lq=1&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;all but one refused to do&amp;quot; means everyone do it or only one did it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;● &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14078/interpreting-the-meaning-of-but-as-an-implication-for-exclusion-inclusion?lq=1&quot;&gt;Interpreting the meaning of &amp;#39;but&amp;#39; as an implication for exclusion/inclusion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;● &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9967/all-but-idiom-has-two-meanings?rq=1&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;All but&amp;quot; idiom has two meanings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;● &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33411/he-all-but-did-something&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;He all but [did something]&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;● &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55869/all-but-at-most-one-what-does-it-mean&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;all but at most one&amp;quot; - What does it mean?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T21:54:19.303" Title="Merge of Questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4233" CreationDate="2013-10-14T07:54:06.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is plenty of discussion here, but it is mostly confined to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and to comments. As posts are structured in a question-and-answer format, and the answers ranked according to votes, it is simply not possible to use the software behind this site as a forum. Long comment chains also get trimmed or referred to chat when they veer off the topic of the question or answer to which they are attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of having questions and answers instead of discussion is fundamental to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange model&lt;/a&gt; in general, not just EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[W]e bring together individual communities of experts on very specific topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We welcome questions that are clear and specific, representing real problems that you face; Stack Exchange is not the place for conversation, opinions, or socializing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably hundreds of other sites where discussion and debate about English are welcomed. There is nothing to prevent you from contributing there, or even promoting those sites over this one if you feel it is a superior model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T07:54:06.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4234" CreationDate="2013-10-14T14:46:27.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sort of duplication is the exact reason we close questions as duplicates if you can the answer you are looking for in the original set of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate way to solve this problem is to not wait for all of the various flavors to appear and then merge them; the appropriate solution is to aggressively close similar questions as duplicates. In rare circumstances this could also entail editing the original question if it happens to be too narrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what to do about the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; situation now that we failed in closing the duplicates, I vote to leave them be. I don't see anything specific to be gained in trying to edit, merge or close them now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2013-10-20T21:54:19.303" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T21:54:19.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-14T15:29:40.180" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'usage' part of EL&amp;amp;U is still not well-defined, and I read the FAQ and searched all of meta (citations &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1568/who-is-elus-audience/1584#1584&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2022/what-does-usage-mean-in-english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3918/are-questions-of-language-usage-discouraged/3920#3920&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/since-it-isnt-in-the-faq-are-we-as-answerers-expected-to-appeal-to-any-of-the/13#13&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2469/should-we-allow-google-ngrams-to-be-presented-as-statistical-evidence-without-qu&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here?lq=1&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of the following distinct types of 'usage' are/ are not allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Established usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regional usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Colloquial usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage in email &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage on social media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbal usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second, for each of those types, what sources can be used to document usage, and isn't this context-dependent?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In particular, if we rely on dictionaries or style guides, we can only address 1, 2. &#xA;So what sources do we use for 4.? (Not dictionaries, since they are lagging indicators by ~1-40 years)&#xA;For 6. Social media, is it ok to cite a Twitter or Facebook search?&#xA;How would we even find reliable contemporary sources for 7. Verbal usage at all? other than academic citations? And how would we resolve which one would be the most authoritative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;about page claims &quot;This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;On the face of it isn't even true for 3..7, since it implies there must be unambiguous authoritative reference(s) to resolve all questions asked on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/strong&gt; So: what's the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Motivated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/56960/11003&quot;&gt;comments on sources to support whether 'hand in'/'hand-in' can be a noun&lt;/a&gt;, which as I already commented can't be resolved by Google N-gram, Google Book Search or any other online resource I'm aware of.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T16:45:40.333" Title="What sources can be used to document usage, and isn't that highly context-dependent?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-16T08:35:55.360" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Is . . . grammatically correct?' or a variant is a commonly asked question on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though most people seeking to give a reasonable response often give answers such as 'This is not a question of correct or incorrect grammar. . .' and go on to address relevant issues such as frequency of use, sensibleness, clarity / ambiguity, likelihood to offend ... the fact remains that they/we are selecting the more rigorous of the common senses for (un)grammatical(lity) etc:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AHD does not give the broader sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gram·mat·i·cal&lt;/strong&gt;  ... adj.&#xA;  1. Of or relating to grammar.&#xA;  2. Conforming to the rules of grammar: &lt;em&gt;a grammatical sentence&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RHK Webster's allows the broader, perhaps generally perceived sense: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;of or pertaining to grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;conforming to the rules of grammar &lt;strong&gt;or standard usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(bolding mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this difference in terminology is so important on a linguistics site, perhaps there should be instructions that the term should not be used in questions, or that the term be used in just one of the two potentially conflicting ways?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T08:35:55.360" Title="'grammatically (in)correct' ... potentially conflicting meanings" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-16T10:35:35.920" Score="-6" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have yet to meet any contributor to the site who regularly marks undergraduate essays, in one of the humanities fields. That kind of person would surely be able to supply useful information as to what is accepted, and what is not, as 'correct' English grammar. after all one definition of 'correctness', in our variegated search for it, must be 'that which is accepted by examiners and others in universities etc'. Whilst the OED is a help, so much of it is archaic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T23:17:02.587" Title="Is there anyone out there who regularly marks essays etc?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4239" CreationDate="2013-10-16T18:58:23.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the quest for a single person to dictate the &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; is misguided.  Instead, I believe it will be more practical for you to study the concept of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I began participating on this site, I had no awareness that such a distinction existed.  None of my totalitarian English teachers had ever let slip that rules are not universal truths.  They simply meted out what is right and what is wrong, and woe unto the student who dared to defend his &quot;improper&quot; grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reality is, what is &quot;correct&quot; is sometimes debated between prescriptivists, and often subject to change.  What is &quot;correct&quot; today may not be the standard at some time in the very near future.  One good example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001437.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;the death of &quot;whom.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  It is widely believed by descriptivists that the rule for usage of who vs whom is on its deathbed (and I tend to agree.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't want to bog down this answer with too many words, because I would really like to have you read &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-descriptivism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this blog post.&lt;/a&gt;   I sincerely believe that it will be helpful to you.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T18:58:23.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4239" CreationDate="2013-10-16T23:17:02.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I daresay there are several of us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself have been out of the education racket for decades; but from the age of 12 until I left for college, I regularly marked undergraduate English papers for my father (it was his way of teaching me what he called 'practical grammar'), and I taught university-level theatre history and criticism for some years in the 1970s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canons here prohibit proofreading; but if you stand in need of it, I will be happy to point out&amp;mdash;or, if you prefer, to correct, silently&amp;mdash;any deficiencies of language and argument I notice in your posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T23:17:02.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4070" CreationDate="2013-10-20T08:53:47.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/updated-procedure-for-reporting-scrapers&quot;&gt;Updated procedure for reporting SCRAPERs&lt;/a&gt; from a Community Manager at Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: &lt;strong&gt;Send all reports of SCRAPERs to &lt;code&gt;team@stackoverflow.com&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Please include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the URL of the copied post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the URL of the original post on SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is the end of the tl;dr section.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to be the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; curator of the two SCRAPER reporting posts here on Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131846/report-sites-that-use-stack-exchange-content-without-following-attribution-rules&quot;&gt;one for attribution&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71820/report-high-google-ranking-stack-exchange-content-copiers-here&quot;&gt;another for ranking&lt;/a&gt;. The community was pretty good about using them, but like all list questions, they eventually turned into unmanageable messes that were hard to search. I've just saved all of the information posted there and deleted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community team has been working on improving its internal process for SCRAPERs behind the scenes, and now that I've joined the staff, I'm going to be in charge of it. By funneling everything through &lt;code&gt;team@stackoverflow.com&lt;/code&gt;, we can organize our own efforts better, and as a side effect, we won't be giving Google-juice to the very sites that are being called out for being naughty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T08:53:47.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-21T06:18:14.917" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was going through the list of badges, I felt there may be a badge which will be awarded when a user has 250 (or more, whatever seems appropriate) of his answers accepted; it may be a hard-to-earn badge though.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What say? Is is possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47192" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T06:18:14.917" Title="A new badge? Acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4245" CreationDate="2013-10-21T19:56:00.280" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is the question is asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/751/6102&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (with a last two questions removed) and would like to ask the same for this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question regarding a statement one reads somewhere and is not sure as&#xA;  to what meaning to derive from it, or has derived a meaning from it&#xA;  but would like to be sure whether the derivation is correct or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are questions of this nature welcome here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54608" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:03.740" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T20:14:30.723" Title="Query regarding nature of a statement. On-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4244" CreationDate="2013-10-21T20:14:30.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This type of question is probably not on-topic here unless it addresses a general grammar or syntax question, or if it is asking about meaning in specific and perhaps unusual context. Questions about interpretation of literature or proofreading the Internet, for instance, are not on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have enough rep that you could ask in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T20:14:30.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-23T19:09:59.997" Score="5" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequent the Electronics Stack Exchange and try to edit questions often which need a little bit of clean up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am puzzled by a couple of recurring patterns by question authors: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;failure to capitalize &quot;I,&quot; the personal pronoun (even though they capitalize the first word of sentences), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;failure to place spaces before opening parenthesis, or around other punctuation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples (from questions I've edited):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;up to 1.3V-ish if i dont hook them up to the controller...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I prefer the simplest way(i wonder if its by pre defined software)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I am curious to know about why cant i have controller which has more than ISR and also ,instead of interrupts at timer overflow,why cant it interrupt at its period match.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this kind of sloppy writing frustrating and often difficult to read. I realize that most of the authors of these questions are not native English speakers, so I expect some grammar issues, which I'm happy to try to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive my naivety, but are we simply attracting people of a language or culture where punctuation and capitalization are not used, making these concepts difficult for people to grasp? I believe we have a large percentage of India natives based on usernames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to improve the quality of these posts other than editing? It would be nice to educate somewhat, and I feel editing questions go unnoticed by the author, and creates busywork for the rest of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2241" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T01:06:51.463" Title="Why do we frequently see failure to capitalize &quot;I&quot; and incorrect spacing around punctuation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4246" CreationDate="2013-10-23T23:30:57.323" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a cheeky &quot;answer&quot;, but maybe we could change the tag on this question from &quot;discussion&quot; to &quot;feature request&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we have a pop-up warning whenever uncapitalised &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; is used in the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ask Question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; screen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T23:30:57.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-23T09:08:15.257" Score="4" ViewCount="1323" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone is aware of a similar service to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Ngram&lt;/a&gt; for words used on the web. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I'm not looking for the frequency of search terms used on the web (i.e.&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/trends/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Trends&lt;/a&gt;) but the actual frequency of words used across many websites over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54732" OwnerDisplayName="jamesmstone" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T12:49:44.277" Title="Word Frequency on the Web" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-24T17:56:34.923" Score="35" ViewCount="781" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit of background before I begin: I am a moderator on ELL, and I admit to not being entirely familiar with what is and isn't on-topic here on ELU. I am posting this discussion because I see a trend that I think needs to be addressed, and the following are just my brainstormed thoughts and opinions; they do not reflect official policy of either site. I really want to hear what you guys think, and I'm open to having my mind changed! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, today a question was closed on ELU and reposted on ELL. This is great; the question is actually appropriate for ELL, I'm glad the user was willing to open an account, and I hope they get great answers to their question. The problem I have is not with what happened with the question itself, but this comment that I read on it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is better asked on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first time I've seen comments like this. Usually they're less specific: &quot;We also have a sister site, ELL. You might find it useful/consider asking this there.&quot; And that's okay too; if a question is off-topic here on ELU and you think someone could get a good answer on ELL, of course it makes me happy for people to tell them that! The problem I have is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A question cannot be off-topic on one site for no other reason than that it fits better on another.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, above is my current personal opinion, though I do base it on my current understanding of the SE system.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of sites with overlap, and ELL and ELU are one such pair. There have been several discussions on this already, and I don't want to get into &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is and isn't on topic on each site; that's not the point. The point is this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some things that are on-topic on ELU. There are some things that are on-topic on ELL. There are some things that are on-topic on both. If a question falls into the &quot;could go either way&quot; category, it belongs on the site it was originally posted to. So that means that the only time we will be suggesting that a user post their question on the other site instead, it is because &lt;em&gt;their question is off-topic on the site they are currently posting it on&lt;/em&gt;. It is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; off-topic because it would work better somewhere else; it must be off-topic because &lt;em&gt;it is inherently off-topic on the site it was originally posted on&lt;/em&gt;. And once it has been determined that this is the case, then you decide &quot;is this question super awesome, and would it work much better on the other site (ELL or ELU)?&quot; If the answer to that question is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, then you ask the OP to repost (or flag for migration). But the question first has to be off-topic on the site it was originally posted to, in and of itself, regardless of whether the sister site existed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically what I'm saying is... Questions should never be custom-closed as off-topic because they are better suited elsewhere. A question is either on-topic or off-topic on a given site, completely independent of other sites in the network. The question you must ask is &quot;If ELU was the only site in the entire network, would this question be off-topic?&quot; If the answer is yes, close it &lt;em&gt;stating the specific reason for which it is off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, and then decide if you think it fits on ELL or not. If the answer is no, then the question is fine where it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so I'd love to hear the community's thoughts. Please do keep in mind that I'm not trying to discuss &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is and isn't on-topic for either site; we've done that plenty of times and I'm sure it'll come up again. I'm just saying that when something &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, it's gotta be off-topic because you guys think it's off-topic, not because it would maybe work on ELL. Go forth and discuss! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22119" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T06:26:14.123" Title="&quot;This question appears to be off topic because it is better asked on ELL.&quot;" Tags="|discussion|migration|scope|ell|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2013-10-24T19:10:46.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't disagree with your main point so this is mostly rambling thoughts on finding an appropriate solution to a few issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are basic English usage questions on-topic?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U needs to decide whether we want questions are simple, basic usage questions. Right now the community seems to be closing most of these as off-topic. I am assuming that this is because EL&amp;amp;U isn't terribly interested in teaching basic English and are more interested in the &quot;fun&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behavior wasn't true during my previous bout of activity a few years ago so I am unsure of the history here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4151/continued-recommendations-that-things-be-moved-to-ell&quot;&gt;Continued recommendations that things be moved to ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How should we handle topical overlap?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked a bunch of questions in chat about the goals for both ELL and Writers.SE in order to understand which place is most appropriate for specific questions. But the underlying question is when we should move questions between the sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a question is &quot;more suited&quot; for a sister site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a question is unsuited for EL&amp;amp;U but &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; suited for a sister site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been operating under the impression that (3) is our goal but since I personally tend to be very aggressive about what constitutes off-topic I do drift into (2) when I think it would benefit the overall relationship between EL&amp;amp;U, Writers and ELL and, therefore, the entire StackExchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is mostly emergent behavior based on feedback from the community and watching how the other contributors react to questions. It wasn't really a conscious decision looking to achieve an explicit goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If basic English questions are off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U but are on-topic at ELL what should we do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems correct to close a question as off-topic but how should we signal that we &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; think the question would be a good fit for ELL? The current close options don't leave a lot of wiggle room and I think this is where the &quot;because it is better asked on ELL&quot; phrase is coming from. We aren't &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; trying to say it is off-topic because it is on-topic on ELL. We are just trying to give the user a path forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... is the solution to just pick a better phrasing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is trivial. If you need help with simple English questions, ask at ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3898/is-it-okay-to-flag-a-question-for-migration-to-a-beta-site&quot;&gt;Is it okay to flag a question for migration to a beta site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor edit: I have started adding links to other relevant meta posts. If you find one, feel free to add it to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T14:18:51.237" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2013-10-25T04:12:05.517" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be brief, the questions which are usually &lt;em&gt;tagged&lt;/em&gt; as being better suited to ELL are not necessarily off-topic. I think a much more common reason for closing or suggesting that many of them be migrated to ELL is because they are considered basic English grammar questions; which until very recently were swept under the &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; rug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it therefore more considerate to say that the question is off-topic and better suited to the sister-site, or as Mr Hen suggested, tell the OP his/her question is trivial (for the real language experts and enthusiasts in ELU) and should be asked at ELL? Which might make it sound more like a landfill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree however, that a poorly thought out question on ELU will still be a bad question on ELL. But there are cases where a good question is classified as being &quot;too easy&quot; (also read, &lt;em&gt;too boring&lt;/em&gt;) for many veterans on ELU if only because they have seen the same type of question repeatedly asked on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2013-10-25T04:18:16.587" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T04:18:16.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2013-10-26T21:51:55.530" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wow.  I searched Google in search of a word and after several variations of my search, I landed on this site.  Thus, I was not aware there was another site.  My suggestion is that you word this phrase so that it does not make a newcomer feel as if they violated a policy.  Your current statement is courteous but there is a lot to learn to take full advantage of the site but initially when just looking for a word one might not be aware that there are different sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my thoughts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54841" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T21:51:55.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2013-10-28T00:56:46.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question is just another symptom of the problem that nobody seems to be able to pinpoint the precise difference between ELL and ELU in user-friendly, readily-understandable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is off-topic because it's too basic/trivial/(your term here).  Try ELL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is off-topic because this site is only for really advanced/academic/esoteric/(your term here) users of English.  Try ELL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure you could spruce up the language a bit, but in essence I think that's what people are getting at.  And as an uninformed reader, potentially new to ELU or SE as a whole, it would be hard not to take offense and/or feel like a dummy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speak for myself, but that's not the impression I want to leave people with.  So while &amp;quot;this question is off-topic because it belongs on ELL&amp;quot; is not technically correct, I see it as a reasonable compromise until the more fundamental problem of site definitions is addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T00:56:46.740" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4246" CreationDate="2013-10-28T01:06:51.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Forgive my naivety, but are we simply attracting people of a language or culture where punctuation and capitalization are not used, making these concepts difficult for people to grasp? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see punctuation and capitalization going downhill across the board, so I don't think it has anything to do with the types of people we're attracting.  I also don't think it has anything to do with native vs. non-native speakers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would attribute it to a combination of dwindling education and a general laziness about grammar/punctuation that is at least abetted by (if not outright caused by) communication on mobile devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any way to improve the quality of these posts other than editing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there's always FumbleFingers' cheeky feature request. :)  Some sort of notification when one's post has been edited has been bandied about as another feature request, which would also increase visibility.   The browsers have as-you-type spell-checking, but a grammar checker is probably a bit much to hope for.  Otherwise, I think you're probably doing the best you can by editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T01:06:51.463" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-02T00:36:29.280" Score="8" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which font was used for the site's headline &quot;ENGLISH LANGUAGE &amp;amp; USAGE&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I like it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10616" LastEditorUserId="577" LastEditDate="2013-11-11T16:43:03.267" LastActivityDate="2013-11-11T16:43:03.267" Title="Which font was used for the site's headline?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-02T07:51:23.113" Score="0" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the question on hallowe'en. I've no idea why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/133831/8360&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; has been deleted! Please would someone tell me why this has happened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T01:45:04.893" Title="An answer of mine which attracted 4 positive votes has been deleted and I have no idea why" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4256" CreationDate="2013-11-02T11:30:03.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was deleted because it was too long to be a comment and it didn't answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T11:30:03.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-02T21:14:50.473" Score="-4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;For reasons best known to himself, Reg Dwight has blocked any further progress on this question by  way of an edict that prohibits anyone voting unless they have already earned 10 points on the question. In such circumstances, how can progress be made? Only activity is allowed from those who have already been active. Seems a bit like 'sour grapes' to me!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T10:44:41.093" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T10:44:41.093" Title="Re: What cricket jargon has emanated from India?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2013-11-02T21:19:02.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume you refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133803/what-indian-words-appear-in-crickets-vocabulary&quot;&gt;What Indian words appear in cricket&amp;#39;s vocabulary?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that prohibits anyone voting unless they have already earned 10 points on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answering&lt;/em&gt;, not voting. Voting limits are defined site-wide as 15 rep required for an upvote and 125 for a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In such circumstances, how can progress be made? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10 reputation is not an insurmountable limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For reasons best known to himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quote, from the protection info block thingy: &quot;This question is protected to prevent &quot;thanks!&quot;, &quot;me too!&quot;, or spam answers by new users.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seems a bit like 'sour grapes' to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way precisely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T21:19:02.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2013-11-03T07:30:07.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Take a deep breath and please read this in a conciliatory tone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's actually a positive measure and if you think about it, a compliment. For a question to be &quot;protected&quot; it means it has generated a surge of interest and answers that goes beyond the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It, as waiwai933 pointed out, prevents users who have not gained any reputation points (and even more importantly, spammers) from posting nonsensical answers, answers which really should be comments, and actively discourages abusive and offensive replies (which I imagined happened fairly regularly in the past). Users can still post answers, they just need 10 reputation points. In other words they need to have contributed to the site by either posting a question with two upvotes or an answer which received at least one upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before posting inflammatory questions, one or two of which I have been guilty of doing myself in the past, go through the site, visit the sections &quot;votes&quot; and &quot;active&quot; to get a clearer idea of how ELU works and next time, make sure you know what you are talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T07:35:31.187" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T07:35:31.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4255" CreationDate="2013-11-04T14:56:14.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ampersand is &lt;strong&gt;Baskerville Italic.&lt;/strong&gt; The main font is a type of distressed/corroded &lt;strong&gt;Caslon&lt;/strong&gt;, which is given away by the serif at the top of the A, especially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some demonstrated at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fontscape.com/explore?7QI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.fontscape.com/explore?7QI&lt;/a&gt;, but not the particular example used here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T14:56:14.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4263" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-11-05T01:48:31.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is appropriate for marking questions that are about deleted content, such as questions, answers, or comments. These sorts of questions might ask about the reasons for deletion, or request discussion about the possibility of deleting content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-11-05T01:48:31.360" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T01:48:31.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4264" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-11-05T01:48:31.360" Score="0" Body="posts (questions, answers, or comments) that have been deleted" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-11-05T01:48:31.360" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T01:48:31.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2013-11-07T14:24:11.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; happen though. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134660/could-i-see-questions-before-or-while-listening-the-conversation-toefl&quot;&gt;this question about the TOEFL&lt;/a&gt; is off-topic on ELU, but probably not on ELL. It has nothing whatsoever to do with using English, but rather a lot to do with &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T14:24:11.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4153" CreationDate="2013-11-07T16:20:11.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/200177/172958&quot;&gt;Network policy has been updated as of Oct. 9 2013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tl;dr: &lt;strong&gt;Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the contact form linked at the bottom of every page.&lt;/strong&gt; Please include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the copied post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the original post on SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution for this answer: originally posted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14499/kevin&quot;&gt;Kevin&lt;/a&gt; on Meta ELU as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4077/94&quot;&gt;an answer to &quot;www.rqna.net scraping EL&amp;amp;U and SE content&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm currently the SE staff member responsible for tracking SCRAPERs down, and I'm already aware of/working on TechQues. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T16:20:11.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-07T20:12:04.660" Score="-1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last hour or so I have attempted to add comments to questions or answers in ELU and when I've clicked Post the comment just went into the bitbucket.  Is anyone else getting this?  Also, the usual text below the comment entry box is not showing the usual &quot;X characters left&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried entering comments in this same account in SO, and it is working normally there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CORRECTED.  It is ELU, not ELL.  I am also unable to post comments here in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: I tried restarting browser but nothing changes.  Can post comment to SO, but not ELU/incl.Meta.  FWIW I am using IE10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastEditorUserId="48112" LastEditDate="2013-11-14T18:51:41.630" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T18:51:41.630" Title="I am unable to post comments to questions or answers" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2013-11-07T23:19:29.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For whatever reason,  the browser tab I was accessing ELU with was set with Compatibility ON.  When I turned it OFF, the issue went away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why this is!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might this still be a bug? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T23:19:29.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4187" CreationDate="2013-11-07T23:24:13.423" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the serial downvoting mechanism worked and reversed the downvotes.  Nice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T23:24:13.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-08T02:21:47.833" Score="11" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got a Nice Answer badge on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134691/what-verb-should-i-use-when-someone-turns-into-a-zombie/134699#134699&quot;&gt;What verb should I use when someone “turns into” a zombie?&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks to our tireless techies, clicking on the notification link autoscrolled down to my answer. I couldn't avoid noticing a fairly short scrollbar thumb, suggesting either someone had posted a very long answer, or there were a lot of answers for what seemed to me a relatively trivial question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turned out to be the latter, and to my mind several of them were somewhat pointless &quot;Me too!&quot; answers. I knew my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege level&lt;/a&gt; gave me either a vote or unilateral &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;power to protect&lt;/a&gt; questions, but I hadn't realised until now that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/52764/what-is-a-protected-question&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;protected questions must be at least a day old&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything in that question up there on &quot;meta meta&quot; (the last link above) about the one day rule, nor anywhere else on SO. I'm tempted to think it has some rationale that doesn't apply to ELU, where any competent native speaker could reel off an almost endless list of alternatives for &lt;em&gt;mutate, turn, transform, convert, evolve, devolve, grow, mature, adapt, become [&lt;strong&gt;a zombie&lt;/strong&gt;]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously no-one ever actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; post the &quot;definitive list&quot;, so new users who haven't necessarily grasped the ideals of the site are tempted to dive in with &quot;yet-another-possibility-I-just-thought-of&quot;. And I think the fact that new users can &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; but not &lt;strong&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't always help here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is a&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot;&gt;feature request:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Can ELU dispense with the 1-day limit, please?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;or a&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot;&gt;discussion:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Why would &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; SO site want a 1-day limit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;so I'll tag both (Yeah, yeah - I know the second should really be on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;SO meta&lt;/a&gt; - Gimmie a break!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T22:20:23.247" Title="Why does ELU have a 1-day restriction on protecting questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4273" CreationDate="2013-11-10T10:17:00.773" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt;, it takes at least a day for a post to go viral and start attracting bad &quot;me too&quot; or duplicate answers from new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The day limit is to prevent the tool from being used prematurely, thus preventing the possibility of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers from new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod can bypass this limit, so in the rare case that you have a flash flood of bad answers, just custom flag asking for a question protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17952" LastActivityDate="2013-11-10T10:17:00.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2013-11-13T13:50:42.900" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://YourDictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;YourDictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also has &lt;a href=&quot;http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example sentences using specific words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crossword helpers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www3.oneacross.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;One Across&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/crossword.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OjoHaven's Crossword Solver&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastEditorUserId="2022" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T15:12:10.583" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T15:12:10.583" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T13:50:42.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-14T19:59:07.813" Score="14" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Laura, a product manager at Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I get into my announcement, I just want to let you guys know that we are not changing anything regarding English Language &amp;amp; Usage. This post is just to keep you informed of some things we're discussing at a high level for the whole network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to let this community know that I've started a discussion over on Meta Stack Overflow about some general guidelines for naming our sites, specifically our language sites, going forward. Feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/207404/standardizing-simplifying-se-site-names&quot;&gt;read and discuss my post over there&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of my proposal is that &quot;&amp;amp; Usage&quot; generally makes a site name longer and more difficult to say and type without adding much, if any meaning. I'd like to rename existing Stack Exchange language sites to just &quot;X Language&quot; and drop &quot;&amp;amp; Usage&quot; from both existing sites and any new language sites we launch in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage is the exception to my proposed rule. We don't want to change your site's name.&lt;/strong&gt; This name is your brand, and has been for a long time. More importantly, we have two English-language-focused sites, and I think it's necessary for both EL&amp;amp;U and English Language Learners to retain their longer names so that it's easier for users to disambiguate the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;We're having a conversation about the way we name language sites that you're welcome to participate in if that's of interest to you, but we have no plans to change the name of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 11/25:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks for your feedback; we're moving ahead with dropping &quot;&amp;amp; Usage&quot; from the site titles of the other SE language sites. Those changes will be made this week. I know that some people feel ELU's name should be changed as well; I encourage you to start separate discussions about that, but if you do, please focus on this community specifically. Talk about what you think is wrong with the current name, propose new names and how the new names address the problems you have with the current one...but keep the focus on the scope and needs of &lt;em&gt;this community&lt;/em&gt;. Do not propose new names for English Language Learners as part of the conversations here; that's a separate community (and one that has by and large been happy with their current name) that should have separate discussions on their meta if they feel their name is problematic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, Stack Exchange does not rename sites, especially ones that are as old as ELU. If there is strong community consensus, however, we will of course discuss it with you; I don't actually see any consensus here about what specifically is wrong with the current name and what a better name would be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11199" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T21:08:45.370" Title="A conversation about language site names" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4277" CreationDate="2013-11-14T21:17:36.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why English Language &amp;amp; Usage wouldn't be renamed. The “and usage” part is just as redundant for English as it is for other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, there is an existing branding, more so than for the other language sites which are still in beta. On the other hand, it is especially important for a site about the English language to have a name that makes sense and is well-chosen — an objective that “English Language &amp;amp; Usage” doesn't fully achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of English Language Learners is no argument against removing the “&amp;amp; Usage” part from the name of ELU. After all, English Language Learners is about usage just as much as ELU is (if not more, since about the only difference in ELL's topic is that it excludes history and etymology, which aren't about current usage and aren't focused even on past usage). If anything, ELU should drop the “&amp;amp; Usage” part and replace it by a different adjective or qualifier that marks it as different from ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a reason to justify the change of name of a branded site, consider that the existence of ELL seeks to carve out part of the topic of ELU. Questions which were formerly accepted as on-topic are now rejected from ELU (even if this isn't the party line, it does happen in practice). There has been a change in scope, so it should be reflected by a change of name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T21:17:36.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-11-14T22:14:10.323" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit that I haven't spent much time on eiter ELL and ELU and I haven't done any systematic research, so this post will be based on anecdotes rather than statistically significant samples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference in terms of official scope between &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt; is minimal. The following topics are listed on both sides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL adds “Practical problems you encounter while learning English” — whatever that is supposed to cover. (Maybe “practical problems you encounter while teaching English” would have more semantic content.) It's unclear to me how such problems would be off-topic on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU adds “Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)”. I don't see how these topics would be off-topic on ELL (perhaps the intent is that ELL would focus on usage while ELU would tend to veer more into linguistics). ELU also adds “Etymology (history of words’ development)” which is explicitly excluded from ELL. That's a pretty minor difference all things considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves the audience as the sole differenciation factor between ELL and ELU. ELL is for “people who are learning or teaching English as a foreign language” while ELU is for “linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts”. The upshot is that threads on ELL are more likely to veer towards teaching to non-natives (with more formalized grammar, special attention paid to false friends, etc.) while threads on ELU are more likely to veer towards scientific concepts from linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary &lt;strong&gt;the two sites accept essentially the same questions but invite different kinds of answers&lt;/strong&gt;. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are precedents with Stack Exchange sites whose scope significantly overlaps but that target on different audiences, however in all other cases the ground covered by one of the sites is significantly larger than that covered by the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/301/the-scope-of-this-site/305#305&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Unix &amp;amp; Linux&lt;/a&gt; is mostly &lt;em&gt;but not exclusively&lt;/em&gt; a subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; and is a superset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://askubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;Ask Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;. AU in particular tends to invite different kinds of answers from U&amp;amp;L for similar questions (one site caters more towards novice Ubuntu users while the other caters more towards advanced users, not unlike ELL vs ELU — however the difference is more subtle than this). U&amp;amp;L vs AU is however a special case in two ways: Ask Ubuntu has official ties with Ubuntu, which would not be possible with a less focused site; and the volume of AU is about 5 times that of U&amp;amp;L and roughly equal to that of SU despite the scope hierarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of ELL and ELU, do the different leanings really matter in practice? In my experience, not really. A majority of posts on ELL involve no pedagogy and a majority of posts on ELU do not involve linguistics, so they would be suitable for either site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference I've observed between ELL and ELU is what happens when a question can be answered either with a simple answer (“phrase A is better than phrase B”) or with a detailed analysis (showing other possibilities, discussing historical, geographical and sociological trends, providing insights by relating to other expressions, etc.). On ELL, the question either lucks out and gets a good answer, or is poorly received and gets a one-line answer. On ELU, the question either lucks out and gets a good answer, or gets closed. It seems to me that ELL and ELU are on par when it comes to generating good answers, and only differ in how they react to questions that are perceived as uninteresting. (Both sites often fail to capture the interest in questions that could be much more than “should I say A or B?”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4168&quot;&gt;Matt describes&lt;/a&gt; the difference between ELL and ELU in different terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;IMO, ELU is about the research of the English Language and analysis of English usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;IMO, ELL is really about helping people learn to communicate effectively in modern, everyday English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a dichotomy here. “Communicating effectively in modern, everyday English” is something that can be the subject of research and analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4173&quot;&gt;terdon&lt;/a&gt; and &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4180&quot;&gt;Bradd Szonye&lt;/a&gt; express different points of view, and I think terdon's phrasing covers both answers's main sentiment: ELL is for practical advice, ELU is for pedantry. &lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is a dichotomy, but a false one. Good ELL answers are not weak. A good ELL answer should say: “textbooks say X, but everybody except the Queen writes Y and pronounces Z”. A bad ELU answer is equally bad on ELL. A good ELU answer may mention nuances relevant only to Shakespeare scholars — but so would an ELL answer if the asker was reading Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't often have questions about English, but when I do these days I have no idea where I should ask. Should I ask on ELL since by definition I am a learner, not a native speaker? Or is my English good enough to be accepted in the big boys' site? Should I ask on ELU since I appreciate well-researched and documented answers? Or should I on ask ELL since I would benefit from natives' intuition? I've read quite a few of these “ELL vs ELU” meta threads (though admittedly not all of them by a long shot), and I'm as puzzled as ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I don't see such a major difference between ELL and ELU, neither in the kinds of questions that are well-received, nor in the quality of answers that they generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the difference is endlessly debated and that after months of debate no consensus has been reached is a big hint that the difference doesn't really exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T22:14:10.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4273" CreationDate="2013-11-14T22:20:23.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not want to prevent a question from becoming popular and engaging people. Answering a question tends to engage visitors, even if it's to post a redundant or content-free answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can protect a question at any time, but we are encouraged not to do this. A question is automatically protected if three answers from new users are deleted, and we are encouraged to wait for this to happen, even if experience has taught us that certain questions are likely to suffer from a rash of poor answers in the next few hours. The idea is to wait for initial damage to happen, then use protection to prevent further damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As you can probably tell, I tend to agree with you. I think it's best to protect questions as soon as it becomes clear that they're attracting a bad sort.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T22:20:23.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4277" CreationDate="2013-11-15T21:20:39.870" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is nothing to worry about and nothing to be concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, in fact I suppose that after &lt;em&gt;IL&lt;/em&gt; we will never see another &lt;em&gt;X Language Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt;, and, furthermore, existing &lt;em&gt;X Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; sites are close enough to be closed because the lack of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, EL&amp;amp;U and ELL belong to a list apart, and they will remain active for a long time, changing or not changing their names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="24531" LastEditDate="2013-11-16T09:43:04.423" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T09:43:04.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-16T06:12:54.520" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a paper recently. The reviewers were intrested in the material of the paper the topic and its novility but unfortunately they had  serious concerns about the quality of its English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to ask you friends, how is it possible to improve the quality of my paper using this place. I mean is it possible to break some parts of the paper into smaller parts  and ask you friends to help me to improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57500" OwnerDisplayName="Mamal" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2013-11-16T18:15:47.427" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T22:31:51.857" Title="Asking for help in order to improve a paper" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2013-11-17T09:13:48.770" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non native with what I believe to be a proficient command of the language I  visit both EL&amp;amp;U and ELL on occasions. Except on very basic questions that would be closed on ELU I don't really see much of a difference.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Latest examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138019/correct-usage-of-but-for&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; asked on EL&amp;amp;U is to me very basic, the meaning of &quot;but for&quot; is understood by most English natives, and the explanation is found in any dictionary&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; without much effort. Nevertheless it was not redirected to ELL and answered on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;StoneyB's answer and following comments to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/13268/where-can-i-use-arrive-to&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that  fits ELL requirements is in no way an answer suited for ELL. Obviously I am not objecting to his having given us this example, but I am sure lots of natives with already a great command of English would have been happy to read it, but they won't unless they visit EL&amp;amp;U (for whatever reason).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That was just an example, both ways, over the months I have found others. I strongly believe the line between both sites is very thin and that audiences from both sites can benefit at times from all answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, yes I'm joining John M. Landsberg's proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For example &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/but_for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/but_for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T09:45:04.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4285" CreationDate="2013-11-17T10:54:06.390" Score="34" ViewCount="2397" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a stupid question to ask, and maybe I will be chastised for not doing the research myself, but recently I have been having doubts on the validity of Ngram charts. Let me explain where my misgivings lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, in the American corpus, does it contain only American publications. Would a Charles Dickens novel, for example, never show up in its results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, how reliable is Ngram for showing the difference between AmEng and BrEng spellings and language usage? For example, I saw these charts in tchrist's posted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87978/how-and-when-did-american-spelling-supersede-british-spelling-in-the-us&quot;&gt;How and when did American spelling supersede British spelling in the US?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7alMu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5fzun.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, did &lt;em&gt;tires&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tyres&lt;/em&gt; (as in auto-mobile wheels) really exist in 1800? What I believe we are seeing is the verb, to tire. (EDIT: Many thanks to @Mario Elocio who pointed out that tires existed in 1800  but were made of iron, not rubber.) And how reliable would the chart be in any case if we typed &lt;em&gt;humor vs humour&lt;/em&gt; if Google books included quotes spoken by American and British speakers in novels? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the same doubts concerning the British corpus, would a J.D. Salinger novel or even a quote from &quot;Catcher in the Rye&quot; never appear in the British corpus results? If books are published in both countries which have different copyright laws (if I recall) then wouldn't both corpora include those texts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if one wanted to find out whether a recently coined expression or even an old slang expression is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;spoken&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; more frequently in one region than in another e.g in the North of England compared to the south west, how would one go about researching it? Wouldn't Ngram be useless in this case? The same question could be said for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;y'all&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; vs. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;you guys&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; I keep reading that the former is usually confined to the southern states of the US whereas the latter is more commonly said elsewhere in the States. Maybe after the phenomenal success of &lt;em&gt;Breaking Bad&lt;/em&gt; the TV series, this usage is changing and is spreading across all the states and even crossing the pond as I write this piece. How would I know, if I am living in Italy? :*(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; On ELL @Matt has posted this Ngram on his answer to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/13358/1694&quot;&gt;What is a word for “very slow”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I3WyN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a perfect example that illustrates that Google Ngram is unreliable for certain tasks. This diagram cannot illustrate whether one expression is more &lt;em&gt;widely spoken&lt;/em&gt; than another. What it seems to be telling us is that the expression &quot;glacial pace&quot; has recently become more frequent.  Despite Matt having changed some of the searched words (this is version B), I still don't understand the scope of this Ngram. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" OwnerDisplayName="Mari-Lou A" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T02:20:54.207" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T02:20:54.207" Title="How accurate is Google Ngram as a language reference source?" Tags="|discussion|ngrams|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4284" CreationDate="2013-11-17T16:07:05.577" Score="12" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;re AmE vs BrE: Dickens is published in the US and UK. Most popular authors will be in both. Check out the ngrams info for the source of the publications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;re speech vs print:  ngrams only captures those things that have been printed in books, not  transcribed speech. So lots of spoken slang, nuances if pronunciation, regional varieties are sparsely represented and even when so have all sorts of orthographical issues.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;re accuracy (which is really your question) grams is a tool that works very well...as all tools it can be misused. It is not telling falsehoods but it may be misunderstood. It will search for the thing you stated. But that may not be the right thing to look for. For example, if you compare &quot;y'all&quot; and &quot;you all&quot;, the latter may find appearances of &quot;... you. All ...&quot;, it may even find you followed by all which are in different constituents &quot;The bank wiill not  give you all the cash&quot;. So you have to be very careful about the question you're asking&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;actually there may be 'difficulties' (I hesitate to say bug) with the encoding of the original texts and the meta data. It is well know that the meta data can have all sorts of wrong things, wrong dates, wrong authors, OCR errors, etc etc etc，so....&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advice is to use ngrams with caution and always look atthe actual results rather than just blindly following the graph results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NGrams is a great tool but it shouldn't be used blindly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" OwnerDisplayName="Mitch" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T16:13:00.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4282" CreationDate="2013-11-18T22:31:51.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions such as &quot;Does the word &lt;em&gt;novility&lt;/em&gt; exist?&quot; or &quot;What is the difference between &lt;em&gt;how it is possible... .&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;how is it possible...?&lt;/em&gt; would be welcome here &lt;strong&gt;so long as&lt;/strong&gt; you have done some research of your own, and need help interpreting the results.  If you ask without any background, many people are likely to assume you are just too lazy to do the work yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as Brian said, proofreading is off-topic; 'how to improve this piece' is both off-topic and primarily opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T22:31:51.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4288" CreationDate="2013-11-19T20:44:16.930" Score="16" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/708/hats-or-no-hats&quot;&gt;question on Meta.GD.SE&lt;/a&gt; asks whether they want to participate in a Hat-Fest like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3460/are-there-any-elu-specific-hats&quot;&gt;ELU did last year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt; that because there isn't a similar question here, it might actually be a foregone conclusion that ELU will get them again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it might not be and it could be that we've been forgotten; or it's every other year; or I haven't noticed that People Said No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we getting Hats for Christmas 2013? I want them. I rather enjoyed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Not sure if this should be a feature-request or not. Probably not.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:10.913" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T00:39:32.880" Title="Are we getting hats this year?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|winterbash-2013|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4287" CreationDate="2013-11-19T23:46:43.867" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we are getting hats this year! Stay tuned for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T23:46:43.867" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4110" CreationDate="2013-11-20T04:31:18.920" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that it is not spam as it is just one guy reporting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57784" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T04:31:18.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-21T05:22:33.857" Score="5" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a web developer, and I've created a framework to be used by other developers. I just want to give it a name, and I thought about creating a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;portmanteau&lt;/a&gt; word for it. I thought of combining &lt;strong&gt;simple&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;native&lt;/strong&gt;, and to form &lt;strong&gt;simpletive&lt;/strong&gt; pronounced /'simpeltiv/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask about its correctness on EL&amp;amp;U? If not, is there any other site on StackExchange to ask it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: By correctness, I'm talking about morphological rules, also phonetics and phonology of the made-up word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10594" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T16:14:09.387" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T19:12:39.957" Title="Is it fine to ask questions about neologism and new words morphology here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4290" CreationDate="2013-11-21T08:22:38.340" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do mean by &lt;em&gt;correctness&lt;/em&gt;? It's a made-up word; it can't be right or wrong. You would need to word the question to explicitly define what answers you expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could ask whether your portmanteau word conjures its two constituents in the reader's mind [note that it's the &lt;em&gt;reader's&lt;/em&gt; mind; most people — and certainly everyone here — will first encounter the word in writing].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could ask whether your proposed pronunciation is reasonable. Since no-one will have heard the word before, they will have to imagine how it sounds for themselves. Ask whether their idea matches yours (which is implied in your question here, but make that explicit). Ask whether there are any rules which govern how your word might be pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to give much in the way of background. Questions about computer names tend to get stamped on, so don't make it quite so obvious. Concentrate on the English surrounding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do I create a successful portmanteau word?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written a simple, native development framework, and as a name for it I've coined the portmanteau word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;simpletive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;em&gt;simpletive&lt;/em&gt; conjure the two words I used to create it? (There's a clue in the first sentence.) If it doesn't, are there any rules which would help do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like that to be pronounced /'simpəlˌtiv/. Is that how you pronounced it to yourself, and if not, are there any rules which govern pronunciation of unfamiliar words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not generally a good idea to have more than one question mentioned per post; but here you are asking about the &lt;strong&gt;mechanics&lt;/strong&gt; of creating your word, and providing an example which should guide the answer about recognisability. You may find that someone answers one half and provides a link to an answer about the other half. That's fine, because your question is still a general pointer which joins things together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By making the question &lt;strong&gt;general,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;How do I do this?&lt;/em&gt;, and not the specific &lt;em&gt;Is this any good?&lt;/em&gt;, your question may be of use to others. This is a fundamental principle of SE questions. (&lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; know that already; you're asking here! But I mention it so that this answer may be useful to others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you have a sufficiently general, but ultimately helpful, question, make sure that no-one has asked something similar before. In this case, the automated suggestion system doesn't find one, so you may be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T08:22:38.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2013-11-28T02:40:40.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker of English, a poet, and I find words interesting. I am not yet an expert. A detailed analysis of a joke helps me understand the corner cases of the language. Of all the joke questions under discussion I learned something from all but two. One was deleted, the other was about Chuck Norris, but that was because I have already studied meta humor. What would I have learned from the one that had been deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58168" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T02:40:40.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4284" CreationDate="2013-11-29T11:59:10.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;tire&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;tyre&lt;/em&gt; example would be heavily confounded by &lt;em&gt;tire&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;become tired&lt;/em&gt;, and to a tiny extent by places in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyre,_Lebanon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lebanon&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyre,_New_York&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;New York&lt;/a&gt; (wp), as well as the iron tyres mentioned in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that serves as an example of how ngrams can easily fool or be fooled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48571" LastActivityDate="2013-11-29T11:59:10.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-30T09:57:55.597" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to delete my own post as a question, but when I try, it says &quot; you can't answer a question that has answers&quot; . Any idea how to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52019" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Can I delete my own post with answers?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4295" CreationDate="2013-11-30T14:31:30.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can delete your own question, but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; if it has been answered. Others have taken time and effort to provide an answer, and it would not be fair to deny them reputation for that contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96670/deleting-my-own-question&quot;&gt;Deleting my own question&lt;/a&gt; on MSO, the SE-wide meta, which provides more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T14:31:30.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4295" CreationDate="2013-11-30T18:03:50.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can delete your own question, but not if it has been answered and the answer has been upvoted. Others have taken time and effort to read and provide an upvote, and it would not be fair to deny their contribution and their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="24531" LastEditDate="2013-11-30T20:23:40.077" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T20:23:40.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4299" CreationDate="2013-12-03T11:32:14.763" Score="0" ViewCount="2114" Body="&lt;p&gt;If yes, then which tag should I be using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Wordplay on WebDAV - DAV - caDAVer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is this software tool called &lt;code&gt;cadaver&lt;/code&gt; that is used to connect to &lt;code&gt;Web DAV&lt;/code&gt; repositories over the Web. Below the author of the tool explains how he came up with the name.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now was the word cadaver chosen because it contains the word DAV or is there some other reason why we have the letters &quot;ca&quot; prefixed to the word DAV? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Frequently Asked Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-&gt; Why this horrible name? It's a play on words: WebDAV - DAV - caDAVer. Gettit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the About page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avoiding asking questions relating to: &lt;em&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does wordplay fall under this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31880" LastEditorUserId="31880" LastEditDate="2013-12-04T06:43:46.437" LastActivityDate="2013-12-04T12:12:20.077" Title="Can I ask questions related to wordplay?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4298" CreationDate="2013-12-04T12:12:20.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This particular question is answered in caDAVer's FAQ: it's called that because cadaver has the letters DAV in it. That's what the line you've quoted says to me. I don't think it's a matter of opinion. Of course, if you're still unsure you're better off asking the person who created the name than you are asking us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to questions about word play. They should be taken on a case by case basis. Much like when someone asks about the meaning of lyrics — sometimes that's OK, sometimes (mostly) it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question boils down to opinion, then it's not suitable. If there is a fact, that is not found in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/484/common-accepted-online-resources&quot;&gt;general reference&lt;/a&gt;, that needs to be explained, then it is suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2013-12-04T12:12:20.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-05T00:47:07.233" Score="34" ViewCount="1195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just logged on and found that, no doubt for my convenience,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;everything on the ELU page was now in a different place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that someone would like to take responsibility for this putative improvement.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, do you spose they could give us a conversion table for finding the stuff we're used to?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or do we have to endure someone's idea of a &quot;tour&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Postscript&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have just been notified that this question has been awarded the &lt;code&gt;Nice Question&lt;/code&gt; badge. &#xA;  In honor of this token of automatic esteem, I've restored the original title,&#xA;  since it's now, officially, &lt;code&gt;Nice&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post-postscript&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Andrew Leach points out that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The question might be nice, but most of the upvotes were for the edited title.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; didn't say &quot;What the f***?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's &lt;strong&gt;impossible&lt;/strong&gt; to say &quot;What the f***?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's putting asterisks in my mouth and I don't like it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I leave it to the readers. Before once again restoring my original title, I pause and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  leave the topic open for discussion here. It's basically just another user interface issue.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the tag that I was forced to choose for this question says &quot;discussion&quot;, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2013-12-05T19:35:18.143" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What the f*** just happened?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2013-12-05T04:48:18.427" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want you can blame me, It won't do any good, but I read about it in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/12/a-new-top-bar-for-stack-exchange/?cb=1&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; and said nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58168" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2013-12-05T05:32:44.233" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T05:32:44.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2013-12-05T19:01:12.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is being discussed/debated extensively on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;My take on it&#xA;is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/q/7429/150988&quot;&gt;Complaints about new interface design&lt;/a&gt;;&#xA;I’ve asked to have it moved (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.superuser.com&quot;&gt;Meta Super User&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;to Meta Stack Overflow, but apparently that’s not a priority for the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T09:30:20.160" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T19:01:12.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-06T11:32:48.783" Score="11" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the time of the year again, namely it is December 2013, and so we shall now refresh our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/4304&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T16:33:09.473" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2014" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-01-01T03:04:10.963" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T11:32:48.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2013-12-06T11:32:48.783" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4O19.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T11:32:48.783" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T11:32:48.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-07T11:14:47.597" Score="17" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly three years ago, someone wondered aloud: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/703/is-elu-becoming-esl&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Is ELU becoming ESL?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Actually, this bit of soul-searching reaches back to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69/is-this-site-for-english-as-a-second-language&quot;&gt;one of this site's first meta questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people who are struggling to learn English find a site about English, they see it as a lifeline of sorts. However, depending on who you ask, many resulting questions do not necessarily fall under ELU's intended umbrella. To address this problem, an English Language Learners was proposed in Area 51. About a year ago, that site went live on beta, where I think it's serving a useful function, getting over 4,000 visits a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All along, some cautioned that having two language sites would be too confusing, that newcomers would have a hard time figuring out where to ask their question, and that it would be very hard to definitively define when a question should go on one site vs. the other. Those reservations have proven to be well-founded – although I still believe that, more than anything else, most “asking on the wrong site” problems stem from newcomers not being aware of both sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A concept may be hard to define, but that doesn't mean it's hard to understand; sometimes, you simply “know it when you see it.” And that's how I feel about some of the more novice questions still popping up on ELU with regularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a problem? Personally, I enjoy helping non-natives understand tricky nuances of our complex language – but very beginner questions such as these aren't what I hope or expect to see when I log onto ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140783/an-apple-is-green&quot;&gt;Which one is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• An apple is green.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• Apple is green.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• The apple is green.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Please describe for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140764&quot;&gt;Which one is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm a beginner to English, today I saw my friend in restaurant, we have spoken bit, then I have said let's we will meet the same place on next to next Monday Or let's we will meet the same place on next on next Monday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140733&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a difference between 'unknowingly' and 'unintentionally'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• Sorry, it was unknowingly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• Sorry, it was unintentionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not “bad” questions; they are interesting to think about, and it can be rather satisfying to formulate a suitable explanation, such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;unintentionally&lt;/em&gt; means “I didn't mean to,” while &lt;em&gt;unknowingly&lt;/em&gt; means “I didn't know any better.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while I &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; to see such questions when I log onto ELL, they don't necessarily strike me as the sort of thing that would appeal to “linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy of sorts: I enjoy watching our local high school's drama club, and I enjoy going to professional productions. But when I go to a Broadway theater to watch a professional production, I don't really want to watch a high school drama club perform there. Some of these more elementary questions strike me as being the wrong production troop on the wrong stage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, the creation of ELL hasn't seemed to stem the tide of novice questions pouring onto ELU. Some have recently pointed out that, as things are going now, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the two sites. Maybe not, but does that mean we should merge them? I guess that depends on what the community wants to be. If the community really wants ELU to be peppered by such questions, then I suppose ELL should not have been created in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for borders and dividing lines, after giving this a bit of thought, I've come to agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4249/this-question-appears-to-be-off-topic-because-it-is-better-asked-on-ell/4251#comment13962_4251&quot;&gt;StoneyB&lt;/a&gt; that the difference isn't always so much about the question itself – or even whether or not the O.P. is a native speaker – as it is about &lt;strong&gt;what the O.P. is looking for in an answer&lt;/strong&gt;. One good example is a question recently asked by ESL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140731&quot;&gt;Is there a rule or something, that explain where to put “even”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• You don't even have a chance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;• You even don't have a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the O.P. is actually only interested is knowing which of those seems more grammatical or sounds more natural, then it was probably an ELL question. However, if the O.P. is indeed interested in learning more about limiting modifiers and the proper placement of elements with focus, then ELU was the right place to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it matters not to me how this conundrum ultimately resolves itself – we can keep the two sites, or abandon one and keep the other. If we keep them both, though, I would hope there would eventually be considerably fewer ELL questions – and ELL &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; – on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T12:55:42.073" Title="Roses are red, apples are green" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2013-12-07T20:10:12.530" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consensus appears to be that the new title bar is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;illegible  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ugly  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are, it appears, negligible concerns, outweighed by a parsimonious reluctance to consult a Real Designer about decisions which The Programmers are perfectly capable of botching on their own. These are, after all, the same people who compose and decompose the &lt;em&gt;Help&lt;/em&gt; pages and other informational matter without consulting an Actual Writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What vexes me is the lack of notice. A couple of weeks ago the admirable &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11199/laura&quot;&gt;Laura&lt;/a&gt; took the trouble to announce, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4277/24489&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/857/32&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;, that these sites were specifically excluded from a new policy which might have occasioned distress and misunderstanding. Why was the same trouble not taken to announce a new design which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; affect us all? Why could this not have been announced on each site&amp;rsquo;s meta, instead of being relegated to the Community Bulletin? &amp;mdash;which I&amp;rsquo;m sure many users besides me (and Prof. Lawler) never notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T20:10:12.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-12-08T01:46:02.527" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the problem for first time users not simply that the site is called &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;? — yes, the tag line &amp;amp; FAQ sections give a more detailed description and if you know about &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; sites, you'll probably pick the right one — but it's a little ironic that we're expecting the type of people who post &#xA; &lt;code&gt;&quot;Apple green. Please describe me&quot;&lt;/code&gt; to even understand what &lt;code&gt;&quot;Linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&quot;&lt;/code&gt; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was learning Spanish &amp;amp; looking at a Spanish Q&amp;amp;A site, and I still wasn't that great at the language, if I understood that it was for &quot;Spanish language and usage&quot;, I too would probably ask my question before reading the FAQ page or trying to work out if I'm an etymologist or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added to this, the link to tell you about ELL in the help section seems a bit buried. Checking just now, I had to go Help (in the menu) &gt; Help Centre  &gt; &quot; What topics can I ask about here?&quot; — &amp;amp; once there, scroll half-way down the page to get to a link to ELL. (Is this really the quickest way to find ELL from ELU?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know we're probably constrained by the StackExchange format, but I think if we could have a more prominent banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Learning English? Try English Language Learners&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the homepage or first Help page, it would help a lot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, combined with changing the name of the site to reflect its true nature, even if it meant having a title that doesn't use &quot;English Language&quot; — e.g. the OSX exchange has &quot;Ask Different (Apple)&quot; as its title — something that's obvious to Mac aficionados, even if other people may not understand it as an Apple site at first (maybe &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; were getting questions about &quot;Apple is green&quot; :) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm assuming that I'm coming late to the party here &amp;amp; that these points have probably been made a dozens time before on meta, but just my 2¢!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25567" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T01:46:02.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-08T03:35:36.947" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140857/break-down-break-out&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140857/break-down-break-out&lt;/a&gt; was apparently posted by a spammer, and will be deleted. Is it worth rescuing?  I could answer it, but I would like at least a second opinion on it's worth. If you think it would go better at ELL, let me know that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T11:36:05.863" Title="rescue a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4310" CreationDate="2013-12-08T11:36:05.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no limit to questions of the form &quot;which of these two prepositions goes best after xxx?&quot;, a fact the spammer knows and plays on. Though superficially interesting, it isn't something that we here can explain better than a grammar book, and (equally important in fact, though less so in theory) answering this one would soon flood the site with similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question whether it would be welcome on ELL can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be answered on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T11:36:05.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-12-08T17:42:50.053" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot; aren't capable of naming a site with the degree of clarity needed to exclude questions they don't want, then perhaps we are all exactly where we belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48653" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T17:42:50.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-12-08T18:35:35.760" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we need is simple, quick, easy migration between the two sites. Doesn't matter what the sites are named, what we write in the FAQ, how many times we explain the difference on the various metas, because &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;people don't read&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. So the best way to tell a new person that their question belongs on the other site is to &lt;em&gt;move it there&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T18:35:35.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-09T00:01:42.513" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new here (6th day) but love it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today is Sunday, and I notice that the quality of the questions is way down. I'm guessing that it's crunch time, and a lot of people with homework questions are posting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a fair assumption? Are Sundays always like this? (Admittedly I have a very small sample size.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T00:01:42.513" Title="Oh Sunday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-09T04:00:26.167" Score="0" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, each of us has his or her own answer to this question.  When I am asked I tell students that the way we talk changes rapidly and, because there is a solid cultural reason that we need to understand what people read and wrote a few hundred years ago, academics have a valid reason for slowing change in the English language.  I'd be interested to learn what others say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48653" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T18:21:48.037" Title="Why does &quot;good grammar&quot; matter?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-12-09T13:15:51.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite new here (7th day), so perhaps I shouldn't be voicing an opinion at all. I answered that Apple question, and some worse than that, because I assume users don't know where to go. If they could be directed easily and quickly to this site, I would feel better about not answering them. I myself only found this site yesterday when someone moved a post from ELU that I was in the midst of answering. And I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; read the introductory material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know nothing about &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site. Is there sufficient interest here such that moving questions will result in as rapid a response? Do people split their time between this site and ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is that a problem? Personally, I enjoy helping non-natives understand tricky nuances of our complex language – but very beginner questions such as these aren't what I hope or expect to see when I log onto ELU...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this. The number of homework-type questions and obvious non-native questions was surprising to me yesterday. That said, I want to be helpful, but I'm not sure how to best do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T13:15:51.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4315" CreationDate="2013-12-09T15:59:14.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on your audience, of course, but, assuming we're dealing with younger students, I wouldn't attempt to motivate them by explaining that they'll need to understand proper grammar so they can read and understand what people wrote centuries ago. After all, we're dealing with a generation where it's often a small victory when you can get them to read a book before watching the movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's something to be said about proper grammar, though, particularly when it's time to start a profession, or even get a job. I remind my kids, &quot;When you turn in a job application, it's probably going into a stack with 50 others. How will your application stand out, to the point where it gets pulled off the applicant pile, and put into the candidate pile?&quot; When the application form asks, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why do you want to work for our company?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and you can't muster anything much better than an internet cat (&quot;Bcuz i need ca$h&quot;), there's a good chance your application will collect dust for a long time. If you have a strong command of language, though – if you can be articulate, precise, and grammatical – you stand a much better chance of rising above your peers from the outset. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, language evolves, but that's not a good excuse to remain ignorant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for slowing down change, I don't mind language evolving, but I'd rather not see it devolve. It's one thing to see a dictionary's usage panel gradually accept a new usage of a word, it's another to plainly sound unintelligent. Everyone will draw their own lines between what makes them bristle and where they are comfortable. Personally, I don't find the use of &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective particularly irritating, but I'd rather hear fingernails scrape across a chalkboard than hear &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/137907/is-funner-a-word&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;funner&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in a sentence. But that's just me. If everyone drew their acceptability boundaries in the same place, there'd probably be little need for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T15:59:14.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-12-10T13:24:11.557" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could detect what language the user is coming to the site expecting (the &lt;code&gt;navigator.language&lt;/code&gt; property comes to mind) and if its prefix is anything but &quot;en&quot; we could show them a banner, translated into the requested language, which suggests that they might be more interested in ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might not work better than any of the other ideas, but it would at least annoy the hell out of @RegDwigнt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2013-12-10T17:43:32.123" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T17:43:32.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4320" CreationDate="2013-12-10T15:55:23.047" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday another user asked if it's appropriate to put a comma before an ampersand in a list, and the question was marked as a duplicate of comma-before-and questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree that this is a duplicate question. An ampersand is a typographic or display element and not a word, so it's normally handled differently in print--specifically, without a comma preceding it even if the style elsewhere is to use a serial comma. AP style mentions this, and I think other reputable guides do, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to appeal the decision to mark the question as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53907" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T16:06:05.333" Title="Request to reconsider duplicate mark" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4319" CreationDate="2013-12-10T16:06:05.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question here is a good way to appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As similar as the questions are, I think the best solution is to add an answer (or improve an existing answer) on the earlier question explaining the exception when &quot;and&quot; is spelled &quot;&amp;amp;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T16:06:05.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4315" CreationDate="2013-12-10T18:21:48.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer is similar to J.R.'s, except my students read voraciously, and still do. One of my students, my son, gave me a book he enjoyed greatly: &lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt;, by Cormac McCarthy. For about a year, I was unable to read it; it is full of sentence fragments. Regarding punctuation, he said, “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” While I loved His &lt;em&gt;All the Pretty Horses&lt;/em&gt;, he takes it too far in &lt;em&gt;the Road&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where grammar is concerned, as a Latin teacher, I was unmoving. I always told my students that there would come a day that they would need to impress &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; generation with their command of the English Language. Here I agree completely with J.R. To stand out is a good thing. As for motivating others, it's like the best reason for etiquette - it puts people at ease. If you speak clearly and well, your audience won't struggle to understand your meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T18:21:48.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-10T20:26:45.937" Score="5" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141199/make-everything-as-simple-as-possible-but-not-simpler-albert-einstein&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; earlier,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did Einstein really say, &quot;Make everything as simple as possible, but&#xA;  not simpler.&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments it was suggested that this question of off-topic because it is about the origins of a phrase, not about the English language.  Since I first started writing this meta post, my question has been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, etymology is specifically on-topic for this site.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4075/what-is-the-origin-of-zomg&quot;&gt;There&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/124590/what-is-the-etymology-of-yellow-and-why-is-it-so-different-in-other-european&quot;&gt;are&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36883/origin-and-evolution-of-hapless&quot;&gt;numerous&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17/where-did-the-term-ok-okay-come-from&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt;, and the etymology tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot;&gt;attached&lt;/a&gt; to thousands of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a long-time StackExchange user, I did read the FAQ and meta for this site before I posted my question, and found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is nothing in the charter which disallows questions asking if one specific person said one specific thing,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about the origins of a single word is specifically allowed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was previously &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2846/are-who-first-said-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;established in meta&lt;/a&gt; that asking a questions &quot;Who said X first?&quot; is not on-topic, but that's not what I'm asking here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are questions of the form &quot;Did (Person X) say (Phrase Y)?&quot; on-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, why not, and has this been previously established for this site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7379" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T23:39:02.660" Title="Are questions of the form &quot;Did X say &quot;Y&quot; on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2013-12-10T21:11:13.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd see a distinction between the development of the English language, vs one person's use of the English language. E.g. if you asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where does the phrase 'a pound of flesh' come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a phrase that has come into general use. It has it's origin in Shakespeare, though that's not obvious to the person asking the question — they've arrived at the phrase through seeing it in use and are unsure how it could have taken on its meaning, which they couldn't fully grasp without being told the context of the original play. To me, that's what makes it an &quot;English language question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example above, by contrast, there isn't a question of etymology (as in, each word is being used as per its standard dictionary definition) — you're simply looking for an attributable source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question would be of interest to people who like the English language, the second to people who like Albert Einstein :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25567" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T21:11:13.340" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2013-12-11T11:45:24.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;May be off topic, but then again...&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a8gyW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Einstein&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T11:45:24.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2013-12-11T16:27:12.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not want us to become a version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quote Investigator&lt;/a&gt; .  Instead, we should close such questions and refer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T16:27:12.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4328" CreationDate="2013-12-11T22:21:00.617" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a general consensus that questions (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/100548/8019&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) which ask about how to fit your text within MLA (or other stylebooks) are off-topic, since both 'what MLA mandates' and 'the way your professor prefers papers set out' are valuable advice to the student, but cannot be classified as 'English Language &amp;amp; Usage'. Often the questions are welcome on Writers.SE, or occasionally on Academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However Chris, the OP on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/141404/8019&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, points out that the distinction is unlikely to be clear to a newcomer to the site, particularly if he has discovered that ELU has a specific &lt;code&gt;mla&lt;/code&gt;  tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't dispute that the tag has been valuable in some cases; but is it still valauable enough to be worth the confusion? Or is it time to retire the &lt;code&gt;mla&lt;/code&gt; tag,and possibly add a sentence to the help along the lines of &quot;specific formats are off-topic here&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T23:26:26.250" Title="Is MLA on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4327" CreationDate="2013-12-11T23:26:26.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The advice I gave Chris, and that I think ought to be adopted, is that if the style question involves (for instance) punctuation or grammatical preferences espoused by specific style guides, we ought to take them here. For things like citation formats, send them to Writers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't had the opportunity to talk this over with the Writers mods yet though. I'll keep you updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T23:26:26.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-13T15:09:16.377" Score="26" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just got in rapid succession these two &lt;em&gt;soi-disant&lt;/em&gt; “questions” over on main:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141662/please-help-to-interpret&quot;&gt;Please help to interpret&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141661/please-help-me-with-this-sentence&quot;&gt;Please help me with this sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking as questions go, those are imperatives not interrogatives, of which we seem to be getting more and more of the former type, basically too-localized/personal demands for assistance instead of legitimate inquiries about general matters whose answers might someday help anyone else but the original querent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that isn’t my point. Rather, my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why oh why oh why isn’t &lt;em&gt;“Please help”&lt;/em&gt; on that stoplist?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a per-site stoplist or a global one across all SE sites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who decides the stoplist: SE staff or per-site moderators?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is the one I really wish I am looking to see answered here.  The other two are merely auxiliary followups to the first, more matters of curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there exists a stoplist that blocks certain things from being included titles, such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  Yes, of course people can just write &lt;strong&gt;pr0blem&lt;/strong&gt;. That’s the same as exist for things like &lt;strong&gt;fukc&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;such&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet still we have a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; filter&lt;/strong&gt; yet no other, yet I do not understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, please see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/107989&quot;&gt;Why can't we use the word “problem” in titles?&lt;/a&gt;, plus the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/107989?lq=1&quot;&gt;34 questions&lt;/a&gt; linked to that one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/question-restrictions?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;MSO question-restrictions (&lt;em&gt;née&lt;/em&gt; stoplist) tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/561&quot;&gt;What should we do about question titles containing vulgar words?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1561&quot;&gt;Should EL&amp;amp;U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/91&quot;&gt;Using asterisks, as in fuck or f*ck?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/6099598&quot;&gt;How to filter out profanity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4300&quot;&gt;What the f*** just happened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the reasons behind it, but I personally find the obsequious pleas of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Please help me!”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to be far more irritating than Dr. Lawler’s &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;“What the fuck just happened?”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some current stats on questions with “Please help” in them include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ELU: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;109 results&lt;/a&gt;; meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;5 results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ESL &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;24 results&lt;/a&gt;; meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;0 results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Programmers &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;84 results&lt;/a&gt;; meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;7 results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SO &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;128,109 results&lt;/a&gt;; meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22please+help%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;117 questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One proposal is to auto-stick “Please help” questions in the Low Quality queue. I suppose that would extend to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+plz&quot;&gt;the recent spate of 11,381 &lt;em&gt;plz help me&lt;/em&gt; questions&lt;/a&gt; as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it is a sempiternal battle, but why does &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; get singled out? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can’t we get some sort of assistance for some of these other ones as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But we should probably let &lt;em&gt;“Prithee masters, I beg that ye kindly holpen me”&lt;/em&gt; slide. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T15:09:16.377" Title="Why isn’t “Please help” on our titular stoplist?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|titles|question-restrictions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4332" CreationDate="2013-12-14T17:01:30.773" Score="-7" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really like English (grammatically, that is; not the literature, culture, etc., which make the language worth it), I just have to use it. It's filled with grammatical and orthographic nonsense (and that's when one writes right - no pun intended). May I make a question asking for giving suggestions to improve it, referring failed attempts in the past, etc.? Would it be on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59750" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T01:05:05.493" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T17:09:36.550" Title="Can I ask a question about changing the English Language?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|questions|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4331" CreationDate="2013-12-16T01:03:56.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longer answer is that a question like you propose would not have any conceivable right answer, and so it does not fit the SE Q&amp;amp;A format. It would most likely be closed as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; because of this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you might possibly find some people in chat who would be interested in discussing your topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T01:03:56.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4334" CreationDate="2013-12-16T06:29:40.863" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;When performing review tasks an option appears saying, &quot;Flag or disagree...&quot; but no option to disagree exists.  For example if a question has been flagged as &quot;not an answer&quot; or &quot;very low quality&quot; I think I ought to be able to say, &quot;No, I think it's fine as is.&quot; That's how I interpret the intent of the &quot;disagree&quot; option anyway.  However, clicking on the pop-up results in only &quot;flag&quot; options being presented, so I have to cancel out and wander away- or is there something I'm missing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastEditorUserId="1046" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T11:26:47.500" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T11:26:47.500" Title="How does one actually disagree when reviewing an item?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4333" CreationDate="2013-12-16T07:03:59.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble actually finding this button (possibly due to the fact that I'm a mod), so I can't verify it for you, but buried in the middle of the flag options, there should be one for disagreeing. It's not the ideal place for it, but it should be there; if it isn't, let me know how you're getting to this dialog and I'll see if I can find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T07:03:59.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4287" CreationDate="2013-12-16T08:41:03.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2013.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;We now have hats!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T08:41:03.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2013-12-16T11:06:45.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new top bar is a network-wide feature, so it wasn't announced before anywhere but on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;main Stack Exchange meta site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/top-bar&quot;&gt;many complaints about the new top bar on the main meta&lt;/a&gt;. Most of the complaints are being dismissed as fear of the new. Neither usability nor design are perceived as legitimate reasons for complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're feeling lost, refer to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210186/new-top-bar-quick-reference-guide-where-has-the-link-to-x-gone/210187#210187&quot;&gt;New top bar quick reference guide / Where has the link to  gone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T11:06:45.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4331" CreationDate="2013-12-17T17:09:36.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been numerous attempts to reform spelling in the English language. Nearly all of these have been ignored (Noah Webster managed to make a few changes in one English-speaking region, but he had the advantage of writing dictionaries.) The advent of texting may actually result in a few beneficial changes, tho I can't see this improving the spelling of more than a handful of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, prescriptive grammarians have been trying for at least two centuries to make English speakers obey certain grammatical rules (some of them sensible,  some of them unbelievably stupid). For the most part, English speakers have been ignoring these people, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would you want to waste your time trying to reform English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5754" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T17:09:36.550" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4344" CreationDate="2013-12-17T19:15:27.097" Score="28" ViewCount="828" Body="&lt;p&gt;The unicorn hat is still stumping those of us who discuss these things in chat. Has anyone had it awarded yet? And is anyone ready to break the oath of silence that comes with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, is anyone interested in discussing it and/or making jokes or other jovial observations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our chains are getting overgrown, so make sure to focus your efforts on the answers that don't have as many comments. Kthxbai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T02:30:33.863" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Has anyone on EL&amp;U been awarded the 'I See Your Point' hat yet?" Tags="|discussion|unicorns|winterbash-2013|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="66" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-17T19:29:41.233" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been awarded that hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One person at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/211979/i-dont-see-your-point-how-do-i-earn-this-unicorn-hat&quot;&gt;meta.se&lt;/a&gt; suggested it might be tied to accepted answers in meta. Of course that might be specific to meta.se, rather than j random meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also suggestions that it's tied to comment activity in meta, either comment upvotes or comment replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T16:43:51.617" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-17T20:53:34.510" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read somewhere it's do with rollbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's find out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="9505" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T19:32:59.560" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T19:32:59.560" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-18T01:00:29.783" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My theory is that it has to do with getting the Coding Horror hat and some other highfalutin' hat like Bounty Hunter.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/211979/i-dont-see-your-point-how-do-i-earn-this-unicorn-hat&quot;&gt;This guy&lt;/a&gt; from Gilles' comment has both of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T01:00:29.783" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-12-18T12:55:42.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a person who learns English as a second language I'm on the other side of the table, and I see the problem in a slightly different light. I have also difficulties to decide which site to use, but not because I'm not aware of both of them or didn't read the faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been using these sites for a long time, but my main concern is how to have a detailed answer from a native speaker without hurting the goals of Stackexchange and the users. I'm aware that ELU is mainly used by native people who are here to discuss the more complicated aspects of their mother language, and I know it can be tiring to answer to basic-level questions of language learners. On the other hand I'd like to have detailed answers from native speakers.  And this happens with a much greater possibility on ELU, than on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm wrong, but if you compare the quality (and the quantity) of most of the answers on the two sites, you will see it by yourself. Perhaps the reason is that ELL is a newer site, and less people know it, but it doesn't help on the problem of the general quality and quantity of the answers. I understand that it's not fun for a native speaker to answer to basic questions, but it is also not fun for a non-native speaker to have an answer on ELL from an other non-native person who probably speaks the language worse than the poster him- or herself. As far as I can see a lot of answers come from non-native folks on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole I'd rather ask my questions on ELL, because this way I don't break the rules and troll a linguistic site asking simple questions, while I know I would have a better chance to have a proper and detailed answer on ELU full of high-quality native speakers (which doesn't mean that there are no high-quality native speakers on ELL, I'm just talking about the chances).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I don't know a good solution, I just wanted to show the other side of the coin and the concerns of a non-native learner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user51460" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T12:55:42.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-18T13:20:24.433" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my true and firm belief that you must believe in unicorns to get this hat. I don't, and as you can clearly see, I have no hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T13:20:24.433" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-18T16:39:50.030" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this answer gets to 40 upvotes, I will get my &quot;Oh the Horror&quot; hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help, especially if you're one of those to have received the hat from me on the club question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20739" LastEditorUserId="20739" LastEditDate="2013-12-30T11:31:14.617" LastActivityDate="2013-12-30T11:31:14.617" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-18T17:14:21.163" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post on Meta.ELU in a long time, and I've just earned the hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confirms the hypothesis that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; this is not about upvotes on posts, but on comments. Experimentally, the comments can be all in one thread, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T17:14:21.163" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4346" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-12-18T19:26:34.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The unicorns are one of three pony races inhabiting the magical land of Equestria. With short, straight horns bearing a helical pattern, they are capable of performing magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most unicorns are only limited to one or few spells - about all can perform levitation magic, which they use commonly for daily functions similarly to how humans use hands, although with skill they are able to lift multiple items, manipulate objects hidden from sight and reach a distance significantly farther than human hands ever could. Besides this common spell, they possess individual skills related to their natural talents - search spells, music-performing magic, scrying, healing and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unicorns used to be the ruling class of the ponykind, next to military Pegasi and peasant Earth Ponies. Nowadays the differences have been significantly levelled out but still most of top of elites of Canterlot are composed of Unicorns. They are also more commonly associated with prestigious jobs while Earth Ponies usually take more menial positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="9505" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T20:06:58.057" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T20:06:58.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-12-18T19:26:34.903" Score="0" Body="Awesome magical equines" OwnerUserId="9505" LastEditorUserId="9505" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T20:07:00.997" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T20:07:00.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4287" CreationDate="2013-12-18T19:43:01.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I have the marauder hat please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T19:43:01.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-18T20:07:43.863" Score="15" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am digging through the old unanswered questions and periodically someone will be asking for a word that simply doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T15:21:21.460" Title="How should we handle single-word-requests that don't have a matching word?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-08-14T05:11:58.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4349" CreationDate="2013-12-18T20:23:29.733" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say &quot;there is no such word.&quot; Maybe suggest some things that are close, but point out why they don't exactly work. And most importantly, &lt;em&gt;upvote the answers&lt;/em&gt; which say that there is no such word. We can't compel the OP to accept these answers, but we can make sure they get upvoted by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T20:23:29.733" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4349" CreationDate="2013-12-18T20:24:32.037" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;There is no such word&quot; is very much a valid answer to a single-word request. Not unlike how &quot;no&quot; is very much a valid answer to &quot;is X grammatical in dialect Y?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More to the point perhaps, &quot;there is no such word&quot; is a much better answer than &quot;here's a random combo of letters I myself just sticked together&quot;. That is to say, we are not a site for coining neologisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course none of what I just said is a carte blanche for posting deliberately obscure single-word requests. The community is free to vote to close any and all questions that it deems to be over the top. Things like context, a sample sentence, the desired part of speech, and really just as many details as possible are never too much to ask for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2013-12-19T00:58:10.633" LastActivityDate="2013-12-19T00:58:10.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-19T02:45:20.840" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This place sure puts the &quot;HAT&quot; in &quot;WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2013-12-19T02:45:20.840" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-20T16:26:15.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can figure out the unicorn hat by looking at all the comments on this question, regardless of whether you read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T16:26:15.727" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4349" CreationDate="2013-12-20T23:51:11.713" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In those cases, suggesting an alternative word or phrase that mostly fills the bill is better and more informative than just saying &quot;I don't know&quot; or &quot;no such word exists&quot;.  I don't know all English words, nor does anyone else on this site&amp;nbsp;— but we, &lt;em&gt;collectively&lt;/em&gt;,  have an awesome vocabulary!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25824" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T08:38:03.893" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T08:38:03.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4395" CreationDate="2013-12-21T15:20:41.553" Score="45" ViewCount="1801" Body="&lt;p&gt;41 people join in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each person upvotes every answer, other than theirs, to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we have 41 answers and votes, I will systematically accept each answer in turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;41 people get the &quot;Oh the Horror&quot; &lt;strike&gt;and &quot;Marauder&quot;&lt;/strike&gt; hat&lt;strike&gt;s&lt;/strike&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Easy.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;Note: as @Gilles has noted, we can't get the Marauder hat in Meta.&#xA;You can, however, answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142142/what-is-a-marauder&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and I will award you the marauder hat.  Ping me on chat if you haven't got it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T19:29:09.000" Title="&quot;Oh The Horror&quot; Hat Club 2013" Tags="|discussion|winterbash-2013|" AnswerCount="44" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4349" CreationDate="2013-12-21T15:21:21.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you should do is answer with what you know, and someone with mastery of vocabulary can state faithfully that they are pretty sure there is no such word (if it is the case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that is not often satisfying to people to state it so baldly. What is better is to elaborate, explaining possibly nearby words and their connotations (and how they are not sufficient for what is asked for), or if a neologism is offered how it sounds. Some suggestions may be rare, obsolete, technical, or dialectal which can be almost the same as 'does not exist'; that also calls for elaboration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, sometimes a request is just too specific: &quot;Is there a word for how a dog's ear flops over when he turns his head trying to understand what you say?&quot; (Oh please is there a word for that?). Sometimes there -are- words for such things, but then again sometimes there are not, so answer which way is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T15:21:21.460" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T15:21:52.467" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this is a fantastic idea.  In fact, now that I am in, we only need 40 others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20739" LastEditorUserId="20739" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T17:53:14.270" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T17:53:14.270" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T15:57:39.103" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we do that we could lose our upvoting capacity for real questions, mightn't we? isn't it limited ? &#xA;Have a safe journey, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastEditorUserId="12918" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T16:07:15.453" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T16:07:15.453" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T16:34:34.543" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sign me in! &#xA;It is interesting that though I tried to qualify for some (secret?) hats on English &amp;amp; Usage site looks like without a single post (or maybe an answer) I can't get any hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60268" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T16:34:34.543" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T16:44:14.867" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got nothing better to do today anyway, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but won't we need 41?  Can't upvote your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T16:44:14.867" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T16:51:51.670" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T16:51:51.670" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T17:52:58.657" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interesting experiment in hat-testing-to destruction (is there a single word for that?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T17:52:58.657" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T17:55:38.657" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed a great idea.  I am in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I'm reading the Guru badge requirements right, does this mean you plan to accept all the answers in turn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Even if the hat thing doesn't work, this club will at least generate a bunch of badges.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Ah, throwing in the Marauder hat confirms the game plan.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2923" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T17:55:38.657" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T18:13:02.500" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, if you are selling hats, then I consider this the perfect business opportunity, because I am buying hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T18:13:02.500" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T19:16:09.620" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haaaaats! And I've always wanted a pirate hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dunno if I want Jeff Atwood's hair, though. Is that a required part of this endeavor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T19:16:09.620" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T20:48:20.107" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first rule of Hat Club is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everyone in Hat Club talks about Hat Club.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I'm wearing the boat hat.  This works out well for me because snail and also boat.  Unfortunately, there are no hats on meta :-(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus &lt;strike&gt;haiku&lt;/strike&gt; senryū:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;俳句をね&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  面倒くさい&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ムズすぎよ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28567" LastEditorDisplayName="user28567" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T21:30:38.097" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T21:30:38.097" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T20:59:26.590" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've gone too far. We might as well continue into the darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastEditorUserId="30784" LastEditDate="2013-12-26T23:10:48.650" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T23:10:48.650" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T21:24:32.273" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not being witty enough to pass muster, I take the lazy man's way out. Oh, and I'm in. The quote should be gender neutral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T21:24:32.273" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T22:22:42.747" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm answer No. 13. Which is fine, because in Italy it's 17 which brings ill fortune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, may I have that black wig, the horror one, it gets so wearisome dying my hair. A wig would solve all my problems, ta very much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T22:22:42.747" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-21T22:55:01.127" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forty&lt;/strong&gt;, you say?  Forty’s not so much, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/142821/&quot;&gt;provided that they’re only goblins, as any bear can tell you&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘. . . I killed a goblin or two with a flash—’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Good!’ growled Beorn. ‘It is some good being a wizard, then.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘— and slipped inside the crack before it closed. I followed down into the main hall, which was crowded with goblins. The Great Goblin was there with thirty or &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;forty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; armed guards. I thought to myself “even if they were not all chained together, what can a dozen do against so many?” ’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A dozen! That’s the first time I’ve heard eight called a dozen. Or have you still got some more jacks that haven't yet come out of their boxes?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T07:18:23.817" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T04:05:04.860" Score="45" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, 'Fine,' but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, 'What a horror!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Marilyn Monroe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T04:05:04.860" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T04:49:40.597" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mmmm, smells good. Is it hat yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey, while we're waiting, how about a little &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGhY4yUYU8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T04:49:40.597" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T05:24:43.053" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;It'll never work... Count me in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T05:24:43.053" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T07:14:26.627" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was an old person of Fratton&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Who would go to the church with his hat on.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'If I wake up,' he said,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'With a hat on my head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I will know that it hasn't been sat on.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60098" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T07:14:26.627" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T11:00:37.723" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please save me from having no alternative other than wearing a menorah on my head! That is my only hat at the present time. I would like a better hashed haberdashery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes no sense, none at all. I apologize. I covet StackExchange hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T11:00:37.723" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T15:14:53.567" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a hat hater, I just don't like SE hats. (My answer will make it 20 which is my favorite number.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7237" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T15:14:53.567" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T19:14:38.433" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is not a great idea, I don't know what is!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Lucky me, there is still room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11482" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T19:14:38.433" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T20:12:58.853" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;A young man sat down by the waters&lt;br&gt;&#xA;his thought, to create some Marauders&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He posted his plan&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And so it began&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To work, though, the scope must be broader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T20:12:58.853" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-22T20:24:42.120" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wow. I'm almost out of votes for the day here. This better work!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an epic cornet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a hat and a wig to get,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He posted an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and said he'd look fancier&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a patch and cap to boot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T20:24:42.120" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-23T03:18:05.373" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37512.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...so by implication...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; believe in unicorns, they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; die (they continue to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;exist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the power of thought/belief sustains fairies, unicorns, the hypothetical multiverse we (seem to) inhabit, and my hopes for getting one of these legendary hats. Unless I'm too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2013-12-23T21:15:32.863" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T21:15:32.863" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-23T10:38:17.497" Score="39" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've been dressing up&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  as something I'm not&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  for so long...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm so afraid you won't like&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  what's underneath.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But here I am.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm just flesh and blood&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and weakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3690" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T10:38:17.497" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2013-12-23T12:27:41.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexipedia.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the word you search, it has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adverbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjectives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Synonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fuzzynyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7237" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T12:27:41.867" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-23T12:27:41.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-23T16:18:02.613" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this whole thing really a good idea?  Is this how we want posterity to remember us, grubbing after votes and slavishly pressing +1, +1, +1 ... for more than a whole minute?  And getting exposed to dangerous signs like &quot;You haven't voted on questions in a while; questions need votes too&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T16:18:02.613" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-23T22:19:29.903" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want a hat. I so want a hat. Hat me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Almost there!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, come on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11928" LastEditorUserId="11928" LastEditDate="2013-12-31T10:18:58.523" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T10:18:58.523" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-23T22:33:15.257" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm probably late to the party but, 'duh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T22:33:15.257" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-24T02:48:56.217" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hat that I had&#xA;would take a hit, but I hid&#xA;under a hood, that was hot in the hut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hot like hell, oh the horror!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16801" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T02:48:56.217" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-24T14:33:08.050" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a lot of work. Will enough people really go to the trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T14:33:08.050" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" Score="41" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. -- H.P. Lovecraft, and everyone in this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-24T19:24:17.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-25T02:34:04.113" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hats! This is probably a bad idea...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23710" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T02:34:04.113" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-25T02:34:04.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-25T03:03:34.967" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hats? We don't need no stinking hats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T03:03:34.967" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-25T03:03:34.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-25T06:58:00.540" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the answers to this questions are not answers and should be flagged as &quot;not an answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T06:58:00.540" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-25T06:58:00.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-26T12:15:19.587" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;For want of a hat answered I this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60389" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T12:15:19.587" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-26T12:15:19.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-27T03:40:52.183" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who would refuse a free hat? Actually, quite a few people would, but not me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13197" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T03:40:52.183" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-27T03:40:52.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-27T06:58:20.007" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ooh, can I join in?  One can never have too many hats, and there's so many hats, so little time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25824" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T06:58:20.007" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-27T06:58:20.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-27T23:12:29.110" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the first answer is nice, but I thought it was the &lt;em&gt;SECOND&lt;/em&gt; rule of Hat Club. I'll have to watch Hat Club again to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60738" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T23:12:29.110" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-27T23:12:29.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-27T23:25:15.913" Score="6" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this has already been asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it considered acceptable for a user to review suggested edits to their own question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this because I've had two seemingly reasonable (to me) edits to a question title rejected by the user who posted the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142947/where-does-the-word-sh-come-from&quot;&gt;&quot;Where does the word “sh**” come from?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, posted by tchrist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/48609&quot;&gt;first edit&lt;/a&gt; was to replace &quot;sh**&quot; in the title with &quot;shag&quot;. This seemed reasonable to me because I didn't feel that &lt;em&gt;shag&lt;/em&gt; was such an offensive word that it needed to be censored in the title. Also, I felt there was the potential for the censored word to be misread as &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt;. This was rejected by tchrist, saying &quot;This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post&quot;. I took this to mean that whether the word &lt;em&gt;shag&lt;/em&gt; is offensive is a subject for discussion rather than a unilateral edit, and I have no problem with that call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/48612&quot;&gt;second edit&lt;/a&gt; was to replace &quot;shag&quot; with &quot;sh*g&quot;, preserving the censorship but removing the ambiguity. This was also rejected by tchrist for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I've asked this question is that it appears that tchrist is &quot;marking his own homework&quot; by moderating changes to his own question. This seems to go against the spirit of peer review, which is the whole point of having suggested edits in the first place. It also seems slightly unfair to allow this practice, because users without review privileges do not get the opportunity to moderate changes to their own questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, without wishing to get personal, it does seem inconsistent on tchrist's part to insist on censoring the word &lt;em&gt;shag&lt;/em&gt; when the words &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142496/where-does-the-word-jism-come-from?rq=1&quot;&gt;jism&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142492/where-did-the-word-quim-come-from?rq=1&quot;&gt;quim&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142493/where-does-the-word-minge-come-from?rq=1&quot;&gt;minge&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142491/where-does-the-word-wankers-come-from?rq=1&quot;&gt;wankers&lt;/a&gt; all appear uncensored in his other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I've tried not to sound whiny here, apologies if this comes across that way. I'm genuinely interested to know if this is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T21:53:20.157" Title="users moderating changes to their own questions" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-28T14:35:22.650" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd settle for knowing just what the secret is behind Chuck Yeager.  I won it twice so far and am completely in the dark as to why...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA:  dang! I ran out of votes!   see y'all late tonite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60044" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T14:35:22.650" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-28T14:35:22.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4398" CreationDate="2013-12-28T21:53:20.157" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I freely admit I don't know why tchrist wants to retain &lt;strong&gt;sh**&lt;/strong&gt; in his question title. But as John Lawler comments above, &lt;em&gt;the poster is the ultimate authority on the proper content of their post.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly the case when there's overwhelming evidence that the OP has excellent command of English. In such situations, unless it's screamingly obvious you're just correcting a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;typo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, I think competent speakers/writers are entitled to express themselves as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, SO &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; support editing of comments (except by the OP, for up to 5 minutes after posting). And that's not always a bad thing. If anyone had &quot;corrected&quot; &lt;em&gt;I've also found [3rd-party edits] very useful, catching &lt;strong&gt;toyps&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in John's second comment, I'd have been denied a chuckle!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T21:53:20.157" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-29T21:00:08.497" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm throwing my hat in the ring, too. Oh, whoops, I don't have a hat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53907" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T21:00:08.497" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-29T21:00:08.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2013-12-30T06:05:01.987" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only voted on answers that had 41 or fewer votes already. I was too lazy to RTFQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was I a good boy? Do I get a present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3175" LastActivityDate="2013-12-30T06:05:01.987" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-30T06:05:01.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2013-12-30T13:28:22.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can only get the Unicorn hat by getting something posted to boingboing which is so horrible/horrifying that it &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;unicorn chaser.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60044" LastActivityDate="2013-12-30T13:28:22.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-31T05:33:30.850" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was just entering a comment directed at a specific user, I just noticed the system now has a pop-up &quot;autocomplete&quot; box when the characters typed after &lt;strong&gt;@&lt;/strong&gt; match &lt;em&gt;one and only one&lt;/em&gt; username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I just have poor mouse control, but I often find it tricky to cut&amp;amp;paste a username without accidentally getting whisked of to their profile. So I think this new feature is just dandy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22I%20take%20my%20hat%20off%20to%20the%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1#q=%22I%20take%20my%20hat%20off%20to%20the%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I take my hat off to the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/code_face&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guys at the code face&lt;/a&gt; (as my mark of recognition for their tireless efforts, I won't &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/are-we-getting-hats-this-year&quot;&gt;wear a hat&lt;/a&gt; for the next 24 hours! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T19:44:10.080" Title="Hats off to the SO staff programmers!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4407" CreationDate="2013-12-31T15:35:54.910" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would the SE team possibly include any fake hats to throw us off? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to figure out which hat to earn next and didn't want to spend my time on a hat that was just there as a tease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23999" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Are there any fake hats?" Tags="|support|winterbash-2013|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4405" CreationDate="2013-12-31T15:36:32.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. They included at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160069/what-is-nicholas-cage-doing-in-winter-bash&quot;&gt;three red herrings&lt;/a&gt; in the graphics last year to throw people off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see from the sheet last year:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/07n2O.png&quot; alt=&quot;2012 hats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T15:44:31.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4405" CreationDate="2013-12-31T15:38:30.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  Look at the spritesheet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bZyfD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those hats have been achieved by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  Proof enough for me that they are fakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20739" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T15:38:30.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4404" CreationDate="2013-12-31T19:44:10.080" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature has been in place as long as I can remember. At the risk of seeming to minimize the achievement of the site's devs, I have to point out that this sort of data-querying &quot;typeahead&quot; feature is pretty common in web applications, and if one can't write such a thing oneself, there are libraries and jQuery plugins available that do the job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I join you in your somewhat belated praise. Such UI features are essential to a good user experience, and it is pretty clear that such an experience is what the staff seems to have the knowledge, the expertise, and (especially) the intent to provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T19:44:10.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-31T21:16:11.760" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got a secret &lt;em&gt;Johnny Three-hats&lt;/em&gt; hat on ELU. I assume, by its name, that I got it for having gotten three hats in one day (?), but there was no description for this one like there is for the other, non-secret ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So … how do we know what we get secret hats for, if their description just says, “This is a secret hat”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Secret Christmas bash hats" Tags="|discussion|winterbash-2013|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4409" CreationDate="2013-12-31T21:48:23.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current stance is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/211709/135907&quot;&gt;&quot;The secret hats are secret for a reason&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Each year more secret than the last. Perhaps next year you'll be awarded secret hats without even noticing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, your description is entirely correct. Three hats in the same day. Do note that some hats such as Frosty are technically awarded the &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; day. So if you have two hats today, and are waiting for Frosty to get you the Three-Hat hat, don't hold your breath. It will count as two hats for today, one hat for tomorrow. Keep that in mind when collecting. Make sure to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; three new hats all on the same day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T21:48:23.640" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-02T05:36:54.977" Score="12" ViewCount="845" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the few days that I've been using this site, I've noticed that many questions have answers that feature a direct copy-paste from a popular dictionary. Note that I am discontent not with citing dictionaries in general --- nothing is more helpful than a quick definition --- but I am taking issue with some posters copy-pasting 10+ lines from an online resource, and using that more or less as the entirety of their answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/144156/55737&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as lazy and poor practice in several ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A verbatim copy-paste often occupies many lines, adding clutter to the answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A dictionary definition usually includes several possible meanings of a word: if the intended, relevant denotation is not highlighted, then the answer may create further confusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A verbatim copy-paste from an online dictionary is unnecessary, only the link has to be provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It follows that if the answer consists only of a copy-pasted definition and perhaps a superfluous or trivial remark, it would be more appropriate as a comment with a link to the definition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, if a question can be adequately answered with a copy-paste from a dictionary, then the quality of the question itself is more than dubious.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done? My opinion is that posts consisting of little more than a copy-pasted definition should generally be flagged as unhelpful, or if the question demands exactly a copy-pasted definition, then users should nominate the question for closure. If a helpful answer nonetheless contains a long copy-paste, I think the answer should be edited: only the relevant portion of the copy-paste and a link to the definition, as well as any explanatory remarks, should be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55737" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T11:49:30.083" Title="&quot;Answering&quot; a Question by Copy-Pasting a Dictionary Definition" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2014-01-02T09:47:00.820" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. In fact, there is a dedicated close reason that says just that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes five high-reputation users to close a question, though&amp;nbsp;— and during the holiday season a lot of people are taking a break from the site, so closing can take longer. Nevertheless, the question you linked to already has four close votes. And I have just added mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you stick around to get 3000 reputation points, you will gain the privilege to vote to close (and reopen) any question yourself. At your current reputation level, you already have the privilege to flag posts as off-topic. This will get them additional attention from the community and mods alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dlVNL.png&quot; alt=&quot;flagging a post as off-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2014-01-02T09:47:00.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2014-01-02T14:55:26.817" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmmmmm - I like it... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's soooo unethical :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3820" LastActivityDate="2014-01-02T14:55:26.817" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-02T14:55:26.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2014-01-02T14:58:28.990" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not clear on the rules and/or expectations.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Must a provided answer be witty, amusing, quotable, or intelligent in any way?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24070" LastActivityDate="2014-01-02T14:58:28.990" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-02T14:58:28.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2014-01-03T00:24:30.883" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;MY KINGDOM FOR A HAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49000" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T00:24:30.883" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-03T00:24:30.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4356" CreationDate="2014-01-03T03:33:24.597" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Want to see if this still works! :P :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30519" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T03:33:24.597" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-03T03:33:24.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2014-01-03T20:22:32.360" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/168/the-overlook-hotel&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Zp38.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writer&amp;#39;s chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T20:22:32.360" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-03T20:22:32.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2014-01-03T22:38:36.157" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2969/19644&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNhTt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Write for the EL&amp;amp;U Community Blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T22:38:36.157" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-03T22:38:36.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2014-01-04T13:37:36.600" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are times when a decent answer might consist of a 10-line copy-and-pasted dictionary entry, coupled with an insightful sentence or two. Not every answer need be a lengthy treatise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I like your insights. My biggest beef with the answer you point to is one of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;formatting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; I think the answer could be much improved with some simple edits. For one, there's no need for a URL to clutter up an answer; for another, copy-and-pasted material should be put in a quote box. Also, the quoted material need not take up so many lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't bother to fix the answer on the main site, because that would tamper with the illustration for your meta question. But I'll show how it would look after I made a few edits which I think produce a more &lt;em&gt;aestethic&lt;/em&gt; answer. In my opinion, that makes it a more acceptable answer, too; one may be too much of an eyesore to be all that helpful. I'll show both of them below, first the improved, and then the original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &lt;em&gt;emanate&lt;/em&gt; as listed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/emanate?q=emanate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;emanate&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt;)  [no object] (&lt;strong&gt;emanate from&lt;/strong&gt;) (of something abstract but perceptible) issue or spread out from (a source): &lt;em&gt;warmth emanated from the fireplace&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;she felt an undeniable charm emanating from him.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;originate from; be produced by: &lt;em&gt;the proposals emanated from a committee&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[with object] give out or emit (a feeling, quality, or sensation):&#xA;&lt;em&gt;he emanated a powerful brooding air&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think &lt;em&gt;emanate&lt;/em&gt;, the way you have used it, fits any of these meanings. Neither sentence seems correct. Is &lt;strong&gt;manifest&lt;/strong&gt; the word you are looking for, maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of emanate as listed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EMANATE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[no object] (emanate from)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(of a feeling, quality, or sensation) issue or spread out from (a source):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;warmth emanated from the fireplace&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;she felt an undeniable charm emanating from him.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;originate from; be produced by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the proposals emanated from a committee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[with object] give out or emit (a feeling, quality, or sensation):&#xA;he emanated a powerful brooding air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think emanate, the way you have used it, fits any of these meanings. Neither sentence seems correct. Is &lt;strong&gt;manifest&lt;/strong&gt; the word you are looking for, maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather not get into the debate about whether the comments in this particular answer have enough substance to merit upvotes. The main point I want to emphasize is that copying &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; contribute to a valuable answer, provided it's done &lt;em&gt;neatly&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also be worth noting that the original link goes to the dictionary homepage where the material was taken from (the visitor would still need to type in the word to find the definition). The link in my &amp;quot;improved&amp;quot; answer goes directly to the entry for word in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T11:49:30.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-04T16:32:42.497" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in question here was:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/14967/can-i-use-on-when-i-add-the-content&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/14967/can-i-use-on-when-i-add-the-content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the question on this forum was from a person trying to learn English, there were some usage ambiguities in the New York Time article which would have added to the purpose of this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach, as suggested in this Meta question ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3750/allow-questions-to-be-closed-as-off-topic-and-migrated-to-ell&quot;&gt;Allow Questions to be Closed as Off-Topic and Migrated to ELL&lt;/a&gt;), if applied too strictly, risks in making this forum into a 'clubby' and hostile forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, questions are sometimes infuriating, but since we are dealing with a subjective area and not an exact science, should there be more leeway?  On a poorly-worded questions, when an attempt has been made to edit the question and someone spots the issue, should it be migrated to ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should the migrating moderator attempt to articulate the reason in a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32135" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T16:32:42.497" Title="Migrate a question after it is answered" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2014-01-04T17:30:28.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I regularly resort to this practice and endorse it only if the online dictionary in question is &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (OED), and the excerpt is made following fair-usage provisions for copyright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED is a subscription-based dictionary and it is mostly only university students, faculty, and library cardholders who have access to it. OED's lexicographers are generally more learned than English.SE's contributors so I am usually comfortable in deferring to their presentation of relevant material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T17:30:28.877" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2014-01-05T02:40:35.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A verbatim copy-paste from an online dictionary is unnecessary, only the link has to be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general an answer should be somewhat self-contained, because links wither and die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been explicit policy on other SE sites I've participated in, though I haven't checked ELU specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32999" LastActivityDate="2014-01-05T02:40:35.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2014-01-05T17:49:30.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't deny that I had slight misgivings earlier today when I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/144647/2637&quot;&gt;posted an answer&lt;/a&gt; consisting almost entirely of copy/pasted text from 3 different dictionary definitions. I decided it was okay because...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: Not everyone can access OED, which has authoritative and often highly relevant definitions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: I figured my highlighting of certain &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; elements in those definitions might well be enlightening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People look for different things on ELU. Someone else answered the same question as me above, at the same time, with what seemed to me no more than a comment &lt;em&gt;(There is the (humorous) definition &lt;strong&gt;millihelen&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;. As I write, that answer has 8 upvotes, but mine (which I felt made a serious attempt to answer the question) has only 3. Let the voters decide!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2014-01-05T17:49:30.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2014-01-05T23:51:34.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think some questions call for answers that are largely quotes from a single source, such as a dictionary. Most notable among these are the pleas for a &lt;em&gt;single-word&lt;/em&gt; where the definition quoted shows the closeness to the questioner's definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @starwed that inclusion of the definition, along with the link, makes the answer self-contained and therefore more helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are multiple terms that fit the bill, and in those cases a list of the terms with a hotlink to each defining source is preferable to a recitation of nearly identical definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree with the OP that a quote of many widely divergent definitions sheds more confusion than light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only hope that my short answers with quoted single word definitions, and my multi-definitional quotes that circle a concept are not the answers that she or he is upset by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2014-01-05T23:51:34.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-07T03:03:15.857" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;So you make a question and leave the page open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then a grey box appears saying &quot;a new answer was posted - click here to refresh&quot;. So you click it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer appears alright, but the answer counter says &quot;N&quot; instead of &quot;N Answers&quot;. You have to do a manual refresh to see the correct form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, it says &quot;2&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2DxyQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of malformed answer counter&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is how it should look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YfhIG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of correct answer counter&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might have seen this occur on other SE sites, not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Google Chrome 31.0.1650.63 with Mac OSX Mountain Lion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4643" LastEditorUserId="64632" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T12:07:10.690" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T12:07:10.690" Title="The &quot;a new answer was posted&quot; quick refresh won't update the answer counter properly" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2014-01-07T08:52:55.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27cPL.png&quot; alt=&quot;No general reference, please!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T08:52:55.990" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-07T08:52:55.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-07T15:25:25.713" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there ways of attracting attention to a new answer - which you think worthwhile – to an old question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T15:48:56.350" Title="answer to an &quot;old&quot; question: how to get it noticed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2014-01-07T15:48:56.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new answer being posted on a question will automatically bump it up to the top of the front page anyway, since it is new activity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to bring attention to an extremely high quality answer that had just been posted on an older question you could also choose to bounty the question as &quot;contains an exemplary answer&quot; using your own reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61227" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T15:48:56.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-07T21:10:58.307" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I linked to an image in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/144816/32999&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone edited the answer to directly show the image.  But I've always been told that hotlinking images like that was bad form.  Is there an official site policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32999" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T03:07:49.133" Title="Hotlinking images" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-08T15:51:14.303" Score="7" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2013.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter Bash 2013&lt;/a&gt; is now over and the site will soon be taken down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the final &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2013.stackexchange.com/leaderboard/english.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;leaderboard&lt;/a&gt; standings for the EL&amp;amp;U site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Network screenshots can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/215235/162511&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T02:19:35.130" Title="Final Winter Bash 2013 standings for EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|winterbash-2013|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4434" CreationDate="2014-01-08T15:51:14.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U itself came a respectable 9th overall. Here's a screenshot of the top of our leaderboard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QHV0x.png&quot; alt=&quot;EL&amp;amp;U top 14&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T15:51:14.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4434" CreationDate="2014-01-09T02:19:35.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make special mention of our own favorite moderator, &lt;strong&gt;RegDwight&lt;/strong&gt;, who not only topped the charts on our site, but also on many of the other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although three other users received more &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; hats than Reg, Reg crushed the competition by earning an astounding &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;604 hats&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; total across the network, soundly thrashing his nearest competitor by a margin of 400%. Or so. I didn't do the math carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Behold the beauty that hat fever produced:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/veueZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Reg&amp;#39;s hat boards&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*image provided by Reg. Actually, he doesn't know I lifted it, so let's keep it between you and me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T02:19:35.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4433" CreationDate="2014-01-10T03:07:49.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right that hotlinking is discouraged. Links are better than hotlinking; however, your links will be subject to the vagaries of the internet, and &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; go away with time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make the images link-rot-proof (well, as link-rot-proof as reasonably feasible), you can upload them - StackExchange uses Imgur.com to store what you upload. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default for uploaded images is to embed them in the post, but that will send poor RegDwigнt scrambling to find the brain bleach. So the best of both worlds (link-rot-proof, but people can choose whether to view the images or not) is to upload the image, but then edit out the exclamation mark from the image markdown code, i.e. instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;![enter image description here][1]&#xA;&#xA;[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/123abc.jpg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you'd have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[enter image description here][1]&#xA;&#xA;[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/123abc.jpg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The latter is markdown syntax for a link.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T03:07:49.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3750" CreationDate="2014-01-10T05:19:48.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kca85.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackExchange flag as ELL question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T05:19:48.663" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4440" CreationDate="2014-01-10T18:01:36.113" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if I have more than a few questions about a chapter in a book, say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried asking them separately, ending up making at least 5 threads.&#xA;But I don't think it is an effective use of online space here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be permitted to post multiple questions about a specific chapter or article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are two types of questions.&#xA;One is the type that comes to you and can be asked separately from books or articles.&#xA;The other is the type that comes to you from articles or books and can't be asked separately without making more than a few threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user41481" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T20:01:49.970" Title="What if I have more than a few questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4439" CreationDate="2014-01-10T20:01:49.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One post per question. It's hard to be more helpful than that without seeing an example, but here’s a shot at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are asking about a grammatical construct you see in several places in the same book. That’s one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, asking about three quite different things, that’s three questions, even though they all came up because you were reading one book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you are reading a book written in modern English and many questions are coming up, it could be that you are an English language learner and should consider taking advantage of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T20:01:49.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-12T19:52:16.713" Score="29" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;h1&gt;EDIT:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, none of this got done in 2014.  Does this mean that we should just give up on tags?  Doing almost any of these by hand will annoy people since they would all bump those questions to the top of the active list, so this requires assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve just looked through &lt;strong&gt;all 856 of our tags&lt;/strong&gt;.   Yes, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to propose the following clean-up measures, some of which are trivial fixes and some of which merit further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Change the name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaic&lt;/a&gt; to the canonical &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaicisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaicisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaicisms&lt;/a&gt; and make the former a tag synonym of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge all of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntactic-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntactic-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntactic-analysis&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sentence-structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sentence-structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sentence-structure&lt;/a&gt;,  and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parsing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;parsing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parsing&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-structure&lt;/a&gt;.  The first, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntactic-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntactic-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntactic-analysis&lt;/a&gt;, might be preferred as the canonical version. Maybe grab &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;structure&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; into that, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and rename and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tech-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tech-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tech-writing&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/concord&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;concord&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;concord&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/concordance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;concordance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;concordance&lt;/a&gt;, then consider merging and synning with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;agreement&lt;/a&gt;. We’re not talking about grapes or supersonic aircraft here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/commands&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;commands&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;commands&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/imperative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;imperative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;imperative&lt;/a&gt;, and make the latter either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/imperatives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;imperatives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;imperatives&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/imperative-mood&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;imperative-mood&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;imperative-mood&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rename and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/derivative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;derivative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;derivative&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/derived-terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;derived-terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;derived-terms&lt;/a&gt;. (Edit: there are no longer any posts tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/derivative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;derivative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;derivative&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disjunct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disjunct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disjunct&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disjunction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disjunction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disjunction&lt;/a&gt;. (Edit: there are no longer any posts tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disjunct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disjunct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disjunct&lt;/a&gt;, but there are three tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disjuncts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disjuncts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disjuncts&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language-change&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language-change&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language-change&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language-evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language-evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language-evolution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/movie&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;movie&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;movie&lt;/a&gt; into the exiting tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cinema&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cinema&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cinema&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Change and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mood&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mood&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mood&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-mood&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-mood&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-mood&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect-aspect&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Figure out which of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;title&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;title&lt;/a&gt; should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/honorifics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;honorifics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;honorifics&lt;/a&gt; and which should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title-casing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;title-casing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;title-casing&lt;/a&gt; or some such.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/period&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;period&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;period&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/periods&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;periods&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;periods&lt;/a&gt;.  Well, assuming we’re talking about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/full-stop&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;full-stop&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;full-stop&lt;/a&gt; punctuation throughout rather than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-epochs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;historical-epochs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;historical-epochs&lt;/a&gt;. (Edit: there are no longer any posts tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/periods&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;periods&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;periods&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recast the following tags  into the plural, which is generally preferred: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adjunct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adjunct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adjunct&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/animal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;animal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;animal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cliche&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cliche&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cliche&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/complement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;complement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;complement&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conditional&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conditional&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conditional&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/date&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;date&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;date&lt;/a&gt; (which might should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dates-and-times&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dates-and-times&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dates-and-times&lt;/a&gt; and merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/demonstrative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;demonstrative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;demonstrative&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diminutive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diminutive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diminutive&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/essay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; (or make it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/essay-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essay-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essay-writing&lt;/a&gt;?), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ending&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ending&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ending&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/generic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;generic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;generic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irregular&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irregular&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irregular&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ligature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ligature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ligature&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/oxymoron&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;oxymoron&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;oxymoron&lt;/a&gt; (but maybe syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/oxymora&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;oxymora&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;oxymora&lt;/a&gt; to the revised &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/oxymorons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;oxymorons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;oxymorons&lt;/a&gt;?), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/palindrome&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;palindrome&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;palindrome&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/participle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;participle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;participle&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive&lt;/a&gt; (or split into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive-pronouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive-pronouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive-pronouns&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessive-adjectives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessive-adjectives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessive-adjectives&lt;/a&gt;?), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/run-on-sentences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;run-on-sentences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;run-on-sentences&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shibboleth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shibboleth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shibboleth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slogan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slogan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slogan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/superscript&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;superscript&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;superscript&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching-aid&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teaching-aid&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teaching-aid&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocative&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I’ve been doing my own burninations, but here are others that should probably go the way of all things: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/concept&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;concept&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;concept&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/construction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;construction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;construction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/description&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;description&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;description&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I feel like something or other might should be done about these mixed-up tags that have been applied to completely different things, but I don’t know what: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ending&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ending&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ending&lt;/a&gt; (maybe some should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/valedictions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;valedictions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;valedictions&lt;/a&gt; to pair with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/salutations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;salutations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;salutations&lt;/a&gt;?), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feminine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feminine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feminine&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiomatic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiomatic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiomatic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/management&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;management&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;management&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/participial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;participial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;participial&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrasing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrasing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrasing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phase&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phase&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phase&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shift&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shift&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shift&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sounds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sounds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sounds&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tone&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/philology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;philology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;philology&lt;/a&gt; be merged and synned into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;historical-linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;historical-linguistics&lt;/a&gt; or some such?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/216458&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which might provide some relief to our poor overworked mods if the boon could be granted here at ELU.  People should please try to suggest and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=all&amp;amp;tab=newest&quot;&gt;vote on synonyms&lt;/a&gt; if they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Former suggestions that have now been implemented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/singular-plural&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;singular-plural&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;singular-plural&lt;/a&gt; with the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-number&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/places&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;places&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;places&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/toponyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;toponyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;toponyms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/short-form&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;short-form&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;short-form&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/abbreviations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;abbreviations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;abbreviations&lt;/a&gt; and consider adding an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocopation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocopation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocopation&lt;/a&gt; syn.&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt; be synmerged?&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rp&lt;/a&gt; syn to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/received-pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;received-pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;received-pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T02:50:42.043" Title="The Great ELU Tag Clean-up Proposal of 2014" Tags="|discussion|support|tag-synonyms|retagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-13T00:35:40.530" Score="12" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;StackOverflow proper&lt;/a&gt;, one of the possibilities offered for an off-topic close reason is that it’s a &lt;strong&gt;simple typographical error&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ocyvy.png&quot; alt=&quot;typo close reason&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the no-repro part doesn’t apply to ELU, we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=typo++is%3Aanswer&quot;&gt;quite a lot of answers suggesting that the question was about a misunderstood typo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of what general use to future visitors is unravelling a one-shot typo situation for just one poster?  Doesn’t the same apply here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T21:17:48.570" Title="What about a “it’s just a typo” off-topic close option?" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|low-quality-posts|typographical-errors|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4442" CreationDate="2014-01-13T11:51:48.200" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally agree, and here's some suggestions, but I don't feel so strongly either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Merge and rename and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tech-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tech-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tech-writing&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-writing&lt;/a&gt; would be better than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-language&lt;/a&gt; and it's more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Change the name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaic&lt;/a&gt; to the canonical &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaicisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaicisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaicisms&lt;/a&gt; and make the former a tag synonym of the latter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd never heard of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaicisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaicisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaicisms&lt;/a&gt; before and think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaic&lt;/a&gt; will be more readily understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some Winter Bash tags created between December 16th and January 3rd which should be synonimsed or removed (here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=new&quot;&gt;newest tags&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest at least the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rude-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rude-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rude-words&lt;/a&gt; should be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T12:03:31.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4443" CreationDate="2014-01-13T16:39:39.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. More generally I think it's a good idea to create a sitewide close reason whenever we find that we're having to create the same custom close reason (Off Topic + Other) over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed close reason can be slightly expanded to cover analogous situations where a person asks an English related question arising from an error or misunderstanding, and where the answer is unlikely to be of interest to anybody but the OP. What I have in mind is covered by the description of the #errors tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions arising from error (real or perceived): solecism, malapropism, mondegreens, eggcorns, disputed usages, so-called &quot;corruption&quot;, folk etymologies, but also requests for interpretation when the text in question arguably contains an error, and questions which stem from a misunderstanding. Do not use when an error has not been made: for example, &quot;which is correct&quot; questions arise from uncertainty, not error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; questions about such things are of general interest and I do not mean all such questions should be closed! Only questions which &lt;em&gt;rest upon&lt;/em&gt; such an error and are too unlikely to help future readers should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proposed close reason&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question rests upon &lt;strong&gt;a typographical, grammatical, or logical error or similar misunderstanding&lt;/strong&gt; either in the question or in the text being asked about. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one is unlikely to help future readers. This can often be avoided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;consulting a good dictionary or searching within written works&lt;/a&gt; before posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T16:39:39.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4449" CreationDate="2014-01-13T20:06:24.227" Score="10" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens occasionally that what seems (to me, the flagger) a straightforward and basically undisputable flag is declined or disputed by a mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through some of the related posts, I see that if one flag on a post is disputed, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; flags on that post are automatically disputed, which might of course indicate that my flag was never even reviewed, but someone else (probably incorrectly) flagged the same answer, and their flag was disputed. (This seems to me a completely nonsensical way of managing flag disputes, but that’s not what this is about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With actual declined flags, though, there is no such ambiguity: someone definitely reviewed my flag and declined it. Now, this in itself is not a problem—it’s how the modding system is supposed to work—but occasionally, the decline just seems to be &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most flags I submit are “Not an answer”; so too the one that sparked my writing here. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26229/what-is-the-origin-of-the-th-suffix-what-is-the-linguistic-term-for-the-mean&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which asks about the etymology of the suffix &lt;em&gt;-th&lt;/em&gt; used to make abstract nouns from adjectives, a user posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26229/what-is-the-origin-of-the-th-suffix-what-is-the-linguistic-term-for-the-mean/145953#145953&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; dealing with the old third-person verbal ending &lt;em&gt;-th&lt;/em&gt;. In my book, that is absolutely not an answer: it is completely unrelated to the matter asked in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the flag was declined with what I am assuming is a standard option: “flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume simply flagging the same answer again would likely not help; but is there a ‘proper’ procedure to follow if I want to somehow express that I find the flag review incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T01:37:19.447" Title="Disputing flag reviews" Tags="|discussion|flags|review|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4446" CreationDate="2014-01-13T21:12:49.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have also seen very obviously correct flags get disputed and nothing ever comes of it. The flagged posts will just sit there unless you go grab a mod and whine about it convincingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be handy to have some sort of appeal process for flags that you thought were indisputable. Sometimes people make mistakes when reviewing flags or have an ulterior motive for disagreeing. Or, at the very least, a way to discuss it with a mod to get a more &quot;official&quot; opinion on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T21:12:49.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4446" CreationDate="2014-01-13T23:53:11.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the example you give, I agree with the decline: &quot;not an answer&quot; means just that, i.e. it's not even attempting to answer the question. Going on about an unrelated -th ending is totally wrong, but it's still an attempt at an answer. &quot;Not an answer&quot; would be asking a follow-up question (&lt;em&gt;&quot;But how do you explain the -th in 'believeth'?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), or making a comment on someone else's answer (&lt;em&gt;&quot;I don't think the ablaut had anything to do with it.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), or trying to start a conversation with someone (&lt;em&gt;&quot;@Anwulf, my cousin's aunt's daughter-in-law's husband also says 'height' like you do.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really do think a decline was incorrect, I think your options are the usual: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Forget it and move on to the next task&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See if you can find a mod in chat and hash it out&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a specific question in Meta (I would only suggest this in particularly egregious cases)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging the same answer again (if the system will even let you do that; I'm not sure it would) is likely to be pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T23:53:11.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4446" CreationDate="2014-01-14T00:26:15.493" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that flags are always handled in bulk, so all flags are marked either helpful or declined. This can be confusing, since it may seem as though your consistent flagging is marked inconsistently, when really it is just a limitation of the system. (I normally mark flags according to the majority, so sometimes I may decline a flag and yet still respond to it as though I might have marked it helpful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case you mention, I declined the flags on the answer because it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; an answer, even though it might not be a particularly good one. I have some leeway in providing a custom decline message, but again this message would have gone to everyone who flagged the answer, and in this case, I felt the standard notice was sufficient to cover my judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, I will either delete posts flagged as non-answers or I will convert them to a comment, editing for length as necessary. If the post is at least an attempt to answer the question, then I generally will reject the flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases or in any case where the non-answer flag is rejected and you disagree, you might consider leaving a comment for the poster with some specific guidance and giving them time to clarify or add to the post as necessary. If the answer is simply wrong, then downvote. That's what downvoting is for. You may also vote to delete if you feel the content is so egregiously in error that it should not be on the site. (Voting to delete answers is a 20K privilege.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my intent in these instances to direct our community toward helping poor answers to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have done all these things and still feel unsatisfied with the situation, ping a mod in chat and we can talk it through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that answers your question. Let me know if I missed anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T01:37:19.447" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T01:37:19.447" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T09:10:04.933" Score="42" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;With our recent spate of spam, a few reminders on how best to deal with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, please flag as spam. That's the first option when you open up the spam dialog, and that will delete the post once six spam flags are reached. This means that spam can be dealt even when moderators are not online.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While there is no prohibition against closing spam as off-topic, it's not really necessary, so to speak, since the post should be disposed of through flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to edit the spam. Stack Exchange has an algorithm that automatically learns which posts are flagged as spam and tries to block those, and editing the spam can decrease the efficacy of the filter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you see it in the review queue, again, please flag. Do not click &quot;No Action Needed&quot; or &quot;Leave Open&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2016-06-08T20:57:35.120" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T20:57:35.120" Title="Dealing with spam" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4442" CreationDate="2014-01-14T16:24:58.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/movie&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;movie&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;movie&lt;/a&gt; into the exiting tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cinema&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cinema&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cinema&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/movie&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;movie&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;movie&lt;/a&gt; be the root and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cinema&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cinema&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cinema&lt;/a&gt; become the syn. I don't think most people would assume &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cinema&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cinema&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cinema&lt;/a&gt; exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Merge and syn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/places&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;places&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;places&lt;/a&gt; into the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/toponyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;toponyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;toponyms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this is a similar issue which really presents the greater question: Should our tags prefer &quot;technical&quot; words or &quot;common&quot; words? Most of our askers probably have no idea what a toponym is. The word doesn't even show up in a standard spellchecker. I'd rather see the root tag be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/places&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;places&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;places&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't feel strongly about either of these suggestions. I am much more pro-organization than I am picky about the terms used in organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T16:24:58.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-15T00:11:50.640" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I seem to be disagreeing with a lot of answer flags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/146225/2637&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, where one or more users think a post is either &quot;Not an answer&quot; or &quot;Very low quality&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I only tend to downvote posts that don't &lt;em&gt;remotely&lt;/em&gt; address the question, or which I think are actually &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;. And they have to be &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; bad before I think about &quot;flagging&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general position is good answers get &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt;. Indifferent or irrelevant answers should be easily identified by the fact that they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; get upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit I'm more likely to downvote poor quality answers to &quot;redress the balance&quot; if I disagree with others who thought they were good enough to be upvoted. But that's about as far as I usually go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mainly when I'm dealing with the Review Queue that this becomes an issue for me (as I'm not a mod, that's the only way I know what others are flagging). My question/point for discussion is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the Review Queue encourage harsher judgements? If so, is this a good, bad, or neutral effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T07:31:06.830" Title="Are &quot;flag for moderator attention&quot; flags increasing, and are they &quot;a good thing&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4458" CreationDate="2014-01-15T19:30:06.060" Score="3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could somebody please explain to me how is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/146045/54608&quot;&gt;Between &amp;#39;(s)he&amp;#39; &amp;amp; &amp;#39;he/she&amp;#39; -- which is recommended/ preferable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question explicitly contains&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are both &quot;(s)he&quot; and &quot;he/she&quot; correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so how can it be opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54608" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-05-24T21:10:33.240" LastActivityDate="2023-05-24T21:10:33.240" Title="Why was my question about '(s)he' vs. 'he/she' closed as being opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4453" CreationDate="2014-01-15T20:10:40.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated in the various comments, this is not a matter of standard English or of any particular dialect or variant. It's a matter of authorial style. There are many options which could be used to write in a gender-neutral way, none of which is more or less right than any other and none of which has any broad consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except using singular &quot;they&quot;. That's always right, no matter what you hear elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T20:10:40.950" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-16T16:29:50.443" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are sexual innuendos an absolute no-no in either questions or answers or comments, even if they are humorous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T21:26:21.583" Title="Are sexual innuendos an absolute no-no on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4455" CreationDate="2014-01-16T21:26:21.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's face it, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AUb1moP3VKUC&amp;amp;q=%22there%27s%20a%20lot%20of%20it%20about%22&amp;amp;dq=%22there%27s%20a%20lot%20of%20it%20about%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=UjDYUpOgJoOJ7Abg6YEo&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;there's a lot of it about&lt;/a&gt;. By any reasonable definition, that's a sexual innuendo (you can decide for yourself whether it's &quot;humorous&quot;, but I hope no-one's actually &quot;offended&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't noticed many &lt;em&gt;gratuitous&lt;/em&gt; innuendos in questions or answers since I've been on ELU. But even though my personal standards are pretty low in this area, I'd tend to edit them out if I thought they might be considered offensive by some visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a mod, so I don't really know how often it's used, but I would just point out that when it comes to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;flagging&lt;/strong&gt; for moderator attention&lt;/em&gt;, the first of five possible choices is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am flagging this comment as &lt;strong&gt;rude or offensive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that &quot;offence&quot; is a subjective thing, I would expect the mods to be extremely sympathetic to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; user's complaints in this area. That's to say I think they should err on the side of caution, and delete/edit any text which someone finds objectionable, even if they themselves don't find the material particularly offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line, as Reg comments, is that superfluous text shouldn't be posted, and may be removed. It's therefore a judgement call for the mods, and thus far I've no complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T21:26:21.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-17T04:09:19.527" Score="30" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;...was with the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146020/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-blackmail/146028#146028&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the word &amp;quot;Blackmail&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;. It was asked by a user who appeared to be new to EL&amp;amp;U and who framed it as a simple etymological question—one that a readily available online reference (the Online Etymology Dictionary) appeared to answer decisively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the strength of those particulars (I suspect), five civic-minded users of this site voted to put the question on hold, pending a reformulation of the question to make it more appropriate to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before any of that happened, though, I had consulted a reference book that gave a different account of the first usage of the word from the Online Etymology Dictionary's, so I put together an answer that offered that alternative explanation of how the word came to mean what it means today. Then, when the question actually went on hold, I did some additional and more extensive research to see what other sources had to say about the question, and added an account of them to my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern was that, having reasonably concluded from a quick check of the Online Etymology Dictionary that there was nothing complicated or controversial about the derivation of &lt;em&gt;blackmail&lt;/em&gt;, advanced users of this site would decline to reconsider the &quot;put on hold&quot; decision when further information on the subject appeared only from an answerer and not from the original questioner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more disturbingly, I feared that those users might take the view that—since the original poster showed no signs of having done any research before submitting his question—the accident of his having stumbled on something that happened to be unexpectedly interesting ought not be viewed as a factor in his favor. Indeed, if he had checked the Online Etymology Dictionary, he would probably have supposed that the incomplete information there was thorough and definitive, and he wouldn't have raised the question on EL&amp;amp;U. But that line of thinking would have led to burying an interesting question because it wasn't asked after an appropriate amount of preliminary effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concerns to the contrary, what I found in the event was that the &quot;on hold&quot; process worked admirably, leading to a reversal of the hold decision, and giving the question (and my answer, along with any others that may be submitted) normal status on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to thank everyone who took the time to read my interminable answer, and especially the users who subsequently voted to reopen the question. I would also like to thank the users who originally put the question on hold. As I noted earlier, their decision under the original circumstances was completely reasonable; and the tremendous amount of (usually) thankless work they do in filtering junk and trivia from this site inspires my respect and awe. You guardians are certainly better citizens of this site than I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks again.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T04:09:19.527" Title="My first experience with trying to get a question reopened after it was put on hold" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4453" CreationDate="2014-01-17T08:11:51.410" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have lots of answers like &quot;There's no single correct way, it's a matter of style. Here's what some style guides say.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we close all those as primarily opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site on English usage, and we can point out some guidelines on standard English usage, and how some popular/well-known sources do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've voted to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T08:11:51.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4462" CreationDate="2014-01-17T19:12:31.747" Score="15" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just went though the closure review queue, consisting of a couple dozen questions with close votes. At least 75 percent of these questions were not even remotely closeable according to the guidelines we are supposed to be using. How in the world are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146234/can-i-say-take-effort&quot;&gt;146234&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146638/verb-and-subject-agreement&quot;&gt;146638&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146500/is-mother-tongue-exactly-the-same-as-native-language&quot;&gt;146500&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146576/neither-of-the-box-of-chocolates-is-suitable-as-a-gift&quot;&gt;146576&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146597/when-and-why-did-the-n-word-and-negro-went-apart&quot;&gt;146597&lt;/a&gt; &quot;off-topic&quot;? (Most of the close votes use the &quot;generally available reference&quot; copout, yet these questions are mostly grammar questions that cannot be easily answered using dictionaries, thesauruses, text corpora, or widely available language references or style guides.) How are 146538 and 146612 &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;? This is insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these will eventually be closed, which is unfortunate and should be reversed, but at least in those cases the users who voted to close will become known and can be held accountable. In a way, though, I'm more irritated about the ones that won't: frivolous close votes clog up the queue and make me waste my time wading through them. Without necessarily asking for names, I'd really like to know whether these close votes are getting anything approaching a broad consensus, or if there's just a handful of overzealous users running around voting to close any question that looks at them the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T19:48:12.140" Title="Who is voting to close all these questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4461" CreationDate="2014-01-17T19:48:12.140" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give you specific statistics about the five questions you link, but there's no easy way that I can think of to get at data in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0 users voted to close 5 questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0 users voted to close 4 questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 users voted to close 3 questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 user voted to close 2 questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 users voted to close 1 question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That at least seems suggestive that there is no secret cabal going about casting close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the close votes use the &quot;generally available reference&quot; copout, yet these questions are mostly grammar questions that cannot be easily answered using dictionaries, thesauruses, text corpora, or widely available language references or style guides.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, yes. Please vote to re-open any such questions if/when they get closed. I'm afraid this has been a problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4078/inappropriate-general-reference-and-proofreading-close-votes&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4085/about-reference-questions&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt;, and short of abolishing that close reason altogether, there does not seem to be an effective solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T19:48:12.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-17T20:46:24.517" Score="15" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree that &quot;questions that can be answered using commonly available references&quot; should be considered &quot;off-topic&quot; at all, but I can at least understand why someone would want to close questions that can be fully answered by trivially looking up a definition in an online dictionary, for example. But I also see legitimate questions about grammar, usage, and etymology—questions that are exactly what this site is supposed to be about, in theory—getting closed for the same reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that some users are using &quot;commonly available references&quot; as a lazy way to get rid of questions they &quot;don't like&quot; without having to think too hard or work too hard. I trust that the irony inherent in lazily using a close reason that chastises the questioner for not doing their own homework is clear to everyone. In addition to being hypocritical, it makes the community appear intimidating and unfriendly and discourages participation by new people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve this problem, I present the following multi-part proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;The &quot;commonly available references&quot; close reason should only be used if the question can be easily and fully answered using a free online resource.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we insist that we're not going to help anyone who can't be bothered to look up the answer themselves, it is completely unrealistic, not to mention impolite, to expect questioners to possess an up-to-date copy of the &lt;i&gt;Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;Fowler's Modern English Usage&lt;/i&gt;—or even, God help me, Strunk and White. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that just because a question can be answered at oed.com (£215 per year to subscribe), that's sufficient reason to close it. &lt;b&gt;If we're going to close questions for being easy to answer elsewhere, it should actually be &lt;i&gt;easy&lt;/i&gt; to answer them elsewhere.&lt;/b&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that includes basic grammar questions, too. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; lists no freely available grammar references; even if it did, it is not reasonable or polite to expect a questioner to go pore over an extensive grammar reference for help distinguishing between verb forms. If they knew how to do that, they wouldn't have asked the question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;If the software supports it, users voting to close a question as &quot;reference&quot; should be required to supply a citation showing where the answer can be found.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you vote to close a question as Off-Topic &gt; Other, you are given a text box to explain your reasons. Likewise, if you vote to close as Reference, you should be given a text box and required to provide a URL or other citation showing where the question can be easily and fully answered. &lt;b&gt;If the question is too hard to be trivially answered with a citation, then the question does not have a trivial answer, and should remain open.&lt;/b&gt; And if you &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; do it but &lt;i&gt;won't&lt;/i&gt;, if you refuse to expend even the bare minimum of effort necessary to copy and paste a dictionary.com URL... well, then maybe you shouldn't be voting to close questions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And last but certainly not least, if we do absolutely nothing else, can we at least &lt;b&gt;fix the &lt;s&gt;grammatical&lt;/s&gt; orthographic error in &quot;commonly-available references&quot;&lt;/b&gt;? There should not be a hyphen between &quot;commonly&quot; and &quot;available.&quot; It just makes us look bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="3534" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T00:45:41.177" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T00:45:41.177" Title="Proposal for narrowing the scope of the &quot;reference&quot; close vote" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4443" CreationDate="2014-01-17T21:17:48.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146593/dispirit-or-dispirited&quot;&gt;A questioner asked about whether to use &lt;i&gt;dispirit&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;dispirited&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/a&gt; It turns out the word he was thinking of was &lt;i&gt;disparate&lt;/i&gt;. I can absolutely imagine someone else making exactly the same mistake in the future. This is therefore clearly a helpful question, and it deserves a helpful answer. Instead, the questioner was corrected in comments and the question was closed as &quot;off-topic,&quot; and now no one can add a real answer that explains the error the questioner made. Explain to me how this makes the world a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question should be reopened, answered, and then protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T21:17:48.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4474" CreationDate="2014-01-18T14:25:41.603" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Statistics: I am not very sure where the correct, current figure for the number of posts I have 'edited' at a given time is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The head &lt;em&gt;revisions&lt;/em&gt; under &lt;em&gt;activity&lt;/em&gt; on the profile page does not seem to be the one. What's the difference between &lt;em&gt;revisions&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;posts edited&lt;/em&gt;, by the way?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="14666" LastEditDate="2014-01-20T14:16:36.487" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Stats: 'No. of posts edited' -- where do I find this?" Tags="|support|editing|user-accounts|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4465" CreationDate="2014-01-18T21:47:28.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just examined my own (very limited) &lt;strong&gt;activity&lt;/strong&gt; set. It seems that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;suggestions&lt;/strong&gt; is a list of edits that I proposed but did not have authority to make real&amp;nbsp;— they had to be judged by others with enough reputation. (The judgements are discoverable.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;revisions&lt;/strong&gt; is a list of edits that I made — either to my own posts (requiring no other approval) or elsewhere (and were approved). The edits were realized.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if &lt;em&gt;posts edited&lt;/em&gt; is an &quot;official&quot; term/title or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62474" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2014-01-20T12:54:46.427" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T12:54:46.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-19T02:48:43.297" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've three related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I believe a comment is essentially a duplicate of an earlier one, what is the proper etiquette, if any? I assume it's better to up vote a comment I agree with, rather than restate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a duplicate comment is clutter, shouldn't we have an option to flag it as &quot;duplicate&quot;? Or is it so rare as to not require a special button?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we ever change our minds after flagging a comment, shouldn't we have an &quot;undo flag&quot; option? It could save the higher-ups some work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A true story that motivated the issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While studying Susan's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146234/can-i-say-take-effort&quot;&gt;Can I say &amp;quot;take effort&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I thought Wayne's comment was repeated, in essence, by Andrew, 4 hours or 2 comments, later.&#xA;In a moment of temporary hyper-criticism, I flagged Andrew's comment as &quot;obsolete&quot;. What I really wanted was &quot;redundant&quot; (or to use the language of question flagging, &quot;duplicate&quot;). &#xA;What I should have done was flag it as &quot;other...&quot; and then explained my true feelings.&#xA;Then, after being beset by feelings of remorse, I tried to &lt;em&gt;unflag&lt;/em&gt; that which I had flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; effectively undo an up- or down-vote to a question or answer by re-upvoting  or re-downvoting it. (I don't know if I can &lt;em&gt;unflag&lt;/em&gt; a Q or A; I didn't understand the answer given to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2028/feature-request-unflag&quot;&gt;Feature request: unflag&lt;/a&gt;.) &#xA;However, an already-flagged &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; is unflaggable! (Or is it unreflaggable? I'm agitated now, though normally unflappable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially embarrassing for me is that now I realize that Andrew was providing a &lt;em&gt;counterpoint&lt;/em&gt; to Wayne's comment and there was no duplication. I'm so weighed down by remorse and embarrassment that I'm going to self-flag, flag and reflag myself vigorously until my flesh is raw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62474" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T02:48:43.297" Title="Duplicate Comments &amp; Un-flagging Comments" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-19T11:40:21.667" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;When did the site take down the animation that indicated what percentage of responses the OP had accepted, and what was the rationale for it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that was a useful tool to remind users to be a part of both the asking of questions and receiving of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T11:40:21.667" Title="What happened to the &quot;percent accepted&quot; animation?" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-01-19T12:33:51.760" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4463" CreationDate="2014-01-19T11:54:46.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be confusing 'what people should do' with 'what the programmers can fix'.  Anyone with sufficient reputation can vote to close a question, and if enough people agree, the question will be closed whether the reason given is a good one or not: that's status-by-design. The available reasons you can give are not perfect; they overlap in some places and leave gaps in others. But if TPTB did implement your suggestion, it wouldn't reduce the number of questions closed; merely change the reason given for closevotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I disagree with the implication that a question should be left open unless it can be proved to fit within certain parameters. This being a site for 'linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts' there will always be a few people who mistake it for a place to ask homework questions, or basic problems like 'where do I use &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;?'.  Some of these would fit on ELL rather than ELU, but many would not (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4155/8019&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4155/8019&lt;/a&gt;). If a question does not show a minimum of research, it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed rather than transferred, regardless of whether a single online resource can be cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T11:54:46.297" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4471" CreationDate="2014-01-19T17:15:11.757" Score="0" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not complaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to understand how it works; I asked one question a couple days ago and compared to other questions around the same period, the one I asked (I won't link it; you can investigate me if you want to find out which one it is) has shot up like a weed, with views and posts far out of range of other questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did someone share it on a couple of social networks, or did it get put on a blog, or is it just that some questions are more &quot;fun&quot; to debate and answer than others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know because it is striking to me how much of an outlier it appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36871" LastEditorUserId="36871" LastEditDate="2014-01-19T17:56:02.290" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T17:56:02.290" Title="How do some questions get &quot;out of control&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4470" CreationDate="2014-01-19T17:29:04.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the sidebar of most pages, there's a list of &lt;em&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/em&gt;, and this list is reproduced across the entire Stack Exchange network. As of this moment, your question is on it. I can't say for certain when your question got on the list, but it was very likely getting on that list that provoked the large number of votes, posts, and views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T17:29:04.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4473" CreationDate="2014-01-20T11:25:09.063" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I opened up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; tag to clear it out. I came across two question that I could not edit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134308/help-with-this-strange-wording-on-the-wrong-side-of-god&quot;&gt;Help with this strange wording “…on the wrong side of God” [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143541/what-is-development-of-effectiveness-measure&quot;&gt;What is “Development of effectiveness measure?” [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that but I cannot vote to reopen or delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions say &quot;comments disabled on deleted / locked posts&quot;, but neither has the locked banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these questions actually locked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why can't I edit these closed questions?" Tags="|support|editing|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4472" CreationDate="2014-01-20T12:07:54.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question that has been migrated from another site and then closed counts as a rejected migration and will be automatically locked. At the same time, the question is unlocked (but not reopened) on the original site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MSO has an outstanding (as in not completed) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130116/show-lock-banners-on-rejected-migrations&quot;&gt;request&lt;/a&gt; to display the lock banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the OP in both cases never created an account on EL&amp;amp;U and the closures were not outrageously incorrect, I have deleted both questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T12:07:54.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4465" CreationDate="2014-01-20T19:36:03.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Revisions&lt;/em&gt; does show posts you have revised, whether questions or answers, your own or others'. Presumably each revision is listed separately, even if you have edited a particular post more than once (it's not easy for me to find such a post to check). It's therefore likely that &lt;em&gt;revisions&lt;/em&gt; is a larger number than &lt;em&gt;posts edited&lt;/em&gt;. You might be able to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; to get figures for separate posts rather than revisions, but the data is only refreshed every so often and is not generally completely up-to-date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/161420/205823/number-of-posts-edited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A potential starter query&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; I can't remember the way of getting it to use your own UID; you need to enter it by hand.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schema-documentation-for-the-public-data-dump-and-data-explorer&quot;&gt;SEDE schema&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That query gets a figure of 359 other-people's posts for me. &lt;code&gt;(4,5,6)&lt;/code&gt; includes titles, body and tags. My &lt;em&gt;revisions&lt;/em&gt; figure is 503, which indicates that (a) it includes my own revisions, of which SEDE finds 114 (359+114=473); (b) SEDE data is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-01-21T07:41:10.370" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4477" CreationDate="2014-01-21T06:51:42.567" Score="12" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is quite common (especially in the &lt;code&gt;single-word-request&lt;/code&gt; tag) to want an &quot;empty field&quot; for example phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Having children of my own &lt;strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;__&lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;__&lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;__&lt;em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; me&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since markdown uses underscores for formatting, it has a tendency to eat up or mess with underscores. However, as you can see, if you use enough underscores, a few will still get through, but the result is a bit &quot;choppy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I wasn't sure which tags to use:&lt;/em&gt; is there any way around this problem (&lt;code&gt;discussion&lt;/code&gt;), or is it possible to change the parser to treat a string of 3+ underscores as plaintext instead of trying to format it (&lt;code&gt;feature-request&lt;/code&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T09:32:59.377" Title="Is there a way to write an &quot;empty field&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|formatting|markdown|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4475" CreationDate="2014-01-21T06:51:42.567" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest solution I have found is using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/extended-ascii-code/underline-underscore-ascii-code-242.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ASCII character 242&lt;/a&gt; since it isn't parsed by Markdown, but in some fonts, it shows up as double underscores:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Having children of my own ‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗ me&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastActivityDate="2014-01-21T06:51:42.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4475" CreationDate="2014-01-21T08:28:35.037" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best solution is to &lt;em&gt;escape&lt;/em&gt; the underscore with the backslash. Using a backslash forces the following character to be used literally rather than as part of Markdown formatting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\_\_\_\_\_\_&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;______&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also use code formatting (with backticks), which is always literal, but that also adds a grey background which may not be universally liked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;______&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/4477/edit&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Edit&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; below to see how this post is formatted. If you can't do that, here's a picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3oQGX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of edit window&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-01-21T11:22:31.477" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4475" CreationDate="2014-01-22T09:32:59.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The gray box produced by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags / backticks might even be turned into an advantage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Having children of my own &amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp; &amp;amp;nbsp; &amp;amp;nbsp; &amp;amp;nbsp; &amp;amp;nbsp; &amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt; me&quot; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Having children of my own &lt;code&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&lt;/code&gt; me&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, perhaps more simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Having children of my own `...........` me&quot; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Having children of my own &lt;code&gt;...........&lt;/code&gt; me&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Somehow, the dots look a lot nicer than underscores in combination with the box, at least IMO.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I realize that this is kind of abusing the markup, but honestly, how often do you see &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; code on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14033" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T09:32:59.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-23T09:15:08.023" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is my second language, and I have accounts with both &lt;strong&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I look through the questions, my first thought is that they are very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help to clarify my confusion?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63091" OwnerDisplayName="gaoxinge" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T10:52:21.737" Title="the Difference between English Language and Usage and English Language Learners" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2014-01-23T10:54:02.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4482" CreationDate="2014-01-25T16:02:48.043" Score="6" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53866/difference-between-validation-and-verification&quot;&gt;a duplicate question&lt;/a&gt;. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42893/verification-and-validation-difference&quot;&gt;the question it a a duplicate of&lt;/a&gt; is deleted. What is the right thing to do in this case? Should I flag the the duplicate for unduplication? Should I just leave it alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T17:30:31.730" Title="Duplicate of deleted question" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4481" CreationDate="2014-01-26T00:40:21.267" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I undeleted the original, which had been deleted by an automatic process, but then realized that it had been closed as a gen ref question. So I redeleted it and reopened the other instead (un-duplicated it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a good idea to flag these with a custom flag and tell us that the linked duplicate has been deleted. This kind of thing happens sometimes, where an auto-delete occurs, and we don't know that it has been linked to something. We're not likely to notice unless someone flags it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a good idea to flag posts that have dead links as well, again with a custom flag that mentions that the link is dead. This is sort of a special case of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for asking, and thanks for helping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T17:30:31.730" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T17:30:31.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-27T02:05:24.990" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a physical thing of which I neither know what it is for, nor what it is called. Would it be adequate to post a picture of it on this site and ask what that is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not just a question like, &quot;I have this thing and it is good for X, can you tell me what its name is?&quot; But rather I don't even know what it does. And I don't know what the right place would be to post a photo and ask this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site is not a good place to ask, any idea where the question would be a better fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63463" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-01-30T07:55:57.357" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T07:55:57.357" Title="Is asking what a &quot;thing&quot; is via a photo, appropriate on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-27T15:22:24.023" Score="29" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm involved in a few StackExchange sites and moderate one not on the StackExchange platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the moderation on this particular site to be over-eager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know each SE community has its own norms and culture but of the four questions I've asked on here, three have been closed. One or two had reasonable cases for being closed, &lt;em&gt;perhaps&lt;/em&gt;, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... my most recent question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147645/are-british-english-conventions-in-decline&quot;&gt;Are British English conventions in decline? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... has been put on hold as being opinion-based, despite the question having (always) had this on the second line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, I'm looking for the results of systematic studies on the topic or of strong evidence for a decline/lack of decline of British English usage (for example, the decline of a few key conventions over the past 5, 10 or 20 years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This in contrast to the reason for closing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;: To clarify, the question was closed by means of closed votes, not by moderators. When I talk about &quot;overeager moderation&quot;, I refer not only to the actions of moderators, but to the use of any powers of moderation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my questions have not been suitable for the site or something, but with the current moderation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm less inclined to ask further questions because they'll probably be closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not precisely sure why my questions aren't suitable, meaning I cannot improve for next time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, I'm discouraged from using the site and I &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; I'm not alone in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand very well the reason why certain questions need to be closed, and I understand the various entailments of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows theory&lt;/a&gt;, but in my view, the moderation of this site is overeager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically: could someone justify why my question above was put on hold as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally (and subjectively): is the current &quot;level&quot; of moderation healthy for the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: This is closely related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4461/who-is-voting-to-close-all-these-questions&quot;&gt;this meta-question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T22:23:41.910" Title="Overeager moderation?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4483" CreationDate="2014-01-28T13:24:50.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't know what it is or what it's for, then your question is not “what is this thing called in English?” but “What is this thing?”. The former question is on-topic here, although you should strive to also describe the object in words: images are hard to search and cannot be read over low bandwidth or by blind people. The latter question is not a question about English, it's off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recognizing pictures is inherently problematic on Stack Exchange, because pictures can't be searched for easily. Furthermore, if you have no idea what the object is about, you can't target an audience of experts. You can try an image search on Google, but the technology is often not up to recognizing objects of a different color or seen under a different angle. You could try asking on a discussion group, for example there are questions like this on the Usenet group &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.puzzles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rec.puzzles&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T13:24:50.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4483" CreationDate="2014-01-29T11:36:48.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can post an image on ELU, I don't see why not. Yours wouldn't be the first question asking what an object is called in English using an image. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the object is recognizable, people will either know instantly its name or think to themselves, &quot;I want to knew what's it called&quot;. The &quot;physical thing&quot; needn't be obscure but if it is, it's more of a challenge to know its technical name (if there is one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77265/whats-the-raised-part-of-an-arch-called&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the raised part of an arch called?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77030/whats-the-low-back-support-part-of-a-chair-called&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the low back support part of a chair called? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121859/what-to-call-a-chandeliers-crystal-drop&quot;&gt;What to call a chandelier&amp;#39;s crystal drop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12925/what-is-the-name-of-the-item-in-this-image&quot;&gt;Name for an electrical element to use multiple appliances on the same plug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T11:36:48.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-29T19:05:39.697" Score="87" ViewCount="1220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's time that we addressed the conceit that ELU is a site for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Its framers and many of its devotees &lt;i&gt;intend&lt;/i&gt; for it to be precisely that, but it is not, and—for a number of reasons which I shall explore here—it never will be. In my opinion, this mistaken belief is harmful to the site, the people who come here to use it, and even to the Stack Exchange network as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is designed for knowlege transfer: information is supposed to flow from the people who have it to the people who do not. I've been a member of Stack Overflow since the private beta days, and I currently have accounts on 18 sites. Different sites have different rules and cultures, and most sites don't tolerate questions from the genuinely clueless. Yet with the exception of this one, every SE site I've seen adheres to a basic unwritten rule: &lt;b&gt;if you know enough about the topic to formulate a serious question about it, you're entitled to an answer.&lt;/b&gt; For example, the front page at Mathematics SE is full of questions I couldn't understand to save my life, yet &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arithmetic&quot;&gt;they still get basic arithmetic questions&lt;/a&gt;, and if those questions follow the rules (don't ask people to do your homework for you; supply enough information to make the question answerable; etc.), they get answers. There's none of this &quot;general reference&quot; nonsense, because MSE &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; the general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's especially important to understand that &lt;b&gt;the Stack Exchange Network is engineered for the more inclusive MSE model, &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; the more exclusive ELU model&lt;/b&gt;. The &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot; section on every page of every site is designed to drive traffic between sites. Visit any page at Biblical Hermeneutics or Bitcoin, at Arqade or Poker, and odds are very good that you're just a click away from one or more questions at ELU. Once you get here, you are told repeatedly in several places that anybody can ask a question, and you don't even need an account to do so. By now, the Stack Exchange network is well known to the Internet community as a place where one can ask &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;questions that are clear and specific, representing real problems that you face&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; &lt;b&gt;People who visit this site have a reasonable expectation that it is a place for asking practical questions about English usage.&lt;/b&gt; For them to be told that their reasonable and well-phrased questions are &quot;off-topic&quot; is mystifying—not to mention incredibly rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic unworkability of this exclusionary attitude is illustrated starkly by the fact that &lt;b&gt;even the people who are most dedicated to the &quot;serious enthusiasts&quot; conceit act like they don't believe it&lt;/b&gt;. ELU has a reputation for being a site inhabited by close-happy snobs, yet if we were truly serious about being a site for expert linguists we would probably be closing about 90 percent of the questions. Few of the questions that get asked here would ever be asked by someone with a bachelor's degree in English, let alone a professional linguist. Yet most of them get answered, and many of them get upvoted, and relatively few of them ever get closed. Those of us with 4- and 5-digit reputation scores have made them on the backs of these relatively basic questions. Don't make me link to individual profiles. We all know it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the overzealous &quot;no reference questions!!&quot; attitude here leads us to close &lt;i&gt;the very questions we're theoretically here to answer&lt;/i&gt;. Example: If there's one topic that should be in scope for a site dedicated to English language enthusiasts, it's etymology. There is nothing more peculiarly English than the details of how this language came together and evolved, and the etymology of even the simplest words may prove illuminating and fascinating as they are followed from &lt;i&gt;Beowulf&lt;/i&gt; to Chaucer to Shakespeare to today. But what happens when someone dares to ask about the origin of a word? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/145794/the-origin-of-the-word-hag&quot;&gt;&quot;Off-topic.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Get thee away from us, child; we are serious linguists and cannot be bothered with your silly questions about where words come from. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146276/is-snoot-really-a-word-where-did-it-originate&quot;&gt;Off-topic.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;But phenry, aren't many of these questions a better fit for ELL?&quot; &lt;b&gt;English Language Learners is not the answer.&lt;/b&gt; I've been a professional writer for more than 15 years, and I'm good at my job because I have an innate sense for the &quot;look and feel&quot; of English. As a result of that, though, I'm way behind on some of the technical underpinnings of grammar and syntax—I'm still not sure I completely understand the difference between a participle and a gerund, for example. (One of the reasons I enjoy answering questions here, in fact, is that it forces me to figure out &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; my answer is correct before I give it.) So I understand as well as anyone that &lt;i&gt;anybody&lt;/i&gt; can have questions about the fundamentals of English. To tell 40-year-old native speakers of English that they need to go to a site for &quot;English language learners&quot; is insulting and arrogant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make it clear what I'm saying here: &lt;b&gt;when I say &quot;this is not a site for serious English language enthusiasts,&quot; I'm not advocating a position, I'm stating a fact.&lt;/b&gt; Barring structural changes to the Stack Exchange network, the Internet-using world as a whole will always see this as a site for asking practical questions about English usage at all levels, and no one here has the power to change that. So there are two ways we can respond: We can continue to circle the wagons, turfing questions that don't measure up to our rarefied standards, growing ever more insular and hostile to outsiders in pursuit of that beautiful, pure conversation about advanced English linguistics that will never happen. Or we can face reality and accepted that ELU is to English as MSE is to mathematics: while we shouldn't feel obliged to tolerate questions analogous to &quot;What is two plus two?&quot;, &lt;b&gt;serious practical questions at every level of proficiency should be welcome here.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if ELU is to be a place where the common rabble are welcome, then whither the serious linguist? Well, gosh, people, &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Linguistics SE&lt;/a&gt; is ready when you are. When I look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/english&quot;&gt;English tag&lt;/a&gt; over there, I see exactly the kind of advanced questions that people here pine for. The Promised Land already exists, and it's right in front of you. If I were in charge of the DNS zone file, I'd even create english.linguistics.stackexchange.com as a shortcut to the tag, along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;http://facebook.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;facebook.stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;. If that won't work for some reason, there are other options. MSE has its own &quot;big brother&quot; site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, for professional mathematicians. I don't recommend asking basic arithmetic questions there. If you want a site for &quot;serious English language enthusiasts,&quot; go to Area 51 and propose one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever else happens, for this community to continue seeing itself as akin to MathOverflow while the rest of the world views it as analogous to Math SE is unsustainable, misleading, inefficient, shortsighted, and rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:47.103" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T04:21:11.207" Title="This is not a site for &quot;serious English language enthusiasts,&quot; and it never will be" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2014-01-30T07:27:06.377" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think anyone who has read any of my comments here or on ELU would call me a &quot;happy-close snob&quot;. I do however close questions which are duplicates, but not blindly. I look at the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question and the answers provided; if they are well formulated, authoritative and clear I consider the &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question to have been answered satisfactorily. I hope that when I post the &quot;possible duplicate of&quot; link no one is interpreting my act as being mean or snobbish. The intention is to help the questioner. I am saying: &quot;Look here! Look here! This post contains some really good answers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when many good questions are closed as being &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;, (although I'd agree there is a tendency to overdo it) it is telling the OP that the answer already exists. Only this time the answer lies in a dictionary and not on ELU. Take for example the question about the origin of the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/145794/the-origin-of-the-word-hag&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just looked at the question now, and I remember reading it at the time, the answer is a straight copy and paste job from Wikipedia. By no means is it bad because of that, look at how many ELU users copy and paste answers from the OED. But there is one fundamental difference. Before asking my question on ELU I can search on Wikipedia, the most famous online encyclopedia that there is and we all use and abuse it shamelessly. It's an accessible, reliable, authoritative, detailed and extremely readable source of information.  On the other hand, OED is not accessible. Due to its expense, even the special &lt;a href=&quot;http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/promotions/reference/aroedhol13.do&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twelve-month subscription&lt;/a&gt; offer caused me to catch my breath, not everyone has access to it. Let me add, I'm not the greatest fan of OED inspired posted answers, because a few fall in the trap of the &quot;hag&quot; copy and paste type answer, nonetheless I would never dream of closing questions that had been answered by using OED. I don't think anybody would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the &quot;hag&quot; question, the OP received a good answer. It was a pity that the user did not supplement the answer with other references, or provided her personal insights but maybe there weren't any. I trust that the users who closed down the question, &lt;em&gt;knew&lt;/em&gt; that nobody would or could have posted a better answer. By the way, I spent 10 seconds Googling &quot;origin hag&quot;. The first result displays: Online Etymology Dictionary; the second, Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T07:32:36.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4494" CreationDate="2014-01-31T05:15:56.733" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question I asked has been flagged as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. What does it mean? (I am not a native English speaker)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21425369/angle-between-two-lines&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63566" OwnerDisplayName="user3226059" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T10:45:25.613" Title="What does &quot;on hold&quot; on Stack Exchange mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4493" CreationDate="2014-01-31T05:38:38.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say something is on hold when it is paused or stopped for a while. Your question is not related to programming so it is 'on hold', i.e , it cannot be answered till it is shifted to the right forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63954" OwnerDisplayName="user124740" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T05:38:38.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-02T11:49:46.887" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of regular contributors have provided very little or no information about themselves. It is helpful to know a questioner's first language, as often a language group will make consistently similar mistakes when speaking English. It would also help one address people better if one knew their level of competence and where they came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T11:49:46.887" Title="More subscriber information would be helpful" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4500" CreationDate="2014-02-03T22:16:59.067" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you click the &lt;code&gt;close&lt;/code&gt; link on a question that already has close votes to it, and then hover over the little white number in a red box (in the code, a &lt;code&gt;span&lt;/code&gt; with the class &lt;code&gt;bounty-indicator-tab&lt;/code&gt;), the &lt;code&gt;span&lt;/code&gt;’s &lt;code&gt;title&lt;/code&gt; text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;these many votes already exist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, ELU happens to be the only SE site where I have sufficient rep to access the &lt;code&gt;close&lt;/code&gt; link, and the &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt; link does not indicate previous flags, so I cannot tell if this wording is common to SE as a whole, or an ELU thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But could it perhaps be fixed? Unlike the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1976/can-we-fix-this-grammatical-error-once-and-for-all&quot;&gt;“Viewed 1 times”&lt;/a&gt; inconsistency, this &lt;code&gt;title&lt;/code&gt; text is quite consistent in being grammatically incorrect if taken to mean the right thing, or meaning the wrong thing if taken to be grammatically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s also rather an awkward phrasing, is it not? Can we change it to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Number of votes already cast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T17:46:10.537" Title="Grammatical errors on ELU: “these many votes”" Tags="|bug|status-completed|spelling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-04T11:28:53.730" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that it not not possible to use MathJax (LaTeX) in E.L.U., while this is indeed possible in other sites of StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any particular reason why the use LaTeX (MathJax) is not possible E.L.U.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60340" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T18:35:20.047" Title="Use of LaTeX (MathJax) in E.L.U" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4498" CreationDate="2014-02-04T14:02:44.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all you want are special symbols, then Unicode v6.1 has 940 code points with the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;General Category&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;Math Symbol&lt;/strong&gt; and 2,195 code points with the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;General Category&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;Other Symbol&lt;/strong&gt;. (I haven’t tallied more recent releases, let alone the impending Unicode v7.0 release.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve a hunch you might find what you are looking for amongst those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or rather, amongst these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;⦟ ≌ ≊ ≈ ⩯ ⨿ ⟑ ∠ ⦞ ⦤ ⥀ ∳ ⟲ ⨑ ≐ ≆ ⩰ ≅ ≒    ⤶ ⤷ ⤵ ⤴ ⊦ ∗ ≃ ∵ ≬ ⧹ ⧸ ⧓ ⧭&#xA;⧪ ⧗ ⧫ ◾ ◼ ⤻  ⌡   ⋈ ⧑ ⧒ ∙ ⦼ ⊛ ⦿ ⊝ ⨸ ⊘ ⊙ ⊜ ⧁ ⦺ ⧀ ⊖ ⨶ ⦷ ⦹ ⊕ ⦸ ⊚ ⊗ ⦶ ⦾&#xA;⦵ ⧂ ⦻ ⧃ ⨐ ⥁ ∲ ⟳ ∱ ⩍ ⫏ ⫑ ⫐ ⫒ ⩌ ⩐ ≔ ⁒ ∁ ⩭ ∋ ⊳ ⊵ ⋺ ⋽ ⋻ ∮ ≘ ∛ ⎪ ⋏ ⋎ ≜&#xA;⋄ ≏ ∣ ÷ ∕ ⋇ ∌ ⋫ ⋭ ∤ ⫮ ⊮ ⊀ ⋠ ⊬ ⊁ ⋡ ∸ ⋅ ∔ ⦙ ⩴ ⫪ ⧟ ∬ ⋒ ⪚ ⪙ ⪜ ⪛ ⫺ ⫹ ⩓&#xA;⩔ ⪢ ⪡ ⪣ ⧺ ⪻ ⫽ ⩎ ⩏ ⫬ ⅀ ⋐ ⪼ ⋑ ⋓ ⫫ ⫥ ⊫ ⫣ ⥿ ⧨ ⧩ ⋱ ⊤ ⫱ ↓ ⇵ ⤓ ⤈ ⥥ ⥯ ⥡ ⥙&#xA;⥝ ⥕ ⟱ ⤋ ∈ ⫙ ⟒ ⋵ ⋲ ⋶ ⋹ ⋸ ⋳ ∅ ⦴ ⦱ ⦳ ⦲ ∎ ⋕ ≕ =  ⩱ ⥱ ⩳ ⧣ ⧤ ⪮ ⩦ ⩷ ⩮ ≝ ⋝&#xA;⋜ ⋞ ⋟ ≚ ≍ ⩸ ⧳ ⧱ ⧯ ⧲ ⧰ ⧮ ≙ ∹ ⤯ ⤬ ⨍ ∀ ⊩ ⫝̸ ∜ ⁄ ⟗ ＝ ＞ ＜ ￢ ＋ ～ ｜&#xA;≑ ≎ ∺ ⧦ ⪌ ⪒ ⥸ ⪐ ⪎ ⪔ ⪊ ⪈ ⪥ ≩ ⋧ ⪧ ⪩ ⋛ ⪆ ≥ ≳ ≷ ⩾ ⪂ ⪄ ⪀ ≧ ⪤ &amp;gt; ⩺ ⋗ ⩼ ϶&#xA;￬ ￩ ￫ ￪ ﬩ ⊹ ∻ ⎯ ≡ ⧥ ⩧ ⊷ ≓ ⧜ ⧡ ∆ ∞ ⧞ ∫ ⨕ ⨏ ⎮ ⨎ ⨙ ⨗ ⨛ ⨘ ⨜ ⨚ ⊺ ⨼ ∩ ⩉&#xA;⩇ ⩋ ⩀ ⩄ ⩃ ∾ ⨝ ⟙ ⨞ ⪫ ⪭ ⫼ ⟘ ⟚ ⟛   ⥐ ⥋ ⥊ ⥎ ⌈ ⎩ ⎨ ⎧ ⥼ ⌊ ⟜ ⋉ ⟕ ⎜ ⎝ ⎛ ↔&#xA;⥈ ⇼ ↮ ⇹ ⇔ ⇎ ⤄ ⇿ ⋋ ⤹ ⎢ ⎣ ⎡ ⊣ ⧏ ←    ⥃ ⥳ ⤟ ⤙ ⥷ ⥺  ⤝  ⇺ ⥆ ↚   ⇷ ⤆ ⤛ ⤂&#xA;⤌ ⥧ ⥫ ⥞ ⥖ ⥢ ⥪ ⥦ ⥚ ⥒ ⇽ ⤎        ⪋ ⪑ ⥶ ⪏ ⪍ ⪓ ⪉ ⪇ ≨ ⋦ ⪦ ⪨ ⋚ ⪅ ≤ ≲ ≶ ⩽&#xA;⪁ ⪃ ⩿ ≦ &amp;lt; ⩹ ⋖ ⩻ ⨔ ⨒ ⨓ ∧ ⩑ ⩞ ⩠ ⩜ ⩚ ⩟ ∨ ⩙ ⩒ ⩢ ⩣ ⩝ ⩛ ⫦  ⟷ ⟺ ⟞ ⟵ ⟻ ⟸ ⟽&#xA;⟝ ⟶ ⟼ ⟹ ⟾ ⟿ ⤿ ◺ ⟓ ⤾ ◿ ⟠   ∡ ⦛ ⦫ ⦪ ⦯ ⦭ ⦮ ⦬ ⦩ ⦨ ≞ ⦝ ⋯ ∓ − ⨺ ⨩ ⨪ ⨫ ⨬&#xA;≂ ⧿ ⊧ ⨊ ≫ ≪ ⊸ × ⨷ ⨴ ⨵ ⨻ ⨰ ⨱ ⊌ ⊍ ⊎ ♯ ∇ ⊼ ⨀ ⨁ ⨂ ∐ ⋂ ⋀ ⋁ ∏ ⨅ ⨆ ∑ ⨉ ⋃&#xA;⨃ ⨄ ⫿ ⊯ ≇ ⊈ ⊉ ≱ ≵ ≹ ≰ ≴ ≸ ⫝ ⊽ ⊲ ⊴ ⤢ ⤨ ⤱ ⤮ ⤤ ⤡ ⤧ ⤲ ⤣ ≉ ∉ ⊄ ⊅ ≄ ≠ ≭&#xA;≯ ≢ ≮ ⋪ ⋬ ∦ ¬ ⋢ ⋣ ≁ ⊭ ⦧ ⦦   ⊶  ∥ ⫲ ⫳ ∂  ⫡ ⋔ ⫚ ± + ⩲ ⨭ ⨮ ⨹ ⨨ ⨣ ⨥ ⨢&#xA;⨧ ⨤ ⨦ ≺ ⪷ ⪳ ⪹ ⪵ ⪯ ⪱ ⋨ ≼ ≾ ⊰ ∷ ∝ ⨌ ⨖ ≟ ∶ ⦣ ⦥ ⫭ ⦰ ⅃ ∽ ⋍ ⧵  ⧷   ∟ ⦜ ⊾&#xA;⍼ ⟴ ⇴ ⌉ ⎭ ⎬ ⎫ ⥰ ⥽ ⌋ ⨽ ⋊ ⟖ ⎟ ⎠ ⎞ ⋌ ⤸ ⎥ ⎦ ⎤ ⊢ ⊿ ⧎ → ⥵   ⥂ ⥴ ↦ ⤠ ⤚   ⥇&#xA;⤞ ⤑ ⇻ ⥅ ↛ ↣ ⤕ ⤔ ⇸ ⇒ ⤇ ⤜ ⇏ ⤃ ⤍ ⥩ ⥭ ⥟ ⥗ ⥨ ⥬ ⥤ ⥛ ⥓ ⇾ ⤏ ↠ ⤅ ⤁ ⤖ ⤘ ⤗ ⤀&#xA;⤐ ≗ ≖ ∘ ⤫ ⤰ ⧴ ⨲ ∖ ⫟ ⫧ ⫞ ⥄ ⫠ ⫩ ⫨ ⧢ ⪠ ⪟ ⩬ ⪞ ⪝ ∿ ⧌ ⪖ ⪘ ⪕ ⪗ ⩘ ⩗ ∍ ⋾ ⋼&#xA;∊ ⋷ ⋴ ﹦ ⪪ ⪬ ﹥ ﹤ ﹢ ⩡ ⨳ ⧶ ⤩ ⤭ ⤥ ⤪ ⤦ ∢ ⦠ ⦡ ⊓ ⊔ ⧆ ⊡ ⧅   ⊟ ⊞ ⧄ ⧇ ⧈&#xA;⊠ ⊏ ⊑ ⋤ ⫍ ⊐ ⊒ ⋥ ⫎ √ ⧠ ≛ ⋆ ≣ ₌ ₋ ₊ ⥹ ⫕ ⫓ ⊂ ⫉ ⫅ ⫋ ⫇ ⊆ ⫃ ⊊ ⪽ ⫁ ⪿ ≻ ⪸&#xA;⪴ ⪺ ⪶ ⪰ ⪲ ⋩ ≽ ≿ ⊱ ⎳ ⎲ ⨋ ⁼ ⁻ ⁺ ⥻ ⫔ ⫖ ⫘ ⫗ ⊃ ⫊ ⫆ ⫌ ⫈ ⊇ ⫄ ⊋  ⪾ ⫂ ⫀ ∯ ∄&#xA;∃ ∴ ⧧ ⩶   ⇶ ⧝ ~ ∼  ⥲ ⩪ ⩫ ⧔ ⧕ ⧾ ⤺ ⤽ ⤼  ⌠   ⫛ ⧊ ⧍ ⧋ ⫶ ⩨ ⩩ ∭ ⫸ ⫷ ⧻ ⫻&#xA;≋ ⫴ ⦀ ⊪ ⫵ ⊨ ⅋ ⦢ ⅁ ⅂ ⅄ ⩵ ⩕ ⩖ ⧉ ⨇ ⨈ ∪ ⩈ ⩆ ⩊ ⩅ ⩁ ⩂ ⦽ ⥑ ⥍ ⥌ ⥏ ⥾ ⟔ ⎰ ◸&#xA;⎱ ◹ ⋰ ⊥ ⟟ ↑ ⤒ ⤉ ⥮ ⥣ ⥠ ⥘ ⥜ ⥔ ⟰ ⤊ ⥉ ⨯ ⧐ ⫤ ⫢  ⋮ | ⫯ ⫰ ⦚ ⋙ ⋘ ∰  ⤳ ℘ ⧬&#xA;⟡ ⟢ ⟣ ⟐ ⧖ ◁ ◽ ◻ ▷ ⟤ ⟥  ⫾ ≀ ⊻ ⋿ ⩤ ⩥ ⨾ ⨟ ⨠ ⨡ ⦁ ⦂&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you are looking for is the “math letters” from the &lt;strong&gt;Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols &lt;em&gt;Block&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, those are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                 &#xA;                                &#xA;                                 &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                 &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA;                                &#xA; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you tally together all the characters with the &lt;strong&gt;Math&lt;/strong&gt; property, I get the following 2,310 of them, sorted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                        &#xA;          ⦟ ≌ ≊ ≈ ⩯ ⨿                         &#xA;  ⟑ ∠ ⦞ ⦤ ⥀ ∳ ⟲ ⨑ ↶ ≐ ≆ ⩰ ≅ ≒ ؆ ؇   ؈ ⤶ ⤷ ⤵ ⤴ ⊦ ∗ ≃ ∵ ≬ ⧹ ⧸ ⧓ ● ⧭ ♣ ◆ ⧪ ▾ ▼ &#xA;⧗ ◀ ◢ ⧫ ◾ ◼ ▰ ▶ ♠ ■ ★ ◤ ▴ ▲ ▮                          &#xA;⤻ ⏟ ⌡ ⏝ ⎵ ⏡ ⋈ ⧑ ⧒ ℬ ∙ ℭ ℂ ⁀ ⦼ ⊛ ⦿ ⊝ ⨸ ⊘ ⊙ ⊜ ⧁ ⦺ ⧀ ⊖ ⨶ ⦷ ⦹ ⊕ ⦸ ⊚ ⊗ ⦶ ⦾ ⦵ ◐ ◒ ◑ ⧂ &#xA;⦻ ⧃ ◓ ⨐ ^ ⥁ ∲ ⟳ ∱ ↷ ⩍ ⫏ ⫑ ⫐ ⫒ ⩌ ⩐                        &#xA; ≔ ○⃔ ○⃚ ○⃕ ○⃙ ○⃦ ○⃜ ○⃖ ○⃮ ○⃐ ○⃡ ○⃭ ○⃫ ○⃒ ○⃥ ○⃗ ○⃯ ○⃑ ○⃬ ○⃘ ○⃓ ○⃛ ⁒ ∁ ⩭ ∋ ⊳ ⊵ ⋺ ⋽ ⋻ ∮ ≘ ∛ ⎪ ⋏ ⋎ ⅅ ⅆ &#xA;≜ ⋄ ≏ ∣ ÷ ∕ ⋇                           ∌ ⋫ ⋭ ∤ ⫮ ⊮ ⊀ &#xA;⋠ ⊬ ⊁ ⋡ ∸ ⋅ ∔ ⦙ ⩴ ⫪ ⧟ ∬ ⋒ ⦕ ⪚ ⪙ ⪜ ⪛ ⫺ ⫹ ⩓ ⩔ ⪢ ⪡ ⪣ ⧺ ⪻ ″ ⦖ ⫽ ⩎ ⩏ ⫬ ⅀ ⋐ ⪼ ⋑ ⋓ ⫫ ⫥ &#xA;⊫ ⫣ ‖ ⥿ ⧨ ⧩ ⋱ ⊤ ⫱ ↓ ↧ ⇵ ⤓ ⤈ ⇓ ⥥ ⥯ ⥡ ⥙ ⇃ ⥝ ⥕ ⇂ ⇊ ⟱ ⤋ ↡ ⅇ ∈ ⫙ ⟒ ⋵ ⋲ ⋶ ⋹ ⋸ ⋳    &#xA;                     ∅ ⦴ ⦱ ⦳ ⦲ ∎ ⋕ ≕ = ⭀ ⩱ ⥱ ⩳ ⧣ ⧤ ⪮ ⩦ ⩷ ⩮ &#xA;≝ ⋝ ⋜ ⋞ ⋟ ≚ ≍ ⩸ ⧳ ⧱ ⧯ ⧲ ⧰ ⧮ ℰ ℯ ≙ ∹ ℇ ⤯ ⤬ ♀ ⨍                  &#xA;        ∀ ⊩ ⫝̸ ∜ ⁄ ℱ ⟗ ＾ ＝ ＞ ＜ ￢ ＋ ＼ ～ ｜ ⁡ ≑ ≎ ∺ ⧦        &#xA;                  ⪌ ⪒ ⥸ ⪐ ⪎ ⪔ ⪊ ⪈ ⪥ ≩ ⋧ ⪧ ⪩ ⋛ ⪆ ≥ ≳ ≷ ⩾ ⪂ ⪄ ⪀ &#xA;≧ ⪤ &amp;gt; ⩺ ⋗ ⩼ ϶ ℊ ￬ ￩ ￫ ￪ ℌ ℍ ﬩ ⊹                       ∻ ⎯ &#xA;ℎ ℏ ℋ ℑ ≡ ⧥ ⩧ ⅈ ⊷ ≓                         ⧜ ⧡ ∆ ∞ ⧞ ∫ &#xA;⨕ ⨏ ⎮ ⨎ ⨙ ⨗ ⨛ ⨘ ⨜ ⨚ ⊺ ⨼ ∩ ⩉ ⩇ ⩋ ⩀ ⩄ ⩃ ∾ ⁤ ⁣ ⁢ ℐ  ⅉ                 &#xA;          ⨝                            ⟙ ⨞ &#xA;⪫ ⪭ ⫼ ⟘ ⟚ ⟛ ⦑ ⦓ ⬲ ⬰ ⥐ ⥋ ⥊ ⥎ ⦗ ⌈ ⎩ ⎨ ⎧ ⧚ ⥼ ⌊ ⟜ ⋉ ⟕ ⎜ ⎝ ⎛ ⧼ ↔ ⥈ ⇼ ↮ ⇹ ⇔ ⇎ ⤄ ⇿ ↭ ⋋ &#xA;⤹ ⎢ ⎣ ⎡ ⦏ ⦍ ⦋ ⟅ ⊣ ⧏ ← ⭊ ⭂ ⭋ ⥃ ⥳ ↤ ⤟ ⇆ ⤙ ⥷ ⥺ ⬾ ⇤ ⤝ ⬸ ⇺ ↩ ↫ ⥆ ↚ ↢ ⬺ ⬹ ⇷ ⇐ ⤆ ⤛ ⇍ ⤂ &#xA;⤌ ⇋ ⥧ ⥫ ⥞ ⥖ ↽ ⥢ ⥪ ⥦ ⥚ ⥒ ↼ ⇽ ⇇ ⇚ ⤎ ↞ ⬶ ⬵ ⬻ ⬽ ⬼ ⬴ ⬷ ↜ ⦃ ⦅ ⧘ ⪋ ⪑ ⥶ ⪏ ⪍ ⪓ ⪉ ⪇ ≨ ⋦ ⪦ &#xA;⪨ ⋚ ⪅ ≤ ≲ ≶ ⩽ ⪁ ⪃ ⩿ ≦ &amp;lt; ⩹ ⋖ ⩻ ⨔ ⨒ ⨓                       &#xA;   ∧ ⩑ ⩞ ⩠ ⩜ ⩚ ⩟ ∨ ⩙ ⩒ ⩢ ⩣ ⩝ ⩛ ⫦ ⟌ ⟷ ⟺ ⟞ ⟵ ⟻ ⟸ ⟽ ⬳ ⟝ ⟶ ⟼ ⟹ ⟾ ⟿ ⤿ ◺ ⟓ ⤾ ◿ ◊ ⟠ &#xA;ℒ ℓ ♂     ⟍   ⟨ ⟪ ⟮ ⟦ ⟬ ⟩ ⟫ ⟯ ⟧ ⟭ ⟋     ∡ ⦛ ⦫ ⦪ ⦯ ⦭ ⦮ ⦬ ⦩ ⦨ ≞ ⦝ ⋯ ∓ − &#xA;⨺ ⨩ ⨪ ⨫ ⨬ ≂ ⧿                          ⊧ ⨊ ℳ ≫ ≪ ⊸ × ⨷ &#xA;⨴ ⨵ ⨻ ⨰ ⨱ ⊌ ⊍ ⊎ ♭ ♮ ♯ ∇ ⊼ ⨀ ⨁ ⨂ ∐ ⋂ ⋀ ⋁ ∏ ⨅ ⨆ ∑ ⨉ ⋃ ⨃ ⨄ ⫿ ℕ ⊯ ≇ ⊈ ⊉ ≱ ≵ ≹ ≰ ≴ ≸ &#xA;                         ⫝ ⊽ ⊲ ⊴ ⤢ ↗ ⤨ ⤱ ⤮ ⤤ ⇗ ⤡ ↖ ⤧ ⤲ &#xA;⤣ ⇖ ≉ ∉ ⊄ ⊅ ≄ ≠ ≭ ≯ ≢ ≮ ⋪ ⋬ ∦ ¬ ⋢ ⋣ ≁ ⊭ ⦧ ⦦                   &#xA;       ⟃ ⟄ ⊶ ⟇ ℴ ∥ ⫲ ⫳ ∂ ℙ ⟂ ⫡ ⋔ ⫚ ± + ⩲ ⨭ ⨮ ⨹ ⨨ ⨣ ⨥ ⨢ ⨧ ⨤ ⨦       &#xA;                   ≺ ⪷ ⪳ ⪹ ⪵ ⪯ ⪱ ⋨ ≼ ≾ ⊰ ′ ∷ ∝ ℚ       &#xA;                   ⨌ ⨖ ≟ ⎷ ∶ ℜ ℝ ⦣ ⦥ ⫭ ⦰ ⅃ ∽ ⋍ ⧵ ⟈ ⧷ ⭁ ⭇ ∟ ⦒ &#xA;⦜ ⊾ ⍼ ⦔ ⟴ ⇴ ⦘ ⌉ ⎭ ⎬ ⎫ ⥰ ⧛ ⥽ ⌋ ⨽ ⋊ ⟖ ⎟ ⎠ ⎞ ⧽ ⋌ ⤸ ⎥ ⎦ ⎤ ⦎ ⦐ ⦌ ⟆ ⊢ ⊿ ⧎ → ⥵ ⭈ ⭌ ⥂ ⥴ &#xA;↦ ⤠ ⇄ ⤚ ⭃ ⭄ ⥇ ⇥ ⤞ ⤑ ⇻ ↪ ↬ ⥅ ↛ ↣ ⤕ ⤔ ⇸ ⇒ ⤇ ⤜ ⇏ ⤃ ⤍ ⇌ ⥩ ⥭ ⥟ ⥗ ⇁ ⥨ ⥬ ⥤ ⥛ ⥓ ⇀ ⇾ ⇉ ⇝ &#xA;⇛ ⤏ ↠ ⤅ ⤁ ⤖ ⤘ ⤗ ⤀ ⤐ ↝ ⦄ ⦆ ⧙ ≗ ≖ ∘ ⤫ ⤰                      &#xA;  ℛ ⧴ ⨲ ∖ ⫟ ⫧ ⫞ ⥄ ⫠ ⫩ ⫨ ⧢ ⪠ ⪟ ⩬ ⪞ ⪝ ∿ ⧌ ⪖ ⪘ ⪕ ⪗ ⩘ ⩗ ﹡ ∍ ⋾ ⋼ ∊ ⋷ ⋴ ﹦ ⪪ ⪬ ﹥ &#xA;﹣ ﹤ ﹢ ﹨ ⩡ ⨳                           ⧶ ↘ ⤩ ⤭ ⤥ ⇘ &#xA;↙ ⤪ ⤦ ⇙ ∢ ⦠ ⦡ ⊓ ⊔ ⧆ ⊡ ⧅ ⟎ ⟏ ⊟ ⊞ ⧄ ⧇ ⧈ ⊠ ⊏ ⊑ ⋤ ⫍ ⊐ ⊒ ⋥ ⫎ √ ⧠ ◧ ◪ ◨ ◩ ≛ ⋆ ≣ ₌ ₍ ₋ &#xA;₊ ₎ ⥹ ⫕ ⫓ ⊂ ⫉ ⫅ ⫋ ⫇ ⊆ ⫃ ⊊ ⪽ ⫁ ⪿ ≻ ⪸ ⪴ ⪺ ⪶ ⪰ ⪲ ⋩ ≽ ≿ ⊱ ⎳ ⎲ ⨋ ⁼ ⁽ ⁻ ⁺ ⁾ ⥻ ⫔ ⫖ ⫘ ⫗ &#xA;⊃ ⫊ ⫆ ⫌ ⫈ ⊇ ⫄ ⊋ ⟉ ⪾ ⫂ ⫀ ∯ ∄ ∃ ∴ ⧧ ⩶ ⟀ ⬱ ⇶ ⧝ ~ ∼ ⭉ ⥲ ⩪ ⩫ ⧔ ⧕ ⧾          &#xA;                 ⤺ ⤽ ⤼ ⏞ ⌠ ⏜ ⎴ ⏠ ⫛ ⧊ ⧍ ⧋ ⫶ ⩨ ⩩ ∭ ⫸ ⫷ ⧻ ‴ ⫻ ≋ ⫴ &#xA;⦀ ⊪ ⫵ ⊨ ⅋ ⦢ ℩ ⅁ ⅂ ⅄ ⩵ ⩕ ⩖ ⧉ ⨇ ⨈                         &#xA;  ∪ ⩈ ⩆ ⩊ ⩅ ⩁ ⩂ ⦽ ⥑ ⥍ ⥌ ⥏ ↕ ⇕ ⥾ ⟔ ⎰ ◸ ⎱ ◹ ⋰ ⊥ ⟟ ↑ ↥ ⇅ ⤒ ⤉ ↰ ↱ ⇑ ⥮ ⥣ ⥠ ⥘ ↿ ⥜ ⥔ &#xA;↾ ⇈ ⟰ ⤊ ↟ ⥉ ⨯ ⧐ ⫤ ⫢ ⟊ ⋮ | ⏐ ⫯ ⫰ ⦚ ⋙ ⋘                      &#xA;     ∰ ⬿ ⤳ ℘ ○ ⧬ ⟡ ⟢ ⟣ ◇ ♢ ⟐ ▿ ▽ ♡ ⧖ ◁ ◽ ◻ ▱ ▷ □ ⟤ ⟥ ◫ ☆ ⏢ ⟁ ▵ △ ◬ ⫾ ▯   &#xA;                        ≀                &#xA;           ⊻                           ℨ ℤ &#xA;                        ⋿ ⩤ ⦉ ⦇ ⩥ ⨾ ⦊ ⦈ ⨟ ⨠ ⨡ ⦁ ⦂    &#xA;       ϐ           ℾ ℽ                     &#xA;ϵ                                      ϴ ϑ &#xA;                              ϰ          &#xA;                                        &#xA;                ℿ ℼ                ϱ       &#xA;                                  ϒ      &#xA;     ϕ                                   &#xA;           ℵ ℶ ℷ ℸ                          &#xA;                                        &#xA;                                        &#xA;                                   &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more complex MathJax style equations, it is more expedient to first draft your equation on any SE site with MathJax support, then cut out a screenshot of just that portion and load that cut-out as an image here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T14:28:15.797" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T14:28:15.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4497" CreationDate="2014-02-04T17:45:56.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like this awkward phrasing has been in there for quite a while now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made the change to &quot;number of votes already cast&quot; - this will be out in the next build (probably rev 2014.2.4.1345).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41761" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T17:45:56.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4484" CreationDate="2014-02-06T18:03:48.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love this stack. I'm grateful for the answers people provide here, and I enjoy the culture. Personally, the claim that the moderation is 'overeager' is too vague for me to comment on it. But, I do wonder whether users would enjoy the stack more if the moderators closed duplicate questions less frequently than they currently do. I think one could make the argument that either, most answers on this stack involve repeating someone else's answer, or most answers on this stack are purely a matter of opinion. Most questions asked here are not answered with original research, so most answers here involve duplicating information. What does it matter if that information is on some old page of this stack or in an English usage book somewhere else? Taken to an extreme, one could argue we ought to close this stack and post a list of links to English usage texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42886" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T18:03:48.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4498" CreationDate="2014-02-11T18:35:20.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;LaTeX would have been useful when I was writing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/151276/2175&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. As it is, I had to format the equations elsewhere, use screen capture to convert the equations to images, and upload the images. This was a very tedious process compared to entering the equations directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T18:35:20.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4505" CreationDate="2014-02-12T05:30:03.730" Score="8" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw something for the first time where the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; posted an additional bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. As it turns out, this user (Community) is a bot. I thought this was amusing, but I'm also curious how is a background process empowered to do this? What criteria must be met by an answer to trigger the bot to do post a bounty? How big can these bounties be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T13:41:03.697" Title="Community bot posts additional bounty" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-12T13:28:26.257" Score="7" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm prompted to ask this question, by feedback on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/151311/&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; regarding a bit of every-day language (such as &quot;It's raining today, isn't it?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm familiar with StackExchange sites for which pragmatic answers suffice, and on the other hand with sites where supporting references are often preferred. My question is essentially this &amp;mdash; which one is this site trying to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker, and while I am not a linguist, nor have the skill with the language of a Stephen Fry, I fancy myself someone who is able to communicate distinctions in meaning of the sort that often come up on this site, and to explain those same distinctions in meaning. It's entirely possible that the way in which I understand some phrases (and the  context which they suggest) is idiosyncratic, but I'm usually vaguely aware of when this is the case, and it is more often in corner cases of vocabulary (e.g. among words of five or more syllables).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the linked answer, I found myself surprised by the comment left behind. I frankly do not know what precisely a &quot;constant polarity tag&quot; is. Though I might guess its meaning, and now knowing the phrase I could look it up, I found the objection strange, as I use these constructions extremely often (and successfully, to all outward appearances). But my question is not about the particular comment in this case, but the academic standards which they hint at. There seems to be a sense in which my answer is lacking; but that answer is likely to be typical of what I would contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; Do we expect almost every answer here to be supportable in principle, at a moment's notice, by an appropriate decomposition into grammar trees, or citation of examples from literature / definitions from references &amp;mdash; rather than merely practical and heuristic descriptions of how words and phrases are used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64459" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T20:36:41.813" Title="What is the target quality of answer on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4503" CreationDate="2014-02-12T13:41:03.697" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Information systems that associate an owner with all objects in them need to account for what happens to those objects when their original owners go the way of all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened in this specific case is that someone posted a bounty and then self-deleted their own account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever that happens, the orphaned bounty is adopted by, or if you would, “re-owned” by the Community user (&lt;code&gt;user id == −1&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is like how when the parent process exits while it still has running children, those orphaned child processes are adopted by &lt;em&gt;init&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;code&gt;process id == 1&lt;/code&gt;), so that there are never any unowned processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It remains an open question whether the moderation team or the SE team will be manually awarding those bounties before they expire, or whether the default 50% unawarding process will be followed.  My bet is on the latter, but I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T13:41:03.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2014-02-12T14:01:55.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a great question -- one to which I don't necessarily know the answer. It seems like there's several competing ideas for what this se will be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's going to be inevitable. On the other se's that I participate in there are similar quirks and flaws. I will mention some of the quirks of each. For instance on stackexchange, you get reams of terrible code with solutions ranging from one misplaced } to people asking you to draw blood from a stone. Also any question that involves SQL will bring out the injection attack monitors. On japanese.se, there's endless requests for translation without demonstrating any prior work. On philosophy.se, there's weird questions from people with not training or knowledge of philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For english.se, I see (a) questions from non-native speakers that are largely reference, (b) questions that are basically about the nature of the English language rather than about style and usage, and (c) questions that are about style and usage from high-functioning speakers (native or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how english.se can avoid getting the same hundreds of questions ad nauseum but neither does  the php tag on stack exchange. (I say this as someone who worked professionally as a php programmer writing OO code in PHP with a 2nd or 3rd degree normalized DB design, so I'm not dissing the language's possibility per se).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think we should source answers if possible, but this is also sensitive to the level of the asker. If we're doing (a)-type questions, I don't think it matters as much. But for arguments about oxford commas and inversion, sources would be best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61126" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T14:01:55.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2014-02-12T15:40:37.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/151311/2175&quot;&gt;your answer&lt;/a&gt; does not seem to rest on any evidence beyond your own intuition as a native English speaker. The trouble with intuition is that it does not really generate &lt;em&gt;knowledge&lt;/em&gt; as such: there is no way for third parties to verify that your intuition is correct, or to adjudicate between native speakers who claim to have different intuitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, you claim that constant polarity tags indicate &quot;verification of something that is apparent&quot; whereas the &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagetools.info/grammarpedia/clausetype.htm#interrogative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammarpedia article&lt;/a&gt; cited in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/151354/2175&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt; claims that &quot;constant polarity tags are used to express surprise&quot;. So, verification or surprise? Which is right? Or can they be used for both? How am I to tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As far as I can tell from a very quick search, the scholarly literature agrees with Grammarpedia and not with you: for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qlxDqB4ldx4C&amp;amp;pg=PA150&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huddleston and Pullum&lt;/a&gt; write, &quot;constant polarity tags ... don't ask for confirmation, but suggest an attitude such as surprise, disbelief, disapproval or the like&quot;. But maybe a more thorough search would find evidence for your theory too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site is to be more than a venue in which people express their opinions, then people need to back up their answers with evidence, in the form of scholarly citations, corpus searches, results of experiments, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T15:58:05.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:48:34.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't let one negative comment get you down. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most answers here are pretty much introspected opinion. It just turns out that when you stated yours in a formal manner, it got the attention of someone with a different formalized opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation and word meanings are easy to reference (dictionary) but syntax is hard (no easily accessible on-line grammar). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't sweat it. Your answer is way higher quality than the OP deserves (it's basic English)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T16:48:34.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2014-02-12T20:36:41.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would encourage you to just learn what you can from valid comments without being discouraged by them. Even native speakers get frequent corrections from non-natives. As you've already deduced, some of the comments come from differing visions for this site, hashed out long before either you or I joined, and still ongoing. In spite of posted guidelines to answers, some members want to maintain a higher standard for the entire site and will comment negatively on or vote to close questions others find acceptable. (One closed question recently became a featured question, drawing 1200+ views in ~3 hours; obviously the moderator reopened it.) One member repeatedly insists that I support &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; my answers from &lt;strong&gt;canonical references&lt;/strong&gt; even when the answer is straightforward to a native speaker. As your answers will without doubt prove themselves valuable, you may well get fewer comments of the nature you have given (I read that and wondered what it meant as well.) I have learned a lot from negative feedback (I just don't reflect on English in the same way non-natives do); some comments I just read and ignore. I hope you can sit back and enjoy the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T20:36:41.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-14T09:43:53.387" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens if you answered your own question and no one else did? You can't 'accept' your own answer, can you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T13:43:29.977" Title="Is accepting your own answer feasible?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2014-02-14T10:01:32.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can accept your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T10:01:32.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2014-02-14T13:43:29.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possible yes, weird usually, rarely it is the best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, sometimes one has a question that one spends time answering (before getting to ELU), but then you realize that the Q/A might be helpful to others. Also, sometimes the answers create a number of partial answers and it is nice to have a single unifying answer which often the questioner is the best one to make. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, for the most part it looks weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you don't get the 15 pts (otherwise you could create questions all day and accept them yourself and increase rep arbitrarily). You get rep for -others- voting on your answer but just not the acceptance points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T13:43:29.977" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-14T17:42:55.193" Score="-3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a basic phrase origin here - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/151958/what-is-the-oldest-trick-in-the-book&quot;&gt;What is the oldest trick in the book?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the answers because they weren't answers.  Susan actually did a better job of adding to the discussion but that is what it was - a long comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no one on the site knows where the oldest trick in the book phrase originated it seems that it is acceptable to just google the phrase and put up the top things on a google search.  I looked it up before asking the question and I find the answers demeaning to any user.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I find the tone of some of the users as rude after they answer.  Just because you spent 20 minutes formatting readily available sources that don't answer the question, doesn't mean that it should be accepted right?  Also should answers that don't answer the question stay under the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T15:15:43.147" Title="What is the baseline for an etymology question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4513" CreationDate="2014-02-15T01:03:29.683" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please note this moderator feedback from a flag I raised a while back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;moderators do not determine the validity, accuracy, or quality of answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incomplete, speculative, superficial, redundant, and incorrect answers are still &lt;strong&gt;answers.&lt;/strong&gt; StackExchange offers several ways to offer feedback for such answers and improve them: don't accept, leave comments, edit, down-vote. However, the “not an answer” flag is isn't a good way to deal with low-quality answers. Emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it does not &lt;strong&gt;attempt&lt;/strong&gt; to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This flag is not for reporting poor attempts at an answer. It's for reporting cases where somebody has &lt;strong&gt;mistakenly&lt;/strong&gt; posted a followup question or comment in the answer box. When you post that a good-faith answer should have been a comment instead, it's actually a bit insulting, as it suggests that the poster has not even attempted to give an answer and has possibly made a newbie mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some StackExchange sites (like Skeptics) ban partial or unsourced answers, but English Language &amp;amp; Usage is not one of them. Etymology in particular is often unknown or obscured by folk etymology, and in those cases we do our best to present the available evidence, often by citing the earliest known usage in print. It's unfortunate that we can't always provide a definitive answer, but calling people out for posting “comments” as answers is non-constructive and rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a few cases, you have actually pressed people to dig up better evidence, which is awesome. However, the way you've gone about that has struck me as abrasive, downright rude sometimes. Please be more sensitive about eliciting better answers, rather than chiding people for posting “long comments” as answers and similar tactics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2014-02-15T01:03:29.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-17T00:18:20.027" Score="16" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152331/why-is-the-elizabethan-english-incorrect-in-this-quote&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; highlighted a humorously incorrect use of Elizabethan-era English in a television commercial and asked how it was incorrect. In the original version of the question (since edited), the questioner added &amp;quot;(Hint: the problem is with the verbs.)&amp;quot; This question was then closed as &amp;quot;off-topic,&amp;quot; with the following reason given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;b&gt;Proofreading&lt;/b&gt; questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see what's wrong here? (Hint: the problem is with the part about &amp;quot;unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the Stack Exchange network, you will find a strong disdain for &amp;quot;do my homework for me&amp;quot;-type questions, in which the questioner is clearly more interested in getting an answer than in understanding it. The prohibition on homework questions is fairly widespread, with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/06/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;different sites phrasing it in different ways&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;b&gt;photography&lt;/b&gt; – “fix my picture” questions are off topic, (but specific technique requests are allowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is about &lt;b&gt;programming&lt;/b&gt;, but programming questions you’d solve on a whiteboard or that ask what’s wrong with a large block of code are no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At ELU, &amp;quot;do my homework for me&amp;quot; questions most often come in the form of questions that give a sentence or a paragraph and ask &amp;quot;What's wrong with this?&amp;quot; One pictures a student in an English class who's been handed an assignment and decides that asking people on Stack Exchange to answer it for free is easier than figuring out the answer—or even understanding the question—herself. It is to deal with these kinds of questions that the &amp;quot;proofreading&amp;quot; close reason exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-proofreading-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This ELU blog post&lt;/a&gt; explains nicely the circumstances under which the &amp;quot;proofreading&amp;quot; close reason is appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, EL&amp;amp;U-SE has a policy that prohibits proofreading questions. Does this mean that we don’t want to help people get better at English and that we’re only here for discussing obscure questions about grammar? Of course not! The entire point of EL&amp;amp;U-SE, and every other SE site, is to help people learn about the subject matter. The reason we don’t allow proofreading questions is because there is nothing to be gained by a simple proofreading question—true, a sentence will be improved, but the author does not benefit from experience, nor does the community benefit, as it is statistically unlikely that some other person will come up with the same sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, we could identify all the errors in a piece of writing, but that doesn’t teach the author about pronoun-antecdent agreement, about idiomatic uses, or about the differences between to, too, and two. We’d love to teach our friends about these things so that they can benefit in the long-term. So while we don’t allow &lt;i&gt;general&lt;/i&gt; proofreading requests, proofreading requests that identify a specific area of concern are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, proofreading questions, &lt;b&gt;when they identify the area of concern,&lt;/b&gt; are welcome on EL&amp;amp;U-SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big problem we have on ELU, and I see this in action almost every day, is that of moderators or close-voters deciding &amp;quot;I don't like this question&amp;quot; and then selecting whatever close reason seems to be closest to the reason they don't like it. That's not how it's supposed to work. If the proofreading reason says &amp;quot;unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified,&amp;quot; and the question clearly identifies a specific source of concern, then you don't get to use that reason to close the question. If you can't find any close reason that fits, then maybe you shouldn't be voting to close the question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T21:04:23.647" Title="What the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason is for" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-17T08:57:40.433" Score="4" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there's been a spate of questions whose suggested edits consist of deleting &quot;Thanks in advance&quot; type of endings. These suggested edits have to be peer reviewed before they are passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I've seen these edits and have noted the post contains various inaccuracies which have been ignored, I reject the edit and tick the box which says the edit is too minor. If I see the post is perfectly acceptable except for the &quot;thanks&quot; bit, I still believe the edit is minor, and reject it. I believe this is the most appropriate policy and one which makes more sense to follow. Apparently, however, there are users who disagree and &quot;approve&quot; these edits in what appears, to me, a knee-jerk type of way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should these suggested edits that consist of deleting &quot;Thanks for your help&quot; etc. be passed through, regardless of whether it has failed to improve and/or &lt;em&gt;address multiple issues in the post&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T14:04:42.247" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T04:38:07.060" Title="Why are some users with 10k+ rep allowing minor, and I mean, *very* minor edits to pass through?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4516" CreationDate="2014-02-17T13:39:29.837" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hellos and thank yous can be deleted even if there's other edits needed. I would approve such suggested edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1123/9001&quot;&gt;related answer by RegDwigнt♦&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key thing to remember is that this site is not a traditional forum or a social network; it is all about questions and answers, not &amp;quot;addressing fellow users&amp;quot;. When you write an answer, you don't write it just for the original poster, you write it for anyone and everyone who might have that question in the future. Personal salutations are extraneous clutter at best, and completely misleading at worst. Remember that anyone can change their user name at any time without notice, or even completely delete their account, so you will end up addressing a meaningless string of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1122/9001&quot;&gt;from Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually we restrict the question area to the question itself, since the site is intentionally structured as Q&amp;amp;A rather than forum discussion. So introductions, thank-yous, signatures, and the like are generally deleted. (Of course, these aren't seen as &amp;quot;poor etiquette&amp;quot; per se, they are just not part of the format of the site, so they will be removed when not relevant to the question.) The same goes for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the top, accepted answer from MSO: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/3021/162511&quot;&gt;Should 'Hi', 'thanks,' taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always been against the greetings and salutations (along with other extraneous clutter) in questions for a number of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It will leave even less room in the question preview so that we have more difficulty gauging what a question consists of by reading the preview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It takes time to read and parse through those questions when I am trying to spend my time more efficiently reading through the actual question and figuring out how to appropriately answer it. If I have to start reading all the little side comments and snarky humor inserted in there it detracts from the overall message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this is supposed to be a website which is servicing more than just the primary author, we need to think about how we construct messages so that they appear more clearly to those searching on google for questions that match their own. If I am looking for a solution for question X, I want to find someone who had the same problem, not their short autobiography and formalities before getting to that actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The second &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989/162511&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; says salutations are automatically removed, but thank yous are harder so aren't touched.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T13:39:29.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2014-02-18T11:39:32.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will they have to be solid hard and fast rules, or is there room to talk about the evolution of the language, and areas of ambiguity, or looser rules?  I'd love to contribute some thoughts on elements of style.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63877" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T11:39:32.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4524" CreationDate="2014-02-18T14:46:43.230" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I ask why the name ’Godzilla’ was adapted in english instead of ’Gojira’?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the help page, &quot;Translation and non-english languages&quot; are marked as out of scope for this site. However &quot;Etymology&quot; is listed as an ok question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66251" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T18:30:47.490" Title="Can I ask this question on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4513" CreationDate="2014-02-18T15:00:27.800" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just have to put my two cents in here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then I find the tone of some of the users as rude after they answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What??? If this isn't the pot calling the kettle black, then the idiom is &lt;em&gt;totally&lt;/em&gt; wasted on me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer questions for a variety of reasons. Sometimes I just want to help someone who seems sincere (I'm a doc. Docs are helper-types.) Sometimes I'm nudged to think of my native tongue more analytically. Sometimes the questions are in an area I like (I've always liked idioms). There are lots of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happened to think your question was interesting. So I put in some time trying to answer it. It was fun. I learned a few things (I almost always do). I really wouldn't have cared if it got no votes at all. &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; got something out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you post this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No offense - your answer was thorough but not my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question was the origin of the phrase. I completely understand what the phrase means and actually stated that in the question. Just because you can't find the original use or anything that is beyond 10 seconds of googling doesn't mean no one knows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; on meta,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I looked it up before asking the question and I find the answers demeaning to any user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want people to be courteous towards you, try modelling it yourself. It &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; your question. I can't be held responsible for your inability to ask for the results you actually want. We are not mind-readers. When multiple commenters tell you the same thing, it's not time to lash out at the community; it's time to look at your own behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, just so you don't whine about this being nothing but another long comment, I'll propose an answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;baseline for an etymology question&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt;: ask an &lt;strong&gt;etymology question&lt;/strong&gt;. Second: the best outcome you can hope for is that someone (voluntarily) will actually find a source from which an answer can be obtained. You get, however, what you get. You don't get much by demanding better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-02-18T15:15:43.147" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T15:15:43.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-18T16:25:07.847" Score="12" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people at ELU seem to view the relationship between seekers and givers of knowledge as being essentially transactional in nature: the job of the questioner is to state his or her question simply and clearly, and the job of the answerer is to provide an answer that fulfills the questioner's requirements as nearly as possible, provided that the question itself meets certain minimum standards. To this end, they are quick to close questions that they feel are &quot;bad,&quot; sometimes resorting to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;ill-fitting close reasons&lt;/a&gt; in order to do so, as though the questioner has failed to fulfill his or her part of the bargain by submitting a question that does not measure up to what they have decided are the minimum standards for questions. I believe that this view fundamentally misreads the dynamic underlying ELU and the rest of the Stack Exchange network, by omitting any consideration of some of the most important parties in the relationship: those who will come later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky founded Stack Overflow, their vision for the site was &quot;Experts Exchange that doesn't suck.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.experts-exchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Experts Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is a programming Q&amp;amp;A site that had gained a reputation for underhanded tactics such as showing up in Google searches with what looked like freely viewable answers that were actually very difficult to access without paying for membership. Stack Overflow, Jeff and Joel decided, would &lt;i&gt;do well by doing good&lt;/i&gt;: it would succeed by offering something of value to the programming community without charge, making it freely available not only to regular users but to casual Googlers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ethos has been engineered into the sites of the Stack Exchange network at a low level. In addition to the well-known &quot;anyone can ask a question&quot; feature, these sites are designed to surface content on search engines so that if someone goes to Google or Bing with a question about programming—or photography, video games, cooking, English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;whatever&lt;/a&gt;—and a question like it has been answered somewhere on the network, they'll see that question and have easy access to the answer. Get a few of your questions answered that way, the theory goes, and you'll get to know Stack Exchange as a resource, and eventually you'll start participating yourself, and maybe you'll explore the rest of the network and find a site where you're one of the experts who can answer questions rather than just a supplicant who asks them. By any measure, that strategy has worked fabulously well, and is likely to continue doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we answer a question at ELU, therefore, &lt;b&gt;we don't just provide an answer for the person who originally asked the question. We provide it for the hundreds or even thousands of people who might benefit from our answer in the future.&lt;/b&gt; And that obligates us to look for ways to provide the best answer we can, &lt;i&gt;even if&lt;/i&gt; the way the question has been asked isn't entirely to our liking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So suppose someone comes along and asks whether it's better to say &quot;It is cold outside&quot; or &quot;It is frigid outside.&quot; We could respond by brusquely replying (in a comment, probably) that they both mean pretty much the same thing, and vote to close as General Reference, because &lt;i&gt;get a dictionary, dummy&lt;/i&gt;. That's one way we could handle it. Alternatively, we could say that &lt;i&gt;cold&lt;/i&gt; comes from the Old English &lt;i&gt;ceald&lt;/i&gt;, and that &lt;i&gt;frigid&lt;/i&gt; derives, ultimately, from the Latin &lt;i&gt;frigidus&lt;/i&gt;, and is cognate with the French &lt;i&gt;frigide&lt;/i&gt;. And we might observe that English seems to have so many more pairs of synonyms for basic concepts than most other European languages do. And we might note that whenever you come across a pair of synonyms for a basic concept, it's likely that one of the words will be of Anglo-Saxon origin and the other will derive from French or Latin, and that when that happens the Latinate word is invariably perceived as &quot;fancier&quot; than the Anglo-Saxon word. And that's because for several centuries after the Norman conquest, French was the language of the nobility in England while English was the language of the commoners, and even today the French-derived words in our language are generally perceived as being appropriate for a more formal register than their English equivalents, and isn't it interesting how the royal ambitions of William the Conqueror continue to affect the language we use everyday a thousand years later. And just like that, we've written a kickass answer that is likely to educate and entertain literally thousands of people over the next several years. And all because instead of just seeing a &lt;i&gt;bad question&lt;/i&gt;, we chose to see it as a question that could—logically, reasonably, and in a way that gives the questioner the information she needs—lead to a &lt;i&gt;good answer&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;But phenry, won't a permissive attitude toward subpar questions be bad for the site? Instead of teaching people how to write better questions, you're just enabling them.&quot; You know what? I really don't care. I'm not a teacher, and this is not my classroom. My role is not to punish people for writing questions that aren't up to my standards. It's to make the world a better place by increasing the amount of knowledge in it. When you vote to close a question because you &lt;i&gt;just don't like&lt;/i&gt; the way it was asked, the person you're really punishing is the guy who comes along a year from now who could have benefitted from a really great answer to that question, but doesn't get it because the first guy didn't recite the proper incantation when asking it, and we told him—in essence—to go away because he sucked at asking questions. That shouldn't be what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone asks a question that you &lt;i&gt;just don't like&lt;/i&gt;, instead of reflexively voting to close it, make an effort to find the diamond in the rough. Instead of closing as General Reference, consider whether there are nuances or connotations worth exploring that wouldn't necessarily be clear from a terse dictionary definition. Instead of closing as &quot;unclear what you're asking,&quot; consider addressing both of the possible interpretations of the question, and explaining the difference between the two. Instead of closing as &quot;primarily opinion-based,&quot; consider exploring why different populations might disagree on the appropriate language to use in the given scenario, and how those populations differ from one another. And if all else fails—if you ask for clarification and the original questioner doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time—remember that if you have enough reputation to vote on closing questions, you have enough reputation to edit them too, and consider taking that bad question and making it into a good one yourself. Yes, it's more work than reflexively voting to close, but no one ever said making the world a better place would be easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T10:23:32.510" Title="Bad questions can lead to good answers" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|question-closure|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4522" CreationDate="2014-02-18T17:40:51.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wished to discuss what people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; on ELU, this would be a good place to do it. If you wish to discuss (and deprecate) what other users &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;, it is not. Your belief also appears staggeringly arrogant and unsupported by the evidence; but, as you say, you don't care about that. Your opinions, and the reasons for them, are your business alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T17:40:51.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4520" CreationDate="2014-02-18T18:30:47.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question 'Why was this name chosen?' is plainly off-topic; the only person who knows for certain is the translator, and even his response is less to do with the English language than what he thought the Japanese name meant. 'What is the meaning and etymology of the name &lt;em&gt;Godzilla&lt;/em&gt;?' I would think to be on-topic, but before you ask it, consider what answer you would accept. A list of associations in common usage? A quotation from the scriptwriter? A full explanation of what 'Godzilla' actually means in English? The first is possible, though 'list' questions are discouraged: the second is not an ELU question at all (try Science Fiction and Fantasy.SE): the third is purely circular, since the only meaning 'Godzilla' has comes from the films.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T18:30:47.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4522" CreationDate="2014-02-18T18:59:36.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, it's more work than reflexively voting to close, but no one ever said making the world a better place would be easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is (at least) the second time you use such hyperbole to describe what is accomplished on EL&amp;amp;U. I find this hyperbole to be at best unhelpful to your cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like closing questions, and will rarely vote to do so unless the question is answered in an adequate way, either in comments, given answers, or a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; duplicate (which means I've scrolled through it, and found a good answer to the OP's question, discernible without too much effort on the OP's part. But &lt;em&gt;I do care&lt;/em&gt;. I've often answered questions simply for lack of these existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not a teacher, and this is not my classroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please know that this is likewise not your website. Although I empathize with you quite a bit, I find lengthy diatribes not only wearying, but counterproductive. You can't browbeat the community into meeting your standards. It's a community. That's also the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T18:59:36.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4532" CreationDate="2014-02-18T22:25:49.740" Score="5" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U blog&lt;/a&gt; and I get redirected to the Stack Exchange blogs main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I try to visit one of the EL&amp;amp;U posts that are listed on that page then I get 404'd&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mx14W.png&quot; alt=&quot;404 page where a blog page should be&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where has the blog gone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T14:07:26.953" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Where's the EL&amp;U blog gone?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-21T20:47:27.630" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to bring this here before actually asking it, as it seems to be one of those borderline questions that I could see as potentially being closed due to being too broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many punctuation marks can you place in a row and have it still be grammatical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is an example (which I thought, &amp;quot;How silly.&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above statement uses four punctuation marks in a row at the end of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other exchange sites, such as Code Golf, would welcome questions like this with open arms. Would this site as well, or is it better left here on meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35937" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T22:10:15.940" Title="Would this question be closed as too broad?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4527" CreationDate="2014-02-21T21:16:08.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is &quot;an infinite number&quot;, because you can do something like this (I will explain how in these brackets (but the brackets can be repeated ad infinitum (even though it is totally unreadable))). You can do the same thing with quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, this question is more about creativity than about solving an actual problem or answering an academic question, so I am inclined to say it would be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that brackets and quotation marks are not technically punctuation, only &lt;code&gt;,;:.?!&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T21:16:08.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4522" CreationDate="2014-02-21T22:56:09.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long &quot;question&quot; (diatribe, more like), so I can't begin to address all the points raised. But I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; make a few pertinent observations...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even blatantly Off Topic questions aren't immediately &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; - for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;five days&lt;/a&gt; they're On Hold. And although we normally think in terms of the &lt;em&gt;Original Poster&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;editing to get a &quot;salvageable&quot; question re-opened&lt;/a&gt;, there's nothing to stop other users with sufficient rep from doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's not forget that quite often, the Original Poster is simply a &quot;drive-by&quot; who's never going to come back to fix a badly-framed question. Although our OP here (phenry) votes to reopen a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions, I can't say I've ever noticed a case where he's edited the question text to address the reasons why it was closed (I myself sometimes do this, particularly when I see that the OP hasn't been back to ELU for several days after asking the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; room for disagreement over what constitutes &quot;General Reference&quot;. For example, I personally think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153211/which-preposition-comes-in-the-phrase-assistant-professor-in-english/153220#153220&quot;&gt;Professor of/in English&lt;/a&gt; is GR because it's trivial to search Google Internet or Books and compare the numbers (although as I write 17 hours after it was asked, only one other person has agreed with me). But the question clearly doesn't interest the community; there are no net upvotes for the question &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking just that particular &quot;preposition use&quot; question above, I would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have closevoted if it had been asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. Indeed, if it &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; been asked there, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; closevoted by others, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the OP hadn't revised the text, I'd probably have edited it myself to ask &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we favour &quot;of&quot; over &quot;in&quot; for the specific context being queried. But that's just &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; ELU/ELL distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, whilst I realise people will have their own reasons for voting or not voting, I find it rather surprising that a user of over 3 years standing, complaining here about how ELU works, should have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3534/phenry?tab=summary&quot;&gt;cast barely 300 votes in all that time&lt;/a&gt;. How are future visitors supposed to know if answers are good or bad, when the people who (hopefully) &lt;em&gt;do know&lt;/em&gt; don't vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T22:56:09.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4531" CreationDate="2014-02-23T08:17:29.317" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody bothered to answer my edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4163/too-many-up-votes-again-fourth-time-lucky&quot;&gt;question yesterday&lt;/a&gt;. So I'll write a new question but ask about the same things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In less than a month I have had rep points reversed three times. I'd like to know what is StackExchange's policy concerning serial upvoters. Presumably the mods know who this or these persons are. Does the person who upvoted thirty questions in under five minutes yesterday know that his/her votes have been reversed? Are &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; penalized in any way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, the happy serial upvoter is someone who has earned at least 15 rep points, the minimum number of points necessary in order to gain the privilege of upvoting answers, so it can't be a complete outsider. I can't believe it is a veteran user but anything is possible with sockpuppets. My instincts are telling me that the behaviour is ironically, malicious, and I'm guessing it's the same offender. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T16:26:14.390" Title="Serial Upvoting" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4530" CreationDate="2014-02-23T16:10:11.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not at liberty to discuss specific details, but I can assure you that the moderators are aware of the situation at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T16:10:11.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4526" CreationDate="2014-02-24T10:42:17.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't just ELU, but has now been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/222142/162511&quot;&gt;fixed&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was an issue with the SOA and A records being cached really hard on some DNS servers for a day. We never had a TTL higher than 5 minutes on the A and no higher than an hour on the SOA at any point, so we're at a loss to explain why some downstream DNS servers chose to cache for a full day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The records in question are fixed now, but if you had this issue then beware your DNS server. It, or an upstream server, is not configured properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T10:42:17.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4546" CreationDate="2014-02-27T00:20:32.047" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow, where I usually spend my time, the questions are mostly objective, and failing to accept a correct answer is generally sloppy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the topics can be much more subjective. Case in point: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154259/word-that-means-more-accepting-of-other-cultures/&quot;&gt;Word that means &amp;quot;more accepting of other cultures&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; has a lot of good answers, none are really &quot;correct&quot;. In that case, the votes and comments are a good indication of how helpful/valid an answer is. I accepted an answer because SO etiquette demands closure, but is it bad form to not accept any answers here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55308" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T18:30:08.330" Title="Is it OK to not accept an answer for open-ended questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4533" CreationDate="2014-02-27T15:21:52.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose it is OK, but the idea for this site is to not ask open-ended questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T15:21:52.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-27T17:05:44.577" Score="16" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/89230&quot;&gt;Shog9's answer&lt;/a&gt; to the SE meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/89217/50-question-per-month-limit&quot;&gt;50 question per month limit?&lt;/a&gt; appears to confirm that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; such a limit, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/40068/whippoorwill?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=newest&amp;amp;page=2&quot;&gt;this ELU user&lt;/a&gt; appears to have asked more than 50 questions in the past &lt;em&gt;week&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the limit never apply to ELU? Does it no longer apply to any sites, or what? I'm not necessarily taking against the specific user here - even if there is a limit, it's certainly not publicised. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ignorance of the law may be no excuse&lt;/a&gt;, but ELU isn't a courtroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - I don't know if it's connected to the (imho, &lt;em&gt;excessive&lt;/em&gt;) number of questions, but I notice that if I view that user's questions, the display starts off by telling me there are 90. If I then look at any individual question and use my browser &quot;back&quot; button, the redisplayed list says there are only 42 questions (so I'm going to add the &quot;bug&quot; tag to my question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T18:51:47.943" Title="50 question per month limit?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2014-02-27T17:48:30.193" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limit is 6 questions per day and 50 questions per month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limit is only enabled on Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault and Math as far as I remember. Each site has to request the limit to be enabled, it is disabled by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to enable this limit, make a meta post about this and gather some community support and discuss it. If there seems to be a consensus that it should be enabled, one of the moderators can ask an SE employee to throw the switch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative to enabling the limit can be to manually warn users that ask an excessive amount of questions, and suspend them if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23030" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T17:48:30.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4515" CreationDate="2014-02-27T21:04:23.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A big problem we have on ELU, and I see this in action almost every day, is that of moderators or close-voters deciding &quot;I don't like this question&quot; and then selecting whatever close reason seems to be closest to the reason they don't like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to call out specific instances of this when you encounter them (just as you did here) but I think part of the problem is that there are a large number of terrible questions that deserve to be closed but the closed reasons don't give us quite the right excuse. So we just pick the closest available and call it good. (The current popular two seem to be Proofreading and General Reference -- ever since we were chastised for suggesting migration to ELL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental question around closing posts like these is whether answering the question will help anyone &lt;em&gt;other than the person asking the question.&lt;/em&gt; In the question you linked we can all learn a little about Elizabethan usage so it seems fine but most of the questions closed are of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is wrong with the sentence? [Example goes here.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a sister form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is [example A] better than [example B]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these are inherently interesting and, by their nature, limit answers to content that is very unlikely to help anyone other than the asker. Therefore, I think most questions of this type should be closed. (The linked Elizabethan question just happens to be interesting in &lt;em&gt;spite&lt;/em&gt; of it matching the pattern.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us with choosing an appropriate Close Reason. But, unfortunately, most of the Close Reasons are confusingly worded or poorly bucketed. &lt;em&gt;Sometimes&lt;/em&gt; we can get away with a General Reference closing but if that fails the only other suitable catchall is Proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we really need is, &quot;This question is worded in a way that makes it unhelpful to others with similar questions.&quot; There used to be a Too Narrow option that fit relatively well but I suspect it was removed for being a catchall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, people are obviously free to disagree with my desire to close many of these questions and I think the push and pull is healthy. My main point is that I disagree with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you can't find any close reason that fits, then maybe you shouldn't be voting to close the question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I cannot find a close reason that fits it is because the close reasons aren't doing their job. The goal is to close terrible questions; the reasons are there to help posters understand why their posts were closed and offer advice so they can avoid posting terrible questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To phrase this another way, a bad question should be closed and it is better to close a bad question with a slightly incorrect close reason than it is to leave it open and encourage more bad questions like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, however, okay to close a good question just because it happens to &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; like a bad question. I would argue that your linked question is an example of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To extend this post even further, the reason I care about this is because EL&amp;amp;U has a serious problem with its question quality. Over the past two days, the Close Votes moderation queue has been so full I couldn't make it through without running out of votes. The Unanswered section is hovering at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;300 questions&lt;/a&gt;. We have &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/162393/questions-with-no-answers-and-a-score-of-zero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;70 questions&lt;/a&gt; with no votes and no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that EL&amp;amp;U is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking lots of uninteresting or unexciting questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are not downvoting these bad questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are not voting to close these bad questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are not upvoting answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are posting answers in comments instead of answers in answers (usually because they find the question uninteresting or are too lazy to verify that their answer is actually correct)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem isn't that we are closing questions with the wrong reason. The problem is that we aren't doing anything with questions that no one wants to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T21:04:23.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4522" CreationDate="2014-02-27T21:50:28.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we answer a question at ELU, therefore, we don't just provide an answer for the person who originally asked the question. We provide it for the hundreds or even thousands of people who might benefit from our answer in the future. And that obligates us to look for ways to provide the best answer we can, even if the way the question has been asked isn't entirely to our liking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would go even further and say that this is the explicit purpose of asking and answering questions. If a question is not answerable in a way that helps future visitors then it is a useless question and should be removed so we can focus on the questions that &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; help others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary audience should be future visitors; not the individual who actually asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So suppose [...] asks whether it's better to say &quot;It is cold outside&quot; or &quot;It is frigid outside.&quot; We could [...] vote to close as General Reference. [...] Alternatively, we could say that cold comes from the Old English ceald, and that frigid derives, ultimately, from the Latin frigidus, and is cognate with the French frigide. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; add all that detail but you &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; for a few reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The person who asked whether to use cold or frigid doesn't care about your details. They want an answer to the question they asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The people who land on the page by searching (our future visitors) will click based on the &lt;em&gt;question being asked&lt;/em&gt; and users who would care about all that detail already know the differences between cold and frigid. So they are unlikely to ever read all those details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is not hoping to replace the dictionary. It is also not hoping to replace the General Reference etymology sources. So we close stuff that people can just look up elsewhere to free up content creators to spend their time answering &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; questions that bring in future visitors looking for interesting details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is not here to teach people the basics of English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is not here to teach people how to use a dictionary or look up basic etymology. We don't need to give them a link to the General Reference; we just need to tell them they can easily look it up on their own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But phenry, won't a permissive attitude toward subpar questions be bad for the site? Instead of teaching people how to write better questions, you're just enabling them.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't close bad questions because we are trying to avoid enabling poor posters. If a good question exists underneath a poorly written question we can edit it to bring it up to our standards and then answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We close bad questions because they sit around and never get answered. Or people rush to post really short, crappy answers in order to farm reputation. Or post what they think is a really good answer only to find out that the question was asking something else entirely but due to terrible quality it was ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know what? I really don't care. I'm not a teacher, and this is not my classroom. My role is not to punish people for writing questions that aren't up to my standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, however, &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; role. I volunteered for that role by voting to close questions, editing posts and voting on posts. I am not perfect; I make mistakes; but over the years of trying to improve the quality of EL&amp;amp;U I have built up patterns of behavior defended by what I consider very good reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, for the record, closing or downvoting a post isn't an attempt to punish users. It is an attempt to guide the proactive, content-generating users toward the most likely path for success. &quot;Don't look here; there isn't anything valuable here. Go that way instead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's to make the world a better place by increasing the amount of knowledge in it. When you vote to close a question because you just don't like the way it was asked, the person you're really punishing is the guy who comes along a year from now who could have benefitted from a really great answer to that question, but doesn't get it because the first guy didn't recite the proper incantation when asking it, and we told him—in essence—to go away because he sucked at asking questions. That shouldn't be what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrong. The person who &lt;em&gt;benefits&lt;/em&gt; the most from closing a terrible question is the one who would have mistook it for something interesting when it was actually crap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find a little amusing about your entire premise is that you seem to want to hide really interesting information underneath a really terrible question. Why not ask a really interesting question and then put the information there? That way the person who is looking for the interesting information can actually find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When someone asks a question that you just don't like, instead of reflexively voting to close it, make an effort to find the diamond in the rough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do. But most times there isn't one. I have repeatedly posted a detailed answer to a rather simple question just because it fits well. I have edited bad questions into good questions and watched the interesting answers roll in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't mean I should let terrible questions lie there and distract people from the interesting things we have to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of closing as General Reference, consider whether there are nuances or connotations worth exploring that wouldn't necessarily be clear from a terse dictionary definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if there isn't any nuance or connotation worth exploring? Then what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of closing as &quot;unclear what you're asking,&quot; consider addressing both of the possible interpretations of the question, and explaining the difference between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggestion is bad because it makes it harder to search for things and makes future duplicate hunting a royal pain. There isn't any reason to rush to answer the question instead of calmly, patiently, asking for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of closing as &quot;primarily opinion-based,&quot; consider exploring why different populations might disagree on the appropriate language to use in the given scenario, and how those populations differ from one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also disagree with this. &quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the answer. People asking questions here (and future visitors looking for answers) are looking for a concrete, definitive answer. Distracting them with lots of detail about the various &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; answers isn't inherently helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if all else fails—if you ask for clarification and the original questioner doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time—remember that if you have enough reputation to vote on closing questions, you have enough reputation to edit them too, and consider taking that bad question and making it into a good one yourself. Yes, it's more work than reflexively voting to close, but no one ever said making the world a better place would be easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, we do this. Or, some of us do. But sometimes bad questions are just bad. And that's why we close them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a further note, the world will not weep if we accidently close a question that could have been saved. EL&amp;amp;U is a site driven by community posted content. When we run out of questions and topics to post about then we can start being more conservative in closing posts down. Until then, all that interesting stuff you know about English can be added to a relevant, good question somewhere else on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is quite a bit of value in cleaning out subpar material. I brought up quite a few reasons above but the fundemental reason is that the community content creators only have so much time to post content and they are already struggling to keep up with the current demand. Why make them answer yet another thesaurus question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other main reason to get rid of crap questions is because they are &lt;em&gt;boring&lt;/em&gt;. They are boring to read; they are boring to answer; and the answers are boring to read. You argue that anyone can turn an uninteresting question into an interesting answer but this just isn't very common. Most people don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to do that. And, because so many of the questions are boring, we risk losing our true experts -- the ones who are only engaged by the very interesting questions. Now, those really, truly interesting questions often sit in the Unanswered queue for months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me to the final challenge for you: If you really want to write up some interesting answers, go find the interesting questions. You don't need to waste time turning an uninteresting question into an interesting answer; there are enough interesting questions already ready to go. Start there. When you run out of those, we can talk about closing too many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T21:50:28.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4516" CreationDate="2014-02-27T22:03:47.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subjective line around what is or is not minor is the whole reason the Suggested Edit queue exists. There will always be people who disagree and &lt;strong&gt;that is okay&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two cents on the subject is that removing chaff from posts is relatively high on the &quot;not minor&quot; side of the scale. Loosely, from &quot;not minor&quot; to &quot;minor&quot;, this is how I personally rank things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replacing a generic title with a specific title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding content from a linked website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing unnecessary images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replacing long link URLs with a proper link&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Major reformatting or grammar changes that improve readability&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Major rewording that improves readability and unequivocally does not alter meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fixing malformed markdown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing greetings and thanks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fixing quotes, highlights or other minor formatting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fixing spelling errors or minor grammar errors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whitespace (really?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I missed some. I usually draw the &quot;too minor&quot; line right under &quot;removing greetings and thanks&quot; but, as with all subjective things, there are exceptions. If one edit hits a bunch of the smaller things at once I'll vote to accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T22:03:47.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4484" CreationDate="2014-02-27T22:23:41.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the original closers. I can provide a small explanation of why &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Decline&quot; was a problem word because there really isn't any way definitively measure this aside from measuring the population of countries that speak BrE -- and I highly doubt that was the intended question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The primarly &quot;opinion&quot; I was reacting to is what actually constitutes &quot;British English&quot;; not whether it rose or declined. You offered two meager examples at the end of your post but aside from simply describing specific &lt;em&gt;changes&lt;/em&gt; over the period this seems like a hopeless Question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Looking for studies&quot; is also subjective in nature and, at its core, a request for resources. I personally find this kind of completely off-topic as Too Broad &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Primarily Opinion Based.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;looking for studies or strong evidence&quot; clarification is actually unnecessary because a question of this nature would need to have that as part of the answer or it wouldn't be a good answer. The need to add such a clarification is a huge red flag and further evidence that this question is inappropriate for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your third paragraph extended the question even &lt;em&gt;further&lt;/em&gt; which easily pushed this into Too Broad territory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I voted to close and the debate was between &quot;Too Broad&quot; or &quot;Primarily Opinion Based&quot; and I don't remember which I chose. The majority chose &quot;Primarily Opinion Based&quot;, as we can see in the post history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, even after all the edits and suggestions the question has received no useful answers and is unlikely to ever get answered on this site in a satisfactory manner. I feel justified in the closure and would vote to close again. I do not think the question is reasonably answerable in its current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I completely sympathize that you did not receive any meaningful feedback on why the question was voted. You did all you could to protect yourself from getting closed as Primarily Opinion Based which is why I think the best course of action is now close it as Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion on how to avoid that is to pick a specific phrase or habit and ask about its usage. This avoids all of the problems I, personally, had with the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T22:23:41.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4516" CreationDate="2014-02-27T23:29:06.637" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a longstanding tradition on the Stack Exchange network to discourage &quot;extraneous chatter,&quot; including comments such as &quot;Thank you!&quot; at the bottom of a question.&#xA; (Whether that's the best policy may be up for debate, but that's the way it is.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &#xA;issue has been brought up from time to time on MSO; see, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115694/why-is-saying-thank-you-in-question-undesirable&quot;&gt;Why is saying &amp;quot;Thank you!&amp;quot; in question undesirable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Dec 2011)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141747/i-say-thank-you-and-it-gets-edited-out&quot;&gt;I say Thank You and it gets edited out?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (July 2012)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should &amp;#39;Hi&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;thanks&amp;#39;, taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Dec 2012)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think saying thank you is a particularly egregious &lt;em&gt;faux pas&lt;/em&gt;, but I suspect that some folks might be trying to drop a subtle hint to an O.P., a hint that says, &quot;No need to put that here.&quot; Although such an edit might be considered very minor, some regulars could be thinking that the cultural hint is more significant than the edit, and thus worth approving. Those who think the hint is worthwhile would be more inclined to accept the edit, while those who don't would not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it would be best to leave such edits to higher-rep users, so that these edits wouldn't need to be peer-reviewed. That's the thrust of the accepted answer of this related MSO discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153074/why-are-edits-removing-thanks-in-advance-sometimes-rejected&quot;&gt;Why are edits removing &amp;quot;Thanks in advance&amp;quot; sometimes rejected?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T09:49:25.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4544" CreationDate="2014-02-28T05:17:11.463" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154530/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-crazier-than-a-shthouse-rat/154583?noredirect=1#154583&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the origins of the phrase crazier than a shithouse rat.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, in an attempt to soften the blow to some of our more &quot;sensitive&quot; readers, I chose to post the term as sh*thouse rat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Need I have done that?  Or, as a language usage site are words that might be deemed offensive but not hateful acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my personal life, I am not one to watch my language except in situations where decorum is absolutely required.  I feel that America is too puritanical in our view of words derived from Anglo-Saxon English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T20:43:47.500" Title="Would I have been flagged for posting a question with a swear word in the title?" Tags="|discussion|titles|bowdlerization|offensive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-29T15:28:14.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4543" CreationDate="2014-02-28T08:37:16.557" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Titles, but not post bodies or tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/975/do-we-really-need-to-add-nsfw-in-question-titles?lq=1&quot;&gt;must be censored for profanity&lt;/a&gt; because they may appear on other sites on the Stack Exchange network where users are not expecting to see profanity in any form. It is not necessary to censor profanity in post bodies or tags if it is a legitimate discussion of said profanity, but using profanity for profanity's sake is not permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T08:37:16.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4548" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:03:00.050" Score="-6" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I continue unambiguously Dating my electronic posts like my paper letters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for this OT (Out of Topic), but I noticed that the Date-and-Time I had added as usual at the end of my post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154408/what-do-you-call-a-person-whos-not-yet-a-customer/154438#154438&quot;&gt;To raise &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; awareness of the business&lt;/a&gt; of Thu 27 Feb 13:43:00 GMT, has been removed, right inside &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; post, on Fri 28 Feb 12:09:55 GMT by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/100/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since 1995, following the very efficient (and kind to everyone) rules and habits on CompuServe forums (the best ones then), I have ended &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; my forum posts and email messages with the &lt;em&gt;Sent-Date&lt;/em&gt; (the instant when I click the &quot;Send&quot; button), just like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_de_Rabutin-Chantal,_marquise_de_S%C3%A9vign%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mme de Sévigné&lt;/a&gt; (and all other writers of all conditions, eras and countries world wide) wrote or write the &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; date inside their letters, no matter the Post Office later adding the &lt;em&gt;Post-received&lt;/em&gt; date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Date thus inserted had or has to be complete, unambiguous and precise to the level consistent with the context: one day and no Time Zone when letters took one week of horse and water coaches from Paris to Grignan and rarely crossed a TZ line, one second or less, complete from DOW to TOG (follow my link below), when an email goes from Paris to Valparaiso in 0.040s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free to english.stackexchange.com to remove it, but I personally will continue that habit, that has always been useful (especially in our time when most forums and news sites insist NOT displaying honest precise unambiguous Date-and-Time) and harmless. Details in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?450107-Difference-between-GMT-and-PST#post_4990749&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mandatory in Written-Date-and-Time: 3EN Month; TOG; DOW&lt;/a&gt;&quot; of Fri 11/11/11 11:11:11 GMT, and sublink &quot;PST and PDT; TZ and TOG; UTC and GMT; Internet Date &amp;amp; Time; PHP date&quot; on the same page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry again for using space for an apparently OT question, but editing the public writing of someone else without his permission or even knowledge is extremely grave in my eyes and would cause big damage if it started to be accepted without causing the due outcry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Versailles, Fri 28 Feb 2014 19:03:00 +0100&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67257" OwnerDisplayName="Michel Merlin" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T20:51:44.580" Title="I continue unambiguously Dating my electronic posts like my paper letters" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4533" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:24:43.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you've quoted is not open ended in the least. You're just not finding a stellar answer that knocks your socks off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can up vote the good ones. And, hold out for the perfect answer. Or just accept the nearest to your intended meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid appearing not to care you have several options: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Make comments. &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; Great word, not quite the exact context I was looking for, because … &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Offer a bounty.  Offering the 50 or 100 pts gets people's attention. And, it shows that you are still searching for your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Revise your question so that your intent is clearer and someone may hit the nail on the head for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as Kit says above:  avoid asking open ended questions altogether. (Yours is not one, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2014-02-28T18:30:08.330" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T18:30:08.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4545" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:27:22.353" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accusing people of editing their public writing without their permission, when you have given such permission, is also grave. You have given all persons with sufficient access here permission to edit your post, by making said post on a site where the fact of, and purpose of, such edits is clearly stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our goal is to have the best answers to every question, so if you see questions or answers that can be improved, you can edit them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you don't like that people remove pointless cruft from your answers, then fine, you are free to dislike that. You can even argue that the policy be changed. Do not though accuse people falsely, that goes beyond a disagreement with policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15770" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T18:27:22.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4545" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:29:12.860" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should take special care to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;the information about editing&lt;/a&gt; in our Help Center. Communal editing is not only expected but encouraged on our site. It is part of how this community works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, no one is intent on upsetting you or making you feel uncomfortable. You are allowed to rollback edits to your post if you think they have been made in error. However, please keep in mind that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1121/etiquette-on-addressing-fellow-users&quot;&gt;extraneous information&lt;/a&gt;, such as greetings and closings, are often removed from posts as part of StackExchange policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, your response contains a datestamp already in Z-time, which you can view if you hover over the relative time in the grey box that contains your identifying information. We don't include location for privacy reasons, and we use UTC to obviate the need for location in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that addresses your concerns. Please use Meta for these types of questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T18:29:12.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:36:39.667" Score="-2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I asked a question about the phrase &quot;are you dumb bruv&quot;, it has been deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144708/are-you-dumb-bruv&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144708/are-you-dumb-bruv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I try to undelete it, a message comes up saying &quot;A moderator has deleted this post and it cannot be undeleted&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from asking it again, what can I do to have it undeleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed from the comments made against it, that it was not received very well by those that commented, but I do believe that it is answerable and also that the answer would be of interest to other people who want to know about the history and origins of this phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user57234" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T21:07:16.937" Title="&quot;are you dumb bruv&quot; deleted" Tags="|discussion|comments|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4549" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:46:58.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been deleted automatically because it was closed for longer than a week with less than zero score and no editing activity. If you plan to edit the question, I can undelete it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to answer the more general question, you can post a question on Meta to ask to have a question undeleted. I believe high rep users can vote to undelete even questions that have been auto-deleted, and a Meta question is the correct way of politely asking for a review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-02-28T18:53:19.237" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T18:53:19.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4549" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:49:58.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't deleted by a human moderator; it was deleted by the Community♦ account. That deletes negatively-voted questions without an answer ten days [? a week? some time, anyway] after the last activity. Because it wasn't deleted by an actual corporeal moderator, it appears it can be undeleted by community votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question was closed as &quot;Unclear what you are asking,&quot; and nothing had been done to make that clearer, and the question had a negative score, deleting it seems to do everyone a favour, and I'm not convinced there's much to be gained by undeleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there is any merit in asking what &quot;Are you dumb, bruv&quot; means. A dictionary will tell you what &lt;em&gt;dumb&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bruv&lt;/em&gt; mean. There &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be some merit in asking when or how it first arose, but such a short phrase in local slang is not going to be at all easy to trace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could indicate in the question above how you propose to improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-02-28T21:07:16.937" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T21:07:16.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4545" CreationDate="2014-02-28T20:51:44.580" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;MetaEd, by treaty, by labor, and by reputation, Fifteen-Thousand-Level English Stack Exchange User. To Michel Merlin, One-Hundred-Level English Stack Exchange User, Greeting. Regarding yours of the XXVIIIth instant, for to make this site useful to many visitors, posts are collaborative and kept succinct. Personal notations are discouraged. Given at my workplace in Fort Worth, Texas, two hundred forty-eight days by horse from Paris, this XXVIII day of the month February in the two thousand fourteenth year of the Common Era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the above adequately explains and illustrates why we limit personal information in posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T20:51:44.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-01T13:18:00.207" Score="-6" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the members of this forum think that the number of hoops that one needs to jump through to post here is counter-productive to the exploration of the subject at hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the words &quot;Pedantic twat&quot; be used to accurately describe any of the moderators here? I have found one example but I am not sure if it's an exception or a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you to the two members who welcomed my question but heavy-handed moderation has made this a very unwelcoming forum and I doubt I will be returning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64538" OwnerDisplayName="Blackthorne" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T12:42:08.590" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T16:46:54.750" Title="Pedantic tw*t - correct usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T02:18:07.180" Score="5" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question about interpreting the definition of an appropriate SE question, specifically, whether any question that can be answered only by a list of suggestions is inappropriate (and why). This discussion started between me and a moderator of English SE, KitFox, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/154284/62044&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll quote some of the points for you: I was asked to &quot;&lt;em&gt;...avoid asking subjective questions where every answer is equally valid,&lt;/em&gt;&quot; which is clearly consistent with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, and I was told that &quot;&lt;em&gt;...this boils down to a list question, which is off-topic here. Questions asking for lists of something generally produce many answers that overlap. They don't invite a single, concise, definitive answer that can be accepted by the asker because many answers contain correct portions, or all answers could be considered correct. Additionally, list-type question tend to rely on opinions and often end up with a lot of non-constructive discussion attached.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a number of issues with these statements, and I would like to discuss them, so I could understand SE better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I replied that list-type questions do not rely on opinions by design, and do not necessarily cause a lot of non-constructive discussion. It is just not true. If I asked, &quot;How can I copy text in Windows OS?&quot;, and the answer would be, &quot;A) By right click and Copy; B) By Ctrl+C&quot;, this list would not have any opinions, and it would not cause more non-constructive discussion than any other question. Calling this question &quot;subjective where every answer is equally valid&quot; is not true either -- there is a limited amount of correct answers, and instead of asking which answer is the best, I just ask to list them all (or as many as you know). This is a primitive example of a list-type question that, in my opinion, can be answered and should be answered on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question I asked in the thread I linked at the top is exactly like this. I asked &quot;How can I do A in a way that would satisfy conditions W, X, Y, and Z?&quot;. The answer would be a list, but just as with our previous example, it does not have to be a list of opinions. There is a limitted number of correct answers to this question, so why is it wrong to list them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I replied to the comment regarding &quot;many answers that overlap&quot; by asking why is it important to have one winner, one single best answer, and what is wrong with having multiple good answers? Moreover, even if we do indeed prefer having only one good answer, the fact that no one on SE seems to be willing to provide every valid answer in one concise post is not exactly the problem of the question, is it? The question cannot be changed to make it simpler for people to answer, it is a list-question in essence, so it's natural that some people overlook potential solutions and other people fill these gaps with their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, please consider that the post you've just read contains over 600 words, and if my question was answered just by a list of suggestions separated by commas, an answer of the size of this post could fit over 600 solutions, which is clearly much more than anyone here is capable of providing, clearly much more than I need, and clearly more than the number of all existing solutions, considering the limitations of the question. So narrowed-down list-type questions do not produce answers any longer than other questions, and the FAQ defines an excessively broad question by saying that, &quot;&lt;em&gt;If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much,&lt;/em&gt;&quot; which is clearly not the case, because I can't imagine an entire book that answers the question in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62044" OwnerDisplayName="Herman" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T19:24:19.297" Title="Why is my list-type question inappropriate on English SE?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4553" CreationDate="2014-03-02T16:46:54.750" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have taken things a tad personally. Even to the extent of referring to people as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/twat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;twats&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a word whose actual meaning I assume you are not aware of and instead meant to write &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/twit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;twits&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is a far less offensive term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on to your &lt;del&gt;rant&lt;/del&gt; question. This site is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a forum, this is very important. It is instead a question and answer wiki. Question posts are expected to be just that, &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;. Your post is indeed both useful and interesting but it is not a question. Even when you added a question to it, it is not a question that is on topic (from our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is basically asking what others feel about your very nice chart. That is exactly the kind of opinion seeking that the rule above tries to avoid. Therefore, your question was closed as being off topic because it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the best things about the Stack Exchange network of sites is that they are all very strict in what they consider on topic. While that may sometimes have the negative effect of blocking useful information such as your post contained, it also has the very positive effect of keeping the sites relevant to their subject matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it so happens that a question you wanted to answer had been &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/new-protected-question-status/&quot;&gt;protected&lt;/a&gt; because it was attracting too much off topic discussion. This means that new users can't answer it. You can still answer 99% of the question on the site, only a very few are protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You had a useful comment to make, so since you couldn't post it as an answer, you did what you would have done in a forum and started a new thread. That's fine on forums but is not how we work here so your question was closed. The SE way of doing things would have been to ask a new question yourself and adding your post as an answer to your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of SE as a society (it is). Whenever you move to a new society, you need some time to familiarize yourself with its rules and social norms. You do not know the norms here and have taken umbrage at something that was in no way a personal attack. I also respectfully submit that calling people &lt;em&gt;twats&lt;/em&gt; is not the best way to start a civil conversation and there is no reason to resort to profanity just because you don't understand how a particular society works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T16:46:54.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T23:04:18.393" Score="5" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is likely a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/742/how-should-we-handle-users-who-generate-consistently-low-quality-and-off-topic-q&quot;&gt;How should we handle users who generate consistently low-quality and off-topic questions?&lt;/a&gt;  But, that seems like a discussion of a more egregious offender than the person who is irking me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a particular poster who is using up all of my close votes in a day by asking the same types of questions over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are not particularly &quot;low-quality&quot; but rather asking about punctuation and grammatical usages that should be easily found using standard English resources.  I have left this person multiple comments to this effect, but they continue in spite of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't bother me, except that this person posts many, many posts which I'm encountering in the review queues.  [They probably hit the daily max and, despite that volume of output, their reputation has remained in the 400 range.]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am deliberately trying not to mention the person directly or post an example question, here yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue lies in the signal-to-noise ratio.  This poster likely has a few valuable posts, but given the sheer number of posts they are making, it's eaten a considerable amount of my time casting close votes, etc.  It makes me default to assuming their question is not valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:43:19.807" Title="How do you handle a poster who consistently asks the same type of off-topic question?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|low-quality-posts|trolling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-03T00:25:46.353" Score="13" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, please know that I have read the duplicates to this question. But I still feel the need for guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've reached a point where I care little for gaining more points (it was fun at first). I enjoy EL&amp;amp;U, have fun researching answers, and I want to help make this community useful and successful. However, I feel a bit silly answering some questions (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154603/as-said-the-man-or-as-the-man-said-or-both/154626#154626&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) in Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, I simply (only) want to make sure a visitor gets an answer on a question with a low probability of a fine answer. I don't care if someone wants to run with my comment, either. But I am &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; hesitant to close vote a question, even an obvious GR question, without an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I not answer in comments? Should I edit the question to make it more relevant (I'm hesitant to do this)? I'm aware that an Answer is preferable, but answers in comments are quite frequent anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T22:31:23.700" Title="Answering questions in comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4559" CreationDate="2014-03-03T03:25:44.077" Score="12" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/2637&quot;&gt;So if you want to enable this limit,&lt;/a&gt; make a meta post about this and gather some community support and discuss it. If there seems to be a consensus that it should be enabled, one of the moderators can ask an SE employee to throw the switch.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any support for this? I would love to see this enabled. I believe it would add to the quality of the site by eliminating frivolous questions often closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB I have no desire to eliminate astute posts, but the number of questions asked are often excessive. Limiting to 50/month (I think) would help some to set internal limits, or at least check the number of questions asked (hopefully to those most interesting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: the limits are 6 posts per day, 50 per month. I think this is more than reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T13:51:09.093" Title="Follow up to FF's question on 50 posts limit" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4558" CreationDate="2014-03-03T04:11:40.183" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not opposed to enabling the posting limits, but I'm not sure it's the best solution to the immediate problem that has prompted the last few meta posts. I think the current “problem user” would be better served by a warning or short suspension. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't gotten the impression that question spam is a common problem on ELU, so I'm inclined to leave things unlimited as they are now. But I would not strongly object if other people felt differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T04:11:40.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4558" CreationDate="2014-03-03T04:23:41.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; against unilaterally imposing the limit, but the cited answer also says...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The alternative to enabling the limit can be to manually warn users that ask an excessive amount of questions, and suspend them if necessary.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/50-question-per-month-limit#comment15125_4535&quot;&gt;one of our mods commented...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;47 questions over two days (by my count) certainly does seem a bit much&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, there's currently only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/40068/whippoorwill?tab=questions&quot;&gt;one &quot;totally OTT&quot; poster&lt;/a&gt; (who's now really &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/155119/&quot;&gt;scraping the bottom of the barrel&lt;/a&gt;), plus one other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/65205/nourished-gourmet?tab=questions&quot;&gt;&quot;prolific&quot; poster&lt;/a&gt; who I don't really see as a problem (yet?! :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in my original question, I'm not necessarily taking against the specific user involved. But I'd rather just see that user asked to rein back - and if necessary suspended for non-compliance. Noting the average rating for his questions (close to, if not actually &lt;em&gt;below&lt;/em&gt; zero), the site wouldn't be losing much by way of valued input, useful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; reasons for urging caution are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: I assume it would be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; difficult to revert to the current situation once we adopt the limit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   It always seems to be easier to &lt;em&gt;pass&lt;/em&gt; &quot;laws&quot; restricting the liberty of minorities than to &lt;em&gt;repeal&lt;/em&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2: I also assume it's probably &quot;one size fits all&quot; - i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/2637&quot;&gt;6 questions per day and 50 questions per month&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I don't find it that hard to imagine someone coming up with more than half-a-dozen &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions during some portion of a week when they don't have ready Internet access (&quot;weeekend-only&quot; poster?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Let's try &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/73/1914.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jaw-jaw before war-war.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T04:23:41.010" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4556" CreationDate="2014-03-03T08:05:31.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to handle a series of very similar worded questions?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Treat each and every question on its individual merits. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's a duplicate, flag it as such. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's boring, ignore it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer is obvious, use the comment section. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wait at least a few hours before closing it as being &quot;off-topic&quot; etc. because someone might answer the question brilliantly. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let off steam in meta (or in chat).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, hearing someone who is using up &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; their closedown votes in one day, smacks to me of obsession. Chill out. They're only words. This applies to other more illustrious users who often feel the need to express their frustrations, reminding us that their quota has been met. Lets instead remind ourselves, EL&amp;amp;U is not a crusade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; The above tactics/solutions do not apply if the offender is trolling, or deliberately acting obtuse after receiving several warnings. In those cases, suspension is the answer. I do not believe the user in question is a troll, and I believe that a moderator ought to send him a personal message advising him/her to &lt;em&gt;slow down&lt;/em&gt; and explaining why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-03-03T08:48:42.373" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T08:48:42.373" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4557" CreationDate="2014-03-04T03:18:26.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hate to disagree with Mari-Lou here&lt;sub&gt;.1&lt;/sub&gt; Originally, I thought I also disagreed with ELL mod WendiKidd, who posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/936/call-to-stop-answering-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;Call to stop answering off-topic questions&lt;/a&gt; on meta there. But it turned out we agreed after all. Anyway, here's the answer I posted there, which also seems appropriate here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas I hope I don't often fall into the trap of &lt;em&gt;posting an answer&lt;/em&gt; to a question that's subsequently (correctly) closed, I do often &quot;answer&quot; in a comment &lt;em&gt;while closevoting&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe this &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; encourage more Off Topic questions - but at least if a question is egregious enough, we can downvote and eventually delete it without (I think) needing mod intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - in many cases, providing answers &lt;em&gt;via comments&lt;/em&gt; to OT questions doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Arguably, it makes the site seem &lt;em&gt;friendlier&lt;/em&gt;, so people who originally came here with an OT query might be encouraged to come back again with one that's &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit that I sometimes get quite annoyed when I see actual Answers posted to questions I really don't think should be here. So annoyed that once in a while I even &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; them, regardless of whether they're &quot;correct&quot; or not. Certainly I'm much more likely to judge &lt;em&gt;harshly&lt;/em&gt; in such circumstances, and I would encourage others to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question has been closed, don't just ignore it. Obviously, first check to see if maybe you can tweak the question so it might get reopened. If not, &lt;em&gt;and you strongly endorse the closevote&lt;/em&gt;, check if there are any Answers you can reasonably disagree with - and if so, &lt;em&gt;hammer&lt;/em&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4557/answering-questions-in-comments#comment15233_4557&quot;&gt;Or maybe not.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T04:18:11.253" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4565" CreationDate="2014-03-04T15:43:50.463" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ref: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/155366/words-and-reading-level#155382&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/155366/words-and-reading-level#155382&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put close... not on topic... belongs on other site.  The only &quot;other site&quot; listed was meta.english.  I would expect either a list of all sites or a freeform text field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61171" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T15:54:47.567" Title="Couldn't select proper close-question reason" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4564" CreationDate="2014-03-04T15:54:47.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a bug. This is &quot;by design&quot; so that users can't just send questions here and there with nary a care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, we used to be able to migrate from EL&amp;amp;U to Writers. However, that caused problems because many EL&amp;amp;U users don't actually know what goes on at Writers, so bad migrations happened and that path was closed to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paths for migration by us normal users must be opened by the Stack Exchange team. This doesn't happen very often. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to recommend that a question be migrated to a site not in the currently approved list you can flag it with &quot;other (needs ♦ moderator attention)&quot; and specify where and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T15:54:47.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4554" CreationDate="2014-03-04T23:39:25.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I thought it probably &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; Off Topic, I didn't actually closevote the original question. I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154284/how-can-i-express-strong-emotions-without-using-biblical-or-profane-language#comment320265_154284&quot;&gt;post a comment&lt;/a&gt; indicating that I thought the basic premise was probably flawed, but I figured there might be a chance someone could provide a &lt;em&gt;generic&lt;/em&gt; answer identifying a class of &quot;swearing&quot; that doesn't reference either religion or excretory/sexual activity/organs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought about it some more, and decided there is in fact no such class. It's worth noting OP's &lt;em&gt;example of an idiom I'm looking for is &quot;Dear me!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - an expression that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10195/origin-of-the-phrase-oh-dear&quot;&gt;has been queried on ELU&lt;/a&gt;, with all answers agreeing the origins lie in &quot;blasphemy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we rule out &quot;swearing&quot; (all of which relies on those standard taboo elements), we're just left with &lt;em&gt;&quot;How do I express strong emotion without swearing?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. And much as I liked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4554/why-is-my-list-type-question-inappropriate-on-english-se#comment15184_4554&quot;&gt;icktoofay's link&lt;/a&gt;, you could fill &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; books and still not come close to a definitive answer to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, so far as I know, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Orwell&lt;/a&gt;, for example, didn't swear in either his books or his private life. But he certainly felt strongly about many things, and was more than capable of expressing himself. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Politics and the English Language&lt;/a&gt; can get pretty scathing, so that's a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'll put my cards on the table and say that if OP's question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; reopened (and currently it has three of the five required reopen votes), I will closevote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T23:39:25.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4554" CreationDate="2014-03-05T02:45:51.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moreover, even if we do indeed prefer having only one good answer,&#xA;  the fact that no one on SE seems to be willing to provide every valid&#xA;  answer in one concise post is not exactly the problem of the question,&#xA;  is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be take an extremely long post to include &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the possible variations that could be applicable. I mean, surely by now you have got the gist? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was: &lt;em&gt;How can I express strong emotions without using Biblical or profane language?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you really need a canonical answer which includes, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seriously?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you serious?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot be serious! (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McEnroe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;McEnroe&lt;/a&gt; used to say this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't possibly be serious!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seriously? You're joking, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't be saying this in all seriousness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't believe you are serious. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That sounds too unbelievable to be true.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've limited myself to expressing disbelief. I believe each suggestion is an acceptable answer. I also believe &lt;strong&gt;these suggestions overlap&lt;/strong&gt;. Do you really &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; another eight or ten versions expressing the same meaning? Aren't the first three enough? AND I included a link, to emphasize the validity of that expression. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the posted answers to your post are either contrived, unnatural, stilted, or very dated. Do you want to see more of those? And yet, they would be &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; answers, because there aren't ten possible answers to your question, but possibly hundreds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You claimed, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a limited number of correct answers to this question, so&#xA;  why is it wrong to list them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T02:51:49.527" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T02:51:49.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-05T10:17:24.473" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/155322/15004&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold as being too basic and thus off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to vote for this question to be migrated to ELL rather than deleted, but the only three options I see in &quot;flag&quot; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is spam&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is offensive, abusive, or hate speech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other (needs ♦ moderator attention)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used the last option, but I seem to remember there used to be an option for migrating to ELL. Is this option gone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this migration is necessary any longer. I've found an answer to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/17272/4559&quot;&gt;on ELL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15004" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T21:18:39.420" Title="How to migrate a question to ELL" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2019-03-21T17:09:55.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4557" CreationDate="2014-03-05T18:57:45.823" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Obvious opinions are opinions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I not answer in comments? Should I edit the question to make it more relevant (I'm hesitant to do this)? I'm aware that an Answer is preferable, but answers in comments are quite frequent anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you should not answer in comments. The only time an answer in comments is appropriate is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are unsure of your answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are confused by the question and need further clarification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason answers belong as answers is relatively straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker can mark the answer as accepted, thereby helping future visitors also get an answer to the question. Otherwise, they would have to read all of the comments and simply hope that the most upvoted comment is the best answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other members of the community can comment on and help improve the answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other members can vote the answer up (or down) appropriately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows the site to track metrics on questions that have been appropriately answered. Answers in comments are impossible to track and clog up views such as the Unanswered section.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not caring about your own reputation isn't really relevant. Reputation exists as a carrot in order to get people to post answers. This is because &lt;em&gt;answers are good&lt;/em&gt;. At some point, the carrot stops looking attractive but it doesn't change the reason the carrot is being offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that being said, there seems to be some debate around whether people should answer &quot;bad&quot; questions. If you are willing to answer the question in a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; then it suggests you believe the answer to the debate is yes, you should answer &quot;bad&quot; questions. So please put the answer in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion on that subject is that answered questions are better than non-answered questions regardless of the question's quality. If the question is &quot;bad&quot; enough then it should be closed; but the only time an answer is &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; inappropriate is when it is (a) wrong (b) the question is unclear and likely to be edited or (c) you are unsure of your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes handle (a) just fine and comments are appropriate for (b) and (c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I do care strongly about this issue is simply because I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; get around to your answer in a comment eventually and will convert it to an actual answer. So you aren't really accomplishing much other than giving me more work.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other related subject would be whether to answer a question in a comment &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question has been closed. I think you should spend your energy editing the question to be more appropriate for the site but, honestly, I don't really care that much. If the question ever gets reopened then you should move your comment to an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for people who &quot;dislike&quot; answering on &quot;bad&quot; questions, they are misusing the site and don't understand what downvotes are for. But since the premise of this question is that you don't care much for gaining points I think you should be able to not care much for losing points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, you need to answer for yourself what goal are you trying to accomplish on this site and then set about achieving that goal in the best way possible. If your goal is to help users get answers then the best way to achieve that is to use answers; not comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Assuming that no one else answered the question, the question stays open, and the question doesn't have a negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T22:31:23.700" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T22:31:23.700" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4554" CreationDate="2014-03-05T19:24:19.297" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are implying two questions with this meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did my question get closed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are list questions off-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason your question was closed is because it was Too Broad. Kit's note about it boiling down to a list question wasn't really suggesting that you were &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; looking for a list of things but more that &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt; of the question were going to have trouble answering the question without devolving into a list of relevant examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the real reason your question was Too Broad is because it matches the description contained in Too Broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any particular confusion about why it qualified for that we can continue the discussion but it seems as if we all got distracted by the second question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental reason list type questions are off-topic is because the question/answer format of SE works best for certain types of questions. List type questions just don't fit well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are exceptions, naturally, but it isn't easy to compile a list across multiple posts for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple posters will have similar ideas and a lot of content will be duplicated over the answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A list that is 80% accurate but 20% inaccurate is hard to upvote because it isn't entirely correct. A comment thread on the subject can help but differing opinions exist and so it will always be harder to vote on things&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discussion around a particular item of a list is not helped by the deliberately low key comment system SE uses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone with a future practical problem isn't likely to get a practical answer from a list type question that &quot;covers&quot; the problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you choose which answer to mark as accepted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of your points in support of list questions would likely work to excuse a &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; list question but my opinion more or less boils down to the following: &lt;strong&gt;List questions should almost always be closed due to the above reasons and it is up to the asker to solve these problems; not the answerers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental point is that SE is a great fit for &lt;em&gt;certain types of questions&lt;/em&gt;. It is not a great fit for certain other types. And that is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T19:24:19.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-05T19:32:47.870" Score="26" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I am used to norms on other stack sites but I don't get why there are 5 answers for a question and no upvotes for the question itself.  To me if you spent the time to answer something, then why would the question not be upvoted — I don't spend my time answering things I consider &quot;filler&quot;. Sorry I am not giving examples but you can always use the front page as a guide because it is almost half of the questions on this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to phrase my question clearly — why would you answer a question and not upvote that question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2014-03-12T01:56:22.057" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T21:40:21.577" Title="Why are questions answered with no upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2014-03-05T19:37:24.363" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this question, not in the least because the simple answer is in my case &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never thought of it. If a question strikes me as particularly interesting or useful, I will upvote it, regardless of whether I will even (try to) answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, especially questions that I don't feel up to answering are likely to get my upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ALL, but certainly also here, some questions I do not find worthy of an upvote, but I still feel I can put in a bit of effort to provide the OP with an answer. I may even answer a question and downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I like your question is that it does make me wonder if this way of working is good or acceptable, so I am very interested in other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T19:37:24.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2014-03-06T07:52:33.540" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvote questions according to the mouse-over help on the voting arrows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is not useful or unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer questions according to whether I know the answer and can support it with evidence or explanation. Lately, most of the questions I've answered have not been particularly interesting, well-researched, or well-written, but I felt I could help out the person asking regardless. Thus, I haven't up-voted many of the questions I've answered recently. (Conversely, many of the questions I've upvoted already had good answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a few cases, I have even voted to close an question that I answered, because the close reason was borderline (e.g., a duplicate question that didn't exactly match the new question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T07:52:33.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4575" CreationDate="2014-03-06T22:05:04.867" Score="7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/155509/is-there-a-secular-non-vulgar-alternative-to-for-heavens-sake&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is protected: &quot;To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.&quot; I have 101 reputation, so why can I not post an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7216" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T00:16:55.067" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T00:16:55.067" Title="Why can't I (101 rep) answer a protected question?" Tags="|support|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4574" CreationDate="2014-03-06T22:19:10.083" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because you haven't earned over 10 rep &lt;strong&gt;on this site&lt;/strong&gt;. You have been given the site association bonus, but that is not counted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T22:19:10.083" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2014-03-08T12:59:01.783" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow itself, most questions get up votes if the asker has tried to work out the answers before posting the question. It's like my school maths teacher always said 'show your work'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions on English are one line or just a few sentences with no clear indication that they tried to find the answer elsewhere beforehand. If they do, they'll be getting an up vote from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66653" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T12:59:01.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3978" CreationDate="2014-03-10T13:34:16.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to FumbleFingers great answer (+1) I also try and do &quot;Fast and Frequent&quot; for my answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll often post a summary one line answer asap, then I'll immediately edit it and add a paragraph of explanation in the next 3-5 minutes and then after that I might spend half an hour really filling out the answer with much more details, links, images, the like.  While time is passing in this way and I am constantly seeing the page refreshed, I'll see if a competing, accepted answer is there and I'll also see the comments and the like.  I think of it like modern programming - advance in the smallest chunks possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13552" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T13:34:16.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4558" CreationDate="2014-03-10T13:51:09.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On some level it would be nice if there were a question limit that were tied to rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the privileges on this site are tied to rep levels.  And, this is designed to prevent abuse by trolls or users without the necessary experience for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the other measures like flagging, IIRC are also tied to the number of successful flags.  That you get more daily flags based upon helpful flags in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would propose something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1-100 rep max 3 posts/day, 25/month&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  101-500 rep max 5 posts/day 50/month&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  500-2000 rep 8 posts/day 100/month&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and &gt;2000 Unlimited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are completely arbitrary numbers that I've thrown in, people could make other suggestions, too.  But, by setting the numbers this way, a 400 rep poster like our friend above wouldn't have gotten more that 5/50.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T13:51:09.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-11T20:43:06.460" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a bug in the review queue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I go to the close votes queue, and I've used up my close votes for the day, it should not show that there are close votes for me to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, it should grey out just like first posts or others do when you've hit your daily max.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's especially annoying when you're in the middle of reviewing a post, and you go to click on close, and you get the little pop-up saying you've used them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, before I'm accused of being obsessive about close voting, I'm just running through the queue.  You can &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; use up all of your votes for the day that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SPo2a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7zbSJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2014-03-11T20:48:43.313" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T20:48:43.313" Title="Close vote queue continues to show as active after running out of close votes" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4583" CreationDate="2014-03-13T01:12:12.463" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the &amp;quot;proofreading&amp;quot; close reason is for&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I'm still not 100% clear what we mean by &quot;specific concerns.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we saying that the following would be acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this sentence grammatically correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Example sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe that the use of xyz phrase is not appropriate here because ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this sentence grammatically correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Example sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(with no point of specific concern noted ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frequently see both types of questions tagged as proofreading.  And, I'm just as guilty as the next guy for tagging and/or going along with the tags of others.  I want to make certain that I'm not being overly harsh in using these tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T12:37:35.260" Title="What exactly are the &quot;specific concerns&quot; that are acceptable in the Proofreading closure?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2014-03-13T09:53:52.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, personally, it is an issue of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am, as far as I'm concerned, qualified to correctly answer (or at least attempt to correctly answer) many of the questions posed on this site. I feel that I am also qualified enough to judge whether or not someone else's answers are accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am hardly a Stack Exchange expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nine times out of ten, when I see a question get closed for reasons other than redundancy, I have no idea why that question is being closed. Usually a reason is provided, but I often find that reason lacking, or I fail to see how the reason applies to the current situation. Unfortunately, I cannot think of any recent examples off the top of my hand, but regardless, I feel there is a major disconnect between what I would consider an appropriate and perfectly valid question to ask and what the general English Language &amp;amp; Usage community would consider appropriate to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that many of the lower-reputation members probably feel similarly. But maybe it's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the question should show evidence of research, and I understand that the question should be understandable and clear, and I understand that the question shouldn't be &quot;Do my homework&quot;, but aside from that, I've seen very little uniformity in what constitutes an &quot;inadequate&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say there isn't a set of rules and guidelines - rather, I just haven't figured it out yet, and so I don't feel qualified to rate most questions as &quot;good&quot; or &quot;bad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33092" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T09:53:52.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4586" CreationDate="2014-03-13T22:22:32.633" Score="48" ViewCount="1467" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been significant interest in this topic, as shown by the number of related questions. Since new users come along regularly (such as myself), I don't think it's useless to review the downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first joined EL&amp;amp;U, I was offended by downvotes without explanation. I thought it was rude, and unhelpful to me in forming better answers. I went to chat to inquire about it, and learned there were good reasons for anonymous downvotes. So I let it go. But several recent events have prompted me to take it up in meta. Among those events was this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not happy with people who won't explain their down votes. They may have a sound reason, but without knowing what it is, I think your answer fits the context that the OP set up. If the OP wants a word that has literal meaning, then he should say so himself by commenting here. +1 by the way, just to stick it in the eye of whoever down votes without explaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like to downvote anonymously. Unfortunately, it usually doesn't work to my (or the poster's) benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ways (I've seen and/or experienced) to guarantee no one will ever explain their downvotes on your posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be nasty and entitled about it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accept upvotes as proof of your intelligence, but downvotes as proof of the commenter's stupidity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demand that a downvoter &lt;strong&gt;prove&lt;/strong&gt; their POV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Immediately retaliate by downvoting that person's recent answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a point of whining after every single downvote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attack the downvoter personally in comments. Highlight your contempt with &lt;strong&gt;wit&lt;/strong&gt;, which will gain upvotes for your complaining comment, further discouraging comments with downvotes. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use &lt;strong&gt;sexual innuendo&lt;/strong&gt; to harass a downvoter who commented, especially if the downvoter is of the opposite sex (if they are the same sex, use a word that sounds like &lt;em&gt;flaccid&lt;/em&gt; in your counter-comment; question their masculinity).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read previous meta questions about anonymous downvoting, I found these very good reasons to do so anonymously (these are quotes, so please don't call me out on an attitude):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the primary purpose of voting is to rate posts. Explanations are not required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site depends on quick-and-easy rating in order to collect enough data to properly sort posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have to explain your upvotes, why do you have to go to the bother of doing it for downvotes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some authors get pissy about criticism and most of us would rather not spend our days arguing with someone over opinions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can always ask in chat if you are particularly worried about the community response to one of your posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvotes and comments are completely separate entities. They are not, and should not, be associated!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really enjoy being able to leave honest comments without worrying that they'll be justifiably interpreted as evidence that I've down-voted. I would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like to see the two systems linked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We already have problems with... revenge downvotes miscast to otherwise helpful and innocent bystanders (commenters on a post that has been downvoted will be assumed to be the downvoter).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it clutters up comments, which are already cluttered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes downvoters don't comment because someone else addressed it already. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvoting is a privilege one pays for and a responsibility that one takes. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you post good stuff it will get upvoted. If you can't handle a little anonymous criticism then the site honestly isn't for you. I look strongly at my downvotes and often either modify my question/answers or delete them entirely in view of my errors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the entire point of SO is that it's not about people... It's about the questions and answers only. So when people downvote, they downvote a question or an answer, and nothing else. Not you as a person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to learn the reason for every downvote I've gotten. After two weeks on this site, I learned to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look at criticism as helpful, and assume the same about anonymous downvotes (I have deleted answers with downvotes, or tried to improve them).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;realize people have reasons I'll never hear, but it doesn't make them evil, cowardly, lazy, or wrong.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not take it personally.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flag inappropriate downvoting (serial downvotes were a problem for me initially).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not engage with a ghost.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;know that I will, by my nature, rub some people the wrong way. We're all human.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;earn respect as best I can (with high-quality answers), not demand it (esp. with low-quality answers).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use chat; people are very kind there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this because I'm tired of commenting on my downvotes, then getting aggressively attacked. &lt;em&gt;My comment is a courtesy I no longer want to extend&lt;/em&gt; (but will do so with users I trust).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-03-13T23:27:03.970" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T07:46:31.697" Title="How to guarantee getting downvotes without explanation" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4580" CreationDate="2014-03-13T23:57:55.623" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to address this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason is for&lt;/a&gt;, but I may have been too long-winded for my own good. tl;dr version: If the questioner is clearly more interested in &lt;i&gt;getting&lt;/i&gt; an answer than in &lt;i&gt;understanding&lt;/i&gt; the answer (i.e., if it smells suspiciously like a &quot;do my homework for me&quot; question), I usually vote to close as Proofreading. If the question shows a good faith effort to understand what the problem might be, I usually let it slide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your examples, I'd vote to close the second one and keep the first one open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T23:57:55.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-14T20:16:57.743" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact is the site would never work if you had to comment on a downvote.  I create internal applications at my company that work sort-of-similar to SE and the ones that have less rules get used more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would take too long.  As most users might be OK with the time, it would keep them from looking at other things on the site.  So you may feel that the purpose of the site is to give a detailed, great answer but to get a feel for what the population thinks you need the hits.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This would be an upsetting process for some people.  Some people (your personal/cultural beliefs) can't even downvote when they think someone is dead wrong.  Making the border-line people comment would make them discontinue using the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This SE site in particular is very political/interpersonal.  Often times I see an answer upvoted that isn't really that great (or sometimes a bit wrong) because a person with a &quot;good reputation&quot; gave it.  So if you leave a comment on a downvote you may be losing constituents for your next answer.  There are many other SE sites that have a similar community but there are others where it doesn't matter as much (stackoverflow).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to your point on people attacking you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chill out.  You don't know the other person's true reaction to your answer.  For instance I disagree with @DavidM a lot because I think his answers are a bit pretentious.  I hardly ever downvote his stuff because I don't downvote unless I think something is dead wrong, something is explained way too long, or if something is used that was already provided in an earlier answer.  But I will comment to him on his snobbishness and it is all in good fun.  He usually has a good answer even though I would never use said word.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to argue people will.  I have to admit that I might press a commenter to have fun.  Who doesn't?  If you don't want to argue with people simply ignore it or give a brief explanation and let that be it. There are some people that I know I can leave them a comment and they will go off for an hour.  I love the passion!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is a website.  You are a smart person.  Languages aren't set in stone.  Your use may not be others.  There are some answers highly upvoted that are dead wrong where I live.  It is your choice to leave comments or not.  I highly respect those that can take criticism, even when they think it is wrong.  I will say that I have called out yourself and FumbleFingers before and you both responded intelligently.  You may hate me for doing it, I don't know.  It is all in fun to me.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To go along with the last point.   I am starting up writing again and have been using the site to get a feel for language changes and norms.  If I feel that someone has good answers but not words I would normally see I like to challenge them.  The way they respond gives me personally a good feeling of how relevant their answers/words would be to my writing.  If I comment and they have nothing back, true or not, I believe they are point-pandering and I tend to not &quot;accept&quot; their answers.  I don't know you but you have mentioned your background so I accept your usage in your area - I personally respect your answers and think that most are very good (although too long- haha).  You would have gotten probably 20 more upvotes from me with shorter answers and lost tons from other people.   FumbleFingers has called me out several times in comments and has commented on my comments.  From his answers I would not gotten that level of detail on his grasp at word usage.  He is a smart dude but more importantly open-minded, which brings in a trust factor on common usage.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So everyone is different.  Some people want controversy, some want none, some want to observe the bickering, some just want answers.  I would rather have 10 comments on an answer than 10 upvotes.  That is just me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accept the downvotes.  If your answer has an issue then change it.  If it doesn't then who cares.  I often have an answer that I feel is right that has 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes.  I understand the downvotes sometimes (often from the same ghosts) and sometimes I don't.  Some people may downvote to raise their answer - good for them.  The only thing I don't like is when I spend a few minutes writing what I think is a good answer and it has NO VOTES.  Useless.  I beg for these to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally if I downvote something without comment it might be because they are using an answer that already exists before theirs.  I don't feel like hearing how theirs is slightly different - so that conversation is played out.  The others are obvious downvotes that are spammish or a comment.  If I downvote a real answer then I leave a comment - BUT THAT IS JUST ME.  And I am honest and most people on here don't like it (or me).  I have lost countless hours of sleep thinking of the ELU people that have my name on their dartboads.  But seriously you see I am pretty honest (and not diplomatic) and it results in less points.  Very easy to see why a point driven site might discourage leaving comments right?  Remember that gamification breeds this behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like researching things and I don't like using words that I wouldn't hear in conversation.  Do I care that I get downvoted for this and lose points?  Frankly, no.  But leave a comment if you want to or a downvote - I like both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T20:16:57.743" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-15T14:49:13.823" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is only a casual relationship between upvotes and answer quality in general. Glib, facile answers can garner scores of upvotes, while seriously thought-out, informed, articulate answers garner one or two — if that. Meanwhile, excellent answers accrue downvotes because they yank some invisible trigger that releases a momentary dart of malice from some of the more splenetic viewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't like to admit it, but reputation scoring in part represents a kind of popularity contest. Upvotes make one feel affirmed, liked, even worthy; downvotes make one feel slighted, snubbed, and at worst, found wanting—a one-click way of saying &quot;You suck.&quot; The single downvote on my highest-scoring answer ever left me feeling slightly outraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet votes in both directions are probably to some degree meaningless, though I have explored &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3865/voting-is-anonymous#comment12094_3865&quot;&gt;one side&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3241/suspicious-completionist-up-votings&quot;&gt;the other&lt;/a&gt;. I've garnered the highest rep scores from more or less facile answers, while what I feel are my best answers languish in the single digits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all a game; deep down you must know this. If you want to &lt;em&gt;win&lt;/em&gt; this game (as I did for two and a half years), you have to jump on answers quickly, give decent but not exhaustive answers, and it helps if you can be funny or charming (popular?) yet innocuous at the same time. Don't make people think too hard, and don't confuse them with a lot of complicated reasoning: Remember, you're playing to the TL;DR crowd. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only question that remains is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/260900.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whether the game is worth the candle&lt;/a&gt;. I have decided it's not; you're still new enough that you may believe otherwise. Good luck to you. But I tell you this: On your deathbed, you're probably not going to look back on your life and feel it would have been complete if only you'd had a higher rep score on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, how can you take this site seriously when people jump exuberantly to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/157291/2303&quot;&gt;questions like this one&lt;/a&gt; yet ignore &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/2489/2303&quot;&gt;answers like this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-03-15T15:22:27.133" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-16T11:35:23.377" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had already upvoted this question before I got to my favorite two bullets of all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;look at criticism as helpful, and assume the same about anonymous downvotes&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;do not take it personally&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I get an anonymous downvote, I examine my answer &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;defensively&lt;/em&gt;, and then I try to improve the answer. More often than not, I can guess why the downvote may have come (perhaps I gave insufficient evidence to support a controversial stance, for example, or maybe I stated something too dogmatically when the language allows for variation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, I find a way to improve my answer. In the end, then, I am better off, and so is the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I really can't find a way to make an improvement, I simply shrug it off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T11:35:23.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2014-03-16T11:50:37.853" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently heard a radio personality wonder aloud:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can the best actor Oscar and the Best Picture Oscar not go to the same film?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't understand the confusion. An actor can do a great job acting in a very average movie, and a great film can have sufficient but not outstanding acting. (As an example, I think the first &lt;em&gt;Rocky&lt;/em&gt; movie was a great film, but I hardly think Stallone gave an Oscar-worthy performance.) One award recognizes good acting, while the other recognizes acting PLUS those other key ingredients of a compelling film: plot, direction, editing, musical score, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I'll answer some very average questions, and upvote some I won't bother to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradd's answer here says it so well: I often upvote questions when they are well-researched – just like the mouse-over tip says. They will consult four or five sources; sometimes, the further into the question I read, the more I am stumped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions are legitimate questions, but the research is scant. I might answer one of those, but I'm unlikely to upvote it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there might be a higher correlation between number of upvotes and number of answers in some of the more technical Stack Exchanges, but that's just a hunch right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T11:50:37.853" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-17T15:26:42.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If posts were purely matters of opinion, or comments on controversial subjects like religion or politics, many up and down votes would require no explanation. They would simply indicate agreement or disagreement, and the reason would be obvious. Like if this was a political site and I said, &quot;This country is doomed if the Democrats win the next election&quot; or &quot;... if the Republicans win ...&quot;, then I'd pretty much take it for granted that, absent further explanation, anyone who up-votes shares my political beliefs and anyone who down-votes takes the opposite position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on a site like this, if someone down-votes, what does it mean? You often have no clue what they are objecting to. Do they think your answer is flatly wrong? Incomplete? Correct but leaving out an important point? Basically correct but unclear? Completely correct but unnecessarily rude or condescending to the original poster? Etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I consider anonymous down-votes to generally be unhelpful. If there is a flaw to my answer but I have no clue what that flaw is, I have no idea how to correct it. If you told me what was wrong with my answer, I might say, &quot;Oh, good point, I hadn't thought of that&quot;. Or I might say, &quot;No, I disagree, I stand by my original answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly agree that there's no point getting your feelings hurt by down-votes. To date I have never had a bank turn me down for a loan because my vote total on ELU was too low. Nor do women swoon over men with high ELU votes. Okay, I admit, I am pleased to see my totals go up, but I have no idea why. On another Stack Exchange site -- Stackoverflow -- I once noticed that my highest-scoring answer was for a joke, while answers that (in my opinion) represented significant thought and insight often got just one or two votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Afterthought&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say that if you down-vote without a comment, the poster doesn't know what you are objecting to ... let me add: And neither does any other reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second afterthought: The idea of down-voting someone in retaliation for a down-vote from them to one of your posts ... Like, wow, this idea never even occurred to me. I'm glad that I'm not that petty. :-) Let's have a down-vote war!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastEditorUserId="13140" LastEditDate="2014-03-18T15:16:52.433" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T15:16:52.433" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-17T21:28:50.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have anything to add to this conversation it's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting on posts is meant to be a means of requesting clarification, or providing your own clarification to a post.  It should never be considered anything but optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post is well thought out, uses sources, and seems to have had some thought put into it, it warrants an up vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the same conditions are true, but it has something wrong.  It warrants no vote, or a down vote depending upon the situation.  But, that same situation should usually deserve a comment, too.  &lt;em&gt;Mainly so others will know what is wrong,&lt;/em&gt; not just for the poster's benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; Susan has pointed out that I may not have explained myself so clearly.  &lt;em&gt;I'm not saying that the down vote and the comment are linked.&lt;/em&gt;  I'm saying that the comment is probably &lt;strong&gt;more valuable than the down vote&lt;/strong&gt; in this case.  That, allowing (usually partially) incorrect information to go uncommented can mislead others who do not see why it is wrong.  Or, perhaps you yourself are wrong, and will be disproven by the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt; you should not feel obligated to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; a comment, but rather to &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it might be valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post is pure crap.  A one-liner which showed no effort, research, and manages to get the answer wrong, too.  Down vote and move on.  In fact, these are typically the ONLY answers I ever down vote.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2014-03-17T23:45:01.347" LastActivityDate="2014-03-17T23:45:01.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-18T19:32:16.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm posting this because I'm tired of commenting on my downvotes, then getting aggressively attacked. My comment is a courtesy I no longer want to extend (but will do so with users I trust).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the most productive attitude. The more I post content that can be rated, the less faith I have in John Q. Public's ability to help me improve my methods. My primary sources of improvement and constructive criticism come from self-analysis and a small group of dedicated contributors who are willing to be honest and discuss things candidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is a small list of pointers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone posts an explanation of their downvote, engage them by asking for help in fixing your post. Usually it only takes a small modification to revoke the downvote. &lt;em&gt;This signals that you listen&lt;/em&gt; and people are now much more likely to explain their disagreements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you disagree with someone, do so by asking for more information. Instead of, &quot;this definition is completely wrong&quot; ask, &quot;can you edit in a reference to this definition?&quot; This signals that the answer is unsourced or unreferenced without sounding overtly confrontational. &lt;em&gt;This type of comment is most effective without an associated downvote.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you get an anonymous downvote, post a link to it in chat and ask the regulars if they can spot a problem. They have often pointed out small errors in my posts and, mysteriously, the downvote is later removed after I fixed the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Befriend (as best you can) the people you disagree with most. Their perspective is immensely more valuable than a bunch of people that constantly tell you things are okay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignore (as best you can) people push conversations &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt; from consensus. Some people will post endless comments nitpicking details forever. There is very little to learn from these conversations; the only reason to engage them is damage control.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignore people who constant make invalid assumptions about your opinions. They are foolish and are impossible to converse with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remember that points are just points; the reason we are here is to help people answer questions about the English language. Strive to help and the SE system will eventually reward you with points -- that is what it was created to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't get peeved by people who &quot;abuse&quot; the SE system to gain points as quickly as possible. If they help people, upvote them. If they post useless crap, downvote them. Let them run their race as long as they don't impede helping others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These last two points, by the way, really help you relax on StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T19:32:16.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-19T13:51:00.887" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question came up today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/158494/59527&quot;&gt;Should I preserve spelling when quoting American English in a British English text, or vice versa?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, the author states that it is an attempt to create Google visibility for the original question by adding in keywords.  In other words search engine optimization (SEO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be more appropriate for him to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) suggest an edit to the original in a reasonable manner that introduced those keywords?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B)  Let the issue stand because we don't care about google visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C)  Raise a referring question that will likely get closed on the basis of being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D)  Write a duplicate question that contains the important keywords expressed per his particular need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Is it proper to create a referring duplicate question for the purposes of SEO?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4592" CreationDate="2014-03-19T13:55:39.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author of this intentional duplicate, I would argue that this is okay practice as long as it is done in moderation.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asked about the topic of the question (quoting BE text in an AE paper, or vice versa) today by a fellow student. I tried to search for an answer (and I like to think I'm a decent Googler), but didn't find the English.SE post  - even though it provides the best quality discussion on the matter that I could find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absence of the English.SE post from my search results was because I searched with a set of keywords that was wildly different from that post's title (my key words were something along the lines of, &lt;code&gt;American English text quote British English preserve spelling&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no organic way to integrate the Google keywords I initially searched for  without significantly altering the original question. To me, tampering with the original in that way would have been the worse choice, ugly SEO possibly diluting the post's quality and making it less succinct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, in such a case, it is legitimate to create a &quot;fake&quot; question with the right keywords, with the sole intention of having it closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Stack Exchange's &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;official reason&lt;/a&gt; for keeping closed duplicates around is SEO - had I simply posted the question without the information that I did it intentionally, it would have simply been closed as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* I would oppose, for example, someone going around and creating dozens of &quot;SEO targets&quot; willy nilly. &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239" LastEditorUserId="239" LastEditDate="2014-03-19T14:10:55.983" LastActivityDate="2014-03-19T14:10:55.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4592" CreationDate="2014-03-19T14:02:55.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;From the Stackoverflow Blog:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my official guidelines on question duplication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having one “perfect” form of a question that contains every possible answer to every slight variation of that question is a myth at best and actively harmful at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having dozens and dozens of variations of the same question is clearly bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we want is on the order of 4 or 5 similar-but-not-quite-the-same duplicates to cover all possible search terms and common permutations of the question. It is also OK for these duplicates to have their own answers so people who find them don’t have to click yet again to get to a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just not sure if the form of a referring question fits the third definition on the list exactly.  I'd personally rather see a fleshed out question which is more likely to carry the keywords in an organic manner.  That is, containing an example of usage, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have definitely been swayed that it is incorrect to merely edit the original post to include the keywords.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-03-20T05:50:30.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4592" CreationDate="2014-03-19T15:29:53.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no guarantee that a dupe question will remain online and be useful for SEO purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are questions deleted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/223820&quot;&gt;by the system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The system will automatically delete any post flagged six times as&#xA;  offensive or spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The system will automatically delete closed (not as a duplicate),&#xA;  unlocked questions with zero or negative score having no upvoted or&#xA;  accepted answers or pending reopen votes, that were closed 9 or more&#xA;  days ago and haven't been edited in the past 9 days.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The system will automatically delete unlocked, unanswered questions&#xA;  that have negative score after 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The system will automatically delete unlocked, unanswered questions&#xA;  with score of zero (or one if the owner is deleted), fewer than 1.5&#xA;  views per day on average, and fewer than two comments after 365 days.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The system will automatically delete any question (and its answers) or&#xA;  answer with a score less than 0 when its owner's account is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that deleted questions &quot;do not appear in search results, so if you wish to later undelete a question that you've deleted you must have saved the URL somewhere.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-03-19T15:29:53.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-20T04:47:24.227" Score="-1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I like an item so much that I would be willing to give it more exposure with extra upvotes as the expense of personal reputation points (SE currency).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has such a feature ever been considered? If so, what subtlety or exploitation have I missed to explain why it was rejected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42060" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T00:35:43.903" Title="+2 at a rep cost" Tags="|feature-request|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2014-03-20T05:11:40.443" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't +2, but you can +50 at a cost of 50 rep to yourself by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;offering a bounty&lt;/a&gt;. This appears as a &quot;Start a bounty&quot; button on questions you &lt;strong&gt;create or edit&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties can range from +50 to +500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53089" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:21.993" LastActivityDate="2014-03-20T05:11:40.443" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4600" CreationDate="2014-03-20T23:31:29.443" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/53102/michael&quot;&gt;Michael&lt;/a&gt; has the Mortarboard badge, but has asked and answered no questions. Is this a bug? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user63230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T00:46:34.097" Title="User has Mortarboard but answered no questions" Tags="|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2014-03-21T00:35:43.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why you want (or need) more than one vote. As @Lego Stormtrooper stated, you can always raise awareness (significantly) by offering a bounty on a question you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think a question especially worthy, I've seen someone in chat (I don't go often, so I don't know how common this is) ask others to look at a good question and vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rep is garnered with a number of great questions/answers, a host of good Q/A, or a flood of mediocre Q/A. The one-vote-per-person seems to be working well enough. If everyone had two votes per question, wouldn't they use them, especially to promote a question they've answered (and often elevating a fluff question)? In the end, it would all come back to everybody being equal, with two votes instead of one. And high rep would mean less than it does now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T00:35:43.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4598" CreationDate="2014-03-21T13:57:09.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/good-answer?userid=53102&quot;&gt;also has the Good Answer badge&lt;/a&gt;, but when you click through to it, it just says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(post deleted or otherwise unavailable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, this user posted one really good answer that caused him to earn all those badges, but it was later deleted (perhaps along with the question it was posted for).  This caused him to lose all the rep gained from that answer, but not the badges, since those are permanent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's as far as I'm able to get with my limited rep here.  A &amp;diams; mod or a user with 10k+ rep should be able to see the deleted answer and possibly provide further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14033" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T13:57:09.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1319" CreationDate="2014-03-21T17:13:06.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be fixed in the next build.  Sorry for the delay in getting to this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T17:13:06.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4598" CreationDate="2014-03-22T00:46:34.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sake of completeness, and so everyone who doesn't have enough rep to see deletions might marvel at how such a thing were possible. (I would have added this to Ilmari Karonen's post, but felt it would be presumptuous to do so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KFdYT.png&quot; alt=&quot;deleted post&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T00:46:34.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-22T14:59:48.170" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it a little annoying that users can &quot;protect&quot; bad questions with bounties but the ability to do this to your own question seems like a particularly blatant loophole. ELU does not close questions very quickly and I've now hit this problem twice in the past few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does adding a bounty on your own question prevent it from being voted closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T17:23:20.207" Title="Why does adding a bounty to your own question prevent it from being voted closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4603" CreationDate="2014-03-22T17:23:20.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because deciding what to do with the bounty when closing is a rather complicated issue, and any automatic ways to either refund or destroy the reputation used for a bounty simply with close votes would be abusable. Closing is a reversible action, posting a bounty isn't because a large part of the value of a bounty is in the increase exposure a question gets when featured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should not be an issue in the vast majority of cases anyway, bad questions should be closed inside 2 days, and before that no bounty can be offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In rare cases where this still is a problem, a moderator can refund the bounty and then close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23030" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T17:23:20.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-22T23:27:25.803" Score="7" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159116/this-box-of-matches-is-empty&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it was closed as off-topic.&#xA;Is asking a question on English usage which is obvious for native English speakers but not so for English language learners off-topic in this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T01:44:32.323" Title="Is asking a question on English usage which is obvious for native English speakers but not so for English language learners off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4605" CreationDate="2014-03-22T23:47:56.473" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. There is a separate Stack Exchange site specifically for English Language Learners &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;, and we try to maintain the distinction between the two. In addition, as the explanatory text says, a question that can be answered by consulting a general reference such as a dictionary is out of place here. It is true that many such answers can only be found if you know where to look; but in this case you had already been given the two phrases 'matchbox' and 'box of matches' which are quite easy to look up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T23:47:56.473" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4605" CreationDate="2014-03-23T01:44:32.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you ask a question (as too many people do) about &quot;which is correct&quot;, then, yes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's not what we're here for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, you ask something that &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; about English Language and Usage, then you may rest assured that it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;obvious for native English speakers&quot;. This is because native English speakers who are educated in Anglophone schools are not taught about English grammar. Instead they are fed a bunch of mythology about tenses and cases and correctness and not writing like you talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that pretty much any native English speaker is the wrong person to ask about English grammar, because they never learned grammar in school -- though they speak English, of course. Thus they have a lot of quaint ideas about it, none of which are true or helpful, but all of which are firmly believed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen no real difference between the two groups; both are staffed by volunteers, and many volunteers have the idea that English grammar is a matter of opinion or of law. Both ideas are false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T01:44:32.323" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-03-23T23:11:47.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get downvoted when I propose a perspective that is new to certain people, and which violates their established hypotheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what do I care. I'm not here to gain votes, but to expose new ideas and techniques people need to be exposed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People familiar with my perspective would upvote me, but people not familiar with it probably think I'm full of myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy and delighted when someone is enlightened by my answers, even if negatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18962" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T23:11:47.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4615" CreationDate="2014-03-24T09:43:43.503" Score="11" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;This touches somewhat on Mari-Lou A's recent post referring to tiny edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often see &lt;em&gt;teeny-tiny&lt;/em&gt; edits, where a word or phrase was italicized, while ignoring rip-roarers. I prefer more rather than less to follow rules. If the edit option states &lt;em&gt;make it substantial&lt;/em&gt;, I'll edit everything that needs it: capitals, spacing, grammar mistakes that don't include the example, etc. It will usually come off as an intelligible question with a flaw-filled example. Most people have been gracious about the edit, just as I am grateful to people who edit out my stupid mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked through meta and didn't find a definitive answer to my question: should we polish the English of our OPs? If so, to what degree (it must not invalidate or answer the question, obviously)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: some of my own posts have been edited. I'm grateful for the folks who correct my stupid mistakes. However, once I actually had a user (you know who you are) who edited a slightly amusing comment out of my post explaining &lt;em&gt;(he) felt grumpy today&lt;/em&gt;. I didn't know what a roll back was at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this kosher? How much is too much, how much not enough? I have long since given up saying &quot;thanks&quot;, or &quot;hope this helps&quot; in my posts. I know it's fine to remove those from OP's posts, but there is usually more to do. My question is: what's going too far (not including changing meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-03-24T17:50:51.227" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T19:19:14.940" Title="How much editing is too much editing in OP's post?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-25T01:08:26.267" Score="-2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;An English language learner better not ask in this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159116/this-box-of-matches-is-empty&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it had been closed as off-topic(it was reopened).&#xA;Some members seem to have an opinion that a learner better not ask here(see the comments of the above mentioned thread).&#xA;I would like to know your opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:41:35.067" Title="An English language learner better not ask in this site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|duplicates|question-closure|ell|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="24" ClosedDate="2014-04-04T19:23:14.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-25T13:25:15.150" Score="7" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159719/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the second spam today for some machinery&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting is that the spam accounts were both unused and sat there for two weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Second spam today from a 15 day old user - coincidence or worth sweeping unused users?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4611" CreationDate="2014-03-25T13:42:33.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't go into particulars about how we monitor these things, as I am sure you understand, but my suggested course of action is to flag the post as spam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to edit it unless it contains links (in which case, you may remove the links if you so choose) or offensive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You needn't waste your votes on it unless you want to. The only advantage to downvoting/close voting is that it reduces the visibility of the post, which may help protect newbie users from stumbling into some nefarious trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T13:42:33.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4610" CreationDate="2014-03-25T19:28:33.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that every site under the StackExchange umbrella has had a question on its meta site making a similar point.  The point being that new users are not made welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases the answer is similar.  The sites have different expectations of their users than a simple forum site would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the disadvantage that it can appear unwelcoming to new users who fall foul of the standards required.  The flags and comments received may appear brusque and unwelcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is outweighed by major advantages.  These sites form a repository of useful information that can be read easily.  The Q&amp;amp;A format leads a reader to information without having to trawl through the drivel of a forum's stream of conciousness.  It is very often not necessary to post a question as the answer can be found simply.  Of course, not all other forums are bad and these SE sites are not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sites are not as unwelcoming as you may at first think.  Please continue to use the site, all are welcome here.  Just please take a moment to understand what there is on offer and what you can offer in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T19:28:33.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4610" CreationDate="2014-03-25T23:55:14.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To directly answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a second site, &lt;strong&gt;English Language Learners (ELL)&lt;/strong&gt;.  It is designed for people who are trying to learn English when it is not their primary language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Langugage &amp;amp; Usage (ELU)&lt;/strong&gt;  assumes that the users already have a fairly advanced degree of knowledge of the English language and are asking more complicated questions.  (As a general rule: On-topic questions would likely be at least a mild challenge to a native speaker.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we vote to close a question here, it is because it doesn't specifically fit the profile of a question on this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common reason for closure is that the answer would a) be readily apparent to a native speaker, b) would be easily found within a general reference that is readily available.  We call this closure reason General Reference.  &lt;em&gt;The majority of questions that are asked by non-native speakers fall into this category; many of these questions would likely be more welcome on ELL.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some, however, that have clearly done their research and are asking for clarification of certain nuances that might not be readily apparent from those general references.  Those questions are typically welcome on ELU.  The key difference is:  &lt;strong&gt;the general reference research has been done PRIOR to posting the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to make my point clearer:  We have a thriving community of non-native English speakers here.  And, many of them are our finest contributors.  But, they already possess a significant proficiency in the English language.  Some, in fact, are more knowledgable than a native speaker with regard to grammatical usage, and other fine points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no stigma to being asked to post on ELL instead of ELU.  That is the entire reason ELL exists, to help people who are trying to learn to speak English at most levels.  If you post a question and it gets closed, then please read the comments explaining why the close votes were applied.  If many of them recommend posting on ELL, then consider reposting it there.  You will likely get a better and more complete answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T23:55:14.163" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4609" CreationDate="2014-03-26T00:11:02.270" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Bear with me, I have to answer the question about an edit being too small before I can answer the real question ...)  The entire purpose to editing large or small is to improve the quality of a post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When editing a post, the question should be asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I improving this post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any post that is made more readable:  punctuation added, capitalization fixed, spelling fixed, etc. is improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:  It is well known that posts with proper titles get answered much quicker than posts with nonsensical ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you were to improve nothing but the title of a post, have you improved the post?  If the answer is yes, then you've made a valid edit.  It just might not be the final edit the post requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The counter-point to this argument is:  But, haven't you left the work undone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, yes.  You have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this invalidate the edit you made above?  I would posit, no.  It is still a valid edit that has improved the post.  Ideally you would, of course, improve the entire post.  But, there are times when you just don't have the free time to do so.  So, any improvement is an improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, getting to the point:&lt;/strong&gt; The same question needs to be asked about a large edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you improving upon the OP, or merely changing their entire post to suit a question you wish had been asked?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question that has been asked borders upon gibberish due to grammatical errors, punctuation errors, or any other manner of glaring issue, then it comes down to a question of whether it needs closure vs. can it be salvaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe you can salvage the question without significantly changing the OP's question, then go ahead and edit the hell out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe you are rewriting the whole thing to the point where it would no longer be recognizable, then vote to close for Low-Quality or Unclear What You Are Asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T00:11:02.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4609" CreationDate="2014-03-26T19:19:14.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is: what's going too far (not including changing meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad edits (not including changing meaning) are those that actively engage in opinion wars. This would include issues of style* (e.g. fancy quotes versus apostrophes; ellipses versus three periods) or issues of dialect/region (e.g. full stop versus period; removing &quot;u&quot; from colour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But those should be rather obvious. The more interesting debate revolves around how to change titles, tags and formatting. If I've opened up a post for editing I will make very drastic changes to the formatting in order to make the post easier to read. This includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Highlighting specific concerns in quotes/examples&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copying content from linked material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing the title to match the question from the post body&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moving examples and quotes into standard markdown &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; blocks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edited to add: some of my own posts have been edited. I'm grateful for the folks who correct my stupid mistakes. However, once I actually had a user (you know who you are) who edited a slightly amusing comment out of my post explaining (he) felt grumpy today. I didn't know what a roll back was at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will remove &quot;amusing&quot; content if I find it distracting or irrelevant or borderline trolling. Users have a bad habit of upvoting amusing content instead of helpful content and certain users use this to fish for cheap upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a change of this type is not typically &quot;large&quot; enough for me to consider editing the post. If I am in there making other edits, however, I take the opportunity to remove chaff &amp;mdash; amusing or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I consider any image that is not absolutely necessary to be bad. Images are almost always unnecessary unless they are providing additional context or have a very good signal to noise ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I have to admit I do make some of these changes myself because the site so overwhelmingly uses three periods for ellipses and apostrophes instead of fancy quotes. But I shouldn't and am starting to just leave them alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T19:19:14.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4620" CreationDate="2014-03-26T19:27:38.970" Score="8" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160030/&quot;&gt;question about the history of names&lt;/a&gt;. The question text is asking about the origin of a practice of family names or surnames. There is some contention as to whether this question is on topic for the site, with user Oldcat making the claim that the question is more about history and culture, outside the scope of the language involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is on topic for the site. My reasoning goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proper names of English speakers are words in the English language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology and the history of words' development are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt; for the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology includes the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;origins, form, and construction&lt;/a&gt; of words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.E.D., the etymology of names are on topic for the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding point &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;, I think the main reason for this is that because English speakers recognize them as words. Clearly, all names of people (and of all things) are a part of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; language, but English names belong to the English language just as Norwegian names belong to the Norwegian language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether or not names belong in a dictionary, I don't think it's stretching at all to claim that they are words belonging to a particular language (or set of languages, if they are common). You could argue that names supersede any particular language: I would expect people to call me by my given name, regardless of the language they speak (provided I could communicate my name to them in the first place). But similarly, if I were speaking to a Japanese speaker and told them my name (even if I spoke perfect Japanese), they would know it was not a &lt;em&gt;Japanese&lt;/em&gt; name; some might even recognize it as an English name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would agree that questions about a specific name or a specific point in history, like &quot;Why did &lt;a href=&quot;http://jezebel.com/map-sixty-years-of-the-most-popular-names-for-girls-s-1443501909&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lisa overtake Mary&lt;/a&gt; as the most popular baby girls name in USA in 1964?&quot;, that question would primarily about culture and history and therefore off-topic about for the site. Similarly, questions about German names would be off topic (and need to be asked on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;site about the German language&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as an example, imagine that a native English speaker (call him Bob) encountered someone named Adam Bzxphilq-Werhbarchkt. Bob would likely infer that this person's surname is a blend of two other family names by marriage. Either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adam was originally named either Bzxphilq-Werhbarchkt and married someone with the other name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This person's parents' family names were Bzxphilq and Werhbarchkt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob would make this inference without any recognition of those particular names (which I just made up; any likeness to real family names is purely coincidental). I think Bob's inference is a convention of the English language above and beyond any particular name, culture or (pure) history discussion that probably has a particular origin, is worth studying, and is on topic for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, even if we accept that names supersede or fall outside of a particular language, the question I asked still falls under the usage of the language because the construction of a hyphenated last name has meaning to an English speaker beyond the actual names involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other questions on the site about the etymology of names (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108134/etymology-of-the-name-stimpson&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45222/what-is-the-origin-of-surnames-based-on-color&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) that an equal argument could be made against. I think this hinges on where we draw the distinction between culture and language. Words are undeniably a part of our culture as much as our language, but that doesn't stop us asking questions about e.g. the language of Baseball in USA or Cricket in Britain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What say ye mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.933" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T16:06:16.780" Title="Is the history/etymology of names appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|migration|etymology|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2014-03-26T19:49:12.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with 2 and 3, but disagree with #1, so #4 doesn't work out for me. Proper names aren't particular to English. My surname could be English, but could just as easily be Irish or German or a corruption of some original Norwegian name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you could skate by with something like &quot;Why are English names usually given name followed by family name?&quot; but even then, it's stretching it because it is asking about custom and not about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with your suggestion that the other two questions are in the same category, so I closed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-03-26T20:05:38.867" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T20:05:38.867" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2014-03-26T20:15:56.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proper names are words in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proper names can be anything at all and don't have follow &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the conventions of the English language. There is going to be a fuzzy line where some things are &quot;interesting&quot; and &quot;on-topic&quot; where others will not be but I don't think proper names are very relevant to understanding how the English language works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my internal ruling goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this question relevant to English &lt;em&gt;aside&lt;/em&gt; from proper names?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, it is off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, use the other example instead&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't to say that all questions about proper names are inherently off-topic but I think anything along the lines of the linked question is way off-topic for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surnames are a cultural issue and are not standard across the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surname particularities are &lt;em&gt;family&lt;/em&gt; specific and, therefore, this isn't even extremely interesting within a particular dialect of English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the content in your post is even &lt;em&gt;further&lt;/em&gt; off-topic and ventures into opinions and strictly historical musings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, as an example, imagine that a native English speaker (call him Bob) encountered someone named Adam Bzxphilq-Werhbarchkt. Bob would likely infer that this person's parents' family names were Bzxphilq and Werhbarchkt, without any recognition of those particular names (which I just made up; any likeness to real family names is purely coincidental). I think Bob's inference is a convention of the English language above and beyond any particular name, culture or (pure) history discussion that probably has a particular origin, is worth studying, and is on topic for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use your own example against you, your guess isn't even correct. In American culture a hyphenated surname is usually due to &lt;em&gt;marriage&lt;/em&gt; and not parental names. But even that isn't always true since it depends on the culture of the family. Central American families tend to inherit their surnames based on gender and just stack them together instead of using middle names. Kind of. The point being that this has nothing to do with the language since they continue the practice for generations after immigrating to English speaking countries. Maybe -- it depends on the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2014-03-26T20:21:52.233" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T20:21:52.233" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2014-03-26T22:04:49.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;English proper names follow most of the same rules and customs as other English words, and they're subject to the same evolutionary forces. They’re &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142975/when-did-we-stop-translating-proper-names&quot;&gt;clearly different from names in other languages&lt;/a&gt;: John Paul II is distinctly English whereas &lt;em&gt;Ioannes Paulus II&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jan Paweł II&lt;/em&gt; are not. They follow English rules for inflection and combination, such that we can sensibly ask how to form plurals or possessives of English and Anglicized names (and people often do ask those questions here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center notes that &lt;strong&gt;giving&lt;/strong&gt; names to things is off-topic here. But I presume that's not so much because the rules for names are different, but that naming is substantially like writing advice: too complex and subjective to give authoritative answers. I don't think &lt;strong&gt;analyzing&lt;/strong&gt; names should be off-topic, and I object to closing existing questions about it (unless they are close-worthy for other reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I'm not sure whether the specific question about hyphenated names is on-topic, because I'm not sure whether it's an &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; naming custom. (But determining whether it's distinctly English is perhaps an interesting ELU question in itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/a/4110/761&quot;&gt;Cerberus’s excellent answer&lt;/a&gt; to Patrick M’s question shows that it’s more a matter of European custom than English language, and I agree with the decision to migrate it to Genealogy. If it &lt;strong&gt;had&lt;/strong&gt; been a more distinctly English custom, however, I believe that it would have been equally on topic here and at Genealogy. But wishes aren’t horses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:37.483" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T00:17:12.330" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2014-03-27T10:21:25.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Questions about the origin of people's names are on topic, if the name is considered an English name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;English name&lt;/em&gt; I don't name that it originated in England, I mean that it is a name of someone whose native language is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that is the case it becomes part of the English language, and so fair game to ask where it came from at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question about the origin of colour surnames in the English language is on topic. And the question about where &lt;em&gt;Stimpson&lt;/em&gt; comes from is on topic. And asking where hyphens in English names come from is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I agree that the last example is better asked at Genealogy.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language and culture inform each other. They are not independent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, IIRC, nohat has reopened questions about the pronunciation of names in English. I don't see why the origin is &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T10:21:25.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4623" CreationDate="2014-03-27T03:20:11.057" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although this forum is about English language does it include questions about the latin and/or greek root word questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user70019" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T15:36:33.910" Title="Although this forum is about English language does it include questions about the latin and/or greek root words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4622" CreationDate="2014-03-27T15:36:33.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask for the etymology of an English word are acceptable, so long at you have done your research. &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymonline.com&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to start and can tell you the basics of where many words come from, down to PIE roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still have questions after that then you should definitely ask here, stating how your research has thrown up questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can't ask about Latin or Ancient Greek words specifically, but only how they pertain to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T15:36:33.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T16:20:42.187" Score="8" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/senses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;senses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;senses&lt;/a&gt; has approximately 9 questions tagged but I have no idea what this tag is for. Is it basically the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions specifically dealing with the various different senses of a single word or term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that hardly clears up the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T07:23:00.717" Title="What is [tag:senses]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T16:34:34.880" Score="53" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a big fan of SE sites and spend an awful lot of time on StackOverflow. When I saw an English Language site, I pointed a few of my friends and family this way (one of whom is an English professor and another is a TEFL teacher).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought they'd enjoy the site, expand their own knowledge and maybe contribute a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've since found out that they've all - without exception - stopped using the site, most of them without even posting. One of them said the comments tended to be rude and arrogant, another said she was made to feel unwelcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that the community was wrong in any particular action/decision, simply that they saw users who weren't familiar with the rules being made to feel unwelcome. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't get to experience the &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; bits and now they're very unlikely to ever do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely end up on the EL&amp;amp;U site, so it doesn't affect me much personally. It did, however, make me think of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/07/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/&quot;&gt;Summer of Love&lt;/a&gt; blog post by Joel which seems to describe the situation they've experienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I thought the opinion of a relative outsider might provoke a discussion on a way to improve the situation (or get me downvoted into oblivion which I'll be forced to claim proves my point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest a miniature, EL&amp;amp;U-specific &amp;quot;Summer of Love&amp;quot; effort with a focus on improving the outward image of the community and making [potential] new users feel more welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the majority of respondents agree with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Low quality posts should be closed/removed from the site rapidly, irrespective of who posted [or Fixed!].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An attempt should be made to educate new users so they don't repeat their mistakes [Not obligatory]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments (and answers) should always be civil and informative, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; with new users. Being helpful too is a bonus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neutral and concise comments are preferred, friendly comments are welcome, snarky ones are not. [See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/138173/135956&quot;&gt;this MSO question&lt;/a&gt; for a larger discussion]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As more answers are added/voted around I'll keep this summary updated. &lt;em&gt;Hopefully&lt;/em&gt; this question will become the community standard after it's been around long enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T13:25:55.250" Title="Bring back the Summer of Love (aka Make new users feel more welcome)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T19:03:00.663" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;kviews&quot; in the image below (far right, under 3) intentional?  I'm fairly certain it's not suggesting 3,000 views.  Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/65rD3.png&quot; alt=&quot;A snippet of an ELU question view, showing 4 votes, 6 answers, and 3 kviews.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69615" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T16:50:32.217" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T16:50:32.217" Title="Is &quot;kviews&quot; intentional?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4626" CreationDate="2014-03-27T19:10:43.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means 3,000 views, yes. It rounds up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, it is 3 thousand-views, which is an arcane unit of measure that was conjured by SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T19:19:40.353" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T19:19:40.353" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2014-03-27T21:56:34.403" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't &lt;strong&gt;sense&lt;/strong&gt; a grammar category like 'voice' or 'tense'.  Google wasn't a lot of help in finding a definite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55902" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T21:56:34.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2014-03-27T22:22:21.853" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been wanting to ask this same question for 110 days now, give or take a few. When I first found EL&amp;amp;U, I was delighted. Since then, I've been dismayed many times by the lack of courtesy, kindness, and tolerance here. I have &lt;em&gt;never even entertained&lt;/em&gt; inviting someone to the site (I know several PhD English professors, as well as ESL and regular English teachers). They're my &lt;em&gt;friends&lt;/em&gt;, and friends don't invite other friends to be abused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this site does have standards found in the help sections. But comments don't politely refer people to the help sections. They are often just rude. Maybe not intentionally, but still, they are. (And I'm not above bad days, or annoyance at the thousandth newbie who wants his homework handed to him on a platter. I'm no saint.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the words of Jeff Atwood (same thread referred to above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Still, I think this post would be stronger with actual real world examples of snarky comments (and some data on how often it was seen, next to the examples) to show people what not to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Today) When &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160265/does-the-motor-speed-mean-the-speed-of-the-motor&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; poster asked very politely asked &lt;em&gt;Does “the motor speed” mean the speed of the motor?&lt;/em&gt;, the first comment (upvoted) was &quot;Can you explain why it &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be okay? Do you have the same problem with &quot;internet speed&quot;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Today) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160206/nuke-the-fridge&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; OP was asked (in comments) for context. On providing a link, the next comment was &quot;Don't use comments to enhance the question. Edit the question to include all relevant information, &lt;strong&gt;including where you heard the expression&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (3 upvotes) Then, on reading the link, another commenter wrote mockingly &quot;I first saw it &lt;em&gt;at this link that completely and entirely explains it using clear language&lt;/em&gt;. What is the point of this question?&quot; (4 upvotes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Today) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160094/did-you-just-present-or-past-tense&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; user does a typical mash up of misunderstanding common to learners, in this case, thinking &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; changes a verb's tense. First comment (1 upvote): What makes you think the word ‘just’ makes any difference? In “did you win”, &lt;em&gt;win&lt;/em&gt; is not a present form; it’s an infinitive. You cannot have two finite forms in the same verbal unit. Also, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; means ‘for example’ (Latin &lt;em&gt;exemplī grātiā&lt;/em&gt; ‘for the sake of an example’), so &lt;em&gt;for e.g.&lt;/em&gt; means ‘for for example’ and does not make sense. (No &lt;strong&gt;decipherable&lt;/strong&gt; - to OP - helpful answer here; mostly a rant.) OP replies: &quot;I wasn't sure, that's why I'm posting a question.. and wow... this community is pretty harsh in the way downvotes are given.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A not unusual comment here: &quot;1) please try searching before asking questions here. A 3 second google search will give you answers 2) don't combine multiple questions into one.&quot; Not the worst rebuke in the world, but not nice, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One unfortunate used &lt;em&gt;y'all&lt;/em&gt; or something like it, enough to warrant this comment: &quot;Mayhap thou shouldst attempt to recast thy queries in the second person singular, for surely the second person plural hath soundly defeated thee, yea unto uttermost incomprehensibility, here most readily taken as mortal insult to the very tongue thou wouldst so dishonor with thine unlettered scrivenings.&quot; (upvoted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my two personal favorites. &lt;strong&gt;#1.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142470/was-the-verb-bring-once-used-as-a-noun&quot;&gt;An OP&lt;/a&gt; misunderstood a passage in the King James Bible (pardon my anglais, but the KJV is a bitch to read). My comment: &quot;Sometimes, when in doubt, it helps to have a more modern translation at hand to compare.&quot; The following was a reply to my comment: &quot;The typography, morphology, syntax, and lexical items used in English Bibles (which are, of course, always merely translations of Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew originals) represent nothing more than the translators' takes on the best way to represent something by current standards. Since &quot;current&quot; covers the last 5 centuries of English, this is, to say the least, a mess. &lt;strong&gt;Nothing in an English translation can be depended on; always consult the originals.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (emphasis mine) Here is someone stating with &lt;em&gt;authority&lt;/em&gt; that we are slackers if we read the Bible in our own tongue, and disregards the fact that &lt;strong&gt;we have no originals&lt;/strong&gt; (that's correct; all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies with who knows how many transcription errors.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;#2.&lt;/strong&gt; This is a comment I got &lt;em&gt;constantly&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answer which had no linked source: &quot;-1 Always substantiate your &quot;answer&quot; with a canonical reference. Opinions are more appropriate in the form of comments, not answers.&quot; Meanwhile, the commenter was generous to others who almost &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; link sources. It was personal; but the point is, it was unfriendly. It was unkind. It was unpleasant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like a rant, but it's actually merely a substantiation of the OP's mild and wise admonition to be welcoming. This is a minute fraction of the insider (or insider wannabe) rudeness that occurs on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the time it took to write this answer, please note the quality of comment the OP got in reply to his post above, the number of views, and the number of upvotes. There must be &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; to his post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T01:33:44.017" CommentCount="34" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2014-03-28T04:34:43.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In summary, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/senses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;senses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;senses&lt;/a&gt; are the meanings of a word/lexeme within a language. The meaning can depend on the context as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; tag is used for the differences between the meanings/senses of (related) lexemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, they can be both used in the same question because related words/lexemes are related to each other in sense. Thus, there are different senses between words or different senses within the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go into details, &quot;senses&quot; in linguistics is a bit complicated and controversial actually (maybe because it comes from philosophy/philosophical semantics). Further read: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Reference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sense and Reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_sense_disambiguation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word-sense disambiguation&lt;/a&gt; article in Wikipedia (this is related with computational linguistics though but it gives some ideas):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One problem with word sense disambiguation is deciding what the senses are. In cases like the word bass, at least some senses are obviously different. In other cases, however, the different senses can be closely related (one meaning being a metaphorical or metonymic extension of another), and in such cases division of words into senses becomes much more difficult. Different dictionaries and thesauruses will provide different divisions of words into senses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The very notion of &quot;word sense&quot; is slippery and controversial. Most people can agree in distinctions at the coarse-grained homograph level (e.g., pen as writing instrument or enclosure), but go down one level to fine-grained polysemy, and disagreements arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a passage from &quot;Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction&quot; By John Lyons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T8PvK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably I made it even more confusing by now but I hope it is helpful at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T04:34:43.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2014-03-28T15:34:49.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've since found out that they've all - without exception - stopped using the site, most of them without even posting. One of them said the comments tended to be rude and arrogant, another said she was made to feel unwelcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I enjoy the idea of having people swing by the site to hang out and have fun, EL&amp;amp;U is intended to be a site to help people solve problems. We need to make sure we focus on that particular goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I do agree that many of the comments are arrogant and rude. EL&amp;amp;U suffers from a jackass expertise problem in that a lot of high rep users act as if they are an authority on the subject matter when, in reality, they just have more useless internet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; particular subject material makes this even worse because there are longstanding opinion wars around what is or is not proper English. This makes interacting with new users even more difficult because they can accidentally wander into old fights between these opinion &lt;em&gt;and the posters on this site are more than willing to restart the opinion flinging&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an inherent temptation to wax eloquent simply because most of the high rep users have an honest love and appreciation for the language. It can be hard to use one sentence when four sentences work just as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, these three things combine into one horrible first encounter for new users. You basically get some mixture of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;People who think they are experts but aren't&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People arguing amongst themselves in comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People that appear to be showing off their mad English skills by typing paragraph after paragraph to explain one small point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But past all of those things, we also have an longstanding battle between &quot;care about everything&quot; and &quot;care about only the most useful things&quot;. Many of the recent meta discussions have revolved around this debate and I think this has seeped out into the main site in the form of far too much snark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;okay&lt;/em&gt; to guide users into making better questions. It is &lt;em&gt;okay&lt;/em&gt; to edit posts and improve them. It is &lt;em&gt;okay&lt;/em&gt; to challenge invalid assumptions behind questions. It is &lt;em&gt;not okay&lt;/em&gt; to this in a snarky manner or in a way that would put the poster down or belittle them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be challenging to endure the wave after wave of boring, newb questions but &lt;em&gt;that is one of the reasons we are here.&lt;/em&gt; We are here to solve problems and answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the end, I agree that a Summer of Love would be great. But to me that means doing what we do without the jackass attitude. Or, in Joel's own words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So we decided to declare the summer of 2012 as The Summer of Love, a.k.a. “The Hunting of the Snark.” The goal is simple: to keep Stack Exchange a welcoming, friendly place &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; lowering our standards. No, you may not ask “plz send me the code” questions, but if you do, we will explain to you, in a friendly and professional way, what you did wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138173/etiquette-for-posting-civil-and-informative-comments/&quot;&gt;Meta.SE thread&lt;/a&gt; Joel linked is a great place to start looking for ways to improve yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T15:34:49.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2014-03-28T19:51:26.690" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem as I see it is that some of the more active high-rep users perceive this as a site for &lt;i&gt;lovers&lt;/i&gt; of English, whereas the Internet-using public at large perceives it as a site for &lt;i&gt;users&lt;/i&gt; of English. Consequently, new users are made to feel like unwelcome interlopers when they come here and behave as the Stack Exchange experience has trained them to behave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most people, English is not a hobby, like cooking or cycling or photography, to be studied in all its manifestations and savored for its quirks and tortured history and discussed as one might talk about a dream or a lover. It is a medium of communication and a tool, and in many parts of the world, its use is not optional: you have to use it to get things done, whether you're fond of it or not. So people have reasonable questions about it, as they will, and they know that Stack Exchange is a place you can go to ask reasonable questions in a respectful way and get useful answers from experts. So they go &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=grid#&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and whoa, there's a SE site called &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; and it's &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt;, it's one of the biggest boxes on the page and it's right up at the top. And from there they go &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and there are lots of questions about English at different levels of expertise, so clearly this is the right place. And so they ask their question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and it gets closed as &quot;off-topic.&quot; &lt;i&gt;Your question is too basic for us, you silly child. Why didn't you consult &lt;/i&gt;Fowler's Modern English Usage&lt;i&gt; before wasting everyone's time? Or the &lt;/i&gt;OED Online&lt;i&gt; (you do have an active subscription, don't you)? Both are clearly listed as resources in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;this years-old question on our meta site&lt;/a&gt;; why didn't you check there first? We can't help you here, I'm afraid, and if this question is an example of what you're capable of, it would probably be best if you didn't try to ask any others in the future. Perhaps you'll have better luck asking your &quot;question&quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;our sister site&lt;/a&gt; for children and ESL students.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community needs to face the truth about itself. Despite what it says on our tour page, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;this is not a site for &quot;serious English language enthusiasts,&quot; and it never will be.&lt;/a&gt; It can't be. It's too big for that, and it has the wrong name for it. Whatever hopes and dreams we might have about this being a utopian society for language lovers, it's simply not reasonable to expect the rest of the world to ever see it the same way. Ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a group as aggressively anti-prescriptivist as we tend to be, we certainly do take a prescriptivist attitude toward the functions and goals of this site. My advice: let ELU be what it will be, a site for people who use English and want to learn to use it a little bit better, and treat those people accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T19:51:26.690" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-28T20:16:02.070" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Hey, this is a nice site.&lt;/a&gt; I have a question to ask, but I want to make sure I do it right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Ahh, the Help Center.&lt;/a&gt; I hope it has some useful guidance for asking questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; —oh no, my question is simple and basic, and is therefore &quot;off-topic&quot; here.  But isn't there anywhere I can go for an answer to my question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;b&gt;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&lt;/b&gt; If your question is simple and can probably be easily answered by looking it up, then you may find common online internet resources to be of some help. View &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;our list of community recommended resources&lt;/a&gt; to find some that may be of help to you.&quot; Why that sounds like just what I'm looking for. I'll click ri-i-ight about here...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;&quot;closed as off topic&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HQUQQ.gif&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T23:51:34.227" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T23:51:34.227" Title="Help center links to a &quot;closed as off topic&quot; question" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1065" CreationDate="2014-03-28T20:24:22.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been 2.5 years since I posted this question and I think I finally have enough data to produce an answer. The short answer is, simply, &lt;strong&gt;Never&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Should EL&amp;amp;U become such an authority?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does not appear to be a need for such an authority. Language lives and evolves at its own pace and it will do so in spite of EL&amp;amp;U's middling interest in its progress. The particular purposes of EL&amp;amp;U are significantly smaller in scope. Our job is to help others use English most effectively — not change it or define it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What can we do as a community to strive toward or steer away from this end?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; done to steer away from this end is ceased posting the deep, thought provoking questions I remember from 2.5 years ago. It now feels extremely difficult to encounter examples such as the ones I linked to in my question above. This could be due to where I spend my time on the site but I have a suspicion that we have lost a great number of the in-depth contributors to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is acceptable in the sense that no one should be shackled to EL&amp;amp;U in order to entertain the masses but I think the years have answered more questions about our direction than any amount of baseless guessing could have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Whatever end we desire, where are we currently heading?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question is still relevant and should be continually reassessed. Where will we be in another 2.5 years? Are we satisfied with the current direction of the site? Do we long for the culture and community we had 2.5 years ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, it should be clear at this point that EL&amp;amp;U is decidedly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; heading toward a direction that awards us with any particular authority on the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T20:24:22.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4633" CreationDate="2014-03-28T22:00:25.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed to prevent further answers from being added, and also to discourage similar resource requests, which are essentially list-type questions and therefore off-topic. However, it is a useful resource, so it was kept for reference purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have incorrectly assumed your question, please edit your post to ask one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T22:00:25.070" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2014-03-29T04:02:37.033" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a relatively recent addition to the site, I would like to add my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many above have pointed out, this site attracts three types of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are the people who stumble upon us by accident of trying to learn English.  [Some of whom post the most basic of questions that any native speaker should be able to answer (on the surface)].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People who are rather proficient in (or native to) the English language, and are seeking to understand the language, its nuances, and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ivory tower intellectual:  people whose knowledge of the language dwarves that of us mere mortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a place for each of us here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The English Language Learners&lt;/strong&gt;: should be sorted.  If it is someone who demonstrates an advanced learner's knowledge of the language and is using the site as a means of honing their understanding, I throw my arms open and welcome them.  (I can think of a few off the top of my head who fit this category.)  This does not mean we will tolerate poorly researched questions or the like.  It just means that we will view these posters as being valuable additions to the site.  &lt;em&gt;Personally, I find their questions to be among the most interesting.  I enjoy the challenge of trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of my own language to outsiders.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people who are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; sufficiently proficient in English need to be shown to English Language Learners.  But, I think we can be more friendly about it.  I think we should each adopt a friendly version of a stock comment.  Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to ELU.  This really does not meet the site's standards for an appropriate question.  We do have a sister site that might be better suited to your needs, however.  Please check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.  If you put a bit more research into your question and post it there, I think you'll get a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a common theme on the site is annoyance with these people.  But, in general, if their question is basic but well stated, I try to give them an answer in addition to the above comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Proficient&lt;/strong&gt;:  I would say these are our bread and butter.  Today's 1 rep point, may well become tomorrow's 41K.  We have to make an effort to treat these people with respect.  I'm not suggesting to tolerate their bad posts.  I'm saying that we should make an effort to explain to them why a question or answer is not up to standards.  And, to do it politely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to ELU.  This really does not answer the above question.  Perhaps you can give a link to the definition of the key terms.  And, explain how the term is used in relationship to the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to ELU.  Generally speaking we don't answer proofreading questions unless there is a point of concern that has been explained.  Perhaps you'd like to ask whether or not the sentence is grammatical with [XYZ vs. ABC].  I think that is your underlying question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been making an effort to do this more of late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Ivory Tower Denizen:&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, even they start out with one rep point.  And, typically they will climb the ranks on their own.  Just give them guidance on how to properly interact on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to ELU.  That is a really great answer.  Can you please post a link to a source for that information?  In general, we prefer sources when possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everyone:&lt;/strong&gt;  In general, the most important thing you can do to be welcoming to someone is to leave a comment on their posts.  FumbleFingers and Bradd Szonye are both excellent at this.  If they find your answer interesting, they tell you so.  If they find it flawed, they tell you so (generally politely until you're a regular ;-p ).  But, they speak to people.  In the month and change I've been active here, they were among the first to make me feel welcomed.  It went a long way to making me stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, in summary:  Be kind.  Don't tolerate crap, but, be nice while you're not tolerating it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T04:11:59.757" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2014-03-29T07:07:00.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to think that every critique (disregarding for the moment its supplier's intention or tone) demonstrates the supplier's vision for the SE. Editing out chaff from questions leaves questions that are easy to understand and quick to scan. Discouraging link rot by including relevant quotes saves the reader time and promotes the site's autonomy. Diligent moderation of the logic and sources behind posts builds an academic presence online, filling a niche that similarly structured sites do not provide on all &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6250413/yahoo_answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;posts&lt;/a&gt; (NSFW). This thread, too, asks for discourse to be friendly as well as academic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is goodness in all of these visions and thus that there ought to be a place here for each. But there are complications. It can be hard to convey the intended tone in writing, especially when formal. It's not difficult for a comment meaning to be precise-but-concise to come across as curt. Or for emphases via italics or quotes to seem like mockery. Or for speaking plainly to seem brunt or condescending, and speaking with big but perfectly suited words to seem pompous. I cannot add emoticons, or &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, or friendly forum acronyms (e.g., TIA and HTH) and sometimes the pleasantries they expand to without feeling I'm detracting from my own vision of a scholarly ELU or &lt;a href=&quot;http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-10/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;upsetting forum etiquette&lt;/a&gt;. And yet, by not adding them, I sometimes find a gruff or austere reading of posts I wrote with a nicer tone in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And actions too can be mistaken: A new user, by misunderstanding the site or its culture, may do or say something that mistakenly seems aggressive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some things may seem harsh by accident or misinterpretation. But there are others that come across too brusque, more at-home on a more recreational website. For these, I've been wondering what others think of a loosely-defined &quot;Milestones protocol,&quot; where the correction of unwanted behavior is dealt with according to the status of the user. For questions and answers, the user's rep is easily visible; in comments, it can be seen by hovering over the username. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user with 1 rep who posts a question easily answered by Google-search or related ELU question ought to be held less accountable than one with 100 rep, who may be an active user on another SE. Because the 1 rep user is new, if their question gets closed it is good to tell them what that means and how to avoid it in the future. The gist is to deal gently with users with lower rep and post counts, who may be unfamiliar with the site. (Admittedly spammers and sock puppets may match these criteria, so if not blatant a severer strategy may be needed for repeat offenders.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to encourage good habits in new users and discourage bad habits in more experienced users. This happens naturally a lot of the time, but it's easy to get caught up in the question and forget the credentials/background of the source. I think this could be a nice addition to the excellent suggestion of Summer of Love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T07:07:00.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2014-03-29T07:23:00.717" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard the phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;proper sense stress&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, which was defined as &quot;emphasizing words and phrases in a way that makes it easy for listeners to grasp the ideas being expressed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, that is used more for speech than written English, so I'm not sure if the answers that use that tag are referring to this or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T07:23:00.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-29T08:47:23.897" Score="7" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that one of the more serious problems on this site is that a good question often ends up getting erroneously closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;erroneously closed&lt;/em&gt;, I mean that the OP's thread is marked as a duplicate and a link is made to a thread that doesn't have a proper answer to the OP's question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is understandable how this mistake can be made by a high-rep-count member who was trying to be helpful: the member could have misunderstood the OP's question, or the member could have misunderstood how the linked thread doesn't really answer the OP's question, or perhaps the member wasn't aware of the grammatical issues that were actually involved in the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a short period of time, I'd expect the member(s) to get better at it: live and learn, so to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When votes are taken to close a thread, I'd hope that there would be some members voting who would see that the closing would be erroneous, and so, prevent that closing. I would hope that's how it works. But in actual practice, it doesn't seem to be working out that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen numerous threads closed as duplicates, and when I click on the link to the thread that's supposed to have the answer, I often find that the thread doesn't address the OP's question, or when it does, it has a bad answer. Often that old thread simply has bad info throughout it. This has happened many, many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The procedure for closing threads as duplicates might need to be tweaked. It probably should be changed. It needs to be fixed, imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57102" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Questions are getting closed as duplicates, when they shouldn't be" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-29T18:35:14.797" Score="11" ViewCount="9758" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just spotted a new &lt;strong&gt;uniquity&lt;/strong&gt; tag, for words that express uniqueness. While I don't object to the idea of the tag, I'm puzzled by its name, which appears to be a rare, possibly obsolete variant of &lt;em&gt;uniqueness.&lt;/em&gt; Should it be changed or syn-linked to the more common term? Or is there some reason to expect that people will use it more as currently spelled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T19:46:05.360" Title="Uniquity? Uniqueness?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4640" CreationDate="2014-03-29T21:32:37.460" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should not have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uniquity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;uniquity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;uniquity&lt;/a&gt;. I'm looking at the current questions tagged with it and am not seeing anything useful in grouping those questions together. Of the current 7 questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 questions are asking for a word that means something similar to &quot;unique&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 question is asking about words that have unique meanings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 question seems completely unrelated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about words that &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; X should not be placed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x&lt;/a&gt;. This leaves &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10614/is-there-a-term-for-words-that-have-a-single-meaning-or-are-only-used-in-a-singl&quot;&gt;Is there a term for words that have a single meaning or are only used in a single context?&lt;/a&gt; as the only relevant question and a tag with only one question in it is kind of useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vote we remove the tag entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T21:32:37.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4639" CreationDate="2014-03-29T22:21:29.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to vote &lt;strong&gt;against&lt;/strong&gt; closure on StackExchange. The best we can to is to state our positions in comments and on Meta (which may convince people to retract their close votes). Once a post is closed, we can vote to reopen, which takes time. If you feel that a post has been closed inappropriately, please question it on Meta and, if you have sufficient privileges, vote to reopen, which will put the post in a queue where other privileged users can see it. Editing the post to address the close reason also helps. (But beware of editing it to say “This shouldn't have been closed!” which sounds presumptuous and may turn off people who would otherwise have agreed with you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to retract a close vote&lt;/strong&gt; – see the bottom of the form:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Di1aH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also vote to “leave open” in the review queue for close votes, but that does not directly count against the close votes. Instead – if enough people vote to leave open – it simply accelerates the close-vote aging process. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/139836/219266&quot;&gt;this MSO post&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T21:53:47.710" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-30T17:57:56.057" Score="6" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two separate tags, both with several questions each: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they the same thing, or is there a subtle difference between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastActivityDate="2014-04-11T15:45:58.583" Title="Is there a difference between [usage] and [word-usage]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4640" CreationDate="2014-03-30T19:46:05.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;it could be incorrect to consider the word Uniquity to be redundant/obsolete as it's usage is not unlike well versed.&#xA;uniquity is more the disposition of &quot;uniqueness&quot; than &quot;uniqueness&quot; itself; it is also the &quot;degree&quot; or &quot;grade&quot; of &quot;uniqueness.&quot; moreover, it is the set of properties purported by &quot;uniqueness.&quot;&#xA;last but not least, it is the &quot;quality&quot; of &quot;uniqueness.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49810" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T19:46:05.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4647" CreationDate="2014-03-31T16:07:01.573" Score="9" ViewCount="2025" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please help me out over this dilemma. I can write proper and &quot;grammatically correct&quot; English, and I feel I have a good vocabulary. And I know for sure my English is good enough for someone who is not a native speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was never serious about learning the &quot;language of grammar&quot;—the terms, definitions,etc.It never mattered to me in my line of work either as all that mattered was good skills in written and spoken English. But out of sheer concern that I can't even name the basic parts of speech, I've started learning formal English grammar rigorously and sincerely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it would motivate me much if you can answer this— Other than from an academic viewpoint, what are the practical benefits of learning formal English grammar? As long as one can write and speak proper, grammatically correct English, what's the point knowing what is a clause, what is a lexeme, what is inflection and all? I ask this as I barely get any time for academic pursuits after a day of work. Please bear with me if my question is a little strange. I am kinda new to this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64476" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T15:05:27.757" Title="What are the pragmatic benefits of having a good knowledge of formal English grammar?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2014-03-31T20:27:01.417" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker, I can give you my take on this, but ultimately it will boil down to opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning English grammar/syntax will increase your proficiency (and your vocabulary), especially in written English, whether you realize that or not right now. Your English is obviously good, but confidence is usually high at the beginning of something, drops the more you learn, then rises again to a degree the more you continue to learn. This alone, this realization that confidence can be unwarranted, is an incredibly important life lesson. (For example, there are many doctors who do not realize how relatively little medicine they know, because they &lt;em&gt;are confident&lt;/em&gt; that they are good physicians. In an accountant, this characteristic might cost you money; in a doctor, it might cost you your health or even your life.) This fact is as old as the ancient philosophers themselves, and was put into apt words by Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing your language, its grammar and syntax, will also help you to understand/learn other languages more easily. It's hard to know how to &lt;em&gt;conjugate verbs&lt;/em&gt; if you know neither what verbs are nor what conjugating is. It will also give you a certain appreciation of your language which you did not have before. That might be as minor as being able to avoid common mistakes, to greater appreciation of good writing (and poetry, etc.) Though I knew basic grammar before joining this site, I could not have told you, say, what the real difference between the simple past and the present perfect was. Having learned that, I'm much more aware of it when I read/write/speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any analytic exercise, learning grammar and syntax will help you to think more analytically. Learning to think more analytically will help you in &lt;em&gt;trying to understand other things&lt;/em&gt;. It's a cycle, like dexterity, or exercise and strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pragmatically, it boils down to what you like, want, and what is useful to you. If none of the above appeals to you, then my answer is only so much chaff, and I'm OK with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-03-31T20:33:36.543" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T20:33:36.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2014-04-01T07:35:53.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think @medica has nailed it very well. I would only add that at some point, it may help you to impress someone, when it's important to do so: A job interview, a date, etc.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I'm not joking - it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10552" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T07:35:53.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4654" CreationDate="2014-04-01T10:09:59.360" Score="6" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've spent the last hour repeatedly clicking my mouse to mine all the coins. I have now opened all of the unicorn rewards. What am I to do with my life now? I am getting unicorn withdrawal symptoms. Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66653" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-04-01T23:20:14.557" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T23:20:14.557" Title="What am I to do now I've gotten all the rewards?" Tags="|support|unicorns|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4652" CreationDate="2014-04-01T11:06:00.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's going to be OK. Put on some Allman Brothers, then lie on the floor, and just stare at the ceiling for a while. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T11:06:00.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4657" CreationDate="2014-04-01T14:55:18.370" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160586/quantification-of-frequency-adverbs&quot;&gt;Quantification of Frequency Adverbs&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - is marked as [onhold] with this info-box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;put on hold as primarily opinion-based by tchrist, medica, choster,&#xA;  David M, MrHen 21 hours ago&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert&#xA;  experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost&#xA;  entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific&#xA;  expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, please &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/160586/edit&quot;&gt;edit your question&lt;/a&gt; or leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I would be happy to leave a comment on the question itself, it is unclear if the parties that flagged the question would be notified, and more importantly, in my opinion, that would be a poor platform for responding to the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have attempted to search the meta-questions of English.SE for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=onhold&quot;&gt;onhold&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and was unable to find any existing information of use; in fact, there were zero results for the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, while I understand that a number of parties agreed on the topic, to my knowledge not one posted an explanation of why they believed either the question somehow solicited, requested, or asked for opinions - or would only result in opinion-based answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I resolve the [onhold] status added to my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T23:31:23.640" Title="How do I resolve the [onhold] status added to my question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4655" CreationDate="2014-04-01T15:04:42.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;On hold&quot; is a new designation for closed questions that are pending improvement. Once you edit your question, it will automatically move into a review queue for our 3K+ users to consider it for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-04-01T23:31:23.640" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T23:31:23.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4655" CreationDate="2014-04-01T15:05:42.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Onhold' is the new nicer name for 'closed'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get it reopened, you should edit your question and then either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) hope that people notice and decide to vote to reopen, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) canvas for reopen votes, either in comments, or in chat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T15:05:42.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13645" CreationDate="2014-04-02T17:43:46.047" Score="3" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philosophical semantics also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are both related with philosophy and the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/philosophy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;philosophy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;philosophy&lt;/a&gt; tag is used only 2 times but they are not related with philosophy of language actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does acceptability depend on the question? Is there any accepted example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would it be better to ask on philosophy.stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side question: When would it be appropriate to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/philosophy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;philosophy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;philosophy&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T17:46:42.633" Title="Is philosophy of language on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4611" CreationDate="2014-04-02T18:03:34.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; stance is that SPAM should not be downvoted since that moves it away from the front page and fewer users will get the chance to flag it. Since enough SPAM flags automatically delete the post, and also bring it to mod's attention, you shouldn't downvote SPAM, just flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/193916/203101&quot;&gt;relevant post&lt;/a&gt; from meta.so states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because downvoting pushes out off the front page but doesn't remove it. This means that it is somewhat less likely to be seen by other active members who could flag it, and therefore kill it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting is for bad, unresearched questions. Spam is just spam, it should be spotted and removed ASAP. Hiding it means it might stick around longer then it needs to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T18:03:34.210" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2014-04-02T19:38:58.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a few colleagues and friends use the site.  Their main comments to me included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They felt that people just upvoted at will just because someone with high-rep answered a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two told me they answered a question and then a higher-rep person took their answer and &quot;expanded&quot; on it as their own answer.  Both basically said they would probably never use the site again.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Almost all commented on some of the encyclopedia type answers.  Their comments on these were that they weren't going to read an answer that is 50 lines unless it really takes 50 lines to make the whole point.  And then they also couldn't understand how these answers were so upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They found it hard to want to cite a bunch of references when they see other answers don't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinions on these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a bit of chicken/egg stuff going on here but there is definitely some in-voting.  I am sure we can all produce ridiculous answers that had the most votes or accepted.  Not sure I see this on many other stack sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Definitely true.  I go out of my way to vote anything above average for new user.  I will also downvote any user taking advantage of another user's answer.  I think it is nicer to help them expand.  This is a common issue on the non-tech stack sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't read these answers, so no opinion if they are good or not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could see comments about citations putting new users off here.  If it is something that you can google and it's a top hit or if it is common reference then why comment on it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I received mixed feedback on ELU.  I think part of it has to do with the diverse reasons why people use the site, part of it because of some possible inclusionist behavior, and part of it because the English language has a few major branches and for some questions we would just have to agree to disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T19:38:58.143" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4666" CreationDate="2014-04-05T01:09:47.077" Score="6" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161720/what-is-the-real-name-of-the&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; particular question, clearly commonly available references were not good enough, as many high-rep users disagreed among themselves about the English name for this object (#).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see it being closed for, perhaps, irrelevance to the English language. But since, as I say, &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; comments from high-rep users and a well-researched answer (which I must admit is mine) still shows much disagreement exists about this, how can it be closed as OT for reason &lt;strong&gt;#&lt;/strong&gt; 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, I don't understand. Is it just because people don't want to type in a custom answer? Or are there fine points that I'm not seeing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T22:37:10.520" Title="I know this has been done to death but... OT because of commonly available references?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4662" CreationDate="2014-04-05T04:39:19.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has at least 4 names I can think of off the top of my head.  Does it have an official name?  Who knows but it is at least debatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that it was off topic for some because they think their word is the word.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all of this is assuming that there is any consistency or rationale for closing things (written by native speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T04:39:19.850" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-05T23:14:56.220" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people seem to have an opinion that a meta thread is not a suitable place for discussion as the comments of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4610/an-english-language-learner-better-not-ask-in-this-site&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; show.&#xA;Hence my title question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="What is the discussion tag for?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2014-04-06T00:16:27.547" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussion is appropriate on meta, based on MSO precedent &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/47634/how-does-meta-stack-overflow-work&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63442/discussion-tag-in-meta&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;, as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;FAQ guidance&lt;/a&gt;. It is true that the Stack Exchange platform is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124643/how-can-meta-be-made-more-conducive-to-discussions&quot;&gt;not well-suited for discussions&lt;/a&gt;, but chat is often not an appropriate place for site discussions, for several reasons in the aforelinked post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the specific case: Your question has been closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4605/is-asking-a-question-on-english-usage-which-is-obvious-for-native-english-speake&quot;&gt;your earlier question&lt;/a&gt;, and I do not see good reason to reopen it. I think your previous question received good answers, and as it has not been closed, I do not think there is anything further to be done in this instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T00:16:27.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4662" CreationDate="2014-04-06T09:02:52.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topic is interesting in its own right. And I think that's important to keep in mind: A question that's General Reference doesn't have to be trivial or boring; it could be so compelling that it's caught the interest of many different people, laymen like myself and researchers alike. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answers to it are great! I always thought # was an odd symbol to connect with pound, but the images in your answer connecting it with a cursive &quot;lb&quot; are enlightening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can see two interpretations of the question. And they vary over how easily they are answered by general references. I have a guess about which the asker meant, but I figure those who voted to close may have read the other meaning. I present them below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a difference between &lt;em&gt;sharp sign&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pound sign&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; Consider the original post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the correct definition of the symbol &quot;#&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm used to say &quot;Sharp sign&quot; to make reference to # sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today a friend told me that the correct &quot;saying&quot; is &lt;em&gt;Number sign&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Hash sign&lt;/em&gt; or even just &lt;em&gt;Hash.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between those &quot;options&quot; and what's the correct usage of the words for this sign?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unclear to me what the OP meant by &lt;em&gt;those options&lt;/em&gt;. If OP is not asking for when to use &lt;em&gt;sharp sign&lt;/em&gt; versus when to use &lt;em&gt;number sign&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;hash sign&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;hash&lt;/em&gt;, then &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the purpose of the introductory sentence? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why use quotes around &quot;Sharp sign&quot; and &quot;saying&quot; if not to mark those as the also-quoted &quot;options&quot;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why use &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; in both the question title and in describing the friend's terms if not to ask &quot;Is &lt;em&gt;sharp sign&lt;/em&gt; also a valid name for #?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the incorrect term &lt;em&gt;sharp sign&lt;/em&gt; for # has no bearing on OP's question, it might have been better to omit the first sentence entirely with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today a friend told me that the way to say # is &lt;em&gt;Number sign&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Hash sign&lt;/em&gt; or even just &lt;em&gt;Hash&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP wants to know the difference between &lt;em&gt;sharp sign&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;number sign&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_%28music%29#Correctly_drawing_and_printing_the_sharp_sign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;top entry of a Google search of &lt;em&gt;sharp sign&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, OP's phrase of choice, addresses this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sharp symbol (♯) may be confused with the number (hash or pound) sign (#). Both signs have two sets of parallel double-lines. However, a correctly drawn sharp sign must have two slanted parallel lines which rise from left to right, to avoid being obscured by the staff lines. The number sign, in contrast, has two compulsory horizontal strokes in this place. In addition, while the sharp also always has two perfectly vertical lines, the number sign (#) may or may not contain perfectly vertical lines (according to typeface and writing style).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: As I write this post, the above WP citation has a &quot;citation needed&quot; label. Although I hold its information to be true from my own experience, I would personally need a similar answer from another easily-available source before calling it General Reference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the most popular label for #?&lt;/strong&gt; Judging from OP's comments and behavior, I think this is the intended question. OP wants to know a general, context-independent name for #, so the comment &lt;em&gt;&quot;Look a cloud shaped like a 'insert-correct-name' sign in the sky!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is easily understood and unambiguous. OP accepted the answer that went into depth about the derivation and typical context for each name of #, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The label &lt;em&gt;pound sign&lt;/em&gt; used in weighing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The name] pound sign...  developed as a scribble for the abbreviation of &lt;strong&gt;pound&lt;/strong&gt; in latin: &lt;strong&gt;lb&lt;/strong&gt;, where lb is an abbreviation of &lt;em&gt;libra&lt;/em&gt;, itself a shortened form of the full expression, &lt;strong&gt;libra pondo&lt;/strong&gt;... If you look at how scribes scribbled &lt;em&gt;lb&lt;/em&gt;, you might recognize the sign (in the first example) [&lt;em&gt;example omitted&lt;/em&gt;] amongst the scribbled and attached lines.... That is still how it's scribbled: I do it myself when recording the weights of babies...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The label &lt;em&gt;octothorpe&lt;/em&gt; used in the phone industry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... octothorp was coined by someone working for a phone company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The label &lt;em&gt;hash tag&lt;/em&gt; in used in Information Technology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hash tag ... in IT as a tag to group information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and ended with the rule-of-thumb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But from the 1300s, it has been known as the pound sign, or, in England, the number sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not consider the question answered here as General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But judging by what's presented in the &lt;strong&gt;question alone&lt;/strong&gt; (disregarding information outside of it, such as OP's comments and my evaluations of OP's behavior) I understand why it might be closed as OT because of General Reference. Disagreements about what the name for # ought to be seem to me more indicative that the question interpreted is asking for opinions. Why does OP believe there ought to be a correct name? Does that imply other names for it are incorrect? What does OP mean by correct: popular, technical, general, original, or something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think encouraging OP to clear up these gray areas would help remove the on-hold status the question now has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T09:02:52.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2014-04-06T11:40:13.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Medica gave you a great answer!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, my foreign language teachers taught me just as much about my native English language as they did French &amp;amp; Latin.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poor grammar and spelling are significant barriers to written communication.  Imagine you want to translate a text online, but it is full of errors and slang.  Online translators cannot handle most of those errors, so translating is difficult if not impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70809" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T11:40:13.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2014-04-06T15:04:00.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me the &quot;difference of opinion&quot; on the linked earlier question is about exactly what &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of &quot;discussions&quot; should be conducted on SO sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I'm aware, most ELU users agree with me (and with those arguing against OP on the earlier post). We think the &quot;discussion&quot; tag on meta questions just means people are encouraged to post &lt;em&gt;what they think&lt;/em&gt; in respect of the issue being raised. An example of that being the &quot;answer&quot; I'm currently posting right here and now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not expecting to engage in a protracted back-and-forth interchange of ideas through comments here. We have &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;our main chat room&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for general-purpose discussions, and if anyone wants an interactive discussion focussing on a specific issue, they can always &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13794/mr-hen-et-al&quot;&gt;create a chatroom just for that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there will always be a certain amount of &lt;em&gt;comment -&gt; response -&gt; counter-response -&gt;...&lt;/em&gt; Plus people often post multiple &lt;em&gt;clarification, supporting evidence&lt;/em&gt; comments under their own actual question or answer, even when they should more properly &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general we don't really want the main/meta Q&amp;amp;A sites to be used to &quot;kick ideas around&quot; interactively. If you don't already know exactly what you think, and you want to explore an issue interactively to help firm up your ideas, do that in a chat broom, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; post whatever you eventually decide is your contribution to the &quot;question&quot; - so people can &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on whether they agree or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2014-04-06T20:30:17.590" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T20:30:17.590" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4684" CreationDate="2014-04-07T11:10:40.527" Score="6" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some questions that I could ask both on  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask them in both places?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, would &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/20760/5345&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question be better suited here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70248" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T17:58:54.943" Title="Can I ask here a question that I have already asked on English Language Learners?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-08T00:41:28.353" Score="8" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is a dupe, but I didn't see it all in one place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since hitting 10K rep, I've been actively reviewing flags, and my disputed flag count jumped from 0 to 15 in a few days.  It occurs to me that this site may have a different culture from the other sites on SE I've been active on.  I know that some of the &lt;em&gt;invalid flags&lt;/em&gt; flags generate an automatic disputed flag tag, but I want to make certain that I'm on the same page as everyone here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we review the definition of &lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Very Low Quality&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;SPAM&lt;/em&gt; flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not An Answer:  This answer does not make any attempt to actually answer the question.  It should not be a statement of the answer's quality, &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.  For example, a wrong answer should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be tagged with this flag.  But, rather an answer that is just completely off the topic of the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Example:  Q:  Which form to the verb to be is correct in this sentence?  I &lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;_ a good man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A:  Verbs often take different forms in English.  I usually use a different verb in each sentence.  --- &lt;strong&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A:  I &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a good man is the correct form.  --- Should be down voted or commented upon.  &lt;strong&gt;NOT FLAGGED&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Very Low Quality:  This answer contains enough quality issues that it is completely invalid.  The answerer's grammar, punctuation, and spelling have made the answer unintelligible.  (It is highly unlikely to be of benefit after editing.) Or it is just a link with no explanation of the link or its meaning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the same example above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A:  i ujuly uses a word at a place ant i duznt no wich wun.  --- &lt;strong&gt;Very Low Quality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A:  I use &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; here.  --- &lt;strong&gt;Not VERY LOW QUALITY&lt;/strong&gt;, just a bit succinct.  Should be handled in comments and votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPAM:  Basically any post that is not even a remote attempt to answer or further the purposes of the site.  This can include actual spammy links to websites, services, etc.  But, it can also be things like &quot;I like toast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some disagree with the last one, but it is spam, just not advertising spam.  Matt points out below these can also be flagged as offensive. That seems reasonable, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2014-04-08T21:17:25.787" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T21:17:25.787" Title="Flagging Reviews" Tags="|discussion|flagging|flag-reviews|flags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-08T02:08:57.453" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have posted a question regarding cockney some while ago. As a learner, I always need the history of my posts, including the answers and responses so I can make sort of review about my progress.  Now, as I can't find it anymore, could admins help me to give it back? May I ask politely why that question has disappeared? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41908" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2014-04-10T15:03:57.817" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:55:22.450" Title="Why I lost my 'question'?" Tags="|support|questions|closed-questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4673" CreationDate="2014-04-08T02:44:51.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is located at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/128000/cockney-how-should-i-know-more-about-it&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/128000/cockney-how-should-i-know-more-about-it&lt;/a&gt;. It was automatically deleted because it met &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/89334&quot;&gt;the following criteria&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question was closed more than &lt;code&gt;9&lt;/code&gt; days ago, and ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not closed as a duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has a score of 0 or less&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no answers with a score &gt; 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no pending reopen votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has not been edited in the past &lt;code&gt;9&lt;/code&gt; days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.. it will be automatically deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T02:44:51.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2014-04-08T03:49:20.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good question, but difficult to answer.&#xA;As a general answer I would say language is a complicated thing and an educated person is expected to know something about language and how a language system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone has to write a lot, I think of journalists or similar persons, hundreds of problems arise and such persons have to find solutions with dictionaries or grammars. But someone who does not have a sufficient knowledge of grammar can't use a grammar, because he does not understand the language of grammar. He can't even use the register of a grammar because he does not know the grammar terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks &quot;What is the practical use of grammar, I can speak and write proper English, even if I don't know the simple grammar terms for the word classes.&quot; I would like to ask &quot;How do you know that you speak and write proper English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, if someone has interest in English, ie he reads or writes a lot, then necessarily a lot of language problems arise. And someone without grammar knowledge can't find answers to his questions on his own.&#xA;If this person has children who ask him what is a noun or a verb and he can't explain it to his children they will consider him as a let-down. And, I think, he should be able to give better answers than the poor explanations that normally are given in grammar books for nouns and verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite another question is what are the good reference works for English as to dictinaries and grammars. I think one sould be able to tell a good dictionary or grammar from a bad one. And I think one should be able to judge the usefulness of grammar terms. What is necessary and good and what is useless academic stuff. One should be able to translate unnecessary terms such as lexem, morphem, constituents into normal words or grammar terms or be able to invent one's own names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63507" LastEditorUserId="63507" LastEditDate="2014-04-13T06:27:07.777" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T06:27:07.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-08T17:40:54.507" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does scientific knowledge of English help in learning other languages? For example, scientific knowledge of Sanskrit makes it easy to learn Hindi and Gujarati, while scientific knowledge of Arabic makes it easy to learn Urdu (which I believe is basically Hindi but it has different letters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English obviously does not help much in learning French, Spanish or German, but if we learn French, it becomes more easy to learn Spanish. By the way, I am bilingual (Hindi and English) and just wanted to know the extent to which a good knowledge of English will help me to learn another language (I just want to learn 1 more language to set myself apart from rest of Indians who also are mostly bilingual).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you tell me the language to which English relates the most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61734" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-08-10T17:20:09.077" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T02:49:09.793" Title="What languages would be easier to learn with scientific knowledge of English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4676" CreationDate="2014-04-09T08:14:18.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly I should say that I write this as someone for whom English is the first language.  People from other countries may have a different view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it that by scientific knowledge you mean the analytical study of the structure of the language in which case the short answer is &quot;up to a point&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of vocabulary, English has borrowed words from so many other languages that it does not always help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of language structure, other languages tend to be more rigorous in their grammar and syntax.  Also, you will find declensions and conjugations that either don't exist in English or do so only in a simplified form.  However, the principles are transferrable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that my knowledge of English has been of great help in learning other languages.  However, the process of learning other languages is of great help in understanding all languages, including my native language.  Your scientific knowledge of the language will help enormously when trying to make sense of a new language.  You will know what to look for and how to use what you find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been fortunate enough to travel widely.  I can say that landing in a country where you don't know the language, nobody there speaks English and the alphabet is strange is a challenge.  The fact that I learnt French and Russian at school enabled me to cope with Korean and Lithuanian, amongst others.  I picked up the key elements by watching the television news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to return to your question, yes a scientific knowledge of English will help you learn another language.  Not necessarily because it it English but because it is a different language to your own.  Then, as others have commented, you naturally feed that back into your knowledge of English and all the other languages that you know.  From my experience of travelling in India, I believe that the widespread Indian experience of speaking local language, Hindi and English means other languages will come more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T08:14:18.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2014-04-10T09:19:58.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta sites do permit some discussion. However, even here, the developers discourage extended discussion in comments. Please note the &lt;strong&gt;bold warning&lt;/strong&gt; above the comment box in the image below. Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95937/why-must-we-avoid-discussions-in-comments&quot;&gt;this MSO post&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pZLYe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T10:22:27.423" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4643" CreationDate="2014-04-11T15:45:58.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From their tag-wikis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; — How and why certain words are used in varying ways within various contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt; — This tag is for questions about correctly using a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a significant difference and it would probably be useful to merge these two tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-11T15:45:58.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-12T04:32:37.797" Score="-2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/140870/71820&quot;&gt;This deleted answer&lt;/a&gt; was used to comment on the usefulness of the actual answers so was criticised and suggestion made that it should have been a comment, not an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need a reputation of 50+ to comment? so this may not be an option&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A comment can only be applied to one answer?, whereas this 'answer' was commenting on the answers in general, not specific to one answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the facility is not there to make a general comment, is it fair to criticise the person for using an answer the way they did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71820" OwnerDisplayName="user2836821" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T15:28:27.087" Title="Using an answer to comment on real answers" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4681" CreationDate="2014-04-12T16:43:19.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you and the original answerer seem not to have taken into account is that there is a &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; why newcomers are not allowed to comment. Specifically, until you have been on here for a while, you are unlikely to grasp what makes SE different from other sites. This is not a forum, but a strict Q and A site. So no 'Thank you', no argument in the comments, no general discussion. Newcomers are not expected to grasp this immediately,so they are not allowed to comment till they have gained a bare minimum of rep [50 might take a day or two, depending on how well-considered your posts are].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And before saying &quot;The site won't allow me to comment, so I shall post what would have been a comment in the box marked 'Your Answer'&quot;, is it really such a bad idea to stop and think it over? Too many flamewars as it is are caused by people who can type faster than they think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-04-12T16:43:19.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-11T20:10:04.740" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not really a language question (probably more of a meta question really), but where is the best forum to discuss meaning / interpretation of poetry / song lyrics - pragmatics, inference, metaphor, contextual relevance, cultural context, interpretation, intention, etc.? Have looked at area 51 poetry but has 2 followers :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61528" OwnerDisplayName="martin" LastActivityDate="2014-04-12T20:04:53.917" Title="discussing meaning in language - poetry and song lyrics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4669" CreationDate="2014-04-15T11:10:35.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, when trying to explain the difference between ELL and EL&amp;amp;U, I have said a number of times that it often is not the question that decides where it should be asked, but the expected answer(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may very well be possible to ask a same or similar question here that has been asked on ELL, as long as it is very clear you are not looking for the same answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I am puzzled about the use and meaning of the subjunctive in modern English, I can ask that on ELL and get some clear answers as to when I should use it and how to form it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could very well ask about the same thing on EL&amp;amp;U if I am interested in how the subjunctive seems to have largely disappeared nowadays, or why certain grammarians seem to put a lot more emphasis on its importance and use than others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it would be more or less the same question, my wording would definitely have to make it clear what kind of answer I am looking for: do I simply want to understand some text that I encountered, or am I interested in the phenomenon and it current place in modern English (and maybe how it got to that position)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your specific question, I would think that you could ask it at Academia if you are indeed wondering about the style(s) of English used there. If you are more interested in what influences exact English usage in places where English is used as a &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt;, ELU may be a better place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have problems understanding the use of certain expressions or grammatical construction &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt;, ELL seems to be the place to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I would normally not say you should cross-post your questions on different stack-exchanges. Try to find out what kind of answer you are really looking for, and chose your stack-exchange based on that. Make sure that you phrase your question appropriately to indicate the kind of answers you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time it is very well possible that you are looking for different kinds of answers on the same subject. In that case you can certainly ask your question in several places. You will probably be better off rewording your question to focus on the specific area you are interested in, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T11:10:35.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4163" CreationDate="2014-04-15T14:29:06.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point, its completely possible you have attracted a troll by posting about it so much on Meta. Trolls are like Chinese-finger-traps: The more you stress out, the more they latch on. Relax and ignore the issue and the problem will mostly likely sort itself out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really, really cannot ignore it, I would nab a moderator in chat and voice your concerns in a less public manner. They are going to be the only ones capable of adding new information to the subject. I'm not sure what you hope to gain by continually editing this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4163/too-many-up-votes-again-fourth-time-lucky/4685?noredirect=1#comment15798_4163&quot;&gt;waiwai933's comments&lt;/a&gt;, the mods would actually prefer that you post &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; Meta posts when you have future concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latest case has been dealt with--in the future, if it happens again, it may be better to make a new post on meta to make sure we see it (mods get pinged for all new questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can say is, while MrHen is right in that only mods can do anything about this, for us to do anything about it, you do need to get our attention (if the system catches it, it'll reverse them, but if it doesn't, obviously it can't alert us). &lt;strong&gt;Both meta and chat are acceptable ways to get through to us, but chat messages are more easily forgotten and dismissed than meta posts.&lt;/strong&gt; The meta post also doesn't need to be anything more than &amp;quot;there are voting irregularities on my account; can a mod look into them?&amp;quot; -- that's enough for us to go hunting down things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T14:35:45.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2014-04-15T15:05:27.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although your English is excellent, you feel you're missing out on something, that's why you're learning the parts of speech. Is this worthwhile? Well, unless you're thinking of teaching English, I'm not sure that this is a good use of your precious time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to be a better driver, would you study mechanics, or advanced driving? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We tend to forget that we learn our first language orally, through our ears rather than through our eyes. We are young, illiterate, uneducated, unreasonable and unsophisticated, yet before we can read or write, we are already talking. Most people never know the grammar of their mother tongue, but that doesn't stop them talking! We also forget that humans have been talking for tens of thousands of years whereas writing is a relatively recent invention. Language &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; oral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the reason we study grammar is because there were no native speakers around to teach us Greek and Latin. Grammar is a bit of a hangover from that time. I'm not saying studying grammar is not rewarding, illuminating and a fast track into a language, it's just that it is so different from the way we learn our mother tongue that it is difficult not to be sceptical as to its real utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your position and at your level, I might be inclined to study rhetoric rather than grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71640" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T15:05:27.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2014-04-16T17:40:23.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are exactly right. Questions should be judged as on-topic or not depending on &lt;em&gt;whether it is on topic on the site in question&lt;/em&gt;. If - and only if - it already &lt;strong&gt;isn't&lt;/strong&gt; on topic, then it can be considered whether it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be on topic elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find a general StackExchange reference for this but I couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Area 51 FAQ&lt;/a&gt; does say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When voting, focus on &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; site&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Don't worry about whether a question might be asked on another site. Your goal is to make the best possible site for &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's what we're encouraged to do when creating example questions for proposed future sites, I can't see why it wouldn't still apply to a graduated site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there are two situations covered by your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Questions which would technically be on-topic at ELU but would fit better on ELL.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should be left on ELU if they're on-topic at ELU. Possibly if they would fit better on ELL then a comment could be added along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi, this is a great question and thanks for asking it! Just so you're aware, we do have a specialist site for English Language Learners that you might find more suitable for explaining basic grammatical differences like these. Your question is fine here, though, I'm just letting you know about the other site in case it helps you in future :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Tailor at will.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Questions which are indeed off-topic but &quot;fits better at ELL&quot; is being used as a close reason&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible that some of the questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; off-topic but the ELL excuse is being used as a filler reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, there will by definition be a reason for it being off-topic and that is the reason that should be given instead of &quot;it would be a better fit at ELL&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62605" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T17:40:23.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4669" CreationDate="2014-04-16T17:58:54.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with oerkelens that to be valid on two different sites, the same question would have to have subtle or major variations appropriate to the two sites. I believe that fits with overall SE network policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree that your example question belongs on Academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the bulk of the answer from oerkelens concerns the distinction between ELU and ELL, and I disagree with it.  An alternative &amp;ndash; as derived from the &lt;em&gt;names&lt;/em&gt; of the two sites &amp;ndash; is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/strong&gt; is the place for questions about the English language and its &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/strong&gt; is the place for questions about, or from folks, &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; the English language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfectly clear, right? Of course not. So, speaking as someone who &lt;em&gt;learnt&lt;/em&gt; to speak, read and write English some 50 years ago, and has continued to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; it with a fair degree of success, I say it's &quot;simply&quot; a matter of &lt;em&gt;level of mastery of the language&lt;/em&gt;. Still learning? Go to ELL. Already fluent? Welcome to ELU. The only difficulty, and it is significant, is in determining exactly where this level of mastery is. But perhaps it doesn't matter: Questions in the grey area can stay where they're posted, while those clearly on the wrong side of grey can get migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are many linguists, etymologists, and &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; serious English language &lt;s&gt;enthusiasts&lt;/s&gt; zealots who will try their darndest, with highfalutin phraseology and much quoting of the Help or About pages, that unless we're up to their very high level of understanding then we must surely belong in ELL. And then there are those who claim to know &amp;ndash; and so should we, of course &amp;ndash; the difference between &quot;everyday&quot; English and &quot;academic&quot; English and that &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is what separates the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where do you post your &quot;English&quot; questions? You, and most of the rest of us, should continue to take the titles of the two sites at face value and post where you or we think fit. Let the huffers and puffers continue their fruitless crusades, but fear them not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62474" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T17:58:54.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4662" CreationDate="2014-04-17T22:37:10.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the confusion is that the experts answered a question which was not asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asked what the correct name(s) is(are).  That's general reference, off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The experts addressed the origin and region-specific uses of various names.  That's on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question should be edited to explicitly ask for the information the experts have provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3540" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T22:37:10.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-18T16:59:03.227" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not really much to say here.  I go to review an edit and then I see it is an anonymous user editing.  Which most of these are crap compared to the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="48112" LastEditDate="2014-04-18T18:01:50.857" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T18:20:43.003" Title="Why are anonymous users allowed to edit questions?" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-18T17:11:21.390" Score="33" ViewCount="756" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't &quot;Advanced English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot; be more appropriate and cut down the ELL questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just by the name of the site the users who post &quot;ELL&quot; are right.  I believe this site poorly named.  I shouldn't have to read a 3 minute preamble to figure out if my question belongs here.  I would assume as a user that I have a question regarding English, so I ask it here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now maybe this was named before ELL was a little sperm swimming to the SE egg but things need to evolve.  We shouldn't be closing 50 questions a day (I am just making that number up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;  In no way do I want this question to construe any need for changing the policy of this site one way or the other.  I simply chose &quot;Advanced&quot; because it is the first thing I thought of.  The question was more about the confusion - to even &quot;advanced&quot; English speakers - on where they should go to ask a question.  I find that these two sitting next to each other in the dropdown adds on to the confusion even more.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So question I raised is proposing changing based on confusion, not new site boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="51137" LastEditDate="2014-04-20T21:29:45.993" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T16:58:11.960" Title="Has anyone thought about changing the name of this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4691" CreationDate="2014-04-18T18:01:12.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even anonymous users can suggest edits. This is what they see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RGjYl.png&quot; alt=&quot;improve answer&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T18:20:43.003" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4692" CreationDate="2014-04-19T21:43:23.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my answer below, I originally misinterpreted RyeɃreḁd's intent with his question.  The issue at hand is &lt;strong&gt;how to distinguish between &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt;, and how to guide people to the right one,&lt;/strong&gt; not how to craft ELU into an &lt;em&gt;academics&lt;/em&gt; only site.  Don't put undue emphasis on his choice of the word &lt;em&gt;advanced&lt;/em&gt;.  I have less insight to provide on the best way to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree that this site should be about &lt;em&gt;advanced&lt;/em&gt; English.  If you squeeze all the learners into ELL, and this site becomes only about the most hoity-toity academic pursuits, where does that leave the vast majority of everyday speakers who would like a little assistance?  They'll still pick one or the other, and if they're using the language everyday, they'll avoid the &quot;learners&quot; site and come here anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I think things are right the way they are now.  As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4689/28746&quot;&gt;martin f&lt;/a&gt; said, the distinction is between &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; the language, and how to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; the language you already know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;phenry put it very well here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;This is not a site for “serious English language enthusiasts,” and it never will be&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T16:46:14.587" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4692" CreationDate="2014-04-20T15:13:57.590" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I have no data to back this up, it's at least possible if not probable that people are simply using &lt;code&gt;english&lt;/code&gt; as the URL because &quot;There must be a Stack for English, right?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest swapping the URLs around, so english.SE goes to ELL and ELU gets ELU.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if that's too much of a change, have english.SE go to a disambiguation page which directs questioners to either ELU or ELL. That would presuppose that there were fairly explicit guidelines which could be concocted to direct questions correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be borderline cases, but there are a large number of questions here which are obviously asked by people learning English as a second language who simply want basic help about which preposition to use in a particular sentence, rather than the &lt;strong&gt;reason&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;history&lt;/strong&gt; of using that preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T15:13:57.590" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-20T21:32:54.947" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4692/has-anyone-thought-about-changing-the-name-of-this-site?noredirect=1#comment15830_4692&quot;&gt;changing the site name&lt;/a&gt;.  So I am also wondering if there are questions on ELL that are really ELU questions - or as many compared to the ELL questions that appear on ELU.  I am not really on there so I would like to know if the confusion swings both ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-04-21T00:19:26.070" Title="Are there just as many questions posted on ELL that should be on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4692" CreationDate="2014-04-21T03:04:46.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other SE sites can suggest to a questioner where to send their query, or warn when a question might be chosen to be closed based on the structure in the title.  Why not a technical measure of some kind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there do exist some text analyzers that can do a grade-level rating of a body of text.  If it measured the post as being below a certain score it could kick in at time of post to offer the suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Your post was analyzed by machine as containing a large number of spelling and grammar errors.  Is your question actually about basic learning of English?  If so, the right place to ask it might be on a different site... click here to have your message posted on ELL&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something like that.  Though I never like these measures &lt;em&gt;blocking&lt;/em&gt; a post, only warning...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1879" LastActivityDate="2014-04-21T03:04:46.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4700" CreationDate="2014-04-22T14:24:31.287" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently got into an annoying arguement with someone over my phrasing of a comment on another SE site. I'd like to remove identifying parts from it and copy and paste the conversation into a question for this site in order to identify who was in the wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is purely for my vanity and pride. Would this be OK to post as a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49648" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T20:15:08.390" Title="Can I use this SE to settle arguements?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2014-04-22T20:15:08.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not. Topics generated from rants and/or arguments don't have a good history of helping anyone other than the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; ask the question in a way that can help others. Tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a question which will give you an answer filled with information that will solve the core of your argument. As in, don't ask us to resolve your argument. Ask us for the information needed to resolve the argument.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When asking the question, stop to think if the answers you are likely to get will simply be (a) dictionary definitions of words, (b) notes on differences of style or (c) &quot;it depends&quot;. These kinds of answers are boring to read, boring to write and typically show a lack of research on the part of the asker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask yourself if you are making any assumptions during your argument and make sure you don't make the same assumptions in your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you can always poke us in the ELU chat and get some quick, informal opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T20:15:08.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-22T20:22:51.013" Score="9" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been working on reducing our number of Unanswered questions but am nearing a point I consider &quot;good enough&quot;. The next thing on my work list is to start analyzing our tags, tag wikis, tag synonyms and tag usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I start jumping into the mess of it, I want the community's opinion on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Examples of &quot;good&quot; tags that are used properly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Examples of &quot;bad&quot; tags that are used improperly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any opinions or blurbs on what you think a tag is for or how it should be used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any tag synonyms you think are needed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any other tag issue you think is relevant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is deliberately open ended in scope and all I really want is lots of opinions flying around so I can get a good perspective on how people use tags, want to use tags, like or dislike about tags, tagging pet peeves, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fire away! The only inappropriate answer is the one you keep to yourself (as long as it is relates to tagging somehow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="6006" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T14:28:21.690" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T05:56:27.823" Title="What are your opinions on tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="572" CreationDate="2014-04-22T23:50:50.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like this got fixed at some point in the last, uh, 3 years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TZa49.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better late than never, right? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T23:50:50.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="662" CreationDate="2014-04-22T23:57:44.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was addressed when the changes to how close reasons work were rolled out last summer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RNBTH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T23:57:44.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2014-04-23T23:20:34.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, look at that... better late than never, eh? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be fixed in the next deployment. Keep an eye out for rev 2014.4.23.1564.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T23:20:34.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-24T08:35:39.263" Score="7" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;As many of you know, we have &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blog&lt;/a&gt;. For those of you who didn't know, that's no surprise as we haven't added new content since July last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2969/elu-blog-the-reboot&quot;&gt;Last time&lt;/a&gt; we tried to get contributors for the blog, we came up with a list of topic ideas, enough for fortnightly content for a few months. It started out well, but our enthusiasm trailed off quite quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems that I think we've identified in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063/elu-blog&quot;&gt;blog chat&lt;/a&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't know who the target audience is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Noöne wants to write for the blog. (Or at least they don't want to &lt;em&gt;enough&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need critical editors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem 3. is inconsequential at the moment, because we have nothing to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve 1. I suggest that the target audience is the people who want to write for the blog. People who have something to say about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would then answer the title question: if our target audience is noöne, then we don't want a blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the case then the blog's run its course and we can put it out to pasture. Maybe Q&amp;amp;A is all we need to get the good word out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if there are people who want to regularly write something about English and show it off to this community (outside the Q&amp;amp;A format), then step up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need 5 or more regular contributors each of whom will contribute a blog post every six months. (i.e. the blog would get about 10 posts per year.) We would need to be able to critique each others posts before they go live, too, so that we regulate our own quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:48:35.510" Title="Do we want a blog?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4701" CreationDate="2014-04-24T10:08:27.943" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;. People just put it against any old question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its blurb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is about how the grammar works: different grammatical usages, how they can be used, or what they mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first 2 newest grammar questions are about punctuation. The next is about word usage. There are some that seem to fit the the blurb, but it's very general and I don't know how it is meant to be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, which covers many of the actual grammar questions. The more specific questions (e.g. preopositions, parts of speech, grammatical number) have their own tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar seems like a pointless tag to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T10:08:27.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-25T17:43:07.577" Score="4" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between english.stackexchange.com and ell.stackexchange.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why two sites are built as English Language forums?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73195" OwnerDisplayName="Milad" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T19:07:52.570" Title="What is the difference between english.stackexchange.com and ell.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-04-25T19:33:44.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4707" CreationDate="2014-04-25T18:15:43.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ell.stackexchange.com&lt;/strong&gt; is for people who are still learning the language. More basic concepts are covered there to help learners understand and use the language comfortably – with help from a native English speaker. &lt;strong&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/strong&gt; is intended and run more for native and fluent speakers of English where more advanced concepts can be covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73195" OwnerDisplayName="Milad" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2014-04-25T19:07:52.570" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T19:07:52.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4701" CreationDate="2014-04-25T19:05:00.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the whole I don't think there is very much wrong with the tags that we have.  However, some of our most widely used tags have a lot of overlap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; Seeks advice on a word for a particular situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-choice&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt; have very similar blurbs, all seeking similar advice but not restricting to a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; could be taken as covering all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we prune one or two of these?  Are they really synonyms amongst them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T19:05:00.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-27T11:22:07.467" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a mistake. I flagged a post I shouldn't have. It's not the end of the world, presumably the moderator will see it was a poor judgement call (I hope) but why can't I &quot;go back&quot; and delete my flag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems silly to flag the same post to say: &lt;em&gt;Please ignore my first flag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or can I do exactly that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2028/feature-request-unflag&quot;&gt;Feature request: unflag&lt;/a&gt; but aren't invalid flags something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one last question, what happened to the highlighted number that used to reside next to our profile avatars, the one  that requested our attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T11:52:28.887" Title="How do you delete or undo a flag?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-05-07T18:14:41.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4710" CreationDate="2014-04-28T11:52:28.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's something horrible, you can post here, like you have done. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226092/lets-get-rid-of-the-10k-flag-queue&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; will hopefully answer your last question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T11:52:28.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-28T14:46:33.060" Score="7" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Ask Question&quot; a primary call to action is treated as a menu item. I actually couldn't even visually locate this button. I had to open stackoverflow, view where the button was and then compare here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a significant usability issue when a developer who has used StackExchange for half a decade can't see a call to action on the site, how does one expect a novice to successfully use the site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6808" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2014-05-02T23:59:06.163" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T23:59:06.163" Title="UX issue, ask a question button" Tags="|bug|design|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4713" CreationDate="2014-04-28T15:10:49.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my quick survey of a handful of sites, it seems that SO, SF, and SU (the original trilogy of sites) have the same layout, with the &quot;ask&quot; button on the far right. The others that I've looked at: ELU, Cooking, UX, WebApps, Unix, stats, Writers (beta), Linguistics, and Android, all put the Ask button right near the menu items, while Gaming, Sci-Fi, and Skeptics put it far away from the menu button. However some of the &quot;keeping it close by&quot; sites do visually distinguish the Ask button by putting a border on it, or adding a small amount of horizontal spacing, or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: UX: keeps it close but makes it visually distinct&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qG2Y2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that site is about usability, they must be doing it right, so we could just copy their approach :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, we could just do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/261qE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or this (c/o Andrew Leach)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yk7E7.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="380" LastEditDate="2014-05-01T13:00:55.717" LastActivityDate="2014-05-01T13:00:55.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-02T03:43:09.883" Score="4" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged a question, intending to suggest it be moved to the language learners site but realized after I submitted it that I had typed &quot;ELU&quot; instead. I did not see anywhere I could edit my flag reason and clicking the flag button again told me I could not re-flag the same question. As I expected, when the moderator saw my flag they declined it and said &quot;This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; ELU...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I could have corrected that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-06-10T16:58:30.890" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T16:58:30.890" Title="Is it possible to edit a moderator attention flag?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4716" CreationDate="2014-05-02T23:58:47.647" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You can always reflag a question if it wasn't obvious what you meant and the flag was declined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in this case, the moderator also included additional information in the decline reason as to why a migration to ELL did not take place (yes, we know you meant ELL; we just don't want you to get into the habit of mixing up the sites and confusing everyone). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T23:58:47.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10990" CreationDate="2014-05-03T20:07:06.633" Score="10" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this community of experts in English language would be interested in a site devoted to an aspect of English literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English.SE has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poetry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; tag, but it is obviously about language usage within poems -- at least mostly so, scanning the list of highest-voted questions for that tag. I was needing some expert advice on an English poet, and thought there must be an SE site for this ... but it turned out there wasn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I've &lt;a href=&quot;http://goo.gl/aDLemi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;launched a &quot;proposal&quot; for a Poetry Q&amp;amp;A site&lt;/a&gt;, and we'll see what comes of it. My hunch is that there are some in this community who could provide valuable input in shaping the proposal's parameters, thus this post in the Meta here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions, comments, feedback would be welcome here, too. (And, no, that site should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be about trite ditties like my question title! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43876" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T17:29:52.670" Title="Any EL&amp;U appetite for a Q&amp;A Poetry site?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6953" CreationDate="2014-05-03T22:13:19.350" Score="11" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed something funny in the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/167888/i-set-a-campfire-on-fire&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iim5M.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the messy &quot;scratches&quot; on each end of the OP's username?  I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this happens is because the same CSS class, &lt;code&gt;owner&lt;/code&gt;, is used to style both the OP's username in the comments and the fancy box containing the OP's user card below the question.  The &quot;mess&quot; in the comment username is simply a small slice of the background image intended for the user card:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sdtgb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Background&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple CSS fix would be to disable the background image for comments, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a.comment-user.owner {&#xA;    background-image: none;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will eliminate the messy background image, but will leave the solid background color in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps. Ugh, I just noticed that the code block above looks really ugly, because the background color for &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags here on meta.ELU is set to &lt;code&gt;#e0e0e0&lt;/code&gt;, while that of the surrounding &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; block is &lt;code&gt;#eee&lt;/code&gt; (which is shorthand for &lt;code&gt;#eeeeee&lt;/code&gt;).  It doesn't seem to happen on the main site, where both have a background color of &lt;code&gt;#eee&lt;/code&gt;.  This could be fixed either by making the colors match, or by adding an extra rule to remove the background entirely from &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; inside &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pre code {&#xA;    background: transparent;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pps. Both of the CSS fixes above are now included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/stack-overflow-unofficial-patch&quot;&gt;SOUP&lt;/a&gt; v1.14 user script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14033" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T20:34:56.750" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T20:34:56.750" Title="Background of long OP username looks ugly in comments" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-04T07:20:26.367" Score="9" ViewCount="1275" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is obvious that the grey of the  blocks and the grey in the horizontal rule don't match up with the rest of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a small amount of the color from the background to it could greatly improve the look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zmQFk.png&quot; alt=&quot;An image of my first question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73966" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T16:30:14.857" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T14:10:22.237" Title="Color of certain elements in Main site doesn't match up with the rest of the page" Tags="|bug|design|markdown|use-mention|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-04T11:20:12.573" Score="4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked some question and among many replies i saw this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Please do search the site before asking, too. This question has been asked a dozen of times already'. And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'This type of question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although i appreciated this comment, how do i search this site for my specific sentence grammar problems etc. Not everything can be found from the search tab above. Kindly do tell me how to find related answers??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user73373" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T16:48:03.163" Title="how to find related questions on this website" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2014-05-04T16:24:11.220" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Please ‘never’ use &lt;code&gt; &lt;/code&gt; on ELU&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tl;dr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please don’t use &lt;code&gt;ˋbackticksˋ&lt;/code&gt; at all: use &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please don’t use preformatted indented blocks except for tables.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonetheless, you were right about one aspect of the trouble: the color.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for pointing that out. While you have indeed identified a genuine problem, I am afraid that you have slightly misdiagnosed it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem isn’t so much that color of the monospaced stuff is off — although you’re quite right that it is.  Rather, the greater problem is that one should never be using that   at all on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks atrocious and makes no sense here. Have you ever seen a dictionary or encyclopedia that uses &lt;code&gt;garbage that looks like this&lt;/code&gt;?  I sure haven’t.  And I can assure you that the professional linguistics literature in refereed journals never does so either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The root cause of this horrific misformatting that plagues ELU seems to be that programmers more accustomed to the programming-related StackExchange sites than they are to correctly typeset English text come to our &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; site expecting to use &lt;code&gt;ˋbackticksˋ&lt;/code&gt; when they wish to make a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction#Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;use–mention distinction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which a programmer equates to making a literal out of something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In written language, mentioned words or phrases often appear between quotation marks (“Chicago” contains three vowels) or in italics (When I say &lt;em&gt;honey&lt;/em&gt;, I mean the sweet stuff that bees make), and style authorities such as &lt;em&gt;Strunk and White&lt;/em&gt; insist that mentioned words or phrases must always be made visually distinct in this manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/364&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here at ELU, we prefer that one set mentions in an italic face&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the way reputable dictionaries always do.  If I were to mention the word &lt;em&gt;discombobulate&lt;/em&gt;, I would write it that way, never as &lt;code&gt;discombobulate&lt;/code&gt;.  See the immense difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All works on language work this way. Notice the way the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (OED)&lt;/a&gt; employs italics in the Etymology section of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/54072&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;discubiture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; when making the use–mention distinction for citing the Latin &lt;em&gt;discubitura&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;discubit-&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;discumbere&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RFbq4.png&quot; alt=&quot;OED example of use-mention distinction&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Fixing your text&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn’t just the OED that works this way.  All texts that talk about language do the same thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how should your text be optimally rendered? Those should respectively be a &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; quotation for the full sentence and then either a “quoted phrase” or a &lt;code&gt;*quoted phrase*&lt;/code&gt; for the embedded part.  One employs &lt;em&gt;an italic&lt;/em&gt; face for the use–mention distinction here, not &lt;code&gt;ˋugly monospaceˋ&lt;/code&gt;, which looks unprofessional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here follow two different alternate representations of your text, both superior to the “ransom-note look” that using an    introduces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Superior Formatting: #1 of 2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I indent your full sentence using a &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; instead of whitespace, which makes it look correct, and I use paired quotation marks around the “inlined” instance.  I’ve put the whole thing in a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; ... &amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; preformatted literal block so that all markdown formatting characters are displayed as literals, not as markdown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;I need an adjective. I am describing a programming language that has&#xA;features from many other existing languages. The sentence I want to&#xA;use it in is along the lines of: &#xA;&#xA;&gt; In short, this language is a ______ of {*list of names of other languages*}.&#xA;&#xA;I know I could use “this language has features from ______”,&#xA;but this seems a better fit to me.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s what that example should look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7lhaQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;reformatted example one of two&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Superior Formatting: #2 of 2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is of course a problem with using paired quotation marks for the mention case, and that is that we use quotation marks for so many other things, such as when I referred above to an “inlined” mention case, there using scare-quotes for their customary meaning.   &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, an &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt; face is usually to be preferred over mere quotes.&lt;/strong&gt;   Here I also choose a bullet for the citation sentence rather than the citation indentation style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;I need an adjective. I am describing a programming language that has&#xA;features form many other existing languages. The sentence I want to&#xA;use it in is along the lines of: &#xA;&#xA;* In short, this language is a ______ of {*list of names of other languages*}.&#xA;&#xA;I know I could use *this language has features from ______*,&#xA;but this seems a better fit to me.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s what that should look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nVQYh.png&quot; alt=&quot;reformatted example number two&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Exceptions to the rule&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few places where one has no choice but to employ the StackExchange literalizing markdown, but it is never for the use–mention case &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If ever one needs to show actual formatting characters in the markdown, like to tell someone who wants something &lt;em&gt;set it italics&lt;/em&gt; to type in the literal characters &lt;code&gt;*set in italics*&lt;/code&gt;.  It is for this reason that I indented the two reformatted versions I displayed above, so that you could see the literal markdown characters themselves, and how it should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the formatting of actual tabular information, when exact column alignment is therefore required.  So from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5467&quot;&gt;this fine answer&lt;/a&gt;, we see:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;                                     BNC    COCA       Google&#xA;&#xA;     ARE NOT CURRENTLY (BEING)     18 (1)  70 (8)   72.6M (21.9M)&#xA;     ARE CURRENTLY NOT (BEING)      4 (0)  17 (0)   10.1M ( 9.6M)&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what that should look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lqXqz.png&quot; alt=&quot;formatted table example&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oh, ick!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s suddenly a startling grey against our otherwise tasteful field of subdued peach, like a light beige or an agèd ivory.  Our normal background color is meant to suggest the color of old pages in a book, at least by intent.  That awful grey splattered atop it looks like so much water damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads to my next point, in which we return to the one aspect of your original bug report that was indeed spot on the money, and should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where you were spot on the money&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you might justly point out that the background color on the preformatted section is an atrocious clash with that of the site in general.  That was part of your original point, and I agree with you about that.  There is certainly room for improvement there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the actual &lt;strong&gt;valid&lt;/strong&gt; uses of preformatted text are so rare that I don’t think anyone has paid much attention to the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related bug is that using indentation to make a table produces inferior results to using an actual &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; ... &amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; block as I have done here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary: &lt;em&gt;Use Italics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But apart from those two very special — and frankly rather uncommon — instances, you do not want to use the &lt;b&gt;&lt;code&gt;terrible monospaced ugliness&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/b&gt; here on &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;, nor on any other non-coding site. For not only does it clash with custom and established practice, it is aesthetically discomforting in the extreme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You instead want to use one of the other mechanisms outlined above, all of which which are less unsettling to the eye — &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;normally italics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum for SE Staff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use–mention distinction&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;citation not working in a posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;This is an example of the&#xA;[use–mention distinction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use–mention_distinction) &#xA;citation not working in a posting.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T14:03:06.220" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4701" CreationDate="2014-05-05T05:56:27.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't care about them, not here, anyway.&lt;sup&gt;#&lt;/sup&gt; Which gives me an idea: All those of you grammarians, etymologists, linguists &lt;em&gt;et al.&lt;/em&gt;, who'd like to elevate ELU to matters beyond mere English and its usage, why not try this as a gatekeeper? &lt;strong&gt;&quot;If you don't know what tags to use, you shouldn't be here.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; It might frighten some people away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On the other hand, at GIS i care a lot about tags and am often seen editing, adding or removing them. But then i'm there for business and only here for fun.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;#&lt;/sup&gt; I did once add the note for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/infinitive-vs-gerund/info&quot;&gt;infinitive-vs-gerund&lt;/a&gt; when i happened to glance at the tags and saw something i didn't understand. I've long since forgotten, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62474" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T05:56:27.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4721" CreationDate="2014-05-05T17:57:51.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't use the site's own search box, top right; it's a waste of time. I don't have much luck finding things that I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; are there (I wrote them) that way. Instead, use a generic search engine, like Google, and enter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:english.stackexchange.com my search term&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62474" LastEditorDisplayName="user28567" LastEditDate="2014-05-13T09:18:05.570" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T09:18:05.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-06T16:03:28.330" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; have a fairly high &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/185919/tag-associated-with-other-tags?Limit=250&amp;amp;LeftTag=meaning&amp;amp;RightTag=meaning-in-context&amp;amp;TagCountFilter=10&amp;amp;PerFilter=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overlap rate of 26%&lt;/a&gt; which means that 26% of all questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning+meaning-in-context&quot;&gt;full list of ~375&lt;/a&gt; don't reveal anything terribly interesting about the association. It seems that our taggers consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; a subtag of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here are the relevant tag-wikis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/meaning/info&quot;&gt;About&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for questions asking about nuances of meaning and definitions for a word or phrase. For a good explanation of how to write a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; question, please read this blog article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about the meaning of a word in a given context, please use the more specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions relating to the origin of a word, its evolution over time, or the earliest known citation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/meaning-in-context/info&quot;&gt;About&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; is for questions about understanding English speech, or writing at a level above individual words or phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oftentimes, the literal meaning of a word or idiom is clear, but it's not obvious what the significance is of that word in the context of a whole paragraph or article. This tag also marks requests for help understanding allusions to literature, pop culture, politics, current events, or other elements of English language usage which depend on a broader context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag-wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; explicitly notes that you should use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;instead&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; when relevant so it seems that these are intended to be mutually exclusive tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this intention still accurate? Do we still want to explicitly distinguish between these two tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T16:03:28.330" Title="Should [meaning] and [meaning-in-context] be mutually exclusive?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-07T02:14:58.787" Score="10" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U getting boring?  I thought it was, but then I asked a question.  And was delighted by the answer and responses that resulted.  I'd like to suggest that all of us contribute more to this site by asking questions rather than answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48653" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T03:56:25.407" Title="Is EL&amp;U getting boring? I thought it was, but then . ." Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4726" CreationDate="2014-05-07T06:05:24.683" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting well-thought out questions are pretty essential to the site's well being. But they're pointless without answers, and they soon become boring if the answers themselves are of low quality. It is true though that the number of irrelevant, off-topic, and low quality questions AND answers on EL&amp;amp;U has risen in the last four or five months (my subjective impression), but occasionally the odd gem appears suddenly among the clutter and the weeds.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for users contributing to the site with more questions, I presume you mean the higher rep users,  there are esteemed veterans who have never asked a question in their entire stay, but I value their contributions; i.e. answers, far more than someone who posts several questions which are either semi-literate or verbose (and perhaps lately my questions have fallen in the second category!) :)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T06:05:24.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-07T18:03:19.250" Score="14" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an explicit proposal to merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; but before I actually submit the merge suggestion I want to garner support and/or feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are the tags?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; is our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=popular&quot;&gt;#3 Top Tag&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; is #20. The about page for each tag notes that the distinction between the tags is whether you are looking for a &lt;em&gt;single word&lt;/em&gt; or whether you would find a &lt;em&gt;phrase or multi-word&lt;/em&gt; response acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; was created as a response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/806/use-single-word-request-for-phrases&quot;&gt;Use &amp;quot;single-word-request&amp;quot; for phrases?&lt;/a&gt;, but it now seems relevant to ask whether having these two separate tags is providing anything especially useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How are they used?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/185919/tag-associated-with-other-tags?Limit=250&amp;amp;LeftTag=single-word-requests&amp;amp;RightTag=phrase-requests&amp;amp;TagCountFilter=10&amp;amp;PerFilter=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roughly 40%&lt;/a&gt; of all &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; also include &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/185919/tag-associated-with-other-tags?Limit=250&amp;amp;LeftTag=phrase-requests&amp;amp;RightTag=single-word-requests&amp;amp;TagCountFilter=10&amp;amp;PerFilter=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;8%&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tends to be one of the following forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a word that matches this meaning?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a word that means the same as this other word, but with this slight difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; commonly follows these forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a phrase that matches this meaning?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a phrase that means the same as this other phrase, but with this slight difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an English equivalent to the this non-English phrase?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why should they be merged?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of each tag is nearly identical and the only distinction is an arbitrary restriction set by the asker. These kinds of restrictions context specific but, in my opinion, the same request in a slightly different context is not enough to &amp;quot;split&amp;quot; the question into two different posts or tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explicitly, I think these two questions tend to invoke the same responses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word that means X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a phrase that means X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, the real question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I say X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker adds a restriction of size, does that actually help us? If there isn't a single word but a two word phrase fits the intended meaning it should be considered an acceptable answer within the scope of ELU. Any context that needs &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; one word is Too Narrow and most likely unhelpful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why shouldn't they be merged?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; merge them is because there is a moderately useful distinction between meanings that can be covered by &amp;quot;phrases&amp;quot; and meanings that can be covered by &amp;quot;words&amp;quot;. (This is also why we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My counterpoint is that this distinction is really only useful once we know the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to the question. The asker, by definition, does not know whether their meaning can be covered by a word or a phrase. If they did, they wouldn't be asking the question. Thus, as a way to categorize &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, I'm not sure their separation provides a great service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What am I asking of you?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post your thoughts, agreements, disagreements here for discussion. One area I am specifically interested in is the naming. Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; should be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-requests&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T14:51:19.840" Title="Can we merge [single-word-requests] and [phrase-requests]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-08T02:41:20.043" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the review queue, I was faced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/168868/2-words-that-describes-a-keeping-an-argument-on-track&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I skipped it, but would like to know how others would deal with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems very chatty and it takes a long time to get to the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I take it upon myself to edit such a post, weeding out the chatty part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T02:41:20.043" Title="How to review a long-winded, overly chatty question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4726" CreationDate="2014-05-08T03:56:25.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if you changed the name to EULa people would begin to assume it was boring, ignore it and leave but until then I think the site is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21407" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T03:56:25.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2014-05-08T12:40:04.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't repro this, it must have been fixed between the report and now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2166" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T12:40:04.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4734" CreationDate="2014-05-08T18:42:31.410" Score="61" ViewCount="3959" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/168907/is-there-any-word-for-a-boy-who-sexually-assaulted-a-sibling&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; single word requests getting out of hand, or am I just still too new to this site to recognize a long-standing problem and standard ways of dealing with them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that by using generally accepted words for heinous crimes, the OP would get the idea that common and well-known words are acceptable. I was obviously in error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that these one-off and usually unanswerable requests are cluttering the site with nonsense (not to mention that it encourages others with similar expectations of the language). What is the best way to deal with these types of questions? Is it to downvote? Vote to close as unsure of what OP is asking? Suggest migration to Neologisms.stackexchange.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: KitFox linked to a similar question where these answers were suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we hack away at the &quot;EL&amp;amp;U as thesaurus&quot; perception I think we can turn it into an extremely useful category. (How do we do this?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... relevant bit being &lt;em&gt;share your research&lt;/em&gt;. And if you haven't done any, should you even be asking here? (I think this is a good idea. I don't see it being done, however.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could try coaching new users with comments on borderline s-w-r questions, especially before they get downvoted or closed. - aedia λ) (Fun and provocative answer, but again, not done. Why?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As long as there are people who like answering these questions, perhaps we should keep them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;any question where the asker says merely &quot;Please give me a word that means X&quot; should be considered off-topic, as we're no longer in that business.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:03:50.230" Title="Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he's amused but the rest of the family isn't?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2014-05-08T23:02:25.260" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support merging to a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag. Basically, the combined tag would be for all crowdsourced-reverse-dictionary type questions. By their very nature, askers of such questions cannot know ahead of time whether a single word exists to fit the desired meaning, otherwise they wouldn't be asking. If they would really, really, really prefer a single word, they can write that in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My highest-voted s-w-r answer is a phrase of two words to a question that was asking for one word. Despite the numeric mismatch, the phrase exactly matches the desired meaning, and in the years since I've posted that answer, nobody has come up with a single word that matches the meaning. In other words, askers might &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; they want a single word, but what they &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want is the best way to express their meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could theoretically see some utility to a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag for &quot;is there an English expression/saying/aphorism that fits this meaning&quot;, but it would be almost impossible to get people to use it correctly. Thus, in practice those types of questions would be better tagged with a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt; (or, if we choose to keep it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T20:57:23.100" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T20:57:23.100" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2014-05-09T02:53:21.983" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This particular tag has had a lot of past discussion. The simple answer is that not all &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; are good questions and the bad ones should be &lt;strong&gt;downvoted&lt;/strong&gt;. But people are shy to use downvotes because they hurt and other people just upvote stuff even though the questions are terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to have a close reason for Too Narrow but I'm not sure if any of the current close reasons would work well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, the current answer for these questions is, &quot;No, no such specific term exists. Here are close options.&quot; And then suffer the inevitable downvotes because people don't like being told there is no word for something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I'm a little bitter about this subject or anything...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2014-06-16T10:59:23.777" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T10:59:23.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-09T03:22:51.373" Score="0" ViewCount="936" Body="&lt;p&gt;My younger sibling sent me memes and i don't understand what ideas they would convey in normal english. Could I ask for a translation here? The emotion they are attempting to convey eludes me. At the moment that sibling is trapped in a world of memes and I don't know any way to reach them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its stuff like this and I have no clue what emotion or idea this is supposed to be coveying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dgxyv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;stuff&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QXMbb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;stufflikethis&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21407" LastEditorDisplayName="user21407" LastEditDate="2014-05-09T05:08:39.573" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T22:58:17.867" Title="Is meme translation on topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2014-05-09T03:58:55.327" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the brief time I've been responding to questions on this forum, I've noticed that a great many of the SWRs seem to originate from non-native speakers of English who have a pretty weak command of the language. That's fair enough, but it does suggest to me that a lot of these questions are being asked by people who probably wouldn't feel the need to do so if their grasp of English was better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two approaches I can therefore think of to reduce the proportion of low-standard questions being asked here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Be stricter/quicker about migrating more of the questions from barely-literate-in-English enquirers to the English Language Learners forum, or closing them altogether at an earlier stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Create a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Research Resources&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; area with links to (at a minimum) the OneLook.com metadictionary, a couple of online thesauruses and a visual dictionary such as the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary. Also include some basic tips to help would-be researchers to structure their search and navigate their way through the various resources (at least in general terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to bear in mind that every year there are new users of the internet who haven't yet learned (or mastered) the intricacies either of 'playing nice' in online forums or developing effective strategies for finding things out for themselves. We can both smooth the path for people in this position, and simultaneously divert or discourage much of the torrent of dross they are liable to generate, by pointing them directly to useful reference tools and compilations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These steps would, I hope, elevate the average standard and degree of interest associated with the remaining questions asked here. The possible loss of the occasional good question as a result of these measures would, I also hope, be more than offset by the improved standard of those questions that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get posted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2014-05-09T04:21:35.703" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T04:21:35.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2014-05-09T08:37:23.213" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl,dr:&lt;/strong&gt; There should instead be additional filtration methods during registration to send users with more basic needs to a different forum entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Erik Kowal's observation that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a great many of the SWRs seem to originate from non-native speakers of English who have a pretty weak command of the language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that some sort of test for proficiency be administered during registration so as to properly direct users to the right forum for their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if there are tools already in place to handle this that I am unaware of (as I am new), please take that into account. However, as MrHen stated, it seems the current system for handling this is one which users are reluctant to use, so I'm suggesting an additional system be implemented for this and related issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PROBLEM&#xA;Already, I have seen many links and references to other related sites for questions that aren't best suited to EL&amp;amp;U. However, I didn't learn about when or how to use any other sister sites when signing up. In the tour (which non-native speakers will probably skip as time-consuming), I was vaguely told (without many, clear examples) what kinds of questions are and aren't appropriate. However, I wasn't tested, so I couldn't tell you what they were off the top of my head. And if I think my question isn't appropriate, from having finished the Tour, my best guess for finding the right place to post that question is to look at the confusing (albeit cool-looking) graphical list that was linked to at the bottom (and easily overlooked, since it was far &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;em&gt;Ask a Question&lt;/em&gt; button) or to read other inappropriate questions and see where those users were directed to. &#xA;ESSENTIALLY, it's way too easy to post the wrong kind of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SOLUTION&#xA;There should instead be additional filtration methods during registration to send users with more basic needs to a different forum entirely. If not during registration, then during the question asking process, which may also minimize the quantity of good quality questions as time to ask increases. However, the asking process is currently very easy and the quantity of low quality questions may be sufficient to make consideration of increasing the difficulty of asking by asking filtering questions worthwhile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Filters would mean asking questions that help determine the nature of the question to aid in categorization before posting. Questions would then be posted within the applicable category (assuming the user could accurately answer the questions and chose to do so) or the poster would be linked/directed to a better forum for their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consideration would be given to these issues: &quot;How many good questions asked under the current system would still be asked if there were additional filters?&quot;, &quot;How many inappropriate questions would be filtered out?&quot;, &quot;Could filters help hone good questions to be even better?&quot;, and &quot;Could filtering questions be written clearly enough to successfully aid users in correctly categorizing their questions with accuracy?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CONCLUSION&#xA;Basically, unenforceable rules are well and good when they are &quot;common sense&quot; and people would generally follow them anyway. But like any rule or law that the system is not designed to enforce, procedures for how to handle certain types of questions will be constantly broken, if only for lack of information. This is an issue to be handled by the Moderators of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74571" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-09-06T16:39:34.243" LastActivityDate="2014-09-06T16:39:34.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2014-05-09T09:49:26.557" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Problems with this type of question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The StackExchange guidelines are in fact &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;not to allow these types of questions at all&lt;/a&gt;, for several of the reasons you've described, summarised in the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a year I am convinced that &lt;strong&gt;guessing game questions do not meet our goal of making the Internet better.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite the opposite, in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the key points from that article, though I recommend reading the whole thing. (Remember, this article is talking about these questions &lt;em&gt;across the whole of StackExchange&lt;/em&gt;. I'll get on to whether I think these objections are relevant &lt;em&gt;to ELU specifically&lt;/em&gt; after I've summarised what the SE blog has to say about them in general. So please read further down before jumping in with another &amp;quot;Omg it doesn't apply!&amp;quot; comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guessing game questions tend to be vague, badly researched and do not tend to fit the &amp;quot;practical, answerable question&amp;quot; criterion of the StackExchange question guidelines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guessing game questions are not helpful for future viewers. A future questioner with the same question is unlikely to be able to search and find the original nebulous question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guessing game questions set a precedent for &amp;quot;do my work for me&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An expert in the topic should be able to have at least some confidence that &lt;em&gt;the answer he’s writing answers the question&lt;/em&gt;. This is not possible with guessing game questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guessing game questions aren’t educational, because there’s no way to learn about the process of discovery.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the last two apply to ELU as much as to the other sites with &amp;quot;guessing questions&amp;quot;, but I do think we have some extra concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guessing game questions can get ridiculously localised when you are asking for a specific word that may or may not exist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming we're not going to abolish word/phrase requests any time soon, we need to address these concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ways we might be able to make it work on ELU&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guessing game questions aren't &amp;quot;practical, answerable questions&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be, but often they're not. We need to be strict about closing those that aren't, to firmly encourage the idea that you can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; ask these types of question &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you define your scope extremely well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answerers cannot be certain that the answer they are writing answers the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is less of a problem here than on other SE sites, because there is a key difference in that questions tagged with things like &amp;quot;story identification&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;identify this game&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;have a correct answer in mind which you have to try and guess&lt;/em&gt;. If you find a book that fits all the criteria the questioner asked for but it's not the book they're thinking of, that's no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; on the other hand &lt;em&gt;are looking for &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; word that fits the given criteria&lt;/em&gt;. The questioner doesn't necessarily have a single correct answer in their head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can further help by making sure the answers are well explained and describe &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the word or phrase fits the request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guessing game questions aren’t educational, because there’s no way to learn about the process of discovery.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also less of a problem here. As long as answers are well explained and discuss similarities and differences between the hypothetical requested word and the suggested word or phrase, they can indeed be educational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ways we will struggle to make it work on ELU&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guessing game questions are not helpful for others who have the same problem in the future.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A future questioner with the same question is unlikely to be able to search and find the original nebulous question.&amp;quot; We can't do anything about this one. It's the very nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guessing game questions set a precedent for &amp;quot;do my work for me&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broken window analogy. We can attempt to crack down on this by being very strict with the word requests that we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; allow. However, this may not be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guessing game questions can get ridiculously localised when you are asking for a specific word that may or may not exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite hard to address. I'm not sure what to suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62605" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T11:34:37.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4735" CreationDate="2014-05-09T12:31:29.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends of course but most likely no, not on -topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most internet memes, like any particular cultural artifact, popped out of some narrow situation that was then shared and other people seemed to like it and continued sharing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes they are language based, but for the most part the hook is cultural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is not about explaining culture unless of course vocabulary or some other linguistic phenomenon is associated with it. On the other hand, lolcatz is unexplainable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, the answer is almost always &quot;They're being sarcastic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T12:31:29.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-09T13:55:52.253" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the following phrase mean? To encourage members to learn? I fail to understand how being blocked to ask questions might encourage a non-native speaker to learn here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a good question? What is a useful question?  Are the Educators really here to help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&#xA;  For help formulating a clear, useful question, see: How do I ask a good question?&#xA;  Also, edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41908" LastEditorUserId="41908" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T05:36:00.057" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T05:36:00.057" Title="Blocked - Good Question: Could a learner be encouraged by Educators here?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4740" CreationDate="2014-05-09T14:23:57.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have 21 questions on your profile. 12 of them are scored zero or lower, which means the community judged those questions to be lacking quality for the site. Of the 9 questions you have with positive votes, 4 of them have been closed, which indicates that there are serious problems with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons a question gets negative votes: Poor grammar, questions that aren't clear or don't make sense, questions that are off-topic for the site, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons a question gets closed: being off-topic, or if the question can be answered by opening up a dictionary, or if the question has been asked before, or if the question cannot be answered for a variety of reasons, such as it not being clear what you're asking, or it being too opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can help fix this by editing your questions to make them clearer, and deleting questions which are off-topic for the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you're having trouble with more basic issues, you might want to consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, our sister site that deals with more basic English questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T14:23:57.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4735" CreationDate="2014-05-09T17:32:35.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are not on-topic for the same reasons that lyrical interpretation is not on-topic. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/995/6006&quot;&gt;Are interpretations of song lyrics, poems or other creative works on-topic?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3170/6006&quot;&gt;Why is the meaning of song lyrics off topic&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short version is that these kinds of meme images are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative in nature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deliberately poke at the edges of what constitutes valid English (e.g., I can haz cheezeburger?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Often reference works from pop culture (e.g., your second example is a quote from The Boondock Saints)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are often puns based on common idioms (e.g., your first example is a play on, &quot;What part of no don't you understand?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I sympathize that it is nearly impossible to discover the meaning of these kinds of memes on your own, it is not something that ELU is best suited to address. We are here to answer questions about the English &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; -- not serve as a pop culture reverse lookup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; places you can find answers to these questions, however. &lt;a href=&quot;http://knowyourmeme.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Know Your Meme&lt;/a&gt; does a good job covering the basics. You can also use your favorite search engine to look for any quotes used. If those two methods fail, feel free to pop by &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and ask any of the regular visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T17:32:35.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-10T09:54:12.653" Score="21" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/64644&quot;&gt;This edit&lt;/a&gt; was well intentioned but obscures the difficulties that the OP is having with the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, to get at the heart of a question it is important to remove grammatical errors, even of learners such as this. But in this case we should not have approved the edit because it changes the nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask &quot;What would he likes to eat?&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a different question to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask &quot;What would he like to eat?&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first (if it were migrated to ELL) we could answer about how &quot;what he likes to eat&quot; is different to &quot;what would he like to eat?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second does not leave such an avenue open, which is possibly detrimental to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T14:59:47.517" Title="This edit should not have been approved" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4450" CreationDate="2014-05-10T11:45:51.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were several obviously spam posts in the &quot;recent questions&quot; list when I just logged on to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know users who've been around as long as me should know the drill by now, but the fact of the matter is I hadn't noticed this meta post before, and I &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; know what I should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I actually did to all 5 spam posts was downvote them and cast a closevote citing &quot;Off Topic because it is about... SPAM&quot; as the reason. And on one of them I editing the post to replace the spam text with the text &lt;em&gt;&quot;(spam deleted)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now realise that what I &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have done was simply &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; each post as spam and leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading this meta post and thinking it through, I now feel the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; justification for editing spam question text would be if it was grossly offensive. It also seems that comments, downvotes, and closevotes are at best pointless, and may actually be counterproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this answer here mainly to admit that I've seen the error of my ways. If any other users are in my position, they might be more likely to do the same if they read this when the question moves to the top of the &quot;Active&quot; Meta questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It may be worth noting that I've just followed my own advice on two spam postings. They both had several comments and downvotes, plus one or two closevotes, and on one the question text had been edited to explicitly &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; it was spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also both had &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;two &quot;spam&quot; flags&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. All I did was add a third &quot;spam&quot; flag, and in each case the automated system &quot;user&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; immediately &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;locked and deleted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T14:05:39.590" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-10T16:05:05.007" Score="6" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was on the cusp of editing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; tag, which currently doesn't have anything in it's wiki, but decided against it. I assumed that the point of the tag was to discuss the &lt;em&gt;linguistic&lt;/em&gt; currency in the sense of &quot;the fact or quality of being generally accepted or in use.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 34 questions in the tag currently, most of them seem to be about linguistic currency. There is at least one question that has it tagged for the monetary sense of &quot;words, phrases etc. about a medium of economic exchange.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that the site is better served by restricting the tag to the linguistic meaning of currency. So I wanted to double check here: is it worth having a tag for linking questions on the monetary sense of currency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45432" LastEditorUserId="45432" LastEditDate="2014-05-11T02:54:12.500" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T12:01:29.877" Title="What is the currency tag for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-11T09:54:35.110" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to find out what questions have been asked concerning the prepositon on?&#xA;Clicking on the tag preposition does not give any results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63507" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T15:34:05.037" Title="Questions as to the preposition on" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4746" CreationDate="2014-05-11T15:34:05.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click on the &lt;em&gt;preposition&lt;/em&gt; tag, in the search box write &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is:question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT leave a space after the colon, and put in inverted commas the preposition you are interested in. For example &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[prepositions] is:question &quot;on&quot; &quot;in&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This yielded &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bprepositions%5D%20is:question%20%22on%22%20%22in%22&quot;&gt;299 results&lt;/a&gt;. Adding &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; narrowed it down to a total of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bprepositions%5D%20is:question%20%22on%22%20%22in%22%20%22at%22&quot;&gt;66 results&lt;/a&gt;. Without the inverted commas/speech marks the results are zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T15:34:05.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T03:03:15.490" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;For word/phrase request questions, is there a convention for highlighting the example word given?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/169794/37273&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/169794/37273&lt;/a&gt; I used bold, and somebody changed it to italics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the convention here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T15:07:09.067" Title="Bold vs italics for giving an example word/phrase" Tags="|discussion|style|use-mention|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-05-13T19:36:33.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2014-05-12T05:56:58.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the statistical analysis clearly supports not merging.  There would be a higher reverse correlation of usage if they were being used interchangeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-request&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when I need or want one word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-request&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when I would like a 'sentence' or thought to convey something clearly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-request&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-request&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when I expect a word but anything (good) will do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-request&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-request&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when I understand that my thought will need a phrase but one word would be great&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="5438" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T16:55:21.820" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T16:55:21.820" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4748" CreationDate="2014-05-12T06:00:04.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mentions are generally in italics, and emphasis is indicated with bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; to indicate ability, reserving &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; to express permission, although in informal situations &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;generally&lt;/strong&gt; works for &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping the two typographical conventions distinct means that it’s possible to combine them when you want to emphasise a mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Give some context&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a specific problem I need to solve, but first, I need to &lt;strong&gt;give you some context.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintaining a convention for the use-mention distinction doesn’t mean that italics and bold may not be used elsewhere (for example, I would probably set &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; in italics), but mentions should be italicised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/363/what-emphasis-to-use-when-referring-to-words&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt; was asked over three years ago, and the advice there has generally been followed to the extent that &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; it’s the norm here and you may find that posts are edited to conform to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T06:00:04.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4450" CreationDate="2014-05-12T07:45:24.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My approach to dealing with spam is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Respond quickly, so the spam message is visible both to site visitors and web crawlers for as short a time as possible. (That of course includes flagging the message as spam.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If one cannot instantly delete the spam, nullify the message by editing it to eliminate phone numbers and web links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Replace the spammer's text with sufficient markers to identify it as still having been a spam message, so that other SE members can downvote it and automatically delete it once it reaches the deletion threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) I see no reason not to insult the spammer. I don't see how a spammer is encouraged by having their message modified -- quite the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had considerable experience of dealing with spam attacks on another forum on which I am an administrator, and I have seen no evidence that making any concessions whatever to spammers is at all useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T07:54:52.837" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T07:54:52.837" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T13:00:18.987" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to find out the number of close votes a user has cast in total? There is a query here, but does not work for me. A similar query for delete votes is also helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/171204/my-total-close-votes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/171204/my-total-close-votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17795" LastEditorUserId="17795" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T13:18:55.163" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T13:18:55.163" Title="How does one find the total number of close votes a user has cast?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4752" CreationDate="2014-05-12T13:14:21.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find out how many close votes you have cast from your profile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aL8R1.png&quot; alt=&quot;3 steps to finding your close votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select the votes tab in your profile. It's the furthest tab to the right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select the colsure sub-tab. It's second from the right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The count of your close votes is shown on the far left.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't include deleted questions (as far as I know) but nor would using the data explorer. The data explorer doesn't have data about deleted questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of delete votes you've cast is in the middle of the sub tabs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T13:14:21.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4743" CreationDate="2014-05-12T14:59:47.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been migrated to ELL and the invalid edit was rolled back. In the future, if you see an invalid edit you should roll it back with a comment detailing the reason and encourage anyone who disagrees to discuss the issue in chat or meta (as you have done here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, thanks for pointing out this excellent example of a common &quot;edit trap&quot; on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T14:59:47.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4735" CreationDate="2014-05-12T22:58:17.867" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I respect (and partially agree with) Mr. Hen and Mitch, because of the inability to use chat, the fact that we often &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; interpret jokes (and song lyrics, poetry, etc.) and, finally, that literacy in language also has an element of cultural literacy involved as well, I wouldn't mind these if the photograph were smaller. I have a thing, I'll admit, about cultural literacy. If someone asked me what &lt;em&gt;Open the pod bay doors, Siri&lt;/em&gt; meant, I would be happy to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am also happy to go along with whatever the community wants. I would not want to 'junk up' the site with meaningless or abstruse 'one off' bad memes requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T22:58:17.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4757" CreationDate="2014-05-13T07:09:10.387" Score="8" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this spammer, we all know him by now. Anyway, I checked to see his account, he's had one at ELU for the last 17 days. Why hasn't he been banned by now? I know that doesn't stop the person from setting up a new account but still... seventeen days, c'mon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/73356/user73356&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/73356/user73356&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RM2Ka.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I took a look in my flagging history, the guy has posted 9 times&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2 (28/5/2014): Only wanted to add that the flagging system is working a treat. Just now a spammer posted and he was annihilated within five minutes. Wow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T08:03:13.237" Title="Spammer's not been &quot;canned&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4756" CreationDate="2014-05-13T13:05:54.917" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the community was particularly efficient at removing this spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is to say, each of this user's posts were auto-deleted when a sufficient number of  users flagged them as spam. The mods never saw them, because the flags were handled (post deleted) before they hit our queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community removed the content, which is the desired effect. I have now destroyed the user account so it can no longer post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not suggest that the community should be less efficient at garbage removal. It is important to bring repeat offenders to our attention. I'd suggest that when you see something like this, &lt;strong&gt;flag one of the posts with a custom flag to bring it to our attention, or tell us about it in chat.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T14:51:58.987" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T14:51:58.987" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4721" CreationDate="2014-05-13T16:48:03.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found that by clicking Ask Question and typing my question in the subject, then I get a far better list than I get by using the search in the upper right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T16:48:03.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-13T18:45:33.853" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed the influx of ELL type questions.  [And the ELL, barely English answers - but that is a different meta]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of questions where it is obvious that the writer has little grasp of the English language or they are intoxicated or both.  Obviously these are better suited questions for the ELL.  But they are answered and kept open.  [Even worse IMO is the fact that people go through and edit their poor grammar/spelling/whatever and try make a proper question of it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not the questions but the background to my question.  My question is - Why do we keep closing out good questions as primarily opinion based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions on this site involve a lot of opinion.  If someone writes an intelligent question with research or context and they display a perceived knowledge of the English language why would we want to close their question?  If anything reword their question title or make a few small edits to help it pass through.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I have closed &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; of questions on ELU in a short amount of time.  I like going through the review process rather than reading the front page because I tend to miss things on the front page.  I have closed maybe 10 questions out of 1100+ because of primarily opinion based.  I have no disposition against closing poor questions but I would like to know others' opinions on this and what they want to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T18:45:33.853" Title="What kind of questions do you want?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4766" CreationDate="2014-05-13T21:13:07.507" Score="8" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/169985/72792&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on the main site and it was quickly closed. Let me be the first to say that I am sure it &lt;em&gt;deserved&lt;/em&gt; to be closed. Most of you know more about the site and its culture than I do, so I trust your judgement. I am here because I want to understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it was closed and why other similar questions remain open. I also want to explore why the differences were not apparent to me as a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider these two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169985/is-pidgeon-a-correct-alternate-spelling-of-pigeon&quot;&gt;Is “pidgeon” a correct alternate spelling of “pigeon”? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67343/is-imbedded-a-valid-spelling-of-the-word-embedded&quot;&gt;Is “imbedded” a valid spelling of the word “embedded”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following points were presented to me in defense of closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;General Reference holds that &lt;em&gt;pigeon&lt;/em&gt; is the correct spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Multiple&lt;/em&gt; correct spellings may exist for a given word. This fails to address the validity of the alternate spelling &lt;em&gt;pidgeon&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Validity&quot; of alternate spellings is subjective, primarily opinion-based, and off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this not apply to the aforementioned question about &lt;em&gt;imbedded&lt;/em&gt; as a correct alternate spelling? The site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; does not discriminate between &quot;primary&quot; and &quot;alternate&quot; spelling questions. It clearly lists spelling questions as On Topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that, after a consensus is reached by the community here, one or more of the following resources be updated by someone more familiar with the site. It is important that new users have the ability to &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt; understand what is or is not on-topic, and the best way to do that is with your On Topic FAQ and the wikis for tags (which are essentially &quot;topics&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;On Topic in the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly some words are General Reference. Other words are highly subjective, primarily opinion-based, and off-topic. Where do you draw the line? Has it not occurred to anyone that this could be a &lt;em&gt;down vote&lt;/em&gt; reason instead of a &lt;em&gt;close vote&lt;/em&gt; reason? Your On Topic FAQ lists spelling questions. If specific spelling questions are off-topic, then the FAQ needs a revision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; tag&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This seems like the most likely spot. Stack exchanges commonly include examples of good questions and poor questions in the tag wiki. This seems like a perfect opportunity to discriminate between primary spelling questions and alternate spelling questions, if the latter is indeed off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/is-it-a-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;is-it-a-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;is-it-a-word&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, what key differences between the alternate spelling of &lt;em&gt;pigeon&lt;/em&gt; and the alternate spelling of &lt;em&gt;embedded&lt;/em&gt; led one to be closed while the other remained open, and how can that best be conveyed to new users entering the site for the first time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72792" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T21:44:17.470" Title="Spelling Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-14T01:42:24.147" Score="5" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question relates to the wider theme of a lot of ELL questions being asked here. Meta discussion here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4759/what-kind-of-questions-do-you-want&quot;&gt;What kind of questions do you want?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example this is the current state of this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/170296/how-do-i-describe-a-person-who-do-thing-that-is-not-necessary&quot;&gt;Is there an expression or word to describe a person who does something that is unnecessary?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a word or words that describe a person who:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Do something that is not important or unnecessary and&#xA;Do not do something that is important or necessary.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Preferable that the word can be fill inside the following blank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ali is a ____ person. He always does not get his priorities right. He&#xA;  always do things that is not important and forget to to do things that&#xA;  is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of 'do' instead of 'does' is glaring, as well as 'Perferable that' instead of 'I would prefer' or similar, 'forget' instead of 'forgets'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems apparent that this OP does not have a good grasp (though not awful) of English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could be easily edited to to tidy it up, and the question would remain good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However should we be doing this? It could be seen to be tolerating ELL questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-05-25T13:15:29.713" Title="What to do about good questions, that have bad grammar or poor English?" Tags="|discussion|ell|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4760" CreationDate="2014-05-14T05:11:29.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the people who voted to close the question, I'd like to explain my reasons. I thought you did a good job with your question in that you did some research and presented it. For that, I do commend you. However, that doesn't mean the question is a really good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you asked it, it is a &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; question. Any dictionary you consult will give you the correct spelling. Some will also give your spelling as &lt;em&gt;archaic&lt;/em&gt;. So the answer is &lt;em&gt;easily found in readily available references&lt;/em&gt;. We don't really have much to add to that based on the way you asked your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to argue that it should be the preferred spelling (so it doesn't look strange to you), that's really a matter of opinion (&lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/em&gt; - another valid reason to close a question) and debating it will solve nothing, as no one here can control how people use language. But if you wanted to know why it lost the &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; - not that it &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; have - that's a question someone might be willing to answer, and less likely to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were my reasons. I don't read more into questions than what is presented. To try to change the way words &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be spelled is a fruitless exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone else will give you a better answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your observations and suggestions. Maybe it will help someone else in your position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T05:11:29.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-14T11:06:44.243" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is language of a sexual nature,which forms an intregal part of the sentence in question, allowed.Example.&#xA;:    *Richard J Ingram. Vice Chairman of the ailing “Home World Pleasures. Inc.”  slipped his shiny blue new Electron across the early morning traffic flow, and hung for a while in the slow lane, barley moving at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“F*****g gridlocked as usual.” said his passenger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“So what’s new…and glancing at the sidewalk he exclaimed. F***, would you just look at the way the girls a** moves, Crossthread,”*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I have put this in the correct section, if not please help and redirect me.JAB &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67244" LastEditorUserId="67244" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T11:49:45.377" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T11:49:45.377" Title="Is language of a sexual nature,which is an intregal part of the sentence in question, allowed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-05-14T11:28:06.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2014-05-14T12:19:54.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what you should be seeing, Mari Lou:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JPBEj.png&quot; alt=&quot;unicode picture&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know why you are not seeing them after having done those things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T12:19:54.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4760" CreationDate="2014-05-14T21:44:17.470" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One very important piece of information is that the question you link to is from 2012. ELU's guidance on appropriate questions does undergo changes. Even though the General Reference close reason was &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;introduced in 2011&lt;/a&gt;, our actual application of what constitutes a GR question has grown much more strict over the past few years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the older question was asked today it is extremely likely it would be closed as GR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The very first comment just links to a dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The accepted answer simply quotes a dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The alternative answer flatly says, &quot;This is general reference, provided you have access to a good dictionary.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T21:44:17.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-16T01:03:49.050" Score="-1" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there best-practices for posting a follow-on question?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to ELU.  I have searched ELU meta for this subject and have not yet found any information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my novice vantage, here are some considerations -- perhaps reasonable -- for posting a follow-on question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a clarification or minor follow-on question as a comment to a particular proposed answer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open a completely new, separate question having its own thread if an answer is required -- even if the original question thread has not been answered and closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include inline links to and from an original question thread and separate, related questions threads.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the previous considerations make sense? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where should the question's original &quot;owner&quot; post a follow-on question if it neither is in response to somebody else's proposed answer nor requires a new, separate question thread? Should the owner edit the original question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75002" LastEditorUserId="75002" LastEditDate="2014-05-17T17:08:53.217" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T03:01:51.147" Title="Best-Practices for posting a follow-on question?" Tags="|discussion|style|hyperlinks|asking-questions|revisions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2014-05-16T14:10:22.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this seems to have become a sort of weird-formatting troubleshooting thread, I’ll chime in as well with a bit of Macness. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Safari Mobile (7.0) on iOS 7.1.1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3vsGg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iBR6F.jpg&quot; width=&quot;400&quot; title=&quot;Hosted by imgur.com&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Safari Desktop (6.1.3) on OS X 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i7KSp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ymKLU.jpg&quot; title=&quot;Hosted by imgur.com&quot;/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrome (34.0.1847.131) renders everything like Safari; Firefox (28.0) renders everything correctly; Opera (12.15.1748) renders all the fancy Unicode stuff correctly, but surprisingly renders the italics in headers wrong, ‘doubling’ the italicising (using the correct italic variant of Georgia, but faux-italicising it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T14:10:22.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2014-05-17T09:12:46.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been here long but already a lot of the more mind bloggling single word requests feel like mere nuisance posts. But the single word request is clearly an established and accepted part of the culture here, both for askers and answerers, and it seems to me unlikely moderation can or will change that at this stage. I think the only choices are to put up with them, or to split the site into something like &lt;em&gt;English Words and Phrases&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;English Grammar and Usage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61581" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T09:12:46.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-17T22:38:29.857" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am quite new to this site and so far I am appreciating the help I receive . I have a question about the use of notes and I am sorry if I am asking something that  is taken for granted by more experienced users. I have noticed that often notes are used to give answers, instead of using the appropriate space for answers. I assume that a note is like a comment, an observation on a question or on another answer, but not an answer in itself. But often notes are used to provide full answers with appropriate links. Is this practice correct? Does it not reduce the ability for other users, especially the less experienced, to provide full answers? Thanks for you attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T22:38:29.857" Title="Use of notes in ELU" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-05-17T22:53:57.573" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2014-05-17T22:49:14.490" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Should we be doing this&quot; is really a rhetorical question at this point. We have been editing posts for grammar, orthography, word choice, and brevity for years now&amp;nbsp;— not just on this site, mind you, but on all 100+ sites of the network. There are badges for editing. You would never get them if every post was flawless to begin with. And if anything, on a site that is all about language, we should be editing &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; eagerly than on Photography or Gaming, say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this can be misinterpreted as tolerating ELL questions. The language, orthography, and formatting of a question are completely orthogonal to what the question is about. An on-topic question that fails to use a single article anywhere is still an on-topic question. Conversely, &quot;What does &lt;em&gt;spouse&lt;/em&gt; mean?&quot; got closed and deleted, even though it was asked in impeccable English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And of course there's no shortage of native speakers who can't string two letters together, much less words. Try labelling them ELLs, then report back with just how fat a lot of good you receive in return.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, edits do mean an additional workload, so OPs are expected to learn from them. &quot;Consistently low-quality contributions&quot; is a reason for suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If, as you say, a question can be easily tidied up to remain good, then go ahead and do just that. If no amount of editing can salvage it, don't waste your time and vote to close. Then the burden of editing it into shape is squarely on the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T22:49:14.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="561" CreationDate="2014-05-18T16:15:27.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deciding that certain words are taboo and mincing the titles is antithetical to a serious academic treatment of legitimate questions.  Such censorship makes this site &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; mature, not more.  It also hinders learning, which is the main purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medical professionals deal with taboo topics all the time.  If a doctor or nurse used euphemisms to avoid socially taboo terms, you would likely question their professionalism.  I would consider English.SE censoring &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;sh*t&lt;/em&gt; to be analogous to a gynecologist saying &quot;vajayjay&quot; instead of &quot;vagina&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English.SE should take a clinical approach and treat all words as valid topics for discussion, provided that the question meets usual quality standards.  A better way to prevent Urban Dictionary-type questions would be to close them as &quot;off-topic: general reference&quot; or invent a new &quot;off-topic: non-standard English&quot; closure reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16310" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T16:15:27.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2014-05-19T04:51:38.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not saying I totally disagree with RegDwight but I think there is indeed a difference between this site and others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only site that requires a mastery of basic English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand those that believe that if a person has a good question then it should be asked.  Yes, if it can be asked correctly.  Often the person asking the question is guiding the answering process.  If they cannot be trusted to write a very basic question (I have pretty low standards for this) then how can they be trusted to answer questions, guide the question along, and pick an answer that actually answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Show me a person with no grasp of grammar, spelling, or English in general, and chances are you will see an accepted answer that is confusing at best.  I used to try until it became a game of guessing what the person meant and that is just a waste of time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you asked a basic html question on SO with a bunch of nonsense and errors it would get downvoted and closed quickly.  I am not sure why this should be any different.   Since it is English that the site is about there needs to be an effort made from the OP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there will be the obvious questions that are just horrible.  They should be closed.  The grey area is harder to deal with.  If it is just some simple spelling errors or a couple of typos, sure help clean them up.  But if the sentences don't make sense then how are we even sure they are asking the question we think we are answering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T04:51:38.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-19T15:07:25.563" Score="9" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171313/an-english-expression-for-femme-fatale&quot;&gt;An English expression for &amp;#39;femme fatale&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; There is almost all answers are in this question also:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133409/feminine-equivalent-for-casanova&quot;&gt;Feminine equivalent for Casanova&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are different but come to the same thing and answers. Is it ok or an exception to keep the newer question then? What value does it add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; In my opinion, most upvoted answer is not an answer to the question but it is still kept. I recommended him to give details but he refused to do that. Why would this answer be kept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP already mentioned that the phrase has become part of English and he is looking for alternatives. Maybe, the title of the question is misleading and I recommended OP to modify it also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I deleted my comments there. Also, I didn't vote as a duplicate because I wanted to ask your opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, there is this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171302/is-there-a-word-for-some-kind-of-incorrect-empathy#comment357621_171302&quot;&gt;Is there a word for some kind of incorrect empathy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did not become a popular question but in my opinion it is a good question. Yes, OP could be more clear but it touches upon different and related topics. The main question is a general concept but the example he gave goes into details. In the end, they were all related to empathy in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was put on hold because it is unclear after he clarified the question also. Yes it was unclear a bit first but he made an effort to clarify it. Also, I spent time to give valuable information (it could be someone else also) and I was going to modify the answer to make it more clear when I get confirmation from him based on comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to make my point and talk about my observations. I wanted to get your insight also regarding to these situations. Maybe there are exceptions sometimes, maybe people see things differently. Maybe a certain amount of unfairness is inevitable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I try to be helpful beside all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T23:00:52.400" Title="Do popular questions and answers get exceptions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4767" CreationDate="2014-05-19T18:41:12.877" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one I did the other day &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171032/regarding-present-tense-and-future-tense&quot;&gt;Look for Frank's comments&lt;/a&gt; but you'll need to be quick as it's [on hold].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seemed to be an acceptable method (no-one complained) but then no-one has bothered to answer your question so it's probably not important how you do it and therefore I'd say do whatever you feel like (except the part @TimLymington pointed out) until enough people tell you you are doing it wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T18:41:12.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4774" CreationDate="2014-05-19T23:00:52.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never actually voted on the &quot;incorrect empathy&quot; question, but I did post a couple of comments trying to establish the relevance of the word &quot;empathy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's response (in comments and edited question text) clearly indicate that empathy actually has no relevance at all - it's just about one person not properly understanding another's situation, because they're inappropriately viewing it from a personal/parochial perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I didn't &lt;em&gt;closevote&lt;/em&gt;, I won't vote to &lt;em&gt;re-open&lt;/em&gt; either, unless the question is further clarified. As it stands, the OP &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; to be specifically interested in misunderstandings caused by a &lt;em&gt;privileged&lt;/em&gt; person's subjective assessment, but for all I know he might actually be interested in a more general term that also covers misunderstandings caused by subjective assessment from a &lt;em&gt;deprived&lt;/em&gt; perspective (some poor people find it difficult to appreciate that wealthy people can also feel dissatisfied with life, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T23:00:52.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4767" CreationDate="2014-05-21T00:47:00.650" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no best-practices for this forum about posting follow-on questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75002" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T00:47:00.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-21T18:33:15.360" Score="0" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to request to reopen this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/170031/an-interjection-for-expressing-nostalgia&quot;&gt;An interjection/expression for expressing nostalgia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not in the review list anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also rephrased for re-consideration. There is an answer that fits, and fits for all contexts as well. I think it is a helpful question with a helpful answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Also, I don't understand why it is closed as primarily opinion-based. You can explain that too.  Even after I rephrased, is it still primarily opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be common interjections (or expressions) used for nostalgia and I even gave an answer that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; primarily opinion based. And the question is put on hold and closed after I gave the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T22:50:21.837" Title="Reopen request: &quot;An interjection for expressing nostalgia&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-23T07:22:53.630" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/232057/who-is-user-19341&quot;&gt;same question&lt;/a&gt; at Stack Exchange Meta, and I think it is also good to ask the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that Google Chrome omnibox suggests me &quot;english stackexchange users 19341&quot; when I search for &quot;English stac&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is interesting; who is this &quot;users 19341&quot;, and more importantly, what is he doing so much with English SE that &lt;strong&gt;0he/she is given special status by Google search?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/07aET.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-05-23T07:22:53.630" Title="Who is user 19341?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2014-05-24T08:34:24.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What to do about good questions, that have bad grammar/poor english&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fix them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful not to change the meaning of the question. If the bad grammar/poor English are part of the question case, then obviously that part stays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T08:34:24.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4822" CreationDate="2014-05-25T12:02:06.353" Score="14" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been a user for twelve months, and I would like to nominate one or more candidates for the position of ELU moderator. Generally speaking, the mods on ELU are doing a great job, with a few who are constantly present and keeping track of everything that's going on. Some might appear zealous to newbies but their &lt;em&gt;hands on&lt;/em&gt; approach I fully endorse and approve. However, there is one mod in particular whose presence I have seen less and less frequently, who seldom posts answers or questions and as far as I can tell, barely participates in meta. I do like, and admire this person's integrity but if this person, for whatever reason, can no longer participate and act as the cool voice of reason, I feel she/he should be substituted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there is one other mod who I feel is particularly biased in favour of the &quot;old vanguard/brigade&quot;, whose motives and ability to be fair and objective I find myself questioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU does not provide much information on these elections. Here is what I did find&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/2?tab=election&quot;&gt;2012 MODERATOR ELECTION&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   On Stack Exchange, we believe the core&#xA;  moderators should come from the community, and be elected by the&#xA;  community itself through popular vote. &lt;strong&gt;We hold regular elections&lt;/strong&gt; to&#xA;  determine who these community moderators will be. [Etc.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; are these elections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T11:51:47.553" Title="Will there be a 2014 Community Moderator election?" Tags="|discussion|support|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4783" CreationDate="2014-05-26T04:00:53.287" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/are-questions-about-ununderstood-english-language-jokes-on-topic&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question about posting questions for jokes you didn't understand in the english language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I also ask questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/256168/do-we-have-a-site-for-miscellaneous-questions/256169?noredirect=1#256169&quot;&gt;jokes in comics&lt;/a&gt; (in the English language) that I didn't really get?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77319" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:21.993" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T02:14:02.740" Title="Do we accept questions about jokes and punchlines, from any source (IE Comics?)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4782" CreationDate="2014-05-26T09:02:40.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts. [At the time of this answer,] questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;bull; Word choice and usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Grammar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Dialect differences&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Spelling and punctuation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;bull; Proofreading (&quot;are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Writing advice or critique requests (see Writers.SE instead—note critique requests must meet their criteria)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; &quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Translation and non-English languages&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;bull; Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That at least implies that jokes which do depend on the English language are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/are-questions-about-ununderstood-english-language-jokes-on-topic&quot;&gt;referenced in the previous question&lt;/a&gt; take their content from that list: they have changed since July 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is that jokes must &lt;strong&gt;rely on the English language.&lt;/strong&gt; In the case of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://explosm.net/comics/3566/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comic strip about &lt;kbd&gt;F5&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I'm not convinced that it does rely on English. It relies on a knowledge of Windows software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is going to ask about a joke, it's probably not obvious whether it's on-topic or not, particularly if one's first language isn't English. &lt;strong&gt;I would suggest that the most appropriate forum for such a question, at least at first, is in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. You may well get an answer straight away, or some interesting point may emerge which indicates that the joke may be of more general interest and might actually form the basis of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Although anyone can read chat, participating requires 20 rep, which might be gained by just one on-topic question if you don't have the +100 association bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T09:11:05.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-26T15:06:01.030" Score="-1" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the term &amp;ldquo;opinion-based&amp;rdquo; is hard to find in the Help Center, it seems to be widely considered an undesirable quality for a question or answer. The problem is, what is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; opinion-based? Plato insisted on an absolute disjunct between knowledge and opinion (even or especially &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; opinion), but in so doing he set the bar for knowledge so high that he himself invariably failed to clear it. Rhetoricians, from his own contemporary and rival Isocrates down to Wayne Booth, have called the distinction sharply in question. In &lt;em&gt;Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent,&lt;/em&gt; Booth uses as an example the proposition that the opening sentence of &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;  is ironical (&amp;ldquo;It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife&amp;rdquo;). That proposition cannot be scientifically proven; and yet for the MLA to come out against it as a body would, he says, be more startling than for a comparable body of the world&amp;rsquo;s physicists to declare the hitherto accepted laws of physics overthrown. In his &lt;em&gt;Philosophy of Rhetoric,&lt;/em&gt; George Campbell shows that even the composition or perusal of an algebraic proof requires faith in one&amp;rsquo;s own memory, and notes that the composer is likely to ask a fellow algebraist for an opinion before publishing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own profession of teaching composition, specifically argument, I often encounter the notion, among novice teachers under my supervision, that for an academic argument paper to be &amp;ldquo;opinion-based&amp;rdquo; is a Bad Thing. I have found that position puzzling too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the community really considered the epistemological underpinnings of this apparent consensus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76878" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T20:25:19.400" Title="What is wrong with &quot;Opinion-Based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4781" CreationDate="2014-05-26T15:29:48.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm perfectly happy with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;all the ELU moderators&lt;/a&gt; at the moment. I'm not champing at the bit for an election to add more mods, nor do I see any reason why any of the existing team should leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that ideally mods &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have little to do, because if an SO site is functioning well, &lt;em&gt;ordinary users&lt;/em&gt; (such as myself) take care of most cases where intervention is required. I don't &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; whether any of the current team think they're &quot;overworked&quot;, but I &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; they don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T15:29:48.703" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-26T17:23:35.083" Score="1" ViewCount="1998" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new user here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know why some people got angry with me because of some mistakes in my questions. If I am a professional in the English language, why would I even ask? Isn't it to be expected that I would make mistakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77222" OwnerDisplayName="ahmed anwar" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-05-26T21:38:55.350" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T21:38:55.350" Title="Why do some people get angry at questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4786" CreationDate="2014-05-26T21:34:55.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A good question gets good answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will offer my opinion as to why you have not gotten the answers you wished for (though I would not qualify the responses as &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt; at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site expressly recommends that you explain the &lt;strong&gt;problem you're having&lt;/strong&gt; in your question.(&lt;em&gt;&quot;Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172783/whats-the-correct-pronunciation-of-g-and-t-here&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, it was not clear in your post that &quot;when [you] listened to a T character in English courses as in &quot;doubt you&quot;, &quot;about you&quot; and &quot;I don't know&quot;, a T character was not pronounced&quot; (a comment you made more than two hours after your question was entered). Had you done this, it would have allowed users to zero in on the problem you experienced instead of giving you &lt;em&gt;answers you were not actually seeking.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be frustrating not only to the person asking the question (who might wonder why their question isn't being addressed straightforwardly), but also  to the user who has to &lt;em&gt;try to guess&lt;/em&gt; what it is you're actually asking in order to answer you directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same principle applies to this question: &quot;Are there any English words where we place the tip of the tongue between teeth? For example: &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you gave two such words as examples makes your question confusing. You obviously know that there are such words. Which leaves the reader to wonder &lt;em&gt;&quot;what, exactly, is he asking?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; These types of questions are discouraged here, and the question was placed on hold for the following reason: &lt;strong&gt;put on hold as unclear what you're asking&lt;/strong&gt; (list-type questions - a list of words with &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; in them - are also discouraged here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a learning curve for new users of any site. One thing a good user will learn is how to ask a &lt;em&gt;good question&lt;/em&gt;. Good questions don't encourage people to &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; at what, exactly, the user is asking. Good questions are clear about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to be more specific, and share your problems, in your next question. See if that makes a difference in the reception and the answers you get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T21:34:55.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-26T22:20:11.987" Score="6" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, yeah, yeah... &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;low quality contributions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't think so, I quite liked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/77286/jahanvi-kashyap&quot;&gt;JAHANVI KASHYAP&lt;/a&gt; contributions. They were &quot;fresh&quot;, one or two were quite original and they all had a certain charm to them. Perhaps it could be argued her questions and her level of English were better suited to ELL, so was she ever invited to post there? I don't recall seeing any comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets see now,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eleven questions posted in two days&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There have been contributors who posted a greater number of trivial questions in a shorter space of time. Is that a valid reason for suspension?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Four questions received minus votes&lt;/strong&gt; for a total of nine &lt;em&gt;visible&lt;/em&gt; downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Five questions upvoted&lt;/strong&gt; for a total of twenty-four &lt;em&gt;visible&lt;/em&gt; upvotes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Two questions garnered over 1,000 views&lt;/strong&gt;. An excellent result in just two days of activity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; (it happens to the best of us), with time and experience she would have learnt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General tone of questions: polite, non confrontational, demonstrated a willingness to listen and heed to advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, she's a very young woman. She's still a baby! (hmm.. maybe it's a cover, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; might be a 65-year-old pervert hiding behind a pretty avatar) But I say the suspension was harsh, unless of course she had been warned that the community regarded her questions to be of low-quality. Was ELU flooded with complaints and flags about her posts? Is it possible to know the count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the first time I've ever felt motivated to express my dissent on a user being suspended. Generally speaking, when users were suspended I've supported the action or not cared. This is different. I think this could have been handled much better. But admittedly, I don't know all the ins and outs of this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one visits the user's profile there is a link which leads the reader to a page called&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;A Day in the Penalty Box&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; formulated by Jeff Atwood in 04-06-09. I will quote the most relevant passages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our general strategy is to discourage specific problem behaviors, not&#xA;  individual users. But sometimes you just can’t seem to reach people,&#xA;  and it becomes necessary to place accounts in timed suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When users exhibit a pattern of either …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No effort to learn and improve over time&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This user does not put reasonable effort into the questions they ask&#xA;  of the community.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is little or no evidence of this user learning&#xA;  over time, either in the topic itself or in the community norms on the&#xA;  site.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This user intentionally spams the site with the same question or&#xA;  very similar questions, over and over.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The user never gives anything&#xA;  back to the community, but only takes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disruptive behavior&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Other users tend to react poorly to this user’s contributions, posting negative responses in kind and generally causing a commotion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a broad sense of community resentment over this user’s behavior, and they are frequently cited in discussion about the&#xA;  community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a dark storm cloud of moderator flags that seems to follow this user around wherever they go.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The moderators get email complaints about this user’s behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This user makes overtly snide, rude, or hostile comments to their fellow users.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&#xA;  [...] &lt;strong&gt;The odds of moderators contacting you with a warning first will be in&#xA;  direct proportion to how much evidence you’ve given us that you are,&#xA;  in fact, a potentially valuable and contributing member of the&#xA;  community.&lt;/strong&gt; [this part is highlighted]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Depending on the severity of the problem behavior — and at the&#xA;  complete discretion of the moderator — your account will be placed in&#xA;  timed suspension for anywhere from 1 to 365 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user was suspended after TWO DAYS. I don't see any evidence of unruly, discourteous behaviour. Agreed that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of her questions were of the general reference kind, although it is interesting to note that one such &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173171/any-word-for-someone-who-is-porn-addicted&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on hold has received a valid answer in the comment section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I have no idea why I am taking such a great interest in this case. Perhaps it's because I feel the suspension appears to be unmotivated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T05:10:34.573" Title="User suspended because her English is not fluent. That was a bit mean" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4788" CreationDate="2014-05-27T02:52:04.200" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user in question was not suspended because of her fluency, or lack thereof, in English. We do not comment on specific details of suspensions. The user in question, if she so wishes, may appeal the suspension by replying to the mod message or by emailing team+english@stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have tried to respond to your post as best I can, though obviously, it is lacking precisely because I cannot disclose relevant facts. The summary of the situation, I think, is that the factors you are using are not the factors that we take into account when warning or suspending users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were &quot;fresh&quot;, one or two were quite original and they all had a certain charm to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what this is supposed to mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;eleven questions posted in two days.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There have been contributors who posted a greater number of trivial questions in a shorter space of time. Is that a valid reason for suspension?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but neither is it a reason not to suspend. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Four questions received minus votes for a total of nine visible downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Five questions upvoted for a total of twenty-four visible up votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers, it happens, are actually higher in both cases because of vote splits. In addition, there may be deleted posts that you have not taken into account. I would also beware of using net vote counts as a definitive metric, as users who consistently post good questions is more important than users occasionally posting exceptional questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Two questions garnered over 1,000 views. An excellent result in just two days of activity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Views do not correlated with quality questions, and in most cases, they are inversely related. I will not comment on this specific case except to acknowledge that both of the questions you refer to have not been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One duplicate (it happens to the best of us), with time and experience she would have learnt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure of the relevance here, except to say that duplicate questions are not usually a cause for suspension. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;General tone of questions: polite, non confrontational, demonstrated a willingness to listen and heed to advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a good sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And, she's a very young woman. She's still a baby! (hmm.. maybe it's a cover, she might be a 65-year-old pervert hiding behind a pretty avatar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not take age into account for suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I say the suspension was harsh, unless of course she had been warned that the community regarded her questions to be of low-quality. Was ELU flooded with complaints and flags about her posts? Is it possible to know the count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not disclose specific details about users unless the user in question has so approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T02:52:04.200" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4784" CreationDate="2014-05-27T14:15:50.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of the site as the world and the users as countries.  The mods and the heavy users are your United Nations, but other smaller countries get a vote too, sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well now imagine if every time a person brought a question to the world it could be vetoed on 5 votes.  Well I (acting like the islands of the Bahamas) have had a few questions closed as primarily opinion based because China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and so on decide that my free speech should not be expressed.  To live I quit posting my questions or they will detain me.  They know I pose little threat and can be cast off as stoned or stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now some users (Easter island in size) may pose a question that slips through the G10 Summit.  But it is no accident.  They are watching.  If &quot;they&quot; think they can groom this user as a devotee, then pass the questions through.  If the user has something interesting to trade, pass them through.  Even if this user nation has no one that speaks English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try to do a stealth operation and pose the question on the weekend or in the dark of night.  Be weary of making the question too good.  They will see the hits and come after you.  Get your feet wet with something pedantic if you go this route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember it only takes 5 to close so there must be politicking on your part.   You must sit down and break bread if you want to submit into the grey area of Primarily Opinion Based.  This is like the gray area that nations use for Threat Alerts and Weapons of Mass Destruction.  It is an excuse most of the time to control you.  And having intelligence, having background in the English language, and use that intelligence on your job... well you have threat on your forehead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what is funny is that Primarily Opinion Based questions are &lt;strong&gt;100% closed based on the opinions&lt;/strong&gt; of these nations.   They will tell you that your questions are full of conjecture but that is it.  You will mention that there are 10 questions on the home page that are just as opinion based.  They will say then they should be closed too.  They won't be.  They voted to close yours. And the world turns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T14:15:50.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4784" CreationDate="2014-05-27T20:25:19.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is wrong with “Opinion-Based”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main goal in closing questions is to eliminate &amp;quot;unhelpful&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;unconstructive&amp;quot; questions. When a reason such as &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; is specified, that reason is explaining &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the question is unhelpful or pointless. That does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; imply that all &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; questions are inherently off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;relevant part of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, by the way, does offer a handful of examples that can help you determine which &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; questions are good or bad matches for the site. Here is are the notes on &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explicitly address your other two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, what is not opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't actually the right question. The right question is, &amp;quot;Which opinion-based questions are bad?&amp;quot; The above linked FAQ answers this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the community really considered the epistemological underpinnings of this apparent consensus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community doesn't give a flip about epistemological issues. They simply want to close unconstructive questions and providing a close reason makes it easier for askers to determine &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; their question was voted as being unconstructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T20:25:19.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-28T15:45:01.253" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that SE sites are not fit for topics that are based more on 'opinion' than on fact. However, we could consider an exception and allow people to post poetry that they are finding hard to understand. And with the language and literature experts that we have available with us on SE, a lot of learners and enthusiasts alike can benefit from their expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find it hard to understand some English poems, such as &quot;An Ode to Autumn&quot; by Keats. So, it would be great to discuss poetry with people who can decipher even the most hidden of metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69905" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:43:11.547" Title="How about a poetry analysis site?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-06-05T02:08:47.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T05:35:45.027" Score="-3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never experienced such stigmatization for asking a question, not on math.stackexchange or any platform. &#xA;Why is it that when I ask a question on english.stackexchange, I am penalized for asking such a dumb or inferior question to what you guys consider as &quot;English?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this platform only for those native speakers who can write articulately? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you guys have the time to answer my question, I would greatly appreciate it. When you disregard my question and refer me to a dictionary or other sources, I am neither able to understand nor solve my dillema. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it really that difficult to answer a &quot;dumb question?&quot; for you high class &quot;English&quot; people? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me what do you guys classify as &quot;English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77093" OwnerDisplayName="user77093" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T02:36:58.667" Title="What is classified as &quot;English?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4793" CreationDate="2014-05-30T02:36:58.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off: no one — absolutely no one at all — stigmatized you, penalized you, or called your question dumb or inferior. You are overreacting, and not by a slim margin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of your questions got put on hold, and that is all that's happened thus far. Putting questions on hold is not a feature specific to this site. It even happens on Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, this site is not exclusive to &quot;native speakers who can write articulately&quot;. This site is not even exclusive to native speakers, period. If you have a quick look at just the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;first page in the Users tab&lt;/a&gt;, you will see people who are native speakers of Dutch, French, Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Hungarian, and Japanese, to name but a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You assume that your question was put on hold by a native speaker who can write articulately because it is not about English. Neither assumption is correct, and it is not clear how you arrived at either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was put on hold for the reason specified: it is not on-topic in its current form. However, rather than leaving it at the boilerplate close reason, I left a comment explaining the closure in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am surprised and saddened to learn that you stopped reading my comment as soon as you came across the word &lt;em&gt;dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. It went on for a while after that. And you were not even really directed to a dictionary in the first place&amp;nbsp;— I would have left it at the boilerplate close reason in that case. Much rather, I specifically included right then and there the crucial bits of what the dictionary would have told you, precisely such as to spare you the lookup. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to reiterate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your use of the word &lt;em&gt;indulge&lt;/em&gt; was ungrammatical, for the reasons outlined in my comment, but it can be easily fixed, in the ways listed in my comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you don't know if &lt;em&gt;indulge&lt;/em&gt; is even the word you're looking for, then neither do we. Going by what little context you have provided, it might or might not work, so we can't really help you there unless you supply additional information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Synonyms for &lt;em&gt;indulge&lt;/em&gt; can be looked up in a thesaurus, a tool specifically designed to look up synonyms. This site is not a thesaurus and is not designed to look up synonyms. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; you have checked a thesaurus and it was of no help, please include that information in the question: which words it suggested and why they didn't suit you. Again, this is not something we ask of you, or of inarticulate folk, or of non-native speakers, or of any particular group of people; this is something we ask of everyone. You are invited to play by the same rules everyone else has to play by.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to have the whole sentence reworded, then that is too broad, subjective and argumentative, and the SE engine is simply not designed for open-ended questions of that kind. Even so, you can still take your question to our chat, which is always lively and helpful. If you are indeed a user on Math and other SE sites, you will get the reputation needed for chat by associating your accounts with a click of a button.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if you can edit the question to address these concerns, it can be reopened. Again, standard procedure. Nobody is stigmatizing you for your dumb question that doesn't suit us high-class people. Take a deep breath. Chill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T02:36:58.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-30T03:02:57.853" Score="4" ViewCount="7430" Body="&lt;p&gt;From EL&amp;amp;U Helpcenter about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;asking&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For more detail, read about our &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;guidelines for great subjective questions&lt;/a&gt; and blog post about how &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;real questions have answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are some examples of constructive subjective questions that are allowed on EL&amp;amp;U? (or What are some examples of great subjective questions on EL&amp;amp;U?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question and answers would be a great reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; It can be same as great primarily-opinion based questions also (which are exceptionally good and previously allowed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note2:&lt;/strong&gt; The below meta post is related also and there are some general examples in it: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1613/a-look-at-question-quality&quot;&gt;A look at question quality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Subnote: I could not be sure if this question is appropriate also. I searched for other questions that might ask for examples but I could not find and I also checked tags that might be used for this kind of question.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T03:39:42.753" Title="Examples of &quot;Great subjective questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|subjective-topics|list-question|reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-30T13:25:59.003" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Persian Cat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/37324/persian-cat&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/37324/persian-cat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I come back with my own old Id?.. I have forgotten the e mail address which I used before and its password!.. But I remember that I exchanged many information with admins by this e mail address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;divar_neveshte@yahoo.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to come back after one year and unfortunately faced with this problem that the site cannot remember me any more with my old Id and I have to make another one that I don't like!..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any solution for this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77803" OwnerDisplayName="Persian Cat" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T20:18:03.257" Title="How can I come back with my old ID?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4796" CreationDate="2014-05-30T20:18:03.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please fill out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact#&quot;&gt;contact form&lt;/a&gt; providing any evidence that you have that that account is yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T20:18:03.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4792" CreationDate="2014-05-31T17:18:31.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many ways, ELU.SE is already a poetry analysis site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The best definition of poetry I've ever seen is in Chapter 111a in &lt;em&gt;Even Cowgirls Get The Blues&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here is that chapter, in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events, until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. &#xA;  How is this done? By fucking around with syntax.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To limit oneself is a kind of suicide.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To limit another is a kind of murder.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To limit poetry is a Hiroshima of the human spirit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Danger! Radiation!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;   &amp;nbsp; Unauthorized Personnel Not Allowed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;   &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; On the Premises of Chapter 111a!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great deal of what we do here in ELU is, straightforwardly, &quot;fucking around with syntax.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Few of the texts we see here are Official Poetry, but some of them do approach this standard,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;if not always by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2016-10-08T18:43:11.547" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:43:11.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-01T22:15:55.400" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we close-vote a question as a duplicate of another question, a comment is auto-generated. This comment reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;possible duplicate of [Title of Dupe Question]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For as long as I've been here, that's been driving me bonkers every time I see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; have a properly capitalised “Possible” here? Pretty please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know, I know. It's a tiny detail. But &lt;em&gt;such an annoying one&lt;/em&gt;!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2014-06-01T22:41:40.823" LastActivityDate="2014-06-01T22:41:40.823" Title="“possible duplicate of…” is uncapitalised" Tags="|bug|design|comments|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-02T14:13:09.353" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask the high brow folks to take a look at a question that was closed.  I have rephrased it, added some arguments and flagged it, but it hasn't been evaluated so far.  What else should I do to apply for re-opening ?  Any suggestions about changing something or adding something else ?  The link is:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160691/can-your-use-of-latin-derived-words-indicate-your-social-class&quot;&gt;Can your use of Latin-derived words indicate your social class?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T14:42:13.187" Title="How to get a question reopened after it has been rephrased?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4806" CreationDate="2014-06-04T14:08:31.187" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain this ?   I got so many marks from this question and all of a sudden it gets me negative marks.  How come?   &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144104/how-accepted-is-fing-in-informal-conversation&quot;&gt;How accepted is ‘f***ing’ in informal conversation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T13:05:00.727" Title="Why negative marks?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-04T17:07:42.513" Score="10" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;i&gt;tl;dr version: &quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; is designed to stop &quot;What's the best &lt;/i&gt;X&lt;i&gt;?&quot;-type questions. It's not supposed to be used on every single question that involves opinions.&lt;/i&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until last year, one of the reasons that questions could be closed was because they were &quot;not constructive&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&amp;A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2013, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/06/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;the question closing process was revamped across the SE network&lt;/a&gt;, in an effort to make it appear less hostile and to more effectively help users improve the quality of their questions. Several existing close reasons were retired, and new ones were introduced in their place. The new option closest to &quot;not constructive&quot; is &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Many good questions generate &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this change was entirely well intentioned—after all, nobody likes to be told they're not being constructive, and it hardly helps them improve—an unintended consequence of the change is that &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; is being used at ELU to close questions it was never designed to close. To understand why, we need to look at why we had a &quot;not constructive&quot; close reason to begin with, as well as our own guidance about what constitutes a constructive question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The archetypal &quot;not constructive&quot;/&quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; question is &quot;&lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;What is the best&lt;/i&gt; [car, game, pet, movie, dictionary, study method, etc.]&lt;i&gt;?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&quot; There is no right answer, and it can only lead to rep-pimping and mental masturbation, as everyone and their dog stops by to leave their two cents and shoot the breeze. It was widely apparent fairly early on in the history of SE that these questions have no place on the network, and it's easy to see why. Questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; are cute, and they can be very popular, but if they start to absorb all the energy on the site, real questions suffer. (Incidentally, this is a big part of the reason the &quot;community wiki&quot; option exists: it provides a mechanism to stop users from gaining thousands of undeserved rep points for lazily pasting their favorite cartoon into an answer.) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Our FAQ provides an excellent list of the kinds of questions that are not constructive&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your question is just a rant in disguise: “______ sucks, am I right?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;b&gt;many people at this site think &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; should be used to shut down discussion of any and all topics having to do with opinions about English.&lt;/b&gt; To select the most convenient example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/174906/what-is-the-point-of-prescriptive-grammar&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, an intriguing and well-written query about the reasoning behind linguistic prescriptivism, currently sits with 4 close votes, and may in fact be placed on hold before I finish this meta question. All four voters in favor of closure have chosen the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; option. But why? The user isn't asking whether prescriptivism is better than descriptivision. He clearly doesn't care for prescriptivism, but he's not just saying &quot;Prescriptivism sucks, am I right?&quot; It's a legitimate question about the philosophical underpinnings of prescriptivism. It should be entirely possible to formulate a comprehensive and useful answer that invokes Robert Lowth and Strunk &amp;amp; White and explores the role of Greek and Latin antiquity in forming the opinions and assumptions of the learned class in Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and so forth. Instead, people see the title of the question—&quot;What is the point of prescriptive grammar?&quot;—and the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; light bulb lights up in their brains, and the close votes pile up. And that's not right. &lt;b&gt;Just because a question asks about opinions does not mean it is asking you for &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; opinion.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be obvious to everyone here that a great deal of English usage boils down to subjectivity and opinion. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/register&quot;&gt;Register&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formality&quot;&gt;formality&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politeness&quot;&gt;etiquette&lt;/a&gt; are vital components of usage, yet talking about them unavoidably means talking about why one word or phrase is considered &quot;better&quot; than another in certain contexts in the greater society, or in or between various subsets of it. Linguists have spilled barrels of ink exploring exactly these questions in classrooms and in scholarly articles. To suggest that they should not be asked here is insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;According to our FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;i&gt;constructive&lt;/i&gt; subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before voting to close a question as &quot;primarily opinion-based,&quot; ask yourself whether it meets these criteria. If it does, leave it be. Try assuming that when the questioner asks something like &quot;When should I say &lt;i&gt;X&lt;/i&gt; instead of &lt;i&gt;Y&lt;/i&gt;?&quot;, they're inquiring about cultural norms, not just bending your ear about what you, personally, think about it. If necessary, edit the question to clarify it. A word or two in the right place can save a question from the garbage and turn it into something that enlightens everyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Disclaimer: The aforegoing is all just, like, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my opinion, man&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T20:57:42.220" Title="What the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; close reason is for" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2014-06-05T13:05:00.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation table shows &lt;strong&gt;recent changes in reputation.&lt;/strong&gt; The question has received two upvotes, which gives a +10 in the table (five rep for each upvote); the single downvote would give a &amp;minus;2 in the table because a downvote subtracts 2 from your rep score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation table does not show the resultant (total) rep for a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example, which happens to be mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tFeuQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Reputation chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer is shown as &amp;minus;2, but all that means is that someone downvoted it, its &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139073/meaning-of-if-gold-rust-what-shall-the-iron-do/139081#139081&quot;&gt;current score&lt;/a&gt; is +2 votes, made up of +3/&amp;minus;1, so it's gained me 28 rep points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second answer is shown as +10 because it received an upvote. Its &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110442/the-cheaper-the-car-the-easier-to-buy-it/110449#110449&quot;&gt;current score&lt;/a&gt; is +2 with no downvotes, so it's gained me 20 rep points in total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; explaining how reputation works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T13:05:00.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4808" CreationDate="2014-06-06T21:19:31.897" Score="9" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just cast a closevote (duplicate) on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175522/term-for-a-yes-no-maybe-decision&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which at the time had no comments, answers, or votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write, it says &lt;em&gt;Marked as duplicate by FumbleFingers &lt;strong&gt;2 minutes ago&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and there's an answer posted &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;1 minute ago&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does seem to be closed. But I'm not a mod, so how come the system didn't wait for 4 more users to closevote before doing this? And how come an answer was accepted &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; it was closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I just been granted &quot;superpowers&quot;, or is there a bug in the system (perhaps relating to the answer being posted seconds after my closevote)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: (having been enlightened by @tchrist). I've just posted an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254602/provide-visual-prompts-to-actions-of-regular-users-when-they-exercise-superpower/258711#258711&quot;&gt;Provide visual prompts to actions of regular users when they exercise superpowers&lt;/a&gt;. In the absence of a visual prompt as requested, I don't actually &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; this &quot;superpower&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to devote huge amounts of effort to making sure I use my unilateral closevote powers any more carefully than I used my normal &quot;1/5th of a closevote&quot; power. I can't even be bothered to keep tabs on which particular tags I'm empowered for, let alone keep checking the questions to see if they happen to have those tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before there'e a kerfuffle about my pending imperious behaviour, you might wish to consider adding your vote to that meta.meta feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: Apparently the links I was given earlier about this subject all end up on &lt;em&gt;Stack &lt;strong&gt;Overflow's&lt;/strong&gt; meta&lt;/em&gt;. But since my complaint involves a site-wide feature, it's more properly addressed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/231625/&quot;&gt;meta for the entire network&lt;/a&gt; (where currently my complaint just has one uncommented downvote, so I feel could use some support! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T07:45:52.057" Title="A single vote closes a question! Have I just been granted &quot;superpowers&quot;?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|badges|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4807" CreationDate="2014-06-06T22:08:01.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, indeed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/471272&quot;&gt;you are now a Superhero, able to wield the mighty Mjölnir&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the gold badge where the diamond would go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R74eF.png&quot; alt=&quot;superhero demo&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:39:08.123" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T22:08:01.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4807" CreationDate="2014-06-08T17:31:48.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;In regards to your concerns over the use of this feature:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to note that we created this feature specifically for sites that get so many duplicate questions every day that it is not feasible for voters in the top tags to keep up with them. &lt;em&gt;Generally-speaking&lt;/em&gt;, gold badges go hand-in-hand with this sort of traffic, but there will no doubt be exceptions for sites where tagging and/or voting deviate significantly from how they are used on SO/SF/SU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U does not get a very large number of questions each day, so if enough people here feel that users with gold badges are doing a disservice via their voting, we can disable this behavior on this site until such a time as it is clearly needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-08T17:31:48.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-08T23:12:19.607" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly over the moon about the way SE has implemented their decision to grant me the power to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4807/have-i-just-been-granted-superpowers&quot;&gt;unilaterally close questions&lt;/a&gt; - but if history has taught me anything, it's that you can't fight City Hall (or indeed &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_powers_that_be_%28phrase%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TPTB&lt;/a&gt; in general, and specifically those at SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that this new ability only applies to &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; closevotes, and even then only if I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2637/fumblefingers?tab=badges&quot;&gt;gold badge&lt;/a&gt; for at least one the tags on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/231625/153229&quot;&gt;little chance they'll reconsider&lt;/a&gt;, and actually provide a &lt;em&gt;reminder&lt;/em&gt; when my closevote is &quot;supercharged&quot;, I suddenly find I need to pay more attention to my badge status. Currently my only relevant gold badge is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/130/single-word-requests?userid=2637&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;.  But I've got a dozen silver badges for other categories - and so far as I know, any of those could become gold badges at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;em&gt;Gold = Earned at least 1000 total score for at least 200 non-community wiki answers&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Silver = Earned at least 400 total score for at least 80 answers&lt;/em&gt;. What I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know is how close I am to gaining more &quot;question category&quot; gold badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - is there an existing link I'm not aware of, or can anyone make &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of those database queries&lt;/a&gt; that will tell me my &lt;em&gt;total score &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; number of non-community wiki answers&lt;/em&gt; for any given tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T11:48:19.587" Title="How close am I to getting another gold badge?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4816" CreationDate="2014-06-08T23:28:55.887" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will have to look under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2637/fumblefingers?tab=tags&quot;&gt;Tags in your user profile&lt;/a&gt; for a quick overview, then manually hover over the numbers in grey boxes for the actual stats you're after:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DRjn2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's 16 upvotes away from a gold &lt;em&gt;word-choice&lt;/em&gt; badge, for example. For &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;, it's 62, and for &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt; you're missing 525 votes in addition to 75 more answers. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-06-08T23:59:03.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-09T20:00:30.113" Score="12" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4857/2014-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, June 16th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this new process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T03:00:57.217" Title="2014 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="20" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-09T20:00:30.113" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T20:00:30.113" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-09T20:03:21.983" Score="12" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2014 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T20:03:21.983" Title="2014 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-06-09T20:03:21.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-09T20:18:11.577" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T20:18:11.577" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4781" CreationDate="2014-06-09T21:08:21.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there will be a 2014 Moderator Election, and it's underway now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Details and nomination here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4818/2014-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;2014 Moderator Election Q&amp;amp;A - Question Collection&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T21:08:21.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-09T21:51:45.287" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T21:51:45.287" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-09T23:05:08.977" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T23:05:08.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-09T23:08:34.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should moderators do about edit wars? Specifically, instances where two or more users rapidly edit the same post in an attempt to undo or override the other's edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T23:08:34.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-10T00:04:15.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T00:04:15.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-10T00:08:33.423" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2014-06-11T08:38:09.330" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T08:38:09.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-10T00:39:38.557" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason it's important is that non-natives need facts; native speakers can tell whether something sounds good or not. And native speakers are largely ignorant of the facts about their language -- because where are they going to learn them? not in grammar school, that's for sure -- and frequently misrepresent things. Non-native speakers are subject to very different linguistic forces, and sometimes take this nonsense seriously. As a former ESL teacher, I'd hesitate to recommend either site to English learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2014-06-13T12:07:04.427" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T12:07:04.427" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-10T07:52:12.843" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2014-06-11T07:13:23.583" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T07:13:23.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4816" CreationDate="2014-06-10T11:48:19.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can actually extract an awful lot of information straight from the servers if you are willing and capable to fiddle a bit with SQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ready-made and saved queries that could answer these kind of questions in detail as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T11:48:19.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-10T14:20:22.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you intend to use your moderator vote to close questions* before the general EL&amp;amp;U community have had the opportunity to review them ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*that are not obviously spam, but may be considered &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T14:20:22.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-10T14:42:44.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This question was copied from John Lawler's post in order to split the questions up.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Whose opinions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T14:42:44.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-11T15:06:36.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This question was based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4818/2014-moderator-election-qa-question-collection#comment17345_4819&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A's comment&lt;/a&gt; since I thought it was a particularly interesting topic.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T16:09:17.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-11T15:24:49.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This question was copied from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2893/6006&quot;&gt;question asked during the 2012 election&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your subjective assessment of how ELU's been progressing in terms of popularity and quality? Do we get more questions than a year ago? Better questions? What about answers? Do we attract new great users? Or is it all Eternal September? What is your recency illusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T15:24:49.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-11T16:13:42.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you continue to post answers and questions on EL&amp;amp;U while being a mod? Why/why not? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T16:13:42.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-11T16:14:59.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you think mods should take a backseat or use a hands-on approach? Why/why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T16:14:59.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-11T16:59:10.730" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you continue to oppose to proofreading questions which are an essential part of the language learning. &#xA;Why/Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T16:59:10.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4805" CreationDate="2014-06-11T17:42:03.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose for closing questions is to remove questions that are not helpful for future visitors or would be extremely difficult to answer in the StackExchange format. &amp;quot;Opinion&amp;quot; questions can bump into the latter problem and the relevant question to ask oneself when deciding whether to close vote or not is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will this question provoke answers that are good, high quality answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this frame of mind, here is how I would address your specific points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2013, the question closing process was revamped across the SE network, in an effort to make it appear less hostile and to more effectively help users improve the quality of their questions. Several existing close reasons were retired, and new ones were introduced in their place. The new option closest to &amp;quot;not constructive&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to remember is that the &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of closing questions remained the same. The reasons associated with closing a question changed in an effort to help users understand what questions to close; why a question was closed; and how to avoid posting questions that will be closed. The matter-of-fact tone behind &amp;quot;Not Constructive&amp;quot; was causing issues, yes, but it wasn't an invalid close reason. It just wasn't palatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this change was entirely well intentioned—after all, nobody likes to be told they're not being constructive, and it hardly helps them improve—an unintended consequence of the change is that &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; is being used at ELU to close questions it was never designed to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is a problem... why? If the community decides that a set of questions isn't worth having on the site, is that... wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand why, we need to look at why we had a &amp;quot;not constructive&amp;quot; close reason to begin with, as well as our own guidance about what constitutes a constructive question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The archetypal &amp;quot;not constructive&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; question is &amp;quot;What is the best [car, game, pet, movie, dictionary, study method, etc.]?&amp;quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I basically agree with this paragraph and only want to point out that the close reasons are the &lt;em&gt;result&lt;/em&gt; of wanting to close bad questions. If a bad question exists and there isn't a valid close reason with which to close it, the close reason aren't doing their job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, if a good question gets closed because it matches the &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt; of the law and not the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; of the law, that is user error and the question should be reopened. StackExchange already has a contingency plan in place for this scenario. And it happens across all close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the end, the purpose is to close a bad question. In my opinion, it is better to close a bad question with a slightly-not-correct close reason than it is to leave the bad question open because there isn't a close reason that perfectly matches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, many people at this site think &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; should be used to shut down discussion of any and all topics having to do with opinions about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really isn't any data backing this statement. At the very least, it wasn't presented in your post. It takes 5 people to close a question and only 5 to reopen one. If one particular group of 5 made a mistake than it should be rather easy to drum up support to get a question reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the idea that some massive group of users are closing good questions because they are misinterpreting a close reason seems unlikely. The methodology should be, &amp;quot;This is a bad question. Which close reason explains it best?&amp;quot; Not, &amp;quot;Here is a close reason. Which questions match this reason?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; there is a group of people out there &amp;quot;doing it backwards&amp;quot; then the lesson should be to teach them the appropriate approach. There certainly isn't anything unique about &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; close reason compared to all of the other close reasons you have posted about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I consider more &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; to be happening is that a bunch of people read the question and think, &amp;quot;This should be closed.&amp;quot; Then they go through the awkwardly worded close reasons and chose the best option -- even if it doesn't quite technically fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To select the most convenient example: [...]. All four voters in favor of closure have chosen the &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; option. But why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it isn't asking a question that can be answered appropriately on this site. Theoretically, what would such an answer look even like? And who would be the one doing the answering? And how would the community vote on such a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these concerns could have been avoided if the author had asked the question in a way that made it less of a loaded question. But they didn't and it was, therefore, closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user isn't asking whether prescriptivism is better than descriptivision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, they just stated their opinion that it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; better and more or less delivered an ultimatum to prescriptivists to respond to their argument. This kind of debate is not appropriate for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He clearly doesn't care for prescriptivism, but he's not just saying &amp;quot;Prescriptivism sucks, am I right?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Prescriptivism isn't logical, am I right?&amp;quot; is in the same family of problem questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a legitimate question about the philosophical underpinnings of prescriptivism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you suggesting that philosophical underpinnings of linguistic theory is on topic at ELU? We aren't actually here to debate linguistic theory. We are here to answer question about English and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be entirely possible to formulate a comprehensive and useful answer that invokes Robert Lowth and Strunk &amp;amp; White and explores the role of Greek and Latin antiquity in forming the opinions and assumptions of the learned class in Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then we have to ask if such an answer would be appropriate &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;. Questions that are too broadly focused are another problem that can result in closing. Your suggestion of a &lt;em&gt;hypothetical&lt;/em&gt; answer seems far too involved for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, people see the title of the question—&amp;quot;What is the point of prescriptive grammar?&amp;quot;—and the &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; light bulb lights up in their brains, and the close votes pile up. And that's not right. Just because a question asks about opinions does not mean it is asking you for your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to jumping to this conclusion. There is nothing to suggest that people voted to close this question because of its title or without reading the entire post. Furthermore, your assumption that they closed it because of how the close reason is worded is just as unfounded (see above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be obvious to everyone here that a great deal of English usage boils down to subjectivity and opinion. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And those questions typically remain open and receive appropriate answers and discussion. The fact that such questions survive your supposed close-vote-gang implies that such a gang may not exist. Or, if they do exist, the more level headed contributors simply reopen the closed questions and all is well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Linguists have spilled barrels of ink exploring exactly these questions in classrooms and in scholarly articles. To suggest that they should not be asked here is insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You appear to be assuming that all topics worth publishing are appropriate questions for this site. I don't understand why you would hold such an assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before voting to close a question as &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based,&amp;quot; ask yourself whether it meets these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before voting to close, ask yourself whether a question is good or bad for the site. The quoted notes on what makes a good subjective question are great examples of &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; questions and should absolutely be remembered and considered when choosing to vote a question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once a question has been weighed and determined bad, it should be closed. Backing up and deciding against the closure because the admins have worded the close reasons a particular way is a grave mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T17:42:03.817" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-13T12:09:10.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's your favourite English word, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T12:09:10.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4846" CreationDate="2014-06-13T17:41:07.650" Score="24" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; Mean people suck, and we should not help them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I don’t actually believe anything &lt;strong&gt;mechanical&lt;/strong&gt; can be done here, and I certainly don’t expect a “closed due to meanness” reason. That’s just plain silliness.  But questions asking about insults or slurs are questions that deserve to be labelled pejorative. It bothered me how many of these there were, and how they tend to draw bikeshedding list responses with no right answer.  It doesn’t look good.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why are we helping people hurt each other?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For nearly as long as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag has existed, it has been a source of several distinct types of controversy.  On occasion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=single+word+requests&quot;&gt;these have been raised here on our meta&lt;/a&gt;.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2160&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6437/shog9&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shog9♦&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1654&quot;&gt;Against Single Word Requests&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/48&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JSBձոգչ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4732&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he’s amused but the rest of the family isn’t?&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/58761&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;medica&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particularly nasty form of these questions are those that are really just asking for our help in coming up with a new way to put others down.  I made a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt; tag just for such requests, and went back and tagged some of the questions that I felt met the following criteria as talen from its tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pejorative language is any language that portrays someone or something in a negative light, no matter whether it is intended to be disparaging and derogatory, contemptuous or disapproving, belittling or offensive, or even abusive. It’s anything that makes someone or something look bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After tagging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language?sort=newest&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;the first 201 questions&lt;/a&gt; I could find, I quit in disgust — but there are others still.  Plus &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language?sort=frequent&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;these are some of our most frequent duplicates&lt;/a&gt;, too, which just adds insult to insult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have elsewhere observed, all these questions had their genesis in bile. Each was looking for some especially nasty new word to use against somebody whose behavior or characteristics they strongly disapproved of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it is a healthy thing for the questioner, nor good for our site or the larger social context, for us to be forever providing people with rude words to use to commit verbal violence upon one another, even if it is only in their own head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But is there really anything to be done about it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why these requests are problematic, but simple eliminating the tag will do nothing to address the underlying issues, because people will just end up using a different tag to ask the same thing.  This seems entrenched in human nature, and inherent social issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In days of old, the worst of these would on occasion be closed as “Not Constructive”, but that is no longer a close reason available to us here.  Some of them were so nasty that they were quickly deleted from our site, but many remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see constructive discussion about anything we might possibly do to discourage these sorts of mean-spirited questions.  I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it makes us look bad, and I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it is going to be used in an unkind manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t really fancy updating our off-topic criteria to include “borne out of nastiness”; that just sounds silly, not to mention subjective.  And yet at the same time &lt;strong&gt;we (&lt;em&gt;claim&lt;/em&gt; that we) expect people to be respectful towards one another&lt;/strong&gt; here, and having all these questions seeking help in disrespecting others seems at some level to run counter to that principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can that paradox be reconciled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were a line to be drawn, I don’t know where or how one would draw it. All I know is that after reading quite literally hundreds of these nasty questions and thousands of answers to them, I find myself dispirited to the point of sickness by mankind’s continued inhumanity to his fellow man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Community Disarmament?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have made a personal decision never again to supply verbal arms to these questioners, arms that I know can have no other purpose than to put others down.   I figure that there are already plenty of words and expressions that assholes use to call each other assholes.  I see no reason to help them, and every reason not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is merely a personal vow, not a site-wide policy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything &lt;em&gt;we as a community&lt;/em&gt; can do with regard to these mean-spirited questions and so stop assisting them in making this world an ever-uglier place to live in?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: As a side-note, I see that the quality of our questions continues to drop in all regards, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1737&quot;&gt;people don’t do any research of their own&lt;/a&gt;.  Jeff’s right about that, and it’s only getting worse.  The current matter I raise is just one aspect of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T22:31:16.667" Title="Can anything be done about mean-spirited requests for terminology?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|single-word-requests|courtesy|community-building|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-13T19:31:18.463" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem awfully certain that people are asking for these words because they want to use them to hurt others. There are many different reasons why someone might want to learn a particular pejorative word, some negative and some quite positive. You yourself used a lot of negative words when writing this question—&lt;i&gt;disgust, bile, nasty, violence&lt;/i&gt;, etc.—and nobody would accuse you of trying to be hurtful with them. For all we know, the questioner asking about the word for bigotry against a particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169443/hatred-of-chinese&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175238/word-for-bigotry-towards-someone-of-political-beliefs&quot;&gt;group&lt;/a&gt; might be preparing to deliver a passionate denunciation of all kinds of prejudice. I don't think we know what's in a person's heart, and I don't think it's up to us to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wish to increase the level of happiness in the world, I'd rather we did it by closing fewer legitimate questions, and being less rude about the ones we do close, than by telling people they can only ask about happy things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T19:31:18.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-13T20:24:48.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe @tchrist has a valid point. As a community, we espouse respect and courtesy in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; members. These requests have the effect of a drive by maiming. Not only are they ugly and unkind (and unlikely to be posed by people interested in becoming productive members of the site), but they attract unwanted attention and entice others to repeat the behavior in a one-upsmanship manner. It decreases the credibility that we are here to discuss &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; and promotes the idea that we are a platform for self-expression, a dictionary or a thesaurus for those uninterested in doing their own research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should not be accused of being inhospitable or a rabid closer. I do my best to make people feel welcome here. But this is beyond hospitality. &lt;em&gt;I would like to see more requests closed on the basis of people not showing their research.&lt;/em&gt; I've not been here long enough to observe cyclical patterns, but in the time I've participated, I believe the quality of the questions has decreased. Honestly, it raises concerns about the purpose and the future of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T23:57:15.673" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T23:57:15.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-13T22:00:27.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We allow questions about profanity, which are hurtful to some. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like an argument against hurtful terms or pejoratives would work for profanity, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I propose that there's nothing mechanical to do in general against these kinds of requests, but to allow disinterested engagement with the intellectual problem posed by them (epithets, profanity) and aggressively edit/close questions about them that are intended to be used hurtfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T22:00:27.263" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-13T23:27:33.747" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I understand people may feel icky or annoyed that our language has mean things in it, I don't feel that it is our job to tell people where the line between &amp;quot;not that mean&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;too mean&amp;quot; is. We can offer our opinion while answering, certainly, but I don't see a convincing argument that it is any of our business to start making rules based on grey moral lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I argue &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; any rule that suggests we should take any particular action or inaction due simply to the problem of unenforceability. Namely, what sort of action would be appropriate? Close &amp;quot;Off-topic: Too Mean&amp;quot;? Just forever ignore someone who asks about something that is Too Mean? Comment on the post saying, &amp;quot;Tsk, tsk. That's too dirty!&amp;quot; I predict that any such behavior will sow more discontent among new users and users who happen to disagree on the obviously subjective nature involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if any particular user doesn't feel like wading through the muck, they are more than welcome to abstain. But I see no reason for one group of morals to be enforced across the entire site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After tagging the first 201 questions I could find, I quit in disgust — but there are others still. Plus these are some of our most frequent duplicates, too, which just adds insult to insult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hate doing something, don't do it. That seems appropriate. If you want help from others in tagging the questions so you can ignore that particular tag, that also seems appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have elsewhere observed, all these questions had their genesis in bile. Each was looking for some especially nasty new word to use against somebody whose behavior or characteristics they strongly disapproved of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it is a healthy thing for the questioner, nor good for our site or the larger social context, for us to be forever providing people with rude words to use to commit verbal violence upon one another, even if it is only in their own head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is your responsibility to govern the appropriate usage of the English language -- nor do I think it is appropriate to try manipulating people because of your personal moral system. ELU is not a moral authority, and it shouldn't be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why these requests are problematic, but simple eliminating the tag will do nothing to address the underlying issues, because people will just end up using a different tag to ask the same thing. This seems entrenched in human nature, and inherent social issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the problems relate to the answerability of the questions, it is really none of your business. It is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; responsibility to avoid things you don't like. It isn't your responsibility to banish all things you don't like -- regardless of how valid and accurate your reasons are for disliking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t really fancy updating our off-topic criteria to include “borne out of nastiness”; that just sounds silly, not to mention subjective. And yet at the same time we (claim that we) expect people to be respectful towards one another here, and having all these questions seeking help in disrespecting others seems at some level to run counter to that principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can that paradox be reconciled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our expectations of people extends to the behavior of the users towards each other. I see no paradox in holding these two statements: (a) Do good to each other; (b) answer questions about English. We no obligation to try and hide the dirty parts of our language behind a bushel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I know is that after reading quite literally hundreds of these nasty questions and thousands of answers to them, I find myself dispirited to the point of sickness by mankind’s continued inhumanity to his fellow man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you are powerless to change human nature. I see no reason for &lt;em&gt;you in particular&lt;/em&gt; to engage these questions if they disgust you. Aside from accidentally reading about humanities venomous side, these questions don't actively harm you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sheer number of such questions would cause you to leave ELU and stop contributing altogether, I would be more willing to entertain ideas on how to keep things relatively sane on the front page and in titles. Nothing I have written above is intended to make you feel like yuck -- and one thing we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to monitor is how &amp;quot;family friendly&amp;quot; we keep ELU as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is certainly value in treating harsh words with respect simply because they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; cause immense harm. But, in my opinion, part of that respect does involve acknowledging they exist and informing people that they should be used with care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have made a personal decision never again to supply verbal arms to these questioners, arms that I know can have no other purpose than to put others down. I figure that there are already plenty of words and expressions that assholes use to call each other assholes. I see no reason to help them, and every reason not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good for you. I think this is the right decision for you and many others. I do not think it is an appropriate decision for the site to make as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we as a community can do with regard to these mean-spirited questions and so stop assisting them in making this world an ever-uglier place to live in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should make sure the front page and question titles are at &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; palatable for those passing thorough. And I think that we should make it trivially easy for users such as yourself to safely ignore these types of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the end, these matters &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; a part of our language and we have no right to tell all of the internet where the line between &amp;quot;too mean&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;not that mean&amp;quot; exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, to be clear, I agree with you in the sense that people shouldn't be using these words flippantly and they shouldn't be actively seeking words in order to merely use them against people they know. I don't disagree with your &lt;em&gt;morals&lt;/em&gt;. I simply don't think it is appropriate for you and I to impose those morals on others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Finally, thank you for raising the issue. I think it is a very important issue and if it causes you grief it should be discussed freely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T23:27:33.747" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-14T05:10:31.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator is there anything you could do to encourage users (old and new) to provide more detailed and comprehensive questions and answers?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related to the above; what is your opinion about edits? Are users doing enough to improve the legibility and quality of posts? What would be your policy or primary concern when faced with a post written in poor English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T06:11:06.593" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T06:11:06.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-15T07:06:12.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personal opinion here, but I think tagging 233 posts (latest count) &lt;code&gt;Pejorative language&lt;/code&gt; is self-defeating your noble argument that we dissuade users from seeking expressions which are used to attack, demean, and disrespect one another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don’t think it is a healthy thing for the questioner, nor good for&#xA;  our site or the larger social context, for us to be forever providing&#xA;  people with rude words to use to commit verbal violence upon one&#xA;  another, even if it is only in their own head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I'm getting a little weary of seeing twenty, thirty similar posts all lumped together on the active page. If anything, this unrelentless mission to tag every request for an insult as &quot;pejorative&quot; is giving a false impression of the site to new users. Think about it, by evidencing man's low morals, you are giving it more prominence, and perhaps, encouraging new users to believe that these type of requests are the most popular on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I tried to counteract  this misleading impression by creating a new tag &lt;code&gt;nonsubjective&lt;/code&gt; whose definition is: &lt;em&gt;Undistorted by emotion or personal bias, having neither positive nor negative connotations&lt;/em&gt;. I only tagged twenty three questions, but there are many requests for neutral terms, for words that describe a phenomenon dispassionately without overtly negative or positive connotations. Let's try to keep things in perspective, by all means tag &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; SWR as pejorative when and where they occur but why actively dredge up the past, if you yourself are disgusted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After tagging the first 201 questions I could find, I quit in disgust&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually come to think of it, you are making it easier for visitors to find insulting terms, whereas before many derogatory questions were simply tagged &lt;code&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/code&gt;, now users will have immediate access to a rich source of negative terms in one easy place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-06-15T07:13:38.753" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T07:13:38.753" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-15T08:59:58.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a question tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158118/meaning-of-skull-as-insult&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt; asks what &lt;em&gt;skull&lt;/em&gt; means when used as an insult -- but it was based on a misreading of &lt;em&gt;skulk&lt;/em&gt;, which was used in the cited text to mean &lt;em&gt;one who hides&lt;/em&gt;. From the wiki description and my own understanding of the tag's name I believe this an apt tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because this post says that the tag was made for mean-spirited requests and because the cited statistic of there being 201 similar questions (the tally as of my writing this is 233), of which it is said that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis added] these questions had their genesis in bile,&quot; I wonder if my intentions in writing it have been mistaken for more sinister ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than wielding it myself I was interested in knowing what the character meant by it. In the three months that have passed I have not found occasion to use it myself. (Although now that I'm reminded of it, I'm tempted to start applying &lt;em&gt;skulk&lt;/em&gt; to Riki in DotA, sneaky little hero that he is!) :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more than in insults, my history suggests an interest in neutral terms: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My second question on ELU, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112384/word-for-intellectual-prankster&quot;&gt;Word for &quot;Intellectual Prankster&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ethically neutral: No connotations of underhandedness, as in &lt;em&gt;crafty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149944/word-for-source-of-unpleasant-disclosure&quot;&gt;Word for &quot;Source of Unpleasant Disclosure&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  (more about generality than neutrality) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My most recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172935/term-for-only-unbelieved-warner&quot;&gt;Term for Only &quot;Unbelieved Warner&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like for this term to make no judgments on such characters, their messages, or deliveries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am at a loss for what to do. On the one hand, I feel this tag fits my question to a tee. On the other, I would like to exercise KitFox' recommendation of removing the tag because I feel by association it is saying that I mean to be offensive, that I'm asking ELU to provide me &quot;with rude words to use to commit verbal violence.&quot; (Permit me a third hand, and I would delete the question entirely; it was not my finest hour, research-wise...) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt; tag meant to carry this sort of stigma? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen questions that very directly said they had someone they wanted to use their answer on, and I don't like those much either. I don't feel comfortable providing that kind of insight into a relationship I vaguely know only one side of. And so I think the advice of not answering is sound, not only ethically but also practically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given MrHen's suggestion of titles that make the subject matter easy to guess, I would even advocate a firmer stance of: If the subject matter sounds like something that would rile me, it's probably in my best interest to not even add to its view count. Ideally, when more people follow this principle, there would be more incentive to post content that appeals to the intellect than morbid curiosity: They would get the most views/votes/activity/etc. But this eventuality depends on an ideal, so it's hard to practice, odd to promulgate (especially to non-community members), and thus somewhat unrealistic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general I think more, warmer responses to all-around good questions is a good thing to aim for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T08:59:58.043" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-15T09:52:04.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pejorative language is any language that portrays someone or something in a negative light, no matter whether it is intended to be disparaging and derogatory, contemptuous or disapproving, belittling or offensive, or even abusive. It’s anything that makes someone or something look bad.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I miss my guess and &quot;assholes&quot; has a positive - or at the very least, a neutral connotation - your statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I have made a personal decision never again to supply verbal arms&#xA;  to these questioners, arms that I know can have no other purpose than&#xA;  to put others down. I figure that there are already plenty of words&#xA;  and expressions that assholes use to call each other assholes. I see&#xA;  no reason to help them, and every reason not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems a little hypocritical in that you've stooped to using pejorative language in order to decry the very pejorative language you're railing against! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there anything we as a community can do with regard to these&#xA;  mean-spirited questions and so stop assisting them in making this&#xA;  world an ever-uglier place to live in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, one can't expect to foist one's moral leanings on others, so it seems to me that all one can do is to lead by example and hope the sheep will follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77081" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T09:52:04.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-15T15:16:53.720" Score="8" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/177784/the-form-that-i-have-never-heard-before&quot;&gt;What does “would not have been possible had I remained” mean?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a grammar question. Of course any grammar question can be looked up in a grammar textbook — once you know which grammar rule applies. But how was the asker to know which grammar rule would apply? One commenter left a link to a non-authoritative source that can only be found by knowing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar questions are very different from questions asking for the meaning or construction of a word, where the word to look up is the object of the question. Here, figuring out which entry in the grammar textbook applies is the whole object of the question. The general reference close reason doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lest someone mention ELL…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm sure that some people will say that since the asker doesn't know something about English, his question must be off-topic here. But this is by no means consensual.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In any case nobody told the asker to go to ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could possibly justify saying that this question is not answerable here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T17:52:04.327" Title="Why was this grammar question closed as general reference?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|general-reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4851" CreationDate="2014-06-15T15:58:02.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it actually has been answered here. We have many questions on bare conditionals with &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;-deletion and inversion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would probably be better to re-open and re-close it as a duplicate of one of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1308&quot;&gt;Conditional sentences not starting with “if”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2631&quot;&gt;A special use of “should”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/162357&quot;&gt;Inverted conditional sentence using 'can' and 'will'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/95943&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of this sentence — “Were it not for the bodies there on the ground, it would have appeared to be a normal day at the oasis.”? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/95741&quot;&gt;“Even were he not to…”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106780&quot;&gt;The verb “should” as a conjunction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To capture more permanently what I’ve just said in a potentially ephemeral comment, one trouble with finding something canonical here is that most such questions get closed as duplicates of question #2 above, but this seems more akin to question #1 above.  We do close  non-&lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; questions as duplicates of the “should” one, but I’m not entirely convinced this is optimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s the sentence in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am sure this would not have been possible had I remained a typical Anglophone North American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about the question under discusion is that this is not just a bare conditional, it’s also a reversed conditional, with the “consequent” (&lt;em&gt;apodosis&lt;/em&gt;) in front of the “condition” (&lt;em&gt;protasis&lt;/em&gt;).  It could be rewritten to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Had I remained a typical Anglophone North American, I am sure this would not have been possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thence to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I had remained a typical Anglophone North American, I am sure this would not have been possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can’t find a good duplicate about all that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The related questions I’ve so far discovered all seem to assume that all conditionals begin with the protasis not the apodosis, but not only do they not do so in English, the closed question is one such. Both of these two: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I’ll do it unless you say otherwise. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I wouldn’t have done it had you only said something. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;have the protasis at the end, but only the second uses inversion and consequent &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;-deletion there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d prefer that it were a duplicate covering &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; “bare” conditionals &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; “reversed” ones, but I haven’t found one for the second issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T16:29:12.887" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4851" CreationDate="2014-06-15T17:52:04.327" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, someone should have simply answered the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would most likely take only a minute or two. It would take less time to answer the question than to go around searching for an exact &quot;duplicate&quot;; also the OP wouldn't then have to pore over the &quot;duplicate&quot; thread(s) in an attempt to construct an answer to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U, there are so few actual questions getting asked about grammar, compared to all the one-word requests and other stuff of similar ilk, that maybe we ought to actually answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By actually answering grammar related questions, the community itself improves its grammar knowledge, by having its own members actually researching and composing a specific answer to a specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by answering the question, the OP gets an answer tailored to that question--which will most likely make the OP happy, or at least satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that if I ever asked a grammar question on this site, I would want an answer tailored specifically to my question. The answer could also have links to older threads that are related to my question--that is fine. But I most certainly would not want to see my question closed and only be given a link or two to older threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too many of these older threads have too much garbage in them, and that includes the accepted answers. The newer answers ought to be better than those older threads, because the community has the older threads as a resource, and so, the newer answers would, ideally, retain the good info of the older threads while ignoring their bad info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine if you call online support with a question, and instead of being given a 30 second answer, you were told that your problem is a duplicate and then given links to a file or two for you to read. How satisfied will you be with that service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57102" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T17:52:04.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-16T01:16:40.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you're goal is here. You tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/174424/word-meant-to-describe-a-crime-where-women-beat-men&quot;&gt;Word meant to describe a crime where women beat men&lt;/a&gt; with your pejorative language tag. Why would you feel such questions are mean-spirited? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of bad things that happen in the world, and our language has words to describe people and their behaviors. If I were to ask 'what do you someone who....?&quot; that doesn't imply anything beyond my own obsession with choosing the right word to describe a person or situation. If my own question were to be tagged, I'd be inclined to ask another - &quot;what do you call someone who wishes to censor the parts of our language that aren't quite so beautiful?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your tl;dr is true, your premise seems very 1984ish to me. What is your goal of not discussing these words? If I observe someone behaving badly and ask for the right word for the act, does that make me mean, just for asking? I'm not one to gossip, but I believe that a marriage contract allows a couple to privately share their thoughts (with each other), and when I'd like to tell my wife about someone who was less than kind, the right words might be useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5784" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T02:32:19.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2014-06-16T11:34:06.467" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;One passive approach you can take as an individual is to edit your user preferences to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; to your list of tags to ignore.  You have the option of either dimming them or hiding them altogether.  This can end the annoyance for yourself, though it doesn't solve the issue for the community (if it is indeed an issue regarding the health of the community, which is debatable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16310" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T11:34:06.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3692" CreationDate="2014-06-16T12:07:23.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way/should there be a way of allowing migration of new user comment 'answers' to a comment, on the question rather than another answer, as that is probably a crapshoot to discern, rather than downvoting/removing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a new user who hasn't fully understood the FAQ, it can appear harsh and unwelcoming, as others have pointed out to just be downvoted and deleted for trying to help, however misguided. Allowing migration to comments allows their potentially positive contribution to remain if it cannot be fleshed out into a fuller answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70998" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T12:07:23.370" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-16T20:02:21.677" Score="17" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4818/2014-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. It was decided that we would take the top 9 questions as submitted by the community, plus 2 pre-set questions from us, for a total of 11 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/e912c815-3e48-479f-b201-35c653c59b3b/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T19:16:47.860" Title="2014 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-16T20:25:49.133" Score="-4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178199/a-single-word-which-can-be-used-in-the-place-of-floccinaucinihilipilification-wh&quot;&gt;'A single word which can be used in the place of floccinaucinihilipilification whithout losing the nuances of its meaning'&lt;/a&gt; got a lot of downvotes?&#xA;(-5 at the time when I wrote this post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T15:27:17.983" Title="Is the floccinaucinihilipilification question a question that really deserves so many downvotes? Why/Why not?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-16T20:33:55.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of an extension of John/FF's questions...  If ELU stays as a separate entity as ELL, how do we ensure that the people answering the questions don't belong on the ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty easy to moderate questions and close them off.  But I find that the biggest issue with the site is the users answering.  Being a long-time SE user and one that uses many SE sites I get that you will have people answering questions without the &quot;right background&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens is you get really bad answers.  Those answers get downvoted and the user flails.  But that doesn't work here because of the ELL/ELU issue (as pointed out by FF's question).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have several users that are obviously not native speakers (John points this out) that answer a high volume of questions.  Some of these users have been near the top of the leaderboard lately.  They answer everything, seemingly using reverse dictionaries.  They edit their answers 20 times based on comments and after finding out the first 10 things they put were incorrect.  Often the 20th thing isn't much better or isn't explained with the right context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often they take answers from other users or simply take another answer and use a thesaurus to answer a question.  This isn't rocket science.  We all know who these users are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my question is what do the candidates think about these users?  What can we do about this situation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I come to the site to learn.  I find some of the accepted answers and highly upvoted answers ridiculous at times - so much so that I am not learning, I am doubting my own knowledge.  I feel that these &quot;answers&quot; detract from the site and also halt good answers/discussion.  These answers usually come with some sort of &quot;proof&quot; that taken by itself might answer the question but put in context they are absolutely incorrect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure how other people feel - but I just get tired of reading a half page of &quot;research&quot; from a non-native speaker doing a reverse dictionary on stuff that just doesn't make sense.   I can downvote these things and I do.  And I can upvote the good answers buried underneath and I do.  But that doesn't make up for the 20 nonnative speakers that already upvoted the wrong answer, which goes back to FF's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T20:33:55.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-16T20:44:29.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is P. Henry, or as you may know me, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3534/phenry&quot;&gt;phenry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language Learners as it exists today is fatally flawed and should not be allowed out of beta in its current state. If it is recast specifically as an ESL site, I believe it will provide a service of great value to thousands of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some history: ELL was proposed in June 2012 as &quot;English as a Second Language,&quot; as a site that would be geared specifically to the needs of ESL/EFL students and people who were not native speakers of English. Almost immediately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5660/why-limit-the-new-group-to-esl&quot;&gt;this restriction was challenged&lt;/a&gt; by people who wanted it to be a site for &quot;questions which are too basic for ELU.&quot; The restriction was removed, and the name of the proposal was changed to &quot;English Language Learners.&quot; In October, Area 51 &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7911/on-the-closure-of-english-language-learners&quot;&gt;closed the ELL proposal&lt;/a&gt; on the grounds that there was no clear difference between ELL and ELU, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7934/reinstating-the-english-learners-proposal&quot;&gt;reopened it&lt;/a&gt; two days later after a tremendous backlash, mostly from high-rep ELU users. The ELL public beta finally opened in January 2013 after &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8808/done-now-restore-this-site-to-esl-english-as-a-second-language?rq=1&quot;&gt;one final plea&lt;/a&gt; from the Area 51 moderator to restore some kind of coherence to the ELU/ELL distinction by returning ELL to its original vision as an ESL site. This, too, was rejected. And so we have the mess we find ourselves in today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find incredibly striking is that many or most of the people who complained the loudest about the ELL proposal being shuttered currently have less than 600 reputation on ELL itself. &lt;b&gt;ELL was shepherded to creation in part by people who, from all appearances, never had any intention of using it themselves as anything other than a garbage disposal.&lt;/b&gt; Is it any wonder its mission remains incoherent to this day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Restore ELL's original name and mission, and move it to esl.stackexchange.com. Designate it as a migration target for ELU, and encourage ELU members to (kindly!) direct non-native speakers there. Tolerate questions from native and fluent English speakers at ELU, even ones that we might think are &quot;too basic.&quot; And happiness will reign across the land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would reach out to the user in an effort to help them understand that they are being disruptive. If the user doesn't respond to outreach, I would not hesitate to support disciplinary action up to and including suspension and banning. We have a large number of very knowledgeable answerers here, any number of whom would quickly fill any vacuum left by a departing problem user. No single one of us is so valuable that the community can't afford to lose us if we begin to create more problems than we solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, moderators at this site should only use their unilateral close power in cases where a question is very clearly useless and unsalvageable. Everything else should be handled by the close queue. We don't have the kinds of close queue problems that other sites have: I work the queue almost every day and I don't remember the last time there were questions still remaining in the queue after I had run through my 20 daily votes. So when a moderator unilaterally closes a question that's a legitimate judgment call, that's a real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's an isolated case I would want to contact the other moderator and inquire about their reasons before taking any action myself. If the moderator in question is someone who routinely closes questions that would have had a reasonable chance of surviving a close vote, judging by the results of past votes on similar questions, I'd feel a lot more comfortable just reopening it and saying &quot;Let's let the voters decide.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;A lot of single-word-requests questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single word requests that get answered quickly and definitively are fine: someone wants to know what you call the person who draws blood at the blood bank, someone else says they're called phlebotomists, the answer gets accepted, and everyone is happy. Let's not pretend that those of us with high reputations haven't made them on the backs of such questions. The problem is with the &quot;Is there a word for…&quot; questions that may not even have an answer, yet no one is really comfortable answering &quot;No, there is no word for that,&quot; because it's conceivable that somewhere in the OED there lurks the perfect answer, a word that hasn't been used in 400 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't favor shooting SWRs on sight, if a SWR sits around for a few hours without any answers other than stupid wild guesses, I favor closing it as Too Broad. I would be willing to decrease that waiting period for those &quot;Is there a word for that feeling you get when you stub your toe on a Thursday when there's snow on the ground and…&quot; questions that are never going to have any decent answers and everyone with voting privileges knows it immediately. Whatever criteria we use should be explained in the help center so that closings don't appear arbitrary and people can learn how to write better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between fluent and non-fluent speakers, if not native and non-native. Non-fluent speakers ask different kinds of questions than fluent speakers, and benefit from different kinds of answers. I would prefer not to frame it as a distinction between native and non-native speakers, in part because I think that skates close to some really ugly territory, but also because I don't think it's either necessary or appropriate—surely none of us would ever wish to tell my fellow moderator candidate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot;&gt;Yoichi Oishi&lt;/a&gt; that he's not welcome here, for example. But saying that ELU is the place for fluent speakers of English and ELL (if recast as an ESL site, as I recommend) is the place for non-fluent speakers would be both entirely appropriate and helpful to both populations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question. On the one hand, I'm running pretty explicitly as a reform candidate, so my election would be a pretty strong indicator of a mandate for change. On the other hand, I don't believe that change is best accomplished by upsetting the apple cart. I would be extremely reluctant to unilaterally override a community-voted closure except in very clear-cut cases. I would prefer to use my bully pulpit to help drive a change in attitudes so that dubious closures don't happen in the first place. (From what I can tell, currently about half of the close votes fail anyway, so I don't believe it's either inappropriate or particularly unlikely to expect that this change can be brought about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that this question—variations on which are practically standard at SE elections—nearly wasn't asked here. Despite receiving the third highest number of upvotes among potential moderator questions, it received so many downvotes that it almost didn't make the cut. That so many people were opposed to this question &lt;i&gt;even being asked here&lt;/i&gt; is striking evidence of the need for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I believe we're not nearly as friendly and welcoming as we could and should be, but you don't have to take my word for it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4625/bring-back-the-summer-of-love-aka-make-new-users-feel-more-welcome&quot;&gt;Bring back the Summer of Love (aka Make new users feel more welcome)&lt;/a&gt; is the 17th highest-rated question on our meta site, and it's less than 3 months old. It's rare for such a new meta question to have accumulated that many votes. Only 3 other questions from 2014 are in the top 20. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3997/so-are-non-native-speakers-not-welcome-any-more&quot;&gt;So, are non-native speakers not welcome any more?&lt;/a&gt; is less than a year old and it's ranked 15th. Few people at other SE sites have anything good to say about the culture here, if chat transcripts are any indication: We're &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/7227?m=16098558#16098558&quot;&gt;negative&lt;/a&gt;. We're &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/16?m=16000562#16000562&quot;&gt;stuffy and haughty&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/11?m=15230227#15230227&quot;&gt;Dismissive&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/14576903#14576903&quot;&gt;Unwelcoming&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/10232302#10232302&quot;&gt;Snobbish&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/9825850#9825850&quot;&gt;Elitist&lt;/a&gt;. It keeps coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I wrote when I announced my candidacy, I don't actually want this job. There's a huge part of me that absolutely dreads the (highly unlikely) possibility that I will win. The only reason I am running is because I feel ashamed to be associated with a site that has this kind of reputation. I don't see enough being done to change it, and I don’t see how I could continue going along with it without at least trying to change it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/query/466/most-controversial-posts-on-the-site&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The most controversial post ever made to our meta site&lt;/a&gt;, with 17 upvotes and 11 downvotes, is a post I wrote in January titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;This is not a site for “serious English language enthusiasts,” and it never will be&lt;/a&gt;. If you're at all interested in my vision for this site, you should go read that, as it's the closest thing to a manifesto I've written. The most important thing to take away from that post is that the title isn't a statement of my position—it's a simple fact. There are two factors that ensure that ELU will always be seen as a general English site rather than an advanced site: our size (&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;we're the 6th largest SE site in terms of overall traffic&lt;/a&gt;), and the fact that we live at english.stackexchange.com. Our poor reputation stems from the fact that a small number of high-rep users who hold power here refuse to accept this fact, and continue to cling to the illusion that ELU could ever truly be a site for &quot;serious English language enthusiasts&quot; only. It can't. It won't. Not at this URL and with this user base. Not ever. I challenge anyone to put forth a reasonable argument that this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is only by accepting what this site is and treating it as such that we will solve this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one sense, all of English is about opinions. English has no official language institute comparable to L'Académie Française. Consequently, English is what the people who speak it say it is. This is true even of basic grammar and orthography, which can vary significantly from dialect to dialect. When people ask &quot;Is it proper English to say &lt;i&gt;X&lt;/i&gt;,&quot; what they're really asking (whether they realize it or not) is whether &lt;i&gt;X&lt;/i&gt; is perceived as orthodox in particular contexts, settings, and registers—in the absence of elaboration, this typically means educated middle-class white people in the US (except the South) and the UK (except the North). To our credit, we mostly get this right, preferring to talk about what is &quot;appropriate&quot; rather than what is &quot;correct,&quot; and warning that certain things &quot;will be perceived as poor English&quot; by whatever group the questioner is hoping to make an impression with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot of this is that we have a different relationship with opinion than do the math and science SE sites, where π has the same value everywhere in the universe and has for all time, and nobody's opinions about it matter. As I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/what-the-primarily-opinion-based-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, not every question that involves opinions should be closed as &quot;primarily opinion-based.&quot; Sometimes citing opinions—for example, the opinions of usage panels employed by dictionaries or universities—is the only way to answer a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a big fan of online chat in general, but I would be willing to put in the time as I am able. I can't think of any topics I would not be willing to discuss, as long as they're relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with my vision for this site, you absolutely should not vote for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this rule for the reasons I outlined above for the &quot;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been&quot; question. Moderators should not be using their unilateral close votes on judgment calls. It's disrespectful to the close voters and to the community at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T19:46:29.770" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2014-06-16T20:59:55.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted the question, and also posted an answer. I downvoted it because &lt;i&gt;floccinaucinihilipilification&lt;/i&gt; is a joke word that has never been seriously used in any context except as an example of a long word. (Prove me wrong!) For that reason, it was difficult for me to perceive it as a serious question. If I'm wrong about that, I sincerely apologize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T20:59:55.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-16T21:36:19.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;medica here (to save you the trouble of scrolling down to find out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe ELL is a great resource and wholeheartedly support it. I would like to be able to migrate questions to ELL in a timely manner. There would be a reward in migration (a speedy answer) and less misunderstanding of how the two sites differ (I would comment on why I took an action so it hopefully wouldn't be perceived as a negative.) Finally, I think I would become more involved in ELL to get a better feeling for the types of questions that are actually better there, instead of just assuming. I was active earlier but stopped because I found I didn’t have the astuteness of getting to the heart of the OP’s question. I think that by looking at answers by higher rep users, and being amenable to advice, I could better understand the different approach to those, and be a better migrator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends; I imagine each situation is unique. I believe that most people are reasonable and don’t like controversy on their threads. With the flaggers' objections in mind, I would communicate privately with that user to try to get to the issues that result in the user posting answers or making comments which tend to attract flags. It might be as simple as asking the user to edit his posts if new information comes up, rather than argue his point in comments, or encouraging him to let his post stand on it’s own. Maybe the user has issues - e.g. former perceived mistreatment - that need to be addressed in a fair manner. I think I can do this. In any case, I think communication and willingness to resolve an issue on both sides are key. If the user wasn’t responding at all to repeated attempts at intervention, I would seek the participation of the other mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I would communicate with that mod to discuss it. I'd like to learn their reasons for closing (I am still relatively new here). I’d support the mod, and also the guidelines proposed by the site. If I had good reasons to continue to disagree, I'd discuss it with all the mods. That's as far as I'd take it, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though some are fun, challenging, and produce very interesting answers, mostly I find they are often poorly researched, don’t provide enough context to avoid a guessing game. Sometimes that's annoying (and at worst, they can be demoralizing). Some seem to be posted for shock value or to generate a lot of traffic and hopefully(?) rep. I've offered my opinion in meta. But they are allowed, so we (who aren’t too fond of them and/or what they do to the site) are left with trying to improve their quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consistently asked (and expected) OPs to show their work (chip away at the EL&amp;amp;U as dictionary/thesaurus/personal platform), some of the posters would find their own answers. Asking for context would help make them better questions. If those who don’t like them down voted, that would be helpful as well. What can I do as a mod? Not much more than any user: make sure to comment, try finding/closing if dupes, link to &lt;em&gt;How to ask&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe see if we can make the FAQ clearer, and closing of truly poor examples easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to distinguish native from non-native participants. Native speakers often don’t understand well how the language works, and have valid questions. Many non-native users have more understanding than native speakers and have very interesting questions. Questions should be allowed to stand, be moved, be closed, or be down voted on their own merits. Low quality answers can be commented on, down voted and deleted as it stands now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would defer to the community. I’m interested in serving it, not manhandling it. I've reopened questions I had close voted before; I had no problem doing so. If I really felt strongly, I’d assume first that it was me who was mistaken. I'd learn from the mods already in place.  I'd refer to the site guidelines carefully to see where I went wrong. I might change a really offensive word or phrase from the title. But that's pretty much all I can imagine doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I don’t. A lot of comments to new users are snarkier than they need to be (at the OP’s expense). I understand the frustration, though, when members  repeatedly see poorly worded questions. I'm not above bad days, or annoyance at the thousandth newbie who wants his homework handed to him on a platter. My goal is to get potentially good new members to stick around and participate by making sure their reception is friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I could do as a mod is to migrate appropriately; what we can all do is be a little more patient and welcoming of new users; find duplicates which might answer the question; explain (educate) why the question is currently a poor fit for our current model; edit a question to make it better (an option I’ve used only sparingly, but with more comfort than initially). Also communicate with new users. Many new users agree with a comment if it concerns migration, and ask to be migrated or make an attempt to better their question. I’ve seen this also with other users’ constructive comments. Some are insulted no matter what. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138173/etiquette-for-posting-civil-and-informative-comments&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; meta post helps me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who doesn't have opinions about language? I don’t have a problem with opinions, as long as they relate to English language and usage. Some very interesting questions are POB. But if it’s got little to do with language, or is really bizarre, I would vote to close them quickly. A question like &quot;What are the overarching themes in book X&quot;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178174/what-is-the-meaning-of-poetry-and-how-far-it-is-different-from-poem&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, though, are too broad and are better answered on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. I’d be willing to discuss pretty much anything related to the site, maybe privately, without violating any privacy issues, etc. Not saying I can resolve everything, though. I think the site works pretty well. But to have easy access to a mod's ear is nice. I know when I've had questions and mods were around, it was very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm. I was hoping this question wouldn't be picked, because to be honest, there are more than one. First, I haven't earned the trust of a lot of the people here. I've done things I'm not proud of. Though I've participated a lot, I was new, didn't know some of the rules, and didn't take the advice I'd give myself now. I think I'll leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would make more work for the moderators, and would delay the closing of questions that really should be closed. But if that's what everyone wants, I'm fine with it. I think what the present mods have to say about this is a lot more valuable than my input. I'm here, though, expecting to work, whatever that looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T02:51:03.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-16T22:06:09.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My relationship with ELL would be to work with their moderator team to understand which questions they feel are appropriate merge candidates. I would not support merging questions that would &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic for ELU but I would much rather see a question merged and answered than simply closed and forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any particular interest in helping define ELL's purpose -- I think that is a question more suited for their community and their moderator team to figure out. But I would do my best to fully support them in their decision and I am comfortable working as a liaison between their community and ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not feel that &quot;arguments&quot; are inherently bad as long as they don't impede the function of the site, don't clutter up the comments too much and don't cause ill will or uneasiness among the community. Ideally, any lengthy arguments would take place in chat -- and would take place with mutual respect between participants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my first action would be to understand whether the behavior truly is negative in nature or simply an overly zealous user who cannot contain their passion for debate. I would also discuss the user's actions and behavior with the full moderator team in order to get as much information about the situation as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I felt further action was necessary, I would then attempt to resolve the situation by contacting the user privately and discussing the issue. I would want to know whether they are aware of the controversy and whether they would be willing to help lessen any negativity during the arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the behavior of the user does not improve I would then warn them kindly but sternly that ELU needs to keep an eye on negativity during arguments. Long comment chains that are flagged may be deleted or pruned as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they still did not improve their behavior, I would discuss further action with the moderator team and look to the past to see what actions have been taken in similar situations. I would not progress further without strong support and advice from the moderator team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would contact them and ask them to help me understand the whys behind the action. I don't see a particular reason why my perspective would be more correct than theirs and I assume they would have a good reason for acting the way they did. I would not undo the action unless I had support from other moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is constant debate about a particular topic than I would urge the moderator team to post a question to the community on Meta.ELU and would volunteer to write up the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I felt that the moderator's actions were truly unjust or unbecoming I would still contact them first and then escalate the issue to the full moderator team and, if necessary, the admins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have actually written many posts on Meta about single-word-requests (the most recent suggesting that we merge single-word-requests and phrase-requests tags) but I can summarize my opinion as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some&lt;/em&gt; of these questions are interesting, valid questions but a great many of them are poorly disguised thesaurus questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't have an inherent problem with the tag but I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; think the tag is a valid excuse for writing poor quality questions or answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think that users who have a distaste for the tag should:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to close if they feel it is appropriate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feel free to downvote questions they think are unhelpful or not useful for the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignore the tag entirely and choose to leave the questions unanswered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not convinced that questions from native participants and non-native participants should be treated differently. Answers to questions should certainly take the asker's context into consideration but we should always remember that our purpose as a site is to answer questions for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; users who visit. A non-native participant can ask questions that native participants find interesting or helpful and I welcome the alternative perspective non-native users bring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-native users, however, absolutely should not be ostracized or ridiculed for their lack of knowledge. There is no excuse to berate someone for lack of knowledge while they are asking for assistance on that very topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I have no special way to identify such users. If I was curious, I would simply choose to ask them if they are a non-native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a user, I was very vocal about my opinions and fought hard to win others to my side of the debate. But as a moderator, I do not see that behavior as completely appropriate. My job as a moderator is to &lt;em&gt;represent&lt;/em&gt; the community -- not decide things for them unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I would resolve the differences by engaging the community directly in order to understand their perspective, their wishes and their reasoning. I imagine most of this discussion would occur on Meta or in Chat. If the differences are not resolved, I will act in accordance with the community's wishes even if I personally disagree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we can always be &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; welcoming and &lt;em&gt;friendlier&lt;/em&gt; to new users. New users have a handful of extremely unique challenges and it is sometimes hard to remember how these users see the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this is a very difficult problem to solve. My job as a moderator would be to calmly remind regular contributors that their actions are not always perceived in the manner intended -- new users visit from many different internet cultures. We need to go the extra mile and not assume that new users understand us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flip side is that we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need to protect our contributors from burnout. This means that we &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; act in ways that new users will find inherently unfriendly. Part of welcoming new users will be to help them understand why we took the actions we did and how they can avoid the issues in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a difficult balance but one I take very seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a direct answer to this question. ELU is an interesting topic for a question and answer site because there is a lot of subjectivity to a language's correctness. I am not actually that interested in debating how much of ELU should be opinions. I am more interested in expressing opinions honestly and sourcing evidence or experts when you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a handful of opinions to an answer disagree, I expect the community to help resolve the issue with upvotes, downvotes, comments and by helping edit sources and evidence into answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be available in chat periodically and anyone should feel free to ping my username if they have topics they want to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be willing to discuss anything about the site, the English language in general, any questions about my particular actions as moderator or concerns about something that has occurred on the site itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not be willing to discuss the actions of any of the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; moderators, general gossip about users or anything not directly related to the site. (You can still ask about these things; I just probably won't discuss them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a limited availability due to responsibilities in my career and to my family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second most convincing reason is that I tend to be very opinionated and fight very strongly for things I believe in. These opinions are not always in line with the core group of posters on Meta. My promise to you, however, is that I will tone down my argumentative side significantly if I were to become a moderator. I do not see moderators as &quot;super users&quot; -- I see them as representatives of the community and it is more appropriate for me to &lt;em&gt;listen&lt;/em&gt; than it would be for me to dictate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of the opinion that moderators should only be closing questions they feel (a) are unambiguously closable as per the guidelines or (b) extremely low quality in order to &quot;pause&quot; the question for editing or clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I see a rule about needing two mods as counterproductive. In both of the above cases, the post should be closed as quickly as possible in order to avoid confusing askers or wasting contributor's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is successfully edited and reopened by regular users, then the system is working properly. If the moderator feels that the reason the closed the question has been resolved and chooses to reopen the question, then the system is working properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, the community reopens the question without any editing having taken place, I would urge the moderator to update their &quot;insta-close&quot; parameters to avoid closing similar questions in the future. As a moderator, this is the approach I would take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T22:06:09.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-16T23:25:42.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Mahnax, by the way—per a comment I have added my username to save you the trouble of scrolling all the way down to see who wrote this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that we have a tough problem on our hands with regards to ELL and ELU. There is overlap between them. I am currently not in favour of a direct migration path to ELL because I don't wish to see questions migrated there willy-nilly. The many different opinions on the matter convolute the issue, but at present, I think the best option is to continue upholding high standards and dealing with questions as they come to us, and recommending ELL to users as appropriate. Further, I believe that community discussion regarding the direction of ELU is necessary to determine what standards we wish to uphold. This is necessary because of late, I have seen so many comments lamenting the harsh standards we hold, or points of view like the one &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4860/11550&quot;&gt;expressed by phenry in this very thread&lt;/a&gt;. If a discussion on our standards takes place and some sort of agreement can be reached, then I believe the next step is to wait for ELL to exit Beta. Following that, discussions with the moderators there can take place to determine whether they even want questions migrated from us at all. It's long-term, and I recognize that my views don't provide a quick fix. In my opinion, that's necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for migration in the here and now: if I were to be elected moderator, I would most certainly become more familiar with not only ELL itself but also its moderators, and I would engage in discussion with them before allowing any migration. As representatives of ELL, they could provide insight as to whether questions are or aren't a good fit better than I could as a visitor. ELL has its own rules and regulations, and since a migration path is not currently in place, I believe it is best to allow it to function as an entity that is largely separate from ELU, with few exceptions. There is too much disagreement at present—and not enough input from ELL—to mandate any action on our end at the current time (with specific reference to migrations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: A true discussion about our standards must take place, which brings up other issues (like those that will be addressed later in this answer). For now, I am happy to treat ELL and ELU as separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this user was regularly hostile to others, I believe a private discussion about respect and following the guidelines that are currently in place would be in order. Failing an improvement in conduct, I would consult other moderators about the situation before taking any specific action myself, given the user's helpful contributions. I would like to note that I do not think I would issue any sort of punitive measures towards &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; without consulting other mods, especially in the beginning stages of my time as moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, though, if you are disrespectful to other users, I don't care &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; good your contributions are. Everyone is subject to the same rules about conduct, and I see no problems with issuing a temporary ban/suspension/etc. if it is truly warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if the arguments in question are simply a little hotheaded and not so disrespectful, a discussion of a different kind would be necessary—essentially, a reminder that civility is important. Longer discussions may take place in chat with fewer restrictions, but the same rules regarding respect would apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious answer is to discuss it with that moderator. Failing any sort of agreement there, I might bring it up in chat and ask for the opinions of other users, or ask a question on meta about it. If I am in the minority, I will defer to the community. If the community supports my views, I would discuss once more with the other moderator, and then I imagine that their actions would likely be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with many members here about SWRs: if they are poorly researched (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/word-for-disrespecting-eldest-half-sister-by-referring-to-her-husband-as-girly-g&quot;&gt;ridiculous&lt;/a&gt;) I see no issue with closing them. Good SWRs, examples of which can be found in the numerous threads on this subject, are perfectly fine, in my opinion. My views on this topic are not particularly revolutionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the notion of distinguishing native from non-native speakers. Anyone, regardless of ability, is technically capable of producing quality content. If the content is weak, it will be treated as such regardless of its source. If it is strong, the same applies. I do not see any reason to paint native and non-native speakers with broad strokes. Being an avid enthusiast of English does not require fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not override the community. In the case that there is a major disagreement between myself and the community, I might raise the issue on Meta to provide further explanation of my point of view and to encourage others to do the same. Otherwise, I will only act unilaterally in cases of spam or abuse, or in situations where question closure, etc. is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; obviously the right choice. If I overstep those boundaries, I am willing to reverse my actions and apologize. I tend to have strong opinions about questions, but I am &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; willing to hear what the community has to say and to act accordingly. As a moderator, I believe that I would owe them nothing less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, I have noticed that many are offended by the lack of explanation for the closure or downvoting of their questions. If this is the case, Meta is available for objections, and the Help Center and comments are available for clarification. If experienced users were to be openly rude to new users—which is something I rarely see–then that would require action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other side of that coin is that many new users do feel unwelcome here regardless of our standards. The best response to this is to simply be as kind as possible when explaining why things are the way they are, and to treat them as human beings—not annoyances. We can always improve on how new users are treated, especially in cases where they are upset about our actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is frequently subjective, and many questions require opinions to be answered. The best response I can think of is that voting will determine the extent to which the community agrees with any opinions presented as answers, which is a vital component of how ELU and SE as a whole both work. Anyone can present their opinions, which is fine as long as we are careful not to assert them as fact, and to be ready to accept those of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have posted over thirty thousand messages in our main chat room alone. I am perfectly willing to discuss anything site-related there, as well as many things beyond that. When in doubt, ping: find out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a lot of actual English expertise. While I am a native speaker with a reasonable command of the language, I am not an expert. I am an enthusiast. In this regard, I am not particularly useful when it comes to issues involving tags, as well as other things which require expertise beyond my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present, I trust our mods to do their jobs and remain within the bounds of reason when they act. I would hold myself to those very standards were I elected. As for necessitating two mod-votes to close a question, I hesitate to see the point. If a moderator does something with which the community disagrees, &lt;strong&gt;it can almost always be reversed&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a key feature of how SE works. We have many users with various privileges and &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of them use them. I say we trust our moderators and our community to work things out, as they have for years. Altogether, the checks and balances in place are sufficient, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for grinding through all these answers. As always, I am available for clarification on any issue both here or in Chat. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11550" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T01:37:58.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2014-06-17T03:00:57.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too late to propose a new question, I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;, but it just occurred to me that nobody has asked about downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very often  users (especially new ones) are mystified as to why their questions are downvoted in such a brief period of time. Many perceive this feature as being hostile and unfriendly, afterall they came to ELU in the hope of getting a response not to feel &lt;em&gt;&quot;ridiculed&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or criticized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your position/opinion on downvotes that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; accompanied by &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; comments? When would you intervene? How would you handle a newcomer who complains?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T03:00:57.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-17T08:11:11.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Matt Эллен's answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like ELL. It provides a great platform for questions that ask about the parts of English that most people (native and non-native alike) take for granted but don't require deep understanding of English to understand. That's not saying a deep understanding of English wouldn't help in answering the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evaluate the situation. Maybe it's not the user but the flagger that is at fault. If it is the user then I would ask them about their behaviour and try and clarify their point of view. If they continue to be disruptive I would confer with other mods and come to a consensus about whether keeping their good content is worth the hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First step I would talk to the mod. If what they did makes sense after that I'd leave it. If I disagreed strongly enough I'd ask the community what they thought and leave it to them to decide. We have plenty of people with reopen votes within the community, one unilateral decision should not trump another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not mind single word requests that follow the guidelines that we already have. Ones that fall outside those guidelines should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not believe we should. What we should be doing is distinguishing between questions suitable for here and ones suitable for ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who ask questions may not know how to differentiate between ELL and EL&amp;amp;U. That's fine. Mods are able to migrate for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL is a great site. Having a question migrated there is not a punishment, or a mark saying &quot;you ain't no good at you're english&quot;, or anything negative at all. Migration is a good thing that will put your question among questions of the same type. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions at ELL are for people looking for rules to follow about how to use English, it's for teaching people how to communicate in English. EL&amp;amp;U is about describing how the language is, how it came to be, it's about intricacies and nuances and discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither site is just for beginners or just for native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a polarising situation and the whole community disagreed with me I'd have to reëvaluate my point of view, but the fact that I am part of this community means that I tend to be part of the majority. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not inflexible. I change my mind when I see compelling evidence to do so. I have voted to reopen questions I have previously voted to close. I undo downvotes and retract closevotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think we are sufficiently welcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. I prefer as little unqualified opinion as possible. I prefer stats and citations to anecdotes in answers. I don't like questions that ask for unqualified opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in chat for a large portion of most days. I'm not willing to discuss my personal life. I tend to shy away from topics I don't know anything about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want big sweeping reforms and major changes to the way the site is run, don't vote for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; overstates things drastically. People make mistakes. These mistakes can be undone. These mistakes don't happen often enough for it to be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T12:24:36.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-17T12:01:44.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;oerkelens'  answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel absolutely, positively great about the existence of ELL. From day one of my activity on ELU, I have been active on ELL, sharing my time between both. &#xA;As I got to know ELU better, I found out there was and is quite some controversy, but most of it surprised me. Having arrived around the end of last year, I actually found it just a very sensible thing to have a separate site for the specific kind of questions that people run into when they are learning the language - and I never had a big problem seeing a clear distinction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is a good raison d'etre for both sites, and what distinguishes them may &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4684/54363&quot;&gt;not so much be the questions as the expected answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that cooperation between the sites should be encouraged. A question that obviously arises from a text-book exercise or language course should gently but firmly be moved to ELL, but on the other hand, questions that dive deeper into the intricacies of the language should be brought home to ELU if they are asked at ELL. And sometimes questions can very well be asked and answered on both sites - albeit from a different angle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining the scope of both ELU and ELL is not something that one community can do without the other. I think that in cooperating with the moderator team from ELL, defining a clearer scopes and identities will help clear up the grey area that exists today and seems to annoy too many users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user does not show any willingness and/or ability to improve the commenting behaviour I would not hesitate to sanction them. Yes, there is a risk of losing a valuable source of good answers, but in a healthy community there are more of those sources. The important thing is that someone who is a source of disruption can do much more damage to a community than a &quot;steady stream of valuable answers&quot; can do good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably contact the other moderator to (possibly strongly) suggest to reconsider their decision, providing arguments for my point of view. It is likely I would look for a way to improve the content of the question, to clarify why the specific question deserves to stay open.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we do not agree and I feel strongly enough about the question staying open I would probably ask a third party (moderator) for their opinion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;More interesting is the situation where I would develop a tendency to disagree with a specific moderator's (closing) action, but I cannot easily imagine a situation where a good talk about moderation guidelines would not bring solace. And I certainly do not intend that to mean the other moderator has to agree with me - I have been enjoying ELU because it helps me learn, and I have no intention to stop learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have started to bother me a bit lately as well, especially when the focus seems to eb on the fact that no multiple word expression should be considered as an answer. If someone is looking for an expression for a cold, delicious snack often enjoyed in summer, I feel &lt;em&gt;ice cream&lt;/em&gt; is a good answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The tag might be broadened to encompass &lt;em&gt;concise expressions&lt;/em&gt;. I feel most often, if the question is legitimate, the point is to find a concise way to express an idea. That, I feel, is certainly something that has a place on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4828/&quot;&gt;Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we have to distinguish them, even if we could. The distinction is often only artificial, and the assumption that a native speaker can &quot;feel&quot; if something sounds right and a non-native cannot certainly doesn't hold water in many cases. Differences in syntax, vocabulary and idiom between different dialects are so distinct that one could argue that to apply &quot;nativity&quot;, one should include the dialect - making the subject non-native in all other dialects.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;More important is, if we want to make a distinction, the fluency in the language.&#xA;As for answers to be tailored to the needs of the asker, I don't think they should be. Answers should be tailored to the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. We are a Q&amp;amp;A site, and if I am looking for an answer to a question, I do not, as a non-native speaker, want to feel the need to ask the same question again because the original question was asked by a native speaker. Ideally, any good answer is useful to native and non-native speakers alike, as long as they are linguists, etymologists, or serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is leading - if I do not understand what the community wants, I will try to find out the reasons. Meta is a perfect place to raise such issues. Overriding community opinion is not something I would see myself do. That also questions whether I would defer to the community; yes, I would. I probably will look for clarification, and probably bring arguments for my point of view on meta, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it could be worse.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That said, it is not great. I remember when I started having the feeling that ELL was the more welcoming site of the two and in order to get started at ELU I had to test the water. Still, I lurked enough not to experience anything bad when I started posting. I do notice, however, that sometimes new users are quite rudely made aware that their question is not up to par. &#xA;It wouldn't hurt if the community in general would take the time to explain in a bit more detail what is wrong with a question or what could be improved. To kindly steer someone to ELL if needed (instead of &quot;sending them off&quot;) and maybe to use the edit-button a bit more often. I do realise however, that even when one starts on this with vigour, after the first day and ten new users, it gets tiresome. In that case, sometimes it is better not to make any remark at all, instead of telling off the new user in some short sentence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would like to encourage people who notice that behaviour in other community members to give an example of how it could be done, and if the comments are really negative towards a new user, please flag them as inappropriate. I believe that unwelcoming behaviour &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of it should be. Mine of course!&#xA;Well, there are very few matters in language about which everyone agrees, and certainly the English language, with its lack of a central authoritative language institute that German, Dutch and French have, its very wide geographical spread and its countless dialects and regional idioms, has its more than fair share of arguable issues.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would always value any opinion based on it's argumentation, credibility and possibly source. &quot;Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence&quot;, so while I do not discourage someone to give a well-formed opinion, even when he does not have five grammar-books to back it up, when the opinion leaves the realm of the generally accepted and recognizable, I would insist on the owner of the opinion providing strong and convincing evidence of its validity. I do trust that the community plays an important role in deciding which opinions they value and which not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am normally available on chat during the evenings (at GMT+1) and I am always looking forward to feedback. As long as the topic is ELU-related, there is absolutely no topic barred, and when it is not, very little is. I will not respond to dating-proposals though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are actually looking for someone with a completely different opinion and outlook on ELU and / or its relationship to ELL, and you prefer someone more authoritarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is similar to the appointment of two consuls in Rome, to circumvent the risks of tyranny. A great idea, and I can see the merits of it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, I am not sure that this is the right way to deal with a moderator's hasty decisions. A moderator should be able to react quickly and decisively, without having to wait for a second opinion. An instant close-vote carries a responsibility, and a moderator should carry that, well, responsibly. If a decision gets counter-acted by the community (a closed question gets reopened, for instance), a responsible moderator would see that as an opportunity to learn and avoid closing similar questions in the future. They might raise a question about it on meta. That is what I think a responsible moderator should do. Therefore a two-vote-close rule does not seem necessary, unless there is an overwhelmingly good reason to accept moderators who do consistently not handle their one-vote-close responsibility to the satisfaction of the community.&#xA;As a moderator-moderation tool, I think it is worth looking back at Rome: the two consuls became three. Then only one remained... and I am not sure that that &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; had the community spirit on his agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T14:30:49.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2014-06-17T15:27:17.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the floccinaucinihilipilification question a question that really deserves so many downvotes? Why/Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, the simple and very boring answer to your the question is yes it does because the community decided to downvote the post. Whether a post truly deserves downvotes is always somewhat subjective but this particular post has a vote count of +3/-9. Having a 1:3 vote ratio is very much telling us that the community agrees with the downvote message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more interesting question, in my opinion, is &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the post apparently deserves so many downvotes. I think phenry's response is a good place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T15:27:17.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-17T15:39:30.007" Score="-4" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I got suspended from the chat because 2 of my posts were flagged and the flag &quot;accepted&quot;; one referenced Islam as people believing in a &quot;magic sky man&quot; or something, the other mentioned masturbation in a way that only the most puritanical person could find offensive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/messages/16122419/history&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/messages/16122419/history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also seen this happen to other people.  Something should be changed about the flagging system to stop these suspensions happening so easily.  It can easily be used by puerile or malicious people to shut down discussion they don't like, which isn't good for chat.  As far as I know, these flags gets sent to every user with more than 10k rep, so having one or two of them &quot;accept&quot; the flag is very likely.  In short: it's way too easy to flag something and get someone suspended from chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flagging system should be overhauled; maybe so that if there are appropriate mods in the room, they should see the flag and no-one else should.  Maybe so that more people (maybe 10?) have to click &quot;Accept&quot; on the flag for it to actually suspend the user; suspension is a very harsh thing that should usually be left to a mod.  Maybe so that there is some warning sent to a user before they actually get suspended; a 3-strikes-and-you're-out system or whatever.  There are many ways to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more, there should definitely be some accountability for actually flagging stuff.  People frivolously flagging posts should be investigated and get warning and/or suspensions themselves.  Right now, it seems like they can just do this with impunity and that sucks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I'm going to, but I could start creating accounts with various different IP addresses, getting a bit of rep, then go around causing havoc in chat by flagging stuff left, right, and centre.  The system's way too easy to abuse at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="4801" LastEditDate="2014-06-17T15:46:44.867" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T15:21:27.460" Title="Do something about puerile chat flagging" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2014-06-17T16:00:17.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the flagged line about the sky man and the masturbation, and they were perfectly fine. We are not children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the flagging system doesn't work, especially since people who &lt;strong&gt;do not understand the context&lt;/strong&gt; get to vote. If you're not part of the conversation, you can't really in good conscience understand the context and validate a flag, unless it's a really serious personal attack, like &quot;I hate you, you fucking whore&quot; or something like that (but, even then, you need to make sure it wasn't intended as and perceived to be ironic!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most of your suggestions could seriously improve the flagging system. I would vote for any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T16:00:17.113" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2014-06-17T16:05:02.053" Score="19" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suspension is a very harsh thing that should usually be left to a mod&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a half-hour suspension per flagged post. And it takes &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; 6 people or a moderator to make that happen, &lt;em&gt;per flagged post&lt;/em&gt;. And that's assuming that other high-rep users or moderators don't decline the flags first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's really going on here is that you managed to piss off a bunch of folks in chat, got no support from moderators or other trusted users, got a slap on the wrist, and are all sad about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126017/are-expletives-allowed-in-se-chat&quot;&gt;Are expletives allowed in SE chat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T16:05:02.053" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2014-06-17T16:10:44.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not the one who approved the flag and I only saw it after the fact, however both posts had a reasonable expectation of being offensive and were certainly not professional.  One mocked a deity, which people are notably sensitive about.  I'd agree the other was closer to the edge, but still was kind of objectifying.  If I'd reviewed that flag, I probably would have edited the line without a suspension personally, but that isn't an option for 10k users I don't believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was any change I'd want to see to chat flags, it would be the option to remove a line without suspension. Mods can still do this, but 10ks can't and it is still more work for a mod to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35859" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T16:10:44.257" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2014-06-17T17:50:05.277" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the flagging system needs to be measured based on the cost of false positives &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; false negatives. In this case, you claim that you were incorrectly suspended which (assuming you are correct) carries the penalty of not being able to use chat for a relatively small period of time. The worst case scenario, then, is that your conversation is interrupted and you have to take a break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative wrong would be the harm caused by the flagging system &lt;em&gt;missing&lt;/em&gt; an offensive post in chat and not removing it. How should we compare this against the temporary suspension? Is it better or worse to leave a &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; offensive post in chat compared to forcing a merely &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; offensive poster to take a short break?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really have a direct equation handy for this comparison but I don't think we should be trying to change the current flagging system until we start addressing both of sides of the coin. In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How frequently does the current system unjustly suspend someone?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How frequently does the current system miss truly offensive posts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we compare the net negative impact from (1) and (2)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we improve the result contained in (3)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you've done is talk about your personal experience as it relates to (1) and then immediately jumped to (4). If you have any interesting thoughts on (2) and (3), I'm eager to hear them. I am all for improvements to systems -- but I am absolutely against reactionary changes to systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T17:50:05.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4857" CreationDate="2014-06-17T21:20:57.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Andrew’s answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear how candidates feel about the existence of English Language Learners, and whether/how they intend to preserve/promote the distinct identities of the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL provides a forum for those learning English — those who need to be able to express themselves in terms of “Third Forms” and the like. Having learned English in a different way, I find the sort of didactic answer which learners need rather difficult, so I haven't participated much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do believe that ELL has a use. It is clear, though, that that use is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; as a dumping-ground for poor questions asked on ELU. A poor question is a poor question and shouldn’t be migrated anywhere. One definite use is in providing answers to questions where the question is obviously based on a grammar book, as answers there are likely to be in a form which is useful to the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4696/18696&quot;&gt;wrote in a Meta answer&lt;/a&gt;, there may be a case for the &lt;code&gt;english.SE&lt;/code&gt; url to point to ELL rather than ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags need to dealt with, as a community can take only so much disruption. Comments would need to be removed, and the standard warning added about comments being intended to request clarification. Continued misuse of comments would need to be handled via private channels. I would hope that it wouldn't be necessary to proceed to suspension, but limited suspensions or an indefinite suspension as a last resort may be needed to enforce a period of reflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Privately! Firstly in a private chatroom, probably, or via the Teachers’ Lounge (I think that’s what it’s called) so that other moderators might express an opinion. I may not have noticed something; there may be some history I’m not aware of; I am open to persuasion. Equally, the other moderator may not have recognised something worthy which I saw in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of single-word-requests questions get asked. Many users find that these undermine the quality of the site. What is your stance on single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no issues with well-written questions. I &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; have issues with poor questions, where there is no evidence of research, no context, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/word-for-disrespecting-eldest-half-sister-by-referring-to-her-husband-as-girly-g&quot;&gt;ridiculous request&lt;/a&gt; or any combination of the above. I’ve tried to use comments to get the authors to improve their questions, but if they haven’t done that reasonably quickly then I’m not averse to seeing the question put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we distinguish native from non-native participants? Should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can’t, and we shouldn’t. One of the candidates in the current election is not a native-speaker, and at least one existing mod is not either, but it’s very difficult to tell. Questions and answers should stand or fall (or be migrated) on their own merits, never forgetting that any post can be edited to improve its chances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you resolve differences of opinion between yourself and the general community? For example, if you have strong opinions about what questions should remain open or closed but there is a significant portion of the community that disagrees, what would you do about it? Would you ever override the community opinion and act as you think is best? Would you ever defer to the community entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in my nomination text, these days I comment in a bid to assist users in formulating a better question and wait. If other community members feel that the question should be closed, then fine. I do find duplicates quite well, but even there I’d be prepared to re-open (or not object to another mod re-opening unilaterally) if it was shown that the duplicate didn't in fact match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community must always trump moderators. As it only takes five votes to close or re-open a question, it doesn’t even need to be a “significant portion of the community” which disagrees. And where a moderator acts in a way which doesn’t have that sort of recourse, there are comments (which can be voted on) or Meta to raise a voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you believe EL&amp;amp;U is sufficiently welcoming and friendly to new users? If not, what do you think should be done to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the site is &lt;strong&gt;sufficiently&lt;/strong&gt; welcoming; or at least, it’s as welcoming as other Stack Exchange sites. I don't think people should simply rock up and post a one-line question. I do believe that the site is better for better questions, and I believe that better questions get better answers. People who want a good answer come to Stack Exchange, but should be prepared to put a bit of effort in themselves to help the community provide that. Those are the basic ground rules across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably scope for comments to be less brusque within the space available; but comments are just that — comments, to elicit clarification or explain something which can’t go in an answer. “Welcome to ELU” is succinct, and Stack Exchange sites are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; forums or message boards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is, or should be, opinions? Whose opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn’t an Académie Anglaise, so every answer is an opinion. A good answer can justify that opinion, however, either with references or with concrete examples. Even references are just opinions at the end of the day though, and it does appear that one or two published authors are trying to push their own agenda with how the language should develop. I have no problem with answers expressing contrary opinions, providing they can be substantiated: it’s up to voters to choose between them (and the asker to accept one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you be available in chat for questions related to the site? What topics are you willing or not willing to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes; I’m logged in a lot of the time and can be pinged for questions relating to the site. I’m not willing to discuss topics not related to the site unless I instigate my participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most convincing reason we shouldn't make you a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t suffer fools gladly. Of course, sometimes that’s a virtue: I stamp on spam and rule-breaking sockpuppets ruthlessly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you feel about a rule of needing two mods to agree before closing a question as being duplicate, off-topic, or POB? Should such a rule be a &quot;soft&quot; rule or strict? All too often this decision appears to be unilateral, and at times, taken in haste. The consensus of two mods would guarantee greater objectivity and hopefully, limit those instances where a question is put on hold based on a question's title and not on its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t say I’m in favour of the idea. By definition a moderator’s decision is unilateral, as they have a binding vote, even if another one agrees with the decision. If a question is put on hold because of its title and the content points to something different, then it’s a poor question because it’s unclear, and something needs to be sorted. Edit the question or its title, put a comment on it explaining matters and flag for moderator attention — or preferably cast a vote — to get it re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T21:20:57.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2014-06-18T15:21:27.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think offence, intended or otherwise, is really relevant to whether a comment is acceptable or not. Can the matter not be approached more philosophically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment is an ad hominem, it goes. If it isn't, it stays. Ad hominem status can (largely) be evaluated context-independently, because it would have to be directed within the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments attacking faith or beliefs directly would easily be identifiable as ad hominem, but objecting to a person professing their beliefs by flagging them is inappropriate. See the example situations below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation 1: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Person A says that X religion is silly, as this is what they believe. Person B believes X religion, so is offended. Consequently they flag the comment. Much as A was stepping on B's sensibilities, B is now equivalently dismissing A's beliefs, with the added consequence of a chat ban for expressing them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ban is an inappropriate result. A should not be muted for expressing their beliefs in an untargeted manner. Any affront taken is mainly 'on the receiver' should be dealt with by rejoinder or ignoring the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Person A says that Person B's belief in X is silly. Person B flags the comment and A is chat banned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ban is appropriate as this is a direct affront to B via their beliefs. Any affront taken is 'on the issuer' as it is a directed statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70998" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T15:21:27.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-18T16:18:15.787" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, someone might want to read a protected question, comments, or answers to it. And someone might want to add a new comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it would be helpful to know before visiting a question whether it is protected. That way, someone who might visit it to offer an answer or edit the question can know beforehand that new answers and edits are not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question has been determined to be a duplicate, you see &lt;strong&gt;[duplicate]&lt;/strong&gt; in its title at the top level.  And if migrated you see &lt;strong&gt;[migrated]&lt;/strong&gt;. Why not similarly show &lt;strong&gt;[protected]&lt;/strong&gt; for a protected question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51214" LastEditorUserId="51214" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T16:36:44.830" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T16:36:44.830" Title="Suggestion: Make clear at top level that a question is protected" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2014-06-18T19:40:31.417" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come back to this meta question on account of the 2014 Mod election. I have this to add: since the beginning of ELU, many answer-providing users have objected to being treated like dictionary operators. There are so many questions that could be easily answered by a simple dictionary lookup. There are so many questions that &lt;em&gt;arise&lt;/em&gt; from a dictionary lookup. There is a major difference between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between fast and quick?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between fast and quick? I checked the dictionary and found that the definitions overlap. Are there situations when I should or shouldn't use one of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU users close the first one because we are not your dictionary operator. Is that too unwelcoming? Dictionaries should be a first-line tool in any English-related question. They are plentiful and there are many free ones and even Google has a built-in dictionary. There range from low (wiktionary) to high (OED) authority. There is just no excuse for not using one. Yet sooooo many questions boil down to a simple dictionary search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don't understand this sentence: &amp;quot; &amp;lt;- look the words up in the dictionary first, or at least explain what part bothers you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What's the difference between X and Y?&amp;quot; &amp;lt;- look the words up first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What's the origin of the word X?&amp;quot; &amp;lt;- look it up in a good dictionary, or on etymonline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Is X really a word?&amp;quot; &amp;lt;- did you try a dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc. I cannot count the number of questions I've seen that show zero effort on behalf of the asker. I should point out that I consider the situation here different from, say, StackOverflow, where a particular program might appear to match what the documentation suggests, yet still fail, or where the documentation you need to answer a question is actually 10 large documents which must be first memorized, then re-analyzed internally, or where there is no documentation at all. The English language is extremely well documented. And crucially, the most important document is widely available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should ELU user be required to allow any lazy questions? Even if this isn't a site for linguists, do we have to let just anyone post questions that are just &amp;quot;What is X? I can't be bothered to look X up in a dictionary&amp;quot;? I think most users who feel we are snobs fall into the category of &amp;quot;users who wanted us to look it up for them.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T19:40:31.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-18T21:23:08.213" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never yet flagged a question, but wanted to flag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178675/why-is-it-important-to-read-dystopian-texts&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178675/why-is-it-important-to-read-dystopian-texts&lt;/a&gt; when it became evident that the questioner was asking us to help him or her with an exam answer, and probably intending to pass our community&amp;rsquo;s insight off as his or her own. I was surprised to find that the menu of options (reasons) for flagging a question did not really allow for this as an objection to a question. Perhaps it should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T23:17:30.747" Title="Questions seeking illicit help from EL&amp;U community on exams, etc" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4879" CreationDate="2014-06-18T23:17:30.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, a close vote would have been more appropriate. The question has since been voted closed as Primarily Opinion-Based by five other users which I think is the best action for this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T23:17:30.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-20T15:28:04.640" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone asked the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/71921&quot;&gt;pwned / owned&lt;/a&gt;. I saw it in the edit queue. I almost voted to delete, but ended up skipping it because I wasn't sure. Would this be considered &quot;very low quality?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T15:52:54.210" Title="Simple questions about slang" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4881" CreationDate="2014-06-20T15:52:54.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slang is on-topic, but &quot;what does a word mean&quot; is usually not, because there are places to go to look up definitions. We have a list of general references and we expect that users try some of those. If they can't understand what they've found, or come up empty-handed, and they explain what research they've done and what their problem is, then their question is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T15:52:54.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2014-06-20T18:29:10.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m coming at this as someone whose &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178819/someone-who-just-thinks-they-know-what-theyre-talking-about&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was just tagged pejorative language (I’ve already got a good answer, so I don’t really care).  I can understand why someone could see my question as looking for an insulting term, but I was looking for a term to refer to a class of people which at some point or other includes nearly everyone who posts on forums, and probably includes everyone in the world who engages in normal conversation. Talking witout any expertise is a practice that’s looked down on, but I was specifically looking for the least insulting term possible that still gets the meaning across, preferably with some humor. Basically, the intent of the question was to find a way to convey this (slightly) negative description in the least mean-spirited way possible. And I got a wonderful answer, and learned a new word at the same time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people took the tag seriously, then perhaps the most useful answers would never have been posted, because they are not particularly pejorative. The question might have prompted a lot of pejorative responses, but that was not the intention. Tagging a question based on the answerer’s interpretation rather than the questioner’s intent seems a unproductive practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is far and away the most times I’ve ever used the word pejorative in any piece of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T18:29:10.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4895" CreationDate="2014-06-20T20:07:54.410" Score="10" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been traveling the past few weeks so I haven't kept up with the election stuff.  I did look at the candidates and they all seem like they would do a good job to me.  Who knows one might be corrupt and turn this into a Sanskrit shop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I feel that people have been beating around the bush a bit on the issue with the site.  I wrote an answer-question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4818/2014-moderator-election-qa-question-collection/4859#4859&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; which I will ask here since it will allow people to answer more appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a bit of an extension of John/FF's questions... If ELU stays&#xA;  as a separate entity as ELL, how do we ensure that the people&#xA;  answering the questions don't belong on the ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is pretty easy to moderate questions and close them off. But I find&#xA;  that the biggest issue with the site is the users answering. Being a&#xA;  long-time SE user and one that uses many SE sites I get that you will&#xA;  have people answering questions without the &quot;right background&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens is you get really bad answers. Those answers get&#xA;  downvoted and the user flails. But that doesn't work here because of&#xA;  the ELL/ELU issue (as pointed out by FF's question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have several users that are obviously not native speakers (John&#xA;  points this out) that answer a high volume of questions. Some of these&#xA;  users have been near the top of the leaderboard lately. They answer&#xA;  everything, seemingly using reverse dictionaries. They edit their&#xA;  answers 20 times based on comments and after finding out the first 10&#xA;  things they put were incorrect. Often the 20th thing isn't much better&#xA;  or isn't explained with the right context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Often they take answers from other users or simply take another answer&#xA;  and use a thesaurus to answer a question. This isn't rocket science.&#xA;  We all know who these users are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my question is what do the candidates think about these users? What&#xA;  can we do about this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Personally I come to the site to learn. I find some of the accepted&#xA;  answers and highly upvoted answers ridiculous at times - so much so&#xA;  that I am not learning, I am doubting my own knowledge. I feel that&#xA;  these &quot;answers&quot; detract from the site and also halt good&#xA;  answers/discussion. These answers usually come with some sort of&#xA;  &quot;proof&quot; that taken by itself might answer the question but put in&#xA;  context they are absolutely incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not sure how other people feel - but I just get tired of reading a&#xA;  half page of &quot;research&quot; from a non-native speaker doing a reverse&#xA;  dictionary on stuff that just doesn't make sense. I can downvote these&#xA;  things and I do. And I can upvote the good answers buried underneath&#xA;  and I do. But that doesn't make up for the 20 nonnative speakers that&#xA;  already upvoted the wrong answer, which goes back to FF's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this kind of gets into some of the topics phenry discussed in his recent meta question.  The bad questions can be tackled with different bylaws and policing but there is nothing in SE to combat users who shouldn't be answering and users who shouldn't be voting.  Well I know there are some things in place but they don't work here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T22:07:23.450" Title="2014 Moderator Election - ELU's real issue" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-21T04:12:27.050" Score="8" ViewCount="677" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I recently first visited the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/a&gt; chat room&lt;/strong&gt;, I arrived with many erroneous expectations. I presumed that the EL&amp;amp;U chat room would center on English language discussion, and that experienced users would be welcoming towards curious new users with similar interests. &lt;strong&gt;In reality, I immediately encountered arbitrary, unintuitive norms&lt;/strong&gt; that many of the users presumed I should deduce by myself. If it were not for the intervention of @Cerberus, @JasperLoy, and other courteous users, I would have continued my desperate attempt to converse with the &quot;bot&quot; @Jarvis and otherwise try to assimilate into this perplexing new environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial experience was far from ideal, and while I did receive sufficient assistance from some kind users, I fear that other prospective chat users may not receive the introduction to EL&amp;amp;U chat culture that is &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; to truly participate in chat. I understand how useful and fun this feature can be, and it would be a shame if new users felt alienated by the strange new environment and subsequently declined to participate in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extrapolating from my jarring experience, I feel there are some &lt;strong&gt;easy ways that the  experience for new users could be significantly improved without adversely affecting the customs of established users&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first suggestion would be to &lt;em&gt;display a room-specific &quot;wiki page&quot; to first-time visitors&lt;/em&gt; that describes what topics are commonly discussed, which topics are appropriate for discussion (including whether profanity or discussion of sex are permitted), whether new users are welcome to just join in on the conversation, and important feature information not included in the Chat FAQ (such as the presence of bots and the commands required to use them). &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/233692/one-page-wikis-to-store-all-the-chat-rooms-nuggets-and-references&quot;&gt;Such a feature has been proposed on Stack Exchange Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but has not received sufficient attention (thank you to @hichris123 for showing me the proposal). If I had seen such a page before I had entered the chat room, my experience would have been significantly smoother. In fact, the first time I visited the EL&amp;amp;U chatroom, I was actually trying to find the FAQ/feature documentation and read the transcript. A wiki page detailing this information would ensure that the new users are aware of the general culture of the room, and that they are willing or even eager to participate in such an environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the first, ideal suggestion has not been implemented yet, my second-best suggestion would be to use the &quot;room topic&quot; field, which is the description underneath the room name, for its intended purpose: describing the room name. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#about&quot;&gt;Chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt; gives the following information on room topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/panj5.png&quot; alt=&quot;All chat occurs in a room; each room has a defined topic. When talking in a room, it&amp;#39;s polite to stay roughly on topic for the room, as defined by the room owners.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the room topic should be just that, a description of the general topic, as the appropriateness of the chat lines is contingent on this field. However, EL&amp;amp;U users who visit the &quot;flagship&quot; chat room for the first time can feel perplexed and excluded when greeted with a bizarre &quot;topic&quot; that looks nothing like the one described in the Chat FAQ. When I first visited, the &quot;topic&quot; seemed more like a shibboleth than an actual description of the room's frequent topics. It was quite disconcerting. For instance, here was the one when I joined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Incomprehensible Room. It slaws your typizg, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the current &quot;room topic&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am in a party. The wine is depleted. Then some Son of God manufacture even more win. Yay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, these are intended to be humorous. However, if the amusement of a select few established chat users comes at the expense of causing bafflement for new chat users, then such a &quot;room topic&quot; is inappropriate, especially when it contrasts with the expected &quot;room topic&quot; concept shown in the Chat FAQ. Although the EL&amp;amp;U chat room is privately owned, it should still conform to some guidelines. The Stack Exchange chat rooms are used by the general public, and new users naturally want to visit a popular room on their preferred topic when they first visit chat. If all the major rooms (especially one called EL&amp;amp;U, which new users will logically assume is the primary chat room for EL&amp;amp;U users) seem exclusive, it will discourage new users from using this valuable feature.  Although the room is the owner's room to do with as he/she pleases, his/her choices affect the quality of chat for other users, especially new ones. Personally, I think a room topic along the lines of the following would be of great help to new users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The chat room for English Language enthusiasts and @Jarvis the bot (visitors welcome too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, not all the documentation can be crammed into the room topic. But there is still plenty of important information that can be added to the topic, information that some old chat users might take for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I think that a basic code of conduct should be enforced, with egregious violations being consistently flagged. For instance, some older users have used the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/09/how-to-ask-out-an-apple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pineapple&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as a secret joke to refer to the mistakes made by English language learners. An even smaller set of users have taken this use to inappropriate levels, ridiculing confused English language learners who are merely searching for the right place to ask their question. This attitude of exclusivity is detrimental to the site, and can easily ostracize new users who feel that they are being secretly ridiculed by the same experienced users that should be helping them. I feel that this should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be acceptable behavior. Even though &lt;em&gt;pineapple&lt;/em&gt; in this sense can be used innocuously or even endearingly, that does not make the offensive instances of &lt;em&gt;pineapple&lt;/em&gt; (which are the only instances with which I take umbrage) any less inappropriate. Moreover, the Chat FAQ has this to say on the matter of proper conduct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do have fun, but please keep it professional and always be respectful of your fellow community members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We expect community members to treat each other with respect ... even when they don't deserve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I feel that even this basic code of conduct is often blatantly transgressed. As @Shog9 mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/14995?m=16193678#16193678&quot;&gt;here in the election chat room&lt;/a&gt;, there is a reluctance to flag even the most obviously offensive posts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4870/do-something-about-puerile-chat-flagging/4872#4872&quot;&gt;Because the penalties for offensive chat lines are quite lenient to begin with&lt;/a&gt;, I feel that chat users should not be criticized for flagging genuinely offensive posts, in accordance with the quite liberal Chat FAQ guidelines. To be clear, I am not advocating censorship, just civility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has further insights on how to improve the chat experience for newbies, please share an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T04:55:51.750" Title="How can we improve the introduction of new chat users to EL&amp;U chat &quot;culture&quot; and features?" Tags="|discussion|user-interface|chat|new-users|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2014-06-21T04:58:28.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of traditions associated with the ELU main chatroom that have evolved over the years. Most of these are all in good fun, but this is the main room that represents our site in the chat system, and it can beneficial to have someone report on these traditions with fresh eyes, as you've done here. As &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/dan-snyder-and-the-redskins-take-a-loss.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Daniel Snyder&lt;/a&gt; is being reminded right now, aspects of a culture that appear innocuous to those within it can come across very differently to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;I am in a party...&quot; tagline is problematic for two reasons, in my opinion. First, as you've noted, it's pretty self-indulgent to use the space that's supposed to explain the room to visitors for private in-jokes. Some of the other main rooms for other SE sites have humorous taglines too, but at least most of them have some obvious connection to the subject matter of the parent site. Secondly, the phrasing bears the hallmarks of a non-fluent speaker of English (specifically, the preposition confusion with &quot;in a party&quot;), and when there is no context supplied—i.e., the way 99.9 percent of visitors are going to encounter it—it just looks like we've decided to ridicule some poor foreign person for some reason. To be clear, I don't think any of this was intended, and I'm certain that no one involved with it is trying to be either exclusionary or a bully. But that just goes to show why it's a good thing to have an outsider's perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't know about the use of &quot;pineapple&quot; as a label for non-native speakers of English until today. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=pineapple&amp;amp;Room=95&amp;amp;page=1&amp;amp;pagesize=50&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;Going through old chat transcripts for uses of the term&lt;/a&gt;, I was struck by how much it reads like an ethnic slur. Seriously, I kind of feel like I need to take a shower after reading that. I really think that this practice needs to stop immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T04:58:28.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2014-06-21T05:08:50.387" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The room topic of the ELU chat room has traditionally been something along the lines of &quot;The Incomprehensible Room&quot; or &quot;The off-topic room&quot;. Sometimes it changes to something more obscure, like the &quot;some son of god&quot; one. I think the room's title is sufficiently self-explanatory that the topic isn't really needed, and I feel it would be a shame to lose that one bit of community fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think a chat-explanation page could be useful. No argument there, really. There isn't enough documentation about the chat features and there's nowhere to document the room norms and memes, like the pineapple pun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KitSox (now Jarvis) is not an official feature of the room. It's just a chatbot run by KitFox. The bot has some useful features and some playful ones. It doesn't respond when you ping it, it only responds to !! commands. I've never seen anyone try to talk to the bot for more than one or two messages before being set straight by the regulars.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need the bot? No. If it violates some policy, or is deemed to be a problem, I'm sure Kit will nuke it and nobody will mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the bot cause any harm? I don't think so, barring the fact that most of the bot interactions are not on-ELU-topic.&#xA;Note that there are similar bots in some of the other rooms. The Javascript room, for example. They are even wilder with it than we are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;then some Son of God manufacture more win&quot; topic: This topic, in particular, I think bears special consideration. It is 100% correct that it is a quote from a pineapple question. It is also correct that it is a humourous sentence, though, unintentionally so. It is a simple fact that when you are learning to speak a new language, you will occasionally utter something unintentionally hilarious. I myself had this problem with Chinese, when I asked a Chinese person to get me a pair of pants from the kitchen (I meant chopsticks). That was hilarious. People laughed. But the important thing was that they weren't mocking me, personally. The user in question had their question edited for grammar and the original text is now hidden in the edit history of the site. But it is an amusing sentence. &#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should that sort of thing be forbidden? I can see why it might be. However I don't feel that that user was mistreated in this situation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does that topic make the chat room less welcoming? I'm not sure that it does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My Chat first impressions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I joined the site, there was no chat. I got to know some of the regular users during the beta through their answers and their comments. We had some lively comments back in the day, with full-blown arguments, etc. Just like now, actually. I remember one of the first users to ragequit the site. I wonder if he would have quit if we'd had chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, there was chat but I didn't bother going. Then I finally went and it was full of people whose names I'd seen all over the site: answers, edits, comments, etc. It was a bit intimidating, because these were the mods, the top users, etc. And even then, at the time, I was a page-1 user, rep-wise. But I was still intimidated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they were chatting. Reg and Rob were telling jokes only they understood. Kosmonaut and Reg and others were having linguistics discussions that stretched beyond my armchair-linguist understanding. Etc. It was a lively place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't there to ask a question. I was there to chat, and get to know the users, so I had to lurk a bit and read the transcript a bit before I felt comfortable speaking up. But in this regard it is no different than any other group. Like when you start a new job, your new coworkers still have conversations about stuff that happened before you were here. They have inside jokes. Shorthand ways of communicating. This is normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the same way whenever I go into any of the active chats on the site. There are regular users and they know each other and don't know me. They ignore me until I address them. And if they're just chatting about nothing in particular, I'll usually have nothing to say because why would I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a specific question that's on-topic, I will usually just ask it, and they will respond appropriately. Most of them are polite. Same with us. Lots of visitors come to our chat and ask for help, either English help or SE help. Some of them become regulars. Some become help vampires. But they almost always get a polite response at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The purpose of chat&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of our chat room, anyway? When SE first introduced the chat rooms, it was specifically so that users could do the thing they wanted to do: chat. talk. shoot the breeze. goof off, a bit. Get to know their comrades. The purpose of the site is to answer questions about English. The purpose of the Meta is to answrer questions about the site. The purpose of the chat is.... the users. Some chat rooms don't even allow questions. They have the site for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is our chat really for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was suggested in the election chat (messages now moved to main chat room) that we could have two rooms: one for helping users, and one for chitchat. To that I have to say that I, and some of the other regulars, find it extremely tiring trying to maintain two chats at once. We will simply be in one room and ignoring the others. I tried being in the ELL chat but it was just too much hassle. So if we have a work room and a play room, I will either be working or playing. And you can guess which it will be. We might have the most welcoming, professional work chat in the whole SE network, but it will also be dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T05:08:50.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2014-06-21T05:57:39.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who enters a new space with preconceived notions will be surprised and perhaps disappointed. While I think your suggestion is fine, I don't think it will do much to curb new user shock, because, as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, &quot;It's always something&quot;. For you, it was the bot, and the tagline. Personally, the first time I said &quot;hello&quot; to KitSox and was corrected, I was amused by my naïveté. I was also amused by the tagline. I had assumed it was the utterance of someone quite drunk. I was distressed, however, to find that it was actually a question which had been posed by a user of EL&amp;amp;U. What would that user have thought if he had wandered into chat? I presume he has not done so, thankfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of these introductions will change the true nature of chat, because it won't change chat's core and the proprietary air of the users, which is demonstrated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4870/do-something-about-puerile-chat-flagging&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; recent meta post and in the Election Chat Room last night. The attitude is, &quot;How dare you dictate what can go on in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; home?&quot; I'm not saying I can't sympathize, because I do. I do believe chat should be a place where people can vent their frustrations about the nth terrible single word request. Or the nth rude comment posted at having been down voted. Or &lt;em&gt;whatever&lt;/em&gt;, with a few major exceptions. I have seen totally green users, non-native and native speakers alike, not only accepted but welcomed into chat. Patience in answering questions. Good suggestions for resources. Advice for how to improve in a particular area. Advice on how to use chat. Advice on everything asked for. I am very hesitant to disturb these sustaining waters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to see addressed is the attitude that nothing is immune from derision. One mentions one's faith in a deity at significant peril. You might wonder why anyone in chat would talk about religion, but it happens, and the result hasn't been pretty in my experience. Also, express any conservatism in matters sexual? Say, you don't like a certain offensive word in a title, and after editing it, you wander into chat? Be prepared to enter a room wherein you're being roundly ridiculed by a select few. Speak in your defense only at your peril. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone is like this in chat; they are by a majority admirable, kind, patient, intimidatingly intelligent people, including the person criticized last night for the funny lines under the room's name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should chat be a place free from seriously abusive behavior? Absolutely. Should it be a place where angels fear to tread? No. Can it be more welcoming? I think it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; welcoming. If you believe it should be different, hang out in chat and make it different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this is not a hill to die on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T04:55:51.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2014-06-21T09:34:18.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;So my question is what do the candidates think about these users? What can we do about this situation?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The basic SE model applies to all SE sites&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody can ask a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody can answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answers are voted up and rise to the top&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding voting (up or down) on an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...good content rises to the top&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...incorrect content falls to the bottom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On accepted answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final statement indicating that the question has now been answered perfectly. It simply means that the author received an answer that worked for him or her personally...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assuming that you want to stay within the general SE framework&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could suggest a change to the reputation limits perhaps raise&#xA;the bar on answering a question to, perhaps, 5000. That would&#xA;prevent the 'unproven' users from providing answers but would also&#xA;alienate new users who could provide answers that meet your quality&#xA;standards. At that level the 'answerer' pool would be reduced to&#xA;around 100 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could suggest that all users must declare what sort of education&#xA;they have and/or whether they class themselves as native or&#xA;non-native speakers and have a moderator judge them accordingly&#xA;whether they are allowed to answer or not. That doesn't sound like&#xA;it would be an acceptable SE policy but you never know but I suspect&#xA;it would be difficult to manage as people would presumably need to&#xA;provide evidence for their claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators could be given the freedom to simply delete answers they&#xA;judge as wrong, then those answers couldn't get votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could down vote answers that you believe&#xA;are wrong, leave a comment explaining why it's wrong and provide&#xA;what you believe to be the correct answer. If the question author still selects a 'wrong' answer as the accepted answer then that is their choice. Perhaps even more important is to up vote all answers you feel are right/good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users could be prevented from both asking and answering questions until they have read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/&quot;&gt;What is General Reference&lt;/a&gt; page. That functionality is available in SE through badges I believe. The GR page is something of a shambles but it could easily be tidied up into a proper &lt;em&gt;If your question can be answered through any one of these linked sites then it will be closed as off-topic. If you answer comes from any one of these linked sites then the answer is a poor answer as the question author could have found it themselves, do not post answers that come from General Reference sites&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps editing it into a list and locking it and only allowing moderators to add new items to the list would help maintain a structure that people might actually look at before asking or answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Items 1 &amp;amp; 2 will almost certainly draw more accusations of elitism/snobbery and whatever else EL&amp;amp;U is renowned for but isn't that the point? If I asked a question here I'd want it answered by someone who at least claims to know what they are talking about, not someone who happens to have a dictionary to hand.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Item 3 may have the [unintended] consequence of branding EL&amp;amp;U as unfriendly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If item 4 doesn't 'work' then that might suggest that EL&amp;amp;U is not a good fit for the SE platform.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Item 5 will reduce the activity on the site massively, possibly to the point of making it a useless SE site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As an aside&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'non-native speakers' get used a lot on this site but it seems to be used to mean 'not very good [by some intangible standard] at English'. ELL makes it very clear that it welcomes non-native speakers. EL&amp;amp;U does not make it clear that it wants (if indeed it does) to discourage non-native speakers and/or people without a very good grasp of English; perhaps it should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to ask how you know (apart from '&lt;em&gt;I just know&lt;/em&gt;') that the answers you are talking about have been written by non-native speakers and have been up voted by non-native speakers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the candidates think about these users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a candidate and I don't know who 'these users' are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do about this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Item 4 in the list above would be my choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T10:52:12.040" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-21T15:16:22.727" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to have reopened &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180112/when-are-big-words-needed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180112/when-are-big-words-needed&lt;/a&gt;, so how can it be improved or emended, if at all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I exemplified with 8 examples, but are these too numerous? My main question concerns the necessity of bombastic words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T17:44:46.230" Title="Can my question on 'turgid words' be improved?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4890" CreationDate="2014-06-21T16:38:56.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I think this question isn't a good fit for a Stack Exchange site. Essentially you have asked &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;are there any valid reasons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to which the answer must be &quot;Yes&quot;, or the words would never be used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a reason is valid or not is entirely subjective: the author must have a reason he believes to be valid. But the only way to find out what that reason is &amp;mdash; so that one might form one's own subjective opinion of it &amp;mdash; is to ask &lt;strong&gt;him,&lt;/strong&gt; not the internet in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the minor point that some of your comparisons are unusual. I wouldn't have paired &lt;em&gt;endure&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;brook/countenance&lt;/em&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the whole, it is a discussion question. It's not a bad discussion question, but because it's a discussion question it's not suited to the SE format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T16:38:56.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4890" CreationDate="2014-06-21T17:44:46.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you not change the question to something like 'Under what circumstances is erudite grandiloquence more suited to the message than colloquial brevity?' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70998" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T17:44:46.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2014-06-21T19:14:02.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though I've been with ELU for a while now, I've only tried out chat a handful of times. (So take my thoughts with a grain of salt.) When I first got the rep, I looked into the general chat room. Chit-chat with a group (and I'd even say chit-chat in general) can be undirected, spontaneous, and lively -- and that's about what I remember this chat being. The topic was not something I found interesting at the time, so I left. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a panel shows up on the homepage about which users are in chat now, but at times it seems to be filled with users I don't know very well. Some I've seen active on older posts, so I bet they're active in silent (e.g., voting) or behind-the-scenes ways; others I've never really interacted with (aside from reading their posts), but I'm not very active. And of the users I have interacted with, I've rarely seen the ones I'm most interested in hearing from on that panel when it shows, so I never stopped by chat even though I have been visiting ELU on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been opening chat more since the moderator elections, but I'm still undecided on whether I'll continue once it closes. The SE Q&amp;amp;A set-up, where I sit down and think about something for a while and weigh in when I think I've found something to say, works better for my current, public persona than chat. (I say &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; because it was different when I was younger, and I don't know which is &quot;me going through a phase.&quot;) :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this raises an important question: Before we invest in changing chat, how interested are newer users in joining chat? But I think there's a more important question to be dealt with: Are there ways to raise new user awareness of what chat is, so they can make an informed decision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is &quot;Yes&quot; and have been thinking of ways to do it. One I think might benefit the community as a whole is: Before putting some questions on-hold, can we bring the asker into chat to talk it out? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;This page says it's 20 rep to chat&lt;/a&gt;, which means a user who starts with 1 rep (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/48037/could-someone-have-negative-reputation-in-stackoverflow&quot;&gt;regardless of initial downvote tally&lt;/a&gt;) could be be allowed into chat if 3 (to give some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77613/can-you-lose-privileges&quot;&gt;wiggle room&lt;/a&gt;) chat users upvoted him. These votes may be undone later at the community's discretion, though it's best to warn the asker beforehand about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, in addition to introducing new users to chat, this approach has the potential of eliminating some of the confusion around flags. When a question is put on-hold, I can understand how an asker might view it as unfriendly: Whether duplicate, GR, NARQ, etc., the asker may feel like he is being &lt;em&gt;told&lt;/em&gt; what the answer to his question is without being &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt; if it is the answer he's looking for. And so he comes to the site with a question and feels like he's leaving empty-handed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I understand chat correctly, I can have a real, free (less restrained by character counts, for example) conversation with others to potentially arrive at a consensus, compromise, or understanding.&lt;/strong&gt; I've seen it used this way for long comment threads on ELU, but not for close-votes. If it has been used in this way, I think it's a great idea to popularize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's ok for the work room to stay the same as the play room, to use Mr. Shiny and New's words. Another reason I would add to his is that now the asker has been introduced to chat and its members via his question, he may stay in a bit for the chatting and thus have a benchmark with which to make his decision about whether or not to use chat recreationally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential downside to this suggestion would be when the asker is not available to chat. In that case, the question may be put on hold to avoid answerers from investing time into it if it turns out after chatting not to be an ELU question, but with a comment noting the hold is not permanent and asking to chat with the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat could become very busy under this approach, so it may best be reserved for: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polite questions/askers &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions where the asker is bewildered by the site's reaction &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chat users' discretion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this would be introducing new users to chat, I think it best to use confusing terms like &lt;em&gt;pineapple&lt;/em&gt; sparingly. But after spending some time in chat and getting to know its residents, the asker may find themselves taking these in the innocuous, light-hearted sense they are meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T19:14:02.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2014-06-22T13:51:46.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you have made some great suggestions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the javascript room, all new users are greeted by the bot with a message that contains a link to their chat rules page. I believe that our bot could do the same thing, since she's forked from their bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a chat rules page, but we could write a blog article or series of articles about our chat room and the specific quirks of our chat culture, including common abbreviations, bot basics, inside jokes, and how not to irritate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come to chat! We'll talk it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T13:51:46.233" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2014-06-23T07:34:21.940" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have several users that are obviously not native speakers (John&#xA;  points this out) that answer a high volume of questions. Some of these&#xA;  users have been near the top of the leaderboard lately. They answer&#xA;  everything, seemingly using reverse dictionaries. They edit their&#xA;  answers 20 times based on comments and after finding out the first 10&#xA;  things they put were incorrect. Often the 20th thing isn't much better&#xA;  or isn't explained with the right context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; who you are talking about, but it's &lt;strong&gt;one/two non native speakers out of hundreds/thousands&lt;/strong&gt;, one particular user does edit his/her answer twenty (and once, to my amusement, even thirty-three times!) but &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; he/she was aware that the post needed improvement. And who's to say that the twentieth edit is not an improvement? On the contrary, I have found it has been. Does it mean I'll upvote it, not necessarily. Besides, what about the times when the users posts are pretty good? When the answers suggested do fit, what do you do then? Do you refuse to upvote because of their previous track record?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the OP's first contributions weren't exactly pearls of wisdom, however the quality of his posts over time has improved dramatically and I enjoy reading his contributions, he is someone who I can rely on to get an American perspective. I trust his judgement (read answers), but I needn't always agree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What EL&amp;amp;U needs (and relatively soon) are more native speakers who ONLY vote, they needn't be grammar gods, but they would instantly see if an answer or question is &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; without necessarily understanding &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. The problem arises though when those &quot;English native speakers&quot; attempt to answer grammar-type questions. Often they'll just provide the &quot;answer&quot; without any explanation, and completely disregard any alternative solutions. They'll fail to explain &quot;why&quot;, and the number of times I've seen misspellings, poor capitalization, and poorly constructed sentences from native speakers is embarrassing. Being a native speaker does not mean you have an awareness of your language, how it functions, how the words connect with each other; whereas speakers of English as a second (or third) language  often do, and will want to understand further by asking those type of questions which your average native speaker will never have reflected upon. Questions which can be stimulating and fun to answer but will mistakenly  be dismissed as being trivial, unimportant and general reference because your average NS will only be able to reply: &quot;&lt;em&gt;because it is&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;English language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; site populated and governed by the greater part by English &lt;em&gt;native speakers&lt;/em&gt; is one destined to die. Don't believe me, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SE Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;, practically a graveyard judging by the number of users and questions asked. If the OP wants a site where his intellectual prowess can be tested, I'd recommend that he visit that site.  He might find it stimulating and gratifying or... out of his depth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My suggestion that EL&amp;amp;U needs native speaker voters, is a provocation, nevertheless it is true that there is a rise in the number of &lt;em&gt;inappropriate&lt;/em&gt; answers being upvoted. If the more seasoned members of this community wish to counteract this phenomenon there are FIVE available recourses:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Upvote&lt;/strong&gt; the best answers.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Downvote&lt;/strong&gt; those answers which are blatantly incorrect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;strong&gt;Leave a comment&lt;/strong&gt; at the post (not necessarily accompanied by a downvote) explaining where the poster is mistaken, or how the post has not answered the OP's question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is the approach I prefer, and often posters have made edits which IMO have improved their posts. Consequently, I delete my comments and, sometimes, upvote their contributions.  I do NOT provide an &quot;answer&quot;. If the poster disagrees, and I really disagree with his/her answer I leave my comment(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;strong&gt;Edit answers&lt;/strong&gt;: a) correcting &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; grammar mistakes b) improve formating (paragraphs, italics in place of caps etc.) to improve overall legibility.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) &lt;strong&gt;Write a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; This I have done myself when the OP (in this case always a non native speaker) has accepted an inappropriate answer five minutes after it has been posted. Sometimes I leave a comment suggesting the OP waits at least a couple of hours before accepting the first posted answer. If my own post is upvoted once, twice etc. and other users have contributed, the OP can make a more informed decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T04:03:46.217" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-23T16:34:55.093" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my mailbox I see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jun, 23 Difference between &quot;day after tomorrow&quot; and &quot;day after next&quot;&#xA;  comment: @KonradViltersten There is often a down-vote as soon as I post, and sometimes after it is checkma... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I click on the link and I come to the page but there's no comment like this. What's up with that? Can I somehow get to see the comment even if it's been deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30362" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T16:34:55.093" Title="Why can't I see the comment that my mailbox claims to have come?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4905" CreationDate="2014-06-24T02:38:33.227" Score="12" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;How we fare in the new badge proposal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the MSE posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/234259/153355&quot;&gt;Asking days badges&lt;/a&gt;, there is a proposal to create a new trio of badges for asking “good” questions on distinct days.  Its basic metric for scoring is the number of separate days that a user both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has a positive record of questions, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asked good questions on that day.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the proposal for precise definitions of those terms and other details, but the short story is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;positive record of questions&lt;/strong&gt; = &#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6D3SF.png&quot; alt=&quot;equation image&quot;&gt;&#xA;Except that you don’t count any question more than once for purposes of being negative, closed, or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;good questions on X separate days&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question is one that's open, not deleted, and has a &lt;code&gt;score &amp;gt; 0&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;p&gt;If you ask at least one good question in a UTC day and none of your questions that day are deleted, you get one more day of credit toward the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Results Summary for top ELU users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ran &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/query/202534/asking-over-time-badges?bronze=5&amp;amp;silver=30&amp;amp;gold=100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some queries against SEDE&lt;/a&gt; to see how ELU members would fair if those badges were awarded as currently defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;top four pages of Users by reputation&lt;/a&gt;, ran them through SEDE a bit, and found that that set of users would under the 5/30/100 criteria be awarded a grand total of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;2   gold&lt;/strong&gt; badges (“&lt;em&gt;Socratic&lt;/em&gt;”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;20   silver&lt;/strong&gt; badges (“&lt;em&gt;Inquisitive&lt;/em&gt;”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;75   bronze&lt;/strong&gt; badges (“&lt;em&gt;Curious&lt;/em&gt;”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Table Sorted by “Good Asking” Days&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sorted first on &lt;em&gt;Days&lt;/em&gt;, the number of qualifying days, and then on &lt;em&gt;Reputation&lt;/em&gt;.  The &lt;em&gt;Rank&lt;/em&gt; is merely the line number of the resulting sort.  The horizontal lines demarcate the gold set from the silver set and the silver from the bronze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it matters to anybody, I’ve marked present moderators with ♦ and this year’s nominees with ♢.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA; Rank      ID Name                      Reputation Days Bronze Silver     Gold&#xA;⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯&#xA;   1.    3119 Yoichi Oishi ♢                21468 567 Curious Inquisitive Socratic&#xA;   2.     305 Brian Hooper                  19811 109 Curious Inquisitive Socratic&#xA;⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯&#xA;   3.    4763 Uticensis                     10183  76 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   4.   17953 Noah                           7867  71 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   5.   10041 Daniel                        34832  68 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   6.     127 Mehper C. Palavuzlar          16184  66 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   7.    2637 FumbleFingers                 78103  63 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   8.   23608 coleopterist                  21824  59 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   9.    4801 Jez                            6472  57 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  10.     252 kiamlaluno                    31745  52 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  11.    9505 SF.                            6569  47 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  12.   11268 Armen Ծիրունյան                6560  46 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  13.   53966 WS2                           11814  45 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  14.   13711 Terry Li                       5040  45 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  15.    6006 MrHen ♢                       22264  44 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  16.   44619 Mari-Lou A                    16415  35 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  17.    3479 F'x                           27021  34 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  18.    8360 KitFox ♦                      18359  33 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  19.      61 Chris Dwyer                    5230  32 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;  20.   17795 Bravo                          9551  31 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯&#xA;  21.    1606 Claudiu                        5675  29 Curious  &#xA;  22.    3782 Manoochehr                     4946  29 Curious  &#xA;  23.    2303 Robusto                       89611  28 Curious  &#xA;  24.    6509 RiMMER                        15429  28 Curious  &#xA;  25.    5964 z7sg Ѫ                         8980  26 Curious  &#xA;  26.   11433 jwpat7                        48950  25 Curious  &#xA;  27.     212 b.roth                        12409  25 Curious  &#xA;  28.     300 RegDwigнt ♦                   58211  23 Curious  &#xA;  29.    4972 Mitch                         26139  23 Curious  &#xA;  30.    1798 JoseK                          5833  22 Curious  &#xA;  31.    3559 Matt Эллен ♢                  19454  21 Curious  &#xA;  32.    1547 Marthaª                       19588  20 Curious  &#xA;  33.   59527 David M                       11432  20 Curious  &#xA;  34.   66974 Josh61                        13476  19 Curious  &#xA;  35.   19894 JAM                            5742  19 Curious  &#xA;  36.   65205 Elian                         10357  18 Curious  &#xA;  37.    4040 Malvolio                       9213  18 Curious  &#xA;  38.   25030 terdon                         8863  18 Curious  &#xA;  39.   11762 Jim                            5888  18 Curious  &#xA;  40.    2085 tchrist                       50161  17 Curious  &#xA;  41.    1506 Jon Purdy                     19378  17 Curious  &#xA;  42.   64985 ermanen                       10922  17 Curious  &#xA;  43.   11550 Mahnax ♢                       7536  17 Curious  &#xA;  44.    7451 Urbycoz                        6978  17 Curious  &#xA;  45.      30 Edward Tanguay                 6514  17 Curious  &#xA;  46.    9001 Hugo                          41045  15 Curious  &#xA;  47.   20739 Ste                            5690  15 Curious  &#xA;  48.      48 JSBձոգչ                       36731  14 Curious  &#xA;  49.    5822 Callithumpian                 19106  14 Curious  &#xA;  50.   51137 Ryereḁd                       13358  14 Curious  &#xA;  51.   36232 Sven Yargs                    10866  14 Curious  &#xA;  52.   42788 Bradd Szonye                  10776  11 Curious  &#xA;  53.   23491 bib                           33090  10 Curious  &#xA;  54.   14666 Kris                          20734  10 Curious  &#xA;  55.     100 waiwai933 ♦                    9307   9 Curious  &#xA;  56.   10287 Tom Au                         6120   9 Curious  &#xA;  57.    6534 snumpy                         4929   9 Curious  &#xA;  58.   11396 Jeremy                         5322   8 Curious  &#xA;  59.    5432 Alain Pannetier Φ             13956   7 Curious  &#xA;  60.   21883 Cool Elf                       7463   7 Curious  &#xA;  61.    8732 aedia λ                        6606   7 Curious  &#xA;  62.      39 nohat ♦                       40985   6 Curious  &#xA;  63.    2022 mplungjan                     18941   6 Curious  &#xA;  64.      77 ShreevatsaR                   18501   6 Curious  &#xA;  65.   21655 Edwin Ashworth                17057   6 Curious  &#xA;  66.    4526 chaos                         15002   6 Curious  &#xA;  67.    6683 JeffSahol                     14891   6 Curious  &#xA;  68.    7662 Fraser Orr                     8089   6 Curious  &#xA;  69.   31341 jlovegren                      5269   6 Curious  &#xA;  70.    8019 TimLymington                  21052   5 Curious  &#xA;  71.   14073 MετάEd                        17271   5 Curious  &#xA;  72.     380 Mr. Shiny and New 安宇        15741   5 Curious  &#xA;  73.    2587 PLL                           14593   5 Curious  &#xA;  74.   13799 Irene                         10165   5 Curious  &#xA;  75.   16205 Pitarou                        9876   5 Curious  &#xA;  76.   18220 J.R.                          40901   4   &#xA;  77.   24489 StoneyB                       31743   4   &#xA;  78.   13140 Jay                           21559   4   &#xA;  79.    2007 Dusty                         12831   4   &#xA;  80.    9186 T.E.D.                        11995   4   &#xA;  81.   11146 Shoe                          11897   4   &#xA;  82.   11035 Lynn                          10718   4   &#xA;  83.    3534 phenry ♢                       9420   4   &#xA;  84.     184 Noldorin                       7254   4   &#xA;  85.   11928 David Schwartz                 7067   4   &#xA;  86.    3946 Kate Gregory                   6884   4   &#xA;  87.   42683 p.s.w.g                        5975   4   &#xA;  88.   32623 rhetorician                    5926   4   &#xA;  89.   12952 Barrie England               104265   3   &#xA;  90.   18696 Andrew Leach ♢                42757   3   &#xA;  91.    3036 Cerberus                      35363   3   &#xA;  92.    5754 Peter Shor                    30250   3   &#xA;  93.   10893 simchona ♦                    24113   3   &#xA;  94.    6336 mgb                           17052   3   &#xA;  95.   13141 onomatomaniak                 13565   3   &#xA;  96.    8377 Unreason                       9743   3   &#xA;  97.     110 VonC                           9686   3   &#xA;  98.     588 Ed Guiness                     7225   3   &#xA;  99.   15581 Brett Reynolds                 6400   3   &#xA; 100.     140 Vincent McNabb                 5188   3 &#xA; 101.   58761 medica ♢                      24673   2   &#xA; 102.   17956 Jim                           16982   2   &#xA; 103.    4941 Neil Coffey                   14309   2   &#xA; 104.    8816 Monica Cellio                 12203   2   &#xA; 105.   16264 Jim                           10403   2   &#xA; 106.   49727 user49727                      7529   2   &#xA; 107.   38065 John M. Landsberg              5878   2   &#xA; 108.    5894 HaL                            5865   2   &#xA; 109.    4951 mgkrebbs                       5455   2   &#xA; 110.    3820 Rory Alsop                     5197   2   &#xA; 111.   15299 John Lawler                   48084   1   &#xA; 112.     449 Kosmonaut                     34448   1   &#xA; 113.     547 Colin Fine                    30249   1   &#xA; 114.    2490 Hellion                       27887   1   &#xA; 115.   18655 JLG                           16858   1   &#xA; 116.   16191 Mark Beadles                  13770   1   &#xA; 117.    8656 MT Head                       10828   1   &#xA; 118.    5262 The Raven                      9488   1   &#xA; 119.   54363 oerkelens ♢                    8429   1   &#xA; 120.    9887 KeithS                         7478   1   &#xA; 121.    3626 slim                           7044   1   &#xA; 122.    7396 FrustratedWithFormsDesigner    6176   1   &#xA; 123.    2386 Jonathan Leffler               5290   1   &#xA; 124.    5450 James McLeod                   5041   1   &#xA;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Table Sorted by Reputation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, a high reputation and a large number of good-asking days hardly go hand in hand.  Here is the same table but sorted first on &lt;em&gt;Reputation&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;Days&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA; Rank      ID Name                      Reputation Days Bronze Silver     Gold&#xA;⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯&#xA;     1.   12952 Barrie England               104265   3   &#xA;     2.    2303 Robusto                       89611  28 Curious  &#xA;     3.    2637 FumbleFingers                 78103  63 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;     4.     300 RegDwigнt ♦                   58211  23 Curious  &#xA;     5.    2085 tchrist                       50161  17 Curious  &#xA;     6.   11433 jwpat7                        48950  25 Curious  &#xA;     7.   15299 John Lawler                   48084   1   &#xA;     8.   18696 Andrew Leach ♢                42757   3   &#xA;     9.    9001 Hugo                          41045  15 Curious  &#xA;    10.      39 nohat ♦                       40985   6 Curious  &#xA;    11.   18220 J.R.                          40901   4   &#xA;    12.      48 JSBձոգչ                       36731  14 Curious  &#xA;    13.    3036 Cerberus                      35363   3   &#xA;    14.   10041 Daniel                        34832  68 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    15.     449 Kosmonaut                     34448   1   &#xA;    16.   23491 bib                           33090  10 Curious  &#xA;    17.     252 kiamlaluno                    31745  52 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    18.   24489 StoneyB                       31743   4   &#xA;    19.    5754 Peter Shor                    30250   3   &#xA;    20.     547 Colin Fine                    30249   1   &#xA;    21.    2490 Hellion                       27887   1   &#xA;    22.    3479 F'x                           27021  34 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    23.    4972 Mitch                         26139  23 Curious  &#xA;    24.   58761 medica ♢                      24673   2   &#xA;    25.   10893 simchona ♦                    24113   3   &#xA;    26.    6006 MrHen ♢                       22264  44 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    27.   23608 coleopterist                  21824  59 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    28.   13140 Jay                           21559   4   &#xA;    29.    3119 Yoichi Oishi ♢                21468 567 Curious Inquisitive Socratic&#xA;    30.    8019 TimLymington                  21052   5 Curious  &#xA;    31.   14666 Kris                          20734  10 Curious  &#xA;    32.     305 Brian Hooper                  19811 109 Curious Inquisitive Socratic&#xA;    33.    1547 Marthaª                       19588  20 Curious  &#xA;    34.    3559 Matt Эллен ♢                  19454  21 Curious  &#xA;    35.    1506 Jon Purdy                     19378  17 Curious  &#xA;    36.    5822 Callithumpian                 19106  14 Curious  &#xA;    37.    2022 mplungjan                     18941   6 Curious  &#xA;    38.      77 ShreevatsaR                   18501   6 Curious  &#xA;    39.    8360 KitFox ♦                      18359  33 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    40.   14073 MετάEd                        17271   5 Curious  &#xA;    41.   21655 Edwin Ashworth                17057   6 Curious  &#xA;    42.    6336 mgb                           17052   3   &#xA;    43.   17956 Jim                           16982   2   &#xA;    44.   18655 JLG                           16858   1   &#xA;    45.   44619 Mari-Lou A                    16415  35 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    46.     127 Mehper C. Palavuzlar          16184  66 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    47.     380 Mr. Shiny and New 安宇        15741   5 Curious  &#xA;    48.    6509 RiMMER                        15429  28 Curious  &#xA;    49.    4526 chaos                         15002   6 Curious  &#xA;    50.    6683 JeffSahol                     14891   6 Curious  &#xA;    51.    2587 PLL                           14593   5 Curious  &#xA;    52.    4941 Neil Coffey                   14309   2   &#xA;    53.    5432 Alain Pannetier Φ             13956   7 Curious  &#xA;    54.   16191 Mark Beadles                  13770   1   &#xA;    55.   13141 onomatomaniak                 13565   3   &#xA;    56.   66974 Josh61                        13476  19 Curious  &#xA;    57.   51137 Ryereḁd                       13358  14 Curious  &#xA;    58.    2007 Dusty                         12831   4   &#xA;    59.     212 b.roth                        12409  25 Curious  &#xA;    60.    8816 Monica Cellio                 12203   2   &#xA;    61.    9186 T.E.D.                        11995   4   &#xA;    62.   11146 Shoe                          11897   4   &#xA;    63.   53966 WS2                           11814  45 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    64.   59527 David M                       11432  20 Curious  &#xA;    65.   64985 ermanen                       10922  17 Curious  &#xA;    66.   36232 Sven Yargs                    10866  14 Curious  &#xA;    67.    8656 MT Head                       10828   1   &#xA;    68.   42788 Bradd Szonye                  10776  11 Curious  &#xA;    69.   11035 Lynn                          10718   4   &#xA;    70.   16264 Jim                           10403   2   &#xA;    71.   65205 Elian                         10357  18 Curious  &#xA;    72.    4763 Uticensis                     10183  76 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    73.   13799 Irene                         10165   5 Curious  &#xA;    74.   16205 Pitarou                        9876   5 Curious  &#xA;    75.    8377 Unreason                       9743   3   &#xA;    76.     110 VonC                           9686   3   &#xA;    77.   17795 Bravo                          9551  31 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    78.    5262 The Raven                      9488   1   &#xA;    79.    3534 phenry ♢                       9420   4   &#xA;    80.     100 waiwai933 ♦                    9307   9 Curious  &#xA;    81.    4040 Malvolio                       9213  18 Curious  &#xA;    82.    5964 z7sg Ѫ                         8980  26 Curious  &#xA;    83.   25030 terdon                         8863  18 Curious  &#xA;    84.   54363 oerkelens ♢                    8429   1   &#xA;    85.    7662 Fraser Orr                     8089   6 Curious  &#xA;    86.   17953 Noah                           7867  71 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    87.   11550 Mahnax ♢                       7536  17 Curious  &#xA;    88.   49727 user49727                      7529   2   &#xA;    89.    9887 KeithS                         7478   1   &#xA;    90.   21883 Cool Elf                       7463   7 Curious  &#xA;    91.     184 Noldorin                       7254   4   &#xA;    92.     588 Ed Guiness                     7225   3   &#xA;    93.   11928 David Schwartz                 7067   4   &#xA;    94.    3626 slim                           7044   1   &#xA;    95.    7451 Urbycoz                        6978  17 Curious  &#xA;    96.    3946 Kate Gregory                   6884   4   &#xA;    97.    8732 aedia λ                        6606   7 Curious  &#xA;    98.    9505 SF.                            6569  47 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;    99.   11268 Armen Ծիրունյան                6560  46 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   100.      30 Edward Tanguay                 6514  17 Curious  &#xA;   101.    4801 Jez                            6472  57 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   102.   15581 Brett Reynolds                 6400   3   &#xA;   103.    7396 FrustratedWithFormsDesigner    6176   1   &#xA;   104.   10287 Tom Au                         6120   9 Curious  &#xA;   105.   42683 p.s.w.g                        5975   4   &#xA;   106.   32623 rhetorician                    5926   4   &#xA;   107.   11762 Jim                            5888  18 Curious  &#xA;   108.   38065 John M. Landsberg              5878   2   &#xA;   109.    5894 HaL                            5865   2   &#xA;   110.    1798 JoseK                          5833  22 Curious  &#xA;   111.   19894 JAM                            5742  19 Curious  &#xA;   112.   20739 Ste                            5690  15 Curious  &#xA;   113.    1606 Claudiu                        5675  29 Curious  &#xA;   114.    4951 mgkrebbs                       5455   2   &#xA;   115.   11396 Jeremy                         5322   8 Curious  &#xA;   116.    2386 Jonathan Leffler               5290   1   &#xA;   117.   31341 jlovegren                      5269   6 Curious  &#xA;   118.      61 Chris Dwyer                    5230  32 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   119.    3820 Rory Alsop                     5197   2   &#xA;   120.     140 Vincent McNabb                 5188   3   &#xA;   121.    5450 James McLeod                   5041   1   &#xA;   122.   13711 Terry Li                       5040  45 Curious Inquisitive &#xA;   123.    3782 Manoochehr                     4946  29 Curious  &#xA;   124.    6534 snumpy                         4929   9 Curious  &#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Observations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, at 2/20/75 bronze/silver/gold badges awarded, this would be a fairly rare badge when compared against our other currently awarded &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=General&amp;amp;filter=bronze&quot;&gt;bronze&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=General&amp;amp;filter=silver&quot;&gt;silver&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=General&amp;amp;filter=gold&quot;&gt;gold&lt;/a&gt; badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also remember that my numbers will be a bit higher than reality, because it does not include deleted questions.  The &lt;em&gt;Days&lt;/em&gt; will be a little lower, and perhaps this will make some slight difference in badges awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn’t very many, all in all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that does not necessarily mean that the criteria for badge awards are “too tough”. An alternate and &lt;strong&gt;completely viable hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt; is the comparative paucity of question-asking badges (and &lt;em&gt;Days&lt;/em&gt; in general) speaks more to the issue which these badges are attempting to address than it does to a problem with their selection criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, there aren’t many people consistently asking good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T17:09:11.910" Title="How curious are you? — or — Tallied ELU “Asking-Day Badges”–Proposal Results" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|badges|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4897" CreationDate="2014-06-24T06:09:48.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of us would love to see more good questions on the site. Creating a badge for good questions seems immediately like a good idea. So, on the one hand, I like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm uncertain if the bar for defining a good question (or questions, etc.) isn't being set too low. If all you need is &gt;0, that might not only include, but even reward, a fair number of mediocre questions. I don't know how carefully people pay attention to attaining badges, but my concern is that we have already many 0 and +1 quality questions. Should they be encouraged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like this more if the bar were set higher. One reason is that, if we have complaints now about down votes, I can only imagine more complaints if a low-up-vote badge is thrown into the fray. The question then becomes, how high? And if higher, then how different is this from the good question badges we already have in place? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason I'm wary of this is that up votes are not a reliable indicator of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet further concern (and perhaps this shouldn't be a concern at all, seeing that answers are a benefit to all users) is that now, the majority of our questions seem to be need-based (e.g. see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178772&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, clearly a &quot;real&quot; question with a score of +3. Though I didn't get any up votes for answering it, I felt (after answering it) that what I learned while putting my thoughts into words was it's own reward. The point being, if we give a badge for multiple questions with a sum score of &gt;0, are we creating an incentive for more 'iffy' questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180423&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question has a score of +1.) Do we really want a boatload of similar questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'll leave it here. Though I really like the idea of lots more good questions (and therefore answers), I'm unsure if this is the way to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T06:09:48.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-24T20:01:54.617" Score="37" ViewCount="646" Body="&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;3rd moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 3 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18696&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/18696.png&quot; alt=&quot;Andrew Leach&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3119.png&quot; alt=&quot;Yoichi Oishi&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3559&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3559.png&quot; alt=&quot;Matt&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/6472855084597248/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T18:04:55.857" Title="2014 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-24T20:04:43.503" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congrats to all y'all! . . . . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T20:04:43.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-24T21:21:51.600" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot to Shog9 and Robusto-san, and many of my Senpais and friends who voted for me on this election. To be honest, I didn’t fancy I can win. However, my motivation for candidacy this time was to encourage non-native English speaking users in this site and many of English enthusiast friends around me by challenging this unique opportunity, and by proving that even a non-native English learner who’s never lived in English-speaking countries, no matter how he is old, can get a fair opportunity and place for giving a say about the improvement and advancement of the site abreast with native speaking Senpais and colleagues. &#xA;I’m sure my peers in local English learning circles would join me in aknowledging my fortunate election result. Again many thanks for your support and continued assistance in improving English language proficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2014-06-25T21:46:17.807" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T21:46:17.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-24T21:45:28.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right mods!! Exactly as I voted!! Congratulations!! Moderate!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75076" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T21:45:28.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-25T01:10:12.443" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Best of luck to our new and continuing moderators. You are a thoughtful and judicious group, and I'm confident that all of you will do fine work for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the nonwinning candidates, I just want to say thanks for running, and please stay as active and engaged in the site as you've been in the past. Two of you were my top two choices, and I know that you would have done a great job as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoy this site immensely, but I think that it has room for improvement, most notably in encouraging newer users to ask and answer legitimate questions. One way to help make that happen is to recognize promising questions and answers with upvotes—and I plan to be less parsimonious in that regard than I've been in the past, especially in responding to users for whom an upvote can be quite encouraging and a downvote quite discouraging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately our shared goal is a site full of good questions and good answers, not victory in a never-ending race for points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T01:10:12.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-25T02:05:01.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations and best of luck to our three new moderators. My simpathy to those who weren't elected but, I'm sure, love EL&amp;amp;U and will continue to give their much needed contribution.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T02:05:01.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4897" CreationDate="2014-06-25T04:51:23.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of clarifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The score for determining a &quot;positive record&quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; deduct a point from the numerator for each negatively scored questions, closure, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; deletion. So if your first question trips all three, you will start at -2 (&lt;code&gt;(1 - 1 - 1 - 1)/1&lt;/code&gt;). The penalty is particularly harsh on a site like Stack Overflow where such a reception occurs more frequently than on most other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The status of question asking days is recalculated each time the check for badges is run. So if you ask a rotten question on Monday, have good asking days the rest of the week, and fix up the Monday question to the point where it's good by Friday, you could earn the bronze badge that week. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've updated the MSE post and I'm sorry for the confusion. Just posting the query for evaluating the criteria might have been a better move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary purpose of a badge is to encourage specific behavior. In this case, the behavior we are targeting is the habit of asking questions on the site when you have them in real life. Most of the rules are designed to discourage a series of bad behaviors that might result from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/228844/should-we-add-more-badges-for-asking-questions&quot;&gt;original proposal&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shotgun: asking as many questions as possible, hope that some are on target, and damn the collateral damage.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grinding: asking questions without any real concern or interest in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates: normally &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;we love duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt;. In this case, it would be too tempting to ask a duplicate and plead ignorance when caught. We tackle this two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions cost you a good asking day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions hurt your asking record.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Feast and famine: the original design made it possible to ask many questions in a short period to get the gold badge and never need to ask again. This version, like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/enthusiast-and-fanatic-badges/&quot;&gt;Fanatic badge&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;measures a dimension of engagement that we haven’t before.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; Coming back day after day to ask an acceptable question is a habit that's surprisingly difficult to get into.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just-too-late asking: I circulated internally a version of the badge set that targeted asking &lt;em&gt;weeks&lt;/em&gt;. It was a lovely idea, but it meant that people would need to wait an entire week at times to ask their next question if they wanted to make progress on this badge. Fortunately, saner minds than mine prevailed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The design goals explain why I don't think raising question score needed to get a good asking day is a good plan. Voters on ELU are somewhat generous toward questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;    Avg Q score  Site Name &#xA;    -----------  ---------&#xA;    11.747645    Skeptics  &#xA;     6.525704    Parenting &#xA;     4.906445    Gaming  &#xA;     3.418933    English Language and Usage&#xA;     2.405586    English Language Learners&#xA;     1.838194    Super User&#xA;     1.602753    Stack Overflow&#xA;     1.448387    Server Fault&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is just below the median site on the network in terms of generosity of question votes. As a result, there will be a large number of &quot;Curious&quot; badges here: 539 as of today. That's actually a good thing. We &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; people who have already shown they can ask not-terrible questions to be acknowledged and, more importantly, spur them on to silver. The count of &quot;Inquisitive&quot; badges using the top 124 users by reputation is not far from the total count: 31. Since there are only 2 &quot;Socratic&quot; badges, it's obviously a true accomplishment. Yoichi Oishi and Brian Hooper don't show up at a site very often. Y'all are incredibly lucky to have those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bronze badges are all about &lt;a href=&quot;http://randsinrepose.com/archives/gaming-the-system/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;discovery&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Ideally, people will earn them without really knowing why. Fittingly, the &quot;Curious&quot; badge should inspire curiosity. &quot;How did I earn that badge? Asking questions on 5 separate days? I wonder how many it will take to get to the next level?&quot; If we make the rules of the game too tight, the sorts of people we want to discover these badges might not get the bronze. I was talked down to 5 from 7 shortly before I posted the MSE feature request and I'm glad I was. Bronze badges (especially one-timers) should be achievable by just about any reasonably motivated user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T17:09:11.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2014-06-25T09:18:57.847" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistically most words are phrases (and any single word that's given as an answer will be), so the tag can simply be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;. The tag description can say that it is for both word and phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T09:18:57.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-25T23:53:02.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We wuz robbed!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your first task, should you choose to accept it, you will monitor, comment upon, edit as necessary, close, should it be required, all responses as to the etymology of this exclamatory phrase (as well as decide as to the appropriateness of follow-on questions as to its relative regional and national usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T23:53:02.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-26T09:16:30.313" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried fixing a typo of one letter in this post - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180876/a-word-to-represent-the-5-senses&quot;&gt;A Word To Represent The 5 Senses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer wrote 'night' instead of 'might'. I just want to fix it to make it right, not for magic unicorn points. Minimum change is 6 characters, the prompt says &quot;is there anything else that can be improved?&quot; to bump it to the quota. I don't want to overhaul the post just to fix the typo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time I've tried to fix typos but been turned back by the 6 character quota.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T10:41:43.720" Title="Why can't I fix a typo?" Tags="|discussion|typographical-errors|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4908" CreationDate="2014-06-26T09:37:13.753" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Editing is a privilege&lt;/a&gt; that is earned once you have 2000 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until you reach that point, you have to submit edits to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;suggested edit review queue&lt;/a&gt;, where people with the edit privilege can review your edit and accept/decline based on their assessment. There is a minimum amount you must edit a post to get into that queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the edit you want to make is helpful, however it is also very small. The problem with small edits is that they could easily flood the review queue. There are so many posts with small typos on this site, we'd simply be inundated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So until you have 2000 reps, the best alternative is to put a comment on the post, telling the poster that they've made a typo. Generally posters are quite grateful that you've spotted a typo and will fix it when they see your comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for caring about the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T10:41:43.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-26T15:07:06.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulation winners!!. I hope that you'd bring more enthusiasm to this group by providing your valuable knowledge to English learners. Please make this site more interactive and well discipline by taking pragmatic measures.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the very best for your future endeavors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24176" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T15:07:06.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4915" CreationDate="2014-06-27T11:02:25.583" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about allowed non-alphabetic characters in English names, but the rules state that questions concerning names are off-topic. Would this question fall under that rule? And if so, is there an SE site I can post this, then? And why are these questions deemed off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I'm asking this because of &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/327/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bobby Tables&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69529" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T15:04:26.990" Title="Why are questions regarding names off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2014-06-27T14:51:19.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a first step, I have suggested the tag synonym. You can officially agree or disagree here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the synonym is accepted then we should have a vote on what to call the one tag as many would find &quot;single-word-requests&quot; a bit of a misnomer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T14:51:19.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-27T14:58:14.837" Score="9" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have 5 tag synonyms submitted that still need votes. Anyone with voting privileges should exercise them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/derogatory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;derogatory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;derogatory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insults&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insults&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insults&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4728/6006&quot;&gt;Meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/senses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;senses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;senses&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4624/6006&quot;&gt;Meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/abbreviations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;abbreviations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;abbreviations&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/short-form&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;short-form&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;short-form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the suggestions here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=suggested&amp;amp;tab=synonym&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=suggested&amp;amp;tab=synonym&lt;/a&gt;. To vote, click on the left tag and it will show you a little up or down arrow to click on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T20:40:24.083" Title="Reminder: You can vote on tag synonyms" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4911" CreationDate="2014-06-27T15:04:26.990" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary reason naming questions are off-topic is because &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; could theoretically be a name. Names don't follow the same rules or patterns that English uses and the rules that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; exist are created by whatever government officially recognizes your child as existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a specific example, your question would be on-topic for any particular US State since each state can set their own rules regarding names. Minnesota, for example, only allows the 26 letters of the alphabet, spaces and hyphens. This explicitly forbids the special punctuation from Bobby Tables. (Interestingly, they also explicitly forbid accented characters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this restriction has nothing to do with the English language. It is a purely bureaucratic decision and, therefore, off-topic on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T15:04:26.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-27T16:43:59.947" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never really taken much notice of &quot;review queue progress&quot; (or badges in general, to be honest). But I just realised that although &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/126/steward&quot;&gt;several other users have a &lt;strong&gt;steward&lt;/strong&gt; gold badge&lt;/a&gt; (for completing at least 1,000 review tasks), I'm barely halfway there. But I think I do my fair share of reviewing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reason for this is that when I'm looking at entries that are only in the review queue because someone closevoted, I often feel I don't have enough information to make a decision without &quot;drilling down&quot; to look at the entire post (by clicking on the &lt;em&gt;Question Title&lt;/em&gt; as shown within the entry for that item in the review queue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nine times out of ten, if I'm going to add my own closevote, I do it from that &quot;lower level&quot;, then click my browser &quot;back&quot; button to return to the review queue. At that point, the display shows &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;This item is not reviewable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, so I click on &quot;next&quot; to look at the next item in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just established that my current progress level was 537 (which I assume is &lt;em&gt;total closevote items reviewed since I signed up to ELU&lt;/em&gt;, at which time there was one item in the &lt;em&gt;closevote&lt;/em&gt; queue. I went through out my normal procedure as above, and my badge progress still says 537.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I'm misunderstanding the situation here, and I've no idea if it's even practical for the system to realise what I'm doing and credit me with having performed the review there, but I have the distinct feeling &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I wuz robbed&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/em&gt; So I'm tagging this &quot;bug&quot; as well as &quot;feature-request&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; being robbed, can I be the second user ever on ELU to sport an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/35/unsung-hero&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;unsung hero&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T19:34:25.593" Title="Am I being robbed of my rightful review queue badges?" Tags="|support|badges|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2014-06-27T16:56:14.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just open the question in a new tab. The vote page will be there waiting for you on the original tab when you're finished looking at the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T16:56:14.957" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4899" CreationDate="2014-06-27T18:04:55.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congrats new mods.  I am not sure who I even voted for but thought everyone would do a good job.  [I was on a beach fully under the influence with the sun glaring on an Ipad and the interface for SE isn't the best sometimes let alone my choppy connection with the island's wifi]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think I voted for phenry because he is militant.  Stay thirsty!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T18:04:55.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2014-06-27T18:31:00.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my suggestion since I feel the need to have one since I complained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a flag that says something along the lines &quot;This answer reflects a lack of basic understanding of the English language&quot;.  Let users over a certain criteria vote if the flag was good/bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users get a certain amount of these flags passed for a given time period the get suspensions in increasing order.  Note that editing your question shouldn't impact the flag.  Whatever the user saw at the time stands.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;10 of these flags in a two month period - 3 days&#xA;10 more after - 7 days&#xA;10 more after - 14 days&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point isn't to kick these users off the site, it is so they quit bombing the site with poor answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:  I fully understand that I have given answers that could be flagged for this.  I have 5-6 times misread a question and have been called out.  I have then promptly deleted answer or dramatically changed answer.  Would I be upset about being suspended for this?  No.  I would probably read questions more thoroughly and not answer when drinking.  As it stands, cheers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="51137" LastEditDate="2014-06-27T18:38:49.037" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T18:38:49.037" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2014-06-27T18:36:43.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would hope when someone takes an action to close a question or reopen a question outside of the review pages that it counts.  Both of these actions should be encouraged and most users don't use the review pages.  If this isn't working I think it is a bug.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T18:36:43.867" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-27T20:55:21.010" Score="29" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181106/word-for-words-that-sound-like-the-sound&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asked what you call those words that sound like the sound they make. It was closed as general reference. Really!? How the hell is the guy supposed to look up the answer when he doesn't know the name of the thing he's supposed to look up? Someone please tell me the name of a commonly available reference work that can be used to trivially answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some people like to close-vote questions as GR when they think the question is &quot;too basic,&quot; but even a basic question can't be looked up if you don't know what to look up. And this question really isn't even all that basic. &quot;Onomatopoeia&quot; is not &quot;apple.&quot; It's a rarely used word that's hard to remember and even harder to spell. If &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;SWRs&lt;/a&gt; are on topic at all here, it's difficult to see why this one wouldn't be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, Josh61 managed to give the definitive correct answer in the brief time this question was open. Let's reopen it and then protect it, so it doesn't just sit around collecting silly non-answers. Either that, or let's implement a new custom close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;general clairvoyance: &lt;/b&gt; This question could be easily answered using a &lt;b&gt;commonly available reference&lt;/b&gt;, if you knew what to look up, which you don't. Go read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;Catch-22&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and stop bothering us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-07-10T17:04:51.957" Title="General Reference = general clairvoyance?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|general-reference|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-27T21:59:34.853" Score="-3" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I try to comment on this site; it says I need &quot;50 reputation&quot;; but as far as I can tell, you have to comment to get reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did everyone who is currently commenting sign up and comment before this was required? Or is there some other method for getting reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is now, the site is virtually unusable, everything I try to do here requires reputation, but I can't get any because... getting reputation requires you to have some in the first place...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is something I'm missing about the situation, the site does not cater to new users and show any way around this barrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are going to require reputation to do things here; there should be a help button or something right next to the &quot;you need rep&quot; warning that explains how to get it. This is probably the 4th or 5th time I've stumbled on this site over the last year and I still can't find any way to do anything while I'm here, its very poorly explained and I can't imagine how many people give up on the site entirely after being frustrated by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: beyond frustrating... even trying to post this question has required several attempts. I can't create tags without 300 reputation but a tag is required? And again no explanation with the warning on how to get reputation. I'm not even sure I want an answer at this point, this site is just stupidly designed and frustrating as hell to even attempt using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82419" OwnerDisplayName="user63802" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T14:14:39.837" Title="How do you get reputation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4922" CreationDate="2014-06-27T22:12:40.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &quot;What is reputation?&quot; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76379" OwnerDisplayName="Joseph Neathawk" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T22:12:40.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4922" CreationDate="2014-06-27T22:38:28.200" Score="21" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there should be a help button or something right next to the &amp;quot;you need rep&amp;quot; warning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, but there is one. And not only on the page with the warning, but indeed &lt;em&gt;on every single page of the site&lt;/em&gt;, and not only when there is a warning, but indeed &lt;em&gt;at all times ever&lt;/em&gt;. It's quite conveniently in the top bar to make it easy to find; it's a question mark and hovering over it gets a tooltip explaining it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t4yoC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help link&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click on it, you get this handy dropdown (this image comes from a different site, but the options are the same everywhere, including on ELU):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kxn7Z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kxn7Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help link dropdown&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the dropdown, you can either take the quick &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;, to immediately get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YGJ1n.png&quot; alt=&quot;Quick tour: reputation&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or you can click on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; for any and all information you could possibly need, including this link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xAity.png&quot; alt=&quot;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which takes you &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;to this page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0pdGc.png&quot; alt=&quot;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a Help link at the bottom of every page. Just &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt;+&lt;kbd&gt;F&lt;/kbd&gt; for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all of that is too complicated, you can simply google for &amp;quot;reputation stack exchange&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mZmhB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google search results&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can specifically search ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cTJa3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google search results&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not rocket surgery. Honest!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-04-27T14:14:39.837" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T14:14:39.837" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2014-06-28T07:37:47.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a comment here earlier about how a Google search of the question's title on my computer led to the Wiki page. But I remembered -- a little too late to keep me from posting, though -- a time on ELU where I learned of regional differences in search. (If I'd read through the other comments here I would've remembered sooner... d'oh!) Although this time the OP noted in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/181106/3&quot;&gt;recent edit&lt;/a&gt; that it held for their web results too, I know that doesn't always hold in general. My bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt; has a special significance for me. I recall learning it from one of the books/magazines I liked a lot as a kid. I remember one long car trip in particular where I read that word and talked to my fellow travelers about it, wanting to know how it was pronounced because I didn't really believe it was a word. The ensuing conversation led to other impressive vocabulary words, namely, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tintinnabulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;tintinnabulation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this resonance I fell into the common trap of knowing how to &lt;em&gt;verify&lt;/em&gt; the answer from the information given, but not really knowing how to &lt;em&gt;deduce&lt;/em&gt; it from the same information. From my personal experience it felt like it was general reference... but my personal experience is not a commonly available reference. Besides, there are words I struggle with that other forum members see with similar/better clarity from their own experiences. So I think the request for a common reference to answer the question at hand (how to recover the proper spelling of a complex word) is a reasonable one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a few points a proponent of the hold might use which I think are worth considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the questions covered on ELU, definitions (although still subject to change in a living language like English) are among the more static. The resources that are authoritative, dictionaries and encyclopedias and thesauri, are plentiful, reachable and typically distinguishable from non-authoritative resources. So I don't think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference?rq=1&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Google Is Not a General Reference&lt;/em&gt; question&lt;/a&gt;, whose question focuses on the authority or credibility of the results, is as applicable here as it would be elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And though the question is about converting a definition to a word, I see it as being different from others tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, which tend to be the other way around -- wanting to know if a word exists for a definition. (I think I'd like to see this tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; too, but the tags applied have little bearing on the quality of the question.) I foresee questions about spelling possibly starting a vicious cycle of their own: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user knows they're misspelling an existent but complex/esoteric word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is admitted and answered because there is no general reference that could remedy their mistake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A second user significantly later posts a distinct enough (and valid enough) misspelling of the same word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be as unfair to close the second one as GR as it was the first by the rationale discussed in this Meta question. If the two questions are distinct enough (the research of one misspelling didn't lead to the other post), it also seems unfair to close as duplicate. It looks to lead to debates on: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What constitutes a 'valid enough' misspelling?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are some misspellings more valid than others?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;When is a word nontrivial/uncommon enough to justify a spelling question?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to such questions need not be more than the spelling and a link proving its validity. And so ELU may get many questions that are highly similar in nature, soliciting short answers &lt;strong&gt;found without the aide of GR but containing little information outside of GR&lt;/strong&gt;, and localized because they are helpful mostly to people who misspell the word similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best we can do in such a situation is treat neither as a bad question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/pMDu3.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;being prudent with how we vote&lt;/a&gt;), but discourage the activity if we find we're getting a slew of different questions about the spelling of some word. Having a question go on hold can be a little jarring but having it done fairly and thoughtfully, with full consideration for the OP, has led to good resolutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside: I'm very pleased with the responses all-around to the linked question. ELU and its moderators, as well as the OP, all handled this situation deftly and peaceably. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T07:37:47.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2014-06-28T13:28:46.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the first to closevote the &lt;em&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt; question, and I freely admit if it had been asked a couple of years ago I'd have cited &quot;Too Basic&quot; as the reason. Since that's no longer available, I chose the best of a bad bunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; accept that only things which can easily be looked up in one of the sources cited by our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available online?&lt;/a&gt; question count as &quot;General Reference&quot;. The first Google search term that came to mind for that question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=grammar%20sounds%20like%20word&amp;amp;rlz=1C1CHFX_en-GBGB569GB569&amp;amp;oq=grammar%20sounds%20like%20word&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57.8264j0j1&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;es_sm=122&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grammar sounds like word&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and I note that &lt;em&gt;two of the first three results&lt;/em&gt; returned there include the relevant word &lt;em&gt;in the &quot;snippet&quot; view&lt;/em&gt; (it was a &quot;Chrome Incognito&quot; search, to avoid being biased by my personal search history, and I frankly don't think &quot;regional&quot; bias would make any significant difference for a query using &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also point out that questioners are expected to do &quot;basic research&quot; before asking here. Apparently the OP already knew he was looking for a grammatical term that &quot;sounds like&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;anamatapic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (he just didn't know how to spell it). If he'd tried searching for, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?tab=ww&amp;amp;ei=YbauU8_wAsOL7AantYC4DQ&amp;amp;ved=0CBIQ1S4#q=grammatical%20term%20word%20sounds%20like&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grammatical term word sounds like&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I imagine the relevant Wikipedia entry would be top of the results list in all regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that &lt;em&gt;the answer had already been posted&lt;/em&gt; when I closevoted (if it hadn't, I'd have posted a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with the relevant information). I would never vote to &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; the question (because it's not &lt;em&gt;ridiculously&lt;/em&gt; Off Topic), but I really didn't see the point of keeping it open (or &lt;em&gt;re-opening&lt;/em&gt; it). Realistically, how many usefully different ways can you say &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;anamatapic&lt;/strong&gt; is a misspelling of &lt;strong&gt;onomatopoeic&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I don't expect questioners to be &quot;clairvoyant&quot;, but I do think that anyone who can't find the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; after just a few seconds Googling can't really be numbered among &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T13:28:46.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2014-06-28T19:04:41.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too voted to close the question. But before I did, I saw the correct answer had been given in the comment section by two users and an answer had also been posted. How many answers of &lt;em&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt; do we need? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also posted a link to an old ELU question with mnemonic tips so next time he has a better chance of spelling it right. Then (out of curiosity) I typed the OP's question, word for word in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=Word%20for%20words%20that%20sound%20like%20the%20sound&amp;amp;rlz=1C1AFAB_en___IT446&amp;amp;oq=Word%20for%20words%20that%20sound%20like%20the%20sound&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i59j69i64l3&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;es_sm=122&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia article was the top result, today it's Oxford dictionaries. I also posted a comment to that effect. I think the comments, and the answer posted by @josh61 were being helpful, friendly and sensible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, the OP &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; wanted to know the word &lt;em&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Nothing else&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before his edits the original question was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In our English lesson, we talked about words that are derived from&#xA;  sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our teacher said they are &quot;anamatapic&quot;, but it seems I can't get the&#xA;  spelling right. Even google does not provide a good suggestion for a&#xA;  better spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So now I am looking for the word that sounds like &quot;anamatapic&quot; and&#xA;  describes the professional term for words that sound like the sound.&#xA;  Everything's clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the above show &lt;code&gt;research effort; it is useful and clear&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue &quot;yes&quot; for all three points. Should it therefore be reopened? No. Because there are no other answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T19:04:41.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2014-06-28T21:13:26.553" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;My problem with the &amp;quot;General Reference&amp;quot; justification for closing questions is a bit different from the one raised here by phenry: Too often people vote to close a question on that basis without doing any research into the poster's question themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case in point occurred yesterday. A poster with a reasonably strong track record at EL&amp;amp;U (1,710 points, 3 silver badges, 7 bronzes) submitted this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181136/first-use-of-bunk&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First use of “bunk”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is simple: Which came first, bunk as in &amp;quot;bunk beds&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;to bunk&amp;quot; as in to find a place to sleep? Almost suredly, the definition of one created the definition of the other by association, however I was wondering if anyone knew which came first. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a few minutes of the question's appearing in the queue, a commenter (who likewise has a fairly strong track record at this site) posted this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a general-reference question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and a few minutes after that, the poster deleted his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, no harm was done, I suppose; but in checking a general reference (Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary) during the brief period when the question was open, I ran into something odd: MW said that the word &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; is &amp;quot;prob. short for &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; despite its being (by MW's reckoning) 81 years older than &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt; (if we treat a word's first known occurrence in print as its date of birth). Baffled by this assessment, I consulted a second general reference (my 1985 edition of the OED) and learned that its editors considered &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; to be &amp;quot;Of unknown etymology&amp;quot;—this despite the fact that in the OED's estimation &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt; was 67 years older than &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few minutes of general-reference research had turned up several interesting things: MW's weird theory that &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; came first but was probably derived from the later word &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt;; OED's refusal to hazard an opinion about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt;; and the two references' opposing views on whether &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt; was the earlier word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I went back to the poster's question to note these facts, however, I found that the poster had already deleted the question. Because the MW–OED disagreement had piqued my interest, I went ahead and ran a Google Books search for &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bunks&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;bunkers&lt;/em&gt;, to see what matches that resource would turn up. Last night, after some hours of investigation, I submitted my own question and answer about the relationship of &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt;, focusing on the issues that I thought were most interesting. But I wouldn't have considered the question at all if not for the original posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP of the &amp;quot;First use of 'bunk'&amp;quot; question had simply consulted the Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary, he would have found that the noun &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; dated to 1758, the noun &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt; dated to 1839, and the verb &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; dated to 1840. If the OP had simply consulted the OED, he would have found that the noun &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; dated to 1815, the noun &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt; dated to 1758, and the verb &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; dated to 1861. Either way, according to both references, he would have learned that the noun &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; preceded the verb &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to me that if the commenter (whom I don't mean to pick on here) had checked those two general references instead of merely asserting that the question &amp;quot;seems like a general-reference question,&amp;quot; he might have been struck by the inconsistency in the dates and in the disputed priority between &lt;em&gt;bunk&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt;. Does anyone else see any irony in criticizing a poster for not consulting general references, without bothering to consult the general references either?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I've learned from consulting multiple references in pursuit of answers to seemingly straightforward questions is that &amp;quot;general references&amp;quot; often disagree on questions of coinage date and etymology—and when such disagreements arise, the notion that consulting a &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot; will resolve the question goes by the boards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that anyone inclined to close a question involving etymology or coinage date as &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot; take the time to consult at least two independent references first, to confirm that a consensus about those details actually exists. It wouldn't hurt, either, to hold off on closing such questions for, say, 12 hours after they post, to give other researchers time to check their own reference works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I have had occasional success in reopening closed or on-hold questions, it's much harder to reopen a question than to answer one that hasn't been consigned to limbo in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, I'd love to see a little less haste in condemning questions as &amp;quot;General Reference&amp;quot; and in pressuring posters to withdraw them. One of this site's best features is that it permits users to investigate and spell out the limitations, inconsistencies, and even outright errors that general-reference answers may include.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T21:48:35.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-29T17:24:59.767" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently felt that my work in the Unanswered queue has hit a stable point and have moved on to helping fix up the tags. My first attempt was to scan through the tags looking for overlap so we can merge tags that are not providing a useful distinction from other, already existing tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first target was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; as noted in this meta discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/can-we-merge-single-word-requests-and-phrase-requests&quot;&gt;Can we merge [single-word-requests] and [phrase-requests]?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite getting generally positive support for the merge, the synonym request was apparently voted down after I reminded people that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4914/reminder-you-can-vote-on-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;tag merging can be voted on&lt;/a&gt;. So that's brilliant. Yet again, a small but active minority has blocked progress on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is a rant. If you, as a general community, feel it is appropriate to just downvote tag synonyms because you see some minute technical difference then I have no idea what you think tags are &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;. I have little interest in helping clean up the tags on ELU if people want to keep a bunch of demonstrably useless tags around. Especially if people feel it is appropriate to actively fight me during the voting process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you tell &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think the tags are for. Tell me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why we have tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to determine the usefulness of a tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to determine whether two tags should be synonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which tags are commonly misused&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have personal opinions on all of these points but I don't feel like arguing with you lot anymore. All you do is complain about the state of things but then fight the few people who are actively making an effort to improve the state of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, foolishly, you never seem to realize that there are differing opinions based on nothing but hunches and you will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; reach an actual consensus. And now that you feel it is necessary to block tag cleanup from occurring, you are doomed to leaving the tag situation the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is your last chance to figure it out. And when, inevitably, a significant portion of you is outvoted suck it up and realize you have two choices: (a) throw a fit and block progress or (b) let the site move forward even if it isn't in the direction you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End rant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T19:26:00.893" Title="The purpose of tagging" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4929" CreationDate="2014-06-29T19:26:00.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a great deal of sympathy for MrHen. I know he's put a lot of effort into clearing the Unanswered queue, and if he's willing to attack the &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; mess with antthing like that gusto, we should all be supportive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think he picked the wrong battleground with &lt;em&gt;merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I do actually &lt;em&gt;lean&lt;/em&gt; in that direction myself, but knowing there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/can-we-merge-single-word-requests-and-phrase-requests&quot;&gt;certain amount of debate&lt;/a&gt; on that particular proposal, I refrained from voting one way or the other when I went through endorsing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4914/reminder-you-can-vote-on-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;all the other outstanding proposals here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What caused me to stay my hand on that one was mainly the fact that there are currently almost 1000 &lt;em&gt;phrase-request&lt;/em&gt; questions, most of which don't also have the &lt;em&gt;single-word-request&lt;/em&gt; tag (which is itself on over 4500 questions). I assume if we merge those two tags, that's a lot of cases where the &lt;em&gt;distinction will be lost forever&lt;/em&gt;. I think there should be a lot more attention (i.e. - votes cast) on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/can-we-merge-single-word-requests-and-phrase-requests&quot;&gt;the relevant meta question&lt;/a&gt; before we take such an &quot;irrevocable&quot; step. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T19:26:00.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4994" CreationDate="2014-06-29T23:26:43.920" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was experimenting dragging the page up as far as it would go for no apparent reason (I have rubber-band scrolling), and I noticed this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4JEKY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't reproduce it on any other site that I tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53935" LastEditorUserId="84783" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T19:15:40.073" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T19:15:40.073" Title="Links are visible far past the top margin of the page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2014-06-30T02:24:50.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the closers, I, too, will offer you a brief(er) response to &quot;How the hell is the guy supposed to look up the answer when he doesn't know the name of the thing he's supposed to look up?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is, he's not. So tell him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP asked his question at 9:46:19. Josh61 answered in comments at 9:49:10 as did Brian Donovan at 10:07:17. By the time I came along (16:53:36) it was, indeed, answered, and it is Gen Ref. It's one of the most well known words for words. Entire songs have been devoted to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point I agree with, though, is that of trying to put oneself in the OP's position. I recently got chastised by an OP for suggesting that he google a well known phrase, as it came up in the first position on my search. He answered that his Chinese google search yielded no results. I was quite surprised (shows my tech-savvylessness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it's not a crime to close as Gen Ref if 1) it is GR, and 2) there is an answer in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-07-02T07:31:45.103" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T07:31:45.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-30T14:07:06.103" Score="6" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't got a lot of time to argue for someone else's question but I really can't understand why a question that's gained almost 2000 views in a day and has a useful answer and an informative comment, has been closed as general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181308/isnt-the-word-shotgun-a-self-redundancy&quot;&gt;Isn&amp;#39;t the word &amp;quot;shotgun&amp;quot; a self-redundancy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only issue I would have with it is that such a simple answer probably doesn't deserve so much rep, but that's not a reason to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker with a decent grasp of English, and I learnt two interesting facts from this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I flagged it with the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This should not be closed. I have learnt two things very useful to know, that I did not previously know. The first comment and the answer are both very informative. It has almost 2000 views since being asked yesterday. Closing this and questions like it is detrimental to this site.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And commented the same on the question. My flag was declined with the reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's exactly why flagged it. Also because I can't vote to reopen. I feel like my issue was brushed aside autocratically without any discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why has this useful question been deemed out of scope?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T06:47:50.343" Title="Hasty flag decline and question close?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4933" CreationDate="2014-06-30T18:14:37.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I haven't got a lot of time to argue for someone else's question but I really can't understand why a question that's gained almost 2000 views in a day and has a useful answer and an informative comment, has been closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply because looking up the word &quot;shot&quot; in a dictionary would have answered the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shot&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; 6. a small ball or pellet of lead, a number of which are loaded in a cartridge and used for one charge of a shotgun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the Online Etymology Dictionary notes the origin of the term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=shotgun&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shotgun&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; 1821, American English, from &lt;em&gt;shot&lt;/em&gt; (n.) in the sense of &quot;lead in small pellets&quot; (1770) + &lt;em&gt;gun&lt;/em&gt; (n.). As distinguished from a &lt;em&gt;rifle&lt;/em&gt;, which fires bullets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;general reference&quot; close reason states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;List of general references&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the average dictionary &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Online Etymology Dictionary are suggested in the list of general references and both can quickly and accurately answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T18:14:37.913" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-30T18:25:41.630" Score="8" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been a year since &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/06/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;close reasons were revamped across the Stack Exchange network&lt;/a&gt;, giving individual sites the ability to define a set of custom reasons explaining why a question is off-topic. At that time, SE Community Coordinator &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/6437/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; &quot;seeded&quot; us with an initial set of custom reasons, and directed site moderators to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184637/what-do-site-moderators-need-to-do-to-support-the-new-custom-question-close-reas/185097#185097&quot;&gt;develop and refine their custom close reasons in consultation with the community&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;b&gt;This was never done.&lt;/b&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3989/closing-changes-on-hold-unclear-too-broad-opinion-based-off-topic-reason&quot;&gt;Despite an effort to get this conversation started at the time&lt;/a&gt;—an effort that, it should be noted, originated from the community and drew little attention from the moderator staff—we are still using the original custom Off Topic reasons Shog9 wrote for us a year ago. As Shog9 himself noted during the recent election campaign, we &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/16126151#16126151&quot;&gt;could probably do a lot better.&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, in a meta post that currently has 16 net upvotes, Shog9 strongly urged us to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4013/please-help-define-the-limits-of-general-reference&quot;&gt;define the limits of General Reference&lt;/a&gt;, including getting a lot more specific about what reference sources should be considered GR for which questions, and helping people understand &lt;i&gt;how&lt;/i&gt; they can find answers for GR questions. There was considerable discussion in answers and comments to that question, but nothing ever came out of it. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/14995?m=16130131#16130131&quot;&gt;Shog9 has urged us to return to this question and actually come up with a resolution.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;What is the process for proposing a change to site policies and governance and seeing it through to resolution?&lt;/b&gt; We are very good at chewing issues to death on meta, and very bad at ever actually doing anything to change anything. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4463/proposal-for-narrowing-the-scope-of-the-reference-close-vote&quot;&gt;I made a specific proposal in January to clarify and narrow how the GR close reason should be used.&lt;/a&gt; It sits at +13, with 19 upvotes and 6 downvotes. Despite attracting a reasonable amount of discussion, it has never officially been accepted or rejected, and as far as I can tell, no one from the moderation staff has ever weighed in on it at all. I'm not wedded to this proposal, and if I were to propose it today I'd probably make some changes to it. But to not even have it get rejected leaves me wondering where we go from here. &lt;i&gt;If this is not how we're supposed to have these conversations, please tell us what we should be doing instead.&lt;/i&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we have to do to satisfy &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184637/what-do-site-moderators-need-to-do-to-support-the-new-custom-question-close-reas/185097#185097&quot;&gt;these requirements&lt;/a&gt;? Does the process need to originate with the moderation staff? If so, why didn't that ever happen? What can we do to help craft a policy that will work for this site? How is the sentiment of the community determined, and to what extent does that sentiment matter? Who makes the ultimate decision, and how will we find out what the decision is? &lt;i&gt;Just tell us what we're supposed to do to help get the process started, and we'll do it.&lt;/i&gt; Doing nothing is no longer an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T15:27:45.950" Title="On custom close reasons and site governance" Tags="|discussion|community|self-governance|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4931" CreationDate="2014-06-30T18:39:55.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those labels are attached to the buttons on the top bar and assigned the CSS class &lt;code&gt;hidden-text&lt;/code&gt;. Despite the name, they are not actually hidden--they're just positioned above the top of the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.topbar .hidden-text {&#xA;    position: absolute;&#xA;    top: -200px;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a strange decision, but all the other SE sites I've checked do the top bar the same way, so I suppose there's a reason for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T18:39:55.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4936" CreationDate="2014-06-30T19:02:12.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this is what the process should entail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community raises an issue and makes a big stink about it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mods acknowledge the issue and post something on meta inviting potential solutions to be posted as answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mods discuss these solutions after letting the issue fester for a week and either:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick the one they like the best&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick a few solutions they can live with and have an official vote on meta to choose between them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once a solution is picked, it is implemented by the mods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T19:02:12.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="986" CreationDate="2014-06-30T20:38:48.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support this proposal: we should get rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag, and we should blacklist it so that it cannot be recreated.  It does not help anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T20:38:48.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-30T22:58:50.523" Score="20" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Encouraging Better Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to encourage the asking of better, more substantial questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every day we receive many brief, low-quality questions that are unlikely to elicit anything but low-quality answers which are equally unlikely to be of any help to future visitors of our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore propose that the initial &lt;strong&gt;Ask Question&lt;/strong&gt; dialogue, which has only a nebulous link to the Help Center, be modified to state its most important point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I am concerned, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; gold standard for how to ask a good question&lt;/strong&gt; is best demonstrated by Yoichi Oichi, our only member to hit 10k let alone 20k sheerly on the strength of his well-researched questions — and whose wonderful work may &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/234259/153355&quot;&gt;soon be recognized&lt;/a&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case Study&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands of these.  They get closed but they never seem to get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example set presented below, I’ve noticed quite a few similarities standing out.  If I were writing an expert system for training our Low Quality Review Queue auto-flagging, some of these observations would definitely make it into the trainer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Not one shows any research or effort.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All are extremely short.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of these questions have been closed for one or another reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;None have been deleted&lt;/strong&gt; as of this writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None have been revised.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost none have been migrated to ELL, even though these are clearly questions from English language learners.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most are asking a boolean question looking for a yes/no answer, or else are forcing you to select between two alternatives as though they were mutually exclusive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most involve asking whether something is “right”, or “correct”, or “grammatical”, or “proper”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many have meaningless titles.  This is useless for searching.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some have ungrammatical titles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many have ungrammatical questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are just a few examples, alphabetized in reverse so that the &lt;em&gt;Wh-&lt;/em&gt; questions come first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181718/2085&quot;&gt;Would one say “plethora” or “plethoral” in this context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180725&quot;&gt;Would my expression be right?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/125477&quot;&gt;Which would be correct? Owen and I or Owen and me&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/133726&quot;&gt;Which sentence is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/170066&quot;&gt;Which sentence is correct to say?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/105912&quot;&gt;Which sentence is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/165136&quot;&gt;which one of these statement's grammar correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/74059&quot;&gt;which one is the most correct answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/156706&quot;&gt;Which one is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180258&quot;&gt;Which one is correct “Where I was or Where was I”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/159546&quot;&gt;Which one is correct (This or That)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/159174&quot;&gt;Which one is correct sentence usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181468&quot;&gt;Which of the two words fits? overchallenged/overtaxed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/175663&quot;&gt;Which of the two is correct usage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/158344&quot;&gt;Which of the following two sentences is correct and/or better?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/172875&quot;&gt;Which of the following sentences is correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/78531/2085&quot;&gt;Which is proper usage: “What I've Learned” or “What I learned”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/119573&quot;&gt;Which is grammatically correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/171657&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “not less than” or “no less than”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/167405&quot;&gt;Which is correct “is” or “are”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/138562&quot;&gt;Which is correct, “from a young age” or “from young age”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/159232&quot;&gt;Which is correct - 'did with the egg' or 'with the egg did'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180700&quot;&gt;when and how to use word “anyway” in a scentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180398&quot;&gt;What's the difference between after and afterwards?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181097&quot;&gt;What part of speech is “to” when attached to an infintive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181023&quot;&gt;What is wrong in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/145559/2085&quot;&gt;What is the proper word/phrase for SMS style language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/175408/2085&quot;&gt;What is the proper use of the word “state of the art”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/57620/2085&quot;&gt;What is the proper spelling of “enqueueing”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102768/2085&quot;&gt;What is the proper interpretation of these two sentences?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/119392&quot;&gt;What is the mistake in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181937/2085&quot;&gt;What is the gramatically correct form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181327&quot;&gt;what is the difference in the usage of the following?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/178980&quot;&gt;What is the difference between owned and pwned?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104511/2085&quot;&gt;What is the difference between “As far as” and “As much as”? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/174349&quot;&gt;What is the correct verb that follows “as well as?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/92945/2085&quot;&gt;What is proper sentence structure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106926/2085&quot;&gt;What is proper grammar for a question that ends with a colon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/130874&quot;&gt;What is grammatically incorrect here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/161285&quot;&gt;What is correct: still to be/continue to be/should be/must be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/165523&quot;&gt;What is better style: “is linked” or “it is linked”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/178605&quot;&gt;What goes after another person: we or us?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/64098/2085&quot;&gt;What does Banglored mean and how it is created?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/147551/2085&quot;&gt;What does a fist bump means?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/105573/2085&quot;&gt;What can be the proper meaning of the ‘over’? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181350&quot;&gt;We have noted the service voucher and are pleased to confirm the booking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/118661&quot;&gt;Verb agreement with “that” as relative pronoun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/116135&quot;&gt;Use of not without an Auxillary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/168665&quot;&gt;Use of IS and WAS in reported speech&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181724/2085&quot;&gt;Use me and grab you appropriate phrases to use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180132&quot;&gt;Usage of “acknowledge”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/112951&quot;&gt;uninterested / me too or me either&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/174379&quot;&gt;This Company is the Driving Force of / Behind our success&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/174190/2085&quot;&gt;The subject or should it be Subject is being moved to a new area tomorrow? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/162657/2085&quot;&gt;Their or there legacy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180100&quot;&gt;The house in the house was destroyed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/171580&quot;&gt;“the” before “condition”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181725/2085&quot;&gt;“Thank you for being so late” vs. “Thank you for having been so late”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/93480&quot;&gt;Technical writing sentence correction/suggestion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/114243&quot;&gt;Successfully submitted vs Submitted Successfully&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181177&quot;&gt;Some problems in understanding a word in a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181560&quot;&gt;Solve this if you are (a) genius?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181023&quot;&gt;Sentence construction using the word “and”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181131&quot;&gt;Reporting to, or reporting into, which is a correct form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177976&quot;&gt;Question related to cover letter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/178447&quot;&gt;question about where the comma goes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/59125/2085&quot;&gt;Proper use of “has been” versus “have been” after plural reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/74668/2085&quot;&gt;Proper usage of the word “trouble”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/84638/2085&quot;&gt;Proper usage of plural/singular verb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/163222/2085&quot;&gt;Proper sentence choice, while sending reply through email&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106377/2085&quot;&gt;Proper punctuation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/107642/2085&quot;&gt;Proper English for “started shooting anywhere” &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/145096/2085&quot;&gt;Proper Capitalization of “ancient romans”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/10640&quot;&gt;“predictions of” or “predictions for”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181924/2085&quot;&gt; “have been” or “has been” ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/162652&quot;&gt;Payable to the order of you or Payable to your order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/168526&quot;&gt;Past tense vs past participle in passive forms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/168848&quot;&gt;Open/switch on the air-conditioner when we are home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/169111&quot;&gt;One or two apostrophes for two subjects in the possessive case?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181277&quot;&gt;off-duty - can't understand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/87232&quot;&gt;Occupy vs. occupying&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181331&quot;&gt;Meaning of “silver of shell”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180696&quot;&gt;Meaning of palm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181088&quot;&gt;Meaning of “over them”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181333&quot;&gt;Meaning of “makeshift dias”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/172352&quot;&gt;Making A Binary Decision&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/114014&quot;&gt;“Lay on the bed” vs. “lay in the bed”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/112286/2085&quot;&gt;“It's me” Phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/85669&quot;&gt;Is “today's” grammatical as a singular possessive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/45280/2085&quot;&gt;Is “thought'd” Proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/158921/2085&quot;&gt;Is this sentence proper grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180926&quot;&gt;Is this sentence grammatically wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/64421&quot;&gt;Is this sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/55010&quot;&gt;Is this saying grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/105616&quot;&gt;Is this Quote grammatically correct?Own Lines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/35839/2085&quot;&gt;Is this proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/159596/2085&quot;&gt;Is this proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/143287&quot;&gt;Is this phrase grammatically correct in UK or US English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/80915&quot;&gt;Is this grammatically correct? “We were thinking of holding a meeting…”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/51156&quot;&gt;Is this grammatical? “Each method has features in which context to use it.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103254&quot;&gt;Is this 2nd sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177579&quot;&gt;Is the word legs singular or plural?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/111455&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “The police had evidence on him.” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106526/2085&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “Does having a way to charge your electronic devices while on the go sound relevant to you?” grammatically correct? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/112991/2085&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “At about the speed of ten miles per hour” correct in the context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/17821&quot;&gt;Is the following sentence grammatically correct? It doesn't sound right&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/113223&quot;&gt;Is that grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/61897/2085&quot;&gt;Is “steepness” a proper word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/46125/2085&quot;&gt;Is Shakespeare proper English? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/42147/2085&quot;&gt;Is “of which” a proper way to begin a relative clause?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180752&quot;&gt;Is 'much better' correct usage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/56813/2085&quot;&gt;Is jargon proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/119566/2085&quot;&gt;Is it proper to say I am going to “prom” or is it “the prom”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181053&quot;&gt;Is it proper grammar to write a number with “th” after the month or only if it is used before the month?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/114787&quot;&gt;Is it grammatical to say: Your understanding is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/178294&quot;&gt;Is it correct “Will ask more questions if needed required”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/48918/2085&quot;&gt;Is “I'll when” proper form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/171650&quot;&gt;is “I does” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/18008&quot;&gt;Is “how much ever” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180859&quot;&gt;Is “from how long are you experiencing this symptoms” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/63944&quot;&gt;Is “for all who” grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/61257/2085&quot;&gt;Is “few couple of …” a proper usage in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/129915&quot;&gt;Is “expect lie from you” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/97306/2085&quot;&gt;Is “… et al. data.” proper grammar? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/66631&quot;&gt;Is “cattle herds” grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/96698&quot;&gt;Is “as is” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/81585/2085&quot;&gt;“In a time when” vs. “in a time where” &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181684&quot;&gt;In a sentence, to OR -&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181681&quot;&gt;I'I'm not sure which prepositions should be filled in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181772/2085&quot;&gt;i have vs i had&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180971&quot;&gt;“If anybody answer this question” or “If anybody answerS this question”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/132504&quot;&gt;“I don't” or “don't I” in questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/170249&quot;&gt;'I can identify myself with' or 'I can identify with'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/120038&quot;&gt;How would you say this? Or is it already grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180402&quot;&gt;How to use the verb ''to be'' in English grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181324&quot;&gt;How to say it differently by using various word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/53038&quot;&gt;How to refer to a period of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/143107&quot;&gt;“Here is/are” followed by plural&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/158812&quot;&gt;he pregnate my daughter and he pregnated my daughter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/172532&quot;&gt;“Hadn't I” vs. “Didn't I”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/141239&quot;&gt;Grammatically correct use of criteria&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/162482&quot;&gt;grammar - No + singular/plural noun + singular/plural verb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180493&quot;&gt;give some example using s+verb(be)+adj+to+infinitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/161460&quot;&gt;Flattering vs. flatter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/39041/2085&quot;&gt;finding proper article for a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/164657&quot;&gt;Family go vs family goes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/137872/2085&quot;&gt;English language proper sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180761&quot;&gt;Do these sentences make sense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181255&quot;&gt;Direct and indirect object with the verb “kick”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181422&quot;&gt;Difference between “through” and “by”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181746/2085&quot;&gt;Difference between systematic and systematical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180684&quot;&gt;Difference between “single” and “a single”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180251&quot;&gt;deserve vs make a compelling case&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177618&quot;&gt;definite article usage with president&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177797&quot;&gt;Countable vs. Uncountable Nouns&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180874&quot;&gt;correct use of “have you and did you”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/118592/2085&quot;&gt;Correct usage of “Peace of mind” &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181235&quot;&gt;correct my sentence in grammatically&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/168996&quot;&gt;coming to the shops or going to the shops?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/104174&quot;&gt;“Cant fight no more”, is this grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/120451&quot;&gt;Can someone please fix the grammar and punctuation in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181497&quot;&gt;Can I say It has written by he himself.?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181682&quot;&gt;Bridge the gap toward/from&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177979&quot;&gt;“A threat to us people” or “a threat to we people”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177921&quot;&gt;“at all time” or “at all times”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181315&quot;&gt;Are the two sentences synonymous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/120277&quot;&gt;Are these sentences both grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/160667&quot;&gt;Are the sentences below grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180334&quot;&gt;Are there any differences between later, latter and last?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181469&quot;&gt;Another way to say “communicate evidence”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/166885&quot;&gt;“All previous work is” or “All previous work are”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/178116&quot;&gt;A different use of BOTH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that if a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;PROMINENT BANNER&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; were to be presented to these askers when they went to ask their question, one that read . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . then those questions would not have been asked in that way.  They might not be asked at all, but they might have been improved and made better questions, thereby soliciting better answers and improving the site overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if not closed, poor questions tend to generate poor answers.  If we can encourage the asking of better questions, it’s better for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Related Questions on ELU Meta&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4897&quot;&gt;How curious are you? — or — Tallied ELU “Asking-Day Badges”–Proposal Results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3939&quot;&gt;Excessive number of fundamental questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3213&quot;&gt;Do we need to write the better questions ourselves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1613&quot;&gt;A look at question quality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1602&quot;&gt;Is English Language &amp;amp; Usage highbrow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3722&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T01:46:19.293" Title="A simple proposal towards improving question quality" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|appropriate-questions|ell|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4941" CreationDate="2014-07-01T00:49:10.577" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the suggested language comes straight from the Help Center, but the word &amp;quot;thoroughly&amp;quot; jumps out at me as sounding kind of, well, cranky. As far as I'm concerned, SE is &lt;i&gt;part of the process&lt;/i&gt; of conducting thorough research. We don't want to make it sound like we don't like being asked questions at all. Along the same lines, I assume that by &amp;quot;PROMINENT BANNER&amp;quot; you mean something other than the help box that's there now, something that reaches out and smacks the questioner across the face and forces them to read it before they can do anything. I'm not opposed to this, but if the show-your-work message is the only thing that appears in the smack-you-across-the-face banner, it will make it look like that's the only thing we care about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to provide first-time askers with a more rounded set of guidelines that also promotes ELL as being a site that's more suited to the needs of people learning English. It's clear that a lot of &amp;quot;low quality&amp;quot; questions come from people who don't know ELL exists and would probably have asked there first if they'd known. Perhaps the banner for first-time askers could say something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language and Usage! The key to getting a good answer is knowing how to ask a good question. Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; for our guide to getting the information you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange works best as a supplement to basic research, rather than as a replacement for it. Many basic questions can be easily and quickly answered by consulting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;commonly available online references&lt;/a&gt;. If you've researched your question and haven't found an answer, tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. Sharing your research helps everyone, and will help you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not a fluent speaker of English, you may get a better answer if you ask your question at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, our sister community for speakers of other languages learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, I think this is a good idea and you have my upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T00:49:10.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-01T03:14:34.803" Score="17" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading some posts on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;improving question quality&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4463/proposal-for-narrowing-the-scope-of-the-reference-close-vote&quot;&gt;narrowing the definition of the General Reference&lt;/a&gt; when I had an idea. What does ELU Meta think about putting a question on hold when &quot;more research is desired&quot; (&lt;em&gt;MRD&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point made &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is that poorer quality questions don't show enough research. I think it's possible that when there's no research present, interesting questions can get mistaken for them -- this is what I believe happened with this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4928/39720&quot;&gt;question about the origin of &quot;bunk&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the close-holds I know, I think there's a place for it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question meant for SE? (Closed as Spam)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question meant for this SE? (Closed to Migrate, for Proofreading, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question unambiguous? (On-hold as Unclear)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the question supported by good reasoning/research? (On-hold because &lt;strong&gt;more research desired&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question sound? (On-hold because of typo or like mistake)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question answerable from ELU's resources? (Off-topic because POB)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question already answered from ELU's resources? (Off-topic because GR)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I hoped to order these based on which to generally look for first, given criteria such as their dependencies on each other. But I go back and forth on the placement of some.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think much good can come from adopting this, &lt;strong&gt;particularly if we use it only when we feel the question will remain open (or become protected) when more research is added&lt;/strong&gt;. This is tricky, because we may not fully understand a question's potential without sufficient research. (This is why I rank GR after MRD, though arguably such a question should be on-hold as unclear.) But the asker has an idea of its potential, so &lt;em&gt;MRD&lt;/em&gt; forces the responsibility of demonstrating it back in the asker's hands instead of into those of the reviewers/answerers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does this responsibility ever leave the asker? Can't they edit their question on request at anytime? Why have a close-vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to preventing mis-closure for another reason, the best practical reason I see is enforcement. This way a question must meet ELU's standards before getting an answer, if an answer has not already been supplied in comments. (Following the ranking above, the question has already been approved as right for ELU; it just needs a little more refinement is all.) If the question appears to be from homework or a test, the asker is forced to show external work to get an answer from ELU. It sounds a little harsh said that way, but I believe it is also reasonable and fair -- &lt;strong&gt;provided we have members willing to go through recently edited MRD questions to reopen them as needed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the list of the first point made above, the asker who gets their question reopened &lt;em&gt;by necessity&lt;/em&gt; amends their question's following shortcomings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Showing little research or effort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being extremely short&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not being revised&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining points may end up amended in the process too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to choose the simplest but most general wording I could, but it's possible there's a better title. I have toyed with replacing &lt;em&gt;Research&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;Detail&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Effort&lt;/em&gt;, since the former could tempt us into looking at the number of links/quotes per question. I myself have posted questions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144020/word-for-no-i-in-team&quot;&gt;presented little (formal) research&lt;/a&gt; because I recognized a pattern but did not know where/how to search for its description. But a downside to using &lt;em&gt;Detail&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Effort&lt;/em&gt; is that the asker may add more informal discussion when formality is desired. I think as long as we flaggers agree that &lt;em&gt;Research&lt;/em&gt; can mean the user's own reasoning / readiness to provide examples / etc., we'll be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I envision the &lt;em&gt;MRD&lt;/em&gt; pane leading to a link of authoritative resources that might help the question. As a parallel to GR's help text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can improve this question and have it reopened by the community by adding citations from other sources. A list of accepted resources can be found here: LINK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where LINK leads to a page mapping topics to handy websites: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Origin? &lt;em&gt;Try Etymonline / Google nGrams&lt;/em&gt;! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meaning? &lt;em&gt;Try MW or other dictionary&lt;/em&gt;! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar? ... &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think, ELU Meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T02:13:07.410" Title="Hold-Reason Suggestion: &quot;More Research Desired&quot; (MRD)" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4933" CreationDate="2014-07-01T06:47:50.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is OK to good.  I grew up on a farm and everyone had a shotgun.  Out of the people I work with now, maybe 1 in 50 would be able to answer this question without looking.  And looking isn't easy either.  There are many definitions out there for shot, gun, and shotgun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand where MrHen is coming from.  He thinks it's easy.  For him this was an easy question, doesn't make it bad though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;shotgun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a smoothbore gun for firing small shot at short range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;shot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the firing of a gun or cannon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a weapon incorporating a metal tube from which bullets, shells, or&#xA;  other missiles are propelled by explosive force, typically making a&#xA;  characteristic loud, sharp noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above is simply the first definition that comes up with googling.  There is nothing in there that discusses a &quot;shot&quot; compared to a bullet.  Also I think it would be really hard for most to infer a shot could be a type of bullet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure why anyone would close this or what reason was used.  I also agree that mods should be more active to reopening things, especially since they seem to partake in closing things off too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T06:47:50.343" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4941" CreationDate="2014-07-01T09:39:13.307" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't you be a bit more forthright ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a StackExchange site for people learning English (ELL), so just make it clear to anyone asking a question that if they are learning English then their question is not welcome on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that having a banner is a good idea but it should state clearly what the site does NOT want. I propose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This site is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; for people learning English it is for native or fluent speakers of English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ELL(with a link) is the correct site to ask questions if you are learning English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you do not understand the words native or fluent then this site is not for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you ask a question about learning English it will be deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If your question is not written in fluent English it will be deleted.&lt;/em&gt; **&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you are a native/fluent speaker and you ask a question that is answerable by using a General Reference (with a link*) it will be&#xA;  deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that I've suggested that 'bad' questions should be deleted. Closing them seems like the nice thing to do but it will just encourage people searching for a similar term to be directed to EL&amp;amp;U. A deleted question will not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The current General Reference link takes you to a garbled page of nonsense that no-one will be bothered to read. If there is a proper list of General Reference sites, not cluttered with comments and chit-chat then people might be more inclined to actually look at the linked sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**This seems to be unpopular guidance, so perhaps it shouldn't be here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stats from websitelooker claim that 17% of traffic comes from India, 19% of traffic comes from the US and the next highest at a mere 5% is the UK. That suggests to me that most questions are coming from people learning English in India and most answers are coming from 'native' speakers in the US and a few in the UK (I'm sure SE could provide more accurate origins for Q vs A). The Chinese haven't yet found EL&amp;amp;U but when they do ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="71783" LastEditDate="2014-07-02T05:37:46.057" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T05:37:46.057" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2014-07-01T11:57:36.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that's a great idea; as an additional note, I see that the hint text by the question upvote arrow on all three sites and metas I'm usually on says &quot;&lt;em&gt;This question shows research effort&lt;/em&gt;; it is useful and clear&quot;. I think that having, in effect, a formal request for more research would (or at least could) result in better questions. And I'll take a &quot;could&quot;. I'll even take a &quot;might&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78415" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T11:57:36.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-01T14:49:44.890" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216080/can-trusted-users-be-trusted-to-suggest-tag-synonyms-without-a-score-of-5-in-a-t/216458#216458&quot;&gt;Can trusted users be trusted to suggest tag synonyms without a score of 5 in a tag? (on smaller sites, not Stack Overflow)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If, on a given site, there's a big problem with runaway tagging... Post a feature-request on your meta along with examples that demonstrate the need. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69588/drop-the-score-requirement-for-proposing-tag-synonyms-atleast-for-super-user/69661#69661&quot;&gt;We've temporarily lowered this in the past for sites with a lot of cleanup to be done&lt;/a&gt;, and I think doing this as part of a larger, coordinated cleanup effort is a good idea. Don't forget: even after a synonym has been created, the questions involved still need to be retagged, either by individual editors, or by a moderator merging the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going through @tchrist's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4442/the-great-elu-tag-clean-up-proposal-of-2014&quot;&gt;excellent list of synonym suggestions&lt;/a&gt; but couldn't propose most of them because I didn't have the required rep counts. Seeing that many of the tags are so infrequently used, it seems unlikely I'll get the rep any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, this is a feature request to let &lt;strong&gt;trusted users&lt;/strong&gt; submit tag synonyms. A trusted user is anyone with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;20k rep or higher&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Since no one has responded to this feature request, can someone at least offer a suitable workaround? The above linked posts suggest that this is the appropriate thing to request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T18:43:22.390" Title="Can trusted users propose tag-synonyms without the rep requirements?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4936" CreationDate="2014-07-01T15:27:45.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The custom close reasons are set already. They are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;List of general references&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to change one or more of these, please post a question on Meta that identifies the specific close reason you think should be changed, provide a clear definition of how the reason is to be applied (including edge cases and examples of questions that do and do not meet the criteria), and if necessary, which existing custom close reason you think should be discontinued in favor of the one you are proposing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the community has discussed/voted on your proposal, the mods will decide on a course of action and make changes as they feel are appropriate. The onus is on the OP to accept the answer that most closely reflects the mods' decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own personal recommendation is that we update the underlying policy (linked items from the custom reasons) and not the items themselves. The process for making that change would be the same (post on Meta, discuss, let us know what you come up with). Also, I think &quot;proofreading&quot; could use modification or at least a link to a policy that clarifies what we mean by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T15:27:45.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-01T19:29:11.213" Score="7" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with at least 10k reputation can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;vote to delete questions&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, the tools to do this are somewhat lacking so I have created a custom query that will show the most likely to be deleted posts on the site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/158719/top-50-posts-with-delete-votes?Top=5&amp;amp;Answers=0&amp;amp;Questions=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Top 5 Posts with Delete Votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This query will automatically update each week so my ask is that few 10k+ users volunteer each week to help vote on whether we should delete the 5 questions in this query. It doesn't need to be the same set of users; this is just more grunt work that doesn't have its own area in the review tools yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find one of the questions linked worthy of debate, feel free to start a conversation here on meta to discuss it. In the meantime, there are a few hundred deletion candidates and simply getting the top five dealt with each week is a huge step in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions please bring them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T22:37:58.710" Title="Reminder: You can vote to delete posts" Tags="|discussion|moderator-tools|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4949" CreationDate="2014-07-01T22:37:58.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When casting delete votes, do please recall that normally, questions closed as duplicates should be left alone, not deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a rule of thumb only, and exceptions will always exist, but the overall idea is that many roads lead to Rome. In other words, duplicate questions can make it easier for people to find the answers if the question is phrased differently in separate postings, because the search engines will pick up the alternate version.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, visitors who are not logged in will be automatically redirected to the question that that one was closed as a duplicate of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On uncommon occasion, there can be an argument to be made that a truly duplicate question should be merged into the original instead of being retained separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T22:37:58.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2014-07-01T22:47:24.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most popular questions of the past week was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180899/soccer-mom-why-soccer/181016#181016&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Soccer mom&amp;quot;: why soccer?&lt;/a&gt;. The accompanying commentary made clear that the OP understood what the term meant and when it had emerged, but wanted to know why its coiner had chosen that particular sport. It was a great question, and a number of people tried to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in a formal, show-your-work sense, the question wasn't especially well researched: The &quot;soccer mom&quot; questioner gave no evidence of having done any independent research in an effort to answer the question himself. He simply described how much he did know on the subject, and asked EL&amp;amp;U readers to inform him about the things he didn't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, his handling of the question was exactly appropriate to the situation—and it was very much the same approach that (it seems to me) Yoichi Oishi uses in formulating his questions, which many (though not all) of us here consider models of their kind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, a good question asks something that people who care about language recognize as interesting (though it may take some research to discover just how interesting it is). Second, the question summarizes what the questioner already knows, so answerers don't waste time rehashing stuff that isn't in doubt. And third, the question is clear enough about what the questioner wants to know that answerers don't waste time guessing at what it might be or pursuing false objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But satisfying these criteria doesn't inherently require any research; it simply requires having a good question to begin with. To the extent that a lack of research constitutes a valid objection to a question, I think, it does so because such research would have disposed of the question; that is, a modest amount of preliminary research by the questioner would have revealed the answer to the questioner without requiring the involvement of EL&amp;amp;U in the process. However, that logic amounts to saying that a modest amount of preliminary research would have revealed that the question itself wasn't good (by the first criterion I mentioned above) in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's where things get problematic for me. More than once I've looked into a seemingly simple question and found that the stock answers offered by general references either disagree in certain particulars or overlook important evidence that complicates the question (and answer). If we insist that questioners show that they have undertaken some independent research before coming to us for answers, those questioners will almost certainly encounter a stock answer from a general reference and will consider the matter closed. At times, this result isn't good for the cause of truth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that EL&amp;amp;U suffers from a serious problem of being inundated by tides of trivial and boring questions. But if &quot;put on hold until you demonstrate that you've done some elementary research on your own&quot; is actually designed to weed out bad questions by demanding more effort of the people who ask them than we do of the people who ask good questions, it establishes an unacknowledged double standard. Again, bad questions aren't bad because they aren't adequately researched; they're bad because there's nothing to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most crucially, to the extent that seemingly bad questions may occasionally be good questions in disguise, I think that sending the questioner back to do more research is actually counterproductive because such a questioner will rarely go deeply enough into the research to find the hidden complications that make both the question and the answer(s) interesting. We're the ones with the multiple reference works on hand and the sense of what to look for in the way of inconsistencies, ambiguities, and other complications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most honest explanation—&quot;put on hold as being a question of no serious interest to anyone but the questioner&quot;—sounds too rude or dismissive to pass muster. But the farther the reason we give for putting a question on hold is from the real reason for our doing so, the likelier we are to reap unintended and undesirable consequences from our policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I don't know how we can filter out all of the bad questions and keep all of the good ones; but even at the cost of tolerating bad ones an hour or two longer than we otherwise might, I would like to see a bit more patience in our handling of certain types of seemingly obvious (and therefore seemingly bad) questions, in the hope that research by an interested answerer might discover something valuable in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I don't sound too negative about dingo_dan's proposal, because it's clear to me that he recognizes the desirability of keeping &quot;hidden good&quot; questions in play while disposing of tons of slag. I just want to make sure that we don't put too high a value on research as a necessary characteristic of good questions, or as a hoped-for way to transform bad questions into good ones or to make bad ones simply disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T02:13:07.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-02T20:40:12.300" Score="14" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to try and understand the purpose of this site better, so I looked at the definition on the tour page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It only made me more confused. I think there are two sides to this description, and they don't fit on the same coin imo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site &lt;strong&gt;for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not consider myself any of these, so perhaps I am not supposed to be here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait, built and run by me? So I am supposed to be here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the purpose is to &lt;strong&gt;build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage&lt;/strong&gt;? Hang on then, why are questions closed as general reference? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because the answer is in a library somewhere else, doesn't mean we have satisfied our objective, does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So if this site is for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts; where do I fit in as a non-linguist, non-etymologist, non-&lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt;-enthusiast English speaker (I am an enthusiast, but not a serious one)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we intend to build a library of &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; question, why are questions closed because the answers can be found on another resource?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contradiction I see is that linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts are incapable of asking &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; question about English language and usage. In fact, this site &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; beginners and intermediates, to achieve its goal of cataloguing every question. Additionally, experts cannot ask simple and widely wondered(?) questions with real purpose, because 9999 out of 10000 times they already know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51660" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2014-07-02T22:05:51.317" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T01:34:33.110" Title="Confusion of purpose due to implied contradiction?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2014-07-02T22:11:04.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In situations like the one that phenry brings up here, where a commenter provides the unmistakably correct answer and the question itself has no search or archive value, why can't we have the option to vote it or declare it &quot;Closed: Answered in Comments&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing controversial about the answer to the &quot;anamatapic&quot; question, and the commenter has helped the only person in the world who cares about the question as it is formulated, so (it seems to me) EL&amp;amp;U should be able to declare at that point, &quot;Our work here is done.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only concern about &quot;Closed [or Put on hold] as Answered in Comments&quot; is that voters might be tempted to cite that reason in instances where a question isn't really or fully answered in the comments beneath it; but that's a danger with any close or put-on-hold option, isn't it? At least with &quot;Answered in Comments&quot; we give the strongest reason why no one should object to the closure—and perhaps we encourage answerers to help out clueless questioners instead of telling them (the questioners) to try harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side benefit, &quot;Answered in Comments&quot; would reduce the size of the Unanswered Questions queue without requiring voters to vote up obvious answers. I suspect that many people answer exceedingly simple questions as comments because (1) they want to help the questioner, but (2) they don't think that the question or the answer rises to the level of deserving an upvote. That's my motivation at times, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that some users might have a philosophical or practical concern about encouraging bad questions by answering them; but EL&amp;amp;U gets boatloads of bad questions anyway, and the real question is how to dispose of them effectively and (if possible) helpfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T22:11:04.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4952" CreationDate="2014-07-02T22:40:33.067" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, you've hit on two long standing debates that do not have quick, easy answers. It isn't trivial to explain exactly where we stand on these issues and there are plenty of differing camps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here is a quick overview to get you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) So if this site is for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts; where do I fit in as a non-linguist, non-etymologist, non-serious-enthusiast English speaker (I am an enthusiast, but not a serious one)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a ton of discussion here on Meta regarding the target audience and whether the audience that we originally wanted is the audience that we ended up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(January 2014) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;This is not a site for &amp;quot;serious English language enthusiasts,&amp;quot; and it never will be&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(May 2013) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3939/excessive-number-of-fundamental-questions?rq=1&quot;&gt;Excessive number of fundamental questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(August 2012) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3054/what-is-the-role-of-non-experts-on-elu?rq=1&quot;&gt;What is the role of non-experts on ELU?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(August 2011) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1568/who-is-elus-audience&quot;&gt;Who is EL&amp;amp;U&amp;#39;s audience?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(July 2011) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1587/problem-with-faq-elu-audience-experts-only-or-students-too?lq=1&quot;&gt;Problem with faq: EL&amp;amp;U audience - experts only or students too?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(July 2011) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1549/is-elu-succeeding&quot;&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U succeeding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm sure I missed many. The short explanation is that the Tour text was written ages ago when the goal of ELU was very much to be a definitive experts site for English. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things got even more complicated with the introduction of ELL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(September 2013) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4167/should-we-consider-going-in-the-other-direction-with-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;Should we consider going in the other direction with ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(February 2013) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(January 2013) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3673/whats-the-status-of-ell-relative-to-elu&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the status of ELL relative to ELU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) If we intend to build a library of every question, why are questions closed because the answers can be found on another resource?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The General Reference close reason has &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; been the subject of much discussion. Instead of wading through the many, many posts, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=general+reference+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;I'll just point you toward the query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the close reason was outlined by Jeff Atwood &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;back in 2011&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The minimum bar for a question is not “is this on-topic?”, but rather “is this &lt;em&gt;somewhat interesting&lt;/em&gt; and on-topic?”. I’m not saying every question needs to be utterly fascinating, but please endeavor to make your questions more than a constant stream of no-duh underhanded softballs requiring nothing more than a quick cut and paste from Wikipedia, IMDB, or some other standard internet reference site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s nothing useful any expert can learn from ultra-basic questions. Allow your Q&amp;amp;A community to fill itself with enough “General Reference” type questions and you’ll soon find no experts there at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does appear to conflict with the goal of building a library to answer &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions but I think that Atwood would amend the goal to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every &lt;strong&gt;interesting&lt;/strong&gt; question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Interesting&amp;quot; is somewhat subjective but the purpose of the General Reference close reason is to set an objectively measurable lower bar for what &amp;quot;interesting&amp;quot; means. If the question can be answered quickly and definitively by the dictionary (or any other reference on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;List of General References&lt;/a&gt;), than the question is not appropriate for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the massive number of posts on the subject, even this lower bar is not universally agreed upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contradiction I see is that linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts are incapable of asking every question about English language and usage. In fact, this site needs beginners and intermediates, to achieve its goal of cataloguing every question. Additionally, experts cannot ask simple and widely wondered(?) questions with real purpose, because 9999 out of 10000 times they already know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original goal was to build an environment where experts can learn from each other about a particular subject. It isn't &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; to build a library of questions and answers. The &amp;quot;library&amp;quot; is a side-effect of getting a bunch of experts to dig into a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put this another way, the library is intended to serve subject matter &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt;. It isn't intended to fully, completely document the subject. In the case of English, there is really no reason to replicate the entire dictionary on ELU when any expert in the area is already going to consult a dictionary when it would be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean beginners and intermediates are unwelcome. But the beginner and intermediate questions being asked should still be asked in a manner that is interesting to &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;. It is really rather boring to respond to a question that can be answered by looking it up in a dictionary. All you do is copy/paste the text into an answer and push submit. That boringness is bad. The General Reference close reason is intended to avoid making our contributors suffer through that boring work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining debate, therefore, is whether the General Reference close reason is succeeding or not. Is it doing what it should? Is it doing too much? As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of debate on the subject. I won't add my opinion to this post — I was merely trying to explain how we ended up where we are. I'll let the others give their two cents on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T22:48:08.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-03T14:28:01.423" Score="-2" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181992/50720&quot;&gt;The use of nominative &amp;quot;whom&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; please be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the outset, I referenced the more general question which I had already read but didn't answer my question, so that mine wouldn't be closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With profuse thanks to subsequent and instructive comments by user Araucaria, I'm interested in learning about other answers and glosses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Supplementary:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks for the answer. I have just emended my original to declare that I don't, veritably, know whether it should be &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;whom&lt;/strong&gt;. My guess in favour of &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; is predicated on those links, but is this wrong, thanks to user Araucaria's many examples and comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2nd Supplmentary:&lt;/strong&gt; Alas, this question was closed again so I thought to elucidate it. Moderator in his answer below writes: 'you know it.' Sadly, I don't (know the answer). Moderator's 3rd paragraph also says 'You are certain.' Sadly, I'm not. I had updated my question by virtue of the many conrete, valid examples evidence against the use of &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T10:55:01.310" Title="Possible validity of 'whom' - Why unilaterally closed again? Please re-reopen?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4955" CreationDate="2014-07-03T14:52:18.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed per the comments on it. The closure has been explained. The question is loaded, the premise as stated is wrong, and you know it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of the comments, it only got closed by one mod after an extended discussion between yourself and a different mod, so the closure wasn't exactly unilateral or unexpected. (And of course mods can't help their close votes being unilateral, that's by design.) In the course of that discussion you did try to improve the question, which we do acknowledge as something most people never even bother with. You just didn't quite get there, is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are certain that it should be &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, and have consulted a number of places that all confirmed it should be &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, but you still go ahead and ask, &quot;I don't apprehend why &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; is correct&quot;. All we can do at that point is repeat right back &quot;well, &lt;em&gt;it is not&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Which people did, in comments and an answer alike. So there's little point in keeping the question open in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canonical questions exist precisely so that we don't have to have a dedicated question for every single typo in the history of mankind. More to the point, we cannot explain the reasoning behind every single typo (or whether it is indeed a typo, hypercorrection, a brain fart, an OCR bug, or plain incompetence). Only the author will know. Perhaps not even him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, the duplicate close reason is a very soft one. The softest of them all. It basically says two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether or not your question is closed, it will stick around forever. So you lose nothing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether or not your question is closed, you are unlikely to receive insight apart from that which has already been supplied. So again, you lose nothing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to edit your question to be substantially different, though if you already got an answer to your original question&amp;nbsp;— which you did&amp;nbsp;—, you are best advised to post that different question from scratch, because otherwise you'd be doing a disservice to the person who answered your original question and whose answer will no longer match the edited version. (If it still does, then the edit is arguably not substantial by definition.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="300" LastEditDate="2014-07-03T19:22:25.880" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T19:22:25.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-04T08:16:10.737" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to post answers that offer terms used  outside of their usual context by specific groups?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry to ask, but it seems that I may have stumbled on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182184/82990&quot;&gt;my first post here&lt;/a&gt; and I thought I should check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... Three downvotes in an hour I guess that answers the question. I'll delete the post and leave the link for 10k users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82990" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T17:50:39.063" Title="Is it OK to post answers that offer terms used outside of their usual context by specific groups" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4957" CreationDate="2014-07-04T08:44:23.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ther's nothing wrong with suggesting a term that's only used by a specific group (or &lt;em&gt;jargon&lt;/em&gt; as it's called), so long as it's properly identified as such.  You do, however, have to distinguish defining characteristics from accompanying  ones.  The sort of person the OP is asking about in the linked question might be called &quot;worldly&quot; and it's often a good description of them. But that, as well as your &quot;lukewarm&quot;, is a description of the person not the behaviour, so it's not a good answer on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T08:44:23.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4957" CreationDate="2014-07-04T17:50:39.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it's OK, as long as it is an attempt to answer the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be judged (and voted on) by appropriateness; Your answer may work in that subgroup, but that's just not what the OP wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T17:50:39.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4955" CreationDate="2014-07-06T03:14:12.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;@LePressentment.&#xA;I feel sympathetic to your displeasure over the closure of your question. I too have experienced similar frustrations several times when my questions were closed for a simple reason of being ‘off-topic” without being given any specific or concrete reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I realized that a closed question can be reopened by revising or improving the wording or structure of your question. As a unique example, I once posted a question under the heading, “’Battle-hardened’’ is this a typo?,” regarding the word used in the headline of the New Yorker's article, which was closed as an off-topic question. I complained it in Meta User, then received a suggestion from the user whom I respect to alter the wording of the heading as “’Battled-hardened,’ is this one of New Yorker’s renowned idiosyncrasies?” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will know the difference. If I preconceive it  a typo which seems to be very likely, it's no use for asking it as a question.&#xA;I followed his suggestion and rewrote the title. The question was re-opened. It means I got 5 reopen-votes to offset close-votes simply by revising the heading. It was very valuable advice for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m simply giving you an example of the blame (though I’m not sure of whether this wording is right or not) for a close-vote being shared mutually by posters and reviewers of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope both parties work constructive on ‘win-win’ relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2014-07-06T19:54:40.907" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T19:54:40.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-06T14:20:46.580" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've now supplemented &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/182000/meaning-of-contend-when-clich%C3%A9s-contend&quot;&gt;Can I use &amp;quot;contend&amp;quot; without a preposition?&lt;/a&gt; with an addedum concernig why it shouldn't be esteemed as &quot;off-topic&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T20:56:41.993" Title="Please reopen 'When clichés contend'?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-06T14:25:35.190" Score="-3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In view of and pursuant to the multitudinous requests here for reopenings, I thought about adapting a modality from Math Meta SE (&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/q/6424&quot;&gt;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/q/6424&lt;/a&gt;) : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it help amalgamate, coalesce, and keep them all into one thread?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm happy to rewrite this to  enact and institute it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T19:30:47.797" Title="Requests for Reopening" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2014-07-06T17:14:58.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to please renominate enabling the limit on ELU the way it is on some of the other higher-traffic sites.  The reason why is simple: the help vampires are gaining on us.  Limiting them to 50 questions in any consecutive 30-day period seems only prudent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-07-06T18:51:47.943" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T18:51:47.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4963" CreationDate="2014-07-06T18:52:36.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, please don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason is that it's entirely new here. Another reason is that it allows each question to be discussed on its own merits: the Meta question proposes re-opening, and that can be voted on; and answers can either support that proposition (and gain upvotes) or stand against it (and gain upvotes for &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; stance). Answers can give reasons for siding in one direction or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is of course, the option simply to vote to re-open the Main question in point without commenting one way or the other; but that option exists however attention is drawn to the question. Arguably, questions on the main site are more likely to be re-opened more quickly if each is a separate Meta question, because those who can cast re-open votes don't have to search through a composite Meta question to find the most recent addition: the relevant Main question is itself pushed to the top of the Meta &quot;active&quot; list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My name has a diamond here, but this answer has not been considered by other moderators. However, I don't consider that the proposal makes life easier for anyone, moderator or ordinary voter-member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-07-06T19:30:47.797" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T19:30:47.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4962" CreationDate="2014-07-06T19:53:57.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing in the edit [as it stands at the time of this answer] which adds more information indicating that all of the existing answers are insufficient, that there is nothing which answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer did misunderstand the phrase in question, but a comment on that explains why it's wrong (and thus that comment helps to answer your question). The other answer actually answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you edit a question with a view to re-opening, the edit must be substantive. You need to provide [that is, &lt;strong&gt;add,&lt;/strong&gt; not merely reference] further evidence and documentation which supports your question and which is not fully covered in the answers when taken collectively. I don't think this has happened in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are interested in further definitions of &lt;em&gt;contend,&lt;/em&gt; I offer &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/contend_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cambridge&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to compete in order to win something:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;There are three world-class tennis players contending for this title&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you substitute &lt;em&gt;compete&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;contend,&lt;/em&gt; the phrase in your question makes sense. The question as it stands &amp;mdash; even with the current edit &amp;mdash; is correctly closed as General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T19:53:57.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4962" CreationDate="2014-07-06T20:56:41.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/182000/revisions&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; the question to focus more on the missing preposition than on the meaning of the word &quot;contend&quot; which is fairly clear from the dictionary references. This should resolve the close reason and, hopefully, people will now vote to reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T20:56:41.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4971" CreationDate="2014-07-06T22:16:47.033" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152/when-should-i-use-a-vs-an&quot;&gt;When should I use &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;an&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; is a very elementary question that hasn't been closed. I've seen lots of other questions, not so elementary and obvious as this one, be closed five or ten minutes after they had been asked, on grounds they were off-topic. Can anyone tell me why? It's preposterous that someone should have got so many votes by answering such a ridiculous question. In fact, many more votes than I have seen for any other question on EL&amp;amp;U.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T04:10:59.970" Title="Such an elementary question in EL&amp;U has not been closed. Can anyone tell me why?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-07T03:28:26.643" Score="0" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this thread should be re-opened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181992/you-owe-a-duty-to-persons-whom-it-is-foreseeable-are-likely-to-be-harmed-why&quot;&gt;The use of nominative &amp;quot;whom&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;duplicate thread&quot; doesn't seem to have an answer to the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &quot;closed&quot; thread poses an example that is grammatically interesting, and maybe not so easy to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already voted for it to be re-opened, so that ELU members who are interested in English grammar can try to answer the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57102" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T16:48:26.327" Title="A thread asking a grammatical question has been closed twice" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2014-07-29T00:52:42.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4968" CreationDate="2014-07-07T04:10:59.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you have linked is from 2010. Back then, ELU was significantly more open to receiving &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; questions about English. The push to reduce the number of &quot;too basic&quot; questions only officially started in 2011 with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;creation of the General Reference close reason&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as far as I know, there is still no official policy on ELU to close questions that are simply &quot;too basic&quot;. Most of the &quot;too basic&quot; questions that get closed are closed as General Reference which, as I noted, didn't exist back when the question was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the question has become a common duplication target and trying to close it now would not significantly improve the site. The primary reason that people find &quot;too basic&quot; questions problematic is that it takes time to answer them and if the site gets clogged with too many &quot;too basic&quot; questions then the regular contributors will suffer from burn out and vacate the site. This concern obviously doesn't apply to a question asked over four years ago and especially not one that already has 11 answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I see no particularly clear reason to close this question. If you are concerned about other questions that been closed as &quot;too basic&quot; it is possible that they &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; have been closed. We can certainly help address any particular examples you bring forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T04:10:59.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2014-07-07T16:48:26.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can be pretty ruthless about closing duplicates, but I think this question should be reopened. The &quot;he/who, him/whom&quot; rule ultimately provides the answer here, but the sentence being analyzed in the newer question is a convoluted one, and requires some untangling before it's clear how the rule should be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule I try to follow when closing as duplicate is &quot;Will the person asking this question receive a &lt;i&gt;full&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;useful&lt;/i&gt; answer over at the other question?&quot; Here, the asker explicitly stated that they consulted the other question first and that it didn't provide a satisfactory answer, and it's not hard for me to see why that would be the case. Remember, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;duplication is not necessarily bad&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Quite the contrary — some duplication is desirable. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find the answer they’re looking for. And isn’t that, really, the whole point of this exercise?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T16:48:26.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4981" CreationDate="2014-07-07T21:14:02.720" Score="11" ViewCount="1703" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Copying, Linking, Attributions, and Plagiarism&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two related questions that I would like to see some discussion on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we need to improve our Help Center’s text to remind people that  they have to cite their sources by name?  &lt;p&gt; &lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: I’m marking this first question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/214096/7&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;completed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as of 2014-07-08 04:38:38 ᴜᴛᴄ.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should we do about postings that lack proper attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit in the attribution if known.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete the posting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the posting.  (and if so, as what?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a blue moderator note.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://islam.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1157/take-pride-in-your-community-and-work-to-build-a-site-you-can-be-proud-of&quot;&gt;ours is not the only site with these problems&lt;/a&gt;.  Most of the issue mentioned there apply here, notably including this quote from that posting of Shoggoth’s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not tolerate answers consisting primarily of text copied from other sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We require that answers consist primarily of the words of their author, and that all quotes be clearly marked as such and attributed to their respective authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bare link next to verbatim, copied-in text is not “attributed”, and answers that are just text copied from elsewhere provide no words from that author. If you read his posting referenced above, there are specific steps given as guidance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;our Help Center’s section on “How to reference material written by others”&lt;/a&gt;, it reads in part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from another site or in an answer on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange) make sure you do all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Provide a link to the original page or answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Quote only the relevant portion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide the name of the original author&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ernest Hemingway - Biographical on Nobelprize.org&lt;/a&gt;, Hemingway saw combat when he was a teenager. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;other sources, quotes, explanations, etc. necessary to complete the answer&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is not happening.  I believe that it should be happening, and I would like for the community to decide how to approach missing attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This omission is especially noticeable in answers to questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, where the answerer will copy in a dictionary definition without saying where they got the definition from.  However, it occurs throughout our site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a link is given, and sometimes it is not.  Now in some cases, one cannot provide a link because the source is from a printed book.  In those cases, posters are a bit better with supplying the name of the work they are quoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the case of links, posters are very bad at this.  In some cases, it’s so bad that their would-be answer is nothing but a word that’s hyperlinked to some online resource.  Link-only answers aren’t real answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even when there is more, actual text copied out, &lt;strong&gt;a link by itself is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an attribution.&lt;/strong&gt;  It does not include in plain text the name of the work linked to.  This is burdensome; how can one judge the authority of the cited source if there is no source given for the citation?  There is a world of difference between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Citing formally curated resources like the OED, the American Heritage Dictionary, or even CGEL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Citing crowd-sourced resources like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, the Free Dictionary, Etymonline, or Urban Dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Citing John Q. Public’s random private web page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even within each of those three types, there is obviously a hierarchy of “trustworthiness”, but if the source is not named, readers of the posting will not be aware of which one it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see the source named so that we can tell how good of a source it is. I believe that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; citations, link or no link, need to provide the actual name of where the text has been copied from.  &lt;strong&gt;That is what our Help Center says, but people are not doing it.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not have to punch through a link to find out how trustworthy the citation is, or even where it has come from.  Telling people to “hover” won’t work not just because it is an undue burden, but also because it does not work on the mobile interface to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Examples Galore&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Some of the examples listed below as being in one of three buckets seem to have gotten unwittingly tossed into the wrong bucket. In particular, some posts were erroneously tossed in the “Ugly” bucket and do not deserve to be there.  My apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are examples of good, bad, and completely absent attributions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Good:&lt;/strong&gt; examples of complete attributions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/165901&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/55110&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/180775&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/79385&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/16798&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/178213&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/127836&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/3224&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/182277&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48018&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/4835&quot;&gt;11&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/54520&quot;&gt;12&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/22986&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/84605&quot;&gt;14&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/73968&quot;&gt;15&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/132983&quot;&gt;16&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/77106&quot;&gt;17&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/23924&quot;&gt;18&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/105442&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/107501&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Bad&lt;/strong&gt;: examples of links missing attributions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/180930&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/115427&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/171104&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/180204&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/168613&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/38725&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/171086&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/47805&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/143787&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/160056&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/165967&quot;&gt;11&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/28070&quot;&gt;12&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/127797&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/182678&quot;&gt;14&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/169713&quot;&gt;15&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/163502&quot;&gt;16&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/123107&quot;&gt;17&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/165914&quot;&gt;18&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/84604&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/147693&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/127236&quot;&gt;21&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/168845&quot;&gt;22&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/15922&quot;&gt;23&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/27993&quot;&gt;24&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182687&quot;&gt;25&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125340&quot;&gt;26&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/147666&quot;&gt;27&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48111&quot;&gt;28&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182639&quot;&gt;29&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/143835&quot;&gt;30&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/172459&quot;&gt;31&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/175377&quot;&gt;32&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48264&quot;&gt;33&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/83544&quot;&gt;34&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125343&quot;&gt;35&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/84614&quot;&gt;36&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/59781&quot;&gt;37&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/165423&quot;&gt;38&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/147647&quot;&gt;39&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/38775&quot;&gt;40&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/124753&quot;&gt;41&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Ugly:&lt;/strong&gt; examples of completely unattributed copying (plagiarism):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/123099&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/182640&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125339&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/143816&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48260&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/129473&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/84626&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48057&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/95034&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125367&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/126492&quot;&gt;11&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/163504&quot;&gt;12&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48257&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/51275&quot;&gt;14&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/143832&quot;&gt;15&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/79182&quot;&gt;16&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/27002&quot;&gt;17&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/59960&quot;&gt;18&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/143911&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/126399&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/126428&quot;&gt;21&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125437&quot;&gt;22&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125410&quot;&gt;23&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/30498&quot;&gt;24&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182625&quot;&gt;25&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/79156&quot;&gt;26&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/30964&quot;&gt;27&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/180479&quot;&gt;28&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T08:35:00.403" Title="What to do about missing source attributions?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|reference|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-07T22:47:00.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure that you are not misinterpreting this rule? (for the part about giving the exact name of the link as a text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started seeing your comments about this in my answers. (I think you should have waited for our opinions first.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/182734/adjective-to-describe-someone-who-is-knowledgeable-resolute-and-calm&quot;&gt;Adjective to describe someone who is knowledgeable, resolute, and calm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I write the exact name of the link as a text in my answer? I'm copying the relevant part and attributing to the link. This covers the first two rules in Help Center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a link to the original page or answer &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quote only the relevant portion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the third rule does not apply: &quot;Provide the name of the original author&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I provide the name of the author of the online dictionary here then? I do not think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I provide the name of the authors only when I give citations from books. Even the example in Help Center looks like my answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit: Hemingway example in Help Center is updated after this answer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of answers that attributes to the link but that does not give the exact name of the link as a text. Even moderators have these kind of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would it be a problem now after all this time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: You are right about the answers that copy from a source but that does not provide any link or source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note2: If there is a really big problem about this, more details can be added to the instructions in Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T13:47:55.687" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-07T23:05:18.937" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to disagree with you strenuously. But I can't. That doesn't mean I can't disagree with you mildly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wholly agree with your discussion about &lt;em&gt;The Ugly&lt;/em&gt;. We should strongly discourage quotes, including definitional quotes, that do not give the reader the ability to check out the source. A quote that provides neither the name of the source nor a link to that source, at the very least least, borders on plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree that an answer that consists of little more than a linked word is also substantially less than helpful, and outside the realm of how we provide answers. It fails because the information that is most important to the reader, the actual definition, is not on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am troubled by the view that an answer, often a single word, accompanied by a written definition (and sometimes even an example of use), coupled with a link to an established online dictionary or other standard online reference, is an unacceptable response. I am flattered that the first example of a &lt;em&gt;Good&lt;/em&gt; answer is one in which I name the source, provide a link, and quote the applicable definition. I am chagrined that this answer was edited by me to read this way as a sarcastic riposte to @tchrist 's chiding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the problem. Someone can post a quote and a link to a site of limited or even spurious repute, and the unwary may simply take the data on our site without vetting the underlying source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet, the most critical information is often the surfacing of the word. The provided definition may clarify and confirm that the answer suits. In many cases, whether the particular definition is from ODO or American Heritage (that sounds so much better than &lt;em&gt;yahoo&lt;/em&gt;) is often (but not always) immaterial. That &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; authority lists this definition as fitting is often enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the reader who is trying to determine the trustworthiness of the source, the link is a better guide than a mere reference to the name of the source.  The link can provide context (alternative definitions, examples, etymology) that the textual cite cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, the section @tchrist cites in this site's Help Section reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this biography&lt;/a&gt;, Hemingway saw combat when he was a teenager. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals ....&#xA;[other sources, quotes, explanations, etc. necessary to complete the answer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Supplemental note:&lt;/strong&gt; The above section and the reference to it in the above question have been modified since this answer was written. I think this actually supports my point as noted in comments below.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the source is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; given, just a link to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between a fairly complete answer that provides a word, or term, coupled with a definition and a link to the source, and that same answer with the name of the source added seems to parallel the difference between footnotes and end notes. Footnotes are clearly more informative during the process of reading. You know exactly who said what. But they are often distracting (have you ever read a law journal? Save me!). End notes provide the same information, but some of the material is not immediately present. However it is readily accessible if you need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't disagree that a simple textual cite to the name of the source (along with other critical elements) is a bad idea. I'm not sure that it should be a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T16:18:49.450" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-07T23:19:18.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvotes&lt;/strong&gt; are for poor answers so while some postings may also need to be downvoted I don't think downvoting is appropriate for missing citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commenting&lt;/strong&gt; gives the best hope of fixing the answer, but there's no guarantee. In the meantime we're hosting content that's essentially stolen; this is not the academic way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing&lt;/strong&gt; to add attribution sounds fine, but won't always apply. If it can be done then I say go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flagging&lt;/strong&gt; may create a lot of work, and what exactly is accomplished? The question/answer/comment hasn't been improved, and the content is still there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;deletion&lt;/strong&gt; is the most appropriate. We may loose content, but was it quality content? &lt;strong&gt;It's not that hard to cite your source.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to adding the Author's name. I think that's overkill. The point of a citation is give credit. So long as the source can be found credit has been given. However I think leading by example would be useful here since including the author's name is good practice; I just don't think it needs to be &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70097" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T23:19:18.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-08T01:42:44.293" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add to the chorus: if you quote a dictionary, it is perfectly sufficient to link to the definition - the link itself becomes the author citation. Explicitly citing the dictionary's name would imply that &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; particular dictionary is somehow to be preferred for this definition, which 99% of the time is not the case. (I have a list of dictionaries bookmarked, and when I need &quot;a definition, any definition&quot;, I will randomly choose one of those bookmarks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer involves comparative definitions (&quot;dictionary A says [x] but dictionary B says [y]&quot;), then naturally, the names of the dictionaries must be part of the answer. But otherwise, adding the dictionary's name would be worse than unnecessary: it would be possibly misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that answers that are 99% quoted, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; are quoted with no attribution, need to be addressed somehow: fixed if possible, downvoted into oblivion otherwise. But please, don't let's start offending good contributors with counterproductive nitpicking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This is becoming ridiculous, folks. A LINK &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;IS&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; AN ATTRIBUTION!!!!!!!!! If this were a print medium, then forcing people to add awkward, possibly misleading verbiage about the source of a quote would be understandable, but last I checked, this is the effing INTERNET.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="1547" LastEditDate="2014-09-03T15:04:08.537" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T15:04:08.537" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-08T03:11:26.990" Score="1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;Help Center | Asking&lt;/a&gt; page it states:&#xA;&quot;Be constructive: name-calling is as likely to drive folks away as it is win them to your cause.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this be changed to state that name-calling is more likely to drive folks away than it is to win them to your cause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83340" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T03:11:26.990" Title="Not clearly stated in the Help Center - Asking" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-08T04:28:58.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe providing links to quotes can be enough to be attribution. Asking for the source to be apparent from the post's text is more likely to prompt inconclusive debates about style rather than good attribution practices. Three Ugly questions are examined with the intent of supporting that claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Intro&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Growing up I remember a debate among fellow players in a sport about how focused our rules should be. One side said they ought to clearly delineate what is and is not allowed. The other side agreed in principle but cautioned that such a task was difficult (if not impossible) to do -- particularly without coming across as legalistic. Some even thought it might promote shifty behavior, intentionally finding loopholes, perhaps to use as tactical advantage. And so those who said nay to further clarification took to using a phrase that I would like to invoke here: &lt;em&gt;the spirit of the rules&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A Tale of Two Citations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spirit of ELU's rules about citation, as I understand them, is &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; about academic honesty: giving credit where credit is due, or (more bluntly) not implying the work of another is one's own. These reasons motivate the opening and closing thoughts of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;ELU Help Center’s page on &lt;em&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/a&gt; - posting &lt;em&gt;the work of others &lt;strong&gt;with no indication that it is not your own&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [emphases added] - is frowned on by our community, and may result in your answer being down-voted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; give proper credit to the author and site where you found the text, &lt;strong&gt;including a direct link to it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not mentioned, but just as important a hallmark of academic honesty, is to try to present cited material in the way its original author intended. This Meta question covers a serious corruption of the first hallmark, &lt;em&gt;plagiarism&lt;/em&gt;. And it has not even touched on the corruption of the second, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;misinformation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;false or inaccurate information that is spread &lt;em&gt;unintentionally&lt;/em&gt;. It is distinguished from disinformation, which is intended to mislead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have structured the above citations to display a point. The quote from the Help page goes above-and-beyond the thoroughness I think necessary. In it I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maintain the cited work's hyperlinks and emphases, regardless of how irrelevant I think doing so may be to the topic at hand. The cited work &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; thought was important thought &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; were important, they're related (or at least not spammy), and I know how to include them. So why not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use ellipses to indicate omitted information, indicating to the reader implicitly that:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The given information may not comprise all the link's material on the topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any loss-of-flow in the cited passage is my fault and not the original author's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicate when I have tweaked the source, using the plural &lt;em&gt;emphases&lt;/em&gt; to indicate that &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the bold and italics are not necessarily the original author's.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet this first example has not even met the standards I was taught in academia! Because of the ephemeral nature of online information, I was asked to provide the times I accessed a webpage when learning the MLA citation format. But posting a timestamp &amp;quot;7 July 2014 20:30:16 MST&amp;quot; to all (or even to the most-likely-to-change) webpage accesses, while official and precise, is not something I would ask every poster to take time to do. (For my purposes, the &amp;quot;upper bound&amp;quot; to when the poster could have accessed the information, automatically provided by the edit/answer capabilities of SE, is more than sufficient.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posit that the second citation, while not as rigorously thought-out as the first, still ought to be regarded as fine, even though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It does not include the links to the &lt;em&gt;False&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Information&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Disinformation&lt;/em&gt; wikipages that the original citation now links to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not including ellipses or words in the beginning may be seen as a misattribution of source. The wikipages don't go around starting fragmented sentences with lowercase letters like that! :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The added emphasis on &lt;em&gt;unintentionally&lt;/em&gt; is not explicitly noted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these oversights should be pardoned because they adhere to the &lt;em&gt;spirit of the rules&lt;/em&gt;. By virtue of having a hyperlink on the word &lt;em&gt;misinformation&lt;/em&gt; that links to a page that reasonably could have contained the information the poster claims it does and by using the site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1115/39720&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/kbd&gt; quote&amp;quot; markdown&lt;/a&gt;, I think the poster has put enough effort toward academic honesty, that &lt;strong&gt;a link alone can be considered attribution&lt;/strong&gt; -- the poster is pointing to where the credit should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it properly used attribution or is it misinformation? In this case I would say &amp;quot;used properly enough.&amp;quot; I think the poster's emphasized text is consistent with the article's point, so it doesn't matter to me if it's notated because it's being used as a tool to highlight the poster's point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree that posts that present a source's material verbatim without crediting the source ought to be handled, preferably edited to include the source. &amp;quot;Bad&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Ugly&amp;quot; posts that can include these changes will likely be improved. But I think it's more likely enforcing these changes will invite debates about style.&lt;/strong&gt; To demonstrate, here are three cases from the Ugly section above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48227/is-there-a-word-for-telling-the-truth-technically-in-order-to-misguide/48260#48260&quot;&gt;Case #1 (Ugly #5)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poster answers &lt;em&gt;Is there a word for telling the truth (technically) in order to misguide?&lt;/em&gt; with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.answers.com/topic/equivocate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Equivocate&lt;/a&gt;: To make a statement that is capable of being taken in more than one way, with the aim of exploiting the ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer does not appear to have been edited since its posting Nov 14 '11 at 15:40. The link on &lt;em&gt;Equivocate&lt;/em&gt; leads to an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.answers.com/topic/equivocate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answers.com&lt;/a&gt; page that after two years still has the cited text, attributed to The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, it would have been better to draw the word from a publicly available or hard copy. But I see little difference between trusting a web service's citation of such a source versus an ELU member citing a hard-copy. Though reputation of either helps me intuit what the situation is in both cases, I wouldn't count either as invalid until I had seen the hard copy or disputing sources. Unless disproved, asking for the reference name here seems more like a stylistic choice than keeping with the spirit of proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84603/single-word-synonym-for-a-pedantic-rule-follower/84626#84626&quot;&gt;Case #2 (Ugly #7)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poster answers &lt;em&gt;Single-word synonym for a “pedantic rule-follower”?&lt;/em&gt; on Oct 3 '12 at 21:56 with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've encountered a few people that you describe. Often, they were &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bureaucrat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bureaucrat&lt;/a&gt;s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An official who is &lt;strong&gt;rigidly&lt;/strong&gt; devoted to the &lt;strong&gt;details of administrative procedure.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is later edited by another user on Jan 2 '13 at 21:32 for the given reasons of &amp;quot;readability (typography), footnote&amp;quot; to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve encountered a few people that you describe. Often, they were &lt;em&gt;bureaucrats&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An official who is &lt;em&gt;rigidly&lt;/em&gt; devoted to the &lt;em&gt;details of administrative procedure&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bureaucrat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footnote is easy to miss in the edit, but stylistically I agree with the decision. The page leads to the singular &lt;em&gt;bureaucrat&lt;/em&gt;, so OP's decision of linking the more obvious &lt;em&gt;bureaucrat&lt;/em&gt; (minus &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;) in the link makes sense. But the editor's change to a footnote is more aesthetically pleasing, as is the change of bold text to less-heavy italics. After about a year-and-a-half, the link to TFD in the original, which stayed through the edits, still contains the cited text but without emphases. I believe any changes to this answer's attribution would be stylistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48227/is-there-a-word-for-telling-the-truth-technically-in-order-to-misguide/48257#48257&quot;&gt;Case #3 (Ugly #13)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also answering &lt;em&gt;Is there a word for telling the truth (technically) in order to misguide?&lt;/em&gt; but on Nov 14 '11 at 15:06:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would use the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prevaricate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prevaricate&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;to speak falsely or misleadingly; deliberately misstate or create an incorrect impression; lie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another commonly used word for this same behavior is &lt;em&gt;to fudge&lt;/em&gt;, meaning to disingenuously avoid or talk around an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;em&gt;prevaricate&lt;/em&gt; follows the patterns I defend above, I will focus on &lt;em&gt;to fudge&lt;/em&gt;. This appears to be a paraphrase, because my &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22to+disingenuously+avoid+or+talk+around+an+issue%22&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;aq=t&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;amp;client=firefox-a&amp;amp;channel=sb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google search of the quoted phrase&lt;/a&gt; leads primarily to this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect OP meant to tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/48237/39720&quot;&gt;the answer currently above it&lt;/a&gt;, which neither cites nor defines its suggested word of &lt;em&gt;obfuscate&lt;/em&gt;. A source will certainly improve this answer in my book. But if that's not the case, I think adding in that the cited definition for &lt;em&gt;prevaricate&lt;/em&gt; comes from Dictionary.com is mostly a stylistic choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;End&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because these three cases which I believe have a fair case for legitimate attribution, have been lumped in the Ugly category with the &lt;strong&gt;worst&lt;/strong&gt; offenders because they don't meet a rule about providing the author's name, I think it's better to go with a looser &lt;em&gt;spirit of the rules&lt;/em&gt; philosophy. Does it seem like a person is farming rep without attribution? That can't go on. &lt;strong&gt;But anything aside from verbatim-without-citation probably ought to be handled on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T04:28:58.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-08T07:07:53.780" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/182481/how-to-order-food-that-is-hot-temperature-but-not-hot-amount-of-capsaicin&quot;&gt;How to order food that is hot (temperature) but not hot (amount of capsaicin)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has edited the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T13:05:46.817" Title="Reopen request for &quot;how to order food that is hot temperature but not hot amount-of-capsaicin&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-08T18:19:05.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help text at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/a&gt; is common to all sites. Here’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;Math.SE’s version&lt;/a&gt; for comparison — it still has the Hemingway quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that it’s a site-wide norm and expected of all posters on every Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s certainly no more difficult to reference a dictionary with its name than it is to create a link on the headword itself: you still have to create a link — just create the link on the text “[ODO]” or whatever instead of the headword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s a service to those who come after you: it immediately identifies the source of the quotation and the reader may or may not feel the need to click through to check it. They certainly don't have to do that (or hover, if that’s available) to find out where the text came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s good manners towards the source of the quote. They hold the copyright, and while Fair Use may allow a quotation for the purpose of reference or argument, the person or organisation who did the work to provide the material should merit an explicit referencing citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It creates a more scholarly look and feel to answers to have even a minimal citation. For an online link a full MLA citation isn’t necessary, but a nod in that direction can’t be bad, especially since it’s not difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reason that Stack Exchange likes the actual text identifying the origin to appear in the reference (and thus why the &lt;em&gt;How to reference&lt;/em&gt; pages mandate it) is that the content of SE is made available via APIs for display elsewhere. Links may not survive. Including the citation in plain text ensures that it is also included wherever SE content is shown elsewhere. This helps increase the value of the content, and of the site as a reliable resource; and SE itself can’t be accused of plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly don’t recommend going through and altering thousands of answers to make them match SE policy. But it’s not unreasonable to expect future answers to follow that policy especially since it isn’t particularly onerous.  If you can edit in a citation on a post without one when you are tidying things up, so much the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post used to mention “unattributed material may be deleted”, which &amp;mdash; while not inaccurate &amp;mdash; isn’t the whole story and is open to misinterpretation. &lt;strong&gt;Plagiarised material&lt;/strong&gt; may be deleted summarily without warning. If you mark a quotation as a quotation, then it’s obviously not plagiarised. In this case, it’s unlikely to be deleted without warning. However, if a citation isn’t added after a reminder, or an edit to add one is rolled back, then the quote or the post containing it might be subject to deletion. Each case will be dealt with individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a simple link &lt;strong&gt;out to another site&lt;/strong&gt; isn’t normally quoting external material. It's normally original text containing a link. This sort of link isn’t covered by the quotation policy at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some worked examples in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5196/18696&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T10:21:51.007" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-08T01:22:33.187" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before criticizing my post being in the wrong section or whatsoever, I want to say: within my knowledge, I judged this to be the most reliable platform for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am banned from the forum, or you must move my question or close it, please answer my question to the best of your ability before doing so. I want to learn English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anyone who can provide a website/link or an explicit set of instructions on how to improve penmanship? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59768" OwnerDisplayName="user59768" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T20:27:42.097" Title="Seeking for penmanship advice" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-07-09T02:36:26.627" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the direction that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4974/25961&quot;&gt;ermanen&lt;/a&gt; and Erik Kowal are going in. I also agree with the comment Erik Kowal said about nitpicking. &lt;em&gt;(His comment can be read under emanen's answer--linked above.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unfortunately on this list in a rather unflattering light (thankfully not Ugly, but The Bad &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/83544/25961&quot;&gt;#34&lt;/a&gt;). I've since corrected my answer, and hopefully it's better now.&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*Please note: I have screenshots in case linked-to points are tampered with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If commenting is an action that should be taken, is there a comment that should be copy/pasted to stay uniform (and to make sure everyone is responded to fairly)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that flagging is not the answer. Flagging will cause mods to lose sight on their main purpose to SE. Deleting posts seems too rash. While they may not be appropriately cited, who is to say that their post isn't beneficial to SE? I think those posts should just be edited--either by another person or by the one to post the atrocity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a blatant lack of consistency: OP has gone on a rampage and is rather unfair to some while being somewhat fair to others. Sure, they made it to The Bad list. However, the rhetoric isn't the same. (I find this to be more than relevant to the question. The question talks about posts not being uniform to the Help Center and a way to correct this. This response is relevant because if we're going to nitpick on consistency, then perhaps notifying people with vigilante comments should be consistent and polite.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone is treated fairly when getting a nasty-gram about their questionable plagiarism or line-bordering plagiarism. There is a non-uniform rhetoric (sometimes with grammar issues). Then there is this case where it is overly friendly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125340/25961&quot;&gt;#26&lt;/a&gt;. Then there is a scenario where there is a blatant disregard for notification for the dastardly plagiarism, but instead a playful comment (listed on The Bad &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/171086/25961&quot;&gt;#7&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, consistency is lacking from OP. Where is your mention of the source for the link you provided? After all, quite a few of those on The Bad list did exactly what you did and, well, they are on your hit list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RrYXC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ironic hypocrisy&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;SUPER ULTRA POINT TO BE MADE HERE: OP NEEDS TO SEE THAT THIS HAS ALREADY BEEN ADDRESSED ON META SE. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/160071/197489&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25961" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T02:36:26.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4985" CreationDate="2014-07-09T12:57:48.797" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is duplication; the closest existing question I could find was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3378/63876&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which touches on the subject but does not resolve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what is the cause and possible solution to the situation which I have seen many times whereby when browsing 'unanswered questions', the answer has already been given in the comments. This appears to be discouraged (I'm relatively new here) but it's not clear what can be done to combat it. At the very least, if no actual answers are posted (or none which resolve the query to the same level as that definitive comment), it doesn't seem possible for the question to ever be marked as answered, even if the asker and other visitors can upvote the comment in question (no pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a common issue, and can anything be done about it? Is there a flag I'm unfamiliar with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63876" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T20:51:11.183" Title="Unanswered questions with comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-07-29T00:53:05.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4984" CreationDate="2014-07-09T13:43:31.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an SE cross-site discouragement of giving a comment that attempts to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often give a comment that essentially answers the question because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't have the time/energy to compose what I think would be a reasonable answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or I think the question is actually closable (and so it would be wrong to give an answer) but I don't want the questioner to go away empty-handed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solutions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for someone to make an answer out of the comment. Encouraging the commenter to do so is a good thing, but for someone else to do so is OK too. It is not plagiarism. The commenter didn't think it worthwhile to make an answer so it is OK if you use that to make one for yourself to get the credit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or vote to close&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2014-07-09T17:30:46.653" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T17:30:46.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-09T14:06:39.963" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be grateful to be advised and enlightened on the closure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/182507/50720&quot;&gt;Question on “subject to being disproved by the person accused”&lt;/a&gt;. I've only been interested in apprehending this sentence in the context of the English language; I'm not asking (and have never asked) about law or legal writing here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Legal tag does consist of questions from legal writs, yet why was this esteemed off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User tchrist asserts: 'This question appears to be off-topic because it is about the interpretation of legalese, not English'.  Yet I'm asking about English, not 'interpretation of legalese'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3384/50720&quot;&gt;Waning gap of acceptable questions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3422/would-someone-please-explain-why-these-question-closures-are-such-a-bad-thing?rq=1&quot;&gt;Would someone please explain why these question closures are such a bad thing?&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T10:34:33.217" Title="Closure of questions under the Legal tag? Please reopen?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4986" CreationDate="2014-07-09T17:43:33.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question should have been closed as off-topic; legal jargon is as much part of English as any other jargon (subject to the obvious caveats where interpretation becomes giving legal advice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I do think it should have been closed as General Reference. The bolded phrase you ask about means exactly what you think it does; you appear to have assumed, rashly,  that the word &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; earlier in the sentence applies only to the word &quot;presumed&quot;, rather than to the phrase &quot;presumed, subject to being disproved by the person accused&quot;. That doen't seem to me to merit reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that closevotes are not a matter of fact; they are an expression of (expert) opinion. If you, with enough reputation, say to yourself &quot;That question should be closed; now which reason should I give?&quot; and four other people, asking themselves the same question, come to different answers, the question will be closed, and probably remain so; that is the way the system is designed. The fact that I and someone else agree that the question should be closed is of more importance than the fact that we disagree on the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T17:43:33.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4984" CreationDate="2014-07-09T20:51:11.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish people would stop putting answers in comments. I believe it discourages people from leaving actual answers, for fear of coming across like they're just rep-farming off of someone else's work. I know that I, for one, feel awkward when I see an &quot;unanswered&quot; question I could post a good answer for, only to find that someone has already covered it in a comment. That breaks the way SE is supposed to work, and doesn't help either the asker or the answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately, if I see a good-quality answer in a comment to a question with no answers, or if the comment covers ground that isn't in any existing answers, I post an answer myself that simply says &quot;So-and-so posted a good answer in a comment&quot; along with the text of the comment in a blockquote. I mark the answer Community Wiki because it's not my work and I don't feel I deserve any reputation from it, but I still think the questioner deserves a genuine answer that's advertised as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T20:51:11.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4990" CreationDate="2014-07-09T21:53:54.793" Score="11" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of Meta posts about flags, both here on Meta.ELU and on Meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3175&quot;&gt;Do we have any guidelines for flagging comment as offense?&lt;/a&gt; (mELU)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2930&quot;&gt;Why can’t I flag a question as offensive?&lt;/a&gt; (mELU)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109390&quot;&gt;What is considered hate speech?&lt;/a&gt; (mSE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/180799&quot;&gt;Official guidelines for flagging answer as offensive/hate speech&lt;/a&gt; (mSE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are quite old, and things may need restating or may even have shifted a bit. What’s the current guidance on how the moderators will deal with flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T19:26:07.510" Title="Do we have any general guidelines on flagging?" Tags="|support|faq|flagging|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4989" CreationDate="2014-07-09T21:53:54.793" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; post, the ELU moderators attempt to consolidate all the advice in order that: it’s relevant for the English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange site; it’s all in one place; it’s easily assimilated; and it provides a starting-point for future moderators as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because this site actually discusses language, there are some quirks and edge cases which might not apply elsewhere.&lt;/strong&gt; This particularly refers to flagging different categories of unwanted content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a lot of what’s here can be applied to Chat, that’s a fast-moving and less formal environment which will be dealt with separately. This post applies to the main ELU and Meta ELU sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The general rules&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is an academic site about language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep any content academic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Civility is required at all times.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rudeness (for example in ad-hominem attacks) will not be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldview is irrelevant to discussing language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are international and cosmopolitan. You will encounter many people who think differently from you, perhaps even a majority. However, worldview is not relevant in a discussion about language, and need not be mentioned at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally it may be necessary to accept the existence of a particular philosophical position in order to discuss the language of that philosophy objectively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Practical applications of the general rules&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s create, for the sake of argument, two groups of people: those who like the colour blue, and those who do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s OK to disagree about liking blue. It’s OK to say you do or do not like the colour blue. It’s even OK to say that you don’t like people who don’t like the colour blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;it doesn’t need to be mentioned at all&lt;/strong&gt; if it’s not relevant to the question or its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Comments&lt;/em&gt; can’t be altered, so flag a comment which is objectionable. Every flag will be looked into, but it helps the moderators if you use the right flag. Even if you use the wrong flag, if a comment needs some sort of action, the flag will be helpful; but the moderators may suggest that a different flag might have been more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Posts&lt;/em&gt; (Questions and Answers) can be edited, so you may not need to flag at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Offensive language in comments and posts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is threatening behaviour, ad-hominem attacks, and using curses and swearing to intimidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think everyone who likes the colour blue should be shot.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are a typical bluey, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if you had blue blood.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just the thing a fucking blue-baby would write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/npnyO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Offensive flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Offensive” flags should be limited to these three types: direct threats of, or support of, violence against the person; direct insults; swear words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can edit such language out of Questions and Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Comments which are otherwise inappropriate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is suggesting that someone’s question or answer is good or bad based on some feature that is not relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, of course all blue-lovers think like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line between what’s “not constructive” and “rude or offensive” can be a fine distinction to make. Looked at objectively, this comment is a general comment about a group of people. It’s disparaging, but it’s not violent or hateful, a direct ad-hominem attack or swearing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;too chatty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a comment which opens up discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;omg, I love blue too! Have you seen that movie about the blue notes? So awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comments are no longer relevant, for example when a request for clarification or detail has been answered and the comment can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;rsquo;t forget that comments are intended for requesting clarification of a question, or (perhaps) pointing out a flaw in an otherwise good answer. Don&amp;rsquo;t engage in debate in comments: if you disagree with an answer, write your own!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Inappropriate language in Questions and Answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All posts can be edited, and even members who cannot edit directly can suggest edits which are submitted for approval by higher-rep members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a worldview is expressed which is &lt;strong&gt;not relevant to the question,&lt;/strong&gt; and it can be removed without destroying the post, edit it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jones is behaving like &lt;s&gt;a bluey&lt;/s&gt; objecting to perceived injustices.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jones is behaving like someone objecting to perceived injustices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original poster might reject or rollback the edit. If that happens, don’t engage in comments, or re-edit the post starting an edit war. Flag the post as &lt;strong&gt;“needing ♦ moderator attention”&lt;/strong&gt; and explain what has happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn’t a direct threat against the person, a direct insult, or swear words. Don’t use the “offensive, abusive or hate speech” flag for this sort of thing: the use of &lt;em&gt;a bluey&lt;/em&gt; in the post is reflective of a particular worldview which is irrelevant and non-constructive and easily dealt with by a small edit. Just make the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you do use the &lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt; flag for something in a post which does not fit the definitions and is actually &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt; it could be declined.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Offensive posts which do contain swear-words, ad-hominem attacks or threats and which are dealt with using this flag carry a 100-rep penalty. For this reason, marking a post as offensive should be reserved for serious infractions where the post cannot be edited successfully. There’s more on this below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions which are actually about offensive language&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU needs to be able to discuss language, including offensive language. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt; tags exist to assist with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the edge cases. It’s necessary to write offensive language in order to discuss it, which is where the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;use–mention distinction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; comes into play. Mentioning offensive words where it&amp;rsquo;s contextually necessary is not offensive per se; it&amp;rsquo;s part of the academic discussion of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are mentioning a word rather than using it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4133/18696&quot;&gt;put it in italics&lt;/a&gt;. This helps people who read your post to put your use of the word into context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of &lt;em&gt;fucking&lt;/em&gt; in an earlier quote was an example of offensive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For titles, put mentions in double-quotes. Titles are already in italics, and double-quotes are prettified. It’s customary to play safe with titles and sanitise any that might be Not Safe For Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use–mention distinction applies to all mentions, not just offensive words. Of course, using italics in an attempt to disguise offensive language as a mention actually emphasises it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions which are predicated on a particular philosophical viewpoint&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU needs to be able to discuss the language associated with various philosophies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to deal with these questions is by following the general rules. Taking a particular example which was raised in one of the earlier Meta posts, there might be a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Hebrew word for God &lt;em&gt;Elohim&lt;/em&gt; is plural, and the Christian God is a Trinity, so why doesn’t &lt;em&gt;God&lt;/em&gt; ever take a plural verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question assumes the validity of a philosophy that God exists. It may be a philosophy that you profoundly disagree with, but the general rules are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is an academic site about language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your worldview is irrelevant to discussing language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about language should make it clear that they are about language. In the above example, the asker might be an atheist but still want to know about the language used. In this case, an answer or a comment along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“God” doesn’t exist, so discussing grammar is futile&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is completely non-constructive. There is nothing requiring you to comment on or answer a question where you disagree with the philosophical premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question, or equally an answer, might betray a particular philosophical worldview, perhaps even one which could be expressed in offensive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What’s the word for someone who thinks Martians should be killed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I hate Martians, and I think they should all be rounded up and gassed. My neighbours call me a &lt;em&gt;Martiophobe.&lt;/em&gt; Is &lt;em&gt;-phobe&lt;/em&gt; really the right suffix for someone who doesn’t actually &lt;strong&gt;fear&lt;/strong&gt; what’s being referred to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than flagging, &lt;strong&gt;edit the post&lt;/strong&gt; if it’s possible to make it obviously about language. In this case, quite a major edit is necessary to turn it into an objective question about language, but even an edit like this comes in at under the 400-character limit for anonymous users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does “-phobia” mean “dislike or hatred” or “fear” of something?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is a &lt;em&gt;martiophobic&lt;/em&gt; statement one which shows a fear of Martians, or one which expresses a dislike or hatred of them? I looked up the origin of &lt;em&gt;-phobia&lt;/em&gt; and apparently it comes from the Greek for &lt;em&gt;fear.&lt;/em&gt; But it seems that it’s often used about statements which don’t express much in the way of fear of Martians. Why is the word &lt;em&gt;martiophobe&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don’t feel confident about making this sort of edit, flag for ♦ moderator attention. The moderators will look at the post, and edit it if possible. If it’s entirely irretrievable, &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; will mark it as offensive and the 100-rep penalty will apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do make the edit and it’s rolled back, &lt;strong&gt;that’s&lt;/strong&gt; the time to flag as offensive, rather than start an edit war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other flags on posts, just for completeness&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Flags on questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other flags on poor questions are likely to be self-explanatory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link or advertisement unconnected with ELU and any question or answer in which it appears. Six spam flags on a post will ensure it’s deleted automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Duplicate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question, or an answer to another question, provides an answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this flag if something is wrong which you can’t fix but which doesn’t require a moderator’s actions. Posts with this flag are offered to high-rep users to help with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Needs moderator attention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Poor answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Low quality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only use this flag if an answer attempts to answer the question but is completely unsalvageable even with editing. If an answer makes sense or can be edited to make sense, but you don't agree with it, or it&amp;rsquo;s not particularly useful, vote instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Not an answer” flag should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185073/how-do-i-properly-use-the-not-an-answer-flag&quot;&gt;reserved for answers which make no attempt to answer the question&lt;/a&gt;, for example because they are “Me too!” or “Thanks!” or a supplementary question, or an “answer” which is unrelated to the question, including gibberish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Not an answer” flag is not appropriate for answers which do attempt to answer the question but are wrong or poor in some other way. That’s what the “Not useful” downvote is for, and users with the required privilege can also vote to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The bottom line&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Follow the rules and avoid being flagged.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fix things you can fix.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote where you can vote.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag things only if there&amp;rsquo;s no other option.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T12:52:18.277" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4931" CreationDate="2014-07-11T19:15:26.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've modified the code to replace &lt;code&gt;top: -200px&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;text-indent: -999em;&lt;/code&gt; which is our &quot;standard&quot; way of hiding things on other DOM elements across the site. This will be live in the next prod build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84783" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T19:15:26.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-12T01:12:37.250" Score="2" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an app for making &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;boilerplate comments on SE&lt;/a&gt;. This makes quickly posting identical comments easy, which helps with site maintenance tasks like flagging or suggesting improvements to posts. In principle the same sort of thing can be done with an everyday text editor, but tools like this make the process much more convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this discussion, my definition of &lt;em&gt;boilerplate&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;comment found verbatim across multiple posts on ELU, linking to Help or Meta, usually with extra constructive text&lt;/em&gt;. I've not seen widespread use of boilerplates on ELU, but I think a few I've seen most do not set a good precedent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I see the appeal and utility of having a fast way to respond to common issues, I am also concerned about how using these methods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the site and community look&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the receiver feel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor edits are a common thing to want a boilerplate comment for. But if the edit is made, the comment has served its main purpose. The comment can still help show new users what ELU expects from its posters. But keeping it does not seem to be in line with the SE mentality of staying on-topic: The edit was minor, comments are easily deleted, and the post's edit history and summary already show the changes and (ideally) its reasons. But this spent boilerplate may linger on the Q-and-A page, where being on topic is most important, having no bearing at all on the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boilerplate comment, to be general, will lack the personal touch that the OP may be offering. Between the few clicks needed to post a boilerplate that's &quot;close enough&quot; and the time it takes to write up a personalized response, which will commenters choose? Will OP even know what to change, without specific examples? What if the boilerplate message is OP's first interaction with anyone on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boilerplates will lead to misunderstandings and, if untended, clutter. But some of these issues can be avoided by etiquette or protocol. Below are some questions I would like discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should there be boilerplate use on ELU?&lt;/strong&gt; Right now we have awarded 18 Tumbleweed badges and have 45 unanswered questions. SEs are a community effort and ours is pretty active for its size. Does it make sense to be using boilerplates in the first place? If so, what tasks need it the most? (I picture review queues as high on the list.) Should we emphasize hybrid boilerplates, which get the main point across with automated text but write a specific part in case more explanation is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should there be (loose) limits on boilerplate frequency?&lt;/strong&gt; Even if they're fitting, is more than one of the same boilerplate on a page too much? Should there be a restriction on how many boilerplates are applied per post? Should they be deleted if they've gone a long time without being addressed? Is using the same boilerplate repeatedly over a short time to demonstrate something is an issue an appropriate use of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is Meta's involvement in boilerplate content?&lt;/strong&gt; Does a boilerplate (particularly one linking to Meta) give the impression that a user is speaking on behalf of the whole community, its moderators, or the linked poster? If so, should boilerplates indicate when they're made without peer review? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are some deserving questions exempt from boilerplates?&lt;/strong&gt; Some I've thought of might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A post with a good score, because the poster has given something of quality. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it looks like significant effort has been put into a question, because boilerplates take very little effort. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A post whose last edit was before something was discovered, discussed, and/or resolved on Meta, because the poster would probably have done it differently now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have not been very big issues, but I think (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging/4990#4990&quot;&gt;like flagging&lt;/a&gt;) it's best if we have general rules about where boilerplates can be used. Should boilerplates also be used only if no other options are sensible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is responsible for cleaning up boilerplates?&lt;/strong&gt; The commenter can do it most easily. But they may miss when some changes are made. Is it ok to flag as obsolete when a boilerplate's issues are resolved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other concerns than those listed here are welcome in this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think boilerplates are a good tool. But if they're used poorly they will be making more work rather than less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:46.197" LastActivityDate="2014-07-12T01:12:37.250" Title="Boilerplate Comment Etiquette" Tags="|discussion|comments|etiquette|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-12T10:12:26.277" Score="-3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trail of a wide number of different user's comments on this page has been deleted. I am wondering why and by whom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181992/the-use-of-nominative-whom-in-legal-contexts-and-possibly-others&quot;&gt;The use of nominative &amp;quot;whom&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the comments may have been primarily about the re-opening of the  post (- which now of course, it might be argued, is not necessarily useful for the readership). However, the majority of comments were simply contributing to grammatical and syntactic debates surrounding the example sentence. These (imo) should definitely not have been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users, I feel, should also be notified when comments are deleted. Some notice period would also allow users to copy or store comments and responses to comments, either for their own records or so that they could be incorporated into answers or new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[An entirely different  point here is that it would be helpful, in such instances, for comments regarding the viability of the post itself to be archived somewhere where users interested in the the meta-processes and editing history of the question could access them. This would provide some transparency as to the reason users and moderators have voted to close or keep posts open and inform readers about the quality of the moderation processes.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T12:39:01.720" Title="Disappearing comment trails" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4996" CreationDate="2014-07-12T13:38:27.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The parts of your question that focus on comment deletion notification is answered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2967/8360&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. It also touches on the myriad reasons why comments are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You kindly asked why that specific comment chain was removed, because you felt that the comments were contributing to the debate surrounding the example sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for debates or discussion.  Comments are intended as brief messages to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;provide feedback, add minor information, ask for clarification, or discuss the content of the post with the intent of improving it&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Comments are temporary.&lt;/em&gt; You should not think of them nor use them as a vehicle for information that is worthy of archiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I removed 40 comments from the question because they were inappropriately placed. I incorporated the relevant parts of the commentary into the question to replace the OP's &quot;see the comments&quot; edit. I think it's a fair assessment to say that the argument you were making was an answer on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment edit history is not available and to my knowledge, deleted comments cannot be retrieved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for editing and whatnot, the edit history and the comments are all timestamped. If you want some more features than that, I encourage you to post a feature request on Meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T12:39:01.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-12T14:51:32.870" Score="5" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've really been harping on things like this recently, and I think I need to go somewhere else to cool down for a bit.&#xA;So I'm deleting my account for now but intending to continue visiting in the future.&#xA;I really enjoy this site.&#xA;Please read this more as a jermiad against an attitude than a diatribe against this community or any of its members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really felt ambivalent to this post I'm spoofing.&#xA;I recently-ish left a situation where labels and negativity played a key role, and find myself wishing I had said something about it while it was happening.&#xA;(The biggest reason now I feel a need to speak out.)&#xA;So I agree on some level with what the original post is saying.&#xA;But on another level, I see put-downs as already prevalent in ourselves in our comments, chat, and Meta -- and arguably votes.&#xA;Is what we're getting out a reflection of what we're putting in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really: &lt;strong&gt;don't take the following spoof too seriously.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I didn't even make the tag it claims I made, though I did sort out some candidates I thought were nice if others are interested.&#xA;We've already got the rest of the spectrum with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;But the wiki entry may need to be edited, because that was just a thesaurus substitution.&#xA;(A description about how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compliments&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compliments&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compliments&lt;/a&gt; is distinct from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt; would help.)&#xA;A lot of the spoof is that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can anything be done for well-wishing requests for terminology?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: Nice people are awesome, and we should help them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I don’t actually believe anything mechanical can be done here, and I certainly don’t expect a “protected due to niceness” reason. That’s just plain silliness. But questions asking about endearments or praises are questions that deserve to be labelled compliments. It bothered me how few of these there were, and how they tend to draw responses of good (but ordinary) words. But it doesn’t look bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why aren't we helping people help each other more?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For nearly as long as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag has existed, it has been a source of several distinct types of controversy. On occasion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=single+word+requests&quot;&gt;these have been raised here on our meta&lt;/a&gt;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6437/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9♦&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;Against Single Word Requests&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/48/jsb%D5%B1%D5%B8%D5%A3%D5%B9&quot;&gt;JSBձոգչ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/word-for-disrespecting-eldest-half-sister-by-referring-to-her-husband-as-girly-g&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he’s amused but the rest of the family isn’t?&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/58761/medica&quot;&gt;medica&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one particularly nice form of these questions are those that are really just asking for our help in coming up with a new way to lift others up. I made a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compliments&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compliments&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compliments&lt;/a&gt; tag just for such requests, and went back and tagged some of the questions that I felt met the following criteria as taken from its tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Compliments are any language that portray someone or something in a positive light, no matter whether it is intended to be exalting and edifying, congratulatory or approving, magnifying or effusive, or even adoring. It’s anything that makes someone or something look good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After tagging the first dozen questions I could find, I progressed with hope — but there are others still. I wish these were some of our most frequent duplicates, though, which would just add compliment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compliments&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compliments&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compliments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have elsewhere observed, all these questions had their genesis in beauty. Each was looking for some especially nice new word to use for somebody whose behavior or characteristics they strongly approved of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is a healthy thing for the questioner, and good for our site and the larger social context, for us to be forever providing people with nice words to use to commit verbal victories with one another, even if it is only in their own heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But is there really anything to be done for it?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why these requests are scarce, and simply adding a tag will do nothing to address the underlying issues, because people have just found somewhere else to ask the same thing. This seems entrenched in human nature, an inherent social issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In days of old, the least researched of these would on occasion be closed as “Not Constructive”, but that is no longer a close reason available to us here. Some of them were so nice that they were quickly embraced by our site, but many remain unasked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see constructive discussion about anything we might possibly do to encourage these sorts of well-wishing questions. I think it makes us look good, and I know it is going to be used in a kind manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t really fancy updating our on-topic criteria to include “borne out of niceness”; that just sounds silly, not to mention subjective. And yet at the same time &lt;strong&gt;we (claim that we) expect people to be impartial towards one another here&lt;/strong&gt;, and having these precious few questions seeking help in flattering others seems at some level to run counter to that principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can that paradox be reconciled?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were a line to be drawn, I don’t know where or how one would draw it. All I know is that after reading quite literally dozens of these nice questions and dozens of answers to them, I find myself rejuvenated to the point of rapture by mankind’s continued humanity to his fellow man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Community Armistice?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have made a personal decision never again to deny verbal arms to these questioners, arms that I know can have no other purpose than to lift others up. I figure that there are already plenty of words and expressions that angels use to call each other angels. I see every reason to help them, and no reason not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is merely a personal vow, not a site-wide policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we as a community can do with regard to these well-wishing questions and so start assisting them in making this world an even better place to live in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Candidates&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some candidates for a compliments tag, along with the quote I feel makes them most eligible. I tried to drive a hard bargain with these. I tried to avoid questions that explicitly stated the word was for a resume, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134106/what-is-the-word-for-someone-who-helps-you-finish-a-sentence-but-in-a-good-way?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;someone else, a friend or a stranger, finishes your sentence better than you possibly could have&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140158/what-do-you-call-a-person-who-keeps-on-going-despite-setbacks-in-one-word-a-n?lq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;this wisdom of having courage&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/92220/what-is-a-good-word-to-describe-someone-who-is-empathetic-quick-and-witty-in-c?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;highly empathetic and witty person — the type of person who’s a fantastic conversationalist&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/120699/is-there-a-word-meaning-disposed-to-correct-one-s-own-behaviour-quickly&quot;&gt;&quot;when they fail and realize their failure, they then regret and quickly correct their own behaviour without any wavering&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2975/word-for-person-who-loves-to-share-knowledge?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;loves to share knowledge&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138366/when-someone-falls-and-tries-to-stand-up-again-in-one-word&quot;&gt;&quot;he falls down every time... but never loses hope.. and tries to stand up again...&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39962/term-for-someone-who-has-experienced-many-hardships&quot;&gt;&quot;The person experiencing the hardships gained much knowledge and wisdom from them&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97454/whats-a-word-for-someone-who-takes-advantage-of-an-unfortunate-situation-as-an?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;This person would make &quot;lemonade&quot; when life throws &quot;lemons&quot; at them&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/168164/a-positive-word-for-opportunist?lq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;The word opportunist seems to be used negatively for a person. Is there a word with the same but positive meaning?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27985/is-there-a-synonym-for-fake-that-has-good-connotations?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;they aren't trying to be fake towards people, they are just so kind that they don't want the other person to feel bad&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35939/what-is-an-expression-phrase-or-word-that-describes-service-being-fast?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;the service was good in that it was pretty fast, without a delay, etc.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/127089/what-do-you-call-a-person-who-is-constantly-busy-yet-always-willing-to-go-the-ex?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;willing to go the extra mile to do more than what is needed&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47948/what-do-you-call-a-man-who-knows-well-how-to-fix-his-household-appliances?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;Some men are really good at fixing things, especially the household appliances while they're not specialists or technician.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96860/whats-the-word-that-describes-this-ability-quality?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;someone who's able to quickly think of alternatives in a situation, especially in a situation that calls for it&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96251/how-to-describe-strength-of-keeping-things-simple-and-beautiful?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;can quickly resolve conflicts with co-workers, and effectively explain policy changes to vendors&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171039/whats-a-noun-for-the-group-of-people-who-youre-very-close-to-such-as-family?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;An example of a loanword for this would be the Hawaiian Ohana.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/130877/words-for-close-family-friends?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;The original and closest friendship may be with a generation now passed on, but a family-like relationship still exists&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169305/what-is-a-specific-word-for-loving-a-friend?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;a person who appreciates the little things in life: someone who takes life at a little bit slower a pace, who enjoys being outside instead of forever inside, and so on and so forth.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166102/a-single-word-for-someone-who-is-loved-quickly-by-everyone?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;I know some friends who are loved really quickly by people around them.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166098/a-single-word-for-someone-who-does-a-routine-but-important-job?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;someone who performs a job on daily basis, but his job is important and vital for normal procession.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76046/a-word-for-something-that-is-both-useful-and-beautiful?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;Is there a word to describe an object that excels in form and function? I am trying to avoid very general words like great, superb or excellent.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;Someone who has their time well-managed, is focused, works out, has ambitions, eats right.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/179013/is-there-an-adjective-for-someone-who-can-withstand-ridicule&quot;&gt;&quot;Is there a word that describes someone who is not easily offended -- able to withstand criticism, ridicule, or jokes made at his/her expense -- without also implying that the person is emotionally callous?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162539/are-there-metaphoric-english-expressions-meaning-keeping-composure-at-a-fatal-m/&quot;&gt;&quot;a person who is self-poised at such a critical moment.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112242/word-to-describe-someone-who-rarely-gets-upset?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;He is generally a pretty happy, calm and collected individual&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T04:01:32.943" Title="Can anything be done for well-wishing requests for terminology?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|courtesy|community-building|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4998" CreationDate="2014-07-12T16:37:10.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the number of people who won't recognise or adhere to the difference in spelling between a grammatical category &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/complement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;complement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;complement&lt;/a&gt; and the more common &quot;well-wishing&quot; sense of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/compliment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compliment&lt;/a&gt;, I've got to say it seems like a terrible idea to actually call the tag that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really see any &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; in grouping together requests that ask for an &quot;approving, supportive&quot; word with positive connotations. But I've no objection to potentially-useful tags in principle. Tags don't work well for me - but if they &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;, then the more the merrier. I think the main issues are...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: Is this category sufficiently &quot;orthogonal&quot; to existing tags? (it straddles much of e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/euphemisms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;euphemisms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: Is there a better category name (plaudits?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   3: Is OP or someone else prepared to implement it for a worthwhile number of past questions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   4: How many questions constitute a &quot;worthwhile set&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-07-12T16:37:10.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-13T10:44:59.847" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to give a &quot;source&quot; for something while answering on ELU which we are getting it from some website but rewording it or typing it without looking at the material. For example: Doltish - someone who is foolish. But I looked it up in the online Websters Dictionary. So in writings like these should I still give a reference or source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user73373" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T14:11:22.107" Title="Giving a source for something which we reword or type by our mind" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-13T11:00:20.497" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any of my answer which is downvoted, how do I change it? I mean should I &quot;edit&quot; it or do what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if I edited it the OP might not find that I have edited it, or will he?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user73373" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T15:49:42.990" Title="Answers which are downvoted" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5000" CreationDate="2014-07-13T14:11:22.107" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two excellent reasons for providing a source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To give credit where credit is due. You have an ethical obligation to your source, no matter that you are paraphrasing or quoting from memory. Moreover, in many situations you have a &lt;strong&gt;legal&lt;/strong&gt; obligation to your source. For instance, people who post content from ELU or any other SE site are required by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; to post a link to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To lend authority to your answer. You and I are merely anonymous posters, with no credibility other than that provided by our reputations here. But a citation from an established source like Merriam-Webster, with a long-standing international reputation,  carries great weight.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no legitimate countervailing reason &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to provide your source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T14:11:22.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5001" CreationDate="2014-07-13T15:49:42.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and edit it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will pop up to the top of the 'most recent' list. Sure, maybe the downvoters won't see it to change the direction of their vote. But other people might see it and upvote. (or not, &quot;you pays your money and you takes your chances&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T15:49:42.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-14T02:19:00.493" Score="-4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closer avers that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184668/imprecate-direct-or-indirect-transitive&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184668/imprecate-direct-or-indirect-transitive&lt;/a&gt; 'can be answered using commonly-available references.' Can it? I tried but don't see a patent, outright answer. Please reopen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/184271/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/184271/50720&lt;/a&gt;? I adduce user Cerberus's instructive comment below: &quot;Examples of prepositions do not claim to be exhaustive, and the Google Books have &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt;, which is not mentioned.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Supplementary to KitFox's answer:&lt;/strong&gt; Yet that curt definition doesn't expound on the verb as user Josh61's comment, and doesn't answer 'What prepositions must be used? ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T02:41:38.883" Title="Which 'commonly-available references' ? Please reopen these 2?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5004" CreationDate="2014-07-14T02:31:34.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the dictionary definition you reference, it says both &lt;em&gt;with object&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no object&lt;/em&gt;. That would be the commonly available reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also includes many example sentences that demonstrate acceptable prepositions to use with this word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-07-14T02:38:58.990" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T02:38:58.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-14T06:56:10.707" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am practicing &quot;Precis Writing&quot; now a days. I checked that there is no TAG regarding precis or summary. I want to ask where or on which stack I can put such questions regarding precis writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84599" OwnerDisplayName="Veer" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T10:18:56.283" Title="Precis Excercise Guidance" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2014-07-14T10:18:56.283" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may find this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;, as it could fall into their &quot;critique&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions will need to be carefully scoped, as explained in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/a/167/5480&quot;&gt;relevant Meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must have either a &lt;strong&gt;specific question&lt;/strong&gt; about your sample or &lt;strong&gt;specific guidelines&lt;/strong&gt; for the critique. Below would be examples of on-topic questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Where are the unneeded words?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Does this character introduction seem smooth?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How can I show more and tell less in this instance?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Does this paragraph make you want to keep reading?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How can I improve this dialogue to create a sense of suspense?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your paragraph must be a concise illustration of your larger question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question must be phrased in such a way that answers can be objectively voted on by the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question should encourage answers which explain their reasoning and back up any subjective statements with experience or recognized authorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While your question should give us an idea of your own style and what you intend to do with your included writing, the question should encourage fair and impartial answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please do not ask us to proofread your work for grammar, spelling, or punctuation issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There appear to be no questions on Writers Meta about precis techniques and results, nor do they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/precis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;precis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;precis&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/summary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;summary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;summary&lt;/a&gt; tags. Before jumping straight in, I would suggest &lt;strong&gt;asking a similar question on their Meta site,&lt;/strong&gt; referencing the critique guidelines I've linked to and quoted here, and asking for specific guidance on how to make precis on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is fairly certain that such questions would not be on-topic on ELU, as they don't fall into any of these categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get a satisfactory response (that is &quot;Yes, Writers is the right place and here's how to do it&quot;), do return here and answer your own question with a link to the advice you're given. If they say Writers is the wrong place, then a comment here saying &quot;Nope, they say No&quot; would help people in the future who have the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T10:18:56.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5014" CreationDate="2014-07-14T16:03:53.443" Score="-3" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flagging a comment or post for profanity can be controversial, so I'd like the community's input. I'll take this as not a 1 time answer, but use it to sculpt my behavior going forward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/184777/20504&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; Received a comment with profanity. The same idea could have been expressed euphemistically or otherwise. Should that comment be flagged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T05:32:05.317" Title="Should I flag this comment for profanity?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5011" CreationDate="2014-07-14T20:18:01.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it was gratuitously crude.  I don’t think it was necessary, but as it is a mention case not a use case, it is wrong to forbid and difficult to condemn outright.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some may find it needlessly offensive, and apparently have. But I don’t know if that suffices for flagging purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I’m sorry but I don’t know that it’s worth flagging: I don’t wish to saddle our moderators with more work than they already have.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at least it was in a comment, which are non-searchable ephemeral artifacts subject to deletion without notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T20:18:01.260" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4952" CreationDate="2014-07-15T01:17:17.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would not consider myself any of these, so perhaps I am not supposed to be here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, but in fact frivolous English language enthusiasts are also tolerated. Stack Exchange decided to cross-advertise questions from one site to another, so any exclusivity there ever was is now out the window for any site that doesn't &lt;em&gt;ruthlessly&lt;/em&gt; slam those not up to scratch. I think MathOverflow is still doing all right, primarily because &quot;question is comprehensible to anyone other than a specialist&quot; is almost sufficient grounds to close over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But wait, built and run by me? So I am supposed to be here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Stack Exchange boilerplate. The &quot;you&quot; means people who are still here and reading after applying the filter of who the site is for. OK, so you might have applied the filter incorrectly, in which case you will be expelled into outer darkness at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More precisely, I suspect it's the &quot;empowering you&quot; that appears in phrases such as &quot;you decide!&quot; and &quot;you may already have won a prize!&quot;. It means someone else, probably not you, but here's hoping you get a look-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hang on then, why are questions closed as general reference? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, Stack Exchange boilerplate. Again, optimistic language. &quot;Every question about &amp;lt;insert site subject&amp;gt;&quot; really means &quot;every question that's on-topic for the site and not closed for any of the listed close reasons and not spam or abuse and probably some other reasons for not allowing the question that we haven't thought of yet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this site is supposed to be distinct from &quot;English language learners&quot; (who ironically are generally more enthusiastic than native speakers, albeit less so than at least some academics), the issue of what's on-topic is clearly going to require quite a lot of making it up as you go along. Not just evaluating against the literal criterion, &quot;is this question about English language? And if not, is it about English usage?&quot;. Unfortunately, like all Stack Exchange sites, you're supposed to actually read the help centre to find out the details. The concise description is just a shorthand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to pick holes in this kind of rah-rah language, then mission statements are exactly the place to look. Bravo! ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62732" LastEditorUserId="62732" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T01:34:33.110" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T01:34:33.110" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5011" CreationDate="2014-07-15T08:54:12.103" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was gratuitous vulgarity (not a discussion about language), and the only connection I can see to the OP's post is that it had to do with an airline. As Andrew Leach clearly stated in his post about flagging comments: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it doesn’t need to be mentioned at all if it’s not relevant to the question or its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Andrew was discussing a 'worldview', the same can be said about offensive comments. The question was 'which is better, &quot;I loved flying with American Airlines&quot; or &quot;I loved flying on American Airlines&quot;? To have a long anecdote ending with &quot;I'm Cathy; Fuck me&quot; is not only offensive (as was the ad campaign - please feel free to search for accounts of the harassment stewardesses had to put up with after that campaign, to which they were vocally opposed), it's completely unnecessary. It doesn't add anything of value, doesn't clarify anything, is there just to exemplify one person's story-telling prowess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is your site as much as it is anyone else's. Yours is just one small voice in a sea of thousands. If users feel quite free to post such crap, you should certainly feel free to flag it if you so desire as not constructive, too chatty, or even offensive. It's your prerogative, it's silent, it hurts no one (there is no penalty, if I'm not mistaken, to not constructive or too chatty flags, and the penalty for offensive is small), and it might serve to make this site actually more about the English Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: A comment was removed which explained the primary reason for &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; use of the word: if the comment were to be deleted (a perfectly reasonable assumption, since it was), the post would leave some to wonder what was the offensive language referred to in the OP's question. Though I grant that many commenters used the word, comments disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-07-17T05:32:05.317" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T05:32:05.317" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5011" CreationDate="2014-07-15T12:47:28.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; find it &lt;em&gt;rude or offensive&lt;/em&gt;? That's the only determiner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; find it &lt;em&gt;rude or offensive&lt;/em&gt; (or any other option) then flag it as such, if you don't, then don't flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need other people's opinions to determine if you feel offended then you weren't offended. Of course, you could be offended after being told you should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw the comment and thought to myself ... &lt;code&gt;that'll offend someone&lt;/code&gt; but it's not my place to flag it just for thinking that someone might be offended, the offended have to take matters into their own hands and declare themselves as &lt;em&gt;offended&lt;/em&gt;. There's a good example here &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184820/word-for-someone-who-wants-to-find-a-single-word-to-describe-a-relatively-obscur#comment383894_184820&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Repwhore comment from KitFox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I didn't flag it as I'm not offended by it but I can imagine some people could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I've had anything flagged so I don't know what happens but I don't think there's anything in the way of controversy about it. Moderators see the flags and act on them in the way they think they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T12:47:28.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5011" CreationDate="2014-07-15T12:54:57.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that you felt the need to ask. The comment didn't add anything to the discussion. Had the profanity been replaced with more tactful language, it was still a candidate for removal. I would have deleted it without a second thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your question, the fact that the comment contained profanity was not in itself reason to flag it. If the comment were contextually appropriate, the existence of the word &lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt; would not necessarily qualify it for flagging. The commenter's word choice was intended to provoke a particular, graphic reaction to demonstrate the crudeness of the innuendo. Because the commenter was explaining what the sexual innuendo was in an illustrative way, it is in the decidedly grey area of &lt;em&gt;use-mention&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I would recommend that if it bothers you, flag it with the 'other' flag and ask a mod to review the wording to determine if it can be amended in such a way as to preserve the original information without using crass or vulgar language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to some of the extended commentary here, I want to put to rest the notion that you should even care about how much work this creates for the moderation team. For one thing, if enough of the community agrees with you that something is offensive, the comment will be automatically deleted and we won't even see the flag. For the other thing, it is one of our responsibilities to handle flags. That's part of what we do, and that's why we just had an election to bring on more mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We won't know what the community finds offensive unless you flag it for us. If there is a lot of offensive content, we need to know about it, regardless of the amount of work it creates for us. That said, tread lightly with the offensive flag. &lt;em&gt;Use-mention&lt;/em&gt; can be a sticky wicket. If you aren't sure, you can use the 'other' flag to write us a note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T13:50:40.053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T13:50:40.053" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-15T14:48:09.040" Score="15" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chat room can one-box lots of things, like wikipedia links and youtube videos, making nice neat messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ELU chat it would be very useful to be able to one-box Google ngram links, to show the graph as returned by Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to post a link like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=springtime%2Csummertime%2Cwintertime%2Cfalltime%2C+autumntime&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cspringtime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csummertime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwintertime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfalltime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cautumntime%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=springtime%2Csummertime%2Cwintertime%2Cfalltime%2C+autumntime&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cspringtime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csummertime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwintertime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfalltime%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cautumntime%3B%2Cc0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and have it do this:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UItgF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we're at it, it would be very handy if that could happen automatically on the main site too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T12:47:35.717" Title="Chat-room one-boxing for Google n-grams" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5033" CreationDate="2014-07-16T11:03:11.620" Score="13" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185221/2303&quot;&gt;this question about why there is no &quot;autumntime&quot; or &quot;falltime&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. I added this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We just use &lt;em&gt;fall&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;autumn&lt;/em&gt; in those cases, both as nouns and adjectives. Not really sure why. We just do it that way. That's not to say you couldn't say &quot;autumntime&quot; if you really wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I noticed the comment had been deleted. I'm curious why that was. The comment was not an answer, certainly, but did not pretend to be one. It was germane to the question, which was itself pretty broad (&quot;Why is it so?&quot; questions tend to be broad to the threshold of being unanswerable, in my view). But it certainly was not offensive. (There are certainly plenty of less germane and more questionable comments scattered throughout this site.) If there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a reason for the deletion, I want to know what the reason was, and if that is a policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AndrewLeach restored the comment after I mentioned it to him. But I'm still left with more concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are the comment police, and why are they deleting comments that are not offensive but offer some value? Is one of the mods grinding for a badge? If so, that calls into question the idea of badge rewards for potentially destructive activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reviewing some of the answers to this question, especially those which attempt to draw distinctions between what is and is not a &quot;useful&quot; comment (some related at great length and with a form of special pleading one normally might associate with legal briefs from the tobacco lobby), I have to say I still am unable to fathom the difference. I just now looked at 50 or so random comments and in all but two or three the &quot;rules&quot; offered here as guidance were about as useful to determine suitability as a magnetic compass would be to find gold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see too that the only reasonable answer here (Daniel's) has been pounced on with negative humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey, do what you like, folks. Just don't call it logical, transparent, or in any way justifiable. Have the dignity or the courage or whatever it takes to own up to the fact that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; don't have any ideas on the matter either besides &quot;Because I said so&quot; or &quot;Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recent Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the Splenetic Mod strikes again. What was restored has since been destroyed. Haha, what a petty little site you run here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T21:00:58.663" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T22:45:01.177" Title="Why was this comment deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5021" CreationDate="2014-07-17T03:12:39.703" Score="1" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is invalid, perhaps a duplicate, a list, or off topic, but not yet closed, and if it has answers, how should they be handled? Should they be upvoted if they answer the question? Should they be downvoted to discourage answering bad questions? Should they be ignored altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81822" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T03:44:53.157" Title="Valid answers to invalid questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5020" CreationDate="2014-07-17T03:38:54.800" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not always obvious whether enough other users consider a question to be invalid to force closure, or even whether you yourself think it deserves to be closed. Who knows for sure (and who can predict with certainty) what goes on in the murky crevices of a prospective close-voter's mind, or how many other individuals there are who might vote the same way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to ignore any votes to close that may or may not have been cast, and to base your decisions purely on your own assessment of the merits both of the question and the answers supplied, as well as on how strongly motivated you feel regarding your own wish to respond. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's generally simpler and easier just to move on if the question and/or its answers don't hold any particular interest for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should they be upvoted if they answer the question?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the question strikes you as worthwhile, then yes -- why shouldn't they be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should they be downvoted to discourage answering bad questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should be downvoted anyway if they are poor answers. If you think the question itself is bad, then downvote the question (and comment on it, if necessary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should they be ignored altogether?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if you're not interested in either the question or the answers made to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2014-07-17T03:44:53.157" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T03:44:53.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-18T09:47:57.657" Score="0" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to find sentence examples for list of words that includes in about 1500 words.So it is not easy to use online services that find examples only for one word(like Google translate or some other that are described &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3557/is-there-an-online-sample-sentence-database-or-search-engine&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and do copy/paste founded examples.Exactly I want to find a web page like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.easydefine.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EasyDefine&lt;/a&gt;.I can copy and paste all of words of my list in it and it get definition for them.But unfortunately it gets &quot;definition&quot; and I need to examples.Do you know any solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85451" OwnerDisplayName="hasanghaforian" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T10:09:49.103" Title="Is there an online example sentence database or search engine to translate LIST of words?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2014-07-18T15:15:29.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To take the other side of the argument, I don't see why this comment should have been undeleted. I wouldn't have personally deleted it (and I can't, seeing as I'm not a mod) but I am having trouble agreeing with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was germane to the question, which was itself pretty broad (&quot;Why is it so?&quot; questions tend to be broad to the threshold of being unanswerable, in my view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't really &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; germane to the question seeing as you added absolutely no useful detail. Saying &quot;we just do it that way&quot; is already covered in the body of the question (or otherwise it wouldn't have been asked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I can understand why someone would delete the comment as &quot;not constructive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(There are certainly plenty of less germane and more questionable comments scattered throughout this site.) If there was a reason for the deletion, I want to know what the reason &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;, and if that is a policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... you are suggesting that we remove these other comments from the site? The policy behind comment deletion, as far as I know, is &quot;comments can be deleted since they are comments.&quot; You can find a bunch of interesting discussion on comments, comment deletion and so on here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/180325/help-us-figure-out-a-way-to-handle-the-explosion-of-comments-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;Help us figure out a way to handle the explosion of comments on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current ELU pattern of behavior is to leave comments alone unless they are causing a specific problem but I, personally, find this to be a little lax. I don't see why comments such as the one in question &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; exist and have little problem deleting them. The only reason I don't flag comments like this is because the ELU community doesn't seem to agree with me and, in the past, the moderators have declined removing such comments. Which is fine in the sense that the community has chosen how to behave. I merely comply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, it was probably deleted by a moderator who was going through the comment flag queue and made a quick judgment call. On further examination, the moderator team reversed the deletion simply because this particular comment was borderline enough to side with the user who cared enough to bring it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in, it doesn't really matter much. It's a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T23:12:18.287" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-18T17:38:38.087" Score="2" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you please reopen this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185672/collective-noun-for-lightnings-thunderbolts&quot;&gt;Collective noun for lightning(s) / thunderbolts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really think that people were not fair about this question and I really feel like people are being against ideas without concrete reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was not primarily opinion based. It was not a writing advice. It is related to English Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was simply asking a word and provided an example sentence. And I provided a lot of information to clarify. I listened to the advices in the comments and improved the question as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more I clarified the more people became against it. They also up-voted the comments with misleading information and ignored my effort. I asked people to write their comments as a detailed answer but they did not choose to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I a lone ranger here? What am I missing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; There is a similar question asked before which is open and up-voted:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81023/collective-noun-for-fire?rq=1&quot;&gt;Collective Noun for Fire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even provided much more explanation than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note 2:&lt;/strong&gt; There are a lot of usages in literature and technical context that can sound ungrammatical to the native speaker. But it is still English. Are we only expecting things that will &quot;sound&quot; grammatical to native speakers and used in everyday speech? Can't we talk about literary and technical usages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if there is a plural form of lightning out there but we cannot use with a collective noun, then explain why as an answer. Is it so hard to do this? I included this question later also in the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not adamant about using a collective noun. I would accept an explanation as an answer also. I listened to your voice, improved the question as much as possible, but I feel like I'm being misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note3:&lt;/strong&gt; Isn't this an advanced English site? Why would we be against uncommon usages? or usages in literature? (this is different than writing advice, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literary-english&lt;/a&gt; tag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, there are similar questions like this asked before and they are open. I really don't understand why this question is being treated differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note4:&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to hear different voices other than being against the question (or being against me within the opportunity of this topic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final note:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks for the support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T17:07:46.700" Title="Reopen Request: Collective noun for lightnings / thunderbolts" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5030" CreationDate="2014-07-18T18:12:22.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; things in English don’t have dedicated collective nouns that describe only them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps still more importantly, mass nouns &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; have special-purpose collective nouns to describe a collection of them: you cannot have a collection of something that is a mass noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your relentless but thoroughly misguided pursuit of esoteric examples of “lightnings” as an attempt to somehow “prove” that &lt;em&gt;lightning&lt;/em&gt; can be a count noun is wasted effort right from the get go, &lt;strong&gt;simply because it sounds ungrammatical to native speakers&lt;/strong&gt;.  You need to recognize our authority on this and abandon that path altogether.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this winds up meaning is that all answers would either have to go inventing things that don’t exist, or be ones which would confuse a native speaker, or which would be using some sort of stylistic circumlocution or metaphor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of those paths leads to a single correct answer.  They all lead to lists of many possible answers, a sort a verbal beauty pageant with you as the whimsical judge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those sorts of questions are a poor fit for the SE format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T18:12:22.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2014-07-20T01:53:55.740" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A mod should have dismissed that flag. Anyone can see that the comment's on topic, and as for adding &quot;absolutely no useful detail&quot;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5019/why-was-this-comment-deleted?cb=1#comment18230_5028&quot;&gt;@trlkly&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The comment actually adds a bit of information that is not found in the question or any answer. It offers a replacement for the missing (or extremely rare) word &quot;autumntime&quot;--one may simply say &quot;autumn&quot; or &quot;fall.&quot; If the comment did only say &quot;we just do it that way,&quot; I would agree with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5019/why-was-this-comment-deleted?cb=1#comment18156_5019&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt; is right about badges not being an issue, which is comforting since we needz all those badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5028/10041&quot;&gt;MrHen&lt;/a&gt; in that while comments may not matter much in terms of rep, deleting a comment is telling the poster &quot;what you thought was worth saying wasn't really worth saying&quot;, which is OK to a spammer, but not to someone with something legitimate to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the poster thought it worth saying, so don't justify your flag/deletion by pretending comments don't matter. Naturally, the poster deserves the cold shoulder of deletion for being rude or adding absolutely nothing valuable to the thread. And no one will mind an obsolete comment (e.g. &lt;em&gt;please add links&lt;/em&gt;) being efficiently thrown under the bus. But a comment which is none of these things should not be flagged, and the mod who sees a flag on such a comment should dismiss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize there's a gray area for everyone, but if it's in the gray (i.e. &quot;borderline&quot;), you should go the respectful route and at least ignore it. In other words, I subscribe to and believe I can justify the &quot;current ELU pattern of behavior&quot; MrHen referred to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with all that, I'm not sure why anyone is considering Robusto's comment as even borderline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T02:08:47.687" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2014-07-20T16:36:22.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderators on EL&amp;amp;U, the community moderators, and community members with &gt; 15 rep are the 'comment police'. They delete commentary at their discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that our &gt; 15 rep users can only delete offensive comments, and your comment was obviously not. However, these users can indicate what comments they feel should be removed by flagging for moderator attention. We see how many of any given type of flag is on a post and that factors into our decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the decision that was made on your particular comment, and because several people have expressed confusion over why it was considered &quot;borderline&quot;, and also because it may benefit future users with a similar question, let me review our guidelines for leaving comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let's look at the comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We just use fall or autumn in those cases, both as nouns and adjectives. Not really sure why. We just do it that way. That's not to say you couldn't say &quot;autumntime&quot; if you really wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's really added here? OP already knows that we use fall or autumn, so we can cross out the first line. The rest amounts to &quot;I don't know. Use it if you want to.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should submit a comment if you want to:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   1. Request clarification from the author;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2. Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   3. Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment does not satisfy #1 or 2. It might be argued that it contains &quot;relevant but minor&quot; information (use it if you want to), so #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast these reasons with: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are not recommended for any of the following:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   1. Suggesting corrections that don't fundamentally change the meaning of the post; instead, make or suggest an edit;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2. Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   3. Compliments which do not add new information (&quot;+1, great answer!&quot;); instead, up-vote it and pay it forward;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   4. Criticisms which do not add anything constructive (&quot;-1, see previous comments you scallywag!&quot;); instead, down-vote (and provide or up-vote a better answer if appropriate);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   5. Secondary discussion or debating a controversial point; please use chat instead;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   6. Discussion of community behavior or site policies; please use meta instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, #2 or 5 might apply, if you consider &quot;I don't know&quot; an answer or &quot;use it if you want to&quot; to be an alternative solution or secondary discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to the guidelines, that leaves possibly-OK comment (&lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; some minor relevant information) or possibly-not-OK comment (answer-as-a-comment or other discussion), hence &lt;strong&gt;grey area&lt;/strong&gt;. Whoever looked at it made the decision to delete it, so we can assume that the not-OK outweighed the OK in that mod's judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is in the FAQ is the policy and has been the policy for quite some time. Mods delete comments all the time, not just your comments. It is part of what we do. If you think the policy needs to be changed, bring it up on Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why &lt;em&gt;your comment&lt;/em&gt; was deleted, amongst all the comments that don't meet the criteria here, that's because a mod saw it and decided to delete it. So the answer is in fact &quot;because [that mod] said so&quot; and also &quot;it seemed like a good idea at the time.&quot; I have yet to fathom why you think this is a big enough issue for Meta.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral and will continue to be ephemeral, so if you have something you think is worth keeping around, then post an answer or propose an edit to an existing answer rather than leave a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, your comment has been restored, you have indicated your satisfaction with that solution, and we can all just move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T18:47:03.987" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5036" CreationDate="2014-07-20T20:59:40.477" Score="5" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker of English (not a &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/09/how-to-ask-out-an-apple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pineapple&lt;/a&gt;), who classes himself as a &amp;quot;serious enthusiast&amp;quot; of the language. This site, as has been discussed elsewhere (most notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4625/74434&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), takes some getting used to for any new user, but I decided to put in some effort to understand the rules and conventions of this site, because I felt that it has the potential to be very enjoyable.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I guess 45 days weren't enough to figure it out. I understood (between this site and the main site) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; questions were frowned upon, but not closed, because people favored questions by and for &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot; (copied from the site blurb). Alright, no problem, I'm a serious enthusiast, I can think of high-level questions that bother me about how this language works, and bring them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm really struggling to figure out why my most recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185993/74434&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was down-voted and closed. In one sense, it is indeed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; question, as I am searching for a term; but in my mind, it's more on-topic than most of those, because I am looking for a word to use to classify nouns. &lt;sub&gt;If you haven't read the question, I was looking for a word to use to differentiate between nouns where someone is given an identity as, for example, a &lt;em&gt;New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;, versus the weaker &lt;em&gt;someone who lives in New York&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason given was &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking,&amp;quot; but I don't think that's it, as Kris understood well enough to give a partial &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/186005/74434&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (I'm considering it partial because it only provides one word out of the two that I asked for, and then not even an English one), Erik Kowal (forgive me if I attributed the answer to the wrong person) understood well enough to give an answer that he subsequently deleted, and Janus Bahs Jacquet understood well enough to leave a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185993/terminology-for-new-yorker-vs-lives-in-new-york#comment386772_185993&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; that I'm still trying to figure out. &lt;sub&gt;And note that those last two, while I'm not accusing them of anything, were among those who voted to close.....&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what exactly was &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; about this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for helping me understand what was wrong with that question. It has since been edited so that it actually makes sense. Thanks!! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74434" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T03:28:52.037" Title="Why was this question closed as &quot;not clear what you're asking&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5035" CreationDate="2014-07-20T21:47:12.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, the “pairs of nouns” you present are not actually pairs of nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Type-1 Noun     Type-2 Noun&#xA;------------    -----------------------&#xA;New Yorker      lives in New York&#xA;diabetic        person with diabetes&#xA;author          writes books&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even within a given column there is no common thread:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second column always has more than one word in it, but then again, the first row’s first column has two words in it as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first column consists of a gentilic, a nominalized adjective, and a normal noun.  I can see no connection here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second column has two entries with prepositional phrases in them and one without.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second column has two verb phrases and one noun phrase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all adds up to a very confusing question. I for one do not understand what you are actually asking, and I neither downvoted your question nor closevoted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T21:47:12.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5038" CreationDate="2014-07-21T02:05:08.607" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/186058/59258&quot;&gt;If the article title ends in closing punctuation, do we still add a period in an APA reference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this really have nothing to do with the English language or its usage. Shouldn't they be considered off topic? From the Writers site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic page&lt;/a&gt; it looks like they could be migrated there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if consensus agrees these are off-topic, would it be helpful to have a specific off-topic close reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T22:50:41.507" Title="Shouldn't referencing questions be off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5037" CreationDate="2014-07-21T06:23:25.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. Questions about citations are on-topic on Writers and not really about the English &lt;strong&gt;language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers.SE even have a tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/citations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;citations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;citations&lt;/a&gt; which supports moving questions there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Citations are references to published or unpublished sources other than the work one is currently reading. This tag should be used when asking for proper formatting for citations or information about the ethics of citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the second question, it's not possible to have automatic migration (which used to be achieved via a close reason) as it led to too many errors. There is also the minor problem that Writers is still in Beta and no migration path exists to Beta sites by design. Those who can vote to close (3000+ rep) can put an off-topic reason; and anyone can flag for moderator attention and write a suitable reason into the &quot;Other&quot; box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-07-21T22:50:41.507" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T22:50:41.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-21T07:48:21.320" Score="21" ViewCount="8116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please advise or enlighten me if such guidance already exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/182707/50720&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I sought to record my thoughts and opinions on how to gloss that sentence. Yet it was still closed as `too broad'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/180097/50720&quot;&gt;for this&lt;/a&gt;, I did cite Etymonline but user Avner Shahr-Kashtan's comment explains my outstanding problem: &quot;I believe etymonline's definition is extremely unclear in this specific case, and shouldn't be used as a general reference close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per contra, questions (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=created%3a2014&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=created%3a2014&lt;/a&gt;) like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/182519/what-does-vanilla-mean-in-the-context-of-gaming/182535#182535&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;vanilla&amp;quot; mean in the context of gaming?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/182709/50720&quot;&gt;Why do people say &amp;quot;to be honest&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; don't explicitly contain references and are thus shorter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do my posts contain overly much detail or information? What are the situations in which one's own words suffice? I'd like to aim to abridge and shorten length like the last two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;original body of question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;With so many rules and slightly different interpretations of them in thousands of cases, it is not always easy to see which interpretation&#xA;    of the law a court will give in your case. This uncertainty is&#xA;    increased by the ability of the judiciary to select from what is often&#xA;    a wide range of precedents, and to distinguish earlier cases on their&#xA;    facts &lt;strong&gt;where this would otherwise&lt;/strong&gt; lead to an unjust result in the&#xA;    view of the judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm contending with &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;otherwise&lt;/strong&gt;. Would you&#xA;  please explain the thought processes behind how to determine the&#xA;  answers here and resolve the ambiguity ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the antecedent of &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; here? Is this use correct? Why not a relative pronoun of the form &quot;preposition + which&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the antecedent of &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; ? The 'distingish[ing]'? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's &lt;strong&gt;otherwise&lt;/strong&gt; opposing, &quot;distinguish earlier cases on their facts&quot;? I don't apprehend the final subordinate clause (and to&#xA;  distingish ... view of the judge).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T15:12:33.023" Title="How much research is needed?" Tags="|support|questions|research-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-21T13:52:28.177" Score="15" ViewCount="627" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there have been a lot of questions about legalese. Here are a couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185227/cite-vs-cite-to&quot;&gt;What’s the difference between “cite” and “cite to”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185890/what-is-subrogation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185890/what-is-subrogation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have been closed as off topic, with such comments as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185890/what-is-subrogation#comment386479_185890&quot;&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is about legal practice, rather than the English language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185574/grammatical-voice-problem/185603#comment385909_185603&quot;&gt;Analysis of the grammar used in legal documents is not a matter for language specialists, but rather of judges, and those who know how judges think, namely lawyers. Legal English does not follow normal English rules for definiteness, repetition, conjunction, reference and coreference, indirect discourse, adverbial placement, and many other syntactic phenomena. It also deploys archaic syntax, lexical items, and idioms that have not been spontaneously spoken by a native speaker in centuries. As I said, it's not within our writ here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, on the other hand, we also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/legal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;legal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;legal&lt;/a&gt; with 111 questions and the summary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about the strange language of legalese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And such comments as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184475/as-of-in-excusal-as-of-right#comment384704_184475&quot;&gt;Where did this idea come from that questions about English-language legal phraseology are &quot;off-topic&quot; here? If the language is archaic, that only makes the case stronger for keeping it here, because that means it's a question about etymology and the evolution of the language, and nothing could be more on-topic than that.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt; section of our help we do not list legalese as something we may not ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me there is a stand-off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we allow legalese questions? What should our help section say about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T01:43:54.247" Title="Where do we stand on legalese questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2014-07-21T14:21:59.837" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to close questions about legal English as long as they are about the language, not about actual legal interpretation as done in court. Even the definition of a legal term is about English, and I would even allow it if it requires some knowledge of a law to answer; otherwise, we should also close questions about the meaning of anacoluthon, sports terms, slang, etc., which also all require some knowledge from certain fields that not everyone may possess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T14:21:59.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2014-07-21T14:38:48.190" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my favorite jobs as a judicial law clerk was writing jury instructions. The legal jargon of the statutes and the case law was created by legislators (often lawyers) and judges (formerly lawyers). The purpose of the statutes and cases was to implement a public policy, something that is supposed to reflect the will of the governed, the average person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jury instructions attempt to reduce the rules and criteria embodied in that law and decisions &#xA;into ordinary language, understandable to most jurors, &lt;em&gt;normal&lt;/em&gt; people. Similarly, there is a move in government documents and in contracts to shift toward simpler language, less jargon. Far to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much jargon is a form of shorthand. When we say &lt;em&gt;mandamus&lt;/em&gt;, legally trained folk have a quick understanding of what is meant without having to recite the sentence that explains its meaning. Some other types of terms or phrases are an attempt at precision, locking in a criteria and leaving little room to err. Ironically some of these are called &lt;em&gt;magic language&lt;/em&gt; by lawyers, a recitation that must be there for the document to have force or effect. For example, a trademark application must assert that the mark is or will be &lt;em&gt;used in commerce&lt;/em&gt;. That has a very specific and set meaning to a trademark lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deal with jargon in a wide variety of fields. Why not law? We deal with complex constructions and parse them out. Again, why not law? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly we do not want to stray into legal interpretation. The reason there are lawyers, and not just fact finders and law enforcers, is that there is a wide range of legal interpretation that can be brought to both the law and documents that reflect or invoke the law. This is especially true in common law countries, such as the US and UK, and many other English speaking countries. But opinion is not our purview anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a range of questions that deal with legal terms that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have correct answers without digging deeply into legal analysis. This is especially true of jargon and questions about construction. It also could cover etymology since so much legal phrasing comes from variants of Latin, French and early (or earlier) English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's keep the field open and sort between the questions that are appropriate and those that stray too far into legal opinion. We seem to have little problem shutting down individual questions that depart from our bounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastEditorUserId="11433" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T01:43:54.247" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T01:43:54.247" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5039" CreationDate="2014-07-21T21:01:33.093" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly reasonable for reviewers to assume that a common expression can be explained by consulting ordinary reference works. They shouldn't have to do that search. If it can't be, it's up to the asker to demonstrate that it can't be. Something like &quot;I researched but maybe I missed it&quot; isn't particularly helpful in this case: if you researched and didn't find anything, at least &lt;strong&gt;show where you looked.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing the research may find something relevant, but it might be unintelligible or not completely helpful. In that case, &lt;strong&gt;show what you found.&lt;/strong&gt; This means that others don't repeat the search you've done, and they can focus any answer on expanding on those findings. &lt;strong&gt;Don't just link to it:&lt;/strong&gt; if it doesn't explain what you want to know, &lt;strong&gt;quote&lt;/strong&gt; the relevant bits and explain why they don't. Doing this also helps the asker to sort out in his own mind what the problem actually is in order to express it clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In common with other Stack Exchange sites, ELU should not simply be asked &lt;em&gt;gimme the codez&lt;/em&gt; &amp;mdash; we expect an amount of independent research, and understanding of what the problem is, to be evident in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;how much research is needed?&quot; is &quot;Enough to show:&amp;mdash; that you have done some; that you understand what you are asking about; and you can explain all of that to people who have no prior knowledge of the problem at all.&quot; Every question needs at least one of those criteria to be satisfied; most need more than one and many need all three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of example, I'll make a start on reworking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186193/how-to-determine-which-definition-of-contingent&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This quote was revealed to exemplify &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/contingent?q=contingent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definition 1&lt;/a&gt;, but working backwards, how would you determine the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;contingent&lt;/strong&gt;? Even after seeing the context, I'm still vacillating between definitions 1 (not 1.1, the one above 1.1) and 3. Don't they  both look right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;But, while personal biographies and group histories are mutually immanent, they are relationally irreducible. The same context may produce several different collective 'histories', differentiating as well as linking biographies through &lt;strong&gt;contingent&lt;/strong&gt; specificities. In turn, articulating cultural practices of the subjects so constituted mark &lt;strong&gt;contingent&lt;/strong&gt; collective 'histories' with variable new meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=rKCHAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA117&amp;amp;lpg=PA117&amp;amp;dq=%22articulating+cultural+practices+of+the+subjects+so+constituted%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Jb8oaRY6Sg&amp;amp;sig=_ZgJI6kt5BVmhM9QQVDpGxdY8Xo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=673IU-b7GtTk8AWpt4KYDQ&amp;amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;=%22articulating%20cultural%20practices%20of%20the%20subjects%20so%20constituted%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; PP 177, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, by Avtar Brah &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rule 1. State what you're asking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; first&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the quotation is relegated to a very much lower status than it actually needs. The question is built upon the quotation: mention it early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rule 2. Never just link. Always quote with attribution.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Definition 1&quot; is from ODO. The question mentions 1.0 (I'll call it 1.0 for ease of reference) and 3. Don't expect readers to click through and swap back and forward to compare your question with your dictionary link. Quote the dictionary definition you're referring to. Using the citation, people can click through to check or see if something else is relevant, but you are basing your question on your prior research: including that research in the question itself is crucial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always, always, refer to more than one dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rule 3. Use simple language. Assume all your readers are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/history/slogan.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Missouri&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to demonstrate what you don't understand. Don't dress it up in fancy language; just say what you don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This quotation uses the word &lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;But, while personal biographies and group histories are mutually immanent, they are relationally irreducible. The same context may produce several different collective 'histories', differentiating as well as linking biographies through &lt;strong&gt;contingent&lt;/strong&gt; specificities. In turn, articulating cultural practices of the subjects so constituted mark &lt;strong&gt;contingent&lt;/strong&gt; collective 'histories' with variable new meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=rKCHAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA117&amp;amp;lpg=PA117&amp;amp;dq=%22articulating+cultural+practices+of+the+subjects+so+constituted%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Jb8oaRY6Sg&amp;amp;sig=_ZgJI6kt5BVmhM9QQVDpGxdY8Xo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=673IU-b7GtTk8AWpt4KYDQ&amp;amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;=%22articulating%20cultural%20practices%20of%20the%20subjects%20so%20constituted%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  by Avtar Brah, page 177&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looking up the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/contingent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt; in ODO&lt;/a&gt;, I think these definitions may be valid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;1.&amp;nbsp;Subject to chance:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;the contingent nature of the job&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;3.&amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;Philosophy&lt;/em&gt; True by virtue of the way things in fact are and not by logical necessity:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;that men are living creatures is a contingent fact&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contingent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; has a number of uses all related to the main definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;depending on something else that might or might not happen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...but if I attempt to replace the word &lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt; with something derived from the definitions, it just doesn't make sense. Is the author using &lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt; in one of these ways here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing this, you are showing that the use of &lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt; isn't easily answered by referring to standard works. You have already done that search and you have shown what you found. You state how you have attempted to deal with what you found, and you explain what the problem is: you can't actually find a definition which appears to fit &lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt; as it's used here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[As an aside, I would say that in this particular quotation, &lt;em&gt;contingent&lt;/em&gt; is the least of the problems! &lt;em&gt;Mutually immanent, relationally irreducible,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;specificities&lt;/em&gt; provide for a particularly impenetrable passage. Its opacity may well be why it doesn't make sense when you try to expand the dense text with simpler words.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is very, very important is not to treat ELU as a personal comprehension-exercise service; nor to be seen to be doing that. Putting &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; of effort into questions (and almost certainly more than I have here) is absolutely vital. This suggested question is an improvement, but it's by no means finished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking good questions takes time. Questions should not simply be thrown together, and it's very unlikely that they can be templated and simply adapted from one to the next. All the research is unique to each question. Even writing this answer, which is heavily based on something already written, has taken a surprising amount of time. Invest in asking to realise a useful return in a comprehensive answer. I would certainly expect someone producing questions for ELU not to manage more than two per day before becoming worn out with the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T15:12:33.023" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T15:12:33.023" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-23T02:47:01.623" Score="-3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question on ELU &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186463/notice-that-name-is-singular&quot;&gt;Link here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Name is singular. Does it mean that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father Son Holy Ghost&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has/have one name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cut a long story short this is a straightforward grammatical question about countable and uncountable uses of nouns. Please can it be reopened? Doctrinal religious issues are a red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T16:12:36.973" Title="A non-doctrinal question" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4986" CreationDate="2014-07-23T10:27:06.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an overarching consideration here. I'd suggest that very few of the contributors here have much familiarity with arcane legal senses of words and the unwieldy (if not actually ungrammatical) piling together of clauses. Comparing it with scientific conventions, say, I'd say that just as it's inappropriate to ask how to correctly write bicyclo[3.2.1]heptatrienyl-CoCp+ on ELU, so questions involving other highly specialised registers should be asked elsewhere. If some of the sentences submitted for analysis in the legal area had actually been written by the OP, we'd have been asking for clarifying rewrites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the frequency of the asking of these questions at the moment, it does invite the question 'Are contributors being asked to fulfil the role that tutors are customarily paid to fulfil?' Not exactly homework, but its first cousin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2014-07-23T10:34:33.217" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T10:34:33.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2014-07-23T15:47:32.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a general site for english language grammar, meaning, and etymology questions. We wouldn't entertain questions about the meaning of the jargon of any of the hard sciences, because those require specialist knowledge and are specific to those professional communities. In the same way, we should not entertain questions about legal jargon, because again that requires the special skills and knowledge of lawyers to answer. Simply put: in all of those fields, we cannot reasonably expect to provide correct answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in respect of parsing the grammar and syntax of legal documents, we can and should assist with those requests. In US (possibly excluding Louisiana) and English law (and as far as I know in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), the general rule is that the ordinary rules of grammar apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I suppose there's nothing wrong with meta level questions about how lawyers use English to discuss law. For example, there's this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186587/what-is-the-intransitive-meaning-of-control&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186587/what-is-the-intransitive-meaning-of-control&lt;/a&gt; asking about jargon which lawyers use to discuss law, which does not in itself denote a legal rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T19:06:42.180" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5061" CreationDate="2014-07-23T16:17:58.473" Score="27" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;(EDIT: This question has now been reopened. Thank you all for your help.)&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186298/the-use-of-not-in-idiomatic-english&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asked about the following passage from a news report:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Pentagon experts on Friday said it was impossible to imagine that the missile could not have been fired without Russian help.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner was puzzled by the presence of the word &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt;, and wondered if it was a mistake, or if the wording was simply idiomatic. The question currently has a score of -4, and has been closed for being &quot;off-topic,&quot; because shame on the asker for not consulting &quot;commonly available references.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the thing, though: &lt;b&gt;The sentence &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; wrong, and the questioner is absolutely right.&lt;/b&gt; As written, the sentence states that the missile could have been fired without Russian help, and that to think otherwise is impossible. In context, that is clearly the opposite of what the article intended to say. This is an example of the class of errors that is sometimes called &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10800&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;misnegation&lt;/a&gt;, most likely caused by the reporter or editor becoming momentarily lost within the difficult triple negative combo of &lt;i&gt;impossible&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt;, and &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt;. Misnegation is an interesting phenomenon, and there's nothing basic about it; indeed, it's clear from the reaction to the question that some people here were tripped up by it just as the original reporter and/or editor were. It's difficult to see why a topic that's provided grist for more than a dozen Language Log posts should be considered &quot;off-topic&quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why, then, should this be considered GR? Please help me understand which commonly available reference or references could be used to answer this question. (Bear in mind that the questioner did in fact show all signs of knowing what &quot;not&quot; means; the question is whether &quot;not&quot; in this context is &lt;i&gt;idiomatic&lt;/i&gt;, not whether it's wrong as strictly parsed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fairness, it should be noted that the question as originally asked was fairly spartan and low-quality, which I assume explains most of the otherwise mystifying downvotes—and kudos to KitFox for whipping the question into shape with a very good edit. Still, it should be noted that at least three of the close votes on this question came &lt;i&gt;after&lt;/i&gt; KitFox edited the question. This seems completely indefensible to me, and the only explanation I can think of is that the close voters did not pay enough attention to the question they were voting to close. That's not how it's supposed to work. &lt;b&gt;If we're going to close questions because the askers didn't do enough research, we owe it to the askers to at least make a token effort not to commit the same sin we accuse them of committing.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186298/the-use-of-not-in-idiomatic-english&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T15:15:25.513" Title="This misnegation question should not have been closed" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5055" CreationDate="2014-07-24T00:38:13.657" Score="17" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4558/follow-up-to-ffs-question-on-50-posts-limit&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/50-question-per-month-limit/4536#4536&quot;&gt;posting limitations&lt;/a&gt; was brought up several months ago, wherein we learned that there are post limits for some SE sites and not for others. We learned that the limitations are 6 &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; per day and 50 &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; per month, which everyone seemed to agree was quite reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that time, the community felt that users who posted an excessive number of questions were few and far between. Because of that, we didn't want to give the impression of targeting a particular user who had been posting many, many questions every day for a few weeks prior to proposal of enabling the limitations. The community preferred to have the moderators intercede, which we did, and then we moseyed on about our business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that time, we have had a number of new users who have posted a flood of questions in their first two weeks of being members. The moderators have tried to catch these users and help them slow down, in a fashion similar to the previous situation (and thus reduce it to a problem previously solved). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it has not been a huge number, just a handful—I can think of at least four without looking—moderators would not have had to intercede at all if the question limits were enabled. I believe that the limits would have helped the users better than moderation interaction (because it is the system and not a person imposing the restriction). I also feel the users would have had a more positive interaction with the community because they would have been prevented from asking many low-quality questions, so the feedback they received from the community would have been more focused (six comments asking to show more research instead of forty, six closed questions instead of forty).  In addition, the community would have been significantly less frustrated by users who don't seem to learn, and the users would have been less frustrated at having all their well-intentioned attempts met with criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it is my belief that enabling the restrictions will reduce the large amount of friction that can be generated by a very small number of users who need a certain sort of guidance on how to use this site effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to request that the question limitations (6/day, 50/month) be enabled on our site. We need a StackExchange employee to do this. We also need your approval. What say you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Please vote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5055/8360&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also post an answer with your perspective on the topic (if you so desire). I feel we've had a lot of consideration for why restrictions are a good idea, and I want to make sure we haven't overlooked any compelling reasons why having the restrictions is a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T06:14:27.833" Title="Do we want to enable post limits?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|questions|question-restrictions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2014-07-24T06:50:10.907" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see definite advantages to all users if these restrictions were implemented. KitFox has mentioned the obvious ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one objects to a slew of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions. If a user decided to post, say, 12 good questions in the span of 24 hours, I think everyone would be happy, and everyone would win. However, in reality this is not a scenario I have ever witnessed (granted I've only been here for going on 8 months.) The proposed limitation  will not affect the vast majority of users here in any negative manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it will do is prevent a situation that's problematic. Generally I don't like close voting, preferring the site to be welcoming and that users (including myself) provide helpful advice about questions. But when such advice goes unheeded, or worse yet, results in nasty exchanges in comments and meta posts challenging down votes and closings, no one really wins. Add to that a measure of burn out, and what we witness then is a spate of unwelcoming, sometimes downright nasty comments in response to users' poor questions. Who needs that? Multiply it by many bad questions in a short period, then fatigue and disregard spills over to relatively innocent users' questions in the form of swift, unexplained closures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have been here long enough, you will recognize a few users who exemplified this behavior before (and now). Some were suspended, some banned, only to return as trolls. One has become a high rep user who obviously provides helpful answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not just suspend the offenders? Because suspension is hard. Suspension is to some extent difficult on the moderators (if you followed the election chat, you'll have read that.) It's to some degree subjective (see above), and it's punitive by nature. Why do that when a questions per day limit might possibly prevent that? By nature, it's impersonal. If someone has burning questions, they can always post them the next day. But it &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; prevent the spate of questions from the student who wants help with every sentence of an essay they need to write. It will allow new users to get to know the site better as they post their questions. It will prevent people who stumble upon this site from excitedly posting a slew of inappropriate questions because they got an answer to their first post. It will make the site tidier and possibly will lead visitors to see it as a higher quality site with expectations from users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will inconvenience a very small number of users while helping to improve the site overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T06:50:10.907" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2014-07-24T16:41:41.110" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at what we have now. I see questions being asked that, in isolation, bear all the hallmarks of a &quot;good&quot; question--they raise reasonable points, they're well-phrased and courteous, they clearly explain the research the asker has done and why it didn't answer the question—yet they begin to gather downvotes almost immediately, apparently due solely to the identity of the person asking the question. It's hard for me to see how that's good for anybody. Downvoting a good question because of personal animosity toward the asker is ugly and unfair, and people who do it really ought to be ashamed of themselves. Moreover, it's bad for the site as a whole when new and infrequent visitors see perfectly reasonable questions getting downvoted and closed for mystifying and seemingly arbitrary reasons. If we have a reputation for being unwelcoming and mean-spirited—&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4857/2014-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/4860#4860&quot;&gt;and we do&lt;/a&gt;—maybe this is part of the reason why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, it's absolutely possible for someone to exhaust the community's patience purely by asking an overwhelming number of questions over a short period of time, &lt;i&gt;regardless of the quality of the questions themselves&lt;/i&gt;. Someone who persists in this behavior despite clear evidence that it exasperates people is either incapable of reading the room, or just doesn't care on some level. Either way, it's not really fair to other people who have the right to ask questions and have them receive the attention they are due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reasonable and impersonal question limit may be the best way to solve these problems. It may not &lt;i&gt;affect&lt;/i&gt; many people, in practice, but it would &lt;i&gt;apply&lt;/i&gt; to everyone equally, and that's the important part. Surely having the software handle it impersonally is a better solution than having quasi-vigilantes single out perceived bad actors for individual punishment by the moderator corps. If it doesn't affect many people in practice, that's a point in its favor, not against it. Six questions per day and 50 questions per month ought to be enough for anybody, and most people, even ones who tend to ask a lot of questions, are unlikely to ever bump up against the limit. For those that do, well, the limited allocation of questions just creates an incentive to make 'em good ones—which itself will reduce unfair downvoting and animosity toward the asker. Everyone wins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T16:41:41.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-25T00:31:00.130" Score="-3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186352/word-compact-phrase-for-written-fictional-works&quot;&gt;Word / compact phrase for written fictional works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been put on hold as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to understand why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not opinion, but fact that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the dictionary definition of &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt; includes merit of the writing and also non-fiction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the dictionary definition of &lt;em&gt;fiction&lt;/em&gt; includes non-written works (the definition says either mostly or 'as (and example)', not entirely, and in common parlance, Star Wars and Star Trek are both fiction)&#xA;(3. Another comment suggest &lt;em&gt;novel&lt;/em&gt; which has another condition that the work must be long, usually 40k words plus)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The objection raised in the comments was that &quot;It seems you are looking for a word that has &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; alternative meanings, in &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; cases, no contexts, no circumstances. I wish you the very best of luck with that in English.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure how that makes the question either opinion-based, or not well-researched, even if the answer is simply that such a word doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me with what exactly is the issue with the question as it is framed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA with clarification after Mitch's response: I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; familiar with the issue with SWR on the site, but I assumed from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests/1659#1659&quot;&gt;this particular exchange&lt;/a&gt; that highly specific SWRs such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure&quot;&gt;Is there a word to describe a highly desirable cursed treasure?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; are the kind of SWRs that are ok. Is this no longer applicable here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66208" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T04:34:02.617" Title="Why is this 'opinion based'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5051" CreationDate="2014-07-25T00:56:40.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't take the 'POB' reason too seriously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed (and any reason was as good as another) probably because it is an often disdained 'single word request'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SWR's are not universally problematic, but your case is one of the common problematic ones in that it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;describes a situation in a couple words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;then requests an exact embodiment of the phrase in a single word (or short phrase).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually misguided (not always) because the description that the OP gives is usually enough (and is the case here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Literature' or 'fiction' by themselves are enough (in context). If you absolutely have to be explicit and unambiguous, usually one word isn't enough for &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T00:56:40.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5051" CreationDate="2014-07-25T01:32:07.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it's true that single word requests are not generally looked upon by all with favor (and I am one of those who does not like them), if there is an answer out there, it's often found here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your request if not easily fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA to add why plain fiction seems insufficient to me - in the modern context, that word can be referring as easily to a TV show or movie or webcomic or podcast or interactive flash media narrative, that using the word would not imply the written word at all, at least to me. If today, someone says 'I love fiction', I don't think they mean to say they love only written fiction, I think, well, that they love fiction, which may be in any medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question &amp;quot;Are both Jane Eyre and Star Trek works of fiction?&amp;quot; is by all accounts &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm looking for a word regarding medium of the narrative, if it exists, where the answer would be &amp;quot;Jane Eyre is, but Star Trek is not&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have defined your search with &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;fiction doesn't mean written&amp;quot; and it must include written fiction but not (audiovisually) portrayed fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were made clear &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; people attempted to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; make the answer Primarily Opinion Based. There is no one perfect answer, and the only way it can be answered is to make guesses until one guess is accepted by you as acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a POB question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your arguing in comments when people are trying to help you doesn't help you. English doesn't have enough words in it to have a single word for every circumstance imaginable. If it did, this answer would have been one word only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That you sought to portray another user to appear hostile by misquoting him doesn't help you either. There is a difference between &amp;quot;Good luck with that&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I wish you the very best of luck with that in English.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T04:34:02.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-25T08:30:55.880" Score="-3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following both involved the participation of moderator KitFox, so would five reopen votes still be needed or simply the number that closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185219/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185219/50720&lt;/a&gt; was closed by tchrist, Robusto, KitFox♦.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185214/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185214/50720&lt;/a&gt;: I've since emended this. I tried to flag this but was confused; two were marked as declined and one helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:39:16.513" Title="How to reopen closures with fewer than 5 votes?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2014-07-25T11:31:40.730" Score="18" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Up vote: Implement the 6/50 restriction.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Down vote: Do not implement the 6/50 restriction.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-07-25T13:19:13.233" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T13:19:13.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2014-07-25T14:40:36.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Erik asked in a comment for some quantitative data. By way of example, these are real figures for one fairly prolific poster, whom I do not intend to identify. &#xA;These figures come from SEDE (with the final columns being totalled in a spreadsheet), so they only go as far as the SEDE data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how the fifty per month is calculated, so for this purpose I used a rolling period of 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each date in the first column, there are the number of questions posted on that date and then the number posted during the thirty days ending on that date. The final two columns show the effect of the limits (that is, how questions could have been posted if the limits were already in place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;dd/MM/yyyy  N/Day  N/30   Ltd  Ltd-30&#xA;28/08/2013     1     1     1     1&#xA;14/10/2013     1     1     1     1&#xA;15/10/2013     2     3     2     3&#xA;19/10/2013     1     4     1     4&#xA;21/10/2013     1     5     1     5&#xA;23/10/2013     2     7     2     7&#xA;30/10/2013     1     8     1     8&#xA;08/11/2013     2    10     2    10&#xA;17/11/2013     1     8     1     8&#xA;22/12/2013     1     1     1     1&#xA;08/01/2014     1     2     1     2&#xA;10/01/2014     1     3     1     3&#xA;31/01/2014     1     3     1     3&#xA;08/02/2014     2     4     2     4&#xA;09/02/2014     1     5     1     5&#xA;11/02/2014     1     5     1     5&#xA;19/02/2014     1     6     1     6&#xA;23/02/2014     1     7     1     7&#xA;28/02/2014     1     8     1     8&#xA;11/03/2014     2     7     2     7&#xA;13/03/2014     1     7     1     7&#xA;20/03/2014     1     7     1     7&#xA;13/06/2014     2     2     2     2&#xA;14/06/2014     3     5     3     5&#xA;15/06/2014     1     6     1     6&#xA;16/06/2014     2     8     2     8&#xA;17/06/2014     1     9     1     9&#xA;18/06/2014     4    13     4    13&#xA;19/06/2014     1    14     1    14&#xA;21/06/2014     3    17     3    17&#xA;23/06/2014     1    18     1    18&#xA;27/06/2014     2    20     2    20&#xA;28/06/2014     1    21     1    21&#xA;29/06/2014     5    26     5    26&#xA;30/06/2014     3    29     3    29&#xA;01/07/2014     1    30     1    30&#xA;03/07/2014     9    39     6    36  (Only 6 possible, hold 3 till next day)&#xA;04/07/2014     1    40     4    40&#xA;05/07/2014     5    45     5    45&#xA;06/07/2014     6    51     5    50&#xA;07/07/2014     5    56     0    50&#xA;09/07/2014     3    59     0    50&#xA;10/07/2014     2    61     0    50&#xA;11/07/2014     5    66     0    50&#xA;12/07/2014     4    70     0    50&#xA;13/07/2014     1    71     0    50&#xA;14/07/2014     7    76     2    50&#xA;15/07/2014     5    78     3    50&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a &quot;fairly prolific&quot; poster would only run up against the limits after a concerted spree of question-posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limits are intended to allow an asker, and the community at large, some respite from posting questions. For a poster who would &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; to be prolific, the limits will allow a build-up to 50/month, and then a fallow period until the questions &quot;die off&quot;, when another burst will be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the 50/month is based on a calendar month, then this user would have been able to ask all their questions up till 16 July, and then prevented from asking questions at all until the end of the month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limits are intended to stop only the most prolific posters. The figures at the top of this list are far more typical, and would never trigger the block. &lt;strong&gt;Almost all members of the community would never reach the limits at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T14:40:36.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5059" CreationDate="2014-07-25T14:42:02.437" Score="5" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new here, and thought I had a reasonable &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186833/in-the-order-it-was-received&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which could start a bit of discussion.  It was, admittedly, about something which annoys me... which is why I completely understand the first comment it got.  So, I looked around, to see if it was reasonable to ask (and if it would fit in) &lt;em&gt;if I rephrased it to sound less whiney&lt;/em&gt;.  Here's what I've found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187043/what-is-meant-by-same-difference&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, the OP says &quot;The problem is, I really don't think the average human is comparing two differences when using the term in question.&quot;  He's asking about an expression which he believes is said incorrectly by people because of a logical problem.  This is exactly what I am asking, though not of a common expression but rather something I've heard once on the phone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/706/which-is-correct-could-care-less-or-couldnt-care-less&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (which is a big shot protected superquestion), it's even more the case.  It is phrased even more like mine, if not exactly the same. The OP says: 'To me &quot;couldn't care less&quot; seems a lot more logical.'  Notice now in my question, I quote something I've heard which I believe to be incorrect, and then point out that something else seems a lot more logical.  I also describe how I believe the original phrasing is illogical.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then went and had a look in the rules, to see if the likes of my question are generally frowned upon.  The few things I could find (and please point out if I'm misinterpreting anything) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under &quot;don't ask&quot; I found &quot;your question is just a rant in disguise: '______ sucks, am I right?'&quot;  This is possible with the original form of my question, but I thought with some revision I could avoid that.  I based my revision on other questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under &quot;what types of questions should I avoid asking&quot; (are these two sections redundant?) I found &quot;Word choice and usage&quot; under the accepted ones.  This is exactly what I'm asking about.  I believed the word choice of a recording was bad, and I wanted to get some opinions on it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to English, I'm generally more conservative and fussy.  This is obviously frowned upon by most of the community, so I run into problems a lot when I get all hissy about the &quot;incorrect&quot; usage of something or a &quot;mistake.&quot;  Usually, people come up with good comebacks (someone posted in a link which I cannot find anymore to a discussion of the use of &quot;I could care less&quot; in Game of Thrones, which was very nice; an answer like that would've been perfect for my question).  I really enjoy when some people can respond with things like that—and then in turn when people can argue the other way too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping this would be a good place for such answering and discussion.  Am I incorrect?  I would very much appreciate some feedback, both with respect to how to behave in the future in this community, and specifically my on-hold question (and whether I did a reasonable job rephrasing it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user85526" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:04:46.857" Title="Why was my question put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5058" CreationDate="2014-07-25T15:04:46.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your edits were good and thoughtful and I think they improved your question. It is true that it was likely closed because it initially came across as peeving. It sounds much less so now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that your question is off-topic for this site because it is about a peeve; you have made a reasoned, articulate statement about a commonly-used phrase and asked for analysis of it. It boils down to &quot;Can one thing be 'in order'?&quot; I see this question two ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's about logic and therefore comes down to primarily-opinion-based off-topic. Also, we don't discuss here. It's not a forum, but a question-and-answer site.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is about usage and connotation. How do we parse this usage, how common is it, is it used in other contexts because this particular usage seems different than other ways we use 'in order', etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hadn't thought about the perspective you brought forth with your question. I think it could be interesting to explore it in a broader context. If you edit your question a bit further to push it more toward usage and less toward logic, I think you give yourself a better chance of having it re-opened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All-in-all, I think you are making your edits in the right direction and asking yourself the right questions about how to improve your post. We'll see if the community agrees with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:04:46.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5054" CreationDate="2014-07-25T15:39:16.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed questions need 5 votes to reopen, regardless of how many votes it took to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users with 3,000 reputation can cast up to 24 reopen votes per day. When a question reaches 5 reopen votes, it is no longer closed, and new answers may be submitted. You may only vote to close or reopen a question once. To cast a reopen vote, click the &quot;reopen&quot; link beneath the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also useful information &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;about closures&lt;/a&gt; in the section about the close vote privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:39:16.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5047" CreationDate="2014-07-25T15:42:58.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this question is not general reference. I edited the question because I felt the user needed help understanding the sourcing information that was requested, and that this was generating significant negativity that was unrelated to the content of the question. As it is edited, it might still be improved with more evidence of other similar uses, but I think it is clearly on-topic because it is asking about the grammar of a specific construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has since been re-opened by community consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:42:58.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2014-07-25T16:12:36.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited the question to incorporate the information the OP had posted in three separate answers (which I believe was a misperception on his part that the Answer space was for discussion). The combination of this information, which even were I wrong about his intent in posting the answers, clearly demonstrates that OP wants a Biblical discussion about the Trinity. That is, he puts forth a counter-example where regular names are used with &lt;em&gt;in the names of&lt;/em&gt; and concludes that the singular &lt;em&gt;in the name of&lt;/em&gt; means that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I don't think the question can be properly answered without an appeal to the original Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek or whatever it was written in and a further discussion of the implications of how that was then translated into English. Sounds like a question for biblical scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to edit the question to make it about countable/uncountable nouns and see if you can preserve the original intent of the post while substituting a non-doctrinal context, you are welcome to do so. Removing the references to the Trinity might help make it clear which parts of it are about English, and are therefore on-topic, which in turn translates into a greater likelihood of re-opening by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T16:12:36.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5065" CreationDate="2014-07-25T18:45:35.843" Score="5" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187104/a-word-to-describe-a-lot-of-people-who-lie-on-a-place&quot;&gt;Describing a group of people who lie down in a public place to send a political message&lt;/a&gt; been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because the standard message written in the box is not sufficient to understand the why, neither It is clear what I should do to improve that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T17:05:43.590" Title="Why has a-word-to-describe-a-lot-of-people-who-lie-on-a-place been closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5063" CreationDate="2014-07-25T18:49:14.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase &lt;strong&gt;must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered&lt;/strong&gt;. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't include information on how it will be used. Please also refer to the linked page (About single word requests) for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T18:49:14.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5063" CreationDate="2014-07-25T23:45:55.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think KitFox did a fine job of answering your direct question, so I won't bother with that bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your question could be improved with a paragraph explaining the context of the photo.  Perhaps you could talk about what you experienced in the 15 seconds leading up to the taking of the photo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was walking through the square, and I came upon a group of people all lying on the ground.  Each had a print out on their chest with a political message, and nobody was moving.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{photo&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What word or phrase could best be used to describe a group of people who lie down in a public place in order to send a political message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title could be improved in a similar manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it is possible to reopen a question that has been closed, if the question is no longer seen as deficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastEditorUserId="51991" LastEditDate="2014-07-26T00:24:36.380" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T00:24:36.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-26T02:53:14.383" Score="-2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've since emended the question; 'commonly-available references' don't answer it. Why was it closed and deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was closed and deleted by members of the community. Maybe different members have a different view on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4463/50720&quot;&gt;Proposal for narrowing the scope of the &amp;quot;reference&amp;quot; close vote&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185219/recover-against-vs-recover-from&quot;&gt;Recover against vs Recover from&lt;/a&gt; (it's been deleted, so it's visible only to 10k+ users and only 20k+ users can undelete it). This is the current, edited, text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;“Recover against” vs. “recover from”&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From page 53 of Frederick Schauer’s &lt;em&gt;Thinking Like a Lawyer&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Judge Cardozo had said, “We hold that in all cases involving a nonbusiness&#xA;consumer and a manufacturer of goods, the consumer may &lt;strong&gt;recover&#xA;against&lt;/strong&gt; the manufacturer for defects in manufacture. . . .”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone please explain why it is not &lt;em&gt;recover from&lt;/em&gt; here?  I’m struggling with the preposition in &lt;em&gt;recover against&lt;/em&gt;. Since I’m not asking about the definition proper of &lt;strong&gt;recover&#xA;against&lt;/strong&gt;, ‘commonly-available references’ don't answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if X wants to recuperate from or be compensated by Y, then wouldn’t X be recovering money or property &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn’t &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; denote X’s opposition to Y, which contradicts the fact that X wants something &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T14:59:15.100" Title="Please undelete and reopen “Recover against” vs. “recover from”" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-26T02:54:43.257" Score="-4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've since emended the question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185214/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185214/50720&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@MattEllen: I had intended the topic sentence to be my question: 'What are the similarities and differences?' Sadly, I don't know if they're the same; that comment only furthers my confusion. Please advise of suggestions or concerns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@KitFox: Sadly, I don't know 'why you think it was closed'. Please advise of suggestions or concerns.  I have since emended, by following your instructive comment below it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If you want this question reopened, you need to explain what is on the other side of those links, and why you think there is or isn't a difference, and what other sources (like a dictionary) you have consulted&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T13:46:34.880" Title="Please reopen “much of the same” vs “much the same”" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2014-07-26T07:30:11.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since KitFox has asked for some discussion that opposes the proposal to limit the number of questions that can be asked in a given period, I'll play devil's advocate. (Please note that I have not yet asked &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; questions, so I'm not grinding a personal axe here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons not to have limits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If I'm reading a particularly opaque or jargon-laden text, over a short space of time I might encounter numerous passages that I'm having trouble with and want some help to understand or interpret. If I can only ask a handful of questions per day, I could end up floundering for want of assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I may be one of those insatiably curious people that love to grapple in depth with the topics that interest them, and have a tremendous capacity to absorb information and eagerly engage both with the material and with other people's perspectives. Low question limits will hamper my ability to investigate these topics, and will tend to chill my motivation and natural enthusiasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Though numerous, my questions may be so thoughtful and stimulatingly provocative that they have considerable value in deepening the understanding of those who attempt to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Nobody is &lt;em&gt;forced&lt;/em&gt; to answer a question that doesn't interest them, or to which they feel they have nothing useful to respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) One of the reasons that some people post many low-quality or low-interest questions may be that they either don't realize that the ELL forum exists and would be a better fit, or they don't feel happy about relegating their questions to what they perceive as being a low-status dumping-ground for questions from newbie learners of English. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; that's the case, there's a more fundamental problem than the ELU forum simply receiving too many questions from a small number of prolific askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2014-07-26T07:43:40.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T07:43:40.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5067" CreationDate="2014-07-26T09:18:38.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem I still see with the question is that there is no clear issue that has been stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you think &quot;much of the same&quot; should mean the same as &quot;much the same&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is unclear the question is still unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T09:18:38.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5066" CreationDate="2014-07-26T13:09:35.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, if X wants to recuperate from or be compensated by Y, then wouldn’t X be recovering money or property &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this questions is yes, as any good dictionary will tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Doesn’t &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; denote X’s opposition to Y, which contradicts the fact that X wants something &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You make no case for why opposition precludes compensation, and the assertion that it does makes no sense. If X sues Y, they are in opposition. X is suing Y because X wants relief, so X will always want something from Y &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; they will always be in opposition. I can't think of a civil case where this is not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless you can clarify what you are asking, this question will remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T13:09:35.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-27T00:13:14.960" Score="5" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why has my question been moved to &quot;English learners&quot;? There's no reason given that I can see.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happened to all of the comments, why were some of them removed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What exactly was wrong with my question about usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/30039/is-the-sentence-how-is-name-localised-to-game-specific-forums&quot;&gt;a link&lt;/a&gt; to the moved question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think the two commenters understand my question (as perhaps I didn't explain it correctly), and instead thought I was asking a very simple question when, from my perspective, I was asking about a peculiar usage of the word &quot;how&quot; that I've recently noticed people using and is a usage that I find completely unique. I wanted to know if this usage was common elsewhere, or just where I'd noticed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In additions to the above meta-questions, I've written a clarification to my original question. Naturally I should edit this into my original question, but I'd like to leave it untouched until this meta-issue is resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clarification is between the two breaks. There are some more meta-stuff after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not asking &quot;How do you use the word 'how'&quot;? I was specifically asking about what I believe to be a unique usage pattern that I've never encountered in my entire life of speaking fluent English. I wanted to know if this usage pattern was in widespread use (e.g. in American English?) or whether it was localised to the specific place I'd observed its apparent common and easy use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How is Mastodon live?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How is Winter Voices?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I think I would normally hear phased as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How good are Mastodon live?&quot; /   &quot;What are your opinions of Mastodon's live performance?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How much fun is Winter voices&quot; / &quot;What are your opinions of Winter Voices?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are questions that are clearly asking for opinions on the given subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tchrist and Scott seem to have confused my usage examples with common ones such as &quot;How are you?&quot;, which are questions that enquire into someone or something's health.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of the usage they &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; I was asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are you?            -&gt; Are you in good health?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   How is Jim's car?       -&gt; Is the car working OK?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   How is Jane?            -&gt; Is Jane feeling well?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   How is the fire?        -&gt; Is the fire lit and burning ok?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I mistaken, and these are in fact the same thing, but a usage I've simply never noticed before? I would say no, these are different, as then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are Mastodon?        -&gt;  What is the current state of Mastodon? (aka Are the members of Mastodon feeling well?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is exactly how I read this kind of question when I see &quot;How is Mastodon&quot; in someone's post. Note: This, to me, is different from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How were Mastodon [last night] -&gt; How well did Mastodon perform last night?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is more inline with the normal &quot;health/state&quot; check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never heard the usage of &quot;how is &quot; to enquire about qualities of X other than their &quot;health&quot;. Is this usage common in some dialects, or is it a universal thing that I've somehow failed to notice before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Is this an absurd and ridiculous thing to ask? Is this &quot;How is &quot; (which means &quot;What are you opinions on &quot;) usage so common to the moderators involved that they fail to see it as being an interesting and unique phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, all of the definitions and examples given by the following dictionaries support my &quot;status/health&quot; question usage and do not in anyway reference the &quot;opinions on&quot; usage, which to me means it is new?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=firefox-a&amp;amp;hs=qis&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&amp;amp;channel=sb&amp;amp;q=define%3A+how&amp;amp;oq=define%3A+how&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.3..0l8j0i10j0.299837.308691.0.308982.11.9.0.0.0.0.279.1040.0j5j1.6.0....0...1c.1.49.serp..5.6.1029.zgDSr8VYuX0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikitionary&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/how?q=how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/how?q=how&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/89004?rskey=bhi7XS&amp;amp;result=6#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/how?showCookiePolicy=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MW&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T21:05:43.563" Title="Why was a question on uncommon usage moved to the English Learners stack-exchange?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5071" CreationDate="2014-07-27T00:21:24.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the comment question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment was flagged as not constructive. I deleted it. That left your comment in response hanging there, with its target gone, so I deleted that one too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I deleted my comments on the migrated question, because one was obsolete (explaining that I was migrating the question), the other was a comment that attempts to answer your question, which is not what comments are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why your question has been moved to ELL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You said in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've never heard &quot;How’s his hamburger, Hubert?&quot;. It doesn't even make sense to me. &quot;How’s your hamburger, Hubert?&quot;, does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I replied to that that &quot;How's his hamburger&quot; is the same construction as &quot;how's your hamburger&quot;, but in the third person (&lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt;) instead of the second person (&lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that seemed to be the main source of your confusion, that makes the question a better fit for ELL, since it's about explaining how pronouns work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should point out that the question is well written, which I why I felt I could migrate it instead of just close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T14:31:28.867" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T14:31:28.867" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-28T01:23:20.193" Score="8" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, questions that seem very simple or straightforward disguise some depth of insight into English language. These are the gold dust of this site and of inquiries into language in general. However, it's not always easy to frame such questions clearly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such question can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/30039/is-the-sentence-how-is-name-localised-to-game-specific-forums&quot;&gt;Is the sentence &quot;How is &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; localised to game-specific forums?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it is quite understandable that one might not quite get the issue with this question. It is quite fine-grained and so kernel of it might easily pass you by if you weren't reading it closely. This shouldn't in any way stop you giving your opinion about the question. In fact, if you have something constructive to say, you positively should do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However - posters, and readers wanting to read other people's posts, should also be able to ask questions about why posts have been closed or migrated. The fact that such questions might not be so simple as they at first seem, is one of the reasons why. Posters should not be subject to aggressively negative responses here merely because they are asking the question. More importantly, we should refrain from being overly judgmental or abusive to the people asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5071/why-was-a-question-on-uncommon-usage-moved-to-the-english-learners-stack-exchang&quot;&gt;such questions&lt;/a&gt;. This is firstly because doing so is against the principles of this site, but secondly because it may show up our own flagrant ignorance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abuse such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your profile doesn't say whether you're a native speaker. But if you're not, you should be able to understand that the question is a better fit to ELL. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;And if you are, I don't know - perhaps your mother never asked &quot;How was school today?&quot; when you got back, or perhaps you really are a bit of an idiot.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... should be unacceptable here purely on the basis that it is offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this commenter's attitude is discernible in a depressingly large number of comments and answers on this SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular comment by this particular Stack Exchange poster makes one wonder, what is the correct response to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is this poster?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T21:26:34.600" Title="Aggressive and offensive comments on questions" Tags="|discussion|offensive|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ClosedDate="2014-07-28T18:55:50.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-28T02:08:54.223" Score="8" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186107/what-word-can-i-use-instead-of-tomorrow-that-is-not-connected-with-the-idea-of&quot;&gt;&quot;What word for &quot;tomorrow can I use that is not connected with the idea of the rising sun?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It collected a bit of controversy (which was not my intent) and the question was put on hold. I attempted to seek advice on how to improve it and then made a fairly substantial edit that I think improves the question to a non-objectionable point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think my question is on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's been no communication with me on how to make it on-topic, despite my stated willingness to change and my seeking out help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will discuss the second first, since the on-topic explanation is somewhat lengthy (as the rules regarding questions are somewhat lengthy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Communication&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am amenable to continuing to edit my question until it fits the rules of EL&amp;amp;U, but I would like to know how. No comments were made on the edited question, even the explicit question I asked was ignored, and those I talked to in the chat seemed satisfied. If anyone has advice on what should be changed, I would be happy to hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of closing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/186140/84957&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; was accepted. I accepted it mainly because the question was attracting way too much controversy and I was hoping marking an answer as &quot;accepted&quot; would make all the attention die down a bit. Apparently that antagonized some people (although it did achieve my goal...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;comment via @RegDwigнt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Going by the kind of answers this has been attracting, the kind of answer that got &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt;, and the number of flags this generates, I have to put it on hold now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in addition to substantially editing my question, I accepted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/186292/84957&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; that had been submitted since the original accepted question, that I liked a lot more and fit my newly-reworded question better. I don't know if that was a good solution, a terrible one, even worse than the original option... I literally have no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, if the problem is new and young users posting without doing any research, perhaps protecting the question would be the correct answer, not closing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-Topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, my question fits into the topics of &quot;Word choice and usage&quot; and &quot;Etymology (history of words’ development)&quot;. My question is not about these topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing advice or critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only topic my question might be on is &quot;Translation and non-English languages&quot;, but the only &quot;non-English&quot; language I'm truly interested in is Old English. Old French and Latin are all valid language responses for my question, but that is because &lt;em&gt;English developed out of those languages&lt;/em&gt;. All of the non-English languages I ask about are deeply involved in the history of English, which seems perfectly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was originally somewhat open-ended, but it did have specific, measurable criteria:&#xA; - The word must be easy to say&#xA; - The word must make sense in a historical context; that is, it must be reasonable to assume that speakers of these languages would have developed this word given this need&#xA; - The word must have sourced examples so that research can be verified&#xA;Thus, every answer is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; equally valid. I ask that all answers be backed up with facts and historical references, and request all creative answers to explain &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;. Thus, it seems to fit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;these criteria&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also edited it to make it less of a &quot;create a word&quot; question and more of a &quot;find a word&quot; question. Thus, I think my question fits the &quot;on-topic&quot; criteria of ELU. (I apologize if the title of this question seems a little arrogant, but according to all the rules I've been able to find, it's a true statement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84957" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T19:23:06.680" Title="No communication regarding wrongly-closed question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5075" CreationDate="2014-07-28T02:29:36.317" Score="-4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;asking for neologisms is not a good use of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the list of bad question types (as well as recommended ones) is not comprehensive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T02:29:36.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5074" CreationDate="2014-07-28T06:21:03.950" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, long-standing members of this community may get frustrated with the assumptions made by askers in formulating their questions. These frustrations may leak into comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, this is undesirable, and it’s already been dealt with in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging&quot;&gt;question on flagging&lt;/a&gt;. If you feel that a comment is not constructive, or undesirable in some other way, &lt;strong&gt;flag it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that comment had appeared on the question in question, the moderators would almost certainly have deleted the comment and migrated the question. If it were elsewhere, or even if the question were not to be migrated, the flag brings the comment to the attention of moderators, who can either remove it entirely or edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m uncertain about the examples you bring forward to support your case. It is certainly possible to say “How is your school?” to mean “What is your school like?” or “Do you like your school?” It’s colloquial, and the exact meaning is dependent on context. It’s exactly the same as “How was school?”, merely brought into the present — as can be seen from that question’s current answer. Any question which makes wrong assumptions like this is highly likely to be migrated to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T06:26:46.310" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5078" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5079" CreationDate="2014-07-28T06:23:47.633" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of days ago I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/12472/how-do-expert-writers-avoid-using-i-when-they-have-to-refer-to-themselves-in-t&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; that happened to attract the attention of hundreds of users (roughly 3.0 k to be specific). Then yesterday I was notified that it's migrated/sent to the &lt;em&gt;writers&lt;/em&gt; forum. Why is that? Are I going to be notified of what's happening to it over there in &lt;em&gt;writers&lt;/em&gt; (I'm not registered in writers)? It seems unjust because It wasn't with my consent; Isn't it? Who has decided this and I'm not going to receive any inbox messages concerning my question; right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85900" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T07:02:34.660" Title="Why has my notable question migrated to the writers?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5078" CreationDate="2014-07-28T07:02:34.660" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question concerned how writers refrain from referring to themselves as “I” when writing (say) an academic paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was brought to the attention of moderators as being off-topic on ELU and more on-topic on Writers. The moderators of both sites agreed, and it was migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU’s on-topic subjects include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers’ on-topic subjects include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-fiction, technical, or scholarly writing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing fiction, poetry, song lyrics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General copywriting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Professional-level blogging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The publishing and editing process itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A writing critique, properly scoped and framed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of your question, it falls more into the “How do I write like this” than “Why is this written like this” category and thus it’s a better fit on Writers. Questions should always appear on the site where they best fit, as they are supposed not only to answer an issue the asker has come across, but also help others in the future who have a similar issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s perhaps unfortunate that it took as long as it did to come to moderators’ attention, but questions can be migrated at any point in their life-cycle (even after they have been closed, if necessary). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you will receive inbox notifications on that question following its migration. There is nothing stopping you opening an account on Writers. Once one of your accounts reaches 200 rep, all the others will get a +100 association bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T07:02:34.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-28T07:48:18.860" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/186168/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/186168/50720&lt;/a&gt; closed as off-topic by members of the community? Maybe different members have a different view on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My trouble is summarised by Professor Lawler's instructive comment below it. 'Commonly-available references' don't answer it. Please reopen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T18:17:23.090" Title="Please reopen What does “mode” mean in “modal verb”?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5071" CreationDate="2014-07-28T10:02:34.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously this question wasn't worded ideally, but I think it's very suitable for English Language and Usage. &lt;em&gt;How is [noun]&lt;/em&gt; has some severe semantic/pragmatic restrictions that I don't fully understand (theoretically, that is). For instance, for me there is nothing remarkable about Pod's first usage example &quot;How is Mastodon live?&quot;. Yet the second example &quot;How is Winter Voices?&quot; strikes me as utterly ungrammatical &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; it is addressed to someone currently obsessed with Winter Voices and this is actually an enquiry about the obsession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language comes close to the issue on p. 907, but essentially they just say that &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; asking for a predicative adjective is severely restricted. I don't consider this completely satisfactory. They also point out that more specific verbs make &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; more widely applicable. The example &quot;How is Mastodon live&quot; shows that this is not the full truth. Apparently, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; more specific information makes &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; more acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the Cambridge Grammar gives the example &quot;How was the concert?&quot; In fact, &quot;How is the concert?&quot; would also have worked in an appropriate context, though it comes closer to the border line. &quot;How is the match?&quot; is just as good, and so is &quot;How is the book? How is War and Peace?&quot; But not: &quot;How is football? How is chess?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this could be rephrased as a good question for Linguistics Stackexchange, though it's probably better to collect some more partial insight here first and work out what the differences in people's individual judgement are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user86291" LastEditorDisplayName="user86291" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T18:06:14.023" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T18:06:14.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5074" CreationDate="2014-07-28T14:33:28.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was my comment, so I suppose I'd better say something about it. I must admit it never occurred to me anyone would find it &quot;offensive&quot;. I was just whimsically echoing OP's own words &lt;em&gt;(&quot;Or am I just a massive idiot?&quot;)&lt;/em&gt; - but I distinctly recall thinking at the time that OP was being too hard on himself, which is why I toned it down to &lt;em&gt;a &lt;strong&gt;bit of&lt;/strong&gt; an idiot&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit I was (&lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; slightly) irritated by the fact that the OP's profile didn't specify whether he was a native speaker, because that seems extremely important in the context of the question. One comment that &lt;em&gt;hasn't&lt;/em&gt; been deleted (or significantly edited like mine) currently reads...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't understand how someone with your command of English can ask such an inane question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and the only existing answer on the migrated question starts with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am surprised that you, a native speaker of English, find this use of How is/was X? odd or novel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to flag &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; as offensive (if it bothers the OP, let him do so). But let's face it, at least my comment invited the OP to say &lt;em&gt;&quot;But I'm not a native speaker&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, in which case I'd simply have repeated my suggestion that the question be moved to ELL (with no implication that the OP was to be ridiculed for not being familiar with the usage in question). I don't see any way OP could refute the implicit ridicule in the above comment (and, to a lesser extent, the answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer above implies I must have missed the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/users/9102/pod&quot;&gt;the OP in question&lt;/a&gt; is actually a native speaker. Without wishing to be disparaging, I also am surprised that any native speaker wouldn't recognise a &quot;syntactic continuum&quot; along the lines of...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;How was school today?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  (What did you think of school today?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &lt;em&gt;&quot;How is your hamburger?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Are you happy with your hamburger?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &lt;em&gt;&quot;How is your wife's hamburger?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Are you and/or your wife happy with her hamburger?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I would not refer to such a person as &quot;an idiot&quot; except in the specific circumstances where I was facetiously echoing that person's own words. (Okay - I should have added a smiley! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T14:33:28.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5080" CreationDate="2014-07-28T18:17:23.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just so you know, I voted to reopen the question. It seems similar to my own &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75491/what-exactly-is-an-adverb&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What exactly is an “adverb”?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which came perilously close to being closed as General Reference before gaining traction and becoming my second most upvoted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apropos which, I'm still a bit piqued that my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87596/where-does-dont-bogart-that-joint-come-from&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where does “Don't bogart that joint” come from?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; remains closed as GR. Okay - it's obvious once it's pointed out. But I couldn't easily satisfy my curiosity anywhere else online at the time, and I generally consider my google-fu to be pretty good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As John Lawler says (and he should know! :),...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Modality is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/Modality.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very complex subject&lt;/a&gt;. It's the source of the grammatical term mood (as in &quot;subjunctive mood&quot;), and it also uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a special variety of logic called Modal Logic&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's precisely on target here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some folk here seem to think I habitually closevote questions as Too Basic, but I reject that. Mostly I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_stupid_question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers&lt;/a&gt;. I often closevote ELU questions because I think they're not suitable for this site, and should have been asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've no doubt entire &lt;em&gt;books&lt;/em&gt; could be written about linguistic &lt;em&gt;moods, modality, modal verbs&lt;/em&gt;, etc. I don't want to see an incredibly long answer on ELU trying to cover every aspect of the concept, but it would be nice if someone could post a relatively short (but authoritative) answer. Which can't happen while the question remains closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T18:17:23.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5075" CreationDate="2014-07-28T19:23:06.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is on-topic and should be reopened.  You did a fine job cleaning it up.  Well done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T19:23:06.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-28T22:50:42.503" Score="6" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently earned review low quality posts privledges, and I'm wondering when I should recommend posts for deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely off topic, and spam posts are obviouly appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for example, this this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187467/appropriate-word-for-a-young-person-who-behaves-like-a-cynical-old-person&quot;&gt;Appropriate word for a young person who behaves like a cynical old person?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;these answers were flagged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;oxymoron&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pessimist, depressed, or just brain-washed by an elder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;curmudgeon &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all first posts, and have been downvoted, (probably by first post reviewers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, they are slightly low quality, they could do with better formatting, and perhaps aren't good answers in themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm of the opinion that they shouldn't be deleted as they are on topic, and provide a good well rounded answer, 'Here are some good answers, here are some bad answers'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T00:41:05.053" Title="When should you recommend deletion?" Tags="|discussion|review|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5085" CreationDate="2014-07-29T00:30:36.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deletion of low quality content is a sticky wicket. I'm not sure that we have any clear guidelines, but your instincts are pretty much exactly what I would recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If content is off-topic, spam, or offensive, you should feel free to vote to delete it. That's clearly content that we don't want on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike that type of content, low quality posts offer some content that could be potentially useful. It may be minimally useful, but our preference is to improve the post rather than delete it. For the examples listed above, improving the formatting, including a dictionary citation and definition, and leaving a comment to ask the poster to explain why they think that answer is a good fit for the question would all be helpful ways to improve the content. Another advantage of improving the posts you have noted here is that it will also help the users learn how to use the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases though, you'll encounter some things that are low quality that really aren't worth trying to keep:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no sense in trying to salvage an incomprehensible answer if comments had been posted asking for clarification and none had been given although [the user had returned since the comment was left or the comment was left weeks prior]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the content is months or years old, the poster hasn't been back since it was posted, and there is significant question about what the intended answer was&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eliminating all the duplicated parts of an answer leaves not really much of anything else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a good idea to encourage users to improve their content, to help them do so, or to just do it yourself (especially for old stuff) in order to improve the content on the site. If a good faith effort has been made in this regard, and the post is still low quality, you should feel free to vote to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T00:30:36.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2014-07-29T15:31:53.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral, right? They can and are sometimes deleted with no forewarning. It doesn't matter if the comments are pertinent to the question, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; comment can be construed as being &lt;em&gt;non-constructive&lt;/em&gt;. A constructive comment might be one asking for clarification, or advising a poster to properly attribute citations.  And if the poster does edit the post accordingly, the commenter ought to delete his or her comment. If for some reason they forget, an ELU  user can flag that comment as being &lt;em&gt;obsolete&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; comments; however, contain the answer to the question, and we all know that answers posted in the comments section are frowned upon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what about &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; which are converted into comments?&lt;/strong&gt; The massively popular and overwhelmingly upvoted answers by the community, the &lt;em&gt;vox populi&lt;/em&gt; answers. Answers whose identities suddenly become ‘a day late and a dollar short’ comments. We are then presented with the ironic situation where an answer is agreed by many as offering a good solution but then rejected by one mod (do they ever consult with each other?) and converted into a plain comment. And if &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; comments can be deleted, then maybe one day, they too will be deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two examples below started life as &quot;answers&quot; (10k rep users can see deleted posts): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186107/what-word-can-i-use-instead-of-tomorrow-that-is-not-connected-with-the-idea-of?answertab=votes#comment390899_186107&quot;&gt;What word can I use instead of &amp;quot;tomorrow&amp;quot; that is not connected with the idea of the rising sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129301/polite-alternative-to-the-term-bitch-when-referring-to-a-female-dog#comment267669_129301&quot;&gt;Polite alternative to the term &amp;quot;bitch&amp;quot; when referring to a female dog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first comment prior to its conversion had earned 14 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second &quot;answer/comment&quot; had earned an impressive 52 upvotes. As a comment, it now has only six upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally, both answers were the most favoured by the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To @Robusto I wouldn't worry about a few random sentences of yours being deleted by a mod especially if they didn't offer a concrete solution. I'd be more concerned with those posts that actually do answer the question, are upvoted, and yet deleted unfairly. My opinion, of course, I accept and expect it won't be shared by many. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATED 2018&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that the redeleted comment was flagged as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no longer needed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by two or more users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This comment is obsolete, chatty, or otherwise unnecessary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP cannot know for certain whether its deletion can be attributed to a single mod unless he knows something that we don't. Next time, convert the comment into an answer and… let sleeping dogs lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T22:45:01.177" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T22:45:01.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2014-07-30T06:07:20.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm of the opinion that a limit makes no sense, for the following simple reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 50 new questions are added to the site in a month, it makes no difference whether they were all posted by the same user, or all posted by different users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow 50 questions posted by the same user is &quot;worse&quot; than 50 different users each posting a single question of similar quality. This is silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you took a random sampling of 50 questions posted in the same month, why does the distribution of user names listed as the author have any impact on the quality of the questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they're off-topic questions, they'll be closed as such, like any other. If they're poor questions they'll remain unanswered, like any other. If they're good questions they'll attract good answers, like any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we went and edited the question database and displayed the same user name for every one of the thousands of questions currently on this site, would the quality of the questions on this site suddenly decrease based solely on the author's display name? Who cares if a given user asks a ton of questions; if they're good questions we want them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout my involvement, as comparatively limited as it may be, in SE sites in general, the attitude I have been &quot;raised&quot; with here is always one of treating the question independently of the user who posts it. Obviously if a given user has a pattern of inappropriate questions it makes sense to, e.g., question-ban that user, but to impose an artificial limit on the number of questions that a user can ask - especially if those questions are good questions - accomplishes nothing at all aside from allowing less good questions to be posted on the site. &lt;em&gt;It potentially hurts something, and most certainly helps nothing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unless you can definitively show that the general pattern of question quality on this site took a turn for the worse (which is actually the important thing here) when these users began posting, it makes no difference whether a group of questions has the same author or not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If said &quot;prolific&quot; users were asking bad questions they would have been question-banned by now anyways; but they have not been, so I'm not sure what problem this limit is actually attempting to solve other than perhaps inexplicable personal peeves against people who ask a lot of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55308" LastEditorUserId="55308" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T06:14:27.833" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T06:14:27.833" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-30T11:14:20.753" Score="8" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I select 'Your Answer' to a question, the guidance says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for contributing an answer to English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange!&#xA;  ...&#xA;  To learn more, see our tips on &lt;em&gt;writing great answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...are not about programming as defined in the help center.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should actually lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...are not about English language and usage as defined in the help center.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T17:34:08.963" Title="'Your answer' leads to tips for stackoverflow not english.stackexchange.com" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-30T15:53:37.207" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do we do for questions that have (very) acceptable comments as&#xA;  answers (even accepted by OP) but due to absence of an answer, the questions tend to remain un-answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've observed several instances of this on EL&amp;amp;U and other sites on the SE network, so decided to ask this question. Now, it might be closed as a duplicate very soon, because there does exist another question with the same topic, here on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4224/how-to-handle-old-questions-with-answers-stuck-in-a-comment&quot;&gt;Meta English SE&lt;/a&gt; and another question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2653/why-are-answers-being-posted-in-the-comments-on-the-question&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to handle old questions with answers stuck in a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why are answers being posted in the comments on the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is somewhat old(asked in 2013), and the latest answer seems to be -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I guess I am not surprised that no one bothered to answer the question&#xA;  I actually asked... but it sounds like there is no comment-to-answer&#xA;  flag and no official StackExchange tool to do this. So the answer to&#xA;  this question is, &quot;No, there is no way to do this aside from copying&#xA;  the comment manually and posting it as an answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I ask this again is I think a new question &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; catch more attention than an update to an old one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an answer for the second question says- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are at least two reasons why I sometimes post answers as comments...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question. Perhaps I consider it &quot;off-topic&quot;, so I&#xA;  don't want to see multiple answers being voted on. But if I think I&#xA;  know the answer and can easily express it in a comment, I often do&#xA;  this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't have the time/inclination/knowledge to provide a full answer,&#xA;  so I put down something in a brief comment, hoping someone else will&#xA;  pick up the ball and run with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am completely for comments being posted, I an just curious about the (expanding list of) unanswered questions, due to lack of answers. But maybe there is already a tool for it,and I'm not aware of the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank You.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79984" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T15:53:37.207" Title="How to handle questions with acceptable comments as answers but no answer itself?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-08-28T01:30:22.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5092" CreationDate="2014-07-30T16:01:13.143" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187338/aberrant-usage-of-the-adjective-incredulous?noredirect=1#comment391503_187338&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;anyone who has access to the database of this website can see who has closevoted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? If so, can anyone post a &quot;template&quot; query showing how to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial thought was that since this information isn't normally made public until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a question is closed, there might be some kind of &quot;privacy&quot; issue involved here. But on reflection I suppose that since the closevoter has no way of knowing when (or &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt;) there will be enough other votes to action the closure, he has to assume the fact of his own closevote is already &quot;out there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if this kind of &quot;sneak preview&quot; is in fact possible, it seems slightly at odds with how the site works in general. I'm not a mod, but my understanding is that by default the system tends to avoid giving even &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; access to information they don't &quot;need&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not adopting a strong position on this issue, but I'd like to know how the system works, and whether or not anyone else feels this behaviour might be considered &quot;sailing close to the wind&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T16:35:58.403" Title="Can I really see who closevoted BEFORE a question is closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2014-07-30T16:35:58.403" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The public data dump at &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; does not provide access to the identities of people casting close votes. However, anyone—unregistered users included—can see the results of review queue votes, if they know the ID number of the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Go2GB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Close vote&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you participated in a queue vote, you'll find a link to it in your activity history, or by going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; &gt; Close Votes (or another queue type) &gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;recent reviews&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/history&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;. Users with 10,000+ reputation will also see the queue votes cast by everyone else on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yWaFE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Close vote queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To see the queue votes for a question, click the name of the vote option—Close, Leave Open, etc. It took me for-freakin'-ever to stumble across this on my own.) If you didn't participate in a vote, you'd have to get the vote ID number for the URL in some other way, or just randomly guess it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this only shows you the votes of people who voted through the review queue. It does not show the name of the person who originally sent it to the queue by casting the first close-vote, or of anyone else who voted on the question page itself, for some reason. I'm all for accountability, personally, but if you're truly paranoid about people seeing how you close-voted, do it from the question page, not from the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T16:35:58.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5089" CreationDate="2014-07-30T17:34:01.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently we had this link to the Stack Overflow how to answer page across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fixed and should be available in the next deploy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reporting!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41761" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T17:34:01.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3878" CreationDate="2014-08-02T20:21:14.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to propose that this site no longer accept questions of&#xA;  the &quot;What is another word or phrase for...?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree wholeheartedly. I really don't understand how this site allows such questions to stand. Any decent thesaurus will give excellent answers to such questions. Even if you're seeking a one word substitute for a phrase, the keywords in the phrase or the meaning behind it will lead you to excellent answers in a good thesaurus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone isn't sufficiently proficient in English to extract the meaning of what they want to express and then use a thesaurus to find good single words to express it, they should use the ELL site, not this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10552" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T20:21:14.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-03T13:57:48.207" Score="7" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems &amp;mdash; having had to deal with a quite a number in the last month or so &amp;mdash; that most &quot;answers&quot; to old questions with an answer which is already accepted are in fact anything but an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nice answer..it cleared my confusion....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally these are automatically flagged by the system, which brings them to moderators' attention. Or, if such answers are sufficiently grammatical to bypass the automatic filter, members of the community flag them manually. Of course they are deleted as &lt;em&gt;Not an answer,&lt;/em&gt; but this makes additional work for moderators, if not other members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question has had such an answer, it's bumped on the site front page and tends to attract other answers which it seems are generally, although thankfully not always, of a similar quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a banner above the &quot;Post your Answer&quot; button advising users that there is already an accepted answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kE1Hu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mockup of possible banner message&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a banner would not necessarily prevent anyone from posting an answer, and it might be limited to users under a certain rep level, or to questions which are of a certain age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be useful to have the system automatically protect questions when an answer is accepted (that is, prevent users with less than 10 rep from posting new answers), but this is probably unnecessarily restrictive; everyone has to start somewhere &amp;mdash; even if starting on an old, accepted question is probably not the best place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Meta question asks only whether we should be reminding users [some users] that they should be posting something useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T11:09:05.733" Title="Where a question has an accepted answer, should we encourage new answers to be useful?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-05T12:31:51.180" Score="12" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188673/whats-the-difference-between-degree-and-grade&quot;&gt;comment to a question&lt;/a&gt;, I mentioned that I hadn't heard the usage of a specific term as an American. I was told that the comment was not relevant and would have been subject to request for deletion, especially in the context that my not hearing this term is no excuse, ostensibly because it was used historically and in other countries. In addition, my mentioning such apparently implied to the other editor that I assumed that the OP was American. I don't know how this is relevant or extrapolated, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how this is subject for deletion, or censure. I'm a native English speaker. If a term or phrase isn't used in America, or at least hasn't been something that I've heard in use  in my lifetime, &lt;strong&gt;should I not be able to comment that the usage appears awkward in American usage?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sub question, as a reaction to this dialog, it occurred to me that regional usage of English may not allow certain types of questions to be answered well within english.SE. &lt;strong&gt;Are there any stipulations regarding the proper usage of English within this site if the answer might be regional?&lt;/strong&gt; For instance, &quot;What is a word for a cylindrical battery operated light source?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188673/whats-the-difference-between-degree-and-grade#comment393667_188673&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; is the particularly admonishing one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T09:13:27.943" Title="OK to comment that you haven't heard the usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5098" CreationDate="2014-08-05T12:36:10.810" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course you should be able to comment about your usage and how it differs with what you're commenting on. That is exactly the nuance that is needed, especially here at ELU, where there are many different varieties and regionalisms at play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T12:36:10.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5098" CreationDate="2014-08-05T12:39:55.213" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is fine to comment about usage if it is relevant to the question. The comments that you linked to are not particularly related, but it is true that the OP should clarify their question so we can get an idea of what the regional context is, and dialectal differences are not always apparent unless someone mentions that they haven't heard it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per your second question, there are tags for some dialects (AmE and BrE, etc) and if the regional expression is important, OP is encouraged to mention it in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T12:39:55.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5098" CreationDate="2014-08-05T22:13:55.017" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly acceptable, when someone asks if &lt;em&gt;&quot;x&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is common, correct or easily understood by English speakers, to comment that you have never heard it in AmE. I would encourage you to feel free to post anything you feel is relevant in a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, comments are also commented upon, and users should feel free to do this as well, especially if their experience is different from yours (&quot;I am British and I hear it regularly.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one reason you met with opposition is that you didn't merely stick to what was relevant. This will come with experience on individual sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are supposed to be relevant and helpful. Comments are expected and welcome when they &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;request clarification from an OP, guide the OP in improving the post, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though they aren't supposed to be used in this way, comments are often used to  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;suggest corrections that don't fundamentally change the meaning of the post, &#xA;  answer questions or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer, compliment (the OP), criticize the OP or another commenter without adding anything constructive, and argue/debate a point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the reality. As you've experienced, it's sometimes unpleasant or confusing. It can also be inappropriate, and for this reason I would encourage you to become familiar with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;reasons to flag&lt;/a&gt; posts and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T22:13:55.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5098" CreationDate="2014-08-06T02:13:08.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course you can comment on usage; I regularly leave such comments myself, and that is one of their uses as others have said. I also apologize if you took my comments as aggressive, as they were not intended to be. I did take specific issue with your comment, not with the concept of commenting on usage in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've not heard an American usage of the 100 point scale at graduation. Usually what's referenced is a grade point average, if at all. The 100 point scale is usually translated to grade letters anyway. This seems awkward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not, in my opinion, helpful to the question. First of all, the 100-point system is indeed used at American institutions, especially historically. So to say that it would not be accepted as an American usage is at best incomplete. Second, the OP is not necessarily American, so what grading system is prevalent in the U.S. is irrelevant for describing usage elsewhere. If I were to ask &lt;em&gt;I heard someone say &quot;ownself&quot; instead of &quot;myself&quot;; is that weird?&lt;/em&gt; and someone remarked &lt;em&gt;We don't say that in America&lt;/em&gt;, I would similarly pipe up and say &lt;em&gt;It's not weird if you're from Singapore&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I mentioned editing or deleting the comment, I was making a friendly suggestion (perhaps not perceived as such) that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; edit or delete it, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that a moderator would do so, although, as they say, comments are cheap. Literally, they are throwaways; I have had more than a few deleted without comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T02:13:08.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-08-06T20:37:58.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I am especially interested in EL&amp;amp;U questions that involve the historical development and alteration of word meanings, or the first occurrence of a word or phrase, providing source information is crucial to the practical value of my answers. A bit of advice I received (some time ago) in a comment from Hugo about the usefulness to others of linking to (as well as quoting) online references has encouraged me to try to be thorough in documenting my sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The drawback of this approach is that such information adds an element of stiffness, formality, and physical length to answers, which some answerers may find incompatible with their writing style. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wonder whether, for answerers who embrace the &quot;competition for reputation&quot; aspect of this site, the desire to be quick with an answer in order to get it posted (and collecting Up votes) as soon as possible doesn't serve as a constant (though probably in most cases low-level) motive not to show their work. To judge from some of the scores earned by answers with unattributed quotations, many voting readers don't have a problem with the lack of annotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think, it's important to believe that good and useful content drives out (or at least outperforms) bad and useless content. To the extent that it does, we can all contribute by endorsing good questions and answers, and by constructively criticizing—or at least refraining from approving—deeply flawed ones; to the extent that it doesn't, we may simply be dealing with an imperfect website in an imperfect world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2014-08-07T19:55:35.150" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T19:55:35.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5108" CreationDate="2014-08-07T05:03:35.757" Score="12" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to search about the phrase &quot;Poor man's X&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110676/when-did-the-expression-poor-mans-noun-originate&quot;&gt;When did the expression &amp;quot;Poor man&amp;#39;s &amp;lt;noun&amp;gt;&amp;quot; originate?&lt;/a&gt; appears when I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=Poor%20man%27s&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt; for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poor man's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22Poor%20man%27s%22&quot;&gt;quotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poor man's&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get three hits, but not the optimal hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the apostrophe and the &quot;s&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22Poor%20man%22&quot;&gt;doesn't help&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poor man&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get six hits, but not the optimal hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I get sub-optimal search results when using quotes? Is this related to the apostrophe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-07-21T13:08:04.830" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T13:08:04.830" Title="Why don't I get good hits when searching &quot;Poor man's&quot; with quotes?" Tags="|discussion|support|status-completed|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-07T10:12:35.523" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question went hot on the network today:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188604/what-do-you-call-someone-who-pretends-to-be-your-friend-but-is-actually-your-ene&quot;&gt;What is a word that means &amp;quot;someone who pretends to be your friend but is actually your enemy?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon visiting it, I found that there are lots of other questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one, and the others, suffer from the problem that what is really being asked is &quot;what is a word that means 'a person who...'?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the answers are full of words that don't mean that at all, they are simply &quot;names&quot; that could be applied to a person like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, none of these words, offered as answers, mean &quot;a person who pretends to be your friend but is your enemy&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a'hole&#xA;d'bag&#xA;sociopath&#xA;deceitful&#xA;con artist&#xA;traitor&#xA;disloyal&#xA;perfidious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if it is a legitimate edit, to change questions of this nature to &quot;What is a word for a that means a person who... ?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60968" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T18:36:33.377" Title="Would it be OK to edit questions that are of the form &quot;What do you call a person who...&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2014-08-07T10:16:30.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that in this particular stack exchange, this question is especially pertinent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a technical stack exchange, the asker is likely to be able to validate the answer conclusively, and likely &lt;em&gt;will do so&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In english.stackexchange, the asker is very often not in a position to validate the answer!   How would a non-native English speaker validate whether &lt;em&gt;Benedict Arnold&lt;/em&gt; is a phrase that means &quot;a person who pretends to be a friend but is an enemy&quot;?  (A real example of an answer to a question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I agree that if there was a better way to select an answer, it would be appropriate in this forum.   The only thing is ... what would be a better way!?    Just go with the highest voted after a time??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60968" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T10:16:30.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5097" CreationDate="2014-08-07T11:09:05.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to believe there is a way to encourage people to stop posting answers that are just deteriorated echoes of other answers, or worse. There already is a notice that pops up for unregistered answerers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0BXKg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Warning that is displayed to new users posting their first answer&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It moves the text box out of the way to display itself, so is very obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I applaud your suggestion, but I'm not sure people who want to post something will read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T11:09:05.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5104" CreationDate="2014-08-07T12:09:09.747" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason you don't get good results using the Stack Exchange internal search facility is because a single general-purpose search engine is common to all SE sites. Some of the things it does (ignoring short words and punctuation marks, etc.) are a net benefit on most other sites, but not on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't usually bother with them. Google's &quot;site-specific&quot; search facility works fine...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;site:&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://english.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Poor man's&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   ...which returns &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fenglish.stackexchange.com%20%22Poor%20man%27s%22&amp;amp;rlz=1C1CHFX_en-GBGB569GB569&amp;amp;oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fenglish.stackexchange.com%20%22Poor%20man%27s%22&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.3884846j0j0&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;es_sm=122&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;these 98 results as required&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T12:09:09.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-07T13:22:53.410" Score="-9" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have been on this site for ten minutes and already received this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt; Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For help formulating a clear, useful question, see: How do I ask a good question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity. &lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is this one of those SE sites where a clique of narrow-minded but self-important people has gained enough power to exert a censorious control over content? i ask because if informed users suggest that is the case i will happily slope off to more favorable pastures and leave such people to continue their tyrannical rule in peace&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDED this extract from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3129/should-downvotes-require-comments?rq=1&quot; &gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; by @Souta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, I've been noticing lately that answers to questions have been getting downvotes with no reasonable explanation. And not all of these answers being downvoted were bad at all. These answers were what OP was asking for, except in different words than other answers on a same question; that is how this site works. (These answers were, for the most part, valid; just not OP's preference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I've been noticing lately that questions are no longer receiving helpful comments for question improvement. Instead, they are being downvoted without giving OP some direction as to what can be said differently in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've quickly looked through meta to see if there had already been a question like this, and I did, but in the sense that other users were being harassed by downvotes...&#xA;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87515" OwnerDisplayName="David Holden" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T19:26:27.030" Title="Has a clique of narrow-minded but self-important people gained enough power to exert a censorious control over content?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5109" CreationDate="2014-08-07T13:47:08.880" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is one of those SE sites where this is an automatic message completely automatically generated by the SE engine. And by &quot;those SE sites&quot; I mean &quot;all SE sites&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T13:47:08.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5105" CreationDate="2014-08-07T13:54:57.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hopefully you won't change it to &quot;What is a word for a that means a person who... ?&quot; because that's not comprehensible. But in general, I think changing &quot;word for a person who...&quot; to &quot;word that describes a person who...&quot; (for instance) doesn't substantially change the intent of the question and could be a valid clarifying edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T13:54:57.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4224" CreationDate="2014-08-07T22:52:59.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would love to see EL&amp;amp;U adopt a conversion tool for transforming valid answers that appear in comments beneath a question into votable answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I'm obviously not as dedicated as MrHen has been to moving questions out of the Unanswered Questions queue, I have spent enough time among the questions in that queue to recognize that it is often clogged with items that are satisfactorily answered either in a comment or in an answer based on a comment, but that no one cares to vote up (and off the queue). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recast a number of question-answering comments as answers (with attribution to the original commenter), but very few of the resulting answers have been voted up. Giving my recast answers the benefit of the doubt, I suspect that two factors are at play here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is of marginal interest to most readers/voters on the site, or it falls into a category (such as requests for prescriptive style advice) that they don't want to encourage others to ask about or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Readers/voters don't like the idea of rewarding someone for performing the simple act of transforming someone else's valid (but obvious) answer from a comment to an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to item #2, I don't especially want to be rewarded with points; I just want to clear some of the weeds from the Unanswered Questions queue. But I understand the general reluctance to view something as obvious as a restatement of a comment to be point-worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere I have suggested allowing questions to be closed for the reason &quot;Answered in Comments&quot; (see my second answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4921/general-reference-general-clairvoyance/4953#4953&quot;&gt;General Reference = general clairvoyance?&lt;/a&gt; and my comment beneath the OP's question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4943/hold-reason-suggestion-more-research-desired-mrd/4951#4951&quot;&gt;Hold-Reason Suggestion: &amp;quot;More Research Desired&amp;quot; (MRD)&lt;/a&gt;)—but that suggestion hasn't gained much support, and I'm less enthusiastic about it myself, seeing that it would drop potentially useful Q&amp;amp;A's from the site's searchable results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another possibility: Why not permit users who have established the necessary level of trustworthiness—by accumulating, say, 10,000 points, or 15,000, 20,000 points—submit answers that are really just conversions of comments) as a community entity called something like &quot;From the Comments&quot; and then (if they wish) upvote that answer as themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, suppose that user &quot;CaptainMarvelous&quot; has provided a perfectly serviceable answer to a question, but his answer has appeared as a comment, not an answer. I come along and want to convert it into an answer for voting, but I don't want it to bear the stigma of being my &quot;original&quot; submission (which it isn't); so I submit it under the user identity &quot;From the Comments.&quot; Having done so, I (and anyone else who wants to) can upvote (or downvote) the answer, just as though it were someone else's answer (which it is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure that this arrangement serves only the narrow purpose for which it exists (that is, the purpose of moving good answers from the comments to the answers, and thereby reducing the number of questions that linger indefinitely in the limbo of the Unanswered Questions queue), we could add several prerequisites to the system. For example, we might require that the question must have lingered in the Unanswered Questions queue for at least 30 days, that the comment to be converted must have attracted at least 2 (or 3 or 5) upvotes in order to qualify for conversion into an answer, that the converted answer must reproduce the original comment verbatim, and that the person performing the conversion must have earned a specified number of points (10,000, 15,000, or 20,000, say) in order to have access to the &quot;From the Comments&quot; user ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach offers several potential benefits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original commenter, who obviously didn't want the exposure to upvotes and downvotes that comes with submitting an answer as an answer, is insulated from numerical censure or reward.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The fact that legitimate answers posted as comments may eventually become full-fledged answers may impel more answerers to cut to the chase and, in the future, submit their answers as answers in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The person converting the comment to an answer won't look like a self-serving point grubber, since all upvote points will go to the institutional entity &quot;From the Comments.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unlike with &quot;Closed: Answered in Comments,&quot; questions that may have some long-term value in the EL&amp;amp;U archives will remain open and therefore accessible to search.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Unanswered Questions queue will have fewer items in it, and the questions that it does have will truly be as-yet unanswered ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T19:14:34.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T06:15:51.987" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems we have an influx of questions relating to non-native English speakers attempting to, for lack of a better term, wrap their tongues around the English tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be here, because &lt;em&gt;of course&lt;/em&gt; it's about the English Language and Usage. How can we grasp the usage without being able to pronounce it properly?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be in [ell.se] because the question is obviously about someone who is learning the English language (or not, this could be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shibboleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shibboleth&lt;/a&gt; instance of long time non-native speakers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be in [linguistics.se] because it's about pronunciation. (or not, because linguistics seems to be a bit high-level for someone trying to learn how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enunciate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enunciate&lt;/a&gt; properly.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some other thing/Flag for deletion, send to /dev/null or Y! Answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas? Direction? Consensus? New SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189294/r-sound-before-th-sound&quot;&gt;'r' sound before 'th' sound&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188381/any-rules-for-pronouncing-v-sound&quot;&gt;any rules for pronouncing &quot;V&quot; sound?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186713/th-sound-is-it-continuant-or-stop&quot;&gt;TH sound, is it continuant or stop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or just browse &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T15:50:30.357" Title="Is &quot;how to make English Sounds&quot; appropriate for this site? Should it go to Linguistics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T10:21:42.697" Score="1" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am nothing short of astonished to have received a lot of downvotes and a closevote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189274/&quot;&gt;sucking sound&lt;/a&gt;, as this was not the first time I had written an interesting question and the community voted down or even closed the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this regard exemplary was the instantaneous and unilateral closing of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187104/&quot;&gt;die-in&lt;/a&gt; question, which then was reopened and got the nice question badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, since the sucking question is about the finer points of the word's definition provided by MW and there is no similar word in my own language, can anyone explain why it was so unwelcome here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that there are users who vote down or close my question basing their behaviour only on prejudices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T19:21:42.853" Title="Why did sucking question get a lot of downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5114" CreationDate="2014-08-08T13:13:21.653" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I neither downvoted your question nor close voted it, so perhaps you don't want to hear from me. But I almost did both. So maybe that counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found some of your questions quite interesting. I thought your &lt;em&gt;lie in&lt;/em&gt; question was fine, and I voted to reopen it, so I hope you'll accept my word that I'm not prejudiced against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about closevoting (and often closevoters also downvote) because I honestly had a hard time knowing what you were asking (&lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt; is a reason to close.) I didn't know if you were asking for a different onomatopoetic word, or if you were kidding with this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anyone describe what a sucking sound is and how it is made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only after some comments were posted did I understand that you were (perhaps?) wondering how &lt;em&gt;slurp&lt;/em&gt; is interpreted as a sucking sound. Even then, it's borderline at best, because it's a matter of opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you implying that because a number of your questions have been well received that all of them should be, or that all down/close votes that are rapidly acquired are uncalled for? If you are, that can't be a serious question. On this site, the &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; that counts (vote-wise) is in the eyes of the beholders. Even diamonds don't sparkle 24 hours a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible that there are users who vote down or close my question basing their behaviour only on prejudices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly it is. It's not fun, and it's not optimal, but asking that will do less to change it than making sure your questions don't fall into the categories for close voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T13:13:21.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5114" CreationDate="2014-08-08T20:03:06.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't recall, but I'd be one to downvote for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know how a sucking sound relates to English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't figure out if the request is serious, and in what context the question is useful for other visitors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know why someone needs to know the answer to the question &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a native speaker of English, I don't understand how anyone would be unaware of what a sucking sound is. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's the case that you are deaf and have never heard such sounds, it would be the case of explaining the color red to a blind person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not sure what would constitute an answer that you'd accept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/onomatopoeia&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;onomatopoeia&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/a&gt; is valid, I'd still expect to have a question in terms of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the word that sounds like ______?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;em&gt;pop&lt;/em&gt; the word that sounds like what bubbles do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, to rephrase your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Why] is &lt;em&gt;slurp&lt;/em&gt; the onomatopoeia for a sucking sound? Are there etymology reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T20:03:06.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5113" CreationDate="2014-08-09T14:37:30.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title question and the questions in the content seem to be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;phonetic pronunciation is totally appropriate for this site. There's no argument there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;those particular questions do seem to be more for ell than here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer as it is to every thing is 'it depends'. ell if it is basic language learning situation, linguistics is it is not particular to English, elu otherwise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T14:37:30.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3019" CreationDate="2014-08-09T20:37:37.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly disagree with your reasoning for Conjecture 2. While I don't mind the reputation payment for editing be high, I don't agree that lowering it will overall cause terrible editing. It seems to me you're implying that people with little experience with this site aren't capable of editing someone's question correctly, is that right? Everyone needs to start somewhere, even people with amazing editing skills!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I took that the wrong way and you're just saying editing is a privilege that you need to earn, then I'm sorry. :) But please don't assume that just because someone joined today, they know nothing about grammar. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84763" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T20:37:37.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5098" CreationDate="2014-08-10T09:13:27.943" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, obviously --- and indeed such comments are the heart of the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With language &lt;strong&gt;there is never a definitive answer&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember the great quoteable from an early intro to the Dictionary that it is &quot;descriptive, not proscriptive...&quot; That's deep and remains true on ESL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense, every QA on here, is: a canvassing for opinions on &quot;what sounds right&quot; and - in a word - what you have found to be common in your region or experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person who told you the comment was improper, is just silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that 99% of everything on the internet is just silly, so no big surprise really. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T09:13:27.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5125" CreationDate="2014-08-10T23:10:42.307" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user edited my post in a very constructive way.  I wanted to say &quot;thank you&quot;, privately, without taking up bandwidth in the comments section.  The user does not have an email address in the info that comes up when I click on his or her name, I can't find any links like the &quot;reply privately&quot; in LinkedIn, and I've searched the help without finding any suggestions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the questions already asked here was about how to thank someone, and it had an answer saying to give their comment or answer an up-vote, but I don't see any up/down arrows associated with the edits.  Is there a way to give someone a vote for their edits, or some other way to thank them? If not, I think there should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87445" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T13:49:01.163" Title="How do I thank an editor?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5123" CreationDate="2014-08-11T13:49:01.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/431/any-way-to-send-a-personal-message-to-another-user&quot;&gt;Any way to send a personal message to another user?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any way to do this other than by either commenting or posting in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt;. While participating in Chat requires 20 rep (so you can do that), and commenting anywhere requires 50, anyone can comment on their own posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;Thanks for the edit!&quot; comment could be flagged as too chatty, and you're right that it's not really worthwhile even as a thumbs-up. Because of that, a single post in Chat is the SE-friendly way of doing this. That's basically what Chat was provided for, as the linked MSE post explains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments do have a feature which might be useful here, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first few words of a comment appear in the recipient's inbox, as a sort of &quot;teaser&quot; with a link to the comment. This inbox message persists even after the comment is deleted. So it would be possible to write a comment, wait five or ten minutes for the system to pick it up and put a message in the inbox, and then delete the comment. If the comment consisted only of &quot;Thanks for the edit. Really useful&quot; then all of that should be visible in the inbox, even though it's no longer visible on the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment is flagged as &quot;too chatty&quot; in the short time it's visible, then you deleting it will clear the flag. And if you forget to delete it yourself, a moderator will do so when the flag is dealt with. [So please don't forget!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, &lt;strong&gt;it's perfectly acceptable not to comment at all.&lt;/strong&gt; It is nice to get an author saying &quot;Thank you,&quot; but because there isn't really a convenient way of doing that, no-one expects to get thanks when they edit a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T13:49:01.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-11T19:21:26.643" Score="30" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/189777/55623&quot;&gt; &lt;code&gt;[single-word-request]&lt;/code&gt; answer&lt;/a&gt;, the question was raised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm … adding all my ideas to one answer. Is that the right way? Rather than generating many answers and letting each one fend for its own votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good question.  For questions that have concise, competing answers (I'm thinking in particular of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;), should we encourage users to break each idea into a separate answer?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might help further separate wheat from chaff, and I don't think it should make a difference from a user's perspective: he'll get as much rep, if not more, by breaking out his responses (because all the people who would have voted for the composite answer will still vote for one of the component answers; and some people who would not have voted for the composite answer because it contained something they didn't like might vote for a &quot;clean&quot; component answer that doesn't contain that language).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there already an established or recommended best practice here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T23:25:07.197" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T23:25:07.197" Title="Should we encourage posting distinct answers separately? (Particularly for [single-word-requests])" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5126" CreationDate="2014-08-11T23:59:28.263" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been struggling with this issue. I often answer single word request, and I often have an initial reaction. I post it. Not infrequently, I think of another answer that is somewhat divergent from the first. I then add it. If the addition is based on feedback, or long after my initial post, I usually label it as a &lt;em&gt;Supplement&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At various points in my editing, people vote up, down, or ignore me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an answerer's point of view, that is fine. But from a viewer's perspective, it's a problem. Let's say my answer (collective) now gets several upvotes. Which of my answers (individual) has earned the endorsement of my peers? Unless there is a comment pointing out which element of my compound answer (or which several in a multi-layered rant) is worthy of praise, how does the person seeking to weigh the crowd sourced valuation know which part(s) is worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our goal is creating a clear database of information, we should not offer only &lt;em&gt;YES&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;NO&lt;/em&gt;, and  &lt;em&gt;NO OPINION&lt;/em&gt; votes for answers that say &lt;em&gt;Mars&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vanilla ice cream&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;my sister's fountain pen&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's keep alternative answers separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I would modify this position to allow a laundry list type answer where there is little distinction, or where we are trying to show the extensive range of possibilities rather than focus on a particular word or meaning.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T23:59:28.263" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-12T15:01:42.243" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;About two months ago, I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173079/can-i-put-greetings-at-the-end-of-an-email-and-if-so-how&quot;&gt;Can I put &amp;quot;Greetings&amp;quot; at the end of an email, and if so, how?&lt;/a&gt;, because I was having trouble to find the right wording and it seemed that English Language Stack Exchange was the right platform to ask for language advice. I also used the tag [word-choice] which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about choosing the best word for a particular context or meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seemed to be a perfect fit for a question asking what phrase to use in the context of an informal email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my question was closed fairly quickly (although I got good answers), with the reason taken from a comment by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666/kris&quot;&gt;Kris&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is not about the English language. OTOH, it may open the floodgates to 'opinions.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closing statement was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with that, because to me my question seems to fit the [word-choice] tag perfectly and I was asking for a phrase to use in a specific situation. I was directed to the help center, but there I could also not find anything wrong with my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/16052/choster&quot;&gt;choster&lt;/a&gt; added some related questions that were going in a similar direction, but not answering my question, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147161/is-it-appropriate-to-use-youre-welcome-followed-by-my-name-in-closing-an-ema&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to use &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re welcome,&amp;quot; followed by my name in closing an email?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132275/which-valediction-should-i-use-with-my-boss&quot;&gt;Which valediction should I use with my boss?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143293/what-complimentary-close-to-use-in-continuous-formal-email&quot;&gt;What complimentary close to use in continuous formal email?&lt;/a&gt;. These questions were not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked why my question had been closed in a comment, but as it was the sixth one and the question had already been closed, I think no one read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A question to the moderation: Is asking how to write a certain phrase (like how to end an informal email) not &quot;word choice&quot;? I also seemed to get quite good answers. Most of the questions posted above by @choster are similar (but not answering my problem) and are not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long story short&lt;/strong&gt;: I'd like to know when a question asking for [word-choice] is allowed and when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, since I was asking for advice on a specific situation, my question should be allowed, and I'd like to ask someone with the power to do so to reopen it. Otherwise, please explain to me why the question should not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77346" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T08:12:21.940" Title="When is [word-choice] on topic and when is it not?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-12T18:07:59.560" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a curiosity, can I block or disable my own account, for say a month?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can imagine ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) one is busy writing a novel or something, and you want to 'prevent the distraction to yourself' (just as an alcoholic may, um, lock up the bottles)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) perhaps, an employer might insist a young employee stops spending so much time, say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible? I've often been blocked for a month on SO sites for swearing, etc -- is it possible to &quot;time out&quot; yourself, say for a month?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS for the sake of searching/tags, what is it called when a user is blocked/banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the humour etc, does anyone actually know if this can be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean technically, is it possible?  Where is the button?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, come to think of it, if I have enough points, can I simply ban myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastEditorUserId="8286" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T06:23:52.353" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T06:23:52.353" Title="Can I deliberately block/cancel/ban my account for a month?" Tags="|support|feature-request|banned|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2014-08-12T19:26:31.047" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change your password to a long string of letters, numbers, and symbols that you could not possibly memorize. Write it down on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. Deliver the envelope to a trusted friend, and ask them to hold onto it for a month. Inform them that under no circumstances are they to return the envelope to you before the month is up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be extra cautious, change your registered email address to that of your trusted friend, so you can't request a password change in a moment of weakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be extra extra cautious, edit the hosts files on all of your computers to redirect any requests for english.stackexchange.com to 127.0.0.1, so you can't visit and use the site as an unregistered user in a moment of weakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be extra extra extra cautious, create a user account with limited privileges on your computer to use for the duration. Change the password for your root or administrator account and put it in the envelope for your trusted friend, so you can't repair your hosts file in a moment of weakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be extra extra extra extra cautious, arrange to be put into a medically induced coma for a month, so you won't be tempted to find workarounds for the above listed precautions in a moment of weakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T19:26:31.047" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5126" CreationDate="2014-08-12T21:03:11.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I answer SWR questions I typically add a bunch of detail about each potential match in order to address the entire area being discussed. English often doesn't have an &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; phrase that fits and I think splitting each section into its own answer would make it harder to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178874/is-there-english-word-corresponding-to-japanese-bureikoh-meaning-an-occasion-y/178889#178889&quot;&gt;Is there English word corresponding to Japanese “Bureikoh” meaning an occasion you can talk freely disregarding status and position?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181498/word-phrase-idiom-to-describe-avoiding-answering-a-question-by-stating-the-quest/181510#181510&quot;&gt;Word/phrase/idiom to describe avoiding answering a question by stating the question doesn&amp;#39;t need to be asked&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12727/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-highly-desirable-cursed-treasure/17469#17469&quot;&gt;Is there a word to describe a highly desirable cursed treasure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I see the argument for splitting any of those answers up, I think they work best as is. Various comments will address portions of the answer and I will typically integrate the extra information into the full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T21:03:11.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5128" CreationDate="2014-08-14T08:02:19.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question has been answered, and very well too. The questions suggested by choster were, admittedly, not great ones and not very helpful. However yours is a duplicate of this question, which was closed for being primarily opinion-based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332/what-are-some-expressions-that-can-be-used-to-end-an-email&quot;&gt;Which expressions can be used to close an email?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, don't think that your question is being singled out for unfair treatment. In the end how one chooses to begin and end an email is dictated by experience and personal preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would also venture to say that your question is not really about &quot;word choice&quot; but rather about how to end an email which is covered by the &lt;em&gt;valediction&lt;/em&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T08:12:21.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-15T07:57:05.653" Score="5" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;With &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, quite often the decisive, true, and most useful answer (most useful: for the OP, for 100,000 years of future googlers, etc) is simply that &quot;hmm, there is in English no single-word for that concept&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; come in two exceedingly distinct flavours: an English-learner who is trying to get at a word, and, an English-expert who has a word on the tip of their, uh, fingers and is needing The Gang to try to ah-hah the word. Interestingly, in &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; cases, the &quot;does not exist&quot; answer is extremely useful and clear and good.}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, it's not worth some &lt;strong&gt;technological&lt;/strong&gt; solution (so, in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; flagged questions, there'd be a special button concept where you could set the answer as &quot;no such word&quot;...) ... I think I just mean basically, should The Community move socially towards &quot;does not exist&quot; as a typical (I'll say .. 25% of cases) Thing that you can and should post (where relevant) on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; QAs.  (So, a social norm, exactly like &quot;you should add references,&quot; say.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note too that once &quot;does not exist&quot; is on the table and accepted by all: it's then more possible / more clearcut to have a free-for-all of other sentence/etc suggestions in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's slightly/very annoying that &quot;does not exist&quot; is rather — not so much avoided, but it's not embraced on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; --- proposal: embrace it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2014-08-15T08:04:23.507" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T12:42:10.650" Title="For [single-word-requests], should we encourage &quot;there is no such word&quot; as an answer?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-08-16T21:35:41.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5136" CreationDate="2014-08-15T12:42:10.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there really isn't the exact word for a given description. There have been thousands of years of language work, in stories and technology, where people have created the refined vocabulary of the world's languages. But just as the Cro-magnon (probably) didn't have words for 'vacation' or 'stirrup' (certainly they could understand and describe those concepts), we (all the world's languages) have quite a few similarly complicated concepts for which we have no single word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a student of a foreign language or someone rising through an academic career, one is getting acclimated to the more rarefied areas of concepts, where most people don't go often, but those who go there need to save space and time and thought by using abbreviations of descriptions that collapse into single words. Then there is the tendency to believe that there will always be a single word for a complex description, because every time they look beyond the horizon of what they know already, there is a new word for a new concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all to support your assumption that there truly are situations where there is no single word for a description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to your point, 3) should we 2) encourage 1) giving 'no such word exists' as an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We've justified that sometimes that 'no such word exists' is the case. But that is only sometimes. Other times it is a matter of tip-of-the-tongue or memory or lack of experience or rarity or obsolescence or lexical gaps (no one 'designs' a language systematically from scratch and so some slots just happen not to be filled, sometimes even when there is a need).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This meta question is encouragement enough. Asking the leading question &quot;What is the single word for ...?&quot; implies that there must be one, when there isn't. Suggesting in comments or editing the question to &quot;Is there...?&quot; is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What you should always do is answer knowledgeably. A bald answer like &quot;No, there is none.&quot; is a terrible answer. A positive answer of a single word is also terrible but there is some hope in being able to look it up in a dictionary. With &quot;no&quot;, you have to explain that absence of word is, in this case, by much experience (which is not very justifiable by authority), evidence of the true lack of the word. (A systematic proof of the lack would have to be a laborious comprehensive listing of 'all' words and for each one justifying that they don't match the concept.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end, sure, for a single word, if you can justify with some knowledge that there is no such word (hopefully with a good thesaurus that gives the small neighborhood of related concepts where you can say &quot;in this neighborhood there is no such word that matches exactly what is sought&quot;), then yes, answer that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though such an answer may be correct, it will most likely not be a high scorer; no one like a negative answer even if correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T12:42:10.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5139" CreationDate="2014-08-16T15:10:54.907" Score="6" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that I can close a question as &quot;&lt;em&gt;better suited to Meta&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but not as &quot;&lt;em&gt;better suited to ELL&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;better suited to Writers.SE&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6wR4g.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of all available migration targets when closing a question, which only lists meta.english.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we add (at least) ELL and Writers to the list of available migration targets for flagging and closing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2014-08-16T19:14:14.250" Title="Why aren't ELL, Writers, etc available as &quot;migration&quot; options when flagging/closing posts?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-08-17T16:13:44.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2014-08-16T19:14:14.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only mods can recommend migration to a site that is still in beta, presumably because the scope of the site is still being defined.  This has come up frequently all across the network, but I do not think there is any chance of changing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-08-16T19:14:14.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5145" CreationDate="2014-08-13T06:27:30.493" Score="-1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189692/correcting-the-usage-of-singular-they-and-their&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; and while the answer is there and everything else is fine, it's incorrectly tagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the incorrect tag is that if one doesn't put effort in actually understanding the text or if (as I suspect) someone is influenced by others' claims, it's easy to make the mistake of missing the main point with the question. (Which is the reason of a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; clear disclaimer at the top.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user who didn't understand the question re-tagged the question which means that at the moment it's incorrectly marked-up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator has now locked the question without any valid motivation. Or, to be extra clear, the motivation given lacks relevance, which I politely explained. After the explanation provided by me, there's no additional input, just a lock-down and the incorrect tag reintroduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole matter isn't that crucial, of course. However, it's still quite embarrassing to the site that a well-reputed user who claims in the comments that he fails to understand the question and still takes the liberty of correcting the OP who apparently does know the intended meaning of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's even more worrying that a moderator votes according to who's got the highest reputation and not the contents of the post. To be extra clear, what I postulate is that having high reputation and/or being a moderator doesn't constitute guarantee of being right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we do anything to prevent such misconduct and if so what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB If this is going to evolve into a discussion regarding if I was clear enough and/or what I meant to ask about, I'll just assume that I'm unable to get through (possibly due to linguistic limitation) and stop answering. It's not a sign of being impolite - I just prefer not to waste others' time. Or mine, for that matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30362" OwnerDisplayName="Konrad Viltersten" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T17:52:30.687" Title="Incorrect tagged question without a real motivation locked" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5144" CreationDate="2014-08-19T17:18:14.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question lock happens for several reasons. This is a standard practice when a &quot;rollback war&quot; or &quot;edit war&quot; occurs. A tag dispute falls into this category. It gives everyone a chance to take the discussion to the community. It provides time to discuss the question on Meta and helps the OP compose a clearer question when the post is receiving a lot of attention. A lock is not intended to be punitive; it is meant to be helpful. In these kind of situations, OP can end up feeling hounded while trying to edit a post and having others try to 'help'. A lock makes this all stop until we can get our heads together and stop working at cross-purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the edit history and the comments, I agree that a lock was prudent. I am disappointed that there was not a Meta question about the post as a follow-up, but you can certainly post one now, and I encourage you to do so. The lock expires soon.  Ideally, you would post a Meta question asking for help clarifying your question so that the proper tags can be applied. As it stands now, I don't understand why you think singular-they doesn't apply; that means I must not understand what you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you have an answer that you say is acceptable, I still strongly encourage you to edit your question. You may get more answers, and a clearer question will be more helpful to future visitors. A post on Meta can get you some assistance from experienced editors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T17:18:14.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5147" CreationDate="2014-08-19T19:51:15.750" Score="3" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;Unanswered&lt;/a&gt; list have one or more answers already. Why is this, and why can't it be changed to only allow unanswered questions into the Unanswered Questions list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72323" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T20:00:20.320" Title="Why do answered questions show up in the unanswered questions list?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5146" CreationDate="2014-08-19T20:00:20.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the right of the question list there is a count of how many unanswered questions there are. In there it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;questions with no upvoted answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there may be answers on the questions, but none of the answers are upvoted, so they stay in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no preferences for the unanswered queue specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T20:00:20.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4998" CreationDate="2014-08-20T04:01:32.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this idea, and after having pondered it for a considerable amount of time, I have decided that not only should we do this, we &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; do this, and we must do it for the same reasons that justified the perjoratives tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, if we label the negative, then the negative is all we will see. Let's make an effort to find the positives, and support the positives, and take our positive mindset to the masses. Let's put a green pen next to our red pen, so we can see when there is more green than red, so we can want more green than red. And let's make our green pen &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; and our red pen &lt;em&gt;oblique&lt;/em&gt; so that people with low color vision can also easily distinguish the two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the core of this community actively looking for the positive content on the site so we can raise it up, we will likewise raise ourselves up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's do this thing, people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T04:01:32.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-20T16:57:43.633" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192339/phobia-word-for-fear-of-hearing-speeches&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, a user mentions that he feels duty-bound to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the arguments correctly, he basically feels that questions that might encourage a neologism (or a “pseudoword hitherto unrecognised in the English lexicon” if you dislike neologisms) should be pre-emptively downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously English has acquired many words in its lexicon, apart from simple borrowing, use of its productive linguistic aspect. Every word that was thus formed went through a stage of being a “pseudoword” for some, a neologism for others and “just the word I needed” for yet others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do accept it is a valid point of discussion whether ELU should in any way assist, play a role or provide a platform for this process. Rather than calling questions that invoke this process dangerous, though, I would like to have an open discussion on that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For good measure, it seems that &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; those kind of &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; dangerous(!) questions should also be discouraged by means of a similar principle-based downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to notice that apart from the very first comment, no fully fledged &quot;made-up&quot; words have been suggested, in comments nor in answers. And even the one in the first comment was deemed acceptable by the user that rejected the making up of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, question and answer &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; acceptable to &quot;punish&quot; certain types of questions with (for now one, but maybe later more) &quot;principle&quot;-downvotes, isn't it better to not allow these kind of questions &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, and make this very clear? If the community does not want (potentially) linguistic productive questions, it would not harm to make this very clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation seems to be that if the word or phrase that is requested does not (yet) exist, you will be &quot;punished&quot; for it with downvotes. Of course, if you knew in advance, you would not have needed to ask the question in the first place. So you get downvoted without having been able to avoid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gives me a strange feeling...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T23:22:55.863" Title="Can we allow questions asking for expressions or words that do not, or may not, exist (yet)?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-22T06:27:43.923" Score="2" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;This website seems hard to me. Always getting down votes. It's highly degrading me. I am frustrated to use this website. I won't post comments or discussion or questions in this website. If I ask questions they are always down voted and so are my answers. This site won't help beginners, I think. I also want to mention another thing: tags, which are extremely disguising things, and also reputation. So that I am tagging here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88927" OwnerDisplayName="burm1" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2014-08-22T07:01:38.097" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T10:20:06.583" Title="I think that this site won't help beginners" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5151" CreationDate="2014-08-22T08:59:30.380" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are very right in drawing that conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this site was never &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to help beginners! It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;clearly stated&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For beginners, people that are learning the English language, there is our sister site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T08:59:30.380" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5151" CreationDate="2014-08-22T09:26:03.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Internet is full of people from different places, different cultures, and different age ranges. Stack Exchange is also a part of that, having a very wide variety of users, some/most of who are here to prove/approve themselves and disapprove all the others out there. This behavior will be more tangible when you're new to the place and the others with a higher reputation, feel they have more authority. This is not a good thing, but that's how the world works nowadays! We need to be able to believe in our own abilities, and try to improve them in a good way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website can have negative effects on the new (or even old) users, but at the same time it helps them grow up, and mature to be independent learners, being able to search, research and learn independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @oerkelens mentioned, you should ask your beginner questions in E.L.L., but chances are you'll get burnt over there, too. I was looking at your profile, and I noticed you had an answer that provided two links only. You do get down-votes for that, because there's no content other than a link; and in case the contents of that link changes in the future, there will be no valid answer for the question on Stack Exchange, so if you want to provide an answer, you must explain it in detail and add the reference to it in your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, a question of yours has been put on hold as unclear what you're asking, since there are no actual questions in that post. You've thought about a person and tried to describe her in two lines and a subject line. We cannot guess what you're thinking about. You should express yourself clearly to get a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also do not forget that all the users get here for the effort they put in answering questions and maintaining the site, is reputation (+badges), they're not paid to maintain such a service, so there should be a rewarding system to demonstrate people's activity, and there's nothing wrong about that. If you think that reputation and tags are &lt;em&gt;disgusting&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;disguising&lt;/em&gt; (?) you shouldn't be bothered at the down-votes that you receive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try editing your posts and adding more context to them, and voters should remove their down-votes. However, there are people who enjoy being sarcastic and mocking others in addition to trolling, and find the Internet and these websites a great place to do so. This shouldn't hold you back, because as I said, different people are different in many aspects and you see this in real life, as well. Do the right thing, flag and report the irrelevant content, and eventually if you're still getting harassed for any reason, flag the related posts for moderation attention, and they'll take care of it, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; it's a rational report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16040" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T09:26:03.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5149" CreationDate="2014-08-22T09:27:23.473" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;oerkelens &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; understand my argument correctly. Or chooses to broaden using obscurantism. Obviously, to a tiny degree, just having such a website as ELU 'might encourage [a person to use on the internet] a neologism (or a “pseudoword hitherto unrecognised in the English lexicon”)'. I made it clear I was talking about questions directly inviting 'make-your-own-word' attempts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm essentially saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who decides whether a string not appearing in any dictionary (including dictionaries of neologisms) is widely-enough used, or even 'deducible enough', to be correctly describable as 'carrying a meaning'? Contributors here? And if not contributors here (and I'd say certainly not), we should not be 'inventing &quot;words&quot; ', as it's off-topic (non-English as commonly accepted, too subjective ...). And thus questions including 'Can you please invent a word for ...' are also off-topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2014-08-22T09:33:43.550" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T09:33:43.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5151" CreationDate="2014-08-22T10:20:06.583" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It couldn't be more obvious - the site you are looking for is ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU has no connection to or involvement with beginners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T10:20:06.583" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-22T13:27:39.087" Score="-3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it a little ironic that a reason for dismissing a question on a grammar/usage site contains at least one example of poor hyphenation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was just looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192414/what-tools-is-everybody-using-or-what-tools-are-everybody-using&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; when I saw that it had been put on hold as off-topic.  The reason given contains &quot;commonly-available&quot;, not to mention the questionable use of the compound &quot;off-topic&quot; after the noun.  These are both frowned upon in every style guide I've seen (though I only look at style guides from the past 50 years or so).  Is it a bit rich to be criticizing a question about correct language usage with poorly used language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18819" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T16:46:23.750" Title="Irony in off-topic reason given by grammar mavens?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5158" CreationDate="2014-08-23T10:22:28.110" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recording is circa five minutes long, it's between me and my companion. I suppose I could transcribe the entire script but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) it would become tedious to read&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) it would take too long for me, and lose its &lt;em&gt;humour&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) it's nice for non-native speakers to listen to (I think!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) ELUers will at long last hear my accent   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would in any case write my question, which is &lt;em&gt;kinda&lt;/em&gt; contained in the recording. &#xA;Can I upload it from my computer? Although first I'd need to figure how to download it from my mobile phone; a recently bought, second-hand, iPhone 4s. If not, is there a quick and &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S This is an almost duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2580/is-there-any-way-i-can-embed-a-small-piece-of-recording-on-elu&quot;&gt;Is there any way I can embed a small piece of recording on ELU?&lt;/a&gt; But the suggested answer is unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T13:12:26.210" Title="I have a recording 1) How do I upload it onto ELU?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5157" CreationDate="2014-08-23T13:12:26.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the SE engine does not provide any means of uploading anything but an image file. I doubt there is enough of a use for this for the suggestion to ever be implemented. However, there are many, many free sites that let you upload arbitrary content and make it easy to play it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option would be to use a service like Dropbox. Once you have uplodaed it (in the case of Dropbox, just add it to your Public folder), copy the public link and paste it into your question/answer. For example, here are the first few seconds of a recording of summertime I made with some friends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14062712/summertime.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14062712/summertime.mp3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click on the link, you can play it back without downloading anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T13:12:26.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-24T21:26:53.420" Score="-13" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made the point in the past that I think the term 'British English' is an unfortunate one. For many reasons I prefer the term 'Received English' which parallels the idea of 'Received Pronunciation'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that my view is underlined by the tragic Foley case. The person who is alleged to have executed Foley has been widely reported as 'having a British accent'. What I think they mean by this is that he speaks English using Received idioms and in a Received Pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There a multitudes of people across the world, who are not necessarily British, who use received English. Aung San Suu Kyi, for example speaks with a received accent, as do a lot of the Pakistani ruling class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that Received English and pronunciation should be exclusively associated with Britain is absurd. And in this instance it has tarnished Britain in that it associates us with the brutal Foley killing.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel strongly that the abbreviation BrE should be changed to RecE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-08-25T03:13:28.577" LastActivityDate="2014-08-29T13:40:03.687" Title="Is 'British English' an unfortunate misnomer?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|retag-request|tagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-26T04:17:18.000" Score="14" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually copy the google definition for common words, or link it if I'm using a specific dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do all word definition answers &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to have a dictionary reference link? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="8278" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T03:18:58.750" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T03:18:58.750" Title="What's up with all these dictionary reference edits?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5162" CreationDate="2014-08-26T07:23:23.793" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have copy/pasted a definition from somewhere, or simply copied it from a printed book, you must reference where you got the definition as well as providing a link back to the source where applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google definitions all come from a dictionary. Not always the same dictionary. That Google do not properly reference their sources is simply bad practice on their part. Luckily it is usually the first hit in the same set of search results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4973/what-to-do-about-missing-source-attributions/4981#4981&quot;&gt;What to do about missing source attributions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T07:19:35.427" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-26T22:20:05.527" Score="17" ViewCount="760" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed on this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182362/37273&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182362/37273&lt;/a&gt; the phrase “Removed OED content as it is not allowed under my license agreement” is used a couple of times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2020-07-04T07:22:02.667" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T07:22:02.667" Title="&quot;Removed OED definition as it is not allowed under my license agreement&quot;" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2014-08-27T02:20:00.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those are my answers and my edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had copied information from OED2 without written permission, which I thought would be OK under a 'fair-use' type policy, however after reading this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/legal&lt;/a&gt; Section 3. Para.1 (goes on a lot longer than this snippet) I realised that SE demands that I license all content that I add to this site to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. You grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works and store such Subscriber Content and to allow others to do so in any medium now known or hereinafter developed (“Content License”) in order to provide the Services, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by You.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst I might be able to argue that copying small parts comes under a 'fair use' policy I can not grant a license to Stack Exchange to other people's copyrighted work under any guise of 'fair use'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now no longer add definitions copied from any copyrighted source, if I need to I will provide a link to the source (without including any material) or where possible the material will come from OED1 which is not under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some links to UK 'Fair Use' and copyright information (which is what OED/OUP fall under)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p27_work_of_others&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p27_work_of_others&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am not, in any way, suggesting that others must do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="71783" LastEditDate="2014-08-27T04:40:14.637" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T04:40:14.637" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-27T19:29:01.017" Score="-4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2137/as-a-site-about-elu-should-we-maintain-correct-grammar-punctuation-etc-thro&quot;&gt;Related&lt;/a&gt; (although the title is too broad, and it references a small item).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we try to keep correct grammar in the comments? I think, being an EL&amp;amp;U site, we should aim to have good grammar across all of the main sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an ungrammatical comment, is it appropriate to reply to them correcting them, as one might do on Facebook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89332" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T13:46:59.867" Title="Should we try to keep to correct grammar in the comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5161" CreationDate="2014-08-27T19:53:09.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think British English (BrE) is the official name for a family of dialects, accents, etc, of English and isn't a synonym for Standard English or Received Pronunciation. Example, in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Chapter 1, section 3.1.2, a footnote says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some English-speaking Caribbean countries have rhotic accents and yet belong to the BrE family&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So clearly the term isn't meant to refer to the geography or politics of the speakers but rather to linguistically group more closely-related families together. Therefore a speaker of a Caribbean dialect of British English would still be speaking British English, even if he or she was also an Islamic extremist beheading infidels in Syria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as what constitutes a &quot;British accent&quot;, the fact is that many people can't precisely tell what kind of accent someone has. Every country has a variety of accents and some of them can be easily mistaken for others, especially if you don't get exposed to the various accents very often. So I don't think the world is particularly mad at Britain if any given extremist happens to speak a version of English that corresponds to the BrE family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T19:53:09.153" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5162" CreationDate="2014-08-28T09:55:31.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you copy something you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; reference it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188721/difference-between-south-west-and-south-western/188723#comment393714_188723&quot;&gt;moderator's comment&lt;/a&gt; to an answer deleted earlier this month:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This entire answer seems to be a verbatim quote from Cambridge Dictionaries. Mods are instructed to &lt;em&gt;delete on sight without further warning&lt;/em&gt; any content that is not properly attributed. Moreover, if a question is sufficiently answered by a dictionary definition, it should not be answered in the first place, as it is off-topic as general reference. — RegDwigнt ♦ 13 secs ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95?m=5116869#5116869&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not edit. Delete on sight. Network-wide policy. If we get hit with a DMCA takedown notice, you are showing prior knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link back is not mandatory, but it's recommended and helpful for online sources, especially as it allows others to follow up if they want more detail or to verify the source (for example, Google Books often reports incorrect metadata).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T09:55:31.080" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5167" CreationDate="2014-08-28T10:05:03.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well sometimes this is appropriate. But some people may react badly. If they do, just drop it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were fine with me - I deleted the comments about it, they reposted and deleted the original, looked like nothing had changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89332" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T10:05:03.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5167" CreationDate="2014-08-28T13:46:59.867" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the general world, correcting other people's grammar and orthography is questionable. Mistakes are a thorn in your side, a nail sticking out that asks to be hammered down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newspaper editors and school teachers have paying jobs to correct these, the rest of us a just annoyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the internet, I think the prevailing current feeling is that it is 'uncool' to tell someone of their error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on SE, if an error is in a question or answer, the software is set up so that one can edit (do something about it rather than just whine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But comments are not set up that way. The author can edit for a few minutes afterwards, but then it times out. One can get around this by the author deleting and resubmitting corrected text. But in a thread of comments it may be out of sync with the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to question you desire to fix errors in comments anywhere but especially here on ELU. There are a lot of different kinds of people writing here with different levels of fluency, both native and non-native speakers. Also different levels of typing. So cut everybody some slack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments here are not as important as questions and answers and the technology is consistent with that. If you feel compelled to point out errors in comments, you might just end up annoying people more than the original error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T13:46:59.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2014-08-28T16:06:54.457" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer &lt;em&gt;(either)&lt;/em&gt;, but I think Frank's comment is potentially misleading. None of us can say exactly what OED would accept as &quot;fair use&quot; (or which if any courts in which countries would uphold that position).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what Frank means is that he &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thinks&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; OED wouldn't consider citing a definition here on ELU to be &quot;fair use&quot; (or perhaps he just thinks that's at least &lt;em&gt;feasible&lt;/em&gt;, and doesn't want to take a chance on being sued for copyright infringement). My position rests on two assumptions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: TPTB within SO probably know more about this than most of us users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If they thought there was likely to be a problem, they'd have told us already.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2: TPTB within OED probably &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; know more about this than most of us.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If they weren't happy with the situation, they'd have complained to SO already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that basis, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22I%20ain%27t%20frit%22&amp;amp;btnG=Search%20Books&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbo=1&amp;amp;gws_rd=ssl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;I ain't frit&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(from OED)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;frit&lt;/strong&gt; adj. Dial. and colloq.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;pa. pple. of &lt;strong&gt;fright&lt;/strong&gt; v. 2a.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T16:06:54.457" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2014-08-29T10:32:29.647" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not use this answer as an example of what we can and can't do. We &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; allowed to quote the OED -  &lt;em&gt;they are wrong.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got in contact with OED, and they said essentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't use their definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry guys. I didn't mention stack exchange or ELU, so we won't suddenly be getting a letter of complaint (I pretended it was wiki answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their fair usage policy states that you can take individual definitions and quotes as long as it isn't a regular thing, and is not on-line. Occasional usage by newspapers etc. is fine, but not for the type of Q&amp;amp;A that we have here. It is fine to link to the OED, but not quote it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an option that SE could buy certain rights, but that is likely to be extortionate (I didn't enquire about actual costs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be sensible (again, I'm also not a lawyer) to use one without this copyright - maybe &lt;a href=&quot;http://thefreedictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thefreedictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;del&gt; I am currently getting in contact with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Collins English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, to find out about their restrictions.&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have contacted Collins with the following email:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in what the copyright is on the Online Collins Dictionary, and whether I am aloud to do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quote it on a blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to it on a blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quote it on a Q&amp;amp;A site (for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://wikianswers.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wikianswers.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to it on a Q&amp;amp;A site (for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://wikianswers.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wikianswers.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quote it on a site whereby all the content is:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;licensed to [name removed for confidentiality] under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. anyone can then reuse it as long as it is kept in that licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6) Link to it on that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for all of this is for helping others with the English Language. Any information posted on the above site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike meaning that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence allows re-distribution of licensed work on the conditions that the creator is appropriately credited and that nay derivative work is made available under the &quot;same, similar or a compatible licence&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do any of the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End of Email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reply from collins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi Tim,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for your email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are happy to grant permission for you to use excerpts from the Online Collins Dictionary as outlined below. For the purpose of clarity, this use does not permit derogatory use or allow for alteration of our content. Where possible, please link back to and credit the Online Collins Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given the nature of your use we are happy to waive any copyright fees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the best,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rachel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89332" LastEditorUserId="89332" LastEditDate="2014-09-05T06:54:45.437" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T06:54:45.437" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5161" CreationDate="2014-08-29T13:40:03.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to suck up the downvotes, just so I can post this as an answer (stolen without remorse from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/193919/55623&quot;&gt;one of @JoeBlow's answers&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KuW2F.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Envaliant Mark III&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-08-29T13:40:03.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-29T22:08:41.400" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my profile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Di41n.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have 839 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My graph has the following: 101, 12, 217 (1 accept), 277 (5 accepts), 230 (2 upvotes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;101+12+217+277+230 = 838&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so not only is it off by 1 (I remember seeing +7 for an answer - no idea how I lost that 3...) it also isn't limiting me - my rep should be 713.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;101+12+200+200+200 = 713&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89332" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T16:19:02.087" Title="The 200 daily limit isn't limiting me" Tags="|discussion|bug|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5175" CreationDate="2014-08-29T22:08:41.400" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is related to the number of accepts - each day the number of accepts is the exact number my rep execed the limit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Day 1 (217) (1 accept, and 1 edit accepted).&#xA;Day 2 (277) (5 accepts, and 1 edit accepted).&#xA;Day 3 (230) (2 accepts, 0 edit accepted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89332" LastActivityDate="2014-08-29T22:08:41.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5175" CreationDate="2014-08-30T16:13:47.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bounty awards, accepted answers [what you and most of us call 'accepts'], and association bonuses are not subject to the daily reputation limit.&quot; From the &lt;em&gt;Reputation&lt;/em&gt; section of the Help page, a useful resource for such queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the odd +3 comes from some combination of -2 for downvotes, +2 for accepted edits, +5 for upvotes on your questions... You can see the full history by clicking &quot;Reputation&quot; of your user page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2014-08-30T16:19:02.087" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T16:19:02.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-31T03:01:59.807" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unsure of the &lt;code&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/code&gt; retag to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193849/word-meaning-likely-to-cause-controversy&quot;&gt;Word meaning &quot;likely to cause controversy?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; I would like to see this tag removed, but I think my reasons for doing so are nuanced enough to need explanation. (And I may be mistaken too!) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the information given, I cannot say with confidence that knowing more about &lt;code&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/code&gt; is the question's aim. The question's use-case excerpt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The name Self-Arming Group isn't as [...] as Gun Club, but controversial nevertheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is ambiguous on that point. The excerpt may be from a critic who suspects the group of euphemizing. But couldn't it just as easily have been said by a member of the club who cares about its success and is civilly discussing how the proposed names affect their image? If that's the case, it seems the member is fair too, for he goes on to say that the other option is still controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pejorative-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pejorative-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pejorative-language&lt;/a&gt; wiki says the tag is for &quot;anything that makes someone or something look bad.&quot; Suppose the thing being made to look bad were not the club itself but the naming options. Then what if the club wants to choose a name that attracts attention, good or bad? Or one that brings a cause like self-defense into the limelight? In such cases, words like &lt;em&gt;controversial&lt;/em&gt; cast both names in an arguably positive light. I don't think we have enough context to read this particular use of &lt;em&gt;controversial&lt;/em&gt; as pejorative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also feel this retag needs to be undone because I don't see &lt;em&gt;controversial&lt;/em&gt; as a derogatory word in general. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/controversial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, for example, defines it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;relating to or causing much discussion, disagreement, or argument : likely to produce controversy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a person or group feels an issue needs to be discussed, I think it can be OK (and in some cases, commendable or laudable) for their presentation to be controversial. I view the events that would make &lt;em&gt;controversial&lt;/em&gt; a pejorative description (offensiveness, for example) as something separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think, ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-31T03:01:59.807" Title="&quot;Controversial&quot; Question Untag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-01T16:46:23.727" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently voted to close a question which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194349/where-did-the-term-redhead-come-from&quot;&gt;looked like a duplicate&lt;/a&gt;. The OP has edited it to make the difference in what he's asking much clearer, and I agree that my close vote is now no longer applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to remove my close vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, can someone please make one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: So, the main site has the close reversal, but not this one... so this is now also a feature request for Mitch to be able to remove his close vote here, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7397" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T07:23:25.637" Title="How can I remove my vote to close a question?" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5180" CreationDate="2014-09-01T17:14:51.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, on the vote-to-close menu, you should be given the option to retract your close-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T17:14:51.320" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-01T17:27:32.620" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while, someone submits a who/whom question. Apparently, the use of who and whom continues to confuse many educated people, even university students at Cornell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/etoMH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cornell protest flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In searching for a duplicate for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194290/&quot;&gt;most recent one&lt;/a&gt;, I had to sift through a lot of questions, and found a near perfect match in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190011/&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent OP's example and the closed example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They chose the candidate whom they thought would have the best initiative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They interviewed several candidates whom he thought had the experience and qualifications he required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no site searching wiz, so it took me a while to find the best answer. If it took me a while, I can only sympathize with someone relatively new searching among all the who/whom answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have at times brought up consolidating answers into a comprehensive reference. Thanks to good answers (including Dr. Lawler's), Geoffrey Pullum (Language Log) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoatmeal.com/comics/who_vs_whom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Oatmeal&lt;/a&gt;, I think I have a pretty good handle on who and whom, the trends regarding it, the hypercorrection problem, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm volunteering to make an attempt at one comprehensive answer, if there is consensus that we could use one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I try, and if so, &lt;em&gt;to whom&lt;/em&gt; do I submit my answer for evaluation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T06:47:58.433" Title="Whom loves you? Who, whom, Geoffrey Pullum and the Oatmeal" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-02T14:21:05.827" Score="-3" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most often referred to pages on ELU when it come to queries regarding verb forms, tense and aspect is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you visit this page, you'll find two answers. One is a diagrammatic representation of how the poster(s) view our mental representations of different verbal catenations or constructions relating to time in English. The second is a rough breakdown of what EFL teachers would call 'tenses', and how they're used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my natural inclination with regards to this question would be to close it. It is far to broad in scope and simply cannot be answered in any meaningful or useful way. There is a further issue, which is that the representation is arguably not accurate in most cases. However, setting the latter issue aside completely, let us just consider how comprehensive this answer (or the other one, or, in fact, any that might possibly be posted in the future) is or could possibly be in the first place. I have duplicated the diagram here for convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dsgdq.png&quot; alt=&quot;picture from the above question detailing how tenses correspond to one another&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us take for example the bottom representation, the one for the present simple. This seems to indicate that that the present simple represents actions that are permanent and continuous. While this may be true for &lt;em&gt;I live in London&lt;/em&gt;, it obviously isn't in the following cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My head hurts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We leave at nine am tomorrow morning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This man walks in to a bar and says...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beckham passes the ball to Rooney and runs past his opponent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;George Clooney asks his girlfriend to marry him, but she says no.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you see her tomorrow, ask her ....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I redecorate my house every twenty-five years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just off the top of my head. It is clear that far more detail and description would be needed to even partially address our usage of the present simple in relation to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't go through each of the constructions on the diagram here, but I hope the point is made. The purpose of my question is not to poke holes in that answer, but merely to point out that issues to do with verb forms, tense and aspect are extremely complex and, furthermore, may not depend on considerations of time at all. Although the post being discussed may possibly be useful to a limited extent to some readers, one thing is definitely clear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This answer post cannot be said to have comprehensively 'answered the question'. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me, finally, to the point of my question here. As I said at the beginning of the post, many other questions about tense and aspect (including those that have nothing to do with temporality at all) are closed with the following banner attached:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question already has an answer here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another? 5 answers &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194424/difference-between-did-you-see-and-have-you-seen&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194424/difference-between-did-you-see-and-have-you-seen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69453/simple-past-vs-past-perfect&quot;&gt;Simple past vs. Past perfect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194481/glad-to-receive-something-or-glad-to-have-received-something&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;glad to receive something&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;glad to have received something&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73143/simple-past-vs-present-perfect-was-vs-has-been&quot;&gt;Simple Past vs. Present Perfect: &amp;quot;was&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;has been&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142530/which-tense-is-more-appropriate-in-the-clause-of-this-sentence-the-simple-past&quot;&gt;Which tense is more appropriate in the clause of this sentence, the simple past or present perfect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invariably the Original Poster's question has not been answered on this page! More importantly the actual question on this very page itself has not been answered in the sense that not every aspect of 'time, tense and aspect' has been comprehensively addressed. I would like to lobby the community here to prevent this page from being used in this way. There is no question that might be asked about tenses, aspects or temporality (other that true duplicates of this one) that wouldn't be better served by a more detailed answer tailored to that specific question. If we have not comprehensively covered tenses and aspect here, we should not be redirecting users here just because their question is about tense or aspect. I am hoping (probably vainly), therefore, that can we agree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not to refer to this question an being 'answered'( in the sense that all aspects of tense, aspect and time have been comprehensively addressed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not to redirect people to this page unless they have specifically asked an absolutely identical question to this one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to hear other users' opinions about whether it is useful to use this page in the way described, and also whether it is felt that reviewers should be able to redirect questions to this page as a comprehensive solve-all for questions about tense aspect and so forth. Ideally I'd like the community to prevent readers being redirected here from other answers altogether. (I'm have no qualms with people being directed here for &lt;em&gt;addtional&lt;/em&gt; info, or as a &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; page containing pertinent content however). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T15:00:36.317" Title="If you want to know how English works, refer to this page!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-02T14:45:50.273" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do we &lt;em&gt;italicise&lt;/em&gt; the term in reply to a suggestion asking for possible terms? I don't mean that we shouldn't, it looks cool, but what's the core reason? Why not &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90086" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T14:45:50.273" Title="Why do we use italics when recommending words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-09-02T17:43:03.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-09-02T15:00:41.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really think &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; is a good alternative for adding emphasis. Code is for code, not visually highlighting something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to me, &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; serve the purpose. They're called emphasis (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;em&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) in Web development too, so here you have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90086" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T15:00:41.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-02T19:38:33.897" Score="-6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this an English language site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, why has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194416/was-not-to-be-closed-construct&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;It was not to be closed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;It should not have been closed&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; got a lot of downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The construct which I was refering to is a difficult one therefore the question deserves at least an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T13:02:10.220" Title="http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194416/was-not-to-be-closed-construct" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5188" CreationDate="2014-09-02T21:27:20.667" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are not related to 'deserves an answer' (whatever you mean by that; why do you &lt;em&gt;deserve&lt;/em&gt; somebody else's time?). The reasons for downvotes are, and as far as I know always have been, &quot;This question does not show research effort; it is unclear or not useful&quot;. Your question shows no effort of any sort, whether research or analysis: with no context at all it is entirely unclear; and with no explanation of what you mean by 'right', it is never going to be useful. Are you really surprised that people voted it down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-09-03T13:02:10.220" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T13:02:10.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5185" CreationDate="2014-09-02T23:39:25.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get a clue about the question's intentions from the first sentences, which I hope you've read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Non-native speakers often get confused about what the various tenses and aspects mean in English. With input from some of the folk here I've put together a diagram that I hope will provide some clarity on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's obviously not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive; think of it as a mere palliative instead. We were getting (and still do) many, many questions asking about the simplest time expressions, over and over, and we undertook this &quot;canonical&quot; Q/A out of a sincere desire to help. As usual, no good deed goes unpunished. I originally wrote the question and answer (with the help of Kosmonaut, one of the original ELU mods and a linguistics grad student to boot) to help newcomers to English understand what we mean by some of the commonest expressions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you're sincere or merely out to be snarky, or you have a linguistics cognoscente's axe to grind I cannot say. Nor do I care. It was not my idea nor ever my intention for this to be an easy wastebasket for junk questions, and if people use it for that I feel no guilt whatsoever. Many of those questions were single-vote-closed by moderators whose job description involves knowing the difference between a good question and a bad one anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, of course you can come up with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other temporal nuances in English. If you ask such a question, and it's fresh or interesting for some other reason, I hardly think anyone will use this question to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T23:39:25.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5182" CreationDate="2014-09-03T06:47:58.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like canonical answers, myself. You can ask and answer your own question, and doing so is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;explicitly encouraged&lt;/a&gt; to further the objective of sharing knowledge. As to who would evaluate it, that would be via community votes as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider preparing the question and answer off-line and then simply pasting them in one go. There’s even &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackedit.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stackedit.io&lt;/a&gt; to help with that: you can prepare and preview text formatted with Markdown, and (if you want to) sync and share via Dropbox or Google Docs before final publication. You can also set up a Chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A blog post would be a good starting point and could test the waters regarding community opinion (via comments on it, or chat about it, as there’s no voting). The blog is separate and not searched via the site search, but you could write a canonical answer based on the blog post and any subsequent discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T06:47:58.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2014-09-03T14:28:02.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is nice to see that even though the rule now is that &quot;moderators are instructed to delete on sight without further warning any content that is not properly attributed&quot;, practice shows that editing extra text is still an option, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194710/how-does-not-least-develop-to-mean-notably&quot;&gt;this ELU question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator's comment suggests this is a one-of show of leniency... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am waiting for this delete-on-sight policy to be put into practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have so far flagged a number of answers, including very good and useful ones, for moderator attention (that is, instant deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once read something about SE being moderated by the community, but now it seems that the community is being told &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to attract any moderator attention if they do not want to see potentially useful information being deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems strange. If &lt;em&gt;moderators&lt;/em&gt; are being instructed to delete on sight, then certainly &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; should be encouraged to assist moderators in their work, as they have always been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If certain content (like an obvious link to an on-line dictionary without an explicit mention to the name of the specific on-line dictionary) is something that the powers that be deem so unwanted on any SE site that it deserves immediate deletion without reprieve (the same way spam is treated), it is hard to understand why users should not be encouraged to treat those terrible offensive questions and answers in exactly the same way as spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Telling users to look the other way while instruction moderators to execute on sight is a contradiction. &#xA;Are users, in order to preserve useful information, now urged to comment on posts, urging the author to &quot;quickly add correct references before a moderator sees it&quot;? I remember those things from the playground... but since we are all over 13, it strikes me as strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such a paradox is the only way to preserve useful content on this site, there is something very wrong in the rules that give rise to this strange construction.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;How can the attribution in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194349/where-did-the-term-redhead-come-from/194350#194350&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; be sufficient, by the way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;images&lt;/strong&gt; are, or seem to be, well-attributed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All images provided by the respective Wikipedia article referenced immediately above each one, with one obvious fair-use exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there &lt;strong&gt;are no Wikipedia articles referenced&lt;/strong&gt;! Yes, there are several &lt;strong&gt;links&lt;/strong&gt; to Wikipedia articles, however, a link is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; sufficient attribution. I guess there should at least be &lt;em&gt;yet another&lt;/em&gt; addition to the post to state that the several unattributed links refer to Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, as another obvious option, I simply fail to see the difference between those links and links to dictionaries with just the referenced word in the link text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T17:25:54.520" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-03T16:01:30.927" Score="21" ViewCount="925" Body="&lt;p&gt;User oerkelens edited one of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/194730/revisions&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt;, with the comment &quot;Saved good answer from potential deletion on sight under the new attribution rules&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had not heard of any new attribution rules, and went looking. But insofar as I found them, I don't see how they apply. I wasn't quoting from a source: the answer was in my own words, but I helpfully (?) linked a couple of terms to a site with more information about them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was my answer really at risk of deletion because I didn't add the name of a site I was linking to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2023-07-13T14:28:06.047" Title="&quot;New attribution rules&quot;" Tags="|discussion|faq|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-03T16:07:49.397" Score="16" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the domain name of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt; uses an ambiguous word in its first element, I think you should prominently place some sort of “announcement” that anyone coming to ELU can always clearly see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this because most beginners first coming here, including me, always think that ELU must be the best SE site to ask simple questions about basic English, but it is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This  confusion is because of its domain name of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and also because we don’t even realize that there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;a completely separate ELL website&lt;/a&gt; specifically geared for beginners’ questions that come up when first learning English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you see a list that includes both &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ell&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt;, it is only natural to make this mistake, so beginners end up asking ELL questions on ELU where they don’t fit well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m moving to ELL now :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87794" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-09-06T16:33:36.260" LastActivityDate="2014-09-06T16:33:36.260" Title="Could ELU place an announcement for beginners linking to ELL?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2014-09-03T16:49:20.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kind of, but not really. They aren't new rules for attribution, but they were recently reviewed. We decided that according to the rules, embedded links didn't pass muster. All linked sources should be named somewhere in the post so a user doesn't have to click or hover to have an idea of how credible the source is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew has given specific guidelines for attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true in your case that because you are not citing the source, you don't need an &lt;em&gt;attribution&lt;/em&gt;, but you should still put the source in somewhere to mitigate the effects of link rot. This is generally good practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't intended to be cumbersome. A simple statement to the effect of &quot;Dictionary.com gives the definition as...&quot; or &quot;According to Wikipedia...&quot; is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, it would be unusual to delete a post without giving the author a chance to comply with the change in policy. Unless your entire answer were a copy-paste from an unidentified source, it would not have been deleted without notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had handled a flag on your post, I would have done what oerkelens did, which was to insert the name of the linked source. Remedies for other types of missing attributions include leaving a comment about attribution if one is not given, editing in a source (if the source is easily discoverable), or deleting unattributed content from a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-09-03T19:02:33.873" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T19:02:33.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2014-09-03T16:51:15.960" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having spent a bit of time on this, I'm going to post it anyway, although KitFox just beat me to it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; the &amp;quot;new attribution rules&amp;quot; apply &lt;strong&gt;specifically to quoted material.&lt;/strong&gt; A simple link to further reading does not require attribution, but where there is material reproduced from elsewhere it is not sufficient merely to provide a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment has reminded me that &amp;quot;quoted material&amp;quot; need not always be textual. The rules apply to text and images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if quoted material is licensed in such a way that attribution is not required, it's still better to say where it came from, as those who check these things won't necessarily know the licence terms and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;SE rules require attribution regardless&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The test for acceptability&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only direct quotations need a citation. A poster's own words do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;just the visible content of the post&lt;/strong&gt; can be reproduced without losing the source of a direct quotation, then the citation is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If losing any links means that all reference to the source is also lost, then an explicit reference needs to be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Worked examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Acceptable:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Columbia Guide to Standard American English&lt;/em&gt; (1993) confirms that &lt;em&gt;surveil&lt;/em&gt; is a late addition to English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Surveil&lt;/em&gt; is a fairly recent back-formation, a verb describing what a &lt;em&gt;surveillant&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;watcher,&amp;quot; an even more recent coinage) does. All these terms are Standard, although some might consider &lt;em&gt;surveil&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;surveillant&lt;/em&gt; primarily police and spy argot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is acceptable because the source of the quote is cited in plain text. SE rules say that it should &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; be a link, and indeed it is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/194664/18696&quot;&gt;Sven Yargs' answer&lt;/a&gt; where I grabbed this from. [Did you see what I did there?] Some material is not available online and therefore cannot be linked to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Also acceptable:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Columbia Guide to Standard American English&lt;/em&gt; (1993) confirms that &lt;em&gt;surveil&lt;/em&gt; is a late addition to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is acceptable because there is no quotation. The sentence is entirely the poster's original words. In this particular example, some corroboration such as a quote or a link would be very useful, but there is no quotation &lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt; to cite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Also acceptable:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what the ESL people call the &lt;em&gt;second conditional.&lt;/em&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishgrammarsecrets.com/firstconditional/menu.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;first conditional&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  is used for something which we expect will happen, though it might not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is acceptable because there is no direct quotation. The link is simply a link to further reading on the matter. The two sentences I've quoted here come from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/194730/revisions&quot;&gt;the original answer&lt;/a&gt; which OP Colin Fine is asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not acceptable:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;reference : The action of mentioning or alluding to something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not acceptable because the source of the quote is not cited in plain text. It doesn't matter if the headword here is a link; the source — which is ODO in this case — must appear in plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Also not acceptable:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;reference : The action of mentioning or alluding to something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/reference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again the source of the quote is not cited in plain text. If the link is removed, all that is left is the word &amp;quot;Source&amp;quot;. In this case, the text &lt;code&gt;[Source]&lt;/code&gt; in the link could usefully be replaced with &lt;code&gt;[ODO]&lt;/code&gt; to identify the source and provide a tidy link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta: if it's obvious where material has been quoted from, perhaps because there is a link to it, then by all means edit the post to include the source in plain text. But there's no need to do that if there is no actual quotation; and if it's not obvious then all it is possible to do is comment. When editing a post or including a citation, try to make it look pretty: a tidied title that forms the text for a link is far better than a bald URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-07-13T14:28:06.047" LastActivityDate="2023-07-13T14:28:06.047" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5194" CreationDate="2014-09-03T19:05:44.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heartily agree with this suggestion. Cheers to you, mockie, and best of luck in your learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 4 questions in the RELATED sidebar that suggest similar things. There is a lot of discussion in comments and on this meta generated by misplaced questions and a lack of awareness of the ELL sister site. I further move that the banner/announcement be prominently displayed in the following places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Homepage&lt;/a&gt; for first time visitors, low rep users and/or anyone who isn't registered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask a question&lt;/a&gt; page, either across the top or in the &lt;em&gt;How to Ask&lt;/em&gt; sidebar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center main&lt;/a&gt;, including everywhere the &lt;strong&gt;Here's How it Works&lt;/strong&gt; banner is displayed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In several help topics related to asking. It's somewhat buried in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;On-topic&lt;/a&gt; listing (IMO), and sorely needs to be added to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Don't Ask&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;On-hold/Closed Question&lt;/a&gt; topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the footer under &lt;strong&gt;Culture/Recreation&lt;/strong&gt;. I realize this is almost certainly a common component across the SE Network. It shows &lt;strong&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt; as the top link even when viewed on EL&amp;amp;U and Meta EL&amp;amp;U. It would be great, in my opinion, if this could be swapped to point to to ELL for every EL&amp;amp;U page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list may be overkill, but the first 3 at least could cut down on the basic and learner questions that appear on this site (and the redundant and repeated discussions that crop up as a result).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T19:05:44.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-09-04T04:02:17.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think downvoted reason is necessary especially for beginner like me. I would like to receive my downvoted happily if there is any reason behind it, because of what ? Because I can learn and know what's my fault so I can do better later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other words, I don't care how many downvoted I got BUT I care to know about the reason. if the purpose of &quot;Downvoted feature&quot; is to give punishment why not giving the reason as well ? Punishment without the reason is useless since I never know what's is my fault and probably I will do the same thing again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keeping the guy who give a downvoted still anonymous = YES, I DO AGREE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BUT Downvoted without any reason = LOOSER.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request a feature &quot;A textbox for giving reason&quot; before someone giving their downvote (and keep this guy still anonymous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87794" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T04:02:17.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2014-09-04T23:04:09.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Letting everyone decide for themselves what is and is not a copyright violation is just a horrible, horrible idea. Copyright law isn't a matter of opinion. We need clear policy on what we can and cannot quote. And we need to be able to flag possible copyright violations to be reviewed by people who actually know about copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am not a lawyer, I have participated in many discussions about copyright issues with experts, and have learned a great deal. There's stuff I don't know, but the following I know for certain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What the OED says about what is a copyright violation has nothing to do with whether it actually is one. No amount of legal disclaimers will change this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The legal info on Stack Exchange is not an attempt to license quotations from other works. Any such licensing would fail. There is absolutely no legal problem here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fair use, or its equivalents in other countries, does not exist at the whim of the copyright holder, but is a legal right. Copyright holders can say what they will pursue as violations, but they have no power to change it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that many, many organizations will quote from UK sources, and many quote from the OED2. These organizations have lawyers who have apparently authorized this use. Absent our own lawyers or citations from lawyers, that's the best information we have on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I also know from my experience on YouTube that many, many organizations will lie about what is and is not fair use. The OED is the last source we need to listen to on this subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78353" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T23:04:09.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2014-09-05T06:51:21.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, yeah, yeah... That's all very well, said and done but explain this to me. Why did this question receive three anonymous downvotes in a row, one after the other? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194020/batman-vs-maxwell-smart-who-said-good-thinking-first&quot;&gt;Batman vs. Maxwell Smart. Who said, &amp;quot;Good thinking, ...!&amp;quot; first?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even posted a comment asking for an explanation. If I ask, it shows I want to know, that I care, that I'm receptive. No replies, no explanations. Nada. Instead I received NINE upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, anonymous downvotes where's the logic? Three different people had qualms and misgivings about that question; or three people simply hated it; or the other two voters saw the first negative number and thought to themselves, &quot;Oh, that's a terrible question&quot; without actually reflecting and followed suit. And there's me staring at it, racking my tiny brains out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How I deal with downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One downvote. I ignore.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two downvotes. Something's up.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three. Something is definitely wrong.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I didn't edit, I left a comment and a number of people seemed to agree with me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I post a one line answer (rare occasion), but I do include an excerpt. Immediately—three upvotes. I think, &quot;Bloody typical. Here I am, spending three days researching and formulating one detailed, watertight answer and it gets 4 upvotes. Today, two minutes finding a half-decent link/reference and &lt;em&gt;swoosh!&lt;/em&gt; 3 upvotes. It's like Robusto says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't make people think too hard, and don't confuse them with a lot of&#xA;  complicated reasoning: Remember, you're playing to the TL;DR crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that's a generalization, because lengthy answers and questions if well-written, (I acknowledge I'm not a wordsmith) will receive positive feedback, but there's still a lot of truth in his words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yesterday I receive a comment TELLING me what I need to do on my answer. This user needs to know that his comments (our second encounter)  come across as being rude. Is this person trying to be helpful? Could well be, I know it's happened to me in the past that something I write is perceived as being arrogant or presumptuous, and that accusation catches me off-guard, every time. Luckily, it's not a frequent accusation. What's more, I know that &lt;em&gt;tone&lt;/em&gt; is impossible to convey,  but a &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;perhaps&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;I wouldn't write...&lt;/em&gt; is easier to accept than a blunt &lt;strong&gt;Remove XX because...&lt;/strong&gt;. And as I say one downvote, I should ignore but I add a brief edit note conceding the commenter's observation;  I get my second downvote, and at that point, I delete. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life's too short.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here's an excellent example of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194916/what-is-a-group-of-cars-on-the-road-called#comment409492_194922&quot;&gt;constructive criticism&lt;/a&gt;, this user didn't downvote anonymously but expressed her perplexions, and thoughtful observations. The poster, listened, agreed, and modified his post. Who benefited the most? The site did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T07:46:31.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5156" CreationDate="2014-09-05T16:40:13.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some style guides, including the most widely influential ones in the Unites States, disapprove of hyphenating compounds of the type &quot;commonly available.&quot; The advice in &lt;em&gt;The Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt;, fifteenth edition (2003), is representative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.87&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Adverbs ending in &quot;ly.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Compounds formed by an adverb ending in &lt;em&gt;ly&lt;/em&gt; plus an adjective or participle (such as &lt;em&gt;largely irrelevant&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;smartly dressed&lt;/em&gt;) are not hyphenated either before or after a noun, since ambiguity is virtually impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So publishers and publications that follow Chicago's style guidelines don't hyphenate phrases like &lt;em&gt;commonly available&lt;/em&gt;—and anyone who favors a minimalist approach to punctuation (that is, an approach based on the idea that punctuation is appropriate only when omitting it might damage the clarity of the writing) may find Chicago's rationale persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's just a style guideline. Hyphenating &lt;em&gt;commonly-available&lt;/em&gt; does not damage the sense of that phrase, any more than hyphenating &lt;em&gt;to-morrow&lt;/em&gt; damages the sense of that word. As long as the text consistently applies the style choice its author or publisher has made, I as a reader have no trouble adapting to that approach. Readers who can't get over their hostility toward a consistently applied style that differs from the one they personally favor are, I think, their own worst enemy: They let their insistence that some minor style decision is wrong divert their attention from the substance of the content they are reading to something that is ultimately arbitrary and trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster's criticism of &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; finds far less support in style guides than his criticism of &lt;em&gt;commonly-available&lt;/em&gt; does. Unlike phrases of the type &lt;em&gt;adverbly adjective&lt;/em&gt;, which Chicago (among other style guides) recommends leaving open regardless of where it appears in a sentence, a term like &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; normally (for clarity) takes a hyphen when it appears before the associated noun (as in &quot;off-topic question&quot;), and Chicago is far from categorical in its endorsement of leaving such terms open when they appear after the associated noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.86&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Compound modifiers before or after a noun.&lt;/em&gt; When compound modifiers (also called phrasal adjectives) such as &lt;em&gt;open-mouthed&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;nicotine-free&lt;/em&gt; come later in a phrase than the noun they describe, ambiguity is unlikely and the hyphen dispensable (though not incorrect). When such compounds precede a noun, hyphenation usually makes for easier reading. ... Hyphenated adjectival compounds that appear in Webster (such as &lt;em&gt;well-read&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ill-humored&lt;/em&gt;) may be spelled without a hyphen when they follow a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of 7.86 is that compounds of the &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; type &quot;may&quot; be spelled without a hyphen when they follow the associated noun, but are &quot;not incorrect&quot; if spelled with a hyphen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2014-09-05T16:46:23.750" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T16:46:23.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-05T17:33:42.810" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to learn that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humor&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/jokes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;jokes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;jokes&lt;/a&gt; were not synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/humor/info&quot;&gt;Humor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about humorous expressions, jokes, puns, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;38 questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/jokes/info&quot;&gt;Jokes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about jokes. But be careful, many joke questions are considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/are-questions-about-ununderstood-english-language-jokes-on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; and will be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;44 questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also interesting is that there are only 5 questions tagged with both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glancing through the list, there doesn't seem to be a noticeable topical difference between the two tags. I propose that the jokes tag be made a synonym of the broader humor tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Howard's comment, I also noticed that there was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pun&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pun&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pun&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/pun/info&quot;&gt;Pun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pun is a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;33 questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pun+jokes&quot;&gt;Pun &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt; Jokes&lt;/a&gt;: 4 tagged questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pun+humor&quot;&gt;Pun &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt; Humor&lt;/a&gt;: 3 tagged questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no questions with all 3 tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think Pun is an appropriate tag because it's a type of humor that relies upon a facet of the english language. As the jokes tag points out via the linked meta question, questions about jokes that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; rely on the English Language are off topic. For that reason, I think Jokes and Humor should be synonym, as they are both fairly generic terms for 'funny stuff'. More to the point, the nuance between Humor and Joke does not depend on the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T20:41:02.770" Title="Should Humor and Jokes tags be synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5194" CreationDate="2014-09-06T09:11:16.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has come up regularly ever since ELL went into beta (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3344/8019&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4759/8019&quot;&gt;here&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;). Both the ELU community and  the ELL community would very much like to make sure learners are directed to the right place, but it is not as easy as it sounds.&#xA;The first screen of the Help page already includes the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, if you are new to learning English, please consider whether your question might be better suited for English Language Learners. [with link];&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could the wording be any clearer without being insulting? The 'tour' is an introduction to the Stack Exchange model, to tell newcomers it is not just another forum. It is standard across the network, so we can't change that. It is not possible for users to ask that a question be moved to ELL till that comes out of beta &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/600/8019&quot;&gt;(see this question)&lt;/a&gt;. And the first page a user sees (by design) is a list of the most recent questions; any announcement would have to be renewed every few days, annoying the majority of users, overworking the moderators and keeping a good question off the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if anybody has any constructive suggestions to redirect English Language learners to ELL and away from here, please post them; but please don't post yet another complaint saying &quot;I thought &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; was for basic English; I'm disappointed&quot;. The problem is well known, and under consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-09-06T09:16:26.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5126" CreationDate="2014-09-07T07:36:18.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning the posting of two or more answers separately, @Dan Bron asks: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there already an established or recommended best practice here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what happened to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once, when I was still a fledgling, I posted two answers to a question that boiled down to orthography. My first post was brief, to the point and effective but users asked me to &quot;explain&quot; why I sustained this opinion. Without wanting to clutter the first post, which had garnered  a number of upvotes (3 or 4) I decided to post a second &quot;answer&quot;, more detailed, containing more references, Ngrams etc. Effectively speaking it was as if I had written an extensive footnote. People were free to either approve or disagree, the response was positive and I received a higher number of upvotes than first post which laid pretty much dormant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was then asked (very politely) by a mod to either delete one of the posts or merge the two together.  It was said that users believed I was  looking to gain rep points unfairly, because both my posts could be upvoted. In short, I was accused of &quot;milking the system&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highly offended, I protested that several times I had seen users post two or more answers, and provided the links to prove it. It was pointed out to me that a user could post several answers if the answers were significantly different from one another. &lt;em&gt;Only&lt;/em&gt; on those circumstances did the site permit this practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, I remembered seeing one user who had posted six separate answers on one question. Again it was NOT a single-word-request, but a question dealing with grammar. The answerer had chosen to break down the question in six different parts, and received a total of (I think) eight upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I signalled this discrepancy in the system, it was suggested that it was permissible because the answers were different from one another. I wanted to observe that however, all six answers could have been merged into one, but by this time it was clear I was losing the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, my pride wounded, I chose to delete both my posts &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the mod deleted one or edited my post to merge the two answers together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that episode I don't think I have ever posted two separate answers, but I have seen others do so, not often admittedly, and not only for single-word requests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a user posts different answers which are distinct and offer alternative solutions, the site will tolerate this practice. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the separate posts can be merged, it will be encouraged but not necessarily enforced. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a user posts two (or more) answers which are linked to each other, and someone flags them, the mod is constrained to act.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-09-07T07:43:43.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-07T07:43:43.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-08T12:45:21.597" Score="3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195387/hypocorism-hypocoristic-vs-diminutive&quot;&gt;distinction between &lt;em&gt;hypocorism&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;diminutive&lt;/em&gt; when referring to the form of a word&lt;/a&gt;. I cam back this morning to find that it had been downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as a user of several other Stack Exchange sites, I generally consider a downvote to be appropriate for questions or answers that are seriously misguided, show absolutely no effort to have done any prior research, are completely off topic, etc. As the downvote hover text says, “this question does show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that apply to my question? I posted several references, but they hadn't cleared up the distinction between which diminitives would not be considered to be hypocorisms, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T17:44:50.363" Title="How can I improve my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-09T17:34:36.903" Score="10" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a few occasions where it was apparent to me why a word a speaker was looking for was unlikely to exist, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/195553/36720&quot;&gt;as in this answer&lt;/a&gt;. I've had it happen a couple times that while many answers with mediocre votes are racing to find words that sort of but not really fit the OP's question, and I post an explanation for why such a word is unlikely to exist with the proper occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the few occasions I've done this, I've been downvoted. This is partly because the burden of a proof against is so much stronger, and in particular usually requires me drawing from society or culture in ways that are evident to most people but extremely difficult to rigorously quantify. The result is that it's very easy to post and upvote mediocre not-quite-answers but the community shuts out any attempt at explaining what's &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; going on with the OP's questions or the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I read the situation right? Is there anything I can do, or that can be done, about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T15:30:39.073" Title="How do you explain why a word phrase is unlikely to exist?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2014-09-10T04:29:48.167" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of your downvoters. I can explain why I downvoted that answer. (Italics and bolding mine, for clarity lest you misread.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it was (to my reading) very negative and opinionated. My experience on a number of SE sites is that good answers are more dispassionate and supportable. Good answers are useful. They address the OP's concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You start right off by disparaging the other answers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most set phrases that relate to this are &lt;strong&gt;very wrong&lt;/strong&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everyone was so wrong, the other answers (which were reasonable, supported with links and might actually help the OP) should not have gotten support. You are implying they did so because we are not as insightful as you are (which does fly in meta, but not on the main site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meal ticket&lt;/em&gt; (a good answer) is reduced to &lt;em&gt;gold digger&lt;/em&gt;, which you informed us was akin to &lt;em&gt;a crime&lt;/em&gt;. Sure, we don't respect them, but is all this necessary? It sounds so &lt;em&gt;squalid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A gold digger refers to a &lt;em&gt;young, hot&lt;/em&gt; girl who finds an older, rich man who marries her or provides for her. This is a disparaging term to refer to a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;delinquent lifestyle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The male in this case is a sugar daddy. Similarly disparaging, and &lt;em&gt;often he is married to someone else and having an affair.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you opine that &quot;marry a guy and he'll provide&quot; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a token of &lt;em&gt;wisdom&lt;/em&gt; and tradition, describing the &lt;em&gt;way society works&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You inform us of how American society really works, which is why everyone who answered is presumably wrong (and kind of refute yourself in the process):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;American society&lt;/em&gt; does not think of marriage this way (is there only one way to think of marriage in all of American society?), there will be no such idiom. American society reveres marriage out of love and disparages marriage out of convenience. &lt;strong&gt;Americans view this as a necessary evil and something to avoid acknowledging and thinking about as much as possible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a helpful answer? To whom? Is it supportable? Is it about the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak for everyone here (nor you for all of American society.) But when someone wants to express an &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt;, that's what &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are part of the reality of SE. It is always amazing to me that people make such a fuss over them. I can't begin to count the number of downvotes I've gotten (well, technically I probably can. Just let me say I've gotten plenty.) If I don't want them, I'm careful to try to give helpful answers; that's the best I can do. If I've done that, it just doesn't matter if someone doesn't like my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if no one ever upvoted me, I'd have to rethink my answers pretty seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T04:29:48.167" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-10T13:53:27.553" Score="25" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;For close votes, we are provided a number of reasons. One reason, in particular, is for being &lt;strong&gt;off-topic because it belongs on a different Stack Exchange network&lt;/strong&gt;, takes you to a list view of related and potentially appropriate SE network sites for the question to belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always hated this implementation, because it is a very short list on every SE network site (it really should just be the same accordion menu as the site's top-left StackExchange site list), but EL&amp;amp;U, I think, takes the cake; the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; option on the list is EL&amp;amp;U meta. That means this specific option for CVs is nearly useless (I don't think the majority of questions asked here that belong elsewhere really define &quot;elsewhere&quot; as &quot;EL&amp;amp;U meta&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that sites usually have to come out of beta before migration can occur, though that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3811/add-ell-to-list-of-sites-for-off-topic-questions#comment11920_3811&quot;&gt;not always necessary&lt;/a&gt;. Well, English Language Learners has been in beta for over 1.6 years now (is SE trying to mimic the Google model?), and seems to have passed beta requirements with &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665?phase=beta&quot;&gt;flying colors&lt;/a&gt;, so &lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt; (will ELL move out of BETA?) &lt;strong&gt;might we add it to the aforementioned list?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T15:55:37.523" Title="Can we add English Language Learners to the &quot;belongs on another SE site&quot; list? (When will ELL move out of beta?)" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|vote-to-close|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5210" CreationDate="2014-09-10T14:21:50.630" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl,dr:&lt;/strong&gt; Making ELL a migration target for non-moderators risks making matters worse, not better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is great confusion about what makes a question suitable for migration.  The main problem here is not the betaness one.  That’s a red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, the real reason the migration list is always a very a short list on all SE sites is because users, even experienced ones, have time and again proven themselves to be poor judges of what counts as a valid question on the receiving site.  Instead, when they just don’t like the bad question, rather than downvoting or closevoting, they try to sweep all the dirt under somebody else’s rug. That makes things worse, not better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More and more, question migration all across the SE network is being left in the hands of moderators, who normally contact the mod team of the other site to negotiate a hand-over.  This makes more work for them, but not so much as it would make if any three users could send garbage questions whithersoever they pleased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how even with negotiated mod-instituted migrations, about one in every six questions which the ELU mods emigrated to ELL failed migration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NkVk9.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU migration stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even on SO, where regular users are given a full list of five migration targets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9sGwh.png&quot; alt=&quot;SO migration targets&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now notice the failure rates, and which are to site not on the above five:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EjIhj.png&quot; alt=&quot;SO migration stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that is blue-for-beta migration site is one that was a mod-only migration, and even these still fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that no matter whether ELL is a beta site or not, that making it an available migration target to non-moderators would result only in a higher rate of failed migrations. This is because too many ELU users are unfamiliar with ELL or consider it a dumping ground for poor NNS questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore do not see how having more failed migrations would help anything.  I have a hunch that it would hurt things, even.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe something should be migrated, flag it for moderator attention with a custom message to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T14:21:50.630" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5207" CreationDate="2014-09-10T17:44:50.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't my downvote on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195387/hypocorism-hypocoristic-vs-diminutive&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hypocoristic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; question, but I must say I think OP is perhaps overreacting (it's only &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; downvote, and there are currently three upvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I can't really see why anyone would upvote the question. Any reasonable dictionary will give &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/diminutive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several meanings&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;diminutive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, from which it should be obvious the much rarer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hypocoristic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is (approximately) synonymous &lt;em&gt;in one specific context only&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be fairly obvious they're only &lt;em&gt;approximate&lt;/em&gt; synonyms in many contexts. Strictly speaking, something like for example, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mumsie-wumsie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (hypocoristic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mummy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) isn't really a &quot;diminutive&quot; form (it's much &lt;em&gt;longer&lt;/em&gt; than the original). But most people are still in the same boat OP &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; in - they don't know the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hypocoristic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, so they use &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;diminutive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I hadn't noticed the question until now, but it looks like General Reference to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T17:44:50.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5113" CreationDate="2014-09-11T00:08:50.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;English phonetics and phonology are part of English Language and Usage.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e, they are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; topic &amp;mdash; very specifically on target.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since English is a living language, and therefore spoken, it could hardly be otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Familiarity with English phonology is necessary for understanding (among many other things)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English grammar (e.g: &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; and /ðə/ði/ distinctions; noun plural inflections)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English lexical items (e.g: &lt;em&gt;can/can't&lt;/em&gt; [kʰɛn/kʰæ̃ʔ],; &lt;em&gt;address&lt;/em&gt; /'ædrɛs/ (n), /ə'drɛs/ (v))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English idioms (e.g: &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; /'hæftə/; &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; = (1) accustomed to (2) past /'yustə/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English syntax (e.g: contractions of quantifiers, auxiliaries, complementizers, prepositions, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To become a grammarian &amp;mdash; or indeed a linguist of any description &amp;mdash; phonetics is &lt;strong&gt;essential&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's a required subject for every graduate program I know, all over the world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And it has been for over two hundred years, in the West.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In India, that's over two &lt;strong&gt;thousand&lt;/strong&gt; years.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So questions are on topic.  Answers are another matter.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you don't actually know English phonetics/phonemics, &#xA;don't bother answering questions about it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Learn phonetics/phonemics instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T15:50:30.357" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T15:50:30.357" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2014-09-11T10:42:15.107" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no answer at all to this other than &amp;quot;I am an experienced speaker and writer of language X, and I'm fairly certain there is no such word/phrase.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other answer is B.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also @djechlin another point ... the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Utterly overwhelming factor here is that...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many questions on this site where the ONLY REALISTIC COMMENT OR ANSWER that ANY of us should give is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&amp;quot;OP, you have told us nothing. Explain more.&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's bizarre anyone went ahead and tried to answer that question without knowing the sense of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a huge problem on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T10:54:28.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-09-11T15:58:30.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My usage, as I put it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77866/15299&quot;&gt;a post some time ago&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this medium, where writing and typography has to express speech and sounds, I use italics and boldface like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use plain italics &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; for citing examples and titles. &lt;strong&gt;Never&lt;/strong&gt; for emphasis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use boldface for emphasis. These are words that would be &lt;strong&gt;LOUD&lt;/strong&gt; in my speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use bold italics for technical terms, usually with capitals, and links if I have them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also use bold italics in examples to point out individual parts that get mentioned in the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found that this formatting practice holds up both in Official Answers and also in comments.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These are habits I formed because I have to explain grammar and language and it's not easy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to do that using unaided English orthography and no sound effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T15:58:30.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5217" CreationDate="2014-09-12T18:22:55.063" Score="1" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I suggest the following name changes:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think English Language Learners (ELL) should change its name to English Language &amp;amp; Usage (ELU) and ELU should become EnglishOverflow, just like MathOverflow is for professional mathematicians, what do you think of this logical unification of the two subjects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason being the abbreviation: ELL is too similar to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;For those not familiar with mathoverflow.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14921" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:47.103" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T18:57:08.070" Title="Renaming ELU to EnglishOverflow" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2014-09-12T21:47:40.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s a &lt;strong&gt;tl,dr&lt;/strong&gt; summary of my position that I’ve raised up out of a comment to one of the CM team: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All I know is that our current naming setup leads to confusion, frustration, and bad feelings. People don’t get answers; they get mad and leave. English alone of language sites—but like Math or CompSci—is so huge that its several communities don’t fit comfortably under one tent. Unlike all other SE lang sites, the current EN-site naming scheme is a deceptive garden path that misleads struggling learners to exactly where they’ll be &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; well-served. &lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is the problem I would see fixed. The “how” doesn’t matter to me: anything that improves the newcomer experience gets my vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Original Post&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the OP: Your argument is a strong one.  Thank you for putting into words. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5194&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/87794/mockie&quot;&gt;mockie&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because the domain name of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt; uses an ambiguous word in its first element, I think you should prominently place some sort of “announcement” that anyone coming to ELU can always clearly see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I say this because most beginners first coming here, including me, always think that ELU must be the best SE site to ask simple questions about basic English, but it is not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This  confusion is because of its domain name of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and also because we don’t even realize that there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;a completely separate ELL website&lt;/a&gt; specifically geared for beginners’ questions that come up when first learning English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you see a list that includes both &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ell&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt;, it is only natural to make this mistake, so beginners end up asking ELL questions on ELU where they don’t fit well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also explains in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5194/could-elu-place-an-announcement-for-beginners-linking-to-ell#comment19057_5204&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;japanese.stacexchange.com is for everyone but english.stackexchange.com is only for advance users. It's confusing! Btw I didn't say &quot;It's easy to do&quot; like you said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the same mistake made, and consequent complaint levied, by people coming from other language sites, including for example the Italian one.  None of the other language sites split this way. That’s because they do not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we do. And we are not alone.  Other sites have done this, too. There have historically been other sites that have needed to as well.  Watch what happened to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mathy Sites&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;: &#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for people studying math at any level and &lt;strong&gt;professionals&lt;/strong&gt; in related fields&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;professional&lt;/strong&gt; mathematicians&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics Educators&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for those involved in the field of &lt;strong&gt;teaching&lt;/strong&gt; mathematics&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that’s not too bad a breakdown.  Notice in particular how the more focussed and professional site is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the one with the simplest name.  I do not know those respective sites’ histories, but I am guessing that it was recognized that the most simply named one would be the biggest draw of non-professional learners, and so sites with less obvious names were calved off for the more focussed communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it gets more muddled elsewhere, especially in this befuddlingly overlapping set:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Programming and the Science of Computing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Unix &amp;amp; Linux&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;users&lt;/strong&gt; of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Programmers&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;professional&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;programmers&lt;/strong&gt; interested in conceptual questions about software development&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for professional and enthusiast &lt;strong&gt;programmers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;computer&lt;/strong&gt; enthusiasts and power &lt;strong&gt;users&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is of course the &lt;em&gt;worst name ever: this is &lt;strong&gt;NOT FOR SUPERUSERS!!!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; For that, you have to go to the site that looks like it’s about hardware issues, not superusers, even though it is:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/&quot;&gt;Server Fault&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;professional&lt;/strong&gt; system and network administrators&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;students&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;researchers&lt;/strong&gt; and practitioners of computer science&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;scientists&lt;/strong&gt; using computers to solve scientific problems&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for theoretical computer &lt;strong&gt;scientists and researchers&lt;/strong&gt; in related fields&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I don’t understand why some things land in one or other of those sites above instead of some other of them.  It’s gotten so one has to look in at least three places above for an answer.  But perhaps this is just me being confused, and it is clear to those communities than it is to me.  I certainly hope so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Hwæt, Ænglisc?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just look at the messy situation that we currently have in English, and compare it with the two sets of sites just described above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;professional linguists&lt;/strong&gt; and others with an interest in linguistic &lt;strong&gt;research and theory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious&lt;/strong&gt; English language enthusiasts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for speakers of other languages &lt;strong&gt;learning&lt;/strong&gt; English&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’re right that this is completely backwards.  The site for any old simple math question that gets asked again and again and again does not go to MathOverflow: people would get upset.  Which, doubtless, is what kept happening until it was fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the problem we are having. Less frequented language sites like, oh, the Pasiegu SE site for example, do not have this problem.  Not even the much more popular Prussian SE site has it.   And there is good reason for that: they aren’t like the Math SE site or the Sysadmin SE site.  That’s because &lt;strong&gt;English really &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; different.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Unlike something like Russian or the Erland programming language, people are not beating down the doors with a killer flood of questions from all possible focuses and backgrounds the way that happens with English and Programming and Math in general.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;EVERYBODY&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; wants those last set, and therefore the only way to not have an increasingly “failing” set of sites is to react accordingly, just like the others have done.  We need to do this for the simple inexorable truth that&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;English is different&lt;/strong&gt;: We need to recognize that, accept it, and embrace it — and then account for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not doing a good job of that right now, and it makes for a lot of unhappy experience. It makes for a bad experience for everyone. The difference is one of volume and focus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until this gets fixed, Stack Exchange will continue to miss the boat on something that it could be doing better, something that it should be doing better.  It is not serving a community — several of them, in fact — as well as it easily could, and should. The current set up is one that’s fundamentally broken and misleading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which sounds terrible, but &lt;strong&gt;it is easy to fix.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;first make site every one go to for english one who has name like other simple place like the math place and call that one english because it is word people think mean that thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then make the professional site something whose name comes not quite so trippingly off the tongue, the one for  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fix is simple, and you have stated it: we should rename the current professional ELU site &lt;em&gt;EnglishOverflow&lt;/em&gt; as you have proposed, and rename the site currently named ELL &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no downside to this. None.  Everybody wins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T20:26:58.947" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2014-09-13T20:09:55.687" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Grace Note, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't disagree with the idea that maybe a name change can be fancy, especially with the confusion between this site and ELL. It's a healthy discussion to have. I'm not going to stop y'all from having some discussions about name changes, but I want to be clear up front not to get your hopes up about actually having the name changed easily - you're going to have to work &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; hard to convince us. But let's put this aside, because that's not the main reason I've come here to post - we can look into the changes once we've got a good idea for a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So putting aside the necessity of a name change, &lt;strong&gt;can we seriously pick something &lt;em&gt;besides&lt;/em&gt; &quot;English Overflow&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;? Seriously - sticking the word &quot;Overflow&quot; at the end honestly rolls pretty stupid as a name in 90% or more of situations. Let's look at some stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/strong&gt; gets its name because it is based off of a construct in the programming world. Basically this gets away with it because it's a cool in-joke.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Math Overflow&lt;/strong&gt; gets its name from the SE 1.0 days, because it was an off-shoot of Stack Overflow. A lot of sites did that back then. They keep that name to this day because the name &quot;Math Overflow&quot; is about as recognized in the maths community as Stack Overflow is in the programming community. This site has far outlived its name as merely a reference to SO - it's grown to its own symbol of identity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SharePoint Overflow&lt;/strong&gt; was an SE 1.0 site that we worked to fold into a SharePoint proposal in SE 2.0 that now exists &lt;a href=&quot;https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;as its own full fledged graduated site&lt;/a&gt;. I want to point out something - it just says SharePoint right now. The need for &quot;Overflow&quot; is unnecessary for them - they're already part of our network as identified by the footer, the top bar, and the URL. The reference is no longer necessary and because the word adds nothing to the meaning, they can drop it without any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/strong&gt; is our research-level Computer Science site. There's also a separate Computer Science site. This was the first time we actually produced our own divide within the network - Math Overflow had always existed as a separate site while Mathematics was our only network site for many years. TCS even came first, existing and even graduating long before we finally got the basic CS site out. They have a similar relation as Maths and MO, but they don't need the word Overflow to get it done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Overflow... it's kinda tacky and mediocre as a name. There's no reference to be made, no history that this name derives from. It has all the same reasons as SharePoint to stay out of it. Slapping Overflow at the end, it is nearly as bad as our old habit of adding &quot;Answers&quot; at the end of names. WordPress Answers, Travel Answers... it's agony in a bucket and there's a reason we, as well as the afflicted communities from our past transgressions, strive to end that pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please... whether we plan to shoot for a simple name difference here (like how IT Security changed to Information Security) or we shoot for an elaborate name (which is almost entirely out of the cards), please don't think &quot;Overflow&quot; is a good idea to help shape the distinction in names here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:33.653" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T20:09:55.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2014-09-14T07:50:49.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not convinced renaming EL&amp;amp;U to &lt;em&gt;Englishoverflow&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;English Overflow&lt;/em&gt; is the answer to stem the current flow of poorly formulated and simple questions that are flooding the site. I'm not convinced that by changing its name to the above the site won't encounter and create for itself other headaches in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my fervent belief  that the site must not discourage non-native speakers whose command of the language is solid from visiting, they help regenerate the community by providing, so to speak, &lt;em&gt;new blood&lt;/em&gt;, and typically, non-native speakers will ask thought-provoking questions which your average native speaker &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; know the answer to but be at a loss to explain. An exception must be made with  simple basic English questions; in those cases they should be migrated to ELL and their fate decided there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I suspect the community will push towards renaming itself (&lt;em&gt;a change is as good as a rest&lt;/em&gt;), whether it will be the easy fix which tchrist posits in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5217/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; remains to be seen. Therefore, I would like to suggest the following name changes as alternatives to &lt;em&gt;Englishoverflow&lt;/em&gt;. I have not gone in great detail as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; any of these names should be adopted but limited myself to giving the gist behind my choice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Academia&lt;/strong&gt;;  highbrow sounding which might have its drawbacks and detractors, however, the  term &lt;em&gt;academia&lt;/em&gt; has origins in Greek, Latin, and French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Avant-garde&lt;/strong&gt;; I like the juxtaposition of the Old English adjective &lt;em&gt;Englisc&lt;/em&gt; with the more modern French term, it also alludes to the rich complexity and history of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Proficient&lt;/strong&gt;; this might actually encourage visitors to believe that &quot;EP&quot; is a site dedicated to improving one's level of English; however the name is short and to the point without sounding pretentious or highbrow unlike &lt;em&gt;academia&lt;/em&gt; and, perhaps, to a lesser extent &lt;em&gt;philology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T07:55:52.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-14T16:43:00.573" Score="11" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Unclutter EL&amp;amp;U before quality drowns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my conviction that the site's health would benefit greatly  by removing those very questions that plague the first two or three pages. As soon as an &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;unanswered question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is put &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt;, deemed &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the questioner/OP to all intents and purposes has disappeared—a recent phenomenon which I have noted to my great annoyance—then that question should automatically go into &amp;quot;quarantine&amp;quot;, i.e. the &amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot; page; no ifs and buts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception should be made for questions which are accidental &lt;em&gt;duplicates&lt;/em&gt;. Often a new poster will pose a duplicate question which is worded quite differently from the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot;. As I understand it, Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;welcomes and loves&lt;/a&gt; duplicate questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I want to be clear about, though, is that duplication is not&#xA;necessarily bad. Quite the contrary — some duplication is desirable.&#xA;There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question&#xA;around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different&#xA;words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find&#xA;the answer they’re looking for. And isn’t that, really, the whole&#xA;point of this exercise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I’ve mentioned probably ad nauseam at this point, people have the uncanniest knack of asking multiple, nearly identical questions with almost zero words in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Jeff Atwood&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above snippet was quoted in this meta post below (Oct 29 2010).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having closed-but-not-deleted duplicates, we have several&#xA;completely different wordings pointing to the same question. For one,&#xA;that increases our visibility in Google search results. Most&#xA;importantly though, it helps prevent more dupes from being posted in&#xA;the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/382/44619&quot;&gt;RegDwight ♦&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an exception must be made for duplicates, I would even argue that visitors might even visit the dupe question and find them useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, after one week of inactivity the &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;POB&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; questions which have not received any answers, and have not been reopened, should be automatically deleted. No ifs, ands or buts. I don't care how many comments a question may have generated, a &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; question is useless if there is no answer. If the OP is present he or she will try to resuscitate the question, he or she will &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; enough to ask how to improve it, to inquire why it is closed. He or she will do some minimal research. That is a good enough indication that the user is genuinely interested and genuinely wants an answer. A user who should be nurtured, who might become a valuable contributor in the foreseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My last observation concerns unregistered users to the site. To my consternation I have noted there seems to an increase of unregistered users on the site,  a great number of these &amp;quot;first time posters&amp;quot; disappear within the first hour or two &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; to return. Very often their questions are the very ones which users on EL&amp;amp;U complain most about. They are the FTPs who don't even look up a word in a dictionary before asking a question on spelling: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196243/real-estate-or-real-estate&quot;&gt;Real Estate or Real-Estate?&lt;/a&gt; Moreover that unregistered user vanished after one hour, the user did not reply to any of the comments left by members. That user behaved  like a mosquito. A small question bite, and then buzzed off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another more recent example is this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196366/fulfil-vs-fulfill&quot;&gt;Fulfil vs. Fulfill&lt;/a&gt; That is a question which should go to the unanswered queue. If the OP wants to reopen his/her question then they go through the normal channels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while those two questions along with a multitude of similar ones are still visible on the front page, the good questions sink in a sludge of banality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are those two questions (on September 14) still visible on the first fifty questions page? Why are those questions, along with dozen of others, cluttering the site? Put them  in &amp;quot;quarantine&amp;quot;. If the OPs return, the questions remain. If after a week they haven't intervened or made any edits etc., delete the lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my little rant over&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; in comments responsible for newcomers leaving the site after one hour?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, in part, they are. The number of newcomers who post a question to then disappear without trace is also due to receiving decent &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; in comments. As these unregistered FTP tend to be non-native speakers, I believe, they are unaware of how the Q&amp;amp;A system works. Whereas users who have 100 rep will already be familiar with the Stack exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like all of us to pay particular attention to newcomers who have seemingly vanished. Are there comments which could be misconstrued as answers? I would also strongly suggest to refrain from leaving such comments, especially to users who have 1 rep. They should be better informed that comments are often wild guesses which may or not be the answer they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The &amp;quot;Hit&amp;amp;Run&amp;quot; users (updated)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is yet another unanswered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198774/accadimic-english&quot;&gt;off-topic question&lt;/a&gt; posed by a &amp;quot;hit&amp;amp;run&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;first time poster&amp;quot;. An unregistered user who will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; return, comment, edit or participate under the same username again. As this appears to be somewhat a pattern, I'm thinking is there a way to check their IP addresses to see if &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; are repeating offenders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T07:20:55.037" Title="Declutter EL&amp;U's &quot;Newest&quot; Page" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2014-09-14T18:57:08.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think renaming ELU is a decision to go under serious consideration.&#xA;A good choice may clear matters up considerably.&#xA;But a poor choice will certainly cause more confusion. &#xA;I worry that a name change to either site is not enough.&#xA;I think part of what's causing our problem is the result of our own choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should have split the other way.&#xA;Looking at Language Stack Exchanges, the only one that does not explicitly say it's for &#xA;students is German, which has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;banner&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;German Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of German &#xA;  wanting to discuss the finer points of the language and translation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All others &#xA;(&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Japanese&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chinese&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;) introduce themselves with a banner that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and &#xA;  linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;explicitly saying they are student-friendly but encouraging challenging/researched questions with &lt;em&gt;finer points&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not frequent these other sites.&#xA;I imagine they get their share of learners' questions, though.&#xA;If the time comes for them to split, I hope they make the advanced site the offshoot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that at one time ELU used to be in Beta, a stage when the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Area51 faq&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;the actual, live site [is] set up on a &#xA;'probationary' basis to see if people use it.&quot;&#xA;During this time the faq also says &quot;[the] earliest questions set the tone and topic of the site for a long time.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this phase I bet the founders were excited by every question asked.&#xA;I looked at questions from the early days:&#xA;Sorting ELU questions by &quot;Newest&quot; and going to the last few pages, I see questions that are interesting and educational but which might have received low vote scores or closevotes if asked today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/398/what-is-the-etymology-of-replenish&quot;&gt;What is the etymology of &quot;replenish&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; asked 10 Aug 2010.&#xA;Today, I think it would have been closed as General Reference and have fewer than 7 votes.&#xA;I don't know when over the past four years those 7 votes were cast or if Google would have &#xA;displayed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=replenish&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline's answer&lt;/a&gt; in its top results. &#xA;But even so, a considerable portion of the answers given are dictionary citations of the word in question.&#xA;Another example might be this question asked three days earlier on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270/what-is-the-correct-plural-of-octopus&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;plural of octopus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;An example of an English learner's question during ELU's early days might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/757/correct-usage-of-on-at-and-in-from-a-foreigner-s-point-of-view&quot;&gt;&quot;Correct usage of ‘on’, ‘at’ and ‘in’ from a foreigner’s point of view&quot;&lt;/a&gt; asked 13 Aug 2010; as of now it has 6 upvotes and 3 favorites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong: Questions like these are illuminating.&#xA;Before reading the posts and sources, I would have answered &lt;em&gt;octopi&lt;/em&gt; to the octopus one.&#xA;But did these more basic questions help get ELU on its feet?&#xA;Has most of our rep on this site come from questions like these?&#xA;(Looking at the sources of my own rep, I don't see anything that I could safely say came from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;a linguist, etymologist, or serious language enthusiast&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We made a logical choice. &#xA;A lot of ELL questions are asked.&#xA;There's plenty of interest; ELL will not likely get deleted from under-use.&#xA;But those questions were and are being asked on ELU.&#xA;Why did we not branch out a new Advanced English (AE) site instead?&#xA;Why did we not leave the more basic questions for the more popular and already-established &#xA;&lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; site, the one that learners naturally come to by making analogies with other &lt;code&gt;'language'.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; sites, as tchrist notes about the Italian and Japanese SE users in his post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through ELU, regulars knew other regulars to have recruited to this potential AE site.&#xA;Would there still have not been enough interest to guarantee its leaving beta?&#xA;Then maybe the demographic of &lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, or serious language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt; was too narrow for their own SE at the time.&#xA;(But judging by the activity of just linguists on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguists Beta&lt;/a&gt;, I don't think that's the case.)&#xA;But if it weren't enough, and if these basic questions were what helped give us a place to ask advanced questions, then maybe the price of having this platform is to deal tolerantly with the basic questions that helped get us here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AE, from the get-go, could have more clearly used votes to say what is and is not appropriate for a site for the target demographic: linguists, etymologists, and serious language enthusiasts. &#xA;Questions that didn't meet the Advanced English site could have been migrated to the general English (ELU or &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt;) site.&#xA;But because AE would have been a niche site instead of &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt;, I think &#xA;inappropriately placed questions would have been less of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose making this AE now, but I fear it spreads us too thin.&#xA;If ELL is for English learners and AE is for advanced topics, what is the point of ELU?&#xA;It seems all that's left for ELU would be question types like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, which don't seem to consistently fall under exclusively ELL or AE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather see a rule that all &lt;code&gt;'language'.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; sites allow students or non-native speakers of 'language'.&#xA;And this is for the site's own good: The easiest site to get to should expect the most new user traffic.&#xA;Unfortunately, a rule like this may mean phasing out ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These suggestions aside, I don't see solutions that will fix the problem any more cleanly.&#xA;I see a banner that directs traffic (for example) helping some but being overlooked by others -- how many of each probably depends on the banner.&#xA;But it may be that there are clever things I'm not seeing, or I have misjudged other solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:26.580" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T18:57:08.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5222" CreationDate="2014-09-14T20:30:59.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/177675&quot;&gt;already happening&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting Shog9’s answer at MSE, the criteria are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Automatic deletion of closed, abandoned questions for questions meeting the following criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Closed more than 9 days ago&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not closed as a duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score &amp;lt;= 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No answers with a score &gt; 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No pending reopen votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No edits in the past 9 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/225187/closed-scoring-0-no-accepted-answers-or-answers-scoring-0-no-reopen-votes?deadline=9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query for questions that are all of: &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closed&lt;br&gt; scoring &amp;lt;= 0&lt;br&gt; no accepted answers&lt;br&gt; no answers scoring &gt; 0&lt;br&gt; no reopen votes&lt;br&gt; no recent edits&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;for ELU at this moment yields 575 questions slated for summary deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T20:30:59.163" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2014-09-18T15:30:39.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, too, have been frustrated with &lt;em&gt;there is no such word&lt;/em&gt; and then have been proven wrong, or at least overruled by well-meaning editors upvoting other answers that, of course, &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; don't reflect &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; interpretation of the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to start on the neutral tactic: Get the OP to respond to clarify what she means, in a context that can be answered. Part of the [help] on the site strongly suggests including &lt;em&gt;What problem does this question solve&lt;/em&gt; as part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is also why I take a general, &quot;Who really cares about this besides the OP?&quot; or, more explicitly, &quot;Who's the audience?&quot; Which, really, is the main question that needs to be established for most of the questions posted on the main site. That an answer &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be found is what editors are seeking. That an answer is &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to the audience of the OP, not just the OP herself should be of importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't express your comments in the same vein as you knowing the totality of the corpus of English speech. Help the OP to frame a question that can be usefully answered, or just flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T15:30:39.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-23T03:12:34.820" Score="-1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Edit - I wish this were a hackneyed topic, but evidently it isn't. The topic is &lt;em&gt;kill first don't answer later.&lt;/em&gt;] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See my comment under the question, if you please:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197762/are-these-dangling-participial-phrases&quot;&gt;Are these dangling participial phrases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why did this get down voted? It is always so unhelpful when a newcomer posts their first post only to get down voted without a comment as to why. This seems like a legit question to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit next day&lt;/strong&gt;] OK, granted &quot;kill&quot; is a tad hyperbolic. And, yes, this has been discussed to various degrees before. The phenomenon of slap-em with cold water and run away, &lt;strong&gt;leaving them clueless&lt;/strong&gt; and adrift to figure out why they are wet, is not unique to ELU. Yet, to me, what I consider rude dowsing seems to happen here more often than elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we do this to a brand-new user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perhaps because of their lack of formatting skill? Although not atrocious but certainly readable, the post in question  was clearly this user's &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not up or down vote initially but let it stand. Now that Cerberus has edited its format and layout, I've given it an up tick as have others, and it is gradually rising above water.  So one might counter that &quot;the system works as intended.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, consider that &quot;clueless&quot; user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He or she is interested enough in English to come here in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They take the time to write up a post (*).  In this instance, more than passing thought is clearly involved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They post with hopes of gaining more understanding ... then &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;WHAM&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the post gets a down vote - sometimes within minutes. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And (more often than not?) &lt;strong&gt;No helpful comment is left to guide the new user&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If if you are a thick-skinned new user, the net effect falls along the range of being left alone scratching your head, through discouragement, to just throwing your virtual hands up in the air and walking away from this place. Or, if you are not so thick-skinned, you might just jump out of the water for good because you worry we are shark riddled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;PLEASE&lt;/em&gt; for all the &lt;strong&gt;newcomers' posts&lt;/strong&gt; needing correction, guidance, {or even a reprimand (* for vagueness, etc. etc.)} &lt;strong&gt;when you down vote, say why, or better, &lt;em&gt;suggest improvements&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't just leave them stranded not knowing what they did wrong.&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, you may say &quot;it's too much effort to deal with all such posts by commenting too.&quot;  Sure, it takes more time to comment. Consider, however, that you have taken the time in the first place to read the post - it only takes a second or two more to say what needs to be fixed. But most importantly doing so achieves two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;educate&lt;/strong&gt; and encourage a new user who might well stay and contribute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;improve&lt;/strong&gt; the overall usefulness and quality of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, again, to those who say &quot;the down vote will send them the message,&quot; I say, &lt;em&gt;well, sort of&lt;/em&gt;.  You are sending them a message alright - but the message has no content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you still feel that lousy posts by &quot;clueless noobs&quot; deserve an indoctrinate dose of cold water, then all I ask is: &lt;em&gt;please never read any of my posts.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T13:22:21.660" Title="nuke-em on first post-em, why do *you* do this without comment?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5355" CreationDate="2014-09-23T10:42:22.657" Score="3" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone who has earned at least 5 points in questions tagged &lt;code&gt;adverb-position&lt;/code&gt;, please suggest &lt;code&gt;adverb-placement&lt;/code&gt; as its synonym. Or nominate the latter to substitute the former, I don't care which. I have tried in vain to do this myself, but apparently I don't have enough rep.... (rolls eyes) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dn50o.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of the tag synonym creation page&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently thirty-three questions tagged &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adverb-position.&quot;&gt;adverb-position&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; but many people ask where &lt;em&gt;to place&lt;/em&gt; an adverb or about &lt;em&gt;placement of adverb(s)&lt;/em&gt; as a result many users tag their posts &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt;, which is too generic. One such case is this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197809/placement-of-adverb-relative-to-verb&quot;&gt;Placement of adverb relative to verb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T09:44:36.370" Title="Synonym for the tag &quot;adverb-position&quot;" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2014-09-26T15:05:01.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good idea. Blogs and forums are a good idea, but they have one weak point. There are a lot of interesting questions, answers and ideas in forums and in blogger sites, but they vanish in the course of time and you can't find things one has read some time ago. It's almost impossible to find such things again.&#xA;There should be ways to make the contents of forums and blogger sites transparent and there should be index-lists and registers so one can find things one is interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63507" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T15:05:01.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5234" CreationDate="2014-09-26T16:22:06.633" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;The guidance notes for ELU's 'late answers' review queue state, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a new user's answer to an old question. Watch for &lt;strong&gt;hidden gems&lt;/strong&gt;, non-answers, and spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A search for this term on the meta site returns no results. Nor could I see anything that looked relevant in a similar search on Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me what a hidden gem is in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T16:26:39.233" Title="What is a 'hidden gem'?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5233" CreationDate="2014-09-26T16:26:39.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;hidden gem&quot; is a good thing hidden amoung not good things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that a lot of new users need help adjusting to SE, it's fair to assume their first posts won't shine like a diamond. But it's possible one will. Look out for those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T16:26:39.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-26T21:02:31.507" Score="-1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I wanted to ask a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, but was unsure whether to go to ELU or ELL. After requesting clarification about this on chat, I got redirected to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14/how-do-i-determine-whether-a-question-fits-on-english-language-usage-or-on-eng/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on meta.ELL.SE, which if applied to ELU would require the migration of a lot of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martha's highest-voted answer regarding at least all single-word-requests having the form &quot;My native language has a word for [concept], is there an equivalent word in English?&quot; would see such SWRs being asked on ELL.SE rather than ELU.SE. She's a bit vague on where all other single-word requests would end up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to waiwai933♦'s answer, all questions that &quot;most fluent speakers wouldn't have asked&quot; should be moved to ELL.SE. Now this is slightly harder to determine, but a lot of the single-word-requests can be easily answered by a native speaker and would thus belong on ELL.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KitFox's answer recommends that all basic single-word-requests should be on ELL.SE (i.e. &quot;single word requests in the vicinity of &quot; 'how is this concept/idiom expressed in English?' &quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted my own question on ELU.SE, because that seems to be the current trend (even though it's not policy). However, I think it would indeed make sense to do a lot of cleaning up. Right now, the distinction seems simply to be between native/fluent speakers vs. non-native/fluent speakers — leaving an incredibly big gray area in between. From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665/english-language-learners&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt;, I doubt ELL will be closed, so would clarifying these boundaries and cleaning up the relevant questions be a worthwhile enterprise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T16:13:44.907" Title="Should we migrate a lot of the single-word-requests (and more?) to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5236" CreationDate="2014-09-27T01:35:21.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not up to ELU &lt;em&gt;as a site&lt;/em&gt; to have a position about what belongs on ELL, even though obviously some individual users (such as me) will have opinions on that. All ELU should be concerned with is whether a question is on-topic &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be very surprised indeed if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198530/an-english-idiom-for-solve-a-problem-that-has-been-solved/198533#198533&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An English idiom for “solve a problem that has been solved”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; gets closed on ELU. On what grounds could that possibly be justified? To be sure, practically all native speakers are familiar with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/198533/2637&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;reinvent the wheel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - but given that we're no longer able to closevote as Too Basic (and that it's actually extremely difficult to look up an idiomatic expression if you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; already know it), I don't see how ELU can just reject such questions. In any case, it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that requests for &quot;well-known&quot; (possibly idiomatic) single words or expressions should be passed over to ELL strikes me as misguided. Very often, the OP does actually know and recognise the right answer as soon as someone posts it - they just couldn't think of it at the time of asking. Are we going to migrate &lt;em&gt;&quot;What's the word/expression for [blah blah]&quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions from OPs who genuinely didn't know, but keep the ones from OPs who just forgot? That seems unworkable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the existence of ELL should be irrelevant to any decision to close a question on ELU. It only becomes relevant &lt;em&gt;after you've decided to closevote for an ELU-based reason&lt;/em&gt;. And even then, only if you know the scope of ELL and think the question &lt;em&gt;would be on topic there&lt;/em&gt; - in which case you can try to push it in that direction by commenting and/or flagging it to the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T01:35:21.490" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-28T03:49:55.323" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the same question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/22072/50720&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;none&amp;quot; singular or plural? How can I decide?&lt;/a&gt;,  but it's closed as a duplicate to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1425/none-as-plural-indefinite-pronoun&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;None&amp;quot; as plural indefinite pronoun&lt;/a&gt;. The latter only concerns examples and etymology, and doesn't discuss the former's question on how to choose between a singular or plural verb. What are the similarities and differences between their usages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet my English is rudimentary, so please correct and educate me if I missed something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T09:32:06.660" Title="Is “none” singular or plural? - Is this truly a duplicate?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5238" CreationDate="2014-09-28T09:32:06.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surely &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/1427/18696&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut's answer&lt;/a&gt; at the duplicate — as well as one or two others — specifically addresses this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With mass nouns, you have to use the singular. (&amp;quot;None of the wheat is...&amp;quot;) With count nouns, you can use either the singular or the plural. (&amp;quot;None of the books is...&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;None of the books are...&amp;quot;) Usually, the plural sounds more natural, unless you're trying to emphasize the idea of &amp;quot;not one&amp;quot;, or if the words that follow work better in the singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/1427/18696&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt;, quoting &lt;a href=&quot;http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxnoneis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alt-usage-english.org&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are two answers at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/22072/50720&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How can I decide?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; question as well, both of which are good and support the view that either can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The customary support for this view is that none necessarily means &amp;quot;not one&amp;quot; (implying singularity); in fact, &amp;quot;none&amp;quot; is just as likely to imply &amp;quot;not any&amp;quot; (implying plurality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/22074/18696&quot;&gt;masarah&lt;/a&gt;, quoting &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammarmudge.cityslide.com/articles/article/1026513/9903.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammarmudge.cityslide.com&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; notice says, you are quite at liberty to ask another question, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; you can say &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; none of answers at the duplicate answers yours. That is, your question would need explicitly to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kosmonaut's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/1427/18696&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[quote the relevant part of his answer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that doesn't answer this question because [state the reason].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and so on for some of the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marking something as a duplicate does not necessarily mean that the accepted answer answers all variations of a question; nor even that the closed question is precisely the same as another — that would normally result in the questions being merged. It generally means that one of the answers provides enough information to answer the closed question, in much the same way as a reference book might provide examples which need to be adapted slightly to the problem in hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;strong&gt;even&lt;/strong&gt; if you do create a question as suggested here, that new question could still be closed as a duplicate if the community feel that your analysis is wrong and an existing question provides the answer. The community might find a different question, or it could even decide that one of the questions you have rejected does in fact answer your question. Hopefully someone will comment in that case and direct you to the specific answer in the duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;standard Help page&lt;/a&gt; about duplicate questions. They are intended to be signposts to good answers, which is why they are allowed and closed with the &lt;code&gt;[duplicate]&lt;/code&gt; label: they provide landing-points for searches using particular words, which then point to the answer. The potential asker may not have thought to use the particular search term which goes straight to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T09:32:06.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5230" CreationDate="2014-09-28T13:22:21.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a noob I'm just beginning to clue in that there seems to be a tension between maintaining quality standards and maintaining a friendly, welcoming atmosphere here. Perhaps the site's threshold for a &quot;kill&quot; needs to be raised or changed, or more subtleties need to be introduced into the voting-process. PS to Tim Lymington: your double-negative is not up to Bob Dylan's high standard, but it's implied advice to grow a thicker skin is well-taken...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92609" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T13:22:21.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4745" CreationDate="2014-09-30T11:51:52.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little surprised that this both has no answer, and that nothing has been done about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; tag. I had the exact same response as Patrick M when I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198981/is-pass-peach-seeds-an-idiom-or-just-a-figurative-expression&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; in the suggested edit queue. Someone with low rep was trying to remove the tag from the question on the grounds that it was &quot;senseless&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I looked for other questions with the tag, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of them are from Yoichi Oishi. To me, this indicates that it doesn't occur to most people to use the tag this way. It certainly doesn't occur to me, or to the person suggesting the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt;, I think the reasonable choices are to (1) burninate, (1a) burninate and blacklist, (2) synonymize with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt; (which I &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; had already been done with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-usage&lt;/a&gt;, judging by the comment stream above, but instead seems to have been one-time merged instead), or (3) allow &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; to live on for use with money questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013/why-is-the-unit-of-measure-placed-before-the-value-for-currencies-are-there-oth&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; are valid uses of the currency-as-money tag, so I'd go with option 3. However, it's hard to imagine too many more questions that could legitimately use the tag this way, so I'm fine with option 2. In either of these cases, the tag wiki should definitely be updated accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2923" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T12:01:29.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-30T22:59:52.903" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I clicked &lt;code&gt;Close&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/199120/51214&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I wanted to suggest English Language Learners as a better site for the question. I picked Off Topic because &lt;em&gt;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring whether my judgment here was good or bad for this question, this is what I was then presented with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing&amp;gt;Off-Topic&amp;gt;Migration&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;icon for meta.english.stackexchange.com    belongs on meta.english.stackexchange.com&#xA;discussion, support, and feature requests for this site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &amp;quot;icon for meta.english.stackexchange.com&amp;quot; is a large ampersand image, and &amp;quot;discussion, support, and feature requests for this site&amp;quot; is in a small, gray typeface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like a bug. Am I missing something? Shouldn't the usual dialog be presented, where you can suggest an alternative site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51214" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T00:22:09.840" Title="Cannot close, suggesting a better site? Only meta available" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-10-21T04:46:26.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5243" CreationDate="2014-09-30T23:21:46.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a bug; this is by design. Beta sites aren't presented as targets, which puts both Writers and ELL out of the frame, at the moment. The alternative is to flag the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But actually, the majority of the questions that are flagged for migration to ELL or Writers are simply &lt;strong&gt;bad questions,&lt;/strong&gt; and the SE mantra is not to migrate what's not good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, their mantra is slightly cruder than that, but that's the idea. Most flags raised suggesting migration away from ELU are not acted upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think either ELL or Writers should be offered as migration targets. It doesn't take much for a question to be wrongly migrated &amp;mdash; Writers &lt;strong&gt;used&lt;/strong&gt; to be an offered destination with many rejected migrations &amp;mdash; and sorting out the mess can leave things looking worse than simple closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the answer is to fix the question so that it's actually a good question which is on-topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;; and then either answer it (if it's on-topic on ELU) or flag for migration to the site for which you have re-written the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And apparently you can now &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239898/new-three-tiered-badge-idea-explainer-refiner-illuminator&quot;&gt;get a badge&lt;/a&gt; for editing a question and then answering it within twelve hours, if it results in an upvote, so there's an additional incentive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T23:21:46.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1712" CreationDate="2014-10-01T16:22:02.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been fixed. Now, the numbering follows from the first item in the list. If the first item in your list is 42, the numbering will follow from that. If the next item in your list is 1037, it will still show up as 43. So the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; number in your numbered list is now respected; the others still aren’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a demonstration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This item is numbered 7, but shows up as 2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is item 4.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And this item is numbered 8, but shows up as 5.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T16:22:02.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-01T20:56:16.840" Score="4" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198882/is-there-any-swearword-in-english-not-associated-with-excrements-the-genitals/198958?noredirect=1#comment421105_198958&quot;&gt;Is there any &amp;quot;swearword&amp;quot; in English not associated with excrements, the genitals, sexual activity or religion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems perfectly clear to me. The user is asking for swearwords that aren't religion, genital or excrement related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was it put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T09:42:18.930" Title="What is unclear about this question asking about swearwords?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5246" CreationDate="2014-10-01T21:09:26.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question appears to be asking for a list of words. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2016/are-list-questions-always-bad&quot;&gt;While I personally agree that such lists are okay, the powers that be have long insisted that such questions are disallowed.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of 9:00 AM GMT-4 I note that the question says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you identify any that doesn't follow the rule and tell when and where it originated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for swearwords that are not related to excrements, sex or religion, and still might shock someone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the question disavows looking for a list, it still seems to me to be asking for a list instead of a yes/no question, especially since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some of them have already been mentioned in the answers below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were a yes/no question, the existence of &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; such swear word would be enough to definitively answer &quot;yes&quot; and then the question no longer needs reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So despite my personal dislike for the &quot;no lists&quot; rule, the question does still look like a list question, and frankly, as a non-list question it would be useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T12:58:17.330" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5246" CreationDate="2014-10-02T14:22:47.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't closevote the original question, and I don't actually think it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that for most Anglophones today, racist/xenophobic terms like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the N-word&lt;/a&gt; are effectively &quot;swearwords&quot;. Given we use that particular euphemism by analogy with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the C-word&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_that_most_frequently_use_the_word_%22fuck%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the F-word&lt;/a&gt;, it's obvious we feel they all fall into the same general category of &quot;taboo words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP makes it clear he's not looking for a &lt;em&gt;list&lt;/em&gt; - just a single example would suffice so long as there's a reasonable consensus that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;swearword&quot;. Perhaps it would have been better if the OP had explicitly asked for a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;precise definition of &quot;swearword&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but that might have been closed a General Reference anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T14:22:47.313" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1773" CreationDate="2014-10-03T07:08:01.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem doesn't exist anymore as this part of the 10k tools has been moved to the review queue since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3546" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T07:08:01.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-04T16:08:47.560" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/199731/51214&quot;&gt;one example&lt;/a&gt; (maybe not the best) of a question that morphed, through editing, from one question to another, as people tried to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does not help SE or its users, as it discourages people from helping (answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be a reason to close a question? (Yes, it is a judgment call, because some morphing is reasonable (and helpful), as a user tries to clarify a question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should it be handled only by downvoting (because the question was not very clear)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51214" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T16:23:11.063" Title="Close questions that morph radically through editing?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5252" CreationDate="2014-10-04T16:23:11.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a difficult one. Thanks for posting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you refer to was certainly asking a different (though related) question in the subsequent development than was posed in the title. I asked for clarification from the OP, but others assumed one or the other of the questions to be intended, and gave an 'answer' to one, the other, or 'answers' to both. Some tried to give a single 'answer' covering both possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After these answers had appeared, OP changed their enquiry to a third related question, which I 'answered', but which rendered the previous 'answers' inappropriate. As you say, this does little for the reputation of the site, or the moods of answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that 'answers' should not be offered until it is clear what the OP is really asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine; but who decides when that has occurred, and polices over-hasty 'answers'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T16:23:11.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5257" CreationDate="2014-10-05T16:00:41.630" Score="5" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to end my status as a &lt;em&gt;lurker&lt;/em&gt; in order to help answer a question that was asking about English usage of a specific phrase &lt;strong&gt;within the context of American culture &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; American government sub-culture&lt;/strong&gt; [NOTE: the question was tagged with &quot;&lt;em&gt;american-english&lt;/em&gt;&quot;]. To answer that question I found it necessary to address issues with the context described by the OP. Response to my answer was mixed. SO... I am asking: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if any, policy exists to guide such questions/answers in the&#xA;  future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199627/what-does-it-mean-when-americans-say-we-love-you-in-an-email/199730#199730&quot;&gt;Here is the link to the relevant question and my answer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under my answer I joined the commentary/discussion of my answer and posted the following. I would ask those reading this to integrate these comments as part of my question. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I myself was dubious on how to best answer this question but language&#xA;  does not live in a vacuum separate from the society that uses it. It&#xA;  would be (IMHO) grossly negligent to answer the OP's question without&#xA;  clarifying his understanding of the context &amp;amp; source of the phrase.&#xA;  Imagine for example if the OP was to walk away from this thread with&#xA;  the concept that &quot;I love you&quot; was (A) synonymous with &quot;I appreciate&#xA;  you&quot; and (B) was in common usage by government. The OP might decide&#xA;  that it would be good English to end every correspondence with&#xA;  government officials by saying &quot;I love you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As for my answer duplicating others', at least I actually provided a source for some of my knowledge (qv professional&#xA;  experience) which is required for such answers. I have been a lurker&#xA;  for awhile before this and I believe when an answer duplicates a non&#xA;  sourced answer the sourced answer should supercede the other. Am I&#xA;  incorrect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93410" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T23:18:00.093" Title="What policy exists on answers with inclusion of cultural context to English usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-05T18:35:07.217" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the other day I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199649/term-for-situation-where-alternative-choice-is-not-really-one&quot;&gt;Term for situation where alternative choice is not really one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it was marked as a duplicate of another, however the duplicate doesn't correctly answer the question. A better duplicate would have been&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80876/expression-for-a-choice-which-isnt-really-one&quot;&gt;Expression for a choice which isn&amp;#39;t really one&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;as listed in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&#xA;I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask/submit this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93379" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T07:45:45.693" Title="(Possible incorrect location) Duplicate question incorrect duplicate" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5255" CreationDate="2014-10-05T23:18:00.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Mitch said, the reasons why your answer was downvoted are known only to three people (at present), and are entirely individual. But it's fair to say that the answer is not of the type normally found here, so perhaps it would be helpful to explain the peculiarities that people may have objected to; this is not intended as personal criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first paragraph is a reasonable answer to the actual question, though there's nothing that wasn't already found in several answers. Not particularly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second section does have some good points, and (rarer and more valuable) some explanation of what your knowledge is, and where it comes from. If you had then said &quot;So the phrase is entirely inappropriate in correspondence to or from American public officials&quot; it would certainly have been worth an upvote. Unfortunately, you read OPs sentence &quot;these community advisors... are govenment employees&quot; as &quot;These Community Advisors are employed by the American government (federal or local)&quot; which is simply unjustifiable. Perhaps OP was using &lt;em&gt;government&lt;/em&gt; to include a church or university; more likely he means his own government. If you think the point is important to actually answering the question, you can leave a comment asking for clarification; that's the original function of comments. What you can't do is say that the basis of the question is wrong because it conflicts with your experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the third section is entirely inappropriate. As you should have gathered from your period lurking, this is not a forum, but a Question and Answer site. Nothing else. Even your &quot;Love, O.M.Y.&quot; would normally have been edited out (despite its relevance in this particular situation) because personal details do not contribute to a good answer.  There is only one sentence in that section that could be properly included in a Stack Exchange post, and that is the one starting &quot;Finally, if the &quot;We love you&quot;...&quot;. That is tangentially related to what OP wants to know, though not to the question as asked.  The rest of the section is your opinion on something we know nothing about.  Please note that it is irrelevant whether I or others agree with your advice, and mostly irrelevant that it is based on a misreading: since it does not help answer the question, it does not belong. More precisely, it is unhelpful, which is a specific reason to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T23:18:00.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5256" CreationDate="2014-10-06T07:45:45.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the correct place to ask. I have replaced the duplicate with the one you've requested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for raising the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T07:45:45.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-08T03:31:16.700" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to ask about Early Modern English, like Shakespeare's or Milton's?&#xA;I ask this because some people seem to think asking about them is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T20:39:58.853" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:39:58.853" Title="Is it OK to ask about Early Modern English?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2014-10-11T21:56:37.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5260" CreationDate="2014-10-08T09:42:41.317" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Subjects which are on-topic are listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help text&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts. Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's even an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaic&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Archaic or obsolete vocabulary and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shakespeare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shakespeare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shakespeare&lt;/a&gt; tag, although that has no description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is off-topic when asking about Shakespeare or Milton (or the King James Bible, or Chaucer, or &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;) is anything which smacks of analysis of the literature rather than its language, or which is simply translation into present-day English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about Prospero's role in the narrative of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is definitely off-topic because that literary analysis/criticism.  But it's fine to ask about how a particular verb conjugates in Early Modern English, or what a &lt;em&gt;petard&lt;/em&gt; was and how one might be hoisted by it, or how one of Chaucer's weak nouns declines, or even what an &quot;iambic pentameter&quot; is, although that last one might be General Reference. Asking what a particular phrase &lt;strong&gt;means&lt;/strong&gt; is moving towards off-topic, either as translation or as General Reference if it can be dissected easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although on-topic/off-topic is a binary decision, members of the community might draw the dividing line in different places, which means that there may be questions which some might answer and others might vote to close. The key thing is to keep a question on-topic by asking about the six topics which are welcomed and avoiding anything which could be deemed out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T09:42:41.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5246" CreationDate="2014-10-10T19:04:57.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to me that in the comments beneath Mr. Shiny and New 安宇's answer, no one seems particularly enthusiastic about the &quot;no lists rule&quot; and yet the consensus is that we must obey and enforce it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many worthy questions may seek answers that are, in effect, short lists. From one point of view, that is essentially what single-word requests are—invitations for answerers to list (and sometimes briefly comment on) the most appropriate words to match the questioner's criteria. Though I'm not a huge fan of single-word requests, they are obviously one of the most popular types of questions on this site, perhaps because coming up with one or two or three relevant suggestions is easy and fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any crucial difference between a question formulated as &quot;What word means X?&quot; (the standard single-word-request formulation) and &quot;What word or words in Category X of words satisfies/satisfy neither criterion Y nor criterion Z?&quot; (the formulation used initially by the OP of the question at issue here). I can easily imagine questions of either type that may have excessively many &quot;correct&quot; answers— such as &quot;What word means 'fast'&quot;? or &quot;What nouns begin with neither the letter &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; nor the letter &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;—but in those instances, the more apt criticism of the question is that it is too broad or too general, not that it asks for a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Jay's comment above that a question that asks for one or more examples that satisfy a narrowly defined set of criteria is distinguishable from a request for an exhaustive list of such examples. It ought to be possible for users of this site to ask and answer such questions without first having to contort the questions so that they can't possibly be interpreted as list requests. What matters most is the value of the question and of the answers it draws, not whether its form can be interpreted as offending some arbitrary but longstanding taboo. Common sense is a better guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Followup Remarks (10/13/2014):&lt;/strong&gt; At this moment, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36745/other-ways-to-say-im-rooting-for-you&quot;&gt;Other ways to say &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m rooting for you?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; has attracted 48,701 views over the three years since it was asked, and it is likely to garner several hundred more views in the next five days, since it carries a bounty of 100 points for most of the next week, offered because &quot;This question has not received enough attention.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The body of the question (as opposed to the head already cited above) is &quot;What are other ways one can say that have the same meaning as, 'I'm rooting for you?'&quot; I see no evidence of any research effort on the poster's part, and both the head and the body of the question look very much like requests for a &lt;strong&gt;list&lt;/strong&gt; of phrases similar to &quot;I'm rooting for you.&quot; So if I were looking for an instance of a minimally researched list request to make an example of by voting to close it, &quot;Other ways to say 'I'm rooting for you?'&quot;—odd punctuation and all—would be a great candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet... and yet... There is something deeply troubling about trying to disqualify a question that tens of thousands of site visitors have cared enough about to view. This is the fundamental contradiction that (in my view) haunts EL&amp;amp;U with regard to list questions and single-word requests: Questioners love to ask them, answerers love to respond to them, and site visitors love to read them. In fact, the only drawback of such invitations to play Name (or List] That Synonym is that they have so little to do with what I imagine are the core concerns of linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts: thoughtful, informed investigations of grammatical structure, word history, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are extremely inconsistent in our barring or not barring of questions that ask for lists, just as we are extremely inconsistent in our barring or not barring of questions whose askers have shown little or no effort to research a question before posting it. Our inconsistency doesn't mean that we should abandon any attempt to bar such questions; but it does mean that a person trying to figure out whether a question is good enough to post, based on what is already up on the site and hence (effectively) approved, will see many misleading examples of what we apparently consider &quot;good enough.&quot; And if their question gets shot down because it asks for a list or doesn't show adequate research effort, they are likely to feel that the decision to close their question was based on arbitrary and unfair selective enforcement. Viewed objectively, it seems to me, they wouldn't be far wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we improve? I favor two steps: rectification of names (identifying reasons for closure that reflect what we actually don't like about the flawed questions), and consistent enforcement (closing all questions that run afoul of those reasons). From other discussions here on Meta, I've gotten the impression that some descriptively accurate reasons for closing bad questions (such as &quot;Too Elementary for Our Site; Try Asking at ELL&quot; or &quot;Already Answered in the Comments and Not Likely to Draw Any Further Response&quot; or &quot;Too Specific to Be of Interest to Anyone but the Poster&quot;) may be deemed too harsh in tone or in some other way inappropriate for the EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the alternative is to get rid of bad questions by selectively playing the &quot;Too General&quot; card or the &quot;Insufficient Effort by the Poster&quot; card, we're not doing the rejected posters or ourselves any favors. We don't help the posters understand what exactly was objectionable about their questions that was not objectionable in various equally general or equally unresearched questions that we've let stand. And we don't help ourselves by giving prospective future posters of bad questions a clear sense what our standards are—a shortcoming that encourages posters to hope that they may be one of the lucky ones whose questions don't get closed despite (for example) minimal research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T09:42:18.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2014-10-10T20:02:48.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My advice is simply to ignore the aspect of EL&amp;amp;U's game mechanics that you dislike. A number of users with high reputation scores at this site have observed that the scoring system favors short, trivial, clever answers over thoughtful, carefully researched answers—but unless you are focused on piling up reputation points, you're under no pressure to devote yourself to short, clever answers. In the long haul, your reputation score will accumulate regardless of how you approach asking and answering questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the prominent display of an answerer's reputation score interferes with a reader's effort to appraise answers purely on their own merits; but countering that drawback in objective fairness is the fact that some answerers have demonstrated sound judgment and substantial authority over a large number of previous answers. A person's overall reputation score must be taken with a grain of salt—there are a number of contributors to this site who currently have lower reputation scores than I do but who are vastly superior to me in knowledge and insight on the subject matter of EL&amp;amp;U. In some instances, the disparity reflects their relative newness to the site; in others, their less frequent visits. But a voter would be extremely foolish to prefer my answer to one of theirs simply on the basis of accrued reputation points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over an extended period, the point system does help distinguish useful questions and answers and useful contributors from untried or unhelpful ones. For that reason, I don't find its shortcomings too objectionable. And the features that I don't care to participate in (such as downvoting), I am free to abstain from.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T20:02:48.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5265" CreationDate="2014-10-10T20:36:16.227" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can text be formatted as underline?  If not, can this feature be added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71576" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T21:01:12.640" Title="Is Underlining Available as a Markup Format" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5264" CreationDate="2014-10-10T21:01:12.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no underlining markup for markdown. The &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;u&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag doesn't work either, so there is no way to underline on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer the other part of your question, as I'm not a Stack Exchange developer, but there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/152160/underline-and-color-picker&quot;&gt;meta meta question&lt;/a&gt; that covers it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It essentially says, &quot;no.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T21:01:12.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-11T15:03:18.527" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you feel that questions that begin with Is or Can are generally poor questions? I'm tempted to downvote them in general, but rather now I'm attempting to edit the questions to not be Yes/No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the intent of the SE is to provide information, Yes/No questions (Is, Can) should be changed to something (Who, What, When, Where, Why, Which, How) to elicit better answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T23:22:21.823" Title="Questions with Can or Is" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5266" CreationDate="2014-10-11T22:31:50.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples, examples, examples. We all can come up with any number of perfectly on-topic questions beginning with either word at a moment's notice. A single word alone does not determine whether a question is on-topic or not, be it the first word in the title or any other word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, after just a quick check, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/300/regdwig%D0%BDt?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;4 of the top 30 questions&lt;/a&gt; of my own begin with &quot;is&quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/300/regdwig%D0%BDt?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;6 of my top 30 answers&lt;/a&gt; are to questions that do likewise. That's 13% and 20%, respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5634/is-it-despite-or-despite-of/5652#5652&quot;&gt;Is it “despite” or “despite of”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12996/is-it-alright-or-allright/12998#12998&quot;&gt;Is it “alright” or “allright”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15039/isnt-the-word-uninstall-wrong/15041#15041&quot;&gt;Isn't the word “uninstall” wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/688/is-rather-shifting-to-become-a-verb&quot;&gt;Is &quot;rather&quot; shifting to become a verb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1749/is-there-a-subtle-difference-between-somebody-and-someone-anybody-and-an&quot;&gt;Is there a subtle difference between “somebody” and “someone”, “anybody” and “anyone”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1265/is-not-at-all-still-alive-and-doing-well&quot;&gt;Is “not at all” still alive and doing well?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18085/is-there-a-word-that-contains-all-the-vowels/18088#18088&quot;&gt;Is there a word that contains all the vowels?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142611/is-the-suffix-ize-particularly-productive-in-the-morphological-domain-of-noun&quot;&gt;Is the suffix “-ize” particularly productive in the morphological domain of nouns ending in “-nym”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79323/is-there-a-word-meaning-append-but-at-the-beginning-not-the-end/79324#79324&quot;&gt;Is there a word meaning “append”, but at the beginning, not the end?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5264/is-my-bad-a-correct-english-phrase/5267#5267&quot;&gt;Is “my bad” a correct English phrase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nine out of these ten questions are open, and have 222 upvotes between them to boot. The top answers have 347 upvotes between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;8 of the top 50 questions&lt;/a&gt; ever asked, or 16%, begin with &quot;is&quot;, with hundreds upon hundreds upvotes between them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/148323/is-there-a-non-sexual-phrase-for-sleeping-with-someone&quot;&gt;Is there a non-sexual phrase for sleeping with someone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-versus-her-versus&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral, singular pronoun (“his” versus “her” versus “their”)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6170/is-there-a-word-or-phrase-for-the-feeling-you-get-after-looking-at-a-word-for-to&quot;&gt;Is there a word or phrase for the feeling you get after looking at a word for too long?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26742/is-there-a-word-for-a-person-with-only-one-head&quot;&gt;Is there a word for a person with only one head?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117493/is-there-english-counterparts-to-japanese-old-saying-present-salt-to-your-en&quot;&gt;Is there English counterpart(s) to Japanese old saying, “Present salt to your enemy.”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14949/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-sentence-structure-she-looks-as-though-shes&quot;&gt;Is there a name for this type of sentence structure: “She looks as though she's been poured into her clothes, and forgot to say 'when'”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37997/is-there-an-american-english-equivalent-of-the-british-idiom-carrying-coals-to&quot;&gt;Is there an American English equivalent of the British idiom “carrying coals to Newcastle”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/is-believe-you-me-proper-english&quot;&gt;Is “believe you me” proper English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's just a quick look at &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;. I am confident we can compile similar stats for questions beginning with &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;. Or &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, which you haven't considered. (In fact, the two top answers on this site are both to questions beginning with &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/do-most-languages-need-more-space-than-english/3022#3022&quot;&gt;Do most languages need more space than English&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/9782/300&quot;&gt;did English ever have a formal version of “you”&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no denying some of these are MultiCollider bikeshedding flukes. But others are just as undeniably among the best this site has ever produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, exactly none of these have received a simple yes/no answer, or would have been done justice receiving one and leaving it at that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, certain things&amp;nbsp;— like not being able to spell &quot;English&quot; correctly on a site all about English, or titling your question &quot;is this grammer??!!1&quot;&amp;nbsp;—, are certainly better indicators for poor or off-topic questions than others. But remember that even the poorest of questions can be saved by a great answer, possibly accompanied by an edit. And that's no hippie talk, that stuff actually happens. Indeed, the most recently introduced &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/166/explainer&quot;&gt;Explainer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/167/refiner&quot;&gt;Refiner&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/168/illuminator&quot;&gt;Illuminator&lt;/a&gt; badges are right up that alley. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, there's no shame in admitting the greatest of questions can be shot down by a bunch of poor half-assed one-liners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'd like to end this by saying that it'd be a nice, but fully surmountable, challenge, to edit &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; on-topic question on every SE site to begin with, end with, or include any word of your choosing. One word does not a swallow make. Don't get obsessed about symptoms, go after the malady.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T23:22:21.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5274" CreationDate="2014-10-12T08:24:46.500" Score="-1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received a run of 14 upvotes for my 14 highest ranking answers yesterday, at virtually the same time. Today 9 of the votes were expunged. Even so, that leaves me with 5 upvotes that seem too good to be true (that is, not earned by the usual system of carefully considered one-by-one voting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The automated explanation for the removal of the 9 upvotes very politely reassured me that everything was being taken care of, skullduggery was not suspected, etc.; but I wonder whether (1) I should have reported the run of upvotes to someone in the EL&amp;amp;U administration as soon as I noticed them, and (2) whether the remaining 5 serial upvotes not yet stripped out of my current total constitute some sort of threshold acceptable windfall (or a nice parting gift or something of that nature), or whether they too should be retracted—and perhaps will be in the fullness of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone clarify the responsibilities of a beneficiary of serial upvoting who would like to be a (reasonably) good citizen about this type of thing, especially in the event that (as in my case) the automatic retraction of the upvotes covered only part of the total bonanza? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T16:26:15.023" Title="Should users immediately report to admins when they receive a windfall of serial upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5275" CreationDate="2014-10-14T10:06:11.803" Score="20" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1515/automatically-replace-the-enter-image-description-here-when-the-post-is-saved&quot;&gt;a request&lt;/a&gt; a couple of years ago to replace &quot;enter image decription here&quot; with some sort of generic text. I think this is a bad idea, as it doesn't add anything. Shog's comment on the proposal essentially articulates how I feel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would rather it changed to something like, &quot;Author hates blind people&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our only other option is to enter useful descriptions by hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Aenglish.stackexchange.com+%22enter+image+description+here%22&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;aq=t&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&amp;amp;client=firefox-a&amp;amp;channel=sb&amp;amp;gfe_rd=cr&amp;amp;ei=Y-o8VJr_O8-q8wfC_oKACw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Google search&lt;/a&gt; shows which posts are still in need of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will make a list of posts that still require fixing, and we can remove them from the list as we go. Feel free to add any that you find yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to write like Shakespeare or Nabokov, just something that makes it clear what the picture is of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this is a big task, but each picture adequately described is a little victory!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in tips on how best to fill out an alt text, &lt;a href=&quot;http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; has some ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T19:34:43.050" Title="Call to action: fill in image descriptions" Tags="|support|images|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5270" CreationDate="2014-10-14T10:15:12.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;To do:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(got to page 11 on the Google search)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to everyone for getting on this so quickly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Done:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158821/processor-vs-processer&quot;&gt;Processor vs Processer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143022/as-evidenced-by-or-as-evident-by&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;As evidenced by&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;as evident by&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/102228/using-the-verb-entitle&quot;&gt;Use of &amp;quot;entitle&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;the book is entitled 1984&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108134/etymology-of-the-name-stimpson&quot;&gt;Etymology of the name &amp;quot;Stimpson&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119293/what-is-the-difference-between-wriggle-room-and-wiggle-room&quot;&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;wriggle room&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wiggle room&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103446/when-things-used-to-be-worth-x-millions&quot;&gt;When Things Used To be &amp;quot;Worth &amp;#39;X&amp;#39; Millions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/151132/who-are-the-witnesses-in-a-court-hearing&quot;&gt;Who are the witnesses in a court hearing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150731/what-does-it-mean-lowess-smooth&quot;&gt;what does it mean: &amp;quot;Lowess smooth&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65650/all-our-x-vs-all-of-our-x&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;All our X&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;all of our X&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75461/what-is-the-name-of-this-structure-at-kids-playground&quot;&gt;What is the name of this structure at kids playground?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133565/why-is-the-word-pepper-used-for-both-capsicum-e-g-bell-pepper-and-piper-e&quot;&gt;Why is the word &amp;quot;pepper&amp;quot; used for both capsicum (e.g. bell pepper) and piper (e.g. black pepper)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138734/how-to-refer-on-the-property-of-a-line-which-has-a-sudden-change-in-its-directio&quot;&gt;How to refer on the property of a line which has a sudden change in its direction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149791/whats-the-meaning-of-country-years&quot;&gt;what&amp;#39;s the meaning of &amp;quot;country- years&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75602/why-are-scaring-and-scarring-confused-by-some-dictionaries&quot;&gt;Why are &amp;quot;scaring&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;scarring&amp;quot; confused by some dictionaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84218/is-it-flotation-or-floatation&quot;&gt;Is it &amp;quot;flotation&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;floatation&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139750/exchanging-experience-or-exchange-experience&quot;&gt;Exchanging Experience or Exchange Experience&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/62159/how-is-all-your-data-are-belong-to-us-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;How is &amp;quot;all your data are belong to US&amp;quot; grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158626/how-to-express-the-trend-in-this-graph-using-the-appropriate-phrases&quot;&gt;How to express the trend in this graph using the appropriate phrases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110492/how-to-refer-to-the-elevated-areas-of-a-mountain&quot;&gt;How to refer to the &amp;quot;elevated areas&amp;quot; of a mountain?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4429/the-a-new-answer-was-posted-quick-refresh-wont-update-the-answer-counter-prop&quot;&gt;The &amp;quot;a new answer was posted&amp;quot; quick refresh won&amp;#39;t update the answer counter properly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39971/i-would-like-to-ask-you-a-favour-vs-i-would-like-to-ask-you-for-a-favour&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I would like to ask you a favour&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;I would like to ask you for a favour&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181546/is-anecdotally-a-proper-adverb&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;anecdotally&amp;quot; a proper adverb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118291/how-to-refer-to-those-fully-equipped-houses-people-let-to-university-students&quot;&gt;How to refer to those fully-equipped houses people let to university students?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163144/why-is-it-called-slippery-dick&quot;&gt;Why is it called &amp;quot;slippery dick&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44969/what-do-we-call-the-gui-box-which-groups-elements-together&quot;&gt;What do we call the GUI &amp;quot;box&amp;quot; which groups elements together?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70975/book-paragraphs-vs-book-snippets&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Book paragraphs&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;book snippets&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185898/meaning-of-fl-and-seq&quot;&gt;Meaning of &amp;quot;fl.&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;seq.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113554/meaning-of-the-word-findings&quot;&gt;Meaning of the word &amp;quot;findings&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173204/can-quotation-marks-be-used-when-describing-the-contents-of-a-label&quot;&gt;Can Quotation Marks be Used When Describing the Contents of a Label?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152970/what-is-the-meaning-of-position-fulfillment&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of `Position Fulfillment`?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125910/when-and-how-did-pretty-enter-english-as-an-intensifying-adverb&quot;&gt;When and how did &amp;quot;pretty&amp;quot; enter English as an intensifying adverb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185672/collective-noun-for-lightnings-thunderbolts&quot;&gt;Collective noun for lightning(s) / thunderbolts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188791/whats-a-word-that-describes-this-facial-expression&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a word that describes this facial expression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147564/is-this-a-grill-door-how-do-you-narrate-if-some-one-opens-or-closes-it&quot;&gt;Is this a Grill door? how do you narrate if some one opens or closes it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188455/meaning-of-the-difference-between-involvement-and-commitment-is-like-ham-and-eg&quot;&gt;Meaning of &amp;#39;The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189755/dust-vs-undust&quot;&gt;Dust vs. Undust?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4626/is-kviews-intentional&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;kviews&amp;quot; intentional?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166155/whats-jewishness-supposed-to-mean&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;jewishness&amp;quot; supposed to mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142791/cross-this-line-versus-cross-the-line&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;cross this line&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;cross the line&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/170536/do-onomatopoeic-words-lose-their-onomatopoeic-character&quot;&gt;Do onomatopoeic words lose their onomatopoeic character?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/167914/where-in-the-world-are-cabinets-called-cupboards&quot;&gt;Where in the world are cabinets called cupboards?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188271/what-do-you-call-those-fenced-grassy-areas-that-people-own-in-the-countryside&quot;&gt;What do you call those fenced grassy areas that people own in the countryside?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149449/what-is-this-part-of-a-bow-tie-called&quot;&gt;What is this part of a bow tie called?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/163955/3559&quot;&gt;Using 'good' and 'well' in comparisons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/174269/what-does-long-mean-before-a-name&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; mean before a name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181931/why-some-blade-is-called-beaver-blade&quot;&gt;Why some blade is called &amp;quot;beaver blade&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132245/is-the-word-radial-in-proper-usage-if-i-want-to-describe-a-star-like-structure&quot;&gt;Is the word &amp;quot;radial&amp;quot; in proper usage if I want to describe a star-like structure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117586/a-word-that-refers-to-a-half-smile&quot;&gt;A word that refers to a &amp;quot;half-smile&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47977/romney-claims-that-china-likes-to-flaunt-the-rules&quot;&gt;Romney claims that China likes to &amp;quot;flaunt the rules&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119256/what-is-the-proper-name-for-the-corkscrew-at-the-top-of-a-soda-bottle&quot;&gt;What is the proper name for the corkscrew at the top of a soda bottle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/171808/3559&quot;&gt;Put down a downpayment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193149/the-meaning-of-muted-kinetics&quot;&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;muted kinetics&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-equivalent-of-komorebi-%e6%9c%a8%e6%bc%8f%e3%82%8c%e6%97%a5-sunshine-filtering-through-leaves&quot;&gt;English equivalent of komorebi (木漏れ日) — &amp;quot;sunshine filtering through leaves&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5231/synonym-for-the-tag-adverb-position&quot;&gt;Synonym for the tag &amp;quot;adverb-position&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190291/why-does-the-word-tortilla-refer-to-three-distinct-types-of-edibles&quot;&gt;Why does the word &amp;quot;tortilla&amp;quot; refer to three distinct types of edibles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171125/etymology-of-manhole&quot;&gt;Etymology of &amp;quot;manhole&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193520/momentary-vs-temporary&quot;&gt;Momentary vs Temporary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198326/what-is-the-meaning-and-usage-of-this-is-true-of&quot;&gt;What is the meaning and usage of this “is true of”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172810/etymology-of-bridge-the-card-game&quot;&gt;Etymology of &amp;quot;bridge&amp;quot; (the card game)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/157925/the-name-given-to-the-trail-of-afterburn-of-a-jet-perhaps&quot;&gt;The name given to the trail of afterburn (of a jet perhaps?)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163189/why-mention-graph-of-genuflect-is-so-steep&quot;&gt;Why &amp;#39;mention graph&amp;#39; of genuflect is so steep?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198682/what-is-the-origin-and-sense-of-the-phrase-put-up-or-shut-up&quot;&gt;What is the origin and sense of the phrase “put up or shut up”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190057/turn-right-backward-or-turn-slightly-right-backward&quot;&gt;turn right backward or turn slightly right backward?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200063/word-for-getting-hit-in-the-head-lowering-your-neck-and-raising-your-shoulder&quot;&gt;word for getting hit in the head, lowering your neck and raising your shoulder? (shrug?)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200170/is-there-a-generic-expression-for-a-universal-product&quot;&gt;Is there a generic expression for a &amp;quot;universal product&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193143/what-do-you-call-a-blanket-used-for-moving&quot;&gt;What do you call a blanket used for moving?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200149/what-do-you-call-those-roofs-you-usually-find-at-the-entrance-of-buildings&quot;&gt;What do you call those roofs you usually find at the entrance of buildings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196354/word-for-a-body-of-water-that-is-sufficiently-populated-with-fish-and-worthy-of&quot;&gt;Word for a body of water that is sufficiently populated with fish and worthy of fishing in&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200950/word-for-the-entire-back-part-of-the-body&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;the entire back part of the body&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175301/a-single-word-for-a-building-located-in-the-centre-of-fork-intersection&quot;&gt;A single word for a building located in the centre of fork (intersection)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200555/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-seemingly-noun-word-claw-catch-in-a-poem&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of the (seemingly) noun word &amp;quot;claw-catch&amp;quot; in a poem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195036/prepositions-the-confusing-widgets-of-language&quot;&gt;Prepositions: &amp;quot;The confusing widgets of language&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194128/whats-the-proper-american-english-and-british-english-word-for-the-wind-shield&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the proper American English and British English word for the wind shield used on beaches?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190089/what-do-you-call-a-water-tap-placed-on-the-outside&quot;&gt;what do you call a water tap placed on the outside&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197804/present-perfect-continuous&quot;&gt;Present perfect continuous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196856/order-of-adjectives-exceptions&quot;&gt;order of adjectives exceptions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198561/what-is-the-name-of-the-symbol-used-to-depict-eat-and-drink&quot;&gt;What is the name of the symbol used to depict &amp;#39;eat and drink&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196830/what-would-be-an-apt-technical-term-for-the-fear-of-eating-cat-food&quot;&gt;What would be an apt technical term for the fear of eating cat food?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199029/what-do-you-call-the-protruding-square-structures-on-the-top-of-a-tower&quot;&gt;What do you call the protruding square structures on the top of a tower?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/174528/what-is-the-name-of-the-supports-which-are-used-with-screws-to-hold-a-box-togeth&quot;&gt;What is the name of the supports which are used with screws to hold a box together?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196942/im-flabbergasted-old-fashioned-pedantic-refined-educated&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m flabbergasted!&amp;quot; - Old fashioned? Pedantic? Refined? Educated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198332/what-is-the-meaning-of-this-general-government&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of this “General Government”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196492/use-of-the-opening-roll-for-corny-pointless-exposition&quot;&gt;Use of the opening roll for corny/pointless exposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149533/two-yellow-spots-on-its-wings-vs-a-yellow-spot-on-both-wings&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Two yellow spots on its wings&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;a yellow spot on both wings&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189891/if-x-was-not-part-y-id-like-it-meaning&quot;&gt;If X was not part Y, I&amp;#39;d like it - meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184445/translation-of-german-bolzplatz-whats-the-name-for-an-outdoor-area-whose-pu&quot;&gt;Translation of German &amp;quot;Bolzplatz&amp;quot; – what&amp;#39;s the name for an outdoor area whose purpose is to provide room for soccer/football?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190287/what-are-schlieren-in-english&quot;&gt;What are &amp;quot;schlieren&amp;quot; in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195586/what-is-the-meaning-of-sticks-as-a-measurement-unit&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;sticks&amp;quot; as a measurement unit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97714/what-does-mechanical-mean-here&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;mechanical&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125887/a-ligature-og&quot;&gt;A ligature &amp;quot;og&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143627/what-do-you-call-the-individual-enclosed-defecating-areas-in-toilets&quot;&gt;What do you call the individual enclosed defecating areas in toilets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39751/where-were-should-shall-and-must-in-the-18th-century&quot;&gt;Where were &amp;quot;should&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;shall&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;must&amp;quot; in the 18th Century?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another/21847#21847&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147511/what-do-you-call-unclean-water-that-you-cant-see-through/147515#147515&quot;&gt;What do you call unclean water that you can&amp;#39;t see through?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T22:13:41.240" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-14T10:15:12.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2014-10-14T10:57:28.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is a good idea. It does not make the image any more accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have started a thread asking people to fill in image descriptions of old images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5270/call-to-action-fill-in-image-descriptions&quot;&gt;Call to action: fill in image descriptions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T10:57:28.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5231" CreationDate="2014-10-15T23:15:04.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As snailboat commented, the tag-synonym suggestion system is pretty much unusable. Basically &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; has enough reputation to suggest anything, and on the off chance that you find a gap and squeeze in a suggestion, pretty much nobody else will be able to vote on it, even if they manage to find the well-hidden page where the suggestions are listed. Forget about it, and post synonym suggestions as new meta threads instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T23:15:04.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5268" CreationDate="2014-10-17T16:26:15.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your responsibility in such cases is to not worry about it, let the automatic processes take care of what they wish to take care of, and enjoy the remaining reputation/badges. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T16:26:15.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5270" CreationDate="2014-10-17T22:23:47.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/235921/posts-containing-images-without-alt-text?SpecialMention=Ngram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt; to find posts that lack image descriptions.  As of 2014-10-17, the query shows about 1500 posts that need work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind that Data Explorer results are based on weekly extracts from the database, and therefore may not reflect recent changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16310" LastEditorUserId="16310" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T22:52:34.987" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T22:52:34.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-19T15:15:23.017" Score="-5" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some questions I asked on Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;As you can see, they received some negative comments, downvotes, and close votes.&#xA;I wonder why.&#xA;Do they dislike Shakepeare's works?&#xA;It's okay if that is the case.&#xA;Everybody has his likes and dislikes.&#xA;However, I wonder why they just &lt;strong&gt;can't&lt;/strong&gt; leave such questions alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202901/the-meaning-of-yet-in-ere-yet-the-salt-of-most-unrighteous-tears-had-left-the&quot;&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;yet&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her galled eyes&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202883/ere-yet-the-salt-of-most-unrighteous-tears-had-left-the-flushing-in-her-galled-e#comment428757_202883&quot;&gt;Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her galled eyes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200086/antecedent-of-whose-common-theme-is-death-of-fathers-in-hamlet&quot;&gt;Antecedent of &amp;quot;whose common theme is death of fathers&amp;quot; in Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202181/let-me-not-think-ont-frailty-thy-name-is-woman&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Like Niobe, all tears&amp;quot; an apposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196155/to-reason-most-absurd-in-hamlet&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;To reason most absurd&amp;quot; in Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197188/does-not-divide-the-sunday-from-the-week&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197188/does-not-divide-the-sunday-from-the-week&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:36:14.277" Title="Why do some people have negative opinions against questions on Shakespeare's works?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|question-closure|low-quality-posts|self-governance|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5276" CreationDate="2014-10-19T23:47:40.557" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The central problem here is that most of your so-called “questions”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;show no research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;present no theories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and expend no effort. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That situation alone merits a &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; according to the tooltip guidelines regarding downvotes. To see why, hover over the down-arrow on any question and the following descriptive text briefly appears: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you do not show any research effort, people are perfectly apt to downvote you; it even says they should.  Also, you should read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;our Help Center’s text on how to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt;, where you would learn that it advises you to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You sometimes don’t do those things.   When you don’t, it is not a good question for this Community.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s probably why all of these were closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/203619&quot;&gt;Is Shakespeare ungrammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Primarily Opinion Based”, and now deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/194772&quot;&gt;“No, faith, not a jot, but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Too Broad”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/195237&quot;&gt;“For food and diet to some enterprise that hath a stomach in’t”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Primarily Opinion Based”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/198776&quot;&gt;What wouldst thou beg, Laertes, That shall not be my offer, not thy asking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Off Topic: because it is about interpreting a stylised and antiquated literary usage”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/197188&quot;&gt;Does not divide the Sunday from the week&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Off Topic: General Reference”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/202181&quot;&gt;Is “Like Niobe, all tears” an apposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18129/discussion-on-question-by-ivanhoescott&quot;&gt;“Off Topic: Proofreading”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/204046&quot;&gt;Etymology of the meaning of waste as a broad expanse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Off Topic: General Reference”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/161258&quot;&gt;Use of singular they for specific person&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as a duplicate of several other existing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/199678&quot;&gt;Can “what” be a plural interrogative pronoun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as “Off Topic: General Reference”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/198968&quot;&gt;Can “what” be plural?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status&lt;/strong&gt;: Closed as a duplicate of an existing question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicates got closed because you couldn’t be bothered to search our site for questions similar to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problematic type of question of yours is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/202181&quot;&gt;one that says “Is this right?”&lt;/a&gt;  That is tepid, and it may well be construed as Off Topic Proofreading. Proofreading question come in many guises, and this is one of them. They are unlikely to be of help to future visitors to this site.  They do not generate quality answers — which is only to be expected, really, since for the most part, questions of quality generate answers in kind while questions lacking in quality most often generate either no answer at all or else poor ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the standard moderator messages here contains explanatory text about one sort of off-topic question, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193929/what-is-the-grammatical-mistakes-in-the-pity-is-that-no-sooner-he-had-left-the#comment406336_193929&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew Leach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading questions can come in many forms:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&quot;Help me fix this&quot;, &quot;What's wrong with this&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes&quot;, Which is correct&quot;,&lt;/em&gt; but they &lt;strong&gt;all involve reading a specific text and won't really help anyone else.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that list can be added such questions like &lt;em&gt;“Is this right?”&lt;/em&gt;. They have no lasting value because they apply only to a single bit of text alone and will help no one else but the original poster.  They are of no lasting value to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot expect demand quality answers of the community when you cannot be bothered to produce a quality question.  This overall lack of quality is the central problem in all your many questions of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wonderment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  They aren’t real questions. Such non-question musing might work somewhere else, like a discussion forum or a social-media site or a chat room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these wandering non-questions of wonder seem to have no other purpose than to provoke discussion, and &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; is something specifically counter to the fundamental question-and-answer nature of the SE network in general and of ELU in particular. I’m talk about the way you again and again and again go tossing off non-questions like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/202901&quot;&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;wondering&lt;/strong&gt; about the meaning of &quot;yet&quot; in the sentence above.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the while pretending it an actual question. However, it is nothing of the sort. We have no idea what you’re asking, what it is you’re &lt;strong&gt;wondering&lt;/strong&gt;. You haven’t done your own legwork, and you’re expecting us to do that work for you.  That is not reasonable.  At best, such questions merit a &lt;strong&gt;closevote&lt;/strong&gt; on those grounds alone.  At worst, they come off as pestiferous &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;trolling&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, because they seek to provoke discussions not answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now you should have gotten the idea that things that say nothing more than “I   &lt;strong&gt;wonder&lt;/strong&gt; what blah means” are apt to be closed.  They aren’t proper questions.  At the time of this writing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A55046+wonder&quot;&gt;you have four and twenty questions in which you “wonder”&lt;/a&gt;. Most of these are not real questions. Many are already closed, and several others are well on their way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in the case of your wondering about “yet”,  even if it were a genuine question, it’s nothing but a trivial matter of General Reference.  If you had bothered to explain what you were wondering, then maybe it would have been a question, but I doubt it: you would have figured it out yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one commenter justly wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202901/the-meaning-of-yet-in-ere-yet-the-salt-of-most-unrighteous-tears-had-left-the#comment428753_202901&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, I do not believe this website is meant to be a resource for explaining the language of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. There are probably websites that do that, and I know there are books that have plenty of notes on the play's language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you’re turning out to be something of a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;help-vampire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; regarding Shakespeare, you should not be surprised that the Community does not take kindly to that sort of behavior and reacts accordingly.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T04:06:37.323" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5276" CreationDate="2014-10-19T23:48:39.010" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a right to be here, and you have a right (it is not off topic) to post questions about Shakespeare's writing. You've gotten upvotes (including mine on occasion) and answers (including mine once).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people have a right to be here, and to express their (&lt;em&gt;whatever&lt;/em&gt;). They have a clear right to express themselves with anonymous downvotes, with closevotes and with comments (as long as they don't violate comment policy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you think this system is defective? Why do you think people should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; down vote you or comment if they believe your question is somehow deficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking why people leave anonymous down votes, that has been addressed here on multiple occasions. My biggest problem with commenting on down votes is that people get defensive. No one likes to be down voted, no one thinks they deserve it, and people tend to insist (in the form of a tedious argument I don't really want to engage in) that I &lt;strong&gt;prove&lt;/strong&gt; to them why my issue with their question is legitimate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone here is &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt;. One user recently reacted to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202656/&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; I made challenging his answer by telling me to pull my head out of my ass and telling StonyB (one of the most helpful people here) that he was wrong and to mind his own business. Who needs that? It's only entertaining the first few dozen times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system works. Good questions get answers, and great questions rise quickly. If you can't abide down votes or comments, you should not be posting on this (or any) SE site. What is that line that in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T03:40:13.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-20T01:45:42.790" Score="-9" ViewCount="870" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does a question which shows no research, no effort deserve a downvote?&#xA;If the answer is yes, I would like to know the reason behind it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T20:38:35.567" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T11:58:59.687" Title="Does a question which shows no research, no effort deserve a downvote?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|low-quality-posts|asking-questions|self-governance|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-10-20T04:57:36.867" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Einstein once said, if I had 60 minutes to solve a problem I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the right question to ask, and 5 minutes on the solution.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of the right question to ask requires both effort and research into trying to answer it yourself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to your question would be &quot;yes,&quot; and the reason behind it is that the learning process is most efficient when actively pursued (PS I did not down vote this question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14921" LastEditorUserId="14921" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T05:07:33.287" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T05:07:33.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-10-20T05:38:25.867" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you search the help section before asking this question? If you did, can you show us what you found, and what you're having a problem with? No? Hmmm... that means I have to do it for you, even though I'm not blessed with more time than you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, here goes... &lt;em&gt;searches...&lt;/em&gt; Ah! Here you go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; section, under &lt;em&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/em&gt;, the first &lt;strong&gt;&quot;tip&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? &lt;em&gt;Sharing your research helps everyone&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that a question not showing research is worth less than one that does, and, in my opinion, is worthy of a down vote from whomsoever wants to confer one for that reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this is {sarcastic}, well, you're right. This is because this concept shouldn't be news to you. (I will speak only for myself here: I tend to cut new users a lot of slack. You, however, have been here for over a year. And, while I usually try to be helpful rather than not, I don't really like it when people complain frequently in meta over perceived injustices, then argue with the people who answer them.) If it is actually news to you, please accept my sincere apologies, and &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; for guidance on how to use this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T05:38:25.867" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-10-20T07:16:31.527" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely it can be downvoted. Even the tooltip on the downvote button mentions a lack of evidence of research as a reason to downvote. Stack Exchange has never looked kindly on &lt;em&gt;gimmethecodez&lt;/em&gt; questions, whichever of the network’s sites they appear on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5281/18696&quot;&gt;Medica's referred you&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Help text&lt;/a&gt;; the supplementary question “So how much research is necessary?” has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt;. The answer at that question is based on a specific example, but can be readily applied generally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CiDyl.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;How to ask&amp;quot; prompt box from the &amp;quot;Ask Question&amp;quot; page&quot;&gt; &lt;sup&gt;[Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;ELU &quot;Ask Question&quot; page&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that doing the research may actually present you with the answer; and even if it doesn’t then if you quote your research it tells others where not to look, or they may be able to point out how you have misinterpreted what you found. If you don’t present your research, then any answer which contradicts what you found won’t be able to explain &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; it’s contradictory, and that won’t really help you. If you didn’t use the best resource, you might even get advice on the research itself: where best to look for the answer to the question asked. None of that is possible without knowing what you did yourself to look for the answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, if the question is interesting and you have already found the answer, you can even post both yourself: double points!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[And just for the record, I vote on questions only occasionally and I don’t believe I’ve downvoted any of yours.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T11:58:59.687" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5270" CreationDate="2014-10-20T13:26:24.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You don't have to write Shakespeare or Nabokov...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's reassuring. So, it's not necessary to be one the greatest playwrights ever known to mankind or probably the most iconic 20th century novelist to fill in the image description. Good to know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But according to an edit of yours, where the image is a photo I took of the Irish Daily Mail, the description has to be pretty detailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Issue of the Irish Daily Mail from Monday, June 30, 2014, folded in&#xA;  half. Banner image has three columns, first is a picture of a woman,&#xA;  second is the text &quot;Miriam: I've gotten better looking as I get older&#xA;  see page nine&quot;, third is the text &quot;only €1 a big read for a small&#xA;  price&quot;. The third's background is a baby blue circle. The whole banner&#xA;  image has a gradient background going from red to black. Below the&#xA;  banner image is a by line: Accidents, fires and breakdowns mean&#xA;  vehicles 'not fit for purpose'. The main headline is below the fold.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean I love the description, don't get me wrong. It's beautifully crafted, I wouldn't be surprised if Google picks up on it, but it does seem a little excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From now on are we expected to go into so much detail? For heaven's sake &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T13:26:24.320" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5276" CreationDate="2014-10-20T13:30:19.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;People are downvoting your questions, not Shakespeare's plays. The reasons are known only to the downvoters (though they presumably include &quot;does not show any research effort; is unclear or not useful&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T13:30:19.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-10-21T03:23:43.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glad to see you're working through Shakespeare.&#xA;I hope to do that myself some day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My philosophy to &quot;downvotes for no research/effort&quot; is: Not always. &#xA;(See the addendum.)&#xA;If votes are important, the question must have something going for it.&#xA;My personal rationale is: If it's new, interesting, or applicable (i.e., I've been wondering about it too) to me, then I upvote.&#xA;For &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;upvote&lt;/strong&gt;, it does not need research or effort if it has these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that votes are (mathematically speaking) a function of the community, which is a function of its members and their (individual and social) attitudes -- all of which are functions of time.&#xA;Just because a question has a poor reception now does not mean it will always have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because votes are a trendy bunch, I think it's best not to pay too much mind to them.&#xA;But I know from my own experience that that's easier said than done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason Andrew Leach provides, that research aids in getting the right answers, is important.&#xA;But because not many of the questions in the addendum seemed to have that problem, I do not think it's a good reason to justify the stance that &quot;all questions that do not show research deserve a downvote.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I offer another possible explanation for that rationale:&#xA;In a moral lifted right off the pages of Pirsig's &lt;em&gt;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle &#xA;Maintenance&lt;/em&gt;, I think we recognize Quality when we see it but we don't completely know what makes a thing Quality.&#xA;So we turn to encouraging &quot;symptoms&quot; of Quality in our questions.&#xA;After all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;there are lots of poor questions that don't show any research&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and there are lots of good questions that show plenty of research.&#xA;We thus make research/effort a rubric for what makes a question a Good Question or an asker a Good Asker.&#xA;But we must be careful not to become too accustomed to such thinking, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4928/39720&quot;&gt;we will miss out on interesting questions&lt;/a&gt; because of the complacency that can rise from habit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am skeptical of using research and effort to discriminate good questions from bad.&#xA;I maintain &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4943/hold-reason-suggestion-more-research-desired-mrd&quot;&gt;there are situations where it's difficult to provide research in the conventional sense&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;And I think making effort compulsory can lead to &lt;a href=&quot;http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fn75-WYscjo/UBYjjoIN1OI/AAAAAAAAETI/Mx8phtHoRVw/s1600/calvin+and+hobbes+on+research.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;questions that undermine themselves&lt;/a&gt; in trying to demonstrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addendum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 18 questions below are drawn from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;50 highest voted questions on ELU&lt;/a&gt; to date. &#xA;Given with the questions' links are their current DOWNVOTE/UPVOTE tallies and dates posted.&#xA;They are sorted by recency.&#xA;Most are older, but some are relatively new.&#xA;The first one below, posted earlier this year, has 3 downvotes and is just a question, a picture, and a transcript of the text in the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Short Half-Question, Half-Intro/-Example&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3/104 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152704/i-dont-get-this-joke-is-it-some-kind-of-play-on-water-too&quot;&gt;I don&amp;#39;t get this joke. Is it some kind of play on &amp;quot;water, too?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; 18 Feb 2014&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3/191 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/148323/is-there-a-non-sexual-phrase-for-sleeping-with-someone&quot;&gt;Is there a phrase that means sleeping with someone without sex?&lt;/a&gt; 28 Jan 2014&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/67 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/is-believe-you-me-proper-english&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;believe you me&amp;quot; proper English?&lt;/a&gt; 11 Apr '11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/132 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6170/is-there-a-word-or-phrase-for-the-feeling-you-get-after-looking-at-a-word-for-to&quot;&gt;Is there a word or phrase for the feeling you get after looking at a word for too long?&lt;/a&gt; 3 Dec '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3/137 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/do-most-languages-need-more-space-than-english&quot;&gt;Do most languages need more space than English?&lt;/a&gt; 14 Sep '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/83 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2429/can-doubt-sometimes-mean-question&quot;&gt;Can &amp;quot;doubt&amp;quot; sometimes mean &amp;quot;question&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; 2 Sep '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/158 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1216/what-is-the-factual-basis-for-pirate-speech-did-pirates-really-say-things-li&quot;&gt;What is the factual basis for &amp;quot;pirate speech&amp;quot;? (Did pirates really say things like &amp;quot;shiver me timbers&amp;quot;?)&lt;/a&gt; 18 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1/87 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412/should-i-put-a-comma-before-the-last-item-in-a-list&quot;&gt;Should I put a comma before the last item in a list?&lt;/a&gt; 10 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1/142 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-versus-her-versus&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (&amp;quot;his&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;their&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt; 5 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/75 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/what-s-the-rule-for-using-who-and-whom-correctly&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for using “who” and “whom” correctly?&lt;/a&gt; 5 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Research Mentioned but not Shown&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/95 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/when-should-i-use-an-em-dash-an-en-dash-and-a-hyphen&quot;&gt;When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?&lt;/a&gt; 28 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/107 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/979/why-do-english-writers-avoid-explicit-numerals&quot;&gt;Why do English writers avoid explicit numerals?&lt;/a&gt; 15 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Only Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/92 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86838/what-the-is-that-called&quot;&gt;What the #$@&amp;amp;%*! is that called?&lt;/a&gt; 15 Oct '12&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10/108 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9293/differences-between-slang-words-for-breasts&quot;&gt;Differences between slang words for breasts&lt;/a&gt; 19 Jan '11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/67 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7986/why-should-the-first-person-pronoun-i-always-be-capitalized&quot;&gt;Why should the first person pronoun &amp;#39;I&amp;#39; always be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt; 5 Jan '11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1/147 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574/how-are-i-e-and-e-g-pronounced&quot;&gt;How are &amp;quot;i.e.&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;e.g.&amp;quot; pronounced?&lt;/a&gt; 12 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1/82 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14/which-words-in-a-title-should-be-capitalized&quot;&gt;Which words in a title should be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt; 5 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0/79 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78/when-to-use-that-and-when-to-use-which&quot;&gt;When to use “that” and when to use “which”?&lt;/a&gt; 5 Aug '10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T03:23:43.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-10-22T05:34:54.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether a question demonstrates effort, or research it should only be down-voted if it breaches the ideals of a good question for this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically the only way to write a good question is to do as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;help guidelines&lt;/a&gt; say, put effort into researching your question to the point of being stuck, and then put in the effort to write a detailed and clear post; hence why those actions are suggested. However researching a subject comes with no guarantee of results, and some people can write masterpieces with the swish of a finger. The point I'm trying to make is that down-voting is not about what the OP demonstrates, it's about whether the question meets the site's criteria. Researching, and putting effort into a post are not a requirement, the help page regarding how to ask a question calls them &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;tips&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;here are some tips&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ref: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site's help pages do not define what a good question is, but the requirements are that a question be one that you cannot find an answer for, (this doesn't mean you have to have looked for an answer, only that if you did you wouldn't find one), and that it fit in one of the white-listed topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&#xA;&#xA;    Word choice and usage&#xA;    Grammar&#xA;    Etymology (history of words’ development)&#xA;    Dialect differences&#xA;    Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&#xA;    Spelling and punctuation&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ref: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if your question isn't adequately answered by [common online internet resources], feel free to ask here on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange. Be sure to mention the research you've done and what you're still hoping to learn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ref: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T05:34:54.670" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-23T11:22:18.213" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user fixes a sizeable bounty on a question then real life intervenes and that user is absent for a week or more. At the end of the bounty period the system kicks into action and awards half the bounty to the answer that  has gained the highest number of upvotes during the user's absence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All fine and dandy. But what happens when the user returns? Can the questioner award the second half of their bounty? Are there mitigating circumstances? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am that user. And no, I do not possess a smart phone, and I had other things more urgent on my mind than awarding bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I suspect that the answer will be negative, but I'd like an explanation. I believe exceptions should be made especially if users have proven to be reliable, and, reasonable people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ANSWER&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No answers after three days. Luckily, I posted the same question on Meta Stack Exchange  and received two answers almost immediately. It appears there is nothing that I nor any moderator can do. There appears to be no mitigating circumstances, which would allow me or the system to reward the remaining 100 points. The only alternative solution is to reset the bounty but that would mean doubling the bounty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not allowed to offer less or the same amount as before. It's a pity, because after offering sixteen bounties (not only on my questions) and never having missed a deadline, a user is &quot;penalised&quot; and loses out on his 200/100 points. The only thing I can add is  &quot;at least I tried&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-10-27T09:29:03.560" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T09:29:03.560" Title="Can a user award half their bounty after being AWOL?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-23T17:00:43.667" Score="-6" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202181/is-like-niobe-all-tears-an-apposition&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Like Niobe, all tears&amp;quot; an apposition?&lt;/a&gt;) was put on hold as proofreading.&#xA;Why do people think it is proofreading?&#xA;The question is not about an English composition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T20:35:38.970" Title="Why do people think this question(Like Niobe, all tears) is proofreading?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|low-quality-posts|self-governance|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5290" CreationDate="2014-10-26T01:09:03.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an answer was given, and it doesn't say &quot;We're closing this because of bullying&quot; I'm likely to take it on face value and move on. I might even think those people might be jerks and they don't know what they're talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, because the responses here have been reasonably civil, and within reason, not personal (&quot;the post is poor quality, shows limited research, is proofreading&quot; vs &quot;the submitter is a pain in the ass&quot;), I'm likely to infer that repeated submission of sub-quality requests, and that rather quickly by a single person on similar topics means that it may just be likely that the submitter is bullying the site into accepting such posts, feigning ignorance and calling foul in advance. I could be misreading this, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't yet had a noticeable opinion on your posts nor have you explained the audience of interest in your post questions or answers besides yourself. (As in, who cares or what problem are you trying to solve? See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;don't ask&lt;/a&gt;.) Don't jump the gun here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt; is what we're trying to be here. It doesn't mean that because I used specific words in a comparison, that they actually apply to anyone, present company included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your questions have been answered before you asked them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your questions have been answered after you asked them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have been prompted to ask the original questions in a manner that better&#xA;reflects the type of questions that the community wants to see on this site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have been given information how to ask this meta question better that it might possibly reflect the ability to open the topic of this question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have been spending more time arguing semantics of the why than improving your posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have been accusing others of bullying and continually insisting it is bullying. If you continue this path, the suggestion to look up and understand &lt;em&gt;irony&lt;/em&gt; is going to be continually presented. A hint: Those who have said their piece and have stopped returning comments have stopped feeding the troll, I have as yet not learned my lesson. Looks like I need to learn about irony.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T01:09:03.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5290" CreationDate="2014-10-27T23:16:59.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason given in the closure message &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be fairly arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's the majority reason. That doesn't necessarily mean that three out of five voted for it, though. There could be 2+1+1 votes for three different reasons. If the last vote is for reason A, then the voting is 3+1+1 and reason A is given in the box; if it's for reason B, then the voting is 2+2+1 and reason B wins because that was the last vote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because it's a majority decision, all votes count, even those cast before a post is edited. A post which is obviously &lt;em&gt;proof-reading&lt;/em&gt; up to an edit could have gained three votes by that time, so that would the reason given even if there was another more &quot;valid&quot; reason after the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voters can make mistakes and choose the wrong close reason. It's not possible to change that, because once you retract a close vote you can't re-cast it. So it needs to be left as a &quot;wrong&quot; vote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voters can simply follow prior opinion: they know the question is bad and needs to be put on hold pending improvement, and simply follow the herd even though a different reason might [now] be more suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't really matter what the reason is. The apposite fact is that the question is on-hold and needs to be improved. The closure message gives a hint as to where that improvement might usefully lie, but it's not foolproof because of the above reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been stated on this page and elsewhere, once the post is improved, ask that it be reconsidered. &lt;strong&gt;That's&lt;/strong&gt; the way to get it re-opened. Asking why it was closed in the first place is both pointless and counter-productive. No-one has to give any reason for any vote, and the community has come to a decision, either collectively or via delegation to a moderator, and that should only be gainsaid in the most egregious examples of error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to bullying, saying &quot;No, you're wrong&quot; is not bullying. Using the mechanics of the site to put poor questions on-hold pending improvement is not bullying. Providing civil answers pointing out how the site works and advising on the right course of action is not bullying, even if those answers aren't the answers you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is it. I'm not entering into discussion on this answer. &lt;em&gt;Quod scripsi, scripsi.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T23:16:59.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-28T02:58:14.720" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious how (not why) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204805/whats-a-word-that-means-intentionally-gullible&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was closed. I see it is closed as a duplicate by one person, FumbleFingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only familiar with closes being done by voting to close (with a required vote of up to 5, I think). When that happens, the statement about the close lists those who voted to have it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case there is no list of voters; there is only one member named. I checked the list of moderators, and I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; see FumbleFinger listed among the moderators. So I'm ruling out that it was closed by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I understanding this right? That one person, who is not a moderator, can close a question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly does that work (even if I got some of my facts wrong)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T10:30:01.817" Title="Mechanics of Closing a Question" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-10-28T19:29:51.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-28T05:04:15.190" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204821/3-times-a-is-increased-by-b-vs-3-times-a-increased-by-b?noredirect=1#comment433480_204821&quot;&gt;“3 times a is increased by b” vs “3 times a increased by b”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204821/3-times-a-is-increased-by-b-vs-3-times-a-increased-by-b?noredirect=1#comment433425_204821&quot;&gt;a comment to SrJoven&lt;/a&gt;, this question is not about how to read (or speak) a mathematical expression, it is how to interpret a phrase to a mathematical expression. However SrJoven and FumbleFingers think that this is off-topic and it should be in Mathematics.SE. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T10:30:21.423" Title="I'm asking about how to make a math expression from (ambigous) phrase. Is this off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-30T03:13:26.607" Score="-11" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the moderators' policy on bullying.&#xA;It seems easy to bully a user.&#xA;For it takes only 5 users who have sufficient reps to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T20:46:40.373" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T05:53:20.337" Title="Moderators' policy on bullying" Tags="|discussion|moderation|question-closure|self-governance|trolling|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5299" CreationDate="2014-10-30T08:24:28.757" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Putting a question on hold is not bullying. It is a request from the closers to the question asker to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel you are being bullied then this is a very important matter. You have two options: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Come to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and ping one of the moderators to ask for a private chat so you can disclose the bullying you have experienced, and appropriate action can be taken. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;Contact the community moderators&lt;/a&gt; with your evidence, so that they can help you deal with the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not tolerate bullying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T08:24:28.757" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5299" CreationDate="2014-10-30T13:10:59.483" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing a question is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; bullying. Where did you get that idea from? I have often voted to close questions, which deserved to be closed. What am I then? A bully?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find your glib accusations highly offensive, and defamatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T13:10:59.483" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-30T13:44:34.083" Score="12" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I had asked about the fundaments/rudiments of a topic on ELL, but in order to seek a deeper understanding or delve into the simple matter, could the same question be reposted on ELU (with disclosure of the previous post on ELL?) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, suppose that answers to a question on ELU proved overly complex for an English learner. For want of a simpler explanation, could the same question be reposted on ELL (with disclosure of the previous post on ELU?) ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T15:24:09.317" Title="Can an ELL question be reposted on ELU, and vice versa?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5302" CreationDate="2014-10-30T13:58:31.570" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;cross-posting is prohibited on the StackExchange network&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means if you're seeking, fundamentally, a single answer, you should choose the best venue to get that answer, and ask only there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you want to ask a &lt;em&gt;fundamentally different but related question&lt;/em&gt;, and you believed that &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question would be better placed on a different site, with reference to the earlier question for context, that would be just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key distinction is you must ask a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question, seeking a &lt;em&gt;fundamentally different&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T15:24:09.317" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5329" CreationDate="2014-11-02T03:50:05.153" Score="33" ViewCount="2962" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently joined English Language &amp;amp; Usage because I enjoy the topic of English language and have (so far) had positive experiences at other Stack Exchange websites. I also wanted to comment on what I thought was an interesting question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205282/gender-neutral-alternative-to-craftsmanship&quot;&gt;Gender-neutral alternative to &amp;quot;craftsmanship&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This title summarises the question well. The answer, I would think, could either dispute the premise of the question or answer it. In other words, this should not have been a controversial question: you can answer the question by either giving examples of words that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; gender-neutral or provide reasoning for why &quot;crafstmanship&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; gender neutral. Simple!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/205347/96294&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; does a good job of answering the question by providing non gender-specific synonyms, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/205284/96294&quot;&gt;most highly voted answer&lt;/a&gt;, which received quite an extraordinary number of votes and was posted by a seemingly reputable member of this community, didn't answer the question and didn't provide (sound) reasons for why the premise was false:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, there is: realizing that &quot;craftsmanship&quot; is gender-neutral.&#xA;  People who think it is not should take it up with themselves, not the&#xA;  word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I see discrimination where there is none, the root of the problem&#xA;  is myself and not the language. It is also a textbook example of an&#xA;  etymological fallacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Craftsmanship implies &quot;man&quot; about as much as woman does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpreted these 3 paragraphs as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP is irrational and should seek introspection, as he/she is lashing out at a word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question contains a logical fallacy, and the questioner is the root cause of a &lt;em&gt;perceived&lt;/em&gt; problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The premise of the question is incorrect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph doesn't add any value, and shouldn't really be part of an answer. If the answerer was intending to make the argument that the word &lt;em&gt;craftsmanship&lt;/em&gt; is in fact gender-neutral, he or she didn't make the reasons for this clear, and therefore the paragraph really only serves to deride the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second paragraph begins with a dubious segway into the topic of discrimination and then makes the assertion that the question contains a fallacy, neither of which address the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph seems to be a conclusion based on the &quot;arguments&quot; provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly a poor answer. The answer only addresses the question in so far as it claims the question is invalid, but fails even in that regard because it provides no meaningful explanation as to why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;, so while I can understand that poor answers come up once in a while (stack overflow is by no means immune to this), I was disappointed to see such strong support for this answer, which was provided by a user with a very high rating who is clearly a significant member of this community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community clearly &lt;em&gt;accepts&lt;/em&gt; this as the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this answer reflect the views of the community, or did the question just happen to &lt;a href=&quot;http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-C_PG4n-gyIE/UG23uTYLgaI/AAAAAAAABQY/mfFUp9BxGK8/s1600/tangled-disney-movie-1400x1050.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;touch a nerve&lt;/a&gt; for some members?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I incorrect in my interpretations of the answer and my view that it fails to address the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T23:49:11.903" Title="Strong community support for a bad answer; why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5305" CreationDate="2014-11-02T06:16:26.903" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question apparently hit the network-wide superconducting multicollider, which pulls in drive-by voters from all SE sites everywhere. It is therefore possible that most of those votes were not actually from regular members of the active ELU  community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/198906&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; SE sites’ have postings whose votes totals can seem disproportionately high&lt;/a&gt;.  There are some truly mystifying examples of one-liners garnering votes far beyond what one would imagine. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=active&amp;amp;pagesize=50&amp;amp;q=score%3a95&quot;&gt;Some of these high-scoring ELU postings “make sense”&lt;/a&gt;, but many of them do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody has their own reasons for voting as they do.  You should not expect this to always “make sense”.  Short, simple postings that are easily digested are always going to draw votes quicker than things that require work to read through;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31253/the-bikeshed-problem-and-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;it’s just how people are&lt;/a&gt;. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/574/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/85248&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. Does that seem sensible?  Furthermore, joke postings &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/68060&quot;&gt;have always been an issue&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although we can really never know why this one has skyrocketed, I would not be surprised if the votes came from people strongly agreeing with the sentiments  expressed by the poster.  You will notice that it has as many downvotes as the OP-selected answer has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think that you are coming down too hard on that answer. It is not a bad answer, and it is not derisive that I can see.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s perfectly germane to point out that a word’s origins are irrelevant to its currently understood meaning, and that it is a fallacy to believe they do matter.  They don’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the answer is correct, because &lt;em&gt;crafts&lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;ship&lt;/em&gt; really is no more a gendered term than &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;ikin&lt;/em&gt; is, whatever their origins.  We don’t need a new word for manikins in store windows sporting women’s lingerie, either, and it is a fallacy to think that we somehow ought to do that.  A manikin is just manikin; it is not a man any longer, not even a wee one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s the sort of thing that leads to nonsense like forbidding the use of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;alter&lt;/strong&gt;nate&lt;/em&gt;  or &lt;em&gt;be&lt;strong&gt;tw&lt;/strong&gt;een&lt;/em&gt; for more than two choices, or avoiding &lt;em&gt;in&lt;strong&gt;cul&lt;/strong&gt;cate&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;con&lt;/strong&gt;notation&lt;/em&gt; because they might appear to contain a somewhat rude word-element (well, if French) inside them, or being afraid to use &lt;em&gt;seminal&lt;/em&gt; for ideas unrelated to procreation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody expects &lt;em&gt;un&lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;ned&lt;/em&gt; drones to be carrying &lt;em&gt;wo&lt;strong&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in them, either.  A “gay-rights” campaign against the Canadian practice of buying &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/strong&gt; milk&lt;/em&gt; would be similarly misguided, just as one driven by a bunch of troglodytes to rename the genus of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homo&lt;/strong&gt; sapiens&lt;/em&gt; to something more &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt;-inclusive of women like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pan&lt;/strong&gt; sapiens&lt;/em&gt; would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those all sound silly.  Or at least, I sure hope they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this over-sensitivity about non-existent issues smacks of political correctness gone mad, like people are just looking for something to complain about. It’s just like how insisting on the ungainly monster-construct &lt;em&gt;“he/she”&lt;/em&gt; instead of the more natural &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; is bound to annoy people.  Quite a lot of people are fed up with all that bother, you see, and for a very simple reason: because &lt;strong&gt;being told how you can or cannot talk &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; rubs people the wrong way!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially galling when it’s making stuff out of thin air as appears to be the case here, but even if it weren’t, it would still vex. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, there’s going to be push-back in response to these teapot tempests about in-words and out-words. It rankles. Perhaps that’s  why so many voted that answer up, because they are tired of being rankled by such silly-in-their-eyes hassles, and they see that posting as speaking to that matter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the final analysis, we cannot know why that answer got the votes it got, but it does not matter that we cannot know why.  These things always happen, and there is no reason to get upset over them.  All SE sites have similar issues — or non-issues, as the case may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T06:24:28.887" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5319" CreationDate="2014-11-02T23:27:35.933" Score="28" ViewCount="901" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two hours after a recent question was closed by five users (four high-rep), the OP (also a moderator) voted to reopen his own question, which is, of course, an instantaneous and binding vote. This situation came up previously with the same mod. It seems a mod should realize that his re-open vote is binding and overrides the usual reopening process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are closed for a number of reasons, including &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;. If the OP/mod frequently voted to reopen closed questions, this could be understood as merely another such vote, however as a user, he rarely voted to reopen, making this much less likely (from available information his reopen votes were in all probability only for his own closed questions). That two binding votes were cast on his own questions makes me uncomfortable that the moderator in question might be using his position to inappropriately bypass the community's decisions to close his questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request that the mods undertake to address this issue. What, if anything, should be done? Does a mod respect the community and let it reopen closed questions on their own merit? Mods surely should use their own judgement to reopen a question which may have been unfairly or mistakenly closed. What I don't know is if this is accepted behavior on the part of a mod pertaining to his &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; questions. In that case it could reasonably be asked why regular users can't reopen their own closed questions with one vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: I'm not out for anybody's blood here. My experiences with the mod team have been very beneficial overall. I think it does a great job. It's &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a transparent process, however; whether it should be is part of the implications of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit #2&lt;/strong&gt;: FumbleFingers wants to pretend there is but one data point here making this question close-worthy. I have a revision history for both times. I can provide them if necessary to prove its existence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(If people are wondering why I don't just ignore this, I refer them to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=This+is+a+site+in+which+I+have+invested&amp;amp;room=95&quot;&gt;this explanation&lt;/a&gt;. Basically I think things go more smoothly in situations where the &quot;rules&quot; are known to all - or at least the majority - and adhered to by all - or at least the majority - with the spirit of the law superseding the letter of the law. I don't see this at work here in this situation. I'm certainly not privy to how mods are supposed to behave regarding their own closed questions. Which is the reason for my post.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-11-05T08:09:19.047" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T01:37:07.607" Title="Is reopening of one's own closed question a misuse of moderator privileges?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|question-closure|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-03T01:07:44.823" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the closevoters on an earlier question from the mod who subsequently overruled the usual means of re-opening by reopening their own closed question (not &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; unilaterally, in that I know another user had already voted to reopen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time it seemed blatantly Off Topic, but now I've just considered it more carefully I disown my closevote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the final analysis though, the issue here is simply whether we the user base are happy that mods can &lt;em&gt;unilaterally reopen their own questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I've no objections at all to mods being able to do such things. We elect as mods those people who are willing to put their names forward, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; whose judgement we have reason to trust. The fact that they might sometimes make mistakes (by which I don't mean to implicate the &quot;meth&quot; question, on which I currently have no opinion) doesn't mean we need to restrict their powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the unlikely event that a specific mod &lt;em&gt;repeatedly&lt;/em&gt; makes bad calls, I suppose there might be a problem. But that doesn't seem to be the case, so I see no reason to call for any rule changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T21:28:08.540" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T21:28:08.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5322" CreationDate="2014-11-03T03:26:58.240" Score="5" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should be done about postings that contain embedded &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhKg7.png&quot; alt=&quot;LaTeX&quot;&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; math markup in them?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly we should not ask for that to be enabled; its cost is much too high!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we replace them with images with the markup evaluated so that the text can finally be read?  To show how nasty it looks, here are example postings with this problem: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/205969/2085&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/205969/2085&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/120237/2085&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/144576/2085&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/26643/2085&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;. So instead of this sort of garbage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The square root of the matrix $A$, denoted by $\sqrt{A}$, is well-defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be replaced with this image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MCHs5.png&quot; alt=&quot;replacement image for previous text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this can be done with Unicode so that it can be left as text, but unfortunately, Georgia is not well disposed towards the needed combining characters.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The square root of the matrix , denoted by √̅, is well-deﬁned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least on my computer, it does not correctly join up the overline to the radical sign, and so is inferior to the image replacement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, image replacement is a pain to make look good — I have not tried to do so here. I just think these math-markup bits look ridiculous, and that we should do something to improve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not quite sure what, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T08:22:27.850" Title="What should we do about broken Tex math markup in postings?" Tags="|discussion|style|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-03T04:34:00.207" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that some basic information needed for arriving at a conclusion regarding the moderator’s action is lacking: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is there actually a rule that prohibits moderators from reopening their own questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If yes, is it a blanket ban, or is there some leeway for different situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) If there is no such rule, should one be instituted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) If there is a rule, and a moderator breaks it, what consequence should follow? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I can see that on the face of it, the moderator’s action opens him to the perception of a conflict of interest, this event seems to me to be better treated as opening a discussion about the general questions I enumerated above rather than as a disciplinary issue. After all, nobody died; nobody lost any money; and I can’t see that anyone was even inconvenienced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the chief damage seems to be the credibility of the rules governing what actions are permitted in relation to a moderator’s own questions, subject to clarification of points 1) and 2) above. Let’s just establish what those rules are (or ought to be), adjust them as necessary, and move on. I think everyone involved is smart enough to learn lessons from this which they will apply in the future: let’s not turn a molehill into a mountain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2014-11-03T05:04:09.773" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T05:04:09.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-11-03T16:21:09.230" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to point out a point which many users might overlook.&#xA;Coming up with a good question is not trivial.&#xA;Even if the answer could be found by Google, the chances are you would never come up with the question, let alone with the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="55046" LastEditDate="2014-11-08T20:26:57.973" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T20:26:57.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-03T19:07:41.513" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moderator re-opening their own question, closed by the community, is clearly a conflict of interest. Moderators are supposed to know the rules and closing reasons, so they typically wouldn't post things that are closeable, so this particular conflict does not seem like a common case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, moderators can still have posts that were wrongfully closed, and are trusted to act accordingly. The StackExchange position is that moderators &lt;em&gt;act&lt;/em&gt;, they do not &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt;. I feel that they should be allowed to vote, especially for circumstances like this one, but that isn't the problem at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion one question was closed properly (disclaimer: I voted to close it). The question's answer was easily found as the top Google result for the query and Google also provides an easy definition to answer the question. Not only that, but there was an upvoted answer also providing this dictionary definition, so there is no reason for this General Reference question to remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the basis that the question was, in my opinion, closed correctly, the moderator's action in reopening it does not seem appropriate. In the big picture it doesn't seem like a big deal, but I feel this scenario should not become any more common than it has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T21:31:36.370" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T21:31:36.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-03T22:11:56.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a rather unique situation, and some extenuating factors that ought to be considered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm under the impression that moderators typically answer far more questions than they ask. (To confirm my hunch, I just visited several other SE communities and gathered data from the profiles of their moderators. I analyzed 15 moderators at random: the average number of questions answered by each moderator was about 420, while the average number of questions asked by these moderators was 25. Only 4 of the 14 moderators had a questions-to-answers ratio of more than 10%, the highest being 42%, from a moderator who had asked 104 questions and answered 247.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the mod is a bit of an anomaly, in that they have &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt; a large number of questions, and &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt; only 23, pretty much an inversion of the typical moderator. Most moderators wouldn't find themselves in this situation, because most moderators don't ask nearly as many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I would answer your question in the negative: I don't think this constitutes an &quot;abuse of powers.&quot; If this moderator reopened almost every one of his own questions that got closed, that might be another issue. If this moderator never opened any other user's question that might have been similarly unfairly closed, that might be another issue. But I'm only aware of one data point, and I don't regard that as an abuse of power.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the mod feels like one of his questions was closed too hastily because of &quot;group think,&quot; it's within their rights to reopen the question. So long as they would do the same for other users in the same situation, I have no problem with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="25030" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T22:49:56.477" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T22:49:56.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T01:09:46.157" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I answered a question very simply and I received &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205973/is-there-a-word-for-a-professional-who-has-a-beautiful-and-neat-handwriting-and/205976#205976&quot;&gt;lots of upvotes.&lt;/a&gt; I was puzzled, however, by why my answer garnered more than twice the amount of upvotes as the other, similar answer. My question to the community is what makes an answer &quot;great&quot; instead of good. I want to know this so I can further improve my answers to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T15:31:47.773" Title="What makes people upvote certain answers over other similar ones?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2014-11-04T02:14:13.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answers that demand no thinking from the reader, and which can be read in a single breath, often attract higher votes than longer, more detailed answers that take more work and provide more quality to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to maximize your reputation, there are very different approaches to take than if you want to maximize the site’s actual value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find out the ratio between the size of a posting compared with its votes for any given user by using &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/242397/longest-answers-by-user-with-votes-and-chars-per-vote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; and a supplied user ID.  Here’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/242397/longest-answers-by-user-with-votes-and-chars-per-vote?UserId=2085&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T15:31:47.773" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T15:31:47.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2014-11-04T10:26:04.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvotes are cast for different reasons. Some cast upvotes on long answers just because of the in-depth research that may have been done. But some very basic answers also get a lot of upvotes, too, as if the voters were saying, in essence, &quot;That's what I would've said, too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where two answers are similar, another cause for a vote disparity might be &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; the two similar answers were submitted. On the question you're asking about, you answered first. Answering first will sometimes garner more votes, for a couple reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people will vote for one answer before any follow-on answers are posted. Many of those people won't go back to that question to vote for other answers. It's a simple matter of how many people see each answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In cases where two people submit very similar answers at close to the same time, some might vote for the older of the two only, and not the other, out of fear that the second contributor might have merely copied the first answer, instead of indepently arriving at the same conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not saying either of those are good reasons for voting or not voting, I'm just saying I think those factors sometimes influence the voting patterns.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to correlate the quality of an answer with the number of upvotes it ultimately gets, you'll drive yourself batty. As an example, you might want to check out the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70897/can-i-wear-an-umbrella&quot;&gt;umbrella question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T10:26:04.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-04T14:13:29.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This is my closevote justification, which is too long for a comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm closevoting as Off Topic. The OP here has repeatedly said she doesn't want to &quot;personalise&quot; this issue, but the reality is we only have a single example of potentially questionable behaviour here on ELU. This makes it very difficult to discuss &lt;em&gt;points of principle&lt;/em&gt; without referring to that example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming we all accept that the purpose of this question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to demand an &quot;apology&quot; from one particular mod (which imho would be extremely unseemly, to say the least), there's no good reason to reference any specific example, or limit the discussion to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ELU&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I propose that this question be closed. A new one (equivalent in all ways except it &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; identify any specific incidents or individuals) should be posted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange meta&lt;/a&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; SE users can contribute to a debate on whether there should be software changes preventing mods reopening their own questions (or a statement of site-wide &quot;best practice&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T14:13:29.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5305" CreationDate="2014-11-04T14:19:36.517" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5306/96603&quot;&gt;tchrist said&lt;/a&gt; in regards to why the answer has so many upvotes, especially this bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not be surprised if the votes came from people strongly agreeing with the sentiments expressed by the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is to say: I believe that it is so highly upvoted because, even though the website itself is for linguists, etymologists, and serious enthusiasts, users have all sorts of backgrounds. This answer is not being upvoted for its merit as an answer, it's being upvoted because it addresses the question asked for its perceived intentions, rather than answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific: the answer &lt;strong&gt;presumes that the question has a hidden political agenda&lt;/strong&gt; (which I also fail to find). And the user answering has a clear problem with the political agenda they perceive, whether or not it is there. And so does the SE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In support of this theory, I offer that tchrist's answer makes, more openly, the same assumption:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this over-sensitivity about non-existent issues smacks of political correctness gone mad, like people are just looking for something to complain about (…) being told how you can or cannot talk really rubs people the wrong way!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially galling when it’s making stuff out of thin air as appears to be the case here, but even if it weren’t, it would still vex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's roll the clock back a bit. The question at hand is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's straightforward to refer to a &amp;quot;craftsperson&amp;quot; instead of a &amp;quot;craftsman&amp;quot; if one doesn't want to imply a gender. But &amp;quot;craftspersonship&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;sportspersonship&amp;quot;, and the like seem pretty cumbersome. Is there a more elegant alternative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to see anything accusatory in it, it's not proposing that this word be banned or that people use a different one and it's not complaining about anything. So I also fail to see why tchrist thinks it &amp;quot;smacks of political correctness gone mad&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree entirely with your interpretation of the answer. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; derisive in presuming that the person wants a gender-neutral alternative because they feel &amp;quot;craftsmanship&amp;quot; is not gender-neutral on its own. It bashes at people who disagree with his view  (&amp;quot;People who think it is not should take it up with themselves, not the word&amp;quot;). It assumes the poster &amp;quot;sees discrimination where there is none&amp;quot;, while none of this is said in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer ignores completely the question and addresses what the user who offered it &lt;em&gt;thinks&lt;/em&gt; the context is. They don't care if the author of the question wanted a word that a feminist character in a book might prefer. They are more interested in lashing out on people who might prefer it for political reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the answer is ridiculous if you ignore the political agenda it forces on the question. The question doesn't even explicitly state that &amp;quot;craftsmanship&amp;quot; is not gender-neutral, it merely asks for an &lt;em&gt;alternative&lt;/em&gt; that is. While the use of the word &amp;quot;alternative&amp;quot; might arguably imply this, that is not explicitly written anywhere, and there's no other reason to assume the user who made the question thinks that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a different SE community, such as the cooking one, it might have gone as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vegetarian alternative for margarine?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's straightforward to use margarine instead of butter if one doesn't want to consume animal products. But for frying, risotto and the like, margarine doesn't add to the flavour. Is there a more flavourful alternative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer in question would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is: realizing that margarine is vegetarian. People who think it is not should take it up with themselves, not the food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see animal products where there is none, the root of the problem is myself and not the food. It is also a textbook example of not reading the label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Margarine has animal products about as much as lettuce does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this parody sounds absurd, because this is exactly the level of absurdity I see in the answer posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, even putting aside the unnecessary aggressiveness, the answer is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; very poor. It fails to answer the question (as it &lt;em&gt;doesn't present an alternative&lt;/em&gt;) and doesn't provide any form of justification for the opinion presented. It would be perfectly fine to answer something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Oxford dictionary, the word &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/artisanship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;artisanship&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; conveys the same meaning as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/craftsmanship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;craftsmanship&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. Please note, however, that even though &amp;quot;craftsmanship&amp;quot; doesn't appear to be gender-neutral, it in fact is, according to [insert reference here].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unprovoked aggressiveness of the answer, the unwavering support for it, despite the utter lack of quality (no matter whatever merits the user who posted it has) and the dimension of the reaction to this question lead me to one conclusion: none of this has nothing to do with the question. The question itself is, paraphrasing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205282/gender-neutral-alternative-to-craftsmanship#comment436576_205282&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;, the windmill that several senile Spanish knights were looking for in this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also paraphrase the infamous answer by saying that there is &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; in the question that justifies such extreme reactions. People who think there is should take it up with themselves, not the question. If one sees political agenda where there is none, the problem is in oneself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will, however, do no such paraphrase, as I haven't amassed enough internet-kudos to make this type of outburst acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96603" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T14:26:45.897" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-04T22:14:22.043" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using mod privilege to re-open one's own closed question is a conflict of interest. We have a natural tendency to believe our questions are on-topic, otherwise we wouldn't have posted them. Normally, moderators do not act on flags pertaining to their own posts and do not engage in privileged activity involving their own posts (with the exception of editing). If they feel action is required, they ask another mod or mods to review the situation. In fact, most of the activity that would be considered in a gray area is handled after two or more mods discuss it first, whether it involves another moderator's content or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In certain cases, the community may decide to honor a venerated user by choosing him for moderatorship, regardless of his lack of familiarity with chat, Meta, or the review tools that are provided high-rep users. In these cases, moderator privilege is viewed as a gift bestowed to a beloved, long-standing member of the community, a token of thanks for his contributions here. And in these cases, where his exercise of privilege is extremely limited in scope—and communication is hampered by technical savvy, timezone differences, and culture—we are inclined to overlook the occasional conflict of interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not to say that we are pleased by it, nor that we are not keeping an eye on it. Please feel free to continue letting us in on your observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T23:13:08.003" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T23:13:08.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5411" CreationDate="2014-11-05T13:54:20.700" Score="2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the answer to this question. I'm torn on the abilities I now have and know I can edit an answer, flag an answer, and downvote an answer (or ignore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really want to flag improperly, and yet, answers that seem to be of the type of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, in my own world, I don't use that word, but use &lt;em&gt;this word&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Really? That's the word? No way, it really should be &lt;em&gt;this word&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem more like comments. So as I'm able to vote on delete as well, I'm trying to figure out the proper way to wield the hammer without seeming to be too overbearing on this. It seems contrary to the intent of SE to leave highly downvoted/poor quality answers as answers in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2606/should-one-delete-his-answer-if-its-found-to-be-poor&quot;&gt;Should one delete his answer if it's found to be poor&lt;/a&gt; is a good point on the other (submitter) side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's the best way to handle this? Move to delete, flag, downvote or ignore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T19:39:23.790" Title="Should I flag a poor answer as not an answer?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|flagging|editing|self-governance|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2014-11-05T23:13:27.903" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ d like to answer to this question as the principal, or the accused who voted “Reopen” to his own question. I have no intention to excuse. Let’s me simply recount what’s happened.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found my question asking the meaning of “meth, methhead, and do meth” was closed for reason of being off-topic, and I think there was one Reopen vote, but not very sure. &#xA;I thought meth is a commonsense to native English speakers, but not to ESL speakers, so the question is worth for staying on board for non-native English speakers, and pushed “reopen” button to add one Reopen vote just as a user, not a moderator. The question reopened instantly. Because it reopened instantly, the memory of the same experience that I argued with the OP once before flashed back. I thought this could be taken as the abuse of moderator privilege by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I pushed “Cancel (or it could be Close) button&quot; offhand. It was rejected by the warning to the effect “You cannot cancel your vote.” I think the message was followed by something like “because it will affect the validity of existing votes.&quot; I gave up to make corrective actions. I thought somebody will bring up the case in chat or meta, and I will explain then what I did, and what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened twice. I admit it’s “unseemly” bungle. I learnt, and am fully aware of that the moderator’s single vote is worth 5 votes of users at the previous event.&#xA;But I have no intention to reopen my own post by abusing moderator’s privilege. I’ve posted more than 800 questions and answers. I have no need to rescue only one or two questions by abusing moderator’s advantage. &#xA;Moreover, I don’t want to stick around the moderator’s title, if you call me a willful power abuser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raised hand for candidacy for ELU moderator this year, because I desired to prove to non-native English speaking peers that even a non-native speaker who had never lived or studied in English speaking countries can be an ELU moderator, and is able to have a say in an international English language study circle as one of its members, and it’s not for self-display, or wielding power, if it exists any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a mistake. I tried to recover it by canceling my reopen vote. I couldn’t do it mechanically, or electronically. That’s the fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding inclination of my posts to mostly questions, it’s simply because I think as a non-native English speaker, I’m less learned and qualified to answer most of subtle nuance of English language questions than native, genuine English speakers are, and it's more suitable for me to stay on the asker’s side and to contribute to the site by doing so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2014-11-19T22:55:39.590" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T22:55:39.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5309" CreationDate="2014-11-06T08:22:27.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Enabling MathJax&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator on Code Review who helped to push for MathJax to be activated there, I can say that the current Stack Exchange policy makes you work hard to justify it.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Performance is a Feature&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.codinghorror.com/speed-still-matters/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speed Still Matters&lt;/a&gt;, says Jeff Atwood, so they want pages to render quickly.  MathJax is enabled per site, not per question, so they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252283/1157100&quot;&gt;reluctant to incur the performance overhead&lt;/a&gt; of loading and executing the MathJax code if it is deemed non-essential to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To request MathJax to be activated, the community needs to come up with a list of posts that would have &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1438/mathjax-on-codereview#comment4244_1443&quot;&gt;benefitted &quot;&lt;em&gt;extensively&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt; from MathJax.  That is a tough request to fulfill for EL&amp;amp;U.  (Code Review had to work hard to convince SE, and we sometimes deal extensively with mathematical notation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Making do without MathJax&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, it is possible to convey basic mathematical notation with a combination of Unicode, ASCII art, and, as a last resort, images.  One way to make an image is to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://latex2png.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;latex2png&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Specific posts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and typeset the specific posts mentioned here using Unicode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16310" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:39:08.123" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T08:22:27.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5305" CreationDate="2014-11-06T10:58:50.080" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I already pointed out on the question, the situation is extremely simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) undeniably, each of the five sentences in the answer at hand, is just a political rant against &quot;non-sexed language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, and this isn't relevant, I personally am completely opposed to the 'non-sexed-language' movement!!!!!! But the situation couldn't be simpler. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Given&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; the 'non-sexed-language' movement, the question asks a &lt;strong&gt;very specific, technical, clear question&lt;/strong&gt; about a particular word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) In answer to the question posed here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) Voting on the ELU site, in particular, is often nuts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) In spite of the absurdist facade of &quot;referenced! encyclopaedic!&quot; answers, voting on all network sites is, often, essentially political.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough here we have &lt;strong&gt;a couple hundred right-wingers expressing their dislike of the 'non-sexed-language' movement&lt;/strong&gt; with a vote -- typically it's more the left-wing that crowd votes en masse here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note (OP) that I already marked the answer in question for deletion, since, it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, on this site the mods just delete any comments they don't like, so this has all been wiped clear on the QA in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the sort of pure nonsense the debate on this questionhas provoked, I need only paste in my comment from above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sometimes the right answer is that the question is wrong. This is one&#xA;  of those times.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What a load of nonsense.  A non-sexed version of &quot;craftsmanship&quot; could not be a more obvious, clear, good, question in the &quot;non-sexed language&quot; field.  Note that indeed a &lt;strong&gt;number of sensible solutions were discussed&lt;/strong&gt;. Any number of eg &lt;strong&gt;web sites that ALREADY USE NON-SEXED VERSIONS of this word&lt;/strong&gt; were brought up! You cannot seriously be suggesting the same question featuring say &quot;chairman&quot; would be &quot;not a question&quot;.  Give me a break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example from anotherwise hugely intelligent and astute contributor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;because craftsmanship really is no more a gendered term than manikin&#xA;  is&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What?  OF COURSE &quot;manikin&quot;, and &quot;history&quot; (&quot;herstory&quot;!) is a word that is considered and alternatives sought, by the 'non-sexed-language' movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again where is this &quot;obvious&quot; line drawn?  Of course obviously &quot;craftsman&quot; would be OK to non-sex but &quot;craftsmanship&quot;, not OK to non-sex.  How silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone very astute pointed out in the comments, (in an entrely separate &quot;political language debate&quot;) even &quot;niggardly&quot; is treated with great care in the USA, since, (purely &quot;accidentally&quot;) it could cause problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good grief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastEditorUserId="8286" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T11:09:17.723" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T11:09:17.723" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-06T13:28:51.850" Score="10" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an advanced speaker of English. I usually make grammar mistakes. For this reason I want to ask questions related to grammar aspects, grammaticality,  meaning of phrases and sentences. I would not like to be upset about closing of my questions or downvoting. Answer please whether or not I can ask such questions here in the English Usage &amp;amp; Language Section . Maybe I should go to the English Learners Forum which low level learners usually visit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user93573" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-11-07T10:06:29.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T14:17:19.540" Title="Should I go to the “English Language Learners” site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5324" CreationDate="2014-11-06T13:56:49.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For basic clarifications on grammar and understanding the meaning of words in context, you probably would find the best fit on &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. The site is geared toward people who are learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel you are quite fluent in English, and the kinds of grammar and meaning questions you have involve unusual syntactical structures or archaic meanings of words or the historical journey of a particular construction, you are more likely to get a comprehensive answer here on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a specific question and you aren't sure which site to post on, you can either post it one place and ask to have it considered for migration if it's a better fit on the other site (moderators can move questions between sites), or you can post on either site's Meta and ask if the community thinks the question belongs there or here. Hopefully, it won't take you long to get a feel for which site is most appropriate for the kinds of questions you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T13:56:49.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-06T22:14:55.033" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is put on hold for being off-topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206495/how-do-i-pronounce-the-name-aurelius&quot;&gt;How do I pronounce the name &amp;quot;Aurelius&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I wasn't exactly sure what the &quot;general reference&quot; reason actually is (&lt;em&gt;When looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; my question would appear to be on-topic.&lt;/em&gt;) I was looking it up a bit here on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1023/60910&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I would think my question is asked in the correct format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/939/how-to-respond-to-dictionary-general-reference-questions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;general reference&lt;/strong&gt;: this question is too basic; the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is another &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; here talking about how Google should not be considered a general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a quote from one of the comments on my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@phenry: ...and I just looked up &quot;Aurelius&quot; in three different online references and found no pronunciation advice, so it's not &quot;general reference&quot; either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my question off-topic? Also, there seems to be a lot of conflicting information on what the &lt;code&gt;General Reference&lt;/code&gt; close reason should actually be used for - What is the current viewpoint on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T22:39:53.743" Title="Question is on hold - should it be? What is considered a &quot;general reference&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|general-reference|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5324" CreationDate="2014-11-07T11:48:52.107" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;; though I would not characterize &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; as for &quot;low-level&quot; anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because most of their participants are &lt;em&gt;studying&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; English, and so have access to textbooks on grammar and conjugations and so on, ELL actually usually has more technical explanations of grammar and syntax, and uses more obscure terms of art, than EL&amp;amp;U&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. As a native speaker, I can genuinely tell you that half the time I have no idea what they're talking about over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; is oriented more towards native and fluent-to-the-point-of-being-native speakers, and &lt;em&gt;questions which would be interesting to them&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, quick sniff test: if you're &lt;em&gt;trying to sound like a native speaker&lt;/em&gt;, use ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; But when EL&amp;amp;U gets wonky, it gets &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205371/graphotactics-of-possessive-the-true-reason-for-the-apostrophe&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; wonky&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T14:17:19.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5305" CreationDate="2014-11-09T01:18:44.300" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been many responses to the question and I think it makes the most sense for me to try to collate them somehow, rather than picking a single answer. I'm reluctant to hijack my own question like this but unless someone comes up with an objective review I don't think it makes sense for me to accept the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had initially chosen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5306/96294&quot;&gt;tchrist's answer&lt;/a&gt; because it did address my question, but it also contained some the same emotional digressions that prompted me to write this post in the first place. Given the strong response to my post I think this page deserves a more complete answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with (a summary of) the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a gender-neutral alternative to &lt;em&gt;craftsmanship&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least 2 ways to read this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What is a gender-neutral alternative to craftsmanship?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Saying &lt;em&gt;craftsmanship&lt;/em&gt; is sexist, what's a non-sexist word?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously these are extremes; the first is a cold literal reading and the second is a disproportionate response that could not have been made by an objective individual. There is a spectrum between these two interpretations and as human beings it seems we are unable to separate emotional inference from the words we see on a page. Those who read the words closer to 2) might have further inferred &lt;em&gt;intention&lt;/em&gt; and interpreted this question as something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wish to impose upon you a non-sexist version of &lt;em&gt;craftsmanship&lt;/em&gt;. What word should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read the question like this, it makes much more sense why it received the kind of response it did. With this paraphrase of the original question in mind, let's look at the winning answer again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...[realize] that &quot;craftsmanship&quot; is gender-neutral.&#xA;  People who think it is not should take it up with themselves, not the&#xA;  word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I see discrimination where there is none, the root of the problem&#xA;  is myself and not the language. It is also a textbook example of an&#xA;  etymological fallacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Craftsmanship implies &quot;man&quot; about as much as woman does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was initially baffled by this response, but if we read it in the context of my paraphrased question, it &lt;em&gt;makes sense&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original question was an unnecessary attack on &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; right to use our language freely, I too might have been inclined to respond like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are still not convinced, here is an excerpt from tchrist's response to my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All this over-sensitivity about non-existent issues smacks of&#xA;  political correctness gone mad, like people are just looking for&#xA;  something to complain about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another example of a response that is not really a response to the question (mine nor the original question), but a response to a perceived attack or infringement of rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think I've taken this line out of context, as there is no mention in that post of this over-sensitivity being only &lt;em&gt;perceived&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;inferred&lt;/em&gt;. He seems to be quite adamantly claiming that such over-sensitivity is &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; and that the questioner was erroneously propagating such an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we put down our argument sticks for a minute and accept, for better or worse, that the original question was in fact viewed through a &lt;em&gt;lens&lt;/em&gt; from which the literal meaning of the question is skewed, then these responses begin to make sense. The ensuing arguments are then simply the result of a disconnect in perception; one side was defending itself against an attack on liberty, and the other against an attack of bigotry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are noble goals which are not all mutually exclusive. Had this difference in perception been communicated there would likely never have &lt;em&gt;been&lt;/em&gt; a conflict, or at least a far milder one. I think we have to view the discussion in this light if we genuinely want to understand and learn from the reactions to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strong community support is likely to have been in a similar vein. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5306/96294&quot;&gt;tchrist pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, the question hit the &quot;network-wide superconducting multicollider&quot; and the answer might therefore have benefited from upvotes as new members with only the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2359/what-is-the-association-bonus&quot;&gt;association bonus&lt;/a&gt; didn't have enough reputation to downvote the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having read through the comments and answers here and on the original question, I think that this is at least a rough description of what happened. I can't of course know what everyone involved &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; thought. At the end of the day, we're emotional creatures, and my argument that the answer was objectively a poor one was perhaps missing the point as much as those who upvoted the answer in the first place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been a wonderful learning experience for me. I think I could spend years learning about what happened here, how it would have gone differently among different cultures, and what analogues of this scenario manifest in the various conflicts we engage in on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were Cai (the poster of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205282/gender-neutral-alternative-to-craftsmanship&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt;), and knowing what I have learnt over the last few days, I would have phrased the question in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Without discussing whether or not &lt;em&gt;craftsmanship&lt;/em&gt; is a gender-specific term, and disregarding any&#xA;  etymological arguments one way or the other, could you suggest a synonym that is less likely to be inferred as having a gender-specific connotation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that such a phrasing of the question would have had a greater chance of garnering the desired responses, and might have pre-emptively disarmed some of the commentary we have seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T21:49:25.123" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5333" CreationDate="2014-11-10T12:25:08.567" Score="15" ViewCount="750" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What should we do about hectoring?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flurry of hectoring&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; comments has appeared both on the main ELU site and also here on ELU’s meta. I seek clarification on the following questions three:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the SE policy — and in particular, our own moderators’ collective position — on hectoring?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should normal users respond to hectoring?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At what point does hectoring merit moderatorial intervention befitting any other persistent troll?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand that I am &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; referring to long comment chains in which many different posters keep going back and forth as though this were a conversation in some forum or chatroom. For those cases, an obvious solution exists: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202181/is-like-niobe-all-tears-an-apposition#comment432350_202181&quot;&gt;move the comment chain to a chat room where it belonged in the first place&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I am talking about what to do when some user acts as though it were their God-given right and point of personal privilege to hector and harangue every user in sight about anything even vaguely tangential to their posting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This not only creates unbalanced comment chains, it makes it feel like specific posters are being picked on by a bully who just won’t move on.  Whether one calls this anti-social behavior &lt;em&gt;targeting, bothering, badgering, haranguing, pestering&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;, it still smells as foul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5279&quot;&gt;32 comments from the same poster.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5299&quot;&gt;26 comments from the same poster.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5276&quot;&gt;20 comments form the same poster.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how unbalanced those all are.  Further examples are easily demonstrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sheer numbers aren’t the main problem. Rather, it is the hectoring tone and tenor of these insistent comments.  They are prickly demands for personal responses as though the persistent hectorer were somehow entitled to such. But no such entitlement exists on any SE site, whether ELU or elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s like coming into a chat room and intentionally pinging everybody you find there, trying to pry an answer from each and every one of them by pestering them until they give in.  This is a breach of etiquette and of common sense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now and then — and more often of late — one finds comments on the main site which have the chutzpah to “demand” a reason for a down vote or a close vote. Some of these questions I can understand, but many others are at best borderline rude. No one “deserves” anything, and to keep forever pushing and poking for an answer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is no longer commentary: this is abuse.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users coming to this side are at risk for believing that abusive behavior is tolerated here. Repeatedly aggressive behavior comes off as rude, and it makes this look like an unfriendly place.  And that’s just the new visitors. The worst thing is that it makes the users targeted by this hectoring uncomfortable: just read their responses, especially their valedictory ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best, this is non-constructive hectoring picking on individual users, singling them out with unrelenting demands for undeserved explanations. This makes those singled-out users feel bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At worst, it is trolling whose only intent is to bully individual users into pointless argument and debate.  Like any other troll behavior, i’s a waste.  It seeks to unjustly bully every possible user to justify each and every possible nuanced reason behind each and every action that user has taken or failed to take.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be read in the final comments from not a few users who have been picked on in this way, they have had enough of it.  This unrelenting and irrepentant hectoring creates a negative environment that detracts from the site.  It draws us down and makes us look bad; in some cases, it may even drive others away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what the policy is regarding this type of behavior so that appropriate action can be taken and hapless users not driven away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we as regular users do with these hectoring comments?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we just stop answering the hectoring bully?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we flag the entire hectoring comment chain as a candidate for deletion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we flag individual hectoring comments as non-constructive?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the above?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Moderators&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should our moderator team do with these hectoring comments and with the hectorers themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete their individual hectoring comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete the entire chain, including the hectoring comments and the few responses alike.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move the chain of hectoring commentary to a chat room. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notify the user that hectoring other users is not constructive and not allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monitor the hectorers once notice has been given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other possible actions not necessarily suitable for general discussion, up to and including suspending the hectorers for unwillingness to comply with moderator instruction duly delivered. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are just a few possibilities. Other constructive suggestions for how this community might usefully deal with this sort of abusive hectoring are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;     1. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary’s entry on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hector&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, both noun and verb, for more about this classic term.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T12:43:18.243" Title="Moderators’ policy on hectoring" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|self-governance|trolling|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5331" CreationDate="2014-11-10T17:16:10.130" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;All three of the linked examples are from the same user, so as with the recent kerfuffle over &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5307/is-reopening-of-ones-own-closed-question-a-misuse-of-moderator-privileges&quot;&gt;mods reopening their own questions&lt;/a&gt;, it's almost impossible to address the issue without referring to the relevant specific individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; case, the relevant user has asked 31 questions (not including anything that may be deleted) in 12 months on ELU, only &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; of which have negative net vote totals (about a third are closed as duplicates or for other reasons). Which suggests to me that most of the questions themselves are welcome, even if not the user's attitudes (&lt;em&gt;six&lt;/em&gt; of his nine meta posts have high net &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; totals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I've never noticed any &quot;bullying&quot; element in this user's comments (though I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; noticed numerous exasperated/dismissive comments levelled &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; him). I know that sometimes it can get annoying when a child replies to your every &quot;answer&quot; with &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. You end up wanting to scream &lt;em&gt;&quot;Because I say so!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and end the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this user isn't a child. If you think he's deliberately raising provocative points and/or refusing to accept &quot;common-sense&quot; explanations just to get a rise out of you, bear in mind that nothing forces you to respond. And there can be &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; variation in how even intelligent/educated people think; just because someone else doesn't understand/accept your point of view doesn't mean they're being wilfully uncooperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I don't see a big problem with even the specific user here, let alone more generally, that would require any kind of coordinated site response. A very few times in my entire time on ELU I've asked the mods to delete hostile comments (sometimes, but not necessarily, directed at &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;). That's always worked, so I see no reason to change established practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the mods decide (&lt;em&gt;collectively&lt;/em&gt;, I'm sure) that some particular user offends too often in this regard, my instinct is to have faith that they'll make the right decision without there needing to be a meta post where everyone upvotes an answer saying &lt;em&gt;&quot;We want to ban or otherwise discipline this user&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T09:45:59.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5331" CreationDate="2014-11-10T18:50:00.857" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hectoring is A Bad Thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Individual users should avoid responding to hectoring at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hectoring requires moderatorial (what a great word) intervention when it damages the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that's out of the way (and those answers are no more foolish than the questions), can we have a reasonable discussion please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though in theory anybody annoyed by a comment should just ignore it, in practice there are just too many users here for that to work; eventually somebody new to the question will respond to the provocation, and another 20 comments obscure the real answer and the original question. Note that I said 'provocation' without taking a position on whether the commenter is deliberately trolling or merely unable to function socially in a Stack Exchange context; anybody trying to shift the focus of the site to a discussion forum is going to fail, requiring and expending much effort and irritation in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I favour swift action in a case like this, partly to reduce the mod time wasted in considering each new argument, and partly to stop actually valuable users being driven away by one annoyance who may or may not prove worthwhile.&#xA;The ideal solution for a poster like the one under discussion would be a (short) ban, and an invitation to discuss the matter in a special chat room, with a list of relevant invitees who may or may not wish to join the discussion.  Given that the two halves are incompatible I would recommend the second, combined with a warning that if the poster does not avail himself of the invitation, but instead continues to spatter both meta and the main site with content-free complaints and demands, he will be banned. I concede that this is likely to lose a possibly valuable contributor (and most of us have been objectionable at one time or another); but ELU is not now at a stage where we should devote vast efforts to retaining one user, and certainly not if his buzzing is driving away others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to disagree with those who have suggested that each new point a user puts forward should be considered separately, without being tainted by previous posts. Stack Exchange explicitly requires a build-up of reputation before you can fully take part in the site: it is an attempt to attract experts. As such, every post you have made can and should be considered by anyone responding to your latest.  If that history shows thoughtful and helpful contributions, your views gain weight; if the opposite, they lose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I agree with FumbleFingers in trusting the moderators to take the right action without protracted discussion.  This is a representative democracy, not a referendum-led ochlocracy, and I for one entirely trust the Computer- I mean the mod team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2014-11-10T21:15:41.593" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T21:15:41.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5336" CreationDate="2014-11-10T21:58:07.950" Score="-1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;A large part of our English class is identification and analysis of film themes, and using these film themes in exams to answer questions (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/nqfdocs/ncea-resource/exams/2013/91473-exm-2013.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/nqfdocs/ncea-resource/exams/2013/91099-exm-2013.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;few&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/nqfdocs/ncea-resource/exams/2013/90850-exm-2013.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; across different levels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions about the &lt;strong&gt;identification&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;analysis&lt;/strong&gt; of film themes on-topic at English.SE, or would they be better suited for &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Movies.SE&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72323" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.407" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T11:15:39.337" Title="Are questions about film themes on topic at English.SE?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5279" CreationDate="2014-11-10T22:31:26.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This is a generality:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more effort you put into a question – which includes sharing at least a summary of the research you did prior to asking the question – the better your question will be received by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when a question is vague about whether or not any research was attempted at all, that question will be more vulnerable to a negative reaction from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean there's always a direct relationship between the amount of research included and the ultimate upvote/downvote totals. Everyone has their own criteria for upvoting and downvoting, and more goes into it than mere research effort. However, you can help people take your question more seriously when you include your research, and you open yourself up for a more harsh reaction when you deliberately elect to omit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the reason behind it, that's not too hard to figure out. If you expect us to do your legwork for you (especially when a tool tip says, &amp;quot;This question does not show any research effort&amp;quot;), then each qualified member of the community has the right to cast a downvote, as a way of collectively encouraging more research in future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T22:31:26.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5334" CreationDate="2014-11-11T11:15:39.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to ask on Movies. As it says on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question generally covers …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Analysis of content or &lt;strong&gt;theme of all forms of Movies&lt;/strong&gt; and TV series&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd be careful about copying questions from your class verbatim into a question, and seeing what others think. That kind of question smacks of &amp;quot;homework help,&amp;quot; which is generally regarded with disdain across the Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you take a cut at answering the question, and you're asking for help on some smaller part of it, I think that might be your best place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T11:15:39.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5343" CreationDate="2014-11-12T00:37:39.193" Score="9" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5331/moderators-policy-on-hectoring&quot;&gt;Moderators’ policy on hectoring&lt;/a&gt;, a response itself to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5299/moderators-policy-on-bullying&quot;&gt;Moderators&amp;#39; policy on bullying&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post takes issue with &lt;em&gt;zingers&lt;/em&gt;, or observations (usually witty, humorous, or exaggerated) about a post's flaws.&#xA;If I asked a question titled &quot;Question about the word Ecomony&quot;, some examples of &lt;em&gt;zingers&lt;/em&gt; about my misspelling of &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt; would be the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;It's the &lt;em&gt;eco&lt;strong&gt;nom&lt;/strong&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, stupid.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a similar question about &lt;em&gt;cimmanon&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;ecomony&lt;/em&gt; the study of the production and consumption of &lt;em&gt;nomey&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an observation that might make the poster feel foolish, when a differently worded comment (or other course of action) could avoid any embarrassment. In the above case, editing my post's typo with a neutrally worded (or default) edit history remark would have improved the question without drawing too much attention to my mistake.&#xA;There are some examples below where another course of action would have been not to comment at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These &lt;em&gt;zingers&lt;/em&gt; can be fun to read and fun to write.&#xA;And my intent is not to spoil anyone's fun.&#xA;After all, as Jeff Atwood said in his post &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun&lt;/a&gt; about off-topic questions: &quot;A world without fun is like a world without waffles and ponies. And what kind of monster would want &lt;em&gt;that?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some posts use wit in a funny and charming way.&#xA;An example that comes to mind is the alliteration in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/196393/39720&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196354/word-for-a-body-of-water-that-is-sufficiently-populated-with-fish-and-worthy-of&quot;&gt;Word for a body of water that is sufficiently populated with fish and worthy of fishing in&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...it is always possible that some petty pissants hearing such words will perceive them as presenting the pissants not with a piscary but with a pissoir, and perforce pitch a personal pot of puissant poison into your pretty poisson pond in a puerile act of piscicide instead of fishing it per your preference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for one, wonder if it was loosely inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/quotes?item=qt0450646&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this popular movie quote&lt;/a&gt;! :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think wit can also be used poorly.&#xA;The point I wish to make is that &lt;strong&gt;zinging is a lot like hectoring&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Zinging and Hectoring &quot;Go Off On Tangents&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/5331/7&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; defines it as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...when some user acts as though it were their God-given right and point of personal privilege to hector and harangue every user in sight about anything even vaguely tangential to their posting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205060/is-there-a-single-word-for-not-pregnant#comment434034_205060&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205060/is-there-a-single-word-for-not-pregnant&quot;&gt;Is there a single word for &amp;quot;not pregnant&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Language is about the combination of words in infinitely many permutations. This constant search for single words for everything is silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't see myself using &lt;em&gt;unpregnant&lt;/em&gt;, I still feel this zinger is not helpful.&#xA;The help text to comments says &quot;[use] comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements.&quot; &#xA;This comment isn't asking for more information.&#xA;And any suggestion made is implicit; the one I read is &quot;Avoid asking single-word-requests.&quot;&#xA;Further, it calls the content and intention of this question (and others like it) &lt;em&gt;silly&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The comment has 5 upvotes, compared to the question's 2.&#xA;There is a case that, like &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;, this zinger is tangential to the post: &#xA;The comment is about single-word-requests in general; the question is about a particular single-word, one meaning &quot;not pregnant.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Zinging and Hectoring Are Rude&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hectoring is also said to be rude.&#xA;One &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206426/become-a-president-or-become-president#comment437567_206426&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/206426/1&quot;&gt;&quot;become a President&quot; or &quot;become President&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you Have Bad Caps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a short post. &#xA;It wouldn't have taken much longer to edit the post than to make that comment.&#xA;It would have been even faster to leave the question alone than do either.&#xA;And I think both those suggestions would've been politer than what was done instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Zinging and Hectoring Can Be Mistaken for Trolling&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked post also compares &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;trolling&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At worst, it is trolling whose only intent is to bully individual users into pointless argument and debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me trolling is epitomized in the infamous &lt;a href=&quot;http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/012/941/davidthornedavidthornef.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spider correspondence&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Trolling, as I see it, is largely about pretense.&#xA;Here, the troll pretends he can pay a debt with an image of a spider, that he no longer has possession of his image, that the re-sent image is not really his, that he is time-travelling, etc.&#xA;Isn't something similar happening in this comment exchange to the question &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206287/whats-a-better-word-for-vegetable-food-products&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a better word for &amp;quot;vegetable food products&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poster 1: What’s a vegetable? Do tomatoes and mushrooms count? What about honey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP: Exactly. Here I'm talking about agricultural products. Honey is not excluded, although it wouldn't be the top of my list. Here I mean vegetable as opposed to mineral or animal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poster 1: No, what does vegetable mean? Suppose a carrot is a vegetable. It is a plant which is not a fruit. A banana is a plant which is a fruit; is it a vegetable? A tomato is &#xA;  also a plant which is a fruit; is it a vegetable? A mushroom is neither plant nor animal. &#xA;  Honey is not a plant, not an animal, and not a fungus. &lt;strong&gt;What does &lt;em&gt;vegetable&lt;/em&gt; mean???&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP: Are you trying to bring an answer here? Why are you getting so intense? There are many definitions of vegetable, here, as already stated above, I mean vegetable in a broad sense: i.e. as opposed to mineral or animal. So that would include fruits and fungus and non-artificially processed vegetable products such as honey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poster 2: @OP The problem is those three categories leave out lots of things. Is Aspirin &#xA;  animal, vegetable or mineral? What about Ebola? Soda water? Coral reefs? Slime molds? &#xA;  Hydrochloric Acid? Citric Acid? The term &lt;em&gt;vegetable&lt;/em&gt; is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OP: Could you please stop trying to delete this post and help me solve my question by improving it? This conservatism is really not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, Poster 1 brought up a valid point, and OP's edit shows he was using a different meaning of &lt;em&gt;vegetable&lt;/em&gt; than I was expecting.&#xA;But the way Poster 1 presented it confused the OP and me.&#xA;It looks like trolling even if it wasn't meant to be, which is one of the problems with &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Zinging and Hectoring Can Be Unconstructive&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 59-upvote comment to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207237/why-isnt-enterprise-spelt-enterprize-in-us-english&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t &amp;quot;Enterprise&amp;quot; spelt &amp;quot;Enterprize&amp;quot; in US English?&lt;/a&gt;, in response to the question's claim that &quot;'-ize' is so widely preferred in US English&quot;, uses a list of US English &quot;-ise&quot; words to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I surmise you’re just improvising here without actual knowledge. I despise it when people are surprised that there is actually an undisguised method and reason behind these things; consider yourself duly apprised that there very much is such. And while I don’t quite mean to chastise you too severely, I must advise you to study English morphology with considerably more diligence than heretofore displayed that you might excise these ridiculous notions from your head. This may, however, require that a tutor supervise your exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sentiments are similar to another commenter's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It still comes off as a little pompous... Such effort would have been better directed toward an answer with an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would even say that the effort would have been better spent on the same idea but put more politely: &#xA;Some sections, &quot;study English morphology with considerably more diligence than heretofore &#xA;displayed&quot; and &quot;ridiculous notions&quot;, come across as abrasive and don't even use &quot;-ise&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might even say that the effort would have been better spent answering another question, one the commenter thought was a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If It's Not Good, Then What?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not mistaken that &lt;em&gt;zinging&lt;/em&gt; looks like &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;, could it be that they have the &#xA;same consequences?&#xA;Could it be that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054188/quotes?item=qt0104532&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;zinging&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;like &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...creates a negative environment that detracts from the site. It draws us down and makes &#xA;  us look bad; in some cases, it may even drive others away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then my position for &lt;em&gt;zinging&lt;/em&gt; is similar to the one given for &lt;em&gt;hectoring&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to know what the policy is regarding this type of behavior so that appropriate action can be taken and hapless users not driven away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user the zinging comment is directed at may feel like the butt of a joke, which can be a hard place to be sometimes.&#xA;Because comments have no downvotes, a new user may see the people who support only one side of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can we do?&#xA;Should we avoid encouraging zingers by not upvoting them?&#xA;Should we post an anti-zinger, so that those who feel the zinger was too harsh have a platform to express their views?&#xA;Should we flag zing-y comments as non-constructive, even if they do lead to constructive &#xA;improvements?&#xA;Other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user39720" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T16:38:58.560" Title="Moderators' policy on zinging" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-12T05:14:28.167" Score="12" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should be removed, and new elections held to fill in that role, or selecting the runner-up in the most recent election (similar to Arqade) to fill in that role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/100/waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His profile clearly reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am now on indefinite leave of absence due to time commitments in the&#xA;real world. Any moderation issues should be directed to other&#xA;moderators or the SE team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the purpose of having a moderator who would rather have other moderation issues directed at other moderators as a moderator?  In this case, isn't it in everyone's best interest to have another user fill in that role as moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my main point.  Instead of having moderators who are doing nothing in their role, effectively wasting a moderator spot, what's the issue with having a runner-up from a previous election fill in that gap? So say, phenry was the runner-up in the most recent election, and considering he's provided some top notch contributions and is active on this site, what's the big deal with putting him in place of the other moderators? Better to have a moderator that does something than no moderator at all, and I'm sure these users would greatly benefit from having access to tools only available to a select few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21921" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T03:19:37.207" Title="Moderators who are clearly inactive" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5340" CreationDate="2014-11-12T12:19:05.517" Score="-1" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every English student knowing enough to post a question on this site understands English capitalization and basic punctuation. Why, then, do we constantly chastise people about things they already know? I'm just wondering why we can't calm down on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90680" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T15:18:08.793" Title="Why are ELU's users so easily irritated?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5339" CreationDate="2014-11-12T12:51:12.537" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sheer &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=806&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;snootitude&lt;/a&gt; perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word denotes a well-informed language-lover and word connoisseur.&#xA;  It aptly captures the linguistic snootiness of those who weigh their&#xA;  words, value verbal nuances, resist the societal tendency to blur&#xA;  useful distinctions, reject newfangled usages without strong redeeming&#xA;  qualities, and concern themselves with linguistic tradition and&#xA;  continuity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There are lots of epithets for people like this — Grammar Nazis,&#xA;  Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised&#xA;  with is 'SNOOT.' The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those&#xA;  other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be defined as&#xA;  somebody who knows what 'dysphemism' means and doesn't mind letting&#xA;  you know it. . . . A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening&#xA;  to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a&#xA;  Stradivarius to pound nails.&quot; (Wallace, &quot;Tense Present,&quot; Harper’s,&#xA;  Apr. 2001, at 39, 41.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94867" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T12:51:12.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5339" CreationDate="2014-11-12T15:18:08.793" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't deny I sometimes get irritated simply because I'm a grumpy ole git. I certainly don't defend myself in this - in fact, I apologise for inevitable future transgressions in my ELU profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, as an active supporter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Language &lt;strong&gt;Learners&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I feel there's at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; justification for being annoyed by substandard English on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: If the poster doesn't know any better, chances are they should be using the &lt;em&gt;learners&lt;/em&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: If they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know better, they're effectively insulting the community by their insouciance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of how it comes about, substandard English in &lt;em&gt;prominent&lt;/em&gt; positions (questions and answers - I don't include &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; in this diatribe) is a poor advert for the site. Not to mention which there's always the danger that uncorrected errors will be accepted as &amp;quot;valid&amp;quot; usages by others. For many users, at least &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of the purpose of ELU is to define and promote competent use of English. Correcting or calling attention to glaring errors is obviously consistent with that aim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If you don't like being picked up on grammatical/orthographic howlers, either take the trouble to avoid making them, or go to ELL (where errors are still likely to be noted &amp;amp; corrected, but at least no-one will disparage you for making them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T15:18:08.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2014-11-12T16:36:10.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4781/will-there-be-a-2014-community-moderator-election#comment16162_4781&quot;&gt;waiwai933 himself commented&lt;/a&gt; a few months ago...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moderators are removed if they have not visited the site in six months&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the general idea is that ideally, moderators wouldn't actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; anything at all. In principle, if the site is operating well (and not under attack by spammers, etc.) then ordinary users (at least, &lt;em&gt;established&lt;/em&gt; ordinary users with sufficient rep to access the relevant tools) can deal with everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not being a mod myself, I don't actually &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; what goes on &quot;behind the scenes&quot;. It's at least &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; waiwai933 (whose past contributions to ELU I greatly respect) represents an ongoing valuable resource to the visibly active mods. He might be available to participate in (public or private) chat to thrash out thorny issues, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep pretty unusual hours myself, and it seems to me there's almost always at least one ELU mod online at any given time of day (whatever &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; day is). That takes care of any sudden need for an urgent response to something the rest of us &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; deal with. And if the active mods feel there aren't enough of them to discharge their collective responsibility, I'd say it's up to &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; to call for another election to top up the numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;eight current ELU moderators.&lt;/a&gt; I expect &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/10893/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; (another highly-valued contributor in the past) will fall off the list soon, having been last seen on May 11. And to me at least, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot;&gt;Yoichi Oishi's&lt;/a&gt; position is more that of honorary &quot;user emeritus&quot; (elected as a token of our collective esteem, rather than to do the donkey work of tidying up the site). I don't often see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; doing anything these days either, but the remaining four (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18696/andrew-leach&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8360/kitfox&quot;&gt;KitFox&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3559/matt-%D0%AD%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD&quot;&gt;Matt Эллен&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/300/regdwig%D0%BDt&quot;&gt;RegDwigнt&lt;/a&gt;) are all present and active on a regular basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I assume there are &quot;enough&quot; mods to do whatever they need to do. I've been on ELU long enough to see several elections, and it seems to me the current frequency (about once a year) works fine. I see no reason to hold them more frequently. When it comes to moderation, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;less is more&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T16:36:10.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5337" CreationDate="2014-11-13T16:38:58.560" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only reason you should comment on a post is because you see something that needs improving and you want to tell the poster about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of comments that don't fit that description. If the comment is lighthearted banter a moderator will probably leave it alone unless it is flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think a comment is harmful or noise, please flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T16:38:58.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2014-11-14T03:19:37.207" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;FumbleFingers has the basic answer. I'll summarize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to moderator activity in general, there are many things we do that the user community is not privy to. Some moderators might never go to chat or comment or post on Meta. Some might not issue warnings and suspensions. Other might not do {mysterious other things we do}. Others do to varying degrees. Just because their contributions aren't seen by the community at large doesn't mean that they are doing nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elections are held when more moderators are needed. If a moderator steps down and the other moderators feel they are not able to handle the increased load, a runner-up from a prior election may be invited to fill the position. Whether this happens or an election depends on how recent the prior election was. Basically, if the community mods feel that the election was recent enough that a runner-up still represents the choice of the membership, there will probably be an appointment rather than an election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to this particular mod, we were all in communication well in advance of his &quot;leave of absence&quot; and we were able to take on his workload without difficulty. Waiwai has been a great moderator on the site, and we hope that he will be able to return and contribute again when his schedule allows him to. We'd like for him to be able to do this without having to get elected again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, having inactive mods doesn't fill positions that might otherwise be active. It's not 'wasting a spot'. If we need more active moderators, then we'll have an election and add more moderators to the team. There's no need for inactive moderators to get booted simply for inactivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T03:19:37.207" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-14T05:14:32.013" Score="-4" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4609/how-much-editing-is-too-much-editing-in-ops-post&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about editing OP posts, but I would like to raise a similar issue about editing answers to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently had a response edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207905/what-do-you-call-a-frustrating-and-inexplicable-ending/207926?noredirect=1#comment441207_207926&quot;&gt;in this thread&lt;/a&gt;, where the edit was deleting the whole post except the first sentence. Naturally, I rolled it back. This edit raises two issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As deleting 90+% of a post is without a doubt changing the nature and content of the response, what is the purpose of an edit: tidy up the language and formatting, or change the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As the post was a selected answer with plenty of upvotes, and this edit got two approvals, is there a conflict between the style of answers the community likes, and the post that the editors like?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit Added November 15th&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Responses below indicate that several people are failing to understand the construction of the post, and compounding that by conflating their opinions with fact, and at least one post has commented that no explanation has been given to say why the deleted section was relevant - though really the onus lies with the editor to prove irrelevance rather than simply repeating it over and over. Bear with this edit; there is a point to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paragraph one&lt;/strong&gt; is the direct answer. It is placed right at the top of the post so that semi-interested people can read it and then decide if they want more information or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paragraph two&lt;/strong&gt; tells the OP that I did not see the actual episode she refers to. This is there so that the OP has necessary information to judge my response. &quot;I saw it and it was lame&quot; is different to &quot;I didn't see it, but it sounds as if it was lame&quot;. I deliberatley phrased in a friendly way as me and the OP have clashed in the past, and because as a result of those clashes I know the OP is smart enough to understand what it says even if some others obviously don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paragraph three&lt;/strong&gt; is there to contextualise the suggested language by providing background. It raises widely stated views that writing a good finale for a TV series is more difficult than writing a finale for a movie or a novel. This context is needed because the 'average' ending for a TV series is not the same as an average ending in other media or formats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paragraphs four and five&lt;/strong&gt; are there for balance. There are counter arguments to the views given in paragraph three, illustrated by the example given in paragraph 5, which the OP should be pointed to. I chose not to dumb it down by spelling out the obvious as the OP doesn't need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that the post is a cohesive item. It gives information, then background information needed to judge the accuracy of the information, then background information needed to put the information in context - finales for TV shows are often lame, so they have a different standard of 'lameness' to movies, and finally a counter view for balance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the editor did was delete all the context and information needed for the OP to asses the information, saying it was irrelevant because they failed to understand why it was there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely why I ask wether censoring content should be condoned. It is all too easy for editors, particularly low-rep ones, to remove information that is needed through failing to read the authors intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T19:10:35.893" Title="Editing policy for responses to Questions: should we allow the edit to change the response?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2014-11-14T07:26:41.780" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The extent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/93408&quot;&gt;that edit&lt;/a&gt; (and most certainly the comment made with it) is inappropriate, in my opinion. Lots of people write answers that are longer than necessary, myself included, but removing 4 out of 5 paragraphs is a bit much. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/93464&quot;&gt;second edit&lt;/a&gt; was much better; not necessary, but completely acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the editor was a low-rep user (791 rep), but ultimately the persons who authorized that edit are responsible for letting it go through. In this case, one user is relatively new to the site (has been active less than one month) and the other, well, it shouldn't have happened. Please note that a more seasoned user &lt;em&gt;rejected&lt;/em&gt; that edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this one slipped by. Perhaps it brings into question what criteria should be met before users can approve edits. Truthfully (see, my answer is too long already, and I'm still going on), I've only seen this a couple of times in my 11 months here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, an edit like that should be rejected by the reviewer, or the reviewer should use the reject and edit function to remove what they think is the excessive portion of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/strong&gt; As much as most people would have it so, not all SE sites conduct themselves equally. Some are strictly business, some are rough and tumble, some are sweetness and light, some are laid back (and that's only the ones I know about). SE may pretend there are only questions and answers, not personalities, but that's wishful thinking. Look at what happened here: someone made an edit, and someone else complained about it. Suddenly people with no association with this site are jumping all over people they don't know with a kind of favoritism that belies the whole issue. WTF happened to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/&quot;&gt;The NEW new “Be Nice” Policy (“Code of Conduct”)&lt;/a&gt;? Was that posted for laughs? Does the following fit the supposedly new be nice guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But do it honestly, focusing on the issues themselves, not using some poor sap who tried to edit a bloated, sophomoric discussion into something approaching Q&amp;amp;A as your scapegoat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should have been taken care of by members and users here instead of becoming a free-for-all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just reminds me that &lt;strong&gt;everyone has feelings&lt;/strong&gt; and the more we ignore those feelings, the worse the problem becomes. What is the point of a be nice policy if only some people try to be nice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit was egregious and accompanied by a dismissive (not helpful) remark. The OP took it to Meta, as he has a right to do. And because the editor has friends, it became fubar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DVQ1I.png&quot; alt=&quot;clown vomiting a sparkly rainbow&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the worst of SE right here. If you don't think this edit addresses the original problem, you have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T19:10:35.893" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5305" CreationDate="2014-11-14T09:44:32.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strong community support for a bad answer; why?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it was a bad question; at least poorly worded. And for whatever reason users decided to upvote the &lt;em&gt;throw this in your face&lt;/em&gt; answer instead of downvoting the question or suggesting an edit. Don't y'all get so pissed when your next question is &quot;Closed because it's unclear what you're asking&quot;. This is the result of &lt;strong&gt;moderator failure&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206777/word-for-the-sentiment-or-behaviour-of-extra-people-putting-the-boot-in-once-a-m&quot;&gt;community bandwagon event&lt;/a&gt;; when the cat's away...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with (TLDR- whoever said it) that the OQ should be deleted or &lt;em&gt;fixed&lt;/em&gt; as I have also suggested in a comment there: (It is an embarrassment to SE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This entire page is garbage until the question is altered to ask whether or not 'craftsmanship' is gender-neutral, or unless changed into a single word request and thereby deleting answers that don't provide one; cleaning up this non-applicable NOISE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T09:44:32.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2014-11-14T10:28:55.610" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I removed that content because it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;added nothing to the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, which was a question about English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;added nothing to this &lt;em&gt;website&lt;/em&gt;, which is a website about English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not touch, not even a single bit, the part of your answer that was actually an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I simply removed the &lt;em&gt;vast&lt;/em&gt; chunk of it &amp;mdash; and the fact that this was more than three quarters of your post is your fault, not mine &amp;mdash; that quite obviously belongs somewhere else entirely. If you want to write an exploratory essay on why some TV shows have bad endings, write it in your blog. Perhaps make it a self-answered question on &lt;a href=&quot;http://movies.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Movies &amp;amp; TV&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3703" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T10:28:55.610" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2014-11-14T17:32:27.057" Score="13" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The Immediate Issue&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As deleting 90+% of a post is without a doubt changing the nature and content of the response, what is the purpose of an edit: tidy up the language and formatting, or change the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The amount of change is not &lt;em&gt;in and of itself&lt;/em&gt; determinative of whether an edit is correct or not. You ask &quot;what is the purpose of an edit [...]?&quot; This is indeed where the focus should be rather than whether or not 90% is too much. For instance, I would expect most would not have an issue with editing an answer that starts with a couple sentences that do answer the question but continues with what is essentially advertisement for proofreading services. It does not matter if the advertisement constitutes 10%, 20% or 90% of the post. It does not belong there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with the part that Lightness Races in Orbit removed is that it does not appear relevant to actually answering the question. It reads as some really tangential observation as to how such and such series ended. Now, one certainly &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; use various TV series to illustrate how one could apply the expression &quot;cop-out ending&quot; but the part that was removed actually does not &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll note here that I at the time I wrote this answer &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of the responses here against the edit have explained &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the passage is somehow doing relevant work in answering the question. (&lt;em&gt;Asserting&lt;/em&gt; that it is relevant does not amount to &lt;em&gt;explaining why&lt;/em&gt; it is relevant.) The focus instead is on the amount removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Larger Picture&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments here, much has been made of the fact that Lightness Races in Orbit is more active on SO than here. This is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let me note here I'm not an SE employee nor do I have any special relationship with SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While it is true that the various SE sites can self-direct and thus one site may allow things that would be off-topic elsewhere, it remains that the sites of the SE network must conform to some core rules.&lt;/strong&gt; To take an example that I think few would disagree with: plagiarism is not allowed, anywhere. If one community on the SE network would somehow decide to allow plagiarism, I would expect SE employees to step in and rectify the situation. The Islam.SE site, for instance, has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://islam.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1157/take-pride-in-your-community-and-work-to-build-a-site-you-can-be-proud-of&quot;&gt;put on notice&lt;/a&gt; due to plagiarized contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the issue is not plagiarism but whether the answer contained contents that was irrelevant to the question. &lt;strong&gt;Allowing irrelevant contents degrades quality, and this goes to the core of what being a quality question-and-answer site means.&lt;/strong&gt; What ELU risks by allowing irrelevant contents is that eventually --- probably not today, probably not next week, but eventually --- this will harm the quality of the site to such an extent that someone at SE will have to step in. I've already mentioned Islam.SE. Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5654/are-you-still-confused-about-what-programmers-is-for&quot;&gt;Programmers.SE&lt;/a&gt;: when quality went downhill, SE stepped in to refocus the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T17:33:40.997" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T17:50:19.957" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5353" CreationDate="2014-11-14T19:24:18.570" Score="2" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207992/is-there-a-word-for-words-about-words/208039#208039&quot;&gt;Is there a word for words about words?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206487/who-is-one-who-participates-in-skulduggery/206507#206507&quot;&gt;Who is one who participates in skulduggery?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepted answers in these questions are very uncommon neologisms from random websites. I would consider they are not notable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we accept any neologism if it is at least used in a random website or a very few random websites? [for example, not even an article but used in a comment from a random user]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the community welcome/approve these answers and are these answers acceptable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I give answers that are neologisms too but I usually give that answer when there is a notable source like a publication in Google Books. [For example, some of them are used in several books or in a significant amount of websites some of which have an article that use the word] [You might discuss here that if a book in Google Books is any more notable than a website].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your opinions about the example questions that I mentioned and about this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note: I neither favor nor disfavor these kind of answers. I'm asking your opinions first.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4290/is-it-fine-to-ask-questions-about-neologism-and-new-words-morphology-here&quot;&gt;Is it fine to ask questions about neologism and new words morphology here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4026/when-are-neologisms-on-topic&quot;&gt;When are neologisms On-Topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T02:47:56.467" Title="Are uncommon neologisms without a notable source acceptable as an answer?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2014-11-14T19:50:49.280" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit raises two issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it doesn't. &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; raised those issues. But you raised them in a way that took the focus off of you and started a big argument about tangential topics. That's not really fair to anyone involved, including yourself. So, in the future, try to avoid that. If you're concerned that your writing style involves too many irrelevant stories, focus on that; otherwise, just roll back and get on with your life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best advice I can give anyone about editing is found in this blog post: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/in-defense-of-editing/&quot;&gt;In Defense of Editing&lt;/a&gt; - it's short, but packed full of wisdom... Particularly the three guidelines which I'll quote here in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are going to edit a post, make sure you’re substantively improving it.&lt;/strong&gt; Avoid making isolated, trivial edits, as they are the source of much friction. For example, don’t bother changing “its” to “it’s” &lt;em&gt;unless you have several other edits to make in the same post&lt;/em&gt;. There has to be a legitimate case that your edit made multiple changes transforming the post from good to great — or at least substantively improving it.&#xA;  (Except when you happen to be editing that rare “perfect except for this one misspelled word” post. This is obviously OK to edit. In my experience, the type of posts that really cry out for editing need a lot of editing to be whipped into shape.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be very specific, I would discourage editing a post solely to remove salutations like “hi” and “thanks”. That’s just adding an unnecessary edit on top of an unnecessary set of salutations. I completely agree that salutations add little to a question or answer, but if you’re going to take the time to go in and remove salutations, &lt;strong&gt;fix the whole post while you’re at it!&lt;/strong&gt; If there’s nothing else to edit, then don’t bother.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be diplomatic in your edit-related comments.&lt;/strong&gt; If you are going to make edits, you have to be more diplomatic and friendly than “suck it up, the FAQ says I can do this.” Explain that the spirit of SO is collaborative editing, and you’re only trying to make &lt;em&gt;substantive&lt;/em&gt; improvements (see rule #1). More readable questions and answers leads to better information for all future travellers! Above all, be nice. And as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-great-edit-wars/&quot;&gt;the blog entry on edit wars&lt;/a&gt;, if there’s any resistance — even unwarranted and unjustifiable resistance — just let go and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Every edit is a judgment call.&lt;/strong&gt; Do we encourage editing? Yes! Do we demand that every user accept every edit? No. There’s no way I can make a blanket statement like that. Do I trust my wife? Sure. Do I agree with every single thing she’s ever done? No. It would be irrational to expect any person on the internet to extend more trust than this to me.&#xA;  We know editing is a net good, but not everyone does… yet. Forcing the issue does nobody any favors, generating active hostility and ill will. Unless the edit is of critical importance (which seems implausible, except in cases of vandalism or evil, which is a wholly different thing) you have to just let them learn the system at their own pace. As they say, you’ll get more flies with honey than vinegar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The vast majority of edits I see, I am fine with. But in the case where the original poster is unwilling to accept the edits and actively rejects them — please &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; force the issue. It just leads to heartache. When in doubt, move on. There’s no shortage of editing opportunities, in fact, more are being written every minute. There are thousands of users who would appreciate reasonable edits that improve their post. Do not &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-great-edit-wars/&quot;&gt;fight an edit war over a crumb of bread&lt;/a&gt; — there’s nothing there worth fighting for! It’s easier to just move on and get work done than create pain all out of proportion to the importance of the individual edit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You got a problem with an edit someone made to your post? Then roll it back - as the author, that's your prerogative. But if that edit was made in good faith, you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't need to start hand-wringing about it - folks naturally disagree on what makes a good edit &lt;strong&gt;because folks disagree on what makes a good post!&lt;/strong&gt; If the edit opened your eyes to the fact that some people might have issues with the way you write, then &lt;strong&gt;treat that as an opportunity for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to learn something&lt;/strong&gt;, don't attack the messenger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issues being discussed here (lack of substance in answers, subjective questions, why y'all are discussing Dexter here instead of going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dexter&quot;&gt;the site where that's on-topic&lt;/a&gt;...) - they're all things you probably &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be discussing. But do it honestly, focusing on the issues themselves, not using some poor sap who tried to edit a bloated, sophomoric discussion into something approaching Q&amp;amp;A as your scapegoat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.407" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T19:50:49.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2014-11-14T20:26:58.453" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edit removed the tangential speculation about how TV shows are written and why endings suck which was completely and 100% off-topic. In fact, the Question itself contained lots of off-topic rambling. It could have been boiled down to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;What do you call a frustrating and inexplicable ending?&lt;/b&gt; I was really disappointed by the series finale of Dexter. The plot and characters made no sense. Is there a word or expression which describes a sudden and inexplicable &quot;cop-out ending&quot;, wherein the reader of a novel or TV viewer feels cheated in some way. Can I say: “a cop-out ending”? Is it idiomatic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire rest of the question is not relevant and a good case could be made that it needs editing for brevity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, all of the rest of the content of that answer regarding this or that TV show, congratulating Mari-Lou A for having made it through Dexter, etc, etc, is just aimless chitchat. It has no bearing whatsoever on the answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself even asks about &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;novel or TV&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and does not limit it to TV shows. It could equally be about film or plays or interpretive dance. The &lt;em&gt;meat&lt;/em&gt; of the answer still stands. The rest is filler by-product and should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T20:26:58.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5350" CreationDate="2014-11-14T22:42:39.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I originally left my response on 'word for words about words' as a comment, since it was not well-sourced or found in significant use; I only converted to an answer at the OP's explicit request, as he (?) apparently deemed it to be sufficient to his needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am unclear as to who this &quot;we&quot; is that you are referring to when you say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So do we accept any neologism if it is at least used in a random website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only person who accepted it was the OP; I'm not sure who else you think should be accepting it, or how this acceptance would take place.  If you think it's a bad answer, you are fully entitled to downvote and/or comment on how unsuitable it is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the alternative to &quot;accepting any neologism&quot; is that all &quot;under-sourced&quot; neologisms should be flagged as &quot;not an answer&quot; and deleted, though, then I will have to say that I believe that should not happen; in some cases there is not a word available for the meaning they seek, and in some cases making one up is actually a reasonable thing to do, especially when the meaning is readily derivable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T22:42:39.973" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2014-11-15T04:11:20.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing this, the four top-voted answers defend the editor.&#xA;And I agree with that.&#xA;I am especially pleased that the editor has made no attempts to press the issue by trying to &#xA;force the edit through.&#xA;But I think it's only fair to defend the OP too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; (in Section 3: Subscriber Content) we grant Stack Exchange and others who use SE the right to modify what we post.&#xA;The editor thought they were improving the post and a considerable number of members agree.&#xA;The editor was acting within his rights.&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/in-defense-of-editing/&quot;&gt;In Defense of Editing&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;link Shog9 opens with: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Editing is the backbone of Stack Overflow&lt;/strong&gt;...&quot;&#xA;And it also cites the FAQ as saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other people can edit my stuff?!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like Wikipedia, this site is collaboratively edited. &#xA;  If you are not comfortable with the idea of your questions and answers being edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor was participating in a crucial and normal part of the workings of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the same time we are also asked in the ToS that if we use someone's post outside of SE, we must cite back (and hyperlink, if we're using the Internet) to that person.&#xA;A post the &lt;em&gt;Defense of Editing&lt;/em&gt; article links to is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-great-edit-wars/&quot;&gt;The Great Edit Wars&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is a bit different than wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;We have a much stronger authorship and owner attribution bent than Wikipedia. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we post does not completely belong to the community.&#xA;Each post is still the author's and we must respect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user says: &quot;[Everything] after the first paragraph is irrelevant, off-topic, and should be removed.&quot;&#xA;This is not completely accurate.&#xA;Irrelevancies can also be &lt;em&gt;demonstrated relevant&lt;/em&gt;, for example.&#xA;It may be the OP was going somewhere relevant with their idea, but it didn't come out right.&#xA;For example, here the OP provided use cases of their word, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first word that springs to my mind is &lt;em&gt;anticlimactic,&lt;/em&gt; though &lt;em&gt;lame&lt;/em&gt; seems to be a &#xA;  popular phrase. &#xA;    Compare the  UK and US versions of the old series &lt;em&gt;Life on Mars&lt;/em&gt;...&#xA;    the UK finale is excellent while the US one is seriously &lt;em&gt;lame.&lt;/em&gt; [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...one has a &lt;em&gt;lame&lt;/em&gt; [emphasis added] ending and the other a great one...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would have been more diplomatic to have left a comment asking OP to clarify &#xA;and/or strengthen the purpose and motivation of the last part of the post.&#xA;(Perhaps the upvotes to the comment would have given OP an idea of how many in the community agree, which is something an edit doesn't do as easily.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead what happened was: a majority of OP's own post was deleted without warning and &#xA;without their permission.&#xA;And not just the majority, quite possibly &lt;em&gt;the justification&lt;/em&gt; of OP's answer.&#xA;If it were the editor's idea to shield OP from downvotes, I think this has potential to &#xA;backfire: &#xA;It's not unreasonable to think that the answer that remained &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first word that springs to my mind is &lt;em&gt;anticlimactic&lt;/em&gt;, though &lt;em&gt;lame&lt;/em&gt; seems to be a&#xA;  popular phrase. I wouldn't say your 'cop-out ending' is idiomatic, but it is definitely &#xA;  descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;makes it look like OP was just throwing words out willy-nilly, which is just as much cause &#xA;for downvotes as irrelevancies.&#xA;This edit did change the nature of the post: &#xA;It made a post that may have been providing too much irrelevant information become a post &#xA;that may not have provided enough relevant information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the case: Would the potential downvoters have looked at the edit history first, or would they have assumed that all the editor did was format, perhaps italicizing &lt;em&gt;anticlimactic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lame&lt;/em&gt;?&#xA;Given that OP has 8k rep, there is good reason to investigate first.&#xA;But I know I wouldn't have.&#xA;Perhaps for this reason, the editor should have made what (or how much) they deleted more &#xA;public via comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really do think the editor was doing our community and OP a service.&#xA;And I also think this is a genuinely good question, that it is not wrong for the OP to have been upset, and that we all can take Shog9's advice and use this as an opportunity to learn something.&#xA;My answer is: Deleting (or modifying) a large part of a post ought to be handled carefully.&#xA;(If only because it leads to misunderstandings like this.)&#xA;I strongly encourage transparency and communication, both with the public and the poster whenever sensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T04:11:20.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5231" CreationDate="2014-11-15T09:44:13.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't remember seeing this question when it was first posted. I've now created the synonym. However even moderators have to suggest the synonym and then approve their own suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T09:44:13.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-17T18:35:53.517" Score="22" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's time for everyone's favorite game show, &lt;i&gt;Show Me the Reference!&lt;/i&gt; The following seven questions were each placed on hold as general reference within the past week:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207598/is-it-correct-to-use-an-apostrophe-to-indicate-something-that-belongs-to-an-obje&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use an apostrophe to indicate something that belongs to an object? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207645/sorry-for-bothering-you-vs-sorry-to-bother-you&quot;&gt;“Sorry for bothering you” vs. “sorry to bother you” [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207838/is-it-incorrect-if-the-last-word-following-a-comma-ends-in-a-full-stop-and-doesn&quot;&gt;Is it incorrect if the last word following a comma ends in a full stop and doesn't feature an “and” before the last word? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208347/should-there-be-a-comma-in-you-again&quot;&gt;Should there be a comma in “You again?”? [on hold]&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208295/a-foremost-correct-usage-of-this-superlative&quot;&gt;“A foremost” correct usage of this superlative? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208524/do-you-ever-get-hit-and-have-you-ever-gotten-hit&quot;&gt;“Do you ever get hit” and “Have you ever gotten hit” [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208683/what-verb-tense-is-we-are-having-to&quot;&gt;What verb tense is “we are having to” [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each question, name a &lt;i&gt;reputable, freely available online resource&lt;/i&gt; that can be used to fully answer the question within approximately 5-10 minutes by someone who has never used the named resource before. Remember, naming a resource that does not appear on the canonical &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;list of general references&lt;/a&gt; that is linked to from each of the above questions will incur a significant penalty in the lightning round!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T07:04:31.243" Title="Show Me the Reference!" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|general-reference|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-17T21:08:33.667" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question on ELU: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208347/should-there-be-a-comma-in-you-again&quot;&gt;Should there be a comma in &amp;quot;You again?&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question may be obvious to some of you, but for me, it isn't. I tried searching on ELU and other sites for an answer, but I couldn't find definitive information about this anywhere. I was hoping I'd get an answer here, but surprisingly the question was closed as 'off-topic':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;List of general references&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the list of references, and as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208347/should-there-be-a-comma-in-you-again?noredirect=1#comment442985_208347&quot;&gt;phenry says&lt;/a&gt;, none of the listed references answer the question.&#xA;While I'm not sure what's the exact reason behind the closure, the only reason I can think of is that the question was too simple. Is that an acceptable reason for closing a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this question have been closed? If so, what is wrong with it it? And how can I improve it, so I don't repeat this mistake again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69038" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T21:08:33.667" Title="Why was my question closed as 'off-topic'?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5356" CreationDate="2014-11-17T21:28:25.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, for the only one I voted to close on, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207838&quot;&gt;Is it incorrect if the last word following a comma ends in a full stop and doesn't feature an “and” before the last word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched &lt;em&gt;list comma &quot;without conjunction&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and in the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.houstonisd.org/cms/lib2/TX01001591/Centricity/Domain/16378/AP%20LITERARY%20TERMS.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;top result&lt;/a&gt;, from the Houston Independent School District,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ASYNDETON Commas used without conjunction to separate a series of words, thus emphasizing the parts equally: instead of X, Y, and Z... the writer uses X,Y,Z.... see polysyndeton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that was good enough for me. If I didn't trust the Houston ISD or the College Board (it's from an AP English Literature terminology sheet), surely I could search for &lt;em&gt;asyndeton&lt;/em&gt; and get loads of authoritative results from rhetoric- and literature-oriented sites as well as dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that not everyone spends as much time on Google as I do and has not honed their search-fu to the same degree. But we're talking about a fraction of a second here, not even 5 minutes of searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T21:28:25.890" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2014-11-17T23:18:01.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't see why looking on Google shouldn't count as general reference. It's no worse than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you don't already know the answer to your question, you have no way to evaluate whether that first Google result is actually correct&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same for general reference books. Dictionaries are okay 80% of the time and atrocious the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't think of the right search terms to ask Google, then you're not going to be able to find an answer anywhere else! The breadth of knowledge of modern search engines is unsurpassed, especially in finding resources for your almost uniquely phrased search terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the whole close reason has major problems. These questions are bad, but the explicit text of the close reason doesn't really indicate why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2014-11-17T23:24:51.813" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T23:24:51.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5356" CreationDate="2014-11-18T05:08:26.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only one of these questions that I had anything to do with was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207598/is-it-correct-to-use-an-apostrophe-to-indicate-something-that-belongs-to-an-obje&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use an apostrophe to indicate something that belongs to an object?&lt;/a&gt; I was very much in favor of keeping this question open when I first saw it (and answered it), and I voted to reopen it after editing the question to make it more EL&amp;amp;U-like. But after receiving the necessary votes for reopening, it was reclosed on different grounds—as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1031/is-using-the-possessive-s-correct-in-the-cars-antenna&quot;&gt;Is using the possessive &amp;#39;s correct in &amp;quot;the car&amp;#39;s antenna&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This disappoints me. First, I put a fair amount of thought into improving the question (as the On Hold guidelines advise users to do) in order to overcome the fault that the users who voted to close found with the original wording. But once the question overcame that obstacle, a different criticism emerged and the question was blown away once again. That hardly seems sporting, does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sporting or not, it brings up a second issue. The &amp;quot;car's antenna&amp;quot; question drew an excellent (but not documented) answer from Jon Hanna, and some okay (but not documented) answers from other contributors. In contrast, all four answers to the &amp;quot;Is it correct to use an apostrophe&amp;quot; question provide sources for the points they make—and in any case, they make some points and offer some evidence that aren't made or offered in the answers to the &amp;quot;car's antenna&amp;quot; question. Moreover, the question &amp;quot;Is it correct to use an apostrophe to indicate something that belongs to an object?&amp;quot; strikes me as being a more general question than &amp;quot;Is using the possessive 's correct in 'the car's antenna'?&amp;quot; and as being at least as search-friendly (although it would be even more so if we changed &amp;quot;apostrophe&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;apostrophe-s&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which question-and-answer block has the greater utility? It seems to me that both have their pluses and minuses, and that you could make a case for either one. But I don't agree with the notion that the answers to &amp;quot;Is using the possessive 's correct in 'the car's antenna'?&amp;quot; have settled and disposed of the question for all time. If someone feels strongly that we should merge the answers for any two similar questions that have already attracted thoughtful answers before being identified as near-duplicates, then by all means merge them. But I don't see any sign that such a merger is likely to occur between the two blocks of questions and answers here. And in the meantime, what harm have we averted by closing the more recent Q&amp;amp;A block as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE: &lt;em&gt;Chronology of the duplicate question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear about how events unfolded in the short life of &amp;quot;Is it correct to use an apostrophe to indicate something that belongs to an object?&amp;quot; I offer a rough chronology of its major milestones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November 11, 18:35: The question is posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November 11, 22:35: The fourth of four answers to the question is posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November 12[?]: The question is put on hold as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[some time between 11/12 and 11/17]: The question is revised to make it clearer and of broader interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November 17 [early]: phenry posts &amp;quot;Show Me the Reference!&amp;quot; on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November 17 [soon afterward]: The question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November 17 [3 hours after phenry's Meta post goes up]: The question is closed as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to post an answer to a &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; question; you really ought to post it to the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question. But in this particular case, the relevance of that truism is considerably easier to see now than it was at any time between November 11 and November 16.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that every time I answer a question, I take a chance that the question might be a duplicate and that someone will eventually close the new question (and my answer with it) for that reason. It's the chance I take by choosing not to delay posting an answer until after I've waded through the EL&amp;amp;U archives in search of questions that either are duplicates of the new question or might be construed to be duplicates by someone with the power to close questions for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to me that there ought to be a better method of dealing with answers submitted to questions that are later closed as duplicates than simply saying &amp;quot;Sorry, but it's your fault for answering the wrong question. Next time, try answering the original one instead of the duplicate.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T12:11:28.943" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-18T22:07:43.453" Score="4" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5362/proposal-add-a-too-basic-uninteresting-off-topic-option&quot;&gt;Proposal: Add a “too basic”/“uninteresting” off-topic option&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that many close-voters use the &quot;commonly available references&quot; option as a catchall for questions that they just don't like for one reason or another, regardless of whether the answer to the question can actually be found in a commonly available reference. Not only is this capricious, unfriendly, and unfair, but by making it difficult for a reasonable person to determine what is or is not &quot;off-topic&quot; here, it actually encourages the submission of low-quality questions. This is exactly the situation that SE Community Coordinator &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/6437/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; was hoping to avoid when he &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4013/please-help-define-the-limits-of-general-reference&quot;&gt;strongly urged us to clearly define what constitutes General Reference at this site&lt;/a&gt;—which we have never done. I therefore submit a proposal that, alone or in concert with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5362/proposal-add-a-too-basic-uninteresting-off-topic-option&quot;&gt;the other proposal I am submitting today&lt;/a&gt;, will help resolve the current untenable situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that the &quot;commonly available references&quot; off-topic option be replaced with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ApeWq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Proposed new off-topic option&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When selecting this option, the close-voter will be required to supply a URL from a set of whitelisted domains. Initially, the whitelist should include the following domains, taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;our standard list&lt;/a&gt;: dictionary.cambridge.org, dictionary.reference.com, thefreedictionary.com, merriam-webster.com, oxforddictionaries.com, etymonline.com, onelook.com, thesaurus.com. Others may be added as appropriate. If the voter does not supply a URL, or the URL is not from a whitelisted domain, the system shall not permit the vote to be submitted. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/14995?m=16129716#16129716&quot;&gt;Shog9 expressly endorsed the whitelist idea during the recent moderator election&lt;/a&gt;, which leads me to believe that the Stack Exchange software is likely to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change will not impose a significant burden on close-voters. If a voter cannot find an appropriate link within about 30 seconds of searching, then the question is not General Reference, almost by definition, and should not be closed as such. If we explain clearly why a question is GR and show how easily it can be answered, it is more likely to help dissuade the OP and others from asking similar questions in the future than just mysteriously closing questions with a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;three dozen sources&lt;/a&gt; of varying quality and purpose. If they end up bookmarking the reference we send them to and returning to it in the future, we win and they win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5362/proposal-add-a-too-basic-uninteresting-off-topic-option&quot;&gt;Proposal: Add a “too basic”/“uninteresting” off-topic option&lt;/a&gt;. I've tried raising these issues before, and nothing came of it. It's time for some straightforward, actionable proposals that can be accepted or rejected. I have made two separate proposals because I believe they can be effective singly or together, and should be voted on independently of one another. Personally, I would prefer to enact this one and reject the other one, but anything would be preferable to the current practice of saying one thing and doing another. On a website that's explicitly devoted to communication, let's at least make a concerted effort to say what we mean and mean what we say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T10:04:54.737" Title="Proposal: Require a whitelisted URL to close as General Reference" Tags="|feature-request|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|general-reference|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-18T22:09:51.700" Score="5" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5361/proposal-require-a-whitelisted-url-to-close-as-general-reference&quot;&gt;Proposal: Require a whitelisted URL to close as General Reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that many close-voters use the &quot;commonly available references&quot; option as a catchall for questions that they just don't like for one reason or another, regardless of whether the answer to the question can actually be found in a commonly available reference. Not only is this capricious, unfriendly, and unfair, but by making it difficult for a reasonable person to determine what is or is not &quot;off-topic&quot; here, it actually encourages the submission of low-quality questions. This is exactly the situation that SE Community Coordinator &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/6437/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; was hoping to avoid when he &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4013/please-help-define-the-limits-of-general-reference&quot;&gt;strongly urged us to clearly define what constitutes General Reference at this site&lt;/a&gt;—which we have never done. I therefore submit a proposal that, alone or in concert with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5361/proposal-require-a-whitelisted-url-to-close-as-general-reference&quot;&gt;the other proposal I am submitting today&lt;/a&gt;, will help resolve the current untenable situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that a new off-topic option be created that reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that are &lt;b&gt;too basic or uninteresting&lt;/b&gt; are off-topic. For more information, see: (new Help Center page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new Help Center page would give guidelines for determining whether a question is too basic or uninteresting. Please use the answers to this question to start building content for the new Help Center page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that closing questions for being &quot;too basic&quot; or &quot;uninteresting&quot; is a horrible idea that will never work, for reasons I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;expressed at length elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, but I do not believe it can reasonably be denied that that is, in fact, what we do. That being the case, and pardon me for being blunt, the current system—in which voters decide first that a question is &quot;bad&quot; and then pick a close reason as a cynical &lt;i&gt;ex post facto&lt;/i&gt; rationalization for turfing it—is dishonest and makes liars out of those who willingly participate in it. We owe it both to the greater Internet-using public and to ourselves to explain simply and accurately why we choose to close questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this new option in place, we'll be able to limit use of the General Reference option to questions that can actually be easily looked up, rather than sending the OP on a wild goose chase looking through online dictionaries for help with their comma splice problem, except that they don't know it's a comma splice problem because we closed their question as GR rather than telling them that it's a comma splice problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you've been looking for an option you can use to close questions you just don't like, here it is at last. Use it in good conscience. Own it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5361/proposal-require-a-whitelisted-url-to-close-as-general-reference&quot;&gt;Proposal: Require a whitelisted URL to close as General Reference&lt;/a&gt;.  I've tried raising these issues before, and nothing came of it. It's time for some straightforward, actionable proposals that can be accepted or rejected. I have made two separate proposals because I believe they can be effective singly or together, and should be voted on independently of one another. Personally, I would prefer to reject this one and enact the other one, but anything would be preferable to the current practice of saying one thing and doing another. On a website that's explicitly devoted to communication, let's at least make a concerted effort to say what we mean and mean what we say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T13:58:21.213" Title="Proposal: Add a &quot;too basic&quot;/&quot;uninteresting&quot; off-topic option" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|general-reference|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5361" CreationDate="2014-11-18T22:31:17.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Worst idea ever.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we give them the link, we are completely defeating the whole point, we are just doing what they want and training them to be gimme-the-codez beggars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been raised many time before, and shot down every time for this very reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it dramatically fails the litmus test of whether it improves the quality of the site for now and for posterity.  It does not.  It waters it down to just another link-nest.  We want people pointing to the site, not away from it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I believe it was Tim Lymington who expressed, more eloquently than I can, that there are nothing shy of an infinite number of questions that run:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What tense is this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the plural of that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have no business answering those, nor tolerating them.  They are ineffably trivial questions that help no one but the unstudious questioner who was too lazy to do any research and justs shows up here with a &lt;em&gt;gimme&lt;/em&gt;.  They just set up a pattern of broken windows.  They drag the site down into triviality.  They will drive everyone away who is capable of improving this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;And it will never, ever stop.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, quite literally &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;billions and billions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of potential questioners out there all around the world, each an every one of them with the nearly limitless capacity of asking &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thousands and thousands&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of these questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is not the place for those, and if it becomes such, you can kiss all hope of ever setting another quality answer goodbye, because that sort of mindless drivel by lazy gimme-the-codez posters will drive everyone away who actually knows anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal asks for nothing less than this.  It must be shot down if ELU is to stand any chance of making the internet a better place, not just of satisfying the selfish urges of those who cannot ever be bothered to look anything up for themselves, who cannot be bothered to propose their own theories and present their own research, or even formulate a question more complex in structure or thought than &quot;What is the past tense of &lt;em&gt;check&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2014-11-19T02:45:32.167" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T02:45:32.167" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5361" CreationDate="2014-11-18T22:37:24.707" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is an excellent idea and I fully support it, provided that it can be done in a technical sense. I think General Reference is hugely misused, and ironically often applied to duplicate questions. This solution encourages the community at large to demonstrate that the question is in fact a general reference according to our nominal standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to also encourage close-voters to search the site for identical questions prior to closing a question that was asked before and determined to be on-topic then. I find closing a question as general reference in these cases to be extremely embarrassing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as encouraging begging, they will beg in any case and a quick shutdown is preferable to a protracted comment chain and discussion on Meta about topicality. If I'm going to spend the time, I'd rather spend five minutes giving directions than five days arguing why they shouldn't have asked in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T22:37:24.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5362" CreationDate="2014-11-19T05:06:36.717" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps what we need is an insufficient research close reason. We can and should downvote for a lack of evidence of research, but there's no legitimate close reason for that. Maybe there should be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@AndrewLeach wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043/59258&quot;&gt;a great post&lt;/a&gt; earlier this year about showing research. Here are some quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &amp;quot;how much research is needed?&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;Enough to show:— that you have done some; that you understand what you are asking about; and you can explain all of that to people who have no prior knowledge of the problem at all.&amp;quot; Every question needs at least one of those criteria to be satisfied; most need more than one and many need all three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking good questions takes time. Questions should not simply be thrown together, and it's very unlikely that they can be templated and simply adapted from one to the next. All the research is unique to each question. Even writing this answer, which is heavily based on something already written, has taken a surprising amount of time. Invest in asking to realise a useful return in a comprehensive answer. I would certainly expect someone producing questions for ELU not to manage more than two per day before becoming worn out with the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T05:06:36.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-19T05:25:19.163" Score="-1" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing as we're discussing potential revisions to the close questions, I thought I'd raise a pet hate of mine: questions asking for a grammaticality judgement which don't explain where they got the idea that their sentence might be ungrammatical. Sometimes that source might be right, sometimes it might be wrong, sometimes the OP might have misunderstood it, but without knowing what it is there's little potential for a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some recent examples I've seen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/3915/59258&quot;&gt;Is “Me neither” incorrect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/207838/59258&quot;&gt;Is it incorrect if the last word following a comma ends in a full stop and does not feature an “and” before it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/207645/59258&quot;&gt;“Sorry for bothering you” vs. “sorry to bother you”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/205983/59258&quot;&gt;Is answering “Hope you had a good time! I” with “I did!” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/200139/59258&quot;&gt;Is “is that” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some punctuation ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/208347/59258&quot;&gt;Should there be a comma in “You again?”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/207270/59258&quot;&gt;Punctuation for referring to a question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/207236/59258&quot;&gt;Semi-colon question: “In Stand Number Two, we don't just make food; we make relationships.” &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be required that if you want to ask for a grammaticality judgement that you provide a link, reference or quote to someone suggesting that it is not grammatical? I think this should be a specific type of research effort we expect for these kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T03:35:47.430" Title="Should we require grammaticality judgement questions to explain who told them something might not be grammatical?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|research-effort|question-requirements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5362" CreationDate="2014-11-19T09:30:37.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right users do abuse the general reference option to close questions because sometimes to actually explain the reason &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; in the &quot;other reasons&quot; box which pops up is, at least for me, problematic. It's easier to click GR especially if I can't find a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be several issues which summed up will justify to my mind that a question needs to be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;put on hold&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The theory being the OP has the time to &lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; their question. The OP can comment on his post and ask for clarification, and users can help the OP to write a more detailed and thought provoking question. I see plenty of comments posted which are helpful, and plenty which contain the actual &lt;em&gt;answer(s)&lt;/em&gt;. In other words GR is a shorter way of saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, your question is considered too basic for this site by five users, please try to do some minimal research first and explain why you are still confused. We will be only too glad to help you, if we can. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is, that many newcomers are akin to &lt;em&gt;Hit&amp;amp;Run&lt;/em&gt; users. They shoot a question and then disappear, forever. Should we deliberately keep their &quot;off topic&quot; questions open, if we can't formulate a comprehensive reason every single time? Why? If the OPs themselves cannot be &lt;em&gt;bothered&lt;/em&gt; to comment, ask why or to edit their posts in the first place? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2014-11-19T12:54:58.673" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T12:54:58.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-19T16:58:41.653" Score="14" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;My instinct is to assume &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209174/help-me-understand-the-pronounced-phrase&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Help me understand the pronounced phrase?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be Off Topic (it's about a movie clip where the OP can't discern what's being said at a certain point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's On Topic, what's to stop ELU being swamped with similar questions from non-native speakers? Or anyone who can't make out the words in an old movie without subtitles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't Close-Voted, because I don't know what reason to cite. Is there one, or am I just wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T18:11:17.317" Title="Exactly WHY is this question Off Topic? Or not?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2014-11-19T17:12:14.610" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot see any way in which it could possibly fall within the site's current purview to act as a transcription service for random video clips, so I voted to close and put in a custom &quot;we are not a transcription service&quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is supposedly about pronunciation, but it's not about what variations of pronunciation are available or how have the pronunciations developed and shifted over time or some other aspect.  Basically, to my mind, the topic of &quot;pronunciation&quot; is about &quot;How do you say&quot;; &quot;What did he say?&quot; doesn't make the cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the question is completely unhelpful to any other person besides the original asker.  (Unless there's some sort of video-clip-search capability that I'm unaware of, and even then I don't see it getting any traffic here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T16:42:16.847" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T16:42:16.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2014-11-19T19:14:06.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is why I get irked at the backasswards approach toward statutory interpretation that people have around here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Pronunciation questions are explicitly on topic here.&lt;/a&gt; They are. They just are. Nowhere in the Help Center do we say that that does not include requests for help interpreting a word in an audio or video clip. A user could read every word of every help page—could do every single thing we ask new users to do—and see no indication anywhere that questions about identifying words in audio clips are off topic here. The very least we should do is give good-faith users who read the rules and make every effort to conscientiously follow them a fighting chance to get it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to &lt;b&gt;modify the guidelines&lt;/b&gt; to specify that questions about interpreting audio are off-topic, they'll have my support. Really! I have no great love for such questions, and they're much closer to ELL's core competencies than they are to ours. Let's do it today! But to ex post facto close-vote a question as &quot;off-topic&quot; just because one doesn't happen to &quot;like&quot; it, when the question itself clearly falls within the published guidelines, is not only wrong, it is rude, unhelpful to both new and longtime users, and, in my opinion, profoundly unethical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FumbleFingers, this rant is not directed at you. Raising this question at Meta is absolutely the right way to handle this, and I applaud you for doing it. I'm just a bit on edge this week about the arbitrary and capricious way we apply our own guidelines. It's not fair, it makes it utterly impossible for even experienced users to figure out just what the hell they're supposed to be doing here, and—when aimed at non-fluent speakers of English, as it so often is—it can come really uncomfortably close to being racist. And I'm goddamned sick of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T19:14:06.380" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5372" CreationDate="2014-11-20T16:05:27.220" Score="4" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to find that upon asking a question, I was presented with the following message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look at my history, just to check whether there might be anything there that anyone could be possibly offended by, and of course found nothing. As a regular stackexchange user, and an English teacher, whose questions on other sites are usually very well received, I am left feeling rather confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61528" LastEditorUserId="61528" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T16:13:28.703" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T18:56:58.240" Title="&quot;Some of your past questions have not been well-received&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5371" CreationDate="2014-11-20T18:56:58.240" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is an automated message, as Tim Lymington has commented. In addition to the closed question, there has been an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4683/discussing-meaning-in-language-poetry-and-song-lyrics&quot;&gt;additional question migrated to Meta&lt;/a&gt;, which means that it was off-topic on Main. That will also affect your statistics; instead of half being closed, it's two-thirds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bit more to the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For help formulating a clear, useful question, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is very little which can be done with the migrated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/168513/is-language-inherently-circular&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt; might be more on-topic on Linguistics.SE. However, that question contains the sentence &lt;em&gt;Now, to &amp;quot;incantation&amp;quot; clearly has its roots in magic,&lt;/em&gt; which — apart from grammar — I think I'd take issue with: I would say it's the other way round and &lt;em&gt;incantation&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt; has its roots in &lt;strong&gt;chanted&lt;/strong&gt; spells. The question also contains an admission &amp;quot;My question, therefore, is ultimately metaphysical.&amp;quot; Does that mean it's about English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would counsel that these two questions demonstrate the need to be absolutely sure that the question is on-topic for the site. (That's a general point – any site, not just this one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question currently has no answers, but it's a bit disjointed. While it has no answers to upset, re-write it so that it's clear exactly what you are asking about. Again, make sure it's on-topic: a phrase like &amp;quot;I wondered how likely it would be...&amp;quot; sets alarm-bells ringing because (a) it's not a question; (b) any answer to your wondering is inherently opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T18:56:58.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5361" CreationDate="2014-11-21T07:19:10.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The strongest argument in favor of this change is that it forces close-voters to mean what they say when they assert that an answer is available in a general reference. Unfortunately, to the extent that &quot;closed: general reference&quot; is a catch-all for questions rejected because they fall into specific (but unspoken) categories such as &quot;closed: dumb question,&quot; &quot;closed: nobody cares,&quot; &quot;closed: poster hasn't shown enough effort,&quot; &quot;closed: poster doesn't seem to know anything about the subject,&quot; &quot;closed: poster should have asked on ELL,&quot; and &quot;closed: it's probably a duplicate, but I don't want to have to hunt down the original question,&quot; it's a false and misleading category name that gives the OP—and a multitude of prospective questioners who may be poised to ask similar questions—no clear idea of what's really wrong with the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the first step that EL&amp;amp;U should take in assessing the success and usefulness of each of its close reasons is to ask and answer this question: &quot;Who[m] is this close reason primarily designed to benefit?&quot; If the answer is &quot;Everyone,&quot; then the close reason really ought to benefit everyone—and not just the hard-working, devoted people who are trying to reduce the number of junk questions in the system. If the answer is &quot;Posters,&quot; then each close reason ought to provide a clear and accurate explanation of what is wrong with the disabled question—not some vague disqualification that often doesn't fit the situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the answer is &quot;EL&amp;amp;U moderators and clean-up crews,&quot; perhaps we should dispense with the pretense that we use the vague language of &quot;closed: general reference&quot; out of concern for the feelings of posters whose questions have been closed, and acknowledge that what we're really after is a way to quickly remove questions we dislike—not to turn such rejections into &quot;teaching moments&quot; to help posters who ask bad questions upgrade their questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in that case, why provide an illusory explanation such as &quot;closed: general reference&quot; when the problem &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; that the answer to the question can be found in an unspecified general reference? Why mislead posters with a false reason when we could use a more honest formulation such as &quot;closed: reason not specified&quot; or &quot;closed: other&quot;? If the point isn't to help the posters in these cases, why give them a reason for the rejection at all? And conversely, if the point, at least in part, is to help them, why not tell them the truth about why we find their question objectionable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely everyone on this site has had the experience of being put on hold or otherwise given the runaround—or of being rejected outright—by a bureaucracy or an automated system on grounds that seem flimsy, irrelevant, or generically dismissive. It's not a good feeling. I would much rather be told what's really wrong with my application, filing, or question than be given a reason that doesn't make sense. I think people who ask bad questions on EL&amp;amp;U deserve similar honesty, as a sign of respect. There are good, clear reasons to reject bad questions; why not use them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2014-11-21T07:26:25.167" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T07:26:25.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-21T08:50:07.277" Score="16" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2014.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Winterbash 2014&lt;/a&gt; is on its way. It will run from  15 December 2014 to 4 January 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who are unfamiliar with the Winterbash hat dash, it is a time of festive fun and hats. Each person can earn hats. The criteria for each hat is available at the above site, although some criteria are secret. If you earn a hat you can put it on your avatar (only one at a time). To see the sort of hats which have been available in the past, have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2013.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;last year's site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with last year, if you don't want hats you can opt out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the possibility of the whole site opting out before it starts. Nobody wants that, though, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T14:03:22.740" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T14:03:22.740" Title="Hats are coming" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2015-01-05T14:03:49.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-21T08:50:32.500" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want hats. Give them to me! They are my birthright!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T08:50:32.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-21T08:51:21.800" Score="-14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hats are stupid. You are stupid. If I see hats I'm quitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T08:51:21.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-21T08:54:49.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't care. Hats or no hats, it makes no difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask me to choose, but I am filled with ennui even at the very mention of chosing about hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not be motivated to choose for or against even if my life depended on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hat choices are meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T08:54:49.450" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5361" CreationDate="2014-11-21T10:04:54.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Not the best idea ever&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us take this example of a question that is currently on the road to being &lt;strong&gt;put on hold&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209291/present-perfect-or-past-perfect&quot;&gt;Present perfect or past perfect?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this question in my review queue, it is a question which has been asked numerous times, but because of its title, it's damn difficult to find a duplicate. It took me about 15 minutes to find one, and one where the answer(s) are particularly helpful. Until yesterday, so to speak, I would have clicked GR (which it is, because there are hundreds of websites—some more excellent than others—dedicated to teaching basic English.) I defy anyone to say that is not a basic English question for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but now; if I've understood correctly, we are being asked to find the one link which specifically addresses the OP's problem before voting it &lt;strong&gt;on hold&lt;/strong&gt; as GR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When selecting this option, the close-voter will be required to supply&#xA;  a URL from a set of whitelisted domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead today what do we have? On this question we have one close vote saying it is &quot;unclear&quot;, and two for &quot;off topic&quot;, I've added my &quot;this is a duplicate&quot; close vote. Unless SE finds a more efficient quicker way for finding duplicate answers, I don't see myself spending 20 minutes or more looking for old questions that are related or are duplicates every time a basic English question is asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There needs to be a canonical post dealing with the present perfect, past simple and past perfect; something which StoneyB has prepared for ELL. We need to direct these type of answers to that post, but only after careful consideration, sensibly and not in an automatic knee jerk reaction. Which I confess, I have occasionally fallen into the trap of doing when selecting GR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T10:04:54.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-21T10:09:55.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My avatar already has a hat.  Tasks which might overlay it carry a disincentive (for me, at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26971" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T10:09:55.113" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-21T11:33:36.650" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love hats! Yay! Winterbash 2014! Oh... not 'til 15 December?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T11:33:36.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-21T11:54:03.230" Score="-3" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question of mine, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209439/how-is-tldr-used&quot;&gt;How is TLDR used?&lt;/a&gt; led to the suggestion that a discussion of the acceptability of such abbreviations in EL&amp;amp;U answers was really a meta question, so I am raising it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are told in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;We don't expect every answer to be perfect, but answers with correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar are easier to read.&quot; In my opinion, such expressions as tl;dr, AFAIC and YMMV do not show 'correct grammar' in terms of the standard language. More importantly, their meaning is opaque to quite a few of the &quot;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot; for whom this site is intended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These terms are now commonly used in chatrooms, social sites and informal private emails and texts, and discussion of their meaning and appropriateness is in order. Their use in serious answers is not - that's my belief. I'd be interested to know what others think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87018" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T11:09:06.203" Title="Are textspeak abbreviations acceptable in answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2014-11-21T16:33:09.473" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/80121/event-planning?referrer=92peYmGtAEjCDFG7GYRf2Q2&quot; title=&quot;Follow Event Planning&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ll7Fc.png&quot; width=&quot;220&quot; height=&quot;250&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A site proposal: Event Planning&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98032" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T16:33:09.473" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-21T16:33:09.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5381" CreationDate="2014-11-21T23:08:11.790" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think some abbreviations are acceptable. TL;DR is very common, and even if someone doesn't know what it means, it's pretty easy to guess when it's followed by a one line summary. Many of the abbreviations are actually unimportant to understanding the answer: &quot;AFAIK, I think it's acceptable&quot; still means &quot;I think it's acceptable.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less than impressed by a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; written like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;plz wat does this mean.i wanna kno coz bf sez i.m wrong :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are to some extent a courtesy. As such, placing more restrictions on them than there already are seems a bit like nagging the contributor. If a good answer has an abbreviation I don't recognize, I'll look it up and be glad to expand my 'vocabulary'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as people can edit questions to improve them, if you hate common abbreviations, you always have the option of expanding them with an edit (imho).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T00:00:35.313" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T00:00:35.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-22T03:02:17.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is hats? I am not knowing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T03:02:17.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-22T05:17:43.197" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hats! Let the fun (and general merriment) begin!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T05:17:43.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5381" CreationDate="2014-11-22T06:22:01.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is an issue of whether people understand the abbreviation, or how often it is used elsewhere, or if it is a language change. It is a matter of what register we want to use in here in ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we have ELL for people who struggle with vocabulary such as 'lexis', my opinion is that ELU is the grown-up relative, academic and hence formal, so informal items such as tl;dr are not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T06:22:01.967" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5381" CreationDate="2014-11-22T11:09:06.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;em&gt;ELU answer&lt;/em&gt; I think txt speak, colloquialisms like OK and P.S., and even site-related acronyms like OP are a little out of place, when the question itself isn't about them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In character-limited and easily-deleted comments and in Meta (whose purpose is more for the site than for the language), I don't mind them so much. &#xA;I use them a lot, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sympathize with arguments against using them altogether. &#xA;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4637/39720&quot;&gt;agree&lt;/a&gt; seeing too many of them (and other SMS hallmarks like emoticons) around would detract from the scholarly atmosphere of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But throughout my education I've heard of other things as taboos in formal writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No contractions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No passive voice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No first-person pronouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No conjunctions as sentence-starters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should these be unacceptable in answers too? &#xA;I agree that following these rules can make answers look less chatty.&#xA;So I would understand where someone's coming from if they edited examples of these in posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, I probably wouldn't edit any of these unless I really felt they made an answer hard to read or saw the answer was getting lots of downvotes.&#xA;And if the edits were rejected I would leave it at that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather see things like these kept when they're used reasonably. &#xA;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;help pages for answering&lt;/a&gt; we are asked to write to the best of our abilities.&#xA;But we are also asked to have fun and to remember &quot;there's a real human being on the other end of that network connection.&quot;&#xA;If writing well (but not by the highest standards I know) keeps discussion on-topic and friendly, then (to me) the rest is just &lt;em&gt;icing on the cake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T11:09:06.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4452" CreationDate="2014-11-25T07:24:59.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your general approach and mine to flagging and up/downvoting are very similar. The only thing I'd add is that I tend to skip answers that appear in the review queue when I think  some of the points they contain are well founded and others are not, especially when it's clear that resolving the issues is going to involve some time-consuming digging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Life's too short, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own reviewing stats show that I tend to approve about half the queried items (often after a bit of tweaking on my part), and vote to kill the other half. I probably skip about 1 item in 15. I don't have much compunction about killing the crappy answers (or questions): poor questions rarely attract high-quality answers, so their only potential value — that of opening the topic for worthwhile responses — is usually negligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2014-11-25T07:31:06.830" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T07:31:06.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-11-25T11:53:53.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came second site-wide last year, failing to obtain just one hat, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MOAR HATZ!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20739" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T11:53:53.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-25T13:03:27.727" Score="6" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125178&quot;&gt;Word for an Origin and Destination without regard for route [closed]&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic. I can't figure out why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know an (unfortunate) edit to the question indicated naming of programming terms (known off-topic) but the question has a real answer without neologism or variable naming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the question is a year old, but I want to vote to reopen, removing the irrelevant part about naming programming (wasn't part of the ORIGINAL unedited question.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I'm struggling with the difference between programming naming and the general gist of Single Word Requests or phrasing that would be otherwise acceptable, even if oh, by the way, this is being used for programming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T13:03:27.727" Title="Why is the word for origin and destination off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-26T14:24:03.493" Score="10" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are widely used (and misused IMO) for different reasons. At times they are real answers or elaborations of answers, at others they are used just to express personal impressions on questions or  answers.   Most useful and interesting comments usually receive a good numbers of up-votes and become part of the answers they relate to. But what about unconstructive or unuseful comments? Why don't we have the possibility of downvoting them instead of having to argue about their unhelpful content. In short, if comments ( like questions and answers) have the dignity of being upvoted or flagged,  why not that of being downvoted too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:57:36.743" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:57:36.743" Title="What about downvoting comments?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5394" CreationDate="2014-11-26T15:22:42.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following answer only applies to the main site. Meta is expected to have discussion, so comments tend to be treated differently here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not like answers or questions. They are not meant to last. If you see a comment that is unhelpful then please flag it so that it may be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvoting of comments is there, ideally, to raise the signal to noise ratio of comments. Comments with up votes will be seen above those without if there are 5 or more comments. Once a comment has been actioned it should be deleted. If you see a comment that has been actioned, then please flag it as obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people stopped treating comments as a place to have a chat, then there would be less of a problem. (I mean, we have &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat rooms&lt;/a&gt; for chat.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments should only be made to comment on how to improve a post. If you feel you are getting into an argument then take it to chat. If you feel like you need to make a joke, take it to chat. Don't be surprised if a comment of yours gets deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments don't get downvotes because they shouldn't stick around long enough to need them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T15:22:42.190" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5397" CreationDate="2014-11-26T18:23:34.343" Score="-2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is the appropriate forum, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way to measure the effect of stack exchange on correct usage of the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97958" OwnerDisplayName="Minnow" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T06:11:56.020" Title="Effect of English Language &amp; Usage Stack?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5396" CreationDate="2014-11-26T19:26:20.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that my math ability has improved because of Khan Academy. Now that I've viewed a lecture on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/math/probability/independent-dependent-probability/old_prob_videos/v/probability-part-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bayes' Theorem&lt;/a&gt;, I think you might be able to answer your question with a dash of Bayes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly, you are looking for the probability that one's English Language usage improves given one has visited EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, you are looking for P(A|B) where A = &quot;one's English Language usage improves&quot; and B=&quot;one has visited EL&amp;amp;U&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To calculate, you'd need three other probabilities: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The probability that one has visited EL&amp;amp;U given that one's English Language usage improved (that is, P(B|A)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The probability that one's English Language usage improved (that is, P(A)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The probability that one has visited EL&amp;amp;U (that is, P(B)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that 1 and 2 are inherently hard to measure, as you would need a rigorous definition of &lt;em&gt;improvement&lt;/em&gt;, such as a better grade on an English essay or a higher score on a standardized test. In regard to probability 1, it's hard to measure because you will have trouble finding teachers who will grade the same essay twice, once before EL&amp;amp;U, and once after EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also have to take into account that some questions are more about satisfying curiosity, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142606/what-does-ratchet-mean-and-when-was-it-first-used&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;ratchet&amp;quot; mean and when was it first used?&lt;/a&gt;. I can't imagine that one would improve either a grade or an SAT score by knowing this etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answers about usage, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/210025/mixing-single-digit-and-double-digit-numbers-how-to-write-formally/210037#210037&quot;&gt;Mixing single digit and double digit numbers - how to write formally&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;might have a slight improvement on the way that some users write out numbers or use figures more consistently. This is arguably a dubious improvement that few readers would recognize. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're serious about the question, you may want to visit our sister site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, and ask how to go about designing a test to measure 1 and 2.  I think that 3 could be estimated by the number of EL&amp;amp;U visits by distinct visitors divided by the number of distinct sites visited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:00.830" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T19:26:20.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5396" CreationDate="2014-11-27T06:11:56.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the tremendous quantity of absolutely atrocious questions and answers on this site, frequenting this site is likely to lead to chronic frustration and despair at humanity. This will lead to a degradation of quality of life, which will undoubtedly decrease your own ability to speak coherently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there are cases of this occurring here at English, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/2854284&quot;&gt;but it has happened on Stack Overflow from time to time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T06:11:56.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5356" CreationDate="2014-11-27T07:04:31.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Results&lt;/strong&gt;: Seven questions cited. Two were reopened immediately prompted by the OP's provocation. One, as soon as it was re-opened  was immediately closed as being a duplicate, &lt;em&gt;Is it correct to use an apostrophe to indicate something that belongs to an object?&lt;/em&gt; It appears that everyone agrees on this final decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and only question to be re-opened and stay open is &lt;em&gt;Should there be a comma in “You again?”?&lt;/em&gt; However, the first answer that was posted &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the question was put on hold, has remained in isolation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: November 27 1914 the community confirms its decision that all the questions cited, with the exception of the second example cited above, merited closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T07:04:31.243" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-28T19:22:11.987" Score="-6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there or will there be a special award, badge, or event for site-wide milestone answers, comments, or questions?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, the person who has the 100,000th accepted answer to an ELU question might get some special acknowledgement or reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the person with the one millionth up vote, might have some showcase of their profile, questions, or responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other contexts I've seen the Xth visitor to a site rewarded; this type of thing remains a mainstay of radio shows to promote the station.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is no, I'd be interested to know the rationale for why.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I could for instance understand if the goal of this site was quality rather than quantity; i.e. promotions may drive traffic at the expense of quality.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97958" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-11-28T20:43:25.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T07:18:45.723" Title="Are there badges or extra reputation points awarded for milestone answers?" Tags="|feature-request|reputation|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5402" CreationDate="2014-11-28T19:44:59.033" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker and I have always doubts about whether my English text is grammatically correct or not. I've searched for online grammar checker websites but I can't find a fully intelligent website. Also I've tried Google translation service but it won't help me too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would it be OK to share my some English texts in this website and ask for grammar checking? But seems here is not the place I'm looking for, If so, where can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99401" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2014-11-28T20:23:23.917" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T21:46:33.357" Title="Asking grammar checking questions, OK or not" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5401" CreationDate="2014-11-28T20:04:57.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because ELU is not a proofreading service, questions asking whether something is correct are off-topic. They would be of no help to anyone but the asker, and would not add value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you could instead recast such questions into asking about a more general matter, something that could apply to other people and situations than your own, perhaps with example texts demonstrating the point you have questions about, then they become on topic again.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does not mean they are not duplicates.  But at least they would no longer be proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T20:04:57.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5400" CreationDate="2014-11-29T06:39:48.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange already has badges for &lt;em&gt;milestone&lt;/em&gt; achievements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a &lt;em&gt;gold badge&lt;/em&gt; for a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;great question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which has earned 100 upvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/42/great-question&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/42/great-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;gold&lt;/em&gt; badge for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;famous questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which have attracted 10,000 visits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/37/famous-question&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/37/famous-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's also a &lt;em&gt;gold&lt;/em&gt; badge for a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;great answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, once again the answer must receive 100 upvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/great-answer&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/great-answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a gold badge for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;being legendary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This means a user has earned 200 reputation points for posting great answers at least 150 times.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/27/legendary&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/27/legendary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By clicking on the links you'll see how rare these achievements are on EL&amp;amp;U. I doubt very &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; much that a single answer will ever receive a million upvotes. Or any user will post 100,000 answers—&lt;em&gt;yikes&lt;/em&gt;! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T07:18:45.723" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2014-11-29T11:50:16.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have picked the &quot;too localized&quot; reason for this, but... it seems like it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184154/closing-changes-on-hold-unclear-too-broad-opinion-based-off-topic-reasons&quot;&gt;no longer exists&lt;/a&gt;.  StackOverflow replaced it with more specific reasons to make the close reasons more useful, but I think in principle it's still a valid reason to close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens often enough, I suppose we could add a &quot;we are not a transcription/translation service&quot; to the close vote reasons.  In the mean time, I would use &quot;other&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, it seems far afield from things that would be of interest to &quot;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot; so I would have no compunctions about closing it. We could update the FAQ, but really - that's not meant to be all-inclusive about what you can and can't ask, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T11:50:16.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5362" CreationDate="2014-11-29T12:40:47.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason you're looking for already exists, and it's called &quot;general reference&quot;.  Personally I would word it a little differently, but fundamentally I wouldn't change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts would already know this and/or be able to quickly look it up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; gone to pains to define what constitutes a &quot;commonly-available reference&quot; on this site. It isn't all-inclusive, but it's a good starting place for someone doing research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I personally also consider &quot;common usage&quot; to be a reference of sorts.  This site cannot benefit from answering questions that would be obvious to any native-speaking grade-schooler.  That's (partly) why ELL exists, and the lack of a &quot;belongs on ELL&quot; close-vote reason still mystifies me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Edit to add)&lt;/em&gt; I think this close reason (particularly with the new wording) also covers the &quot;insufficient research&quot; problem, which is a big deal with a lot of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T13:58:21.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-27T23:30:13.273" Score="-4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is known, when things aren't working the way you want them to, or you feel you're surrounded by problems, it can be tempting to look outward and try to change the things that you feel are causing issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I feel the fact this site is called 'English Language &amp;amp; Usage' causes me some issues, particularly there is no space on my mobile screen to visualize that name entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, even if no one will change that name, I'm wondering: Is there a word, one word, which means 'language and usage' combined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" OwnerDisplayName="Xavier Hernández Balcázar" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T21:08:57.723" Title="A word that means 'language and usage'" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5410" CreationDate="2014-11-30T01:41:04.093" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted an answer to a question which was completely wrong. It was (I believe) sane, well-reasoned, formatted, and so on, but it answered a slightly different question to the one asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original poster pointed out my elementary comprehension mistake in a comment, and it was immediately obvious to me that this was indeed the case. I upvoted the comment and then deleted my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then wondered if that is an ok thing to do? Maybe someone else would think of answering the same way, and the presence of a massively downvoted answer (mine) would prevent them doing so. Maybe it is somehow unethical here to hide your mistakes in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clarification on this matter is gratefully received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73657" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:22:13.340" Title="To delete, or not, your own incorrect answer" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5409" CreationDate="2014-11-30T16:22:13.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature of SE is that you are able to delete your own answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is up to you whether you want to remove the downvotes from your rep, or if you want it to stay as a sign post that your answer is in fact not the right one, which may be useful information to later readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is sometimes the feeling that one is covering up a failure by deleting, but rather than worry about that, just consider if your wrong answer will confuse people or fill in an obvious gap (that it would be weird to not be present) or be a signpost to avoid. Sometimes a wrong answer is just plain wrong and shouldn't be there, sometimes it is informative (still wrong, but informative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is up to you. If it is so egregious, others may do the job for you, but taking responsibility for yourself is also an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:22:13.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2014-11-30T19:16:34.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been touched on before, but a brief walk through the low-quality review queue history this morning has shown me that we need to revisit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;The remedy for a wrong answer is downvoting, not deletion.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that answers that are clear and address the question at least a little, but are fundamentally wrong, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141851/reviewing-low-quality-posts-when-to-delete/141857#141857&quot;&gt;should be &lt;i&gt;downvoted&lt;/i&gt;, not deleted.&lt;/a&gt; A wrong answer still “looks good”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last part hurts, I know. Clicking “Looks Good” for an answer you &lt;i&gt;know for an absolute fact to be wrong&lt;/i&gt; is almost physically painful. If it were up to me, I'd rename it to something that doesn't inspire life-threatening cognitive dissonance. But it's what we have, and it should be used as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing to remember is that &lt;b&gt;bad answers can be helpful too, by showing people what &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to do&lt;/b&gt;. That goes for not only wrong answers, but answers that address the question but are insufficiently supported, or even just plain useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/95362&quot;&gt;Here's an answer with four votes to delete.&lt;/a&gt; Why? Because the poster pulled it out of his ass? So downvote it and explain why. If this answer sits around with a negative score and comments explaining why it's not a good answer, might it not help observant people understand that the road to success here does not involve pulling things out of your ass? And if that prevents even one prospective answerer from making the same mistake in the future, doesn't that justify keeping it around as an example of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anti-pattern&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, a deleted answer doesn't teach anybody anything, which is why deletion should be reserved for the truly hopeless cases: spam, complete gibberish, comments posted as answers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T19:39:23.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-02T22:20:45.400" Score="3" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;It strikes me as a breach of etiquette to edit or delete another person's comment. Where can I find the guidelines on, or discussions of that topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372442" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T22:22:02.233" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T11:29:56.363" Title="Who has the power to edit or delete another person's comments, and what justifies the edit or deletion" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2014-12-02T22:25:37.150" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only moderators and the commenter have the ability to edit or delete comments, and commenters can only edit within a short timeframe. I added the comments tag to this question. You can find posts related to these activities within that tag. Please feel free to post another Meta question if you have something more specific that you can't find an answer for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T22:25:37.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-03T11:38:59.100" Score="16" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a spin-off suggestion from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5362/proposal-add-a-too-basic-uninteresting-off-topic-option&quot;&gt;Add a 'too basic' close reason&lt;/a&gt;.   I put forth that we already do have a 'too basic' reason, General Reference, but the wording should be improved.  Here is what I suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It appears that your question might be answerable through &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt;.  Please provide more detail about the research you've done, or consider if the question might be better suited to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; sister site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Updated from comments&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This addresses the three buckets of questions that I believe commonly fall into the GR dumping ground.  Ones that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Definitely could be answered using commonly-available references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show no evidence of research, so it seems like they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be answered by common references.  If the OP adds evidence of what research they did and why they're still confused, it might actually be a good question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are too basic / obvious to native speakers, and don't fall within this site's charter.  They might be good questions for ELL, but maybe not.  There have been various discussions (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4564/couldnt-select-proper-close-question-reason&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) that hint that an auto-migration path to ELL may never exist, even after it graduates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not oppose having three separate close reasons, but I think we're limited in how many we could have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T19:48:13.657" Title="Reword General Reference to include research / ELL" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5415" CreationDate="2014-12-06T19:48:13.657" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I support Lynn's argument and suggestion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's up to the asker to demonstrate that a question is not answerable by General Reference, and research is the way to do that. A question is only put on hold not closed outright, in order that it can be reworked and re-opened [brought off-hold]. So saying that a question is answerable as General Reference is the same as asking for more research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CiDyl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Provide details. Share your research (from Ask Question page)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already written an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;answer about research&lt;/a&gt;, which appears to have been well-received (apart from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5279/does-a-question-which-shows-no-research-no-effort-deserve-a-downvote&quot;&gt;one member of the community&lt;/a&gt;, anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to suggesting ELL, I'm not sure that this message is the place to do that, because it will result in cross-postings. It's better for members of the community to vote to close and flag for migration. Bear in mind that &lt;strong&gt;bad questions should not be migrated.&lt;/strong&gt; Bad questions should be improved and then (if they are off-topic) be migrated to a site where they are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Consequently I propose that the General Reference reason be amended to something close to Lynn's suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that your question might be answerable through &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt;. Please provide more detail about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; you've done, in order to demonstrate that the answer is not easily available.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is scope for the target of the &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; link to be a different answer, or even a new custom-crafted question and answer: please use comments on this answer to suggest replacement links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this suggestion brings the need for research from the &amp;quot;How to Ask&amp;quot; checklist into the on-hold reason. It means that we can retain the other two current custom close reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on &lt;strong&gt;choosing an ideal word or phrase&lt;/strong&gt; must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading&lt;/strong&gt; questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They too could probably be improved; but we can leave that for a separate discussion (If you want to discuss them, please don't use comments here; write a fresh question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've based this suggestion on previous discussions and votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5415/18696&quot;&gt;Lynn's question above&lt;/a&gt; currently at +11&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5362/18696&quot;&gt;phenry's question about &amp;quot;too basic or uninteresting&lt;/a&gt; at +2, but countered by +6 argument for more research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5367/18696&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A's answer requesting more research&lt;/a&gt; at +5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5406/18696&quot;&gt;Lynn's answer quoting &amp;quot;Linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&amp;quot; and suggesting more research&lt;/a&gt; at +1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5361/18696&quot;&gt;phenry's suggestion of mandatory link from a GR whitelist&lt;/a&gt; at a net −7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;Martha's position that Google is not a General Reference&lt;/a&gt; at +42. It's a directory to potential General References&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5279/18696&quot;&gt;Ivanhoescott's question about research being unnecessary&lt;/a&gt; which I calculate to be at a net −51&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;A related question about how much research is necessary&lt;/a&gt; at +8&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T19:48:13.657" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5432" CreationDate="2014-12-07T07:42:25.603" Score="6" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled (to my utter amazement) on a question which was linked to a comment posted on Meta, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who do not have the rep to see deleted questions, it is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;What does “TL;DR:” mean? [closed]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I found two different sentences that were prefixed by TL;DR:.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &quot;I've been here for quite some time, spent considerable time and&#xA;  effort in shaping the […]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asked by a high-rep user and was posted on &lt;code&gt;Jan 30 '11 at 13:46&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;There were six answers posted in response to that question. The top answer received 59 upvotes. The entire question, along with its answers, was deleted by &lt;em&gt;seven&lt;/em&gt; users on &lt;code&gt;Sep 19 '12 at 2:02.&lt;/code&gt; Five of these are still very active today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason it was first closed was because it was deemed as &quot;general reference&quot;. The original wording was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we should all be aware of the fact that a little over two weeks ago, an identical question was asked on EL&amp;amp;U: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209439/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how-is-it-used&quot;&gt;What does &amp;#39;TL;DR&amp;#39; mean and how is it used?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't that closed as &quot;general reference&quot; (especially by those very users who deleted the previous question)? Will that recent question plus its five answers be deleted one day? Until today, I would have argued that that was an impossibility, but I'm not so sure any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I once voted to close a question for being general reference—which it was. It had nevertheless received an excellent and detailed answer; the answerer was a newcomer who, being justifiably concerned, queried if his post was doomed for deletion. I reassured him that posts which had received at least one upvoted answer could not be deleted. Was I wrong? If the rules governing closure can be changed (as seems to be the case), is that good answer at risk of being deleted one day? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I strongly believe that the aforementioned TL;DR: question should be &lt;strong&gt;undeleted&lt;/strong&gt; and marked—ironically—as a duplicate of the more recent one. If the original post hadn't been deleted, the second question would have been closed in an instant as being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for deleting GR questions that have accrued no upvotes and no answers in the space of, say, four weeks. They achieve nothing besides cluttering up the EL&amp;amp;U site; they should consequently be obliterated. Similarly, if the recent question was never (to the best of my knowledge) at risk of being closed, and it remains open to this day, then the older question should be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T14:20:38.057" Title="What are the &quot;rules&quot; for deleting questions? And should “What does ‘TL;DR:’ mean?” be undeleted?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5429" CreationDate="2014-12-07T23:31:56.353" Score="10" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia uses &lt;em&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/em&gt; as the canonical form and uses &lt;em&gt;Irish English&lt;/em&gt; as the autolinked-to synonym for the same thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Irish&lt;b&gt;–&lt;/b&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; with a dash and &lt;em&gt;Irish&lt;b&gt;-&lt;/b&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; with a hyphen are two different things, a fine distinction that we cannot represent in tags due to lack of en-dash support. In contrast, &lt;em&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/em&gt; suffers no such ambiguity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No matter which of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hiberno-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hiberno-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hiberno-english&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irish-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irish-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irish-english&lt;/a&gt; is chosen as the canonical form, those should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be two different tags; one should be the synonym of the other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve gone through and retagged all the questions tagged with &lt;strong&gt;Irish-English&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hiberno-english&quot;&gt;be tagged with &lt;strong&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I’ve also spruced up its &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/hiberno-english/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki and excerpt&lt;/a&gt; a wee bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we therefore please have a tag synonym/merge/magical-alias created so that whenever someone types in “Irish English” for a tag, this gets automagically retagged to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Hiberno-English”&lt;/a&gt; instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background and Reasoning:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical name for this on Wikipedia is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is why I chose that version of the tag.  Now, they do recognize the synonym:  if you look up &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irish English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia, you will notice how it automatically redirects you to the Hiberno-English link.  All I’m asking if for us to have the same sort of aliasing that they do, to help prevent confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why they should have chosen the H-version as the canonical form and the I-version as the synonym — rather than vice versa — I cannot say for sure. I only know that is what they have done, and it seems sensible enough to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly the word &lt;em&gt;Irish&lt;/em&gt; used alone when referring to language leaves it ambiguous whether it’s an English tongue or a Celtic one that’s under discussion.  Imagine if you are talking “Irish–English relations”, like “US–UK relations”: both of those are talking about two different countries, and it is asking a lot for people to tell the difference between an en dash and a hyphen in &lt;em&gt;Irish–English&lt;/em&gt; compared with &lt;em&gt;Irish-English&lt;/em&gt;  (Plus our tagset doesn’t support dashes, only hyphens.)  With “Hiberno-English”, no such ambiguity exists, so for that reason if no other it seems the preferable term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t actually care particularly strongly just which one of &lt;em&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Irish English&lt;/em&gt; winds up being the canonical version. I just think that because the two terms do in fact here on ELU refer to the same thing, &lt;strong&gt;there should not be two distinct tags&lt;/strong&gt; for the same thing.  That requires a tag synonym and a merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did the work of the retagging because there were questions in both tags, but I don’t strongly care how it reads &lt;strong&gt;provided&lt;/strong&gt; that the two spellings go to the same place.  This is exactly what tag synonyms are for.  But because there are only a couple of dozen questions with this tag, we don’t have the power as tagsyn voters to effect this change.  That’s why this is a support request for moderatorial intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people have an allergy to &lt;em&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/em&gt; as “too fancy” and don’t care that “Irish-English” is ambiguous in a way that the former term is not, so be it. There still should be only a pair of synonyms.  But those same people will probably also next request that the &lt;em&gt;Orthography&lt;/em&gt; tag and its tag-synonym &lt;em&gt;Spelling&lt;/em&gt; have their canonicity reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T23:56:54.230" Title="Tag Synonym Request: “Irish English” → “Hiberno-English”" Tags="|discussion|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-08T01:00:22.750" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday evening (GMT) my reputation dropped from 6650 to 6218 all of a sudden.  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T07:24:24.923" Title="My reputation has dropped 400 points all of a sudden. Can anyone tell me why?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5421" CreationDate="2014-12-08T07:24:24.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of questions were deleted. I've undeleted them for the moment as there is nothing immediately obvious to indicate why they were deleted. If something is drawn to moderators’ attention, or otherwise comes to light, they may disappear again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions accounted for the majority of your loss, and you’re currently back to 6530.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may be able to shed some light on what’s happened to the rest, but moderators don’t have access to a detailed history of reputation changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T07:24:24.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5420" CreationDate="2014-12-08T15:28:38.500" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree to make the two synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer Irish-English to be the main tag and Hiberno-English to redirect to it, as it's perhaps a bit clearer, but don't mind too much either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T15:28:38.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-09T01:36:57.340" Score="8" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue comes up in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/127144/do-you-know-the-meaning-of-the-american-idiom-pot-calling-the-kettle-black&quot;&gt;The meaning of the American idiom &amp;quot;pot calling the kettle black&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which has just been placed on hold as being off-topic because the body of the question focuses on a series of survey-type questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three things are noteworthy about this question. First, it is the only question on EL&amp;amp;U that specifically asks (in the title, anyway) about the meaning of the idiomatic phrase &quot;the pot calling the kettle black.&quot; The closest thing to a similar question that I could find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45205/pot-calling-the-kettle-black-but-what-if-the-kettle-isnt-black-figurativ&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Pot calling the kettle black&amp;quot; ... but what if the kettle isn&amp;#39;t black (figuratively speaking)?&lt;/a&gt;—but in that case the question is specifically about how to describe a situation where a (black) pot is calling a (not black) kettle black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the now-on-hold question was asked on September 15, 2013, which means that it has been a question in good standing (and has been attracting answers) on EL&amp;amp;U for more than 14 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, all five of the nondeleted answers to the question address only the question &quot;What is the meaning of the American idiom 'pot calling the kettle black'?&quot; That is, the answers address what appears to be a legitimate question about meaning posed in the title of the question, and ignore the (arguably off-topic) quasi-survey questions in the body of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are (1) Is it legitimate for an editor in this case to delete the entire series of survey-style questions in the body of the OP's question, and replace it with a restatement of the question posed in the title? (2) Or should we wait and see whether the OP will undertake some sort of major edit of the body of the question in hopes of restoring it to good standing—and if the OP fails to do so, should we consider this question dead and start over with a question that asks very nearly the same thing in the title but also (in the body of the question) avoids any attempt to poll readers, and perhaps shows some level of initial research into the answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more general level, I would like to know how much editing is too much in situations like this one, and also how much interest there is in preserving worthwhile answers to poorly framed questions like the OP's by rewriting the body of a question, as opposed to simply bagging the flawed question and starting over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE (January 6, 2015):&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I as thinking of putting in place of the OP's original question text, while preserving the wording that the OP used in the original question title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We commonly hear the idiom &quot;That's like the pot calling the kettle black&quot; when, for example, a politician in one party criticizes a politician in an opposing party for some dubious action or behavior or comment. But how are we to understand this idiom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the crucial implicit idea here that the pot is just as black as the kettle is? If so, what is the nature of the &quot;blackness&quot; that both of them possess? And what's wrong with a black pot calling a black kettle black, anyway? Also, does the idiom have a racial element? And when did the idiom arise in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, the answers posted beneath the now-close question address the questions asked in my revision, and ignore the laundry list of questionnaire-like queries asked in the body of the original question. Consequently, it seems possible to preserve the various answers already given, instead of starting over with a new question that asks about the same things that the old answers answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is that worth doing? I think Jon Hanna's view that everyone might be better off to walk away from the closed question and start over with a new one ought to be taken seriously. The issue, to me, is whether we want to make an effort to preserve the old answers or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I'm not at all sure how users of this site feel in general about performing major surgery on a bad question to preserve interesting answers versus starting afresh. I also still don't know whether the old answers will eventually vaporize if the old question remains closed, or live on in some visible limbo where closed questions and answers wander the twilit landscape eternally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T05:01:05.780" Title="When (if ever) is it justifiable for an editor to change the entire body of a question while retaining the question title?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-09T07:24:56.587" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you please help me understand why  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211163/whats-a-word-for-a-thing-that-makes-one-sleepy/211164#211164&quot;&gt;What's a word for a 'thing that makes one sleepy'?&lt;/a&gt;   is a general reference question while  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/210929/finance-is-to-financial-as-trade-is-to-what/210939#210939&quot;&gt;&quot;Finance&quot; is to &quot;financial&quot; as &quot;trade&quot; is to what?&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, is not? I answered both questions assuming they had no 'generals reference' characteristics, and, especially regarding the former, I don't see how it could be easily answered looking ( which word?) up in the dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T08:49:23.963" Title="General Reference: here we are again!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5425" CreationDate="2014-12-09T07:43:37.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that your answer quoted verbatim from a dictionary to &lt;em&gt;What's a word for a 'thing that makes one sleepy'?&lt;/em&gt; is proof that it is a general reference question. Plus saying you answered the first question thinking it had no impediment implies you waited for someone to raise an objection, but you answered with &lt;code&gt;soporific&lt;/code&gt; only &lt;em&gt;two minutes&lt;/em&gt; after the question had been posted. The speed in which you replied is &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; an indication that it was a GR question. This doesn't take way the fact it was a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second question, &lt;em&gt;Finance” is to “financial” as “trade” is to what?&lt;/em&gt; The accepted answer was given by a mod, so presumably that person recognizes when a question is on topic or off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T07:43:37.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5425" CreationDate="2014-12-09T08:49:23.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Others voted for GR, but I cannot explain their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I closed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211163/whats-a-word-for-a-thing-that-makes-one-sleepy/&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a word for a &amp;#39;thing that makes one sleepy&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt; because it is a bad &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It fails the basic &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;single-word request checks&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question Checklist&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before making a single-word request, ask yourself the following&#xA;questions (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2298/8816&quot;&gt;this meta topic about good request questions&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question describe exactly in what context you want to use a single word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question specify the criteria for which the suggested word will be accepted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question list which words you didn't like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question show that you searched for a suitable word before asking the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to all those questions is &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, as far as I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the other question: I hadn't seen it before, but I have closed it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T08:49:23.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5420" CreationDate="2014-12-09T16:35:36.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As requested by tchrist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Hugo, I would prefer &lt;em&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/em&gt; as the main tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the field of linguistics (as applied to Ireland and her languages in particular), &lt;em&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;Hibernian English&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;Irish English&lt;/em&gt; are actually two distinct terms with (slightly) different meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hiberno-English&lt;/strong&gt; is the variant of English that is currently spoken in various dialects on the Emerald Isle (Republic and Northern Ireland)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irish English&lt;/strong&gt; is English spoken as a second language by native Irish speakers, with all the usual first-language influences that entails.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a speaker of Hiberno-English is normally a native English speaker (who may or may not even know that a great many of the words they use is of Irish origin), while a speaker of Irish English is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that ELU is about English, not Irish, Hiberno-English is of greater relevance to our needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction is (usually) upheld when dealing with the current status of Irish and English in Ireland today in linguistic articles, etc.; but outside this narrow scope, they are nearly always synonymic, and even linguists who are not specialised in Ireland in particular often use them indiscriminately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it would be absurdly persnickety and nitpickety of us to have separate, non-synonymic tags for the two here (especially since one of them would be all but useless in our context anyway), and I thus agree entirely with Hugo that they should be synonymised; but I think we should let ourselves be guided by the consensus within the field, even if it isn’t very widely known outside a small field of scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:35:36.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5417" CreationDate="2014-12-09T21:13:39.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious what the point of resurrecting the old question in order to immediately close it as a duplicate of the newer one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that we now have a canonical answer to the TL;DR question, that goes further than the original question or the original answers. The second question is higher-quality than the first. If we had never deleted the first, the second might have been closed and we'd have only the first set of answers instead of the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, undeleting the old question won't help future visitors at all, as far as I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is strange that we can re-open the question while it is deleted, but not undelete it, but either way I see no reason to play with the old question at all. It was off-topic before, it's off-topic now, AND a duplicate of an on-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T21:13:39.450" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5417" CreationDate="2014-12-10T16:46:20.950" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question simply asked what &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; means, which is beyond a shadow of a doubt General Reference. And it wasn't just closed by ELU mods and high-rep users - I'm not sure what's happened to now-deleted user &quot;Will Hunting&quot;, but I think he is/was one of &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;he &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;owers &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;hat &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;e within the entire Stack Overflow group of sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; question (which I haven't closevoted) has at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; credibility, in that it could be seen as asking for more details about the &quot;status&quot; of the usage (is it acceptable in a formal context, for example?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think the fact that over 100 users are prepared to upvote a meandering answer to that second question (with its pointless plethora of &quot;not-so-funny&quot; images) doesn't reflect well on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there's an argument for saying it &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; reflect what many people want to see here - why else would they keep upvoting? If ELU mods or even higher-level representatives of TPTB within SO want to close/delete the second question they'd have my full support, but I don't see why I should have be the first one to stick my head above the parapet (I don't mind here on meta, because I assume most of the people who disagree with me are casual visitors to the main site, who are not so likely to read/downvote my words here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T16:46:20.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5417" CreationDate="2014-12-10T18:08:43.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duplicates are not bad. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32311/do-not-delete-good-duplicates/32315#32315&quot;&gt;In fact, they're good:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds our fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wish people wouldn't delete questions with good answers. You're destroying the useful contributions of your peers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improved-question-merging/&quot;&gt;merging is a thing.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;if there’s anything of worth in the answers, the question should be merged with another question rather than being deleted!&lt;/b&gt; ... I’m not necessarily advocating deletion, either; we want some of these merge stub questions hanging around so people can find two “identical” questions that were asked in two totally different ways. The exact, perfect duplicate question, in my experience, is much more rare than people think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;edit:&lt;/i&gt; Actually, it looks like no questions have been merged here since 2012, so maybe the mods have forgotten about it, or we mortals have forgotten (or never knew in the first place) that it can be requested. Let me repeat that last part really big so everyone knows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improved-question-merging/&quot;&gt;Merging is a thing!&lt;/a&gt; The older question should be undeleted and the two questions should be merged!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T18:08:43.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5434" CreationDate="2014-12-11T22:33:00.407" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my youth, when actually hitting my rep cap was not an unusual event, I was unruffled by missing a cap by one or three points. Now, however, hitting my cap is a rare event, and a dilemma has presented itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I do hit my cap but don't have an answer accepted, a single downvote on my part will put me under. It doesn't seem to matter if I have 22 upvotes or more. I did ask about this once and the answer was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You did it to yourself.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like it would discourage someone from doing their duty to down vote (as oppose to delete vote) bad answers when spotted or working the queue. Since I don't know when a mediocre answer will be mysteriously and repeatedly upvoted, I feel a bit ruffled when the downvote or two or three prevents me from adding another 200 rep day towards a pretty limited legendary badge (issued twice on EL&amp;amp;U).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's happened often enough (honest, it has) to matter. The rep is not a big deal, but it would be nice both work the queues &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; to earn that legendary badge if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just didn't do it to myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2349/bug-in-rep-recalc&quot;&gt;this has been asked&lt;/a&gt;, but I still don't understand the reasoning behind it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this be addressed? I'm sure I'm not alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add&lt;/strong&gt;] This could easily be solved by not downvoting, or carefully selecting times to downvote, but this seems a bit contrived (I don't keep a mental list of what questions or answers should get a downvote). I can delete bad answers instead of downvote them, but that doesn't help the site. I think the SE model has an expectation of me to downvote bad answers. This was made even clearer by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5320/should-i-flag-a-poor-answer-as-not-an-answer/5411#comment21508_5411&quot;&gt;this mod comment&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Deleting posts for users doesn't teach them anything. They get given rep (get given it back) and don't have to ask where it came from.&lt;/em&gt;) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5320/should-i-flag-a-poor-answer-as-not-an-answer/5411#5411&quot;&gt;this recent upvoted answer&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The remedy for a wrong answer is downvoting, not deletion.&lt;/em&gt;) While, sure, I would like to earn a badge, my main point is that the rep system has built into itself a disincentive to downvote &lt;em&gt;appropriately&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;12/19 Edited to add&lt;/strong&gt;: @Matt Эллен has looked into this and has graciously and patiently explained that only the downvoting that occurs &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; reaching the 200 rep cap is deducted from the cap, but that regardless of how much a user would have scored from up votes, downvoting afterwards is deducted from 200. If the user down voted before reaching 200, they will still reach 200. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems to clear up most of the problem for me, which is to continue to vote responsibly as I go along. Though I certainly can't predict when a question I've answered will hit the multicollider, it's not instantaneous, and sufficiently narrows down the time frame when downvotes might affect the rep cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Thanks to @Matt Эллен for clearing this up!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T08:28:58.490" Title="Rep caps vs. downvotes, and the downvotes have it" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5433" CreationDate="2014-12-11T23:27:07.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I genuinely don't see a real problem here. A downvote by you carries a penalty as a design feature, to make you think whether it is justified. For those of us no longer in our SE youth (I would call myself a greybeard in this context; not sure what the female equivalent is) 1 point of rep is less of a penalty but the possibility of not hitting the rep cap is more of one: why would you want to fix one half without the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, how difficult is it when you have reached +200, and think it unlikely that you will receive another upvote (to cancel your downvote) before the end of the day, to wait until a new day before downvoting? An enforced pause may even benefit your critical faculties. If that day you then reach +199 but not +200 then yes, you unarguably did do it to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T23:27:07.460" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5437" CreationDate="2014-12-12T23:23:20.187" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Irritatingly I have taken some noise recently on my original answer (prior to editing) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206894/what-is-a-word-that-describes-a-secret-that-passes-on-from-a-person-to-person/206901?noredirect=1#comment455717_206901&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - My original answer was &quot;Are you referring to &quot;open secret&quot;...&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was jumped on almost immediately by a small number of people intent on pressuring me to conform to the &quot;rule&quot; that Answers are for answering and question may not be asked within them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with this principle- Using an answer to draw out more information or clarification from the OP is clearly wrong, I accept that and I uphold the principles of the SE family wherever I am. However, as I explained twice (one block of comments has since been withdrawn by me and their author), despite the fact my opening statement was interrogative, it was not actually a question it was merely a less formal way of offering my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to have got several people all excited and a few have offered admonitions and downvotes (seems like some people get more joy out of correcting others than offering helpful suggestions or answers, or maybe I am just suffering from selection bias) culminating with a polite request from a moderator not to frame answers as questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, having been somewhat annoyed by the entire approach to my answer I did check out, in detail, the documented rules for answering. I do believe that if I have broken rules then moderator intervention is justified and will be observed. However there do not seem to be any relevant guidelines for how to frame answers, certainly nothing that says you cannot ask a question in an answer, and nothing I can find justifying the interest from several people in trying to make me uncomfortable enough about my answer to conform to the stated &quot;rule&quot;. It just isn't part of the &quot;manifesto&quot; of this site, yet has been metaphorically rubbed in my face and I have certainly seen the reaction deployed elsewhere here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why have I been put under so much pressure from community members and why was it felt that moderator intervention was justified? What community &quot;rule&quot; backs that up? I would be considerably less annoyed if I was genuinely asking a question designed to elicit information or even a response from the OP, but my answer style was merely less formal and more like how one person would speak to another in the real world. One person was so incensed that they edited my entire answer to make it the way they wanted to appear, together with reference (another common demand that appears nowhere in the &quot;rules&quot;), downvoted my answer and left a comment telling me they had done so because my answer did not actually answer the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that, given the lack of &quot;real&quot; rule, all the interventions seem somewhat petty and sanctimonious. In the end, following the moderator's response I did edit it as I have no desire to be a troublemaker. But I did not, and do not think that I needed to have done so and I feel slightly bullied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76722" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T12:51:35.100" Title="Why does this post require moderator advice on format?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2014-12-13T00:23:30.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made the change to the answer to conform to the rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I made the edit because it's okay to edit questions and answers here. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You were given an opportunity to make a change to make an answer an answer and refused. That, not simply by inaction, but by stating unequivocally that you wouldn't be bound by such formatting restrictions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OK, I'll take the heat on being terse about editing and downvote but considering I hadn't downvoted until the edit, I was hoping that the conversation wouldn't have gone that far. My intention was to provide an opportunity for a better structured answer to exist, versus flag for a moderator.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since your post had presented a question encompassing a valid answer, I moved to make it look more like an answer than a question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP didn't consider the answer valid. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be assumed (by most people?) that an answer is an answer and not a question. That is, that the entirety of the answer should not be a single sentence that begins with an interrogative word and end with a question mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;how to answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Answer the question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244956/how-to-handle-answers-which-begin-with-what-are-you-trying-to-achieve&quot;&gt;What are you trying to achieve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T12:51:35.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2014-12-13T00:31:04.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll take your word that it's not written anywhere. Lots of stuff that's expected to be observed here isn't, and lots of stuff that is written is ignored, even (and inexplicably) by seasoned users and moderators. Every site has unwritten rules that are learned in time, and this is one of them. SE prides itself on being a Q&amp;amp;A site, so the &quot;?&quot; in the answer set off a knee-jerk response.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This place is far from real life, and our better angels are not always on display. You aren't the first person to be made to feel uncomfortable here. Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4625/bring-back-the-summer-of-love-aka-make-new-users-feel-more-welcome&quot;&gt;Bring back the Summer of Love, aka make new users feel more welcome&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4504/what-is-the-target-quality-of-answer-on-this-site/4509#4509&quot;&gt;What is the target quality of answer on this site?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback&quot;&gt;The New new Be Nice Policy&lt;/a&gt;, or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4857/2014-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/4862#4862&quot;&gt;this ?question&lt;/a&gt; to see how contentious the seemingly simple issue of being nice is, partly because that is defined differently by different people, and partly because you have nothing but a block of cold text - you can't divine the intent behind it - in a comment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a thick skin, please hang around for a while. You are welcome here. If you're tender-hearted, get out while the getting is good, because this is how it is. Not always, but enough that you just experienced it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T02:50:02.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2014-12-13T10:31:20.063" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;moderator advice&quot; was mine, and followed flags raised on a comment in the post (I tend to read the context around comment flags, particularly when something flagged as &quot;not constructive&quot; might actually be constructive criticism). The comment in question is one of those which has been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice was, I thought, polite and explanatory, and was an effort to avoid more flags, perhaps on the answer itself, particularly since by this stage it had been edited, deleted, rolled back and undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please don't phrase answers as questions. Answers should be answers. It's ok to start with &quot;You may be referring to...&quot; if you believe there is some uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; just have edited the post to do that. I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have construed the answer as a request for more information from the asker and summarily converted it to a comment &amp;mdash; another user actually commented &quot;Is this an answer or a comment?&quot;! I chose to do neither, but comment myself instead; I would far rather answerers edited their own posts. However, if you felt my comment was not constructive, you could simply have flagged it &amp;mdash; another moderator would have dealt with that flag; I don't moderate my own flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to rules, some may well be unwritten and a part of site ethos. We try not to maintain that situation, although in any community it's somewhat inevitable. Rules are occasionally codified after something happens. It may well be that this Meta question highlights a gap which needs to be dealt with (one way or the other). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, rules are mentioned in a number of different places which need to be referred to together to form a complete picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site Tour&lt;/a&gt;, which has elements common to all Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: it's not a discussion forum. Answering a question with another question may invite discussion, which would probably be conducted in comments. Comments are definitely not for discussion, so answers should never invite it. Giving an answer with no distractions satisfies this stated aim in the Tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of Meta questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/answer-howto&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answer-howto&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answer-howto&lt;/a&gt; which might also be useful. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/637/is-it-a-better-idea-to-check-some-resources-before-answering-to-the-questions&quot;&gt;Is it a better idea to check some resources before answering to the questions?&lt;/a&gt; contains advice from Stack Exchange's founder, Jeff Attwood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should always try to cite sources or data for your answers, even for subjective ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may not be directly relevant, but it does indicate that answers should be backed up with corroboration. Corroborated answers aren't generally phrased as questions &amp;mdash; or if they are, then they can be read as rhetorical questions which contain their own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T10:31:20.063" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5440" CreationDate="2014-12-13T14:04:27.463" Score="-2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181080/future-tense-and-future-perfect-tense&quot;&gt;Future tense and future perfect tense [closed]&lt;/a&gt; was marked as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, no sufficient followup for clarification was presented, but I wanted to ask (or at least find an answer to) the exact same [type of] question. Even if I did, would the question be marked a duplicate of a closed, off-topic, or could it have a chance at getting a response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't see the question being asked as &quot;What is the correct answer?&quot; The question is &quot;What is the difference?&quot; And that is more subtle and appropriate for this site. It's exactly the type of question that gets answered over and over with any other &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt; and is the question I seek an answer from experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask to move to reopen or ask anew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preemptively: I'm quite willing to accept that there's a duplicate with an answer, though titles for this type of question are too similarly labelled to effectively distinguish the appropriate &lt;em&gt;future tense&lt;/em&gt; question from all the others. (Also, yes, even though there's no future tense, I'd still be interested in meaning difference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T17:30:34.717" Title="Off topic? Future tense versus Future perfect" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5439" CreationDate="2014-12-13T17:30:34.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between the simple &lt;em&gt;“will do”&lt;/em&gt; sort of construction and the perfective &lt;em&gt;“will have done”&lt;/em&gt; one is surely a matter of ultra-super-hyper-duper-basic grammar — and thus one of General Reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, it’s also yet another candidate to be marked a duplicate of our number-one most frequently asked question of all time, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/21846&quot;&gt;“How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?”&lt;/a&gt;, itself something of a catch-all for the infinitely many questions that ask about how this or that one verbal form differs from or is similar to that or this other verbal form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, there really are infinitely many such duplicate tense-and-aspect questions from people who can’t be bothered to use a basic grammar book.  Such questions are simply far too basic, and too repetitive, to be interesting to etymologists, linguists, and serious language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T17:30:34.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-13T22:50:56.357" Score="5" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/44619/mari-lou-a&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt; told me one of my posts wasn't formatting correctly (I forget which one). But I couldn't see anything wrong, and while we were exchanging comments (to the effect that both of us were using the Chrome browser under Vista), apparently her problem went away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few minutes ago I noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/214531/2637&quot;&gt;this post of mine&lt;/a&gt; was completely misformatted. Using &quot;edit&quot; to check the actual text I got the impression things were going wrong wherever I'd used &lt;em&gt;asterisks&lt;/em&gt; to delineate italicised text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write this text, I see that the word &quot;asterisks&quot; above isn't displaying correctly (presumably because of the asterisks enclosing it). But &quot;this post of mine&quot; displayed correctly for me when I opened that page to get the address for a link here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it hadn't been for Mari-Lou, I'd just assume my system is internally messed up. But as I write this I'm using Chrome under XP. So I don't think this is a browser or OS problem, and I doubt it's peculiar to just us two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like a bug. Does anyone know what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be a valid screenshot of &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; screen (I don't see the second &quot;this&quot; there)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h9F7n.gif&quot; alt=&quot;my screen&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I don't recall rebooting the XP machine this post was written on yesterday. It's my &quot;home network server&quot;, which I usually turn on/off when I get up/retire. I did that today and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;everything displays correctly&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; users have just experienced what looks like the same problem under two different OS's, I think this post should remain open in case it affects others in future. But I don't know if &quot;problem resolved itself without explanation&quot; is a valid reason for removing the &lt;strong&gt;bug&lt;/strong&gt; tag, so I'll leave that for others to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T12:16:41.393" Title="Formatting problem (with asterisks?)" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5424" CreationDate="2014-12-13T23:19:20.563" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question (or well, that it wasn't a question is part of the problem) is a total mess, and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've an idea for how part of it could be turned into a good question, then since such a question would be considerably different to the original, why not just ask a new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15770" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T23:19:20.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2014-12-14T10:18:53.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's OK in Chrome 35.0.1916.153 dev-m on Windows 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SRI4c.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot of this question showing italics&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updated to Version 39.0.2171.95 dev-m and it looks the same. So, it's either something to do with XP (although Cerberus sees nothing unusual), or it's a glitch with fonts on your computer. Even that is slightly odd, because the page title uses Georgia Italic, and that's fine. It may be something to do with how your machine renders that font at that particular size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I'd say &quot;Can't reproduce&quot;, but if it &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; affects Stack Exchange pages, and others chime in with similar experiences, then it may be something to pass on to developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; rebooted the machine? That sounds like a cop-out, but it clears data held wrongly in memory, allows pointers to be reset and the like. It can fix problems with fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T10:18:53.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2014-12-14T22:22:34.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's happened to me again. There are blanks in place of words in bold or in italics. This is what I currently see on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/214594/why-is-weird-given-a-sexual-connotation-nowadays&quot;&gt;WS2's question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rYvTL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would give you its title but that's gone as well...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rokC1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laptop Aspire 6930; OS Windows Vista (I can hear you Macintoshes sniggering. Stop it.), Chrome browser Version 39.0.2171.95 m&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third episode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gmSxK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time to switch off. Night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; Feb 15 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Not again!!&lt;/em&gt; Can someone help me? &lt;em&gt;Please&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4KtaA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;POSSIBLE SOLUTION&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uninstall Chrome, reboot, and immediately re-install Chrome. It at least helped in finally getting rid of the adware and malicious programmes that had infested my browser (together with manually deleting 200 files... but that's another story.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T12:16:41.393" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2014-12-15T05:13:37.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if it's okay for me to post this as an &quot;answer&quot;. But maybe it's better than cluttering up the original question. Anyway, here's another screenshot (on Chrome+XP)...&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JuSrw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;duff display&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...where the question &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt; is missing. As soon as I saw that, I opened another browser window and went to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/214700/we-make-an-identity-for-ourselves-or-we-make-identities-for-ourselves&quot;&gt;the same page&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the second tab, where the title shows correctly as I write...&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dx9aV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;okay display&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; case, there are no asterisks around the text that's not displaying correctly, but it is (or would be) in italics because that's hard-coded within the UI. It may be worth taking special note of the fact that both the valid &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; invalid display are right there in two different &quot;tabs&quot; &lt;em&gt;on the same instance of the Google browser&lt;/em&gt; (the third tab in the screenshots is the one I'm using to enter this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;strong&gt;GARRRGH!!!&lt;/strong&gt; - I haven't noticed any more problems with missing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; text that hit me for 2-3 days starting a week ago, but today I've just had this. The large digit &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; for this &quot;question net vote score&quot; is missing (but displayed correctly when I copied the address into a new window). In the absence of any useful pointers, perhaps I'll do a full system restore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KBG0W.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T00:34:56.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T12:26:26.303" Score="6" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/214594/why-is-weird-given-a-sexual-connotation-nowadays&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;#39;weird&amp;#39; given a sexual connotation nowadays?&lt;/a&gt;, has been put on hold as 'off topic', for the reason that 'it is not about the English language'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it queries the current nuance placed on the word 'weird', it seems to me directly to concern the 'English language'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did, for reasons best know to the commenters, attract some vehement, forthright, and at times childish responses. But it would appear to me to relate entirely to a matter of current vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T12:57:14.597" Title="Why has this post been put 'on hold'?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T13:54:26.133" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've tried preparing my question in a Word document, inserting IPA characters as appropriate, but when I paste the text into the 'Ask Question' box, the text reverts to ordinary script.  E.g., a superscript 'h' becomes a plain 'h'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99951" OwnerDisplayName="David Garner" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T13:55:38.270" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T14:42:57.177" Title="How do I insert IPA text in a question on this site?" Tags="|support|ipa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2014-12-15T15:22:15.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2014-12-15T13:59:04.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean this&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;h&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T13:59:04.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2014-12-15T14:11:50.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you were using Word's superscript formatting. There is actually a special unicode character for IPA superscript h: the &quot;ʰ&quot; character, so you may want to use that instead. This character should always appear superscript no matter how it is formatted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find characters like this in the Windows Character Map if you are using Windows; most operating systems have an equivalent utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T14:11:50.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2014-12-15T14:42:57.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest way for me to enter IPA is use something like this &lt;a href=&quot;http://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA Keyboard&lt;/a&gt; and “type” the right characters there, then use your mouse to copy it from that bottom window to the entry widget on ELU.  It’s nice because it handles &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; IPA, including arbitrary combining diacritics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T14:42:57.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5452" CreationDate="2014-12-15T22:19:15.500" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 6-character minimum requirement for edits means that you can't fix spelling errors in a post. What is the reasoning behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94567" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T23:07:16.573" Title="Why does an edit have to be at least 6 characters?" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|spelling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-12-23T12:10:59.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5451" CreationDate="2014-12-15T23:07:16.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard wording is &quot;This edit is too minor; suggested edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post.&quot; While I have no authority here, I can suggest three possible reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can gain reputation and badges (and, for all I know, hats) by proposing edits. This is based on the idea that your edits actually improve the post and contribute to the site, which single-character typo corrections do not.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every edit puts an extra load on the servers and slows the site down, particularly if it has to be peer-reviewed. Any individual edit is negligible, but the total number is not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a number of small-minded Holofernes-like pedants about who believe that English is what they were taught in school and nothing else. Changing an American spelling to British or vice versa, inserting or removing a single comma, or correcting an 'obvious error' that was actually meant as a joke apparently justifies the existence of such people, and they really should not be encouraged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you really can't find any way to improve a post that doesn't change six characters or more, for goodness' sake leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T23:07:16.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2014-12-15T23:26:14.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hats are a sneaky and VERY FUN way of getting everyone in the &quot;community&quot; to get involved and maybe even do a little extra clean up of old posts, answers and comments.  I LOVE HATS! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25824" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T23:26:14.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5455" CreationDate="2014-12-16T22:44:54.483" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the featured questions page, there are a pile of really old questions that have new bounties. One even has an accepted answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this happen every year as an attempt to get all the hats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S. I like the hats.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97958" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T23:10:43.923" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T12:13:49.027" Title="Are people putting bounties on old questions to get a hat?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5454" CreationDate="2014-12-16T22:45:57.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The long answer to this question is yes. And in response to your other question, also yes. By the way, the short answer is also yes. Both times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T22:45:57.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5454" CreationDate="2014-12-17T12:13:49.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's for hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gelt hat is for a bounty offered during Hanukkah (December 16 and December 24) and there'll be more offered on Christmas day for the Stockings Hung by the Fire hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not only does the bounty-offerer get a hat, anyone who answers a bounty (and gets an upvote) also gets the Major Award hat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there were bounty hats &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/212999/162511&quot;&gt;last&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/winter-bash-2013-wrap-up/&quot;&gt;year&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not matter on what site you set up a bounty. You get the &lt;em&gt;Make it rain&lt;/em&gt; hat when you award that bounty to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IG-88 was a less well-known bounty hunter, and the hat that bears his name went to users who tried for a bounty, but didn’t win it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T12:13:49.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-17T13:10:31.860" Score="31" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reviewing several Meta posts and related commentary, the moderator team has replaced one of the custom close reasons on the site. The General Reference close reason has been replaced by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new reason more adequately conveys why the community was closing general reference questions (because more research was desired), it provides the same rationale for other questions that might not be considered general reference but are still lacking information, and it also suggests the English Language Learners site, which is helpful for users who may need to learn how to do the research in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T10:21:39.523" Title="New close reason: include the research" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-17T22:40:46.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T22:40:46.913" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T22:40:46.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-17T22:40:46.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the titles of questions on the main site." OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T22:40:46.913" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T22:40:46.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5475" CreationDate="2014-12-17T23:08:16.133" Score="10" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;title&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;title&lt;/a&gt; tag includes a jumble of questions concerning different concepts of titles, making the tag less than useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the name given to part or whole of a creative work, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139042/is-capitalising-every-word-more-common-in-music-titles&quot;&gt;Is Capitalising Every Word more common in music titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169648/how-to-capitalize-get-out-of-in-a-title-according-to-cmos&quot;&gt;How to capitalize &amp;quot;get out of&amp;quot; in a title according to CMOS?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106743/appropriate-title-case-em-or-em-or-em&quot;&gt;Appropriate title case: &amp;#39;em or &amp;#39;Em or &amp;#39;EM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about honorifics and styles, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133473/first-name-or-last-name-with-sir&quot;&gt;First name or last name with &amp;quot;Sir&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26043/what-does-ms-stand-for&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;Ms.&amp;quot; stand for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about occupations and professions, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86744/what-is-the-name-for-a-person-who-raises-turkeys&quot;&gt;What is the name for a person who raises turkeys?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161412/how-does-a-research-scientist-differ-from-a-scientist&quot;&gt;How does a &amp;quot;research scientist&amp;quot; differ from a &amp;quot;scientist&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about labels or names in general, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186951/what-name-would-you-give-to-data-about-a-persons-illnesses-ailments-diseases&quot;&gt;What name would you give to data about a person&amp;#39;s illnesses, ailments, diseases and medical condition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175103/what-do-you-call-devices-which-passed-the-test-successfully&quot;&gt;What do you call devices which passed the test successfully?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I perceive a slight preponderance of questions of type #1, and believe that should be the purpose of the tag. I am inclined to retag questions of type #2 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/honorifics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;honorifics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;honorifics&lt;/a&gt;, type #3 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/professions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;professions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;professions&lt;/a&gt;, and type #4 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, or others as may be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in that the original intent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;title&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;title&lt;/a&gt; is for essays and not essayists or essaying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T08:02:55.383" Title="What manner of “title”?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5473" CreationDate="2014-12-18T01:35:52.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct in that &quot;title&quot; is for things like title case and the like. The others should be re-tagged as appropriate. You might want to add a tag wiki to explain the purpose of the tag as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T01:35:52.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5473" CreationDate="2014-12-18T08:02:55.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way of finding what a tag was originally intended for — probably the only way without any tag wiki — is to look at the earliest questions. Very often, a number of questions will have been retagged with the new tag when it was created, and these example questions can only be those in existence at that time. The earliest questions are at the end of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title?page=3&amp;amp;sort=newest&amp;amp;pagesize=50&quot;&gt;“newest” list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;title&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;title&lt;/a&gt; questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14/which-words-in-a-title-should-be-capitalized&quot;&gt;Which words in a title should be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt; (Question number &lt;strong&gt;14&lt;/strong&gt; from August 2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460/do-you-capitalize-both-parts-of-a-hyphenated-word-in-a-title&quot;&gt;Do you capitalize both parts of a hyphenated word in a title?&lt;/a&gt; (August 2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5007/why-should-one-capitalize-titles-when-publishing&quot;&gt;Why Should One Capitalize Titles When Publishing?&lt;/a&gt; (November 2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8732/is-actor-peter-fonda-found-dead-body-inside-car-correct&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Actor Peter Fonda found dead body inside car&amp;quot; correct?&lt;/a&gt; (January 2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9448/how-to-capitalize-first-letters-in-titles&quot;&gt;How to capitalize first letters in titles?&lt;/a&gt; (January 2011, duplicate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14892/how-do-i-style-book-titles-in-a-block-of-italicized-text&quot;&gt;How do I style book titles in a block of italicized text?&lt;/a&gt; (March 2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then things start to go off the rails a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16357/is-the-title-total-superleague-too-much&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16357/is-the-title-total-superleague-too-much&lt;/a&gt; (March 2011, closed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19166/what-is-the-meaning-of-p-s-in-a-name&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of P.S. in a name?&lt;/a&gt; (April 2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21019/is-there-a-name-for-this-style-of-capitalisation&quot;&gt;Is there a Name for this Style of Capitalisation?&lt;/a&gt; (April 2011 and correctly tagged)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23733/when-is-it-appropriate-to-refer-to-someone-as-dr-surname&quot;&gt;When is it appropriate to refer to someone as Dr. [Surname]?&lt;/a&gt; (May 2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the tag was created in March 2011, and it was intended for the titles of books and articles. It looks like it was not intended for names or honorifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think new tags should &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; be accompanied by at least a tag wiki excerpt if not the full page to avoid just this sort of misinterpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T08:02:55.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-24T19:00:44.443" Score="-4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started a bounty for this question which got 11 downvotes:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46355/on-the-subject-of-bring-up-and-raise&quot;&gt;On the subject of &amp;quot;bring up&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;raise&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is there a badge for a user who starts a bounty on a question which has more than ten downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't, do you think that such a badge is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T17:27:36.423" Title="Starting a bounty for a question which has a lot of downvotes. Does it deserve a badge?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5477" CreationDate="2014-12-24T19:24:20.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badges are designed to encourage and reward certain kinds of behaviors in our user community. There is no badge for specifically starting a bounty on a highly-downvoted question, although you can get badges for starting bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A massively downvoted question usually means it is not desired by the community. Putting a bounty on such a question seems like the opposite of something we want to encourage, so it's pretty unlikely that StackExchange management would create a badge for that kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2014-12-25T12:13:45.223" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T12:13:45.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5407" CreationDate="2014-12-25T12:27:33.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does it really matter if the name of the site fits entirely on a mobile screen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, there's a bit of irony in you being the one who brought this to the community's attention. After all, your user name doesn't fit in the standard SE box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/taTpi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose, then, it shouldn't be so much of a big deal if the name of the site happens to be too long to fit on your phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2014-12-25T21:08:57.723" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T21:08:57.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-26T19:20:39.370" Score="-15" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help page states that the following is &quot;off-topic&quot; for english.stackoverflow.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Literature now gone, I think that we should allow this type of question in english.stackoverflow.com, in the same way (in the U.S.) English literature is thought to be a part of an &quot;English&quot; class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5171" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T08:02:39.113" Title="Can we remove the following from &quot;off-topic&quot; for english?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5480" CreationDate="2014-12-27T04:48:27.663" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as a very bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first place, LitCrit has always been explicitly excluded from this site's subject matter, so adding it would mean a ground-up redefinition. We have no experience answering such questions; we would have to start over from scratch, establishing entirely new canons of topicality and recruiting a cadre of competent answerers&amp;mdash; matters which for new sites typically take a year or so of preparation and a year or so of Beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second place, LitCrit has very little to do with language &lt;em&gt;as language&lt;/em&gt;, as it is treated here. The English language is merely the stuff out of which English literature is constructed, what Aristotle would call its 'material cause'; there is no more reason for this site to embrace English literature than to embrace English philosophy and law and religion. And although poets have managed to create some fascinating local textural [sic] effects with that language, the bones of literature are not utterances but actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third place, LitCrit is singularly unsuited to a Q&amp;amp;A site of the SE sort. Questions of literary analysis&amp;mdash;at least those questions which would interest anybody competent to answer them&amp;mdash;cannot be addressed in off-the-top-of-my-head notes of five or six hundred words. And no question of literary analysis can be conclusively answered; one of the few things that almost all critics would agree on is that literature is not once-and-for-all interpretable but infinitely reinterpretable. LitCrit is &lt;em&gt;ultra vires&lt;/em&gt; here, not because it provokes multiple 'subjective opinions' but because it provokes multiple contradictory and competing &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; opinions, &lt;em&gt;all of which may be true.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="24489" LastEditDate="2014-12-27T04:53:33.473" LastActivityDate="2014-12-27T04:53:33.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-27T06:05:38.117" Score="-9" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216288/reducing-ambiguity-in-the-construction&quot;&gt;reducing ambiguity in the construction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details were included in an edit as requested. Why is it on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97343" LastActivityDate="2014-12-27T08:41:11.167" Title="why is question still on hold" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2014-12-27T08:41:11.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users with 3,000 reputation can cast up to 24 reopen votes per day.&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;When a question reaches 5 reopen votes, it is no longer closed,&lt;/strong&gt; and&#xA;  new answers may be submitted. You may only vote to close or reopen a&#xA;  question once. To cast a reopen vote, click the &quot;reopen&quot; link beneath&#xA;  the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of today your question has received one reopen vote and one delete vote. Your question needs four more reopen votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2014-12-27T08:41:11.167" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2014-12-27T16:50:13.307" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Replaced incorrect samples at bottom with true ones showing the difference between faked small caps and real ones, and made all images clickable for enlargement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Elements of Typographical Style&lt;/em&gt;, Robert Bringhurst writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genuine small caps are not simply shrunken versions of the full caps. They differ from large caps in stroke weight, letterfit, and internal proportions as well as in height. Any good set of small caps is designed as such from the ground up. Thickening, shrinking, and squashing the full caps with digital modification routines will only produce a parody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then presents an example of the relationship of faces:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xPE59.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xPE59.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bringhurst example of small caps&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The small caps of 2.2 are obviously different from the uppercase in 2.1; they are also less aggressive on the eye than the almost garishly thick bold of 3.5, things one should reach for seldom.  Bold works best as a titling face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another Bringhurst example where you can see how different true small caps are from the parody simulations of scaled-down full caps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7zLCU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7zLCU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bringhurst example two&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern OpenType fonts do allow one to access the true small caps included with that font, but Stack Exchange is not concerned with such niceties.  If they were, they would also do something about the default line length, which is too many ens long for comfortable reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we are not granted access to the technology that would allow for small caps to be accessed in the correct way, we are forced to resort to what Bringhurst calls a parody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the current limitations at Stack Exchange sites, the only available way to poorly simulate small capitals is to use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;SMALL CAPITAL&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to create&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;SMALL CAPITAL&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the stroke weighting is far too light, and so bolding it can look better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;b&gt;SMALL CAPITAL&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s a bit too heavy in weight, but is better than the skeletal effect produced by simple resizing as in the first example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/217022/2085&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; is an example of OED etymology examples using small caps in the non-bold style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;pronounce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ME. &lt;em&gt;pronunce, pronounce&lt;/em&gt;, a. OFr. &lt;em&gt;pronuncier&lt;/em&gt; (1277 in Godef. Compl.), for earlier &lt;em&gt;purnuncier&lt;/em&gt; (mod.Fr. &lt;em&gt;prononcer&lt;/em&gt;) :– late L. &lt;em&gt;prōnunciāre&lt;/em&gt; for orig. &lt;em&gt;prōnuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; to proclaim, announce, rehearse, narrate, pronounce, f. &lt;em&gt;prō&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;PRO&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; + &lt;em&gt;nunti-āre&lt;/em&gt; to announce: cf. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ANNOUNCE, ENOUNCE&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;announce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. OFr. &lt;em&gt;anonce-r&lt;/em&gt;, earlier &lt;em&gt;anoncier&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anuncier&lt;/em&gt; :– L. &lt;em&gt;adnuntiā-re,&lt;/em&gt; f. &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; to + &lt;em&gt;nuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; to bear a message, f. &lt;em&gt;nunti-us&lt;/em&gt; bringing news. See &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;AN-&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;pref.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;enounce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad. Fr. &lt;em&gt;énoncer&lt;/em&gt;, ad. L. &lt;em&gt;ēnuntiā-re&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ENUNCIATE&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;), after the analogy of &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ANNOUNCE&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;renounce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad. Fr. &lt;em&gt;renoncer&lt;/em&gt; (OFr. also &lt;em&gt;renuncer&lt;/em&gt;) :– L. &lt;em&gt;renuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; (-&lt;em&gt;ciāre&lt;/em&gt;) to announce, proclaim, also to disclaim, protest against, f. &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; re- + &lt;em&gt;nuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; to make known, report: cf. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ANNOUNCE, DENOUNCE&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, those are spindly and misshapen.  Here is what you get when you bold them to thicken the stoke weight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;pronounce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ME. &lt;em&gt;pronunce, pronounce&lt;/em&gt;, a. OFr. &lt;em&gt;pronuncier&lt;/em&gt; (1277 in Godef. Compl.), for earlier &lt;em&gt;purnuncier&lt;/em&gt; (mod.Fr. &lt;em&gt;prononcer&lt;/em&gt;) :– late L. &lt;em&gt;prōnunciāre&lt;/em&gt; for orig. &lt;em&gt;prōnuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; to proclaim, announce, rehearse, narrate, pronounce, f. &lt;em&gt;prō&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PRO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; + &lt;em&gt;nunti-āre&lt;/em&gt; to announce: cf. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ANNOUNCE&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ENOUNCE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;announce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. OFr. &lt;em&gt;anonce-r&lt;/em&gt;, earlier &lt;em&gt;anoncier&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anuncier&lt;/em&gt; :– L. &lt;em&gt;adnuntiā-re,&lt;/em&gt; f. &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; to + &lt;em&gt;nuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; to bear a message, f. &lt;em&gt;nunti-us&lt;/em&gt; bringing news. See &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AN-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;pref.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;enounce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad. Fr. &lt;em&gt;énoncer&lt;/em&gt;, ad. L. &lt;em&gt;ēnuntiā-re&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ENUNCIATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;), after the analogy of &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ANNOUNCE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;renounce&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad. Fr. &lt;em&gt;renoncer&lt;/em&gt; (OFr. also &lt;em&gt;renuncer&lt;/em&gt;) :– L. &lt;em&gt;renuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; (-&lt;em&gt;ciāre&lt;/em&gt;) to announce, proclaim, also to disclaim, protest against, f. &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; re- + &lt;em&gt;nuntiāre&lt;/em&gt; to make known, report: cf. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ANNOUNCE, DENOUNCE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second simulation is better than the first, because the stroke is no longer far too thin to match the normal letters.  However, it is now a bit too thick. Even worse, the proportions have become grotesque (in the non-technical sense) making clear why small caps must be designed from the start, not parodied with digital routines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, modern fonts have these. Here’s what it looks like when you use actual small caps using Richard Slimbach’s Minion Pro typeface, which gives the small caps a different letterfit — and also proportions, which you can see if you look at the real and fake P or A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Click on the image to see it without resizing artifacts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gj8wd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gj8wd.png&quot; alt=&quot;small cap demo using real font small caps&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how much easier to read those small caps are than the two kinds of emulation available to us?  Especially in the original image, the small caps are the same weight as everything else and so do not jump out at you as messed up the way the existing emulations do. &lt;strong&gt;They just plain work as typography, and there is no substitute for them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in a nutshell is the difference, using Minion Pro in Chrome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QJMCe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QJMCe.png&quot; alt=&quot;small cap demo with Minion Pro in Chrome&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;That’s really quite terrible: no wonder Bringhurst calls these emulations parodies!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the stroke width of the emulated small caps is no longer a match for the regular characters of the same font, and the letterfit it simply atrocious. The Firefox emulation is somewhat less lame about letterfit here than the embarrassing joke that Chrome presented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Dmz3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Dmz3.png&quot; alt=&quot;small cap demo with Minion Pro in Firefox&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Those aren’t directly comparable because although the face is the same, the point size of the actual font I used in Firefox is slightly larger than the earlier one in Chrome.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, the real small caps are more generous to the eye in several ways. There’s nothing to be done about stroke width and proportion, so even Firefox’s improved emulation is still a far cry from the real small caps in the font itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Stack Exchange doesn’t care (enough?) to make the font’s actual small capitals available to us, even with the lame emulation, and so nasty parodies that Bringhurst speaks of are all we’re permitted to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Technical Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual small caps in the first example are using CSS with &lt;code&gt;font-feature-settings: &amp;quot;smcp&amp;quot; 1&lt;/code&gt; and therefore use the true small caps in the font instead of trying to fake it. The emulated ones in the second examples are using CSS with &lt;code&gt;font-variant: small-caps&lt;/code&gt; which despite its name perversely enough only emulates them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T03:48:59.203" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5480" CreationDate="2014-12-29T08:02:39.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This started out as a comment in response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5480/can-we-remove-the-following-from-off-topic-for-english#comment21769_5480&quot;&gt;another&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English literature shapes the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;way language is used&lt;/strong&gt; in literature shapes others’ use of English. But that’s Use of English; it’s not literary criticism. Ask questions about the way a certain sentence is constructed, but don't ask whether that construction is any good. SE deals in specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, it's fine to ask about being hoist with a petard, or how to analyse a particularly complex sentence from Dickens or Joyce or even one of the Epistles in the Authorised Version: those are questions about how English is &lt;strong&gt;used.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prohibition on “criticism, analysis and discussion of English literature” is supposed to stop questions on, say, the character development in &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice,&lt;/em&gt; or from Austen’s work into P.D. James’ &lt;em&gt;Death comes to Pemberley.&lt;/em&gt; And that’s for all the reasons StoneyB gives in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5481/18696&quot;&gt;his excellent answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T08:02:39.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:56:09.910" Score="34" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been lurking on ELU for around six months now, and in my time here, I've seen many, many questions being closed due to being off-topic.  More than any other SE site.  I've browsed the meta for why this is so much more prevalent here than elsewhere on SE, and the main reason that I've found is that people reason that if an answer can be quickly found elsewhere, it's not worth answering here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why?  The internet is full of resources from dictionaries to grammar help sites to etymology resources to thesauruses to rhyme finders...  I would argue that there are virtually no questions that an average person would want to know about language that aren't already answered &lt;strong&gt;somewhere&lt;/strong&gt; on the internet already.  So then why does this site exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to contribute positively to this site rather than increase the plethora of rejected questions.  But every time I think of something I want to ask, I chicken out from fear of downvotes or rejection, and eventually I just spend the extra time to find it somewhere else online.  Is this really how we want new users to feel at this site?  What kind of questions are we looking for here if we don't like questions that can just be looked up somewhere else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90265" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T03:24:00.223" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T12:01:39.087" Title="What kind of questions ARE we looking for here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-31T15:16:42.303" Score="3" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics professionals maintain that there are only two &quot;tenses&quot; in English. The linguistics definition of &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt; is quite specific, by which is meant &lt;em&gt;morphological&lt;/em&gt; tenses. I have no problem with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost everybody else in the world believes that any time expression is a &quot;tense&quot;: present progressive, future perfect, what have you. So their understanding of the term is a lot looser. I have no problem with this, either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet we find ourselves in a situation here on ELU where people ask questions about tenses, as they understand them, and to answer such a question is to invite the scorn of linguists who admit only the narrow, specific sense of the term, even though most dictionaries have entries that cover both its specific and the general senses. And so long comment battles ensue, to the benefit of nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's getting so that I don't even want to answer a question about time expressions anymore because the OP used the word &quot;tense&quot; in the question. Is there any way to get past this? How can we all lay down our arms and reason together graciously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2014-12-31T15:21:50.790" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T01:10:12.917" Title="Forward into the past: a clear and present anger over questions about time expressions on ELU" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2014-12-31T19:34:39.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR Most people will use 'tense' in the non-morphological sense. So answerers should accept that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer detailed answer: I'm just trying to justify what I think is a bizarre technical usage. So really there's not much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T19:34:39.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2014-12-31T22:27:05.000" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/21847/86388&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; is the only question/answer ever askable on ELU regarding tense, there will be only the boilerplate stamping &amp;quot;Duplicate&amp;quot; and thus it is, thus it will ever be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm referencing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5439/off-topic-future-tense-versus-future-perfect&quot;&gt;my meta question&lt;/a&gt;'s accepted answer from @tchrist, quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, it’s also yet another candidate to be marked a duplicate of our number-one most frequently asked question of all time, “How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?”, itself something of a catch-all for the infinitely many questions that ask about how this or that one verbal form differs from or is similar to that or this other verbal form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, there really are infinitely many such duplicate tense-and-aspect questions from people who can’t be bothered to use a basic grammar book. Such questions are simply far too basic, and too repetitive, to be interesting to etymologists, linguists, and serious language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T21:55:41.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2014-12-31T22:49:22.053" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this really how we want new users to feel at this site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we would want people to be &lt;em&gt;fearful&lt;/em&gt; of downvotes, per se, but certainly the voting system gives good reason for thoughtful consideration before posting something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you also need to consider the broader &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;StackExchange mission&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We build libraries of &lt;strong&gt;high-quality&lt;/strong&gt; questions and answers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE sites are designed to help people get expert answers to interesting questions; they're not intended to be landing pages for trivial answers that you can find on your own elsewhere. If you were able to find the answer yourself with a modest amount of research - that's good!  If you can't, or if you found an answer and you're not sure if it's right, or you found an answer but don't understand it - that's when the experts are here to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that... once you cut out the basic language questions (which go to ELL) and the questions that can be found through other sources (which get closed as 'show the research'), that does seem to leave us with a particularly narrow band of viable questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T22:49:22.053" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-01T03:03:36.650" Score="11" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5491&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T05:21:33.377" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2015" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-04-04T05:39:51.687" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T03:03:36.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-01-01T03:03:36.650" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R89Nz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T03:03:36.650" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T03:03:36.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2015-01-01T14:37:41.390" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The internet is indeed full of resources so it is not unreasonable to expect people to look at them before asking in here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are good reasons for that. One is that nobody (including me) wants to be somebody else's Googler. A second is that we don't want to be answering the same questions over and over and over again - especially when an answer can be found by spending a few minutes with Uncle Google. One example that we see often and irritates the hell out of me is &quot;what is the etymology of X?&quot; questions, that are easily answered by looking in a dictionary. This is a &quot;willing to help people who try to help themselves&quot; stance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your fear of asking questions... if you have done some basic research, and either don't really understand the information you get, or it doesn't directly answer your question, go ahead and ask. I doubt you will have any problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I will say. I have been on this site for nearly 3 years, and it is very rare (only once I think) that I see a question being closed and disagree with it. If we close more questions than other SE sites, it is because we get more questions that deserve to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T14:37:41.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2015-01-02T07:45:06.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If adding a small-caps option to EL&amp;amp;U is technologically feasible and straightforward, I would love to have the option to use them. As matters stand, when I quote definitions from old (and some new) dictionaries, I generally replace small-and-large-cap words with all-cap equivalents; but the closer my retyped versions are to the originals, the better I like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T07:45:06.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-01-02T19:43:00.363" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2969/19644&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNhTt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Write for the EL&amp;amp;U Community Blog!&quot; title=&quot;Write for the EL&amp;amp;U Community Blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T19:51:06.293" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T19:43:00.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5498" CreationDate="2015-01-03T04:48:13.130" Score="10" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone recently asked about the famous &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*Buffalo buffalo ... *&lt;/a&gt; sentence, asking for an explanation of how it worked, having read the Wikipedia page and apparently not having understood it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/217862/18250&quot;&gt;Buffalo explanation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question explicitly asks &quot;Could anybody please explain in detail the sentence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the question was closed as a duplicate of this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2459/18250&quot;&gt;What are some examples of awkward sounding but grammatically correct sentences?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not only is this question much more general, the only answer that mentions the buffalo sentence simply gives the sentence and a link to the Wikipedia page, which the closed question had asserted wasn't enough explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this count as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18250" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T00:08:37.953" Title="Why was the buffalo question closed as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2015-01-03T09:02:45.737" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been re-opened by a moderator (who wasn't me, but I can explain what happened).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four of the close votes were for the duplicate; one was requesting the research made and presumably what was unclear about the referenced Wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that the linked question doesn't contain an answer to the question (or anything which might be used as a reference to find an answer), and it was not a good suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better target would have been the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31163/buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo&quot;&gt;question Frank linked to in a comment&lt;/a&gt; in this Meta post. Even then the answers may not be as good as the answers which the newer question has garnered. The new question and the Buffalo-specific question are candidates to be merged as they are so closely related as to be identical. Certainly, which is the duplicate of what could be adjusted. That needs to be calculated and co-ordinated in order that it can be achieved quickly, because it will bump the questions on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, a duplicate is nominated which really is a duplicate but the answers are not quite as complete as they might be [and consequently the closed question is not &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; answered by the linked target, or it's not easy to extrapolate the solution from the answers given]. If that is so, then the answers on the open question should be enhanced to cover all applicable cases. But a duplicate does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean that the question is &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; the same, merely that the answers are applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not the case here, and the question has been re-opened. However as I indicate above, there may be further linking to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T09:02:45.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2015-01-04T03:08:39.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because if they can find it somewhere else, they should have done it in the first place instead of making others waste their time on the question, whose answers will not benefit anyone in the future (because they could have found it somewhere else easily!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102586" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T03:08:39.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5501" CreationDate="2015-01-04T19:01:49.000" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3453/answering-at-the-same-time-as-asking-ok&quot;&gt;self-answered&lt;/a&gt; a question about a racist slang term (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218301/what-does-the-verb-nig-mean&quot;&gt;Q&lt;/a&gt;) because I wanted the term documented for the record. The question was initially poorly received (score -3), though the answer fared better. None of the early downvoters left comments as to why the question &quot;is unclear or not useful&quot;. It crossed my mind that because of the taboo subject matter, they might be downvotes for disagreement analogous to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254108/downvotes-on-meta-are-confusing-do-they-really-mean-poor-post-quality-or-jus&quot;&gt;what routinely happens in child metas and Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Stack Exchange sites (but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1339/should-users-with-many-down-votes-on-a-meta-site-be-banned-from-asking-questions&quot;&gt;not child metas&lt;/a&gt;) automatically impose an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-sorry-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-from-this/86998#86998&quot;&gt;indefinite question ban&lt;/a&gt; once a user asks &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277004/why-am-i-banned-from-answering-on-stack-overflow?cb=1&quot;&gt;about three&lt;/a&gt; poorly received questions, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/152158/are-question-answer-bans-implemented-in-stack-exchange-2-0-sites&quot;&gt;not all do&lt;/a&gt;. I wonder whether this question would count as my first of three strikes, or whether English Language &amp;amp; Usage uses post bans at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70625" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T10:11:59.023" Title="Does EL&amp;U frown or ban certain topics?" Tags="|support|down-votes|banned|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5500" CreationDate="2015-01-04T23:57:31.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not use permanent automatic question bans, which are what you refer to. However, temporary automatic question bans of up to a week's duration are enabled. I should note that the automatic bans do not use 3 bad questions as the sole criterion; instead, the algorithm for determining whether an automatic ban should apply takes many factors into consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the question you posted currently has a score of 0. Although the question ban algorithm is secret, past evidence suggests that a question with a score of 0 is not an active trigger for an automatic ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, moderators can of course impose manual suspensions, of a duration at our discretion. This is usually done after a consistent pattern of low quality questions, or other behavior that is actively detrimental to the site. In this instance, I see no reason to consider your question to be of low quality, or that it has otherwise been harmful to the site or community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T23:57:31.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2015-01-05T00:08:37.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/217862/buffalo-explanation?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Buffalo explanation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has now been closed as a duplicate of and been merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31163/buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, as I felt the latter had the better written question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T00:08:37.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-05T10:50:20.007" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218058/parts-of-speech-and-functions-bob-made-a-book-collector-happy-the-other-day&quot;&gt;Parts of speech and functions: &amp;quot;Bob made a book collector happy the other day&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks for the structure of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob made a book collector happy the other day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, it asks for the relevant parts of speech and functions of the words in the sentence. It also asks for some evidence for the relevant categories. Apparently this question is too broad, and has been closed. I am a bit puzzled by this, as it seem to me an answer would be relatively straightforward, and look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Bob [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;]; made [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;];&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;]; book [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;]; collector [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;happy [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;];&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;]; other [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;]; day [&lt;strong&gt;POS&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt;].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Evidence: &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; here is an X, we can see this because we can modify it with Ys, it can't be modified by Zs. &lt;em&gt;Happy&lt;/em&gt; is a W because it's Q-able, and T-able. XYZ is clearly an adjunct because we can move it to the following positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem ridiculously broad to me, and seems an eminently appropriate question for an English Language and Usage site for linguists, etymologists and serious English language enthusiasts. Here is a question in which I gave an analysis of three different sentences: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/177913/has-scientists-excited-or-has-excited-scientists&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;has scientists excited&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;has excited scientists&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if people could clarify for me how I might improve the question or explain exactly why it is too broad. Or, if I have persuaded any gentle readers here that this question is reasonable, then your reopen votes would be useful to help this, imo, interesting question be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:38.837" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T04:07:06.133" Title="Are questions asking about the structure of sentences too broad?" Tags="|support|appropriate-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5503" CreationDate="2015-01-06T03:14:12.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually thought it was an interesting question, but I voted to close it for several reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comment I made early on:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you need to establish the boundaries for how you want things to be categorized. As your referenced question (specifically tchrist's answer) indicates, there are numerous Part of Speech tag sets, ranging from the classic 7 to the 241 NUPOS tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer limiting oneself to only the 7 classic parts of speech tags would be far different - and potentially just as &quot;correct&quot; - as an answer that categorized the question by the NUPOS tags, or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford parser&lt;/a&gt; or the Penn Treebank set, etc.  As tchrist said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75491/what-exactly-is-an-adverb&quot;&gt;What exactly is an adverb?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You will find that the POS tag-sets used by various reference works vary a bit, sometimes a good bit. Even the OED changed a little in how it assigns parts of speech to senses between v2 and v3. ... This is especially noticeable when doing syntactic analysis for natural language processing. The parser will make POS assignments to each word in the sentence analysed, and you have to know what each POS tag means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It felt like categorizing by POS &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; function and providing detailed explanations as to each reason would be a rather lengthy answer - especially when it seems folks can't even agree as to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/217760/what-is-the-difference-between-a-part-of-speech-and-a-function&quot;&gt;difference between the two&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So given the wide range of potential answers and differing definition sets, and the length of any potential response, it seemed to fit the very definition of the &quot;Too Broad&quot; close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also lacked any research, as SrJoven pointed out.   And it seemed to cover a lot of the same basic ground as the adverb and function questions, presumably (extrapolating from your chat comments) because you were dissatisfied by the answers there.  This made it feel more than a little like a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-01-06T03:14:12.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-01-06T08:18:15.423" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/*-english&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmhUp.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU: because you say &amp;#39;tomato&amp;#39; ...&quot; title=&quot;ELU: because you say &amp;#39;tomato&amp;#39; ...&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T10:24:26.960" CommentCount="23" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-06T08:18:15.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6510" CreationDate="2015-01-07T02:35:50.570" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just reading this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218878/why-is-it-behead-and-not-dehead&quot;&gt;Why is it &quot;behead&quot; and not &quot;dehead&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it reminded me of a question I asked a while back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204844/why-does-the-word-delight-have-positive-connotations&quot;&gt;Why does the word delight have positive connotations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why my question was closed as off-topic, and the other one I've quoted is accepted. Can you please help me to understand this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reference point, I come from Stack Overflow where on topic questions are warmly received when an answer is able to be found elsewhere. It's only when a question already has an answer to be found on Stack Overflow itself that the question is unacceptable for reasons of pre-existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did use an online dictionary first, and it was quite insulting to be told &quot;just look it up in a dictionary&quot; because such a lookup didn't answer my question. If it was so obviously answerable I wouldn't have asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T00:50:53.637" Title="Curious about my question being closed as off topic when I see other similar ones well received" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5424" CreationDate="2015-01-07T08:40:16.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I edited the OP's post thinking Sven Yargs would answer a new question on EL&amp;amp;U. If Sven disagrees with my edits, I invite him to modify the post as he sees fit. I have tried to retain the &lt;em&gt;essence&lt;/em&gt; of the OP's question as much as possible, in the attempt to make it on topic, and respect the answers that have already been posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the reason for its closure has been nullified: it no longer resembles an online survey, the question includes different aspects but they are all connected to the English language, it now clearly asks about usage. As a result, I see no reason why it should remain closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users or mods disagree, can they please explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-01-08T05:01:05.780" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T05:01:05.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2015-01-07T09:09:08.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever a question I've voted to close pops up here, I feel the need to explain my vote. I hope it helps. I also hope it's not insulting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a small amount of research, you could have found that delight never had anything to do with light, so &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;-light isn't really applicable. Hence &lt;strong&gt;Closed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delight is a recent spelling of a much older word, &lt;em&gt;delite&lt;/em&gt;, crossing over from &lt;em&gt;delite&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;delight&lt;/em&gt; in the 16c. when other &quot;-ight&quot; words became prominent: light, flight, and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It comes from Latin, &lt;strong&gt;dē&lt;/strong&gt; (intensive pref) + lectāre (to entice) so, delectare meant to entice a lot. We get words like Old French delectable, from Latin delectabilis &quot;delightful&quot;; also delectably, delicious, and others. If any of those carry a negative connotation, feel free to jump in (that's basically what your question asks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this could have been found in one of our top recommended sources, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=delicious&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology online&lt;/a&gt; (or etymonline). The recommendation to look in etymonline come from this post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can do this in about 1 minute, so can you! What if every body asked us a question on one of the millions of words which could easily be found in a decent source? We would be slaves if we had to answer them all, and I don't like being a slave to someone who can't even find a rudimentary explanation. If someone, however, makes an effort, I up vote their question and sometimes answer, but I don't close (unless it has another problem, which can be found in out site tour and help section).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why couldn't I give all this as an answer? Takes too long. I'd rather answer better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my real life, people ask me question after question after question, and I am truly happy to answer, because the answers aren't readily available. I'm pretty much a professional question answerer. (Aren't most of us to one extent or another?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fun, but it's not my real life. We have to prevent user burnout by screening the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of words in the English language is: 1,025,109.8. This is the estimate by the Global Language Monitor on January 1, 2014. That represents a lot of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T23:03:45.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-07T09:14:05.750" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a very edifying or dignified question, but I'm curious: do they spend every waking hour on ELU, painstakingly earning 10 points here and 15 points there? Or do they just strike lucky with an answer which brings them thousands of points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101862" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-05-06T16:49:38.597" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T16:49:38.597" Title="How do users with huge reputations acquire them?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-07T10:26:35.527" Score="13" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is simple and can probably be easily answered by&#xA;looking it up, then you may find common online internet resources to&#xA;be of some help. View our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;list of community recommended resources&lt;/a&gt; to&#xA;find some that may be of help to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link currently leads to a question on the main site, that is currently closed as off-topic by RedDwight♦ (and rightly so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not historically locked (even though there's a moderator comment indicating so). Additionally another comment leads to meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More organized on meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;List of general references&lt;/a&gt; - Andrew Grimm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest the help center should link directly to the meta question.  Why? because the meta is there for defining of topic. Not some nevermore changing list-question on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96028" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T10:26:35.527" Title="Update the &quot;list of community recommended resources&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|general-reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2015-01-07T21:42:45.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is another question to ponder: Since the prefix &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; in English often conveys the same sense of negation as the prefix &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; does, we might expect the verb &lt;em&gt;deliberate&lt;/em&gt; to mean &quot;enslave&quot;; but instead it means &quot;to think about or discuss ideas or issues carefully.&quot; Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you generalized from your question about &lt;em&gt;delight&lt;/em&gt; and my question about &lt;em&gt;deliberate&lt;/em&gt;, you might get to a pretty interesting question about the role that &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; plays in the Latin source words &lt;em&gt;delicere&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;deliberare&lt;/em&gt;. Is &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; functioning in those words the way freestanding &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; does in Spanish and French—that is, to convey the meaning &quot;of&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not have closed your question, but I can understand the inclination others may have had to put it in on hold in hopes of eliciting a clearer formulation of a broader question about the nature and source of &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; in a nonnegating sense in some English words. The &lt;em&gt;behead/dehead&lt;/em&gt; question that you cite is likewise largely a question about a somewhat out-of-the-ordinary sense of a prefix (&lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt;), but in that case framed as a question about why the &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt; prefix was used instead of the &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you went back to your closed question and reworked it to indicate what you already know about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;delight&lt;/em&gt;, and specified that you're interested in learning why the &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; syllable in &lt;em&gt;delight&lt;/em&gt; doesn't have a negating sense (perhaps by asking what the &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; means in the following etymological note on &lt;em&gt;delight&lt;/em&gt; from Merriam-Webster: &quot;fr. L &lt;em&gt;delectare&lt;/em&gt;, freq. of &lt;em&gt;delicere&lt;/em&gt; to allure, fr. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;em&gt;lecere&lt;/em&gt; to allure&quot;), I think you might well draw the five votes necessary to reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no sugarcoating the fact that having a question closed or a question or answer downvoted on EL&amp;amp;U is very disappointing—especially for a newcomer. But the people who close or downvote aren't nearly as hostile as they may seem at such moments. Often a seemingly minor adjustment in your handling of the question or answer will eliminate the defect that others thought it had. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your original question about &lt;em&gt;delight&lt;/em&gt;, you come across as a good-humored guy interested (in an off-handed way) in a peculiarity you noticed in a common English word. That's a good start; and I think that if you added a bit more information about what you found out about the word on your own and what still puzzles you about the word, you'd have a perfectly acceptable question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above all, I urge you not to retreat into a defensive attitude toward your question and a pugnacious attitude toward other EL&amp;amp;U users' response to it. I've found that, as a group, the people who participate at EL&amp;amp;U are remarkably polite, open-minded, and enthusiastic. They love language and take questions about it seriously; and some of them are extremely well-informed.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-01-07T22:31:03.833" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T22:31:03.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6508" CreationDate="2015-01-07T22:24:49.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very few high reputations at EL&amp;amp;U are built on what amount to slot-machine jackpots. Indeed, the 200-point daily limit for reputation is designed to prevent someone from gaining many hundreds of points from a single answer in a brief period of time. A timely, well-received answer may pile up 40 or 50 upvotes in a day, but only the first 20 of those votes (assuming that the answerer hasn't received any other votes that day) will contribute toward the answerer's overall reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that certain questions—specifically, single-word requests—draw lots of viewers and hence lots of upvotes for a good (or obvious but early) answer. So I suppose that you could specialize in single-word request answers and—if you were good at them—rack up points pretty quickly. But most answerers here simply focus on the questions that interest them for one reason or another, and let the points fall where they may. Eventually the sheer volume of answers that a person submits will translate into a fairly large number of points, even if (as in my case) the answerer's upvotes-to-answers ratio is quite low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for spending every waking hour on EL&amp;amp;U, there certainly is something intoxicating about researching and answering questions here and then seeing the slow drip, drip, drip of upvotes accumulate. But I can stop any time I want (famous last words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-01-08T00:13:30.643" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T00:13:30.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2015-01-08T00:50:53.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started writing this as a comment, following your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5506/curious-about-my-question-being-closed-as-off-topic-when-i-see-other-similar-one#comment22841_6510&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on Sven's answer, but it got too big to be a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using my time to respond, in order to help future readers who may wander by. This is my perspective as a user of modest rep on multiple SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the close reason does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say the answer is obvious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two sides here. I have had your experience (not on EL&amp;amp;U). If I was really honest with myself, I could see that I had just blasted off a question without doing proper research. Like you I was a little bent out of shape about it. But if I saw your question on the review queue I would vote to close it also - because it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; answerable with a little online research. &lt;em&gt;One&lt;/em&gt; dictionary may not answer the question, but there are many &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=delight&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;. At least one of them explains the &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; prefix. One could research that further. And produce a really strong question that showed that research and attracted strong answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is the key - showing your research and why it doesn't answer the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly does take effort to write a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; question. But you don't need an awesome question to avoid closure, just to show some effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user63230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T00:50:53.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-08T01:59:40.940" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions crop up on ELU with dispiriting regularity. Two recent examples are the use of 'singular they/their', and whether an acceptable singular (and possibly gender-neutral) form of the pronoun 'themselves' exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions continue to be posted so often that I now find myself resenting even the time it takes to point out that they duplicate existing questions which have already been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To discourage yet more of them from appearing on the site, I suggest that the moderators should analyse the frequency with which new questions duplicate existing ones (perhaps using close-vote statistics), and post links on the front page of the site to 6-10 of the equivalent questions that have already been asked and answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the attention of querents could also explicitly be drawn to this set of questions on the screen that is displayed when they ask a question, inviting them to verify that their prospective new question does not duplicate any of those on the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a lot less distracting clutter on the main page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;less time wasted by both askers and answerers in composing unproductive questions and responses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quick and easy access to the answers to the most popular questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a greater proportion of novel and interesting questions among those that do get asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any good reasons why this approach should not be implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T01:59:40.940" Title="A possible solution for discouraging the most-duplicated questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-08T08:00:11.553" Score="-5" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this question asking how we should refer to the Christian God migrated to the Christianity site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/36254/how-should-we-refer-to-the-christian-god-she-it-or-they&quot;&gt;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/36254/how-should-we-refer-to-the-christian-god-she-it-or-they&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly the question was largely edited by other members.&#xA;I just asked how we should refer to the Christian God: she, it or they&#xA;because many people frown upon the use of &quot;he&quot; as a gender-neutral pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is purely about the usage of an English pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:54.117" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T04:55:07.347" Title="Why was this question asking how we should refer to the Christian God migrated to the Christianity site?" Tags="|discussion|migration|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6514" CreationDate="2015-01-08T08:13:48.110" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I commented (&lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; before this Meta question appeared) on the question in both places,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question asks about domain-specific language and is more suited to a domain-specific SE site, since there is one. I've adjusted it to make it even more fitted there (and probably should have edited it there rather than on ELU -- sorry about that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was not well-received on ELU, having been downvoted to -4 with no upvotes. Comments indicated that it would be better asked on a domain-specific site which could justify the use of the pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since SE does have a relevant site for the domain of the question (whether to refer to the Christian God by a different pronoun than &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;) I migrated it there. In order to demonstrate that there &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a precedent for feminist language, I added in a reference to two notable female figures from the Middle Ages who &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; refer to God as Mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the question remained on ELU, it would almost certainly have been closed as opinion-based, having garnered two close-votes before migration. On C.SE, it can be answered by those who know the domain. It's had at least one upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In hindsight, the adjustment of the question to better fit C.SE should have happened on that site. I won't make that mistake again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T08:13:48.110" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6518" CreationDate="2015-01-08T10:11:42.543" Score="-1" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218176/grammatically-correct-sentence-where-youre-and-your-can-be-interchanged/218193?noredirect=1#comment466568_218193&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; being closed because it's too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be misunderstanding the reasoning but I can't see how it's &quot;broad&quot; in any aspect. If anything, it's &lt;strong&gt;waaay&lt;/strong&gt; too narrow. Still an interesting question, though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30362" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T10:22:13.800" Title="Why is this question &quot;too broad&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6516" CreationDate="2015-01-08T10:22:13.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm curious though, is there any sentence that can be constructed where replacing &quot;your&quot; with &quot;you're&quot; keeps the sentence grammatically correct, but changes the meaning? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the &quot;too broad&quot; reason states (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are either &lt;strong&gt;too many possible answers,&lt;/strong&gt; or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to &lt;strong&gt;narrow the answer set&lt;/strong&gt; or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are already eleven extant answers, and probably an infinite number of possible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T10:22:13.800" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-08T13:08:08.230" Score="7" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/220210/why-do-we-say-a-before-any-number-besides-11-where-we-would-say-an/220211&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the following sequence of events happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP asked the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I started writing an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone (say, Alice) commented that it was a duplicate question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I submitted my answer and moved on to something else; I didn't see the comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later, my answer was downvoted. Someone else (say, Bob) commented to the effect that I should have read Alice's comment before posting. They further noted that because the question was a duplicate, I should have done a search before posting any answer to see if I was answering a duplicate question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was closed as being a duplicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I saw the notification from Bob's comment, I looked for Alice's comment, but it was gone; apparently, Alice had deleted their comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I commented to indicate that I'd open a question on meta because I wasn't sure about the procedure in this case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are answerers responsible for ensuring that they are not about to write an answer to a duplicate question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I have deleted my answer once it became apparent that the question was a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69090" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T15:19:45.290" Title="When a question is later marked as a duplicate, should you delete your answer?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-08T14:04:48.623" Score="-9" ViewCount="8246" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is an opinion-based question and why should it be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site were about physics or mathematics, I could understand why such questions should be closed. However, this site is about the English language which is far from being an exact science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect questions that are closed for being POB  is often an excuse for reasons, which the close-voters don't want to reveal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I think the following questions are opinion-based, but they were highly upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-versus-her-versus&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (&amp;quot;his&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;their&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6854/what-is-the-accepted-stance-on-using-they-in-a-singular-form&quot;&gt;What is the accepted stance on using &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; in a singular form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T10:05:50.993" Title="What is an opinion-based question and why should it be closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6519" CreationDate="2015-01-08T14:32:52.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My short answers would be &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; is easy: you wrote your answer and have no obligation to delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt;... Some questions are obvious candidates for a duplicate in which case I might check, and if it is a duplicate I wouldn't answer, but I don't think you have any particular responsibility to check. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular question, two conflicting things struck me. Seeing the question in the list my reaction was that it was a very basic question, so I went there with an intention of recommending it be moved to ELL and found it already closed as a duplicate. The second thing that hit me was the comment saying you shouldn't have answered, which seemed to be a bit of an over-reaction. The conflict is that as alarm bells were ringing before I even looked at the question, the (over) reaction does have a point. A question about using &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; has very likely been asked before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary... you don't have to delete an answer, and you have no responsibility to check for duplicates - but it might be a good idea to do so if a question appears to be very basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T14:32:52.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6519" CreationDate="2015-01-08T15:19:45.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, even as I'm one who has answered a known duplicate question, I won't delete my answer if it's significantly different from the answers given on the duplicate question. Some duplicate questions aren't duplicates, in spite of the close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be argued, though, that I might move my answer to the &quot;original&quot; question if I have the strong belief that my answer might be of use and significantly different from existing answers. Knowing how these things work, though, it's a crapshoot whether additional and offsetting-the-loss-of-existing upvotes will occur in the original versus marked-as-duplicate new question, save for some moderator intervention at which point ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I am seeing a significant downward trend in votes, I'll probably delete the answer as I want to regain that lost reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T15:19:45.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6531" CreationDate="2015-01-08T18:16:23.663" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mind boggles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218770/meryl-streep-is-a-as-a-big-compliment/218778&quot;&gt;Meryl Streep is a ______? (as a big compliment)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily opinion based? Really? If you're having such a bad day that you feel compelled to close a significantly above-average single-word-request/phrase-request, please step away from the keyboard and go fly a kite or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really rather pissed off: this sort of totally random &quot;we're gonna close this question because some of us don't like questions of its type, even though it's perfectly valid and doesn't fit any of the close reasons, least of all the one we chose&quot; behavior is what gives our site a bad name, and rightfully so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sheesh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T19:54:12.770" Title="How the [expletive deleted] is this question &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6527" CreationDate="2015-01-09T02:07:49.293" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do my comments sometimes seem to disappear or become invisible to me? Am I doing something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98990" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T14:42:00.637" Title="There are times when I can't see comments I have posted" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6514" CreationDate="2015-01-09T04:55:07.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reasoned that this question belonged on the Christianity site rather than EL&amp;amp;U as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christianity is a world wide religion, practiced in many languages, not just English. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The underlying question has a long history of debate in multiple languages. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leading to my conclusion that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The gender of that religion's God is a matter for those who have expertise in that religion. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for this question, it did not fit the rules of Christianity.SE. Every SE  community has it's own rules, and they apply them as they see fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user63230" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T04:55:07.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6523" CreationDate="2015-01-09T07:44:24.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meryl Streep is a _____________.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meryl Streep is many, many things. A great beauty. A supremely talented actress. A wonder to behold. A national treasure. The question is a &lt;strong&gt;guessing game&lt;/strong&gt;, and it's too broad. It's also primarily opinion based. I would vote to close it again today if that decision came up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is an 8-letter word for a person who behaves in an authoritarian or tyrannical manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That one is very, very specific. I would vote to close based on the fact that it will serve one person and one person only: the OP doing the crossword puzzle. I have no desire to see this become a place which welcomes crossword-type questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have one vote per question to close, one vote per question to reopen, one vote for each question (up or down) and one vote for every answer (up or down), up to 30 (in some cases &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90202/&quot;&gt;40&lt;/a&gt;) per day. That is the exact same amount of votes you have, no more, no less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone has a right to post in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like something, post about it, as you've done here. But making a comment that the 5 people who close-voted need to have their close-voting privileges revoked is a bit dictatorial. Your opinion should hold value equal to mine, no more, no less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T00:33:12.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6524" CreationDate="2015-01-09T14:42:00.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use your &quot;back&quot; button to go back to a page, it will be to the version you first opened, without any of your votes, comments, or edits. You need to do a refresh to see the content you added. (Or, navigate back to the page using links rather than your &quot;back&quot; button, but that's not always possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment doesn't appear even after a refresh, it may have been deleted. If a comment is added automatically on your behalf as a result of a close vote, it's subject to automatic deletion if and when the closure actually takes place. This is true even if you edited the automatic comment. And of course moderators can delete comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T14:42:00.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6520" CreationDate="2015-01-09T17:28:56.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An opinion-based question is one that cannot be authoritatively answered based upon standardized sourced material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be closed because it cannot be authoritatively answered based upon standardized sourced material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This StackExchange is designed to have questions answered by experts who, in theory and practice, know about which they write. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example question that might be rejected as opinion based in Mathematics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is 1 plus 1 really 2? What is the acceptance stance for it being 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T17:28:56.857" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6523" CreationDate="2015-01-09T22:06:54.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this question was not &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a significantly above-average single-word-request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asking us to give them a word that they'd forgotten. That is a guessing game. There is no criteria for success, except if you hit the right one. Finding the right word methodically has nothing to do with English or language, just googling for the phrase in the question and looking for likely hits. The question, as asked, is not really acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you mentally rephrase the question thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a word for a compliment, which is the highest compliment you could give someone such as an actress? I've considered &quot;living legend&quot;, &quot;crown jewel&quot;, &quot;cherished rare commodity&quot;, and &quot;monolith of greatness&quot; and those aren't what I'm looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it because a regular, but still not that good, SWR. And that's why I haven't bothered to vote to close it, but believe me, it's a close call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T22:06:54.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-01-11T16:16:14.787" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27cPL.png&quot; alt=&quot;No general reference, please!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T16:16:14.787" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-11T16:16:14.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6523" CreationDate="2015-01-11T19:54:12.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happen to agree with you on this one, Martha (as my comment on the question also clearly states).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slightly rephrased, the question basically says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is this phrase I cannot for the life of me recall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The meaning of the phrase is something like the ultimate compliment you can give to someone like an actor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One particular place I recall hearing this was when Meryl Streep was being introduced at some award show or other (perhaps the Oscars?); the person introducing her said something along the lines of “Meryl Streep is a real [X]”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It was something structurally/semantically similar to “living legend”, “crown jewel”, “cherished rare commodity”, etc., but it’s none of those.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others here have said that the question as it stands is a guessing game, and that’s reason enough to close-vote as being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask me, almost &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;every single SWR on the site is a guessing game&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. That is the very nature of SWRs. The only exception would be things like “What do you call this little plastic doodad that I have a picture of here but don’t know a word for?”, and even there, there tends to be differing answers depending on dialect and location—which makes it, once again, a guessing game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is, in fact, much &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; of a guessing game than most other SWRs because there was so much data and detail to work from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of other questions here that arise from someone being unable to recall a specific word, and then describing what it means and how it can be used—exactly like this question—and I have never, that I can recall, seen any of them closevoted as being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to give authoritative, well-researched answers to this question; if the asker finds one of these answers superior to the others (in this case: if the answer has the word the asker could not recall), that answer will be accepted as the &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; one. That doesn’t mean the other answers are worthless, nor that they are not helpful to anyone else:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other four answers given on this question have all received upvotes, and the accepted answer is the &lt;em&gt;only one&lt;/em&gt; to have received any downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if no one in the future will ever be specifically looking for this particular phrase used once to describe Meryl Streep, we still have an answer here that gives a good choice of words you can use to bestow upon someone (particularly an actor) an immense compliment, which is definitely useful to future users and not too narrow or limited in scope at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;being useful to the asker&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;being useful to future visitors&lt;/em&gt; are two quite separate things. That is why it’s not relevant that questions are guessing games in the way this one is. Only one answer is ‘correct’, in the sense that it is the one the asker was looking for; but &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; good answer can be correct in the broader sense that it will be useful to anyone looking for a word that fits the situation, though perhaps not the specific context and details. The asker’s needs do not necessarily equal future visitors’ needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the wording of the question itself could perhaps be improved upon to better reflect this, I simply cannot fathom how the question can in any way be perceived as lacking research, opinion-based, unclear, or anything else that is off-topic here. At all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Addendum&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment to this question, KitFox writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Specific enough that the answer can be found by checking the transcripts of Oscar ceremonies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two points here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker said it was &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; an Oscars ceremony. It may well have been something else—an Emmy awards ceremony, a charity event, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trawling through god-only-knows how many years of Oscars ceremony transcripts&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; goes &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; above and beyond what I would ever consider reasonable research efforts on ELU. If that level of research were expected of askers, we might as well shut down the site, because &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; question would be on topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/18052/is-it-possible-to-optain-clips-or-transcripts-from-previous-oscar-ceremonies-3&quot;&gt;this answer on Movies.SE&lt;/a&gt;, it might not even be possible, short of obtaining video or audio recordings of all the ceremonies to do so. Note that the Oscars transcript database contains only &lt;em&gt;speeches&lt;/em&gt;, not introductions, and would not be useful here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.407" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T19:54:12.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6534" CreationDate="2015-01-12T14:50:31.820" Score="8" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag description for &quot;grammaticality&quot; says, &quot;Grammaticality refers to whether something obeys the rules of grammar for English.&quot; The tag &quot;grammatically&quot; has no description, but its &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatically&quot;&gt;23 questions&lt;/a&gt; all seem to be concerned with whether something obeys the rules of English grammar. Four of the questions under this tag follow the format of &quot;Is ________ correct/grammatically correct?&quot; and several others ask which of two options is correct. It seems that all of these questions fit the description of the &quot;grammaticality&quot; tag, so does the &quot;grammatically&quot; tag have some other purpose that sets it apart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94567" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T00:24:51.570" Title="Is there any difference between the tags &quot;grammaticality&quot; and &quot;grammatically&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2015-01-12T15:04:07.073" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have stated, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a delicate balance. I personally am dismayed by the number of subpar questions we get here, many of which display a marked lack of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; understanding of English. I sometimes wonder if most of the &quot;good&quot; questions have already been asked and answered. I've read that in a formal system, performance tends to &quot;normalize&quot; over time, and early results become outliers. I don't want to believe that about ELU, but the feeling is stubbornly persistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also will note that, given the raft of bad questions we do get, it's hard not to be reflexively censorious about those that are merely on the border and could be salvaged instead of savaged. If I visit the &quot;close&quot; queue and see nothing but &quot;look it up&quot; and &quot;duplicate&quot; questions, it's very difficult not to have that color my thinking about the next question in the queue which may have some redeeming facet. We're only human here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that question-closing is not about malice. It is much more likely to be about fatigue and (understandable and still human if less forgivable) impatience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2015-01-13T13:25:38.187" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T13:25:38.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2015-01-12T19:57:51.080" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatically&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatically&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatically&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;.  I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; that if the synonym is approved, re-tagging becomes unnecessary, but that may just be wishful thinking on my part. In any case, if the system will let you, please &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/grammaticality/synonyms&quot;&gt;vote&lt;/a&gt; on the synonym suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It should go without saying that I believe the &quot;grammatically&quot; tag is a typo for &quot;grammaticality&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ETA: the synonym is now approved (thanks for the last vote, oerkelens!), and I was right: the system automatically re-tagged all the relevant questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T00:24:51.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6536" CreationDate="2015-01-13T00:40:42.607" Score="6" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is asking (and allowing) a trivia question like 'Is there an English word containing four consecutive sets of double letters?' trivialising the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T17:43:36.233" Title="Acceptability of trivia questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6535" CreationDate="2015-01-13T01:17:13.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think trivia questions like that are useful for users of this site. I also don't care for single word requests, which I put in the same category. I don't feel like these types of questions raise anything interesting about the English language, rather they encourage infinite variations on the same tedious topic (a word with four As, a word with alphabetical letters, a word that has my name hidden inside it but is not an anagram, the antonym of stairs, etc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They might find a more suitable home on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling.SE Beta site&lt;/a&gt; where they can be geared toward satisfying the gaming urge more directly. It's not that I don't like them; I just don't like them &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;. I'm glad you asked the question though. I'm interested to hear what the rest of the community thinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:54.983" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T01:17:13.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6539" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:01:32.483" Score="9" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am bereft of my laptop. Until recently, a friend of mine had lent me his mini computer while my laptop gathered dust at a friend of a friend's house who had promised to fix it. The lender has reclaimed his itty-bitty computer, so now I am forced to use my secondhand iPhone 4 to surf on the Internet and I have made the following observation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The banners for both sites  on my phone are virtually identical. Their titles get cut off at &quot;English Language  &amp;amp; Us...&quot; and &quot;English Language Lear...&quot; The colour themes are the same, the layout identical. It's no wonder new users are unaware of ELL's existence. You can't tell the difference! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a well-known design defect? Because to my mind, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a defect: users and visitors should be aware they are on two different sites. Considering that the number of mobile/cell/tablet users will increase over time, and PC users will decrease and eventually expire, I suggest this design issue should be swiftly  dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea if the same design 'feature' is evident on tablets or other devices which allow one to surf on the net. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I've also noticed the following missing privilege features:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1) There  is no review queue.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) I cannot see the number of upvotes and downvotes a post has received.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) The number of visits a post has attracted is not displayed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) There is no editor 'toolbox' nor preview feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is little difference between the normal text and a quoted excerpt. The latter appears indented on my display, whereas on a computer monitor, the citation is formatted more effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T19:38:01.423" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T19:38:01.423" Title="iPhone display is (almost) identical for EL&amp;U and ELL" Tags="|discussion|design|mobile|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:03:50.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just did a quick check of the top 100 highest all-time scorers on EL&amp;amp;U and found that 76 of them have &quot;single-word-requests&quot; listed among their top three tag categories for upvotes. Unmistakably, single-word requests draw a disproportionately high level of interest among people who cast upvotes—with the result that, no matter how much time you devote to answering other categories of questions, you'll probably find that SWRs loom large in your scoring totals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most of the past year I have tried to avoid answering single-word requests as answers except when I couldn't compress my answer into the space available for a comment. Even so, SWRs are my seventh-highest-ranking tag category by upvote total and my fifth-highest-ranking tag category by number of questions answered. I can't get away from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see why SWRs are popular: They call for short answers that rarely involve more than a minute or two of research; they invite input on a subject (word choice) that practically everyone here has strong opinions about; and they attract lots of voters who won't stick around to read long-winded answers to complicated questions. So: fun, easy, and rewarding—what's not to like, from an answerer's perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that the most serious criticism I could make about SWRs is that most of them aren't very interesting to me. But it's hard to think of a less objective criticism than that. And obviously a great many EL&amp;amp;U participants—including some genuine language experts and a great many language enthusiasts—find them both interesting and satisfying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the key question is whether the popularity of SWRs constitutes evidence that the stated mission and guidelines of EL&amp;amp;U don't mesh well with what most site visitors care about. The site is supposed to be for experts and serious enthusiasts, but a great many participants want answers to basic language and usage questions or want to ask and answer questions of the form &quot;What word means X?&quot; So either the site isn't doing (and perhaps can't do) a very good job of enforcing its idea of what kinds of questions should be asked and answered here, or its vision of itself doesn't match what the vast majority of its participating users want it to be—and what it already is. Or both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current highest-scoring unanswered question on EL&amp;amp;U (with 12 upvotes) is a highly technical question about &quot;graphotactics of possessive.&quot; And yet despite having appeared at or near the top of the Unanswered Questions page for almost ten weeks, and despite having been viewed 611 times, and despite having (at one point) had a very large bonus attached to it, and despite having attracted 26 comments, the question has drawn exactly one answer, from a user with a reputation score of 1; that answer promptly received four downvotes and two days later was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have expected that this graphotactics question would generate some interesting answers from the experts who participate on this site, but if so you'd have been disappointed. Experts did speak up, but in piecemeal comments only; no knowledgeable person submitted an actual answer—a disappointment given that EL&amp;amp;U is supposed to be a question-and-answer site, not a question-and-multiple-comments site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me back to single-word requests. Lots of people answer those questions, and lots of people read and vote on their answers. So maybe we're kidding ourselves when we imagine that EL&amp;amp;U is designed to be a magnet for complex questions and answers on serious subjects like graphotactics and not for lightweight ephemera such as what the correct word is for the first balmy day of spring. I'm not saying that questions about graphotactics should go to another site; I'm saying that the vast majority of EL&amp;amp;U users seem to have very different ideas about the sort of content they find interesting to create and upvote. Is our goal simply to drive them away and to recruit more people who might be able to answer questions about &quot;graphotactics of possessive&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that practically everyone who answers questions at EL&amp;amp;U—including those of us who generally dislike single-word requests—has benefited (in terms of upvote totals) from the popular interest in SWRs. Maybe it's time to admit that, for many EL&amp;amp;U participants, SWRs are the meat, potatoes, and dessert of the site, and to ask how we can healthily accommodate that interest within a broader notion of EL&amp;amp;U as a site for English language experts and enthusiasts—instead of ineffectually trying to suppress it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:03:50.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6537" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:46:02.680" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spot the difference...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oeToI.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU on mobile&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sa2Qr.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELL on mobile&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could have something which uses the colours of the main-site theme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aNtDH.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU colours&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:46:02.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6535" CreationDate="2015-01-13T17:43:36.233" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though I don't myself find this sort of question interesting, there is no way we can reasonably call them 'off-topic'; they are about one facet of the English language. Where they might run into problems is 'too broad'. It is unlikely that there is just one word fulfilling the criteria, so there are &quot;too many possible answers&quot;. &quot;Narrowing the answer set&quot; could be done by excluding unassimilated foreign words and proper names; but unless you use standard dictionary criteria (whatever your standard dictionary may be), it's purely arbitrary, and the question, as KitFox says, would fit better on Puzzling.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a wordplay question that does not fall foul of the published close reasons, I certainly don't think we should alter the reasons just to exclude it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T17:43:36.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T03:47:41.087" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to see a pattern where Answers receive far more up-votes than the Questions they answer. I even see instances where an Answer has been selected while the Question remains at Zero votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: if a question is worth answering isn't it also worthy of at least 1 up-vote? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98990" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-01-15T06:56:27.200" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T06:56:27.200" Title="The Comparison of Up-Votes Between Questions &amp; Answers" Tags="|discussion|questions|voting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ClosedDate="2015-01-15T07:02:25.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T01:23:52.827" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if some kind soul could explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is a 'content dispute'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are content disputes resolved?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long should a content dispute be expected to take to resolve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other posts on meta where one can find out about content disputes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T01:23:52.827" Title="Content dispute" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T18:01:23.890" Score="4" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N2pic.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;comments overflow into sidebar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caused by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222267/dog-who-has-escaped-an-animal-shelter-name/222272#comment473240_222267&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; overflowed comment which isn't line-broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your table layout sucks! &lt;em&gt;shakes fist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77180" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T06:20:49.877" Title="Comment overflow" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6546" CreationDate="2015-01-19T03:43:46.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment in question was made in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222267/dog-who-has-escaped-an-animal-shelter-name&quot;&gt;this posting.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is nothing to do with line breaks. It is due to the fact that Kris failed to include the &lt;strong&gt;http://&lt;/strong&gt; component of the URL. (NB — I am using Chrome as my browser.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how he/she formatted it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=runaway+&lt;em&gt;&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end‌​=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t2%3B%2Crunaway%20&lt;/em&gt;%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0‌​%3B%3Brunaway%20slaves%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20slave%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20horse%‌​3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20negroes%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20inflation%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bruna‌​way%20match%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20from%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20horses%3B%2Cc0%3B%‌​3Brunaway%20and%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brunaway%20servant%3B%2Cc0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appended as a comment below is the same link, this time including the &lt;strong&gt;http://&lt;/strong&gt; prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T03:50:42.120" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-19T20:56:15.703" Score="-4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 3 out of 4 close votes for POB on something that is not POB. There's an answer, a real one, that has real English rules that should be attached. I want to know ... whose opinion would it be that determines non-grammatical answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't &quot;what's your favorite color&quot; or &quot;Which is the right word to use here?&quot; This is ... if there's an answer, prove it. If it's POB that there isn't an answer (or that there is one?), I'm rather confused what I'm asking experts for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222460/please-find-a-word-that-it-is-not-grammatically-correct-to-begin-a-sentence-or-q&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T02:15:27.463" Title="POB? Word that is ungrammatical to start a sentence?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6548" CreationDate="2015-01-20T02:15:27.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/222460/39720&quot;&gt;Please find a word that it is not grammatically correct to begin a sentence or question?&lt;/a&gt; is Primarily Opinion Based.&#xA;But one reading of the first two sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple questions herein ask &amp;quot;Is it grammatically correct to begin a sentence or question with X?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm definitively asking, are there any words for which it is absolutely not grammatically correct to begin a sentence with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which motivate the rest of the post, makes it seem like it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reading is meant to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen many questions asking &amp;quot;Is it grammatically correct to begin a sentence or question with X?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I haven't seen one asking it the other way around: &amp;quot;Is there some word Y that cannot start a grammatically correct and non-trivial sentence?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Description/examples of trivial cases&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my first reading was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions about &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; are asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question about &lt;em&gt;Not X&lt;/em&gt; is meant to be used as a link to aid answering those questions:&#xA;'If &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is not posted as an answer to this question, then your answer is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this reading, I think the question &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be close-worthy, because it appeals for not only a list but a complete one at that.&#xA;(I think the word &lt;em&gt;definitively&lt;/em&gt; is what set me onto this interpretation.&#xA;Whenever I see that word, it's usually in the phrase &amp;quot;definitive list.&amp;quot;)&#xA;This muddied the intention of the question for me, because it looked like you were asking for a list, when your next sentence explicitly says you weren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, the question looks good to me.&#xA;I agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222460/please-find-a-word-that-it-is-not-grammatically-correct-to-begin-a-sentence-or-q#comment473866_222460&quot;&gt;it looks like a trivia question&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't think we've decided yet on whether or not they should be kept or closed (and if closed, under what close-reason): &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6535/39720&quot;&gt;Acceptability of trivia questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if it came down to that, this question is interesting enough to me that it seems it would be a better candidate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6536/39720&quot;&gt;migration&lt;/a&gt; than closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T02:15:27.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6555" CreationDate="2015-01-20T17:50:49.840" Score="6" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the correct way to deal with someone who posts an answer largely echoing material put forward in a previous 'comment' (possibly because the 'commenter' wanted to help the questioner, but felt the question not quite appropriate for ELU)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T18:01:45.203" Title="Answers that echo comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2015-01-20T23:06:45.087" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to go with: Not starting a fight over nothing by making condescending comments on perfectly legitimate answers and in doing so derailing an actual conversation that was taking place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refer yourself to Andrew Leach's comment for a duplicate meta question which contains overwhelming support for my stance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78319" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T23:06:45.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-20T23:41:25.817" Score="-2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to delete my account permanently.  It seems your system is deliberately making account deletion a difficult task (to say the least).  I appreciate your prompt attention to deletion of my account, or I expect to be given an explanation by the legal department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user106741" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-01-20T23:47:33.370" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T22:32:00.283" Title="System is blocking acount deletion" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6552" CreationDate="2015-01-20T23:47:10.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see the Help page which explains how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleting-account&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleting-account&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is a published process, please follow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that deleting your account does not delete any content you have posted, because you have licensed it to Stack Exchange, but that content will no longer be associated with your named account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T23:47:10.530" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-21T07:20:41.547" Score="-1" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that there are some users on EL&amp;amp;U who ask many questions, but rarely (or never) accept any of the answers given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that I am not the only one who regards such behaviour as a poor way of acknowledging the effort that others have made to research and craft a good answer. Recently, Janus Bahs Jacquet posted this pertinent comment under one &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/221686/etymology-of-a-pride-of-lions/221692#221692&quot;&gt;question:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you feel any of the answers given adequately answers your question, you should choose it as the accepted answer. If not, you should edit your post to clarify what is lacking. Accepting an answer is a good way, in addition to votes, of helping future readers judge the merits of an answer. Currently, only three of your 15 asked questions have accepted answers; you should consider being more proactive in accepting what you feel is the best answer given when you ask a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to my suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is that once a person has asked more than (say) twenty questions, the system should block them from asking any more until they have accepted answers for at least one third of the questions they have already posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that my suggested thresholds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adequately allow for the likelihood that not all questions will elicit answers that are good enough to be accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;also acknowledge the fact that if they are good, a substantial proportion of questions &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; almost inevitably receive some good answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;will motivate querents to improve their prior questions so that they subsequently attract better answers. This will also improve the overall reference value of the EL&amp;amp;U's Q&amp;amp;A repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do others think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T22:52:43.747" Title="Should askers who never ‘accept’ answers be penalized in some way?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2015-01-21T08:15:21.910" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do sometimes restate as a formal answer the answer that a commenter has provided in response to a simple question, but I generally try to observe three points of protocol in doing so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I focus my efforts on questions that I find in the Unanswered Questions queue. Any question that already has an answer with a net positive vote score will not appear in that queue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wait several weeks before offering such a restatement. This ensures that I'm answering a question that isn't on the verge of being closed, but instead shows signs of lingering indefinitely in the Unanswered Questions queue, taking up space there. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I give explicit credit to the commenter who provided the dispositive answer to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truth to tell, the answers in most such cases don't redound to the credit of either the commenter or me because they are obvious and elementary. But perhaps seeing an actual answer to the question will encourage another reader not to ask the same one (assuming that such readers search for such questions and answers before posting the same question). Or perhaps someone will upvote the obvious answer, and we'll have one less piece of dead weight in the queue. Or perhaps, as is usually the case, nothing will happen—but at least we will have a formal answer to the question in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting and challenging questions do sometimes lurk in the nether reaches of the Unanswered Questions queue. And I think it's a shame that those questions are surrounded by a mid-Pacific Gyre of dull and incoherent questions that repel any but the most dedicated question answerer from seeking them out. I don't have a solution to the problem of what to do with the junk besides to try to retire it, but I do think that the Unanswered Questions queue is well worth inspecting regularly in hopes of spotting an interesting question that somehow went unanswered (or unupvoted) on its first descent through the EL&amp;amp;U main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T08:55:44.647" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T08:55:44.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6554" CreationDate="2015-01-21T08:51:51.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked 28 questions on EL&amp;amp;U and have accepted answers to 5 of them (including one just now), so I would be barred from asking further questions under the proposed one-third acceptance rule—or indeed, under a one-fifth acceptance rule—a result that I would find very disappointing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to think that the reason I've seemingly been so ungenerous with answer acceptance is that the questions I ask tend to be difficult to answer in a way that clearly and fully disposes of the question. I do greatly appreciate the thought and effort that most answerers put into their responses to my questions, and I try to be free with my upvoting of such responses—but to me, accepting an answer means saying that the matter is settled, and often I think it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone likes to have answers accepted, but I oppose the idea of pressuring questioners to accept answers by making the privilege of asking future questions contingent on meeting a minimum acceptance quota. I'm not asking for a special dispensation or for the establishment of some sort of multiple-criterion test of question worthiness that might allow my answer acceptance record to avoid being subjected to the full force of the rule. I'm asking that answerers simply view answer acceptance as a completely voluntary bonus that question askers are under no obligation to provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T08:51:51.843" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-22T15:40:01.363" Score="-4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please advise if the use of 'time-sensitive' in the title is right. &#xA;I ask questions about writing over different time periods and want to tag questions more precisely. So should we further array or decompose the expansive category  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern English&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for questions about syntax in Shakespeare, should I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elizabethan-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elizabethan-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elizabethan-english&lt;/a&gt; tag, more specific than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/early-modern-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;early-modern-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;early-modern-english&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, what tag for late 1700s/early 1800s writing (barring the sweeping 'Modern English')?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the general question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/223013/507200&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T17:19:30.983" Title="Narrower, more precise, 'time-sensitive' tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2015-01-22T23:18:29.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the use of tags is the [question] use of tags. The other part is the [viewer] use of tags. If one uses tags and another does not, it's just unnecessary tagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagging should be as precise as to be uniquely useful and no further, and especially no overlap with another tag in meaning. This doesn't mean that a question cannot have multiple tags. It just means each tag is independent of the other tags attached to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my opinion, and it would be easily argued that this aspect has been violated already (before I made this statement or even had a say in it, so don't ask me to justify it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to ask for a specific time period, then why not a specific year? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T23:18:29.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6552" CreationDate="2015-01-23T22:32:00.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You were trying to submit a deletion request from &lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt;, using your &lt;strong&gt;main site&lt;/strong&gt; profile link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try the main site contact form: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and scheduled your account for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T22:32:00.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6563" CreationDate="2015-01-26T18:44:29.160" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel I have been wronged by a mod.  What is the procedure to escalate the matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question where I faced the said difficulty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223814/meaning-of-back-on-their-heels?noredirect=1#comment477298_223814&quot;&gt;Meaning of &amp;quot;Back on their heels&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly feel the mod is acting in a biased, patronizing and condescending manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CLARIFICATION:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My grievance is not so much about the hold placed on my question, but on the disrespectful treatment I have been subjected to by the mod. (Please note that the mod's comments and mine have since been removed by another mod.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOLLOW-UP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have since read the following question and its answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;honestly&lt;/em&gt; did not know ELU was intended only for &quot;serious linguists&quot;, as one answer specifies.  If in fact true, it goes to explain the elitist treatment I have received on occasion.  Also, if it is true, then the site banner should say so, so that I and others know to stay away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user40248" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user40248" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T09:50:55.487" Title="Procedure for escalating a conflict w/ a mod" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2015-01-26T19:24:27.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our EL&amp;amp;U moderators are elected by the community, roughly on an annual basis. If you are having a disagreement with a mod and you feel you cannot get satisfactory resolution, you can email the community moderation team at team@stackexchange.com or use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact form&lt;/a&gt; that is available through the Help Center. They are StackExchange employees whose job it is to monitor the SE sites and resolve issues that the volunteer moderators cannot (or should not). Alternatively, you can come to chat and try to work things out there. We can help you ping a community mod if you would rather not speak to one of us directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read through the comments on your post and looked at the history. I don't feel Andrew was being unreasonable. I think in this case, there was a misunderstanding between the two of you that was exacerbated by the fact that the Internet doesn't carry tone and expression. Andrew was trying to be helpful by communicating to you very directly what you needed to change in your question to make it topical, and you interpreted this as elitist and patronizing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I removed the commentary because it is not helpful to future visitors and because ruminating on the exact wording and what someone may or may not have intended is not helpful to the parties involved. Suffice it to say, I edited into your post the information you included in comments as evidence of your research, and this should put the post in the re-open queue for the community to vote on. If it is not re-opened, you might consider editing it with further research, or appealing the close vote here on Meta (as a separate question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T19:24:27.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2015-01-26T19:48:26.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you really want to &amp;quot;escalate&amp;quot; the situation, although there is nothing wrong with asking for the community to take a second look if you feel like a question should not have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, the best way to get your question reopened is to revise your question. Many questions get closed because they are written in a way that makes it look like the O.P. hasn't done enough research, and it looks like they are asking on ELU before looking in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sometimes this isn't really true, but the best way to handle the situation is to strengthen the question by including your research, as opposed to getting into a drawn-out debate in the comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a footnote, Andrew Leach and I joined the ELU right around the same time, almost three years ago. I've never known him to be biased, patronizing or condescending; his actions always seem to be fair and level-headed. That said, I've witnessed several instances where  remarks that were meant to be helpful nudges were misconstrued or misinterpreted as personal attacks or criticisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, some comments have been removed before I had a chance to read them, but, if you really feel like Andrew Leach was condescending toward you, I'd be willing to bet that was purely a misunderstanding, and that Mr. Leach meant to be only constructive and respectful in his duties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other thing – I don't know if you were put off by the initial remark when the question was closed. Several times I've seen people get into a &amp;quot;huff&amp;quot; because they thought those words were condescending, when in fact they were only automatically copied from a standard phrase found in a Stack Exchange template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BeR7B.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T20:03:52.233" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2015-01-27T09:50:55.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I honestly did not know ELU was intended only for &quot;serious linguists&quot;, as one answer specifies. If in fact true, it goes to explain the elitist treatment I have received on occasion. Also, if it is true, then the site banner should say so&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site banner may not say so, but this is clearly stated up front in ELU's help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1N5Jd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;first question&lt;/a&gt; in the site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWqp3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T09:50:55.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-27T10:30:15.337" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the &quot;good&quot; reasons for deleting someone else's answer? And, related, &#xA;— can you delete someone's answer with no reason? &#xA;— how many delete votes does it take to delete an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95331" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T14:26:47.040" Title="Deleting an Answer" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6564" CreationDate="2015-01-27T10:40:20.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on who you are as to how many votes are required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with less than 10K reps can delete their own content, with the exception of questions that have upvoted answers attached to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with 10K+ reps can cast delete votes on other people's content, and it takes three votes to delete something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can delete with only one vote, so not exactly a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons to delete something are that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it's spam&lt;/strong&gt; — An unsolicited advert, but this should be done by flagging rather than delete votes. 6 spam flags delete a post, and help inform the system what spam is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it is other nonsense&lt;/strong&gt; — This covers two main types of problem. First of all there is gibberish, e.g. &quot;a;dsfh;hulasdfs&quot;. Secondly there are offensive posts. It could be argued that both are offensive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it does not attempt to answer the question at hand&lt;/strong&gt; — This doesn't include wrong answers, but does include questions and comments (either on the question or one of the answers) posted in the &quot;Your Answer&quot; box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it is very low quality&lt;/strong&gt; — This is more subjective in definition. Answers that don't explain their rationale are typically what I would call low quality. Especially single word request answers that amount to no more than &quot;you can use &amp;lt;this word&amp;gt; for that.&quot; I would also include answers that are posted after another answer with (almost) the same answer but are less informative. Low quality answers don't always have to be deleted, if a downvote and/or comment give enough incentive for the answer to be improved then the answer can stay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2015-01-27T14:26:47.040" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T14:26:47.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6567" CreationDate="2015-01-28T03:47:37.970" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was under the impression that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;marked as duplicate--this question already has an answer&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; meant that OP's question had not only elicited an answer or answers, but elicited one that satisfied the OP and had been officially selected. But apparently that is not the case, so &lt;strong&gt;what constitutes an answered question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98990" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T10:57:38.597" Title="Duplicate Question -- Already Been Answered" Tags="|discussion|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6566" CreationDate="2015-01-28T10:57:38.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with at least 3000 rep can vote to close questions. One of the options to do so is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has been asked before and already has an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a duplicate is not necessarily an exact copy. An exact copy is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158066/what-are-merged-questions&quot;&gt;merged&lt;/a&gt;, not closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question nominated as a duplicate has at least one answer which &lt;strong&gt;provides an answer&lt;/strong&gt; to the closed question. It may not be the accepted answer there, but one of the answers will either answer the question, or show the way to answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nominated question may be a generic question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2031/are-there-any-simple-rules-for-choosing-the-definite-vs-indefinite-vs-none-a&quot;&gt;Are there any simple rules for choosing the definite vs. indefinite (vs. none) article?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; that one will show the asker how to determine which article they should use, in order to answer a question about articles. That generic question can't answer every specific question which is linked to it as a duplicate, but does provide an answer which &lt;strong&gt;can be applied&lt;/strong&gt; to the closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the closed question becomes a pointer to the canonical answer, which (if the system is used correctly!) will quickly refer people with similar questions to their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asker of the closed question can comment on closure suggestions during the time votes are being amassed, because there is an automatic comment advising them of a potential duplicate, and can still do this after it's been closed. They are at liberty to comment (or, preferably, amend their question) in order to show that the nominated duplicate is not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that what the current closure system does not do is to link directly to the best answer within the &quot;target&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T10:57:38.597" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-29T12:21:00.617" Score="17" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/755/should-grammaticality-be-a-synonym-of-grammar&quot;&gt;this four-year-old question&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag (and also its misspelt cousin, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammer&lt;/a&gt;, which I implicitly include here) is the fourth most used tag on ELU, and it seems to be overwhelmingly misused as a generic tag by new users who don’t understand how tagging works and just put in ‘grammar’ no matter what the question is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/986/the-plan-for-grammar&quot;&gt;this slightly-less-than-four-year-old question&lt;/a&gt;, that basically makes the tag completely useless. Nohat’s answer in the first question makes a useful distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; is appropriate for questions about whether something is grammatical or not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; is appropriate for more abstract questions about how various grammatical structures are defined and named, or how they function or differ from each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, I suppose, a fair amount of questions that could meaningfully be put into the latter category; but the vast majority of questions currently tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; are either in the former category or belong to some completely different category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JSBձոգչ’s question seems to have been quite positively received, but nothing appears to have come from it. My suggestion on how to help fix this tag abuse is a bit different from his, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we rename the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-structure&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-structures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-structures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-structures&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully if new users see no tag simply titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, they will try to find something a bit more descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T07:23:28.790" Title="Rename the [grammar] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6568" CreationDate="2015-01-29T14:33:51.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm open to this idea, and I'd like to know what the rest of the community thinks. I agree with tchrist's comment that renaming it won't make it go away. We'd have to blacklist it so that users didn't keep re-creating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do want to mention that the tag has been helpful as a marker for new users who are likely to need early help. It's not the intended purpose of tags, but I do believe it has been useful for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, will it be useful to have all of the grammar tags renamed? If many or most of the posts tagged thus are incorrectly tagged, we should probably instead mount a cleanup effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T14:33:51.857" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2015-01-29T18:01:45.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6550/answers-that-echo-comments?cb=1#comment23099_6550&quot;&gt;Josh61 noted&lt;/a&gt;, comments are comments.  Answers are answers.  If you think your reply will answer the users question, take a few seconds to find a link to a reliable source and post it as an answer.  I believe comments are for clarification and further discussion, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; for answering the users question.  Any time you do that, it's fair game and you are running the risk of someone hijacking your content.  Yes, the answerer should reference your comment if they are directly copying it, but there are no rules saying that &quot;if a commenter got to it first, you can't use it as an answer,&quot; and it should stay that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, if your answer is an answer, post it as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90265" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T18:01:45.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-30T08:19:43.800" Score="-2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can/do/should we incorporate one or more answers into our own? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there value in combining two or more answers into one? See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224556/reversal-of-blacklisting/224563?noredirect=1#comment479125_224563&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, where I think the best answer includes two answers combined with mine. I started to ask one other person if we should do so, but I can't figure out what's best to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T00:06:57.940" Title="Combining answers a good thing?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6573" CreationDate="2015-01-30T20:17:31.630" Score="1" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of asking a question that has a swear word in its title.  The question would have the same swear word, 3-4 times.  It isn't offensive for anyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beautiful ways to say 'Get the f*ck out'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention is to simply ask ways to say that, that don't require swearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107614" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T11:29:42.083" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T11:29:42.083" Title="Is swearing allowed in questions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|bowdlerization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6572" CreationDate="2015-01-30T21:51:47.170" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253/referencing-the-existence-of-words-that-may-be-offensive&quot;&gt;in this Meta question&lt;/a&gt;, asking about a swear word is absolutely okay (as long as your question meets all the standard criteria, of course); the mere fact that it is a question about a swear word should not bring any opprobrium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary restriction is that you should post in a polite, civil manner, which means that you should not actually &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; swear words or offensive terms as part of your general presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;okay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's a more polite way to tell someone to &quot;get the fuck out&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;not okay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why the fuck should I have to conform to some anonymous asshole's stupid rules about civility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also (as pointed out by @KitZFox in comments), since question titles can automatically be published network-wide in the &quot;hot network questions&quot; sidebar, bowdlerizing the title of your question by character substitution is recommended.  I don't know if we have any preferences for &quot;f*ck&quot; vs. &quot;f**k&quot; vs. &quot;f***&quot;, but I'd imagine that the more letters you can blank out while still leaving your word recognizable, the more socially acceptable it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T01:23:00.490" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6571" CreationDate="2015-01-31T00:06:57.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, combining answers is definitely Not A Good Thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange format encourages unique answers to questions, each of which may be voted upon and from which the OP chooses the answer best for their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining answers makes this primary aim impossible; and where the different answers come from different people it completely subverts the reputation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can even be argued that where answers are sufficiently similar that combination might be a possibility, it's actually essential that they remain separate in order that different nuances can be isolated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T00:06:57.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="986" CreationDate="2015-02-02T23:08:48.573" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic discovery and analysis should not be about learning an esoteric terminology.  The more hoops you ask questioners to jump through to ask their questions, the worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106784" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T23:08:48.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-03T19:54:19.637" Score="-3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know who it is and I can watch my numbers fall within seconds of one another.  Help me!  LOL  I have (11) points.  Count them, 11!  The systems tells me I'm getting close to forever banishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:  As a result of asking the above question, I've now lost both badges.  LOL  I don't even know how you lose those!  Well, well, well.  My very own personal troll surely must feel the power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updated update:  Who has the power to completely clean my account of all activity?  Ever been on the receiving end of a narcissistic rage?  LOL  I know I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108227" LastEditorUserId="108227" LastEditDate="2015-02-03T20:41:45.680" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T00:49:39.570" Title="New member gets vendetta down-votes from well established member" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-04T00:26:11.480" Score="-8" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this question(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225083/on-referring-to-a-specific-definite-person-whose-gender-is-known-as-they&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225083/on-referring-to-a-specific-definite-person-whose-gender-is-known-as-they&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA; voted to be put on hold as being POB by a user while his question(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69191/english-parts-of-speech-better-new-treatments&quot;&gt;English parts of speech — better new treatments&lt;/a&gt;) is far from being objective?&#xA;I smell double standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T18:44:45.543" Title="Why was this question voted to be put on hold as being POB by a user while his question is far from being objective?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6576" CreationDate="2015-02-04T00:49:39.570" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a look at your account, and there's no enough activity at this point to draw any conclusions. Please do let us know if you continue having trouble. You can do this by flagging one of your downvoted posts with an &quot;other&quot; flag and leave a little note for the moderators asking us to look into serial downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed when I was surveying your answers that you are generally not answering the question. This site is not a forum; when you post an answer, we expect it to answer the question. You'll have the privilege to leave comments when you get to 50 rep points. You can use comments to ask for clarification or provide feedback to another poster, which it what it seems like you are using the answer section for. That might account for the downvotes you've noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell by your posts that you are interested in the site. I hope this early experience doesn't discourage you from exploring here more. Take a look at some of the highly-upvoted answers and that will give you an idea of what we're looking for here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T00:49:39.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6577" CreationDate="2015-02-04T18:44:45.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about whether a particular usage is considered acceptable are entirely answerable, even from a descriptivist point of view: &quot;In 2013 a majority of the usage panel at &lt;i&gt;Murgatroyd's Unabridged Dictionary&lt;/i&gt; considered this to be an acceptable construction,&quot; would be a fine answer. &quot;In this &lt;i&gt;Language Log&lt;/i&gt; post from last August, Prof. John Frink stated that 'opinions about this particular permutation are still very much up in the air,'&quot; would be another. An answer might note an apparent lack of scholarship on the topic, but propose a course of action based upon similar usage trends. Or one might simply note that there is no consensus to be found, and that would be the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a very real sense, all of usage is about opinions. Just because a question involves opinions in some way doesn't make it POB. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/what-the-primarily-opinion-based-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;That ain't what it's for.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T18:44:45.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6582" CreationDate="2015-02-04T19:46:50.377" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not unused to having to use the meta of an SE in order to figure out what I did wrong in asking a question, and what I can do better next time. This post is similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the question I had asked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224290/hereby-referred-to-or-hereafter-referred-to&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224290/hereby-referred-to-or-hereafter-referred-to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224290/hereby-referred-to-or-hereafter-referred-to&quot;&gt;In a google search (for me at least)&lt;/a&gt;, my question is one of the top results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishforums.com/English/ArticleUseageHerebyHereafterHereto/vjcbv/post.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this resource&lt;/a&gt; (full of crappy ads and other stuff, and one of the top results), I can make a guess that &quot;hereafter&quot; is the right choice, but to me at least, its not immediately clear that this is the case, because it does not refer to my specific usage case at all. I think I have often come across cases where I have seen sentences like &quot;hereby referred to...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1218853&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;top link&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to be something about Spanish rather than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the assumption had still been tacitly made that I hadn't done any research. I think most people know that a google search is much faster than writing up an SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to compare my question to this well received question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225466/word-for-someone-who-is-quietly-reliable&quot;&gt;Word for someone who is &amp;quot;quietly reliable&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at that question, I am even more confused as to why mine was closed. There doesn't seem to be any attempt at research (&quot;I am sure there is a word for this...but I can't put my finger on it&quot;) -- for instance, a thesaurus could have been consulted, and subsequently a dictionary to see examples of usage. That's essentially what the answers are doing for the question. In any case, there are similar questions to that one (synonyms for honest) on E.SE, which make it more &quot;commonly asked and answered&quot; than mine, which has none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't intend to criticize that question, I just intend to convey that it is at first glance, very similar to my question. So, why was my question closed, and what can I do to make it better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T20:06:11.233" Title="I need a better answer for why my question was closed, so that I can become a better user" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6580" CreationDate="2015-02-04T20:03:45.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed because you didn't mention your research efforts. If you did research, please edit your question to reflect that and it will automatically enter the re-open queue. Some of what you mention in this question is appropriate to include in your post, as is a dictionary definition of each word. Try to be as specific as possible concerning why you aren't clear on which is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the other question you mention, it's a single-word-request, which is a different type of question. We have specific rules for single word requests, so it's not a good comparison for your post. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/210699/difference-between-content-and-contentment&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; instead for something closer to what we expect for a comparative meaning question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T20:03:45.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6580" CreationDate="2015-02-04T20:06:11.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In questions asking for help with straight-up definitions, people here like to hear that you've consulted a dictionary (several of which are listed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which is linked to from the close reason) but still need help beyond what the dictionary can give you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the dictionary definitions for the two words are sufficiently different from one another that you probably wouldn't need to ask here at all. If you still did, you would want to say something like &quot;I've looked up both words in the dictionary and I don't understand how they are different.&quot; (The question would probably still get closed, because there is a small group of people here who zealously vote to close all questions they believe are &quot;too basic,&quot; but if you've followed the rules and done your due diligence you would at least stand a good chance of getting it reopened.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T20:06:11.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4805" CreationDate="2015-02-04T20:57:42.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the crucial point in phenry's excellent post is that questions that ask &quot;What is the rationale for X?&quot; are not asking &quot;What is your opinion of X?&quot; Rather, they are asking for factual information—assuming that a rationale for X actually exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I ask &quot;What is the point of the subjunctive mood?&quot; and make clear in my description that the question isn't merely one of rhetorical annoyance but a request for a clarification of what purpose the subjunctive mood serves or is supposed to serve, I am not asking a POB question. My question may still be inappropriate for EL&amp;amp;U, for some other reason, but rejecting it as &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; seems to me to misunderstand the nature of my question and to misapply the extremely valuable POB justification for closing &quot;What do you think of X?&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would hate to jeopardize the tone of civility that prevails at this site by inviting pointlessly divisive discussions of controversial subjects. But on the other hand, it seems regrettable to limit the site's scope and usefulness because, at some level, we don't trust ourselves to behave well and to stick to facts when facts are asked for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T20:57:42.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-04T22:59:05.483" Score="8" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a clear difference between my question and the question marked as a duplicate. I have edited the post to emphasize how it is different, now I'm posting here to see if someone can review it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225523/where-did-the-practice-of-using-quotation-marks-to-discredit-an-opponent-scare&quot;&gt;Where did the practice of using quotation marks to discredit an opponent (&amp;quot;scare-quotes&amp;quot;) come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;META&lt;/em&gt;: I generally don't trust people who complain on Meta Stack Exchange sites about stuff like this, but I believe my case is pretty strong here. It might be that I didn't communicate clearly enough, but I'm positive that the question that I'm trying to ask is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72833" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T23:14:09.107" Title="My question was incorrectly marked as a duplicate. Can this be reviewed again?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|question-closure|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-04T23:11:07.443" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;code&gt;vote-to-close&lt;/code&gt; tag, but it would be nice to have a &lt;code&gt;vote-to-reopen&lt;/code&gt; tag also, for those of us who believe our questions were wrongfully closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72833" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T23:21:53.967" Title="Can we have a vote-to-reopen tag here on meta ELU?" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|vote-to-close|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-04T23:20:08.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-02-04T23:20:08.917" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T23:20:08.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-04T23:20:08.917" Score="0" Body="Use this tag to dispute or discuss questions that have been closed." OwnerUserId="72833" LastEditorUserId="72833" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T05:41:44.023" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T05:41:44.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6585" CreationDate="2015-02-04T23:21:53.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Kit Z. Fox has kindly pointed out that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/question-closure&quot;&gt;question-closure tag&lt;/a&gt; is for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72833" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T23:21:53.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6568" CreationDate="2015-02-06T07:23:28.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all grammar is about &quot;structures&quot; (though if you are a proponent of Minimalism then maybe that's not the case.) Grammar involves syntax, morphology, semantics - it's a broad part of linguistics and includes a lot of things, excepting phonetics and social linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the tag system proposed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/986/the-plan-for-grammar&quot;&gt;this old question&lt;/a&gt; should be implemented instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T07:23:28.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-07T07:26:46.843" Score="-4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too often, I see questions--both here and perhaps even more so on ell.se--that include some type of constraint on the answer which produces less-than-ideal or downright horrible English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226053/adjective-describing-a-project-goal-that-is-easy-to-collaborate-on&quot;&gt;Adjective describing a project/goal that is not easy to collaborate on&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Questions of the form &quot;Which is better, X or Y?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- &lt;em&gt;(Feel free to update this list with any examples.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, the answers generated are plausible in the-world-of-definitions but are awkward or unnatural in the-world-of-real-usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be useful to employ a standard catch phrase to alert the potential problem.  Perhaps a standard comment like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Forced answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps some other way to handle these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61171" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T13:55:05.393" Title="Forced Answer? How to handle artificial answer constraints" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6591" CreationDate="2015-02-07T13:55:05.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see questions that include some type of constraint on the answer which produces less-than-ideal or downright horrible English. Often, the answers generated are plausible in the-world-of-definitions but are awkward or unnatural in the-world-of-real-usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Maybe that's why it's a question. Maybe the O.P. has made an effort to conjure an adjective when there isn't a good one – but sometimes there's no way to know that with certainty until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question is posted, and everyone else has drawn a blank, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) In my view, answers that are &lt;em&gt;plausible-but-awkward&lt;/em&gt; are okay, but such answers should include a caveat or disclaimer – something along the lines of, &quot;This words fits your needs, but...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;if you use it, very few people will know what you're talking about.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;you run the risk of sounding like you've teleported from the 18th century.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;there are probably better ways to say this, so maybe an adjective isn't the best choice here.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) If you find an exceptionally awkward answer that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; mention any kind of disclaimer, feel free fix that by adding your own in a comment, or exercising your right to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T13:55:05.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-08T10:19:53.750" Score="-8" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this question put on hold as unclear what you're asking by tchrist, Mysti Sinha, Hellion, medica, Barmar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty clear what it's asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of singular they referring to a specific person before the year 1960&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/220767/examples-of-singular-they-referring-to-a-specific-person-before-the-year-1960&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/220767/examples-of-singular-they-referring-to-a-specific-person-before-the-year-1960&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T18:15:45.043" Title="Why was this question asking for examples of singular they referring to a specific person put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6593" CreationDate="2015-02-08T20:38:28.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not close-vote the original question, but reviewing it now I must confess that I had no idea what you were asking at first either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest chopping/trimming the first few paragraphs about the 'generic singular they', as they are pretty tangential to your question and probably just muddy the waters.  I also thought your comment about the murder suspect with the quote from Doyle really helped to illuminate what you were asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, asking for a shopping list of examples of this sort of 'specific singular they' usage strikes me as a question that would probably be closed as &quot;too broad&quot;.  You might want to rethink the question a little more before editing/reasking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T20:38:28.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6596" CreationDate="2015-02-09T19:33:51.343" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notion of a &quot;well-received&quot; question is mentioned in several places on EL&amp;amp;U – such as in the qualifications for the &quot;Curious&quot;, &quot;Inquisitive&quot;, and &quot;Socratic&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;Question Badges&lt;/a&gt; – but I've been unable to find the specific criteria by which a question is adjudged to be &quot;well-received&quot;. (I searched both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta.English&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.) What are those criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T20:16:41.320" Title="By what criteria is a question considered &quot;well-received&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6595" CreationDate="2015-02-09T20:43:53.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked it up on meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A well-received question is one that's open, not deleted, and has a score &gt; 0.&quot;(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234259/asking-days-badges&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2015-02-10T19:55:21.900" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T19:55:21.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6593" CreationDate="2015-02-10T18:15:45.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lynn pretty much nailed my thought process; (a), I wasn't sure what you were asking for (although your later edit giving a specific example did help), and (b) &quot;give me as many examples as you can find&quot; is too broad, which I believe is what I selected as my close-vote reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T18:15:45.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-10T18:56:48.347" Score="-1" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an earnest new user here at EL&amp;amp;U. I'm enjoying the site very much, and I'd like to make useful contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm perplexed as to why someone downvoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226286/the-wooden-dock-was-crowded-everyone-excited-for-the-show-to-start/226309#226309&quot;&gt;this Answer&lt;/a&gt; that I wrote the other day. Whoever downvoted it left no comment to explain why. Did I do something wrong? Sage advice appreciated, as always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T06:51:07.707" Title="What advice would you offer to a new EL&amp;U user perplexed by the first downvote of an Answer they wrote?" Tags="|discussion|answers|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6598" CreationDate="2015-02-10T21:25:56.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not the downvoter, but I will wager a guess that perhaps they felt that your answer was too brief and didn't provide any background or explanation, particularly when compared with CopperKettle's answer (which was posted half an hour before yours).  Yours basically just asserts &quot;Yes, it's grammatical and common&quot;; the other goes into detail about what it is (with citations), when it is used, and how to interpret it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the more explanation and research you can put into your answer, the more likely it is to be well-received.  There is also a &quot;first-mover advantage&quot;, of course, but longer, more detailed, better-cited answers will usually win out in the long haul; even if the original questioner was only after a yes/no answer, having a thorough answer will help everyone else who views the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T21:25:56.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6598" CreationDate="2015-02-11T23:48:34.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the sincerity of your question here and of your desire to contribute useful answers to EL&amp;amp;U. As you note in your comment to Hellion's answer the official EL&amp;amp;U guideline for casting a downvote is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your downvoted answer, it seems to me, isn't sloppy or clearly incorrect, and it shows a reasonable amount of effort (especially in coming up with additional examples of the form that the OP is asking about). Consequently, I can see why you might have been mystified by the initial downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a simple explanation for why downvotes happen in instances such as the one you bring up, and it is essentially the explanation that Dan Bron gives in a comment to Hellion's answer: People who have earned the privilege of downvoting use their own criteria for exercising that privilege. A vindictive pattern of downvoting a particular other user may lead to moderator intervention, but otherwise the downvoter isn't answerable to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I'm not a huge fan of downvoting, it arguably serves a quality-control function when applied by voters to signal &quot;your answer doesn't show enough effort&quot; or &quot;your answer doesn't add anything meaningful to what other answers have already said&quot; or even (perhaps) &quot;your answer may be pretty good but it doesn't deserve the number of upvotes it has received, so I'm going to cancel one of them.&quot; I think that downvoting can be counterproductive when applied by voters to signal &quot;I don't like your tone&quot; or &quot;I disagree with the result you reached even though your argument is reasonable&quot; or &quot;I don't think you should answer questions like this one because it only encourages more people to ask them.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to improve a downvoted answer or to avoid submitting future answers with similar shortcomings, what practical information does a downvote convey? How do you know which of the reasons listed above (or not listed here) triggered a downvote if no one explains the downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is, you can't know. Everyone who participates in EL&amp;amp;U—including some participants whose deep knowledge of language and usage leaves me in awe—receives downvotes from time to time. In the big picture it doesn't matter why they happen in a particular case, as long as you made a real effort to add something of value to the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You won't run afoul of the official standards for downvotes—egregious sloppiness, absence of effort, and obvious error—if you continue to answer questions at your current level. You'll probably incur fewer downvotes if, in addition, you avoid submitting answers that don't add anything substantially new to the answers that others have already submitted, and if (when possible) you bolster your position with citations to outside authorities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, as others here have noted, you just have to let it go. This site isn't a free-for-all; good answers generally receive respectful attention, and more votes up than down. If you stick with it long enough to develop a sense of what voters in general are looking for, you'll be able to make a consistently positive contribution to the site—and you'll be rewarded with (mostly) upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-02-12T00:02:28.227" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T00:02:28.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T22:45:30.577" Score="84" ViewCount="1397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll come right out and admit it: I'm a pretty self-absorbed person, and I sometimes have a hard time remembering that not everything is always about me. To this day I believe deep in the core of my soul that when I leave the house in the morning, someone somewhere deploys an army of drivers with the specific intent of ruining &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; commute, personally. It is only when I force myself to confront the general impossibility of such a thing that I really appreciate the sad fact that &lt;i&gt;nobody&lt;/i&gt;, to within a margin of error of a few hundred people, cares whether I as an individual live or die, much less what my &lt;i&gt;opinion&lt;/i&gt; about something is. The painful truth is that in the scheme of things, I'm just not that important. And whoever you are, dear reader, it is my sad duty to inform you that neither are you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, to my point: I learned today that there's a thing in the C++ programming language called a &lt;i&gt;deque&lt;/i&gt;, and although it's a recognized thing among programmers, it doesn't appear in general purpose dictionaries. Being unable to look the word up in a reference work, therefore, one of our users was curious about whether it has a standard, commonly used pronunciation, and if so, what it was. So far, so good. Unfortunately, when he posted the question here, the title he gave it was &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226954/how-do-you-pronounce-deque&quot;&gt;How do you pronounce 'deque'?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see the problem yet? In the body of the question, the OP specifically wrote, &quot;I just want to know how most programmers pronounce it.&quot; From this, it's clear that the &quot;you&quot; in the question title is being used in its capacity as an indefinite pronoun, akin to &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, e.g.: &quot;How do you operate this thing?&quot; But alas, it seems that upon reading &quot;How do you...&quot;, several of our high-rep users leaped to the conclusion that the OP wanted to know how &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, as individuals, would pronounce &quot;deque&quot;... because, one supposes, it is de rigueur in some circles to while away a February afternoon posing odd and unusual words and asking each person assembled how he or she would choose to pronounce them, similar to how idlers in the royal courts of medieval Europe used to pass the time inventing whimsical names for groups of animals like &quot;a parliament of owls&quot; and &quot;a murder of crows.&quot; And because we don't have time for such upper-crust silliness around here, they closed the question as Primarily Opinion-Based, and it remains on hold as I write these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question is not Primarily Opinion-Based. It should not have been closed. It should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/what-the-primarily-opinion-based-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;&quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; is designed to stop &quot;What's the best X?&quot;-type questions. It's not supposed to be used on every single question that involves opinions.&lt;/a&gt; English has no language academy akin to l'Académie Française; it is what the people who speak it say it is. In a very real sense, therefore, all questions about English are about opinions. Hardcore descriptivists, like many of us here, even shy away from language like &quot;right&quot; and &quot;wrong,&quot; preferring instead to talk about &quot;normal usage,&quot; or what's &quot;considered acceptable.&quot; What are these, if not appeals to the collective opinions of the English-speaking world about how the language should be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, before we vote to close a question as POB, it's important that we ask ourselves whether the question is &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; asking us for &lt;i&gt;our&lt;/i&gt; opinions on the subject, or simply inquiring as to the common practices of the English-speaking world, or one or more sub-populations thereof. Think about answers as well as questions. If a question asks how you flonjugate an irregular nerb, and there is no commonly accepted practice, that does &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; mean the question is POB: it means that the correct answer is &quot;There is no commonly accepted practice; everyone flonjugates it differently.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And hey, if there's a way to improve the wording of a question so it won't get closed as POB, edit it! &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/226954/revisions&quot;&gt;That's what I did.&lt;/a&gt; This will be a much better site if we all spend a bit more time looking for ways to save questions, and a bit less time looking for reasons to kill them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226954/how-is-deque-commonly-pronounced&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and let's not be so quick to close future ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T22:36:48.093" Title="Nobody cares how YOU pronounce it" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2015-02-15T03:17:10.213" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interpreting musical lyrics. Vote up for {On Topic}. Vote down for {Off Topic}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T03:17:10.213" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-15T03:17:10.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2015-02-15T03:18:16.203" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interpreting Shakespeare. Vote up for {On Topic}. Vote down for {Off Topic}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T03:18:16.203" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-15T03:18:16.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6603" CreationDate="2015-02-15T04:08:09.123" Score="44" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This will be a much better site if we all spend a bit more time looking for ways to save questions, and a bit less time looking for reasons to kill them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THIS. Exactly this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't actually have much to add to your excellent post; I just wanted to say that I agree with what you say and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Also, I'm totally stealing &quot;flonjugate an irregular nerb.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T04:08:09.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2015-02-16T18:10:35.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;{Off-Topic}&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I make this (citation, document, quote, whatever) conform to MLA (or APA, or any other) style guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[vote up if you agree it should be off-topic, vote down if you think it should be on-topic]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T18:10:35.893" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-16T18:10:35.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-17T17:20:36.603" Score="16" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was recently closed as duplicate and linked to another question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/227848/using-is-versus-are-in-a-relative-clause#comment489044_227848&quot;&gt;Using &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;are&amp;quot; in a relative clause&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However by the time it was closed it had generated a significant amount of interest including three answers. The post it was theoretically a duplicate of was this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134539/singular-verb-following-one-of&quot;&gt;Singular Verb Following &amp;quot;One of . . .&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this thread that readers are now directed to, only has one answer. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=google+books+%22one+of+the+men+who+is%22&amp;amp;oq=google+books+%22one+of+the+men+who+is%22&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.9861j0j1&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=+%22one+of+the+men+who+is%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that answer's not accurate&lt;/a&gt;. It doesn't contain references to any vetted grammar sources and is generally misleading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better if interesting and pertinent questions were not linked to dead end posts with only one answer or, worse still, inaccurate or bad answers, especially if the more recent question is getting the attention that the subject deserves. There is no doubt that this would be better for readers here on ELU. (I'm not saying that answer's bad, but it's inaccurate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is of course the argument that one could write an accurate answer for the limping, duplicate thread, but we are all aware that this is very unlikely to happen. Old threads rarely get sufficient attention to merit anyone writing an answer for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot of all of this is that as things currently stand, readers are not going to get to read a post on this subject with, for example, references to vetted grammar sources. The new thread is now closed and the old one is as dead as a dodo (a dead one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the thing to do in such situations is to merge the old question with the new one, but I don't feel it's a good idea to link good questions to threads with no good answers - especially if the tag on the link says &lt;em&gt;This question already has an answer here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two things really, is there any chance of reopening this thread, as I believe it would be beneficial for readers. Secondly, what should we do about good questions' being linked to lame threads, especially when they are thriving on their current page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T00:53:41.507" Title="This question doesn't have an answer here" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-18T15:34:34.587" Score="3" ViewCount="909" Body="&lt;p&gt;On  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229194/how-can-i-prove-a-word-is-a-noun/229208#comment489577_229194&quot;&gt;How can I prove a word is a noun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Aurucaria thus spake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@DanBron Bad advice;-) Dictionaries are RUBBISH on parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the reference materials that we hold dear&amp;ndash;genuflection included&amp;ndash;are indeed rubbish, how the heck are we English experts allowed to be thus experts? More to the point, why do we even bother with referencing them for these trivial questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preemptively: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But this isn't a trivial question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sure, but the question's nuances are not evident in the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. One must dig into ephemeral comments to determine the subtle distinctions that bring out the true meaning of the question. Even then, throwing out our blessed resources for not being able to answer the question means what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Not appropriate to answer the question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then why bother? What do we trust? And how can we believe the heretics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T12:42:19.640" Title="Calling out a comment - Dictionaries are bad sources for determining words' parts of speech" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-19T14:13:28.607" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is an &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; user expected to have searched at &lt;a href=&quot;http://onelook.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;onelook.com&lt;/a&gt; before asking a question about a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, should it not mention such an expectation in the Help or Tour sections of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for one, had never heard of this site before, although I am familiar with a variety of dictionaries available both off and online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My prompt for asking is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229377/could-impliant-be-a-proper-word-meaning-opposite-of-pliant&quot;&gt;this question I asked&lt;/a&gt; where I seemed to receive both downvotes and comments suggesting I didn't do enough prior research, as well as a comment suggesting that I should have guessed &lt;code&gt;unpliant&lt;/code&gt; based upon the word I was asking about, &lt;code&gt;impliant&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103772" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T14:13:28.607" Title="Is an english.stackexchange user expected to have searched at onelook.com?" Tags="|discussion|comments|down-votes|etiquette|new-users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-19T15:34:58.677" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229381/what-is-the-antonym-of-the-past-tense-verb-corrupted?noredirect=1#229381&quot;&gt;Verb meaning &amp;quot;redeemed&amp;quot;, but without implying a previous corruption&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boring meta question: my question got put &quot;on hold&quot;, but I don't see what's wrong with it. Thesaurus and Lexipedia don't have anything, so it's not a case of &quot;didn't do basic research&quot;. Where's my error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm totally willing to fix it, but I don't know how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13216" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T15:43:15.753" Title="What am I doing wrong?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6611" CreationDate="2015-02-19T15:43:15.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a good start. You should cite your sources and possibly change the title from 'antonym of corrupt' to your specific question 'going from good to better', although I think paralleling &lt;em&gt;corrupt&lt;/em&gt; with what you are looking for is useful. Antonym questions are treated poorly around here. Also, adding an example sentence or two with a blank will help establish the context for the word you are seeking. The headline example you give is good, but make that more obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; for single word requests should help you out here. I think you've almost got it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T15:43:15.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6603" CreationDate="2015-02-19T21:12:12.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I agree with the sentiment (try to save questions rather than trying to kill them, the word &quot;you&quot; is highly ambiguous in the English language), I feel that an English language and usage site is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a good place to ask or answer questions about the pronunciation of technical jargon that's not in common usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that point, how would you to pronounce &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;SQL&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;O(N!)&lt;/code&gt;?  Or, if you think I'm being deliberately difficult with those examples (which is fair enough, since I am), what about &lt;code&gt;cobol&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I think this kind of question being answered here does a bit of a disservice to the person asking (or could), because ultimately, how &lt;strong&gt;YOU&lt;/strong&gt; (in the sense of the primary audience of an English language usage site) pronounce it doesn't matter even a little. What matters is how the people who use the jargon pronounce it, and someone pronouncing it wrong stands out like a sore thumb.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I don't think this site's audience needs to be told this, jargon is often used as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shibboleth&lt;/a&gt;, and woe be to them who fail the test.  One would be vastly better off to simply inquire about the pronunciation of the in-group, rather than the general public.  I, in fact, remember an encounter I have several years ago, where someone lost his job in IT, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/26614/25994&quot;&gt;essentially based on his pronunciation of &quot;cache&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  (That the guy was an absolute fraud who deserved to lose his job is beside the point, at least for the purposes of mentioning it here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the curious among you, the four terms above are pronounced &quot;see sharp&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/sequel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;sequel&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &quot;order N factorial&quot; and &quot;co-ball&quot; (or if you prefer, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like the element but, without the terminal 't'&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25994" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T21:12:12.640" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-20T02:25:39.927" Score="4" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a particular question in mind, which may be somewhat opinion-based and thus off-topic here. My question is on the pronuncation of &quot;Catholicism&quot;. I've heard it pronounced by emphasizing on the first syllable, even though online pronunciation guides say it's pronounced on the second syllable. Now, you may think &quot;Well, it must be idiosyncratic then!&quot; No, I don't think it's that person's idiosyncrasy, because this artist tends to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXsZbkt0yqo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pronounce that way too&lt;/a&gt;. I believe, for this reason, that the unusual pronunciation is really a dialect, and I need help in identifying this dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48322" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T01:05:51.997" Title="Can we ask for dialect identification questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2015-02-20T08:10:36.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to assess the 'nouniness' of a word is to see how it is used in the wild.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you should look in usage corpuses, Google Books etc. and form your own judgment (possibly with the help of some supplementary statistical analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Fumblefingers correctly notes in his comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Verbification, nounification, etc., are standard features of English, but dictionaries only tend to list the most common usages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also notes in a comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229194/how-can-i-prove-a-word-is-a-noun/229208#comment489577_229194&quot;&gt;here,&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...I think you should ditch the notion that a word itself can properly be classed as a &quot;noun&quot;. What matters is whether it &lt;em&gt;functions&lt;/em&gt; as a noun &lt;strong&gt;in any given context.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or as Edwin Ashworth stated in a comment on the same question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;POS &lt;em&gt;[part-of-speech]&lt;/em&gt; determination hinges on how a word functions in that usage / the syntactic environment; formal considerations; considerations from other languages; and yes – even semantic considerations. Linguists haven't agreed on the correct balance of these factors, nor even on undisputed tests for how a word is functioning in a usage.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can't expect even comprehensive dictionaries like the OED to cover the full range of possible usages of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add to the comments by Fumblefingers and Edwin Ashworth that the elements of any living language are a constantly-moving target, so a statement about usage that was largely accurate 80 years ago may not be so today, and one that is largely accurate today may not be so 80 years from now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all the reasons cited above, a dictionary can &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be fully categorical regarding the usage of any given word or expression (except, perhaps, with respect to terms that have fallen entirely out of use in contemporary speech and writing, and for which the usages have therefore become frozen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T10:05:02.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6603" CreationDate="2015-02-20T17:19:06.073" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Teacher: &quot;Billy, how do you pronounce f-u-g-u-e?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Billy: &quot;Foo-gway.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teacher: &quot;No, I'm sorry, that's wrong. The dictionary says that it is pronounced 'fyoog'.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Billy: &quot;You asked how &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; pronounce it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T17:19:06.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6614" CreationDate="2015-02-21T01:05:51.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dialect questions are a bit haphazard, but we have answered them before. If you post your two examples and possibly more, and feel you can identify other common dialectal features, you have a good shot of being on topic. However, it's difficult to identify a dialect from a single word. Maybe you could compare the backgrounds of those two people and discover a common dialect and have your answer that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T01:05:51.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6623" CreationDate="2015-02-23T13:49:22.057" Score="5" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question and it is not well-received:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229982/what-is-happening-to-thank-you?noredirect=1#comment492065_229982&quot;&gt;What is happening to &amp;quot;Thank you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ask the reasons before getting crushed under the  wheels of the bandwagon. I would appreciate suggestions also. You can see in the question that I tried to give as much information as I can and I tried to avoid discussion as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Mari-LouA is the only person who tried to improve the question and give suggestions in a polite way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people are arguing against it or down-voting; and on top of that, using a mocking and even belittling language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really nice where we are talking about being nice to each other and constructive towards questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, this question was well-received:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/212215/what-happened-to-youre-welcome&quot;&gt;What happened to &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re welcome?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was inspired by that question and I even tried to give more information to support my answer. So why do you think it is well-received and not mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes feel like there is a psychological pressure on this site but I'm trying to contribute well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I updated my question based on the suggestions of &lt;em&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/em&gt;. Thank you again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;em&gt;medica&lt;/em&gt; for her answer to this meta question as well. It helped a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I removed all my opinions. I would like to hear experiences from native speakers or people from English-speaking countries/environments. Not everything is about linguistics or evidences, it is about living with English! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the question is more acceptable now. I would like to invite you to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note2:&lt;/strong&gt; I admit that the language that I used in the original question might have sounded too opinionated and my intention might not have been communicated clearly. But I'm always willing to improve the question if people are willing to help. It doesn't have to be through impolite and harsh criticisms. There are friendlier words and better ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;You can even open a meta question on behalf of someone to ask how to improve a question. Why not?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funny that, not long ago, ~60 people up-voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6603/nobody-cares-how-you-pronounce-it?cb=1&quot;&gt;a speech&lt;/a&gt; that included these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This will be a much better site if we all spend a bit more time looking for ways to save questions, and a bit less time looking for reasons to kill them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T22:32:39.910" Title="What is wrong with &quot;What is happening to “Thank you?&quot;&quot; question? Can it be re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6622" CreationDate="2015-02-23T22:24:16.330" Score="6" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;What explains the discrepancy between the &quot;number of posts awaiting review&quot; highlighted in the header of the site, and the number of posts I actually see for review across all queues I have access to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jPbUN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of EL&amp;amp;U showing review queue discrepancies&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought it was just a synchronization or lag thing, but the header number is consistently higher than the sum of posts in the review queues.  I then thought maybe it has something to do with other stacks I'm subscribed to, but currently EL&amp;amp;U is the only stack where I've earned reviewing privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not even anything in the Meta.ELU review queue that could be contributing to the total count. The only other thing I can think of which could explain the discrepancy is the 55 includes items for review in queues which I don't have access to yet (say, the delete queues).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone shed some light? Or should I be asking this on Meta.StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T12:10:35.740" Title="Why doesn't fifty-five equal thirty-six?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2015-02-24T12:10:35.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference is (what needs to be done on the site) - (what you can do). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an item in the queue (e.g. closing a question) needs more than one vote to be completed, you can only contribute a fraction of what's needed to get the item off the review queue. That's multiplied by six for six review queues. While you may have voted on every item, the number of items left for the remaining votes is still high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... it takes a village to clear the queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T12:10:35.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6620" CreationDate="2015-02-24T12:34:51.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you really do want honest feedback (always a risky proposition)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/212215/what-happened-to-youre-welcome&quot;&gt;What happened to “You're welcome?&lt;/a&gt; was a simple question, without editorializing, using a familiar, yet interesting example: &quot;...when the interviewer says &quot;Thank you&quot; to the interviewee, the reply is also &quot;Thank you.&quot;&#xA;While that particular example is understandable, it was still thought provoking. It was reminiscent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146671/&quot;&gt;When should “no problem” replace “you're welcome” as a response to “thank you”?&lt;/a&gt;, another simple yet interesting, highly up-voted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question, however, elicited a stronger reaction, and maybe that's part of the reason it wasn't well received. I must say &quot;thank you&quot; &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt;, i dunno, 10-15 times per hour (probably more) at work. To be ridiculously honest, I thank &lt;em&gt;my dogs&lt;/em&gt; when they bring back an item I throw for them. Every time. When I catch myself, I feel stupid. But it's so &lt;em&gt;reflexive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who wants to be told that their manners are falling by the wayside when they're probably dropping thank you's like balls on New Year's Eve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People don't like stuff like that. It's like being asked if they stopped beating their wife yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; voted to close, but didn't have the heart after all the work you put into it. I certainly didn't down-vote it. But I understand the push back. It's probably unfounded, it's patently untrue in my experience, and it's clearly POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most people are arguing against it or down-voting; and on top of that, using a mocking and even belittling language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not true. There are an enormous number of users here, and you heard from a smaaall fraction of them. Which is enough to sting anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unasked for Advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) From the So Much Easier Said Than Done Department: Don't worry about it. Really, it happens to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of us. It even happens to Mari-Lou.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Always pay attention to Mitch. He's one of the most honest yet gentle truth-tellers on this site. It's almost impossible to piss him off, so &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; take what he says as friendly advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Never argue in comments. It always comes off wrong, because it usually comes from a lesser part of you [defensiveness/hurt/anger/indignation/whatever]. Just don't. We can all be better than that (not that I haven't fallen into that trap, but by golly, after the fiftieth time or so, I learned my lesson.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Remember, you're on the &lt;em&gt;internet&lt;/em&gt;. It's a place that allows all of us to leave our more likable traits at home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) Learn. You know, make lemonade. It's over already, even though it doesn't feel like it. No reasonable person is going to remember this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(answered with good intentions, from an opinionated person who &lt;em&gt;thanks her dogs&lt;/em&gt;, for cryin' out loud)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T12:40:19.647" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6603" CreationDate="2015-02-24T22:36:48.093" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]t seems that upon reading &quot;How do you...&quot;, several of our high-rep users leaped to the conclusion that the OP wanted to know how they, as individuals, would pronounce &quot;deque&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the problem that I've noticed most about this Stack Exchange site compared to others that I participate in.  Every other site is clearly about getting the best answer for users' questions and the experts participate because they're the best and they want to show it.  The answerers are the ones who have to prove their worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site, I feel it's the other way around.  To me, the high-rep users here feel like the kings of this realm, and all other peasants are just making offerings in a desperate hope to appease them.  On other sites, questions are closed because they are indecipherable or completely unrelated.  On this site, questions are closed because they're not hard enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90265" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T22:36:48.093" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6626" CreationDate="2015-02-25T01:05:45.863" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what occasions my question: I submitted an answer (the first answer) and in the course of the next 24 hours three other users provided essentially the same answer. Until now, my conduct has been to hold back posting an answer when I see that this answer has already been submitted? What is the community protocol on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98990" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T02:21:17.627" Title="If the answer I was going to submit has already been submitted what should I do?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6625" CreationDate="2015-02-25T03:00:32.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the big picture, answers that merely repeat existing answers aren't good for EL&amp;amp;U. Intentionally duplicating someone else's answer and relying on a higher site reputation score to poach votes from the earlier poster would seriously transgress against the site's rules and against the collegiality of this site. I don't think I've ever seen it happen here, though it might on very rare occasions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sense is that the repetitions that do occur are almost always accidental: A person doesn't read the earlier answers closely enough (or at all) or somehow doesn't recognize the great similarity between the existing answer and the newly submitted one. After all, it's not as though duplicate answerers are trying to get away with plagiarism; anyone can see that the other answer says the same thing and was posted earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience duplications occur most frequently in single-word request answers, where a finite number of relevant short answers are possible, and where multiple people think of the same word and then scan down the list of answers to see if anyone else has already posted that suggestion. It's easy to overlook an earlier suggestion of the same word in that situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm usually pretty good about not offering answers that significantly overlap other answers, but I blundered into that situation within the past 48 hours, just because I wasn't careful enough in reading a response that someone had already posted. If the author of that earlier answer hadn't pointed out to me the overlap in our answers, I still wouldn't be aware of it, so I'm grateful for the notification I received. The author of that post was a good sport about the whole thing, and I decided that there was enough non-overlap in our answers to justify me in leaving my answer up rather than deleting it. But the experience served as a reminder that being a good reader of other answers is a skill that requires a person's whole attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pointing out a duplicate answer to a later answerer may encourage that person to pay more attention to existing answers before posting, thereby reducing the number of duplicate answers in future. We all benefit from being more careful in our reading of other posts and in our crafting of our own. Still, I would hesitate to call someone out for an answer that duplicated mine if the duplication were simple and obvious (as when both answers suggest the same single-word answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most effective strategy in that situation (somewhat surprisingly) may be to wait for a third party to point out to the answer duplicator that your answer already gave essentially the same answer. News of the duplication may well come as complete surprise to the later answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a third party intervenes (whether or not any site participants downvote the later answer for not adding anything new to the discussion), the late answerer is most likely to recognize the disinterestedness of the criticism and to take to heart EL&amp;amp;U's disapproval of needless repetition in submitted answers. At the same time, a third-party intervention helps the person who submitted the original answer avoid sounding unduly proprietary or point-conscious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you don't submit answers that others have already posted, Little Eva, you are already following the appropriate standard, in my opinion. The question of how to deal with situations where someone else duplicates an answer that you posted earlier is harder to answer; but if you start from the assumption that everyone participating at EL&amp;amp;U means well and wants to help questioners find useful answers, I don't think you can go far wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T02:21:17.627" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T02:21:17.627" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6625" CreationDate="2015-02-25T03:00:44.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your answer is not bringing something new to the table, then you aren't doing anybody any favors by attempting to siphon off some rep.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see duplicate answers, I will only upvote the one that has the earlier timestamp.  Sometimes I will also leave a message to the duplicate-poster (especially if they are new) indicating that an answer should have something to distinguish it from others.  Occasionally even a downvote may be in order, or a flag for &quot;should have been a comment&quot; if the post is of the form &quot;I agree with X, who said Y.&quot;   I believe that this is the generally accepted strategy of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, of course, honest duplication happens (often checking the timestamps shows that the answers were posted very close together).  If I find myself the duplicator in such a situation, I'll either work to distinguish my answer, or delete it; if I see an honest duplication, I'll probably ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T03:00:44.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6625" CreationDate="2015-02-25T10:13:01.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I see near identical answers posted, I will leave a comment and direct the answerer to the post that contains the same answer.  If the answerer does not edit his or her post, (obviously I wait a bit) then I will flag it. I may even vote to delete it. Two or more identical answers are pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But if the later post contains information, shows some research, has a different angle  and/or  is obviously superior to the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt;, then I won't flag it/them. And I probably won't leave a comment either. Let the community decide which answer(s) they prefer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I myself have posted an original &quot;answer&quot;, and others come along and &quot;steal&quot; my research, copy my ideas, and post them as their own, then that is plagiarism. I don't think this has ever happened to me, but I would feel mighty upset. Ultimately my hope would be that other users leave pertinent comments, flag and/or downvote the offending post. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T10:13:01.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-25T10:14:33.533" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I saw this interesting question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/230399/how-did-s-and-the-s-come-to-mean-opposite-things&quot;&gt;How did &amp;quot;s***&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the s***&amp;quot; come to mean opposite things?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how the title is automatically censured?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, on Serverfault:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqC8W.png&quot; alt=&quot;Serverfault printscreen&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It this a bug or was it intentional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107614" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T14:26:01.647" Title="Auto-censorship in questions' titles?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6629" CreationDate="2015-02-25T10:19:06.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was edited to sanitise the title, as you can see in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/230399/revisions&quot;&gt;revisions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can take some time for other references to it to catch up and display the edited title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T10:19:06.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2015-02-27T00:39:04.230" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This cannot be explained completely by the reasons stated above. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/230495/what-is-the-most-common-colloquial-name-for-the-lifebuoy&quot;&gt;My question about life preservers&lt;/a&gt; didn't get any close votes and does not appear to require anything other than a very short answer from a native speaker, so even a very short answer will be a full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did get my answers, so as an asker I do not have a major issue with that. But it looks messy and odd. Perhaps a &quot;promote comment to answer&quot; feature is in order, especially if it can carry over the upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T00:39:04.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-03-01T15:39:15.057" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BEAvc.png&quot; alt=&quot;See all questions with active bounties&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/english.stackexchange.com/bounty.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;herokuapp.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11394" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T05:21:33.377" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T05:21:33.377" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-03-01T15:39:15.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2015-03-03T00:15:41.087" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, one way to go would be to reference a modern vetted grammar source. For example, a proper academic grammar of English. Some examples might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, Rodney Huddleston &amp;amp; Geoffrey Pullum, 2002&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik, 1985&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford Modern English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, Bas Aarts, 2014&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexicographers are called &lt;em&gt;lexicographers&lt;/em&gt; for a reason. Dictionaries are very good at meanings and also at etymology. However, compiling dictionaries is a very long-term and arduous task. Dictionaries are not meant to be sources of grammar knowledge. To give you an idea of how up-to-date our very best dictionaries might be, the Oxford English Dictionary still has very, very many pages that they have not been able to update properly since 1888. It is not very surprising then that they aren't completely up-to-date with modern grammar. It is also a very expensive and disruptive enterprise to rejig a dictionary's parts of speech and not many users are serious grammar students, so it is both risky and of little benefit to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will not surprise readers that both Oxford and Cambridge publish dictionaries and also publish serious grammars of English. Their dictionaries list parts of speech for words, but their serious grammars of English - which deal with parts of speech, grammatical relations and the like - give detailed analyses of these which differ very significantly from the dictionaries'. No-one would dispute that it is the grammars based on serious research in English linguistics which need to be referred to for a serious analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point to make here is that it is of course the linguists that dictionaries consult in the first instance to obtain their part of speech definitions and information. It doesn't work the other way round! It's just that it takes a long time, and a lot of money, for developments to filter into dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this should be taken as an assault on lexicography, an essential and important aspect of our understanding of language. It's just that on parts of speech, we're better off consulting those people whom the lexicographers consult on parts of speech in the first place. That's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2015-03-26T11:22:20.563" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T11:22:20.563" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6639" CreationDate="2015-03-04T18:17:13.627" Score="6" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder what the community policy is respecting question edits that change the meaning, and existing answers to earlier version of the question. I looked around a bit but only managed to find several hints that meaning-changing edits to questions are generally a no-no. None of the posts addressed the problem what to do with existing answers. I'd be happy for a reference therefore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I occasionally read past questions and answers across StackExchange, but it never occurred to me to delve into the edit history of posts and their timestamps to find out which answer pertains to which version of the question. Never fully dawned on me that if an answer does not seem to answer the question, it may be because the question has been edited substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never, that is to say, until I saw it happen. The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231428/is-there-a-single-opposite-word-to-alibi&quot;&gt;Is there a single, opposite word to “alibi”?&lt;/a&gt; has been edited many times. While the first few versions seemed to me to be mainly about criminal acts and incriminating evidence for such, the later versions seemed to be mainly about presence at a party and evidence one's been there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several users, me included, posted answers that addressed various edits of the post. The modified meaning of the question probably rendered some answers a bit bizzare. (I am not implying that my own answer was invalidated in this manner. Rather, because I posted an answer, I had the opportunity to watch the evolution of the question and the various answers to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding my own post, of course I might delete it (but that would feel as if I have changed my mind about it, which I have not) or edit it (but then I might not even notice the edit to the question, and if I did, I might not feel up to answering the new question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me whether it is useful to maintain a different policy towards edits of one's own questions, and edits of other people's questions. Once the question is posted, people start thinking about it and posting their answers. The effort put into this activity is diminished if the meaning to the question is changed. Therefore, it might be useful if edits by OP to an already posted question were subject to approval of community members, in a manner similar to edits to other users' posts. (I probably do not fathom the intricacies of the editing mechanism, so this may be totally off the hook.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general way to deal with the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added, based on answers and comments:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I think I need to step back from the strong claim I made about the &quot;alibi&quot; post that inspired my question here at meta. Several people pointed out to me that they perceive the subsequent edits of that post as clarifying, not meaning changing. While I cannot agree, I realize I may be completely wrong about the word &quot;alibi&quot; (which, to me, indeed strongly connotes a crime), and I would like to apologize for unnecessarily focusing on the specific example. The question stands in general.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T13:54:55.620" Title="About answers to heavily edited questions (re alibi)" Tags="|discussion|support|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4922" CreationDate="2015-03-04T18:34:04.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did everyone who is currently commenting sign up and comment before this was required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the private beta of Stack Overflow, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139280/how-did-stack-exchange-bootstrap-its-reputation-system&quot;&gt;a lot of things required less reputation than they do today&lt;/a&gt;. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214173/why-do-i-need-50-reputation-to-comment-what-can-i-do-instead&quot;&gt;because of spam&lt;/a&gt;, the administrators introduced a reputation requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or is there some other method for getting reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get to 50 quickly, you can do one of two things, neither of which requires already having privileges at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Answer questions that need no clarification&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two types of questions on a Stack Exchange site: clear ones and unclear ones. Giving a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;complete answer&lt;/a&gt; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;clear question&lt;/a&gt; does not need reputation. Only adding a comment to help the asker fix an unclear question needs reputation. So until you have 50 reputation, &lt;strong&gt;skip the unclear questions&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132976/my-answer-asking-for-clarification-was-removed/132977#132977&quot;&gt;find clear questions that lack an answer&lt;/a&gt;. Each upvote on a useful answer adds 10 reputation. One thing that makes this slightly more difficult on more active Stack Exchange sites is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem&quot;&gt;the &quot;fastest gun in the west&quot; problem&lt;/a&gt;, as a clear question may already have a decent answer by the time you get to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Earn 200 reputation on a different Stack Exchange site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sign up for &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;multiple Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt; with the same credentials, Stack Exchange will &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/cross-site-account-associations/&quot;&gt;link those accounts&lt;/a&gt;. Once &lt;strong&gt;one of your accounts reaches 200 reputation&lt;/strong&gt;, your linked accounts will earn a one-time association bonus of 100 additional reputation points. A Stack Exchange site proposal on Area 51 cannot become a beta site until at least 100 committers have the association bonus. This ensures that at least some users of a new site understand how the Stack Exchange web application works (&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5204/121549&quot;&gt;#1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/70553/229356&quot;&gt;#2&lt;/a&gt;) and can help the asker fix unclear questions, as any user with the association bonus has enough reputation to comment unless he spends too much reputation on bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites that may interest a new EL&amp;amp;U user include &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70625" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T02:15:36.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2015-03-04T22:27:42.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &quot;original&quot; version of the question, I can see it &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; included the specific context &lt;em&gt;For instance, I want to prove that I was there at a dinner party last night.&lt;/em&gt; (No &quot;crime&quot; involved.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably therefore the subsequent edits were because initial answers had misconstrued the question (and thought it was about being &lt;em&gt;placing a &lt;strong&gt;guilty&lt;/strong&gt; person at the scene of a crime&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the original text was reasonably clear - but if it wasn't, potential answerers should have posted comments asking for clarification &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; answering. In the circumstances, the OP has done the best he could by repeatedly editing to try and show why terms like &lt;em&gt;damning evidence&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in flagrante delicto&lt;/em&gt; didn't suit his context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I don't think the OP wanted to know ever changed. If people misunderstood it and answered a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; question (rather than asking for clarification of the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; question), they just need to take it on the chin. It's like premature answers on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t6l0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;University Challenge&lt;/a&gt;, where &quot;incorrectly anticipating the question&quot; leads to points being &lt;em&gt;deducted&lt;/em&gt;. At least on ELU you can &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; your inappropriate answer to avoid possible downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would just say I think it's a whole 'nother ball game if the OP himself changes his mind about what exactly he's asking. That's obviously something that should be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; strongly discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Eeek! Checking again, I see the &quot;dinner party&quot; text &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; always there. But I'm still inclined to think the OP knew what he was asking all the time, and I still stand by the &lt;em&gt;principles&lt;/em&gt; I've set out, so I won't delete &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; answer! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;em&gt;Should we [or the answerer] delete answers which no longer address the question?&lt;/em&gt; I think it's effectively irrelevant that they may have seemed pertinent to an earlier version of the question (which many voting users don't have the rep to access even if they &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; to see them). We have to deal with the situation as it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, not how it was, or how we'd &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if a question is so radically altered as to unquestionably make it a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; question, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; if answers to the &quot;original&quot; have already been posted, I would consider &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;reverting the question edits,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; while commenting to the OP that he should &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;post a new question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2015-03-05T13:27:18.893" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T13:27:18.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2015-03-05T06:04:04.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is associated with the OP's name, not the community, and if the OP needs to redefine their question, they should not need the approval of the community to modify their post, even if it has answers that are broken by the newly formatted question. There has to be flexibility to make a question better, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are people who edit for perfectly good reasons, one being a significant language barrier and with it a fear of being misunderstood. That's understandable. Another OP is/was a compulsive editor (whose questions were interesting); I counted 45 edits on &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of his questions, which would change as answers were posted (in comments, I asked him to ask a new question rather than change the old one.) This is a community made up of flawed people; even so, things usually go on quite well. On quite rare occasions, a user will deliberately change their post because they don't like the &quot;correct&quot; answer. If you think this is going on, flag a mod, and don't answer their questions anymore. If it happens a lot, they'll see a pattern and address it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also edit your answer to include that it only addresses the original question, which has now been edited. I've never voted to delete such an answer. The fact that you've seen such non-answers (which have not been deleted) tells you that people who delete are a discriminating bunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question itself belongs to the OP, so to speak. I can't imagine imposing the kind of restrictions your talking about for the occasional inconvenient edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering a question is always associated with a very slight risk that it will be rendered obsolete. As long as it stays slight, I think the status quo can be maintained. You always have the option of commenting, flagging, or editing your answer to address the changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T06:04:04.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6641" CreationDate="2015-03-05T06:36:37.747" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer to the  question ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231531/one-word-someone-so-scared-that-he-cant-move/231568#231568&quot;&gt;One word- someone so scare that he can't move&lt;/a&gt;) has been deleted by Mr. Robert Cartaino. Looking at his profile he appears to be a moderator to a numbers of different sites ( EL&amp;amp;U included), but he is not in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; of this site. &#xA;Are there other moderators that are not in the EL&amp;amp;U list? &#xA;This probably refers to some regulation I am not aware of ( sorry for that).  Can anyone explain pls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T09:25:51.760" Title="Has EL&amp;U more moderators than those in the list?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6640" CreationDate="2015-03-05T07:17:59.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99338/who-are-the-community-managers-and-what-do-they-do&quot;&gt;Community Managers&lt;/a&gt; have moderator privileges on every site, including mSE (the only site where there are no elected moderators).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They pop in from time to time. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8566&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; handles the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5491/community-promotion-ads-2015&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/a&gt;. Occasionally they may take “normal” moderator actions too, as here, particularly if moderation needs to happen quickly and members of the site team aren’t online. In that regard, yes, there are more moderators here than just those &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;elected on ELU&lt;/a&gt; specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T07:17:59.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-05T16:25:26.730" Score="12" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;My name is Kurtis and I'm a designer with Stack Exchange. You may have noticed some minor updates to the design of the site. The updates are part of a SE network-wide update to a new base css framework. The updates allow us to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use .svg sprites for retina displays&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fix layout bugs globally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More easily add new features to all of our sites in the future&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We tried to maintain the essence of the original design while making updates. If you see any bugs please let us know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updates 03/09/2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for the feedback! We've pushed updates to the site and are adding the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'status-completed'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; tag to your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109177" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T00:49:03.913" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T03:25:51.733" Title="Updates to the site" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-05T16:28:27.913" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question titles on the front page are no longer large enough: there's not enough differentiation between the title and the excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is likely to be because the font metrics for Georgia are different from Arial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Meta site looks rather brown; the grey page background is probably necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments are in Georgia. Again, not enough differentiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The favourite tags sidebar widget probably needs looking into:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kE2y6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Favorite tags&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Add image&amp;quot; dialog isn't right:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TgWPr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Add Image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; dislike the new font for the logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T00:50:02.900" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-05T16:38:31.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that you want to clean up your CSS. That's always the job I try to fob off onto someone else. ^)^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a before-and-after look at what happened with ELU. Comments are now in Georgia, not Hevetica Neue, and the voting box has changed. There are some spacing and alignment issues as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wy0fH.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU Before&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JEP5t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These don't really look intentional, but I could be wrong. (Anyway, you probably know all this already.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T01:01:57.443" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T01:01:57.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6647" CreationDate="2015-03-05T18:46:24.730" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firefox 36.0, Windows 7 SP 1 x64, the name of the OP looks strange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FmCi1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has already been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4719/background-of-long-op-username-looks-ugly-in-comments&quot;&gt;reported before&lt;/a&gt;, but since that question was asked almost a year ago, I guess it was already fixed and now reappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T19:10:38.560" Title="Background of OP username looks ugly in comments" Tags="|bug|design|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6646" CreationDate="2015-03-05T19:10:38.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be fixed now along with a handful of other bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109177" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T19:10:38.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2015-03-05T23:17:46.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to answer to your question as a person concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After placing this question, I received several comments requesting clarification of the intent of my question such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Are you looking for something like red-handedness? - skimninge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-If the term you are looking for is not necessarily related to a crime scene, I think you should add that piece of information in your question!! –Josh61&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-The more I read your second paragraph, the less I understand what you're trying to ask: &quot; proves that a person was in the place at the time of an event taking place regardless whether it's associated with or not?&quot; 1. By event, do you mean crime? 2. regardless  whether what is associated with what? –Jim Reynolds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I tried to make my point clear by adding editions several time. I appreciate Mari-Lou's comment - the OP trying his best to clarify his request, in this regard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the cause of confusion relies on basic difference of our notion of the word, “alibi, which is translated as “不在証明” in Japanese. The word, “アリバイ” pronounced “aribai” in Japanese is used for both crime scene and a mere social scene not associated with crime at all. So I asked for the antonym of alibi that works for the proof of presence in the scene regardless crime or non-crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added the following comment in response to @JimRaynols comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;＠JIｍRaynpolds. We have both “存在証明- Sonzai-shomei” meaning the proof of your being there” and ”不在証明-Fuzai-shomei ” meaning the proof of your not being there in Japanese, the latter of which I think corresponds to alibi, though both “Sonzai-shomei” and “Fuzai-shomei” aren’t associated with a crime scene, and can be applied to the innocuous scenes like dinner party. The difference of “存在証明” and “不在証明” is just the first one character, but the meaning is opposite. I’m curious to know if there is the English counterpart to “存在証明 - Sonzai-shomei.” in single or two words like &quot;alibi.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for edition I, as a non-native English speaker who is not so confident in the quality and clarity of my own writing in terms of contents and grammarical correctness as you are, do more re-editing than you do. I think it's better to do so than leaving original text misconstrued. I added three or fourth revisions even to this answer in order for communicating my intent more clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you’ll do the same if you are asking a question about Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Russian, and whatever foreign language expressions in not your own mother tongue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2015-03-06T07:58:08.050" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T07:58:08.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-06T20:52:49.780" Score="9" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232174/whats-the-word-for-something-that-has-a-maximum-lifetime&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; which got put &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; as being &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt;. I since edited my question but it initialy went like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need to name a configuration value that describes how much time a&#xA;  &quot;session&quot; lives on its own before it is either destroyed automatically&#xA;  or joined by at least one user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I initially thought of &lt;code&gt;session_lifespan&lt;/code&gt; but that does not convey the&#xA;  appropriate meaning: it refers to the maximum duration the session&#xA;  will live, regardless of whether somebody joined it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a good word or expression for such a concept ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232174/whats-the-word-for-something-that-has-a-maximum-lifetime#comment497895_232174&quot;&gt;mentionned&lt;/a&gt; that questions asking for names for &quot;progamming thingies&quot; were off-topic: fair-enough. It's my fault after all for not reading the rules beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited my question to remove all programming related references, which then looked like this (pasted here to ease comparison):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need to &lt;strong&gt;find a term&lt;/strong&gt; that describes how much time an &lt;strong&gt;&quot;entity&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; lives&#xA;  on its own before it is either destroyed automatically or &lt;strong&gt;becomes&#xA;  &quot;used&quot; (which implicitely prevents its destruction)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I initially thought of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;entity lifespan&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; but that does not convey the&#xA;  appropriate meaning: it refers to the maximum duration the entity will&#xA;  live, regardless of whether somebody &lt;strong&gt;started to use it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a good word or expression for such a concept ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1088/is-python-a-snake-or-a-programming-language-if-the-latter-why-is-it-choking-my&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which states why asking for variable names does not fit &lt;em&gt;English StackExchange&lt;/em&gt; and I actually agree with the community-approved rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, something still feels a bit off here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while my question indeed mentioned a programming-related context, it could easily be reworded to be programming-agnostic. I merely mentionned my goal to eventually provide some context (You won't define &lt;code&gt;crane&lt;/code&gt; the same way if I tell you I use it to lift something or if I tell you I need to feed it every morning).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the few technical terms that were present in the initial version were probably not a barrier to understanding the question: the notion of session is not really programming-specific for instance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the reworded question basically asks for the same thing but I feel like it's abstract formulation makes it &lt;strong&gt;harder&lt;/strong&gt; for people to grasp the exact nature of what's asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the end, I feel it shouldn't matter whether I need the expression to name a variable in a configuration file or a concept in fan-fiction novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if I have some naming constraints due to size, programming language or company policy, then I agree this has nothing to do here and is ultimately my problem. Note that this wasn't the case here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the word I was looking for was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;unclaimed&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which is not programming-specific (not that many words are anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd really like to be a good citizen here and I fail to see how I should have asked my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone define more clearly the line between: &quot;it doesn't belong here&quot; and &quot;programming is just a context here&quot; ? Should I always remove any programming context before asking how to name a thing in order to comply with the community rules ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3747" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T19:55:44.010" Title="Should one always remove all context before asking a &quot;what's the best term&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-06T21:13:16.963" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'status-completed'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a small peeve, but it's been tripping me up since the update: the new horizontal rule between answers is very light and thin, and I'm starting to confuse whose answer I'm reading. Can that be thickened and darkened? At least so that the line separating answers is more pronounced than the line separating comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T00:51:09.467" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T00:51:09.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-07T12:30:17.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'status-declined'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mostly use the StackExchange mobile app, so the changes don't effect me much, so take this feedback for what it's worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, something bothers me about the new larger, emptier voting buttons. The old style seemed more solid to me; more real, like something I could interact with. The new ones seem more like design elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T00:58:41.960" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T00:58:41.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-07T23:43:49.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'status-completed'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did we lose a dividing indicator between the end of one answer and the start of the next? Is it me, or do answers now seem to run together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23491" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T01:02:22.533" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T01:02:22.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-08T20:48:45.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old design, the &quot;action links&quot; all lined up on one line instead of being split over two, even with the &quot;mod&quot; menu and a number of close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D9BeC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it does where there are no close votes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LbDgU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but not where there are votes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFox9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and the vertical alignment with other text is not particularly good either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular comparison shows up the difference in font sizes, styles (is there a reason the timestamps have changed font?) and the user card border. The spacing in the user card isn't even either: although I've removed user details here, the space between the border and &quot;asked&quot; is larger than the space at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really surprising that the old graphics have been completely redrawn. Was it not possible simply to SVGise them as they were?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all seems rather bland and characterless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T00:54:55.850" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T00:54:55.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-09T00:54:24.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'status-completed'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the colour of the links, and they're too faint. Exactly what colour are they supposed to be? Tangerine?  Not everyone has twenty-twenty vision, some of us do wear reading glasses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T01:03:59.710" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T01:03:59.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-09T05:05:07.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s a font bug here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cJuom.png&quot; alt=&quot;font bug demo&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two different instances of &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; are in different faces, with the active one being the odd man out. It should be set in Georgia like the rest of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PS: Please don’t make that block an Helvetica/sans block: we &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; our text figures here, and would not part with them willingly. :)  Yes, it is possible to select “lowercase” text figures instead of “uppercase” titling ones in other faces, but that requires fancier fonts than you can reasonably expect everyone to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T01:01:00.617" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T01:01:00.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-09T22:19:14.843" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;The more recent question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232255/is-this-correct-one-of-the-things-that-makes-him-great-is&quot;&gt;Is this correct? &amp;quot;One of the things that makes him great is...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;One of the things that makes him great is he brings it every night.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure it should be &quot;that make him&quot;, because one of the&#xA;  things is referring to a lot of things ...but I always see native&#xA;  American speakers say it with an s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is one of the responsibilities that comes with greatness and he understands that.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They always use the word with s even though it's grammatically&#xA;  incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question it is supposed to be a duplicate of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46040/one-of-them-was-were-you&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;One of them was/were you&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I am talking to somebody about a certain group of people in the&#xA;  third person, and then want to refer to the person I am talking with&#xA;  as one of those people, which do I say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;One of them were you&#xA;&#xA;One of them was you.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely this is a mistake and the more recent question should be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T23:11:29.467" Title="Why would people think this question was a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6664" CreationDate="2015-03-09T22:50:31.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it was improperly closed as a duplicate of a question which it is not in fact a duplicate of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would be a wee bit surprised if this question had not already been answered here under some other guise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Related Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/184634&quot;&gt;“It’s one of the best films that has/have ever been made.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/185714&quot;&gt;“One of the children who was” vs. “one of the children who were”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/200208&quot;&gt;Subject-Verb Agreement with “Who”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/130633&quot;&gt;One of the many things that (have or has)? affected me was&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/37299&quot;&gt;“One of those is flags”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/177097&quot;&gt;Can you guess what one of his tasty ingredients were?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/12628&quot;&gt;Singular or plural noun in a sentence after using both in a related conjunction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T23:11:29.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-10T20:05:13.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the mobile Android app, when I check my &quot;recent achievements, reputation, etc.&quot; icon and select one of my recent reputation changes, it takes me to a seemingly random point within the thread of the question. Should it not take me to my answer, if my recent update is to a vote on that answer? Likewise, should it not take me to the comment in question if I'm notified that someone is directing a comment to me? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30784" LastEditorUserId="30784" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T21:16:08.017" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T21:16:08.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-11T06:54:00.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just my eyes or is there something wrong with the 'D' in the 'LINKED' and 'RELATED' sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from Chrome on Win7.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5N4sY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is from IE on Win7. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o5Jr9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2015-03-25T19:27:27.470" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T19:27:27.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-11T13:54:11.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When there are counts placed after an action like edit/close/delete etc, these can line break and appear on the wrong line, making it look like they apply to the wrong action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xt5gN.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of confusion on instance counts&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should not be allowed to happen, because it is misleading.  There it looks like the flag count is 1, but in fact, the delete count is one.  I imagine one could either change the space between the action and the count into U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE, or else wrap the action and its count in some sort of nobreak span group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way it’s a totally different problem, but when it is the owner themself who has edited their question, the &lt;code&gt;edited&lt;/code&gt; portion presents itself as being part of the same set of action elements as the ones I just mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1poOp.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of confusion on edited portion&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that odd, since the previous problem triggered a break to keep them separate from each other even though it was the wrong break.  But here it is not breaking at all, leading to a strange representation.  It’s like there is an edited action just to the right of the unprotect action, which means you wind up having a row that looks like has &lt;code&gt;edit ... edited&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T13:54:11.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2015-03-11T19:59:44.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think our rule of thumb should be this: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Don't change a question in a way that invalidates existing answers.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; If you do, even if you are the Original Poster, other community members should revert your edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the OP asked a question that differed from the one they &lt;em&gt;intended to ask&lt;/em&gt;. That is not a problem: it is still an interesting question that got good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the OP realizes their mistake, (&lt;em&gt;alibi&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean what they thought it did) they can go on and create a new question which doesn't mention crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the approach that they have at Stack Overflow, and I think the same reasons apply here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254524/1899424&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254524/1899424&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36727" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:39:08.123" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T19:59:44.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6673" CreationDate="2015-03-12T17:40:53.547" Score="27" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a huge fan of single word requests, but I don't think they should be closed for the wrong reasons, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233246/in-search-of-an-adjective&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; was. The OP was looking for a word that describes someone with what we used to call a &lt;em&gt;dirty mind&lt;/em&gt;, someone who saw double entendres where none were meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was quickly closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/92220/&quot;&gt;What is a good word to describe someone who is empathetic, quick, and witty in conversation?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top answers for the dupe were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;conversationalist, a wit, warm, charisma, gregarious and convivial, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were a lawyer telling a male boss I would give him my briefs tonight, and he snickered for the fiftieth time, I would not really find that &lt;em&gt;warm&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;charismatic&lt;/em&gt;, or particularly &lt;em&gt;witty&lt;/em&gt;. I'd probably tell him to get his mind out of the gutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't care as much as some when questions are closed. I do think that in all fairness, though, we should do so for the proper reasons, both for the sake of new users who are often already perplexed by our close reasons, and to avoid the appearance of elitism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add&lt;/strong&gt;: I don't think we are elitist, or that most of our closures are bad (with apologies to phenry.) This could have been closed for a better dupe, for failing to meet the requirements of swr's, etc. Just not a &quot;dupe&quot; which is not a dupe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T15:35:07.970" Title="Get your mind out of the gutter, you great conversationalist!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6672" CreationDate="2015-03-12T20:39:05.167" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree this should be reopened. They seem quite different questions to me. I can't seem to find the reopen button on the SE app, but hopefully I won't need to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T20:39:05.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-12T22:43:11.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the font switch for the red &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; link intentional? Shouldn’t it stay in the same font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ahh0h.png&quot; alt=&quot;Improvement banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T22:43:11.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-13T20:02:21.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can barely see the up vote and down vote numbers on the main site. I don't have before and after to show as comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the readability on the main site is much worse than before. Meta looks a lot better though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T20:02:21.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6677" CreationDate="2015-03-15T04:01:41.663" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted an answer; and I am writing this in order to ascertain the appropriateness of personal information which I usually omit to ensure an unbiased reaction to the media I produce. In my opinion, it was necessary to indicate I have a mental disability to give context to the information I provided. In my experience, people tend to overcompensate while attempting to be unbiased. As my Algebra professor put it one day in class,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You dug yourself into a hole; dig yourself out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I created a conundrum where people are afraid to be critical of my input due to the fact that their response may be misunderstood as biased?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71016" LastEditorUserId="71016" LastEditDate="2015-03-15T19:29:55.723" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T19:29:55.723" Title="Is it appropriate to include relevant personal information?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6676" CreationDate="2015-03-15T06:46:41.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why you wouldn't include it in your answer; you start your answer with &lt;em&gt;In my social groups...&lt;/em&gt; which really means at some point in your answer you will need to explain what 'social group' that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case it was relevant to the subject of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had you included that information on a question like this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233658/whats-the-meaning-of-im-slinging-mad-volume-and-fat-stacking-benjies&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the meaning of &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m slinging mad volume and fat stacking benjies&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; then the additional information on your personal situation is unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;em&gt;... people are [may be] afraid to be critical of my input...&lt;/em&gt; I think you'll find people on this site are more than willing to criticise anything they can find fault with (and rightly so) and I doubt very much that anyone will consider your personal situation before downvoting or providing a critical comment. I certainly would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T06:46:41.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6680" CreationDate="2015-03-15T11:36:58.157" Score="14" ViewCount="2535" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like every other question we get has the title &quot;Are these sentences correct?&quot; Either that, or &quot;Is this grammatical?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generic question titles make it more difficult to figure out if a question has been asked before.  And usually, after you pore over the question like an archaeologist deciphering the Rosetta Stone, the contents make it clear that the content amounts to nothing more than ELL fodder. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that people asking questions on ELU be required to create a title that identifies some specific issue. If they can't do that, it's my opinion that the question belongs on ELL. It isn't our job to edit such questions, and even if it is we don't do it enough. A clear title is a small thing to ask. Closing such questions would help our community avoid wasting time on marginal entries, and it will help as well the people who ask such questions, since it will require them to think about what they want to know, not just bleat that they &lt;em&gt;don't understand!&lt;/em&gt; and then dump their ugly messes of half-baked consternation onto our table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All current mechanics would still apply. If they edit to identify a specific issue, their questions can be reopened. Closing is not a death sentence (remember, we don't &quot;close&quot; questions anymore, we put them &quot;on hold&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/strong&gt; This does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean we should send bad questions to ELL. It is only to suggest that titles like the above are indicators that the OP may be struggling with basic concepts. In any case, questions that are put on hold are not automatically sent to ELL anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further refinement:&lt;/strong&gt; A quick search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=sentences%2Bcorrect&quot;&gt;&quot;sentence+correct&quot;&lt;/a&gt; yields &lt;strong&gt;136 pages of results&lt;/strong&gt; at 50 questions per page. Currently we have about 50,000 questions on ELU. If even half of those results remain open and point to the kind of question I'm talking about, we're looking at ~7% of &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions on the site falling into the category. Even when these results have further specification in the title, it often turns out that one of our users has edited an &quot;Is this correct?&quot; title to provide that information. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87432/incriminating-others-vs-incriminating-the-others-is-this-sentence-correct&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, edited by @Martha, as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Years later, the 7 percent solution still applies&lt;/strong&gt; The 7% ratio is holding. We currently have 105,105 questions, of which 14,886 are &quot;sentence+correct&quot; questions. Most of which, obviously, have some form of &quot;Is this sentence correct?&quot; in them. And nothing has been done to discourage such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T21:55:52.053" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T21:55:52.053" Title="&quot;Are these sentences correct?&quot;—Is a title like this enough reason to close a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2015-03-15T15:48:30.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It isn't our job to edit such questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, actually, it is. That's why the SE network is engineered to encourage anyone to ask a question, even without having to own an account. It's why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;editing other people's questions and answers is encouraged&lt;/a&gt; &quot;[a]ny time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do so.&quot; It's why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;suggested edits&lt;/a&gt; feature was added so that anyone can suggest improvements to a question or answer. It's why it's repeatedly drummed into our heads that we do not &quot;own&quot; our contributions and that anything we write can be edited at any time to make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of instituting yet another arbitrary rule that the masses will fail to take notice of, leading to even more rules lawyering and hard feelings at EL&amp;amp;U, &lt;b&gt;we should redouble our efforts to encourage everyone to &lt;i&gt;improve, improve, improve&lt;/i&gt; wherever they can,&lt;/b&gt; and that should include changing &quot;Is this sentence correct?&quot;-type titles to something more indicative of the content. Editing posts is easy’n’fun, you get to have your avatar attached to the post so everyone can see what a trooper you are, and you can even get badges for doing enough of it. That's what I call a win-win, my friend. Let's ask everyone to start doing more of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &quot;It isn't our job to edit such questions,&quot; what you really mean to say is &quot;I don't want to edit such questions.&quot; And that's fine! You totally don't have to! Those of us with five-digit rep scores are often guilty of acting as though we are the thin blue line that stands between order and chaos at this site. But the plain fact is that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of medium-rep and even low-rep users who are more than happy to make their bones doing the yeoman tasks here even if you or I don't step up to do them. My work responsibilities often lead to me being away from this site for months, and yet it unfailingly continues to run in my absence. I'm confident that you will find the same to be true if you choose to let this particular cup pass from your lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T15:48:30.173" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2015-03-15T20:08:27.103" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking into this in some detail, I now strongly believe in the following proposition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;Resolved:&lt;/em&gt; The words “correct” and “grammatical” should both be forbidden in question titles.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Actually, just the strings &lt;code&gt;correct&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;gramma&lt;/code&gt; would be better, not full words.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are almost all proofreading questions with no research and no help to future visitors of this site: they are essentially ELU’s &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GIMME DA CODEZ!!!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the data included below and see whether you don’t agree with this assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: (&lt;em&gt;Incomplete, Best-Case!&lt;/em&gt;) SEDE data added to end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brief questions asking for yes/no answers virtually never elicit quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I say this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this sentence right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this grammatically correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it correct to say X?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is X the same as Y?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I use a comma here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I capitalize this word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I right that X Y Z?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, questions that ask for a one-word answer are often poor, even if they are not seeking a boolean response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that questions having “correct” in their title tend to be poor ones. It is hard to rescue them, and often impossible. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+grammatically+correct&quot;&gt;Questions that have both “grammatically” and “correct” in them are especially miserable.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking into this in some detail, I now believe that “correct” should be forbidden in question titles.  Also “grammatical” and its variants — like “grammer”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Data&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/64630&quot;&gt;“adapt the discussion to suit your own needs” &amp;lt;- correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150439&quot;&gt;“an html link” vs “a html link”, which is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68316&quot;&gt;“Ann's friends and herself” — is this correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/213020&quot;&gt;Are the following old English examples grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193407&quot;&gt;Are these default questions about events correct grammatically?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160667&quot;&gt;Are the sentences below grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180674&quot;&gt;Are these questions grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/120277&quot;&gt;Are these sentences both grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78255&quot;&gt;Are these sentences grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/194894&quot;&gt;Are these sentences grammatically correct?? How to correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/218625&quot;&gt;Are these structures correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172259&quot;&gt;“Are you kidding me?”- Is it grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152377&quot;&gt;“As far as…longer an obstacle.” Is this a grammatically cor…&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152761&quot;&gt;“Can” or “could”, which is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/120451&quot;&gt;Can someone please fix the grammar and punctuation in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104174&quot;&gt;“Cant fight no more”, is this grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190189&quot;&gt;“Cheat legal” - grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/78202&quot;&gt;Confused about grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/220682&quot;&gt;Correct English: “Get sick” or “fall sick”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/148630&quot;&gt;Correct English Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229733&quot;&gt;Correct grammer for comparison [migrated]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/114443&quot;&gt;Correct pronunciation of the word “Mature”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/111030&quot;&gt;Correct punctuation in song lyrics that aren't necessarily good English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/102812&quot;&gt;Correct sentence structure and grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143278&quot;&gt;Correct spelling: Magic or Magick?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197535&quot;&gt;Correct tense for a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4294&quot;&gt;Correct usage of “Could” and “Can”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/92752&quot;&gt;correct usage of “instead of”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/118592&quot;&gt;Correct usage of “Peace of mind”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206491&quot;&gt;Correct usage of possessive.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166147&quot;&gt;Correct use of either&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111680&quot;&gt;Correct use of the word “damage” in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74651&quot;&gt;Correct use of “wanting”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233108&quot;&gt;correct use of yours, possive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119366&quot;&gt;Correct verbs in sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94147&quot;&gt;Correct way of saying a decision has been made&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132189&quot;&gt;Do all variations of this sentence seem grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23200&quot;&gt;Does the word “amen” have anything to do with men? Which is the correct pronunciation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/233224&quot;&gt;english grammar, correction of sentences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73065&quot;&gt;“Extremely appreciate”: grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/213086&quot;&gt;Grammatical correction request : Is this a correct Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131675&quot;&gt;Grammatical correctness of a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/183137&quot;&gt;Grammatical correctness of the sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192720&quot;&gt;Grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218176&quot;&gt;Grammatically correct sentence where “you're” and “your” can be interchanged?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158027&quot;&gt;Grammatically correct usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141239&quot;&gt;Grammatically correct use of criteria&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/103607&quot;&gt;Grammatically incorrect sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/119167&quot;&gt;“He have a point” is this correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186375&quot;&gt;Hello everyone,which one is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158022&quot;&gt;How can this sentence be corrected to be more concise and grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110008&quot;&gt;How do we correct the sentence, “The party was held on the hotel’s roof.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/232947&quot;&gt;how do you correct this: obviously global warming has been a growing concern for eradicating the earth and creatures survival&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/232660&quot;&gt;How do you know when to use prepositions appropriately and correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/232568&quot;&gt;How to correctly phrase: “She always delivered in time and always to promise.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101476&quot;&gt;“I am full to die.”—Is this sentence correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/165758&quot;&gt;“I became proficient”—is this correct grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192727&quot;&gt;“I never went to poker yesterday”—Is this grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140642&quot;&gt;Is a comma followed by 'and' grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/155873&quot;&gt;Is “Agreed.” a complete and correct sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66566&quot;&gt;Is “all total” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101345&quot;&gt;Is a question beginning with “How to” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115130&quot;&gt;Is a sentence “I knew that someone will want to take it” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96698&quot;&gt;Is “as is” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59957&quot;&gt;Is “as long as” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46735&quot;&gt;Is “a very good read” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67937&quot;&gt;Is 'but rather' considered grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207198&quot;&gt;is “click to image to enlarge” correct ？&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154952&quot;&gt;Is “consistently helped” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147387&quot;&gt;Is “Didn't you have a meeting to attend to?” grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113259&quot;&gt;Is “encrusted with dust” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129915&quot;&gt;Is “expect lie from you” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54543&quot;&gt;Is “fires” the plural of “fire”? Is this sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171415&quot;&gt;Is 'have having had' correct English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83911&quot;&gt;Is “He picked up a quarrel” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162764&quot;&gt;Is “Here's some tips” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134642&quot;&gt;Is “homogeneous…as” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55377&quot;&gt;Is “Honouree” correct in British English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202289&quot;&gt;Is “hot sun” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181145&quot;&gt;is “How is conditions being unfair not an issue?” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18008&quot;&gt;Is “how much ever” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90336&quot;&gt;Is “I am at the doctor's” a correct usage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/128560&quot;&gt;Is “I can have cheeseburger?” really grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/38331&quot;&gt;Is “I currently make part of the Xyz project” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171650&quot;&gt;is “I does” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162502&quot;&gt;Is “if I were going to simplify” a correct sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231305&quot;&gt;Is “If you be…” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149373&quot;&gt;Is “I have Asperger syndrome” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111548&quot;&gt;Is “I need to deposit my checks” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122425&quot;&gt;Is “instead of served by it” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131209&quot;&gt;Is “in the old decades” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44833&quot;&gt;Is it correct that imply:infer::sender:receiver?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205816&quot;&gt;Is it correct to ask “ What degrees is it outside?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/137083&quot;&gt;Is it correct to say&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117272&quot;&gt;Is it correct to say 'children 12 and under'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112878&quot;&gt;Is it correct to say: please refer to my resume?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190682&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use “better+verb”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104187&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use “either” and “too” interchangeably?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/155470&quot;&gt;Is it correct to use estimate as an adjective?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/212689&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67331&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to add “anyway” at the end of this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/145910&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to capitalize pronouns referring to God&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134849&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to change tense in a sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216465&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to omit “is” in the following sentence? Is it correct in formal …&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144553&quot;&gt;is it grammatically correct to put a verb before a noun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/212481&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to respond “Yes, I won't go.”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215171&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to say “John, good morning to you”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/145899&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to say “Many more happy returns of the day ”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139234&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to say 'Simple stuff…&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83804&quot;&gt;Is it grammatically correct to use different languages…&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/114787&quot;&gt;Is it grammatical to say: Your understanding is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122468&quot;&gt;“Is it right?” or “Is it correct?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218045&quot;&gt;Is “It would thus be” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129395&quot;&gt;Is 'long time no see' grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200553&quot;&gt;Is “neither I” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/232375&quot;&gt;Isn't “English language” incorrect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131603&quot;&gt;Is “of all manner” as grammatically correct as “all manner of”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57064&quot;&gt;Is “ O’Leary’s’s ” orthographically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/165416&quot;&gt;Is “physically based rendering” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195840&quot;&gt;Is repeating the word “that” ok, if it is technically, grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169394&quot;&gt;Is “Rouse me not” grammatically permissible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/148334&quot;&gt;Is 's/he' grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233531&quot;&gt;Is “Should I be of further assistance, please feel free to contact me” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113223&quot;&gt;Is that grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/170791&quot;&gt;Is the above sentence correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101733&quot;&gt;Is the clause “chances are” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97510&quot;&gt;Is the expression “It don't” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/221502&quot;&gt;Is the following question grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17821&quot;&gt;Is the following sentence grammatically correct? It doesn't sound right&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200800&quot;&gt;Is “The mall is constructing” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/112991&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “At about the speed of ten miles per hour” correct in the context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91881&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “fresh six muffins” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106203&quot;&gt;Is the phrase grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223701&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “has got” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207448&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “tirade of” grammatically correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36869&quot;&gt;Is the question “What is your body figure” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/232995&quot;&gt;Is there any grammatical mistake in this sentense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134135&quot;&gt;Is the sentence correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225743&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “I hail my praise in your daily sandbox activities” grammatcally correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233252&quot;&gt;Is the sentence, “I wrote him,” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111455&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “The police had evidence on him.” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/151799&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “We are invested” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52901&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “We're done” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233456&quot;&gt;Is the statement grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199379&quot;&gt;Is the usage “one of the better” correct and grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/112923&quot;&gt;Is the use of “ignorantly” correct in the context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54491&quot;&gt;Is the “will let you know afternoon” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207469&quot;&gt;Is the word order grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77452&quot;&gt;Is “They all had 15 minutes waits” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/226491&quot;&gt;Is “They are the best kind of people.” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103254&quot;&gt;Is this 2nd sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/60121&quot;&gt;Is this Americanism grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139045&quot;&gt;Is this comma usage correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/130985&quot;&gt;Is this correct punctuation for the sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152919&quot;&gt;Is this correct syntax:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185064&quot;&gt;Is this correct usage of 'to'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169077&quot;&gt;Is this expression correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105441&quot;&gt;Is this expression correct: “spring that force was applied to”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/107097&quot;&gt;Is this grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45101&quot;&gt;Is this grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171571&quot;&gt;Is this grammatically correct: “It has happened for a while now.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80915&quot;&gt;Is this grammatically correct? “We were thinking of holding a meeting…”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103287&quot;&gt;Is “this object remains a valid inclusion in a discussion of similar objects” grammatically …&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122995&quot;&gt;Is this question grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105616&quot;&gt;Is this Quote grammatically correct?Own Lines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55010&quot;&gt;Is this saying grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/233818&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196698&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/182375&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct grammatically?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/234503&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct:I already have posted the letter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123055&quot;&gt;Is this sentence correct: “She didn't have any book with her.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/64421&quot;&gt;Is this sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/202677&quot;&gt;Is this sentence grammatically correct? from non-native&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/231671&quot;&gt;Is this sentence grammatically correct? Please offer suggestions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233087&quot;&gt;Is this sentence using relative clauses correct grammatically?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106380&quot;&gt;Is this sentence written correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70144&quot;&gt;Is this the correct usage of the word “Poultry”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108441&quot;&gt;Is this translation of a joke grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60533&quot;&gt;Is this use of “having” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140768&quot;&gt;Is 'thought it to be' grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104786&quot;&gt;Is “uplift your life” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106389&quot;&gt;Is “volumn” a correct word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204641&quot;&gt;Is “Were there cattle on the road?” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141563&quot;&gt;Is “What's your Islam question?” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71095&quot;&gt;Is “which [noun] …” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/217254&quot;&gt;Is “will open 1st quarter 2015” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194155&quot;&gt;“It is me whom she loves” or “It is I whom she loves” which one is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225227&quot;&gt;“Its funny how people see others as themselves” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/203183&quot;&gt;It's unconventional, but is “T's &amp;amp; C's” technically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184947&quot;&gt;Laid—Had Laid … Which is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215558&quot;&gt;Let me confirm your name. Is this sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59357&quot;&gt;“Me” or “Myself”- which one is correct here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89897&quot;&gt;More grammatically correct: “anything but” or “anything except”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/233033&quot;&gt;Need help with this sentence. Not sure about the proper use of grammer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147095&quot;&gt;“of” or “for” - which is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199570&quot;&gt;please tell me the correct use of the word boredom in a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/168356&quot;&gt;Question about understandability and correctness of given sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/130069&quot;&gt;Question on grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116136&quot;&gt;Semantics to give correct meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/234147&quot;&gt;Should I use “to” or “of”, which one is gramtically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58102&quot;&gt;“Two films don't a revolution make”: is this sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/193808&quot;&gt;Usage of the future perfect tense: “… a year will have completed…” Is it correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202721&quot;&gt;“We are software tester” - is it grammatically correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125350&quot;&gt;What is correct “Other” or “Miscellaneous”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/130874&quot;&gt;What is grammatically incorrect here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/230536&quot;&gt;What is more grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106926&quot;&gt;What is proper grammar for a question that ends with a colon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41574&quot;&gt;What is the correct British / Irish English spelling of Yoghurt?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59907&quot;&gt;What is the correct pronunciation of “pizza”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88006&quot;&gt;What is the correct usage of the word “frontier”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/173034&quot;&gt;What should be the correct form of the following interrogative sentences?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172783&quot;&gt;What's the Correct Pronunciation of g and t here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185352&quot;&gt;What's the correct usage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185140&quot;&gt;Which answer is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146824&quot;&gt;Which is correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/157241&quot;&gt;Which is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/227130&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “confirm or confirmed”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110297&quot;&gt;Which is correct, “does go to” or “does goes to”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153832&quot;&gt;Which is correct — “email me [on/at] x@y.com”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/210153&quot;&gt;which is correct? grammatically and in present form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4578&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “he don't” or “he doesn't”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150661&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “I’m done” or “I have finished”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225839&quot;&gt;Which is correct (i miss you -or- miss you) Or both can be true In the correct English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119129&quot;&gt;Which is correct, “in the past one hundred years” or “in the past hundred years”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96718&quot;&gt;Which is correct, I or me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216555&quot;&gt;Which is correct, me and Larry or Larry and I?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/66542&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “successor to” or “successor of”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154092&quot;&gt;Which is correct? What comes around goes around OR What goes around comes around?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/121246&quot;&gt;which is correct? you no need to worry or you need not to worry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195634&quot;&gt;Which is grammatically more correct - “The sight of her&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85277&quot;&gt;Which is more correct, “Which one do you want?” or “What one do you want?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149816&quot;&gt;Which is more grammatically correct - “performance in” or “performance on”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198549&quot;&gt;Which is or are grammatically correct: &amp;quot;Cats are carnivores / carni…&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/158203&quot;&gt;Which is right, the simple past or past perfect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33602&quot;&gt;Which is the correct construct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222586&quot;&gt;Which is the correct sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51768&quot;&gt;Which is the correct wording when describing a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172875&quot;&gt;Which of the following sentences is correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144405&quot;&gt;Which of these is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166025&quot;&gt;Which of these two sentences is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/140542&quot;&gt;Which one is correct in this sentence, “a herd of moose” or only “moose”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/159174&quot;&gt;Which one is correct sentence usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/156706&quot;&gt;Which one is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/74059&quot;&gt;which one is the most correct answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133726&quot;&gt;Which sentence is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/234352&quot;&gt;Which version is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/92165&quot;&gt;“Why you no…?” or “What that no…?” — are those grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39494&quot;&gt;Word-order and meaning - which is correct for this notice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229946&quot;&gt;word usage or grammatically correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/232163&quot;&gt;Would this sentence be the correct usage for the word “bears”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;SEDE Results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some SEDE data on what this would do.  The important thing to remember is that because these results do not include deleted questions, they are completely wrong on the low end, and that reality is much higher than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two basic queries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287082/closed-questions-with-lame-titles-correct-gramm-right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Closed Questions matching CORRECT/GRAMMA/RIGHT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287082/open-questions-with-lame-titles-correct-gramm-right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Questions matching CORRECT/GRAMMA/RIGHT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those can be used to generate results like these. &lt;strong&gt;REMEMBER THAT REALITY IS MUCH WORSE THAN THESE SHOW!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;               Closed   Open  Cl/Op%&#xA;               ------  ------ ------&#xA;1. CORRECT       675    1577     43%&#xA;2. GRAMMA        202     515     39%&#xA;3. RIGHT          91     293     31%&#xA;4. Any           867    2165     40%&#xA;&#xA;              Cl ≤ 0  Low%  Cl ≥ 10  High%&#xA;              ------  ----  -------  -----&#xA;1. CORRECT       415   61%       13     2%&#xA;2. GRAMMA        116   57%        4     2%&#xA;3. RIGHT          49   43%        1     1%&#xA;4. Any           518   60%       16     2%&#xA;&#xA;              Op ≤ 0  Low%  Op ≥ 10  High%&#xA;              ------  ----  -------  -----&#xA;1. CORRECT       409   26%      156    10%&#xA;2. GRAMMA        126   25%       40     8%&#xA;3. RIGHT          79   87%       22    24%&#xA;4. Any           565   65%      200    23%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That looks like 40% will be closed and 60% of those closed will have scores low enough to be autodeleted and yet haven’t been, either because they aren’t old enough, because they’re duplicates, or because they have at least one answer with a positive vote total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, neither of those percentages is accurate: they don’t have deleted data in them.  It’s actually going to be &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a lot worse&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; than that, but we cannot know the real figures until and unless a helpful employee runs queries on a version of SEDE that includes deleted data, then reports summary findings back to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-06-01T12:41:18.947" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2015-03-15T22:17:46.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might as well raise a suggestion I made before: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5366/59258&quot;&gt;grammaticality judgement questions should explain where they got the idea that their sentence might be ungrammatical&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could it be required that if you want to ask for a grammaticality judgement that you provide a link, reference or quote to someone suggesting that it is not grammatical? I think this should be a specific type of research effort we expect for these kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good grammaticality questions will be based on a &lt;s&gt;rule&lt;/s&gt; grammatical description, which the question can ask whether it applies to their sentence or not. Maybe the grammatical principle is hard to understand. Maybe all the examples are for simple sentences and their sentence is more complex. Maybe their sentence seems to be causing a conflict between two principles and they don't know which one takes precedence. But if you show why you are wondering about a sentence then there's the possibility for good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with these questions, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/233818/59258&quot;&gt;this most recent one&lt;/a&gt; is that without that kind of context these questions could never be useful to anyone else. They'll never be duplicate targets. No one else will learn from them. Probably the asker won't even learn from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to teach people that if your question is &quot;Is X grammatical?&quot; then it's a bad question because we could ask that question about &lt;em&gt;every single sentence ever spoken in all of history.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T04:58:28.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6744" CreationDate="2015-03-16T01:31:44.390" Score="10" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This support request will require the assistance of a Stack Exchange employee, probably a kindly Community Manager.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As shown at the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6680&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, I present some SEDE results on just how many &lt;strong&gt;non-deleted&lt;/strong&gt; questions’ &lt;strong&gt;titles&lt;/strong&gt; contain any of “correct”, “gramma”, or “right”. I used queries like these to produce those charts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287082/closed-questions-with-lame-titles-correct-gramm-right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Closed Questions matching CORRECT/GRAMMA/RIGHT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287082/open-questions-with-lame-titles-correct-gramm-right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Questions matching CORRECT/GRAMMA/RIGHT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those allow one to produce a chart like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;               Closed   Open  Cl/Op%&#xA;               ------  ------ ------&#xA;1. CORRECT       675    1577     43%&#xA;2. GRAMMA        202     515     39%&#xA;3. RIGHT          91     293     31%&#xA;4. Any           867    2165     40%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;those figures are quite wrong&lt;/strong&gt; because they do not contain deleted questions matching those strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific support request is for a kindly Community Manager&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; to please run &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287082/closed-questions-with-lame-titles-correct-gramm-right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a version of the closed query&lt;/a&gt; against their own private version of SEDE which actually includes the deleted data as well, and then tell us how many they found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it easier, it would be enough just to report back the number of &lt;strong&gt;DELETED&lt;/strong&gt; questions matching any of those strings. With just the result of that single modified query run against the employee-only info, we will be able to fill&#xA;in the Deleted column’s &lt;code&gt;???&lt;/code&gt; figure here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;               Deleted  Closed   Open  Cl/Op%&#xA;               ------- ------  ------ ------&#xA;4. Any           ?????    867    2165     40%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will allow the ELU community to more realistically consider the potential ramifications of adding those as blacklisted keywords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps only “correct” and “gramma’ are what we should end up blacklisting, but we really need to understand the deleted questions first before we can really even discuss this further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other guidance you may wish to give us on this would also be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnote&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no &lt;em&gt;kindly&lt;/em&gt; Community Manager is available, then any other sort will work, too. :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T23:47:36.383" Title="Request for aggregate data regarding deleted questions with subjects containing CORRECT, GRAMMA, or RIGHT" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T02:26:45.017" Score="11" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is simple: how can we get more people to edit postings so they look better?  There are badges, but it doesn’t seem to work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Awarded  Badge Name          Type&#xA;=======  ==================  =======&#xA;     19  Copy Editor         gold&#xA;      0  Illuminator         gold&#xA;     14  Refiner             silver&#xA;      4  Research Assistant  silver&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;most of the edits on ELU are done by a very, &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; few people&lt;/a&gt;. Watch how fast the number of edits per user drops by a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;full order of magnitude&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from that of our top editor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QbrE0.png&quot; alt=&quot;top editors&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are only 5 of us between Reg and Mari-Lou, by which point we’ve lost an entire order of magnitude.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently only have 19 users who have earned the gold &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/33/copy-editor&quot;&gt;Copy Editor&lt;/a&gt; badge, and only 14 who have earned the silver &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/167/refiner&quot;&gt;Refiner&lt;/a&gt; badge.  No one has yet earned the gold &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/168/illuminator&quot;&gt;Illuminator&lt;/a&gt; badge — in fact, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/277180/site-wide-illuminator-badge-refinement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nobody is even close&lt;/a&gt; to Illuminator!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The silver &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/109/research-assistant&quot;&gt;Research Assistant&lt;/a&gt; badge for editing 50 tag wikis is also extremely rare, having been so far awarded to only 4 members in all of ELU history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top 25 editors collectively account for more than three quarters of the edits (64043/83599).  However, even within that group of the top 25, as you can see from the numbers above, it drops off precipitously after the first few rows. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/286802/most-prolific-editors-all-edits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here’s another way to look at that data&lt;/a&gt;, using a slightly different counting metric:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# 1. 22200 / 83599 26.6% of  26.6% RegDwigнt&#xA;# 2. 19556 / 83599 23.4% of  49.9% (Everybody Else Combined!)&#xA;# 3.  9459 / 83599 11.3% of  61.3% tchrist&#xA;# 4.  3773 / 83599  4.5% of  65.8% waiwai93&#xA;# 5.  2934 / 83599  3.5% of  69.3% kiamlaluno&#xA;# 6.  2872 / 83599  3.4% of  72.7% JSBձոգչ&#xA;# 7.  2304 / 83599  2.8% of  75.5% Daniel&#xA;# 8.  2173 / 83599  2.6% of  78.1% Matt E. Эллен&#xA;# 9.  1894 / 83599  2.3% of  80.3% Mari-Lou A&#xA;#10.  1646 / 83599  2.0% of  82.3% Andrew Leach&#xA;#11.  1372 / 83599  1.6% of  84.0% Kris&#xA;#12.  1249 / 83599  1.5% of  85.4% simchona&#xA;#13.  1176 / 83599  1.4% of  86.9% Kit Z. Fox&#xA;#14.  1087 / 83599  1.3% of  88.2% Hugo&#xA;#15.  1005 / 83599  1.2% of  89.4% jwpat7&#xA;#16.   978 / 83599  1.2% of  90.5% coleopterist&#xA;#17.   971 / 83599  1.2% of  91.7% MετάEd&#xA;#18.   943 / 83599  1.1% of  92.8% medica&#xA;#19.   902 / 83599  1.1% of  93.9% Uticensis&#xA;#20.   869 / 83599  1.0% of  94.9% Jimi Oke&#xA;#21.   823 / 83599  1.0% of  95.9% J.R.&#xA;#22.   748 / 83599  0.9% of  96.8% Thursagen&#xA;#23.   747 / 83599  0.9% of  97.7% Mahnax&#xA;#24.   713 / 83599  0.9% of  98.6% Robusto&#xA;#25.   620 / 83599  0.7% of  99.3% FumbleFingers&#xA;#26.   585 / 83599  0.7% of 100.0% Marthaª&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that’s right: in the SEDE ranking above, just between Reg and me we two alone account for 3 out of every 8 edits overall, or &lt;strong&gt;about half of those done by the top 25 put together!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything that the ELU Community can do to get more folks to help out the few of us who are currently doing the bulk of the work &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt;: the top &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; people listed above)&lt;/sup&gt; to put an attractive fresh coat of whitewash on our nice picket-fence so Aunt Polly doesn’t scold us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will make our site look better, and it really needs more hands at the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T18:36:48.823" Title="How can we encourage more folks to edit?" Tags="|discussion|editing|badges|site-cleanup|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T03:04:32.597" Score="12" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;The theory is that bad questions get closed and eventually deleted.  The problem is that &lt;strong&gt;that does not happen&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287117/closed-questions-with-negative-scores&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here are over 2,000 closed questions with negative vote totals&lt;/a&gt; that are just sitting around.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?  In some cases they’re duplicates and so should not be deleted.  However, most of them are there because “almost nobody” ever deletes stuff on ELU. Some of you do — you know who you are.  But for the most part, it doesn’t get done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287116/closed-questions-with-delete-votes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;643 closed questions with pending delete votes&lt;/a&gt;. 10k users should help dispatch those.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are also &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287116/answers-with-delete-votes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;881 answers with pending delete votes&lt;/a&gt;. 20k users should help dispatch those.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58842/when-should-i-vote-to-delete&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this Meta.SE posting&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/a&gt; from one of the Community Managers on “When should I vote to delete?”. We are &lt;strong&gt;specifically instructed&lt;/strong&gt; to delete all questions that are closed Unclear, Off Topic,  Primarily Opinion Based; many to most that are closed as Too Broad; and few that are closed as Duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, part of the problem is that &lt;strong&gt;there is no delete-review queue&lt;/strong&gt; to help remind people, nor are there any &lt;strong&gt;badges awarded for deletion&lt;/strong&gt; to help motivate them.  Right now all we have is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=Delete&amp;amp;daterange=last30days&quot;&gt;10k delete post rankings&lt;/a&gt;, which is a far cry from a real review queue for deletable stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it still needs doing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T02:24:06.390" Title="How can we get more 10k and 20k users to help clean up the site?" Tags="|discussion|badges|deleting-posts|site-cleanup|review-queues|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6683" CreationDate="2015-03-16T08:08:53.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (possibly overlapping) reasons I can think of that might discourage people to edit less-than-optimally phrased &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The question is not interesting enough, or seems too parochial or restricted in its scope, to stimulate much desire to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Users might suspect that the question is so unsalvageable, or so off-topic, or  so likely to be a duplicate of another question, that it will probably soon be closed or deleted. In such a case, most people will not want to expend time and effort on attempting to improve it. If they have enough reputation points they too may prefer to vote to close the question than get involved with it in some other way. (This is probably a good thing: at least they will be helping to prevent the accumulation of more dross.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Some users (especially non-native speakers of English) may lack enough confidence regarding certain aspects of their command of the written language (such as correct comma usage) to want to risk having a go at editing other people's questions or answers. (Such lack of confidence may or may not be justified.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Some questions are formulated so unclearly that users may be in doubt about what the questioner is actually trying to ask. Most such users will be likely to avoid any possibility of having to defend/amend their editing of such a question in response to feedback from the OP or other users of the site. They might be more willing to venture an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to the question, if it interests them enough despite its lack of clarity, than to amend the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think that motivating more people to edit more postings (especially defective questions) is not going to be very easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it should be pointed out that your summary of the editing stats only considers the &lt;em&gt;total number of edits per person&lt;/em&gt;. It does not take account of the &lt;em&gt;length of time that each person has been active&lt;/em&gt; on the EL&amp;amp;U site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you analyse the &lt;em&gt;rate&lt;/em&gt; at which people edit postings, there is much less variance across the individuals in your table of 'most active editors' than the gross figures suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="71980" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T18:44:48.460" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T18:44:48.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6683" CreationDate="2015-03-16T17:49:56.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange,&lt;/em&gt; any correction of the English text is a relevant improvement and is therefore a justified edit. The term correction is generally defined as ‘action to eliminate a detected nonconformity’. Here, nonconformities may relate to orthography, grammar, punctuation, or typography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many posts contain only a few of these nonconformities. In many cases, users are prevented from making the necessary corrections by the annoying six-character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WrOTo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, most users just want to correct the characters that are clearly wrong. They do not want to add some arbitrary and unnecessary improvements of the text just to bypass this unjustified limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, after some failed attempts, many frustrated users stop caring about making necessary corrections – even if six or more characters may be affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in order to encourage more users to make relevant edits, the six-character limit shall be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user92615" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T17:49:56.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6649" CreationDate="2015-03-16T19:55:44.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the name of the term really is important to you then you would have to remove all programming context, because people will justifiably say 'it doesn't matter what you call it'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's akin to asking, &quot;In my story, should I call my main character 'John' or 'Richard'?&quot;  The answers you will get (if any) will be subjective and therefore of no value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would have to be creative and remove all programming context and may, as a result, get a wider range of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you could say you are constructing an alien world where one of the lifeforms has a relatively short set lifespan, unless it it finds a mate. I need to refer to that period of jeopardy. What term would fit? I thought of 'entity lifespan' but doesn't convey the appropriate meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, I'm writing a story about slavery set in the future. The slaves are put on a carousel and if they make more than 6 cycles and remain unsold they are taken away and destroyed. What could I call that period when they are 'on the carousel'?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about &lt;em&gt;'unclaimed'&lt;/em&gt;? Like at the airport.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113771" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T19:55:44.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6684" CreationDate="2015-03-17T07:29:44.770" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even after reading the community manager guidance in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58842/when-should-i-vote-to-delete&quot;&gt;When Should I Vote to Delete&lt;/a&gt;, this still doesn't strike me as a high-value activity.  Some might consider these questions &quot;broken windows&quot;, but if the broken window is tucked away in the basement and you only see it when you specifically search for &lt;em&gt;that kind&lt;/em&gt; of window, is it really that harmful to the site?  Some have answers that might actually help people, or discourage someone from asking the same bad question again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's say for the sake of argument that we do want to delete them.  Then let's improve the auto-delete task and just do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, really if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Five privileged users have already said that the question doesn't belong &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP has had time to clean it up &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody has voted to reopen &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Q/A scores are terrible, or even borderline &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a duplicate (dups should probably stay as a 'see also...' reference)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the chances that this is a question worth keeping?  Slim to none, I think, and certainly not worth having &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; batch of people re-review the question to make sure it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's such concern over accidentally deleting a worthwhile question, make a review queue.  Otherwise forcing people to go through a highly manual task to clean these up does not seem like a valuable expenditure of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T14:48:11.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6683" CreationDate="2015-03-17T08:00:00.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with encouraging folks to contribute to the site in new ways, but a lot of this question seems to be geared at highlighting that only a couple people are doing the bulk of the edits, as if that's somehow a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing, deletion, tag cleanup, etc. - these are &lt;strong&gt;privileges&lt;/strong&gt; that are &lt;em&gt;earned&lt;/em&gt; and can be exercised &lt;em&gt;when you choose to&lt;/em&gt;.   This is reflected by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;SE help&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;privileges explanation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When should I edit posts?  Any time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do so. Editing is encouraged!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere in there do I see a statement that editing is required, that it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6679/11035&quot;&gt;&quot;our job&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or responsibility as dutiful community members, or that Aunt Polly will come along and scold us if we don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't like editing.  I'm not comfortable making substantive changes to other peoples' posts, and minor issues really don't bother me.  No amount of badges, encouragement or scolding is going to get me to do it.  But that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People contribute to the site in different ways - asking questions, answering them, flagging questions that should be closed, editing, managing tags, discussing things on meta, etc.  It's ok to bring attention to tasks that might need a little love if folks are so inclined.  It's not ok (IMHO) to imply that others are not doing enough to help the site just because they spend their time differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T08:00:00.320" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2015-03-17T13:54:55.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I think the solution to the problem is for people to not edit posts in ways that change the meaning. Then the problem just goes away. I think there's a huge difference between, (a) fixing a spelling or grammar error in the original post; (b) clarifying the language; and (c) changing the post to what you think the person should have said. (a) is almost always a good thing. (b) could get debatable. (c) is just bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had an answer I posted on another Stackexchange site where someone edited my answer to change several statements to say almost the opposite of what I originally said. His comment on his edit said that he was correcting an inaccurate statement. In fact I am quite sure that my original statement was correct, but regardless: It seems to me that if you disagree with someone else's answer, you should post a comment or your own answer, not change the other person's answer to what you think is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, if you think someone's question is fundamentally flawed -- based on a false premise, for example -- I think you should make a comment to this effect, not &quot;correct&quot; the question to what you believe is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone HAS made such a change, I think the right solution is to change the question back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example given seems to bring up a hazy case: A question was misunderstood and someone clarified it in a way that made already-posted answers invalid or incomprehensible. IMHO the best solution in that case would be to add clarifying information to the question while leaving the original ambiguity intact. Then earlier posts are not invalidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13140" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T13:54:55.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2015-03-17T15:59:04.080" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Dissection or Parse of Sentences&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/233771/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/233771/50720&lt;/a&gt;, I encountered the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link Parser&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T15:59:04.080" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-03-17T15:59:04.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-17T18:54:54.157" Score="-1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several generous users on ELU recommend the use of OED for etymology, but does the OED it truly helps? &#xA;I'll exemplify the two kinds of problems that I faced; please feel free to moot any others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to user 'tchrist' below, I now know about OED's &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/how-to-use-the-oed/key-to-symbols-and-other-conventions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Key to symbols and other conventions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/8552?rskey=LWBqbv&amp;amp;result=3&amp;amp;isAdvanced=falseER&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anticipate, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Etymology:&lt;/strong&gt;  &amp;lt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;anticipate adj.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or on analogy of verbs so formed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Compare French &lt;em&gt;anticip-er&lt;/em&gt; ( &amp;lt; Latin) found in 14th cent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/8551ER&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;† anˈticipate, adj.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;         &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Etymology:  &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;anticipāt-us&lt;/em&gt;, past participle of &lt;em&gt;anticipā-re&lt;/em&gt;, prop. &lt;em&gt;antecipā-re&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;ante&lt;/em&gt; before + &lt;em&gt;-cipāre&lt;/em&gt;, deriv. &amp;lt; cap-ĕre (in compound &lt;em&gt;-cip-ĕre&lt;/em&gt;) to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem 1: This only presents the facts, but no explanation or reasoning 'between the lines'. I admit that I'm unversed in linguistics or languages, but at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/234189/50720&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; does try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/3736?rskey=MEfUVK&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=falseER&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;again, adv., prep., and conj.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymology:  Cognate with or formed similarly to Old Frisian a-jēn , Old Dutch angegin , angegen , anegeginne , Old Saxon angegin , Old High German angegini&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt; the Germanic base of on- prefix + a Germanic base either identical to or related to that of gain adj. (compare gain- prefix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem 2: Now the entry's length complicates understanding. Problem 1 still rankles, especially for someone who doesn't even know the modern &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;varieties&lt;/a&gt; of the old dialects cited (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/11766/5306&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T19:58:12.343" Title="To what degree does the OED help with etymology?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6693" CreationDate="2015-03-17T20:22:50.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to read the key!  When they write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;† anˈticipate, adj. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are telling you that that sense is obsolete with the obelisk, and they are indicating that the word is stressed on the antepenultimate syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to use the key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T20:22:50.830" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T15:58:39.830" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that the 'delete on sight' threat was used in this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234354/robust-as-a-noun&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Robust&amp;quot; as a noun&lt;/a&gt; as a comment on this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/234368/71783&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/234368/71783&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whom are you quoting? Where is this from? Moderators are instructed to delete on sight any third-party material that is not properly attributed. –  RegDwigнt♦ 8 mins ago&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [ &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234354/robust-as-a-noun#comment504377_234368&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Robust&amp;quot; as a noun&lt;/a&gt; ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I was typing this meta question, the answer disappeared. I don't know if it was deleted by a moderator or by the answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a policy to delete on sight and if so, is this policy now being put to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T15:58:39.830" Title="Is unattributed material being deleted on sight?" Tags="|discussion|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-03-18T23:21:27.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sidebar title height inconsistent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The handwriting graphic in the &quot;Love this site?&quot; sidebox forces its title section height to be larger than the other sidebar boxes.  That being said, the whitespace it affords to the title text is preferred to the default, cramped view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hwmyb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106801" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T23:21:27.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-19T05:25:57.777" Score="-1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What's the origin of &quot;narf-farbling&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I came across this word on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6603/nobody-cares-how-you-pronounce-it#comment23302_6603&quot;&gt;separate meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and LOVED it, having never heard it before.  So I googled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://w3facility.org/question/what-is-it-called-when-you-%E2%80%9Crefill%E2%80%9D-a-debit-card/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6603/nobody-cares-how-you-pronounce-it&quot;&gt;results&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of which being the page I just came from.  Both from a user with the handle &lt;em&gt;Marthaª&lt;/em&gt;.  What a coinkidink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I'm still absolutely curious where Martha came up with &lt;em&gt;narf-farbling&lt;/em&gt;, the more &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; question is, &lt;strong&gt;is it appropriate to ask a question on EL&amp;amp;U directed at a single user?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T07:23:46.537" Title="Is it appropriate to ask a question on EL&amp;U directed at a single user?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2015-03-19T06:32:06.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etiquette suggests that it is not appropriate to name users, but it depends on a case-by-case basis. Generally speaking, I would avoid doing so unless you wanted to compliment the person, which you've done in this case. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning &lt;em&gt;narf-farbling&lt;/em&gt; it's not necessary to name the person but you might want to add a link directing users to how the word is used, which will make it counter-productive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who would benefit from the question? If there are only two results for &lt;em&gt;narf-farbling&lt;/em&gt; how could users possibly contribute with their &quot;answers&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would your question be? Would you ask about its origins? Then you need to ask its creator! Would you ask for people's opinions as to whether we should adopt this expression in our everyday lives, then the question will be closed as being primarily opinion-based aka, POB. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way your question could be on topic would be to (1.) ask about the origins of &quot;narf&quot; and &quot;farbling&quot; (2.) ask for other similar compounds with either &lt;em&gt;narf&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;farble&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't see how a post asking about a specific (and such a unique) neologism could generate quality answers. But you could try looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neologisms&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;code&gt;neologism&lt;/code&gt; for ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T06:42:15.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T11:29:43.580" Score="12" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a relative newcomer to ELU, I'm often struck by the lack of voting on questions here, and especially upvoting. It might be case that you receive many poor questions, but compared to for instance BiologySE (where I'm more active) the difference is striking. There, voting on questions is more generous and liberal than voting on answers, following the principle that many can evaluate the quality of questions while it's more difficult to evaluate if answers are correct. Here at ELU, the pattern seems to be almost the opposite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking a questions from the last two days (112 questions), 70 of them have a score of 0 or lower (median zero, 22 with a negative score), even if many of them, to me, live up to the statement: &quot;&lt;em&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. As comparison, the number of zero or lower voted questions out of the last 100 at a couple of other SE-sites is (number of Qs with a negative score in parenthesis): Academia-SE 35/100 (14), Biology-SE 33/100 (11), and Tex-SE 33/100 (2).&#xA;I understand that communities are different, but I still think these numbers can be informative. Overall, the lack of upvoting seems to be the biggest issue for ELU, and the average scores of upvoted questions at the other sites are also much higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main point is that the initial impression of ELU is rather hostile and focused on negatives. Since people here seem rather hesitant to vote up, it is also easy for single downvotes to tip the scales so that questions (and answers) end up with a negative score. Again, some questions and answers certainly deserve this, but to me, many useful questions and answers end up with a score of zero or lower at ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For full disclosure, this post was sparked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234498/single-word-meaning-containers-used-to-transfer&quot;&gt;my own last question&lt;/a&gt;, which currently has a single downvote. This question is certainly not excellent or very advanced, but I fail to see why the overall impression should be: &quot;&lt;em&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help me understand why voting on questions is so sparse at ELU, and why there is a relative lack of upvotes compared to many other StackExchange sites?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What makes ELU different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77983" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T17:24:00.953" Title="Why the lack of voting on questions at ELU?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6699" CreationDate="2015-03-20T13:41:23.273" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an active user of both ELU and Biology.se, I might be able to shed some light on this. First of all, the scope here is very specific and very rarely understood by our users. This is not a site for questions that any native speaker of English could answer. It is a site for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, any question whose answer is known to the average native speaker of English is off topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a huge number of questions that are simply too basic for this site. In fact, this was (and is) a big enough issue to warrant the creation of a spin-off site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. You know all those poor homework questions we keep getting on Biology.se? Well, the equivalent here is a wealth of questions that any native speaker would be able to answer. Unfortunately, because this site is much larger than Biology, the number of such questions we get is enormous. The community, therefore, is far more stingy with their upvotes since they are the best way we have of showing what questions we want here. On Biology, on the other hand, we're still in beta and are making a conscious effort to improve our voting stats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, while Biology.se is open to both professional Biologists and laymen, this site is not. It is not a site for simple queries about the use of the English language. It is targeted at &quot;serious&quot; language enthusiasts. A term that is, admittedly, very vague but gives you an idea of the scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the general problem. In the case of your question specifically, I'm guessing that you are running afoul of two problems. First, single word requests are particularly disliked by the site's regulars. They are rarely very interesting as questions, they are often very badly written and often ask for absurdly specific words. For more on that, see the meta discussions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4732/25030&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1654/25030&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; similar posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you don't provide enough context for someone to understand what you really need to say. You explained what &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is but what is &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;? Where will you be using this phrase? In what context? Is this technical writing? Popular science? A newspaper article? The more you tell us, the better your chances of getting a useful answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, a single word request is very unlikely to get many upvotes here and while people do actually vote (and more so than in Biology as far as I can tell), they choose what they vote on carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T01:10:00.137" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T14:11:34.107" Score="3" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the following question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234671/on-the-verb-peruse&quot;&gt;On the verb 'peruse'&lt;/a&gt; peevish? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about a verb  that has two distinct opposite meanings. Its etymologic evolution;  the use of the two opposite meanings( does one meaning usage prevail on the other);  what do  natives first think when they read or use it (reading carefully or skimming);  way to avoid to misuse it and risk misunderstandings etc...Isn't all this English Usage??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T14:36:24.510" Title="Is this really a peevish question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6701" CreationDate="2015-03-20T14:36:24.510" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, all that is English usage. Sadly, exactly none of that is actually &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the question. Instead, it reads, &quot;How come then that they've made it to the top of a page in the virtual Merriam Webster Dictionary? It doesn't make any sense to me. Jeez! &quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within the shorthand description &lt;em&gt;peeving&lt;/em&gt;, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and this question in its current form is precisely that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is free to edit it into shape, though. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; are free to edit it into shape, if you want the OP to get credit for your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T14:36:24.510" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T23:21:59.930" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I came across the following question about &quot;universal words&quot; that are the same in all languages: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234744/universal-words&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234744/universal-words&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; Based off of the guidelines,&#xA;&quot;translation and non-English languages&quot; are off-topic on this site.&#xA;I flagged the question to be closed, but found that there was no option to tag this reason for closing. There is also no way to enter a custom reason, or to flag a question for off-topic in general. I ended up saying it was &quot;blatantly off-topic&quot;, but I felt uncomfortable doing so since I feel that it's not really blatant; the person asking it probably thought it was on-topic. Therefore, I'm requesting the addition of a new close tag:&#xA;&quot;off topic because...&quot; --&gt; &quot;Questions about translation or non-English languages are off topic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: there were some comments, but nobody ended up writing an answer to the question. Based on a comment I left, the original poster asked the question on Linguistics Stack Exchange and promptly got an answer there. Based off of this, another good way to deal with many of these questions could be migration to Linguistics Stack Exchange. If you think this option is better, please say so in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T14:35:47.553" Title="Request for &quot;translation or non-English languages&quot; close tag" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6699" CreationDate="2015-03-21T09:15:27.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I view upvoting as appropriate in two situations: (1) when I think that a question or answer is especially interesting or insightful or well presented, and (2) when a question or answer that seems reasonable and unobjectionable, though not particularly outstanding, has been jumped on by one or more downvoters whose low opinion of the question or answer is not (in my opinion) justified. I don't downvote, because I think that the more appropriate way to handle unusually bad questions or answers is to close them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't see any reason to habitually upvote run-of-the-mill questions and answers that fall into the &quot;reasonable and unobjectionable&quot; category, just because they satisfy the standards for inclusion on the site. And since I'm strongly interested in relatively few categories of questions that appear on EL&amp;amp;U, I rarely feel inclined to upvote questions that fall into other areas—such as single-word requests, syntactic analysis requests, and parts-of-speech labeling requests—even on the rare occasions when I try to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the attitude of other site users toward the subject areas within EL&amp;amp;U that interest them (and that don't interest them) is similar to mine, then right out of the gate you have far fewer people voting at all on, say, &quot;grammaticality&quot; questions or &quot;style&quot; questions or &quot;terminology&quot; questions than you might expect given the number of participants on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some users feel strongly that certain categories of questions shouldn't be welcomed (or tolerated) on EL&amp;amp;U at all. So in addition to low upvote totals owing to Balkanized interests within the universe of subjects covered by EL&amp;amp;U, you have the possibility of some quick-trigger downvoting of questions and answers that fall into categories that individual users want to discourage because they consider them inappropriate for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think that the low upvote totals for many perfectly acceptable questions and answers on EL&amp;amp;U aren't really much of a problem. Just because a particular category of question has few enthusiastic followers—and therefore garners few upvotes—doesn't mean that the questions and answers it attracts can't be well conceived, well expressed, and useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am more concerned that certain question categories (such as &quot;punctuation&quot; and &quot;style&quot;) not be banished from EL&amp;amp;U because some users deem them incompatible with the scholarly mission of a site truly dedicated to linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. I take a broad view of what the word &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; in the phrase &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; encompasses, and consequently I think that a wide range of questions ought to be acceptable here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I may not find a particular category of questions interesting or fruitful to pursue, that doesn't mean that no one else reasonably may. And since I'm under no obligation to pass judgment on questions in those categories, it makes sense for me to attend to the categories of questions that I do find interesting and to leave the others, unmolested, to their enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T09:15:27.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6699" CreationDate="2015-03-21T09:42:28.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;The privilege&lt;/a&gt; of viewing the number of upvotes and downvotes a post receives is visible when you earn 1,000 reputation points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact of the matter is, even questions which are not easily answered by native speakers, are well-researched, and cite references, &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; still earn a few downvotes on El&amp;amp;U. This is a hard crowd to please. In its beta days—back in 2010—a &quot;the-answer-is-obvious&quot; question earned generous approval, and generally speaking, there was a greater air of tolerance and good-will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of today's tough crowd, see these comments left by two different users on two separate questions of mine. Users who &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; leave a note and explanation for their downvote (one of those rare occasions when I get a glimpse of the criteria used by some members.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232991/abolition-vs-abolishment#comment500471_232991&quot;&gt;Comment one&lt;/a&gt; recommends that I redirect my search towards the different usage between &lt;em&gt;abolish&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;abolishment&lt;/em&gt;, and their subtle difference in meaning. Please note I included the Oxford dictionaries links for each word, and an excerpt from a well-respected website citing there is effectively no difference in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232337/how-common-is-the-term-boondoggle-and-what-are-its-origins#comment498428_232337&quot;&gt;Comment two&lt;/a&gt; criticizes me for not doing enough research. Please note that this comment received two upvotes which means that three users agree the question lacked research. I was stunned by that observation but luckily, some users did reply in my defence and the question was deemed useful enough to merit eight upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232337/how-common-is-the-term-boondoggle-and-what-are-its-origins#comment498440_232337&quot;&gt;Comment three&lt;/a&gt; left by the same user on the same question says that the original question title &quot;How common is the term “boondoggle”?&quot; contradicts with the &lt;code&gt;etymology&lt;/code&gt; tag, and says the question is not about etymology. I explain that it is,  but nevertheless I modify the original title and specifically ask about its origins. However the user in question, never sees fit to reverse his downvote after I modify the question to appease him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it any wonder I have ill feelings when the same user downvotes  my answer to a question, which I posted several days later. An answer which he points out does not answer the OP. By the way, I am the OP in question. When I politely disagree and argue then he must therefore downvote the other three answers which answer &lt;em&gt;my question,&lt;/em&gt;  he acknowledges his error and professes he cannot reverse his downvote, because the system prevents him from doing so. He does upvote all the other answers nevertheless—&lt;em&gt;hooray&lt;/em&gt;! But not my question—&lt;em&gt;boo&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point being that there are users who will take an instant dislike to a question or to the OP and downvote accordingly. There are users who rarely upvote any question or answer, I suppose they think a good question can only be posed by someone who has linguistic credentials. Maybe they're right. There are veteran users who upvote generously, in silence, and some who upvote and give voacal encouragement to newcomers. There are users who will help improve the legibility of questions being posted, which includes correcting typos and writing &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; with a capital letter. But seeing for the 500th time &lt;em&gt;english&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;inglish&lt;/em&gt; it does get wearisome, and irritation (I admit I am feeling this myself) sets in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T09:42:28.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6703" CreationDate="2015-03-21T14:30:32.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can't actually be done. The &lt;strong&gt;Blatantly off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; reason is network-wide. However, it is the right option to use if the question is off-topic and none of the other options apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit of explanation may be worthwhile because &quot;Blatantly off-topic&quot; isn't something which many users will see. It only appears because you have less than 3000 rep and cannot close-vote. By the same token, you may not know what happens when you get to 3000 and are granted the privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user without the close-vote privilege doesn't see &lt;strong&gt;close&lt;/strong&gt; in the post options and can only flag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cGCMb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Unprivileged user&amp;#39;s post options&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's what you have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QVqWq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Unprivileged user&amp;#39;s flag options&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &quot;It should be closed for another reason...&quot;, which allows you to access a dialog very similar to the standard close-vote dialog (note that it still says &lt;em&gt;Flagging&lt;/em&gt; in the heading; with the close-vote privilege, this says &lt;em&gt;Closing&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xCsEv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flag-to-close options&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can then choose &quot;Off topic because...&quot; and either select one of the standard reasons, and indeed &quot;Blatantly off-topic&quot; is the only one which might apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nLDne.png&quot; alt=&quot;Unprivileged close reasons&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the close-vote privilege, the dialog changes slightly because you are casting a real vote, and not merely queueing the question for review by others who can cast a vote. The comment you get to write in here is used as a comment on the question, and this is where &quot;...because it's about a language other than English&quot; might be stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PulIU.png&quot; alt=&quot;Close-vote privilege close reasons&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[The &quot;edit these reasons&quot; link is moderator-only and is the mechanism by which the first three reasons are changed. We only get three custom reasons.]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have flagged as off-topic, the question is added to a review queue for members to vote on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nZnwc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Review queue&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/acuQG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Close review&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how your flag is recorded as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;off-topic:&lt;/strong&gt; This question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the [help/on-topic],&quot; which is fine; exactly right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user with the close-vote privilege who clicks &lt;strong&gt;Close&lt;/strong&gt; gets presented with the close-vote dialog to choose the reason, which includes the write-in specific option. If five members or one moderator vote to close, the question is put on-hold so that it can made on-topic if that's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to providing other migration paths, there used to be one from ELU to Writers. However it was so easy to get bad migrations that this path was removed during a revamp of question closing and it has not returned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that the question should be migrated &amp;mdash; that is, even if it isn't &lt;strong&gt;blatantly&lt;/strong&gt; off-topic there is a better Stack Exchange site for it &amp;mdash; then use the &lt;strong&gt;moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt; option and suggest it be migrated (and why that should happen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You won't be able to raise another flag while this is being dealt with, but either the moderator who looks at it will agree with you and migrate the question, or simply close it; or he won't. If your flag is declined, then you should be free to raise an off-topic flag as above, in order to let others decide. If a migration seems reasonable and there is a possibility that the question will simply be re-posted elsewhere if it is not migrated, then flag for a moderator. We want to ensure that questions are not cross-posted, and only moderators can migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-03-21T14:35:47.553" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T14:35:47.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6699" CreationDate="2015-03-22T17:18:42.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR&lt;/strong&gt;: People cast about 5 votes per new post per day on both English and Biology. For further exploration, run both this&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/259299/questions-answers-and-votes-per-day?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first query on totals&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/291585/daily-vote-rates-per-post-question-and-answer?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second query on rates&lt;/a&gt; against different Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Comparing Like with Like&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to compare like with like before you can compare anything at all. ELU and Biology are very unalike in daily visitors and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;Sorted by traffic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                        Beta? Visits  Questions&#xA;*English                no      286k    63  &#xA; Arqade                 no      246k    37  &#xA; Ask Different          no      232k    56  &#xA; Programmers            no      138k    35  &#xA; Unix &amp;amp; Linux           no      203k    84  &#xA; Electrical Engineering no       72k    67  &#xA; Workplace              no       25k    12  &#xA; Rôle-Playing Games     no       15k    14  &#xA;*Biology                YES      10k    12  &#xA; Webmasters             no       13k    16  &#xA; MSE                    no        9k    26  &#xA; Puzzling               YES       8k    11  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;Sorted by questions per day&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                        Beta? Visits  Questions&#xA; Unix &amp;amp; Linux           no      203k    84  &#xA; Electrical Engineering no       72k    67  &#xA;*English                no      286k    63  &#xA; Ask Different          no      232k    56  &#xA; Arqade                 no      246k    37  &#xA; Programmers            no      138k    35  &#xA; MSE                    no        9k    26  &#xA; Webmasters             no       13k    16  &#xA; Rôle-Playing Games     no       15k    14  &#xA;*Biology                YES      10k    12  &#xA; Workplace              no       25k    12  &#xA; Puzzling               YES       8k    11  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;That 10k traffic number is rounding; the actual Biology traffic number to two significant digits is 9.8k not 10k.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So given that we are comparing unlike things, it would be unsurprising to learn that voting patterns may differ between the two sites.  In some ways they do, but in the average number of votes cast per new post, they do not. This is illustrated below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Comparing Totals&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the results of a query comparing posts, questions, and answers per day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/259299/questions-answers-and-votes-per-day?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English daily totals for votes, questions, answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JUbYo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JUbYo.png&quot; alt=&quot;SEDE graph of English daily votes, questions, answers&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/biology/query/259299/questions-answers-and-votes-per-day?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biology daily totals for votes, questions, answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z525R.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z525R.png&quot; alt=&quot;SEDE graph of Biology daily votes, questions, answers&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Comparing Rates&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the number of votes per day and the number of posts (questions + answers), you can also plot how many votes there were per post on average.  That’s the red line below.  You can also try dividing the vote total by each of question and answer separately, but that isn’t as reasonable. Those are the other two lines below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/291585/daily-vote-rates-per-post-question-and-answer?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English average daily vote-rates per post, question, and answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k0tZY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k0tZY.png&quot; alt=&quot;SEDE graph of English average daily vote rates per post, question, and answer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/biology/query/291585/daily-vote-rates-per-post-question-and-answer?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biology average daily vote-rates per post, question, and answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cLYFE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cLYFE.png&quot; alt=&quot;SEDE graph of Biology average daily vote rates per post, question, and answer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to understand that is to suppose there are 100 votes cast on 10 posts of which 2 are questions and 8 are questions. Then 100v / 10p is 10 v/p, 100v / 2q is 50 v/q and 100v / 8a is 12.5 v/a. It is a bit of a silly metric, perhaps.&#xA;You can really only trust v/p in any regard,&#xA;since you do not actually know the split on how v were applied to q&amp;amp;a separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you realize that and &lt;strong&gt;look at the &lt;em&gt;red line&lt;/em&gt; on both graphs&lt;/strong&gt;, which represents how many votes each post received on average, you notice that in fact both graphs show that line weaving around the 5 line, with ELU coming just a bit under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they aren’t really all that different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For Further Research&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very strongly encourage folks to run both queries (the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/259299/questions-answers-and-votes-per-day?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one on totals&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/291585/daily-vote-rates-per-post-question-and-answer?Tag=-&amp;amp;StartDate=2014-12-16#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one on rates&lt;/a&gt;) against various different Stack Exchange sites, preferably those comparable in visits, questions, or both, to the ones under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T17:24:00.953" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6683" CreationDate="2015-03-22T18:36:48.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that editing bumps a post probably stops 90% of my would-be edits. &quot;Avoid trivial&quot; is another 9%. -&lt;em&gt;I would certainly love fix that spelt mestake for u, but they aksed me not too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a site with more than 2k, I'm very cautious about my instantaneously approved edits. On one with less rep I don't want to waste the time of an approver but I'm more apt to make larger changes knowing someone will check my work before it goes through. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some food for thought, I'm not sure what would change this behavior. Maybe it's something about &lt;em&gt;being approved&lt;/em&gt; to get 2 rep and &lt;em&gt;feeling appreciated&lt;/em&gt; when you get 10. Also, a rejected edit feels like one step above having a post get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing does not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211228/what-do-you-call-someone-who-is-addicted-to-a-qa-website/211449#211449&quot;&gt;slake the thirst&lt;/a&gt; of altruists or rep-hounds; only pedants (who are somewhat discouraged for their &quot;trivial edits&quot;) and users with an &lt;em&gt;extreme&lt;/em&gt; devotion to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, it becomes a toss up between not wanting to offend the OP with corrections to their work (while it's still a post being useful to them) and not caring anymore if they don't either. Greater recognition is required for something that's not so easily perceived; being helpful to &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add an extra tick box to the edit review: (&lt;strong&gt;Editor's Bounty&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;() This edit provides substantial improvements to the post. The editor will receive additional reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Cuz &lt;code&gt;2&lt;/code&gt; rep is so, &lt;em&gt;meh&lt;/em&gt;. And it's not like you'll ever get a '&lt;em&gt;thanks, me too&lt;/em&gt;' out of it, verbally or numerically. Points given to you seemingly &lt;em&gt;by the system&lt;/em&gt; don't count towards your stackhead fix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a 2 that became a 4 will... (through the recognition of that by another human being, beyond the '&lt;em&gt;yea, this'll do, +2&lt;/em&gt;') perhaps accompanied with a stock message: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Great work! We look forward to more contributions from you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Thanks for your edit, [maybe you'll get points]&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, doesn't seem like it'd work as well as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{you just got some points, whoopee!}...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;{reads about why they got (even more!) points}...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;{eagerly does more; better edits}.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative: allow &quot;trivial edits&quot; for a +2. Anything superior gets a +4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally experienced reason why you &lt;strike&gt;have less noise&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;have less edits to perform&lt;/strong&gt; on my own posts and my increased ability to make more, and better edits: (Thank you) @Mari-Lou A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If there's only a typo, I tend to leave a comment for the user. With experience you learn how posts are best formatted, what's a good question title, and what's not etc.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Teach a man to fish.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T18:36:48.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6715" CreationDate="2015-03-24T19:47:03.110" Score="16" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I look through the review queues there are often many which I skip for various reasons. These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not having a clue whether the answer is good or not, the matter being beyond my ken,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a general world-weariness at the issues raised,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;having no strong opinion one way or the other,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thinking it certainly problematic, but being paralysed with indecision over which crime has been committed (most often overawed by the magnitude of the inanity),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not being sure whether the merits of the case weigh one way or another, but being able to articulate cases in both directions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this rather over-emphasises my equivocation: at other times I'm like Dredd on Speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question concerns my general dissatisfaction with all these kinds of abstention being &quot;Skip&quot;s. Are there negative implications for me or for the site skipping in these various circumstances? Is skipping as if I'd never seen it (which I have been assuming) or does it have other implications for the question, site, or me? Is skipping actually the right thing to do in these various circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is profligate skipping dissolute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73657" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T10:17:31.093" Title="Varieties of abstention in review queues?" Tags="|discussion|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6714" CreationDate="2015-03-25T03:10:21.700" Score="8" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that EL&amp;amp;U currently has a tag labeled 'antedecent', and that seven of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antedecent&quot;&gt;fifteen questions that carry this tag&lt;/a&gt; include the word &lt;em&gt;antedecent&lt;/em&gt; in their headline. for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191924/antedecent-of-velocity-u-in-particles-moving-in-a-medium-with-macroscopic-vel&quot;&gt;Antecedent of &amp;quot;velocity u&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;particles moving in a medium with macroscopic velocity u&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Is this a typo for &lt;em&gt;antecedent&lt;/em&gt;, or is some notion of language and usage &quot;before decency&quot; at play here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually tried to go into the tag Wiki to change the spelling of the tag to 'antecedent', but found that I didn't have access to it. Any thoughts on how I (or others) should proceed? (I note that there is also an 'antecedents' tag that has twelve associated questions. Maybe the simplest thing would be for me to go in and replace all of the 'antedecent' tags with 'antecedents' tags, and then correct any related typos. But we would still want to delete the 'antedecent' tag itself, wouldn't we?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T15:54:07.807" Title="EL&amp;U's mysterious 'antedecent' tag" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|retag-request|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6713" CreationDate="2015-03-25T03:52:41.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would just go ahead and switch all the singulars to plurals. There aren't that many of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually it may delete itself once it no longer has any questions that love it anymore. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T03:52:41.360" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2015-03-25T10:17:31.093" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Skipping is definitely not dissolute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have at least considered the post and consciously decided that you cannot honestly pass an opinion.  This has to be better for the site than clicking either the exterminate or the keep button without proper consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T10:17:31.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6718" CreationDate="2015-03-26T09:40:36.317" Score="5" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that the 50.000 question target is very near. There are fewer than 40 questions left. Are we planning any festivities for this tremendous target?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113984" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T01:57:35.743" Title="Are we planning any festivities for the 50.000. question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2015-03-26T11:38:12.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe questions that are just &quot;please proof-read this text&quot; are off-topic on English Language Learners as well. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/what-should-our-faq-contain&quot;&gt;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/what-should-our-faq-contain&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263/alternative-websites-for-proofreading&quot;&gt;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263/alternative-websites-for-proofreading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a non-native speaker of English, writing sentences in English and want them checked even though you don't have a specific question about them, then the non Stack Exchange web site &lt;a href=&quot;http://lang-8.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://lang-8.com&lt;/a&gt; is probably your best bet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only provisio is that you should be prepared to proof-read entries written in your native language in return, to help other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T11:38:12.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2015-03-26T15:53:34.497" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The horrible cynic in me is doing a jig right now entertaining the prospect of making a fuss over a question such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I start a sentence with the word &quot;...&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;what's a synonym for &quot;play&quot; (no other explanation)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is &quot;us&quot; right in this sentence: &quot;They and us went to lunch?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is this sentence correct? (proofread, please)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why don't Americans pronounce the 'r' in (alright/around/contract/horrible)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Whats a single word for falling off a ladder because one of the rungs was loose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do I use &quot;is&quot; or &quot;are&quot; here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;what's the difference between &quot;to die of&quot; and &quot;to die from&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think we should do so, not only because the question might get placed on hold (Hooray! Our 50,000th question - unfortunately on hold - was posted today!!!) or down voted (Hooray! Our 50,000th question - unfortunately now at -3 - was posted today!!!) or closed (Hooray! Our 50,000th question - unfortunately a dupe - was posted today!!!) , but can you imagine the quality of the flood of questions we will get when we hit 49,998?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose instead that we upvote good questions, downvote really bad ones, close those which deserve to be closed, edit those we can improve, answer those we can, etc. etc. In other words, go about the business of making this a useful site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we have 50,000 great questions here, that will be a real reason to celebrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Feel free to call me any names that apply: cynic, curmudgeon, pessimist, defeatist, killjoy, etc. Though in general I am not so much of one, I won't argue here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2015-03-26T16:56:02.803" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T16:56:02.803" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2015-03-27T06:19:46.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose celebrating this mathematically arbitrary milestone by requiring &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15299/john-lawler&quot;&gt;John Lawler&lt;/a&gt; (who states in his profile &quot;I enjoy answering questions&quot;) to supply the two answers that would officially bring his total to precisely 1,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T06:19:46.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-27T18:34:11.143" Score="-2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234281/these-it-much-many-macaroni&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, which asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've got macaroni spilt all over your house. Which one would be a correct version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are too much macaroni.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are too many macaroni.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's too much macaroni.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60905/how-do-i-pluralize-italian-foods-like-pasta-noodles-spaghetti-macaroni&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it proper to say &lt;em&gt;spaghettis&lt;/em&gt; for more than one spaghetti noodle?  What about &lt;em&gt;macaronis&lt;/em&gt; as a plural for more than one macaroni noodle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is a question that accepts &lt;em&gt;macaroni&lt;/em&gt; as singular/noncountable and asks only about which modifier to use with it a duplicate of a question that explicitly asks whether &lt;em&gt;macaroni&lt;/em&gt; should be treated as countable in the first place and says nothing about modifiers? Is it because they both mention macaroni? Are all questions involving macaroni henceforth to be treated as duplicates of what is apparently now the macaroni ur-question? If so, shouldn't we consider creating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/macaroni&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;macaroni&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;macaroni&lt;/a&gt; tag to help us properly administer and process these things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T19:21:01.837" Title="Seriously though, how is this a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6720" CreationDate="2015-03-27T19:21:01.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two questions deal with how to pluralize macaroni. Both questions are badly worded but I disagree that one question is just &quot;do we use an s or not&quot;. Either way, the proper answer to both questions is the same: macaroni is usually used as a mass noun. Mass nouns take singular agreement. The older question asks about pluralizing the mass noun with an s, the newer seems to waver about whether or not it is a mass noun or what the plural form might be, but they boil down to the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bigger problem, IMO, is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60905/how-do-i-pluralize-italian-foods-like-pasta-noodles-spaghetti-macaroni&quot;&gt;the older question&lt;/a&gt; is closed as a duplicate of other questions that do not really duplicate it, so we cannot provide a better answer to both questions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T19:21:01.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6739" CreationDate="2015-03-28T00:18:24.137" Score="7" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember those rather amusing double toilets in Sochi? (O.K., I have no class. I admit it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5uRk9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;one stall with two sit-down toilets in it&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They made me (and millions of other people) laugh, because, well, it would be kinda awkward... one &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; is quite enough for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kind of feel a somewhat similar awkwardness when I see (not a rare event) two answers by the same user to a single question on the main site here. While I can see this as perfectly acceptable on meta (or math, or somewhere where there might be two unique and equally acceptable answers), my sense of awkwardness makes me wonder if I'm being a killjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/236044/word-that-describes-terms-that-exclude-or-divide-people#comment508567_236051&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; finally nudged me to ask this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would split that into two answers so the two suggestions and be up- and down-voted separately&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I looked it up at Meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28471/two-answers-one-question&quot;&gt;These&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25209/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224772/&quot;&gt;posts&lt;/a&gt; have conflicting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly - but this may be a confirmation bias revealing itself - it seems people feel that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[i]n general there should be one answer per person per question; if you need to amplify your answer, edit it! - Jeff Atwood (Oct 8 '09)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are multiple possible answers, I crowd them impolitely into one answer box.  What should the etiquette be on the main site here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I promised you a second question, and in keeping with my lack of class, here it is: &lt;strong&gt;Which seat has been left in the proper position?&lt;/strong&gt; Bonus points if answered correctly!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:13:52.720" Title="This question, and another? (i.e. when are two of something better than one?)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2015-03-28T00:28:43.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, it makes sense that one question will have one answer if the question has been asked in a fashion that makes it on topic. This is why the guidelines are geared toward encouraging users to edit and expand on their existing answer rather than adding a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are certain kinds of questions where more than one answer is acceptable. Most notably on this site is the single word request, which I dislike as a category particularly because it invites a slew of answers, all of which may or may not fit the bill. There are other questions though where for instance a descriptivist answer and a prescriptivist answer would offer distinct perspectives that would inform the asker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offer this guideline: if you have more than one answer and each answer can stand on its own merits, it is acceptable to post more than one answer. On the other hand, if you have more than one answer, and they involve comparing and contrasting amongst themselves, these should really be one answer. I will look for (or make up) some examples to illustrate this guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T00:28:43.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2015-03-28T01:57:35.743" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that we delete lots of terrible off-topic/unresearched questions. There's no reason why &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; day can't be a celebration of the 50 thousandth question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T01:57:35.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-28T05:44:27.823" Score="-14" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had the argument whereby comments on down votes are not such a good idea, but how about making the DV'er's user name publicly available. anonymous down voting belongs to the dark ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108658" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T12:26:43.083" Title="should downvotes be anonymous" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2015-03-28T08:23:07.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that if you are answering a question of the type &lt;em&gt;What word is ....&lt;/em&gt; then each answer should only offer a single word. If there are a number of other words that may fit the bill then either add another answer or leave it for others to provide a different choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely upvote answers that give a choice of two or three words except in the event that one of those words is perfect (in my opinion) and I'll upvote and add a comment explaining the upvote is only for that one word, not the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that, I wouldn't particularly like to see this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235882/71783&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235882/71783&lt;/a&gt; turned into a score of individual answers by one user, no matter how well written they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I've also broken my own 'rule' on a number of occasions where I've offered a 'multiple choice' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;As to the picture - the one on the right is in the correct position, anyone can use it without touching the toilet with their hands, a closed toilet lid can be quite a pain for someone with disabilities and you also get the opportunity to see the contents (or lack thereof) of the bowl before committing to that particular cubicle, there's often a nasty surprise lurking under a closed toilet lid. An added bonus is that dogs can get a drink.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71783" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T08:23:07.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6725" CreationDate="2015-03-28T17:23:33.340" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4582/&quot;&gt;I can't disagree with this more strongly.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never seen &lt;strong&gt;anyone&lt;/strong&gt; complain about anonymous up votes. That is most likely because the user feels validated/rewarded/(insert positive here.) However, there are very many complaints about anonymous down votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users often state that explanations of down votes will help them learn to post better questions/answers, and this may very well be true. However, much more often the user feels unjustly attacked. After a few down votes, some believe they are being serially down voted. Few people honestly want to hear that their post is simply not helpful, useful, poorly researched, incorrect, or any other legitimate reason for a down vote. They want to &lt;em&gt;argue with the down voter&lt;/em&gt;. This results in tedious comment wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better way to deal with unwanted down votes is to improve the content of your posts. You will contribute more to the site, and the up votes will be a pleasant side-effect of posting instead of a bummer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, your answer to @curiousdannii's question (that you live on Mount Olympus), while amusing, indicates that you might enjoy hurling your thunderbolts at the down voter more than doing anything useful about the content they are down voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T21:06:48.710" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2015-03-31T01:01:12.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't recall doing it more than once (though I may have done; it seems like no big deal to me), but &lt;em&gt;at the time&lt;/em&gt; I thought I had reasons for posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/60636/2637&quot;&gt;this second answer&lt;/a&gt; a week or two after my first one. I also posted a bounty which seems to have gone down the toilet, so it was a pretty weird question all round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In retrospect maybe it wasn't such a good idea, since there wasn't much support for my &quot;supplementary musings&quot;. But in principle I can't see any reason to object to multiple answers by the same poster, &lt;em&gt;provided they're recognisably &quot;different&quot; answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T01:01:12.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-31T23:01:56.843" Score="14" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to EL&amp;amp;U today wondering about the correct way to use plural verbs in regard to nouns that imply plurality (such as &quot;group&quot;). While I did find answers, I found many questions that were closed as duplicates of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions were not truly duplicates, but were asking variations on the same core question. Unfortunately the better written questions and answers were spread around multiple threads, and many more specific forms of the question were not answered at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that getting a complete answer to my question required I search through multiple threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216466/is-a-group-singular-or-plural&quot;&gt;Is “a group” singular or plural?&lt;/a&gt; - Open, but the question is not general enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39838/is-group-singular-or-plural&quot;&gt;Is “group” singular or plural? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; - Closed, but has a more general (and useful) question and answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338/are-collective-nouns-always-plural-or-are-certain-ones-singular&quot;&gt;Are collective nouns always plural, or are certain ones singular?&lt;/a&gt; - 2  links to this, though it isn't really the same, as it about proper names for organizations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/230740/is-this-compound-noun-compose-of-a-group-of-many-things-plural-or-singular&quot;&gt;Is this compound noun compose of a group of many things plural or singular? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; - Deals with a &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt;, but marked as duplicate of 2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84798/singular-or-plural-verb-after-collective-noun-initialism&quot;&gt;Singular or plural verb after collective noun initialism&lt;/a&gt; - Very similar to 3, though it also deals with initialisms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3288/is-staff-plural&quot;&gt;Is “staff” plural?&lt;/a&gt; - Similar to 1 and 2, but about a different word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91901/the-current-crop-of-x-was-were-which-is-correct&quot;&gt;“The current crop of X (was/were)” - Which is correct? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; - Similar to 2 and 6. Closed as duplicate of. . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4501/is-the-usage-of-are-correct-when-referring-to-a-team-group-band&quot;&gt;Is the usage of “are” correct when referring to a team/group/band? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; - Similar to 2 and 5. closed as duplicate of 6.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases the &quot;duplicate&quot; questions are closed for isn't even all that similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, after reading them all. . . I'm still not sure how to correctly choose plural or singular verbs for collectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idealy there would be a question that is well written, has well written answers, and deals with all those weird permuatations of the same problem (that may even have conflicting answers! 1 and 2 have near opposite answers). Or there would be multiple specific questions dealing with each specific case, and they would not be closed immediately as &quot;duplicates&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't just ask the question in a better form, because that question will be immediately closed. I can't just edit a question, since I would have to completely rewrite the question, not just modify it a bit - I doubt anyone would approve such a drastic change. I can't even &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the good questions using information from the others because they are close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30598" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T03:05:35.927" Title="Lots of questions on the plurality of collective nouns, sets, and organizations" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6729" CreationDate="2015-04-01T01:40:20.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Language Is Not Math&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason you are not clear on how to correctly choose singular versus plural verbs for collective nouns is that it is not possible to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, you have the freedom and privilege of choosing whichever one it pleases you to select, based upon your intent and situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will never get anyone to declare some great rule that inevitably applies, because none can ever exist outside the mind of each individual speaker and setting and time.  It is a grave error to believe there can be only one acceptable answer here or in most things in language.  There isn’t. Do as you please.  I assure you that every native speaker does so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were you really unable to come to this understanding after reading through so many postings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T02:18:23.053" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-04T03:10:23.580" Score="-6" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to answer a question, in this case &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/237365/dialogue-tags-with-a-mute-speaker&quot;&gt;Dialogue tags with a mute speaker&lt;/a&gt;, but my answer falls outside of what the English Stack site might allow, or rather that it would answer the question in an unconventional manner and cause more discussion than was warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can still answer that question, but send it directly to the OP to avoid untoward responses?  It's not insulting, crude, or otherwise offensive -- but it is outside the standard rules of English dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I merely wished to explain how I handled the problem in my own writing, and leave it to the OP to decide if my answer had any validity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T15:46:49.253" Title="How can I answer a question privately?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6725" CreationDate="2015-04-04T03:32:43.243" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer, because I cannot yet comment.  I'll work on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not limit down votes to -10 or so, and any beyond that don't affect the total.  The OP gets the point that their post has been negatively received, but does not feel overwhelmed by &quot;serial downvoting.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @medica in her second paragraph.  Removing anonymity more often than not leads to arguments, not resolutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53704" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T12:26:43.083" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T12:26:43.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6734" CreationDate="2015-04-04T03:05:36.993" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/113399/neil&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/113399/neil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is me.  But then when I registered it doesn't show my other posts from that account which is supposed to be this account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113399" OwnerDisplayName="Neil" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T00:21:40.730" Title="How do I connect my account to itself?" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6733" CreationDate="2015-04-04T07:32:15.050" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see the Help page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;merging accounts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you used the same credentials to create the registered account as the unregistered, then the system should have detected that. Even if it didn't, if the email addresses associated with the accounts are the same then the unregistered account may get merged into the registered account at some point. (I think that still happens.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the way to ensure that the accounts are merged is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;ask the Stack Exchange community management team&lt;/a&gt; to do it; moderators can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T07:32:15.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2015-04-04T08:53:22.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Answers can only be posted here. If you don't wan to post an actual answer, you can always post a comment. Or, well, you will always be able to post a comment as soon as you get 50 reputation points. The only other option would be to email the OP if they happen to have provided their email address on their profile but that's not a good idea. This site is where answers should be posted, not in private communications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, what you describe sounds like an answer. I don't understand why you would not want to post it. The voting system allows the community to decide if your answer is valid and the OP can choose to accept it or not according to their own opinions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T08:53:22.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2015-04-04T09:21:19.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE system does allow the creation of private chat rooms, so you could leave a comment explaining your dilemma, and ask him to create a room with restricted access where you can discuss the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just an answer to the general problem, though, since I cannot see any reason in your question why your answer should not be a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T09:21:19.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2015-04-04T11:26:19.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the OP has provided contact information in their profile, then you are presumably welcome to use it, as is anyone else. However that is the only way you can send an answer directly. Stack Exchange does not provide a mechanism for users to contact other users in this manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principle of Stack Exchange is that questions and answers don't just help the OP: they are useful to those who come after them too. This is why answers are public and available to more than just the original asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the asker does have a role in assessing the validity of an answer, by voting and accepting the answer which helped them most, Stack Exchange is community-driven. But it's not a forum, and does not encourage discussion on the main site; chatrooms are available for discussion of an answer. (Meta works slightly differently.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the site is community-driven, you may find an answer is downvoted. But if a solution has worked for you and you want to pass it on, write an answer. If the answer is really unconventional, it would probably be worthwhile to take the trouble to explain why you opted for that course of action &amp;mdash; and possibly what the alternatives were and why you rejected them &amp;mdash; and also what the reaction was at the time. If your action was justified and the response you got was generally accepting, then your personal experience should have some weight when the community reads the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can delete one of your own answers at any time&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Deleting a post which has reached &amp;minus;3 actually earns a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/20/peer-pressure&quot;&gt;badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; uncertain of the community response then you &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; create a second account to post the answer. Any reaction would thus be isolated to that account and you would be insulated from the effect of downvotes. You would also protect yourself from upvotes and badges if it is well-received. Creating second accounts is permitted but &lt;strong&gt;frowned upon&lt;/strong&gt; because it subverts the community; SE uses various methods to make it difficult to do, and uses cookies deliberately so that it is not particularly easy to manage different accounts if you succeed in creating them. There is also the risk that you could use one of your accounts to vote for the other by mistake; that's voting fraud, even in error, and any abuse of the system using two accounts is rigorously stamped on. In this case, I can see no real reason which would justify using a second account. In the unlikely event that a good, well-argued answer is downvoted, the remedy is simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: post your answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; You are not able to delete an answer which has been accepted. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;Full details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T15:46:49.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6740" CreationDate="2015-04-04T18:47:32.083" Score="7" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;em&gt;In a question like, &quot;Who hears a noise?&quot; Is the subject of the sentence who?&lt;/em&gt; was put on hold, I believe correctly, because OP had not given the slightest sign of any research, and in all probability just wanted a yes/no answer (this borne out by the answer they accepted, and the manner of acceptance). However, the underlying question is an important one worthy of debate (as another contributor was quick to point out). To make the question 'acceptable', some quoted material (arguing both for and against subject-realisation) would really be necessary, showing that this is a far deeper question than one might suppose. This would need major editing, which I feel really swamps the OP. On the other hand, it is a shame to throw out the baby with the bathwater. What is the best way to facilitate the deeper debate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:33:45.743" Title="Rescuing good but poorly presented question (Wh-word as subject?)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2015-04-05T15:13:52.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One commenter on that post said this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I also find it hard to vote when an answer is actually two answers. I respect your approach however I would suggest that you give more consideration to giving more than 1 answer as it may be easier and more usable for in the community at general. I prefer multiple answers, even if from the same person to answers that contain multiple answers within them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree; I have no problem with that answer as is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is clearly stated in the first line, the answerer is offering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;two adjectives that may be useful&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means: prehaps both of them are useful, maybe none of them are useful, and maybe one will be more helpful than the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Splitting them into two answers might make it easier for &lt;em&gt;voters&lt;/em&gt; who want to upvote one suggestion but downvote the other. But the end goal is to provide useful answers to the O.P. (and others who are interested in the question), not to the voters. I don't think that splitting that answer into two would make the result any “more usable for in the community at general.” Either way, I have two suggestions – take 'em or leave 'em.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the upvote button hints are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This answer is useful  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This answer is not useful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think an answer can be “useful” even when one of the more-than-one suggestions isn't to someone's liking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing: I often notice a &quot;synergistic effect&quot; when people list more than one suggestion in a single answer – the answer &quot;builds upon itself,&quot; in a way. That could be lost if every word- or phrase-request answer was split into multiple entries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note to the voter&lt;/strong&gt;: Perhaps you think that my point about synergy is a really good one, while my earlier discussion about usefulness was off-the-mark. If that's the case, I apologize for the quandary I've put you in by combining those two answers into one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:13:52.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6738" CreationDate="2015-04-05T15:33:45.743" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that having someone spend a lot of time on editing and making a proper question out of it, only for all the reputation of that work to go to someone who was likely only ever a one-off asker and will not visit the site again, is less than ideal. (Plus, if the asker does turn out to revisit their question, they may not appreciate someone having fundamentally reshaped it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be that someone who has the time and the inclination asks a new question with the full spectrum and all the details, and then notes in the question itself that the current question is more or less a duplicate of the new question—but that the difference in usefulness and discussion means that the old should be made a duplicate of the new, rather than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure if that’s playing &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; by the book, but I do feel it is likely the best solution to the problem, and also in the SE spirit of making the most useful question with the best answer the ‘base’ question as far as duplicate-marking goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:33:45.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6743" CreationDate="2015-04-06T07:51:01.860" Score="10" ViewCount="1656" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my answer to the following  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/237596/a-single-term-for-the-duration-between-sunrise-and-sunset/237597#237597&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; I used as reference, as I often do,  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary or TFD&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@tcrist somehow objects and '&lt;em&gt;humorously&lt;/em&gt;' comments that &lt;em&gt;Every time you write TFD I am reminded of &lt;a href=&quot;http://it.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RTFM&lt;/a&gt; and then wonder just which dictionary is being referred to so pejoratively:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; is actually one of the approved online sources  for our community, so I wonder whether there is something wrong with citing TFD  as a source. The fact that it includes more  dictionaries makes it an interesting source to me as you can easily compare different definitions. Citing the specific dictionary it refers to does not make things easier for those you want to look it up ( browsing is one of our main tasks and a necessary ability users need to develop if they want to deal with the huge amount of information available, I guess). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything wrong in my approach, how can I improve it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T10:21:29.750" Title="Is TFD a RTFM online source?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6741" CreationDate="2015-04-06T10:48:19.010" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not cursing it as a source. I simply misread the acronym, thinking it something it wasn’t.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it had been called &lt;em&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, this would not have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T10:48:19.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6741" CreationDate="2015-04-06T11:02:42.320" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're reading far too much into that comment. It has a smiley. Try hearing it as though the speaker is smiling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, now that you raise the question of The Free Dictionary, there is a potential problem with the way they collate entries. &lt;strong&gt;They&lt;/strong&gt; correctly cite each one. It's &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; citation which should appear here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Dictionary is in effect a directory of definitions, in much the same way as Google or Bing is a directory of websites. We wouldn't accept a Google search link and extracts from the results page&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;; each of those quotations would need to be explicitly referenced with the source. I believe the same applies to The Free Dictionary. And given that each extract is supplied with a citation all ready to copy and paste, there's not really any reason not to. You should probably add an &quot;All via TFD&quot; link at the bottom of a set of quotations, so they can be verified and other cross-references might be used; but &lt;strong&gt;the original authors of those definitions should be given appropriate credit&lt;/strong&gt; when they are quoted here, in accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;SE's referencing requirements&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While ideally a link to the original definition in AHD or ODO or wherever should be provided, it may not be necessary&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; and it seems reasonable to me simply to add a usual abbreviation to each as cited in TFD. Your quote from TFD might look like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(n.) the time between sunrise and sunset. (AHD)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(n.) the time between dawn and dusk; the day as distinct from evening or night. (Collins)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(adj.)&#xA;  Occurring in or appropriate for use during the day: daytime tasks; daytime clothes. (AHD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Daytime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That indicates the true source of each definition, and avoids the RTFM abbreviation, for not very much more effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This does make for problems when answers simply reproduce the content Google supplies from a &lt;code&gt;define&lt;/code&gt; query. Presumably Google have an agreement with their sources where they can omit any reference. I don't think we should endorse that, particularly when it's easy to provide cited references from original dictionary websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; This is a pragmatic opinion on a practical implementation of the policy when applied to directory websites. Because it has a diamond at the bottom of it, this answer may change if the opinion is found to be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T11:02:42.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6682" CreationDate="2015-04-07T20:38:41.947" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Including deleted questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;        Deleted Closed Open Closed% Deleted% Cl or Del% &#xA;        ------- ------ ----  ------ -------- ----------&#xA;CORRECT     938   1513 1687     47%      29%        51%&#xA;GRAMMA      250    341  333     51%      37%        54%&#xA;RIGHT       111     17  294     38%      24%        41%&#xA;Any        1299   2031 2314     47%      30%        50%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a title contains &lt;em&gt;more than one&lt;/em&gt; of these keywords, it's only counted once because I used this case statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  case &#xA;     when Title like '%correct%' then 'CORRECT'&#xA;     when Title like '%gramma%'  then 'GRAMMA'&#xA;     when Title like '%right%'   then 'RIGHT'&#xA;   end&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible for a question to be deleted and open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for kicks, here's the same query for &lt;em&gt;all questions&lt;/em&gt; regardless of title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Deleted Closed Open  Closed% Deleted% Cl or Del%&#xA;------- ------ ----- ------- -------- ----------&#xA;  14985  23303 42198     36%      23%        41%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That puts ELU in 6&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; place when it comes to close rate. (For the curious, the top 5 are Programmers, The Workplace, Network Engineering, Christianity, and Patents.) When compared to the median close rate of 15% (TeX&amp;mdash;LaTeX and DBA), the grammar questions look pretty bad. But compared to &lt;em&gt;this site's&lt;/em&gt; close rate, titles &lt;code&gt;like '%right%'&lt;/code&gt; are awfully similar to other questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also to be considered is if forbidding &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/107989/1438&quot;&gt;problem titles&lt;/a&gt; will be sufficient to prevent problem questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T23:47:36.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-11T04:14:30.780" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minor edits (especially thinking about tag edits here) update the timestamp on a question and therefore &quot;bump&quot; it up the list of &quot;recent&quot; questions.  99% of the time this is just noise and shows people old questions they would just as soon not see.  Often one sees 20 straight question all &quot;bumped&quot; by the same tag edit.  Is it really necessary to update the timestamp in such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T00:00:24.103" Title="Is there a way to prevent minor edits from updating a question's date?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6746" CreationDate="2015-04-11T18:37:26.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, I'm not a question bumper or mass re-tagger. However, I have to say that I do like questions being bumped up the queue every so often.The reason for this is the queue is very long and includes many questions that are of a very common garden variety. Questions that get bumped up quite often stand a higher chance of being genuinely interesting than other questions, in my opinion. Even if the edits are only minor (quite often they're in response to comments), these tend to occur on more interesting and helpful questions. I agree that mass tagging shouldn't warrant bumping up, but otherwise I welcome seeing older questions cropping up every now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2015-04-11T19:30:51.653" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T19:30:51.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6746" CreationDate="2015-04-12T00:00:24.103" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to prevent old questions from being bumped because of tag edits would be to fix their tags when they were first asked!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6683/59258&quot;&gt;There has been some recent discussions about how to encourage people to edit more&lt;/a&gt;. This is another reason why we need more editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every day dozens of poor questions get asked which could be edited. If you want to help, then just get going! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T00:00:24.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6741" CreationDate="2015-04-12T13:21:00.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use TFD all the time because it's quick, easy, and free, but still remains a reliable source. It is an aggregator* for other dictionaries, so you don't get just a single viewpoint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has its drawbacks, of course, as does any dictionary (yes, including the hallowed OED), but it is plenty good enough for our purposes on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for the notion that the initials (TFD) may be perceived as some sort of rebuke, I can only offer my opinion that we should not be out to ban things just because of how they might be perceived by the hyper-vigilant reader &lt;em&gt;who is laboring under a misapprehension&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* Insert picture of aggressive alligator here.&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2015-04-25T10:21:29.750" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T10:21:29.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6752" CreationDate="2015-04-14T12:12:17.767" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity and not advocating or evangelizing for any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question recently appeared on the front page, and was deleted 10 minutes later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/239191/why-is-it-spelled-channel-name-instead-of-channels-name&quot;&gt;Why is it spelled &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;channel name&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;channel's name&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FtLr4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of deleted question for non-10K users&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was fairly ordinary, but I could see how it might have attracted an interesting answer from one of our resident linguists. In any case, nothing stuck out about it to me that called for deletion; it certainly wasn't offensive. There weren't even any comments on it except a quick one I shot off asking for more context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know why this question was deleted, and so quickly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Again, I'm not asking for your undelete votes, because I don't know if the question was deleted for a good reason.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T12:33:28.487" Title="Why was the &quot;channel name&quot; question deleted so quickly?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6751" CreationDate="2015-04-14T12:33:28.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is in the deletion message. There are only two ways that a single user can delete a question: one is if they are a moderator; the other is that the asker removes his own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what happened here. There's no diamond, so it's a self-deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is slightly odd is that, having also deleted their account (hence the grey/unlinked user name under the question), the old username is still used in the deletion message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T12:33:28.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-15T04:08:19.847" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been marking flags on a lot of the spam questions that have been popping up over the last couple hours (the ones about bam war or something), and I accidentally marked one as offensive instead of low quality. I don't want that flag to be rejected because of the way it was marked (nor do I want it to show in my profile that I had a flag rejected). Is there a way to edit my flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97421" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T08:14:40.083" Title="Is there a way to remove or edit a flag?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-04-17T17:21:03.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6753" CreationDate="2015-04-15T08:14:40.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Medica's advice is what I would give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to change the type of flag that has been cast. In future, though, please flag spam with the spam flag, not &quot;low quality&quot;. Not that we would mark &quot;low quality&quot; as wrong, but if you flag spam as spam, the post will be deleted sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put your mind at rest, though, if a post gets shutdown through validating spam flags, then any other flags will be validated, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T08:14:40.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T13:43:07.507" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: Rewrote offending word in upsidedownascript so as not to provide free advertising for the spamvertiser.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be seeing this only today. Maybe it's been going on since a long time but the only post I could find about it is from 9 hours earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any post about this on the main meta, too. Is someone targeting english SE? Can we completely block posts containing the &lt;code&gt;ɹɐʍɯɐq&lt;/code&gt; word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113984" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T15:39:05.033" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T15:39:05.033" Title="What is this “ɹɐʍɯɐq” nonsense?" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6757" CreationDate="2015-04-15T16:02:56.247" Score="6" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sooner or later I will get enough reputation to protect questions. It’s not my intention, as it's never been, to use my privileges more often than I am expected. I would appreciate it, therefore, if someone who’s been here long enough could clarify this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of question do you think should be protected, and why?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are questions protected from?  From being closed? Or from getting a “thank you note”?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When do you protect a question?  When you think it is likely to be close-voted by 5 members?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a mod close a protected question?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And finally, I once had a question protected by community.  Since community is not a person, but the system, so I”ve been led to believe, why did community protect my question? Was it a random event? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T16:34:07.777" Title="When is a member expected to protect a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2015-04-15T16:26:03.093" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are receiving a lot of poor answers from low reputation (less than 10 reps) users should be protected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions are protected from further low quality answers by low rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;See 1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, and not just mods. Protected question can still be closed by anyone with close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is protected people need a minimum of 10 reps to be able to post an answer. The minimum does not take account of association bonuses from linking your account with other SE sites. (So if you start with 101 instead of 1 rep, you still need to earn 10 reps from editing or posting before you can answer protected questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;this privilege&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;this privilege&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your fifth question, please have a read of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109116/what-causes-a-question-to-be-protected-by-the-community-%e2%99%a6-user&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Meta&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, Community will protect a question when it has a lot of views or five or more low quality answers from new users in a short space of time (24hrs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T16:34:07.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T18:43:05.383" Score="6" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently when I've been going through the Close-Vote Review queue, and the existing votes are for &quot;This question is a duplicate of (Other-question)&quot;, I've noticed many cases where the selected (Other-question) is also closed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we be applying the law of transitivity to these cases? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If question A is a duplicate of question B, and question B is off-topic,  should we close question A as off-topic rather than as a duplicate?  (If we want to make sure that the questioner gets an answer, we could link the possible dup in a comment.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If question A is a duplicate of question B, which is a duplicate of question C, should we Vote-to-Close A as a dup of C instead of B?  (I recognize that in some &quot;duplicate&quot; cases, question B may have a better or more-specific-to-question-A answer than question C, so there can be exceptions; but in general I think going directly to C &lt;em&gt;(or following the duplicate chain to its bitter end, if somehow it's more than 1 layer deep)&lt;/em&gt; should be the preferred solution.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot more wiggle room (and not nearly as many occurrences, in my unscientific opinion) in the case of B being &quot;Too Broad&quot; or &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; depending on both the nature of question A, and the answers that B got before it closed, so I won't argue for those in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T00:35:20.743" Title="Closing a question as a duplicate of a closed question: Apply transitivity?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6760" CreationDate="2015-04-16T23:23:30.763" Score="18" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to Stack Exchange and would like to know how greatly having one of your questions closed is detrimental and if such possible &quot;offenses&quot; end up penalizing your account in any way (especially if multiple closed questions were to accumulate over time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read that having a &quot;closed&quot; question is not a punishment, but I want to make sure of this, so that I can best suit my thinking to be tailored to the proper rules. I asked a bit of a stretch question that was voted as too broad by the community (even though I did not intend to and tried to avoid straying too far off topic). Despite asking the wrong question, I was still able to get helpful answers from stack exchange members and I am okay with having the question closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now understand where I went wrong, but I do feel concerned about the potential seriousness of my mistake as a new user. I also feel ashamed and regretful about it and will do my best in the future to ask questions better pertained to the specific content of this stack exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of present, my question is &quot;on hold&quot;. After it is &quot;closed&quot; will it disappear or most likely be deleted from the site? From what I read off of the help section, a &quot;closed&quot; comment should remain on the site with the same features as a comment &quot;on hold&quot;, but as a new member I want to check that I am understanding this information correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any extra feedback for me is welcome. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117022" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2015-04-17T00:07:06.670" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T10:20:46.750" Title="What Are The Implications of Closed Questions on Authors?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|general-reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6759" CreationDate="2015-04-17T00:34:19.027" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was quite interesting! People liked it: it attracted 4 upvotes, along with a detailed, upvoted answer from a reputable user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should definitely &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; feel any embarrassment or shame that it was closed¹; you didn't ask a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; question, you simply asked a question that we (as a community, and as a site with a specific set of aims) are not equipped to answer. That is all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In re: your larger question here: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;yes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, an extensive and &lt;em&gt;consistent&lt;/em&gt; track record of poorly-received questions (voted down or closed), can have repercussions, but even these are temporary and can be remedied by establishing a new track record of well-received questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your particular case, I have absolutely no concerns that you will fall prey to these traps or be sanctioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the fact that you've even &lt;em&gt;asked &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; question, here&lt;/em&gt; (on Meta) is, heuristically speaking, a sign of a bright future; it puts you in something like the 90th percentile of courteous and well-behaved users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the fact that you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;read the material in the help center&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and then f'in &lt;em&gt;referenced&lt;/em&gt; it in your question, puts you in the 99th percentile! In fact, even &lt;em&gt;being concerned about how you're perceived here&lt;/em&gt;, at all, had already put you in the top quartile. You'll do fine, kid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Also worth pointing out that you &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/239185/55623&quot;&gt;asked another question, previously&lt;/a&gt;, which had a net positive score and had to be answered with terms like &quot;&lt;em&gt;attributive&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;participle&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which is more than anyone can say about questions &lt;em&gt;I've&lt;/em&gt; asked :) You'll fit in with the word-nerds quite nicely. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;And finally, I can't speak for the guys over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt;, but it occurs to me they might welcome your &quot;exact science&quot; question over there. And if not them, &lt;a href=&quot;http://philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Philosophy.SE&lt;/a&gt; sometimes answers questions about the philosophy of science (&quot;&lt;em&gt;what is a science, exactly?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;). &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T10:20:46.750" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-17T04:48:50.213" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/239232/meaning-and-origin-of-word-pantheon/239549#239549&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; should be closed as off-topic for take-your-pick: unclear what's being asked, too broad, basic (dictionaries for use examples), and better for ELL if it were . . . better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it has an open bounty currently. So can or should anything be done? Thanks for any attention to this vitally urgent crisis. o.o&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T14:33:55.287" Title="Question should be closed" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6761" CreationDate="2015-04-18T14:33:55.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Get with the program - it's democracy in action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several times over the years I've been annoyed by bounties which prevent me from closevoting, but in the end there will only be one of two possibilities...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: Wait until the bounty ends, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; cast your closevote, and hope 4 other users will back you up (I seriously doubt any mod would wade in with a unilateral VTC in such circumstances).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: Accept that in any &amp;quot;user-controlled&amp;quot; site, you won't &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; agree with everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started off leaning towards option #1 every time, but #2 is just &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T14:33:55.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-20T06:45:18.270" Score="16" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proof-reading is currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;explicitly off-topic&lt;/a&gt;. That's because finding mistakes in a passage isn't particularly useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Posters on a site for &quot;serious enthusiasts&quot; should have a reasonable knowledge of the language already and not have to ask &quot;Are there any mistakes here?&quot; &quot;What have I got wrong?&quot; or whatever;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each question helps only its asker. There is no way that anyone else is going to come up with exactly the same passage and exactly the same errors. (If there is something specific to ask about, then it's not proof-reading.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we currently have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proofreading&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proofreading&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proofreading&lt;/a&gt; tag. It has no tag wiki and it's not clear what it's for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should it be for? I don't propose allowing proof-reading questions on the site — in fact I will argue vehemently that the current policy is entirely correct — but what should happen to the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we use it to explain that proof-reading is explicitly off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we burninate and blacklist it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is something else appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T04:52:07.523" Title="Proof-reading tag: what to do with it?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-20T07:22:33.023" Score="-4" ViewCount="703" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be hard to figure out whether an OP is an ELL or not.  This would be helpful information, because this would give us a clue as to what the OP is really after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen people assume the wrong thing, both in EL&amp;amp;U and the ELL forum.  I did it once myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to ask the OP if he's an ELL.  (What if he isn't?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to know if the OP is an ELL, to gauge how deep the question really goes, and also, to know whether the answer needs to be written in simple English (short, straightforward sentences; few idioms; no esoteric discussions; etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would like to suggest that instructions be put in some obvious place within EL&amp;amp;U, that would welcome the poster or visitor to StackExchange, and encourage him/her to visit ELL -- if that is appropriate.  (e.g., Are you a non-native speaker of English?  If so, please visit StackExchange English Language Learners (ELL).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, given that some people will still not find their way over there, I'd like to ask for a required field so people can choose ELL or not ELL/native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dropdown should be required on ELL as well.  Some non-ELLs post on ELL, and it is sometimes embarrassing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pretended I was going to ask a question, and saw the sidebar hints @AndrewLeach referred me to.  Here are some specific suggestions, then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Move &quot;If your question is about learning English, ask it on ELL instead&quot; up higher in the sidebar, make it stand out more, by making it bold, and don't start out using the abbreviation ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Right now, the help text in the input box says, &quot;What's your English language and usage question? Be specific.&quot;  This would be a great place to put something specific that would steer the ELLs to the correct place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Offer a tag called &quot;learner&quot;.  Then if someone actually chooses the &quot;learner&quot; tag, it would be great if there could be a way to offer the poster an opportunity to jump over to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make sure it's clear why I am suggesting some changes be made.  It's because I see a large number of ELLs posting at EL&amp;amp;U, and I think they'd be better served over at ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've taught English as a Second Language, both in the US and abroad, and I've lived in several other countries and been a language learner, so I have a lot of empathy for ELLs.  Oh, and I've also been a translator/interpreter in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this makes my motivation clear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T02:12:44.030" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T02:12:44.030" Title="ELL vs. non-ELL" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6764" CreationDate="2015-04-20T09:04:49.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already a reference to the ELL site in the &quot;How to ask&quot; sidebar box when asking a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1GtYk.png&quot; alt=&quot;How to ask box&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that could be better worded (&quot;If your question springs from learning English&quot;, or something?), but bear in mind that many non-native speakers actually use better English than many native speakers. We have a number of non-native posters in ELU with high rep scores. We wouldn't want to tell &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; to go elsewhere to ask their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T09:04:49.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-20T09:07:42.143" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;My badge progress section tells me that my next badge will be &quot;informed&quot; on the meta site. As I know there aren't any tour pages on meta sites. Am I misinformed about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is a little pun intended on the question sentence ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113984" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T13:28:33.240" Title="Meta badge : informed" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6766" CreationDate="2015-04-20T13:28:33.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a post about the same problem on the &quot;New profile pages are out - bugs and feedback master list&quot; page on Meta Stackexhange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this one is still being worked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/253486&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/253486&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113984" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T13:28:33.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-20T14:56:59.133" Score="-1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen many questions migrated from ELU to ELL, but I don't recall ever seeing a question go the opposite way. I also admit I don't know if my question here should more properly be asked on ELL meta (maybe it should even be posted on &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;, but that seems a bit OTT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELL question that bothers me is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/1439/is-the-construction-whose-each-correct/55138#55138&quot;&gt;Is the construction “whose each” correct?&lt;/a&gt;. It was asked over 2 years ago, but the OP hasn't returned to ELL since posing the question. I've probably confused the issue even more by offering a bounty a few days ago, but we are where we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current thinking is that &lt;em&gt;from the learner's point of view&lt;/em&gt;, the cited usage should probably be considered &quot;non-standard, unusual, dated, undesirable&quot;, but that the specific matter of whether it's &lt;em&gt;grammatically acceptable today&lt;/em&gt; is largely irrelevant to the needs of learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific question here is really a two-parter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: Should that &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; question be migrated?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: If not, under what &lt;em&gt;if any&lt;/em&gt; circumstances might ELL =&gt; ELU migration be recommended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T21:58:14.703" Title="Should this ELL question be migrated to ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6763" CreationDate="2015-04-21T02:09:54.997" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Burninate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the questions with that tag are generally bad (closed or have no upvotes) and all but one have other tags anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T02:09:54.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6768" CreationDate="2015-04-21T02:26:39.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a regular ELL user, so it's hard to speculate about the types of questions that would be worthy of migration in general.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular instance, if the OP had shown some research and asked a more meaningful question than &quot;is this right?&quot; then I would support migrating it.  As it stands, though, if that question turned up here in its current form I would've voted to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your bounty and the interesting depth of the answers shows that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a good ELU question buried in there somewhere, if only someone could unearth it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ETA)... which it appears someone &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104004/under-what-circumstances-is-the-construction-whose-each-grammatical&quot;&gt;already did&lt;/a&gt;.  Perhaps it's just the answers that should be migrated/copied to the ELU question, rather than the entire question being migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;I'm also in favor of having only one English site, precisely because the boundaries of what belongs where are hazy and problematic.  But as you said, we are where we are.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T13:53:52.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6768" CreationDate="2015-04-22T01:00:49.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometime it happens, as it happened with this interesting question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/114045/if-as-john-lawler-says-orthography-is-not-part-of-language-how-can-these-com&quot;&gt;If , as John Lawler says, orthography is not part of language, how can these commas interfere with today&amp;#39;s discussion about gun control?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you abstractly compare the cited question with the above mentioned one, the answer #1 is no and  the answer #2 is that if you want a question migrated here you want a great question such that above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T07:05:47.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-25T13:22:54.613" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately, I'm seeing lots of attempts to reply by anonymous user. I strongly suspect it's just one anonymous user who's responsible. How can we handle this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77339" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T14:19:52.630" Title="In the review queue, getting lots of edits as attempts to reply by an anonymous user." Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6772" CreationDate="2015-04-25T14:19:52.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/history&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; should lead quickly to a ban on accepting edit suggested from that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T14:19:52.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-25T19:26:40.503" Score="2" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning, before a nine-hour power cut, I had problems posting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gripes are two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)   I am a human, with a reputation of nearby 500 after about a week. I am highly literate, and cannot for the life of me see how any software can suspect me of being a bot. The post in question, prior to a slight edit, can be seen in the thread about politicians and calumniation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)  Even worse is that the program refused to GIVE me a captcha to solve. I got a box with the dumb message that somebody can't tell me from a bot, plus a link to the Wikipedia page on what a captcha &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, plus a Tenniel illustration from &quot;Alice&quot;. That's it, end of story. NO CAPTCHA TO SOLVE &quot;below&quot;. Now please explain to me how a human can prove his biological nature by &lt;strong&gt;solving a captcha that he cannot see.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens again, I shall go back where I came from and never darken your door again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T20:38:37.617" Title="I'm human but can't get past the captcha; because it does not display" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6774" CreationDate="2015-04-25T20:38:37.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Captcha is entirely automatic and doesn't have anything to do with your rep or account &amp;mdash; I've seen it myself recently, and even had the checkbox method fail and had to enter a number. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The captcha is displayed if something is up with your connection [eg, unexpectedly changed IP address]. The captcha box is provided by an external API, and if that fails for some reason it's possible that it won't display.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some issues with HTTPS and captchas, and if you're using something like HTTPS Everywhere then it's quite likely to cause problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your profile shows that you are &quot;currently in Cameroun&quot;, and given the problems there appear to be with infrastructure, it's possible that whatever caused the captcha to be triggered also prevented it from being displayed. It really is nothing personal. Sometimes technology Just Doesn't Work&amp;trade;, and there can be so many different potential points of failure that it's not possible to diagnose &amp;mdash; even with complete information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T20:38:37.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6758" CreationDate="2015-04-26T00:10:33.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing ticks me off like finding the question I want to ask closed as the duplicate of a closed question with no answers or answers that are not completely applicable. Only close the question as a duplicate if the other question has an answer that answers this question, or they are word for word identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I'm done ranting. Duplicate questions are assumed to be on topic, so if the question that it is a duplicate of is off topic, usually (but not always) this question also is. If the other question is too broad that hint is less strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58168" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T00:10:33.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-26T11:15:37.560" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I &quot;arrived&quot; here the other day I followed the convention of starting a comment with a @ and the name of the person I am replying to etc., but lately this has not shown up on my comment. If I go back in and edit it in, the system edits it out again. Am I doing something wrong or is this the &quot;technology just not working&quot; again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-04-26T11:42:50.630" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T11:42:50.630" Title="Why is &quot;@Commenter&quot; being deleted?" Tags="|support|comments|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-04-27T16:14:26.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6777" CreationDate="2015-04-26T11:41:18.723" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@name is automatically removed where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are addressing the post author and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are no ambiguities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authors automatically receive inbox notifications of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; comments on their posts, so if a comment is addressed to them, it doesn't need the @name address. If there are other commenters on a post, and you need to differentiate between a reply to them and the OP, then @name should be retained if even that is the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@name is retained when you are replying to a commenter who is not the post author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been part of SE functionality &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/97098/eeeeek-what-happened-to-my-salutation&quot;&gt;since July 2011.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you found @name being removed under other circumstances, please edit your question to give full details (including a link to the comment, which you can get from its timestamp). If that's the case, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; tag can probably be reinstated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T11:41:18.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-27T14:26:30.043" Score="2" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a question that really belonged on another stack exchange site, but when I tried to flag it as needing migration, the only option I had was to select migration to meta. So, I didn't flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was meta the only option on the migration list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-04-27T14:28:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T14:28:53.677" Title="Why can I only propose migration to meta?" Tags="|support|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-04-27T14:28:43.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6786" CreationDate="2015-04-27T14:43:14.940" Score="1" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen several questions on this site asking whether a certain expression would be appropriate in formal writing. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234971/is-hard-to-read-at-spots-appropriate-in-formal-writing&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; regarding the expression &quot;hard to read at spots&quot; was closed for being primarily opinion-based. I am not making an attempt to recover this particular question, but I am concerned about how future questions of a similar nature will be handled, and would also like to avoid this outcome in future ones. It was clear that something in the question was not being well regarded after the first few comments, which contained short answers and some humor attempts. Unfortunately, such behavior from the community does not enlighten me on how to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My greatest confusion is in the close reason. Given &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/what-the-primarily-opinion-based-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; close reason is for&lt;/a&gt;, it appears to me that the question does not have enough reasons for such a close: it already contains a valid answer, and the expression itself could eventually be stumbled upon by other people. If the formality of the expression itself is opinion-based, then wouldn't a close only make things worse? After all, the OP would not know that before asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all this in mind, where should the community stand when handling these questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114602" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T07:22:07.037" Title="When should questions asking for the formality of an expression be closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6780" CreationDate="2015-04-27T15:03:55.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Always. Every single time. &quot;Formal&quot; is imaginary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only half joking. &quot;Formal&quot; accademic writing is incredibly diverse, and it would be very hard to concretely distinguish it from normal speech or writing. As long as you avoid text-speech (&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ppl&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; etc.) then that's probably as strong a rule for &quot;formal&quot; language as you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course individual fields or journals have their own conventions, but they can't be grouped together under the label &quot;formal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T15:03:55.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-27T18:34:02.183" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been told that I have earned the privilege to access review queues, but not what that is. The announcement does not &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; the way new badges do. I have poked around but should be grateful for a &quot;Review Queues for Dummies&quot;, if someone would take pity on a poor newbie. Strangely enough, it's not on &quot;Questions that may already have an answer&quot; (as opposed to questions about the details of RQs, including some nigh-flamewars), so perhaps I have now earned the Idiot badge..... Anyway, I have no intention of going near a RQ until I know what I am supposed to be doing. I may be dim tonight (blame the tropics), but I'm not a vandal or a troll. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T19:21:14.737" Title="What exactly IS the review queue?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6783" CreationDate="2015-04-27T19:21:14.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find more information about this privilege in the Privileges section of the Help Center. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the link for the privilege you just received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The queues provide a means by which users can help keep the site tidy. As you gain more privileges, you will be able to access more queues that will help you use your new privileges more effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have access to only two queues at this stage. It's explained in that post, but to recap, you can help review answers that were posted long after the question was asked (late answers) and first posts. Late answers are reviewed because they are often either spam or new users. First posts are reviewed because very often the first question or answer that a user posts is their worst one, and we want to make sure that the community helps those new users get started off on the right foot. Having these two queues available to you makes it easier for you to identify posts that might need editing or encouraging comments, or that might need to be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to do reviews in these queues, but you are not required to. You can participate as much or as little as you like. You can earn badges from working the queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T19:21:14.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6780" CreationDate="2015-04-28T07:22:07.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions are closed as “primarily opinion-based” (which you may see as POB from time to time, especially in comments) because that’s exactly what they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the “rules” of grammar/punctuation/spelling are more-or-less codified, what is “formal” is entirely dependent on circumstances and what the answerer believes to be formal or informal enough in those circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the circumstances are explicitly spelled out in the question, each answer depends entirely on the opinion of the answerer and how they would act in that situation: each is entirely subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;canonical post on good-subjective vs bad-subjective&lt;/a&gt; was written in 2010. That shows that it’s possible to write a good subjective question which implicitly invites experiential answers, backed up with actual results (and perhaps potential better courses of action which were second-guessed, if the results weren’t great).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply asking “Is this formal enough for academic writing?” is insufficient principally because each academic publication has its own standards; and each person answering certainly does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T07:22:07.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T12:11:42.900" Score="11" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is currently a question posted on both ELL and EL&amp;amp;U as &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/55218/and-build-upon-that-but-build-they-have-should-that-2nd-build-be-built/55317#comment104751_55218&quot;&gt;&quot;an experiment&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in the words of the poster of one of the questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have plariarised your question, kind of, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/241446/4915&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It's really an&#xA;  experiment to see whether the answers here are much better than the&#xA;  answers on ELU!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bounty associated with one of the questions, on EL&amp;amp;U. Both questions are recent, and open, with no accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ELL, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/55218/and-build-upon-that-but-build-they-have-should-that-2nd-build-be-built/&quot;&gt;“and build upon that, but build they have”: Should that 2nd “build” be “built”?&lt;/a&gt; The corresponding question on EL&amp;amp;U is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/241446/wrote-it-i-did-is-this-grammatical&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Wrote it I did&amp;quot; Is this grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it rather confusing to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/241446/wrote-it-i-did-is-this-grammatical#comment522926_241584&quot;&gt;comments on EL&amp;amp;U referring to &quot;Pazzo's  answer&quot;&lt;/a&gt; when there was no answer by Pazzo on EL&amp;amp;U but &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/55312&quot;&gt;rather, on ELL&lt;/a&gt;.  Similarly, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/241446/wrote-it-i-did-is-this-grammatical#comment522954_241584&quot;&gt;entire discussion on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; about an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/55317&quot;&gt;answer by F.E. on ELL&lt;/a&gt; and the answer's use of CGEL. This would have been (and was!) completely opaque, if I were not to have done a search on ELL to understand what the basis for it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this acceptable? It is not allowed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;according to StackExchange rules&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-05-30T10:13:29.477" Title="Cross-posting simultaneously on ELU and ELL" Tags="|discussion|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T18:14:15.130" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6782/why-unclear-how-does-but-for-mean-if-it-were-not-for?noredirect=1#comment24069_6782&quot;&gt;This meta question&lt;/a&gt; motivated this. By linguistic traps, I mean those listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12077/5306&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12077/5306&lt;/a&gt;, such as the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, though it'd be easier not to,  I repeat that 'I heed the Etymological Fallacy'. In  the past, questions have been closed because the closers might have thought that the poster didn't know about it. On the contrary, I do 'heed' these traps and want to state this outright, to anticipate repliers' concern and to forestall extra (redundant) writing on these traps (for each question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T18:21:08.703" Title="Should queriers of etymology declare awareness of linguistic traps?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T18:39:08.907" Score="16" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/242074/in-a-single-word-how-can-you-describe-something-as-being-made-by-women-for-wome/242076#242076&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, concise but clear and easily comprehensible to my eyes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two &quot;desperate&quot; tentative answers; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a few comments;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a series of down-votes and the closing of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think probably no one meant to laugh at the question, but seen from outside and to the eyes of a new user  the sense of frustration may be amplified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the down-votes to the question and its closing may be easily justified, I wonder if, sometimes, we could do better than this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T08:33:16.437" Title="&quot;Thanks man for not laughing at my question :)&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T19:44:29.990" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking around, seeing lots of posts getting a few downvotes on completely regular questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/242195/whats-a-metaphor-expression-for-confirmation&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a metaphor/expression for &amp;quot;confirmation&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/242191/what-is-the-appropriate-preposition-which-can-be-used-with-the-word-server&quot;&gt;What is the appropriate preposition which can be used with the word &amp;quot;server&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: My examples got upvoted back to 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why these posts are getting downvoted. Does someone not like them? Did they not have correct grammar? Did some guy think downvoting these would be &quot;funny&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T19:44:29.990" Title="Why do completely normal posts get downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6792" CreationDate="2015-04-28T20:30:50.617" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;That comment breaks my heart. I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4625/&quot;&gt;long wished for a friendlier culture&lt;/a&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not downvote, but I did snark, because these requests (what's the word with a negative connotation for what constant, too-high waves do the the shore and it's inhabitants?) EL&amp;amp;U on (what's a better and more eloquent way to say &quot;a regular basis&quot;?) and leave me (what's a single word that describes the discouragement someone feels when something they hold dear seems to be slipping away and they're afraid it might never be like it was? I don't mean nostalgia.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yea, though I (what's a good word or phrase for &quot;walking in the valley of the shadow of something&quot;, but a lot shorter?), see to what depths of depravity I have fallen? &lt;em&gt;Snark&lt;/em&gt;. I am disappointed in myself. (Is there a single word or idiom in English that refers to the regret someone feels when they see that they have become the thing they once disliked - and kind of still do - and were hoping they wouldn't become, but have anyway? But that still makes them feel guilty about it, and they know they are maybe wrong, but also they understand how that happened?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once, it would have been me welcoming the user and scratching my head, trying to (what's a better word for &quot;assist&quot; that carries with it a connotation of wanting to help?) them. And I've only been here (what's a single word that means &quot;a little over a year&quot; but less than &quot;a year and a third&quot;?). Imagine how it feels to people who have been here even longer yet still have higher hopes for the site than to look at the front page and see it peppered with requests like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It breaks my heart. But it also breaks my heart to look at the front page, to look at the review queue and see 130 reviews every day, to take on six low quality answers and &lt;em&gt;in the time it takes to review those six&lt;/em&gt;, to have five more added to the queue so that it becomes eleven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My heart breaks for this individual. I (a word not quite as dramatic and exuberant as rejoice, but more than the insipid &quot;am happy&quot;) that you are still tender-hearted and enthusiastic, and that you've become such a valuable user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But see how tedious this response has become? Yet it only asks for eight words. That might be about the number of SWRs we've gotten on a single busy day here in the same time it took to write this very snarky answer. But, (is the interjection &quot;wow&quot; still used in American English? Is there a newer word that has replaced it but means the same thing?), it is so very, &lt;em&gt;v e r y&lt;/em&gt; understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep on pushing for making the community a better place in every way. That is always right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I hope you know that in spite of the snark - and some hyperbole - I really meant everything I said. My heart did break on looking back at the question. You &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; doing the right thing.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T08:33:16.437" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6799" CreationDate="2015-04-28T23:17:38.220" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/242269/is-hoover-capitalised&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has one close vote already. Being relatively new to the site (and witnessing some high-rep users treat lower-rep users without the amount of respect they deserve) I am unsure as to why it has received such a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was suggested to be a duplicate of two other questions (I did check for similar previous questions before asking), but I don't see how the names of cheeses are relevant to brand names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T05:55:18.357" Title="Why is my question being closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T02:25:23.887" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit too difficult to determine that the checkmark is checked. Using a lighter color, as with the up/down vote arrows would do the trick, I think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is, some newcomers will have some difficulty in determining the purpose of the checkmark button. If it used the same unchecked/unselected color as the upvote/downvote buttons, there would be no problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LQCgp.png&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9175" LastEditorUserId="9175" LastEditDate="2015-04-30T02:37:36.697" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T02:43:10.863" Title="Unchecked checkmarks should be a bit lighter in color" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2023-04-27T01:29:10.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T05:28:01.107" Score="21" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several folks &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6792/106801&quot;&gt;have noted&lt;/a&gt; that ELU regulars have a predilection towards snobbery and are perceived as generally unwelcoming to new users.  I realized today that I'm guilty of this, and I haven't even been around that long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, pursuant to a more continual &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4625/106801&quot;&gt;summer of love&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, I suggest a repository of polite responses to various types of off-topic or ill-suited questions asked by new users.  The intent here is to provide a &lt;em&gt;server-side&lt;/em&gt; community-edited &lt;strong&gt;starting point&lt;/strong&gt; of pro-forma responses from which reviewers may cull polite, appropriate responses when deciding how to interact with problematic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should be in the form of a Community Wiki, each answer pertaining to a situation encountered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When using the suggested responses, keep in mind they may need to be tailored to the questions and answers (and possibly users) we encounter&lt;/strong&gt;.  These are not universal solutions that will work for everyone.  Use your best judgment when replying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other relevant links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/136609/281446&quot;&gt;Repository of useful pro-forma comments&lt;/a&gt; (geared mostly towards Stack Overflow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/138173/281446&quot;&gt;Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/152969/281446&quot;&gt;Polite way to tell new users to improve question/answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9953/281446&quot;&gt;Could we please be a bit nicer to new users?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/167452/281446&quot;&gt;What are the most effective ways to guide new users?&lt;/a&gt; (especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/167474/281446&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.meta.stackexchange.com/q/627&quot;&gt;Reference: templates for common comments&lt;/a&gt; (from CS.SE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106801" LastEditorUserId="106801" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T13:16:13.840" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T13:16:13.840" Title="Repository of polite responses" Tags="|discussion|new-users|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="17" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-04T14:02:25.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6796" CreationDate="2015-04-29T05:55:18.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with disrespect, and everything (and really only) to do with the question being pretty much a duplicate. Votes here are on questions and answers, not people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one I know of actually likes down votes or close votes, but that is a huge part of how this site works. It's not meant to be hurtful at all. Cheeses? Did you read @Edwin Ashworth's answer? He even mentions &lt;em&gt;hoover&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had many more than 50,000 questions here. Some are exact duplicates, even when they are worded differently. It's bound to happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T05:55:18.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T07:14:41.220" Score="8" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I had my question closed and, upon browsing through the answers to the proposed duplicate, I did find half of an answer to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to wonder about some things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it frowned upon within the ELU community to ask a question that is similar to a previous one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there anything wrong with asking a question that has been asked before in the hope of better quality answers or answers from different viewpoints?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I, as an enthusiastic user, feel dejected or guilty?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any negative effects from having a question closed as a duplicate? Does it affect your respect in the community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are questions allowed to be marked as a duplicate immediately? Should there not be a grace period in which there's a chance for new, more informative answers than those of the &quot;duplicate&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that my points are nothing more than small concerns; I do not object to the closure of my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason I am asking this is because as a frequent user of the site, I feel that I should be as familiar with it as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thoroughly enjoy answering and editing questions asked on ELU and I have even gotten many helpful answers myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-04-29T08:52:16.160" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T12:03:36.647" Title="Is it a bad thing to have your question marked as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6800" CreationDate="2015-04-29T13:05:30.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are operations in effect that, if you garner enough net negatively voted items and/or closes, you may be temporarily banned. (I don't know the details, but from seeing things, it's something like 5 or more questions answers within a short amount of time with no positive ones). However, I'm fairly certain that a duplicate closure does not come in to this calculation. So a duplicate question is not a mark against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, for general hygiene of the site, duplicate questions are not desirable. Also, asking a question that turns out to be a duplicate &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; show a lack of preparation by the OP: on one hand, people have a tendency to ask SO without looking elsewhere or without trying to see if already answered here, but on the other, the SO search is not the best and Google will find duplicates better. Also, like a spelling dictionary, how are you supposed to look it up if you don't know how to spell it already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2015-05-01T12:03:36.647" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T12:03:36.647" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2015-04-29T13:25:55.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a newbie educating myself on the culture here. I have had experience on a Usenet site where the nastiness was orders of magnitude greater than anything I have seen here; I have seen some snark, but not yet &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; personal attacks. I would agree that starting anything with &quot;What is wrong with you/those (ethnicity)?&quot; is an atrocity – but you only seem to have one example of that, before my time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it takes two to tango, and a noticeable feature of internet culture – it goes back before the Millennials, confer my Usenet experience , which was the late 80s and early 90s – is that some (not all) students not only want you to do their most basic homework for them, entirely &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; them, but also have a sense of &lt;em&gt;entitlement&lt;/em&gt; about it, so they do not need to ask politely. It's do this for me, do that for me, peel me a grape. I have met this in realspace too: the niece of a friend wanted help with an assignment, received pointers, and then complained that I should have &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; it all for her, and in a different language to boot. I haven't spoken to her since. If I ever meet spoiled brats like that here, with an heroic effort of self-control I may remain silent, but making nice to them is not on the agenda. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community wants to try to be more polite, well and good, but do the questioners have no obligation of couthness as well?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T13:25:55.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T17:04:37.797" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mari-Lou wrote a pugnacious message to persons unknown, did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use my @name, but it nevertheless arrived in MY inbox, causing distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect a bug.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-04-29T20:15:38.210" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T20:15:38.210" Title="Message not addressed to me arrived in MY inbox" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T17:10:19.167" Score="-3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I was deducted 15 points in one go. Now 15 is not a multiple of 2, and in any case the rep level at the question itself seems unaffected. So is this some kind of swingeing great FINE, in which case I would like to hear the charges against me and file an appeal, or a BUG?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-04-29T20:13:55.433" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T20:13:55.433" Title="I just lost 15 in one go – a fine?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2015-04-29T17:30:05.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is almost certainly the result of a question being removed, (either by the author or by the moderators), in which case all the reputation gained by others for answers or acceptances on that question is also removed. Try looking at your &lt;em&gt;Reputation&lt;/em&gt; tab, ordered either by post or by date; you will probably see &quot;-15 post removed&quot; at some point. There is, by design, no way of telling who removed the post; and though it is occasionally possible for reputation to be conserved after such a removal, this is rare and depends on the historical significance of the post, not on your feelings about losing 15 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also try being more careful about your complaints. Levelling wild accusations of malice and incompetence simply because you haven't troubled to read the relevant sections of the Help is unlikely to predispose potential voters in your favour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T17:30:05.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2015-04-29T18:02:45.300" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is probably due to your answer on &quot;Should I use 'which' or 'that'?&quot; having been accepted by the asker, and then un-accepted. An Accepted answer gives 15 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T18:02:45.300" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6790" CreationDate="2015-04-29T22:24:36.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A really &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/55218/and-build-upon-that-but-build-they-have-should-that-2nd-build-be-built&quot;&gt;good question&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; got posted on ELL about why some present perfect sentences on the internet have preposed verb phrases that don't use past participles (main verbs that have been moved to the front of the sentence that aren't past participles even though the auxiliary verb is &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;). Here's the example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Of course, they had the considerable advantage of being able to see what worked well and what didn't work so well in Java, and build upon that, but &lt;strong&gt;build&lt;/strong&gt; they &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite a sophisticated question, really, definitely one worthy of any linguist or serious enthusiast of English language. However, there was an even more interesting type of similar example that sprung to mind for me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They said that I wrote it, and &lt;strong&gt;wrote&lt;/strong&gt; it I &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, if it's grammatical, we see the verb form &lt;em&gt;wrote&lt;/em&gt; as a complement of the verb &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;. As in the example before, it has been preposed. Normally, when we see another verb as the complement of &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;, we expect to see a verb in the plain form. Here, it's in the past simple form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while there are vetted grammar sources which talk about the first type of example, there are none that I know of, or have been able to find, that talk about the second, so I wanted to know what other linguists thought about this example. So I posted a question here on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in a way, my question derives from Cookie Monster's question (they're the poster on ELL). Here's a picture of them so that they get the recognition they deserve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lmNDR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, to let them know about the question I was posting here, to pep them up, I left a tongue-in-cheek comment to make them feel good (which they deserved to do) under their post. After all, why wasn't I posting the question there on ELL? The answer is that I think this particular question (not the original) needs the attention of some dedicated linguists or language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry for making warm and friendly tongue-in-cheek comments to learners on ELL, especially if it offends the linguists on this site, and never again will I joke about ELL posters being even better than EL&amp;amp;U ones - because that wouldn't be funny for an ELL learner who's trying to learn English. Sorry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to stand in the corner and flagellate myself with whips twisted together from medieval Latin dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T09:29:22.733" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6797" CreationDate="2015-04-29T23:32:05.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that there could be some improvement in the difference in color between checked and unchecked.  A slightly more greener &amp;quot;checked&amp;quot; checkmark or a slightly lighter gray &amp;quot;unchecked&amp;quot; checkmark would solve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, all of the other buttons on the site that indicate &amp;quot;clicked or not&amp;quot; start out gray as well, and change into a colored version when clicked.  This by itself is a clear and consistent indication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here they are side by side.  Take note of the gray-to-colored indication in the voting buttons as well:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N5Hf0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;only the questioner will see any &amp;quot;unchecked&amp;quot; checkmarks&lt;/em&gt;.  If there are multiple answers provided to the question, &lt;strong&gt;they would all appear gray at first&lt;/strong&gt;, and obviously only one of them can be selected as correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a crude mspaint mockup for your suggestion.  I have to say, I like it better than the darker checkmark.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ls5lC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T02:43:10.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2015-04-30T01:16:07.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Questions deemed too basic for ELU&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many new users arrive here with very basic questions that could be easily answered by anyone who spoke English fluently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi (username), thanks for visiting ELU. Your question looks like one that could be easily answered if you asked an English teacher or a friend who spoke English fluently. This site is not a substitute for formal English lessons or practicing with a friend, which makes this question off-topic. If you have tried to answer it using several resources, then please [edit] this to explain how you have tried to answer it yourself and why you're still unsure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, a redirect to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; might be warranted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi (username), thanks for visiting ELU! That's a good question, but I feel it may be a little too basic for this site; we are not a substitute for formal English lessons or practicing English with friends.  However, we have a sister site called &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; where I think your question may be more appropriate.  Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hi (username), thanks for visiting ELU! That's a good question, but I feel it may be a little too basic for this site; we are not a substitute for formal English lessons or practicing English with friends.  However, we have a sister site called [English Language Learners](https://ell.stackexchange.com/) where I think your question may be more appropriate.  Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T10:25:54.680" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-04T02:09:35.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2015-04-30T03:25:51.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the EL&amp;amp;U tag wiki and noticed that there was a lot of blank space, but the main issue is the font size. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The font near label 1 is just fine, but it is a lot bigger than anything else. The font near label 2 is tiny. The body of the tag wiki is also tiny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the body font and header fonts were larger, maybe the label 1 area font wouldn't look so large in contrast?  Also, the use of serif and sans-serif is really noticeable, due to the size contrast... maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wTSua.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot of EL&amp;amp;U tag wiki layout&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Google Chrome browser running Windows 7 on a desktop with a normal size screen, 18.4&quot; and no magnification or changes to the fonts in my browser settings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T03:25:51.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-30T08:07:58.887" Score="9" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every so often I see an edit that has been approved by the community, which I consider either inaccurate, misleading, or worse of all, actually harmful to the OP. When I look back at the history in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;review queue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the users who have approved these poor edits are either non-native speakers, or largely inexperienced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course everyone makes a slip-up now and again; we all do, and that's why a newcomer's suggested edit is approved by two users who have earned these moderator's privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm beginning to think this is not sufficient. Whenever I spot a poor edit, I try to rectify it, but this is a delicate operation. I risk offending the newcomer whose edit &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; approved, and I risk looking like a fuss-pot, or worse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I alone in thinking this is a &quot;problem&quot;? Perhaps I should flag and wait for a mod to rollback. I think this type of intervention &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; better done by them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give visitors an idea of what I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4908/why-cant-i-fix-a-typo&quot;&gt;Why can&amp;#39;t I fix a typo?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4743/this-edit-should-not-have-been-approved&quot;&gt;This edit should not have been approved&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1636/when-a-user-changes-your-edits-back-to-their-original-pre-edit-form?rq=1&quot;&gt;When a user changes your edits back to their original, pre-edit form&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3466/the-review-queue-ii-this-time-its-personal&quot;&gt;The Review Queue II: This Time It&amp;#39;s Personal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T05:34:35.303" Title="&quot;Inaccurate&quot; edits that pass through the review net" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-30T08:28:07.153" Score="5" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-selection&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-selection&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-selection&lt;/a&gt; on the main site has only 6 questions tagged with it and it seems to me that it has the same meaning as the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;. I propose to merge them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113984" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T15:51:08.910" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T15:51:08.910" Title="Merge request: [word-selection] into [word-choice]" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|retag-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6800" CreationDate="2015-05-01T04:42:07.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering your questions in no particular order...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, duplicate questions are not desirable because you end up with answers to the &lt;em&gt;same actual question&lt;/em&gt; spread out across &lt;em&gt;multiple question posts&lt;/em&gt;.  When the next person comes along with that same question, it's much harder to find the answers.  That's why duplicate questions are closed before they can accumulate more answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unsatisfied with existing answers to a question, there are several ways to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7046/how-do-i-get-attention-for-old-unanswered-questions&quot;&gt;draw attention to an old question&lt;/a&gt;, but asking the exact question again would only result in the new one being closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question has some subtle but important difference from the existing one, it's OK to post a new question.  But it would be advisable to call out the older one in your question to preemptively stave off people closing yours as a duplicate. &quot;This may seem like a duplicate of (this other question) but it's not, because...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is natural to feel dejected when you receive negative feedback, but it's just a part of life on the site.  It is very easy to ask a duplicate question accidentally.  As long as you did your diligence in searching for an answer and reviewing the list of 'potentially similar questions' on the ask screen, you shouldn't feel bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Mitch already answered, closed questions don't really count against you unless it's a repetitive problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T04:42:07.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6811" CreationDate="2015-05-01T05:08:14.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think there's no doubt at all that the edit was wrong, just revert it immediately. If you're 90% sure you could ask on Chat for a second opinion, if you're 50% sure then starting a discussion in Meta would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These things happen all the time, and it's not that big a deal. Sometimes at first glance it looks like the edits really are faithful to the original, and we should expect a few bad edits to be approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem is reviewers who never reject any edits, always vote to keep questions open etc. The reviwer stats in the edit review page show you how the reviewers have reviewed in the past. If you see someone with 100 approvals and 5 or less rejections, then that looks bad. As reviews are public you can check on their activity page to see if they have been approving obviously bad edits. And if you find someone like that, you should report them to a mod. There are many unconstructive behaviours on this site, like users who don't vote or only answer in the comments, but unlike those, approving bad edits has clear and definite negative effects. I'm not sure exactly what process the mods would take with such a user, but I believe that bans would not be off the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T05:08:14.013" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T14:58:01.277" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;&quot;what is reputation?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; help page, we have a list of 7 ways you can gain reputation, and 5 ways you can lose it (receive downvote to question, receive downvote to answer, give downvote, place bounty, be flagged as a spammer/offender).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, those 5 ways are not actually the only ways for someone to lose rep, as evidenced by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6787/why-reputation-is-lost-when-a-question-is-deleted&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/i-just-lost-15-in-one-go-a-fine&quot;&gt;recent&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6788/why-am-i-losing-two-reputation&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;. Can we add a few more elements?  Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;accepted answer is un-accepted: -15&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;upvoted answer is un-upvoted: -10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;upvoted question is un-upvoted: -5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;post &lt;em&gt;(question or answer)&lt;/em&gt; is deleted: lose all rep points gained from that post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestions for wording on that last item are welcome.  :-)  Also, are there any other ways that I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T14:58:01.277" Title="Update &quot;What is Reputation?&quot; page to include other rep-loss events" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6811" CreationDate="2015-05-01T15:30:37.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit back, and explain why in the edit comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the example where &lt;em&gt;not everything that is gold glitters&lt;/em&gt; got mistakenly changed to &lt;em&gt;not everything that glitters is gold&lt;/em&gt;, you could edit and explain in the comments something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Previous edit changed the meaning of the first sentence; reverting to author's intent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or in the one where the OP asked &quot;Can I say [wrong sentence]?&quot; and the grammar of the wrong sentence got changed, you can say something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reverting the part of the edit which changed the sentence that OP was asking about, because that edit made it a new question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(or a more succinct version of that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the edit made actual improvements besides the error, there's no need to revert the whole thing; just correct the mistaken part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, remember that you can ping editors of a post by @ing them in a comment on the post. Assume good intent and be polite (as I'm sure you would be) - if I made such an editing error myself, I'd be grateful that someone else picked up on it, and having my attention drawn to it would tend to make me pay closer attention in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty unlikely that a user would get upset over that if you explained clearly and politely what you were doing and why. If they did, chances are they would have got upset whatever you did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62605" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T15:30:37.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T16:27:34.927" Score="-2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have the rep to close questions or shut people down, but perhaps one day I will have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mari-Lou, bless her, just told me not to feed a troll. Now, I have encountered some of the wickedest trolls on the net, I &lt;em&gt;know from trolls&lt;/em&gt;. And I don't think this one is a troll, just stupid. I see no malice there. Likewise with another questioner who keeps getting told the same thing and not believing it. I itch to ask him – if he, a Frenchman, knows English better than us, why is he here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We try to be nice, but some people make it very difficult. &quot;Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain&quot;, wrote Schiller. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard for how many times you should tell a person the same thing before giving up on him? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T17:55:47.117" Title="What to do with people who just don't listen" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6817" CreationDate="2015-05-01T17:55:47.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no need for a community rule on that. Sure, you shouldn't hurt existing rules - so, if for example it started out as a lengthy comment discussion, you should move to chat instead. But else, it is your personal decision how long to talk to somebody. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are in the middle of the conversation and don't know which way to decide, you could take a minute to think:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are you trying to achieve by talking to this person? Why are you talking to him at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now that you are clear about your goal: Will it be achieved by repeating what you said? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, repeat it &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the answer is &quot;only if he is receptive for listening&quot;, start helping him become more receptive. If it works, come back to your point, else give up. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the answer is &quot;no&quot;, ask yourself if there is something else you can say to achieve your goal&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is something else, try that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if not, leave the discussion. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that anybody can give you a guideline on the preferred length of a discussion before giving up, but maybe somebody will surprise me. Again, the above assumes the situation you described: not a troll, but somebody who does not hear what you are saying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4252" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T17:55:47.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T23:22:03.077" Score="13" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read Josh61’s considerations about “Thanks for not laughing at my question”, I stopped to ponder.  There are days, and I think you all agree, when only 10 to 20% of the questions we get deserve an answer.  Most of them are off-topic, be it because they are unclear, poorly formulated, very elementary for EL&amp;amp;U, or they simply have no answer (“Is there a word for seeing your neighbor in town and not being able to talk to him?” as someone here posted as a pertinent example of a lousy question).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couldn’t the mods or “the powers that be” do something about this?  Shouldn’t the “Don’t ask about…” instruction be more emphatic, clearer and, perhaps in bold type?  A clearer reference to ELL as the appropriate site for beginners would also help but I don't see it there.&#xA;Also, I believe some “first-timers” never even take the time to read the instructions.  Wouldn’t it, then, be the case that we had these instructions repeated on the “ask your question” page? Something like “WE DON’T ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT…” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I realize that it is frustrating for newcomers looking for an answer to have their questions closed, it is also frustrating for those of us who care about this site to see that the latest ten or fifteen questions shouldn’t be here at all and all we have to do is close-vote or direct the new user to ELL.  All this when most of us were expecting to find questions of a better caliber. I'm not sure everyone agrees but I believe it's much better for EL&amp;amp;U to receive five good questions a day than fifty questions which nobody cares to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we can do?  If we don't, we will have to work much harder to deal with the review queue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T18:17:01.410" Title="Is there anything we can do to get fewer off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-02T03:28:15.353" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a well-known military acronym (like KIA, SOP, or POW) ending with a specific letter. I've went through a rather long list of acronyms, but none are really well-known (or unambiguous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think EL&amp;amp;U is a really a good fit for this kind of question, is it? And if not, where should I go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109883" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T03:28:15.353" Title="Where to ask for an acronym?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6822" CreationDate="2015-05-02T03:44:52.273" Score="4" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the deleted question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6709/a-simple-proposal-to-encourage-people-to-ask-better-questions&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6709/a-simple-proposal-to-encourage-people-to-ask-better-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it be re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I didn't get much support or attention. I don't know if it is a reason to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T08:06:50.533" Title="Why was my question about improving this site deleted by &quot;Community ♦&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6821" CreationDate="2015-05-02T08:06:50.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an MSE post about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;deletion of questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The system will automatically delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/auto-deleting-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;unlocked, unanswered questions that have negative score after 30 days&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't realise this applied to Meta posts, but I suppose there's no reason not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post was not locked, was at &amp;minus;1 and had no answers. The last comment on it was on March&amp;nbsp;27, so it was deleted after thirty days or thereabouts on April 25. It's &quot;thereabouts&quot; because deletions are done by a scheduled job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it was too specific for a question. That is, instead of a question &quot;Would this fix this problem?&quot; it seems more common to ask a question &quot;What would fix this problem?&quot; which allows a variety of answers. You could try adding your proposal as an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6819/is-there-anything-we-can-do-to-get-fewer-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;a related question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T08:06:50.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6763" CreationDate="2015-05-03T04:52:07.523" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Introduce the OPs to lang-8.com . That site is dedicated to language learners having their compositions proof-read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T04:52:07.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2015-05-03T21:56:52.430" Score="20" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Grammar&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;McCawley's &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;. It turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;pg=PR4&amp;amp;lpg=PR4&amp;amp;dq=mccawley+1998+syntactic+phenomena&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first three chapters&lt;/a&gt; of this classic 1998 grammar &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; available free on Google Books. The rest of the book is not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be very good marketing for the University of Chicago Press, or whoever made this decision, because it gives a good and useful sample of what's in the book. The first three chapters are the general ones, where the author lays out the methodology, definitions, examples, and tests for syntax. They're all most people need to read; the other chapters are specialized on individual construction types and other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These chapters consist of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; (pp 1-10) Introduction&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; (pp 11-54) Overview of the Scheme of Syntactic Analysis Adopted Below&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; (pp 55-81) Some Tests for Deep and Surface Constituent Structure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are useful tree diagrams and excellent example sentences throughout. Anyone familiar with what's in these three chapters has gone a long way toward mastering English syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McCawley's book is very clear, but it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a technical scientific work intended as a college textbook for a year-long course. It's not necessary to understand linguistics to benefit from the book; however, readers will have to understand that &lt;strong&gt;spoken&lt;/strong&gt; English is what grammar, and therefore this book, is about. There is no treatment of spelling, punctuation, or &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; grammar, for instance; these are not syntactic phenomena, but social ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pullum and Huddleston's &lt;em&gt;Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;.  This gigantic (1860 pages) and magisterial reference book was published in 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huddleston and Pullum covers everything -- including, for example, a chapter on punctuation by Geoffrey Nunberg -- and introduces a number of terminological innovations that may become widely accepted in a while; my advice is to be wary of the terminology -- learn it, and learn the alternative terms as well. They are discussed as they are introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, what McCawley calls a &amp;quot;restrictive relative clause&amp;quot;, Pullum and Huddleston call an &amp;quot;essential relative clause&amp;quot;; what McC calls a &amp;quot;particle&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; in phrasal verbs like &lt;em&gt;pick up&lt;/em&gt;, P&amp;amp;H call an &amp;quot;intransitive preposition&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;. You will find both sets of terms (among many others, from all over the world) used here on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T03:51:29.073" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:51:29.073" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-03T21:56:52.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2015-05-04T01:00:54.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&quot;Comment&quot; Answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New Users (&amp;lt; 50 rep)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many brand new users arrive here with hopes of commenting on the conversation (so to speak), but provide an &quot;answer&quot; instead, as they do not have the requisite rep to comment everywhere.  This may be perceived as a catch-22 to the new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi [username], welcome to ELU!  This is closer to a comment than to an answer to the poster's question. Unfortunately, as a newcomer on this site, you aren't eligible to post comments yet; but if you accumulate 50 points from asking and answering questions here that get upvoted, you will earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt; of commenting on other users' questions and answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hi [username], welcome to ELU!  This is closer to a comment than to an answer to the poster's question. Unfortunately, as a newcomer on this site, you aren't eligible to post comments yet; but if you accumulate 50 points from asking and answering questions here that get upvoted, you will earn the [privilege](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges) of commenting on other users' questions and answers.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi [username], welcome to ELU!  That's an interesting (situation/example) you provided, but this feels more like a comment than a standalone answer.  If you intended to comment on another answer, you won't earn this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt; until you earn a little reputation first by asking and answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hi [username], welcome to ELU!  That's an interesting (situation/example) you provided, but this feels more like a comment than a standalone answer.  If you intended to comment on another answer, you won't earn this [privilege](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges) until you earn a little reputation first by asking and answering questions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New Users (with other SE accounts)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tell-tale sign someone falls into this category is having 101 rep due to the association bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi [username], welcome to EL&amp;amp;U!  That's an interesting (situation/example) you provided, but this feels more like a comment than a standalone answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T00:02:25.603" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-04T01:00:54.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2015-05-05T02:41:56.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came here through your comment on my question, and couldn't leave without my 5 cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern HTML tries to more and more &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Semantic_HTML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;separate&lt;/a&gt; structure/semantics from styling, and Markdown as a lighter way to write a subset of HTML even more so. It is for this reason that in HTML one should use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;em&amp;gt;x&amp;lt;/em&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;strong&amp;gt;x&amp;lt;/strong&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (emphasis and strong emphasis) instead of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;x&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;x&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (italic and bold) – not to mention &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;font&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;! –, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown codes&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;*x*&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;**x**&lt;/code&gt; stand for the former and not the latter. Because of that I think allowing more styling-oriented markup in questions and answers on SE would be the wrong move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that separation perspective, the question would be: What kind of &lt;em&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt; would you like to lead to a styling in small caps? For example, on the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; website, small caps are used to style names. Since HTML does not have a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag, the correct way to implement this would be to use a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; with a &lt;code&gt;class&lt;/code&gt; attribute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1929 &amp;lt;span class=&quot;name&quot;&amp;gt;F. M. McNeill&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt; &amp;lt;em&amp;gt;Scots Kitchen&amp;lt;/em&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then have an associated style sheet that contains&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;span.name { font-variant: small-caps; }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it would be even better to also use something like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span class=&quot;title&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;em&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the above example. However, to enable something like that on SE would necessitate to agree on a whole host of additional semantic classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, SE could go beyond the small subset of HTML &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/135909&quot;&gt;whitelisted&lt;/a&gt; in questions and answers and allow to use something like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span style=&quot;font-variant: small-caps&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, but a) that would go against semantics &amp;amp; style separation, and b) I guess it would it make harder for them to filter out other kinds of HTML markup that might have &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;malicious side effects&lt;/a&gt;. Also, we are not the designers of this website, just the guys who write all the text. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T13:32:21.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-05T03:50:13.513" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/244267/50720&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; closed, in view of claims to 'please include the research you've done...'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated in my OP, I consulted Etymonline, OED, and a logic textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update on 2015 May 6:&lt;/strong&gt; I thank the five users who generously reopened my question. Maybe no reply is needed to this question then, but I shall leave this for the benefit of others&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(but please feel free to advise otherwise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T14:57:35.633" Title="Closure of question that cited Etymonline, OED, &amp; a logic textbook?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-06T05:09:11.103" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed the following comment left pretty much verbatim, and it bothers me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post - you can always comment on your own posts, and once you have sufficient &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; you will be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment on any post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a moderator, I have no access to anything above the most basic review queues, so I don't know if this a quick response available at higher reputation levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But leaving it on new new users' posts doesn't seem terribly helpful.  Why suggest to leave a comment when they can't leave a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be constructive here, a possible solution would be to offer two separate answers depending on the rep level of the poster, with new users getting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6825/106801&quot;&gt;slightly more helpful version&lt;/a&gt; that does not suggest leaving a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9953/could-we-please-be-a-bit-nicer-to-new-users#comment422302_9953&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T20:30:18.247" Title="Why do we tell users to comment when they don't have sufficient rep to do so?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-06T07:33:30.177" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/244537/59258&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt; as an example, word/phrase request questions frequently get answers for many different word classes. It has several verbs and adjectives, and 'tooth and nail' would be an adverb I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason for off-topic word/phrase requests is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Describe the intended meaning, connotation, and/or context in as much detail as you can. ... Does the question describe exactly in what context you want to use a single word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it should be required for these request questions to specify if they are after a noun, verb, adjective etc. Those that do not should be closed. I think it would be helpful for the tag wiki page to be edited to explain that part of what 'describing the context' means is to specify a word class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T07:33:30.177" Title="Do word/phrase requests need to say what word class they want?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|single-word-requests|question-requirements|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6830" CreationDate="2015-05-06T11:37:40.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, yes that text is a templated response available from the review queue.  It is worded the same way on all the sites that I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen quite often on sites like SuperUser that new users will post an answer along the lines of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Have you tried...?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  This is clearly something that should be in a comment.  In these cases the template response is appropriate and guides users to the help centre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation threshold for comments has been discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/51926/new-users-cant-ask-for-clarifications-except-as-answers/51939#51939&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  It tries to teach new users the difference between a comment and an answer on the SE system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that the &lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt; close reason is sometimes used too enthusiastically. It is also true that the wording may be confusing to a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The template texts do get changed from time to time.  Perhaps you could suggest an improvement.  Meta.SE may be a better place to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T11:37:40.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6830" CreationDate="2015-05-06T18:47:39.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't fully agree with the premise of the Question, that &quot;we tell users to comment when they don't have sufficient rep to do so&quot;.  It clearly states the limitations on Commenting, as a privilege to be earned via reputation building.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can argue that this restriction is undesirable for policy reasons, but that is a different discussion, one that has been held on Meta.SE as well as many Community Meta sites.  If new users are &lt;em&gt;motivated&lt;/em&gt; at all to earn this privilege by participation in constructive ways, that aspect of the templated text is serving a useful and &lt;em&gt;encouraging&lt;/em&gt; purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some corner cases where &quot;comments-as-answers&quot; are worthy of being transformed (by a Moderator) into actual Comments (one can and should flag for Moderator attention in those rare cases).  But often the posts that get deleted with an explanation that it isn't an answer but (possibly) a comment instead are simply failed efforts at providing useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the primary message of the templated text is giving the OP a sense of which way they have failed in using the Answer box on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further this particular message is only a template, and an optional one from a list of several available to a Reviewer.  That is, the No Comment option is the default, and since the message is posted as a Comment under the Reviewer's username, it is editable for an interval of time after posting, and it can be deleted by them at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7004" LastEditorUserId="7004" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T20:30:18.247" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T20:30:18.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6819" CreationDate="2015-05-07T05:28:32.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once made a suggestion, and posted it on meta. It garnered a few upvotes but nothing changed. So I'll propose that same suggestion again. (Does that make any sense?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5222/declutter-elus-newest-page&quot;&gt;Declutter EL&amp;amp;U&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Newest&amp;quot; Page&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rereading it, I sound mightily pissed off. Or perhaps today I am because recently I have  seen newcomers who post questions that could have been answered, or have been improved upon if they had looked up the definitions in a DICTIONARY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244768/what-is-demeanor-and-how-is-it-measured&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244768/what-is-demeanor-and-how-is-it-measured&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please define &quot;demeanor&quot; and discuss how it is measured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244792/what-does-plough-mean-in-this-context&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;plough&amp;quot; mean in this context (“they would plough you”)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following excerpt has been taken from The Time Machine by H.G.Wells:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,’ &#xA;   the Very Young Man thought. &#xA;  ‘In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The &#xA;   German scholars have improved Greek so much.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does 'plough' mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/243022/what-is-the-meaning-of-tank-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;tank&amp;quot; in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that to tank means to become strong, huge in height and weight. But I can't place the same meaning in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the economy tanks as it did in the recent recession,&#xA;  How does the economy become stronger in a recession ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amazingly, that last question earned three upvotes. This is nothing short of crazy voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions 1 and 3 are currently on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2 has received a very good answer, which makes me very pleased for the OP, but that doesn't mean it is a ‘good question’. If the OP had shared his research, and explained &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he was confused that would have made the question more interesting for users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T06:18:18.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5366" CreationDate="2015-05-09T02:08:47.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We actually do occasionally close questions for this reason: &quot;based on a faulty presupposition&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the end, it doesn't matter how they acquired the faulty presupposition, does it? We all walk around with such presuppositions in our heads. They ask a question, and we do or do not correct their faulty presupposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems rather odd on a Q&amp;amp;A site - especially one about language, something few native speakers study - to require people to share why they think the way they do. Before finding this site, I had a lot of strange notions about language as well (probably still do), and I was raised bilingually, which means I didn't give much thought to not only two languages, but to how or why they differed as much as they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T02:08:47.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-09T06:44:29.627" Score="8" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4691/why-are-anonymous-users-allowed-to-edit-questions&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; didn't have a satisfactory answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been seeing edits that are increasingly vulgur. Here's the latest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dxBqr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering: is there a reason you're not required to create an account before proposing edits. Is there some benefit from this I'm not seeing. I suppose it is to encourage new users to participate more, but has anyone stopped to evaluate if this is really helping the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T18:56:40.327" Title="Why are anonymous users allowed to propose edits?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6839" CreationDate="2015-05-09T14:48:33.767" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;is english.stackexchange normative or creative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as with anything that evolves, english improves through a creative process that introduces new features and remains cohesive through a normative process that removes rarely used features. i realize that some questions specifically encourage neologisms, but outside those are you expected to provide answers for which you could (in theory) provide citations to existing works? similarly, when voting on answers, should i upvote answers that effectively describe to me an elegant way of communicating to a modern native english speaker the objective of the asker. or should i only upvote those that are already widely accepted as &quot;proper english&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example, take my answer to this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244841/single-word-that-unambigously-describes-the-product-of-folding/244915#244915&quot;&gt;Single word that unambiguously describes the product of folding&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;i used a word &quot;topology&quot; in a way that seemed intuitive to me as a native english speaker.  it was pointed out that topology has historically been used (in the context of mathematics) to describe an algorithm rather than an output. however, i felt that the perhaps somewhat novel usage would be clear in the context of the question (a math paper on folding). regardless of the quality of my answer, my question is about the validity of an answer that is novel usage. in the context of a question that does not invite such answers, can new words and new grammar be legitimately proposed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;perhaps another way of asking this question is to say: &quot;is english.stackexchange about communicating effectively within the bounds of english? or is it about communicating effectively with people who understand english?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is a closely related question about the type of community we are trying to be/attract: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17/how-can-we-promote-this-site&quot;&gt;How can we promote this site?&lt;/a&gt; it occurs to me, that for many users, perhaps the site is not about communicating effectively at all. as answers to the other question suggest, the site may appeal most to linguists who think all native speaker usage is &quot;right&quot; or &quot;mavens&quot; who have a narrow and pedantic focus on widely accepted grammar and word definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternatively, is there a way to efficiently flag questions and/or answers as either creative or normative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T01:07:40.133" Title="is english.stackexchange normative or creative?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6836" CreationDate="2015-05-09T18:56:40.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer as to why SE allows anonymous users to suggest edits is the same reason as to why registered users with 1 rep can suggest edits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I earn reputation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a suggested edit is approved, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/76284/223820&quot;&gt;the user who suggested it gets +2&#xA;reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The regular daily reputation cap applies, and the total&#xA;cap for reputation gained via suggested edits is 1,000. Like any other&#xA;reputation, the +2 is reversed if the edited post is ever deleted.&#xA;When a suggested edit is rejected, no penalty is given. Once you have&#xA;earned the edit privilege, your edits are no longer peer reviewed and&#xA;no reputation is given for edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What about abuse or bad edits?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are strict limits enforced. &lt;strong&gt;If a user&lt;/strong&gt; (anonymous or registered) &lt;strong&gt;submits many rejected edits they will be automatically banned&lt;/strong&gt; from suggesting edits for 7 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fixed size queue also helps protect us from abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;SO helpcentre&lt;/a&gt; which I have always presumed provides the basis for all the other Stack sites&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I edit posts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit, &lt;strong&gt;you are welcome to do so&lt;/strong&gt;. The original author of a question or answer may always edit their own post, regardless of reputation level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some users suggesting edits is an easy and quick way of earning the mythical reputation points. It is one of the many ways a newcomer can ‘earn’ certain privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;Remove New User Restrictions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Privilege Type: Milestone Privilege&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Awarded At: &lt;strong&gt;10 Reputation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;Vote Up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Privilege Type: Moderation Privilege&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Awarded At: &lt;strong&gt;15 Reputation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not such a quick way to earn the right of commenting everywhere …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comment Everywhere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Privilege Type: Communication Privilege&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Awarded At: &lt;strong&gt;50 Reputation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T18:56:40.327" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6837" CreationDate="2015-05-09T21:25:42.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your terminology, the community at ELU is almost entirely &lt;em&gt;normative&lt;/em&gt;, meaning answering according to existing rules and variations (more on that in a second).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community has explicitly noted that they should mostly avoid things like neologisms or changes to grammar rules that are proposed to be better (by some criteria) and therefore is not (in general,- there are infrequent exceptions to everything) &lt;em&gt;creative&lt;/em&gt;. The SE (not just ELU) principles of having mostly answerable non-discussion questions directs us away from making up things or discussing the viability of a change in some rule (these are much too opinion based and or broad, two close reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to 'normative', I am putting prescriptivism and descriptivism together here, because they both are rule based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptivists tend to hold that there is one correct grammar and style for speaking and writing. It is often the province of professional writers and educators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Descriptivists tend to record rules on what people &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; do (which is often at odds with the 'single' approved style/grammar). They still have the concept of a language mistake, it's just more lenient than a prescriptivist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Descriptivist is a somewhat derogatory term that prescriptivists give to those people who insist on poor, 'anything goes' English, allowing profanity and textspeak in serious publications like Merriam-Webster, or allowing '10 items or less' at grocery signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist is a somewhat derogatory term that descriptvists give to those people who insist on grammar rules that are inauthentic and made up out of some bizarre pedagogy (split infinitive, no prepositions at the ends of sentences) or double negative (used in informal or varieties of English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one will say that prepositions come after the noun, or that &quot;I Liking the two dog&quot; is how to say it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some sense, in answers, we are all prescriptivists here, trying to tell people what is right, just that descriptivists will allow more variation, and describe differences between register and dialect. &quot;I'm going to hospital&quot; is totally wrong in American English, but totally right in British English. &quot;I ain't going&quot; is not something you should be writing in a newspaper article, but a foreign learner of English will have to know how to understand and say that (and the rules that govern it) to get by in certain subcultures of English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T21:25:42.003" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6837" CreationDate="2015-05-10T00:03:06.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;suppose that for unexplained (but possibly mystical) reasons of my own i decide to capitalize every Seventeenth word in my answer to this question. on the one hand, such a decision seems difficult To characterize as &quot;normative&quot; since it isn't something most people do, and since it isn't calculated to Make what i write easier for readers to comprehend. but on the other hand, if i enforce It consistently, it clearly qualifies as a rule (albeit an arbitrary one) regularly applied and rigorously enforced Across the length of my answer, which can be viewed as its own miniature universe obedient to The physics i choose to impose on it. surely such predictable regularity is the very essence of &quot;Normative.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at the same time, since i thought of this rule myself, with little or no encouragement Or precedent from others, it indisputably qualifies as a creative approach, though &quot;creative&quot; seems an odd label To attach to an innovation that, once instituted, requires nothing more than careful counting. but that's the Contradiction here, isn't it? to be meaningful to others, words, sentences, punctuation, capitalization, and myriad other aspects Of written language must be normalized at some level. otherwise readers are forced to deal with the Worst form of humpty-dumptyism—the form in which the humpty-dumpty figure doesn't bother to define &lt;em&gt;glory&lt;/em&gt; because, After all, it, like any other word, means whatever he wants it to. very creative is mr. Dumpty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;still, to answer questions creatively, we must do more than consistently apply a limited set of Boolean operators. we must deal in nuance and impression and inventive example. and we do, at times. I think that the idea that &quot;normative&quot; and &quot;creative&quot; pull in opposite directions is misleading and ultimately Incorrect. it may be that for pascal, operating in an existential universe of big questions demanding solution, Chopping the methodology of answers into &lt;em&gt;esprit de géométrie&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;esprit de finesse&lt;/em&gt; made a certain amount Of sense—but that, i think, is because he was trying to understand all solution space as Fundamentally mathematical or at least logical. here at el&amp;amp;u, prospective answerers are under no such pressure or Obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so i would say that the primary goal that answerers at this site seek to achieve Is to supply answers that cover the question fairly and (if possible) thoroughly in a way that Both the original question asker and subsequent readers can understand—which calls for a combination of the Normative (orderly argument and logical clarity) and the creative (constructing apt examples and respecting the imprecision of Language). it isn't an either or situation. oh and as for the seventeen thing—it's about the Locusts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-05-10T01:07:40.133" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T01:07:40.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-10T11:20:50.820" Score="22" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are currently 36 questions &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/essay&quot;&gt;tagged, &quot;essay&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Nearly two thirds of them are closed or on hold. Most of the questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/essay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; are due to OP needing to write an essay, rather than being about essays. Let's consider deleting this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way that future use of the tag can be blocked, so that it doesn't reappear in new questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T07:08:52.293" Title="Should we delete the essay tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-10T13:02:46.717" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I did before and based on the suggestions, I do google to find matches for the sentences/phrases I'm doubtful about. Some times, although sentences seem to be correct, there are no (or few) matches  for them. For example, for &quot;is disagreeable at first glance&quot;, there is one exact match in the Google Books.&#xA;So, my straight question is should I rely on such results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103809" OwnerDisplayName="Eilia Abraham" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T13:32:25.600" Title="Should Google be considered as the ultimate resource for checking sentences?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6811" CreationDate="2015-05-11T15:06:42.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things you should know about the edit approval system. The first is that bad approvers is a huge problem and there are some attempts (in my opinion, not enough) to deal with it. Review audits, for example, will lock some people out of the approval system if they just mash the Approve button without looking at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that you can @ an editor. You won't get autocomplete, so it might not feel like it's working, but it's working. So in addition to rolling back the edit and explaining yourself in the edit comment, leave an @ comment for the person who submitted the edit saying that you have rolled back and why. There is a chance you will make this person a better editor by doing this. The robo approvers are a different story, but if you ignore them and go to the source (a bad suggested edit that should have been declined) you have a chance to improve site quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3946" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T15:06:42.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6811" CreationDate="2015-05-11T19:53:14.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only recently begun taking review tasks seriously as a responsibility that comes with being a fairly high-scoring participant at this site—prompted in large part by tchrist's inspiring Meta post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6683/how-can-we-encourage-more-folks-to-edit&quot;&gt;How can we encourage more folks to edit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came to EL&amp;amp;U from a background in copyediting, so I have a fairly strong sense of how to improve questions and answers while remaining true to the intent of the poster. But what I don't have is a shared standard regarding what constitutes a legitimate question or answer; and in the absence of that, I apply my own standard, which appears to be considerably broader than the standard some other users have. I hope that my judgment hasn't led me to endorse bad edits of the type that Mari-Lou A rightly denounces in her question, but it has led me to try to upgrade and preserve certain questions and answers that others might prefer to see rejected out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the brief time that I've been vetting suggested edits, I've seen many instances where the editor simply grafts an unrelated opinion onto an exiting post, or makes alterations that are irrelevant to the quality and clarity of the original post. These I vote to reject. On the other hand, I've seen enough positive editing efforts in the queue to conclude that such contributions are probably, on balance, beneficial to the site. The key to making the system work is for the people doing the reviewing to take their job seriously and not to give glazed-eyed approval to everything they see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am leery, however, of the idea of punishing &quot;bad&quot; reviewers—particularly reviewers of first posts, late posts, and possible low-quality posts. Because our standards vary so much from person to person, and because those standards reflect differing views as to the types of questions that should be welcomed (or tolerated) at EL&amp;amp;U, I think that threatening reviewers with punishment for being insufficiently discriminating in their approvals is problematic and potentially counterproductive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might make more sense for a moderator who perceives a problem with a reviewer's laxity to send the reviewer a tactful note suggesting that he or she consider either adopting a more stringent approach or leave reviewing the queues to other users. After all, I imagine, people participate in such review tasks mainly out of a sense of public-spiritedness, and not from a desire to gain a handful of obscure badges. I know that if a moderator were to tell me that my standards were so much at odds with those of the reviewing majority that they would prefer that I stop &quot;helping&quot; with review tasks, I would readily comply and go back to focusing on the more enjoyable tasks of asking and answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that reviewers (and editors) are participating in a spirit of good will, we can help each other contribute to EL&amp;amp;U in positive ways, and avoid needless conflict and hard feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T19:53:14.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6811" CreationDate="2015-05-12T16:13:52.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is the most grievous sin anyone can commit on a board like this one: to &quot;edit&quot; someone's question or answer into meaninglessness or worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/94886/2303&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I gave a few years ago, and especially look at the edit trail, and the comments below. Some helpful soul decided that what I said was 180° opposite from what he thought I should have said. And apparently some other individuals decided he was right. So he, and they, changed my answer into nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sigh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T16:13:52.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-05-12T18:05:09.420" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/168/the-overlook-hotel?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SiAgx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writing exercise chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T18:05:09.420" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-12T18:05:09.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6819" CreationDate="2015-05-14T05:10:51.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One approach to reducing the flow of subpar questions from non-native speakers of English might be for the 'Powers that Be' to use IP data to analyse the national origins of the traffic flowing to ELU (and ELL, for that matter), and then to post links to FAQs that correspond to the main language(s) spoken in those countries. One of the primary aims of these FAQs would be to clarify what type of question is best suited to which forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning is that the eye of a native speaker of, say, Russian, will tend to be caught by a link written in Russian (which would only have to express the concept &quot;FAQs in Russian&quot;), and its owner would then be reasonably likely to read that FAQ before deciding where (or even if) to post his or her question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are far too many living languages in existence for it to be practical to cater for them all in this manner. But my unverified &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;educated guess&lt;/a&gt; is that FAQs written in Arabic, Bengali, German, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian and Spanish would find readers among a good proportion of non-native speakers of English who visit the ELL and ELU sites. (Some tweaks would no doubt have to be made to that list to reflect the actual demographic characteristics of site visitors.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd imagine that compiling relevant FAQs in a dozen or so other languages that describe at least the most important posting criteria should be doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71980" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T05:10:51.480" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T05:22:53.427" Score="15" ViewCount="1363" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta&quot;&gt;The Many Memes of Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;em&gt;meta.stackexchange&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Catchphrases and concepts that spread from person to person are known as memes, which, courtesy the Internet, can now explode across the Earth like a highly contagious virus (hence &quot;going viral&quot;). As with their real-life counterparts, some infectious diseases are global (pandemic), while others are endemic to specific regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's list the memes of EL&amp;amp;U here to have a museum of EL&amp;amp;U memes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: One meme per answer please.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T05:41:23.010" Title="Memes of English Language &amp; Usage" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2015-05-14T05:23:07.767" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originator:&lt;/strong&gt; Community♦ (creator of the tag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural Height:&lt;/strong&gt; Every day (almost?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; Most popular and most discussed question type on EL&amp;amp;U. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;third most-used tag currently&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/word-for-disrespecting-eldest-half-sister-by-referring-to-her-husband-as-girly-g&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he&amp;#39;s amused but the rest of the family isn&amp;#39;t?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; The meme is not just about it being a tag. It covers all the absurd single word request questions we get and the discussions regarding to this question type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T13:54:47.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T07:04:23.993" Score="8" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please advise me if this is better suited towards the main site. I posted the question here considering that it is about an ELU feature.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HFzRO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question relates to the Editor Statistics above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My area of concern is the phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-user- &lt;strong&gt;had&lt;/strong&gt; 47 edit suggestions approved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the sentence sounds very &quot;terminated&quot;. What I mean by that is it makes it seem like the user has since deleted their account and I feel that the Editor Stats are providing a summary instead of an up-to-date statistic/record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The below phrase seems a much better fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-user- &lt;strong&gt;has had&lt;/strong&gt; 47 edit suggestions approved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also taking into consideration the fact that the Reviewer Stats use &quot;has&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TK97w.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason why &quot;has&quot; isn't, or shouldn't be, used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2015-05-17T12:20:01.397" LastActivityDate="2015-05-17T12:20:01.397" Title="Past Tense in Editor Statistics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2015-05-14T20:00:02.517" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme&lt;/strong&gt;: _________ hits on Google&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin&lt;/strong&gt;: Possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/133145/117780&quot;&gt;Janus Bahs Jacquet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural Height&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;code&gt;23,460,000 hits on Google&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;: Often used to justify a &lt;code&gt;single-word-request&lt;/code&gt; answer, no suggestion can possibly be considered complete without stating just how easy it was to search for on Google. Seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/246364/117780&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49383/is-there-a-word-or-phrase-for-shared-accountability-that-leads-to-collective-in/49410#49410&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88094/honorary-gifts/88116#88116&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and partially debunked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246359/is-there-a-word-to-describe-a-person-whos-addicted-to-downloading-stuff-from-in#comment533669_246364&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117780" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T20:00:02.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2015-05-15T05:04:04.000" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; Thank you for visiting ELU. Your question is off-topic. Please visit English Language Learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin:&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural Height:&lt;/strong&gt; Still yet to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; Because 95% of questions asked on this site are borderline off-topic, you have a very high chance of seeing this in most questions. It doesn't seem possible to prevent the questions from being asked, so the best we can do is tell them they're on the wrong site after the fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2015-05-15T05:41:23.010" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T05:41:23.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-15T22:35:54.243" Score="12" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spam&lt;/em&gt; can be defined in various different ways, but for the purposes of a StackExchange site, I have always been of the opinion that a broad definition is generally desirable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/spam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;(ODO)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition fits well with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/content-policy&quot;&gt;SE Content Policy&lt;/a&gt; note on spam users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users that do not publish meaningful content, use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or whose primary purpose is affiliate marketing, will be suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you flag something as spam on ELU, the explanatory text (and thus, presumably, the definition of what constitutes spam on ELU) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exists only to promote a product or service, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;does not disclose the author’s affiliation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– which is quite a different definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a certain amount of questions and answers that are almost certainly made by spambots and has only more or less irrelevant, auto-guessed, or downright nonsensical content, even if they don’t actually contain any links or try to promote any product or service as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26903/why-is-a-fountain-pen-so-called/246174#246174&quot;&gt;this (now deleted) answer&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, the question is about fountain pens, and yes, the answer is also a picture of a fountain pen … but answer visibly consists &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; of a picture of a fountain and a (nonsensical, ungrammatical) ‘headline’, and the full text in the answer (which, apart from the header, is hidden in the link text box for the image) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;My Fountain Pen My Favorite One (And my only one)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is my exquisite fountain pen I saved up for. it is a mess. Why? Well, because it's a fountain pen of course. Fountain pens are awful, but awesome at the same time. My friend tricked me with some disappearing ink on my B-day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, to me at least, reads like a very obviously automated answer made by a spambot. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/121548/user121548&quot;&gt;user&lt;/a&gt; who posted it had just signed up when this was posted—in fact, as far as I can tell (and I’m not even sure how this is technically possible), the answer was posted &lt;em&gt;the same second&lt;/em&gt; the user account was created, and the user has not been seen since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I flagged the answer as spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag, however, was declined (“a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it”). This is not, if memory serves, the first time I have flagged a similar post as spam and subsequently had the flag declined, which leads me to believe that the moderators are basing their definition of ‘spam’ on the text in the flagging box: if it doesn’t actively try to promote a product/service, then it’s not spam. (Please correct me if this belief is mistaken.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, this type of question/answer should more appropriately be flagged as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt; instead, though criteria for what that category entails are even more fuzzy; the words of one or two moderators on a different question somewhere would lead me to believe that at least some moderators would decline such a flag for the answer in question here, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just me, or is that shooting ourselves in the foot somewhat? Would it not make more sense to reserve ‘not an answer’ for real, actual users who post answers that do not try to answer the question; use the ‘spam’ category for anything that appears to be automated, irrelevant, meaningless, nonsense, deceptive, or otherwise &lt;em&gt;not what you’d expect of a real user&lt;/em&gt;; and update our definition of spam to be more in line with the general SE Content Policy definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T10:26:07.250" Title="What constitutes spam?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6865" CreationDate="2015-05-17T12:42:47.863" Score="19" ViewCount="14307" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I ask this is because an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246404/is-there-a-term-for-a-question-that-is-only-a-question-because-of-a-question-mar/246410#246410&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; I gave to a question quoted an Urban Dictionary definition and received 2 downvotes without any explanation as to why. Could anyone please tell me what (if anything) is wrong with my answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T08:12:02.420" Title="Is Urban Dictionary an acceptable source?" Tags="|discussion|answers|answering-advice|online-resources|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6860" CreationDate="2015-05-17T13:00:05.193" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Urban Dictionary can be a resource for slang phrases that are not in traditional dictionaries. However, it is not at all an authoritative source, since it is mainly an entertainment site. For questions not specifically about slang or obscure phrases, if you can find another source, it would be better to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2015-05-18T02:58:27.090" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T02:58:27.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-18T00:42:23.983" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the StackExchange footer - shown at the bottom of all the network sites - you will see that English Language &amp;amp; Usage is categorised under &quot;Culture/Recreation&quot;. I'm not sure if it is just me, but it doesn't seem right. English isn't purely cultural, nor is it exactly recreational. Sure, people take enjoyment from writing novels and such, but the writing itself - and the grammar rules and styles - is best described as an art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look under the Culture/Recreation category you will see communities such as Skeptics, Christianity and Bicycles. At the top there's English Language &amp;amp; Usage and it looks rather out of place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ELU would fit nicely with Academia, which is filed under &quot;Life/Arts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T00:42:23.983" Title="Why does this site fall under &quot;culture/recreation&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-18T21:07:25.143" Score="27" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a question at the moment. I had a question about whether &quot;bear&quot; was correct when used as a verb as in  bear with me&quot; I found the answer and much more on this site. I wanted to write a &quot;Thank you comment&quot; saying how useful this site is, but I was not able to submit one. I hope I am not wasting space and people's time, but thank you very much for this very useful site.&#xA;Kind regards,&#xA;Steve Iversen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user122108" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T01:06:00.507" Title="I just wanted to say: Thank you!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6841" CreationDate="2015-05-19T15:04:45.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am deleting instances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/essay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt;. I will do a few each day, so they don't flood the new or newly edited question view.  Feel free to remove some if you're so inclined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4915" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T15:04:45.997" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6860" CreationDate="2015-05-19T16:56:02.307" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;UD is a source that is written by amateurs, and rated by amateurs. I've used it from time to time, but it's best when supplemented with other examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether or not the UD is an &quot;acceptable&quot; source, that depends on the nature of the question. For example, suppose the O.P. is asking something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's a good slang term for a person who thinks too highly of himself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm already familiar with terms like &lt;em&gt;braggart&lt;/em&gt;, but I'm looking for&#xA;  something more modern&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and slang – something that might not have made its way into a dictionary yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, I'd say the UD is fine, particularly if someone is wanting to suggest a term that might not be widely known. However, if the O.P.'s question reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm looking for a clinical term for a person who thinks too highly of himself.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the UD probably isn't a good reference to substantiate the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back your reference, if the only place I can find the term &lt;em&gt;Question-Statement&lt;/em&gt; is in the Urban Dictionary, perhaps it's not good to use that as an answer to the O.P.'s question. However, if you can find and cite other published instances where that same phrase is used, then maybe the UD's definition, coupled with the other references you've found, could make a good answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands now, it seems like the O.P. is perhaps looking for a literary or grammatical term, and all your answer does is suggest something from the UD – something that has a rather &quot;amateurish&quot; feel. It might have gotten upvotes as a comment, but, in its current form, it was vulnerable to downvotes as an answer. In other words, I don't think the UD reference is the sole cause of the downvotes, but it's the UD reference absent any other supporting research for this particular question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Not my downvotes, btw. Just giving my opinion.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T16:56:02.307" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6860" CreationDate="2015-05-20T01:34:31.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;UD is a great source. A quick scan of the definitions give you a reliable definition of the term. Moreover, it also provides variant definitions, and the up/downvotes give you an idea of how many people would accept those definitions. Note the wisdom of crowds. The crowd is rarely wrong. (E.g. The audience on Millionaire has been right 95% of the time - much more than the experts are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42886" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T01:34:31.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6858" CreationDate="2015-05-20T10:26:07.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a newbie (exploring), I can't say anything about SE spam specifically, but I would observe that on my own essay website, my tools block vast quantities of bot-written stuff that doesn't seem to have any commercial agenda at all. Someone has called it &quot;beatnik poetry&quot;. I can't see the benefit to any flesh-and-blood person behind it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see blocked SE spam, but on the basis of my own experience as an deployer of anti-spam software, my suggestion is that we are dealing with a new life-form here. If bots have differing success in reproducing, they will be subject to selection pressures and change accordingly. Maybe we got it wrong about people creating A.I. top-down, silicon intelligence will evolve from the bottom up like the old squishy kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, I would suggest that the enemy is not solely &quot;unsolicited commercial&quot; stuff but also &lt;strong&gt;non-meaningful &quot;bot life&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Moving product in the real world is surely a contingent aspect, rather than an essential definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117675" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T10:26:07.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6860" CreationDate="2015-05-21T02:16:10.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very interested in the meanings and origins of words and phrases—and yet I think that I've used Urban Dictionary as a reference source in my answers exactly once, in response to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215078/what-does-fleek-mean-and-when-was-it-first-used/218809#218809&quot;&gt;What does “fleek” mean and when was it first used?&lt;/a&gt; And even then, I was more interested in investigating the theory that an Urban Dictionary user was the original source of the phrase &quot;on fleek&quot; than in relying on its multitude of arbitrary, sometime-compatible/sometimes-contradictory definitions for my understanding of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That experience left me with the strong impression that Urban Dictionary is a very unreliable source of accurate real-world definitions, in addition to offering virtually no practical insight into how the meanings of words and phrases have evolved over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the site's fault, really. The fundamental problem involves the large number of insincere, prank-oriented, adolescent-humor-driven users who submit definitions. The sheer volume of utterly worthless dross at Urban Dictionary is astonishing—and that's before you factor in the sincere entries written by people who can scarcely write a meaningful sentence when they try. Ultimately, there is so much random noise at Urban Dictionary that trying to extract a useful definition there can be more arduous and less rewarding than visiting a handful of online publications that happen to use a particular slang term and trying to glean its meaning there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T02:16:10.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-22T12:50:47.470" Score="4" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/245463/hypernym-for-to-increase-and-to-decrease&quot;&gt;Hypernym for &amp;quot;to increase&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;to decrease&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is on topic, I'm guessing someone saw I was asking about a video game and instantly closed it. It's about English if you actually read it. I see nothing wrong with it. Could someone explain why this was closed so I can not make the same mistake in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T12:50:47.470" Title="Why was my post deemed off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-24T00:32:05.013" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I up-voted an answer from 0 to 1, but then thought better of it and tried the down button to undo it. But when I did, the score went from 1 to -1, which is not at all what I wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couldn't each member's contribution to the score change on the fly between -1, 0, and +1 by rolling up or down between them, recalculating its effect each time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120823" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T01:02:52.843" Title="Changing my vote" Tags="|feature-request|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6871" CreationDate="2015-05-24T01:02:52.843" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to undo your upvote then click on the up arrow to remove your vote. Clicking on the down arrow will remove your upvote then add a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T01:02:52.843" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6876" CreationDate="2015-05-24T09:18:03.657" Score="-6" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I'm not the first one to discuss this, but bear with me. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-downvotes&quot;&gt;I saw this, btw&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few answers are poor. They get lots of downvotes, perhaps deservedly so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answers are divisive. They get lots of upvotes AND lots of downvotes. Usually (but not always), some representative from each camp explains their rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What really stings is the downvote of an answer others perceive to be good, as evidenced by the upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally hurtful is when an answer score changes from 0 to -1. I think the poster has a right to know why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose to make it mandatory for the FIRST downvoter to explain his rationale in a comment. If the question receives further downvotes, it can be assumed that others agree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't be surprised if I am not the first one to come up with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Adding another idea from the disussion in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative could be making anonymous downvoting a privilege, like everything else. That way, only serious trusted users can have anonymity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 125 rep, we earn downvoting privileges. That shouldn't be anonymous. Anonymous downvoting should be a privilege earned at a much higher rep. I'm thinking 1250 or 2500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T01:41:24.320" Title="The first anonymous downvote" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2015-05-24T15:16:50.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6873/the-first-anonymous-downvote#comment25616_6873&quot;&gt;OP points out,&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;trusted users are the ones who usually don't hide behind the anonymity, and [usually] speak their mind in the comments.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody's perfect, least of all me. But if I post a comment along with an [erroneous] downvote, there's a good chance I'll be pinged by someone (not necessarily the OP) challenging me to justify myself. And with any luck I'll reconsider my position and retract, if I've just been thoughtless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with OP's observation there, and I've no reason to suppose anonymous votes by high-rep users represent a serious problem on ELU (primarily because we don't do it much). Personally, I don't think &lt;em&gt;low-rep&lt;/em&gt; users cause a problem in this area either - but even if not everyone agrees with me on that, I wouldn't want to change the current system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the main reason OP is bothered is because an anonymous downvote could be seen as hostile/intimidating (once your rep starts getting into the thousands, you're hardly going to be bothered by the loss of a few points).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But disregarding unwanted &quot;noise&quot; from NNS who should usually be posting on &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, it's important to remember that &lt;em&gt;we all speak English&lt;/em&gt;, and to a first approximation we all &lt;em&gt;collectively&lt;/em&gt; define &quot;valid&quot; usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If wealthy educated grammarians had always been able to publicly &quot;out&quot; the perpetrators of any usages they didn't agree with, things like &lt;em&gt;a naranja&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Mine Ed[ward]&lt;/em&gt; might never have led to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt; orange&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;My &lt;strong&gt;Ned&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In both those examples, &quot;uneducated&quot; people propagating the new usages would have been shouted down, because by the standards of the time they were &quot;wrong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: English is inherently &quot;democratic&quot;. So is anonymous voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T15:16:50.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2015-05-24T17:52:36.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A downvote indicates that somebody thinks your answer 'not useful'; nothing more and nothing less. There is no intrinsic reason why there should be more upvotes than downvotes in total, let alone why anyone should be required to justify a downvote any more than an upvote.  If there were any evidence that people are downvoting for bad reasons, it would be worth investigating both specifically and generally;  but despite periodic complaints, there is none (for the general case; only the mods know about specifics). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, posts like this make me &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; likely to leave a comment when I downvote. Most users are mature enough to accept that a downvote indicates one person's view, and it may be worth indicating how the answer could (in my opinion) be improved. But sometimes a downvote says all that is necessary, just as an upvote may do. Somebody who thinks anonymous downvoting should be a privilege while anonymous upvoting is normal has misunderstood the nature of criticism, and nobody has a 'right' to argue with the fact that somebody else thinks an answer bad. It is not far along that line to &quot;But can you prove your opinion?&quot; or &quot;Well, you shouldn't be allowed to say things like that.&quot; An anonymous downvote from me indicates that I think that answer unhelpful, and am willing to lose a point of rep to indicate the fact. I don't expect the answerer to agree with me, but I would hope he would re-examine the post with a fresh eye. If he still thinks it a clear expression of a view he genuinely holds and can support, then it can be put out of mind (unless the numbers start to look worrying).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T10:27:12.553" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T10:27:12.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2015-05-25T06:15:14.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The officially delineated grounds for downvoting at EL&amp;amp;U are not (it seems to me) internally consistent. On the one hand, on the Help Center's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;Privileges page&lt;/a&gt;, the &amp;quot;vote down&amp;quot; privilege is accompanied by this brief and extremely broad description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indicate when questions and answers are not useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you click that description and jump to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;Vote Down page&lt;/a&gt;, you get what I take to be a significantly different representation of what downvoting is all about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is voting down?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting down, also known as &amp;quot;casting downvotes&amp;quot;, is how the community indicates which questions and answers are least useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the wording &amp;quot;indicates which questions and answers are least useful&amp;quot; is a sizable step away from the wording &amp;quot;indicate when questions and answers are not useful,&amp;quot; although what either phrase means is, of course, subject to interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might argue, for example, that endorsing the downvoting of questions and answers that are &amp;quot;least useful&amp;quot; encourages more-aggressive downvoting than does endorsing the downvoting of questions and answers that are &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot;—since a question or answer can be useful and yet still qualify as &amp;quot;least useful,&amp;quot; whereas a question or answer that is &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot; (if we understand that term literally) is less useful than the worst &amp;quot;useful but least useful&amp;quot; question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I think that reserving downvotes for &amp;quot;least useful&amp;quot; questions and answers invites a more restrained approach than does applying downvotes to all questions and answers that are &amp;quot;not useful.&amp;quot; I suppose that much of the ambiguity here relates to the unanswered question &amp;quot;useful to whom?&amp;quot; I almost never see a single-word request question or answer that is useful to me, and many of them don't seem likely to be particularly useful to most other readers, either. But for the person asking the question, both the question and the array of answers it elicits may be quite useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances, the invitation to downvote the &amp;quot;least useful&amp;quot; questions and answers seems to envisage restricting downvoting to questions and answers that seem unlikely to be of significant value to anyone, as opposed to downvoting ones that merely aren't useful to the voter. This impression is strengthened by the next question on the Vote Down page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I vote down?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvoting standard here seems radically different from either the &amp;quot;questions and answers are not useful&amp;quot; standard or the &amp;quot;questions and answers are least useful&amp;quot; standard. Taken at face value, it ignores the criterion of usefulness altogether and sets up in its place a three-pronged analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the question or answer egregiously sloppy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the question or answer constitute a no-effort-expended post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is an answer, is the answer clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to any of these three questions is yes, the standard indicates, a downvote is appropriate; and if not, it implies, not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If voters took this standard seriously, I have no doubt that there would be far fewer downvotes at EL&amp;amp;U. Questions and answers that are egregiously sloppy or show no effort at all, and answers that are clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect are far less common here than downvotes are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I've ever seen a question or answer on the main site by Tushar Raj or Mari-Lou A or Andrew Leach or TimLymington or FumbleFingers or Dan Bron (to name the six users who have participated in this discussion so far) that deserved downvoting under an objective reading of the &amp;quot;When should I downvote?&amp;quot; standard—or for that matter under an objective reading of either of the other two standards presented in EL&amp;amp;U's Help pages. Yet every month, if not every week, they—like every other regular EL&amp;amp;U participant—post useful and reasonable answers that draw downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just the way it goes at this site, perhaps to some extent because the Help Center offers inconsistent advice about what downvoting is about and when it is appropriate, but almost certainly to a much greater extent because people who have earned the right to downvote rely on their own ideas about when to exercise that right—as (I think) they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be quite vexing to put a lot of time and thought into an answer only to have someone breeze by and downvote it for some unknown reason. But to me, that's the price of participation as an answerer here. Though I sympathize with Tushar Raj's unhappiness about how unhelpful anonymous downvoting is to the person whose answer has been slapped, I think that it's a mistake to obsess over the unfairness of it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, the difference between a +25 answer, a +10 answer, a +3 answer, and a -1 answer has less to do with the quality of thought and reasoning each contains than with the vicissitudes of how many visitors read the answer, cared about it (and the related question), and agreed with its conclusions. After all, it's not as though someone who posts reliably solid answers is a genius one day and a hopeless idiot the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that comments can help you recognize weaknesses in your answer that you had previously overlooked, whereas downvotes can't. But the lesson of this disparity isn't, I think, to try to make downvoters become commenters; it's to try not to let downvotes gain outsize importance in your own appraisal of the quality of your work. Indeed, I suspect that if downvoters were required to explain their reasons for downvoting, the answerer would find the thinness of many of the explanations quite disappointing and not at all helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is founded on the twin propositions that—in the long run—thoughtful, well-reasoned questions and answers will yield positive vote totals, and that people who submit such posts will see their point totals rise. This view is (as FumbleFingers indicates in another answer) both democratic and optimistic; and if it doesn't work in the long run, we have much bigger problems than the fact that good answers sometimes go unrecognized. My advice is, Have confidence in the quality of the content you submit, and let the votes fall where they may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T01:41:24.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6878" CreationDate="2015-05-21T02:56:18.410" Score="15" ViewCount="3022" Body="&lt;p&gt;Douglas Harper, creator of Etymonline, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/abbr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;considers himself an amateur linguist&lt;/a&gt; and warns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... if you're a professional linguist or a serious student of linguistics,&#xA;you shouldn't be doing your homework here. This is for the rest of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, it is a popular web resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites (Wiktionary, dictionary.com, wordnik) seem to focus on definitions at the expense of sense evolution. If you want more etymological details (context of word usage) online, where can you go, short of buying the sources used to make Etymonline?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user122427" LastEditorUserId="50590" LastEditDate="2023-09-12T14:34:40.980" LastActivityDate="2023-09-12T14:34:40.980" Title="Is there an online etymology dictionary more comprehensive/detailed than Etymonline?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6877" CreationDate="2015-05-21T05:27:50.280" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oxford (OED) is the most complete source I've seen online. It's subscription-only though, unless you are on campus at a university or something. It goes a little deeper than Etymonline, in that you can see cited examples of the earliest uses of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harper's site is perfectly good for most uses, though. If you just want to learn the origins, even professional linguists like me will use Etymonline. It's a great reference. The only reason why you &quot;shouldn't be doing your homework&quot; with it is because it isn't a properly cite-able source, not because the information is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122433" OwnerDisplayName="Aly Sevre" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T05:27:50.280" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2015-05-25T11:35:09.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's hurtful to new users to see their questions go from 0 to -1, then perhaps new questions should start with a score of -1. I'm only half joking ;). Most questions on this site are bad, especially questions from new users. I prefer to flag/closevote than downvote such questions but I can't fault anyone who wants to downvote them. They deserve their downvotes. What can new users do? &lt;strong&gt;Read the tour!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T11:35:09.550" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2015-05-25T11:41:17.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes serve a very useful purpose on the Stack Exchange: they discourage answers that are weak, sloppy, incorrect, unsubstantiated, or hastily-written. This motivates many contributors to be more careful and thoughtful, to corroborate their ideas, to proofread their answers, and to strive to write something that is accurate and useful for the long-term.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal has one telling sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think the poster has a right to know why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think “right” is a very strong word here. Sure, posters usually &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to know why, but I'm not convinced they have a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to know why. More importantly, I'm not sure this perceived “right” trumps the right for another user to downvote anonymously – and those two rights can't co-exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all downvotes had to be explained, some people might be less inclined to downvote. (Raise your hand if you've ever explained your downvote only to get sucked into a bitter and hostile debate.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might view fewer downvotes as a good thing. However, it's quite possible that the overall quality of the site would diminish if there were fewer negative consequences for submitting weaker answers (and therefore fewer incentives to submit better ones). I'm not asserting that such a decline in quality would be an inevitability, but I think it's a possibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that has kept me active in SE is that so many of the answers here &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; worth reading, and very few are distractingly weak or glaringly incorrect. I believe the ease and anonymity of downvoting help keep the site the way that it is, and there is some underlying wisdom in the site's current design.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I propose to make it mandatory for the FIRST downvoter to explain his rationale in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a very bad idea to me. There would be less incentive to start negative feedback for a flimsy or dubious answer. Many users would wait for someone else to be the “bad guy” before piling on, and the few who are hardy enough to open the floodgates will gain reputations as being overly critical and negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At 125 rep, we earn downvoting previleges. That shouldn't be anonymous. Anonymous downvoting should be a previlege earned at a much higher rep. I'm thinking 1250 or 2500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That idea has some merit, but I don't think it addresses the initial problem that prompted this question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T11:41:17.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-26T10:49:24.417" Score="14" ViewCount="728" Body="&lt;p&gt;As many of us have seen, questions are sometimes closed for being &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;. I don't object to this at all and I see it as a good thing, but it also begs the question - is there a particular section within the Stack Exchange network that allows one to actually ask a question based on opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of one of these types of questions would be &lt;em&gt;What is your favourite idiom?&lt;/em&gt; which I, personally, would find really enjoyable to read and contribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2015-06-10T11:44:23.613" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T11:44:23.613" Title="Where SHOULD you ask opinion-based questions?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2015-05-26T11:02:02.610" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no site on the Stack Exchange network to ask questions of the type &quot;What is your favourite X?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some sites on the network that allow questions about recommendations, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, however this is not for posting your favourites without reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;World Building&lt;/a&gt;, where people contemplate what is possible given certain constraints, but all opinions are meant to be backed up somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only place you could really ask &quot;what is your favourite X&quot; would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.  Chat is great for extended discussion and is often full of unchecked opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:35.857" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T11:02:02.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2015-05-27T03:37:42.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Opinion-based questions might (or might not) be more appropriate on the Quora service than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60632" LastEditorUserId="94567" LastEditDate="2015-05-29T13:50:23.513" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T13:50:23.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-27T08:15:14.147" Score="6" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The superscript (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) and subscript (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) HTML tags can be quite useful when answering (or asking) questions, and it eludes me as to why there isn't a button for it in the question/answer editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason for this, or has it just been overlooked or deemed unnecessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T08:15:14.147" Title="Superscript/Subscript Shortcut" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2015-05-27T08:45:27.573" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best place is at a bar: ask your friends over a meal or drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T08:45:27.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-28T08:16:45.890" Score="16" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of new users ask questions regarding lyrics interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page in the help center, and noticed that lyrics interpretation is not specifically mentioned in the don'ts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/997/77339&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; does a pretty good job of summing up when a lyrics interpretation question is on topic and when it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any way we could succintly include the information on the said page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T18:53:09.037" Title="Informing people about lyrics interpretation in help center" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-28T12:28:02.890" Score="-1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/248961/what-is-not-having-a-dominant-foot-called&quot;&gt;What is not having a dominant foot called?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to the comment &quot;@HotLicks actually, it's the 3rd most popular team sport in the US, after basketball and baseball&quot;, I replied &quot;So, go ask FIFA&quot;, or something of that nature.  My comment was deleted, though Rajiv's response to my comment was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was wrong with that comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T13:23:19.903" Title="So what was so bad about my comment?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6887" CreationDate="2015-05-28T13:00:49.277" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment &quot;So, ask FIFA for the term&quot; was flagged as &quot;rude or offensive&quot;. It's not possible to see who flagged it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may seem innocuous, and if you read it with a smile, then it probably is. If you read it imagining a frown instead, it's a bit direct. While I probably wouldn't flag it, as a moderator I would delete it following the flag. At the very least it's not constructive. (It wasn't me who dealt with that flag, but I would have done the same thing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that moderators do not see context when dealing with comment flags. We see the comment and the flag. While it's possible to find the post and the context, it's not immediately available. All we get initially is just the comment and someone's opinion of it. If that opinion appears justified, the comment is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comments are ephemeral and should not be expected to last at all.&lt;/strong&gt; Conversations in comments are discouraged: they are intended only for seeking clarifications. Since that particular question and its comments has been brought up, I'll do a bit of clearing up. (Other heavily-commented questions will probably follow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-05-28T13:23:19.903" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T13:23:19.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6890" CreationDate="2015-05-28T16:08:02.647" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249087/pass-me-by-or-pass-by-me&quot;&gt;Pass me by&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My edit was rejected by @Tushar Raj and @Choster, on the grounds that it deviated from the original intent of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like someone else to review their decision, as in my opinion the edit was valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I say he passed me by, or he passed by me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I think it's passed me by, but I'm not sure.] The OP is saying that he thinks the correct answer to his question is 'it's passed me by', but that he is not sure. I wanted to remove this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain my thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question lacks basic punctuation and context, which was partially remedied by a previous edit and comments. However, I first thought the second sentence was given as example of usage, then realised it wasn't. I then assumed it must be another strand to the question, regarding the meaning and usage of 'it's passed me by', but it wasn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having finally concluded the OP was asking for positive affirmation of what he thought was the right answer, I was going to insert more punctuation, but am unsure of group etiquette on this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I opted for removing the sentence, to try and keep the question as straightforward as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122465" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T23:18:19.557" Title="Query decision to reject edit request" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6889" CreationDate="2015-05-28T23:18:19.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proposed edit would have removed &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it's passed me by, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;resulting in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I say he passed me by, or he passed by me?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We receive a crushing load of &quot;which is right&quot; and &quot;is this correct&quot; questions, almost all of which are of substandard quality such as this one. As one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;guidelines for asking a good question&lt;/a&gt; is to &quot;be specific,&quot; we generally ask the posters that as a minimum, to indicate which one &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; believe is right, and why. Thus, this edit would have detracted from a question that is already poorly presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the second sentence might have been interpreted as another example instead of the author's supposition, it would have been better to format the example as quoted text. But overall, I am surprised the question is still open; there's no research and no context. I do not expend much effort in trying to salvage questions that are likely to be closed and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was no reflection on your English skills, but rather on your relative newness to the stack, and I hope you are not discouraged from proposing edits elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T23:18:19.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2015-05-29T11:52:31.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the second proposal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anonymous downvoting should be a privilege earned at a much higher&#xA;  rep. I'm thinking 1,250 or 2,500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Pertinent considerations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;privilege&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of downvoting an answer (125 rep points) is awarded &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; earning the privilege of upvoting an answer (50 rep points). The community trusts the user  to cast downvotes, at his/her discretion, responsibly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The majority of users are disgruntled at receiving an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;unexplained&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Anyone would feel &lt;strong&gt;confused&lt;/strong&gt; by two downvotes in a row, with no explanation, if they had spent time writing a post to the best of their abilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• If there is a comment helping users see where the problem lies, they &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;can edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; their answer/question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Likewise when questions are put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; it is accompanied by an explanatory note, which indicates what the problem might be.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Some users &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do not care&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or never ‘listen’ to comments. That is their prerogative. And downvotes are like water off a duck's back to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Some users will nitpick continually. The commenter or answerer may read &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;abusive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comments. There are users who thrive on being confrontational, it can be exhausting (and a waste of time) arguing with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More often than not, when I explain to a bemused poster the motivation behind &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; downvote, the OP will edit their post; the stumbling block is removed, and I delete my comment, and/or reverse my downvote. I'm not always right, and sometimes an answer gets upvoted despite my observation/objection/criticism. And that's fine, at least I have voiced my downvote, the user knows &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and can disagree with me. And that's perfectly fine. I may or may not change my own mind. But other users can see my comment, and make their own decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medica in her meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4582/how-to-guarantee-getting-downvotes-without-explanation?lq=1&quot;&gt;How to guarantee getting downvotes without explanation&lt;/a&gt;, listed three possible reactions from users who receive motivated downvotes: 1) Moaning and whining. 2) Immediate launching of personal attacks and insults. 3) Revenge downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If all downvotes had to be explained, some people might be less&#xA;  inclined to downvote. (&lt;em&gt;Raise your hand if you've ever explained your&#xA;  downvote only to get sucked into a bitter and hostile debate.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6875/44619&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I struggle to remember the last time any of these incidents happened to me &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; I left a comment attempting to explain a downvote.  On the contrary, it's been my experience that many users have responded thoughtfully, and were appreciative that somebody took the time to comment as to why their post may be misleading or inaccurate. (*Raise your hand if that has &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; happened to you.*) But I have had [short] heated debates with users, unrelated to downvotes. Insults; disagreements; accusations; teasings; rudeness; and sarcastic replies etc.  occur, regardless of downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[A brief note on sarcastic comments on EL&amp;amp;U: how can a user tell if it is said with a smile; a wink; a smirk; or with a snarl? IMO they can be thinly-veiled attacks.]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tip: If you cannot handle the occasional, mild online abuse, don't post opinionated comments or answers in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proposals&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP—who has forwarded two proposals—does not say he wants every downvote to be explained. The first proposal asks that the first downvote includes a motivated comment. Subsequent downvotes do not require a comment. If the comment left at the first downvote is accurate and fair, my supposition is that the incriminated post might attract further downvotes because subsequent downvoters will agree with the commenter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second proposal argues that the user must earn the privilege of anonymity. I'm in favour of the second proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider the instance when a question is put &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;on hold&lt;/a&gt;, the OP still has the opportunity to edit his post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A question is only put on hold not closed outright, in order that it&#xA;  can be reworked and re-opened [brought off-hold].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5416/44619&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the help centre which provides tips, and guidance on how to keep questions on topic. If you can have that for questions, what's wrong with leaving a comment beneath poor answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But sometimes a downvote says all that is necessary, just as an upvote may do.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6875/44619&quot;&gt;TimLymington&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes that is true. Not all posts need a motivated downvote, especially if the user is unregistered  &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; has written utter drivel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But sometimes&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an answer will basically consist of one word, with no references or support. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;people post &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers to questions which they think the OP should have asked. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a biased, or loaded, or strongly opinionated answer/question will be posted.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a correct answer, which was obvious to any native speaker, will be posted; but without any explanation.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;answers will have not have addressed all the issues.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;correct answers, written by non-native speakers, will contain significant grammar, spelling or punctuation errors.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;answers or questions are formatted so poorly, they are unreadable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the poster has not fully understood the question.         &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all these cases, and in many others,  a user may be justified in casting a downvote, but to the OP, the reason for the anonymous downvote may not be obvious. Why can't &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; comment be left explaining &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of the reason(s)? Helping posters &lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; their answers or questions actually benefits the site. It's &quot;pro-active&quot;, it's &quot;constructive&quot;, and a civil exchange of ideas can lead to one to reconsider their answer or downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet after two years of participating on EL&amp;amp;U I still don't get why there is always such a strong opposition to encourage this sort of behaviour.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;No!&quot; everyone will cry in unison, we all want this to be the standard behaviour on EL&amp;amp;U. If that's the case, how do we encourage this behaviour? How do we cultivate a civil and fruitful exchange of opinions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps if &lt;strong&gt;the privilege of anonymous downvoting had to be earned&lt;/strong&gt;, then the newbie ‘downvoter’ will think longer on the reason for downvoting an answer. The non-anonymous downvoter will be motivated to write a  comment in a polite, logical, coherent manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users can't verbalize why they cast a downvote, then perhaps that's a good enough reason for not casting one in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another advantage for making anonymous downvoting an earned privilege is that when an answer or question &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; receive an anonymous downvote, the user knows that the vote was cast by an experienced member. Someone who has had learnt the ropes, and has over time recognized the difference between a weak and a bad/false answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Drawback&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revenge downvoting. And AFAICT that is the second proposal's largest drawback. It is pointless flagging downvotes when it is limited to only two or three posts, the mods cannot do anything. The system; however, does &quot;protect&quot; users from serial downvoting, but it is not infallible. The ‘voting fraud detection script ’ is a well-guarded secret, see the links below for further details, so I would not advise circumventing the script to test its limits. Please, don't. ☺&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130844/consistent-serial-downvoting-now-avoiding-detection&quot;&gt;Consistent serial downvoting now avoiding detection&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/193973/victim-of-serial-downvoting&quot;&gt;Victim of Serial Downvoting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Protection against revenge downvotes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried coming up with my own solutions, e.g. freezing a downvoted user from voting  for a short specific period. But I can imagine that being terribly complicated to put into practice, and in turn, this counter-measure would be abused. Maybe it's not worth it. Maybe we should be adult enough to support the sting of a downvote.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T12:08:22.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-30T19:52:30.310" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I log off this site?  I'm certain it's easy but I'm currently flummoxed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I utilized the tags below just so I could post the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123502" OwnerDisplayName="Reverend KMB" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T22:49:26.853" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T22:49:30.007" Title="Logging out/off of ELU" Tags="|support|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6860" CreationDate="2015-05-31T08:59:04.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I do not take Urban Dictionary too seriously, it certainly is a great resource for non native speakers, specially when trying to understand slang phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121758" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T08:59:04.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-02T06:36:23.577" Score="-11" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we normally consider a user's reputation to be a fairly faithful representation of a user's value for this site. But it isn't enough. Valuable users of this site post good questions and answers, but they also vote, and edit, and use the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've realised this is a problem because I keep seeing high-rep users post answers on questions which are clearly off-topic instead of closing them. When I check their profiles I see lots of posts, but little to no contribution to this site's self-moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have made a data query to highlight the users of this site with the highest reputation who haven't achieved the Civic Duty badge (which only takes 300 votes). The query shows user names, number of votes, number of edits, and the last time they visited. I would've added the number of reviews they've made, but I couldn't figure out how. (It may not be possible given the data available.) But you can click on their user names to check yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/321628/416012/top-users-sorted-by&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/321628/416012/top-users-sorted-by&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user with 26215 rep, 542 answers but only 148 votes, 17 edits and just 9 reviews is contributing both to the health of the site and its disrepair. These users do not deserve access to the moderator tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that there will be some users who are on this list but aren't problem users. Write a couple of really popular answers and you could get a huge rep boost, but otherwise your actual site use is appropriately constructive for someone with your general level of site participation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's the problem. What solutions are there? I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting good answers is still good. Voting must still remain private. Review queues are not essential to contribute to the site's self-moderation (you can flag and vtc as you come across bad posts normally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing I can think of is what prompted this whole thing: making a bigger fuss of established users who answer blatantly off-topic questions. If you join me in this, what is the best way to make such a fuss? Comment? Flag? Downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2015-09-12T13:52:08.043" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T13:52:08.043" Title="Name &amp; Shame: Top users who don't vote, edit or use the review queues" Tags="|discussion|editing|voting|users|community-building|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6896" CreationDate="2015-06-02T16:29:50.833" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15299/john-lawler?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;John Lawler&lt;/a&gt;, for example, has a much lower ratio of votes cast relative to reputation earned than most high-rep users. But he's undoubtedly one of the most valued and knowledgeable users here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;Yoichi Oishi&lt;/a&gt; is also a relatively restrained voter, but he's so popular that we've chosen him to be one of our site mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: There are many ways to &quot;support&quot; the site. Voting is just one of them. I see no reason to hound people for voting less often than &quot;average&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T16:29:50.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6899" CreationDate="2015-06-02T17:28:05.870" Score="3" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is community fine with accepting questions that seem like &quot;interesting&quot; but lack any research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see these kind of questions quite a lot. Two recent examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249894/opposite-of-d%C3%A9j%C3%A0-vu&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;opposite&amp;#39; of &amp;#39;d&amp;#233;j&amp;#224; vu&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249801/what-is-the-etymology-of-the-word-bae&quot;&gt;What is the etymology of the word &amp;quot;bae&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No research effort is included in the above questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General reference was discussed before. Google is not considered a general reference. But everyone can simply search and at least include some research effort in their question. (People do this to answer questions and on top of that, the original poster sometimes accepts the answer that they can find on the first page of Google search result).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;Google is not General Reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, everyone might not be good at finding the most credible sources. For example, OED is not accessible without subscription. And of course, people can answer with their own knowledge but it depends on the question also.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against the questions or answers. My only concern is about lack of research. For example, I spent at least 1 hour to prepare some of the questions that I asked here. (Well, you don't have to spend that much time to construct a good question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5459/new-close-reason-include-the-research&quot;&gt;New close reason: include the research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note1: It depends on the question but this is obvious in the examples that I gave. Some people can eliminate words with reasoning and include an example sentence for word choice questions, then it would be an acceptable question. We cover that case with another close reason.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note2: Probably this is another version of some similar discussions. Related to the lack of voting, general reference etc.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T17:07:15.567" Title="Lack of research vs. &quot;interesting&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6898" CreationDate="2015-06-02T21:24:06.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in the case of the &quot;opposite of 'déjà vu'&quot; question, I'm not sure how the person asking the question could research the question effectively. If I were to try to answer it, I suppose that I would start by running a Google search online for 'déjà vu' + 'opposite' and see what came up—but &quot;opposite of X&quot; questions are very tricky to provide a groundwork for, and I think they depend more on there being someone in the EL&amp;amp;U community who happens to know the requested term already than on directed research by someone who doesn't. This is by way of suggesting that some questions can be interesting and worth posting here despite not being especially researchable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;What is the etymology of the word &quot;bae&quot;?&quot; question is different. A modest research effort by the questioner would surely have turned up at least a little of the information that Josh61 provides in his useful answer. Nevertheless, I voted to leave that question open, essentially because I thought that the question was good to have on EL&amp;amp;U. There is a great difference in baseline effort between the &quot;bae&quot; question as it was formulated and Hugo's compact but well-researched question from last December, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215078/what-does-fleek-mean-and-when-was-it-first-used&quot;&gt;What does “fleek” mean and when was it first used?&lt;/a&gt; And yet I think both questions should be on the site—and I'm glad that (for the moment, anyway) both of them are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wide-ranging site dedicated to English language and usage strengthens its authoritativeness by dealing with subjects of wide popular interest, and I think that questions about the meaning and origin of very popular slang terms fall squarely into that category—especially because they are too new to have been examined in a systematic way by most general-reference sources. So if such an inquiry into &quot;bae&quot; is ultimately appropriate for EL&amp;amp;U, and if having a thorough and timely response to the question is valuable to the site, it seems counterproductive to me to reject a question that poses the issue squarely and concisely, on the grounds that the person asking it didn't do—or didn't detail having done—any significant research into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this is a question-and-answer site, it's easy to get caught up in the sense that the questions asked here are one-offs from particular individuals who owe the site and prospective answerers at least a threshold level of effort in order to qualify for participation. But the vast majority of people who benefit from EL&amp;amp;U's content are drive-by visitors who haven't done a stroke of work beyond typing, say, &quot;&quot;bae: etymology&quot; into a Google search window. When they do that and find a link to the &quot;bae&quot; question and Josh61's answer at EL&amp;amp;U, it doesn't matter to them or to the site's prestige and usefulness that the person who asked the original question didn't undertake a preliminary investigation of the question. All that matters is the factual and stylistic quality of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, a lack of effort on the questioner's part becomes annoying when the question involves a truly general-reference issue that the questioner didn't bother to look up in an obvious source. But the underlying problems in that case are that the question isn't interesting beyond a simple look-up level and that the questioner could have avoided cluttering EL&amp;amp;U with such simple stuff by doing the work him- or herself. I certainly wouldn't be any happier with a questioner who did the research, found the relevant answer in the general-reference work, and then came here—citation at the ready—to ask whether the information was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that close-voters have gravitated toward the &quot;insufficient effort&quot; close reason because it offers a convenient way to discard questions that are weak and uninteresting for other reasons—chief among them, being too elementary, too localized, or too narrow in applicability to be of use to other site visitors. But the trouble with using one reason to close questions that are in themselves unsatisfactory for another reason is that the nominal reason for closing takes on a life of its own. After all, if the reason you give for closing a bad question is that the questioner seems not to have done any (or adequate) preliminary research, doesn't it follow, as a matter of procedural due process, that you should also close good questions that don't show any research effort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think, a person's attitude toward objectively interesting questions goes a long way toward determining how that person feels about closing questions for &quot;insufficient effort.&quot; A substantial number of voters at EL&amp;amp;U see questions as applications for inclusion on the site: If the question doesn't measure up for any reason—including failure to demonstrate preliminary research effort—it should not be accepted. Eventually, if the question is good, someone will ask it in an acceptable way, without compromising the site's standards for asking a question. By definition, a question that fails to satisfy the threshold criteria cannot be a &quot;good question.&quot; In the meantime, the fact that no active entry on EL&amp;amp;U addresses the subject of the question is simply a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a person who (like me) imagines that the long-term goal of EL&amp;amp;U is to be a place where visitors can find answers to every possible interesting, non-general-reference, factual (as opposed to opinion-based) question about English may take the view that good questions justify themselves. From my perspective, rejecting an interesting question because the person who asked it didn't adequately research it first is a bit like disqualifying a question because the person who asked it didn't have an advanced university degree: the qualification may well bear on the fitness and quality of the questioner's questions in general, but an interesting question is an asset to the site regardless of how fortuitous its origin may have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, my preference would be to accept any &quot;interesting&quot; question on its merit as a question, and to reject any bad question (by which I mean a question that is of little interest to anyone but the questioner, or a question whose answer is readily findable in a general reference, or a question that is so open-ended or dependent on opinion that it defies practical answering) on its lack of merit as a relevant question for this site, rather than on the basis of its asker's evident lack of research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T21:24:06.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2015-06-04T07:05:02.123" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many an online forum welcomes primarily opinion-based questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26653" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T07:05:02.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6913" CreationDate="2015-06-04T18:33:21.717" Score="5" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=gre&quot;&gt;lots of questions&lt;/a&gt; that use the acronym &lt;em&gt;GRE&lt;/em&gt; in the title, then go on to use the acronym in the thread without explaining what it means. A quick Google search reveals that it is some kind of American literacy exam, known as a &lt;em&gt;Graduate Record Examination&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm from the UK, and have never heard of GREs before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is specific to GRE exams, then it would be a poor fit for the site. If it is a good question generally, then the fact that it comes up in a GRE exam is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm really asking is should we generally discourage and remove any mention of GRE exams from questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32863" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T01:12:22.170" Title="Are GRE questions a good fit for the site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-09T01:27:05.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6931" CreationDate="2015-06-04T19:05:52.420" Score="5" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the current questions listed are not that exemplary. (Although, I don't think they are awful; there are certainly better alternatives.) This is one of the most common question types we get and if we have better examples in this section, it would be beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current questions in the info section are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2856/whats-an-english-word-that-means-a-community-of-experts&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s an English word that means &amp;quot;a community of experts&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4754/word-that-means-obsession-with-publishing&quot;&gt;Word that means &amp;quot;obsession with publishing&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5089/word-to-describe-compliance-with-unspoken-resistance&quot;&gt;Word to describe &amp;quot;compliance with unspoken resistance&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1103/read-beautiful-interesting-stories&quot;&gt;Read ( Beautiful + Interesting ) stories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4311/word-for-device-that-provides-constant-doses-of-a-liquid-dust-substance&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;device that provides constant doses of a liquid/dust/substance&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are better worded and detailed single-word-request questions that are more useful and we can update the info section to include those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please offer the most useful/exemplary single-word-question that you think of as an answer. Please explain why it is exemplary/useful. Then, we can upvote/downvote and top 5 might go to that section.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The benefit is that if we list better questions there, people might ask better questions if they check there. Also, this meta post can be a reference of good SWR questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T16:43:00.020" Title="Please vote for the most exemplary single-word-request questions (to be put in Help Center)" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2015-06-05T00:20:08.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not the questions like your example but you can ask &quot;good&quot; subjective questions on EL&amp;amp;U or other Stack Exchange sites (subject to the rules). Although, community doesn't agree sometimes even if you try your best to ask a &quot;good&quot; subjective question. So you have to choose your words carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the details about how to ask &quot;good&quot; subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T00:20:08.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6905" CreationDate="2015-06-05T03:43:44.840" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; page,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that need additional work or that are not a good fit for&#xA;  this site may be put on hold by experienced community members. While&#xA;  questions are on hold, they cannot be answered, but can be edited to&#xA;  make them eligible for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently have two question put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249434/taxi-fraud-or-taxi-scam&quot;&gt;Taxi Fraud or Taxi Scam?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250472/word-for-taking-too-much-pride-in-something-mediocre&quot;&gt;Word for taking too much pride in something mediocre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honest don't know how to further improve my question's quality. Should I delete them instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94324" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T06:07:47.690" Title="When should I delete my questions that are put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6904" CreationDate="2015-06-05T06:07:47.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve just voted to re-open one of those questions, now that it satisfies the requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag for context and examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are put on hold when they are either off-topic as defined in the Help pages, or unanswerable for another reason. Many tag descriptions provide quite a bit of help on the sort of question they are to be used on (and, occasionally, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to be used on), including how to frame the question so that it can be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is put on hold because it doesn’t contain the detail it needs, it can be edited to fit what’s required; you did that. &lt;strong&gt;Then&lt;/strong&gt; it needs to be reopened. There are a number of ways to achieve that: I’ve listed some below in order of preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Editing bumps the question on the front page, which should get it noticed. Members of the community with the right privileges can then vote to re-open it. Your question had three re-open votes by the time I got to it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can bring it to the attention of the community by asking a question on Meta. Including a link is necessary; it’s also very helpful to summarise the changes you made to make the question on-topic (although these are available via the edit history).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there are comments from close-voters, you can add a comment answering their concerns. If they are satisfied with the edit, they might vote to re-open. Some users don’t like receiving this sort of ping.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question was summarily closed by a moderator, then you could flag it yourself for moderator attention, filling in the “Other” reason as appropriate. This carries a risk that your flag might be declined, but a successful flag counts towards a badge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this may take some time. Bear in mind that the users who voted to close your question may not be in your timezone. Generally it’s worth waiting at least 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deletion should really be a last resort, and the system doesn’t make it particularly easy. You won’t be able to delete the taxi question because it has an upvoted answer — but since the question also has upvotes, you may not actually want to do that. While question quality is not an issue here as they are both upvoted, deleted questions are not ignored when the system assesses a user’s overall ability to ask good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250472/word-for-taking-too-much-pride-in-something-mediocre&quot;&gt;boasting question&lt;/a&gt; was improved by including examples, following the checklist at the end of the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249434/taxi-fraud-or-taxi-scam&quot;&gt;taxi question&lt;/a&gt; might be improved by adding research into the difference between &lt;em&gt;fraud&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;scam,&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;taxi fraud&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;taxi scam&lt;/em&gt;. We value research!—and a well-researched question will often get a very good answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will probably find that &lt;em&gt;fraud&lt;/em&gt; tends to be widespread or systematic, or defrauding the government; while &lt;em&gt;scams&lt;/em&gt; tend to be perpetrated by individuals on individuals. But as well as degree it's a matter of register: &lt;em&gt;fraud&lt;/em&gt; is more formal than &lt;em&gt;scam.&lt;/em&gt; You may need to consult two or three dictionaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then edit that research into the question, together with at least one concrete example of the type of behaviour you are attempting to classify (including how widespread it is) &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; how and where you want to use the term — because the level of formality may be important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; still be held as opinion-based, although I would say that such an edit makes it far more answerable; or you may find that your research actually answers the question you had. In &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; case, you could still edit the question but &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; answer it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T06:07:47.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6896" CreationDate="2015-06-05T09:20:47.213" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hang my head as one of the named and shamed. Admittedly, I hadn't realized that amassing a certain number of points also meant that I had amassed a certain number of duties. I don't remember signing up for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a limited amount of time to spend on this site (usually weekend mornings and school holidays such as today), and I prefer to use most of it writing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do promise to cast more votes, starting with a downvote for the OP. Firstly for the implication that there is something shameful about failing to review or edit, and secondly for conflating several issues in one post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T09:20:47.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6901" CreationDate="2015-06-05T14:09:53.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think GRE questions, when offered undigested, are a poor fit here. As others have said, the actual issues involved can be on topic, but simply to offer up an entire question and demand an explanation feels like the EL&amp;amp;U equivalent of a &quot;gimme da codez&quot; question on SO. Such questions show no effort and point to nothing of a real &quot;question&quot; nature, and I think they should be down-voted, closed, and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker can frame the question by pointing to a specific issue (not including &quot;I don't understand why the answer is A and not D&quot;), and can abstract that issue sufficiently, then I don't see any problem. That is not what generally happens, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T14:09:53.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-05T16:47:42.797" Score="6" ViewCount="1332" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a constant issue on ELU from the very beginning but one that I feel has never been explicitly addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions and corresponding answers hinge on how well known a word is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example 'chattel' (a cognate of cattle meaning livestock or people treated as material goods) is not a top 1000 word in English, yet it could be expected to be understood in context by someone with a (recent) college degree (in the humanities). But to say &quot;'chattel' is a common word&quot; is very misleading, as I'm sure many people might not recognize it. But it is way more common than say 'adze' (a hoe-like farming implement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am looking for is an economical but objective way to say how common a word is. Number of hits in a corpus like COCA would be a good start, but it kind of needs a legend to go along with it (other words with their frequencies to show relevant commonness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of scale that a word can be placed on that objectively says how common a word is &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; is easily understandable? Something like 'basic - top 1000' '1st grade - top 2000' 'newspaper - top 10K' 'economist - top 20K' 'scrabble player - top 100K' with examples? Or the word levels in freerice.com? ghits (with all its problems)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may want to make a FAQ page for this for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically we want a Zipf curve for English words and labels (and exemplars) for percentiles (or gross categories). Is there something like this that exists already somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T12:52:25.747" Title="Objectively relating how common a word is" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2015-06-05T18:12:41.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wordfrequency.info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; claims that it contains the most accurate frequency data of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our data is based on the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) -- the only large corpus of English that is both up-to-date (the latest texts are from Summer 2012) and which is  based on a wide range of genres (e.g. spoken, fiction, newspapers, magazines, and academic writing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T18:12:41.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2015-06-05T23:05:52.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of good answers I see on questions like those referred to link to a query in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngram viewer&lt;/a&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=graduated%20college%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cgraduated%20from%20college%3Aeng_us_2012&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgraduated%20college%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cgraduated%20from%20college%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250045/do-i-need-to-use-from-after-graduated/250066#250066&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. This viewer shows not only the relative frequency of words, but how that's changed over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a fairly low cutoff, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.xkcd.com/2015/05/13/new-book-thing-explainer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Randall Munroe published a book&lt;/a&gt; explaining challenging concepts using only the most frequent 1000 words.  There's also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://splasho.com/upgoer5/?i=ITucplOcplOuVUOlMKE0rFOmnJ1joTHtLz94VUqbMKWyVRxtL2ShVUE5pTHtq29lMUZtLJ5xVUEbMFOwo21jqKEypvO3nJkfVTAbMJAeVUEbMJ0tLJqunJ5mqPOuVUAyqPOiMvOiqTuypvO3o3WxplO0nTS0VUOyo3OfMFO1p2HtqzIlrFOiMaEyov4tVRyzVTy0VTMcozEmVTShrFO3o3WxplO0nTS0VTSlMFOho3DtnJ4tqTuuqPOmMKDfVTy0VTc1p3DtM2y2MKZtLFO3LKWhnJ5aVTyhp3EyLJDto2Ltp3IaM2ImqTyhMlOuoz90nTIlVUqipzDtqTuuqPOgnJqbqPO3o3WeVTyhp3EyLJDhVPOQnTShM2yhMlO0nTS0VUqiqJkxVTWyVT9hMFO3LKxtqT8toJSeMFO0nTymVTAbMJAeMKVtLzI0qTIlYt==&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;text editor here&lt;/a&gt; which lets you easily check your own writing against &lt;a href=&quot;http://splasho.com/upgoer5/phpspellcheck/dictionaries/1000.dicin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that list&lt;/a&gt;, though the source of that list isn't quite clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115786" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T12:52:25.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6896" CreationDate="2015-06-06T00:27:40.450" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting can be a charged issue. It can hurt feelings. Some people opt to stay above the fray. Some people simply aren't comfortable making judgement calls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is made up of all types. Some comment frequently, others not so much. Some are more confrontational, others are more encouraging. Some vote harshly, others more gently; some vote infrequently, others are trigger-happy. Some make edits, others work the edit queues. Some frequent chat, others don't. Some are here mostly to learn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad the community isn't made up of a thousand clones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these folks were running for moderator, you might have a case here. Perhaps their lack of voting should make people think twice. But I think you've got too far by picking a few arbitrary ways to contribute, and discounting the rest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A user with 26215 rep, 542 answers but only 148 votes, 17 edits and just 9 reviews is contributing both to the health of the site and its disrepair. These users do not deserve access to the moderator tools&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That user has earned 59 Nice Answer badges out of 542 answers given – meaning more than 10% of those answers received a good number of upvotes. Very few users rack up Nice Answer badges at that rate. When I see that, I can't help but assume that user puts a lot of care into their work and contributes with exemplary answers. I can't agree that such a user is &quot;contributing&quot; to the &quot;disrepair&quot; of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for access to moderator tools, no system is perfect. Contribute often enough, and you'll garner enough rep to earn new privileges. That's the way the system works. These folks have earned their privileges, and I think it would be a mistake to revoke some of them simply because they happen to exercise those rights sparingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;making a bigger fuss of established users who answer blatantly off-topic questions,&quot; if the system works as designed, those questions should eventually get closed anyway. Someone might leave a helpful answer first, but I don't see how that necessarily leads to the dilapidation of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T00:27:40.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6901" CreationDate="2015-06-06T08:59:50.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GRE is a U.S. standardized test administered to students who wish to apply to graduate school in fields other than law and medicine (which have their own standardized tests—the LSAT and the MCAT), for the benefit of graduate school admissions offices that want to gauge how students from very different academic backgrounds fare on the same wide-ranging test. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the GRE is aimed at students who have completed or are near completing four years of collegiate study, you might expect the test questions on English to be sufficiently sophisticated and challenging to be of interest to participants at EL&amp;amp;U. But unfortunately, the GRE suffers from the same drawbacks as other standardized tests—most significantly, that each question included on it is designed and calibrated to draw a certain proportion of incorrect answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal isn't merely to see whether test takers recognize a particular syntactical or vocabulary shortcoming in a question, and know how to improve it. Instead—at least in some questions—the point is to gauge how well the test taker keys on some hint or tertiary aspect of the sentence or passage in the question to conclude that one of the five optional answers is better than the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such situations, to my mind, the test isn't testing English language and usage, or reading comprehension, or anything else beyond the test taker's ability to analyze which answer the test creator has set up as the correct one. Consequently, these questions are a bad fit for our site because they don't involve grammar (broadly understood) or usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the questions that clearly do have an objectively defensible best answer grounded in language and usage may not be much good as a means to teach about or explain the underlying principle of language because, again, the false answers are framed in ways to make them plausible (or at least ambiguous) so that significant numbers of test takers will choose the wrong one; and the right answer may be far from optimum so that it doesn't stand out too strongly against the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the greatest problem with the GRE (and the SAT, and the LSAT, and the MCAT) as it applies to English is that it supposes that mastery of the language can be adequately gauged by offering test takers one supposedly right answer and four supposedly wrong ones to each of a series of discrete questions. This is not a fruitful way to approach English, in my opinion, and analyzing why the supposedly correct answer is (d) and not (a) is not particularly fruitful or meaningful either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A dedicated Standardized Tests SE would no doubt draw numerous thoughtful answers to the task of analyzing why particular test questions are framed the way they are, and why the test creator considers one of the answers to be the right one. But at EL&amp;amp;U, I think, the task is only marginally related to our focus on English language and usage, and such analyses are in fact counterproductive because they encourage a false notion of what it means to have a firm understanding of English. I would be happy to see no more GRE questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T01:12:22.170" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T01:12:22.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-06T15:02:51.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/124665/what-do-we-call-people-who-go-to-the-gym&quot;&gt;What do we call people who go to the gym?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user (me) had identified there was a lexical gap in the language, she suggested possible solutions but had shared her research.  She was open to idioms, slang, fixed expressions etc.  Users were asked not to offer neologisms. Answers which were supported by reliable references, were openly encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T15:02:51.870" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-06T15:25:32.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-06T15:25:06.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47667/what-do-you-call-the-interconnecting-bits-of-a-puzzle-piece-in-english&quot;&gt;What do you call the interconnecting bits of a puzzle piece in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A concise, unambiguous SWR. We all know an image can paint a thousand words, and anyone who read the question definitely knew what the request was about. Because it was so specific, it didn't risk attracting twenty or more possible suggestions—the biggest drawback in a SWR question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T15:30:34.140" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-06T15:25:06.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-06T15:28:07.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224975/what-do-you-call-a-note-that-gives-preliminary-information-before-the-main-part&quot;&gt;What do you call a note that gives preliminary information before the main part?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a clear context (The word was also needed to use in Stack Exchange questions and it can be helpful for everyone).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a detailed explanation and research effort. (Some words are eliminated with reasoning and definitions)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question attracted very precise and useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T15:28:07.760" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-07T15:22:38.903" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-06T15:46:04.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81170/a-word-that-describes-a-process-that-can-be-both-good-and-bad&quot;&gt;A word that describes a process that can be both good and bad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP explained why the questions is not a duplicate (by explaining why the answers in the other question don't fit)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question contains an advanced context &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Research effort is included (some options are eliminated with reasoning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clear indication of formal/scientific word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T15:46:04.020" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-07T15:23:08.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-06T16:35:56.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161021/what-do-you-call-the-child-who-doesn-t-resemble-his-her-parents-in-english&quot;&gt;What do you call the child who doesn’t resemble his / her parents in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a good example of how non-native speakers might describe the word they need. The user provides the expression in their mother tongue, and clearly explains its meaning. The user also mentions that the word/expression in his native language is not necessarily derogatory and provides a further example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I particularly appreciate the fact that the answer can't be found in Wikipedia. In other words this is not a general reference question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T16:35:56.083" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-06T16:35:56.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2015-06-06T16:49:39.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about Reddit? Eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reddit English&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T16:49:39.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-07T15:03:44.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158374/aren-t-there-english-equivalents-to-japanese-word-senpai-%e5%85%88%e8%bc%a9-meaning-a-senior&quot;&gt;Aren’t there English equivalents to Japanese word, Senpai (先輩) meaning a senior in school, career, or age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clear explanation and context from Japanese culture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Research is included&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Useful information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attracted great answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T01:00:43.130" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-07T15:22:49.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-07T15:14:49.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/237015/sabotaging-through-purposeful-procrastination&quot;&gt;Sabotaging through purposeful procrastination&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clear and detailed context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explanation of a word from another language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eliminating a word with reasoning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicating what part of speech is acceptable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attracted many useful answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T15:14:49.297" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-07T15:22:58.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-09T15:32:59.840" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a recent question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250533/how-do-i-identify-a-british-idiom-from-an-american-one&quot;&gt;How do I identify a British idiom from an American one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that has been closed. I am canvassing support for reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a question with way too many parts, many of those subquestions are not just broad but require an encyclopedia, and other subquestions are asking for numbers for vague un-numerable things (percentage of overlap of American and British idioms). And then there is a longish list of individual idioms asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is ostensibly very closable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd like to make a case for reopening it, since (biasedly) I have an answer for all those subquestions (for the broad ones, the answer is generally 'get a book' or an explanation as to why words are hard to count). And then for the individual idioms there actually is a quantitative method to compare them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the 'no answer' answers will be informative to many as to what 'too broad' means. And the answers for the specific idioms will teach people that such comparisons should now almost be considered gen ref.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am requesting a couple more reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T21:49:56.880" Title="Please vote to reopen 'idioms' question, it actually has an objective answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-09T16:19:30.300" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250445/origin-of-the-word-facebook/250446#250446&quot;&gt;Origin of the word &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research is included now (close reason was lack of research) and it is a good question with good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP didn't directly asked the origin of &quot;Facebook&quot; (the company name). He asked about the noun &lt;em&gt;facebook&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Etymonline is sometimes missed even if you do some research. There are examples of this in the past and those questions are not close-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T16:28:23.113" Title="Please vote to reopen the &quot;facebook&quot; etymology question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6926" CreationDate="2015-06-09T18:42:20.980" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last two or three days in a row, I've gotten a message that I've reached my daily voting limit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember ever seeing this message before (well, maybe once, a while ago?), so I'm wondering whether the threshold has changed recently, either globally or for me specifically, or whether I'm simply voting more and haven't noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm remembering what the modal popup said, my daily quota is 40 votes. Is that normal? Is anyone aware of any recent changes in his area? Is the threshold the same for all users, or does it tune itself to each user's voting pattern (e.g. to prevent fraud or voting binges)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I'm asking about regular voting on questions and answers here, not close- or delete-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry if this is an obvious question, I have a hard time searching Meta.SE on occasion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T21:46:13.247" Title="Has the voting quota changed recently, or am I simply voting more?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6925" CreationDate="2015-06-09T21:46:13.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's been 40 for years. And you can only vote on 30 answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T21:46:13.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6923" CreationDate="2015-06-09T21:49:56.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's great that you were able to write such an in-depth answer (and it really is a great answer) the question is still too broad, and should be closed if it remains as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the part of your answer that's meant to teach the OP about broad questions. Well, I think this is better off as a comment on broad questions, or perhaps in a Meta discussion which you can link them too. If we followed your strategy then we would never close anything as too broad because we would be showing them how broad their questions are through answers... which would not be a healthy change for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a terribly broad question. The concept of a word is already slippery, an idiom even moreso, especially with figurative meanings. How many words are there in the English language? There’s no good quantitative assessment of that. ... This task has so much variability and vagueness involved that any kind of percentage estimate will be meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next time before canvassing for reopen votes, please edit the question into shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/124338&quot;&gt;an edit pending&lt;/a&gt; which will hopefully be approved and tighten its scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T21:49:56.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6898" CreationDate="2015-06-10T17:07:15.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes to your question. An interesting question with no research is still interesting, while a well-researched dumb question is still dumb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106784" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T17:07:15.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2015-06-12T17:12:55.320" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should not allow single-word requests for &lt;strong&gt;synonyms&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;antonyms&lt;/strong&gt;, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for a word that means (or that means the opposite of) XYZ, where XYZ is a description, is typically not a problem. The asker has an idea in mind and lacks a word for it. This is different from a request for a synonym or antonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm looking for another word for &lt;strong&gt;useless&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm looking for a word that means the opposite of &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requests for synonyms and antonyms are something that can be easily googled for: &lt;code&gt;foobar synonym&lt;/code&gt;.  What value do such questions &amp;amp; answers on EL&amp;amp;U really add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK yes, here someone answering might provide some context or describe different connotations, which can help. But such info is also available by looking up the definitions of the synonyms or antonyms returned by googling, and often the google search hits themselves go into the various shades of gray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be to forbid such questions a priori. Any given synonym or antonym request could still be judged to be a useful exception, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51214" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-06-12T17:12:55.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2015-06-14T16:43:00.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apathy reigns on EL&amp;amp;U, certainly where suggestions for improving the quality of questions is concerned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single-Word Requests are one of the most common questions asked on this site, and probably the most discussed. Experienced users often direct newcomers to the Help Centre, suggesting that they take the tour and see what questions are off topic and how to formulate questions which should show a minimum of research. The examples listed in the SWR tag page are either dull beyond belief; show &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; research; give no indication as to how the single-word would be used in a sentence; or have such low view counts one is left wondering just how useful the question was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the tag info page needs to be updated, spruced up, rewritten. A bit more enthusiasm needs to be injected. As it is, the list just contains the bare question title.  Is it any wonder we receive one sentence questions, and then newcomers get disgruntled when their posts are put on hold, e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1103/read-beautiful-interesting-stories&quot;&gt;Read ( Beautiful + Interesting ) stories&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is said to be a question that definitely belongs to the SWR tag, and that's that. That &quot;on topic&quot; question is dated  Aug 16 '10, and has attracted 1029 views. In almost five years! Surely there are better examples which the site could submit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T16:43:00.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-16T04:55:24.850" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I miss a tag like function word. The most difficult words in the dictionary of English and all other languages are function words. &#xA;The thread &quot;Is this subjunctive?&quot; in ELU concerned with &quot;come+time&quot; has the tags meaning, grammar, subjunctive-mood. That is of the vaguest kind, but no precise labelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the system how tags are presented very confusing and unsystematic. It is very difficult to see what choices there are as to tags. I think one should consider a new arrangement of the sector tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63507" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T04:55:24.850" Title="tag: function word" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6945" CreationDate="2015-06-17T07:46:08.587" Score="10" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Preface&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get many questions along the lines of &quot;&lt;em&gt;how do I frame a question in order to elicit an ordinal number as a response?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&#xA; And, inevitably, they are all closed as duplicates of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13662/how-should-i-phrase-a-question-that-must-be-answered-with-an-ordinal-number-e-g&quot;&gt;What ordinal number reflects the position of the number five in the set of five numbers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to make a question having an answer as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5 is the &lt;strong&gt;third prime number&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bold part is the answer. How to phrase the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whose top-voted, but not accepted, answer is (summarized):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The number two is the first prime number. In the sequence of prime numbers, what is the position of the number five?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, this question, and this answer, are the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;canonical versions&quot; of this common inquiry on EL&amp;amp;U.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the current &quot;canonical&quot; question is the best representative, and I don't think the &quot;canonical&quot; answer(s) are the standard, natural way native speakers would frame the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate my point, the answers of the ‘canonical’ question are in bold while the linked &quot;answers&quot; are each taken from one of the duplicate posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(I hope you agree that &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of questions in bold could possibly lead a person to reply: &lt;em&gt;I am the third eldest daughter&lt;/em&gt;, or, &lt;em&gt;I came fifth in the race&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;strong&gt;What ordinal number reflects the position of the number five in the set of prime numbers?&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481/how-to-frame-a-question-about-the-order-of-birth-between-sisters&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am the third daughter of my parents&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answer:  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20773/framing-a-question-to-which-you-reply-with-i-am-the-third-born-in-my-family?lq=1&quot;&gt;I am the third born in my family&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;strong&gt;The number two is the first prime number. In the sequence of prime numbers, what is the position of the number five?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77222/how-do-you-convert-the-sentence-george-washington-was-the-first-president-to?lq=1&quot;&gt;George Washington was the first president.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answer: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244718/order-of-things&quot;&gt;You finished 5th [in the race]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;strong&gt;For the sentence “5 is the nth prime number” to be correct, what should be the value of n?&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86869/what-will-be-the-question-for-he-is-my-second-son?lq=1&quot;&gt;He is my second son&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answer:  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131683/how-to-ask-about-ordinal-place-of-an-offspring&quot;&gt;I'm the second child of my parents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;strong&gt;What is the position of 5 in the sequence of prime numbers?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66659/how-can-i-ask-a-question-with-the-answer-im-eating-the-fourth-apple?lq=1&quot;&gt;I'm eating the fourth apple&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answer: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73847/how-manyth-son-to-your-father&quot;&gt;I am the fourth son of my father&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answer: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21876/how-to-ask-a-question-to-get-an-ordinal-number-answer?lq=1&quot;&gt;Barack Obama is the 44th President of U.S.A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you agree that the questions and answers are appropriate and correct; please leave the following questions closed as a duplicate of the canonical question above.  However, I would suggest that we identify a new &quot;canonical&quot; version of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions as being duplicates of current &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;canonical&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481/framing-a-question-whose-answer-is-an-ordinal-number&quot;&gt;Framing a question whose answer is an ordinal number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131683/how-to-ask-about-ordinal-place-of-an-offspring&quot;&gt;How to ask about ordinal place of an offspring?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66659/how-can-i-ask-a-question-with-the-answer-im-eating-the-fourth-apple?lq=1&quot;&gt;How can I ask a question with the answer &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m eating the fourth apple&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21876/how-to-ask-a-question-to-get-an-ordinal-number-answer&quot;&gt;How to ask a question to get an ordinal number answer&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20773/framing-a-question-to-which-you-reply-with-i-am-the-third-born-in-my-family?lq=1&quot;&gt;Framing a question to which you reply with &amp;quot;I am the third born in my family&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77222/how-do-you-convert-the-sentence-george-washington-was-the-first-president-to&quot;&gt;How do you convert the sentence &amp;quot;George Washington was the first president.&amp;quot; to a question?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86869/what-will-be-the-question-for-he-is-my-second-son&quot;&gt;What will be the question for &amp;quot;he is my second son&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/252809/ask-someone-about-their-birth-order/252886#252886&quot;&gt;Ask someone about their birth order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244718/order-of-things&quot;&gt;Order of things&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73847/how-manyth-son-to-your-father&quot;&gt;How manyth son to your father?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/102618/how-manieth-as-an-ordinal-number-question&quot;&gt;How manieth as an ordinal number question&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104967/manieth-is-it-acknowledged&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;manieth&amp;quot;, is it acknowledged?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My preference is to elect question number 1&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481/framing-a-question-whose-answer-is-an-ordinal-numbe&quot;&gt;Framing a question whose answer is an ordinal number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) as the new canonical question, and linking all the other questions to that one. It has four practical sensible answers, and nine upvotes.  It might also be an idea to merge this post with &lt;strong&gt;question number 2&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131683/how-to-ask-about-ordinal-place-of-an-offspring&quot;&gt;How to ask about ordinal place of an offspring?&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers in the two questions do not clash, and they are not carbon copies of each other. Moreover, users  will see this wise observation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/131691/44619&quot;&gt;“&lt;em&gt;There isn't really a simple way of asking this in English, ...&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/a&gt;. It also helps to explain why the terms; &lt;em&gt;manieth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;manyth&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47107/how-to-ask-nth-time-of-something&quot;&gt;nynth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; do not exist in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:07:47.080" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T11:07:47.080" Title="Please change the canonical 'ordinal question' to one which is more informative" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-17T17:29:47.240" Score="-6" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/248711/77081At&quot;&gt;What word means &amp;quot;explicitly forbidden by the most fundamental laws&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; I posted what I thought would be a winning answer, but yet was &quot;rewarded&quot; with a downvote for no apparent reason, was given no explanation, and ran into an apparent refusal, by anyone, to communicate. Could/would someone please apprise me of the reason for this seemingly rude behavior? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77081" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T08:52:12.217" Title="What's going on here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6935" CreationDate="2015-06-17T22:38:09.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why your answer was downvoted was that some person thought &quot;This answer is not useful&quot;.  Who do you think has a duty to explain further, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, exactly why do you think disapproval is &quot;rude&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2015-06-18T08:52:12.217" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T08:52:12.217" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-20T18:08:54.350" Score="-3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance.....The question where does the saying &quot;The bees knees&quot; come from was posed on this site. The answers were senseless dribble at best. The correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ever wondered why we say this most odd expression: the bee’s knees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all started with another expression, still used today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression ‘the be-all and [the] end-all’, meaning chiefly ‘the central or most important element’ is (like ‘one fell swoop’) a quotation from Macbeth. Macbeth is contemplating killing Duncan: “..that but this blow/Might be the be-all and the end-all…/..We’d jump [ie risk] the life to come.” (Macbeth, I.vii.4ff)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage is a well-known one, and the phrase the be-all and [the] end-all has been popular over the years. It is usually found without the second ‘the’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though many people are aware that it is a Shakespearean allusion, it is not as common as, say, ‘to be or not to be’ and it is usually used without any special reference to Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After years of use, ‘the be-all and [the] end-all’ became shortened to: the Bs and Es (the be-all and end-all), the Bs being the things which are all and the Es being those things which end all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this was said, over time (if you repeat this fast, you will see), it sounds like ‘the bee’s knees’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126052" OwnerDisplayName="Dirk Moby" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T19:13:07.627" Title="Why cant I answer or comment on a question/answer without being &quot;approved&quot; by someone whom YOU deem fit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6938" CreationDate="2015-06-20T18:25:11.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you are referring to may be : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47088/where-does-the-phrase-the-bees-knees-originate-from&quot;&gt;Where does the phrase &amp;quot;the bee&amp;#39;s knees&amp;quot; originate from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer you have provided seems to be from : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammar-tip/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-the-bees-knees/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammar-tip/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-the-bees-knees/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I will upvote your question, and if somebody else upvotes too, then you will have enough points to update the earlier question with your answer, but do provide the source, which adds weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what you are feeling because I went through it when I had 1 point. Wish we had a better alternative, but the current system is not too defective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, by upvoting your question, I will part of those whom are ranting against, as approvers. Ideally this question must be moved to &quot;meta&quot; but I think you may not have access there yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58798" OwnerDisplayName="Prem" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T18:25:11.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5459" CreationDate="2015-06-21T10:21:39.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Not really sure if this is an ‘answer’ to a meta ‘question’ at all… but close enough. Since the question isn’t a question, I guess its answer can be one instead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One minor niggle has just occurred to me: the &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; in the first sentence is misleading. It would be better to change it to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;AND&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; makes it look like the asker should &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; include their research &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; consider whether the question is better for ELL, when in fact of course the asker should do &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt;: including your research does not mean the question is necessarily better on ELU than ELL, and ELL expects research to be included as well, so considering that it’s a better fit there does not preclude one from including one’s research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T10:21:39.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-22T02:09:59.083" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is motivated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/248237/how-does-the-gerund-bear-carry#comment538876_248237&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There should be a tag &quot;grammar terms&quot;. The tags etymology and Latin are rather vague and do not characterize the problem of this post sufficiently. And I think the discussion of grammar terms - their sense and nonsense - should be a main topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T02:09:59.083" Title="Would a tag for 'grammar terms' help?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6934" CreationDate="2015-06-23T15:18:58.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may or may not already know, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481/framing-a-question-whose-answer-is-an-ordinal-number&quot;&gt;Framing a question whose answer is an ordinal number&lt;/a&gt; has been reopened. The bounty (500 points) will expire &lt;del&gt;in three  days time&lt;/del&gt; &lt;del&gt;tomorrow&lt;/del&gt; &lt;strong&gt;today&lt;/strong&gt; and I will have to award it to only one user. I would very much like to share it equally among &lt;del&gt;three&lt;/del&gt; [update 6/25/15] four users but I know this is impossible. Please upvote the answer that you believe is the most complete and thorough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Thank you” to all those concerned; to copy-editors Dan Bron, and Kit Z. Fox, who took an interest and Dan Bron who practically rewrote the post and made me realize the initial post lacked focus and an aim;  the users who reopened the question; and to the users who have responded to &lt;em&gt;‘the call of duty’&lt;/em&gt; :) by providing some excellent answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T11:39:59.007" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T13:18:20.990" Score="5" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/254566/have-you-ever-been-to-opera-when-you-lived-in-milan-did-you-ever-go-to-opera-wh&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have you ever been/Did you ever go&lt;/strong&gt; to opera when you lived in Milan?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the closed question turns on the fact that &lt;em&gt;when you lived in Milan&lt;/em&gt; represents a single specific period in the past that definitely occurred, which is why only &lt;em&gt;Did you ever...?&lt;/em&gt; works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't see anything in answers to the &quot;canonical&quot; question that addresses this point. If we change the &quot;when-clause&quot; restriction to be something that could have happened repeatedly (or indeed, might &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; have happened), we could contrast, for example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: &lt;em&gt;Did you ever go to the opera when you were a drunk?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: &lt;em&gt;Have you ever been to the opera when you were drunk?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...where (1) again probably refers to a single &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; past timeframe (during which you had alcohol abuse issues), but (2) simply restricts the scope of the question to the co-occurrence of two past activities (being at the opera, and being drunk), either or both of which may never have occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me the closed question isn't about &lt;em&gt;how do the verb tenses work?&lt;/em&gt;. It's about whether &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; references a &lt;em&gt;specific, actual&lt;/em&gt; past time, or simply a condition/action which &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:08:37.857" Title="Reopen request - Have/Did you ever xxx? during a specified past timeframe" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T03:51:23.327" Score="-1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the closers of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/254428/50720&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; 'as off-topic', commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/254428/how-did-but-evolve-from-old-english#comment555943_254428&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because in the final analysis it's almost always a matter of opinion &lt;strong&gt;how and why acceptable usages for a word change over time&lt;/strong&gt;. Especially with common short prepositions, conjunctions, etc., since all Anglophones have been using them for centuries - mostly without the benefit of having been formally taught exactly what &quot;definitive&quot; usage rules should have applied during their lifetime. Often, all we know now is what &lt;code&gt;changes did occur&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;questions with the most upvotes asked in 2014 onwards&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the question of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;changes did occur&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;are asked in, but NOT limited to, the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185221/why-is-there-no-autumntime-or-falltime&quot;&gt;Why is there no &amp;quot;autumntime&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;falltime&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218878/why-is-it-behead-and-not-dehead&quot;&gt;Why is it &amp;quot;behead&amp;quot; and not &amp;quot;dehead&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121266/why-is-pound-of-weight-abbreviated-lb&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;pound&amp;quot; (of weight) abbreviated &amp;quot;lb&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7281/why-do-eleven-and-twelve-get-unique-words-and-not-end-in-teen&quot;&gt;Why do eleven and twelve get unique words and not end in &amp;quot;-teen&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the above, many other questions  on &lt;strong&gt;how and why acceptable usages for a word change over time&lt;/strong&gt; abound and remain open.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The objective of all these questions equate identically to mine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and the comment quoted above applies to the aforesaid questions. So why was my question closed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I should hope that a question be considered on its merits, notwithstanding the questioner's identity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T15:01:41.353" Title="Why was my question on the etymology of 'but' closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T06:14:02.270" Score="-5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/254726/what-do-you-call-call-a-woman-philosopher&quot;&gt;What is the English word for &amp;quot;female philosopher&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;currently stands at +2/-5. I'd like to discuss why it's being downvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting that there should be any changes in behaviour, or changes to rules or anything like that, I just think it's an interesting topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I suspect, is that people don't like either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The conversation/story-like tone of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that the story is about a guy flirting with a girl and getting her number. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I think it remains an interesting question, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any words for female philosophers or similar? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in fact the OP gives context for how it's being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are other people's thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:08:18.030" Title="Let's talk about why this question is being downvoted" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6948" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:13:30.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taken in a wider context, it is an interesting question on English usage.  While there are many words that have a feminine ending, -ess or -rix, there are many that do not.  A question regarding why this should be could elicit some interesting responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two paragraphs of introduction in the question don't help.  I can see many people downvoting based on their wording alone.  They are irrelevant to the core of the question, maybe editing them out would increase the question's popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:13:30.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:58:35.173" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;People seem to be not getting pung by other peoples messages recently. I've seen several comments about it, and people I've pinged ain't been getting punged either. Also messages aren't getting into my inbox. Are the powers that be aware of the pinging crisis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've taken Dan Bron's advice and also asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/259432/in-boxes-and-being-pung&quot;&gt;Meta, here&lt;/a&gt;. If any users have had the same problem, perhaps you could add the details to the list in that question over there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T14:20:49.600" Title="In-boxes and being pung" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T14:27:12.260" Score="13" ViewCount="664" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/253999/is-there-a-verb-that-means-to-make-poor/254160?noredirect=1#comment556865_254160&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; says that I have to copy in definitions for words when responding to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some discussion about this on meta but no definitive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4412/answering-a-question-by-copy-pasting-a-dictionary-definition&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; says that &quot;A verbatim copy-paste from an online dictionary is unnecessary, only the link has to be provided.&quot; I thought that made sense but am being told that's wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153/does-copy-and-paste-infringe-copyrights/1036#1036&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; suggests that &quot;a whole main entry from a reference work&quot; is too much.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4973/what-to-do-about-missing-source-attributions/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; states in large bold, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;do not tolerate answers consisting primarily of text copied from other sources.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/253999/is-there-a-verb-that-means-to-make-poor/254160?noredirect=1#comment556865_254160&quot;&gt;requested edits&lt;/a&gt; would seem to cause the answer to violate that admonition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one person contacted OED, they &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5165/removed-oed-definition-as-it-is-not-allowed-under-my-license-agreement/5173#5173&quot;&gt;clearly said&lt;/a&gt; &quot;It is fine to link to the OED, but not quote it at all.&quot;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/89332/tim&quot;&gt;Tim&lt;/a&gt; claims OED is wrong but cites no more authoritative source.  I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/78353/trlkly&quot;&gt;Trlkly&lt;/a&gt;'s statement that some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5165/removed-oed-definition-as-it-is-not-allowed-under-my-license-agreement/5200#5200&quot;&gt;clear policy is needed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5165/removed-oed-definition-as-it-is-not-allowed-under-my-license-agreement/5166#5166&quot;&gt;Frank says&lt;/a&gt; &quot;I now no longer add definitions copied from any copyrighted source, if I need to I will provide a link to the source (without including any material).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this meta question isn't about off-topic questions like &quot;what's the meaning of this word that I could have easily looked up in a dictionary&quot; but for questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; that are a bit harder to look up answers to via common reference sources.  It seems unnecessary to paste in a definition especially when one can read the question or click the links to see what the word means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that link rot is generally an issue, though it seems like it should be less of an issue with dictionaries, and the link also always contains enough information that if a dictionary did change its format, one still has the word one's trying to look up and could just paste that into the search box.  Batch editing for dictionaries that change URL formats could be possible too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/253999/is-there-a-verb-that-means-to-make-poor/254160?noredirect=1#comment557268_254160&quot;&gt;Dan Bron points to a post&lt;/a&gt; which says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/are-answers-that-just-contain-links-elsewhere-really-good-answers/8259#8259&quot;&gt;answers should contain an answer and not just a pointer&lt;/a&gt;.  I think that's not a fair criticism for the answer that comments on, which does contain the answer (the words requested).  Had I just written something like &quot;Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impoverish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pauperize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beggar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that would probably fall short of actually providing an answer, especially if the word wasn't obvious in the URLs.  A reader can look up the provided terms in almost any English dictionary or follow the links for one particular convenient dictionary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I think that links to dictionary entries should generally be acceptable and (for copyright reasons) maybe even preferred over versions with pasted definitions as long as the meaning is clear in contexts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/253999/is-there-a-verb-that-means-to-make-poor/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; when the word definition is a very close fit to what's being requested in the question.  However, because some other far more experienced folks disagree, I'm bringing this up for focused discussion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115786" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:43:45.857" Title="When definitions are linked to, is copy-pasting the definitions required?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:34:57.797" Score="-4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone suggested an edit to an answer I wrote recently. The edit was reviewed and rejected on grounds I as the author would have been best situated to assess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a good idea for the OP to be notified of suggested edits and have a say - especially since they have authority to make the edits anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44962" LastEditorUserId="44962" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T20:28:12.453" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T06:14:37.823" Title="Suggested Edit - Author input?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4719" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:44:30.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that both of these issues have been fixed at some point, probably as a side effect of the general SE design rework carried out in spring.  Owner comments now have a solid-color background, and the background color of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags is now consistently &lt;code&gt;#eee&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14033" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:44:30.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6948" CreationDate="2015-06-25T16:51:46.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forget about the backstory: I actually &lt;em&gt;enjoy&lt;/em&gt; questions which have a bit of a narrative to them, and especially ones which share personal motivations for asking. That makes them not only more fun to read, it makes them easier to answer! I didn't downvote for the narrative aspect of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, forget the indelicate details; I'm going to hazard a guess that if any of you knew me personally, &quot;prudish&quot; would not be in the top 5 adjectives you'd use to describe me (&quot;impatient&quot; would be). I would not, do not, and did not downvote because of sexual language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, let me turn the question around on you.  How would you vote on a question which asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the English word for the color of the sky on a sunny, cloudless day at noon? &lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to hazard another guess that you'd vote it down (at a minimum, you'd close-vote it for lack of research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6948/lets-talk-about-why-this-question-is-being-downvoted#comment26046_6948&quot;&gt;in my comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll put my hand up and tell you I downvoted it without even reading the body of the question itself. Of the collection of reasons I downvote questions, two are primary: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the question itself would never occur to a native speaker, because the answer is obvious&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and so doesn't belong on the site, and the &lt;em&gt;question embeds a false premise&lt;/em&gt;, and so is invalid. I downvoted this question for the former violation, but the latter applies as well (questions which commit this latter crime are even more annoying and odious when they do it to advance a particular political position, i.e. are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/254426/how-is-the-predicate-of-the-verb-to-diagnose-formed#comment556578_254426&quot;&gt;peeving&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was being honest: I voted down immediately after reading the title, before I read anything else.  You could make an argument that I should not do that, but I did, and in this particular case I don't see anything which suggests I should reverse my decision.  Do you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tl;dr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: It's a &lt;em&gt;dumb question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, I suppose, for the sake of completeness: questions on socially-relevant topics tend to attract more votes overall than simple factual questions, and questions which implicitly or explicitly advance the cause of equality for women tend to get upvoted. The reverse is true, too. That line of reasoning didn't motivate my personal downvote, but it may have influenced others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt; Yes, I put all those adjectives in to preempt the wags in the audience. But, they're always making better wags.  Let's see what they come up with.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:08:18.030" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2015-06-25T19:02:46.573" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently include relevant portions of definitions in my answers. My main reason for doing this is to produce a finished answer that reads as a self-contained explanation, rather than as a suggestion with links for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like to rely on links to do anything more than provide a view of the source I'm quoting, in case readers want to confirm the accuracy of my quotation or check the source for additional context. Although many standard-reference sources seem quite stable, links can disappear or become garbled in unpleasantly magical ways, so there is always some risk that a link may become inoperative and reduce the value of an answer correspondingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument that block quotes make answers unwieldy would be far more serious if EL&amp;amp;U didn't have such a well-designed formatting option for block quotes. As matters stand, the shaded block quote is easy to recognize as such, neatly distinguishing the answerer's original wording from cited material and adding visual relief from what might otherwise be a hedge of monotonous black-on-oatmeal paragraphs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who wants to focus on an answerer's word-choice suggestion(s) can readily skip the block definition(s) without fear of losing the thread of the original answer, and anyone who wants to see what the reputable reference work that the answerer chose for corroboration has to say about the meaning of a suggested word can read the definition while remaining in sight of the answerer's supporting argument (if any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a difficult time taking arguments about copyright violation seriously when we're talking about citations of short blocks of text as part of a larger (and sometimes much larger) answer. In the first place, the legal notion of fair use is precisely about protecting the benefits to public discourse that result from a policy of content sharing that allows people to quote (with proper acknowledgment) useful ideas already in print; this is especially so when an answer is comparing different sources' ideas or citing illustrative examples from different years or decades. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the case of reference works, there is a further consideration: If I quote a sentence or paragraph from the &lt;em&gt;Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Garner's Modern American Usage&lt;/em&gt; and the advice strikes readers as offering sound and authoritative insight into the question asked, I have made a case in miniature for buying a copy of the book so they can conveniently consult it on other discrete questions. That's free publicity for a deserving reference work. In my opinion, properly documented quotations of small portions of published works in a noncommercial (and nonpaying) forum such as English Language &amp;amp; Usage do not compromise anyone's interests under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the notion that copying and pasting block quotes is lazy, I have two thoughts. First, just because an answer includes a block quote doesn't mean that the quote got there via a simple Ctrl-C Ctrl-V operation. Despite being a slow typist, I type the vast majority of the block quotes I include from their original sources, which tend to be either Google Books titles that offer only a snippet of copyable/pastable text or actual print books that permit no block copying at all. Second, it is hardly reasonable to treat even a quick copy &amp;amp; paste operation backed by a link to the source as lazier than a link to the source without a supporting copy &amp;amp; paste operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, each answerer gets to decide how complete to make each answer. Some will win the approval of voters who appreciate succinctness; others, the approval of voters who appreciate thoroughness. The variety of approaches is ultimately a good thing, since it serves readers who are looking for different things in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T04:03:48.520" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T04:03:48.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:55:59.330" Score="14" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve been noticing an increase in answers that, essentially, consist of nothing but a suggestion or bald assertion and that are often lacking any apparent effort to even format, punctuate, or spell properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I’m only a recent convert to the pleasures of EL&amp;amp;U, I can readily recall the advice I was provided from more experienced and wiser users concerning the characteristics of a “good” answer – an answer which was likely to be helpful to, not only the OP but also to other users – &lt;strong&gt;aside from being accurate and coherent&lt;/strong&gt;. I was advised to contribute at least a modicum of person advocacy derived from first-hand experience, to include links to supporting information from established authorities (when possible), with citations in plain, rather than hypertext (due to the ever-present threat of link-rot), and to use quote-blocks only for direct quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators and more experienced users explained how these components were what made a mediocre answer “good” and “useful.” They explained that including the above mentioned components assisted OPs and other users in their evaluation of the quality of my answers, as well as increasing the likelihood that my answers would garner positive votes, which in turn would enhance my reputation score and grant me access to features of EL&amp;amp;U that were currently unavailable to me. I have found all that advice, and gentle but persistent guidance, to be absolutely accurate and I appreciate and try hard to adhere to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the EL&amp;amp;U Help Center &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answering&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from another site or in an answer on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange) make sure you do all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Provide a link to the original page or answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Quote only the relevant portion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Provide the name of the original author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Ernest Hemingway - Biographical on Nobelprize.org, Hemingway saw combat when he was a teenager. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[other sources, quotes, explanations, etc. necessary to complete the answer]&#xA;Do not copy the complete text of external sources; instead, use their words and ideas to support your own. And always give proper credit to the author and site where you found the text, including a direct link to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is our current position on these issues? What is the bottom line on citing to established authority, plain text source attribution, and links?&lt;/strong&gt; How should I respond to what appears to me at times to be a flood of OP/Answers that fail to adhere to the site’s protocols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98990" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user98990" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T04:00:48.383" Title="What is our current position on these issues?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|self-governance|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6952" CreationDate="2015-06-26T06:07:55.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model relies on community participation to make questions and answers more helpful. People can up vote, down vote, flag, comment, vote to close, delete, and with enough reputation, edit. Good edits are encouraged with reputation and badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is that OP's &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; notified and can roll back (if you weren't, you can address this as a bug.) If you're feeling proprietary about your posts, it might make this model less than ideal for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see this as a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T06:14:37.823" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T06:14:37.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T16:50:55.337" Score="6" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;On New Year's Day, a poster asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/217898/how-when-and-where-did-the-phrase-state-of-the-art-originate&quot;&gt;How, when and where did the phrase &amp;#39;state of the art&amp;#39; originate?&lt;/a&gt; Unfortunately, those words were the entirety of both the question header and the question body—and the question was (not inappropriately) closed for lack of research effort. As far as I can tell, the poster never supplied any evidence of additional research into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before it was closed, the question drew two useful answers suggesting  fairly late first-occurrence dates for &quot;state of the art&quot; as a phrase equivalent to &quot;status of the art&quot; (late 19th century), &quot;state of the art&quot; as a phrase equivalent to &quot;stage of development of a practical or technological subject,&quot; and &quot;state-of-the-art&quot; as an adjective phrase (1955). All of these datings are attributed to OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick Google Books check, however, turned up an instance of &quot;state of the art&quot; in the sense of &quot;status of the art&quot; from 1776—a century before the reported OED suggestion of late 19th century. I have altered the OP's question to note that occurrence, and I think it would be interesting to see what other early occurrences for each sense of the phrase may be findable. But first the question needs to be reopened. It's a classic case of a potentially interesting question disabled by the poster's lack of effort. Please consider reopening this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T16:50:55.337" Title="Reopen request: Another potentially interesting question that originally showed no research effort" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2015-06-27T06:27:57.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes (or rather, a lot of times), a word means more than one thing. If you're making a case for the word you suggested, &lt;strong&gt;it helps if you copy-paste the relevent definition instead of leaving it to the OP to click on a link and wade thorugh the whole entry to find the exact sense you wrote about.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford does have a system to link to individual definitions, but it's not perfect. They use it internally (when they cross-link), but you can't get a link to any specific definition readily (there's no 'share' button). Most other online dictionaries don't even have this feature internally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, including the definitions makes life easier for everyone. It maintains the flow. For a single-word request with 10 good answers, I'd be considerably more annoyed if I had to click on 10 links or more to see what they meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the answer you linked to which says it's illegal isn't very clear about the version of the OED being talked about. &lt;strong&gt;I highly suspect it's the free online version that's illegal to quote.&lt;/strong&gt; I think it's more likely they're talking about the premium/subscribed versions. (Notice that &lt;em&gt;'you can link'&lt;/em&gt; part could be the author's own words, not quoted from Oxford).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77339" LastEditorUserId="77339" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T19:21:55.360" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T19:21:55.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6964" CreationDate="2015-06-28T21:49:39.680" Score="5" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker, but I usually do try my best in interacting with the Stack Exchange-sites. I haven't been using this site much so maybe there is something culturally I have missed here, but would it be possible to get some feedback on my recent question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/255593/word-for-something-that-is-emotionally-charged-in-a-way-that-reduces-the-chances?noredirect=1#comment559271_255593&quot;&gt;Word for something that is emotionally charged in a way that reduces the chances of approaching the subject from an objective point-of-view?&lt;/a&gt;) that at this point have two downvotes without any suggested improvements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is an unsuitable use of meta then please let me know and I'll remove this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121595" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:01:08.957" Title="Question feedback - Did I do anything wrong here?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6963" CreationDate="2015-06-29T08:14:54.747" Score="5" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading through &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions I often notice that a lot of the answers are not 'single word'-answers. Instead they give a combination of words describing the requested topic. Some users however take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag seriously though and try to either force it into a single word, however these are (obviously) of poorer quality often than the multi-word expressions. A typical example is for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/255612/what-is-the-word-for-a-deep-desire-that-was-prohibited&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;forbidden fruit&lt;/em&gt; is a perfect fit, however the closest 'single word' would be &lt;em&gt;fixation&lt;/em&gt; (though a 'no such word exists' answer would make even more sense I guess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should multi word answers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions be downvoted? Or should the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; (or a better description to make clear that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; are actually not about 'single words')?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22361" LastEditorUserId="1420" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T08:34:47.807" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T08:34:47.807" Title="Should I downvote multi word answers on single-word-requests?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6962" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:00:04.793" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; for users searching for multi-word expressions, so a rename is not in order. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; really is (supposed to be) about single words, and that should be taken into account when writing an answer to a question with this tag. (Questions may be tagged with both to emphasize that either a single word or a multi-word phrase would serve.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a multi-word response to a question tagged only with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and not with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, and it looks like a good answer aside from this, the first step I'd advise is making sure that the original poster really wants a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest way to find out is if the original poster actually says something about a &quot;single word&quot; in the question, title or comments. (Many of these questions ask for &quot;a word&quot; or &quot;the word&quot; for something, but this wording is somewhat less clear, and might potentially encompass a multi-word phrase.) And on the other hand, the original poster might say somewhere that they would accept a multi-word phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original poster hasn't made it totally clear in their writing, I would then check the history of the post to see if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag was on the question from the beginning, or if it was added later by an editor. (For an example of the latter, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/255701/revisions&quot;&gt;the history of this question&lt;/a&gt;.) If the tag was added later, and the original poster only used vague terminology like &quot;what is the word&quot; or &quot;give me a word,&quot; I personally wouldn't consider this evidence enough that only a single word is strictly acceptable. In this case, you might want to leave a comment below the question asking the original poster for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above is basically to remind you that it's possible that the mistake is not in the answer, but the tag. In that case, a downvote for this reason would clearly be inappropriate; the tag should be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if it's clear that the tag is correctly applied? It is up to you how to use downvotes. Personally, I would generally &lt;strong&gt;not downvote&lt;/strong&gt; answers that are good aside from this issue. Such answers are in my opinion &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;, even if problematic, because people who find the question later might not have such stringent requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, even when the OP explicitly says they want a single word, they end up going with a phrase. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/255677/is-there-a-single-word-for-reducing-various-arguments-of-different-levels-to-th&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, where the questioner talks about a &quot;single word&quot;, but the accepted answer ended up being a two-word phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T06:43:41.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2015-06-29T21:26:06.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The direct answer to your question is that downvotes are as much part of the site as upvotes, and we cannot tell precisely why three people (at time of writing) downvoted the question any more than why six (at time of writing) upvoted it. There is no accounting for disapproval any more than approval, and we certainly do not require explanations for either, as innumerable hurt posters on meta have been told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your more general point is less clear and more interesting.  The help page on voting says &quot;Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information.&quot;  The tooltip when you downvote a question says &quot;This question does not show research effort: it is unclear or not useful&quot; (note that this is not exactly the same as downvoting an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, with which some of your comments seem to have confused it). And the 'Privileges' page says &quot;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&quot;  The three are not entirely consistent, though it is important to note that all of them are the same across the Stack Exchange network (so any requests for change would have to be made on Meta Stack Exchange) and the wording has already been the subject of long and agonising debate (so any such requests are unlikely to be greeted with enthusiasm).  Each site conducts a discussion on what should be downvoted, and ELU has very many questions on the topic (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2858/8019&quot;&gt;Should ELU offer more guidance on Question Downvoting?&lt;/a&gt; as an example: searching &quot;downvoting&quot; on this meta gives 484 results), but it comes down in the end to what each individual voter thinks, which is no more susceptible to justification or explanation than which way a political vote is cast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T21:26:06.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2015-06-30T02:01:08.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not at all sure that there is any advantage to spelling out when people who have  downvoting privileges should exercise that right, since such advice is ultimately strictly precatory anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As sumelic says in a comment above, the advice to &amp;quot;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect&amp;quot; doesn't say &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Only&lt;/strong&gt; use your downvotes...&amp;quot; Indeed, it doesn't put any practical limits on when to use downvotes at all. But it does suggest that downvotes are most appropriate in what I think it is fair to describe as instances involving exceptionally poor submissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this language can easily lead to hard feelings when posters concludes that downvoters must have judged their submission to be egregiously sloppy, effortless (in a bad way), and/or clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect. Maybe the site's policy would be clearer and less susceptible to misunderstanding if the Help section said something like this, instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Casting downvotes is, in general, an unregulated privilege. Downvoters are under no obligation to explain their downvotes or to identify themselves as having downvoted a particular post. Some downvoters limit their downvoting to questions and answers that they deem egregiously sloppy, lacking in effort, or factually incorrect. Others downvote questions and answers that they consider excessively simple, lacking in evidentiary support, or unduly opinion based. Still others downvote questions and answers that they find uninteresting, unhelpful, or (in some other respect) unsuitable for this site. It is even possible that some people downvote questions and answers that, although acceptable in point of research and presentation, reach conclusions or make points that the downvoters disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are five important things to understand about downvoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting is a privilege that users earn by acquiring enough points on this site to establish themselves as being presumptively responsible users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting (like upvoting) is part of an assessment system that is designed to be anonymous and that therefore requires no explanation or justification for particular votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cumulatively, downvoting (together with upvoting) tends to promote better questions and answers, and restrain worse ones, by helping the one to rise and the other to sink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting can help a poster recognize that a submission may have weaknesses that the poster was not previously aware of, and thus encourage the poster to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everyone gets downvoted occasionally, whether the downvoted post deserves it or not. If you recheck a downvoted submission—particularly if it has attracted only one or two downvotes—and it still seems sound, consider the possibility that the downvote is not a profound and authoritative judgment on the quality and usefulness of your answer, but rather one person's opinion, expressed at the click of a button, after an unknown amount of deliberation, for an unknowable reason. Then let it go, and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:01:08.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:31:59.717" Score="22" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;The website &lt;a href=&quot;http://learnhub.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learnhub.org&lt;/a&gt; seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=EL%26U+learnhub.rog&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;amp;ei=VmqSVZ20HcbyUL2qi6AI#q=EL%26U+learnhub.rog&amp;amp;filter=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copying content wholesale from EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; without any attribution at all. Unlike with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/is-http-englishqna-blogspot-com-violating-elu-or-your-copyright/2154#2154&quot;&gt;this blogsite problem here&lt;/a&gt;, there isn't even a link back to the original EL&amp;amp;U posts. So apart from your material being published without respecting your moral right to be recognised as the author of your own work, EL&amp;amp;U content is not recognised as belonging to EL&amp;amp;U. The questions and answers there even appear in the same order that they appear in on EL&amp;amp;U if ordered by reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really wish to scan through learnhub.org to find all my posts so that I can make an individual complaint for each one, and I don't suppose you guys would want to do that for yours either. Can EL&amp;amp;U help us get this content removed from that site, given that both questions and answers from here are appearing there together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T22:59:40.253" Title="Mass infringement of our copyright" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|scraping|attribution|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6966" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:56:55.057" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I reposted this on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that if you want to do research about this on Meta sites, the terms &lt;em&gt;scraper&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;scraping&lt;/em&gt; are very useful. Here's what I found out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer: What to do:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/updated-procedure-for-reporting-scrapers/200178#200178&quot;&gt;short answer by Pops&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the form on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/contact&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;contact us&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; page, linked at the bottom of every page.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use the &quot;Other&quot; reason on the form (fortunately, we don't get enough of these reports to justify making SCRAPERs their own category/reason). Please include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the copied post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the original post on SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How other sites can use your material:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/updated-procedure-for-reporting-scrapers&quot;&gt;another post by Pops&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/05/now-licensed-under-creative-commons/&quot;&gt;Since day one&lt;/a&gt; of Stack Overflow, all content posted on Stack Exchange sites by their users (i.e. you wonderful people) has been provided to the whole universe under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the CC-BY-SA license&lt;/a&gt;. For my fellow non-lawyers, that license basically means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Anyone can use any Stack Exchange posts at any time without having to ask for permission&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Making money off of the copied content &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; permitted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You don't even have to copy stuff from here verbatim; you can just use it as a starting point and make whatever edits you want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There are just two rules you have to follow:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You have to provide &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;attribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Simple links to the original post and author info are just fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You have to allow other people to use your content, as long as they follow these very same rules. How meta!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(If you ever forget any of that, and want to refresh your memory, the license info is linked to in the footer of every page.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are, in fact, a lot of people who republish varying amounts of our content for assorted reasons. Unfortunately, there are some Stack Content Republishers Attributing Poorly and/or Excelling at Ranking (SCRAPERs, for short).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What attribution re-users must give:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a StackExchange Blog by Jeff Atwood, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;Attribution Required&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the content contributed to Stack Overflow or other Stack Exchange sites is &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-wiki&lt;/a&gt; (aka &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-by-sa&lt;/a&gt;) licensed, intended to be &lt;strong&gt;shared and remixed&lt;/strong&gt;. We even &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/&quot;&gt;provide all our data as a convenient data dump&lt;/a&gt;, seeded by us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But our cc-wiki licensing, while intentionally permissive, does &lt;strong&gt;require attribution&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt; — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought it was pretty clear what “attribution” meant, but given the semi-scammy way the content is popping up in some seedier areas of the internet, maybe not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hiveminds.se/vote/framed/story.php?id=23472&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hiveminds.se/vote/framed/story.php?id=23472&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://programmingfaq.w3ec.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://programmingfaq.w3ec.com/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(there may be others; these are just the ones I know about)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we REQUIRE that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the&#xA;  Stack Exchange network&lt;/strong&gt; in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious;&#xA;  a discreet text blurb is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink directly to the original question&lt;/strong&gt; on the source site&#xA;  (e.g.,    &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show the author names&lt;/strong&gt; for every question and answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink each author name&lt;/strong&gt; directly back to their user profile page&#xA;  on the source site (e.g.,&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By “directly”, I mean each hyperlink must point directly to our domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a tinyurl or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be &lt;a href=&quot;http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nofollowed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is about the spirit of &lt;strong&gt;fair attribution&lt;/strong&gt;. Attribution to the website, and more importantly, to the individuals who so generously contributed their time to create that content in the first place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyway, I hope that clears up any confusion — feel free to remix and reuse to your heart’s content, as long as a good faith effort is made to attribute the content!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: Because I cannot edit the blog in question, I've had to reformat it by hand. Some formatting features (use of red colour and so forth) may have been lost in translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:34:11.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T17:41:10.323" Score="8" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a preferred method for answering single-word requests or phrase request answers if you have two or more recommended words/phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few possibilities I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Multiple answers - Answer once with each word/phrase option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This keeps it neater and allows the OP to pick their exact favorite word/phrase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a good thesaurus (and the question is really generic), you could be listing answers all day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One answer, multiple options - Leave only one answer but include all options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This shows the OP a digest of options and keeps the number of answers down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't allow for specific acceptance of answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One answer, one option - Pick your favorite option and don't mention the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keeps the focus on what you think is the best answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's possible no one else will think of those other options but it does give other people the chance to answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I only had two or maybe three different words/phrases, I'd be more likely to use option one but I'm afraid it looks like you're rep-scavenging. I do like that it gives people the option to refer to the answer specifically with the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to go with option two because it's easier but I champion one answer over everything else and mention the other options in passing. I particularly use this for when someone is looking for a word that has 10-20 good options in the thesaurus, and I'll sometimes post a screen-shot of the thesaurus options just to show that there are a bunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think option three is very useful to the person asking the question because of the second bullet point... if no one else thought of it, then the OP (and subsequent viewers) would never see that option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to know if there's a preferred method to answer these questions. I know that questions should always be split if there's more than one question, so is the same true for answers with more than one answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T06:43:57.060" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T20:31:05.153" Title="Word request answers - one answer per word?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-07-09T16:45:31.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6975" CreationDate="2015-07-01T15:11:11.833" Score="7" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to respond to the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/256286/is-it-common-to-use-pervert-as-in-a-pervert-as-an-adjective&quot;&gt;Is it common to use “perverted” as an adjective?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; with evidence from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA Corpus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't want to link to the generic COCA main page or landing page, I want to link to particular results.  Ideally, I'd like to provide a link so the OP could see a page like this, with all 3 panels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hh0Vo.png&quot; alt=&quot;COCA corpus screenshot, marked up&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd settle if I could link to just one of the panels; for preference, the main panel, outlined in yellow in the bottom-right, which lists all the examples of &lt;em&gt;perverted&lt;/em&gt; used as an adjective, but I'd also accept the panel giving measurements of relative usage, outlined in orange in the top-right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is I'm stymied by the site's use of iFrames.  I was able to sniff the HTTP traffic and get the appropriate query string to, theoretically, produce the content of either the examples panel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/x3.asp?xx=1&amp;amp;w11=perverted.[j*]&amp;amp;r=&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, again theoretically, the content of the usage metrics panel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/x2.asp?chooser=seq&amp;amp;p=perverted.%5Bj%5D&amp;amp;w2=&amp;amp;wl=4&amp;amp;wr=4&amp;amp;r1=&amp;amp;r2=&amp;amp;ipos1=-select-&amp;amp;B7=SEARCH&amp;amp;sec1=0&amp;amp;sec2=0&amp;amp;sortBy=freq&amp;amp;sortByDo2=freq&amp;amp;minfreq1=freq&amp;amp;freq1=10&amp;amp;freq2=10&amp;amp;numhits=100&amp;amp;kh=100&amp;amp;groupBy=words&amp;amp;whatshow=raw&amp;amp;saveList=no&amp;amp;changed=&amp;amp;corpus=coca&amp;amp;word=&amp;amp;sbs=&amp;amp;sbs1=&amp;amp;sbsreg1=&amp;amp;sbsr=&amp;amp;sbsgroup=&amp;amp;redidID=&amp;amp;ownsearch=y&amp;amp;compared=&amp;amp;holder=&amp;amp;whatdo=seq&amp;amp;waited=n&amp;amp;rand1=y&amp;amp;whatdo1=1&amp;amp;didRandom=n&amp;amp;minFreq=freq&amp;amp;s1=0&amp;amp;s2=0&amp;amp;s3=0&amp;amp;perc=mi&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But plugging these URLs directly into a browser tab simply produces an error. I'm guessing the webapp is sensitive to referrer URLs or session cookies or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know how I can create a link which would take visitors directly to the results of a particular COCA query?  If not, do you know of a more-easily-citable corpus of comparable scope and reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if not, would this be a legitimate question for &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/79824/how-can-i-link-to-a-result-in-the-coca-corpus&quot;&gt;Webapps.SE&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:25.287" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T20:54:58.190" Title="How can I link to a result in the COCA corpus?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6969" CreationDate="2015-07-01T20:31:05.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If both of your suggestions are equally valid and serve the same purpose, i.e. they're used in the same context(s) and have the same connotation(s), then you should probably post them as separate answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this almost never happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, when you have multiple words to suggest, chances are that each of them has pluses and minuses. For example, one meets the formality requirement, but is well-nigh obsolete with the desired meaning, while the other clearly means the right thing but is borderline-offensive slang, etc. etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In almost all cases, the best answer to a s-w-r question would detail &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the options, describing why each might be suitable, as well as why it might &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thesaurus-like &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to single-word-requests are just as undesirable as unresearched, context-free single-word-request &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T20:31:05.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6962" CreationDate="2015-07-01T20:41:33.837" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd venture to guess that 90% of the time when a question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, the only reason the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-request&lt;/a&gt; tag isn't added as well is because the questioner doesn't know that such a tag exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, don't downvote a multi-word answer to a single-word-request question just for being multi-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T20:41:33.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2015-07-02T11:21:54.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully agree with Sven Yargs' answer, but I would like to add, and illustrate, why including a block quote from the referenced source is, in my opinion, a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First is a practical consideration.&#xA;I regularly browse this site on mobile devices. Some of the common references that are used here are decidedly unfriendly to anyone on a slow (or expensive) data connection. SE itself is quiet easy on the data, and when I want to see the two lines of text that encompass the relevant part of the definition of a given word, I'd rather not load in an external heap of imagery, scripts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, many references do not easily allow one to create a link to a specific part of a page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, suppose that someone is looking for a concise way to describe the style of one's handwriting, I would probably answer along the lines of:&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;That would simply be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. As Merriam-Webster shows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5 a :  style of penmanship :  handwriting &lt;em&gt;wrote in a fancy hand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I very much doubt the use of answering:&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The word you are looking for is &lt;strong&gt;hand&lt;/strong&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Because that leaves it up to the reader to read through all 12(!) definitions to see if there is anything in there that would render my answer useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try it, and I predict comments that ask you to quote the relevant piece of the definition to corroborate your answer. Even from people that will not even click the link to start with; and I cannot disagree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T11:21:54.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6970" CreationDate="2015-07-02T20:54:58.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6970/how-can-i-link-to-a-result-in-the-coca-corpus#comment26183_6970&quot;&gt;@RegDwigнt's tip&lt;/a&gt; about registering an account, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/79855/97102&quot;&gt;a step-by-step guide to sharing COCA links&lt;/a&gt; over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Webapps.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:25.287" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T20:54:58.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2015-07-02T21:43:45.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This comment says that I have to copy in definitions for words when responding to single-word-requests etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the comment doesn't say that you &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt;, it merely indicates that you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;quoting the definitions will aid in the long-term utility of your answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider it a &quot;best practice.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems unnecessary to paste in a definition especially when one can read the question or click the links to see what the word means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if link rot is unlikely to be an issue, there are a few reasons I think it's often best to paste definitions in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It's easier for the reader to stay on-site, rather than jump to a bunch of different dictionary sites (think about how this problem might be compounded if, say, half a dozen people answer the question, and every one of them posts a link instead of a definition). What a pain in the neck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Sometimes it's not the word itself that's the crux of the answer, but the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the word. This is especially true when a suggested word has multiple meanings, some of which have little to do with the question. In your question, for example, you link to the word &lt;em&gt;impoverish&lt;/em&gt;, which has two meanings: one is directly related to the O.P.'s question, the other more tangentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;: to make (someone) poor&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  : to use up the strength or richness of (something, such as land)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The O.P. asked for a verb that means &lt;em&gt;to make poor.&lt;/em&gt; So, if I'm only familiar with the second meaning of &lt;em&gt;impoverish&lt;/em&gt;, then I might think you've made a weak suggestion. I generally appreciate seeing the pertinent definition in the answer itself, rather than having to go find it in the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Many dictionary sites have a lot of ads (my computer will sometimes slow down significantly just by loading a page from M-W, for example). Posting the definition instead of the link can help alleviate this problem  – it's a courtesy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Without any discussion of the meaning of the word(s), the answer looks more like a comment than an answer. (There are other ways to address this problem besides pasting a definition, such as paraphrasing the definition, instead of copying it verbatim.) That's why I've always thought that an answer that says little more than: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How about &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://onelook.com/?w=doohickey&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;doohickey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is rather &quot;thin&quot;, even if it aptly and precisely solves the single word request. I think something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about &lt;a href=&quot;http://onelook.com/?w=doohickey&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;doohickey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is a word that can be used to describe something when we don't know the formal name for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be better, particularly for a site that strives to &quot;build &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;libraries&lt;/a&gt; of high-quality questions and answers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:43:45.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T08:11:18.543" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I get confused where to ask questions, here or on English Language Learners. Anyway,  could &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/60866/what-is-the-term-of-someone-who-like-to-have-the-center-of-attention-talks-about&quot;&gt;&quot;What is the term of someone who like to have the center of attention, talks about him self and greatness&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; be asked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53961" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T08:46:51.497" Title="confused if this question be asked here or in ELL" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6966" CreationDate="2015-07-03T17:49:38.720" Score="-16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what to do.  Try to teach yourself not to be selfish with your good answers to questions.  Be flattered if the answers are repeated elsewhere.  Take pride in your work without trying to keep others from seeing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106784" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T17:49:38.720" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T05:17:34.157" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;So many of the questions are answered in the &quot;comment&quot; portion rather than in the proper &quot;answers&quot; spot. I do not understand this behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127782" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T05:17:34.157" Title="Why do people constantly answer questions in the &quot;add a comment&quot; section?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2015-07-08T07:32:23.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6985" CreationDate="2015-07-07T01:06:23.693" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is down voting open to scrutiny at any level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103961" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T06:27:24.643" Title="Is there a reputation level where the identity of down-voters is revealed?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-08T16:54:07.180" Score="0" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am dissatisfied with a recent up vote of my reputation. Is there any mechanism on EL&amp;amp;U that will allow me to down vote my own reputation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116014" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T17:26:37.710" Title="Can I down vote my own reputation?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2015-07-08T17:26:37.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are, by design, prevented from voting on your own posts.  If you really think your question should not be upvoted, you can delete it (so long as it does not have upvoted answers; it if does, you would be unfairly reducing the repuation of others).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you may also need to reconsider your view of reputation. It is not a negotiable currency (unfortunately) or a personal reward; it is an indication that others think this is a useful question, which should be marked out from the mass so that others may consider it.  What you think about this is in a sense irrelevant; so long as a question is not closed (which is a more technical point, and depends on the view of experienced users), every question is set adrift on the sea of public opinion, to gather votes and answers as it may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T17:26:37.710" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6981" CreationDate="2015-07-09T06:27:24.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;While the intent of the question may have been to ask about mandatory commenting on casting a downvote, it actually asks a different question to which an answer might be useful.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes. Downvoting is open to scrutiny&lt;/strong&gt; but only to Community Managers&amp;dagger; and Stack Exchange staff&amp;dagger;. There is no reputation level which allows access to voter identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have some limited tools to examine vote patterns, but can’t see who cast which individual votes. Suspicious vote patterns are submitted to CMs for detailed investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is never truly anonymous, or rep lost with downvotes on answers which are subsequently deleted could never be refunded. There’s also a nightly job which examines voting and can invalidate certain votes (such as obvious revenge downvoting) automatically. The effect of revenge downvoting, and that it was done, can be seen by anyone; but only the auto job and CMs know who did it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; Community Managers’ and staffers’ contributions on the site are identified with a diamond as if they were moderators (which they are) but they are not listed with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;site-elected moderators&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;Further reading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T06:27:24.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6962" CreationDate="2015-07-10T04:07:30.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should I downvote multi word answers on single-word-requests?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily, but you should think long and hard about upvoting an answer that does. Above all, be consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/242004/how-should-i-vote&quot;&gt;How should I vote?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be consistent with your scoring.&lt;/strong&gt; Everyone votes a little (or a lot!) differently; however, to make this process work, everyone must be judicious in their OWN voting consistency - don't worry about matching other peoples' votes, or be coddled - this is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever way a user decides to vote is fine, provided they're willing to consistently adhere to their own criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T01:18:32.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T19:53:54.963" Score="15" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, this question was put on hold: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/257953/why-is-their-italicized&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; italicized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, why it is considered out of scope? If it's considered to be too close to &quot;analysis of literature,&quot; that would seem to me like a valid reason in principle, although I might disagree. However, in the comments section, Oldcat suggested that the reason the question was off-topic was because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Italics are for emphasis, and are not part of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a valid reason to close a question, and as Mortimer Ballsack pointed out, there are already many questions on the site tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/italics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;italics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;italics&lt;/a&gt;. Should they all be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Help Center, it is stated that questions about &quot;Spelling and punctuation&quot; are on topic. Italics are not exactly either, but I feel they are similar. I understand that this is &quot;English Language and Usage&quot; Stack Exchange, not Typography Stack Exchange, but there are elements that overlap. I think questions about the use of typographical elements &lt;strong&gt;in English&lt;/strong&gt;, such as ligatures or italics, should be considered on topic (assuming the question is not about graphic design.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be differences between languages in the use of italics; see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa031901b.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article about German punctuation&lt;/a&gt; for some examples of where German writers use quotation marks where an English writer would use italics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other relevant tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ligature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ligature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ligature&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/capitalization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;capitalization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;capitalization&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diacritics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diacritics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diacritics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T03:29:11.797" Title="Are questions about the use of italics in English off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6947" CreationDate="2015-07-13T15:01:41.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There exists a wide gray area between &quot;acceptable&quot; and &quot;unacceptable&quot; questions.  It's not a finely defined line that can be discerned easily. This is why it typically takes 5 votes to close a question, and two further to delete it.  This is the area that moderators &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; allow the community to decide and define simply by close and open votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly and salient to your specific question here is that you will always find examples of questions in this area that are open that are worse than another given example which was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community isn't static, and this line changes and evolves over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it does no good to ask comparative questions, &quot;why was this action taken on my question and not on these other example questions&quot; when you are operating in an already murky area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask questions which are clearly allowed, and not in the gray area, they won't be closed, as long as they are well formed and not duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to ask questions in the gray area, consider either 1) visiting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;most popular meta questions&lt;/a&gt; and understand the community better, as well as submitting your own reasoning to these meta questions to convince others to accept questions in the gray area, and 2) asking a pre-question on meta, &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'd like to ask about X.  Here's my first draft, please help me improve it or change it so it's acceptable...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The community has already spoken in many things on meta, and there are some still rather divisive issues, which may result in some unacceptable questions lingering or ending up opening and closing multiple times.  Some moderators prefer to &quot;nip it in the bud&quot; so to speak and close when they know a question is ultimately unredeemable, but might not be closed quickly or stay closed. Of course, there are activist moderators too, and if you find that's the case, participate in site elections and open meta questions when you believe they are acting against the community's interests.  That's a different question, though.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3452" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T15:01:41.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6991" CreationDate="2015-07-13T17:47:55.897" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;When to use block-quotes, and when to not use block-quotes. Can someone clarify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98990" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T21:06:54.217" Title="Use of Block-quotes in Formatting Q &amp; A's" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6990" CreationDate="2015-07-13T21:06:54.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of our formatting is simply &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; convention, reflecting the preferences of longstanding members who edit and post frequently. While there was some early attention to formatting standards, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1210/path-for-adopting-elu-formatting-standards&quot;&gt;Path for adopting EL&amp;amp;U formatting standards&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/525/style-guide-for-questions-answers-and-comments&quot;&gt;Style guide for questions, answers, and comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nothing like a formal style guide has come to fruition. Some individual questions of formatting have been covered in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/363/what-emphasis-to-use-when-referring-to-words/444&quot;&gt;What emphasis to use when referring to words?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3411/formatting-poetry&quot;&gt;Formatting poetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4128&quot;&gt;Formatting a Quote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also related is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3091&quot;&gt;How would we like to format our keywords?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my couple of years of participation here, I would say that &lt;strong&gt;blockquote formatting is liberally employed on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular, because this stack uses text examples rather than code, and because virtually every question and every answer entails drawing a use-mention distinction, authors and editors are very liberal with italics, boldface, block quotations, lists, and headings, and the case has been presented to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2433&quot;&gt;add smallcaps&lt;/a&gt; as a further option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main exception is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/529&quot;&gt;widely and much-despised preformatted code&lt;/a&gt; format, against which tchrist has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4722/16052&quot;&gt;made a comprehensive case&lt;/a&gt;. They are tolerated in the rare cases where preformatted text is truly desired, as to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/12998/16052&quot;&gt;simulate tables&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because blockquotes are the most distinctive way to set off certain text from other, they are applied wherever a strong distinction is desired:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Always”&lt;/strong&gt; when the situation would call for the traditional use of a blockquote in written communication, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/56874/16052&quot;&gt;quoting passages of prose&lt;/a&gt;, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/33131/16052&quot;&gt;other SE posts&lt;/a&gt;. It is not necessary to wrap images in blockquotes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/215404/16052&quot;&gt;even when they are images of quoted text&lt;/a&gt;, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/200677/16052&quot;&gt;some have&lt;/a&gt; out of an abundance of caution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/126760/16052&quot;&gt;quoting more than one line of poems or lyrics&lt;/a&gt;, though it wouldn't be necessary if somehow the poem constituted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/106592/16052&quot;&gt;entire answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/189842/16052&quot;&gt;quoting dictionary definitions&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/2628/16052&quot;&gt;excerpts&lt;/a&gt; from other references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Often”&lt;/strong&gt; when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24750&quot;&gt;providing example text&lt;/a&gt; longer than four or five words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1073&quot;&gt;providing multiple examples&lt;/a&gt; in succession, though this is not strictly necessary for readability when used in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/2126/16052&quot;&gt;bulleted list&lt;/a&gt; or similarly distinctive formatting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Occasionally&lt;/strong&gt; you will see it used to set aside the main question from its background information, or where &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/112/16052&quot;&gt;headings would be more semantically appropriate&lt;/a&gt; but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the author just wants the text to stand out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't myself endorse the latter uses, though I don't consider them so egregious as to edit them out. I do edit to insert them for readability in the first five cases; if you look at older posts from 2010 or 2011 before the conventions were widespread, you'll find many more solid blocks of text that are much harder to skim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T21:06:54.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-13T22:42:29.647" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/259246/is-there-a-word-for-someone-or-something-that-apparently-defies-the-laws-of-phys/&quot;&gt;Is there a word for someone or something that literally defies the laws of physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was initially badly phrased asking for words meaning something that &lt;em&gt;really does&lt;/em&gt; defy physics. Initial answers then quite rightly gave answers like 'supernatural', while also pointing out that 'defying physics' wasn't really what was happening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later edits by the OP show that these really weren't the answers he's looking for, because he wasn't wanting a deference to magic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've since edited the question to reframe it as '&lt;em&gt;appearing&lt;/em&gt; to defy physics', but this invalidates the other three answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think what should have happened was the original answerers should have edited the question straight away. Given that that hasn't happened, is my edit the best course of action, or is it better to close the question and ask a new one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T22:42:29.647" Title="Should you make an aggressive edit on a post that already has answers?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6994" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:38:17.183" Score="-2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would you prefer I do about the comment that's repeatedly being applied to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/258991/9548&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People keep making the same comment, I object to the comment and/or warn against using the phrase being suggested, that causes some inflamed discussion, the comment and/or discussion is deleted, and then someone makes the very same comment again (this is the 3rd such comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives I can think of are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete my answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the comment as offensive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a comment in reply (same as previously) to explain why I don't think it's a good suggestion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9548" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:45:04.103" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:45:04.103" Title="What should I do about the comments on this answer?" Tags="|discussion|comments|flagging|specific-question|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:07:05.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you find such comments &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt; objectionable that they should be removed then I  suggest you carry on flagging. There is no guarantee that a flag on one comment will be accepted, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible for moderators to lock an answer to prevent further comments being added, but that also prevents votes being cast on it. Although locks can be (and usually are) temporary, lasting only long enough for the question to fall into relative obscurity, to use the measure in this case would be unusual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the more-or-less identical comments has been added by a different user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while moderators do remove potentially-inflammatory comments which &lt;strong&gt;start a conversation&lt;/strong&gt; which goes off course &amp;mdash; as happened on this answer &amp;mdash; this particular comment doesn't actually swear. For myself, I would prefer to let the latest comment stand. At least it's only a comment, and it does document a phrase which seems to be at least reasonably common &amp;mdash; since three different users have added it. While it may not conform to the way &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; would refer to the good Lord, ELU is an academic site which provides and answers and documents the use of English. Such a comment does fit, and people are quite able to come to their own conclusion about whether they would use such a phrase. Or even form an opinion about those who do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be no need to comment on such a comment though. If someone replies to the comment, that response is probably either &quot;too chatty&quot; or &quot;not constructive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:07:05.077" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:21:52.337" Score="-3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay - I've found this meta but it could have been made easier. It's not on the main menu or list of communities and is hidden in 'help' which is in very small lettering at the top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if a newbie doesn't know about metas or what they are, how would they find out except by accident?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new myself so I may be missing something obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could a pointer to metas be provided in a more obvious place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T11:28:05.447" Title="Why aren't metas easier to find?" Tags="|feature-request|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6997" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:28:12.470" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that comments may not be edited after some specific time limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that I made a partial comment but was then defeated by my connection going down.  Somewhere along the line the partial comment got posted. It doesn't make sense, as it terminates in the middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way that I can delete it or request someone else to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a moderator can do it for me, I'm not sure where/how to report it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I make the request by flagging it in the Question or Answer that I commented on. Should I request it here?  Is there some other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:38:53.987" Title="I want to delete an incomplete comment" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6996" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:38:53.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mystery meat&lt;/a&gt; of Stack Exchange is the comment deletion mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hovering over the comment in question will reveal options after the timestamp:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GvndR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment options&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click the &amp;times; button to remove the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't do that &amp;mdash; perhaps you're using an app which conceals it even more securely &amp;mdash; you'll need to flag something. The most obvious thing is the post (Question or Answer), but that raises a flag &lt;em&gt;against someone else.&lt;/em&gt; If there's another comment which could be flagged, say a &quot;@chasly Did you really mean to say that?&quot; then raise a custom flag on that comment instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:38:53.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6995" CreationDate="2015-07-14T11:28:05.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not on the main menu or list of communities &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I present you with the list of communities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ILS9I.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also used to be on the main menu, but was scraped in favor of being put on this list instead, as well as the Help menu.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could a pointer to metas be provided in a more obvious place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I present you with the front page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p2y8h.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is hidden in 'help'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have to elaborate why that is &quot;hiding&quot; and not precisely the very  &quot;providing in the most obvious place&quot; you're asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nrEOx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone looks for help, they &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; find the meta. That is not a definition of &quot;hiding&quot; I am familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, if a newbie doesn't know about metas or what they are, how would they find out except by accident?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now let me ask you this: why &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; a newbie need to find out? A newbie comes here to ask a question about English, not about Stack Exchange. They likely never even &lt;em&gt;heard&lt;/em&gt; the words &quot;Stack Exchange&quot; or &quot;meta&quot;. They are not interested in local politics. They are interested in doubt about word in language english.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, should they for some strange reason happen to ask a question about Stack Exchange, or politics, or philosophy, or photography, or gaming, their question will be migrated to the appropriate site. No harm done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, that's what the word &quot;newbie&quot; &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T11:28:05.447" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9444" CreationDate="2015-07-14T16:43:40.947" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the real world, there are any number of ways to distinguish &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;formatting&lt;/em&gt;, but on Meta.EL&amp;amp;U, neither has been specified in the tag wikis. They are both a jumble of questions about which type of formatting to use to represent different elements in a post, about how to indicate such formatting in Markdown, about SE changing the visual presentation of those elements, and about tone and writing style. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formatting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formatting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4200/about-formatting-ellipses&quot;&gt;About formatting ellipses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3358&quot;&gt;Should we fix backticks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1180/whats-the-best-way-to-format-quotes-within-quotes&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the best way to format quotes within quotes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/363&quot;&gt;What emphasis to use when referring to words?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3849/inline-quotes-formatting&quot;&gt;Inline quotes formatting&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26/should-we-have-a-standard-way-of-indicating-deliberately-malformed-sentences&quot;&gt;Should we have a standard way of indicating deliberately malformed sentences?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagged with neither:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4128/formatting-a-quote&quot;&gt;Formatting a Quote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/393/fancier-quote-formatting&quot;&gt;Fancier &amp;quot;Quote&amp;quot; formatting.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5264/is-underlining-available-as-a-markup-format&quot;&gt;Is Underlining Available as a Markup Format&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formatting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formatting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt; nor &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style&lt;/a&gt; is heavily used, each with 15–16 posts. Therefore, I propose &lt;strong&gt;merging them as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formatting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formatting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym, followed by cleanup relegating a few questions to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, a case can certainly made for keeping them distinct, but as they are currently used almost interchangeably, I suspect it may not be worth the upkeep on a relatively small number of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:11:17.547" Title="“Style” and “formatting” tags on Meta: synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|retag-request|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T22:27:58.770" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correspondence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correspondence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correspondence&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127902" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T00:18:15.913" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T00:18:15.913" Title="Meaning of [Correspondence] tag?" Tags="|support|tags|meta|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T09:18:08.743" Score="-3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a text for the dedication and aknowledgements sections of my thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129110" OwnerDisplayName="biotech" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T07:33:17.593" Title="Where to ask &quot;Is this right?&quot; question of a brief 10 lines text?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7001" CreationDate="2015-07-15T12:23:24.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since @Andrew only posted this as a comment, but imho it represents all and everything that really needs to be said, I'll post it as an upvoteable answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;neither ELL nor ELU does proofreading, although Chat is available for that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Okay, I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have something else to say...) Very likely this issue has been addressed in ELU Meta before, so the current question may well get closed as a duplicate. But the question &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt; is so succinct it's useful to have around so future visitors can easily find it as a way in to any discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T12:23:24.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7005" CreationDate="2015-07-16T08:09:34.433" Score="10" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be down to a matter of opinion. In which case, feel free to downvote/close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking for a word for ages: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144758/a-word-that-fits-the-concept-of-only-do-something-once-and-only-when-it-is-nee&quot;&gt;A word that fits the concept of &amp;quot;only do something once, and only when it is needed&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still didn't find the word, so awarded a bounty. Now I have 2 answers suggesting the same word. One was quicker (with sufficient explanation), one was answered a little later, but with a more elaborate example of how it could be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who should get the answer reps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't usually ask, but since there's a 100 bounty on it, I'd prefer to get it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T10:39:29.420" Title="In this scenario, who gets the bounty?" Tags="|discussion|answers|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7004" CreationDate="2015-07-16T09:24:48.403" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a tough one. You can put this off until the day before the bounty expires. Or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's totally your choice; whichever answer you find more helpful is the one you should choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My $.02 (or less, admittedly it's not worth much): If the answer is &lt;em&gt;idempotent&lt;/em&gt;, I'd go with the earlier answer for several reasons: 1. He was first. And he defined it sufficiently well. 2. The guy has 399 points, for goodness sake. And he came up with the answer. A bounty is encouraging, and good &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt; are an asset to recruit. Upvote the other guy. 3. I kind of have a minor thing about people with a significant amount of rep essentially repeating the answer given 5 hours earlier by a low-rep user. Unless there is a significantly large improvement, it's still just a repetition of an earlier answer with a link thrown in. (Nothing personal against the later answerer, but the definition he gave was cut-and-pasted from his link even.) The first guy defined it in his own words, at least, which is worth something. Maybe even more than $.02.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Your desire to do the right thing is admirable. Your clear willingness to be downvoted or closed is unusual. I hope you stick around.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T09:24:48.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T20:04:13.493" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was wondering if anyone knows of a solid resource (site) on the web or even an app in the play store that would be a good place to go to supplement my learning in school...i.e. someplace that has a good amount of the right information plus examples and/or tutorials with answers for things like syllabification, complementary and contrastive distribution, syntax, phonology, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user129529" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T20:52:10.340" Title="Looking For an Excellent Resource for People Learning Linguistics" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7009" CreationDate="2015-07-22T14:05:33.383" Score="5" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I currently write there are 100 odd questions to be reviewed in the close-vote queue. This is quite a lot, and it seems to me that reviewers are highly unlikely to try and clear this queue in one go. It's a bit like sitting down to a meal that's obvioulsy way to big for you. It kind of puts you off. We obviously want reviewers to be making careful and considered judgements, and often this means taking sufficient time and care to read questions closely and perhaps do some research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not equally interested in all the questions on the site here. One word wonder questions are my pet hate. It's therefore extremely difficult for me to review such questions objectively or with equanimity. I therefore skip nearly all W3 questions unless I can make an instant decision. Anything that requires more that a second's thought triggers an automatic reflex skip command to my hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when I see a syntax question, I am much more able to give it calm and considered attention. I'm pretty sure there are users here who have the inverse response to these categories of question and who could quite happily sift through W3 questions for hours but go green at the mention of an auxiliary verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to add a feature to the review queues so that we could filter them by tag? It seems to me that this would make the process much more efficient as users will be focussing on areas that interest them. Offending questions are going to get shorter shrft and better ones and ones with more potential will be considered by people who are more interested in those particular areas and would have more time to properly asses them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="39105" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T08:12:31.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T08:12:31.423" Title="Tag-sorting in the review queues" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2015-07-22T14:21:31.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This already exists!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvLyQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvLyQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;filter for tags and close reason types&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:21:31.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-22T21:27:33.157" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask what the difference is in common English usage between two particular words having to do with Internet browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127902" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T21:27:33.157" Title="Are questions asking definitions about tech stuff on-topic?" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6988" CreationDate="2015-07-23T03:29:11.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than one out of ten people (99 views, +11) upvoted the accepted answer and half of them upvoted the question (+6). There are 46 questions tagged &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt;. Four of which are closed and there's a few &lt;em&gt;duplicates&lt;/em&gt;. This OP's question should be historically locked, or its duplicate found, as apparently inquiring minds would like to know how to use italics. Point in case: this question's +10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It should be closed as being a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; and general reference, though I expect that reference to be &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which it is: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1289/usage-of-italics-in-writing&quot;&gt;Usage of italics in writing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T03:29:11.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6962" CreationDate="2015-07-23T05:17:19.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to note that the alt text for the downvote arrow is &quot;this question is not useful.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is useful for anyone, not necessarily the OP, then it should not be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reserve your downvotes for wrong, misleading, and inapt answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102411" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T05:17:19.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6962" CreationDate="2015-07-23T12:48:35.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All this time I thought the question was about giving multiple answers to a single word request, that is, a list of possible single words that might fit the specifications. This often happens, sort of a shotgun approach hoping that at least one of the words in the list is correct. This is frowned upon at Stackexchange (multiple answers by the same author in one answer) because it makes it difficult to judge and compare against others (lists = bad). I don't think it is terrible, but I understand that it isn't a rule-based use of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's not what this question is about. This is about giving a phrase as an answer to a question that explicitly asks for a single word &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; has the tag &lt;code&gt;single-word-request&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrase answers to single-word-requests are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; acceptable and &lt;strong&gt;should not be downvoted&lt;/strong&gt;. Usually the OP is in a state of lack of knowledge about the concept (either as a non-native speaker where a dictionary search can be misleading) or the native speaker looking for the 'right' word. And in such a state, they shouldn't be held firm to the desire for a single word. Not all concepts can be expressed as a single word, and though it does not answer the direct request, to say 'no, a single word doesn't exist' or 'an accurate way to say it is with a phrase (a single word doesn't capture the nuances)' is solving the OPs problem (even though sidestepping what they explicitly request). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose I ask &quot;What is the single word for 'unrequited love'?&quot;, the best answer is &quot;There is none, you really want to use those two words.&quot;. The question's assumption is just wrong and it's best to solve the bigger problem rather than try to shoehorn something inappropriate just to answer the letter of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T12:48:35.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7020" CreationDate="2015-07-24T19:31:00.787" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I think this may be a bug:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7RBdw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7RBdw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment everywhere at 49 reputation?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appear to have achieved the &lt;code&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/code&gt; privilege with 49 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a huge problem, but a curiosity... Do I report this or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128243" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T14:52:29.540" Title="Comment Everywhere at 49 Reputation bug?" Tags="|bug|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-25T16:19:02.927" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to see this question was closed but probably the reason is my background. I think it would be a very nice question at Mathematics Stack Exchange. Is there some way I could suggest that it be migrated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88380/abbreviation-or-expression-for-we-will-prove-that&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88380/abbreviation-or-expression-for-we-will-prove-that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82607" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T12:17:43.057" Title="How to suggest that a closed question be migrated to another site?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-26T12:23:29.457" Score="-11" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why did this question on meta, where one - as the help center says - can ask things to improve their attitude to stay well and better on ELU, get 4 down votes and no answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does it works this community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/inAt3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/inAt3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="24531" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T19:59:36.697" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T19:59:36.697" Title="Why did this question on meta, related to a question which got 2 down votes on the main site, get 4 down votes and no answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7017" CreationDate="2015-07-26T18:51:52.870" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes on meta are more an indication of disapproval or disagreement than (as on the main site) &quot;not useful&quot;; they do not affect your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But each downvoter has his own reason, which is not vouchsafed to the rest of us; there is no way that anybody can tell you the reason for any particular vote.  If you made an honest attempt to improve, some of us might make suggestions; but demanding explanations, ignoring a request to post links rather than screenshots, and not bothering with basic grammar, are no way to ask for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this has been said before, and most of it is on the help site: somebody who has been here for 3 years really should not have to ask a question like this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T18:51:52.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7015" CreationDate="2015-07-27T12:17:43.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you link is too old to be migrated, even from moderators. Otherwise, you could flag it for moderation attention, and explain what you want to suggest about the migration. Consider that moderators could not migrate it, though; first, they generally ask to the moderators of the other site, and if they don't want it, it doesn't get migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T12:17:43.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7014" CreationDate="2015-07-27T12:24:11.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably down-voted answers right after you reached 50 points, or you got some of your posts down-voted. Once the system notifies you about a new privilege, there isn't any way to remove the notification if you lose reputation. Probably, they could add a delay on notifications for new privileges, but then there would be users complaining they aren't notified when they get new privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T14:52:29.540" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T14:52:29.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T20:02:21.153" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to write subscript on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61558" LastEditorUserId="39105" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T07:52:11.607" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T07:52:11.607" Title="Is there a way of writing subscript in one's answer (or question)?" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7021" CreationDate="2015-07-27T20:04:52.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;.  Use the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;…&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; tags.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the series &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;, ⋯ &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;n&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, we see …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are corresponding &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;…&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; tags.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for certain, specialized uses, there are specific Unicode characters you might find useful¹.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt;Such as the superscript numerals&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More Formatting Options&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have yet to find one source that completely describes all the markdown and HTML features StackExchange supports, but these four together seem to cover the bases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;Editing help&lt;/a&gt;: list of all the standard Markdown features available in &quot;plain text&quot; editing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canonical Markdown reference&lt;/a&gt; (external): note that SE's Markdown may deviate from this spec in order to tailor the syntax for its own purposes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;HTML tags supported by SE&lt;/a&gt;: These are HTML tags, over-and-above the formatting features offered by Markdown, which SE supports. The &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags mentioned above fall into this category.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92060/add-data-se-style-magic-links-to-comments/94000#94000&quot;&gt;Magic links supported in comments&lt;/a&gt;: These are handy shortcuts for use in comments which make it easier to say common things, like &quot;&lt;em&gt;questions about the site belong on [Meta]&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which will automagically convert the bracketed text to a link to that specific stack's meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are small details like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125148/implement-style-markdown-code-blocks&quot;&gt;```-style Markdown code blocks&lt;/a&gt;, which I'm not sure are comprehensively collected anywhere.  If anyone does know of a single, central, consolidated, comprehensive, and authoritative reference, add a comment and I'll update this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T21:48:41.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-30T18:39:38.667" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;A large number of questions on ELL are asking for the meaning of metaphors. Many are from song lyrics or poetry, about which there are a number of meta questions. Some are from literature, most recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263455/what-does-a-box-like-plan-mean-i-met-this-in-this-side-of-paradise&quot;&gt;What does &amp;#39;a box-like plan&amp;#39; mean? I met this in &amp;#39;&amp;#39; This Side of Paradise&amp;#39;&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes they come from the news media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if these should really be considered specific to the English language? The meaning of a metaphor is mostly derived from the concepts represented in the words, not the particular language used. If you do a literal translation of the metaphor into another language, it would usually have the same meaning (although that doesn't mean the same phrase would necessarily be used by a native of the other language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different from an idiom, whose meaning is not necessarily determined from the literal meanings of the words, and a word-for-word translation would not make sense. Which is why questions about idioms are perfectly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that many people post these questions in lieu of trying to think imaginatively about the phrase they've heard/read. If they don't immediately understand the phrase, they seem to assume it's an idiom and give up. I'd like to encourage them to make more effort first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions do show a little attempt to discern the meaning, they ask &quot;Does &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt; mean &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;, and perhaps these should be acceptable. But questions like the above feel like they're just asking us to do their thinking for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66603" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T18:39:38.667" Title="Should questions about the meaning of metaphors be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T15:47:58.900" Score="10" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange network was &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackstatus.net/post/125387022934/read-only-test-august-1-2015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;put into read-only mode today&lt;/a&gt; for a failover test.  A banner was posted on each site to advise users of this.  However, on English.SE (and Meta.English.SE), the banner consists of white text on a beige background, and is nearly impossible to read, or even notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6uIJu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6uIJu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14981" LastEditorUserId="3438" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T12:40:25.087" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T12:40:25.087" Title="&quot;Read-only mode&quot; banner is illegible due to color scheme" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7028" CreationDate="2015-08-01T20:30:19.617" Score="9" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rhotic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rhotic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rhotic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rhoticity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rhoticity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rhoticity&lt;/a&gt; are separate tags.  One should at least be a synonym of the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67775" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T16:42:00.407" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:42:00.407" Title="Merge tags &quot;rhotic&quot; and &quot;rhoticity&quot;" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-02T00:50:52.587" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/264137/i-a-work-of-fiction-fill-in-the-blank/264150&quot;&gt;I _____ a work of fiction. (Fill in the blank.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;work of fiction&quot;, I meant &quot;fictional story&quot;, or &quot;fictional narrative&quot;, or &quot;product of imagination that relates a series of connected imaginary events&quot; -- you get the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people answering and commenting on the question thought I meant &quot;work of fictional literature&quot;. Consequently, the page is cluttered with discussion about the meaning of &quot;fiction&quot; rather than discussion of the word I am looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I solve this problem? Ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add text to the question body to clarify what I mean by the question title. (I have done that, but the page is still cluttered, and the question title still misrepresents the intended question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reword the question title. (The page would still be cluttered, and it would be even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; confusing for someone who comes along later and sees all this irrelevant discussion about what a &quot;work of fiction&quot; is.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a new question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Jordan" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T12:56:39.380" Title="Wording of question caused confusion; how to correct it?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7026" CreationDate="2015-08-02T12:56:39.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should edit your question (and possibly the title) to explain what your personal definition of 'a work of fiction' is. Otherwise, readers will use the normal definition, of a written work (which may of course include a screenplay or anything similar).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One word of warning, though; if (as I suspect) you mean &quot;anything, in any medium or using any sense, that is not documenting facts&quot;, the question is likely to be closed as 'too broad'. You would need to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you think all such experiences can be described by a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T12:56:39.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2015-08-02T15:25:12.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Crisis averted ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per FumbleFingers's comment: Retagged the four &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rhoticity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rhoticity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rhoticity&lt;/a&gt; questions to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rhotic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rhotic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rhotic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now go vote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/80423/241697&quot;&gt;Tag Synonyms on Low Use Tags&lt;/a&gt; so we never have to go through this exercise again! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T15:25:12.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T10:59:47.393" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just thought I'd introduce myself to everyone on this site. My name is Suhayl, and I'm an aspiring poetry writer. Being a poetry writer, I, naturally have an infatuation with the English language, it's many intricacies, synonyms, and just the overall beauty of the language. Being that it is not my first language, I do at times struggle with the usage, be it written or spoken. I am hoping to learn much on this site, and hopefully acquire new skills along the way. I would sincerely appreciate anyone who after reading my posts, takes their time out to correct any errors, be they incorrect wording, punctuation etc.&#xA;Regards, Suhayl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s I take it I can't discuss poetry on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user131577" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T11:29:09.863" Title="Newcomer Question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7029" CreationDate="2015-08-03T11:29:09.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome, Suhayl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you find EL&amp;amp;U an enlightening place. There is certainly a wealth of knowledge relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt;, and not just synonyms, but thousands of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;. When it comes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;, we've got you covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poetry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; section, we don't actually analyse poetry, per se. We do answer questions about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; of words, in a specific context, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully you've noticed that your question has moved from the main site, to our meta site (the background is grey, not off-cream), where people ask questions about the site itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should definitely take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help centre&lt;/a&gt; for more information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that Stack Exchange provide question and answer websites, not discussion forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you are quite right, there is no discussion of poetry on the main site. There &lt;em&gt;shouldn't be&lt;/em&gt; any kind of discussion on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also be interested in two other Stack Exchange sites: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;, a Q&amp;amp;A site for professional and aspiring writers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T11:29:09.863" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7024" CreationDate="2015-08-03T12:40:12.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreed; that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a colo[u]r-scheme for the faint-hearted! Changing it to something less anti-social...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3438" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T12:40:12.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:54:12.763" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that most of the questions about the one topic will also be related to the other. So why not have a single overarching tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/count-noncount&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;count-noncount&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;count-noncount&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/countability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;countability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;countability&lt;/a&gt;, and make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/countable-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;countable-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;countable-nouns&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uncountable-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;uncountable-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;uncountable-nouns&lt;/a&gt; synonyms of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a parallel case is the use of a single tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-number&lt;/a&gt; rather than separate tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/singular&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;singular&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;singular&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plural&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;plural&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;plural&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm talking about this, I'll also mention that the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/count&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;count&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;count&lt;/a&gt; seems of questionable usefulness to me; one of the questions tagged with it is about the countable-uncountable distinction, while others seem to be either about grammatical number or counting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, do you agree with me? If so, what do you think is the best name for a tag about countable and uncountable uses of nouns? I'm leaning towards &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/count-noncount&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;count-noncount&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;count-noncount&lt;/a&gt;, which you can find a lot of Google hits for, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/countable-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;countable-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;countable-nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uncountable-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;uncountable-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;uncountable-nouns&lt;/a&gt; and their synonyms being made synonyms of this single tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T02:59:40.030" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T02:59:40.030" Title="Do we really need to distinguish between the tags &quot;countable-nouns&quot; and &quot;uncountable-nouns&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T23:14:29.297" Score="5" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no difference in meaning between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt;, since mood in English always refers to a verbal category [Edit: I was wrong; F.E. has pointed out the application of &quot;modal&quot; to adjectives, adverbs and nouns in English grammar]. I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't have enough rep in the tag to suggest a synonym on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why &quot;modal-verbs&quot; should be the main tag, and &quot;modals&quot; the synonym&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no followers for either tag, so we don't have to worry about disrupting distinct communities. Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; has many more questions (283), it seems like it should be the main tag. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; does have 23 questions, enough that I'm not comfortable deleting it from questions one-by-one, and also I think enough to show that it is a tag that is likely to be used again in the future if we don't make it a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; also seems to me to be more parallel with other existing tags: we have a tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/auxiliary-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;auxiliary-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;auxiliary-verbs&lt;/a&gt;, but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/auxiliaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;auxiliaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;auxiliaries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is true&lt;/em&gt; that some linguists refer to modal adjectives, adverbs and nouns. However, I haven't seen any questions about these on ELU, and I just looked through the entirety of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Side-question: what should we with the tag &quot;semi-modals&quot;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since only five questions were tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt;, all of them were also tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt;, and the tag has no followers, I just went ahead and deleted this tag from all questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/57102/f-e&quot;&gt;F.E.&lt;/a&gt; disagreed with my removal of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt; and rolled back my edits to the relevant questions. F.E. has explained the reason for this as follows:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just because the line between core modals and non-core modals might be&#xA;  hazy, that doesn't mean that the label &quot;semi-modal&quot; is not useful. The&#xA;  class of core modals (or central modals, or whatever term your grammar&#xA;  uses) is in general mostly consistent no matter which grammar&#xA;  framework you use. The non-core modals are on a gradient, and often&#xA;  have different classifications w.r.t. the various grammars out there.&#xA;  Non-core modals--such as &quot;BE going to V&quot;, &quot;had better&quot;, &quot;dare&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;need&quot;, etc.--shouldn't be grouped with the core modals (e.g. WILL,&#xA;  CAN, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I still think that the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt; should be eliminated. Here's my argument against the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not used much; currently it only has 5 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is generally always accompanied by the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt;; this makes the tags on a question more cluttered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the above is also evidence that regardless of what is technically correct, in practice question-writers already do group non-core modals with core modals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the people interested in questions about semi-modals, both from an asking and an answering perspective, are likely to also be interested in questions about core modal verbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different sources have different definitions of the dividing line between true modals and semi-modals; not all sources use the classification of &quot;semi-modal.&quot; (I don't have any direct examples right now, but there is some discussion of this on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_auxiliaries_and_contractions#Differences_in_listings_of_auxiliary_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about English auxiliaries&lt;/a&gt; that has citations said to support this.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Alternate proposals of mine&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above, I propose merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt;, and deleting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt;. However, as you can see, there are also arguments for keeping these as separate tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community decides to keep the tag &quot;modal-verbs&quot; restricted to the core modal auxiliaries, as its tag wiki suggests, it seems to me it might be more clearly named &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-auxiliaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-auxiliaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-auxiliaries&lt;/a&gt; or something like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; should probably also mention &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; as an overarching category tag and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt; as a tag for other non-auxiliary verbs or phrases that are similar to modal verbs. These two tags also need tag wikis written for them that describe their scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a few incorrectly tagged questions that we would need to retag. (Some questions currently tagged &quot;modal-verbs&quot; deal exclusively with semi-modal expressions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I would also like a policy on whether double-tagging questions with both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt;, or both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt;, is encouraged, discouraged, or up to the preferences of the individual tagger. If double-tagging is discouraged, I don't even know which questions would use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt;, as the more specific tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt; completely cover all the questions to date. I don't think double-tagging should be encouraged because, as I said earlier, it clutters up the tags beneath questions, and it is also hard to do consistently. And if it's up to each individual tagger (the usual &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; case even if there is a policy) then there is certainly going to be inconsistency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar issue: there are a number of questions that deal with both core modal auxiliaries and semi-modals. How should these be tagged: a) with only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; b) with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt; c) with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, if we keep all three tags, I'd propose changing their names to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-auxiliaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-auxiliaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-auxiliaries&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt;, and coming up with a clearer policy of where each should be used and how they differ from one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:31:55.057" Title="Merge tag &quot;modals&quot; with &quot;modal-verbs&quot;" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-04T15:17:08.603" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is related to a question with an accepted answer and a bounty awarded: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/261990/a-snappy-and-inoffensive-alternative-for-calm-your-tits/264723#264723&quot;&gt;A snappy and inoffensive alternative for &amp;quot;calm your tits&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to close my question, in the sense of not receiving any more answers or comments.  Is the ONLY way to do this to delete the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then I propose to edit the question and state clearly that no more answers or comments are being sought.  Would that be kosher?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T06:09:48.907" Title="How to close a question to new answers?" Tags="|support|bounty|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7034" CreationDate="2015-08-04T17:33:13.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with the site as well as the Stack Exchange model: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site tour&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; will give you guidance on how to use this SE site (and others). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; will give you an idea of what you can do at your present rep level, and what you can look forward to with more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot vote on your own question, though I believe with enough rep, you might be able to vote to close. Closed questions are subject to removal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, once you post a question or answer on an SE site, your post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;kind of becomes community property&lt;/a&gt;, to edit, delete, etc. Your &quot;ownership&quot; over it ceases once the community interacts with it in a significant manner. To shut down potentially better answers takes something away from the community which invested in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That also applies to closing, answering, etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, then I propose to edit the question and state clearly that no more answers or comments are being sought. Would that be kosher?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it neither chews its cud nor has split hooves, technically, no.&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to change the SE model is a fruitless pursuit. (It isn't broken. It isn't implemented perfectly, but the model is just fine.) It would be better to properly use the system in place than to try to mold it to your desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;I totally stole that from someone wittier than me.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T06:09:48.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-04T19:33:59.417" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I best handle the following as SE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to reword &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/264081/request-for-a-scholarly-reference-for-the-correct-usage-of-the-english-indefinit&quot;&gt;this question's&lt;/a&gt; title because as the discussion and answers evolved I realized the focus of the question resolved in a different direction than I initially perceived. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically I would like to reword the question as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OLD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Request for a scholarly reference for the correct usage of the English indefinite article (a/an).&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NEW: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is the relationship between the English indefinite article (a/an) syntactical or phonological?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems (IMHO) that those who tagged this question as a duplicate mistakenly saw it only as a request for a &lt;em&gt;generic&lt;/em&gt; &quot;How to use a/an correctly?&quot; and overlooked the carefully included initial statement that the Question was &quot;&lt;em&gt;to address a &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; question&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore I would like to then be able to have someone remove the duplicate tag as this is certainly a more specific and divergent linguistic issue than a mere &lt;em&gt;how-to use a/an&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the SE way to do this right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93410" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T19:33:59.417" Title="Rewording a question's title and removing the duplicate flag" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-04T23:32:08.400" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably one of the roles of moderators is to correct users that are performing clearly erroneous reviews.  I thought the two users who &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/131654&quot;&gt;rejected this edit&lt;/a&gt; could probably use some guidance, which AFAIK can only be provided by mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I tried to find some means of contacting the moderators.  There was no chat room for ELU moderation (although &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/26515/english-mods&quot;&gt;I created one for them they might consider using&lt;/a&gt;).  No moderators were present in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;regular ELU chat&lt;/a&gt;.  So I pinged them &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23191841#23191841&quot;&gt;30 hours later Kit Z. Fox responded&lt;/a&gt; with an explanation of what a rejection is.  I said I didn't think the rejections were warranted.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23205608#23205608&quot;&gt;17 hours later&lt;/a&gt; Kit replied, &quot;I don't have an opinion on it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this just a more laissez-faire site than the typical Stack Exchange?  Or am I missing some better means of engaging the moderators here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T23:32:08.400" Title="How can we contact or engage the moderators?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T13:09:11.410" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/264953/what-does-got-takes-on-mean/264957#264957&quot;&gt;what does “got takes on” mean?&lt;/a&gt;, I gave an answer. I understand that it may be less than perfect. However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I did search online to find a definition of the idiom I was describing. I couldn't find one that satisfied me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I made up my own examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without my consent. my answer was edited to provide a link to a website that was a general one about learning English. It didn't address the original question and it is not even clear that the idiom is covered on the website at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happens when a disagreement about an edit occurs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't have a discussion in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be petty to just delete the edit and get into a delete/undelete war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best/usual way forward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T13:24:57.987" Title="How do I resolve a disagreement when someone edits my answer and I don't accept their edit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-08-05T13:34:23.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T16:48:53.400" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;My StackOverflow experience tells me that once a hold is put on a question it's very unlikely to ever be removed.  However, since this is English Language &amp;amp; Usage I wondered if there might be hope.  I've edited the question.  Now I ask if there is more I should do or if I should shut up and take the hold like a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/264898/76689&quot;&gt;Section title for explaining where a subject fits into a field of study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T05:24:24.023" Title="Please, how do I request that a closed question be reopened?" Tags="|support|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7040" CreationDate="2015-08-05T20:27:43.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the closers, I can explain that I had no idea what you were asking for; I'm sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a non-programmer, I still have absolutely no idea what you're asking for. However, in it's edited form, even though I certainly can't figure it out, I usually don't vote to close such a question because there are plenty of programmers on this site who might have the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you did is the right thing. When a question is put on hold, the correct thing to do is to edit it, and nominate it for reopening. If you're brave, you come to meta for support. It's not unusual here for a well-edited question, or one that is explained adequately, to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll vote to reopen since I would not have VTC the question if asked in it's present form. If four other people understand it, think it's on topic, and think it's answerable, then mission accomplished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T20:27:43.980" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7043" CreationDate="2015-08-06T19:29:44.903" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In July 23, I flagged five posts that were closed as duplicates, asking if a mod (or mods) could link them to different post. A post which, in my opinion, contained far better answers than the original &quot;canonical&quot; post . I've only noticed today (06 August 2015) that in August 2,  three of these answers were completely deleted by one mod.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions closed as duplicates were perfectly legitimate, a few even had a couple of half-decent answers and around 1,500 views, but they have now been deleted. I feel terribly responsible for their deletions. I never cast a vote to close them, and I didn't mention the term &quot;delete&quot; in any of my five flags, I only asked the duplicates to be linked to a different question. Many duplicates are linked to two questions, and this was my hope. In retrospect, I could have worded my flag request better, but I couldn't think  know how to say it. I should have said &quot;substitute&quot;, maybe that would have been clearer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, is there a way for the three deleted posts to be undeleted? I have the earned privilege  to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the deleted posts, one could copy and paste the entire page, couldn't they? It can't be too difficult a task. Is it too late? :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hesitate to add the links, I blame only myself for not making my request crystal clear. If I hadn't flagged the posts, none of this would have happened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:55:48.540" Title="Can a post deleted by a mod be undeleted?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7042" CreationDate="2015-08-06T20:55:48.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have managed to find the three questions from the clues here, and undeleted them. The fact that one of the affected answers was mine did not influence that decision at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not particularly straightforward to change the &quot;duplicate&quot; link target, but that might be the request to make in your flag(s): &quot;Please change the target link as a duplicate to X, which is the real answer&quot; or some such. I can't say that that will be done, or that such a flag will be judged helpful, but it's probably clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  hope for the moment that order is restored to the universe :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just how to answer the &quot;how manieth&quot; questions that we get at least weekly might usefully be the subject of a meta post, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:55:48.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-07T09:16:53.703" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some learners make efforts to disguise a quotation in their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is because they have had it drilled into them that plagiarism is a deadly sin (which it is of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they don't appear to realise is that a correct quotation with a proper attribution to the original author is good practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps none of this would matter but for the fact that their attempt to rewrite a sentence that they already don't understand, usually ends up so mangled as to be incomprehensible. (I don't want to single anyone out but if it's vital to the discussion I could provide a link to such a question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone think of a solution to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have invented an example for the sake of clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The student submits the following question to English Language &amp;amp; Usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I use the expression &quot;distant type&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw a friend write the sentence, &quot;X got bigger because of distant&#xA;  type Y&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does the phrase mean? How can I use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On investigation it turns out that the original was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... obtained results suggesting a totally unexpected acceleration in&#xA;  the expansion of the universe by using distant type Ia supernovae as&#xA;  standard candles...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Accelerating universe From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example isn't exaggerated and it is quite common in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to raise this issue on Academia SE.  The difference is that here I am explicitly asking about ways to deal with the problem (as I see it) on this site. Under Academia I shall be asking if there is a solution with regard to academic students when pursuing formal courses. I see this as sufficiently different to justify both questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="127726" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T21:51:02.420" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T21:51:02.420" Title="Disguised quotes that are inaccurate to the point of being incomprehensible" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7044" CreationDate="2015-08-09T10:49:14.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that failing to attribute, as you have phrased it, is either common or a problem on this site. If anything, we have the opposite problem. Asking &quot;Is this a common phrase?&quot; when a writer uses a metaphor or productive suffix is not really answerable; it would be better dealt with by the OP looking outside the context in which he found it, and searching for other uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your example brings up a problem that really is common: unfortunately it is neither new nor soluble.  A thoughtful OP may try to generalise the phrase he is asking about before asking &quot;What does this mean?&quot; Unfortunately,  by definition he does not fully understand the locution, and so his paraphrase may alter or destroy the meaning. The only way to deal with this is for questioners to be clear in their own minds whether they want to know &quot;What does the writer mean here?&quot; or &quot;What does this mean as a phrase?&quot;; in the latter case, it is also necessary to be sure that it actually is a common construction rather than a one-off turn of phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T10:49:14.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T16:18:13.507" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I asked in a comment if a question the author realized the answer to should be deleted or self answered and the question improved.  For those who can view deleted questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/265853/fill-in-the-blank-with-one-word&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/265853/fill-in-the-blank-with-one-word&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I wonder if I shouldn't have asked and still wonder what the answer really is in this case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T00:09:11.157" Title="How to judge when is it better to delete a question rather than improve it" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4692" CreationDate="2015-08-09T22:05:34.767" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any division between &lt;em&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; has to be arbitrary.  Why not just scrap it and merge the two? I personally find the whole business of vetting a question irritating - who am I to judge? Who is anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining levels works perfectly on a forum I used to inhabit (Wordreference - It has its faults too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, you object, I don't want to answer trivial question about whether to say &quot;Where are you?&quot; or &quot;Where you are&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well the answer is straightforward - &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don't&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All we have to do is self-select. Pick the questions that interest us and ignore the others, no big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from any selfish considerations, think of newcomers. What sort of welcome is it to be greeted with votes to close your question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amalgamate them. That's what I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T22:05:34.767" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7044" CreationDate="2015-08-10T21:43:51.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to what @TimLymington says, I think there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem with querents (often, non-native speakers) asking what some particular string of words &quot;means&quot;, but failing to supply full and/or accurate context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having just checked the current ELU Help pages, I can't find anything explicitly exhorting querents to provide a link to at least one fully-contextualized example of the usage they're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm active on both sites, and it's feasible I'm conflating instances on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, but at least ELL has the (highly upvoted) Meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/&quot;&gt;Please, everyone… details. Please&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;And&lt;/em&gt; we have a link to that page in the ELL Help section, for all the good it does! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that almost daily we get one or more questions concerned with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; where any supplied context is either inadequate or has been accidentally distorted by the OP in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An inevitable side-effect of this is that some &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt; jump the gun and post responses based on contextual assumptions that are later found to be inapplicable. I seriously doubt we could force all querents to get it right first time, but I think there's at least a chance that more established users (the ones most likely to be answering) can be persuaded to delay answering if comments requesting clarification or crucial links (that might significantly affect the response) remain unaddressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T21:43:51.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7051" CreationDate="2015-08-10T22:57:34.040" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is closed as duplicate, but other readers do not believe it to be so, what is the recommended course of action? Is it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a question about that question on meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2411/this-isnt-a-duplicate&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt;)? Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the question for moderator attention? Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both? Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None of the above?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the last, what should be done instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T10:17:12.483" Title="How to challenge a duplicate closing?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7046" CreationDate="2015-08-11T00:09:11.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether the questioner later realised the answer is not in fact relevant to whether the question should be closed/deleted. The fact that you think of the answer an hour after posting may make you feel as if the question was pointless, but (unless you merely failed to check a dictionary) your question may help others in the future: post the answer, and you may get a 'Self-Learner' badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, what seemed like a good question in your head may, once you have formalized it sufficiently to ask on ELU, turn out to be trivial; I understand programmers call this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rubber duck debugging&lt;/a&gt;, though sensible teachers have known it for centuries. If so, best to delete it before it is downvoted or deleted. (In theory, you could get upvotes for your answer and gain a 'Reversal' badge'; but it doesn't apply to closures, and in point of fact ELU has not awarded any Reversal badges).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an outsider's point of view, I suggest a rule of thumb; would you, after the question has been improved, be happy for it to go out over your name? If so, go ahead and edit. If not (and the example would get a definite 'No' from most people), then flag for a mod to close, closevote, or vote to delete, depending on your reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T00:09:11.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7049" CreationDate="2015-08-11T14:11:08.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve gone ahead and reöpened the question for you because I could not see how the would-be duplicate could be considered such, and there was no explanation posted by the closer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that when you would like a closed question reöpened, it’s usually better to raise the matter on Meta, presenting a persuasive case for that action, than it is to flag the question for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T14:11:08.117" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7053" CreationDate="2015-08-11T15:51:22.827" Score="19" ViewCount="24451" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/266016/word-to-describe-the-caring-of-the-seller-for-the-buyer/266022?noredirect=1#comment586051_266022&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, another user was adamant that Google is not a citable source and that that is a policy of ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link given as evidence for that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6741/is-tfd-a-rtfm-online-source/6743#6743&quot;&gt;Is TFD a RTFM online source?&lt;/a&gt; - a footnote to an answer to a different question so I am not satisfied with that as an authoritative answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that this and many other similar questions/answers were not just LMGTFY. The answer was the word (I didn't Google it to get it). The Google links are just convenient definitions of the word. This question is not about LMGTFY questions and answers. It is only about whether Google Dictionary is a valid reference.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched on Help and Meta and cannot find anything that explicitly says it is or isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online/2574#2574&quot;&gt;list of recommended dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; but it is only a list of recommendations not an approved list where anything else is forbidden. Google isn't on that list but neither is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5162/whats-up-with-all-these-dictionary-reference-edits&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s up with all these dictionary reference edits?&lt;/a&gt; comes closest but there is a disagreement of opinions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is speculation about where Google gets their definitions: some suggest they get them from various other online dictionaries (from leeching the definition from the first dictionary link). This doesn't seem to be supported by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia article on Google Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google Dictionary was an online dictionary service of Google,&#xA;  originating in its Google Translate service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Google Dictionary website was terminated on August 5, 2011 after&#xA;  part of its functionality was integrated into Google Search using the&#xA;  define: operator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the content now came from another&#xA;  Oxford dictionary, the Oxford American College Dictionary. As of 5&#xA;  August 2011, Google Dictionary was discontinued as a separate service,&#xA;  although similar results have been incorporated into the Google search&#xA;  sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that Google have their own dictionary, copied from one or more other dictionaries perhaps but, if so, they undoubtedly have the intellectual rights to do so. They provide this as part of a search (much like searching for &quot;the time now&quot; shows the current time) rather than as a separate URL as they did before. There is of course no plagiarism on their part. They cite no references and don't need to (just like other dictionaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I see no reason that Google Dictionary (now incorporated into Google Search) shouldn't be cited as a reference. So long as the definition it gives is copied into the answer (as all such references should) then any volatility of Google's dictionary is hardly an issue (the definition at the time of writing was shown). The source of the definition was Google and was cited. I see no problem with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a potential problem with Google search links in that many users copy a lot of unnecessary junk in the URL but this question only relates to properly sanitised Google search links: e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is in two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Is there a policy on ELU that Google Dictionary is not acceptable for providing the definitions of words?&lt;/strong&gt; (If so, please provide the link to where that is explicitly stated. Someone's opinion buried within a question on another subject on meta will not do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) If not, should there be?&lt;/strong&gt; (And why?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect everyone who has an opinion has voted and the consensus is quite clear: Google dictionary is not to be referenced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The down votes to the question are curious. Does that mean people feel it shouldn't have been asked or just that it was asked badly? I am glad it has been and I now know where ELU community stands on the question. I don't think it was clear before. People can say &lt;em&gt;Google is not a citable source&lt;/em&gt; with a lot more confidence and authority now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117446" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T13:58:09.597" Title="Is Google Dictionary a valid definition reference (in particular in answers)?" Tags="|discussion|reference|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7052" CreationDate="2015-08-11T19:49:49.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta posts and votes on them define policy, in that (insofar as Stack Exchange allows) the community decides how it should operate. Some aspects of ELU are mandated by the company; one such is the attribution policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of anything better, then the footnote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6743/18696&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; upvotes is part of site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I’ll state it explicitly so it can be voted upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The attribution policy] does make for problems when answers simply reproduce the content Google supplies from a &lt;code&gt;define&lt;/code&gt; query. Presumably Google have an agreement with their sources where they can omit any reference. I don't think we should endorse that, particularly when it's easy to provide cited references from original dictionary websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google is a directory. They have recently taken to providing answers directly on their site, but do so without any attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would not accept a link provided by Google as an answer: an answer should be more than a link and should reference source material. Similarly, we would not accept a Google &lt;strong&gt;search&lt;/strong&gt; link and text from the &lt;strong&gt;search results,&lt;/strong&gt; which is arguably close to providing a dictionary search link and data from the dictionary results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site were one where the questions lent themselves to Google’s calculator, we would not accept a bald figure as an answer: the method of calculation would have to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, &lt;strong&gt;no, we should not accept Google’s dictionary definitions at face value either.&lt;/strong&gt; Google does not acknowledge its sources, despite simply reproducing content&amp;dagger;; Stack Exchange policy does not allow unacknowledged material. The work is not Google’s: they have reproduced the work of others, and Stack Exchange policy is that that work should be acknowledged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side issue, but related, is that answers which reference Google definitions &lt;em&gt;tend&lt;/em&gt; &amp;mdash; often, but not always &amp;mdash; to include only Google’s content. If there is anything which is original at all, it is very little. Stack Exchange answers are supposed to be complete, and are expected to show some originality of thought. Regurgitating Google’s summary of another site is short-changing the asker and providing a bad example to follow. The quality of answers generally goes down, and if saying “No Google” is a way to stem that progress [regress?] then to do so is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in my original footnote, it’s easy to provide cited references from original dictionary websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; This is easily demonstrated by using Google’s own search engine to find the real source of their text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T07:41:36.840" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7052" CreationDate="2015-08-11T20:59:29.223" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it should be at least as valid as the dictionary that it reproduces: oxforddictionaries.com (an ELU recommended dictionary) it appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Google have been given the right to call it their own then it is not unattributed on any meaningful level (morally or legally) - it is attributed to Google as is their right. OED, for example, have a right to publish 'their' definitions because of intellectual property contracts between the company and its staff that produce them. Google has rights by a different route to the works of oxforddictionaries.com's staff. I see no difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other feelings about Google as evidence depends on the subject. This is specifically and solely about definitions of words in Google. The validity of Google for other references or evidence is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117446" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T20:59:29.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T08:05:25.740" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a comments section gets long, the @mentions can become a bit distracting. Would they be better off in a dark grey sort of colour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot of a comment I coded to help explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GSs36.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GSs36.png&quot; alt=&quot;Grey @Mention&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The @User blends nicely with the timestamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="39105" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T07:52:07.703" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T07:52:07.703" Title="Different Colour for @Mentions" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T12:58:03.833" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at the question that was asked here and not sufficiently answered: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104224/what-is-the-difference-between-phonetic-and-phonemic&quot;&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;phonetic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;phonemic&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking whether there is a difference between phonetic and phonemic transcription. In the responses, there is no indication of how either is transcribed in phrase format. For example, would phonemic transcription be /'sæd 'deɪ/ and phonetic transcription be [sæd de] in IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user133865" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T13:18:48.603" Title="Please reconsider the closing of this question and reopen it for a response that actually answers the question" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T21:53:38.863" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask if there is an equivalent antonym for the term, &quot;portable app&quot;, but this term is specific to software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U or should I ask it instead on Super User?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I already posted on SE Meta; they referred me here. I also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1307/questions-asking-for-technical-terms-jargon&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post which went a bit deeper into the topic, and although certainly an answer was chosen, in my opinion both of the two answers had good points, hence my uncertainty.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T21:53:38.863" Title="Are word requests for jargon-specific terms on-topic?" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-08-22T04:25:53.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7049" CreationDate="2015-08-15T10:17:12.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to tchrist’s answer, since the question is a general question about procedure...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can (and probably should) edit the question to make clear &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; it’s not answered by the nominated duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;em&gt;Question X&lt;/em&gt; which seems superficially similar, but all the answers there talk about &lt;em&gt;hewages&lt;/em&gt; whereas this question is actually asking about &lt;em&gt;flurbles.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You then need to expand on that in the text of the question itself to make it clear that you are asking about flurbles or whatever, adding examples too as they always help to strengthen a case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But — especially if there are not already any answers — don’t simply &lt;strong&gt;add&lt;/strong&gt; that (particularly after a subtitle “Edit:” since the history is available anyway). &lt;strong&gt;Change the question&lt;/strong&gt; to make it clear what you are asking about, so that it cannot be a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that’s done, ask a question on Meta as here, as that will get the greatest exposure. Questions which are edited after they have been closed do go into a review queue, too, which is another reason for editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has been closed by a moderator vote then it can only be reopened by a moderator vote, but even then, raising on Meta — &lt;strong&gt;having made the question clearly not a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; — will allow others to comment and discuss whether it’s still a duplicate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T10:17:12.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-15T22:21:10.630" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/267072/what-is-the-most-concise-way-to-describe-these-strange-wings&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; should be put on hold, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/257216/is-there-a-more-concise-way-to-describe-this-hairstyle&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, question hasn't been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do, how would you improve it so it's good enough to open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just that the former question is &quot;What's the best way to . . . ?&quot;, while the latter is &quot;Is there a more concise way to...&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think so, then I'll change them to match, and the best answer would be judged on a 50-50 basis around how accurate the description is, and how wordy it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115108" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T13:38:47.920" Title="Do you think this question should be put on hold, when this other question isn't? And if so, how would I improve it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7060" CreationDate="2015-08-15T22:30:38.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that those questions cannot have a single “right” answer, only an open set of countless possibilities offered up based on diverse personal opinion.  This also makes it hard to judge which one to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that one can find many examples of other such open-ended questions here, but I don’t think they’re a very good fit for a question-and-answer site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be wrong, however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T22:30:38.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-16T09:10:55.040" Score="6" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewing low-quality answers - particularly to [single-word-requests] - you will come across an answer which does more or less answer the question, but just lacks in detail. Currently the closest review option to &quot;please add more detail&quot; is the one for link-only answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What is a word for __________?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; This [word] and this [word].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is not low quality per se because it suggests two valid words; however, it does not contain definitions. This is where we need an option such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not enough detail&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While the information you have included attempts to answer the question, more detail needs to be provided. Consider adding definitions or references to help improve your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T13:10:25.037" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T06:25:27.360" Title="Low Quality Answers - Add Option for &quot;Not Enough Detail&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|review-queues|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-16T12:38:06.250" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/266755/what-exactly-is-an-adverbial-phrase&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What exactly is an adverbial phrase&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which did not originally show much research, seems to actually be a very useful and helpful question. I've put the text here for your convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;What is an adverbial phrase ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I recently learnt 'to boot' , meaning &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt;. And someone was saying it is an adverbial phrase. I think I know what's an adverb, but never learnt of adverbial phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit note [16, 08 2015]:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;On the Wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverbial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adverbials&lt;/a&gt;, it says that an adverbial is an adverb or a phrase functioning like an adverb. It also says that an adverbial is a phrase modifying a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;But further down the page it says that &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; is an adverbial phrase in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;John put the flowers &lt;strong&gt;in the water&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;In the sentence above &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; is not a modifier of the verb. It is a complement. If we don't have this type of complement the sentence is badly formed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*John put the flowers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;This sentence cannot be grammatical on its own, although it would be ok, perhaps, as a response to the question &lt;em&gt;What did John put in the vase&lt;/em&gt;. But that's because this complement has already been supplied by the speaker. In addition to this, we cannot use an adverb in this function. If we use an adverb instead of &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; here the sentence will badly formed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*John put the flowers locally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The sentence above still needs a locative complement like &lt;em&gt;on the table&lt;/em&gt;. The adverb &lt;em&gt;locally&lt;/em&gt; won't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The same kind of confusing facts exist with phrases like &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; in sentences like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;The flowers are in the water.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;This phrase &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; is the complement of the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt;. Also, it cannot be replaced by an adverb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*The flowers are locally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;But people, for example on this site, or on other pages on Wikipedia seem to refer to phrases like this as adverbial phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Lastly, the word &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; is an adverb. It is also modifying a verb in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;I almost lost the race.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Is  this as an adverbial too? There aren't any examples of adverbs in this position like this being described as adverbials on the Wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To summarise:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;What exactly is an adverbial?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;As illustration could you also explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why are phrases like &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; an adverbial in sentences like &lt;em&gt;John put the flowers in the water&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The flowers are in the water&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;in the water&lt;/em&gt; is an adverbial in the sentences above, is &lt;em&gt;regional&lt;/em&gt; an adverbial in sentences like &lt;em&gt;The divisions were regional&lt;/em&gt;? And how about &lt;em&gt;happy&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;They made her happy&lt;/em&gt;? Why, or why not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;em&gt;to boot&lt;/em&gt; an adverbial?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Adverbial phrases seem to be talked about a lot, but they also seem difficult to understand conceptually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to be a simple &quot;look it up&quot; type of question, but rather one that would help readers a lot, because clear information is difficult to find on this topic. I'm a disbeliever in adverbial phrases and have put my own skeptical answer there. It would be a shame if it was the only answer the Original Poster, or future readers got! Any chance of your re-open vote here? Especially if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, a clear and simple answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T18:17:03.773" Title="Shall we reopen this helpful question?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2015-08-16T17:16:06.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why OP wants the option of voting to &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; insufficiently-detailed answers. If they're not actually &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, just don't upvote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the lack of detail really bothers you, you can always &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt;. If several people do this and the answer ends up with a significantly &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; vote tally, higher-rep users will get the option to delete it without having to go through the moderators (and without having to give a reason either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T17:16:06.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2015-08-17T06:25:27.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the proposal, it should at least encourage &quot;positive behaviour&quot; in newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, consider also the fact that there is a minimum number of characters before a user can post any answer. I believe it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/836/exception-to-30-character-minimum-for-answers&quot;&gt;thirty characters&lt;/a&gt;. This limit is supposed to overcome the one-word-answer and therefore prevent the lack of detail which the OP is referring to. But, admittedly, it's hardly foolproof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T06:25:27.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-18T04:43:31.913" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Edit -- I just discovered that I posted a working draft by accident yesterday, so am doing a substantial re-write.  At least half of my draft was missing from what got posted.  Note, this was due to human error, not a problem with the software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite a few questions written by English language learners (ELLs) are mistakenly posted on this site.  I sometimes see riddles, or criticisms, or flippant remarks posted as comments below the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1. How flippant does a comment need to be for it to be worth flagging it as dispresfectul?  (Without becoming the child who cries wolf.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm imagining a sole language learner at a dinner table, with the native language users sometimes tossing quick, funny asides to each other back and forth that you aren't expected to try to follow.  He might wonder, &lt;em&gt;What are they laughing about?  Does it have anything to do with my language blunders?&lt;/em&gt;  I'm uncomfortable when this happens, because the quips are sometimes funny, but they also make me squirm, because I've been the sole language learner at that dinner table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2. Could a flag reason be added, to the effect that the question would fit better on ELL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that isn't possible, I'd like to ask that folks try to remember (or imagine) what it feels like to struggle to express yourself in a new language, in a way that others will understand and not laugh at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T12:24:47.223" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T12:24:47.223" Title="Add flag reason: should be closed and migrated to ELL" Tags="|discussion|status-bydesign|flagging|ell|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7066" CreationDate="2015-08-18T07:52:20.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already a flag reason which mentions closure and migration to ELL, but it may take a little bit of finding. &lt;strong&gt;Migration to ELL is a closure reason.&lt;/strong&gt; It appears in the standard close dialogs which are accessible when you reach a reputation score of 3000. But until then, you can still flag for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EAIw1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flag dialog 1: Should be closed&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8svse.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flag dialog 2: Off-topic&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0lfGJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flag dialog 3: Research/ELL&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last dialog is very similar to the close dialog which is presented to users who have the Vote to Close &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bTyEU.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote to Close dialog&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is that there is a distinct &quot;Migrate&quot; option &amp;mdash; but that only allows users to suggest migration to Meta, not to another non-Meta site like ELL. You have to use the first reason, which does explicitly mention ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T07:52:20.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2015-08-18T08:00:35.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the question is okay in theory, this specific version of the question is far too concerned with what are obvious mistakes on Wikipedia. Wikipedia does have mistakes, but the place to address them is there, not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see @tchrist has removed all that though, so the question is appropriate again :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T08:00:35.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6554" CreationDate="2015-08-18T11:24:30.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Six months ago I downvoted the OP, believing we shouldn't be pressurized into doing something we didn't feel comfortable with. As long as there was some give and take between askers and answerers, I saw no real problem. If a user posts ten questions in a row but doesn't accept any answer because he or she &lt;strong&gt;disagrees&lt;/strong&gt; with the answers submitted. What's wrong with that? It's a free country, or maybe I should say &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;. As long as that same user leaves some sort of feedback, in the way of comments; answers; questions; and casts + and - votes, that user is an integral part of the community. He or she shouldn't be made to feel ashamed or embarrassed by their not wanting to accept an answer at all cost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are exceptions to the rule. And I've come across that exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one user who has asked &lt;strong&gt;FIFTY&lt;/strong&gt; questions; and not once, has the user ever accepted an answer. In the  2 years and 11 months this user has been a member of EL&amp;amp;U,  only one vote has been cast. &lt;em&gt;One&lt;/em&gt; vote.  This information is visible to anyone who visits that person's “activity” page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I don't understand this person's behaviour. The first two times I left comments encouraging the said user to actively participate. I suggested that if he or she was unsatisfied with the answers submitted, to leave a comment explaining why. I thought that maybe the user was ignorant about the voting system, about how to accept an answer. I suggested/explained how to accept an answer. In return?  Complete and utter silence. I then became more aggressive and challenging, reminding visitors of the user's appalling track record. Still silence from the OP. A few days later the same user formulates a new question wherein he/she pleads to the community for help: “Please, give me the answer”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three users respond, one of the answers is from a very high-rep user. I'm not saying the OP &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; to accept any of the answers posted, but at least cast a bloody vote, mate! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if after three years and &lt;strong&gt;FIFTY&lt;/strong&gt; questions asked (not counting the ones deleted) only one vote is cast, how is this a valued member? Perhaps in extreme cases such as these, maybe they should receive a warning. Maybe  a rule could be enforced whereby all users with voting privileges, must cast a minimum of one vote per day, it doesn't matter whether it's a downvote or an upvote, casting even a single vote is giving  something back to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that's how I see it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stumbled upon another user who has posted &lt;del&gt;fourteen&lt;/del&gt; &lt;strong&gt;FIFTEEN&lt;/strong&gt; questions and never accepted an answer, or cast a vote. But this user is relatively a newcomer, so I'll let him/her off the hook for the time being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2nd UPDATE      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newcomer finally accepted an answer—an important token of gratitude—hooray! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T16:58:12.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T16:58:12.093" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7072" CreationDate="2015-08-20T17:54:29.043" Score="12" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, high rep users do not give references or closely reasoned arguments in their Answers.  Perhaps I have become sensitized, but this occasional lapse seems more frequent than it did when I first arrived at this site (early May).  Perhaps I should give several examples, but I am not feeling prosecutorial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sets a bad example to newcomers. Why should they free-climb the rep cliff when others are sailing past in a gondola?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a high enough rep is an assertion enough to answer an &quot;obvious&quot; point?  And how obvious is obvious?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be away and totally off-line until just before Labor Day, and thus will not be able to respond to comments on this question until September 4th.         &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T18:31:27.327" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T00:50:48.207" Title="What level of obviousness does not require a reference in an Answer from a high-rep user?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-20T18:15:31.567" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this a good question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Did &quot;Dungeons and Dragons&quot; give a new meaning to the word &quot;Dungeon&quot;? If so, what meaning was it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or would a better question be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How did the meaning of &quot;Dungeons&quot; in &quot;Dungeons and Dragons&quot; evolve from the meaning of Dungeon as a Prison (Cell)?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Made a Question on RPG.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/67422/why-do-dd-and-other-rpgs-players-use-dungeon-to-mean-the-places-they-go-to&quot;&gt;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/67422/why-do-dd-and-other-rpgs-players-use-dungeon-to-mean-the-places-they-go-to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta question is also asked here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7158/has-this-been-asked-before-how-did-dungeon-evolved-to-mean-place-where-adv&quot;&gt;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7158/has-this-been-asked-before-how-did-dungeon-evolved-to-mean-place-where-adv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5733/are-these-good-questions-what-does-dungeon-mean-in-dungeons-and-dragons/5735#5735&quot;&gt;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5733/are-these-good-questions-what-does-dungeon-mean-in-dungeons-and-dragons/5735#5735&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5735/21941&quot;&gt;Apparently&lt;/a&gt;, the &quot;Dungeons&quot; of &quot;Dungeons and Dragons&quot; is meant to be evocative, instead of descriptive... I think that's what Doppelgreener's saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115108" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:52.057" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T16:33:26.183" Title="Are either of these &quot;Dungeons and Dragons&quot;-related questions, good questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7070" CreationDate="2015-08-20T23:44:34.630" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't noticed a decline in the level and quality of reasoning and documentation that answerers have been providing since early May of this year, though such a decline is certainly possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have noticed is a tremendous improvement in the level and quality of documentation that answerers have been providing in the past 36 months compared with what they tended to provide in the period before that. I think that the proportion of answers that are backed by useful, confirmable citations to authoritative references—linked and unlinked—is much higher on this site today than it was three or four years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that the answers given in 2011 are incorrect or even (in general) less reliable. But I think that in the early months of this site's existence, the prevailing notion was that answerers who knew their stuff fulfilled their role more than adequately by answering questions briefly and correctly, without the need to cite any authority beyond their own expertise. (Some knowledgeable participants have cited authority and investigated questions in depth from day one, but others seem to have seen less reason to adopt so painstaking an approach.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greater stress on third-party authority in more-recent years is perhaps a reflection of the participation of so many non-expert answerers (like me): If you don't possess an academic background in linguistics and an intimate acquaintance with advanced grammatical analysis, you have to look things up to ensure that you aren't misapplying a rule or repeating a baseless factoid that you picked up at random somewhere. The worst answers propagate erroneous information; and some supposedly authoritative reference works undoubtedly are erroneous themselves on some points. But at least when you point to a source of information, you enable better-informed participants at the site to review it and challenge its conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for knowledgeable answerers who don't provide documentation, I imagine that people who have complete command of the subject must find it extremely tedious to have to dig up a reference to something they consider elementary and obvious. I remember seeing, some months ago, a comment from an EL&amp;amp;U participant saying that we are lucky to receive contributions from some genuine experts, and that we should gladly accept those contributions on whatever terms the experts choose to provide them. I agree that their expertise is of tremendous value to the site, though I think it is even stronger when yoked to documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, what makes an answer on this site helpful for the poster and for subsequent readers is a combination of things, some of them not especially compatible: accuracy, clarity, succinctness, comprehensiveness, and documentation. The closer we get to producing answers that possess all of these qualities, the better we serve our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T00:50:48.207" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T00:50:48.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7075" CreationDate="2015-08-20T23:51:01.650" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/266305/the-since-then-construction/267656#267656&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; by logging in as a guest. I want my guest login to be merged with this profile. When I try to contact the Help Center my request is invalidated as I don't have the other profile link to enter in the form. How can I get my profile merged with my guest login?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T10:15:29.087" Title="Request to merge an unregistered profile" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7073" CreationDate="2015-08-21T10:15:29.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see the Help pages, which contain just what you need to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T10:15:29.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7078" CreationDate="2015-08-21T16:30:40.540" Score="8" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;In particular when a user feels compelled to &quot;correct&quot; (edit) questions and answers he sees are &quot;simply&quot; misinformation, ambiguous, typos, common mistakes, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69501/meaning-and-usage-of-to-no-end-as-a-misspoken-phrase/69502#69502&quot;&gt;Meaning and usage of &amp;quot;to no end&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (The edited title was: &lt;em&gt;Meaning and usage of &quot;to no end&quot; as a misspoken phrase?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the hypothesis that the user is 100% correct, does that justify literally rewriting posts that are two or more years old? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP who asked the question has chosen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69501/meaning-and-usage-of-to-no-end&quot;&gt;rollback the edit&lt;/a&gt; and commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Guys, I don't understand the need for all these edits. I thought my question was pretty clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T03:21:03.060" Title="Is overriding several posts simultaneously ever justifiable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7077" CreationDate="2015-08-21T17:54:27.273" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the editor seriously overreached in this instance, and that the editor's emphasis on erroneousness and misspeaking—as opposed to real-world usage taken at face value—altered the nature of the question asked and the sense, tone, and relevance of the answers that were submitted in response to the question as originally formulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper approach, in my view, would have been to add comments contesting the validity of the question and of any answers that the editor found flawed, and to submit an answer that made the editor's case at greater length than might be possible in one or more comments. The editor in fact did both of these things, and was well within his rights in so doing. But changing the original question and two or three answers to comport with his views was, I think, a mistake and should not be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legitimate weapons at every high-reputation user's disposal in promoting a particular view of a question are commenting, upvoting, downvoting, and answering. I consider editing an inappropriate tool for such promotion. The central purpose of editing is to help the poster say more coherently what the poster intended to say but somehow failed to say well—and perhaps (in extreme instances) to make a promising question or answer that is in danger of being closed or deleted acceptable under the site's guidelines for asking and answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing questions and answers to make them reflect one's own ideas of correctness—or (in the worst case) to vindicate a peeve—doesn't fulfill the purpose for which we are empowered to edit questions and answers. I am confident that if the changes that occurred in the present case had been submitted through the Suggested Edits queue, they would have been rejected as being inconsistent with the original posters' intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that this answer isn't taken as a personal slam of the editor who made the changes. He has made numerous positive contributions to EL&amp;amp;U, I have never had a hostile exchange with him, and I find his enthusiasm and lack of pretense refreshing. But I do think that in this case he exceeded the bounds of appropriate editing, and I would roll back all of the changes he introduced to the question and answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T18:24:35.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T18:24:35.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7077" CreationDate="2015-08-22T03:21:03.060" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't call it &lt;em&gt;overriding&lt;/em&gt;. I would call it editing. In this case, it was not appropriate editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem with multiple edits in a thread if they stick to editing guidelines. I've done it. It is imperative that the original intent of the post is never altered. If the editor is respecting the guidelines, it makes the questions and answers more understandable, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the edits on the linked question were not appropriate. The editor removed a perfectly valid interpretation of &quot;to no end&quot; in one answer (that, to me, harms the answer), and the edit of the OP's question is based on a personal opinion of &lt;em&gt;proper spoken language&lt;/em&gt;. It's just vandalism at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the editor did this &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; submitting his own answer makes this an especially unwise use of editorial privilege. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T03:21:03.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-22T04:32:17.373" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to bring an edit to the attention of the moderators.  How do I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know how to flag a question, an answer and a comment, but not an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't want to get into an edit war.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T04:32:17.373" Title="How do I flag an inappropriate edit?" Tags="|support|flagging|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2015-08-22T14:21:21.920" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rise in defence of mean people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I believe vocabulary questions are skewed to confrontational words is because when we are dealing with a disagreement the last thing we want to seem is stupid.  Thus, people are strongly motivated to learn such words as opposed to others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can easily make it seem like most users are mean people.  I suspect they just don't want to be intimidated when arguing with someone with a broad vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than discourage this I'd prefer to deal politely with such questions and lead by example.  On the whole I don't think this is bad for the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if you ever do feel like being mean to me, I would actually appreciate it if the names you called me made sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T14:21:21.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-23T20:47:10.257" Score="-2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268385/usage-of-do-not-vs-does-not&quot;&gt;Usage of &amp;quot;do not &amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;does not&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, I saw the following in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Reg Dwight has said, '[W]e write stuff in comments that is too obvious to qualify for an answer. [This] is not really a topic for a site for linguists and etymologists, and we don't want it to become a topic.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just something that those in the know have gradually figured out, or is it articulated formally somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Edit --  Or something else (if so, please politely explain).  I feel like I've come into the movie theater in the middle of the movie.  Please, help me understand what's going on in this site and what is expected of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T06:16:43.063" Title="Folklore or official policy?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7084" CreationDate="2015-08-24T06:16:43.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please, help me understand what's going on in this site and what is expected of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;search&quot; function in meta can be very, very helpful. For example, searching &quot;answers in comments&quot; will get you 676 results, of which the top few should provide a lot of insight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These may answer your query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3629/58761&quot;&gt;Why are answers being posted in the comments on the question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4557/58761&quot;&gt;Answering questions in comments&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;lt;- kinda the same question you're asking, I think)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6980/58761&quot;&gt;Why do people constantly answer questions in the “add a comment” section?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3629/58761&quot;&gt;Answers in comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the last two are closed as duplicates, the answers in the comments (ha) are very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you have posted a number of questions about the site, I suggest that a giving a reason why your search of meta has not cleared your confusion about an issue will help you get a more helpful and satisfying answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, fyi: SE etiquette is that meta questions are about an issue, not a user, so names are usually left out of questions on meta to avoid making it about a particular user. :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T06:16:43.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T15:49:41.357" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand what is wrong with my downvoted answer on this site, and why it would be downvoted and receive a delete vote.  Given that the question itself appears to be acceptable, what kind of answer would be most appropriate?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/156609/thanking-you-in-anticipation/156612#156612&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/156609/thanking-you-in-anticipation/156612#156612&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could edit it, but have not, because it seems reasonable to assume that the asker is open to suggestions to improving their statement, which I provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31012" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T20:58:39.523" Title="Answer to &quot;yes/no&quot; question downvoted/voted for deletion because it gives more than &quot;yes/no&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T18:43:43.477" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Based on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7049/how-to-challenge-a-duplicate-closing?cb=1&quot;&gt;How to challenge a duplicate closing&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; it seems posting a query here is how to do it...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/167713/how-to-pronounce-letter-e-in-new-invented-brand-names-in-fictional-words?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;How to pronounce letter “e” in new invented brand names? (in fictional words)&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is merged as it is an exact duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/167648/how-to-pronounce-letter-e-in-new-invented-brand-names-in-fictional-words&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; -- which it is -- but the original question doesn't exist:  &quot;page not found.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the original doesn't exist, shouldn't we re-open the new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92394" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T22:22:55.843" Title="Duplicate question, but original doesn't exist" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7086" CreationDate="2015-08-24T20:45:33.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I am answering you, but I, personally, did not downvote your answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Voting is anonymous&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first: &lt;strong&gt;voting is anonymous&lt;/strong&gt;. The only people who could tell you definitively why you were downvoted are the specific individuals who downvoted you, who, a year and a half after you posted your answer, may not even be here anymore, or if they are they still may never see this Meta-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the net score of your answer is -2, but the vote count is 2 up, 4 down. Assuming whoever voted to delete is also one of the downvoters (a good bet, but I can't verify because I don't know where to look for delete votes), that means 4 people didn't like the answer. I'd say it will be hard for us to even speculate about the motivations of four anonymous people over the course of the year+ since you posted your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Issues with your answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I'll hazard some speculation anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, despite your declaration to the contrary, &lt;strong&gt;the question itself is not acceptable&lt;/strong&gt;; it was downvoted and closed. A very common pattern on SE is for people to downvote answers to bad questions even if the answer itself is ok, because giving the OP answers encourages him and others to ask more bad questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if that were the only force in play, then @WS2's answer would be downvoted as well, instead of sitting at +3. Right? Right, so...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, your answer is very short; it offers neither details nor corroboration. It is pure &lt;strong&gt;unsubstantiated opinion&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to do that, post a comment. Posting unsubstantiated opinion as an answer proper is bad juju. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Third, it &lt;strong&gt;doesn't really address the question as posed&lt;/strong&gt;. The OP asks about the acceptability of &quot;&lt;em&gt;thanks in anticipation&lt;/em&gt;&quot;; you ignored that concern and answered about another phrase, &quot;&lt;em&gt;thanks in advance&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: it's a throw-away answer to a throw-away question. SE doesn't want either of those things, and the voting here reflects that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general rule of thumb on SE is: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;expect your answer's final score to be roughly proportional to the effort you put into it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. ¹&lt;sup&gt;,&lt;/sup&gt;² &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Possible resolutions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your situation, my personal inclination would be to accept that I posted a throw-away answer to a throw-away question, and walk away. I might even decide to delete the poorly-received answer myself. But in any case I wouldn't stay up at night thinking about it. I'd focus on building my reputation³ by finding new questions to answer, and putting thought and effort into answering them deeply and well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you really want to rescue this particular answer⁴, then here's what I suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, &lt;strong&gt;answer the question as asked&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Address the usage of the original phrase (&lt;em&gt;... anticipation&lt;/em&gt;): how common is it, how likely is it to be well-received, in what contexts is it appropriate or inappropriate, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second, if you still want to bring it up, particularly if the first part of your answer establishes that &quot;... &lt;em&gt;anticipation&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is unacceptable, then offer &quot;... &lt;em&gt;advance&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;strong&gt;as an alternative&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again, detail how common &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; phrase is, why it is preferable to the &quot;anticipation&quot;-construction, in what contexts it works and doesn't work, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After offering all that detail, make sure you &lt;strong&gt;substantiate all of it&lt;/strong&gt;. Back up anything you claim with reference to external authorities. Make sure to &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; those authorities, and where possible, provide live links to the material you're citing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a lot of work, right?  Right. &lt;strong&gt;That's the point.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sup&gt;As further evidence: though you can't see them, two &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/156609/thanking-you-in-anticipation/156612#comment591537_156610&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/156609/thanking-you-in-anticipation/156612#comment591535_268344&quot;&gt;users&lt;/a&gt; posted substantially the same answer as you, and additionally added a bunch of garbage characters to satisfy the minimum length criterion (&lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; their answer were so short &amp;amp; unsubstantiated), and those answers were not only downvoted to oblivion, but deleted to boot.  That's what happens to poor answers in SE; don't take it personally.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² &lt;sup&gt;This doesn't always work, particularly for questions which hit the hot network questions queue, but it's a good baseline to start from anyway.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ &lt;sup&gt;That is, the thoughts in other community-members' heads about me, not the number displayed next to my name.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ &lt;sup&gt;Maybe because you want to minimize the number negatively-scoring answers in your history, which is legitimate enough.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T20:58:39.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7087" CreationDate="2015-08-25T07:54:38.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well spotted. I have closed the question as a duplicate of the one Mr. Shiny and New lank to. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77116/any-rule-for-pronouncing-e&quot;&gt;Any rule  for pronouncing “e”?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T15:11:50.850" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-25T13:33:35.650" Score="-4" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/folklore-or-official-policy&quot;&gt;Folklore or official policy?&lt;/a&gt;, I wrote, &amp;quot;I feel like I've come into the movie theater in the middle of the movie. Please, help me understand what's going on in this site and what is expected of me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highlighting some material from that thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We write stuff in comments that is too obvious to qualify for an answer.  [Such-and-so] is not really a topic for a site for linguists and etymologists, and we don't want it to become a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for formal or official policies, it seems to me Stack Exchange has a relative lack of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing to formal policies that I know of are the documentation in the Help Center, and the mechanics of the site itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE etiquette is that meta questions are about an issue, not a user, so names are usually left out of questions on meta to avoid making it about a particular user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, today I read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this site has a policy of not discussing poetry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268802/meaning-of-trailing-clouds-of-glory&quot;&gt;meaning of &amp;quot;trailing clouds of glory&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to assume that the goal is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to set up a mine field for newcomers trying to make meaningful contributions to this site.  So let's be constructive.  I would like to invite users in the know to help me assemble &lt;strong&gt;a compendium of generally accepted guidelines/conventions to this site&lt;/strong&gt;.  Answers would be preferred over Comments.  I'd appreciate it if you would avoid bringing up anything potentially controversial here.  (You could always create a different question in Meta about a particular item or set of items.)  Also note, this question isn't about mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/269677/a-word-to-mean-the-act-of-making-two-things-equivalent/270071#270071&quot;&gt;A word to mean the act of making two things equivalent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please set mentions in italic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also confusing.  I see many people setting their word or phrase proposals in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found another one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'‘If we accept the axiom that trivial [/very basic] questions are bad&#xA;for the site, then the proper response to [such] a ... question is:&#xA;1.Don't answer! 2… [Vote] to close. The point is not to encourage trivial [/very basic] questions. If you post an answer or vote up an&#xA;existing answer, you're implicitly encouraging more questions like&#xA;it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270603/can-i-use-they-for-non-living-things&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270603/can-i-use-they-for-non-living-things&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T01:04:42.687" Title="What are the commonly accepted guidelines specific to this site (2015)?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1513" CreationDate="2015-08-27T15:16:03.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this text no longer exists on the flag history page, I'm going to &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-norepro&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-norepro&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-norepro&lt;/a&gt; this so this no longer lingers as an active request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28544" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T15:16:03.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1806" CreationDate="2015-08-27T15:18:34.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we no longer use valid/invalid on flags, I'm going to status-norepro this so this no longer lingers as an active feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28544" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T15:18:34.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T18:10:09.710" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/269040/the-pronunciation-rules-of-words-which-begin-com-col-cor-or-con#comment593305_269040&quot;&gt;The pronunciation rules of words which begin &amp;#39;Com-, Col-, Cor-&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;Con-&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, this question here didn't necessarily seem well put. It wasn't clear exactly what aspects of the pronunciation of the &lt;em&gt;cor/com/con/col&lt;/em&gt; prefix the Origninal Poster should be worried about. I've had a bit of an edit of the question. I think that from a phonetics and phonology point of view, it's actually got some gristle worthy of a site for linguists and enthusiasts of English. Here's the text of it for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Very often these words have an /ɒ/ vowel, like in the word &lt;em&gt;hot&lt;/em&gt; - in Gen American, I think it's the vowel /ɑː/. Other times they may have a schwa, /ə/, like the first vowel in &lt;em&gt;amazing&lt;/em&gt;. Sometimes they seem to have a syllabic consonant, /n/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Sometimes there even seem to be two words which are spelled the same but have a different pronunciation. For example &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;happy&quot; and &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; as in &quot;the content of the lecture&quot;, for which Cambridge Dictionaries gives the transcriptions  /kənˈtent/ and /ˈkɒntent/ [US:/ˈkɑːntent/] respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Here are some examples with transcriptions from Cambridge Dictionaries Online:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;common /ˈk&lt;strong&gt;ɒ&lt;/strong&gt;m.ən/ &#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;commercial  /k&lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt;ˈmɜː.ʃəl/  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;colleague /ˈk&lt;strong&gt;ɒ&lt;/strong&gt;l.iːɡ/ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;collection /k&lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt;ˈlek.ʃən/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;correlate /ˈk&lt;strong&gt;ɒ&lt;/strong&gt;r.ə.leɪt/  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;correct /k&lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt;ˈrekt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Is there any rule for whether a schwa or full /ɒ/ or /ɑː/ is used?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Are there generalisations that can be made which will help me have a good guess at which to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Are there any rules that will enable me to tell in certain restricted situations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;If I'm unsure about a particular example, would I be better to go with a schwa or a full vowel. Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any chance of your reopen vote here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T11:12:06.640" Title="This question seems worth reopening" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7093" CreationDate="2015-08-28T11:12:06.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't think this was worth re-opening in its present form, because of three problems, all mentioned in the comments there, that you have chosen not to address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not, and never has been, the case that there is just one pronunciation for a word in English. Different countries, areas, and social groups have different dialects, and pronounce words differently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is doubtful, to say the least,  whether words go from spelling to pronunciation. Historically, of course, spelling was merely a rough attempt to represent the spoken word: Shakespeare famously spelt his name a dozen different ways, without worrying about whether this meant 'changing his name'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no reason to believe in the existence of a 'rule' for any aspect of English, in the sense that words must follow certain regulations. It is sometimes possible to deduce generalizations in restricted areas, such as common etymologies or impossible phonemes; but 'every instance of these three letters' is not such an area.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since others seem to think this is a useful question, I won't vote to re-close it just yet; but you do need to consider these points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T11:12:06.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7098" CreationDate="2015-08-29T11:12:52.373" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, before I go put on my asbestos underpants and ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the mothership&lt;/a&gt;, let me ask here first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across this question today: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/269950/55623&quot;&gt;Can you be sharp and intelligent but got bad grades in school?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot people nowadays think that your smart only if you get good grades In gcse's and A Levels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it doesn't happen daily, but we do get questions which have literally &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; to do with the topic of the site.  The problem is, we don't have a close-reason for that¹. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not? Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/233770/blatantly-off-topic-close-reason-incorrectly-rendering-link&quot;&gt;other sites do&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jcrgj.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the close-voting dialog of MSE, showing the option &amp;quot;blatantly off-topic&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why don't we? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e3Ebq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the close-voting dialog of ELU, lacking the option &amp;quot;blatantly off-topic&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note, I am emphatically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking that we allocate one of our precious three custom close-vote categories to creating a &quot;blatantly off-topic&quot; reason; rather, I'm wondering why that isn't already offered as a &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was &quot;blatantly off-topic&quot; ever offered as a standard close reason on ELU? If so and it was removed, why? I suppose I can imagine people abusing it as the laziest option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do to institute &quot;blatantly off-topic&quot; as a standard (not custom) close reason on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt;Yes, of course I could VtC the question as &quot;other&quot; with a custom message, but that doesn't seem like the right approach to me: first, this is a common enough issue to warrant a standard close reason, second, what would my custom message be, beyond &quot;&lt;em&gt;blatantly off-topic&lt;/em&gt;&quot;? I'd also like a fire-and-forget option for closing such questions; they're not worthy of the extra time required to type a custom message, especially on a mobile device.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T12:55:39.050" Title="Why no &quot;blatantly off-topic&quot; close reason?" Tags="|feature-request|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7097" CreationDate="2015-08-29T12:13:05.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nevermind, apparently the &quot;blatantly off-topic&quot; close-vote option was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/274774/can-we-have-the-blatantly-off-topic-close-vote-back&quot;&gt;universally revoked sometime in 2013&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's still an option to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/185873/165773&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; questions as blatantly off-topic&lt;/a&gt; (hence that screenshot I was able to find), but for actual close-voting, the recommended best practice is indeed to use the &quot;other&quot; category with a custom message. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That still seems wrong to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;shifts burden of effort to community rather than person asking a wildly untopical question; this effort to clean up after  inconsiderate people is even greater on mobile devices.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;will encourage people to use the wrong category for close voting (case in point: I VtC the example question as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, rather than pick &quot;other&quot; and have to think up and type in a custom reason).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;automatically posts the reason as a comment under the question &lt;em&gt;with the original close-voter's name attached&lt;/em&gt;, which destroys anonymity at the worst possible time: when someone is saying &quot;your question is no good&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the burden to &lt;em&gt;restore&lt;/em&gt; anonymity is again shifted to the wrong person: the user must manually delete that comment (which doesn't, of course, change the fact that it has already appeared for anyone, OP and Google included, to see).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;willfully ignores the most fundamental reason questions should and will be closed: because they have nothing to do with the site's purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's the first reason most people seem to object to, and it is bothersome enough, even to the extent that the powers that be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/274819&quot;&gt;suggest with a wink-and-a-nudge&lt;/a&gt; that one doesn't have to type &lt;em&gt;too much more&lt;/em&gt; into the message field to get past the minimum length filters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's the last reason which really irks me. We're obstinately ignoring the fact that people can, do, and will ask completely irrelevant questions, and at the same time giving up the benefit of being able to gather such questions into an independent category for analysis (the combination of the reality of bullet #2 above, and the fact that custom &quot;other&quot; messages are completely unstructured makes it impossible to reconstruct such a category under the status quo). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because really, look at Shog9's suggested close reason in the linked MSE answer: is the really closing the question because it's &quot;&lt;em&gt;about personal relationships&lt;/em&gt;&quot;? No, he's closing it because it's &lt;em&gt;not about programming&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T12:55:39.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-30T15:50:54.007" Score="-3" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268185/last-added-by-alternative-word-or-phrase&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; not too long ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was trying figure out a word, term, or phrase that means the same as&#xA;  last added by. I prefer something concise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For context, I have a database table which contains a list of things&#xA;  added to our system. Each thing was last added by a specific person. I&#xA;  want the table to be name to be thing_last_added_by. However, the&#xA;  table name seems too wordy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it was voted to be closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because naming&#xA;  programming-related things is specifically out of bounds (see&#xA;  english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic, where it says &quot;don't ask for&#xA;  help on ... Naming, including naming programming variables/classes &quot;)&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;–  Hellion Aug 20 at 21:34&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the rule (although this is the name of a database table and not a variable or class), but if I just removed the software context out of then I'm just looking for a synonym phrase for &quot;last added by&quot;. I kind of find this rule silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just re-edit this question so it can be opened again? Is there any other place I can post about for naming database tables? Code review doesn't seem to fit the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="CyberneticTwerkGuruOrc" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T15:51:31.990" Title="English Language &amp; Usage programming variable/classes rule question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-30T16:55:06.037" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would a general question about orthography be appropriate for this forum or would it be more at home in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133302" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T09:24:22.067" Title="Where to post an orthography question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7100" CreationDate="2015-08-30T17:37:08.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general rule is that if the question is specific to English, it is fine here (subject to being on-topic and the other restrictions); if you could ask the same question in a different language and still get useful responses, it would be better on Linguistics.SE. But if you're uncertain, ask wherever you think most suitable: it &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be migrated, but there is no charge for the service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T17:37:08.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2015-08-31T07:33:59.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the example presented by Claudiu—&quot;Does the word cheese indicate something yellow?&quot; I would follow the &lt;em&gt;Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt; convention of italicizing words used as words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the word &lt;em&gt;cheese&lt;/em&gt; indicate something yellow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would do so not because this particular option is inherently superior to other ways of calling out a word used as word, but because I've done it for 35 years, to the point where the practice has become almost automatic for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't, however, use italics in all instances that involve calling out a word used as word in an answer. In single-word requests, where (in effect) the single word used as word is the crux of the answer, I follow the very frequent practice of SWR answerers on this site of putting the suggested word in boldface. I think of this as a convenience for readers who may be looking for the SWR suggestion—and nothing else—in each answer they scan. It's especially helpful I think for people who are considering their own SWR answer and want to scan the already-posted answers to see whether someone else has already suggested the word they want to nominate. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For a single word meaning &quot;a food consisting of the coagulated,compressed, and usually ripened curd of milk separated from the whey,&quot; I suggest &lt;strong&gt;cheese&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other place where I use boldface formatting is when I am reporting multiple early instances of a word or phrase in answer to an etymology question. Here again the point is to give readers a quick signal as to where the relevant word or phrase appears in the block quote that I've retyped. People who want to read the examples carefully are welcome to do so; but for many readers, I suspect, only the immediate context—or perhaps only the bare existence of the word or phrase in the cited quotation—is of interest. It's very easy for italics to get lost in a paragraph-length block quote, and of course italics in the original source are far more common than boldface there. For example, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=K-dMAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA395&amp;amp;dq=%22cheese%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CDAQ6AEwAjiABWoVChMIncvRseXSxwIVUymICh3yAASS#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22cheese%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Transactions of the Department of Agriculture of the State of Illinois&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, volume 9 (1880):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The exportation of butter from January 1, 1879, to November 27. has reached 34,705,284 pounds; the excess over last year for same time, 13,518.230 pounds. The exportation of &lt;strong&gt;cheese&lt;/strong&gt; for same time is 120,350,857; a falling-off of 8.638,316 pounds, as compared with last year, as per New York price-current report of November 27, 1879. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm certainly willing to reconsider my boldfacing practices if they strike enough people here as being obnoxious or counterproductive in some other way, but I think that they usefully serve the crucial purpose of making particular kinds of answers easier to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T22:25:56.933" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T22:25:56.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7100" CreationDate="2015-08-31T09:24:22.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about orthography as an item of study (such as how to design one, the history of existing orthographies, etc) should indeed be asked at Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T09:24:22.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T12:34:38.270" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am brand new to Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I am being particularly thick &amp;amp; dense.. I just can’t work out how to ‘Apply a Tag’ to my question on The English Language &amp;amp; Usage Site? I did (somehow!) manage it yesterday, my first post &amp;amp; question; however can’t for-the-life-of me, remember how I did it &amp;amp; can’t seem to replicate it today! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have gone into the ‘help page’ and ‘’advanced help’ on Tags but STILL can’t ‘get it’! As well as taking ‘The Tour’ several times! Could you please, give me detailed and clear instructions how I can submit a tag to a further/additional question please? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When responding please note; I am severely dyslexic (think this is also the problem why I can’t fathom-out how to place a tag into a question) Therefore please make your explanation as clear and precise &amp;amp; detailed as possible.  Once I’ve ‘got it’; I won’t need to EVER ask again. Sorry to be a nuisance and pest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am able to use ‘the Tags’ on Meta; as I just simply ‘click’ on the blank space (in Tags) and I am given several options; in this particular instance, I chose ‘support’!! However I am unable to do this on the main Stack Exchange site! Maybe Stack Exchange, is just too advanced a site for me? Hope not!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look forward to hearing back form you. How will I know if you have repsoned?  Thnak you in advance. Kind regards and best wishes (Thick and Dibby and confused!) Corinne    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="135931" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T12:46:10.207" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T16:18:13.720" Title="Can't figure out how to apply tags on Main" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7104" CreationDate="2015-08-31T16:18:13.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;How tagging works&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you edit a question, there are three fields to fill out. In order from the top of the screen to the bottom, these are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;body&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, tags are the bottom-most text field which appears when you ask or edit a question. It is this field, outlined in red in the screenshot below, which you need to populate to properly tag your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bhn0C.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bhn0C.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of &amp;quot;ask a question&amp;quot; form, with fields specific to tagging called out&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user experience for this field can be a little confusing; it looks like a standard text input just like the title field, but when you start using it, it acts differently.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use it, start typing the name of the tag you want (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;), and below the field a list of tag suggestions will appear. Notice in the screenshot I've already included the badge &quot;word choice&quot;, and then started typing &lt;code&gt;gr&lt;/code&gt;, and the prompt below has dutifully suggested all tags containing that sequence of letters (&quot;&lt;strong&gt;gr&lt;/strong&gt;ammar&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;gr&lt;/strong&gt;ammaticality&quot;, &quot;ortho&lt;strong&gt;gr&lt;/strong&gt;aphy&quot;, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can click on one of the suggested tags to add it to your question, or simply finish typing the name of the tag. It's really best practice to re-use an existing tag than create your own (see &lt;em&gt;guidelines for tagging&lt;/em&gt; outlined in purple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may add up to 5 tags per question.  However, it rarely necessary to add that many; usually one or two will suffice.  The ten most common tags on EL&amp;amp;U are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expressions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may click on any of those links to learn more about that specific tag, including the kind of questions it's usually applied to, or see a longer and more detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;list of the most popular tags on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; (accessible by clicking the &lt;code&gt;tag&lt;/code&gt; tab at the top of the list of questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notification of responses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In re: how to know if/when someone has responded to you: most people simply check back periodically or keep the site open in a background tab. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has answered your question, addressed you in a comment, or voted on one of your posts, the black header bar at the top of the page will contain a notification (a red numeral, like an iOS badge, over the &quot;inbox&quot; icon for answers and comments; or a green highlight to the histogram icon for votes and other notifications relevant to your reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if you have a mobile device, you can install the native app, and get push notifications and badges (similar to how you're notified of emails and txt messages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T16:18:13.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7090" CreationDate="2015-09-01T04:34:21.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Please set mentions in italic”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me address the ﬁnal point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some people do set mentions in bold, but I really wish they wouldn’t. For the past ﬁve years, ELU editors have followed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/364&quot;&gt;this simple standard&lt;/a&gt; posted by nohat♦ on October 15&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; 2010 at 8:05pm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually use &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt;. Sometimes I use “double quotation marks” when referring to long phrases or whole sentences. I would stay away from &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;code&gt;verbatim&lt;/code&gt;, or plain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His policy offers these advantages at the least:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is the top-voted answer to the meta question about the matter. In the absence of explicit directives to the contrary, this therefore represents community consensus on site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although it is one member’s preference and style, it was posted by one of our moderators, and this cannot help but carry some guiding weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is short, simple, and to the point. This makes it easy to remember and to apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has been there for ﬁve years as of this writing, setting long-standing precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It’s the standard used by dictionaries and professional linguistics journals, and is therefore the appropriate one on a site whose charter is “for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those of us who do the most &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;editing&lt;/a&gt; have been consistently following this standard as long as the site has existed.  This helps give our site a well-groomed look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is typographically &lt;em&gt;inoffensive&lt;/em&gt;, because the overall color (how much black, basically) of the Georgia italic face matches that of the Georgia roman one, allowing the page to look professionally put together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It presents a uniﬁed &lt;a href=&quot;http://practicaltypography.com/color.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page color&lt;/a&gt;, which is highly desirable. Interrupting the smooth texture of the paired roman and italic with inline super-heavyweight bold scattered randomly about the page destroys that simple elegance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The default font weight all browsers give to bold in the absence of CSS to reduce it is much too heavy a weight to look tidy.  Without a CSS hack which our style sheet does not have, we suffer a ponderous and plodding default bold weight that no publisher worthy of the name would ever dare set down in print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bold used for things other than headers* leaves the page looking too &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SHOUTY&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, as though it were a cheap supermarket tabloid, a seven-year-old’s workbook, or a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;ransom&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;note&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  It isn’t nice to be yelled at by a noisy page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To give the occasional point special emphasis, the skilled writer competent at his craft need use nothing but the English language itself — rather than tawdry typographical blunderbusses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s plenty enough to convince me. I only hope it also persuades others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* And even then you should rely on point size allowing the weight to scale proportionately.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T19:17:31.013" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-03T02:49:46.180" Score="10" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of questions about coordinating pronouns with nouns for joint possession, along the lines of &quot;my wife's and my dinner,&quot; most recently: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270794/you-your-or-yours-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;you,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;your&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;yours&amp;quot; in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt; Many of these are closed as duplicates of the following question, which superficially seems to be about this issue: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4226/my-wife-and-is-seafood-collaboration-dinner&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;My wife and I&amp;#39;s seafood collaboration dinner&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in fact this question is more specific and not suited to being a canonical answer to the general question. One of its answers addresses the general issue, and received &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4226/my-wife-and-is-seafood-collaboration-dinner#comment173119_86817&quot;&gt;the following comment&lt;/a&gt; (bolding added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This answer misses the point. The handy rule you've been taught —&#xA;  we've all been taught that handy rule. &lt;strong&gt;We all know that &quot;my wife's and&#xA;  my&quot; is Standard English; we all know that a stanalone &quot;I's&quot; is not;&#xA;  but this question is about neither.&lt;/strong&gt; It's about a peculiar construction&#xA;  produced by a native speaker (who himself is well aware that it's&#xA;  non-standard) and an attempt by another native speaker at an&#xA;  explanation of why it was possible for it to be produced in the first&#xA;  place. This question is all about putting that explanation to test,&#xA;  and the top and accepted answer adequately does just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this evaluation of the question (I disagree with the idea that &quot;we all know that 'my wife's and my' is Standard English,&quot; taken literally, since to many people this &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; seem to be obvious). Because of this, I feel that the top answer here is not really a very good fit to all the other questions closed as duplicates of this one (there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/4226?lq=1&quot;&gt;2 pages worth of questions linked to this one&lt;/a&gt;). A lot of this answer is devoted to explaining &lt;em&gt;why the non-standard form makes sense&lt;/em&gt;; in contrast, many of the linked questions are about &lt;em&gt;what the standard form is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that a much more straightforward canonical question is the following: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8520/what-possessive-forms-are-used-for-mutual-1st-person-ownership&quot;&gt;What possessive forms are used for mutual 1st person ownership?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it could be edited to remove the reference to 1st person in particular, since the issue is the same (as far as I know) for pronouns in other persons as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I'm envisioning something similar to what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6934/please-change-the-canonical-ordinal-question-to-one-which-is-more-informative&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A proposed for this set of questions.&lt;/a&gt; Please respond to tell me what you think, and if I've presented my thoughts clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important issue is the matter of identifying the most suitable answers to this general question; currently there are many answers spread out across the multitude of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible canonical answers I've been looking at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/8536/77227&quot;&gt;What possessive forms are used for mutual 1st person ownership?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/11852/77227&quot;&gt;&quot;Nikki's and Alice's X&quot; vs. &quot;Nikki and Alice's X&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/38849/77227&quot;&gt;How do you make the possessive form with &quot;He and I&quot;-style subjects?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:07:09.193" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T11:07:09.193" Title="Can we switch to a better canonical question about using pronouns in compound possessives?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-03T18:41:58.617" Score="-4" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question arose from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7090/what-are-the-commonly-accepted-guidelines-specific-to-this-site-2015&quot;&gt;What are the commonly accepted guidelines specific to this site (2015)?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User A has a strong aesthetic ideal of what posts should look like, in terms of colors, bold, proportions, etc. -- I will let that user's description speak for itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately User A is a bit more isolated in this crusade for tasteful formatting than User A would probably like.  And it is a big job.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270386/an-adjective-meaning-a-question-which-can-be-answered-several-ways&quot;&gt;an adjective meaning a question which can be answered several ways&lt;/a&gt;.  In this thread, we see that the most glaring of the (subjectively determined) &quot;bad&quot; formatting was allowed to stand, while the low-hanging fruit was promptly taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the referenced Commonly Accepted Guidelines question, I requested, &quot;I'd appreciate it if you would avoid bringing up anything potentially controversial here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed, however, that there seems to be some interest in discussing the topic of editing formatting, so I am posting this question here, to provide a venue for discussing precisely that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, those of us who appreciate precise and effective language use are more likely to have a strong aesthetic sense of what looks pleasing or jarring on the (web)page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are ELU users who would like to have personal control over their post formatting, and resist the idea of a rigid template for posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I can sympathize with both sides of this issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a happy medium?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T18:11:43.167" Title="Is there a happy medium for editing of post formatting?" Tags="|discussion|editing|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-04T06:43:53.547" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I supposed that once a question was deleted, it could not be easily visible as explained in the  following question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3752/how-do-i-find-deleted-questions&quot;&gt;How do I find deleted questions?&lt;/a&gt; but, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this recent deleted question is actually easily visible on Google &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.it/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#q=etymology%20of%20%20field%20questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology of field questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot; where it  appears just top of the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any 'anonaly' about it  or is it just the way Google works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T03:45:46.080" Title="Why do deleted questions remain visible on Google?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7110" CreationDate="2015-09-04T13:35:57.033" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will propose a candidate happy medium:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As long as there is not an overly large proportion of boldface in the post, let the individual choose his own formatting.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T13:35:57.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2015-09-04T13:49:42.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google does not work in real time; they &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34439?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;have algorithms&lt;/a&gt; for how often and how deeply for various sites, but the specifics are of course a trade secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange as a whole seems to get re-indexed very regularly, multiple times per day, but because of the multitude of problems that can prevent a website from loading correctly— congestion in different parts of the Internet, failures of various server and network hardware components; bugs in the web server software, the application server software, the database server software, etc. ad infinitum— a URL that returns an error is not going to be deleted immediately. It will be revisited periodically to see if it is available again, and only after an algorithmically-determined amount of time when it remains unavailable will it be demoted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T13:49:42.943" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-09-05T06:14:31.157" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/82841/language-learning?referrer=sg-MbJAGOjNnNFDS7ptHjQ2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xlpvC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastActivityDate="2015-09-05T06:14:31.157" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-05T06:14:31.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-05T09:13:46.727" Score="4" ViewCount="1399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused. There appears to be conflicting ideas as to what constitutes a &lt;em&gt;canonical answer&lt;/em&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply saying it is the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer, is too subjective. Best for whom? Best for the OP who is asking the question? But how would the user recognize the best answer without some previous knowledge? &lt;em&gt;Best&lt;/em&gt; because of the number of upvotes an answer receives? But sometimes the funniest and cleverest answers are the most upvoted ones, and therefore, objectively speaking, not necessarily the most correct. &lt;em&gt;Best&lt;/em&gt; because the answer is beautifully  written in flawless English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see the most recent bounty set up for:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/251800/a-word-for-a-non-logged-in-user&quot;&gt;A word for a &amp;quot;non-logged in&amp;quot; user&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am confused as to why the user offering the bounty believes his answer (currently standing at 70 upvotes) is not ‘canonical’. There is, however, an answer that has 80 upvotes so far, an eighteen-word-long post. Would anyone agree a single sentence answer is &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt; because it has more upvotes than any other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three more examples of bounties set up with the aim of receiving a &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481/framing-a-question-whose-answer-is-an-ordinal-number/253795#253795&quot;&gt;Framing a question whose answer is an ordinal number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This post earned the bounty because it had the largest consensus.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/472/how-can-i-reliably-and-accurately-identify-the-passive-voice-in-writing-or-speec/250562#250562&quot;&gt;How can I reliably and accurately identify the passive voice in writing or speech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here the bounty was NOT awarded to the highest upvoted answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you/151925#151925&quot;&gt;Did English ever have a formal version of &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Objectively speaking, the user awarded the bounty is EL&amp;amp;U's most authoritative user/author. Does that mean the answers which earned 415, 78, 41, and 31 upvotes  are not &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take for granted an answer consisting of one or two sentences can rarely be considered &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt;; that EL&amp;amp;U encourages every user to support their answers with references and cited sources, and a wrong answer cannot be ‘canonical’, what exactly is a canonical answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain what the criteria is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it based on the number of upvotes an answer receives?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it the most “accurate” and/or most “correct” answer, regardless of the number of upvotes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a canonical answer the most &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it the most authoritative because of its author?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; written? (due to style and accuracy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can users please provide examples of canonical answers that they believe are exemplar and explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can agree what makes a &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt; answer, would it not be best to mark it some way so that users and visitors can easily identify it? That way we block users from setting up “canonical” bounties on questions which have been abundantly and satisfactorily answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature would not prevent bounties on questions and answers that need to be updated (although an answer replying to a &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; question five years ago is still going to be a correct answer today) or awarding bounties on answers that are considered worthy of greater attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:10:37.563" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T11:10:37.563" Title="What is a “canonical answer”?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7115" CreationDate="2015-09-05T11:03:43.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course there is no clear definition for 'canonical', any more than for 'best' (which is presumably why Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; uses neither term). There is, however, general agreement that some answers are better than others; each voter decides which post or posts to upvote, and the highest-voted is the best &lt;em&gt;in the 'opinion' of ELU as a whole&lt;/em&gt;, no matter what you or I may think of it (the accepted answer is presumably the best in the opinion of OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, there is general agreement that certain questions are asked repeatedly, and it would be useful to (for example) close every &quot;What is the question to which the answer is Xth?&quot; question as a duplicate of one particular example. There is, however, no agreement, far less an official line, on which example that should be. So you close the next one as a duplicate of your preferred example, I will do the same with mine, and perhaps a canonical post will emerge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-09-05T11:03:43.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7110" CreationDate="2015-09-05T13:48:49.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest that formatting should never be edited by anybody but the OP, with one or two explicit exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions would be such things as using &lt;code&gt;code&lt;/code&gt; for emphasis, or ending a post &quot;Thanks and best wishes&quot;, which are both proscribed by TPTB for specific reasons. Rather than asking OP to change, it is best to edit these yourself, and explain why in the edit field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But straight quotes rather than curly quotes, italics rather than quotation marks, square or round brackets? Leave it alone. Any poster who has a strong opinion about the English language (i.e. any poster on ELU) already has his own opinions about these matters, and if it offends your &quot;strong aesthetic sense&quot; you can a) make a suggestion in the comments box or b) live with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T18:11:43.167" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T18:11:43.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7120" CreationDate="2015-09-06T14:36:35.717" Score="10" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I am too blunt sometimes. However in most cases I find that a comment pointing out a weakness in someone's answer or comment is taken well. Speaking personally, I've often edited my own answers and acknowledged the commenter if they have pointed out an error I've made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that excessive courtesies are discouraged on Stack Exchange, can anyone give me some tips for pointing out inaccuracies and requesting further clarification from answerers without this ending up in, at best a blustering and unconvincing counter-argument, or at worst a personal attack?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T21:28:27.210" Title="Defensiveness when replying to comments" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-06T15:11:25.977" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a specific question about a term from literary theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/objective%20correlative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;objective correlative&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask it on english usage? I guess not, but it probably is more about the meaning of that term than any poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T20:04:14.280" Title="Can I ask about a term from literary theory?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7118" CreationDate="2015-09-07T00:41:30.733" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps. &lt;strong&gt;Some things I've learned:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IRL, you can only control your own behavior; the same is true here. If you believe framing a comment in a certain way will guarantee that you won't be met with defensiveness or worse, your expectations are unrealistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be direct and polite. Remember that people can't read tone from a short sequence of written words, and no one likes to be corrected in public, so treat someone as you'd like to be treated (please disregard this advice if you like sarcastic mockery as a response to your own answers!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is flat out wrong, you can simply state what you know to be true, adding a link. Then walk away knowing you've alerted the next reader to a possible inaccuracy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask the user an honest question if you're confused. Most people are happy to explain. I can't &lt;em&gt;remember&lt;/em&gt; this ever going wrong for me (other than egg on my face if I was wrong), though I'm sure it has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid rhetorical questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid snark. If you feel snarky about an answer and show it, then expect an attack. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...at best a blustering and unconvincing counter-argument...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes two to spar. You've made your point; if you don't like to spar, just walk away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume the best about the user. You don't know the person you've directed the comment to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember you can just DV, flag, or move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From experience (and advice from others on SE for a longer time), the best thing is to make your comment and move on. Drop it. Don't engage. It's perfectly OK to not reply to a comment challenging yours in an unproductive manner, if this is what concerns you. Flag something if someone answers you in an offensive manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that excessive courtesies are discouraged on Stack Exchange...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are? I mean, I don't start my comments with Dear Sir or Madame, etc., but I never saw a prohibition of common courtesy, even in excess (except for welcoming new users, and that varies from site to site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things I know in my head but have yet to put into practice consistently:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't argue with people with fragile egos or certain mental illnesses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck. I've briefly read over some of your comments and you don't come across as offensive to me at all. I don't think this should be a big problem for you here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I've made a lot of mistakes. If I've ever given you a hard time, I've forgotten, so please just accept my apologies.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T09:04:24.567" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T09:04:24.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7119" CreationDate="2015-09-07T03:03:55.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this is a 'term of art' peculiar to literary criticism and indeed to a particular moment in literary criticism. It is meaningful only within the critical discipline and comprehensible only through an understanding of Eliot's poetic practise and the Symboliste poetic tradition within which he worked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its explication is therefore not a matter ELU should undertake, any more than we should undertake explication of technical terms from law or theology or physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T03:03:55.217" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7119" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:04:14.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your question simply were about what the term &lt;em&gt;objective correlative&lt;/em&gt; means, I would classify it as general reference and therefore off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (2003), &lt;em&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, fourth edition (2000), &lt;em&gt;The Random House College Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, revised edition (1975), and &lt;em&gt;Webster's II New College Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (1999) all have entries for objective correlative, although some other dictionaries—including &lt;em&gt;The Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus&lt;/em&gt; (2003) and &lt;em&gt;Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English&lt;/em&gt;, new edition (1987)—do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if (as seems likely) your question weren't about the basic sense of the term, but about some application of it to literary analysis, I think StoneyB is right that the question would be off-topic for almost the opposite reason—as being a discipline-specific term of art whose meaning depends on how it is understood not in normal English usage but in evolved academic usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves only one area where I think EL&amp;amp;U might perhaps be a suitable forum for a question about &lt;em&gt;objective correlative&lt;/em&gt;—one in which an author has applied the term in a setting unrelated to literary analysis, and the questioner presents the question along these lines (for example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; defines &lt;em&gt;objective correlative&lt;/em&gt; as &amp;quot;something (as a situation or chain of events) that symbolizes or objectifies a particular emotion and that may be used in creative writing as to evoke a desired emotional response in the reader.&amp;quot; But the term doesn't seem to have that meaning in this excerpt from Antonya Nelson, &amp;quot;Palisades,&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=HDjPmj13jVMC&amp;amp;pg=PA91&amp;amp;dq=%22objective+correlative%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CFQQ6AEwCThGahUKEwij0dix0-XHAhVMo4gKHbMRCqA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22objective%20correlative%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Female Trouble: Stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2002):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a good confidante, and I'll tell you the secret: never offer advice, merely listen. You may repeat, ratify, sympathize, query, even divulge a tidbit or two, whip up the &lt;strong&gt;objective correlative&lt;/strong&gt;, but you must &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; give an opinion about what your friend should do next. Never, never, never.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;whip up the objective correlative&amp;quot; have an objectively identifiable meaning as used in this story? If so, what is it? And what does the term &amp;quot;objective correlative&amp;quot; mean here?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, this question is not answerable by resort to general-reference sources, nor is it a matter of advanced literary theory. It's simply a question about how a standard dictionary-defined term is being employed in a particular setting. I'm sure that some EL&amp;amp;U participants would vote to close it anyway, on the grounds that it is essentially a request for literary interpretation, but I would be inclined to interpret it as being centrally about the meaning of the term itself as used in a particular nonspecialist context. And that, to me, is a legitimate question of English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T20:04:14.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-08T05:18:41.973" Score="-3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm acquainted with some of the differences between the U.S. English I speak, and other flavors of English. Wikipedia has a term, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wikitravel.org/en/English_language_varieties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Commonwealth English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which I'll abbreviate CE.  I know, for example, that &lt;em&gt;holiday&lt;/em&gt; equals &lt;em&gt;vacation&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;loo&lt;/em&gt; equals the &lt;em&gt;john&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;toilet&lt;/em&gt; equals &lt;em&gt;bathroom&lt;/em&gt;.  But there must be lots of other terms and expressions of mine that will have a different meaning in CE than what I'm used to, that I don't realize.  And vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do ELU users deal with this?  How do ELU habitués avoid inadvertently setting up barriers to understanding in their ELU posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched among the existing ELU tags and found ten questions labeled commonweath-english [sic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-- Edit --&lt;/strong&gt; I apologize for noting being clear about the raison d'être of this question from the start.  Personally, I enjoy the challenge of communicating with people whose English is a bit different from my own.  My main other language is Spanish, and living in the U.S. is a fun place to speak it, what with so many different flavors of Spanish living in close proximity with each other, in an atmosphere of camaraderie, identification and mutual support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was motivated by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/272481/is-act-like-a-mensch-too-localized-for-elu-readers-u-s-and-or-british-englis&quot;&gt;mensch question&lt;/a&gt;.  There is a substantial camp of ELU users in that thread that are bothered by the idea of a yiddishism like this being used on StackExchange, since it is apparently used primarily in the U.S.  This made me wonder how SE users handle the problem in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd like to hear from some users that felt strongly about the inappropriateness of using an apparent Americanism on SE.  I'm now doubting whether that is likely to happen on Meta.  Is there some way I could adapt my question to make it work on Academia, instead of Academia Meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would ask that if you have an approach or a coping mechanism to contribute, please put it in the form of an Answer (rather than a Comment), so that it can be up or downvoted.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm looking for answers that focus on &lt;strong&gt;positive coping mechanisms&lt;/strong&gt;, not on finding a better way of classifying the major varieties of English spoken in different parts of the world.  (That would be a different question, and one which someone else is welcome to pose!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T03:28:09.330" Title="Tomayto, tomahto -- How can we avoid barriers to understanding on SE ELU?" Tags="|discussion|american-english|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7118" CreationDate="2015-09-09T04:50:12.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Medica's post is spot on and I very much agree with its sentiment. However, I would like to make a small expansion to the point about flags and it was too large as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to personal attacks, there is no room whatsoever at Stack Exchange for that behavior. If you encounter a direct personal attack simply flag it as rude and move on. Moderators here are very good at dealing with this content and also with users who have a pattern of that behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users become very adept at being insulting without directly insulting you. In this situation the comment can still be flagged as non constructive as it is not beneficial to the overall conversation or post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that comments are second class citizens at Stack Exchange and they will be removed if there is no topicality to them with a flag rather easily. Given that status, please also keep in mind it can take 12 to 36 hours for a comment flag to be reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr; Feel free to trust in the moderating team for your exchange, they tend to be very classy people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23999" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T04:50:12.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2015-09-09T17:06:38.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long, long time ago (by EL&amp;amp;U standards) the folks here got tired of answering a banana-boatload of trivial questions that seemed unrelated to English and only of use to a very narrow sampling of people: programmers. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1088/2303&quot;&gt;Is Python a snake or a programming language? If the latter, why is it choking my dog?&lt;/a&gt; You can get up to speed on this issue by reading the answers and comments there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, helping individuals name things, especially programming artifacts, doesn't seem like such a good use of our time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T17:06:38.407" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7123" CreationDate="2015-09-10T08:24:07.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With English as a language there are the basics which are relatively common, but there are a lot of words and phrases that are localised slang or colloquialisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am talking to someone (especially online where their initial confusion is not obvious) who is not a native English speaker, or to a lesser extent someone who is not a local English speaker then I try to avoid such colloquialisms. Similarly I would quite possibly avoid using imperial measurements for many people; much of the English speaking world has switched to metric, or at least has a good understanding of it. While the USA is still heavily biased to the imperial system, is uses a slightly different selection of imperial measures. For example a US gallon is smaller, and I can't ever remember hearing an American referring to a person's weight using stones and pounds, while in the UK it is virtually unknown to refer to someone's weight just in pounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course some words which have very different meanings in the UK and the USA and best to avoid those. &quot;Going out for a fag&quot; for example has &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different meanings, while a fanny refers to 2 different parts of the anatomy. Going in to shops and asking for pants would get you different items of clothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original thread about &lt;em&gt;mensch&lt;/em&gt;, I wouldn't have understood the word nor from where it was used would I have been able to correctly infer its meaning. My guess would be based on the word &lt;em&gt;untermensch&lt;/em&gt; which has unfortunate associations but would have just left me thinking &lt;em&gt;human&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall I tend to take the view that language is for communication. If the choice of phrases in a language gets in the way of communication then it is failing in its primary reason for existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137802" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2015-09-11T03:28:09.330" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T03:28:09.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:06:32.317" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273254/are-fact-and-opinion-mutually-exclusive&quot;&gt;this philosophical question&lt;/a&gt; (Opinion vs. Fact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree it could be off-topic for this site, despite the fact I have enjoyed the experience of thinking about it and providing an answer on it. I agree it is probably on-topic on the Philosophy SE (though I have not studied their charter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I disagree with is that it has been closed as a duplicate of an answered question. I don't think it is the same question &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; though there is a superficial similarity. The original question was about the English sentence construction of &quot;incorrect fact&quot; and whether that is an oxymoron. I certainly agree with the accepted answer on that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is about whether it is philosophically acceptable to have an opinion on a demonstrable fact or whether such a circumstance has any meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merely stating that something that is a &quot;fact&quot; cannot &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; be incorrect says nothing about whether one can have an opinion on a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I assert it has been incorrectly closed and should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it is off-topic or not should be decided by the community using the usual process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76722" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T10:58:55.837" Title="Voted to reopen due to incorrect closure reason" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7180" CreationDate="2015-09-10T13:10:16.897" Score="42" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this has been discussed before but, at the time, it was not possible since &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; was still in beta. Now that it has graduated and has had its first mod elections and everything, it might be time to reconsider the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do choose to have one, we should also set up some clear guidelines on what kind of questions we will be migrating. ELL is not and should not become the dumping ground of bad ELU questions. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91446/203101&quot;&gt;golden rule&lt;/a&gt; will still apply: &lt;em&gt;don't migrate crap&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we do receive a fair amount of perfectly good questions that are simply too basic for this site but would be perfect for ELL. Questions that are clear and well formulated but which, while obvious to any native speaker, are understandably confusing for someone learning the language. Such questions really belong on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should we have a migration path opened to ELL? I believe this would make a lot of sense and is the single most useful migration path we could have here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T00:08:17.433" Title="Should we have a migration path to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-10T13:13:20.603" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should. (Vote for this answer if you think we &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; open a migration path to ELL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T13:22:31.073" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T13:22:31.073" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-11T13:38:05.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-10T13:15:47.877" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, we shouldn't. (Vote for this answer if you think we &lt;strong&gt;should not&lt;/strong&gt; open a migration path to ELL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T13:15:47.877" CommentCount="19" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-11T13:38:19.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-10T13:25:18.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe. I think many questions asked here should be asked there instead. However, the user base here doesn't fully overlap with the user base there and it can be difficult to judge if a question should be migrated. In my ideal world, users with high-rep accounts on both sites would be the ones who perform the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T13:25:18.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T14:45:02.623" Score="-5" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just 'cancelled' (downvoted as a counter-measure) an upvote for what is essentially an old chestnut {&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273313/gender-neutral-pronoun-other-than-singular-they&quot;&gt;Gender-neutral pronoun other than singular they&lt;/a&gt;} (ie &lt;em&gt;I'm not aware of the previous question&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I'm not happy with the answers there.&lt;/em&gt;) Perhaps upvotes could be attributed, or ones that wrongly reward questions ELU really doesn't welcome be made to count against the voters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T11:40:44.137" Title="How does one deal with the problem of the phantom upvoter?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2015-09-10T15:12:50.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removing the &quot;programmer&quot; part of the question often makes the question unanswerable. List all the synonyms for X? is not a valid question. For single-word/phrase requests, there is an additional rule which is that you have to specify what makes the question answerable, i.e. how you expect the word/phrase to be used, and what alternatives (if any) you've rejected, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failure to specify the use-case of a word request makes it a poor question for this site. We don't necessarily close all such poor questions, but that doesn't make them okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of programming, naming is often very important and very deliberate and fraught with heated opinions. What makes a good word for something often doesn't make it a good word in a codebase or database table, and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: we will also close other word requests that are too specialized. We've closed legal word requests, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If you can fix your question to make it more generic, it might be re-openable. If not, then simply removing the programmer language just hides your intentions and still leaves us with a poor question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T15:12:50.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2015-09-10T15:51:31.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For at least some of these questions, it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; possible to remove the database/computing part and make a real-world example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/102771/not-empty-set-in-one-word&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Not empty&amp;quot; set in one word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question gained its upvotes after the edit to make it on-topic, although it wasn't edited soon enough to prevent closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule is the rule, and it's not silly. This is primarily an English site, not a computing site. If you want a name, call it Milly; that's probably unique and would work just as well in a program or database schema (that is, it would not error). If you want a word, &lt;strong&gt;describe the word.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case in point, &lt;code&gt;last_added_by&lt;/code&gt; is fine as a database column name. If you want an English word, you need to come up with a sentence where &quot;last added by&quot; might be replaced. I doubt that &quot;This item was last added by Edgar&quot; is that sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T15:51:31.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T16:46:27.377" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reviewed a post, and then clicked &quot;approve edit&quot;, when I actually meant to reject the edit. How can this be reversed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78569" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T17:03:52.567" Title="How do I reverse approval of an edit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-10T16:46:35.907" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a regular user of ELL I would request that migrations to ELL continue to be handled by the moderators of ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is, in general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/261200/284336&quot;&gt;very reluctant&lt;/a&gt; to create migration paths because they tend to be abused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261196/when-should-we-consider-adding-a-default-migration-path&quot;&gt;When should we consider adding a default migration path?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Almost never.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Truth is, migrations are not often particularly necessary. It's usually just as easy for the asker to re-post his question on a new site as it is for 5 close-voters or a moderator to migrate. There are better tools available for those rare occasions when a new site is actually carve off of an existing one, and that's primarily what the current system was designed to handle anyway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until then, I'd want to see a veritable deluge of &lt;strong&gt;good but blatantly off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; questions on a site before I'd consider adding a migration path. [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reality is, even with &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; ELU moderators migrating questions, the quality of the questions being migrated is occasionally extremely poor... meaning that the question is not a &quot;good question&quot; by the standards of any SE site, regardless of it being on-topic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did bring this up in the ELU chat recently and it seems that the quality of migrated questions has improved to some degree since then, which I sincerely appreciate. I don't feel there's enough &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; content to warrant opening the possible floodgates between the two sites (and, yes, this means I also think ELL should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have a migration path to ELU).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the golden rule of migration is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91446/284336&quot;&gt;don't migrate crap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is migrated (and deleted on the original site) and then the target site rejects the migration by putting the question &quot;on hold&quot;, the question enters a limbo state where it can never be recovered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a disservice to the person who asks the question because they have no way to improve their question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/811/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; put it &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23710759#23710759&quot;&gt;really nicely&lt;/a&gt; in a chat between M&amp;amp;TV and Sci-Fi about migrations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a general rule, if the form of the question wouldn't be acceptable on your site (regardless of topic), then dropping it onto someone else's (where the author may not even have an account) is rude: it's probably not gonna get better. When in doubt, drop in a link to movies.stackexchange.com/tour and suggest that the asker read it and re-post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Always acceptable to NOT migrate. If you're gonna migrate or ask someone else to do so, try to make sure the asker looks good when his question appears on the new site. Failing to do this creates a bad experience for everyone involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU should &lt;strong&gt;close vote&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;poor quality&lt;/em&gt; questions and encourage the asker to re-ask the question on ELL rather than migrating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T16:46:35.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7135" CreationDate="2015-09-10T17:03:52.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to go edit the post yourself to revert it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T17:03:52.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-10T18:12:54.617" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR:&lt;/strong&gt; I don’t have a lot of confidence that this will work out, but unless we make the attempt we won’t have the data to support that hunch. Plus until we do so, people will keep asking for it. But before we can, we would have to have some other stuff in place first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225006&quot;&gt;Don’t Migrate Crap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are ELL migration stats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZwhiD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZwhiD.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELL migration stats&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tell us that right now, almost one in every six questions currently migrated to ELL from ELU &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;by moderators&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is being rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, here are ELU migration stats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ewKZW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ewKZW.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU migration stats&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, those are all moderator migrations because no one has a default off-topic migration path to ELU right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps for comparison, here are SO migration stats, where there are OT migrations available to regular close-voters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aor8Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aor8Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;SO Migrations&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones that are user-migrated are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mpqPp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mpqPp.png&quot; alt=&quot;SO CV migration possibilities&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/134636&quot;&gt;historically been others&lt;/a&gt;, but they were removed because people were migrating too much crap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is what I worry will happen with us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Historical Record&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once took a broad look at the ELU questions that had received comments to the effect that the post would do better on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion at that time was that if all those had turned into migrations, there would have been an overwhelmingly high rejection rate: not just a simple majority but maybe 80 or 90 percent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s true that these were just comments not actual migration votes by 3k users with the close-vote privilege, so we don’t know what the votes might have been. And migration does require a super-majority of at least four out of five votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of questions closed for General Reference or Proofreading on ELU that people say should be on ELL should not be, because they would just get closed for Dictionary or Proofreading there, too. That shows that people forget not to migrate crap, and are just looking for a dumping ground. That is a real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get plenty of migration rejections even now with only migrator-migrations. It could only get worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Due Diligence and Paired Reputation Requirements (not happening)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gut feeling is that having CV privileges on ELU may not be a good enough qualification for making someone good at judging whether a question is a good fit for ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might work, but which is too hard because there is no code to support it right now, is for there to be a reputation requirement for both source and target site for migrations. However, the question asking for that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/74053&quot;&gt;Require minimum reputation on the target site for migration&lt;/a&gt;, has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; on MSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless and until this feature were reconsidered, it wouldn’t be possible to have a double reputation requirement. However, if it were, I wouldn’t mind starting with a requirement of Trusted User on both sites, and then consider halving it if that works out ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know that’s very high. But I am afraid that at this point I quite honestly don’t have enough confidence that ELU-to-ELL migrations will be done well enough not to provoke bad feelings and high rejection rates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What We &lt;em&gt;Could&lt;/em&gt; Try Now&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the other ELU meta posts I linked to as Related in my comment on Rob’s question, I predict that the Community will come down firmly in favor of there being such a path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is what the Community truly wants, or perhaps the Communities, then we could try it for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it works, it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it doesn’t, then we’d have concrete data to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this is my hunch, we don’t actually have that data yet, and can’t get it in any other way.  It would cause no great lasting harm to give it a go for some initial trial period, whatever is long enough to acquire that data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s going to take a lot user education first for there to be any hope of it working out well.  We have over 400 users with vote-to-close privileges on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Just FAQ It&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore if we were to try this, we should absolutely have a FAQ here on Meta with concrete guidelines about just what should and should not be migrated to ELL, along with plenty of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T19:15:10.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7140" CreationDate="2015-09-10T18:23:34.930" Score="-4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked this new question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273362/english-translation-for-kock%C3%A1sf%C3%BCl%C5%B1-ny%C3%BAl-hungarian&quot;&gt;English translation for Kock&amp;#225;sf&amp;#252;lű Ny&amp;#250;l (Hungarian)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for which I'd like to use the 'hungarian' tag which doesn't exist at this time and I don't have enough reputation on this site to create it. Can someone with sufficient reputation please create the tag and add it to my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138260" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T19:59:49.540" Title="New 'hungarian' tag" Tags="|feature-request|tags|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7139" CreationDate="2015-09-10T19:59:49.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are meant to provide useful categorizations of the questions.  Honestly I think we could do without most or all of the existing language-name tags (I found tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/german&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;german&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;german&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/french&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;french&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;french&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/japanese&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;japanese&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;japanese&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chinese&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chinese&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chinese&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spanish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spanish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spanish&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/italian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;italian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;italian&lt;/a&gt; just by looking at a few questions already tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think having a tag with the originating language substantially assists people in finding questions; it's quite sufficient to mention in the text of the question what language you're coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T19:59:49.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7132" CreationDate="2015-09-11T09:01:32.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why a user has to penalise an OP for posting a duplicate question. Very often newcomers are unaware or unable to search a related question. Which doesn't appear to be the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For us &quot;oldies&quot; who keep seeing the same  question time and time again, it can get irritating. But that's not the fault of the OP. And maybe a duplicate question shows effort, research, and context too. If a post receives one upvote, someone somewhere believed it deserved recognition. Why penalise the poor OP? The anonymous upvoter (guilty of... what exactly?) is totally unaffected by the counter downvote/measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T09:01:32.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7145" CreationDate="2015-09-11T14:32:04.667" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine learning English misused &quot;peoples&quot;. While I was able to explain to her how to use &quot;person&quot;, &quot;people&quot; and &quot;peoples&quot; (I decided not to mention &quot;persons&quot;), I realised that I didn't have a clue why English uses the &quot;person&quot; and &quot;people&quot; the way it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, first check whether ELU had already answered the &quot;why&quot; aspect. Nope, nothing. Google? No luck either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask a question? Not so fast. If I don't provide a link to a dictionary, then I'm going to get closed as being available in a &quot;commonly-available reference&quot;. Ok, link to the OED entries about &quot;people&quot; and &quot;person&quot;, and show how they don't mention the relationship with each other. I should be ok now, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. My question about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; English uses &quot;person&quot; and &quot;people&quot; got marked as a duplicate of questions about &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; to use &quot;person&quot; and &quot;people&quot;, and got &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/273492/revisions&quot;&gt;dupehammered&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next time, to force the person closing it to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273492/why-does-english-usually-use-one-person-but-two-people#comment603297_273492&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt; instead (which doesn't attract the dupehammer) (&quot;The precise reason why we do this is probably unanswerable&quot;), should I pre-empt claims of being a duplicate by linking to an existing ELU question and spelling out in words of one syllable how it is not a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.807" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T15:52:08.967" Title="Should I pre-empt accusations to stop dupehammer time?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|dupehammer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7143" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-11T14:33:28.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Dupehammer&quot; refers to the ability of tag gold badge owners to unilaterally close and reopen duplicates which were asked in tags of which they have a golden badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is assumed that tag gold badge holders are well-versed and community-trusted for the specific tag they hold a gold badge of. As such, their vote-to-close power is proportionally reflected by means of this &quot;privilege&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230865&quot;&gt;When did I get close-vote superpowers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230865&quot;&gt;Increase close vote weight for gold tag badge holders&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2015-09-12T13:14:41.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T13:14:41.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7144" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-11T14:33:28.187" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Dupehammer&quot; refers to the ability of tag gold badge owners to unilaterally close and reopen duplicates which were asked in tags of which they have a golden badge." OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="1420" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T08:04:25.510" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T08:04:25.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7142" CreationDate="2015-09-11T15:52:08.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for this specific case, I would deem that question as &quot;related,&quot; but not a duplicate. I've cast my reopen vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your general question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I pre-empt claims of being a duplicate by linking to an existing ELU question and explaining how it is not a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; a good idea, for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It shows you've done your research. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might thwart dupe-voting when the questions are more related to each other as opposed to true duplicates of each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By explaining why your question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate, you'll clarify the matter you want addressed, which could ultimately help you get better, more pertinent answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It spares the community from a long discussion in the comments about potential duplication. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The links might be helpful to others who are interested in reading more about the issue. Imagine someone finds your question two years from now, and is curious about this whole person/people issue. It's certainly not going to hurt to add a footnote saying, &lt;em&gt;&quot;I found this related question on ELU, but it doesn't really address the core of my question, because...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Now, instead of your answers being isolated, there's a cross-reference to a related question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experienced users often add such links in the comments; it only makes sense for the O.P. to do that on their own accord if they found a similar, related question.  By doing so, you're making your question (and the website as a whole) more useful to future users and curiosity seekers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The link might also help prevent a duplicate question down the road. Assume someone asks Question A in 2012. Someone else asks Question B (a related question) in 2014. In 2016, someone comes along with Question A in mind. They do a search, and Question B comes up. If Question B also has a link back to Question A, that might help this future user get the answer without asking a duplicate question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T15:52:08.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7132" CreationDate="2015-09-11T16:37:35.237" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what Mari-Lou said about punitive downvotes for dupicate questions, there is some added irony in this case: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The &quot;offending&quot; O.P. actually &lt;strong&gt;linked to the duplicate question&lt;/strong&gt; which shows that they did their legwork, homework and research with due diligence – something hardly deserving of a downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I'm not convinced the questions are true duplicates. The original question asks about the gender-neutral pronoun in this context: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each student should save &lt;strong&gt;his/her/their&lt;/strong&gt; questions until the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the new one uses this example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He/she/they&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is/are&lt;/strong&gt; coming with us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the former, the verb doesn't change; in the latter, it does – and it looks to me like &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; what prompted this new question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) The closing message reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273313/gender-neutral-pronoun-other-than-singular-they&quot;&gt;please ask a new question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That's exactly what the O.P. did!&lt;/em&gt; The O.P. even referenced the alternatives presented in the answers to that question (namely, both &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;), but now appears to be stuck in an infinite &lt;code&gt;LATHER-RINSE-REPEAT&lt;/code&gt; loop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) The first question has over 190 upvotes, making it the sixth-highest upvoted ELU question of all time. The new one, despite explicitly linking to that question, and explaining that a suitable answer wasn't found, now has two downvotes, and we know one of them was cast simply to &quot;offset&quot; an upvote. What a way for the O.P. to be welcomed into this community with their first question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the issue here is not the &quot;phantom upvoter,&quot; but the &quot;quick-triggered close voters&quot; instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I've gone on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3422&quot;&gt;record&lt;/a&gt; defending this community against allegations of rudeness and curtness, before, and I'm not going to change my stance on that. However, in this instance, I'm having trouble defending the regulars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T16:37:35.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T19:03:11.287" Score="10" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have 38 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correct&lt;/a&gt;.  This is a horrible meta-tag that does no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should either be removed altogether and put on the blacklist, or possibly merged into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-09-21T13:59:08.360" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T13:59:08.360" Title="Please either burninate the “correct” tag or merge it into “grammaticality”" Tags="|support|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7118" CreationDate="2015-09-17T21:28:27.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in medica's excellent answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;People can't read tone from a short sequence of written words, and no one likes to be corrected in public.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In consideration of these two factors, I like to take a page out of Ben Franklin's book - specifically, page 42 of his autobiography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own.  I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as &lt;em&gt;certainly, undoubtedly,&lt;/em&gt; etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I &lt;em&gt;conceive,&lt;/em&gt; I &lt;em&gt;apprehend,&lt;/em&gt; or I &lt;em&gt;imagine&lt;/em&gt; a thing to be so or so, or it so &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to me at &lt;em&gt;present.&lt;/em&gt; When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering, I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there &lt;em&gt;appeared&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;seemed&lt;/em&gt; to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this charge in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with other to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that this approach allows one to adopt a comfortable middle ground, avoiding both the one extreme of &amp;quot;excessive courtesies&amp;quot; that weaken one's own position, and the other extreme of absolute conviction that can come across as argumentative or hostile (or prove terribly embarrassing, in the event that one turns out to be in the wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128370" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T21:28:27.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T21:50:27.603" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, every question and answer on this site is supposed to deal with using words and phrases in an English-language context. To further this goal, mention of the pronunciation of words in other languages is fine; if it helps people learn about how to pronounce the word in an English-speaking context, it's great. (The same goes for usage and meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are certain types of questions that I feel are off-topic, and similar types of questions that I feel are on-topic but tend to attract off-topic answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example off-topic question: &quot;How do I pronounce ---- in Greek?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in my opinion, there can be better ways to deal with the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; than just closing it. I would probably close-vote, but it's equally important to leave a comment to the original poster asking for clarification on what they want. If the actual question is &quot;How should I pronounce the Greek word ---- in an English-language context?&quot; then it's on-topic for ELU, in my opinion, and I would retract my close-vote. If the actual question turns out to be &quot;How did the Ancient Greeks pronounce ----&quot; or &quot;How do the Modern Greeks pronounce ----,&quot; then it's clearly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main issue is that the original, ambiguous question often attracts &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that I see as unambiguously off-topic for this site. Without knowing exactly what the original poster wants, people will post things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, the Ancient Greeks pronounced it /----/ [IPA for reconstructed pronunciation of Attic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Greek, I know how to pronounce this! It's /---/ [IPA for modern Greek pronunciation].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just invented these specific examples. The posters are not always ignorant; the issue I have is that these kind of answers solely describe a foreign pronunciation. In my opinion, this kind of answer is misleading if the original poster's question was about how to pronounce the word in an English-language context. And if the original poster actually wanted the foreign pronunciation, then the question is off-topic. So I see no reason for answers like this to exist; in my opinion, appropriate answers for this site should always also include accurate information on pronunciation or usage in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I routinely downvote this kind of answer (even if the pronunciation info is accurate for the foreign language), and I generally try to leave a comment explaining why, but I'm wondering if there's anything else that can be done to discourage this. Alternately, if someone disagrees that this is an actual problem or thinks that it's inappropriate to downvote these answers (after all, they frequently do show research effort, and may be useful and clear to some people), I'd appreciate hearing that perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T22:13:23.103" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T22:28:16.153" Title="Are either questions or *answers* purely about how to pronounce things in foreign languages on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7152" CreationDate="2015-09-17T22:28:16.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is precisely why such questions should be closed. It may very well be that the poster actually wants to know 'how this Greek term is pronounced in English', and if edited to ask that, the question can and should be re-opened. But pronunciation in foreign languages is blatantly off-topic, and leaving an off-topic question open will (reasonably enough) attract off-topic answers, which is A Bad Thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something special about foreign-language questions, or are the guidelines on how to deal with off-topic questions not clear enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T22:28:16.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7150" CreationDate="2015-09-18T14:21:35.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote for burnination and blacklisting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T14:21:35.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-19T10:44:22.377" Score="-7" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a genuine question, asked in a spirit of enquiry. I don't want to start a row - simply to ask for people's thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I and some other Brits on ELU have noticed that a minority of self-declared US English speakers appear not to value our variety of the language and, as a result not value our answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told by one user that he'd always thought Britain was some fictional place from Star-Trek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another said that Britain -  the nation and its language - were of rapidly diminishing importance in the world. The implication was that my answer was therefore worthless,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't give you the links because I flagged these remarks and they were removed. I'm sure they are still on the system somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit - I've received other, milder, comments that give me the same impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could of course justify British English to these people, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The English language actually originated in England and was later exported all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Educated Americans are often familiar with the works of Milton, Shakespeare and Dickens as well as later writers such as, for example J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame. All of those wrote in the language of the British Isles.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many students from Europe and Asia learn British English in school in preference to American English. I don't have precise statistics but in my home city - and many others, not even counting London - we have dozens of language schools with thousands of foreign students.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My username clearly indicates my origins.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I answer, if I am aware of a difference, I indicate to the reader that they may wish to wait for US answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would people care to come forward and state their true feelings about this. Would you prefer this to a be a site for American English only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a genuine question and I'm hoping for honest answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="127726" LastEditDate="2015-09-20T00:52:48.963" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T00:52:48.963" Title="Is British English unwelcome on ELU for some people?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1463" CreationDate="2015-09-19T12:06:17.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that a very short discussion in comments can sometimes provide useful clarification. However, as you say, the temptation is to keep making further points or even get into an argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My personal approach &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; effectively &quot;over and out&quot;. I usually make my final point and then say something like. &quot;I'll leave it there and not return to this discussion.&quot;  If others want to continue, I don't join in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you can do is simply say &quot;Let's take this to chat&quot; and do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T12:06:17.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7155" CreationDate="2015-09-19T13:17:17.057" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you yourself point out, the offending comments were removed when you flagged them. Your question, therefore, reads like &quot;Some unpleasant people acted like idiots and the mods stepped in and put things right&quot;. I don't see how you go from a couple of idiots to &quot;ELU doesn't like BrE&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, remember that at least three of our mods are actually British. As are quite a few of our top-rep members. We also have 1043 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, of course BrE is not unwelcome here. Quite the contrary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastEditorUserId="25030" LastEditDate="2015-09-19T17:02:06.527" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T17:02:06.527" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7155" CreationDate="2015-09-19T13:32:08.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just put it out of your mind. Their perspectives will gradually adjust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Americans confuse xenophobia for patriotism (which is supposedly healthy), as do nationals of many countries, especially folks with more idealism than real-life experience. Chauvinism is always difficult to defuse constructively, to be sure, but however you prefer to approach that general sort of behavior should be appropriate. Flag and move along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4385" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T13:32:08.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-20T05:57:48.280" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried entering some Chinese characters into the body of an ELU question, and it said &lt;code&gt;Body cannot contain (Chinese character)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even putting it inside backticks or blockquotes doesn't seem to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it matters, the characters involved were from the Japanese title for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somewhere_Street&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Somewhere Street&lt;/a&gt; (I can't enter the characters even in meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand questions and answers should be written in English, I think it should be ok to quote or discuss phrases in other languages (though it isn't vital for the question I'm writing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a ban on Chinese characters &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263724/unable-to-post-chinese-characters-due-to-validation-filter&quot;&gt;because of spam&lt;/a&gt;, but I think there should be an exception for ELU, just like there are for other sites about language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T22:05:09.547" Title="Body cannot contain &quot;(Chinese character)&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7160" CreationDate="2015-09-20T09:13:07.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ban was implemented because of a spate of oriental spam on ELU (and other sites, but ELU was one of those targeted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, Stack Exchange is an English-language network &amp;mdash; with a notable exception for Portuguese &amp;mdash; and as &lt;strong&gt;we're&lt;/strong&gt; discussing English here, there should be no need for characters from other languages. Especially non-Latin characters which don't exist in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there may be a case for quoting a phrase in a non-Latin language, there won't be a high percentage of the readership who could read it, and it's probably not necessary anyway: it would be sufficient in almost all cases to provide a literal translation in the body of the question. As you say yourself, to include the characters themselves not usually vital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; vital, I suggest including an image with a worthwhile description both in the image tag and in plain text, together with a transliteration. That provides the most accessible way of including banned characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: Japanese.SE is obviously a case out on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T22:05:09.547" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T22:05:09.547" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3750" CreationDate="2015-09-21T04:43:08.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is now September 2015 and we still don’t have this capability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T04:43:08.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-09-22T11:21:01.787" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/13TuW.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Come visit English Language Learners!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T11:21:01.787" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-22T11:21:01.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3750" CreationDate="2015-09-22T12:15:04.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is now September 2015 (plus one day from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7162&quot;&gt;the last count&lt;/a&gt;) and we do have this capability, courtesy of The Powers Who Do That Sort Of Thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use with care!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there will be statistics gathered and pored over to see how many questions migrated from here are closed on ELL. Learners' questions should be migrated; but a &lt;strong&gt;poor&lt;/strong&gt; question is a poor question. Try and edit it into shape first. There may be some more concrete guidelines forthcoming, depending on how things go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter if there is already a duplicate on ELL, because there will be an additional pointer to it with the migration, and there may even be the stub left on ELU to help, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MqGd0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MqGd0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sample Migration dialog&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Image via &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/users/1407/jimsug&quot;&gt;jimsug&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T12:29:15.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7167" CreationDate="2015-09-22T15:35:48.930" Score="13" ViewCount="658" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of Sept 22, 11:24am UTC-4, the review queue is at 306:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PRwf8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PRwf8.png&quot; alt=&quot;review queue at 306&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems outrageous. 209 close items, 37 first posts, a smattering of others (which don't add to near 306)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just a lot of work. Going through the Low Quality queue tends to reduce the total one-to-one (nice!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going through the Close Votes queue is more like 6 to 1 (20 reviewed, only 3 or 4 removed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is 306 bad? (I think so)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are there so many close suggestions? That is how do they get on the queue? By a single close vote by someone?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The others are pretty algorithmic right? First post easy, low quality - some measure of length and other metrics. But does everybody get the same queue? (e.g. if I complete the first post queue, does everybody else's queue go down? (5 votes are needed to close, what about the other queues?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To get them off the close queue, we need more people reviewing. How do we do that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Wow...thanks everyone for paying attention to this...as of a week later from posting, we're down to ~70. Keep going!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2 an hour later:&lt;/strong&gt; Wow...WTH. Did I say something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x7YJS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x7YJS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Many late answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this seems like a crazy jump. Someone must be doing something special. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2015-09-29T20:03:38.483" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T04:50:37.183" Title="WTH is up with the 'beyond 300' review queue?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|review-queues|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-09-22T16:29:33.113" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things get in the CVRQ by having a close vote cast or a close flag cast. They stay there until they get enough Leave Opens or Closes, or are closed, or expire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was 322 when I last looked at it.  We average two days to close things here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Over Closed Asked Percent&#xA; 1d     12     65 18.46 % &#xA; 2d     51    129 39.52 %&#xA; 7d    174    435 40.00 %&#xA;14d    363    915 39.67 %&#xA;30d    769   2036 37.77 %&#xA;90d   2455   6284 39.07 %&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility would be to ask the CMs to raise our close-vote count from 24 to 50 the way it is on the bigger sites. We might also need to change our review-queue max from 20 to 40 for that queue.  (I have a few reservations about us actually doing that, but not sufficiently well thought out to put into coherent words quite yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise the close vote queue will just keep growing. At 1,500% of any one person’s quotidian quota of close votes, it is really really hard to keep up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T13:49:01.313" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T13:49:01.313" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-22T17:25:17.773" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/68736/change-i-must-go-and-look-for-my-brothers-from-active-voice-to-passive-voice&quot;&gt;Change “I must go and look for my brothers.” from active voice to passive voice&lt;/a&gt; was migrated to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know &lt;em&gt;learners&lt;/em&gt; are more likely than native speakers to ask questions involving switching a statement from active to passive voice, and there would certainly be a strong case for migrating &quot;trivial&quot; questions in this general area (assuming ELU doesn't already have a suitable earlier question that would justify &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; closevotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to me the specific example above isn't at all trivial - it's downright &lt;em&gt;awkward&lt;/em&gt;, and imho it deserves the kind of detailed analysis ELU should be more geared up to provide. To my mind, a suitable response on ELL would simply be &lt;em&gt;This sentence wouldn't normally use passive voice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so it's clear what Up/Downvotes for this meta question should mean, I think the question should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have been migrated. So upvote if you agree, and downvote if you think migration was the right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T18:04:36.070" Title="Why was this question migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7168" CreationDate="2015-09-22T18:04:36.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I migrated the question because it seems to be very basic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I could tell, the question required no deep insight into English, just a lesson in how to turn an active voice sentence into a passive one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am wrong we can ask for it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T18:04:36.070" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-22T18:59:39.267" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/275268/80007&quot;&gt;An edited question in ELU&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yj8ip.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31541/14341&quot;&gt;An edited question in Academia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Azxvt.png&quot; alt=&quot;image description&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.463" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T18:59:39.267" Title="Misalign between OP's avatar and editor's avatar" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-23T09:36:19.753" Score="14" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;The  following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/275233/when-and-why-did-women-become-curvy&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt;  has  attracted some very unpleasant (and unfair to my judgement) comments regarding the issue it is about ('curvy' referring to women) and  the Curvy Convention link whose content was said to be  more appropriate for &lt;em&gt;one of those sites&lt;/em&gt; rather than ELU. To avoid futher comments and asking myself if I had in any possible way offended anybody's sensibility, I decided to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like  to understand from  a wider audience of users if the subject treated may be offensive or appear obscene  to anyone. Is the question poorly  framed as to induce any 'ambiguous' consideration? Should similar subjects (that touch on sex or sensuality)  be avoided in this site?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When and why did women become &quot;curvy&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A term that has been recently spreading also outside the English speaking world, especially, but not only, in the field of fashion is curvy. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://curvyconvention.co.uk/models-on-the-catwalk-2015/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Curvy Convention 2015, Models on the Catwalk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curvy is an adjective that means 'full of curves' whose usage dates back to the beginning of the 20th century (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=curvy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1902&lt;/a&gt;), according to Etymonline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the century, apparently around the 60's (see Ngram) the term started to be used to refer to women with the meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(informal) of a woman’s figure, shapely and voluptuous. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/it/definizione/inglese/curvy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When was the term first introduced and in what context (Hollywood movies, TV shows , politics)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it initially used as a more 'neutral' and 'politically correct' alternative to terms like 'voluptuous' or to more common but less nice terms like 'fatty' for instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T21:02:03.977" Title="Can ELU deal with a question like this?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-23T23:43:10.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's already a migration path: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with_good_intentions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The road to ELL is paved with good intentions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128097" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T23:43:10.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-24T04:59:03.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator on ELL, I'm going to try and explain why I think this is a Well Intentioned but Very Bad Idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that the request for an ELU-&gt;ELL migration path has come up in the past, an  gotten support on your end, I'm not sure it's the best for our (or either) community. Our users have already pretty summarily rejected the reverse ELL-&gt;ELU path. Personally I think the same logic applies to paths in both directions... And I am pretty much positive that we would have a repeat of SO-&gt;Programmers if an ELU-&gt;ELL path opened up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the mods have time to handle questions ELU mods migrate to ELL, and ELL-&gt;ELU migrations? Absolutely. Do we have time to reject all the questions that shouldn't be migrated that people will then migrate, and have our users waste time answering them? No. Another litmus test: I'd love to ask the ELU mods how many flags they get for migration to ELL that are not valid flags. And that's knowing it'll have to be mod-approved...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while I understand the spirit behind the request, I think it would just end up with frustration on all sides and more work for both mod teams. The questions you want to have migrated to ELL are already being migrated by the mod team. The ones you don't, still won't. I don't think the need is there, I think it would be abused, and I don't believe our community would go for it. But you're welcome to open a meta post over on ELL and ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22119" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T04:59:03.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-09-24T05:06:49.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site gets lots of new users who post questions which aren't up to scratch. I would guess that a long term average of 40% closed is on the high end across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps something that could be considered would be a site-specific lowering of the number of votes required to close questions. If questions needed only 3-4 close votes the queue would be processed considerably quicker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T05:06:49.387" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-09-24T07:06:33.917" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is perhaps an inevitable affliction of mature Stack Exchange sites.  The closure review queue grows due to a confluence of several factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found that empirically, user reputation scores follow a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Power-law_probability_distributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;power law distribution&lt;/a&gt;, or something close to it.  Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/177349/reputation-histogram#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;histogram&lt;/a&gt;; the same histogram &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/206518/reputation-histogram-log-log-scale#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;plotted on a log-log scale&lt;/a&gt; looks roughly linear.  This means that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Counterintuitively, the median reputation of the entire population &lt;em&gt;decreases&lt;/em&gt;, even though the reputation score of each individual member tends to increase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The growth in the number of new users exceeds the growth of the number of users who have earned 3000 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the database grows, the probability of asking a good question that isn't a duplicate decreases.  (The site still gets a reasonable number of good questions, since the increase in volume can mask the problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a brief while after earning the vote-to-close privilege, it feels nice to wield the power to close off-topic questions.  However, the novelty soon wears off, especially when the queue has grown so large that reviewing is more a demoralizing chore than a privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be done?  Some ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lower the eligibility requirement below 3000 points to keep up with the falling population distribution of scores.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lower the threshold for closure to some number below 5 questions.  It would be interesting to find out what value is added by requiring a 4th or 5th vote — how many questions get 4 close votes but never get the 5th vote?  I don't believe that it's possible to extract that information from Stack Exchange Data Explorer, so we would need to ask staff for the statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16310" LastEditorUserId="16310" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T18:22:48.083" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T18:22:48.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7198" CreationDate="2015-09-25T03:31:05.800" Score="12" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect-tense&lt;/a&gt; alongside &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/past-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;past-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;past-perfect&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future-perfect&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simple-past&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simple-past&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simple-past&lt;/a&gt;. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect&lt;/a&gt; does exist as a redirect. I think it would be better to make it the main tag, which would be more consistent. Some might also consider it more technically accurate, since the present perfect is generally described as a combination of tense and aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The answer to the following meta post suggests using the word &quot;tense&quot; in all of these tags, but the post is quite old and it looks like that suggestion was never implemented: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224/which-should-the-tags-for-tenses-be?rq=1&quot;&gt;Which should the tags for tenses be?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;In addition, the question talks about &quot;past-tense and future-tense,&quot; which it does seem might have some ambiguity as single words; but &quot;present-perfect&quot; seems completely unambiguous to me as it is. The answer there even calls it a &quot;problem&quot; that &quot;tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect-tense&lt;/a&gt; are rather long.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I have now posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7179/77227&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; there, so please upvote it if you agree with me and disagree with the older answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit Oct 1, 2015.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;There hasn't been as much community discussion as I would like, either below this question or below the linked question. However, there have been 11 upvotes, and there was only one downvote, and the post has been up for nearly a week. This indicates to me that the community is in favor of making this change, so I'm going to try to actually get it done now. According to this question on Meta SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87437/how-to-rename-a-tag/197731#197731&quot;&gt;How to rename a tag?&lt;/a&gt;, a moderator should be able to do this, although I'm not sure if the issue is complicated by the fact that the two tags are already marked as synonyms of each other. I'll ask a moderator in chat and see what happens—if more community action is needed (for example, voting on tag synonyms) I'll post about it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T07:10:37.567" Title="Change the tag &quot;present-perfect-tense&quot; to &quot;present-perfect&quot; by itself" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2015-09-25T23:52:32.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's how I think these tags should be named. I've used &lt;strong&gt;bold text&lt;/strong&gt; to mark the changes that would have to be made from the current situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags for just the tenses use the word &quot;tense&quot; at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/past-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;past-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;past-tense&lt;/a&gt;(currently has the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/past&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;past&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;past&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-tense&lt;/a&gt;(currently has the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future-tense&lt;/a&gt;(currently has the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags for just the aspects use the word &quot;aspect&quot; at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect-aspect&lt;/a&gt;(currently coëxists with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;which should be made a synonym&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/progressive-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;progressive-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;progressive-aspect&lt;/a&gt;(currently coëxists with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/progressive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;progressive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;progressive&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;which should be made a synonym&lt;/strong&gt;), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/continuous&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;continuous&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;continuous&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;which should also be made a synonym&lt;/strong&gt;, although some things in it are mis-tagged and refer to continuous nouns).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above two conventions make it less likely for confused taggers to mark their question about “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/167518/revisions&quot;&gt;How perfect is that?&lt;/a&gt;” or &quot;What's a synonym for &quot;birthday present&quot; with an incorrect tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But tags for tense-aspect combinations do not use the word &quot;tense&quot; or &quot;aspect&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/past-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;past-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;past-perfect&lt;/a&gt;(currently has the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pluperfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pluperfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pluperfect&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect&lt;/a&gt; &lt;s&gt;(currently just a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect-tense&lt;/a&gt;; this should be reversed)&lt;/s&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;: this has now been reversed]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future-perfect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-progressive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-progressive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-progressive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These terms are already unambiguous, and also they refer not just to tenses or aspects, but combinations of these categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, other multi-word tags referring to verb tense forms, or structures referring to time, do not use &quot;tense&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simple-past&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simple-past&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simple-past&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future-in-past&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future-in-past&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future-in-past&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/will-be-going&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;will-be-going&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;will-be-going&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/used-to&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;used-to&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;used-to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote up on this answer if you agree with me, vote down if you disagree (and if there's an alternate proposal that you would support that's not already on this page, I'd appreciate it if you wrote an answer that explains what it is).  Hopefully this will make the community's opinions clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T09:22:53.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-27T10:37:19.430" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of 22 September 2015, we do have this capability, courtesy of The Powers Who Do That Sort Of Thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As WendiKidd has implied &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7174&quot;&gt;in her answer&lt;/a&gt;, there are risks and potential difficulties. &lt;strong&gt;Use with care!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there will be statistics gathered and pored over to see how many questions migrated from here are closed on ELL. Learners' questions should be migrated; but a &lt;strong&gt;poor&lt;/strong&gt; question is a poor question. Try and edit it into shape first. There may be some more concrete guidelines forthcoming, depending on how things go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter if there is already a duplicate on ELL, because there will be an additional pointer to it with the migration, and there may even be the stub left on ELU to help, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MqGd0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MqGd0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sample Migration dialog&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Image via &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/users/1407/jimsug&quot;&gt;jimsug&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T10:37:19.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7209" CreationDate="2015-09-28T09:38:34.707" Score="5" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/275268/80007&quot;&gt;What is the name of a small unluxurious restaurant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;42 votes? Nearly 10k views? 20 answers? In only one week? I can't believe it. I even had thought about skipping this question with a thought: &quot;Nah, &lt;em&gt;restaurant&lt;/em&gt; is good enough. Not worth my time to research about it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really have no idea why it is so attractive. Can you explain why? In the scale in which the maximum is the hottest question you have ever seen, how do you score the heat of this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T21:30:25.373" Title="Why is the question about &quot;the name of a small unluxurious restaurant&quot; so attractive?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-09-28T09:50:34.530" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It made the &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot; list which is shown on the right of many Stack Exchange pages. It's the successor to the &quot;supercollider&quot; which used to appear in the page header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will usually artificially inflate a question's popularity and voting. (But that question also includes pictures, which are always popular and will guarantee upvotes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's a bit of a pain, because we get all sorts of contributions on such questions from people who don't really know English, let alone what's being asked about. Most of the featured questions end up being protected to save them from low-rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The algorithm which selects which Network questions are &quot;hot&quot; is explained on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/60756/how-do-the-arbitrary-hotness-points-work-on-the-new-stack-exchange-home-page&quot;&gt;Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T10:13:51.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7185" CreationDate="2015-09-29T23:25:02.677" Score="11" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the review queue was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7166/58761&quot;&gt;recently brought up by Mitch&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can't be right, can it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L3iM7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L3iM7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close-vote queue was dramatically reduced (at which point Mitch commented that we were doing a good job). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Mitch jinx the site? If not, can someone explain what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I don't really think @Mitch did it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T08:03:54.847" Title="Is this @Mitch's fault?" Tags="|discussion|review-queues|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7171" CreationDate="2015-09-29T23:47:00.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an older woman. I was a bra-burning, dyed-in-the-wool, Betty-Freidan/Gloria-Steinem-quoting feminist applying to medical school when my interviewers would ask outright, &quot;Why should we let you in (yes, using those words) when you're probably going to take time off to raise a family? A man will practice 20 years longer than you will.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that to say that if something about women might be offensive, I'd snap like the lash of a whip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gotta say, I can't find any hint of blood boiling within me at your question. To me, that question is about as insulting to women as is commenting on the weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T23:47:00.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2015-09-30T00:30:52.673" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;After clicking around a bit through Andrew's link, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213020/late-late-answer/222413#222413&quot;&gt;this explanation&lt;/a&gt; of how the Late Answers Review queue works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the late answers queue works is by checking two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the answer posted at least 30 days after the question was asked?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the answer posted by a user who has 10 or less reputation (disregarding suspension)  &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[but see below]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both of these are true, it is entered into the review queue until it eventually gets reviewed. In most cases, this will catch things as they come in and so you will only see new posts, so we don't spend any resources checking time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on rare occasion, someone will actually drop below 10 reputation, while having some past answer that does qualify. That's what happened in your example - the user received a dunk in reputation from 15 down to 5 on December 21st, 2013, and so this ancient post of theirs that has not previously been reviewed, is now put into review that same day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier today, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/266696/can-we-raise-the-bar-for-reputation-for-late-answers-to-enter-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;someone's request on Meta StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;, the reputation limit was changed from 10 to 50, causing thousands of answers on sites all across the network to suddenly qualify for the review process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T00:30:52.673" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2015-09-30T06:15:18.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was hoping that &lt;del&gt;the powers above&lt;/del&gt; The Powers That Be could reverse the settings, but apparently they cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please roll back this change immediately. We have now a 3.2k entries long review queue on ServerFault. That's total crap. –  Sven 10 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reverting won't help, I'm afraid. The damage has been done. I have gone over to pitch in on Server Fault as an act of penitence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/266696/can-we-raise-the-bar-for-reputation-for-late-answers-to-enter-the-review-queue#comment866418_267080&quot;&gt;Jon Ericson♦ 10 hours ago&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's any comfort, the queue on EL&amp;amp;U is shrinking.... (and ServerFault are having a much worse time than we are)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MwjvB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MwjvB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE 2nd Oct 2015&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry Hellion....&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tSjri.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tSjri.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T13:37:40.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-09-30T16:56:19.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gold Tag Badge holders and Mods can insta-close things.  If this is still a problem, I'd recommend figuring out if there's any specific tags that have a disproportionate volume of close votes and specifically making a call-out to gold-tag-holders there to help with question closure.  Possibly you have a category of questions you are currently allowing that are too much work for the stack to maintain and they should really be made off-topic entirely.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, maybe you just need to add an extra mod to the mod team, given how big your site has grown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113307" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T16:56:19.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7171" CreationDate="2015-10-01T13:04:58.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good heavens, I had to reread the question twice as I found it bewildering.  I find it hard to imagine that anyone might find the question offensive.  I'm a middle aged programmer, but I like to think I'm pretty sensitive to women's issues -- at least my wife would say that I am.  I frequently have to chastise my blatantly sexist colleagues, so I'd even say I care about such things.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note, I found Mazura's tile suggestion a real improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114425" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T13:04:58.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7199" CreationDate="2015-10-02T01:49:44.953" Score="21" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225006/262486&quot;&gt;...crap&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/277360/58761&quot;&gt;Which is the subject (and what's the other thing called)?&lt;/a&gt; is a crappy question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sister can drive the car today&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is the subject: sister or car? Also, what is the other thing called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be  marginally interesting because of the &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, but it shows absolutely no research. &amp;quot;The other thing?&amp;quot; There is more than one &amp;quot;other thing.&amp;quot; That makes it &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL is not a garbage can. There is a close reason on ELL that states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question should include more details than have been provided here. Please edit to add the research you have done in your efforts to answer the question, or provide more context. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/439/3457&quot;&gt;Details, Please.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listed among the details are &lt;em&gt;Explain why you are confused&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Show your research&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above question does neither. There have been other questions I've voted to close for the 'show your research' reason which I've seen others have voted to close in order to migrate to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please treat ELL with the same respect that ELU should be accorded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Granted I suffer from &lt;em&gt;native English-speaker guilt&lt;/em&gt;, but every time I vote to migrate, I go over to ELL and answer a reasonable but unanswered question. That's how I deal with (my) karma. Maybe the people migrating crappy questions should think about doing the same; it might make them think twice.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/strong&gt; I didn't know this question had such a nice, helpful answer, which is great when that happens. However, it is still a crappy question. What I have learned since then is that there has been some discussion on ELL about migrating crap, so maybe if the mods can let us know what they want (there is some disagreement), I can get down from this soap box. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I'm old, and my balance isn't so good.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T15:24:39.630" Title="Please don't migrate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-10-02T04:50:37.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...as of a week later from posting, we're down to ~70. Keep going!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wow...WTH. Did I say something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;831 Late Answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange implemented a change to the way they evaluate late answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/266696/can-we-raise-the-bar-for-reputation-for-late-answers-to-enter-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;Can we raise the bar for reputation for late answers to bypass the review queue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TL;DR: As of today (September 29, 2015) the maximum reputation for having an author's late answer enqueued has been raised from 10 to 50.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be roughly when you noticed the jump. I think it is affecting all sites - suddenly you get heaps of entries that need &quot;reviewing&quot; - some months old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127694" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T04:50:37.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7195" CreationDate="2015-10-02T05:48:55.617" Score="17" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked a question which was slightly different from what I intended to ask in the first place. Now there are 4-5 valid answers. What should I do now? Re-ask the question, or edit my question to what I intended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real reason I'm asking this is that I think editing the question would be disrespectful to the people who answered my original question, because their answers are valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140931" LastEditorUserId="140931" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T19:30:22.877" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T19:30:22.877" Title="Asked a question which is slightly different than I intended with valid answers. Re-ask or edit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2015-10-02T06:29:57.890" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where there are a number of valid answers, you are right that to change the question and invalidate them would not be a good thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it's not a good thing when there are &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answers, but at least when there is only one it's fairly easy to add a comment apologising and noting that the question has changed. Hopefully that will stave off any downvotes the answer might attract because it doesn't answer the question which later visitors see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing to do is to ask a new question in which you can link to your original. You may even be able to ask in such a way as to value the existing answers. &quot;This was useful because it showed X. However, what I actually wanted to know was Y, and the answers don't cover that as I can't apply X because of Z,&quot; or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; thing to do is to ask the right question in the first place. Take time to write it; make sure that there is no ambiguity at all. Do some research yourself, including looking for generalised keywords here which may be related to your query: and present your research in the question. You may find the answer to your query [in which case, upvote the post(s) as they've been useful] or you may be able to build on someone else's post and you can link to it for background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T06:29:57.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2015-10-02T08:37:11.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read and up-voted some of the excellent answers already here, I think there's another point that can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whited sepulchres. This is what they are called in that noted work of fiction &quot; The Bible&quot;, King James' Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forget whether the remark is offensive. Forget whether it is funny. What we should be asking is, is it &lt;em&gt;relevant&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the fictional or non-fictional nature of the Bible affect the validity of the phrase, 'whited sepulchres' as an answer?  Clearly it might affect the validity of &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; answers but does it affect this one?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that in this specific case it doesn't.  Whether the Bible is true or not makes no difference to the usefulness of the the phrase 'whited sepulchres' as an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I believe the remark was simply irrelevant and should have been challenged on that basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a possible comment could have been, &lt;em&gt;Please can you explain how the fictional or non-fictional nature of the Bible affects the validity of the phrase 'whited sepulchre' as an answer?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author had given a convincing answer explaining how, in general, the fictional nature of a work affects the usefulness or correctness of the language used within it and how it affects this point in particular, then I would have accepted it. If not then I would have down-voted and explained why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: we should judge an answer, and any comments within it, by the normal standards of the site. Is the answer cogent, well-supported and well-thought out? Do the comments support the correctness of the answer or are they  (as Django Reinhardt puts it in his answer here) simply noise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T08:37:11.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-10-02T08:47:40.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because single word requests are fun, and they're questions that beginners can understand. They also allow you to discuss concepts you know about but haven't talked about before because there isn't a word for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T08:47:40.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7177" CreationDate="2015-10-02T09:47:27.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been a mapping from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-perfect-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-perfect-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-perfect-tense&lt;/a&gt; anyway, so I just went and swapped it. We can always swap it back should the need arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T09:47:27.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7191" CreationDate="2015-10-02T09:47:40.073" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There has been some discussion on ELL about migrating crap, so maybe if the mods can let us know what they want (there is some disagreement)...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yup, there has been some disagreement. That makes sense to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One person sees this question and thinks, &quot;This is just ‘crap’ with no research.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another sees this question, and thinks, &quot;Here is a person who is confused about subjects and objects,&quot; and proceeds to write a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/69703/which-is-the-subject-and-whats-the-other-thing-called/69705#69705&quot;&gt;helpful answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third person sees the question and thinks, &quot;This looks more like a learner's question than a serious etymologist question,&quot; and makes a move to migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fourth person sees this question and its answers, and thinks, &quot;This would be more helpful to future visitors if we added the &lt;code&gt;object&lt;/code&gt; tag,&quot; and therefore makes an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/69703/revisions&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which person was right? I think all four have defensible points – although perhaps not all responses are equally constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the Stack Exchange has in its “library of detailed answers” a pretty good summary about how to differentiate between subjects and objects. That answer is on the English Learner's Exchange, which is probably where it belongs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most of the karma I see here is on the positive side&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T09:47:40.073" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-02T10:26:09.167" Score="2" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a programmer but seeking emigration in an English speaking country, which requires IELTS band of 7 in each module.Can I use this forum for IELTS? If not please suggest me other forum similar to stackoverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140818" OwnerDisplayName="Programmer Khan" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T07:15:32.013" Title="Does this stackoverflow forum answer questions related to IELTS?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2017-07-07T19:44:14.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7208" CreationDate="2015-10-02T22:36:06.410" Score="8" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt;(0 followers, 82 questions) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect-aspect&lt;/a&gt; (0 followers, 54 questions) should be merged in some way. I'm not sure what it should be named; on the one hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/167518/revisions&quot;&gt;&quot;perfect&quot; is ambiguous as a tag name&lt;/a&gt;, but on the other hand, there are differing views on whether the English perfect is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/sula2jb.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;aspect&quot; or a &quot;relative tense.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this post from tchrist (&lt;em&gt;way back in Jan 2014!&lt;/em&gt;): &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4442/the-great-elu-tag-clean-up-proposal-of-2014&quot;&gt;The Great ELU Tag Clean-up Proposal of 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit Oct 16, 2015&lt;/strong&gt;: As has been previously discussed on the overall &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/127459/does-the-tag-synonym-suggestion-system-work/&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange meta site&lt;/a&gt;, the procedure for the community to process tag synonyms is pretty broken for small tags. For this reason, &lt;strong&gt;I'd like to repeat my previous request for a moderator to take action and make some of these synonyms.&lt;/strong&gt; This post received 3 upvotes and 0 downvotes; tchrist's post that I linked has 21 upvotes and 0 downvotes. I've left this post up for a while, and nobody has objected to any of these proposed synonyms. Besides this edit, I'm also going to try to contact a moderator in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Former suggestions that have now been implemented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive&lt;/a&gt;(0 followers, 58 questions) should be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt; (2 followers, 192 questions)&lt;/s&gt;. Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/progressive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;progressive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;progressive&lt;/a&gt;(0 followers, 14 questions) should be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/progressive-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;progressive-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;progressive-aspect&lt;/a&gt; (0 followers, 103 questions)&lt;/s&gt;. Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subject-verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subject-verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subject-verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt; (1 follower, 55 questions) should be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt;(2 followers, 403 questions). Basically all verb agreement in English is with the subject (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7201/obvious-tag-synonyms-that-i-dont-have-enough-tag-rep-to-suggest#comment28431_7201&quot;&gt;Araucaria&lt;/a&gt; pointed out one exception, proximity concord, that seems pretty marginal to me), so these tags have a huge amount of overlap. Everything in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subject-verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subject-verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subject-verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt; should safely fall under the category of &quot;verb-agreement&quot; as a whole.&lt;/s&gt; Completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:27:42.043" Title="Obvious tag synonyms that should be merged in some way" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-05T02:52:19.360" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any value in keeping the following three questions distinct. However, there are some valuable answers to each of them (but not too many answers). So, I think all of the answers should be merged under the most general question, with the question possibly edited to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/269040/the-pronunciation-rules-of-words-which-begin-com-col-cor-or-con?lq=1&quot;&gt;The pronunciation rules of words which begin &amp;#39;Com-, Col-, Cor-&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;Con-&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/227247/the-pronunciation-of-words-which-begins-con-and-com?rq=1&quot;&gt;The pronunciation of words which begins &amp;#39;con&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;com&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208182/pronunciation-of-con-words?lq=1&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of &amp;#39;Con&amp;#39; words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T09:33:06.217" Title="Three duplicates that I think should be merged (pronunciation of &quot;coN-&quot; words)" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T22:39:38.347" Score="13" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;The majority of the questions asked on this site come from new or junior users for obvious reasons but, despite some notable exceptions, these questions  are  not rarely  put on hold for not meeting the general requirements. I wonder if a more substantial participation from seniors or more experienced users could actually help the site in this respect, giving  more examples to new users with more articulated questions and keeping the general interest higher with possibly more good questions.  From what I can see senior users tend to be more active on the answers front, and hyper-active on comments at times, so why not make an effort on questions too? I perfectly realise that no user should feel obliged to do anything they don't feel like doing, but could more questions from them actually benefit ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T10:45:18.403" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T01:31:33.963" Title="Could more questions from senior/experienced users benefit ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T23:14:59.423" Score="15" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to make a post about &quot;why my question was closed,&quot; but I'm having a hard time understanding it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/269725/can-the-stress-pattern-of-uroboros-ouroboros-be-explained-by-any-principle-or?lq=1&quot;&gt;uroboros&lt;/a&gt;&quot; asks about two things: descriptive information about the history of that particular word's various pronunciations, and prescriptive advice about the validity of one hypothetical pronunciation that I give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/269732/can-penult-stress-for-stigmata-and-similar-words-be-explained-or-justified-by&quot;&gt;stigmata&lt;/a&gt;&quot; asks for descriptive information about the history of that particular word's various pronunciations. The one answer that exists so far gives an explanation in terms of inflectional endings, which is completely inapplicable to the case of &quot;uroboros.&quot; So &quot;This question already has an answer here&quot; seems to be false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, if they're duplicates, I should be able to edit the question about &quot;stigmata&quot; to make it about both &quot;stigmata&quot; and &quot;uroboros&quot;. In fact, though, that would be a different question, and it would invalidate the current answer. So I can't do this in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how the first can be a duplicate of the second: the pronunciation history of one word is not identical to that of another. So far, no answer has been posted that provides a general explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that two people voted to close the question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;because it is better suited for SE linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, this doesn't explain how my question is off-topic for this particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I just decided to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14569/irregular-penultimate-stress-in-english-words-from-classical-sources&quot;&gt;re-post on Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;. But I'd like to know if similar questions about other words would be welcomed here in the future, or if they would be inappropriate or considered to all be duplicates of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T02:07:48.547" Title="Why is my question about the stress of &quot;uroboros&quot; a duplicate of the one about the stress of &quot;stigmata&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7201" CreationDate="2015-10-08T20:15:08.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please give your approval for the following synonyms, thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/progressive-aspect/synonyms&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;progressive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; should be the synonym of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/progressive-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;progressive-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;progressive-aspect&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/passive-voice/synonyms&quot;&gt;passive&lt;/a&gt; should be the synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T21:34:25.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-10-09T21:30:25.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On English and ELL.SE, questions like the following are popular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A simple question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No single answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many potential answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Colloquial answers, or regionally specific ones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The many potential answers come easily to mind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These &lt;strong&gt;thesaurus&lt;/strong&gt; questions, as I call them, tend to garner interest simply because they are very accessible: everyone knows an answer, often one which has not previously been posted, and their contribution is likely valid. As such they gain a lot of views (&quot;Oh, I know this!&quot;) and answers, therefore votes etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38389" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T21:30:25.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-11T20:07:58.973" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not used to getting a great deal of downvoting on my answers but I have negative 3 on this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/279300/please-help-me-understand-humbler-wall/279303#279303&quot;&gt;Please help me understand “humbler wall”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a problem. People disagree and they are entitled to. What surprised me is that the answer seems to be disappearing visually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, does this answer appear 'faded' to everyone who sees it? When does this kick in -- does it happen at 3 downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I am happy with my answer and don't intend to withdraw it, what consequences (apart from semi-invisibility) are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it get progressively more insubstantial as it becomes less popular? Does something dire happen when I reach, say, -10?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I say, I'm not complaining about downvotes, I'm just interested in the process. What happens next if there are more downvotes and what will the ultimate consequences be. Will the answer disappear altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm hoping someone knows because otherwise my curiosity is likely to get the better of me and I'm going to have to give a truly preposterous answer to some question just to see how unpopular I can make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-10-11T20:13:27.183" Title="Do answers get blanked if they receive down votes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-12T19:48:10.167" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alright, I wonder whether a question like the following would be deemed on-topic. I am posting below the question as it would appear on the actual site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The opening credits for episodes of TV series &quot;Masters of Sex&quot;&#xA;  pictures what is apparently supposed to be sexual innuendo. The&#xA;  imagery in sequence contains (where unsure I added a question mark):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a sunflower blossoming in time lapse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a cock (the animal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a railway tunnel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the Washington Memorial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a cat being pet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a knife buttering a muffin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a blouse being opened (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a lady biting into an apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a beaver munching on a twig&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a coin being inserted into a slot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;some kind of cream/balm being pushed out of a tube (container) and wiped off with a finger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a mushroom (fungus) growing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a torero tricking a bull with a red cloth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a train driving into a railway tunnel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a Venus flytrap entrapping a fly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;cream being applied to a spatula (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;bread rolls inflating in an oven (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a key inserted into a lock&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a cucumber being washed under running water&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a billiard ball being sunk into a pocket&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;pinball machine kicking a ball&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;male&quot; bunny figurine behind &quot;female&quot; bunny figurine &quot;humping&quot; (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a switch labeled &quot;Vibrate&quot; being switched on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a patch being applied to an arm (?) to fixate some electrode (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a thermometer going beyond safe limits (according to a label)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a blinking advert with the label &quot;BINGO&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a wine bottle being uncorked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a person dropping a gown (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a champagne bottle being popped open and some foam escaping&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;some wires being dragged across a belly (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a lie detector or cardiogram or similar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a balloon containing confetti being popped&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a bed sheet clenched by a female and a male hand respectively&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a geyser going off&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a rocket being launched&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a firework igniting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a volcano erupting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;two feet caressing each other then toes &quot;clenching&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a firework (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a neck area&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a blossom opening in time lapse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some are obvious to me, e.g. the phallic symbols. However, even those&#xA;  and certainly the others probably require knowledge about slang use for&#xA;  certain words (e.g. I think at some point I heard &lt;em&gt;beaver&lt;/em&gt; being used&#xA;  for the vagina or that area).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I presume, it takes some native speaker of English&#xA;  living in a particular culture given the origin of the series&#xA;  (probably US-American?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would someone please be so kind as to point out the proverbial/slang&#xA;  sayings attached to the imagery?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yeah, I am serious about this question. This is not meant as a practical joke but genuine interest in the proverbial sayings or slang words that are behind the imagery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been to the US and other parts of the world where English is a first language. However, since dictionaries rarely ever list these words (possible exception the Urban Dictionary - which has no reverse search, though) and there is a sometimes eerie sense of political correctness at the office, it's hard to learn these things. I was luckier with Russian (which is neither my native language) in the past (more &quot;informal&quot; encounters than formal ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5362" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T19:48:10.167" Title="Would the following question be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-13T07:53:45.383" Score="-2" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never really liked the pecking order that one finds on some forum sites, one famous one in particular. (It rhymes with &quot;said it&quot;.) While I've found EL&amp;amp;U to be relatively civil, there is an aspect of meta-discussion and disapproval that I still see fairly often, along the lines of: &quot;Is this forum really the best place for this question?&quot; &quot;I'm voting to lock this thread.&quot; &quot;You could only come up with one example? Please come back when you can put in some real effort.&quot; First of all, there is the problem of tone. These are simply not nice ways to talk to people. When you consider that many users here do not use English as their first language, it's really quite presumptuous to blast them. After all, we are trying to be educators. No one here is anyone else's boss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bigger point, however, that has to do with the logic and working principle of forums like this one. Certainly, a forum can specify certain ground rules about format and content. Don't post spam, please stay on topic, etc. But this is, after all, a totally public outlet. (I don't need to remind users here about the meaning of the word forum.) As such, we should really expect some amount of disorder: some repetition of questions or parts of questions; some half-baked thinking; some rowdy discussion or argument. However, the online culture for these things seems to have diverged from that. Frequent users or mods can seem to have a mama-bear attitude, one that I find distasteful and a little weird. It can seem like these protective users expect the forum ledger to resemble a textbook FAQ or a committee's official minutes, rather than a somewhat messy, peer-to-peer exchange. (Consider the associations of that word too, as in the name of this website.) And, it isn't just unreasonable; it quickly devolves into waste and pettiness. To go back and forth, among several users, deciding whether a topic is worthy of our consideration can quickly approach bureaucratic farce. If it's really that egregious, someone with the authority should simply lock the thing, perhaps providing an explanation, and be done with it. Parading one's disapproval is nothing more than childish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I do understand some of the motivating desires of many of these type-A users. If this is going to be a resource, it might as well look a little clean, and polished, and avoid redundancy and be perfectly on-topic, etc. My confusion is why you would ever expect a public forum to be that kind of document. And so, I just want to offer a suggestion-- or at least, see if anyone has an idea why this &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; the way things are done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What seems to me most reasonable, would be to take the existing EL&amp;amp;U forum, use mods or veteran users or whatever, and then create a higher-order, curated stack. This would include the best questions and answers from the whole history of these records. It could be catalogued, alphabetized, never redundant and nicely cross-referenced. It would satisfy the housekeeping urges of many of the users here, while also leaving the main page to breathe a bit and just be what it is: an exchange or a forum. To my mind, there's a ridiculous expectation built into forums like these: because someone has already asked about who vs. whom, or participle vs. gerund, you're not supposed to ask anymore. People have been asking questions like these for hundreds of years, but we don't expect students in school to have read all the literature before raising their hands in class. Teachers of language, whether at the grade school or university level, are asked about who vs. whom many times every year they teach. Only a very bad teacher would get impatient about that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111352" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T01:26:33.420" Title="Forum tone, reasonableness, and the possibility of a curated stack" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7213" CreationDate="2015-10-13T11:01:37.467" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you can't please all of the people all of the time. That's not meant to be particularly dismissive or snarky; it's just a fact. Some people like their coffee black, some with cream, some with sugar, and some don't like coffee at all. It doesn't matter if it's free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forums or question and answer sites are no different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to understand why Stack Exchange sites are structured the way they are, and why they are an imperfect fit with your expectations, it might help if you went &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ#t=1m12s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;straight to the horse's mouth&lt;/a&gt;. This is an enlightening video on the formation/philosophy of Stack Overflow and later Stack Exchange. The vision of the founders of SE (and I'm understating a bit here) was to create a useful place for good questions to get helpful - and whenever possible, &lt;em&gt;expert&lt;/em&gt; - answers to make the internet a better place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model is not discussion based, but a straightforward Question and Answer model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, people have struggled with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/7931/262486&quot;&gt;etiquette&lt;/a&gt; of the site for years (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4629/58761&quot;&gt;myself included&lt;/a&gt;.) I would like the site to be a bit more welcoming. But I'm just one of hundreds of regular users, and even on my best days do not like &quot;gimme deh codez&quot; questions. If you're not a native speaker and don't know much about the language, at least look at English Language Learners.SE first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like the site, you stay. If you really like the site, you stay and try to have a hand in shaping it by contributing, welcoming, commenting, asking questions of a new user that might prompt a better question, do rep-level appropriate decision-making, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I haven't seen much of (though it's not completely absent) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Is this forum really the best place for this question?&quot; &quot;I'm voting to lock this thread.&quot; &quot;You could only come up with one example? Please come back when you can put in some real effort.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to actual comments you found unfriendly would be more helpful. I interpret the first question as &quot;Is there a better SE site for this question (e.g. ELL?)&quot; That can come from a genuine desire to get the user to the best place for their question to be answered. The second is just following the rules set up by each community individually (for example, you would probably &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt; Skeptics or Health. This place is absolutely hand-holding compared with those.) I haven't personally seen the third/fourth comment. I do see (and ask) &quot;What have you found when you researched this question?&quot;, because a question with a bit of research presented will have the approval of most of the members of this site, and will make for a more pleasurable new user experience overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more discussion-type experience,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118582/what-is-an-acceptable-answer/118694#118694&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt; is an informal environment where pretty much anything is allowed and the only moderation done is for spam and offensive content. You can discuss off-topic questions, alternate endings for the Star Wars trilogy or exchange pleasantries.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While what I say next might be the very embodiment of your &quot;mama bear&quot; attitude (I'm not altogether sure what you mean by that), I do feel discouraged when new users come in and want the established site to change to suit their needs or expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people I love are like that. Within three weeks of starting medical school - which he was grateful and ecstatic to have been accepted into - my son was agitating to change the entire first year curriculum because it didn't fit his ideas of what a good medical education should consist of. I admired his youthful enthusiasm, however I spoke from experience when I (frequently) reminded him that medical training in the US changes very slowly. In his third year now, he still agitates for change. But it's more informed and less self-centered now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're new here. You can agitate for change, but likely you're not familiar enough with the site to know what can change and what won't. Stick around, observe, seek to understand (read meta posts). You may come to find you like the model, or you'll be better prepared to fight your battles.But right now, I think you're coming at this a little out of left field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T20:17:56.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-13T11:10:06.470" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a self answer question the date overhangs the decorative box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tLh1a.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tLh1a.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an issue for questions because &quot;asked&quot; is shorter than &quot;answered&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89332" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T11:10:06.470" Title="In a self answer question the date overhangs the box" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7191" CreationDate="2015-10-13T23:03:45.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, this is not remotely ELL.SE. Note that ELL is for &quot;speakers of other languages learning English&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who is learning English as a second language will have some difficulties. But one thing they are almost guaranteed to know (and better than many native speakers) is the technical terms &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; (or should I say, &quot;other thing.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has all the hallmarks of a native speaker who uses grammar intuitively but who has no idea of linguistics or formal understanding of how grammar works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me click on the question.... Oh look, a 100% English sounding username, what a surprise!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the question is basic, The OP is NOT a speaker of another language, and the question is not one that would be asked by a speaker of another language. So this does NOT belong on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT in response to Andrew Leach's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I am clear that this does not belong on ELL, I take no position on whether it belongs here (most, but not all, think it is too basic and under-researched.) In that case, closing and deleting would have been more appropriate. I think there was some good intention in trying to find this question a &quot;home&quot; on ELL. But as I say, learners of English as a second language are actually even more likely to know the terms &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; than native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69422" LastEditorUserId="69422" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T10:44:27.767" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T10:44:27.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2015-10-14T04:26:30.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the more active users in moderation over on ELL, so you can imagine I viewed this proposal with a certain degree of concern, and in fact I &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2673/10820&quot;&gt;voiced caution&lt;/a&gt; on ELL's matching meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, so far, things are going well. It's been about three weeks, and in that time, the 10k (2k) stats that I've been keeping an eye on show that migrations in a rolling 90-day window have gone up steadily from about 90 to about 130, while rejection rate has gone down steadily from 12+% to 7%. That's quite good! (A little surprising, really; that random 3k voters here are that much better than diamonds at not migrating garbage is quite counterintuitive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep up the good work, stay selective, and know that you have our thanks for doing a much better job than we feared, and perhaps even a better job than we hoped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this was originally posted, the situation has not stayed so rosy; at present (Jan 2016), the rejection rate is 13%, and most of that is in the last month or so. Could use some more caution, it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93992" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T00:08:17.433" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T07:37:13.220" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please note that I'm asking about a thread on this meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7213/forum-tone-reasonableness-and-the-possibility-of-a-curated-stack&quot;&gt;Forum tone, reasonableness, and the possibility of a curated stack&lt;/a&gt;), not for general use within ELU. I will be needing more than 600 characters for sure. Do I answer my own question and put it there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T09:23:11.463" Title="How do I write a long response to an answerer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7218" CreationDate="2015-10-14T09:10:34.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't respond, especially if the response is that long. &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More in the way of discussion is inherent in Meta, but a post which is longer than 600 characters should really be crafted into its own entity. A response that long to an answer implies a contrary view; a response that long to a question implies it's really an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer your own question with the answer you think it should have, and let the community vote on the alternatives thus presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T09:23:11.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T09:23:11.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T13:19:56.823" Score="9" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/279738/13804&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;you&amp;#39;re no rainbow-pooping unicorn&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/278329/13804&quot;&gt;What does ‘If she’s a feminist, then I’m a T. Rex’ mean?&lt;/a&gt; have recently been highly up-voted questions with multiple highly up-voted answers, and lively comment discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I have observed, many of the answers fail to address that each is an example of some idiom, and only speak to the meaning of the specific example.  One of them has already been marked as a duplicate, but what happens in the future when someone else asks for the meaning of one of these statements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If X, then I'm the Queen of England.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If X, then I'm a monkey's uncle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If X, then I'm a ham sandwich.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If X, then I'm an ocean liner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or for the other one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're no bowl of cherries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're no bouquet of roses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're no basket of puppies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're no angel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a suggestion myself, but I would like to see some way of addressing questions like this as a class rather than an instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T15:26:19.903" Title="Questions that ask to explain an idiom, using a specific example" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7200" CreationDate="2015-10-19T07:15:32.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the questions related to IELTS are about how to pass the exam, then the &#xA; plain answer is ‘no’. This site does not cater for candidates wishing to &lt;em&gt;prepare&lt;/em&gt; for any one of the dozen English language exams that are currently available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, nowhere on the help centre is this clearly stated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the following topics&lt;/a&gt;. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;Is this right?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the translation tag info for details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asking about exam preparation is covered by “How to improve my English”, but perhaps that could also include a side comment, similar to;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e.g. asking for advice about English language exams.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T07:15:32.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7205" CreationDate="2015-10-19T21:55:31.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surely they would, but I think we have a problem here. It's really difficult to ask a good question. When I think of a question and find it really interesting, I often realize I'll have to discard it. And for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U has a bank of more than 60,000 questions.  It is not surprising, therefore, that most good questions on linguistics and grammar have already been asked. It often happens to me, to think of a potentially good question, only to find somebody else has already asked it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most doubts I have can be easily answered if I Google them. That type of question would, no doubt, be considered general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some other questions I can think of would be considered opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the obstacles I encounter whenever I try to post a question. Despite that, I'm always thinking and trying to find a good question: a question that would be well-received by the community. Finally, if the &quot;powers that be&quot; decided to give the questions the same value as the answers, that is one vote = 10 marks, the members here would probably be more motivated to post questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T21:55:31.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7205" CreationDate="2015-10-20T01:31:33.963" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course. Also, giving senior members the option of marking certain questions as idiotic would probably improve the general flow. The entire screen gets cluttered with inane gibberish sometimes, which is very frustrating. Thunder and lightning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T01:31:33.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-20T08:42:36.923" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a couple of months since I joined this community and needless to say while posting the questions we have to include the research we have done to prevent it from being flagged or worse being removed. I see people using some google tools to search for the origin and different aspects of a word. I am not aware of such tools and usually post anything which springs to my mind and call it my research(pun intended). I would like you to kindly let me know which tools exist and when do we use them. I suspect that many of the confusion would be cleared if I use these tools and would save the site from getting filled with &quot;bad&quot; questions from my side, regardless of the number. Till now, I have heard about Ngram, the phrase finder and I am yet to explore them. I would like you to give me a recommended list of places to search before putting them on EL&amp;amp;U. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130965" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T08:42:36.923" Title="What tools do people use for including research?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-21T05:28:48.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7239" CreationDate="2015-10-20T11:31:43.373" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this is not a duplicate. I will delete it if found so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of new posters might not know what would be the appropriate/right questions for EL&amp;amp;U and they might not even know how to take the tour. Some questions should have been posted in ELL but I don't think many of them are aware that ELL exists.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, there were 2 questions which were usual suspects for the right word. The first one was &quot;put on hold&quot; and the second one was not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why the second one is not &quot;put on hold&quot; when the first one is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One commented, &quot;Take the words you'd use in your mother tongue, then use a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bilingual dictionary of your liking to look up their English counterparts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many questions in the past do you think should be &quot;put on hold&quot; &lt;strong&gt;if you use the &lt;em&gt;same standard and argument&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP of the second question will be able to find the answer in a dictionary or any site as easily as the OP of the first question would. Furthermore, the first question has &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;an upvote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; while the second has none. (I wanted to downvote it, but decided not to to post this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it could be very subjective decision to pick the worse of the two, but I believe the same standard sould be applied. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;At least a question with an upvote should not be put on hold&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as it indicates some are showing an interest in the question or like it. (I am not the one who upvoted it) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or questions like the first one &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;should be migrated to ELL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. I think it is more appropriate than putting it [on hold] and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fairer to the OP.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this long &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;question and discussion&lt;/a&gt; and I can understand the difficulties this site is facing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/281300/how-to-describe-someone-who-speaks-less-and-shows-in-action&quot;&gt;Question No.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to describe someone who speaks less and shows in action? [on hold]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose someone often speaks less however he is intelligent and&#xA;  skillfull. Basically, he shows in action rather in speaking (in a&#xA;  positive way). I wonder what kinds of words can be used to describe&#xA;  such a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/281252/what-do-you-call-a-topic-thats-ignored-by-people-because-its-boring-abstract&quot;&gt;Question No. 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you call a topic that's ignored by people because it's boring, abstract, or improper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Example topics: Existentialism, quantum mechanics, abstract math,&#xA;  suicide, genocide, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Example sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He started shaping his fears and [...] topics into stories.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Maybe&#xA;  shunned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T04:09:35.937" Title="What is the difference between these 2 questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-22T04:12:13.163" Score="-4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a very sincere &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/281278&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and it was put on hold for being &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;The question was :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;What is the euphemism for &lt;code&gt;motherfucker&lt;/code&gt;&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind the question was to learn to express very strong emotions without being cheap. This is a valid pursuit and the question attracted quite a few good answers before being closed by some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T11:12:47.520" Title="What is the complain mechanism for EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7232" CreationDate="2015-10-22T08:34:03.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As sumelic has commented, you can complain here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite feeling the answers were &quot;good&quot;, it looks as though you didn't upvote any of them* because the one which has upvotes has a comment from you expressing dissatisfaction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was not put on hold as too broad, although that &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; mentioned in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is too broad. Your question asks for a euphemism. But your comment wants something harsher. Can you be more explicit? We're not mind readers. What exactly do you want? What is the situation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It received two close-votes as &quot;Primarily opinion based&quot;, before a moderator closed it for lack of research. However, &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot; would have been equally valid, as that comment demonstrates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was then flagged as offensive and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; allow terms which are offensive, because this is a site about language. However, if you want to ask about offensive language in a question such as yours, you need to be very careful to explain the circumstances and the requirement &lt;strong&gt;exactly,&lt;/strong&gt; or you risk just being seen as a troll who is using offensive language on the site simply because it's allowed. If you have a real question, &lt;strong&gt;demonstrate&lt;/strong&gt; that it's a real question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would also counsel against calling people names in Meta, as it really doesn't help your case. &lt;em&gt;Mother-hugger&lt;/em&gt; is a fairly obvious euphemism.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Moderators can't see votes; we have to guess from the same evidence as everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T08:34:03.950" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5491" CreationDate="2015-10-22T11:30:34.157" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BlZX1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BlZX1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Would you like to learn Korean? Join Korean Language and Usage&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38874" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T11:30:34.157" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-10-22T11:30:34.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7236" CreationDate="2015-10-22T15:36:50.630" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked this question yesterday and it was put on hold as it was deemed to be &quot;opinion based&quot;. I was asked to re word this question to fit the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/281640/why-is-our-friend-used-sarcastically-at-times&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;our friends&amp;quot; being used sarcastically here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already did that but the question is still on hold. Is there any other reason for it to be on hold apart from the one that was stated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116847" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T01:12:03.460" Title="Question put on hold despite edit" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7235" CreationDate="2015-10-23T01:12:03.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asked in your title, &quot;Why is 'our friend' used sarcastically at times?&quot;, is unavoidably opinion-based; everyone has their own reasons for using sarcasm and we cannot reasonably enumerate the occasions when someone might decide to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, since you edited the question to refer to a specific instance (regarding &quot;our friends the Saudis&quot;), the actual body of the question was an objectively answerable question (&quot;yes, it's being used ironically to call attention to certain hypocritical political stances&quot;); so I edited the title to match.  Perhaps it will be considered reopenable now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T01:12:03.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7221" CreationDate="2015-10-23T15:26:19.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually think that the rainbow-pooping unicorn question functions as a stand-alone question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker, and well aware of the idiom &quot;you're no ###&quot;. I had &lt;em&gt;absolutely no idea&lt;/em&gt; what &quot;rainbow-pooping unicorn&quot; meant. To me, that was the crux of the question, because at first glance it doesn't seem like a positive thing to be compared to. In fact, after reading the answers and understanding the phrase, I came to the conclusion that it was a poor simile to choose, and hence I completely understand the OP's difficulty in understanding the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I don't think anything needs to be done based on that question specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T15:26:19.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-24T13:54:06.553" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please show what the problem is when my question is blocked? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139788" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T13:54:06.553" Title="I can't ask questions because my previous question was not asked properly as is implied. what should i do?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7230" CreationDate="2015-10-26T04:09:35.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Single word requests have some additional specific requirements because the site gets so many of them and a lot of them are terrible.  See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;tag info&lt;/a&gt; for details.  Neither is a great question (as evidenced by the lack of upvotes on both), but Question #2 certainly comes closer to meeting the requirements and is a better question overall.  #1 is barely comprehensible and shows no evidence of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably wouldn't have chosen &quot;opinion based&quot; for the first question, but who knows how that happened.  It looks like it was ultimately closed as &quot;off-topic / lacking research&quot;, which seems right to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrating questions directly to ELL is suitable in some cases, but not when it's flat-out a bad question.  It would get placed on hold just as quickly over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up votes and close votes are deliberately distinct concepts in StackExchange.   As Sumelic said in a comment, &quot;people upvote for both good and bad reasons&quot;.  Plus, something can be very popular and yet still be a duplicate or inappropriate for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T04:09:35.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-26T11:40:49.757" Score="-9" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked an OP to provide some context and research for their question (see below). I believed that it could have been answered by using basic resources. I did however think it might be a good question if the OP gave evidence of research and that the research had failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP agreed to do the research and return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, despite the brief conversation between me and the OP about this, people answered. Presumably they had seen the conversation and simply ignored it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I down-voted someone for not waiting for the research promised by the OP. It seemed to me that this was a valid reason for down-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a discussion ensued in comments. I have permission to refer to this from the other party involved. It is in this question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282731/contesting-the-palm-looking-for-a-definition-and-possible-origin-of-this-ar&quot;&gt;Contesting the palm” — looking for a definition and possible origin of this archaic phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one of the arguments I used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Suppose someone asked, &quot;What does 'incomprehensible' mean and they didn't give any research or explain why it was difficult for them. Would you answer or would you vote to close because they should have used a dictionary? The OP could have looked up the same sources you did. If that still didn't make sense in their context then they would be justified in asking.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a valid argument?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T21:54:47.693" Title="Is it valid to downvote on account of an answer being 'too hasty'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7240" CreationDate="2015-10-26T12:05:38.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You chose a poor example to downvote that person's answer. That question wasn't a general knowledge one, where a simple dictionary research or a link to Wikipedia would have provided the answer. In those cases, and I've seen too many for my liking, I'd say &lt;strong&gt;vote to close the question for lack of research&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't upvote the person who was first off their mark to answer an “easy question” besides if the answer is correct, why downvote it? It seems you're saying the answer is &quot;wrong&quot;, when it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only time I would suggesting upvoting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_draw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fastest draw&lt;/a&gt;-type answer is if the answerer is a newbie or a newcomer.   An upvote  is a friendly sign of encouragement, but some users may strongly disagree with me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The newcomer's answer should still follow the basic SE criteria for a useful answer: support/backup, references, possibly a link, and have acceptable grammar, spelling and punctuation. We are an English language site after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-10-26T12:24:29.957" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T12:24:29.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7240" CreationDate="2015-10-26T19:29:27.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I down-voted someone for not waiting for the research promised by the OP. It seemed to me that this was a valid reason for down-voting. Is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are using your down vote to try to shape the site into the site you want. That is often the way down votes are used. However, they are also used for petty or personal reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't like someone's snide style? Down vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't like a user's incessant questions about minutiae in the works of Walt Whitman? Down vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't like a user's vulgar, misogynistic name? Down vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't like a user's religiosity and want to discourage religiosity on the site? Down vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't like that someone answered a question you thought was insufficiently researched? Down vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason users down vote &lt;em&gt;are their own&lt;/em&gt;. They are often petty. But the down voter doesn't need to explain it, and they certainly don't need to ask the community for permission to use it whichever way they want. No one can control your down vote, and should not be able to unless it's so petty as to be harmful, like revenge down voting, etc. which can be detected and reversed. &lt;strong&gt;That doesn't mean that as a community, we don't wish for people to use their down vote more responsibly.&lt;/strong&gt; Most of the members here favor reasonable, not frivolous, use of the down vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Mari-Lou A's answer that your down vote was poorly cast. The answer is useful, researched, interesting, etc. and a good answer. Your down vote can then be called petty. You down voted someone because &lt;em&gt;they didn't agree with/respect your decision to withhold answering until your demands were met&lt;/em&gt;. In spite of giving a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want the community to side with this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that's going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T21:54:47.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T21:54:47.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7240" CreationDate="2015-10-26T20:38:33.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments on the answer you suggested should've been downvoted, I see you say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My motivation (in this sort of situation) is to get people to ask high quality questions. I'm not criticising your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems straightforward to downvote questions if they are not good questions, but to downvote an answer because the question is not good doesn't seem appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the EL&amp;amp;U site is approached as if it was a game, where a high score is the primary goal, but I don't think that even works when the game becomes more of a race: there's no timer to make sure all contestants have an equal chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T20:38:33.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7245" CreationDate="2015-10-27T06:30:50.823" Score="14" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time and again, I have seen people making comments (polished and polite) here which I think I could borrow and use at other relevant places later because I often feel like I am at lack of words and probably won't be able to vocalize my opinion on a question/post in a polite and humble way. I have tried to search for some of them (which I really liked the first time I saw them) but it just gives too many results and it would take a ridiculously long amount of time to search through all of it just to search for a single comment (I forgot to save them at the time when I first saw them but when I face the same situation, I believe their comment (which I read a long time ago and vaguely remember) would have been appropriate and succinct to say in that situation). Also, I checked out the user's profile but it seems there is no way to check their daily activities(the comments they make on a particular day). By the way, I am not trying to stalk any user in particular, so please do not get me wrong. Is this possible to view comments made by someone? or is that a privilege one needs to earn? or is it not possible at all? Also, what do you do in a situation when you know the answer to a question but still find it difficult to write it down without making it look like it's been written in broken English with a very clumsy use of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130965" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2015-10-27T20:56:02.993" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T15:40:03.627" Title="Is there any way I could view the comments of a particular user?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7244" CreationDate="2015-10-27T16:39:14.940" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can reach a chronological list of the comments left by a particular EL&amp;amp;U user from the user's Profile page, in three clicks. First click the &lt;em&gt;Activity&lt;/em&gt; link in the upper left corner of the Profile page; then click &lt;em&gt;all actions&lt;/em&gt; in the row of links beneath the Reputation, Badges, and Impact summary boxes; and then click &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; in the row of links that appears immediately below 'all actions'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that there are no reputation-based restrictions on access to a user's comments or to any other linked data field in a user's Profile or Activity summary, though I may be wrong about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T16:39:14.940" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-27T17:19:31.723" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I have a slight problem with a self-described retired moderator having the last word on commentary implying that the conversation had descended into rudeness and then locking because the comments were &quot;off topic.&quot;  None of the comments were the slightest bit rude, and although many may have been filtered through the commenters' political views, almost all were about the context of the wording under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282686/what-does-hillary-clinton-s-a-little-note-of-levity-at-715-at-night-mean&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T01:29:53.067" Title="Please reconsider unlocking comments on this question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7246" CreationDate="2015-10-28T01:29:53.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post will automatically unlock twenty four hours after the lock was applied (roughly 14 hours from now). I should note for the record that my decision was made based on comments that I have deleted, as well as other information not publicly available. As I stand by my decision, I do not intend to unlock the post any earlier, though another moderator may do so at their discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T01:29:53.067" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T13:07:21.863" Score="0" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else find it more than a little irritating, when one spends 10 minutes or more, typing an answer, only to discover it has been closed or put on hold, during that time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'closer' gets to chip in their opinion, then closes it (or holds it) without giving a damn what others may be writing; or the time spent in doing so.  Moreover, in holding the question, more information is frequently requested.  In such cases, such additional information may not be relevant or required, by my answer; yet I will have to return to re-write everything I have just written, or save it as a word file, for later posting, if I bother - which, I probably will not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were these questions left open for at least some time - more than the 15 minutes as was just the case - I may be less inclined to complain.  However, I have absolutely no idea what purpose is served, by holding a question.  I can see further data has been requested, and I am more than capable of discerning, for myself, whether I am of the same opinion.  If I am not, I see no reason why I should be encumbered by the requirements of another, which I may believe to be petty or unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144581" LastEditorUserId="144581" LastEditDate="2015-10-28T13:44:56.207" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T23:20:56.540" Title="Holding or Closing Questions" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2015-10-28T18:00:13.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been in this situation myself, and once or twice I've kept open the browser window with my answer that I can't post, then posted &lt;em&gt;approximately the same question&lt;/em&gt; myself in another window (modified as appropriate to prevent it too from being closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I've cut &amp;amp; pasted my own answer to my own question. There's nothing in either the site guidelines or &quot;established practice&quot; to stop you doing this, and if the answer &lt;em&gt;genuinely&lt;/em&gt; shows how the question can be On Topic, you might well gain extra Brownie points from upvotes to both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T18:00:13.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2015-10-28T23:04:25.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The 'closer' gets to chip in their opinion, then closes it (or holds it) without giving a damn what others may be writing...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your anger might be misplaced a bit here.&#xA;As @Chenmunka stated, the person or persons closing the question don't know that you're in the process of answering the question. There's no way to tell. &lt;em&gt;it's not personal; it's not intentional.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have absolutely no idea what purpose is served, by holding a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read the close reason; that's one. There are several more. Before you read into someone's motives and actions, read the help section on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;why questions get closed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing questions takes either 5 users or a moderator (or a combination.) The moderator knows (as do regular users) which questions should be closed, and it's their job to close them (unless they wait for the community to do so. Personally, I think that leaves a lot of bad questions open, but that's me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The 'closer' gets to chip in their opinion...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is considered prudent for a moderator to explain why they're closing a question. They don't get points for it, and they are not thanked by anyone for it. In fact, it annoys people and gets meta questions complaining about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so you know, it's happened to me a number of times, and it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; annoying. I may have not known it was a duplicate. I may not have wanted to see it as off-topic because I was interested in it. But really, it's usually an appropriate closure, and it's not malicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any detriment to the site, in questions being allowed to stand, for 24 hours?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe it or not, yes, there is. The detriment is that it will be viewed as an acceptable question by a number of new users (which can be considerable on a busy site), who will then go on to post their own bad, close-worthy questions, which will get closed, which will result in more ill-feelings. It just doesn't end until the community defines its goals and values, then moderates the site accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T02:49:55.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T06:33:07.597" Score="-2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;... at least keep it from dropping even further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it, basically. Why, and what, and how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T14:25:00.590" Title="Why has my rep dropped 100 points in one day and what can I do to fix it or" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7251" CreationDate="2015-10-29T14:25:00.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/283147/100&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; was marked as offensive, which carries a 100 reputation penalty. An &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/58035/89334&quot;&gt;FAQ on spam and offensive flags is available&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T14:25:00.590" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-30T03:57:17.937" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/133013/70061&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as unclear, expecting it would be a pretty cut and dry case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every answer expresses uncertainty regarding what the asker is asking. There are multiple comments asking for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left this comment: &quot;I think the rubber band example might be overcomplicating things, but I'm not certain. If you had some other round things that did not stretch, like plates, and one had a larger radius than the other, would the word you're looking for still apply?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And got this response from the asker: &quot;Alas, 2 years and 2 days later I don't remember at all what I had in mind then. Thanks anyway!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the person who asked the question doesn't even know what they were asking, then how can we conclude anything other than that the question is unclear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the response from the asker was taken as &quot;bemusement&quot; by some, as if the age of the question has some sort of effect on whether it should be answered or not. I didn't even notice when the question was posted until that comment, and still don't think it has any relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; find this question through some sort of queue or algorithm. I was &lt;em&gt;using the site&lt;/em&gt;. I was browsing around, happened upon a potentially interesting question that was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;open and without an accepted answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. If the question is open, it is still inviting answers, and if there is none accepted, then it &lt;em&gt;hasn't been answered&lt;/em&gt;. So, therefore, I tried to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After spending some time on it, it became clear that the question was unclear. Therefore, since we have an open, unanswered question that has been found to be unclear... we close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully understand wanting to take the age of questions into account when &lt;em&gt;looking&lt;/em&gt; for questions to moderate. But that isn't what we're talking about here. This is a question that has been &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt;. It has been found naturally and identified as unclear. What kind of precedent does it set to ignore this, given that the work of finding and identifying the question has already occurred?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would we be more inclined to close it if I did the same thing the other answerers did, and posted a poor answer while trying to guess what the question means, bumping the question to the top of activity page? Surely that's not preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T04:20:55.063" Title="Why was my flag declined, and can we close this question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7255" CreationDate="2015-10-30T06:18:42.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathize with your opinion that someone who posts a question ought to be able to provide clarification about what he or she is seeking when asked to do so. But I also sympathize with the original poster's sense of bemusement when challenged to clarify something that he asked two years earlier—a question that had earned 2 upvotes (and at some point 1 downvote) and had elicited three answers (that themselves earned 4 upvotes) all on the same day: October 25, 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether you chanced upon this question and felt compelled to pursue the previously abandoned issue of its ambiguity, or whether (as seems more likely) it came to your attention because an automated dredging operation brought up an old and harmless question &quot;because of its length and content&quot; and put it in the Low Quality Posts queue for reconsideration. But if the issue arose out of the latter process, I think EL&amp;amp;U is not well served by that automated mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site receives lots of fresh questions of dubious usefulness every week—questions that might benefit in multiple ways from prompt review and thoughtful comments like the one you sent to the poster of the two-year-old question here. It seems a shame to have the task of keeping up with very recent questions complicated by an engine that exhumes old, noncontroversial questions and clogs our review queues with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to see a statute of limitations imposed on mechanized review requests, to prevent the parade of zombie questions from occupying so much of our reviewers' time. Two full years seems more than long enough to figure out whether a question ought to be approved, improved, or closed; indeed, I think eighteen months or a year is a far more reasonable window. In the meantime I am opposed to closing old questions that had been sitting quietly for months or years, not bothering anyone, until an overzealous software routine came along and stirred up trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T06:18:42.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-30T17:37:37.997" Score="0" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;The type of question I'd like to ask is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of the following quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(not an actual quote) This is a quote or short passage from a book or elsewhere that sounds very pithy and wise. In my first search for this quote I found seemingly conflicting results and am not sure of the origin. After I have completed my search later when I have more time, I'd like to know if there's a place to ask this sort of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure English.SE is the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastEditorUserId="1421" LastEditDate="2015-10-30T20:06:47.483" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T22:34:35.880" Title="What is the appropriate site to ask this question about origin of a short paragraph?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-11-11T00:21:38.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7257" CreationDate="2015-10-30T18:19:39.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, English.SE is certainly not the right place for such a search: your question does not relate to any issue about the English language. It isn't really suitable for any Stack Exchange site, since 'quotations' like this buzz around the Internet at high speed, altering a word here and being rephrased there, until even the original author wouldn't recognize the popularised version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try &lt;a href=&quot;http://philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Philosophy.SE&lt;/a&gt; or another SE site in the field where you think this arose. Note, however, that I know of no site where a bald &quot;where is this from&quot; is welcome as a question: the best approach would be to join the site, gain a little reputation from sensible questions or good answers, and then ask in the chatroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you will have to rely on your search-engine skills. Even then, though, I would caution you against accepting the first answer you come up with; many such phrases turn out to have been invented by motivational speakers or so-called 'educators', who then felt the need to attribute the words to some figure well-respected in whatever field is under discussion, regardless of what this figure would have thought of the 'quotation'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T18:19:39.020" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7257" CreationDate="2015-10-30T18:25:41.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quickest source for this sort of thing is Google. Pasting the passage into the search bar provided a link to John Allen Paulos, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=KflY-Yz5P8UC&amp;amp;pg=PA165&amp;amp;lpg=PA165&amp;amp;dq=%22Two+individuals+cannot+forever+agree+to+disagree.+As+their+beliefs,+formed+in+rational+response+to+different+bits+of+private+information,+gradually+become+common+knowledge,+the+beliefs+change+and+eventually+coincide.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=NQuxfJamzw&amp;amp;sig=1B4sSc7p7r1-MSPl20AtS5lcKS8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIj6z1v-fqyAIVR9djCh1w9Q6q#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Two%20individuals%20cannot%20forever%20agree%20to%20disagree.%20As%20their%20beliefs%2C%20formed%20in%20rational%20response%20to%20different%20bits%20of%20private%20information%2C%20gradually%20become%20common%20knowledge%2C%20the%20beliefs%20change%20and%20eventually%20coincide.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Paulos writes there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robert Aumann, who first defined the notion, proved a theorem which can be roughly paraphrased as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and proceeds with exactly the passage you quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allen_Paulos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Paulos&lt;/a&gt; is a mathematics professor at Temple who has won prestigious awards for his writings, so I think  you can safely assume that the paraphrase is his own. If you really want to know more you can pursue the writings of Robert Aumann.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24489" LastEditorUserId="24489" LastEditDate="2015-10-30T18:31:45.530" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T18:31:45.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6554" CreationDate="2015-10-30T21:35:28.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an annoying side-effect of all these questions without accepted answers:  When a question goes without an accepted answer for a period of time &quot;Community&quot; marks the question newly modified to bring it to the top of the list.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question really needs attention this is OK, but probably 75% of the time the question has decent answers but none have been accepted, and a (typically) meaningless question is resurrected as a &quot;zombie&quot;, often attracting meaningless additional activity, and definitely creating an annoyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If steps are not made to further encourage closing questions, this behavior of &quot;Community&quot; needs to be somehow changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T21:35:28.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6554" CreationDate="2015-10-31T17:18:06.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stackexchange design philosophy tends more towards the carrot than the stick. That is, the emphasis is that desirable behavior is awarded, and undesirable behavior is hoped to be not awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the solution here would probably be to award accepting an answer (with something small like 1 pt rep), rather than to award negative rep. But such an award seems too much, so this will probably not go over well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe a bronze badge for going above a certain percentage of accepted answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T17:18:06.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7264" CreationDate="2015-10-31T20:22:27.003" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a Question on the Linguistics site &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14848/where-to-find-old-article-on-frequency-of-letters-pairs-of-letters-triplets-an&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14848/where-to-find-old-article-on-frequency-of-letters-pairs-of-letters-triplets-an&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a partial answer covering the more technical part of the Question.  In a few days, if I don't get the rest of the info I want, I would like to Accept the Linguistics Answer and repost the Question on this site, along with the information (properly credited) that I have gained from Linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than Commenting on Linguistics that I am going to do this, it there anything else I should do?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T00:26:35.900" Title="What is the etiquette on moving a Question from another site to this one?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6554" CreationDate="2015-10-31T22:52:43.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest a &lt;strong&gt;prompt&lt;/strong&gt; to the OP if he/she has not accepted an answer after, say, 96 hours.   I recently got a prompt from &lt;em&gt;Great Outdoors Exchange&lt;/em&gt;, as I was upvoting some answers, reminding me that I hadn't upvoted any questions recently.  I found it a ,useful reminder.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a significant portion of the non-acceptances are because people don't know about accepting (you can't really expect people to read the guidelines!) or even forget they have posted a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are the people who don't give a s__t.  I don't know what to do about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are cases as Yargs said, where no answer is a complete answer.  My personal opinion is that a &lt;em&gt;thoughtful, good answer that advances the OPs knowledge&lt;/em&gt; should be accepted. An upvote is not enough. Pat the dog in addition to giving him a bone.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T22:52:43.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7262" CreationDate="2015-11-01T00:26:35.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to make sure that your question is sufficiently different from the one on Linguistics (just reposting &lt;em&gt;the same question&lt;/em&gt; on different sites is against overall SE policy) and that your question is on-topic for this site (which I believe means it should be about English in particular rather than about an issue that is the same no matter what language we're looking at). Honestly, I'm not sure that it would be on-topic, so as I said in the comments, I'd advise against doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T00:26:35.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T16:10:35.980" Score="-2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283970/one-word-for-people-who-hate-others-success&quot;&gt;What is the one word for people who hate others success?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question seems to be put on hold, as off topic, can anybody please explain how is this an off topic question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T18:21:23.087" Title="question put on hold, reason unclear?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7265" CreationDate="2015-11-01T18:21:23.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason the question was put on hold is stated in the post notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked page contains more details on how to create a good single-word request question, specifically in the short summary and the checklist at the bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word that fits a meaning. To ensure your question is not closed as off-topic, please be specific about the intended use of the word. &lt;strong&gt;You must include a sample sentence demonstrating how the word would be used.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Describe the intended meaning, connotation, and/or context in as much detail as you can. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1654/8816&quot;&gt;Questions that show no research are likely to be closed.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question describe exactly in what context you want to use a single word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question specify the criteria for which the suggested word will be accepted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question list which words you didn't like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question show that you searched for a suitable word before asking the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The criteria are stringent, because Stack Exchange is a question-and-answer platform where answers are voted on how well they answer the question and where a single answer is acknowledged as best. Single-word-request questions are prone to receiving many answers, so the criteria by which those answers are judged need to be very specific. There are more details about the policy in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1654/8816&quot;&gt;second link above&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get a good answer (or more than just one), you need to put quite a bit of effort into creating a good question. Other Meta answers have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5279/does-a-question-which-shows-no-research-no-effort-deserve-a-downvote/5282#5282&quot;&gt;more on this point&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;even more&lt;/a&gt;. That is, the question is not off topic, but it's currently not a good question and needs more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you edit the question to make it fit the tag info, &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; simply add a subtitle &quot;Edit&quot; followed by additional information. Different versions of the question are already available (click the &quot;Edited&quot; timestamp link). Make the question complete and able to stand on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question is edited following its being placed on hold, it's put into a review queue and the community can vote on reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T18:21:23.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-02T15:09:18.033" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to delete the linked &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284124/usage-of-the-word-hand-in-the-context/284128?noredirect=1#comment632845_284128&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; but failed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;as it was accepted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some comments I can't take any more and I would like to delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your help will be much appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2024-01-14T18:01:10.133" Title="How can I delete an &quot;accepted answer&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7244" CreationDate="2015-11-02T15:40:03.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know, or are willing to learn a bit of, SQL, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. You should be able to get a query that targets a specific user, where you can find comments containing keywords and within specific timeframes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13346" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T15:40:03.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-04T01:19:42.807" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently come across situations on this site that I would've liked to ask and bring up to SE managers/creators without it  being to the public or raising a flag. I specifically would like to have a conversation with the SE about a specific question/user that has been deleted. Is there some way I can do this? If not, can I make a request for all users to have the option/a way of contacting SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140723" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T01:39:17.227" Title="Is there a way to ask questions specifically to SE managers?" Tags="|feature-request|questions|deleted-questions|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7270" CreationDate="2015-11-04T01:39:17.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first order of business is to find if you want to contact &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;site moderators&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/team#Community&quot;&gt;community managers&lt;/a&gt;. These are disjoint groups of people: the former are volunteers, the latter are employees of Stack Something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can be contacted using a flag, or you may be able to catch them in a chatroom. If you want to ask about a deleted question, it's more likely to be a question for moderators than for community managers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community managers can be contacted using the bold link &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in the footer of every page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, don't expect &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to have a conversation with the SE about a specific question/user that has been deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't have time for chatting in general, and do not disclose why a user was deleted for privacy reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T01:39:17.227" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-04T18:24:31.057" Score="-8" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284856/good-to-hearread-from-you/284858?noredirect=1#comment634332_284858&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asking why it is &quot;generally accepted&quot; to use &quot;good to hear from you&quot; while the OP thinks &quot;good to read from you&quot; is better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I replied: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hear&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hear&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has the following meaning: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(hear from) Be contacted by (someone), especially by letter or&#xA;  telephone: ‘if you would like to join the committee, we would love to&#xA;  hear from you’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Oxford Online Dictionary]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can't say it is wrong to use &quot;hear from&quot; in your example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was one comment: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The funny thing is, this does not answer the question one bit.&#xA;  Dictionaries follow usage. So basically you merely just repeated the&#xA;  question right back at the OP. They know that &quot;hear&quot; has that meaning.&#xA;  Their question is, why does it have it.– RegDwigнt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I commented back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think it is always true dictionaries follows usage. How long&#xA;  do you think our ancestors lived without proper dictionaries? How many&#xA;  words did you learn by looking up dictionaries especially those&#xA;  derived from Latin? Your logic doesn't work unless you learned to&#xA;  speak all those Latin words verbally from your parents or siblings. If&#xA;  he is asking for a word that is not listed in a dictionary, your logic&#xA;  might work, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I thought it would be better to change my answer even though I felt a bit annoyed with the comment as my asnwer is not different from that of Centaurus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is my answer really funny? How should I take the comment?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it fair to comment only on my answer when the other poster's answer is almost same as mine?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is fair to express your opinion in the comment without writing your own answer. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a comment-only site. If I had been him and found any other anwer funny, I would have posted my own answer myself. Is there anyway to force such a comment-only-poster to post their own answers? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T20:53:53.880" Title="Why should my answer be criticized as &quot;questioning back to the OP&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2015-11-04T19:59:39.297" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Funny': You are taking things way too literally, not as much as the OP but still. Both for 'funny' and 'hear'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are taking things way too personally. Maybe you just happened to be in line first. Or maybe people really are out to get you. Wear a mask with big eyes on the back of your head to scare away tigers, they will fucking eat you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are being way too ... ok the parallelism doesn't work. You want to force people to do things? Because you feel slighted? Sure, we're all curious about why someone did something off from our expectations, why dammit can't they do it right?  Because you're not them. Frankly you're not you either in that situation, you are just saying what you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you'd do, not actually being in the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for answering your questions so literally one by one. I think you're just upset at Reg. Don't take things so seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T20:07:37.733" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T20:07:37.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2015-11-04T21:37:13.583" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The advantage of an answer, of course, is that it can yield upvotes and increase your reputation score on the site; the disadvantage is that it exposes you to downvotes and to comments that are not themselves subject to downvoting. The advantage of commenting is that it insulates you from downvotes (aside from retaliatory downvoting of other questions you have answered, which I think is pretty rare); the disadvantages are that it doesn't earn reputation points and that comments may disappear without warning at the whim of a moderator. So there's a trade-off between responding in answers and responding in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frequently find that a comment that challenges some aspect of an answer I've submitted functions as an invitation to revisit and reconsider that critiqued aspect, which may lead to my improving the answer by removing a flaw, addressing a previously neglected issue, or bolstering an argument that wasn't as persuasive as it could have been. I always feel a bit of trepidation when I see that one of my answers has drawn a comment, but I also think that many comments have helped me make my answers much better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a comment isn't helpful, I either ignore it or try to explain why it is off-point. But in general, the usefulness of a comment is far more closely tied to its insight into the issue it raises than to its seeming friendliness or hostility to the posted answer. As ab2 observes in a comment under Mitch's answer, people who post comments (and answers) have different voices and different moods. If you take what is useful from them and discard what isn't, you gain from them—even (and sometimes especially) from the ones that sound prickly or pugnacious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I don't think your answer was &quot;funny,&quot; and I don't think that the commenter meant to mock it by opening his comment with &quot;The funny thing is...&quot; As the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099685/quotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example of Tommy DeVito&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Goodfellas&lt;/em&gt; establishes, certain words can trigger unexpectedly intense reactions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the person who said or wrote them intended to provoke such a reaction. To me, &quot;The funny thing is&quot; reads like nothing more than an innocuous preface to the comment's main point, which was to challenge the pertinence of your answer, but not to demean or humiliate you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I think the comment system at this site is extremely useful, and I wouldn't change it. I urge you not to think of commenters as snipers lurking in hiding places and taking mean-spirited potshots at honest answerers as they march down the street. To the extent that everyone here is trying to contribute to good and meaningful answers, everyone is on the same side—even when they disagree about how to achieve that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T20:53:53.880" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T20:53:53.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T00:27:52.883" Score="-10" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, power gets to people's heads. Certain members here have been monitoring my questions, answers and comments closely. My crime? I believe that humor a) makes people happy b) helps the learning process. I've been called names. My questions and answers have been edited for no reason. This is humiliating and boring. Is there a way to guard yourself against trolls with high rep numbers? Or should I just leave (I don't mind)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T15:41:22.967" Title="What should one do when one is being trolled?" Tags="|support|trolling|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T01:41:34.503" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, there are many answers that cite Wikipedia. An example is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/285018/77227&quot;&gt;recent answer where I quoted Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; in the following manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The modern name has two parts: &lt;em&gt;Plym&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mouth&lt;/em&gt;. The element &lt;em&gt;Plym&lt;/em&gt; is taken from the River Plym along which it traded with its parent settlement of Plympton, but &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; name (first recorded as &lt;em&gt;Plymentun&lt;/em&gt; in c. 900) is considered to derive from the Old English word for 'plum tree', also &lt;em&gt;ploumenn&lt;/em&gt; in Cornish, though the local civic association suggests an alternative derivation from the Celtic &lt;em&gt;Pen-lyn-don&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;fort at the head of a creek&quot;). An alternative derivation is from Latin &lt;em&gt;plumbum album&lt;/em&gt; 'British/white lead' -meaning tin - where &lt;em&gt;plomm&lt;/em&gt; is also Cornish for lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is not exactly how the original text looks. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Plymouth#Toponymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; has footnotes referencing the source of the information in the passage; these footnotes are marked in-line with superscripted numerals in brackets that hyperlink to the bottom of the page. Like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The modern name has two parts: &lt;em&gt;Plym&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mouth&lt;/em&gt;. The element &lt;em&gt;Plym&lt;/em&gt; is taken from the River Plym along which it traded with its parent settlement of Plympton, but &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; name (first recorded as &lt;em&gt;Plymentun&lt;/em&gt; in c. 900) is considered to derive from the Old English word for 'plum tree',&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; also &lt;em&gt;ploumenn&lt;/em&gt; in Cornish,&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; though the local civic association suggests an alternative derivation from the Celtic &lt;em&gt;Pen-lyn-don&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;fort at the head of a creek&quot;).&lt;sup&gt;[3]&lt;/sup&gt; An alternative derivation is from Latin &lt;em&gt;plumbum album&lt;/em&gt; 'British/white lead' -meaning tin - where &lt;em&gt;plomm&lt;/em&gt; is also Cornish for lead.&lt;sup&gt;[4]&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Watts, Victor (2010). &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names&lt;/em&gt; (1st paperback ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 475–6. ISBN 978-0-521-16855-7.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.howlsedhes.co.uk/cgi-bin/diskwe.pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.howlsedhes.co.uk/cgi-bin/diskwe.pl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psmca.org.uk/castle.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Plympton Castle&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Plympton St Maurice Civic Association. Retrieved 2 December 2012.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The ancient language and the dialect of Cornwall, Fred W.P. Jago 1882, Truro&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of site policy on the format of quotations, do I need to, or should I, include the superscripted numerals? If I do, should I include the text of the footnote citations, or at least a link to them? Should I just avoid this problem by not posting extensive quotes from Wikipedia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently looking up questions where the general issue has been discussed on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following seem somewhat relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/156355/how-to-use-in-text-citation-for-a-sentence-in-an-article-that-also-uses-in-text?rq=1&quot;&gt;How to use in-text citation for a sentence in an article that also uses in-text citation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/157123/in-my-example-how-do-i-use-in-text-citation?rq=1&quot;&gt;In my example, how do I use in-text citation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(although the two above deal with in-line citation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123797/plagiarism-how-to-cite-the-citation-of-your-source?rq=1&quot;&gt;Plagiarism: How to cite the citation of your source?&lt;/a&gt; (kind of the opposite situation: this person cited only the original and not the immediate source, and was subject to charges of plagiarism)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235111/when-citing-a-french-citation-in-the-original-should-the-guillemets-angle-quot?rq=1&quot;&gt;When citing a French citation in the original, should the guillemets (angle quotes) be changed? What about punctuation order?&lt;/a&gt; (the top voted answer and some of the comments suggest that even minor details of punctuation in a citation should not be silently changed or tidied up)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153991/ibid-source-citing-source&quot;&gt;Ibid source citing source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T08:35:53.947" Title="On this site, how should I quote text that has citations in footnotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7277" CreationDate="2015-11-05T03:00:18.693" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to acknowledge explicitly that you've omitted from your reproduction of the original text some footnotes that you don't want to cite in full, you can simply add, in brackets at the end of the first block quote above, &quot;[citations omitted].&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since you provide a link to the cited source anyway, it seems to me that retaining the footnote numbers that appear in the running text is needlessly punctilious. It's distracting, too, if you don't also include the footnotes themselves—and presumably the reason you didn't do that in the first place is that it adds a lot of clutter to your excerpt with very little benefit to most EL&amp;amp;U readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I check someone's linked source and find that footnote markers have silently dropped out of the EL&amp;amp;U version of the quotation, I don't view that as a sign that the answerer is unreliable. To the contrary, I just think that he or she had the good sense not to include extraneous tertiary material. The important thing (to me) is that the content of the quotation be reproduced faithfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a site policy does exist on this point, I'm unaware of it—and I've been innocently violating it for a long time. (I'm a longtime dropper of asterisks, daggers, and in-text footnote-number callouts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T03:00:18.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7276" CreationDate="2015-11-05T13:18:11.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try to answer each of your points. It's just my opinion of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes, power gets to people's heads.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm someone who criticises people's posts. Those I criticise might think it's a power trip. I see it as a way of improving questions and answers and the standard of the site generally. Personally I don't care who I criticise: If they have higher rep than me or are a moderator I'll still criticise if I think there is a good reason. I flagged a moderator's comment in the last hour or so because I thought it was offensive (not to me but to someone else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certain members here have been monitoring my questions, answers and comments closely.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, that sounds a little paranoid. Of course you can give the usual reply &quot;Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do wonder though. Maybe these people are critical of everyone and you have only noticed their behaviour with respect to your own answers. Why would they single someone out?  Why would they go to the trouble of following you? (you're not  Justin Bieber I'm guessing ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note - That last bit  was humour. I hope you saw it as humour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My crime? I believe that humor a) makes people happy b) helps the learning process.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ditto but be aware that sense of humour differs from person to person -- a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've been called names.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is completely unacceptable and totally out of order. You should flag the remarks as offensive. Check back to see if the moderators have erased them. If not then complain again. I've done this before and usually the offensive remark gets removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My questions and answers have been edited for no reason. This is humiliating and boring. Is there a way to guard yourself against trolls with high rep numbers?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a problem. I personally think it is bad practice to edit someone else's question or answer. The only valid reason I support would be to help, say, a newbie with formatting or a non-native speaker with grammar  or  clarity. I prefer to comment and let the person deal with it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or should I just leave (I don't mind)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe me there are tougher on-line environments than Stack Exchange. Here are some ways forward if I may make so bold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Change your own behaviour. Take a reflective approach. Notice what you constantly get criticised for and decide it if it is  essential. If not, try to do whatever it is less. [I frequently have to do this myself]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fight back.  This needs a lot of care. Always do it in a way that avoids sinking to the other person's level. Answer them logically and coolly--don't' become them.  Don't forget you can roll back unwanted edits.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grow a tough hide. Sticks and stones. Life's like that. Illegitimi non carborundum (&quot;Don't let the bastards grind you down&quot;).  The fact that there are plenty of aphorisms about coping with difficult people tells us that life is just like that. Here is a good anonymous safe place to practise dealing with morons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leave  [not recommended by me! I like your contributions]. However if it really is too hot in the kitchen then it's best to simply get out of the heat. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="127726" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T13:23:46.547" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T13:23:46.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7276" CreationDate="2015-11-05T15:41:22.967" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of your 67 answers (plus the others now removed), three have been edited by others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284406/word-for-term-for-inhabitant-of/284407#284407&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;term for inhabitant of&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; removed &quot;Go and Google it&quot; and added a real reference instead&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283768/what-word-describes-the-relationship-between-words-like-art-and-artist/283770#283770&quot;&gt;What word describes the relationship between words like &amp;quot;art&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;artist?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;  &amp;mdash; spelling correction&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282913/is-this-correct-do-you-know-what-a-dog-is/282916#282916&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282913/is-this-correct-do-you-know-what-a-dog-is/282916#282916&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; formatting  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of your 35 questions (plus the others now removed), seven have been edited by others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284824/why-doesnt-buckingham-palace-require-an-article&quot;&gt;Why doesn&amp;#39;t Buckingham Palace require an article?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; removed off-topic material&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284263/some-residual-effects-of-the-great-vowel-shift&quot;&gt;Some residual effects of the Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;  &amp;mdash; formatting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283866/how-do-i-insultingly-describe-an-extremely-ugly-building&quot;&gt;How do I insultingly describe an extremely ugly building?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; title improved&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283149/when-did-i-could-care-less-rather-than-i-couldnt-care-less-become-popular&quot;&gt;When did &amp;quot;I could care less&amp;quot; (rather than &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#39;t care less&amp;quot;) become popular?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; retag&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/281255/if-you-were-writing-a-play-about-ancient-rome-and-one-of-your-characters-had-to&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/281255/if-you-were-writing-a-play-about-ancient-rome-and-one-of-your-characters-had-to&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; spelling&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/280998/he-was-neither-seer-nor-prophet-how-would-you-explain-the-absence-of-an-articl&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;He was neither seer nor prophet&amp;quot; How would you explain the absence of an article?&lt;/a&gt;  &amp;mdash; improved title and edited tags&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/280767/what-verb-would-you-use-to-describe-the-sound-tires-make-when-they-roll-on-the-a&quot;&gt;What verb would you use to describe the sound tires make when they roll on the asphalt?&lt;/a&gt;  &amp;mdash; added context, retagged&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't gone through comments to find out any name-calling; please do add examples to your question, or flag where they appear and they will be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a proportion, having 20% of questions edited to correct the formatting or spelling, improve the title and add relevant tags is quite high, but I don't think you're being deliberately targeted. Many users take a great interest in the quality of questions and will edit frequently, so even if the same editor has featured more than once, it doesn't indicate a vendetta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems to me &amp;mdash; making the cap fit, perhaps &amp;mdash; that you are specifically referring to the Buckingham Palace question (the most recent), which I dealt with as a moderator. So I'll address that, since the edit history is public anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version 2, you added text which included&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why this is not a duplicate question:&lt;/strong&gt; This is not about the general rules about articles; nor am I asking for instructions on how to use them. [proudly and with a touch of self-complacency]: I already know how. [sternly]: This is a pretty sophisticated question, so please read it carefully and answer thoughtfully. Pavlov has about enough dogs in his kennel. Thunder and lightning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from which I removed meta information, reducing it to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why this is not a duplicate question:&lt;/strong&gt; This is not about the general rules about articles; nor am I asking for instructions on how to use them; I already know how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is justified by the policy explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Help on editing&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, &lt;strong&gt;relevant,&lt;/strong&gt; and up-to-date&quot; (my emphasis). Nothing I removed changed the question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an edit war where you added your text back, along with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not edit my stuff.&lt;/strong&gt; I must say that editing texts into which this published author has invested some of his time, energy, and thought, is a highly presumptuous practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and I removed that as well, because it was completely irrelevant to the question. I then locked the post for a couple of hours to discourage further adverse changes. &lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; is the only action specific to moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is well made in the Help that &quot;if you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.&quot; As far as editing goes, a trusted user has at least 2000 rep points: there are currently 435 such users, including me, and any of them could have made the changes I did. With under 2000 rep, edits are suggested and reviewed by users who do have the privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be succinct, contain sufficient information to enable them to be answered &amp;mdash; including reasons against being a duplicate, if that's relevant &amp;mdash; and &lt;strong&gt;nothing&lt;/strong&gt; which is not relevant to the problem at hand. &quot;Proudly and with a touch of complancency&quot; is not relevant; whether you think your question is sophisticated or not is not relevant; asking people to read it and answer carefully is superfluous (that's the whole point of the site); and Pavlov, thunder and lightning have no connection to whether Buckingham Palace requires an article or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep questions on topic and correctly spelled and tagged, and write clear, complete &lt;strong&gt;and corroborated&lt;/strong&gt; answers, and you should find your purple prose remains unmolested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T15:41:22.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-06T04:45:33.320" Score="4" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309426/non-community-wiki-answers-and-grammar?noredirect=1#comment266564_309426&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on the stack overflow meta page regarding what I found to be confusing grammar in some stack overflow phrases, and suggested that it be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pushback where I posted the original suggestion implied that I was wrong, or at least that the change wasn't worth being made.  I was pretty sure I was right, but I'm no expert, so I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7280/non-community-wiki-answers-or-non-community-wiki-answers?noredirect=1#comment28809_7280&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on English Language &amp;amp; Usage.  It looks to me to be a pretty clear question about English grammar rules.  That question was migrated to the English Language &amp;amp; Usage meta.  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118668" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:39:08.123" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T17:58:58.943" Title="why was this off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7283" CreationDate="2015-11-06T17:58:58.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that your post belongs on main and not Meta. I'm not sure why it migrated. The delay was because I wasn't sure how to send it back without deleting it, but I think I figured that out. Please comment on this answer if you discover something wrong about the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T17:58:58.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3213" CreationDate="2015-11-08T01:05:47.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Good questions&quot; do not &quot;help boost the impression of the site&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Good&lt;/em&gt; questions are usually left with few votes because the average user has no idea what is being discussed. Those are my preferred type of questions to answer. I actually don't like getting +10 every five minutes. That would mean I answered a 'stupid' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to boost impressions, &quot;good&quot; questions need a way of being 'pinned' to a side bar, or something, like &lt;em&gt;featured&lt;/em&gt; (I've no idea how or if this should be done; some new kind of bounty? mod votes? high-rep only votes? sounds elitist to me...). Votes from the masses aren't ever going to make that* happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*good content rises to the top, etc. - (&lt;em&gt;Popular&lt;/em&gt; content rises to the top.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A high rep user's job is to edit or suggest improvements to turn crap questions into gold mines.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6683/how-can-we-encourage-more-folks-to-edit&quot;&gt;How can we encourage more folks to edit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Don't forget about bounties. More often than not, random new good questions come from new users who abandon them. Then no one wants to put the time in, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233975/are-names-of-diseases-ever-capitalized&quot;&gt;unless you bounty it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties are our &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken out of context from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71603/why-no-tag-badges-for-good-questions&quot;&gt;Why no tag Badges for Good questions?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This would cause a great increase in questions because of people trying to [do this], which simply prevents people who legitimately need their question answered from getting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T20:50:23.527" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-08T15:44:23.210" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;My writing skill in English is very weak. I often write sentences that sometimes include wrong words, therefore sound unnatural, awkward, or they are grammatically wrong. I found that this website is very helpful in learning English. Everyday I want to write something in English in this website to have corrected. When I will know what are the correct forms of my written sentences, I will be able to improve my skill ness. Are there any option/chance in this site in which I can write something to have corrected? If there are, please tell how to submit ones writing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112999" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T02:39:59.310" Title="Are there any option/chance in this website in which I can write everything to have corrected?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2015-11-09T02:39:59.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;General proofreading requests are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;explicitly not acceptable&lt;/a&gt; here, as a longstanding community guideline; see &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/383/can-i-ask-the-community-to-help-me-find-errors-in-a-text-sentence&quot;&gt;Can I ask the community to help me find errors in a text/sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/512/does-this-sort-of-question-qualify-as-proofreading&quot;&gt;Does this sort of question qualify as proofreading?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and also &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/327&quot;&gt;How about allowing people to post entire compositions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, general proofreading requests are not accepted at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners SE&lt;/a&gt;, nor at &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers SE&lt;/a&gt;. I would not expect them to be accepted anywhere on StackExchange, as it is ill-suited to a format where only one answer is can be deemed the best, and you can only vote on an entire answer, and not components of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good proofreading is time-consuming, and what is &quot;good&quot; or &quot;correct&quot; or &quot;polite&quot; and so on is dependent on many factors, from the type of communication to the global locale to the tone of the message. A great deal of context is required. As such, a good proofreading request would be too specific to be of much help to any future visitors, and even then subject to opinion, or require too lengthy a response to be suitable. The proofreading requests we do see, by and large, are not good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others have suggested finding a language partner through any of a number of other sites, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lang-8.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lang-8.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://livemocha.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Livemocha&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.italki.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;italki&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T02:39:59.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T10:26:22.903" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any limitation to the number of posts for a certain period? Suppose, I want to ask more than six questions within one hour. Does this act go against the rules of this website? What is the highest number of questions which can be asked within one hour?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112999" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-11-09T12:56:37.780" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T12:56:37.780" Title="Are there any limitation to the number of posts for a certain period?" Tags="|support|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7289" CreationDate="2015-11-09T10:42:04.807" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5048/do-we-want-to-enable-post-limits&quot;&gt;a limit&lt;/a&gt;, but it's based on a number of days not hours: six questions per day, and fifty per month. So you would be allowed to submit six questions in an hour, but that would use up your allowance for the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, six questions an hour should be infeasible, unless they are of poor quality. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed/5043#5043&quot;&gt;an answer about question quality and research&lt;/a&gt;. Even six questions a day should be pushing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T11:40:28.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T13:24:09.137" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, there was this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/285965/why-is-women-pronounced-as-wimin&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asking why &quot;women&quot; is pronounced as [wimin]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4708/why-is-women-pronounced-the-way-it-is&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt; and the answer is there. The linked question looks very similar (almost identical) to the new post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It prompted me to ask these questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks why the &quot;eu&quot; and &quot;u&quot; sound the same for &quot;beauty&quot; and &quot;cute&quot;, or why the &quot;c&quot; sound is pronunced as &quot;k&quot; in &quot;cute&quot;, is it an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on-topic question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? There could be millions of questions for English pronunciation and they could be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no less different&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from &quot;woman&quot; vs. &quot;women&quot;. I mean when it comes to pronunciation, that's the way it is and it has evolved to be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe there might have been discussion about this, but is it a bad idea to close questions about &quot;pronunciation&quot; as we do about &quot;proof-reading&quot;? I believe some &quot;proof-reading questions&quot; (previously closed for the reason) have much more to learn about &quot;EL&amp;amp;U&quot; than &quot;pronunciation questions&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any duplicate. I will delete this question if it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T06:28:41.340" Title="Questions about Pronunciation Vs. Proofreading" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6863" CreationDate="2015-11-10T01:06:00.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to &lt;strong&gt;thank&lt;/strong&gt; this community and its members, is by contributing back, and &lt;strong&gt;helping&lt;/strong&gt; making it what it was for you, for &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt;!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;upvote&lt;/strong&gt; what you find &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt;, so &lt;strong&gt;others&lt;/strong&gt; can find it too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvote what you find &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt;, so the OP's are pushed to &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;clarify&lt;/strong&gt; their post. Take it easy on this one!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;share&lt;/strong&gt; your knowledge, either by creating &lt;strong&gt;Q &amp;amp; A&lt;/strong&gt; styled posts, or by answering others.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Research&lt;/strong&gt; before asking a &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; question, and show what you &lt;strong&gt;found &amp;amp; tried&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On behalf of SE: You are very welcome! Keep up the good work!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user146563" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T01:06:00.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7292" CreationDate="2015-11-10T05:16:59.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Disclosure: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; is my one and only favorite tag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may have misunderstood your point 2, but my answer is a definite NO:&#xA;I don't think all questions about pronunciation should be made off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some useful divisions I see for questions (the titles are simplifications and not all questions use this exact wording):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Correct me&quot; questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Andrew Leach said, one important point against proof-reading questions is that they are very specifically tailored to the questioner, so the answer is not as helpful to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equivalent in pronunciation seems to me to be questions of the format &quot;Listen to a recording of what I'm saying and give me feedback about my pronunciation.&quot; We have received some questions like that, but I don't think they are good questions for this site. (I don't know exactly what close reason they would fall under, but that's immaterial.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Who,&quot; &quot;What,&quot; and &quot;Where&quot; questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other types of pronunciation question. One type, &quot;how is X pronounced?&quot; is basically equivalent to questions like &quot;What does X mean?&quot; and &quot;How can I use X?&quot; This kind of question seems clearly on-topic to me, at least in terms of subject matter. Questions like this are often &#xA;&quot;off-topic&quot; in practice, but only if they show lack of research (most commonly, if the asker didn't consult a dictionary). Often additional useful questions can be asked, such as &quot;where do people use this pronunciation?&quot; or &quot;Who uses this pronunciation?&quot; Again, these questions parallel questions about vocabulary or grammatical structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some high-voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; questions that I find interesting in this category:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/what-is-the-correct-way-to-pronounce-router&quot;&gt;What is the correct way to pronounce &amp;#39;router&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/88115/how-are-marry-merry-and-mary-pronounced-differently&quot;&gt;How are &amp;#39;marry&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;merry&amp;#39;, and &amp;#39;Mary&amp;#39; pronounced differently?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12980/how-to-pronounce-tuple&quot;&gt;How to pronounce &amp;quot;tuple&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Why&quot; questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example question about &quot;women&quot; is a third type of question: a &quot;why&quot; question. In my opinion, these kinds of questions are frequently problematic no matter what the subject matter (and they can be asked about grammar or word usage just as well as pronunciation). They can always be answered &quot;just because,&quot; or &quot;it is what it is,&quot; but as medica notes, that's not a valuable answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, we can describe the historical steps that led to the current situation; this is sometimes what the original poster wants to know (making it more of a &quot;how&quot; question). I really like learning about the historical development of pronunciation. I understand that this topic is not interesting to everybody, but I think it is legitimate information about the English language, and therefore on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, we can describe the current situation by reference to other analogous examples from the modern language. This also seems on-topic to me: there is useful information about the English language in in these answers. Sometimes they are a bit subjective, but it can be the &quot;good kind&quot; of subjective rather than the bad kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some high-voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; questions that I find interesting in the &quot;why&quot; category:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202355/why-is-i-in-milk-pronounced-differently-from-i-in-find&quot;&gt;Why is ‘i’ in milk pronounced differently from ‘i’ in find?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10036/why-is-primer-pronounced-with-a-short-i-sound&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;primer&amp;quot; pronounced with a short &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33434/why-are-sugar-and-sure-pronounced-with-an-sh&quot;&gt;Why are &amp;quot;sugar&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sure&amp;quot; pronounced with an SH?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/102306/why-is-worthy-pronounced-with-a-%C3%B0i-unlike-healthy-wealthy-and-stealthy&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;#39;worthy&amp;#39; pronounced with a /&amp;#240;i/ unlike &amp;#39;healthy&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;wealthy&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;stealthy&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24318/the-pronunciation-of-buoy&quot;&gt;The pronunciation of buoy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100504/why-is-the-l-silent-when-pronouncing-salmon&quot;&gt;Why is the “L” silent when pronouncing “salmon”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20941/why-is-the-a-in-cocoa-silent&quot;&gt;Why is the &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;cocoa&amp;quot; silent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's completely unclear which of these the questioner wants, or if the original post shows no evidence of research or motivation for the question, I think it can be appropriate to close &quot;why&quot; questions. In my opinion, at least one thing that can be said for &quot;why&quot; questions about pronunciation is that it's often quite a bit harder to find the answer than for &quot;what&quot; questions (since most dictionaries list what the pronunciation of a word is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T06:28:41.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7298" CreationDate="2015-11-10T08:47:57.940" Score="25" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want it back.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am referring to an answer which was posted on my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244408/did-the-english-call-a-fruit-open%C3%A6rs-for-700-years&quot;&gt;Did the English call a fruit “open&amp;#230;rs” for 700 years?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt; Users with 10,000 rep are able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;view deleted posts&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The owner, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/118519/pisces?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Pisces&lt;/a&gt;, deleted his/her post on October 23 at 14:43. A post which I had awarded 350 bounty points, I therefore claim rightful possession. That answer belongs to &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, I &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; it, I “paid” for it, so I &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; it back! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously though, I would like the post to be undeleted. Apart from not understanding why the owner deleted a perfectly good post, which had also earned 8 upvotes, I would also like to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I wasn't alerted. Inexplicable deletions of &quot;good&quot; answers (I don't care about the crappy ones) harm not only the overall quality of questions posted, but, in my opinion, harm EL&amp;amp;U as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I would like to be informed/notified whenever a user deletes a post from one of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; questions. The user is free to delete his or her post, but at the very least I am warned, and I might be in time to dissuade them from carrying out this action. Another excellent reason why this site would benefit from having &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3985/feature-request-private-messaging&quot;&gt;personal/private messages&lt;/a&gt; system included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(pause.... she remembers that user Pisces had also posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/241766/how-did-lobster-mean-two-different-species/242799#242799&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; on a different question of hers, she checks....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want that answer back as well, please.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Pisces has deleted all but one of their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before users start posting answers stating I don't &quot;own&quot; Pisces posts, I realize this. But I'm not entirely clear as to who owns our posts. Is it SE, the community, or the original posters? There's some mumbo-jumbo legalese posted here, for those curious to know more: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18221/who-owns-the-content-i-post&quot;&gt;Who owns the content I post?&lt;/a&gt; and here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons, Legal Code&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wider Implication&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my question deserves attention because when good answers are deleted from any site, that site is immeasurably poorer. What for instance would happen if &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet&quot;&gt;Jon Skeet&lt;/a&gt; were to delete ALL his answers from SE Overflow? Could he do that? He is the &quot;owner&quot; of his posts, or isn't he? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE (sort of...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in the archives of Meta StackExchange brought little comfort. A question posted seven years ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7635/what-to-do-when-a-user-deletes-all-their-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;What to do when a user deletes all their questions and answers?&lt;/a&gt; One answerer suggests that users either do nothing or hunt for the deleted answers, and save them on their own computers. Two users suggests that a deleted post can be reversed and be made a Community Wiki or anonymous. In a second SE meta post,&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37720/is-it-ok-for-a-user-to-remove-all-their-contributions?lq=1&quot;&gt;Is it ok for a user to remove *all* their contributions?&lt;/a&gt;  @Rosinante says  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Last time this happened, the defacement was all reverted and then some negotiation between the management and the user ensued. The site makes it clear that people who type stuff in here are granting a license, and so defacing your own stuff is no better than defacing anyone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No mention of warning the OP or a bounty benefactor when a user deletes their answer  that has been awarded a bounty. In my case, I have offered two bounties in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T20:24:18.833" Title="I &quot;really&quot; want a deleted post back" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7297" CreationDate="2015-11-10T14:36:03.913" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for bringing this to our attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excessive self-deletion is a big red flag for us that a user needs to be contacted. It can mean a variety of things--from rage-quitting to severe depression--and we take it very seriously, not just because it means losing valuable content but also because it can also mean losing a valuable user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as deleted content, posts on StackExchange are viewed as community property. So no, this isn't really &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; content, but once something is posted, it does belong to the EL&amp;amp;U community, to all of us. This is evident in our process: we communally edit, offer bounties on posts that we didn't write, and vote on content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we respect OP's decision to delete their own content in most cases, as the primary case for deletion is downvoted or zero/low voted content. In this case, it is often clear that the community supports removing the content because it is not helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if a post is highly upvoted and especially if it has been awarded a bounty, this is clear evidence that the community finds it useful. In those cases, we strongly support undeleting content. Therefore, for the two posts that meet this criteria, those answers have been undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who is considering deleting upvoted content for whatever reason, I would encourage you to contact the mods and ask for your account to be disassociated with the content instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as your feature request to be notified when answers are deleted from your posts, I think that's a question better posted on Meta.SE, since that would be a Stack-wide feature and not a local one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T14:36:03.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T21:12:08.257" Score="-10" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/286192/heres-one-for-the-brits-i-guess&quot;&gt;Here's one for the Brits I guess&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was edited five times, beginning with the title. It is now unrecognizable; a whole different question. Not my question; not anymore. I asked whether &quot;blag&quot; was the British equivalent of &quot;chutzpa,&quot; because I remembered reading something to that effect in a magazine. Some ignorant idiot thought it was the same as asking &quot;What is the British equivalent of &quot;chutzpah.&quot;  The entire text of my question was then re-written by the same idiot. I couldn't roll back everything: too many edits. I got seriously confused. Now the question is a garbled mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this, some kind of Orwellian universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I brought up this issue here earlier. Some people commented. I replied. Now more than half the comments and replies are gone. Someone figured that deleting something other people wrote was a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left this board once before because of similar issues, but was asked to come back by a good person. I'm leaving again, and I'm not coming back this time. I'm not a masochist. I've dealt with all kinds of editors in my career, but I don't remember it ever being this surreal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T23:02:08.867" Title="I really don't see why ignorant idiots should be allowed to edit my posts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2015-11-11T08:34:56.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7257" CreationDate="2015-11-10T22:34:35.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good place to ask that sort of question is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;English.SE chat&lt;/a&gt;. While it may not be on topic for English.SE &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, the chat room is open to just about anything and you might well find someone there who can help you with the research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T22:34:35.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7299" CreationDate="2015-11-10T23:02:08.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only major edits to the question have been by your good self, apart from a member of the community removing your rant about the duplicate closure. I attempted to give some advice about that, in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of ranting, could you actually explain why the linked question is not a duplicate? That is, in terms of &quot;This question asked A, but the duplicate answers B&quot; with as many examples of A and B as possible? You might also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/203362/18696&quot;&gt;one of the answers&lt;/a&gt; which references a British English magazine and implies that a British word for &lt;em&gt;chutzpah&lt;/em&gt; is, in fact, &lt;em&gt;chutzpah.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You chose to ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, the title of the question should be descriptive of the content. It's used in pattern matching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags must be relevant. They're used too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral and may be deleted at any time. Two users' flags or one moderator's vote are sufficient to remove them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record too, although I was &quot;the idiot&quot; who made the title more descriptive, I certainly did not re-write the entire text of your question. It's not the done thing to call people idiots, and it's certainly not good to accuse people of something which is demonstrably false &amp;mdash; the edit history is available for all to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7282/18696&quot;&gt;an answer to a previous question&lt;/a&gt;, any post may be edited by any member of the community with sufficient rep points. If you are so sensitive about editing, then perhaps the Stack Exchange model is not for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a little intriguing is that there is an automatic flag against &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; question because the system has detected &lt;strong&gt;your own&lt;/strong&gt; editing as a rollback war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T23:02:08.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-11T15:54:33.290" Score="-9" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this site belongs to &quot;Native Speakers, Etymologists, and Serious Language Enthusiasts&quot;. I belong to the third one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a very interesting question which received 18 upvotes (including mine) and has this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/286450/are-the-dual-transportation-and-learning-meanings-of-both-coach-and-train-ju&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind at all how many upvotes this answer receives. However, I do mind its qualities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the answer has the standard quality required by &quot;Native Speakers, Etymologists, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Serious Language Enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a lot of flaws and I consider it a pure &quot;fabrication&quot; which has nothing to do with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of &quot;Train&quot; and &quot;Coach&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had been a moderator, I would have warned him the minute I saw the answer (which I did as a member). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;first comment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that I made after the answer was posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Rathony: Your link about &quot;coach&quot; explicitly reads &quot;Meaning &quot;to prepare (someone) for an exam&quot; is from 1849. Related: Coached; coaching&quot; which is different from &quot;help some with an activity&quot;. What activity? Was it used in 1849 and never used after 1849?  (It was commented around 5-10 minutes after the answer was posted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am copying a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;train&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Rathony: &quot;The downvote is not mine,&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: As there was only one downvote at the time. I just wanted to tell him I didn't downvote it yet as some members do sometimes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Mitch. &quot;The downvote is uninformed. Nice etymological exposition.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Rathony: Nice etymological exposition doesn't put what was written in the plain text. Really? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Mitch: &quot; I don't get your objection. Or rather I can't tell if you have an exception except that you say 'really?'. Can you elaborate?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here on, @Mitch's comments are omitted. The followings are all mine: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Rathony: The answer states that &quot;coach* was used in 1849 in the modern sense of &quot;help someone with an activity&quot;. The online dictionary (which is available to anybody) states that &quot;coach&quot; meant as a verb &quot;to prepare (someone) for an exam&quot; from 1849. The year matches, but the explanation doesn't. If it was made up by him, he should explain on what basis he made up &quot;help someone with an activity&quot;. What activity? Baseball was there in 1849? Tennis? You can call many things an activity. There is no explanation on that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the dictionary states &quot;coach&quot; as a noun started to mean a tutor who &quot;carries&quot; a student through an exam; athletic sense is 1861. Then, what activity? Both America and Britain started to use &quot;coach&quot; as a verb and noun related with &quot;study&quot;. Not an activity. Then, where are all others who were busy criticizing others' answers and questions? Are you guys giving him a special treatment? No comment at all about its poor contents? Come on, Mitch. You have to be neutral, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He fabricated a story with &quot;help someone with an activity&quot;. Isn't it a fabrication? If &quot;helping someone with an exam&quot; is the only activity on the face of the Earth, it is not a fabrication. (I changed the word. Thanks) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I don't get your point. It took 31 years for Britain to extend the meaning to athletic sense. If you think 31 years in Etymology is nothing, fine. I don't agree with you as we are not sure what kind of athletic sense it took in 1861? What usage? What sports? Is there any evidence to prove it? Was there any exam for sports? (I could suspect there might have been). I will leave it there, if you don't mind. Nice conversing with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have deleted this answer an hour ago If I had posted it. I am sure you know what I mean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still no comment from any moderator. I would like to know (1) why there is no comment from them, (2) if the answer is acceptable to the EL&amp;amp;U standards, and (3) if acceptable to EL&amp;amp;U standards, I would like to have your opinion on the reason why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T19:29:19.910" Title="Let's discuss this answer about &quot;Etymology&quot; seriously" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7303" CreationDate="2015-11-11T16:13:54.410" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators are not required to judge the correctness of answers. In the most egregious and obvious cases, we will delete incorrect answers, but as none of us are experts everywhere, we will generally tread on the side of caution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to your questions,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no guarantee that a moderator will view a post unless it is flagged, and the post has not been so flagged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2/3. The answer is not spam or offensive, and is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T16:13:54.410" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7307" CreationDate="2015-11-12T15:43:54.843" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pretty normal on forums to have lists of moderators. However, after looking around I haven't found a list for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I just looking in the wrong place or doesn't such a list exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not why not? It's sometimes useful to be able to contact moderators. (I have a reason to at the moment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T16:17:52.613" Title="Is there a list of moderators and diamond moderators for ELU? If so where is it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7306" CreationDate="2015-11-12T16:17:52.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; via the &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; dropdown at the top of any page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvmsf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvmsf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There among other categories you will find &amp;quot;Reputation &amp;amp; Moderation&amp;quot;, with the very first question getting you &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;one step closer to your goal&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RV4z7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RV4z7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On that page by scrolling to the very bottom you will find the links you seek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/urK1W.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/urK1W.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here they are in plain text for your convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Find out who the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderators for this site&lt;/a&gt; are, or explore a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/moderators&quot;&gt;moderators on all Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can skip all that nonsense and just go directly to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;Users&lt;/a&gt; (right under the site title) → &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; (tab in the upper right corner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T16:17:52.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-13T11:58:22.037" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a sister site, ELL, as far as I understand. (So, to some extent, do other sites, such as Theoretical Computer Science (Computational Science) or MathOverflow (Mathematics). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether we would consider a question &quot;duplicate&quot; at all if the criteria we normally apply to &quot;duplicate&quot; were met by a question on our sister site. Because of the considerable overlap in scope, that can easily happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may pertain to a site policy -- how strong the family bond is between EL&amp;amp;U and the rest of the StackExchange family, and namely, whether we want to be comprehensive by ourselves in terms of covering individual topics, or whether we feel &lt;em&gt;it is sufficient that StackExchange is so&lt;/em&gt;. I would like to learn about the policy. (As far as I know, ELL was born out at least partly out of the needs of this site.) Also, there might be technical issues, of course. I'd be interested in those, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T12:57:09.627" Title="What if the dupe is on another site?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7308" CreationDate="2015-11-13T12:57:09.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the question is answered on another site, I shall take &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/256035/184638&quot;&gt;the advice in that answer&lt;/a&gt; and its comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Take the relevant parts of the answer from the other site and summarise/quote in an answer exactly as you would for any other internet reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions that are on-topic on both stacks, not asked by the same person, and already have a good answer on the other stack:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Link to the other question with a community wiki answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, it could be good to include the full text of the post in block quotes (using &gt;) in case it gets deleted, and linking to the other author's profile on the other stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Allows the question asker to get the information they are looking for&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Has no risk of receiving reputation for another's work&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Prevents any worries of plagiarism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the best compromise solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/200235/durron597&quot;&gt;durron597&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, as long as you quote and reference properly, I don't really see a problem with not making this community wiki. Afterall you usually get reputation for quoting and summarizing other sources from the internet anyway, so why not another SE answer. If the answer's good give that guy his rep, CW is IMHO counter to the workings of SE in those case. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/162011/christian-rau&quot;&gt;Christian Rau&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't have a problem with extending the &quot;Duplicate&quot; closure reason to other Stack Exchange sites, but as that isn't likely to happen, this seems to be a good solution which follows existing practice for information on non-SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This answer only applies to a question which, while answered elsewhere, is still on-topic on ELU.&lt;/strong&gt; Where a question is answered elsewhere because the answer is where the question is on-topic, then the question should be migrated and treated as a normal duplicate. That may even happen between ELU and ELL [in either direction], as well as a question being on-topic in both places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T12:57:09.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-15T04:30:15.470" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted my question because I needed to re-write it. I tried to upload a new one, but the site tells me it's a duplicate, showing the deleted one with an undelete button for someone who wants to vote for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I could send up a new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50925" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T04:30:15.470" Title="Is there a way to upload the corrected, new question after deleting a question because I needed to correct it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7312" CreationDate="2015-11-15T07:32:02.783" Score="4" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/287128/hard-disk-vs-hard-drive-vs-hard-disk-drive?noredirect=1#comment641201_287128&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; could work here. What's the purpose of asking a question and posting two different answers to your own question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP commented: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've added such example answers in an attempt to demonstrate this and&#xA;  help ward off closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;posting your own answers&quot; relevant to helping ward off closing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can the OP achieve by doing this? Is it even allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw an OP's answer posted to his own question a few times in the past. It was understandable at the time because those questions were not as easy as this one and could result in many different answers. But if you look at the linked question, he is posting all the possible answers. Then, what is the purpose? Just to keep the OP's record and knowledge? I don't think this site is meant to be someone's hard disk drive. I am asking specifically why this kind of behavior (asking a question and answering 2 possible answers) is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T14:49:55.927" Title="What is the purpose of posting &quot;2 answers of your own&quot; to a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7311" CreationDate="2015-11-15T11:55:39.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;On-topic-ness is not (generally) related to whether a question is answered or not, nor is it related to the number of answers, nor to who answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is poor enough to be closed because it's unclear or doesn't show any research, but someone answers anyway &amp;mdash; perhaps with a good answer &amp;mdash; then the question should be improved as well. Providing an answer in that case &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; ward off closure, because it shows that the question which &lt;strong&gt;should have been asked&lt;/strong&gt; is answerable. But if the question is not made on-topic, then the presence of answers is not necessarily going to save it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/287086/what-might-have-appalled-us-when-wed-started-our-trip-just-a-few-days-ago-no-l&quot;&gt;Here's an example&lt;/a&gt; where the edit did reprieve the question and it was re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is blatantly off-topic, such as a proof-reading request, then any answer will certainly not ward off closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering your own question is not a guarantee that the question will not be downvoted. Questions with a negative score, even if they have answers, can be removed by the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing more than one answer is allowed, although if the answers are diametrically opposed then there seems little point &amp;mdash; but there may actually be diametrically-opposed answers. A question about split infinitives, or whether &lt;em&gt;onto&lt;/em&gt; should really be two words, for example, might draw opposing answers. Each instance needs to be treated on its own merits. But answering your own question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;allowed, even encouraged&lt;/a&gt; and the system does not prevent more than one answer. I have two answers for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/42992/how-could-you-prevent-users-from-leaving-their-original-copy-in-the-photocopier&quot;&gt;a UX question about photocopiers&lt;/a&gt;, because I thought of more than one solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where an OP himself provides two different answers, what is being proposed is a beauty contest, where voters are encouraged to choose the best answer. This may seem rather unethical (because the OP gets rep for votes on the question and for votes which he can use to determine the best answer), but it's exactly the same mechanism no matter who thought of the answers &amp;mdash; like the photocopier question I answered. It just happens to be the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case in point, there may be no difference &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; between &lt;em&gt;hard disk, hard drive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hard disk drive,&lt;/em&gt; but there certainly has been. Perhaps I should answer that question. Perhaps it should be migrated to a computer hardware Stack, if there is one, as that sort of specialist domain knowledge would appear to be valuable. I'm not convinced it's actually a question about &lt;strong&gt;English,&lt;/strong&gt; and if it's not about English then it's off-topic. Answers are irrelevant to that judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T11:55:39.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7311" CreationDate="2015-11-15T22:42:15.897" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the OP on the question Rathony objects to.  Although I'm aware of &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; possible answers to the question, I don't actually know the correct answer.  That's why I thought I'd ask on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having multiple &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; answers on the same question helps avoid a closing &lt;em&gt;on the basis that one particular answer is so obviously correct&lt;/em&gt; that it's a simple answer by a reference link and therefore the question is off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Showing the presence of multiple possible answers that each seem to make sense (or be &quot;obvious&quot;) when viewed independently, but which seem to conflict with each other when viewed together, helps motivate why it's a good question to ask.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that question, Rathony commented that &quot;Good questions will attract more than 10 answers and poor ones will get nothing.&quot; While this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/391864/good-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;just not true&lt;/a&gt;, assuming good faith behind the comment uncovers an underlying view that good questions &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; multiple distinct answers, and that at least Rathony considers the number of distinct answers to be a reliable signal about whether or not a question is good. If a question is really not good, it should be closed.   Therefore, it would seem useful to demonstrate that there are multiple distinct plausible answers, or seed the possibilities of answers, to help people who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; (at some level) use this evaluation criteria in deciding whether or not to cast a close vote (regardless of whether or not that is a good evaluative criteria that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be used).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For extra clarity, the mechanism by which this is supposed to help ward off close votes is by addressing the &lt;em&gt;psychology&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reasons behind&lt;/em&gt; some close votes.  It's not trying to address any &lt;em&gt;technological&lt;/em&gt; limit or catch in the platform. It's an effort to gently persuade people who use a criteria like &quot;has a single obvious answer&quot; or a criteria similar to the one quoted from Rathony (&quot;Good questions will attract more than 10 answers and poor ones will get nothing&quot;) that the question is a good question which has multiple different and plausible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115786" LastEditorUserId="115786" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T14:49:55.927" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T14:49:55.927" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2132" CreationDate="2015-11-16T08:56:03.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Comparison of ELU.SE and Wiktionary policies&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes and opinions on StackExchange are definitely not the basis for any edit to Wiktionary, just like the mere existence of a definition on Wiktionary does not make said definition a good answer on StackExchange. So, in principle, no circularity is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Wiktionary and StackExchange have matching goals: respectively they aim to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Entry_layout#References&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;based on references&lt;/a&gt; (plus &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Neutral_point_of_view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NPOV&lt;/a&gt;) and objective. They might differ in how lax their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Criteria_for_inclusion#General_rule&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;criteria for inclusion and attestation&lt;/a&gt;, but if there is a severe mismatch in definitions and so on then something probably went wrong on either site. So, in case of conflict between Wiktionary and SE entries, it's fine to use the best curated of the two to improve the other. (Here I linked the English Wiktionary policies, but the principles are the same on all Wiktionary subdomains.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;StackExchange process for mistakes found via Wiktionary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find a mistaken StackExchange post, you can add a correct answer, mentioning your sources, and &lt;strong&gt;hope to eventually get enough popularity and upvotes&lt;/strong&gt; to reach the top. Do kindly comment the other answers to point out why you think they are wrong, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Wiktionary process for mistakes found via StackExchange&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find a mistaken or otherwise improvable Wiktionary entry, do &lt;strong&gt;edit it yourself, or encourage to edit it, in compliance with the Wiktionary policies&lt;/strong&gt; above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure to reference your sources and explain your rational arguments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the matter is particularly complex or controversial, remember to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;history page&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;talk page&lt;/a&gt; to find out why the entry was that way and to explain your reasons. The more solid your references, the bigger the changes you can make. Wiktionary consensus is based on rationality and discussion, not votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do link the StackExchange post for context and transparency, especially if there is more content into it than the source you mentioned; but add such links in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;edit summary&lt;/a&gt; or talk page, because StackEchange is not a valid source in itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Legal obligations when using Wiktionary on StackExchange or vice versa&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you quote or reference Wiktionary material, &lt;strong&gt;make sure to link the Wiktionary entry&lt;/strong&gt;, both for attribution and so that the user can reach the most recent and better version (the entry might even be improved by you or other StackEchange users, per above!). I'd even argue that a link is more informative than a quotation, given Wiktionary revisions are going to stay there forever and no information loss is possible, while quotations can quickly get outdated. An exception is when the Wiktionary entry is very big or in rapid flux, making it hard to understand what part of it you are referring to (think of the entries with dozens of meanings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike StackExchange, Wikimedia is very strict on copyright and copyleft, to ensure all entries are perfectly legal, so this is important; however the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use#7c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;terms of use&lt;/a&gt; are very reasonable, so it's easy to comply. If you add to Wiktionary an original definition or other copyrightable material from a StackExchange post, &lt;strong&gt;link the StackExchange post in the edit summary&lt;/strong&gt; as I suggested above is also required for copyright attribution; you should also &lt;strong&gt;mention the cc by-sa 3.0 license&lt;/strong&gt;, which is the same Wiktionary uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130551" LastEditorUserId="130551" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T17:57:05.620" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T17:57:05.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="946" CreationDate="2015-11-16T09:12:41.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mgkrebbs said, WordNet is mainly for machines, not for humans. Sources which blindly include its content as definitions, like those you mentioned, are clearly untrustworthy and should never be used as references. These sites usually only exist to attract clicks from search engines, not to provide real content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, Wiktionary is an open data and free culture copyleft dictionary made and manually curated by humans. There is some automatic maintenance of various kinds and some public domain resources were largely imported, such as as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Webster&amp;#39;s_Dictionary,_1913&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webster's Dictionary, 1913&lt;/a&gt;, but these are actual dictionaries too. Hence, Wiktionary's quality is generally superior, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/September#Wiktionary_special&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proven by ample research&lt;/a&gt;, and it's generally fine to use it as learning resource, albeit with a grain of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7314/130551&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7314/130551&lt;/a&gt; for details on how StackExchange and Wiktionary entries can help each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130551" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T09:12:41.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2015-11-16T09:43:10.100" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer to a question is very straightforward and easy, as long as the question doesn't get closed, sometimes a link is the best possible answer. Especially if the resource preserves history of all revisions and doesn't delete anything of what you are referencing now and in this moment, like Wiktionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, part of the purpose of this site is to teach how to use references and so on; in this sense, going to Wiktionary before and after StackExchange, both for consultation and editing, is a direct continuation of this site's purpose and activity. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7314/130551&quot;&gt;my answer on how to reciprocally improve StackExchange and Wiktionary entries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130551" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T09:43:10.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2015-11-16T09:54:24.967" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the question &quot;What should we do about postings that lack proper attribution?&quot;: when the source is Wiktionary, the good news is that the post can easily be edited to respect copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally speaking, a link to Wiktionary is sufficient attribution, because all authors are either stated in references or retrievable from the page history. Additionally, Wiktionary preserves all revisions, hence the link is never going to get outdated though it might become a bit tedious to retrieve the exact version the author was referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in order to make the post compliant with copyright, just edit the ELU post to add a link to any quoted Wiktionary entry and mention the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permalink is not required, though it can be helpful to understand any changes. If one wants to avoid any copyright concern, a mere link to a Wiktionary entry is totally fine, unless the material referenced is hard to find in the entry or the post is discussing/suggesting the need to edit the entry, in which case a quotation of the (current) relevant passage is most handy. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7314/130551&quot;&gt;my answer on how StackExchange and Wiktionary help each other&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more detailed information, refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Terms_of_use#7g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of use&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; (sections 4(a), 4(c)), which are the only legally binding documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130551" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T08:35:00.403" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7320" CreationDate="2015-11-17T02:58:46.873" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/287209/129806&quot;&gt;“She ran… , her nose pressed against the glass” Are the actions simultaneous or consecutive?&lt;/a&gt;.  Edwin Ashworth (correctly in my opinion) asked the OP for surrounding sentences.  I also asked for the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed many people post sentences asking if they are &quot;correct.&quot;  Sometimes they cite a source, but most of the time, the OP does not cite a source and people don't generally ask for one.  Then the guessing and hypothesizing start.  I've noticed in many of these questions the OP doesn't respond to requests for further information, or doesn't mark an answer as &quot;best answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that answering whether or not a sentence is correct or not is largely dependent on seeing where it came from.  It is more likely that if the sentence came from The New York Times or The Economist or even Harry Potter it is more likely to be &quot;correct.&quot;  If not, we can see that there is a typo that clarifies things or the surrounding context helps see that the sentence is &quot;correct&quot; but could have / should have been written in another way, or perhaps the sentence is an example of BrE / AmE / IE, etc.  Sentences that are made up or invented (in my opinion) stand a greater chance of being ungrammatical or illogical.  In the example I cited above, if the OP answers, &quot;I just made it up.&quot; then it is easy to answer by explaining &quot;Sentences in English should have this construction...&quot;  If we don't know the source, then people need to make an assumption that it did come from a source and the answers will have a &quot;justification&quot; feel or will try to figure out what the original writer of the sentence meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that we should ask for sources.  If one can't be provided, I feel that is OK but it must be stated in the question that &quot;This sentence is invented.&quot;  The sentence could have been invented because the person is reading a grammar book and wants to know if their invented sentence complies with what they were learning.  Answers to these kind of posts are valuable because they provide help to others who may be thinking the same thing...usually questions about certain grammar points are common.  For example present perfect, semicolons, or the recent question about past progressive and the use of &quot;when.&quot;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/287484/129806&quot;&gt;past progressive with dependent clause -- dependent clause types in the face of ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we be asking  for sources?  Should a question be closed if, after a reasonable amount of time, the OP can't provide a source or explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T07:10:36.230" Title="Citing sources of sentences" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7318" CreationDate="2015-11-17T06:51:28.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do ask for context. I have done so hundreds of times, and I'm far from the most productive reviewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've decided it's a waste of time. Perhaps one in fifty new posters ever even replies to my comments, perhaps one in a hundred makes the suggested improvements. It's much more productive simply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/287565/what-does-the-phrase-spread-crossing-mean&quot;&gt;track down the source and insert it my own damn self&lt;/a&gt;, and the same goes for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/278886/can-we-pronounce-the-th-sound-as-a-d/278946#278946&quot;&gt;adding references to bad answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T06:51:28.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7318" CreationDate="2015-11-17T07:05:27.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand your desire for more information. I'm sure there are a lot of things I'm overlooking in this answer. However... no one is forced to answer a question they feel is inadequate. If you think a question is deficient, you have a number of options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment (if they don't respond, you tried)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google the sentence for a source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Down vote (with or without a comment)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;close vote if you have sufficient rep (Is it unclear? Is there lack of research? Custom option? Some of the latter are quite amusing.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Skip the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can't do for the most part, though, is tell other users if they should or shouldn't answer. It won't work, because there are too many users on this site, and no matter what you want to impose on them, new users ignorant of your wishes will answer it anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we be asking for sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly can ask for sources or context. It doesn't mean you'll get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should a question be closed if, after a reasonable amount of time, the OP can't provide a source or explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you have the option to walk away, that strikes me as somewhat authoritarian. It also feels to me that you might change your answer based on the source. The New York times once wrote that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/215000/58761&quot;&gt;an author was married to her dog&lt;/a&gt;. That it was the NYT didn't make it more likely to be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI, Googling for a source is exceedingly easy to do (copy, paste adding quotation marks, et violà!) It gives me a source 99.999% of the time (top hit). I often edit in the source and the context by doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to get an entire community to change their behavior because you feel something is missing is not going to work, especially when it's an interesting (and amusing) question, great answers are being given, and new users who don't know the site etiquette will constantly break it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;P.S. thanks for asking this question; I totally missed out on the fun, and you called it to my attention.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T07:10:36.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7323" CreationDate="2015-11-17T08:55:23.633" Score="1" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an unwritten rule that prevents a mod from advising an OP that they had better edit their question/answer because their post risks being &lt;strong&gt;permanently deleted&lt;/strong&gt;? Is there some rule of conduct that says a mod  cannot explain to an OP &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a post risks deletion &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; it is deleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there was a link attached to the now-deleted answer on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/286613/why-is-toast-uncountable&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. And the reasons for the deletion  by &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; mod is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why was my answer deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;commentary on the question or other answers&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;asking another, different question &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“thanks!” or “me too!” responses  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;exact duplicates of other answers  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;barely more than a link to an external site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not even a partial answer to the actual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you wish to improve an existing answer, click the edit link beneath it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the irony is that I cannot do anything to improve it, because it was deleted by a mod. It's gone. I have the 10k rep to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the phantasmagoric post, but I cannot do anything about it. For example, I cannot vote to un-delete it. I cannot ask fellow members on the site to reopen it either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the OP who flagged several &quot;obsolete&quot; comments for deletion because her gut feeling told her that the train of comments was getting too long. I am the OP (read &lt;em&gt;sod&lt;/em&gt;) who posted the question, but was not forewarned that all the comments (80% on-topic with the rest being either cheeky or funny) were going to be wiped out. And indeed they were, shifted to a nursing home by a different mod.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the OP who pleaded with two users to post their comments as answers, because  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;although amusing and &quot;nerdy&quot;, they were relevant. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they were said in plain English, which I'm partial to   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they were both heavily upvoted by visitors.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those comments have gone to a chat room. Who visits those abandoned chambers? The comments might as well be in limbo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I retain myself to be a reasonable person, the fifty-year-milestone is fast approaching and yet,  I'm treated as a child. Things have to be done behind my back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Talk to me&lt;/strong&gt;. Leave a comment, &lt;strong&gt;give me the opportunity to improve the post&lt;/strong&gt; AND to undelete it. If three users downvoted a post because they thought it &quot;didn't answer the question&quot; it meant they didn't understand my aim, and that was my fault; however, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/287102/44619&quot;&gt;CW post&lt;/a&gt; contains excellent links, dictionary entries, and present-day e-magazine articles.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question also touches on the role, the authority and responsibility a mod has; it also hints at the unilateral decisions they sometimes make. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite often a single mod will decide to put on hold a question that is off-topic, as defined in the Help pages, or unanswerable for any reason; this temporary closure may occur in as little as twenty minutes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if the post is spam, deemed offensive and &lt;em&gt;blatantly&lt;/em&gt; off-topic; e.g. a proofreading request,  it's a relief to see a &quot;bad&quot; question being dealt with swiftly. However, in the majority of cases,  all is not lost. The OP, it is argued, has the opportunity to rectify, and improve his or her question. Users will often post suggestions, and &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; the OP to finalize that aim. In order to reopen a question put on hold, five users have to cast re-open votes. In the end, &lt;strong&gt;it is the community&lt;/strong&gt;, or the users who frequent the site most often, &lt;strong&gt;who approve or disapprove of a question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens when it is an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; that is deleted by a single mod? I know full well that in my case the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;community-wiki&lt;/a&gt; post earned three downvotes, I can live with that. I can see it as an indication that users disagree with it, or that they disapprove of it. A comment is useful, and one user left such a comment, and probably downvoted the c-w post too. Fair dues. So give me the chance to fix it (I know how to fix bad posts) otherwise, leave me to decide to delete it myself, leave as is, or improve the post. &lt;strong&gt;But &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; it is deleted summarily by a mod.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer, two mods have pointed out, is off topic, I disagree. I have K34+ that stands for something. It represents experience, it represents a member who knows the &quot;rules&quot; and has abided by them. I don't want to post a new answer, it was never meant to be a &quot;proper&quot; answer, &lt;em&gt;it was meant as a tribute to all those users who contributed to making a question fun and informative.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT November 20 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quit. I'll still upvote and downvote answers and questions from time to time, but as of yesterday, for a variety of reasons; e.g., users (plural term used deliberately here) pretending not to know that an awarded answer is a duplicate;   I will no longer post answers or questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 20 December&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've started posting answers again, I like contributing and sharing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Kill me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On 18th December I finished editing the CW post, I sincerely believe that it now complies with EL&amp;amp;U standards, and I ask that the post be undeleted by a mod.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T08:30:04.183" Title="Could a mod have notified me that my post risked being “permanently” deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|moderators|request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7321" CreationDate="2015-11-17T14:45:57.640" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't me who deleted it (for those who can see deleted posts, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/287102/18696&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) but it's &lt;strong&gt;not an answer to the question.&lt;/strong&gt; It's a collection of comments in the answer box, and you have found the justification in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Help&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;commentary on the question or other answers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As if to make that point, it attracted three downvotes before you were saved from any more; and a user actually posted a comment, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not an answer and &quot;Community wiki&quot; does not mean &quot;This wouldn't be acceptable as an answer but it's OK to post it this way so I don't get rep for it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You attempted to justify the post with a response to that comment,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know, I think these comments are actually helpful, and provide essential background information. A few of the links are very on-topic, and could have easily been posted as answers. I think the downvoters have misinterpreted the objective behind this, admittedly, unorthodox way of using the community wiki. But you see, the reason why this is a CW answer, is NOT because I don't think it is an answer, but because of the word community. It is a joint effort. And why shouldn't other users contribute, improve, or edit their own comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...in which you appear to acknowledge that it is not an answer, that the use of a CW post was not obviously what it was intended for, and that the comments could easily have been posted as answers in their own right. However, they weren't; the authors didn't consider them worthy of being an answer, or couldn't be bothered, or didn't have the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are comments. They might contain the answer; they might even be a complete answer. But they need to be posted as &lt;strong&gt;an answer which answers the question&lt;/strong&gt; if they are to be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post was correctly deleted, in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments are &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/31543&quot;&gt;preserved in chat&lt;/a&gt;, as far as chat is preserved. &lt;strong&gt;Comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time.&lt;/strong&gt; They are designed to allow clarification of a post. They are not permanent, and no-one should have any expectation of permanance at all. Upvotes on comments do not bring immortality. The system does users a favour by allowing comment threads to be removed but still available; that system should not be subverted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you would like to create an &lt;strong&gt;answer,&lt;/strong&gt; that's a different thing altogether. You can still see your post, and the chatroom is available too if that makes collecting links easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T16:06:44.353" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7321" CreationDate="2015-11-18T13:08:15.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the delay to my answer. I wanted to give myself time to forget your post so I could take a fresh look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having reread it I have to agree with Andrew. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why I didn't inform you that the answer wasn't an answer. Is that something that needed to happen? I've never done it before, when someone posts and answer that doesn't attempt to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've both been members here for a while, so we know how the site works. If something is posted via the &quot;Your Answer&quot; box and it isn't answering the question, it will be deleted. Bearing in mind that &quot;not answering the question&quot; isn't the same as someone who tried to answer the question and got it wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly can't see how a collection of comments, some of which were just jokes, and the rest being a confusing melange of attempts at answering and counter points, could be thought to be an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've read this question, I get what you were trying to do, but we need a sculpture, not a slab of granite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T13:08:15.497" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-19T09:22:03.713" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if anyone can recommend any good free online style guides for theses and dissertations, especially for the sciences. Looking for something authoritative and that really gets into the detailed nitty-gritty. Something maybe like the &lt;em&gt;Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt; but for scientific dissertations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27272" OwnerDisplayName="curious-proofreader" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T09:30:52.057" Title="Recommendations for Scientific Dissertation Style Guides" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-11-19T09:31:28.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7359" CreationDate="2015-11-20T11:47:06.943" Score="-1" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just happened to find this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17943/by-foot-vs-on-foot&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; with a seemingly (I really want to use &quot;absolutely&quot;) wrong answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any procedure to change the accepted answer or even delete it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how it works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This previous &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131/utterly-wrong-answers-upvoted-and-accepted&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; here seems to be addressing the same issue. The answers to the question sound reasonable. But what if the OP is not responding to multiple downvotes and doesn't budge a bit after comments that are intended to correct it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any statue of limitations or procedure to correct it for this kind of answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T11:02:38.553" Title="Why is a &quot;seemingly&quot; wrong answer kept as it is?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7325" CreationDate="2015-11-20T13:30:58.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no way to delete somebody else's answer because you think it is wrong. If there is a provable inaccuracy, leave a comment with a short explanation or a link. If you think it not only wrong but misleading, downvote. If you merely disagree, post a competing answer, or leave it in peace if the question is old enough not to worry about.  This is the basic principle of SE; over time, the better answers will get upvotes, the bad ones will not. If you disagree with the votes on one question, that's interesting but not a reason to nullify the voting system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's just as well you didn't use &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt;; the word does have a clear meaning, which does not apply to any of the answers on that question as far as I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T13:30:58.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-20T17:40:55.670" Score="3" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can any member vote, or is there a Reputation and/or other eligibility prerequisite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've been a member for more than a year, yet I never got an election notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68341" LastEditorUserId="68341" LastEditDate="2015-12-01T19:48:14.947" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T19:48:14.947" Title="What are the criteria for being eligible to vote in a moderator election?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7329" CreationDate="2015-11-22T01:00:48.840" Score="56" ViewCount="1116" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the past few weeks I have been receiving many comments from the user Rathony.  The pattern goes like this: 1) I make a comment on someone's answer, or I post my own answer 2) Within minutes, a comment appears in my inbox from this user, 3) As soon as it appears in my notification box, it disappears and is replaced with something else or nothing at all.  The comment appears long enough for me to read or see it on my Ipad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments have been rude and abrasive (calling me a fool or foolish among other things--although to be honest, my Exes have called me worse things), telling me I need to erase my answers, calling me biased, threatening to delete or erase or edit my answers because they are incorrect, contain grammatical mistakes, are illogical, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last night, I received the following message from Rathony:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZrgDG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZrgDG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hey.  I know you are downvoting my answers.  Just dropped from 2935 to 2931?  Go ahead.  Keep downvoting.  You know what is amazing?  I am not downvoting your answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message actually deleted before my eyes as I was taking this sceenshot, and was replaced by a message saying that I needed to delete my answer because it contained many grammatical mistakes.  This comment later &quot;evaporated&quot; before I could take a screenshot.  Following this, I received seven downvotes on answers that I posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tILkk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tILkk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like everyone, I've had my fair share of down votes...but 8 in a row?!  And immediately following this comment?  This comment can not be called a &quot;mistake&quot; because it clearly references the number of points I have and the fact that they did in fact decrease because I cast two negative votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this sort of behavior acceptable or normal on SE?  Can people erase or delete half of my answer and fill it with what they think is correct?  How is it that this person is stalking / tracking me like this?  Does the system allow users to follow other users?  Are my votes anonymous?  I thought they were.  I am not able to flag the comments because they disappear before I am able to.  Since my first encounter with Rathony on November 7, I have ignored all of the &quot;comment grenades&quot; lobbed at me and have not responded at all...how can I when the comments instantly are deleted?  I have actually upvoted many of his comments or answers as I found them helpful or useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="129806" LastEditDate="2015-11-22T02:07:56.017" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T06:34:03.510" Title="CyberBullying on SE" Tags="|discussion|comments|flagging|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7328" CreationDate="2015-11-22T03:59:20.770" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for letting us knowing what is going on. We will look into the serial downvoting and that will be reversed if we confirm that it is happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the comment harrassment, please flag (with &quot;needs mod attention&quot;, and explain that it is for this question) the post/posts or one of your own comments on the posts where this has occurred and we will look into it.  It's possible he's writing the comments then deleting them, but it's also possible that the comments have been flagged for removal, so they are being deleted automatically and we don't see them in the queue. In either case, it warrants investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your other questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is expected that users will edit your posts for clarity or to correct grammar and other mistakes, but edits should not change the original meaning of the post. You can rollback edits if you feel that the edit has changed the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; of your answer, but I encourage you to leave stand edits that change the structure and spelling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to &quot;follow&quot; users, but it is simple to click on your name to get to your profile and then from there look at your other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your votes are anonymous unless you leave a comment stating how you voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T03:59:20.770" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7321" CreationDate="2015-11-22T09:34:13.793" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, don't panic. Wait, it gets worse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on your side here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a lousy feeling. You spend time and energy putting something together and someone just pounces on it and starts doing things to it. They sink their filthy claws, or malodorous tentacles, into it, and just go at it, the unnatural bastards. You're bound to feel violated. Oh yeah. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen: I really would like to see that answer of yours, after this kind of promotion. But I realize that's just otiose curiosity on my part right now. Maybe not. Doesn't matter. Not right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does matter is there's gotta be a rule of some kind, or something. Maybe one needs to get past a certain number of those precious rep points, or whatever. But posts by certain people should never be touched except by their authors. Don't kill me yet. It gets worse still. Dark and tortuous are the roads we travel, quirky and unreliable the jalopy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can suggest whatever edits they deem necessary, or express derisive incredulity in a few elegantly supercilious phrases. They can ridicule my post, and me along with it. They can mock me to their heart's content. They can even be petty and downvote everything I write here. But they shouldn't be allowed to touch my post, or any other post, if it's written in proper English, or even just fluent and coherent English, except their own. Unless they've asked and received the author's permission. Or the author has expressly asked them to do so. Anything else is worse than reading other people's mail. It just ain't decent, is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen. I think your questions, answers, and comments are well-written, informative, oftentimes captivating, and extremely valuable to this place. It was a lousy thing they did to you, and I hope that answer can still be recovered, along with the comments. I also think you're a good person. As well as an intelligent one. Please calm down, and stay. Shit happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T09:34:13.793" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-22T20:49:32.383" Score="14" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could we know the details of how the current migration to ELL from EL&amp;amp;U works? I think that in general the migration path is a good thing. However, I'm a bit worried that there might be some counterproductive aspects to the way it currently works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impression that I get is that questions are being migrated as soon as 5 vote-to-close votes are assigned to the question. I also think that maybe some mods or high-rep users may be getting these questions migrated unilaterally or with another vote or two. In &lt;em&gt;principle&lt;/em&gt; I'm not averse to this, but in practice, it seems to me that there might be a bit of a problem here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that some questions might at first look like language learning questions, but may in fact be of huge significance and interest for linguists etymologists and serious English enthusiasts. In particular this applies to questions about grammar and syntax (yes, I know, syntax is part of grammar!). It can sometimes be very easy for people who care about the site, but aren't familiar with certain developments in modern grammar, or classical problems, or just interesting questions to migrate questions because a) they know intuitively what is  grammatical, and b) because the OP is not a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kinds of questions that I'm worried about use losing are questions like &lt;em&gt;What is a noun&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;What is a question?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Can a word or phrase be a subject and an object at the same time?&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;What is an adverb?&lt;/em&gt; and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when questions get closed unilaterally by a mod or get five down-votes, there is the opportunity for the community to vote, and if necessary appeal here on meta, to get the question reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question gets migrated to ELL, does this happen instantaneously after it gets the necessary vote? If so, could this be changed so that there is an incubation period so to speak, where the community has a window of a couple of weeks to get the question reopened if it is in fact of value to us here at EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2015-11-22T21:39:04.517" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T19:47:18.110" Title="Question migration to English Language Learners" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-23T08:27:03.270" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that I was recently (yesterday) given the &quot;Edit community wikis&quot; privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description about the &quot;Edit community wikis&quot; privilege says that the privilege is given when the user has 100 reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I joined this SE site (EL&amp;amp;U) about 2 and a half years ago and was given 100 &quot;Association Bonus&quot; points at that time, and I have only earned 13 additional reputation points since then (total 113).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what triggered the &quot;Edit community wikis&quot; privilege at this time?&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;113 Reputation  &#xA;&#xA;+2    2 days ago 20:47   edit    Image is to pixelated as a song is to ___?  &#xA;+10   Jul 22 '13 19:57   upvote  How to indicate possession when using abbreviation “Dr.”  &#xA;+100  May 3  '13 22:32   assoc   Association Bonus  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three entries add up to 112. The extra point (total 113) is because new accounts always begin with 1 point (I think).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The odd thing to me, is that if the &quot;Association Bonus&quot; counts toward the 100 required points, the privilege should have been given when (shortly after) I signed up in May 2013. And if the &quot;Association Bonus&quot; DOESN'T count, then I never earned anywhere near enough reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can think of, is that:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;Edit community wikis&quot; privilege is a brand new privilege, or  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reputation point requirement for the &quot;Edit community wikis&quot; privilege has recently changed (lowered).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I happen to already meet the reputation point requirement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was notified about this privilege in the &quot;Achievements&quot; notification list a few days ago. I was able to click on the entry in the notification list to see info about the privilege, but that notification entry is now gone. I checked my &quot;privileges&quot;, and I do have that privilege shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing, when I got this notification, I was notified that I now have this privilege on 2 SE sites: EL&amp;amp;U, and another site that I don't recall, and since the notification is now gone, I can't tell which other site it was. The only details I can remember are that it was a site I signed up for about 2 years ago, and that I currently have between 125 and 150 (~135) reputation points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43682" LastEditorUserId="43682" LastEditDate="2015-11-24T03:25:11.797" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T03:25:11.797" Title="How did I earn &quot;Edit community wikis&quot; privilege" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-23T17:14:07.680" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/288060/how-do-emojis-sort-in-a-dictionary&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; put on hold as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to feature a recent phenomenon that clearly falls under &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, even &lt;em&gt;English language and usage&lt;/em&gt;; it is interesting, clear, and important. It is also tagged correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what is opinion-based about sorting emojis in a dictionary. This is not rhetorical; I wonder in earnest. In comments, one of the close-voters remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just don't think this is about English Language and Usage- OED’’s decision notwithstanding. And even if it was, you’d only get opinions on what the OED might do unless 1. There’s someone here that represents the OED or 2. The OED has some sort of published paradigm that we could quote- but then that would be GR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect there to be a clear, definitive answer. &lt;strong&gt;It is another thing entirely that we do not know how to answer it.&lt;/strong&gt; Anyway, I don't. Is that a reason for closing it? It is apparently anticipated by the close-voters that &lt;strong&gt;no one here knows the answer&lt;/strong&gt;. Why? And, if this is general reference, what isn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T21:47:09.707" Title="Question about sorting emojis" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7338" CreationDate="2015-11-23T17:26:36.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Jim &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/288060/how-do-emojis-sort-in-a-dictionary#comment643764_288060&quot;&gt;explained in his comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@WayfaringStranger- that's great. I know how they're represented. I just don't think this is about English Language and Usage- OED’’s decision notwithstanding. And even if it was, you’d only get opinions on what the OED might do unless 1. There’s someone here that represents the OED or 2. The OED has some sort of published paradigm that we could quote- but then that would be GR. – Jim Nov 19 at 1:36&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no accepted way to alphabetize things that are not part of the alphabet. The OED may or may not include emoji in their dictionary, but where they would be listed is, at this point, a matter of speculation. It is also somewhat arbitrary. Thus the question is asking for guesses, and that isn't what we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T17:26:36.180" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7341" CreationDate="2015-11-23T18:24:25.410" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions regarding this site's policies and operation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there an administration? Is there a contact for the administration? Is there any entity able to deal with conflicts or disagreements?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why was my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/286991/can-help-fill-the-gap-or-can-help-filling-the-gap&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/286991/can-help-fill-the-gap-or-can-help-filling-the-gap&lt;/a&gt; closed? I added the information required. I can't understand what is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I flag user inappropriate comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T21:24:59.387" Title="Site policies and operation" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7340" CreationDate="2015-11-23T21:24:59.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conflicts and disagreements are (usually) initially handled by moderators, and that's initiated through flagging. If you can't flag, then use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; link which is at the bottom of every page to contact the Stack Exchange staffers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's also what to do if you don't have the confidence that the moderators are able to deal with your issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have diamonds in their username (like mine).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed as &quot;unclear&quot;, and required further details. When you edited it, the question entered a review queue where community members with 3000+ rep can vote to re-open if they feel it warrants it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at 10:48 UTC on 17 November, there was the third &quot;Leave Closed&quot; vote on your question and the system removed it from the queue. While that doesn't mean that it won't be reviewed again, it makes it more difficult to achieve. Your Meta question here might help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're not able to flag a comment (it may require 15 rep to do that), then you can get a link from the timestamp and send that to the SE staffer team using the Contact us link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find if you're able to flag by hovering your mouse over the comment. If it's possible then you will find that a couple of options appear:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jfYo4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jfYo4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment options&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...and you can click the flag icon to flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; deal with comment flags, although the only action which is generally publicly visible is that offensive comments disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T21:24:59.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7338" CreationDate="2015-11-23T21:25:10.087" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because there's a group of &lt;em&gt;country matters&lt;/em&gt; (in the Shakespearean sense) with high reps around here who never post questions (as they already know everything) and whose mission in life is continuously to demonstrate to others that they have power over them. Editing questions, closing questions, putting questions on hold, it's all they do all day. They barge in unbidden like a veritable schoolmarm of yore, saying in a gravelly voice, &quot;Now, now ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rGWI0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rGWI0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know: some people collect stamps, others like to sing in karaoke bars, still others favor reading classical literature; and then there are frustrated schoolmarms, or the publishing industry's editor corps rejects, or whatever these country matters are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now watch them rush in to downvote this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastEditorUserId="143137" LastEditDate="2015-11-23T21:47:09.707" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T21:47:09.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7321" CreationDate="2015-11-24T08:25:18.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To sum up; Andrew Leach♦ says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The post was correctly deleted, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matt E. Эллен♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who deleted the answer, says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As to why I didn't inform you that the answer wasn't an answer. &lt;strong&gt;Is that something that needed to happen? I've never done it before,&lt;/strong&gt; when someone posts and answer that doesn't attempt to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, the answer to the question, which no one has really affronted, “should a mod warn a user that their post will be &lt;em&gt;permanently&lt;/em&gt; deleted” is “no”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T08:25:18.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2015-11-24T12:10:24.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl,dr:&lt;/strong&gt; An incubation period of several weeks wouldn’t work out very well because the original asker wouldn’t get a timely answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Migratory Mechanics&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions immigrate to another site when four out of five non-binding close votes are for that particular migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the normal course of things, this is perceived to occur “immediately”, but what really happens is that the question is immediately &lt;strong&gt;locked&lt;/strong&gt; on the original site and its answers deleted (leaving a migration “stub”), and a message sent to the target site’s queue requesting that other site to create the migrated copy. Once that happens, the origin site annotates the stub to that effect with a pointer to the migrated copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This creation of the migrated copy by the other site &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; happens so quickly that it appears to be all one action, but sometimes it isn’t exactly so. I’ve seen it take more than a minute for the queue to be processed, and in cases of network troubles, even double-digit numbers of minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An incubation period of several weeks wouldn’t work out very well. The original asker might need an answer right away, even though it’s off-topic on the source site where it was. If it’s on-topic for the destination site, there’s no reason to have a waiting period for answers to appear — and if &lt;em&gt;isn’t&lt;/em&gt; on-topic there, it shouldn’t’ve been migrated in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrated posts have downvotes cleared in the migrated copies. The reasoning behind this is that the downvotes on the question may have been incurred because of its perceived unsuitability on the origin site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the target site closes the migrated copy of the question, it &lt;strong&gt;locks its own migrated copy&lt;/strong&gt; and sends a message to the site where the question emigrated from. It does not migrate new answers on the migrated question back to the origin site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that original gets around to processing that notification message, it automatically unlocks (but does not automatically reöpen) the original copy and undeletes any answers it had previously deleted due to migration. This makes the now-unlocked original again eligible for reöpening under the customary rules and new answers being added once that’s done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A locked migration stub is deleted by the system after some period of time that’s intended to be long enough for the original asker to follow the link to the other site; I believe this currently stands at a month out from the migration.  However, if the stub becomes unlocked due to a failed migration, then it becomes subject to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/177675/153355&quot;&gt;the normal deletion rules for closed questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this locking and unlocking is there to make sure there is only one valid copy of a given question across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although upvotes on the migrated question (and any on migrated answers) go along with it, those votes are not attributed to you on the target site, and so you may vote “again” should it please you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means you do have an opportunity to vote again on the migrated version (and any answers), even if you had previously voted on the other site. That’s by design: votes on one site do not count against the “one vote per post per user” rule on any other sites. You may also upvote any migrated comments despite having voted on them on their origin site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T19:47:18.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7352" CreationDate="2015-11-24T13:41:13.490" Score="5" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;If, say, I wanted to continue a discussion of someone's question or answer in my personal blog or through email: would I be allowed to post a link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, alternatively, if I wanted to get in touch with a particular user - by, say, sending them a personal message - how would I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched and searched, but I haven't been able to find any answers. If strict anonymity is one of the rules here, hey, I'm all for it, but shouldn't there be instructions to that effect somewhere? What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T23:54:57.027" Title="Is exchanging emails and/or posting links to personal blogs and/or sites allowed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7349" CreationDate="2015-11-24T16:29:42.493" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a quick way to find out how many words I've written altogether in my posts on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T17:47:33.880" Title="Is there a quick way to find out how many words I've written altogether in my posts?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7348" CreationDate="2015-11-24T17:47:33.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the SQL from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14008509/how-can-i-count-the-number-of-words-in-a-string-in-oracle&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow, I've put together a word count query on the latest data dump on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/398004/how-many-words-have-i-written-all-together?UserId=76472&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not a way to see it in &quot;real time&quot; on the site. The data dump is updated regularly every Sunday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T17:47:33.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T17:55:58.427" Score="0" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it can make a large difference in culturally accepted definitions. I've heard some pretty absurd definitions given that were accepted which are far from commonplace here in the United States, and thought it might be because they were in the context of the United Kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145169" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T18:19:06.387" Title="I'm new here, does this site favour or favor questions of this English Language? (USA vs UK)" Tags="|discussion|american-english|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7350" CreationDate="2015-11-24T18:19:06.387" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;All dialects of English are on topic and welcome. Just make sure you give sources for your definitions when they come from dictionaries and cultural and geographical background if your answer is based solely on personal experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would, however, avoid calling a something absurd just because it doesn't conform to your own experience and your own cultural background. Many words are used quite differently in different dialects and all are as valid as each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to spell using BrE or AmE customs. I don't know of any other choices off the top of my head, but if there are and are considered standard in any part of the English speaking world, then they're welcome here as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our top users are from both sides of the pond (and beyond), there is no one dialect or style we're supposed to cleave to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25030" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T18:19:06.387" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7347" CreationDate="2015-11-24T23:54:57.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right that there should be some documentation of all this. I haven't been able to locate very much, so this summarises what I've found to be the policy so far. It's likely that there is policy enumerated in the Help pages or on Meta.SE, but it's not easy to find. For the moment, this post will have to suffice, together with any comments correcting it or links added to existing policy documentation when it's found, and other answers supplementing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Links to the outside world&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes these are welcome, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; they must be relevant where they appear. If the link appears in a question or answer, then it's fine if it links to additional information which &lt;strong&gt;supports&lt;/strong&gt; the post, in the same way as any other reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have &lt;a href=&quot;http://acleach.me.uk/gmaps/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Maps demonstrations&lt;/a&gt; available on my own webspace. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11792916/over-query-limit-in-google-maps-api-v3-how-do-i-pause-delay-in-javascript-to-sl/11825245#11825245&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow, I quote my code, and link to an example which I know is not going to disappear, because I'm in charge of hosting it. I don't have any ELU examples, or I'd link to those here, but the same principle applies: if you have a blog post on Chaucer's use of the subjunctive, by all means summarise and link when it's useful to an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're simply mimicking the standard &amp;quot;Let's continue this discussion in chat&amp;quot; comment, then add the link as a comment. Bear in mind that all comments are ephemeral and it only takes two flags to delete them: the comment and the link may suddenly disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use your site profile to promote a blog or other external site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Quoting Stack Exchange content elsewhere&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can. But you must include a citation of the author's name and a link to their site profile, and a link back to the original content too. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;Attribution policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Private messaging&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not supported within Stack Exchange.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the @username form of commenting, but &lt;strong&gt;comments are not for discussion.&lt;/strong&gt; While the @username comment will create an Inbox message five minutes later, it's still public. Inbox messages survive the deletion of the originating comment, but deleted comments are still visible to moderators and staff, so even deleting a comment after the first (public) five minutes doesn't make it a private message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the Chat system and set up your own chat rooms, and invite members to chat. You can't restrict read access, and it's deliberately not easy to restrict write access. Generally even if you do manage it, it will be revoked. Chat is publicly available for everyone. If it's needed, moderators and SE staff can create rooms with restricted availability in order to manage private discussions with particular users for the purposes of moderation, but Stack Exchange has only made that privilege available to moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that Chat is not really site-specific, and &lt;strong&gt;all site moderators have moderator access to all chat rooms.&lt;/strong&gt; In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;ELU chatroom&lt;/a&gt; you'll see a number of people post who have blue usernames: those who are not ELU mods are mods on other sites. They all have the same privileges in Chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat can take a bit of getting used to, but it's a good way of discussing matters instead of using comments, which aren't there for discussion. Chat pings when the recipient is offline go in the Inbox to be dealt with when possible, and any message — no matter how old — can be replied to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's all essentially public. For real private messaging, you need to use email outside the Stack Exchange system. See below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Your personal profile&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your profile page on each site where you're a member is yours. While signature blocks and other paraphernalia are discouraged on posts (to the extent that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;all such material may be removed&lt;/a&gt;), you can use your profile page to publicise what you want — lawyers permitting, of course. Libel or other offensive content is not advised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your profile page you will find a link &amp;quot;Edit profile and settings&amp;quot;. The &amp;quot;About me&amp;quot; section is fair game for you to publicise what you want, including your email address if you are happy for people to contact you. You can also fill in the fields for website, Twitter following and Git repo, if you have any of those. If you have a blog which is separate from your main website address, I suggest putting the blog address in the &amp;quot;About me&amp;quot; field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Contacting other users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contacting other users is very much an &amp;quot;opt-in&amp;quot; thing. Members of the community have to release their own email address into the outside world in order that others can use it. If they do that, it's fair game (as is any response or non-response). If they don't do that, it's probably best to respect their privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the profile page, there is a space to enter your email address, but this is not published. It is available to moderators and SE staff, but it will only be used &lt;em&gt;in extremis&lt;/em&gt; — moderator messages sent through the system will be copied to it by default, and SE staff might use it in some circumstances [which I'm not privy to, I'm not staff; but I can envisage that it might happen]. However, an email address entered there is not shared and if you want the wider community to be able to contact you then you will need to put your email address in the &amp;quot;About me&amp;quot; field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T23:54:57.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-25T17:08:44.110" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I posted the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/267522/50720&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://udel.edu/%7Edlarsen/ling203/Slides/Phonology.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; p 5 of 26, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/pub/darrell-larsen/47/652/ab5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr Darrell Larsen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an analogy involving letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eaadO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eaadO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To phonetics, these are all slightly different, as&#xA;their forms are not identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To phonology, these are all the same, since,&#xA;psychologically, they all represent the letter .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: phonetics and phonology aren’t concerned with letters&#xA;at&#xA;all&#xA;, only with sounds.  This is just an&#xA;analogy&#xA;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39894/phonetics-vs-phonology?rq=1#comment73047_39896&quot;&gt;rudimentary analogy&lt;/a&gt; may also help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T17:22:24.063" Title="Why was my answer (upvoted once) unilaterally deleted by a moderator?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7353" CreationDate="2015-11-25T17:22:24.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That answer was flagged as being so similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/104226&quot;&gt;one posted two years earlier&lt;/a&gt; that it duplicated it. The flag was handled by a moderator, who deleted the post because it fitted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;published reasons for deletion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;commentary on the question or other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;asking another, different question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“thanks!” or “me too!” responses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;exact duplicates of other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;barely more than a link to an external site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not even a partial answer to the actual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag indicates that the decision was not entirely unilateral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T17:22:24.063" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7356" CreationDate="2015-11-25T19:10:23.757" Score="18" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;People like hats.  Will there be hats? Will there be new hats? Hats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97958" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T09:55:06.453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T09:55:06.453" Title="Will there be hats this winter (2015)?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|winterbash|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7355" CreationDate="2015-11-25T21:46:37.447" Score="23" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People like hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, um, that's... not really a question, but, we can start off slow. Yes! True. Correct. People do, for the most part, like hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will there be hats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of tradition-breaking libertines do you take us for? Hats are coming, friend*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will there be new hats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There sure will!&lt;/strong&gt; In fact, we will be bringing you an all-new assortment of hats for your avatar-decorating needs, as we have done every year since the very first year of Hat Dash, 2011. (This is because we love you, and certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; because we forget where we store the old hats every year, like so many squirrels with their nuts. Nope, nope, nope.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haaaaats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;sub&gt;assuming the community consensus is pro-hat&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T21:46:37.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7325" CreationDate="2015-11-27T12:47:21.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a bounty of 350 points on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17943/by-foot-vs-on-foot&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;By foot&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;on foot&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the endless stream of low quality answers from anonymous and unregistered users was depressing. The question has attracted 42k views since it was posted, it seems there is an effective need for a concise but comprehensive answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's hope the question attracts some high-quality answers and up-votes which will indicate the community's general consensus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;UPDATED&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that the accepted answer is regaining upvotes. There are a total of 13 upvotes against eight downvotes. May I  point out, (which Rathony also picked up on) the user, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/17946/44619&quot;&gt;snumpy&lt;/a&gt;, says, and I quote [emphasis mine]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When it comes to using &quot;on foot&quot; or &quot;by foot,&quot; either would be correct; however, &lt;strong&gt;a quick google search&lt;/strong&gt; demonstrated that &lt;strong&gt;&quot;by foot&quot; is more commonly used&lt;/strong&gt; (150M hits vs. 85.4M hits)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, the above affirmation is false, none of the answers posted since November 26 have confirmed this bold statement. Therefore, the above answer is inaccurate and  &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; misleading. Despite Tim Lemington's affirmation &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… over time, the better answers will get upvotes, the bad ones will not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it appears that the community continues to upvote &lt;em&gt;poor&lt;/em&gt; answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T11:02:38.553" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-29T06:21:43.650" Score="14" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not complaining or anything. It's just a thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who really want to learn should absolutely be shown hospitality, assisted, and encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, any regular here would agree that the vast majority of questions pouring in lately are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;haphazardly, nay, chaotically worded; so much so that one needs to do some pretty serious deciphering before the meaning becomes relatively clear    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indolently written (to put it mildly; I'm being super-polite here, and not at all judgmental, you see): some of the spelling and punctuation is downright insulting. Capitalization is a common feature in all European languages. The rules aren't very difficult to grasp. The spellchecker is an &lt;em&gt;invasive&lt;/em&gt; feature on pretty much any software system these days. What gives?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;concern the least captivating aspects of the language   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have to do with homework assignments that students don't wish to be bothered with because they have lives and all      &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have to do with moronic video games based on mass genocide in dismal surroundings      &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;posted by people who won't return after getting the answer they're looking for; or else by people who won't return even to get the answer they're looking for (as they have better things to do)     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and so forth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying such questions should be ignored or closed as soon as they're posted. But many folks here (of this I'm nearly certain) would appreciate it if superior questions were somehow &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encouraged (rep points, or whatever: the actual method isn't very important)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Promoted. Since all of us are from vastly different time zones, more often than not a good question gets pushed down the page and is soon drowned in the swamp of brazen illiteracy. More often than not only those who were fortunate enough to see it within two hours (or less) of posting and answer it or comment on it get to ponder on it further, research it, or discuss it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of &quot;featured&quot; questions currently consists of two items: one is from the year of Our Lord 2012; its companion is a year older; both have been answered to the satisfaction of their respective OP's. Seriously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now the list of the &quot;newest&quot; questions is adorned by the following two top posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Is these terms are different?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Is a comma needed after following in this sentence?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; In order to get to the latest interesting question, one has to navigate to the second page. How many newcomers are going to do this, do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anything be done about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T17:49:36.733" Title="Shouldn't intriguing and/or challenging questions written in good English be rewarded?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7361" CreationDate="2015-11-29T15:44:09.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Shouldn't intriguing and/or challenging questions written in good English be rewarded&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; -- but &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;, and if there is a workable way to do so, do the mores and/or rules of SE allow any changes, or do they merely encourage discussions about changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the site should be conservative, and not make frequent changes, but I repeat that my answer to the title of Ricky's question is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suggestion as to how:  High rep users (HRUs) (rep 10,000 and higher ?) could be allowed a limited number (one per day? five per week?) of double upvotes on Qs. A double upvote would mean 10 points from one HRU on an exceptionally good Q.  A given Q could receive a limited number (two ?) of double upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shouldn't be hard to implement -- only modest programming would be needed.  Whether this would actually encourage better Qs, or whether people want to put such awesome power into the hands of HRUs is a matter for discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suggestion to address another of Ricky's points: &quot;6. posted by people who won't return after getting the answer they're looking for; or else by people who won't return even to get the answer they're looking for (as they have better things to do)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've suggested this before, but would it be so hard to send a prompt to an OP who has not accepted an answer -- say 96 hours after the question was posted?  (Or 72 hours or 120 hours.)  I find it discouraging when an OP that I have thoughtfully answered has not accepted &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answer, when clearly one of the answers -- not necessarily mine -- would be acceptable by any reasonable person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; In a quick scan of the most active users in the past month, I find about 20 with rep 10K or above.  So my suggestion of allowing each of them one &quot;supervote&quot; per day (or five per week) to reward exceptionally good questions, is probably high.  Also, the supervotes should probably &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt; to relatively new users.  But, honestly, is there any point to thinking about how to improve things, even modestly?              &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T22:54:45.160" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T22:54:45.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1053" CreationDate="2015-11-30T19:13:35.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The community manager Shog9 has kindly granted our request. No more questions tagged &quot;words&quot; (or &quot;word&quot;) will appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T19:13:35.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-01T03:27:16.033" Score="-2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of us (specifically: the chatty faction) could use something - a blog or a guestbook (personally I'd prefer a &lt;em&gt;forum&lt;/em&gt;) where we could further discuss questions and answers posted here; post questions whose answers might be opinion-based; post mere thoughts or observations; reviews of books, plays and films; have spirited fights over this or that nuance of language, usage, and, yes, &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have to create it and moderate it for some time, so be it. Despite my arrogance, or perhaps because of it, I promise you I wouldn't delete, nor edit, anyone's posts or comments (unless I detect, or someone draws my attention to, malicious spam). That's &lt;em&gt;beneath me&lt;/em&gt;. If anyone else wants to be a mod, or the main mod, please say so. But you must promise you won't delete ... unless ... etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yeah, a &lt;em&gt;forum&lt;/em&gt; would be nice. The simpler the better, but personally I would like it to include picture and video posting options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions? What's the best forum-hosting site these days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do we need one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T03:58:29.983" Title="I would like to create a forum extension for ELU. Any suggestions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7364" CreationDate="2015-12-01T03:58:29.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a blog. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063/elu-blog&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; for it and Matt Ellen is the primary moderator contact for anyone who wants to write a blog post. You can ping him in that room if you are interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A forum for discussion would be the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;main chat room&lt;/a&gt;, which is what it is there for. It is moderated by site moderators as well as other stack moderators, including community moderators. Room owners assume moderator duties when mods aren't around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Content is rarely deleted from chat, unless it is offensive or the user elects to remove it. That said, you will probably want to familiarize yourself with chat etiquette and mechanics before jumping into a discussion there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T03:58:29.983" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7328" CreationDate="2015-12-01T06:34:03.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;ad-hominem insults are not acceptable under the official Stack Exchange guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96401" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T06:34:03.510" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7361" CreationDate="2015-12-01T17:49:36.733" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is about &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt; that are well-written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; that are well-written?  Should such answers be rewarded because they are well-written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT - INDEED, YOU'VE BROUGHT TO THE FORE A &lt;em&gt;HUGE PROBLEM&lt;/em&gt; ON THIS SITE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A huge problem on this site is the bizarre voting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One voting problem is &quot;momentum voting&quot; which the site is more guilty of than any other site in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a bigger problem is the &quot;correctly written answer&quot; effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any answer, &lt;strong&gt;even one that is explicitly utterly wrong&lt;/strong&gt;, which is (a) correctly-written in terms of grammar and spelling, and (b) follows the style-guides of this site correctly (offering references etc) ....... TENDS TO GET UPVOTED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a disaster and it must be stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I believe the reason this happens is there are many naive - I don't mean that in a negative way - learners of English on this site, which is perfectly reasonable.  This group have absolutely no clue at all about the actual OP asked, but rush to reward answers which, in themselves, have good English and follow the rules of the site. This is my guess to explain the weird &quot;mindlessly tick well-written answers&quot; effect here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of your question, OP, about rewarding QUESTIONS which are well-written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is &lt;strong&gt;it is dangerous to do so&lt;/strong&gt;.  &quot;Crap that is well-written&quot; is still crap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T17:49:36.733" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7370" CreationDate="2015-12-02T01:57:37.620" Score="6" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/290689/when-can-a-celebrity-be-referred-to-by-their-surname-only/290693?noredirect=1#comment651158_290693&quot;&gt;When can a celebrity be referred to by their surname only?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has been placed on hold for being primarily opinion-based and thus attracting opinion-based answers rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.  I'd like to call this into question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question certainly makes some opinion based claims but I fail to see why the answers must be.  The question gave some provocative examples and some wild claims of what made sense and what didn't.  But it concluded asking &quot;why is that?&quot;.  The answer is hardly opinion.  It has to do with context and disambiguation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we'd been asked about a particular celebrity, that would be subjective.  A correct answer today might be wrong tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we weren't asked about a particular celebrity.  We were asked &quot;when&quot; and &quot;why is that?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem every writer who wishes to discuss a celebrity is faced with.  Writers decide how to introduce someone as a topic all the time.  What they decide to do might be subjective. What they should consider when doing so is not.  Let's not confuse the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking for the question to be reopened.  If you feel it has issues that need to be addressed please spell them out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:30:04.143" Title="Can a question ask for an objective explanation of a subjective topic?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7369" CreationDate="2015-12-02T16:28:55.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mentioned in two comments, which were swiftly deleted, (why, I have no idea) that in speech the word &lt;em&gt;Poe&lt;/em&gt; might not be understood. For example, if out of the blue someone said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love Poe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The listener might ask for confirmation—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh! You mean &lt;em&gt;Edgar&lt;/em&gt; Allen Poe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the name &lt;em&gt;Edgar&lt;/em&gt; would be stressed in speech, someone more expert than I might confirm or disagree and say which word  would be stressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, echoing and adding extra info is but a spontaneous and natural reaction, a method to double-check we have understood. In normal speech this takes seconds. In writing the problem is less likely to occur; we see the word Poe and we (should) recognize the author immediately. I made a similar observation about Shaw in a comment (which was deleted), the surname has the same pronunciation as &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt;. In casual fast speech, a person may hear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Was it Shaw who said: ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and quickly ask—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Was &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; sure?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“George Bernard Shaw, you nimrod!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, in writing this error is unlikely to occur but in speech? And the OP seemed to refer to people &lt;em&gt;speaking&lt;/em&gt; and asking for confirmation, not in writing. Surnames with two or more syllables are less likely to misinterpreted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mussolini was great&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No difficulty there. It's superfluous  to add Benito, the same goes for Mozart, Van Gogh, Picasso, Obama, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I argued that sometimes a first name or last name will mean different things to people according to their background, culture, and interests. If I say &amp;quot;I'm a fan of Jackson&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I admire Jackson's innovative style&amp;quot; am I referring to the pop singer, Michael Jackson, or the artist Jackson Pollock?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP, Ricky also made some interesting observations along with several other users, but these comments were deleted too.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Do I &lt;a href=&quot;http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/have+an+ax+to+grind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have an axe to grind&lt;/a&gt;? You bet I do)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to sum up, the question is subjective but answers can be objective and can offer a possible explanation as to why...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… if you say, &amp;quot;I read this story by Poe,&amp;quot; someone is very likely to make absolutely sure by asking, &amp;quot;Edgar Allan Poe?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, one of the users who closed the question left this comment—not deleted— saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is an interesting question in its own right, and could stimulate some interesting discussion&lt;/strong&gt;, but I see no way this can be answered objectively.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/290689/when-can-a-celebrity-be-referred-to-by-their-surname-only/290693?noredirect=1#comment650156_290689&quot;&gt;@Roaringfish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The risk of POB questions is that users will post their thoughts, opinions, and their experience in their answers. Things  which are discouraged on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users have to write answers that are supported by links, Ngrams, citations (which must be properly attributed); any references used in formulating their responses should also be cited, and authoritative sources are preferred, such as the OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't provide a good objective answer without using any of these props.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or can you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T08:10:17.133" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-03T00:02:59.777" Score="5" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chat room can one-box lots of things, like wikipedia links and youtube videos and Google ngrams, making nice neat messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ELU chat it would be very useful to be able to one-box Etymonline entries and The Free Dictionary entries using links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to post a link like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mitten&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mitten&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and get something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mitten (n.) Look up mitten at Dictionary.com&#xA;  late 14c., from Old French mitaine &quot;mitten, half-glove&quot; (12c.), from Old French mite &quot;mitten,&quot; and from Medieval Latin mitta, which are perhaps from Middle High German mittemo, Old High German mittamo &quot;middle, midmost&quot; (reflecting notion of &quot;half-glove&quot;), or from Vulgar Latin *medietana &quot;divided in the middle,&quot; from Latin medius (see medial (adj.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T00:10:01.217" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T00:10:01.217" Title="Chat-room one-boxing for Etymonline and The Free Dictionary" Tags="|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-03T19:32:59.760" Score="13" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I previously asked this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6966/mass-infringement-of-our-copyright&quot;&gt;here on ELU Meta&lt;/a&gt; and on Meta too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6966/mass-infringement-of-our-copyright&quot;&gt;Mass infringement of our copyright&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the information that I got from the answers to that question from Meta and from ELU I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6966/mass-infringement-of-our-copyright/6967#6967&quot;&gt;posted this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which detailed the recommended way of going about reporting sites. However, since then the situation has changed considerably. The recommended actions don't address the problem outlined here, to any extent. This question has since been closed as a duplicate of that other question, but this question is specifically asking about SE's actions and responsibilities in relation to user's copyright of material posted on the ELU site. This question is necessary because the number of sites scraping SE users work without attribution is rapidly growing. Here is the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've seen more and more sites scraping content off SE EL&amp;amp;U and SE ELL. There are now so many that I can't keep up with them. I think we need a public ongoing page accessible on Meta where people can list websites that are nicking content without the full proper attribution, and where TPTB (the powers that be) can get back to us once the situation has been resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am now more interested in what SE is doing to ensure that it isn't neglecting its users. I'm a bit surprised that users seem to have to find this stuff and report it. I kind of feel that it's SE's responsibility to check on a regular basis who is scraping its members' (and its own) material. Shouldn't this be a routine practice on their part? If not, the agreement that they put forward to users is kind of useless. It amounts to - anyone can scrape your content without attributing it to you under the terms set out here on SE - so long as you don't report them to us. This seems unacceptable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sites seem to be worse than others. Some link to SE, but not to the page they scraped the content from. Some list the username from here on SE but don't link to the page or mention SE or EL&amp;amp;U. Some just mention EL&amp;amp;U. There is definitely a range of violations going on. But it seems to me that SE has a duty of care towards its users - at least a moral one - to try to ensure that the terms set out on the site actually apply in a meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy for checking up on who's nicking what from users here and from SE in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I found in 20 mins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;List of scrapers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://htmlasks.com/the_subject_of_an_interrogative_sentence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://htmlasks.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jhedzworld.com/2015/10/19/what-part-of-speech-is-down-in-put-your-pencils-down-english-stackexchange-com-jhedzworld/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.jhedzworld.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.itsprite.com/english-languagehow-can-i-reliably-and-accurately-identify-the-passive-voice-in-writing-or-speech/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://english.itsprite.com/english-languagehow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://asiw.net/more/694539_9/grammar-What-is-the-correct-verb-that.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://asiw.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://trello.info/question/view/en/YUhSMGNEb3ZMMlZ1WjJ4cGMyZ3VjM1JoWTJ0bGVHTm9ZVzVuWlM1amIyMHZjWFZsYzNScGIyNXpMekkzT1RjM055OTBhR1V0WlhSNWJXOXNiMmQ1TFc5bUxYUnZMWEJ5YjNabExXUnZkV2Rv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://trello.info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pr8x.com/english/questions/290399/aspiration-of-plosives-in-final-position-and-word-boundaries.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://pr8x.com/english/questions/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://newtips.co/english/questions/290976/the-superhero-is-you-vs-the-superhero-are-you.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://newtips.co/english/questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://possessive66.rssing.com/chan-46700668/latest.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://possessive66.rssing.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T01:36:05.880" Title="What's being done to protect users' copyright?" Tags="|discussion|support|copyrights|scraping|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7375" CreationDate="2015-12-03T23:41:06.113" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291436/a-short-punchy-phrase-that-encapsulates-the-mining-industry-is-on-the-improve?noredirect=1#comment652477_291436&quot;&gt;recent EL&amp;amp;U question&lt;/a&gt; requested&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A short punchy phrase that encapsulates “the mining industry is on the improve” .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was noted in comments that this is a request for a headline and is therefore off-topic. On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;main-site help page&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;meta-site list&lt;/a&gt;, a text search (using the browser's search function - not a site-wide search) of each page for the text &quot;headline&quot; produces no hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;headline&lt;/em&gt; label is apt, but why is it off-topic? How is it different from other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/271044/equivalent-for-personify-thats-not-human-specific&quot;&gt;single-word&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291528/how-to-say-it-well/291531#291531&quot;&gt;short-phrase&lt;/a&gt; requests? And finally, does &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291591/conveying-data-collection-storage-using-one-word&quot;&gt;commercial motivation&lt;/a&gt; (real or perceived) have any bearing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T01:11:17.237" Title="Why are requests for headlines off-topic? What about more general work-related questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7373" CreationDate="2015-12-04T01:10:01.007" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Dan Bron says in his comment, single-word and short-phrase requests deal primarily with already-existing words and phrases. Answers can be supported by evidence from dictionaries or searchable corpora. But answers to a question like the one you link to can only be based on opinion. I think it is comparable to the situation with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;writing advice and naming advice&lt;/a&gt;, which are also off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T01:10:01.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7373" CreationDate="2015-12-04T01:11:17.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At Lawrence's request, I'm reproducing my response (originally given in a comment) to a similar question that he asked me on the main site about why the poster's request was off topic. Here's that comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question falls into the category of requests for writing advice, and such questions are off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U because they have no long-term value: they are so particularized that answers to them aren't useful to anyone but the person who poses the question. In a sense, the situation resembles a request for proofreading (which is also off-topic at this site), except that instead of asking &quot;Is anything wrong with this sentence?&quot; the poster asks &quot;Can you think of a better way to word this sentence?&quot; Maybe the question would be a better fit at Writers SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T01:11:17.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7377" CreationDate="2015-12-04T14:08:07.523" Score="1" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed in many comments to questions regarding single word usage in particular sentence or phrase that a user with high reputation will say something that ultimately boils down to &quot;use a dictionary&quot;. At times it can be downright sarcastic or rude to the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this type of comment useful? Are we to assume that a question poster does not know what a dictionary is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would not be better to provide an answer, even if it is a simple answer? Perhaps after a direct answer is given one could expand on the theory of the word usage if they are so inclined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148459" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:29:05.977" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:29:05.977" Title="Is it really helpful to tell a user to look something up in a dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7376" CreationDate="2015-12-04T15:33:46.827" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No Stack Exchange site is a tutorial service.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No Stack Exchange site is a research service.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No Stack Exchange site is a substitute for looking in a standard reference work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question which does not show elementary research be closed in short order.&lt;/strong&gt; The current close reason contains enough detail to explain what can be done to improve the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very often, there's a comment recommending recourse to a dictionary or other such commonly-available reference; and the closure banner links to a useful list at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question might arise as to how to decide between summary closure and a migration to ELL, since that path has been opened. That decision tree starts with the fundamental consideration &amp;quot;Is this a good question?&amp;quot; and its supplementary assistants, &amp;quot;Does this show research? Is the question clear? Does the asker actually understand what they are asking about?&amp;quot; That last one means is there some understanding of what the actual &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; is, not what the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; is, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question shows some understanding, but it's couched in terms which indicate that the OP is actually a learner (for example, mention of SAT or GRE, but other indications may appear) then it's a reasonable question for ELL. It could be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that if a question is improved in order that it can be reopened, it's actually reopened and then migrated to ELL. But at least it will be a good question which is migrated. Bad questions should not be migrated; nor should they be answered. They should be improved before anything happens, and being put on hold is the way to ensure that things are done in the right order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may mean that the question box sidebar needs to be changed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently it says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is your question about using English?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We prefer questions that can be &lt;em&gt;answered,&lt;/em&gt; not just discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Share your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; English, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ask it on ELL&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about this website, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ask it on meta&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;visit the help center »&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;asking help »&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that would appear to support the proposal that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question which does not show elementary research be closed in short order.&lt;/strong&gt; And if additional comments help to point the OP in the right direction, so much the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T15:33:46.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7384" CreationDate="2015-12-05T02:35:55.023" Score="5" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, a user brought up the issue of questions that could seemingly be answered by looking in a dictionary and the responses given to those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew Leach posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7377/129806&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that had a useful suggestion for improving this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think tinkering with the wording of the sidebar could help improve the quality of questions and also help users decide whether their question should be posted on ELL or ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently it says this (subject to how we can lay it out in a post):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is your question about using English?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We prefer questions that can be &lt;em&gt;answered,&lt;/em&gt; not just discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide details.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Share your research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; English, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ask it on ELL&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about this website, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ask it on meta&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7377/129806&quot;&gt;visit the help center »&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;asking help »&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &quot;learner&quot; in ELL is unfortunate because I'm sure there are many people who think to themselves &quot;I've been practicing English for 5 years.  My question doesn't belong on the beginner's page.&quot;  ELL is not a beginner's page.  It seems that users with questions aren't going there first.  I'm not sure why that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Can we collect some ideas for improving the sidebar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If we all agree on wording changes, what are the appropriate next steps to suggest this as a change to the &quot;authorities.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) This might be a post that generates heavy comments on answers.  To keep this neat and orderly, could people who post answers, take the appropriate comments and incorporate them into their answers, and could we delete our comments as we go?  This will help the question and also keep moderators from having to delete comments, which could anger some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Once we get an answer that has the most votes we can submit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T00:28:30.700" Title="Rewriting the Question Box Sidebar" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T12:01:17.077" Score="-6" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I used to be a regular reader, than I answered a bunch of questions and was part of the community.  Heck I answered questions for a few months.  I really like the concept of the site because I like to see obscure usage and I have gotten back into writing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More often than not I only come to the site because of seeing a &quot;Hot&quot; question on the right when I am on another SE site.  Today I clicked on - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291034/phrase-to-describe-a-moving-goal-that-is-forever-just-out-of-reach/291918#291918&quot;&gt;Phrase to describe a moving goal that is forever just out of reach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to tell you that my expectations are extremely low because I realize that many of the top users (volume wise) have very poor English skills and often English is not their native language.  Well even my low expectations weren't met.  An answer with 30 upvotes and accepted as right is not only horrible but has &lt;strong&gt;THREE&lt;/strong&gt; horrible examples.  &lt;strong&gt;ZERO FOR THREE&lt;/strong&gt; of the answers fit the question.  Holy cow!!  And this is a user with a very high reputation on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my meta question is how can a site function when the ignorant are fvoting for ignorance?   Let's say you had a friend who was an English professor and loved English usage.  Would you send her here or would you be embarrassed?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:24:08.827" Title="Really really really hard to take ELU serious or even read a question and answer" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7380" CreationDate="2015-12-05T16:07:23.367" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think your expectations are low enough. The hot network questions are not selected for being the highest quality questions with the highest quality answers—they're mainly composed of bicycle-shed questions where even non-experts feel like they know the answer, questions about popular topics like sex, and interesting questions from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; category. But although it may seem like it sometimes, this site doesn't just deal with single word requests. In my opinion, the quality of answers actually tends to be higher for the less-popular posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for ignorance: it's possible you're more informed than everyone else on this site. I know I'm not; I can think of many answers and users from which I've learned new things. I also haven't noticed poor English skills from most of the top users, so I can't really say why it seems that way to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether I would recommend the site (to anyone) depends on several factors, including that person's particular personality. In general, I don't feel that the quality of the answers is too low for me to recommend it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your main interest is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;-style questions, and in-depth discussions about nuances of meaning, I can see why you might be disappointed with some questions and answers. As a Stack Exchange site, this is by design a poor place for questions that call for opinion-based answers or that require extended discussion. Unfortunately, I feel that questions about meaning, or about the best words to describe some situation, are inherently a bit opinion-based. And unlike on Stack Overflow, there is no real way for the OP to test out an answer to see if it &quot;works&quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T19:39:00.217" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T19:39:00.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7380" CreationDate="2015-12-05T16:18:57.993" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I certainly wouldn't recommend EL&amp;amp;U to a professor who&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thinks that if English is not your native language you must have poor English skills&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;believes that correct English arises from something other than use by English-speakers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thinks that 'like a dog after the rabbit' refers to something unattainable, since dogs often do catch rabbits, both in the wild and in coursing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sees 'chasing rainbows' as a &quot;horrible&quot; suggestion for 'pursuit of something forever just out of reach' and feels no need to support that view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most importantly, I would not recommend it to somebody who wishes to impart Olympian wisdom, not to learn; and who cannot distinguish between 'my opinion' and 'correct'. Fortunately, such professors are rare in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T16:18:57.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2015-12-05T18:55:03.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What suggestions would you make for improving the wording in the Question sidebar box? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidelines seem pretty good to me: clear, straightforward, and easy to follow. I'm pretty confident the guidelines have helped more than one newcomer to formulate a half-decent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the guidelines on  the &lt;strong&gt;Ask Question&lt;/strong&gt; page  do not affect the  influx of low quality questions that plague EL&amp;amp;U today. What concrete evidence do we have that newcomers are not helped by the instructions? What evidence do we have that suggest newcomers even &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; the list in the first place? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case in point is the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/292704/what-does-the-expression-way-to-go-champ-mean&quot;&gt;What does the expression &amp;quot;way to go champ&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I found this expression in the internet and I would like to know its meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it. Nothing else was added. &lt;em&gt;Nothing&lt;/em&gt;. Not even a link to show ‘where’ the user saw this phrase on the Internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It received two answers. But at least those answers aren't taken from &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;The Phrase Finder&lt;/em&gt;. The users who posted their answers have drawn from their personal experience and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/292707/44619&quot;&gt;deadrat's answer&lt;/a&gt; tells the newcomer that the phrase can also  be used ironically; there are links, citations and a good explanation on its meaning. In short, it is &lt;em&gt;an exemplary answer&lt;/em&gt;, for a question that has ignored all the guidelines and instructions that the site kindly provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The problem of low-quality questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;resurfaces every few months or so on meta. It is my understanding that English Language Learners was created specifically to deal with the increasing load of off-topic, general reference questions that was flooding EL&amp;amp;U back in 2011. There is nothing new under the sun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members who care and wish to keep the site healthy and strong have offered a multitude of proposals and fixes over the years: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/742/how-should-we-handle-users-who-generate-consistently-low-quality-and-off-topic-q&quot;&gt;How should we handle users who generate consistently low-quality and off-topic questions?&lt;/a&gt;  Feb 20 '11 (566 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1546/basic-questions-are-not-so-basic?lq=1&quot;&gt;Basic questions are not so basic&lt;/a&gt; Jul 13 '11 (526 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1613/a-look-at-question-quality&quot;&gt;A look at question quality&lt;/a&gt; Jul 18 '11 (474 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt; Nov 15 '11 (1176 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/do-we-need-to-write-the-better-questions-ourselves&quot;&gt;Do we need to write the better questions ourselves?&lt;/a&gt; Oct 20 '12 (345 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3384/waning-gap-of-acceptable-questions?lq=1&quot;&gt;Waning gap of acceptable questions&lt;/a&gt; Dec 6 '12 (677 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3514/can-we-reverse-the-trend-on-low-quality-questions&quot;&gt;Can we reverse the trend on low quality questions?&lt;/a&gt; Dec 27 '12 (114 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language Learners (Beta) is born on January 23, 2013&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3750/allow-questions-to-be-closed-as-off-topic-and-migrated-to-ell&quot;&gt;Allow Questions to be Closed as Off-Topic and Migrated to ELL&lt;/a&gt; Feb 17 '13 (164 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3939/excessive-number-of-fundamental-questions&quot;&gt;Excessive number of fundamental questions&lt;/a&gt;  May 9 '13 (461 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4522/bad-questions-can-lead-to-good-answers?rq=1&quot;&gt;Bad questions can lead to good answers&lt;/a&gt; Feb 18 '14 (185 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4692/has-anyone-thought-about-changing-the-name-of-this-site&quot;&gt;Has anyone thought about changing the name of this site?&lt;/a&gt; Apr 18 '14 (533 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4726/is-elu-getting-boring-i-thought-it-was-but-then/4727#4727&quot;&gt;Is EL&amp;amp;U getting boring? I thought it was, but then . .&lt;/a&gt; May 7 '14 (306 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/word-for-disrespecting-eldest-half-sister-by-referring-to-her-husband-as-girly-g&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he&amp;#39;s amused but the rest of the family isn&amp;#39;t?&lt;/a&gt; May 8 '14 (1,689 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;A simple proposal towards improving question quality&lt;/a&gt; Jun 30 '14 (325 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5222/declutter-elus-newest-page&quot;&gt;Declutter EL&amp;amp;U&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Newest&amp;quot; Page&lt;/a&gt; Sep 14 '14 (280 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5486/what-kind-of-questions-are-we-looking-for-here?lq=1&quot;&gt;What kind of questions ARE we looking for here?&lt;/a&gt;  Dec 29 '14 (515  views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6678/are-these-sentences-correct-is-a-title-like-this-enough-reason-to-close-a-que&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Are these sentences correct?&amp;quot;—Is a title like this enough reason to close a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Mar 15 '15 (460 views)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6819/is-there-anything-we-can-do-to-get-fewer-off-topic-questions?lq=1&quot;&gt;Is there anything we can do to get fewer off-topic questions?&lt;/a&gt; May 1 '15 (297 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;September 10, 2015 ELL graduates&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;19&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7128/should-we-have-a-migration-path-to-ell?lq=1&quot;&gt;Should we have a migration path to ELL?&lt;/a&gt; Sep 10 '15 (538 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7205/could-more-questions-from-senior-experienced-users-benefit-elu&quot;&gt;Could more questions from senior/experienced users benefit ELU?&lt;/a&gt; Oct 6 '15 (461 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7378/rewriting-the-question-box-sidebar&quot;&gt;Rewriting the Question Box Sidebar&lt;/a&gt; Dec 5 '15 (120 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7429/what-can-we-do-to-make-this-site-more-intimidating&quot;&gt;What can we do to make this site more &amp;quot;intimidating&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; Dec 19 '15 (579 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7470/how-to-save-elu&quot;&gt;How to save EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;  Dec 19 '15 (331 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/proposal-to-protect-old-questions-from-lqa-by-low-rep-users&quot;&gt;Proposal to protect old questions from LQA by low-rep users&lt;/a&gt; Dec 28 '15 (158 views)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7535/does-elu-have-it-worse-than-other-sites?lq=1&quot;&gt;Does ELU Have Worse Questions Than Other Sites?&lt;/a&gt; Jan 02 '16&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Has anyone discovered a way to encourage users to do some preliminary research before asking their questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the more experienced among us cannot come up with good questions, because  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/do-we-need-to-write-the-better-questions-ourselves&quot;&gt;let’s face it, writing a good question on purpose is really really hard.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Why would a newcomer be any different? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the emphasis on SE has always been on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/important-reputation-rule-changes/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While we value good questions (and asking a great question is&#xA;  absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide&#xA;  the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good&#xA;  answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more&#xA;  intrinsic value than questions, and the reputation balance should&#xA;  reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new user posting an answer will be rewarded with 10 rep for every upvote, whereas a question will earn only 5 rep, and yet a downvote carries the same weight for answers and questions. This does not encourage nor help regular users to post “good” questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For convenience's sake, I'll repost my comment which seems to have drawn some consensus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;problem&quot; lies with the site's name, its url address, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; and the &quot;problem&quot; is that visitors see the website is populated by a good number of native speakers who are declared &quot;experts&quot;, why wouldn't they answer their short simple question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Newcomer: ‘What? Someone says I have to read pages of tutorial before I can type out my simple question. I haven't the time, I'm at work now.’ [Or] ‘I don't understand half of what it's saying, it's all in &quot;sophisticated&quot; English. I only need to know if this sentence is grammatically correct, what's wrong with that? Hell, I'll post my question which I know is about the English language and its usage.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T09:34:37.653" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7355" CreationDate="2015-12-07T15:30:30.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cocklaphobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cocklaphobic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No head thingies round here, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T15:43:05.157" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T15:43:05.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7392" CreationDate="2015-12-07T18:07:55.103" Score="12" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I notice that the box around the box around the user information is not rendering correctly in my browser. I'm using Chrome 47 on Windows 7. Here is a screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nRa6V.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nRa6V.png&quot; alt=&quot;incompletely rendered boxes with lovely hand-drawn green circles.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I drew those circles by hand. w00t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I did refresh my cache, then reboot my machine, then I took off and nuked the entire site from orbit because it was the only way to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll note that I also circled the question box, but that seems to have always been that way and I was too dense to notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T16:08:05.257" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T16:08:05.257" Title="Pretty boxes not rendering correctly" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7372" CreationDate="2015-12-07T22:04:09.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the footer of this (any every Stack Exchange) site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked a couple of the sites you linked, and somewhere on the page they all list the source of the content with a link to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they unethical? Yes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we stop it? Probably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it infringing copyright? Probably not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53089" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T22:04:09.597" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7376" CreationDate="2015-12-08T10:25:19.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't regard &amp;quot;Did you look that up in a dictionary?&amp;quot; as a rude question. Take it at face value. It's a hint, a prompt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Either the O.P. used a dictionary first, or not.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, a dictionary should have been consulted first. (Probably a few dictionaries, actually.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then results from that prior research should have been included, summarized, or at least mentioned in the question. Potentially, that can serve a few functions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It demonstrates prior research was done, which in turn helps ward off negative comments and downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It helps people reading the question better understand where the O.P. is coming from, and where the confusion lies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It saves people who want to answer the question a trip to the dictionary themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It prevents the answers from going in several different directions that the O.P. doesn't want by clarifying what the question is really asking about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it's not a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rude&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; question, it's a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fair&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's two sides to the rudeness coin. Personally, I think there's a degree of &amp;quot;rudeness&amp;quot; when a question is skimpy on details and scant on research. It's like saying, &lt;em&gt;“I just want an answer to my question. I don't want to have to do any work myself, or put any effort into this. Everyone should just be able to figure out by osmosis what I already know, and what I still need to figure out.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, there's a reason I put &amp;quot;rudeness&amp;quot; in scare quotes. I don't think most new users are really being &amp;quot;rude&amp;quot; – certainly not intentionally. We live in an online society filled with tweets and snarky comments, where brevity is valued and thoughtful deliberateness is shrugged off. Newcomers to the Stack Exchange often don't realize that this site strives to be differernt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; on SE starts with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;We're a little bit different from other sites.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and exorts new users to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Include &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;details about what you have tried&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; what you are trying to do.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a language forum, that &amp;quot;details about what you have tried&amp;quot; part means, &lt;em&gt;“Did you look this up? What did you search for? What did you find?”&lt;/em&gt; – particularly when the question is primarily about the meaning of words or phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to pull this off and write good questions, I've already written about this in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/please-everyone-details-please/465#465&quot;&gt;answer to an ELL meta question&lt;/a&gt;. And ELL is probably where most &amp;quot;ESL students, general non-English speaking persons seeking clarification&amp;quot; should ask their questions – but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/3723#3723&quot;&gt;that's another matter entirely&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T21:26:45.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7389" CreationDate="2015-12-08T20:01:22.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue has been corrected. Sorry for inconvenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uZxII.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uZxII.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66588" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T20:01:22.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7394" CreationDate="2015-12-10T16:35:18.320" Score="4" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep seeing people say in comments &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'let's take this to chat' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'this would be better in chat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't know how to get to there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked all over the FAQ and it mentions chat but I don't see the link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I get to chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:11:11.767" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T12:44:25.483" Title="Chat: How do I get to it?" Tags="|support|faq|chat|chat-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7393" CreationDate="2015-12-10T16:59:43.607" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right to want to come to chat. It's a wonderful place where lots of great and constructive discussion happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find your way to chat you'll have to look at the top of the site, to the left of where your avatar is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QEiKC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QEiKC.png&quot; alt=&quot;highlighted stack exchange logo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you'll see the Stack Exchange logo. Click on that and a menu will appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gQNU9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gQNU9.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Menu&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have highlighted there the link to chat. Click on that and you will be transported to here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LA3eG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LA3eG.png&quot; alt=&quot;list of chat rooms&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the list of chat rooms. The first in the list, as it's shown there, is the one you're most likely to want to visit, that's the English Language &amp;amp; Usage main room, called English Language &amp;amp; Usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that the rooms are ordered by activity, so sometimes a different room will be first in the list, but mostly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;chat help&lt;/a&gt; before you start chatting, to familiarise yourself with how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T12:44:25.483" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T12:44:25.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7405" CreationDate="2015-12-11T03:26:01.930" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently gone over 2,000 rep, which means I can review flagged posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can barely understand some posts, and editing them to relevance is beyond me, but possibly not beyond some of the site's gurus.  I have been hitting &quot;Skip&quot; too often.  Guidance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answers would be OK, even useful, as comments, but should not be answers.  Sometimes they are answers because the user does not have enough rep to comment. Sometimes they are just lazy answers.  However, converting such answers to comments is not within my power.  Can I recommend conversion to a comment, and if so, how?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:20:32.143" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T12:40:20.957" Title="Need guidance on how to deal with review of flagged posts" Tags="|support|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-11T12:23:08.587" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fairly new to SE and ELU(less than a month old). While going through some questions and answers, I spotted a few comments that made absolutely no sense to me. &#xA;Comments that appear to at-mention some user and suggest a clarification or express an opinion or simply post another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess those comments were posted &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a series of other comments, but for some reason , all those previous comments were deleted by their respective authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus , my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If comments add no reputation to an user and are simply there to add value to a post, then why delete them at all? Won't new users (like yours truly) find it hard to decipher the flow of comments and understand what was being discussed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it not possible to delete all the reply comments that were triggered by a deleted source comment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Call me a fool, but I personally feel that comments too add immense value to Q&amp;amp;As and I feel helpless when I see random comments without being able to understand the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: This is my first meta-post . Please feel free to close this question if it doesn't belong here or if it is a duplicate. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:22:00.890" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:22:00.890" Title="Comment threads that make no sense" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7398" CreationDate="2015-12-11T17:35:09.600" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that I've figured out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7393/chat-how-do-i-get-to-it&quot;&gt;how to get to chat&lt;/a&gt;, I see that there's kind of a lot there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see all sorts of weird things there. Before I ask about what's appropriate behavior, I'd like to know just how to use all the bells and whistles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that you type in the box at the bottom, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if you make a mistake (how do you edit)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you ping someone?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who can you ping?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you reply to a specific comment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are those items on the right? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what about images and videos and tops of web pages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What else is there that I haven't thought of?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to do all those cool things! (within reason of course)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:10:44.900" Title="Chat: how do I use it right?" Tags="|support|faq|chat|chat-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7397" CreationDate="2015-12-11T20:40:30.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Editing Messages&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you note in your question, it is possible to edit your messages, within a 2 minute window of posting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two method's for editing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest is to push the up arrow key &lt;kbd&gt;&amp;uarr;&lt;/kbd&gt;, and that will put your last message in the text box for creating messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1fkxw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1fkxw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mitch editing his message&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that the background of the text box is darker now that you're editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the next key you push is &lt;kbd&gt;&amp;uarr;&lt;/kbd&gt;, then that will let you edit your message before the one you are editing, so long as you posted it within the 2 minute window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you prefer to use your mouse, there is a menu you can bring up next to your message, by clicking on this arrow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v48Au.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v48Au.png&quot; alt=&quot;chat menu arrow&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;edit&quot; option is in the bottom left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/55gm1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/55gm1.png&quot; alt=&quot;chat menu&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you desperately need your message edited (e.g. you've accidentally put your password in it) and you've left the two minute window, you can flag the message for a moderator (option in the bottom right of the window) and they can make the requisite changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the only use for the flag, but we can discuss flagging problem behaviour in another post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The delete option does what you'd expect: delete the message. Deletion has the same time limit as editing, and so you can use the moderator flag for that, too, if need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Linking/Referring to Messages&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permalink option at the top is a link to the chat transcript, which is a permanent record of what has been said in chat. You can use that to link to your message. If you post a permalink as its own message (without any other text) then the linked message will appear as a quote in the chat window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have implied, other people's messages also have a menu, similar to the one above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X1F5j.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X1F5j.png&quot; alt=&quot;chat menu for other people&amp;#39;s messages&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This menu doesn't have edit or delete options, but at the top there is the option to reply. Clicking this adds a colon and a number to your text box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sPpeo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sPpeo.png&quot; alt=&quot;text box&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number in the text box is the ID of the message you want to reply to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also achieve this by clicking the arrow on the right hand side of the message you want to reply to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tkPBJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tkPBJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;chat reply arrow&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things available in the menu, starring and flagging as spam/offensive, are also available on the right of the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;'Starring' Messages&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The star is used for, as the title suggests, highlighting interesting things people say. When a message is starred, then it will appear on the starboard at the right of the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y0Ghn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y0Ghn.png&quot; alt=&quot;star board&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stars at the top of the board that are outlines, rather than solid, are pinned to the star board, by moderators, because they are particularly important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things you have starred have yellow stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned before, flagging will be discussed in another post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that covers the basic things you can do to a message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Pinging Another User&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinging someone, i.e. getting their attention by mentioning them in your message, can be achieved by typing &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; and then the first few letters of their name. This will bring up a list of possible users, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9MZVq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9MZVq.png&quot; alt=&quot;text box with autocomplete options&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can click on one of the names to autocomplete it, or push &lt;kbd&gt;tab&lt;/kbd&gt; to autocomplete the first option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ping will appear in the user's inbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinging another users will only work if they are in the chat room at the time, or have visited recently. The list of users that appear in the autocomplete indicate that these users are pingable.  If they do not appear, then they are not pingable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Summary of a Web Page in a Messages&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to &quot;tops of web pages&quot;, certain websites can have their content &quot;one-boxed&quot;, i.e. a summary of what you are linking to is inserted into chat. This only works if you send the URL as the entirety of the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of sites this works for is available &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#formatting&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and includes Stack Exchange questions and answers, Wikipedia and Twitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;An Image as a Message&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also post URLs to images as their own message and these will be shown as images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as that you can upload image from your computer with the upload button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwIie.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwIie.png&quot; alt=&quot;chat image upload dialogue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images uploaded in this way go to imgur. You can also use this dialogue to take images from a website and save them to imgur, to save on the other website's bandwidth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Other&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the basics and should get you going. There are other things that can be done, such as viewing all the rooms, creating your own room, reading the transcript and scheduling events, but you'll only want to start doing that once you're up to speed with the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2015-12-11T21:17:03.483" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T21:17:03.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7399" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:14:33.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before posting your own question, please consult these questions to see if there is already an answer that solves your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is additional &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;general help for chat&lt;/a&gt; available in the footer on the chat site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:14:33.940" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:14:33.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7400" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:14:33.940" Score="0" Body="The chat tag is used for questions specific to the chat rooms associated with EL&amp;U, which can be found on chat.stackexchange.com. " OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:14:33.940" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:14:33.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7401" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:18:41.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This series of posts is intended to give users an overview of how chat works for our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:18:41.380" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:18:41.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7402" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:18:41.380" Score="0" Body="The chat FAQ is a series of posts to help users understand how chat works." OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:18:41.380" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:18:41.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7403" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:39:14.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Winterbash is StackExchange's version of the Hat Dash. For several weeks in winter (usually mid-December to early January), users may earn hats for their avatars. You can find information on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/promos/15/winter-bash-2014&quot;&gt;promo site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:39:14.720" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:39:14.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7404" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:39:14.720" Score="0" Body="For questions generally relating to the annual Winterbash event." OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T02:39:14.720" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T02:39:14.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7395" CreationDate="2015-12-12T12:40:20.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only mods can convert answers to comments and, though they do so at times, it is rare. If you genuinely feel that this answer would be a useful comment and that the benefit to the site would outweigh the encouragement to this and other low-rep users to post comments in the answer box, you should flag it yourself, &quot;in need of moderator intervention&quot;, and recommend conversion. But most 'not an answer' flags result in deletion; if the user perseveres for a few days, he will presumably gain enough rep to re-post as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T12:40:20.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7407" CreationDate="2015-12-12T19:08:06.510" Score="-3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wonder what British natives feel when they see American English is being used globally (?). English originated in Britain, but now British have to see everyone using American spelling and pronunciations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that question on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T03:15:11.887" Title="Would asking about the feeling of British natives toward the widespread of American English on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7406" CreationDate="2015-12-13T03:15:11.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Primarily because it is a question of human reaction, rather than one of syntax or language subtleties, it would probably not be considered on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user151361" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T03:15:11.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-13T04:51:57.450" Score="-8" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is known, an emoticon is a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression that, in the absence of body language and prosody, serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal non-verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think emoticons should be supported by EL&amp;amp;U in order to make more clear comments &amp;amp; answers?&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D69UM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D69UM.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of several emoticons&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T23:11:22.783" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T23:11:22.783" Title="Do you think emoticons should be supported by EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1570" CreationDate="2015-12-13T06:19:20.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though not online, books abound, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1442233273&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/The-Greek-Latin-Roots-English/dp/1442233273/ref=dp_ob_title_bk&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T06:19:20.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7409" CreationDate="2015-12-14T01:14:33.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U already supports emoticons. ;-) :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T01:14:33.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7409" CreationDate="2015-12-14T17:54:40.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you've mistaken 'emoticon' for 'emoji'. The examples above are small high resolution images that usually involve faces with some kind of emotion, and these images are historically based on emoticons which are sequences of characters resembling facial expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no matter. The facial expressions expressed by emojis (or emoticons) are somewhat vague. They are officially attached, via Unicode, to labels and definitions and descriptions of what the graphic or character sequence are supposed to mean. But the images without the definitions are somewhat inarticulate. For that reason they are not a reasonable information transfer mechanism (not that writing is either, but at least there's an attempt for writing to be consistent over a longer period).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if these particular emoji are consistent in meaning, there's no established teaching mechanism (to help disambiguate), and no established authority about what emojis mean. They were all invented recently, so who knows how long they will last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since emojis may have code points in Unicode, which I fully endorse, I therefore support the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of using emojis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because of this lack of definiteness, I don't think they should be encouraged with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the changing direction of the title of this question (at the beginning it said 'support' and at this moment it says 'banned' and in the next moment who knows):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not think they should be banned (if unicode is supported then it would be hard technically to implement, and also it would be a strange desire to ban a communication device)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think they should be technically supported (as much as Unicode should be supported)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not think they should be encouraged (I think they should be discouraged) because of their frivolous and poor information carrying nature (similar to what I expect our view of emoticons should be).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T20:18:29.160" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T20:18:29.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7420" CreationDate="2015-12-14T18:07:40.733" Score="11" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that I know how to get to chat and use all the features (the buttons and edits and links and stuff), what am I supposed to do with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best use of chat vs when should you post or comment? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it 'anything goes' conversation? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I ask people to proofread a sentence or two?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I just can't remember this word on the top of my tongue! What is it?!!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I ask more opinionated questions that just would not go over on main? I've tried that but got little response.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see people having weird conversations about things that seem totally off topic, but then sometimes it makes sense, but then I can't get a word in edgewise. My English is only so-so, and things go by so fast. What can I do with chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat - what is it good for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T15:59:05.490" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T15:59:05.490" Title="Chat: what is it good for?" Tags="|discussion|faq|chat|chat-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7419" CreationDate="2015-12-14T22:09:09.027" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;My hat looks like a cheeseburger with a cherry on top.  Some of the other hats are really neat!  Is there anything I can do to get a hat with more je ne sais quoi?  Or do I just have to wait until next year? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T22:34:43.240" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T22:34:43.240" Title="Can I choose another hat?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7418" CreationDate="2015-12-14T22:16:53.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/12/announcing-winter-bash-2015/?cb=1&quot;&gt;Winter Bash&lt;/a&gt; announcement for more details. You can change your hat by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Earning a new hat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selecting the new hat from the hat menu (snowflake).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clicking &quot;Wear Hat&quot; on the hat display.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can adjust how your hat looks by using the &quot;show controls&quot; checkbox and fiddling with the widgets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T22:16:53.547" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7415" CreationDate="2015-12-15T01:03:02.953" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the best use of chat vs when should you post or comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rule of thumb (which I just made up) is, if what you have to say is oriented toward the site -- for example, you're pointing out a logical or factual error in a post, or asking for clarification -- then it should stay on the site, i.e. as a comment. If what you have to say is oriented toward yourself -- you have a minor question, perhaps prompted by a particular Q&amp;amp;A, but not actually about it -- then chat might be a good place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it 'anything goes' conversation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same &quot;be nice&quot; rules apply to chat as to the rest of Stack Exchange. Avoid profanity, and never use ridicule/put-downs, not even in jest. You don't have to stay on topic, though it's nice if you can manage it. However, if you wouldn't bring up a topic as dinner table conversation at the office holiday party, it probably doesn't belong in chat, either. (Assuming your office isn't a fan of knock-down-drag-out dinner table fights, that is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask people to proofread a sentence or two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure. Be patient, and be prepared to accept &quot;sorry, no time right now&quot; as the response. (Or, more likely, be prepared to be ignored if nobody is in a proofreading mood when you post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just can't remember this word on the top of my tongue! What is it?!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume you meant it's on the &lt;em&gt;tip&lt;/em&gt; of your tongue. :) You can certainly ask in chat, especially if you don't have (or can't be bothered to provide) the details that a single-word-request question would require. Whether you get an answer will depend on who else is in the room with you, and how well &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; brain synapses happen to be firing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask more opinionated questions that just would not go over on main? I've tried that but got little response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask. No guarantees about getting an answer; as mentioned, with chat, it all depends on who is in the room with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't get a word in edgewise ... things go by so fast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is never a linear conversation. If you have a comment to make about something someone said 5 minutes ago, go ahead and post it, even if the conversation seems to have moved to an entirely different topic (or three) since then. If you make your comment an actual reply (by clicking the little angled arrow pointing to the right that appears when you hover over the 5-minute-old post), people can simply follow the link to figure out what you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does help to be able to type quickly. But another skill is just as valuable, and much easier to learn: do not worry too much about typos. Unlike many other chat systems, SE chat allows you to edit your posts (for a limited time interval, obviously), so if you fat-finger something in an effort to post it in a timely manner, you can go back and fix it. Or, if people seem to have understood what you meant, don't even bother with the editing. (Yes, that's easier said than done, at least for a certain segment of the ELU population.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T01:03:02.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7426" CreationDate="2015-12-15T13:23:10.497" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently don't have any questions to ask. However, yesterday I asked a question that received mostly negative attention but attracted one answer that was not upvoted. Here is a link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/293875/modern-use-of-i-should-think-vs-i-would-think-in-speech&quot;&gt;Modern use of &amp;quot;I should think&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;I would think&amp;quot; in speech&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to delete it, based on having half-read this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/311810/can-self-censoring-end-up-with-a-question-ban#311812&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/311810/can-self-censoring-end-up-with-a-question-ban#311812&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After deleting it I read the rest of the post saying that deleting a question after someone posts an answer can lead to a stiff penalty. Is there a way I can tell if I'm penalized without asking a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142967" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T02:22:38.777" Title="Detect question ban" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-15T17:05:57.060" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294066/name-of-an-accessory-put-on-horses-that-helps-them-avoid-distraction&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; after searching a few times(through Google and within ELU Search). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out , it had already been asked and answered before &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/254998/looking-for-the-word-which-covers-the-eye-lid-of-the-horses-and-led-the-horse-to&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and consequently, my question was marked as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My disappointment lies in the fact that even the &lt;strong&gt;Questions that may already have your answer&lt;/strong&gt; dynamic list did not match my question to the already existing one. I guess it matches tags and few words from the title and body to populate the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to configure anything additionally to get the most appropriate matches? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the best practices to avoid duplicates, as someone who wants to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only search a few times but I need some support from the SE's search algorithms to come up with the questions that already exists. It will save everyone's time I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T17:35:56.310" Title="Why &quot;Questions that may already have your answer&quot; doesn't populate the right set of similar questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-15T23:40:25.810" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is not liking the answer given for an existing question a reason enough to ask a duplicate/similar question? Ironically, kiamlaluno did not receive an answer on asking this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T14:30:24.957" Title="Asking essentially a duplicate question if one considers the original wasn't answered satisfactorily" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7424" CreationDate="2015-12-15T23:46:00.290" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not liking the answer is an insufficient reason to justify a duplicate question. The question should be closed as a duplicate of the original question and the original should be improved if necessary. Editing a question will attract more attention to it. If the question has an accepted answer, posting a bounty is a more effective means of attracting new answers. That is the desired course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In rare cases, the duplicate question might be considered more useful or helpful than the original question. In that case, a Meta question posed to the community about closing an older question as a duplicate of a newer, clearer question might help to determine the correct action. However, generally speaking, we would prefer to see old, canonical answers &lt;em&gt;improved&lt;/em&gt; rather than new posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you don't like the answers given:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. Edit the original question to make it better&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. Post a bounty on the original question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, your duplicate question will probably be closed as a duplicate and someday in the distant future, it will be merged with the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said,&lt;/strong&gt; it is not helpful to anyone to close a question as a duplicate of a closed question -- if they are duplicates, then it should be closed for the same reason. If the close reason doesn't apply, then it's probably not actually a duplicate. Also, it is not helpful to close questions as duplicates of posts with negative score, since this are auto-deleted at some point in the distant future, which will break the duplicate link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T14:30:24.957" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T14:30:24.957" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7421" CreationDate="2015-12-16T02:19:03.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that this information is available to users until they try to post a question. Moderators can find out if a user on their site has triggered the ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't worry about deleting one question with an answer. The temporary ban is to prevent &quot;help vampire&quot; behavior, where a user posts a question, gets an answer, then deletes the question and posts another one, repeating the cycle in an attempt to avoid downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that behavior is problematic is that questions and answers are intended to persist in order to help future visitors. Users who post off-topic or poorly worded questions rapidly and then delete them as soon as they have an answer are adding more work for the rest of the community without providing any benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you do not appear to have triggered the ban. I would also like to encourage you to consider un-deleting your question. There is nothing wrong with posting a duplicate question. It means someone else thought of it already and it was a good question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it doesn't appear that your question was actually closed as a duplicate, which means there is still plenty of opportunity for good answers to appear. EL&amp;amp;U takes longer than SO to respond, so give it some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some food for thought. You can leave it deleted if you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T02:22:38.777" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T02:22:38.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-16T07:24:19.853" Score="6" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2015.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Winter Bash 2015&lt;/a&gt; is under way and EL&amp;amp;U is taking part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we turn this whole hat malarkey off for the whole site, and we can concentrate on the finer points of the English instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always on meta: an upvote indicates agreement, and a downvote disagreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T12:23:24.843" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T12:23:24.843" Title="Shall we just toss the Winter Hats into the bin?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="16" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-16T09:23:47.803" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there is obviously a hat in the offing for the question, I'll provide an answer anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hats are supposed to be an additional gamification encouraging &lt;strong&gt;good practices and behaviour.&lt;/strong&gt; If hats simply provide a reason to post straw-man questions, or change one or two characters in a post (which bumps the thread to the top of the active list), then that is not promoting useful practice and yes, hats should be turned off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bah, hatbug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T01:21:32.023" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T01:21:32.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-16T09:30:22.303" Score="23" ViewCount="924" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U questions are spiraling out of control, and we get so many of them every day!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are always asking about comma placement, whether it's who-or-whom, where the apostrophe goes with a name ending in &quot;s&quot;, if an inexplicable combination of never-before-put-together words is a commonly used idiom or saying, the definition of words they can't bother to look up in a dictionary, and complaints about badly written sentences we have absolutely no control over. Worse yet are complaints about reasonably written sentences that people think are badly written (like, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Who are you, sir, may I ask?&quot; &amp;lt;- Have you ever seen this type of question?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we make this site finally appear sufficiently intimidating to passers-by such that an end can be put to this kind of nonsense? Clearly our tour and help section are not intimidating enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a permanent banner threatening deletion of particular kinds of questions on contact reasonable? Should our tour and help section contain only obscure polysyllabic elements of speech? If these are not possible, what else might we do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: since this question appeared, these questions appeared on the main site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294276/58761&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294276/58761&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294271/58761&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294271/58761&lt;/a&gt; (Thank you, @Andrew Leach), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294273/58761&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294273/58761&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;sigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T13:44:00.050" Title="What can we do to make this site more &quot;intimidating&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-16T10:18:09.940" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since a prime requisite is evidence of research, an easily-implemented change would probably be to &lt;strong&gt;change the minimum-length restriction on questions.&lt;/strong&gt; I don’t know what it is currently, but forcing questions to be at least 800 characters, or 200 words, or whatever, would mean that some effort has to be put into providing something meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Padding out a poor question to the right length will only exacerbate its poor quality, will probably trigger the SmokeDetector bot in Chat and will lead to closure [due to lack of research, probably] and deletion in short order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the notice “Your question is not long enough” could include a link to the Help on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to write a good question&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; which may need revising if this is thought useful &amp;mdash; and possibly something like “If your English isn’t up to this, you might consider ELL.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limit (and deletion of questions which don't meet quality standards) will improve the shop window of current questions and hopefully seed a virtuous circle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T10:18:09.940" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4522" CreationDate="2015-12-16T10:23:32.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  The person who asked whether to use cold or frigid doesn't care about your details. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you know whether the &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; (or any reader, for that matter) would be interested in learning the details or not? &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are maybe not &#xA;interested in details, but many people have highly inquisitive minds and most&#xA;of those people &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; actually want to know the juicy details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  The people who land on the page by searching (our future visitors) will  &#xA;  click based on the question being asked and users who would care about &#xA;  all that detail already know the differences between cold and frigid. &#xA;  So they are unlikely to ever read all those details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I found this site &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; I read the snippet of text highlighted in Google's brief descriptions &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; I was intrigued by the context of the &#xA;discussions being had, not the wording of the question that started the discussions. Such discussions are often developed over long periods of time and by the continued efforts of people in this community who occasionally revisit, reconsider, and respark old discussions with new ideas or changing perspectives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  EL&amp;amp;U is not hoping to replace the dictionary. It is also not hoping to &#xA;  replace the General Reference etymology sources. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is exactly why just giving straight-to-the-point answers, simple answers should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be the default response protocol followed. If the &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; is concerned with the difference between synonyms enough to bother coming here to ask about it, then they must be seeking something more than just the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  So we close stuff that people can just look up elsewhere to free up &#xA;  content creators to spend their time answering interesting &#xA;  questions that bring in future visitors.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What brings future and return visitors is the opportunity to participate in whatever discussions they might stumble-upon while exploring the &#xA;site and the added bonus of the enjoying the rewarding feeling one experiences when carrying out acts of kindness or helping others. The questions that kick-off some of the most fascinating and informative discussions to be had on a subject; But the questions themselves tend to be very poor flagships for purposes of generating interest anew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  ...looking for interesting details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, wait... didn't you just say that visitors don't care about phenry's details? Details or no details, which is it? You've contradicted your own &#xA;previous answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  We close bad questions because they sit around and never get answered. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Precisely why those particular questions should be left open to debate or be &#xA;promoted with additional exposure to more and more people, in the hopes that it&#xA;will eventually become an answered question. Closing unanswered questions just appears, to me, to be the equivalent of sweeping the dust pile under a rug instead of out the house... a hiding away of anything not pretty and perfect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  And, for the record, closing or downvoting a post isn't an attempt &#xA;  to punish users. It is an attempt to guide the proactive, &#xA;  content-generating users toward the most likely path for success. &#xA;  &quot;Don't look here; there isn't anything valuable here. Go that way &#xA;  instead.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And who decides for the world at large whether/in what other people will find &#xA;something of value? Especially since much of what becomes most valuable to&#xA;people are those things that they are allowed to explore freely and ponder over&#xA;for long periods of time. Not allowing simple questions/answers to sit and &#xA;stew in people minds for some time will never generate new value for something &#xA;else, once removed. Potential value is lost not redistributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Wrong. The person who benefits the most from closing a terrible &#xA;  question is the one who would have mistook it for something &#xA;  interesting when it was actually crap.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arrogant, much? You keep suggesting that you think your opinion should be the &#xA;law. What makes you so sure that you would know what the rest of the world &#xA;thinks about something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143107" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T10:23:32.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-16T14:07:06.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I naturally agree with my esteemed colleague, EL&amp;amp;U is well-known for bending the &quot;no fun&quot; rule, especially during the Winter Bash. It certainly encourages us to remember the fun questions from Bashes Past and to post new thoughtful questions and answers that we might just have chatted about in chat otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Embrace the hatterdashery! It only lasts a few weeks and helps us through the dark part of the year (in the Northern hemi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T15:57:00.103" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T15:57:00.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-16T14:18:58.333" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as a non-mod, I think hats should stay all year. They should never go away and users should be able to wear all their hats at once, even if it's ridiculously breaking with metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T01:20:50.023" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T01:20:50.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-16T14:35:42.363" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Changing the question length as Andrew Leach suggested might help some, but there are many long, bad questions and some short, good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for me is that when you come to a site named &lt;em&gt;english&lt;/em&gt;.se and see a title &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;, then questions about comma placement and who/whom seem entirely on-topic.  And asking someone who doesn't have a great command of English to go do research (in English) on grammar seems, well... unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So personally I favor the various suggestions for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4692/has-anyone-thought-about-changing-the-name-of-this-site&quot;&gt;renaming the site&lt;/a&gt; that resurface now and again.  The trouble seems to be reaching a consensus about exactly &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; to call it.  I don't much care, as I think &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; would be better than what we've got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;english&lt;/em&gt;.se could direct to ELL, which would help the learners who stumble here via Google.  If a more advanced user ended up on ELL, they would presumably be savvy enough to go:  &quot;Hmm... I'm not a learner, I wonder if there's any other site...&quot; A banner or notice in ELL's help center might also help direct those people here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T14:35:42.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7439" CreationDate="2015-12-16T14:44:14.013" Score="11" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the SWR topic gets a lot of debate here, but given that the things exist, I am asking for a best practice in a particular set of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quintilian said something like &quot;the goal of communication should not be merely to be understood, but to make it impossible to be misunderstood.&quot;  More recently, Randall Munroe &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in his new book&lt;/a&gt; has taught us that sometimes the best thing to say is &quot;techtonic plate&quot; but other times &quot;the big slowly moving flat rock that we live on&quot; is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone comes here to ask &quot;What is a single word for 'using big words when small ones will do'?&quot;  I know that &lt;em&gt;sesquipedalian&lt;/em&gt; is a perfectly reasonable answer.  But I also know that if the OP uses this word in the context&#xA;she describes, she will sound arrogant, pompous, pretentious, or worse.  She is also likely to not be understood by her audience, and violate Quintilian's advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offer as one example this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/294260/13804&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;.  There are two good answers, and each deserves the up-votes it has.  But a comment by @Necreaux to one answer is an excellent summation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While perspicacious is good, it is a word that may not be understand [sic] by many and could sound pretentious.  Depending on the audience it might not be a viable option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own belief is that the four-word phrasing in the question is far better than any one word could ever be.  Should I add this as an answer, with this explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T11:34:51.860" Title="How to answer single-word-request when a single word exists, but a multi-word phrasing is preferable?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7435" CreationDate="2015-12-16T14:55:19.560" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people ask single-word-requests because they expect there's some easy-to-understand, fairly common word that they just don't know yet or have forgotten. Other times they really need a single word. It's super important, for some reason. Sadly, the SWR questions usually don't provide much context or limit the scope of possible answers. Finally, SWR questions are often only tagged as such, and the question doesn't even explicitly state that it's limited to single-word answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I'd say you should answer the question with a phrase if a phrase works best. Explain your reasons for discarding other answers if that helps make it clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T14:55:19.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-16T15:57:37.620" Score="12" ViewCount="700" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been a room owner of various chat rooms: chat rooms I created myself, and now, the ELU main chat. But what IS a room owner? What can a room owner do, what can't they do, what &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; they do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how can a regular user find or identify room owners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T15:58:11.853" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T16:15:04.187" Title="Chat: What is a Room Owner?" Tags="|support|faq|chat|chat-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7440" CreationDate="2015-12-16T16:15:32.820" Score="12" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been asking a series of questions about chat because, even though I've been there a few times, it takes some getting used to and I'm just trying to clarify things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's up with behavior and etiquette?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently it seems like in a number of chatrooms (including ELU) there was a bit of drama, people being flagged and suspended and yelled at and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ragequit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rage-quitting&lt;/a&gt; (I know, I know what I've said about UD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to have fun in chat, but I also don't want to piss anybody off. Chat is just typing, and so if it's hard to tell someone's emotions in real life it's that much harder through typing (and, no, emoji's are not helping).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the rules (or rather I hope just recommendations) of etiquette here? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7420/4972&quot;&gt;Martha touched on it&lt;/a&gt;. I'm sure that they all stem from 'Be Nice, Don't be a jerk' but I guess I need more guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T00:17:40.610" Title="Chat: etiquette?" Tags="|discussion|chat|chat-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7435" CreationDate="2015-12-16T16:48:06.220" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always thought a brief, more-than-one-word phrase ought to be an acceptable answer for a single word request, particularly when the suggestion is, say, a phrasal verb, a multiword expression (MWE), or an established phrase, idiom, or maxim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, what counts as a single word, anyway? Is &lt;em&gt;ice cream&lt;/em&gt; a single word? What about &lt;em&gt;hors d'oeuvres&lt;/em&gt;? (I'd venture that, deep down, most &quot;single word requests&quot; are probably &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; asking for a single lexical item. But I digress.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would be a bad thing to reference another person's answer, but, as you say, it's best to avoid a negative spin when doing do. In other words, instead of saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't use &lt;em&gt;sesquipedalian&lt;/em&gt; – you'll sound like a pompous ass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;try a page from Necreaux's book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While &lt;em&gt;sesquipedalian&lt;/em&gt; is a fine answer, you might want to keep something more readily understood in your hip pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for referencing the wording used by an O.P. (e.g., &lt;em&gt;What is a word for someone who is a good judge of character?&lt;/em&gt;), I wouldn't leave &quot;Good judge of character&quot; as an answer. Sure, the phrase is familiar and therefore viable and  deserving of a comment; however, in the case of a single-word-request, I think an answer should offer &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; alternative to the O.P.'s original wording. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T16:48:06.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7438" CreationDate="2015-12-16T18:08:18.263" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/etiquette&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;etiquette Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etiquette&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means the rules or norms (written or unwritten) of polite behavior within a social group. There are three significant sources of Stack Exchange chat etiquette, listed in order of highest priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norms formally established by Stack Exchange Inc.&lt;/strong&gt; (the owners). Whenever there is a potential conflict of norms, these take priority.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Local social norms other than the above&lt;/strong&gt;, sitewide or in a particular chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Common global social norms for chat rooms&lt;/strong&gt;, not Stack Exchange specific but often in effect as long they are not in conflict with the first two sources.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. Norms formally established by Stack Exchange, Inc.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The purpose of these norms is to make this a welcoming site and build a community. Always consider whether your behavior is constructive and welcoming.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice&lt;/strong&gt;. This has been elaborated on by management in various ways, which can be summarized as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; treat others with respect &lt;em&gt;even when they don’t deserve it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; disagree politely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; be rude, vulgar, inappropriate, or sexually suggestive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; be hostile or demeaning. Do not call names, harass, or bully.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; use language likely to offend or alienate – when unsure, do not post it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De-escalate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; disengage with users whose behavior is impolite.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; flag impolite behavior for moderator or staff attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use chat to build community:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; collaborate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; socialize.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; stay roughly on topic.¹ ² ³ ⁴&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. Local social norms other than the above&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot; title=&quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage | chat.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage chat room&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; discuss language freely, including taboo language. There is a clear difference between investigating offensive language and using it to offend.⁵&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; post questions and opinions that would be off-topic on the main site, such as:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;“Can I have some proofreading help?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;“&lt;em&gt;Ain’t&lt;/em&gt; is an abomination, am I right?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;“Hey &lt;code&gt;@tchrist&lt;/code&gt; what is the etymology of &lt;em&gt;Balrog&lt;/em&gt;?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; socialize, including puns, wordplay, and idle chatter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; limit idle chatter when there is a site-related question or discussion going on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Common global social norms for chat rooms&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are well known norms that are often expected to apply in chat rooms.⁶ They apply to Stack Exchange chat rooms to the extent that they are relevant and not in conflict with the first two sources. So, unlike the norms listed above, &lt;em&gt;these are not necessarily all in play in all Stack Exchange chat rooms&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; locate and read the chat room’s user guidance or frequently answered questions before posting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; introduce yourself if you are new.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; say hello and goodbye.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; stay on topic. (But see above for nuance.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; keep posts short and to the point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; wait patiently for an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; use a pseudonym. (But note that on Stack Exchange, there is no special pseudonym function in chat. Chat uses your regular user handle.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; use an unwelcome pseudonym.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; post personally identifying information – yours or someone else’s.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; pester people for their age, sex, or location.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; use all caps.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not&lt;/em&gt; flood the room.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Notes and references&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice. - Help Center - English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;What kind of behavior is expected of users? - Help Center - English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Chat for chat.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  4. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;Privileges - talk in chat - Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  5. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Use–mention distinction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  6. Google search [ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/webhp?q=chat%20room%20etiquette&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chat room etiquette&lt;/a&gt; ]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T00:17:40.610" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-16T19:02:14.363" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You got the monkey hat! Hat's off to you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;doffs cap; dons it again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T19:02:14.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-16T21:37:57.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You got the Monkey hat, now it's our turn. So no, we shouldn't throw away the hats, we should embrace them to support the beneficial activity on the site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dUFJ0.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dUFJ0.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T21:37:57.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7451" CreationDate="2015-12-17T00:20:19.310" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47182/origin-of-the-idiom-if-ifs-and-buts-were-candy-and-nuts&quot;&gt;Origin of the idiom &amp;quot;If ifs and buts were candy and nuts&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; has 123,000 views? It seems totally out of line with the number of views for other Questions.  Do we understand anything about the psychology of the viewer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.553" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T10:47:31.013" Title="Re the psychology of the viewer: does anyone understand why the &quot;candy and nuts&quot; question got 123,000 views?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-17T00:27:52.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with a &lt;strong&gt;hatocracy&lt;/strong&gt;.  The reason the Greeks did not invent it was because they got stalled at the democracy stage.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T15:57:43.037" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T15:57:43.037" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-17T01:56:24.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's puzzled me for a while that none of the SE sites have any sort of grading system for questions such as beginner/intermediate/expert or even easy/medium/difficult. I searched various meta sites and could not find a similar proposal, please correct me if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion for EL&amp;amp;U would be for want of a better phrase 'A self-service triage system'. Upon asking a question the OP would have to choose one of the following options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beginner/Novice/Learner/Basic &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intermediate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expert&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Professional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing the Beginner/Novice/Learner/Basic option would automatically migrate the question to ELL (The user would become a member of ELL if they are not already)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Leaving the more serious questions to EL&amp;amp;U, which is what most users seem to want?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To encourage the correct level selection an OP would lose a point if they select a higher category than their question actually is. No points if their question is upgraded.&#xA;There will be 'grey' areas, so guidelines will have to written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a bolt-on 'Intermediate' questions would receive 4 points and answers 8 points; offset by 'Professional' questions receiving 6 points and answers 12 points. This could encourage a higher standard of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To implement a system such as this would take a lot of effort, including code changes, no radical change will ever be easy, it will depend on how much we want that change.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This meta is literary peppered with questions, answers and comments from users who want some sort of change, will this suggestion resolve everything? No. Is it in the right direction? Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar system could be implemented immediately by using the 'Tag' system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not exactly 'intimidating', just a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit.&#xA;Comparing EL&amp;amp;U with SO, EL&amp;amp;U seems to have a low ratio of regular users to questions asked. A badly written or researched question on SO receives the necessary corrective comments within minutes of being asked, followed by the requisite number of close votes, I know this from bitter experience! So for me to ask another question on SO is a little intimidating, unless of course I do the necessary research, word my question correctly, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To improve this ratio we have to either increase the number of regular users (Lots of effort has been made in the past, 'Summer of Love' etc.) or reduce the number of questions.(Automate them out)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I suspect that some prospective new users are put off by the level of questions, so we are in effect giving ourselves a 'double kicking'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70486" LastEditorUserId="70486" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T02:26:07.717" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T02:26:07.717" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-17T05:55:51.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I had bothered to look it up, I might have known all I had to do was &lt;em&gt;answer this&lt;/em&gt; to get a monkey hat. D'oh! Chimpanzee grooming is often a one-way street; luckily humans are more fair minded. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T05:55:51.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7444" CreationDate="2015-12-17T06:07:15.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it has had 4 years to accumulate views.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Second, it is a snappy rhyme.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Third, I never heard it in my whole life, and I use such sayings (if wishes were horses, etc.) way too much (kids and all, you know.) I'd click on it simply because I never heard it before and I'd be intrigued.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Fourth, people sometimes search sites! &quot;If, and, but&quot; are common enough that this one might pop up and catch one's eye.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Finally, and the real answer is: there is no one psychology to explain the phenomenon. People have different motives for clicking on things, and I'm guessing any espoused reason is mere guesswork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T06:07:15.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T08:19:22.003" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over my brief time spent here on EL&amp;amp;U, I have seen some questions posted by other users which I would like to know the answer to/follow. One option is I could up-vote them and then later, I check them in up-voted questions section in the activity tab but this would only work till the day the number of questions eventually accumulate so much that finding that particular question would become some task in itself. Same thing holds true if I mark them as a favorite. Is there any other-more easier and a robust way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I was searching for this question if it already exists, I came across this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/480/is-there-a-way-to-search-for-questions-answers-ive-commented-on&quot;&gt;Is there a way to search for questions/answers I&amp;#39;ve commented on?&lt;/a&gt; and the accepted answer talks about data-dump and a query search and it has a problem with regular updates and it made me wonder if there's a similar method to keep track of the questions of my interest. If not, it would be helpful to make a separate 'follow' tab beside every question so as to get regular notifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T08:03:20.753" Title="Is there any way I could follow a question asked by someone else?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7449" CreationDate="2015-12-17T08:25:12.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not within the SE interface. The official position seems to be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13546/please-allow-me-to-follow-questions&quot;&gt;favoriting = following&lt;/a&gt; (I think this conflation is a problem, but that's just my opinion) or people will tell you to use other resources like RSS feeds. While it's tough to look through them once you get a lot of favorites, the tab for them does list the most recently active ones first, and it highlights any that have been changed since you last viewed the tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T08:41:12.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7444" CreationDate="2015-12-17T10:47:31.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I went digging in the archives, and saw that question pop up, I immediately found it intriguing on several levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I don't think I have ever heard the &lt;em&gt;nuts and candy&lt;/em&gt; version, which didn't surprise me all that much because I'm not American. Secondly, the existing answers didn't really do the post any justice. Thirdly, the post was closed because it was deemed to be general reference question, which I disagreed with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose if I had come across that phrase, I too would be tempted to look it up, in any case I Googled the aphorism, and sure enough it was credited to Don Meredith, and quite a number of results repeated The Phrase Finder's answer. However, on Google there were also a number of inquiries connected to the Big Bang Theory. Apparently there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1632244/quotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2010 episode&lt;/a&gt; which has Sheldon using the Meredith's catchphrase, and TBBT fans were no doubt Googling online to find out more about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fans must have liked the phrase because there's even a &lt;a href=&quot;http://bazinga-t-shirt.spreadshirt.com/if-ifs-and-buts-were-candy-and-nuts-we-d-all-have-a-merry-christmas-t-shirt-A6678269&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T-shirt&lt;/a&gt; which you can buy online with the &quot;catchphrase&quot;. There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/If-ifs-and-buts-were-candies-and-nuts-wed-all-have-a-merry-christmas-106658202692609/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FaceBook&lt;/a&gt; page. I don't know if there's a meme, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few (gif) images of the Sheldon and Leonard exchange were not shared online. The Big Bang Theory has a huge following, it's watched worldwide, geeks, nerds and kids adore the show. I was a big fan myself, but that punchline escaped my attention (I have the episode at home). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hunch is that the impressive number of views is due to the show's popularity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Google images &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rNLdL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rNLdL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T10:47:31.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7435" CreationDate="2015-12-17T11:34:51.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a single word exists, but a phrase is better, then say that in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Include the single word to satisfy the explicit request for one, and then say that even though that word exists, there's a phrase that's better in certain circumstances. It would help to outline those circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70061" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T11:34:51.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-17T13:47:25.683" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my humble opinion, the first action (and possibly least invasive and most bang for your buck) would be to &lt;em&gt;change the name of the site&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a matter of continuous amusement to me that a site for learned discussion of the etymology and linguistics of the English language ironically failed to use that language effectively enough to describe the quintessential nature of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;English Language and Usage&quot; is virtually an &lt;em&gt;explicit invitation&lt;/em&gt; to post exactly the kinds of question that are so discouraged here. If you changed it to reflect the actual content that is welcomed, such as &quot;English Etymology and Linguistics&quot; that would be sufficient to discourage most, if not all, of the simple questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without taking this step then I imagine tens of contributors becoming bewildered on a daily basis why their questions &lt;em&gt;about English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt; are met with such negativity, and I have some sympathy for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76722" LastEditorUserId="76722" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T14:32:13.923" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T14:32:13.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-17T16:35:35.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To put a crazy idea out there: all questions could start out closed and need to gather votes to be opened before they can be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On most sites familiarity with the topic is enough to merit the right to answer a question. Occasionally you get incredibly basic questions (What is maths?) but usually people know a little, and that little is enough to ask a somewhat informed question. But unlike other topics, everyone on this site will be familiar with the topic, but most people's knowledge of it will be &lt;em&gt;tacit&lt;/em&gt; rather than explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who want their questions to be opened and then answered will have to show us they're not just using the site as an alternative to practising English with a friend or taking English classes, that they're not using this site as an alternative to a dictionary, or a thesaurus, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was originally going to suggest that this apply only to those below X rep, but you know what? This site is filled with users with thousands of rep with seemingly no understanding of the site's conventions and expectations of what makes a good question. Many top users routinely answer blatantly off-topic questions. Many refuse to vote on anything. Apply the standards to everyone. If this site is to improve then it needs to make hard choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T02:15:45.153" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T02:15:45.153" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-17T20:41:11.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't normally post &quot;me-too&quot; answers,  but I agree with everyone who says we should keep the hats and revel in a turn-of-the-millennium fashion while it is possible to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="9001" LastEditDate="2015-12-23T08:35:45.647" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T08:35:45.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-17T22:45:26.323" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haters gonna hate. Hatters gonna hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18399" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T22:45:26.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-18T02:24:46.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's change the name to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Word Suggestions and Grammaticality Judgements&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, that's what 95% of the questions people ask here are for. Most people want to have some words suggested to them, and to know if their sentences are grammatical. Let's just make that perfectly clear for everyone else!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T02:24:46.643" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-18T12:35:24.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People are always asking about comma placement, whether it's&#xA;  who-or-whom, where the apostrophe goes with a name ending in &quot;s&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People do that because they need them and want this site to provide a quick/simple solution to their problems &lt;em&gt;free of charge&lt;/em&gt;. How can we stop them from posting those questions? &lt;strong&gt;No way&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's take a look at the reality. While we are complaining about the fact that there are so many off-topic and sometimes ridiculous questions like this one without any context, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209696/what-does-i-want-you-to-do-me-mean&quot;&gt;What does &quot;I want you to do me&quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt;, how many active users are making their efforts to write quality answers and questions to prove that the site's quality is superior enough to be intimidating? Many of them are quite busy finding faults with other users' answers and commenting this and that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a better idea and explanation and if you think the posted answer is somehow wrong, just post your own answers. That's the way you could show new users to find that this site could be better than so many sites on the internet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most of new users don't even know what this site is all about&lt;/em&gt;. And I think about 90% of them don't even come back after posting their first question. They don't care and they would never be intimidated no matter what we do. What do they have to lose? Nothing!!! They don't even care to respond to a comment that is meant to guide them to write a better question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They might feel they are mistreated with some arrogant comments by a few users and they might think, &quot;It is not fair and it is not the only English site available in the world.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some off-topic questions could be guided/made into good questions and &lt;em&gt;have we made enough efforts to take it from the OP's point of view&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't think it is a good idea to make it more intimidating. You can't stop people all over the world from posting an off-topic question with any intimidating comments or pop-ups. &lt;em&gt;They will just come and go&lt;/em&gt;. If they like it, they will stay here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With around 64 thousand questions already asked and those strict off-topic rules, &lt;em&gt;I don't think there is much room for any excellent on-topic questions&lt;/em&gt;, especially grammar and idiom-related ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: We should figure out the way we can show new users what type of questions is on-topic and welcome here &lt;em&gt;with your own examples&lt;/em&gt;. I want to see &lt;em&gt;some high-rep users lead new users by example&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: No matter what we do, we can't stop this kind of question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/295132/did-you-were-at-home-or-were-you-at-home&quot;&gt;“Did you were at home ? ” or “Were you at home?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T13:44:00.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7463" CreationDate="2015-12-18T15:37:37.117" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two questions seem to be of the same kind, yet they are acceptable on two different sites. The examples that caught my attention are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Cognitive Science, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/5914/is-there-a-formal-name-for-the-love-of-arguing&quot;&gt;Is there a formal name for the &quot;love&quot; of arguing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On English Language &amp;amp; Usage, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294623/what-is-a-word-meaning-or-having-to-do-with-a-love-of-fighting/294627#294627&quot;&gt;What is a word meaning or having to do with a &quot;love of fighting?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are similar enough that it seems as if either could be asked on either site, since both ask for an English, scientific term. Is it fine that both sites answer the same kind of question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151593" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:17.530" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T19:41:20.920" Title="Why is this same type of question able to be asked on two different sites?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7462" CreationDate="2015-12-18T18:29:17.910" Score="7" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tagged questions pages (for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) show a count of questions at the top, like &quot;8,279 questions tagged&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a list of related tags, and their counts. However, the counts are missing commas as thousands separators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nPB8X.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nPB8X.png&quot; alt=&quot;tags with counts like 1203&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the related tag counts also have thousands separators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T20:11:07.203" Title="Related tags don't have thousands separators" Tags="|bug|tags|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7461" CreationDate="2015-12-18T18:29:17.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, for consistency, these numbers should also use thousands separators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the main SE language is English, even for sites about other languages such Russian, then a comma should be used as the separator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other parts also use thousands separators, like stats, so tags should do so too. Here's some stats from Russian Language Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LHmm3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LHmm3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stats from Russian SE that use commas&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T18:29:17.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7460" CreationDate="2015-12-18T19:18:50.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is fine that both sites can answer the same kind of question.  There is inevitably going to be some overlap between topics in the wide variety of SE sites (do you want your question about the Cowboy Bebop movie on Movies.SE, Anime.SE, or SciFi.SE?) and trying to draw some kind of hard line will be an exercise in futility and frustration.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the poster is expected to put some effort into deciding which site is the best fit for their question; asking about the etymological derivation of some cognitive-science term is clearly not a question about cognitive science &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, and would be much better off on English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, asking the exact same question on two sites is frowned upon;  You are expected to pick one site and try your luck.  If the community there decides that a different site is a better fit, the question should be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T19:41:20.920" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T19:41:20.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-18T19:41:59.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how this site is governed, and who has the power to make changes.  I'm guessing that the site (&lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; on the site ?) can make minor changes, but can only recommend major changes to whoever owns (administers ?) the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step (TFS) in making any change is to find out if anyone is willing to spend time on it -- potentially serious time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a first task for that volunteer, I recommend writing up and presenting via Meta a brief history of changes that have already been made, and what the effect was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, see phenry's comment under Tim Lymington's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4522/bad-questions-can-lead-to-good-answers&quot;&gt;Bad questions can lead to good answers&lt;/a&gt;.  I followed phenry's links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From those links, it seems like in late '12/early '13, the issue was that too many questions were being closed - 40%.  What happened?  Did the high rep users become more tolerant, and if so, why -- did they follow a consensus among the users that they should, or did they just, inexplicably, become more tolerant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did this lead to the influx of elementary and bad (two different things) questions the site now gets, or is there no connection?  Where does the founding of ELL fit in?  Are there other changes in attitude or policy that produced noticeable (measurable may be too much to hope for) changes in the nature of Qs and As. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it difficult to think seriously about making the site more intimidating without background information of the sort I just sketched &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; without knowing if any volunteers are going to step forward to do the work that an effective change in the site will require.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T19:41:59.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T23:32:35.447" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoy the Winter Bash and want to encourage our community to participate. But please participate sanely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please stop flagging a bajillion comments. I like comment clean-up as much as the next mod, but the hat is specifically for your &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; comments. You can delete those yourself, please and thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a secret hat for posting a bug on Meta (plus some other conditions). Do not post a fake bug on Meta to get this hat. If you want this hat (and I really do), find a real bug to report.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T23:36:03.780" Title="Some specific things regarding the Winter Bash" Tags="|discussion|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7465" CreationDate="2015-12-18T23:36:03.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;but wait a minute. Someone posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7427/shall-we-just-toss-the-winter-hats-into-the-bin&quot;&gt;Meta question&lt;/a&gt; in an attempt to earn a hat! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, self, that's true, but that Meta post contains all that is needed for everyone else in the community to earn the same hat. The hat for posting a bug only goes to the one who posted the question. Plus, it dilutes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294808/what-meaning-is-legitimately-gaining&quot;&gt;legitimate&lt;/a&gt; use of the bug tag. So please don't do it for kicks, even if you think Grace Hopper is the bee's knees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T23:36:03.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T23:40:43.277" Score="7" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294777/i-need-a-word-for-my-obscure-phobia-for-hard-smooth-spheres&quot;&gt;I need a word for my obscure phobia for hard, smooth structures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner seems to realize that his situation is... unique and all the answers are just trying to create words based on greek roots. It just has no value at all for future visitors, the answers won't be understood by other people (and given that language is all about communication that's a pretty big issue) and it could even be argued that the answers are primary opinion based (given that every answer is thinking up new unique words). So, do we want questions like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T23:40:43.277" Title="Is asking for people to think up new specific words on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7471" CreationDate="2015-12-19T08:53:56.723" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the OP of this question,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294929/secretariat-vs-directorate&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Secretariat&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Directorate&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; created the tag &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; another user created it and it has been abandoned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the right procedure to request a change or deletion of the tag? It should be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/speeling/info&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;speeling&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is one tag called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and do we need another tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Currently any user with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;300 reputations&lt;/a&gt; can create a tag. I think it is too low considering the fact that there are not many tags to be created. Wouldn't it be a good idea to put it at around &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;2,000&lt;/a&gt; at which you can edit questions and answers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T15:31:13.203" Title="Creating a new tag and changing/deleting it, reputations to create a tag seems too low" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-19T11:43:51.560" Score="11" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one way to massively improve this site would be to start a new Stack Exchange site called something like &lt;em&gt;English Phrase Finder&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Word finder&lt;/em&gt; or something like that where single word requests, word choices and phrase requests could be answered along with crossword puzzle solutions and the rest. I'm sure it would be a very successful site, perhaps more so than EL&amp;amp;U, and would grow very rapidly. EL&amp;amp;U could then have a migration route for these types of question, and the quality of this site would also improve significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could also help that site out by migrating thousands of questions from here to over there to propagate it and give it a helping hand with its start up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion? Do we want to do this and if so, how should we set about doing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T12:50:14.477" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T13:05:53.450" Title="How to save EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|scope|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7469" CreationDate="2015-12-19T12:34:47.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can flag the question, but there are actions which can be done without needing moderators to deal with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With 2000 rep, you can edit the tag to be the correct one. If the tag only appears on one question (which can be verified by hovering over it) then the incorrect tag will be cleared up and will no longer exist. This doesn't happen immediately, it probably needs an overnight script; or that may be weekly. But it will happen. With less than 2000 rep, you can suggest the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; is already a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;, and anyone who creates a question with tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; will find that it's changed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; automatically. With 2500 rep you can suggest tag synonyms. In this case, although &lt;em&gt;speeling&lt;/em&gt; could be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; it's best to correct it since &lt;em&gt;speeling&lt;/em&gt; is obviously wrong. [In fact it appears the user himself did this and then didn't like &lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag creation is supposed to be moderated by 10k users in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=stats&quot;&gt;&quot;new tags&quot;&lt;/a&gt; tool. (At the bottom of that page; it's 10k-only). I've corrected &lt;em&gt;speeling&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pharases&lt;/em&gt; and dealt with the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coin-a-term&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coin-a-term&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coin-a-term&lt;/a&gt; which is obviously a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neologism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neologism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neologism&lt;/a&gt; along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To alter a privilege would be a network-wide change and unlikely to happen. But you could suggest it on meta.stackexchange.com. It could be worth asking about the rationale for setting the privilege threshold so low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T15:31:13.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7470" CreationDate="2015-12-19T16:16:03.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think creating one new site for SWRs is a good solution to the problem. The problems I see based on my experience here are not questions related with SWRs IMHO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, many active/high-rep users are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;more active in commenting on questions and answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; than asking and answering them. I don't think it is the right way to improve EL&amp;amp;U's quality. They need to post their answers (not just commenting) and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;regularly post exemplary and on-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions, too.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, as Josh61 mentioned in his comment, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;SWRs do have fun part&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Without SWRs and after new users find out that SWRs will no longer be accepted as &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;, traffic of EL&amp;amp;U will dramatically decrease I am afraid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, creating a new site &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;will add more confusion to new users&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; than creating any solution to the current quality problem. IF SWRs should (absolutely) be removed from EL&amp;amp;U, it would be better to migrate them to ELL adjusting ELL's function. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It might help beginners/intermediaries to learn more about English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, there is limited room for good/high-quality questions related with grammar, etymology, etc. with 64,000 questions accumulated over the past years. Many of them could be closed as duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't see much difference between ELL and EL&amp;amp;U. Some basic questions are asked in EL&amp;amp;U without being closed or migrated to ELL and some questions that could be good questions in EL&amp;amp;U are asked in ELL. It would be interesting to know how many new users (who have been recommended to go to ELL and whose questions have been migrated to ELL) actually bother to post a new question or their second question in ELL. I doubt there are many. Creating the new site and asking new users to go there will not be an ideal solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T16:21:33.300" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T16:21:33.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7470" CreationDate="2015-12-19T22:05:20.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support Araucaria's suggestion, albeit with some degree of uneasiness. To me the most important aspect of English Language &amp;amp; Usage as a resource is that it provides searchable, archived answers to language and usage questions that visitors other than the original poster may find valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single-word requests, phrase requests, and idiom requests all involve a questioner's posting a definition and asking for the term that best conveys that meaning, or providing a sentence with a blank in it and asking for an appropriate word or phrase to complete the sentence. For the poster, the answers are undoubtedly useful, and for answerers the questions resemble name-that-word vocabulary quizzes or trivia challenges—they're fun and not especially research-intensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the value of these questions and answers to future site visitors is severely limited by the fact that they amount to a collection of reverse-dictionary entries. Their accessibility to future visitors depends on the visitors' happening to search for the same word or phrase that the original questioner supplied in describing the definition of the wanted word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the central question is this: If each such question is primarily of interest to one questioner and (temporarily) to a bunch of prospective answerers, doesn't it make sense to ask and answer them in a place that is explicitly dedicated to that particular type of entertainment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like most other EL&amp;amp;U participants, I try to answer single-word requests from time to time. I recognize their popularity and intellectual appeal, and I recognize their practical use as a gateway to acquiring reputation points relatively easily. Indeed, the strongest argument I can think of for retaining SWRs, PRs, and IRs on this site is that the relative ease with which new users can parlay them into reputation points may provide an important and continual infusion of new blood (in the form of people with newly acquired privileges) on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from the perspective of practical value to EL&amp;amp;U in its role as a reference tool, the cumulative effect of these requests may be quite harmful. If you are using EL&amp;amp;U's internal site search to hunt for a discussion of how a certain word is used or where it came from, it is counterproductive to have to wade through a bunch of chance occurrences of the search term that arose in the context of SWR suggestions. Questions with little or no intuitive lookup value gum up search results and clog the archives with what amount to false positives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see this issue as involving the salvation or destruction of EL&amp;amp;U, but I do think that if we want to improve the long-tern usefulness of the site as an archival resource for questions that have significant staying power, we ought to consider whether spinning off &quot;name that word&quot; and &quot;fill in the blank&quot; questions to a Stack Exchange site that specializes in such questions might be beneficial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T23:43:15.453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T23:43:15.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7470" CreationDate="2015-12-19T23:08:29.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of it on principle, but I'm not actually convinced that this would &quot;save&quot; ELU.  As Mari-Lou pointed out in a comment, it may very well kill it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Take SWR away from EL&amp;amp;U and you might be looking at a semi-deserted EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the learner questions go to ELL and the SWR questions go to Word Recommendations... what's left???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that's not such a bad thing, on balance, but I doubt it would help with the kinds of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7429/what-can-we-do-to-make-this-site-more-intimidating&quot;&gt;mediocre questions&lt;/a&gt; that are a thorn in ELU's side.  They might be all that remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T11:55:40.403" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7480" CreationDate="2015-12-20T08:03:41.913" Score="13" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen several times a user, mostly a newbie, post an exact same answer, i.e. in this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/295042/what-would-be-next-after-minor-major&quot;&gt;What would be next after minor, major, …?&lt;/a&gt;. The chances are either Ugh didn't read the previous answers or he is not fully aware of how to post an answer. And not surprisingly, the post appeared in the review for &lt;strong&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you click on &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/156723&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;, you see the below pop-up and unfortunately there is no warning for this situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be better if we could have one more warning/basis for Recommend Deletion such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your answer has already been posted by another user and doesn't&#xA;  provide any additional information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your thought about this? Will it be OK to just click on &lt;strong&gt;No comment needed&lt;/strong&gt; for this answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more question: Wouldn't it be better to create one more warning for an answer which is the opposite of &lt;strong&gt;a link-only answer&lt;/strong&gt;, for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This answer doesn't provide any reference/research (or link) that can support&#xA;  it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this happens more often than a duplicate answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 1&lt;/strong&gt;: This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/156736&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294965/what-is-toiletis&quot;&gt;What is toilet?&lt;/a&gt; is not an exact duplicate but it doesn't add any additional information. It is not a wrong answer, either.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;: I do see more often duplicate or no-research/reference answers than thank you answers or link-only answers. Thank you answers could be flagged or recommended to delete very easily without any comment because it is blatantly not an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am proposing to change the pop-up to include more useful warnings, i.e. deleting &lt;em&gt;This is a &quot;thank you&quot; comment&lt;/em&gt; (or possibly &lt;em&gt;This is a different question posted as an answer&lt;/em&gt;) and creating the two suggested comments above.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pHp48.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pHp48.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T09:27:51.633" Title="Warning to a user who posts the &quot;same (exact) answer&quot; and answer &quot;without any reference/research&quot;" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7475" CreationDate="2015-12-20T12:09:02.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the pre-set comments are handy, there will obviously be times where they don't fit.  If that scenario you described is very common, it may be worth a pre-set, but maybe it would be more useful to just have a &quot;Write my own comment&quot; option that lets you type one in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T12:09:02.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7475" CreationDate="2015-12-20T14:34:08.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If two identical answers are posted, the duplicate answer should be deleted immediately as in the OP's 2 cases (one in Edit 1). Duplicate answers are posted mostly in Single-Word-Request questions or other popular questions like &quot;&lt;em&gt;What is toilet?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; If they are posted almost simultaneously as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282114/is-there-a-single-word-that-means-strange-object/282118#282118&quot;&gt;Is there a single word that means “strange object”?&lt;/a&gt;, it would be better to delete the second answer even if there is only 8-second difference. The principle should be &lt;em&gt;first come first served basis&lt;/em&gt;. Leaving the duplicate answer might give a wrong idea/impression to other users that it is OK to post a duplicate answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;timing is very important&lt;/em&gt; and we have to flag it as soon as we find a duplicate answer. Policing duplicate answers is as much important as marking questions as duplicate. We should make more efforts to detect duplicate answers and delete them to improve EL&amp;amp;U's quality. I think it would be useful to write a warning against a duplicate answer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/answering&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Answering&lt;/a&gt; warning new users to check if there is any duplicate answer before posting. There is only a short phrase &quot;&lt;em&gt;exact duplicates of other answers&lt;/em&gt;&quot; will be deleted under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why and how are some answers deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Protecting (popular/correctly-answered/accepted with good answers) questions&lt;/em&gt; should be implemented more vigorously to prevent newbies from posting a duplicate answer. The answer posted by ABC today in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16365/is-there-any-difference-between-unproductive-and-nonproductive&quot;&gt;Is there any difference between “unproductive” and “nonproductive”?&lt;/a&gt; is not an exact duplicate, but it doesn't add any value to the accepted answer or other upvoted answers. This post and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/156754&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;thank you answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; could have been prevented if the question had been protected.  User76855's answer seems to be a duplicate as commented by Chenmunka. There could be a lot more if we try to find them and there is a way we can prevent them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will leave the pop-up part to more experienced users and moderators.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T09:27:51.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7437" CreationDate="2015-12-20T15:51:41.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/271269/278659&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt; on main Meta about this, from Community Manager bluefeet. I've copied it pretty much verbatim below, as it seems to answer your questions about what a room owner can/can't/should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your last question about finding and identifying room owners, they're listed on the info page for a given chatroom. E.g. for the main ELU chatroom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0WYdm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0WYdm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image showing where the info link is located (center bottom of room box)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/71bfEm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/71bfEm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image showing where the room owners are listed (left lower panel of general room info)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;copy begins&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What tools are available to room owners?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Room owners are users that have some elevated permissions in a chatroom. Typically, they will be the first line of defense when it comes to inappropriate content or behavior in a room. Users will look to the room owners to guide the room.  The room owners are also able to perform moderation tasks without the need to involve a diamond moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a room owner, there are several different ways you can keep your room in-line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Taking out the trash&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If unsuitable messages are being posted, then you have the ability to move the messages to the trash can. A “trash” (or “bin”) is just a room created for the sole purpose of holding unwanted messages. Users who have their messages binned aren’t punished but are implicitly encouraged to stop whatever they were doing. This keeps the transcript free of inappropriate, offensive, or spam messages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can bin messages via the room↓ menu on the right side of the chatroom, then selecting move messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7XuP4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7XuP4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Move Messages&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By selecting move messages, you will be presented with batch operation popup to allow you move multiple messages at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uIISx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uIISx.png&quot; alt=&quot;batch popup&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By hovering over a message, you’ll see a large plus as the cursor which is the indication that the message will be added to the migration list. Selecting the message (by holding down &lt;kbd&gt;ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt; you can select multiple messages) will highlight it and once all of the messages are selected, you can choose “relocate” which will allow you to choose the target trash room and the messages will be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yjIhx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yjIhx.png&quot; alt=&quot;relocation&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This removes the messages from the main transcript. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Kick-mute a troublesome user&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should your room be graced with the presence of a user who is causing trouble, and they fail to respond to the guidance of the room owners and other participants, then you have the ability to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229905/impose-a-re-entry-delay-on-users-kicked-out-of-a-chat-room/239226#239226&quot;&gt;kick them out of the room for a period of time&lt;/a&gt;. The kick-mute length increases with each instance: initially they will be kicked for 1 minute, then 5 minutes, then 30 minutes. After three kicks from the room, an automatic moderator flag is raised. The kick-mute option is available by clicking on the username and the following pop-up will be presented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qv6Ih.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qv6Ih.png&quot; alt=&quot;kick-mute&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user who has been kick-muted will be removed from the room, and upon attempting to return, will see a message informing them that they must wait along with some guidance on how to behave in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/co3Im.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/co3Im.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user who has been repeatedly kick-muted will lose the privilege to create chatrooms and will automatically have a moderator flag raised; this should normally serve to inform the moderators of a seriously disruptive person. &lt;em&gt;However,&lt;/em&gt; in some cases a person may cause enough problems in chat to require moderator intervention before the three-kick-mute threshold is reached; in these instances, you can flag one of their messages for a moderator to review and step-in as needed. &lt;strong&gt;Don’t be too reluctant to use kick-mute&lt;/strong&gt; – if you wait with kicking until everyone hates the person, they’re going to have a hard time coming back &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; it may take too long to get a moderator involved. Kick at the first sign of trouble, and be ready to forgive and forget if they correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that kick-mutes are not announced to the room in general although other ROs will receive a banner notification; you may find it helpful to post “kicked” in order to reassure others in the room who have become agitated by the person being kicked. However, this is not required and if the conversation shows signs of moving on then you should generally allow it to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Putting the room in timeout&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; is being disruptive or inappropriate, or a disagreement among a subset of users threatens to polarise others and lead to non-constructive behavior. In these situations, it's helpful to put the room into a &quot;timeout&quot; and give everyone a chance to calm down and reflect on what they're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AJaV8.png&quot; alt=&quot;room menu, showing &amp;quot;timeout&amp;quot; option&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing the &quot;timeout&quot; option from the room menu presents you with a dialog asking for a &lt;em&gt;duration&lt;/em&gt; and an &lt;em&gt;explanation&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PjasY.png&quot; alt=&quot;timeout dialog&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are mandatory. If you forget to enter a message, nothing will happen. (Note that &lt;strong&gt;moderators&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; impose a timeout without entering a message, in which case a default message will be displayed reminding folks to keep the room on-topic). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to write a message that explains the problem you've observed and encourages people to reflect. Avoid messages that will further inflame tempers or that point fingers at individuals. Note that the message is limited to 100 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good&lt;/strong&gt;: This conversation is getting heated - let's take a break and talk about something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad&lt;/strong&gt;: Magisch ruined it for everyone. Now no one gets to talk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good&lt;/strong&gt;: Conversation here should be relevant to SciFi enthusiasts; let's create a separate room for politics. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad&lt;/strong&gt;: Trump is a bad choice for US president; if you disagree, GTFO.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a message is entered and &quot;OK&quot; is pressed, the room will be in &quot;timeout&quot; mode: only room owners and moderators will be able to post messages; everyone else will see a countdown where the message input form normally sits. Also, the message explaining the timeout will appear in the transcript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/25b36.gif&quot; alt=&quot;timeout countdown&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the timeout has expired, the input form will return and everyone will be able to resume conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Timeouts can be cancelled by imposing a new timeout that lasts 0 seconds. You'll then get to see a &quot;Timeout cleared&quot; message. Note that you still have to provide a timeout reason, even while it won't be displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Flagging messages and users&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like any other user of chat, you have the ability to flag messages for a moderator and/or flag messages as inappropriate, offensive or spam.  Letting a moderator know when there’s a problem you can’t handle by yourself is a good way to ensure that they work &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; you rather than seeing you as part of the problem. Please read the guidance about &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; you should flag, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/271268&quot;&gt;answer covering tools for regular users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Establish a room topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the room description to set boundaries what users can expect in the room or is expected from them when they join. If the guidance doesn't fit consider linking to a team page or an external hosted site. Adding tags can help in giving a room focus. When necessary, judicious use of short timeouts can help to reinforce the topic(s) allowed in the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Lead by example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to prevent problems from arising is frequently to set a good example for others by conducting yourself in the way you’d want them to. If you are welcoming and friendly, that sets an expectation for those who join you. Conversely, if you’re casually vulgar and insulting, expect that anyone willing to hang around will be as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn’t limited to room owners, of course... But as a frequent participant in the room, you may have a better ability than most to recognize when a problematic attitude is developing, and more opportunities to correct it in your own behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;copy ends&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T16:15:04.187" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T16:15:04.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7475" CreationDate="2015-12-20T17:33:39.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always click out of the review queue, write a comment beneath the answer, and then go back to the review queue and vote to delete it without further comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of duplicates, obviously exact duplicates should be discouraged and deleted, but in cases where the duplicate says basically the same thing in a different way, it can be hard to evaluate whether it adds value or not. Different people might find one of the two answers easier to understand. In cases like that, I believe it's better not to delete it; let the voters decide (and the second answer posted will have a disadvantage by default, since it doesn't have as long a time to accumulate votes and all the voters can see that it was posted later than the other). If you think it doesn't add any value, that's certainly a valid reason to downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T17:33:39.520" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7475" CreationDate="2015-12-20T20:23:51.103" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because I have once or twice (or thrice) inadvertently duplicated another poster's prior answer—because I paid inadequate attention to the answers already posted—I strongly favor assuming that any such duplication has occurred by accident, without any intention on the answerer's part to trick readers into upvoting the answer at the expense of an earlier, equally good or better answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I like the wording of Rathony's message—&quot;Your answer has already been posted by another user and doesn't provide any additional information&quot;—as a standard (preset) delete reason: It doesn't accuse the dupe poster of having nefarious motives; it simply points out that the answer already exists, rendering the later answer superfluous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if an answerer turns out to be one of the few who don't acknowledge their Johnny-come-lately status and gracefully back out of the picture (as seems to be the case in the example that Mari-Lou A gives in the comments beneath Rathony's question), having a highly visible delete-as-duplicate-answer option that other site users can cite in such cases might help make the point more forcefully that &lt;em&gt;institutionally&lt;/em&gt; English Language &amp;amp; Usage views persisting in the error to be a significant breach of site etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that add nothing to the discussion of a particular question aren't merely airy nothings that readers can lightly brush off. They're lumps of congealed substance that clog the string of answers, call into question (temporarily) which twin has the rightful claim to any upvote that might hang in the balance, and impede brisk review of the useful posts. For this reason, I think it's important for answerers to understand just how seriously we at EL&amp;amp;U view duplicate answers as a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T00:20:45.370" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T00:20:45.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T01:10:20.027" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;To recreate this, begin to close a question by clicking on the question's &quot;close&quot; option.  When the &quot;Why should this question be closed&quot; pop-up appears hover over the pop-up title and click and drag the pop-up.  The page does not refresh properly.  This is happening in Firefox 43.0.1. I have not tried verifying this behavior in other browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d5Xxw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d5Xxw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: It works properly in Chrome on the same computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastEditorUserId="17956" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T06:40:38.503" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T06:40:38.503" Title="Redraw does not happen properly when repositioning the &quot;Close Reason&quot; pop-up" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T03:05:13.717" Score="6" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a user posted this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7376/129806&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed since then that users still tell OPs to use a dictionary (and not usually in what is considered polite language [something non-native speakers are especially attuned to]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so we're clear what I'm talking about, if someone asks a question, &quot;I don't understand what the word &lt;strong&gt;predict&lt;/strong&gt; means, can someone help me?&quot;  Well, that question is a &quot;look it up in the dictionary&quot; kind of question, &lt;em&gt;unless we get further context.&lt;/em&gt;  in which case we ask for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a question such as &quot;I was reading a play and the play said &quot;to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.&quot; and I don't know what slings and arrows are because I thought they were something used to kill people like a bow and arrow.&quot; is not a &quot;Look it up in the dictionary, you lazy OP,&quot; kind of question.  It's a question that makes you stop and say, &quot;OK, the language is being used in a figurative way and that's not something that a dictionary can solve, so I can see how a non-native (or even a native speaker) might not understand the sentence.  As a senior user and someone knowledgeable about language and playing at being a teacher on this website, you understand this and post an answer.  You are an ambassador of goodwill for SE, The English Language, and native English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have purposely used Shakespeare as an example because I think that many users will recognize this and feel that &quot;this is a question worthy of my time&quot; and spend some effort on it, whereas if the question were referencing &quot;Friends&quot; &quot;Seinfeld&quot; or &quot;Scooby Doo&quot; people would be more likely to be dismissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If you're in a bad mood, in pain because of your medical condition, are feeling irritated about the quality of the questions, or don't feel like having compassion as a teacher, stay off the site for a while.  Take a breather.  Recharge your battery and come back ready to tackle the &quot;unwashed masses.&quot;  Try and &quot;read into the question&quot; and have a little compassion for learners or non-native speakers.  Heck, I could use some of that at times myself...maybe even more than I already have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Dictionary style questions are not automatic fits for ELL, closure, or snarky comments...especially not snarky comments, or ones that scold an OP, or otherwise accuse them of not using all their marbles to play &quot;your game.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have a healthy discussion about this and come to a consensus about comments such as &quot;What did the dictionary tell you?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T07:50:57.930" Title="&quot;Use the Dictionary&quot; Revisited (again)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7482" CreationDate="2015-12-21T07:50:57.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what this question adds to the previous discussion. Of course, people should not be rude when asking what research the original poster of a question has done. I haven't seen many comments that I would consider rude. But I'm a native speaker, and you say that I may not be as attuned to rudeness as non-native speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without knowing the specific actual questions you saw, it's hard to evaluate the examples you give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking this example: &quot;I was reading a play and the play said &quot;to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.&quot; and I don't know what slings and arrows are because I thought they were something used to kill people like a bow and arrow.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually is already better than a lot of the questions we get, in that it shows some level of research or prior knowledge as to the literal meaning of &quot;slings&quot; and &quot;arrows.&quot; More commonly, questions don't indicate anything about whether the poster is totally unfamiliar with a word, unfamiliar with a specific literal use, or unfamiliar with a certain metaphorical use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for impolite language, generally my &quot;formula&quot; for these kind of comments is this: &quot;What did you find when you looked up [&lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;] in a dictionary?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is a little terse; please tell me if it comes across as impolite because of this, and also suggest what you would consider polite wording. I do try to avoid assuming that the OP &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; look it up, and I also want to ask in a way that doesn't seem like a rhetorical question, but encourages them to actually post the relevant definition rather than just responding with something non-informative like &quot;I looked it up but I didn't understand how the definition applies.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post already has close votes, I may add another sentence before this saying something like &quot;Questions here are required to show a certain amount of research effort; without adding more information, your question is in danger of being closed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T07:50:57.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7449" CreationDate="2015-12-21T07:54:30.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can &quot;favourite&quot; a &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;, tick the grey star underneath the arrows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JoYLC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JoYLC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this becomes a &quot;gold&quot; star&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jeQ6Z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jeQ6Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your profile page click on &lt;em&gt;favorites&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X3ims.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X3ims.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The page will show a list of questions you have starred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T08:03:20.753" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T08:03:20.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2015-12-22T01:37:07.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, a moderator should ask &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; moderator to re-open one's closed posts.&#xA;That way, there will be no question of conflict of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the request is meritorious, then the second moderator will usually have enough respect for the first one to reopen it. If you can find no moderator willing to re-open the closed post, maybe the request is not so meritorious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T01:37:07.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T14:06:52.107" Score="23" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of you may be happily oblivious to the Winter Bash hat dash, in which case you can skip right over this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who are afflicted with the annual fever, I would like to encourage you to post or vote on this question only (unless of course you have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294808/what-meaning-is-legitimately-gaining&quot;&gt;legitimate&lt;/a&gt; Meta post to make or participation to be ... um. had?) as a means of containing your enthusiasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hat in question is &quot;Airing of Grievances&quot; so you may, if you wish, follow the theme of the hat. Happy Festivus to all, and may your feats be always strengthful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T23:51:10.830" Title="Please air your grievances here" Tags="|discussion|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T14:59:02.070" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a grievance I'd like to air. People are sometimes not nice. I wish they would stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have come across as not nice, then I'm sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merry Solstice!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T14:59:02.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T15:33:52.797" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRzhflMkGLg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nobody Likes Me. Everybody hates me.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried eating worms &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; Christmas, but they weren't very nice (&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; I didn't get any extra presents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have a worm recipe that tastes okay and actually works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T15:33:52.797" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T15:43:38.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that I am neither an idealist nor a very active downvoter. Since I reached 8,000 reputations in less than 3 months, I will try to be both an idealist and an extremely active and fast downvoter from next year. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a record to break next year. Not reps, but my running time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope you will all achieve your targets and break all the barriers and records in 2016! Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T15:43:38.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T15:49:52.070" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that complaints here are often too motivated by hats this time of year. I didn't get that. Did I actually just post a long response recently in meta that was actually in response to someone's bid for a hat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did, didn't I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D'oh! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a Merry Winterbash to all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T15:56:50.120" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T15:56:50.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T15:54:01.597" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that I did have a grievance, but a very nice mod changed all that, and now I'm ... quite happy. A thank you to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T15:54:01.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T16:28:24.753" Score="10" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UtoT1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UtoT1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TcdT6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TcdT6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18696/andrew-leach&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach&lt;/a&gt; ♦ and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/547/colin-fine&quot;&gt;Colin Fine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's uncanny! The handsome rugged features, the piercing gaze... could it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T22:35:05.467" Title="Separated at birth?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T17:07:32.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance (one amongst many actually, but I digress)...is that I missed out on the first 2 &quot;gimmees&quot; this year in Winter Bash!  Fudgecicles!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25824" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T17:07:32.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T18:27:45.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that I don't have the monkey hat yet. Harumph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T18:27:45.540" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T20:13:25.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I shall air grievances none, but for lack of The Airing of Grievances hattage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T20:13:25.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-22T20:39:48.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that all this holiday food is making me fat(ter).  Stop feeding me, dammit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T20:39:48.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2015-12-23T02:34:46.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;DO&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What every other site does about off-topic questions, for which mechanics for handling exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update the help center for clarity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Add an appropriate close reason.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Get community consensus, prepare a clear meta post or FAQ entry to link closees to if need be.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use said close reason judiciously.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommend other appropriate sites, perhaps even in the close reason text itself. Use migration tools as needed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that MathOverflow solves the exact same problem well enough by using close reasons and votes liberally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;DO NOT&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arbitrarily &quot;make the site more intimidating&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add &quot;warning banners&quot;. No other SE site has these, because other strategies exist. If you can't keep those questions off the site using the same tried-and-true strategies and mechanics that every other site uses to stay healthy, you're doing it wrong. A link to a meta post describing the ELU vs. ELL difference, posted in a comment or displayed to a new user, is one reasonable approach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be negative, snarky, and angry right out of the gate. It's as easy to type &quot;Sorry, this question is off topic here, you might want to check out ELL&quot; as it is to type anything else then participate in the ensuing non-constructive argument.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of stuff feels good but hurts a site in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a bonus: Who knows? Maybe some of those ELL askers who found this to be a welcoming place despite asking inappropriate questions may one day master the language enough to come back here and contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;OTHER USEFUL TOOLS&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add here as I discover things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE&lt;/a&gt; - This tool allows you to define canned comments and adds a button next to all comment boxes to insert them. Great for e.g. ELL links.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55308" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:46.197" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T13:23:20.860" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-23T03:02:27.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that most of the hats don't go well with my icon.  It's like they're designed for faces or something... I don't get it.  :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is probably posted too late to get the hat, but that's okay, because see above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T03:02:27.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-23T03:19:50.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a grievance, but a &lt;em&gt;nagging worry&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/106169/has-the-autodestruct-sequence-ever-not-been-aborted-on-a-starfleet-vessel&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on SciFi SE will not receive 10,000 views (now at 9,690). You don't have to &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; it, but it would be nice to click on it. Thanks! (or not, depending.)   Oh...and if you are feeling exceptionally generous, the N_Soong's answer to my question needs 4 more votes to hit 100.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:40.093" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T03:30:07.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-23T08:24:37.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, come on, no one wants hats. Especially the monkey one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54112" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T08:24:37.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-23T08:37:13.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hate downvoting without giving a reason, so the only reason I downvoted here was &quot;you told me to&quot; in order to vote on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not consider myself to be a fanHATic (sorry), but I think that seasonal hats introduce a (possibly needed) bit of levity here. It could be possible to take this site too seriously sometimes, and as long as it doesn't interfere with the site's core purpose (which I don't think hats do) a bit of humour now and then can make this a more accessible and enjoyable place to be for users of all levels. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/morose#morose__2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Almost all levels&lt;/a&gt;.) That's to everyone's benefit if ELU specifically and SE in general is to thrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55185" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T08:37:13.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-23T09:27:22.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The monkey hat scares me. And it's not really a hat anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the monkey hat should be banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(but I still want one, just to get my hat tally up...)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="91730" LastEditDate="2015-12-24T09:05:56.220" LastActivityDate="2015-12-24T09:05:56.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-23T11:16:40.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My primary grievance is that Thalia is very hard to get when you don't have enough rep to vote to reopen! I know that I could just ask and answer lots to get more rep, but I tend to do a lot more voting than answering - normally when I get to a question I could do a half-decent answer for, people have already written better answers than I could!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My secondary grievance is the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7498/91730&quot;&gt;Martha's&lt;/a&gt;. And that we end up doing stupid things to get hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ooh, my tertiary grievance is that I edited loads of old &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; before I realised that Timey-Wimey was only for editing old &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;. But hey, I guess I improved the site and am moving towards Strunk and White.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My quaternary grievance is that the rules for Clean-Up Crew haven't been clarified yet. And I want more secret hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My quinary grievance is with myself for posting here without bothering to research what comes after &quot;tertiary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Further grievances will be added when I think of them. I actually already have the hat for airing grievances, but I couldn't resist writing a rant. And hopefully getting the Sun Wukong monkey &quot;hat&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T13:22:42.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7509" CreationDate="2015-12-23T17:57:44.507" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157176&quot;&gt;This edit&lt;/a&gt; was recently suggested to one of my posts. I agree that it should have been rejected; however, it was rejected as &quot;This edit defaces the post in order to promote a product or service, or is deliberately destructive.&quot; This is, in my opinion incorrect: it is in no way promoting a product or service and is not at all destructive. My understanding is that there are fairly severe consequences to a user if their posts are marked as spam and I feel that these consequences are unwarranted in this case. Is it possible that they can be undone? (Or do they not apply to anonymous users?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63503" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T18:20:32.307" Title="Edit correctly rejected but wrongly marked as spam" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7508" CreationDate="2015-12-23T18:20:32.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't worry about it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits marked as spam are not posts marked as spam; penalties (if there were any) cannot be applied to an anonymous user as the system doesn't know who they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit was correctly rejected. There are a few standard reasons, and &quot;defaces the post/deliberately destructive&quot; which includes spam is one of them; there are other reasons which can be used, but it doesn't really matter. An anonymous user is not going to come back to see it. For this reason, it wouldn't really matter if the user &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; get the 100-rep penalty; they will never be back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably have used the &quot;incorrect attempt to reply to the author&quot; reason, or &quot;alters the post against the author's intention&quot;. But it really doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T18:20:32.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-23T21:29:16.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's all about the monkey, the monkey!  Personally, I prefer Hugo's fetching purple onion hat.  I keep checking for tips on getting these coveted &quot;secret&quot; hats but I have not seen anything yet!  Please strongly agree or disagree with me if you think that purple onion is the finest hat out there in &quot;Winter Bash 2015&quot;! Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25824" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T21:29:16.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-23T21:40:13.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So lemme get this straight. The only way I'm gonna get to throw &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; hat into the ring is if I can write a sufficiently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/193851/2637&quot;&gt;polarizing&lt;/a&gt; post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Meet-Tory-s-poshest-MP-Jacob-Rees-Mogg-unlikely/story-28414647-detail/story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jacob Rees-Mogg&lt;/a&gt; for President!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T21:40:13.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-24T01:04:56.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did I miss? It is still 23rd here :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I missed, here is the airing of grievances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2015-12-24T01:04:56.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-24T07:20:58.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that too many people prescriptively advocate for descriptivism by insisting that the &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; of grammar &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be followed, even if the work concerned will be subject to scrutiny under the academic standards of higher education. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Languages &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; become more explicitly defined as they evolve and &lt;em&gt;expand&lt;/em&gt; over time, not more vague, not less structured, nor less differentiated across similar but not identical meanings. New rules must necessarily be agreed upon as new and more precise language comes into use. The whole point of language is to communicate in a way that promotes a more accurate understanding of each other. We already have a perfectly relate-able way of communicating &lt;em&gt;feelings&lt;/em&gt; to each other, it's called &lt;em&gt;art&lt;/em&gt;. And, sure, language can be applied as a medium of art, as well; However, language is also unique its ability to exemplify specificity. It has more applications to be used for many purposes so berating the one feature unique to it seems a bit stubborn and &lt;em&gt;pedantic&lt;/em&gt; itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Advising people who have bothered to come here, register an account, and ask a specific question regarding English grammar are obviously interested in knowing what the answer is in terms of the academic standard of higher education. If a person is in a casual enough situation where &lt;em&gt;correctness of grammar&lt;/em&gt; is not an issue, then they wouldn't be prompted to ask about what the grammatically correct way of saying something is, in the first place. In other words, any suggestion to disregard &lt;em&gt;proper grammar&lt;/em&gt; and just &lt;em&gt;write how you speak&lt;/em&gt; is directly equatable to willfully sabotaging someone's term paper or college thesis, and kind of like being a jerk, if you ask me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Why must self-described &lt;em&gt;descriptivist linguists&lt;/em&gt; butt their noses into questions specifically about the proper use grammar? If all they are out to do is describe what is and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; participate in or influence the development of a more conformed, specific, complex, and yet more widely understood, language standard... then why should questions about actual grammar be of the least bit of interest to them? Why not just keep their &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; about &lt;em&gt;language theory&lt;/em&gt; to themselves and let the &lt;em&gt;prescriptivist&lt;/em&gt; grammarians answer questions that are asking about the &lt;em&gt;prescribed&lt;/em&gt; use of grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against anyone who wants analyze modern conversational speech - go ahead, analyze and describe all you want... in the domain of cultural linguistic discussions and/or philosophical conversations; But, when it comes to questions regarding the &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; use of grammar, sentence structure, or the parts of speech (questions which are clearly seeking advise from actual &lt;em&gt;educators&lt;/em&gt; and not the contemplative notions of language &lt;em&gt;theorists&lt;/em&gt;) - Well, couldn't you just take a pass on those questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. How on earth can people possibly convince themselves that stripping away the scaffolding which lends shape to something and tossing the rest into one, big, free-flowing blob of mix-and-match sentence fragments and generalizations into a pile, on the floor - that &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; somehow qualifies as being the more  &lt;em&gt;scientific&lt;/em&gt; of the two approaches to language? Scientific methods are &lt;em&gt;strictly&lt;/em&gt; devised within the most restrictive of parameters obtainable with every little detail of every little itemized protocol being followed, diligently. So how exactly is descriptivism in any way scientific?. Disregarding any portion of a set of predetermined instructions (a.k.a. rules) is the most &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;scientific way to go about making reliable observations. Scientific = conformity to standards, regardless of whether you like those standards. So, please, just stop saying that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143107" LastEditorUserId="143107" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T23:51:10.830" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T23:51:10.830" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-24T12:42:14.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hate hats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hate hats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hate hats, I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2015-12-24T12:42:14.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-24T14:25:16.480" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out how to get the Onion Knight hat, my answer on SE meta became a c-w post on 23rd, which messed up my theory. The next day, it was deleted. Actually all the answers submitted to the Winterbash question were deleted. So, I can't complain... well, allow me to &lt;em&gt;sniff&lt;/em&gt; and shed a tear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm trying to test it elsewhere, but without luck...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ha! Double ha! I may not have the burgundy balaclava but I have the mutiny hat, *Edward Edwards, 'tis even more gallant and rarer than the Onion Knight one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree, please downvote. If you agree, then upvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2015-12-29T01:06:41.517" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T01:06:41.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-24T18:10:23.903" Score="12" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you please reopen:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/295273/what-is-the-origin-of-ex&quot;&gt;What is the origin of &amp;quot;ex&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for closing it was the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please include the research you've done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The research has now been included.&lt;/strong&gt; Moreover, the OP didn't &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; ask about the origin of &lt;em&gt;ex&lt;/em&gt;, but he also wanted to know: &lt;em&gt;Does ex have a full form?&lt;/em&gt; As a result, the answer is not  easily ‘Googlable’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community should reopen the question because, in my opinion, it is a good and valid question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I don't favor questions without any research at all, but questions should be saved if they have good answers. For example, I wouldn't reopen a question that asks &quot;What is the etymology of book?&quot; and if lacked any details in the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;OK maybe I'm just being too nice in the spirit of the holidays :)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-12-25T08:09:07.820" Title="Reopen request: What is the origin of “ex”?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-25T19:43:17.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My grievance is that I am apparently not controversial enough to earn the monkey hat.  Hey, I know -- let's talk about singular 'they'!  That oughta do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2015-12-25T19:43:17.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-27T07:11:02.147" Score="-3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm suggesting we keep a repository of answers deleted for good and sufficient reason, but the loss of which would be a shame.  I'm prompted to this request by the following answer to the featured question about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;shenanigans&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's clearly from the Mandarin Chinese. 'She na ni gan' ...roughly&#xA;  translates as: One way or another, sooner or later, I'm going to get&#xA;  your monies, your lands, &amp;amp; your women, you stupid white schmucks.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, this needs to go, but I'm still laughing trying to figure which pictograms capture all the Yiddish nuance of &quot;schmuck.&quot;  Also to the claim of a &quot;rough translation.&quot;  While this lampoons our (sometimes too serious) view of the site, it also makes fun of folk etymology.  I've chosen to interpret the comments as ironic (or at least two out of three), which makes this even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T23:22:40.780" Title="The Museum of Deleted Answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2015-12-27T09:38:25.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm outraged at this flagrant abuse of meta for personal gain!  However, I quite like to gain personally, too, so I'd appreciate it if around half of you would agree with my outrage and the other half would be outraged by my outrage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63503" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T09:38:25.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-28T19:30:12.080" Score="-5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I flagged an answer which looked like a spam under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162523/it-never-rains-but-it-pours/296401#296401&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. The answer (by fadumu shafic) was later deleted (I am not sure whether it was deleted by the poster or moderator), but my &lt;strong&gt;flag was declined&lt;/strong&gt; with a comment &quot;a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&quot;. Does it mean my flag was declined because it was not a spam or my flag was not helpful? As far as I remember, it was a spam. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202735/what-is-the-better-way-to-say-i-will-wait-until-you-ask-me-to-start-off&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; to ask moderators to &lt;strong&gt;protect&lt;/strong&gt; it with a comment, &quot;This question needs protecting to prevent newbies from answering this question. I don't think there is any more valid answers to this question.&quot; And my flag was declined with this comment, &quot;Questions are protected when there are many low rep users answering the question. That is not the case with this question.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50693/what-is-the-difference-between-none-of-and-neither-of&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; to ask moderators to &lt;strong&gt;protect&lt;/strong&gt; it with a comment, &quot;I think this question needs protecting to prevent newbies' answers as there can be no better answer than the answers already posted.&quot; And my flag was declined with this comment, &quot;Two deleted answers in four years by low rep users is not sufficient need to protect a question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not posting this question to dispute moderators' decisions but I want to have a discussion on how to stop newbies' answers to (relatively) old questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have reviewed so many &lt;strong&gt;Low Quality Answers&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Late Answers&lt;/strong&gt;. But I have rarely found any good/acceptable/on-topic answers among them posted by newbies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If protecting old questions could be considered as a reasonable defense/way against newbies' low-quality answers, don't you think it is a good idea to protect as many questions as possible? Especially those questions which have good-quality answers with a lot of upvotes. IMHO, it will do more good than harm to this community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to have your thoughts on this issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I am not proposing to &lt;strong&gt;ban&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;discourage&lt;/strong&gt; newbies from answering &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; old questions. I am suggesting to protect questions that can't generate more &lt;strong&gt;better/on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; answers than the existing ones.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question with five good answers could be an ideal solution, but it would be very controversial. Who judges what? I don't want to raise such an issue. I don't think we need to care about those newbies who choose to answer 4-year old question without knowing the norms and rules of this community like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/157843&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. I see (sometimes) existing members don't even follow the guidelines in our help center. Now, newbies have a place in &lt;strong&gt;new questions&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;new answers&lt;/strong&gt;. There are plenty of them. If they get more than 10 reputation points, they can always answer those questions, even the oldest one hopefully after studying some guidelines of this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;LQA=low quality answers&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T08:14:14.717" Title="Proposal to protect old questions from LQA by low-rep users" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7519" CreationDate="2015-12-28T23:10:21.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleted answers are already viewable by anyone with sufficient reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you'd have to go through whatever process you use now to find answers that are interesting or informative, although you'd be looking specifically for deleted posts. Mods can do that; I don't know if regular users can or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think putting deleted answers that you personally find sufficiently amusing to preserve them in a Meta post is particularly useful for future visitors, although I believe someone on SO has a personal blog of screenshots of favorite deleted things and possibly some funny situations encountered in review queues. You could probably do that if you were so inclined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2015-12-28T23:22:40.780" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T23:22:40.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2015-12-29T00:10:57.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to grieve that I missed this hat having been otherwise occupied on the 23rd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97958" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T00:10:57.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7522" CreationDate="2015-12-29T00:43:50.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The time to protect a question is when someone submits a new answer that is NOT an answer, but a different question. It's usually posted by a complete newbie to Stack Exchange, someone who thinks the Q&amp;amp;A website is a forum. They post a related &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; in the answer box, in the hope someone will answer. Whenever we see &quot;non-answers&quot; we should inform the poster that their post will be deleted, if they want an answer they should click on the tab &lt;strong&gt;Ask Question&lt;/strong&gt; and rewrite their question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't protect the Original Post that newbie could post a second question, and a third, so it has to be nipped in the bud quickly. This protection can be undone at any time, by any user who has earned &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;this privilege&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples are when the poster's English is so bad, it's embarrassing; when the answer is clearly wrong, gibberish, or obscene; when it is unequivocally spam, racist, or sexist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THAT is when you “protect” a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this “protection”? Basically a user must have earned at least 10 rep on the site before they can submit an answer. It's a very good deterrent against spammers, would-be-trolls, disgruntled visitors, and time-wasters; but it's not a guarantee against users posting low-quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes—and it happens every so often—a visitor will post a story; an episode that happened to a parent or a grandparent; a historical fact that sheds some light; some remarkable insight in the meaning of a word or its grammar that makes me stop in my tracks, and say &quot;Wow! That is so new, and so interesting.&quot; Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10 that answer will have no supporting evidence, references or links, so you can never be sure if the answer is 100% accurate or truthful. But I still think those answers are important contributions, they are examples of attestations written in good faith that may reveal a completely different angle to a tired old question. How marvellous that somebody visiting this site finds a question so inspiring, they feel compelled to add their voice, however little it may seem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen more new answers to old questions that belong to the former category, but when I have seen answers that belong to the second, I am always thrilled. It's like finding a tiny new piece of a giant jig-saw puzzle. And for that reason alone, I strongly disagree that newcomers should be discouraged or banned from answering old questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is always something new to learn, there's always going to be a new user who posts their first answer, and who's to say they have to answer only a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T07:43:20.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7522" CreationDate="2015-12-29T11:25:22.033" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to point 1, that may well have been me. Spam has a particular definition (it's advertising) and as it carries a large penalty, spam flags are really serious business. &lt;strong&gt;Please do not use spam flags for posts which are not spam.&lt;/strong&gt; There are better flags (eg Very Low Quality) which put the post into a review queue where other members of the community can also vote on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the entire content of the answer was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;100/100 and it is the best game ever&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that cannot be spam; there's no advertising. It's certainly Not An Answer; it's probably Very Low Quality. In the end I  agreed with two other users that it wasn't worth keeping, cast the third delete vote and it disappeared. Perhaps I could have treated the flag as helpful; but actually it didn't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; a moderator's intervention on a high-priority flag — we have spam/offence flags highlighted in bright red — and it was definitely the wrong flag to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging&quot;&gt;Guidelines on flagging&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags are calls to action where urgent action is needed. Some flags — spam and offence — are passed directly to moderators, or cause the system to take action by itself. Most posts do not require this exceptional level of alacrity and should be handled by the community. Note that moderators are exception handlers. While we do take action unilaterally, particularly to close an obviously off-topic question, we don't usually do that in the case of answers; normally at least one user will have flagged NAA or VLQ and voted to delete before a moderator will cast a binding vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange system uses votes to prioritise answers. If an answer is poor, downvote it. If you have the rep to vote to delete it, do that. You need 20k rep to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;delete answers&lt;/a&gt;; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;delete questions&lt;/a&gt; it's 10k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to points 2 and 3, protecting is usually done retrospectively, and that can also be done by the system once a number of low-quality posts from new users have been deleted. Moderators do look at ELU questions which appear in the Hot Network Questions sidebar, and they might be proactively protected. However, protection is not usually applied to a question which has only garnered a few low-quality answers over an extended period; it's intended to protect against a flood of poor contributions (such as from HNQ links).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I urge users to vote early and vote often. If an answer is useful, upvote it. &lt;strong&gt;If it's poor, downvote it.&lt;/strong&gt; If it's merely a comment, downvote it first and consider a flag as Not An Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvoting poor questions and answers is the most important thing you can do to protect the site.&lt;/strong&gt; Votes are used by the system to protect itself: if a user has two questions at −2 it can be sufficient for an automatic bar on posting any more. There are similar criteria for answers†. Multiple instances of closed questions or deleted answers are automatically flagged and will usually result in a mod message which might be accompanied by a suspension to allow the user and the site to recover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, you may be interested in an earlier attempt to influence user behaviour: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5097&quot;&gt;Where a question has an accepted answer, should we encourage new answers to be useful?&lt;/a&gt; That suggestion doesn't go quite as far as protection, but it's not a new sentiment that the site should do something about just anyone pitching in no matter how rudimentary their knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, we have no option but to use the tools at our disposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assess the usefulness of the answer and vote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes count toward answer bans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If an answer can be improved by judicious editing, do that, and then reassess its usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest voting before editing, and then retracting a downvote after editing, if you want, because that makes it more difficult for the user to get the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1/teacher&quot;&gt;Teacher badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag &lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt; answers. Flag &lt;em&gt;Very Low Quality&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But use the right flag. Flags determine which review queue the post goes to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote to delete where that option is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And do continue to contribute upvoted material to gain the necessary privileges if the option is not available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;† The criteria for question- and answer-bans are not published and are more complex than simply two poor-quality posts. But that level of contribution has been enough to trigger a ban in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T11:25:22.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7470" CreationDate="2015-12-29T15:58:00.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr - No, I disagree with splitting ELU into enmeshed but functionally separate communities. An alternative is proposed that requires two small programming tweaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt; covers everything that should be in scope for ELL and the proposed EPF/EWF. Items need to be explicitly and somewhat artificially listed as out of scope to narrow ELU. Even then, I'd expect significant on-going work to educate ELU users and migrate errant questions simply because ELU &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; like it's a good place to ask questions about the English language and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the intent is simply to partition ELU, do it via tags instead of splitting off a new site.&lt;/strong&gt; This would have the side-effect of making the OP's proposal just a special case of a more general and flexible filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how the tagging system is implemented on ELU specifically or SE generally, but most of the effect you're looking for could be supported with these two programming tweaks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;enable ELUm's mandatory-tag system on ELU. ELU Meta's mandatory tags are &lt;code&gt;discussion&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;support&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;feature-request&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;bug&lt;/code&gt;. Here are some suggestions for the main ELU site: &lt;code&gt;request words&lt;/code&gt; for word / phrase / idiom requests, &lt;code&gt;please explain&lt;/code&gt; for clarification and etymology, &lt;code&gt;grammar&lt;/code&gt;, ..., and &lt;code&gt;general&lt;/code&gt; as a catch-all for the rest. The category names are up to the community - the point is to set up a small number of well-defined categories that each covers a fairly broad area of interest. Question posters must select at least one mandatory tag, but may include multiple tags (mandatory or otherwise) if so desired; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;two search boxes on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags page&lt;/a&gt;: one for tags to include, and the other for tags to exclude. A question would match if it has no excluded tags and at least one included tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to enforce the tagging of the most common categories when each question is asked. Members of the community can then pick their own partitions of interest and filter out the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that in SE, communities are the primary partitions. But I'd venture to suggest that the real test of whether a community should be split (or conversely, whether multiple communities should be coalesced) is whether reputation points ought to cross over among those communities. For example, having high-rep in Code Golf doesn't really mean much in ELx communities, but having high-rep in ELU ought to count for something in ELL even though for technical reasons it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there is an expectation for OPs to do their research - this is supported by the automated search facility that is activated when a question is being composed. The automatic search facility does not return results from other communities, so breaking a community artificially into separate communities may reduce the effectiveness of this facility in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where there is essentially only one community as is the case with ELU / ELL / EPF / EWF, tag-supported filtering allows the community to remain intact while individuals focus on eclectic combinations of sub-categories that may change from person to person and from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T04:27:58.133" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-30T17:27:08.267" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105081/why-are-put-and-but-different-in-their-pronunciation?lq=1&quot;&gt;Why are “put” and “but” different in their pronunciation? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was editing my answer to a very similar question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/254455/why-there-is-difference-in-pronunciation-of-words-put-and-cut/254506#254506&quot;&gt;Why there is difference in pronunciation of words PUT and CUT?&lt;/a&gt; In fact, I think these questions should be merged. But I also think that the merged question should be re-opened, in case someone in the future has more useful information about this topic. Please post an answer explaining what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T17:28:40.480" Title="Should this question closed as &quot;not constructive&quot; be re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7528" CreationDate="2015-12-30T17:28:40.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is basically about the historical development of one part of the English language. It has a real answer supported by facts and not opinion; read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/105092/77227&quot;&gt;Jon Hanna's post&lt;/a&gt; to see what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T17:28:40.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-01T10:01:07.480" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one were to ask a question on meta when it's 17:01 on Friday somewhere in the world (say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/thailand/bangkok&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bangkok&lt;/a&gt;), which is subsequently upvoted, would it be hatworthy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T19:36:50.997" Title="Can questions on meta earn the It’s Always 5 O’Clock Somewhere hat?" Tags="|support|winterbash|winterbash-2015|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-01T10:30:09.307" Score="8" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited the question found here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297021/what-does-iran-s-hard-liners-attempt-to-sabotage-an-agenda-that-is-about-to&quot;&gt;What does it mean to &amp;quot;sabotage an agenda&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were several typos in the passage that I had fixed, checking with the original quote. I was rejected on the grounds that my edits went too far in changing the OP's original post. Later, two users commented on the question pointing out the same typos. I do not understand why my edit was rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the edit in question where I received one &quot;approve&quot; vote and two &quot;reject&quot; votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/158264&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/158264&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134753" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T23:45:08.997" Title="Curious why my suggested edit was rejected" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7531" CreationDate="2016-01-01T15:01:04.143" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this hat secret has been revealed and is on the Meta StackExchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270789/winter-bash-2015-secret-hats&quot;&gt;secret hats&lt;/a&gt; post, so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T15:01:04.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7549" CreationDate="2016-01-01T15:52:19.887" Score="19" ViewCount="792" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to a couple comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7429/what-can-we-do-to-make-this-site-more-intimidating&quot;&gt;What can we do to make this site more “intimidating”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Jason-C asserted that ELU's problems with question quality are no different than what other sites face.  Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many sites on SE have faced similar problems and solved them, never by making the site more &quot;intimidating&quot;, but instead by using the tools we have been given appropriately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that really true?   I'm no SE guru, but I do pop over to other sites and have not noticed this same phenomenon there.  Not even close.  Writers, Sci-Fi, RPGs, WorldBuilding... sure, they get silly questions now and again, but the vast majority seem to be good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I likewise find it hard to believe that an academic-oriented site like &quot;MathOverflow&quot; ever got the same deluge of horrible questions as we do.  It would be like someone going there and asking &quot;What is 27 x 52?&quot;  To which the immediate response would likely be:  &quot;Is your calculator broken?&quot; or &quot;Why in the world are you asking that here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like @Andrew-Leach's summary of why ELU may be different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do think that subject area to be a special case, because the world his wife and his dog think they know something about English (as opposed to car maintenance, or mathematics), but members of other communities may not understand that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong.  I'm not savvy enough with the data stats to answer my own question, but perhaps someone else is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit to clarify why I'm asking this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you're complaining about your house being swarmed by flies and your neighbor says, &quot;I had that same problem.  Just use a flyswatter.&quot;  But you've been using your flyswatter, and it's not working, and your arm's getting tired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you start asking for a bigger flyswatter, I think you need some justification for why &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; need one when nobody else does.  Maybe you don't. Maybe you're just doing it wrong.  Maybe you're overstating the fly problem.   Maybe your neighbors know something about fly-killing tactics that you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again... maybe you've got a whole fly colony and nobody else does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a question I believe can be answered with real data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T06:11:25.540" Title="Does ELU Have Worse Questions Than Other Sites?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7531" CreationDate="2016-01-01T19:36:50.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly, but the question must be on main and not meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/297133/9001&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the origin of &amp;quot;lit&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T19:36:50.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2016-01-02T00:33:00.373" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have hard comparative data, but I suspect we do have a problem most other sites don't (or at least not to this extent): a lack of &lt;em&gt;functional&lt;/em&gt; consensus on the purpose of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've seen me on Meta much then you'll know I often complain about high-rep users who never vote, edit, flag etc, and just answer questions. Other people always respond and say that our users have the freedom to decide how to participate, which is fair, they do. But the reality is that this site has two groups of people with very different expectations of what the site scope is. The group that frequents Meta have come to the consensus position that questions without evidence of research, proof reading questions etc are off-topic. But there is another group which deem any question coherent enough to understand worth answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which other sites are so divided over whether homework questions are allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the bad questions inevitably get closed, even if they do get answers from such users first. I'd like to say that having so many users with a different position on scope sets a bad precedent, encourages those questions to be asked etc, but I have no evidence that stopping those answers would really help things much at all. But I think it does affect our moral, for me at least. Our problem isn't just that we're fighting a never ending flood of bad questions, but that there are dozens of 5000+ rep users who aren't joining the fight, and some are even actively working against us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T22:44:31.947" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T22:44:31.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7545" CreationDate="2016-01-02T02:46:38.573" Score="2" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;In July, I answered a post about a comma (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/261157/129806&quot;&gt;Using &amp;quot;which&amp;quot; without a comma&lt;/a&gt;)  The user accepted my answer and the question disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last night, edits to the question change the tone of this post, and also &quot;built in&quot; an answer which makes my answer look wrong.  Right after that, I got 3 downvotes in a row based on sudden interest in the post (after it lay dormant for months.).  Maybe my answer was wrong.  The OP didn't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question had this line &quot;Word always complains, seeing it as a restrictive clause and demands a comma...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit changed this to &quot;Seeing it as a relative clause I'd like to know...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The OP doesn't see it as a relative clause.  Word sees it that way and Bob was asking if that is correct.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need clear guidelines for editing.  In my opinion, posts should not be edited to remove a person's local dialect / personality, add what you think they mean, or make it less &quot;suggestive&quot; or more &quot;moralistic&quot;.  If the OP drops the F bomb or uses other such language, in my opinion that's an editorial decision for the Mods.  If the OP ends a post by saying &quot;Thanks a bunch.&quot; I will leave it alone...Bob is a patent attorney and doesn't need me to tell him how to speak or that &quot;Thanks a bunch&quot; is improper for this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, this website is about asking questions and giving answers and is done so in the spirit of democracy.  This means that there will be some good answers and some &quot;not so good answers.&quot;  I have posted my share of not-so-good answers (from my own 20/20 point of view and the view of others who gave me downvotes.)  We vote on those and the voting should be a fair, and like any democratic situation the votes can only be as good as the voting pool (and in my opinion we have some pretty strong voters here!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T16:45:50.017" Title="&quot;Edits&quot; That Change the OP's Meaning" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7538" CreationDate="2016-01-02T03:10:45.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, you should edit a post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's debatable how much &quot;clarification&quot; one can do without changing meaning, I think any attempt at &quot;major surgery&quot; is going beyond what the privilege is intended for.  Especially when the post is months old and already has an accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel the edits changed the meaning, you're always free to revert it or flag it for a mod's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, I voted to close this question in particular because it lacks basic research and is easily Google-able.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T03:10:45.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7538" CreationDate="2016-01-02T03:15:42.113" Score="-9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe Edwin Ashworth left the comment, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/296440/why-are-there-many-internet-grammar-lesson-examples-using-past-perfect-with-bef/296441#296441&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not a suitable question for EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Questions like this should be close voted, not answered. The same applies to the question that I edited. The question I linked is very &lt;strong&gt;basic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;substandard&lt;/strong&gt;. It is just an elementary grammar question that had been asked many times in EL&amp;amp;U and &lt;strong&gt;repeatedly&lt;/strong&gt; closed-voted as duplicate or lack of research. See how many &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=past+past+perfect&quot;&gt;past past perfect&lt;/a&gt; question have been closed. Take a look at how many questions have been asked in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/search?q=past+past+perfect&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;. I think it makes most sense to vote to close or at least propose a duplicate, rather than answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If any question is off-topic with many errors mainly in formatting, I think it is best to edit it on a best-effort basis. &lt;strong&gt;This site is not for showing personality and style&lt;/strong&gt; in one's question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The guideline is to delete &lt;strong&gt;thank you&lt;/strong&gt; message in any question when editing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts/3021#3021&quot;&gt;Should 'Hi', 'thanks,' taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131009/what-should-i-keep-out-of-my-posts-and-titles&quot;&gt;What should I keep out of my posts and titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153074/why-are-edits-removing-thanks-in-advance-sometimes-rejected&quot;&gt;Why are edits removing “Thanks in advance” sometimes rejected?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: I have just reviewed my edit and I don't see any problem with it. I don't think I changed any meaning of the question. If you think there are mistakes in my edit, please edit it yourself and read this. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4516/why-are-some-users-with-10k-rep-allowing-minor-and-i-mean-very-minor-edits/4541#4541&quot;&gt;Why are some users with 10k+ rep allowing minor, and I mean, &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; minor edits to pass through?&lt;/a&gt;. @MrHen ranks from not minor to minor as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Replacing a generic title with a specific title &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tag changes &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Adding content from a linked website &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Removing unnecessary images &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Replacing long link URLs with a proper link &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Major reformatting or grammar changes that improve readability&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Major rewording that improves readability and unequivocally does not alter meaning&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Fixing malformed markdown &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Removing greetings and thanks &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Fixing quotes, highlights or other minor formatting &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Fixing spelling errors or minor grammar errors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Whitespace (really?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bold above is what I did to the post. &lt;strong&gt;There is absolutely no change in any meaning in my edit&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T13:20:48.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7542" CreationDate="2016-01-02T03:47:49.747" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few minutes ago, I made an edit to a question. I added the hyperlink to a Wikipedia definition (for sourcing) and slightly changed formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my revision (#2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/297201/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/297201/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, it says that the OP was the person who made the edit. I know it's my edit because it has my reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I provided the link to the included quote (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that I didn't write in the edit that is shown in the edit is adding the word &quot;more.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134753" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T07:16:24.520" Title="OP was credited for my edit" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7541" CreationDate="2016-01-02T07:16:24.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to have more than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;2,000 reputation points&lt;/a&gt; to edit any post without going through a peer review. If 2 reviewers accept (reject), your edit will be posted (rejected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, after you finished your edit and submitted it for a peer review, the OP could see the change as it is notified to the OP by a message. The OP has 4 options, &lt;strong&gt;Approve&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Reject&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;Improve Edit&lt;/strong&gt; (suggested by you), and do nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the OP doesn't do anything and your edit is approved by 2 other users, your edit will be posted. You will receive 2 reputation points. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the OP clicks on &quot;Improve Edit&quot;, your edit will be reflected right under the OP's edit in the revision history and 2 rep points will be given to you. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, if the OP rejects your edit and uses your contribution (links and changes) in his/her own edit, your display name will not appear in the revision history, nor will 2 rep points be given to you. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP typed &quot;more&quot; additionally to your edit and clicked on &lt;strong&gt;Save Edits&lt;/strong&gt; and the No. 3 above happened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't happen very often and there is nothing you can do about it. We can never know whether the OP did it intentionally or not. It could be just coincidence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further information, please visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Our model&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T07:16:24.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2016-01-02T07:29:13.480" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;programmers&lt;/a&gt; site has &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7807/181655&quot;&gt;a similar problem&lt;/a&gt;. Someone suggested that it might be due to the name of the site. The specifics are different, but the idea remains that the community's name may be attracting certain kinds of content. There's a lot of content that fits under the heading &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt;. (NB: I'm not proposing a name change for ELU - such a drastic step has repercussions, some of which were brought up in the discussion on the programmers site, including rebuilding site reputation / brand recognition and SEO ranking.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are rules about what's on-topic and off-topic, but to a new user landing on an ELU page, the link to those rules is on a page that itself is accessed via a link consisting of one word in the footer, a place many websites put their copyright notices, names of web developers and other things not of primary interest to most site visitors. That is, visitors don't normally intentionally visit the page just to read footers, much less documents linked in the footers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the &lt;em&gt;HOW TO ASK&lt;/em&gt; box on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ask a Question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; page doesn't tell you immediately what's on-topic and what isn't. The link to the help page is more visible, but the relevant information is still hidden behind a link to 'help'. People who land on the site and want to ask questions probably consider the 3-box form (title, body, tags) simple enough that they don't need help. A dedicated link named &quot;What questions does this site accept?&quot; might be more useful if you wanted visitors to look it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, as a regular visitor to ELU, I haven't (yet) found the low-quality problem to be particularly problematic. It's easy enough to just skip uninteresting questions. If more is desired, consider requesting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7527/142322&quot;&gt;tag exclusion filter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr: On the &quot;Ask a Question&quot; page, link directly and prominently to the on-topic / off-topic rules.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; related to @michael_timofeev's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Timofeev pointed out the gentler, more helpful approach taken by users of the mathematics forum. Would it really be so bad if ELU followed the same path? We'll get more me-too questions, but these would be pointed to canonical questions and answers. With the extra attention on the canonical pages, they may eventually migrate to wiki status. If the concern is losing the canonical Q&amp;amp;A in the sea of lookalikes, consider also that linking back from the (possibly many) me-too questions to the canonical Q&amp;amp;A should help improve the page rank of the canonical Q&amp;amp;A / wiki. Far from diluting the usefulness of the forum as a place to find answers, allowing duplicates of popular questions automatically make it easier (via improved page rank) to find the canonical Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T12:50:10.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2016-01-02T08:07:50.970" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Andrew Leach hit the nail on the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look in other areas that I visit things seem to be a bit different.  For example, on the mathematics forum most of the questions and answers are handled in a different way.  Take this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/679712/262555&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/679712/262555&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a question which could be googled or looked up in a third semester calculus textbook.  However, no one told the person to &quot;look it up.&quot;  Users pitched in to help.  Of course this is not a 27X52 type of question.  It is the kind of question that requires knowledge and the ability to teach mathematics (or at least give an answer that can help someone learn.)  In most math, it's not really possible to say &quot;in my opinion,&quot; because either the answer is correct or not.  The way to get to the answer varies, however there are usually tried and true methods that people prefer because they save a lot of time and confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the math forum there are questions that amount to &quot;proofreading.&quot;  In fact a large number are of the sort &quot;I'm trying to prove this and so far I did this.  Am I on the right track?&quot;  Many of those questions are also ones that could be &quot;looked up on the internet.&quot;  Of course people don't because they enjoy the community feel of &quot;doing math.&quot; and math requires a bit more help and &quot;seeing the big picture.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have posted questions and had them ignored or had my butt chewed out because they were &quot;basic&quot; or you could &quot;look it up on the internet.&quot;  In the math department &quot;basic&quot; questions such as &quot;why is a negative times a negative positive?&quot; have been discussed and rediscussed many times, and I have seen a number of brave dads ask some basic questions to help their 8 year old son.  The brave dad got answers, and they weren't &quot;look it up on the internet.&quot;  or &quot;Did you ask his teacher for help?&quot;  I saw a bunch of people vying to give the coolest answer and add something new to an old question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast that with ELU where anyone who speaks English can ask a question or answer it, and you can right away see the potential for &quot;trouble.&quot;  Anyone can answer a comma question based on &quot;in my opinion,&quot; &quot;according to Dr Bund..,&quot; &quot;Who knows because there are no rules...&quot; or &quot;Grammar Girl states that...&quot;  Heck, even I can answer questions around here.  Combine this with how &quot;stirred up&quot; some of us seem to get by &quot;wrong&quot; answers and the fact that some people around here have &quot;seen it all&quot; and there are going to be questions about the site and our common purpose.  How can we have a common purpose when no one here can really agree on where commas should go in a sentence?  How can we have common purpose when some users pop in every once in a while to answer a few questions for the heck of it, some stop by to &quot;clean up the trash&quot; and then leave not to be seen for a few weeks, and other users want this place turned into the hallowed halls of academia where everything has to be footnoted and people walk around with robes and mortarboard with a site-approved tassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be time to realize that because language is such an open field and it does not take a college degree to answer questions, this site might always be &quot;plagued&quot; with this &quot;problem&quot; and that it will have to undergo a periodic &quot;purge&quot; to rid it of a nuisance inherent in it's structure from the get go.  On the math site it's harder to fake it and mathematics from the get go is intimidating so you aren't going to get very many people asking 2+2 sorts of questions.  Contrast this with English where someone who listens to Grammar Girl feels they are a grammar expert, someone who is a computer programmer feels they have a &quot;structured mind&quot; and can answer questions, a guy who reads &quot;tough books&quot; in his off time can weigh in on relative clause matters, and someone studying English in Oz needs some quick help on his homework, and you have a recipe for disagreement...or maybe you have a recipe for a site with a lot of variety and no possible way of having consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:22:08.410" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T05:16:24.803" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7538" CreationDate="2016-01-02T09:24:02.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur. The information about Microsoft Word's grammar checker is important and I have restored that. It provides the information about where the premise for the question actually lies and what the OP is asking about. It's not his long-standing view; it's a view presented by Microsoft's software. While the omission of that information doesn't change the meaning, it does change the premise and it does remove the potential for an answer which states that Word has it wrong and the user's implied understanding is actually correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rest of the edit: the quote formatting is helpful; the removal of chatty meta-information is justified; the other changes were not important enough to make, in my opinion, but equally they are not worth undoing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all of that said, the questioner should not have asked two questions in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T09:24:02.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7532" CreationDate="2016-01-03T00:03:18.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rejected the edit because there was no straight-forward way to verify if the edited quoted text accurately represented the printed article. Therefore, either (1) the edit was improving the grammar of a quoted article, which may not reflect the original article, or (2) the edit is basically challenging the integrity of the OP by declaring the citation to be inaccurate. I chose the latter interpretation, and rejected the edit as an attempt to reply to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the article was available to you, but you could not provide a link to the original article, you could have created an image of the paragraph in question and submitted it as part of the edit. Then, it would have been trivial to verify the edit was making the quoted text accurately reflect the printed text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not choose to &lt;kbd&gt;Skip&lt;/kbd&gt; because I did not feel that edit was acceptable as it stood without a link to the source (a screenshot would have been acceptable as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87426" LastEditorUserId="87426" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T23:45:08.997" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T23:45:08.997" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2016-01-03T01:48:36.370" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The creation of ELL was supposed to help alleviate this problem, but it seems like ELU gets as many novice/basic/learner questions now as it ever did. Many of these come from new users who appear to be English learners (or &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; English learners – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297321/is-there-a-space-before-an-exclamation-or-question-mark&quot;&gt;one recent question&lt;/a&gt; began with &lt;em&gt;First of all, I am a french secondary school pupil so I am sorry for every mistakes&lt;/em&gt;). However, such questions are rarely migrated, and I don't see many comments pointing toward ELL, either, unless I'm the one leaving them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297206/how-do-i-use-blast-in-this-context&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; may ultimately get (rightly) closed, but, from what I've observed, they get routinely answered and upvoted as well. It seems like a critical mass of English learners have made ELU their Stack Exchange of choice for honing their English skills, and more are finding this cite every week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often see brand new users ask a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297149/whats-the-difference-between-specifyand-point&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the difference between &lt;em&gt;specify&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;strong&gt;They have the same translation in my language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and they are exhorted to go find a dictionary, rather than the English Learner's exchange. When that happens, I wonder if maybe Robert Cartaino was &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7911/on-the-closure-of-english-language-learners&quot;&gt;right&lt;/a&gt;, and we should have just kept all the English questions in one place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is now, it seems like we have one community specifically geared toward learners – and another with a hodgepodge of learners and serious etymologists jockeying to hold sway over its future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:06.313" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T01:48:36.370" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2016-01-03T10:10:46.577" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;My theory: ELU has it worse because it has been successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsuccessful sites (like Travel.SE) mainly get users from other Stack Exchange websites (primarily Stack Overflow), who are familiar with the Stack Exchange model, and know how to ask good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Successful sites get people coming from Google. They may or may not know how to ask good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU has been a &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questions&quot;&gt;successful site&lt;/a&gt;. To make it worse, ELU is a non-STEM site, so probably has less overlap in the user base with other Stack Exchange sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T10:10:46.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2016-01-03T23:22:19.977" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate everyone's input as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; ELU may be worse than other sites.  I was actually looking for proof/disproof as to whether it actually &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; or not.  I believe I have figured out the data explorer well enough to answer my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LnmoL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LnmoL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This graph shows the percentage of closed questions (compared to asked questions) from 9/1/15 - 1/3/16.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, Programmers and ELU rate &lt;em&gt;significantly&lt;/em&gt; higher than other sites - both needing to close about 28% of questions asked.  (On some months, ELU was as high as 48%.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to add:  As curiousdanni notes in the comment, this doesn't include deleted questions, so the actual number of bad questions is even worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to be tied directly to popularity;  Mathematics had 10x as many questions and StackOverflow had over 100x as many questions, yet both have much lower close rates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a perfect representation of question quality, but I think it illustrates that the problem is not &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; but it is likely much worse than average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastEditorUserId="11035" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T14:27:51.780" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T14:27:51.780" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2016-01-04T00:28:30.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people probably don't look at the side bar. Would it be possible to have some of the guidelines as a placeholder text in the question body box?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a quick mockup of what I mean, but we'd want to have a thorough discussion of what it should say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/50D0v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/50D0v.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image showing the new question page with a placeholder text in the question body&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T00:28:30.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7470" CreationDate="2016-01-04T13:05:53.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have little to say toward the proposal of splitting ELU, and this answer targets the title of the question, rather than the proposal in the body. (It seems to me that while some classify ELU as &quot;big&quot;, referring perhaps to the number of users and the daily number of questions, it would look much smaller if the number of regular users were considered as a measure. This is perhaps the main problem in dealing with questions that are deemed below par or &quot;off topic&quot;. Mere size of the site is not the problem I gather; at other sites, too, following particular tags, rather than perusing the full stream of questions, is a necessity; the latter is impossible because of the sheer volume.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me point out that ELU is currently listed under CULTURE/RECREATION -- alongside other philology sites such as German, French or Japanese, and also Bicycles, Travel, History, etc. Linguistics, on the other hand, is listed under SCIENCE. The other philology sites may be viewed as siblings to this one, but still, they may define themselves differently, and the may embrace different kinds of questions. Notably, they perhaps get fewer questions overall, including fewer homework/proofreading/thesaurus ones, fewer peeves, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as ELU defines itself as a site for &lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;, aims for visibility as such, and mourns the lingustics stuff that is drowned by SWRs, it may be worthwhile reconsidering being classified as CULTURE/RECREATION. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a disclaimer, I add that this is just an observation (and not a proposal). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to promote lingustics stuff here (again, I'm not taking stance), it might be worthwhile restating what differentiates ELU from Linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T13:05:53.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7409" CreationDate="2016-01-04T20:13:13.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two similar things here: Emoticons, which are formed using punctuation, and emoji, which are characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emoticon: :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emoji: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are composed using a subset of Unicode characters. The former are traditionally made with ASCII but lately other kinds of emoticons using non-ascii have arisen. The proper display of these things depends, as always, on the reader's computer having the capability to display them. Some Emoji have widespread support and many do not. Example: Sumelic's comment has these emoji:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only see the first, second, and fourth. The third shows as a little square in Chrome on Windows 7. (On my Android phone they all appear, looking like the pictures posted in the original question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We typically do not prohibit people from typing text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we do edit things for tone and content. Thus, an appropriately used emoji or emoticon could actually improve a post. However, like excess punctuation or filler words or run-on sentences or other things, we edit them out when their removal improves the post. Also, if an emoji is widely unsupported, it might be better to replace it with an image, or just leave it out. If, for example, a segment of your post is meant to be humorous or ironic and you convey that using a winking emoji that nobody can see, you've just miscommunicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="380" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T20:18:46.027" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T20:18:46.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7554" CreationDate="2016-01-04T21:48:59.993" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been part of ELU for about a month and a half, and I have seen many questions closed (usually as unclear but sometimes other reasons) that should have been migrated to ELL. The vast majority of these questions are asked by new users attracted to a site called &quot;English Language and Usage.&quot; What should we do about this, if anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148067" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T22:09:32.857" Title="What should we do about closed questions that should be migrated?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7553" CreationDate="2016-01-04T22:09:32.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is closed here, it is generally because it does not meet our quality guidelines.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What Types of Questions should I Avoid Asking&lt;/a&gt;.)  If it is a decent question that meets the guidelines for ELL (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/please-everyone-details-please&quot;&gt;Details, Please&lt;/a&gt;), then the people who are voting to close it can and should be selecting &quot;This question should be closed because it belongs on ELL&quot; as their close reason, which will cause it to be migrated automatically sometime after the final close vote is cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is about a topic that belongs on ELL, but the question doesn't meet our (or their) quality guidelines, the question should be closed, but NOT migrated.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7191/please-dont-migrate&quot;&gt;Please Don't Migrate&lt;/a&gt; for reasoning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have some specific examples at hand, my inclination is to assume that the questions fall under the &quot;Please Don't Migrate&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T22:09:32.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-04T23:23:02.607" Score="-3" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not going do adduce any here because that would only distract folks from focusing on the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well-researched, well-thought out, well-referenced answers to complex and truly intriguing questions are hardly ever rewarded here anymore. Simple-minded answers posted in passing, as it were, to oftentimes idiotic questions, turn into gifts that keep on giving, garnering points for weeks on end. I know this because I know where most of my own rep points here have come from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, good &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; are even worse off. A question about the Kardashians (metaphorically speaking) gets ten times more points than a question about Shakespeare: every damn time. Never fails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, some people are discouraged from composing anything half-way comprehensive, intriguing, fascinating, etc. During the month I spent &quot;in exile,&quot; the overall quality of the questions and answers here seems to have fallen below that of ELL. I know because ELL is where I was exiled to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning, the point system here was geared towards encouraging newcomers. This is understandable. However, the site has evolved since then. Wouldn't it be nice if someone tweaked the system a little so that good answers from thoughtful veteran language warriors could receive the attention they deserve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point. Recently, I gave a +1 to an answer that I thought was brilliant. One other person upvoted it an hour later. Almost immediately after that two intellectually challenged individuals downvoted it back to 0 (on the grounds it was too long for them to read through, and contained  words they weren't familiar with, I would imagine). In the meantime, an answer immediately below it received seventeen upvotes. Here's the clincher:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very much &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;doubt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; those upvotes came from people with 10K+ reps. I'm pretty &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; they didn't come from people with 40K+ reps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see what I'm getting at?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T04:02:50.977" Title="The simplest answer to the stupidest question never fails to get the most points (still). Why?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T08:34:33.020" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/296694/book-is-to-booklet-as-hand-is-to&quot;&gt;Diminutive forms in English &lt;/a&gt;, has received a number of comments by experienced and, I think, authoritative users that appear to contradict and somehow reject what I am asking. It seems that it is an elementary issue that I simply fail to see. Despite a very good tentative answer I still don't understand if the issue I am trying to raise is recognised or not. Could ELL, given the basic question, be more helpful in that respect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T12:01:28.120" Title="Should this question be migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T11:21:03.383" Score="-5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195960/spelling-of-the-word-connoisseur&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is excellent. So is the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it embarrassing, though, that the answer should get all those upvotes, but not the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't it be NICE if people who find that a question deserves an answer (and post one) would acknowledge it by upvoting the question? Wouldn't it be ... well ... &lt;em&gt;decent&lt;/em&gt;? ... polite? ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't it be even nicer (even more decent) if folks lavishing upvotes on an answer would at least consider upvoting the question that inspired it as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T11:38:10.163" Title="When upvoting an answer, wouldn't it only be polite to upvote the question as well?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7557" CreationDate="2016-01-05T11:38:10.163" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Upvote questions that are good, clear and show research effort, and downvote questions which don't. Upvote answers which are clear, actually answer the question itself rather than some related topic, and which are support with quotes or data. Downvote answers which are confusing, or don't support themselves with evidence. And don't forget to flag both questions and answers (or vote to close questions if you have 3000+ rep.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are tons of good answers on terrible questions. There is nothing wrong with downvoting the question and upvoting its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site isn't about being nice and polite at the expense of making the voting system meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to be frank, someone with only 186 votes might want to vote more before lecturing others how to vote. You have 0 downvotes, you might want to start there. Can you honestly say you've never seen an unclear question, a question with no research, or an answer making bold claims without a shred of evidence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top voter so far this year has only voted 113 times. We could all catch up in three days!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T11:38:10.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T11:40:36.857" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a suggested edit to one of my posts here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/158765&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/158765&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor involved already knew that, because of my baby-level knowledge of syntax, I believe that the phrase &lt;em&gt;One of the main problems&lt;/em&gt; is the Subject in the sentence in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the main problems was people doing X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they disagreed with me about this, they decided to rewrite my post so that it reflected their own interesting idea of the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do about edits that flagrantly ignore the author's intent? Can we have a wall of shame, please? Or a ducking stool or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: If you fancy a giggle, read the edit summary given by the editor!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T12:44:27.870" Title="Editing posts - feature request" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7555" CreationDate="2016-01-05T11:42:57.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the comments above, I think this post is more a rant than a helpful suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is one easy and concrete way to support answers which you think have been neglected: post a bounty and reward them! You have a lot of rep and seem to be gaining it quickly. You could probably post a 100 rep bounty every day and keep your rep at a stable level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T11:42:57.100" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7556" CreationDate="2016-01-05T12:01:28.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; a language is as it is questions are almost never constructive. The answer is inevitably that a bunch of effectively random historical forces combined to produce the language we have now. This doesn't mean that those historical forces can't be explained, but to properly answer &quot;Why are diminutives in English not always formed by adding a suffix, like in French for instance?&quot; an answer would need to cover the individual fate of several unrelated affixes, which each have an idiosyncratic history unrelated to the others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But it's extremely rare in any language for there ever to be only one way to do something. Why are diminutives not &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; formed by adding a suffix? Because language is never so rigid. If you want to try taking the first question to Linguistics.SE, I'd suggest phrasing it in terms of why it's less common in English than in other languages (and to improve such a question, concrete data on languages where it is more common would be good.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your second question is reasonable, but should be asked by itself. It belongs on ELU not ELL. But it's a very different question, and asking the two of them makes it too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T12:01:28.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T19:47:47.657" Score="17" ViewCount="1624" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that on EL&amp;amp;U some people seem to take it as axiomatic that only spoken language is &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; language. This does not seem axiomatic or otherwise obvious to me. Is it just a currently fashionable doctrine in linguistics, or is there an adequate argument in support of it, or both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194084/dictionary-of-english-constructions#comment428743_194084&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Colloquial English means English as it's spoken, which is the real language. What's sometimes called &quot;formal English&quot; is simply stuffy, an attempt to talk like our betters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;mdash;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297868/jolly-good-meaning-extremely-good-in-british-english#comment669329_297871&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm sure it's already far more common in real (spoken) language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T08:47:29.833" Title="Is spoken language ontologically superior to written language, really?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-06T00:22:58.010" Score="34" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this suggestion to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7550/59258&quot;&gt;another post&lt;/a&gt;, but thought it would be worth its own separate feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it already possible to add a placeholder text to the question body box, or would the SE developers be able to add this functionality? If so, we can then discuss what the text should be. This placeholder text might be seen by more people who just ignore the side bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a quick mockup I made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/50D0v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/50D0v.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image showing the new question page with a placeholder text in the question body&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T19:09:06.417" Title="Can a placeholder text be added to the question body box?" Tags="|feature-request|design|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-01-06T01:13:07.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even supposing that the putative primacy (it comes first) and commonality or frequency (it comes more often) of spoken language can be established, those traits don't confer 'ontological superiority', that is, they don't make spoken language any more or less 'real' than recorded language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The view that primacy, commonality and frequency somehow make spoken language more 'real' should be more accurately expressed as the &quot;currently fashionable doctrine in linguistics&quot; that those characteristics make spoken language a fitter, more viable subject for contemporary linguistic studies than recorded language. That expression of the case, then, as opposed to an ascription of greater or lesser 'reality' for spoken versus recorded language, recommends a type of &quot;ontological superiority&quot; that doesn't set up and burn a straw man in one smooth flick of a Zippo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An ontological feature of humanity is the use of language. ... Different from the transient nature of spoken language, the recordable character of the text significantly developed the brain, social life, and intellectual skills of humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dsvista.org/news/articleView.html?idxno=280&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Superiority of Hangul&quot;&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;em&gt;The Duksung Vista&lt;/em&gt;, 20101004.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the propositions in that excerpt are deployed in the service of what must be considered a parochial argument (the superiority of Hangul), in isolation they are evidently true, and speak to a distinctly different view of ontological superiority than the aforementioned &quot;currently fashionable doctrine in linguistics&quot;. In this view, the 'reality' conferred by comparatively greater and more recent contributions to human development assumes an equally greater and more recent ontological significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such human development is the study of linguistics, which itself is only possible by means of recorded language. To neglect this, that recorded language is the medium and sine qua non of linguistic study, in favor of a blinkered view that posits spoken language as the only or the more important subject of linguistic studies, is to neglect the essential nature, as well as the necessary philosophical underpinnings, of linguistics &lt;em&gt;as a scientific endeavor&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I contend, the &quot;currently fashionable&quot; linguistic doctrine that argues the primacy, frequency and commonality of spoken language make spoken language a fitter more viable subject of linguistic study must yield to the primacy, frequency and commonality of the language of linguistics itself, that is, recorded language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T06:50:52.290" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T06:50:52.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-01-06T03:04:49.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a common view in the 1800's (especially continentally) that the written word was ... better than spoken. But that is an inchoate comparison. And the common view now is that spoken is 'better'. To answer your question we would need to specify what the criteria are. 'Ontologically superior' is marginally more meaningful than 'better'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's try to specify the decision criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if the question is about pronunciation, then spoken wins over written (especially in English). So we can easily dismiss that question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What leads to clearer communication? I think it is obvious that writing has less room for misunderstanding, at least in the transfer medium (one can equally confuse people with the choice of words an argument in either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is more lasting? Again, it is obvious that the technology of writing is much more permanent than speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could continue to list all the ways where writing is better than language. But I know what your question really intends. Why do people on ELU say things like spoken language is real but written language is not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ELU we are asking and answering questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; communication in English. We are using writing to communicate these ideas, not speaking, but the subject matter is the language itself. And the questions are of the form 'Is it ok to say X?' or 'What is the word for Y?'. So the real question you should be asking is what the criteria for judging such questions are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is in writing that is not already in spoken language? The alphabet or character list. Anything else? Oh, orthography. In English that is complex, but the complexity is ... not linguistic. Spelling is a poor attempt at capturing sound, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED is a written artifact and it is created to record the meanings and histories or words in English. It's data and support for entries can only be written samples. &lt;strong&gt;Writing is a record of the way people speak. Speaking is not a record of the way people write.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an understandable confusion, especially for those learning a language. It is much easier as a second language to learn from written accounts, simply because of the convenience of the medium. You don't have to have a native speaker always at hand when you can just look up in a dictionary or search online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, though it is unphilosophical to refer to reality, I feel it necessary to bring up the matter of invention, arbitrariness and biology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing is an invention by individuals, a spoken language is a continuous process of a community. Sure, someone can invent a new word that everyone uses, but that would be one out of thousands of existing ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;because writing is an invention, it is arbitrary. Its elements can be changed easily and still be equally functional. Chinese can be communicated in hanzi characters or pinyin romanization. Roman characters transcribe Latin as well as English. Surely there is arbitrariness in spoken language, too, signs and symbols and Saussure and all that. But an alphabet or characters is infinitely simple in comparison to spoken language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Humans have evolved biological processes specifically for processing spoken language, both for listening and speaking, brain areas for processing, and mouth, nose and lung physiology for controlling speech. We didn't evolve fingers for holding pens or for typing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we've been speaking for tens of thousands of years, but only writing for a few thousand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing is a better medium for communication, but speaking appeared first and writing is an attempt at recording speech, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when someone asks a question about whether it is right to say &quot;I ain't no snitch&quot; vs &quot;I ain't any snitch&quot;, the answer is about spoken language and is decided for spoken language, not about written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T20:14:00.073" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T20:14:00.073" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7555" CreationDate="2016-01-07T03:50:50.830" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source of your woe—if indeed you are woeful—seems traceable to the fact that you are an idealist. That is, you imagine that thoughtful, intelligent people, if they put their minds to it, will inevitably agree with you (since you are a thoughtful, intelligent person) about what constitutes the beautiful and the good—in this case, the beautiful and the good EL&amp;amp;U answer. But in reality, thoughtful, intelligent people disagree about practically everything and are constantly at each other's throats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this state of affairs, it may make more sense to ask yourself not &quot;How can we thoughtful, intelligent people make common cause to rid English Language &amp;amp; Usage of its blights and inequities?&quot; but instead &quot;How can I reach a state of equipoise at this site so that I can enjoy myself and feel fulfilled by my contributions to it without being periodically banned from the premises?&quot; In my view the most important step toward balance is to do things on the site that are rewards in themselves and don't hinge on the level of approval they receive from others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes write very long answers. In fact I once was asked to convert an answer into a blog post because—even after I divided it into two answers—both halves exceeded the maximum character count for an EL&amp;amp;U answer. Just yesterday I spent eight or ten hours researching and writing up an answer to a five-year-old question. It's a long answer—mostly citations—but its purpose isn't to overawe the reader; it's to give a picture of how people have responded to the poster's question over a period of roughly 175 years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More narrowly, I felt that one of the earlier answers to that particular question was polemical and tendentious in a way that encouraged misunderstanding—which, to me, is the worst thing an EL&amp;amp;U answer can do. I wanted to establish a historical framework or context within which this other answerer's argument could be fact-checked and fairly gauged. In the end, I hit that darn maximum character count again; but after a bit of self-discipline, I brought the answer in under the maximum and in what I took to be fine fettle. At that point, my happiness was pretty much complete: I had countered the misleading answer with what I considered an exceedingly judicious presentation of the evidence I had uncovered. My work there was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is missing from this picture? Oh, yes—upvotes. To my pleasant surprise, my long long answer received three upvotes and no downvotes (though I'm sure that the person whose answer I sought to undermine will downvote mine as soon as he becomes aware of it). That works out to about 0.33 upvote per hour spent on the answer—not bad for one of my long answers. Of course, if I compared that rate of reward with the rate at which some single-word request answers pile up upvotes, I might feel less jolly. But I don't. And the reason I don't is that I have a clear idea of what I want to contribute to EL&amp;amp;U (thoughtful, carefully researched answers) and what I expect in return (not much). Receiving upvotes is always pleasant, but it's not why I participate at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is full of people—many of them both thoughtful and intelligent—pursuing very different goals under the same umbrella. Given the diversity of interests and purposes, it is hardly surprising that we don't speak with one voice on matters of grave import, or indeed on much of anything. But what we can do is tolerate each other—and perhaps even presume (absent clear evidence to the contrary) that everyone who participates here is motivated by a desire to make the site better, though their notion of improvement may be incomprehensible to us—and (when it is our turn) use the open microphone that this Website provides to give voice to the things we care about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I'm not sure I agree with you about anything (except refusing to downvote). But there are times when I read one of your answers and think &quot;This guy could be a real asset to this site; he has a sharp mind, and his answers—when he isn't just showing off or getting into a rage about something—are quite perceptive and useful.&quot; I don't think that EL&amp;amp;U is ripe for revolution, and I have no wish to see it altered radically. If you do, I think you are likely to be disappointed; and it may be that a fruitful relationship with this site is simply impossible for you. But whether you work out a satisfactory modus operandi here or not, I wish you the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-01-07T04:02:50.977" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T04:02:50.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-01-07T05:28:13.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're mis-reading the comparison.  It's not &quot;English as it is spoken&quot; versus &quot;English as it is written&quot;, it's &quot;English as it is spoken&quot; versus &quot;English as formal rules describe it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69879" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T05:28:13.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-01-07T15:25:23.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreeing with Mark's answer, but elaborating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument is between being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prescriptive&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;descriptive&lt;/a&gt; of the language. The &quot;U&quot; in our name says right up front this stack values the descriptive approach. The only place this really intersects with writing is that written English often has to go through editors, so it tends to have a lot of prescriptive rules applied to it where spoken generally does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd further argue that trying to be &lt;em&gt;prescriptive&lt;/em&gt; with English may have some localized uses, but in general is &lt;strong&gt;inherently absurd&lt;/strong&gt;. The language does not currently have a single prestige dialect to coalesce around. What is considered &quot;Correct English&quot; is very different in England than in the USA (and in Australia, and in South Africa...) Its true that both the New York Times and the London Times enforce style guides on their writers, but they are different style guides. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best you could do in general is compile a list of what is considered &quot;proper&quot; where, and at some level of detail that just devolves to descriptivism anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9186" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T15:25:23.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-07T16:07:59.507" Score="13" ViewCount="1602" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that proofreading is prohibited in this site. However, I'd like to ask if there are free online websites to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember once there was a website where I can help people in Spanish/Portuguese and they help me in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I attempted searching on Google, but I didn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestions are highly appreciated guys. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154309" OwnerDisplayName="sarah" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T12:01:58.593" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T16:19:49.577" Title="Where can I ask for free proofreading?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2016-01-07T16:14:55.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few very reliable sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paperrater.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Paper Rater&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammarcheck.net/editor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammar Check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spellcheckplus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Spell Check Plus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.polishmywriting.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Polish My Writing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and finally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onlinecorrection.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Online Correction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140723" OwnerDisplayName="anonymous" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T16:14:55.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-08T08:59:33.313" Score="15" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through the FAQs in Help Section and came across this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/product-support&quot;&gt;Can I support my product on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Types of questions and where to ask:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I? -- ask on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (tell them what tags to use -- your product tag at minimum)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got this &lt;strong&gt;error&lt;/strong&gt;, why? -- ask on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got this error and I'm sure it's a &lt;strong&gt;bug&lt;/strong&gt; -- report it on your own site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an idea/request -- report it on your own site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you? -- ask in your own community (support forum, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When will you? -- ask in your own community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if people will associate &lt;em&gt;errors&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bugs&lt;/em&gt; with English Language and usage. Just to be clear, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what type of products are we talking about here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that a generic template (that came from SO, the root) is used across the SE sites with just a change in the site name. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shouldn't this be rephrased to be more in line with the goals of individual sites?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rather trivial question but posting it nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:59:41.457" Title="Report &quot;Errors&quot; in English Language &amp; Usage?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-09T04:02:38.807" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;In writing a question, answer, or comment, how can I include a clickable link that cross-references another question, answer, or comment at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&amp;nbsp;SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found through &amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp; at EL&amp;amp;U and as questions at EL&amp;amp;U Meta were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to reference material written by&#xA;others&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1061/153448&quot;&gt;What's the best way to answer when there's a really good answer&#xA;elsewhere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4213/153448&quot;&gt;I'd like to be able to provide simplified hyperlinks in my answers but&#xA;do not know how&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are helpful in various ways but do not touch on the mechanics of obtaining a good link address (URL) for the target posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;(This question is here to facilitate access to information,&#xA; in accordance with&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange policy&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T00:19:21.503" Title="Link to a question, answer, or comment" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7574" CreationDate="2016-01-09T04:02:38.807" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been answered at Meta Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/272427/313009&quot;&gt;Link to a question, answer or&#xA; comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;(This answer is a plant to facilitate access to information, in accordance with&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange policy&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T22:25:02.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-10T10:38:18.413" Score="17" ViewCount="801" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't keep up with them, the brand new users who have 1 rep. There's too many, they're swarming the site and often their questions consist of one or two lines with no context.  All the following questions were posted on January 10, 2016 &lt;strong&gt;by 1 rep users&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298847/is-it-proper-to-say-turn-right-right-here&quot;&gt;Is it proper to say &amp;quot;Turn right right here&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298850/to-spoon-coffee-into&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298850/to-spoon-coffee-into&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298845/do-we-use-the-present-or-the-past-after-when-in-a-conditional-sentence&quot;&gt;Do we use the present or the past after &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; in a conditional sentence?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298837/which-sentence-is-correct-and-should-we-add-the-in-front-of-english&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298837/which-sentence-is-correct-and-should-we-add-the-in-front-of-english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298840/word-for-someone-who-makes-careful-word-choices&quot;&gt;Word for someone who makes careful word choices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298822/is-it-correct-to-say-if-i-wont-wouldnt-get-any-reward-i-wont-wouldnt-hel&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298822/is-it-correct-to-say-if-i-wont-wouldnt-get-any-reward-i-wont-wouldnt-hel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298804/what-preposition-should-be-used-with-map-in-or-on-please-see-my-example&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298804/what-preposition-should-be-used-with-map-in-or-on-please-see-my-example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298805/website-for-forms-of-words&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298805/website-for-forms-of-words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298785/what-is-the-correct-word-for-worrylessly&quot;&gt;What is the correct word for &amp;#39;worrylessly&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 hours later...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298885/should-always-i-as-uppercase&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298885/should-always-i-as-uppercase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298888/is-it-correct-to-use-an-before-subject-organizational-setting&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298888/is-it-correct-to-use-an-before-subject-organizational-setting&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298882/usage-of-take-a-step-forward&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298882/usage-of-take-a-step-forward&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298865/are-you-really-want-to-quit-vs-do-you-really-want-to-quit&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;Are you really want to quit ?&amp;#39; vs &amp;#39;Do you really want to quit ?&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt; (this one does have context, but there's no research)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298861/in-which-instead-of-when&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298861/in-which-instead-of-when&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298894/how-can-i-differentiate-a-gender-to-word-cousin&quot;&gt;How can I differentiate a gender to word cousin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm sure I've missed a few others)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks a bit suspicious to me, is it possible that someone is creating these new accounts to give EL&amp;amp;U some much needed sap? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know for a fact that some very high-rep users/mods do create sockpuppets to test things out, is the above an example of that? See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65604/i-am-a-sockpuppet-may-i-exist-if-i-have-a-real-purpose&quot;&gt;I am a sockpuppet, may I exist if I have a real purpose?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've probably had a half dozen or so alternate accounts over the&#xA;  course of the site. &lt;strong&gt;They're useful sometimes: testing bugs that only&#xA;  show up at low rep levels, reminding yourself what the site &quot;feels&#xA;  like&quot; for someone with only the basic abilities, maintaining a highly&#xA;  unnatural q/a ratio...&lt;/strong&gt; That said, I always treat these as disposable&#xA;  accounts, and some of them have been removed (either automatically or&#xA;  via mod intervention) when I crossed a line somewhere - you should&#xA;  never assume that a sockpuppet is &quot;protected&quot; if you're actively using&#xA;  multiple accounts on one site; ...   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/57685/223820&quot;&gt;July 19 2010&lt;/a&gt; Shog9♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why don't the newcomers know about ELL?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second concern is why are all these new users coming to EL&amp;amp;U in the first place? Why aren't they posting their &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;low-quality questions&lt;/em&gt; on ELL? I'm not suggesting the questions posted on 10 Jan should be migrated, but I'm confused as to why these users seemingly have no awareness that ELL exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why not just ignore the low-quality posts?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this seems the easier, friendlier and more civil approach, this will create a gateway effect. Once a user has their off-topic question answered, and this includes answers that are either posted as comments or edited and embedded in the OP, you are reinforcing that behaviour. Think of Pavlov's experiments, and &lt;em&gt;learned behavior&lt;/em&gt;. It's the same thing, after all why do users keep posting answers? Because they receive 10 points, and don't tell me its not gratifying. It's exactly the same mechanism. Likewise, a user who regularly receives an answer to his/her off-topic question will learn to repeat that behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If LQQs are allowed to proliferate,  the more experienced linguists and  ‘experts’  will not stick around. Compared to two years ago, the old vanguard is nearly halved. Wonderful contributors such as, Robusto, Barrie England, medica, RegDwight, NoHat,  JSBձոգչ and oerkelens are simply not posting any more. I don't want ELU to become the next &lt;em&gt;Yahoo! Answers&lt;/em&gt;. But it will do, if we don't demand a &quot;minimum&quot; standard from everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T02:32:42.677" Title="Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users" Tags="|discussion|ell|low-quality-posts|new-users|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7576" CreationDate="2016-01-10T14:58:03.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spot ELL&lt;/strong&gt;  on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;home page of Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;. On the other hand, it's hard to miss EL&amp;amp;U, and its size suggests that the site is successful. Could this home page be partly responsible for users simply not knowing that ELL exits? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/51Mwb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/51Mwb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7128/should-we-have-a-migration-path-to-ell&quot;&gt;Should we have a migration path to ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have that migration path now, but what use is it, if the questions are obviously  off-topic to begin with? I've done my best to help newcomers, and where possible I have interpreted their questions, and added traces of research to at least give them a semblance of being on-topic, but... it's a losing battle. There comes a time when you have to say, &lt;em&gt;sort it out yourselves&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Learners' questions should be migrated; but a poor question is a poor&#xA;  question. Try and edit it into shape first.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Andrew Leach ♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T20:59:03.443" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7429" CreationDate="2016-01-10T16:07:42.213" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What can we do to make this site &lt;strike&gt;more intimidating&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;work better, and be more like every other SE site?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only assume that the reason why the other sites, like Math, don't find this problem insurmountable, is because they have enough high-rep and invested users (who have enough close votes between them) &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to run out of close votes before the work is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've come across a few questions on ELU that were obvious crap, and was surprised to see no close votes on them. So then I went into chat and asked why. The answers were: &lt;em&gt;not worth one of my precious close votes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I've used all of mine for today&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user base (as it currently exists*) doesn't have a full enough tool box to combat the situation. I've never used all of mine and probably never will, but there are users here that do on a daily basis. If those people are willing to take out the trash, you'd better let 'em.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;High rep users need more close votes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is intimidating enough already on the whole. You're asking how we can stop passersby from raining on the parade? You don't. You go get a bigger umbrella. Perhaps the rep required for the &quot;close hammer&quot; should be lowered. Or a sliding scale for what a particular user's close vote is worth. It just seems strange that all of a sudden, at whatever the rep is, you can solo close. Where's the middle ground?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don't force it. Get a bigger hammer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(noticeably absent in this discussion, is one of the users I quoted. They're probably of the opinion that this question will lead nowhere, your 'antechamber' as an affront to the SE model, and too busy closing crap; getting it done. IIRC this user din't really want more, though &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; believe they should be at their disposal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: ELU is likely one of the sites, where the community is disproportionately uninterested in the back end of things. Where as the users of STEM sites might be much more into the 'meta'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T16:07:42.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7576" CreationDate="2016-01-10T21:50:46.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the explanation is much more simple: Stack Exchange awards points and badges for asking lots of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding why so many lately: random events inevitably occur in groups, precisely because they are random. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67227" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T21:50:46.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-01-10T23:27:05.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you read, for example right now, you will probably have a kind of feint voice going on in the back of your mind. Perhaps this seems like a dubious concept. It kind of should. There's no actual noise coming off the black squiggly things you're looking at right now. So maybe we need to explore this idea. Let's consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hey, sleigh, day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have noticed that those words rhyme. That's extremely weird. What does that mean - they &quot;rhyme&quot;. It means that the &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; at the ends of these words are the same. But why do you think about this when you're &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt;? You're looking at squiggly marks. You aren't hearing sounds. These words seem to not just indicate meaning; they very specifically indicate &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; to you (unless, perhaps, if you're deaf). And in a very immediate way. The shapes of writing on its own don't have quite the same echoic effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enough, bough, through&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words don't have the same effect for you as the ones further above. It may even be that the fact they look similar makes them more difficult to read well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you can speak English, you will also get a sense of rhythm from the words that you're reading - even though this does not stem visually from the squiggle in front of you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clear dream states fly straight green stones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Georgie Porgie pudding and pie&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines above will have a very different rhythmic effect, even though you're reading. And in order to get the rhythm from those lines you need to internally translate them into sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as it turns out, this does not seem to be an entirely illusory phenomenon. When you read you may physically have increased activity in the auditory cortex - that part of your temporal lobe that processes auditory information. In addition, when silently reading you will be making very small involuntary movements of the muscles associated with speaking (known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;subvocalisations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this all show in relation to the current question? Well, it would seem to show that the written word  involves the encoding and decoding in some sense of speech, or &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; over time. In other words we are translating, to a certain extent, squiggles into the sounds and articulations that we use to communicate with the spoken word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be pertinent to think at this point about the way that we learn language. All healthy people without some health condition can speak language. The same is not true for written language at all. We learn to speak without any direct tuition, but we need some form of tuition, however minimal, to master the written word. We also need to know some form of language before we are able to start reading. Written language is the encoding of another dynamic language system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then, the fact is that is that we  psychologically &lt;em&gt;translate&lt;/em&gt; written language  into spoken language. Although written language has an effect on spoken language, spoken language is more pervasive, more universal. It is in many ways more primary, more biological, more primordial than written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that spoken language is &lt;em&gt;superior&lt;/em&gt; to written language? I don't even know what that means. Writing, of course, has had an enormous impact on human history and culture and our ability to communicate across time and space. Understanding written language is hugely important to understanding human beings and human history, civilisation and culture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that what the  linguists Brian is citing are angling at is that spoken language is more biologically, cognitively, humanly primordial. It is what we have to psychologically translate writing into to understand it. Spoken language also has a greater impact on diachronic change in written language than the other way round. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T17:15:01.400" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T17:15:01.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2016-01-11T04:21:11.207" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think just suck it up, and take it as a fun opportunity to be rude to idiots who ask lame-ass questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the poor buggers on the Physics list ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... half the questions there are superb insightful questions about physics. The other half are UFO-nuts wanting to know if their idea for perpetual motion will work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really think just take it as it is and have fun with it - Happy New Year!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T04:21:11.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7576" CreationDate="2016-01-11T07:06:31.993" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember buying English and other language grammar books, novels and audio tapes at the turn of each year with a new year's resolution to study harder. The recent spike could be related with new year resolutions of new learners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is virtually nothing we can do to prevent new users from posting those questions as I mentioned in a previous &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7429/what-can-we-do-to-make-this-site-more-intimidating/7459#7459&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;. This answer is more focused on how to deal with the Low-Quality Questions (LQQ) down the road. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close Voting.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High-rep users should be more active in closing (blatantly) LQQ. I have noticed that closing these posts is not as active as a few months ago. The factors could be various, i.e. decreased involvement of a few moderators and high-rep users, more lenient views or opinions towards LQQ, but as Mazura mentioned in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7429/what-can-we-do-to-make-this-site-more-intimidating/7578#7578&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, the solution could be to &lt;em&gt;deal with LQQ with a &lt;strong&gt;bigger hammer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298805/website-for-forms-of-words&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; requesting for on-line resources is not closed yet. We need high-rep users to visit the &lt;strong&gt;review&lt;/strong&gt; more frequently in order to close LQQ more actively.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migration to ELL.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I commented above, migrating all (or most) of LQQs onto ELL is not such a bad idea. Of course, it could be seen as dumping cr** on ELL, but at least we can let new users know that ELL exists on Stack Exchange. They are all beginners or intermediaries in English. If they have another question in the future, they'll know where to post a question if they are properly guided to ELL. It is  not a matter of dumping LQQs, but a matter of good guidance to new &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt; users for ELL. We don't want them to post another LQQ on EL&amp;amp;U. Then, we have to figure out seriously how to guide them well to ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consensus on answering LQQ. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users have different views when judging which question is LQQ and which is not. Some users choose to answer because they think it would be helpful to learners. I can't agree with them more. However, it might leave the false impression that LQQs are welcomed and tolerated  on EL&amp;amp;U. Posts of mine have been downvoted in the past for answering a LQQ or a duplicate. But I don't think downvoting the answers to a LQQ is an ideal solution. We need to reach a consensus on this issue. The best solution would be to close a LQQ before any answer is submitted, but that won't be possible unless a few more moderators with a solo-closing power are more actively involved than at present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guiding new users who post low-quality answers:    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to guide new users who not only ask LQQ, but also answer LQQ or duplicates with poor-quality answers. As Mitch commented, a 1-rep user posted an answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298837/which-sentence-is-correct-and-should-we-add-the-in-front-of-english/298839#298839&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; before it was closed. The answer is wrong and still it received one upvote. There are many instances where 1-rep or 101-rep users posted blatantly wrong answers or poor-quality answers that don't follow the rules and guidelines of this community. We need to pay more attention to those users, too, so that they may settle down well in either EL&amp;amp;U or ELL.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: We need to be &lt;strong&gt;more proactive&lt;/strong&gt; than reactive in dealing with LQQs and new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T08:39:06.570" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T23:34:49.620" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I flag a question as more appropriate for another StackExchange site, I can only choose to move the question to ELL or meta.  Sometimes to question is more appropriate for workplace for StackOverflow.  Am I missing something?  Or is this something we can add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108286" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T23:47:26.570" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:00:50.793" Title="Flag a question for migration to unlisted StackExchange site" Tags="|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-12T02:30:23.840" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue of copyright infringement of referenced (non-ELU) works has been discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153/does-copy-and-paste-infringe-copyrights&quot;&gt;previously&lt;/a&gt;, with citations and fair use provisions considered. However, the ELU&lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; questions I looked at didn't address the issue of reproducing lengthy license terms when excerpts are quoted under those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that fair use provisions cover these situations, but if not, and if the licenses need to be reproduced, their bulk would dominate that of the answers. Would a link to the license text suffice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specifics:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299012/142322&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt; an ELU question using a quote from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mcdonald.me.uk/storytelling/lichert_article.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt; published under the &quot;Open Gaming License version 1.0a&quot; (license terms displayed at the bottom of the linked page), which requires the full text of the copyright notice to be displayed in some situations (clauses 6 and 10, at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted portion doesn't look like what the license defines as &quot;Open Game Content&quot;, but I'm not a lawyer and I'd like to know whether I should note the &quot;Open Gaming License&quot; in the answer, e.g. (the portion from the dash onwards):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;(text quoted from the source document)&quot; - quoted under the Open Gaming License at the end of the linked paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T02:30:23.840" Title="Reproduction of copyright notices" Tags="|discussion|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-12T02:49:22.593" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very often questions (and, in particular, differing opinions as to the correct answers) hinge on whether the individual is native to the US, UK, or some other place on the globe.  But only very rarely does the individual's profile identify place of residence and/or birth.  I can appreciate that many people want to &quot;retain an air of mystery&quot;, but isn't there some way to encourage them to at least identify their place of residence in their profile so that one doesn't have to repeatedly inquire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T09:46:41.413" Title="Could contributors somehow be encouraged to record their geographic location in their profiles?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-12T07:00:35.553" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have relatively short experience on EL&amp;amp;U and I found some questions where every post was downvoted &lt;em&gt;in a matter of one minute or so&lt;/em&gt;. I mean it is very unusual to see every single post in one question get downvoted and I &#xA;haven't seen them very often since I joined EL&amp;amp;U.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first encountered it one or two months ago, I suspected it could be a pure coincidence where a few users are downvoting each of them almost at the same time. But I became a little more suspicious when I saw the following question whose posts were all downvoted, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298845/do-we-use-the-present-or-the-past-after-when-in-a-conditional-sentence&quot;&gt;Do we use the present or the past after “when” in a conditional sentence?&lt;/a&gt;. Even the accepted answer received two downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299058/is-there-a-term-for-replacing-name-with-a-number-code/299061#299061&quot;&gt;Is there a term for replacing name with a number/code?&lt;/a&gt; seems to have the same problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I think the followings could be the reasons that triggered the multiple downvotes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The question is neither good nor on-topic enough (too basic or without context) for EL&amp;amp;U. The message is &quot;You should not have posted an answer to this kind of question.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) All the answers are poorly written without good reference or research. The message is &quot;You should not have posted such a low-quality answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion on this? Is it constructive to downvote all the posts without leaving any comment? The two questions received a total of 13 downvotes and there is &lt;strong&gt;not a single comment&lt;/strong&gt; related with any downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feature request: Is there any way that I can delete my answer which was accepted by the OP? Would it (deleting my answer) be possible if I flag my answer with &lt;em&gt;in need of moderator intervention&lt;/em&gt; and state the reason? I am not talking about the answer accepted by the OP in the second link.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T12:56:19.780" Title="Is downvoting every single post in a question without leaving any comment constructive?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7587" CreationDate="2016-01-12T09:20:30.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is some modest encouragement present already in user profiles: &lt;em&gt;location&lt;/em&gt; is an item there. If a user leaves that field blank, well that may be an omission, but it is probably intentional with active, long-term users. I rather doubt any additional &quot;encouragement&quot; will work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think people may be more specific than they currently are (overall) in what they're actually asking, &lt;strong&gt;via tagging&lt;/strong&gt;. We do have tags for regional variants (and if we don't, we should). Tagging an individual question (in case regional variants matter, of course) is much more to the point than the location of the asker because a correct &lt;strong&gt;tag can specify what dialect/variant of English the question is about&lt;/strong&gt;, rather then where the OP comes from. It is perfectly acceptable if a user from, say, Denmark asks about, say, Indian English: in that case, a tag helps, &lt;em&gt;whilst&lt;/em&gt; location of the OP does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, one can always ask in comments. People may be slightly more willing to part with their personal info in comments, which are disposable &lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt; not immediately visible to your random profile viewer. Anyway, that information, if relevant, should be included in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastEditorUserId="105642" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T09:46:41.413" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T09:46:41.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-12T15:43:58.823" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299319/3306&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, I replied with documentation from both sides of the debate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; are equivalent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; differ.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be more helpful to the community to separate these into two responses? By separating these into the Language Log and Strunk &amp;amp; White answers, the more favored response would float to the top. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would a single, comprehensive answer serve the community better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T15:43:58.823" Title="Separating answers to gauge community response" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7594" CreationDate="2016-01-13T15:13:47.580" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had badges in the past not get awarded to me. For example, the one that won't be awarded to me currently is the curious badge. It has that I have more than 5 positive questions asked but will not award me the badge. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140723" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T15:42:20.467" Title="Badges that were supposed to be awarded" Tags="|support|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7592" CreationDate="2016-01-13T15:40:12.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The badges are awarded algorithmically. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;As you can see&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;curious&lt;/em&gt; badge is fairly rare, having been awarded less than 1000 times overall. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/67399/7867&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, the badge's criteria are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Curious&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bronze; awarded once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asked a well-received question on 5 separate days, and maintained a positive question record&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any open question that is not deleted and has a score &gt;= 1 is considered well-received&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only days where all questions asked have been well-received, count (source)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A positive question record means you don't have too many closed, downvoted or deleted questions, overall. The formula is &lt;code&gt;(total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions &amp;gt;= 0.5.&lt;/code&gt; Questions that have been downvoted and closed and deleted count three times in this calculation!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T15:40:12.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7592" CreationDate="2016-01-13T15:42:20.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Curious&lt;/em&gt; badge is awarded only when two separate criteria are both met:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking a question that is open, not deleted and positively scored on 5 separate days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having a positive question record, which is defined as:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(total q's - negative q's - closed q's - deleted q's)/total q's &gt;= 0.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note in particular that a question that has both a negative score and is closed will count as two penalties, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/234259/89334&quot;&gt;Asking days badges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you don't currently have a positive question record. You've asked 19 questions, 4 of which have a negative score, 6 of which have been closed, and 3 of which have been deleted. The relevant figure is thus (19 - 4 - 6 - 3)/19 = 6/19 which is less than 0.5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if you feel you haven't been awarded a badge you should have been and 24 hours have elapsed (badges can take some time to be awarded), you should post here on meta so that we can look into the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T15:42:20.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7597" CreationDate="2016-01-13T17:52:22.700" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked around meta and I was surprised that there hasn't been a discussion (I could find) that tries to delineate what should and shouldn't be considered on topic for ELL but not ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the old adage &quot;Don't migrate crap&quot; applies, but what divides the two sites' topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that sparked this question was &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299634/what-does-answer-for-means&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299634/what-does-answer-for-means&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand that &quot; answer to &quot; means to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in my book, I saw he wrote &quot; answer for &quot; which takes about&#xA;  responsibility, so i am confused about it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With cleaning up, this seemed to me like it might be a valid ELL question, but not an ELU one as it seemed to just be about not understanding a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However as someone who hasn't even earned 100 rep on this site, I was hesitant to assume I knew the topic of the site. Can anyone clarify or point me to a robust resource that I may have missed to make edge cases clearer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found questions that address the existence of ELL and try to explain the difference, but they mostly speak to the broad intent of having 2 sites, rather than actually what the two sites separate topics are. Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3722&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; here also contains some useful info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3673/whats-the-status-of-ell-relative-to-elu&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the status of ELL relative to ELU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T15:30:00.783" Title="What should and shouldn't be migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|ell|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-01-18T15:52:06.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T20:23:08.063" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;After completing an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299667/compare-something-with-to-something-vs-compare&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;compare [something] with/to [something]&amp;#39; vs. &amp;#39;compare&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;, I clicked 'Post Your Answer' and the answer went live. But unbeknownst to me, a moderator had put the question on hold almost 10 minutes earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did my answer get through? Is there now a grace period of, say, 10 or 15 minutes to allow people who were in the midst of writing an answer to post it after the question is put on hold? Or was my answer saved by a glitch in the automated process of answer blocking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be delighted if there were some sort of 10- or 15-minute warning on questions that are about to go on hold, so that answerers would know either to abandon ship or to get their initial version of an answer in before the wall goes up. But perhaps, from EL&amp;amp;U's perspective, the block needs to appear without warning in order to prevent people from posting answers (or the skeletal beginnings of answers) to questions whose value is in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T20:23:08.063" Title="Is there now a brief grace period between when a question goes on hold and when answers to it are blocked?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-14T01:13:51.517" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7595" CreationDate="2016-01-13T22:08:41.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turns out ELL's meta has the best resource on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/135&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. As I cannot mark something as a cross site duplicate, I'll note the key point of what's considered on topic for ELL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about the English language, but is unlikely to ever occur to a native speaker (except in the context of teaching English as a foreign language), you should ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some good examples that are suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I need a word for [concept] because I want to construct a&#xA;  sentence a particular way&quot; belongs on ELU, but &quot;My native language has&#xA;  a word for [concept], is there an equivalent word in English&quot; belongs&#xA;  on ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Is there a dialect where 'on yesterday' is idiomatic&quot; goes on&#xA;  ELU, but &quot;Why do we use 'on' with Monday but not with yesterday&quot; goes&#xA;  on ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;In dialects that don't pronounce word-initial 'h', how do&#xA;  they distinguish 'ate' and 'hate'&quot; goes on ELU, but &quot;My native&#xA;  language doesn't have 'h', how do I remember the difference between&#xA;  'ate' and 'hate'&quot; goes on ELL. And so forth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Credit goes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/users/50/martha&quot;&gt;Martha&lt;/a&gt; for writing these quoted sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T22:08:41.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7600" CreationDate="2016-01-14T00:36:34.500" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;On reflection, I don't think the answer I flagged was VLQ.  Not HQ by any means, but I was too harsh.  I'd like to reverse the flag.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T22:47:11.227" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T22:47:11.227" Title="How do I withdraw a &quot;very low quality flag&quot; on an answer?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T01:31:10.690" Score="8" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96671/i-need-one-word-with-two-etymologies?rq=1&quot;&gt;I need one word with two etymologies [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Q2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69044/are-there-any-words-that-are-spelled-the-same-but-have-separate-etymologies&quot;&gt;Are there any words that are spelled the same but have separate etymologies? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1 was marked as a duplicate and merged with Q2. Q2 has since been deleted, leaving Q1 dangling - it is accessible, but cannot be answered. This kind of dead-end question (no answer, not allowed to answer, no referral) doesn't really have a place on Q&amp;amp;A sites such as ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, since Q2 was deleted, presumably it was a low-quality question or unsuitable for ELU for some other reason (I have no information on that). The fact that Q1 was merged into Q2 suggests that Q1 was of lower quality than Q2 or otherwise even more unsuitable than Q2 for ELU. &lt;strong&gt;As such, when questions like Q2 are deleted, should questions such as Q1 that have been merged into them also automatically be deleted?&lt;/strong&gt; Alternatively, should merged questions like Q1 be individually reviewed when questions like Q2 are deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any mechanisms for easily finding merged-in questions when deleting a question? That is, when deleting questions like Q2, does a list pop up to show dependent questions like Q1? If not, consider this a feature-request for such a mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T13:19:19.543" Title="When a question is deleted, should merged questions be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7598" CreationDate="2016-01-14T10:26:02.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As medica has commented, you can't. Flags once raised cannot be lowered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many flags will simply age away if nothing is done. Low-quality flags put the post in a review queue for others to look at, and if nothing else happens then the flag dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it used one of your flags for that day, it marked the post as flagged, and it caused others to review it where it may not have needed it. Please be careful about what you flag!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you felt at the time that the post was low-quality. Fine. Others may have felt the same; as you don't link to the post in question, it's not possible to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T10:26:02.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T10:35:46.350" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/explanation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;explanation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt; tag has 23 questions.  Some appear to ask for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt;, and should probably just be replaced by those tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other questions, I don't see what they have in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done with this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16310" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T18:53:58.320" Title="Can someone explain the [explanation] tag to me?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7601" CreationDate="2016-01-14T18:40:59.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't even explain why the tag exists at all, let alone what it might be supposed to mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could hazard a guess that some people might feel that asking for an &lt;em&gt;explanation&lt;/em&gt; of a preferred choice (as opposed to simply asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204588/&quot;&gt;Should I use “such that,” “so that,” or “in a way that”?&lt;/a&gt;) might make a question more &quot;On Topic&quot; (i.e. - less a &quot;matter of opinion&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But quite frankly, it seems to me about as useful as the tag for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - I'd say get rid of both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T18:40:59.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7610" CreationDate="2016-01-14T19:01:13.633" Score="-2" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;One user who used 3 different user names, one mainly for posting an answer and another for down voting other users' answers was suspended on ELL. There seems to be another user who uses two or more user names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user posted one question on EL&amp;amp;U and posted the same question on ELL using a different user name one day later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The different user name was also used on EL&amp;amp;U to ask four questions, three of which were closed as off-topic. This user (using his/her main user name on EL&amp;amp;U) kept asking off-topic or strange questions without proper reference or research and that's why I remember this OP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is the right thing to do to use more than two user names on Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to use more than two user names on EL&amp;amp;U or ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the procedure? Do we need to flag the question &lt;em&gt;in need of moderator intervention&lt;/em&gt; and explain the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any system to detect this kind of user on EL&amp;amp;U and ELL?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Dan Bron's comment, I found the related question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57682/how-should-sockpuppets-be-handled-on-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How should sockpuppets be handled on Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't seem to address the issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T12:54:42.603" Title="What is the procedure when you find a user who is using 2 or more user names?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7603" CreationDate="2016-01-14T21:23:52.963" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I don't think it is the right thing to do to use more than two user names on Stack Exchange.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is really neither here nor there, since there is already ample discussion on Meta about multiple accounts with different user names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the accounts do not interact with each other, it's legitimate. In other words, if they are not used to upvote each other, or to circumvent bans, or to close or reopen questions, etc., then it's &lt;em&gt;fine&lt;/em&gt;. Many users on SO have (for reasons best known to them) more than one username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Meta responses may be pertinent here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;People are allowed to have multiple accounts &lt;strong&gt;as long as they don't use them to vote for themselves.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;  - Jeff Atwood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Many people are very civil and will not engage in abusive acts when registering extra accounts. And for those that do, the rest of the community has proven to be very good at noticing these trends.&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; - Grace Note&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is not a problem to have multiple accounts, as long as they aren't voting for each other and doing other sockpuppet-y things.&lt;sup&gt;[3]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you are not a moderator, you cannot know if a user is using multiple accounts, in the same way you cannot know if two accounts using the same display name are really used from the same person.&lt;sup&gt;[3]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you found such false voting activity, just flag it for moderator attention with &quot;other&quot; option and write your description in text box. Moderator has better view and tool to find such users. You yourself can not perform such IP level activity, So better leave that matter with moderators.&lt;sup&gt;[4]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The chat is automatically associated with the account with the highest reputation.&lt;sup&gt;[5]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Users can always come back if their behavior improves. However, in this case, it is too much manual work to re-associate the deleted account, so the user should start at zero, or whatever the new accounts have. Probably better to start with a fresh slate anyway.&lt;sup&gt;[6]&lt;/sup&gt; - Jeff Atwood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I think we should give people the benefit of doubt and assume that their intentions are honourable. ...perhaps keep an eye out for sock-puppetry but otherwise do nothing.&lt;sup&gt;[7]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user asking/answering with one account and downvoting with another... well, it's not against the rules, as long as one account doesn't interact with the other. In fact, it might be that the user doesn't want someone (maybe, like you?) keeping track of their down votes. Or are embarassed to DV. Who knows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, flag a mod. But please know that multiple accounts are sanctioned on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add&lt;/strong&gt;: I think all your questions are answered here, but to be on the safe side,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the procedure? Do we need to flag the question in need of moderator intervention and explain the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Andrew Leach commented, if you think there is something shady going on (not just that there are multiple accounts), flag a mod and explain what you suspect with a reference to the unflagged action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any system to detect this kind of user on EL&amp;amp;U and ELL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, mods have the ability to detect such improper activity if they suspect it, look for it, or are pointed to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72277/why-are-people-allowed-to-have-multiple-user-accounts&quot;&gt;Why are people allowed to have multiple user accounts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/35593/262486&quot;&gt;What's the SO policy about having multiple user accounts? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/35593/262486&quot;&gt;What's the SO policy about having multiple user accounts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/179995/what-if-a-user-uses-multiple-accounts-with-different-names&quot;&gt;What if a user uses multiple accounts with different names?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[5] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/174984/same-user-two-login-chat-username-on-site-x-shows-so-user-name&quot;&gt;same user two login - chat username on site x shows SO user name&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[6] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23072/combine-multiple-accounts&quot;&gt;Combine multiple accounts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;[7] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26735/when-is-it-right-to-report-multiple-accounts&quot;&gt;When is it right to report multiple accounts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T00:14:43.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T01:35:20.120" Score="6" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's a normal percentage of declined/disputed flags for reviewers?  1%? 10%? 25%?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to help with review queues and I want to make sure I'm not causing more headaches than normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108286" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-01-19T00:29:47.537" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T00:29:47.537" Title="Flag acceptance rate?" Tags="|discussion|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T02:58:31.923" Score="21" ViewCount="916" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's 2016 now, and we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites&quot;&gt;made some changes to the sidebar size&lt;/a&gt;. As such, we can now restart the Community Promotion Ads for 2016!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, we have updated some of the guidelines compared to previously - the changes are marked in bold in the Image Requirements section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;300 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of &lt;strong&gt;150 KB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/7606&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T05:23:24.437" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2016" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-01-15T02:58:31.923" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/64ZpZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T02:58:31.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T06:14:31.213" Score="18" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I see one typo in something, should I edit it? Or does this behavior border on pedantry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example: &quot;clohes&quot; instead of &quot;clothes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because sometimes I see a typo in a post, but I hesitate to correct it because of the following alert:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We welcome all constructive edits, but please make them substantial. Avoid trivial edits unless absolutely necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would feel less inclined to correct minor spelling errors if this wasn't an English Language site specifically. I'd imagine some people who are not fluent in English may be set off by even the slightest typo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134753" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T16:22:57.800" Title="Does a single typo warrant an edit?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T09:04:30.223" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that two tags have appeared, vernacu and vernacula. Are these words that I don't understand or typos for vernacular? If the latter, what should I do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305" LastEditorUserId="305" LastEditDate="2016-01-15T09:27:05.667" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T21:00:27.887" Title="Vernacula and Vernacu" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7603" CreationDate="2016-01-15T11:34:32.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I'll give an answer, but it will be substantially similar to what's been said before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly fine to have more than one account on a site. It's perfectly fine to use each account separately, even using each one to post a different type of question. Some users purposely maintain accounts at different privilege levels so they can see the site from different points of view. Many moderators have a non-mod account so they can post screenshots without revealing mod-only data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if multiple accounts are held they may not interact with one another. They may not vote for each other; they may not act in concert to give multiple votes on a particular post; they should not comment on each other's posts. Sockpuppetry is not allowed. Having more than one account increases the risk of doing something wrong, and more than two takes some work managing it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not allowed to create an account to circumvent a suspension or a system-block on posting. Thus if a user has an account on ELU which is blocked, it's not acceptable to link a different account from another site to ELU (or create a new, separate ELU account) and carry on posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Stack Exchange site is separate, and accounts are separate. Individuals may choose to link accounts and receive an association bonus, or they may keep each Stack entirely isolated. There's no requirement to link accounts on different sites. It's fine to post on ELU with one account and on ELL with another. Indeed, even with linked accounts, the display name can be different on each site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting is discouraged, because questions should only be asked once, even if they may be on-topic on more than one site. Migration should be used to move good questions to more appropriate sites. If a question is on-topic on more than one site, it could appear on each in a substantially-similar form, but each version should be tweaked to differentiate and make the most of each site's speciality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you suspect prohibited interaction between accounts, flag a relevant post which was made by one of the accounts. The custom text probably won't be long enough, but do make sure you say which other account is interacting, and what the interaction is. It's helpful to use user numbers rather than user names &amp;mdash; you can get these numbers from a link to an account profile; hover over my name below and you will see a link mentioning my number of 18696.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are system processes which will detect some activity, and these may raise flags or even take action themselves &amp;mdash; many vote reversals happen automatically. Moderators may detect such goings-on, and may be able to investigate activity which is drawn to their attention by flagging. This may be appropriate if you don't think the automated processes have acted. Some things need direct access to the data held in the database, so those reports are passed to staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may take some time for your flag to leave the &lt;em&gt;Pending&lt;/em&gt; state, while things are looked into, particularly if it needs to be passed upstairs. Moderators or staff may make a private chatroom to discuss the background to the flag, or there may be enough evidence one way or the other to make this unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't be upset if all you get back is a &quot;Thanks; it's been dealt with.&quot; We're not at liberty to discuss sanctions taken; nor would it be wise to reveal details of what was actually going on, especially if the automated tools did not detect it very quickly. You may also get a reply saying nothing untoward was happening, and that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; mean the flag is declined.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T11:34:32.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7609" CreationDate="2016-01-15T12:45:49.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19753/how-can-we-get-rid-of-misspelled-and-unused-or-zombie-tags&quot;&gt;Tags are automatically deleted within a short amount if time if they have no posts.&lt;/a&gt; So the proper way to deal with misspelled tags that cover a small number of questions is to re-tag. In this case, neither of the tags have posts associated with them, so these tags should disappear soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the misspelling is particularly common and recurrent, it may be worth merging with the proper spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;As of 16 Jan 2016, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vernacu&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vernacu&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vernacu&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vernacula&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vernacula&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vernacula&lt;/a&gt; seem to be &quot;destroyed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T21:00:27.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-01-16T01:26:58.800" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/168&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6LjbP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Come to Writer&amp;#39;s Chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T22:42:24.790" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T22:42:24.790" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7608" CreationDate="2016-01-16T01:27:00.283" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come from a background in copy editing, so (not surprisingly) I think that a post with the word &lt;em&gt;clothes&lt;/em&gt; in it is significantly better than a post with the word &lt;em&gt;clohes&lt;/em&gt; in it. And as several experienced and well-informed editors point out in comments above, once you're in for the typo, you might as well clean up some of the other shortcomings of the post as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't start editing other people's posts on this site until I had reached the rep level at which my changes skipped the review queue and took immediate effect, so I missed out on useful feedback I would have gotten from other users' vetting my suggested changes. But even so, I can't recall having received more than a couple of negative reactions from posters about the changes I've made to their posts. (Those arose in instances where I thought I understood what the poster was trying to say on an ambiguously expressed point and tried to make that meaning explicit, but I got the intended meaning wrong. In those instances I would have done better to query the poster about the intended meaning than to introduce changes based on guesswork.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because spelling, formatting, and grammatical corrections make the poster's question or answer look and sound better, a poster usually has no reason to react badly to such improvements. After all, no one wants to have a serious question or answer dismissed because it contains typos or inadequate formatting. On the other hand, altering the poster's voice or changing the poster's argument to reach a different conclusion—even when you think the change is for the better—is inappropriate at this site, just as it is in the world of professional publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only time I feel uneasy about correcting typos and doing other cleanup chores on a post is when the post has no substantive merit and/or has already drawn close votes. Occasionally, a post's faulty spelling and bad formatting obscure an interesting question or answer, and clearing away the rubbish makes the hidden issue or insight visible. But far more often, the post's shortcomings in spelling and presentation are entirely consistent with its low overall quality. In those cases, it doesn't make sense to try to improve the post on a formal level, since its substance will remain weak and close-worthy despite the upgrades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You never know how a particular poster will react to editorial changes or suggestions until you interact with that person. But if your suggestions are usually sound (which you can tell by the proportion of them that are accepted in the review queue) and if the poster isn't unusually prickly about changes, the process is painless for you and beneficial for the poster and for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-01-16T05:59:13.287" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T05:59:13.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-16T04:11:20.917" Score="4" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, I posted what was perhaps the first comment for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/300131/what-is-the-name-of-this-keyboard-music-instrument&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, stating that the generic name for the item in question was a &quot;keyboard&quot;, and that a more specific identification would likely only be the specification of the manufacturer's name.  (There was nothing that could be considered even borderline inflammatory about the comment.)  This was ahead of &lt;em&gt;choster&lt;/em&gt;'s comment.  My later comment remains, but that first one has been deleted for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this same thing has happened three or four other times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:39:15.910" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:39:15.910" Title="Why are comments deleted seemingly randomly?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2016-01-18T16:11:21.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-01-16T08:47:29.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, speech has been primary and emergent, while written language has been secondary and controlled (by printers like Caxton, dictionary writers like Webster, newspapers and journals such as NewYork or London Times, by universities, such as Chicago and Cambridge with their style manuals, and Oxford and Macquarie with their dictionaries, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subvocalization back to voice-in-my head spoken language is common but not ubiquitous (in fact speed reading courses teach you not to do it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, social media - kids chatting more by text than voice - is changing this as language change is being influenced by the mores and restrictions of messaging systems. Traditionally, this change would happen in the playground.  Similar effects on a smaller scale are happening in the meta language of stack exchange too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of informal vs formal language, and descriptivist vs prescriptivist paradigms, is closely related and reflected in the quotes Brian Donovan chose for the original question. The real point of these quotes is not speech vs text but descriptive vs prescriptive, as others have noted. Some of the early choices, like spelling, were originally designed to distinguish homophones so they weren't homographs, while later language reformers have sought to go back to a more phonetic representation - at the expense of etymology and cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relation to grammar, the standards have been ill understood and poorly taught. In some cases, Latin grammar rules have been inflicted on us.  In some cases, rules of thumb are taught to the poor students (both first and second language learners) that are totally wrong due to lack of insight by the teacher.  In other cases it is the student that has misunderstood and overgeneralized or overspecified.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make this concrete consider some examples - the accusative/dative pronouns and the copula, combined with pragmatic/social/cultural guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't put yourself first (&quot;me and...&quot; or &quot;I and..&quot;).&#xA;You should use I (nominative) with the copula (&quot;is/am/be&quot;).&#xA;You should use I (nominative) with conjunction (&quot;and&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These leads to monstrosities like&#xA;... on behalf of my wife and I...&#xA;... it is I who did that ... (why not &quot;it am I&quot; if it is truly reciprocal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have been told not to say &quot;me and my brother&quot;, &quot;my wife and me&quot; etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The written forms mandate more strongly still the prescriptivist forms that ignorant teachers have been forcing their students to adopt. Upper class speech tends to have incorrectly generalized forms of these, while lower class speech tends to reflect the natural form of the language.  Their writing tends to reflect the same differences, but their the application of the rules (correctly or incorrectly, directly or in posteditting) is more likely - so is less likely to reflect their language as opposed to the prescriptivist version taught/learnt at school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39262" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T08:47:29.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7608" CreationDate="2016-01-16T16:22:57.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, there are only two reasons why TPTB on SO discourage trivial (one-word) edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: There's a &lt;em&gt;throughput&lt;/em&gt; overhead when people without the necessary rep to unilaterally apply an edit &amp;quot;propose&amp;quot; one, because it has to go through the review queue. In such cases, not only does the SO platform itself have to support that computational/storage overhead - we the &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; also have to spend time processing that review queue (which can get quite large sometimes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: Even in the case of edits made by mods and higher-rep users (which are instantly applied, and don't go through the review queue), there's still an overhead in storage/processing terms because the system maintains a history of past edits to each post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possible factor is that if a post has had &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; trivial edits (rather than a single edit fixing many problems at once), the display can become rather cluttered for higher-rep users who want to look at the edit history. But as one of those users, I can't say this is a significant issue for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As OP suggests, there are stronger reasons for a &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; site to more assiduously correct typos. We probably have a higher proportion of users who might not recognize a typo for what it is. Hence they may fail to understand the text at all - or even worse, mistakenly believe that what they're looking at is in fact &amp;quot;valid&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I sometimes make even a single &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt; edit (for example, if someone mistakenly writes &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it's&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; where it should be &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;its&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;). But in such cases I normally check the rest of the text fairly carefully, to make sure there's nothing else that &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; to be corrected. But I think the system prevents lower rep users from &lt;em&gt;proposing&lt;/em&gt; edits involving six characters or less, and I'm perfectly happy with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T16:22:57.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7614" CreationDate="2016-01-16T16:53:25.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I wouldn't mind if TPTB arranged for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; user to periodically delete a few older comments &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;at random&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, I could easily be persuaded this would be a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've no doubt that &lt;em&gt;in their capacity as moderators&lt;/em&gt;, our mod team would all agree that I post far too many comments on ELU (particularly, comments that aren't directly relevant to the post in question). I probably won't change my behaviour unless I'm specifically taken to task over this, but I certainly wouldn't expect to win the argument over whether I'm in the right or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case anyone has trouble finding the relevant &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Help Page&lt;/a&gt;, in essence it says...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only posts comments to...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   1: Request clarification&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: Leave constructive criticism that may prompt someone to improve a post&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   3: Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't use comments to...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   1: Suggest trivial corrections (instead, make or suggest an edit)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   2: Resolve the OP's question (instead, post an actual answer)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   3: Agree or disagree (instead, use up/downvotes)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   4: Start or continue extended discussions (instead, use 'chat' or 'meta')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is comments should be seen as &lt;em&gt;ephemeral&lt;/em&gt;. If there's anything important that needs to be preserved, it should be in the relevant Question or Answer (or you should post a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; Answer). But unless the mods start complaining about the excessive workload caused by non-observance of this principle, I see nothing wrong with the way things are currently handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T16:53:25.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7614" CreationDate="2016-01-17T00:43:15.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cite relevant passages from &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;&quot;A Theory of Moderation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your goal is to &lt;strong&gt;guide the community with gentle -- but firm --&#xA;  intervention&lt;/strong&gt;.... [D]emonstrate fairness and impartiality in your&#xA;  actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever possible, &lt;strong&gt;try to leave frequent comments on posts where&#xA;  you've taken (or considered taking) a moderator action&lt;/strong&gt;, explaining&#xA;  the reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ideal moderator does as little as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the theory underlying the practice of moderation on ELU.  Moderation is a constant and intrusive presence, with moderators closing questions as fast as they can type, scrubbing comments they deem unsuitable, and handing &quot;timeouts&quot; to questions and posters alike.  I have never seen a moderator explain anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, moderation is very much in accord with the views of a significant portion of the ELU community, the part that seriously considers the site to be part of (for lack of a better word) the academy.  And that's pretty much the answer to your plaintive ending question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;ast;Emphasis in the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T00:43:15.677" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-17T05:33:28.447" Score="14" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been around here for very long, however I've been around here long enough to see patterns and get a sense of people's quirks, pecadillos and idiosynchrosies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that questions concerning spelling have frequently received comments and even answers that amount to &quot;Because it's English, that's why.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about questions such as &quot;Should I write centre or center?&quot; or &quot;Is it OK to put a hyphen in to-morrow?&quot; (although I feel that those questions could lead to thoughtful and educational answers that would help the site maintain an image as an authority.)  I'm talking about questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300332/129806&quot;&gt;Why is &quot;build&quot; spelt with a &quot;u&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was answered.  I'm not knowledgeable about spelling so I can't judge the answer.  As of this moment the question has not been closed.  (Maybe we should have a few bookies around here that can take bets on how fast questions are closed and by whom.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I have seen countless other questions of a similar nature either closed or denigrated with comments that are literally &quot;It's English--get over it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to make the case that questions about the history of English spelling (even the &quot;dumbo&quot; questions) are quite on topic, relevant, and can contribute to the quality of the site.  Isn't spelling and pronunciation an integral part of etymology?  Isn't it a fact that when looking up a word's history that there are spelling and pronunciation changes that are important or contribute to our current definition?  Isn't it a fact that many of these questions can't be googled because they require specific knowledge and the ability to assemble that knowledge into a cohesive answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to say that if you don't know anything about English spelling or don't have the credentials to intelligently comment on the subject, you shouldn't be answering / commenting &quot;It's English, that's why.&quot;  When I first started on this site, there were a few users who answered spelling questions with long, scholarly answers that were awe-inspiring and humbling.  I couldn't understand a lot of them but I could definitely tell these people knew what they were talking about.  They were standard bearers that made me think twice about posting my answers.  I don't see them around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the answer I will receive is &quot;The community decided these questions are off-topic.&quot;  Ok, fine.  But what are the credentials for these people saying that spelling questions can't be answered or that we will never know because English spelling is a mystery?  If your credentials are &quot;I studied it in college while majoring in English,&quot; or &quot;I did a research paper on The Canterbury tales and allusions in it to Beowolf.&quot; ok, I would trust that person's opinion.  But if your credentials are &quot;Why do I need to tell you?&quot; or &quot;I like reading about it in my spare time.&quot; I'm not so sure that is good enough to be closing questions as &quot;unanswerable.&quot;  I'm not saying everyone that answers needs to be currently involved in a Shakespearean quarto research project at Cambridge with an emphasis on spelling variations between 1606 and 1607 but some authority or genuine knowledge might be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say we should expand a bit and let these questions be welcomed and answered.  I say, if you don't know anything about the subject don't answer / comment / close vote.  We can all learn something by inviting more of these types of questions, and it can help the site be more authoritative and inviting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129806" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T06:37:06.090" Title="Spelling Questions on ELU" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7619" CreationDate="2016-01-17T06:59:26.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both spelling and etymology questions are officially &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, which from my point of view makes questions about the spelling history of a single word on-topic. I would certainly oppose it if the question you linked to got closed; fortunately, I don't see any signs that this is going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do find it irritating when people leave comments just saying &quot;because.&quot; But I can also see to some degree where this is coming from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7292/questions-about-pronunciation-vs-proofreading/7295#7295&quot;&gt;&quot;why&quot; questions&lt;/a&gt; can sometimes seem to be based on false or naive premises, which is frustrating. The people who leave these comments are certainly not all ignorant: I've seen very educated people make comments like this. They are trying to be helpful by discouraging people from looking for not-very-useful historical &quot;explanations&quot; as a practical guide to spelling words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However (I saw a comment making the following point somewhere but frustratingly can't find it): this is a site for &quot;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&quot; We should assume that people asking questions here either already understand that spelling doesn't correspond one-to-one with pronunciation. If you disagree with this assumption, please at least assume that while that they would benefit from learning this, they &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; want to learn the (often complicated and unclear) specific reasons underlying specific cases: not for practical reasons, but just out of curiosity or academic interest. And often there are real &lt;em&gt;reasons&lt;/em&gt; and applicable general principles, not just idiosyncrasies. Even in cases where there aren't, where professional sources are stumped and have no answer, find a citation for this! &quot;Just because&quot; is definitely not a satisfactory answer. There is a whole site for &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English language learners&lt;/a&gt; where people can ask questions if they don't want to get complicated answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T06:37:06.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7619" CreationDate="2016-01-17T07:34:48.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was preparing for a similar question about &lt;em&gt;punctuation&lt;/em&gt; questions which read more like a proof-reading request and answers are sometimes primarily-opinion-based. Good answers to punctuation questions quote some manuals, but there are no hard-and-fast rules on punctuation. I think questions on spelling has similar characteristics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about English spelling are tricky. Almost all the English words that we know at present time were spelled differently before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;. If someone asks me &quot;Why is that?&quot;, I would answer, &quot;Because they were different in OE and ME in terms of pronunciation and sometimes their meanings. And those words have come to be &lt;strong&gt;the way they are now&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully understand why you are raising this issue and I would like to play the devil's advocate here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist nor an etymologist. But if pressed to answer the linked question, I would say &lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt; is spelled that way to differentiate it from &lt;em&gt;bild&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;biuld&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;buld&lt;/em&gt; or whatever form. &quot;The major goal of the English writing system is not merely to ensure accurate pronunciation of the written word – it is to convey meaning&quot;. A quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spellingcity.com/importance-of-spelling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Importance of Spelling&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could be millions of questions on spelling, i.e. Why does &lt;em&gt;knight&lt;/em&gt; have K while night doesn't?, Why do &lt;em&gt;guilt&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;quilt&lt;/em&gt; have u (very similar question to &lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt;)? Why is &lt;em&gt;Mississippi&lt;/em&gt; so complicated? Why do &lt;em&gt;ought, fought, sought, and caught, ect.&lt;/em&gt; have &lt;em&gt;gh&lt;/em&gt; in them? I mean I could swamp this community with this kind of question if I make up my mind to sabotage (?) this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key question is &quot;Are they useful to users in this community?&quot; I don't think every user would have the same opinion on this. Some might find this useful and some might not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, those questions that could interest as many current and future users as possible should be encouraged with upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems &quot;Why is that?&quot; type of question doesn't work very well in this community. If the question was asking about a specific trend of English spelling together with &lt;em&gt;guilt&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;quilt&lt;/em&gt; or other similar words, it would have received more upvotes. But as it is, the question is about one specific word that looks like a few exceptions.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I upvoted the question and answer, but I am not sure if I would if someone asks a question about &lt;em&gt;guilt&lt;/em&gt; in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T14:15:55.367" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T14:15:55.367" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-17T16:37:49.020" Score="11" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is about the origins of the word &quot;dude.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the posted answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you can find a really old dictionary, it's in there as an infected&#xA;  hair of an elephants butt. I looked it up in grade school because the&#xA;  teacher said it when I called him dude. Late 80's early 90's but it&#xA;  was St. Louis public schools so the dictionary looked like it was old&#xA;  back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer was flagged by someone for deletion.  Now I'm doing reviews.  My first inclination was to delete it, but now I'm not sure.  Whereas this is a poor answer, I'm not sure it's that poor.  Whereas this is clearly someone BSing, I'm not sure that's grounds either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I did check a 1979 hardcover edition of &lt;em&gt;Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and the word &lt;em&gt;dude&lt;/em&gt; is not defined as an infected hair of an elephant's butt or anything of the sort.  Moreover, another user left a comment about having checked a 1971 volume of the multi-volume &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; reporting the same, that nothing about an elephant's butt hair is listed as a definition for &quot;dude.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it kosher to click &quot;recommend deletion&quot; for this or not?  Are we allowed to recommend deletion for no other reason than the answer quite obviously appearing to be completely made up?   Do we suffer sarcasm for the simple fact that we can't prove that the answer is not sincere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115101" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T12:56:38.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T12:56:38.190" Title="Is it OK to recommend deletion for answers where it's obvious the responder was making it up/joking?" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-01-18T08:29:46.810" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u0sTB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wiktionary: Help write the free dictionary&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T08:29:46.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-18T11:15:25.737" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68758/why-do-we-pronounce-dean-as-di%CB%90n-but-sean-as-%CA%83%C9%92n&quot;&gt;Why do we pronounce Dean as /diːn/ but Sean as /ʃɒn/?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/217012/why-is-sean-pronounced-shawn&quot;&gt;Why is Sean pronounced Shawn?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I was the first one to vote for closing the first as a duplicate of the second, and now I feel stupid for not noticing the relative dates. Anyway, it seems to me that all of the existing answers on each question are equally suitable for both, so would a merge be appropriate here? I'm a bit hazy on the process for that; since a moderator has to do it, it seems like merges are a lot rarer than closing as duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read these meta posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158066/what-are-merged-questions&quot;&gt;What are merged questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/are-there-guidelines-on-direction-for-merging-questions-which-question-to-close?rq=1&quot;&gt;Are there guidelines on direction for merging questions (which question to close/merge?)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm interested in learning about what people think about this specific case, and what the moderators here have to say about the merging process on this site. (This is why I didn't just flag it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T11:20:46.297" Title="Should a moderator merge the questions about the pronunciation of the name &quot;Sean&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|exact-duplicates|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7614" CreationDate="2016-01-18T12:50:33.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post in question drew a &quot;too many comments&quot; flag, which usually means that a discussion or argument has erupted in the comments. The usual response is to move the comments to chat, prune chatty comments, or purge the chain outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was nothing offensive about your comments, just that there were too many comments on the post and when they were pruned, yours was cut. Although I did not take action on the post, I can see that the moderator who did removed many chatty comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You answered the question in your comment, you did not tell the OP that the question was off-topic. I am pretty sure that's why your comment was deleted but not choster's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T12:56:27.280" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T12:56:27.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7633" CreationDate="2016-01-20T08:53:57.807" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to review a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/301056/what-was-slang-profanity-and-swearing-like-in-the-1800s&quot;&gt;first post&lt;/a&gt;, and noticed that there were already a few close votes on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't see anything outstanding that would warrant closing the question, but I don't do review that often, I was wondering what was the reason given to close this question. But I didn't see any obvious way to get to this information and I don't dare to click one the close button when I don't intend to cast a vote myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current course of action would be to let this question as it is, but I am curious to know if there is a way to find out, as a reviewer, why people want to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T15:54:32.000" Title="Seeing the reason behind close votes" Tags="|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7629" CreationDate="2016-01-20T10:14:24.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close. Out of the close reasons on offer, I checked &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my reasons for the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The OP has not shown much effort in answering their own question prior to asking it. I believe potential answers will anyway build on resources available on the Internet, that are available to the OP too. They have not been consulted, as it appears.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are some posts at EL&amp;amp;U that are concerned with offensive language diachronically. Again, OP does not seem to have taken notice of them. &lt;strong&gt;This is an essential thing to do from the point of view of building a searchable Q&amp;amp;A database.&lt;/strong&gt; We do not wish to repeat ourselves too often.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not explained why the OP is interested in N.Carolina and Tennessee. There may be valid reasons but they have not been stated. As I remarked in comments, it is dubious whether there was a stable population at that time, that might constitute a regional dialect to ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question seems mildly sensational to me. Swearwords are popular, &quot;cheap&quot; topic. I think it has a lot of potential for good, interesting questions, but this post &lt;em&gt;as it stands&lt;/em&gt; does not seem to tend that way. It is also hard to see how to edit it into better shape, for lack of info.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB. Each VTC is partly subjective. I have seen VTC's on questions that I did not understand, either. That is why it takes five of them to close the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T10:14:24.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7599" CreationDate="2016-01-20T13:19:19.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually fairly frequent. It is my opinion, expressed before, that deletion should not be possible if it will leave dangling pointers. If you want to delete such a post, you should first be required to tidy up any questions closed as a duplicate thereof, either by deleting them too, or by reopening them, as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, until such a policy is put in place and enforced by Stack Exchange, the only thing to do when you come across such dangling pointers is to flag them for moderator attention. To make their life easier, you might also choose to recommend a course of action (i.e., deletion, reopening, closing as a dupe of something else) as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T13:19:19.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7724" CreationDate="2016-01-20T13:31:53.983" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some display issue in the side bar in some browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;see an example newsletter&lt;/strong&gt; content is partially not visible in the side bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TiOrV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TiOrV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sidebar content in Firefox&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firefox Version: 44.0b9&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very similar in Chrome 47 on Windows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6HCkR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6HCkR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sidebar in Chrome&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in IE11 on Windows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dd6gd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dd6gd.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sidebar in IE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last two images are from a machine with Helvetica installed, but the ad is still truncated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154058" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T13:45:34.437" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T17:44:04.987" Title="Partial content is not visible in the side bar" Tags="|bug|design|display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7629" CreationDate="2016-01-20T15:54:32.000" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clicking the &quot;Close&quot; link does not commit you to casting a close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you click the link, a dialog will appear showing a list of close reasons.  If others have cast close votes already, a number will appear next to the reason(s) that they selected.  You can then X out of the dialog box instead of selecting your own reason and clicking the &quot;Vote to Close&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T15:54:32.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7635" CreationDate="2016-01-20T16:34:33.627" Score="10" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the profiles of ELU moderators and came across the profile of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/3559/matt-e-%d0%ad%d0%bb%d0%bb%d0%b5%d0%bd&quot;&gt;Matt E.&lt;/a&gt;(can't read the last name)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H0ffb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H0ffb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how do I read their last name? What character set is used? How's it pronounced? Sorry if I sound silly but let's say my curiosity got the better of me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T15:52:05.590" Title="How do I pronounce our moderator's name?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7634" CreationDate="2016-01-20T16:51:31.157" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronounce my surname /ɛlən/. As in Ellen DeGeneres or 'elen of Troy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the regular font, displaying Cyrillic characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T21:45:24.040" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T21:45:24.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-20T18:38:36.923" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I have to write my documents in English. I try hard to improve my English, but my English is very bad. So it would be really nice if there would by a place on the internet, where people (or algorithms) correct grammar and spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156400" OwnerDisplayName="Alex C. Johnson" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T19:21:34.773" Title="Where can I get my English corrected (online)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-01-20T22:06:48.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2016-01-21T04:29:20.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lang-8.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lang-8.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a good volunteer-based proofreading portal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works on the principle of reciprocity: you proofread a guy or gal's posts in your language, they proofread writing in theirs. Furthermore, the more you've proofread, the higher your reputation is, and this also attracts readers and proofreaders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48335" LastEditorUserId="48335" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T17:50:58.187" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T17:50:58.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7639" CreationDate="2016-01-21T06:21:18.737" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this phrase on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/301303/revisions&quot;&gt;one of the edits&lt;/a&gt; that I made today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;Edit removed during grace period&quot; mean? Does it mean that the OP is on &lt;em&gt;kind of&lt;/em&gt; suspension and (s)he is not allowed to edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen it several times, but I don't understand it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T08:34:48.327" Title="What does &quot;Edit removed during grace period&quot; mean?" Tags="|support|editing|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7638" CreationDate="2016-01-21T08:34:48.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the first five minutes after an edit, further edits get wrapped up into it, rather than making more entries in the post history. If you return the post to exactly how it was before you started editing it, that's the message that is displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T08:34:48.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7622" CreationDate="2016-01-22T18:44:57.273" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can click the button in that situation, it's not wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that, instead or as well, you comment and downvote, to explain that unsubstantiated half rememberings aren't helpful as answers and ask that they find a reputable source to back their fallible memories from decades ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously be more tactful than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for taking the time to answer. I haven't seen this definition in any current dictionaries. Can you recall the name of the dictionary, or have you seen it used this way in a publication you can cite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2016-01-23T13:40:37.510" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T13:40:37.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7576" CreationDate="2016-01-23T01:43:36.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL:DR - The SE system breaks down when there is a lack of comradery throughout the community. Our proactive options are: change the system or try to change people. Systems are a lot easier to program... but that's not to say that the community can't improve as well. Note: 1 reps are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; part of the community and even though they may be the cause, they're not at fault; the system and the community share that blame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to guess, quite a few of the 5yo high-rep users you mention (and some that you didn't) seem to have made a new years resolution to stop posting; I came across two accounts that have, since Dec. 29th, ceased activity on ELU. I hope they're just on a vacation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me to be constructively frank: this is a (well deserved) rant; you came here at the site's golden era, and became a golden child yourself. Now you look around to see but a scarred battlefield, of which you are now in command. It's time to close ranks. &lt;strong&gt;We always say that upper echelon is a bad thing, but that* is precisely what differentiates SE from Yahoo.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might I suggest a little more participation in chat, from all of us. Especially if all those old curmudgeons aren't there to slay us with their linguistic repertoire. (That's what ELU chat feels like when you go in there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SF&amp;amp;F users on the other hand, use chat all the time for: &lt;em&gt;hey yo, help me close this crap&lt;/em&gt;. Which is your &lt;strong&gt;#1 problem with the situation: LQQs not getting closed fast enough&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A bigger hammer. (Close-hammer rep required is lowered.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Increase close-vote review queue awareness. (Unless it's an audit, they're all hidden in the review queue page; there's no &lt;em&gt;hey-look-at-me: &lt;code&gt;22&lt;/code&gt; 'meta' problems to solve!&lt;/em&gt; on the top bar.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lower the number of required close votes. (Alternatively, calculate a user's rep as a percentage of what their close vote is worth. E.g., two 10k'ers can close or it needs four 5k'ers.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last suggestion would let the 35k OP and one other +3k'er close stuff. Your worried that this is too elitist? Well, like I said, that's what keeps SE working (and also exactly what you're complaining about; the loss of our elites). Can this be abused anymore than by someone who already has a close hammer? No. It would just involve collusion, and SE is well prepared to handle that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU doesn't need any more &quot;sap&quot;, anyone who thinks it does and adds to it for this reason alone is a troll, but I don't think those are trolls' questions; they're simply vampires'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pavlov? yes, to some extent - just don't forget that it works both ways. I've also noticed an increase in LQQs &lt;em&gt;getting away with it&lt;/em&gt;. That's the problem, they're getting away with it. And that's &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; fault. The problem with solving that, is it only leads us back to last month's question, catch-22 style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7535/does-elu-have-worse-questions-than-other-sites?lq=1&quot;&gt;Does ELU Have Worse Questions Than Other Sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, if you read all of its links and comments (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6683/how-can-we-encourage-more-folks-to-edit?lq=1&quot;&gt;How can we encourage more folks to edit?&lt;/a&gt; is a good pit stop), you'll end up right back here. Allow me to TL:DR all of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the SE system not keeping up with its end of the bargain or are both new and old users failing the system?&lt;/strong&gt;... Umm, yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the site is not the (real) problem and it will not be changed. New users are never the problem if the old users are doing their part. If for whatever reason, established users aren't keeping up with the trash, then &lt;em&gt;the system&lt;/em&gt; is broken and needs adjustment (both types of &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; are neither here nor there). Continuing to blame users is a straw man with no solution. If we as a community can no longer deal with what's thrown at us, then the &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; has failed us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really need someone who knows how to use those neat data explorers. All those linked Q&amp;amp;A's have great suggestions buried in them, but we're in need of a cohesive question and answer to this elephant in the room that finds itself in all of those posts: (the likes of which can be heard on many of the other sites)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the problem &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; (that data can give credit to) and what is your proposed solution (that will change how the system works, regardless of who is using it)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the questions we'd have to ask to &lt;strong&gt;know where the system broke down and how to fix it&lt;/strong&gt;. Without a drastic re-write of the whole shebang we'll never fix the &quot;1 rep problem&quot;, but we can change how we deal with it without too much fuss, I hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T01:43:36.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7576" CreationDate="2016-01-23T02:32:42.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went over 3K a few days ago, and started on the close-vote queue.  I am allowed to vote on only 20 posts per day.  I can understand why there is a daily limit, but 20 per day is low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with everything, there is a learning curve, and I understand why a new reviewer might be limited to voting on 20 posts per day, but this limit could be raised for more experienced voters.  Of course, once the thrill wears off, even 20 per day might seem too much.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long do VLQ questions remain open, on average, after they are first flagged?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T02:32:42.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-24T23:34:15.317" Score="-8" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;Popular belief holds that if the system is unfair, gaming it is tantamount to rendering a public service, while the opposite is also true: folks inclined to game a good system are dishonest sociopaths who should be flogged every Tuesday in the town square. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, gaming the system is an egregious practice. Isn't it? Gaming an unfair system should not be called that. It's more like a quixotic quest, is it not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed a while ago that the answers that get me impressive amounts of rep points are simple, mindless one-liners; while well-thought-out, well-researched, well-written, humorous, illustrated, cross-referenced posts (answers &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; questions) oftentimes result in a lot more downvotes than gratification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To test this theory further, I once spent a few days posting a lot of one-liners. As it turned out, my suspicions were well-founded.&#xA;Am I gaming the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JUST IN CASE&lt;/strong&gt;: Some commenters here have already questioned my motives. Why would &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; need rep points at all, they unhypocritically demand? Why? There's no &lt;em&gt;money&lt;/em&gt; in it. Or (gasping) is there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, there's money in it. Not an awful lot. Just some.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't care about the money, actually. My goal is gaining the privilege of &quot;Paying the EL&amp;amp;U Maoists in Kind.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDENDUM:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me illustrate my point by drawing your attention to the questions that come up right now on EL&amp;amp;U when you press the &quot;newest&quot; questions button (the original grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, question marks, etc, etc - everything's preserved ... in its original ... fff ... form... ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what official english words to describe these activity&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accomplish+a verb form?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;i want to persue masters in management which one is the best for me?? [on hold]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Goal-driven vs. goal-oriented&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you call the action of alternatively walking and jogging to complete a Full Marathon?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3rd conditional + inversion&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Idiom for “dominate”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Structure of this sentence is not clear to me&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Figure X, … - with Comma?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;why “come into a place” sounds like /kʌməntsə/ /pleis/&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tawkin'? Tawk? I don't get the joke. (This one is actually curious, and one wants to open it and see what it's about, and, wow,&#xA;  the post begins with a lengthy quote from a well-written novel ... oh,&#xA;  but I'm the one who posted it ... oops ... Guess what? One downvote,&#xA;  and counting)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who and Whom in a question&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do the quoted sentences mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Meaning of “blatant plug”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Must the use of a comma plus “and” be followed by a complete sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt;, ladies and gentlemen, is where we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastEditorUserId="143137" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T12:58:43.747" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T13:01:18.553" Title="Am I gaming the system?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7644" CreationDate="2016-01-25T07:13:05.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you are not gaming the system. You are often times lucky and sometimes unlucky depending on a day when you write a well-thought one-liners or simple, mind-less one-liners. You are just confirming one of the voting patterns happening on ELU.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed there are noticeable voting patterns on ELU. The followings don't cover them 100%, but if I may: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting your conscience: Ideal, but not practical. Nobody can be a perfectionist nor idealist. Not everyone votes this way. I was not voting this way from the day I got 15 (minimum for upvote) and 125 rep points (minimum to downvote) for a few months. I am trying to vote this way now (at least from a few weeks ago). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting based on length and research (links): Some users might give more weight to them even though the answer might not be 100% correct appreciating the time and efforts the OP spent to write those answers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting based on conciseness: Some users seem to prefer this as it is easier to understand (catch the point) and they don't need to read TL;DR answers. You can't blame nor change them and they will never change. As I raised in the linked question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7475/warning-to-a-user-who-posts-the-same-exact-answer-and-answer-without-any-re&quot;&gt;Warning to a user who posts the “same (exact) answer” and answer “without any reference/research”&lt;/a&gt;, the one-liner received two upvotes when my answer received two or three upvotes. I think it would have received more upvotes than mine if Andrew Leach hadn't converted it to a comment to my answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting against wrong answers: Coincident or not, one of your questions generated a lot (maybe too many) of upvotes as my answer was not considered the right one by many. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297769/what-do-you-call-a-glade-or-path-created-artificially-in-order-to-to-prevent-wil&quot;&gt;What do you call a glade or path created artificially in order to to prevent wildfires?&lt;/a&gt;. My answer received 20 upvotes with 14 downvotes while the most upvoted one received 116 upvotes with just one downvote. If my answer had not been posted, I am sure the other one would not have received that many upvotes. Some might have downvoted mine and upvoted the other at the same time to prove that my answer is not right. I am not proud of this answer, but it shows one of the several important voting patterns on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting answers to (blatantly) off-topic questions: If you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-quality-is-dropping-on-stack-overflow/252531#252531&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to a question, &quot;Question quality is dropping on Stack Overflow&quot;, some are encouraging downvoting on answers to bad questions saying &lt;strong&gt;Answers (even correct ones) are not useful if they contribute to the demise of the site&lt;/strong&gt;. I guess those downvotes mentioned in my previous Meta question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7588/is-downvoting-every-single-post-in-a-question-without-leaving-any-comment-constr&quot;&gt;Is downvoting every single post in a question without leaving any comment constructive?&lt;/a&gt; were cast for this reason. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on and so forth...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: It is not a secret that the voting system here doesn't work as ideally as one would expect or hope as people are as subjective and independent in voting as in asking and answering questions. We can't control their behaviors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I increased the number of downvotes dramatically over the past few weeks to discourage poor-quality answers and questions and I think it does work for some users. It might be a good idea for users to think about their voting patterns one more time using this opportunity and to figure out how their voting could improve or worsen the quality of this community. I feel more discouraged when witnessing any upvote to (blatantly) off-topic questions (answers) than seeing a one-liner get upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not join us in close-voting Low Quality Quesitons and downvoting Low Quality Answers and Questions?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T13:01:18.553" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7644" CreationDate="2016-01-25T11:52:59.340" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't appear that you're &quot;gaming the system&quot;, although you aren't doing it any favours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have previously mentioned that you don't give downvotes. If that's the case, you are helping to shore up the poor result that you decry. Downvotes are necessary to indicate poor-quality content. They actually help the system: a user with a record of poor questions or answers can be blocked. But the system can only work if it's given the data it needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting poor questions to below &amp;minus;3 will take them off the front page (and again, the system needs its data to do that). But fewer downvotes than that still sends a message about the sort of question the community feels is unwelcome. If you feel a post doesn't help the site, use your votes to say so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By not downvoting in this way, you are forgoing the one really effective means you have of influencing content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel a question doesn't meet the requirements to be &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, or is explicitly &lt;a href=&quot;/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt;, then use your close votes to say so. A user with too many closed questions is flagged, normally warned (which usually means that they don't return) and can be blocked by the system, if they are not banned manually. Close votes matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you are not actually gaming the system &amp;mdash; that has a particular meaning on Stack Exchange &amp;mdash; you are helping to cause its demise by allowing the posts to persist. That may not actually be the effect you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that votes on a site Meta like this one are different from main sites and Meta.SE, and simply indicate agreement or disagreement with the sentiment or proposal expressed in a post. They don't count for rep, although they may be taken into account in elections and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T11:52:59.340" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7644" CreationDate="2016-01-25T18:02:24.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can lead by example.  I just looked at one of your experimental one-liners. (pressing problem)  Have you no shame?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you got 110 points for it!  That's a free 110 points that you can use on 110 downvotes.  You can use the downvotes on 4 and 5 rep users who post completely unsubstantiated answers; they should be able to take it without having a nervous breakdown.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can anyone expect new users to learn how to write a good answer if 4- and 5-rep users post one-liners?  And some new users do learn.  They see a comment asking for a citation or an example, and they respond.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others just vanish after being deleted, but there are several billion people out there and no barrier to posting a Q or an A.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T18:26:19.790" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T18:26:19.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-27T21:58:37.407" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to complete my profile, since I've been led to believe I will earn another badge by doing so... So I go to the &quot;edit profile &amp;amp; settings&quot; page and add a few simple text-only things (location: &quot;Wisconsin&quot;.... and &quot;writer &amp;amp; editor&quot; in the &quot;about me&quot; box. I try to save, but I get an error message that says &quot;Oops! There was a problem updating your profile: Invalid image type.&quot; What am I doing wrong? Or is this some sort of bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157422" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T02:46:58.607" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T02:46:58.607" Title="I'm unable to edit my profile" Tags="|support|bug|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-28T09:10:52.163" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poetic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetic&lt;/a&gt; has 17 question and no wiki. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poetry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; has 176 questions and a wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the former be merged into the latter? Should the former be blacklisted to avoid misuse in the future or just make them synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157679" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T12:03:16.537" Title="Are both [Poetic] and [Poetry] needed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7651" CreationDate="2016-01-28T11:57:24.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The posts marked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poetic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetic&lt;/a&gt; seem to consist of posts about poetic language but not (classical or formal) poetry. The highest-voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160467/what-is-the-aerial-equivalent-of-bathing-when-one-enjoys-the-breeze&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; under that tag asks for a poetic term for enjoying the breeze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is accurate to say that &lt;em&gt;poetry&lt;/em&gt; is simply the noun form of &lt;em&gt;poetic&lt;/em&gt;, the term &lt;em&gt;poetry&lt;/em&gt; has acquired enough of a distinctive meaning that it is a little uncomfortable to call flowery or vivid prose &lt;em&gt;poetry&lt;/em&gt;. Describing it as &lt;em&gt;poetic&lt;/em&gt; still seems appropriate, maybe in the sense that even though it isn't poetry, it is &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a place for the two tags to have separate identities. For clarity, I'd suggest renaming &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poetic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetic&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;code&gt;poetic prose&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T12:03:16.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-28T10:07:26.180" Score="-2" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; question. Seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folks use both words with great confidence, which leads me to believe they know what they're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are assured that on EL&amp;amp;U questions must not be posted whose answers can only be opinion-based. And - if your answer isn't factual, it'll be closed immediately. Yes. We know the drill. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it came to me as a shock today when someone with a rep of more than 50K (a fellow whom I like, incidentally) began answering a question with &quot;I think ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I have nothing against it. Opinions are superior to facts - in Decartes' ... &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; ... anyway. The word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a derivative of the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;opine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which means &quot;to think&quot; in Latin. Had Decartes &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; ... damn it ! ... had he thought it was the other way around, he would have said &quot;I've got some facts here, therefore ...&quot; But he didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the standard definition, a fact is something that can be proven right. (They usually leave it at that; however, an honest person should hasten to add &quot; ... or wrong&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An opinion is something that cannot be proven right, nor wrong for that matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or so they say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A long, long time ago scientists took it as a matter of course that the Earth was the center of the Universe. To them and their groupies this was a fact. At the same time other scientists protested that the Sun, and not the Earth, was in the center, or slightly off-center. The two schools of thought continued to prove their rivals wrong and their own theory right. This went on for many centuries. Geocentric, heliocentric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There was, to be sure, Nicholas of Cusa, who explained that the Universe as we know it cannot have a geometrical center, but he was pointedly ignored). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, many centuries later, someone demonstrated, or thought he did, that neither the Sun nor the Earth were in the middle. Today's scientists believe in the almighty singularity that appeared out of nowhere and detonated itself with such vim and vigor that space, time, matter and energy suddenly appeared and began rapidly to expand in all directions centerlessly. That is now a fact, while the older ideas are no longer viewed as facts: they're outdated opinions. (Facts cannot be outdated: facts are forever, as Cleopatra used to say). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is the source of this?&quot; demands the skeptical Mr. X squeamishly when he encounters information that doesn't quite fit into his well-adjusted outlook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ancient Romans thought the story of Troy was fiction. Troy? Fiction. Of course. It's a fact. Only ignorant people believe it might be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folks continued to hold this ... op ... whoa. Folks continued to view the fictional nature of Troy as a fact until someone somewhere developed a different ... opinion ... damn it ... Eventually, an amateur named Schliemann dug up something that definitely wasn't Troy. Then, reluctantly, some folks began to agree that it was ... well ... kind of ... Troy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we know &lt;em&gt;for a fact&lt;/em&gt; that the Trojan War took place sometime in the 12th Century B.C. Look it up if you don't believe me. What's my source? I've got many. Wikipedia is one. Britannica Encyclopedia is another. There are countless books and essays. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but all those encyclopedia entries, all those textbook chapters - they didn't just magically appear, did they? No. They were written by, well, people. Reputable and scholarly, but still human. What was &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; source? Evidence? What evidence? Homer and Schliemann? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no one questions Troy anymore. There's just no need. Too many entries. Too many books, well-indexed and cross-referenced. Consensus. Part of the &lt;em&gt;paradigm&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But. Someone was first. The pioneer. The trailblazer. The idea's only champion at the time. At some point in the past that someone said, &quot;Homer's account was based on actual historical events.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They called him a moron and told him to keep his uninteresting &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; to himself. Until ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, a fact is an opinion agreed on by many. Evidence or no evidence. An opinion is a unit of information someone believes in. A fact is a unit of information many reputable people believe in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're stating a fact, it does help if your ... uh ... &quot;source&quot; ... is &quot;reputable,&quot; i.e. the person whose essay or book you're so cavalierly alluding to is properly certified (has the stamp of approval, a.k.a. &quot;the Sign of the Beast&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right? ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now comes the comical part. I'm pretty sure a whole bunch of folks will want to close this question because &quot;it is primarily opinion-based.&quot; Which is to say that, while we only consider facts, and never opinions, here on EL&amp;amp;U, what a fact or an opinion actually is is a matter of opinion, not fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; give me &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; definition of those two words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" OwnerDisplayName="Ricky" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-01-29T09:07:35.427" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T09:07:35.427" Title="What is the difference between opinion and fact?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2016-01-28T11:07:15.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the following snippets of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are assured that on EL&amp;amp;U questions must not be posted whose answers can only be opinion-based;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it came to me as a shock today when someone with a rep of more than 50K ... began answering a question with &quot;I think ...&quot;; and  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while we only consider facts, and never opinions, here on EL&amp;amp;U, what a fact or an opinion actually is is a matter of opinion, not fact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it that you're questioning the difference between fact and opinion &lt;em&gt;in the context of EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;subjective questions are not ruled out completely&lt;/a&gt;, it is safe to say that answers need not be restricted to those that are lab-provable or maths-derived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the same link, the primary qualification is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so we should consider the terms &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; in relation to EL&amp;amp;U posts to be synonyms of &lt;em&gt;substantiated posts&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unsubstantiated posts&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to note that some unsubstantiated answers are tolerated while others aren't. Personal experience is certainly a source of substantiation, but it can also be really hard for others to verify, particularly posts that reduce to &lt;em&gt;'Trust me, I know what I'm talking about'&lt;/em&gt;. As you point out, there is a whole spectrum between fact and bare opinion, so where should the line be drawn? To answer this, we need to return to the purpose of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stated aim is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage&lt;/a&gt;. The site goes on to say &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;how questions should be answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;it's not whether an answer is categorised as opinion or fact. Rather, the standard is that the answer has to be &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Lone opinions that have no supporting documentation and no logical argument fail this standard, but opinions that are supported should be well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" OwnerDisplayName="Lawrence" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T11:07:15.970" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2016-01-28T12:36:11.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;BBC has this article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/factsheet/en06opin-l1-f-what-is-fact-and-opinion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fact or Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that explains the difference very well and I find it useful in explaining what &lt;strong&gt;primarily-opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; means on ELU: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;fact&lt;/strong&gt; is something that can be &lt;strong&gt;checked&lt;/strong&gt; and backed up with&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;evidence&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. In 2010, Lionel Messi was named FIFA World Footballer of The Year. We can check these details by looking at FIFA&#xA;  records. Facts are often used in conjunction with &lt;strong&gt;research&lt;/strong&gt; and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;study&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;opinion&lt;/strong&gt; is based on a &lt;strong&gt;belief&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;view&lt;/strong&gt;. It is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; based&#xA;  on &lt;strong&gt;evidence&lt;/strong&gt; that can be &lt;strong&gt;checked&lt;/strong&gt; e.g. Wayne Rooney is the best&#xA;  football player in the EPL. Some people might think there are other&#xA;  players in the EPL who are better than Wayne Rooney...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding questions that can generate &lt;strong&gt;primarily-opinion-based (POB)&lt;/strong&gt; answers, I think it is a good guideline to close those questions as they could be only useful to the OP him/herself and it might not be a good reference to current and future readers. I believe the motto on Stack Exchange in relation to asking questions is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Ask questions that can benefit others&lt;/strong&gt; and don't ask questions that can benefit only yourself.&quot; Majority of POB questions are beneficial only to the OP and it is not good for the community. Some of questions closed as POB are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Punctuation questions: There is no unified rule on punctuation in English, so many of them could generate only POB answers depending on posters' style and preference (style book). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is it? or Which is better (or best)? type of questions: It doesn't work very well on ELU. However, some of them are well-received when users could find them answerable with reference and research. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about it? type of question. Unless they are about regional differences or nuances, they are not well-received.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I commented above, 5 votes are required to close any question and I believe it needs more than 5 votes to delete an answer depending on your rep points (I can only recommend deletion at my reputation). Opinions could be different, but facts could not. Many grammatical points are opinion-based and sometimes different depending on authors, but they can be reasonably understood by English speakers. There is a grey area between an opinion and a fact. But the important thing is the guidelines of ELU doesn't encourage a question that could generate only POB answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the linked questions on Meta, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/what-the-primarily-opinion-based-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the “primarily opinion-based” close reason is for&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4453/why-is-question-146045-opinion-based/4458#4458&quot;&gt;Why is question 146045 opinion-based?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4784/what-is-wrong-with-opinion-based/4790#4790&quot;&gt;What is wrong with “Opinion-Based”?&lt;/a&gt; would be interesting for you. There are many more if you use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=primarily+opinion+based&quot;&gt;the search&lt;/a&gt;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Lawrence. Answers should be as correct—hopefully more fact-based than opinion-based—and useful as possible to current and future users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user253042" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T15:52:16.907" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2016-01-28T15:36:54.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A long, long time ago scientists took it as a matter of course that&#xA;  the Earth was the center of the Universe. To them and their groupies&#xA;  this was a fact. At the same time other scientists protested that the&#xA;  Sun, and not the Earth, was in the center, or slightly off-center. The&#xA;  two schools of thought continued to prove their rivals wrong and their&#xA;  own theory right. This went on for many centuries. Geocentric,&#xA;  heliocentric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(There was, to be sure, Nicholas of Cusa, who explained that the&#xA;  Universe as we know it cannot have a geometrical center, but he was&#xA;  pointedly ignored). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then, many centuries later, someone demonstrated, or thought he did,&#xA;  that neither the Sun nor the Earth were in the middle. Today's&#xA;  scientists believe in the almighty singularity that appeared out of&#xA;  nowhere and detonated itself with such vim and vigor that space, time,&#xA;  matter and energy suddenly appeared and began rapidly to expand in all&#xA;  directions centerlessly. That is now a fact, while the older ideas are&#xA;  no longer viewed as facts: they're outdated opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This what you describe here are neither facts, nor opinions but theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157727" OwnerDisplayName="tim-o-matic" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T15:36:54.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T21:01:16.237" Score="-2" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[With Addendum]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we discourage the use of argot such as&#xA;&lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;BrE&lt;/em&gt;&amp;mdash;even &lt;em&gt;ELU&lt;/em&gt;&amp;mdash;[added:]&#xA;in answers to nonspecialists' questions at ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most visitors who find answers here come from a browser search&#xA;and have no idea what &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;BrE&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;mean&lt;s&gt;,&amp;nbsp;nor should they be expected to guess&lt;/s&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insider abbreviations encrypt the information&#xA;that we hopefully provide to a more general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it too much trouble to spell out &amp;ldquo;American English&amp;rdquo;&#xA;and &amp;ldquo;British English&amp;rdquo;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some answers to nontechnical questions use technical abbreviations&#xA;such as &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;BrE&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302626/153448&quot;&gt;recent example&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;where the question does not use the term &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;yet the answer uses both &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;American English&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;without indicating that they are the same)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With a deep interest in language, I already understood the meaning of &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a technical editor, I imagined a less-ensconced perspective&#xA;that seems more usual among questioners at ELU&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[No longer completely true:]&#xA;Found unrelated answers at ELU and its Help Center&#xA;for &amp;ldquo;what is AmE&amp;rdquo; or just &amp;ldquo;AmE&amp;rdquo;&#xA;(with or without capitals, as with the searches below)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Now true:] Found a useful answer at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/89643/153448&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between British English phrases and American&#xA;phrases?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;by searching ELU for &amp;ldquo;what is AmE&amp;rdquo; and noticing that the&#xA;match's listing included &amp;ldquo;... American English (AmE) ...&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Found nonanswers at &lt;a href=&quot;http://onelook.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;onelook.com&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;some answers at specific dictionary sites&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia redirects &amp;ldquo;AmE&amp;rdquo; to&#xA;&amp;ldquo;American English,&amp;rdquo; which doesn't mention &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt; per se&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Found a barrage of extraneous matches in web searches for&#xA;&amp;ldquo;AmE&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;AmE English&amp;rdquo;&#xA;that overshadowed a match with a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/AmE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terse definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A web search for &amp;ldquo;AmE English language&amp;rdquo; at last led to some&#xA;useful web pages, though only&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2012/10/briticisms-in-ame.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;of many that I viewed both has &amp;ldquo;AmE&amp;rdquo; in its title&#xA;and actually spells out &lt;em&gt;AmE&lt;/em&gt; in its content&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good answers and references!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guess I'll sporadically add specific comments to ELU answers&#xA;that might overmatch their questions technically.&#xA;See how that goes.  Wanted to pose the question here first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably not news but just for the record,&#xA;the standard in technical writing is to introduce&#xA;an abbreviation parenthetically or as a link&#xA;when there is any doubt that a reader&#xA;will understand it precisely and readily.&#xA;(I often encourage an author to present&#xA; a concise table of terms early in their article.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T17:09:11.960" Title="Should we discourage the use of argot such as AmE, BrE, ELU, ...?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|american-english|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7657" CreationDate="2016-01-29T22:20:18.430" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU is for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts -- in other words, specialists. Specialists have their own jargon, and they use it routinely to communicate clearly and succinctly with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among ELU users, you are likely to see jargon that includes abbreviations such as AmE and BrE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than asking these specialists to abandon the very way they communicate, it makes more sense to me to make sure the site helps anyone who is not familiar by documenting common jargon, including abbreviations, in the online help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good way you could assist with this is to look through the existing online help and see if there are any glaring omissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-and-acronyms-noad-esl-pie&quot;&gt;List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T22:20:18.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7657" CreationDate="2016-01-29T23:39:48.357" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree: we should use as few abbreviations as possible. Not only are they generally not as nice to look at as full words, but they are often incomprehensible to those unaccustomed to our website, or at least they slow down their reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the task of a writer to burden his readers with as little work as possible; if you, as a writer, spend the extra three seconds it takes to type out British English once, you may save a thousand readers the thirty seconds it would take them to look up BrEng. Your 'return on investment' would be ~100,000% in this case. And more than a thousand people may read your answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is common advice to be found in most serious style guides. We are here not just to answer questions, but also to set the example. What will people think when we give them advice about how to write while at the same time needlessly using abbreviations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to needless jargon; but jargon is more often necessary, and it doesn't have the ugliness that abbreviations have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abbreviations can be justified in chat, where speed is an issue. In ordinary writing, though, you can just say &quot;the site&quot; if you have already mentioned English Language and Usage, or &quot;this variant&quot; if the reader knows you are talking about Indian English. The fact that Oxford English Dictionary is too long is not really an excuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In physical print, space is sometimes an issue, such as in dictionaries. Then abbreviations can be justified as well, despite the extra work they burden the reader with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a quotation from our esteemed moderator Nohat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shame on anyone for using any of these abbreviations (NOAD, OED, PIE) without defining them or least linking them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T01:38:00.277" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T01:38:00.277" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7665" CreationDate="2016-01-30T16:35:35.453" Score="6" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;This popped up in my &quot;Review Suggested Edits&quot; Queue...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TT9tM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TT9tM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit has only minor formatting improvements (the word &quot;goodbye&quot; has been bold-italicized) to the earlier edit. Incidentally, I had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/303068/revisions&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; the question previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I handle such edits from anonymous users? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T19:15:56.887" Title="Should I approve or reject trivial edits from anonymous users?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-30T20:06:07.830" Score="-12" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;It gets very frustrating sometimes when you invest time and energy into putting together an answer, and the OP doesn't appreciate it or understand it, and tops it off with a downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, yeah, it's all right - when it happens once. Twice. I can take four in a row without batting an eye. Patience is a virtue, up to six times. But there's virtue and then there's masochism, and once you've been insulted seven times in a row, the line begins very gradually to blur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose each member be granted the right to use an offensive acronym in a comment at least once a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143137" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T12:42:11.203" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T12:42:11.203" Title="Is there a euphemism we could use, say, once a week, just to vent?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7660" CreationDate="2016-01-30T20:57:20.727" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reject them!  Reject and then click on the reason that says something like &quot;Does not improve the clarity of the post.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you want to stop your dog from begging for food at the table?  Don't feed him!  Same principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reject any edit that seems like busy-work.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T20:57:20.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7661" CreationDate="2016-01-30T21:27:33.647" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not. It will be flagged as offensive, abbreviation or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six &quot;offensive&quot; flags on a post (or one moderator's &quot;offensive&quot; flag) will result in a 100-rep penalty applied automatically, and runs the risk of suspension. Offensive comments are removed by fewer flags, but if there are enough of those then again there is a risk of suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T21:27:33.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7657" CreationDate="2016-01-30T22:14:17.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Don't know what this adds to @MetaEd's excellent answer, but here goes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't think this is a problem (at least it's never been raised in meta before.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some background might help to understand the pushback*, the downvotes, and the range of opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For years, EL&amp;amp;U has been struggling to be a site for &quot;for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot;, but one look at the front page will tell you just how far below that goal the site really is. Not only is this not treated as an serious site, but it is a daily struggle even to enforce/encourage the &lt;em&gt;use of a dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, putting questions in context, citing sources, etc., something necessary to maintain a minimum level of quality for questions and answers. It's been difficult, and there's a lot of meta discussion about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your proposal strikes me as one more step in accommodating those who can't be bothered to look things up, which is a bit of a hot button here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4491/58761&quot;&gt;This is not a site for “serious English language enthusiasts,” and it never will be&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5362/58761&quot;&gt;Proposal: Add a “too basic”/“uninteresting” off-topic option&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7535/58761&quot;&gt;Does ELU Have Worse Questions Than Other Sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4921/58761&quot;&gt;General Reference = general clairvoyance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1546/58761&quot;&gt;Basic questions are not so basic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7576/58761&quot;&gt;Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1546/58761&quot;&gt;Basic questions are not so basic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7128/58761&quot;&gt;Should we have a migration path to ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6792/58761&quot;&gt;“Thanks man for not laughing at my question :)”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4732/58761&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he's amused but the rest of the family isn't?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;I apologize to the community, and especially to the OP, for my belligerent comment (now deleted). It's not elevating to the community, and it was a terrible way to welcome a new user to meta. Unfortunately, I have no excuse for it. I hadn't even had a bad day.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T01:33:42.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7660" CreationDate="2016-01-31T00:06:35.887" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;goodbye&quot;-to-&quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;goodbye&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; change you mention is indeed exceedingly minor, but given that it brings &lt;em&gt;goodbye&lt;/em&gt; into parallel with the way &lt;em&gt;hello&lt;/em&gt; is handled in the twin example immediately preceding it, I would have accepted the change. Minor as it is, a change to establish symmetry of this type removes any potential distraction that the asymmetry might cause a reader, so I think it's worth doing (on my questions and answers anyway). But I'm a copy editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The countervailing argument, I suppose, is that many minor edits that EL&amp;amp;U newcomers suggest aren't improvements of any kind: either they leave the post no better off than it was before or they make it significantly worse. If you feel that nuisance edits are a big enough problem at this site that we should discourage any edits that don't save the author from embarrassment, then you should probably reject minor edits whether they are marginally useful, neutral, or harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that way, and I'm okay with minor edits that makes a post slightly more consistent internally. I also don't begrudge the editor the reward of a point or two of reputation for a minor improvement—if it is indeed an improvement. When I edit other people's posts at this site, I try to limit myself to nontrivial things (though I consider adding block quote formatting and hiding URLs in links to be nontrivial for readability). I don't approve of changing one consistently handled style decision for another, however, because EL&amp;amp;U doesn't have a style guide for matters such as serial commas, single vs. double quotation marks, and punctuating inside vs. outside quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it doesn't impose a minimum reputation requirement for editing posts, Stack Exchange invites everyone to participate in  this task. I can imagine this becoming a burden if nuisance edits grow to epidemic proportions, but I don't see that happening. I've been participating regularly in Review queue vetting for about a year now, and I'm only at about 230 Suggested Edits reviewed— because there just aren't that many of them compared to items in the other Review categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I don't know what Stack Exchange's thinking was in putting question and answer editing within the reach of first-time site visitors, I imagine that the goal was to encourage participation in an easily reversible way that might also build up interest in the relevant SE site and reward efforts to make simple technical improvements as well as more-significant corrections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Higher-rep site participants are essential in this process, to assess whether an edit is useful or not. But their reward for this rather tedious work is a series of copper, silver, and gold badges at various service milestones; anyone who seriously dislikes this kind of work doesn't have to participate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write this, the Review page lists the following queues awaiting review: 116 Close Votes, 3 Reopen Votes, 1 First Posts, 1 Low Quality Posts, 0 Late Answers, and 0 Suggested Edits. This is typical except that First Posts and Low Quality Posts sometimes fluctuate upward into the very low double digits when traffic is light on the Review page. Given that the stream of suggested edits is so (seemingly) manageable, I don't see any reason not to assess each one on its own merits and to approve ones that introduce even minor improvements to a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-05-27T19:15:56.887" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T19:15:56.887" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7660" CreationDate="2016-01-31T03:30:01.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to be (again) the one who rejected the suggested edit in your question. I rejected it partly because there was no improvement and it was so trivial, but more importantly it was suggested by an &lt;strong&gt;anonymous user&lt;/strong&gt;. The question was not wordy and short enough to be well understood.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I found very strange when I started to review &lt;em&gt;suggested edits&lt;/em&gt; was many of them were suggested by none other than &lt;strong&gt;anonymous users&lt;/strong&gt;. I asked my self, &quot;WTH?! Why is it even allowed?&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4691/why-are-anonymous-users-allowed-to-edit-questions&quot;&gt;Why are anonymous users allowed to edit questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I found an answer to it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/203397/strange-suggested-edit-from-anonymous-user/203410#203410&quot;&gt;Anonymous users are permitted to make suggested edits. Because we have good users standing at the gates preventing the bad edits getting through&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my rather short experience, edit suggestions by anonymous users were not very &lt;strong&gt;constructive&lt;/strong&gt; nor &lt;strong&gt;helpful&lt;/strong&gt;. Probably less than 10% were.  Therefore, I always reject it. I have never approved a single suggestion made by them. Most of them were one of the followings: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempt to reply: They add their ideas briefly. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spam or Vandalism: It is not difficult to detect and reject it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minor change for punctuation or typo: Sometimes helpful, but I would rather reject it and edit it myself than approve it because there is a chance that it could be rejected by other uses who don't approve any edit suggested by anonymous users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to edit a post largely depends on your personal style and preference. I do believe that we are allowed to review a suggested edit because we have sufficient reputation points to do that and the community trusts us. The decision on whether to approve it or not is entirely yours.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T03:30:01.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T13:48:41.373" Score="8" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112528/do-tenses-in-a-time-clause-never-back-shift-in-reported-speech&quot;&gt;Do tenses in a time clause never back-shift in reported speech?&lt;/a&gt; (which I'll call &lt;em&gt;The Backshift Question&lt;/em&gt; or TBQ for convenience) has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/112688/142322&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; that could be considered canonical for &lt;em&gt;back-shifting in reported speech&lt;/em&gt; questions. I've just referred &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303682/from-direct-to-indirect-speech&quot;&gt;someone&lt;/a&gt; to that answer and voted to close their question as a duplicate of TBQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In doing so, I found that TBQ was closed as &quot;not a real question&quot;, or in greater detail, &quot;This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking at Shoe's answer, I consider the question unambiguous, precise, complete, of useful breadth, genuine, and reasonably answered in its current form. In short, I submit that it is a &lt;em&gt;real question&lt;/em&gt; and I would like to drum up some support to reopen it, with a view to making it a canonical Q&amp;amp;A for &lt;em&gt;back-shifting in reported speech&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/8743/canonical-post-1-when-to-trust-your-grammar-checker&quot;&gt;Here is a sample canonical ELL post&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't found an equivalent for ELU. The ELU community seems to be able to find good examples for many recurring questions, but with the recent comments in ELUm about the number of low-quality ELU questions, I'd like to explore the idea of gathering a collection of canonical answers and presenting that list in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask Question&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7667/discussion-on-reopening-a-specific-question-do-tenses-in-a-time-clause-never-b?noredirect=1#comment31283_7667&quot;&gt;Thanks @Shoe&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/241582/142322&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a more comprehensive post to serve as a canonical answer for back-shift questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:08:43.573" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T11:08:43.573" Title="Discussion on reopening a specific question: &quot;Do tenses in a time clause never back-shift in reported speech?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7668" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-02-01T14:58:42.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T14:58:42.317" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T14:58:42.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7669" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-02-01T14:58:42.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T14:58:42.317" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T14:58:42.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-02T16:35:57.440" Score="3" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a site for English Language enthusiasts willing to share information with one another to enhance our understanding of the English language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users seem to like to leave condescending, belittling and highfalutin comments riddled with condescending rhetorical questions demonstrating their &quot;superior&quot; knowledge of English grammar and syntax by pointing out all the little exceptions to grammar rules an answer fails to account for. This is unacceptable behavior.  Users like these deter new users from continuing to use this site and share their views and opinions.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to suspend someone's account after a certain number of complaints made against that person for rude behavior? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148408" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T17:00:42.217" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T12:58:05.327" Title="Problematic Users" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|suspension|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7670" CreationDate="2016-02-02T17:08:54.320" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Account suspension can occur for a variety of reasons. Repeated complaints and flags against a user are amongst those reasons. They are not the only reasons for account suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, it is considered poor etiquette to call out specific users in posts or comments. If you feel the moderators are not scrutinizing another user closely enough, you can flag a particular comment or post of theirs and request investigation. That is one purpose of the Other... flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please bear in mind that the outcome of any user investigation is not public information, so while you may feel certain that moderators are not doing anything about a user's obvious abuse, this is not usually the case. We have a sequence of steps that we go through, including corrective actions, that are invisible to the community. The purpose of privacy is to help prevent ostracizing community members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a fair question to ask about how the process works. Generally speaking, it follows this pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Moderators have their attention brought to a user. This can be via flags, chat messages, Meta posts, or incidentally during routine other work. Moderators investigate the situation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Moderators edit or delete problematic content, or leave a comment to encourage a change in behavior. Occasionally, we use a private chat room to discuss concerns with the user or to facilitate understanding between users in real time. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Moderators send out routine notices for continued problematic behavior. These messages contain instructions and helpful links for the user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Moderators issue suspensions of increasing severity. The lengths are preset by the system -- one week, one month, one year. It is uncommon for us to issue another warning after a user has been suspended once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actions we take depend on the situation, whether we feel it is necessary to curb escalation, and whether we are immediately present or late to the party (for instance, if something is flagged over the weekend or sleeptime). We normally discuss suspensions within the mod team prior to issuing them. Our preference is to handle  situations as quietly and unobtrusively as possible so as to not disrupt the community and draw negative attention to a user. High visibility is often caused by a need to defuse a rapidly escalating problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, remember that moderators can and do delete comments, and they can also be auto-deleted by flagging, so what you see may not be a user self-deleting comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T16:00:35.563" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T16:00:35.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7670" CreationDate="2016-02-03T01:56:45.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's worse behavior to try to get someone suspended for criticizing your answer. It's fine by me if people are deterred from sharing their views and opinions; that's not what this site is for. It's for sharing &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to questions, and a good answer should be backed up by evidence so that you can be confident that it is correct. If you post an answer that fails to account for some things because you think they are not important, just ignore the comments or downvotes you get about the exceptions. Alternatively, you can edit your answer in response. People are supposed to be nice, but that doesn't mean they aren't allowed to comment if they feel a substantiative error exists in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to me that people do feel free to post comments that criticize perceived errors in answers, because I want to know if the answers I read have exceptions or inaccuracies, and I definitely want to know if the answers I post have exceptions or inaccuracies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to later comments by the original poster: Obviously, flag anything you think is inappropriate. Comments that are about the user, not the answer, (such as a comment that just says &quot;you don't understand English DO YOU?&quot;) aren't useful and are likely to be deleted if you draw a moderator's attention to them. My answer is about the behavior you described in the original post, where someone posts comments that seem rude &quot;pointing out all the little exceptions to grammar rules an answer fails to account for. &quot; As Dan Bron said, this sounds like a description of useful comments that are not phrased tactfully enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T03:31:34.850" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T03:31:34.850" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-03T23:53:21.227" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304285/1473&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; that is suggested as a duplicate and says I should edit the question to make it non-duplicative.  If I feel it is not a dup, but I feel the question already, as written, is not a dup, what is the procedure in such as a case?  Do I edit and make a trivial change to touch it?  Or maybe comment on it?  Please advise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T23:53:21.227" Title="How to respond to duplicate suggestion when I feel no edit is needed?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7686" CreationDate="2016-02-04T09:51:10.540" Score="-1" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Mari-Lou A pinpointed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users&quot;&gt;Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users&lt;/a&gt;, we have been swamped with Low-Quality-questions (LQQs) recently and it has been overwhelmingly difficult to deal with them especially when high-rep users are not actively involved in close-voting them and informing new users of the rules and guidelines of this community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't read all the questions on this community and some users might not notice some LQQs that should have been closed unless they use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;moderator tool&lt;/a&gt; where you can see the questions with most close-votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to propose a weekly or bi-weekly (once in two weeks) Meta post to include LQQs that should be closed, but received not enough votes so that they could be closed more efficiently and effectively. If they don't receive enough votes, the existing close-votes will be cancelled and it would be more difficult to close them and ultimately delete them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't close a blatantly-off-topic question, it could be used as an excuse or justification for other uses to ask another similar off-topic question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The format of a weekly or bi-weekly post would be like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title: LQQs on the week 1 of 2016 Feb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303991/what-does-swing-exactly-mean&quot;&gt;What does swing exactly mean?&lt;/a&gt;: Even though the OP says (s)he checked a dictionary, it is general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303718/the-difference-between-the-phrases-leave-the-house-and-leave-home&quot;&gt;The difference between the phrases “leave the house” and “leave home”&lt;/a&gt;: Lack of research, general reference. Better suited on ELL.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another question: Brief reason why it should be closed.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post could be edited by any user who wants to include a question that should have been closed in the previous week and questions that are closed would be deleted from the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am adding more questions that should have been closed in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303024/shorter-words-for-likely-to-be-in-apartment-names&quot;&gt;Shorter words for “likely to be IN apartment names”?&lt;/a&gt;: Unclear, no context. Received only 2 close-votes. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298804/what-preposition-should-be-used-with-map-in-or-on-please-see-my-example&quot;&gt;What preposition should be used with “map”, “in” or “on”? (please see my examples)&lt;/a&gt;: General reference and could be a duplicate. All 3 close-votes were cancelled. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298882/usage-of-take-a-step-forward&quot;&gt;Usage of “take a step forward”&lt;/a&gt;: General reference, lack of research, better suited on ELL. All close-votes were cancelled. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303156/is-make-a-day-ok-to-use-in-an-ad-slogan&quot;&gt;Is “make a day” ok to use in an ad slogan?&lt;/a&gt;: Primarily opinion-based. The three votes could be cancelled soon. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/304197/is-it-normal-to-struggle-a-lot-trying-to-understand-spoken-english-in-a-noisy-en&quot;&gt;Is it normal to struggle a lot trying to understand spoken English in a noisy environment?&lt;/a&gt;: Primarily opinion-based. The three votes could be cancelled soon. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303743/is-who-an-acronym-or-an-initialism&quot;&gt;Is WHO an acronym or an initialism?&lt;/a&gt;: Duplicate. The two close-votes could be cancelled soon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303201/is-that-the-correct-use-of-past-perfect&quot;&gt;Is that the correct use of past perfect?&lt;/a&gt;: No research. Why is that? type of question. The two close-votes could be cancelled soon. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/232255/is-this-correct-one-of-the-things-that-makes-him-great-is&quot;&gt;Is this correct? “One of the things that makes him great is…”&lt;/a&gt;: Asked in Mar. 2015. Exact duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few of them above could be still in a queue. The purpose of this suggested post would be prevent as many close-votes as possible from being cancelled and close/delete those questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T09:01:27.630" Title="Shall we make a list of Low-Quality-Questions regularly on Meta?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7657" CreationDate="2016-02-04T17:09:11.960" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, absolutely. These shorthands are counter-productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tiny amount of typing time it saves one person is much less than the incredible amount of time it wastes for many, many readers and also for robots, who represent readers who are typing “American English” into a search engine. At least some of those readers are learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for readers who are familiar with the shorthands, when we read them, we have to decode them before we understand them. You can put electrodes on a person’s head and see the dramatic difference in brain activity between just reading “American English” or decoding “AmEng.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point of writing is to be read and understood, not to be cryptic or save typing time. Especially on StackExchange, you are writing for the community, not for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to save typing time, go into your operating system settings and make a text substitution: “AmEng ➡ American English” so that when you type “AmEng” the computer types “American English.” It is 2016, not 1955.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies also to acronyms. They are obsolete when writing for the world unless you expand them at least once on every page because there is the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and also the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) and if you say you learned to make a flambé at the CIA you will be misunderstood again and again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88309" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T17:09:11.960" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7678" CreationDate="2016-02-05T08:11:12.873" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my 2 months of EL&amp;amp;U contribution, I have come across umpteen instances where top users suggest OPs to include some research effort from their side(rightly so) and I too have adopted this practice whenever I see vague questions from relatively new, low-rep users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then , I came across this  5 year old question - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3312/yall-or-yall&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Y&amp;#39;all&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ya&amp;#39;ll&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hugely popular question (upwards of 80k+ views) with the simplest of titles and (probably) the shortest body content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why was this question not flagged for lack of research efforts?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the bigger scheme of things, should we always (I mean a 100%) look for research efforts in new questions? Or are there any special clauses that can be applied to a few questions(such as the one mentioned above)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/em&gt; : I have nothing against the OP or the linked question. Just trying to understand in-depth about the moderation techniques and working of EL&amp;amp;U site. Please feel free to point out any fallacies in my argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:31:16.863" Title="Should we always look for research efforts in EL&amp;U questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7677" CreationDate="2016-02-05T08:31:16.863" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you point out, that question is five years old. That's plenty of time to garner many views, and it's plenty of time for site policy on research to mature as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent Meta questions touching research which I can find easily are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5279/does-a-question-which-shows-no-research-no-effort-deserve-a-downvote&quot;&gt;Does a question which shows no research, no effort deserve a downvote?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;How much research is needed?&lt;/a&gt; There are undoubtedly more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current consensus of the community is that some research has to be demonstrated; this is similar to Stack Overflow's expectation of a modicum of understanding of the question's topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:31:16.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-07T00:30:15.333" Score="12" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Got a quick question about flagging questions as duplicates; I've already established that ideally it should be identical or very similar to a question previously asked, but the window where you choose to flag questions as duplicate says &quot;and already has an answer&quot;; does this necessitate that the person who asked chose one of the answers as the &quot;official&quot; answer? Or does it just have to have some posted answers that appear to be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: is there a limit to how recently the original has to have been posted to justify it being duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155456" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T00:30:15.333" Title="Etiquette on flagging as a duplicate without an &quot;accepted&quot; answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-07T07:06:17.660" Score="29" ViewCount="882" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/304567/word-for-a-person-from-another-race&quot;&gt;Is there a word for &amp;quot;a person from another race&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has three down-votes and was closed because &quot;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic&quot; and &quot;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What type of commonly-available resource answers this question? It is not like a synonym request; you can't look up &quot;of another race&quot; in a thesaurus, and there are no general-reference &quot;reverse dictionaries.&quot; I can understand downvoting this question for lack of research, even if I don't agree with it, but it does not seem &quot;general-reference&quot; to me and therefore, I don't think it should have been closed as off-topic. (I know that this close reason was technically &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5459/new-close-reason-include-the-research&quot;&gt;changed from &quot;general reference&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for a reason, but in this case I don't see why more research is necessary for the question to be on-topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the question already has information about how it will be used. There are two example sentences, which have in fact been there since the question was first asked. This is good! I don't understand what more context is needed. The intended meaning seems pretty straightforward to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something? What's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T23:45:17.590" Title="Why was there such a negative reaction to this question: &quot;Word for a person from another race?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|question-closure|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7681" CreationDate="2016-02-07T17:56:42.133" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, if you're missing something, I'm missing it too. I have no idea what the close-voters were thinking, but in any case, it's reopened now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Hint for the future: there really isn't much you can research for a word request. The bad word requests are the ones that don't give a &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt;, and newsflash: two example sentences is perfectly sufficient context.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T17:56:42.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7687" CreationDate="2016-02-08T02:38:28.303" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I better run this past the meta before asking it on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been directed here from Biology.SE regarding good scientific language, see the question below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/43058/proportion-of-mass&quot;&gt;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/43058/proportion-of-mass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this fall under &quot;Word choice and usage.&quot; and so is ok to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6335" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:15.263" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T13:22:44.180" Title="Proportion of Mass? Checking if this question is ok" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7681" CreationDate="2016-02-08T03:09:59.277" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've got to understand that single-word-requests are obnoxious in general.  Yes, maybe half have straight-forward answers, but the other half fall into at least one of several categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The concept is so rare and specific that there's no &quot;evolutionary pressure&quot; to specialize a word to fit.  Eg, a single word to describe a web page with an X in the upper right corner and a pulsating circle in the lower left.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The desired meaning is unclear.  (The subject question has this problem to a degree.  What is the meaning of &quot;another race&quot;?  Is a light-skinned African-American considered of &quot;another race&quot; in the US?  What about someone from Iran?  Or even Italy?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(As in this case) there's often a strong hint that the desire is for terminology that can be used pejoratively.  Wordies here don't generally object to dredging up old, colorful pejoratives for works of fiction, but it goes against the grain of a word lover to intentionally expose a perfectly fine word to the degradation of use in the service of bigotry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's predictable that valid suggestions will be ignored/rejected, for one reason or another.  (Somehow you can just tell this is going to happen.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And one I forgot, though pretty much disjoint from the others (though I suppose there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; often substantial overlap with #1):  Requests to provide a variable or procedure name for a computer program.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="70861" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T13:46:19.440" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T13:46:19.440" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7681" CreationDate="2016-02-08T06:34:33.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can tell you what I was thinking when I voted to close it, and my thinking is neatly encapsulated in Mari-Lou's comment below her own answer: &quot;the OP didn't specify&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question stands, it is unanswerable because we lack information. Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What research was done. This was asked for, and though the OP refers to it it is not provided. I don't see myself as being here to do other people's research for them, and if they have done some research but won't share it, it is almost certain thet we are going to provide suggestions that they have already found and rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What words were rejected, and why. Why are the standard words such as foreign, outsider, alien, etc. not acceptable? Why can't these 'people of another race' simply be referred to by their race or nationality?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As Hot Licks says, what is meant by 'race'? Is the OP meaning colour, nationality, or both? If so, why are the standard white/non-White/coloured phrases not acceptable? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the 'different race' individual the same nationality or not? We need this information to include or exclude phrases such as &quot;ethnic minority&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without this information, the question is way too broad and any answer is going to have circumstances where it is not suitable and a whole bunch of &quot;aaaah but...&quot; responses below it, because &quot;the OP didn't specify&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastEditorUserId="18649" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T08:47:02.817" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T08:47:02.817" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7675" CreationDate="2016-02-08T09:01:27.630" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no rule against posting on Meta an annotated list of questions that you would like other people to join you in close-voting, or against updating such a list as often as you like. Since questions that have been nominated for closure already appear in a list in the Review queue, I think it's fair to say that this standing or recurring list would amount to an ongoing lobbying effort designed to recruit Meta readers to support your (and presumably others') close preferences. Undoubtedly, precedent exists for such lobbying in the form of Meta posts that users submit in favor of reopening particular questions that they feel were incorrectly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your proposal differs from those one-off efforts in being a systematic attempt to rally opposition to the questions you (and other close voters) think should not be on the site. If successful as a lobbying tool, it would increase the number of closed questions on the site. So one question that other site participants might ask themselves is whether they share the view that the current system—lacking, as it does, the additional publicity of a weekly or biweekly hit list of questions identified on Meta as Low-Quality Questions—is unsatisfactory as a way of dealing with suspect questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that any innovation that increases the likelihood that questions on the site will be closed also (though certainly not intentionally) increases the likelihood that good questions will get swept up in the dragnet and closed. And to me, few things are more counterproductive to the goals of this site than closing good questions because they superficially fit into one or another close category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a second issue with this proposal that I think deserves careful thought. EL&amp;amp;U's current review system requires reviewers to assess the merits of questions nominated for closure (or computer-identified as potentially being of low quality) in random order as they pop up in the Review queue. This arrangement works against targeted reviewing. Posting a list of particular questions on Meta under the heading &quot;Low Quality Questions,&quot; in contrast, invites targeted close-voting. This undoubtedly makes close voting easier—because a person can jump straight to the question and click 'Close.' But I think it also throws the vetting process out of balance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, there isn't a 'Leave Open' button on the post itself that a person who disagrees with the claimed LQQ status of that question can click. So a person who sees a post on the LQQ list of the week and agrees that it should be closed can click the link to jump directly to the question and vote to close it, but a person who thinks that it should stay open has to reach the question the old-fashioned way (through the randomly ordered Review queue) to vote to keep it open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To equalize that system, it seems to me, we would have to add a 'Leave Open' button next to the 'Close' button on each posted question, so that voters could register their support or opposition to closing a particular question with equal ease. Otherwise, we skew the system in favor of closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conclusion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If adopted, this proposal to establish a recurring list on Meta of posts recommended for closure might significantly increase the number of questions that get closed and the speed with which closure happens. Whether you think that result would be a good thing for EL&amp;amp;U depends in part on whether you think the site's current review system strikes a satisfactory or unsatisfactory balance between closing worthless questions and preserving valid ones. I am opposed to maintaining on Meta a standing list of questions that should be closed, because I think this approach would create a path to closure that sidesteps the existing closure system and enables pro-closure voters to exploit the fact that individual question pages have a 'Close' button but not a 'Leave Open' button. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that some site users may be deeply frustrated by the number of bad questions they see open on EL&amp;amp;U at any particular moment, and that they may not believe that closing good questions is much of a problem. If I shared that view, I might very well support this proposal. But I think that the current Review queue system for closing questions—random as it is—is a better and fairer way to deal with questions nominated for closure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T09:01:27.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7683" CreationDate="2016-02-08T12:18:46.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the problem with this question is that there are many answers that could conceivably work. See the first bullet point in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, namely, &lt;em&gt;every answer is equally valid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People could respond with &lt;em&gt;weight&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mass&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mols&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;volume&lt;/em&gt;, or just about any kind of measurement, and it could be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you narrowed it down to &lt;em&gt;mass&lt;/em&gt; (or the definition of &lt;em&gt;mass&lt;/em&gt;), then you've answered your own question and don't need to ask it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T12:18:46.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7689" CreationDate="2016-02-08T13:17:48.883" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phase&quot;&gt;phase&lt;/a&gt; tag and I am wondering what it is used for, since it does not have any description in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156082" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T13:27:56.480" Title="What is the phase tag used for?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7688" CreationDate="2016-02-08T13:27:56.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be &lt;em&gt;phrase.&lt;/em&gt; I'll deal with it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T13:27:56.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7698" CreationDate="2016-02-10T09:19:28.967" Score="9" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that we have two tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subject-verb-agreement&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;subject-verb-agreement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-agreement&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;verb-agreement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for similar questions. I briefly read some questions under them and I don't see much difference. Am I missing something? How about combining the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, a tag named &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/superfluity&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;superfluity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was created and is it necessary to have it when we have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/redundancy&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;redundancy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16.09.2016: All synonyms are in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T19:40:38.923" Title="Difference between &quot;verb-agreement&quot; and &quot;subject-verb-agreement&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T16:03:22.260" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Let's use the EL&amp;amp;U blog as our repository for canonical posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: the site's blog was closed some time after this post was made (it has since been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10550/142322&quot;&gt;archived&lt;/a&gt; on Meta). The blog is therefore no longer available as a repository for anything. However, the proposal isn't dependent on a blog &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. I've retained references to the blog because some of the arguments depend on ease of access and on prior content in the blog. If the elements of the former blog can be migrated to, say, somewhere on the help pages, the arguments below would still hold. They would just refer to the help pages instead of the blog. Please read this post with that substitution in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7667/discussion-on-reopening-a-specific-question-do-tenses-in-a-time-clause-never-b&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;, I raised the subject of canonical posts in passing. I'd now like to raise the subject on its own merits for discussion as a good way to address the issue of low-quality questions (LQQs) as well as a generally useful way to manage the information and meta-information spread around the ever-growing ELU site (questions, answers, forums, meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Motivation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LQQs (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7535/does-elu-have-worse-questions-than-other-sites&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;) are often raised because the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hasn't looked at the site rules and norms;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doesn't know where to find general references; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305426/like-also&quot;&gt;tried&lt;/a&gt; searching ELU but got lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list isn't exhaustive, but I think the above (the first item alone!) accounts for a large chunk of LQQs. To vote to close (VTC) the questions sometimes feels cruel as these new visitors are simply finding their way around a site filled with nooks and crannies, and think that a Q&amp;amp;A site ought to entertain questions and answers that appear &lt;em&gt;to them&lt;/em&gt; to be in the right ballpark. On the other hand, writing the same explanations over and over becomes tedious for the seasoned members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that information is spread out so much that even with the ELU search facility, it can be hard to find information you know you've seen before on ELU, let alone someone coming in fresh. Why is so-called Lit Crit so despised? Why isn't it enough to describe the single-word-request I'm after without putting it in a sentence? Why does &quot;This is what I want and the word is called ___.&quot; satisfy that requirement - or does it? I can go on, but I trust I've made my point: the answers are already there, but it takes quite some determined looking sometimes to get it. If a visitor didn't know the answers were there, they might not even think to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to use the term &lt;strong&gt;canonical post&lt;/strong&gt; here to mean an easily found, well-researched, well-written, well-mannered post that answers a basic question, be it about English, about ELU or about ELU's culture and norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Suggested Solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existing &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; provides the functionality we need for canonical posts. There's even a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1063/elu-blog&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; dedicated to the blogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the entries is &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/12/you-could-look-it-up/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You Could Look It Up&lt;/a&gt;. Having this post on tap means that we can now (actually, since 2012) simply link to it when we VTC questions for lack of research. If the VTC boilerplate linked to this post, all the better. Those voting to close don't need to type out the same boilerplate over and over again, while the newcomer gets to see an extensive post about the topic, complete with links to banks of general reference works for their perusal. This gives the dedicated answer-seeker the tools to do much of the research on their own. The only downside is that the tools may work so well that they don't return to EL&amp;amp;U to report their findings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested bloggers could add similar entries for the other VTC reasons to provide the affected OPs with tools to redraft their (our) questions to a higher standard. I'm not sure what the process is for submitting and vetting blogs, but it ought to be fairly tough and rigorous. I'm sure the moderators would be happy to tell us on the ELU blog's chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of blog entries can be expanded to provide canonical answers to common questions like those on back shifting. Issues like Lit Crit, once debated in full in ELU&lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; or private chat rooms etc, can have the best of their pros and cons summarised together with caveats and exceptions, all neatly packaged as a blog, ready to be linked to when a wayward question arises. It's envisaged that blog entries would be revised over time, though the revision process would need to be as thorough as the original compilation of the entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canonical posts offer a good way to increase the quality of ELU by making it easy for reviewers and others to quickly provide resources and information to question posters and answerers about the parts of ELU that are at the same time repetitive, essential, and (e.g. for VTC) call for tact. The existing ELU blog looks like a good repository for canonical posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Access&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;blog&lt;/code&gt; link could be made more prominent, but it is currently available from the StackExchange menu item next to &lt;code&gt;chat&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;logout&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T05:18:38.857" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T05:18:38.857" Title="Blog as Canonical Repository" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7696" CreationDate="2016-02-12T12:47:07.057" Score="7" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305999/reserved-or-ashamed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305999/reserved-or-ashamed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1 rep OP asks a clearly-a-homework-question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a sentence:&quot; As a(n) .... girl, she found it difficult to&#xA;  socialize with other students in the class.&quot; Can one of these answers&#xA;  is the best correct to indicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A) reserved&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    B) ashamed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    C) dynamic&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    D) industrious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the answer is B or A but I'm not sure. Can you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I downvoted it and vote to close and flagged it, but it did get me thinking. It's a question that has the potential for clear justifable answers, so is there anything wrong with it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T13:28:07.113" Title="Are we here to do homework questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|homework-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-16T05:50:31.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7695" CreationDate="2016-02-12T13:21:27.453" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could do it, but the question shows no research &amp;mdash; the difference between &lt;em&gt;reserved&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ashamed&lt;/em&gt; should be elicited from a dictionary and &lt;strong&gt;only then&lt;/strong&gt; asked about if it's not clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=research&quot;&gt;Previous Meta questions and answers&lt;/a&gt; (even &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/598/should-we-require-some-reasonable-research-being-done-aka-questions-that-can-b&quot;&gt;as far back as 2011&lt;/a&gt;) have indicated that we're not here to do elementary research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the question were worded &quot;What is the difference between &lt;em&gt;reserved&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;withdrawn&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (for example; that's a feasible confusion, unlike &lt;em&gt;reserved&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ashamed&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; written showing the research &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043/18696&quot;&gt;like my example from summer 2014&lt;/a&gt; then it would be answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T13:28:07.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7691" CreationDate="2016-02-14T03:30:29.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have now suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subject-verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subject-verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subject-verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt;. If this suggestion is accepted, then in the future all questions that people try to tag with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subject-verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subject-verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subject-verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt; will be automatically re-tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to accomplish this, at least four other people with an answer score of 5 or greater in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verb-agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verb-agreement&lt;/a&gt; tag need to vote up the suggestion. Three people have done so already, so we only need one more! They can do that from here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/verb-agreement/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/verb-agreement/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know what your score is in this tag, you can see it from the &quot;tags&quot; tab on your profile. There is also a list of top answerers for the tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/verb-agreement/topusers&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/verb-agreement/topusers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we're on the subject of agreement and tag synonyms, it seems to me that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/concord&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;concord&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;concord&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Questions about grammatical agreement&quot;) should be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/agreement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;agreement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;agreement&lt;/a&gt;. Anyone with the requisite reputation can suggest that here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/agreement/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/agreement/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T17:34:50.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T09:33:29.730" Score="4" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it correct that my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305757/idiom-request-for-wasting-time-or-money&quot;&gt;Idiom request for wasting time or money&lt;/a&gt; was put aside as not respectful of   the site rules. I have a short experience here but I think it was clear and it actually received many interesting answers. I had also posted an example of where to use the sentence as requested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is wrong with my question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T11:10:18.750" Title="What is wrong with my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7706" CreationDate="2016-02-14T11:56:41.897" Score="13" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it any use answering or commenting on a question that was asked years ago? Or is it just 'un coup d'épée dans l'eau' (a strike of the sword at water), meaning a complete waste of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T03:17:37.133" Title="Is it any use answering or commenting on a question that was asked years ago?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T12:51:17.447" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you start a bounty on a question that already has an accepted answer, if you feel that your answer to the question is better than the one that was accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2022-05-26T19:48:52.637" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T19:48:52.637" Title="Can you start a bounty on a question that already has an accepted answer?" Tags="|support|bounty|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T21:20:40.000" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5418/word-meaning-coincidence-of-reference-to-the-unusual&quot;&gt;Word meaning coincidence of reference to the unusual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133033/phenomenon-of-learning-a-new-word-that-youve-never-seen-before-and-then-seeing?lq=1&quot;&gt;Phenomenon of learning a new word that you&amp;#39;ve never seen before, and then seeing it being used&lt;/a&gt; (currently merged with the above)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16304/a-single-word-for-a-psychological-bias?lq=1&quot;&gt;A single word for a psychological bias&lt;/a&gt; (currently marked as duplicate of the first question above)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to me it seems that the first question is more about &quot;coincidences,&quot; while the second is about a psychological phenomenon. The issue I have is that the second, merged question is pretty much the same as a new question that was recently asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/307393/a-word-for-when-you-just-learned-a-new-word-and-suddenly-you-notice-it-everywher&quot;&gt;A word for when you just learned a new word and suddenly you notice it everywhere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the top answer for the first question about &quot;word meaning coincidence of reference to the unusual&quot; is &quot;synchronicity,&quot; which I don't think is the best answer for the putative duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another probable duplicate, which again has top answers like &quot;synchronicity&quot; and &quot;coincidence&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/304639/term-for-simultaneous-rare-experience-occurrence/304663#304663&quot;&gt;Term for: Simultaneous rare experience/occurrence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should divide these questions into two groups of duplicates: one that asks for the name of this taken as an actual phenomenon (with the answers of &quot;coincidence&quot; and &quot;synchronicity&quot;) and one that asks for the name of this taken as a perceived, illusory phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something like this. It is sort of hard to determine exactly how to split them. The current situation is kind of confusing though; there's a lot of linked questions, a few are merged, and there's considerable duplication of answers across questions (sorry, I just contributed to that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other possible duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153166/what-is-the-term-for-when-you-become-more-aware-of-something?lq=1&quot;&gt;What is the term for when you become more aware of something?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T00:58:31.577" Title="Related questions that I think were incorrectly merged" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T02:39:26.883" Score="2" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see several discussions of titles containing vulgar words, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/561/what-should-we-do-about-question-titles-containing-vulgar-words&quot;&gt;What should we do about question titles containing vulgar words?&lt;/a&gt;, but nowhere can I find an actual POLICY stated, even though sumelic is claiming there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there a policy??&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, where is it documented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T19:36:17.117" Title="What is the policy for question titles containing vulgar words?" Tags="|discussion|titles|bowdlerization|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7704" CreationDate="2016-02-15T03:02:42.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it is not very well documented. The reason I believe there is such a policy is because of previous meta posts, and the continuing actions of site moderators. An important point that I forgot to mention is that the policy was originally network-wide, top-down rather than something that was created by the users of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the relevant posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/975/do-we-really-need-to-add-nsfw-in-question-titles/981#981&quot;&gt;Do we really need to add &amp;quot;NSFW&amp;quot; in question titles?&lt;/a&gt; (Jeff Atwood's answer here in 2011 says that question titles should be censored; I assume he was speaking here as a representative of the Stack Exchange team)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2357/censorship-of-offensive-questions/2359#2359&quot;&gt;Censorship of offensive questions&lt;/a&gt; (MετάEd's answer here from 2012 describes this as a network policy; the answer proposes adding it to the FAQ, but it looks like this was never done!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any more recent statements from Stack Exchange on the ELU site. But without further information, I assume the policy has not changed. From what I have seen, the site moderators do currently follow this practice. They should be able to tell you more about its current status, and whether they do it just because they think it is a good idea, or if there are still instructions from Stack Exchange to enforce this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some relevant, more recent general Meta posts from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/811/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; (a current Community Manager for Stack Exchange, Inc.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/172736/306255&quot;&gt;Copying profanities and obscene words on Meta&lt;/a&gt; (from 2013)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/238581/306255&quot;&gt;Profanity in hot questions list&lt;/a&gt; (from 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this last one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's precious little value and plenty of potential harm from&#xA;  scattering vulgar language across the sidebars of the entire network.&#xA;  Not only does it irritate people, the titles also get indexed in&#xA;  search results as part of the pages they're linked from - we've gotten&#xA;  complaints from folks who found their questions listed in search&#xA;  results for some fairly shocking phrases due to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under normal circumstances, it's best to either close or edit&#xA;  questions that contain vulgar language. However, we do block a range&#xA;  of vulgar terms from appearing in the network-wide &quot;hot&quot; list as a&#xA;  fall-back in cases where there's a dispute or the post is simply&#xA;  overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, what counts as &quot;profanity&quot; that needs to be censored is not entirely clear; Jeff's answer talks about &quot;extremely vile curse word[s],&quot; and Shog's is about the programming language Brainfuck, which contains a word usually considered to be &quot;stronger&quot; than &lt;em&gt;shit.&lt;/em&gt; It's not uncommon to see posters on various Stack Exchange sites use words like &lt;em&gt;crap&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dick.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the general position seems to be that &lt;em&gt;titles&lt;/em&gt; specifically should minimize their use of words that are considered vulgar by some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:15:53.720" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7700" CreationDate="2016-02-15T08:59:58.330" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have an answer that better answers the question than any other answer already there, then please post the answer. Questions get more views the older they get, and new information comes to light all the time, so it's in the best interest of the site to post a new answer when the answer has more up to date information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New answers bump the question to the top of the front page, so your answer will garner new attention to the question, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is little to no point commenting on questions that old. Unless there is something really insightful you can ask of the person who posted the question, that will make the question useful, it's unlikely to be worth yours or anybody else's time to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting on older answers might be helpful if you have some constructive criticism and the person who answered is still active on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T08:59:58.330" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7700" CreationDate="2016-02-15T18:03:11.697" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relatively new participants at this site may not be aware of how much traffic older questions get; but anyone who has asked a question of broader interest than &quot;Is this sentence correct?&quot; can see (by referring to the Questions data recorded on their 'Activity' page) how the number of views the question has drawn continues to grow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The substantial number of Necromancer badges awarded on English Language &amp;amp; Usage provides strong evidence of the value to later site visitors of posting well-conceived new answers to older questions. This silver badge, awarded when you &quot;Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more,&quot; has been earned 975 times on EL&amp;amp;U, even though such answers have to compete against longer-established answers and (in many cases) accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage is an unusual Stack Exchange site in that it hosts many questions that ask for factual answers but that nonetheless may be answered in multiple useful ways. Even when a question has one or more good answers, it is often entirely possible to introduce a new, nonrepetitive, good answer that makes the collective EL&amp;amp;U answer (which consists of all of the answers on that page) even stronger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test I use in deciding whether to post a new answer to an old question is this: Does the answer I have in mind provide new and useful information or a different and interesting perspective for understanding the problem that the original poster's question asks about? If so, it's worth posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T18:03:11.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7699" CreationDate="2016-02-16T02:00:34.430" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although your idiom request was quite clear, your &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; question is of interest regarding ELU questions more generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer just addresses the issue of adding &lt;em&gt;sample sentences&lt;/em&gt;, but the principle behind other requirements (e.g. &lt;em&gt;show your research&lt;/em&gt;) is similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good answers often take a lot more time and effort to produce than it took to ask the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is therefore only fair that the crafting of questions is held to a high standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site (ELU), a guess at (or statement of) the &lt;em&gt;requested word or idiom&lt;/em&gt; on its own is often considered insufficient as an answer to questions tagged single-word-requests, idiom-requests and the like. Dictionary entries, arguments for and against, Ngram links, or references to other accepted authorities are par for the course. This is also the case more generally - answers are expected to be backed up by research or logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After going to the trouble of finding a word or idiom to satisfy the request, it's a little disheartening when the OP (original poster) rejects it because &lt;em&gt;that's not quite what I had in mind&lt;/em&gt;. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/44619/mari-lou-a&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou's two examples&lt;/a&gt; in the comments to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Friend: You really _______, haven't you? How do you think you're going to pass the exam next week?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob: You shouldn't have ______ money. Now you need to fix your car, where's the money going to come from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &lt;em&gt;ran your well dry&lt;/em&gt; (adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/305986/142322&quot;&gt;K1eran's answer&lt;/a&gt; to your idiom request) fits the first but is clumsy in the second. On the other hand, the past tense &lt;em&gt;squandered&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/305765/142322&quot;&gt;matt's single-word answer&lt;/a&gt; fits the second but not the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a sample sentence means that those who answer can simply drop their answers into the blanks to check if they fit, and avoid the research if they don't. The answers tend therefore to be more satisfying to the OP, or else easily down-voted since the OP's intent is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clear question, an answer that clearly answers the question, community support for the answer by up-votes, and the green tick of approval all help the broader community and contribute toward the fundamental goal of all Stack Exchange sites: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. When a visitor searches for the same question and lands on yours, all these factors contribute to helping them decide whether the answer is useful for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And it all starts with clarity in the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T22:05:18.707" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T10:43:24.893" Score="-2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/307575/does-wage-war-mean-declare-war&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;wage war&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;declare war&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; was rejected by users on EL&amp;amp;U while my second question,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/81519/can-wage-war-be-synonymous-with-declare-war&quot;&gt;Can “wage war” be synonymous with “declare war”?&lt;/a&gt; has been well received and has attracted a lot of attention on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that ELL is a site for more basic questions compared to EL&amp;amp;U, but I don't understand why it was rejected because of lack of research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked dictionaries and gave the definitions I found, but after that I still didn't  understand if &quot;wage war against&quot; can be used as a synonym of &quot;declare war against&quot;. The  definitions are similar but I have a doubt so I asked here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I to understand that my doubt about the usage of &quot;wage war&quot; is too basic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other research should I have done to solve my doubt by myself? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are EL&amp;amp;U users so quick  to reject questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T02:58:30.727" Title="Why was my question rejected on EL&amp;U yet well-received on ELL?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7710" CreationDate="2016-02-16T11:37:26.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the fifth close-voter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tagline for English Language and Usage (ELU): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site&#xA;  for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English Language Learners (ELL): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site&#xA;  for &lt;strong&gt;speakers of other languages learning English&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a gray area between the two sites and some questions could be well received on both sites. However, some questions are not well received on ELU because they could be considered as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt; answerable by your favorite &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;English language tools&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very unlikely for &lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt; to be confused with to &lt;em&gt;wage&lt;/em&gt; and to &lt;em&gt;declare&lt;/em&gt;. The most &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/81519/can-wage-war-be-synonymous-with-declare-war&quot;&gt;upvoted answer&lt;/a&gt; to your question on ELL states in the first sentence, &quot;The two concepts (&quot;declaring war&quot; and &quot;waging war&quot;) are &lt;strong&gt;distinct&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to advise you to visit our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; and read the articles, especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Asking&lt;/a&gt;. It will help you if you spend some time trying to understand what kind of question is upvoted or downvoted, and closed or put on hold on both sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will learn more as time goes by. You are always welcome here with an on-topic question for ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T02:58:30.727" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7713" CreationDate="2016-02-16T13:46:19.010" Score="3" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this dedicated &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;Community Moderator Elections&lt;/a&gt; page on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help but wonder...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did the EL&amp;amp;U elections happen in 2015? If not, why? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At what intervals (once in 2 years/ 3 years) are the EL&amp;amp;U moderator elections held? ( I observed that the elections were conducted in 2011,2012 and 2014 in EL&amp;amp;U. However, I don't see any election details for the year 2013. So it is not regular is my inference )&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What factors necessitate moderator elections on EL&amp;amp;U? (spurt in low-quality questions, spike in number of users would be my guesses) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a &quot;SIMILAR QUESTION&quot; populated in the right panel as I type this - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4781/will-there-be-a-2014-community-moderator-election&quot;&gt;Will there be a 2014 Community Moderator election?&lt;/a&gt; posted by &lt;strong&gt;Mari-LouA&lt;/strong&gt;. I'd like to re-ask the same for this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will there be a 2016 Community Moderator election?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/stack-exchange-moderator-elections-begin/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; from 2010 by Jeff Atwood. I doubt whether it is relevant after 6 years.  I assumed that community moderator elections are conducted every year across all the 150+ sites in SE network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T14:39:55.910" Title="Was no community moderator election conducted in 2015?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7712" CreationDate="2016-02-16T14:39:55.910" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, there was no election in 2015, because it wasn't needed (see 3 below).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elections are held as needed (see 3 below), so there is no set interval.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elections are held when the amount of moderator intervention required exceeds the amount of intervention possible from the existing team. That is, when more manpower is needed, the community is asked whether they can provide it and to volunteer if so moved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to say what will happen in 2016 (see 3 above). It is definitely not possible to say how many vacancies there may be to fill, other than to say it may be zero and is more-or-less certain to be less than ten.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff's post is still relevant, although not really relevant to your question. It covers the necessity for self-government and the mechanism of the elections themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T14:39:55.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7704" CreationDate="2016-02-16T16:43:15.920" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/981/3559&quot;&gt;Jeff Attwood's answer&lt;/a&gt; (as lank to by sumelic) is the definitive answer. There is no profanity allowed in question titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question with a swearword, etc., in the title please edit the title. Either censor the words, e.g. change &lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;f***&lt;/em&gt;, or reword the title so that it doesn't require such a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T16:43:15.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7710" CreationDate="2016-02-16T21:39:54.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think &quot;too basic&quot; is really the right dividing line. Some questions on ELL can be difficult to answer, because some aspects of English are difficult to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &quot;too intuitive&quot; would be a better way to say it. (Most native speakers instinctively know the difference between &lt;em&gt;declaring&lt;/em&gt; war and &lt;em&gt;waging&lt;/em&gt; war: War is &lt;em&gt;declared&lt;/em&gt; by political leaders and rulers, war is &lt;em&gt;waged&lt;/em&gt; by soldiers and sailors and airmen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the reason a question gets closed, it's not unusual for that reason to be a little bit misleading. Closevoters are presented with a menu that gives them a list of canned reasons why a question might be closed. Sometimes one of those reasons is a clear fit, other times it's simply the best available option from the ones listed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UbZhw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UbZhw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, if you think your question is something that is easily and readily understood by most native speakers, you may want to consider asking it on ELL. I've discussed this some more in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/3723#3723&quot;&gt;earlier answer to a similar ELU meta question&lt;/a&gt;, and in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4306/roses-are-red-apples-are-green&quot;&gt;question I asked a couple years ago&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T21:39:54.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-17T03:41:52.927" Score="2" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;LucidityofPower posted Q1 (below) which was closed as a duplicate of Q2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/301187/is-this-sentence-grammatical-all-there-is-are-idiolects&quot;&gt;Is this sentence grammatical: “all there is, are idiolects?” [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13056/the-thing-is-is-that&quot;&gt;“The thing is, is that…”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2 is an example of the double copula, but as my answer to Q1 argues, apart from an extraneous comma, the quoted phrase in Q1 doesn't contain a double copula. (Note: there is also a possible issue with singular / plural agreement, but that's not addressed by Q2 either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I've proposed reopening the question&lt;/strong&gt;, but so far there are only 3 votes to reopen. Is Q1 really a duplicate of Q2? If not, could I please request that more people vote to reopen the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate issue is whether the question is a low-quality question. I don't think it is, though I also invite replies about this. The is/are collocation is quite interesting, as is the issue about whether noun phrase admits both singular and plural agreement depending on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T19:33:08.240" Title="I think the 'idiolects' question isn't a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7700" CreationDate="2016-02-17T14:37:17.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is &quot;Sure, go for it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm providing an answer to this very old question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T14:37:17.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8024" CreationDate="2016-02-18T03:14:52.590" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at a profile that seems to have a new layout and was initially confused by the post listing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQ4hp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQ4hp.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;All Questions Answers&quot; and &quot;Votes Newest&quot; text don't provide any indication as to which category and sort option is selected, and initially I didn't realize that they could be clicked at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the active ones supposed to be bolded or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm using Chrome 48.0.2564.97 m on Windows 8.1, and see the same in IE 11 and FF 40.0.2.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3347" LastEditorUserId="109857" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T12:38:13.977" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T12:43:36.983" Title="&quot;All Questions Answers&quot; hard to understand on new profile pages" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-19T05:39:21.690" Score="5" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my view, it looks like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from both personal experience and observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303080/is-there-a-similar-english-phrase-for-this-tamil-proverb-lavish-outside-home&quot;&gt;top voted question&lt;/a&gt; so far is regarding English idioms corresponding to a proverb in Tamil(my native language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Soudabeh's profile is loaded with such questions, as evident from her( or his?) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/125388/soudabeh?tab=questions&quot;&gt;Profile&lt;/a&gt; page. And most of them are very well received (high up-votes, viewed many times, favorited by many, diverse answers, lots of comments and discussions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in recent times I've also come across questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/307865/is-programming-not-a-noun&quot;&gt;sample&lt;/a&gt;) concerning the very basics of English, but tend to get less votes/views. However they attract well researched and well written answers from users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My questions:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; If I happen to have lots of questions about English equivalents of thousands of expressions from my native language, can I ask them too without any hesitation?(of course after duly verifying that they have not been asked before)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; Why is that &amp;quot;English equivalents of foreign phrases&amp;quot; questions are (generally) more popular than other types of questions(grammar, etymology, pronunciation or anything that a serious English language enthusiast would be interested in)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I enjoy @Soudabeh's questions and this question is more about my curiosity than me being nitpicky. I apologize in advance for taking (user)names of others. Please feel free to edit and remove the information if that's unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T17:41:19.757" Title="Is the EL&amp;U community generally more receptive to idiom-requests that seek English equivalents for foreign phrases?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7704" CreationDate="2016-02-19T19:36:17.117" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question's title is written in a vulgar tongue.  Writing ELU question titles in English should be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86541" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T19:36:17.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7255" CreationDate="2016-02-20T04:20:55.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the full text of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If one circular object A (such as a hair rubber band) has the same radius at rest as another B, but stretches to a larger radius than B is able to, is there a way to say &quot;A is xxxxxer than B&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear enough to me. You have two circular objects A and B. Both have the same radius when untouched. A can be stretched more than B. Fill in the &quot;xxxxxer&quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7255/why-was-my-flag-declined-and-can-we-close-this-question?rq=1#comment28693_7255&quot;&gt;suggestion by FumbleFingers&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;stretchier&lt;/em&gt;) seems to fit well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133013/single-word-to-express-an-object-having-a-larger-radius#comment628118_133013&quot;&gt;Plates&lt;/a&gt; are not normally considered to be stretchy (they are close enough to having fixed radii in this context). Using a plate as A or B gives you a trivial answer to whether it is stretchier (or xxxxxer) than the other. Alternatively, applying xxxxxer to non-stretchy things is out of the question's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I think that as far as &lt;em&gt;clarity&lt;/em&gt; is concerned, the question is on-topic for ELU regardless of its age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T04:20:55.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7719" CreationDate="2016-02-20T15:21:21.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;well-asked&lt;/em&gt; question will almost always be welcome, whatever the subject.&#xA;If you have done some research and come up with apparently unhelpful results; if you then put some effort into asking a specific question and checking that it has not been asked before; above all if you have a new and interesting topic, you will gather upvotes and answers in profusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is easier if you are looking for an equivalent for a pungent foreign idiom than if you are teetering between the Scylla of &quot;Everybody in my new class pronounces &lt;em&gt;exit&lt;/em&gt; with a &lt;em&gt;gs&lt;/em&gt; sound rather than the &lt;em&gt;ks&lt;/em&gt; I am used to; who is right?&quot; and the Charybdis of &quot;I want there to be a word &lt;em&gt;irregardless&lt;/em&gt;; why are all the dictionaries wrong?&quot;. But just asking &quot;What is the English for this Tamil proverb?&quot; will certainly not be popular, even if it is not closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T15:21:21.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-02-21T10:50:15.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rPCM4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160721" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T13:01:09.070" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7632" CreationDate="2016-02-21T17:44:04.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like the alignment issue is fixed in Firebox, Chrome and IE 11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latest side bar screenshot is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wO3Fe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wO3Fe.png&quot; alt=&quot;Latest side bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154058" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T17:44:04.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7716" CreationDate="2016-02-22T19:36:40.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; just rubber-stamp appeals on meta to reopen questions, but in this case I just thought it through and decided it wouldn't be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The thing is&lt;/em&gt; expressions like &lt;em&gt;There is...&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;It's [just] that...&lt;/em&gt; are effectively &quot;syntactically complete&quot; in and of themselves - so they don't necessarily force syntactic changes in associated text. From my perspective, that means you can introduce your &quot;executive summary&quot; by saying &lt;em&gt;What it is&lt;/em&gt; regardless of whether &quot;it&quot; is singular or plural, or whether the actual text of &quot;the thing&quot; starts with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T19:36:40.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T22:34:39.013" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in reviving my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/304316/meaning-of-phrase-early-late-in-the-piece&quot;&gt;Meaning of phrase &quot;Early/late in the piece&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It was closed and then automatically deleted. I've tried to edit it to improve it. Is this question any good now, or is it still lacking something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(After it got put &quot;on hold&quot; I tried to improve it, but I wasn't sure at that point what procedure I was supposed to follow to possibly get its &quot;on hold&quot; status reviewed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T22:34:39.013" Title="Is this question sufficiently improved to be undeleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7700" CreationDate="2016-02-23T00:05:02.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original poster or the age of the question is not the point at all. The point is the quality of the question and the quality of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you post an answer to any question, here is who benefits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all users of WorldWideWeb, who often Google a question and find the answer on a StackExchange site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all users of StackExchange and the particular StackExchange site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the individual who asked the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the individual who writes each answer because sharing knowledge enhances the knowledge of the person who shares it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the person who asks the question is not the only beneficiary of the answer. If they had that question, it is likely many others have that question. That is why StackExchange is on the Web rather than the questions just going to the original poster through email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, how old a question is doesn’t actually tell you whether answering it will benefit the original poster. Someone can ask a question on a StackExchange site, then 5 minutes later find the answer somewhere else, and then you come along and answer a 10 minute old question that is already irrelevant to the original poster. But your answer may help another StackExchange reader a half hour after that, and somebody who finds the answer through Google the next day, and then 200 people who find the answer through Google over the next month. And then 2000 people over the next two years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is a reference book. The questions are just a way to create a new chapter and add to the book. The book is written for everyone, including people who will read this page 5 years from now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88309" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T00:05:02.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7735" CreationDate="2016-02-23T19:46:53.537" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question asking if all three words: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/306268/can-a-single-sentence-be-made-using-words-to-too-and-two-consecutively-one-af&quot;&gt;&quot;to&quot;, &quot;too&quot;, and &quot;two&quot;&lt;/a&gt; could be used consecutively to form a single sentence, by @1Fish_2Fish_RedFish_BlueFish has been placed on hold after being rejected for migration from &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/27825/can-a-single-sentence-be-made-using-words-to-too-and-two-consecutively-one-af&quot;&gt;Puzzling&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage is certainly not devoid of humo[u]r (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2459/what-are-some-examples-of-awkward-sounding-but-grammatically-correct-sentences&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) so it seems not inappropriate here (I have queried the rejection on Puzzling as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain to me why it was rejected on EL&amp;amp;U  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit in response to answers: would it be possible to add a note to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2459/what-are-some-examples-of-awkward-sounding-but-grammatically-correct-sentences&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; explaining why it is locked; something like &quot;This question is off-topic but is retained for interest&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106882" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:54.983" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T09:35:36.233" Title="Why was this question put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-23T20:14:12.333" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I undo acceptance of an answer if another one ends up getting more votes than the one I initially accepted… and that other answer is mine! I mean, it adds a competitive edge to the otherwise sedate pursuit of if not truth, at least commonly received usage… !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2016-02-23T22:59:58.063" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T22:59:58.063" Title="Is it justified to undo acceptance of an answer if another one, later on, gets more votes?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7700" CreationDate="2016-02-23T22:09:10.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;YES. Yes. Yes. Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is a site designed to share expertise. Sometimes I may ask a question and get well-intentioned answers but find that none of them were really helpful. I'm sure OPs would appreciate new answers if that answer satisfactorily answers their question or solves their problem. (There is nothing like completeness!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, even if the question is too old for the new answer to benefit the OP, desperate answer-seekers - particularly programmers - may just find that golden answer you just posted to an age-old question. As a programmer, these golden answers are essential - I may be searching and searching, and finally... I have an answer! It works! It's a fantastic feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, yes! Google is a significant part of SE and your contributions might just help that person who has been searching for days for an answer to even a simple question. After all, a question left unanswered is a question that bugs and lurks around the mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The date is merely a timestamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Oh, and one last thing: If an answer has become outdated or no longer works, then it should certainly be rectified!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T22:09:10.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7730" CreationDate="2016-02-23T22:23:33.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are supposed to accept the answer to your question that most helped you, which may well be other than the one with the highest current vote total. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will do what they will do, but this is the expected determinant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T22:23:33.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7729" CreationDate="2016-02-24T07:40:04.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the second close-voter of the question. The question is not related with English Language and Usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe asking this community to write a sentence with three specific words is a request for &lt;strong&gt;writing advice&lt;/strong&gt;. It is not on-topic. If you visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Asking&lt;/a&gt;, you can find the following: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out of scope for this site: Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Original Poster (OP) is asking this community to write a sentence for him. This community is not a writing service. The OP should have written one or two sentences and asked specifically what is wrong with the sentence by identifying a specific concern in the sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is not clear. Originally the OP asked if the three words, to, too and two could be used one after the other &lt;strong&gt;consecutively&lt;/strong&gt; in a sentence. Look at the accepted answer. The three words were not placed one after the other. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tagline for English Language and Usage (ELU) clearly states:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site&#xA;  for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question would be helpful to any of current and future linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T07:45:11.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-24T12:11:00.700" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have found on my simple research, context clues are useful to learn meaning of dictionary words. For academic purpose, I need corpora of example sentences for dictionary words that contain such context clues as definition, contrast, example, restatement etc. It would be ok if I find 100-200 example sentences in each context clue category. Could anyone point me towards such resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are new to the concept of context clues, please &lt;a href=&quot;http://wps.ablongman.com/long_licklider_vocabulary_2/0,6658,416421-,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;refer to this site&lt;/a&gt;. For the type of sentences I am looking for, please &lt;a href=&quot;http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-context-clues.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;refer to this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152994" OwnerDisplayName="sangam" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T07:30:17.327" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T07:30:17.327" Title="Corpus of example sentences with context clues for dictionary words" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-02-25T07:30:50.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7729" CreationDate="2016-02-24T16:55:27.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One question like this is funny, but it opens the door to a lot of nonsense.  On another site (The Great Outdoors), I argued that questions that were  marginally on topic at best  were OK (if they were good questions) because the users could self-arrest on the slippery slope of accepting marginal questions.  But TGO gets fewer than 5 Qs/day. ELU has to be stricter.  Thus, I second Rathony's rational rationale.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T17:47:10.630" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T17:47:10.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7738" CreationDate="2016-02-24T23:54:45.960" Score="21" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed old questions revived because a new user posted an answer.  If the new answer adds information, that is good.  But many new answers to old Qs add nothing to the answers posted more than a year ago. (Often these answers are not only uninformative, but poorly worded and otherwise bad.)  See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/157572/if-you-say-in-english-wear-the-pants-in-a-relationship-then-can-you-also-say-w&quot;&gt;If you say in English: wear the pants in a relationship, then can you also say wear the skirt in a relationship?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sven Yargs posted a Yargsian answer in March 2014. After he posted his answer, two new users posted less than Yargs had already told us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest adding a new category for flagging an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  o adds nothing to previous answers  or&#xA;  o adds nothing to the accepted answer&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I am grateful that this question was brought up, because of the masterly Yargs answer.  Should we tolerate the clutter because of the goodies that are disinterred?      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T20:24:45.753" Title="Add new reason to flag answer: Adds nothing to answers already given?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2016-02-25T02:12:28.053" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need a new flag reason. If it plagiarizes another answer, flag it for moderator attention. If it's very low quality, flag it as &quot;very low quality.&quot; I think the current flag reasons are broad enough. If you think it doesn't add anything useful, you should downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other relevant Meta questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7475/warning-to-a-user-who-posts-the-same-exact-answer-and-answer-without-any-re&quot;&gt;Warning to a user who posts the &amp;quot;same (exact) answer&amp;quot; and answer &amp;quot;without any reference/research&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/proposal-to-protect-old-questions-from-lqa-by-low-rep-users&quot;&gt;Proposal to protect old questions from LQA by low-rep users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T22:10:10.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2016-02-25T07:29:56.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a similar question before, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7475/warning-to-a-user-who-posts-the-same-exact-answer-and-answer-without-any-re&quot;&gt;Warning to a user who posts the “same (exact) answer” and answer “without any reference/research”&lt;/a&gt;. I agree it would be better if we could have such a new category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances we don't have that category, I think the best way to deal with such an answer is to &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;leave a comment&lt;/strong&gt; for the poster to realize that their answers don't add additional value or information. I never hesitate to downvote such an answer and usually, minus one reputation that cost me in downvoting comes back when the answer is put in a review and deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can use &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; to distinguish good answers from bad or poorly-worded ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T07:29:56.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2016-02-25T17:48:12.473" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a persistent mindset that surfaces from time to time 'Bad answers should be deleted.' No, they shouldn't.  If it is unhelpful (as an answer identical to another must be), the post should be downvoted; the tooltip for a downvote says precisely that.  But there are many good reasons to leave a bad answer in place; not the least is that, by being downvoted, it shows future readers that is a bad idea to leave such answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And if you didn't want it deleted, what on earth would be the point of flagging it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T17:48:12.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-26T01:25:31.303" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U gets numerous questions along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/309866/clarifying-a-misunderstanding&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, asking how to deal with a communication &quot;situation&quot; between two parties.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the communication is face-to-face, sometimes via email, sometimes via formal letter, but the basic fact remains that there is little in the discussions which have to do with the specifics of the English language itself, but rather the questions are about how to manage human-to-human interactions, be it (as in this case) how to broach a sensitive question without creating further animus, or (as in other cases) the appropriate greeting and salutation to use in an email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a separate place for such questions, or, failing that, should they be closed as &quot;off topic&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T03:47:54.520" Title="Should there be a &quot;community&quot; on &quot;Interpersonal Communications&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7741" CreationDate="2016-02-26T03:09:14.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe there should be a place for such questions, but there won't be anytime soon.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some such questions should be on &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;  As for questions not suitable for The Workplace, as in your example, close them as off-topic, and by the time they are actually closed, the OP will have received some good guidance.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:50.307" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T03:35:07.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7741" CreationDate="2016-02-26T03:47:54.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one proposal in Area 51 for &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/92736/interpersonal-skills&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interpersonal Skills&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and I believe it is related with the example questions in your post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you agree with the proposal, you can follow it. If enough users follow it and commit in the next stage, Interpersonal Skills Stack Exchange Beta will be created in the same way &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Latin Language Beta&lt;/a&gt; has just been created. Then, we can migrate those questions or ask the posters to visit it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until then, I think it is better to close them as &lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Too Broad&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:09.220" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T03:47:54.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T08:19:49.717" Score="0" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rejection of edits seems to be final. Isn't it possible to argue the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my own rejected edit in mind — suggested edit to: &lt;em&gt;When is a gerund supposed to be preceded by a possessive pronoun?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6756/usage-of-the-gerund-preceded-by-the-possessive-pronoun&quot;&gt;StackExchange ELU 'When is a gerund supposed to be preceded by a possessive pronoun?'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/166910&quot;&gt;rejected edit suggestion about the title, replacing 'pronoun' with 'adjective or determiner'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, who would dare (to) say that possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs) and possessive adjectives or determiners (my, your, his, her, its, our, their) are the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T00:36:47.940" Title="Edit rejected: is it possible to respond to this?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7744" CreationDate="2016-02-27T10:32:10.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You appear to have misunderstood what editing is for. It is not to 'correct' somebody else's argument; otherwise every post would constantly be overwritten by those who disagree. Rather it is to improve the quality of the post, rather than the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with an answer to any question, you can (and should) post your own competing answer.  Since you are obviously right (even though, since you didn't include a link, I haven't seen the question) your answer will gain lots of upvotes and everybody will be happy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T10:32:10.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7744" CreationDate="2016-02-27T11:31:54.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand what happened. I have just edited the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have more than 2,000 reputation points, you can edit the post without having to go through the review process. Until then, you can try the followings: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please try to state clearly what the purpose of your edit is in &lt;strong&gt;Edit Summary&lt;/strong&gt; so that reviewers can understand what your intention is. But note that it can never prevent 100% a good edit from being rejected. We all make a mistake sometimes.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you are sure about the mistake, you can re-edit the post. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-02-27T13:54:35.753" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T13:54:35.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T12:00:14.350" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Subject question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/256801/whats-the-difference-between-bug-and-glitch&quot;&gt;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/256801/whats-the-difference-between-bug-and-glitch&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this question be migrated from Arqade to English Language &amp;amp; Usage, because it asks about game terminology or not? (It asks about the difference between &quot;Bug&quot; and &quot;Glitch&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162628" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:10:05.130" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T23:07:07.473" Title="Should we migrate this game terminology question here?" Tags="|discussion|migration|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7747" CreationDate="2016-02-27T12:19:23.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don't. The question itself is off-topic because of the following reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no research the OP has done. &quot;What is the difference between the two words?&quot; is not workable on English Language and Usage (ELU). The Original Poster (OP) should show us his/her own research efforts and context where s(he) heard or read the two words. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you thoroughly &lt;strong&gt;searched for an answer&lt;/strong&gt; before asking your&#xA;  question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found&#xA;  and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken&#xA;  the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious&#xA;  answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant&#xA;  answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a similar question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/238463/is-there-any-word-for-the-opposite-of-a-bug-in-programming&quot;&gt;Is there any word for the opposite of a “bug” in programming?&lt;/a&gt;. We don't even know where the OP heard the two words. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU doesn't welcome any question without the OP's own research efforts and proper context. I think it would be better for your community to judge whether to close it or leave it open.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T12:30:22.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T23:48:12.480" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the tedious tasks one takes on when answering questions here is citing from online dictionaries.  Since we're encouraged to provide more than a simple link we find ourselves performing little copy and paste chores.  However, the text you get when you do this seldom reproduces the format nicely.  So you end up also being a copy editor fixing all these little markup errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any good tricks to automate this mindless exercise?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T03:43:47.160" Title="Techniques to automate quoting from sources" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7749" CreationDate="2016-02-28T00:06:53.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always been willing to work hard to be just a little more lazy.  So I wrote a few regular expressions that work in notepad++ on sites like &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dictionary.reference.com/&lt;/a&gt; to automate this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lookup a word.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Copy its definition to notepad++.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Make sure to leave a blank line at the top.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Press ctrl+h and you'll see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pMFEI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pMFEI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ensure Search Mode is Regular expression (as shown above)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Fill in find and replace fields (see below)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Press &lt;code&gt;Replace All&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Copy to english.stackexchange.com to preview effect.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Repeat as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to correctly cite your source so everything is above board, nice and legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some handy replacements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fix numbered points being on a different line&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; Find what&lt;code&gt;:([0-9]).\r\n:&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Replace with&lt;code&gt;:\1. :&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Convert to hard returns, double space lines, add french quote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; Find what&lt;code&gt;:\r\n:&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Replace with&lt;code&gt;:  \r\n\r\n&amp;gt;:&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two bracketing colons &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt; are not part of these regular expressions.  Copy from between them.  Spaces aren't preserved well here so it's a hack around that limitation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, &lt;code&gt;\r\n&lt;/code&gt; are the windows codes for a newline.  If you're on mac or some other *nix you likely just want &lt;code&gt;\n&lt;/code&gt;.  The nicer text editors let you turn on a mode to show whitespace characters.  In notepad++ its View | Show Symbol | Show all characters.  This shows &lt;code&gt;\r\n&lt;/code&gt; as (CR)(LF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know a better method I'm all ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="76689" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T03:43:47.160" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T03:43:47.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7700" CreationDate="2016-02-28T03:17:37.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure you should! Question will be forever in doubt if there is no one answers. Just anwer to queetions you know the answer. As long as it is a question, it needs to be answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162581" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T03:17:37.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7753" CreationDate="2016-02-28T23:30:45.240" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got distracted and OKed a very bad question from a new user.  Mea Culpa.  Is there anything I can do except downvote and vote to close in this situation?  Is there no way to say &quot;Oops, I take it back&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T13:27:42.827" Title="Is there a way to instantly reverse an OK of a question by a new user?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7752" CreationDate="2016-02-29T00:35:21.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any, but you shouldn't worry about it. At most, it might lead to the question being removed from the &quot;posts by new users&quot; queue. You should just deal with it like you would with any bad question you encounter outside of a review queue: you can either downvote, or vote to close, or both, whatever you feel is best. (Or flag if one of those is appropriate.) If you vote to close, it will enter the close-vote review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-02-29T00:59:06.667" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T00:59:06.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7752" CreationDate="2016-02-29T13:27:42.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another thing you can do is to go to the post and flag it as low quality or for moderation intervention and mention there what is wrong with the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if a new post is mistakenly 'OKed' in the review queue, then people will notice it on the page and will deal with it accordingly, so no need to worry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59475" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T13:27:42.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7758" CreationDate="2016-02-29T18:23:30.237" Score="15" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat a self-centered question, but I love this site and yet at the same time feel my interest flagging recently, so I'm looking for some guidance from others who have and remain loyal and active here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gamification aspects of the SE model were enough to get me engaged initially, and kept my attention for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember quite when it happened, but I think around the 10K mark, when the last &quot;useful&quot; (by my lights) privileges are earned, I stopped caring about rep&amp;sup1;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In part, this makes my use of the site more enjoyable; I can be more casual, care less about the inevitable spats, take my time to offer comprehensive answers rather than fast answers, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as a side effect, it also makes me less motivated to provide answers at all. This effect, combined with the fact that I'm usually visiting the site from a phone, a device designed primarily for consumption rather than production (i.e. with inconvenient and handicapped input capabilities), is the reason you guys have to periodically chide me to convert my comment-answers into answer-answers&amp;sup2;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, I noticed that SE has added a new tier of privileges, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;Access To Site Analytics&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which at a high level promise &quot;three graphs show a timeline of posts, votes, and traffic&quot; as well as access to a full Google Analytics dashboard. That sounds neat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, finally, on to my question:&lt;/strong&gt; for those who have this new privilege, and use it: is it fun? Has it given you any interesting insights into how people use the site today, or ideas for how we could shape people's use tomorrow? Is it a draw for you to visit the site more frequently? Is it worth (probably) a couple months of investing time and effort to earn another 10K points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of that, for those of you who have 10K, 20K, 30K+ and are still growing: what brings you back? What motivates you to answer or ask questions? How do you keep the site fun for yourself after a year, or two, or three?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;Or, more precisely, I stopped caring about rep, qua rep, at about 2-3K, but I continued trying to gain it until I earned the last few privileges I thought would make my time here more satisfying&lt;/sub&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;Though I will take this opportunity to note that it's &lt;strong&gt;always fair game for anyone sees one of my comments and likes it, to go right ahead and convert it to an answer himself&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Consider this permanent and carte-blanche permission, so you don't even have to ask me. Heck, you don't never need to attribute or cite me! Feel free to either quote directly or paraphase, and bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate to taste. The only thing you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; do is put words in my mouth.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T18:48:48.247" Title="Is the new &quot;site analytics&quot; cool enough to bother about rep again?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7755" CreationDate="2016-03-01T07:16:20.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't answer your title as I am at 15K reputation points. It's fun to get my reputation points growing. One day I received 245 reputation points (200 daily limit reputation points + 3 acceptances + a few downvotes). I didn't know there is a daily limit until that day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't post many answers, but really enjoy reading comments and answers. Some users including you write a really good English that I will never possibly be able to command. And as a non-native English speaker, I learn a lot everyday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are some real English enthusiasts who care deeply about others' problems and difficulties. Many of questions on English Language and Usage are those I had when I was a beginner and intermediary and still, I find a majority of questions very helpful to me and they really help me to work on my project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a human part. There are conservatives, moderates and liberals on ELU as all other communities and countries have. Some are strict enforcing the rules and guidelines of this community and some are not. They sometimes have exchange of comments and opinions. People have different opinions and watching them how they behave and express their opinions is the real fun part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once, I was caught drunk-driving in Singapore. It is notorious for strict rules and punishment. They still cane people. But I was not charged with any fine or penalty. I still find it strange and ask myself, 'why did this officer let me go?' But since that happened, I've never driven drunk again anywhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another fun part; close-voting, up/down-voting, delete-voting and protecting questions. We can use moderator tools after we pass 10,000. It was one of the motivating factors when I crossed 5,000. But 20,000 doesn't seem to be as much motivating for me because I am not that interested in deleting answers. I don't even know what &lt;em&gt;expanded editing&lt;/em&gt; means.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All combined, I think it is fun to visit ELU. But, I don't find it as fun as before to increase my points after I crossed 15,000 points. I don't see big difference in privileges I will get eventually if I keep visiting ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T12:30:39.867" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T12:30:39.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T11:37:40.563" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have 8 categories as off-topic under &quot;Why should this question be closed?&quot; I have listed them in order of easiness in deciding whether to close-vote or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Proofreading question, (2) Lack of research, (3) Duplicate, (4) Primarily opinion-based, (5) Unclear (6) Too broad (7) Better suited on English Language and&#xA;  Learners, (8) Choosing an ideal word or phrase should have&#xA;  context &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your opinion might be different from mine and that is not an important issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue I want to raise here is about category No. (8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/310768/what-is-the-single-word-for-make-something-slow&quot;&gt;What is the single word for “make something slow”?&lt;/a&gt; This question was asked 5 hours ago with 472 views and 6 upvotes. I see two problems with this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no context in violation of this guideline: &lt;em&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is close to a general reference question. I firmly believe the word the Original Poster is looking for is readily searchable using their own &lt;em&gt;native language to English dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, e.g., by typing &lt;em&gt;slow (down) speed&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;make something slow&lt;/em&gt; into either their language website or dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why there has been no single close-vote for this question. Nowadays, I don't cast the first close-vote unless the question is blatantly off-topic for proof-reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason why this question remains open without any single close-vote?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took approximately 23 hours for this question to be closed. 989 views with 3 upvotes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/310627/phrase-for-doing-something-unexpectedly-fast&quot;&gt;Phrase for doing something unexpectedly fast&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another typical Single Word Request question without context. It is not even clear: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/310943/what-is-the-general-word-for-a-language-changing-process&quot;&gt;what is the general word for a “language-changing” process?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T16:14:55.337" Title="Close reason for Single Word Request question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7755" CreationDate="2016-03-01T18:18:16.907" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who has site analytics access, I can safely say that I looked at it once when I first heard about it (probably a couple of years ago), and then again today after I read your question, and at no point in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I see of it, it is idle-curiosity information at best, a momentary diversion.  I have no idea why they slotted it all the way up at 25k rep; there is nothing in there that merits such restrictive requirements.  I could just as easily imagine them putting it at 1k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be wrong and there's a wealth of fascinating detail buried in there somewhere, but a first glance shows &quot;voting percentages are pretty constant&quot;, &quot;people visit less on weekends/holidays&quot;, &quot;the network sidebar drives a lot of traffic&quot;, and &quot;google drives a heck of a lot of traffic&quot;, and doesn't promise to deliver much more insight than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for my motivational factors, I like seeing what questions people come up with.  I have a very hard time generating a question that is interesting, but isn't either already answered here or easily searched for elsewhere.  I also particularly like learning about idioms in other languages and coming up with corresponding English idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, while it's nice to watch my numbers creep up (very slowly at this point, for the most part), and I will be mildly tickled when I finally hit 40k, I do still like to try and work my way toward some new badges.  I'd love to get a gold tag badge and have to try to avoid accidentally badgehammering questions. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T02:19:42.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T02:19:42.433" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T19:51:42.883" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who can delete a comment, apart from their author?&#xA;Because it seems to me certain comments have a way of disappearing… ?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T19:51:42.883" Title="Some comments have a way of disappearing: who can delete a comment, apart from their author?" Tags="|discussion|support|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-03-01T23:07:34.553" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7757" CreationDate="2016-03-02T04:48:55.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what should be done. I don't even know if it's a problem if we enforce the current policy inconsistently or not. I do think that enforcement &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; currently inconsistent, but... I can find a way to justify that. Basically, I'll vote to close if the question actually seems unclear to me (especially if there are answers that seem to have missed the point of the question) but I often won't vote to close on other questions that don't meet the guidelines, but that somehow seem clear to me anyway. I thought there was a recent example of this, but I somehow can't find it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also less inclined to vote to close if there are already answers. For one thing, if the answers are upvoted, it means the question is much less likely to end up deleted. At that point, I want to leave the question open so that people will be able to post better answers. For another thing, it's just discouraging to see that so many people are willing to answer these sorts of questions, and it can make me re-consider my own judgement of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another observation: there seems to be a disconnect between the up-voters of this site and the &quot;close-voters&quot; of this site, as shown by the high number of votes these questions often receive. Again, I don't know what this means. In general, I don't trust up-voters to select good content. But it's a big part of the mechanisms of the site, and that's not going to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I wish single word requests were on a separate site. But at this point, a split like that seems impractical for many reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have guidelines, but ultimately the guidelines are supposed to be set and enforced by the community. If the community is not enforcing the guidelines, I think we should either change the guidelines to reflect this, or change the way the community acts. But I don't know what the best way to do that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important thing to me is that we avoid alienating knowledgeable users. But, how do we do this? Different users have different personalities. Some might be driven away by the presence of a lot of poorly-researched questions. But others might be driven away by a perception that ELU is being controlled by &quot;close vote police&quot; who go around closing interesting questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor: we want answers to be useful. But how do we best accomplish this? Closing a question prevents any new answers from being added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-03-03T16:14:55.337" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T16:14:55.337" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T06:05:57.653" Score="11" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a few weeks spent on this site, there is something I'd like to understand better and I think this is the place where to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the are a number  of rules regarding how and what a question and an answer should be about. Whenever these rules are broken, or as supposed to be broken, a system of rejection of the question or of the answer involved is activated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading comments both here and in the Q&amp;amp;A session I understand that the is often disagreement about the application of there rules, but in the end it appears to me that the stricter attitude gets the upper hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've  seen there are users who are more involved in this process (like users Rathoney and Sumelic for instance) but also many others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to understand is if there is a sort of &quot;hierarchy&quot; in deciding what is correct or wrong in applying the rules of this site: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have the more active users  on this front a  sort of 'mandate' in suggesting or imposing their views?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are moderators those who have the last word ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are users with more seniority and reputations those whose advice and views are  to be followed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T18:41:58.930" Title="Who is the boss here?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7761" CreationDate="2016-03-02T07:37:42.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The following is my personal view based on observation and experience. If users find any wrong data/fact, please feel free to edit it out.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as EL&amp;amp;U is concerned (or any site under the parent SE network, for that fact), you are your own boss! There is no hierarchy in place and the entire site is community run. You'd have noticed that even anonymous users can suggest edits to any post. However, there are various levels of Privileges that are set(till 25,000) to which access is granted once you accumulate the requisite reputation points. This is part of the gamification model in this site that help it retain users and kindle interest among them. Higher rep directly translates to more Privileges (along with added responsibility, I should say).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Have the more active users on this front a sort of 'mandate' in suggesting or imposing their views?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. I consider myself an active user and here's waht I think. If I feel that a post doesn't adhere to the community rules (listed under the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), I vote to close it. (It's a privilege I earned after hitting the 3k rep mark). Yet, my vote alone is not enough to close the post(It will be once I earn silver and gold tag badges). Four more community members need to agree with me in order for the question to be &lt;em&gt;completely closed&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, if a post is closed, it doesn't necessarily mean that we are intolerant towards the question. It just means, it has the scope to be improved so that it can prove really useful for the community in general. If the OP (expected) or any other good Samaritan of this site(least expected, as OP's context and problem is seldom known) edits the post, then we can vote to reopen the post. Similar to close votes, you need 5 reopen votes to enable the question to receive more answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;are moderators those who have the last word ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only in cases where the community is unable to arrive at a consensus. As you might be aware of, Mods have elevated privileges which gives them one-click powers to bring order if chaos prevails! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;are users with more seniority and reputations those whose advice and views are to be followed?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might appear so. The general tendency is that users with higher rep, badges or with more EL&amp;amp;U (or any other network site) experience (in terms of years active) command a certain degree of respect. However, even they probably make mistakes(very rarely though) but they are quick in correcting them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To summarize, I'd profess that our community is like one big family (or a flat organization) where you are your boss. More experienced EL&amp;amp;U users act as navigators/mentors while newbie users learn the ropes under their able guidance. And everyone is just trying to solve each other's queries in one way or the other :)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T13:15:56.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7761" CreationDate="2016-03-02T10:46:10.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites have moderators, identified by a diamond symbol next to their name, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/18696/andrew-leach&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach&lt;/a&gt;. They do have powers to moderate posts and comments and to suspend users, but these powers are rarely exercised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the community is tasked with most of the moderation privileges, earned by rep points and exercised by voting in most cases. Privileges are accessed when a user's rep points reach a predetermined level. Rep points are the only form of hierarchy among non-moderators on SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, any user can make a case on this meta site if they think a mistake has been made. This includes newly registered users, I think. This is the forum for raising issues that you can't sort out on your own. You may gain support from others to effect what you propose, or perhaps others may cast light on the subject in a way that makes you rethink your proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T10:46:10.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7761" CreationDate="2016-03-02T18:41:58.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good and natural question, and if this is off topic (as per comments), then I do not know what is on topic here. It is also specific to this site because, even though one might in theory raise these points with any SE site, this question is inspired by behaviour observed here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Privileges gained by rep milestones have been mentioned in comments and in other answers. In theory, the privileges gained by individual users offer them more and more access to running this site. &lt;strong&gt;In theory.&lt;/strong&gt; In reality, though, there are, as you observe, perhaps only a few users at any given time who fully enjoy all of their privileges. People differ; some jump at new posts, some dig around old posts, some improve the site by editing, some go for rep, some go for a coveted badge, some spend the better part of their day here, some peep in occasionally, some come and go. I have not tried to get my hands at the stats, nor do I know if I can access it, but I guess that, while many users post questions and answers each day, activities such as closing, reopening, migrating, editing, deleting, etc., perhaps even voting, are, at any given time, in the hands of a few users. Users who care; users who can spare the time; users who have ambitions for this site. And, of course, users who have gained the necessary privileges. Moderators, too, are elected by the &quot;community&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Management by being absent does not work here. Inevitably, &lt;strong&gt;the more active users push their views&lt;/strong&gt;; not perhaps with each individual issue, but certainly in the big scheme of things. One can always raise this or that issue at meta, but many things that happen here simply go unnoticed by the &quot;community&quot;. Who knows which posts have been migrated, and why? When the dust settles after the turmoil of today, it is already time to think about tomorrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies to the site rules too; they are shaped by the &quot;community&quot;, just as language is shaped by the community using it. Just as with language, the behaviour (usage) you observe today will in all likelihood be forged into the rules of tomorrow. The more active will have the more say in it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had a year of very modest and occasional participation here, and yet I think I've seen a bit of history. Even within this relatively short time, people came, shone, and went (apparently). I like to think, or I very much hope, that the best things each of us has given to this site will remain, while the dubious, the second-rate, the murky, the erroneous, and the nasty, will be wiped away. There are perhaps many things to be learned from experienced users, but one thing I am rather thankful for learning is peace of mind and a kind of statistical thinking and a belief (or blind trust) in collective effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the best of possible worlds, each post here, including the halo of surrounding activity, gets the attention it deserves and is addressed appropriately. If not today, then let's hope tomorrow, or in a year perhaps. If a good question is deleted (by mistake, of course!), it will perhaps be asked again in time. If some wonderful new users get scolded with their first posts, they will (no doubt!) learn from their mistakes and increase their efforts in framing their questions and answers according to the &lt;em&gt;Rulez of Thys Syte&lt;/em&gt; on future occasions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T18:41:58.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T21:02:20.690" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a website that reproduces EL&amp;amp;U questions and answers without crediting the source. For instance &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nxhlh.com/what-s-the-name-of-this-literary-device/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/275315/whats-the-name-of-this-literary-device&quot;&gt;this one on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nxhlh.com/what-is-the-name-for-a-torture-device-that-uses-electricity-to-make-the-victim-suffer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226540/what-is-the-name-for-a-torture-device-that-uses-electricity-to-make-the-victim-s/226651#226651&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. I think the external website has questions from other SE communities too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on? Should I notify anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131779" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T21:02:20.690" Title="I found EL&amp;U material on external websites? Should I do anything about it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-02T21:19:28.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-03-02T23:43:34.963" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oGSs5.png&quot; alt=&quot;See all questions with active bounties&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/english.stackexchange.com/bounty.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;herokuapp.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11394" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T05:23:24.437" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T05:23:24.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T10:26:43.597" Score="1" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not referring to a post being edited between five and ten times by their owner. I'm referring to posts that have been edited over thirty times in the space of one day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There used to be a time when a question which had been edited ten times by its original author,  or generated more than 30 answers automatically became &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts/11741#11741&quot;&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt; posts. This measure was removed in 2014, and rightly so in my opinion. But now... I'm seeing users who edit their posts thirty, forty and even &lt;em&gt;fifty&lt;/em&gt; times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, it's not a widespread phenomenon, and it appears to be limited to two or three users on EL&amp;amp;U but shouldn't there be &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; limit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If after thirty edits your question or answer still has not been fixed, or you haven't finished answering, maybe knowing you don't earn reputation points on a CW will encourage greater attention and accuracy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know, what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T16:45:01.700" Title="Should there be a limit on the number of edits a single post generates?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|editing|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7767" CreationDate="2016-03-03T11:52:10.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For answers, it's more straightforward - edit it as much as necessary, so long as it gets better each time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions, it's technically the same. However, people who are composing answers would be inconvenienced if the sense of the question changed. I also second Josh61's comment that the OP should not invalidate existing answers. Otherwise, there's no difference between reading a post that's been edited once and a post that's been edited 100 times, so long as it's not edited while you are reading the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preferred solution is probably for them to delete the post, edit it to their liking - multiple times if necessary, then undelete the post. So long as they don't close the page, taking the post offline temporarily in this way should be a trivial exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T11:52:10.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7767" CreationDate="2016-03-03T12:59:47.997" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know which question you are referring to. It was edited once again 7 minutes ago and it is the Original Poster's 56th edit in roughly 40 hours after the answer was posted. One edit every 43 minutes for 40 hours seems extremely excessive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see the problem is this. The question itself is too broad without any research or context and it is not answerable in a simple way. Even a doctoral dissertation on the subject wouldn't be enough to cover the answer fully. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask myself, &quot;If I asked this question now, would it survive?&quot; I believe it would never survive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question should be closed by this community or a moderator who has a single close-vote as too broad and lack of context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of limiting the number of edits, I don't think it is necessary as long as the edit is made to improve the existing post and the number of edits shows the OP's enthusiasm and efforts to own the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP doesn't seem to have a bad intention and the answer keeps improving after each edit. The final edit was just to fix a simple typo in a verb. When you look at other answers posted by the OP, it seems that it is just a one-off occurrence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question should have been closed a long time ago. The answer itself proves that we should not allow too broad a question here. (I will close-vote it tomorrow as I've run out of votes.)    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-03-03T13:46:56.387" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T13:46:56.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T17:36:48.287" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a lot of questions that native English speakers would have difficulty answering get asked on ELL as opposed to ELU. And as a result, many questions get asked on ELU that are essentially a duplicate of a question already asked on ELL. I was wondering if it would be possible to migrate or cross-post these questions from ELL to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that I think would be helpful are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/24463/tense-agreement-in-the-past-irrealis-conditionals&quot;&gt;Tense agreement in the past irrealis conditionals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/7515/he-mustnt-couldnt-have-been-hungry&quot;&gt;He mustn't / couldn't have been hungry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably similar questions to these already on ELU, but I feel that the sources cited in these particular questions (in the answers and the comments) would be very helpful to those wanting to learn more about modal verbs and conditional statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that modal verb questions and conditional statement questions are good candidates for cross-posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; in response to @Sumelic's post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I haven't considered the exclusive interests of each site on this network. I see how migration would harm the visibility of ELL. I'm not so convinced with cross-posting. But I don't really know what goes into a network such as stack-exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; I think my using the term &amp;quot;cross-post&amp;quot; has confused some people (@Rathony &amp;amp; @Curuiousdannii). I'm not asking to cross post questions to solicit better answers, but to cross post questions along with answers to help people find &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to commonly asked questions, which I believe would reduce duplicate questions.  So I am asking to cross post &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; but that would require cross posting the questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148408" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T16:29:43.300" Title="Could we migrate or cross-post excellent questions and answers to ELU from ELL?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|migration|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-03-11T23:12:22.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7770" CreationDate="2016-03-03T18:09:49.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not feel good about migrating these. To me, it seems like &quot;stealing&quot; good questions from a smaller, newer site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting questions, I'm not sure about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are probably similar questions to these already on ELU, but I&#xA;  feel that the sources cited in these particular questions (in the&#xA;  answers and the comments) would be very helpful to those wanting to&#xA;  learn more about modal verbs and conditional statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, before posting a new question, I would first try to find one of these already existing similar questions, and then post or edit an answer to add these helpful sources. I think it would also be a good idea to include a link to the ELL question: this provides proper attribution, and lets people go read the answers there. If you post a new question, it will just spread things out more and make it harder to keep all of the most useful resources updated and accessible from the same place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T16:29:43.300" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T16:29:43.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7767" CreationDate="2016-03-03T18:48:31.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Lawrence has already stated what I would have answered, but I'll add this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it hurt the site in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it puts it at the top again. I think if the user does this, say, to draw more attention to the question (gaming the system, so to speak), it can be something to look into. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP is self-conscious about their English and notices errors, it seems unnecessary to force them to live with unnoticed errors after the tenth (twentieth, thirtieth, fortieth) edit. If the essence of the question is unchanged, it should not matter except in that it kicks it to the top. And I'm not sure that's really a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's an answer, as has already been stated, if it improves the answer, it is (imo) not unwelcome. If it makes the answer worse, and the behavior is across multiple answers, then I think a flag to attract the mods should be sufficient, but that's just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a new user, it might just reflect enthusiasm for the format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;There used to be a user who edited their questions &lt;em&gt;so often&lt;/em&gt; (like routinely at least two-three dozen times), I wondered if there was a reason for such behavior. I realized at some point that it was possible that maybe the OP had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Whatever helps them feel better about their post is fine with me. I feel differently when someone edits a post repeatedly to counter a comment or get a different answer, breaking the answers already given. But that is a different matter.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2016-03-03T19:54:51.343" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T19:54:51.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2016-03-03T21:59:01.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the other answers.  SE likes to say that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/128099/154510&quot;&gt;broken windows lead to more broken windows&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;strong&gt;Keeping&lt;/strong&gt; garbage content in the hopes that someone seeing it will think we don't want it is very backwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then, what is the point in keeping an entire class of answers that are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; reviled and downvoted?  Masochism?  A comment explaining what's wrong can be left whether or not the post is deleted afterward, so again it is backwards to attempt to teach the poster by allowing the post to stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99% of the time these duplicates are far worse than what they're copying, being one-liners and such &amp;mdash; and in the 1% case, they should be editing the existing answer if they want to improve formatting and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrong answers should be kept, and similar answers should be kept.  Answers that copy others without adding value should not be.  Reposting is not a replacement for upvoting, editing, commenting, or reading the other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3347" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T21:59:01.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7770" CreationDate="2016-03-04T09:54:42.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions should be posted on, or moved to, the site where they are &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; appropriate. If a question has been posted but it would be more appropriate on another site, it can be migrated. This is subject to the &quot;Don't migrate crap&quot; rule. Poor questions on the wrong site should simply be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a grey area where a question is entirely appropriate on its existing site and would also be entirely appropriate on another. This shouldn't happen very often. In that case, moving is discretional: if enough voting members can be bothered to vote to migrate, it can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But cross-posting is definitely Not A Good Thing To Do. A question is unlikely to be entirely appropriate in two places. If it is, then it is entirely appropriate in its first location and it doesn't &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; to appear in the other: Stack Exchange is an ordered repository of knowledge, and the question and answers are likely to be found by those who are looking for them, whichever site they appear on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a possibility that a question appears on ELL which is a duplicate of one on ELU (or vice-versa). That's OK: answer the question as appropriate to the site it's on. Or if you vote to migrate it to the other site, then a comment to point out the existing duplicate will be helpful: it can be migrated and closed as a duplicate. This requires moderator action because a simple closure will reject the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T09:54:42.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-04T19:00:04.133" Score="-6" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;English consists mostly of borrowings. Therefore, there is almost no etymology in English itslelf and my questions on the etymology of English words are always stopped by &quot;that is beyond the scope of English&quot;. Meantime, the world is mostly English speaking and we learn about most of the words in English. Isn't it right to dig English words deeper in the English forum or there is a better alternative that I overlook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98477" LastEditorUserId="98477" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T19:05:21.930" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T16:49:18.397" Title="Making Latin etymology on-topic" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7775" CreationDate="2016-03-04T19:19:06.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/75409/latin-language&quot;&gt;Latin Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; now, although it is still in private beta. You will be able to ask questions about the etymology of Latin words there. Some kinds of etymology questions are on-topic for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Linguistics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for asking questions here, it really depends on the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The type of questions I see as off-topic are questions that would still make sense even if asked in another language without any reference to English, such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the Latin word &quot;versus&quot; related to the Hebrew word &quot;נגד&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be on topic (assuming you show sufficient research and meet other requirements) to ask things like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Are there any English words that have the same root as this Latin word?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;When did this Latin word first start being used in English texts?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I'll try to address the original question more closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English consists mostly of borrowings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seems to be true.&lt;/a&gt; (also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Loanwords/What-percentage-of-words-in-English-are-borrowed-from-other-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, there is almost no etymology in English itself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with this. According to the Quora answer and Wikipedia page  I linked to, Native&quot; English makes up around 25-33% of the lexicon. That's not insignificant, and there are plenty of interesting etymological questions about words in this class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and my questions on the etymology of English words are always stopped&#xA;  by &quot;that is beyond the scope of English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;False. Your current account has three questions that I can see. Two of them are closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291513/is-breadth-related-to-broad&quot;&gt;Is &amp;#39;breadth&amp;#39; related to &amp;#39;broad&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;, is about native English words, not Latin loans, and it was closed for lack of research, not as &quot;beyond the scope of English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311585/germination-of-hermeneutics&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311585/germination-of-hermeneutics&lt;/a&gt;, is related to Latin loans, but it was not closed for this reason. It was closed because it shows zero research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there are other questions that I can't see because they were deleted or because you asked them with a different account, this shows that your questions are not &quot;always&quot; closed for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meantime, the world is mostly English speaking and we learn about most&#xA;  of the words in English. Isn't it right to dig English words deeper in&#xA;  the English forum or there is a better alternative that I overlook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I listed several alternatives above, but you don't seem to be truly interested in them, as you have not acknowledged them at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T16:49:18.397" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7775" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:33:06.260" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about the etymology of English words are welcome on the site, even for borrowed words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions were not rejected by &quot;that is beyond the scope of English&quot; or by &quot;we do not discuss Latin&quot;. In fact, your questions lacked references or any evidence of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nov 3 '15 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284642/on-the-right-track-to-distract&quot;&gt;On the right track -&amp;gt; to distract&lt;/a&gt; [open; you added the requested information]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dec 3 '15 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291513/is-breadth-related-to-broad&quot;&gt;Is &amp;#39;breadth&amp;#39; related to &amp;#39;broad&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt; [closed; you did not add the requested information]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mar 4 '16 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311585/germination-of-hermeneutics&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311585/germination-of-hermeneutics&lt;/a&gt; [4 closevotes; you have not added the requested information]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you (1) add references and evidence of research to your December and March questions, and (2) see if you can get the December question reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T21:44:12.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7779" CreationDate="2016-03-04T22:38:13.627" Score="9" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/similarities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;similarities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;similarities&lt;/a&gt; seems too broad to be useful to me. It is not really a single topic, since it has been used to cover similarities in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/12471/revisions&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt;, similarities in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1608/what-is-the-difference-between-proven-and-proved&quot;&gt;usage/meaning&lt;/a&gt;, and similarities in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/247277/did-pertinacious-and-pertinent-come-from-the-same-origin&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;. So, should we get rid of it? I have started editing it out of questions, but there are around 48 questions and I don't want my edits to be disruptive by bumping up that many old posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2016 May 17:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Through editing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/similarities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;similarities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;similarities&lt;/a&gt; has now been eliminated. There is a similar tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/similar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;similar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;similar&lt;/a&gt;, which has only 19 questions and seems to have the same problems of vagueness and redundancy. I will try to eliminate this next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T20:48:34.757" Title="Should we get rid of the tag &quot;similarities&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2016-03-04T22:40:25.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should review the questions in the tag, clean them up, and if no objections come up, a moderator should &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239191/306255&quot;&gt;burninate&lt;/a&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T22:40:25.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2016-03-06T01:31:38.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always read the tag label &quot;similarities&quot; as being the flip-side of the very popular tag label &quot;differences.&quot; In my experience, &quot;differences&quot; comes up most often when a question focuses on distinguishing between two words that are close synonyms. But the opposite case, where a question focuses on two generally unlike words may have something in common, is quite rare. And since we have the tag label &quot;synonyms&quot; (as well as &quot;alternatives&quot; and—arguably—the dread &quot;single-word request&quot;) to handle what amount to requests for alternatives to a given word, it seems not very useful to bring &quot;similarities&quot; to the party as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest having the &quot;similarities&quot; tag automatically convert to &quot;synonyms&quot; going forward, after disposing of the questions that already include the tag—either by converting &quot;similarities&quot; to &quot;synonyms&quot; or by deleting the &quot;similarities&quot; label and (if possible) finding a different and more suitable replacement label. That would take care of instances where the tag currently appears in questions that ask about similarities in etymology or spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that a brief surge in old posts with tag changes is a serious problem; but if most people feel otherwise, we (or sumelic) could convert, say, ten of them a day until the category is emptied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T20:05:06.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T20:05:06.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-06T12:57:12.613" Score="10" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for this question,  but I still need to understand the different dynamics of this site (site which I find very interesting and helpful). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to understand if I can trust users who are currently suspended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am referring in this specific case to a user who is very active both on ELU and ELL (probably a bit too much) in giving advice especially to new users like me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen that this user is currently suspended from ELL, I have no idea why but I guess that being suspended is not a good thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this imply that this user should not be trusted or is it just a temporary problem that has no impact on the reputation of the user?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to clarify that  I am not referring to their (the suspended user) linguist competence, but to their advice on the rules and their application on these sites. If they have been suspended, I may reasonably suspect that their behaviour was not &quot;compliant&quot; to the sites rules, so &quot;should I trust them in this respect&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T19:43:57.960" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T02:25:02.130" Title="Should I trust a suspended user?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7781" CreationDate="2016-03-06T18:40:40.833" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As regards being told how you should &lt;em&gt;act&lt;/em&gt; on the site...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (with a diamond after their username) &lt;em&gt;instructs&lt;/em&gt; you to do or not do something you should comply - but if you seriously disagree, you can obviously raise the issue on meta and try to garner support from the entire user base. If a mod gives you &lt;em&gt;advice&lt;/em&gt; you should trust that advice. But again, you're free to argue the toss here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any other user (including me, for example), I suggest you take any advice with a fairly large pinch of salt - especially if what they're saying doesn't seem to be explicitly supported by the FAQ. I'm sure we all have our off days, and sometimes say things we wouldn't necessarily endorse later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to &lt;em&gt;statements about English&lt;/em&gt; (grammaticality, terminology, etc.) posted as answers or comments, you can't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; &quot;trust&quot; anyone. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7781/should-i-trust-a-suspended-user?cb=1#comment31870_7781&quot;&gt;@Edwin comments&lt;/a&gt;, even professors can disagree. But as a rule of thumb, if two different users give you conflicting information and you've nothing else to go on, it's probably better to assume the higher-rep user is &quot;correct&quot; (unless/until further information comes to light). In general, high rep on ELU reflects the fact that &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; users have repeatedly endorsed pronouncements by the high-rep user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's any good reason to assume a user who's been suspended is any less qualified to advise on correct use of English than any other user. People can be suspended for many reasons, few of which have any implications for whether their advice on the use of English is &quot;trustworthy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T18:40:40.833" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7781" CreationDate="2016-03-06T19:37:16.373" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't really matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspension is mainly a tool for moderators and Stack Exchange employees, which allows them to control the ability of a user to make posts and take other actions on a site. Suspensions are temporary, but that doesn't mean they aren't serious. However, suspension isn't designed to be a public sign of how &quot;trustworthy&quot; a user is, so I would say you should not interpret it this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7761/who-is-the-boss-here#comment31750_7761&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on your previous question, new users should generally take all &quot;advice on the rules and their application on these sites&quot; seriously, because it is generally backed up by actions. Rules provide general guidelines, but high-reputation users have a fairly large degree of freedom within these guidelines to take various actions on posts (editing, closing, deleting). For example, if you receive a comment from a user with more than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;3000 reputation&lt;/a&gt; saying that your question is off-topic, that user has probably already put in a close vote for your question. If four other users agree, the question will be closed. So you should think about how you can convince this user, or other high-rep users, that your post is not off-topic after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I mean by &quot;take it seriously&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the comment asks for more information, edit your question to add it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the comment says that the question is too broad, think about how you can edit your question to make it more narrow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you feel that you absolutely cannot follow the advice in the comment, respond with a new comment explaining the reason why you disagree&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You generally aren't obligated to follow any user's advice, but it would probably be wise to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T02:25:02.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-06T21:37:55.327" Score="107" ViewCount="2060" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been getting a lot of migrations to ELL lately.  That's actually fine by me – I think a lot of them are okay on ELL, even if they're not suitable for EL&amp;amp;U.  The two sites have different standards, and that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we've also been getting migrations like &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/83653/when-someone-wanna-talk-perfect-english&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone wanna talk perfect English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanna learn English how can I do that, can someone help me or give me good ideas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure the migration will be rejected within the hour, but it'd be better if it had never been migrated in the first place.  &lt;strong&gt;Please don't migrate terrible questions!&lt;/strong&gt;  When questions are this bad, please use another close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28567" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T03:09:00.203" Title="A friendly reminder: ELL is not EL&amp;U's trash can" Tags="|discussion|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-08T10:34:42.973" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;An OP seems to have put good effort in updating her question, but despite the question having been flagged to get moderator attention (I've requested the 'On Hold' be removed as it's now clear what the OP is asking for), but so far, the question is still on hold without having an opportunity to answer the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I am referring to is: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311954/how-do-i-replace-the-phrase-as-of-when?noredirect=1#comment705582_311954&quot;&gt;How do I replace the phrase &amp;quot;As of when...&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this question be 'reopened?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T05:34:29.330" Title="Remove 'On Hold' request" Tags="|support|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7785" CreationDate="2016-03-08T13:56:57.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no reason why the question should be reopened. This site is not an editing service and we're not here to suggest alternatives for authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If considered as a phrase request question rather than a proofreading question it is still very poor. It doesn't explain what is wrong with the existing option. It doesn't explain what is wrong with a simple &quot;when&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T13:56:57.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7789" CreationDate="2016-03-09T09:58:58.977" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I clicked on &lt;strong&gt;Ask Question&lt;/strong&gt; today, it took me to the right place to post my question but with my previous question's data already there in the Title text box as well as Body text box, you can see in the following screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ksS7k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ksS7k.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was afraid that it will update my last question asked, so I skipped it. I think it's very rare but I found it today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164320" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T11:07:51.197" Title="&quot;Ask Question&quot; retrieving the last question asked" Tags="|bug|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7788" CreationDate="2016-03-09T11:07:51.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the last question asked at the time was somehow saved as a draft and I was unaware of it because it was posted successfully. Later, I discarded it and never saw it again on clicking &lt;strong&gt;Ask Question&lt;/strong&gt;. But earlier, it created little bit confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164320" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T11:07:51.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7792" CreationDate="2016-03-09T13:54:16.770" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below are two identical suggested edits.&#xA;The first was accepted but the second rejected.  Why?&#xA;The reason given for the rejection was that the edit deviates&#xA;from the original intent of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both edit suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were in the highest-rated answers, likely be read by a variety of visitors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did not change the texts of those answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Added links from dictionary abbreviations (&lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;MW&lt;/em&gt;) to EL&amp;amp;U's list of dictionary abbreviations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were under questions that are stated plainly, with no abbreviations or dictionary mentions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These answers surely did not intend for dictionary abbreviations to be&#xA;cryptograms that overshoot the technical levels of their questions.&#xA;Anyone familiar enough with EL&amp;amp;U to understand an isolated &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;MW&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;doesn't even need that information when it is contained in a URL elsewhere&#xA;in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't suggest this kind of edit when the tone&#xA;of a question seems appropriate for EL&amp;amp;U shorthand in answers.&#xA;These suggestions were for the sake of clarity, not points.&#xA;(Anything past the 50 points needed to comment is more than enough for me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An accepted edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/305953/153448&quot;&gt;What are “legacy brands”?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Does the phrase &quot;Legacy brands&quot; just mean &quot;companies that are inherited from generation to generation&quot; or there is another particular meaning?&amp;emsp;.&amp;nbsp;.&amp;nbsp;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/305955/153448&quot;&gt;Answer:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;ensp; &amp;#x2807; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [ODO]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp; &amp;darr; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/164907&quot;&gt;edit accepted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/148/153448&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;= &lt;code&gt;[[ODO](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/148/153448)]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Same edit rejected&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/312557/153448&quot;&gt;Does English have an equivalent word for alimungawan?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's the short semiconscious or confused state after sleep. Very much like a hypnic jerk but you don't go back to sleep.&amp;emsp;.&amp;nbsp;.&amp;nbsp;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/312560/153448&quot;&gt;Answer:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;ensp; &amp;#x2807; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [MW]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp; &amp;darr; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/169158&quot;&gt;edit rejected:&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&amp;ldquo;This edit deviates from the original intent of the post.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/148/153448&quot;&gt;[MW]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;= &lt;code&gt;[[MW]](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/148/153448)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T07:11:23.797" Title="Why reject a suggested edit to add a link for a likely-to-be-mysterious acronym?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7790" CreationDate="2016-03-09T14:05:45.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most obvious reason is that two different reviewers had different opinions about linking the abbreviations to the meta post. I'd guess in the second case, the reviewer thought you intended to link to a definition of &quot;groggy&quot; or that it was a snarky way of suggesting that the OP look up the word in one of many dictionaries. It's hard to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I think it's a good idea to link to the meta post for abbreviations and I felt your comment made it clear that that was what you intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T14:05:45.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7790" CreationDate="2016-03-10T07:11:23.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand you tried to do something very meaningful to this community. If this community had discouraged using all those non-standard and unfamiliar abbreviations in the first place, you would not have had to make those efforts to link the Meta post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first edit was approved by the Original Poster who posted the answer. That's why it didn't require two approvals. The second one was rejected by other users who probably didn't find it necessary to link the Meta post to the abbreviation &quot;MW&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users have different style and preference. For example, I always use &quot;Merriam-Webster&quot; or &quot;Oxford Online Dictionary&quot;, but some users prefer &quot;MW&quot;, &quot;M-W&quot;, &quot;ODO&quot;, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were reviewing the second edit now, I would not approve it because it doesn't seem to improve the post very much and if you click on the hyperlink &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/groggy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;groggy&lt;/a&gt;, you can see the link is from Merriam-Webster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have more than 2,000 reputation points, you will be able to edit any post without going through a peer review process, but I would not recommend linking the Meta post to all the abbreviations appearing on English Language and Usage. There could be tens of thousands of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T07:11:23.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-10T11:16:47.770" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had posted this question today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/312779&quot;&gt;Is there a word for those random spots/patterns you see when you enter your home after playing outside on a sunny day?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was marked as duplicate by Mari Lou A and it pointed to this question -&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/130724/the-dark-dot-in-your-eye&quot;&gt;The dark dot in your eye&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a duplicate because my question deals with a very specific scenario. While the answers to the previously posted question and those that I have received are same, my question is different in the sense that it is more restricted to light and temperature changes (transitioning from hot and sunny outdoors to relatively cool/dimly lit indoors). This specificity may probably lead to more specific answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question, is more generic in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A problem can have many solutions. Likewise, can't many problems have the same solution? What is the ELU's consensus regarding this scenario?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can my question be reopened?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question has been reopened! I thanks this community for trusting me and to the users who voted in favor of reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T04:40:52.987" Title="Reopened: &quot;...word for those random spots/patterns you see when you enter your home after playing outside on a sunny day?&quot;" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7793" CreationDate="2016-03-10T14:09:06.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two questions are obviously related in both having to do with anomalies with the eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the kinds of anomaly are described differently and therefore deserve two separate questions and their separate set of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly it would probably be best to ask of a medical practitioner, someone who has a technical vocabulary for these phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a policy difficulty here. Five people originally voted to close as a duplicate. Then five more voted to reopen after this meta-question. Just now, a single user, with a phrase-request gold badge, hammer-voted to close as a duplicate. The process now, if people so desire still to reopen, is to canvass for further reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T14:09:06.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-10T16:41:39.530" Score="16" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7913/notes-to-reviewers-trial-version-2-1&quot;&gt;Version 2.1 of the trial&lt;/a&gt; is now live. The intention is for the last voter who closes a question to link to the trial in lieu of the link appearing in the notice of closure. Here's a template that can be pasted directly as a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;See [Notes to Reviewers](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7913/142322)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Low-quality questions (LQQ) serve as a disincentive for visitors and regulars to seek or contribute high-quality answers at ELU. We therefore place an LQQ on hold for a grace period, reopening it if it sufficiently improves and deleting it if not. The OP of a closed question should bear the onus of proof that their edits make their questions worth reconsidering, but in practice, that burden falls almost exclusively on reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, on-hold notices can appear final to visitors. It can feel off-putting to find that the community deems one's posts unworthy of attention. Closing a question is &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt; an invitation to improve the question, but invitations should sound like &quot;here's where to go and what to do&quot; rather than &quot;go away until you improve&quot;. The OP may make a case on the meta site for reopening, but they are only told the policy if they ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/28156148#28156148&quot;&gt;core&lt;/a&gt; of this feature request is to address both issues by giving the &lt;strong&gt;OP&lt;/strong&gt; of a closed question some transparency and guidance about the process of reopening their question. This is an explicit invitation to (re)engage to have their posted question answered. It also helps &lt;strong&gt;reviewers&lt;/strong&gt; of the reopen queue: it's easier, less frustrating and more accurate to read what the OP thinks s/he did to improve the question than it is for &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; reviewer to piece the clues together from edit trails and comment trails. Here's the gist of what I'm suggesting should be on the close/on-hold notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After editing your question, please note in comments or [notes to reviewers (link)] how your edits improve the question. Your question will be reopened if it gains 5 reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the worst case, OP behaviour doesn't change at all. However, the improvement to the quality of our ELU process, namely, greater transparency of the reopen process, is justification enough to expand the boiler-plate notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the best case, the OP raises their own question to a high quality and stay on to contribute, so we have a better site &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; feel welcoming to good company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;em&gt;The previous version of this feature request can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/7795/10&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T11:45:01.693" Title="When a question is closed, tell them the procedure for reopening it" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7795" CreationDate="2016-03-11T06:38:57.650" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's not feed the bear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community is surrounded by many hungry bears who don't want to hunt to feed themselves. Also, I found some bears who complain about our not feeding them quoting a few vague guidelines of our Help Center or a question asked a long time ago when we didn't have those guidelines in place. A few lazy bears don't even respond to comments intended to help write a better question.  We should not welcome those bears. We need to build up more fences and enforce those guidelines more strictly so that those bears could learn what to do to survive here and how to ask a well-researched question with context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/312348/what-is-the-exact-definition-of-the-expression-a-rats-chance&quot;&gt;What is the exact definition of the expression 'A Rat's Chance'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP started the question with &quot;I started to learn English.&quot; Then, the OP is a learner. I don't think the question is salvageable. It would be better to leave the following comment: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are a speaker of other languages learning English, I'd like to&#xA;  advise you to visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language&#xA;  Learners&lt;/a&gt;, but please make sure you&#xA;  take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit their&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; before posting any&#xA;  question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/312862/does-the-expression-make-something-of-a-meal-out-of-something-mean-essetially&quot;&gt;Does the expression “make something of a meal out of something” mean essetially “make a meal of something”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Hotlicks commented, the question is not clear. A full sentence is required. The OP is lazy. What else can we do? The OP seems to be a learner and he should be advised to go to ELL where (s)he belongs. (I close-voted this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Original Posters don't seem to belong on English Language and Usage (ELU), but belong on English Language Learners (ELL). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a well-established mechanism where a question is placed on a review-queue for reopen vote when it is edited. We will review it and decide. We rarely see a question re-opened while so many questions are being closed everyday. The main reason is almost all those hungry bears don't respond to comments and close reasons. That could mean (1) they are one-off users who don't intend to stay here long, (2) they don't want to bother to edit it and get it reopened (they are not desperate enough), (3) unfortunately, they don't know how it works and they don't even know how closing and re-opening work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we possibly do to those users? I don't think letting them know they can go to Meta or ELU Chat Room to get their questions reopened is as much helpful to those OPs as advising them to edit the post in as much detail or go to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should edit their questions and our focus should be on whether they edit their posts properly or not. The beauty of ELU is we are democracy and decision-making process is quite fast, especially for reopening.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just left a comment (advice to go to ELL) to an OP who asked six questions, five of which were closed. We need to post such a comment more to the OPs who will be welcome and upvoted on ELL while being downvoted and closed on ELU.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T07:03:27.460" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-11T09:44:30.677" Score="7" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed some users with editing privileges make a lot of edits that are either unnecessary or go beyond what is outlined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;. (Sometimes I think it wouldn't hurt to either raise the bar higher than 2,000 Reputation or require at least one other high-rep user to approve a change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are edits that don't objectively improve the answer and instead conform an answer to one's personal stylistic preferences. An example would be changing an ampersand to the word, &quot;and.&quot; Another example may be changing a suggested word in italics to bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not talking about stylistic edits that are done in addition to fixing a typo, embedding a quote in a quote box, or some other valid reason to edit. I am referring to lone trivial edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they have not been informed that these edits are unproductive, these edits may proliferate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not have a personal messaging system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I simply write the @ sign, as in @User123, will the user be notified? I think the answer is &quot;No.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I comment on the edited question or answer, the editor won't be notified because the editor is not the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I wanted to start a dialogue with a user about their editing MO, or get their attention directly via notification, is there a way to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134753" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T12:05:09.347" Title="How does one contact an editor?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7803" CreationDate="2016-03-11T10:56:26.523" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about whether there's any point in editing a question where you can see clear points for improvement but still feel that the question lacks the sufficient research/examples to give a proper answer to it. I personally don't think it's worth it, but I'd like to hear the opinions of some of the other members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking, for example, about questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/313011/the-importance-of-the-research-vs-the-research-importance-in-the-thesis-vs-resea&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. My first instinct was to edit it to use quote blocks for the separate possibilities OP was asking for, but then I realised there wasn't really enough to the question for a decent answer to be given anyway; either that or it would end up being primarily opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155456" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T18:02:07.423" Title="Editing questions that will probably be closed or downvoted anyway" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7767" CreationDate="2016-03-11T16:45:01.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll plead guilty to this as well. I dunno about 50 edits, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I get bored, and even after I answer a question, I spend a lot of time perfecting the answer - there's just something about making it look as encyclopedic / informative / entertaining / perfect as possible that brings me enjoyment. It's like painting or working on a jigsaw puzzle. I'm a writer and editor by profession, so I don't really care if it's a disorder - if it is, it works &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; me and not against me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not frothing at the mouth over it, and I don't do it just to bump my posts / answers for attention. That being said, I can't speak for others who may or may not do it for that reason - but then again, there are also users who downvote strategically to put their answer on top instead of upvoting a good previous answer or just leaving it alone, and as I understand it, they get to do that without repercussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless this really bothers a significant number of users or unless people start seriously abusing it, I would just leave it alone and browse normally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular site gets a LOT of questions / answers, so no matter how many edits there are, there will always be plenty of new / good questions at the top.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164539" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T16:45:01.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2016-03-11T17:16:32.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends entirely upon the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm emphasizing a single word or phrase as an example, I use &lt;em&gt;italics.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm emphasizing a point, I use &lt;strong&gt;bold,&lt;/strong&gt; as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; good phrasing choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or CAPS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is a VERY good phrasing choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm quoting a person (real or hypothetical), source, or post, or I am making a usage / punctuation / phrasing example that is not important enough to isolate: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;If it is a word, a phrase, or a sentence fragment, I use 'single quotes.' &#xA;&#xA;If it is a complete sentence, I use &quot;double quotations.&quot; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to isolate an example, or if it is more than one or two short sentences (in any circumstance), I use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Block Quotation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how I handle emphasis / quotation. The tools are all there for a reason, so we might as well use them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164539" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T17:16:32.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7799" CreationDate="2016-03-11T18:02:07.423" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the awkward thing about editing a very poorly worded question that is a bad fit for EL&amp;amp;U anyway is the disparity between the voice of the revised question and the level of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often a question that shows little command of English asks something that even an intermediate English language learner would consider exceedingly simple—or wrongheaded in its underlying assumptions. When you edit to make the wording more fluent, you create a gulf between the tone of the revised question and the nature of the question being asked. The result can be confusing to prospective answerers, too, because the question is framed with a certain degree of articulateness and yet it asks something that seems (not to put too fine a point on it) weird or dumb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases, I think we're better off leaving the wording as originally formulated and simply moving to close or delete the question promptly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T18:02:07.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13358" CreationDate="2016-03-12T07:15:41.613" Score="11" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the nature of this site, it happens that one wants to quote something that contains a blockquote itself, e.g., as an example sentence. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A run-on sentence is something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came I saw I conquered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the quote inside the quote is only distinguishable from its surrounding through the faint dotted line and the small indentation. Regular quotes are much easier to distinguish due to the difference of the background colour. By contrast, on most other Stack Exchanges, quotes are also marked by a vertical bar and thus double quotes can be distinguished sufficiently easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A makeshift alternative that some users resort to is using code blocks, but this has several disadvantages like a monospace font and no automatic line wrapping. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/223162/1&quot;&gt;this answer for examples&lt;/a&gt;; it does not really work here on Meta due to the desaturisation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thus propose that the site design is changed to make double quotes easily recognisable as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T12:21:38.210" Title="Make blockquotes inside blockquotes better distinguishable" Tags="|feature-request|design|quotes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-12T10:57:26.203" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question needs to be closed as off-topic  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C4Mqx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C4Mqx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but none of the canned reasons are a good fit.   This leaves us with Other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TvuaB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TvuaB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Other demands a comment.  Typing is hard.  What are some good canned comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="76689" LastEditDate="2016-03-12T13:49:32.560" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T07:44:10.497" Title="Closing off-topic questions with Other" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7805" CreationDate="2016-03-12T10:57:46.547" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; page expressly forbids things we don't have a canned close reason for.  Here are some canned comments in a copy and paste friendly format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is off-topic because the topic &quot;How to improve my English?&quot; is expressly prohibited by the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the translation tag info for details  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is off-topic because the topics &quot;Translation and non-English languages&quot; are expressly prohibited by the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page when outside the limited scope of the [translation](https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/translation/info) tag.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is off-topic because the topic &quot;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&quot; is expressly prohibited by the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is off-topic because the topic &quot;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&quot; is expressly prohibited by the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is off-topic because &quot;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&quot; are expressly prohibited by the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As JR correctly points out taking the time to customize a comment can be very instructive to a new user.  This answer is actually intended to give you that time by freeing you from the more repetitive typing.  There is certainly room to add more instructive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be useful to see this answer edited and ratified into something the community agrees with so we can use these with confidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T13:44:30.313" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-12T14:23:17.187" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2016-03-12T11:04:38.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could solve this problem fairly easily by putting your example sentence in italics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A run-on sentence is something like this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I came I saw I conquered&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If desired, you can also increase the indent by inserting &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&lt;/code&gt; a few times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A run-on sentence is something like this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;I came I saw I conquered&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think either of those options would be much better than your &quot;makeshift alternative&quot; of using backticks and putting the text into an ugly, monospaced font:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A run-on sentence is something like this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;I came I saw I conquered.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;this has several disadvantages like a monospace font and no automatic line wrapping&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sentence is longer than a few words, I think “no automatic line wrapping” is a deal-breaker on a site like this one. In my mind, that example you point to is a good one to illustrate what &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to do. It should probably be edited and cleaned up, not pointed to as exemplary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;O R I G I N A L&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvBud.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvBud.png&quot; alt=&quot;snapshot of original version&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;IMPROVED VERSION&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/quZBc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/quZBc.png&quot; alt=&quot;snapshot of improved version&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2016-03-12T11:27:34.113" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T11:27:34.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7810" CreationDate="2016-03-12T12:33:41.353" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen an increase in prevalence of new (or seemingly new) users posting answers which are basically just comments, which don't really contribute to the question. Such answers aren't going to gain the user any reputation, and thus do nothing to aid their journey towards being able to comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally when I started out here there were times I wanted to comment on a question but couldn't, so I had to post an answer. I understand why this is the case, but then I was in a better position to provide concrete, upvotable answers than your average bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that someone asks a question expecting solid answers (otherwise why post it?), wouldn't the ability to answer questions be arguably &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; important than the ability to make comments? Comments are generally, as far as I've seen, used for tongue-in-cheek humourous responses, non-verified clarifications, or just general points of consideration that aren't fleshed-out enough to be considered true answers to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I suppose that it wouldn't be feasible the other way around, since upvotes on comments don't give you rep, but does anyone else think the way it works just now is perhaps limiting to new people being able to contribute meaningfully?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the main point of discussion I'm opening up here is why commenting is a rep-locked feature in the first place, as being able to do so doesn't hugely affect one's ability to be a valuable member of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155456" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T09:19:37.230" Title="Does it really make sense that commenting requires more reputation than answering does?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7805" CreationDate="2016-03-12T12:56:10.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one I've used more than once:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Given that you're relatively new to the site, I'd like to tell you about our sister site, [ell.se]. In the future, that may be a better place for questions like this one. You can read more about the two sites at our [_What is the difference between ELU and ELL?_ meta post](http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/).&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T12:56:10.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7808" CreationDate="2016-03-12T13:04:10.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am happy to see you settling well on English Language and Usage (ELU). As far as I understand, your question has been discussed extensively on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; as in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12119/lower-the-amount-of-reputation-needed-to-comment&quot;&gt;Lower the amount of reputation needed to comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/53647/50-reputation-for-making-comments-is-too-high&quot;&gt;50 reputation for making comments is too high&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not repeat what is in the answers to the questions. I agree with one of the answers that says the rep-locked feature is there &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to encourage new users to avoid commenting since the site's focus is&#xA;  questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers and comments are two distinct things on ELU. Some members use a comment to post an answer and some including many new users use an answer box to post a comment, even a question or just crap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is those worthless low-quality answers (or questions) are flagged automatically (if it is too short) or by frequent users who find them unfit for ELU. It is not a difficult process to delete those flagged answers by voting in a low-quality &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in order to delete a comment, you need to flag it as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) rude or offensive, (2) not constructive, (3) obsolete, (4) too&#xA;  chatty, (5) other (with your own reason)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine those new users start to make comments as they post a low-quality answer. Our moderators will be extremely busy deleting those comments with flags. I personally think the 50 reputation threshold is a good policy to prevent new users from abusing comments. Especially, under the circumstances a new user can post any comment to his/her own question or answer, I think it does more good than harm and getting 50 reputation points is not that difficult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get a &quot;Pundit&quot; badge if you have 10 comments with 5 upvotes or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users need to learn how to adjust themselves to ELU first before being able to comment on any post. I think that is much more important.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: If &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/313197/a-word-that-means-taking-your-time-and-doing-things-correctly&quot;&gt;a question is protected&lt;/a&gt; by a user who has more than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;15,000 reputation points&lt;/a&gt;, one-reputation users or 101-reputation users (with association bonus of 100 points) can't post an answer and only users with more than 10 reputation points (or 111 reputation points) can answer a question. We only protect popular questions like the one in the link or old questions with a few low-quality answers posted by new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T09:19:37.230" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7805" CreationDate="2016-03-12T13:26:34.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done @J.R.'s way:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; page discourages things we don't have a canned close reason for.  Here are some canned comments in a copy-and-paste friendly format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question may be off-topic because ELU discourages questions about &quot;How to improve my English?&quot; as noted in the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the translation tag info for details  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question may be off-topic because ELU discourages questions about &quot;Translation and non-English languages&quot; as noted in the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page when outside the limited scope of the [translation](https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/translation/info) tag.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question may be off-topic because ELU discourages questions about &quot;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&quot; as noted in the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question may be off-topic because ELU discourages questions about &quot;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&quot; as noted in the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question may be off-topic because ELU discourages &quot;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&quot; as noted in the [help/on-topic](https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) page.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @J.R. correctly points out taking the time to customize a comment can be very instructive to a new user.  This answer is actually intended to give you that time by freeing you from the more repetitive typing.  There is certainly room to add more instructive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T07:44:10.497" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-12T14:23:33.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7805" CreationDate="2016-03-12T14:19:25.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Rathony points out some questions are closed as off-topic because the community has decided they are not what this site is about.  While it's always good to direct a new user to the help it may confuse them to cite the help as the reason the question is being closed when the help doesn't expressly prohibit the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose to gather such close reasons here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311551/first-joke-request-for-english-subtitles&quot;&gt;transcription service&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because ELU is not a transcription service&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/258/shortest-complete-sentence-in-english/265&quot;&gt;not constructive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not constructive&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T17:22:34.673" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-12T14:19:25.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2016-03-12T15:03:35.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. I was just editing a question like this, and while I think the current embedded block quotes look better than code blocks, they are very subtle and could benefit from being made more obvious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italicization only works for example sentences. It can't always be used (for example, it looks bad in extended quote blocks), so it is not a general solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the indentation for block quotes embedded in other block quotes should be made larger, so that the quoted text is more clearly set of from the rest. The current indentation is minuscule, and the only other marker is the light dotted lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll borrow J.R.'s examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvBud.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvBud.png&quot; alt=&quot;snapshot of original version&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J.R.'s Improved version (currently possible):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/quZBc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/quZBc.png&quot; alt=&quot;snapshot of J.R.&amp;#39;s improved version&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think would be the best version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zd0Kh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zd0Kh.png&quot; alt=&quot;snapshot of my improved version&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-03-12T16:32:29.343" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T16:32:29.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2016-03-12T19:52:15.550" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yet another option is to use superscript (sup and /sup) tags for the internal quotations, which produces text that looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subject area and disciplines&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject areas like biology, sociology, engineering, women's studies and psychology are common nouns and don't normally take a capital letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The University of Ottawa has programs in an array of disciplines, from mathematics and medicine to chemistry and criminology.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to broader areas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Professor Doesitall has published extensively in the humanities, pure and applied sciences and arts.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach has the advantage of enabling you to retain italics that may have appeared in the original quotation as distinct italics—although admittedly you could use roman (reverse italics) to serve the same purpose if you adopted J.R.'s all-italic default formatting for internal quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference in type size, working in combination with the (regrettably skimpy) extra indentation, makes the internal quotations very easy to recognize. I have used this approach several times in answers of mine that contain embedded quotes within a quotation block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T19:52:15.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7798" CreationDate="2016-03-13T06:37:36.700" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Massimo Ortolano posted this link in the comments, which provides details about how the @replies operate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-do-comment-replies-work&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do comment @replies work?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best practice is to comment on the edited post and use the @ reply to ping the editor, who will be pinged even if the editor has not left any comments or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134753" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T06:37:36.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7795" CreationDate="2016-03-13T10:52:38.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: this (below) is the text I intend to post as the 'appeals court' meta question. Before taking that as a unilateral step, however, I'm posting it here first for a few days for community editing and comments. The next step would be to post the meta question as a live trial, during which users can link to it from comments when voting to close a question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7839/please-consider-reopening-my-question-trial&quot;&gt;trial&lt;/a&gt; is now online.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title: Please consider reopening my question. [Trial]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Original meta discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7795/142322&quot;&gt;When a question is closed, tell them the procedure for reopening it&lt;/a&gt;. Please use that question to discuss the procedure below. Answers to this question should only consist of appeals to reopen specific questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question has been closed, it means that Stack Exchange's English Language and Usage community has voiced an opinion that your question wasn't quite ready for prime time yet. Questions can be closed for many reasons. In each case, the main reason will be shown on the notice that appears on your closed question. There's a simple procedure to ask to reopen your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit your question to meet the site's requirements.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will automatically put the question into a review queue, where it will be reopened if 5 reviewers (or one moderator) vote for reopening. If you think the reviewers have missed or dismissed your improvements, this page is a place where you can explain why your question should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we go into specifics, here are two general guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your question must be clear&lt;/strong&gt;. People should be able to look at your question and immediately know what you are asking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your question must be clearly answerable&lt;/strong&gt;. It should be possible to answer your question fully, within a reasonable space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Basic Steps&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Address the concerns on the close/on-hold notice.&lt;/strong&gt; For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your question is claimed to be a duplicate of another question, read the linked question and its answers. Sometimes, the link of duplicates may include several questions (yours links to theirs, which links to another, etc). Read them all, then if you still think your question is different, edit your question to refer to those questions and explain why.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your question involves a single-word-request or similar tag, follow the detailed instructions in the tag's info (hover over the tag and click 'info'). Quite often, the only thing lacking is a sample sentence to show what part of speech you want. Edit your question to follow the extensive guidelines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Look up general references yourself&lt;/strong&gt; and edit your question to report what you have found, then explain why you are not satisfied with what you have found. This helps the community to directly address the actual problem. Here are some collections to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/142322&quot;&gt;Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; - an important part of the above. There are links to dictionaries for words, idioms, pronunciation and more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1482/142322&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Search the ELU archive for answers to similar questions&lt;/a&gt; - this page also includes tips on conducting advanced searches.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Further Steps&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above isn't enough to get your question reopened, try explaining here why you think it should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Explain what you have done by adding an answer to this question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add an answer to this question. This will bring the question to the attention of people on the meta site (note: don't add a whole new question on the meta site to ask for your question to be reopened - that's what this page is for).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your answer, summarise what you have done and include a link to your question. You can get the link by clicking the &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; button under &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; question.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NukSx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NukSx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer any issues that the community may raise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link to the answer you just posted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click the &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; button under your answer, and copy the link that pops up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to your closed question and add the following comment: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;[I have made a request to reopen this question.](xyz)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, replacing &quot;xyz&quot; with the link you copied from the &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; button.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the square brackets and round brackets exactly as shown. This adds a link in your comments to the reopen request you've just made, which makes it easier for reviewers to see why you think your question should be reopened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See you on the other side!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T01:28:14.650" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-14T16:23:47.817" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a question come through in the &quot;reopen vote&quot; review queue which was posted sometime in June 2014. It was quite an interesting question but perhaps overlong and I felt that the length of time it had been closed made it less of a good idea to open it back up, especially as it was closed at the time for being off-topic and, me still being relatively new here, I'd hate to step on anyone's toes using my newfound powers for evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, at least two members for whom I have an enormous amount of respect have voted to reopen it, so I've become confused by the accepted etiquette around here for reopening older questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular convention I should be following? Or should I just ignore when it was posted/closed and just reopen it if I think it's a good question that will get some decent answers/discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155456" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T21:39:39.327" Title="Reopening questions that are more than a year old" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-14T16:42:50.767" Score="8" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reviewing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/&quot;&gt;Close Votes&lt;/a&gt; review queue when one of the questions to be reviewed for closing was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209089/a-word-that-means-that-something-is-not-real-but-feels-real&quot;&gt;A word that means that something is not real but feels real&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was asked more than a year ago and apparently it got protected today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the best practice adopted in EL&amp;amp;U for closing questions that are more than a year old?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there any tangible benefits for closing questions that are too old (to migrate) citing any of the close-vote reasons?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VjiPO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VjiPO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T08:42:50.173" Title="Is there any point in closing questions that are more than a year old?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7821" CreationDate="2016-03-14T16:51:07.620" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;All questions, even old ones, provide examples to new users about what we think is acceptable on the site. If a question does not meet our standards, it may be closed regardless of how old it is. With this in mind, we might want to peruse some of the oldest questions in the Frequent tab and bring them up to our current standards or mark them with a historical flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T16:51:07.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7837" CreationDate="2016-03-14T17:56:06.933" Score="12" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the proper procedure for recommending that an old question be retained as being of historical (and continuing) interest despite its clearly not satisfying current site standards for research by the poster?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen some very old questions marked with a boilerplate blurb to the effect that the question has been granted special exemption against closure because it is of historical significance (which may involve, in some cases, an unresearched question that drew excellent answers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how does a site participant nominate an old question—and in particular, an old question that has been closed or is in danger of closure—to be &quot;marked with a historical flag&quot;? Do I flag a question for moderator attention and then specify that I'm requesting that EL&amp;amp;U's &quot;historical question&quot; blurb be added to explain why a question with (let's say) no sign of research is open when more-recent, similarly unresearched questions are being closed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case in point is this recently closed question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1269/is-it-bear-or-bare-with-me&quot;&gt;Is it &quot;bear&quot; or &quot;bare&quot; with me?&lt;/a&gt; The question was asked on August 18, 2010, and the poster shows no signs of having done any research at all. On March 6 of this year, it was closed for lack of research. But in the intervening 5½ years, the question has accumulated 125 upvotes, and the succinct but authoritative accepted answer (which cites a &quot;common errors&quot; reference work) has received 224 upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the question clearly does not pass muster by current EL&amp;amp;U standards. But on the other hand, the large number of upvotes and the huge number of page views (1,096,414) strongly suggest that people are interested in the question and have found it (and the answers to it) useful. When I ran into it in the Review queue, I voted to reopen the question because of its established record of interest to site visitors (it remains closed as I write); but what I would really like is to see it granted an exemption from the site's current Q&amp;amp;A standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T00:48:51.733" Title="How can users nominate old, popular questions for exemption from closure as being of 'historical value'?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7823" CreationDate="2016-03-14T19:29:15.450" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have voted to close it if I had not run out of my close-votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, the question is general reference and it can never qualify as a legitimate and on-topic question for English Language and Usage. If it were asked today, it would take less than an hour to close it as general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The viewer number has nothing to do with the quality of a question. As you have noticed, a popular single-word-request question can generate a couple of thousand views in one day while a serious and well-researched question does 30 to 50 views per day. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We need to close all those general reference questions that were asked when the community didn't have firm rules and guidelines. The question could be used as an excuse for current and future users to post a similar off-topic and general reference question as it was not closed properly. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should select all those general reference questions that were asked from the beginning up to one or two years and close all of them and delete them if they are deemed worthless. I would vote to delete the question as it is closed now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I believe it is high time that we did the clean-up exercise of this community by selecting all those worthless questions that are off-topic and figured out how to deal with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T20:19:34.870" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T20:19:34.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7820" CreationDate="2016-03-14T21:39:39.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question abides by the current site standards for scope and on-topicness then it should be reopened. Age is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T21:39:39.327" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7821" CreationDate="2016-03-15T13:23:06.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Close&lt;/em&gt; the older off-topic questions as a means to discourage low quality answers; &lt;em&gt;protect&lt;/em&gt; any question that is older than 12 months to prevent new users from making any contribution; &lt;em&gt;stick&lt;/em&gt; a historical flag so no one can post a new answer nor express their approval on the question, or cast a vote on any of its answers. Anything, but anything is better than &lt;em&gt;deleting&lt;/em&gt; them, as recommended by one member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@sumelic Thanks. As far as I understand, English Language and Usage Meta is to discuss workings and policies of this site and that's why votes don't affect your reputation points. I will write a post that includes the list of &lt;strong&gt;all worthless crap&lt;/strong&gt; that should be closed &lt;strong&gt;and deleted&lt;/strong&gt; when I have time. It is high time we did that. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7823/how-can-users-nominate-old-popular-questions-for-exemption-from-closure-as-bein#comment32079_7824&quot;&gt;How can users nominate old, popular questions for exemption from closure as being of &amp;#39;historical value&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not proposing to close and delete all of them at once. The poster asked a question and I expressed my opinion. I think it is a good thing to close old questions &lt;strong&gt;and delete them&lt;/strong&gt; even if they are more than a year old.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/140086/rathony&quot;&gt;@Rathony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Madness. Sheer folly. The idea of possibly deleting three or four years' worth of database because hundreds of questions asked in 2010/11/12 do not conform to today's guidelines, is pure folly. It was those &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; questions that first attracted me here in the first place. I looked up a question, and the answers on that question spurred me to read another post, and another, and yet another until I was hooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in May 2013 my Italian private student wrote: “... our body's health...” I wasn't sure about the spelling, should it have been “..our bodies' health...”? I Googled, and EL&amp;amp;U popped up, the rest is history as they say. If that question had been deleted (because it lacked research) I would never have come across this website. I was a rookie then, a baby, a newcomer, and I was fascinated by the answers that had been posted. I was literally in awe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12750/our-bodies-or-our-bodys&quot;&gt;Our bodies&amp;#39; or our body&amp;#39;s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, a high rep user has suggested that old questions which are clearly off topic should be deleted because they are &amp;quot;worthless crap&amp;quot;. They do not conform to the updated site's policies. Not today they don't, but they &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; between 2010 and 2013. Why the need to penalize users who followed the rules back between 2010 and 2013?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like bulldozing a 19th century English country cottage because it was built following yesteryear's building regulations and norms. Is that fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site's regulations, and guidelines are modified almost on a yearly basis, it is therefore quite probable that there are going to be questions which are on topic today which will no longer be in four or five years time. Questions that may seem banal and irrelevant to future users, but which at the time was a source of interest and intrigue. If the community deletes five-year-old questions today,  it means questions that were submitted in 2015 could be deleted in the future. From an egotistical viewpoint; where is the guarantee that my contributions are safe from deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I like every question that has been posted? Do I think every question must be saved for prosperity? No, of course not, but if a post older than 12 months earned a couple of thousand views, generated one or more answers which attracted upvotes then it means someone, somewhere, found that question or its answers useful. Should we endorse deleting that post because it fails to conform with the present-day guidelines? There are other avenues, one of these is to close that question with the approval of five users. If this needs to be said, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;closing&lt;/em&gt; a question is not equivalent to &lt;em&gt;deleting&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2270/difference-between-locked-and-closed&quot;&gt;Difference between “locked” and “closed”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/why-is-this-question-locked&quot;&gt;Why is this question locked?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T08:42:50.173" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T21:21:10.280" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had thought to chat with a specific user, but I don't see any way to invite anyone to chat, and I am wondering if using the @username formulation will cause a notification to appear in a user's notification queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20156" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T10:39:26.137" Title="How do I invite a user to chat and mentioning user?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7832" CreationDate="2016-03-16T00:39:01.303" Score="4" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1269/is-it-bear-or-bare-with-me&quot;&gt;Is it &amp;quot;bear&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bare&amp;quot; with me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's been a lot of discussion on Meta in the comments about this question recently, but it's actually not the main topic of any of the recent questions. I thought I'd post a new question dedicated to this topic, so that people can keep all their discussion about it in one place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see several options: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we can leave it as closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we can give it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;historical lock&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we can reopen it (there was one vote for this last time I checked)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we can delete it (there was also one vote for this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these do you think is best, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; As of March 18, 2016, the question has a historical lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T12:08:04.243" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:08:04.243" Title="The &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question: what should we do with it?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|questions|appropriate-questions|locked-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7829" CreationDate="2016-03-16T00:41:28.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, here's my opinion, partially copied from some comments I left earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete&lt;/strong&gt;: To me, it seems that there wouldn't be any damage done if we deleted it. I don't think having it on this site is helpful. (Yes; it has many upvotes. Even so, upvotes do not measure quality, and it had a head start on most of the other questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information is easy to find. Even ignoring Google, you can find most of the relevant information by simply looking up the words &quot;bare&quot; and &quot;bear&quot; in dictionaries (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bear&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bear with&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is defined in the Merriam Webster entry for &quot;bear,&quot; and has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/bear-with&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its own entry&lt;/a&gt; in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary with an example sentence that includes &quot;bear with me&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you do a Google search for &quot;is it bear with me or bare with me?&quot;, we're the first result, but our answers are short and not really any better than the multitude of other results. On the first page of the Google results, there are longer and more complete explanations such as &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dailywritingtips.com/bare-or-bear-with-me/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.dailywritingtips.com/bare-or-bear-with-me/&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://writingexplained.org/bear-with-me-or-bare-with-me-difference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://writingexplained.org/bear-with-me-or-bare-with-me-difference&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishforums.com/English/BearBareWithMe/vclxd/post.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.englishforums.com/English/BearBareWithMe/vclxd/post.htm&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our main answer is just a cut-and-paste from the following source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/bare.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/bare.html&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main goals of Stack Exchange, as I understand it, is to improve the internet by providing better or more relevant answers to Google search queries than other internet sites. I don't think this question does this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be against deleting questions like the following &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/148323/is-there-a-non-sexual-phrase-for-sleeping-with-someone&quot;&gt;Is there a phrase that means sleeping with someone without sex?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24750/how-do-you-quote-a-passage-that-has-used-sic-mistakenly&quot;&gt;How do you quote a passage that has used &amp;#39;[sic]&amp;#39; mistakenly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12634/gender-generally-associated-with-toad-characters-in-english-fiction-and-folkl&quot;&gt;What gender is generally associated with &amp;quot;toad&amp;quot; characters in English fiction and folklore?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because these questions have more answers, and each answer seems to be more valuable. What I mean by this: the answers are mostly original content rather than quotations, they are longer rather than shorter, and they seem to have more effort put into them (which makes it harder to reproduce them if the question is deleted). While the questions themselves may be off-topic, I don't want to delete bad or off-topic questions that have accumulated good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reopen&lt;/strong&gt;: I don't think it should be reopened, because I don't think there's anything significant that a new answer could added. It's a straightforward question with a straightforward answer. In addition, reopening it, combined with its high vote count, might send the message that we welcome this kind of question, which is bad because it is clearly off-topic by today's standards. That said, I don't think it would actually change much if we reopened it, but I don't understand why some people think it would be a good idea to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Historical locking&lt;/strong&gt; seems OK. To me, the biggest plus to this is that it gets taken off the list of top-voted questions (historical locked questions only show up in search results, not in lists). The downside is that we're stuck with it forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T15:39:14.887" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7829" CreationDate="2016-03-16T00:47:31.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should just leave it closed. The advantage over deleting it is that it can be a duplicate target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T00:47:31.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7829" CreationDate="2016-03-16T07:57:17.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about how to request a historical lock for old but seemingly popular questions that don't meet current site standards for preliminary research (or some other criterion) here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7823/how-can-users-nominate-old-popular-questions-for-exemption-from-closure-as-bein&quot;&gt;How can users nominate old, popular questions for exemption from closure as being of &amp;#39;historical value&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I stated explicitly there that my preference would be to preserve the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question in a locked state, it's only fair that I expose myself to the wrath of close/delete proponents by reiterating that preference here. Neither the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question nor the two answers it drew are especially substantial, but more than a million people have viewed the page since it was posted in August 2010. And though the coverage isn't deep, it is clear and accurate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that much of the debate over this question comes down to whether (on the one hand) you think that the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question lowers the prestige of English Language &amp;amp; Usage and encourages similar low-brow questions from people who see it, or whether (on the other hand) you think that the primary goal of EL&amp;amp;U is to provide useful answers to questions of English language and usage that people are interested in, regardless of their level of sophistication. As this description of the two viewpoints indicates, it is easy for proponents of either view to talk past the other because one view does not obviously and directly entail the negation of the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not embarrassed by the existence of the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; Q&amp;amp;A on our site, and I think that its presence is unrelated to the flood of low-end questions that arrive here day after day. Those things happen, I believe, because the vast majority of visitors to this site are neither experts nor advanced enthusiasts when it comes to the English language. They are people who want their English-related question answered, and who either ask it here or search Google and find a related answer posted here. This is the central fact that phenry in his famous Meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/this-is-not-a-site-for-serious-english-language-enthusiasts-and-it-never-will&quot;&gt;This is not a site for &amp;quot;serious English language enthusiasts,&amp;quot; and it never will be&lt;/a&gt; insists upon: most people who use EL&amp;amp;U are not looking for complicated, recondite explanations of advanced linguistic phenomena; rather, they want to know the name of a color that is somewhere between crimson and scarlet, or a word that means you kind of think someone's a jerk but your mind isn't entirely made up, or the difference between &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt;, or whether you should use &quot;bare with me&quot; or &quot;bear with me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five and a half years after the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question was posted, no one has attempted to provide a deep answer to it, which suggests to me that no one here who is capable of such an answer is inclined to provide it. That may be because knowledgeable people consider it a fundamentally uninteresting question—but their lack of interest in the question obviously doesn't extend to the Internet community at large. In any case, the 125 people who have upvoted the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question and the 224 people who have upvoted the accepted answer to it aren't zero-rep fly-by users: they are Stack Exchange participants who, one way or another, accumulated enough reputation points to cast upvotes on EL&amp;amp;U posts. (I am not among them, by the way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, if no one has cared to improve on the concise answers posted five years ago, I see little reason to reopen the question (which was closed earlier this month) just to make additional answers theoretically possible. That's why I would prefer to see the page given locked status. That way, it can continue to provide quick practical advice to the many people who continue to find it in Google Searches, without having the cloud of &quot;CLOSED [for lack of adequate research]&quot; hanging over it, and without the threat of its being deleted outright and inviting new rounds of questions about the difference between &lt;em&gt;bare&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; from inquisitive visitors who find their way to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarize, I favor the locked preservation option for the &quot;bare/bear with me&quot; question because (1) I think the page is useful to people who seek it here or on Google; (2) I think the locked status draws a useful line between questions that satisfied older EL&amp;amp;U standards but don't satisfy current standards, and questions that do meet current standards; (3) I don't think the existence of historically locked questions harms the site; and (4) I think older questions that have earned many upvotes over the years deserve a degree of respect and tolerance for having done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, no one as yet has detailed the steps involved in giving a question a historical lock. I continue to hope that someone will provide such an answer. [[&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE, 3/18/16:&lt;/strong&gt; Sumelic's answer to my &quot;How can users nominate...&quot; question appears to be a definitive response; I followed the method it described (namely, flagging the moderators with a request for a lock) in seeking a lock for the bare/bear question (as others may have done, too), and a moderator responded to the request(s) by locking the question—without reopening it, I might add. The result is that the question remains closed but is no longer in danger of being deleted. Thanks, mods!]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T00:04:01.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7829" CreationDate="2016-03-16T08:08:44.640" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need to have one standard that is applicable to all the questions regardless of when it was asked, how many views it generated, how many upvotes it has. They are all irrelevant when we decide to close it or even delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user said the question has a historical value, but I beg to differ. The question is just a general reference question without any research effort. There is nothing common between the two words etymologically or meaning-wise. The question is no better than &quot;what is the difference between hair and hare?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language and Usage (ELU) wants to differentiate its name from Yahoo Answer type of communities where you can ask whatever you want in any format. If we allow the question to remain undeleted, it will mislead users into believing that such a question had been accepted and welcomed for more than five years and it was belatedly found out by the community. What message does it give to new and future users? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember one new user quoted an old question which is asking for a list of words with a &quot;historical lock&quot; and asked. &quot;Why can't I ask this question while you allowed this question in the past?&quot; even though there was a clear comment by Andrew Leach stating &quot;this question should not be used as an example for a future general reference question&quot; (I don't remember it word for word). What if another user uses the question as an excuse or to insult or mock the integrity of this community? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of questions on ELU is reaching 70,000 soon and it will be more than 100,000 next year. We have to think about this. What benefit does it give to this community to let it remain on this site? What is the cost against the apparent benefit coming from removing the question from ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?fr=uh3_answers_vert_gs&amp;amp;type=2button&amp;amp;p=difference%20between%20bear%20and%20bare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo Answers link&lt;/a&gt; and see how exactly the question looks like those on Yahoo Answers. If &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101205070710AAAkrw6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; were asked today, how long do you think it would take for five users to close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A rule is a rule because it is the rule&lt;/strong&gt;. We deleted one-and-a-half-year old question for the same reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean#comment111627_10659&quot;&gt;What does “TL;DR:” mean?&lt;/a&gt; (sorry for users with less than 10,000 reputation points that you can't read it) with 2,755 views, 30 upvotes for the question, and 59 upvotes for the top ansewer, 9 upvotes for the second answer. The post date was Jan. 30, 2011 and the deletion date was Sep. 19, 2012. If the question had not been deleted, it could have generated far more views and upvotes. Who knows? What justifies deleting this question and what justifies leaving the &quot;bear/bare&quot; question closed? We deleted a very popular question with a lot of upvotes. Why can't we delete the &quot;bear/bare&quot; question? I don't see any difference between the two questions, but if someone asks me to choose only one between the two to delete, I will choose the &quot;bear/bare&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we aiming for double standards? The Original Poster of the &quot;TL;DR&quot; question and answers were just unlucky while the &quot;bear/bare&quot; posters are very lucky to have your sympathy? Where is fairness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T14:09:41.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7828" CreationDate="2016-03-16T10:39:26.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you create a chat room you can invite a user to it. The limitation is that the user has to have used chat before, in order that they have a chat user to invite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all you have to find the user you want to invite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;chat.se users tab&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;type in the name of the user you want to invite:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/afdx7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/afdx7.png&quot; alt=&quot;SE chat search, users&amp;#39; tab.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;select that user by clicking on their name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you need to create a room for you both:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ng1in.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ng1in.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chat user page, hilighting chat room creation button&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then an invitation is sent by the system to that user, which appears in their SE inbox, like comment pings do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T10:39:26.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7836" CreationDate="2016-03-16T17:19:01.627" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the avatar, name and rep of a user are misplaced on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/22/enthusiast?userid=133955&quot;&gt;badge page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a picture with freehand circles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7H1Bp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7H1Bp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133955" OwnerDisplayName="wythagoras" LastEditorUserId="109177" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T18:36:46.513" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T18:36:46.513" Title="User avatar is misplaced on the badge page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7835" CreationDate="2016-03-16T18:36:36.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just pushed a fix. This will be live in the next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109177" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T18:36:36.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7823" CreationDate="2016-03-17T00:48:51.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if you've already seen this, but the process is described to some extent at the following Meta Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;What is a historical lock, and what is it used for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;How do I request a historical lock on a question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flag the question for moderator attention, with the &quot;custom&#xA;  description&quot; option. In the flag description, explain why you think&#xA;  the post should be historically locked. A moderator will evaluate the&#xA;  question using the criteria outlined above, and will either lock the&#xA;  question, or decline your flag with an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if you want to try and gain more community support for&#xA;  the question, or contest the moderator decision, you can post a&#xA;  question here on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T00:48:51.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7840" CreationDate="2016-03-17T01:10:17.280" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305708/is-there-an-english-equivalent-to-do-not-expose-others-misdeeds&quot;&gt;Is there an English equivalent to &amp;quot;Do not expose others&amp;#39; misdeeds&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was recently bumped, and as I would consider at least three of the eight answers to be subpar, I thought to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;protect&lt;/a&gt; it in line with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6756/when-is-a-member-expected-to-protect-a-question&quot;&gt;When is a member expected to protect a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3164/is-the-protected-question-tool-overused&quot;&gt;Is the &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; question tool overused?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such option, however, just&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kY2NB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kY2NB.png&quot; alt=&quot;share/edit/close/flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asked and last edited on February 11, so it is not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3485/ability-to-protect-questions-on-meta-and-main&quot;&gt;24-hour limit&lt;/a&gt;. I don't know if protection/unprotection is logged, but there is no indication of any past actions in the edit log that might have locked its status. I am a 15K user and so far as I know, not under any disciplinary restriction that would have suspended that privilege. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T11:37:44.003" Title="Why can't I protect this question?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T01:24:30.273" Score="-1" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7913/notes-to-reviewers-trial-version-2-1&quot;&gt;version 2.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of this trial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Exchange, closing a question and putting it on hold is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10583/286574&quot;&gt;an invitation to improve the question&lt;/a&gt;. When you do, your question is automatically queued for review. It will be reopened if 5 reviewers vote for reopening. This page is for you to make brief notes to reviewers, similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19042/requests-for-reopen-undeletion-votes-etc-volume-01-2015-current-versio&quot;&gt;that of Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/439/24861&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; for some excellent tips on how to ask questions, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/465/24861&quot;&gt;examples of good questions and a simple pattern for asking good questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit your question&lt;/strong&gt;, paying attention to the concerns listed on the close/on-hold notice. Here are some general references that may help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/142322&quot;&gt;Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; - an important part of the above. There are links to dictionaries for words, idioms, pronunciation and more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1482/142322&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Search the ELU archive for answers to similar questions&lt;/a&gt; - this page also includes tips on conducting advanced searches.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can add notes for reviewers by commenting on your own question. You may also place your notes into a new answer here and link the answer to your question as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your answer, include a link to your question. Click &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; under your question for the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add the comment &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Notes to reviewers](xyz)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to your question to show reviewers where to look. Keep the square brackets and round brackets as shown, but replace &lt;code&gt;xyz&lt;/code&gt; with a link to your answer. Click &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; under your answer for the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T11:41:01.220" Title="Notes to Reviewers [Trial Version 2. Deprecated]" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-04-06T22:20:48.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7838" CreationDate="2016-03-17T01:48:46.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/276978&quot;&gt;recent feature change&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We recently implemented a change to protected questions based on the suggestion by Robert with a few modifications. 15k users will still be able to protect but in order to do so the question must have at least one answer by a new user aka a user with &amp;lt; 10 rep on the site (which is the required rep limit to answer protected questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question does not have an answer meeting this requirement, then the protect option will not be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked has one answer by a new user, but that user then earned 10 reputation points... for that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically speaking, if that answer was downvoted, the user would drop to 109 points, and (I think) you would be able to protect the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, if an answer is something that should be prevented from being posted, then it's certainly worth downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, this is hypothetical; I did not attempt to evaluate said answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T01:48:46.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T04:20:31.567" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the &quot;How do I ask a good question&quot; page clearly states grammar and word usage related questions are welcome...There have also been helpful comments amid all the useless markings for posting inappropriate questions so I doubt they are incomprehensible. Furthermore I am redirected to &quot;duplicates&quot; that allegedly cover the same topic where they have little to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163539" OwnerDisplayName="L.White" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T15:41:15.287" Title="Why am I not supposed to ask grammar related questions and get downvotes/deletes every time I do?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7841" CreationDate="2016-03-17T05:47:59.687" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of your questions are in conformity with our rules and guidelines and they are off-topic questions. We don't encourage a question that has no research efforts on your own. I believe you deleted a few questions with my comments to them and they were all general reference or too basic questions for English Language and Usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;FAQ for Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-or-on-hold-question&quot;&gt;the link&lt;/a&gt; that you can read. Some of them are in our Help Center. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you find the duplicate doesn't answer your question, you need to edit your question and explain why the duplicate is not helping you in detail so that we can start to vote to reopen it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is on your own here. We don't help those who don't help themselves. It's up to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best advice is you can visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; (ELL), but please make sure you take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit their &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; before posting any question. That's what migrating a question is for and one of your questions was migrated to ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still you don't seem to have an account on English Language Learners. If you post an off-topic question on ELL, your question will be closed. Remember this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Search and&#xA;  research&lt;/a&gt; Have you&#xA;  thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? &lt;strong&gt;Sharing&#xA;  your research helps everyone&lt;/strong&gt;. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t&#xA;  meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve &lt;strong&gt;taken the time to try&#xA;  to help yourself&lt;/strong&gt;, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and&#xA;  above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T06:02:02.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7841" CreationDate="2016-03-17T12:56:12.507" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of the time of writing this response, you have 8 questions. One is open with an unaccepted answer. Two were migrated to a more appropriate site. Two were marked as duplicates. Three were marked as needing more detail (two of these were deleted automatically after a period of inactivity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six out of your 8 questions were on-topic for the site but didn't meet our guidelines for asking. You are  getting down- and close votes because your questions do not have enough information for us to answer them. If you feel the duplicates don't apply, it is up to you to edit your post to explain in detail why the duplicate doesn't answer your question. That reassures us that you actually read the duplicate and the answers and thought about how it applies to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad you read the part of the Help Center that described the scope of the site. Please also take the time to read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to ask good questions&lt;/a&gt;, kinds of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;questions that aren't a good fit for the site&lt;/a&gt; as well as the section about what to do about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closed questions&lt;/a&gt;, and then let us know if you have additional questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T12:56:12.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7841" CreationDate="2016-03-17T15:31:08.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a close voter of the &quot;love/loved&quot; question, I thought I would give you my reason, although it's explicit in the answers above.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your original question consisted of the title and this one-line body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is it loved here? I think it is correct but do not know why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I closed it for lack of research. Although it's not easy to find the guideline for this &lt;em&gt;before the question is closed&lt;/em&gt;, one of the major close reasons we have is &lt;em&gt;lack of research&lt;/em&gt;. Unfortunately one often finds out only when it's posted as the close reason. That guideline is way towards the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;Asking&lt;/a&gt; on the right hand side: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research just means telling us what you found when you looked it up, even if all it did was confuse you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing indicating that you did any research when you originally posted your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had your question initially included all the detail it does now, I would not have voted to close it. I've voted to reopen, even though I think it's a better fit on English Language Learners (which is not only for non-native speakers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;When someone raises an issue in meta with a question I've closed, I usually feel compelled to give my reason.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T15:41:15.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T17:02:18.720" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;As interpretations go, they can be more or less subjective. With that in mind, questions asking for them may make little sense. Of course, there has to be a however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, proverbs. Would you consider questions asking for interpretation of proverbs as valid? The sense of the proverbs may be obvious, and I would consider that a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about their origins, though? Since those can often be poetic, or lost in the depths of history, this can be subjective as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To extend this question's context a little, as an English learner, questions asking for &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; help verify the understanding of the language. In ideal circumstances, the question would receive a set of different answers, evaluated via voting, through which I could compare how wrong I was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76859" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T17:25:47.420" Title="Questions asking for interpretation" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7846" CreationDate="2016-03-17T17:25:47.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions on interpreting a foreign word or phrase into English are generally considered off-topic because they can be answered using a dictionary for that purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the nuances of related words (which might arise during translation) are on-topic, provided they are asked clearly, with context, and demonstrate effort on the part of the asker beyond &quot;they were both suggested as translations of {my foreign word}&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about word/phrase usage and meaning in context are also on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, phrase or word requests are acceptable for seeking translations of foreign words and phrases (including proverbs) as long as they meet all the other requirements as well -- context, research, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=translation&quot;&gt;quite a few questions&lt;/a&gt; about our policy on translation that you might want to check out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T17:25:47.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T18:29:20.410" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this is yet another discussion about the migration path to ELL. There needs to be some sort of community consensus on what should be migrated, what should be closed, and what should be answered on EL&amp;amp;U. Yes there are lots of discussions on Meta EL&amp;amp;U about this topic, but none of them seem to have borne fruit, so I'm bringing it up again with a more recent example of a strange migration choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/84764/&quot;&gt;Can you replace “anywhere” with “where”?&lt;/a&gt; was asked on March 8th and migrated 3 hours ago tagged only with &amp;quot;grammar&amp;quot; (gee thanks). I don't understand why it was migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I was tagging it more appropriately, I noticed it has a chain of 20 comments including one that asks one of the commenters to turn their comment into an answer. Obviously this question was of interest to the EL&amp;amp;U community. The question is not obviously from a non-native speaker, and even if it is, it's not a question only of interest to folks learning English as a foreign language as evidenced by the discussion it generated on EL&amp;amp;U. If no-one on EL&amp;amp;U feels like writing out an answer to a question that's been discussed extensively in comments, why is that an ELL problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the EL&amp;amp;U community needs to get on the same page about what types of questions are appropriate to migrate to ELL. We aren't interested in turning your comments into complete answers for you. Just like you, we're not interested in questions that can be completely answered with a dictionary. Not every question about English is on-topic at ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're getting a&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/82383&quot;&gt;lot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/82520&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/83540&quot;&gt;crap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/83653&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;migrated. Don't send us questions that are really poor quality or obviously off-topic on ELL. That's just rude. We have plenty of questions to answer, so you aren't doing as any favors by sending us junk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't clear about what sorts of questions ELL welcomes and what is off-topic, there's a summary on ELL Meta : &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2672/&quot;&gt;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2672/&lt;/a&gt; I'll reproduce the off-topic part of that answer for easy reference (even though the particular migrated question I started my post with is not off-topic at ELL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Off-topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology, evolution of the English language, or historical English - see english.stackexchange.com instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing advice - see writers.stackexchange.com instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that can be answered by a quick dictionary lookup (these are off topic on ELL, and there are many free dictionaries available online)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&amp;quot;are there any mistakes?&amp;quot;), &lt;strong&gt;unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;How can I improve my English?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;What's a good tool for...?&amp;quot; (these are not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Requests for resources (we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/735&quot;&gt;Resources List&lt;/a&gt; on Meta which you might find useful).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T18:29:20.410" Title="Closing the loop on migrations to ELL" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2016-03-18T00:43:15.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T03:37:50.417" Score="4" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/160154/70861&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/160154/70861&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer was edited to add a single space ahead of the first line.  Does this serve any purpose? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The main issue, from my point of view, is that frivolous edits pop the questions to the top of the &quot;Top Questions&quot; list, effectively polluting that list with meaningless &quot;noise&quot;. There are times when this sort of activity makes the &quot;Top Questions&quot; list nearly useless, driving reviewers away.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T19:08:54.237" Title="What is the point in editing answers to add a single space to the first line?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7850" CreationDate="2016-03-18T03:57:28.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that there is no point, and that this should not be happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T03:57:28.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7850" CreationDate="2016-03-18T06:58:05.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's any effect at all. Just by highlighting the text, it seems the space is removed from the formatted text anyway. The lines of text in the next section form a conclusive test, assuming meta's formatting is the same as the main site's for leading spaces. A single leading space has no effect, though multiple spaces can change the formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Test: this line was typed with a leading space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Test: this line was typed with &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; leading spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                Test: this line was typed with several leading spaces.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the editor's rep count of 5K+, I don't think editing points are awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the question isn't closed, but editing &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; doesn't push &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; onto the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack exchange has lots of seemingly-undocumented features, so there may be a side-effect we've not considered that the editor was counting on. It could also be as innocent as an accidental mouse-click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have to pose a question to the editor if you want to know :) . Post back here if you find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T06:58:05.693" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T07:48:49.687" Score="10" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I post a question on the origin of a common expression or on the etymology of a word (something I often do, sorry for that) I regularly receive a fair amount of criticism about their &quot;unproductiveness&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, most users don't like this sort of question and are just happy with the information offered by  Etymonline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, digging deeper, it is sometime possible to shed more light on  issues which are not yet  available on common online references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what about creating a separate section where  etymological questions don't interfere with other language activities and users are not annoyed by their presence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T18:56:11.313" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T13:42:18.017" Title="What about an &quot;etymological section&quot; on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7850" CreationDate="2016-03-18T11:21:47.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;ab2 explained that they edited it in order to reverse a downvote. A questionable move, but it does sometimes serve a purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T11:21:47.330" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7853" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:00:52.580" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at your profile, it seems to me that the majority of your questions tagged with &quot;etymology&quot; have been received well votes-wise. I also did not find any that were closed. So I'll assume you're talking about comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate that some people don't see the value of these questions, but it looks like most people have found them useful and on-topic. So you shouldn't be reluctant to ask more of them on this site. As long as you tag them &quot;etymology,&quot; users who hate etymology can put that tag on their &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23811/how-do-i-hide-posts-matching-my-ignored-tags&quot;&gt;ignore list&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which can be configured to either gray out questions with the tag, or hide them entirely. I really don't think we need a new, separate section of the site beyond that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T10:52:18.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7853" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:47:29.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A 'separate section'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no feasible tech to do what you want within ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are alternatives that go in the direction that you want but I fear will not be satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could try to create an Area51 proposal but I doubt that would be successful; I don't think there's enough market and people wouwld just say 'ask at ELU already.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There already exists tags which could suffice, but no one cares. The 'etymology' tag already exists which you could use but nobody uses tags for a 'subsystem' like you ask for. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest behavioral encouragement whenever you see an etymology question: use the tag, edit questions to ask for 'beyond what is in etymonline', 'allow more speculative answers'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the etymology question has to not be closable. If what is sought is beyond etymonline, then it should be quoted, and then asked for further info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:47:29.030" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7853" CreationDate="2016-03-18T23:33:46.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love questions about etymology (in the sense of the origin and evolution of words and phrases) because, often, researching them yields such surprising and rewarding results. In my experience, a well-researched answer to an etymology question on English Language &amp;amp; Usage is likely to be considerably richer and deeper than the more narrowly focused answers that Etymology Online provides. This isn't a knock on Etymonline; it's an acknowledgment that space restrictions require that resource to take a narrow view of what identifying the etymology of a word or phrase means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, EL&amp;amp;U can accommodate multiple instances of early occurrences of a word or phrase, along with discussions of the context of these occurrences, and coverage of evolving meanings (if any). Taken together, these components of an answer can help make it a legitimate original contribution to popular understanding of the origin of a word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that some linguists and language enthusiasts seem to think that etymology is properly limited to identifying the root words of—or the progression through other languages of the antecedents of—the word or phrase in question. For them, Etymonline's coverage resolves the question of etymology insofar as etymology is on-topic at EL&amp;amp;U. Hence the frequent comment made to posters of etymology questions, &quot;Did you check at Etymonline? What did you find?&quot;—as though that site's coverage were conclusive and exhaustive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take a different and much broader view of what &quot;etymology&quot; encompasses. Since we don't have tags at EL&amp;amp;U for &quot;word origin&quot; and &quot;phrase origin,&quot; questions that inquire more broadly into the circumstances surrounding the emergence of a word or phrase into its modern sense in English tend to use the &quot;etymology&quot; tag, though they may seek information about early occurrences and early meanings of the word or phrase, in addition to its etymological derivation, narrowly understood. In effect, they are requesting the kind of early usage coverage that the full OED provides in its historical citations for a word—and today, happily, inquiries into such examples often turn up earlier occurrences than the print OED has recorded because they can take advantage of searches of digital libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For inquiries of this type, Etymonline is merely a starting point. I would welcome any question about etymology (in the broad sense) that began by saying, &quot;Etymology Online reports that word [or phrase] X comes from &lt;em&gt;bar-bar-bar-bar&lt;/em&gt;. What (if any) significant information about the etymology [or &lt;em&gt;origin&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;emergence into mainstream English&lt;/em&gt;] of this word [or phrase] does Etymonline's account omit?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not favor trying to sequester questions of this type in a special reserved area of EL&amp;amp;U. To the contrary, I think that such questions should remain integrated in the core of EL&amp;amp;U, not least because I think that they produce some of the most useful contributions that EL&amp;amp;U makes toward broadening public knowledge of matters of English language and usage. What I would urge is that site participants who currently take a narrow view of the proper scope of &quot;etymology&quot; consider adopting (or at least accepting as legitimate) a broader notion of what that term &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt; encompasses on this site, and try to take a more welcoming (or at least tolerant) attitude toward questions and answers premised on that broader interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T23:33:46.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7853" CreationDate="2016-03-18T23:59:00.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started looking through your posts - just yours with the etymology tag - but stopped when I realised the search produced &lt;em&gt;25 pages&lt;/em&gt; (!) of results. After going through maybe 10 questions, I found a single possibly negative comment, and many constructive ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the negative comments I recall on the subject (not necessarily related to &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; posts) objected to using etymology to define current usage, not to whether etymology was on-topic for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, etymology is firmly part of ELU, all the way back to its tour page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the need to segregate questions about etymology from ELU's core. Labelling them with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; tag is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T06:06:52.243" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T06:06:52.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7798" CreationDate="2016-03-19T06:14:29.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that too many users are 'editing' simply to bring somebody else's post into line with their own personal preferences. In short, they are editing for style rather than content. I too have had posts 'edited' for petty stuff like changing italics to bold, or changing the way I post a link, and to be totally honest with me it irritates the hell out of me! Sure, as Rathony says, it can be rolled back but it still leaves a bad feeling against the petty editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is needed is some guidelines for editing, as generally speaking editors (meaning professionals) edit out errors, reformat to a house style if such a thing exists, but actively avoid editing for their own preferences. While an editor may prefer to see &lt;em&gt;December 20th&lt;/em&gt;, they will not 'correct' &lt;em&gt;20th December&lt;/em&gt; unless there is a house style guide saying &quot;dates should be written as December 20th&quot; I am sure the petty editors in ELU think they are being helpful, so they need educating and an editing guide/style guide would be helpful in that. I agree with Kyle's grievance, butI don't agree that contacting the petty editor is a good way to do it - that looks like a recipe for an argument to me. A set of guidelines is less personal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives... raise the rep required for editing. Or do the reverse - high rep brings immunity to editing, except maybe for editing by mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T06:14:29.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7839" CreationDate="2016-03-19T15:50:31.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I believe my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314604/even-were-or-were-even&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314604/even-were-or-were-even&lt;/a&gt; was closed incorrectly.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my notes in reference to any and all reasons my question was closed for being off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/on-topic&quot;&gt;The Scope Defined by the Community&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Word choice and usage&amp;quot; applies to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;don’t ask any questions about the following topics&amp;quot;: none of those apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to the Help Center, this question is &lt;strong&gt;On Topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7839/142322&quot;&gt;About reopening questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both general guidelines are satisfied - my question is clear and clearly answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm asking for the community to select between two sentences to say which is grammatically correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I know that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Were even&lt;/em&gt; is grammatically correct, while &lt;em&gt;even were&lt;/em&gt; is not.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to do various Google searches, but nothing comes up, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;amp;as_q=or%20%22even%20was%22&amp;amp;as_epq=was%20even&amp;amp;as_oq=&amp;amp;as_eq=books.google.com&amp;amp;as_nlo=&amp;amp;as_nhi=&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;cr=&amp;amp;as_qdr=all&amp;amp;as_sitesearch=&amp;amp;as_occt=any&amp;amp;safe=images&amp;amp;as_filetype=&amp;amp;as_rights=#newwindow=1&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_qdr=all&amp;amp;q=or%20%22even%20was%22%20%22was%20even%22%20-books.google.com%20-tripadvisor.%20-biblegateway.com%20-imgur.com%20-quora.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt;.  I have also seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=were%20even%2Ceven%20were%2Cwas%20even%2Ceven%20was&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwere%20even%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ceven%20were%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwas%20even%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ceven%20was%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google's Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;, but this replies with &lt;em&gt;most common&lt;/em&gt;, I want &lt;em&gt;grammatically correct&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, here are just a few of many questions similar to mine that aren't closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314656/how-should-i-use-sell-out-be-sold-out&quot;&gt;How should I use &amp;quot;sell out&amp;quot; &amp;amp; &amp;quot;be sold out&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7015/plural-of-runner-up&quot;&gt;Plural of &amp;quot;Runner-Up&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154558/is-grownup-grown-up-or-grown-up-the-correct-usage-as-a-noun&quot;&gt;Is grownup, grown up, or grown-up the correct usage (as a noun)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T11:58:00.763" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-19T17:18:44.750" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for some guidance or best practices on the situation where you've asked a question and already received one or more stellar answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, as soon as one accepts an answer, the question is considered resolved. It's technically possible, but almost never observed in practice, to see a new answer to a &quot;green&quot; question (i.e. one with an accepted answer, which shows up green in the question feed). So you'd kinda like to delay accepting for a little while, not because you're expecting a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answer, just some &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; ones, offering different perspectives and data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when someone posts an answer which not only answers the question, but does so in a comprehensive, detailed, well-researched and -cited, and often entertaining way, it's unlikely that any new answer will &quot;supercede&quot; it. So you know eventually you're going to accept it. And therefore witholding the tick seems kind of, I don't know, punitive? Or, if not that far, then impolite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's a matter of a cut-off. After N hours / X days, etc, when does it start becoming discourteous to not accept a good answer? When do you, personally, start getting frustrated with an OP who hasn't accepted your (good, highly-voted, expert, etc etc) answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-03-20T01:13:41.103" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T01:28:16.213" Title="What is the customary amount of time to leave before accepting an answer when you've already gotten a really good answer?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2016-03-19T17:29:42.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an answerer, I'd be happy to see a comment of appreciation in that situation, with a note to indicate whatever period of time the OP thinks is reasonable to keep the question open. At this point, it's mostly a matter of setting and managing expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can probably wait up to a day or so without posting a comment, though an immediate up-vote would not be out of place for a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For active users, given the number of questions answered at a sitting, the green tick is more of a bonus than something waited upon with bated breath :) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T17:29:42.510" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2016-03-20T01:28:16.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you can define X for all situations. It partly depends on a few factors, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many other people have answered the question?&lt;/strong&gt; (If only one or two people have answered the question, I think an O.P. has every right to wait awhile before accepting an answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much does your answer &lt;em&gt;definitively&lt;/em&gt; answer the question?&lt;/strong&gt; (A question asking &quot;What does this mean?&quot; can perhaps be answered quite definitively. However, a question asking, &quot;What's a good word to describe this concept?&quot; may elicit a lot of answers, any of which might work in a pinch, but perhaps none of them works as deftly as the O.P. had originally hoped.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not long ago, I had an answer accepted after about two weeks. But my answer was the only one given, and it wasn't necessarily a stellar answer. I didn't mind the wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting: not everyone logs onto the Stack Exchange as frequently as many of us regulars do. Sometimes the onus is on the regular to be patient, rather than on the O.P. to be checking answers daily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So it's a matter of a cut-off. After N hours / X days, etc, when does it start becoming discourteous to not accept a good answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to pick a single value that could be held as a general guideline for all situations, I'd probably use a unit of &lt;em&gt;weeks&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;hours&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;days&lt;/em&gt;. After 2 or 3 weeks, it's probably a good time to see if your question has gotten an answer worthy of a green checkmark. (Sooner that that would be okay, of course – but that's not what this meta question asks.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I'd rather have an O.P. select an answer after 10 days than after 10 hours. We are a global community. After 10 hours, half the planet hasn't even been awake long enough to look at the question. Every now and then, I've seen some pretty mediocre answers picked a bit too hastily for my tastes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T01:28:16.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-20T15:13:37.870" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to the community and not sure of accepted standards yet, but I'd like to help and not make a nuisance of myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an edit suggestion to add the Hiberno-English tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51427/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-top-of-the-morning-to-you&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, but it was rejected because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This edit introduces tags that do not help to define the topic of the question. Tags should help to describe what the question is about, not just what it contains&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at some other questions that have that tag, and there are a few asking about specific phrases &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/264241/what-words-do-children-of-english-native-speakers-use-for-kid-child-etc&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/151158/where-does-the-irish-idiom-at-all-at-all-come-from&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160280/why-do-we-say-county-durham&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, rather than about the dialect as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I get clarification on where dialect tags should/shouldn't be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T11:33:38.557" Title="Clarification on tag usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7853" CreationDate="2016-03-21T07:59:26.373" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reminded that exasperation recently led me to the same thought, to wit, that the controversy over phrase etymology questions might be best resolved by a special section of ELU, or a new area (as suggested by Mitch in the answers here). My exasperation was inspired by the comments on, and inconsistent treatment of, two questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/307852/etymology-of-the-half-your-age-plus-seven-phrase&quot;&gt;Etymology of the “half your age, plus seven” phrase?&lt;/a&gt; (Feb. 16, 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/308130/whats-the-story-behind-read-my-lips&quot;&gt;What's the story behind “read my lips”?&lt;/a&gt; (Feb. 18, 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't color the controversy with the details of my trivial outrage, other than to say (as I mentioned in the comments on question 1) that such questions, if well-formed and adequately researched, should not be close-voted as off-topic. The whole of the controversy seems to be embedded in the comments on question 1, which was closed, reopened and closed again, and which now has 1 delete vote. Yet question 2, which is not notably dissimilar, has no close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point here is that the prejudice against 'etymology' questions, especially as concerns phrase origins, does undoubtedly exist. It seems, however, to be especially virulent when directed at questions from comparatively low-scoring participants. For that reason, the prejudice is even more annoying than it would be if applied to all phrase origin questions indiscriminately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T08:47:49.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7870" CreationDate="2016-03-21T14:20:14.963" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about what a character in a certain book is talking about during a certain passage of said book, and I am wondering if that would be on-topic here.  If not, what site could i ask it on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163776" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T14:29:30.333" Title="Is a question about the meaning of a certain passage from a book on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7869" CreationDate="2016-03-21T14:29:30.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the question. If you are asking about the meaning of a word or phrase in context and you can show that you have done some work to try to figure it out on your own (e.g., you've looked up the word or phrase in a dictionary and can explain what it means), it is probably on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you are asking what the entire passage means in the context of the story, that would not be on-topic. I don't believe we have a site for that, but you could ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T14:29:30.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9452" CreationDate="2016-03-21T16:22:16.333" Score="16" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most questions asking for an English equivalent of proverbs or sayings in other languages use 3 tags together - &lt;em&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;expression-requests&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expression&lt;/a&gt; is defined by ODO as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word or phrase, especially an &lt;strong&gt;idiomatic&lt;/strong&gt; one, used to convey an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;We have an expression, ‘You don’t get owt for nowt.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idiom&lt;/a&gt; is defined by M-W as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;expression&lt;/strong&gt; that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words but that has a separate meaning of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What exactly is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be no description or tag wiki for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T20:11:10.643" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T20:12:29.813" Title="What are [expression-requests] tag for?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-21T16:54:22.113" Score="2" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made a few attempts to ask/answer a question. Complete fail! Almost all of my questions/answers  were deleted.  Probably I'm an idiot, but how come that the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16976/using-and-at-the-beginning-of-a-sentence?rq=1&quot;&gt;&quot;And&quot; at the beginning of a sentence&lt;/a&gt; is nice, respectable and  merits exposing for years, while my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314292/is-it-grammatically-correct-to-begin-a-sentence-with-which-in-academic-style&quot;&gt;about &quot;Which&quot; at the beginning of a sentence&lt;/a&gt; is vicious, opinion-based and deserves only being put on hold by a swarm of experts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS, I feel that this question will be deleted within minutes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PPS The other closed question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/301656/how-to-ask-properly-how-grave-a-mistake-is&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The deleted answer (1 of 1) concerned physics, so I don't cite it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156774" OwnerDisplayName="Serguei" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T18:57:53.183" Title="Bullying newcomers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7872" CreationDate="2016-03-21T18:57:53.183" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314292/is-it-grammatically-correct-to-begin-a-sentence-with-which-in-academic-style&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; followed the same pattern as the other one you cite, I would agree that there was a double standard. However, in your question you do not explain your understanding of what part of speech 'which' is and how it is generally used, nor do you explain why you think that beginning a sentence with 'which' should or should not be grammatical based on your observations or research. It seems you believe it is ungrammatical, in which case, you need to provide evidence that it is in use, rather than that it is a usage you made up so that you could ask a question about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you haven't provided any of these details, the question is not answerable by anything but an opinion at this point. You have the opportunity to edit it to include some more details. After you've edited it, it will automatically enter the reopen queue for high rep community members to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, you have no answers posted on EL&amp;amp;U. You have one deleted question and two closed questions. The one question that was deleted was removed automatically for inactivity. The two closed questions were skimpy on detail and did not have a clear question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have one question that was closed as a duplicate. That means it was a good question, just someone had already asked it. You have another open question with an accepted answer. I see no evidence of anyone bullying you, but I see a lot of evidence of community members trying to help you and give you information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T18:57:53.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7795" CreationDate="2016-03-22T03:41:41.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Trial Version 2.1&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As before, I'll leave this up for a few days for comments and improvements before taking it live. I'd like to incorporate some of the lessons learnt from the trial so far.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title: Notes to Reviewers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; (ELU) is a community for etymologists, linguists and English enthusiasts. As a Stack Exchange community, ELU shares Stack Exchange's goal to &lt;em&gt;build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be asked within ELU's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;areas of interest&lt;/a&gt; and answers should be definitive. This imposes a level of expectation to carefully state the question. It may include noting aspects of the question that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of interest, how far you've got, or carefully highlighting the &lt;em&gt;core&lt;/em&gt; of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the expectation isn't met, the question may be put on hold as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10583/286574&quot;&gt;an invitation to edit for improvement&lt;/a&gt;. Once edited, your question is automatically queued for review. It will be reopened if 5 reviewers vote for reopening. &lt;strong&gt;This page is for you to make brief notes to reviewers to assist the review process&lt;/strong&gt;, similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/19042/requests-for-reopen-undeletion-votes-etc-volume-01-2015-current-versio&quot;&gt;that at Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/439/24861&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; for some &lt;strong&gt;excellent tips on how to ask questions&lt;/strong&gt;, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/465/24861&quot;&gt;examples of good questions and a simple pattern for asking good questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit your question&lt;/strong&gt;, paying attention to the concerns listed on the close/on-hold notice. Here are some general references that may help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/142322&quot;&gt;Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; - an important part of the above. There are links to dictionaries for words, idioms, pronunciation and more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1482/142322&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Search the ELU archive for answers to similar questions&lt;/a&gt; - this page also includes tips on conducting advanced searches.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can add &lt;strong&gt;notes for reviewers&lt;/strong&gt; by placing a comment on your own question. You may also record your notes in a new answer here and link the answer to your question as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your answer, include a link to your question. Click &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; under your question for the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add the comment &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Notes to reviewers](xyz)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to your question to show reviewers where to look. Keep the square brackets and round brackets as shown, but replace &lt;code&gt;xyz&lt;/code&gt; with a link to your answer. Click &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; under your answer for the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T11:34:20.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-22T12:29:31.390" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are three recent question examples, including one asked by me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/315107/13804&quot;&gt;What do you call the space where you park a car? Parking spot, space, bay or what?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314484/13804&quot;&gt;This baby-walking device is called a ([prefix]-)[name] by people from [location]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314854/13804&quot;&gt;AmEng equivalent for BrEng &amp;quot;decorator&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google will find me lots of dictionary entries and other things to tell me definitions of the words pram, stroller, paperhanger, interior decorator, parking spot, parking bay, and so on.  However, I don't know of any way to find which of these terms are most common in England versus Australia versus the Eastern U.S. versus the Western U.S. versus anywhere else people claim to speak English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, I see comments which tell where the user is from, and what that user and his/her friends/ family/ associates call the thing, and whether the user is familiar with the alternative terms.  Definitive, well-resourced answers are hard to come by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try to assist these askers, answerers, and commenters.  Please provide tips on what resources exist, or what sort of terms to use in searches to obtain reliable information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T12:29:31.390" Title="Resources to help with answers to regional difference type questions" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7784" CreationDate="2016-03-23T14:59:40.050" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe the problem is that questions get migrated at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that option is there, then I don't see anything unreasonable in expecting the ELL community to sort out which ones to close. Surely that is more reasonable than expecting the ELU community to make those decisions for ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sheer volume of migrated questions is becoming a problem, I think it would be better just to take the option away, or change it to something more akin to a resubmission option presented to the poster: &quot;your question is not right for ELU. Perhaps you would like join our other site here (ELL link)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the history of discussion about migrations to ELL, we see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5210/can-we-add-english-language-learners-to-the-belongs-on-another-se-site-list?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (repeated &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7128/should-we-have-a-migration-path-to-ell?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) that even when ELL was in beta and migrations were handled by moderators, ELL still rejected one out of six of them. This kills the argument that 'folks with enough rep to migrate should know what fits and what doesn't.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of those threads also have warnings that opening a migration channel could lead to problems of ELL accusing ELU of sending crap. Those predictions have come true. I can't really think of a better argument for closing the migration channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T02:11:40.200" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7878" CreationDate="2016-03-23T15:39:43.713" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the etiquette if I come to a question that is thus far unanswered and I have an answer in mind, but before I post my answer I see that in the comments, someone has already said the same thing, and perhaps has received some votes for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it poor etiquette for me to go ahead and post my answer, which might then go on to be accepted and voted up, even though someone else already suggested that answer in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the general consensus a &quot;you snooze, you lose&quot; policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6858" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T15:42:41.997" Title="Etiquette re: Answering a question that has been &quot;answered&quot; in comments" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-26T18:03:25.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7877" CreationDate="2016-03-23T15:42:41.997" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's absolutely fine for you to post an answer regardless of what people have said in comments. If you have a definitive answer that will cover what the OP asked, have at it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious justification for this is simply: &quot;if the person who posted the comment wanted the chance at upvotes/being selected as the correct answer, they wouldn't have posted their answer as a comment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen several instances lately of questions where someone made a suggestion in the comments which was later posted as an answer by someone else (though they elaborated on the comment and linked definitions) and this was actively encouraged by the original commenter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether to post answers as comments is a pretty polarising issue around here, I've found, and is especially controversial on ELL. The general consensus seems to be that it's best to use comments for clarification/tidbits that don't fully answer the question, while answers are for...well, answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155456" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T15:42:41.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7887" CreationDate="2016-03-23T16:49:12.753" Score="16" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit discouraging to me when a user, especially one with high rep, answers a blatantly off-topic question. I don't at all begrudge them the rep earned by such an answer; I just feel it encourages more questions of the kind. But to each their own, I thought. People have their reasons; trying to be helpful is one of them, as is having a different opinion of what constitutes a blatantly off-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also wanting to be helpful, I sometimes leave a comment and a link to ELL, or I'll just VTC. But sometimes I answer for my own reasons, and recently this comment appeared under such an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you think this question is on-topic? I am curious to know why you would choose to answer a blatantly off-topic question? When you say &quot;it really depends on the context&quot;, don't you think it is necessary to ask the Original Poster what he/she is asking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a bit surprised. It doesn't feel to me that it's someone's business to tell other users what to do in so direct a manner. Knowing the commentor, though, it fit their personality, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a few days later, I saw a very similar comment, also quite direct, by a different user admonishing someone else for the same thing. (It was a few days ago, and I can't remember the name to look for it. Searching by LQQ &lt;em&gt;(Low Quality Question)&lt;/em&gt; would be too depressing.) But the tone was there, and I thought a bad example might have been set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, should this be encouraged as a way to deal with the problems we have here with LQQ? On the one hand, it's direct, and likely to make an impression on most newish users who commit this &quot;infraction&quot;.  On the other, it's kind of hostile and may create an atmosphere of rigidity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1757/58761&quot;&gt;addressed before&lt;/a&gt; in 2011, but maybe could use revisiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives to leaving such comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consistently leave &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; * comments on the answers (and wait for the slew of meta complaints)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consistently downvote the answers, leaving a &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; comment (and wait for the even greater slew of meta complaints)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvote the answers without comments (and wait for meta complaints we can close as duplicates)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ignore and hope it happens with less frequency (knowing that new users always will take up the practice as they come across the site not knowing any better)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VTC asap and hope the question gets closed before anyone answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others? Suggestions? Opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add&lt;/strong&gt;: My position (which I thought was clear) is that I don't think it's my business to tell other users when and when not to post answers. I guess what isn't clear is the question, &lt;em&gt;Is it anybody's business to do this?&lt;/em&gt; If it's not, should we flag such comments? (From the above list of options, my choices have been the last two.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;It's great that you're interested in answering, but in general, answering questions that show no research (or whatever the close reason is), is discouraged on this site... please see (appropriate section of guidelines).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T13:39:28.030" Title="Should we be leaving comments discouraging users from answering off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-23T20:42:01.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't need to comment on or downvote answers to supposedly off-topic questions because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Not everyone agrees as to whether a question is off-topic. That is why there are votes. If you think it is off-topic, vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Downvotes ideally should be reserved for wrong or misleading answers, not correct answers that simply answer questions you don't like. If you don't like the post, vote to delete after closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, users are of course free to comment and downvote as they wish. I am sick and tired of many such comments and downvotes though, which often come from non-experts parading as experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, sometimes I feel that more effort is spent on policing the site (via these comments, closevotes and downvotes) than actually helping people and answering questions on English, which I believe should be the true spirit of ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user146098" LastEditorDisplayName="user146098" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T00:55:11.857" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T00:55:11.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-23T23:19:05.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My position is that it is helpful and useful to post a comment on a question to explain why you feel the question is off-topic. Voting to close a question as off-topic goes right along with that. I would that both these things were one and the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting on an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to a question that you feel is off-topic to explain to the answerer that you think the question is off-topic and therefore they ought not to be answering it, well, that's presumptuous and inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't feel it is particularly necessary to downvote an answer on a question that you feel is off-topic if your only reason for downvoting is because the answer exists, not because the answer is bad or lacks research. That's not to say you should upvote it either. You could just leave it alone. However, that is up to the discretion of the voter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, please don't answer questions if you think they are off-topic -- although you should feel free to post helpful advice or answers as comments to help the user, even though you voted to close the question (which I will politely assume that you did since you bothered to leave a comment about topicality). For example, I feel it's friendly and appropriate to say &quot;We don't handle methods of patching it up with your auntie on this site, but you might try bringing her a new orchid for her garden the next time you visit&quot; in a comment. It should not be an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T23:19:05.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-24T09:55:05.327" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for raising the question. In the meta question you linked to, the OP's accepted answer is to down-vote the answer to a poor question. However, the answer with the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; up-votes advocates against it ('most' by a small margin - excluding my vote, it's 12 votes to the accepted answer's 8). In any case, answers on meta are simply opinions, so they aren't authoritative. Naturally, moderators' opinions carry more weight, but the often cited ones aren't from moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the issue is the &lt;strong&gt;intended purpose&lt;/strong&gt; of up and down votes for answers, which the tooltips tell us is &quot;this answer is (not) useful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting down an answer one considers &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; simply to protest the deficiencies of a question looks very much like an attempt to game the system, which should be on par with blindly down-voting someone's answers simply because the &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; is unpopular. It doesn't do justice to the answer, and it gives a false impression of that answer to later visitors. If the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is subsequently up-voted, whether because people start reading it in a different light or because it has been well edited, the answer might still be valid but its votes would be unfairly handicapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is already a mechanism in place to address off-topic questions - vote to close them. To say that a useful answer hinders the closing process dismisses the possibility that the question, perhaps reframed, may not be so off-topic as to warrant closure. And if it really &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; that bad, the presence of answers shouldn't be regarded as a deterrent to voting to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, deal with &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; using mechanisms that deal with &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is inappropriate to discourage the posting of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question, including questions the commenter considers off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T09:55:05.327" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-24T18:03:07.090" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315609/what-do-you-describe-the-act-of-visiting-a-sick-person-in-a-single-word-in-the-e&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What do you describe the act of visiting a sick person in a single word in the English language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was closed because it lacks sufficient detail, but &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; it was closed, @cobaltduck posted a comment link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207922/is-there-a-single-word-for-visiting-someone-who-is-sick&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there a single word for “visiting someone who is sick”.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one of the closevoters, I have to admit I was partly motivated by the fact that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no single &quot;standard&quot; English word other than &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;visit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (which is probably why Indian English sometimes uses &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;condolence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as a noun form in this context). If I'd thought there might be such a word, I'd have just left it open to see if anyone else could bring it to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we are where we are, and it seems to me that beyond question the later question should have been closed as a &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt;, not for being &quot;Off Topic&quot;. It's beside the point that &lt;em&gt;as it happens&lt;/em&gt;, there is no such word (since the &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt; that there isn't is in fact the &quot;correct&quot; answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;em&gt;Should we arrange for the closevote reason to be changed?&lt;/em&gt; And if so, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;How&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; It seems a bit roundabout for five of us to vote to reopen, then re-vote to close for a different reason. Is this a fairly &quot;open-and-shut&quot; case where we should just ask a mod to do it? (Assuming they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T14:34:17.853" Title="Wrongly closed for &quot;Insufficient Detail&quot; instead of &quot;Duplicate&quot;. What's to do?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9584" CreationDate="2016-03-24T21:20:57.857" Score="12" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, a user contested the closure of his question with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315452/using-superlatives-as-prefixes-order-of-significance#comment715942_315452&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And yet there are opinion based questions all over this site. &lt;strong&gt;There is even an 'opinion' tag&lt;/strong&gt; already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he's right, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opinion&quot;&gt;there is&lt;/a&gt;. There are currently seven questions so tagged, mostly run-of-the-mill and non-descript, and none but would be improved by the removal of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's burninate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opinion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;opinion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;opinion&lt;/a&gt;, please (meaning: remove and blacklist it). We don't need to arm future OPs with further excuses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T20:49:02.737" Title="Burninate [opinion], please" Tags="|support|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-24T21:47:03.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly support offering polite advice to newer EL&amp;amp;U participants regarding the unwritten preferences of active site users and the likely consequences of disregarding them. Offering such advice has three potentially beneficial effects: (1) it sets a tone of civility in direct interactions with other users, as a model for the newcomers; (2) it conveys information about what I as an experienced site participant take to be the reality of how things work here, including information that may not be evident from the explicit formal policies of the site; (3) it combats the notion that this is a closed (and elitist) country club whose members are hostile to newcomers, by indicating that newcomers who adapt to the &quot;unspoken rules&quot; of the site are very welcome here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three enumerated benefits have the greatest chance of being effective when experienced users offer relevant advice to newish site participants, of course. The longer a person has been active here, the less likely he or she is to be ignorant of general tendencies and preferences among active users, and the more likely he or she is to have worked out a personally satisfactory balance between accommodating majority preferences and flouting them. I rarely post advisory comments about how to get along at EL&amp;amp;U to users with more than a few hundred rep points on this site because I figure that the advice is unlikely to be helpful to them or beneficial for the site as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that most newcomers—and especially most newcomers who are likely to contribute to a stronger EL&amp;amp;U community—want to know what other people think they're doing wrong, if for no other reason than to be able to do it anyway from an informed position rather than from an unwitting one. If someone at my table politely informs me that I have a piece of spinach stuck in my teeth, I can decide whether to remove it or not—but at least I know that it's there; what I don't want is to be humiliated by the form of the announcement or to be left ignorant of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T21:47:03.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-24T22:03:55.657" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As medica (the OP here) points out, this question has been raised before - but it was a long time ago, so I fully endorse revisiting the issue (and it's much better &lt;em&gt;presented&lt;/em&gt; this time around!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should first admit that I myself have sometimes posted an answer where I probably &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have posted a comment asking for clarification and/or closevoted for lack of sufficient detail/context. I enjoyed the &quot;game&quot; of sometimes making a lucky guess as to exactly what the OP wanted to know. But I now think that was a bad habit - not just because I could be humiliatingly &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; in my guess, but because it's counterproductive to improving the quality of (current &lt;em&gt;and future&lt;/em&gt;) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see someone else has commented asking for clarification and/or closevoted for lack thereof, I would urge you to think &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt; before posting an answer. There's no need to rush - potentially salvageable questions are just &quot;On Hold&quot; for the first 48 hours, and we should give the OP time to respond &lt;em&gt;through revised question text&lt;/em&gt; (not just &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt;) if we want well-presented questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are plenty of Off Topic questions that are &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; going to be salvageable (they're inherently OT, or the OP is unable / can't be bothered to make requested improvements). Like many others, I get a bit annoyed if someone posts an answer to an OT question (not least because it hinders the closevote process), but I don't see how anyone can argue with the point made by Cerberus in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1790/2637&quot;&gt;the previous top-voted answer...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[&quot;punishment downvoting&quot; is] contrary to the way the system is supposed to work, because the vote does not reflect the quality of the answer itself at all&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I've always found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1757/people-answering-off-topic-questions-what-should-we-do#comment3609_1761&quot;&gt;Kit Z. Fox♦&lt;/a&gt; to be our &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;most moderate&lt;/strong&gt; moderator&lt;/em&gt; - and in that link, even &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; comments...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;we should encourage downvotes on answers only &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; the question has actually been closed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also mention that obviously &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; users don't have the rep to post an &quot;answer as comment&quot; to an OT question. But I assume most people are like me, in that they're only really irritated by &lt;em&gt;high-rep&lt;/em&gt; users answering inappropriately (because they should know better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final point (incisively raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7879/should-we-be-leaving-comments-discouraging-users-from-answering-off-topic-questi?noredirect=1#comment32481_7881&quot;&gt;Dan Bron's comments&lt;/a&gt;) is that there could be advantages to both ELU and ELL if we become more &quot;exacting&quot; (&quot;less friendly&quot;, if you insist) on this side. ELL is naturally more &quot;indulgent&quot; because many OPs there are struggling with a foreign language anyway, but here on ELU we should be primarily focused on &lt;em&gt;articulate&lt;/em&gt; users asking &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Don't downvote &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers to OT questions because that degrades the site itself. But keep a weather eye open for any such answers that you could &lt;em&gt;feasibly&lt;/em&gt; downvote as &quot;incorrect&quot;. And rather than posting snarky comments, just post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7879/should-we-be-leaving-comments-discouraging-users-from-answering-off-topic-questi?noredirect=1#comment32501_7879&quot;&gt;a link to this very Meta question&lt;/a&gt; (if only to keep our &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/don&amp;#39;t+wash+your+dirty+laundry+in+public.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dirty laundry&lt;/a&gt; off the main site! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T22:03:55.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7884" CreationDate="2016-03-25T01:53:02.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flag a moderator to ask for the question to be so handled. It's one of those &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;'exception-handling'&lt;/a&gt; things for which the position of moderator was intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it isn't already something they can do directly, they are able to reopen the question and immediately close it as a duplicate. Whether they agree to do so is, of course, up to the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T01:53:02.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7915" CreationDate="2016-03-25T02:09:44.157" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following question on the main site representative of the questions of interest here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/315460/142322&quot;&gt;Is the verb &amp;quot;cast&amp;quot; in acting, metalworking and programming the same verb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; think it asks whether &lt;em&gt;cast&lt;/em&gt; used in programming has anything to do with &lt;em&gt;cast&lt;/em&gt; used for actors and sculptures, etc. This is, however, something of a &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; since the original version says nothing about this, and merely asks whether the word has the same root in each case. &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; found the underlying question interesting (as did at least one other), but others also aired the opposite opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The motivation for all Stack Exchange sites including ELU is to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;build libraries of high-quality questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;. So when a low-quality question (LQQ) turns up with the potential to &lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt; a high-quality question, but the OP doesn't edit it or is otherwise unresponsive to comments, should we feel free to edit the question even if this involves an element of &lt;strong&gt;guesswork&lt;/strong&gt; on our part (perhaps with an invitation to roll back), &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; should we vote to &lt;strong&gt;close&lt;/strong&gt; the question because it is an LQQ at face value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing commentary suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to edit only if you would be prepared to have asked the question yourself (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7046/how-to-judge-when-is-it-better-to-delete-a-question-rather-than-improve-it&quot;&gt;How to judge when is it better to delete a question rather than improve it&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voting to close &lt;em&gt;without useful feedback&lt;/em&gt; discourages asking other questions because they could also be closed, and it's not apparent how to improve for the next time (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4484/overeager-moderation&quot;&gt;Overeager moderation?&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edits should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; change whatever intent &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; apparent (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7538/142322&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Edits&amp;quot; That Change the OP&amp;#39;s Meaning&lt;/a&gt;); and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;clarifying&lt;/em&gt; edits are valid (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5105/142322&quot;&gt;Would it be OK to edit questions that are of the form &amp;quot;What do you call a person who...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking about goes beyond simply &lt;em&gt;clarifying&lt;/em&gt; edits - they may be considered wholesale changes to the question. Naturally, this doesn't include changing the question to something completely foreign, but it may involve changing something like &lt;em&gt;Do the words X,Y,Z have the same root?&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;What does Z have to do with X and Y?&lt;/em&gt; with the &lt;strong&gt;objective&lt;/strong&gt; of picking out an interesting aspect of a question where the question would otherwise be (or perhaps less controversially, &lt;em&gt;has already been&lt;/em&gt;) closed for being too broad, general reference or uninteresting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T15:15:42.773" Title="When a question is interesting but too 'loose', is it better to edit it even if you need to guess, or to vote to close it?" Tags="|discussion|editing|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7889" CreationDate="2016-03-25T12:49:01.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think the question has merit but needs to be fleshed out, edit it. If you think you can provide a thoughtful and useful answer, post an answer. If you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; your answer will be brilliant, what are you waiting for? Many a time I have seen a really good answer lift a seemingly mediocre and poorly-researched answer from the depths of anonymity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S I also thought that question was quite thought provoking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T12:49:01.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7884" CreationDate="2016-03-25T14:34:17.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lawrence has suggested the appropriate course of action - moderators can unilaterally reopen and then close as duplicate immediately. This process is facilitated if you include a link to the duplicate in your flag. Raising the question on Meta is also helpful, so the moderators can get a feel for whether the community supports the duplicate determination (although I think this one is pretty clearly a duplicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this specific case, I don't feel that the suggested duplicate meets our standard for a single word request, so I'm on the fence about whether it makes sense to close the more recent as a duplicate when the original really ought to be closed (not that you can't have a duplicate of a closed question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T14:34:17.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-26T05:35:55.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first time I got this type of direct challenge in a comment, I told the commenter to fuck off (but not in those two words).  In return I got what seemed to be a hurt and plaintive response that the intent was to make ELU a better place.  This made me realize the extent to which some people care about the quality of the site (or rather their perception of its quality).  I call these collected folk by the abbreviation CPVPV, and if you're a paid-up member, I think you have a duty to inform the errant answerer of your views.  And I think the answerer has a reciprocal duty to take your comment seriously, which is to say, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to do what I did at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that you're discouraged by off-topic answers, and you've confined yourself to ignoring and hoping.  That seems a recipe for more discouragement, and I see no reason for you not to act in good faith.  I would suggest the following guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If politeness is important to you, by all means be polite.  I don't care about politesse, so I think it's importance in commentary is in inverse proportion to the reputation of the answerer to whose post you're responding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote whatever moves you -- question, answer, or both.  But leave a comment to announce what you've done.  A driveby downvote (a curse upon this site) may leave readers with the impression that the answer is factually wrong, and it gives the answerer no clue as what the answer lacks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't stalk repeat offenders.  If sweet reason (or bitter hectoring, for that matter) fails, and the answerer has told you about mutual irreconcilable differences, there's no point in creating a cycle of recrimination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't flag comments if you're a third party (unless, of course, the comments are abusive).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take your point about the tone of comments creating a hostile environment and an impression of rigidity.  But the train has long left that station.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="125330" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T23:24:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T23:24:41.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T13:18:45.980" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/315921/76689&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/315921/76689&lt;/a&gt; may not be a steller answer it does point to a rather nice duplicate of the question.  But the dupe is on ELL.  Can we close the question as a dupe?  Have we discussed this before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T22:53:51.027" Title="Should we close as duplicate from a different site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-26T14:42:29.817" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to react to a questionable question is the most critical thing anyone acting to moderate this site can know.  This defines what the site is about.  I don't come here to talk about cooking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, our boundries are fuzzy.  They will ever be so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questionable questions are tough to judge precisely because they are hard to understand.  This means a questions quality varies from reader to reader based on the assumptions they make.  Even more troubling is that the questions quality changes as it attracts answers.  Answer a questionable question well and you can save it.  Suddenly it's getting upvotes.  Answer it badly and watch it go to pot.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's tempting to just close everything that is questionable.  No answers means the quality isn't going to change and surprise you without an edit from the OP.  This can be comforting.  This isn't always in the best interest of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We close questions to show people what we don't consider to be good examples of questions.  We don't close them because they confuse us and we don't feel like answering.  Be careful of your motivations.  If in doubt take the time to reread.  Make a comment.  Wait.  A bad answer to a bad question isn't the end of the world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To allow a moderator to feel like there is time to wait it's entirely appropriate for them to voice quality concerns in a comment.  Answering a question without addressing those concerns is bad for the site.  Answering a question in a way that does is good for the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is designed to make us race to answer questions.  The close process actually accelerates this rather than slow down the race to answer a questionable question.  This is frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than adding a stern label to the question, forbidding answers is precisely what closing a question does.  It's understandable that a moderator, halfway through the close process, would feel frustrated seeing an answer come in anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, once the answer comes in the questions quality has changed.  It's not yet time to react.  It's time to reread the question and answer and think about how this will look a year from now.  Once you do that, start commenting and voting.  If you haven't already, consider closing.  Watching a questionable question attract bad answers and doing nothing is just wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is, don't let your frustration show.  Be polite and convincing.  If the answer came in after a concern was raised and the answer doesn't address the concern then it is entirely valid to point that out.  Just be prepared that the result might be that the answer is improved and your point is made moot.  They may even edit the question.  No matter how well you've memorized the sites rules you aren't god.  There are things you don't understand.  You can be surprised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, most visits to the site hit old answers that have long since been voted on.  The process might not make you feel like it, but it's how we look in the long run that counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I know who this question is about.  I've watched the guy for a while.  He's stern and quick to judge.  But I'm lazy and too forgiving.  Somewhere between the two of us I think something good is happening for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm wrong feel free to tell me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastEditorUserId="76689" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T19:26:19.227" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T19:26:19.227" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7879" CreationDate="2016-03-27T13:39:28.030" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should leave comments discouraging users from answering off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, we should not flag such comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you close a question you are actually preventing people from answering it.  Why would you vote to close if you think adding answers would be a good thing?  Why would you keep quiet about that before or after such an answer appears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm answering a question I watch for close votes.  What I'd rather see are comments telling me what's wrong.  Sometimes they change my answer.  Sometimes they mean the question should be edited.  Sometimes they mean I should rethink answering and vote to close myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment affects my behavior far more than the close vote counter does.  The counter just makes me hurry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T13:39:28.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7893" CreationDate="2016-03-27T18:01:12.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each SE site stands alone, so no you can't close a question as a duplicate of one on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it would add something to the other site, you can migrate and propose that it be closed as a duplicate there.  Duplicates are valuable for wayfinding; if the new question asks the question in a way that's different enough from the original that people searching for an answer might encounter either of them, a duplicate is useful.  If they're near-virtual duplicates, though, then having a duplicate link doesn't add much (so certainly wouldn't be worth migrating to create that link).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the general practice on Stack Exchange is that questions should only be migrated if they're &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; on the original site.  Some sites have overlapping scope; if it's on-topic here then the fact that it would also be on-topic somewhere &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; doesn't matter.  Only consider migration if the question is definitely off-topic &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.  Then, migrate only if it's a good question and would benefit the other site.  &quot;If it's a good question&quot; is important; if it would just be put on hold as unclear or opinion-based or the like on the other site, then don't send it over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/03/respect-the-community-your-own-and-others/&quot;&gt;Respect the community -- your own, and others'&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As members of a community, your first loyalty should be to &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; community. When evaluating a question, you shouldn't be looking to push it off on some other site; instead, ask if it could be appropriate and on-topic for you, the experts who the author decided to ask. &lt;strong&gt;Be a bit jealous of your site&lt;/strong&gt; - don't blithely turn askers away simply because their question could be asked somewhere else. Don’t hit them over the head with your scope, help them tailor their question to fit into it - and if that means your site’s scope overlaps a bit with another site’s, so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="8816" LastEditDate="2016-03-27T22:53:51.027" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T22:53:51.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-28T19:14:57.340" Score="6" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;This concerns a specific example of a more general procedural issue that bothers me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315495/idioms-for-a-obvious-or-needs-no-explanation/315561&quot;&gt;A recent question&lt;/a&gt; is headed &lt;em&gt;Idioms for a 'obvious' or 'needs no explanation'&lt;/em&gt;.  Its well-stated core is a matter of professional discourse:  ‘For [Human Resources] the relevant facts are very obvious or need no explanation but for me they are completely new.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP is asking about appropriate professional comportment in trying to help HR colleagues understand the difficulties that some of us might have in interpreting policies that HR discusses and applies as if they are totally transparent to everyone.  The &lt;em&gt;professional&lt;/em&gt; thrust of this Question is very obvious indeed, as OP dutifully and efficiently unpacks it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of Answers addressed this question at a surprisingly naive level of terminology, many suggestions being inappropriate (some of them dangerously insulting) in the professional context that OP came here to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then the Question was suddenly branded a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159607/what-is-the-idiom-for-as-anyone-can-see-or-clearly&quot;&gt;the basically unrelated Question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;What is the idiom for “as anyone can see” or “clearly”?&lt;/em&gt;.  This was summarily achieved by the momentary twitches of five people, not one of whom has made a stroke of effort to do any of the research that ELU purports to venerate, and to require of tentative users like OP.  OP was just &lt;em&gt;swatted&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;For one thing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, then, it is clear that in this case the statement, ‘This question has been asked before and already has an answer,’ is simply &lt;em&gt;false&lt;/em&gt; and should not be delivered to OP in the unexamined way that currently occurs.  The earlier Question was clearly about &lt;em&gt;synonyms&lt;/em&gt; for ‘obvious’.  The recent one is about respectful professional discourse, and &lt;em&gt;the minefield of linguistic protocol or register&lt;/em&gt; of conveying that something that might seem obvious in one domain might not be so evident in another.  That is:  &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually applying any of the earlier Question’s answers to the recent one would be disastrous in the professional community about which OP was sufficiently clear.  The earlier Question very &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; does not Answer this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, it takes only a few people’s presumably hasty assessment to result in OP being slapped with this automatically-worded and inaccurate rejection of a perfectly sensible Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, OP has not been served well &lt;em&gt;or respectfully&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Connected to that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, even having explored SE (as a recent and excited convert) I am perplexed by this cult of priority.  Even if the earlier Question &lt;em&gt;had been&lt;/em&gt; similar to this new one (which it was not), how do we get so immediately and uncritically to the judgement that the earlier Question automatically leapfrogs any possible activity on the new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any earlier Question might have been asked with vengeful manipulation, Answered by a fascist, and Accepted after a bottle of whisky.  Why should some similarity in the heading mean that a new Question just gets batted over the hedge, and people automatically get herded towards the final (i.e. earlier) solution, &lt;em&gt;whatever it was&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see sense in imposing some kind of moratorium, perhaps in an informed and critical way inviting the new Questioner to examine specified earlier Questions for a day or two, and to come back with the results of this ‘research’ as adjustments, extensions or exclusions within the present Question.  Such a process could benefit individual Questioners, and ELU in general, by giving them &lt;em&gt;guided&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt; access to the archive, rather than (as here) blindsiding someone with a swift and unjustified &lt;em&gt;gotcha&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, however, this process can simply work to &lt;em&gt;exclude&lt;/em&gt;, as in this case.  Not only do we seem to have a fallacious bias towards anteriority-and-seniority, but we also appear to assume tacitly and communally that no modern &lt;em&gt;input&lt;/em&gt; can be valued if we have any sort of vaguely-similar ancient text &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can’t be right.  That overall dynamic encourages the slow creation of a community quite keen on encouraging old people to assure us all that we have probably heard &lt;em&gt;whatever this is&lt;/em&gt; before, and that we should therefore ignore it.  It doesn't matter how mistaken the old people could be:  we just muck about until they say that they reckon something sounds familiar, and then we proceed to mucking about with something else instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, &lt;em&gt;this trusting OP&lt;/em&gt; has just been smacked in the face with a shovel, for no reason at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152310" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T20:59:08.800" Title="Why must we assume that earlier answers are better, especially when they are not even related?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|new-users|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7897" CreationDate="2016-03-28T20:50:51.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked into the two questions very much yet, so I can't say if they are truly duplicates. However, I can say that the practice of marking questions as duplicates isn't due to some assumption that earlier answers are automatically better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purposes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to &quot;[invite] the new Questioner to examine specified earlier Questions for a day or two, and to come back with the results of this ‘research’ as adjustments, extensions or exclusions within the present Question,&quot; just as you said. Putting a question on hold as a duplicate is not irreversible; if the original poster is not satisfied with the answers at the linked question, then the later question should be edited to explain the differences between the two questions. Just as it only takes five users to close a question, it only takes five to re-open it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to collect the best answers to a single question in one place. There is no time limit on posting answers. If two questions are really duplicates, but you think you can write a better answer than the ones that already exist, you will generally be able to post it at the older question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more information about duplicates here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled&quot;&gt;How should duplicate questions be handled?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking at the questions and their answers in more depth, I agree with you that they are not exact duplicates, so I've voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T20:59:08.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-28T21:37:29.827" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative&quot;&gt;Alternative&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about choosing different or alternative words or phrases.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative-words&quot;&gt;Alternative-Words&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Used to request words that can be used in place of another word because they have essentially the same meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should these tags be merged or distinguished (with cross-links in descriptions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115786" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T07:40:37.807" Title="Tag synonym proposal: alternative and alternative-words" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7899" CreationDate="2016-03-29T00:45:11.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I kind of feel that both of these should be merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt;. I guess the word &quot;synonym&quot; may tend to connote a single word, but it can also refer to a phrase or expression. In any case, users can make it clear which kind of synonyms they're looking for by adding the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible downside I see to this is that it would make it harder for people who want to &quot;favorite&quot; only questions requesting alternative words, and not other questions about synonyms such as &quot;what are the differences between these synonyms.&quot; There are only 2 followers of the tag &quot;alternative,&quot; however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stats:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternative-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternative-words&lt;/a&gt;: 0 followers, 64 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternative&lt;/a&gt;: 2 followers, 181 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt;:  25 followers, 1.7k questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-03-29T00:52:13.483" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T00:52:13.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T11:33:04.877" Score="17" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possible duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/what-the-primarily-opinion-based-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; close reason is for&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's a litmus test here that is misapplied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/316303/capitalizing-stages-of-diseases&quot;&gt;Capitalizing Stages of Diseases&lt;/a&gt; is currently collecting POB close votes. It boils down to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I capitalize the names of the stages [Stage I, Stage II] or leave them in lowercase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the correct answer is that the capitalization is primarily a matter of &lt;em&gt;personal choice&lt;/em&gt;, and the correct answer is &quot;either is okay&quot;. That's different than an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to differ in character from questions such as the fictitious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do adverbs destroy otherwise well-written passages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This encourages diatribes and flame wars and sword fighting and all manner of debate. It isn't a matter of &lt;em&gt;personal choice&lt;/em&gt;. Whether you &lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt; a passage with adverbs is your choice, but whether it destroys your passage is the opinion of the reader, and has no correct answer. &quot;It's a personal choice&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a correct answer to the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize I've led the witnesses, but is this the intended interpretation? Are we over-using POB in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T11:33:04.877" Title="when is &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; a valid answer, and not a reason to close?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-30T04:38:20.233" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I voted to close this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/316579/can-anybody-understand-what-shes-saying&quot;&gt;Can anybody understand what she's saying?&lt;/a&gt; (it was subsequently deleted by the original poster) based on the answers to this Meta question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5368/exactly-why-is-this-question-off-topic-or-not&quot;&gt;Exactly WHY is this question Off Topic? Or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I felt uncomfortable doing so, because despite some suggestions in these answers for adding this as an off-topic reason to the Help Center, this has never actually been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I was thinking of posting a new Meta question that explicitly proposes adding this information to the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I saw this question from 2015: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6886/informing-people-about-lyrics-interpretation-in-help-center&quot;&gt;Informing people about lyrics interpretation in help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically the kind of post I was going to make. It received what I would consider a fair amount of support: 7 upvotes and no downvotes. It seems like nobody voiced any objections. But ultimately, it never led to anything. Our Help Center page &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; still doesn't say anything about lyrics, as far as I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened? Was the question just overlooked? Is there some other action that would be more effective in getting this kind of change accomplished?&#xA;Or was posting the proposal as a Meta question the right thing to do, and it's just that big changes like this require even more upvotes before a moderator will implement them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T04:47:46.997" Title="What process is required to get the Help Center text changed?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7784" CreationDate="2016-03-30T10:56:19.260" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone's banging on about that one bad question that was migrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Someone lets their dog crap in my yard and I go out and scoop it. Now I can toss it in the garbage, or I can go leave it on my neighbor's lawn, because he has to clean up after the dog walkers sometimes too. It seems stupid to try justify dropping that crap on my neighbor's yard because if the dog had just walked a couple more feet it would have been in his yard. I've already done the work to clean it up, why would I ask my neighbor to do it too? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can/7876?noredirect=1#comment32477_7876&quot;&gt;Colleen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Roaring your arguments are ridiculous. I'm being blunt here, since the complex reasoning is explained above clearly already. The question was trash. ELU users used ELL as a trash can. ELL doesn't appreciate being treated as a trash can. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can/7876?noredirect=1#comment32488_7876&quot;&gt;Viizionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Mari-LouA It seems simple. Migration is a process for users who have a strong understanding that the question would be a good fit for the site they're migrating it to. Not only was the question an obviously terrible question for the site, the question was an obviously terrible question for any SE site. ...&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can/7876?noredirect=1#comment32554_7876&quot;&gt;Viizionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the crap analogy continues....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wow, so much fuss over something so obvious. Don't send us your crap, okay? The end&#xA;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can/7876?noredirect=1#comment32584_7876&quot;&gt;IͶΔ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it needed reminding, which judging by the stream of comments under Roaring Fish's answer it appears necessary, the number of users who voted to migrate the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/83653/when-someone-wanna-talk-perfect-english&quot;&gt;When someone wanna talk perfect English&lt;/a&gt;, were exactly three. Three users out of the hundreds of users who have earned the ‘privilege’ to close questions through democratic decision. &lt;strong&gt;Only three users voted to migrate it&lt;/strong&gt;, not five. I was the 5th user to cast their vote to close that question. It needed to be closed. It was a very, very poor fit for a Q&amp;amp;A website, but three other users believed that ELL could make something from it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question was clearly off-topic for both English sites, that is not under discussion, mistakes happen and we can all benefit from understanding how to avoid repeating them in the future, but from here to claiming that EL&amp;amp;U dumps their “crap” on ELL — is jingoistic war warmongering at its worst. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T10:56:19.260" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T08:51:30.847" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a few occasions while going through the review queue, I've come across questions flagged as off-topic, usually for lack of research (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/173019&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) where I agree that it's off-topic but someone already posted an answer or answered it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering at this point the OP basically got what they wanted even though it should have been closed rather than answered, is there really any point in voting to close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that's potentially more hurtful than harmful, as the answer is already there and closing the question isn't likely to accomplish more at that point than preventing others with similar questions from finding these ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155456" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T15:55:21.783" Title="Agreeing with several votes to close a question as off-topic when it already has an answer or &quot;answer comments&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7905" CreationDate="2016-04-01T09:19:40.407" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Vote to close off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sends the message that the question is off-topic and should not have been asked in its present form (or on the site at all). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter that there is an answer, whether that's an actual answer or in the comments. Often, the community tries to be helpful with poor questions, and answers-in-comments are not unusual for proof-reading requests, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't prevent others from finding the question if they search &amp;mdash; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; they search. But an off-topic question is unlikely to be asked again anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T09:19:40.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7905" CreationDate="2016-04-01T15:55:21.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Andrew Leach's answer (close off-topic questions regardless of answers). This answer expands on his closing paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is about building an archive of expertly answered questions. There are three broad status levels: open, closed, and deleted. Between 3K and 10K rep, we can move questions between the first two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question simply marks it as being of questionable relevance to the site. From the perspective of SE as an archive, however, this has little to no effect on search. Anyone can still view closed questions and their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What closing does is feed into the deletion process, where higher rep users &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; take the question out of the repository altogether as far as generic searches are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your question is primary about the point of closing questions when it doesn't prevent the asker from getting an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Considering at this point the OP basically got what they wanted even though it should have been closed rather than answered, is there really any point in voting to close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is that we are a very diverse community. People find interest in all sorts of things that others don't. So people will answer questions that others find completely uninteresting. This may help the OP, or it may not. I don't think it's necessary to police this - if the question is so bad that it gets deleted, the answers and comments will also disappear. If the OP is helped in the process, that's between the answerer and the OP. It shouldn't factor into the decision to close or delete a question on grounds of relevance to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the primary factor in reviewing questions for closure should be whether it is a good fit for ELU - that is, whether it is something that etymologists, linguists or English enthusiasts are likely to find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T15:55:21.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7909" CreationDate="2016-04-02T02:08:35.920" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple question, and perhaps posted wrongly here, but this is sort-of meta and I have been googling for quite some time but I could not find what I am looking for, which tool do some users use to see e.g. how many times the word &quot;Ponder&quot; or &quot;ponder on&quot; have been used in the last 2-3 decades? I see these statistics frequently in the answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155608" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T23:56:04.973" Title="People sometimes post statistics about how frequently a word is used, how does one do that?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7908" CreationDate="2016-04-02T03:06:56.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're referring to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Books Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;, just click the link and type the phrases with a comma in between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ponder,ponder on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can set a few parameters such as the period of interest (e.g. 1990 to 2010). There's also a check-box for you to specify whether you would like the search to be case sensitive or case insensitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2016-04-02T23:56:04.973" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T23:56:04.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T11:39:49.510" Score="1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; (ELU) is a community for etymologists, linguists, and English enthusiasts. As a Stack Exchange community, ELU shares Stack Exchange's goal to &lt;em&gt;build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be asked within ELU's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;areas of interest&lt;/a&gt; and answers should be definitive. This imposes a level of expectation to carefully state the question. It may include noting aspects of the question that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of interest, how far you've got, or carefully highlighting the &lt;em&gt;core&lt;/em&gt; of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the expectation isn't met, the question may be put on hold as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10583/286574&quot;&gt;an invitation to edit for improvement&lt;/a&gt;. Once edited, your question is automatically queued for review. It will be reopened if 5 reviewers vote for reopening. &lt;strong&gt;This page is for you to make brief notes to reviewers to assist the review process&lt;/strong&gt;, similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/19042/requests-for-reopen-undeletion-votes-etc-volume-01-2015-current-versio&quot;&gt;that at Mathematics.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/439/24861&quot;&gt;Please, everyone… details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for some &lt;strong&gt;excellent tips on how to ask questions&lt;/strong&gt;, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/465/24861&quot;&gt;examples of good questions and a simple pattern for asking good questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit your question&lt;/strong&gt;, paying attention to the concerns listed on the close/on-hold notice. Here are some general references that may help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/142322&quot;&gt;Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; - an important part of the above. There are links to dictionaries for words, idioms, pronunciation and more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1482/142322&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Search the ELU archive for answers to similar questions&lt;/a&gt; - this page also includes tips on conducting advanced searches.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can add &lt;strong&gt;notes for reviewers&lt;/strong&gt; by placing a comment on your own question. You may also record your notes in a new answer here and link the answer to your question as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your answer, include a link to your question. Click &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; under your question for the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add the comment &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Notes to reviewers](xyz)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to your question to show reviewers where to look. Keep the square brackets and round brackets as shown, but replace &lt;code&gt;xyz&lt;/code&gt; with a link to your answer. Click &lt;code&gt;share&lt;/code&gt; under your answer for the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Original meta discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7795/142322&quot;&gt;When a question is closed, tell them the procedure for reopening it&lt;/a&gt;. Please use that question to discuss the procedure below. Answers to this question should only consist of notes to reviewers for specific questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T16:45:22.930" Title="Notes to Reviewers [Trial, version 2.1]" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T13:43:57.610" Score="12" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be useful for us to have two EL&amp;amp;U Glossaries on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first could be for SE and EL&amp;amp;U specific abbreviations and acronyms, including ones that just happen to crop up a lot here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second could be for terminology that differs between different grammars, specialist fields and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in one we could have &lt;em&gt;OP, FAQ, AFTK, TPTB, wiki&lt;/em&gt; and so-forth. The other might have &lt;em&gt;apodosis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;V3&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;NP&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;prep&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;predicator&lt;/em&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T13:43:57.610" Title="EL&amp;U Glossaries" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7889" CreationDate="2016-04-06T15:04:44.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon reflection, there are three key thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;improving any post improves the quality of the archive (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7890/142322&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;editing a poorly-phrased question gives a false (higher) impression of the OP's level of sophistication (building on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1061/24861&quot;&gt;StonyB on ELL&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can?cb=1#comment32615_7876&quot;&gt;referenced by J.R. on ELU&lt;/a&gt;); and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question should reflect the OP's intent (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7889/when-a-question-is-interesting-but-too-loose-is-it-better-to-edit-it-even-if/7915#comment32536_7889&quot;&gt;Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In keeping with SE's aims and with good manners, I think that we should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit any post that has underlying merit, regardless of the OP's ability to communicate fluently (polish diamonds in the rough);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not edit any post that has no underlying merit (avoid polishing turds, as it's popularly and colourfully phrased) - vote to close or delete instead; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post variants as new questions if the existing question isn't about the variant. Even if the old question doesn't specifically exclude the variant, that's not what the original question was about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T15:15:42.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7918" CreationDate="2016-04-06T18:28:32.053" Score="9" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the past three days, the new user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/168522/yorgun&quot;&gt;yorgun&lt;/a&gt; has asked 10 questions, all seeming to be asking for clarification on various excerpts from the same book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=i0sTiwJQMi0C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diplomacy, A Very Short Introduction&lt;/a&gt; by Joseph M. Siracusa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/317582/13804&quot;&gt;early questions&lt;/a&gt;, though not without controversy.  Some of the other questions are closed, or have close votes and down votes; while others have been well-received.  The user does seem to be attempting to give his/her interpretation and research, but not always.  Each question in isolation is borderline for on-topic, but noticing them collectively raises some flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My aim is to help this person, but I am not sure how.  Whether it be tips to the user to improve the questions here, redirect to ELL, or redirect to some reading help site outside the SE Network, I have no idea.  What I do know is that I am not the right person to make that decision, so I am bringing it up here. I think a common message to this user might be helpful at this point, perhaps even by putting a comment on each of the questions inviting to participate in this meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T08:11:15.633" Title="Helping this user read a (somewhat technical) book" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7916" CreationDate="2016-04-07T08:11:15.633" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;thanks to all, I don't know English well (as elementary translator or trying to learn more by translating ! ). but. when i ask questions. the questions are not very technical (usually I don't need the meaning of technical words), but my questions are about phrases (usual idioms that native English speakers understand them, something like reading newspaper form them). however, my questions will finish and I'll try to be better in asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168522" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T08:11:15.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-07T11:09:38.643" Score="-1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/278026/176236&quot;&gt;suggested on meta&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It definitely doesn't belong in health. It appears to be totally on topic for English. From the help center: &quot;Word choice and usage&quot; is on topic. I'd ask on their meta why your question doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've left a comment on the question @-ting at one of the closers making my case. They may explain nuances I'm not catching, or they may agree and vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm opening (yet another) discussion about the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/317781/168886&quot;&gt;Why is salt being referred to as “sodium”?&lt;/a&gt; which is currently on hold as &quot;This question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168886" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T01:16:07.043" Title="Question on hold" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7919" CreationDate="2016-04-07T13:23:20.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't see the Meta.SE post until now, but here is what I wrote there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question in its current form also does not show sufficient research for EL&amp;amp;U word choice type questions. At minimum, you would need to define each term that you find confusing and explain why you are having trouble understanding the difference between the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may have been confusing for you because the close reason was custom, meaning that it showed up as this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's about medicine and health, and is unrelated to English as a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rather than it the close reason box, so you had only the generic close prominently displayed to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T13:23:20.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7919" CreationDate="2016-04-07T21:45:09.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to claim this isn't about English.  This is, infact, a disambiguation issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm more on the fence regarding research.  Research is a hard close reason to argue for or against objectively.  The question did show that it understood salt was being referred to as sodium from the beginning.  The question could have detailed this understanding by citing definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been edited to add research.  I've edited it further to add detail to the research and remove some pointless snarky remarks.  I'm on the side of finding a way to make it into a good question and opening it.  In that order.  If there is more you find wanting let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76689" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T21:45:09.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-08T01:30:46.027" Score="9" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/318237/an-employee-called-me-boss-but-i-dont-like-it-how-can-i-colloquially-say-th&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An employee called me &quot;boss&quot;, but I don't like it. How can I colloquially say that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has received multiple answers, but only the following one was deleted.  I reproduce it here for convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm the same, don't like being called 'boss'. If I deem it necessary&#xA;  to ask them to stop with it, I'd say something like: &quot;nah, you're the&#xA;  boss, boss&quot;, looking them in the eye, with my hand placed on their&#xA;  shoulder in a friendly but sincere way. The physical message is what I&#xA;  believe would drive the words home. I noticed that people with the&#xA;  tendency to call others 'boss' have a tinge of insecurity and calling&#xA;  people 'boss' is a mock self deprecating confidence boost. Best to&#xA;  handle that by indicating they don't need to play that out with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other answers in the same style, and they have been left untouched.  Not that the question is on topic.  In fact, I've voted to close it.  It not only asks for an opinion, it ask for a opinion having everthing to do with a social situation and little to do with the word &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt;.  Not that this answer or the other answers are on topic.  They're mostly advice on how to conduct oneself at work.  (And bad advice at that.  I would never advise physical contact in a situation in which a misunderstanding has arisen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this answer at least mentions in passing that this use of the word &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt; may have an element of self-deprecation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this answer singled out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T02:56:54.930" Title="Boss, why was this answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7923" CreationDate="2016-04-08T02:56:54.930" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not the moderator who deleted the answer in question, and so therefore cannot speak as to why it was originally deleted. However, the deletion was correct in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer principally and primarily is related to &lt;em&gt;physical action&lt;/em&gt;, not English. It is therefore not within the scope of this site. Had the question been asked on &lt;a href=&quot;http://workplace.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Workplace&lt;/a&gt; instead, then the answer may have been within the scope of that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it is quite frankly a terrible answer, because physical escalation for this scenario is extremely excessive. It therefore also qualifies for deletion under the &lt;em&gt;very low quality&lt;/em&gt; rule, wherein no amount of editing (that does not entirely change the meaning of the answer) is capable of saving the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T02:56:54.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-08T06:39:41.353" Score="6" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following questions are duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/59059/142322&quot;&gt;should a list of tokens be called a &amp;quot;token list&amp;quot; or a &amp;quot;tokens list&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1314/142322&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;User accounts&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;users account&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer (by Peter Shor) in the &lt;em&gt;token list&lt;/em&gt; question has reasoning, exceptions, an ngram chart, and also answers the typical case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer in the &lt;em&gt;user accounts&lt;/em&gt; question is just &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;singular-noun&amp;gt; &amp;lt;plural-noun&amp;gt; is the way to go.&lt;/code&gt; (with some formatting). Even taking the 3 answers to this question together, Peter Shor's answer is still more comprehensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;token list&lt;/em&gt; question was closed as a duplicate of the &lt;em&gt;user accounts&lt;/em&gt; question. To further Stack Exchange's goal to &lt;em&gt;build libraries of high-quality questions and answers&lt;/em&gt;, whichever question and whichever answer has the highest quality should be made canonical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to request a review of whether the direction of the duplicate closure furthers that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; As R.M. points out, the questions are actually different and should not be considered duplicates of each other. That is, it would appear that good answers to one don't work for the other. If so, we should consider de-linking the questions (i.e. neither is a duplicate for the other).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T01:27:38.640" Title="Review the duplicate linkage between the 'token list' question and the 'user account' question" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-11T10:07:17.540" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/business-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;business-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;business-language&lt;/a&gt; has the following tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are very many specialized terms and communication conventions&#xA;  related to doing business in English. This tag covers questions about&#xA;  those topics, including any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The meaning of a specialized term used in management, commerce, or industry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Whether a given word or idiom has an appropriate level of formality for use in business communication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Whether a piece of industry jargon is likely to be understood by members of the general public&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions in this tag should generally involve terms that are used&#xA;  across multiple companies and industries. Questions about jargon&#xA;  that's specific to a particular company or a single narrow&#xA;  specialization are likely to be closed as &quot;too localized&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The portion &quot;Whether a given word or idiom has an appropriate level of formality for use in business communication&quot; seems to concern using language that is formal, and I assume prescriptively correct, English. I can see near-fluent learners of English wanting to use this to know how to look professional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the other portions of the wiki, about jargon, seem to cover &quot;business-speak&quot;, which includes some heavily criticised practises including the nouning of a large number of verbs and some controversial metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does business-speak belong in the tag business-language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T20:19:20.260" Title="Does &quot;business-speak&quot; belong in [business-language]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7927" CreationDate="2016-04-12T05:50:10.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take your reference to 'business-speak' to be limited to those instances that have gained broad acceptance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the questions about email that Dan Bron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7927/does-business-speak-belong-in-business-language#comment32748_7927&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; refers to, which are off topic on &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;proofreading&lt;/em&gt; grounds, questions about 'business-speak' are about established English terms. Also, unlike some lit. crit., where meaning is subjective, 'business-speak' terminology &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; have established meaning, or else they would have already failed as 'business-speak'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Business-speak' should therefore be treated as figures of speech, or at least granted the same courtesies as questions about region-specific turns of phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does business-speak belong in the tag business-language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it does. There's no prohibition against politely stating one's disagreement with the aesthetics or otherwise of such terms, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T05:50:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2016-04-14T10:26:44.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll preface this by stating that it's Good for the Internet to have a Google-able worldwide-crowdsourced &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverse dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question thus&lt;/strong&gt; is whether the community here (English.SE) wants to serve this role.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So far&lt;/strong&gt;, consensus is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1659/8278&quot;&gt;&quot;yes&quot; provided&lt;/a&gt; it cannot be easily answered with a general thesauras and the usage of the requested expression is &lt;strong&gt;clear&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;( Who knows, OneLook and Datamuse which &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/iidNt#selection-1065.0-1065.12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently utilizes&lt;/a&gt; Google Books Ngram data, CMU phonetic data, WordNet, word2vec, and etc, might start indexing and &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/NSNcD#selection-291.0-291.17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;incorporating&lt;/a&gt;  English.SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data dumps&lt;/a&gt; and return results obtained from here. Mere technical solutions alone &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1309/are-single-word-requests-always-welcomed-questions#comment32779_1312&quot;&gt;will never&lt;/a&gt; be able to completely replace crowdsourced solutions. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T10:35:48.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7938" CreationDate="2016-04-17T05:09:55.213" Score="4" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/319926/single-word-for-lazy-student&quot;&gt;word request question&lt;/a&gt; without having read any other answers. In the question, the OP suggested the best word that came to their mind, and my answer agreed with their suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was later brought to my attention that another user's answer had also agreed with the OP's suggested word, and they are now demanding I remove my answer, claiming it is a duplicate of theirs. I am unsure if this is a just course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post I am being accused of duplicating did not define the suggested word as I did, and additionally suggested many, many other words, which I did not. We both agreed with the OP, but I do not think this is grounds for being a duplicate. It's not even as though I took the other answer's idea, it was the OP's. If the community at large seems to think I should delete my answer, however, I will do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147488" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T10:10:13.680" Title="Is my answer a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7936" CreationDate="2016-04-17T09:21:30.227" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to make the site look better for everyone. So I vote to close some questions that deserve it. And I flag as &lt;em&gt;very low quality&lt;/em&gt; when I'm out of &lt;em&gt;close votes&lt;/em&gt;, hoping that the others would vote to close/delete it instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently almost all my flags were declined with the following comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - if you think a question should be closed, please use your votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes, even when I flag a question with -5 votes as very low quality, I get this response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What evidence should I provide? Isn't the question itself the evidence? It looks off-topic and terrible. Also usually have negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (30/5/16):&lt;/strong&gt; I now have a gold &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/103/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt; badge, thanks to my improved flagging behaviour! Now I'm one among the 21 users so far to have ever received it on ELU. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T17:31:35.950" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T17:31:35.950" Title="Why does a moderator serially decline all my flags?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2016-04-17T09:27:49.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You were flagging questions. You have the &quot;Vote To Close&quot; privilege. You do not need to flag questions when you want them closed, certainly none of the old ones you were flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T09:27:49.020" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2016-04-17T09:28:51.277" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Very low quality&lt;/em&gt; is not equivalent to a close vote. Note the description says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has severe formatting or content problems. This question is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, a question that is salvageable but is inappropriate for the current site in its current state should be &lt;strong&gt;closed&lt;/strong&gt; but should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be flagged as &lt;strong&gt;very low quality&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the flag decline reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suggests that the moderator who reviewed your flag found that the post would have been salvageable, even if the question should have been closed or the answer deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would further point out that the decline reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - if you think a question should be closed, please use your votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;itself is quite clear. The system has enforced a limit on you for a reason; there is no need to attempt to circumvent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93595/is-the-very-low-quality-flag-too-ambiguous&quot;&gt;Is the Very Low Quality flag too ambiguous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T09:28:51.277" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2016-04-17T10:05:03.210" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed there was a sudden increase in the number of low-quality questions in a review a few hours ago and I now understand you flagged them.  I think two moderators answered your question well. Now, if you run out of close-votes and want to close questions (mostly old questions), you can write up a Meta post with links to those questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually many of the questions you flagged were close-voted by myself and some of them were closed with a moderator's single close-vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I posted this suggestion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7675/shall-we-make-a-list-of-low-quality-questions-regularly-on-meta&quot;&gt;Shall we make a list of Low-Quality-Questions regularly on Meta?&lt;/a&gt; was to make sure closable questions could and should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make a similar post with links and I will close-vote them if they seem closable hoping other members do the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T10:05:03.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7933" CreationDate="2016-04-17T10:10:13.680" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duplicate answers, in the sense that the same answer is given but the post is not literally the same, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/112084/89334&quot;&gt;are permitted by Stack Exchange policy&lt;/a&gt;. This allows users to provide different explanations, or provide their own take on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for obvious reasons, we do not accept copy-and-pasted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your answer is of the former kind, there is no issue with it. I have removed the comments on the answer accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T10:10:13.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7943" CreationDate="2016-04-19T16:57:13.597" Score="10" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a couple of questions were posted which indicated a desire on the part of the OPs to speed up closure of certain questions. We've had similar questions before, and some helpful advice and encouragement on how to help clean up the site, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6684/58761&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on deleting closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that many users feel strongly about the quality of questions (and answers) on this site, and that includes me. However, we have established ways of dealing with off-topic or low-quality questions: vote to close, downvote, comment requesting clarification, comments suggesting taking the site's tour and reading the help section, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I came upon a new (to me) way of helping the deletion process along: repeated requests to the OP to please delete their question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have mixed feelings about making this post, and haven't linked because it's about soft policy, not about a particular user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question closable as a dupe has one DV and one VTC. There are 2 comments below the question, and only two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Posting the same question is not allowed on Stack Exchange. Please delete this question as it is the same question as [X + link].  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You haven't deleted this question, yet. Please go ahead and delete this, too. (Same user, about 2 days later.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against freedom of speech or freedom to comment. But there are guidelines, and I haven't seen this covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is asking a user (repeatedly) to please delete a question an appropriate way to deal with low quality questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;It's not the first time I've seen comments like this, though it's uncommon. What particularly surprised me - and prompted the post - was the repetition of the request.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T15:29:46.687" Title="Please delete your question? I say again, please delete your question?" Tags="|discussion|comments|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7941" CreationDate="2016-04-19T18:05:08.090" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP asked a total of 4 identical questions on ELU and 2 on ELL. Posting the same question on ELU is not allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the following Meta posts, it is not allowed to post the same question on multiple Stack Exchange sites unless (1) you delete your previous question, (2) your first question is closed by a mod when it is spotted by him/her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4708/what-to-do-with-cross-site-duplicates/4713#4713&quot;&gt;What to do with cross-site duplicates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the OP keeps posting the identical questions &lt;strong&gt;repeatedly&lt;/strong&gt; without knowing the rules and guidelines of this community, I don't think asking the OP to delete the duplicate posts letting him/her know the rules and guidelines is a big issue. Actually the OP deleted third and fourth questions on ELU based on the comment and I left the second comment in your question for the second duplicate question on ELU that (s)he didn't (maybe forgot to) delete as one or two posts were posted with a different user account (same user name). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The is the OP's comment on the 4th question on ELU which was deleted: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am asking same quetion because i am Not satisfied with answer and&#xA;  when i ask sth in comment No one responds me back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side note: I don't think the question is a low-quality question. The original question on ELU has 3 answers with multiple upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T18:25:44.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7941" CreationDate="2016-04-19T18:34:14.443" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with the idea of informing a new user of a policy that they were probably not aware of, but a bare demand for corrective action like that is rather in violation of our &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4625/bring-back-the-summer-of-love-aka-make-new-users-feel-more-welcome&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt;&quot; directive, especially since a new user has no incentive to help keep the site neat and will likely sense the &quot;tone&quot; of the comment as curt and demanding, not helpful, welcoming, or informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the better course of action would be to flag the post for moderator attention, politely mention the policy (with a link), and state the probable course of events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi!  I see that you have posted this identical question on several other Stack Exchange sites as well as this one.  Per our policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, posting the same question on multiple sites is not allowed.  This copy of the question is likely to be closed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T14:45:28.973" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-20T01:28:59.690" Score="15" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a hypothetical example, should we close &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105081/why-are-put-and-but-different-in-their-pronunciation&quot;&gt;Why are &amp;quot;put&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; different in their pronunciation?&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24257/why-is-chore-pronounced-differently-from-the-chore-in-choreography&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;chore&amp;quot; pronounced differently from the &amp;quot;chore&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;choreography&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that would be ridiculous, but I have seen votes to close questions as &quot;duplicates&quot; for similar reasons. To me, this seems like a hostile way to treat perfectly good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also not how duplicates are supposed to work. See the following Meta SE posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74080/close-as-duplicate-what-if-only-the-answer-is-a-duplicate&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Close as duplicate&amp;quot; - what if only the answer is a duplicate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/157464/what-constitutes-a-duplicate-question-in-particular-is-a-question-a-duplicate&quot;&gt;What constitutes a duplicate question? In particular, is a question a duplicate if the answer is contained in another question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates are matching questions, and they have to match in the specifics, not just the general type of question. And in fact, the answers generally aren't duplicated either. Users are right to expect answers that are more in depth and specific than &quot;etymology, great vowel shift, English spelling is so random.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community decides we really don't want to welcome this kind of question (which has not been established yet), it should be made clear in the Help Center that they are off-topic. Then it would be valid to vote to close these questions as &quot;off-topic.&quot; But calling them &quot;duplicates&quot; is just false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a general question. Although it was prompted by specific close-votes that I feel are a problem, it is not just about these votes or the users who cast them. But for those who want the actual examples, here they are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305023/why-is-the-word-watch-pronounced-differently-from-words-like-patch-latch-match?lq=1&quot;&gt;Why is the word watch pronounced differently from words like patch, latch, match, catch, and batch?&lt;/a&gt; It was suggested that this is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24257/why-is-chore-pronounced-differently-from-the-chore-in-choreography&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;chore&amp;quot; pronounced differently from the &amp;quot;chore&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;choreography&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; These are obviously not the same question. The top answer to the &quot;duplicate&quot; starts out &quot;Because of etymology.&quot; Etymology is totally irrelevant to the diffent pronunciations of the vowels in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/watch_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;watch&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/latch_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;latch&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Both words derive from the same source language (Old English), and they had the same sequence of sounds in that language (&quot;watch&quot; comes from &lt;em&gt;wæcce&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;wæccende,&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;latch&quot; comes from &lt;em&gt;læccan&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;læccean.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/320512/why-do-bomb-and-tomb-have-different-pronunciations?lq=1&quot;&gt;Why do &amp;quot;bomb&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tomb&amp;quot; have different pronunciations?&lt;/a&gt; It was suggested that this is duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105081/why-are-put-and-but-different-in-their-pronunciation&quot;&gt;Why are &amp;quot;put&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; different in their pronunciation?&lt;/a&gt; Both of these questions are about how vowel pronunciations have evolved over time. The similarity ends there. The top answer to the second question starts with the following introductory paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English is over a thousand years old, and has been through so many&#xA;  changes in the meantime that even very competent speakers struggle&#xA;  with English as it was written a few hundred years ago, and that of a&#xA;  few hundred more is so different as to essentially be a different&#xA;  language entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This has left us with a great many inconsistencies, and the fact that&#xA;  English borrows from different languages, at different times, with&#xA;  different degrees of Anglicisation, leaves us with many more (though&#xA;  not in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the reasons for particular cases are hard or impossible to&#xA;  track, and some are open to reasonable conjecture, while others we can&#xA;  make more reliable statements about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, some people have the impression that this would make a satisfactory answer all by itself to all questions of this type. But if you look at the post, that's not even a fifth of the way into it. The rest of it is an in-depth explanation of the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; etymological histories of &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; and the sound changes that applied to these words. And none of that is applicable to the words &quot;bomb&quot; and &quot;tomb.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit (27 April 2016)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found an older, highly upvoted question that has comments related to this topic: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202355/why-is-i-in-milk-pronounced-differently-from-i-in-find&quot;&gt;Why is ‘i’ in milk pronounced differently from ‘i’ in find?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; I thought I'd copy nohat's comment, which I think perfectly expresses my feelings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know you guys don't like these questions, but I love them and the&#xA;  interesting, subtle facts we can learn from the fabulous answers we&#xA;  get, as Janus's here. Sure, many people don't intuit the primacy of&#xA;  spoken language, but to dismiss these questions because the askers&#xA;  have a misunderstanding is short-sighted. To say that they all have&#xA;  the same answer is empirically false, and, with all due respect, there&#xA;  is a complex relationship between English spelling and pronunciation.&#xA;  Pronouncements implying that they are utterly orthogonal are&#xA;  manifestly wanting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T18:16:09.793" Title="Are all questions about the reason a word is spelled/pronounced the way it is duplicates of one another?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7784" CreationDate="2016-04-21T03:03:33.653" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it should be, but you'd have to read my comments above to understand &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty easy to identify &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;, who &lt;em&gt;belong&lt;/em&gt;,* on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this question, and the general animosity about migrating to ELL, prevents me from even trying. If that was your goal, you've succeeded. (&lt;em&gt;friendly&lt;/em&gt; indeed, in my mind that's a different &quot;f&quot; word, just cleverly worded.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** users whose own self interest, as well as the interest of SE at large, would be better served there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we expect users with a poor grasp of English to be instantly good SE'ers &lt;em&gt;on sites where the text is in English&lt;/em&gt;? How does ELL deal with questions like that? Are they just complaining because they already have to deal with plenty of them, themselves? And basically have no outlet for, &quot;You're beyond any help (&lt;em&gt;that would be on-topic for this site&lt;/em&gt;), try [this site.]&quot; like ELU does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; it be ELL's job to teach people English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; how to SE at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, if you don't want crap questions migrated, make a feature request at ELU for an automatic &quot;user creation script&quot; for &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt; (migration) / creation (or some such route for what I'm intending). Then you can have them all to yourselves from the get-go. However, this may be difficult to implement without SE itself violating the Be Nice policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having to &quot;kindly word&quot; &lt;em&gt;yo, you need to go learn how to english&lt;/em&gt; is not my cup of tea. It does however, pain me to admit that I've given up on y'all (users who need help). SE exists to answer people's questions, not to make life easier for moderators or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example question is actually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/255813/learners-of-english-se-site&quot;&gt;dupe of a Meta question&lt;/a&gt; (cross-site duping is a battle for another day). This one is even better, because it's written in the broken English someone would use to ask it. And it (the link) has but one sole answer that might as well have a full stop after: Go join ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'll take any DVs as, &quot;That user migration thing would be even worse.&quot; Please note if otherwise&lt;/strong&gt; and BTW, you can leave the &quot;kid gloves&quot; at the door. Mine came off when the OP &lt;em&gt;fudged&lt;/em&gt; the F word. Or don't (explain yourself), the numbers on my first comment and the one below it, tell us that about 1/3 of the users who read it agree (that there should be a way to migrate users, which also tells us that it's unlikely to be &lt;em&gt;status: completed&lt;/em&gt;). So, if this ends up with half as many ups as downs, we won't make any ground here unless you explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T03:09:00.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-21T06:04:01.670" Score="3" ViewCount="699" Body="&lt;p&gt;In stack overflow the mechanism is simple, you have a problem, you ask a question, people propose a solution in an answer, you try it, if it works you choose the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In EL&amp;amp;U Stack Exchange however; I do not think the user have the same ability or means, at least not all the time, to judge if the answer is correct, it is not like if he used a wrong answer he would get a compilation error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this is somewhat philosophical, and I do not really have a clever alternative, but maybe someone does or someone has a counter argument to end this line of thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1157/how-should-i-handle-accepting-answers-when-i-dont-know-if-they-are-correct&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is basically asking the same thing, and I think the conclusion there is good too, why not add a guideline to choosing an accepted answer based on the suggested references and methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T10:59:55.543" Title="Is it correct that a user chooses the correct answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2016-04-21T07:21:02.857" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user does not choose the correct answer, on any Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user selects the answer which he &lt;strong&gt;found most helpful.&lt;/strong&gt; In some cases, the two are synonymous, and the most helpful answer will be the code which doesn't crash his PC. In other cases, particularly in Arts subjects, the answer which is most helpful to the user may not be the one which most people would judge is most correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In extreme cases, this can lead to a completely wrong answer being accepted, probably because the answer panders to the asker's misconception or prejudices and is the answer he &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; rather than the one he &lt;em&gt;needed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is what voting is for. If an answer is wrong, or at the very least unhelpful, &lt;strong&gt;downvote it.&lt;/strong&gt; If there is a good answer, upvote that. It's the voting which should guide the asker into choosing the best answer as most helpful. (Yes, you incur a penalty for downvoting an answer. But the answerer incurs twice as much for each downvote, and enough downvotes will probably also trigger delete votes. When an answer is deleted you get your 1-point rep penalty back.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be unfortunate that the accepted answer gets a green tick. But that doesn't mean &quot;this is right&quot;; it means &quot;this worked for me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T07:21:02.857" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2016-04-21T10:07:35.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me paraphrase your post to confirm we're talking about the same thing. You observed that in ELU, the people who answer typically have a firmer grasp of English than the person who asked the question (the OP). You're then asking why it makes sense for the OP to judge an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense because the OP is the one who needs to be satisfied with the answer (see Andrew Leach's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7948/142322&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;). The question remains: without knowing the answer beforehand, how should the OP decide when a question receives multiple answers and the answers don't agree, other than looking at the &lt;strong&gt;tally of votes&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They decide by looking at the support provided for each conclusion. ELU answers should be supported by &lt;strong&gt;appropriate justification&lt;/strong&gt; such as dictionary definitions, logical argument, statistics, usage example and so on. These lend credibility to the answer; conversely, their absence can leave an answer looking weak. (See, for example, my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7654/142322&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to a related question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU regulars also tend to &lt;strong&gt;point out flaws&lt;/strong&gt; in answers rather freely, subject to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; policy&lt;/a&gt;. Although criticism is on occasion unwarranted, the discussions tend to bring out nuances of questions and answers that may have otherwise been left unaddressed. The process tends to validate or to invalidate an answer more clearly than just the bare answer. These discussions can provide valuable information to the OP regarding the correctness or otherwise of an answer. The answers themselves are often improved upon as a result of these discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7947/is-it-correct-that-a-user-chooses-the-correct-answer/7949?noredirect=1#comment32902_7949&quot;&gt;Note&lt;/a&gt; that all this also influences the community's votes on answers, which the OP can use as a gauge of each answer's popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the community's &lt;strong&gt;involvement&lt;/strong&gt; and our preference for &lt;strong&gt;supported answers&lt;/strong&gt; help the OP to judge the answers they receive. Based on this informed opinion, it then makes sense for the OP to award the green tick to whichever answer is most helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T10:33:34.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7944" CreationDate="2016-04-22T08:11:22.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that there are different purposes for these spelling vs pronunciation questions, and that there is so little out there for people to get real answers other than asking native users who like talking about this stuff.  Dictionaries are so lacking, and the gap between standardized spoken English and all the ever-changing variations heard out in the world can just confound users when they try to look for clues in spelling...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a natural inquiry about pronunciation and spelling that I respect - from both an academic and a user standpoint. Here's an example: Being from Boston and obsessed with language use, I can tell the difference from someone who is from Boston proper and has Gaelic influence in their speech heritage and someone from western Massachusetts who has French heritage, simply by the way they produce the final consonant in the word &quot;what&quot;.  Back in the day my motivation in learning to discern the difference had more to do with being street savvy enough to identify quickly who was from which part of town, but that street skill is one that I find handy in deepening my understanding of language and human geography now.  If I were a learner/practitioner and repeatedly found that what I was hearing out in the world did not match what I saw/wanted to express on the page, I would want a forum like this to turn to for help.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect of this issue that I respect is about keeping current with creative/common uses in comparison to covention.  I don't listen to much spoken-word performance, but on the rare occasion that I do, I am invariably struck by the new forms of rhyming that collapse or expand diphthongs and frontalize lateral glides etc...and I can't imagine what these utterances would like like on the page - now or in the near future as inevitably change in usage will change spelling convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there is worthwhile contribution here, and I like the idea of creating/diverting space for it.  Maybe a category for semi-duplicate and a re-direct link to the original-but-not-exactly the same inquiry could be a solution...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170793" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T08:11:22.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7966" CreationDate="2016-04-23T09:11:48.450" Score="11" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just going through some old posts of mine. Thought I could improve them just a tiny bit. I have no intention of bringing them back onto the &quot;active questions&quot; feed. How do I edit them, yet keep them away from the feed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T11:33:05.687" Title="How do I edit my very-old-questions without pushing it onto the &quot;active&quot; feed?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7954" CreationDate="2016-04-23T12:43:08.677" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/152482/50044&quot;&gt;this accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;. Emphasis mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;India is a huge country with over 20 (not exactly sure) vernaculars. The official language varies from state to state. Although &lt;strong&gt;Hindi is considered the national language&lt;/strong&gt;, not all people from all states speak Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research, I've found out that Hindi is, in fact, &lt;strong&gt;an official language, not the national language of India&lt;/strong&gt;. English and Hindi are the two official languages of the country. Each state then has an additional official language of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/hindi-not-a-national-language-court/article94695.ece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's a quote&lt;/a&gt; from division bench of Chief Justice S.J. Mukhopadhaya and justice A.S. Dave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Normally, in India, majority of the people have accepted Hindi as a national language and many people speak Hindi and write in Devanagari script but there is nothing on record to suggest that any provision has been made or order issued declaring Hindi as a national language of the country.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_in_India&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia link.&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_language#India&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T14:28:47.520" Title="Is it okay to edit this answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7953" CreationDate="2016-04-23T14:23:24.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the answer to the following Meta post suggests, editing an accepted answer is discouraged unless it is &quot;harmful&quot; and it is better to write a comment to the post or your own answer and use your downvote if you find the answer unhelpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/156043/old-accepted-answer-is-now-wrong-edit-or-create-new-answer&quot;&gt;Old, accepted answer is now wrong. Edit or create new answer?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find the following linked question and answer helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7325/why-is-a-seemingly-wrong-answer-kept-as-it-is&quot;&gt;Why is a “seemingly” wrong answer kept as it is?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you read the edit history of the accepted answer, you will understand what happened. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;place a bounty&lt;/a&gt; on the question if you want to attract more attention to it. Obviously the 350 reputation point bounty on the linked question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17943/by-foot-vs-on-foot&quot;&gt;“By foot” vs. “on foot”&lt;/a&gt; worked pretty well. Not only did the question receive more helpful answers, the accepted answer was edited afterwards.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T14:28:47.520" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7956" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-04-24T10:35:33.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the meta page, you might have queries about the status of the different questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, you might want to ask why a particular question was put &lt;strong&gt;on hold&lt;/strong&gt;, marked as a &lt;strong&gt;duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; question etc.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you might have doubts regarding how the site or community treats different types of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, you might have a query along the lines of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;When are questions deleted and under what circumstances?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;How old must a question be before it gets deleted&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and so on.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem you might have is the very process of framing a question. For new users, a common problem is that their questions have a tendency to be unclear or contain too little information about what they actually mean to ask.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;By using this tag&lt;/strong&gt;, you could ask for tips or ways in which the question can improved so that it gets a better response and thus be answered as quickly as possible in a satisfactory manner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, by using this tag, the focus is more on the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; itself, rather than what is being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170666" LastEditorUserId="170666" LastEditDate="2016-04-25T23:33:38.307" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T23:33:38.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7957" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-04-24T10:35:33.543" Score="0" Body="Use this tag whenever you have any queries regarding the status of yours or any other users question or if you need any information/tips on how to frame a question" OwnerUserId="170666" LastEditorUserId="170666" LastEditDate="2016-04-29T01:14:18.920" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T01:14:18.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-24T10:39:29.003" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an old question related to Lewis Carol's Jabberwocky poem which was deleted -- for containing apparent nonsense -- but I like it so I'd like to view it again. Is there a feature which would allow me to search out the deleted post; which I should still be able to view myself -- so I can look it over, as I still like it, and I would like to show my friends off-site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When attempting to access site.stackexchange.com to find information on how to do this (as suggested in the comments), I get the following error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cJ9gJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cJ9gJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Error Message Shown&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145550" LastEditorUserId="145550" LastEditDate="2016-04-24T12:53:47.293" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T12:53:47.293" Title="How do I find a question which was deleted?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-24T11:22:16.603" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions that are put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ON HOLD&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; visible in the main forum of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170666" LastEditorUserId="170666" LastEditDate="2016-04-24T11:36:24.320" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T11:23:33.067" Title="When my question is &quot;ON HOLD&quot;, can the question be seen on the main page?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-24T21:21:02.873" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This post is not requesting that homework questions be treated as cheating on ELU.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It is seeking a means of reassuring users who are concerned about possible cheating that the general consensus does not object to homework questions.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had a good look around Meta this evening and (deep breath) am hoping this question doesn't constitute a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier I saw a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/321319/how-to-use-resulting&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that sounded, to me, like an obvious case of a student cheating. They were even quite bald-faced about it; the post started with, 'My teacher gave me an error identification question.' It then proceeded to ask the community to identify the error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I challenged the questioner about this because I couldn't in good conscience provide anything like an answer when I already knew this person was planning to transcribe it into their assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I went looking for official guidance on dealing with cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following thread did give me the information I needed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/how-to-deal-with-homework-questions/&quot;&gt;How to deal with homework questions&lt;/a&gt;. However, certainly nothing helpful had come up in my searches for the word 'cheat', and it was only by combing through a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of Meta posts from related search terms that I happened to spot the right one. Never would have occurred to me to apply the specific term 'homework'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question has two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I correct in understanding that homework questions on ELU are not&#xA;interpreted/judged as cheating?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to signpost the term 'cheat' prominently to redirect concerned users like me to the information about homework questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Cause I figure these questions probably show up a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essence of my question does not seem to have come across very well initially, so I'll try to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, my own opinion is that cheating on homework &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible, depending on what exactly has been assigned. That's why I was concerned enough to begin researching the topic here in the first place. I don't know, maybe teachers these days assume their students will Google everything and they design the questions accordingly. I'm pretty sure that when I was in school there was homework I was expected to do on my own, although (scary) it is getting to the point where that was so long ago that I can't remember with certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well, I'm not denying that study groups and parents will always have a place when it comes to homework. To me it seems that they differ to Stack Exchange in one crucial way: they are not like having experts on tap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I appreciate that on ELU, my interpretation is by the by; I gather that homework questions are officially(?) regarded as acceptable. And I understand the point about it being impossible to police this behaviour effectively anyway. (Someone who wants to get help on their homework from the internet, whether they're supposed to or not, is sure to persist until they find &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in case another user comes along searching for 'cheating' because they believe they have witnessed it, I thought it would be nice for them to be able to find the right information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, hopefully this question can serve as that signpost. I think that will remain the case however much it gets downvoted (as long as it's not &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; downvoted into oblivion, if that's possible). I made sure to include a prominent link to the comprehensive and illuminating discussion that can be found elsewhere on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T21:22:16.083" Title="Suggestion: Prominently clarify that asking homework questions is not cheating" Tags="|feature-request|appropriate-questions|appropriate-answers|homework-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7960" CreationDate="2016-04-25T11:17:46.643" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking my moderator hat off here. I don't want this answer to be construed as EL&amp;amp;U policy (unless it's agreed that it should be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I disagree with your definition of cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me cheating is breaking the rules to get ahead, and the way you break the rules is detrimental to the other people you are competing against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Education is not a competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to ask strangers to answer their homework problem, that's not cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, what I want for EL&amp;amp;U are high quality questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question along the lines of &quot;I've got this sentence and I need a word to fill in the blanks from this selection,&quot; should be closed as there is not enough research. I thoroughly believe in the &quot;teach someone to fish&quot; idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you highlight is borderline. The asker shows that they're almost there with their understanding, but need a nudge in the right direction. I would recommend that question be migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;, because the asker is clearly still learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like your example should, in general, be migrated to ELL. This is because EL&amp;amp;U is not for people still learning the basics of English. There will be exceptions, so take each one as it comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Education is something we do for each other. Getting other people's help is only a problem when doing so doesn't teaching you anything. This puts the onus on people answering the question to question if what they are saying is teaching the other person the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T11:17:46.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7959" CreationDate="2016-04-25T11:23:33.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being put &quot;On Hold&quot; leaves the question in the list at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/a&gt; so people will be able to find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an algorithm that pushes questions off the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;main page&lt;/a&gt; so that &quot;better&quot; questions get more viewing time. If a question is &quot;On Hold&quot;, it will likely be pushed of the front page, but it is still viewable from the questions page and it is still searchable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T11:23:33.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1256" CreationDate="2016-04-26T11:16:18.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system pushed this meta post back to the top of the list and the answer has changed, presumably due to programming changes since 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to your profile and identify the following line (just below the major boxes near the top) -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;summary answers questions tags badges favorites all actions responses votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the last link (&lt;code&gt;votes&lt;/code&gt;) to list the votes that you have cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T11:16:18.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7952" CreationDate="2016-04-26T11:33:05.687" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @sumelic notes in comments and via the offered link, there is no way to edit any post without bumping it to the &lt;em&gt;active questions&lt;/em&gt; feed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand SE's philosophy on the matter to be that improvements to posts are encouraged because the site is intended to be a repository of expertly answered questions. The community goes to great lengths to review, edit, vote and cull questions and answers for quality. So if you can raise the quality of an old post, it would be consistent with Stack Exchange's philosophy for you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;- help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T11:33:05.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T15:48:58.443" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we merge and synonymize the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/be&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;be&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;be&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/to-be&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;to-be&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;to-be&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133955" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T15:48:58.443" Title="Synonymize and merge the tags [be] and [to-be]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7970" CreationDate="2016-04-28T05:14:00.540" Score="6" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm referring to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/322103/what-was-this-optical-apparatus-called-it-was-used-for-showing-pictures&quot;&gt;What was this optical apparatus called? (It was used for showing pictures.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it asks for the name of a certain device as shown in the attached pictures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5IXLym.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5IXLym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uWE3tm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uWE3tm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/322106/50044&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;&amp;mdash;&lt;strong&gt;peep show&lt;/strong&gt; aka &lt;strong&gt;raree show&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;mdash;was clear and concise. It even explained where these images are from. But then I get downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hours later comes &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/322124/50044&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt;, which basically is just similar to mine, but has more weightage given to &quot;raree show&quot;. It is highly upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused now. Is my way of answering the question terrible? Is my answer factually wrong? In short, what gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T13:01:06.537" Title="Why did I get downvotes on my answer, while a similar late answer got upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|reputation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7969" CreationDate="2016-04-28T07:40:44.320" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two downvotes (so far) on the OP's submitted answer were probably from users who had not read the post carefully, they probably thought the first suggestion, &lt;em&gt;peep show&lt;/em&gt;,  was &quot;bad&quot;, or &quot;incorrect&quot;, or &quot;inappropriate&quot;, or simply &quot;wrong&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user's  answer (now self-deleted) explains very &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; why the OP asking the question might prefer not to use this term today. But... he could have at least acknowledged the earlier post, because their answer does not add a new or alternative term, instead it shifted the focus of attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up, the second user's answer is not copied because it adds a different slant, but I'd say it errs on the &quot;unsporting&quot; side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T13:01:06.537" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T13:01:06.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7969" CreationDate="2016-04-28T09:39:50.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody knows why driveby downvoters vote the way they do because they leave no indication of their thinking.  These people are a curse and a plague on this site because they either leave the OP no chance to improve a weak answer or they leave the impression that a strong answer is somehow lacking. This is a stark problem for a site that prides itself on being some kind of repository of knowledge that delivers definitive answers, but as long as people feel that the anonymity of voters is so sacred that it must override concern for the quality of answers, then nothing will change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best of both worlds might be possible, but I suspect that it would be difficult to change the commenting mechanism to require an anonymous comment upon downvote, say a selection from a pop-up window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T09:39:50.963" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7972" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7973" CreationDate="2016-04-28T12:48:01.677" Score="0" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this message more often nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please review them before flagging this post!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the reason, almost &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; is given as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the actual flagged posts are deleted or closed or &lt;em&gt;punished&lt;/em&gt; as needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples where the flagged posts are deleted. I can't visit the links myself, but maybe &lt;em&gt;high-reppers&lt;/em&gt; can. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/322057/how-to-describe-someone-whose-voice-or-way-of-talking-creates-an-anxious-or-unco/322062#322062&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/318771/how-do-you-describe-this-person&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268271/what-does-illuminate-mean&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/318420/what-does-dangling-off-turrets-mean-here/318423#318423&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178344/usage-of-however&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;. I have a dozen examples where they are closed. And I get banned ultimately. I don't understand why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So why decline my flags in the first place? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do mods see my name with the flags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are these some sort of personal &lt;em&gt;revenge-declines&lt;/em&gt;? How's this even possible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The linked posts that I flagged &lt;strong&gt;to delete&lt;/strong&gt;, were in fact deleted, not by a mod, but for various reasons and sometimes by the actual OPs. And I assume the same fate for my other flag-declined posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mods that did review these flags, thought it's best not to kill the posts instantly and chose to decline my flags instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thanks to all for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (30/5/16):&lt;/strong&gt; I now have a gold &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/103/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt; badge, thanks to my improved flagging behaviour! Now I'm one among the 21 users so far to have ever received it on ELU. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T17:29:57.653" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T17:29:57.653" Title="Why did moderators decline most of my flags even if they were helpful?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7972" CreationDate="2016-04-28T15:09:46.333" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So why decline my flags in the first place?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7934/why-does-a-moderator-serially-decline-all-my-flags&quot;&gt;we told you before&lt;/a&gt;, do not use VLQ flags as close votes. Low-quality questions should be downvoted and close voted, not flagged. When you keep doing it and we keep declining your flags, you get the notice to review your declined flags. If you ignore the notice, you have your flag privileges revoked automatically because you don't seem to be getting the message: &lt;strong&gt;Stop flagging off-topic questions as VLQ.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do mods see my name with the flags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see names with some types of flags, not with others. Sometimes we can identify a flagger if we want to go through a lot of effort to look. There aren't any in the queue at the moment, but I believe that we can see the flagger for VLQ flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are these some sort of personal revenge-declines? How's this even possible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your flags have been declined by a variety of moderators. The declines are not personal. Moderators decline flags that are not valid for a variety of reasons. The user who raised the flag is not generally something we even notice. If you are finding that a large number of your flags are declined, it is because you are not flagging appropriately. Your automatic suspension from flagging is a clear indication that you need to adjust your flagging behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. What defines a post as &lt;em&gt;objectively flag-worthy&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;These do&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T15:09:46.333" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-28T21:18:16.450" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;@matt-e-Эллен&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/322050/attitude-should-be-professional-looks-need-not-to-be-is-it-grammatically-corre&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Attitude should be professional looks need not to be&amp;quot; is it grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the accepted answer to the above question was deleted --I'm not sure why.  I didn't think it was a particularly good answer, but it doesn't seem to be an exact duplicate of any other answer, and it's the one the OP marked as accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54466" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T11:28:29.730" Title="Why was this accepted answer deleted: Attitude should be professional" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7974" CreationDate="2016-04-28T21:57:58.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't realise it was the accepted answer. It's not something I usually check for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mod queue posts are presented without votes or formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a very bad answer. It gives the minor correction to the sentence without explanation. If you're not looking carefully you could be forgiven for thinking they hadn't even corrected the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I give people the benefit of the doubt and ask them to justify their answer, but this time I didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be more careful in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T21:57:58.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7979" CreationDate="2016-04-30T15:24:39.313" Score="12" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17468/do-the-words-angst-and-anxiety-share-a-common-root&quot;&gt;posted a question&lt;/a&gt; about English etymology in Linguistics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was contemplating whether to post it here, but decided against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I have posted it here, or would it have been off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160195" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:12.000" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T19:13:48.443" Title="Would this question have been off-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|etymology|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7977" CreationDate="2016-04-30T16:27:02.153" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since both words are (now) part of the English language, I think that asking about their etymology would be on-topic at this site. Also, the question you posted at Linguistics SE shows research effort on your part, so the question would clearly have passed muster on that account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just by way of underscoring that no easily accessible answer to your question is available online, you might have added to the question (if you had asked it at English  Language &amp;amp; Usage) that you had consulted Etymology Online (the etymology resource of first resort at this site) and found no hint there that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=angst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;angst&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=anxiety&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;anxiety&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, the only threat to your question would be from question monitors who might feel that going farther back than Old High German and Latin in search of a shared ancestor is too distant from the Englishness of the two words to justify posting the question on EL&amp;amp;U. I disagree: To me, welcoming questions about etymology (which we do) means welcoming questions that look back deep into the past—and I think voting to close your question because it might require delving as far back as Indo-European would be unreasonable. But some of my fellow EL&amp;amp;Uers take a very narrow view of &quot;English language and usage,&quot; and I can't (and don't) speak for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T16:27:02.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7977" CreationDate="2016-04-30T16:27:36.083" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think NVZ is right: it may very well have been closed on EL&amp;amp;U, sadly. This site is very close happy about questions that are very interesting but that is not exclusively about modern English (and also about other types of questions). I would certainly support your question, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cause of this that it takes the votes of only 5 high-rep users to close a question (a tiny minority of high-reps), and the other high-reps can do nothing whatsoever to prevent this from happening if they're just browsing the site, however much they like the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing they could do is try and find the question in the Review Queue and vote to leave it open, but that is a rather tedious exercise, and it can only be done &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question has already received close-votes. So there is no way to vote &quot;don't close&quot; during normal question-browsing until after a question has already been closed—at which point the question has been up for a while, and most users have already seen it once, and they are unlikely to view the question again later. The number of high-rep users is ever increasing, so this problem is unlikely to ever be solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2016-04-30T19:13:48.443" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T19:13:48.443" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-04T10:23:10.987" Score="0" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following  question asks for the correct expression to use for a specific case of plagiarism: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/68176/is-it-plagiarism-when-copying-something-that-you-have-written-before&quot;&gt;Is it plagiarism when copying something that you have written before?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and though it got a correct answer on ELU, it was removed and migrated to another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is essentially about an English term and its usage and OP is not asking about  possible  implications of &quot;self-plagiarism&quot;. Moreover, the  answers given in the other site don't seem to add much to the answer given on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On what grounds was the question removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the whole issue appears to be based on my misunderstanding of the question, sorry for that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.463" LastActivityDate="2016-05-04T13:05:02.607" Title="Why was the following question removed from ELU?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7984" CreationDate="2016-05-04T10:31:15.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was moved because the question is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;essentially about an English term&quot;, nor does it ask &quot;for the correct expression to use for a specific case of plagiarism&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am writing an essay and I have previously written and submitted an essay to a different professor about a similar subject. Would it be considered plagiarism if I copied my own exact sentences from my previous essay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is asking whether an academic institution would consider the practice of self-copying plagiarism. He is not asking whether there is such a term as &lt;em&gt;self-plagiarism&lt;/em&gt;. The question as asked is better asked of a community of academics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth pointing out that the question has gained a number of upvotes following its migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-05-04T10:31:15.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7987" CreationDate="2016-05-05T18:24:50.133" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/323687/what-is-a-biological-only-father-called&quot;&gt;question &lt;/a&gt; got me 11 up votes but the reputation was not added. What can be the issue? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71659" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T21:53:45.777" Title="Reputation is not being updated" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-05-09T07:50:37.653" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7986" CreationDate="2016-05-05T18:41:11.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get a maximum of 200 points a day (UTC 0000-2359), excluding accepts which give you 15 points and bounties that are not subject to the daily rep cap. Congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user146098" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T18:41:11.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7969" CreationDate="2016-05-06T01:58:39.750" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hotlicks' answer has been self-deleted. As of this moment, the two answers that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; there have both received -4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this isn't fraudulent sock-puppetry, nor simply a bandwagon effect, I believe these answers were caught in a &lt;strong&gt;vote-to-order&lt;/strong&gt; war. I used to do that, before I took a nice hard look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/242004/how-should-i-vote&quot;&gt;how I vote&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With those protocols in mind, I've decided to upvote the &lt;em&gt;praxinoscope&lt;/em&gt; answer and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; upvote yours, even though it is &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;. So I guess I still do vote to order, just not with arbitrary down votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning being that praxinoscopes &lt;em&gt;provide&lt;/em&gt; peep-shows (but they indeed have become known as peep-shows, so +0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Upvotes are not for &quot;correcting&quot; downvotes. It is not your job to take away somebody else's right to vote. Only upvote if you thought that it was a great question/answer, not because you disagreed with somebody else's downvote. –Lightness's profile&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes aren't for &quot;correcting&quot; upvotes either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update: everyone's wrong.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that there's three view ports, and the inner workings are a simple scroll, it's probably a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zograscope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zograscope&lt;/a&gt; : &quot;an optical device for enhancing the sense of depth perception from a flat picture.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T17:42:24.023" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7999" CreationDate="2016-05-10T00:29:58.033" Score="-3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a site for English Language &lt;em&gt;Usage&lt;/em&gt;. To me, usage implies use, which implies an active, present-time focus, including improvements that can be made. Why study usage at all unless your goal is to improve, not only yourself, but the field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I often wonder why questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/324583/what-is-a-better-term-than-unleaded-gasoline?&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; that propose improvements to usage are always met with the answer: &quot;because we have always done it that way&quot;? Isn't that antithetical to the very concept of usage as an evolving, improving practice in everyday life? Eschew Ossification!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user126158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T14:31:04.907" Title="Is Usage a noun or a verb?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7990" CreationDate="2016-05-10T00:47:51.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realise &quot;answer the question&quot; perhaps doesn't apply here but, a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174265" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T00:47:51.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7990" CreationDate="2016-05-10T06:49:44.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that one person's &quot;improvement&quot; is another person's &quot;corruption.&quot; This site is for asking questions that have reasonably objective answers, or &quot;good subjective&quot; answers as described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; (basically, these are answers to &quot;why&quot; or &quot;how&quot; questions). It's not a place for proposing changes to usage. People can't really &quot;answer&quot; such proposals, only &quot;respond&quot; to them by giving their opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T14:28:47.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7990" CreationDate="2016-05-10T07:28:58.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you ask a question about &quot;word usage&quot;, you should make some efforts to do your own research and show us what you found and what still bothers you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Search and&#xA;  research&lt;/a&gt; Have you&#xA;  thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing&#xA;  your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t&#xA;  meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try&#xA;  to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and&#xA;  above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes you think proposing to use &quot;standard&quot; or &quot;regular&quot; in place of &quot;unleaded&quot; is improving anything? I think your question comes from your misunderstanding of the term &quot;unleaded&quot; and how it has been used historically. See this link, &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/ckolstad/www/Newell.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The U.S. Experience with the Phasedown&#xA;of Lead in Gasoline&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the adjective &quot;regular&quot; is used before gasoline to differentiate other &lt;em&gt;octane grades such as &quot;premium&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and it has nothing to do with whether gasoline is leaded or unleaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0210-paying-premium-high-octane-gasoline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simple research&lt;/a&gt; would have answered your question and explain why we can't use &quot;regular&quot; or &quot;standard&quot; for &quot;unleaded&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer to your question on the main site, what is a better term than &quot;unleaded&quot; gasoline? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no better term than &quot;unleaded&quot; and &quot;regular&quot; or &quot;standard&quot; can never be used&#xA;  to mean &quot;unleaded&quot; as they have another specific usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T07:34:20.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7990" CreationDate="2016-05-10T12:24:19.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of different issues here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'Usage' is a noun (but somehow I think by asking that there is something deeper. You probably want to be more clear to get a relevant answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions are closed for many reasons and even the stated reasons are not so literal or consistent or applicable to a given situation (even when obviously closable). You question is closable for many reasons: it is asking for opinions (the established norm here is for factual answers; it doesn't present the situation well (few examples) meaning not enough research has been presented (the varieties and histories of words used).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism - You are under the misapprehension that this site is intended for setting language policy in English. Answers on ELU lean toward descriptivism but also try to explain what the standard is. ELU is not a school teacher or newspaper editor but it is also not a half-educated teenager (even though sometimes it feels that way).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Language history - Language isn't the labels in a database schema. Language just doesn't change that way. Language isn't literal, isn't logical, and it can't easily be forced. Things change as they will or won't change as they will. You may suggest a change, but there are better ways than peeving about it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I don't think you made a good case for the suggested change. Chat is probably a better place to have an informed discussion (though don't expect much coherence there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T12:24:19.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T07:16:37.750" Score="14" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the reason why a deleted answer, unlike a deleted question, remains visible on the site? Wouldn't  it be more appropriate to have it removed once the OP decides, for whatever reason, to delete it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T17:55:58.360" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T20:12:10.307" Title="Deleted answers vs deleted questions" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7996" CreationDate="2016-05-11T08:49:59.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason you think deleted answers remain visible but deleted questions do not is because deleted question are more difficult to find. You can still read deleted questions because you have over 10K reps. People with less than 10K reps cannot see deleted posts at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30314/difference-between-histrionics-and-hysterics&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30314/difference-between-histrionics-and-hysterics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just that because deleted answers appear in not-deleted questions, you see them more frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T08:49:59.873" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T10:44:01.907" Score="-4" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;The related question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/323458/what-do-you-call-all-the-pieces-of-a-song-minus-the-lyrics/323459#323459&quot;&gt;What do you call all the pieces of a song minus the lyrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically, I'd go for 'Music'. But I might be wrong, but I might be right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the second sentence is an idea borrowed from PiL - Rise: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songlyrics.com/pil/rise-lyrics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.songlyrics.com/pil/rise-lyrics/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I got 9 upvotes and 6 downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me why me post was deleted, costing me 78 rep points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer had received numerous upvotes. How does anyone have the right to delete an answer that has earned the user rep points? As this is a community site, and the community has decided an answer is worthwhile, then this surely ought to take precedence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108658" LastEditorUserId="108658" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2019-06-03T15:24:31.373" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T15:24:31.373" Title="Deleting answers with a positive rep balance" Tags="|discussion|reputation|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7990" CreationDate="2016-05-11T14:31:04.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/324583/2&quot;&gt;linked to&lt;/a&gt; a question whose title asks for a &lt;em&gt;better term&lt;/em&gt; in the context of established usage. The question's elaboration proposes using a generic term (e.g. &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt;) to replace one that is more specific (e.g. &lt;em&gt;unleaded&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of issues here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;Should we call this something else?&quot; question in this context is arguably classifiable as &lt;em&gt;naming&lt;/em&gt; and hence off-topic at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Replacing what amounts to specialist terminology that has well-defined meaning (&lt;em&gt;unleaded&lt;/em&gt;) with a generic term (&lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt;) can easily lead to 'misunderstandings'. E.g. Driver: &quot;I used your fuel and now my car won't go.&quot; Fuel attendant: &quot;Well, &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; 'standard fuel' is diesel. You should have used the 'non-standard fuel', or &lt;em&gt;unleaded&lt;/em&gt; as they used to call it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wording the question differently can help, e.g. &quot;What is a positive term (not &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-something) for &lt;em&gt;unleaded&lt;/em&gt; petrol?&quot; This better fits the purpose of ELU because it is something for which an ordinary individual's answer can be authoritative, as opposed to something that requires either the relevant authorities or mass participation to be effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my reading of your meta question, your main issue is about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an active, present-time focus, including improvements that can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider programming as an analogy to the use of English: we use programming languages and standard libraries to build new and innovative programs. Even the languages and libraries themselves change over time. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What you are asking in your linked question is something akin to &quot;Should we rename the &lt;em&gt;for-loop&lt;/em&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; programming construct since &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; isn't a good word for expressing iteration?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A good understanding of the 'language and libraries' or 'English as currently used' paves the way for innovation. There is a place for a repository of current usage, even if your goal is innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T14:31:04.907" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T15:03:03.453" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm able to paste an em-dash character. But I was wondering if there's a way to place an em-dash or an en-dash into an answer? The tag &amp;endash; doesn't work. I could not find them among the whitelisted HTML tags at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;What HTML tags are allowed on Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T22:03:17.600" Title="Does EL&amp;U support an em-dash or en-dash" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8000" CreationDate="2016-05-11T16:59:23.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the nudge in the right direction, Matt. Here's a site that has em-dash (use &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;mdash;&lt;/code&gt;) and en-dash (use &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;ndash;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/web/codehtml.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/web/codehtml.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also helpful for &amp;ldquo;Andr&amp;eacute; owes me &amp;euro;50.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Desired                 HTML sequence       numeric keyboard shortcut&#xA;em-dash (—)             &amp;mdash&amp;semi;                Alt-0151&#xA;en-dash (–)             &amp;ndash&amp;semi;                Alt-0150&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3306" LastEditorUserId="3306" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T22:03:17.600" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T22:03:17.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7996" CreationDate="2016-05-11T17:22:00.790" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main practical reason for preserving (in hidden form) answers that a poster has deleted is, as Rathony points out in a comment above, to enable the poster to reopen the post later. I have occasionally done this when I've posted an answer that a commenter has pointed out has a glaring but correctable fault that requires further research to amend; while I'm doing the additional research, I don't want my flawed answer to draw downvotes from voters who recognize the validity of the commenter's point and wonder why I'm leaving up a bad answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for truly obliterating an answer that seems unfixable and may even be embarrassing, I gather that doing so isn't possible on Stack Exchange sites—certainly not in the straightforward way that obliterating one's own comments is. But you can remove a deleted post from the immediate view of 10,000-rep site participants by following a simple process: Reopen the deleted post, click the edit button, delete the content of the post (or replace it with a message such as &quot;Original content removed.&quot;), save, and redelete. At this point, your pinked-out deleted post should show none of the original content of the post you deleted. I can't recall ever having done this myself, but I've seen posts from other users who seem to have adopted this method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T17:22:00.790" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8000" CreationDate="2016-05-11T18:35:01.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange supports the html character sequences for various dashs and hyphens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;shy; &amp;mdash; Wo&amp;shy;rd with soft hyphen in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;mdash; &amp;mdash; Wo&amp;mdash;rd with an em-dash in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;hyphen; &amp;mdash; Wo&amp;hyphen;rd with a hyphen in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;ndash; &amp;mdash; Wo&amp;ndash;rd with an en-dash in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T18:35:01.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7996" CreationDate="2016-05-11T20:12:10.307" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All questions and answers were taken from Stack Exchange Meta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why are answers visible to 10K users?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt; [edited May 8 2016]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What does deletion &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; for a post?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deleted posts are usually &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; physically deleted (that is, removed from the system); they're just hidden (AKA soft-deleted). This means they won't appear in search results or data dumps, and normal users following links to them will see a 404 (not found) page explaining the cause of deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators, and normal users with &gt;=10k reputation, see all deleted posts that they have links to. Moderators are able to undelete any deleted post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;10k users&quot; may vote to undelete deleted questions: it usually takes three votes to undelete a question, but sometimes more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;20k users&quot; may also vote to undelete deleted answers: it takes three votes to undelete an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/365/why-should-10k-rep-users-view-self-deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why should 10k rep users view self-deleted answers?&lt;/a&gt;  [last edited 2009]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comment section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the deletion is to remove clutter, in many cases the action is in good faith and is sensible. Admins (and 10K plus users are effectively a sort of admin by design) can see everything that happens so that, if bad faith, poorly done deletions occur they can be dealt with. What if someone writes abusive stuff then deletes it? how about threats then deletes it. The people doing the checks on this need to be able to see this. –     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ShuggyCoUk%20Jun%2029%20&amp;#39;09%20at%2010:44&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@ShuggyCoUk&lt;/a&gt; Jun 29 '09 at 10:44&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172183/what-checks-are-in-place-to-prevent-high-rep-users-and-mods-from-abusing-their-p&quot;&gt;What checks are in place to prevent high rep users and mods from abusing their privileges?&lt;/a&gt; [last edited 2014]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The biggest obstacle to abuse is... Everyone. Yourself included. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172183/what-checks-are-in-place-to-prevent-high-rep-users-and-mods-from-abusing-their-p/172236#172236&quot;&gt;As Tim notes&lt;/a&gt;, there's a papertrail for everything - and &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of that record is &lt;strong&gt;public&lt;/strong&gt;. Posts, edits, close/reopen, review actions... Even deletion is visible once you have 10K+ on the site. Don't trust a high rep user? Open up his activity feed and keep an eye on him. We can't make &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; public, but the more information that's available the better chance there is that someone will catch it. […]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;@Shog9♦&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108066/why-are-deleted-answers-never-purged-from-the-system&quot;&gt;Why are deleted answers never purged from the system?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Deleted questions are sometimes undeleted. Not possible if deletion was permanent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Sometimes moderators needs to make a judgement call about a user. The more information they have, the better. Having access to the user's deleted questions and answers can help the moderators make an informed decision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Since deleted posts rarely get viewed, they have little-to-no effect on the performance of the site. […]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;@agf&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What to do if you need to &quot;hard delete&quot; an answer or a question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/112350/how-to-permanently-delete-questions-that-contain-sensitive-information&quot;&gt;How to permanently delete questions that contain sensitive information&lt;/a&gt; [duplicate]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Email team@stackoverflow.com; they (the devs) are the only people who can truly erase information from all users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  @waiwai933&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132117/what-should-i-do-if-a-user-posts-sensitive-information-as-part-of-a-question-or&quot;&gt;What should I do if a user posts sensitive information as part of a question or answer?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;First, edit out the sensitive information.  […]        &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Second, flag for moderator attention with &quot;other&quot; flag, explaining why the sensitive information should be removed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  […] &lt;strong&gt;Moderators can redact individual revisions&lt;/strong&gt; to remove all traces of such information from both the post and its history; flagging will alert them to the nature of the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T20:12:10.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7998" CreationDate="2016-05-12T17:18:25.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the comments above suggest, your answer was flagged as low-quality and therefore removed by the community (or by a moderator, perhaps. &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2015/11/why-did-i-delete-your-answer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;See why&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall that I had posted a comment asking you to improve your answer, but you didn't pay attention. The up-votes you got were because it was a good &lt;em&gt;suggestion&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. music). The down-votes were probably because it was not a good &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;; it showed a lack of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have enough rep and badges, so I'm sure you know what a good answer is supposed to be. And if you would rather suggest a word without any explanation, use the &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; section, so that someone else may use your suggestion to write a detailed answer themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T17:18:25.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2016-05-13T11:36:34.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammarly is a Chrome extension and &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammarly.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;website&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; that can check grammar for you. Note that it does not work in Google Drive apps. Finally, it can store documents on the webpage on your account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163934" LastEditorUserId="163934" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T19:49:08.193" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T19:49:08.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7798" CreationDate="2016-05-13T14:27:10.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chanced upon this meta now. Surprised to see that it mentions me. Here's the thing. Mostly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I'm a speed reader.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise,&#xA;I have a mind like a sieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are multiple answers to a question, each with many suggested words and lengthy explanation, I can't help but fail to peruse them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Big or bold words catch my attention while &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; don't. So, in my own posts I follow a style accordingly, a style where the &lt;strong&gt;suggested words are highlighted&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;explanation is hidden&lt;/strong&gt; in plain sight. (&lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/302254/50044&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/323472/50044&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/319928/50044&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/304683/50044&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/322106/50044&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/315305/50044&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/318165/50044&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/321322/50044&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/322001/50044&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back then, my edits on others' posts were aimed at helping those other speed-readers, knowing that the respective owners can simply roll back my edits if they wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's my bad when I edit others' posts to reflect my style. I have made my fair share of mistakes. Forgive the old me. Trust the new me because I've learnt tons over these months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T14:27:10.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-13T15:43:17.100" Score="10" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewing low quality answers, often someone else has added a constructive comment prompting the responder to improve their answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I hit &quot;looks okay&quot; to clear it from the queue and give the suggestion some time, or should I hit &quot;skip&quot; to keep it in the queue? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long should these comments be given before reflagging the answer (if dropped from the queue) or recommending deletion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-05-14T12:24:01.780" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T13:00:43.880" Title="Low quality answer review. Skip button vs Looks okay button" Tags="|discussion|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-13T21:31:11.710" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have no question of my grandmother's dedication&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &quot;I have no question of whether my grandmother is dedicated&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &quot;I do not question my grandmother's dedication.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which can be used, grammatically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/325303/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/325303/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, the formatting of this leaves something to be desired (though in 20 hours, no one thought it would be good to reformat it)... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also granted, the question isn't very well asked, the OP didn't bother to address any of the comments... fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this closed as &quot;off topic&quot; (migrated to ELL) and not &quot;needs more info&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language in this doesn't sound like it's coming from someone who's learning English... the punctuation and capitalization are good...  All three versions of the sentence are complex and they are all valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer here does a good job of explaining that and also explains when each version would be more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the format? The lack of detail? Do you not entertain questions about grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a decent answer was so easily attained, why not edit the question to suit this site better... &quot;In what cases should I use each of the following?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not here complaining about the migration... I use both sites (though I use ELL more) I'm honestly trying to understand the thought process of why this doesn't fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it only takes three out of five close votes to migrate a question, so perhaps not all of the votes were for migration... It would be nice to know why the people who did vote to migrate did so over voting to close for another reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T09:20:39.470" Title="Why is this question with a eyecatching title off topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8009" CreationDate="2016-05-14T07:30:13.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the second close-voter and I never close-vote any question to migrate to ELL at all. I did it a few times when I was new, but stopped after I realized that posting a comment to guide a new user to ELL could be better than migrating the question. It's just my personal opinion. &#xA;I don't believe many OPs whose question has been migrated to ELL return to ELL to post another question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question seems to have several issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't know what the OP wants to express. We can only guess what it is and I think Sven Yarg's comment answers the question. Dedication to what? The question is &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question should have a reasonable amount of research. I don't think it is easy to do research on the question, but at least the question should include what bothers the OP most and what specific part he can't understand so that a definitive answer could be made with proper research and reference. There is nothing other than &quot;which is grammatically correct&quot;? This is close to a request for &lt;em&gt;proof-reading&lt;/em&gt;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/325531/for-someone-having-taught-themself&quot;&gt;For someone having taught themself&lt;/a&gt; has received two close-votes up to now (if I vote, it will be three) for proof-reading. I think it was triggered by &quot;which sentence is correct?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any value of this question in terms of whether it will be useful to current and future users of this community. It is a typical homework or preparation-for-test question. If it depends on personal preference on how to express &quot;My grandmother's dedication is beyond question&quot;, it could be &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why you think &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The language in this doesn't sound like it's coming from someone who's learning English: We can never know. It does to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The answer to the question does a good job of explaining...: I think No. 1 and No. 2 sentences have a problem even though they could make sense. Who would use the two sentences in what context? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question generated two close-votes and one down-vote on ELL. I think it is up to ELL to decide whether to close it or not. I don't think migrating the question is a bad idea as the OP seems to be a learner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally believe a question like the linked one &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/325424/is-its-grammatically-correct-to-say-as-we-grow-old-we-will-encounter-many-a-sit&quot;&gt;Is its grammatically correct to say “As we grow old we will encounter many a situations together..”?&lt;/a&gt; could be migrated to ELL. But it received 4 close-votes as general reference. However, one user introduced ELL to the OP and hope it works well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T09:20:39.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2016-05-14T13:00:43.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I hit &quot;looks okay&quot; to clear it from the queue and give the suggestion some time, or should I hit &quot;skip&quot; to keep it in the queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You be the judge.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review process takes a while. If the OP returns to edit, click &quot;looks okay&quot;. Else, &quot;recommend deletion&quot;. &quot;Skip&quot; delays the review process, until someone else attends to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, personally, would leave a comment or upvote others' and still &quot;recommend deletion&quot; if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't improve it myself &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think that the OP is gone for a very long time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How long should these comments be given before reflagging the answer (if dropped from the queue) or recommending deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Again, you decide.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have flagged it instantly. It's debatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T13:00:43.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8014" CreationDate="2016-05-17T07:35:03.890" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the revision history of this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/326031/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/326031/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7 revisions (so far) and nothing has been added or removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T11:49:48.580" Title="What's being revised here?" Tags="|discussion|editing|revisions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8013" CreationDate="2016-05-17T09:03:36.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing has been revised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It started from my misunderstanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@surlawda commented to the answer, &quot;I accidentally hit the &quot;edit&quot; button, but made no changes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I thought @surlawda could roll it back to the original post so that it would not show the editor's username. Sorry that it was my misunderstanding and bad advice. Now I understand only the OP could roll it back. I left this comment. &quot;Hi, Surlawda. So sorry, I didn't know you couldn't roll it back. I think only Steve Cooper could have rolled it back. Anyway, I learned one thing. I am tempted to ask a question about this on Meta. Let me think about it.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think @ab2 wanted to help with the roll-back which seems to have resulted in no change except that it changed the editor's username. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T11:49:48.580" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T11:49:48.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T08:34:51.530" Score="62" ViewCount="3346" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ngram seems to be more authoritative than the Periodic Table here on EL&amp;amp;U. As someone with more than a passing interest in the language, I wanted to know how good Ngram is. And on Wikipedia, of all authorities to cite when seeking reliability, I found these relevant facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Google Ngram Viewer or Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online&#xA;search engine that charts frequencies of any set of comma-delimited&#xA;search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources&#xA;printed between 1500 and 2008... in Google's text corpora in American&#xA;English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, or&#xA;Chinese. ... generated in either 2008 or 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google populated the database from over 5 million books published up&#xA;to 2008. Accordingly, as of January 2016, no data will match beyond&#xA;the year 2008, no matter if the corpora was generated in 2009 or 2012.&#xA;Due to limitations on the size of the Ngram database, only matches&#xA;found in over 40 books are indexed in the database; otherwise the&#xA;database could not have stored all possible combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data set has been criticized for its reliance upon inaccurate OCR,&#xA;an overabundance of Scientific Literature, and for including large&#xA;numbers of incorrectly dated and categorized texts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From points 1 and 2 we learn that the English corpus contains 5,000,000 digitized books dating from 1500 to 2008. From point 3 we learn that there are criticisms. The &lt;em&gt;overabundance of Scientific Literature&lt;/em&gt; is a particularly telling point in tracking words in common usage. This is important because this site itself shows us that usage in scientific literature is skewed and stilted: users often ask for a more polished word for something that seems to an educated person (shameless self-promotion there) to be perfectly normal and acceptable even within the ivied porticoes of academe. So the 5-cent word the questioner would have used at the dinner table could be lost to us, and the five-dollar substitute remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is changing very rapidly, and I am sure that there has been as much change since 2008 as in the 30 years before that, in both UK and US usage. These changes will obviously not show up in the linguistic fossil record used by Ngram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese there are corpora based on newspapers. These reflect current speech, are easy to update, and are accurately dated. Since much of the material is already digitized, there are no OCR problems. Now that there are so many publications online, it should be easy to construct one for any variety of English you choose, but I haven't found one so far. I reckon I need to look harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article cited mentions that Ngram has been found useful in machine translation. I reckon that accounts for much of machine translation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of all this, I have three related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In view of the fact that it is a fossil record, should we rely on Ngram as an authority for current usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If Ngram is found to be wanting, what do we use instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there an up-to-date currently-maintained corpus based on newspapers and Web sites for English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172380" OwnerDisplayName="frank" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-19T12:17:02.947" LastActivityDate="2022-04-19T12:17:02.947" Title="How reliable is Google Ngram?" Tags="|discussion|ngrams|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8015" CreationDate="2016-05-17T08:57:53.893" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was originally intended as an answer to the &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; question of how current use of a term could best be gauged. As such, the answer lists common resources available for that purpose. Google Ngrams/Google Books do not satisfy the demand: being raw statistical data (the n-grams from the Google Books corpus) based on raw textual data (Google Books), inferences drawn from the mess are &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; invalid and, if sound, only sound as a result of aleatoric serendipity; outside of tightly controlled experimental environments, the textual data as presented via the Ngrams interface is only useful as a biased and poorly focused selection of instances of term use during the stipulated time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the painstaking, longwinded traditional lexicographical techniques of gathering and comparing dated uses of terms &lt;em&gt;in context&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;over time&lt;/em&gt;, no technique or set of techniques (that I know of) suffices to address the desired distillation of 'contemporary use' into 'contemporary senses'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should stress that 'contemporary use', that is, what you call &amp;quot;current use&amp;quot;, although I'm understanding it in the spirit you seem to intend (which is notably parochial), &lt;em&gt;includes all historical use&lt;/em&gt;. That is to say, for example, that to the extent that  Shakespeare is still read and discussed, Shakespearean usage remains contemporary to that limited extent, however rarely a Shakespearean sense of a still-common term may occur in &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; contemporary use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In view of the fact that it is a fossil record, should we rely on Google Ngram Viewer as an authority for current usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Google Ngram Viewer is found to be wanting, what do we use instead?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No (to question 1). Any &amp;quot;fossil record&amp;quot; should inform and condition conclusions regarding &amp;quot;current usage&amp;quot;, but the notion that a fossil record is all that is presented when the beast (the literature) still walks the earth is just plain wrong. Google Ngram Viewer/Google Books has &lt;em&gt;limited&lt;/em&gt; utility as a collection of corroborative evidence of term use to 2008. Current, that is, contemporary use, is best gauged with a wide-ranging combination of resources. For links to some of those resources, see the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an up-to-date currently-maintained corpus based on newspapers and Web sites for English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if &amp;quot;up-to-date&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;corpus&amp;quot; are somewhat loosely used. The &amp;quot;corpus&amp;quot; is the sum total of World Wide Web resources available through general and specialized internet search facilities. &amp;quot;Up-to-date&amp;quot; for these resources is not &amp;quot;up-to-the-minute&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the obvious general internet search of contemporary journals and newspapers using any of a variety of search engines, free searchable newspaper corpora include the compilation from some US, Australian, New Zealand and Singapore newspapers at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.elephind.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elephind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and the more specialized compilation of US papers at &lt;a href=&quot;https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/#tab=tab_search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicling America&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. These each have their strengths and weaknesses, in terms of the results interface, etc. &lt;em&gt;Elephind&lt;/em&gt; includes &lt;em&gt;Chronicling America&lt;/em&gt; results, but the interface is weaker in some important areas (highlighting search terms, or not, being the most prominent area of disparity). Note also that &lt;em&gt;Elephind&lt;/em&gt; includes some papers from as early as 1787 and as late as 2015 (the Elephind date range is a moving target because the Veridian enterprise is ongoing), while the &lt;em&gt;Chronicling America&lt;/em&gt; collection is limited to papers published between 1836 and 1922.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other useful sources of newspapers and other works include these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listcs&amp;amp;colltype=featured&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hathi Trust Digital Library&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (contains many works also included in &lt;em&gt;Google Books&lt;/em&gt;, and sometimes offers alternative routes of text access where access is limited via &lt;em&gt;Google Books&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/texts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Internet Archive and Open Library&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;10,000,000 eBooks and texts&amp;quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Google Books&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (this is the base collection for Google Ngram Viewer; I find it returns different results than the Viewer, and so usually check both);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://veridiansoftware.com/collections/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Veridian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (many of these are included in &lt;em&gt;Elephind&lt;/em&gt; results);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newspapers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Newspapers+ Publisher Extra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (some time in the past I gave up on the next paywalled source in favor of this one; I believe the problem with the next source was signal-to-noise ratio, but I don't remember, although I assume my reasons were sound);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://newspaperarchive.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Newspaper Archive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (this bills itself as the &amp;quot;World's Largest Collection&amp;quot;, but you'll have to pay to use it);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Internet Library of Early Journals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (limited collection of 18th and 19th Century English journals).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual specialized online corpora, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COHA&lt;/a&gt; (Corpus of Contemporary/Historical American English), &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Micase&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), &lt;a href=&quot;https://lextutor.ca/m/conc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Corpus Concordance English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, etc. (see especially the listing shown at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/m/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;english-corpora.org&lt;/a&gt;), should be mentioned. Some of these are listed in other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/484/common-accepted-online-resources/3034#3034&quot;&gt;questions and answers&lt;/a&gt; at the ELU meta site. (See the related questions and answers listed in a sidebar box associated with the linked question on the ELU meta site. The most comprehensive lists seem to be in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt; on meta and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt; on main.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your specific question, there doesn't seem to be an organized and comprehensive answer; the questions and answers on ELU and ELU Meta referenced in my preceding paragraph are more general, very roughly organized, and don't include the newspaper or some of the other corpora I mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Raw Google Books n-gram data and more sophisticated interface&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the chops, the raw Google Books n-gram data is &lt;a href=&quot;https://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available for use&lt;/a&gt;. Unless whatever application you devise includes Google Books lookup and link collection facilities, of course, you will find the Google Ngram Viewer more convenient for many uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/googlebooks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;much more sophisticated interface&lt;/a&gt; than the Google Ngram Viewer for the Google Books n-gram data is available via English-corpora.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Up-To-Date Usage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your question 3, two very useful corpora only recently (May, 2016) made available are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/now/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOW Corpus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of contemporary online newspapers and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/core/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;CORE: Corpus of Online Registers of English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. For details see their respective sites, but here are brief descriptions from those sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;NOW&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NOW corpus (Newspapers on the Web) contains about three billion words of data from web-based newspapers from 2010 to the present time. More importantly, the corpus grows by about 4 million words of data each day (from about 10,000 new articles), or about 120 million words each month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this corpus, you can see what is happening with the language this week — not just 10 or 20 years ago. For example, see the frequency of words since 2010, as well as new words and phrases from the last few years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;CORE&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This corpus contains more than 50 million words of text from the web. Unlike other corpora from the web, which are just big &amp;quot;blobs&amp;quot; of data, this is the first large web-based corpus that is carefully categorized into many different registers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... You might pay special attention to the comparisons between registers and the (new) virtual corpora, which allow you to create personalized collections of texts related to a particular area of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to these recently released corpora, one of particular interest for researchers looking for information about contemporary informal usage is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/soap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Corpus of American Soap Operas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SOAP corpus contains 100 million words of data from 22,000 transcripts from American soap operas from the early 2000s [ed.: 2001-2012], and it serves as a great resource to look at very informal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" OwnerDisplayName="JEL" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-16T14:33:04.983" LastActivityDate="2022-04-16T14:33:04.983" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8015" CreationDate="2016-05-17T11:56:23.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use Ngram and just look at the graph you are looking at garbage.  If you carefully examine a representative number of the actual references you get a much better idea as to whether the graph is meaningful or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you become a billionaire you may certainly create your own database (being sure to observe copyright limitations!) and set up your own site to search it.  Until then I'm thankful that Ngram works as well as it does as often as it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" OwnerDisplayName="Hot Licks" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T11:56:23.287" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8015" CreationDate="2016-05-17T14:25:42.023" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Ngrams has problems for ELU questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not speech, which is often the unspoken context of questions, even though we only research things through print.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not the web, which has more colloquial usage (again more often the question context here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it includes a lot of strange publications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it has a lot of OCR errors for older books (with messy printing, messy fonts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it has a lot of metadata errors (especially date of publication)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not curated (it was a one-off in 2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British National Corpus (BNC)&lt;/a&gt; are somewhat comparable, curated corpora of newspaper English. They do not do websites. So the 'speech' (written language) is expected to be formal but up to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the problems with searching Ngrams is not necessarily with the data but with the user's expectations of the search they attempt and therefore true of any corpus search. If you do a search on comparing the color terms pale vs light, there will be all sorts of FPs for multiple other meanings that will wash out entirely any kind of hypothesis support. There is some way around this (part of speech tags and phrases with surrounding words) but it can be difficult for any corpus and question. If you assess these results as a non-native speaker, you may very well get a blunt, misleading view of things, whereas a native speaker might understand the nuances of each instance better. So even with a (non-existent) perfect corpus, it may be difficult to justify definitive universal hypotheses (eg &amp;quot;'bucket' is always used in preference to 'pail' in a nautical context&amp;quot; (I made that up, I don't know)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Ngrams is quick and easy, and gives links to the source immediately, so you can check your hypothesis with respect to context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to using an Ngram comparison on ELU as justification, you'd have to account for all the Ngram specific caveats &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; the general word search problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my suggestion is to, along with other online resources, use Ngrams but with great caution keeping in mind all the caveats. Don't rely on a single source. Corroborate with other corpora, a plain google search, talking to native speakers, comments here, chat here, etc, etc, etc. If you are a native speaker, you can be motivated by introspection of your own speech patterns but beware, simply asking a question or reading someone else's idea can bias you in a chaotically emotional direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" OwnerDisplayName="Mitch" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-16T14:03:45.727" LastActivityDate="2022-04-16T14:03:45.727" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8015" CreationDate="2016-05-17T14:50:10.777" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;One more problem with ngram that (I think) has not been mentioned (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wired.com/2015/10/pitfalls-of-studying-language-with-google-ngram/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wired&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the traps in using ngrams to divine the popularity of people,&#xA;ideas, or concepts is that a book only appears once—whether it’s been&#xA;read once or millions of times. &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is in there&#xA;once, and so is some random paper on mechanics. The two&#xA;texts are weighted equally. It doesn’t reflect what is people are&#xA;talking about [or reading, or being influenced by] so much as what people are publishing about—and until&#xA;very recently, most people didn’t have access to publishing. Like,&#xA;what does this really tell you about language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66965" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-16T14:06:41.363" LastActivityDate="2022-04-16T14:06:41.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8026" CreationDate="2016-05-18T17:31:53.477" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions Requesting Explanation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we fail to find a satisfying or sophisticated answer on the Internet or in our books, can an explanation of poems or dialogs or certain Shakespearean lines be asked here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user171176" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-05-25T07:15:33.097" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T07:15:33.097" Title="Questions about English Literature" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8020" CreationDate="2016-05-18T17:34:33.017" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't do interpretations of writing on this site, but you can ask in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;. You may find some people who are interested in talking over author intent and artistic meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T17:34:33.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2016-05-18T18:11:17.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post was recently referred to in a comment on a similar kind of question, and since I hadn't answered then, I thought I would do so now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble with posted audio or video clips is that asking &quot;What is this person saying?&quot; is unlikely to be helpful to future visitors. Even if it were, it would be nearly impossible for future visitors to find. Also, asking what word a person is saying is not really to do with English Language &amp;amp; Usage so much as it is to do with listening comprehension, which could apply to any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with phenry that our guidelines could be altered to make this clearer. I also think&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is acceptable to post links in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; asking for help hearing words in context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is acceptable to ask a question on Main about particular pronunciations and dialects (for instance) and to include audio/video links as appropriate for support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T18:11:17.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T04:11:59.430" Score="6" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, so I'm new here, and I don't necessarily know my way around, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It strikes me that on a lot of questions, people will answer the question, but post their answer as a comment to the question. Now, as a new user, I don't have the option to do that, but even if I did, I just &lt;em&gt;don't get it&lt;/em&gt; -- why not post your answer as an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to the question???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This mainly irritates me as I'm trying to look for questions that haven't been answered, so it's frustrating when I click on a question with 0 &quot;answers&quot; which has been &quot;answered&quot; already in the comments; but surely there's a wider point about the ways people are using the site?? (which tbf I don't really know about, as I'm new here...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326808/word-for-a-member-of-a-team-who-improves-morale&quot;&gt;Word for a member of a team who improves morale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326789/that-what-is-being-composed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326789/that-what-is-being-composed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326787/word-for-blowing-off-of-a-traveling-object-in-the-wind&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326787/word-for-blowing-off-of-a-traveling-object-in-the-wind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326782/pass-under-an-overpass-alternative&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Pass under an overpass&amp;quot; alternative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326742/match-for-vs-matched-by&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326742/match-for-vs-matched-by&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just off the first two pages with &quot;0&quot; answers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174265" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T13:17:46.997" Title="Answers as comments" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7718" CreationDate="2016-05-20T12:38:06.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added margin between filters so it's easier to read/use. It will be live after our next production build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109857" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T12:38:06.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8023" CreationDate="2016-05-20T17:06:44.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are entirely correct that this is a problem. It has been extensively discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2653/8019&quot;&gt;(Why are answers being posted in the comments on the question?&lt;/a&gt; for example), but nobody can force users not to put an 'answer' in the comments (so long as they have the requisite reputation). It may be done because the user does not think the question warrants a full answer, because the answer is either speculative or incomplete, or simply because the user is inexperienced (Which certainly does not apply to Rathony above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, there are two sanctions; that the comment may be deleted for any reason or none (which does not happen to answers), and that anybody is free to take up, add to, edit, fold, spindle or mutilate a comment in pursuit of your own answer, while using somebody else's answer in this fashion is frowned on, if not outright plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:06:44.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8020" CreationDate="2016-05-22T12:21:21.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shakespeare?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;eighty questions&lt;/a&gt; have been asked about Shakespeare, and some specifically asked about pronunciation, or the meaning of lines in his plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72937/pronunciation-of-host-in-shakespeares-time&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of &amp;#39;host&amp;#39; in Shakespeare&amp;#39;s time&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284434/thank-thou-or-thank-thee&quot;&gt;Thank thou or Thank thee&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/86749/searching-for-a-literary-term-for-if-this-then-i-m-a-this-statements&quot;&gt;Searching for a literary term for “if this, then I’m a this” statements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283375/shakespeares-scansion&quot;&gt;Shakespeare&amp;#39;s Scansion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/203865/is-worser-correct-grammatically&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;worser&amp;quot; correct grammatically?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/300305/what-does-macbeth-mean-when-he-says-his-heart-is-seated&quot;&gt;What does Macbeth mean when he says his heart is &amp;quot;seated&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202901/the-meaning-of-yet-in-ere-yet-the-salt-of-most-unrighteous-tears-had-left-the&quot;&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;yet&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her galled eyes&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163132/why-does-hamlet-not-say-ere-he-rots&quot;&gt;Why does Hamlet not say, &amp;quot;ere he rots?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/267244/what-did-shakespeare-mean-by-gild-refined-gold&quot;&gt;What did Shakespeare mean by &amp;quot;gild refined gold&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (although this question has been closed)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32874/what-does-this-mean-to-be-thus-is-nothing-but-to-be-safely-thus&quot;&gt;What does this mean: To be thus is nothing; But to be safely thus&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... let's say users &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; ask about specific lines from Shakespeare's works as long as they explain what they do not understand, and show they have done some research. It's an act of courtesy towards EL&amp;amp;U users as it will save them time looking up the same references, and it has the added benefit of making the question more interesting. A note of warning; it is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; enough to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I Googled the quotation, but I didn't get the answer I was looking for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T12:21:21.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8031" CreationDate="2016-05-23T13:46:40.653" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently see questions about word-suggestions, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a term to describe X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this could attract a lot of answers, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could call it &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could call it &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, actually,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you could call it &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could call it &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, actually,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you could call it &lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, on a third though,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you could call it &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if there is no &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; (in the objective sense) answer, those who propose &lt;em&gt;more than one&lt;/em&gt; suggestions have higher chances of getting upvoted, because &lt;em&gt;one of&lt;/em&gt; their suggestions could be quite right. This way &lt;em&gt;every single&lt;/em&gt; suggestion they made (in the same answer) rises to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for an outsider, it is not at all that clear, that which of &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; got the upvotes, or which of &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt; received the upvotes. So, which one should be choosen by a naive outsider?? Needless to say, that sometimes suggestion &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; should be heavily upvoted, whereas suggestion &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; (from the same user within the same answer) should be heavily downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that answers of this kind are not at all useful, and it is very difficult to correctly vote on those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: what is the rationale behind letting people post multiple suggestions in the very same answer? Is this by-design, or an unfortunate by-product? How do you vote on these answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T11:20:48.587" Title="Every one a winner, or how do you deal with multiple suggestions in a single answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2016-05-26T09:24:56.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8030" CreationDate="2016-05-24T19:28:10.040" Score="13" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I haven't given an answer, but have only commented, I feel OK about volunteering an explanation of the green check to a new user, provided: enough time has passed, and there are good answers to choose among.  I've done this once or twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it different if I have answered?  Is it just not done -- is it pushy -- to explain the green check when one's own answer is a candidate?  (This is assuming a reasonable amount of time has passed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, a new user thanked me for my answer (which was the only one), and I explained the green check, but I felt odd about it.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T23:21:02.173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T23:21:02.173" Title="Etiquette: Is explaining the green check (acceptance) to a new user bad manners?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8029" CreationDate="2016-05-24T22:13:17.110" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Receiving thanks from the poster, it seems to me, puts you in the position of participating in an ongoing conversation, if you choose to follow up with a hint about how answer acceptance works at Stack Exchange sites. And as long as your answer isn't the only response to, say, a two-hour-old question, I don't think such a comment subverts EL&amp;amp;U's preference that answers remain unaccepted for a decent interval in case a better answer comes along within a reasonable time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initiating a conversation along the same lines when the poster hasn't said anything to indicate appreciation for your answer strikes me as falling closer to the line of soliciting for points. I've seen answerers do it, and I don't think it's impolite, exactly, but the self-interest quotient seems higher. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some long-time participants at EL&amp;amp;U have occasionally expressed frustration at the tendency of first-time question askers not to accept answers that thoroughly resolve their question. To those observers, it is the questioners who exhibit bad manners, by not acknowledging the usefulness of the answer and the effort that the answerer made on their behalf. And since very-low-rep askers don't have the power to upvote answers, the only ways they can express gratitude are by posting a comment of thanks, by accepting an answer, or both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, asking for green check marks seems a bit unwholesome. If the goal is to introduce new questioners to the etiquette of answer acceptance, the selfless thing to do (which you and some other site participants have done) is to leave comments on questions where you don't have an answer in play, pointing out the acceptance option and suggesting that using it is a good way to indicate satisfaction with an answer. It's a public-spirited approach, certainly—but no one wants to spend all day monitoring the board for seemingly ungrateful first-time questioners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, answering an interesting question well is its own reward; and the more fully you believe that proposition, the more fun you'll have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T22:13:17.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8027" CreationDate="2016-05-25T11:05:16.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt; a lot. It's hard to decide whether I should post all suggestions in one or separate answers. I always put out there, everything that I've got, and hope the community informs me, by comments, what works and what doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some who just up/downvote my answer simply because one, out of many, suggestion they found good/bad. Which is not helping me or the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My meta experience tells me &lt;strong&gt;I should keep posting all suggestions in one&lt;/strong&gt;, as long as they're all closely related, and explain them well. And that I should post separately only when two suggestions are drastically different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a meta answer that kind of supports my view. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5131/50044&quot;&gt;MrHen says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I answer SWR questions I typically add a bunch of detail about each potential match in order to address the entire area being discussed. English often doesn't have an exact phrase that fits and I think splitting each section into its own answer would make it harder to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I see the argument for splitting any of those answers up, I think they work best as is. Various comments will address portions of the answer and I will typically integrate the extra information into the full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T11:20:48.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8023" CreationDate="2016-05-25T13:17:46.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm also relatively new here, only having joined a few weeks ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on this is that the community punishes brief answers. If you don't post something that has a dictionary reference, if you don't pad out the answer with a 'proper' explanation and demonstrated research, then you run the risk of getting downvoted pretty quickly. That has the double effect of hurting your reputation while your answer drops to the bottom and is buried, which renders it a waste of typing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the comments become the only &quot;here's a quick thought...&quot; mechanism that's open without suffering such slings and arrows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you could argue that only full responses are desired, which is fine - but we'll get far fewer answers as a result, especially when anyone can turn to a dictionary to look up any of the suggestions if they want to know more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173001" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T13:17:46.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T19:43:33.770" Score="6" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know if there is a way that I could print out all of my answers and or questions on E&amp;amp;U without going to each individual page and printing it off?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, do we want there to be a print button on pages? I quite often want to print out other peoples answers. It's a bind having to select them etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T08:17:29.520" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T14:17:40.313" Title="Printing out all my posts" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8035" CreationDate="2016-05-26T07:35:33.930" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time, I find some interesting questions with one or two delete vote counts. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37183/antonym-of-distributed-as-in-distributed-system&quot;&gt;Antonym of “distributed” as in “distributed system” [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the question received three down votes, its top answer received 18 upvotes. My questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Will it be deleted if I click on the delete button? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I clicked on the delete button, would my action be justifiable? How many upvotes in the answer do you think could justify leaving a question undeleted?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any general guideline on deleting posts on ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T09:12:38.700" Title="How many upvotes in the answer would justify leaving a question undeleted" Tags="|discussion|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8034" CreationDate="2016-05-26T09:12:38.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleting a question will automatically delete all the answers posted on that question, irrespective of the number of upvotes each answer received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;moderator tool guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, users are asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before voting to delete, please check whether there are any good answers; if so, then the question should be flagged for moderator attention as a potential merge candidate. &lt;strong&gt;We don't like to lose great answers!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, be cautious when &lt;strong&gt;deleting questions closed as duplicates; they can serve as a signpost, directing users to useful answers on another question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes 3 votes, minimum, to delete a closed question. However, the number of delete votes required scales to the number of votes on the question and all its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many great answers — but this is a very subjective area — that have earned only a handful of upvotes. Answers which have earned 50 or more upvotes are not necessarily &amp;quot;great&amp;quot;, but they may have been perceived to be the &amp;quot;right answer&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T09:12:38.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8037" CreationDate="2016-05-26T08:36:40.400" Score="2" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is 'OP'? I want to know the meaning of 'OP' used here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26375" OwnerDisplayName="박용현" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T13:06:28.143" Title="I want to know the meaning of 'OP?'" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-05-26T18:11:48.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8036" CreationDate="2016-05-26T08:38:16.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP stands for &lt;em&gt;Original Poster/Original Post&lt;/em&gt;, which here is the person who asked the question or the question itself. In this case, it is you. In forums for instance, it is the person who starts the thread, or the first post in the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I agree with the OP, acronyms can be very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In video games, however, OP means &quot;overpowered&quot; -  a person or group that is too powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That class is too OP, everyone is gonna play it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169087" OwnerDisplayName="MorganFR" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T08:44:06.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2016-05-30T05:23:14.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might try&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;englishforums.com&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll need to create a free account. Click on &quot;Forums&quot;, the rightmost item in the main menu and scroll down to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Essay, Report &amp;amp; Composition Writing&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where you can post your text and people will give you advice even beyond simple proofreading.  The site also has an internal messaging system, which can be helpful for one-on-one conversations about your writing.  I don't know how many &quot;editors&quot; avail themselves of that facility.  I used to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T05:23:14.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-31T14:19:20.303" Score="24" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning, I and my fellow moderators are faced with a quandary. Once again, we have a pile of disputed low quality flags in our queue, the majority of which are for answers to single-word-requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most low quality flags go through the community review tools. They come to the moderators to resolve when there is dispute about whether the flag is valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They usually manifest as one or more of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as a suggestion/question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about &quot;fish&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;filled in the blank of the example context question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would really like you to &lt;strong&gt;examine&lt;/strong&gt; that thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as a shotgun list that might be copypasta from a thesaurus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wedge; heel; flat; slide; mule; slipper; trainers; jellies; crocs;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the entirety of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the time these are technically answers.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the time these don't meet our requirements - they are not linked to a dictionary definition and explained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the time we leave a note to that effect and either the answer is never updated or the poster gets angry and ends up suspended. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd like to post a reminder on Meta and then begin just deleting these answers outright. I would like to hear suggestions from the community first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T17:42:07.533" Title="On deleting low quality single-word-request answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8040" CreationDate="2016-05-31T16:48:12.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once a post has gone to moderation, the resolution is moderator’s choice. Deletion is a perfectly reasonable choice when the post does not belong on the site. Deletion leaves the site clean while also educating the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not lower the bar further for answers than for questions. I enjoy a good SWR, but they’re few and far between. SE management have repeatedly said SWRs do not belong here, with the exception of requests which are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;expert-level&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;particularly interesting, unique, and thought-provoking&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;showing effort and research into the question&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most SWRs and their answers do not meet this standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T16:48:12.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8040" CreationDate="2016-05-31T17:06:48.060" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; Leaving these lying around just encourages others to follow their bad example. We don't want that to happen.  Deleting is good for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;SLAs are NARAs&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We used to have &lt;em&gt;“Not A Real Question”&lt;/em&gt; close reason, sometimes called a NARQ. It seems that now we’re discussing the flip side of that, or NARAs: things posted as answers that are &lt;em&gt;“Not A Real Answer”&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as writing a good question takes some amount of effort, so too does writing a good answer.  That’s why &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/186087&quot;&gt;this post notice&lt;/a&gt; text exists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We’re looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don’t just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don’t include explanations may be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “answer” that doesn't include actual reasoning behind it explaining why this or that suggestion applies, preferably with actual references and citations properly document, is &lt;strong&gt;Not A Real Answer&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SWRs are like network-wide honeypots drawing extremely low-quality “contributions” that do nothing to improve the site for future visitors. If someone wishes to be especially forgiving for these drive-by SLA (single-line answers) then one might attach that post notice, or add equivalent text as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But such SLAs just keep coming in daily, and far more often than not a notice is ignored anyway. If a moderator chooses to delete these low-quality contributions out of hand, that’s perfectly fine, even when they have positive vote totals. It just isn’t worth taking the time to try persuade the answerer to apply the requisite turd polish needed to make the NARAs into RAs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T17:06:48.060" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8040" CreationDate="2016-05-31T18:00:08.310" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the most part, the first-time posters who submit one-word answers followed by a little filler to meet the minimum character count are not interested in anything more than participating in a quiz-show-format guessing game. They have no sense of what EL&amp;amp;U's standards are or what sort of resource the site is hoping to be—and admittedly single-word requests feed that impression by being (in most instances) fairly trivial questions that draw predictable answers and have little long-term value to the site. But single-word requests (and more recently, phrase requests) evidently have tremendous popular appeal on this site, drawing lots of page views and upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the words suggested by newcomers without citation or documentation are legitimate suggestions, but many others are marginally suitable for the OP's context or are simply bad. The former, I think, deserve a chance to be improved, and we give posters a chance to do exactly that by adding a comment beneath the bare-bones answer recommending that the poster add a suitable definition from a reputable dictionary. Usually posters ignore the advice—but sometimes they respond positively, and it seems to me that those who do may very well become productive participants at EL&amp;amp;U, given their willingness to improve their initial answer, their respect for this site's standards, and their ability to provide basic support for their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a moderator's perspective, it must be a nightmare to have to slog through an endless marsh of crappy answers from clueless and sometimes belligerent one-off answerers. Nevertheless, I don't think that all insufficient answers should be treated the same. If a moderator feels that a word or phrase suggestion is unsuitable to the OP's context or is only marginally justifiable, AND if the suggestion appears without any documentation or other support, I think deletion is a mercy to everyone involved. Far too often, I've encountered a poor SWR suggestion in an Review queue answer and asked the poster to add a suitable definition from a dictionary to show why the posted answer may be helpful. This amounts to challenging the poster to find the Elephants' Graveyard or the Seven Cities of Cibola; and the only lesson the poster may learn from the experience is that, if you look a word up, you may find that it doesn't mean what you thought it meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some suggestions are good, and the only thing wrong with them is that they lack supporting references. In these cases, it seems to me, the problem isn't so much that the posted answer is irredeemable as that it shows annoyingly little effort or a real or feigned ignorance of EL&amp;amp;U guidelines for posting an acceptable answer. If EL&amp;amp;U were like some other Stack Exchange sites, we might get around the problem by having other site participants add the missing components to the answer. But that's not the way this site generally works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? I can think of several possible reasons. One is that single-word requests are already on shaky ground here. As tchrist points out in his answer, very few SWRs have any staying power. Their contribution to the site is like an all-sugar lunch: they draw a big buzz for a short time, and then they crash. In the language of publishing, they have little or no tail. Why should anyone make the effort to improve someone else's SWR answer when the question itself is ephemeral?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second possible reason is that, by any practical measure, an answerer who posts a quick-and-dirty SWR answer hasn't shown enough effort to deserve to reap multiple upvotes when someone else does the minimal work involved in meeting the very low standard required of a supported answer. The quiz-show aspect of SWRs, where in many cases there are a few widely known suitable answers that participants are sure to suggest sooner or later, already rewards quick-draw answers. If we were to adopt a policy of filling in the blanks on incomplete answers for those posters, we would surely encourage more of (or worse than) the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possible reason is that the subject matter at EL&amp;amp;U is not conducive to collaborative answer building. Questions about English usage or even about word or phrase origins are often better answered by separate responses that take different approaches to addressing the question than by a single canonical answer that addresses every aspect of the issue. But that being the case, we tend to consider answers (and answerers) as sinking or swimming on their own—both in SWR situations and with regard to more-complicated questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conclusion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if an SWR answer makes a legitimate but unsupported suggestion, we should give the poster a chance to amend it, with a warning that the window for doing so is narrow (specifying the time frame, if possible); then, if the poster doesn't improve the answer within, say, 24 hours, we should delete the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SWRs are a gateway into EL&amp;amp;U for some people who eventually become major contributors to other types of questions. I wouldn't want to wall off that continuing source of valuable site participants. But if a one-minute SWR answer is off-base, I think we should be far more ruthless than we have been in the past in simply deleting it. In dealing with such an answer, advising the poster to find supporting evidence for the posted suggestion is a waste of everyone's time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T17:42:07.533" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T17:42:07.533" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-31T20:03:51.697" Score="-2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I post this meta because the mod I discussed this with to told me to. There's this &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2940/25326&quot;&gt;The Great Retagging Event&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; on Chemistry Meta, where they hunt and retag a bunch of questions within a fixed duration. This helps to keep messing up the &amp;quot;active feed&amp;quot; to a minimum duration. In their words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing questions bumps them up; and somehow surprisingly, there's a good portion of chem.SE users who only use the 'active' tab. Thus, bumping too many questions would stop newer questions from getting the needed attention. Thus, the frequency of retagging must be small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But people just can't keep up with editing 1 question every ten minutes. They can't be consistent, and they're not to blame. Hence, if the only way we can keep editors helping is by flushing down the 'active' tab, let's do it in an organized way, in a small frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose something similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schedule cleanup events (weekly/bi-weekly/monthly...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit your own old posts (to update/improve/retag/expand...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meanwhile, improve other posts that you chance upon without listing them on meta for others. (also close/flag/delete...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU gets closer and closer to utopia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't be able to plan/host any of these myself due to reasons I can't tell now. I want the moderators/high-rep-users to come forward for the sake of the community and design a good cleanup program and make this thing a reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What are your thoughts?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T13:40:41.560" Title="Can we have regular site cleanups (weekly/monthly, etc.)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8044" CreationDate="2016-05-31T20:19:39.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I review and clean up posts I've asked or answered, but rarely and on no particular schedule. Also, I star posts I want to review later, and I review these starred posts, again rarely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A scheduled event might motivate me to do this more often, but I can't promise I would do it exactly on the proposed day and time because of work and family schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T20:19:39.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-01T09:09:09.007" Score="-1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329120/what-is-the-meaning-of-like-mom-what-do-you-mean-i-cant-go-get-tacos-at-3-am&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329120/what-is-the-meaning-of-like-mom-what-do-you-mean-i-cant-go-get-tacos-at-3-am&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote is hardly proper English, it is a slang usage which doesn't follow grammar rules and practically its own freeform dialect. Should such a question be allowed, or should we close it as being off-topic for the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it is off-topic, what is the right close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blatantly off-topic (this question has nothing to do with English language and usage) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or is it better to redirect this to ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T09:44:06.040" Title="Is it valid to discuss freeform non-grammatical slang on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8044" CreationDate="2016-06-01T09:13:23.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first question on Chemistry SE (CSE) was posted on Feb 17, 2012 and it has a total of 15,381 questions (average 9.8 questions per day) as of now. In  contrast, ELU's first question was posted on Jun. 16, 2009 and it has a total of 71,304 questions (28 questions per day). CSE is far much slower than ELU in terms of number of questions. It could be a factor that enables them to do it on a regular basis. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The CSE retagging event seems to be more focused on tags. For ELU, nobody seems to care so much about tags. I personally think there are too many tags (272 tags on CSE vs 1,102 tags on ELU) and we rarely use many of them. I don't think tags are very important as long as we have high-quality questions and answer as we can search using the right word or terms without having to depend on tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we have many dedicated users who try their best to improve the quality of ELU's questions and answers. They will undoubtedly continue to do so without such a regular event. Let's keep focusing on dealing with low-quality questions and answers. I do believe we need a regular Meta post on both of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T09:13:23.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8047" CreationDate="2016-06-01T09:44:06.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that it falls under English &lt;em&gt;Usage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage is not always grammatical and can vary by location and generation of the speaker.  Questions about slang are on-topic, provided of course they meet the usual quality criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion of proofreading is appropriate if the question were along the lines of &quot;&lt;em&gt;Have I used slang correctly in the following...&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T09:44:06.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8052" CreationDate="2016-06-01T10:10:54.330" Score="-4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the grounds for permanent deletion of a question on this group? That is: total deletion with no-one able to see or undelete the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145550" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T05:13:42.213" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T05:13:42.213" Title="Grounds for permanent deletions" Tags="|support|deleted-posts|redacting-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8050" CreationDate="2016-06-01T13:52:39.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators redact content that contains contact information (like email address or phone number), personally identifying details, passwords, or connection strings. We will often honor a request to redact content that may have potentially harmful impact to a poster as well -- this doesn't usually happen on EL&amp;amp;U, but occasionally happens on SO or Workplace, for instance when someone has inadvertently posted proprietary code or revealed trade secrets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can redact both posts and chat messages. Redactions of posts have to be approved by a second. Any time we redact an edit or purge a chat message, that action is logged and the community moderation team is made aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, editing or deletion is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T13:52:39.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-01T18:12:22.197" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back, we noticed that our comments seemed to get a little bigger. I went and poked around a few other sites and it seems like Meta.SE, Parenting, Academia, and Programmers all have 15px in the body text and 13px for comments, but EL&amp;amp;U has 15px in the body and 14px for comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the comments go (or go back) to 13px or however that is so it is consistent with other sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T18:12:22.197" Title="Did our comments get bigger?" Tags="|bug|design|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2016-06-01T21:13:56.503" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the problem I see is in clique voting, particularly certain groups within the site voting for the &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; they like and don't like, rather than the questions themselves, which will likely put a lot of people who would otherwise ask good questions off. This is probably as much a personal gripe as anything else, but I feel it important to mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is that I feel there needs to be more codification in a formal setting that's easily findable by new users (that is, not in Meta, but perhaps in the tour, or at least in the FAQ or something that can be very easily linked to new users and marked as &lt;em&gt;authoritative&lt;/em&gt;) of what is expected in questions (what's expected of answers seem to be more straight-forward -- at least when people are acting in fair and and unbiased manner), so new users at least have an idea what is expected when they post questions. There should also probably be guidelines for what makes a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; question on EL&amp;amp;U, as opposed to what might make one for, say, ELL, or Writers.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present it's often totally baffling when you post questions that prompt very interesting discussions on the English language, and to your mind are educating users, only to have them heavily downvoted. This certainly isn't an issue specific to this Stack Exchange site, but with the more established sections, like Stack Overflow and Super User, the same problems aren't so readily apparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145550" LastEditorUserId="145550" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T21:30:00.413" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T21:30:00.413" CommentCount="11" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-06-01T21:13:56.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-05T17:53:26.010" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often when I type &lt;code&gt;@[person]&lt;/code&gt; at the start of a comment, the &lt;code&gt;@[person]&lt;/code&gt; disappears without warning when the comment appears, and even when I try to click on the little white box above to auto-select, it won't allow me to do so. Why is this happening? I seem to always be able to @ people as long as it's not the first word of the sentence, but it sometimes fails when I start the sentence with @. Other people seem to be able to do this fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I been stealth banned from @ing, is this a bug or is there some bizarre and complex reason for it (like with the weirdness that is the 'Curious' badge rules...)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145550" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T07:58:55.520" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T07:58:55.520" Title="Why can't I '@' people at the start of comments?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-05T18:18:51.913" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following post needs an edit to fix two minor grammatical errors (I could have sworn those weren't there when I posted, but such is the way of the universe that it often fails to mimic the certainty of memory when reevaluated at different times and with a seemingly newer pair of eyes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329170/name-for-it-within-grammar&quot;&gt;What is it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needs a bit of an edit, and since the question was locked as opposedly* to* for the reason that: &quot;something about the comments&quot; I am is* failing to see why I am being* not allowed to edit, thusly(*?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*me, fail English, that's unpossible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T07:22:34.510" Title="Post with grammar error is sad because it cannot be edited to be grammatical (status: by design?)" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8056" CreationDate="2016-06-05T19:58:28.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is not closed; it is locked. That's why you can't edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locking a question prevents any changes being made, including adding comments. In this case, there are 43 deleted comments. Some of the comments are even duplicates. Comments are ephemeral, and the functionality is really only provided to request clarification of a post. In some cases, a trivial answer might be given as a comment in order to assist a user prior to the question's anticipated closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of your question on Main, you have an answer already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T19:58:28.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8055" CreationDate="2016-06-05T20:03:01.197" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't use @ at the start of a comment when you are addressing the post owner and there is no ambiguity about who the comment might be addressed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post owner gets notified of all comments regardless of who they are actually addressed to, so when a comment is actually addressed to them &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; there is no-one else it could be addressed to, the @ addressee is not required. Where there are already two separate participants in a comment chain, the @ addressee will be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upside is that those characters within the character count are available to you for your message rather than the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential reason is that a username you enter by hand might not actually match the user's actual username, especially if their name uses non-Latin characters. A Cyrillic С isn't the same character as a Latin C, even if it looks the same. If you type a name which doesn't match, the system may decide it's irrelevant and discard it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T20:11:21.463" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T20:11:21.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T03:34:30.547" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question whether &quot;it is more difficult and nobler an enterprise&quot; is grammatical.&#xA;It was closed as off topic.&#xA;They who voted to close it said it is proofreading and therefore off topic.&#xA;IMO, this is not a trivial question, because some native speakers think it is grammatical while some don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/324842/having-troubles-together-with-a-poor-stupid-girl-is-more-difficult-and-nobler-an?noredirect=1#comment739869_324842&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/324842/having-troubles-together-with-a-poor-stupid-girl-is-more-difficult-and-nobler-an?noredirect=1#comment739869_324842&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the point of the original question is clear, I don't see why it was closed as proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T06:20:56.787" Title="Is asking whether a particular sentence is grammatical or not off topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-06-06T13:34:07.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8061" CreationDate="2016-06-06T06:20:56.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it is off topic unless you identify a specific source of concern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why you think the point of the original question is clear as I see only one point in your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was posted in Lang-8, where native English speakers are supposed to&#xA;  correct it if necessary. However, no one corrected it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that in Lang-8, all ungrammatical sentences are corrected and changed to perfectly grammatical sentences by native English speakers? How can you be so sure? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like since it was not corrected in Lang-8, the sentence must be fine. How do you know?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our guideline clearly states &quot;&lt;em&gt;Proofreading questions (&quot;Is this correct?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;)&lt;/em&gt; or critique requests are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't specify any source of concern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, what on earth do you want to mean using the sentence? How come &quot;more difficult&quot; and &quot;nobler&quot; could be placed side-by-side? If the original sentence comes from an essay written in Japanese, don't you think it should be checked whether the translated sentence makes any sense at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T06:20:56.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8040" CreationDate="2016-06-06T14:55:59.287" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sven Yargs points out that the problem is with poorly supported but otherwise correct answers; tchrist advocates deletion of single-line answers (SLAs) because they are not real answers. MετάEd concurs, but leaves it in the hands of the moderators (reviewers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key question is whether an SLA that gets to the heart of a question should be shored up or deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why should anyone make the effort to improve someone else's SWR answer when the question itself is ephemeral?&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8043/142322&quot;&gt;- Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a somewhat contrarian view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim of Stack Exchange is to build a high-quality reference database. As a &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; database, it might be used in a way analogous to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Ngram search can hold a significance to the user that far outweighs the number of times that search is conducted. More to the point, any given document returned by Ngram might only ever have been accessed a small number of times. If the document matches the user's requirement, the fact that it has only rarely been accessed is of no consequence whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say that it's like finding a needle in a haystack is to miss the point (no pun intended). The active users of Stack Exchange work to plant and curate those needles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;long tail&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; should therefore be applied to the database as a whole, not any specific question or answer on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The somewhat contrarian view I'm floating is, then, that &lt;strong&gt;if someone thinks a particular SLA is an exceptional nugget of an answer for its question, we should encourage them to &lt;em&gt;edit for quality&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - put in dictionary references, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if this encourages the lazy user to post more brilliant nuggets? Well, that's not a problem. What if they post, um, the other kind of nugget? Those get flushed post-haste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T14:55:59.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T20:24:26.777" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/329192/69422&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, asking why vowels get changed when prefixes/suffixes get added to a word, Aricauria states (in their very popular answer) that this is a side-effect of the way English organises stressed syllables in connected speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aricauria does a very good job of describing what a stress timed language is. But the phenomenon of vowels changing when word endings change is not limited to stress-timed languages. This can be demonstrated by some simple examples of similar changes occuring in, for example, Spanish (a strongly syllable timed language.) This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to stress timed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, everyone is having such a party over there talking about stress timing (Araucaria has over 250 upvotes, and the top comment &quot;I'd never heard of stress timing before&quot; has over 60.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances, it seemed absurd to leave a comment suggesting that Araucaria edit his/her answer so I wrote a short, polite answer with some examples of similar vowel changes from Spanish (see below) to demonstrate this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite gaining a modest number of upvotes, my answer has been deleted by a moderator. &lt;strong&gt;I fail to see how this improves the site.&lt;/strong&gt; I think pointing out that such vowel changes also exist in non stress-timed languages was a useful addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here is my deleted answer for reference.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Araucaria's answer is almost perfect. I just have one thing to add: this phenomenon is not limited to English, nor to stress-timed languages. In Spanish (a syllable-timed language) we find similar behaviour. Students of Spanish as a foreign language are exposed from a very early stage to &quot;radical changing verbs&quot; where the last vowel sound of the verb stem is stressed strongly in certain persons (and is a dipthong - usually) and weakly in other persons (and is a different, simple vowel sound.) Here are some examples, with the correct stress indicated by capitalization. (English meanings should be obvious.) The full present-tense conjugations are available &lt;a href=&quot;https://conjuguemos.com/chart.php?language=spanish&amp;amp;id=2&amp;amp;etre=no&amp;amp;commands=no&amp;amp;all=no&amp;amp;source=public&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and in many other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Infinitive (to do)  1st person singular (I do)  1st person plural (we do)&#xA;&#xA;resolvER            resUELvo                    resolvEMos&#xA;preferIR            prefIERo                    preferIMos&#xA;repetIR             repITo                      repetIMos&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also occurs (more rarely) where adjectives are derived from nouns, e.g. Venezuela -&gt; Venezuelan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;VenezUELa -&amp;gt; venezolANo &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deletion reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While that is interesting it is not an answer to the question, nor related to English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this I would like to respond: Actually it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; about English, because it is pointing out that the observed phenomenon is not necessarily caused by stress-timing. If I had been more blunt, my answer might not have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69422" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T16:55:45.923" Title="I wrote an answer giving an important comment on another answer but my answer was deleted - what was a better way to proceed in this case?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8065" CreationDate="2016-06-07T22:27:11.860" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I've seen the answer, as I didn't see it or the associated flag on it before it was handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with the decision to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may seem harsh, but the answer really has nothing to do with English. It is really more of a comment, noting a phenomenon that occurs in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers can be converted to comments, and that is probably how I would have attempted to handle the situation. The answer would still have been deleted because it's strictly irrelevant &lt;em&gt;as an answer to the question as asked,&lt;/em&gt; but its content would have been preserved. But there is a limit on the length of comments, and formatting is destroyed on conversion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't consulted with Matt about the deletion. It's entirely possible that he attempted to convert the answer to a comment, but found the result not useful; I don't know what evidence of that would be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the &quot;answer&quot; isn't an answer to the question, but is rather a comment on another answer, it should have been a comment. It may not have fitted very well as a comment, but in that case, I would recommend a course of action which would head off &quot;Not An Answer&quot; flags and counter objections to gaining real rep on what should be a comment: make the answer a Community Wiki, and preface it with a statement that it doesn't fit as a comment on the other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This should not be taken as general advice about commenting on other answers, or presenting information about languages other than English.&lt;/strong&gt; It's a pragmatic response to a particular instance. It doesn't even guarantee success here, as even CW answers may be deleted if they are not relevant enough to the question as asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2016-06-08T16:55:45.923" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T16:55:45.923" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-08T01:38:18.120" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to sign up for this website but is the English based on English English or American English? I need American English  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user179902" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T06:26:34.037" Title="American English or English English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8067" CreationDate="2016-06-08T06:07:15.713" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site name is neither &quot;American English Language and Usage&quot; nor &quot;British English Language and Usage&quot;. It is &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as your questions are related with English (American, British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Indian, etc.) and its usage, they are all welcome unless they are off-topic based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;guidelines of our help center&lt;/a&gt;. Please don't ask &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;Is this right?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the translation tag info for details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a speaker of other languages learning English, you can consider visiting our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, but please make sure you take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit their &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; before posting any question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T06:26:34.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-08T22:13:22.667" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/331626/where-does-the-sic-go-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;Where does the [sic] go in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;  The OP mentioned he had posted it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://travel.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3725/correcting-language-errors-in-quotes-from-official-sources/3726#3726&quot;&gt;https://travel.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3725/correcting-language-errors-in-quotes-from-official-sources/3726#3726&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was obviously an innocent double-posting.  The question will probably be answered better here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T22:13:22.667" Title="What should I do when I notice that a question posted on ELU was posted on another site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8073" CreationDate="2016-06-09T00:55:27.807" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was in the review queue: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/184484&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/184484&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the exam question the OP asked about as bad as I think it is?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen several questions from earnest learners puzzled by what their teacher said was the right answer: sometimes the teacher was right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes all the answers were ... odd.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very thankful that I am not an English learner.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T07:46:24.217" Title="How does anyone learn English if this is a representative example of how they are taught?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-06-10T06:23:14.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8072" CreationDate="2016-06-09T07:46:24.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non-native English speaker who has struggled with all different idioms, prepositions, expressions and accents, etc. I can understand why this is happening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is being taught like mathematics, especially at the elementary level. For example, when you are asked &quot;How are you?&quot;, the only reply you would learn is &quot;Fine, thank you and you?&quot; as if there were no other alternatives. That's the elementary level English. The linked question seems to have the same pattern. The only logical and idiomatic reply seems to be D (Nothing). But some would argue B (no matter) is better because it is short for &quot;It is no matter&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter what the right answer is, I don't believe everything a questioner says when it comes to &lt;em&gt;who says what is right&lt;/em&gt;. I have witnessed a few occasions on English Language Learners (ELL) where a questioner said their teacher couldn't even tell the right answer from the wrong one when there was nothing confusing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could be lying, or they could have misunderstood something. But they learn something through this process and as @DanBron mentioned, there seems to be nothing ELU can do about it except that we ask those OPs to go to ELL, which I just did.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T07:46:24.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8075" CreationDate="2016-06-09T15:33:19.320" Score="9" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked around Meta for an answer about how to get more info on someone else's closed question, but haven't been able to find it. If there's a thread already, my apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about the British usage of the term &quot;gone&quot; before a time (e.g. &quot;gone midnight&quot;). I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223648/time-gone-eight&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; which was closed for lack of context, I believe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think my question would meet with the same objections; I have done and will cite research, and my question is not an English-learner question--I'm a native (American) English speaker with a question about British usage that I haven't been able to find a good answer to elsewhere. My question could have been answered in the older thread, but wasn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to post my similar question? If not, should/can I edit the original question, or is there another way to ask for more information there? I'm very new, and don't have a sense for the etiquette of (and privilege levels required for) editing other people's stuff yet, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T16:29:26.603" Title="How should I ask a question similar but not identical to someone else's closed question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8074" CreationDate="2016-06-09T16:29:26.603" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will be a perfectly legitimate question if you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;link the previous question as you did here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;state what you understand with your own research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;state what the difference is compared with the previous question and what still bothers you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your concern about editing the previous question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is meaningful and necessary to edit the question as it was closed as off-topic and it will take some time for five voters to vote to&#xA;reopen it. It's better to ask another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can always edit any post, however, your edit will be placed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;review for suggested&#xA;edits&lt;/a&gt; for&#xA;other users to approve or reject it until you reach &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;2,000 reputation&#xA;points&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-editing-work&quot;&gt;How does editing work?&lt;/a&gt; to understand more about editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will learn more as time goes by and you can start slowly. Good luck and welcome to English Language and Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;FAQ for Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T16:29:26.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8078" CreationDate="2016-06-09T20:12:41.953" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this site entirely for the purpose of picking the right words for sentences or passages, or are other things allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I looked over the tour and the link I was shown about the scope of English as defined in the help centre and I found that it seemed like other topics are acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I look at the questions, all the ones left open seem to be requests for word suggestions, or requests for understanding when a word is used (quite similar). Which is fine, but the comment on my first post seemed to be complaining that there were too many of this sort of post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am thoughtful. Is there a desire to discuss advanced linguistic topics on this site or is it more for word choices for novels and blogs and things like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way is fine, just wanted to clarify what you would like me to do for you when posting questions or answers and when voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user180045" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T12:25:58.090" Title="What is the purpose of this site?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8079" CreationDate="2016-06-09T20:30:17.397" Score="7" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I searched for this question, I found questions regarding whether asking for people to coin words is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a little bit of a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose if OP is making a single word request, and is not asking for a word to be coined, but there simply is no good word for what they are asking for. Can I then answer with a newly constructed word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have quite a strong feeling the answer is going to be &quot;no&quot;, but I just want to confirm it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/331625/160195&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I (somewhat jokingly) constructed the word &quot;samsaraphobia&quot; in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; new (A Google search tells me some people have used the adjective &quot;samsaraphobic&quot; already), but it's certainly not in any dictionary or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it ever be acceptable to post such a constructed word as an answer to a single word request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160195" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T20:54:05.367" Title="Can a newly constructed word answer a single word request?" Tags="|discussion|answers|single-word-requests|answering-advice|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8076" CreationDate="2016-06-09T20:46:16.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site's scope is much wider than that. Other things that are on topic include linguistics, grammar, punctuation, syntax, etymology, pronunciation, spelling, and much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have correctly observed that there are a lot of single word requests and the like. That may be because those are popular, and they fit well into the Q&amp;amp;A format of Stack Exchange. But they are by no means the only thing this site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7977/would-this-question-have-been-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt; discussing a more outside-the-box type of question that many agree would be on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the comment you received: I feel that the user wasn't necessarily expressing a dislike of single word requests in general. Note that he used the word &quot;inane&quot;, which means &quot;lacking sense or meaning; silly.&quot; So, most likely the user was expressing a dislike of questions that he feels have that quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't agree with that user that your question was senseless or silly. Maybe there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; such a word, in which case you could have gotten a good answer. The way for you to find that out was to ask the question. Anyway, the user may have been tired of all the single word requests (many of them silly, maybe) and used a comment on your question to vent about it. He may even have meant it as an innocent joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, this site has quite a wide scope. Most questions about the English language, or its use, that are not too broad, trivial or opinion based are on-topic. When asking, try searching the site first to see if your question has been asked before. You could use Google for this. Just type something like your question into Google, and at the end add &lt;code&gt;site:english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; If it's been asked before, then don't ask again. You can then instead vote, comment on (if requesting additional information) or answer the existing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160195" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T12:25:58.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8077" CreationDate="2016-06-09T20:54:05.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question asking for people to coin a word is out of scope for this site. A coinage in an answer might be in scope, depending on how well-reasoned it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is a coinage which follows naturally from the way the language works, such as your example &quot;samsaraphobia&quot; which follows from the common practice of sticking &quot;-phobia&quot; on new things people are afraid of, that seems well-reasoned. Such an answer would be easy to defend by including a link to the &quot;-phobia&quot; suffix in a good dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is where I am coming from. The purpose of the site is to collect useful, reliable answers to questions. Because of this, questions for which answers will necessarily be arbitrary or opinionated are not a good fit. We cover this in the FAQ section about what questions NOT to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also cover a special case of this in the FAQ section about what questions TO ask, where we say that asking for help to name something is out of scope. Though that prohibition is in there mainly to fend off frequent requests to &quot;name the variable&quot;, coining a word is arguably asking for help to name something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this also means answers which are arbitrary or opinionated are out of scope as well. A good answer is well-reasoned and reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T20:54:05.367" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8076" CreationDate="2016-06-09T21:21:40.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The owners of this site have said numerous times that we need to enforce the same high standards on word request questions that apply to all types of question. Word request questions should be expert-level, particularly interesting, unique, and thought-provoking, and show effort and research into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of word requests, and the vast majority are out of scope. They suffer from various problems. Lack of research and lack of clarity about how the word will be used are very common. These are the &quot;inane&quot; word requests that the commenter was writing about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't mean there can't be a good word request, and we do see them occasionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T21:21:40.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8083" CreationDate="2016-06-10T12:14:00.153" Score="-4" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to have two more reputation points (I have 48 reputation points now) so I can comment on other people's posts here as I need &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;50 reputation points in order to comment everywhere&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I don't have another question to ask and I don't want to answer again until I've thought about the site some more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other way to get more reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user180045" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T08:26:06.347" Title="Ways to improve reputation that aren't asking or answering?" Tags="|support|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="32" ClosedDate="2016-06-13T07:38:30.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8082" CreationDate="2016-06-10T13:53:48.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You get 5 reputation points from an upvote of your question and 10 points from that of your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You lose 2 reputation points when your questions or answers are downvoted. The best way seems to be either edit another (not your own) post to get two points or flag the following question for moderator's attention and ask a moderator to delete your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of your questions has 9 downvotes. You will recover 18 reputation points when this question is deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further information, please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;How does “Reputation” work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @DanBron commented, if you post a question or answer that could attract so many downvotes again, the system might block you from posting anything. You had better be careful when you ask and answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Privileges &gt; Edit Questions And Answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;FAQ for Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T08:13:27.800" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8088" CreationDate="2016-06-13T07:13:37.597" Score="-3" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just happened to find this and my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has this moderator been removed from ELU moderatorship automatically in accordance with the absentee policy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any moderator who is not active on the site for a period of six months&#xA;  is subject to removal of their moderator abilities. Moderatorship is&#xA;  an elected position, so if an absentee moderator returns to the site,&#xA;  they may be eligible for reinstatement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will  there be a moderator election to replace this moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T20:54:31.583" Title="One of our moderators has not logged in since Oct. 23, 2015" Tags="|discussion|election|moderators|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8086" CreationDate="2016-06-13T07:46:20.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, because there is still a diamond next to their name. The diamond is tied to having moderatorship privileges: one goes with the other. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://modnewsletter.stackexchange.com/2012/01/december-2011-newsletter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;absentee mod policy&lt;/a&gt; states they are subject to removal after 6 months of absence; but when the removal actually happens is flexible. For example, a Seasoned Advice moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2257&quot;&gt;was removed last month&lt;/a&gt;, after being absent since May 19, 2015. More than a year passed between last login and losing the diamond. In a comment animuson remarked that the absentee mod process is not as straightforward as &quot;x months away, diamond gone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will know when it's announced. On a site with 8 moderators, if we lost 1, we'd still have 7, which is not sure to trigger an election. It depends on whether the remaining moderators need a reinforcement to effectively moderate the site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:43:53.153" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T10:38:44.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8086" CreationDate="2016-06-13T11:48:56.773" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have this question come up from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are sometimes inactive for extended periods of time. We have a mechanism of recording a 'leave of absence', which is helpful for marking vacations as well as longer holidays. We have one mod in particular who took almost a year off to focus on his studies. We manage leaves of absence pretty well and generally have sufficient planning in advance so that the community doesn't notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator who is absent without checking in for longer than six months and who hasn't discussed being absent is considered absentee. That just means that we might look into removing moderatorship due to inactivity, as the community changes over time and part of a mod's job is to be aware of and represent those changing needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, elections are a different matter. We hold elections when the mod team (and-or community moderators) feel that the workload exceeds the current capacity of the moderator team. With an absentee mod, removing a diamond isn't going to have an impact on our workload because we've had months or years to adapt to the shift, so it's unlikely that removing an absentee mod will trigger the need for an election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T14:12:27.747" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T14:12:27.747" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-06-13T13:04:41.597" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2OFgn.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:51.093" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T13:04:41.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8086" CreationDate="2016-06-13T17:04:51.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A community call for moderator resignation or dismissal due to inactivity is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between the community and the moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your view might be that people who run for moderator make promises of performance to the community if elected: promises which they have a duty to the community to fulfill. Perhaps you view moderators as elected representatives, and feel you have rights or vested interests as a member of the community that elects the moderators. From this perspective, a moderator who does not fulfill his duty to the community should resign or be dismissed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the duty of a moderator is to Stack Exchange. A moderator is a Stack Exchange volunteer (which is what all of us in the community are). There is no close parallel between moderator campaigns and campaigns in other contexts (such as democratic government). Moderator elections are for Stack Exchange to find out which candidates are credible and best qualified to serve as moderators. A moderator campaign promise is a promise to Stack Exchange, not to the community. The role of the community is to decide whether the promise is credible. After election, it's Stack Exchange, not the community, that the moderator needs to satisfy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange's inactivity policy helps provide clarity to moderators about what is normally expected of them, but it does not mean Stack Exchange automatically dismisses inactive moderators. Surely Stack Exchange is not looking for reasons to demote volunteers. In fact I imagine it's the opposite: they can use all the good help they can get. What interest would be served by dismissing a good moderator who goes on hiatus and communicates the fact to Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comment, you express the view that an inactive moderator stands in the way of giving a new user an opportunity to serve in his place. As far as I know, it is not a zero-sum game. Stack Exchange does not need to demote one moderator before it can appoint another. Moderators can be added or removed as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T20:54:31.583" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T20:54:31.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8092" CreationDate="2016-06-13T17:42:55.737" Score="18" ViewCount="627" Body="&lt;p&gt;For context, I'm brand new to closed post review, hence asking for advice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this exchange about an old post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer provided an answer with no definition and links only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/331189/a-word-for-stripping-someone-of-something-hard-earned/331198?noredirect=1#comment758249_331198&quot;&gt;A word for stripping someone of something hard-earned&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it appeared in the review queue, for me, the case seemed clear, I just clicked &quot;delete for link only answer&quot; with the generic message. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's got a relatively high rep and seem to think that I've been too harsh. From what I understand his point of view seems to be that  because the question was weak to begin with his answer had the right to be weak as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three ways of asking the same question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a policy on a weak question that warrant a weak answer? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the answer weak or did I misinterpret the rules?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I have kept open this answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bqNrd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bqNrd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T11:26:30.920" Title="Does a weak question legitimize a weak answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8091" CreationDate="2016-06-14T02:49:34.527" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some help center guidelines apply directly: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but &lt;strong&gt;please add context around the link&lt;/strong&gt; so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. &lt;strong&gt;Always quote the most relevant part of an important link&lt;/strong&gt;, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...are unclear or &lt;strong&gt;lacking specific details&lt;/strong&gt; that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...&lt;strong&gt;require too much guidance for you to answer in full&lt;/strong&gt;, or request answers to multiple questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take is that the guidelines quoted provide ample justification for your recommendation to delete the answer because it is not a good answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing the question on grounds that it is &quot;too broad&quot; is another ... question. Fortunately, it's not your question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T03:40:29.503" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T03:40:29.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8095" CreationDate="2016-06-14T09:59:43.060" Score="1" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see tons of &quot;no action needed&quot; reviews on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/history&quot;&gt;First Posts&lt;/a&gt; and I believe some of them actually deserved some action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some robo-reviewers, I feel, who consistently and thoughtlessly choose &quot;no action needed&quot;. I find such reviews to be detrimental to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we discourage such robo-reviewers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I bring this problem to a mod's attention in secret?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many reviews are needed on a particular First Post to clear it from queue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any system to automatically detect such misuse of review privileges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T17:44:09.117" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T17:44:09.117" Title="Too many &quot;No Action Needed&quot; on First Posts?" Tags="|discussion|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8093" CreationDate="2016-06-14T17:15:31.923" Score="9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Choosing &lt;em&gt;No Action Needed&lt;/em&gt; is not a behavior that needs to be done less, but rather more appropriately. In the instructions, it says &quot;when this post needs no action from you.&quot; Interpreted generously, this action is applicable in all cases. Because review work is volunteer, technically no posts &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; action from any one user. However, this action actually &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;strong&gt;the post does not need any help, it's fine, and it can be left alone.&lt;/strong&gt; Please use it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can bring any issues up to a mod privately using a moderator flag. For this example, you might flag one of the posts (&quot;in need of moderator attention&quot;) that you believe was reviewed improperly and explain to a moderator that you feel the user's review actions should be reviewed. You can flag your own posts if you have other issues you want to bring to our attention, like possible serial downvoting, sockpuppets, or voting rings. You can also find us in chat and ask to speak privately.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it is one or two reviews depending on rep and agreement. I'll see what I can find out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, for anyone who is wondering -- yes, it is worthwhile to flag for our attention if someone is abusing the review queues. There are disciplinary actions we can take, just as there are with posts. Please do this sparingly though. It is a lot of work to investigate review behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T17:15:31.923" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8091" CreationDate="2016-06-16T06:17:35.523" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this should be a comment or not, but here's my take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm, yes and no. See, on one hand you can't exactly expect a good answer from a poor question. Especially if it is unclear. I'll admit to giving one-liner answers to poorly constructed questions (depending on how much time I have or what sort of a mood I'm in). But this should be taken with a pinch of salt, as @NVZ mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;With great reputation, comes great responsibility.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; If we respond to poor questions, we are encouraging more users to post poor questions. ~NVZ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, a good answer &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; (but probably won't) encourage (and subtly show the quality expected on SE) the OP to, in the future (or as an edit for future visitors), be clear, format neatly (i.e. don't use code formatting for quotes and literal words!) and understand that StackExchange is different to other sites whereby it's a semi-formal forum-but-not-forum site with reasonable standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR - It shouldn't be an issue to give a half-arsed answer &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; the question is half-arsed or just poor in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2016-06-16T06:35:52.743" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T06:35:52.743" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-17T07:00:21.177" Score="5" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have experienced it a few times in editing a question, and I have just found an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/333008/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/333008/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, your edits, no matter how many times you edit within 5 minutes after your initial post or last edit, are supposed to be rolled into the previous revision, not appearing as a new revision history as the above link indicates. The above link shows only 3-minute interval. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding incorrect? Have I missed something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T16:20:23.277" Title="Is five-minute grace (window) time gone for editing questions and answers?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8100" CreationDate="2016-06-17T15:54:02.583" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought about deleting the question, but decided to leave the link with brief summary as it could be useful for current and future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@DanBron's comment has the answer. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-editing-work/21789#21789&quot;&gt;How does editing work?&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a comment has been added to the post since the previous revision by&#xA;anyone other than the editor, the five-minute grace period for editing will not be applied and the edit made after the comment will be shown as a separate revision history (even if it was made within the five-minute grace peirod).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think two comments were added to the answer before the two edits were made (and later deleted). That's why the link shows the two revision histories even though the intervals are less than five minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started to find a duplicate in Meta Stack Exchange and found a question related with five-minute grace period in &lt;strong&gt;editing a question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216567/reset-question-grace-period-once-an-answer-has-been-posted/251876#251876&quot;&gt;Reset question grace period once an answer has been posted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Shog9's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits will be rolled into the previous revision if the previous&#xA;revision was created by the same author and none of the following&#xA;conditions are present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The previous revision was created 5 minutes or more in the past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A comment has been added to the post since the previous revision by anyone other than the editor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An answer has been added to the post since the previous revision&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The previous revision was a rollback&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The new revision is a rollback&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T16:20:23.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8091" CreationDate="2016-06-17T16:25:09.030" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A list of words &lt;em&gt;is an answer&lt;/em&gt;. It may not be a top quality answer, but it certainly is an answer. The addition of links makes it a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answer (still not good, but still definitely an answer). To actually be a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer it would need a lot more: actually include the definitions, and also some discussion on which of the words is a better fit for different situations in the context of the question. I am not saying that this is a good answer, but it absolutely is an answer, and anyone who flagged it as &amp;ldquo;not an answer&amp;rdquo; is quite simply wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-is-in-another-castle-when-is-an-answer-not-an-answer&quot;&gt;Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T16:25:09.030" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-20T00:52:14.413" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a newbie to the forum and I notice that questions sometimes get both comments and answers, or sometimes just comments, and wonder what the rationale is for this distinction. Does the difference merely denote a difference in formality of the response, or are there other reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159985" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-06-20T05:55:58.290" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T05:55:58.290" Title="What's the rationale for responding to a question with a comment as opposed to an answer?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-06-20T10:52:21.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-06-20T20:54:17.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pJUbj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Language Learning Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155782" LastEditorUserId="155782" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T15:45:28.237" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T15:45:28.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8116" CreationDate="2016-06-22T20:11:27.270" Score="4" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a long standing annoyance that SWRs (single word requests), though unusually highly trafficked, the source for rep for many people, and having a few catchy interesting questions, are poorly written and even moreso tend to attract poor quality answers which are often not to the expected standard of ELU. Just witness the many similar questions on the sideboard here that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;disparage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;SWRs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all complain about the weather but does anybody ever really &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; anything about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certainly lots of other sites that one could ask on. I'm wondering if, for the poorer expressed SWRs, we could suggest going to one of these sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's ask.com, answers.yahoo.com, quora.com, but I think what would be more successful is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/whatstheword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/whatstheword&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an appropriate solution, vote to close (most, or rather the poor) SWRs with the redirect to the helpful link or just downvote/flag/VtC/comment to edit/clarify hope the stupid question will go away? I'm easy either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T13:23:37.297" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T13:23:37.297" Title="Redirect for SWRs?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5394" CreationDate="2016-06-22T20:42:15.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to do this because Stack Exchange administration has decided it's not needed. See this Meta SE post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3615/allow-downvoting-comments&quot;&gt;Allow downvoting comments&lt;/a&gt;. So discussion here is unlikely to make a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I agree with Josh61 that it would be beneficial to be able to downvote comments. Flagging only seems appropriate to me for comments that are obviously rude or non-constructive. I don't think flagging is right for comments that present information that at first appears to be correct, but then turns out to be wrong: these require too much subjective evaluation to be flagged for deletion. (Just like incorrect but valid answers.) It also doesn't seem right to delete all comments that present controversial but valid opinions. (And I don't think the mods would do this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, people can respond to comments like these with new comments, but in order for this to be helpful it has to either convince the original poster to delete the unhelpful comment (which is rare) or gain enough attention and upvotes to appear alongside the unhelpful comment in the collapsed view of comments. The second scenario can be difficult when addressing comments on old or rarely viewed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T20:42:15.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8107" CreationDate="2016-06-23T20:58:58.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hate SWRs, but many people like them. They don't really bother us, do they? How do we suffer by letting them be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only disadvantage I see is that people who mainly answer SWRs will become our highest-repped users, so that we will be represented by those specialised in what we consider to be outside the core of our side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T20:58:58.777" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8107" CreationDate="2016-06-24T00:30:54.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say it &lt;a href=&quot;//ell.stackexchange.com/users/10820/nathan-tuggy?tab=tags&quot;&gt;as shouldn't&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not convinced the noisiness of SWRs is worth keeping around. (On ELL &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; here.) It's difficult to make them anything more than passing entertainment, because getting useful &lt;em&gt;patterns&lt;/em&gt; out is tricky when you have something so specific, and getting anyone who really needs those patterns is even harder given the nature of the questions. It's almost like wordsmithing ad copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/503608/late-vs-prompt-answer-upvotes-per-tag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;out of the top 50 tags, it has one of the lowest percentages of late upvotes (1 week+)&lt;/a&gt; (namely, 15%), so it's not giving us nearly as much long-term benefit as, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; (at 41%), only cheap, quick amusement. (Several of the others at the bottom are the other [*-request] tags. They are even worse.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's leaving out the unfortunate effect of allowing low-quality answers that don't actually try to explain anything to get 10 or 20 or 50 upvotes, just because their terse recommendations seem to fit well. Not only does this promote noise directly, it also has an effect on morale on answerers that try to do a better job. (Whether it also encourages more bad questions I don't know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say we should just point them somewhere else that's dedicated to less-profitable endeavors, such as helping individuals or sharing funny things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93992" LastEditorUserId="93992" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T02:03:40.923" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T02:03:40.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8114" CreationDate="2016-06-24T03:43:25.300" Score="-1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we add something to the close-vote off topic &gt; proofreading tick-item to include &quot;what does this mean&quot; requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm not suggesting adding a new tick box, just adding to the label of the existing proofreading reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T04:09:24.280" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T04:09:24.280" Title="Closing &quot;what does this mean&quot; questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-24T05:29:51.407" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if this is a duplicate, but I can't find any prior guidance on this. Closest I could get was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3593/asking-questions-with-very-short-answers/3612#3612&quot;&gt;Asking questions with very short answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone just posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/334135/confusion-among-possibility-probability-and-plausibility&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Possibility means ability or capacity to happen. Probability means something is going to happen. Plausibility means something has logical and/or intellectual support to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this argument right ???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious answer is simply &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no,&quot; but that doesn't fit the tone of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should yes/no questions be addressed? May we actually answer with only &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99792" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T19:30:20.903" Title="What to do with yes/no questions?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|answering-advice|answer-howto|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8112" CreationDate="2016-06-24T05:38:19.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One-word answers are definitely not acceptable. (In fact, the software doesn't even allow them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that is formulated in a way that seems to call for a one-word answer may need some improvement. For example, if you are unsure what kind of answer the questioner really wants, you might post a comment asking for more detail about the problem or vote to close the question as unclear or not showing research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you do think the question is clear, within the scope of the site, and ready to be answered, here is how you should write an answer post. In addition to saying &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; or &quot;sometimes,&quot; you should explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the answer is yes or no. If the explanation is  controversial or not obvious to native speakers, you should cite reliable sources about English language and usage to support your answer. (If the answer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; obvious to native speakers, it's possible the question actually belongs on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners site&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things that might be in a good answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;examples from real-life usage to illustrate the point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an explanation of how the specific question connects to a broader concept&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;links to resources that can be used for more in-depth study of the topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T19:30:20.903" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T19:30:20.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8111" CreationDate="2016-06-24T06:57:44.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need another close-reason when we have &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What does this mean&quot; questions should be closed using &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Plese include the research you've done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can cover many questions that don't show enough research efforts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T06:57:44.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8107" CreationDate="2016-06-24T07:31:43.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Redirecting doesn't always work as well as we expect. They don't care&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most active redirecting service we are providing is for our sister site, English Language Learners (ELL). If it's possible, I'd like to see some statistics that show how many questioners go to ELL when redirected with a comment, &quot;you sound like you are a learner. You belong on ELL, not here&quot;. I believe the figure would be dismal because if they had visited ELL thanks to the comment and migration, ELL would be swamped with new learners' questions. It is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, why would vast majority of learners not go to ELL to post a question when redirected? It is just a guess, but probably they don't like Stack Exchange format. They want just a quick fix and they don't care which question belongs to which site. They just need an immediate answer and there are other sites which can give them what they want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need to make an effort to redirect SWRs to other sites. They are capable of searching other sites. They don't care whether we close their questions or downvote them. All they care about is a quick reply and practicing English by interacting with native English speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to ask questioners of poorer expressed SWRs to include research efforts, example sentences and context. If they don't respond, we just close it. They will never come back and we know that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no other solution to poor questions than (1) commenting to encourage editing them to be on-topic and (2) closing them as soon as possible so that it won't attract poor-quality answers from new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/237494/a-single-word-for-someone-who-readily-takes-responsibility-new-tasks&quot;&gt;A single word for “someone who readily takes responsibility/new tasks”&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23301/whats-a-good-word-for-a-lack-of-concentration&quot;&gt;What's a good word for a lack of concentration?&lt;/a&gt; should be closed immediately. They are just low-quality questions without an example sentence or context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T05:10:57.653" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8107" CreationDate="2016-06-24T13:39:53.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is no secret that I hate SWRs. If we had one or two really good ones every week, I wouldn't mind so much, but we have bunches of crappy ones all the time. I like the idea of directing them to another place -- we generally try to help in comments even when a question is off-topic -- but I'm not sure if that will actually help or just make us feel better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to keep aggressively closing the ones that don't meet the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if there are interesting ones that don't really fit here, don't forget that Puzzling.SE is a good site for some of these. They will take questions along the lines of &quot;what's a single word with all five vowels in order&quot; and things like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T13:39:53.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8118" CreationDate="2016-06-25T12:29:32.317" Score="-2" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason I deleted this question&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't want to help the question attract other reopen votes as it was closed right after I posted this question. I was also disappointed at the initial comments as I believe the question doesn't belong on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason I undeleted this question&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Josh61 persuaded me to undelete this question. @DanBron promised to answer this question and I should respect their opinions. I think it is on-topic on Meta ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My original question&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333832/is-having-sex-a-hobby&quot;&gt;Is having sex a hobby?&lt;/a&gt; could survive on EL&amp;amp;U for three days without being put on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ‘hobby’ is well-defined in any dictionary and there are about 1,240,000  related links on the internet if you Google &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#q=Is+having+sex+a+hobby%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is having sex a hobby?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of answer can this community provide to the OP? Can an answer be definitive with any reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question should be closed as &quot;primarily-opinion-based&quot; as there could be no definitive answer and at least two users agreed with my initial close-vote. @Mitch commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The nuances of the words 'hobby' and 'sex' are known. judgement as to&#xA;  their overlap are cultural or philosophical speculation. This question&#xA;  belongs on philosophy.stackexchange.com. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts? Is this question in line with our guidelines? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yahoo Answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070805212239AAlFEYe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can sex be considered a hobby?????&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AwrXnCcplW5X2DMAWxNPmolQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByNWU4cGh1BGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?qid=20061021122158AAWymPg&amp;amp;p=Is%20sex%20a%20hobby?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is SEX A Sport?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quora: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-is-sex-not-a-hobby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why is sex not a hobby?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Can-sex-be-a-hobby#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can sex be a hobby?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T23:11:12.173" Title="Is &quot;Is having sex a hobby?&quot; on-topic? [Undeleted]" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8117" CreationDate="2016-06-26T02:25:33.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would tend to agree that this question is primarily opinion-based, as currently written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What constitutes correct usage of the word 'hobby'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does any pastime (watching TV, having sex...) qualify to be called a&#xA;  hobby or are there one or more criteria such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shouldn't be too universal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shouldn't be a passive activity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should be a productive or developmental activity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question cites dictionary definitions, so it's clear the poster is familiar with the basic meaning of &quot;hobby.&quot; The poster is also aware that &quot;it is not commonplace to refer to having sex as a hobby.&quot; The question doesn't ask for an explanation of what the word means in some existing context; instead, it asks for a description of what constitutes &quot;correct&quot; usage. There is no definition of what the poster means by &quot;correct.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier on, the poster describes two opposing sides as though this is a debate, rather than a question of fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Viewpoint 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some people believe that the word hobby can be used for any regularly&#xA;  practiced leisure activity, such as watching TV, or listening to&#xA;  music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Viewpoint 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other hand, others believe use of the word is not appropriate&#xA;  for passive activities such as watching TV. If watching TV were a&#xA;  hobby, one could argue that watching the wall could also be&#xA;  technically a hobby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that there is, or should be, a &quot;technical&quot; definition of what a hobby is, with logically consistent criteria that can be used to deduce whether an activity is a hobby or not independently of how we normally refer to it, seems to require some authority beyond usage that regulates the meaning of words. But there is no such authority for English in general, so it's not clear what kind of answer the original poster is looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many possible ways one could formulate a technical, logical definition of &quot;hobby&quot; if it only has to describe &quot;correct&quot; usage and not actual usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T02:25:33.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-28T15:14:27.207" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Politics can be defined from concerning potentially everything (as done by Carl Schmidt) and something that one cannot connect at all with a Q&amp;amp;A on the english language. Thus, there's need for a documenation of the &quot;politics&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concretely, I was wondering if I could tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/334680/is-there-any-initiative-or-movement-trying-to-abolish-capitalization-of-i-natio&quot;&gt;Is there any initiative or movement trying to abolish capitalization of I, nations and religions?&lt;/a&gt; with &quot;politics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T10:28:02.783" Title="What does the tag politics stand for?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8091" CreationDate="2016-06-29T06:30:44.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's The Same Old Soup&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(It's the literal translation for &lt;em&gt;è sempre la solita minestra&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is the perfect example of a  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/334454/what-is-one-word-for-a-messy-mixture-of-a-lot-of-ingredients&quot;&gt;Low Quality Question&lt;/a&gt; that also happens to be a Single-Word-Request. The question consists of one sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a single word that describes: a mixture of a lot of things that ends up pretty messed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer, quality-wise,  is a hundred times worse than the one under scrutiny in the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question should have been closed hours ago, if it had been, the OP would have been forced to clarify his Q and I wouldn't be feeling so incensed as I do now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I deleted my previous answer because when a user, who you are actually defending, posts a hostile-sounding comment you just want to say: &lt;em&gt;Ahh fuck it. Why do I bother?&lt;/em&gt;  However, from that deleted answer, here are the first two paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Low Quality Questions. What to do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, if you know the question is weak, don't dignify it with an answer. If you know it's weak and you have voted to close it, all the more reason not to answer it. Weak questions, and those that are perceived to be low quality should NOT be answered in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Q: Does a weak question legitimize a weak answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A weak question does not ‘legitimize’ an answer that lacks depth and detail, but six answers do legitimize a low quality question in the eyes of visitors. Also consider the eventuality that one or more high quality answers will tell visitors, and the OP,  that the question is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T11:26:30.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8128" CreationDate="2016-06-30T08:12:01.447" Score="2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Original &quot;thoughts&quot; replaced by facts and references)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I found that this is by design; it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/272544/309993&quot;&gt;a new network-wide feature added&lt;/a&gt; to SE on 21/6/2016. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2016-06-21: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/326635/5832912&quot;&gt;VLQ flag is no longer available on posts older than 7 days&lt;/a&gt;. This does not impact &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326585/unable-to-flag-as-very-low-quality-for-answers/326635?noredirect=1#comment359987_326635&quot;&gt;low-quality auto-flagging&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the linked article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So as of about 24 hours ago, the VLQ flag is no longer available on posts older than 7 days (the precise value may change, but 7 seems reasonable). We'll be monitoring flags (especially NAA and &quot;Other&quot;) to ensure this doesn't cause problems; feel free to voice any concerns here on meta as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case we decide to voice our concerns over at Meta SE, this ELU meta discussion could be used as reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it a good decision? What are your thoughts on this new feature? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about the 7-day rule? Should this be changed? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T03:10:49.507" Title="What's your opinion on not having the &quot;VLQ&quot; flag nowadays?" Tags="|discussion|flags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8119" CreationDate="2016-06-30T10:28:02.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right in that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt; currently has no tag wiki.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How it should be used is therefore undefined and open to interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You, and anyone else, are entitled to propose a tag wiki definition.  It is then reviewed just like any suggested edit - with the proviso that the reviewers must have 5,000 reputation rather than the 2,000 for regular edit suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having tags without guidance is something of a vacuum in any site.  You would be doing the site a favour by filling it in with a good concise definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T10:28:02.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8124" CreationDate="2016-06-30T14:25:08.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it a good decision? What are your thoughts on this new feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the decision was made without considering other side or negative effects. But SE decided so and we have to follow it. The question is not whether it is good or bad. The real question is how English Language and Usage Stack Exchange (ELU) will cope with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about the 7-day rule? Should this be changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. It doesn't need to be changed as long as we take care of Very Low Quality (VLQ) answers within 7 days and we figure out how to deal with old VLQs. &lt;strong&gt;We need more active involvement of high-reputation users (including moderators) to take care of VLQ answers&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long Answer&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That decision seems to affect all Stack Exchange sites. I don't think it affects ELU that much as long as ELU can establish its own way of dealing with low-quality answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know ELU has three sets of opinions in terms of dealing with low-quality answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Progressive Party: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might call it &lt;em&gt;aggressive&lt;/em&gt;, but users including myself in this party think that all one-liners should be downvoted, flagged and ultimately deleted regardless of whether a post answers a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Centrist (Moderate) Party: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They maintain middle ground. They don't voice their opinion on the issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conservative Party: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They think, as long as a post answers a question, one-liner should not be flagged and deleted. They know it is not encouraged, but it is wrong to persecute the OP just because (s)he didn't spend time to expand their answers with a dictionary link,  proper reference or essential part of a link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a look at the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76046/a-word-for-something-that-is-both-useful-and-beautiful&quot;&gt;A word for something that is both useful and beautiful&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a total of 13 answers, two of which were deleted. Out of 13, seven answers are one liners as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The most upvoted answer: Could it be described as an elegant solution or an engineering marvel? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above sentence reads more like a comment than an answer as it ends with a question mark. However, this answer has at least two links for &quot;elegant&quot; and &quot;marvel&quot;, but it doesn't include essential part of the links, nor is it explaining why it could answer the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I think neat could work as well. (It even has one upvote). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The best answer that comes to my mind is the word nifty. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Exquisite, polished or &quot;exquisitely polished&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ergonomic could possibly be an answer, it is the appropriate word that can help improve your ability to work with the area around you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Amazing, exquisite, marvy, simple, outstanding, fine, neat, inventive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(Deleted) I would like to use the word &quot;Admirable&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances where we can't flag any of the above answers as &quot;VLQ&quot;, the remaining questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we flag such answers as &quot;Not An Answer (NAA)&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those one-liners should be flagged as NAA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are we going to continue to allow users to post one-liners?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. We should post a comment to encourage them to include a link with essential part and proper reference. If a poster doesn't respond, we should flag it as NAA and vote to delete them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about time we had firm policy on one-liners no matter when they were posted asking ourselves this question, &quot;What good do those answers do to ELU?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I copy and paste one of @DanBron's comments: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U. Please note that &lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange seeks to build a&#xA;  library of definitive answers&lt;/em&gt;, those which not only supply a quick&#xA;  response, but which provide full explanations behind the response,&#xA;  including suitable examples and references. I strongly encourage you&#xA;  to take the site tour and review the help center for a better&#xA;  understanding of our standards and guidelines, and then edit this&#xA;  answer to expand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T08:40:39.723" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8124" CreationDate="2016-07-01T01:18:45.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want my opinion?  It is: &lt;strong&gt;Grrr!&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;Snarl!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seven days is a much too short a statute of limitations (SoL) on a VLQ answer.&lt;/em&gt;  I don't know what the ideal length of the SoL would be, but 3 months seems reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315293/a-simple-word-or-phrase-that-describes-a-non-conflict-day-in-the-life-story-in&quot;&gt;A simple word or phrase that describes a non-conflict &amp;quot;day in the life&amp;quot; story introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was resurrected by Community.  It has the kernels of two good answers in the comments, and two answers which are both non-referenced laundry lists.  But they are too old to flag as VLQ (one of them is less than a month old and the other is 2 months old), and they don't really fit as Not an Answer, because they both contain words that could be answers.  (As can any laundry list, if it is long enough.) Both of the responders have enough rep to know the norms of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged them as Not an Answer because, really!           &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T03:10:49.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-01T19:38:19.863" Score="4" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest you visit &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=delete&amp;amp;daterange=today&quot;&gt;Delete Votes of the Moderator Tool&lt;/a&gt;&quot; when you have time. There are answers that need deleting. I am not saying you have to vote to delete all of them, but there are answers that are blatantly off-topic or don't answer the question at all. Since it takes only &lt;strong&gt;three &quot;delete votes&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; from users with more than 20,000 reputation points to delete an answer, it would be far more effective than gathering &lt;strong&gt;six &quot;recommend to delete votes&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; from users with less than 20,000 reputation points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have 15 delete votes you can cast a day if you have 20,000 reputation points. An additional vote is granted per 1,000 reputation, to a maximum of 30 delete votes. Please spend a few minutes a day and vote your conscience. That will greatly help the community maintain its quality and integrity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please review more &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts&quot;&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/late-answers&quot;&gt;Late Answers&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts&quot;&gt;First Posts&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. There are many questions and answers that need your attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have a few minutes, you can visit &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=close&amp;amp;daterange=today&quot;&gt;Close Votes of the Moderator Tool&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and review &quot;most votes&quot;. There are questions that you might have missed while reviewing &quot;close votes&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only a limited number of users who are regularly reviewing those posts and I think the more often you review them, the less chance of leaving low-quality answers on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T08:19:29.547" Title="To users with more than 20,000 reputation points" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8129" CreationDate="2016-07-01T21:24:17.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I agree.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need more participation from 10k and 20k users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visit just any “top reviewers all time” list, and you’ll see how much time and effort our gems have invested in ELU to give you and me an ELU clutter-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to see all of you use, nay, utilise to the fullest, all of your privileges. Then we can all gift to our future visitors, an ELU that’s beautiful, an ELU that means business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A VLQ post often goes straight to the bank laughing, meanwhile, all those inspired follow suit, and ruins our ELU and that’s on me and you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes ages to reach 6 &amp;quot;recommendations&amp;quot; to delete certain pages. So with the rare “delete” privileges…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What are you waiting for! Let’s burn those that deserve it!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; I appreciate all the great posts you have made over these years. If you are unable or uninterested in donating a few extra minutes from your ELU time for reviews, that’s perfectly okay. Please continue posting nice stuff, that’s what we need more.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K1Lwyl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K1Lwyl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;I want you!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T07:40:39.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-02T19:44:14.900" Score="2" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be quite a few very old, very good questions that are being needlessly 'protected' for some reason recently. These questions are popular reading, it seems from the number of views, but given that some of these questions are four years old, and they have not been littered with bad answers or silly comments, I do not understand why they are being protected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Protecting these questions only does one thing, which is prevent them from being answered by new users. This is not doing a service to the site. Far from it, it is doing a disservice to future readers and  deterring new members. Can we use the protection privilege more judiciously please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do about questions that have been needlessly protected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T09:03:09.237" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T00:44:21.523" Title="Random question protection" Tags="|discussion|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8131" CreationDate="2016-07-03T05:57:22.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are referring to this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78136/endure-vs-perdure-vs-persist&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;endure&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;perdure&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;persist&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons I decided to protect it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question reads more like general reference without any research efforts. I think it should be closed. I thought about whether to close-vote it or protect it and I chose the latter as it is a very old question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are two answers from one-reputation users and two deleted answers, all of which are sub-standard. (Please read my comments to the two answers). I judged it is enough to trigger protection. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I judged it would be very unlikely for the question to have a meaningful and well-researched answer from a new user as @tchrist's answer seems to be the right answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only benefit of protecting a question is blocking new users with one reputation or 101 reputation points with an association bonus of 100 from answering a question. Other than that, there is nothing beneficial or non-beneficial to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is why you think protecting a question is doing disservice to this community and why it would deter new members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are tens of thousands of questions that are neither closed nor protected&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have rarely seen good answers posted by new users to an old question. Do you think there is a chance of a well-researched and helpful answer being posted to the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you need to note that &lt;strong&gt;you have every right to unprotect any question&lt;/strong&gt; that you find unduly protected.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found another protected question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33406/what-does-five-o-mean-and-why&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;five O&amp;quot; mean (and why)?&lt;/a&gt; It was protected right after the second low-quality answer was posted. I don't see any problem protecting this question as it is again general reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low-quality questions always lead to low-quality answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T16:14:46.917" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:16:53.693" Score="1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closure should not necessarily follow Protection, nor should Deletion necessarily follow Closure.  These are three independent steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78136/endure-vs-perdure-vs-persist&quot;&gt;“endure” vs “perdure” vs “persist”&lt;/a&gt; was protected 23 hours ago, and already has three votes for closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was protected because of VLQ answers, at least one of them very recent.&#xA;Fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is on its way to closure because it &lt;strong&gt;looks&lt;/strong&gt; like a general reference question.  Forget about the fact that the question was OK by the standards of its time (August 2012).  Read the answers and comments!  Do you understand the subtle difference between perdure and endure?  I don't, nor has some googling of my own made it clear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question and the site would benefit from a bit more work on this question.  @tchrist has the priority on this, but if he doesn't want to revisit an antique question, someone else may, this week or next month or sometime.  Possibly me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step after being arrested is not being found guilty and sentenced to prison.  The first step after being protected should not be being closed.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T19:22:43.667" Title="endure, perdure, persist: why not keep open?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8133" CreationDate="2016-07-04T04:11:51.470" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that when many of the close votes were cast &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/78136/1&quot;&gt;this was the extent of the question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;“endure” vs “perdure” vs “persist”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;erdure and endure both mean &amp;quot;to remain in existence&amp;quot;, and persist means &amp;quot;continue to exist&amp;quot;. So are there any differences among the three verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's how the question was when ab2 started this meta discussion, and in such a state it absolutely deserved to be closed. Neither the age of a question nor community standards at the time it was asked matter in the slightest to determining whether it is up to scratch now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ab2 has since edited in some definitions, a questionable act to save a questionable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO it should still be closed. Checking one single online dictionary is not sufficient research effort, especially if that dictionary is not the OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T04:11:51.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-04T15:57:16.953" Score="4" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/95495/dogs-not-cats-why-not/95496#95496&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dogs, not cats -&gt; why 'not'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; originated in EL&amp;amp;U, but was migrated to ELL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the original question and the first (my) answer are probably more appropriate to ELL than EL&amp;amp;U.  But the second answer (from @NVZ) seems to me to be more appropriate for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way of dealing with this type of situation, and getting at least the second answer back into EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am aware of the following questions on Meta:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7770/could-we-migrate-or-cross-post-excellent-questions-and-answers-to-elu-from-ell&quot;&gt;Could we migrate or cross-post excellent questions and answers to ELU from ELL?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6790/cross-posting-simultaneously-on-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;Cross-posting simultaneously on ELU and ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first Q. cited above does seem to have some relevance to my current question, but it was closed as a duplicate of the second citation above (although I do not think it was strictly a duplicate).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; advocating cross-posting: I am asking whether it is possible to move one or more &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to the more appropriate site, albeit with a revised Q if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T00:05:37.383" Title="One answer to a Q. is suited to ELL, but the other answer is suited to EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|ell|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8136" CreationDate="2016-07-04T23:16:37.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course there's a way to deal with the problem, and that's to disband the CPVPV or at least change its members' absurd dedication to the supposed purity of this site. You can find this attitude exemplified by the first comment to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers don't matter for determining whether a question belongs here, only the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this site is supposed to &lt;em&gt;dedicated&lt;/em&gt; to finding answers, they don't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you've rediscovered is that some seemingly-simple and naive-sounding questions from non-fluent learners can touch upon some deep and subtle workings of English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really this isn't about questions; it's about questioners. And as long as the untrained and unlettered are automatically unwelcome, interesting answers will find themselves in the discarded bathwater. Which is why we can't have nice things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="125330" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T08:12:08.970" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T08:12:08.970" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8136" CreationDate="2016-07-06T10:36:42.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't see there's any problem at all. The ELL stack is quite explicitly dedicated to 'speakers of other languages learning English'. There is nothing in that description about the nature of a question (or answer), only about the nature of the clientele. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: By the way, Joseph Conrad's first language was not English. Nabokov's first language was not English. Yet they are two of the greatest writers in the English language. So moving around questions and answers on the assumption that 'English Language Learners' are less capable is ignorant and--frankly--vaguely xenophobic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175469" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2016-07-11T10:06:23.267" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T10:06:23.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2016-07-06T12:01:39.087" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a clear problem with this site in that a lot of the disagreements that occur have to do with disjunctions between various systems of traditional grammar and various linguistic schools of thought. Given that, a question such as &quot;What is a verb?&quot; could well get an answer such as &quot;There is no such thing as a verb.&quot; Or, more realistically, &quot;What is the definition of a verb?&quot; could get dozens of answers, none of which is actually satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in that sense, there is no such thing as a basic question. Looking at common references in relation to even the most basic issues (&quot;What is the definition of 'here'?&quot;) reveals disagreements and contradictions. So judgements about the value of a question are really mostly judgements about the value of the questioner or the spirit in which the question is asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I ask &quot;what is the past participle of 'to show'?&quot;, I think a good answer would acknowledge that the theoretically correct answer is 'shown', but common usage drifts towards 'showed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there are any bad questions, just bad answerers. A bad answerer is so wrapped up in their own assumptions that they do not even consider the many implications of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175469" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T12:01:39.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-09T11:40:14.890" Score="20" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new here, and have been reading Meta questions and such as I try to get a handle on things like answers vs comments, what's on topic, etc. I greatly appreciate the thought that has clearly gone into the shaping of the site (even when I don't always agree with the outcome).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recently re-watched the Tour, and noticed that &lt;strong&gt;the question highlighted in animation does not seem to meet current standards&lt;/strong&gt;. Specifically, it asks for a definition without describing any research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqLck.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqLck.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screen capture of EL&amp;amp;U's Tour page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the answers here in Meta and also comments on &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; questions point new users to the Tour, so it seems like it would be in everyone's best interests if the question featured there actually represented current best practices. Is it possible to fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T16:37:10.983" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T16:47:35.093" Title="How can the Tour screenshot be updated to reflect current standards for questions (and answers)?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|help-pages|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8140" CreationDate="2016-07-10T06:37:18.803" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tour page would be far better if it included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Detailed explanation on the differences between ELU and ELL and a link to ELL for learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A few good example questions that are well researched with clear context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A guide to use the search box encouraging new users to search a key word or phrase before asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A sentence emphasizing ELU is not a discussion forum and any question seeking an opinion is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A sentence emphasizing &amp;quot;What does XYZ mean?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Proof-reading request&amp;quot; type of question is off-topic unless well researched and a specific source of concern is identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The above was intended to attract upvotes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More serious notes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I doubt many new users are reading the tour page and guidelines on our Help Center. If they did, a majority of questions would not be posted in the first place. More than 80 to 90% of new users don't come back after posting one new question. I don't think changing the tour page would be as effective as we expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The more important things to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) make a specific comment that mentions a related guideline so that new users can edit their question. For example, &lt;em&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered&lt;/em&gt; for Single-Word-Request questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) give new users a warning that an off-topic question could be&#xA;close-voted unless properly edited&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) put low-quality questions on hold as soon as possible if no edit attempt is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) edit a question proactively when it looks salvageable by editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need more participation of experienced users in helping new users get familiarized with the ELU's guidelines and standards.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T16:38:40.990" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T16:38:40.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T07:11:26.433" Score="-4" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;strong&gt;spam flag&lt;/strong&gt; for the answer below to a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/275414/is-the-phrase-request-you-to-send-the-copy-correct/335668#335668&quot;&gt;Is the phrase 'request you to send the copy' correct?&lt;/a&gt; was marked as &lt;strong&gt;helpful&lt;/strong&gt;. It seems that the post was deleted by spam votes, not by a moderator or any other delete votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/335668/revisions&quot;&gt;jijijijijnizhiwokodsa dengni ma? haha&lt;/a&gt; - It was the answer posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bVpD1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bVpD1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336385/change-active-into-passive-voice&quot;&gt;change active into passive voice&lt;/a&gt; was posted 16 hours ago, closed 8 hours ago and just been deleted by voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you see a question like this, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is it OK to flag it by clicking on &quot;flag &gt; spam&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 flags could have removed it from the front page and 6 flag votes could have deleted this post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hpksr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hpksr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question that (I think) should have been flagged. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335914/where-is-queen-elizabeth-2-now-and-which-countrys-queen-is-she-originally&quot;&gt;Where is queen elizabeth 2 now .. and which country's queen is she originally?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2PBn0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2PBn0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related Meta question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/what-are-the-spam-and-offensive-flags-and-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;What are the spam and offensive flags, and how do they work?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T14:09:00.337" Title="&quot;Spam&quot; and &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flag options" Tags="|discussion|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8140" CreationDate="2016-07-10T13:05:41.750" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Tour page describes editing others' questions and answers, but it doesn't mention one of the most important editing functions: &lt;em&gt;editing your own post&lt;/em&gt;, especially to incorporate suggestions in the Comments about how to improve your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd list this as the &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt; explanation on editing. After all, the Tour is primarily for those who are (a) new (or relatively new) to the site, and (b) have at least some degree of interest in how the site works. It's this latter 5% of new users who would most benefit from highlighting this self-editing expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To expand on part II of user140086's answer, how difficult would it be to engineer ELU so that a pop-up message appears when a low-rep user commences a question or answer, presenting a couple of really basic dot points - e.g. a note that ELU isn't for opinions; a link to How to write a good question/answer; a link to ELL. It wouldn't &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; flagworthy posts, but it might reduce the flood. Is such a structural enhancement possible for just the ELU site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T16:38:02.283" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T16:38:02.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8142" CreationDate="2016-07-10T15:28:20.013" Score="17" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Exchange, &quot;spam&quot; has a specific meaning, unlike the way the term is often used on the internet as a whole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exists only to promote a product or service, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;does not disclose the author's affiliation.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions you've linked to are very low quality, worthy of being closed and deleted, but they aren't &lt;em&gt;spam&lt;/em&gt;. Flagging them as spam would be not only technically incorrect, but also potentially detrimental as it would confuse the automatic spam detection filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an argument for flagging the first one as &quot;rude or abusive&quot;, since shouting the same phrase over and over could certainly come under&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A reasonable person would find this content &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;inappropriate for respectful discourse.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but the second one is neither spam nor abusive, but should simply be closed as blatantly off-topic and then probably deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T16:12:45.960" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8142" CreationDate="2016-07-10T23:04:09.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Perhaps.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the argument in favour of flagging the “zombie wall of text” question as &quot;spam&quot; is that only 6 flags are needed for the post to be automatically deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is not your bog standard, very-low-quality, off-topic question. It's &quot;junk&quot;, and to me &lt;em&gt;junk&lt;/em&gt; = spam, the sooner it's dealt with, i.e. eliminated, the better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And someone must have flagged it as spam, (&lt;em&gt;I did&lt;/em&gt;) because  it &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; spammy, and it is &lt;em&gt;spammy&lt;/em&gt; because it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; worthless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If flagging that single post as spam is going to tilt the automatic spam prevention system, (aka &lt;em&gt;automatic spam detection filter&lt;/em&gt;) then the system is at fault, or needs fixing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Next time?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. I would like to hear a mod's view on this. Was closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336385/change-active-into-passive-voice&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;change active into passive voice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;    as being &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt; the correct procedure? Or should it have been flagged as &lt;strong&gt;abusive&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T14:09:00.337" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T02:10:32.027" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;For maybe a month now, it takes too long to backpedal from TFD to the previous url.  Is this my computer, or is this happening to other people too?   I noticed this at about the same time I noticed that TFD was cluttered with ads.  I suppose the ads work, statistically, but I will try to avoid TFD because I am tired of getting stuck on the site when I want to move back and then on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T02:10:32.027" Title="Has anyone else but me noticed that The Free Dictionary has become sticky?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-07-11T10:04:45.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T05:31:28.593" Score="6" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336418/is-there-a-word-like-inherit-for-when-a-widower-takes-full-ownership-of-the&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, looking for a word like &lt;em&gt;inherit/inheritance&lt;/em&gt; that applies to a widow(er) as opposed to an heir or a successor. Really, I was just looking for a good word, a word by which I could express myself more clearly, not a technical legal term. But a lot of people thought (and a couple &lt;strong&gt;insisted&lt;/strong&gt;) that I was asking about legal terminology, even going so far as to vote to close the question. How could I have asked differently, and is there any way to salvage it now, with the increasingly negative view the community seems to be taking? Should I just delete the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T15:14:16.273" Title="How could I have better asked this question, which was taken as being about legal terminology?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8142" CreationDate="2016-07-11T06:19:03.533" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel rather strange and sorry that we are debating the definition of &quot;spam&quot;. The more important thing is discussing what we are going to do about it in the future, not whether it is SE policy or not. Is there a clear-cut polity at all on Stack Exchange regarding this issue? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is &quot;offensive&quot; flag? The below image reads &quot;This question was marked as &lt;strong&gt;spam or offensive&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nURZJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nURZJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked answer (image below) to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225606/as-my-friend-already-introduced/336592#336592&quot;&gt;As my friend already introduced&lt;/a&gt; was posted an hour ago and it took only 49 minutes for three members to delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sQR6S.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sQR6S.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do this answer and the first question (change active voice into passive voice) read abusive? Nah. What does it abuse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do this answer and the first question read offensive? No. I am not offended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do this answer and the first question read spammy? Yes. It reads like completely useless crap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to find solutions such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;spam&quot; option should be changed to &quot;spam and junk&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another flag option could be created such as &quot;gibberish&quot; or &quot;trollish&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Enable users with more than 20,000 reputation points to vote to delete it when it has a negative score in the same&#xA;  way the above answer was deleted by three votes as shown below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j78zD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j78zD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T13:09:33.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8147" CreationDate="2016-07-11T15:14:16.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How could I have asked differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is always better to edit your question when a user asks you to clarify some points in the question. You commented &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I said shared estate in my question, and complained abut inherit&#xA;  because it seems to suggest that the survivor didn't share the estate&#xA;  before the death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but you didn't edit your question. It would have been better if you had edited it as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You use to inherit when the ownership of an estate which was 100%&#xA;  owned by a husband is transferred to his wife after his death, but&#xA;  which verb do you use when the estate was 50% owned by her before his&#xA;  death. Do you still use to inherit? Is there any better verb to use in&#xA;  this case where the widow(er) taking the full ownership from 50% ownership?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would have been better if you had edited your question to that effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any way to salvage it now, with the increasingly negative&#xA;  view the community seems to be taking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always edit your question and improving a post is encouraged here. Basically, your question reads more like a request for a legal terminology that can be applied to that specific case. But only two users voted to close it for that reason. It requires five close-votes to put your question on hold unless a moderator is involved with a single hammer.  I don't think just two close-votes mean &quot;the increasingly negative view of the community&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I just delete the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You need not delete your question. Your question received six upvotes and no downvote. It means six users find your question useful. It won't be a bad idea to try asking the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Law Beta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. I would try if I were you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:26.747" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T15:14:16.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T16:50:05.377" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/part-of-speech&quot;&gt;part of speech (POS)&lt;/a&gt; are interesting and useful to me. However, honestly I don't understand how the linked question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/328502/what-part-of-speech-is-the-word-very-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;What part of speech is the word “very” in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt; could have survived without getting closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this question is not asking ELU users to close-vote it. I am asking it to see if there is something I am missing or grey area (grammatical) that can justify the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T22:58:14.493" Title="Are questions asking for &quot;part of speech&quot; all on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8151" CreationDate="2016-07-11T17:48:29.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no good reason why the linked question was not closed.&#xA;Questions which lack results of research are out of scope.&#xA;That being said, there is no solid existing answer explaining how &quot;very&quot; works there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T17:48:29.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8136" CreationDate="2016-07-11T19:59:53.293" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I composed a response to this question several days ago but didn't post it because it seemed tangential to the question that TrevorD raises. The interesting comments (most recently Araucaria's and Dan Bron's) beneath deadrat's answer have prompted me to try again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two basic weaknesses in the way this site handles closing/deleting questions and answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By establishing &quot;lack of research effort&quot; as a close reason, we make a poster's failure to jump through what amounts to a pro forma hoop—one that often adds nothing to the usefulness of the question—a justification for closing a question reflexively, without considering whether the question is interesting in and of itself. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some close voters vote to close questions that are outside their areas of knowledge and interest, which means that they may be unaware of the deeper ramifications (if any) of those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first weakness is, I think, what deadrat has in mind when he refers to babies and bathwater. Every interesting question is (relative to the usual murk) a baby. I don't think it helps EL&amp;amp;U overall to reject worthwhile questions on the theory that someday someone will ask the same questions in a way that satisfies our &quot;show prior research&quot; criterion. This criterion may well have arisen as an improvised filter to help us reduce the flood of questions inundating this site. But the filter is not designed to distinguish good questions from bad questions; it's designed to automatically disqualify a large number of incoming questions regardless of their value as questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, post-filter, we were left with boatloads of good questions, perhaps the crudeness of the filter wouldn't be a problem; but that's not what I see. I see a bunch of single-word and phrase requests and a sprinkling of interesting questions. Our site needs to retain all the good questions it gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;show prior research&quot; filter seems to be more effective in blocking some categories of questions than in blocking others. If you ask a question about etymology but you haven't checked Etymology Online's coverage of the word, your question is likely to be challenged as not showing prior research. But if you post a single-word request and do a reasonable job of describing the idea you're trying to find a word for, you're in. After all, what practical research is possible in that case? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we end up on the one hand blocking at least some questions that would have yielded more- complex and more-useful answers than Etymonline has the space, time, and inclination to provide, and on the other okaying many questions that amount to miniature instant trivia contests. Because our &quot;show prior research&quot; requirement is far less effective as an automatic blocker in areas such as single-word requests and phrase requests than in areas such as etymology, it may contribute to the disproportionate number of SLRs and PRs among open questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second weakness mentioned above reflects a presumptuousness (or at least a degree of overconfidence) on the part of some close voters. Whether because they dislike certain classes of questions or because they feel duty-bound to pass judgment on every question in the Review queu—including ones that they aren't especially knowledgeable about—they vote outside their areas of interest and expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm well aware of the temptation to pontificate on topics of grammar and usage that one is unqualified to address. There are large areas of linguistics and grammar that I should leave alone, and yet I sometimes get carried away and post an answer to a question in one of those areas—only to discover that my answer is completely wrong. I can tell myself, &quot;No, Sven: Do not try to answer questions about parts of speech,&quot; but consistently exercising appropriate self-discipline is hard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their zeal to close-vote, it seems to me, some site participants must be permitting themselves to pass judgment on topics that they would do better to recuse themselves from. I hate the idea that we may be discouraging extremely knowledgeable contributors from participating on EL&amp;amp;U because we too often close interesting questions that we don't recognize as interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is how I would like to see EL&amp;amp;U deal with the two weaknesses enumerated above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stop using the &quot;no prior research&quot; reason for closing, and instead use the &quot;I am voting to close this question because ...&quot; reason, completing it with a brief explanation of why the question itself is bad. This will accomplish three things: (a) it will help us escape our overdependence on a close reason that doesn't distinguish between bad questions and good questions; (b) it will force us to state clearly what we think is bad about a bad question; and (c) it will give other voters a basis for voting to close on the merits (or demerits) of the question as a question rather than on what often amounts to a technicality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote to close a question only if you are qualified to pass judgment on questions of the type involved. And by &quot;qualified,&quot; I mean possessed of sufficient expertise in that area to be a good judge of the question's intrinsic merits.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Junk questions are junk, and we should close them without equivocating, apologizing, or second-guessing ourselves. But what makes them junk isn't that they fail to include evidence of prior research; it's that they have no depth and complexity, or that they can have no practical value to anyone but the poster. Let's close them for the right reason, and let's not be so eager to close questions that fall outside our personal areas of competence and interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-07-12T00:05:37.383" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T00:05:37.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T00:19:46.037" Score="6" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335453/i-am-who-whom-g-d-made-me&quot;&gt;I am [who/whom] G-d made me&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) was marked as a duplicate of these questions (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/what-s-the-rule-for-using-who-and-whom-correctly&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for using “who” and “whom” correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/328326/when-to-use-what-or-who&quot;&gt;When to use what or who&lt;/a&gt;&quot;), but I don't think either of these answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw a post from a moderator that mentioned there are some other people who think it should not have been closed and that recommended bringing up the subject on Meta. I didn't see a question here yet about it, so I'm posting this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will explain my viewpoint in an answer so that people can vote on it separately from the question. (I.e. downvote this question if you think I shouldn't have brought up this issue; downvote my answer if you disagree with my reasons for wanting the question re-opened). I hope some of the people who think the closure was appropriate will post answers explaining their points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T00:19:46.037" Title="Should the question about &quot;I am [who/whom] G-d made me&quot; be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8154" CreationDate="2016-07-12T00:19:46.037" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335453/i-am-who-whom-g-d-made-me?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;I am [who/whom] G-d made me&lt;/a&gt;&quot; should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about &quot;prescriptive&quot; grammar, so the answer is not intuitively obvious. The example sentence combines two environments that are notorious for causing trouble: the case of the relative pronoun &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; and case after a form of the copula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question also touches on several interesting aspects of the grammar of actual English, so it shouldn't be closed just because you dislike prescriptive grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It addresses the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In sentences of the form &quot;Taking on responsibility made you an adult&quot; where we have a subject, an object, and a nominal complement, what is the case of the nominal complement?&lt;/strong&gt; Or more broadly, what is its grammatical role? This is an interesting syntax question in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the answers to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/what-s-the-rule-for-using-who-and-whom-correctly?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for using “who” and “whom” correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; discuss this particular grammatical environment. They do offer general rules of thumb like &quot;substitute another pronoun for &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;whom.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Doing that in this case gives &quot;God made me me&quot; or &quot;God made me I.&quot; &quot;God made me me&quot; sounds better, so is the question answered by this simple rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems reasonable to me to doubt this. For one thing, online examples that are similar to this often show some odd punctuation that casts doubt on the role of the pronoun here. Often there is a comma or ellipsis before the pronoun: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gdysqalK2iQC&amp;amp;pg=PA69&amp;amp;dq=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjG3oWxz-zNAhVBNiYKHa7mAAcQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What made me, me&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=98p0azZ2xrUC&amp;amp;pg=PA56&amp;amp;dq=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjG3oWxz-zNAhVBNiYKHa7mAAcQ6AEIPzAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;everything that made me ... me&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Sometimes, what appears to be an &quot;object pronoun&quot; is capitalized or put in quotation marks: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=FCvebWHTBHwC&amp;amp;pg=PA24&amp;amp;dq=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjG3oWxz-zNAhVBNiYKHa7mAAcQ6AEINDAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What events in my life had made me, Me?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=dDg1AgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT47&amp;amp;dq=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjG3oWxz-zNAhVBNiYKHa7mAAcQ6AEIRTAH#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22made%20me%20me%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the things that made me 'me'&lt;/a&gt; &quot;. In other words, the &quot;me&quot; here often seems to be treated as a noun rather than a pronoun, and in that case it would not inflect for case and would be useless as evidence for the &quot;who&quot;/&quot;whom&quot; rule. (A parallel case: we say &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/031034056X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Me I Want to Be&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, not &quot;The I I want to Be,&quot; but prescriptive grammar still prescribes the nominative form in the phrase &quot;who I want to be.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After doing this research, I would &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; that the nominal complement in sentences like these is in fact objective case, but it is not exactly obvious to me. I don't think the question should be closed unless you think this is an obvious topic. It's further complicated by the fact that the example sentence &quot;I am [who/whom] G-d made me&quot; is a compound sentence that starts with a nominative pronoun followed by a form of the copula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another topic: &lt;strong&gt;When is it grammatical to replace the nominal complement with a fronted relative pronoun? Does it make a difference if the pronoun is &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;(&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; The answer to (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/328326/when-to-use-what-or-who&quot;&gt;When to use what or who&lt;/a&gt;) is certainly relevant here, as it implicitly assumes that this is grammatical in some cases. However, a comment beneath that question says&#xA;&quot;I don't much like usages like &lt;em&gt;He is who he is&lt;/em&gt; [...]  it's still much less common than &lt;em&gt;He is what he is&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and references a Google ngram chart to support this statement. In addition, many comments beneath the &quot;I am [who/whom] G-d made me&quot; question suggest that the sentence is not grammatical. &lt;strong&gt;If the sentence is not grammatical, why not?&lt;/strong&gt; How is it different from the definitely grammatical &quot;I'm what you made me&quot; or the apparently grammatical &quot;I'm who you made me&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T00:19:46.037" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T11:11:17.660" Score="5" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is migrated from ELU, is there anything left behind that might still direct the attention of our users to that question? For example, is there a list of migrated questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit curious because, as far as I can see, the decision to migrate seems to be up to five or so ELU users, however, once it happens, the question seems to disappear from here so latecomers have no access to it. That seems to make migration hardly revocable, although (as I said) it is decided by only a few users.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T09:42:32.213" Title="Tracing migrated questions" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T19:20:25.950" Score="5" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because chat is the place where members can sneer behind your back. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat is the place where members can take delight in telling others that someone (me) is looking to pick a fight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because chat is the place where members use code such as &lt;em&gt;peroxide blonde&lt;/em&gt; instead of using your proper username. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But chat is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; place to go if you want to highlight someone's anti-social and passive aggressive behaviour. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And chat is the one place where the mods take your message of anger and distress seriously. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ih5Hn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ih5Hn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-07-12T19:26:00.480" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T15:43:15.257" Title="Why do I dislike Chat so much?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8157" CreationDate="2016-07-12T21:51:05.840" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the name of solidarity, I present the reasons Dan Dislikes Chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat is, effectively, unusable from a phone, my preferred and most frequent interface to SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I talk too fast and Chat doesn't talk fast enough. Whenever I log in I see something like &quot;14 users currently chatting, &lt;em&gt;last message sent 2 hours ago&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to (2), I often feel anxious that I'm ignorant of and swimming against the established culture by flooding the channel with a bunch of ADHD comments pursuing whatever tangent my hamster brain has latched onto.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, I participate rarely in Chat, so I can't say one way or another if the politics are more or less rancorous or the commentary more or less snide than on the main site. I'm not even involved enough there to judge if the remark you quote is the barb you think it is, or the unrelated comment others seem to take it for (which is why I'm unable to vote on your question one way or the other). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it doesn't matter because the cure is the same either way. To quote the second most &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8157/why-do-i-dislike-chat-so-much#comment34453_8157&quot;&gt;imperturbable member&lt;/a&gt; of the site&amp;sup1;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Richard Feynman's last autobiographical work was entitled &lt;em&gt;What Do You Care What Other People Think&lt;/em&gt;? I can't aspire to reach his intellectual level, but I try to emulate his attitude. Who here do you empower to distress you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as you know what you're worth, whether you were smeared or not is irrelevant&amp;sup2;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;Sorry, I have to award the diadem to Sven; you couldn't flap him with a giant pancake inverter.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;Protip: If you've never experienced the warm glow of magnanimity that spreads through you when you give someone the benefit of the doubt, then I can personally recommend it. Wonderful tonic for the ego.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T15:43:15.257" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8157" CreationDate="2016-07-12T22:21:53.260" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand why you were upset and I don't want you to feel discouraged from coming to chat. I think it was a series of misunderstandings that happened after you and others had some back-and-forth commentary that wasn't immediately visible to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chat is one means of bringing potential problems up to a moderator. Flagging for mod attention and comments with an at-ping are another means. A user who points out that they feel there is uncivil behavior occurring is not &lt;em&gt;sneering&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There was no indication of emotional value in the statement that &quot;Someone really wants to pick a fight with me&quot; nor were you at all identified by name in that message or thereafter. You interpreted it as referring to yourself and you interpreted as delighted. You might as well have read it as a simple statement of fact or trepidation or confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lolwhut? No one said &lt;em&gt;peroxide blonde&lt;/em&gt;. It was &lt;em&gt;peroxide&lt;/em&gt; and it was referring to a completely different other conversation that was not in some secret code, but was joking commentary about the White-Haired Girl, a Chinese opera we talked about earlier. You would see it easily if you followed the arrows or scrolled up. I have no idea who you think it would refer to. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Passive aggressive&lt;/a&gt; is frequently misused and it bothers me. There is no passive aggressive behavior in chat. If you are having problems with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;anti-social&lt;/a&gt; users, you should feel free to flag their inappropriate comments. Also, I did not see any such behavior when you were in chat although I left to commute right after my last comment, so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should always feel welcome to come to chat to talk to a mod if your concerns aren't addressed quickly. We can speak privately and confidentially if you want. This applies not only to you, but to other users as well, and I hope you understand how this circles us back around to #1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I would like to reiterate what I said in chat, and to generalize it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you (in the general sense here, not &lt;em&gt;you, Mari-Lou A&lt;/em&gt;) find that you are &lt;strong&gt;having a heated exchange in comments about something like question closure, migration, or deletion&lt;/strong&gt;, this is a signal to you (in the general sense here, not &lt;em&gt;you, Mari-Lou A&lt;/em&gt;) to &lt;strong&gt;post a question on Meta&lt;/strong&gt; to discuss the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides more visibility to the community and will allow you to both garner support for your argument as well as more completely understand the other side of the coin. It will reduce the sense of being personally attacked and open up the discussion for many more than two points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T22:21:53.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-13T14:02:55.893" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question to get the female equivalent of &quot;Esq&quot; or &quot;Esquire&quot;. &#xA;There is no appropriate tag for my question. I want to create the following tags: &quot;word-request&quot; and &quot;word-equivalent&quot;. But, I am not allowed. Hence, I raise the issue here (in Meta) to get the tags created. Please help me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the question referred to above: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336996/is-there-any-female-equivalent-to-esq-or-esquire&quot;&gt;Is there any female equivalent to ‘Esq’ or ‘Esquire’?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147068" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T21:23:07.000" Title="&quot;Word-request&quot; and &quot;word-equivalent&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8117" CreationDate="2016-07-13T20:29:48.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe this question should be considered primarily opinion based &lt;em&gt;for the reasons presently stated here&lt;/em&gt;. Please do not misunderstand, there are reasons why I think the closure might be appropriate regardless, particularly the potential contentiousness of the subject in conjunction and the relatively finite number of answers may attract low quality answers that just answer without doing anything else. I can not fully predict what sort of answer other people would actually give to this question, so I maintain that I am presently indifferent to whether this question stays closed or becomes reopened. However, with my current understanding of the policies, I dislike the sort of precedent this meta-question presently sets as it is phrased and answered might set and would like to explain why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the questioner did was perform the bare minimum requisite steps to prevent the question from being closed as General Reference Based and Unclear What you Are Asking close reasons or perhaps even less. General Reference requires us to show the research in a question such as this and when it regards word meanings it minimally requires citing a dictionary definition as par community guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is simple and can probably be easily answered by looking it up, then you may find common online internet resources to be of some help. View our list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;community recommended resources&lt;/a&gt; to find some that may be of help to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try a dictionary if you want to know what a word or phrase means, how it evolved, or how it is pronounced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try a thesaurus if you want to know words or phrases that have a similar meaning to one you already know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if your question isn't adequately answered by these resources, feel free to ask here on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange. Be sure to mention the research you've done and what you're still hoping to learn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt; I am of course assuming try a dictionary means try any one dictionary, rather than a plurality of them or it should at least read as &amp;quot;… some dictionaries …&amp;quot; and I do not recall seeing a question where more than one dictionary entry was cited. Wiktionary ranks highly among our recommended resources too, not only at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;what good reference works area vailable in English&lt;/a&gt; at the help center link but also on the highly upvoted meta-question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What Good Reference Works are Available in English&lt;/a&gt;, so as a matter of policy I think it should be considered a sufficient resource for demonstrated research. This is especially so since we don't seem to have any sort of credibility requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that is done, you need to clarify what type of answer you need by identify what difficulty you have comprehending that definition so we know how to answer. In this case, the user has observed conflicting usage and wants to know if the word has further nuances than what is found in the referenced definition which may disqualify carnal activity. This requires us to identify those additional nuances and apply the found criteria, if any, to the activities in question. This is something a dictionary can not do, so I do not believe they can definitively answer the question. Establishing such a relation is the reason General Reference is usually &lt;em&gt;a single link&lt;/em&gt; rather than a series of links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Performing this preliminary step does not give a question complete impunity from being closed as General Reference, but I do not believe that the resources provided are General Reference. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference?s=1%7C3.3624&quot;&gt;We have a motto to that effect for Google&lt;/a&gt;, so I do not feel as if I should have to explain why here. If Google does not easily lead you to a resource that would be General Ref., it seems irrelevant. I would argue that websites like Yahoo answers and Quora are not either, since they are specifically designed to provide linguistic information, do not fully and definitively answer the question even if they are considered as such and are user participation websites just like Stack Exchange. I reference &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/09/writing-good-meaning-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to ask good Meaning Questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Are some Questions too Simple?&lt;/a&gt; regarding matters of what general reference constitutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of &amp;quot;How to Ask Good Meaning Questions&amp;quot;, I also do not believe this question is too localized. I think &amp;quot;What are your hobbies?&amp;quot; is one of the first things many monogamous people ask prospective mates, and that the results of giving an answer like &amp;quot;Sex!&amp;quot;, well … I'll any people who did that infer how they came to be with spaghetti in their hair, and wine on their clothes or on a mysterious bedside without one of their kidneys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mentioning differing people's viewpoints does not strike me as being considered untopical for a very specific reason: I flagged a question as Primarily Opinion Based using that rationale, and the flag was outright declined. However, I won't admit against the possibility that the question is protected by some sort of Grandfather Clause I do not know, as I did not realize how old it was at the time I flagged it. The question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273617/difference-between-lead-and-leash&quot;&gt;Difference between Leash and Lead?&lt;/a&gt; for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose you are wondering now, why I am referencing close reasons which are different from the one the question actually has. One reason is because I do not realize the relevance of mentioning other online resources for a closure that is not actually General Reference, so I surmised Ranthony was curious about that. The other and much more important one is because it presents us with a specific sort of dilemma, often called a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/morton%27s-fork?q=Morton%27s+Fork&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morton's Fork&lt;/a&gt;. We have two options which lead to the same undesirable result for questioners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If simply for doing the bare minimum necessary to evade General Reference closure, the question suddenly becomes qualified for the Primarily Opinion Based close reason and closed regardless because it is considered that the questioner should be able to infer his answer and further data we provide would be too subjective for us to answer, even if that is not the case. The problem this provides us is that I fail to see how explaining the nuances and definitions of words can be considered topical for this website. Given that our most popular question tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot;&gt;Meaning&lt;/a&gt; and that is its stated purpose, I doubt that is the case. It is also problematic because if the same result may be achieved irrespective of effort, it would not be worth the effort to write thoughtful questions over lazy ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even have reasons to believe that the Primarily Opinion Based close reason is more lenient than it is made out to be here. First, the Primarily Opinion Based close reason is qualified with the word Primarily for a reason, which is that &amp;quot;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience …&amp;quot;. Moreover, our help center does expressly state that there is some leniency for subjective content matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt; As such, I would suggest that while it would be preferable to try, we do not need to provide definitive answers but rather merely convincing ones. That is to say in other words that the answers should only need to be persuasive and based upon evidence, rather than an answer that is final, presumably because its perfection precludes the need for anybody else to even try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because the answer is not elucidated by the provided dictionary definition given, does not mean there are not other types of corroborative evidence we can provide. The Primarily Opinion Based Close reason specifically mentions several other types we may use, which are expertise and facts, by which I presume verifiable facts are specifically meant. Moreover, just because one reference is provided, does not mean we can't choose to proffer a potentially better one, especially if we believe we can convincingly explain why it is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Illustrative quotations demonstrating good usage, trustworthy references detailing what particular hobbies are for comparative evidence, which would be useful for gauging the amount of effort required of a hobby and maybe even corpus evidence or idiomatic dictionaries demonstrating popular usage of suggestive phrases all strike me as being potentially sufficient ways of verifying facts for this question. I will refrain from demonstrating how, since it would require essentially constructing an answer to the closed question, which I believe is an inappropriate circumvention of due process, would add further length to this post and is probably unnecessary here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of a very different nature than the only other two questions I (successfully) flagged as Primarily Opinion Based. Those are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291639/can-you-list-each-word-whether-its-a-very-position-positive-very-negative-neg&quot;&gt;Can you list each word whether it's a very position, positive,very negative, negative or neutral connotation? (deleted)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263425/how-do-i-ask-someone-to-join-me-for-a-meal-in-a-wacky-way&quot;&gt;How Do I Ask Somebody to Join Me for a Meal in a Wacky Way(closed)&lt;/a&gt;. I forget exactly why I did that but the gist of my curent opinion is that these questions ask for much more instance specific and possibly even predictive data, which is much harder to reliably corraborate with prior usage than this one is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The word ‘hobby’ is well-defined in any dictionary …&amp;quot; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/140086/rathony&quot;&gt;Ranthony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I suppose I understand why you might think that. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/hobby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Most definitions for hobby on the Free Dictionary by Farlex&lt;/a&gt; seem to be slight variations on Noah Webster's, which was probably the first dictionary given that the word is only attested as far back as 1816 according to Merriam-Webster. This demonstrates a strong consensus and Noah Webster's definition is eloquent, concise, nuanced and evidently time tested definition. However, I must disagree regardless and the only way I think it can become evident is to show it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any favorite object; that which a person pursues with zeal or delight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/regulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Moreover, there are other definitions which I would classify as being different. Both Wiktionary and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hobby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Advanced learner's Dictionary and Thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; have a potentially less strict one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An activity that one enjoys doing in one's spare time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wiktionary definition of Hobby&lt;/a&gt;, under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the O.E.D's. definition is potentially stricter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A favorite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or intererest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse (sense 3); an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance. Formerly Hobby-horse (sense 6)&amp;quot; — From &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/newenglishdict05murrmiss#page/n337/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Hobby entry on page 316-317 of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principals, volume 5, H-K page&lt;/a&gt;, first published in 1901 by Oxford University Press&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;https://1828.mshaffer.com/d/word/hobby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary provides additional details&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A subject or plan upon which one is constantly setting off; a favorite and ever-recurring theme of discourse, thought, or effort; that which occupies one's attention unduly, or to the weariness of others; a ruling passion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;  Because these definitions differ significantly, I doubt they can all simultaneously be considered equally well-defined under any theory of linguistics and hence no one entry definitively answers defines the word &amp;quot;hobby&amp;quot; in the manner so meant by this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of answer can this community provide to the OP? — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/140086/rathony&quot;&gt;Ranthony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;  Given what I've said above, there are four main categories of legitimate answer I suppose can be legitimate, alongside variations which blend between them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can be a hobby, because it can meet the broad general requisites of a lenient definition for these reasons. The lenient definition suffices because of how the word is used in these contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, it can't be a hobby, because it can never meet one or more requisites of what a hobby is narrowly considered for those reasons. I can explain why this narrower definition is better because of how the word is used in those contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, it can't be considered a hobby even if it meets the general requisites, because I can explain why this is a special exception to the general rules any definition provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it can be considered a hobby but only under special circumstances that allow it and I'll explain what these circumstances are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I doubt it's really what answers we can give in this case, so much as a matter of what types of answers which will likely to be given which should be considered in this case due to this line of text in the Primarily Opinion Based Close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt; We do not want to attract too many very low quality answers which provide little to no insight and clog the voting system, require deletion by staff or detract attention away from better answers and more productive questions. The questions I think we should be asking are &amp;quot;Would this question do that?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Why would it do that if it does?&amp;quot; when determining whether this question is topical or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T23:11:12.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8160" CreationDate="2016-07-13T21:23:07.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt; and possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T21:23:07.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8165" CreationDate="2016-07-14T05:17:18.930" Score="12" ViewCount="593" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at recent posts here on Meta, it appears to me that there are often clashes among users based on personal issues rather than specific &quot;site&quot; matters. This  makes a negative impression on me, and probably on other less experienced users who come to this site mainly for language issues. I understand that personal issues  my prevail at times but recent posts suggest an acrimony    among experienced users  that is &quot;surprising&quot; . Well, &quot;it's none of your  business&quot; someone might object, but I want to offer my point of view despite that. My feeling is that language issues should come first, and personal problems should be kept at bay. Personalism is a problem and has little to do with language matters.   I don't want to make specific reference to posts and users names, but it is all very visible and readable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2016-07-14T06:39:00.500" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T03:47:01.713" Title="How should ELU deal with personalism?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8156" CreationDate="2016-07-14T09:26:59.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...as far as I can see, the decision to migrate seems to be up to five&#xA;  or so ELU users...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes five close-votes to put a question on hold unless a moderator is involved with a single hammer. However, it doesn't necessarily mean it takes all five close-votes to migrate it. Sometimes, it takes only 3 close-votes to migrate when the other two votes are cast for other reasons such as 'general reference' or 'proof-reading'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a list of migrated questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can search using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=migrated%3a1&quot;&gt;migrated:1&lt;/a&gt; to see the list of questions migrated to and from ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you reach &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10,000 reputation points&lt;/a&gt;, you will be able to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/away&quot;&gt;moderator tool &gt; review &gt; migrated&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That seems to make migration hardly revocable, although (as I said) it&#xA;  is decided by only a few users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is closed on the site to which it was migrated, the question will return to ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen one case where @deadrat posted a request on ELL Meta to migrate a question back to ELU by closing the question on ELL. It was done within an hour or so and I don't think &quot;migration&quot; is hardly revocable even though it will take some time and efforts to do that. If it is coordinated well between moderators of each site, it would be even faster and easier.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many questions related with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=migration+to+ELL&quot;&gt;&quot;migration to ELL&quot;&lt;/a&gt; which might interest you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T09:42:32.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8163" CreationDate="2016-07-14T12:00:24.060" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it does not make the best impression to air our dirty laundry publicly on Meta. I agree as well that the questions on the site should be the focus of the site rather than reputation, badges, and egos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have excellent contributors here. They have diverse experiences and think with a multitude of thoughts. We are a richer community because of our differences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we are human and we don't always get along. When any of us gets to the point where we can't agree to disagree, or where we're feeling like our point of view is not understood, or when we are frustrated, angry, or upset, then we're faced with a choice: we can talk about it and try to make it better, or we can walk away from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer that we talk about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is better to discuss in public on Meta than it is to argue in comments, and I'd posit that it is better to post on Meta than to debate in chat. Overall, in my opinion, it's better to talk about it than to not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T12:00:24.060" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8170" CreationDate="2016-07-17T03:04:42.567" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/337601/what-does-stacked-mean-in-the-eminem-song-lose-yourself&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/337601/what-does-stacked-mean-in-the-eminem-song-lose-yourself&lt;/a&gt; , I asked about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; of a misheard word. However, it wasn't just misheard by me: when I looked up the lyrics, Google Play gave me the same words (I also came across this &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/hes-so-stacked.2459168/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poorly answered question on another site&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I could have done to avoid asking about such a mondegreen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T06:48:49.277" Title="How do I avoid asking about mondegreens?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8169" CreationDate="2016-07-17T03:30:57.620" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this kind of situation is rare enough that you don't have to take special steps to avoid it. You can just let people tell you about it in the comments. Once you learn that the question is based on a misunderstanding, I would delete it, since it is not answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-07-17T06:48:49.277" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T06:48:49.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2016-07-17T10:41:44.587" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because many on this site follow a widely accepted, but to me unacceptable, practice of  breaking the rules of the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation for a late answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a relative newcomer to English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (although not to other SEs) I have been surprised and annoyed at the way some members of high reputation ignore the general SE rules on comments. On three occasions I have expressed these feelings in comments addressed to those making the offending comments, but it became obvious that a more appropriate place to do this was in ‘Meta’. As the question has already been raised, and new post would be classified as a duplicate, I feel obliged to use an answer to this original question to express my views. I don’t particularly wish to get involved in an argument: I just wish to state objectively what the rules are, explain how their violation struck me subjectively, and give notice of how I intend to proceed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The rule is clear and immutable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Stack Exchange community has its own particular rules, together with rules that are common to all members of the SE network. For the most part the particular rules deal with which types of question are suitable, and which unsuitable, and what is required in an answer. These are formulated when a SE community is set up, and presumably can be modified should the need arise and a majority of high-reputation members with the appropriate privilege agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common rules are those involving the scoring system and dealing with aspects of questions answers and comments, and the procedure for dealing with those that are inappropriate in some way (duplicates, off-topic, spam, offensive etc.). Individual SE communities do not have the power to change them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule on commenting on questions is quite clear, and it has been felt important enough that it appears in grey every time one opens a comment box. I quote: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements.&#xA;  Avoid answering questions in comments”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;good reasons&lt;/a&gt; for this rule, as for the other general rules, and in any case SE has the power to impose them because it set up the network of SE sites and finances it. However, if people do not like the rules then they are free to leave the club and set up their own with different rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The bad impression caused when high-reputation members violate the rule&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first ventured into English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (as light relief from more technical SEs) I did read (or skim through) the introductory page. However I leapt into answering a few questions on topics I thought I knew about, often questions tagged as ‘single-word-requests’. My answers were often a phrase or sentence, as it seemed to me that this was a suitable response. I was soon told off and voted down by senior community members (those with a high reputation), and it was pointed out to me that the rules demanded that answers provide evidence/sources for their assertions. Although irked by this, I went and read the rules in full, after which I had to admit I had (probably) been in the wrong. Anyway I have changed how I answer questions and now take the time and trouble to consult and quote dictionaries and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However subsequently, on following up (often unanswered) questions, I discovered that people were answering questions as comments — clearly against the rules — and the worst offenders were long-standing members with very high reputations, the same sort of people who had slapped my wrist when I broke their rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this appear to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It looked as if the senior members of the community were making their own decisions on which laws should be obeyed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It looked as if they were too lazy to answer questions properly, but nevertheless could not resist showing off their own knowledge, and&#xA;  so used the comment facility to do this (where nobody could embarass&#xA;  them by pointing out their answers lacked citations etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that everyone is contributing to the site on a voluntary basis but, in any community, if you set yourself up as a judge, you must apply the laws equally and obey them yourself. If you do not  you forfeit all respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Making things worse&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is clearly black and white, so that attempts to defend the use of comments to answer questions only made things worse. The sort of arguments I a received included&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Thats the general practice in this community.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— So if everyone breaks the rules it’s OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The question was off-topic and I have flagged it as such. I was only&#xA;  being kind to the questioner.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or similarly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The question was low quality and I’m voting for it to be closed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— It’s still against the rules to use comments in this way. Your comment should have been to the poster that the question was off-topic/low-quality with information about rectifying the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It wasn’t an answer… I was making an uneducated guess… to get the&#xA;  ball rolling”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— The word ‘causistry’ comes to mind. But regardless, where does it say that comments can be used to make educated guesses or get the ball rolling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is to be done?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, on being told that what was common practice was actually breaking the rules, people would admit their mistake and change their behaviour (like I did). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, bad habits are hard to break, and I have been told that I am “flogging a dead horse”, so I intend to adopt the only remedy that appears open, although this depends on the integrity of members of high reputation, some of whom may well be unkindly disposed towards me. This is to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flag instances of the misuse of comments to the moderators for&#xA;  removal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I have done this twice and one comment has been removed. I shall continue to do this from time to time and see what transpires. I encourage others who wish to improve this site to do likewise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T10:41:44.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2016-07-18T06:26:14.123" Score="-5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is an internet site. It is not possible to 'fill' it or 'use up all the space' (unless a serious spam problem develops). So I cannot see the necessity of deleting any questions (or moving them). The site is fully searchable, by both its internal tools and Google. A 'dumb question' might be exactly the same question someone else wants answered, and they can find it with Google. If people don't like a particular question, they can ignore it. There is no territory on the internet. Unfortunately, many internet users feel compelled to battle over 'territory' regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A textbook--even an online one--does have limited space. A short textbook will attempt to give a simple answer to a particular question. A longer one will acknowledge more complexity. And an academic paper--in linguistics, say--will tackle the difficult details of an issue in a way a textbook never could. There is probably no such thing as a complete answer to any question about language. There are always twists, exceptions, differences in usage--even if we restrict ourselves to so-called 'standard' English. Hence the usefulness of a site like this. That usefulness is severely impacted (if people will accept that as a verb) by people appointing themselves as 'editors' and 'guardians' of the site. I think the mere fact that people plainly feel uncomfortable and intimidated by the behaviour of others here is indicative of that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not the private territory of a few people with a Dirty-Harry-like compulsion to 'clean up the streets'. And as far as 'doing research' is concerned, almost any statement you find in textbooks or online is incomplete or challengeable, and many are simply wrong. I have been told off several times on this site for relying upon Part Of Speech listings in dictionaries (I think one statement was on the lines of 'never use dictionaries for POS. That's not what they're for').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain people are approaching this site as though it was a civic centre or something. It's not--it's a rapidly-widening puddle, nice and warm and muddy, slippery at the edges and deep and a little frightening in the middle. Like language. Attempts to drain and clarify the puddle--or divert it to another site--are doomed. And also completely unnecessary, egotistical, and aggravating for other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175469" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T06:26:14.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-18T18:08:27.227" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/123246/4&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/123246/4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title was changed from the OP's &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it rude to say &quot;Thanks for asking&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it okay to ask“ Thank you for asking”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was about to comment on the poor grammar in the title when I realized that it had been edited in a nearly malicious manner.  How could this happen, under the aegis of &quot;community&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T06:14:46.100" Title="Why is this mangled edit &quot;community&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|editing|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8177" CreationDate="2016-07-18T18:19:26.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the linked Meta SE question explains well. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Community&quot; appears (as far as I know) in the following situations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the reviewers has chosen the option to &quot;Improve&quot; your suggested edit. In that case, depending on whether the reviewer has&#xA;  chosen to deem your suggested edit helpful, the Community user will&#xA;  approve or reject your edit. (Meta SE answer. There is another case in the link)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a spam or offensive question or answer posted by unregistered user is deleted by the system or votes as indicated in the linked answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208839/what-is-the-best-term-in-global-copywriting-sticky-tape-tape-scotch-ta/337734#337734&quot;&gt;What is the best term in (global) copywriting: &amp;quot;sticky tape&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;tape&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;scotch tape&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sellotape&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This answer was marked as spam or offensive and is therefore not shown&#xA;  - you can see the revision history for details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;locked by &lt;strong&gt;Community&lt;/strong&gt; ♦ 9 hours ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;deleted by &lt;strong&gt;Community&lt;/strong&gt; ♦ 9&#xA;  hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a duplicate which is suggested by a close-voter is accepted by an OP. For example,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/337867/i-would-like-to-know-what-your-name-is-instead-of-i-would-like-to-know-what-i&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I would like to know what your name is&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;I would like to know what is your name&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; was close-voted as duplicate by only two users, but closed because the OP approved it. That's why it shows &quot;marked as duplicate by FumbleFingers, Hot Licks, &lt;strong&gt;Community♦&lt;/strong&gt; 1 hour ago&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Community&quot; (which approved the edit) means the edit suggestion was re-edited by another user. The user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; seems to represent an unregistered user or those who don't have the right to close-vote a question, etc. as indicated in the link: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Own suggested edits from anonymous users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove abandoned questions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T06:14:46.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8177" CreationDate="2016-07-18T18:23:08.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a look through the timeline. I believe what happened was that there was a suggested anonymous edit that was improved by a 2K+ user, so both the improvements and the suggestion were marked as accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T18:23:08.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8184" CreationDate="2016-07-21T12:10:15.837" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/338327/70861&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/338327/70861&lt;/a&gt; -- Should have been a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/175655/70861&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/175655/70861&lt;/a&gt; -- Has nothing at all to do with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T13:17:03.907" Title="Why was my &quot;not an answer&quot; flag declined on these two &quot;answers&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8183" CreationDate="2016-07-21T12:36:09.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, when I went to the flags page (first time I'd ever seen it), I saw the &quot;pending&quot; flags and assumed those were the ones being brought to my attention, completely missing the fact that I needed to press the &quot;declined&quot; tab to the right.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could argue with some of the decisions, but I suspect it would be an uphill battle, so we'll leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T12:36:09.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-21T19:10:44.657" Score="-9" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every day people who have little grasp of English attempt to answer questions in their own uniquely inept way; they have no conception of which words work with which other words and they rarely provide sources for their answers. I believe this can be mitigated with a mandatory English quiz given when signing up for the site. It'll lessen the strain on the community to delete these posts. Why hasn't it been done yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user180089" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-07-23T16:46:15.427" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T16:46:15.427" Title="Request to have mandatory English quiz in order to join this site" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2016-07-21T20:56:39.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A strain on the community? How hard is a downvote on a poorly written question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T20:56:39.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2016-07-22T11:08:27.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand why you've proposed &quot;taking mandatory English quiz&quot;. Yes, it is frustrating to see all those low-quality posts and find that we are not doing enough to prevent or slow down the influx of low-quality posts. My question is &quot;Is there anything we can do?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user once proposed all questions be &lt;em&gt;put on hold&lt;/em&gt; automatically and users vote to open an on-topic question among them. This suggestion illustrates there have been so many off-topic and low-quality questions and answers posted and deleted on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is open to everybody in the world. Even a user who doesn't bother to register their user name can post a question and answer (except to closed and protected questions) and edit any post they want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't stop new users from asking, answering a question and editing a post. We need to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post a comment for clarification, additional information, request to show research. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag a question if you don't have 3,000 reputation points needed to vote to put a question on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvote a post which is not useful and doesn't show research efforts. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Monitor suggested edits, especially those submitted by anonymous users, and review first posts and late answers carefully. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are mechanisms we can use to deal with low-quality posts. I am one of the most aggressive users who are employing them to clean up the site. Even though asking new users to take mandatory English quiz might help reduce the number of low-quality posts, it is not an ideal solution considering the manpower and time it will take.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7429/what-can-we-do-to-make-this-site-more-intimidating&quot;&gt;What can we do to make this site more &amp;quot;intimidating&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7535/does-elu-have-worse-questions-than-other-sites&quot;&gt;Does ELU Have Worse Questions Than Other Sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users&quot;&gt;Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T17:23:57.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8190" CreationDate="2016-07-22T16:15:23.307" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time, we see a new question from a new user like this one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/338689/passive-vs-active-treatment&quot;&gt;passive vs active treatment&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asked to include more context or clarify some points, (s)he posts an answer using a different user name instead of editing the question like this, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/338689/passive-vs-active-treatment/338724#338724&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/338689/passive-vs-active-treatment/338724#338724&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best course of action that we should take? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Advise the OP to visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; My Account&lt;/a&gt; and follow the guideline to (1) merge the two accounts, (2) delete the answer which is not an answer, (3) edit the question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag it for moderator's attention as @ColleenV commented when it seems obvious that they're the same user. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the question myself and flag the answer as &quot;not an answer&quot; for deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T18:46:00.190" Title="What is the best advice for a new user who created two accounts?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2016-07-22T17:58:51.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My account is two years old, but I started off few months ago.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm not a native English speaker, and I have made mistakes a lot.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If such a quiz was mandatory, I wouldn't even have joined at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T17:58:51.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8188" CreationDate="2016-07-22T18:46:00.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the example quoted, I don't believe there's any harm in editing the additional information into the question. You can then flag the &quot;answer&quot; (see below) as well as vote to delete it &amp;mdash; the vote gets the answer into the review queue, and the moderators can deal with the account anomaly. And delete the &quot;answer&quot; if that hasn't happened by then. But the example of an edit-as-answer-and-never-return is more of a special case: usually, duplicate accounts post on different questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While moderators can't actually merge accounts or reassign ownership of posts, they can engage staff [who do have that power] and they can contact the user to advise them of the difficulty and how to help themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus &lt;strong&gt;the general rule is to flag,&lt;/strong&gt; especially where the posts are on different questions. Flag one of the posts, and include the URL of the &quot;other&quot; user's profile page with a note to say that you believe the users are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that it's not advisable for users to point potential duplicates to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;Help pages&lt;/a&gt; is that the two accounts may not actually be the same user, and moderators have tools which can help identify whether they are. We can also keep any embarrassment out of the public eye by using private messaging rather than comments. Lastly, it's possible (although unlikely) that the two accounts are interacting in ways which are against the rules, and that should be dealt with by moderators rather than have attention drawn to the possibility by pointing out the duplicate account publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T18:46:00.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-22T22:16:49.280" Score="-3" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perennial concern about low quality questions and low quality answers is resurfacing again.  It is my impression (not backed by data) that many VLQ answers are posted by rep 1 unregistered people.  This seems to be true also of some low quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there data or could data be obtained to back up or refute this impression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could ELU run an experiment (for say, 3 months) requiring new users to register before posting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like an effort which might: (a) reduce the VLQ posts; (b) be unlikely to scare off people we want to attract; and (c) not require a lot of work to implement and analyze. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum in response to comments so far&lt;/strong&gt;:  Is it likely that ELU will be &lt;strong&gt;permitted&lt;/strong&gt; by SE to require registration, either as a test or permanently?  If not, we should move on.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2016-07-24T02:19:43.590" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T18:34:18.577" Title="Can we require a new user to register before posting?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2016-07-23T16:45:55.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your question of why it hasn't been done yet: It had not been requested before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of downvotes here indicates that the community does not support this plan. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that it won't be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T16:45:55.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-23T17:26:55.037" Score="10" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a nice place for giving  vent to our frustrations, to express our best thoughts on how to improve the site  and to suggest the  improvements  we would sincerely like to see implemented to make ELU a &quot;better&quot; place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But has any of the ideas put forward so far  really made a concrete change to the main site? Is there any evidence of effective implementations?  and which would the procedure that a suggestion should follow to be finally materialised  in a real change? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I am referring to changes in the written rules, those which we refer to in the help center. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-07-23T23:25:10.157" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T23:25:10.157" Title="Is there evidence of concrete Meta contribution to the rules that govern ELU?" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8195" CreationDate="2016-07-23T23:17:08.377" Score="5" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been considering asking this question here on Meta-English Language &amp;amp; Usage for the past few days &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;pursuant to help-center guidelines&lt;/a&gt; and after just having asked several users about it, have been encouraged to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a question regarding the spelling (or more accurately the lack thereof) of inspecific was closed as a duplicate of another question was closed a long while ago. That question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113776/why-can-we-use-inadequate-but-not-inspecific&quot;&gt;Why can we use inadequate but not &quot;inspecific&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; However, the alleged duplicate, which is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2532/are-there-any-patterns-to-observe-in-choosing-the-correct-negation-prefix-to-use&quot;&gt;Are there any patterns to observe in choosing the correct negation prefix to use?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; does not seem to really be a duplicate in my opinion as it only asks for a generalized rule. If the rule of thumb given applied in this case, that would be fine and just, yet this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer given in the generalized question is to the effect of &quot;germanic derived words use un- and latin derived words use in-&quot;, but a trip to the Online Etymology Dictionary demonstrates that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=specific&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; is ultimately, a latin derived word. The given answers do not make mention of specific exemptions, nor should they have to do so, because the question is only requesting a generalized rule. In a few words, the alleged duplicate is too &quot;inspecific&quot;, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason for my concern is that with the redirection link as it is now, some of our less astute readers might receive the false impression that &quot;specific&quot; is germanic because it can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/unspecific&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the un- prefix&lt;/a&gt; according to Collins English Dictionary &amp;mdash; Complete and Unabridged 14th edition, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unspecific%2C+nonspecific%2C+inspecific&amp;amp;year_start=1777&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cunspecific%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cnonspecific%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cinspecific%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google nGrams demonstrates that the although un- form, although overwhelmingly less popular than the non- form, has a longer tradition of usage.&lt;/a&gt; With things being as they are now, I suspect English Language &amp;amp; Usage could be a source of implicit misinformation, and I doubt any of us want that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Granted, it would be deceptive if I did not add that I have some degree of curiosity regarding the matter myself: The only reason I spotted this was because my first instinct was to spell the word as 'inspecific' and then wondered why my spelling checker highlighted it as wrong. I have reason to suspect that &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ewjffZwfm_MC&amp;amp;pg=PT11&amp;amp;lpg=PT11&amp;amp;dq=Star+Trek+%22inspecific%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Sy_c5WyOUN&amp;amp;sig=9l6tF9F0h35_RUPcETTv_EE9Sso&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwisksiE04rOAhUOwGMKHdb8AoIQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Star%20Trek%20%22inspecific%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Star Trek&lt;/a&gt; is the bad influence upon me, but that is irrelevant to the subject at hand.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problematically, the question is also general reference as it is, since no research is demonstrated by the questioner, who is unlikely to return given three years of closure and presumably little other interaction with our website. However, I think that can easily be fixed without altering the core intention of the question by editing in a tagline like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=adequate&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adequate&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=specific&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; have latin origins according to The Online Etymology Dictionary, and latin words usually seem to take the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-unv1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in-&lt;/a&gt; prefix when negated. Why is that not the case here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exemplifying inadequate and saying &quot;it sounded right&quot; seems to suggest to me that the Latin etymology may have subconsciously influenced the questioner's instinct and curiosity, so I do not think this sort of edit would be too astray from the question as it was originally asked. Thank you for your consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T23:14:48.623" Title="Should &quot;Why can we use inadequate but not 'inspecific'?&quot; be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8194" CreationDate="2016-07-23T23:32:37.140" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You make a specific and adequate claim that the post is not a duplicate. I agree with your thought to edit the question. I would suggest that you refer to the alleged duplicate and the rule of thumb you describe here as well as including the additional suggested text. If you do that, I'd be happy to reopen the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T23:32:37.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8191" CreationDate="2016-07-24T17:55:39.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm against the idea of making it a requirement to sign up before posting on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am curious what good it will bring to ELU and I'm okay with conducting a trial run, but for just one month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T17:55:39.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8191" CreationDate="2016-07-24T18:34:18.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the founders of Stack Exchange (SE) were imprudent enough not to think about this issue. The whole purpose of SE is to let any user, regardless of whether they are registered or unregistered, ask and answer a question &lt;em&gt;free of charge&lt;/em&gt;. If registration is required, it could block some of potential users, who could contribute a lot in the future, from participating in SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, SE has various mechanisms such as automatically flagging low-quality posts, spam filters, close-votes, delete-votes and flags, to name a few, necessary to maintain the quality of the SE sites. As long as we use them more actively, we don't have to worry about unregistered users. The key issue is &lt;em&gt;how to deal with unregistered users&lt;/em&gt;, not how to block them.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just found a related Meta SE question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270672/why-does-stack-exchange-allow-fake-email-addresses-for-registration&quot;&gt;Why does Stack Exchange allow fake email addresses for registration?&lt;/a&gt; and @Shadow Wizard's answer seems to hit the nail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... This is just an extra step that will make it harder for ordinary&#xA;  people to post, while not making the spammers' life even a bit harder.&#xA;  I'm 100% sure they can use, and are using, real email addresses and&#xA;  can verify them just as any other (real) user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All in all, just a &lt;strong&gt;pointless barrier that should not exist in the&#xA;  first place&lt;/strong&gt;, and I'm glad it really doesn't exist. (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T18:34:18.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8198" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8199" CreationDate="2016-07-27T14:34:36.133" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged an answer as 'spam', because the content was something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am Jeff. Jeff Jeff Jeff. etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post was deleted - yet my flag was declined. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For 10k+ers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4405/short-sighted-and-near-sighted/339611#339611&quot;&gt;Short-sighted and Near-sighted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T14:45:23.610" Title="Why was this flag declined?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8198" CreationDate="2016-07-27T14:45:23.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because it is not selling or promoting a product or service. It's just a vague quote from a kid's book. &quot;Not an answer&quot; would be appropriate for this type of post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It matters insofar as spam flags train our spam filter, which is why your flag was declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T14:45:23.610" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8202" CreationDate="2016-07-27T16:51:22.693" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Context:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/339209/50044&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Is there a word or phrase for “taking the long way around a square”?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/339215/50044&quot;&gt;My answer&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Scenic route&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; with enough details and has got upvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/339340/50044&quot;&gt;Duplicate answer posted hours later&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I've always humorously called this kind of thing the 'Scenic Route'&amp;quot;...&lt;/em&gt; and no further explanation or additional value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The issue:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I didn't think the duplicate answer deserved these flags:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VLQ&lt;/strong&gt;, because it's a great suggestion, which is why I had posted such an answer myself. I'm sure the community would have upvoted or edited to improve it, if my answer wasn't posted earlier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NAA&lt;/strong&gt;, because it clearly gives an answer, although it lacks explanation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rude or abusive&lt;/strong&gt;, because the user/post was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;nice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spam&lt;/strong&gt;, because it is not promoting any product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I flagged it for moderator's attention:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Duplicate answer, adds nothing new.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderator's response:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;declined&lt;/strong&gt; - Using standard flags helps us prioritize problems and resolve them faster. Please familiarize yourself with the list of standard flags: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;What is Flagging?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community's response:&lt;/strong&gt; Post deleted by MετάEd, Dan Bron, tchrist..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What standard flag should I have used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just worth mentioning that I currently have about &lt;strong&gt;2,478&lt;/strong&gt; helpful flags&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T14:40:29.570" Title="What standard flag should I have used here?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8200" CreationDate="2016-07-27T17:08:07.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very low quality. It's sufficient to flag it as such. It doesn't need a custom flag which puts it in my workflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T17:08:07.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8200" CreationDate="2016-07-28T14:40:29.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens all the time. You don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to flag it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often in this situation, someone will (and should) leave a comment that this answer has already been given and that it adds nothing new (and maybe could be edited to add more information or some other way to improve it, etc.) and perhaps even down vote. Often, high rep users will vote to delete the answer. It doesn't need to involve a moderator at all. Moderators should ideally be involved in issues that can't be resolved by the community itself, or that might take too much time for the community to act on, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you don't &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; the answer just because you wrote it first, and you need not alert anyone. If people want to upvote it, they can. You can down vote the other person if you like. Leave a comment. You can leave it to the community to delete (I do this all the time, that is, cast a delete vote when appropriate, and also a downvote if needed to delete) but involving the moderators isn't necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T14:40:29.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8206" CreationDate="2016-07-29T16:44:31.693" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious. Can users with high 'reputation' unanswer a chosen answer? The reason I ask is because an answer I gave &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340099/below-vs-under-the-keyboard&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; was selected by the person that asked it as the best answer, yet about 15 minutes ago I lost the points for that answer, and it was unselected. Yet when I checked the person's profile, they have not been active for over 30 minutes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask in light of the fact of decidedly dubious comments such as the one here, which asserts my answer is not an answer to the question (rather ridiculously)&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340092/synonyms-for-beginning-of-a-research-era/340095#340095&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Random downvotes for perfectly fine responses.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340087/what-does-parse-mean&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the fact that someone has just transferred another question I answered to the beginners language section, resulting in me losing the points for answering it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One or two of these events in isolation, I could chalk up to non events, but the volume and pace of them, I am starting to think someone is abusing their authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T23:52:55.037" Title="Can someone apart from the original person that asked a question unchoose the chosen answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8205" CreationDate="2016-07-29T17:05:02.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer you first question, no. Only the OP may select or unselect the checkmark for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the next part, a user posted a comment and you disagreed with it. It's fine to flag that as not constructive. I've deleted the comment, although you might consider that he was trying to offer some helpful advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, it's one downvote. I think the system downvotes answers on questions that are closed as off-topic, although some users do it too, to discourage people from answering off-topic questions. Don't take it to heart. If you notice that many of your posts are downvoted in quick succession, that is a sure indicator of problem behavior. In that case, flag one of your downvoted posts using a custom moderator flag and ask us to investigate possible serial downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T17:05:02.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-30T14:39:08.407" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reviewing a participant's first attempt at an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340223/please-help-me-understand-the-difference&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't know where to send her for help. Many of us arrive at EL&amp;amp;U totally unaware of &quot;Meta&quot; and how to find information about asking and answering questions. I've been active since last November and it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; took me a few minutes to find information on what makes for a good answer (information that is outdated and far &quot;looser&quot; than what is actually enforced, by the way). As it is, it is just too difficult for beginners to find out how to begin at EL&amp;amp;U and ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; 8/1/16: Thank you all for pointing out the little &lt;strong&gt;help v&lt;/strong&gt; on the black bar between review and Search Q &amp;amp; A in the upper right corner of the main screen. I feel foolish for never having noticed it. It would be so much more clear and helpful if there were a button to the right of Questions / Tags / Users / Badges / Unanswered and / Ask Question that was labelled &lt;strong&gt;Getting Started&lt;/strong&gt;. It could have the same links as &lt;strong&gt;help v&lt;/strong&gt; or (better yet) provide additional information and guidance for beginners and regular users alike (including information many of us need to be reminded of periodically). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U we now have &lt;strong&gt;more than 3200&lt;/strong&gt; unanswered questions (up from about 2400 eight months ago). Many of these are from first-time users asking questions that are poorly written and show no effort whatsoever at research. It would be helpful to be able to leave a comment stating, &quot;Please click on the &lt;strong&gt;Getting Started&lt;/strong&gt; button above and follow the guidance to improve your question/answer. Doing so will help others to provide you with more useful responses.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any support for this idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148605" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T16:16:12.037" Title="Could we PLEASE include a link to the Help Center on the main page(s) e.g., Unanswered Questions?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8207" CreationDate="2016-07-30T20:17:05.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a help link right up top, to the left of the search box. How do you want it improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5784" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T20:17:05.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8207" CreationDate="2016-07-31T12:28:58.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, I was wondering how hard it was to find some guidance about asking, since I answer more than I ask on SE sites, and it turns out there is a lot of help to the right of where you're writing your answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BzBVq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BzBVq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen grab of &amp;#39;Ask Question&amp;#39; page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the guidance about &quot;learning English&quot; should also suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the banner unregistered users see:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9k5qZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9k5qZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the top bar if you aren't signed in:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hhaNC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hhaNC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:51.093" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T16:16:12.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-31T20:26:26.063" Score="-9" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/339733/should-we-refer-to-a-female-senator-as-a-senatrix&quot;&gt;Should we refer to a female &amp;quot;senator&amp;quot; as a &amp;quot;senatrix&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember making a comment on why actor/actress and waiter/waitress are used but not author/authoress, but the comment is gone now. Who is responsible for its deletion and why was it deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this is a second/third/(or perhaps even 10th, who can know, because we never get notified?) instance that one of my comments or answers was deleted without any notification, which frankly is such a nonsensical and counter-intuitive practice on this site that I'm frankly shocked it has not been addressed. How exactly are we supposed to improve our posting habits if we don't know the specific violations we committed? How exactly are we supposed to even know if the deletions were justified at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user180089" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:40:32.517" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:40:32.517" Title="Why was one of my comments deleted on this question? (also, request to add a feature to the site to be notified of post and comment deletions)" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2016-07-31T23:55:29.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8211" CreationDate="2016-07-31T21:48:00.027" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Our Help Center’s section on comments&lt;/a&gt; has the answers to some of your questions, including what comments are for and what they are not for. Did your comment fall into either of those two categories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understand that comments on Stack Exchange sites are unimportant ephemera that aren’t even searchable. They do not add value to the site. Comments are always subject to deletion without notice. Comments can be deleted by their owner, by the moderator team, or by the community at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, asking &amp;quot;who deleted my comment?&amp;quot; is not productive. Even if could be answered — and many times it cannot — it probably should not be.  Otherwise you fall into a fingerpointing game of public name-calling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not discuss users here by name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the flaggers, the deleters, or both may choose to name themselves here in response to your question, there's no good reason for them to do so, and plenty of reasons for them not to. I recommend against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that matters is why, and the reason why is virtually always readily inferable once you review the guidelines we are given regarding these matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is instructed to flag comments for deletion under &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237978/a-guide-to-moderating-comments/237980#237980&quot;&gt;a variety of circumstances&lt;/a&gt;. If enough of these accumulate, then the comment is automatically remove without further intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the site moderation team (appointed, elected, or employed) may take early action on comments, whether flagged or not. Moderators are given &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237978/a-guide-to-moderating-comments/237982#237982&quot;&gt;general guidelines for moderating comments&lt;/a&gt;, but other situations can and do arise beyond the ones spelled out there. Several options are available to moderators, but you will notice after reading the guidelines that the recommended action is to delete flagged comments that provide no lasting value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments don't matter. If one or more members of the community felt that your comments fell outside the narrow bounds of what we're told that comments should be used for, then they flagged it and in due course it was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not notify the comment's owner when one of their comments is deleted for all the reasons spelled out above. Nor should they.  I cite &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2967&quot;&gt;one of our moderators answering a duplicate&lt;/a&gt; of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;It is not within the scope of our duties to always leave a comment to explain why comments have been deleted. It rather defeats the purpose of comment deletion, and also it is quite time-consuming, as well you can imagine. Oftentimes, pruning comment chains is just a routine task.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I again stress that comments are ephemeral and unimportant, no matter how precious they are to their owners. After all, if they were important they would be in a question or answer, not in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments tax the system by demanding more moderator attention than they deserve, so if the community can handle it on their own, all the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T20:32:09.467" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8214" CreationDate="2016-08-01T11:25:19.410" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good afternoon friends, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let me place this into some context&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new to ELU and have been enjoying the atmosphere here, the satisfaction that comes from helping someone that has a question and is seeking an answer, and also enjoying learning something new almost daily thanks to the wealth of knowledge and experience that surrounds these boards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the aspects that attracted me to ELU was the non hierarchical nature of the setup. You answer questions, you either help people, in which case you gain recognition, or you do not in which case you stagnate. Seems like a fair exchange to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of a mind that likes to help. That is one of the reasons I am here. Frequently throughout the day you will see a question that looks a little something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question title: Can I use 'versatility' when referring to the trait of&#xA;  something that is versatile?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I use 'versatility' when referring to the trait of something that&#xA;  is versatile? Or is it versatile ability ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is a reasonably basic question granted. However it does pertain to how you use the English language. Does it show research effort? No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a number of options when confronted with a question like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Ignore the question. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) Give the person advice how they might improve their question. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) Answer the question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) Answer the question and give the person advice about how they might improve the question. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;5) Downvote the question. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;6) Downvote the question and give the questioner advice as to how they might improve their question.  &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been inclined to simply answer the question. Why? Because I do not see the lack of research effort particularly as a sign of tardiness on the part of the questioner. For someone that is asking such a basic question, I find myself pondering just how capable they are to actually research the question they are asking. After all if they possessed that particular skillset, chances are they would have already solved their own question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they really know how to use a dictionary properly? I very much doubt so. Sure they could recount a paragraph about 'what they have done' before they got to ELU to ask the question, but when we are dealing with a question as basic as this, does this really make all that much difference to their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course other questions, on the spectrum from demonstrating absolutely no effort, and being barely comprehensible, to those that are perfectly written but lack some research. I have used the above example merely to illustrate the point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I have at least given you pause for thought, in terms of how a lack of research initiative might not necessarily be a reflection of a lack of effort on the part of the questioner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From time to time, someone with more reputation than me decides they should educate me on the do's and don'ts of &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; vision for the site, and posts something along the lines of.. 'please do not answer this question. it lacks research effort' etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial reaction to this was it was rather ludicrous that someone should think that I would adjust my answering habits merely based on their own vision of how they would like the site to be run. Given I am educated well in the English language I was of the idea that I am essentially the same as everyone else as far my status here goes, and then there are moderators, who I view higher for obvious reasons in the scheme of things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I look with admiration at users with very high reputation scores, I do not correlate this with a superiority when it comes to the value of their own judgements about the site and mine. For instance if a moderator asked me to do something or told me they did not like the way I was behaving, I would instantly take that on board - out of respect for the station. When it comes to everybody else however, I see us all as one mass looking to help others, share wisdom amongst ourselves and generally enjoy the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have however been thinking about this a bit more lately...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question to the community is two fold, but they are linked questions, so I hope you allow me the liberty of asking them both here at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Do you think that we should refrain from answering people that post&#xA;  showing a lack of research effort &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and I would say this is the&#xA;  crucial aspect&lt;/strong&gt; their questions are exceedingly simplistic in nature?&#xA;  (implying I would say that they lack the capacity to properly research&#xA;  their own question).&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2) Do you think &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; should change your posting behaviour based on&#xA;  what other members are writing on your posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am putting this question to the community, because I am genuinely interested in what the community as a whole feels. I am under the impression that I keep bumping into a couple of 'die hard' crusaders in my answers that receive this type of attention, and the rest of the otherwise silent majority are of a like mind to myself. They just want to help people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am genuinely interested here, however, because it is the community aspect that obviously makes ELU what it is, and that has been integral to my experience here in the short time I have been here, so I would like to reflect the wishes of the saner consensus as much as I am able to in my activities on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your answers to these questions, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure they will prove enlightening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: (lest my question should fall foul of the exact defects I am seeking to discuss)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made use of the 'what's meta' &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;pages&lt;/a&gt; which was useful in deciding to post this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Meta English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is the part of the site where users discuss the workings and policies of English Language&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and 'how do I ask a good question' &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also explored the 'answering' section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/answering&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; to check if there were any questions I should specifically not answer, but none are listed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T12:54:39.453" Title="What is the community consensus on answering trivial questions and responding to those who say we shouldn't" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8213" CreationDate="2016-08-01T12:54:39.453" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that there is no explicit listing of questions which should not be answered. But there is an implicit list: questions that should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are closed for a number of reasons, but the common theme is that &lt;em&gt;they are not welcome here in their current form:&lt;/em&gt; they don't show any research; they are simply proof-reading requests which don't highlight a particular, identified, problem; they don't contain enough information with which to formulate an answer, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, closable questions should not be answered: you waste your time (because when the question is closed it may be deleted), and you provide a bad example by showing that such questions are worthy of answering. If they are closable, they are not worthy of answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is this point which the comments are attempting to draw your attention to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a question is closable, it should not be answered.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question can be edited so it's no longer a closure candidate, &lt;em&gt;do that!&lt;/em&gt; You can even provide an answer. If there isn't enough information in the question to guess at how it should be edited, vote to close (or flag to close, which places the question in a review queue for others to vote on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this should be taken as excusing (let alone encouraging) comments which hector users and attempt to beat them into submission. That's not on. But if you have been receiving a number of similar comments on different answers, that may be enough to give you a feel of how members of the community feel about humouring questions which shouldn't be humoured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, none of this prevents a user being helpful and providing an answer in a comment, as well as voting/flagging to close. But that's not the same as posting an answer, which can give quite the wrong impression about the quality of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's fine to provide an erudite lengthier answer to a simple question, but in that case the question should be phrased in such a way as to invite it. It can be difficult to edit the question and write the answer before the question is closed, and if that happens, save your answer somewhere, edit the question and vote/flag to re-open it. In extremis, post a Meta question summarising the reasons to re-open it (which may include a précis of your intended answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, this isn't a new phenomenon: an early similar question (2011) actually led to the creation of the &quot;general reference&quot; close reason, which has now become &quot;show your research&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/598/should-we-require-some-reasonable-research-being-done-aka-questions-that-can-b&quot;&gt;Should we require some reasonable research being done? (aka Questions that can be answered by opening an online dictionary)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T12:54:39.453" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9227" CreationDate="2016-08-01T14:45:01.140" Score="5" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a number of reasons the number of new users who post low quality questions or answers does not appear to be flagging by any measure. This issue had often generated stress among users who rightly insist on a more correct usage of the site and expect new users to be compliant with the site rules. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I wonder if, rather than keeping on suggesting to take a tour for the site rules, we offered a short  5 to 10 minutes teach-in video&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in which the main features and rules of ELU can be easily visualised and , probably, more easily understood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The video could concentrate  on apparently unsolvable issues like;  lack of research, proofreading and general reference for instance,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  which  could be shown with examples from past questions and the subsequent hold or deletion of the off-topic posts  could   probably be more easily  explained. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The short video could be made compulsory for new users to whom access to the site would not be allowed till the whole video has run out.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; It does not intend to replace the written rules, but just to make them easier to assimilate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think that watching  and listening to instructions is more effective then just reading them.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: what do the many donwvotes mean? An aversion to change or a poor and ineffective suggestion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2016-08-03T21:41:40.280" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T04:04:12.140" Title="Are low quality questions and answers here to stay?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|new-users|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2016-08-01T19:11:06.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There'S a far simpler way to weed out low quality Q&amp;amp;A by indicating clearly what this site is about: chose the right title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people ( I don't remember the exact figures but we're talking 95% + for anything concerning stuff online) –including me– don't read disclaimers, guidelines, tours or users' agreements etc. normal people just jump in and expect to learn as they use a site or app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could make a video, actually, you should make it, why not?– but I guarantee that you'll be talking in tens of views not even hundreds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt; is too broad and does not indicate well enough what level is this site about, particularly for English learners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like &quot;Advanced English Language and Usage, &quot;English language and Usage, advanced&quot;, &quot;Expert; English Language and usage&quot; etc.  or even a subtitle (if ELU wants to keep its title intact) that indicates this notion clearly would go a long way and be the best return on value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42481" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T19:11:06.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2016-08-02T02:00:58.080" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm opposed to it being a compulsory video. Some people may lack the bandwidth or technology to play a video, or may have difficulties being verified as watching the video. Also, some users may have disabilities meaning they can't watch or hear a video, or may wish to translate some parts of the content into their native language using machine translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, provide them with a web page that contains in textual information all the information they need, with pictures or video as an optional resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T02:00:58.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2016-08-02T18:05:20.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick video guide is ten times better than reading through dozens of instructions, for me, at least. But I propose such a video should be optional, not mandatory. It would be good to have a link to this video in ELU's preset comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T02:41:02.737" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T02:41:02.737" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2016-08-02T21:11:18.647" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion a video wouldn't help. I think the real problem is there is no indication on the way to posting a low quality question that indicates exactly that fact to a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with P. Obertelli, no one reads tours watches intro videos. The neglible amount of people who do don't post bad questions afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it bluntly, the starting page asks for those kind of questions and nothing is stopping anyone on the way to ask the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There following steps create lead to a low quality question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone has a problem that is ELU off-topic &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That someone googles and finds ELU.SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Starting page looks promising&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask question is available without login, perfect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No indication before posting question about off-topic-ness (totally a word) or research requirements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a quick look at how the site looks to those users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume most low quality questions come from users that found the site via google. Thus they are not logged in when the visit for the first time and they have their low quality question of utter annoyance already in mind ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing on the start page that indicates that research is a prerequisite for a question, proofreading is off-topic or anything the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how it looks like on a first visit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NQZIq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NQZIq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Start page without login&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ask question dialog, still not logged in, is no further help either. It doesn't hint at any research either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhTe2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhTe2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &quot;how to ask&quot; (yeah my question is not complicated enough for details or research) and a &quot;how to format&quot; (woohoo, big letters for my important question) section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is missing? A &quot;what to ask&quot; section.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mh81L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mh81L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(obviously I am no web designer ;))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T21:11:18.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2016-08-03T05:43:32.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A video might be very helpful. Hence the following modest proposal for instructing new users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GW9vN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GW9vN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T05:43:32.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8225" CreationDate="2016-08-03T09:56:28.477" Score="5" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;, it clearly says it is off-topic to ask questions about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But would asking if a name of a product is bad or not is bad or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is on-topic in ELL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3122/11458&quot;&gt;I name a product with an English word, and many people say it's a bad name. Can I ask why it's bad here?&lt;/a&gt;. The way to asking in there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I chose this word to name a product because I thought it would make people think of X and Y, but now my friend says that it's a bad name because Z. The product is a type of sth. Does the word have a bad connotation when used as a name for this thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T10:12:12.897" Title="Is asking about a name of a product (not naming it) on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8224" CreationDate="2016-08-03T12:36:19.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; you are essentially asking, &quot;What do you think about &lt;em&gt;some name&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;, then yes, it's off topic at ELU. The name is predominant, and this is just &lt;em&gt;naming&lt;/em&gt; by another name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic criterion for Stack Exchange posts is that they should have some authoritative reference value (to someone else) after the question's poster has been satisfied. Naming is traditionally seen as too &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4915/142322&quot;&gt;arbitrary&lt;/a&gt;, too &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4620/142322&quot;&gt;complex and subjective&lt;/a&gt; to be authoritative, and more &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2541/142322&quot;&gt;cultural&lt;/a&gt; than linguistic. Like &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7287/142322&quot;&gt;proofreading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, naming is also considered to be too specific to be of interest to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; if by your phrase &quot;asking if a name of a product is bad&quot; you mean that you produce a name and want to talk about its connotations, etymology, etc as a &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;, then that's just talking about the English language, and hence on-topic. In this latter case, it's irrelevant that the word happens to be a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T10:12:12.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-03T22:07:10.210" Score="-10" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time you encounter a meaning request, and provide a word which is obviously directly relevent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You reference your definition, provide a sample phrase etc. Yet someone still downvotes your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarification I am referring to questions here that are well formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, does someone need a valid objective reason to downvote an answer, or can they do it in isolation, simply because they feel like clicking the down button in front of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1492/my-questions-keep-getting-down-voted-is-it-revenge-down-voting?rq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which discusses the cases of flagrant abusive downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/231/tactical-down-votes&quot;&gt;on tactical downvoting&lt;/a&gt; which references the difficulty in proving a down vote was tactical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I havent been able to glean, is if it is unacceptble for someone to downvote a post without an objectively good cause, or if they can just simply say &quot;i didn't like it&quot;, in which case I will just ignore these instances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They aren't all that frequent maybe a couple of times a day, and thankfully the upvotes are so weighted that your net gain from answering a question well, even with dimwitted down votes is still positive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my question is, is it OK for someone to downvote a question without an objectively good reason for doing so? If it is not, should I continue to do what I just did and flag the question, with a comment along the lines of &quot;there is no objective reason to downvote this question&quot; can you investigate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am conscious of the fact moderators are busy and I don't want to be wasting their time, but at the same time, It seems entirely perverse that there are some individuals going about down voting questions with zero objective justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T10:47:05.627" Title="What is the view on / process for handling dimwitted down votes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8226" CreationDate="2016-08-03T23:54:52.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You certainly shouldn't flag a post just because it has received downvotes that you feel are unwarranted. You have no way to tell that someone &quot;downvote[d] a question without an objectively good reason for doing so.&quot; Maybe there was a good reason and you just can't think of it. It's nice when people leave comments explaining their reasons for down-voting, but it's been established time and time again that there is no obligation to do so. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15942/do-volunteer-elected-moderators-have-access-to-detailed-voting-history-data&quot;&gt;Moderators do not even have access to the voting history of individual users&lt;/a&gt; and they won't investigate unless there is evidence of anomalous voting patterns (as in, repeatedly voting a certain way on a certain user's posts or making a large number of votes in a very small amount of time). When there is evidence of anomalous voting patterns, it's usually obvious and caught by automated systems that bring it to the attention of the moderators, so even in this case there is little reason to flag a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T00:01:35.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2016-08-04T01:24:10.667" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted the question because (1) I appreciate your continuing effort to improve the quality of questions and answers around here, and (2) I think a short video presentation might work with drive-by questioners who aren't especially keen on researching the site's standards—especially if it means reading something. But I second Dan Bron’s suggestion that the video be about how &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to ask a question. You could title it &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;VIDEO: How can I ensure that other people will downvote and close the questions I ask on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;VIDEO: Why do the people here hate my question?&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; Then present examples of five or ten types of questions that drive EL&amp;amp;U regulars nuts, and respond succinctly to each one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sample script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; Someone called something I said &amp;quot;hyperbole.&amp;quot; What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; Let me look that up for you &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in a dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Or on second thought, why don't &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; look it up &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in a dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; Please correct this sentence: &amp;quot;Happy with the strong performance in the test, it was decided that Ram give himself a five day rest.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; EL&amp;amp;U isn't a proofreading service. No one but you cares or will ever care about the particular sentence you just brought up. So it makes no sense for us to clog our archives with one-off questions like this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is it &amp;quot;What are you inferring?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;What are you implying?&amp;quot; I hear both words being used to mean the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; You see that white box—the one with the magnifying glass and the words &amp;quot;Search Q&amp;amp;A&amp;quot; in faint gray letters—near the top of the page on the far right-hand side? Type &lt;em&gt;infer imply&lt;/em&gt; into it and click Enter (or Return), and you'll find that someone else has asked a very similar question about the difference between the two words. Conveniently, the answers are already there for you to consult and consider. English Language &amp;amp; Usage search: Use it &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; you ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; What is a single word that means &amp;quot;marauding sea elf&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you ever stopped to consider that &amp;quot;marauding sea elf&amp;quot; might be a better choice than, say, &amp;quot;aggroaquasprite&amp;quot;? Sometimes there isn't a single word for some complicated phrase or multifaceted idea—and there shouldn’t be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; In English the word is &amp;quot;I have going&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I was went&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; If you are new to English and have basic questions about how to speak it, you might find a more welcoming environment at English Language Learners, a site created to help beginning and intermediate students of the language improve their grasp of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; My company is about to release a new product, and we need a slogan that tells buyers this is the best thing on the market, a must-have item, and well worth the price. Suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; Your question isn't about English language and usage; it's about marketing. This site is not a free crowd-sourcing mechanism for composing commercial slogans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; What does Blake mean by &amp;quot;symmetry&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; That's a tough question to answer—and not just because you've provided almost zero context for it. If you're asking about William Blake’s use of &amp;quot;fearful symmetry&amp;quot; in his &amp;quot;Tyger&amp;quot; poem, you're asking for literary interpretation—and we don't do that here, largely because it falls into the realm of opinion rather than fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clueless question:&lt;/strong&gt; I am so sick of seeing people use &lt;em&gt;propinquity&lt;/em&gt; when they mean &lt;em&gt;propensity&lt;/em&gt;. Making such a dumb, easily avoidable mistake simply defies reason. And don't tell me that if enough people say &lt;em&gt;propinquity&lt;/em&gt; when they mean &lt;em&gt;propensity&lt;/em&gt;, that will make it okay and we'll all just sit around in close propinquity (or is it propensity?) singing kumbaya. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response:&lt;/strong&gt; You're ranting. Don't come to EL&amp;amp;U and rant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This script may look harsh, but I suspect that it would sound less so in a video. In any case it covers some of the more common categories of bad or misdirected questions we get at EL&amp;amp;U, and newcomers might be tempted to watch just because (1) it's a video, and (2) the title is intriguing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T04:04:12.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8226" CreationDate="2016-08-04T10:47:04.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted practice here regarding down-votes that you find puzzling is to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; in comments to the down-voted post. Since you don't know who down-voted, there's no name for you to ping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you'll get an answer from the down-voter, which you should then consider carefully. After all, it reduced their rep to cast the down-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At other times, members of the community other than the down-voter will chip in with educated guesses. If they agree with you, you might get an up-vote from it, which more than cancels out the down-vote. Of course, they may agree with the down-voter and vote your post down further - that's the risk you take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether thoughtless down-voting is condoned at ELU - no, it isn't. Unfortunately, unless there is a visible voting pattern, it's hard to spot. The motives of individual voters are private. Fortunately, individual undeserved down-votes don't normally amount to much, especially in the face of balancing up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On flags, I agree with sumelic's answer: don't bother mods with isolated down-votes; it's not worth the hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, even if your answer is factual, referenced, linked and correct, occasionally you'll encounter people who down-vote it because they dislike the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. I disagree with this stance. Fortunately, this doesn't happen a lot, as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T10:47:04.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9238" CreationDate="2016-08-04T12:36:46.087" Score="15" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8040/42471&quot;&gt;On deleting low quality single-word-request answers&lt;/a&gt; established the consensus that single line answers (SLAs) to single word requests (SWRs) shall be deleted, however the highest-voted answer argues that they should not be deleted immediately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that if an SWR answer makes a legitimate but unsupported suggestion, we should give the poster a chance to amend it, with a warning that the window for doing so is narrow (specifying the time frame, if possible); then, if the poster doesn't improve the answer within, say, 24 hours, we should delete the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already noted in the comments on that answer, there are practical problems with realising this as there is no timed deletion mechanism for answers (by contrast questions can be put on hold). To this, moderator Matt E. Эллен responded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We currently leave flags in the [moderator] queue for up to a week, once a comment has been left asking for more effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a central paradigm of SE’s review system is to delegate the handling of such standard cases to users, so that a moderator never sees them. I do not think that having all these answers sit in the moderator queue for a long time is a good solution (and nobody explicitly suggested it), as our moderators are busy enough, the moderator queue offers no good mechanism of organising this, and there is no clear way to get these posts in the moderator queue and only there in the first place¹.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I am asking for &lt;strong&gt;a practicable way to handle such answers&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I encounter a SLA to a SWR in a first-posts or late-answers review, shall I flag it and if yes, how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I encounter a SLA to a SWR in the low-quality queue, shall I vote to delete it or not? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of comment shall we leave on such answers that provides useful and friendly guidance to the author?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;¹ Custom flags are not a solution because the respective post could still be deleted in the mean time through the low-quality queue or 20 k users, respectively (and the custom flag will remain in the mod queue despite this, which is annoying to Kit Z. Fox in any case (who was the mod who edited this part in)).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Glossary:&lt;/strong&gt; SLA: single-line answer; SWR: single-word request; SE: Stack Exchange&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T17:02:22.330" Title="How should reviewers (and other users) handle SLAs to SWRs?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|single-word-requests|review|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9229" CreationDate="2016-08-04T17:17:11.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my take on this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I encounter a SLA to a SWR in a first-posts or late-answers review, shall I flag it and if yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While using the review queues, I am more inclined to flag SLAs as VLQ and those that don't answer the question as NAA, but sometimes I just edit them to help the new user.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(say, Flag 70%, Edit/Comment 20%, Skip 10%)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I encounter a SLA to a SWR in the low-quality queue, shall I vote to delete it or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very inclined to &quot;recommend deletion&quot; if I think the new user will never return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the SLA is from a reputed user, I will definitely &quot;recommend deletion&quot; because I'm afraid of leaving any comment there at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, in some rare cases, I edit to improve the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What kind of comment shall we leave on such answers that provides useful and friendly guidance to the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like new users, I want to help them learn the SE culture. Simply commenting &lt;em&gt;&quot;Please edit your answer to...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; might work, but in most cases I've noticed, the user gets very defensive. So, at times when I have enough time, I edit the post for them and leave constructive comments telling them how I have edited the answer and how they can follow that style in the future. In some rare cases, some users may even rollback my edit. But, at least, I tried to help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T17:33:01.463" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T17:33:01.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9229" CreationDate="2016-08-04T19:18:19.597" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important to get a hopeless answer in the VLQ queue ASAP because: (1) after 7 days, the answer can't be flagged VLQ; and, (2) long before then, it may attract enough undeserved upvotes to be immune from being flagged as VLQ.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that not all VLQ answers are one-liners, and not all VLQ answers are responding to a SWR.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sporadically edit VLQ answers from new users into acceptable answers, and then leave a comment explaining what I have done  -- it depends on my energy level -- but my cutoff for doing this is -- it depends -- maybe several hundred rep.  Above that, I sometimes leave a gentle comment asking them to add a source and link.  Some users comply and send back an appreciative comment; others ignore the comment. I've seen some users reply with a comment that is borderline offensive, but so far, no one has done this to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag any VLQ answer as VLQ, no matter how august the poster!      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T19:23:50.813" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T19:23:50.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9229" CreationDate="2016-08-04T23:00:54.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166566/lots-of-not-always-useful-but-well-intentioned-answers&quot;&gt;Lots of not-always-useful but well-intentioned answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single line answer should be removed even if it's not answering a word or phrase request. It is a comment posted as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes and deletevotes are important feedback to the person posting. And they are often the only type of feedback that matters. Especially when combined with a constructive comment that explains the vote in terms of site policy, it lets the poster know what to do next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been developing a set of boilerplate constructive comments that I use to explain my votes to the poster. I was revising them today when I saw this question. Here is my revised boilerplate comment for this situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We appreciate the desire to help, but please consider either expanding your answer or deleting it. We’re looking for long answers that provide explanation and context. Explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Unsupported answers may be removed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/165006/what-are-these-notices-under-my-post&quot;&gt;(more)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166566/lots-of-not-always-useful-but-well-intentioned-answers&quot;&gt;(and more)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I notice that some others have started borrowing my boilerplate comments. Would it be helpful if I put them in a meta post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T23:00:54.037" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8205" CreationDate="2016-08-04T23:52:55.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Kit Z. Fox says, it must have been the OP who unaccepted your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the dubious comments on your answer to '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340092/synonyms-for-beginning-of-a-research-era&quot;&gt;Synonyms for &amp;quot;beginning&amp;quot; of a research era&lt;/a&gt;' that it does not answer the question, I wrote one of them. Until you realize that you misunderstood the question, of course my comment is going to seem dubious. I'm sorry about that, but it can't be helped. The OP asked for a good replacement for &quot;beginning&quot; in the sample sentence. Your rewritten sentence leaves the word &quot;beginning&quot; in place and adds the word &quot;perennial&quot; elsewhere in the sentence. I cannot speak for the other user (P. Obertelli) who left a similar comment but I am willing to assume it was for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the four random downvotes (and no upvotes) on your answer to '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340087/what-does-parse-mean&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340087/what-does-parse-mean&lt;/a&gt;', I am one of the downvoters, and I left a constructive comment explaining my vote. Again I cannot speak for the others, but I can say that I have written parsers, and I know for a fact that one of the other reviewers of your answer has also. So one (possibly two) of the downvotes was based on professional experience. In short, one person's random downvote for a perfectly fine response is another person's well-informed downvote for a wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T23:52:55.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-05T11:40:51.023" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the best place where the community can review my article/letter for errors or increasing the quality? Or can I post my letter on the main site for review?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189913" OwnerDisplayName="Shahzeb" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-08-05T11:42:39.773" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T11:42:39.773" Title="Articles/email/letters review" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-08-05T12:07:28.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-08-06T12:41:24.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mHH5h.png&quot; alt=&quot;Language Learning Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155782" LastEditorUserId="155782" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T15:44:01.820" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T15:44:01.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8226" CreationDate="2016-08-07T10:47:05.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems a bit presumptuous to assume that all unexplained downvotes are cast by &quot;dimwitted&quot; individuals who have no good reason to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the downvoter rightly believes that your word isn't a very good suggestion, despite the fact that you think it's &quot;obviously directly relevant.&quot; Or maybe you've made a fair suggetion, but your answer fails to demonstrate that convincingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite easy lull yourself into the belief that your answer is expert and above reproach, and therefore any downvote must be because someone is voting spitefully or dimwittedly, or abusing their downvoting privileges. I'd recommend being a bit more introspective, though, and open to critical feedback. Perhaps your downvoted answers aren't quite as stellar as you believe them to be, and maybe you can improve your answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure which of your recent answers inspired this meta question, but I took a look at a few that recently received downvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/341051/a-word-that-describes-something-whose-purpose-is-to-be-fancied/341053#341053&quot;&gt;The alluring vase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/341185/whats-a-good-word-for-get-more-done-or-do-more-faster/341189#341189&quot;&gt;The swift company&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/341042/it-works-and-its-work/341049#341049&quot;&gt;It works vs it's work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't buy that &lt;em&gt;alluring&lt;/em&gt; &quot;works well&quot; when it comes to describing a decorative vase; &lt;em&gt;alluring&lt;/em&gt; would imply the vase was so nice that it pulled me into the room. It's not a terrible word, but it's not a great word, either, and I don't think that downvoting a mediocre suggestion is necessarily a bad thing. As for &lt;em&gt;swift&lt;/em&gt;, your answer completely ignores the fact that &lt;em&gt;swift&lt;/em&gt; has a fairly common contemporary usage that means &quot;a blunder&quot;, and the phrase &lt;em&gt;That was real swift&lt;/em&gt; might not be referring to a speedy action at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your description of &quot;It's work,&quot; it might have been a mistake to put the following in bold print:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the thing that is being talked about 'it' - is work ; meaning 'it' is an occupation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not necessarily true! I'll grant you, you explained it well in your next sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More idiomatically this phrase would mean it requires some effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by putting one part in bold and the other in plain text, some might find your answer misleading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I don't think a downvoter needs to justify every downvote, nor am I saying that every downvote is cast for a good reason. But I am saying that some downvotes &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; case for legitimate reasons, and sometimes the onus is on you to figure out why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a footnote, I didn't downvote any of these answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T10:47:05.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-07T11:52:19.990" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember seeing comments against answers advising users that they can delete their own posts (regardless of reason). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I check my own answers, I do see a &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; option; however, when I hover the mouse pointer over it, I see a message &quot;vote to delete this post&quot;. I don't want to end up downvoting my own answer in a &lt;em&gt;failed&lt;/em&gt; attempt to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple search did not help me, so the closest &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; information I could find on SE that deleting own posts &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; allowed is in the &quot;badges&quot; section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example:&#xA;Peer Pressure - Delete own post with score of -3 or lower&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is possible for me to delete my own posts, right? Wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173817" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T11:52:19.990" Title="How to delete own answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9229" CreationDate="2016-08-08T13:25:58.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I post this answer to distil the other high-voted answers into a clear guideline and also to suggest a more suiting comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter an unreferenced answer to a single-word request (or similar) in the wild or in the first-posts or late-answers queue, flag for deletion &lt;em&gt;(not an answer&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;very low quality).&lt;/em&gt; If you have more than 20 k reputation, additionally cast a delete vote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter an unreferenced answer to a single-word request (or similar) in the low-quality queue, choose &lt;em&gt;recommend deletion&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;delete.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In either case, consider editing a reference into the answer, in particular with new users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise and if nobody has already done so, leave a comment along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We appreciate your desire to help, but we’re looking for complete answers that provide explanation or back up. Please consider editing your answer to explain why it is right, ideally with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;. Unsupported answers will be deleted. (If your answer was deleted before you read this comment and no other answer made the same suggestion already, feel free to post an improved version of your answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For easy copying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We appreciate your desire to help, but we’re looking for complete answers that provide explanation or back up. Please consider [edit]ing your answer to explain why it is right, ideally with [references](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573). Unsupported answers will be deleted. (If your answer was deleted before you read this comment and no other answer made the same suggestion already, feel free to post an improved version of your answer.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt; will automatically be expanded to a link to edit the post.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T17:02:22.330" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-08T13:25:58.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:02:28.403" Score="4" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2016 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T20:02:28.403" Title="2016 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-08T20:02:28.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:19:55.150" Score="14" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates. This is the same as we've done in previous years. It will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9291/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, August 15th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T21:13:18.607" Title="2016 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:19:55.150" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T20:19:55.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:53:06.753" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T20:53:06.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T22:00:39.877" Score="42" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a display problem on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-341797&quot;&gt;the current election page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Information overlaps the &quot;user card&quot; and hurts legibility.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare (bad):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7pvza.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Bad CSS&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7pvza.png&quot; alt=&quot;Bad CSS&quot; title=&quot;Bad CSS&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To better from &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/election/1?tab=nomination#post-36875&quot;&gt;the current Philosophy election&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CHVqu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Good CSS&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CHVqu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Good CSS&quot; title=&quot;Good CSS&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this issue occurs on both Firefox and Chrome and has also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-341787&quot;&gt;been reported by TylerH, Kit&amp;nbsp;Z.&amp;nbsp;Fox, and Dronz&lt;/a&gt; (Linked nomination now deleted. ¿10K can see?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note the extra elements as pointed out by Marthaª, in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ne6Hg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Ugly CSS. Click for larger view.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ne6Hgm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ugly CSs&quot; title=&quot;Ugly CSS. Click for larger view.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are from &lt;a href=&quot;http://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/english/img/sprites-extra.svg?v=0d6e2bde6aea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the same sprite set (&lt;code&gt;sprites-extra.svg&lt;/code&gt;) as the &quot;user card&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FgU9Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Spritely spritzes. Click for larger view.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FgU9Yt.png&quot; alt=&quot;EL&amp;amp;U extras, sprite set&quot; title=&quot;Spritely spritzes. Click for larger view.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that the element, that contains the sprite, is not sized correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20655" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T20:39:41.527" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T20:39:41.527" Title="Election candidate statistics overlap candidate's user card, plus sprite CSS problem" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|election|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7201" CreationDate="2016-08-09T01:50:28.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt; (96 questions) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect-aspect&lt;/a&gt; (56 questions) remain separate and accumulating questions, even though they clearly refer to the same concept, if there is no consensus on whether to call it an aspect or tense, we should merge to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt; and make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/perfect-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;perfect-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;perfect-aspect&lt;/a&gt; the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T01:50:28.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-09T04:52:41.913" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T04:52:41.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-09T05:01:14.697" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T05:01:14.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-09T15:30:44.030" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else entirely&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T15:30:44.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T17:48:10.547" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does, after an argument or exchange of comments between two users is over, one user, finding that he was on wrong track, delete his comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With one user so deleting his comments, the comments of other user remain. The reader who has  not read the comments earlier (that is, when the comments of both sides were present on the site) finds the remaining comments unmeaning. He is simply at a loss what the remaining comments mean. He has no clue that some beads of the actual string which once consisted a complete whole with all the comments being present are missing and, that is why, the remaining beads do not make a sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it not advisable that a user be  restrained from deleting his comment(s), unless the other user also deltes his comment(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152093" LastEditorUserId="152093" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T16:24:41.627" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T16:24:41.627" Title="Advisibility of deletion of comment(s) by one user" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9249" CreationDate="2016-08-09T17:58:43.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral. They are not intended to be permanent. When a comment is found that is no longer relevant, such as the ones you describe, they can be flagged as obsolete for moderators to delete them. Leaving wrong comments up can be a recipe for misleading future readers who don't notice that they're wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T17:58:43.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9262" CreationDate="2016-08-09T20:30:07.707" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342023/word-for-clues-pictures-connected-by-threads-used-for-investigation&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (deleted since)it's a verbatim copy-paste of a question asked &lt;a href=&quot;http://ask.metafilter.com/175282/Does-this-investigative-process-have-a-name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;somewhere else&lt;/a&gt; 4 years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A law enforcement officer is investigating a case. The officer takes&#xA;  clues such as photographs and pieces of paper and pins them to a wall&#xA;  or cork board. Yarn or string is stretched between some of the pins to&#xA;  indicate a relationship between those clues. What is this&#xA;  investigative process or technique called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it does not seem to go against ELU rules, I feel uncomfortable that op did not reference the original source. It's dishonest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gut feeling would be to flag it for deletion (clicking &quot;other causes&quot; as suggested), but for what would be the reasoning for deleting exactly? How does it hurt ELU or anybody that a question was plagiarized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any argument for or against it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T14:52:11.997" Title="Reasons for or against deleting a question plagiarised from another site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:31:00.977" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T21:31:00.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9252" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:37:02.187" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: As for whether or not plagiarism hurts the site, I have three issues with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It's not good for the site. As you say, it's dishonest. It's taking credit for other people's work, and it makes us look bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I've often wondered if people who plagiarize questions verbatim are just trying to accumulate rep points. It doesn't feel like the question is based on an actual problem that they face. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) In cases where a good answer is already provided at the original site, why waste people's time here formulating an answer to a question that has already been adequately answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone thinks the question is interesting enough that it ought to be archived on ELU, that's fine, but at least paraphrase it, and point to the original to give credit where credit is due. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to flag it, why not flag it &quot;in need of moderator intervention,&quot; and let the mod team decide what to do from there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFRkw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFRkw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T16:35:05.913" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T16:35:05.913" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-10T00:11:42.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators have a limited set of powers normal users don't, such as writing the custom close reasons, editing (part) of the tour and on-topic/off-topic pages, and liaising with SE staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is something specific you would like to do to improve the site which you can't currently do through community moderation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-08-14T06:44:27.087" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T06:44:27.087" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9269" CreationDate="2016-08-10T01:22:03.007" Score="13" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is being closed, or has been closed as being unclear or lacking research, is it ethical to clarify and add substance to the question when your edit will make your answer plausible?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/339394/what-is-the-origin-of-man-on-the-spot/341412#341412&quot;&gt;What is the origin of &amp;quot;man on the spot&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm tempted to edit this question in hopes of reopening it, but it may be too self-serving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T00:32:21.067" Title="Is it ethical to edit a closed question when you think you have a good answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-10T06:01:16.003" Score="5" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;After recent debates here on Meta about the opportunity to elect new moderators I see that a decision has been made and, as they say, now the race is on to be elected. It is the first time I have a chance  to see how it works and I am impressed that a fair number of users have immediately proposed themselves as candidates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What strikes me is that the current  candidates are either experienced high-rep users or low-rep user with a limited or unclear contribution to ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that no real prerequisites are necessary to be a candidate and potentially become a ELU moderator, such as a minimum level or reputations and a  measurable  participation in ELU activities which often generates badges etc. Much of the preferences will likely be based on &quot;I am a good guy and I will be a good moderator, just trust me&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it so? or is it just a wrong impression from an inexperienced  user like me? &#xA;While I may express a preference on an experienced user looking at their  activities on the site,  what should I think about the less expressed ones, and there are quite a few on the list, whose activities are still limited and standard of behaviour  is still to be proved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T02:58:25.103" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T11:49:51.043" Title="And finally the race is on" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-10T09:45:50.890" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:45:50.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3364" CreationDate="2016-08-10T10:02:25.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Etiquette, manners, and politeness&quot; are on topic here if we are talking about &lt;em&gt;speech,&lt;/em&gt; hence the English language. &quot;Who cares?&quot; falls into that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is off topic if we talk about &lt;em&gt;actions&lt;/em&gt; such as which fork to pick up, when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T10:02:25.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9252" CreationDate="2016-08-10T13:00:44.617" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I typed up an answer for this, but unfortunately, it seems that the question has already been removed.  Judging from OP's reluctance to flag it 1 hour ago and JR's screenshot, I'm guessing it was him.  This is disturbing on a moral front.  This question was intended to discuss whether the question in question should be flagged.  It was not intended for others to flag it without thought.  I am disappointed in this outcome, as I would have liked to see the answer to the question, if there was one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here was the answer I had:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't flag it because it's not a substantial theft.  Yes, that is subjective, but there's no ideal way to approach this.  It's not creative property; it's merely describing a situation.  Think of Wikipedia, which is all released freely and legally permitted to quote without sourcing.  Although this is frowned upon socially, there'd be no basis on which to report it.  I'd treat this question in the same way, although I am not aware of metafilter's policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if the question was not answered on another site, and the reader wanted an answer, all he can do is repost it elsewhere.  It would be fine if he sourced it, but it would simply add irrelevant information to the post and make people visit another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it is always good to create new discussion, and that's all I see here, no mal-intentioned plagiarism.  I find that a flag would be frivolous and would halt/remove discussion that may have led somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190601" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T13:00:44.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9252" CreationDate="2016-08-10T14:08:23.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why you would flag the question is to help maintain the quality of the questions on the site (and tangentially our community's reputation). If a poster is unable to phrase their question in their own words, they are probably unable to respond to requests for clarification or otherwise engage with their question and the folks answering the question. I would see it as an attempt to farm reputation, which I think should be discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may very well be ethical and legal concerns, but I think they are secondary concerns. What if the original author comes to EL&amp;amp;U and finds their question &quot;stolen&quot; word for word? Do you think they'll want to be a contributing member of the community? Who would likely be the more valuable member of the community - the original author or the plagiarizer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question had referenced that question and the poster added &quot;I found this interesting question and it didn't have any suitable answers on the other site - I did this research but I still couldn't find anything.&quot; I think it would be perfectly fine to leave it. Most free community sites require you to allow certain uses of your contributions, so it is different from, for example, plagiarizing a self-published blog. You still have to attribute the content in most licenses though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T14:08:23.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9257" CreationDate="2016-08-10T14:17:34.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voters are not asked to rank all candidates from best to worst. In the final round of election, one only needs to identify 3 worthy candidates. If you don't see any reason why someone would make a good moderator, then you are probably not going to put them among those 3, and that's the end of the story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does it make sense to have candidates whose low-reps and limited contribution to ELU make it objectively difficult express an opinion on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense to have a process that allows many site users to nominate themselves. Perhaps they should not, but they should be able to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much any activity on the Internet has some background noise; elections are no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T14:17:34.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9265" CreationDate="2016-08-10T14:25:00.163" Score="9" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following topics are off-topic by definition of the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;Is this right?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests&#xA;  &quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the translation tag info for details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet there is only the off-topic flag for proofreading, not for the other ones, which only leaves blatantly off-topic. Although that is not really true either most of the times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion these six points as defined in the help center should be available as flagging options. It reduces both the time the moderator reviewing the flag (I guess) as well as the time the person who flags needs to decide. I know that that problem disappears for people who can actually vote to close, but for us lowly &amp;lt;3k rep users that would be a valuable addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4109/missing-off-topic-flagging-options&quot;&gt;same idea&lt;/a&gt; has already been floated a few years ago but without any real responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is still not wanted I am interesting what one should flag those questions with? Are they all &lt;strong&gt;blatantly off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; although the certainly have something to do with the English language, just not in the scope of this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I pick something more or less at random from the other reasons? Do I just ignore it and leave it for people with the reputation to close right away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T15:19:43.090" Title="Why are there not all Off-Topic reason flags?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9264" CreationDate="2016-08-10T14:36:38.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a limit to the number of custom close reasons, so we have to choose which are the most frequent. Writing advice is much less common than proofreading requests, for example, so proofreading requests get the custom close reason. When someone asks a writing advice question then we can always give a manual close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T15:19:43.090" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T15:19:43.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9268" CreationDate="2016-08-10T16:43:37.287" Score="-1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, when voting to close a question because &lt;em&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered&lt;/em&gt;, you have to go through the option &lt;em&gt;off topic because&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a question without information on how it should be used is off-topic, I think it is unclear. We have a separate close reason for &lt;em&gt;not clear what you are asking&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So surely the &lt;em&gt;must include information&lt;/em&gt; option should be a subset of &lt;em&gt;not clear what you are asking&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T23:46:05.897" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T23:46:05.897" Title="Should &quot;information required&quot; be part of &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9256" CreationDate="2016-08-10T18:31:18.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;As a general rule&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions can be edited by anyone because we expect the community to help out to improve questions. Therefore, if your edit improves the question, it is hard to argue that doing so is unethical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;As a matter of topicality&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic things usually cannot be edited into shape. However, sometimes it is possible. A question closed as &quot;proofreading&quot;, where the OP is essentially uttering a concern about some grammar point, might be editable into a question about that grammar point. This type of edit is rarely possible, and should be attempted with care, because it's not always clear how to reformulate the question into an on-topic question while preserving the OP's intent. Maybe the sample sentence has an interesting use of auxilliaries but the OP was really worried about &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; and didn't explain themselves properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question , er, in question, is an example of the latter case. The OP didn't give enough detail about what they are asking about and another user inferred it and filled it in. It's not obvious to me that the filled-in content is right or wrong. I'd consider this example borderline. One of the things missing from the OP's question is an example of the phrase in context. Probably the edit is referring the same sense of the phrase as the OP but I can't say for sure. However, intent being a part of ethics, I'd argue that this edit is acceptable until the OP shows up to speak for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T18:31:18.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9266" CreationDate="2016-08-10T18:44:02.250" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Off-topic&quot; is very, very wide!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything which is explicitly off-topic, or even not on the &quot;on-topic&quot; list, is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's OK to say that questions which don't adhere to the published guidelines as stated in question tags are off-topic as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag guidance for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; is very explicit, having undergone a number of revisions to improve it over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question doesn't meet the tag guidelines for a single-word request, it's fine to mark it as off-topic: single-word requests must meet the guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite apart from the technical limitations: custom close reasons can only go under &quot;off-topic&quot;, so that's where this one is. In choosing the custom close reasons (again, over a number of years), the most common are: lack of research or too basic; proof-reading; incomplete SWR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T18:44:02.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9256" CreationDate="2016-08-10T23:29:13.980" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the exchange between curiousdannii and ColleenV beneath the original question indicates, one area of controversy involves attempts to rescue questions that were closed—or are on the verge of being closed—on grounds that they do not show any signs of prior research effort by the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of very active question reviewers on this site feel strongly that a question's lack of evident research effort should be an absolute bar to its being answered—that upon seeing such a question, a would-be answerer should not even consider whether it may be interesting and worth trying to answer: If it doesn't show research effort &lt;strong&gt;as originally posted&lt;/strong&gt; it should be removed, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other site participants will unhesitatingly embrace a potentially interesting question, regardless of whether the question's poster has satisfied the threshold research effort requirement. I'm one of those. To me, there aren't so many interesting questions at EL&amp;amp;U of a summer's day that I'm okay with automatically rejecting unresearched questions that might reward investigation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never been a fan of the &quot;closed for lack of research effort&quot; rationale. I think that it exists as a close reason mainly because it offers a convenient way to deal with questions that don't quite fit into a demonstrable &quot;closed as general reference&quot; pigeonhole—either because the research required to find the answer involves a Google search (and there is a years-long dispute at this site over whether Google search results are equivalent to general-reference information, at least in some cases) or because the close-voter isn't sure where to find the answer but feels sure that it wouldn't be hard to do. Alternatively, it offers a simple way to filter out some of the many questions EL&amp;amp;U receives every day, without having to consider their merits more than superficially. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we treat the close reason at face value, of course, once a question does show at least a modicum of research effort, the formal argument for closing for lack of research effort collapses. Any insistence that the showing of research must be done by the original poster is, to me, an acknowledgment that the &quot;show research&quot; requirement is in place simply as an excuse to reject questions mechanically, not as a way to ensure that they ask something at least moderately difficult to answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This came up only yesterday in connection with a question that, as asked, showed no research effort but that I nevertheless thought was interesting enough to be worth looking into. The question had already drawn one or two close votes before I posted the results of my research as an answer; and after I posted the answer, the question drew two more close votes—and a commenter admonished me that I &quot;really shouldn't be answering such blatantly unresearched questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an effort to save the question (and answer), I added a bit of previously uncited research to the question. As a result, the question now shows some research independent of the answer I posted. If the question had been submitted originally in its current form, I doubt that anyone would have claimed that it didn't show adequate prior research. But I daresay that some close voters may feel that by adding research to the question, I was cheating, and that the spirit of the requirement demands that the research be done before the question is posted and that it be done by the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't agree. What matters is what is in the question—not who put it there. If a question is objectively improved by an editing alteration or addition, who or what is victimized thereby—the original poster, whose name is now associated with content he or she didn't write? That's what the rollback option is for. The integrity of a Q&amp;amp;A system that rests on the need for questions to persist in their state of primeval faultiness so that close-voters can remove them more efficiently? Then why does anyone other than the OP have the ability to edit the OP's question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an original question has little or no substance, its formal flaws are not worth addressing. But if, with a little effort, you can make the question useful to the site, it seems short-sighted to disqualify it on purely technical grounds. My advice is to look to the long-term value of a question and its answers, and to try to make promoting that long-term value your primary concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T23:29:13.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9256" CreationDate="2016-08-11T00:32:21.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; answer, I don't see any reason to disagree with reopening the question. As an asker of questions myself, I know the satisfaction of finding an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a poor answer however, it's probably best to leave the question alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T00:32:21.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-11T13:36:56.877" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T02:13:24.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T02:13:24.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9273" CreationDate="2016-08-11T14:16:17.093" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342273/are-whores-and-horse-homophonic/342281#342281&quot;&gt;Are &amp;quot;whores&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;horse&amp;quot; homophones?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question linked to above is interesting for phoneticians and other linguists because, surprisingly perhaps, there is very unlikely to be any difference in voicing in the last segments of the words &lt;em&gt;whores&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt; despite what we think our ears are telling us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason the question is noteworthy because it raises the issue of how we are able to differentiate between the two words. And that is a story for linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help reopen this question if you have sufficient rep, please? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit note: This question is now reopened. Thank you to the reopen voters. I think the question's potentially very useful for readers and for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T01:06:30.223" Title="Can we reopen this question, please?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9272" CreationDate="2016-08-11T14:46:52.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it may not have seemed such to its closers, this is an interesting question because of how illustrative it is of how native speakers of one language can have trouble with an L2 language when the phoneme set of their L1 doesn’t perfectly align with the one they’re learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve voted to reöpen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T00:32:46.187" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T00:32:46.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-11T19:23:49.553" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just closevoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342333/understanding-figurative-meaning-of-a-sentence#342333&quot;&gt;Understanding figurative meaning of a sentence?&lt;/a&gt; because the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question text was virtually unintelligible. I think you need high rep to see that original, so I'll just reproduce it here because it's since been extensively edited...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For exmaple Suicide Squad’ Chases Nihilistic Swagger . Here i looked for the word Nihilistic shows-the belief that traditional morals, ideas, beliefs, etc., have no worth or value and then swagger its refer-a very confident and typically arrogant or aggressive gait or manner. but the actual meaning maybe something else . Please need help. How could i solve my problem . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That's exactly how it was!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really had &lt;em&gt;no idea&lt;/em&gt; what was being asked when I closevoted. Presumably I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have worked it out (@P. Obertelli obviously did, in order to do all that laborious reformatting and error correction! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as I saw the revised version, I immediately &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;retracted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; my closevote - because it was really obvious &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt; could see a meaningful question there, even though I myself hadn't actually looked at it long enough to see &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what that question was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having (fairly and dutifully, I thought) retracted my closevote, I sat back and read the question fully. I realised straight away that the text as presented didn't mean anything without context (and not knowing of the movie, I couldn't imagine what that context might be). But I knew I couldn't retract my closevote, so I Googled the source thinking to helpfully comment with a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I realise that &lt;em&gt;Suicide Squad&lt;/em&gt; is a movie about which the relevant &lt;em&gt;NY Times&lt;/em&gt; review says &lt;em&gt;it chases after the &lt;strong&gt;nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool”&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy”&lt;/strong&gt; but trips over its own feet.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cutting to the chase, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;my problem is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; given the OP &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; have had that context (after all, he can only have read those words &lt;em&gt;in that review&lt;/em&gt;) I now find myself strongly motivated to close for lack of prior research (i.e. - &lt;em&gt;Read the other words in the source text!&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it my fault I retracted in haste, and must I now repent at leisure? Or is there any support for my &lt;em&gt;feature request?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Could closevote ability be reinstated after retracting at least &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; types of closevote?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Specifically, obviously, in my situation where I feel unjustifiably restricted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T11:28:41.433" Title="Retracting &quot;Unclear what you're asking&quot; closevote" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3198" CreationDate="2016-08-12T09:13:25.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvote correct answers to low-quality and off-topic questions in some circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I try to base my votes on the tooltip explanation: upvotes are for useful answers, downvotes are for answers that are not useful or that are in some way more harmful than helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s hard to write a useful answer to a bad question. (In fact, I would say that’s the best way to define bad questions.) But it’s not impossible. A useful answer to a bad question should not be downvoted. Ideally, the question can be edited to improve it or make it on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think all correct answers are useful, though. Here are some circumstances where I might downvote a correct but unimpressive answer to a low-quality, off-topic question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a question that is closed for being clearly general reference gets an answer that is just a block quote from one of the major free online dictionaries. It's not useful to replicate a dictionary on this site. We aren't professional lexicographers: a real dictionary is a more useful resource than this site for answering basic questions about pronunciation, etymology, or meaning, and answers that copy this information piecemeal will just end up distracting or wasting the time of people who comes across them as search results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a single word request question that is closed for being overly vague and not giving enough information about how the word will be used gets an answer suggesting a word that is technically correct, or correct under one interpretation of the question, but that (in my opinion) doesn’t have the right connotations, is incorrect under another plausible interpretation of the question, or belongs to the wrong register of the language. This is definitely more subjective. I’m more likely to downvote an answer like this if there are many other answers to the question, since I think that in this situation votes of any kind generally help to sort answers by usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different people vote in different ways, and that's fine. The Stack Exchange system is set up to work with a certain level of disagreement. This is the way I vote, but I only can vote once per post, so if enough other people disagree with me, the answer may end up with a positive score. I do like to leave a comment so that even if there is a disagreement, people will at least know what it is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this answer helped you understand why some people might downvote a correct answer to a question that is basic and off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some other relevant posts, some pertaining to ELU specifically and others to other network sites: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1757/people-answering-off-topic-questions-what-should-we-do/1761#1761&quot;&gt;People answering off-topic questions: What should we do?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-quality-is-dropping-on-stack-overflow/252531#252531&quot;&gt;Question quality is dropping on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/114792/down-voting-correct-answers-and-community-values-vs-individual-decisions&quot;&gt;Down voting correct answers, and community values vs. individual decisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:13:25.253" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T09:33:24.687" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, somebody posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/342398/91730&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;afterclap means an unexpected, usually unwanted, repercussion of or sequel to an affair which had been thought to be closed from collins dictionary. Don't forget to check out &lt;em&gt;{website link that I won't repeat here because it shouldn't be preserved}&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially edited out the website, because I thought that it was &lt;em&gt;irrelevant&lt;/em&gt;, but that there was a genuine attempt to answer the question (although with a VLQ answer). I then realised that the username partially matched the website link, so used a custom flag to say &quot;maybe this is spam&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My edit was then rolled back, with a comment from curiousdannii saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@AndyT Don't edit out spam. It needs to remain so that other people will see it and flag it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was news to me. I'd have thought hiding the spam was more important, and that a mod would see the flag and delete it soon enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should spam be edited out as well as flagged? Or flagged and left so that others can see and flag it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:33:24.687" Title="Should spam be edited out as well as flagged?" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-08-12T09:52:35.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T10:09:16.430" Score="11" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8215/are-low-quality-questions-and-answers-here-to-stay?cb=1&quot;&gt;Josh61's idea&lt;/a&gt; caused me to have my own idea for how we (try to) stop new users posting low quality questions: compulsory multiple choice quiz!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very easy for anyone to ignore the guidance on the right hand side when posting your first question, just as it's easy to ignore a video. But if there is a compulsory multiple choice quiz, then they &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to read it. (Or, at least, it being the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing on their screen, and requiring input, there's a much higher chance of them reading it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My implementation concept is this: when a new user (maybe someone with 10 or less rep?) clicks &amp;quot;Post Your Question&amp;quot; they get taken to a page which says (bullet points represent radio buttons):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you provided as much detail as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you included any research (e.g. what a dictionary or thesaurus has said) in your question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If they have selected a tag which has additional requirements, there would be additional questions. e.g. if they select [single-word-requests] there would be an additional question of &amp;quot;Have you provided an example phrase?&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they click &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot; to all, it proceeds to post the question. If they click &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; to any, they get a screen showing extended guidance on that subject, and a &amp;quot;Edit Your Question&amp;quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes there will be people who click &amp;quot;edit your question&amp;quot;, do no editing, and just select &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot; to all to make their question get posted. But, hopefully, it would improve a significant proportion of first time questions &lt;em&gt;by making sure that people have read the guidance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T04:14:49.503" Title="Hoop-jumping for new users: multiple choice quiz!" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7563" CreationDate="2016-08-12T10:59:01.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I love this idea. SE Devs should definitely add it. Quick and easy, and should be harder to ignore than the &quot;How to ask&quot; (which is off to the side).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T19:09:06.417" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T19:09:06.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T18:05:23.417" Score="14" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/341833/the-origin-of-knickers-in-a-knot-and-knickers-in-a-twist&quot;&gt;The origin of &amp;quot;knickers in a knot&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;knickers in a twist&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; was closed for lack of research. I have added a paragraph to the question pointing out that in a reputable and fairly recent dictionary of idioms (the 1998 &lt;em&gt;Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms&lt;/em&gt;) the entry for the phrases that the poster asks about does not answer the poster's question about their exact origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question now shows some research, I think it ought not remain closed for not showing research. Please consider voting to reopen it. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T23:54:56.647" Title="Reopen request following addition of research results" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9277" CreationDate="2016-08-13T03:14:24.793" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the spirit of your idea, but I don't know how effective it would be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not hard to imagine users checking ‘Yes’ to the first question, even if their questions are very scant on details. (It just seems like the &quot;right&quot; box to check, whether it's true or not.) The second question might provide a nudge in the right direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something like this were implemented, it might be nice to include the consequences of what could happen if this guidance isn't followed – maybe something that reads like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: Questions that fail to provide sufficient context or demonstrate prior research may be downvoted or closed.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T03:14:24.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9284" CreationDate="2016-08-13T18:23:38.250" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I saw a question that (I believe) was valid, but it had -2 rep. Has OP committed some Stack Exchange faux pas? Why was OP downvoted? &#xA;(here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342627/comma-before-only-to&quot;&gt;Comma before &amp;#39;only to&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the single quotes used to quote &quot;only to&quot;, I see no problem with this question. The Help Center wasn't particularly helpful; it doesn't make any reference to downvoting questions (only saying that, through voting, &quot;good answers will rise to the top&quot; and implying that bad answers are meant to be downvoted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for my ignorance of what may seem like common knowledge; I'm pretty new here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tony&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T00:01:06.117" Title="What does it mean to be downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9281" CreationDate="2016-08-14T00:01:06.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tool tip on the downvote button for questions says &quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful (click again to undo)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably most questions are downvoted when they show a lack of research effort. That definitely applies to the question you linked to. In fact it is highly likely that it will be closed for lacking research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T00:01:06.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-14T06:52:08.393" Score="-16" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;By fiat or tradition or something, all candidates for moderator are self-nominated. What could possibly go wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, first of all, there's the rampant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dunning Kruger&lt;/a&gt; syndrome, in which the skills of the sufferers are inversely proportional to their confidence in their illusory skill. This explains the survey results that show that 80% of people surveyed on a topic think they're in the top 20% of experts in that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me hasten to add that this is a societal issue (at  least in the US), and not one particular to ELU. And while I'm hastening to add things, let me also say that this isn't directed to anyone in particular in this year's list of hopefuls and that I include myself as possibly infected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is that those striving to attain authority over others thereby offer prima facie evidence that they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that authority. This applies to the police, the military, the political apparat, and moderators of online forums. Perhaps all will turn out for the best, but by my count more than half the self-nominees are card-carrying members of the CPVPV, and there's at least one I once regarded as a stalker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other ways of selecting moderators, but I don't know of better ways given that the gentle con of the StackExchange business plan is based on convincing people to exchange their time, effort, and expertise for the nugatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the election results be streamed live this year? I, for one, can't wait to hear the stirring words &quot;May I have the envelope, please.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~~~~~~~~&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;... unclear what you're asking. Please edit your question.&quot; OK, I don't mind if I do. First, I call nonsense. Not least because this isn't &lt;em&gt;Jeopardy&lt;/em&gt;. Many discussion topics do not appear as questions, especially when it comes to discussing the mechanics of keeping out the riff-raff. We've heard calls for forcing newcomers watch a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8215/are-low-quality-questions-and-answers-here-to-stay&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt;, requiring them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8191/can-we-require-a-new-user-to-register-before-posting&quot;&gt;register&lt;/a&gt;, and making them post bond before they can post questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(OK, I made that last one up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all of a sudden, when it comes to a discussion of the mechanics of moderator selection, things become so murky the &quot;question&quot; needs to be put on hold. At least in the opinion of one moderator, one candidate for moderator, and one other who seems eminently qualified for the position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly the kind of behavior I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it clear yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now maybe this is pointless to discuss because the procedure is set in stone system wide. And maybe it's fair to criticize me for not proposing alternatives. (Sorry, I don't have any. I've dealt with one other site in which the moderators groom high-rep users for an invitation to join their circle. I didn't think that worked any better.) But these are different considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But thanks for making my point for me. Well played!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T21:50:50.247" Title="2016 Moderator Election. Meh" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="40" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9240" CreationDate="2016-08-15T02:54:31.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users appear to approach any well-meaning comment as an invitation to a duel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T21:13:18.607" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T21:13:18.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9285" CreationDate="2016-08-15T13:48:21.843" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your first question, there are problems with self-nomination, as you yourself have conveniently summarized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you will forgive me if I take umbrage to your claim that anyone who would self-nominate is unqualified for the post. You will recall that &lt;em&gt;all eight&lt;/em&gt; of the current moderation team self-nominated for the position, including nohat (who was previously appointed as pro tem) and waiwai (who was appointed when Kosmonaut left). I think the moderation team is doing a good job. I haven't heard anything to the contrary recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, the issue with self-nomination is that there are many community members out there who are diligent and kind and have good instincts for moderation -- but think that moderation isn't something they are qualified for. Let me tell you this: You don't have to be high-rep to be a good mod. You don't have to be an expert in English. You don't have to devote your entire day (or life) to moderation. Here's what you should look for in a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;patience&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an ability to de-escalate a heated situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;equanimity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an ability to see through different styles of communication to recognize what the core of the issue is -- that means letting people &quot;berate&quot; you or &quot;snark at&quot; you or use crappy punctuation and poor grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if we change the system to find other ways of nominating moderators, then the ones who are in it for the power trip or to win the game of internet points will just adjust their behavior to game the new system. That's a systemic problem and not one we're going to solve by clever coding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your next question, the results aren't streamed live but they are posted as immediately as it takes for the algorithm to run. Often, community members who frequent chat will wait in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/43655/2016-english-language-moderator-election&quot;&gt;election chat room&lt;/a&gt; for the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for your last question ('is it clear yet?'), no, I don't think so, but I am interested to see how others will respond to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T13:48:21.843" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6672" CreationDate="2016-08-15T15:35:07.970" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/233246/revisions&quot;&gt;edit history shows that the original question was vague&lt;/a&gt;. The duplicate it was closed at answers the question as originally asked. Subsequent edits clarified the question and it was re-opened. This is how the site is meant to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T15:35:07.970" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9285" CreationDate="2016-08-15T17:23:08.697" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, first of all, there's the rampant Dunning Kruger syndrome,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators aren't claiming exclusive domain over all the knowledge posted to this site, so your understanding of Dunning-Kruger seems rampantly misapplied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is that &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; on this site shares in the (small 'm') moderator responsibilities, so the tools to curate this content become increasing available based on your success in posting and managing that content. A few users volunteer their time for a few administrative duties that require a degree of &quot;trust&quot; to carry them out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip; those striving to attain authority over others thereby offer &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; evidence that they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why it's an &lt;em&gt;election&lt;/em&gt; and not a political &lt;em&gt;coup.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention that there are other ways of selecting moderators, but don't actually mention them in this post; fair enough. But saying folks who choose to become police or join the military or the political apparat need not apply&amp;hellip; that leaves birth right and compulsory enlistment through conscription. Since neither of those solutions seem likely, decrying that you don't like an election of appointees or volunteers does not seem terribly useful&amp;hellip; or prescriptive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T20:02:34.030" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T20:02:34.030" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T20:06:10.487" Score="23" ViewCount="1036" Body="&lt;p&gt;Candidate answers, sorted by time of completion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9297/8360&quot;&gt;WBT&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9298/8360&quot;&gt;sumelic&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9303/142322&quot;&gt;Lawrence&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9295/8360&quot;&gt;NVZ&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9307/2085&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9305/16052&quot;&gt;choster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9311/59258&quot;&gt;curiousdannii&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9354/50044&quot;&gt;MετάEd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9240/2016-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Not every question was compiled - as noted, we only selected the top 8 questions as submitted by the community, plus 2 pre-set questions from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/6051db73-d7e8-4eb2-94cc-28ce7ba0dc96/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;. Oh, and please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&quot;? &quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loath to censor?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T18:34:18.107" Title="2016 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9285" CreationDate="2016-08-15T20:06:33.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose I may not have anything to say that is useful or detailed enough to warrant a response-answer, but I did suggest re-opening the topic, so I feel quixotically obliged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To respond to your last question first, because it's low-hanging fruit, your topic-question never seemed unclear to me. You included a topic paragraph and a topic question, by gum, so why should it be considered unclear? It's true the question was a bit overblown, but that blowsiness (the rhetorical &quot;possibly&quot;) was amusing though cliched, and would have been easily overlooked even if I didn't find the humor sympathetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clarity of the topic was further crystalized by the details you provided, details that outlined precisely what you suppose could and does go wrong with self-nomination systems. I hope you won't object if I summarize my understanding of your suppositions, although I will inevitably misrepresent (to those who only read the words and clauses they can understand without effort) your position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who nominate themselves for the duties of moderator at ELU may or may not be up to the task, but will invariably be confident that they are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who nominate etc., by so doing, offer superficial (&lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt;) evidence they're unfit for the duties for reasons other than or in addition to their confidence etc., as mentioned in 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before going on, I have to submit that neither of those points are limiting. The first succeeds when there is a happy correspondence between confidence and ability (however much that correspondence may be purely fortuitous); the second succeeds when the superficial evidence fails to reflect the factual case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should hasten to add (as long as we're hastening to add things), that you didn't in my interpretation rule out that self-nomination could succeed when it came to selecting moderators. You simply seemed to find it unlikely or at least chancy that good moderators would rise to the top using a self-nomination process, and suggested there might be a better way, unknown to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's this last that inspires my response. I'm by no means an expert on political matters, having assiduously avoided them for most of my life, perhaps due to a primal awareness of my inaptitude and innate inability. However, I do have some crude opinions based on what little I know, and will risk my footing in the quagmire of sewage I must navigate to express those opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The political landscape has been somewhat remodeled in the last 35 years or so by the advent of refined communications mechanisms (for example, the web). My knowledge, and so my opinions, have been hard-pressed to integrate the changes so wrought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've heard it suggested, and tend to agree, that the most viable known alternative to democratic systems, benevolent dictatorship, is indeed superior&amp;mdash;but is neither sustainable nor predeterminable...that is, a benevolent dictatorship cannot be systematically installed, nor can it be systematically sustained once installed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may well be that the changes wrought by the refinement of communication mechanisms in recent years lend themselves to an effective hybridization of democratic and benevolent dictatorship systems. It might even be that the Stackexchange microcosm is such a hybrid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having wandered so far afield, and offered my tentative, ignorant suggestions, it has become obvious what a legitimate 'closure' of your 'question' would look like. You mentioned it yourself: the 'question' might be better suited to StackExchange meta (supposing it has not already been discussed there), or perhaps, acknowledging that the time is ripe now for the discussion &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, on one or more of the meta politics or philosophy StackExchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T21:50:50.247" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T21:50:50.247" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T20:37:16.000" Score="-3" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;In particular I am concerned about the comments on (removed). Some of the comments pointed out that the answer was off base. The number of comments grew quite lengthy and so a moderator indiscriminately removed all the comments and put them in chat, with the end result being that the answer ostensibly looks like an excellent answer from the high vote count and lack of comments saying otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't moderators abstain from removing such valuable comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20755" LastEditorUserId="20755" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T01:22:17.847" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T01:22:17.847" Title="Moderators removing valuable comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9293" CreationDate="2016-08-15T20:50:54.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect your 'question' here will soon be closed as a duplicate. Misunderstanding of the answer you linked aside, comments at ELU (and, I presume, elsewhere on StackExchange sites) are explicitly ephemera, subject to removal at any time. So the answer is no: moderators should use their best judgement when removing comments, but I suspect the relative value of the comments is not much of a consideration, because that value is highly subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you've cited, if the comments were truly valuable, they could've and should've been reworked into an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the help page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;&quot;Comments are temporary &quot;Post-It&quot; notes left on a question or answer.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Note the &quot;temporary&quot;. Also, from the same page: &quot;Comments are not recommended for any of the following: .... Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this meta question and its answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8211/why-was-one-of-my-comments-deleted-on-this-question-also-request-to-add-a-fea&quot;&gt;Why was one of my comments deleted on this question? (also, request to add a feature to the site to be notified of post and comment deletions)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta question and answer may also be useful: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2964/why-are-my-comments-deleted&quot;&gt;Why are my comments deleted?&lt;/a&gt;. The answer is provided by a moderator, and is in my opinion more cogent and complete than the answer given for the first meta question I linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer at the first meta question I linked notes, mistakenly in my opinion, that comments &quot;do not add value to the site&quot;. In my experience on this and other StackExchange sites, comments add the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; value available, but my opinion is pragmatic rather than theoretic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T21:56:03.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-16T00:06:53.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NVZ&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU’s a beauty, and a beautiful thing’s never perfect. Amount of questions incoming often exceeds reviewers’ capacity, and some bad questions stay open. Interestingness of a closed question is subjective. Let those interested, edit to improve, and more will chip in to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More volunteers to the review queues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gold-tag-badged users timely casting weighted close-votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible feature-requests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weighted close-votes for efficient reviewers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More close-votes for efficient reviewers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optional short intro video for new users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tools to detect and deal with robo-reviewers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are being discussed network-wide and have many drawbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Started off with bad posts, but I got more positive criticism than confusing drive-by downvotes, and now I’m here. By now I've seen 2k new users. Most never revisit, sign up, absorb feedback, and can’t even differentiate ELU from other English forums. We can’t force users to stay, and I’ve not seen them pushed away either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No pressure, no diamonds&amp;quot;, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, changing English.SE to ELU.SE and ELL.SE to English.SE, could significantly minimize posts from English learners. But that’d be a huge undertaking involving more complications than benefits. Hope someday such a feature-request succeeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d consult experienced mods before big decisions. I could go easy on new users while I Dark Knight the crap out of high-rep repeat offenders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I see no major concern. It’s not up to just the mods, but the community as a whole to help out new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speedread, and prefer concise posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acceptable short answer:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Bk7D.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Bk7D.png&quot; alt=&quot;Acceptable short answer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is informative i.e. has sources, explanation and examples, defines the relevant words, and is precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unacceptable short answer:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ApMVY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ApMVY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Unacceptable short answer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be obvious to native speakers, but not to most others. How it got upvoted is beyond me. Similar answers by new users are usually shot on sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow-up to Q3. What if the low quality answer is, objectively speaking, correct, and it is highly upvoted? Would you delete it if the user was a native speaker and/or had a high rep? Would you expect lower rep users to edit the answer; e.g. provide a dictionary link and definition? — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9291/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire?answertab=oldest#comment36174_9295&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if they answer the question correctly, low-quality answers are usually removed by users and mods, eventually. If, somehow, such a low-quality answer from a high-rep user reaches the Hot Network Questions and gets a hundred upvotes, and still remains a VLQ, I think it'd be up to a mod to remove that answer when it's certain that the owner won't edit to improve it. Or maybe, depending on the answer's usefulness, I may edit it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, changing English.SE to ELU.SE and ELL.SE to English.SE, could significantly minimize posts from English learners. But that’d be a huge undertaking involving more complications than benefits. Hope someday such a feature-request succeeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are deployed to keep order, not to make policies. It’s up to the community to decide what needs to be done and a moderator must only enforce cooperation among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community decides the fate of unresearched and off-topic questions using tools they have. A mod has to fairly intervene only when these groups stir up trouble. I will stay neutral and objective when I’m a mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as a regular user, my thoughts are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Littered sites attract more litter (e.g. Yahoo! Answers).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It’s best to help out new users, who post bad questions, by comments, not answers. It’d prevent them accepting a possibly bad answer, thereby allowing speedy automatic deletions of such questions, and reduced review queues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer an ELU with more quality than quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, users who post “answers in comments”, know that comments are short-lived and don’t add to rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a “partial answer in comments” have remained under an on-topic question for a reasonable time, it’s expected of others to write up a full answer, giving credit where it’s due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “partial answer in comments” is usually very constructive and does not need to be flagged as offensive, obsolete, or too chatty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I post them, too. My reasons often include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question is unresearched or off-topic and deserves no answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lack of time or resources for a full answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unsure about an answer and await feedback.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP should take the hint and do some research themselves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the flags are legit, I’d defuse the situation with comments or private message, acknowledge the user’s valuable contributions, and encourage them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;have fun, and be good to each other&lt;/a&gt;. If things escalate further, I’d consult with mods and take necessary action. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Last resort, I’d call in &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/FdWJ-Njeaig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tony Stark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d study the said post. If a mod’s action appears odd, I’d be inclined to discuss it with them in private, without stepping on their toes. For serious issues, I’d seek other mods’ views or community consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &amp;quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&amp;quot;? &amp;quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&amp;quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions from learners are often too basic, and therefore closed or, better yet, migrated to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU’s gems often write answers so beautiful, that it saves such questions from the gallows. They even help flesh out such questions to fit ELU better. This, IMHO, is the best thing ELU can do for learners. Or at least, use comments to assist them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, if users post one-liners or unsubstantiated answers to such questions, although it often helps the OPs, it won’t help ELU attract &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;. ELU intends &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;to build a library of detailed answers&lt;/a&gt;, not turn into Yahoo! Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don’t intend to patrol and beat up everyone posting basic answers. Let the community use the tools they have, and work its magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &amp;quot;borderline&amp;quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &amp;quot;keep it nice&amp;quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the freedom to express our views, but more importantly, we have a duty to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt; and keep things on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d look for further clarification regarding borderline comments. If they’re targeting a post, it’s bearable. But if they’re attacking users, then I’d be forced to put the offender in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;penalty box&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T12:44:25.063" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-16T04:15:11.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-342959&quot;&gt;WBT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not be lowering technical barriers to closing questions (e.g. reducing the number of close votes required), but it would be a good idea to get more people actively up into being able to have input.  We should instead focus on &lt;em&gt;making it easier to ask good questions,&lt;/em&gt; such as more clearly prompting askers to share prior research, and valuing that with positive reinforcement when it is done, as models for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I believe it is a problem, and the club is even significantly smaller than one half of one percent of the site’s users, so my candidacy in this election is that of a relative outsider, which might wind up faring as well as that of Bernie Sanders in the US.  The clubbishness even showed up strongly in this election, for example in a comment on Jesse Williams’ nomination (“In my opinion, I think you're the least qualified to become a community moderator”).  That kind of vague, blunt, negative comment is unconstructive and seeks primarily to exclude people without helping indicate any path forward or improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that moderators can help shape the site, they may be able to help make it more welcoming to newcomers with structured prompts and interfaces that set clearer expectations about what is considered a good question.  Responses should also focus on what’s good about questions, not just what’s bad about them, because positive reinforcement is more likely to turn a new user into a valuable contributor than being “greeted” with negativity.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/343137/115786&quot;&gt;Here's a recent example&lt;/a&gt; illustrating a positive way to encourage &quot;more like that&quot; on a newcomer's answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top criteria: Does it answer the question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Second criteria: Is it backed, or able to be backed, by at least one credible source other than the answer’s personal claims to expertise?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(The second criteria is less important when the question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the answerer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends.  Some questions are appropriate and on-topic at either site, but might benefit more from the different communities of people and different focus/style of answers on one site or the other.   If it seems the user doesn’t know ELL exists, that signals that the choice of ELU may not have been fully informed by the options available, and might really appreciate a polite comment pointing out that the other site exists as an option, pointing to some description of the differences, and explaining how the user could request a question get migrated there if they think ELL is a better fit once informed of both.  I used that basic approach with &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/100485/20777&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;, which did get migrated, and I think will get answers more helpful to OP at ELL, but which could have been reworded to fit OK on ELU.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/342719/1&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt; also clearly came from a non-native speaker, but I think it fits better here on ELU and deals with some rather challenging material.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general approach to mediation is to listen to each side’s points and support of those points.  In conflicts where people are invested, it can also help to ask each side to restate the other side’s points to help build mutual trust and understanding.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On SE, we are not practically constrained by computing resources in how many questions and answers we can have.  Primary limits have more to do with time and attention, which are not necessarily zero-sum.  We want to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.  For this question, if folks on opposite sides of it could agree on some predictions that follow from their points, I’d be able to look at the analytics tools mods have access to in order to help answer the questions and make data-driven decisions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest effect of answering in comments is that it severely reduces the reliability of statistics about what questions are and aren’t answered.  We have to use extra caution in interpreting those statistics for ELU compared to many other sites in the SE network, even at the level of any specific question in a questions list.  Ideally, folks who post partial answers in comments would be more explicit about encouraging others to develop those into more complete answers; both the commenting and further development are valuable contributions to the site.  Mod comments can credibly provide this kind of encouragement too.  Comments should not be deleted just because they contain partial answers.  See also the question above about short answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote good answers, and add comments explaining what’s good about the answers.  This is a positive reinforcement strategy that should help not only that user but others see what they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do, which I think is a lot more helpful to the growth of a site than just shutting down and blocking things folks &lt;em&gt;shouldn’t&lt;/em&gt; be doing.  It would also send a message to the user that I’m not against them personally, but that critical comments from me focus on specific behaviors and instances.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would then pick the comments which are most clearly inappropriate and add comments saying so directly, with reason(s) why.  If issues continue, I would recommend the user take a break from the site for a few days voluntarily.  If issues still continue, and they are bad enough to have significant negative effects on other users, I would enforce that suggestion with a temporary block of the comment privilege.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d talk about it with them, in chat, asking them to explain in more detail why they took that action and also explaining in more detail my own differing perspective.  I’ve been known to convince others and also to be convinced (change my mind) myself, and have in some cases been in disagreements that led to some creative outcome that wasn’t anybody’s position at the start but which addresses the concerns each person raised.  I think I’m generally reasonable and hope the other mods generally are too.  This doesn’t mean we won’t disagree - indeed, I &lt;em&gt;hope&lt;/em&gt; we have enough diversity on the team that we sometimes disagree - but I do hope it means we’ll be able to discuss and work things out, and I'm quite optimistic on that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&quot;? &quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Correct and helpful answers” are generally good for the site!  These kinds of answers are the same ones discussed above that sometimes appear as comments, but are perhaps better posted as answers in order to signal what’s been answered.  It’s better if the answer cites a source or gives an example or is otherwise more complete than the kinds of answers most commonly found in comments on the question.  Encouraging the posting of sources and resources is helpful, and folks are more likely to develop a good answer when they’ve started with something simple and get encouraged to develop it further, than if the initial bar is forced too high.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, while something may be “obvious” to you, it may not be “obvious” to others, particularly the OP, and other readers.   I’m not worried about a “reputation grab” – is this community really so clubbish that you would begrudge newcomers who are trying to provide a good answer to a question some Internet points?  I think being able to view the analytics would be helpful in making these discussions more informed by data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the &quot;freedom of expression&quot; that folks (in my experience, especially Americans) hold up in so many online arguments is a freedom from repression by the government, and says nothing about private or voluntary associations, which can and should set their own community rules and norms.  I would underscore that if a post needs improvement, this does not mean OP is the one who has to be doing that improvement personally; I think it’s important to lower the barriers to making a valuable contribution and that means being open minded to the idea that one person can make a contribution with a post that’s in need of improvement, and another person can make another contribution by improving that post.  Look at how Wikipedia works - most improvements to most pieces of content are by someone other than the original creator of that page.  I think it’s easy to forget this and we should make it more explicit more often.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it’s important to keep the discussions relatively on-topic and focus on providing substantive, on-topic points that can be responded to with another substantive, on-topic point.  Personal attacks generally don’t meet that criteria.  It’s important to look at how someone’s comments are affecting the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; and the discussion as a whole, not just how they might be affecting e.g. &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;.   Appropriate expressions that someone finds something frustrating should not be shut out wholesale:  Especially when bringing a novel point or perspective, they can serve an appropriate role in identifying opportunities for improving the site and the experiences it offers its users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;//stackexchange.com/users/flair/420593.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for WBT on Stack Exchange, showing totals of sites with over 200 rep&quot; title=&quot; profile for WBT on Stack Exchange, showing totals of sites with over 200 rep&quot; /&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-342959&quot;&gt;Vote here!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115786" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T20:55:38.373" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-16T04:54:30.763" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election#post-341816&quot;&gt;Sumelic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think the site is doing fine with closing questions. I don't think any of the mechanics are in need of reform. It's ultimately up to the community to decide which questions should be closed. As a moderator, the main way I'd try to influence the status quo is by continuing to ask questions and post answers on Meta that present my viewpoint. Hopefully it's convincing to some people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd reserve close-voting for questions that uncontroversially don't belong on the site, which I see as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proofreading (which means extended passages, not asking about a single word or phrase) and critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very short single word requests that don't satisfy any of the criteria on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;question checklist&lt;/a&gt;, along the lines of &quot;What's a word for when there's a person who's mean to you at work?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions that are extremely unclear, or that don't have any apparent question at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;blatantly&quot; off-topic (you know, those questions with no relationship to English, that make you wonder how the original poster got here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also might close as duplicate if it's truly an &quot;exact&quot; duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my viewpoint on questions that are closed for &quot;lack of prior research.&quot; I think it’s useful to consider why the “general reference” close reason that we had before the current one was changed to add the link about including &quot;the research you've done.&quot; Looking back at Lynne’s post from 2014, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5415/reword-general-reference-to-include-research-ell&quot;&gt;Reword General Reference to include research / ELL&lt;/a&gt;,  it describes the problem as questions that “Show no evidence of research, so it seems like they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be answered by common references. If the OP adds evidence of what research they did and why they're still confused, it might actually be a good question.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the most sensible interpretation of the “research” requirement is this: “if a question looks like it would be answered by a general reference, you can vote to close. Close-voters are not obligated to expend research effort trying to find out where exactly the question is answered in general reference material; it's the original poster's responsibility to show that the question is not answered by general references.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I think it should be about making things easier for close-voters. I don’t think it makes sense to focus on making sure the original poster shows enough effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, we want to encourage people to do research before posting here so that they don’t ask questions that can be answered by a general reference. But if someone posts a question that clearly identifies a point of confusion that is clearly not answerable by a general reference, it doesn’t need to be closed just because it lacks research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes other users aside from the original poster can take actions to help make it clear that a question is not answerable by a general reference. I think it can be helpful to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post an answer that shows that the question is not general reference&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leave a comment to the original poster advising adding some research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit the question to add some research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perceived rudeness or unfriendliness is indeed a perennial problem; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9953/could-we-please-be-a-bit-nicer-to-new-users&quot;&gt;not confined to this site&lt;/a&gt;. (Aside from that post, I also like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263833/why-does-stack-exchange-have-to-feel-so-unfriendly-now/263858#263858&quot;&gt;DEAD's summary here&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA;What I take out of this is: some people will always be uncomfortable because they perceive downvotes, close-votes, and comments saying &quot;this is off-topic for such-and-such reason as listed in the Help Center&quot; as hostile actions. I'm not going to try to solve this (because these are fundamental parts of how a Stack Exchange site works) and I don't see it as a problem (because from my viewpoint, none of these are inherently rude actions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think it's important to avoid other types of actions that I would consider rude. Comments should be informative without being insulting. I think sometimes for people who have been on the site a long time, it becomes tempting to post or upvote snarky comments that are not as helpful to the original poster as a matter-of-fact comment would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see a post by a new user, I usually leave a comment that says &quot;welcome&quot; and I try to explain anything that seems like it might be unfamiliar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing that I think makes a short answer “low quality” is lack of any explanation or support for the answer. Taking a &quot;single word request&quot; answer as a model: &quot;I think the word you are looking for is ____&quot; is low quality and should be deleted (unless it gets edited). If it has a link and a quote or a short description of how to use the word, it's not delete-worthy, although it still might not be a great answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes! I'm absolutely in favor of mentioning ELL to new users who seem like they might be non-native speakers. (I think it's a bad idea to &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; someone is not a native speaker, though). Whenever I see posts like this, I leave a comment; usually I word it something like &quot;If you are still learning English, it's better to ask questions at our sister site for &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; I think I'll edit my stock comments template for this to add a link to that Meta post as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, this is not an area where I think elected moderators have much to do. Users with enough reputation to vote to close can vote to close if they think that's the right action, for one of the established reasons or for a custom reason. Other users can vote to reopen. If somebody is unhappy with the result of this process, they can post on Meta to draw attention to a question. The only time I think moderators would need to get involved is if a question is being repeatedly closed and reopened and the community cannot come to a consensus. In that case, the question might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/22229/306255&quot;&gt;locked&lt;/a&gt; until the issue is resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t want to delete valuable content. Comments are &quot;second-class citizens&quot; and not the optimal medium for answers, but in many cases they do have value. I have posted answers in comments many times. Nowadays, I've learned more about the disadvantages and I try to avoid it, but I still believe it is legitimate in a number of contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am only in favor of deleting answers posted as comments in the following circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is an answer or a previous comment that says exactly the same thing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are too many comments, and I'm moving all of them to a chat room except for the ones that request clarification or give constructive criticism of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a new moderator, I'm sure I would have a lot to learn from the rest of the moderation team, so I would talk to them about any users that seem to be causing problems. If &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/38504/306255&quot;&gt;a user is consistently generating flags&lt;/a&gt;, that is a problem, and the first step would be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23661/what-is-the-point-of-a-30-day-account-suspension/23681#23681&quot;&gt;email warning&lt;/a&gt; that describes the pattern of behavior that is causing concern. A user who continues to cause problems even after an email warning may get suspended temporarily. Obviously, it's especially unfortunate if that happens to a user who produces valuable answers, but good answers don't excuse bad behavior or grant immunity to suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would depend on how strongly I felt about it. I wouldn't necessarily be bothered by another mod doing something I wouldn't have. A closed question is still visible for community review and other community members could vote to re-open or make a post on Meta about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had serious objections to the action, I would first try to contact the moderator in chat so I could learn the reason for their actions. Hopefully after talking it over we'd be able to come to a consensus. If not, I think the best thing to do would be to talk about it together with a third moderator/other moderators (this is also what I'd do if I couldn't contact the moderator who took the questionable action).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&quot;? &quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently posted about a similar topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3198/downvoting-an-answer-because-the-question-was-bad/9275#9275&quot;&gt;Downvoting an answer because the question was bad?&lt;/a&gt; To summarize, I don’t think all correct answers are “helpful” overall. Unsubstantiated and obvious correct answers are helpful to the original poster, at best. They are often harmful to this site’s mission: “to build a library of &lt;strong&gt;detailed&lt;/strong&gt; answers to every question about English language and usage.” As I say in the linked post, in some cases I think it’s appropriate to downvote answers like this. But I don’t think that’s the best course of action in all cases. If someone is new to answering, it’s more helpful to leave a comment explaining why the question is off-topic.&#xA;That’s my personal viewpoint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think answers like this require any other kind of action, and if I am elected moderator, I wouldn’t go around deleting or otherwise punishing correct answers just because the question is trivial or low-quality. If the question is truly unsuitable for this site, then it should be closed, and if it can’t be improved, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86046/off-topic-questions-should-be-deleted-rather-than-closed/86056#86056&quot;&gt;eventually deleted&lt;/a&gt;. In that case, the answer will also be deleted. The community is capable of deciding which questions to close and delete without moderator intervention, aside from exceptional cases (which can be discussed on Meta—for example, Sven Yarg's request that the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7832/77227&quot;&gt;bear/bare with me&lt;/a&gt;&quot; question be historically locked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, “debate” of any kind will often be out of place on the main site. Stack Exchange is not a forum. Questions should be used for asking ELU-related questions, answers should be used for answering questions, and comments should be used for requesting clarification and offering constructive criticism. This is an ideal picture, of course, and in reality things get more complicated. But it’s a problem if user interactions become more prominent than these functions. And  interactions on the “borderline” of civility often do become a distraction from the site goal of answering questions about English.&#xA;If it seems like this is happening, I would leave a comment to the involved users advising that they continue their debate on Meta or in a chat-room, since those are spaces specifically designed for user interactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it’s a good idea to just remove comments of this “borderline” nature. Often, even if they seem too harsh, there is some kind of relevant criticism embedded that could be useful. Even &quot;nasty, disparaging comments about our site&quot; could be useful to some extent as feedback and an indication of the mindset of the user who posted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T03:55:31.913" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9274" CreationDate="2016-08-16T11:28:41.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think generally this restriction is fine, you should have evaluated the post completely before retracting. So when you retracted it that's your problem and you can very well repent at leisure. Have fun ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there are two more aspects I would like to consider, first the possibility to retract one close vote and bring forth another - which would apply to your case as well - and secondly the reset of that restriction after the question is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion it should not be possible to close vote, retract and close vote for the same reason. On the other hand it should be possible to close vote for another reason and it should be possible to vote for any reason after the question is edited. After all the new post can be completely different from the previous version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T11:28:41.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9257" CreationDate="2016-08-16T11:49:51.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the election page offers a candidate score which includes exactly the reputation and a set of - more or less - helpful badges each candidate has earned you can easily discern those qualities you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your question ends with, &quot;what should I think of&quot;, we can't really answer that. It's the point of any election that everyone decides with one's own gusto how to cast the vote(s). As you can see on the current stage, the votes the nominees got so far correlate quite nicely with their &lt;em&gt;candidate score&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; election you will have voters who are more involved and voters who are less involved - just look at the post Brexit google trends in the UK. However I think that with the &lt;em&gt;candidate scores&lt;/em&gt;, the election chat, the possibility to see the candidates' contributions it is possible to make an informed decision if you want to. No one can be forced to inform themselves beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most important reasons for self-nominating is that only the person putting themselves forward can know if they want the job and invest the time that it requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T11:49:51.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9293" CreationDate="2016-08-16T13:14:55.937" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. By definition, comments aren't 'valuable'. If they are worth keeping, they need to be edited into a real post. The comments were moved to a chat room instead of being deleted, so they are still available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion to those who disagreed with the correctness of the answer is to post their own 'correct' answer instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T13:14:55.937" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-16T14:31:22.827" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- by Lawrence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;State of question closure? It's fine. We should encourage clarity in questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to welcome newcomers? Shut down &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks, provide friendly help with site norms, and invite them to chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What makes a short answer acceptable? Usefulness and support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Policy regarding poorly-worded, basic questions? If there is a point of interest, edit to bring it out. Otherwise, vote to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to mediate between &lt;em&gt;nuke 'em&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;answer everything&lt;/em&gt; factions regarding LQQs? Point both to the content, then refer to Q4.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to handle flagged answers-in-comments? Leave them be, but allow others to turn them into answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to handle prickly geniuses? Separate the prickles from the glow, then proceed as normal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to handle disagreements about mod actions? With decorum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to handle good (or helpful but unsubstantiated) answers to bad questions? The problem lies with the question. Close the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to handle 'borderline' behaviour? Shut down &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks and discourage unproductive assertion chains, but &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt; allow robust content-focused discussion, even if the discussion is about the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Close Votes&lt;/em&gt; review queue contains less than 50 questions at the moment, which I think isn't a problem. The issue, though, is how we should handle bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we need to define &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we use the goal stated on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour page&lt;/a&gt;, namely, &quot;to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage&quot;, there really &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; such a thing as a bad question, provided the question is about &lt;em&gt;English language and usage&lt;/em&gt;. Even when we &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;look deeper&lt;/a&gt;, there is a case for keeping 'faulty' questions so long as they are &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 'bad' question, then, is one that doesn't communicate its point of interest. Placing the question on hold (which sounds a lot less final than &lt;em&gt;voting to close&lt;/em&gt;) is intended to be reversible. That is, the question can be taken &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; hold when it has been suitably edited. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very much, due at least in part to the impression that closure is final.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should address this by reviewing the wording of close-vote 'banner' messages to more effectively advise editing for clarity, and to explain the reopening process. Once this is done, we can then encourage swifter voting to close questions that are unclear, along with swifter voting to reopen questions that have been sufficiently clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, no EL&amp;amp;U arbiter of what constitutes an &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; question, other than the execution of repeated close/reopen sequences with enforced limits on multiple sequential votes. I think this is an effective mechanism for the community to express its preferences on such issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The philosophy of close-voting on Stack Exchange (and consequently EL&amp;amp;U) is &lt;em&gt;thoughtful democracy&lt;/em&gt;. That is, high-rep users consider the site's aims, then decide for ourselves which way to vote. Compelling people to vote one way or the other would therefore be inappropriate here. We still need to raise the status of &lt;em&gt;reopening&lt;/em&gt; to match &lt;em&gt;closing&lt;/em&gt;, but I think the approach outlined above would hold true to the site's goals while fostering a culture of asking (and &lt;em&gt;expecting&lt;/em&gt;) 'good' questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The regular EL&amp;amp;U community doesn't act with a single attitude. There is a group that considers that the database should be safeguarded by turning away those who do not meet its standards on first presentation. There is also a group which tries its hardest to bring newcomers up to speed. Newcomers get a mixture of views, though it's natural for the harsher comments to be felt more strongly. Moderators need to (and do) nip &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks in the bud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking deeper, I think the regulars mostly react when those who post questions do so with an attitude of entitlement - they've asked, therefore we must answer. This is particularly galling when one has already spent time on a question, be it in editing, research, answering, or providing guidance on site norms in good faith. Nevertheless, the mechanism for flagging already exists, and EL&amp;amp;U's moderators tend to react promptly to such matters. I see no reason to change this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communities are built on interaction. At EL&amp;amp;U, questions, comments and answers don't normally provide enough recurring positive interaction to capture the enduring interest of newcomers. We can invite promising newcomers to the main chat room, where this kind of interaction does take place. One doesn't need to be a moderator to issue such invitations, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should answer the question in a way that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7654/142322&quot;&gt;useful&lt;/a&gt;, with enough linked or logical &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8112/what-to-do-with-yes-no-questions&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt; for the answer to be independently verifiable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;... as simple as possible, but not simpler&quot; - attributed to Einstein, &lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quote Investigator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Follow-up question: Q3 What if the low quality answer is, objectively speaking, correct, and it is highly upvoted? Would you delete it if the user was a native speaker and/or had a high rep? Would you expect lower rep users to edit the answer; e.g. provide a dictionary link and definition? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9291/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/9303?noredirect=1#comment36172_9303&quot;&gt;– Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Per&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange's &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;, I will assume the answer was flagged for moderator attention, and further, that it was flagged for low quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to consider would be whether the answer was indeed of low quality. Based on the general approach I outlined above, I'll also assume that the main deficiency was a lack of independent support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time ago, I questioned an answer given by a well-respected user. The answer wasn't short, but it had no external substantiation. The reply I received was that the user was considered an expert in the matter, so there wasn't any need for independent substantiation. After all, if we accept (for example) a dictionary's authority, then the opinions of its editors or compilers should carry some weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's different in quantitative disciplines, I think there is a place for appeal to authority and appeal to experience in the study of the English language generically, and EL&amp;amp;U in particular. Questions such as normative use or the idiomatic interpretation of phrases could otherwise require disproportionate research to answer. On the other hand, we need to recognise that simply floating an opinion doesn't automatically make it valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is therefore a judgement call to be made in such matters. Ideally, the person's expertise, scholarly reputation and prior answers would be taken into account, but I hasten to add that they may tend to be compressed into a moderator's familiarity with, or impression of, the user. I imagine this would be the case in the cut and thrust of wading through heavy flag queues, but possibly more generally as well. Balancing this, it's good that even deletion isn't final on Stack Exchange. Other moderators and high-rep users are free to voice alternative opinions, to be resolved in the usual manner on meta and chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether I expect lower-rep users to edit their answers to add dictionary links and definitions - yes. I think it would be commendable to even do it &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; them on occasion to give them a template or good example that they can use for similar answers, accompanied by a &lt;em&gt;friendly&lt;/em&gt; comment about site norms. I consider this a constructive action that benefits the user, the EL&amp;amp;U community, as well as the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Follow-up question: Thanks for the effort you've put into your answers. #3 in particular was very cogently argued. More broadly, you and others make the valid point that inadequate (rather than bad) posts can be community-edited to improve them - but there's little incentive other than knowing you're being helpful and improving the site. Do the site rewards for editing need review? What change (if any) would you recommend? – Chappo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oded explains that rep is granted for &lt;em&gt;approved&lt;/em&gt; edits, not merely for &lt;em&gt;suggested&lt;/em&gt; edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the time you have 2,000 rep, we see you as someone who understands what makes a good edit and not a learner anymore. The community doesn't need to approve your edits anymore. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/268481/4983400&quot;&gt;- Oded&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I support this policy. It's hard to algorithmically determine what makes a good edit, and awarding points for arbitrary edits encourages trivial editing and possibly even the vandalism of posts. When the reason for editing is to improve the content, the user engages in the conversation for its own sake. That's community participation. And it promotes good editing, to boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/442/what-kind-of-edits-contribute-to-the-editor-badges&quot;&gt;badges are still awarded for editing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, something should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question contains (or even appears to contain) a point of genuine interest with respect to the English language, then either direct the user to edit the question to bring out the point of interest, or edit it on their behalf. Interaction with the user can help establish whether the question is a good fit for EL&amp;amp;U. Otherwise, vote to close, selecting the option to migrate to ELL if the question looks like a good fit for that site, or some other (appropriate) close reason if it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the person asking is a non-native speaker is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll assume from the phrasing of this question that the questions in question are on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U and otherwise interesting, but lack research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For moderators, the basis for mediation between the two groups must rest on the site's principles. Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Exchange, expressed a tolerance for 'incomplete' questions so long as there was a point of interest, but also acknowledged the controversy. I agree with his conclusion, and think it is a good guide for mediating between &quot;these two groups&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The key distinction to make here, in my mind, is that all questions are ultimately in service of the people answering them. That is the audience you need to satisfy if you want to have any hope of creating and sustaining a community of peers learning from each other. The minimum bar for a question is not &quot;is this on-topic?&quot;, but rather &quot;is this somewhat interesting and on-topic?&quot;. I'm not saying every question needs to be utterly fascinating, but please endeavor to make your questions more than a constant stream of no-duh underhanded softballs requiring nothing more than a quick cut and paste from Wikipedia, IMDB, or some other standard internet reference site. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;- Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a minimum standard expected for answers, and EL&amp;amp;U doesn't have a well-established culture of helping to complete partial answers. If someone has something to contribute, but feels that their answer falls short of the minimum standard or is otherwise incomplete, I would welcome their contribution in the form of comments. To do otherwise would be to either lose the contribution altogether, or face greater issues with low-quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main substantive argument against this is that there is no down-vote button on comments, so comment-answers that aren't particularly good cannot be voted down. An appropriate reply to this argument is that people are free to leave dissenting comments, so long as the dissent is aimed at the content, rather than the person. If this is done in a spirit of cooperation, it can help lead to the construction of a good answer, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2027%3A17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iron sharpens iron&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, if someone posts a partial or even full answer in comments, and someone else later uses that as the basis for an answer, there should be no recourse for the comment-answerer unless they made it clear in their comment that they were seeking further information from the OP as they prepared their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answers and the arguments/flags relate to different posts, each should be handled on its own merits. Prickly people can produce good answers, and valuable contributors can be prickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in EL&amp;amp;U chat and as supported by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/155538/what-are-the-guidelines-for-reviewing&quot;&gt;guidelines for reviewing&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only real difference between SE and anywhere else is that it focused mainly on content, not the person who posts it. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31693337#31693337&quot;&gt;- DEAD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This holds even if the person who posted the valuable answer is disagreeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the disagreeable user, the usual sanctions and processes are applicable, regardless of the value of their contributions. See also my answer to Question 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod-wars are unhealthy for the community and for the site. Further, since both mods have single-click powers, there is little to be gained in unilateral action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the action is not an abuse of moderator powers, then the fact that both are mods is irrelevant. Set that aside for the time-being, and relate as regular users. Find out the rationale behind their actions. It's often the case that there is value at both ends of a spectrum, so communication in good faith can go a long way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't help, bring in other moderators to provide perspective. From here, much depends on the details of the specific case. It might end with a vote, or it may end with agreeing to disagree, or something else altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an abuse of mod powers, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151606/handling-calls-to-remove-a-moderator/157258#157258&quot;&gt;established process&lt;/a&gt; to follow as a last resort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Follow-up question: I like that you have concrete ideas of some changes you would like to see implemented. I am interested to know what your thoughts are for handling #8 in the case that the recipient of a particular behavior (closure/deletion or what have you) has posted on Meta accusing the mods (because they don't know which) of systematic abuse. – Kit Z. Fox♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, find out what's wrong so that it can be addressed. Moderators have strong reserve powers, but a meeting of minds would be much preferred. Besides, if the problem is a perception of the abuse of power, the immediate application of power might not be a good solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to get caught up in the emotions of the accusations, and I don't claim exception to this, so a documented (even if informal) process would be very helpful. The process linked above doesn't address the grievances of a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; user against 'all mods' or against 'the system', and I am not aware of one at SE / EL&amp;amp;U that mods can use as a guide. I'll also note that the following thoughts are only preliminary, and can do with further development via the usual community process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The starting point should be one of framing. Wild accusations are unpleasant, but the user's attempt at communication should be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, we would move the discussion from emotional outbursts to a fact-based discussion. Under the circumstances, wider latitude should be given to &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks, but there will still be a limit. Having said that, I recognise that sometimes it's a &lt;em&gt;perception&lt;/em&gt; that the user has, and they can't easily point to specific insults or inappropriate conduct. Even then, it would be helpful to determine when they started feeling aggrieved, or perhaps what triggered the reaction, so that the discussion can turn to something constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod actions are said to be heavily logged, so it should be possible to dig up the relevant interactions. Depending on the level of trust remaining, responses may include discussions to determine the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; nature of the grievance, explanations of site norms, personal explanations and apologies by either or both sides, follow-up actions if appropriate, etc, or if communication has broken down, escalation to CMs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Escalation has its own process, but for the rest, depending on specifics, the participants in the discussions may include the whole community, or a private chat room where both the complainant and the accused moderator can invite a few others. In the latter case, the roles of the additional people are to provide moral support or to furnish facts and personal impressions. The goal of the exercise would be to articulate the pressure point with a view to addressing it in a way consistent with the aims of the site and with common decency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&quot;? &quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the context here and my answers to previous questions, I will assume that after conducting due diligence, it has been determined that the question has no point of interest for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7883/142322&quot;&gt;My position&lt;/a&gt; on good answers to trivial questions is that the answerer should not be penalised for the failings of the asker. Per Jeff Atwood's quote in my answer to Question 5, if the answer is correct and helpful, I'd let it stand. I don't mind if someone else edits to improve the answer, but the problem lies with the question, not the answer. The &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The litmus test should always be whether the user is targeting the content or whether they are targeting another user. The former should be allowed considerable leeway; the latter should be nipped in the bud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes/no/yes/no chains can be unproductive and should be stopped if the participants don't advance their arguments (or if they escalate them instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for disparaging comments about EL&amp;amp;U, I consider them to be &lt;em&gt;freedom of expression&lt;/em&gt; so long as they aren't &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T04:33:00.730" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-16T18:52:29.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;h3&gt;choster&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close…. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions…. What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is important to draw a distinction between marking a question &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; and marking a question as &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;. In my opinion, this was a key improvement of the 2013 &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184154&quot;&gt;closing reform&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not hesitate to put on hold questions that do not meet basic standards. A post that shows no research effort, or is rife with formatting problems or typographical errors, is a disservice to the community &lt;em&gt;regardless of its intrinsic intellectual interest&lt;/em&gt; (III), because however much we want to deny it, such superficialities degrade the experience of visiting the site, and consciously or unconsciously discourage participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My philosophy is that if those superficial problems cannot be corrected immediately— for example, an edit to add context, when the source is evident— we should place them on hold &lt;em&gt;for safety&lt;/em&gt;, where they can be improved without attracting bad answers, and where the OP, especially if he or she is a new user, can do so while saving face. Of course, if the OP has no interest in improving them, then it is doubtful that they would ever have been contributing members. I do not believe we have been hesitant about re-opening questions when their value has been defended on Meta, or given a comment from a senior member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I have found myself running out of closevotes more and more often, even though I tend to skip over anything that is not egregiously unanswerable. As a moderator, I would use the enhanced close/hold power principally on these obvious cases, so that others need not &amp;quot;waste&amp;quot; a vote on an unsalvageable question. The hope is that without the pressure of triple-digit review queues overhead, our more knowledgeable users would have more time and energy to improve and answer questions which are flawed only in their initial presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What moderators should do to help inexperienced users is &lt;em&gt;help them become experienced users&lt;/em&gt;. I almost always include a link to the help center and site tour when commenting on a &amp;quot;rep 1&amp;quot; user's post, and I always say &amp;quot;welcome to EL&amp;amp;U.&amp;quot; But I have no illusions that the average person learns standards and social conventions from manuals and rule enforcement, nor that I will ever craft the perfect message that is never simultaneously taken as abrupt and patronizing. We gain comfort through familiarity, and to me, familiarity and confidence is gained by having good examples to follow. This may mean explicitly developing a list of &amp;quot;model&amp;quot; questions and answers, especially for the notorious &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions, but it is also about demonstrating an earnest tone of helpfulness in comments, and trying to adhere to a standard even when I post a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/133103/16052&quot;&gt;speculative answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfriendliness, or perceived unfriendliness, is a perennial issue in any online environment. There is the usual problem of the written medium, and the difficulty of transmitting tone across it. There is the additional problem that online messages are delivered in near real-time, directly into one's personal space (workstation, bedroom, mobile phone), magnifying their impact. And there is the further complication of the international and intergenerational makeup of our community, some of whom are new not only to StackExchange but to online communication in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet we have active and well-respected members from all over, of differing academic backgrounds, and members who had a rough or mediocre start, but stuck around to build the community. I do not believe EL&amp;amp;U is notably hostile, much less that any &amp;quot;club&amp;quot; roves the queues wielding downvotehammers upon innocent newbies. This is not about macho toughness, but about becoming comfortable with the level of social context here, the same as one adjusts when moving from Japan to Russia or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer need only be as long as it needs to be, and while it would be nice on some level for every answer to be a Tchristian or Svenyargsian tome, or provided the answer is supported— a dicdef, a quote from the day's &lt;em&gt;Wall Street Journal&lt;/em&gt;, etc.— I will leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted, I do leave a standard welcome comment to new users, and may point out the existence of ELL &lt;em&gt;even if&lt;/em&gt; the question is in fact on-topic at EL&amp;amp;U if I think that user might benefit from it. Ultimately, however, it is the question, not the questioner we can accept or decline as on-topic or off-topic for EL&amp;amp;U. After all, some of our most active participants are non-native speakers who have an academic interest in English and questions that may not be appropriate to ELL's focus on gaining proficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered.… As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the topic being debated, it is the place of a moderator to &lt;em&gt;moderate&lt;/em&gt;, not to use their privileges to enforce a position on which reasonable people may disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this particular issue, I think a false dichotomy is presented in this question. Who wants any question to be &amp;quot;closed and not answered&amp;quot;? As I noted in my response to question #1, I want to see low-quality questions turned into &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; questions. An unresearched question has the opportunity to be turned into an answerable one, and this can take place if a question is on hold just as it can if it is live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether one dislikes partial answers in comments or not, I do not see why they would be &lt;em&gt;flagged&lt;/em&gt;. The main criteria for flagging a comment are that it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rude or offensive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not constructive / off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obsolete&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;too chatty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the role of the moderator to check if a comment thusly violates community standards, and it falls to the community itself to set those standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there is a blanket rule that would apply to every scenario. Flagged comments should be evaluated on their own merits, not on who posted them; even if there is a known feud between two members, it is not impossible for one to reply to the other without escalating or prolonging that feud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A responsible moderator, as any community member, should intervene based on the specific circumstances. Do the disputes arise because of content or because of tone? A comment or chat invitation might be sufficient intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those of us who peruse the review queues are startled on a daily basis by some community decision or another, but we remember that a Stack is a community project, and we must grant an assumption of good faith to our fellow members. Yet again, I do not think being a moderator changes the approach. If there is a profound disagreement, it can be brought to Meta discussion; for marginal cases, we should live and let live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception might be cases of mod abuse, especially if there is a history of abusive behavior, in which case other moderators might be brought in to intervene, and ultimately a case can be made to the community manager to have those privileges revoked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &amp;quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&amp;quot;? &amp;quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&amp;quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer cannot be verifiably obvious, correct, or helpful if it is unsubstantiated. Of course, it cannot be verifiably non-obvious, incorrect, or unhelpful, either. I will generally leave a comment on such answers encouraging the author to provide at least a little explanatory text. But leaving that aside, if the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is a weak question, then that is the first place to focus one's attention. Improve the question and it should improve the answers, and the voting mechanism should take care of the rest. If the question is off-topic or cannot be improved, then let it be deleted, and take its answers with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &amp;quot;borderline&amp;quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &amp;quot;keep it nice&amp;quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already leave comments on many questions and answers, and have found indignant responses to be relatively uncommon. For the most part, they are ignored, or silently accepted, and occasionally an apology is given and/or the post improved, but actual negative responses to my comments have been rare. Comments which disparage the site, but come from a demanding, vulgar visitor will hardly damage our reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly, however, I am not familiar with any &amp;quot;debate&amp;quot; that is commonplace on the main site. Sure, different community members have different philosophies about whether and when to answer or comment, but I cannot remember the last time I saw an actual feud take place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such a situation arise, however, my criteria for action depends on the progress of that robust debate. If the arguments presented are about content, then the debate, criticism, or disagreement should be allowed to run its course. The moderator should step in chiefly when things turn to ad hominem attacks or hate speech— things which not only degrade community members, but which drive away potential new members, and contribute to the long-term decline of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T23:58:44.047" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9308" CreationDate="2016-08-16T20:59:02.760" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why did this four year old answer appear in my late answer queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xVouX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xVouX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T12:13:21.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T12:13:21.893" Title="Bug in the late answer queue?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-16T22:44:11.417" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;tchrist&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at&#xA;  EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much&#xA;  effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor&#xA;  of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier.&#xA;  But other site participants feel that some questions that might&#xA;  elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons&#xA;  not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often,&#xA;  for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state&#xA;  of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to&#xA;  try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once took a hard look at this one in preparation for my question on our&#xA;meta regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6682/request-for-aggregate-data-regarding-deleted-questions-with-subjects-containing&quot;&gt;Request for aggregate data regarding deleted questions with&#xA;subjects containing CORRECT, GRAMMA, or RIGHT&lt;/a&gt;. This was back when our close-vote queue was in the many hundreds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that our overall closed-or-deleted rate at the time that&#xA;Jon collected those data was 41%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions took around two days to close, but the long tail goes&#xA;out a full month before they all get closed that are going to. We were closing a&#xA;bit more than twice as many questions per day as people have votes in our&#xA;close vote review queues.  If we see those queue numbers resurge after the&#xA;election dies down, I would raise the possiblity of increasing our alotted close votes&#xA;from 25 a day to 40 — the way it is on the other high-traffic sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community Management team is currently reviewing &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/266500/proposal-to-make-close-votes-scale-with-rep&quot;&gt;another proposal of&#xA;mine&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;about scaling close votes with rep.  The problem with both of these is that&#xA;the only thing that scales is to have more reviewers, not just reviewers&#xA;with more votes.  Only during elections and hat races do our queues go&#xA;down, because only then are there enough people participating in them.  So&#xA;while I'm less than 100% convinced that having more close votes will help,&#xA;we haven't tried that experiment yet to see whether it might, so we should&#xA;try for one of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also looked at the possibilities of popups for keywords or tags, but it isn't clear those are effective. They happen on SO often enough. One thing though: SO got &quot;problem&quot; put on the banned from title list at only half our close rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly&#xA;  toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness&#xA;  or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing&#xA;  problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel&#xA;  more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a bit vague to definitively recommend any one restorative measure,&#xA;but the root of it is that persistent unfriendliness poisons a community&#xA;like a bad apple or festering wound.  You can't let that creep into your&#xA;community.  So now you have two problems: the users upset with the&#xA;newcomers and the newcomers whom these users have upset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The degree of unfriendliness, and perhaps its recidivism, will be the&#xA;controlling factor in dealing with the unfriendly parties. You want to&#xA;apply only just enough persuasion to get them to stop pushing people away.&#xA;Of course, if that doesn't work and they will be neither nice nor quiet,&#xA;then there are other mechanisms available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the newcomers who risk getting scared off, whether in umbrage or&#xA;in fear, you need to remove the comments that caused them to feel that&#xA;way. It is usually appropriate to offer them a helpful welcome in compensation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mention the unfriendliness itself in your remarks to the&#xA;offended; you just make it go away, then try to make them feel more welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short&#xA;  answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a&#xA;  short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be acceptable, even a short answer needs to explain why it is the&#xA;answer, preferably with references. Answers to single word requests that&#xA;are nothing but single words without explanation and citation do not&#xA;improve the quality of the site, and therefore fail to pass muster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators do not just go around &quot;cleaning up a site&quot; on their own. They react to flags about posts.  Flagged posts that don't meet our published standards are at risk for deletion.  It's not automatic, and it doesn't happen without flags. At least not usually from a moderator. The Community may take these matters into their own hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But see also my answer to question #9 below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days,&#xA;  rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic&#xA;  question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems&#xA;  evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker.&#xA;  Chances are, this user has not read this meta post, and is probably&#xA;  not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should&#xA;  something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This case is clearly one where the asker should be told about the&#xA;existence of ELL as a site that might better suit their needs,&#xA;being specifically constituted to serve those just learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often as not, they don't even know of the other site and are happy to be&#xA;told that we have a sister-site ready-made for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community&#xA;  over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One &#xA;  group says that any question which can be understood can and should&#xA;  be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term&#xA;  health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to&#xA;  be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think&#xA;  something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how &#xA;  would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let me give credit to Centaurus for bringing up the following&#xA;thought-experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine two scenarios, one with nothing but 4 very good questions per day&#xA;and no others asked, the other getting another 40 below-average questions&#xA;on top of that.  Which is better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is better because those below-average questions are still able&#xA;to be improved into a state where they could be answered, or perhaps under&#xA;narrow circumstances, migrated.  If you don't have those, they never can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while it is known that questions of low or high quality most often provoke answers of a like&#xA;quality respectively, it is not always so, and on rare occasion great&#xA;answers can appear unlooked for on weak questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, we even have badges for this: Explainer, Refiner, and Illuminator.&#xA;These specifically encourage answers to improve askers' questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need more of those badges awarded on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are &#xA;  (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by&#xA;  it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will&#xA;  be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach&#xA;  this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I view comment flags as a good indicator that the comment should be removed.&#xA;Not a perfect one, but a good one.  Folks shouldn't become too attached&#xA;to ephemera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truth be told it also depends on who's doing it, what their history is of&#xA;this.  When someone like RegDwigнt♦ or John Lawler occasionally posts a&#xA;short comment rather that taking the time to write up a formal answer, I&#xA;would probably give them the benefit of the doubt and not bother removing&#xA;something that is genuinely helpful.  I have actually created Community&#xA;Wiki posts of a few of these just so that they would be more lasting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who view their comments as important contributions should be nudged&#xA;into putting their money where their mouth is and making those actual&#xA;answers that can be searched, edited, and voted on.  If there is a pattern&#xA;of this, a moderator note would be in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: The two posters I just named need no such nudging because of&#xA;their long record of wonderful answers.  But others who are just taking pot&#xA;shots aren't in that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream&#xA;  of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of&#xA;  arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would set up a private chat with the user.  Once there, I'd sincerely&#xA;thank them for their steady stream of valuable answers.  After that, I&#xA;would bring up that their comments were earning a lot of flags and that&#xA;they were causing too much argument on the site.  I would ask them to tone&#xA;it down and not get too distracted in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't work to moderate the problem behavior, then a moderator&#xA;notice of official warning comes next, and finally if that too fails&#xA;to bring about change, there's always suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc&#xA;  a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask them why they did whatever it was, and if it still didn't make&#xA;sense to me, I would tell them why I disagreed.  I would only do this in&#xA;the ELU mod chat room, not in some public location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators don't argue in public. Ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct&#xA;  and helpful answers to trivial questions? &quot;It's an easy reputation&#xA;  grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on&#xA;  ELU&quot;? &quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the &#xA;  one who asked and the one who answered to come back&quot;? Something&#xA;  else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers&#xA;  because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or&#xA;  are even too trivial for that site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how often this happens, and what's really happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the real problem is that they're giving answers to questions that should&#xA;be closed or migrated, I would post a comment asking them to please try&#xA;to hold off from answering questions that shouldn't be left open in the&#xA;first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they have provided an answer that is useful to the asker but is&#xA;unsubtantiated, I would post a comment asking them to flesh out their&#xA;answer.  Often these answers hit the Low Quality Review Queue, allowing&#xA;the Community to decide what to do with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a few cases, I might consider adding a post notice like one of these two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context.&#xA;Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right,&#xA;ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be&#xA;removed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of the information contained in this post requires additional&#xA;references. Please edit to add citations to reliable sources that support&#xA;the assertions made here. Unsourced material may be disputed or deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to&#xA;  &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about&#xA;  being asked to improve their post or having their precious question&#xA;  declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty&#xA;  managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment&#xA;  an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic&#xA;  behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would&#xA;  interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are &#xA;  unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it&#xA;  nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about&#xA;  our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of&#xA;  expression that you would be loath to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a bit of a false dilemma, one that presents two choices as though&#xA;they were diametric opposites but which surreptitiously demand concessions&#xA;to the asker's large assumptions in both cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the question is couched, there's no way that you can allow nasty&#xA;and disparaging comments to persist.  You can't let that sort of thing&#xA;poison your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because these are about the site itself not particular&#xA;individuals, a bit more latitude might be afforded them.  In particular,&#xA;you never want to risk making it seem like you're effacing all&#xA;trace of dissent in site governance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right place for meta discussion about the site is on our meta,&#xA;not in comments on main.  I would have no qualms about deleting&#xA;&quot;nasty, disparaging comments about the site&quot; if they were on main.&#xA;I would then direct the disparager towards meta as the proper place&#xA;for discussions about site issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T03:06:31.220" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9306" CreationDate="2016-08-16T22:48:06.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers by users with reputation of less than 50 rep go through the late answers queue if the question is 30+ days old.  The late answers queue was only implemented in 2012, and initially the rep limit was much lower (10 rep, I believe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the user got five upvotes, pushing his reputation to 51, above the threshold. He was above 10 rep when the late answers queue was implemented in 2012, and above 50 rep when the limit was raised in the last year.  So the post never previously met the late-answer criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, apparently recently, this answer got a downvote, dropping the user's reputation to 49.  This caused the criteria to be met—the question was more than 30 days old when this answer was posted, and the answerer's rep is &amp;lt;50.  So it now appears in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53711" LastEditorUserId="53711" LastEditDate="2016-08-16T22:56:14.633" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T22:56:14.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-17T00:43:41.047" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;Community Moderator Election&lt;/a&gt; the name box (the one showing the user name and the candidate score) does not show correctly in my browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari in Mac OS X).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried this with incognito mode also, where there is no extensions running, so I think this is not an issue of my browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTkoK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTkoK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of the page showing the bug&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58844" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T00:43:41.047" Title="Name box does not appear correctly in community moderator election page" Tags="|bug|display|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-08-17T01:03:02.623" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9252" CreationDate="2016-08-17T01:34:08.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without a doubt, I can tell you that plagiarism is bad, and it does go against our rules (which are network wide). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; addresses this specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Plagiarism - posting the work of others with no indication that it is not your own - is frowned on by our community, and may result in your answer being down-voted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The wording reflects the fact that most acts of plagiarism are answers, not questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct action depends on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it doesn't seem like it was in good faith. My experience with plagiarism is on Stack Overflow, and the reasons I see for doing this range from spam (cleverly disguised spam may live longer than blatant spam) to avoiding new user restrictions (and post-bans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod flagging was the right action here. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160071/what-to-do-when-plagiarism-is-discovered&quot;&gt;What to do when plagiarism is discovered&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T14:52:11.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-17T03:52:36.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Hi, I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-341821&quot;&gt;curiousdannii&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A number of site participants feel that one major problem at EL&amp;amp;U is that bad questions remain open too long and take too much effort to close; some of these participants have argued in favor of instituting reforms designed to make closing questions easier. But other site participants feel that some questions that might elicit interesting answers are closed too quickly and for reasons not especially relevant to their value as questions (most often, for lack of prior research). What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I think the consensus community standards are appropriate (i.e., unresearched questions should be closed.) I think it often takes too long to close them - frequently days or weeks. By that time the OP has lost interest in the question, and possibly the site. I think mods should quickly close the most obviously unacceptable questions, both so that they get closed quickly before they attract poor answers and while the OP is still around to improve them, and so that other users can use their limited 24 close votes on the more contentious questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not happy with all of the current custom close vote reasons. I think the proofreading close reason needs an overhaul because it is frequently used on questions which do highlight some particular issue. So we should either be allowing them, or make it much stricter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest I haven't seen too much clubbishness or hostility, but I may be more tolerant than others. I think the whole community should definitely be both pleasant and welcoming to new users. However when someone comes here asking blatantly off-topic questions along the lines of &quot;give me the codez&quot; I won't fault anyone for giving a curt response that those questions are off-topic. Even then though, it would be good to give a pleasant welcome and an encouragement to read the tour and help pages. I don't currently use any userscripts, but if I was elected I would, to make it much easier to post welcome messages etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers have to give something to support what they say, whether that's a dictionary or grammar quotation, or citing their own regional dialect (when that's relevant). Decent answers will give some measure of explanation too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question would be on-topic at ELL then it can be migrated. If not, a comment welcoming them to the site, pointing them to the help pages and appropriate meta posts, and alerting them to the existence of ELL would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I asked this question. From what I've observed, many of those who welcome any and every question participate on Meta only infrequently. So the first step would be encouraging them to come to Meta more often so that their voices can be heard in the consensus shaping discussions. Whether they are willing to do that is up to them, but in the end the consensus site policies must be what are enforced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not too bothered by them. They're not the purpose of comments, but they usually don't hurt too much. If these answer-comments are on open on-topic questions then they can readily be deleted. If they are on closed questions then I'd probably leave them for a day so that the OP has the chance to see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering is a privilege not a right, and highly disruptive users should not be participating on this site, even if their answers are top notch. But we'd have to take these users on a case by case basis, and probably try to mediate on chat first. There's no single process to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was something I felt very strongly about I'd probably raise the issue in a question on Meta so that the whole community can voice their thoughts. Mods are given the power to unilaterally close questions, which is a good thing, but disputes over specific questions should be solved like normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&quot;? &quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shorter and faster a question is answered the more it looks like a reputation grab, regardless of what the poster's intentions were. But neither speed of answering, brevity, correctness, or helpfulness really matters much. As I wrote above, I look for answers to support their claims. Any unsupported answer should have the needs-research flag applied to it. If that isn't provided then it may be deletable, though not having the power to delete yet, I haven't looked up the full history of this site's Meta discussions on deleting unsupported answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &quot;moderate&quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &quot;borderline&quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &quot;keep it nice&quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loath to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common theme in my answers here is that answers should be self-supporting. ;) There's nothing really to debate there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so what about a comment chain, not asking for improvement, but disputing points? I'd probably apply the same standards to them, that they should give evidence. Sometimes there are regional differences, and those comments are very useful. Comments that amount to &quot;you're wrong&quot; are not useful and should be deleted. Disputes on questions should generally be taken to Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user shows a pattern of aggressive comments or rudeness in general, then temporary suspensions are appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like my way of thinking, then please give me an upvote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election#post-341821&quot;&gt;the election primary!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T04:04:02.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T03:15:53.537" Score="-14" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;After considerable thought and as much profound reflection, that is, after entertaining a whim and examining the votes for and against the candidates, I've determined the best way to demolish the ELU clubhouse is to advance the primary candidates with the fewest downvotes, rather than those with the most upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This approach would be much more in line with the community-avowed desire to make the site more friendly to newcomers, and more friendly all around, for the simple reason that those candidates with the fewest downvotes have obviously inspired the least acrimony in the electorate, and could be expected (however erroneously) to continue along that path.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The approach can be adopted without any feature changes on the ELU site, and could be specific to, and perhaps fitted only for, ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The approach would frustrate the unseemly and counter-productive ambitions of the candidates who have spent years cultivating troops of followers in the backrooms, excuse me, chatrooms, gladhanding and perhaps palming off bitcoin on the more susceptible members of the ELU community in order to secure their upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Timing is essential, though; if adopted, I suggest the change not be officially adopted until the primary election is on the verge of being complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T13:07:41.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T03:50:48.147" Title="Opening up the clubhouse: defacing the &quot;no girls&quot; sign" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9313" CreationDate="2016-08-18T05:35:03.203" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the point of this. This primary is only going to eliminate one candidate, so your proposal could only frustrate the ambitions of a single person. Your post uses wording that suggests that you think more than one candidate has been engaging in shady business. So even if I agreed with everything that you're saying (which I don't) I wouldn't see this as an effective way of &quot;demolish[ing] the ELU clubhouse.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T05:35:03.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9313" CreationDate="2016-08-18T07:11:55.663" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although your proposed solution is quite clear, I don't understand the problem you are trying to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be making certain assumptions for which I do not intuitively see any arguments, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the unseemly and counter-productive ambitions of the candidates who have spent years cultivating troops of followers in the [...] chatrooms, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being actively involved on chat and meta is regarded as a good indication of a person's actual involvement in the site. There are even badges for it, in order to encourage such behaviour. Assuming that such participation emanates from &quot;unseemly&quot; and / or &quot;counter-productive&quot; ambitions looks like nothing but a non-sequitur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for making the site more accessible and welcome to new users, but I don't see how the moderator elections are a plausible venue for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54363" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T07:11:55.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9313" CreationDate="2016-08-19T14:35:39.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting approach: choose the least disliked candidate instead of the most liked, with the premise that down-votes carry more weight than up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's possible that posts need to provoke more of a reaction to elicit a down-vote than they do to elicit an up-vote, the approach doesn't necessarily help with your aims. In particular, if one has an cadre of sycophants (and I'm not suggesting that any candidate of this election does), it's just as easy to direct them to down-vote others as it is to direct them to up-vote themselves. And a low down-vote score may simply indicate a lack of engagement with the community, rather than a friendly person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem with voting is that people either don't vote, or they don't think about what they're voting for. Call me a dreamer, but I would like people to vote for those whose policies and known behaviour resonate most with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that we should promote a welcoming and friendly culture, but not by changing the election process mid-stream. This would smack of election manipulation, which you oppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T14:35:39.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-19T20:51:03.627" Score="7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I thought my question was a punctuation question (which would be on topic) and all the experts here thought it was a typography or style question (which is understandably off topic) how is it justifiable to close my question based on my incomplete knowledge that I could only gain by asking the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343510/how-to-show-that-one-long-line-of-poetry-is-only-one-line&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343510/how-to-show-that-one-long-line-of-poetry-is-only-one-line&lt;/a&gt;, I'll wait...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, shouldn't the answer be, &quot;this varies by publisher, there's no grammatical way to format poetry, here are some examples... YMMV, etc, etc...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if there was an answer, like &quot;use a double virgule&quot;, wouldn't that be worth posting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, how do you who closed it or answered it starting with &quot;This isn't an English question&quot; know that this question doesn't have an real and definite answer out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In closing, benefit of the doubt would be appreciated, I am asking a punctuation question, not a style question.  I want to know because I like posting dumb clerihews on Facebook and quite often it flips on to the next line and my dumb clerihew just became even dumber.  I don't like having to take 10 minutes to defend an indefensible question, but will do so when I think an injustice has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reading and not reversing the charges... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3122" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T20:51:03.627" Title="I thought my question was a punctuation question" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9313" CreationDate="2016-08-20T03:50:48.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of its inadequacy as a means in this particular election of eliminating the most experiences candidates in favour of the least experienced -- given only one of the 11 could be eliminated -- the idea of promoting a campaign to engineer a last-minute &quot;voting plunge&quot; in the primaries seems an extraordinarily anti-democratic proposal. It's quite blatantly a proposal to rig the election outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting it's the case, but * if * a hostile or unrepresentatative clique or cabal exists, and if this group controls anything in EL&amp;amp;U, the solution is to engage in the democratic process by electing an alternative group of candidates who, by their activity on EL&amp;amp;U, have demonstrated their worthiness. It's known as factional politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The division of the active and passionate minority of a group's membership into alignments is generally inevitable. There's no doubt such alignments exist within EL&amp;amp;U, but they're mostly unplanned, amorphous, fluid, leaderless and directionless, with the only convergence being a shared view on typical faultlines such as putting answers as comments, or downvoting posts, or how to deal with SWRs or VLQ answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the most experienced EL&amp;amp;U members seem to have cemented into a consistent view on these matters, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, let alone a clique. But even if it has become a conscious grouping that defends a particular culture of behaviour within EL&amp;amp;U, this is a normal process in organisational dynamics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes such a group may become out of touch with an evolving membership, at which point it's common for the Young Turks to lead a rebellion, which often fails because their antagonism is too overt and is offputting to the general membership (which then rallies in defence of the status quo). Eventually though, if the more experienced members don't address the issues, a second wave of activists steps up, whose focus is not on &quot;the bad guys&quot; but on a considered platform of improvements. The membership is open to this message and elects them to power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of the above describes the situation within EL&amp;amp;U, then it also describes the available solution: the democratic process. Defining your enemy by blunt measures such as patterns of voting on posts, presence in chat rooms, duration of membership or simply amount of rep points completely fails to address what's wrong that needs improving. Worse, eliminating &quot;enemy&quot; candidates using ambush voting is a corruption of the democratic process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly 20 years as a dissident within the political arena has taught me two things above all else: (1) naked antagonism is doomed to failure, and (2) building relationships through demonstrated competence is the only path to achieving your goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T03:50:48.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T10:20:58.653" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing there are 74,223 questions on EL&amp;amp;U. How many answers are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:28:58.137" Title="How many answers are there on English Language &amp; Usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T10:28:40.317" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I appear in chat, my icon is currently showing as a pink diagram, instead of my normal green. Can this be rectified as as soon as possible, please. Does anyone know why this is happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some screengrabs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whole screen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ul1gB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ul1gB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top right-hand corner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GbE02.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GbE02.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom left-hand corner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JZUps.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JZUps.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T13:09:48.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T13:23:29.860" Title="Wrong emblem appearing in chat" Tags="|bug|chat|avatar|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9326" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-20T11:13:25.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The avatar in Stack Exchange is a user specified image which serves as a visual representation of an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears next to the username in posts and chat, and also in the chat sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T11:13:25.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T11:13:25.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9327" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-20T11:13:25.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about the user-specified image in user cards" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T11:13:25.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T11:13:25.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9324" CreationDate="2016-08-20T11:19:08.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Data Explorer will provide reasonably up-to-date exact numbers (exact up to the last refresh), but even the front page of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; shows an approximate figure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SBekL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SBekL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of Data Explorer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;74k questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;184k answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;556k comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;976 tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An existing &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/441236/number-of-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; provides the following statistics as at the time of this edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers: 184317&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions: 74068&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference in the number of questions is because the Explorer data isn't quite up-to-date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T11:28:47.160" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T11:28:47.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9324" CreationDate="2016-08-21T01:44:40.373" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get an accurate and completely up-to-date count by using an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;advanced search&lt;/a&gt; (you just need to be logged in, otherwise it only returns 500 results maximum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I search with &lt;code&gt;is:a&lt;/code&gt; I get 254,853. When I first posted this answer, I got only 184,750. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aa&quot;&gt;Try a search.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T22:28:58.137" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:28:58.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T07:55:21.333" Score="14" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I the only one to be very disturbed by the re-opening of the 'What is the exact wordings for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342724/what-is-the-exact-wordings-for-there-is-a-single-stupid-question-in-the-world&quot;&gt;There is a single stupid question in the world … &quot; in Stephen King's &quot;Under the Dome&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;' question? ... 'I'm curious to know if somebody knows the exact line'. &#xA;In my opinion, this is far too narrowly scoped, not far removed from 'Can anyone remember the name of the dog in the 'Famous Five' series?' I can't see how this question fits at all into the ELU format. It's about literature, not language. Asking for ELU members to provide an accurate version of a passage from a readily-available book. Quite acceptable on other forums, as is the 'Timmy' request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T14:30:19.237" Title="Are requests for arbitrary lines from novels on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9332" CreationDate="2016-08-21T08:43:45.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a site for people to ask questions of each other, where experts volunteer to increase the accessibility of world knowledge in a free and open way. This site is not a service site, whether that's proofreading, dictionary lookup, or language learning. Now sometimes there's a thin line between them, but that's the general principle. (And there aren't very many truly world-class experts here (I'm not!) but we're all kind of experts in our own way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be right to go up to a university lecturer in English, or in Literature, or even in the narrow field of Stephen King Studies to ask that question? Would it be right to ask Stephen King himself? I don't think so. You'd go to a library and borrow the book! Or you'd search on Google Books or something like that. Questions like that absolutely do not belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how much of an expert of English you are, unless you had a copy of the books to check you could not answer it at all. No amount of prior experience, no amount of formal study, no amount of practice would help. Only having the books and looking through them. That's how to know that the question is off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-08-23T05:11:05.150" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T05:11:05.150" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9332" CreationDate="2016-08-21T14:59:36.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment on the original question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9332/are-requests-for-arbitrary-lines-from-novels-on-topic#comment36366_9332&quot;&gt;Josh61 wrote the following&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I generally tend to read &quot;between the lines&quot; and see if a &quot;simple&quot; question is actually an opportunity to discuss related issues such as its usage in different contexts and origin. While from a strict perspective of the site rules application you are right, I don't see anything wrong, unhelpful or really out of scope in this question. Please take also into account its &quot;non native&quot; origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments cannot be searched, nor are they votable in the sense of having a score that derives from the sum of the Community’s upvotes reckoned against their downvotes. Comments cannot be downvoted, only upvoted, so it isn’t the same thing. And not being searchable makes them hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T15:40:01.177" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-21T14:59:36.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T20:29:43.137" Score="6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, answers on this site are supposed to have references. This was established early on by the top answers to the following Meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/since-it-isnt-in-the-faq-are-we-as-answerers-expected-to-appeal-to-any-of-the&quot;&gt;Since it isn&amp;#39;t in the FAQ, are we as answerers expected to appeal to any of the various English authorities?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, JSBձոգչ's answer also describes this as a policy that is limited to questions of &quot;correctness,&quot; saying &quot;Not every question will be addressable in one of these ways.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what standards we should have in general for answers to questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-questions-are-on-topic-and-off-topic-here/279#279&quot;&gt;dialect differences&lt;/a&gt; or accent variation. In these cases, there is no single correct answer; the questioner wants information about the variety of forms that exist. (Such questions can still be on-topic because even if there is no &quot;correct&quot; answer, the answers can be ranked based on how informative they are and how well they summarize the &quot;big picture&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange Meta post about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/167259/how-widespread-is-the-back-it-up-principle&quot;&gt;the 'back it up' principle&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has some discussion of how personal information can in some cases be the basis of a useful answer. I would say that this is the case for questions about dialect, but I can also see why some people might argue that such information is too personalized to be of any use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the information is truly useless, there is no reason to retain it at all. I've seen some people leaving information like this as comments, or advising others to leave it as comments. I don't think that is a good course of action, for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It’s not really what comments are for. Comments are supposed to be ephemeral “notes” used to give feedback about improving the question. They aren’t supposed to try to answer the question. I know there's a tradition on this site of leaving partial answers as comments, but I don't see why we should &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; this. There are known disadvantages (for example, comments are not indexed by site search and they are more easily deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's left as an answer, people can indicate how useful it is by voting up and down. While the initial post might only reflect one person's experience, the score will give an indication of how many other people have encountered this dialect variant. Comments don't work as well for this purpose: they can only be voted up, and it's easy for them to become completely hidden beneath other comments with more upvotes. If a moderator ends up moving the comments to a chat-room, all voting information is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New users cannot comment. This means that a new user who wants to answer a question about dialects by sharing their personal experience will either just give up (not share any information) or will end up posting an answer. In the latter case, I don't see why it's necessary for the answer to be converted into a comment (a process that requires moderator intervention).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you think? Should answers like this be allowed, or prohibited? If they are prohibited, should we allow the same information to be left as a comment? What is the advantage of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other posts that I think are relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10465/does-stack-overflow-encourage-one-comprehensive-answer-or-many-incomplete-ones&quot;&gt;Does Stack Overflow encourage one comprehensive answer or many &amp;quot;incomplete&amp;quot; ones?&lt;/a&gt; (SE Meta)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the general Stack Exchange guide on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is&#xA;  helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or&#xA;  simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller&#xA;  explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was prompted by a discussion about the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/343756/77227&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55887/pronunciation-of-vowel-in-vague-as-%C3%A6-instead-of-e%C9%AA&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of vowel in vague as [æ] instead of [eɪ]&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is odd for me too. Somehow, for me, plague could take either the&#xA;  vowel of vague or of bag when a noun (I would use the &quot;vague&quot; vowel if&#xA;  placing emphasis on the word), but only the vowel of bag when used as&#xA;  a verb. The sounds are not merged for me, and I don't know where I&#xA;  picked this up. I'm from Rochester NY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate feedback about this specific example, but I hope people address my general question also. I can see why this answer could be borderline even for someone who generally agrees with me, since the answer talks mainly about the poster's idiolect and doesn't say if the described pronunciation is commonly used by other people in the poster's region. I think positives of this answer are that it makes it clear what the source of the information is (personal introspection, which can actually be quite a good source for information about accents), it describes an unusual pronunciation pattern that it would be difficult to learn about from other sources, and it does say what region the poster comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T00:37:25.410" Title="Are answers that only cite personal experience acceptable for questions about dialects?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|reference|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9335" CreationDate="2016-08-21T22:17:37.253" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As my flagging of a comment instigated @sumelic question, I'll share my thought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on pronunciation are quite interesting, particularly for non-natives as myself, as resources are very sparse outside what's in dictionnaries. ELU could help in that and fill a real need, even though natives might not realize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About dialects and sharing personnal experience: let me share some :-)&#xA;In my very personnal experience variations in speech can vary more between social classes and education than between places of birth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My wife and I come from the same city, we're even born in the same hospital at a few months interval...We definitely did not have the same education nor the same upbriging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She's speaks in &quot;standard&quot; accent, she pronunces every single syllable that is supposed to be utered. So much that if she speak in crowded noisy room, you'll hear her voice distinctly on the opposite side, above the chatter of tens of people.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &quot;eat&quot; half of my syllable, always try to reach the maximum economy, the less effort, I got a very marked working class accent and bad pronunciation in my native tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that to say, that when someone says &quot; I utter this vowel like this &quot; and for only reference has &quot; I'm from Bitville Alaska&quot;...well that requires a lot of clarifications, for example:&#xA;Where your parents immigrants or from outside the region? ( Italians for example, tend to retain peculiar ways of speaking two or three generation down.) Was your first pre-school teacher from the area? How far did you go to school? Where you born there or did you came in the region later? Did you ever take lessons in theater? Did you spent time abroad? Are you part of a Toasmaster club? Do you speak for a living? Are you morbidly obese or have other ailment? Is your town a suburb, a big city, a small village settled by a handful of Dutch, German, Mormons,Jews etc. who kept to themselves to the point of inbreding?etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these facts may influence the way one speaks individual vowels or consonnants as much as where one is from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all to expand a bit the scope of ELU, sometimes I feel we're applying too strongly the original ethos, but for this kind of question that resembles a sort of disguised poll or invite discussion, shared personnal experience should still maintain the standard &lt;strong&gt;&quot; provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, that would mean sharing anything that is known to influence speech pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone more versed in speech science than I could share the kind of parameters used to classify subjects of experiments. Ideally we could have a set of miminal perso info to add when answering questions on pronunciation where personnal experience count. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes the same amount of work to add Age, Education, Sex, born from immigrants –anything deemeed useful– than to give the complete answer we came to expect here: a question with reference, link, sources etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42481" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T22:17:37.253" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9332" CreationDate="2016-08-21T22:49:57.377" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I approach close voting in the first instance as if I were on a jury and I were under instructions to apply the letter of the law (the site's close-vote criteria) to the case before me. It sounds straightforward enough—and the law in many cases is quite clear on how I should come out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the funny thing about jurors is that they are human and thus susceptible to considerations other than those comprehended purely by the letter of the law. In fact, one major reason we have juries and not merely judges is that jurors de-professionalize the process. It's as though at some level the legal system considers that jurors' irrational thinking may be a check on the possibility of by-the-book injustice. Sometimes, being a rebellious juror is a crucial part of being a good juror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At English Language &amp;amp; Usage, this situation tends to arise (for me, anyway) in situations where the letter of the law demands condemnation of the accused but other facts and circumstances inspire a wish to grant clemency. In the little world of EL&amp;amp;U, this may sound all too grandiose, but I think that we shouldn't wholly exclude our irrational inclinations from playing a meaningful role in determining whether a question should be closed or left open, reopened or left closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I can agree with Edwin Ashworth that the EL&amp;amp;U question under discussion here does not meet objective standards to qualify as an appropriate question at EL&amp;amp;U, and yet at the same time (or shortly thereafter) I might support leaving the question open or even reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These mixed feelings might make me a bad moderator at this site, but I don't think that they make a bad private citizen here. If EL&amp;amp;U's close criteria are someday perfected, the site's governors really ought to automate them and let the  machines enforce justice. In the meantime, we humans should be true to our best judgment—at least until we demonstrate that our judgment is so biased or weak or counterproductive that we must be excluded from participation in the process altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T22:49:57.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9335" CreationDate="2016-08-22T00:37:25.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is specifically asking about dialect differences, then I think these kinds of answers are acceptable. (They aren't for pretty much all the other kinds of questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that cite other sources are even better and should be upvoted more of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T00:37:25.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9340" CreationDate="2016-08-21T11:00:14.293" Score="6" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put the spelling 'filosophy' in a Google Ngram and got &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=filosophy&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfilosophy%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this very strange chart&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that misspellings and grammatical mistakes will always be present in texts, if only as printing errors, so what level of usage should we consider to below the 'noise floor' (that is, just random) in an ngram chart? The question is particularly significant when usage changes over time. At what point can we consider a usage to have died out, even if it turns up faintly on an ngram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and why doesn't the word 'jabberwocky' show up on an &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=jabberwocky&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cjabberwocky%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ngram&lt;/a&gt; till 1890, when &quot;Through The Looking Glass&quot; was published in 1871?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175469" OwnerDisplayName="Dunsanist" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T16:49:29.947" Title="The noise floor in Ngram" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9339" CreationDate="2016-08-21T17:21:45.070" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;By way of confirming Peter Shor's observation about Ngram's default case-sensitivity, here is the Ngram chart for &quot;Jabberwocky&quot; (blue line) and &quot;jabberwocky&quot; (red line) for the period 1800–2000 (with smoothing reduced to 0 from 3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=Jabberwocky%2C+jabberwocky&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJabberwocky%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cjabberwocky%3B%2Cc0&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest match that the Google Books search results listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jabberwocky%2Cjabberwocky&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJabberwocky%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cjabberwocky%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;links beneath this graph&lt;/a&gt; find is from the June 15, 1872, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gxfnAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA552&amp;amp;dq=%22jabberwocky%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiR3Jy_9dLOAhUE_WMKHQqOCrwQ6AEIMDAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22jabberwocky%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Once a Week&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; and the next-earliest match is from the December 1882 issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pNhDAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA155&amp;amp;dq=%22jabberwocky%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiR3Jy_9dLOAhUE_WMKHQqOCrwQ6AEIKzAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22jabberwocky%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;St. Nicholas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In both instances, Jabberwocky is initial-capped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reduce the time period from 1800–2000 to 1870–1900, you get a magnified image of the relevant segment from the first chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=Jabberwocky&amp;amp;year_start=1870&amp;amp;year_end=1900&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJabberwocky%3B%2Cc0&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jabberwocky%2Cjabberwocky&amp;amp;year_start=1870&amp;amp;year_end=1900&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJabberwocky%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cjabberwocky%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;links beneath this graph&lt;/a&gt;, you'll find nine unique, previewable matches from the period 1870–1879 alone, including an 1875 edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=cJJZAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA21&amp;amp;dq=%22jabberwocky%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjv2eWm-dLOAhVC2GMKHbVkCsUQ6AEIODAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22jabberwocky%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-glass: And What Alice Found There&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which very conveniently details in its front matter the moves in a chess game corresponding to Alice's adventures, in which &quot;White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point here is that the degree of detail provided in the Ngram-associated Google Books search results varies tremendously depending on what time interval you use, but the Ngram line graph seems quite stable (aside from predictable changes in magnification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a baseline noise floor, much depends on the years over which you are running your search. Searches going back to the 1600s produce many OCR errors based on blurred, faded, or broken page images; old-fashioned font sets (especially in connection with italics); foreign words misread as English ones (especially if Latin texts are proportionately much more common in the results); books and journals with multiple columns per page and narrow spaces between them, which the OCR sometimes jumps incorrectly; and (in particular) words that use the old-fashioned lowercase &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;long s&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (ſ), which Google's OCR system often misreads as a lowercase F (f).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you get closer to the present, image quality generally improves and the incidence of OCR errors drops considerably. By the middle-1800s, Ngram/Google Books OCR accuracy is much better than for the early 1800s and before. Nevertheless, searches that bring up disproportionately many newsprint articles have a higher noise problem, due to small type, smudging, and fading of the type. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my conclusion is that there is no consistent baseline or floor to Ngram noise. Every search must be appraised and fine-tuned on its own unique terms. But the only way to get a sense of what results to trust is to go into the search result links and check each match. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest match for &lt;em&gt;filosophy&lt;/em&gt;, for example (and the one responsible for the skyscraper centered on the year 1820 in your link), is to a page in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ntMgAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22filosophy%22&amp;amp;dq=%22filosophy%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiugrfb_9LOAhUK5mMKHULjAO0Q6AEIIDAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1820 Parliamentary history&lt;/a&gt; that got creased, causing successive lines to lose the equivalent of 1½ visible characters; hence the OCR misreading. But matches for &lt;em&gt;filosophy&lt;/em&gt; from the late 1800s are not errors—they are matches to publications that evidently took a half-baked approach to spelling simplification and balked at &lt;em&gt;filosofy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" OwnerDisplayName="Sven Yargs" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-08-22T16:49:29.947" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T16:49:29.947" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T05:02:08.113" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that many questions, answers and comments on this site involve the popular and specialized terminology of food, restaurants and gastronomy. I have also noticed that some are deemed off-topic or otherwise dismissed as having little to do with &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage.&lt;/em&gt; Is this site really unsuited to such a discussion? Is there another associated site dealing with these matters? I do not consider &quot;cooking&quot; to be such a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190025" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Point" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T10:50:23.407" Title="Popularity of questions regarding the terminology of food and other aspects of gastronomy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9332" CreationDate="2016-08-22T15:21:49.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Full disclosure: I did not vote to close or reopen the question itself, but I did engage in a lengthy discussion on it in chat. The discussion started &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31677682#31677682&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and ended &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31680024#31680024&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342724/what-is-the-exact-wordings-for-there-is-a-single-stupid-question-in-the-world?noredirect=1#comment795389_342724&quot;&gt;requested&lt;/a&gt; by a moderator, here is a summary of that discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic was posted in chat in the usual manner, accompanied by the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone really think this kind of question belongs in our site mission?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant quotes (verbatim from the transcript; possibly verbatim from the OP as well, but the original is no longer available for verification):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My question has nothiing to do with &amp;quot;criticism, discussion, and analysis of English.&amp;quot; I'm simply asking what is the original English version of &amp;quot;There's no stupid question,&amp;quot; which I found interesting because it's equivalent to Japanese proverb, &amp;quot;Asking a question is a momentary shame. Not asking a question is an eternal shame.&amp;quot; I'm only following the wisdom of this proverb, which ironically seems to be against you guys priinciple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both Josh61 and Dreadrat whom I respect as the reputable user of EL&amp;amp;U kindly advised me where the quoted line is from, which differes from the source the Yomiuri's editor quoted, and read by 9 million plus Japanese readers. It was great finding, I believe, only available from knowledgeable EL&amp;amp;U colleagues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion can be grouped into 4 main views:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. The question is &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, and seriously so.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. There have been questions closed for less cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Translation questions are off-topic, &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The OP's track record of setting the bar for asking good ELU questions was noted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. The question has a basis in &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was rejected on the basis of the OP's first quote above&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Is the question closable as &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Based on Meta posts recalled, good questions should hold the interest of ELU's target audience (etymologists, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; refers to accepted repositories of information relevant to a particular SE community. For ELU, they include dictionaries and the like. Books that aren't covered by this are, by definition, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; general references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Based on Jeff Atwood's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/88521/286574&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; to the post that requested Gen Ref as a close reason, it's not merely 'general reference' that makes something off-topic. It's &lt;em&gt;trivial&lt;/em&gt; general reference that makes a post off-topic SE-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. (Point 3d has been deleted - the point raised in chat was inaccurate; it is also not critical to this summary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e. Based on those principles, it was inferred that straight 'look it up' quote searches are off-topic because they aren't of interest to the target audience. But if the look-up is somehow integral to a topic that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; of interest, then requesting the look-up is accepted as corroboration and research fulfillment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. The question is based on translating an idiom.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Idiomatic translations are well accepted at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Reconstructed sequence of events, which the second quote above seems to support:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;someone made a statement in English;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the English statement was translated to Japanese and reported in a Japanese newspaper;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the OP considered the Japanese version similar to a Japanese proverb, for which the OP half-remembered an English version, as well as its possible source; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the OP asked about the English translation, providing as much information as he could, including the half-remembered English version and the possible source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Both answers to the OP's question addressed other aspects of the translation, one of which was etymology. It appears that the look-up was integral to the question, but there was some doubt that it would satisfy the OP if someone had suggested a lookup not close to the Japanese idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. Based on the reconstructed sequence of events, the heart of the question is a request for an English equivalent to a Japanese proverb. This is on-topic at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T14:30:19.237" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T15:51:32.797" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/344000/how-is-cyan-pronounced-and-where-is-the-stress&quot;&gt;How is &amp;quot;cyan&amp;quot; pronounced and where is the stress?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the question covers both the pronunciation of the vowel and the position of the stress. I edited this post to quote dictionaries, so it shows the necessary amount of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing then that the close-voters think it is a &quot;question that can be answered using commonly-available references&quot; but in fact, &lt;strong&gt;the dictionary entries are known to present an incomplete picture of the situation&lt;/strong&gt; because there are evidently various people who pronounce this word with stress on the second syllable. You can see some of them in the comments and the answer to this question; I also added &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/344000/5&quot;&gt;links to some examples&lt;/a&gt; which were then edited out in a later revision of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the pronunciation with stress on the second syllable is non-standard (which seems very likely), I think it deserves some explanation, and the question should be re-opened so that it's possible for the original poster to get an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I edited the question and it is now re-opened. Thanks to everyone for voting on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T19:21:36.960" Title="How does the current version of the &quot;cyan&quot; pronunciation question not show research?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|question-closure|general-reference|research-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9343" CreationDate="2016-08-22T16:12:36.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The timeline available to moderators shows that the question was closed with five votes, then you edited it and it was reopened with five votes. It's now had five different people vote to close again, starting eight hours &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; your edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that the &quot;research&quot; reason requires that basic sources do not answer the question. You have found that the sources provide three different pronunciations, so they answer the &quot;How is it pronounced?&quot; question &amp;mdash; it's pronounced at least three different ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ODO and OED both also put the stress on the first syllable. However, along with Jim, who commented, I've only ever heard the stress on the second. That introduces a fourth option, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9335/are-answers-that-only-cite-personal-experience-acceptable-for-questions-about-di&quot;&gt;presumably valid&lt;/a&gt;, but is that valuable enough to give as an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;Where is &lt;em&gt;cyan&lt;/em&gt; pronounced...&quot; and &quot;Why is it so&quot; are different questions to the &quot;How is it pronounced?&quot; which was originally asked and answered by common references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T16:12:36.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T20:22:32.763" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343863/why-do-we-crunch-numbers-when-solving-math-problems-particularly-in-accounti&quot;&gt;a recent question&lt;/a&gt;, there was an answer given that I thought was quite valuable, even though it didn't seem to be an answer that would be accepted as final / correct.  The answer had upvotes and discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user who gave it chose to delete it.  Is there a way to petition to have it back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a cache of the page, otherwise I'd just re-add it myself. It wasn't picked-up by archive.org, or others, quickly enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was a fairly high-rep user, so perhaps they'll notice this and chime-in.  Thanks all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ref:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3821/23834&quot;&gt;The situation happened here&lt;/a&gt;, but the result was that mods undeleted it.  I'm hoping for some guidance about how anyone can solve this, without opening a meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23834" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T01:30:54.967" Title="Can we revive a valuable answer that was removed?" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T22:43:13.113" Score="6" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;page that lists privileges&lt;/a&gt;, hovering over items in that list cause a single underscore/whitespace underline to appear before each group of text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3H3hB.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3H3hB.gif&quot; alt=&quot;This site&amp;#39;s Privilege List&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not appear to happen on some of the other SE sites I've checked (Stack Overflow, SE meta, and Worldbuilding):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oz1F9.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oz1F9.gif&quot; alt=&quot;StackOverflow&amp;#39;s Privilege List&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue persisted across both Chrome (v 52.0.2743.116 m) and Firefox (v 47) with all extensions disabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T23:20:08.043" Title="Leading whitespace hover underline on privileges page" Tags="|bug|design|css|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9345" CreationDate="2016-08-23T01:30:54.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible. The OP can undelete their own post (they may or may not want to, some people delete a post while making changes, eventually to leave it undeleted. Users with high enough rep can vote to undelete (I can see the answer as deleted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T01:30:54.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9332" CreationDate="2016-08-23T02:28:21.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;@curiosdannil. &quot;Would it be right to ask Stephen King himself? You'd go to a library and borrow the book! Or you'd search on Google Books or something like that. Questions like that absolutely do not belong here.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I return this naive statement straight back to your mouth. I tried Google, but I failed to locate the source as I honestly stated in my question. But I got exact answers that I wished to have within an hour or so from two respectful users, from this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should I go to library? Why should I search for and go to visit an English professor to ask this question, when there are go-to guys and reliable go-to resources? What's wrong with utilizing, capitalizing on the large pool of expertise, knowledge and learnings English language at our arm's reach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We call people who don'k know how to use tools / assets / resources in their hands 宝の持ち腐れ in Japanese, meaning a silly guy who rots and spoils treasures in their hands left unused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't service site, of course not Amazon. But this is the site to exchange stock of knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offers all knowledge I have unstintingly to non-native Japanese language speakers (mostly Americans) in SE Japanese Language site. There's no &quot;off-topic&quot; hazard. No one there brandishes insular &quot;off-topic&quot; flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I'm not asking a question about Chinese, Russian, Greek, Hindu, nor Pakistani. It's English language and its usage that I've been asking. Do you know it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="3119" LastEditDate="2016-08-23T03:36:09.353" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T03:36:09.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9351" CreationDate="2016-08-23T09:14:47.413" Score="8" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I recently got the privilege to review edits I noticed something that I found quite peculiar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that one user edited out little pleasantries from at least a few questions and answers for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/344308/revisions&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/196460&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. Since at least in the last instance there seem to be different opinions I hereby ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the lines &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please enlighten me. Thank you! :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;were edited out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a thank you in a question really a reason to edit a question? Why would we actively discourage a jovial flavor in questions and answers - provided of course the questions and answers themselves are valuable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T13:44:49.570" Title="Is a &quot;thank you&quot; reason for editing" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9350" CreationDate="2016-08-23T09:23:21.337" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; it's a general Stack Exchange policy to edit out irrelevant parts of a question like pleasantries, signatures, and greetings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons are discussed in the answers to the following Meta SE question (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should &amp;#39;Hi&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;thanks&amp;#39;, taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) and the answers to the linked questions that can be seen in the right sidebar on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the consensus is that this kind of text is distracting and wastes time and space. One thing to keep in mind is that under the Stack Exchange model, questions and answers are intended to be read many times by future visitors to the site. These visitors will not be helped by seeing a &quot;thank you&quot; that isn't even addressed to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with this, you don't have to make these kind of edits yourself, but please don't revert or reject edits by other users that conform with these guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T09:30:19.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9350" CreationDate="2016-08-23T12:14:28.627" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would you feel about picking up an encyclopedia in which every entry had &quot;thanks in advance&quot; stuck in between the entry heading and the answer? Don't you think after scanning a couple pages those lines would just be noise that got in the way of what you were looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about Wikipedia? What if the article summary at the top of every entry started out with &quot;I hope you find this information helpful...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A sites are not quite either of those things, but they are meant to be more akin to those reference formats than they are to  discussion boards or social media sites where the personal interactions are part of the game. Unlike Wikipedia your name is attached to every post you make, but it's neatly tucked away as part of your user card. &lt;strong&gt;The expectation is that the actual posts will get straight down to business.&lt;/strong&gt; The low amount of noise on SE sites is part of what makes the resulting sites such good reference tools. When you turn up a post looking for an answer yourself you get just the meat of the thing rather than having to sift through some other people's interactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted norm is to always edit these kind of personal interactions out of post if they are being edited for any other reason &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; if the post has recently been bumped by getting an answer of having been edited by someone else. On the other hand if you run across years old posts with thank you lines in them and there is nothing else worth fixing, don't bother editing and bumping these to the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6807" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T12:14:28.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9291" CreationDate="2016-08-23T18:21:31.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;MετάEd&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is your view of the current state of question closure at EL&amp;amp;U, and what—if anything—would you do to try to change the status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a structural problem. It is a cultural problem. StackExchange exists to serve experts in specific fields of technology by creating libraries of expert answers to expert-level questions. English is a very widely adopted technology and there is a very large population of novices. The number of people who want help expressing something simple in English is much, much bigger than the number of people who want help expressing something simple in C. This is why EL&amp;amp;U attracts more novices than other SE sites. EL&amp;amp;U attracts many questions that are not expert-level, and also attracts many helpful people who want to answer those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge for StackExchange is to help first timers learn what the site is about. First timers learn from the votes and constructive comments that are offered by other users. The main thing I think a good moderator can do in this area is model good behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A perennial issue at EL&amp;amp;U is whether the site is unfriendly toward low-rep users and especially newcomers. Do you view clubbishness or hostility/rudeness toward recent arrivals at EL&amp;amp;U as a continuing problem? What can moderators do to help inexperienced users feel more comfortable and welcome here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two kinds of behavior at EL&amp;amp;U that are perceived by first timers as clubbish or rude. One kind is actual rude or dismissive speech. In this case the moderator's job is to intervene, respectfully and firmly, to protect the site and the community. The other kind is constructive speech which frustrates the first timer's attempt to get an answer. For example, we frequently get first timer requests to proofread a text. The correct response, that proofreading is off topic here, is often perceived as clubbish or rude: deliberate unhelpfulness. And it is also perceived that way by people who try to give helpful answers. In this case the moderator's job, besides de-escalating any drama that might ensue, is to clearly communicate the site mission and policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a moderator, I often have to judge the difference between a short answer and a low quality answer. What do you believe are the criteria for a short answer to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is the proper remedy for most poor answers. Moderator intervention is appropriate when the post is plainly not an answer. Examples: a comment on the question, a post that doesn't try to address the question (such as a new question, an incomprehensible post, or spam), a bare link, etc. It is also appropriate when the post gives insufficient explanation. An obvious example is a bare &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;. StackExchange is looking for &amp;quot;long answers that provide some explanation and context&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;answers that don't include explanations may be removed&amp;quot;. So if an answer fits a lot of explanation and context into a small package, then it's acceptable. Otherwise it might be better converted to a comment on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user to the Stack Exchange (member of ELU for 2 days, rep of 1, not a member of any other SE site) posts a rather basic question on ELU. Based on how the question is worded, it seems evident that this question is coming from a non-native speaker. Chances are, this user has not read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably not even aware of the existence of English Language Learners. Should something be done? If so, what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question is not expert-level, it's off topic and can be closed with a referral to ELL, along with a link to the ELL question criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a fairly substantial division in the ELU community over what we should do with medium-to-low quality questions. One group says that any question which can be understood can and should be answered. Another group says that it is better for the long term health of the site and its community for unresearched questions to be closed and not answered. (There are surely others who think something else, but these are the two big groups.) As a mod, how would you mediate between these two groups?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators do not make policy – SE management does. Moderators need to know and follow site policy. SE management has repeatedly asked the community to respect the requirement that questions be expert-level and show effort and research. Moderators can help with community divisions by staying respectful and communicating clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the things that seems to divide this community are (usually partial) answers posted as comments. Some are annoyed by it, others post them on a regular basis. As a moderator you will be responsible for handling comment flags – how will you approach this issue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers posted as comments are fine. But that's not where it ends. Users are encouraged to turn them into comprehensive answers, at which point the comments are obsolete and can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean inappropriate, confrontational argument. I would not let a user's output excuse their bad behavior. If someone is not being nice then moderators need to protect the site and the other users. Depending on the harm and the intent, an intervention can be anything from a gentle explanation to locking posts or users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would discuss it with the other moderator but avoid forcing the issue. Unless of course there was evidence that the action taken was malicious; in that case I would do basically what we recommend to anyone who runs into inappropriate behavior: disengage with the other moderator and bring it to the attention of staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's your stand on obvious, often unsubstantiated, but correct and helpful answers to trivial questions? &amp;quot;It's an easy reputation grab that encourages more such questions which are not wanted on ELU&amp;quot;? &amp;quot;Welcome introduction to answering that encourages both the one who asked and the one who answered to come back&amp;quot;? Something else entirely? I am referring to questions that have obvious answers because they should have been posted on ELL in the first place or are even too trivial for that site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we're talking about answers to questions that shouldn't have been asked in the first place. The bar is as high for those answers as for any answers. An unsubstantiated answer is not helpful, not in the context of expert Q&amp;amp;A. See my answer to question 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the most difficult roles for a moderator is to &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; users' behaviour. Users can get pretty indignant about being asked to improve their post or having their precious question declared off-topic. And of course some users simply have difficulty managing their personality disorder, with any well-meaning comment an invitation to a duel. What's your own tolerance for problematic behaviour - in particular, the &amp;quot;borderline&amp;quot; kind that some would interpret as acceptably robust debate, while others might feel are unacceptable shows of anger that breach the spirit of &amp;quot;keep it nice&amp;quot;? Would you aim to remove nasty, disparaging comments about our site as quickly as possible, or do you see this as freedom of expression that you would be loathe to censor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a big difference between disagreement and bullying. Disagreement is healthy, even though it might get under the other person's skin. But I lean very hard towards removing all nasty, disparaging comments. If people do not feel they are basically safe here, they will vote with their feet. The site lives or dies by whether it can attract and keep volunteers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T18:21:31.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-23T20:01:59.990" Score="35" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;fourth moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 2 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2085&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2085.png&quot; alt=&quot;tchrist&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14073&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/14073.png&quot; alt=&quot;MετάEd&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please join me in thanking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/10893/simchona&quot;&gt;simchona&lt;/a&gt; who is stepping down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/5649233675812864/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T14:55:35.993" Title="2016 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9355" CreationDate="2016-08-23T20:46:05.010" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to our new moderators!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farewell to simchona and thank you for your service!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, a big thank you to all the candidates. It is a scary thing to put yourself out there like that and you did it! We had a lot of good choices this election and I hope you will consider running again in a future election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T20:46:05.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9277" CreationDate="2016-08-24T04:14:49.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure whether this will be effective, but in case it goes through, I would like to suggest to not use radio button with &quot;Yes&quot; and &quot;No&quot;, since what you want is just &quot;Yes&quot;. You can instead just use a list of check box, because it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a check list, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6WMtW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6WMtW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example of check list from codingame.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The figure above comes from codingame.com, a website for programming challenges, where users can contribute challenges. This box (overlaid on the whole page) is shown when a user clicks on &quot;Approve this contribution&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see that this gives the users some opportunity to realize that they have not done something in accordance to the guidelines (if any), because this feels like accepting terms and conditions, which (at least for me) should give more impact to the users instead of multiple-choice questions with obvious answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the &quot;Accept&quot; button is disabled until you check everything in the list. True that this doesn't prevent people who just mindlessly clicking all the check list, but I do believe this is better than multiple-choice questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not associated with codingame.com, just thought that the way they encourage users' actions against a check list is good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58844" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T04:14:49.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T08:43:46.743" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the moderator election I clicked through the newly discovered user tabs and I found a little inaccuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JQlDX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JQlDX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tool tip of the tab says &lt;strong&gt;users who joined in the last 45 days&lt;/strong&gt;. As it happens I am a 46 day site member. Yet I am still listed in the tab. Of course, this is not a big thing, I just thought to mention it anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Since the time zone might be relevant. I am currently within the UTC + 1 time zone. I noticed and took the screenshot at around 10:30.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-08-24T09:20:22.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T09:20:22.147" Title="Inaccuracy in the new users tab" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T09:32:32.617" Score="-3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you please reopen my question?&#xA;My question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/344393/on-which-to-unload-those-most-unbelievable-yet-haunting-of-fairy-tales&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;On which to unload those most unbelievable yet haunting of fairy-tales&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156741" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T11:09:56.897" Title="Could you please reopen my question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9359" CreationDate="2016-08-24T09:40:24.097" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewers consider whether to vote to reopen a question, it helps for the request to explain why it should be reopened. Was it closed in error? Was it closed correctly, but you've now addressed the issues (and if so, how did you do that)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked in the right place, and the community is usually keen to help. It really lightens the load for reviewers to be able to just confirm that your reasons are valid, rather than to have to wade through the edit trail to work it out. This makes it more likely that a request accompanied by a valid reason would be taken seriously than one that doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following example if you believe that you have addressed the issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7516/reopen-request-what-is-the-origin-of-ex&quot;&gt;Reopen request: What is the origin of “ex”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Meta post lists the question and the reason for closure, then says what's changed to address the issue that led to the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your request to reopen is because you disagree with the reason for closure, consider the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5080/please-reopen-what-does-mode-mean-in-modal-verb&quot;&gt;Please reopen What does “mode” mean in “modal verb”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It lists the question and mentions the reason for closure, then explains why the reason didn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T11:09:56.897" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9355" CreationDate="2016-08-24T14:55:35.993" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me congratulate you guys. We had so many good candidates and, not surprisingly, you made it in what was a keen competition.  You're both great contributors and have been around long enough for us to feel sure that your attitudes as moderators will always be tempered with reason and tolerance. Good luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T14:55:35.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2016-08-24T17:47:03.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't &quot;copy&quot; prior answers. But it could happen by &quot;accident.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I answer, I check the other answers before answering. Then I type my own answer (having done the check after completing research). This may take ten minutes or more (I'm not a fast typist). Then I will release the answer to make sure that gets posted. (I don't do a final recheck because I've been known to &quot;lose&quot; answers this way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that another, similar answer will have been posted during the time I spent typing. That is particularly true if I and the other answerer referred to the same quote or cliche. It doesn't happen often (to me, anyway), but has been known to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T17:47:03.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-25T05:12:02.273" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there was a question that attracted a lot of answers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343411/is-there-a-word-for-a-person-who-cant-do-things-right-or-cant-handle-things&quot;&gt;Is there a word for a person who can't do things right? Or can't handle things, and ends up messing up?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zv7ov.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zv7ov.png&quot; alt=&quot;text of question: &amp;quot;I just wanted to know, so I can learn more about words that might describe as me. If you know some words or something related about those of my question please answer it. I would be glad that you&amp;#39;d help me. Thanks&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was nicely coming along. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W2THP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W2THP.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of &amp;quot;nice answer&amp;quot; badge&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, however, it is deleted.&#xA;I asked why this happened and received the stock answer it was deleted because of being off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm questioning this order of events. Why remove something generating quite lively and interesting input so late, after much happening, and why remove, not just put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the decision points here? I'm... disappointed as this stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; after the answers received.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Good answers both. But still disappointed. Taking this further &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9373/about-controversial-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121521" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T11:26:59.453" Title="Question deleted with multiple up-voted answers, why?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|deleted-questions|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9364" CreationDate="2016-08-25T07:25:38.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This answer simply states the general principles. I didn't vote to close or delete the question, so I'll leave it to those who did to confirm.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a question is suitable for the site is decided at the time it is put on hold, i.e. when voting to close a question. Those votes don't immediately lead to deletion. Questions are put on hold so that the OP can address specific deficiencies. If the issues are adequately addressed, the questions can, and should, be reopened promptly - with a nudge at Meta if required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary 'decision point' for deleting a closed question is then whether the stated reason for its closure has been adequately addressed. If it hasn't, the onus is on those who want to keep it open to explain why the reason for closure was invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/343411/revisions&quot;&gt;revision trail&lt;/a&gt; suggests that the OP has ignored the request in the notice to edit the question, as well as the request in comments for more information. As such, the decision to delete simply ratifies the decision to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that at Stack Exchange, all questions and answers are freely editable by anyone with at least 2000 rep and, subject to review, freely editable by those with less rep. It doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; edited the question - if the reasons for closure are adequately addressed by the edits, anyone may note this on Meta and request that the question be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T07:25:38.727" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9364" CreationDate="2016-08-25T07:31:05.087" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why the question was judged unsuitable for this site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question did not meet the criteria for single word requests, and the original poster never edited it or returned to it in the approximately five days since it was closed (closed Aug 18 at 13:59, deleted Aug 24 at 1:58).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, stripped of fluff, basically consists of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a word for a person who can't do things right? Or can't&#xA;  handle things, and ends up messing up? I wanted to learn more about&#xA;  words that might describe me, or something related to my&#xA;  question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question was closed, a notification was posted that explained the close reason and linked to the tag information for for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;single word requests&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word that fits a meaning.&#xA;  To ensure your question is not closed as off-topic, please be specific&#xA;  about the intended use of the word. YOU MUST INCLUDE A SAMPLE SENTENCE&#xA;  DEMONSTRATING HOW THE WORD WOULD BE USED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no sample sentence. In my opinion, a sample sentence isn't actually &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; if the question is clear enough otherwise, but this question was definitely not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that are about finding a single word to fit&#xA;  a meaning. Describe the intended meaning, its connotation—is it&#xA;  laudatory or derogative, and/or context in as much detail as you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was some description of the desired meaning. It's likely the desired connotation was negative, but it's not entirely clear, since the original poster wants to describe himself using the word. There was not much detail and pretty much no context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that show no research are likely to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Question Checklist&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before making a single-word request, ask yourself the following&#xA;  questions (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2293/is-this-the-type-of-single-word-request-question-we-should-be-closing/2298#2298&quot;&gt;this meta topic about good request questions&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question describe exactly in what context you want to use a&#xA;  single word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question specify the criteria for which the&#xA;  suggested word will be accepted? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question list which words&#xA;  you didn't like? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question show that you searched for a&#xA;  suitable word before asking the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to all of these is &quot;no.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why it was deleted even though it had high-scoring answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2168/77227&quot;&gt;if a question is bad enough to be close-worthy, it's bad enough to be deleted.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different opinions about the circumstances where &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4522/bad-questions-can-lead-to-good-answers&quot;&gt;Bad questions can lead to good answers&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; (For what it's worth, I mainly agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4538/77227&quot;&gt;MrHen's answer&lt;/a&gt; to that question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposedly, this site's mission is to be a &quot;library of &lt;strong&gt;detailed answers&lt;/strong&gt; to every question about English language and usage.&quot; Single word requests, with their tendency towards single-word answers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;have always been an uneasy fit with this goal&lt;/a&gt;, even though they constitute one of the largest categories of questions on this site. Jeff Atwood's answer to the preceding question specifically mentions that good questions make it easier to write good (=long, detailed) answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirement for citations in answers and the character limit does provide a kind of &quot;lower bar&quot; for answers to any single word request, but its difficult to get much detail beyond that without more detail in the question. For this question, the top three answers were essentially just words and quoted dictionary definitions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T07:31:05.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9369" CreationDate="2016-08-26T04:19:01.160" Score="8" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342437/single-word-for-something-that-is-not-yet-a-fact-but-very-close&quot;&gt;Single word for something that is “not yet a fact” but very close?&lt;/a&gt; erupted into a furious flurry of answers, comments and hostility over the last few hours. Twice I was in the process of composing a comment when the answer I was commenting on was deleted. In both cases, my comment had included a recommendation to take up the discussion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not disputing whether the action taken in deleting the posts was appropriate. However, I'm concerned that ordinary EL&amp;amp;U members like me, with only modest rep points, seem to have no access to what's going on behind the scenes and therefore no ability to reflect on the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the most recent remaining post has been locked and has the following message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being&#xA;  resolved. For more info &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;visit meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems entirely inadequate: visiting Meta provides no information on this specific issue at all, and presumably means &quot;we have a Meta site, go search there for something that might explain the general process for how this issue will be dealt with&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reasonably experienced with both the general expectations and processes, and the things you can find in Meta, but what's happened with the several posts to this particular question seems very opaque, and the auto message doesn't seem very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we also lost a valuable answer by Mary_Mag (?) when it potentially could have been edited to save it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is not a criticism of any decisions taken, but I'd like to understand what's happened. And I do think the message referring to Meta needs to be better worded or have a more targetted link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T23:52:20.127" Title="What happened in the &quot;Single word for something that is 'not yet a fact'&quot; controversy?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2016-08-26T05:06:21.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the message just means that if you want to discuss the locked post you should do it on Meta, as you just did. I agree that it's not very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you get 10,000 reputation, you get access to some &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;moderator tools&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which include the ability to see deleted posts. It's true that lower-rep users do not have direct access to what's going on behind the scenes. However, by posting on Meta or in chat, you can get the attention of members with higher rep who can go look at the posts and tell you about them. (For example, I posted a screenshot of Mary Mag's answer that you can see in earlier revisions of this post. I removed it because it is not relevant to the general question, and I think it's distracting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You got an answer to your question from a moderator, Andrew Leach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was enough evidence of abuse of the system to delete answers.&#xA;  The moderator agreement means that to protect personally-identifying&#xA;  information we can't be any more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, in this case, nobody besides the moderators has &quot;access to what's going on behind the scenes,&quot; and you aren't going to get any more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You said &quot;I'm not disputing whether the action taken in deleting the posts was appropriate&quot; so it seems to me there is nothing left to say here. If anyone does want to dispute the moderator actions on the basis of the limited information that we do have (for example, if you feel that Mary Mag's answer should have just been edited rather than deleted) I'd advise making a new Meta post. I'd be happy to provide screenshots or quotes for this if you don't have access to deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T23:24:42.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2016-08-26T20:58:24.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was enough evidence of abuse of the system to delete answers. The moderator agreement means that to protect personally-identifying information we can't be any more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T20:58:24.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-27T02:22:56.827" Score="7" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166847&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Put me in touch with whomever created it&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think F.E.'s answer here is very good and complete--the best overview on the case of fused relative pronouns that I've seen on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question is marked as a &quot;duplicate&quot; of two questions with answers that in my opinion don't explain the subject anywhere near as well, if at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84376/whoever-vs-whomever&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Whoever&amp;quot; Vs. &amp;quot;Whomever&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is about fused relative pronouns, but it deals with a vocative expression containing a nominative relative pronoun, not a very common situation. The answer also doesn't mention the complications of sentences like  &quot;(?) [Whomever he marries] will have to be very tolerant&quot; (which F.E. quotes from Huddleston and Pullum's CGEL). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121043/whoever-or-whomever-happy-for-has-the-pleasure-of-working-with-you-next&quot;&gt;Whoever or whomever: &amp;#39;happy for ___ has the pleasure of working with you next.&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one deals with a similar situation, but the answer is much shorter and doesn't have references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually found one more question, from 2011, that I think covers the same subject and has some interesting answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44893/should-i-use-whoever-or-whomever-i-will-kill-despises-me&quot;&gt;Should I use &amp;#39;whoever&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;whomever&amp;#39;: &amp;quot;I will kill ___ despises me.&amp;quot; ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what I would propose is marking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166847&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Put me in touch with whomever created it&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44893&quot;&gt;Should I use &amp;#39;whoever&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;whomever&amp;#39;: &amp;quot;I will kill ___ despises me.&amp;quot; ?&lt;/a&gt; and merging the answers (since F.E.'s answer is mostly about the general topic, it can easily be edited to address the earlier specific question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think? Are there any more useful posts about the case of fused relative pronouns that I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T02:22:56.827" Title="The answer to this question is great! But the question is closed and a bit hard to find" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|answers|duplicates|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9379" CreationDate="2016-08-27T02:26:54.767" Score="10" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen this a few times during the past few years. Most of the times they were only subtly derogatory comments, but on rare occasions openly bellitling. Whether the comments were well-deserved or not is not the point here. My question is: is it unethical to post criticism on somebody else's answer when you have also posted an answer yourself? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It hasn't happened to me and I'm not taking sides here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastEditorUserId="61075" LastEditDate="2016-08-27T15:24:03.090" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T02:46:36.707" Title="Is it unethical for a user who has answered a question to post a negative comment on somebody else's answer?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9371" CreationDate="2016-08-27T03:09:18.027" Score="25" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Is it unethical for &lt;em&gt;any user&lt;/em&gt; to post a &lt;em&gt;derogatory, belittling&lt;/em&gt; negative comment? Yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be clear about what we're taking about. &quot;Derogatory&quot; or belittling comments are never OK, whether you've posted an answer or not. The &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt;&quot; policy applies to everybody, in all situations. If you think a comment crosses the line, flag it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; all criticism crosses this line. It is not unethical to post civil and constructive criticism. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;That's one of the main purposes for comments.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me rephrase the question to avoid the irrelevant parts. I'll assume by &quot;negative comment&quot; you mean a comment that you would be fine with if it were posted by someone who hadn't written an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it unethical for a user who has answered a question to post a &lt;em&gt;constructive and civil&lt;/em&gt; negative comment on somebody else's answer? No, it isn't.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would it be? Someone who knows enough to be able to answer the question is more likely to know enough to criticize &quot;competing&quot; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put &quot;competing&quot; in quotation marks because competition is really not the point of this site. The point is to give the OP and future visitors the best answer or set of answers possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only concern that I can see is the possibility that people might try to abuse the system and try to make their answers more prominent by posting false or harmful comments in an attempt to get other answers downvoted or deleted. And this is really not very likely. People's names are attached to their comments. As I said earlier, if somebody posts a bullying, belittling comment, there are many other users who will see it and be able to react: they can flag it to get a moderator to deal with it, or post a comment in response that explains how it is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, even though it's much more prone to this type of abuse, people can even downvote other people's answers! Downvotes are anonymous and actually affect the ranking of the answers. But Stack Exchange still allows it. Some of the reasons are outlined here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/47886/does-answering-a-question-lock-you-out-of-downvoting-on-other-answers-to-that-qu&quot;&gt;Does answering a question lock you out of downvoting on other answers to that question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Jon Skeet says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No-one benefits from a correct answer being hard to distinguish from&#xA;  an incorrect one because you wanted to be sportsmanlike :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My experiences&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regularly post critical comments on answers that I think could be better, even if I've also posted an answer to the question. Obviously, I try not to be rude or belittling. I don't know how many might be considered &quot;subt[ly] derogatory&quot;: that's a pretty vague phrase, and it seems it would be easy to either miss this kind of &quot;subtle&quot; rudeness, or to see it where no rudeness was intended. It's certainly not the tone I aim for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also post positive comments on other answers if I think the answer is good. Same goes for voting: I'll downvote an answer if I think it's bad, and upvote it if I think it's good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T02:46:36.707" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-27T11:20:12.377" Score="0" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to propose a way to deal with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9364/question-deleted-with-multiple-up-voted-answers-why&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;controversial questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current state of events.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while a question pops up that by itself is flawed when set against site rules, but at the same time is adopted enthusiastically by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;rule&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; violation/on hold status, a lack of correctional actions by the OP or reputed users lead to closure and then deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After deletion the question with all that goes with it basically is gone, never to return. (Disregarding the small chance that there are 3 10K users that will actually resurrect it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question only can fixed by the OP, because it boils down to what this person drives. And sometimes the OP is never seen again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question is kept on closed and undeleted because of 'historic value' at the discretion of the reviewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several discussions have addressed this already, with good arguments put forward about the lines in the sand, but petering out without any real outcome towards site policy that I can see (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while a discussion sprouts indicating that maybe the rules sometimes fail us when dealing with the untidiness of life as it happens. So, what if we define 'historic value' and so create a purgatory of controversial closed undeleted questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rule violation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High view count.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple up-votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really want to keep such questions and their answers. I think they achieve something. It would be something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;What is a historical lock, and what is it used for?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;. (hard to find)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343411/is-there-a-word-for-a-person-who-cant-do-things-right-or-cant-handle-things/343426#343426&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343411/is-there-a-word-for-a-person-who-cant-do-things-right-or-cant-handle-things/343426#343426&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/345009/does-like-mean-to-build-a-further-relationship&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;like&amp;quot; mean to build a further relationship?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References.&lt;/strong&gt; (A pretty random list, and one of em mine) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/asking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/44471/sandy-lines&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/44471/sandy-lines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9364/question-deleted-with-multiple-up-voted-answers-why&quot;&gt;Question deleted with multiple up-voted answers, why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4522/bad-questions-can-lead-to-good-answers&quot;&gt;Bad questions can lead to good answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5417/what-are-the-rules-for-deleting-questions-and-should-what-does-tldr-mean?rq=1&quot;&gt;What are the &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; for deleting questions? And should “What does ‘TL;DR:’ mean?” be undeleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9370/the-answer-to-this-question-is-great-but-the-question-is-closed-and-a-bit-hard&quot;&gt;The answer to this question is great! But the question is closed and a bit hard to find&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9367/what-happened-in-the-single-word-for-something-that-is-not-yet-a-fact-contro&quot;&gt;What happened in the &amp;quot;Single word for something that is &amp;#39;not yet a fact&amp;#39;&amp;quot; controversy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(in fact the list is endless)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121521" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T12:11:27.080" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:11:27.080" Title="About controversial questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|close-reasons|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9371" CreationDate="2016-08-27T15:02:22.077" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my view there is no correlation to the fact if I have posted an answer as well. All comments should be civil and constructive and no comments that are belittling or derogative are ever okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I answer a popular question the review queues will regularly prompt first answers and low quality answers of a question I answered too. Therefore the review system actively encourages me to react to answers - in whichever way. On the other hand the badge system offers a badge if I up vote answers of questions where I also answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways one should always react to an answer based on its own merit - or lack thereof, not based on the fact if oneself has answered, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T15:02:22.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9373" CreationDate="2016-08-27T19:15:07.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you pointed out, there is already a similar site policy for dealing with controversial questions: historical lock. I don't think we need another mechanism, especially not an automatic one (I can't tell if that's what you're proposing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question you linked to indicates,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions can be historically locked when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The post is Off-Topic or Not Constructive, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The post is stellar, in&#xA;  spite of its off-topic nature, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There are a large number of views,&#xA;  upvotes and inbound links on the post, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The post is contentious;&#xA;  e.g., it has been closed and reopened at least once, or deleted and&#xA;  undeleted at least once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep such a question and you think it adds something valuable, you can flag it for a moderator to review, or make a Meta post to gather support for locking the question. One example of a successful Meta appeal to get a question a historical lock is Sven Yarg's answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7832/77227&quot;&gt;The “bare/bear with me” question: what should we do with it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that your criteria (High view count. Multiple answers. Multiple up-votes.) are basically just a subset of the criteria for a historical lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the additional criteria for historical lock are important. Many bad questions receive multiple answers. This is especially true for single word requests, where a vague question often gets a lot of answers since there are a lot of words that seem like they might fit. High view count and upvotes are better indicators of value, but they still are not always reliable, especially for recent questions where most of the attention may be from being on the front page or getting on the &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot; list rather than from being a useful web search result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say the best indications that a question is controversial are closures and re-opens, or deletions and un-deletions. These show that different community members feel strongly about having this question on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this case, the question can't be undeleted because one of the users who voted to delete it is a moderator. So the best way to establish that it is a controversial post that a number of community members think is valuable is to make a Meta post to gather support for undeleting and locking the question. I don't think it's a good idea to establish a system for avoiding the discussion process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T20:34:23.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-27T20:39:27.617" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a moderator (with an 82K rep) went through and edited about 30 old question, deleting tags which he apparently judged to be inappropriately used.  While I suppose this is a commendable &quot;cleanup&quot; activity, it &quot;bumps&quot; all of those questions to the front of the &quot;Top Questions&quot; list, obscuring most &quot;real&quot; activity on the board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't there some way to perform such updates without messing things up for everyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-09-19T22:08:44.830" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T22:08:44.830" Title="Why can't moderator's tag edits be done without &quot;bumping&quot; the question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9376" CreationDate="2016-08-27T20:52:01.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131508/chaos-like-option-for-moderators-to-edit-without-bumping&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange does not support it.&lt;/a&gt; It's important for all revisions, even ones made by moderators, to be reviewed by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few existing options for people who aren't interested in reviewing tag edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to see the most recently asked questions, they can view the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;newest questions list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to see recent answers, they can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/235102/finding-questions-with-the-newest-answers-anywhere-on-site&quot;&gt;search using &quot;is:answer&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and then sort the results by &quot;newest.&quot; (Here's a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer&quot;&gt;newest answers on ELU&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As tchrist said, moderators do have special options for dealing with tags as a whole (deleting or merging a particular tag) but not for making edits to the tags on individual questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T20:57:09.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9376" CreationDate="2016-08-27T20:54:32.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, but not in this case. You saw only the fixes that I was unable to do &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly this was for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbal&lt;/a&gt; tag. This was being variously used for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gre&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gre&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gre&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speech&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speech&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speech&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deverbal-nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deverbal-nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deverbal-nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verb-phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verb-phrases&lt;/a&gt;, and other sundry things. It was therefore not possible to merge it into any other one tag, as there were too many mappings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, as you see, quite a bad tag, so I got rid of it. It could always return, but probably should not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T20:54:32.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9371" CreationDate="2016-08-27T21:11:11.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Unethical' seems to be too strong a word for it. I find it a slighty dodgy depending on the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, whoever said it, if the comment is questionable, it is questionable. If another answerer said it, there is extra added on because of the possibility of conflict of interest. Even though rep points is entirely fictitious, it can feel like betting or a race or [pick your own 'winning' metaphor]. And a comment on another answer that attempts to bring the score down (however rational that might be) seems like it's being done in one's own favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everything were purely rational, say questions like addition, one answerer who believes themselves correct might want to point out a supposed error in another's different answer (to help explicate an error). But it still seems dicey. When things are vaguer, such comments can feel childish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not go so far as to say unethical but merely questionable, uncool, or self-serving, but it depends on the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T21:11:11.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9376" CreationDate="2016-08-27T21:56:39.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's that bad a thing. If the tagging of the question is changed it may put it into view for people who have a specific interest in a certain field - and thus tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the favorite tags color the questions differently it is a good thing that after a change in the associated tags the question is bumped to the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T21:56:39.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-28T03:05:54.537" Score="9" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9367/167396&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; about the processes involved in handling a contentious situation in EL&amp;amp;U that had spiralled out of control. High-rep users were able to see the deleted posts that I was asking about, but users with less than 10,000 rep don't have this level of access. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers given were sufficient to address my concerns about process. However, there were two other quite specific issues that I'd raised, and I want to explore them independently of the actions taken. This is the first of those two issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/344883/167396&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; by Barge Simpson has been locked, and the revision history shows why this was the appropriate action to take. The &quot;content dispute&quot; notice added to the post says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being&#xA;  resolved. For more info &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;visit meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the wording and/or link inadequate in suggesting that &quot;more info&quot; can be found on this meta site?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, if it's supposed to mean that you can find out what locking involves, or how disputes are resolved, then it should point to this information directly rather than just referring the person to meta and leaving them to try to find this information using the search function. I've spent nearly an hour reading through the Help Centre and searching in EL&amp;amp;U Meta, and it seems there's almost no &quot;info&quot; about locked posts, other than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2282/167396&quot;&gt;this meta answer&lt;/a&gt; which usefully and concisely explains the difference between locking and closing a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another view is that &quot;for more info visit meta&quot; is intended as an invitation to (1) ask a question on meta re why the post has been locked, or (2) check on meta to see if someone else has asked this. This indeed was the position taken in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/250099&quot;&gt;answer to a similar question on SO Meta&lt;/a&gt; regarding an identical content dispute notice (except that the &quot;info&quot; link was to SO Meta rather than EL&amp;amp;U Meta). All I can say is that if this is the intention of the link to the respective meta site, the wording fails to convey this, and could easily be interpreted as misleading or dismissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The wording of the &quot;content dispute&quot; notice needs revision to make it more transparent what the link to Meta is intended for.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be useful to add an extra line or two in the Help Centre regarding content disputes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps an EL&amp;amp;U Meta post could bring together the available information about locked posts and resolving content disputes, so that the content dispute notice then links directly to that post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T12:05:56.543" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:05:56.543" Title="Is the &quot;content dispute&quot; notice adequate?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|locked-question|content-disputes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9382" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-28T03:20:38.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T03:20:38.307" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T03:20:38.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9383" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-28T03:20:38.307" Score="0" Body="This tag is for a general question about how content disputes are managed or what locking a post means. Concerns about a specific post should use a different tag such as [questions]." OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T18:06:25.427" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T18:06:25.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-28T08:42:56.900" Score="-3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/o-ou&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;o-ou&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;o-ou&lt;/a&gt; hasn't helped us much, it's only got 9 questions and 0 followers. It has no tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Should we burninate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/o-ou&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;o-ou&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;o-ou&lt;/a&gt;? Created: 2010-08-07 13:32:11&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90081" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T08:59:26.520" Title="Let's burninate [o-ou]!" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9384" CreationDate="2016-08-28T08:59:26.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd vote against it, although I don't feel strongly about the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, it's only got 9 questions. So it's not super popular, but that also means it's not doing that much harm. Nine is at least enough that it doesn't feel like a waste to me when I click on the link to see the tagged questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I think I've used that tag before to quickly find other questions about this subject. It's a bit harder to use search for this, as a search for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=o%20ou&quot;&gt;o ou&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has various irrelevant results about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/296222/silent-e-at-the-end-of-words/296231#296231&quot;&gt;the diphthong [ou]&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249811/why-is-ammunition-shortened-to-ammo-and-not-ammu/249897#249897&quot;&gt;truncated words&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think small, rarely used tags like this are anywhere near as much trouble as vague, common tags like &quot;usage&quot; or &quot;grammar.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T08:59:26.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9387" CreationDate="2016-08-28T15:23:43.630" Score="3" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know that all high reputation users will always get a few points from questions and answers posted long ago. But what I've noticed is that there's a user who hasn't posted anything during the past two years, according to his activity record, and still gets regular increases in his reputation in addition to keeping his all-time rank unchanged. What am I missing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; - After reading the explanations given by two users, &lt;strong&gt;I don't have any doubts anymore&lt;/strong&gt;. As I explained in the comments, I thought &quot;passive income&quot; (for lack of a better term) wouldn't be enough to keep one's rank position unchanged for two years. I therefore wondered whether the &quot;powers-that-be&quot; considered that particular user's contribution so valuable as to deserve being honored #1 for life.  Now I realize that it's the whole community who has been doing this well-deserved act by upvoting old answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61075" LastEditorUserId="61075" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T16:47:55.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T16:47:55.937" Title="How can a user who hasn't posted anything for the past two years get regular increases in his reputation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9386" CreationDate="2016-08-28T15:43:30.470" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's because it doesn't matter how long ago that user's last post was.  If people are voting on that user's old posts, then the post owner will still incur the reputation changes resulting from those votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T15:43:30.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9381" CreationDate="2016-08-29T07:28:39.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is whether the following message is adequate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't adequate - at least, not yet. The natural sense of the message is that the link would bring the reader to some information about the dispute. Instead, it simply brings the reader to the Meta site. I say &lt;em&gt;not yet&lt;/em&gt; because, with questions like this, sufficient information may accumulate to satisfy the natural sense of the message, at least with respect to publicly available information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the message would be more helpful if it linked to even generic information about locking and disputes. Natural curiosity would prefer that the invitation was to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; a question on Meta, but I support Stack Exchange's policy of protecting privacy and holding &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; personal reputation (as opposed to rep points) in high regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T07:28:39.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9390" CreationDate="2016-08-29T15:36:03.533" Score="8" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the ELU position on flagging very recent low quality answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use the review queue for first posts there are a lot of very low quality posts. Sometimes other users have already commented on the post along the usual lines, &lt;em&gt;welcome, add some sources, etc...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume the post itself is very low quality in its current state and an hour old and the comment is half an hour old, so both pretty recent. Am I supposed to purely act the current state of the post? I.e. flag VLQ and move on or is there a general policy that I should skip it to give the user time to improve the answer? I assume that the latter possibility will just make it pop up in someone else's review queue, which increases the overall review effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T16:19:35.640" Title="Flagging very recent answers VLQ" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9389" CreationDate="2016-08-29T17:21:57.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I supposed to act purely on the current state of the post? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I act on the post's current state. I choose whether to comment, edit, flag, vote or simply move on, and I act quickly. If someone edits it later, the post will be cleared from the VLQ review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that VLQ flag option for a post is automatically disabled after 7 days, or if somebody upvotes it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you comment on a first answer, do you simultaneously flag it as VLQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't usually take more than one action on a First Post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So if there is a one liner with just a word, that would fit, but there are no sources. Do you flag VLQ or do you write a comment suggesting to add something and welcome the new user? Both seems appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have time on my hands, I'd edit it myself, or leave a comment. Else, I'd downvote it, or flag it as VLQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T16:19:35.640" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T16:19:35.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-29T21:05:45.573" Score="6" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the vocabulary tag is mostly superfluous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/404/184706&quot;&gt;old post from 2010&lt;/a&gt; which compares the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt;, which has since been rightfully discontinued, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;. RegDwigнt asserts at the end that the words tag is a simple cop-out for someone who doesn't know which tag to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the state of the taxonomy has evolved since 2010. I am well aware that the tag is in the all-time top30 of used tags. However, it seems, that the vocabulary tag might be actually obsolete now. Every use of the tag - which is by the way not given by the tag wiki - seems to be covered by other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, the tag info says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag should be distinguished from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;, which is for questions about choosing a word from a set of alternatives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, which is for questions about finding a word to fit a meaning, when you don't yet have any alternatives to choose from &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;, which is for questions about definitions and nuances of meaning in a word or phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, that's not how the tag is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests+vocabulary&quot;&gt;321 overlaps with single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice+vocabulary&quot;&gt;200 overlaps with word-choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning+vocabulary&quot;&gt;227 overlaps with the tags containing &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the questions tagged with vocabulary almost none besides the example questions seem to match the tag's intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/530567/vocabulary-only-questions-2016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List for 2016 vocabulary only questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/530568/vocabulary-only-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;All time vocabulary only questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another indicator that the tag in its current state might be not that useful is that almost 30% of the vocabulary only tagged questions are closed which is higher than the overall rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As first step I edited the usage guidance of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag to match its intention as described in the old post and the example questions. Thankfully, that has since been approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What am I suggesting now?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a second step, however, I want to ask if the tag &lt;em&gt;vocabulary&lt;/em&gt; is necessary at all? Especially considering that we have a closing reason &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and it seems to apply to most of the example questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S. It would be nice to get some insight by the people who actually use the tags. Especially the highly involved tag editors.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T18:10:17.717" Title="Is the vocabulary tag helpful?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9403" CreationDate="2016-08-30T11:52:52.010" Score="6" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ad for English Language Learners has the old speech bubble with ELL in it, instead of the new picture. Will you update it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7606/community-promotion-ads-2016/7723#7723&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the answer on the Promotional Ads 2016 post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T01:11:17.763" Title="ELL ad is out of date" Tags="|support|status-completed|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9386" CreationDate="2016-08-30T12:13:16.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly normal for people with large numbers of answers to keep on reaping the reward of those answers indefinitely as new members come across them and upvote them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are some patterns that are indeed suspicious and suggest that the voting privilege  is being abused. This should not be taken as a reflection on the poster themselves, only on the voter(s) involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot illustrating some dubious voting behaviour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v17Kr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v17Kr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be seen this user had 8 completely different posts all upvoted within 1 minute. This strongly suggests a single user going on an upvoting spree without actually  reading any of the posts involved. This is a misuse of the voting privilege. The bottom three events, in contrast, seem to be instances of genuine votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see this type of behaviour the best thing to do is to advise one of our long suffering moderators if the system does not correct it automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T12:22:19.987" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T12:22:19.987" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9399" CreationDate="2016-08-30T13:15:31.917" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are too many questions, mostly asked by first time users, for which the answers are just synonyms. I know that the users are not allowed to ask questions for which they can get the answer just by searching on the web and also questions without proper research will not be well-received. But since a first time user might not usually go through the &lt;em&gt;help centre&lt;/em&gt; before asking a question, that person might ask a question which just requires the meaning of an another word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of us spending our time on explaining him not to ask such questions and then flagging the question, why can't ELU have an inbuilt dictionary and thesaurus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user is in need of a synonymous word, he might get the relevant words by just right-clicking on the typed word or may be we can provide a link somewhere in the page that might not force the user to go out of ELU's page and also give the suggestions for his required word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add such a feature? I think it would add nice user experience and it would also lessen the works of other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162061" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T02:37:50.417" Title="Dictionary for ELU" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9402" CreationDate="2016-08-30T17:27:00.470" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/345747/why-are-ships-always-female&quot;&gt;Why are ships always female?&lt;/a&gt; really a duplicate of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/287721/pronoun-question-referring-to-inanimate-objects-as-he-or-she&quot;&gt;Pronoun question: referring to inanimate objects as &amp;#39;he&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;she&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt; second?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are some general remarks about ships in the other question it's all rather unspecific. The most likely reasons regarding ships are not mentioned at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T19:49:23.220" Title="Is this actually a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9411" CreationDate="2016-08-30T21:31:01.387" Score="7" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created tag synonym suggestions to map the barely used and completely undescribed tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/for&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;for&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/of&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;of&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/by&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;by&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;by&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/from&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;from&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;from&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/with&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;with&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;with&lt;/a&gt; to our tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;. Its description already includes all the words and there is clearly no use for the single tags and the usual &lt;em&gt;prepositions&lt;/em&gt; questions encompass questions regarding the other prepositions either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The synonyms will be accepted by two up votes on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/prepositions/synonyms&quot;&gt;preposition synonyms&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: At the readers who up vote this question. Please head over to the synonyms page and up vote the tag synonyms there as well. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: We did it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T14:22:08.773" Title="Proposed tag synonyms for the prepositions tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9391" CreationDate="2016-08-30T23:55:25.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that &quot;vocabulary,&quot; as it is used, is often redundant or overly vague. Most of these questions seem like they could be tagged with at least one of the following: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; and if they are tagged with one of these, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; doesn't add any information that I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; are all related to vocabulary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; questions, based on just the tag name, sound like in principle they might refer to the meaning of grammatical structures rather than words, but in practice they are, as the tag info says, used for &quot;questions related to definitions and nuances of meaning of a &lt;strong&gt;word or phrase.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; So in other words, it's safe to assume a question tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;is related to vocabulary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; questions are almost always about meaning or usage in my experience, and it already implies that we're discussing multiple words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; already implies that we're discussing multiple words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of RegDwight's undeleted examples of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; question is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/953/informal-terms-for-money-amounts&quot;&gt;Informal terms for money amounts&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. I agree that this doesn't quite fit into the above categories. It's kind of like a &quot;single word request&quot;/&quot;phrase request,&quot; but explicitly requesting multiple words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is from very early on (Aug 15 '10) and I'm not entirely sure that we need a special classification for it in our current categories. Things I'm wondering: Is this kind of question on-topic anymore? I kind of feel like it would get closed if it were asked today, but is this how it should be? It has a greater than average number of answers (9) and many of them are single-liners without citations. It also uses the &quot;community wiki&quot; convention for list questions and answers, which seems to be kind of dead nowadays (from what I understand, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;questions cannot even be posted as Community Wiki anymore&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T00:35:02.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9395" CreationDate="2016-08-31T02:37:50.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some notes from chat room discussions (sources: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/conversation/20160831-dictionary-discussion-1&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/conversation/20160831-dictionary-discussion-2&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;), summarised and expanded at various points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's technically (or at least technologically) unnecessary. Basic dictionary and thesaurus entries are easier to find than English.SE - just type the word on its own into the search engine or even straight into the address bar of modern web browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If implemented, the user interface will need to be carefully considered to highlight the existence of such a facility. There are several things 'obvious' to regulars that are routinely overlooked by visitors, such as the tour and help pages. Even elements of the recent ELU election process were missed by some regulars. Given the turnout (about 10%?), it's possible that the election itself was missed by many.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If implemented, it would be useful to include a pronunciation guide as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To avoid having to implement artificially intelligent agents (AI bots) to decipher the manner in which questions are phrased, one possibility is to include a panel that displays a grid of links to basic resources against an alphabetically sorted list of all words used in the question. The panel would sit alongside the existing list of suggested questions. (In case anyone observes that the said list appears to be ignored on occasion, please refer to point 2 above.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T02:37:50.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-08-31T15:29:01.397" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vHHqU.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Language Learners&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53935" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T13:54:24.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9396" CreationDate="2016-08-31T19:49:23.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a duplicate. The answers to the other question do mention ships. I think the question &quot;Why are ships always female&quot; should be edited by the original poster to clarify what information is needed before it is reopened. The question in the title doesn't match with the question in the body (&quot;Is it unique to ships?&quot;) and it's not clear which question best reflects the original intent of the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another related question that focuses more on ships: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12632/is-it-a-good-practice-to-refer-to-countries-ships-etc-using-the-feminine-form&quot;&gt;Is it a good practice to refer to countries, ships etc using the feminine form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T19:49:23.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9393" CreationDate="2016-09-01T01:11:00.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ELL community ad has now been updated, and should now match the site’s graduation theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T01:11:00.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9405" CreationDate="2016-09-01T20:18:12.330" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180988/what-is-the-word-for-poignant-but-with-a-positive-connotation&quot;&gt;This was closed&lt;/a&gt; because of the 'misconception' that poignant carries negative connotations. I found it because I was going to ask something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't think it carried a negative connotation, but it does convey sadness and possibly regret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadness isn't (by most standards) positive, and certainly regret isn't. The OP wanted something more &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt;. Poignant implies a strong feeling but I believe the OP meant, what's a strong feeling that doesn't carry a sad or regretful connotation? They just said 'negative' instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I missed something? Is the question, in that light, still off base or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185028" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T21:31:23.710" Title="Why was this closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9404" CreationDate="2016-09-01T21:31:23.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions which make no sense, to the point that they can't be answered usefully, should be closed &quot;unclear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions which do make sense but still rest on an error or misunderstanding can perhaps be answered by pointing out the error, provided that the resulting Q&amp;amp;A are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally agree this question does not rest on an error or misunderstanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wouldn't reopen this question just yet. One of the closevotes was for lack of demonstrated research and clearly that's the case. if someone feels the question demands an expert answer and wants to do the research and edit the question to include evidence of research effort, then surely it could be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T21:31:23.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9407" CreationDate="2016-09-01T21:38:07.593" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/346054/what-do-the-seasons-mean&quot;&gt;What do the seasons mean?&lt;/a&gt; requires an answer of four parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of the parts do not make any sense to me (unless I visit the out-of-the-site link the poster urges me to). Especially Autumn (and the other is Summer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am OK to do so, that's not cool, since links die and the answer will he half-invalided for the future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean in SO, there are tons of answers that were heavily based on links, which have now died, making the answers (partially) useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have let the poster know, but he is stubborn. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anything else I could do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T21:51:00.347" Title="Partly link-only answer persists" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9406" CreationDate="2016-09-01T21:51:00.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can edit the answer. Answers that you edit will be reviewed by other members of the community. There's a good discussion of when it is appropriate to edit a post in this FAQ page: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Edit Questions And Answers&lt;/a&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T21:51:00.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9526" CreationDate="2016-09-02T10:57:37.647" Score="17" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt; seems like the ultimate cop-out tag. It has five questions with an accumulated score of -8, I expect it to sink further today with the question that made me stumble upon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no description or usage guide and of the five questions three are closed and today's most likely will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I move for the tag to be deleted. It adds no value whatsoever to the taxonomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/300/regdwig%d0%bdt&quot;&gt;our mod RegDwigнt&lt;/a&gt; already retagged everything there are currently no more questions tagged with this tag.  Following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate&quot;&gt;guideline from Meta.SE on burninating&lt;/a&gt; I posthumously answer these to do the final burninating step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied?&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;is it unambiguous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't. It was a bad cop-out tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was supremely meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the tag add &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; meaningful information to the post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is ready to get that tag&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zm85C.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T02:28:56.847" Title="Should the 'language' tag be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|support|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5017" CreationDate="2016-09-02T12:47:35.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just bumping this up again, maybe technology evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T12:47:35.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9397" CreationDate="2016-09-02T12:53:49.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll accept this to mark the issue concluded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T12:53:49.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-02T21:04:32.547" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;The identicon that appears at the top of the questions page and on my profile changed yesterday, but strangely, the identicon that appears on the edit screen as a recent editor remains the way it was. To be clear, I see my both my old and recent posts and edits tagged with the old identicon, but a different one is at the top of my screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: the green one that is by my name in this post is the old one, The new one is being displayed at the top of my screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several similar posts, but no explanations given in any of them that I have found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this continue indefinitely, or does it sync up eventually?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else see my newer identicon (pink) anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How widespread is this glitch?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would uploading a custom graphic help others? Personally, I don't care one way or another if it isn't confusing to others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T21:22:58.687" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T21:22:58.687" Title="identicon glitch?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-09-02T21:07:52.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7598" CreationDate="2016-09-02T21:11:53.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281010/271002&quot;&gt;August 2016&lt;/a&gt;, you can retract flags on questions and answers, but not on comments. To retract a flag, click the flag link again and the button should become “Retract Flag”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding section of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; has been changed accordingly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, while your flag is still waiting to be handled, you re-open the flag dialog, you'll be presented with the option to &lt;em&gt;retract&lt;/em&gt; your pending flag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3aoe2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3aoe2.png&quot; alt=&quot;retract flag option&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot raise the same type of flag twice on a post: for example, if you retract a &amp;quot;spam&amp;quot; flag, you won't be able to raise a spam flag or an abusive flag in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retract flags only when you're sure there's no need for the post to be flagged, or you become convinced that a more serious type of flag is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user92615" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T21:11:53.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-02T23:50:25.537" Score="12" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/346281/polite-alternative-for-none-of-your-business&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, like so many on EL&amp;amp;U, garnered several answers that were fairly short, written in conversational tone, and had no supporting citations. Such answers are considered low quality according to official site guidelines, regardless of whether they are accurate, helpful, or upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those answers got the following canned warning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;We appreciate the desire to help, but please consider either expanding your answer or deleting it. Questions should be answered as an expert would answer them: comprehensively, with explanation and context. Explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Unsupported answers may be removed.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't believe the verbiage is meant to be &lt;em&gt;harsh&lt;/em&gt;, but it was only placed on the answers from new or low-rep users (I haven't verified, but it seems like the cutoff is 100 rep). Several other answers were of similar quality but didn't get the warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems discriminatory and unwelcoming to new users. (Yes, I know that's a recurring theme.) It gives the impression that the rules are not the same for everyone; that if you can somehow make it &quot;into the club&quot; then you don't have to adhere to the same standards. It's also confusing to receive both upvotes from the community and a suggestion to delete your answer from a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, we should be able to keep the helpful &quot;you can improve your answer, and here's how&quot; while losing the ominous &quot;improve your answer... or else&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would also come across better if we disclose the reason their answers are triggering the message while other same-quality answers are not. This might be a bit involved to explain in a comment, so we could certainly include a link. Speaking of which, the links that are already included in the warning (namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/165006/what-are-these-notices-under-my-post&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/166566/lots-of-not-always-useful-but-well-intentioned-answers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) don't strike me as very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one explains &lt;em&gt;notices&lt;/em&gt; that are &lt;em&gt;not comments&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe the newbie warning comment &quot;annotates an exceptional situation&quot; and is thus somehow not a &quot;normal&quot; comment, but that's as clear as mud, especially to the target audience: users who don't yet know the ins and outs of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one points to a lot of discussion about well-intentioned but &lt;em&gt;not useful&lt;/em&gt; answers. It actually seems to be focused on how those affect the visibility of the question (via being answered or not answered). But the answers that are getting these newbie warning comments actually are useful (as corroborated by the upvotes). They just don't meet official guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, I understand the motivation for the newbie warnings, but their execution leaves a lot to be desired. (You might say these are well-intentioned but not useful warnings. :P)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2923" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T17:15:31.213" Title="Improving the newbie warnings on &quot;low-quality&quot; answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9414" CreationDate="2016-09-03T08:52:42.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the &quot;template&quot; I've been using recently for writing comments to answers like this. Anyone else who finds it useful is free to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Welcome to the site and thanks for your contribution! (&lt;em&gt;use on first posts&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Thank you for your contribution! (&lt;em&gt;use if the user has already posted here&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including this is probably debatable. It doesn't really give any useful information, but I feel like it's a good way to start positively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next section depends on the type of answer/question. I've bolded these just for my own convenience, so I can easily see the differences: normally I copy-paste so the bold formatting does not appear in the comment left to the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is requesting a word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please provide an explanation of why this is the right answer,&#xA;  preferably by quoting a&#xA;  [reference](&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/59/77227&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/59/77227&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;such&#xA;  as a dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;. This makes your post more convincing and helps&#xA;  explain &lt;strong&gt;the meaning of the suggested word or phrase&lt;/strong&gt;. The goal of Stack&#xA;  Exchange is to &quot;build a library of detailed answers&quot; to questions.&#xA;  One-line answers are not as useful because without a source or&#xA;  explanation, it's hard to tell if the answer is really correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is about a grammatical structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please provide an explanation of why this is the right answer,&#xA;  preferably by quoting a&#xA;  [reference](&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/59/77227&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/59/77227&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;such as&#xA;  a grammar or style guide.&lt;/strong&gt; This makes your post more convincing and&#xA;  helps explain &lt;strong&gt;the relevant grammatical constructions&lt;/strong&gt;. The goal of&#xA;  Stack Exchange is to &quot;build a library of detailed answers&quot; to&#xA;  questions. One-line answers are not as useful because without a source&#xA;  or explanation, it's hard to tell if the answer is really correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I think the suggested word is a good fit, and the post can easily be salvaged by adding a dictionary entry, I may just edit it in myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, it's encouraged to [back up your&#xA;  posts](&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/59/77227&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/59/77227&lt;/a&gt;) with&#xA;  references such as quotations from dictionaries. This makes your post&#xA;  more convincing and helps explain the meaning of the suggested word or&#xA;  phrase. &lt;strong&gt;I edited your post to add a quotation from [&lt;em&gt;insert dictionary name&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/strong&gt;; if you don't like the changes I made,&#xA;  you can always edit your own post to replace this with another&#xA;  quotation you like better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T08:52:42.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9414" CreationDate="2016-09-03T09:34:21.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having looked at the page in question, I can see what you mean. The low-rep answers attracting the advice aren't particularly worse than some of the higher-rep answers that don't. (This isn't a criticism of the advice, by the way.) On the other hand, the answers do answer the question, even if they are short on length and substantiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the issue isn't with the answers. &lt;strong&gt;The issue lies with the question&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems it's rude and impolite to say directly to someone &quot;none of your business&quot;. So, what's the more gentle alternative(s) for situations in which we should say &quot;hey, this is none of your business!&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time I prepared this answer, there was just one close-vote, voting to migrate the question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Learners&lt;/a&gt;. I don't think that's the best way to tackle this particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question, evidenced by the number of votes it has received (+24 -1 at the time of preparing this answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also an open-ended, eliciting list-style answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/98366/286574&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino♦&lt;/a&gt; explains the mismatch between such questions and Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking everyone to contribute to a large bucket of answers means that it stops being a question of specific expertise and becomes a &quot;poll&quot; of the community. For right or for wrong, answer start accumulating and people start voting on what they recognize as familiar, rather than vetting the relative merits of each answer. Often there are too many entries to even know what anyone is contributing anymore. It doesn't even matter; There's usually no expectation that any one answer will be better than any other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I support the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98334/list-questions-community-wiki#comment248416_98366&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; made to that answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which is why I was thinking having just one editable answer and adding all other responses to that answer would be the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd go further: making that single answer a wiki would strike a balance between keeping interesting list-style questions and furthering Stack Exchange's aims. This would require that the question be closed (but not migrated; Primarily Opinion-Based would be an appropriate reason to close this question), and all answers merged into a &lt;strong&gt;single wiki answer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T09:34:21.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9414" CreationDate="2016-09-03T17:15:31.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment on that comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;We appreciate the desire to help&quot; = &quot;I am being condescending, what follows is going to suck&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Please either do X or delete it&quot; = &quot;holy crap, your answer sucks. Get rid of it.&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of 'expert' sounds offputting. It might as well say &quot;be an expert&quot; or &quot;try to be an expert (you obviously have not)&quot;. &quot;Questions should be answered as an expert would answer them&quot; could almost be removed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also, the last sentence Unsupported answers may be removed.&quot; = &quot;If you don't do what we say, and you don't fall on your own sword, we'll do it for you, you bad answerer!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's some content left that isn't hurtful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest the following edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your answer was automatically marked as 'low quality'. Consider expanding your answer. Try to answer with explanation and context. Explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Even if people can recognize that your answer is right, some readers (especially younger or non-native speakers) may not be able to see that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'automatically' may be a lie but it tells them that a person isn't being mean on purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find annoying is such comments at all, they mar the site. I read a question that is a little simple, maybe badly formatted, but interesting, and then I see a hand swatted. I don't know how to get around that, but it doesn't look good to see all this hand swatting (and I feel like blaming the swattee all the time doesn't look good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T17:15:31.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T19:08:49.140" Score="8" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have currently three tags in our top 20 tags (by amount of questions) that are being arbitrarily and interchangeably used. Those are the highly frequented tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expressions&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt;. Combined those tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases+or+idioms+or+expressions&quot;&gt;mark a whopping 8,500+ questions.&lt;/a&gt; Some 1,300 are tagged with at least two of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if one looks just at the first page of search results for the tags it is obvious that a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt; questions are not regarding idioms, a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; questions are not about linguistic phrases and lastly the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expressions&lt;/a&gt; tag is just all over the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if one wants to see questions on either of those three topics one has to consider all three of the tags. Thus, making distinguishing between them in the first place completely obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;1. &lt;strong&gt;Nothing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plus: Done!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Minus: Searching for any of the tags remains futile&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;2. &lt;strong&gt;A massive and continuous re-tagging effort&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What: Keep the tags as they are, re-tag and keep re-tagging&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: One can actually distinguish between the three categories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: There are 8,500 questions which would have to be looked at.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: The three categories seem interchangeably to the usual questioner and likely have to be re-tagged when posted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: The effort is massive enough to warrant another minus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;3. &lt;strong&gt;The complete merge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What: Merge all tags into one, likely 'expressions'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: One tag which holds a clearly defined (big) group of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: None of the manual effort from the other solutions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: A new tag 'grammatical phrases' could give a fresh start for the intention of the old tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: One-time mod effort / database solution (idk)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: All of the previous distinctions are lost (wrong and correct)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;4. &lt;strong&gt;Merge two, keep one&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What: Merging phrases and expressions to expressions; Keep idioms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: Idioms stay separate from more literal expressions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: One tag for all colloquial phrases and non-literal expressions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: No more confusion between colloquial phrases and other expressions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus: Space for a new tag regarding 'grammatical phrases'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: One-time mod effort / database solution (idk)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minus: Continuous effort to keep idioms and expressions apart (which isn't always black and white)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-09-04T10:59:10.663" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T10:59:10.663" Title="An ELU taxonomy improvement: Idioms / Phrases / Expressions" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T19:21:46.893" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both those tags were exclusively attached to questions with either another something-request tag or the politeness tag. I re-tagged those. Now I move to make them total ashes. Let's burninate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T19:21:46.893" Title="Burninate tags [request] and [polite-request]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9418" CreationDate="2016-09-03T19:38:59.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reading of the three tags is that &lt;strong&gt;phrases&lt;/strong&gt; is an exceedingly general category and therefore a &quot;miscellaneous&quot; bucket for questions that don't fall into a more specific category; &lt;strong&gt;expressions&lt;/strong&gt; covers more or less set phrases that may be idiomatic, colloquial, or proverbial; and &lt;strong&gt;idioms&lt;/strong&gt; covers set phrases that have meanings not inferrable from the sum of the component words' meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My strong preference would be to retain all three tags because I think that each of the three serves a distinct purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T19:38:59.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-04T10:50:46.487" Score="20" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am suggesting to create a guideline post describing how to tag specifically for the ELU taxonomy. The discussions in chat and all the posts and comments regarding tags on meta lead me to believe that such a guideline could massively improve the state of our taxonomy going forward. If it's well accepted we might link it on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;ELU tagging page.&lt;/a&gt; Here we go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am suggesting to create and use a tagging guideline, offering this as a first draft. A guideline that represents the taxonomy as it is. Such a guideline can help the editors and users to choose the proper tags. Let us move discussions on the validity of single tags out of this discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I guess my question is, do you agree that a tagging guideline would be helpful for ELU?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ELU tagging guideline&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags for questions looking for&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... words, phrases, idioms, expressions. These &lt;em&gt;request questions&lt;/em&gt; are our quiz or reverse dictionary questions. The appropriate tags are&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; when looking for one word,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; when looking for several words and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-request&lt;/a&gt; when looking for a set idiomatic expression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... a decision on a &lt;em&gt;choice&lt;/em&gt; between given alternatives. These &lt;em&gt;choice questions&lt;/em&gt; are those which require the question to contain all alternatives. The appropriate tags are&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; when deciding between &lt;em&gt;two or more given&lt;/em&gt; words and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-choice&lt;/a&gt; when deciding between &lt;em&gt;two or more given&lt;/em&gt; expressions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Those two are mutually exclusive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... explanation of meaning of &lt;em&gt;something given.&lt;/em&gt; These &lt;em&gt;meaning questions&lt;/em&gt; need to contain what they are asking about and sufficient context. The appropriate tags are&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; for questions about nuances of words and phrases,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; for questions of understanding of parts of longer texts,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-meaning&lt;/a&gt; specifically regarding phrases and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-meaning&lt;/a&gt; for idioms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Only one of those tags should be used.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... clarifications about the usage of &lt;em&gt;something given.&lt;/em&gt; These &lt;em&gt;usage questions&lt;/em&gt; need to contain what they are asking about and an explanation what's unclear about the usage. The appropriate tags are&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt; for the usage of certain words and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-usage&lt;/a&gt; for the usage of certain phrases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags for questions regarding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... specific topics that are part of the language or linguistics. These tags can stand on their own. A multitude of our tags fall into that category, the lists are not complete.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are lexical items like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;verbs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fields of linguistics like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sentence-structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sentence-structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sentence-structure&lt;/a&gt; ,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatical categories like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tenses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tenses&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatical units like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clauses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clauses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clauses&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dialects and variations of English like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;american-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;american-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/australian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;australian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;australian-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slang&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two groups above make the bulk of our tags and every question should have &lt;em&gt;at least one of those tags.&lt;/em&gt; The following groups of tags offer additional information on the questions but cannot stand on their own. This is either due to the fact that they are not sufficiently able to describe a question or that they are hyponyms that should also be tagged with their hypernym tag. (Remark: I expect this last sentence to be controversial.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags describing further question information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... by adding field of usage or further categorization to the question.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are field of usage like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/academia&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;academia&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;academia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;time periods like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/old-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;old-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;old-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/middle-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;middle-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;middle-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/1600s&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;1600s&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;1600s&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/1700s&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;1700s&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;1700s&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;source languages for translations and relations for etymology like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/french&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;french&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;french&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/german&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;german&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;german&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;superfluous information like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antonym&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags that refine the main question tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... by refining a popular tag. The hypernym tag should be used as well.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific tenses like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simple-past&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simple-past&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simple-past&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-tense&lt;/a&gt; refine &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tenses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific symbols like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/comma&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;comma&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comma&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/question-mark&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;question-mark&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;question-mark&lt;/a&gt; refine &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Common pitfalls&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some commonly misused tags even though the tag wikis describe their usage differently. Those are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; vs &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; describes questions regarding grammar itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; describes questions regarding the grammaticality of sentences, clauses and the like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not create or use meta tags under any circumstances!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of meta tags is heavily discouraged on the StackExchange network. The reasoning can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;this blog post.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is also already on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;ELU tagging page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bad examples of meta tags on ELU are &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1053/blacklist-the-words-tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9409/should-the-language-tag-be-deleted&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;, homework (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147100/the-homework-tag-is-now-officially-deprecated&quot;&gt;cf. SO.meta&lt;/a&gt;), test, English, gre, etc..&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I'll leave it at that and wait for some feedback. Of course, this can be enhanced and refined. I think this will give our editors a fighting chance to adhere to the taxonomy as intended. After all we are editing two-thirds of all questions anyways. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/533924/675163/question-editing-percentage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's the query.&lt;/a&gt; If we make an easy guideline available to the people editing the questions and raise some awareness to edit the tags as well, we should be able to dramatically increase the ELU tag precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second activity should be to improve the tag wikis, starting with the top 30 most used tags. I'll suggest a structure in another meta post which can then also be used as a blueprint. (EDIT 09/09/16: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9442/suggested-tag-wiki-blueprint&quot;&gt;Blueprint suggestion&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-18T12:42:30.210" Title="ELU tagging guideline" Tags="|discussion|tags|guideline|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-11-26T01:49:52.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9422" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-04T11:56:13.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that provide an explicit guideline on how to use the ELU or ELU meta sites. If the meta discussion deems the guideline unhelpful the tag should be deleted. The entirety of meta posts tagged with this tag will provide a concise guide on how to use ELU and meta ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question checklist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question (or one of the answers) provide guiding principles on ELU site usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/9421/proposed-elu-tagging-guideline&quot;&gt;Proposed ELU tagging guideline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T09:06:35.423" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T09:06:35.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9423" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-04T11:56:13.283" Score="0" Body="This tag should be used for questions that provide an explicit guideline on how to use the ELU or ELU meta sites. If the meta discussion deems the guideline unhelpful the tag should be deleted." OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T09:06:31.303" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T09:06:31.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-04T13:03:24.273" Score="6" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Through the sidebar, I just happened upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/77896/41454&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on [programmers.se].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the lower part of the answer, after the horizontal line, you’ll see that the text is smaller. Inspecting the DOM elements on the page as well as the contents of the post as written, this is done simply by using a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (superscript) element. Since the limited subset of HTML we’re allowed here doesn’t really allow for a better method, that’s the same way I usually write footnotes to my answers, if there are any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is that on Travel, the line height is correct in Fiksdal’s answer (except the first line, before the quote), while here on ELU, all my footnotes have horrible, gigantic line spacing.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the first few lines of text are wrongly spaced in Fiksdal’s answer, but the rest isn’t, is that the following paragraphs are ‘Markdown paragraphs’ (i.e., blocks of text surrounded by double blank lines on either side), which means the parser encloses them in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (paragraph) in the resulting HTML. These are then nested inside the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraphs have a line height of 1.3 and a font size of 100%; sub- and superscripts have a font-size of 80% but retain their parent paragraph’s line height. Nesting a paragraph inside the superscript tag resets the font size to 100%, but calculated based on the 80% that the sub-/superscript has; since line height is calculated based on the font-size of the nearest flow-content container (the paragraph element itself, whose size is 80% of the general font size), line height is set to 1.3 of those 80%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I tried to fix one of my footnotes here on ELU in this way, however, I found that superscripts are handled differently here than on Travel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Travel, if you enter multiple paragraphs of text inside a superscript tag, it turns the ones surrounded by blank lines into paragraph tags nested inside the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element, even though that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-sub-and-sup-elements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doesn’t seem to be valid HTML&lt;/a&gt;. (At least in browsers which accept the non-standard formation and style it appropriately; I haven’t found any that don’t.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On ELU, if you do the same, the output will be that the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; ‘Markdown paragraph’ will be converted to a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element, and the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; will be a child of that element. Any subsequent ‘Markdown paragraphs’ (including ones wrapped in actual &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags) become paragraph elements with no &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; child—that is, just regular paragraphs. In other words, ELU ignores the location of the ending &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag if it comes after the end of the nearest flow-content parent element. This adheres more closely the spec, but it sadly makes for an eyesore of a footnote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible for us to adapt our Markdown parser so that it doesn’t automatically close &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags when it reaches the end of the nearest flow-content parent element?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if altering the parser to actually &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt; the standard is not a route a place like SE is keen to go down, is there a way to allow the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;small&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag on a per-site basis? The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/40035&quot;&gt;meta.SE suggestion to allow &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;small&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (thanks to suməlic for digging that up) is over six years old and doesn’t seem to have borne any fruit…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I would have thought something like that would a network-wide thing, but I guess not, if Travel works differently from ELU.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Just look at this note, for example, which with a bit of extra waffling on to force the sentence to be long enough to break into at least two lines of text, will have a line height that looks like it’s about 40% bigger than it ought to be for the text to look harmonious.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:14.093" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T11:56:38.837" Title="Can we improve our sub- and superscript (or: footnote) formatting?" Tags="|feature-request|markdown|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-04T18:55:08.850" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sentence-structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sentence-structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sentence-structure&lt;/a&gt; tag is on 808 questions and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntactic-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntactic-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntactic-analysis&lt;/a&gt; tag is on 117 questions, with only 4 questions having both tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems me that those are both the same thing. Is there any reason to maintain them as separate tags, or should we make one the synonym of the other and if so, which should be the master?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T10:03:42.057" Title="Are the sentence-structure and syntactic-analysis tags synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9425" CreationDate="2016-09-05T03:04:33.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sentence-structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sentence-structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sentence-structure&lt;/a&gt; is easier for the layperson to understand, and therefore should be the master, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntactic-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntactic-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntactic-analysis&lt;/a&gt; its synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert in this language, and may not know if these two are exactly the same thing. I'm only assuming they are, based on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T14:49:08.317" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T14:49:08.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9428" CreationDate="2016-09-05T08:21:52.300" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85595/word-for-a-part-of-a-wooden-railroad-track&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Word for a part of a wooden railroad track&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; appeared in my close vote review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am new to close votes that prompts some questions for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why on Earth would we close a four year old question with an accepted answer where both question and all answers have many up votes? The question and the three answers accumulate over 90 votes and there is a reasonable accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did come into the review queue? Did someone recently go back, flag or close vote it and two other reviewers agreed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T08:40:26.493" Title="Why would we possibly close this question and why is it in my review queue?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9427" CreationDate="2016-09-05T08:40:26.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was an answer within the last twelve hours or so, which would have propelled the question to the top of the &quot;active&quot; question list and thus made it more visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer was substandard and converted to a comment, which means it's only visible to 10k users. The three votes so far have come from sub-10k users; there's been a subsequent comment from a 10k+ user who presumably did understand the reason for the bump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question is old and was well-received at the time doesn't necessarily mean that it's still well-received now. We have a number of questions which are deliberately preserved for posterity, and many more which have never resurfaced to be voted on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this instance, I believe the question is on-topic, and well-expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136989/how-do-close-votes-age-away&quot;&gt;Close votes do age&lt;/a&gt; and &quot;Leave Open&quot; votes on reviews also have an effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T08:40:26.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9425" CreationDate="2016-09-05T15:01:43.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems  to me that a question about the structure of noun phrases for example, would come under syntactic analysis, but not sentence structure. Therefore, if the consensus is that these two should be merged, &lt;em&gt;syntactic analysis&lt;/em&gt; should be the main tag, and &lt;em&gt;sentence structure&lt;/em&gt; the synonym. However, I'm not sure that we definitely need to merge these two tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T10:03:42.057" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T10:03:42.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9421" CreationDate="2016-09-05T22:08:29.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, we might as well try. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some possible advantages, in my opinion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help users choose the right tags. (Not a big advantage, since most users will probably never see this Meta post.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help editors choose the right tags. (A much more significant advantage.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible disadvantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One more thing to keep updated in addition to the tag wikis. If it gets out-of-date, that's confusing. But people can always ask questions about it on Meta if they aren't sure if a certain part is up-to-date.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T22:08:29.217" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-11-26T01:49:52.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-06T14:19:48.427" Score="6" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am returning to ELU after a considerable duration (~6 months). I soon realized that I have missed tons of questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I've been just going through the profiles of some of my favorite contributors to check what have they been writing. I'm also going through the moderator election related posts, which I was so looking forward to but couldn't participate! (I don't think I got any email notifs &lt;em&gt;:(&lt;/em&gt; ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I filter the questions and answers for a specific duration? Like&#xA;&quot;show me all the top voted posts from March to August 2016.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any option to quickly collate what I've missed in these&#xA;past 5-6 months?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150645" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T14:24:11.343" Title="What's the best way to catch up on ELU posts after a hiatus?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9431" CreationDate="2016-09-06T14:24:11.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search for &lt;em&gt;created:6m.. score:20 etc. is:question [favorite-tag]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=created%3A6m..+score%3A20+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;This search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the tags only help you a bit, since tags are a mess. So support &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9421/proposed-elu-tagging-guideline&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T14:24:11.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-06T15:25:25.147" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering whether English Language &amp;amp; Usage is an acceptable place to discuss topics of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Corpus linguistics questions (e.g. &quot;Is the English conformity with Zipf's Law unique or universal?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How would a person with a native language of Han Chinese likely construct the sentence 'I went to the store to buy some milk?' if they were speaking in English?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178030" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T15:25:25.147" Title="Is this an Acceptable Site to ask about Linguistics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-09-06T17:26:53.810" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BeN5I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Explore the roots of English at the Latin Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53711" LastEditorUserId="53711" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T01:46:12.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T01:46:12.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-06T19:33:44.183" Score="4" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some good and authoritative references/data sources for modern usage examples of words? My typical workflow of learning a new word is to look it up on OED and read the definitions and example sentences.  But a huge drawback and uncomfortableness is that OED's example sentences are typically old or oldest usage example sentences that their editors could find which is NOT the best resource for learning the words' usage in modern context. What are some other references and data sources I should use to complement OED?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17129" OwnerDisplayName="qazwsx" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T16:13:20.493" Title="What are some good and authoritative reference/data source for modern usage examples of words?" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9435" CreationDate="2016-09-06T21:33:15.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that if you've got access to the &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; OED then that's a good place to start. No other source has (nor probably ever &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; have) that level of acknowledged expertise (as opposed to unaccredited sources like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, or those like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheFreeDictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TheFreeDictionary&lt;/a&gt; that effectively &quot;scrape&quot; other dictionaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to get a better handle on how the way a word is used might have shifted in very recent times, you need to bear in mind that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; usages which might appear ubiquitous today may very well turn out to sound extremely dated (or even be &lt;em&gt;unfamiliar&lt;/em&gt; to most) within a very few decades. I don't know, but my guess is &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; new usages don't actually last long (doubtless that's part of the reason dictionary editors tend to be conservative! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I normally search &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; with the search criteria set to &lt;strong&gt;21st century&lt;/strong&gt; if I want to see current instances in context, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NGrams&lt;/a&gt; if I want to see prevalence trends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T21:33:15.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7871" CreationDate="2016-09-07T11:29:54.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they should be merged (or made into synonyms or whatever the correct terminology is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T11:29:54.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9435" CreationDate="2016-09-08T16:13:20.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I think you are looking for is a number of examples of a target word in a sentence or paragraph (most dictionaries will give at least one sentence in its definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED is great (arguably the best) for definitions of words, with nuance provided by finely differentiated subdefinitions. Also, a number of context sentences are given to show it's historical usage (the first known appearance and then a handful of later appearances). Unfortunately these citations don't always give the full context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A corpus, a well-curated collection of texts, should give not only good coverage of vocabulary in narrative texts, but also allow for you to search for individual items and look at the original text, the surrounding sentences for fuller context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most easily available corpora are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt; for primarily American English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BNC&lt;/a&gt; for primarily British English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2578/4972&quot;&gt;the longer list of corpora here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because these are curated, they are likely to have few errors, but are more likely to come from formal sources (newspapers, official transcripts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internet search engines, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;, give copious examples of search terms in context. However, the entire world is not curated, and the examples are not necessarily formatted well or even sentences. But it might be the easiest and quickest to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.613" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T16:13:20.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T08:28:50.490" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work as an Assistant Language Teacher in Japan. There is a language sample for the textbook- the school (and nearly every teacher) is super boring about using the textbook. They'd like me to sound like the CD- is there an online language comparator to tell me how close that I am sounding like the samples and advise how to get closer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53812" OwnerDisplayName="user2617804" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T10:39:37.683" Title="Is there an online speech comparison programme" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-09T14:31:20.407" Score="6" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our taxonomy is a mess. As second part of my two part approach to try changing that to the better this is a suggested blueprint for tag wikis. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9421/proposed-elu-tagging-guideline&quot;&gt;Part One: Tagging Guideline&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this post I am suggesting a blueprint for tag wikis. If the feedback is well I'll put the result in a CW answer and accept it. Thus, providing a copy-paste blueprint for anyone who wants to help editing tag wikis. Including a list of all the &lt;em&gt;use some other tag&lt;/em&gt; bullet points to choose from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two things to consider about tag wikis. The actual tag wiki and the tag wiki excerpts. The latter are the texts that are displayed when choosing the tag or hovering about a tag anywhere on the site. Now to the blueprints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag wiki excerpt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This tag is for questions about&lt;/em&gt; whatever the tag is primarily about. The tag wiki excerpt can at most be 500 characters long. No mark-ups can be used. Only plain text is allowed. Thus, CAPITAL LETTERS are the only way to emphasize in any way. At a maximum one thing should be emphasized with capital letters most likely the primary requirement for questions with the tag. To save space only listing the most commonly mistaken other tag is advised. This example has near five-hundred characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example: Word-Choice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about choosing the best word FROM A GIVEN SELECTION for a particular context or meaning. The selection to choose from must appear in the question. If you do not know the word already, use single-word-requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stay the hand with the capital letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List the most commonly mistaken tag for distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep it short and simple.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The beginning phrase &lt;em&gt;This tag is&lt;/em&gt; will not be displayed in tag overview page. Continuing the sentence with &lt;em&gt;for questions about&lt;/em&gt; will improve the feeling of a more coordinated taxonomy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag wiki body&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that are about using a word correctly in a particular situation or context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider the question check list if your question fits the tag. You can also look at the example questions. If this tag doesn't fit your question have a look below at somehow related tags that might fit your question better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question checklist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is the question about the usage of one word or compound?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question contain the word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question clearly describe the concern regarding the usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94683/can-n%c3%a9e-be-used-for-entities-other-than-people&quot;&gt;Can “née” be used for entities other than people?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283071/is-dear-commonly-used-to-describe-something-that-costs-too-much&quot;&gt;Is “dear” commonly used to describe something that costs too much?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118067/is-the-word-author-correct-for-the-artist-who-created-particular-painting&quot;&gt;Is the word “author” correct for the artist who created particular painting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not what you are looking for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-usage&lt;/a&gt; for questions about the usage of complete phrases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; for questions that concentrate on choosing between two words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; if you don't know the word you need yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the example above is a tag wiki I wrote myself, I do not want to adorn myself with borrowed plumes. The structure is a merge from good ideas of the few other good wikis that existed already. In my opinion the tag wiki should provide answers to four questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is this tag about?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my question complete?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are good example questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm wrong here, what other tag do I use?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions are answered by the introductory paragraph and the three lists. In my opinion three defining checks, three examples and three alternative tags should be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's your opinion on the blueprints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T10:24:59.347" Title="Suggested tag wiki blueprint" Tags="|discussion|guideline|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-11T15:02:30.403" Score="14" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of resource requests that were recently migrated to ELU Meta (e.g &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9441/is-there-an-online-speech-comparison-programme&quot;&gt;Is there an online speech comparison programme&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9435/what-are-some-good-and-authoritative-reference-data-source-for-modern-usage-exam&quot;&gt;What are some good and authoritative reference/data source for modern usage examples of words?&lt;/a&gt;). These questions aren't actually about the site; they're about the subject matter. I don't see any reason why they should be on ELU Meta rather than the main site. New people will not know to look for them here. If we want to continue treating them as off-topic for the main site, that's fine (although I think we should add an explanation of this to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; tag). However, I don't see any way they are on-topic for the Meta site. So they should just be closed, not migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A relevant answer by Robert Carantino to a Latin SE Meta question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.meta.stackexchange.com/a/142/9&quot;&gt;Should we make a canonical “resources” question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:38:30.577" Title="What is the point of migrating all resource requests to Meta?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|meta|resources|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6999" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:09:14.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style&lt;/a&gt; is a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt;, which is the master.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formatting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formatting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt; is gone,  although &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/format&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;format&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;format&lt;/a&gt; exists and matches 13 questions, mostly closed.  One could make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formatting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formatting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt; the master and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/format&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;format&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;format&lt;/a&gt; the synonym, but I don’t find the tag particularly clear as things stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=relevance&amp;amp;q=is%3aquestion%20format&quot;&gt;searching for questions that happen to contain &lt;em&gt;format&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;formatting&lt;/em&gt;, etc.)&lt;/a&gt; yields around 400 results that are all over the place, with some being about orthography, some about typography/typesetting, others about citation formats, and still others about general layout design questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it doesn’t seem very well understood and agreed upon, and there is no tag wiki excerpt guidance for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t reckon it would be the best idea to merge the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/format&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;format&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;format&lt;/a&gt; questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt; any longer, but this is just a hunch. If you could please look them over and perhaps update your request for the current scenario, perhaps we can get these taken care of, one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:09:14.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="978" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:16:37.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has not been done, nor do I see any votes that it be done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nomenclature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nomenclature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nomenclature&lt;/a&gt; has 83 questions and a tag wiki, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; is considerably larger with over a 1,000 questions and two existing synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:16:37.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:22:36.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has now been done: the master is in the plural for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definite-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definite-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definite-articles&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indefinite-articles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indefinite-articles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indefinite-articles&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:22:36.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7033" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:31:45.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve made &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modals&lt;/a&gt; a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modal-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modal-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modal-verbs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve leaving &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modals&lt;/a&gt; based on Professor Lawler’s comment that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semi-modal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semi-modal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semi-modal&lt;/a&gt; makes sense for &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dare&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the tags here are useless because they're random names and descriptions with different meanings for everybody. I never pay any attention to them, because of that. As for &quot;semi-modal&quot;, it makes sense to use that term in English for &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dare&lt;/em&gt;, which can swing either way in negative contexts: &lt;em&gt;He doesn't need/dare to &lt;code&gt;VP&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;He need/dare not &lt;code&gt;VP&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; are both fine, but *&lt;i&gt;He need/dare &lt;code&gt;VP&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/i&gt; is ungrammatical. Of course that's not an argument for using it as a tag — as I said, the tags are at best confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:31:45.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:40:04.063" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93238/literature?referrer=J5ptbIP_b18RMbN3ps5MrA2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0J6a7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Support the Literature SE on Area 51&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T23:51:38.987" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T23:51:38.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:41:52.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve made these tags synonyms now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:41:52.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="399" CreationDate="2016-09-11T16:51:09.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It hasn’t been deleted: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammer&lt;/a&gt; tag is now a synonym for the correctly spelled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, no &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glamour&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glamour&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glamour&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T16:51:09.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9443" CreationDate="2016-09-12T08:05:44.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like Lawrence's idea of a stub that points to meta. Just fill it with all the words people might search for. Make it Community Wiki, lock it and add a stern warning not to post similar requests on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people who post these request don't look at either the help center or meta. Thus, the rules or the existing posts on meta do not help. I cannot guess how many did search the main site, but searching forums or Q&amp;amp;A sites has more general applicability than SE specific things like meta and the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T08:05:44.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7871" CreationDate="2016-09-12T08:31:29.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; since the latter addresses colloquial phrases. Thus, they are indistinguishable from each other, so we should go with the more popular one. It's a clear distinction from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands in our current taxonomy we are using all the &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; tags completely synonymous to phrases. Originally &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; was intended for phrases in a grammatical sense, but the existing  ~3,700 questions do not reflect that. When I updated the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki I couldn't find a single good example that matched the description and I didn't change the intent of the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would not only merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, but all &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; tags to their according &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T20:12:29.813" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T20:12:29.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-14T14:57:51.843" Score="0" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagin you posted a question on ELU. Sometime later you go to your question hoping your problem will be solved, only to find a &quot;duplicate&quot; mark on it. Disappointed but encouraged by the prospect of enlightenment you click the link. But, after having read the question and answers carefully, you are still in the dark, not understanding why the two questions are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348173/he-advised-me-to-avoid-tomatoes-and-to-eat-more-potatoes-or-he-advised-me-to?&quot;&gt;what happened to me&lt;/a&gt;. Learners often ask &quot;wrong&quot; questions because of the very fact that they don't know the answer. Therefore, if you choose only &quot;correct&quot; questions, you may throw away real questions from earnest learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I urge you to consider more about learners point of view before marking a question as a duplicate. I also would like to suggest some kind of mechanism in a question page marked as a duplicate which enables questioners to ask the reason why they got the label. I believe people who hold a question have some responsibility to the questioner because they have taken away a chance of getting answers from the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34662" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T08:26:21.123" Title="What is &quot;an exact duplicate of an existing question&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9443" CreationDate="2016-09-14T15:42:18.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr It was the simplest way to take the questions off Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've wondered about it, but perhaps one reason is that providing resource suggestions is about how to use the site: at least where to do your own research before asking a question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9443/what-is-the-point-of-migrating-all-resource-requests-to-meta#comment36856_9443&quot;&gt;– Andrew Leach♦&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't find any reasons on ELU Meta for resources to be on-topic there. I also looked briefly at Stack Overflow for precedents (their analogue is the &lt;em&gt;recommendation question&lt;/em&gt;) but didn't see any reasons there either. Since it appears that even Andrew Leach doesn't know, I'll assume there is no canonical answer, and present some speculations and suggestions of my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/254393/4983400&quot;&gt;recommendation questions&lt;/a&gt; on SO, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254394/4983400&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; identifies the problem of providing canonical answers to questions that don't ask about how to solve a specific problem. Elsewhere, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/251135/4983400&quot;&gt;Robert Harvey&lt;/a&gt; notes that &quot;we don't accept questions of this type on any Stack Exchange site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tells us why resource requests should not be hosted on Main. However, the resources elicited are useful and interesting, so it is natural to want to keep them. I speculate that they have been migrated to Meta because it was the simplest way to take them off Main. I further speculate that because there aren't all that many canonical resources to list, having a small number of off-topic posts on Main or Meta (both, actually) has simply been tolerated. They are useful, and they don't really get in the way most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I agree with your view that resource requests are off-topic on Meta. The question is what to do with them, since I don't think the community is seriously considering just deleting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the four spaces available to ELU: Main, Meta, Blog and Chat, the Blog is the only repository of filtered ELU wisdom. &lt;strong&gt;I propose that resource suggestions be discussed in Chat and on Meta, but eventually collated on the Blog and referenced from the help pages&lt;/strong&gt;. The existing Main and Meta questions can either be retained for their historical value or replaced with stubs. Either way, those questions should be edited to reference the blog(s) either directly or via the relevant help page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the unlikely event that the list of recommendations (the 'answers' part) grows beyond casual pruning and additions, we can consider launching our own version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/271676/4983400&quot;&gt;SO's Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T19:38:30.577" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:38:30.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9443" CreationDate="2016-09-14T22:21:27.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Resources are on-topic for Meta.ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're usually tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; (like this question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the questions at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What Good Reference Works On English Are Available&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these are considered community wiki, so that every one can add to a more formal answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T22:21:27.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9456" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9459" CreationDate="2016-09-16T08:13:10.240" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we have a 'should be asked on ELL rather than ELU' (or words to that effect) close-vote reason, it would be reasonable to have some knowledge on what the people at ELL deem suitable questions. I rarely visit the sister site (and on a couple of occasions, felt that questions there should have been migrated to ELU!) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just voted for migration of the '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348768/which-is-correct-i-needed-to-see-you-or-i-wanted-to-see-you&quot;&gt;Which is correct: I needed to see you or i wanted to see you?&lt;/a&gt;' question from ELU to ELL, but I wonder if I'm doing our colleagues there a disservice? Is this also too basic for ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll transfer a deleted comment to include my approach to answering (or otherwise) a question; this comment was in response to deadrat's &quot;Have we started giving a damn about what low-rep posters want...?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My 'line of approach' is almost always (1) Has OP made the slightest&#xA;  effort to tailor their question to ELU recommendations? If so, (2) Is&#xA;  it still obviously off-topic? Whether or not, (3) Is there an&#xA;  interesting and on-topic point for discussion, either overt or in what&#xA;  may well be the 'question behind the question'? (4) If so, is an edit&#xA;  preferable before an answer? If I reject at the first stage, I will&#xA;  still consider submitting a related question myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T10:02:15.250" Title="Level of questions expected on ELL: is migration violating 'A friendly reminder: ELL is not EL&amp;U's trash can' principle?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9453" CreationDate="2016-09-16T08:26:21.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a look at the following links (disclosure: I wrote the second).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-or-on-hold-question&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; or “on hold” question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7913/notes-to-reviewers-trial-version-2-1&quot;&gt;Notes to Reviewers [Trial, version 2.1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Stack Exchange, the overall goal is to build a repository of answers to questions of interest to specific communities. Placing questions on hold is a way for the community to ask for the question to be improved. Normally, it is only if no improvement is forthcoming within 5 days that the question is closed and possibly deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; duplicate, the repository already contains the question, so the duplicate isn't needed. As the question's author, if you think that your question is actually different, the thing to do is to edit your question, linking the purported duplicate, and stating why your question &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; its duplicate, explicitly stating &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it is different. You should also take the opportunity to rephrase your question if it helps to clarify exactly what you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This automatically pushes your question to a review queue, where the community looks at your edits and considers whether to reopen your question. In addition, after editing your question, you can also post a question on Meta to make your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to address your specific questions and issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is “an exact duplicate of an existing question”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one where both questions address exactly the same issue. In your case, both questions appear to be asking about the presence or absence of the word &quot;to&quot; in a list of conjunctions. If your question is different, you should explain how it is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I urge you to consider more about learners point of view before marking a question as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Determining whether a question is a duplicate is normally fairly objective process. Reviewers look at both questions to see if there is so much overlap that the new question doesn't add anything to the repository. If there is, and if the other question has been answered properly, the learner loses nothing by looking at the answers to the other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that before asking questions, users are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;expected to check the repository&lt;/a&gt; for answers. The goal of SE is to build a repository of expert answers, and the repository already contains many questions that are curated to be on topic and well-answered, so it's a good place to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also would like to suggest some kind of mechanism in a question page marked as a duplicate which enables questioners to ask the reason why they got the label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be done in comments under the question, or on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe people who [place] a question [on hold] have some responsibility to the questioner because they have taken away a chance of getting answers from the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a true duplicate, the answers should exist on the linked question, or others can navigate to it via the closed question, and place new answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; a true duplicate, the wording of the question would have already misled (typically 5) others. If the question was kept open, the answers you get might not suit the question you had in mind. Editing to clarify your question helps you to get better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T08:26:21.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9456" CreationDate="2016-09-16T08:55:26.957" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference in content between the sites is summarised in the respective tours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt;: every question about English language and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Learners&lt;/a&gt;: every question about learning the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, many questions about &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; the language are also questions about the language itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the Learners site is out of Beta, I think it's time to stop migrating questions there routinely. It may be useful to note the presence of the other site in comments, but if the OP still wants to ask the question here, the question should simply be handled as an ELU question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migration of the question should be considered only upon request from the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the question you mentioned, the core of the question is how native English speakers use (and differentiate) the terms &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt;. The dictionary provides a clinical distinction between the two words, but there is a closer-than-suggested historical link as well as typical-usage link between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question on its own merits, and ought to be on-topic on both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9456/level-of-questions-expected-on-ell-is-migration-violating-a-friendly-reminder/9458?noredirect=1#comment36894_9458&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;: I sometimes to look at questions a little differently. If the question as presented isn't all that interesting but there's a gem in there somewhere, it's useful to the repository for that gem to be taken out and polished, preferably by the original poster. If the OP refuses, then yes, the right thing to do would be to ask a new question instead of editing the existing one. I wouldn't do it in this case because I already know the answer, but it would otherwise be better (for the repository) than just discarding the whole thing. – Lawrence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT to preserve the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9456/level-of-questions-expected-on-ell-is-migration-violating-a-friendly-reminder/9458?noredirect=1#comment37038_9458&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@deadrat My 'line of approach' is almost always (1) Has OP made the slightest effort to tailor their question to ELU recommendations? If so, (2) Is it still obviously off-topic? Whether or not, (3) Is there an interesting and on-topic point for discussion, either overt or in what may well be the 'question behind the question'? (4) If so, is an edit preferable before an answer? If I reject at the first stage, I will still consider submitting a related question myself. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/21655/edwin-ashworth&quot;&gt;Edwin Ashworth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T03:53:11.690" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9456" CreationDate="2016-09-16T09:58:28.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which are obviously asked by someone learning English, who might be in need of a more didactic answer, are eligible to be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pointer, among others, is the use of terms like &quot;Third Conditional&quot;. There may be explicit references to tuition text-books or exams or school or learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a general rule &lt;strong&gt;poor questions should not be migrated.&lt;/strong&gt; At least some evidence of research is needed on ELU &lt;strong&gt;and ELL.&lt;/strong&gt; The reason for that is that it saves others looking up references (the OP has already found and noted them) and answers can concentrate on what is unclear or what the OP has misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELU closure message specifically mentions research, but also points out the existence of ELL for those for whom it might be a more appropriate forum. Its rules still apply, though, and questions asked there which show a lack of research are likely to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the post in question here, there is no evidence of research. While Laurence may be right that the distinction between &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; may be interesting, there is no evidence that the OP has even bothered to look up that there is a distinction. If, having found there is a distinction, there is a question to ask about that, it would probably be on-topic. Without that research, the question would be unwelcome on ELL, which means it should not be migrated there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, since I began this answer and was called away for a meeting, I see that the question has been closed for lack of research. That is the right decision, I feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it doesn't have to be the OP who edits the question to make it on-topic. Anyone can do that, even after it's been put on hold for lack of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T09:58:28.230" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9476" CreationDate="2016-09-16T16:32:02.583" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt; seems to provide no value to the taxonomy. Besides the fact, that &lt;em&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/em&gt; are considered off-topic, the questions seem to be either arbitrarily tagged (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348825/what-is-the-difference-between-get-back-to-your-box-and-get-back-in-your-box&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315437/are-there-previous-formulations-of-this-quote-from-george-r-r-martin&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303868/singular-or-plural-the-whole-of-a-b-is-are&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, ...), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/308671/how-should-a-month-and-ten-days-from-now-be-interpreted&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/127608/what-does-the-initial-fragment-of-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-mean&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, ...) or actual off-topic poetry interpretations (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340372/in-the-poem-green-beret-by-ho-thien-is-this-line-considered-as-using-irony&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/325529/a-swift-execution-on-a-morning-mortal-with-light-petrified&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and made the suggestion in the system.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/meaning/synonyms&quot;&gt;Four votes are needed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The synonym is in place. Topic closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T15:59:32.050" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T15:59:32.050" Title="Should the tag interpretation be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-17T10:40:25.327" Score="7" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/obscure-terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;obscure-terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;obscure-terms&lt;/a&gt;. It has 36 questions and the only thing obscure about them is the thought process that lead people to tag them with this tag. Mostly words that seemed obscure to the OPs, sometimes regarding the actual word obscure, sometimes completely arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a proper tag this tag can be made synonym of. I think we should start with gradually re-tagging the questions manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do with the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate&quot;&gt;guideline from Meta.SE on burninating&lt;/a&gt; I answer the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied?&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;is it unambiguous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hell no! The questions are an arbitrary bunch only kept together by tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were a discernible concept, maybe. The tag has no information and googling and meta dictionaries like onelook.com cannot provide any information about &lt;em&gt;obscure terms&lt;/em&gt; being an established concept of any sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the tag add &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; meaningful information to the post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly does not seem so. There are also no followers of the tag. The tag is completely arbitrarily used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly not. They range from concerning the words &lt;em&gt;obscure&lt;/em&gt; to regarding more or less uncommon words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's get it ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zm85C.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T09:52:37.907" Title="What's the tag &quot;obscure-terms&quot; for? Is it necessary?" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9462" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-18T10:03:05.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything is explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate/239191#239191&quot;&gt;this meta.se post&lt;/a&gt;. Don't waste anyone's time not following that guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag to get tags &#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zm85C.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-09-19T08:38:21.427" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T08:38:21.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9463" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-18T10:03:05.370" Score="0" Body="Use this tag to pose official burninate requests. Follow the guideline from meta.SE: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate DON'T WASTE ANYONE'S TIME WITHOUT FOLLOWING THAT GUIDELINE." OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-09-18T19:07:46.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T19:07:46.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9442" CreationDate="2016-09-18T11:26:49.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Copy-paste blueprint&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy everything between after the horizontal line, fill out the description, adapt the check list, pick example questions other tags (3-4). Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah I know this looks hideous, but no one has to edit this to copy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Use this tag for questions that are about INSERT SHORT DESCRIPTION.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Consider the question check list if your question fits the tag. You can also look at the example questions. If this tag doesn't fit your question have a look below at somehow related tags that might fit your question better.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;**Question checklist**&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA; - Is the question about the meaning of a word or a short phrase?&#xA; - Does the question contain the word?&#xA; - Does the question clearly describe the concern regarding the meaning?&#xA; - Does the question refer to the general meaning out of a specific literary context?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;**Example questions**&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA; - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335784/why-does-mickey-mouse-operation-refer-to-a-poorly-run-company&#xA; - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/323803/jane-makes-over-six-figures-how-much-money-does-she-make&#xA; - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30217/in-sex-talk-how-many-bases-are-there-and-what-do-they-all-mean&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;**Not what you are looking for?**&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA; - Use [tag:meaning-in-context] for questions about the meaning of words or phrases in specific contexts.&#xA; - Use [tag:etymology] for questions that concentrate on the origin of a word or phrase rather than nuances of the meaning.&#xA; - Use [tag:single-word-requests] if you don't know the word you need yet.&#xA; - Use [tag:phrase-usage] for questions about the usage of complete phrases.&#xA; - Use [tag:word-choice] for questions that concentrate on choosing between two words.&#xA; - Use [tag:expression-choice]for questions about choosing between longer phrases&#xA; - Use [tag:vocabulary] for broader questions, e.g. those that ask for lots of words at once&#xA; - Use [tag:grammaticality] for questions about specific sentences and whether they obey the rules of English grammar.&#xA; - Use [tag:orthography] for questions about spelling.&#xA; - Use [tag:punctuation] for questions about punctuation marks, including commas, semicolons, colons, and all the rest.&#xA; - Use [tag:grammar] for questions that ask about how grammar works, different grammatical usages, or what they mean.&#xA; - Use [tag:expressions] for questions about expressions.&#xA; - Use [tag:expression-request] for questions about finding an expression.&#xA; - Use [tag:meaning] for questions about the meaning of words or phrases devoid of specific contexts.&#xA; - Use [tag:symbols] for questions about symbols that are not considered punctuation.&#xA; - Use [tag:contemporary-english] for questions about the linguistic currency of a word.&#xA; - Use [tag:currency] for questions about money and its units.&#xA; - Use [tag:finance] for questions that concentrate on terms of the broader financial industry and economics.&#xA; - Use [tag:offensive-language] for questions about words or phrases that can be considered offensive.&#xA; - Use [tag:pejorative-language] for questions about words or phrases which primarily try to shine a negative light.&#xA; - Use [tag:confusables] for questions about words that can be mistaken for each other.&#xA; - Use [tag:ambiguity] for questions about words or phrases with multiple or ambiguous meanings.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T10:24:59.347" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T10:24:59.347" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-18T11:26:49.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-18T12:47:30.120" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the following question as a duplicate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/349088/142322&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/349088/142322&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question already had one close vote, but not &lt;em&gt;as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt;. After I voted, a mod voted to close as well, presumably not &lt;em&gt;as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the notice doesn't show the purported duplicate, and the usual comment about the possible duplicate didn't show up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm logging this as a bug since it throws away useful information for the OP, namely, the link to the purported duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought there might be some information on Meta.ELU and Meta.SE, but the closest Meta questions I found were the following, none of which helped:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta.ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/662/possible-duplicate-message-is-difficult-to-notice&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Possible duplicate&amp;quot; message is difficult to notice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta.SE from a search with the string &quot;close duplicate missing notice is:question&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/50067/improve-close-as-exact-duplicate?s=1|0.4206&quot;&gt;Improve “Close as exact duplicate”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/279984/for-a-gold-badge-user-how-to-propose-for-closing-a-question-as-duplicate-with?s=2|0.2978&quot;&gt;For a gold badge user, how to &amp;quot;propose&amp;quot; for closing a question as duplicate without completely closing it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134762/why-not-remove-the-close-link-for-questions-with-an-active-bounty?s=3|0.2061&quot;&gt;Why not remove the &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; link for questions with an active bounty?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78748/should-moderators-close-questions-for-reasons-other-than-obvious-violation-of-th?s=4|0.1283&quot;&gt;Should moderators close questions for reasons other than obvious violation of the rules?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118323/editing-possible-race-condition?s=5|0.0854&quot;&gt;Editing - possible race condition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/146837/whats-with-all-the-php-hate?s=6|0.0553&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s with all the PHP hate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T12:47:30.120" Title="Duplicate notice not showing up" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-18T21:23:06.077" Score="9" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of one word tags that make nearly no sense. Among them are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/what&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;what&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;what&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/do&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;do&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;do&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/did&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;did&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;did&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;like&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/they&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;they&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;they&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/winterfest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;winterfest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;winterfest&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/motto&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;motto&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;motto&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/it&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;it&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;it&lt;/a&gt;. They are pure gems of uselessness and I urge you to prove me wrong and provide any value these tags might add. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suspicion is that some of those tags came into being by someone simply typing something regarding his question in the tags field. &lt;em&gt;Winterfest motto, did they like it?&lt;/em&gt; This translates with the standard mechanism into shitty tags. It dumps all symbols but letters and dashes and creates tags from the rest. Typing in, &lt;em&gt;What's this field actually for?&lt;/em&gt; results in this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uxv3Z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uxv3Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;The root of all evil&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call this drive-by tags. Everyone above 300 reputation can create those. We are approving edits for another 1.700 reputation points, or 850 up votes. There is no further requirement for the creation of the tag. I think this is a problem and part of the reason we have 943 tags. There are many reasons why a low reputation hurdle to create tags and I don't want to increase the needed reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make at least suggesting a tag wiki excerpt mandatory for new tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The person posting will notice in case of inadvertent creation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The person posting the question has to use at least a minuscule amount of thought to provide a meaningful description, discouraging ill-thought-out tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag wiki excerpts go in the review queue, stopping useless tags in their tracks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Difficulties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE is in its core a Q&amp;amp;A site, this potentially complicates posting questions. This would be doubly important network-wide. However, when implemented just for ELU, the site maturity and scope will make that highly unlikely. Either way, it just adds a little hurdle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternative suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another idea would be simply new tags in a (new) review queue. New tags would pop up to be reviewed by moderators or users with sufficient reputation. How would one review a featureless tag like &lt;em&gt;it?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not too easy. However, the inadvertent drive-by tags could just be re-tagged in their tracks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, alternatively new tags could be put through a voting process similar to close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T04:31:29.173" Title="Tackling the drive-by tag problem" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9490" CreationDate="2016-09-19T11:54:30.820" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;As already previously discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4745/what-is-the-currency-tag-for&quot;&gt;this question, its answer and comments&lt;/a&gt; the currency tag is as ambiguous as they get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the tag description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;usefulness of this tag is under debate&#xA;  If your question is about whether a saying or usage is currently in active use, consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about money, consider keeping this tag, or using only other tags that categorize your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4745/what-is-the-currency-tag-for&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; for the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that even the description is rather unhelpful and advises already against using it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the previous meta question &lt;em&gt;two mods and everything that's up-voted agrees&lt;/em&gt; on using the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt; for everything regarding the currency of use and the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; for questions regarding money. For further clarity AndrewLeach suggested using the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; and make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I suggest a two-pieced approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the two tag wikis - &lt;em&gt;The tag wikis have been updated.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go through all 78 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt;, evaluate if they regard money. If they do, re-tag them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; as AndrewLeach suggested. If they don't re-tag them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt;. - We did it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T22:48:22.980" Title="Call to action: Let's tidy up the currency tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9468" CreationDate="2016-09-19T11:58:50.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Feel free to edit this post if you edited more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/272784&quot;&gt;Why “off the table” is not included in major English dictionaries while “on the table” is shown as an idiom in all of them?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13551&quot;&gt;€10 = &amp;quot;ten euro&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ten euros&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125598&quot;&gt;Is “She-economy” getting currency?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/249645&quot;&gt;Is “It’s not unheard-of to do” not-an-unusual expression in day-to-day conversation?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/279057&quot;&gt;Is “pre-spin” a common word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132792&quot;&gt;Is the word &amp;quot;mid-shelf&amp;quot; applicable to any merchandize being sold at retail shops more than liquor?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189488&quot;&gt;Lean in and lean out&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/277889&quot;&gt;Is ‘scooplet’ a popular word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116493&quot;&gt;Is ‘on (in) a tear’ a popular idiom?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37952&quot;&gt;What is the correct way to write a range of dollar figures?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/164013&quot;&gt;Is “cheese-stick operation, manufacturing, building current word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24134&quot;&gt;Pluralization rule is different when we say, 10 pound note and 10 pounds?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147689&quot;&gt;Is there a list of plural names of currencies?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/322233&quot;&gt;How to write &amp;#163;1 million where style guide clashes&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013&quot;&gt;Why is the unit of measure placed before the value for currencies? Are there other measures where the unit precedes value?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/308939&quot;&gt;What does Mr. Trump’s “inner rabbit” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/167909&quot;&gt;Is “release one’s butt cheeks” a euphemism?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/280968&quot;&gt;What does “triple down” in “Trump triples down on George W. Bush’s responsibility for 9/11”mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185326&quot;&gt;What does ‘Reverse fig leaf” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65289&quot;&gt;How to say the total amount?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246416&quot;&gt;Is “over-babble” a common word usable in day-to-day conversation?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125235&quot;&gt;Does ‘legit intel” pass as a usual English word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169805&quot;&gt;Is “I’m Mike” scam a popular metonym of &amp;quot;grandparent&amp;quot; scam?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/126603&quot;&gt;Is “play chess when others are playing checkers,” a well-known / well-used phrase?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216121&quot;&gt;What does “literary stylist” mean? Is it a characteristic or a profession?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/313189&quot;&gt;Is it common to use &amp;quot;where&amp;quot; after &amp;quot;a time&amp;quot; as a relative?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123622&quot;&gt;What does “Awesome” mean when you are complimented by an Apple-shop salesclerk on your answer to a barrage of his questions?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/279649&quot;&gt;Can the word, “OK’er,” be used in other area than copy editing?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180623&quot;&gt;Word or concept for &amp;quot;credit system&amp;quot; in context of &amp;quot;topping up&amp;quot; an account&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/349045&quot;&gt;The origin of the word, aw-shucks&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/266367&quot;&gt;What does “for comfort” in “too fast (close / hot/ warm / crammed) for comfort” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/312240&quot;&gt;Is “There are perks, but there’s also baggage” a popular English adage?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166834&quot;&gt;Is the word, “kinda-sorta” accepted as a normal word to be used in writing?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125886&quot;&gt;What does “I really get the juices flowing when I’m driving” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223121&quot;&gt;Is there a word for the most granular parts of currency, eg, cents, pence, etc?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/338678&quot;&gt;What does “The Cruz-Trump relationship goes solid #TBT” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326797&quot;&gt;What does “crawl over a pile of hot coals” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/275999&quot;&gt;What does “medical scare” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/319060&quot;&gt;What words describe the relation between &amp;quot;dollars&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;cents&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205294&quot;&gt;Who are “Security moms”?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326127&quot;&gt;What does President Obama&amp;#39;s “pro-knowledge” remark mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216165&quot;&gt;Who are “the perks people”?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187743&quot;&gt;Is “Ur-moment” a normal English expression?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198675&quot;&gt;What is the provenance of “ring the cherries”?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196184&quot;&gt;What does “media (news) disruptor” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196188&quot;&gt;The usage of “banzai”&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119177&quot;&gt;Is ‘celebvocate’ gaining currency in English?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/220401&quot;&gt;What does “Live in one’s own skin” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26378&quot;&gt;Case of USD — &amp;quot;United States Dollar&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;United States dollar&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26400&quot;&gt;Should it be 10 US$ or US$ 10?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/171811&quot;&gt;What does ‘Konrad Lorentz’s observation was “one sentence”’ mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/319602&quot;&gt;What does “the New York egoscape” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/210357&quot;&gt;Is “Click bait” an Internet buzzword? How can I rephrase it?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100404&quot;&gt;Dollar sign necessary in &amp;quot;$16 LD&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17072&quot;&gt;How to correctly write a range of currency?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204281&quot;&gt;Are “Real class” and “Paper class” well-received pair words?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180061&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “Corporate Daddy” getting currency, or is it just a one-off coinage?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117838&quot;&gt;What does “Small words” in “They are small words that reflect a dark and negative point of view.”?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305046&quot;&gt;What does “Retail politics” mean? Is it an established political term?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/212335&quot;&gt;Is “Grey tsunami” a mere metaphor, or acknowledged phrase to represent for accelerated global increase of old age population?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161735&quot;&gt;Is the word, ‘nerdocracy’ just a nonce word, or becoming current?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/221181&quot;&gt;Is “two-Perrier” lunch a businessmen’s buzz word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169433&quot;&gt;What does “soft bigotry of low expectations” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/126146&quot;&gt;What does “Wonk gap” mean in brief?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172802&quot;&gt;What does “Empty dress” exactly mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129304&quot;&gt;Does the words, “Love interests” and “Love intelligence” have a special meaning other than plain “love affair” and “love gossip”?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158270&quot;&gt;Is “un-grown-up” a common, or not so common word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218235&quot;&gt;What does “cheffed-up” in “Traditional ramen that hasn’t been cheffed-up” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/122830&quot;&gt;Is “closed press (remark / ceremony / meeting)” a popular English word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/126754&quot;&gt;What does “Love arrives with a bonk on the head with a balloon” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119051&quot;&gt;Is the phrase, “Let ‘em up easy” Abraham Lincoln’s one-off phrase or an obsolete idiom?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187551&quot;&gt;Is “since-folded (TV network)” an accustomed English word?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/265330&quot;&gt;What does “fall for a bluff” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71266&quot;&gt;Are monetary values plural?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12701&quot;&gt;English term that groups notes and coins of a currency&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186929&quot;&gt;Does the expression, “As sound as a pound” still holds its currency?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215264&quot;&gt;Is “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” a common or respectable English expression?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191747&quot;&gt;What does “show some (a little) leg” mean?&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70315&quot;&gt;How to spell out dollars and cents&lt;/a&gt; - Done!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T15:03:14.593" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-19T11:58:50.180" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-09-19T16:57:29.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm also against changing how backticks are displayed. I use them deliberately for their effect and never use them for italics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The formatting is visible 'live' beneath the editing window on the standard site, and it's certainly visible after posting even if accessing the site from a phone. Whatever people use for formatting, the effect of the formatting is easily checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better to assume that people who use backticks do so deliberately. So long as Stack Exchange allows freedom of formatting, and provided the formatting isn't so garish as to obstruct comprehension, that deliberate choice should be upheld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T15:02:59.093" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T15:02:59.093" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9472" CreationDate="2016-09-19T22:02:59.577" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, the top 10 questions on &lt;a href=&quot;http://English.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; are almost all about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; and its linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tp4S6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tp4S6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Top questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pEaxB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pEaxB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Top questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a problem with the prioritisation algorithm, is the tag is being purposefully advertised, or is this all a massive coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9376/184766&quot;&gt;mods bumping up old questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T22:14:58.333" Title="Why are all the questions about money?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2016-09-19T22:06:11.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not the top questions, it's active questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag edits bump questions. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9468/call-to-action-lets-tidy-up-the-currency-tag&quot;&gt;Call to action: Let&amp;#39;s tidy up the currency tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T22:06:11.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-20T09:30:37.787" Score="10" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just noted two much admired contributors have &quot;disappeared&quot;. One has the sense of operating in an Orwellian/dystopian environment when people suddenly disappear. One is said to have been &quot;temporarily suspended&quot; - it seems for one year. Where has the other gone? Do we have the right to know, or even to ask? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T22:58:35.823" Title="Where are the &quot;disappeared&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9473" CreationDate="2016-09-20T12:32:11.403" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to ask and it's expected that community members will be curious if they discover that other members are suspended or deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we don't disclose specifics about suspensions or deletions for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suspensions are not intended to be a shaming punishment. They are given to allow a member time to calm down, take a break, get a clear head, and reflect on what community expectations of behavior are. It's hard to calm down when you feel like everyone is looking at you, which is why we don't announce suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The member who has been suspended cannot chat or post, so they are not able to present their point of view to the community. Additionally, hashing it out publicly tends to draw out the corrective process both by keeping emotions high and by giving the community the illusion that decisions about suspension are debatable. The moderation team has the authority to enact suspensions. The community does not. That said, if you feel a suspension (either your own or someone else's) is unwarranted or unjust, you may contact the community moderation (CM) team (who are paid employees of StackExchange) and they will investigate. They are the ones who watch the watchers. You can reach them at team@stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The moderation team has access to a variety of tools and information that help us do our job. If we post the details and evidence of how we know when the rules are being broken, then we make those tools less useful. In short, if we must prove publicly that suspension is warranted, our jobs become much harder. I know that requires a lot of trust from the community and that is one reason why I will reiterate that if you feel there is something hinky going on with the moderation team, please contact the CMs at team@stackexchange.com. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I can tell you about suspensions is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there aren't a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23366/suspension-reasons&quot;&gt;reasons to suspend an account&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suspensions follow a prescribed progression: 0-day (warning), 7-day, 30-day, 365-day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we sometimes vary the length if the rule violations are different, but it will never be less than the previous suspension&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Little Eva, as Dan Bron mentioned, you can tell that the account is deleted because it reverts to the generic username (user#####) and the name is greyed out. That means that user does not or no longer has an account on EL&amp;amp;U. We don't usually give out details about account deletions either, although there are also very few reasons to delete an account (by request, sockpuppet, spammer). I will go out on a limb and tell you that she requested to delete her account. I think it is OK for me to say so. I don't have any further information about why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T12:32:11.403" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-09-20T12:47:31.980" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking we should start with trying to reduce the amount of newly created posts with that kind of markup by creating awareness for the style that we do want to have on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure there are no statistics about how many people type the backticks and how many use the according button ({}), but the latter one is a WMD button. The functionality of this button could be enhanced. Furthermore, if one enters too many tags in the tag field a warning shows up as soon as one selects the sixth tag or leaves the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PmXkr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PmXkr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Too many tags warning&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose a similar - not as red - information showing up if one uses code  markup in any way. It could be displayed as soon as one presses the {}-button or as soon as one leaves the body field of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could read something like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mono-spaced markup is disrupting the appearance of sentences, please consider using italics&quot;,&lt;/em&gt; or when used in the complete line fashion, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Please consider using a quote section rather than pre-formatted text.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if those warnings can incorporate links. If that's possible the link to a proper style guide for ELU can be included. (I know that currently there is no such thing in a single post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is a second awareness that needs to be created. The editor awareness. Currently there is a lot of knowledge on how to edit scattered in dozens of meta posts, mostly answers, some of them accepted, some of them not, not even all of them the highest voted. As a relatively new ELU user I know that the normal way to get to know them is to have them linked by an experienced user. After that, one can favorite it and pay the good deed forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;preferred usage of italics on ELU&lt;/em&gt; is exactly such a thing. It came to my attention after one of my posts was edited (although from bold to italics) and a certain comment was provided. There is no information in the tour or the editing privileges page, or anywhere to indicate anything about italics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, there is even code markup on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit privileges page&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt; page, which is understandably full of code markup, is also no mentioning of anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR &amp;amp; suggestions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add backtick / code markup warning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add information about restraining use of code markup to help pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a proper edit guideline on meta (CW; Single point of reference)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a proper format guideline on meta (CW; Single point of reference)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T12:47:31.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9460" CreationDate="2016-09-20T14:51:54.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The synonym is in place. Topic closed. I will accept this to keep it from bumping up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T14:51:54.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9473" CreationDate="2016-09-20T18:23:39.930" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another way of looking at the second question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do we have the right to know, or even to ask?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person involved can tell you anything. And if they are willing to be contacted, they can include contact information on their profile page, such as an email address. For privacy reasons, the site does not provide another way to send unsolicited messages to a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volunteer moderators and Stack Exchange employees are not free to tell you anything. Volunteer moderators must accept the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;Moderator Agreement&lt;/a&gt;. Here is my synopsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Moderator Agreement protects user privacy. Moderators sometimes see information about a user that is not public. Moderators agree never to disclose such information, and to use it only in their capacity as moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not seen the agreement that Stack Exchange employees accept as a condition of their employment. Presumably it is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gloss treats all non-public information about a user as &lt;em&gt;potentially personal&lt;/em&gt;, and therefore subject to the Moderator Agreement, for two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is a clear standard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is how we are told to understand the agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative would be for moderators to make judgment calls about what is &lt;em&gt;potentially personal&lt;/em&gt;. That’s broader and less clearly defined than &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt;. And dismissal is the likely outcome of violating the Moderator Agreement. For these reasons, it is unlikely in practice that moderators would feel comfortable disclosing any non-public information. The end result would be the same. That is my impression as the “new guy”, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:54.517" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T20:57:15.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9473" CreationDate="2016-09-20T20:11:01.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In her answer, Kit Z. Fox notes the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;suspensions follow a prescribed progression: 0-day (warning), 7-day, 30-day, 365-day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So (presumably) the progressive series of suspension durations applies to all Stack Exchange sites, and (also presumably) introducing a different-duration suspension is not within the power of our citizen moderators at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this lack of flexibility is extremely unfortunate—especially when we are talking about valuable contributors to this community. I understand that it is dangerous for moderators to ignore rule violations on grounds that the violator's contributions justify special leniency. But on the other hand, having no alternative in the face of a repeat violation by someone who is on or who in the past has received a 30-day suspension but to increase the suspension to a full year forces mods to be harsher in a particular case than they might wish to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, Stack Exchange would be better off if moderators had the discretionary power to double or triple or sextuple a suspension when a previously or currently suspended person committed a further breach of the rules, instead of their having to impose a twelvefold increase in the suspension. In most settings, doubling or tripling the duration of a suspension wouldn't seem to be especially lenient—and it certainly wouldn't qualify as ignoring the subsequent violation. If moderators had the option to impose an intermediate punishment—without thereby establishing that every violator had to be stepped through the additional suspension periods—they would be in a better position to determine a penalty truly appropriate for a particular repeat violation, and the community might benefit from the earlier return of the chastened contributor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am talking here about the general rule governing progressive suspensions—not about any specific instance of suspension in actual operation. To me, the jump from a one-month suspension after two previous incidents to a one-year suspension after three seems draconian—especially as a one-size-fits-all approach to repeated site rule violations. In effect, it's the Stack Exchange equivalent to mandatory sentencing. And denying moderators the power to take a more nuanced approach if they considered it appropriate puts them (I think) in an uncomfortable and very unenviable position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T22:58:35.823" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T22:58:35.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T16:31:45.287" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I commented on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/349640/184766&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/348961/184766&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about the long-ago evolution of the thorn (þ) into a &amp;quot;y&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Jon Hanna answered the question very well, with an answer that is, to my knowledge, perfectly correct. The issue arises in the fact that he did not quote any sources nor cite references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On links, the EL&amp;amp;U &lt;a href=&quot;http://English.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; explains the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provide context for links&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are &lt;strong&gt;encouraged&lt;/strong&gt;, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether I should down-vote the answer for not providing references, up-vote it for being correct or do nothing and search online for corresponding links so that I can add them for myself.  I should note that the Help Centre uses the word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;encouraged&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; in relation to this topic, do perhaps down-voting simply for a lack of references is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I respond?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T16:57:42.650" Title="Should I down-vote an accurate answer that lacks references?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|reference|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9479" CreationDate="2016-09-21T16:57:42.650" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote useful answers. Downvote answers that are not useful. A useful answer is an answer that will help not just the asker but also anyone who might come across the question in a site or Google search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fine to improve someone's answer by adding links to useful external resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T16:57:42.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9467" CreationDate="2016-09-21T18:05:14.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of features to help keep the new tag count down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can see what tags have been created recently by going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=new&quot;&gt;Tags &gt; New&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only 9 tags have been created since August 8th. There are 73 questions tagged with these tags, but if you exclude &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; (which is the product of organized community tagging), there are only 35. (34 if my one edit gets approved.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can eliminate a tag by editing it out. Once nothing is tagged with it, it gets automatically deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that all of the newest 8 tags (excluding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt;) are bad, it wouldn't take any time at all to retag all of them, even if they are all edited for grammar and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: after revisiting this with more experience on this site, I'm not sure I would discard all these tags as useless. Guess &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; word most questions use? Now try and find questions about that word. It doesn't need urgently need a tag wiki because you know &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that we &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9482/191178&quot;&gt;now&lt;/a&gt; warn people about new tag creation with a popup like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/233897/323179&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gQbdD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T04:31:29.173" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T04:31:29.173" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9524" CreationDate="2016-09-21T21:20:14.013" Score="13" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/233897/338924&quot;&gt;meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt; is a neat functionality to stop people from creating new tags is described. Unfortunately it's not active on ELU. Fortunatly, Laurel has this brought to ELU attention over &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9481/184706&quot;&gt;here in an answer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This feature is currently enabled on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Unix &amp;amp; Linux, Mi Yodeya, Ask Ubuntu, Physics, Sound Design, Pets, and Mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would provide us with this neat warning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gQbdD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is already available on other network sites it should be relatively easy to activate it on ELU. I think it would be a great addition and keep senseless tags from being inadvertently created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T14:23:32.617" Title="Activate the StackExchange new tag warning on ELU" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9484" CreationDate="2016-09-21T23:12:25.610" Score="6" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been gone about five weeks, and returned to find the Close Vote queue very short -- about 10% of its length when I left in mid-August. Are there fewer questions?  Better questions?  Is this normal summer doldrums, which I would have expected in July/Aug but not in mid-September?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T00:19:57.473" Title="Why is the Close Vote Queue so short?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9483" CreationDate="2016-09-22T00:19:57.473" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had begun to despair as the review indicator had not fallen below triple digits for some time, but now they rarely reach the double digits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is indeed a substantial dip in the number of questions, and especially the number of answers, during the Northern Hemisphere summer, as you can see in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/6134&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;. The most dramatic dropoff, however, takes place earlier in the season. My theory is that the cycle reflects the academic year. Participation plummets starting in May after final exams are over, then picks up again in August as students return to universities. There will be a period of overlap when question volume starts to rise, but answers and reviews do not because an outsize proportion of the answerati and the reviewqueueburo and moderatariat are still lying on the beach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions are improving, it isn't reflected in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/293209/average-question-score-per-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;average question score&lt;/a&gt;, which is lower in 2016 than in it was 2013 or 2014, though better than 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9355&quot;&gt;2016 Community Moderator Election Results&lt;/a&gt; is almost certainly the biggest change, as we added two extremely active moderators while losing one who had not visited the site since October 2015. In particular, tchrist is the top reviewer of all time by a substantial margin in both the CV and LQP queues. These also happen to be the longest queues, and no doubt received outsized attention after relative neglect during the previous epoch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T00:19:57.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8033" CreationDate="2016-09-22T12:40:54.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This might be a good meta.stackexchange.com question...if it's not a duplicate. With a little tweaking, the accepted answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269804/&quot;&gt;Dump of my own Stack Exchange content&lt;/a&gt; might suggest a way. – JEL May 26 at 6:13 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T14:17:40.313" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-22T12:40:54.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7585" CreationDate="2016-09-22T13:00:50.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only the most common sites will get listed. It took years to get ELL on that list. If you think it should be migrated somewhere else, write a custom flag and a mod will consider it. – curiousdannii Jan 11 at 23:48&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:00:50.793" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-22T13:00:50.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7573" CreationDate="2016-09-22T13:03:53.260" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bump, the description is still as it is described in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:03:53.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7573" CreationDate="2016-09-22T13:59:41.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest the page be removed in its entirety. There is no conceivable &quot;product&quot; which would be on-topic on ELU.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:59:41.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9468" CreationDate="2016-09-22T19:45:03.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that the questions have been sorted into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt;, the final stage has been completed with the creation of tag synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which are attempted with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; will get &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions where the user attempts to use &lt;code&gt;curr&lt;/code&gt; to start something to do with &quot;current English&quot; will &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt; because it has a new synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/current-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;current-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;current-usage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T19:45:03.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9504" CreationDate="2016-09-24T18:26:22.487" Score="9" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed recently that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/350167/184766&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; used the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microsoft-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microsoft-word&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this question was about the usage of a specific program, it was moved to &lt;a href=&quot;http://superuser.com&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; to which it is much better suited. There have only been two questions using the tag so far this year and one of those was the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is simply, why do we need the Microsoft-Word tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely all of its uses are covered by &lt;a href=&quot;http://superuser.com&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been pointed out to me in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9495/184766&quot;&gt;@Helmar's answer&lt;/a&gt; that the Microsoft-Word is simply a meta-tag and as such ought to be deprecated. My suggestion now, would be to begin the process of removing references to the tag and eventually its burnination, like with this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9468/call-to-action-lets-tidy-up-the-currency-tag&quot;&gt;Call to action: Let&amp;#39;s tidy up the currency tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The next stage of the process has begun! Please help out in any way possible as many hands make light work. See my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9504/184766&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; for more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T14:03:19.100" Title="What is the point of the Microsoft-Word tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-24T19:49:05.197" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;To preempt the predictable, I have been here nearly half a decade. I have read all the guides, thanks. I know what they say about comments so don't start quoting them at me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is that, backed by guidelines that need changing, ELU is becoming over-moderated - particularly with regards to discussions. Every time anything approaching a discussion gets underway, a mod pops up and kills all the the fun, with the result that ELU is becoming - I am going to say it - boring. We come in, answer a question or two. Finish. Don't discuss anything because that is not allowed. Go elsewhere, look at G+ or something. Given that high-rep users are  becoming conspicuous by their absence I suspect that I am not alone in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So -  a simple question: should discussion be allowed? What is the justification for a 'discussion is baaaaaaad' dogma?  I suggest that allowing discussion would build community engagement for users and be interesting reading for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18649" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T16:05:30.203" Title="Why does ELU hate people discussing English Language and Usage?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9492" CreationDate="2016-09-24T20:43:46.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Discussion is bad&quot; (in the context of &lt;em&gt;answering questions online,&lt;/em&gt; not in all contexts) is one of the founding principles of Stack Exchange, from what I understand. It's not restricted to ELU. I don't think you'll make much headway trying to change this viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a Meta SE post about why discussion in comments is considered a bad thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95937/why-must-we-avoid-discussions-in-comments&quot;&gt;Why must we &amp;quot;avoid discussions in comments&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that discussion in comments is sometimes helpful. It mainly causes problems when there are a large number of off-topic comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other relevant Meta SE posts about discussion in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/34625/really-good-discussion-questions&quot;&gt;Really good &amp;quot;discussion&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/167516/how-can-i-encourage-stack-overflow-to-rein-in-the-subjective-vigilantes?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;How can I encourage Stack Overflow to rein in the &amp;#39;subjective&amp;#39; vigilantes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant blog post by Robert Cartaino:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument against discussion is that it interferes with the main goal of the site, to create useful and easily accessible content. Discussion is &quot;noise&quot; that makes it harder for visitors to find the answers to their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having fun is not a primary goal of this site. It's true that it's a problem if people contribute less. But it's not clear that that's happening. In any case, there are alternative methods to encourage participation. Stack Exchange has traditionally incentivized participation by using &quot;gamification&quot; techniques, such as points and privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T02:22:06.993" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9492" CreationDate="2016-09-25T11:03:27.023" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU hates discussion because Stack Exchange hates it. This has been the stated case for at least five years, as there was a question in 2011&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95937/why-must-we-avoid-discussions-in-comments&quot;&gt;Why must we &amp;quot;avoid discussions in comments&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; there is current evidence in the moderator messages available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites, of which ELU is one, are Q &amp;amp; A sites. They are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; discussion fora. There is a question, and you are welcome to answer. If you agree or disagree with an answer, you can vote on it; you can also provide your own, better, answer. Comments are there for eliciting clarification. Comments are not provided for discussion. Occasionally, a comment might be made pointing out a fundamental flaw in an answer (instead of, or in addition to, a downvote); or adding something worthwhile which doesn't merit an answer of its own. On  a question, a comment might be used to provide helpful advice on an off-topic question (so the asker doesn't go away entirely empty-handed), or even to point out a basic error in the premise of the question, or maybe to offer additional corroboration. But &lt;strong&gt;comments are not for discussion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss within the Stack Exchange environment, use Chat. With 20 rep, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;main ELU chat room&lt;/a&gt;; with 100 rep you can create your own room(s); there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87761/is-there-a-list-of-se-chat-privileges-and-the-minimum-reputation-required-for-t&quot;&gt;other privileges&lt;/a&gt; too. Chat offers one-boxing of posts so it's easy to link discussion to a particular example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e5zgz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e5zgz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of one-boxed answer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the discussion has crystallised into a position, head back to the question and write an answer (or edit the question, depending on what the discussion was based on). Discussing things in comments isn't helpful when what is required on a Q &amp;amp; A site is a succinct question and succinct answers: it shouldn't be necessary to trawl through a discussion to come up with a position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system flags excessive comments on a post to draw moderators' attention to something going wrong, and it does that because Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum and comments have a specific purpose. Moderators are expected to do something with the developing situation, and the system offers the opportunity to move comments to a chatroom. Generally, a large number of comments indicates a discussion, so the comments are moved. Sometimes it's not a discussion but rather an argument, in which case different actions may be called for. But long comment chains indicate something is going wrong within the Stack Exchange Q &amp;amp; A model, and they will be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, part of the armoury provided to moderators is the moderator message. We have boilerplate templates for a number of reasonably foreseeable situations, and excessive discussion in comments is one of them. You may not have seen it; it looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've noticed that you have a pattern of engaging in lengthy discussions in comments, frequently consisting of responses involving multiple, back-to-back posts. Comments are intended as brief messages to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;provide feedback, add minor information, ask for clarification, or discuss the &lt;em&gt;content of the post&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Lengthy clarifications should be edited into the post itself or posted separately as a new question or answer, and extended discussions should be taken to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. Extensive comment threads tend to be a distraction for other readers. &lt;strong&gt;These lengthy discussions are often hard to follow, and can easily hide critical information.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferring to argue with other users in comments over revising your questions and answers to address their concerns is a red flag to moderators, indicating you may not fully understand the purpose of Stack Exchange: our goal is to provide readers with expert questions and answers, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; host discussion or debate. If you desire conversation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;stop into the site's chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second paragraph there may need tweaking, depending on whether it's sent to the writer of a post or someone who comments on it, but it is a network policy that discussion within comments is discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing a network policy is not actually within the competence of ELU users (including ELU moderators): if you wish to change network policy, you are welcome to ask the question again on MSE, or to provide a dissenting answer to the question linked above — which will also bump that question — for the proposal to be voted on. Make sure you have a fully worked-out proposal and justification before posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would point out now that even if this answer is downvoted to indicate disagreement, policy on this site will not change unless network policy changes (when votes here may be taken into account), simply because it cannot change: &lt;em&gt;the system itself follows the network policy,&lt;/em&gt; its processing mandates how discussion is dealt with, and moderators are bound to follow network policy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; is the place to initiate changes to network policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For discussion, please use Chat: that's what it's provided for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T11:03:27.023" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9491" CreationDate="2016-09-25T13:06:51.680" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TL;DR: We certainly don't need it. It has no point.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's a meta tag, one of the bad ones&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is irrelevant to the question if my own Sprachgefühl, Microsoft Word, the editor of my novel, a teacher or the pattern answer of some certificate or English test triggers my concern about a sentence or wording. It can be in the question, but it's not worth a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is the same, the people come here and post a question. Neither of the tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;test&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gre&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gre&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gre&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cloze-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cloze-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cloze-test&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microsoft-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microsoft-word&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling-checker&lt;/a&gt; adds any valuable information to the question. On the contrary they are likely indicators of bad questions with little research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;If the tag can't work as the only tag on a question, it's probably a meta-tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of those tags can stand on their own. They do not indicate anything about the question. Is it about a word being not recognized? Is it about a sentence structure the program didn't recognize? A printing error in the text book? A strangely worded test question? Nothing. Those tags tell us nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't us anything about the type of problem, about the parts-of-speech or linguistic field involved and they don't help us to put it in a general area of expertise like the tags for other sciences, languages and time periods do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those six tags are the embodiment of the taxonomy mess on ELU. The meta tag rule is from 2010. In August it had it's sixth birthday. Maybe it's time to give ELU a present commemorating that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The usual solution: blacklist them all&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we truly deleted those six tags and blacklisted them. Everyone trying to ask a question with those tags would get a warning before posting. This could very well be the relief of shitty test questions that is so often discussed in chat and part of so many meta discourses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The warning would look like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z40fq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z40fq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why we don't do it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At ELU, we are unable or more precisely unwilling to do it. Having a meta discussion about tags makes people apparently ignore it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1053/blacklist-the-words-tag&quot;&gt;It took four years to blacklist the tag &lt;em&gt;words.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; If we look without any further analysis at the posts tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/tags&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tags&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; they have comparably meager up votes and few answers. ELU people just don't care enough to voice a proper consent on anything tag related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like they have low up vote counts because they are disputed. The few I randomly checked have no single down vote. There are just in total only a few up votes. It's just that nobody cares. Since the community managers for good reasons can't take apathy as support nothing changes as long as we don't have enough voices to show proper support for our tag measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately until that changes we will mostly be stuck with our own continuous re-tagging efforts. Blacklisting is done one a StackExchange permission level above moderators. We as ELU participants have to show via voting on meta posts that we have a consensus for them to act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have only a few people who suggest tag measures and only a few more people to show their support for those measures. Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/revision/544258/688284/#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pitiful voting pattern for the blacklisted word tag question&lt;/a&gt;. It got five votes in the first two times it came up. That is for a tag that has been &lt;em&gt;&quot;has been heavily discouraged since the early days of the site.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; As such I would expect the full voting weight of the moderator team and site regulars of the time behind the proposal. Not sure if that really only amounted to &lt;strong&gt;five&lt;/strong&gt; back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there's some light at the end of the tunnel. We have a new moderator who cares about tags and my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9409/should-the-language-tag-be-deleted&quot;&gt;regarding the language tag&lt;/a&gt; has garnered 13 up votes in a week. That tag is in the same ball park of ridiculousness as the words tag was. Maybe that's a good sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do want to start getting rid of those tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239192/338924&quot;&gt;this is the way to do it.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T15:24:44.113" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-25T16:43:26.453" Score="-4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you come on to EL&amp;amp;U (or any other SE site) and you're not necessarily a member, you are faced with a cold wall of questions and their answers. This is usually very helpful - it is the reason many SE sites have grown so much - but when you want to look in greater detail at a topic SE becomes very opaque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone comes onto the site, looking for extra reading or a way of looking at a topic in more depth, they should not be turned away and told that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/137942/184766&quot;&gt;'&lt;em&gt;resource requests are off-topic&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/a&gt; but shown a source of knowledge, not directly answering their question (that is already the purpose of SE), but providing sources and a springboard for further research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also good from a purely site-selfish point of view; people who find that EL&amp;amp;U gives them extra help, are likely to want to give something back to the community and to spread the knowledge they discover in their dive into the world of English Language. This in turn will provide more springboards and also people to join the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a couple of suggestions as to how we could go about doing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shadow site, much like chat or meta. Users with an arbitrary amount of reputation can create a discussion post, except it would have some form of structuring, almost like a meta site in that people can vote for the best points and they are ordered slightly as such. It could be made easy to create a discussion post from a main site question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this may be out of the control of mere users or even moderators, but perhaps this sort of idea could become a reality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the following is a more easily creatable suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not create a new tag 'discussion' or 'further-reading' on the main site where questions can be responded to but in a more casual way than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9492/why-does-elu-hate-people-discussing-english-language-and-usage/9494?noredirect=1#comment37045_9494&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;over-moderated&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; standard question. This would allow for the Stack Exchange voting system to self-regulate the discussion while keeping them interesting and enjoyable for contributors.&#xA;Essentially, every time someone mentions a new topic in chat or goes astray in the comments, you could create a new question tagged with this in which their references/extra detail/interesting points could be contained and then archived, leaving behind a question and a series of answers on a given topic which would be tagged and available for people to find online, building extra reference material around a question. This would not replace a question, it would simply provide extra context material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something that we, as an individual site community, could trial, since tags are completely our own business, not that of the official Stack Exchange employees&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T12:09:52.397" Title="How could we create extended discussion on EL&amp;U that could be used as reference material to back up Q&amp;A" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9497" CreationDate="2016-09-25T17:56:07.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's the blog. You could get a couple people to write contrasting viewpoints in a topic and post it as an article on the blog. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, 'meta' tags like 'discussion' on the main site are not allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, please stop using the phrase &quot;over-moderated&quot;. We are not over-moderating. We are doing our jobs, which includes removing discussion in comments. The problem is not with moderation; the problem is with community members who want the site to be different than it is. As it has been said before, if you don't like the policy, you should post on Meta.SE and try to get the rules changed. This is not something that EL&amp;amp;U mods can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T12:09:52.397" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T12:09:52.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-09-26T02:54:59.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are cases where back ticks are quite useful.  For instance, when telling someone what Google argument to use it's much clearer to say &lt;code&gt;synonym pope&lt;/code&gt; than &quot;synonym pope&quot; (should the user include the quotes or not?) or &lt;em&gt;synonym pope&lt;/em&gt;.  And recently I wanted to discuss &lt;code&gt;[sic]&lt;/code&gt;, and any other sort of &quot;quoting&quot; would have been confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I suppose there is some &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;keyword&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/keyword&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; notation that will present the same, but it would be much more awkward to use, and blocking the actual use of back ticks in such cases is simply being punitive against those who are doing nothing wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T02:54:59.137" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-26T02:56:00.933" Score="-1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/284969/encouraging-citations-in-answers&quot;&gt;this question on stackexchange's meta&lt;/a&gt; with a more general audience. However, it was suggested to me in the discussion that I should bring up the topic in site metas, where this may be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that other stackexchange sites do not value citations in &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; as much as this site does, and many of them do not see it worth value to use them strictly as a citation or as a way to provide proof of your answer (many of them use them simply as a way for people to learn more about the topic, like stackoverflow uses them often as &quot;how to use this&quot; type references). So, when a user from one of those sites decides to &quot;move&quot; over to this one (like myself) and start providing answers, I feel discouraged from using the site as I do not value citations the way that other users on this site do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that encouraging citations that are to &lt;em&gt;ONLY&lt;/em&gt; used for backing up your answer like it is an argument can discourage users from using the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion in stackexchange's meta was to only allow encouragements of citations that &lt;em&gt;BOTH&lt;/em&gt; encourage backing up your answer as an argument, and providing a place where to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;learn more&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on the subject and encouraging users to go to this place (I don't think that this site values encouraging users to &lt;em&gt;learn more&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user189910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T19:22:26.710" Title="Potential Users and Encouraging Citations" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-09-26T03:03:29.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with both sides of this. I think that backtics should be displayed as italics, however, I think leaving the option for users to use additional formatting should be left open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a way to do this is to leave the normal html elements to their normal display&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so that &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags still display the way they are expected to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user gets confused, we should provide an article mentioning the &quot;remapping&quot; of the backtic while mentioning that normal html elements behave the same way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user189910" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T03:03:29.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9500" CreationDate="2016-09-26T07:57:01.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did you come to the conclusion that ELU doesn't value links that provide further information? I regularly use links to blogs that explore topics in more depth and I never got any bad feedback about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the answer provides a basic level of answering the question further links are always welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T07:57:01.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9500" CreationDate="2016-09-26T18:59:47.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Citations or links aren't required here per se, any more than they are on any other StackExchange site. On site such as ours, however, citations and links are of far greater value and importance than on StackOverflow or other technology stacks in helping the end user evaluate the usefulness of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no Fiddle for English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers on StackExchange are supposed to be based on their &lt;em&gt;helpfulness&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. usefulness). When the question is about development, system administration, software usage, or other technology tasks, the overriding factor in every case will be the answer to the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the original posters can look at the answers provided, plug the solutions into their… solutions… and get nearly immediate results. The package will compile, or install, or execute when it wasn't before. The error message or condition will go away. The animation will play in Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold. Sometimes, a one-line answer that fixes a typo is all you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no JSFiddle for English usage— nor for many of the other subject areas StackExchange now covers. There's no tool where you can copy and paste in the solution to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/102822/&quot;&gt;Could I fake death to stop being Force-choked?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to see if it &quot;works.&quot; There's no mathematical model that demonstrates &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5786&quot;&gt;How to avoid procrastination during the research phase of my PhD?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; There's no test case that confirms &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/7275&quot;&gt;Is it permissible to erase the name of G-d from an E-reader?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the end user is the one seeking the knowledge from experts, how then can he or she know what the &quot;right&quot; answer will be? If the answerer's personal authority is not personally established— and aside from the odd Barrie England or John Lawler, it rarely is— the answerer must in turn make some appeal to authority (&quot;here's a paper in a linguistics journal&quot;) or to popularity (&quot;here's BNC frequency chart and some Amazon previews from books showing that this phrasing is used&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[We all understand that appeals to authority or popularity are logical fallacies, but almost no questions on EL&amp;amp;U, or anywhere on SE, are formulated as requests for &lt;em&gt;logical proofs&lt;/em&gt;, so that objection is not a final one. Prove that Caligula succeeded Tiberius. &quot;Because Tacitus said so&quot; is usually good enough.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;softer&quot; the stack, the more that outside citations will substantially improve an answer; the &quot;harder&quot; the stack, the more that the solution is self-evident. A stack like History.SE requires a great deal of outside references to make an answer useful. A stack like SuperUser requires very little, and references to secondary sources in particular will clutter more than elucidate. EL&amp;amp;U lies somewhere in the middle. Note that by using the terms &quot;hard&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; I am not suggesting that the &quot;soft&quot; stacks are less rigorous. Skeptics.SE is extremely strict about requiring outside citations and avoiding original research and personal opinions, and no one would question their rigor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misunderstanding abounds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions about usage can be answered by any reasonably competent speaker. Many of my answers come down to me &quot;knowing&quot; the answer as a native speaker, then hunting for a justification. But establishing one's competence in a written forum is fraught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, unlike the finer points of, say, Sharepoint or Solaris, many people hold themselves to be excellent at English, whether as a mother tongue or as a secondary language, so there is a much larger pool of random answerers lurking the site. And we have also absorbed innumerable &quot;rules&quot; which are either oversimplifications (e.g. &quot;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is nominative and &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; is objective&quot;) or whole cloth inventions (e.g. &quot;starting a sentence with &lt;em&gt;hopefully&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical&quot;), but which have been parroted textbook to textbook, teacher to teacher, rendering those of us with &quot;excellent&quot; educations overconfident in our knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it's far better if someone can identify the origin of their knowledge so that the questioner may evaluate it and its applicability or currency to their situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Correctness&quot; is not the same as &quot;helpfulness&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, even if the answer is correct and a cited rule is sound, the answer may still not be &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;How do I get to Carnegie Hall?&quot; &quot;Practice&quot; is correct, but not helpful. &quot;The R Train&quot; is correct, and somewhat helpful, but not complete. &quot;The easiest way is the N/Q/R Train to 57th Street, but there are even more options on their website at www.example.net&quot; is correct, and helpful, and complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every external link is created equal, of course. I may prefer to link to the official MTA page rather than a commercial site about visiting Carnegie Hall. The point is that the addition of a good reference almost certainly makes an answer more helpful, because it comes from another source that can help answer other questions, or goes into thorough detail that is difficult to achieve in the space of a StackExchange answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our standards for references and examples are extremely loose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one is going to mistake any part of SE for a scholarly enterprise. We're hardly demanding that quotations come from peer-reviewed academic journals and papers authored by prize-winning tenured professors at tier one universities. An online dictionary or a language blog may be sufficient. I take many examples from freely available newspapers and magazines. We even widely tolerate Wikipedia and Wiktionary links, even though I would never tolerate them in my own organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The failure to find a justification for an answer is thus not usually a problem of paywalls, firewalls Great and otherwise, or other technical, financial, or legal hurdles. In my view, it reflects instead an unwillingness of the answerer to invest any effort into the answer. It isn't against the rules; it shouldn't get you banned. But it shouldn't exactly be encouraged or rewarded, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.463" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T19:22:26.710" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9491" CreationDate="2016-09-26T20:50:41.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question has been up-voted enough, vindicating the proposed deletion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microsoft-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microsoft-word&lt;/a&gt;, the process of &lt;strong&gt;burnination begins&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zm85C.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The following questions have been tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microsoft-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microsoft-word&lt;/a&gt; and so need to be re-tagged, migrated or deleted&lt;/strong&gt; (only if it is really necessary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List-Update by Helmar, we are down to two stubs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350167/&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350167/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104207/&quot;&gt;Software to change American punctuation to British&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phew! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do be aware that many of these questions are very old, of poor quality and some have been closed, put on-hold or migrated. If this becomes a problem, comment or add an answer and as a community we can decide the best course of attack.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Try not to change too many questions at any one time as that leads to a pollution of the &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; feed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have completed a question pleas write a short response (e.g. &quot;re-tagged&quot;) and then put the question in a 'spoiler tag' so that it is easier to see which questions still need editing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't yet have &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; editing-rights, I shan't do this myself and I am very grateful to those who help with this endeavour; a cleaner EL&amp;amp;U is a better EL&amp;amp;U!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T21:18:51.517" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T21:18:51.517" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-09-26T23:17:32.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;IDEA #1&lt;/em&gt;: Remap &amp;quot;`&amp;quot; and preserve &amp;quot;&amp;lt; code &amp;gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another Solution, is to add a new markdown character. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9501/189910&quot;&gt;I responded&lt;/a&gt;, I agree that backtics should be &amp;quot;remapped&amp;quot; and the way HTML elements should be displayed should be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why &lt;em&gt;IDEA #1&lt;/em&gt; is bad:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9499/189910&quot;&gt;Hot Links brought up an issue&lt;/a&gt;: Using HTML is awkward, and not as convenient as regular markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3360/189910&quot;&gt;mentioned&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8816/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;), &amp;quot;remapping&amp;quot; is not good for new users coming from other SE sites, because we would be the one SE site against a million not using backtics the traditional way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;IDEA #2&lt;/em&gt;: Remap &amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;`&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot; and introduce double/triple backtics (&amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;``&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;```&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, an alternative, is to still &amp;quot;remap&amp;quot; the backtics, but add a new markdown charater/character sequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could use the triple backtic (&lt;code&gt;```&lt;/code&gt;) to represent code formatting, sort of like github does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even shorten it to a double backtic (&lt;code&gt;``&lt;/code&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why &lt;em&gt;IDEA #2&lt;/em&gt; is OK-ish:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would also give us a &amp;quot;meet-in-the-middle&amp;quot; between those who think it should not be &amp;quot;remapped&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3360/189910&quot;&gt;for good reason&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it would be helpful to new users if we mentioned in the side bar that backtics are &amp;quot;remapped&amp;quot; on this site, and new &amp;quot;forms&amp;quot; of the backtic have been introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still not perfect, because new users from other SE sites could still often get confused&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;IDEA #3&lt;/em&gt;: Do not remap &amp;quot;`&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead add an article on the side bar or provide a notification asking users to be wary of their usage of &amp;quot;`&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why &lt;em&gt;IDEA #3&lt;/em&gt; is bad:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users will still use backtics badly on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Footnote:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem this site has with backtics (just to clarify), is that there is a proper and an improper way to use them on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the problem comes down to what is more important and less of a risk in this community? (Favors attracting new users) Confusing new users from other SE sites? (Favors turning new users into experienced users) or encouraging a &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; usage of backtics in this community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Additional Important Footnote:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the big problem with deciding what to do with this is none of the solutions are perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they could be seen as good solutions for &lt;em&gt;certain time periods&lt;/em&gt; in the community's development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community was just starting to begin to develop, perhaps &lt;em&gt;idea #3&lt;/em&gt; is the most appropriate; if the community is no longer at the beginning, but still developing, perhaps &lt;em&gt;idea #2&lt;/em&gt; is the most appropriate; if the community was extremely large, and we had a large amount and portion of well-seasoned ELU users, perhaps &lt;em&gt;idea #1&lt;/em&gt; is the most appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user189910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T23:58:12.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9525" CreationDate="2016-09-27T17:21:59.770" Score="11" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;While poking about removing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microsoft-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microsoft-word&lt;/a&gt; tag from a few questions, I came across a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling-checker&lt;/a&gt;.  This seemed to me to be a meta-tag of no more value than the ms-word one, so I removed it.  A quick tag search reveals that there are 60 questions with this tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the guidelines on when to ask about tag burnination, and I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; this one fits the bill:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a meta-tag (there are many spell-checkers available (although MS Word's is the most-asked-about spell-checker here) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is clearly an off-topic tag (asking about spell-checking software rather than a valid ELU topic) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it does not add any useful information  (Reviewing the list of tagged questions shows one question regarding the effect of computers on spelling (now closed) and 59 questions about (approximately) &quot;why does the spell-checker say this is misspelled?&quot;, which is really a question about spelling, which 17 of the questions are also tagged with)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we burninate this tag?  Alternatively, should we make it a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;, just like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling&lt;/a&gt; is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:50:22.973" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T13:50:22.973" Title="Should we burninate the [spelling-checker] tag? (0 posts left tagged)" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9507" CreationDate="2016-09-27T17:34:36.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly agree, full explanation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9495/184706&quot;&gt;my answer of the Word question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the further steps, I certainly advocate for &lt;em&gt;burnination&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synonym-mapping might not help, because modern spell checkers check more than just orthography. When it still had options in the 2013 version (burn in hell for deleting those, MS) there were about fifteen options you could check for the program to look for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T17:34:36.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9511" CreationDate="2016-09-28T12:47:20.510" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anything being done to address user's lost avatars? Avatars are a bit like signatures. I don't want a new pink avatar thanks very much; I want the original green one I had for my first two years on the site. What's being done about this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T21:45:11.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T21:45:11.680" Title="Users' Lost Avatars" Tags="|bug|status-reproduced|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9509" CreationDate="2016-09-28T13:00:22.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/283643/why-is-my-profile-image-different&quot;&gt;An MSE question from 20 August&lt;/a&gt; identified this as a problem with Gravatar. It's not a Stack Exchange problem: their provider is experiencing difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing stopping you generating your own Gravatar-like image &amp;mdash; or even something completely different like mine &amp;mdash; and uploading it as a custom avatar. That avoids Gravatar and their difficulties altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure how you can recover your green icon in order to use it in your profile. You may be able to find it if you search for your posts in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T13:00:22.110" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9509" CreationDate="2016-09-28T15:24:38.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At @Araucaria's request I'll repost an answer that I originally wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/284078/158468&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I get my other icon back or will I be stuck with this new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maybe.&lt;/strong&gt; If you've been using any Stack Exchange site long enough that you've grown attached to your identicon, there's a good chance that it's cached or archived somewhere even if you don't have it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tool that worked best for me was Internet Archive's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;. I used it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Navigate to your profile page on your favorite Stack Exchange site. This is the page with the large version of your identicon (even though it's the wrong one). Copy the URL for your profile page. The URL will be of the form: http://&lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt;.com/users/&lt;em&gt;youruserid&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;yourusername&lt;/em&gt;?tab=profile&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Paste that URL into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt; and cross your fingers that there's a copy. You'll likely get a calendar showing the various dates on which your profile page has been archived. Click one of the dates and see if your old identicon is there. If yes, download the image.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go back to your profile page (the current one) on your favorite Stack Exchange site. Click the identicon to edit it, and upload the image that you just saved. Click the Save button at the bottom of the page when you're done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7225" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T15:24:38.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2016-09-28T20:04:35.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this still active? I have no such lines. Sometimes I actually do miss the links in the color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0gtD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0gtD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T20:04:35.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-28T20:18:26.283" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second question should have a different color since I favorited 'tags'. While the RGB values I picked from the picture try to convince me of a difference between the background of the second question I can honestly not see it (I am a bit red-green color blind). Can we get something that looks actually a bit different for the 5% with a color deficiency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z7UM0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z7UM0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-10-20T19:21:26.507" LastActivityDate="2023-10-20T19:21:37.697" Title="Color Scheme on Meta" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|design|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9521" CreationDate="2016-09-28T23:29:44.207" Score="3" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a matter of longstanding practice, and supported by W3C's draft HTML5 specs, along with my own sense of 'the rightness of things', I place citations/attributions &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; of blockquotes. Blockquotes, by my view, contain only HTML markup and quoted material. So, if I'm quoting (at length) material from another source, by convention I place the quoted material in the blockquote and the attribution/citation outside the blockquote. In Markdown, this looks like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; Lengthy quote.&#xA;&#xA;(source of lengthy quote)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant verbiage from W3C is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; element represents a section that is quoted from another source.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Attribution for the quotation, if any, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;must be placed outside the blockquote element&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here a &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; element is used ... to clearly relate a quote to its &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;attribution (which is not part of the quote and therefore doesn't belong inside the &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; itself)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/the-blockquote-element.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;W3C HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML, Editor's Draft 22 August 2012&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;4.5.4 The blockquote element&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Bold emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is an example of my style choice. In my view, placing the citation/attribution inside the blockquote (other than in a &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt; attribute or similar markup, as discussed below) not only looks wrong, it violates the spirit and the letter of HTML5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HTML5 recommendation from 2014 differs slightly from the &lt;em&gt;Editor's Draft&lt;/em&gt;, but the recommendation is clearly geared toward (a) future browser implementations, rather than present-day implementations, and (b) a version of Markdown that implements the recommendation and is appropriately translated for rendering by common browsers. That is, the 2014 recommendation, as opposed to the draft quoted above, assumes the implementation of appropriate rendering for elements not currently implemented either by Markdown or by common browsers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; element represents content that is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;quoted from another source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, optionally with a citation which must be within a &lt;em&gt;footer&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt; element, and optionally with in-line changes such as annotations and abbreviations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Content inside a &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; other than citations and in-line changes &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;must be quoted from another source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, whose address, if it has one, may be cited in the &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt; attribute.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Attribution for the quotation, may be be placed inside the &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; element, but must be within a &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt; element for in-text attributions or within a &lt;em&gt;footer&lt;/em&gt; element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;W3C HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML, &#xA;W3C Recommendation 28 October 2014&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;4.4.4 The &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; element&quot;. Bold emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is, have I overlooked an ELU convention for blockquotes and blockquote attributions (that is, a convention that both the blockquote and its attribution should be put inside Markdown that will be translated into one &lt;em&gt;blockquote&lt;/em&gt; element) &lt;em&gt;supported by sufficient reasoning to overcome my objections (as suggested by the foregoing)&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 'question' on Meta SE also broached this topic, so I added an 'answer' synthesizing this 'question' and the accepted 'answer'. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263365/allow-sourcing-in-blockquote-markdown&quot;&gt;Allow sourcing in blockquote markdown&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T04:01:53.710" Title="Citation/attribution for quote in blockquote on ELU" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9514" CreationDate="2016-09-29T00:23:25.580" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to put it outside, but recently I think I've been putting it inside  by analogy with typographical block quotes. (It's also more compact.) Either way seems fine to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think official recommendations really matter much. Your own quotes seem to show that they are varied. Also, it's not like people always use other elements of markup in officially prescribed ways (&amp;#60;sub&gt; and &amp;#60;sup&gt; are  commonly misused for footnotes, &amp;#60;em&gt; is commonly misused for presentational, non-emphatic italics, &amp;#60;code&gt; is commonly misused for monospaced or specially formatted text that is not computer code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T00:30:50.370" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:30:50.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-29T00:33:06.793" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very often we get questions of the form &quot;What does XYZ mean?&quot;, without any context to allow us to understand how &quot;XYZ&quot; is being used.  (Eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350826/meaning-of-sanely-insane&quot;&gt;Meaning of “Sanely Insane”?&lt;/a&gt;.)  One can close these as &quot;unclear&quot;, but that itself is unclear in that it fails to refer to the lack of context.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should one just do &quot;Other&quot; -- &quot;Lacks context&quot;, or should there instead be a &quot;proper&quot; closing code (with some documentation behind it)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T09:16:27.667" Title="Should there be a closing code for &quot;lacks context&quot;?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-29T07:45:36.973" Score="9" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1453/184706&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; still active?&#xA;According to that thread there are supposed to be fine dotted lines beneath links. I have no such lines. Sometimes I actually do miss the links in the color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Links as they are supposed to be:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YgDuI.png&quot; alt=&quot;English link color&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Links as they are (at least on my devices):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0gtD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0gtD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T07:45:36.973" Title="Link style on the main site" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9516" CreationDate="2016-09-29T08:29:45.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it's my understanding that the overall number of close reasons is limited and the number of custom one's is three (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184637/how-do-moderators-make-changes-to-the-site-specific-closed-question-reasons/185097#185097&quot;&gt;Cf. Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;), we can't add one. Currently we have &lt;em&gt;general references, missing example sentence,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;proofreading&lt;/em&gt; in the custom slots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to enhance the &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; reason with another sentence that concerns lacking context. However,  I do not know if that's the kind of request that can or will be granted by the powers that be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a quick look at what the SEDE tells us about our (non-deleted) close reasons since the close reasons were revamped. Unfortunately, the custom reasons are clumped together. I don't know if the 10K or mod-tools reveal more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;101 : 4966 (Duplicate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;102 : 6766 (Off-Topic: Custom Site Reasons)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;103 : 1454 (Unclear)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;104 : 403 (Too Broad)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;105 : 1311 (Primarily Opinion Based)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T08:29:45.770" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9514" CreationDate="2016-09-29T08:42:32.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently put the source inside the block quote. Especially if it's just an abbreviation or the word &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;link.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perfect SWR answer VERB&lt;/em&gt; word is exactly used as the OP asked for [ - ODO]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lengthy text that is cited from somewhere, like a newspaper for example. It has to go on for at least a few lines and maybe it has even paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paragraph two continues from the same source. [ - Source]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the squared brackets which include a single link make it pretty clear what's going on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would not do this if I listed the complete name of the source like in the first example of the question. I think that is better put below the block quote. The single link however fits nicely and more compactly inside the element. It seems like wasting valuable screen estate otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T08:42:32.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9491" CreationDate="2016-09-29T08:51:44.610" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might be too late, but I think the tag has merit. Microsoft Word's spelling and &quot;grammar&quot; checker is a prominent, distinct, and idiosyncratic view on the English language. If we can have tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style-manuals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style-manuals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style-manuals&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gre&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gre&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gre&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mla&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mla&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mla&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ielts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ielts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ielts&lt;/a&gt; and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pirate-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pirate-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pirate-english&lt;/a&gt; then we can have a tag for questions about complying with the peculiarities of the Microsoft Word dialect of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would of course require that the tag be limited to the spelling/grammar checker, and other questions be detagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T08:51:44.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9514" CreationDate="2016-09-29T10:15:09.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise of the question appears to be based on the structure of HTML rather than the legibility and ease of understanding of what is actually seen on the screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there may be some benefit in adhering to HTML standards, it does require that ability to be implemented in Markdown. The Markdown which Stack Exchange uses doesn't allow &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;blockquote&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to include a &lt;code&gt;cite&lt;/code&gt; attribute, and it doesn't support the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element. In fact, it doesn't look like the current version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#blockquote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Markdown's blockquote&lt;/a&gt; includes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, structuring information according to the HTML standards is impossible, although adding support for &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; would presumably be possible, perhaps with a &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;?&lt;/code&gt; marker (as in &quot;Where does that come from?&quot;) It could then be styled suitably. The W3C even demonstrates placing &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;within&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;blockquote&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/html/elements/blockquote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;W3C &amp;lt;blockquote&amp;gt;&lt;/a&gt;], so it would be possible for something like the following to be rendered correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis vitae neque eu metus &#xA;&amp;gt; finibus malesuada nec rhoncus libero. Duis leo lectus, gravida non rutrum at, blandit&#xA;&amp;gt; at metus. Vivamus et suscipit lectus. Sed porttitor dui sed orci sagittis molestie.&#xA;&amp;gt; Praesent semper egestas elit eget euismod. Aliquam id ante sed libero tempor sodales&#xA;&amp;gt; in et urna.&#xA;&amp;gt;? [Lorem ipsum text](http://www.lipsum.com/)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;blockquote&amp;gt; &#xA;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis vitae neque eu metus &#xA;finibus malesuada nec rhoncus libero. Duis leo lectus, gravida non rutrum at, blandit&#xA;at metus. Vivamus et suscipit lectus. Sed porttitor dui sed orci sagittis molestie.&#xA;Praesent semper egestas elit eget euismod. Aliquam id ante sed libero tempor sodales&#xA;in et urna.&#xA;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lipsum.com/&amp;gt;Lorem ipsum text&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/cite&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/blockquote&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With appropriate styling, that could be rendered as in this simulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis vitae neque eu metus &#xA;      finibus malesuada nec rhoncus libero. Duis leo lectus, gravida non rutrum at, blandit&#xA;      at metus. Vivamus et suscipit lectus. Sed porttitor dui sed orci sagittis molestie.&#xA;      Praesent semper egestas elit eget euismod. Aliquam id ante sed libero tempor sodales&#xA;      in et urna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lipsum.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lorem ipsum text&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since that's not possible, a pragmatic approach to &lt;strong&gt;what is seen on screen&lt;/strong&gt; is reasonable to adopt. It makes sense to indicate clearly where a quotation may be found, and to &lt;strong&gt;separate this reference from the commentary text&lt;/strong&gt; which the quotation illustrates. Since separate citations are not supported, the best way of indicating that a citation is not commentary text is to include it in the quote block. By the same token, it's necessary to ensure that there is visual separation between the actual quoted text and its source reference, as in my simulation above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that screen-reading software will use the HTML code to determine how text should be classified (for example, a quote may be spoken in a different voice, or the citation may be prefixed by the spoken words &quot;taken from&quot;). But, I contend, even with these quirks it would be better to include the citation inside the quote in order that the citation is audibly different to the commentary text surrounding the quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I believe the citation should be included within the blockquote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T10:15:09.927" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9513" CreationDate="2016-09-29T15:56:18.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The background color of page elements marked &lt;code&gt;tagged-interesting&lt;/code&gt; should be changed from the color &lt;code&gt;#fafafb&lt;/code&gt;. That color is basically indistinguishable from the default background. It should be darkened. The color &lt;code&gt;#eff0f1&lt;/code&gt;, which is already in the scheme for code blocks and blockquotes, would do fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have flagged this as a bug. The site design clearly intends questions marked &lt;code&gt;tagged-interesting&lt;/code&gt; to have a contrasting color. This is a problem in implementation, i.e., a bug. Probably easily squashed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T17:33:23.683" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T17:33:23.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9514" CreationDate="2016-09-29T17:10:57.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is too much to expect contributors to know that the &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; markdown is rendered into a &lt;code&gt;blockquote&lt;/code&gt; element, much less to understand that the standard semantics of that element anticipate that citations would only appear within it as span-level &lt;code&gt;cite&lt;/code&gt; elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know of a ELU convention that restricts where citations should appear. We offer some suggestions on style, but little or nothing binding. If we look to accepted style guides such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;MLA Formatting and Style Guide&quot;&gt;MLA&lt;/a&gt;, in-line citations are acceptable in block quotations. It would be unreasonable to forbid them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see several ways forward for you personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could do as you suggest in your question, pull citations out of block quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Span-level HTML tags – e.g. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;del&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; – can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Markdown: Syntax&quot;&gt;(Markdown: Syntax)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could use the &lt;code&gt;cite&lt;/code&gt; element in block quotations, anticipating that it might eventually be supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Span-level HTML tags – e.g. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;del&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; – can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header. &lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Markdown: Syntax&quot;&gt;(Markdown: Syntax)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Instead of in-line citations, you could create notes with title text (a.k.a. hovertext or tooltips). This is what I often do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Span-level HTML tags – e.g. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cite&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;del&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; – can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header.&lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Markdown: Syntax&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T17:10:57.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2016-09-30T13:50:07.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, this isn't turned on for meta as new tags are far more likely to be needed here (in conjunction with the required tags) as things evolve on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, it's now enabled on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3995" LastEditorUserId="3995" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T14:23:32.617" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T14:23:32.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9507" CreationDate="2016-09-30T18:38:26.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm testing a new approach to edit tracking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you edit the tag out of questions just change the number. The list of questions we had in other posts seems not very helpful. Don't forget to generally tag the question correctly if you are editing. Likely candidates for these questions seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we started the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling-checker&lt;/a&gt; was attached to 55 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we are down to: &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt;. Woo hoo!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All done, now all it takes is for a mod to remove the tag itself&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T12:17:17.150" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T12:17:17.150" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-30T18:38:26.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9409" CreationDate="2016-09-30T22:52:19.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've sent a message to a CM, requesting a blacklisting. – Matt E. Эллен♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done. Like a hypothetical &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt; seems intrinsic to every question on the site. – Jon Ericson♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T22:52:19.977" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-30T22:52:19.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-01T22:43:46.217" Score="8" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I gain reputation, I only have one, and to make more you need to vote on people's answers, but I only have 1 reputation and I need 15 to do so, and to answer some ones question, but you need 50 reputation?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user198924" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T10:49:03.450" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:16:51.290" Title="How do I gain reputation so I can participate more?" Tags="|discussion|questions|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9527" CreationDate="2016-10-02T21:45:31.967" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not quite how reputation works. Voting for other people's answers (and questions) gives those people reputation (except on meta). Also, nobody gets reputation from comments, even when they are upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make this more clear, I've quoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;&quot;What's Reputation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, with some minor changes for clarification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your reputation is increased when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[your] question is voted up: +10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[your] answer is voted up: +10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[your] answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[your] suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[someone else's] bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T22:16:51.290" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:16:51.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9530" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-10-03T15:20:50.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T15:20:50.347" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T15:20:50.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9531" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-10-03T15:20:50.347" Score="0" Body="Questions about how to promote English Language &amp; Usage SE, in order to attract more users. " OwnerUserId="163363" LastEditorUserId="163363" LastEditDate="2016-10-04T22:44:43.673" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T22:44:43.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9535" CreationDate="2016-10-05T18:49:10.137" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a comment on this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/351692/what-is-a-word-for-someone-who-tries-to-comfort-their-mistakes-by-trying-to-reas&quot;&gt;What is a word for someone who tries to comfort their mistakes by trying to reason with him or herself?&lt;/a&gt;, and I think someone even upvoted the comment, but my comment disappeared soon after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment was &quot;The person is rationalizing&quot; -- or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I could have developed the comment into an answer had I not had a life apart from ELU, but leaving an embryonic answer as a comment has never been a deletion-worthy offense before.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have the standards changed, post-mod-election, or is there is glitch in the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing reportedly happened to a very early comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350816/rosa-parks-is-a-symbol-for-the-civil-rights-movement/350820#350820&quot;&gt;Rosa Parks is a [symbol?] for the civil rights movement?&lt;/a&gt;.  The user (whose name I have forgotten) was upset and there was some discussion about the deletion; the entire discussion was eventually (and understandably) deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:41:28.107" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:41:28.107" Title="Curious, but complaining only a little: Why was my comment deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9534" CreationDate="2016-10-05T19:52:26.290" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like someone that has the ability to see the reasoning for this answer deletion to try to explain why it was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/351853/105360&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this is often an emotionally charged topic, and I suspect that the person deleting my answer did so based on emotions rather than looking at the content of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the delete can not be justified other than just not liking my answer, how can I get an undelete started?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was I not notified?&#xA; Edit: SE doesn't currently work like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was I not given a reason?  Edit: SE doesn't currently work like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;According to chat, the answer did turn out to be deleted out of emotion and disregard of the facts.  A pity there's not yet any recourse for misusing privileges on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user105360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T05:53:03.990" Title="Please Justify This Deletion" Tags="|support|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9533" CreationDate="2016-10-05T20:00:15.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, you aren't notified or given a reason if your answer is deleted. You definitely should not expect this—that's just not how deletion works on Stack Exchange. (Nobody else has the ability to see the reason for deletion either.) If you want someone to tell you the reason, you'll need to actively seek that out, as you did by making this post on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32756928#32756928&quot;&gt;Matt E. has specified in chat&lt;/a&gt; that the answer was deleted for offensive content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;she is not technically still their stepfather. that is offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also Kit Z. Fox's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My initial guess for the reasons was the following)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess your answer was deleted mainly because it is opinion-based and doesn't provide any sources. This is a matter of format, not content. That said, I see there is another answer without sources that was not deleted, so there may be some evaluation of the content involved as well—your answer had already gotten two downvotes, showing some level of community disagreement with you, while the unsourced answer that remains has one upvote. In other words, unsourced answers that don't appear to be accurate are not tolerated as much as unsourced answers that do appear to be accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh--another thing I just noticed was that you consistently referred to Caitlin Jenner using &quot;he&quot; and corresponding pronouns; many people find that offensive. This by itself wouldn't constitute a reason to delete your answer, since it could easily be changed by editing, but it might be another reason the answer wasn't received well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T15:29:35.540" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T15:29:35.540" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9532" CreationDate="2016-10-05T22:24:04.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;leaving an embryonic answer as a comment has never been a deletion-worthy offense before&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be using the word “offense” tongue-in-cheek, but just in case you are serious, I want to be clear that comment deletion does not mean there was an offense, and posting an embryonic answer as a comment is not a problem. Love that term “embryonic answer”, by the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, comments are deleted because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comments are temporary “Post-It” notes&lt;/a&gt;—they are ephemeral. There’s no organized cleanup effort, but if a post ends up in a moderator queue for any reason, the responding moderator often tidies up that post’s comments. I did not delete your comment, but I believe it is what happened in your case. This is why it’s best to assume comments are short lived, even though you might have seen many comments that stuck around for years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can give an embryonic answer much more sticking power by posting it as a partial answer instead of a comment. If you want to post a partial answer without taking credit or affecting your reputation, you can mark it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt;. This is also a great thing to do with other peoples’ good embryonic answers, when you happen on them in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T22:24:04.257" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9540" CreationDate="2016-10-05T22:34:40.360" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/351902/160195&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; as very low quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag was rejected, with the notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I flagged this as VLQ is because.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It cites no sources or references.&#xA;Nor does it cite any personal knowledge or experience. (Having lived in Britain and heard the phrase, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be wrong. (This alone may not warrant VLQ deletion, but coupled with the lack of sources, I figured it might.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this answer deletion-worthy? I'm thinking it might be, due to the total lack of sources and references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it take lower quality than this to warrant deletion? And is this the reason my flag was rejected? Why was my flag rejected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160195" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T19:01:08.867" Title="Why was my VLQ flag rejected?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|flag-reviews|deleting-posts|flags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-06T00:28:05.210" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/351988/how-can-i-express-logical-and-unambiguously-but-simply&quot;&gt;How can I express logical AND unambiguously but simply?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking a question here about the better use of English, viz how to rephrase something so it passes the &amp;quot;Plain and Simple English&amp;quot; test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That appears to fall squarely within the remit of the group, as expressed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;o Word choice and usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199556" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T23:43:34.313" Title="Why is this on hold?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9537" CreationDate="2016-10-06T10:37:32.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was put on hold by five members of the community voting for the custom close reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a well-studied problem in user interface design, and can be better answered elsewhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit you made following its hold placed the question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/reopen&quot;&gt;&quot;re-open&quot; queue&lt;/a&gt; where members who have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;re-open vote privilege&lt;/a&gt; can consider whether the edit is sufficient to address the close reason. Five re-open votes will re-open a question, although while it's in this queue, three &quot;Leave closed&quot; votes are sufficient to remove the question from the queue. Your question received three &quot;Leave closed&quot; votes and no &quot;re-open&quot; votes, although it's still possible to get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question received an answer, and your commented query was also answered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other comments on the question indicated that &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; here wasn't actually a &quot;Logical AND&quot; at all, or even if it was it's still the normal use of the word. It can only be construed in one way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because of that, how &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; is presented is a user-interface question. You even reinforced this line of reasoning by including a screenshot of your user interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your edit didn't address the closure reason, which stated it was a well-studied problem in user interface design. Your edit ignored this completely, when it should have made the question explicitly fall into the ELU remit (or &quot;even more explicitly&quot;, depending on your point of view).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point is probably why the review result was a 3&amp;ndash;0 defeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that the question wasn't simply migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ux.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;User Experience&lt;/a&gt; is that the question was first &lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/1737/intuitive-interface-for-composing-boolean-logic&quot;&gt;asked there&lt;/a&gt; in 2010 and already has many duplicates listed in the &quot;Linked&quot; sidebar. There would be no real point in adding another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you disagree that your use of &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; here is not the normal use of &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; to join two attributes, there really is no other word to do that. So presentation of the idea to make that understandable falls into the User Interface camp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, had you improved the question by including examples justifying the opening assertion that &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; are frequently confused, it may have helped; or it might even have strengthened the case that it is ultimately a user interface question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T10:37:32.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9533" CreationDate="2016-10-06T15:14:24.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are sensitive to transgender issues and your answer was ill-informed. I understand that you were referring to a 'genetic' viewpoint of parentage, but your answer neither made this clear nor respected the human right of choosing gender identity. It was offensive, so it was deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T15:14:24.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2016-10-06T19:01:08.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Low quality is not the same thing as wrong, incomplete, or unreliable. An answer that is readable and apparently addresses the question passes the quality test.&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/111108/what-kind-of-answer-should-be-flagged-as-very-low-quality-but-not-flagged-as/111112#111112&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; When an answer: (i) fails the test; (ii) is impossible to fix or would take an unreasonable amount of effort to fix; and (iii) does not fall into another low quality category (spam, abusive, or not an answer), then it is appropriate to raise the Very Low Quality flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that a Very Low Quality flag is a flag for deletion. But a wrong or unreliable answer is still valuable to readers because it attracts downvotes. A downvoted answer warns a reader “don’t go this way”. A deleted answer does not have the opportunity to warn readers of anything. Also, moderators have been told we are not arbitrators of whether an answer is wrong. That decision is left to the whole community by way of up- and downvotes. Deletion is for answers on which a downvote would be wasted: answers that are &lt;em&gt;not even wrong&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93595/is-the-very-low-quality-flag-too-ambiguous/93606#comment308634_93606&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have been told to be sure the reviewer’s chosen flag strictly applies to the post. “The system has to be able to trust the accuracy of quality related flags”.&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160754/why-are-the-moderators-being-so-strict-with-quality-related-flags-recently&quot;&gt;³&lt;/a&gt; There are actions taken behind the scenes which are different for different flags. These depend on accurate flags. Past flags are also used to train reviewers through review audits (not currently active on our site, but has been in the past and probably will be again). The review audit system also depends on accurate past flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if the answer is right or wrong, reliable or unreliable, vote it up or down. Otherwise, if unsalvageable, flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the answer in question, it is readable, articulate, and addresses the question. So the appropriate action would be a vote up or down, not a flag or delete vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging&quot;&gt;flagging FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T19:01:08.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-07T11:53:00.780" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consult the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/351821&quot;&gt;Is there a single word for people who inhabit rural areas?&lt;/a&gt;  Scroll down to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/352054&quot;&gt;an answer provided by me&lt;/a&gt; (deleted; requires 10k). The comment by @tchrist immediately following complains that my answer had already been given. He's right about that: Even though I scrolled down seeking a similar answer, I missed it. (It wasn't a long answer, and indeed there wasn't much in it by way of typography to catch my eye.) I would have inevitably &#xA;noticed it, and I would have flushed it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except I was not given the opportunity to do so. Someone (I suspect the guy who complained) had in some way contrived to make it impossible for me to do anything at all with my answer, including deleting it. And his complaint was accusatory and quite snotty. What can be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T15:58:47.293" Title="Who is this guy, anyway?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9542" CreationDate="2016-10-07T15:16:11.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That guy&amp;quot; (tchrist) is a moderator (as you can tell from the little diamond thingy, ♦ , after his name) and he deleted your post because it fell afoul of our attribution requirements as noted on our &amp;quot;Referencing&amp;quot; help page, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&lt;/a&gt; (under &amp;quot;Help &amp;gt; Help Center : Answering &amp;gt; How to reference material written by others&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism - posting the work of others with no indication that it is not your own - is frowned on by our community, and may result in your answer being down-voted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from another site or in an answer on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange) make sure you do all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a link to the original page or answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quote only the relevant portion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide the name of the original author&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is additional material on proper attribution form at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/new-attribution-rules&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;New attribution rules&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and its top answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer, though, is that an improperly attributed answer may be subject to immediate deletion regardless of its other redeeming qualities.  I am sorry you ran afoul of this requirement, but there it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the nature of the comment he left, I can only say that reading tone into a text-only comment is fraught with opportunities for insertion of ill will where none was meant.  Yes, it was a bit terse, but I don't believe it was intended to be rude or accusatory; rather it was a (brief) explanation of why he felt deletion was justified (&amp;quot;it's a duplicate and it lacks the attribution we require&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if you feel you were robbed of your agency in determining how to manage your own post.  However, if your response would have been to delete it, that has been taken care of.  If you believe you could have expanded it and added attribution to make it more comprehensive and useful than the other post which also mentioned the same word, you are still free to post a new version of your answer with the enhancements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, just for reference, you can find the complete list of moderators by selecting the &amp;quot;Users&amp;quot; link under the site header, and then choosing the &amp;quot;moderators&amp;quot; tab (all the way to the right)., which will take you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T15:58:47.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7601" CreationDate="2016-10-07T18:53:58.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It got worse, there are now 35 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/explanation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;explanation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should really stop this tag in its tracks now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T18:53:58.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-07T19:26:51.657" Score="6" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a look at the meta discussions that are about burninating, blacklisting/deleting or creating tags. I made a list of them. Why? It's for two purposes. Firstly, to have an overview about our taxonomy efforts besides &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;tag synonyms&lt;/a&gt;. Secondly to track reappearing tags that have been burninated by community consensus before. Since the second is a lot more important those are at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the second more important? It is important because it gives us a reason to put them onto the blacklist if they pop up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are just rhetoric questions so far you say? Yes there are. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What I want and hope this helps to do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is keeping tabs on burninated tags and squashing resurrecting ones in their tracks. If one detects a resurfaced tag the - hopefully few - questions can be edited and the date added to the burninated tag. If there are several dates behind a tag we can request a blacklisting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Burninated but doesn't stay dead&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-games&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1588&quot;&gt;On tag:scrabble, tag:word-games, tag:games&lt;/a&gt;) - 15 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Decent votes but no burnination completed yet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/obscure-terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;obscure-terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;obscure-terms&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9461&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the tag &amp;quot;obscure-terms&amp;quot; for? Is it necessary?&lt;/a&gt;) - 38 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2099/191178&quot;&gt;Is the &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; tag really useful? Is there a way to vote to delete it?&lt;/a&gt;) - 45 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disputed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/explanation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;explanation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7601&quot;&gt;Can someone explain the [explanation] tag to me?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7871&quot;&gt;What are [expression-requests] tag for?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuance&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1367&quot;&gt;Do we need [tag:nuance]?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/908&quot;&gt;Are typography questions on-topic or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30&quot;&gt;Does the &amp;quot;usage&amp;quot; tag have any value?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4643&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between [usage] and [word-usage]?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4643&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between [usage] and [word-usage]?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;request&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polite-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polite-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polite-request&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9419&quot;&gt;Burninate tags [request] and [polite-request]&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2871&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Literature&amp;quot; a pointless tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9391&quot;&gt;Is the vocabulary tag helpful?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags validated by meta discussion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654&quot;&gt;Against single word requests&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/title&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;title&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;title&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5473&quot;&gt;What manner of “title”?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/209&quot;&gt;Is the tag &amp;quot;writing&amp;quot; necessary?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Blacklisted or burninated by community consensus&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blacklisted tags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system prevents the use of blacklisted tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9409&quot;&gt;Should the &amp;#39;language&amp;#39; tag be deleted?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;english&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/625&quot;&gt;How about getting rid of the [english] tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;words&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1053/blacklist-the-words-tag&quot;&gt;Blacklist the [words] tag&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Word&amp;quot; tag -- useful?&lt;/a&gt;) Synonym of words actually&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Burninated tags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceptability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceptability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceptability&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/320&quot;&gt;Tag for questions about whether a language feature is acceptable/common?&lt;/a&gt;) - Removed again 09.10.2016&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9618&quot;&gt;Let&amp;#39;s get rid of the &amp;quot;correction&amp;quot; tag&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/descriptivism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;descriptivism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;descriptivism&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2402&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of the descriptivism tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/essay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6841&quot;&gt;Should we delete the essay tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genericized-trademarks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genericized-trademarks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genericized-trademarks&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ic&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ian&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;games&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1588&quot;&gt;On tag:scrabble, tag:word-games, tag:games&lt;/a&gt;)  - Removed again 13.10.2016&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar-checker&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/862&quot;&gt;What should be done with the &amp;quot;grammar-checker&amp;quot; tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/harry-potter&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;harry-potter&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;harry-potter&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/management-speak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;management-speak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;management-speak&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microsoft-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microsoft-word&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9491&quot;&gt;What is the point of the Microsoft-Word tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opinion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;opinion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;opinion&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7885&quot;&gt;Burninate [opinion], please&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pedantic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pedantic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pedantic&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2169&quot;&gt;Delete [pedantic] tag&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polisemy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polisemy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polisemy&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/productiveness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;productiveness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;productiveness&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proofreading&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proofreading&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proofreading&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6763&quot;&gt;Proof-reading tag: what to do with it?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2522&quot;&gt;Delete [puzzle] tag&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scrabble&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scrabble&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scrabble&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1588&quot;&gt;On tag:scrabble, tag:word-games, tag:games&lt;/a&gt;) - Removed again 07.10.2016&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sexist-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sexist-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sexist-language&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3930&quot;&gt;Creating the new tag &amp;quot;sexist-language&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;) [Creation discussion at -10 &amp;amp; removed by SE moderator at the time] - Removed again 10.10.2016&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/similarities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;similarities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;similarities&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/similar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;similar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;similar&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7778&quot;&gt;Should we get rid of the tag &amp;quot;similarities&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spelling-checker&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spelling-checker&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spelling-checker&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9507&quot;&gt;Should we burninate the [spelling-checker] tag? (0 posts left tagged)&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tech-speak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tech-speak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tech-speak&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wish&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843&quot;&gt;Delete the [wish], [harry-potter], and other tags?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T03:05:20.833" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T03:05:20.833" Title="List of tags that are blacklisted, burninated or under discussion" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-10T18:00:23.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-07T22:05:15.797" Score="6" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/352081/whats-the-term-for-government-worker/352322#352322&quot;&gt;I have done a question&lt;/a&gt; and the answers where many and highly region dependent, there was different perspectives from countries such as India, USA, UK, Australia on how to say something in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to indicate a question should be region dependent? Should a question address a particular region, or one question per word with all the regions responded in answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know, it's how it's managed for example when a certain concept has different words in different places, countries , around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175723" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T23:35:27.740" Title="Shouldn't some questions be region dependent?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-10-08T18:42:36.840" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am strongly against this for one reason only: it encourages and validates the misuse of backticks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the rest of the network, as it is we already have quite enough trouble training users (particularly those from certain places of the world) not to use backticks for emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last thing we need is a site literally saying &quot;your backticks will be converted to emphasis formatting; go ahead and have fun&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could remove the backtick feature from ELU entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3703" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T18:42:36.840" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9546" CreationDate="2016-10-08T23:34:51.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Mitch already says in the comment, we have tags for different variations of English. They are manifested on ELU in the tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;american-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;american-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indian-english&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/australian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;australian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;australian-english&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not have tags for geographic regions per se. However, I don't see any reason for that. The amount of questions where it is relevant and not matching the English variation in use in that geography is likely minuscule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T23:34:51.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9550" CreationDate="2016-10-09T16:47:02.927" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the 9&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; of October 2016, I noticed that a user with only two reputation with practically no prior question/answer history had completed a review activity on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't intend to accuse the user, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/6663596/tallal-hassan&quot;&gt;@tallal hassan&lt;/a&gt; of any misconduct, quite the opposite, thanks for helping the site, but I was concerned that the usual reputation limit has not applied to them and that this might apply mistakenly to others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone look into this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBr07.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBr07.png&quot; alt=&quot;Suspect Image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T20:43:55.303" Title="Why could a 2 reputation user complete a review exercise?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9549" CreationDate="2016-10-09T16:53:27.293" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/203497&quot;&gt;a review of a suggested edit on their own post&lt;/a&gt;, something the post's owner has a binding vote on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T16:53:27.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9555" CreationDate="2016-10-10T09:18:45.893" Score="4" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350709/did-noted-17th-century-poet-katherine-philips-make-a-grammatical-error&quot;&gt;Did noted 17th century poet Katherine Philips make a grammatical error?&lt;/a&gt; on hold? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is clearly about the history of grammatical development in English, specifically about the grammatical use of 'I', and so the question is clearly within the topical scope of ELU.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even supposing I've overlooked some defensible argument that puts the question outside that scope, nobody who voted to close saw fit to comment on how the question falls outside the scope of ELU, so the OP has no route forward for editing to re-open the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &quot;defensible argument&quot; I don't include arguments that fly in the face of the long-established and still extant primary definition of 'grammar': &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with &lt;strong&gt;the rules for employing these in accordance with established usage&lt;/strong&gt;; ....  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&quot;grammar, n.&quot;. OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80574?rskey=2ACPm8&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80574?rskey=2ACPm8&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false&lt;/a&gt; (accessed October 10, 2016). Emphasis mine.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T19:18:27.423" Title="Why is &quot;Did noted 17th century poet Katherine Philips make a grammatical error?&quot; on hold?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9551" CreationDate="2016-10-10T14:09:27.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I provided the original close reason I'll gladly elaborate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/em&gt; is off-topic per help center. This includes poetry, so the analysis of it is off-topic. Regarding the grammaticality the poet has the poetic license that is mention in the other highly up voted comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clearly stated in the second comment under the question which is the exact close reason I suggested. I didn't comment there, it's the reason I entered when I voted to close. Therefore, there is a clear and specific close reason that can be addressed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question was reworded to pose the question about the historical use of the pronoun like you indicate in your question here, I would be inclined to vote to reopen. In its current form I don't see that question clearly and supposedly neither did the others that voted to close and up voted my comment with the close reason. As long it's just asking, &lt;em&gt;&quot;did a poet make a grammatical error?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I stand by my close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T14:09:27.257" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-10T20:11:29.540" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72713/the-meaning-of-mingle&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; in my review queue for a close vote. It's mostly my fault because I edited a previously burninated tag out and bumped it to the front page by doing so. Naturally, another user came along and voted to close the question for being primarily opinion based. I explicitly do not want to discuss the merit of that vote or the specific question that brought the topic up. It is just to stand in as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically we have questions that don't necessarily meet our ELU standards of today in the treasure trove that is our question archive. Some of those questions have a lot of views. Some of those have a lot of views. We also have the possibility to put a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126631/338924&quot;&gt;historic lock on questions&lt;/a&gt;. We do this for questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1269/is-it-bear-or-bare-with-me&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7823/how-can-users-nominate-old-popular-questions-for-exemption-from-closure-as-bein&quot;&gt;flagging the post for moderator attention&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the close votes are a bit redundant on the bear question and the question should have been flagged for historical locking in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the general requirement for historical locks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a rule of thumb where a moderator on ELU will likely approve the lock? 10k views? 50 votes? Something like that besides what's in the meta.se post? Otherwise it would be &lt;em&gt;safer&lt;/em&gt; to vote for closure and flag in case the moderator declines the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T20:11:29.540" Title="Historical lock instead of closure for high view questions" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4705" CreationDate="2016-10-11T16:48:35.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noting here for the record that &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285478/blogoverflow-text-overflow#comment925838_285478&quot;&gt;Blog Overflow is actually going to be shutting down completely soon&lt;/a&gt;&quot; per animuson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are relatively &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&quot;&gt;few SE blogs&lt;/a&gt;, and even fewer of these remain active. Jack B Nimble's answer to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285599&quot;&gt;Why doesn't anyone use the Stack Exchange community blogs anymore?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; at MSE suggests that WorldBuilding, SciFi, and any other active blogs have moved or will move to third party platforms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:48:35.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9551" CreationDate="2016-10-11T19:18:27.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never seen that question before, but if I had to guess, I'd say its primary flaw is the question rests on the premise that poetry must or should be grammatical. Invalidating Phillips' poetic license, so to speak. Having said that, determining whether Phillips actually employed her poetic license -- i.e. demonstrating whether the usage adhered to the prevailing rules of grammar -- seems a legitimate line of inquiry to me. – Dan Bron&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure that the question would attract a good (and on-topic for this site) answer, but it did. And once that happens, I see no reason to find fault with the question or to try to close it. Like many other participants at this site, I have little or no interest in certain areas of English language and usage; but I think it's important to resist the temptation to presume that questions in those areas are off topic unless someone can prove them to be otherwise. Wouldn't it be more sensible to let participants who are interested in those topics assess the legitimacy of such questions? – Sven Yargs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T19:18:27.423" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-11T19:18:27.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T22:39:44.333" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found some background questions about this, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4580/what-exactly-are-the-specific-concerns-that-are-acceptable-in-the-proofreading&quot;&gt;What exactly are the &amp;quot;specific concerns&amp;quot; that are acceptable in the Proofreading closure?&lt;/a&gt; Phenry's answer, score of 7, says (regarding questions asking if a single sentence is grammatically correct):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the questioner is clearly more interested in getting an answer&#xA;  than in understanding the answer (i.e., if it smells suspiciously like&#xA;  a &quot;do my homework for me&quot; question), I usually vote to close as&#xA;  Proofreading. If the question shows a good faith effort to understand&#xA;  what the problem might be, I usually let it slide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/512/does-this-sort-of-question-qualify-as-proofreading&quot;&gt;Does this sort of question qualify as proofreading?&lt;/a&gt; Cerberus's answer, which has the highest score of 4, says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel that &quot;proofreading&quot; should normally apply only to longer texts,&#xA;  at the very least a paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next-highest scoring answer (at 2) by Eldroß says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would say that the question would need to be expanded to give some context. ... [If the assumption that there is something wrong with the sentence were] wrong, then it would be definitely off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the &amp;quot;proofreading&amp;quot; close reason is for&lt;/a&gt; MrHen's answer here, with a score of 2, says &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fundamental question around closing posts like these is whether&#xA;  answering the question will help anyone other than the person asking&#xA;  the question. [... questions of the form 'Is [example A] better than&#xA;  [example B]?' are not] inherently interesting and, by their nature,&#xA;  limit answers to content that is very unlikely to help anyone other&#xA;  than the asker. Therefore, I think most questions of this type should&#xA;  be closed. [...] it is better to close a bad question with a slightly incorrect close reason than it is to leave it open and encourage more bad questions like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two recent events that made me think about this issue are the closing of the following question by MetaEd (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/352905&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/352905&lt;/a&gt;) as &quot;proofreading&quot; and the recent discussion in chat starting with &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32860004#32860004&quot;&gt;this post by tchrist&lt;/a&gt; about the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should this close reason be used? Does it matter? And if it does, should the description of the close reason (&quot;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified&quot;) be edited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T09:33:06.713" Title="Does the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason cover questions that do identify specific words or phrases?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9556" CreationDate="2016-10-12T09:33:06.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is only a limited amount of space, character-count, whatever, allowed in the custom close reasons, so they tend to be either terse or densely-packed like the current General Reference reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question which asks &quot;Is this grammatical?&quot; is definitely proof-reading.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question which asks &quot;Have I used &lt;em&gt;flonk&lt;/em&gt; correctly in this sentence?&quot; is proof-reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is &quot;source of concern&quot; specified, but it's not specified clearly enough. What do you think the sentence should mean? Presumably you have looked up &lt;em&gt;flonk&lt;/em&gt; and found a meaning and maybe an example sentence: those should be in the question too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even then, &quot;Have I used &lt;em&gt;flonk&lt;/em&gt; correctly?&quot; is a question which will benefit only its asker. A better question title would be &quot;How do I use &lt;em&gt;flonk&lt;/em&gt; to mean &lt;em&gt;gribble&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; That question, appearing in the question list or search results, is likely to be found by others with a similar problem. The question text will indicate research that &lt;em&gt;flonk&lt;/em&gt; can be used to mean &lt;em&gt;gribble,&lt;/em&gt; but perhaps it's conjugated irregularly or it has an unusual plural form; but &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; is the &quot;specific concern&quot; which the current close reason means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be possible to edit a question into shape, perhaps using material supplied in comments. If so, great! That question can be brought off-hold.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other questions about specific words or punctuation need similar detail. &lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; have you used a semi-colon instead of some other mark? &lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; are you asking your question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the underlying philosophy is that, as the &lt;a href=&quot;/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt; states right at the outset,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question needs to be aimed at that community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason currently says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading&lt;/strong&gt; questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but a level of detail as given in this answer* won't fit. However, that text also appears in the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on&amp;#x2011;topic&lt;/a&gt; list, and it would be possible to expand &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; page with details of how to avoid closure as &quot;proof-reading&quot;, and link to it in the close reason text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line: Any question which asks &quot;Is &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; correct; have I used &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; correctly?&quot; is proof-reading. There needs to be a lot more detail about what your concern is in order to save the question from closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Of course, the definitive answer is determined by votes. This is simply a quantitative assessment.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T09:33:06.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:24:48.407" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/352830/62591&quot;&gt;Logical fallacy: X is bad, Y is worse, thus X is not bad&lt;/a&gt; was closed because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, at the time of writing, it has 20 upvotes (I cannot see the downvotes, if any), and four answers totalling fifty upvotes. In addition, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=Logical%20fallacy&quot;&gt;158&lt;/a&gt; results search for &lt;em&gt;logical fallacy&lt;/em&gt; for 31 questions (the reset are answers -- thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/184706/helmar&quot;&gt;Helmar&lt;/a&gt; for point this out); many of those (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16132/does-this-logical-fallacy-have-a-name?s=4%7C2.2035&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47577/word-for-logical-fallacy-of-including-a-debatable-proposition-in-a-list-of-truis?s=7%7C1.9353&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; for example) specifically ask to identify a logical fallacy. &lt;em&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/em&gt; is on topic. It's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; bullet point on the help and just what I am asking about. I can justify that it does not fall into the out of scope bullet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I cannot fathom why was it closed: &lt;strong&gt;How can I tweak it so it gets re-opened?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62591" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T21:49:57.833" Title="Why was &quot;Logical fallacy: X is bad, Y is worse, thus X is not bad&quot; closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9558" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:33:14.230" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't asked its closers, but I can well imagine it was closed because it is not about English Language and Usage.  It should probably be on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Philosophy site&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the frequent obsession over logical fallacies is a mystery to many of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T13:33:14.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9558" CreationDate="2016-10-12T19:36:50.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked with the moderators on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Philosophy Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt; about your question, and they said it’s on-topic there so I’ve emigrated it &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/38375/logical-fallacy-x-is-bad-y-is-worse-thus-x-is-not-bad&quot;&gt;thither&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:23.037" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T21:49:57.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-13T12:50:33.453" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have several tags that are hypernyms to other tags. Probably the most prominent are &lt;em&gt;punctuation, tenses, prepositions&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;terminology&lt;/em&gt; all in our top 30 of tags. I want to question the current philosophy behind those tags and unify the approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let's have a look at those four tags and the hyponym tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/comma&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;comma&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comma&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dash&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dash&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dash&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...  half a dozen more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tenses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tenses&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/past-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;past-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;past-tense&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/present-tense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;present-tense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;present-tense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All tenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/programming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;programming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;programming&lt;/a&gt; with synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/programming-terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;programming-terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;programming-terminology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other sciences, and fields of terminology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Synonyms &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/for&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;for&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/of&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;of&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/by&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;by&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;by&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/from&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;from&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;from&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/with&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;with&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;with&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All other prepositions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have several different approaches here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Synonym approach (prepositions)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9397&quot;&gt;Community decision&lt;/a&gt; to create synonyms thereby merging everything into the hypernym and foregoing any sub-level distinctions. A good solution when the hyponym itself would be rather meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pro:&lt;/strong&gt; One-time solution: Create synonyms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Con:&lt;/strong&gt; Loss of distinctions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Dual-tagging approach (punctuation, tenses?)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are tagged with both the hypernym and the more specified hyponym, e.g. &lt;em&gt;punctuation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;comma&lt;/em&gt; or  &lt;em&gt;tenses&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;past-tense.&lt;/em&gt; There are two directions to this approach. If the hyponym is unknown or irrelevant the hypernym tag certainly suffices. The other way around the hypernym tag should always be added if it doesn't hit the five-tag limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pro:&lt;/strong&gt; Both fine distinction and grouping easily possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cons:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;50:50 chance to search for correct tag if not consequently tagged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consequent re-tagging necessary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Utter chaos (terminology, figures of speech, several others)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While terminology is technically a hypernym of a few dozen other tags there is no mention of it in any of the tag wikis, the tagging behavior is arbitrary and it's in its current shape not a helpful tag. Generally the &lt;em&gt;terminology&lt;/em&gt; tag is all over the place. Another example is &lt;em&gt;figures of speech&lt;/em&gt;, it's a hypernym of &lt;em&gt;metaphors, simile, personification, hyperbole&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;synecdoche.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Possible Solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the utter chaos is not really a viable approach. The all-synonymous approach means a loss of a lot of information. Currently we operate in the utter chaos with many tags, which makes searching and the general use of tags less viable. There are also a lot of questions affected which makes manual editing a total pain. Still the second approach should be our goal to make those tags more helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I suggest the following steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Community consensus on which tags to cluster according to approach two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Script-based addition of the hypernym tag to all hyponym-tagged questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Script-flag questions that would hit six tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regularly repeat from 2. (Preferably regular background job)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I am suggesting a SE-technology backed way to create tag hypernyms - likely somewhere in the moderator area. If a regular system-backed solution is not possible more or less regular script based changes by moderators would be my second choice. Third and last choice would be completely community based tag additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T13:51:34.907" Title="Our Tag Hypernyms" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9562" CreationDate="2016-10-13T16:05:42.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using synonyms to tie terms that are actually hierarchically related is not going to work. The SE filter algorithm treats synonyms as synonymous for matching purposes. I ran into this just lately. I have a wildcard filter which uses the tag pattern &lt;code&gt;*mail*&lt;/code&gt; to represent the set of tags containing the word “mail”. This wildcard filter does not work as intended because someone has made tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php-mail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;php-mail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;php-mail&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;php&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;php&lt;/a&gt;, when actually it is a hyponym. But because the filter algorithm treats synonyms as synonymous, my filter returns all questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;php&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;php&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T16:05:42.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-13T20:02:41.883" Score="4" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/124842/13804&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as an example, but I have seen several similar situations.  Here are some relevant facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has been bumped by Community six times, once per month for the last six months.  The first bump was over two years after the original posting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question poster was &quot;last seen&quot; October 22, 2013, a few weeks after posting this and a couple other questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has an answer with an up-vote, although never accepted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; claims to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this no longer a useful thing to do in this case?  I doubt if this question will get any additional answers.  The existing answer may get more votes, but since the user has obviously given up on SE, there is almost no chance of the answer getting accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is just one example of something I have observed repeatedly.  I'm curious as to what algorithm community uses to decide what to bump, and should said algorithm be revisited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If it is felt this would be better on meta.se instead of this site-specific meta, I have no objection to migration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T17:08:43.953" Title="The Community bump- what are the rules, and are these rules proper?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9571" CreationDate="2016-10-14T03:21:54.867" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/353288/58761&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has an interesting use of a post notice which is usually used for answers which don't meet SE standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems not to pertain to the OP's question, which appears to have enough context, but more as a warning to users posting an answer. Seems appropriate enough, but then it would make more sense to post this notice with every new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T01:47:30.787" Title="New use for a post notice?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9565" CreationDate="2016-10-14T04:52:47.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this is aimed at comments posted as answers (as is mine in the question linked to) as well as brief answers posted without supporting evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been my practice to do this if I have what amounts to a useful suggestion that I cannot back up (for whatever reason). At least the OP has some sort of answer and anyone else is welcome to take it up and turn it into a fully-formed answer if they are willing and able.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps 'comments posted as answers' are tolerated more readily in ELL, but if the site owners/moderators want to discourage such actions in EL&amp;amp;U or across the board, then for most of the time I would simply not bother and let questions go unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T04:52:47.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T01:26:57.400" Score="-4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my question: why did someone delete my post? Whoever did it, just tell me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user198816" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T15:32:34.620" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T15:32:34.620" Title="Who deleted my post?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9562" CreationDate="2016-10-14T06:10:10.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's usually acceptable to have both hypernym and hyponym tags. If you know the appropriate sub level tag, then use it. If a question doesn't have 5 tags already, then the higher level tag can be added, but if there are four other more useful tags, then it's better to have them instead. But often people won't know what the right sub level tag is - they might know they're asking about verb tenses, but not know about pluperfect-progressive-double-future-simple, or whatever other name is in vogue right now! (Yes that would be a ridiculous tense label.) So in such situations it's appropriate to just use the high level tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T06:10:10.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9567" CreationDate="2016-10-14T08:54:22.963" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/349033/can-quoted-i-e-citation-text-retain-its-original-sentiment/353277#353277&quot;&gt;answer you posted&lt;/a&gt; just before asking this question was deleted because it gained &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flags. It does appear that you have not been stung with the 100-rep penalty which I would expect for the post being flagged and deleted. However, that sort of post &lt;strong&gt;is not tolerated&lt;/strong&gt; and will be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this Meta post is actually about the &lt;strong&gt;other&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116662/each-pronoun-or-adverb/351207#351207&quot;&gt;deleted answer&lt;/a&gt;, it gained three downvotes and no upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that each is an adverb. But that's my answer. It depends on how you use it in a sentence. If you use each to describe a verb, adjective, or adverb, it is an adverb. You have to ask yourself these questions: is the word telling how,where,when,what,to what extent, or under what condition? If it tells you one of those things, it is an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was deleted by a moderator; not me, but I can explain it. It started out with &quot;I think...&quot;, whereas what Stack Exchange seeks and encourages are knowledgeable answers. It continued &quot;I think that each is an adverb. But that's my answer&quot; which is a bit short, so you then attempted to justify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer doesn't actually answer the question, which was &quot;It seems that &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; is an adverb in (1) but a pronoun in (2). Can anyone explain why &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; is not a pronoun in (1)?&quot; In your answer, you are telling the OP how to judge an adverb, but a good answer would actually explain how &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; satisfies that test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, unfortunately, it's actually wrong. This is indicated by the downvotes and the fact that it contradicted the top-voted answer, given by a professor of English at an American university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer was deleted because it was not authoritative; did not really answer the question asked; and the answer it gives was judged to be wrong by the community. Deleting it saved you from further downvotes and the two-point penalty which accompanies them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum where opinions can be shared. It is a Q&amp;amp;A network, where questions asked can expect authoritative answers. The community, and moderators to a certain extent, curate the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are probably not aware that new users' answers go into a review queue where they can be assessed by more experienced members of the community. There are also flags generated for late answers (which I believe is defined as more than six months after a question is asked) and those also get special attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a general rule, it is not a good idea to answer a question three years old, or which has an accepted answer (unless that accepted answer is &lt;em&gt;demonstrably&lt;/em&gt; wrong), or where your answer falls short of a highly-respected answer to the question.&lt;/strong&gt; When you do answer, the answer must actually answer the question, be authoritative, contain its own justification, and be detailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T15:31:38.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2016-10-14T15:09:03.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had cause to use backticks on ELU from time to time. Not very often, because it's not a common need on ELU, but it has come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather that ability wasn't taken away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also encourage people to misuse backticks on stackexchange as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15770" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T15:09:03.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9565" CreationDate="2016-10-15T01:47:30.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature is not unique to this site. It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/107142/323179&quot;&gt;originally implemented&lt;/a&gt; for Skeptics, as a way to indicate an answer requires citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying it to a question helps the message be visible for those looking to answer. Applying it to an answer is more of a message to the poster (and anyone looking to edit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasnotice%3Ayes+locked%3Ano&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can find ALL the posts with notices (excluding the lock notices) on ELU. There's not very many (a number of which are on that linked question and its answers). I think that it might be good to use the banner a bit more often, especially with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; that get tons of one-line answers. On the other hand, I think that adding it to &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question will ruin its effectiveness as we get desensitized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T01:47:30.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9614" CreationDate="2016-10-15T14:19:15.917" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just looking through the tag synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antonyms&lt;/a&gt; and discovered that it does not have the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antonym&lt;/a&gt;, in fact, &lt;em&gt;antonym&lt;/em&gt; is a completely separate tag with just two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't have the necessary reputation, could someone suggest a tag synonym so that &lt;em&gt;antonym&lt;/em&gt; gets re-mapped onto &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antonyms&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitch has suggested the synonym, it can be voted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/antonyms/synonyms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (1 more to go - we can do it people!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote on the tag synonym!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T23:14:11.903" Title="Why doesn't the tag 'antonyms' have the synonym 'antonym'?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tag-synonyms|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-15T22:25:21.053" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent post &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348676/what-are-names-for-territories-in-space&quot;&gt;What are names for territories in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP seemed to ask for us to make up new words for him. OP seems to realize this, based on the later comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I pointed this out in worldbuilding which this actually belongs in but they refused it was told to ask here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an isolated incident. I'd hate to see people transferred multiple times becase SE sites have different ideas of each other's missions. Should EL&amp;amp;U make it clear to other sites that word-invention requests are off topic here? Are they off topic for that matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T02:13:29.110" Title="Should EL&amp;U clarify with other SE sites what constitutes a suitable single-word-request?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|content-disputes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9573" CreationDate="2016-10-16T02:13:29.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, ELU has nothing to clarify &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; other sites. ELU's standards are its own to determine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a good general rule for every site is that if you suggest another site to ask a question on, that you include a brief note something like &quot;but make sure you check out their on-topic page and question guidelines.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T02:13:29.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-16T08:28:00.077" Score="4" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I have been going through the tag wikis of some of the less used tags, adding in definitions and basic information regarding the tag. Unfortunately, after about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?page=7&amp;amp;tab=popular&quot;&gt;page seven&lt;/a&gt; of the tags, the majority have no tag wikis or excerpts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to suggest that we work together as a site to sort this out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that needs doing for some of them is to add a quick definition of the term so that it is clearer for users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Can people join with me to systematically work through all of the tags to add quick definitions and usage guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T10:31:18.700" Title="Sorting out our tag wikis" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|site-cleanup|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9575" CreationDate="2016-10-16T10:31:18.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9464/184706&quot;&gt;blueprint&lt;/a&gt; a while back. It can easily be used as copy paste boilerplate. Feel free to use it when tackling the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T10:31:18.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-16T17:35:39.527" Score="5" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proofreading: (&quot;Is this right?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we define &quot;specific source of concern?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/353445/are-the-words-big-and-huge-colloquial&quot;&gt;Are the words &amp;quot;big and &amp;quot;huge&amp;quot; colloquial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a clear question &quot;Are the words 'big' and 'huge' colloquial?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was that not a &quot;specific source of concern?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201029" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T17:59:17.727" Title="Proof reading questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9577" CreationDate="2016-10-16T17:59:17.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you wanted to know is specific enough and perfectly fine on this site: whether &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; are too colloquial in the context of that sentence. At any rate, it does not concern proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the first question in your Question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What, if any changes should be made to this sentence in the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does sound like proofreading. The question can probably be reopened if your remove that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T17:59:17.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9581" CreationDate="2016-10-17T16:32:45.443" Score="8" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, this question of mine was closed as off-topic:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/353555/from-where-does-the-sign-originate?noredirect=1#comment821116_353555&quot;&gt;Where does the @ symbol come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know (and some commenters have agreed) the use of symbols in English if &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My argument for this is essentially based on the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/symbols&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;symbols&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;symbols&lt;/a&gt; and its uses, particularly including history-based questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161720/what-is-the-real-name-of-the&quot;&gt;What Is the Real Name of the #?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79060/origin-of-pipe-symbol&quot;&gt;Origin of | (pipe symbol) &lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200677/how-did-7-come-to-be-an-abbreviation-for-and-in-old-english/200698#200698&quot;&gt;How did 7 come to be an abbreviation for &amp;#39;and&amp;#39; in Old English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three of the above questions include historical references and are effectively looking at a symbol's etymology.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The reason the question was voted as off-topic is due to its being not &quot;&lt;em&gt;about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help centre.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such a question off-topic?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it is, should we close those other questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T20:42:34.047" Title="Are 'symbols' and their etymology/usage on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9582" CreationDate="2016-10-17T16:49:23.240" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just edited the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/dialogue/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialogue&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialogue&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialogue&lt;/a&gt; and have found in the 'related tags' section the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conversation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conversation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialogue&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialogue&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialogue&lt;/a&gt; is about &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about conversations between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or film.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conversation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conversation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions related to conversation or speech&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What separates the two tags?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should they be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T13:46:35.360" Title="What separates 'conversation' questions from 'dialogue'?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9579" CreationDate="2016-10-17T18:26:20.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help center welcomes expert-level questions about English spelling and punctuation, and about the history of English words.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot; title=&quot;“Help Center &amp;gt; Asking” at English Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; The list of welcome topics is illustrative, not definitive. Expert-level questions about the history of letters, numerals, punctuation symbols, scribal abbreviations, and other symbols which represent English on the page are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “@” sign is commonly understood by English readers as an abbreviation of an English word: namely, the word “at”, generally with the connotation “(&lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt;) at”, or “at (&lt;em&gt;the rate&lt;/em&gt;)”, in phrases such as “12 apples @ $1”.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Origin_theories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;“At sign: Origin theories” at Wikipedia&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about how the “@” sign came to represent the word “at” is not unobjectionable, &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. There was a point made in comment that the question is general reference because there is a Wikipedia article which offers answers. But the question asks if these answers are correct, and I notice that the Wikipedia answers are marked “citation needed” (meaning Wikipedia currently lacks any evidence for these answers). What we mean by general reference is that the question “is simple and can probably be easily answered by looking it up”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an expert-level question about English. I have reopened it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T20:42:34.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9580" CreationDate="2016-10-18T13:05:02.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right the two tags are related &amp;mdash; as indeed the system shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conversation&lt;/em&gt; is an unscripted interaction between two or more persons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dialogue,&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;a feature of a book, play or film,&quot; is a scripted interaction designed to look like a conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two tags are not synonyms: the scripted nature of one which is absent in the other is an important difference. &lt;em&gt;Conversation&lt;/em&gt; is off-the-cuff, unconsciously spoken, while &lt;em&gt;dialogue&lt;/em&gt; has had a third party consider it carefully in order that it &lt;strong&gt;appears&lt;/strong&gt; to be instinctive. In reality, it's anything but.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the &lt;em&gt;dialogue&lt;/em&gt; of spoken conversation in JK Rowling's &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; books, for example (about which we have had a number of questions) is not the same as &lt;em&gt;conversation&lt;/em&gt; which real children have in the schoolyard&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is there a hypernym available. The tagging system doesn't handle hierarchies; it's only able to make equivalences at the same level. If we invented a hypernym like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spoken-interaction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spoken-interaction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spoken-interaction&lt;/a&gt; and then linked both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conversation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conversation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialogue&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialogue&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialogue&lt;/a&gt; to it, all three would become synonyms. The synonym system is designed to help with common misspellings like &lt;em&gt;dialog&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;dialogue&lt;/em&gt;, or with alternative terms like &lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;orthography.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Sorry, Harry Potter isn't real. Perhaps that should have been in spoiler markup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T13:46:35.360" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T13:46:35.360" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9579" CreationDate="2016-10-19T10:29:29.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that questions on the &lt;strong&gt;English names or labels for symbols&lt;/strong&gt; are on topic, but not necessarily other questions. &quot;What Is the Real Name of the #?&quot; is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;logograms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, symbols which are used in the place of full words, and have consistent spoken equivalents, are on-topic IMO. This would include both the questions on @ and &quot;7&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most questions about &lt;strong&gt;type-setting&lt;/strong&gt; should be off-topic, but many of them can be asked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Graphic Design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:19.427" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T10:29:29.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7885" CreationDate="2016-10-19T17:40:21.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been burninated a while ago apparently. Please accept this CW to mark it done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T17:40:21.560" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-19T17:40:21.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9564" CreationDate="2016-10-20T17:08:43.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal of Stack Exchange is to build repositories of on-topic questions and expert answers. It's not particularly fussed about whether answers are accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;ELU tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Accepting doesn't mean it's the best answer, it just means that it worked for the person who asked.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following post answers the more general question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/48578/what-can-cause-a-question-to-be-bumped&quot;&gt;What can cause a question to be bumped?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It links to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that the posts eligible for bumping are those scoring &gt;= 0 that have gone at least 30 days with no activity, have at least one non-deleted answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that, and no accepted answer (also, they can't be locked or closed).&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/184511/286574&quot;&gt;- Shog9&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's relevant here is whether the question is on-topic and of a sufficiently high quality. If it meets those criteria but doesn't have an answer with even a seconder, bumping it occasionally for exposure is consistent with the site's goals. Otherwise, they can be dealt with by voting to close them, or requesting to have them locked. Alternatively, according to algorithm articulated by Shog9, up-voting or down-voting the zero-scored, sole answer would stop it from getting bumped. Naturally, up-voting and down-voting the answer should be based on an appropriate assessment of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T17:08:43.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-20T17:18:25.120" Score="1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online has had a major site revamp. Since its brand name is simply &quot;Oxford Dicationaries&quot; (not Oxford Dictionaries &lt;em&gt;Online&lt;/em&gt;) and its URL is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/&lt;/a&gt;, I suggest that our FAQ entry containing the list of accepted abbreviations be updated to reflect this. In particular, I suggest that we drop the trailing &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the FAQ is maintained as a community wiki and hence freely editable, freely editing it without community support can easily become messy. I'm therefore raising this as a meta question for support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-and-acronyms-noad-esl-pie&quot;&gt;List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Current entry: &lt;em&gt;ODO — Oxford Dictionaries Online (now &quot;Oxford Living Dictionaries&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suggested entry: &lt;em&gt;OD — Oxford Dictionaries (former names: &quot;Oxford Dictionaries Online&quot; and &quot;Oxford Living Dictionaries&quot;; both were listed under the abbreviation &quot;ODO&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you support the change to &lt;em&gt;OD&lt;/em&gt;, up-vote this question. If you prefer to leave it as &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt;, down-vote this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T22:41:22.550" Title="New abbreviation for Oxford Dictionaries?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9586" CreationDate="2016-10-20T18:42:57.990" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Changing the abbreviation from &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;OD&lt;/em&gt; would invalidate existing answers,&lt;/strong&gt; and the list is intended to help people interpret existing answers, not just assist in creating new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any change has to be &quot;backwards-compatible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why in the most recent revision I maintained &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; as the abbreviation for the online Oxford Dictionaries at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com&lt;/a&gt;. Incidentally, calling &quot;Oxford Living Dictionaries&quot; a &quot;former&quot; name as in your suggestion is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;incorrect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-referencing with the pre-existing Oxford dictionary with &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; in its abbreviation helps avert confusion in choosing the abbreviation to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if &lt;em&gt;OD&lt;/em&gt; were accepted as an abbreviation, &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; would still need to appear, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the differentiation for &quot;Oxford Living Dictionary&quot; would also still be needed. It creates an extra level of complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be possible to lay out the list more clearly, although I don't think it's exactly unclear now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you're right that &quot;freely editing it without community support can easily become messy,&quot; I don't believe the change I made, keeping &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; for the dictionary's new persona and disambiguating a potential confusion, was actually a substantive change. Currently the list reflects the status quo and has not introduced anything new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I made the latest change, and so naturally I support its current content, I'm not averse to improvement. But improvement must not invalidate existing answers or make the list useless in interpreting existing answers; nor should it introduce unnecessary complexity. I do not support the introduction of &lt;em&gt;OD&lt;/em&gt; (and have voted on the question accordingly &amp;mdash; this answer explains why I did that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T18:42:57.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9586" CreationDate="2016-10-21T14:11:16.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Based on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9586/new-abbreviation-for-oxfords-dictionaries?noredirect=1#comment37442_9586&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190503234158/http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/august-2013-update/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference to ODO&lt;/a&gt; in the dictionary's blog, dated 28 August 2013. Interestingly, it refers to &quot;OxfordDictionaries.com Online (ODO)&quot;, not &quot;Oxford Dictionaries Online&quot; as we have it in our FAQ. Unless there's compelling reason otherwise, I'll take this as an authoritative reference and leave the abbreviation as it stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the time of this blog predates the recent dictionary 'refresh', the domain name has remained the same. The domain name was one of two justifications for changing the abbreviation, the other being the name displayed on the dictionary's landing page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T22:41:22.550" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T22:41:22.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-22T18:47:32.860" Score="5" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/354834/need-help-with-love&quot;&gt;Need help with love&lt;/a&gt; has received an upvote. I am tired of trying to preserve the credibility of the site by reverse-voting such perverse voting (which happens far too frequently). Is there some way to deal with anonymous members voting in a way so detrimental to the site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T03:52:46.310" Title="Dealing with the upvoting of execrable questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2016-10-22T19:18:40.237" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there's nothing anyone can do about it. All upvotes are anonymous; not even moderators can see them normally. I wouldn't worry about the credibility of the site; people who have been on Stack Exchange for a while are all aware that voting has an element of noise. A single upvote will not preserve the question from deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T19:18:40.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2016-10-23T01:55:56.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's a single upvote, don't worry about it. Mistakes happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T01:55:56.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2016-10-23T13:27:11.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally agree with @sumelic's answer, but I don't agree with &quot;there's nothing anyone can do about it.&quot; There is no problem that has no solution. I am a very aggressive voter with 3,247 upvotes and 2,891 downvotes. When I saw a comment to a moderation election post which raised the issue of upvote/downvote ratio of a certain candidate, it was really hilarious. Some users seem to misunderstand the philosophy behind downvoting, believing it conflicts automatically with a &lt;em&gt;be nice policy&lt;/em&gt;. Well, downvotes help the site clean up its mess, keep the quality and could lead to a more useful post encouraging an edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kept mentioning &quot;upvoting privilage should not be given to users with 101 association bonus&quot; on various Meta SE posts such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/284993/how-about-creating-most-recommended-question-mrq-list&quot;&gt;How about creating &amp;quot;Most Recommended Question (MRQ)&amp;quot; list&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also believe it is time SE considered cancelling the upvoting&#xA;  privilege to 101 (association bonus) reputation users. They sometimes&#xA;  (I am guilty, too) go to some sites (especially new) and vote without&#xA;  knowing well whether a question or answer is well-researched and&#xA;  really helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not saying &lt;em&gt;that particular upvote&lt;/em&gt; was cast by a user with an association bonus. When the number of upvotes goes up beyond reasonable level, I suspect many of them are cast by them. &quot;Giving them the privilege to upvote so that the OP can receive reputation points, but don't count their upvotes on the post&quot; could be a reasonable solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you are talking only about that execrable question. If there are posts that you think have some issues, you can post the link in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/40642/elu-reviewers&quot;&gt;ELU Reviewers&lt;/a&gt; chat room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What ELU needs now is more downvoters who can downvote a post that doesn't show research effort and when it is unclear and not helpful. Their downvotes will off-set those blind upvotes down the road.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T14:32:07.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-21T20:42:13.393" Score="0" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a variable naming rule that I would like to enforce in my software:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Variable names of scalar types should be written in singular form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Variable names of collection types should be written in plural form.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a list of english words that document spelling in both singular and plural form.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I realize there are many words whose plurality is ambiguous.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If that were notated as well, it would be a bonus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a well established source where I can find or derive this type of information?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Princeton has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lexical database for English&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't see plurality as part of their data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25816" OwnerDisplayName="Trevor Hickey" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T19:01:57.050" Title="Where can I find a list of words in their singular and plural form?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9594" CreationDate="2016-10-22T16:17:35.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mongodb does this, although not perfectly.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Automattic/mongoose/blob/master/lib/utils.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Their code&lt;/a&gt; is the best starting place I can think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108286" OwnerDisplayName="jimm101" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T16:17:35.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7606" CreationDate="2016-10-24T10:33:37.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/94224/internet-of-things?referrer=J5ptbIP_b18RxGMuCsy-JA2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tardp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Commit to the Internet of Things Q&amp;amp;A&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T20:35:36.177" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T20:35:36.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-24T12:27:04.400" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;In our help center on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic page&lt;/a&gt; the following old ELU-question is linked for references (last section, first paragraph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to change that to our meta post which is a lot better curated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T12:27:04.400" Title="Change the linked references in the help center" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9443" CreationDate="2016-10-24T12:41:29.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, please update the help center!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9594&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which was migrated to meta the OP correctly noted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I typed &quot;Where can I find a list ...&quot; many other questions appeared in this format that were not closed. After reading the rules, I didn't see anything discouraging a user from asking for data, so I decided to post. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9594#comment37466_9594&quot;&gt;Trevor Hickey 2 days ago&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iAEhJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iAEhJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;WhereCanIFindAList&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that we have a clear gap between what we describe as on-topic and what we judge to be on-topic. There does not seem to be a rule against &lt;em&gt;list requests&lt;/em&gt; and yet the community voting including a moderator vote migrated the question to meta. &lt;em&gt;This is doubly bad since the OP actually checked all our resources about on-topic-ness and still felt like it was fitting.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that one should have to google your way through meta.ELU to find out if a question is on-topic after having found nothing to the contrary in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we should do two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a help center section about off-topic-ness of resource requests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consequently close and/or historically lock those requests that do exist on the main site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T12:41:29.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-24T13:17:59.087" Score="8" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/355083/105642&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold shortly after being asked. In the meantime, two established users provided comments that seem to contradict each other, and another answered. The question does not explicitly mention that the asker consulted a dictionary, however a dictionary definition does not necessarily help here. The question provides background rationale for the quandary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was it put on hold, and what is the (blatantly obvious) answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T00:09:12.420" Title="Why was &quot;What does the word “most” mean?&quot; put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-25T12:44:56.687" Score="5" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355232/more-formal-word-for-know-it-all&quot;&gt;More formal word for &amp;quot;know-it-all&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; was closed as duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335245/know-it-alls-a-synonym&quot;&gt;Know-it-alls--a synonym&lt;/a&gt;, which is duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/203302/is-there-word-for-this-other-than-know-it-all&quot;&gt;Is there word for this, other than know-it-all?&lt;/a&gt;, which is duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/165899/one-word-for-someone-who-thinks-they-can-do-anything-and-believes-everything-th&quot;&gt;One word for someone who thinks they can do anything, and believes everything they do is right but others are wrong&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are many words and phrases that can be used in place of &lt;em&gt;know-it-all&lt;/em&gt;. But the question doesn't need to be closed because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has a very specific context. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is seeking a more formal word than know-it-all. There is no answer in any of those questions that say which word or phrase is more formal than others. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP is explaining why the question is not duplicate. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question reads far better than a majority of questions that are not closed on ELU. Can we just reopen the question and let the OP get an answer and move on? Is closing it the best thing we can do about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T12:50:40.253" Title="Can &quot;More formal word for know-it-all&quot; be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9599" CreationDate="2016-10-25T16:41:52.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I recall, I posted my comment containing &quot;the obvious answer&quot; - substantially the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/355113/2637&quot;&gt;the overwhelmingly upvoted one&lt;/a&gt; - to justify my &quot;Migrate to ELL&quot; closevote (I did explicitly make that point again in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355083/what-does-the-word-most-mean#comment823909_355083&quot;&gt;a later comment.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some later point (after the question had been closed and reopened), I posted another comment pointing out that it covered the same ground as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55920/is-most-equivalent-to-a-majority-of&quot;&gt;Is “most” equivalent to “a majority of”?&lt;/a&gt; (asked long before migration to ELL was an available option here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to get bogged down in a back-and-forth tug-of-war here, but it's worth pointing out that the question itself has barely a third as many upvotes as the top answer. I think that reflects the fact that almost all native speakers &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the answer (so it's not a very interesting question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't vote &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt; to migrate the question, but I still think it belongs on ELL. Anyway, OP asked why it was put on hold in the first place - I had and still have my reason, even if there weren't / won't be enough others voting in the same direction at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T16:41:52.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-25T22:03:16.637" Score="11" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this question is to clarify how plagiarism is defined for the English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange, and how the community can respond appropriately to plagiarism when it is discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T19:31:04.957" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T17:17:13.193" Title="What is plagiarism? How do I avoid it? How do I address it when I see it?" Tags="|discussion|faq|policy|plagiarism|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9602" CreationDate="2016-10-25T22:03:16.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange questions and answers are written by you, the members of the Stack Exchange community. Your work is valuable to the community, and you get credit in the form of reputation for the value that you create. Like many institutions, such as schools, journals, and news organizations, Stack Exchange does not permit you to improve your reputation using other peoples’ work: whether intentional or accidental, doing so is called &lt;em&gt;plagiarism&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;“Plagiarism” at English Wikipedia&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;“What Is Plagiarism?” at Plagiarism.org&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt; The English Language &amp;amp; Usage policy on plagiarism closely reflects the general policy on plagiarism for all of the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;“ Stack Exchange does not permit you to improve your reputation using other peoples’ work: doing so, whether intentional or accidental, is called &lt;em&gt;plagiarism&lt;/em&gt;. ”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Etymology&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the word &lt;em&gt;plagiarism&lt;/em&gt; means theft of ideas. Its ancestor, the Latin word &lt;em&gt;plagiarius&lt;/em&gt;, means a kidnapper. Metaphorically speaking, plagiarism is theft of a person’s literary children.&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;“plagiarism (n.)” at Online Etymology Dictionary&quot;&gt;³&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Avoiding plagiarism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing a question, above all, it should be your own question, and when writing an answer, it should be your own expert answer. Do not post questions or answers from elsewhere on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center describes &lt;strong&gt;good questions&lt;/strong&gt; as “&lt;strong&gt;based on actual problems that you face&lt;/strong&gt;”.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot; title=&quot;“What types of questions should I avoid asking?” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot;&gt;⁴&lt;/a&gt; The Stack Exchange blog adds that unless you have “demonstrated a practical reason” why you yourself need the answer, it’s “not a real question”.&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot; title=&quot;“Let’s Play The Guessing Game” at blog.StackOverflow.com&quot;&gt;⁵&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange plagiarism meta-question explains that &lt;strong&gt;your answer should be your own work&lt;/strong&gt;, not someone else’s. “A post that consists only of copied text is not your work.”&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot; title=&quot;“Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?” at meta.StackExchange.com&quot;&gt;⁶&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;“ When writing a question, above all, it should be your own question, and when writing an answer, it should be your own expert answer. ”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean that you cannot use sources to support your work. In fact, Stack Exchange encourages you to provide support, and using sources is a good way to do that. You should always give credit to the other people whose ideas you are using. This is called &lt;em&gt;attribution&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;When you use sources, only use what is needed to support your work.&lt;/strong&gt; If you use direct quotations, always put them in quotation marks or in a quotation block.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help#simple-blockquotes&quot; title=&quot;“Simple blockquotes” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot;&gt;⁷&lt;/a&gt; A well written attribution identifies the author and the work, and provides a link to the work whenever possible. It is a good idea to either quote or summarize each supporting idea, not just link to a source. This protects your work from “link rot”.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;“Link rot” at English Wikipedia&quot;&gt;⁸&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Correcting plagiarism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When correcting possible plagiarism, above all, fit your actions to the situation. Bear in mind the Stack Exchange “Be Nice” model,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot; title=&quot;“Be nice” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot;&gt;⁹&lt;/a&gt; which tells us to assume good intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gauge the value of the person’s work. A short conclusion (such as “no”) supported by a long quotation may still have some value. A post that contains no original work at all (a paste-only post) is often a sign of a non-expert answer, and may have no value, but this is not always true. Examples of quote-only posts that nevertheless have value might include a quotation that required in-depth research to locate, or that was laboriously reproduced from a print-only source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;“ Fit your actions to the situation. Bear in mind the Stack Exchange ‘Be Nice’ model … assume good intentions. ”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you become aware of plagiarism in your own post, edit your post. When you see evidence of plagiarism in someone else’s post, there are several options to consider, depending on the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit the post&lt;/strong&gt; (no reputation needed to suggest a peer reviewed edit, 2 000 reputation needed to make an edit without peer review). For example, you can add missing attribution, or remove unnecessary quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment on the post&lt;/strong&gt; (50 reputation needed). Explain the problem respectfully, perhaps with a link back to this article. Note this step can be taken as part of a closevote if you have sufficient reputation points (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvote the post&lt;/strong&gt; (125 reputation needed). Consider reversing your downvote when the author corrects the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cast a closevote&lt;/strong&gt;, if the post is a question (3 000 reputation needed). Because there is no predefined close reason for plagiarism, use the close reason “Off-Topic &gt; Other” and include a respectful comment (see above).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cast a deletevote&lt;/strong&gt; (10 000 reputation needed). Take this step when the post (including associated answers, if it is a question post) has no “lasting value whatsoever”.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot; title=&quot;“Access To Moderator Tools” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot;&gt;¹⁰&lt;/a&gt; By this is meant the value of the author’s own work, not including the value of any plagiarized work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;“ Most problems with posts, including plagiarism, can (and should) be resolved by the community without moderator intervention. ”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these responses do not resolve the problem, &lt;strong&gt;flag the post&lt;/strong&gt; for moderator intervention (15 reputation needed). Because there is no predefined flag for plagiarism, use the flag “in need of moderator intervention”. In the flag explanation box, give as much detail as you can so a moderator can check it out properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if you have the authority to make a copyright complaint on behalf of the owner of the plagiarized content, see the “&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Network Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;” for information about how to &lt;strong&gt;submit a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act&lt;/strong&gt; (DMCA).&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot; title=&quot;“Stack Exchange Network Terms of Service” at StackExchange.com&quot;&gt;¹¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The role of moderators&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most problems with posts, including plagiarism, can (and should) be resolved by the community without moderator intervention. When comments and votes do not resolve the problem, such as when there is a dispute, moderator intervention becomes necessary. A moderator might delete plagiarized content and might warn the author against plagiarism. If the problem continues, the author might be suspended.&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot; title=&quot;“Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?” at meta.StackExchange.com&quot;&gt;¹²&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;” at English Wikipedia&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Is Plagiarism?&lt;/a&gt;” at Plagiarism.org&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plagiarism (n.)&lt;/a&gt;” at Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;Let’s Play The Guessing Game&lt;/a&gt;” at blog.StackOverflow.com&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt;” at meta.StackExchange.com&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help#simple-blockquotes&quot;&gt;Simple blockquotes&lt;/a&gt;” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link rot&lt;/a&gt;” at English Wikipedia&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt;” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;Access To Moderator Tools&lt;/a&gt;” at English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Network Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;” at StackExchange.com&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt;” at meta.StackExchange.com  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T22:03:16.637" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-26T20:18:46.013" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355379/what-is-a-word-for-deliberate-dismissal-of-some-facts&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it received very good answers. One user suggested a dupe for this question, and I agree with the designation. However, I much prefer the answers on this question than the ones from five years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, if any, should be closed as duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T02:54:07.107" Title="Duplicate Question Confusion" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-11-05T07:55:46.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9602" CreationDate="2016-10-27T06:01:04.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few quibbles with this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this effort even necessary? Has there been some increase in&#xA;plagiarism lately on ELU? Or some particularly egregious cases?&#xA;Anything that requires explication of the general policy?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This one is merely an issue of style. File it in the category of&#xA;&lt;em&gt;How to get over ourselves&lt;/em&gt;. Can we drop the references in the  preamble about how valuable we all are and how we’re like real&#xA;institutions of value like “schools and journals”? Because we’re not&#xA;all that. It’s simply enough to say that SE does not allow users to garner reputation based on the unattributed&#xA;work of others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism can be “intentional or accidental”. In a word, no. All&#xA;the cited analogs — appropriation, stealing, theft, kidnapping,&#xA;immoral and unethical behavior — require &lt;em&gt;mens rea&lt;/em&gt;, the intent&#xA;to do wrong. People make mistakes. A false accusation of plagiarism is serious, an analog&#xA;of libel per se, if you will. &lt;em&gt;Be nice&lt;/em&gt; is hardly a sufficient&#xA;caution to the zealous.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I’ve got a couple of problems with plagiarism.org, the site, not the cite. First of all, this is a site set up&#xA;by iParadigms LLC, a company pushing plagiarism detection software,&#xA;which makes me suspicious of the scope of their definitions.&#xA;Secondly, they’re sloppy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by copyright laws, just like original&#xA;  inventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intellectual property is that which can be protected by intellectual&#xA;property laws. (In the US, that’s copyrightable material, patents,&#xA;trade secrets, trademarks, and service marks) Not all expression of&#xA;original ideas can be so protected. And inventions cannot be&#xA;copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Etymology: a) Who cares? and b) perhaps it would be best to avoid&#xA;the etymological fallacy on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When writing a question, above all, it should be your own question,….&lt;/em&gt; Dear God, would it be too much to ask that essays&#xA;associated with ELU avoid dangling participles? But beyond that&#xA;distraction (which perhaps is mine alone), it’s almost impossible to&#xA;imagine a question that involves plagiarism. Suppose I ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of my saying “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”, can I properly say “It was the bested of times; it was&#xA;  the worsted of times”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will anyone actually accuse me of plagiarizing Charlie D? Certainly&#xA;some questions are so profound that credit accrues to the asker. For&#xA;instance &lt;em&gt;If you’re in a spaceship, can you tell the difference&#xA;between the absence of nearby masses and free fall toward a nearby&#xA;mass?&lt;/em&gt; Has anyone ever asked such a question on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You should always give credit to the other people whose ideas you are using.&lt;/em&gt; This sounds very noble, but taken literally it’s neither&#xA;necessary nor practical. “Other people” have constructed the&#xA;accepted body of work for various fields, and we don’t call it&#xA;plagiarism when we refer to that knowledge without attribution. When&#xA;I say that the general quintic has no solution for its roots in&#xA;terms of its coefficients, no one expects me to cite Galois and&#xA;Cayley.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The best current practices for minimal attribution and avoiding link&#xA;rot seem out of place as they have nothing to do with plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you note, the help center does describe a good question as one&#xA;“based on actual problems that you face”, but from the context it’s&#xA;clear that this is not as opposed to “problems that others face&quot; but&#xA;to requests for chatty, open-ended answers. The Stack Exchange blog&#xA;does tell posters to demonstrate a practical reason for their&#xA;questions, but from the context it’s clear that’s not as opposed to&#xA;asking questions for others, but to requests for answers to trivia&#xA;quizzes or memory jogs for half-forgotten words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[I]&lt;em&gt;f you have the authority to make a copyright complaint&lt;/em&gt; In the&#xA; US, you probably don’t unless you’re the copyright holder or his&#xA; agent . Copyright cases are notoriously fact-dependent.  Which&#xA; means that many times the only way to determine infringement is to&#xA; ask a jury. If you file a DMCA takedown notice, you file it under&#xA; penalty of perjury, so make sure you know what you’re talking&#xA; about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also note a problem particular to ELU — quoting dictionaries.&#xA; It’s almost impossible to copyright a word definition. Definitions&#xA; are close to factual statements, which can’t be copyrighted, and in&#xA; any case, lexicographers have been stealing from each other as long&#xA; as there has been lexicography, making claims of ownership&#xA; impossible to maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I don’t see that the guidelines for dealing with plagiarism&#xA; and the unsubstantiated claims about moderator forbearance are&#xA; specific to plagiarism. Comments, downvotes, closevotes, flags, etc&#xA; — these are all mechanisms available for any problematic post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="125330" LastEditDate="2016-10-31T05:43:25.033" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T05:43:25.033" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9610" CreationDate="2016-10-27T20:03:25.330" Score="7" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I was asking a question, I had a look whether it could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;off-topic (help)&lt;/a&gt;. Since I didn't consider it as off-topic from that page, I asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite soon, it received comments to vote it as off-topic, which made me wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I found that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic help page&lt;/a&gt; lists much better reasons for questions to be off-topic. That made me delete my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This violates the principle of least astonishment. Is it possible to migrate the off-topic reaons from the on-topic page to the off-topic page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68468" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T10:39:48.250" Title="Information about off-topicness on the on-topic help page" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11964" CreationDate="2016-10-27T20:11:27.350" Score="8" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that naming is off-topic and single words requests are on-topic on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I identify whether I'm asking a naming question or I have a single word request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68468" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T21:45:23.400" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T15:27:20.867" Title="Naming vs. Single word requests" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9607" CreationDate="2016-10-27T21:18:07.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I can't think of a simple criterion that can be used to determine if a question is &quot;naming&quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The class of name requests that seems most solidly off-topic to me is composed of questions about naming a company, product or brand. These are off-topic for several good reasons: brand names are not necessarily English words, there are many factors to evaluate when choosing a brand name that English-language experts are unlikely to know about, and often the choice between different potential names is primarily opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &quot;naming&quot; close reason also applies to some questions asking for words to use in programming (such as your question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/278041/automatically-advance-to-the-next-step&quot;&gt;Automatically advance to the next step&lt;/a&gt;). The Help Center literally says &quot;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes,&quot; but some people extend that somewhat to questions that just involve using a word in a context related to programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually think such questions are inherently off-topic for a site like this (and in fact, that question is now open; I don't know if it was closed in the past, or if you asked another question more recently that's been closed and deleted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with questions of this type was that people often found them uninteresting and prone to being unanswerable. There's a relevant answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1309/are-single-word-requests-always-welcomed-questions/1311#1311&quot;&gt;Are single word requests always welcomed questions?&lt;/a&gt; Apparently, we also used to get a lot of them (mentioned here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7099/english-language-usage-programming-variable-classes-rule-question&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage programming variable/classes rule question&lt;/a&gt;). So the Help Center mentions naming programming variables as off-topic specifically to discourage this type of question, and this is also used as a close reason by people who don't like specific questions that fall into this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would give the following advice to someone considering asking a question about a word to use in programming:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be sure to follow all of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;guidelines for single word requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In particular, try to show your research to avoid being perceived as &quot;lazy.&quot; If you can think of any words that have a similar meaning to what you want, mention them and explain as best as you can why they don't satisfy you. (I think it was helpful that you did this in your &quot;auto-advance&quot; question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although you should include context and an example sentence and present a clear &quot;problem&quot; that you're facing, it doesn't actually have to be the same problem that you're trying to solve in real life. You could try to explain the concept using an example that is not directly in a programming context, even if programming is where you plan to use the word. This is a bit &quot;iffy&quot;, I guess, but I think it's fine, &lt;em&gt;as long as you're willing to accept whatever answers you get that fit the question you asked.&lt;/em&gt; If you would be dissatisfied with an answer that has the correct meaning, but that for some reason or another is not useable in your specific programming context, you should not ask the question here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This last one is very subjective, but: is your question likely to be &quot;interesting&quot; to other people who aren't facing the same programming problem? It's true that this is a Q&amp;amp;A site, and its main purpose is providing answers, not entertaining the users. But word-request questions are kind of marginally accepted, and interesting questions get more leeway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T21:18:07.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-27T21:36:57.493" Score="19" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what color links are on the ELU site, but they are really hard for me to see as I am red-green colorblind. Could we either change them to a color with more contrast or add a bottom border? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/color-blind-accessible-figures/59189&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/color-blind-accessible-figures/59189&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59495" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T23:46:43.313" Title="Colorblind-friendlier design" Tags="|feature-request|design|accessibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9606" CreationDate="2016-10-28T10:27:55.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should note that the off-topic page you are referring to as &quot;off-topic (help)&quot; can't be edited by anyone other than Stack Exchange employees. That means moderators can't change a word in it. If you compare it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;that of Japanese SE&lt;/a&gt;, you will notice there is no difference at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only on-topic page could be edited by the moderators here. You will see big differences in &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Japanese SE's on-topic page&lt;/a&gt;. Japanese SE has a more lenient policy and approach towards off-topicness because they cater to very basic questions about the language while English Language Learners SE take care of learners' basic questions about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Helmar commented, &lt;em&gt;off-topic (help)&lt;/em&gt; page lists types of questions that should be avoided on all Stack Exchange sites. The reason the on-topic page  (What topics can I ask about here?) is on the top is it is more important than the off-topic page.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:49.277" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T10:39:48.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9516" CreationDate="2016-10-29T09:16:27.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be buried, but the requirement for context is covered by the &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; close reason contains the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;How to Ask&amp;quot; page contains this help, amongst other information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be specific&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask a vague question, you’ll get a vague answer. But if you give us details and context, we can provide a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the reason to use where context is required. Context &amp;quot;clarifies the specific problem&amp;quot;. A useful answer requires the question's context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be helpful to add a comment to the answer explaining why context is necessary (and what that context might be, to give a specific example to assist the asker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a case for amending the closure text, but as it's not something under moderator control — and neither is the &lt;em&gt;How to Ask&lt;/em&gt; page, either — we would need to demonstrate some consensus about wording in order to ask TPTB to make the change. However, it is this close reason which needs to be changed if context is to be asked for explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T09:16:27.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-29T22:02:06.937" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently re-tagging a question clearly about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transatlantic-differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transatlantic-differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transatlantic-differences&lt;/a&gt; which had previously been tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;american-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;american-english&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to remove the two English tags in favour of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transatlantic-differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transatlantic-differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transatlantic-differences&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should I have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T13:52:03.340" Title="Should questions marked 'transatlantic-differences' include the AmE and BrE tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9612" CreationDate="2016-10-29T23:13:24.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't bother retaining the individual region tags for North American vs. Insular English if it's about transatlantic differences of the customary variety. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, one only gets five tags total, so it would be all too easy to waste all those enumerating myriad transpondian dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T23:13:24.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9572" CreationDate="2016-10-29T23:14:11.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've approved the synonym suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And I hope this answer doesn't get flagged for quality due to its length!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T23:14:11.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9612" CreationDate="2016-10-30T12:13:37.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/331377/british-mass-nouns-versus-american-count-nouns&quot;&gt;British Mass Nouns versus American Count Nouns&lt;/a&gt; has three tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;american-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;american-english&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transatlantic-differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transatlantic-differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transatlantic-differences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/267981/if-someone-says-they-insisted-that-he-left-is-there-any-ambiguity-in-bre-or-i&quot;&gt;If someone says &amp;quot;They insisted that he left&amp;quot;, is there any ambiguity in BrE or in AmE?&lt;/a&gt;, doesn't have [american-english] because the OP is asking about ambiguity in BrE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/262321/what-is-the-us-english-for-soppy&quot;&gt;What is the US English for &amp;quot;soppy&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, doesn't have either [american-english]  or  [british-english], just [transatlantic-differences]. I think this question should be tagged [american-english], too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333434/difference-between-everlasting-and-eternal&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;everlasting&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;eternal&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, has both [transatlantic-differences] and [differences] and I don't see any reason why this question should be tagged [transatlantic-differences]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a few enthusiastic users have contributed a lot to streamlining the tag system on ELU for the last couple of months, but IMO, there is no harm in tagging as many tags as possible. We can tag maximum five.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think a question is about [transatlantic-differences], but tagged only [american-english] and [british-english], please just add the tag without deleting the two in the same way as we tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; while leaving other related tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T13:52:03.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-30T18:44:49.863" Score="-8" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just found the linked question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355442/equivalent-for-crowd-in-the-context-of-machines&quot;&gt;Equivalent for &amp;quot;Crowd&amp;quot; in the context of machines&lt;/a&gt;, received two reopen votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the review history and three users voted to keep this question left closed. (This question is not about how the reopen queue works. I am just stating the fact.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question title reads like it is looking for a synonym of &lt;em&gt;crowd&lt;/em&gt;, but the question body reads very clearly that it is looking for a word or phrase that could refer to &lt;em&gt;process of outsourcing a task to a set of machines&lt;/em&gt;. All the answers are suggesting synonyms of &lt;em&gt;crowd&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to source&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger issue I see is the OP has not responded to the request to make it clearer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we pay a little more attention when we vote to reopen an unclear question or Single Word Requests (SWR)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T19:55:31.097" Title="How could this question receive two reopen votes?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ClosedDate="2016-11-17T11:42:22.120" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9616" CreationDate="2016-10-30T19:49:11.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A completed review in the reöpen queue does nothing to remove current reöpen votes if there are any, nor to prevent new ones from appearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those reöpen votes must therefore exist because two members voted to reöpen that question. The reöpen review queue will be unrelated to those votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T19:49:11.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-30T19:49:42.677" Score="15" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any value in the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;correction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;em&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; Currently 87 questions are infected with that hideous tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since unspecified proofreading is off-topic I don't think this should be used as tag anywhere. We already have &lt;em&gt;grammaticality, orthography &amp;amp; punctuation&lt;/em&gt; for the usual suspects regarding corrections. Naturally, there is no usage guide whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate&quot;&gt;guideline from Meta.SE on burninating&lt;/a&gt; I answer the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied?&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;is it unambiguous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course not, we have no idea what should be corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends, but we do have specific tags for the different areas of possible corrections and specifying the concern is &lt;em&gt;mandatory.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the tag add &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; meaningful information to the post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than a disregard for existing and more used tags? No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really, it can everything from acceptable questions to a lazy cop-out homework/proofreading replacement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's get rid of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit 07.11.2016:&lt;/em&gt; After +4/-4 votes and a tumbleweed badge (yay!) I would love to hear from the down voters what merit they do see in the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit 24.11.2016:&lt;/em&gt; I started removing the tag after reaching net +6. We are now down to 75 questions and I encourage everyone to pitch in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit 03.12.2016:&lt;/em&gt; The questions have all been edited in a community effort. The nightly roomba should take care of the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T19:32:26.493" Title="Let's get rid of the &quot;correction&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9609" CreationDate="2016-10-31T23:46:43.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those of us who are NOT colorblind, this the difference between normal and red-green colorblind link colors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yXqsK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;original&quot;&gt;.......&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SRl0J.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;colorblind&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Image generated with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vischeck&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three styles here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Visited link:&lt;/strong&gt; This answer here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Unvisited link:&lt;/strong&gt; post&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Normal text:&lt;/strong&gt; also suggests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in full color, I think the links need more contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also did some research on achrive.org and found out that the link style was changed some time in January 2014:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20140205133354/https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144052/difference-between-labyrinth-and-maze&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beginning of January 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150416150600/https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149035/meaning-of-parochial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;End of January 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change removed the persistent dotted underline, but, on hover, an underline appears. There must have been another change later on, since this doesn't happen now either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T23:46:43.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-02T11:21:32.853" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot find the thread in which it is written that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;past tense has a boundary and present perfect has no its boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not the title, it is a part of the explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me find the thread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55088" OwnerDisplayName="Indranil Bar" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-11-02T11:27:55.740" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T11:37:51.087" Title="Finding a post: how do I do it?" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9621" CreationDate="2016-11-02T11:37:51.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to search is to use Google, rather than the site search in the top-right corner. When using Google, you need to specify the site you want the results to come from, using the &lt;code&gt;site:&lt;/code&gt; parameter. The following is a suitable search, although it should all be on one line and entered as a single string into the search box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;past tense has a boundary and present perfect has no its boundaries. site:english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That currently gets you &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/#newwindow=1&amp;amp;q=past+tense+has+a+boundary+and+present+perfect+has+no+its+boundaries.+site:english.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four results&lt;/a&gt;, three for this question (which is available by various routes), and one which might be the post you want: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/276191/habitual-activities-within-a-limited-period-of-time&quot;&gt;Habitual activities within a limited period of time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know the &lt;strong&gt;exact&lt;/strong&gt; phrase you're looking for, enclose that in quotation marks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;past tense has a boundary&quot; site:english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That won't find what you're looking for if the exact phrase doesn't appear in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T11:37:51.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9624" CreationDate="2016-11-02T14:19:20.327" Score="-7" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I try to upvote an answer, this is what the website says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YA2Lg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YA2Lg.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Why is it (ironically, because it's on EL&amp;amp;U) &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;fewer&lt;/em&gt;, when your reputation is something that can be counted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199797" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T14:31:09.227" Title="Why is it 'less', not 'fewer'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-11-05T17:27:57.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9623" CreationDate="2016-11-02T14:31:09.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; is not a count noun in this sense.  You have “15 reputation” not “15 reputations”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T14:31:09.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-03T16:27:59.793" Score="13" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, I will dig up some research on a question, and then discover that someone else has already given the answer, but without much supporting information.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; My general habit is just to post a comment with a link to additional support, leaving it up to the answer's author to incorporate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, occasionally an answer is so bare as to be barely an answer, and/or I have done fairly extensive research that can't easily be encapsulated in a single or even double comment. In that case, is it better practice to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leave a lot of comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;directly edit the other person's answer, or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post an answer of my own?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A current case in point is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/356652/origin-of-drug-of-choice/356655?s=2%7C0.6886#356655&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;em&gt;Origin of &quot;drug of choice&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;. This one is more borderline than some other cases, as there is at least a link in the original answer and my research is limited to a Google Books search and some browsing through the OED (the actual OED Online, not the publicly-available Oxford Dictionaries). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to nudge the original answerer toward expanding the answer, and obviously I'll wait a bit to see if that happens before taking any other action, but if nothing eventuates what is the recommended course of action? The OP's question is somewhat interesting, and I think it deserves a fuller answer than it has so far gotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Much more often someone has posted a very good version of the same answer, in which case I just upvote that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T09:40:05.850" Title="Edit someone else's answer, or post my own?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|best-practices|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2016-11-03T17:51:07.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question should not be about the upvote, but about the OP.  It's been removed, appropriately.  That takes care of its baggage as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears the mechanism in place to deal with such low quality questions is working.  If anything, I'm guessing questions with votes are probably seen more and therefore more prone to being eliminated if they're in need of it.  So the voting may actually be part of the solution rather than a problem in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204180" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T17:51:07.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2016-11-03T18:07:21.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There will be divided opinion on how best to handle this. Some feel that editing the missing info into the OP's answer is spoon-feeding them and not our job. Some feel the appropriate response is to down vote as not useful and move on. Or leave some kind of comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment is perfect (imo). It's helpful, polite, and encouraging. It indirectly encourages someone to learn how rep (and ultimately the site) works. And it's a lot less work than posting your own answer. But, I think posting your own answer is perfectly acceptable as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a &lt;strong&gt;new user&lt;/strong&gt; posts a correct answer but not up-vote-worthy based on site criteria, I have often edited it to bring it up to par, then left a comment welcoming them, explaining why the edit was made, and letting them know they could roll back if they like (basically taking it one step further than you have done.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, nothing happens. Sometimes those users are grateful for the help, and a few have gone on to become regular and helpful contributors. Either way, I don't see that it does any harm, but if it makes the site less intimidating and more welcoming to the new user, then I'm for it.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;Until they've done this 50 times in spite of helpful comments. Then I pass or downvote, depending on how far their answer falls from the mark. Does it take more time? Sure. But if I'm invested in the site, it's not wasted time.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T18:07:21.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2016-11-03T19:05:02.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the particular example you give: Allow the OP about 24 hours to respond to your comment; this takes into account differing time zones and the fact that the OP may have a life apart from ELU.  Then post your answer, acknowledging the earlier answer and explaining why you are posting your answer.  I would like to see a full answer to this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T19:05:02.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2016-11-03T19:52:43.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You did research then come back to find new shitty answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take a narrow look at your premise that you basically &lt;em&gt;dug up some research and then came back to the question to find a shitty answer&lt;/em&gt; I would very likely answer myself. There's two simple reasons for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, when the research wasn't that extensive, meaning the answers are likely posted relatively close to each other time-wise. So a minute or two in case of a SWR or maybe fifteen for something else is a time where no one can really complain. Sure I'll incorporate that someone else went down a similar avenue but that's it, mostly after reloading the page when I hit post. No need to retract the answering intention just because someone else started the same time and quit half-way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, when the research was extensive the quality difference is very likely too significant to reasonably edit someone else's post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, if one can reasonably assume that I haven't read the post or the quality difference is too significant I self-answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There's a shitty answer, then you did some research and it turns out it hit the target in the first place without showing why&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lot more interesting and it's a very clear &lt;em&gt;depends&lt;/em&gt;. You've pointed out the options, so let's look at them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commenting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plus:&lt;/em&gt; On it's own this achieves two goals at the time you do it. It notifies the post owner of the posts deficiencies and anyone reading it that this is not really considered a good answer in the current state. Especially if the comment is up voted (like I just did with yours).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meh:&lt;/em&gt; You've got to check back later to see if the poster reacted and retract the comment or escalate to editing or self-posting. In the mean-time you have to bench your research and the post stays in a low quality state. Later means at least a day considering that ELU users are all over the world and well do stuff besides ELU. Which also means your research is not fresh anymore when you do escalate to the other options later. You are not done after commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two outcomes. Best case gives you the least effort, worst case it's the most effort of all options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/em&gt; Use it if you think there is a likely reaction of the original poster which basically means consulting the crystal ball of your discretion. Can also be used to help new users. The profile might help. Don't bother with repeat offenders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plus:&lt;/em&gt; The research is incorporated into the answer. The overall quality of ELU rises. Yipee. The post is immediately more helpful than before. You should leave an additional comment or an edit comment explaining why you did it. You're done after editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meh:&lt;/em&gt; As medica put it, you are spoon-feeding the user. The reputation goes to the original poster. Worst case it encourages people to just provide the basics and hope for guardian editors. Oh and of course some people really don't like people editing their posts. Retaliation may range from unnoticed rollback to angry comment to well, it's the internet. Trolls do what they gotta do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/em&gt; Don't do it several times for the same user. Try to get the message to spent the effort when initially answering across. Don't bother with repeat offenders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer separately&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plus:&lt;/em&gt; The research is incorporated into a helpful answer. The overall quality of ELU rises. Yipee. The Q&amp;amp;A page is immediately more helpful than before. You  &lt;em&gt;definitely have to&lt;/em&gt; mention the other user to share credit since the answer was there already when you started. The reputation goes to the one who did the research. (Of course, you could go CW.) You are done after posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meh:&lt;/em&gt; Since a lot of the answers you talk about come from users who could really use more reputation you are taking the chance for them to do that with their idea. This might turn potential future contributors away. If the research difference is small, it can be perceived badly. If you do it a lot, it can be perceived as reputation stealing. If you explain that the other answer is shitty, you can be perceived as condescending (and thieving on top). Well again, it's the internet, you might very well piss someone off ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/em&gt; The less the other poster will miss that reputation the less he or she likely cares about &lt;em&gt;reputation they missed out on.&lt;/em&gt; They also more likely know where meta is to rant about it. Furthermore users with a certain amount of reputation &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; know better than to post such garbage in the first place. The greater the research difference the less problems. Certainly do with repeat offenders. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;In any case, do credit the other user&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; There is no hard and fast rule (that I know of). Generally speaking, take your effort, the original poster's effort, the post age and the poster's behavior in general into consideration when picking one of the options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T19:52:43.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2016-11-04T08:37:01.797" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;When should I edit posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit is encouraged when you &lt;em&gt;add related resources or hyperlink&lt;/em&gt;. If you want to just add resources or links, an edit would be preferred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding leaving a comment, the newer the OP is, the less likely he will respond to your comment. That's based on my experience. You should note that it will be waste of your own time to check whether the OP has responded and wait for the OP's edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always post your answer saying &quot;Adding to @user's great answer and according to this and that research, the answer is ...&quot;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related Meta SE question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15839/editing-versus-answering&quot;&gt;Editing versus answering?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most upvoted answer reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...In the meantime, if you see an answer that you could improve, but&#xA;  don't have the reputation to edit it, I would recommend cutting and&#xA;  pasting it into your own answer and then improve that version. It&#xA;  would probably be polite to give a footnote of credit to the person&#xA;  you're quoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you have more than 2K rep to edit a post, but the answer is still relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T08:43:09.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-04T09:56:02.663" Score="5" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I noticed that there is a bit of an editing dispute between Rathony and CuriousDanii regarding the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/356208/another-vs-other&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Another&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;other&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; regarding which version of the question should be kept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The matter under consideration began when the original question was closed. SvenYargs provided some research, which fulfilled his wish of rekindled interest in the question, since he felt it had a legitimate underlying basis and as a result of his edit it was reopened. Rather than summarizing what I think their opinions are, I'll let Rathony and CuriousDanii's own comments show their opinions on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/356208/another-vs-other#comment828297_356208&quot;&gt;CuriousDanii&lt;/a&gt;: You shouldn't add research to new users' questions. What's the point, just ask your own question if you're actually interested. And in addition, we have no idea of knowing whether the OP has seen the particular things you've raised. The OP was asking about singular/plural words, whereas by adding that quote from Bernstein you have changed it to being about things of the same kind or different kind. Your edit is illegitimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/356208/another-vs-other#comment828300_356208&quot;&gt;Rathony:&lt;/a&gt; It's not that I don't understand your point. But what's the point of rolling back SvenYarg's edit? He tried to improve the post in good faith and I don't think it deserves rollback. The post was reopened thanks to the edit and let's move on. If you don't object to it, I will roll it back to SvenYarg's version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Rathony and CuriousDanni also revised part of their opinions, and now suspect it should be closed as a duplicate. The duplicate proposed is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87759/can-another-be-used-with-plural-nouns-provided-periods-or-measurements-don-t-c&quot;&gt;Can “another” be used with plural nouns provided periods or measurements don’t count?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We discussed the matter and agreed to wait upon SvenYarg's response before taking further action, since we respect his contributions as a user and demonstrated knowledge regarding the subject of grammar. However at this point it looks like Sven is not going to respond, or at least not in a timely manner, and Rathony took the liberty of rolling back the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth further note is that the original draft of this question suggested research had been done. Unfortunately, the question seems to have been asked in an incomplete state. A definition from the suggested resource was not provided, nor was the specific sentence in question. Luckily, I own a copy of The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary 8th edition, and can personally verify that its entry for Another is textually identical to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/another?q=another&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry presently available on the Oxford Learner's Dictionary website&lt;/a&gt;. The exact same definitions, quotations, usage note and even idioms are provided. My printing is the 2015 printing, with a C.D. in the back that has iwriter software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That dangling &quot;I&quot; and mention of pluralization in the original version, which is the only version the author touched upon by the author suggests the sentence in question is one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I got another of those calls yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;‘Finished?’ ‘No, I've got another three questions to do.’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done in this case, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T15:53:00.833" Title="What should be done with &quot;Another&quot; vs &quot;other&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|editing|duplicates|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9632" CreationDate="2016-11-04T09:56:02.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally wish to refrain from casting judgement on the matter of determining whether this is a duplicate question, as my judgement on the matter seems to frequently be at odds with the community determinations. Naturally, if the question is a duplicate, it should be closed as a duplicate, and maybe even merged with the prior thread. The remainder of this answer will regard the matter of what to do if it is not a duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drastic edits are permitted, and I have no objection to providing additional research in a bid to reopen a question as CuriousDani does. However when this is to be done, I agree that it needs to be done in a manner that is congruent with the questioner's intention, pursuant to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, since attribution is primarily ascribed to our posters and in the case of questioners, for the purpose of having the question they asked answered. Only questioners can accept answers, since only they can know what their question truly means. I have every reason to believe Rathony is correct that Sven acted in good faith and I think that not only as a manner of good intentions, but also accordance to this principle. Regardless I am not 100% certain that he actually fulfilled it. Without further input from the questioner, I can not know for certain if he did, so his edit should be retracted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us with the problem that the question is unfit for English Language &amp;amp; Usage, as indicated by the original close votes, which were perhaps prematurely reversed as a result of that edit. Personally, I do not wish to see the question closed, because I think more answers to the question may be of worth, especially if Sven's interpretation of it was mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Viettungvuong's exotic username, and the fact that he elected to choose to solicit a learner's dictionary as a resource imply that he is an E.S.L. learner. The fact that the question as it was closed as it was originally asked suggests that the community was not sufficiently interested by the matter. Both of these circumstances suggest to me that the question should be moved to E.L.L. Part of the reason I suggest this is that research was allegedly performed, and the question does regard a matter of English, so the only way I see this being off-topic here is if it is better suited there because it is not a sufficiently interesting question for Linguists, Etymologists and Serious English Enthusiasts, but still decently asked and useful to others &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell/3723?s=2|0.0000#3723&quot;&gt;which is the sort of question E.L.L. is meant to harbor.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the question in its original state was incomplete, and in accordance to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can?s=1|0.0000&quot;&gt;E.L.L. is not a trashcan principle&lt;/a&gt;, I think it should first be edited. A more conservative edit should be applied that expressly indicates the extent of the research claimed. My initial proposal for such an edit would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not really know when can I should use another over other. At first, I thought another was only used when a singular word comes after it, but then I saw the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/another?q=another&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary 8th Edition's&lt;/a&gt; entry: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;one more; an extra thing or person&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would you like another drink?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;‘Finished?’ ‘No, I've got another three questions to do.’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;We've still got another (= a further) forty miles to go.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;‘It's a bill.’ ‘Oh no, not another!’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I got another of those calls yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Another can be followed by a singular noun, by of and a plural noun, or * by a number and a plural noun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another&lt;/strong&gt; can be followed by a singular noun, by &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; and a plural noun, or by a number and a plural noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Some of these sentences have plural words after another which invalidates that theory. Can somebody please explain why that is happening, and when I should choose &quot;Other&quot; over &quot;Another?&quot; and visa-versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only included the first definition, because it is the only one with plural words in the exemplary sentences. While I would prefer to isolate the sentences I suspect to be in question, I do not have sufficient basis to believe which one it is exactly, so I just decided to leave them all in. The final question takes guidance from both the titular question, and the provision of the original theory. If somebody can suggest a more accurate interpretation of the original question's intention though, I would like to be informed since that is the purpose of this proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person who originally asked the question probably will not benefit from this course of action, as they have accepted an answer, it is my hope that more answers to the question might be helpful to others who happen to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T15:32:51.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9632" CreationDate="2016-11-04T15:53:00.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I think the only one who should roll back edits that add additional research is the original poster. Only that person can determine if his intention was violated. Otherwise it's just two people with their interpretations. Such disputes are solved on meta. &lt;strong&gt;Before rolling back!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, &lt;em&gt;rolling back to a former closed question state&lt;/em&gt; is a unilateral action violating the expressed voting decision of five users. That's what happened here. The edited question had been deemed worthy by five people. The only people who should ever do anything like that are our moderators. &lt;strong&gt;Anyone else, go to meta first, do not roll back unilaterally!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it's very good that the question has been returned to the state in which it has been deemed worthy by a community decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone thinks that community vote is a bad call, that is a different discussion. Again for meta, not for rollback-battles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T15:53:00.833" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-06T14:12:00.123" Score="5" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that these tags are very similar and effectively have the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched in two search engines &lt;code&gt;define proverb&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;define saying&lt;/code&gt;, here are the results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yahoo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a short pithy saying in general use, stating a general truth or piece of advice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a short, pithy expression that generally contains advice or wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a short, well-known pithy saying, stating a general truth or piece of advice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a short, pithy, commonly known expression which generally offers advice or wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going by these obvious similarities, shouldn't they be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are to be merged, which should be a synonym of the other?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'Saying' is slightly more popular than 'proverb' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+proverb%2C+a+saying&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2Ca%20proverb%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Ba%20proverb%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BA%20proverb%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Ba%20Proverb%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Ca%20saying%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Ba%20saying%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BA%20saying%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt;) but proverb sounds more academic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T17:24:34.657" Title="Should the tags 'saying' and 'proverbs' be merged?" Tags="|discussion|tags|retag-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9637" CreationDate="2016-11-06T14:50:33.360" Score="-4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/225344/is-st-always-the-abbreviation-for-saint&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; about the difference between the abbreviation for &quot;Saint&quot; and &quot;Street&quot;. I responded with an image of a street sign for &quot;St. Paul St&quot;. The purpose of this image was to clarify that on street signs, the abbreviation for &quot;Saint&quot; gets a period, whereas the abbreviation for &quot;Street&quot; does not. I believe that this is helpful in answering the question. I even got an upvote. But my response was still deleted. Could I please have the support of the community to undelete this post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T15:50:35.753" Title="Please undelete my helpful image" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9636" CreationDate="2016-11-06T15:50:35.753" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the person who deleted your answer, I'd like to point out that the question asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Is St. always the abbreviation for 'saint'?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Since I never met anyone, before or since, who abbreviated saint [as S.], I am wondering if anyone else ever encountered it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does not ask if there is a difference between the abbreviation for saint and street. Your post does not answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T15:50:35.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9635" CreationDate="2016-11-06T16:02:38.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're probably right that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/saying&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;saying&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;saying&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proverb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proverb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proverb&lt;/a&gt; are probably the same&#xA;thing and so should be synonymized and merged.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, so too is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/epigram&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;epigram&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;epigram&lt;/a&gt; which I bet is my fault although I haven't looked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those should all be in the plural, and there should be one tag to rule them all, one tag to find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the point it’s probably best I not mention &lt;em&gt;gnome, adage,&#xA;epigram, aphorism, apothegm, apophthegm, sententia,&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;paroemia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor shall I drift into &lt;em&gt;expression, platitude, bromide, refrain, byword, witticism,&#xA;quip, catchphrase, maxim, mantra, truism, axiom, homily, precept, brocard,&#xA;dictum, tenet, motto, slogan, jingle, saw, chestnut, cliché, banality,&lt;/em&gt; or &#xA;&lt;em&gt;parable.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor &lt;em&gt;tweet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-11-07T01:58:24.193" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T01:58:24.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2016-11-08T09:40:05.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Write your own answer. You may think your answer is better, and you may be correct. Alternatively, you might be wrong. The other poster may have very good reasons not to include the information that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think should be in there. Writing a more comprehensive answer is just giving a different answer. Do it. If it's better it will be upvoted and this will be a sign that it's a positive contribution to the site. Two answers that say the same thing but say it in different ways are both good and helpful contributions to readers and to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T09:40:05.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9635" CreationDate="2016-11-08T17:24:34.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest proverb and saying are quite different both in meaning and use.&#xA;A proverb is typically advice or an old expression of a common truth. If a new phrase were coined, such as &quot;Make America Great&quot; I would suggest it would not be labelled a proverb but a saying.&#xA;A saying is a current phrase or short statement in popular use that typically has a meaning beyond that strictly associated with each discreet word. A saying may see a change in the underlying meaning predicated on use and application. A proverb is usually less mutable as its meaning is captured in respected or accepted texts with an associated explaination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202119" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T17:24:34.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9642" CreationDate="2016-11-09T09:19:19.717" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I understand why an edit does not get accepted and a question does not get re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few weeks ago I had edited the closed question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195711/is-it-re-offend-or-reoffend&quot;&gt;Is it “re-offend” or “reoffend”?&lt;/a&gt; in order to make it a better fit for being kept open.(*) My edit ended up in the peer-review queue. However I never saw my change accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I want to know why my edit was not accepted and subsequently why the question was not e-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find out? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Because I think the question is very valid and the answers not just opinion-based - far from it: the answers show research with proper citations/links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9579" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T13:31:12.740" Title="How can I understand why an edit does not get accepted and a question does not get re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9641" CreationDate="2016-11-09T10:15:47.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To find what happened to your suggested edits, go to the profile page on the site where you made the suggestion (Main ELU in this case: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/9579&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/9579&lt;/a&gt;). The options available change with reputation level and privileges earned, but there should be enough here for you to navigate around the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click &lt;strong&gt;Activity&lt;/strong&gt; in the top line of the profile page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S5hAK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S5hAK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of Activity tab header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...then &lt;strong&gt;All actions&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Suggestions&lt;/strong&gt; a little further down the page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IbRqJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IbRqJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of Suggestions tab header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which will show what's happened to your suggestions, like these for example [these aren't yours]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9X9M4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9X9M4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of suggested edits&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can click on the words &quot;approved edit&quot; and &quot;rejected edit&quot; to see the result and how reviewers reacted to your suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a rejected edit you should find the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T10:15:47.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9641" CreationDate="2016-11-09T10:39:29.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will answer the question, &quot;Why was the question not reopened?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to get a question reopened, you can edit the question body, which will automatically make it appear in the reopen votes queue if it is edited within 5 days of closure. For more information on &lt;em&gt;reopen review queue&lt;/em&gt;, read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196677/how-to-get-a-question-to-reopen-review-queue&quot;&gt;How to get a question to reopen review queue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the question was closed longer than 5 days ago, you should post a Meta question to ask users to vote to reopen a closed question.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there have been many questions asking about the prefixes such as &lt;em&gt;re&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pre&lt;/em&gt; and whether a hyphen is needed after them such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84855/hyphens-in-verb-construction-containing-prefix-such-as-re&quot;&gt;Hyphens in verb construction containing prefix such as &amp;quot;re&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7731/adding-a-prefix-re-to-a-word-with-or-without-a-hyphen&quot;&gt;adding a prefix &amp;quot;re&amp;quot; to a word, with or without a hyphen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87262/hyphen-for-re-when-doing-again&quot;&gt;Hyphen for re when doing again&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/323661/hyphenation-in-pre-determined/323664#323664&quot;&gt;Hyphenation in pre[-]determined&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure why it was not closed as duplicate. I would have voted to close it as duplicate, but views of others might differ from my own.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T13:31:12.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-10T22:19:23.567" Score="9" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange recently started a collaboration project with the University of Melbourne, in an attempt to improve the automatic detection of duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information on the project and a call for help from the community can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286329/project-reduplication-of-deduplication-has-begun&quot;&gt;Project Reduplication of Deduplication Has Begun!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, Tim Post mentions that Doris Hoogeveen (me) will post a message on the different meta sites to let you know that we're ready for help. This is it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a brief summary, the project is about finding ways to automatically determine if two questions are duplicates, and also to detect the opposite: falsely tagged duplicates. To validate our methods, we need manual judgements from people who really know the data. This is where we need your help. It is impossible to manually annotate all the data from Stack Exchange, and so we have applied several filters to make sure we only show you questions pairs with a high likelihood of being duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participation is completely optional, and there's no minimum time requirement. There's a reputation requirement however: only people who have duplicate question tagging rights on the site can participate. That is people with at least 3000 reputation points, or a gold badge. This is to ensure the annotations are compatible with StackExchange's quality standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in participating in the project, please head over to the annotation interface, which can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can log in with your Stack Exchange account, so no sign up is required. The site also contains some more information on the project, which might answer some questions you may have. And I'm also happy to answer them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T00:05:30.973" Title="Project Reduplication of Deduplication - English" Tags="|discussion|support|duplicates|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9644" CreationDate="2016-11-11T01:57:20.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your work on this project!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts so far (I think I've done around 30 of these):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is the intended use of &amp;quot;Related, not duplicates&amp;quot;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned this in a comment, but I don't think I had enough space to explain clearly. There are four options available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;No duplicates&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Duplicate of&amp;quot; (can go either direction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Related, not duplicates&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Really can't tell&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand what criteria to use when choosing between &amp;quot;No duplicates&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Related, not duplicates&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume &amp;quot;related, not duplicates&amp;quot; questions will not be tagged as duplicates. But what is the purpose of identifying them? Currently, I'm operating the assumption that these might trigger an automatic comment with a link, so I'm not selecting this option unless the questions are highly related, enough to make it useful for anyone interested in the answers to one question to read the answers to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Minor site oddities/bugs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why sometimes, right after I log in, the questions I see  are presented above one another rather than side-by-side. (Sounds like this may be fixed now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One time after this happened, I got an odd diagonal layout with the next question (the second post was both below and to the right of the first one), but I accidentally navigated away from the page before getting a pic of that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Miscellaneous other feedback&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably nothing can be done about this, but I find that pages load irritatingly slowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T17:32:23.257" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-11T10:01:29.030" Score="4" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit note 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patient and long-suffering OP has now re-asked aspects of this question in three separate posts. So, there's now probably no harm in leaving this one closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This useful question on parts of speech got closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/357709/are-these-parts-of-speech-correct&quot;&gt;Are these parts of speech correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, it was a bit difficult to read in the original version. It has since been reformatted by the original poster and the question more clearly set out. I think it is precisely the kind of question we should have on a site for linguists and serious language enthusiasts. Can we reopen it please? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T21:10:17.507" Title="Can we reopen this question please? [Now re-CLOSED]" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-11T15:57:39.887" Score="6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/357897/what-is-the-question-tag-for-this-sentence&quot;&gt;this question on question-tags&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81076/he-has-to-do-it-hasnt-he-to&quot;&gt;this other one&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the new question (though not particularly well-written by the standards of the site) is about tense, whereas the one it is an &quot;exact duplicate&quot; of is about using an infinitive in a question tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell the older question has no relevance other than also being about question tags, and the accepted answer while explaining about &quot;to have to&quot; in question tags explains nothing about tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T21:30:50.463" Title="Reasons for dupe-close on question with the tag question-tag?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9647" CreationDate="2016-11-11T21:30:50.463" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot speak for the other three closers’ reasons for closing it as a duplicate, but my own reason was a simple one: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;because it is a duplicate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the original question asks what the question tag is for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They had to go home, ______?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the duplicate question asks what the question tag is for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He has to do it, ______?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both askers are perplexed as to why the &lt;em&gt;to have to&lt;/em&gt; construction takes an irregular tag question, respectively &lt;em&gt;didn’t they&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;doesn’t he&lt;/em&gt; for this pair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;strong&gt;had to&lt;/strong&gt; go home, &lt;strong&gt;didn’t&lt;/strong&gt; they?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has to&lt;/strong&gt; do it, &lt;strong&gt;doesn’t&lt;/strong&gt; he?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are irregular because attempting to apply any simplistic and uninformed for regularly deriving tag questions would produce ungrammatical tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They had to go home, *hadn’t they? &amp;lt;----- ɴᴏᴛ ɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴀᴛɪᴄᴀʟ!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He has to do it, *hasn’t he?  &amp;lt;----- ɴᴏᴛ ɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴀᴛɪᴄᴀʟ!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, why does &lt;em&gt;to have to&lt;/em&gt; to an irregular tag question? Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/81100/2085&quot;&gt;the accepted answer from John Lawler&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Have to&lt;/em&gt; is an idiom, a paraphrase of the [modal auxiliary verb][1] &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;; it's always pronounced &lt;strong&gt;/'hæftə/&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;/'hæstə/&lt;/strong&gt; in 3SgPres -- &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; /f/ instead of /v/ and /s/ instead of /z/), and it can't be split up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why it doesn't form a normal tag question; the tag requires a contracted negative, and that's ungrammatical. Instead, as Rory, Kris, and Noah all suggest, using &lt;em&gt;do/does/did&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support is the correct solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the correct answer, and it applies to both questions. The two questions are duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Now please go re-close again for the duplicate that it is.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T21:30:50.463" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9649" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-11-12T06:19:34.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions concerning tags synonyms on both the main site and meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;What are tag synonyms and merged tags? How do they work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/864/tag-synonym-suggestions&quot;&gt;Tag synonym suggestions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T20:55:25.453" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T20:55:25.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9650" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-11-12T06:19:34.303" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning tags synonyms on both the main site and meta." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T20:55:19.030" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T20:55:19.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9644" CreationDate="2016-11-12T09:41:51.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My immediate thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first pair I got were two very clearly unrelated questions that had nothing whatsoever to do with each other—same as what several others have noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect they were matched because of an overlap in words used in the body of the questions themselves. The problem is that one of the questions is just one sentence long, while the other is ten paragraphs: weeding out filler words (“I want to know”, prepositions, copula, determiners, etc.), there are only &lt;strong&gt;four words&lt;/strong&gt; in that question: &lt;em&gt;grammatically&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;conference&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these four, the term &lt;em&gt;grammatically correct&lt;/em&gt; should be ignored on ELU, because it occurs in somewhere around 80% of the questions asked here, mostly because most people have no idea what ‘grammar’ or ‘grammatically correct’ means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves just &lt;strong&gt;two real words&lt;/strong&gt; to use for comparison: &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;conference&lt;/em&gt;. Both of these happen to occur in the ten-paragraph answer, but quite incidentally. So obviously, to a computer, that looks like a duplicate if you just go by brute-force checking words that occur in both questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next pair I got was even worse: one was a one-liner (body almost entirely identical to title), the other about four paragraphs. In this pair, the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; words that overlapped were &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;. Nothing else. No tags, no similarity in title or anything else. At a quick glance through the comments (only the longer question has any) and answers (the longer question has a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long answer; the short question has seven answers ranging from very short to medium-length), nothing leaps out as being obviously repeated between the two questions, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to believe that the questions were chosen on the basis of a brute-force word comparison between the (questions and) answers, seemingly disregarding frequency and length, which doesn’t seem like a good starting point for identifying duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to show on the page itself what criteria were used as the basis upon which the question pair you’re looking at were matched as potential duplicates? That way at least users wouldn’t have to be so confused (or do as much detective work) as to why two entirely unrelated questions were marked as potential duplicates to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I simply misunderstanding how this works? Are we as users presented with a mix of pairs identified as potential duplicates and pairs identified as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; being potential duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47827" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T09:41:51.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9653" CreationDate="2016-11-13T10:14:13.587" Score="4" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question recently got closed as a dupe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358097/why-shouldnt-we-pronounce-the-second-t-in-word-potential&quot;&gt;Is it wrong to pronounce the second &amp;quot;T&amp;quot; in word &amp;quot;potential&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, for many speakers, whether produced consciously or not, there &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be a second /t/&#xA; in the word &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt;. For some speakers this will be accidental and for others it will be part of their phonemic inventory for the word. The reason, of course, is that in this type of environment, we are likely to see an epenthetic /t/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to this question is that there is no reason at all not to pronounce a second /t/ in this word, but also that this fact bears no relationship to the spelling and is allowed by the specific environment of a nasal being followed by a post-alveolar fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question bears no relationship to the question that it has been closed as a duplicate of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4737/what-rules-of-english-allow-the-first-t-in-patient-to-make-an-sh-sound&quot;&gt;What rules of English allow the first t in “patient” to make an sh sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we reopen the first question, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update note:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has now been reopened. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T18:59:53.307" Title="The potential for a /t/ in &quot;potential&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9652" CreationDate="2016-11-13T10:20:47.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur. The OP actually accepted the nominated duplicate (which is why it was shown as closed by Community) but certainly the sound in &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as the sound of &lt;em&gt;potential.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've re-opened that post. Presumably you have an answer formulated ready for it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T10:20:47.713" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9652" CreationDate="2016-11-13T16:50:17.590" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original poster had already accepted the linked question as a duplicate. It is clearly wrong to say that it has &quot;no relationship&quot; with the question that was asked. Not all speakers have a second [t] in &quot;potential.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for pointing out the potential for t-epenthesis here--I had overlooked that. That said, I don't think it requires an entirely new answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would have been sufficient to add a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250728/should-the-ipa-of-the-word-conscious-be-%CB%88k%C9%91%CB%90n%CA%83%C9%99s-or-%CB%88k%C9%91%CB%90nt%CA%83%C9%99s&quot;&gt;Should the IPA of the word &amp;quot;conscious&amp;quot; be /ˈkɑːnʃəs/ or /ˈkɑːntʃəs/?&lt;/a&gt;, which covers the exact same issue that you've interpreted this question to be about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think it's a bit hyperbolic to say that neglecting to mention t-epenthesis would have caused serious harm to the OP or future readers. It's good for English-language learners to know about this kind of epenthesis so that they won't be surprised if they hear it, and so that they can use it if that is easier for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not all varieties of English have this type of epenthesis. It's not incorrect to transcribe the pronunciation of &quot;potential&quot; as /pə'tɛnʃl/; phonemically, this may be the best transcription even for dialects with t-epenthesis. There are a host of other phonetic or dialect-dependent details not apparent from this transcription that might or might not be useful to mention depending on the specific learner: aspiration of /p/ and /t/, devoicing of /ə/, pen-pin merger changing /ɛ/ to /ɪ/, nasalization of the vowel before /n/, velarization of /l̩/ (or in some dialects, outright vocalization to something like [o]). Without more information from the original poster, it's hard to tell which elements of this transcription might be misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T18:59:53.307" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-13T23:58:09.167" Score="11" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History&lt;/strong&gt; On November 8 came this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/357460/mimsy-were-the-borogoves-why-is-mimsy-an-adjective&quot;&gt;Mimsy were the Borogoves - why is “mimsy” an adjective?&lt;/a&gt; for which I provided an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/357464/125330&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that I consider was fair to good. Over the course of the next two days came a series of comments directed at various parts of the answer, comments that led me to sharpen my presentation, add necessary missing information, and provide citations for the argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments were then moved to chat by @tchrist. My request to restore the comments from chat was ignored, and the comment itself deleted. Two further substantive comments were deleted on the grounds that once a comment thread is moved to chat, further comments cannot be moved there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another mod contacted me privately to admonish me for violating the &quot;Be Nice&quot; in my objection to tchrist's action. I rejected the charge and asked whether it might be possible to see this admonishment as objectionable. Let me be clear that the private communication was couched in the mildest possible terms and was accompanied by flattering comments about my contributions. (I would prefer that all mod actions be public, but this communication was private, so I will neither identify the correspondent nor quote the correspondence without permission. I don't believe my public comment in any way violated this site's etiquette, but I won't repeat my words. No matter of principle is involved in such forbearance, and to do otherwise would be a gratuitously insulting rejection of a polite request.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Commentary&lt;/strong&gt; I am going to detail as best I can how the commentary improved my answer. I do this for two reasons. First to demonstrate the nature of the contributions and their importance in improving the answer. And secondly, to give contributors due credit, the documentation for which is now either missing or sidelined to chat. Anyone not sufficiently interested in the question itself may skip this section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unknown. (Sorry, I can't find this in the chat transcript.) My discussion started at the lexical level, describing the formation of adjectives from nouns with the suffix &lt;em&gt;-sy&lt;/em&gt;. The suggestion is instead to start at the syntactic level to demonstrate how English grammar dictates the possibilities. This emendation starts with &lt;em&gt;At the suggestion of a kind commenter&lt;/em&gt; and ends with the first list of adjectives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@PJTraill. Who notes a missing discussion of the word &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; in the line beginning &lt;em&gt;All mimsy&lt;/em&gt;. The addition is an explanation of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; as either a universal determiner or an intensifying adverb, and you may find it following &lt;em&gt;At the prompt of a second kind commenter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Andrew Savinykh, @paolo. Who take issue with my argument that &lt;em&gt;mim&lt;/em&gt; must be the noun precursor for the adjective &lt;em&gt;mimsy&lt;/em&gt;, noting that words in the adjective list may have no such precursors. This prompts me to make the following necessary changes: note that I'm arguing for the weight of the vocabulary evidence, note every adjective that has either no precursor or only an obsolete one, describe how I came up with my lists to assure readers that I haven't place my thumb on the scale.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@echristopherson. Who notes the rarity of nouns ending &lt;em&gt;-ms&lt;/em&gt;. I haven't incorporated this observation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@paolo. Whose comment allowed me to note the difference between fluency and knowledge. Also unincorporated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unknown. Sorry, dropped or never made it to chat. This was a note about the possibly anachronistic use of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; as an intensifier. The response in the answer appears at &lt;em&gt;Note the ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all and sorry for any omissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why restore?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There appears no necessity for removal. Extended commentary appears&#xA;scattered about site unmolested. Go &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/357642/125330&quot;&gt;hither&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/357545/125330&quot;&gt;thither&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/357538/125330&quot;&gt;yon&lt;/a&gt;. Yeah, comments shouldn't be relied on to track useful contributions answers, but that's not the case here. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly what commentary is for. Discussions of specific&#xA;points raised in questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly what chat is not for. Chat is for extended and discursive ramblings peripherally related to a question or answer. I find chat utterly useless -- hard to use and hard to read. I doubt I'm alone in this opinion. It's a place where substantive discussion goes to die. And so it was in this case. (Sorry @Malvolio.) In addition, commentary goes astray, either in the move or during the after-the-fact deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This commentary provided an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/358059/125330&quot;&gt;exemplar&lt;/a&gt; of the kind of collaborative and informative work involving posters of varied rep levels and seniority. I submit visibility for that kind of effort helps encourage the process of providing for that supposed valuable repository of answers so cherished by some here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This commentary allowed me to credit contributors without cluttering the answer with asides or further footnotes. For all practical purposes, that's gone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I Expect&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After perusing the site during the composition of this post, I am somewhat surprised to find that the answer is nothing. (Well, nothing beyond the customary.) I do, however, wish to renew one further objection. Commentary on mod actions is clearly off topic, but mods should realize that summary deletion of such is a serious conflict of interest. For holders of power come responsibilities, and one of those is to forbear the erasure of criticism directed at oneself no matter how ill-founded that criticism is felt to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:54:32.087" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:54:32.087" Title="Undo removal of comments to chat" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2016-11-14T19:52:12.943" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot to address in your post, and I will address points as they come. My opinion is derived from my years as a member here, and my time serving as a moderator on another site. I believe the problems mods face are pretty similar from site to site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two further substantive comments were deleted on the grounds that once a comment thread is moved to chat, further comments cannot be moved there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods have a way of moving comments to chat with one action (it used to be a bit harder.) But there is &lt;em&gt;no way&lt;/em&gt; to move additional comments to chat once the conversation has been moved initially except by copy-pasting, which I've done as a mod on another site (I'm a softy) but no more; it's too labor-intensive even for a slow site. This is not a slow site.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would prefer that all mod actions be public, but this communication was private, so I will neither identify the correspondent nor quote the correspondence without permission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;mods&lt;/strong&gt; are under obligation to keep communications private, but you are not. You are actually free to shout it from the rooftops if you want to do so. Most people don't; some people do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am going to detail as best I can how the commentary improved my answer. I do this for two reasons. First to demonstrate the nature of the contributions and their importance in improving the answer. And secondly, to give contributors due credit, the documentation for which is now either missing or sidelined to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons to move a long comment thread to chat are many; there may be an argument in the comments that distracts from the answer, there may be comments unrelated to the post, there may be flags on the comments, etc. Or, the thread is simply too long (mods get a notice once a comment thread reaches a certain length) and it becomes something that detracts from the answer. SE prefers answers to be self-contained, which means comments can be incorporated into the answer, can be expanded into an answer, or they can simply disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people don't like their comments to simply disappear, which is why comment threads are moved to a chat room created for that purpose. But to ask for a thread to be reinstated is to ask that a detraction from a self-contained answer be reinstated, and I have never heard of this being done before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are people whose comments disappear, and who want to take it up in meta. In that case, they go to chat and ping a mod. The mod is usually happy to copy the deleted comment to chat for the commenter to use to build their case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Extended commentary appears scattered about site unmolested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true, because mods don't go around measuring comment threads (or even reading them.) But once flags have been raised calling the attention of a mod &lt;em&gt;to a particular comment&lt;/em&gt;, the mod usually takes action on all comments that need action. They will delete obsolete comments, remove rude or chatty ones, leave pertinent ones, or move a too long thread to a chat room. But unless a mod is made aware of a problem thread, they are usually left alone not because they deserve to be there, but because the mods are unaware of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not address your fine points of attribution, etc., as Tonepoet has done that justice in their comment above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Commentary on mod actions is clearly off topic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, as it has little to do with the post. But had you served as a mod on an SE site, you'd be aware that people complain in comments and on meta about mods &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt; (likely on some sites more than others.) People complain not only in comments &lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; and on a site's meta, but on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/267094/262486&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;lt;- a complaint about me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For holders of power come responsibilities, and one of those is to forbear the erasure of criticism directed at oneself no matter how ill-founded that criticism is felt to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is nonsense. Comments aren't for criticising anyone. If they don't fulfill the purpose of a comment, they are subject to deletion, period. No need to keep that on the main site &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. That is what Meta is for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you don't know which mod removed the offensive comment(s). When a disagreement breaks out, the custom is to get other mods involved exactly to prevent conflict of interest and poor judgement from prevailing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not involved in the question/answer in any way except to enjoy it. I hope you can appreciate this answer as from someone not involved at all, but who knows the SE model pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[1] This is a site feature which has been requested exactly for the reason that users would rather see their comments somewhere - even in a chat room - rather than deleted. I want that too, and from the number of upvotes the proposal got, so do a lot of others. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[2] Personally, I have never removed a complaint about me in comments; this is when I ask fellow mods to review the entire comment thread or post and thread. In meta, I feel a mod has the responsibility to answer complaints about themselves, but sometimes other mods do so when the complaints are clearly egregious. I don't have the same expectation of all mods. That's just my opinion about how I should handle complaints for the sake of transparency.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T03:35:06.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9644" CreationDate="2016-11-15T01:36:37.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As promised, the question pairs now load faster -- on average -- than they did last weekend.  Sometimes the next pair loads quickly, and sometimes there is a long delay. If all the questions loaded as quickly as the quickest, giving Melbourne feedback would be easy and fun, but enough still load very slowly so that one needs an alternate task to turn to while waiting.  Thanks for speeding it up.  It is much less of a chore to give you feedback now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also enough duplicates and relateds to make it interesting. Did a human being salt the Demo, or is the computer learning?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On what basis should we decide whether X is a duplicate of Y or Y a duplicate of X?  (Apologies if you explained that somewhere.) I made my choices partly on the comprehensiveness and quality of the answer pairs, not solely on the c &amp;amp; q of the question pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of questions are still completely unrelated -- some are so unrelated that asking if they are duplicates made me laugh. It seems that humans are still good for something.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2016-11-15T02:06:54.843" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T02:06:54.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9660" CreationDate="2016-11-15T12:41:22.320" Score="8" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can we get small capitals to appear in our answer posts? There is no guidance that I can find anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some that I've copied and pasted, but I can't actually get small caps to appear in the dialogue box myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;2 : to put on the appearance of : &lt;strong&gt;sɪᴍᴜʟᴀᴛᴇ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-11-17T05:08:17.887" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T05:08:17.887" Title="How can we use small caps in our posts?" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9658" CreationDate="2016-11-15T13:21:33.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I’m delighted you asked...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but as I am unclear on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clusivity of &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I shall answer not in the semantically ambiguous first person plural but in the far more concrete first person singular, explaining what I myself do. I merely run whatever lowercased text string through the following one-to-one transliteration set via &lt;a href=&quot;https://metacpan.org/release/Unicode-Tussle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a simple little ᴄʟɪ tool&lt;/a&gt; written in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perl&lt;/a&gt;, wherein I map each code point from the first set to the one that figures immediately below it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tr[aæbcdðeǝfgɠhiɨjklłmnoœɔȣprɹꝵstuʉɯvwyzʒγλπρψл]&#xA;  [ᴀᴁʙᴄᴅᴆᴇⱻꜰɢʛʜɪᵻᴊᴋʟᴌᴍɴᴏɶᴐᴕᴘʀᴚꝶꜱᴛᴜᵾꟺᴠᴡʏᴢᴣᴦᴧᴨᴩᴪᴫ];&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not always produce the most appealing of results in our selected type face, but in the fullness of time this too shall pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is currently less that idea, given its current incompleteness: there’s nothing for &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; are so newly defined that support for them in your computer’s implementation of our selected Georgia face may be poor, triggering an ugly font-substitution algorithm to kick in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because these are actual code points not out-of-band formatting mark-up, this has the advantage of surviving reuse of the content which loses formatting. However, it has the disadvantage of being at the mercy of whoever cut the type, er, created the electronic font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the CSS style sheet for our site could be modified so that when someone used &lt;code&gt;**bold**&lt;/code&gt; here it produced a span with this CSS style hint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;font-feature-settings: &amp;quot;smcp&amp;quot; 1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we could in the most trivial of ways employ the actual small capitals in our own font, allowing us to produce text like this via simple markdown&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;em&gt;content credit to the ᴏᴇᴅ, typesetting my own&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gj8wd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gj8wd.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of small caps done right&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;                  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gj8wd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt; to see properly rendered without compression artifacts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn’t that elegant?  It’s how real dictionaries do things, you know, and quite useful in scholarly text. Alas, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5484/2085&quot;&gt;my ancient entreaties&lt;/a&gt; that this be done fall ever on ears deaf to the request and eyes blind to the aesthetics of type well set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had my druthers, all inline &lt;code&gt;**bold markup**&lt;/code&gt; on ᴇʟᴜ would magically work this way, with the font’s actual bold reserved for headers where it belongs, not used as inline weighting where specifying bold would map to native small capitals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus it would give &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3408/2085&quot;&gt;Professor Lawler’s weighting score&lt;/a&gt; another ᴄᴏɴᴛʀᴏʟ-ᴍᴇᴛᴀ-ᴄᴏᴋᴇ-ʙᴏᴛᴛʟᴇ &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bucky-bits.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bucky bit&lt;/a&gt; to dress up one’s postings with. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T13:21:33.297" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9658" CreationDate="2016-11-15T13:39:19.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible to get a &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;REASONABLE APPROXIMATION&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; of small caps by enclosing a string of capitals in both &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (in that order). As you see, the baselines don't line up exactly, although the size is quite a good match for the x-height of normal text. True small caps should be slightly wider than a simple optical reduction, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;REASONABLE APPROXIMATION&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method is easy and will display something intelligible in browsers that can't handle the full Unicode set. If that doesn't appeal, then there's either tchrist's method, or using the Windows Character Map application to find, copy and paste real small caps. That app does not make it easy to find small capitals in fonts, though, and there's no guarantee that other systems will be able to display them (it depends on browser capabilities and the fonts installed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T13:39:19.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2016-11-15T16:59:22.333" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9655/undo-removal-of-comments-to-chat/9656#9656&quot;&gt;medica wrote an excellent response here already&lt;/a&gt;; I'd just like to emphasize one thing: &lt;strong&gt;in years past &lt;em&gt;we just deleted comments like these&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, removing them permanently with no record whatsoever so as to make room for new ones...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THAT is the alternative here: permanent deletion. That a moderator took extra time to archive the comments is nice, but quite honestly if you make too much of a fuss over that they'll probably go back to just wiping the threads and moving on since it's a lot less work. OTOH, if you don't like chat, then fine, &lt;em&gt;don't use it&lt;/em&gt; - pretend the comments are gone and move on with your life. You've already made the necessary edits to your answer and the comments continue to exist only as a dusty file in an archive somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important bit here is that you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; relegate critical information to the comments, where readers may well ignore them, where they can't be searched or updated, where new bits of feedback become increasingly buried - because that's how most other forums work, that's why it's so tedious and error-prone to do any research on the 'Net, and that's &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; the problem all of this was created to get away from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;What are comments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237978/a-guide-to-moderating-comments&quot;&gt;A guide to moderating comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286907/writing-comments-to-a-post-after-comments-have-been-moved-to-chat&quot;&gt;Writing comments to a post after comments have been moved to chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T16:59:22.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T23:05:48.550" Score="1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;A veteran SE member recently posted this question here on ELU &amp;mdash; an increasingly rare and and very welcome syntax question, worthy of our site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/357709/are-these-parts-of-speech-correct&quot;&gt;Are these parts of speech correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was difficult to format well, was closed in the first instance and then reopened after being edited. The OP was harangued into splitting their question into different parts - although, in my opinion, these were minor aspects of a quite simple question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore requested in my edit to this Meta-post here ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9646/can-we-reopen-this-question-please-now-re-closed&quot;&gt;Can we reopen this question please? [Now re-CLOSED]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... that the question remain closed, as the OP had spent a long time rejigging their question into three new separate questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the OP's original question, and the answer that I gave there have now been flagged for deletion by a member here (edit: since the posting of this question, 2 members). I feel that the answer, which I spent a reasonable amount of care and time over, is of benefit to readers - even if the question has been closed.  The question itself has 7 upvotes. The answer has ten upvotes and has been accepted by the OP. The question itself currently has 4 reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to preserve this answer or this content for future readers here, please vote to reopen this question. This will prevent it's imminent deletion. One reopen vote will do the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit note:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been reopened, which saved its content and the content of its answers for future users. Thank you to the re-opener. There seems to be a problem at the moment with the over-zealous closing of linguistics questions (imo). I hope we don't let this spread to the overzealous deleting of linguistics content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T11:07:02.937" Title="Can we prevent this question from being deleted, please?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9668" CreationDate="2016-11-16T03:41:24.847" Score="4" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordinating-conjunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordinating-conjunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordinating-conjunctions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordination&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordination&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordination&lt;/a&gt; Tag wiki says &quot;Questions about coördinating conjunctions, such as “and”, “but”, “or”, “nor”, and “so”.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem pretty clearly synonymous. I'd recommend marking &quot;coordinating conjunctions&quot; as a synonym of &quot;coordination&quot; rather than vice versa since the latter already has a tag wiki, and that way we can cover any edge-case questions about coordination without conjunctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-11-17T05:03:33.117" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T05:03:33.117" Title="&quot;coordinating-conjunctions&quot; and &quot;coordination&quot; tags should be synonymized" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9665" CreationDate="2016-11-16T08:16:28.390" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was disappointed to discover that my rep. had fallen from 11 down to 5. I'd appreciate if someone could help me out, thanks :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" OwnerDisplayName="Louie Bnouie" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T08:56:50.813" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T09:26:37.300" Title="Does deleting former posts add reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9664" CreationDate="2016-11-16T09:26:37.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleting posts which have a negative score and which have attracted a penalty thereby should restore the reputation lost. It's a little more complicated than that, because &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; votes are reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer which has a single downvote (score &amp;minus;1) will have incurred a penalty of 2 points. Deleting that answer will restore those points. It also restores the &amp;minus;1 penalty incurred by the downvoter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer which has a &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; score of &amp;minus;1 reached by an upvote and two downvotes will have gained +10 for the upvote and &amp;minus;4 for the two downvotes. Removing that answer will restore the rep lost from the downvotes but also the rep gained from  the upvote. That will result in a net loss of six points, the same as the net gain it had from votes. Again, the downvoters' penalty is also restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar mechanism operates for questions, albeit with different numbers (an upvote is worth +5, a downvote &amp;minus;2, with no penalty for the downvoter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see your reputation moves on your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/201373/louie-bnouie?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;profile page&lt;/a&gt;, and the public view shows the movement resulting from posts which still exist (1 + 10 &amp;minus; 2 &amp;minus; 2 &amp;minus;2 = 5). You may be able to see more detail there than other users. Moderators have access to some slightly more detailed data than is generally available &amp;mdash; which, just to be clear, does not include the identities of voters. I don't propose to go into that detail in a public answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T09:26:37.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-16T21:06:50.487" Score="10" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;We receive a large number of questions about the proper use of pronouns, which in turn means that many of these questions are closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; duplicates of one another, though: there are actually several topics involved. It’s true they’re related, but they’re not all the same, and the topic is confusing enough that I think it’s a good idea to focus on one main topic per question (and to have a separate question for each topic, so that people can write detailed answers that aren’t too long).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should have a better dupe target for &lt;strong&gt;questions about the order of pronouns in coordinate noun phrases&lt;/strong&gt; (in particular, the “me/I last” rule). By &quot;better&quot; I mean &quot;more focused on this particular issue.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We just got a question about this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358684/is-i-and-he-just-as-correct-as-he-and-i&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;I and he&amp;quot; just as correct as &amp;quot;He and I&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; I marked it as a duplicate of the following question: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1133/my-friends-and-i-vs-my-friends-and-me-vs-me-and-my-friends&quot;&gt;Should I put myself last? &amp;quot;me and my friends&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;my friends and me&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;my friends and I&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. That question was originally titled “Should I Put Myself Last (&quot;me and you&quot; vs &quot;you and I&quot;)?” However, it was later edited on Oct 9 '12  to “'My friends and I' vs. 'My friends and me' vs. 'Me and my friends'”. I actually prefer the original title. Since the edit, it has attracted some answers that don’t actually address the original question about word order at all, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/102869/77227&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/102869/77227&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/102874/77227&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/102874/77227&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138478/me-and-x-or-x-and-me?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Me and X or X and me?&lt;/a&gt; is another earlier question focused on the issue of order, but it was marked as a duplicate of the preceding question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have dupe targets that specifically address case in various circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case of pronouns in coordinate noun phrases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7188/which-is-correct-you-and-i-or-you-and-me&quot;&gt;Which is correct: &amp;quot;you and I&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;you and me&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;. It’s clear what this question is about, and it addresses a single rule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case after the copula.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30336/it-is-me-vs-it-is-i&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;It is me&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;It is I&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case in sentence fragments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4556/who-wants-ice-cream-should-i-say-not-i-or-not-me&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Who wants ice-cream?&amp;quot; — Should I say &amp;quot;(not) I&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;(not) me&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it's best if our dupe target for pronoun order &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; focus on the issue of case, which is well-covered elsewhere. This seems to have been the original intention of the OP, but I'm unsure what to do now that the title has been edited for so long and it's accumulated several answers about case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best way to deal with this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T21:06:50.487" Title="We should have a better dupe target for questions about pronoun order" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9663" CreationDate="2016-11-17T05:03:23.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should be all taken care of now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T05:03:23.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9662" CreationDate="2016-11-17T11:07:02.937" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be three identical questions asked by the same OP before you posted this Meta question as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358211/nouns-vs-nouns-used-as-adjectives&quot;&gt;Nouns vs. nouns used as adjectives&lt;/a&gt; asked on Nov 14 at 3:07&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358212/verbs-vs-gerunds-vs-something-else&quot;&gt;Verbs vs. gerunds vs. something else?&lt;/a&gt; asked Nov 14 at 3:11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358245/adjectives-vs-determinatives&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Those other people&amp;quot;: Adjectives vs. determinatives&lt;/a&gt; asked Nov 14 at 7:26&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was quite surprising to find that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) it took only four minutes for the OP to write the second question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) all three additional questions are 100% identical to the question&#xA;  below other than changed titles and &quot;It originally came from this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/357709/are-these-parts-of-speech-correct&quot;&gt;closed&#xA;  question&lt;/a&gt;&quot; added at the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/357709/are-these-parts-of-speech-correct&quot;&gt;Are these parts of speech correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) you posted this question after more than 27 hours passed since the&#xA;  third additional question was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU seems to have a few options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dupe-close or delete the first original question as three additional questions are exact duplicates. As other questions are 100%&#xA;  identical, I don't see any reason not to delete the first question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the 2nd, 3rd and 4th questions to clarify what is being asked. There are too many unrelated example sentences and parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question reads too broad, you should wait until the question is narrowed down with one specific question or two. If you answer such a question and when the question is split, it can create such mess that ELU has now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you should note that Stack Exchange has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/222735/can-i-ask-only-one-question-per-post&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;one question per post policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and when a question is too broad, we usually ask the OP to narrow it down before answering it. If you had waited until the question was edited, none of this mess would have been created in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the OP doesn't seem to know how to ask a question on ELU. When a user with over 2K reputation points shows such a behavior, it is worrisome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T11:07:02.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-18T16:16:13.843" Score="65" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the last few months, I have been going through the process of being diagnosed with cancer. The English mod team, SE community moderators, and mods from other sites have been very supportive and understanding during this period, and now that I'm taking a leave of absence for treatment, I felt it was time to share the news with the EL&amp;amp;U community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I want to reassure you that the moderation team has the workload covered. The diagnosis process started before the moderator election this year, and while it wasn't the driving factor for the election, we took into consideration that I might be absent for an extended period or step down when we were deciding how many moderators would likely be needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I want to reassure you that I will be OK. It is serious (adenocarcinoma of the lung) and requires surgery to remove part of my right lung, but the prognosis is very positive. Once the tumor is removed, no further intervention is necessary. I will be &quot;cured&quot;. Surgery is not fun, but this cancer is not going to kill me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be on leave until probably mid-January 2017, which means that sadly, I will miss the Hat Dash this year. If you want to get in touch with me in the meantime, you can comment or post an answer here. It will pop into the inbox on my phone, so I will see it, although it will be difficult for me to respond to it. Or you can ask any moderator to pass information to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards to you all and I will see you next year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T13:33:45.413" Title="Why I'm absent for a little while" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9672" CreationDate="2016-11-20T13:43:01.790" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to ask on english.stackexchange.com questions about meaning of some sentences. For example, I have a quote from Lovecraft and I don't understand what does it mean at all, can I ask it here, or it's better to ask on ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T14:35:49.690" Title="Questions about &quot;what does that sentence mean&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2016-11-20T14:35:49.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It all depends&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, questions that do nothing but present a passage of text and ask what that passage means are offtopic on both sites. Stack Exchange does not provide paraphrasing services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are normally too wide open and unspecific to help anyone but the asker, which runs against our mission of building of a library of useful answers that will help future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These usually show no research, which will get them downvoted, and are generally considered too broad for our format. Interpretation of literature is also offtopic in a general sense, although specific questions about the underlying mechanics of the language used are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Improvements&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is make these questions interesting in the hope that they will attract expert answers.  You should be very specific about what you do not understand and why you do not understand it. You should tell us what you have already looked up and where, and tell us why what it said did not help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for which site you place your revised question on, that would depend in part on what sort of answer you are hoping to elicit. If you are looking for answers from linguists, etymologists, and serious English-language enthusiasts, then you should post it to ELU. But if you are looking for answers for people who are just getting started at learning English as a foreign language, then you should post it to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it takes merely a native speaker to answer, you probably should post it to ELL. If it requires an expert in English linguistics, then probably you should post it to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Examples of good “meaning” questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For excellent examples of how to construct questions about meaning that are extremely well-received here, look no farther than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=user%3a3119%20%5bmeaning%5d&quot;&gt;this list of questions from our moderator, Yoichi Oishi ♦&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T14:35:49.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9674" CreationDate="2016-11-20T15:24:49.153" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Community&lt;/em&gt; user edited the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/327529/142322&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;spot inspection&amp;quot; make sense?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R8dxE.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R8dxE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question itself has no edit trail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vse6I.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vse6I.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: what did the Community user edit, and where is the edit trail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I understand that the Community user isn't a real user, but they should still leave an audit trail when an edit is claimed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The edit claimed by the system was done months after the question was asked, so it wasn't a 'recent post' masking of the editing, even if such were possible for a &lt;em&gt;Community&lt;/em&gt; edit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It wasn't an edit of the answer - there's only one answer to the 'spot inspection' question (&lt;em&gt;disclaimer: I supplied the answer&lt;/em&gt;), but the answer wasn't edited either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T16:02:38.520" Title="What did the Community user edit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9673" CreationDate="2016-11-20T16:02:38.520" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was no edit. Our beloved Communibot has bumped the post as shown &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/327529/timeline&quot;&gt;here in the public timeline&lt;/a&gt; for that post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kkdtg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kkdtg.png&quot; alt=&quot;public timeline&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.893" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T16:02:38.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-20T19:07:06.053" Score="14" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand there is a limited list of common reasons to declare a question as off-topic, and that we have to stretch some terms to provide coverage, but I am genuinely confused by what is meant by lit crit on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/359306/old-soldier-in-a-pejorative-sense&quot;&gt;What does the expression &amp;quot;old soldier&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt;, I see nothing that even approaches lit crit. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that the question can be addressed constructively from well-sourced examples. I don't see what distinguishes this question from any other question that provides an example of the usage they are curious about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the subject of the discussion is the phrase in question, and not the peculiarities of the author, I don't see any lit crit, regardless of how much textural context is needed to support an answer. Some questions do require a lot of context when meanings have changed over time, literary styles have changed over time, and the cultures reflected in the dialog have changed over time. These issues may need to be addressed in the answer; and I feel it detracts from the site if we feel forced to avoid them in our answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What role does needing extensive context play in determining lit crit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is discussing usage with respect to literary style off-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are answers pertaining to literary dialog more susceptible to being labeled lit crit? If so is this a problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T08:44:25.680" Title="What criteria are used to close for &quot;lit crit&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9681" CreationDate="2016-11-20T21:38:25.603" Score="7" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I set a bounty on a question and I think I may have missed the deadline.  I upvoted the answer I thought was the best, and I accepted it, but there was no thingie on the left for me to award the bounty.  Is that because I missed the deadline?  Where did the bounty go in this case, and can I award it now somehow to the following answer?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/359033/112436&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/359033/112436&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind the 50 points disappearing -- after all, I should have kept to the deadline-- but I wanted to give the accepted answer the bounty.  I noticed there is apparently an opportunity to open a new bounty.  Really?  I can start a new bounty, this time to reward an existing answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T14:51:59.063" Title="Did I miss the bounty deadline and if so, is there any way of manually awarding it?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9676" CreationDate="2016-11-20T23:20:40.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/272535/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/272535/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you missed it, and it looks like you missed the grace period too. &quot;Bounty Ended with no winning answer by Community♦&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the system requires a post with at least two upvotes to automatically award the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T23:20:40.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9676" CreationDate="2016-11-20T23:20:47.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I’m sorry but you’ve missed the deadline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because no new answer posted after the bounty was set managed to reach a score of 2, nor any new answer marked as accepted, those repubits have now all been recycled by the great repcatcher in the æther.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to an MSE question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/56298&quot;&gt;“Why aren't bounties refunded if they are not awarded?”&lt;/a&gt;, Grace, one of our community managers, answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bounty is not a guarantee. It's less risky in the new system, but it never has, nor ever will be, a guarantee for the answers you need. It's payment for a &lt;em&gt;bid for an answer&lt;/em&gt;, not payment for actual answers themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that although you didn't get an actual answer, you did get 7 days on the Featured tab. If you got refunded, then you could keep your question on the Featured tab forever, which really reduces the benefit that placing a bounty has in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, consider this like a parking meter - the reputation you spent is good enough for only 7 days. If you need more time, you need to spend more reputation. Of course, it's a parking meter where you can pay however much you want and get the same amount of time, but the extra payment is for the possibility of better quality attention during that same period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, a refund request feature for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/21609&quot;&gt;“Should bounty be returned if there is NO answer at all?”&lt;/a&gt; was marked &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I’m afraid that’s all she wrote, as the saying goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T23:20:47.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-21T09:20:10.913" Score="3" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to pick on any of our users or mods, but I must admit that I do not see the merit in answering this question when it showed zero evidence of research: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/359359/59258&quot;&gt;Within or inside?&lt;/a&gt; (it has since been edited by someone else.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that a lot of questions are contentious, with no clear amount of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5459/59258&quot;&gt;required research&lt;/a&gt; or no easy way to try to do that pre-asking research. But &quot;Within or Inside?&quot; is not one of those. It's a very simple question. Maybe not all dictionaries would raise the issue of the different parts of speech, but we don't require question askers to be successful in their research, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5365/59258&quot;&gt;only that they show they've attempted to do some&lt;/a&gt;. (That's why it's different from the old general reference close reason, which was about the intrinsic merits of the question, and was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4921/59258&quot;&gt;necessarily much more subjective and harder to judge&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of high rep users who disagree with closing these questions. They have the right to disagree and also to answer them if they wish. But shouldn't the mods be modeling the site standards? Shouldn't mods raise an issue on Meta if they disagree with them, rather than blatantly ignoring them? If a mod has answered that question then we can only conclude that the standards have in effect been changed, in which case, let's just remove the close reason entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T19:20:04.240" Title="Has the insufficient research close reason been retired?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|research-effort|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9679" CreationDate="2016-11-21T10:43:01.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The close-reason &quot;more research required&quot; is meant to be a means of closing questions &lt;em&gt;that require more research&lt;/em&gt; to be useful and interesting questions. When users ask questions that are self-eminently useful and or of interest to any linguists or language enthusiasts, these questions should not be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is NOT the case, that reviewers should look at every question and ask &lt;em&gt;has the Original Poster shown their research?&lt;/em&gt;, but rather, does this question &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; more research to become a decent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is a comment on whether the question in question should have been closed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close-reasons are not meant to stand in for common sense. We are still required to apply some critical evaluation of a question's merits in terms of their benefit to the site and to other users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-11-21T11:36:40.800" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T11:36:40.800" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9676" CreationDate="2016-11-21T11:41:16.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may indeed set a new bounty to reward an existing answer - in fact, when you offer a bounty, this is given as one of the choices for explaining why the bounty is being given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only small snag is that when a second or third bounty is offered, the bounty itself needs to be (at least) double the points of the previous bounty. So, if you wanted to offer a new bounty, it would have to be for 100 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2016-11-21T14:51:59.063" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T14:51:59.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9676" CreationDate="2016-11-21T14:04:43.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I appreciate your enthusiasm in following up on your original bounty I don't  think that the question or any of the answers are particularly helpful to ELU. Since it's all based on the whimsical usage of a single internet comment by a non-native speaker this question is off-topic from the get go. Unfortunately the continuous barrage of bounties blocks close voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to coin the term &lt;em&gt;hurzel-purzel-word&lt;/em&gt; the only knowledgeable person about that word is me. The same applies to the &lt;em&gt;uber-word&lt;/em&gt;. Once again: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I made up the combination uber-word, but the etymological root is of course &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cber#In_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users/48743/hagen-von-eitzen&quot;&gt;Hagen von Eitzen&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23999664#23999664&quot;&gt;here the chat log&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is essentially a request for chat analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the original commenter did not involve him- or herself in this question we remain clueless about the precise meaning. Thankfully the accepted answer holds a disclaimer that it is full of guesswork. It had been good judgement when what's now an answer was posted as a comment and not an answer. There is no authoritative source, there are three options which are obviously guesswork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JOSH's answer on the other hand gives detailed information about the current use of &lt;em&gt;uber&lt;/em&gt; in English, yet we have no idea in which way the term &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to be supercharged by the prefix since the current usage does not yield immediately sensible conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, I implore you to not award the bounty to any answer. In seven days we will finally be able to close the question without setting further precedents for awarding guesswork or answers that still leave one guessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T14:04:43.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9679" CreationDate="2016-11-21T15:58:08.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I generally agree with Araucaria's opinion that a certain leeway is necessary in judging the required research for a question I do think that any research effort should go past this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've read a lot of letters with these words and the people say that[sic] mean the same.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last half of the sentence is just not a valid basis for a question. It's certainly not any sort of herculean effort to at least look at a dictionary. That should in my view be the minimum bar for any &lt;em&gt;word meaning&lt;/em&gt; questions: &lt;em&gt;Have at least one look at a dictionary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit there is a bit of impression about the asker's effort involved. If there had been the added sentence, &lt;em&gt;I looked in the dictionary and the definitions didn't help me,&lt;/em&gt; I would likely not have voted to close. In my opinion a question regarding meaning of a word should include information about why looking at a dictionary did not help the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;P.S. I happily voted to reopen the question with the added research. After all, post improvements are always a good thing.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T15:58:08.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9679" CreationDate="2016-11-21T23:49:26.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are lots of high rep users who disagree with closing these&#xA;  questions. They have the right to disagree and also to answer them if&#xA;  they wish. But shouldn't the mods be modeling the site standards?&#xA;  Shouldn't mods raise an issue on Meta if they disagree with them,&#xA;  rather than blatantly ignoring them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it’s obligatory for any user, and definitely not for mods, to close a question just because an applicable close reason exists. To paraphrase Jesus, “the close reasons were made for the voters, and not the voters for the close reasons.” Everyone is expected to use judgment and not just robotically vote to close a question. The standards are set by the community; as that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5459/new-close-reason-include-the-research&quot;&gt;linked post&lt;/a&gt; says, the text was changed because the &quot;new reason more adequately conveys why the community was closing general reference questions.&quot; My interpretation of that: it's descriptive, not prescriptive. The way the community sets standards is by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;its actual voting patterns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Our site has plenty of high-rep users with closing privileges; I don't think we need to rely on mods to close questions that break the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition,  the system is set up to allow anyone to post an answer to an open question. This is the standard for ordinary users. I don’t see why mods should be held to a different, stricter standard, when as you point out, there is not even a consensus among high rep users that having such a strict standard is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think raising issues on Meta is good for mod actions that go against an established community consensus or that are unremediable by ordinary users. But a mod answering an open question that other people think should be closed is neither of these. After the mod's answer is posted, if you still think the question is not useful, you’re able to vote to close it, and then vote to delete it. If you don’t think the mod’s answer is useful, you can always downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be legitimate to object if the community closed a question like this, and then a mod re-opened it without discussion to post an answer. But that would be a different situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a mod has answered that&#xA;  question then we can only conclude that the standards have in effect&#xA;  been changed, in which case, let's just remove the close reason&#xA;  entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this close reason should remain. It seems to be used fairly often; I don't understand how it would benefit anyone to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T00:41:33.037" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9675" CreationDate="2016-11-22T08:44:25.680" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lit crit is the examination and analysis of literature as reduced to a set of &quot;texts&quot;, i.e., as works unrelated to the usual classifications like novel, play, poetry, etc. The inquiry is performed through the lens of literary theory, a method of applying various social theories (e.g., marxism, feminism, gender studies, etc.) to the texts. There is some claim that lit crit is the application of the theory, but it would be hard to make a distinction since both are written in identical and impenetrable jargon that is so abstract and metaphoric that it can have no meaning discernible to the reader. (That is, the only possible method of understanding would have to be to query the critic directly.) For an example, try typing &quot;Sian Ede&quot; in the search box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite explication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; What's the difference between a literary theorist and a mafia don?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; A literary theorist makes you an offer you can't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As used here, the term is a misnomer applied to questions that ask about the interpretation of a passage of a work as that passage is related to the overall theme or deeper meaning of the work. There are a few works that would have definite answers (say, &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt;), but for most literature, any answer would be hopelessly opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the lit crit charge were used solely to close questions that are thus hopeless to answer -- many of which are motivated, I suspect, by the approaching deadline of a school assignment -- that would be fine. But the charge is also used in an attempt to discourage any discussion of context for the understanding of specific words, terms, or phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;old soldier&lt;/em&gt; answer is a case in point. Understanding this term requires some understanding of the class structure of Trollope's day. In another recent example, you're not likely to understand the wording of a passage of Mary Wollstonecraft's &lt;em&gt;A Vindication of the Rights of Woman&lt;/em&gt; without knowing about Talleyrand's contribution to &lt;em&gt;The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, careful judgment is required to distinguish between a question that seeks an explication of the context of a work of literature and a question that seeks the understanding of the language of a work, when that understanding in turn requires understanding some context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, in the case of lit crit itself, there is no discernible distinction. Again, search for &lt;em&gt;Sean Ede&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T08:44:25.680" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-22T21:22:13.897" Score="16" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the multiple-choice options that close voters are invited to select as justification for voting to close a question posted on English Language &amp;amp; Usage emphasizes the absence of evident research in the body of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please include the research you've done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the merits of this close reason, it doesn't on its face foreclose the possibility that someone other than the original poster will try to satisfy the identified shortcoming by adding research to the question. In doing so, of course, the person making the addition may be criticized for intentionally or inadvertently altering the nature and direction of the original question—and thus frustrating the OP's attempt to get a suitable answer. As a commenter put it yesterday,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The value of mindreading askers and adding research they never performed is a question for another day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's make it a question for today: &lt;strong&gt;Should English Language &amp;amp; Usage forbid third parties from adding research to questions that are subject to closure for lack of research, on the ground that such additions necessarily involve guesswork about and approximations of what the OP wants to know, and on the ground that such editing may shanghai the OP's original question and refocus it in a direction unintended by the OP?&lt;/strong&gt; Are there other good reasons to adopt a policy of leaving posters to sink or swim on their own when trying to ask questions that EL&amp;amp;U close voters find acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit that I have a strong bias in favor of intervening to save and improve potentially interesting questions. In part that's because, as a copy editor, I make my living reading the minds of authors who have expressed themselves ambiguously or incompletely, and trying to express their thoughts more clearly and seamlessly—often to the extent of adding or citing research that they have omitted. My experience (or professional hauteur, as the case may be) leaves me unapologetic about the mindreading aspect of the job; after all, I'm not the only reader who will have to struggle to make sense of the ambiguity or gap if the text remains as it is. And if I get it wrong, the author can set things right easily enough by clarifying what his or her intentions were. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my bias in favor of intervention also comes in part from a sense that what matters long term at EL&amp;amp;U is recognition and refinement of questions worth answering—not careful adherence to the limits of a poster's original conception of the dimensions of the question posed. If a poster asks a question that has very interesting implications, but the poster exhibits no awareness of those implications, I think it is counterproductive to insist that we adopt what we take (using our mindreading powers again) to be the poster's narrow conception of the question—especially when doing so will lead us to close the question as unfit for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My views on adding research to potentially interesting questions are similar: Why should we think that our primary duty in dealing with a question that lacks research is to uphold the poster's autonomy and integrity in having chosen not to include research? If the long-term goal of accumulating a full roster of useful answers to interesting questions is central to EL&amp;amp;U's reason for existing, I think we should take that goal seriously and do what we can to promote it. And I think we serve that goal better by making the improvement of potentially good questions our primary focus than we do by ensuring that we do not stray from strict fidelity to the question asker's original (and quite possibly myopic) intent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T18:01:19.163" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T15:19:22.527" Title="Editing Questions, Adding Research, and Reading the Original Poster's Mind" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T05:05:21.050" Score="-2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/262503/any-slang-word-for-debt-collector-specially-among-gangsters-criminals/262543#262543&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; from a year ago suggested &quot;Shylock&quot; as a slang term for &quot;debt-collector&quot; and received 4 upvotes. Academics still debate whether Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was anti-Semitic, but there's absolutely NO debate about whether it's anti-Semitic for denizens of the 21st century to use Shylock as a synonym for loan shark. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer cited this 2014 TIME article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://time.com/3394403/shylock-biden/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;When Did ‘Shylock’ Become a Slur?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and used quotes from it totally out of context, completely changing its meaning. This is the meaning those passages were actually conveying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word “shylock,” which has been used to refer to loan sharks, is an&#xA;  eponym from a Jewish character in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of&#xA;  Venice. Jewish Americans have publicly challenged the portrayal as an&#xA;  insult to Jews for more than 50 years, even as it remained a fixture of the modern lexicon. Today, “shylock” is considered an anti-Semitic slur [...] [but] the term was, not&#xA;  too long ago, considered by many to be appropriate for public usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A quick survey of TIME’s archives reveals 119 articles that use the&#xA;  word. Many of those are articles about The Merchant of Venice and&#xA;  Philip Roth’s book Operation Shylock — but the last time it was used&#xA;  casually, without reference to the character, was in a 1977 story&#xA;  about the mafia”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article goes on to reference a &quot;slang lexicographer&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Concern about Shylock wasn’t new in the ’60s either. Writing in the&#xA;  journal Engage, slang lexicographer Jonothan Green has noted the word&#xA;  was listed in a 1950s collection of “schoolyard wit and wisdom” as a&#xA;  taunt for Jews. (Green also notes that the word doesn’t start to&#xA;  appear to mean a loan shark until the 19th century.) [...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short,&#xA;  “shylock” has long been considered offensive — but that didn’t stop&#xA;  its casual use in conversation and print at least into the 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best way to handle something like that? I would think it should either be flagged as hate speech/offensive or at a minimum, edited to clarify that it's considered an anti-Semitic slur in modern usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207139" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T21:47:20.413" Title="What's the best way to address an antisemitic slur suggested as an answer over a year ago?" Tags="|discussion|support|flagging|answers|offensive|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9688" CreationDate="2016-11-23T05:17:49.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It must not have been an “anti-semitic slur” for Joe Biden, and I had never heard of it being considered that either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it’s still  a way to portray someone as a brutal loanshark unrelated to their personal and private religious preferences. I’m not especially keen on that myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But aren’t pretty much all the answers on that page mean words? Should they all have disclaimers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should we just stop catering to people who ask for words to use in unkindness against their fellow?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we did that, we might have no traffic left on the site. :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T05:17:49.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9688" CreationDate="2016-11-23T10:41:18.373" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would certainly take &quot;Shylock&quot; these days to refer to the unsavoury aspects of loan-sharkiness rather than be anything to do with religion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that British attitudes to language differ slightly from American attitudes. But we also need to bear in mind that this is a site &lt;strong&gt;about language.&lt;/strong&gt; Knowledge is amoral, and it's up to those with the knowledge as to whether they turn it to moral or immoral purposes. That is to say, this site seeks to be academic and there should be no restriction on the academic discussion of language. Once that language is taken out of that academic context, it could certainly be used pejoratively &amp;mdash; but that's outside our control &lt;em&gt;and responsibility.&lt;/em&gt; Stating that a word exists with the meaning requested does not necessarily license or condone its use. If that were the case, dictionaries would be half the size they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there would be no harm in following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9688/whats-the-best-way-to-address-an-antisemitic-slur-suggested-as-an-answer-over-a#comment37976_9688&quot;&gt;terdon's suggestion in a comment&lt;/a&gt;: Why not just propose an edit and add a sentence like &quot;Note that this term can be considered offensive&quot;? That is almost certainly the best course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T10:41:18.373" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9688" CreationDate="2016-11-23T14:08:00.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two issues here. The linguistic/cognitive nature of the fact and then how this site deal with such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no doubt it is an anti-semitic pejorative. It has only ever been used to associate the despicableness of a loan shark with all the other prejudicial attributes of Jewishness. It is not well known nowadays (Is Merchant of Venice not taught nowadays &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of the taint of possible anti-semitism?), and is very roughly medium on the slur scale: not as hurtful as 'whore' but more than 'slut'. If a journalist (TV commentator, newspaper writer) were to use the word 'shylock' to describe a banker on the news, the journalist would be out of a job (but maybe at the gym they'd just be a jerk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to dealing with it here, ELU is a public use website that attempts to let the community set standards. One of the historically agreed upon standards is to uphold the use/mention distinction. That is, mean things should not be used (using mean things bad), but it is entirely fair game to discuss (hopefully rationally) mean things (mentioning/quoting mean things OK). And there's also understanding: titles that mention distasteful words are expected to be asterisked but the contents of questions and answers can quote anything verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a good, rational, extensive dictionary, these and much more should be discussed to properly describe its usage. Frequency, cultural context, collocations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people come to ELU for a definitive explanation, like more than better dictionary. Some come to help them with a good comeback when arguing with friends. ELU tries not to cater to the latter. So &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; should be said in that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others have suggested that a comment be made on that answer. Since comments are intended to be removable and answers to stand alone, and an essential part of the connotations of that word are missing, I think &lt;strong&gt;the answer itself should be edited&lt;/strong&gt; to note that the term is hurtful to a minority group and that current practice would be to not use it at all in the media and avoided between friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T14:08:00.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9688" CreationDate="2016-11-23T21:47:20.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish one of the answers mentioned the edit of @Tonepoet (made about 2 hours after the Meta question was posed) and whether that edit solved the problem in this particular case.  (I think it did.)  Tonepoet added the citation that the OP left out.  That citation is &lt;em&gt;When Did 'Shylock' Become a Slur?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a lucky edit, in that all Tonepoet did was add the citation. This lucky edit cannot answer the more general question, but would be a guideline as to what people think is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T21:47:20.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T23:38:43.280" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I know this will be instantly marked &quot;dupe&quot;, but if I ask my question on one of the &quot;dupes&quot; it will almost certainly be ignored.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand why the person who deleted a comment is not identified, but I don't understand why there's no way to tell &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; a comment was deleted.  Surely one can see that if a commenter keeps making the same faux pas and keeps getting comments deleted, it would be good for them to know why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know that often comments are deleted during &quot;clean-up&quot;, but sometimes it seems like &quot;clean-up&quot; occurs within hours of the question being posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have some way to know &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; deletion occurs??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:44:13.803" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:44:13.803" Title="Basic problem with comment deletion" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9599" CreationDate="2016-11-24T00:09:12.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you ask a &quot;what does this word mean&quot; question for a word such as &quot;most&quot; on English Language and Usage, it is considered an ELL question and is usually migrated, or put on hold. It is necessary to make your questions more specific so this does not occur in the future. Hope this helps :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T00:09:12.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9694" CreationDate="2016-11-24T03:45:13.017" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer this, I’ve deliberately &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; just gone and looked into your particular comment record to prime me with concrete knowledge. That way I can speak in broader generalities.  Here are some common reasons why comments get deleted by a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that aren’t seeking clarification from the poster.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that have drifted off into discussions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that no longer apply, like a question of the post owner which has been answered and incorporated into the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments where people aren’t being nice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that are actually answers and not comments at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that have any number of flags on them, from &lt;em&gt;Not Constructive&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Comment As Answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that just make jokes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that just complain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments that contain inappropriately personal material.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments addressing now-deleted comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are just off the top of my head, so &lt;strong&gt;please&lt;/strong&gt; do not think any of those reasons are why yours in particular shall have gotten themselves deleted on you because of. They are not, save by coincidence. I haven’t looked at yours because I wanted to be able to write this answer without that bias coloring what I talked about here.  Rather, these are all simply general reasons that apply to everyone, and I do not currently know which ones applied to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments tend to be deleted by a moderator when they visit a post that has garnered flags. When there’s a flag on anything, we’ll normally also look at all posts not just the one that drew us there, so the question and all its answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you spend time in the Low Quality Review Queue, you’ll have some insight into how often posts get kicked there, whether through a low quality flag or not-an-answer flag. These flags always gather like flies whenever one our site’s questions hits the Hot Network Questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally,the Community♦ Mod-Bot flags a huge whole lot of things, things moderators need to look at. Some of these are directly related to comment issues, but many are not. Still, it brings us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And our users can and do — and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; — use flags on comments themselves. Sometimes these are from the standard set, but we also get custom comment flags. Some of those custom comment flags’ wordings basically say “comment as answer”; I’ve seen a fair number of those sort over the past month.  I have a suspicion that the evil single-word-requests and the even eviller hot-network-questions list may be driving those sort up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t usually overrule a comment flag, because most of them our members are right that there’s an issue with the comment or comments. Of course if they’re just flagging someone they disagree with out of spite, this is a different problem altogether and will be dealt with differently. But the vast, vast majority of comment flags are valid flags, or at least ones cast in good conscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only so many things one can do with comments. Sometimes we copy their discussions to a chat room, although that we can do once only.  Sometimes we edit out the not-niceness if there’s salvageable content there. Sometimes we copy answers-as-comments into Community Wiki posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the answers-as-comments don’t make the least attempt at trying to meet our site standards for what we expect of answers, such comments will probably simply be deleted as noise. They aren’t actually helping anyone, and they run counter to the Stack Exchange founders’ goals for why SE should be useful and different from chat forums.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments can become a distraction, and wading through them doesn’t help anyone. They are meant to be things that can go without affecting the post.  If they can’t, then they should be incorporated into the post or made into their own answers.  That way their content can be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;indexed and linked, searched and found, curated and updated, and voted on by the community at large.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are really important features of SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments lie outside that system and those “features” of our community. Those capabilities are too integral to the SE experience to have ramifying content that exists apart from them.  We need to be able to do those things with the content, and it is in no small measure because we cannot do those things with comments that they are held to be of no lasting consequence and value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T03:45:13.017" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9702" CreationDate="2016-11-24T06:46:09.150" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/continuous-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;continuous-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;continuous-aspect&lt;/a&gt; (60 questions) and its synonym &quot;continuous&quot; seems to be the same thing as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/progressive-aspect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;progressive-aspect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;progressive-aspect&lt;/a&gt; (141 questions). If they're different, I welcome correction (and someone should post an answer to the following question explaining the difference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6308/is-the-tense-called-present-progressive-or-present-continuous&quot;&gt;Is the tense called “Present Progressive” or “Present Continuous”?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T20:10:51.330" Title="Progressive aspect synonym: continuous aspect" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-24T10:10:56.887" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question which was soon after edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the origional question was relatively open it is now very specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer answers the wider scope of the old question, but does not really answer the new question which focuses on one example of the old question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does have an upvote though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I delete the answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190333" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T00:53:41.957" Title="Question Edited-Delete my Answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-11-28T04:24:46.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9698" CreationDate="2016-11-24T16:32:28.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_and_progressive_aspects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quoth Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The continuous and progressive aspects (abbreviated ᴄᴏɴᴛ and ᴘʀᴏɢ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action (&amp;quot;to do&amp;quot;) or state (&amp;quot;to be&amp;quot;) in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.&#xA;In the grammars of many languages the two terms are used interchangeably. This is the case with English: a construction such as &amp;quot;He is washing&amp;quot; may be described either as &lt;em&gt;present continuous&lt;/em&gt; or as &lt;em&gt;present progressive&lt;/em&gt;. However, there are certain languages for which two different aspects are distinguished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think we can safely merge those for English.  &lt;strong&gt;I wouldn't want to add gerunds to the mix, though.&lt;/strong&gt; Remember how we have folks who think any &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; word is a gerund.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of aspects.  For example, there’s also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state.[1][2] As its name suggests, the habitual aspect (abbreviated ʜᴀʙ) specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily. The habitual aspect is a type of imperfective aspect, which does not depict an event as a single entity viewed only as a whole but instead specifies something about its internal temporal structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospective aspect is a combination of tense and aspect that indicates the action is in preparation to take place. The inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g. Esperanto uses ek-, e.g. Mi ekmanĝas, &amp;quot;I am beginning to eat.&amp;quot;) and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state (The flowers started blooming) or the start of an action (He started running). Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T20:10:51.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-24T19:14:32.913" Score="9" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bit of a meta meta question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/49058/should-the-correction-tag-be-burninated&quot;&gt;having a conflab&lt;/a&gt; about burninating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position was that fourteen votes (at the time the conversation started) wasn't enough to know that community wants the tag gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is just a gut feeling. I don't have a solid number of votes and ratio of up to down votes that would shout &quot;burninate it now&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need community consensus to burninate a tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do need it then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many people need to have voted (on the question, or the answers) to say that we should get rid of the tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should the ratio of up to down votes be to give the go ahead?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking for numbers, but I expect them to be fuzzy thresholds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, if you can think of other ways to come to consensus, different to the above stats, please propose them, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T19:51:04.190" Title="What do we consider &quot;consensus&quot; for burnination?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2016-11-24T19:24:29.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think any kind of consensus is needed, except for the consensus that an individual edit to a post is correct. If removing a tag from a post is a correct action, then it requires no consensus to act. If removing the tag from all its posts is correct, then it can be done without a consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where we disagree about whether an edit is correct, or how a tag should be used, then I'd say we need at least a dozen votes. However, I'd also argue that we need a discussion. People need to provide arguments about what is correct or not. Downvotes are not an argument, unless they are overwhelmingly outnumbering upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People downvote tag burnination for a variety of reasons. One reason is that they don't like to see edits bumping old posts. In my opinion, that is not sufficient reason to avoid editing old posts. Tag maintenance should not be put off just because the &quot;active&quot; tab gets cluttered while the maintenance is going on (although if the StackExchange software were ever changed to not bump posts like that, even this excuse would go away). If someone doesn't provide a reason that a tag edit is incorrect, then their downvote doesn't really count for much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T19:24:29.970" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2016-11-24T21:11:10.677" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Do we need community consensus to burninate?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we do. Why? Because burninating a tag is not just editing it out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically it might be a sum of edits removing the tag from the affected questions. For this we don't need any consensus whatsoever. Every ELU user with 2k reputation has the privilege to edit stuff unsupervised. While trivial edits are discouraged for obvious reasons any 2k member is trusted to wield his or her edit powers responsibly. If a user feels a tag is unnecessary he or she is free to go on a edit spree or edit a few questions at a time. That's an earned privilege. It is also a very good way to stop bad new tags in their tracks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However that's not what burninating a tag is about. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate&quot;&gt;Burninating a tag&lt;/a&gt; is about getting rid of a tag that has already a foothold in the taxonomy and doing so with meta involvement. That is why the linked meta post describes the criteria for burninating a tag. It also calls for meta agreement. Such an agreement and several burninations of tags are also a requirement for possibly blacklisting a tag later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I split this answer in two, to separate the answer for the question about having a consensus (this answer) from the one what constitutes a consensus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9710/184706&quot;&gt;over here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T19:51:04.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-25T07:19:11.077" Score="5" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;If users detect the presence  of serial downvoters on ELU how should they behave? Are they supposed to post comments to the downvoters telling them to refrain from their improper activity or should they just inform mods who will take care of the issue?  (btw what's the best way to contact mods in this respect?). I couldn't find specific guidance about this problem in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, or maybe I just didnt find the relative rules  (sorry for that). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, what is the recommended course of action for users to deal with serial downvoters? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T14:19:43.443" Title="What's the site policy for serial downvoters?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-11-25T13:18:13.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9706" CreationDate="2016-11-25T08:45:34.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Reputation &amp;amp; Moderation&lt;/a&gt; states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you see very unusual votes being targeted at your account, don't&#xA;  worry about it. You should wait at least 24 hours after noticing&#xA;  before becoming concerned, as the automated system should detect it&#xA;  and reverse it for you. If, after 24 hours, you do not see any fix to&#xA;  your reputation, please contact the team using the &quot;contact us&quot; form&#xA;  located at the bottom of any page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related Stack Exchange Meta post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28756/what-can-i-do-if-im-the-victim-of-serial-downvoting&quot;&gt;What can I do if I&amp;#39;m the victim of serial downvoting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do NOTHING&lt;/strong&gt;. The daily vote anomaly script will pick it up and your rep will be recalculated automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If after 36 hours (give the script time to run) you still see a problem, then flag one of your posts and ask a moderator to look into&#xA;  the anomalous voting patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it still hasn't been corrected, contact the SE team via the &quot;contact us&quot; link at the bottom of any page on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my experience, I flagged one of my own answers which was downvoted and asked a moderator to investigate it. I guess it led to suspension of one user who was serially downvoting my answers and others and surprisingly he had a few different accounts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T08:50:38.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9709" CreationDate="2016-11-25T10:32:49.910" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt; has 74 questions and a majority of the questions seem to be intended to ask about grammaticality, &lt;em&gt;correctness&lt;/em&gt; (not correction) and proof-reading for some phrases and sentences, for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proof-reading: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/359325/my-morning-text-revison&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/359325/my-morning-text-revison&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/346279/sentence-structure-can-you-help-me-to-arrange-the-words-in-the-correct-order&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/346279/sentence-structure-can-you-help-me-to-arrange-the-words-in-the-correct-order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336937/is-this-sentence-correct&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336937/is-this-sentence-correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammaticality: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350094/could-you-please-tell-me-the-answers-and-why&quot;&gt;Could you please tell me the answer and why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332722/which-one-is-gramatically-correct-was-were&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332722/which-one-is-gramatically-correct-was-were&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/331626/where-does-the-sic-go-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;Where does the [sic] go in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315009/can-i-use-a-gerund-in-a-non-restrictive-clause&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315009/can-i-use-a-gerund-in-a-non-restrictive-clause&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't list all the questions. Would it be OK to synonymize &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; since we don't allow proof-reading and there is no proof-reading tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is more efficient than unnecessarily editing all the 74 questions just to remove the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt;. Thoughts, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T18:49:21.167" Title="Correction tag synonym: grammaticality [Correction tag burninated]" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9708" CreationDate="2016-11-25T13:33:38.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correction&lt;/a&gt; is being used almost as a meta tag, rather like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;. It's not tagging questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; correction and the correction process, but tagging questions which ask &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; correction. In fact, I find it difficult to imagine on-topic questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; correction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is indeed its primary use, it should be removed, not synonymised &amp;mdash; and probably blacklisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And yes, that will bump all those questions. But that effect is temporary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T13:33:38.687" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2016-11-25T14:14:07.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion has been primarily started by my assertion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9618/lets-get-rid-of-the-correction-tag&quot;&gt;this question posted by me&lt;/a&gt; where I assumed +10/-4 to mean a pretty strong sign of community support. Please aim any comments to the specific tag at that question. This post is just about participation on meta and what can reasonably be considered a consensus. Also a warning, lots of numbers ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's leave the particulars of the case behind and have a look at the kind of participation we can expect form ELU.meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What makes a community consensus?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Observing and participating in meta&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For meta to agree on something people have to be given time to read and evaluate an issue, form an opinion and voice said opinion. Thus a certain timespan has to be given to the topic. The timespan has to be long enough to give a reasonable amount of people the possibility to voice their opinion. We have ~480 people visiting meta in a month if I take this month as representative. Not even 300 in the last two weeks. Maybe the 10k users have access to better numbers. Anyhow most questions on meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/revision/583383/732573/meta-views&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;do not get even 250 views in three months&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/revision/583392/732582/average-meta-view-count&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;average view count of all 2016 questions is 153.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most internet sites follows the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;90-9-1 rule&lt;/a&gt;, meaning 90% just lurk, 10% contribute (vote) while 1% answers or asks. I don't know about the actual SE numbers, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/revision/583389/732579/meta-scores-per-views&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; strongly suggests that this seems not too far off for ELU.meta. There are only a dozen questions all year that outpace those 10% score.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an average view count of 150 and about 10% of people actually voting, 15 votes is what is to be expected on a topic of average interest. Thus, the 14 votes on ~115 views the correction tag question&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; had before this meta post and the discussion is totally within the range of what is to be expected as participation. It is even a bit above par.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Summarizing, on any common topic about 150 views and around 15 votes are about as much participation as we are gonna get on ELU.meta.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this assertion has been challenged by gut feelings in the comments I offer a more detailed analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I adapted a great SEDE query about weekly stats to monthly stats and ran it for meta.ELU. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/revision/583833/733032/site-activity-and-votegraph-per-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raw data is here.&lt;/a&gt; As we can see there my assumptions of meta participation based on the view count were even too high. Excluding election months, the active meta participants range roughly between 60-90. That's active meta participants, everyone who asked, answered, commented or voted in said month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added two divisions in Excel (right-most columns) that show how many votes we can expect per answer or question in a month. Spoiler alert, it's not that many. We really cannot expect a lot more than 10-12 votes on any given question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ep75h.png&quot; alt=&quot;meta participation&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a second analysis based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/revision/583881/733083/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; and added an column for accumulated percentage of questions per vote count. It includes questions since 2015. (Older questions have less votes on average and would as such strengthen a case for low votes being a base for consensus. Thus, I excluded everything older than 2015.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c5h0t.png&quot; alt=&quot;vote percentiles&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that almost fifty percent of questions never reach six votes. Two thirds never reach double digit vote counts. With 13 votes a question enters the top 20% and only 10% make it past 17 votes. Note that these are all vote totals, not score totals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarizing, we really cannot expect for a common topic like tag gardening to reach a high amount of votes in total. Not even in the long run. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everything above 12 total votes is in the top 25% percentile and very well voted on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to interprete those votes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's one sided the question is irrelevant but in a case were the votes are split we have to establish an agreement about which net score or voting disparity constitutes a favorable vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10/4 or ~70/30 in percentages is in most environments considered a strong vote of confidence. Nearly 75% if one counts the OP in favor of the topic which seems a valid assumption on a burnination request. Since meta is our essentially ELU parliament one might excuse the comparison, but in most countries more than two thirds or even three quarters are enough to change the constitution. That should be enough to burninate a tag. Of course percentages are susceptible to low total numbers. However, as I detailed above, we are unlikely to get higher participation on the average topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why +5 is a solid value when disputed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As detailed above we cannot assume to get 17 votes on an average topic. Counting the OP in favor of the suggested burnination +5 means at least two thirds support of interested users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F5sZ4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Plus5isGood&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's custom?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A last thing to consider is that people tend to involve themselves less in stuff that works. Specifically what was considered a good standard to burninate before? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9545/list-of-tags-that-are-blacklisted-burninated-or-under-discussion&quot;&gt;Consider this list of burninated tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;. We have burninated tags (unanimously) with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2402/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-descriptivism-tag&quot;&gt;as low as 3 votes&lt;/a&gt; and rarely have a score reaching double-digits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Considering the expected vote count anything that reaches high single digit scores or a net score of +5 when disputed should be considered a vote of confidence unless there is an answer stating something else.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's an answer it has to be decided on a case by case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I used the score rather than the actual vote count which is obviously higher for disputed topics.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2 Disclosure: I created that post.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3 Disclosure: I created that post as well.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T14:14:07.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9708" CreationDate="2016-11-25T15:05:08.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be a terrible idea. If we would make correction a &lt;em&gt;synonym&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;grammaticality&lt;/em&gt; the auto-suggest shows the parent tag. We already set this unfortunate precedent with &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;correctness&lt;/em&gt;. Whenever anyone types correct in the tag field this shows up. Making the people believe they tread the same path as nearly 4k other users before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M7gX8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M7gX8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burnination would lead to this, a first road bump when creating shitty correction questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIr0o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIr0o.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And subsequent blacklisting would lead to this for the persistent user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Ilf3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Ilf3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the decision to synonymize would create the impression of 4k precedents while burninating and blacklisting has a serious chance of stopping such bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T15:05:08.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9714" CreationDate="2016-11-25T18:32:27.173" Score="8" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've answered several questions with a link to the OED.  A few hours ago, I added an OED link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360210/what-language-is-this-oed-entry-in&quot;&gt;What language is this OED entry in?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP said my link did not work for those who did not have access.  Have I been uselessly linking to the OED in my answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Test:&lt;/strong&gt;   Does this work -- fag as defined by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67608?rskey=duzh9l&amp;amp;result=3&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T18:45:31.897" Title="Does a link I post to the OED work for everyone, or only for those who subscribe?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2016-11-25T18:45:31.897" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from a few occasions where they make it freely available, the online OED is available only by subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without logging in (or a valid login cookie) those visiting your link will get a login page. I am able to log in to OED, but without doing so I get the login page from your link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link will work for those who have already logged into OED (and thus have a valid cookie in their browser). I've just tested this by using my public-library* login in one tab and then clicking your link: I got the definition you intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the link isn't useless. It's available to those who can make use of it. What OED's login policy means in practice is that you will need to quote what you need to make your point. Because of their login policy, which is designed to protect a revenue stream, you should quote &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; what you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Local authorities in the UK run public libraries and as part of the service provide free subscriptions to many online resources, generally including OED. Mine is one such. It's also possible to purchase an individual subscription from OUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T18:45:31.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6684" CreationDate="2016-11-25T20:04:50.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update SEDE 20-11-2016:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are now &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287117/closed-questions-with-negative-scores&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;over 3.200 questions with a negative score&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are now &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/287116/closed-questions-with-nonpositive-scores-sorted-by-delete-votes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;~600 closed questions with a negative score and pending delete votes.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T20:04:50.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6684" CreationDate="2016-11-26T01:30:25.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a compulsive tidy-upper and throw-it-&lt;em&gt;awayer&lt;/em&gt;, so I jumped on the Delete Queue enthusiastically and voted to delete five questions I thought had no redeeming qualities.  I was too hasty on one of them, because the f-word turns me off, utterly.  Not a good reason, as @Mari-Lou A pointed out above.  The answers were worthy of keeping. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, I was cut off at five deletes, and I went browsing and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/216602/so-which-wich-is-it&quot;&gt;So which &amp;quot;wich&amp;#39;&amp;quot; is it?&lt;/a&gt;, which had an excellent answer by Jon Hanna, and a brilliant comment by WS2, which evoked an unforgettable picture of eating a ham and cheese cardigan while wearing a cashmere sandwich.  All in all, a gem -- a museum piece. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;take time to read the answers before you vote to delete!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will go back to the Queue, vote to undelete the question that offended me, and approach each question as only the first part of a question-and-answers whole.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum:&lt;/em&gt;  It seems perverse to me that a user with 10K can vote to delete questions, but 20K is needed to vote to delete answers.  When you delete a question, you delete all its answers.  That requires more judgment than deleting a single answer! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T02:24:06.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2016-11-27T17:38:06.610" Score="28" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;K&lt;/strong&gt;it, we wish you all the very best of luck.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;n this site you are a most essential part.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;ake your time, and hang in there until you're well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Z&lt;/strong&gt;eal in modding must now wait - your health comes first -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;ellow mods of English bear your burden well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt;n returning you'll find hats we saved for you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt;-rays, surg'ry - you'll pull through, and see you soon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T17:38:06.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9722" CreationDate="2016-11-28T00:22:16.177" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just wondering why my reputation hasn't changed after I deleted two downvoted answers and one downvoted question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T11:47:13.430" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T11:47:13.430" Title="I have deleted my downvoted questions and answers, but there's no change in my reputation" Tags="|discussion|reputation|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9699" CreationDate="2016-11-28T00:53:41.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if you gave the link to the question you described above. If you wish to keep your reputation points, I would suggest you leave the answer, unless eventually it gains more downvotes than upvotes. You can either edit the answer, or add another answer (I have done this in the past and it only incurred 1 downvote compared to 3 downvotes for the initial answer). I had a similar question about deleting a post and this is what Andrew Leach had to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An answer which has a single downvote (score −1) will have incurred a penalty of 2 points. Deleting that answer will restore those points. It also restores the −1 penalty incurred by the downvoter.&#xA;An answer which has a net score of −1 reached by an upvote and two downvotes will have gained +10 for the upvote and −4 for the two downvotes. Removing that answer will restore the rep lost from the downvotes but also the rep gained from the upvote. That will result in a net loss of six points, the same as the net gain it had from votes. Again, the downvoters' penalty is also restored.&#xA;A similar mechanism operates for questions, albeit with different numbers (an upvote is worth +5, a downvote −2, with no penalty for the downvoter).&#xA;You can see your reputation moves on your profile page, and the public view shows the movement resulting from posts which still exist (1 + 10 − 2 − 2 −2 = 5). You may be able to see more detail there than other users.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are planning on deleting posts, don't delete too many, otherwise you may receive a dreaded &quot;post ban&quot; from Stack Exchange! Hope this helps :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T00:53:41.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-28T02:42:05.130" Score="11" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange developers instituted a Be Nice policy for all of their sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you've come to ask questions, or to generously share what you&#xA;know, remember that we’re all here to learn, together. Be welcoming&#xA;and patient, especially with those who may not know everything you do.&#xA;Oh, and bring your sense of humor. Just in case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be a good idea to remind people of this when they make snarky comments. We could either reply to their comment with a link to the Be Nice policy, or a link to this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a lot of people on this forum want to be witty, but are unaware that sometimes their wit comes across as belittling. People should be mindful that kindness comes before wit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm creating this thread so that others can share their thoughts, and perhaps commit to calling others out on hostile or demeaning comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth sharing that this problem has been discussed before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4625/bring-back-the-summer-of-love-aka-make-new-users-feel-more-welcome/4629#4629&quot;&gt;Bring back the summer of love (ELU Meta Forum)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/&quot;&gt;Summer of love, by Joel Spolsky, Co-founder and CEO&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some not nice things I've noticed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions not worth asking&lt;/strong&gt;. I sometimes get the impression that my question is not worth asking, and have to spend time defending myself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers picked apart&lt;/strong&gt;. I feel like, if people sense any weakness in an answer, it gets picked apart in a way that's not constructive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speaking from authority&lt;/strong&gt;. Sometimes people claim that your question or answer does not follow the guidelines. But they cite no guidelines to back themselves up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Carelessness with tone&lt;/strong&gt;. The fact that tone is hard to discern from writing does not provide an excuse, but rather an obligation to make one's intentions clear and one's kindness felt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestions for improvement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Positive feedback&lt;/strong&gt;. Since we're kind of skewed towards negative feedback, I think it would be helpful if users made an effort to give more positive feedback, especially to newbies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pointing out the guidelines&lt;/strong&gt;. It would be helpful to point out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; to newbies, without shaming them for not having read them already.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Migrating ELL questions to ELL&lt;/strong&gt;. Members who have the privileges could make an effort to migrate ELL questions to ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close-vote nicely&lt;/strong&gt;. It's important to close-vote off-topic questions. But it's just as important to be nice and not make a snarky comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm compiling a list of examples, but omitting the name of the author. The goal is not to shame anyone, but to raise awareness of the problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me say this in as a nice a way as possible: It is clear from the&#xA;guidelines that this is not a place for people learning the English&#xA;language to ask questions, especially if they are basic questions&#xA;and/or they evince no research. Yet, my question to &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; is why do&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; keep answering such questions... &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360653/which-is-more-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;one of many examples&lt;/a&gt;. This question should be close-voted for no research. It is actions&#xA;like &lt;strong&gt;yours&lt;/strong&gt; that only encourages more ELL questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment was directed at me in this thread. The tone of the question made me feel vilified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And are people really being &amp;quot;draconic&amp;quot;? Or are they just dragon things out? Perhaps you meant &lt;em&gt;draconian&lt;/em&gt;. (Sorry, the tone was meant to be lighthearted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually double-checked that draconic was okay to use, and it's a synonym for draconian. (1) merriam-webster.com/dictionary/draconic. (2) en.wiktionary.org/wiki/draconic. I chose to use it because it sounded better in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I actually double-checked.&lt;/em&gt; Then you actually missed my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above was also taken from this thread. The play on &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; felt a little bit like an attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beneath is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/338105/is-this-the-correct-use-of-catalogue&quot;&gt;question that I asked&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: He came up with a catalogue of things his father said or did which upset him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the use of &amp;quot;catalogue&amp;quot; correct in this example? I personally think so, as the word derives from the Greek καταλέγω, which means to &amp;quot;recount, to tell at length, or make a list&amp;quot; (1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is normal; but your argument from Greek is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, what I gave wasn't an argument, it was a reason for thinking so. Why not share things we find interesting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument makes a claim. It attempts to persuade. I did neither. I simply shared my hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I am pointing out (by the link I referenced) that your hypothesis is without foundation. If you rely on etymology to determine (as opposed to suggest) the meanings of words, you will often get them wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was offended in the above thread because the commenter is acting like a know-it-all; and, furthermore, acting like he knows my intentions better than I do. To say that you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; something is correct because of etymology doesn't mean you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; something is correct because of etymology. A hypothesis is not the same thing as an argument, and it's perfectly fine to share a hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360080/since-english-is-a-stress-timed-language-why-have-poets-chosen-to-write-in-iamb&quot;&gt;question I asked&lt;/a&gt; and the ensuing comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Since English is a stress-timed language, why have poets chosen to write in iambic pentameter? Doesn't the language already have a natural rhythm without resorting to meter? And isn't that natural rhythm already quite close to iambic pentameter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenter: This question doesn't really make sense. Poets chose to write in Iambic pentameter because they wanted to. Why did they want to? Well, you need to ask a historian but I imagine the traditions derived from Latin and Greek were factors. Languages with word stress patterns do, of course, have their own rhythm, but it's inevitably irregular and in the mind of classically influenced poet an irregular and naturally occurring meter is probably insufficient. That's why they tend to work English's natural stress pattern into a precise meter, such as iambic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me: I think I'm asking whether the natural rhythm of English is really so different from iambic pentameter that a precise meter is called for. It seems that the definition of a stress-timed language is regular stress patterns, which already accomplishes what meter sets out to do. Although here's an interesting thought: perhaps meter serves not only to highlight regularities, but also to highlight irregularities? That is, accenting syllables which we wouldn't expect to accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenter: No offence, but this question seems to be more about your dismissive attitude towards Iambic pentameter than an actual question. Many English speaking poets evidently did feel there was something special about, which is why they worked so hard to fit the natural rhythm of English into it's meter. Many modern poets don't use it, well obviously, many modern poets don't even care about meter. &amp;quot;what, if anything, is the natural rhythm of spoken English?&amp;quot; This question doesn't really make sense, English doesn't have a strict meter, there are just natural linguistic patterns in stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me: You misinterpreted my comments, then! I do not feel a dismissive attitude towards iambic pentameter. On the contrary, I enjoy a lot of poems and plays written in this meter. This enjoyment is what led me to reflect on the meter, and why some of the authors whom I admire choose to employ it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenter: But the question you're asking isn't really about English. You're basically asking why many English speaking poets chose to fit English's natural time stressed rhythm to Iambic pentameter. The only answer is because they wanted to, why they wanted to might be better explained by a historian. The natural rhythm of a time stressed language will never as regular as a poetic meter, so no doubt they thought it more beautiful or perfect when the meter was exact. Why they often preferred Iambic is probably down to its historical significance. There's little else to be said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is another example of a commenter acting like a know-it-all. It's not constructive to say, &lt;em&gt;I don't think your question makes sense&lt;/em&gt;. Or to go on and say, &lt;em&gt;There is little else to be said.&lt;/em&gt; That's simply not for him to decide. Others might have something to say; and in fact, others did have something to say. There was a great answer to my question. The reason we have close-votes is so that we &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt; on whether a question gets closed. This is not a court case where we need a prosecutor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T10:28:08.753" Title="Can we turn this into a nicer community?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="47" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9720" CreationDate="2016-11-28T09:24:15.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The motto for this site should be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We'd like to help you out, just as soon as we can figure how you got in.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;Kevin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is structural, built in, if you will. The site is a &lt;em&gt;soi-disant&lt;/em&gt; place &quot;for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&quot; And there is a group of people who take that seriously and proprietarily. They treat this place as High Table in the Hall (or perhaps the Fellows' Common Room), and they want to see deep questions, expect meticulous research and scholarly citation for both questions and answers, and wish to curate an archive of definitive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, these folks are locked in a deadly embrace of mutual incomprehension with people who don't (and I maintain, can't) meet these standards. Frustration is inevitable, and this sometimes leads to a certain amount of — shall we say — brusqueness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to forgo your own cyber-umbrage, even if in principle it's warranted. After all, you know nobody here. How important in your life can our attitudes be? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And imagine the result of commenting on every piece of snark with a link admonishing &quot;Be Nice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2016-12-02T08:05:43.550" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T08:05:43.550" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9718" CreationDate="2016-11-28T09:35:46.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can see of your reputation, you do appear to have recovered the losses incurred from downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the baptism/christening question, your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/359611/18696&quot;&gt;November 22 answer&lt;/a&gt; and your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/359751/18696&quot;&gt;November 23 answer&lt;/a&gt; have both had their reputation penalties restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360099/what-is-the-exact-origin-of-the-english-language&quot;&gt;&quot;exact origin of the English language&quot;&lt;/a&gt; question resulted in a net movement of reputation of zero on November 25.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't normally post screenshots of what moderators see, so I don't particularly want to do that. But I can't see any error in the way the system has handled the reputation calculations here. It is a stable, robust and tested mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the time, though, to restate a warning about deleting badly-received posts. &lt;strong&gt;They still count in the automatic quality check.&lt;/strong&gt; Rather than removing posts, you should attempt to improve them. With off-topic questions, it can be difficult to make them on-topic, so you need to be sure to post on-topic questions in the first place (but you removed your question without the community deciding it was off-topic). There is a question on MSE, the network-wide meta.stackexchange, about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;post bans&lt;/a&gt; which can result from too many low-quality posts: deleting them only makes it more difficult to recover the situation because they remain low-quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell whether you're in any danger of triggering the post ban: I don't know what its criteria are; it's automatic and it just happens. You may be OK at the moment. But if you try and model your questions and answers on upvoted posts by high-rep users, you may receive more upvotes and find that you feel fewer deletions are necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T09:43:59.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-28T12:02:57.000" Score="7" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/to-be&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;to-be&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;to-be&lt;/a&gt; be synonymized with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/be&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;be&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;be&lt;/a&gt;. Related Meta post by @wythagoras: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7968/synonymize-and-merge-the-tags-be-and-to-be&quot;&gt;Synonymize and merge the tags [be] and [to-be]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/be/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/be/synonyms&lt;/a&gt; (It requires four upvotes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please upvote if you agree with it after clicking on the link above and downvote if you don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users with a total answer score (total upvotes minus total downvotes) of 5 or more on the tag, can vote for tag synonyms. Suggestions will be automatically approved when they reach a score of 4, and automatically deleted when they reach a score of -2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional question: Is there any review queue to check those suggestions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T11:52:11.473" Title="Let's synonymize &quot;to be&quot; tag with &quot;be&quot; tag. [Completed]" Tags="|support|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-28T13:01:58.347" Score="6" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/346402/why-is-it-called-christening-instead-of-baptism-when-it-is-for-a-baby/358656#358656&quot;&gt;answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; was deleted by mods for &quot;not meeting the required site standards&quot;. The answer  didn't contain offensive material or support  prejudiced concepts that might have negatively affected users, but despite that it was deleted  without a previous comment or a warning to give me the possibility to fix  it according to &quot;the site standards&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point I want to make is not on the merit but on  the methodology. I know that mods can do whatever they think is appropriate with the answers and questions on this site,  but I don't understand why I was not given a chance to elaborate my original answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T08:12:17.963" Title="What's the appropriate course of action for deleting an answer?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9724" CreationDate="2016-11-28T14:12:25.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also found the immediate deletion of this post odd when I first learned of it. However, you can still edit the post and flag for mod attention asking for it to be undeleted once it has been improved. So it seems to me that you do still have a chance to elaborate on your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find a post where &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5195/77227&quot;&gt;Kit Z. Fox&lt;/a&gt; said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it would be unusual to delete a post without giving the author a&#xA;chance to comply with the change in policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it doesn't seem to be the usual course of action. However, this does not say that this would never happen, or should never happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the moderator's comment doesn't suggest editing the answer, and I don't know if this was the moderator's intention. I just see this as a potential course of action. The site mechanics allow you to edit deleted posts, and if you do so to fix the issues identified by the moderator, I don't see any reason why the post should remain deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why might a moderator have viewed this as plagiarism?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Definitions of plagiarism: it may include more than just omitting citations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism is complicated to define. The most obvious case is copy-pasting without a citation. However, many definitions encompass using others' words, even &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; a citation, when it is not made clear that the wording as well as the idea comes from the source. In other words, copy-pasting specific sequences of words, even with a citation, may be considered plagiarism if there are no quotation marks to indicate that the wording comes from the cited source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of this definition of plagiarism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forms of plagiarism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Verbatim (word for word) quotation without clear acknowledgement&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Quotations must always be identified as such by the use of either&#xA;quotation marks or indentation, and with full referencing of the&#xA;sources cited. It must always be apparent to the reader which parts&#xA;are your own independent work and where you have drawn on someone&#xA;else’s ideas &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [bold italics added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism?wssl=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Students &amp;gt; Academic Matters &amp;gt; Study Guidance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inadequate paraphrase&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source's ideas in&#xA;your own words. It's not enough to change a few words here and there&#xA;and leave the rest; instead, you must &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;completely&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; restate the ideas in&#xA;the passage in your own words. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If your own language is too close to&#xA;the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a&#xA;citation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [bold italics added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&amp;amp;pageid=icb.page342054&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Constitutes Plagiarism? Harvard Guide to Using Sources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also mentioned in the Wikipedia article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; that is linked to from the answer to the Meta SE question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt; that MetaEd mentioned. Wikipedia says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://healthinformatics.uic.edu/resources/infographics/the-reality-and-solution-of-college-plagiarism-infographic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Reality and Solution of College Plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; created&#xA;by the Health Informatics department of the University of Illinois at&#xA;Chicago there are 10 main forms of plagiarism that students commit:&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Providing proper citations, but fails to change the structure and wording of the borrowed ideas enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (I'm talking to the reader in general, not to Josh in particular) may define plagiarism differently. My point here is not to say &amp;quot;this is plagiarism&amp;quot;, or to &amp;quot;charge&amp;quot; Josh with plagiarism. What I think these citations show is that it is not unreasonable for a moderator to consider this kind of thing plagiarism. If you think we shouldn't define this kind of thing as plagiarism on this site, you should ask a new Meta question to try to establish a site policy about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The answer in question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center page &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism - posting the work of others with no indication that it is&#xA;not your own - is frowned on by our community, and may result in your&#xA;answer being down-voted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also says that when quoting external sources, &amp;quot;use their words and ideas to support your own&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Josh's answer uses few words of his own. The answer is nearly all quotation blocks, except for a summary paragraph at the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the summary paragraph does not use quotation marks, its wording is actually very similar to that of the cited source. In particular, there is one sequence of fourteen words that is identical in the source and the answer. Here I have bolded and italicized the most noticeable identical parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two terms &amp;quot;Baptism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Christening&amp;quot; are often used&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;interchangeably&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as their &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;connotations mean basically the same thing.&#xA;However there are significant literal and historical differences&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; among&#xA;which the more important is probably the fact that Baptism is a&#xA;sacrament while Christening refers to the ceremony of baptizing a&#xA;child:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JOSH's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/346402/why-is-it-called-christening-instead-of-baptism-when-it-is-for-a-baby/358656#358656&quot;&gt;Why is it called &amp;quot;christening&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;baptism&amp;quot; when it is for a baby?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source for comparison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people use the words &amp;quot;Baptism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Christening&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;interchangeably.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;This is OK in the sense that the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;connotations mean basically the same&#xA;thing. However there are significant literal and historical&#xA;differences&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; often forgotten, overlooked, or misconstrued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baptism: Baptism is a Greek word. Prior to Christianity, baptism was&#xA;the ritual use of water for purification. Christian &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;baptism is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; defined&#xA;as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a sacrament&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; marked by the ritual use of water and admitting the&#xA;recipient into the Christian community. This is the traditional term&#xA;used and is an official sacrament of the Catholic Church. Baptism&#xA;practices vary between churches, however it almost always involves the&#xA;Trinitarian invocation (&amp;quot;I baptize you in the name of the father, the&#xA;son, and the holy spirit&amp;quot;). In some cases recipients are fully&#xA;submerged in water, and in other cases it may be poured or sprinkled&#xA;over the head. The earliest non-biblical forms of baptism were&#xA;referred to in the Didache around 100 AD. This reference speaks to the&#xA;baptism of adults rather than children. Around the same time we have&#xA;references from others about infant baptism being customary. From the&#xA;3rd century, onward, groups of Christians baptized infants as standard&#xA;practice (although some families preferred to wait until the child was&#xA;older).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christening: Introduced in the 14th century, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Christening&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the&#xA;ceremony of baptizing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and naming &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a child&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It comes from English&#xA;culture and isn’t properly defined in the modern day. Many&#xA;dictionaries will refer to &amp;quot;baptism&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://christeningcards.net/Files/BrokerBranding/christeningCards/Include/difference.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The REAL Difference between Baptism and Christening - Christening Cards&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T20:48:49.503" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9724" CreationDate="2016-11-28T19:39:51.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user flagged the content for problems with the Stack Exchange network’s policy on attribution. The flag was useful, and the content was deleted. I encourage you to edit the answer, correct these two problems, and then flag it for re-review and undeletion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The entire post consists of the work of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some direct quotations are not marked as quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two good sources of information about the attribution policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt;” in the main Stack Exchange series of frequently answered questions. Relevant excerpts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that moderators delete some of your content if plagiarism has been discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You still have to write an actual answer, in your own words. A post that consists only of copied text, even when attributed, is not your work either.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/a&gt;” in this site’s help center. Relevant excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting the work of others with no indication that it is not your own may result in your answer being down-voted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why this content?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NVZ made a good point in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9724/whats-the-appropriate-course-of-action-for-deleting-an-answer#comment38192_9724&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always copy-paste from online dictionaries, and none of my answers so far were deleted by mods for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are many other posts with attribution problems. It takes awhile for users to learn how Stack Exchange differs from other help networks. I would bet money that my own post history includes content that has attribution problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators get involved when there are flags. Another Stack Exchange FAQ, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160071/what-to-do-when-plagiarism-is-discovered&quot;&gt;What to do when plagiarism is discovered&lt;/a&gt;”, points out that moderators are not expected to go hunting for problems. They don’t have time, for one thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T19:39:51.430" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9724" CreationDate="2016-11-29T04:05:01.713" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...it was deleted without a previous comment or a warning to give me the possibility to fix it according to &quot;the site standards&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've been here for a long time now. How is it that you actually believe a mod needs to notify you before deleting an answer, or to give you a warning or a chance to edit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newbies need to have 'intro to ELU' type comments. If your rep was under 300, I think the following would be appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi, Josh, and welcome to the site. This answer is perilously close to the site's definition for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/160077/262486&quot;&gt;plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;. Please read the guidelines and edit your answer accordingly, or this answer risks being deleted. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have been here longer than is necessary to really learn the ropes. Or, maybe not. In which case, there is a help center addressing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;how to answer&lt;/a&gt; in great detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;As others have stated, please feel free to edit and flag for reopening.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T04:05:01.713" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9720" CreationDate="2016-11-29T11:24:28.703" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Be nice&lt;/em&gt; is one part of the Stack Exchange model. Civility is strongly encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it’s not the only policy that applies. When I’m on ELU and I click the &lt;code&gt;Ask a Question&lt;/code&gt; button, I notice this simple prompt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xRQr4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xRQr4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If more users paid heed to such simple guidance more closely, I believe ELU would quickly become a much “nicer” place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it’s easier to find so-called belittling comments on questions that are scant in details and show no research than to find such comments on questions that are well-researched and richly detailed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as manners go, ignoring site guidelines from the get-go could be considered a form of rudeness, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T11:24:28.703" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9731" CreationDate="2016-11-29T18:00:10.947" Score="7" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a comment, that received several upvotes &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/360803/2303&quot;&gt;on this question&lt;/a&gt;, yet some mod chose to delete it. It is germane to the topic, is referenced multiple times in the comment chain, and has spawned some conversation, which is rendered incomprehensible without it. One user even wanted me to post it as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand unstarring my chat messages—that can be explained by simple spite and malice—but spite goes a bit far in this case, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recognize that lengthy comment chains are discouraged, but this was one of the first comments posted, if not &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:07:11.310" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:07:11.310" Title="Why was my comment removed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2016-11-29T21:35:58.113" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OK, you just haven't read Lawler far enough. ^_^ Try his post on conversational deletion. This happens when material understood from context is removed without lost of communication. Note that &quot;Are you doing?&quot; is not possible because material is removed that is essential to comprehension. Whereas the &quot;what&quot; in &quot;The f**k are you doing?&quot; is obvious, &quot;Are you doing?&quot; can have any number of introductory fragments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;– Robusto 2016-11-28 22:21:42Z (my bowdlerization)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The comment was not deleted by a moderator.&lt;/strong&gt; As the person who is recorded as deleting it is not a moderator, it will have been deleted by flags from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sumelic has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9730/why-was-my-comment-removed#comment38307_9730&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; that it may be possible for a comment to be deleted with a single flag; normally it takes two, or even three. At present, the information available to me is anomalous &amp;mdash; it appears that the comment was removed by a single flag which should not (to my mind) have had that result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the fact that it should have been an answer, I can't see anything objectionable in the comment. I would have restored it with this Meta answer, except that the system doesn't make that possible: we can only undelete mod-deleted comments. I'm investigating how that might be achieved in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be an opportune time to remind members that this site exists to serve an academic interest in the English language. English contains words which in some circumstances can be offensive. However, the academic discussion of offensive words is not, of itself, offensive. If you find you are offended by the mere &lt;em&gt;mention&lt;/em&gt; of such words, rather than their &lt;em&gt;use,&lt;/em&gt; just walk away from the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also an opportune reminder that content &amp;mdash; comments, posts, or entire questions and their answers &amp;mdash; can be removed without any moderator intervention whatsoever. And to say again that comments are ephemeral and can be removed at any time. As it stands at the time of this answer, I can't see a reason that the comment should be removed, but that doesn't mean it's immune from the normal operation of the site. It may end up deleted by further flags, or removed from the post but preserved in a chat room, or just deleted anyway. If a comment is worth preserving indefinitely, it's worth expanding into an answer, especially since it may not be possible to restore a comment if it's deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T21:35:58.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9738" CreationDate="2016-11-30T02:13:13.210" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like when one day I am contemplating answering a question, but then I reach my question limit or I want time to think about it, and forget to favourite the question. Then I go back the next day and I don't find the question! I am sure many other Stack Exchange users would appreciate a &quot;follow question&quot; option. It would be nice if we could &quot;monitor&quot; our favourited questions from our inbox, eg. &quot;So and so has added a new answer on your favourited question&quot; or &quot;You favourited a question 1 minute ago&quot;. Or, it could be included next to the &quot;Recent achievements&quot; section in the top left-hand corner, making it easier to access, instead of looking through our profile. Can we make this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastEditorUserId="201373" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T10:44:37.690" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:23:40.140" Title="Can we add a &quot;follow question&quot; option?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9734" CreationDate="2016-11-30T03:18:57.597" Score="7" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have gained both the &quot;Suffrage&quot; and &quot;Vox Populi&quot; badges, but I still don't understand the concept of the &quot;10 extra votes for questions&quot; function! The topic has been discussed on Meta, but I don't know how it works! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Webpage: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/used-up-all-my-votes-but-no-vox-populi-badge/1444#1444&quot;&gt;Used up all my votes, but no Vox Populi badge?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T17:49:01.613" Title="What is the &quot;10 extra votes for questions&quot; function?" Tags="|discussion|badges|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9733" CreationDate="2016-11-30T10:34:32.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting is a network-wide thing rather than an ELU-specific thing, and I think this is answered by an Meta.SE question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90479/whats-the-difference-between-suffrage-and-vox-populi-badge/90480#90480&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between Suffrage and Vox populi badge&lt;/a&gt;. It's not possible to mark this question as a duplicate of that one because it's on a different site, but please do refer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffrage: used 30 votes per day&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Vox populi: used the maximum 40 votes in a day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, you can vote forty times, but ten of those votes are reserved for votes on questions. You can only use these ten reserved votes &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; you've used 25 answer votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers on the MSE question mention a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/05/vote-for-this-question-or-the-kitten-gets-it/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5213/&quot;&gt;FAQ on vote limits&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; it's complicated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T17:49:01.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9737" CreationDate="2016-11-30T10:53:07.727" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is similar to my other question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9732/can-we-add-a-follow-question-option?noredirect=1#comment38317_9732&quot;&gt;Can we add a &amp;quot;follow question&amp;quot; option?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except what if you don't want to favourite, or potentially &quot;follow&quot; the question initially, but wish to find it later? It would be nice if there was a &quot;history&quot; or &quot;recently viewed&quot; section next to or inside the &quot;all actions&quot; tab. Could we make this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T11:39:04.620" Title="Could we add a feature that tracks visited questions in the &quot;all actions&quot; tab?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-12-01T16:41:38.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9736" CreationDate="2016-11-30T11:02:01.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two questions you asked on English Language and Usage SE Meta should be asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; as it will affect all SE sites. You can't have this feature change just for ELU SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, if you find a question interesting and you'd like to follow it, you can just &lt;em&gt;favorite&lt;/em&gt; it and you will be able to find it under the tab &quot;favorites&quot; under Activity in your user profile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related FAQ on Meta SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/53585/how-do-favorite-questions-work&quot;&gt;How do favorite questions work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T11:39:04.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9732" CreationDate="2016-11-30T14:23:40.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any of your favorite (starred) questions which has had recent activity will be highlighted in yellow on the &quot;favorites&quot; tab of your profile page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:23:40.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2016-11-30T21:00:42.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My only objection to edits adding research is that they may not reflect the actual understanding of the original poster (OP). I don't agree with the idea that adding research is wrong because &quot;lazy&quot; OPs deserve to have their questions closed, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the principle that &quot;edits should reflect the intent of the original poster&quot; is somewhat important because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the OP always has control over the accepted answer. It's not ideal if someone writes a long answer addressing some interesting side point, and this answer gets stuck beneath a boring/trival answer that addresses the OP's boring/trivial original question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the OP generally has control over revisions of the question. If the OP returns to a question that has been edited to ask something else, the OP may make new edits that invalidate existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, if this is not permitted, the misinterpretation of the question may annoy the original poster and, in the worst case scenario, this drives away someone from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these scenarios may be unlikely. But as curiousdannii says, you can always ask a new question if you get an idea for a good question from an unclear post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T21:00:42.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-01T06:25:27.573" Score="1" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many people are experts on the passive voice, but not the active voice? Or want to learn about one, but not the other? It seems silly to me to treat these as distinct subjects. It would be like having separate tags for &quot;singular&quot; and &quot;plural&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a large proportion of the questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/active-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;active-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;active-voice&lt;/a&gt; are also tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose renaming &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;grammatical voice,&quot; and then marking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/active-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;active-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;active-voice&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym. Of course, keep &quot;passive voice&quot; and &quot;active voice&quot; as redirects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Another possible synonym is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/middle-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;middle-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;middle-voice&lt;/a&gt;, which only has two questions. However, perhaps middle voice is rare enough that it should be kept as a distinct tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T09:37:11.643" Title="Merge &quot;passive-voice&quot; and &quot;active-voice&quot; as &quot;grammatical-voice&quot; (with redirects)" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2016-12-01T06:48:05.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To keep and communicate the proper perspective, I find the need for a prefix to English pejoratives that indicate a theoretical violation of standards that in practice doesn’t matter because of the small stakes involved. I don’t know of any such construct, so I’m going to use the symbol &amp;ddagger;. For instance, when my newspaper delivery service consistently throws my paper in the swale adjoining my driveway instead of on the driveway itself, I might write, “Its a &amp;ddagger;shame that I can’t get my paper delivered properly.” Yes, the delivery people should do the job I’m paying them for, and it’s too bad they don’t, but a real shame would be say, the treatment of Syrian refugees. My newspaper delivery problems are only a &amp;ddagger;shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TFMMPFM = Thanks for making my point for me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WIHKYTRWIAW? = Would it have killed you to read what I actually wrote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T06:48:05.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2016-12-01T06:57:34.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Explanation of typography &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9741/125330&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one response was unexpected, and that was the answer from @Shog9, informing me that &lt;strong&gt;they used to delete comments, period&lt;/strong&gt; and that if I didn't stop making &quot;too much of a fuss&quot;, maybe they'd go back to doing just that.  If I may paraphrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;STFU, and if you don’t, we’re gonna wipe out your comment threads. In other words, &lt;em&gt;nice little chat room you’ve got there, Colonel. It would be a shame if something happened to it.&lt;/em&gt; And did I mention that you should just STFU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I’m used to the &amp;ddagger;derision and &amp;ddagger;contempt routinely directed at users of ELU, but I’ll have to say the &amp;ddagger;aggression here is a &amp;ddagger;disgrace. And the fact that 20 people approved of this response is an even greater &amp;ddagger;&amp;ddagger;disgrace. There’s simply no excuse for anyone, but especially a mod, responding to a dissent in this &amp;ddagger;manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let me mention in passing that this &amp;ddagger;inappropriate response makes absolutely no sense as a threat. I’ve already made it clear that I consider that chat has no value, but at least it’s hard to use. How does it work as a threat to take away something I don’t use and in fact, don’t consider useful? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three more things. First about the lecture on understanding the “important bit” of not relegating critical (I suppose you mean substantive) information to comments. That’s not what I did and not why I considered the thread useful. WIHKYTRWIAW?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, thanks for the life coaching, but if I had a life to “move on with”, I wouldn’t be posting here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, @Shog9 cites an essay “A guide to moderating comments” in which we find this gem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't worry about cleaning up benign conversations that don't appear on page load.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And who wrote this guide? Why, @Shog9, of course. TFMMPFM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T06:57:34.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2016-12-01T07:06:40.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Explanation of typography &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9741/125330&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@tchrist managed to cite ten supposed dupes. (Only nine unique ones though. I guess to emphasize the duplicated nature of my question). He claim that he’s not “at liberty to override SE network policies on comments”. Here’s a lesson for us all: don’t assume that cites for a claim support the claim. We can all learn from an answer found in his first cited dupe, commenting on the site’s “Theory of Moderation”, which says in part, “The ideal moderator does as little as possible”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not the theory underlying the practice of moderation on ELU. Moderation is a constant and [&amp;ddagger;]intrusive presence, with moderators closing questions as fast as they can type, scrubbing&#xA;  comments they deem unsuitable, and handing &quot;timeouts&quot; to questions and posters alike. I have&#xA;  never seen a moderator explain anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there’s some damn fine writing, and TFMMPFM, if indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T07:06:40.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2016-12-01T07:14:19.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Explanation for typography &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9741/125330&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your reply, @medica, both for its content and for the evident respect with which it was delivered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish you had addressed the point about attribution instead of admiring the justice of @Tonepoet, who pretty much missed the point entirely. To be fair, @Tonepoet wasn’t obligated to read the &lt;em&gt;Mimsy&lt;/em&gt; answer, but if he had, he would have seen that footnotes for attribution would have interfered with the multiple substantive footnotes. And yeah, inline cites for unquoted material aren't necessary, and yeah, attribution could be buried in the revision history. But either of those choices would have undermined the reason for keeping the thread as an example of the cooperative effort that I claim goes into making good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few secondary issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the vow of omerta undertaken by mods, allegedly to protect the privacy of users. But there’s little privacy to violate, as most people here are anonymous, and everybody can choose to be so. I say that I would prefer all mod actions be public, because I think the secrecy is &amp;ddagger;deleterious. For the case at hand, if a mod has the unaccountable power to ban me for violating the organization’s rules, that mod shouldn’t &amp;ddagger;falsely accuse me violating those rules.  When I reject the accusation, the proper response is a retraction or a proof. Silence is &amp;ddagger;unacceptable and an &amp;ddagger;embarrassment to the site. Or it would be if things weren’t cloaked in secrecy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn’t clear when I was talking about commentary on mod actions being off topic. @Sumelic was right when he figured that I meant such commentary under questions and answers. You’re certainly right that these comments aren’t for disputes. But there’s an issue that overrides this consideration and that’s the &amp;ddagger;conflict of interest that  a mod has in removing criticism of mod actions. Such comments should be treated like red-hot iron bars — perhaps out of place, but not to be touched until they cool. It doesn’t matter which mod disappeared the comment into the memory hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, as I write your answer stands at +17/-1. The driveby downvoter has struck again. It wan’t me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T07:14:19.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9740" CreationDate="2016-12-01T09:37:11.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a different opinion on naming &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;grammatical voice&quot; for the following reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Grammatical voice&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=grammatical+voice%2C+passive+voice%2C+active+voice&amp;amp;year_start=1900&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgrammatical%20voice%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cpassive%20voice%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cactive%20voice%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not a popular term&lt;/a&gt; compared with &lt;em&gt;passive voice&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;active voice&lt;/em&gt;. I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;voice&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-active-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-active-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-active-voice&lt;/a&gt; could work better than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammatical-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-voice&lt;/a&gt; if you want to redirect other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/passive-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;passive-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;passive-voice&lt;/a&gt; has 328 questions and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/active-voice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;active-voice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;active-voice&lt;/a&gt; has only 63 questions. I think it would be more efficient just to synonymize the latter with the former. Other potential terms that could be used in the future also should be synonymized.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T09:37:11.643" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-01T12:00:24.903" Score="-5" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3544/should-users-be-asked-to-increase-their-accept-rates&quot;&gt;Should users be asked to increase their accept rates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6554/should-askers-who-never-accept-answers-be-penalized-in-some-way&quot;&gt;Should askers who never ‘accept’ answers be penalized in some way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to these posts and their answers, accepting an answer is the OP's role because he is the one who can decide if an answer has reached his standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I too have seen questions without accepted answers, with no apparent reason not to accept an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be completely fine in the case of an ambiguous topic, or unsufficient answers, but there are cases where the post is left to rot without an accepted answer. Future users might feel unsure about a perfectly valid answer because it's not accepted, and could even ask the question again only to see their question marked as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvoting a good answer may help, but sometimes the best answers are not the most popular, especially on &lt;strong&gt;old posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think giving &lt;strong&gt;high-rep. users&lt;/strong&gt; the ability to &lt;strong&gt;vote-accept&lt;/strong&gt; an answer some time after the question was asked (something like a month) would help both the reputation system &lt;del&gt; and clear the &quot;Unanswered Questions&quot; list of question that already have accurate answers&lt;/del&gt; and the future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the OP would still be the strongest on that matter, and can decide to unaccept that answer and accept an other at his will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; : Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9747/18696&quot;&gt;Rathony's answer&lt;/a&gt;, I do see the negative sides of such change. Being able to tell the difference between the &lt;strong&gt;asker's choice (accept)&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;community's choice (upvotes)&lt;/strong&gt; is indeed important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the asker is mute, I see no harm in the community being able to choose for him, as long as it seems to fit the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9748/204859&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach said&lt;/a&gt;, restricting this ability to questions asked by users who might not have grasped the concept of accepting answers yet could be a good idea. Having &lt;strong&gt;less than 300 rep. in a month&lt;/strong&gt; is a sign of being a &lt;strong&gt;drive-by single-issue user&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I wrongfully used &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; while I wanted to mean &lt;em&gt;high-rep. users&lt;/em&gt;, so I've edited that in the above title and texts (along with the formatting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2 :&lt;/strong&gt; I'm also talking about that kind of questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299041/idiom-for-making-fun-of-something-people-are-ashamed-of&quot;&gt;Idiom for making fun of something people are ashamed of?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204859" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T16:44:44.713" Title="Should high-rep. users be given the right to vote-accept answers" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9746" CreationDate="2016-12-01T12:42:25.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. It's best to leave the decision to the OP and users including moderators here can upvote useful and clear answers with research. You need to note that there are many new users who post a question and don't even bother to come back to read their answers and don't accept an answer because they don't now how to accept it. There are some sites where some moderators and experienced users post a comment to encourage new OPs to accept an answer, but ELU is not one of them.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been asked and answered more than a few times on Meta SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18312/moderators-accepting-answers-on-users-behalf-after-a-certain-time-period&quot;&gt;Moderators accepting answers on user&amp;#39;s behalf after a certain time period&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115263/feature-request-moderator-ability-to-accept-an-answer&quot;&gt;Feature request: moderator ability to accept an answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Troggy answers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, this is a user-oriented site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is intended to answer people's questions. They know their problem&#xA;  the best and know what solves it for them. We need to leave it up to&#xA;  them to accept whatever answer they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@blahdiblah answers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer is meant to indicate only &quot;this solved my&#xA;  problem&quot;. If the user who asked the question is AWOL, then there's no&#xA;  way to determine if the given answer solved their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If an answer is good, it should garner upvotes regardless of whether&#xA;  the question asker is around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once thought about asking Stack Exchange to give moderators the right to change the accepted answer when it is obviously wrong, but decided not to after reading those linked questions and answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please make sure you upvote and downvote when you see a post depending on its research, usefulness and clearness.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side note: If a question has an upvoted answer, it will clear the &quot;Unanswered Questions&quot; list. In other words, unaccepted questions are not the only criteria to be listed in &quot;Unanswered Questions&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T14:40:11.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9746" CreationDate="2016-12-01T13:07:46.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting idea, which as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9747/18696&quot;&gt;Rathony has pointed out&lt;/a&gt; has been discussed before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not be happy with only moderators having this unilateral ability. But if it could be implemented in a similar way to other votes like voting to close (five votes from 3000-rep users) or voting to delete (three votes from 10k users), then it may be a useful way of foiling the Community user's bumping of questions, which can be unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be restricted to questions asked by a user with less than 300 reputation or who has accepted fewer than five answers. Once a user has reached 300 rep or accepted five answers he might be expected to know how the system works and the community shouldn't have to work it for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the OP still has the ability to undo the acceptance and/or change his choice, I don't see a problem with the community making the choice for him after a period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: I would put some meat on the proposal in the question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An answer becomes eligible  to  be accepted by the community on behalf of the asker if...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the answer is a month old &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the question asker has less than 300 rep or has accepted fewer than five answers in total&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An answer would be accepted by the community if...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;five members with more than 3000 rep have voted for that (like closure) &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;one moderator votes for it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The asker always has the ability to unaccept the answer, or to accept another answer, as he does at present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The asker does not receive the +2 rep for accepting an answer where it's done on his behalf (but other rep changes work as now: the answerer does get the +15 accept bonus, and the asker would get the +2 if he did his own acceptance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I suspect that as a tweak to mitigate the effect of drive-by single-issue posters, it would be rather too much work. It would be useful to sites where there is a disproportionately-high number of such drive-by users, though: ELU is one such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T13:07:46.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9746" CreationDate="2016-12-01T13:32:22.227" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No, I don't think anyone but the OP should have the acceptance privilege&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I too am frustrated by questions with good answers, none of which have been accepted.  It is just common courtesy to acknowledge and reward the work that many people have done to answer your question.  The reasons for not accepting could be ignorance on the part of new users, laziness, inconsiderateness, or forgetfulness.  And, rarely, no answer satisfies the OP, in which case the OP should say so and clarify his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What might help is an automatic prompt to accept after, say, two or three weeks.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are unaccepted answers to questions by OPs with experience enough to know about acceptance; these questions often have many good answers. The OP has probably just forgotten -- people do have other things to think about than ELU.  In one case, I am tempted to send a reminder comment to the OP myself, but have not done so because I have the answer with by far the most upvotes (99) and I don't want to be pushy.  (I'm also hoping to get that 100th vote, which is more likely if the question is not marked as having an accepted answer.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T13:32:22.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2016-12-01T15:19:22.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am all in favour of editing thought-provoking questions to add research; I do it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is relatively clear, just lacking research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's getting close votes for lack of research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you're able to do some research and prove that the question is non-trivial (i.e. not just answered by consulting a dictionary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I think editing in your own research is completely justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T15:19:22.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9746" CreationDate="2016-12-01T19:06:19.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that no one but the OP should be able to set the current acceptance mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possibility would be an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;acceptance check mark in another color&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to indicate an answer that has been accepted by community vote. That could be an extension to what Andrew wrote in his answer. That way the community could mark an answer as accepted only in case the original poster did not do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There would be some advantages to a community accept over simple max votes top. It could act as counterweight to highly up voted popular but not necessarily high quality answer to questions that hit the &lt;em&gt;hot network&lt;/em&gt; list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an community accept could be seen as an &lt;em&gt;valued by experts&lt;/em&gt; since it is by definition only granted to answers that a few high reputation users have chosen to honor. Of course that would be another sinkhole where the more active users spend time on and I am not sure that the benefit of such a community accept - especially if only answers that fulfill certain prerequisites - would outweigh the additional effort people have to invest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow that is a discussion for meta.se not elu.meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T19:06:19.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9752" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-01T19:38:45.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T19:38:45.197" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T19:38:45.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9753" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-01T19:38:45.197" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the usability of English Language &amp; Usage Stack Exchange by people with disabilities." OwnerUserId="163363" LastEditorUserId="163363" LastEditDate="2016-12-02T08:56:21.180" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T08:56:21.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-02T03:03:42.223" Score="-3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I realised that badges don't give you reputation points. I thought that it would be a great idea to give +5 or +10 points for each badge earned. Could we make this a feature please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="208596" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T09:42:24.410" Title="Can we add a feature where you gain reputation points for earning badges?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2016-12-02T08:13:37.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand that, early in membership of the community when reputation is hard-earned and badges come somewhat more easily, a badge-related way of earning points looks attractive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it actually defeats the purpose of reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges are a measure of involvement: how much you have done. Your reputation is a measure of &lt;strong&gt;how the community values your posts&lt;/strong&gt; on the main site. It's a fundamental measure. Stack Exchange sites exist to provide good answers to good questions, and gaining reputation from good answers or good questions is a mark of your participation in that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are some things that do gain you reputation: you gain +2 points for every suggested edit (up to a limit), because you are improving things and helping the site to host good questions and good answers. You get +2 points when you accept an answer to a question you've asked, because again by accepting an answer you're helping to curate the site content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you gain far more reputation by actually providing that content. For every upvote on a good question, you gain +5 points. For every upvote on a good answer, you get +10. If your answer is accepted by the question asker, you get another +15. It is providing this good content which gains reputation, because the community values your input to the body of knowledge it holds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges and points are actually very different. They are kept apart for good reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T08:13:37.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2016-12-02T08:56:26.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to @Andrew's great answer, I'd like to highlight the fact that badges don't work in the same way as reputation does. For example, you need to give up your own 50 to 500 reputation points to earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Altruist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Investor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; badges which are awarded to users for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First bounty you manually award on another person's question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First bounty you offer on another person's question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't work well for Stack Exchange to award reputation when you try to give up some of your reputation. Out of 138,000 users on ELU, only 77 and 94 users have those badges respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many badges in Question, Answer and Tag badges come along with reputation. Therefore, if you want to get more badges, you have to participate more in asking and answering questions in a more useful and clear way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't get Moderation badges if you don't participate in moderation activities, such as flagging, voting, editing, etc. It's not always true the higher reputation you have, the more badges you have, especially on Meta. You don't gain any reputation from activities on Meta, but only badges. We can know how active a user is by looking at the number of badges on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a related question on Meta Stack Exchange, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/152/reputation-for-badges&quot;&gt;Reputation for Badges&lt;/a&gt;, @JonSkeet answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. Badges tend to come via the same sort of actions which gain you reputation anyway... I don't think it makes sense to make the reputation system even more complicated in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another related post on Meta SE,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196790/rep-prize-money-when-badges-are-awarded&quot;&gt;Rep &amp;quot;prize money&amp;quot; when badges are awarded&lt;/a&gt; (which was closed as duplicate of the above question), @AdamLear answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone joins a site, their goal shouldn't be editing, flagging, commenting, etc. It should be asking and answering questions, at least to start with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should note that if you propose this on Meta SE, it will be closed as duplicate of the first question unless you show more convincing arguments than other questions. Also, downvotes on Meta SE are cast more aggressively than English Language &amp;amp; Usage Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T09:42:24.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-02T14:33:02.303" Score="7" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question of mine has so far got three close votes and a slightly annoying dupe notice hanging around at the top of it when I am signed in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360061/the-carrots-need-being-chopped-and-the-carrots-need-to-chop&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The carrots need being chopped&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The carrots need to chop&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is basically about why it is that the verb &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; appears to be a control  verb [or Equi-deletion verb, if you prefer] when it's followed by an infinitival clause, whereas it works like a hollow clause verb [or a tough-movement verb, if you prefer that terminology] when followed by a gerund-participle clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, this calls for a discussion of gerund-participles. However, it has been linked to a supposed dupe which asks about the dialectical possibility of the verb &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; taking a past participle as a complement. There is no mention of gerund-participles (-&lt;em&gt;ing&lt;/em&gt; forms of the verb) in the linked-to question at all. Here's the theoretical duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9331/needs-cleaned-or-needs-to-be-cleaned&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Needs cleaned&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;needs to be cleaned&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially if we see that a question has been asked by a reasonably seasoned or high rep user, could we be a little bit more careful about the duplicate voting, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't edited my question in response to the duplicate close-votes. The reason being that I don't think it's helpful for the site to have explanations of why answers to a question about Father Christmas do not answer this here question about cabbages :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T19:35:03.080" Title="Please can we take more care over duping" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9759" CreationDate="2016-12-02T18:22:33.943" Score="-7" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confusables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confusables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confusables&lt;/a&gt; seems like a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;, should it be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T19:46:43.577" Title="Should the tags 'ambiguity' and 'confusables' be merged?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9758" CreationDate="2016-12-02T19:46:43.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my limited experience with these tags, they mean different things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Confusables&quot; is about words (or other things) that speakers or learners commonly confuse. For example, &quot;what is the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/why-is-there-confusion-between-depreciated-and-deprecated&quot;&gt;'deprecated' and 'depreciated'&lt;/a&gt;?&quot; People asking these questions want to learn about some distinction so they can avoid making the mistake of confusing these terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ambiguity&quot; is about ambiguous structures. Ambiguity is not necessarily, or even usually, a mistake. People asking about ambiguity may want to know how to interpret an ambiguous sentence, or they may want to know about alternative ways of phrasing that are less ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T19:46:43.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9720" CreationDate="2016-12-02T20:12:16.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An issue I had when reading this question was something that you yourself bring up in a comment: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can't control other people's behavior, you can only control your&#xA;  own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I don’t think it’s a simple matter to make the community nicer. So rather than trying to do that, I am just going to focus on what I’ve been doing already: answering questions, commenting on questions and answers, voting posts up and down, posting links to related posts, voting to close, reopen, delete, and undelete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You suggest calling out any comments I see that I find unkind. I am not convinced that I should try to do this. Call-outs take effort, especially since it’s easy for a call-out itself to cause offense. If I commited to this course of action, I’d have to spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to word these messages. And even if I made this effort, I might get it wrong and end up offending people in the attempt to make the site nicer. I don't think that would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issues and suggestions are about topics that I already have thought about, and I would guess many other members of the site have thought about as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that you say are not nice: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions not worth asking.&lt;/strong&gt; I agree that it’s not enjoyable when people act as if a question is not worth asking. I also think that some questions are actually bad. And sometimes, &quot;bad&quot; questions are salvageable with editing. When this is the case, a comment pointing out weaknesses of the question may actually be useful. It's easy for such a comment to just be rude, of course, but I don't think there is an easy way to determine how to classify comments on questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers picked apart.&lt;/strong&gt; As The Nate says, critical comments are often constructive and they can be very useful. Personally, I would strongly resist any attempts to discourage leaving critical comments, because I want to learn about any weaknesses in the answers that I write or the answers that I read. Of course, commenting should not take the place of downvoting and posting an alternative answer, but I don't really understand how it would help anyone if people were silent about the weaknesses of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speaking from authority.&lt;/strong&gt; I agree, it's more useful to cite relevant guidelines. That's what I try to do when I leave a comment about site guidelines. But it's not totally useless to post a comment without a link. It at least notifies the owner of the post about the general kind of rule that might be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Carelessness with tone.&lt;/strong&gt; I don't know how to respond to this point. I try to watch my tone in comments and posts. I have no control over the tone of other people's comments, and as I mentioned above, I am not convinced it would make things better if I committed to calling out any comments that seem to me to have an unkind tone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestions for improvement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Positive feedback.&lt;/strong&gt; Are we skewed towards negative feedback? I actually don't know. Regardless, the main methods of positive feedback I know of are upvotes and comments. I already use upvotes on content that I find helpful. I might comment if there is something in particular that I think it would be useful to point out, but this takes more effort and I feel like it may just add noise. Newbies may need more positive feedback, but it's frequently exhausting to actually take effort to do this, since there are many new users and a large proportion of them don't stay even if they get positive feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pointing out the guidelines.&lt;/strong&gt; Members already do this. I have a document filled with pre-written comments with explanations and links to the guidelines; I mentioned some of them in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9415/77227&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. I know some other site members have a similar methodology. Sometimes it helps, often these comments are just ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Migrating ELL questions to ELL.&lt;/strong&gt; This already happens, a lot. (In fact, I'm inclined to think it happens more often than it should. There are issues with migrating low-quality questions that have been mentioned for example by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285467/a-proposed-philosophy-of-question-migration&quot;&gt;Catija in the comments here&lt;/a&gt;.) People on this site are very aware of the existence of ELL, and often try to send learners there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close-vote nicely.&lt;/strong&gt; I agree that it's best not to leave a snarky comment when close-voting. I try to avoid doing this, or upvoting comments like this. I don't know of any way to prevent any member of the community from doing this, however.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T20:12:16.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-02T20:29:18.123" Score="6" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the impression one loses brownie points when posting an answer to a question that will obviously be closed in short order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should one draw the line in deciding whether to post an answer to a gray-area unsuitable question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How bad it is to post an answer to an unsuitable question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to do it out of a desire to help the person out who asked the question.  On the one hand, I'm helping the individual by answering the question; on the other hand, I'm apparently diluting the effectiveness of the site.  How much of one, how much of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, please see comment: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361461/mexican-newspaper-el-tiempo-or-the-mexican-newspaper-el-tiempo/361463?noredirect=1#comment841182_361463&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361461/mexican-newspaper-el-tiempo-or-the-mexican-newspaper-el-tiempo/361463?noredirect=1#comment841182_361463&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, it is safe to ignore the fact that my answer was not well documented.  That's a clear boo-boo but that's not what I'm asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not asking whether you agree with @EdwinAshworth who commented that particular question should be closed.  Assume for the sake of argument that it should, but that it wasn't obvious enough to be closed very quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T13:20:44.090" Title="How bad is it to answer a question that might be unsuitable for the site?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2016-12-02T20:40:19.827" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason this is bad that I know of is that it may prevent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;automatic deletion of low-quality questions&lt;/a&gt;. This makes the site have more low-quality questions that show up in search results even though they aren't useful (or it makes more work for voters to delete these questions manually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people also seem to feel that it's a bad thing because it &quot;rewards&quot; someone who they don't think deserves an answer. I'm not really convinced this is important, though. It doesn't particularly bother me in and of itself, and while it might seem to encourage people to ask more bad questions, people who don't improve will encounter question-bans regardless of whether their questions have been answered or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason that some people seem to find this objectionable is that the &lt;em&gt;answerer&lt;/em&gt; will get &quot;undeserved&quot; reputation for answering the question. But I don't think this is a big deal either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3198&quot;&gt;Downvoting an answer because the question was bad?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I resort to answer-comments if I want to answer such a question, and I consider that an acceptable strategy. I might downvote an answer like this if I think it isn't likely to be useful for the site as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T20:40:19.827" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9720" CreationDate="2016-12-02T21:17:58.850" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to point up an important part of the “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt;” policy: two constructive steps you can take when you see a hostile, disrespectful, or unprofessional message, whether or not it is directed at you personally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disengage&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these steps are important. Step 1 will get moderators involved to protect the site and the community. Step 2 will help de-escalate the immediate situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if someone posts a demeaning comment, it helps if you do not reply (disengage), and instead flag the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T21:17:58.850" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-03T00:04:42.173" Score="-2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87087/sentence-pattern-clarification&quot;&gt;sentence pattern clarification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has two conflicting answers.  When I read each answer by itself, I think it sounds right and good and convincing.  Neither one provides documentation to help me choose between them.  I personally am not a stickler for documentation if the answer explains things clearly and convincingly for me, but in this case I just ended up confused about indirect objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be reopened, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T14:41:31.733" Title="Would like to reopen and offer bounty for this question" Tags="|support|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-03T02:43:54.080" Score="19" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, questions which actually ask about aspects of the English Language which might be interesting to linguists, etymologists or serious language enthusiasts are now banned on EL&amp;amp;U. Single word-request junkies who have the disinclination for such questions to appear on EL&amp;amp;U have started sending such questions to the English Language Learners site so as to be able to rid EL&amp;amp;U of such questions. Here is the latest example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360061/the-carrots-need-being-chopped-and-the-carrots-need-to-chop#360061&quot;&gt;“The carrots need being chopped” and “The carrots need to chop”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need some mechanism to be able to stop this kind of behaviour from happening? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of one method that might work. Certain types of question, for example grammar, syntax, phonetics and etymology questions – that may often be answered by linguistics professors or real language enthusiasts – should be protectable by users who have sufficient reputation in relation to that tag, or related tags in order to stop them being closed by careless users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I also feel that people whose primary tag is for SWRs shouldn't be able to close-vote questions which don't have a SWR tag, but that's another question]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T13:28:31.303" Title="No questions for Linguists on EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2016-12-03T05:28:47.813" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;See my close-reason on ELL below for where this question belongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/76tnt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/76tnt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T05:28:47.813" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2016-12-03T07:09:01.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9720/can-we-turn-this-into-a-nicer-community&quot;&gt;I was excoriated for doing so.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let me say this in as a nice a way as possible: It is clear from the&#xA;  guidelines that this is not a place for people learning the English&#xA;  language to ask questions, especially if they are basic questions&#xA;  and/or they evince no research. Yet, my question to &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; is why do&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; keep answering such questions... &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360653/which-is-more-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;one of many examples&lt;/a&gt;. This question should be close-voted for no research. It is actions&#xA;  like &lt;strong&gt;yours&lt;/strong&gt; that only encourages more ELL questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's worth pointing out that there might be a double standard. One of our most respected and knowledgeable members, a true linguist, also answered an off-topic question recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361584/propositional-logic-question&quot;&gt;Propositional Logic Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hesitate to bring up anything that would reflect badly on someone, especially since this person is one of our most knowledgeable members, whose answers I value very much. But I hope it will raise an important question. That being, is there a double standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T07:09:01.167" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2016-12-03T07:37:01.890" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is appropriate to call other ELU users &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U. Single word-request junkies&lt;/em&gt;. That's name-calling and it's against &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt; policy: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Name-calling. Focus on the post, not the person. That includes terms that feel personal even when they're applied to posts (like &quot;lazy&quot;, &quot;ignorant&quot;, or &quot;whiny&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't agree with other users who voted to close or migrate the question, you can just state the reasons why you don't agree and ask other users to migrate it back to ELU. It could be more efficient to post a request on ELL Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certain types of question, for example grammar, syntax, phonetics and etymology questions – that may often be answered by linguistics professors or real language enthusiasts – should be protectable by users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with this idea. Not only will it be against the &lt;em&gt;community-driven&lt;/em&gt; mechanism of Stack Exchange, but also it could lock basic and ELL questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/359409/can-i-use-has-after-being-a-noun&quot;&gt;Can I use &amp;quot;has&amp;quot; after being a noun?&lt;/a&gt;. This question has been asked and answered repeatedly. I wonder what makes you think this kind of basic learner's question should be answered again on ELU. Why is it so difficult to research and find references for the question like this? &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116240/singular-vs-plural-with-multiple-gerunds-as-subject-ie-gerund-and-gerund&quot;&gt;Singular vs. Plural with Multiple Gerunds as Subject (IE: [Gerund] and [Gerund] are/is [something].)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/gerunds.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerunds and &#xA;Infinitives:&#xA;Their Noun Roles&lt;/a&gt;. Should this question be answered by  linguistics professors or real language enthusiasts? I don't think so. This question should have been closed as duplicate or lack of research. (Note the links above are the first two I found after searching &quot;verb agreement after gerund/ing&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also feel that people whose primary tag is for SWRs shouldn't be able to close-vote questions which don't have a SWR tag, but that's another question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who continuously ignore the guidelines of ELU and answer off-topic and basic questions shouldn't be able to vote to reopen a question, either. You should raise this issue on Meta SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T07:58:23.943" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9764" CreationDate="2016-12-03T08:13:43.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with reopening the question as it doesn't show any research. Please consider editing it first before requesting users reopen the question. I will vote to reopen it when it is edited with research.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also consider asking your own question based on the old question explaining why it doesn't help you. It is better than reopening an old question and offer a bounty especially when the question was closed for lack of research and detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your new question won't cost you any reputation unless it is downvoted and it could earn you more reputation if it is upvoted. Please make sure you include your research efforts and explain what bothers you most.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T08:13:43.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2016-12-03T11:12:38.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It totally depends. Only answer bad questions when you provide a good answer. Otherwise, keep it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would have been a great thing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If however you do see something interesting that might be of use to future visitors then yes please answer. But please answer with an explanation. Any answer on ELU should answer the why. If you had answered and explained why the definite article should be kept the answer alone would be a reason to keep the question as well. Have a look at answers from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/36232/sven-yargs&quot;&gt;Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/76472/araucaria&quot;&gt;Araucaria&lt;/a&gt; who are just two examples of high reputation users who often try to find the redeemable in the questions and answer profoundly. &lt;em&gt;We have a lot of bad questions on ELU that have been saved by good answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happened in the example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually completely disagree with your assertion that the quality of the answer is not important. We do have some questions that are by quality of their content or other aspects simply bad. Your example has a trivial question. A question that you do not even answer at all. You should not answer such questions in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That example now has a bad question and a bad answer that in no way addresses the question about the definite article. That is in my view a double no against answering that question that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is also that the amount of low quality posts was increased, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/211323&quot;&gt;the VLQ review queue was triggered for five reviewers&lt;/a&gt; and sabotaged the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;automatic roomba&lt;/a&gt; that is supposed to clean up the site because questions with answers are harder to get rid of than the ones without. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;You should never do that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; If one wants to answer with a single sentence, keep it a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T13:20:44.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2016-12-03T12:22:32.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emphasis in bold mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Apparently, questions which actually ask about aspects of the English Language which might be interesting to linguists, etymologists or serious language enthusiasts &lt;strong&gt;are now banned on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that's not true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting  questions about linguistics are not banned, but they can be put on hold due to lack of research, which was not the case here. They can be closed for being a duplicate, which didn't happen here. They can be put on hold for being unclear, but nobody cast their vote for that reason. And finally, they can be migrated to ELL because &lt;strong&gt;some users believe the answer is relatively straightforward&lt;/strong&gt;, which is exactly what happened in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we really want to be picky, the question was not  &lt;em&gt;banned&lt;/em&gt;, it was not closed, but it was &lt;em&gt;relocated&lt;/em&gt;. Cerberus has offered a solution; however, I believe only the mods at ELL can bounce this question back to EL&amp;amp;U. (see update)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certain types of question, for example grammar, syntax, phonetics and etymology questions – that may often be answered by linguistics professors &lt;strong&gt;or real language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt; – should be protectable by users who have sufficient reputation in relation to that tag, or related tags in order to stop them being closed by careless users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who or what defines a &quot;real language enthusiast&quot;? Presumably any user who has been a member for at least six months and has answered perhaps thirty unrelated questions could qualify. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the numbers. The first user who cast their vote to close the question has over 10,700 rep; the second has just over 6,000 rep and has been a member of EL&amp;amp;U for almost six years. The third user has earned nearly 10,500 rep, but the fourth is a relatively new member (only 4 months); and the last user, whose vote meant that the question was doomed for migration, even if they cast their close vote for a totally different reason, has also been a member for nearly 6 years and has nearly 40,000 rep to their credit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Objectively speaking, four out the five users have the necessary experience, and a passion for the English language which qualifies them as being fully-fledged enthusiasts, and there may even be a graduate of English or linguistics hiding among them for all we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I also feel &lt;strong&gt;that people whose primary tag is for SWRs shouldn't be able to close-vote questions which don't have a SWR tag,&lt;/strong&gt; but that's another question]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think each and every one of these five users has as much right to cast a vote as an esteemed linguist or student of linguistics. In addition,  &lt;strong&gt;not one&lt;/strong&gt; of the five users has the SWR &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders&quot;&gt;dupe hammer&lt;/a&gt;, but each and every one one has SWR as their number one tag. On the other hand, Araucaria's most successful tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronunciation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronunciation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;, only tchrist♦ &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/pronunciation/topusers&quot;&gt;tops him&lt;/a&gt;, but Araucaria has as much right to close a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;  question, as any user who has earned that same &quot;privilege&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we need some mechanism to be able to stop this kind of behaviour from happening?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE  system for closing questions as is, generally works. The type of mistake that happened on this occasion  is rare, but it will happen again, no democratic system is perfect. And ensuring only a specific group of users the privilege of closing or reopening linguistic or grammar questions, would smack of elitism to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement and a simple solution is the following. &lt;strong&gt;Before casting a vote to migrate&lt;/strong&gt; a basic English question  to ELL,   &lt;strong&gt;read the entire question&lt;/strong&gt;, not just the question title, and ask yourself: &quot;Would I be able to answer that question satisfactorily without doing any research?&quot; If the answer is &quot;no&quot;, the question should probably stay on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE #1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The question is back home.&lt;/strong&gt; Yay!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Among the five users who cast their votes in favour of migration (it was visible on the ELL page) are two  who have earned the SWR dupe hammer, one of them was me. The other was JOSH (who I don't think will mind my mentioning his name). If we had been  excluded from casting a vote, it is likely that the question would have taken longer to migrate, so bear this in mind the next time you (Araucaria) are tempted to take a (gentle) swipe  at those users who may also have the SWR dupe hammer. We kinda get it when a question is worth saving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE #2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360061/the-carrots-need-being-chopped-and-the-carrots-need-to-chop&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The carrots need being chopped&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The carrots need to chop&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; has been reopened, but within minutes a bounty  was hastily placed  in order to prevent its third closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, the &quot;carrot&quot; question is safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE #3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question has been locked for 21 hours, it is now impossible to edit the question, upvote any comment, or cast any vote on the actual  &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; itself. And no new answers can be submitted. :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9757/please-can-we-take-more-care-over-duping&quot;&gt;Please can we take more care over duping&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T13:28:31.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9764" CreationDate="2016-12-03T12:46:17.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the... I am astounded that anyone would ever nominated that question for reopening. The question needs to specify what definition/schema of sentence patterns it wants an answer for. It's impossible to answer without the OP doing so. And considering the question is over four years old and the OP hasn't been on the site in over a year, I doubt they're going to be filling in that detail any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, here are several non-equivalent systems for notating these so called sentence patterns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/function/sentpatt.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/function/sentpatt.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.towson.edu/ows/sentpatt.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://webapps.towson.edu/ows/sentpatt.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wmtang.org/temp/resources/english/7-basic-sentence-patterns/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wmtang.org/temp/resources/english/7-basic-sentence-patterns/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T14:41:31.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T14:41:31.733" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9757" CreationDate="2016-12-03T12:58:39.857" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that your main question is &quot;How does the grammar of these sentences affect their meaning?&quot; You ask two further questions, and don't make it clear which you regard the main one. Please edit your question to ask one clear specific question in the question title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right that it is not a dupe of 9331, but I think it is a dupe of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/24163/59258&quot;&gt;How are “needs to be washed,” “needs washing,” and the regional variant “needs washed” to be distinguished&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; That question is wider than yours (which is okay for a dupe target), but its answers do cover the semantic/pragmatic differences of how the -ing and to be -ed versions differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T13:26:23.927" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T05:08:30.270" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there such a thing as an autoflag for Very Low Quality (VLQ) questions or answers?  If so, how does it work?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between flagging an answer as VLQ, downvoting it, and writing a comment to let the author know about the problem?  In other words, I'm trying to find out the recommended best practice procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similar, but for flagging a low quality question, and in this case another option would be &lt;em&gt;vote to close&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is a participant supposed to find out that his or her post has been flagged as VLQ?  And in the case that multiple posts s/he has written have been flagged as VLQ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take me, as a guinea pig.  On November 14 an exasperated reviewer informed me of a problematic pattern in my answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358104/word-or-phrase-used-to-describe-a-person-concerned-with-self-preservation/358210#358210&quot;&gt;Word or phrase used to describe a person concerned with self preservation&lt;/a&gt;.  I didn't understand at the time, but something started to get through my hard skull.  I took a good look at what I thought was a model answer and started making a point of following that format.  By the time I got another exasperated comment from someone else, on November 24th (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/359975/112436&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/359975/112436&lt;/a&gt;), I had already started working on improving my documentation of single-word, phrase, and idiom request contributions.  But it still hadn't sunk in about my answers having landed in the VLQ list until I was called out quite publicly by the first exasperated user (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9770/112436&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9770/112436&lt;/a&gt;, see first version of answer in edit history).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that leads me to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can contributors learn from their mistakes, if they are not informed in a timely way that they have written posts which have been flagged as VLQ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T13:52:20.253" Title="Questions about Very Low Quality flags" Tags="|discussion|flagging|low-quality-posts|review-queues|flags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9775" CreationDate="2016-12-04T11:19:51.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a great question and I will try my best to answer it based on my experience and some discussions with moderators. I can't find all the references necessary to support this answer. Please feel free to edit or point out my misunderstanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, both questions and answers are auto-flagged as Very Low Quality (VLQ) if they are not long enough (usually one or two liners) or they contain some words banned by Stack Exchange. As @Catija commented, we don't know what exactly triggers them. You need to note that sometimes an answer that is longer than one or two liners could be flagged, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361796/difference-between-get-hands-on-and-get/361810#361810&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;get hands on&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;get&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. I could only guess it was automatically flagged for using too many bold words or many words were being repeated. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you flag an answer as VLQ, it will appear in the moderator's review queue, not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;general users' review queue&lt;/a&gt;. You can flag it when you are convinced that a post is flaggable as low-quality, but you need to note that moderators don't approve VLQ flags as frequently as NAA (Not an Answer) flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.2. I never flag a post as VLQ after several of my flags were declined by moderators 10 months ago. The comment from moderator was along the lines of &quot;&lt;em&gt;Please downvote an answer instead of flagging it as VLQ&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. In my opinion, downvotes work better than flagging as VLQ as VLQ is very hard to define. Related ELU Meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9536/why-was-my-vlq-flag-rejected&quot;&gt;Why was my VLQ flag rejected?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4446/disputing-flag-reviews&quot;&gt;Disputing flag reviews&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7972/why-did-moderators-decline-most-of-my-flags-even-if-they-were-helpful&quot;&gt;Why did moderators decline most of my flags even if they were helpful?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.3. I always try to make a comment to VLQ posts that answer a question. If they don't, I just either downvote or vote to delete them. Sometimes users respond to my comment, but more often than not, they don't. Also, I aggressively edit a VLQ post which answers a question. When you flesh it out with some links and examples, you can upvote it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/360716/is-there-a-phrase-for-the-re-establishment-of-friendship-with-someone/360749#360749&quot;&gt;The latest VLQ post I edited&lt;/a&gt;. Not only can you get the VLQ post out of the review queue, but also you help other users get more upvotes.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can vote to close only questions while you can flag both of them as VLQ. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a way for users to find out their posts have been auto-flagged. But experienced users should know their posts should be long enough with supporting links and references. Just inserting a link can flesh out your answer by several tens of words. The best to avoid the flag is write a post relatively long enough.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As explained above, you can pay attention to those comments and try to write a post with research and references. If you keep that in mind, you don't have to worry about this flag. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T15:16:33.450" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T13:33:18.880" Score="-9" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the past few years, I have spent some time on ELU and ELL. (I deleted several accounts, so my current account is very new, in case you are wondering.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that ELL was formed because of the dropping standard of questions asked by mostly learners of the language. If I recall correctly, however, Robert Cartaino never saw the need for a separate ELL, and it was Jeff Atwood's intervention that made ELL come into existence just before he left SE. (Forgive me if this is wrong.) At that time, I agreed with Robert's view that there should not be two separate sites. I will list a number of observations I have made which you may not agree with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, it is difficult and largely subjective where to draw the line between whether a question fits better on ELL or ELU. Many questions that can benefit one community of users also benefit the other, if one is seriously interested in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Learners of the language actually learn grammar formally and ask many interesting and technical questions about grammar on ELL that many native speakers do not know about. On the other hand, many native speakers actually ask questions such as single word requests which should not be the focus of ELU anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many questions asked by learners are actually non-trivial but get interpreted as trivial by some native speakers. Hence they get downvoted and closevoted more than they actually deserve. Sometimes, a seemingly local question may be part of a larger, global theory of the language, and illuminating answers can salvage a less than perfectly phrased question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On some days, the quality of questions and answers on ELL seems way higher than that on ELU. ELU, despite what is advertised, is not actually for linguists, etymologists, and serious enthusiasts, and never will be. The point is that standards on ELL are so high and ELU so low that the two sites really are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty arbitary which posts on ELU get migrated to ELL, and looking at some of these and how similar they are to other posts, we might as well migrate half of ELU to ELL. If the sites are merged, we will not waste time migrating questions between them, and the single merged site can benefit from shared human resources. It would be easier for genuine enthusiasts to see all questions at one glance, and users not interested in particular kinds of questions can just choose to ignore them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you downvote this post, do spend at least a month on each of the two sites, and perhaps you will realise that you agree with me. I propose that ELU and ELL be merged, because they were never meant to be separate in the first place. Thank you for considering this suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3349/proposal-to-merge-ell-and-elu&quot;&gt;(This post is also on ELL meta.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user190973" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user190973" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:51:35.430" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T21:38:52.457" Title="Proposal to merge ELU and ELL" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2016-12-04T16:25:51.650" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I will propose a method to figure out whether it's okay to answer a gray-zone question.  Feedback would be very welcome!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I read an iffy question that has received no answers yet.  If it has at least one close-vote already, then don't write an answer, and wait and see if the question survives the challenge.  Otherwise, evaluate the question to see if it is an obvious duplicate, poorly explained or documented, a proofreading request, or more suitable for ELL -- if so, vote to close with an appropriate reason.  If not, it's okay to write an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361763/what-does-it-mean-by-lie-to-something&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361763/what-does-it-mean-by-lie-to-something&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XALLd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XALLd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By my proposed algorithm, it would not be frowned upon to write an answer to such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T16:25:51.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T19:03:43.207" Score="-1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;So many of our tag wikis are small or non-existent that we really ought to do something about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bet-Hedging&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my data query &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/590205/tag-wikis-and-their-lack-of-length&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I show that there are 168 tags that have no wiki and 26 that have no wiki excerpt, however, when I did a query for their names I got 131 tags; hence more than 130.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, this is a big issue; how are users supposed to identify whether their question is on or off topic and then, what are we supposed to quote when users decide to post those questions anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two ideas that I have posted as Community Wikis below. If you feel you can add anything to them or have a different idea, please edit or answer accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in any precedents you can find as these would show that this sort of thing is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think we should do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T01:47:57.983" Title="How do we deal with more than 130 empty tag wikis?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9780" CreationDate="2016-12-04T19:03:43.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Review Queue&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not try to incentivise the site's user base into fixing this by creating a new review queue and by upping the amount of reputation you get for a successful tag wiki edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason many of these tags are without wikis is due to the fact that they are under-used and some of them might need to be burninated or synonymised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are multiple options per tag wiki, the obvious answer would seem to be a review queue; each tag could have the options: &lt;code&gt;Edit Excerpt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Edit Wiki&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Add Synonym&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Recommend Burnination&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Skip&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a tag gets an arbitrary number of Burnination-Votes then a meta post could be made or a mod informed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a vague concept and I'm not sure how much freedom the site (or its moderators) gets over this sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T19:03:43.207" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-04T19:03:43.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9780" CreationDate="2016-12-04T19:08:50.127" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Organised Meta Effort&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is common on meta, someone points out something that needs changing, people up-vote it and then, about a month later, the change is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a fall-back, this is that post.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The following is a list of all the wiki-less tags, remove each tag once it has a wiki and comment if you get any issue with the wiki-ing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a template, I recommend Helmar's excellent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9464/184766&quot;&gt;tag wiki blueprint&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/accent&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accent&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modifiers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conversation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conversation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rules&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rules&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/date&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;date&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;date&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dictionaries&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionaries&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/objects&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;objects&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;objects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/structure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;structure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indian-english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/australian-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;australian-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;australian-english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/part-of-speech&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;part-of-speech&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;part-of-speech&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/names&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;names&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diacritics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diacritics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diacritics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/old-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; 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class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-media&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-media&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dickens&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dickens&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dickens&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bilingual&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bilingual&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bilingual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sense-verbs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sense-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sense-verbs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pennsylvanian-english&quot; 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class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irregular-verbs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irregular-verbs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;context&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialectal-equivalent&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialectal-equivalent&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialectal-equivalent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/retronyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;retronyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;retronyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ielts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ielts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ielts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vulgarity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vulgarity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vulgarity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adjectival-form&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adjectival-form&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adjectival-form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T19:08:50.127" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-04T19:08:50.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T19:23:03.317" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, when on the low-quality posts review queue, the &lt;em&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/em&gt; options produces the following menu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Somxr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Somxr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Current Deletion Options&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;So&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; often, questions on the LQP queue are acceptable answers but just lack any citations or evidence pertaining to their answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we add a delete comment for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please edit your answer to explain why it is right, ideally with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;. Without evidence to back up your answer you cannot prove that it is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T14:36:11.963" Title="Why isn't there a deletion comment for 'needs citations'?" Tags="|feature-request|low-quality-posts|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9783" CreationDate="2016-12-04T19:49:19.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;This answer does not meet our site’s quality standards.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’re looking for longer answers that provide some explanation and context,&#xA;preferably with citations. Good answers explain why you think they’re&#xA;correct and use mostly your own words to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s the sort of language often placed on low-quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/103069/153355&quot;&gt;this MSE post by Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt; come four objective criteria to help evaluate when to delete an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that quality equates strongly with length (TWSS). Therefore, answers that are strong candidates for deletion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;belong to low rep or anon users with no real commitment to the community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are &lt;em&gt;provably&lt;/em&gt; duplicate, that is, were added well after (30+ mins later) other answers that contained the same exact information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are short in length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not explain much of anything&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T23:07:02.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T01:31:19.607" Score="-4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just wondering whether my upvoted questions or answers on ELU meta affect my reputation. If they don't, would we be able to make this a feature? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201373" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T00:06:09.203" Title="Do the upvotes gained on ELU meta affect your reputation?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-05-05T10:41:53.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9785" CreationDate="2016-12-05T01:35:03.883" Score="-11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't. I know this because a friend and I tested it. They asked a question on meta and I upvoted it and they didn't receive any reputation points. I agree with Louie Bnouie though and think that this should become a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="208596" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T01:35:03.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9785" CreationDate="2016-12-05T01:47:26.130" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers on Meta do not earn you reputation. The only exception, network wide, is questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, the network meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a reason for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation relates to your knowledge of the site's subject matter. Meta is not related to that subject, so the reputation does not count. MSE is different because Meta &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the area of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, with things like Feature Requests, downvoting is a way to show disagreement, and the last thing you want to do is propose a disliked question or answer and then be punished for voicing it by losing a lot of reputation... or to be punished for downvoting answer posts you don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users should feel free to voice their opinions on Meta without worrying about whether those opinions are popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, voting on Meta does not &lt;strong&gt;and should not&lt;/strong&gt; affect your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related on MSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/256625/why-dont-meta-upvotes-count&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t Meta upvotes count?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;this help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-05-03T00:06:09.203" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T00:06:09.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9780" CreationDate="2016-12-05T01:47:57.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you edit a tag wiki there is an edit rejection option along the lines of &quot;this edit only describes the topic of the tag and not how it should be used&quot;. Blank tag wikis are not considered to be a problem if it is obvious what the tag is for. Tag wikis are needed when a tag title is frequently confused or if the tag has site specific connotations which it doesn't normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the blank tag wikis you have listed would no doubt benefit from having tag wikis, but others don't need then. But for those who would benefit, it would also be essential to go through them to ensure that all the tagged questions would match the new usage guidance being added to the wiki, so it's a much bigger job than just writing the wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T01:47:57.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T02:44:20.467" Score="10" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9778/2085&quot;&gt;the proposal to merge ELU and ELL&lt;/a&gt;, the asker in passing mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, many native speakers actually ask questions such as single word requests which should not be the focus of ELU anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very shortly afterwards, and with complete absence of chalance, another member inquired after this remark as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with single word requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m moving that discussion here lest it overwhelm the other question.  For not only is this a fine question in and of itself, it is one which I feel we should periodically reassess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, here were some of our previous discussions about this problem. Most include postings by Community Managers and Site Moderators concerned with this grave issue that confronts us all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2160/2085&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8043/2085&quot;&gt;On deleting low quality single-word-request answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1737/2085&quot;&gt;Against single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1311/2085&quot;&gt;Are single word requests always welcomed questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4732/2085&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he's amused but the rest of the family isn't?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/354/2085&quot;&gt;Are single word requests allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4842/2085&quot;&gt;Can anything be done about mean-spirited requests for terminology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3878/2085&quot;&gt;Reconsidering the single word request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from reading those, single word requests have always been a problem on this site, and the situation has if anything gotten worse as time has worn on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Let’s finally do something about it&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own personal opinion is that we should get rid of these if at all possible, and severely curtail and restrict them if not.  It doesn't matter whether the request is for a single word, a phrase, an idiom, a proverb, or any other related “guessing-game style” of request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter what guise they take, these are all a drain on our site quality and a drain on our community’s time, both moderator time answering flags and that of the general community running the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These posts do not fit with the SE model.  They are mere guessing games.  Often the most highly upvoted “answers” are mindless copypasta with no original text to speak of.  They draw one-liners that are essentially unexplained and unsupported single-word answers that get automatically flagged for low quality.  And everybody and his dog, and his neighbor’s dog, thinks they should add yet another one-liner “this is my opinion” suggestion years down the road, even though that one was already given a long, long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;These are not answers worthy of our site.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am becoming increasingly convinced that all requests for words and phrases are fundamentally a poor fit for the SE format. They're just guessing games and popularity contests, too broad and opinionated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They draw low quality contributions and copypasta. They drive away the very experts we seek to attract, for these are not expert answers well suited to a site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English-language experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually there is no research. People haven’t bothered to look at a thesaurus or even Google.  These almost all wind up being thinly veiled requests for &lt;strong&gt;writing advice, programming advice, and shaming advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you know what? We have no reason being in any of those three businesses here. That’s why I say good riddance with bad rubbish! Let’s get rid of them and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I say isn’t that important.  The important matter is. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What does the community say about these?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:27:23.073" Title="“What’s wrong with single word requests?”" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T10:03:05.103" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each time I visit this site, I often see that a question has no good answer in the answer section, but actually several good candindates for answer in the comments on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are people here so reluctant to post their brilliant suggestions as an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/354909/1717&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Here we see that there are two answers, but they are obviously wrong, and properly down-voted (proof that the SE voting system works as intended). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comment-section there are several answers that are potentially the correct one, but since they are posted as comments, and not answers, they are drowning in the long list of comments on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they were posted as answers instead of comments, it would open up for comments on each suggestion, instead of a long foum-like thread in the top comment on the question, that is hard to find out what is actually proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1717" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:39.680" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T11:00:41.437" Title="Why are so many questions answered in comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-12-05T13:23:12.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9789" CreationDate="2016-12-05T12:35:19.390" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I accept that we see a ton of bad SWRs every day that show almost zero research effort. Those bad apples shouldn't make us ban the &quot;requests&quot; concept entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes even tech-savvy users like me find it difficult to google certain things. So it's very helpful to ask experts in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, SWRs, and the like, should remain on ELU. And we should focus more on how we can reduce the number of bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T12:35:19.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9789" CreationDate="2016-12-05T13:35:53.423" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this issue is an easy one before English Language and Usage (ELU) clearly sets its target audience and strategy. Almost all the guidelines on ELU  are vague and grey except for those on a request for proof-reading and translation. That's why there are disputes and arguments among users. Some are more lenient and others are more strict. For example, we have a close reason for Single Word Request (SWR) questions as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on &lt;strong&gt;choosing an ideal word or phrase&lt;/strong&gt; must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above close-reason means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You need to write an example sentence where the word or phrase would be used. There are many questions that don't have it and still remain unclosed and answered by users. Examples are abundant in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;SWR Tag&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot;&gt;Phrase-Requests Tag&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It excludes idioms and expressions request. They usually contain some context for users to suggest idioms or expressions. I don't think they are problematic as long as they have detailed context for which the idiom or expression would be used.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a compromise for the time being, I'd like to suggest we close all SWR questions that don't have any example sentence. We need to post a comment requesting the OP to come up with an example sentence and if they don't respond, let's close them. I think it is a good start before considering banning all the SWR questions immediately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T13:35:53.423" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9775" CreationDate="2016-12-05T13:52:20.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users never see flags on their own posts, although I suppose that, if you have access to the relevant review queues then it may be possible to find that your own post has been flagged. I don't know if the system actually checks for that in what it presents for review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to deal with Question 6, which you didn't ask: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do I avoid flags in the first place?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way of avoiding flags is to follow the guidance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/stackexchange&quot;&gt;The Stack Exchange model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;How to stay on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What not to ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/asking-rate-limited&quot;&gt;Don't flood the site with questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How to write a good answer&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to reference others' material&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of those links has a sidebar with more information, all of which is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find that users (including moderators, perhaps) will occasionally point out how your posts might be improved in order to help the site and avoid flags and their consequences. &lt;strong&gt;Take the advice;&lt;/strong&gt; it's meant well. You may find that people simply downvote. While a reason for that is more difficult to diagnose if there isn't an accompanying comment, take some time to consider your post in the light of the help pages, and see what might be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if you follow the guidance about posts, you should find that downvotes are rare and flags are even rarer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T13:52:20.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9789" CreationDate="2016-12-05T13:53:52.460" Score="20" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single-word requests are not the problem, they are just the kind of questions where some problems (in particular lack of guidance) predominantly manifest themselves. Only addressing these problems will lead to actual progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the criticism described in the question is specific to single-word requests, but it is either not an actual problem or only applies to a small subgroup of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The General Problems&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following problems are not specific to single-word requests; they are just more prominent in them. Banning single-word requests on their account would not solve these problems and we would get fed up with other question types soon. Rather we should address these problems in a more general matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Lack of Guidance for Askers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that many users asking single-word requests can actually produce good single-word requests if they receive proper guidance, preferably before asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we do not have many ways at hand to provide users with guidance before they ask a question. Okay, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/274634/2127008&quot;&gt;tag warnings&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/278399/255554&quot;&gt;they are broken&lt;/a&gt;. This problem is not specific to single-word requests; we see it with all sorts of questions. It’s not even specific to this site; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889/255554&quot;&gt;Let's Plan the Second Iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality Project!&lt;/a&gt;, the top answer and many more address this very problem. Instead of banning single-word requests, where this problem is very notable, we should lobby for a general mechanism to give askers guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can do ourselves is give askers better and early guidance. As askers are not automatically informed about close votes (or even closure), we should help them with comments as early as possible. There was an attempt to create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6798/42471&quot;&gt;repository for pro-forma comments&lt;/a&gt;, but it didn’t really take off. We really need some sort of resource for reviewers (and other power users) to make it as easy as possible for them to properly guide askers – not only for single-word requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Lack of Guidance for Answerers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the above problems apply to answerers as well, however in addition I witness many high-reputation users leaving the following canned comment from the low-quality queue under single-line answers¹ for single-word requests (or the slightly modified one if the answerer has the comment privilege):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is misleading as those answers are not proper comments. Moreover it does not provide any guidance whatsoever as to what is wrong with the question. We have to educate these reviewers that rather should not choose a comment and even better write a fitting comment themselves (or upvote an existing one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Disposing of Bad Answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I obtained access to the review queues, I often skipped single-line answers¹ because I didn’t know whether I should flag them for deletion or not. Past discussions on Meta did not yield clear information, so I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9229/42471&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; myself. Unfortunately many of the answers skipped one of the cases, but as a general tendency I would say that the community favours quick deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this outcome causes many reviews, these reviews are particularly easy. Single-line answers¹ on single-word requests can be clearly identified within seconds. So, I really do not see the reviewer and moderator load as a problem, as long as we all agree that immediate deletion is the best course of action for these answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;¹ more precisely: answers without reference or other backup.&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answers in Comments&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn’t mentioned in the question, but this is something that annoys me about many single-word requests (and other types of question). These lead to long, unnecessary, and unproductive comment strings, loss of structure and quality, and they lead to moderation work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this should be addressed by clearly banning answers as comments and agreeing that they are free game for flags. If sufficiently many users raise a non-custom flag, such comments can even be deleted without moderator intervention – but then we need to agree upon this. However, this should be discussed separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;“I want this to be an expert site”&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a pattern on Stack Exchange sites (in particular language sites) that a group of high-reputation users wants them to be an expert-questions utopia. They want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gerrymander&lt;/a&gt; the scope such that it only allows for questions they are interested in. &lt;strong&gt;This is a bad idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as a site has reached a certain popularity, it will automatically attract non-experts asking non-expert questions, and this is a good thing because it keeps the experts (who are most likely to ask expert questions) entertained. Moreover, while a single non-experts are less likely to ask expert questions, non-experts in total are more likely to do so due to their sheer number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, not all experts are entertained by the same sort of non-expert questions, so most experts have to live with some non-expert questions they do not care about, be it single-word requests, questions on punctuation, or trivial grammar questions. If we want the site to strive we have to live with a portion of questions that we do not like. And the good thing with single-word requests is that they have their own tag and can thus be easily ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, I do not think that single-word requests are non-expert questions: Most of them cannot be answered with a dictionary or thesaurus (and I find it silly to require people to put a boilerplate statement that they searched a those, if it is not obvious what keyword they should look for). They need somebody whose vocabulary already contains the word – a feature most likely to be found on an expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what can we do about all of this? Raise awareness and accept that we do not have to like every question on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Specific Non-Problems&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While most of the problems with single-word request can be addressed and are not specific to them, there is some critique that I do not consider an issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Guessing Game&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These posts do not fit with the SE model. They are mere guessing games. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I beg to disagree. Of course, we can only make an educated guess as to what really helps the asker, but that applies to all Stack Exchange questions to some extent and at the end of the day, it only decides about which answer will be accepted, if any. What answers the question as posted is not a guessing game (at least for good single-word requests), can be evaluated by voters, and is useful to future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than once, I was looking for a word and found it an answer in a single-word-request that was not the accepted one, because the question was about a sufficiently general problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Copypasta&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it’s inherent to the nature of single-word requests that answers are little more than a dictionary quote, I do not consider this a necessarily bad thing. The challenge lies in connecting this information with the question. Also, we are helping the asker and possibly future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;“writing advice, programming advice, and shaming advice”&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see how this applies to more than a tiny fraction of bad single-word requests that should probably be closed. It’s not a problem of single-word requests in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not ban single-word requests in general.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pressure Stack Exchange to give us some mechanism to inform askers and answerers before they post anything.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Install clear and easy guidelines for reviewers and other power users to reduce the reviewing workload.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accept that each of us has to live with some questions that we do not particularly find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:29.123" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T14:24:24.433" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9783" CreationDate="2016-12-05T14:36:11.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers that are actual vandalism (LQP) should simply be deleted. A comment is not necessary; the vandal will understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that are not answers (NAA) should be deleted with a comment for the author. That's what the delete reasons are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; answers, but are very short because they are wrong, or they lack authority (evidence, explanation, etc.), are &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. These are not what the delete reasons are for. Vote on the usefulness of these answers. A downvote is the appropriate signal to future visitors that the answer is not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T14:36:11.963" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T16:24:09.303" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should &quot;Edit: &quot; be used in posts when edited by the original poster?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How spooky are the skeletons? (Edit: spelled skeletons wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make more sense, at least to me, exclude these from a post. They can be included in the edit notes, but not in the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example from a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/9754/revisions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Train service or Train's service - Adj or Possessive (Edit) Genitive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP included an &quot;Edit: &quot; in his post explaining why he edited the post, I removed it because I believed that it was inessential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done about these in the future? Continue to edit them out&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T16:02:15.530" Title="Explaining edits in the post" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9797" CreationDate="2016-12-05T17:41:03.427" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally feel the same as what Dan Bron said in his comment: I prefer that new or changed material be integrated seamlessly into the original post so that it can stand alone instead of calling attention to how it evolved, but I recognize that occasionally a big fat marker calling for a second look and re-evaluation of the question can be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your in-post example (about fixing a typo), I completely agree that calling attention to the fact that you fixed something trivial is entirely unnecessary; that sort of comment goes in the &quot;edit explanation&quot; box, not in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your real-world example &lt;em&gt;(originally &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/362021/revisions&quot;&gt;this deleted post's edit history&lt;/a&gt;, visible to 10k+ users only)&lt;/em&gt;, I think you could have tightened up the added material a bit, but should not have rolled it back completely; the OP was trying to add material clarifying the specific source of concern for the question.  As originally written, it was an &quot;unclear/too broad/proofreading&quot; sort of question; the edit narrowed the focus down to &quot;how do I correctly punctuate this type of clause&quot;.  (Which I agree was still an entirely closeable question, but there was at least an attempt to improve it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general guideline, I would lean toward the same rule of thumb as the &quot;thanks&quot; situation: if you see a post with some form of &quot;thanks&quot; at the end or an &quot;edit:&quot; marker, don't just pop in, remove that, and move on; take the time to look the entire post over and fix other small flaws that you find.  If you can't find anything else that needs fixing, leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T16:02:15.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9801" CreationDate="2016-12-05T21:23:35.583" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to come across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361773/using-the-correct-word&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question that was put on hold as being opinion-based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is someone who favours someone from their own country -regardless of the other persons colour- still classed as &lt;em&gt;racist&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know how this came about, as I think it leads in a single, well-defined direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121521" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:12:05.913" Title="How did this question get closed as opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9778" CreationDate="2016-12-05T21:38:52.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No mechanical changes will fix the problems with ELU because those problems are cultural. The site is inhabited by two tribes, each bearing a curse that keeps them locked in a deadly embrace of mutual incomprehension. The first group, which I have been known to call the CPVPV&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; has a proprietary interest in the site, regarding it as a worthy research institution, part of the academy, if you will, and (as I also have been known to say) High Table at the Hall or the Fellows' Common Room at the College. For a glimpse of this attitude, you may go &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9789/125330&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; where you'll find worries about the &quot;drain on our site quality&quot;, the influx of &quot;low quality contributions&quot; that drive away the&quot;experts we seek to attract&quot;, and a reminder that this is &quot;a site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English-language experts.&quot; Now this last claim may be debatable&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, but to be fair it's almost a verbatim description of the site from its &lt;em&gt;Welcome&lt;/em&gt; page&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, as those who enjoy the irony of that label may see by navigating there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The group labors under the curse of knowledge. I take this phrase from Steven Pinker, who uses it in his book &lt;em&gt;The Sense of Style&lt;/em&gt; to explain why experts often write so badly about what they know the best. Pinker means that experts know what they know and can no longer imagine not knowing it. They thus cannot tell when they've left out explication crucial to the understanding of non-experts. I adopt the term to mean people fluent in a language and unable to imagine what it's like not to be. This leads to the explanation that questions are &quot;lazy&quot; (see above), and by implication, so are the questioners. &quot;Do the research!&quot; is the &lt;em&gt;j'accuse&lt;/em&gt;, and if the lazy would vanish, in the words of the post I cited, it would be &quot;good riddance with bad rubbish!&quot;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those thus contemned are subject to a complementary curse, the curse of ignorance, and by this, I don't mean not knowing something. That is, after all, the human condition. I mean not knowing a critical organizing principle. This is hard to define for language, but it's the language processing that allows fluent speakers to automatically process syntax, idiom, collocations, irony, humor, etc. It's like breathing -- under conscious control when we focus; autonomic, when we don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;tl&lt;/strong&gt; arg=&lt;strong&gt;dr&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Perhaps this is the organ that processes Chomsky's universal grammar,&#xA;  but since no one has ever seen such a thing, perhaps an example from&#xA;  another venue will serve as an analogy. The organizing principle of&#xA;  biology is evolution through natural selection, and in a famous&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4444260?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt;, a notable biologist wrote &lt;em&gt;Nothing in Biology Makes Sense&#xA;  except in the Light of Evolution&lt;/em&gt;. Before Darwin, biologists (who&#xA;  probably called themselves &lt;em&gt;naturalists&lt;/em&gt;) proposed other explanations&#xA;  for the biosphere. Perhaps it's the split between sea and land that's&#xA;  important. Perhaps every terrestrial species has a thalassal&#xA;  counterpart. (Which is why we have sea horses and sea cows and sea&#xA;  oats.) In retrospect and with the advantage (and the curse) of&#xA;  knowledge, it's easy to laugh at these efforts. Without the organizing&#xA;  principle, investigators are mere collectors of facts and artifacts&#xA;  that don't fit together. Examples abound -- dynamics before Newton&#xA;  explained inertia, particle physics before&#xA;  electrochromodynamics&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;, to name just two.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/&lt;strong&gt;tl&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that ELU is not visisted by lazy seekers of easy answers for their homework. It is, but it's easy to forget how useless it is for many to hear the exhortations to do the research and consult the general references. The instructions for the research tools are written in idiomatic English, the answers are presented in idiomatic English, the exceptions are noted in idiomatic English, and the examples are given in idiomatic English. And as hard as it is for the fluent to understand, this will defeat people whose knowledge consists of an unorganized collection of facts about the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And let's hope the unwary don't try typing their query in the ELU search box. They'll be directed to what I sometimes feel is Borgesian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;library&lt;/a&gt;, which will likely have their exact question and a correct answer, but also every question close but not quite apt and every possible answer including the misleading and the outright wrong. I'm a native speaker, and I'm afraid to go in there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose this site were English Spelling and Orthography, which received questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need to know how to spell a pulmonary disease that sounds like new-MOAN-yah. I checked and it doesn't start with the letter &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the research, the OP is told, and he starts to work backwards from &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, soon finding that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mnemonoic&lt;/em&gt; starts with a silent &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;. Does new-MOAN-yah?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, try again, he's told, and off he goes finding silent and doubled letters. It will him take a while to circle back to the &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;'s. His betters, of course, know the organizaing principle of etymology, the Greek part in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not choosing sides here. It's not a question of who's right and who's wrong about what ELU is or should be. There have been many proposals for &quot;fixing&quot; ELU -- requiring a test for posters, banning SWRs, instituting tag privileges, and now merging with ELL. These are what I call mechanical fixes, and I think these are doomed without a community consensus on the nature of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not &lt;em&gt;debatable&lt;/em&gt;. What's that other word? Oh, yeah -- &lt;em&gt;risible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The official version uses &lt;em&gt;enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt;, but close enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I prefer &lt;em&gt;good riddance &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; works for me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That's quarks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T21:38:52.457" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9799" CreationDate="2016-12-05T23:12:05.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;principle of charity&lt;/a&gt;, I personally read this question to be about the definition of the term &lt;em&gt;racist&lt;/em&gt;. Does the term &lt;em&gt;racist&lt;/em&gt; include prejudice that is based on country of origin? This is a request for a &quot;correct&quot; answer. Because of that, I agree with you. I wouldn't personally flag it as opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question is so short that it's hard to know what the asker really wants. I can understand how reasonable people might flag it as a request for opinion. In any case, we're in the dark about what the asker has already considered and why there is still a question. I'd actually flag it to be closed as either unclear or lacks research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:12:05.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T06:29:24.130" Score="-2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am re-editing this post hoping to convey the sense of my request: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recent &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362259/how-do-you-pluralize-a-last-name-ending-in-y&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has been closed as a duplicate but IMO the issue appears to be  still open and needs a more definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All evidence I found and posted in my answer suggest a clear rule about  the pluralisation of family names ending with a &quot;y&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some interesting upvoted comments which support a very different view and suggest a much less prescriptive usage of the rule  mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the comments are not supported by any reference, they are relevant and can actually be the basis for the type of answer OP is looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the question be reopened or should  the OP ask a new question? A bounty on the old question doesn't make sense in my opinion and the new one cannot be the object of a bounty for obvious reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the case, I think the question still needs attention and whether or not the issue is just a question of personal preference should be made clear to the OP and other users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T20:33:32.453" Title="Should the following question have a proper answer?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|exact-duplicates|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9803" CreationDate="2016-12-07T07:39:07.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new question is an exact duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/68374/59258&quot;&gt;How do I pluralize a name ending in “y”?&lt;/a&gt; If you think a more thorough answer is warranted then by all means, write one for the old question. Or if you think one is needed but don't know enough to write one yourself (or lack the time), then a bounty can be started on the old question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T08:20:16.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T09:57:14.803" Score="1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was deleted this morning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362327&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362327&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three main concerns. I don't think this question should have been closed in the first place, but there is absolutely no reason for this question to have been &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt;. The question is a very useful question. The difference between actors and subjects is an issue that confuses many users, including quite well-seasoned and learned ones. Can this question be reopened, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, this question has been locked. I was wondering why. If questions are locked it prevents people from voting to undelete them, thereby undermining this democratic part of the SE process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly this question has been closed as being spam or offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Can we NOT close questions that are not either spam or offensive for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: the question also seems to have a reasonable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T12:52:52.953" Title="I don't think this question should have been deleted" Tags="|discussion|deletion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9720" CreationDate="2016-12-07T10:28:08.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see two problems with adopting a policy of systematically and publicly calling out commenters for remarks that one or more other site participants interpret as &quot;not nice.&quot; First, I think that such challenges are difficult to lodge politely. How do you call out a site participant for failing to be kind without implying that the person is in fact unkind? And how is posting that charge not a species of public shaming? Perhaps the person making the charge considers the criticized commenter guilty of serious rudeness and so feels uninclined to shed a tear on behalf of the transgressor's bruised feelings. But I think public shaming is inherently problematic, whether the person doing the shaming is a blackhearted troll or a squeaky-clean, newly minted member of the anti-brute squad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I don't think that calling out misbehavior to the community at large (as opposed to flagging it for consideration and action by the site's moderators) is a healthy thing for the site. To the contrary, I think it gives inordinate power to site members who have their antennae out for opportunities to be aggrieved on their own or someone else's account, who tend to think the worst of others' motives, and who are quick to demand vindication of their (or others') rights against the wrongs they believe they (or others) have suffered. Hypervigilance against the endless danger of microagression inevitably leads to endless discoveries of the crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the notion of English Language &amp;amp; Usage as a safe place where no one ever says anything that upsets anyone else, and where that safety is enforced by an eternally watchful citizenry continually vetting everything everyone else says, is far from ideal. I would prefer that participants begin by imagining that we're all on the same side, collaborating to produce useful, interesting questions and answers. And when a comment falls glaringly short of that ideal, and it isn't possible to write it off as an error of phrasing or construction, or as a temporary and uncharacteristic departure from good behavior, I would rather that the site moderators take up the case with the transgressor in private. I don't think that the intellectual equivalent of walking on eggshells all the time is good for the soul, and I don't see how a community becomes friendlier, more welcoming, and more collaborative by giving the most aggressively sensitive person in the room unilateral authority to determine for the community what constitutes a hurtful or otherwise unacceptable comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that EL&amp;amp;U is a paragon of friendliness, welcome, and encouragement. Some participants at this site have a tendency to tell newcomers, in effect, &quot;you can't play here until you prove you're good enough.&quot; It's a recipe for bad feelings, and sometimes there is a bullying aspect to it. But a policy of public shaming for rudeness, I think, would only drive the existing hostility toward newcomers farther underground, leading to an increase in anonymous and unexplained negative conduct: no-comment close voting, no-comment downvoting (which is already very common on the site, maybe in part because downvoters sometimes get burned by angry downvotees when they tried to explain their downvotes), and no responses to provocative questions on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, the best way to improve the treatment of others at this site is to try to live up to the behavior you consider appropriate yourself. That seems to have been the upshot of the question and answers given at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4625/bring-back-the-summer-of-love-aka-make-new-users-feel-more-welcome&quot;&gt;Bring back the Summer of Love (aka Make new users feel more welcome)&lt;/a&gt;, a Meta post that drew a tremendously positive response (47 upvotes, 3 downvotes at last count) and some outstanding responses. The discussion there may even have contributed to better behavior by site users, by encouraging site participants to be more thoughtful and less dismissive of newcomers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current net positive vote of +11 (20 upvotes, 9 downvotes) on the present question may be taken as evidence that EL&amp;amp;U participants are ready to start calling out rudeness whenever they encounter it; but I suspect that at least some of the upvoters are simply agreeing with the proposition that the site could be nicer than it is and that established site users should make an effort to treat visitors better than they sometimes do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing about the poster's question here is that it honestly expresses  the poster's view of what constitutes unacceptably unkind behavior, offers a possible solution to the problem, and then invites others to weigh in with their views on the same subject. That's the sort of debate we ought to be able to engage in—politely but without suppressing our own opinions for fear of upsetting someone—on a site that by and large respects intelligent discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:53.677" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T10:28:08.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9805" CreationDate="2016-12-07T10:37:02.950" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was deleted because of its relation to spammers. It's not the only question to be deleted over the last two or three days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it's not possible to say much more than that without revealing the nature of checks and consequences. Doing so will only help those who would circumvent them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the question itself might be reasonable, the consequences of allowing it to remain are likely to require far more clearing up than an answer on Meta (or your reposting the question and answering it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are tyring &amp;mdash; and succeeding, in the main &amp;mdash; to catch things quickly, and the particular problem &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to be abating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry you were inconvenienced by necessary actions, and that it was necessary to remove an answer with it [it's the only answer to suffer in the current campaign against spammers]. I did check that the answerer would not lose rep by deleting the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do consider reposting the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T10:37:02.950" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9805" CreationDate="2016-12-07T10:52:52.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think this question should have been closed in the first&#xA;  place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was never closed&lt;/strong&gt;. A total of eight questions were deleted by the system an hour ago. You need to note that none of them was closed by anybody, but instantly locked and deleted. What they have in common is they are too short without any research or examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can this question be reopened, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community at large can't do anything to a question deleted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Only moderators can. I guess this is an appeal to moderators rather than users in general, but it doesn't look like moderators will do that in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this question has been locked. I was wondering why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for the Community to delete it, it should be locked and deleted at the same time. The question was locked and deleted at 09:02:30. It has nothing to do with any democratic part of the SE process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly this question has been closed as being spam or offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, it was never closed. If it had been closed, it would show &quot;&lt;strong&gt;closed&lt;/strong&gt; as off-topic by User names or moderator name on Date at Time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T12:52:52.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T16:23:32.690" Score="30" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been some rather unsavory things posted almost mechanically as of late, and we're seeing an increase in spam / trolling on a couple of other sites. As we can't rule out that these things are related, we're making some tweaks to help you dispose of it with quite a bit less effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effective 3 minutes ago, it only takes &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;half&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of the usual spam / abuse flags for a post to be deleted and the spam system to be trained. We hope this will make it easier for folks to clean this stuff up, and to teach the system faster as long as this continues. We're going to leave this in place for the next 7 - 10 days, run some numbers, and see if it's time to go back to normal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Special thanks to all of you that have been helping to keep this site welcoming and clean, we're here with you and we believe that this will help put an end to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions or concerns, please just leave a comment or an answer :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3995" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T05:46:31.440" Title="A Temporary Tweak to Work Around Abusive Posting Patterns" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9809" CreationDate="2016-12-07T16:36:59.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the long run, please consider making a flag from high-rep users, e.g. over 15K or 20K, count double than other users. It will be more effective as I don't question their integrity and commitment to the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will really help the site respond to increasing number of low-quality posts and spams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T16:36:59.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9809" CreationDate="2016-12-07T16:59:59.150" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very happy these questions are fast-deleted and am glad to see we are being given more powerful tools to deal with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I have noticed the majority of the questions being quick-deleted are about comparing present vs past perfect, or other benign topics (though still not up to our standards). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not noticed any advertisement or abusive language. A quick spot check of some of the responsible users' profiles also didn't turn up anything particularly suspicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, on their face, from a normal-user perspective, these posts and users do not appear to have any ulterior motives. Without revealing information which would let future miscreants game the protections on the site, can you share some details on what makes us think this is an intentional attack, either automated or coordinated, rather than a run-of-the-mill spike in &quot;Eternal September&quot;ness, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users&quot;&gt;last time&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if we are fairly confident these are intentional attacks, do we have any insights or suspicions about what the motivations are? Are the responsible parties simply testing our defenses (&quot;casing the joint&quot;) in preparation for future attacks where they &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; get some meaningful benefit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users&quot;&gt;Tim's comment&lt;/a&gt;, and tchrist's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9809/a-temporary-tweak-to-work-around-abusive-posting-patterns/9812?noredirect=1#comment38889_9812&quot;&gt;collection of examples&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;I am going to restricting my flagging to questions which are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;registered&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; users (if their profile says (unregistered) then they are not part of the scheme),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with 1 rep,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;who are evidently non-native speakers,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking about:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to learn English grammar more easily, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;auxiliaries, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modals, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;present or past perfect, or comparisons of present and past [perfect] tenses,  or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;have been&lt;/em&gt; and so on,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which are short and exhibit no research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T11:39:17.643" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9809" CreationDate="2016-12-08T01:11:11.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One technical improvement that might be useful is for the number of close flags for each question to be displayed (with the up and down votes). Making available a breakdown of the reasons given would also be useful. Why? It just might discourage regular users from answering LQQs if they see that other users have flagged them. I know that it would be helpful for me, and would make me think twice before dashing off one of my &quot;answers as comments&quot;. I have now started checking all low-rep users to see if they are noobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastEditorUserId="194338" LastEditDate="2016-12-12T05:46:31.440" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T05:46:31.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-08T11:30:18.927" Score="4" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362525/when-a-name-ends-in-z&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362525/when-a-name-ends-in-z&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343943/possessive-form-for-a-surname-ending-with-z&quot;&gt;Possessive form for a surname ending with &amp;quot;z&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Q1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that question is in turn closed as a duplicate of an earlier question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/187031/should-an-apostrophe-be-used-with-a-z-at-the-end-of-a-word&quot;&gt;Should an apostrophe be used with a z at the end of a word?&lt;/a&gt; (Q2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be the other way around. Tchrist's  answer to Q1 is more informative with much more detail than Q2, whose answer is actually (and unhelpfully) about &quot;proper nouns ending in s&quot;. Q1 has the &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt; canonical answer, and I think all future questions should be closed as a dupe of it, not of Q2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6934/55623&quot;&gt;we nominated a new canonical&lt;/a&gt; &quot;asking for an ordinal&quot; question, can we please vote to re-open Q1, and when that's done, vote to close Q2 as a dupe of Q1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:07:17.043" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T11:07:17.043" Title="Let's change the canonical question about forming possessives for words which end in 'z' [Completed]" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:21:37.413" Score="16" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the recent question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9815/lets-change-the-canonical-question-about-forming-possessives-for-words-which-en&quot;&gt;Let&amp;#39;s change the canonical question about forming possessives for words which end in &amp;#39;z&amp;#39; [Completed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and its predecessor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6934/55623&quot;&gt;Please change the canonical &amp;#39;ordinal question&amp;#39; to one which is more informative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering: is there a list of FAQs and/or canonical posts, for ease of reference when closing as duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is such a list, please close this question as a dupe of that question (I'll delete it after).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no such list, let's use this thread to create one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to this question should be of the form &quot;Here's the canonical question on X&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;all future questions in X not sufficiently differentiated in their details should be closed as duplicates of that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:07:56.793" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T15:29:19.723" Title="List of FAQs and canonical posts" Tags="|discussion|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="20" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:48:19.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Forming possessives&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we form a possessive for a word which ends in an &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt;?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How about a &lt;code&gt;z&lt;/code&gt;?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if it's a surname?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343943/possessive-form-for-a-surname-ending-with-z&quot;&gt;Possessive form for a surname ending with &amp;quot;z&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Giant Ostrich Bomb's (GOB) fuse&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Giant Ostrich Bomb (GOB)'s fuse&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pendleton, et al. (2002)’s research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13600&quot;&gt;How do I correctly use the possessive apostrophe with a parenthetical citation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332392&quot;&gt;Where should the apostrophe go on a possessive abbreviation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T15:29:19.723" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T15:29:19.723" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T16:48:19.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:49:54.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Forming questions to elicit ordinal numbers as a response&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I ask a question about Abraham Lincoln's position in the sequence of US presidents to elicit &lt;strong&gt;sixteenth&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;16th&lt;/strong&gt; as a response?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11481/framing-a-question-whose-answer-is-an-ordinal-number&quot;&gt;Framing a question whose answer is an ordinal number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T23:58:23.010" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T16:49:54.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:54:01.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Basic questions on differences in tenses and aspects in English&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T16:56:19.457" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T16:54:01.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:54:57.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;General neutral pronouns&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use the &quot;singular they&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is a gender-neutral way to refer to a single individual?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-versus-her-versus&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (&amp;quot;his&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;their&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T16:54:57.350" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T16:54:57.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:56:42.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Basic questions on differences between Present Perfect and Past Simple&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57869/present-perfect-for-past-action-with-present-effect&quot;&gt;Present perfect for past action with present effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63256/which-is-correct-has-died-or-died&quot;&gt;Which is correct: “has died” or “died”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T11:13:18.107" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T16:56:42.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:00:24.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Ordering adjectives&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it great green dragon or green great dragon?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:00:24.040" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:00:24.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:01:33.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;How many spaces after a period?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I use one space or two after a period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it ok to use just one space after a period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2544/how-many-spaces-should-come-after-a-period-full-stop&quot;&gt;How many spaces should come after a period/full stop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:01:33.053" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:01:33.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:04:32.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;When should I use a hyphen vs en-dash vs em-dash?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/when-should-i-use-an-em-dash-an-en-dash-and-a-hyphen&quot;&gt;When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:04:32.393" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:04:32.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:07:52.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;When do I used &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/what-s-the-rule-for-using-who-and-whom-correctly&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for using “who” and “whom” correctly?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:07:52.773" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:07:52.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:09:13.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;When do I use &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78/when-to-use-that-and-when-to-use-which&quot;&gt;When to use “that” and when to use “which”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:09:13.613" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:09:13.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:10:19.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;When should I use &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152/when-should-i-use-a-vs-an&quot;&gt;When should I use &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;an&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:10:19.647" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:10:19.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:34:00.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Compound possessives incorporating the first person&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4226&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;My wife and I&amp;#39;s seafood collaboration dinner&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also upvoted, but now marked as duplicates of the first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38847&quot;&gt;How do you make the possessive form with &amp;quot;He and I&amp;quot;-style subjects?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8520&quot;&gt;What possessive forms are used for mutual 1st person ownership?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:34:00.533" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:34:00.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T17:54:26.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Singular or plural agreement with collective nouns&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The team is here&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The team are here&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338&quot;&gt;Are collective nouns always plural, or are certain ones singular?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where coupled with a dummy subject, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35389&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;There is/are more than one&amp;quot;. What&amp;#39;s the difference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/290856&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;There are no shortage of applications&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T17:54:26.527" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T17:54:26.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-08T18:11:08.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Backshifting and reported speech&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/240479/problem-with-backshift-in-reporting-clauses&quot;&gt;Problem with backshift in reporting clauses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T18:11:08.183" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-08T18:11:08.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9837" CreationDate="2016-12-08T20:38:35.643" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to request consideration for migration back to ELU for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9811/has-objective-research-been-done-on-the-effectiveness-of-grammar-checking-tools&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9811/has-objective-research-been-done-on-the-effectiveness-of-grammar-checking-tools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address some of the noted concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No precise definition of &quot;correct&quot; exists.&lt;/strong&gt; |  This concern is overcome because results are measured against a &quot;gold standard&quot;, and for any penalty the system creators are given the chance to flag a correction as a correct alternative which is manually reviewed by the judges.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other ELU meta &lt;strong&gt;discussion by senior members seem to support such a question&lt;/strong&gt;.  The idea of questions about grammar, syntax, correctness, even if such questions are of interest to linguists or serious language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not a request for resources and &lt;strong&gt;the question is not subjective&lt;/strong&gt;. It can definitely be answered precisely.  In the time since posting I have discovered an answer and would be glad to add it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for taking a look -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111926" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T18:54:31.680" Title="Request for reconsideration of migration - Grammar question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-09T00:03:57.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Writing compound nouns&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I write &quot;nounnoun&quot;, &quot;noun-noun&quot; or &quot;noun noun&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/889/59258&quot;&gt;When should compound words be written as one word, with hyphens, or with spaces?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T00:03:57.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-09T12:42:43.577" Score="16" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362635/emoji-considerations-with-colons-and-parenthesis?noredirect=1#comment844171_362635&quot;&gt;A question was published recently&lt;/a&gt; in which the OP asked about the proper style for usage of emoji, which as it turned out I guess he meant emoticons since he was talking about using punctuation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His specific question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the above sentence, if I want to end my thought with a smiley emoji, does the smiley part of the smiley face serve as the lips AND the end of the parenthesis? Depending on the answer...where does the period mark go as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was fairly heavily downvoted, and the question was put on hold for &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;, but I would like to know if it is not actually off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we going to entertain style questions about emoticons and emoji? Are they even covered in any style guide? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T02:05:01.893" Title="Do questions about emoticons belong on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9835" CreationDate="2016-12-09T17:49:36.703" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=emoticons+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;precedent for questions about emoticons&lt;/a&gt;. Some of these questions have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80928/is-a-smiley-at-the-end-of-a-sentence-like-a-period&quot;&gt;well-received&lt;/a&gt;, others &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49000/what-emotions-do-3-and-s-convey&quot;&gt;not so much&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's wise to have a blanket policy for all emoticon questions; instead, it would be better to evaluate each question on its own, based on the query itself, along with how well it is written, researched, organized, and presented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T17:49:36.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9833" CreationDate="2016-12-09T18:54:31.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question as it is stated is not about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If intended to be limited only to the effectiveness of &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; automated grammar checking tools, then it should be edited to clarify, and I agree it would make sense to have it on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If intended to be about the effectiveness of automated grammar checking tools for all (or multiple) languages, suggest it be asked at Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T18:54:31.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9803" CreationDate="2016-12-09T20:33:32.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forget about the Mayberries and the Mayberrys. (I'm not disparaging them or the original OP!)  Is there a question &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; can ask (and possibly answer) based on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, ever heard of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies? :) – tchrist♦  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@tchrist - Yes of course I've heard of Sicilies: Usage note: While the&#xA;  rules of English state that proper nouns ending in y add an s to form&#xA;  their plural (as in Germanys and Marys), Sicily is an exception to&#xA;  this rule, as in The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Thanks for pointing&#xA;  out this interesting exception to the rule.&#xA;  en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sicily – JOSH  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reason for why it is a so-called exception to being exceptional is&#xA;  because all nouns like this used to be regular in their plurals,&#xA;  whether proper or otherwise, and it is only now in later years that&#xA;  people have starting creating exceptions where none were before. –&#xA;  tchrist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T20:33:32.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-10T02:52:06.657" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question yesterday: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362659/is-there-a-list-of-verbs-for-starting-yes-no-questions&quot;&gt;Is there a list of verbs for starting yes/no questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It very quickly gathered 5 close votes and a lot of comments. When I checked it again today it had 4 reopen votes and it let me cast the fifth. So far, it has received 3 upvotes and only one downvote, so it doesn't seem to be a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I have is that those who voted to close seemed to know the answer, but would not tell me/make it clear what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One comment says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because surely any verb that is used to start an interrogative sentence is likely to give rise to a yes / no response. The wh-words invite other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've instead close-voted for the reason that this is very basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to that, another comment says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's basic if you study EFL, but it's not basic for a native speaker, because such knowledge is &lt;em&gt;tacit&lt;/em&gt;; it is not knowledge that we are able to consciously recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As further argument for closing my question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This appears in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103658/are-there-other-verbs-that-work-like-dare-and-need&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;closed as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question linked to has three answers and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103230/need-to-do-vs-need-do&quot;&gt;the question it is marked as a duplicate of&lt;/a&gt; has five answers. The questions and answers are only peripherally related to mine, and they don't appear to be duplicates of each other, but merely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Barrie England's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/137970/modal-vs-non-modal-vs-auxiliary-modal-vs-conjugated-verb/137971#137971&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; lists primary auxiliaries, modals and semi-modals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems very low quality to me and unrelated to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;perhaps you need reminding that ELU is aimed at linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt like I had been given this response from &lt;em&gt;The Simpsons&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, it should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual, who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's going on here? I don't believe it's the consensus that only linguists should use this site. I've always previously been of the opinion that any well-considered question about English Language and Usage is welcome here, as long as it's not a duplicate and not trivial to find the answer by looking in a dictionary, doing an online search, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm not a linguist or an etymologist, I would describe myself as a &lt;strong&gt;serious English language enthusiast&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we seem to have two polar opposites here? One group is quick to vote to close my question as off-topic, and the other group is equally quick to reopen it. I find it strange that no-one has yet definitively answered my question if it is so basic. I don't think that my question is off-topic, basic or a duplicate (although I don't always find duplicate questions due to using different terminology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By, the way all this is a distraction from getting an answer. Ultimately, I don't care what happens to this particular page, and my question remains unanswered, although heavily hinted at. I don't care if my question gets closed, as long as an answer appears somewhere, even just in the comments. The reason I'm bringing my issue to Meta is because it's much more likely to receive an answer if it's not on-hold or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is ELU becoming elitist? If I don't live up to other people's lofty expectations, my questions aren't welcome here? Is it acceptable behaviour to withhold the answer but spend time writing long comments if you don't think the question is worthy of ELU? Short of getting a degree in linguistics, what can be done about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T08:37:16.673" Title="Is ELU becoming elitist?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-10T05:46:46.667" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose User A gets carried away and writes a comment that is not in keeping with the &quot;Be nice&quot; mantra.  Suppose User B flags it and the flag is deemed &quot;helpful.&quot;  User B can see a record of that by clicking on his profile and then on the number of helpful flags (on the right, fairly near the top of the page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens from the public's point of view?  The comment disappears without a trace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens from User A's point of view?  I have no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T09:38:07.757" Title="What happens when a not-nice flag on a comment is accepted?" Tags="|support|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9839" CreationDate="2016-12-10T07:48:44.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;So, is ELU becoming elitist?&lt;/em&gt; In terms of some attitudes about attributed lofty goals, that train has long left the station. In terms of scaling those heights, I'd have to say no.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I don't live up to other people's lofty expectations, my questions aren't welcome here?&lt;/em&gt; Correct, except to the extent that they allow those others to use you as an object lesson and whipping boy. See Dan Bron's comment above. &lt;em&gt;In ioculo, veritas.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it acceptable behaviour to withhold the answer but spend time writing long comments if you don't think the question is worthy of ELU?&lt;/em&gt; For some, it's considered mandatory. See the answer to your last question directly below.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Short of getting a degree in linguistics, what can be done about this?&lt;/em&gt; A degree in linguistics won't help you. This is a cultural problem of the site, and any solution must come from that perspective. For an extremely cogent, witty, and learned analysis of the problem, go &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9800/125330&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. You're welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T07:48:44.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9840" CreationDate="2016-12-10T08:32:55.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens from the public's point of view? The comment disappears without a trace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;the comment disappears without a trace&lt;/em&gt;. From other users' point of view, they wouldn't know if there was any specific comment by User A. Only moderators can read a deleted comment. If a specific comment by User A is gone, they will just guess it was either (1) flagged by other users and deleted or (2) deleted by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens from User A's point of view? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way for User A to know whether his/her past comment has been deleted unless (s)he checks his comment again as there is no notification such as &quot;Your XYZ comment has been deleted&quot;. Furthermore, it is impossible to know whether it was flagged by other users or outright deleted by a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens when a not-nice flag on a comment is accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably most of the time, the comment will be gone if the flag is accepted. But it wouldn't surprise me if a moderator marks the flag helpful and doesn't delete the comment and only edit out some offensive or irrelevant part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2016-12-10T09:38:07.757" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T09:38:07.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-10T11:05:17.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When to use Present Continuous (Progressive) for future actions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235368/when-do-i-use-present-continuous-for-near-future-instead-of-be-going-to&quot;&gt;When do I use Present Continuous for near future instead of “be going to”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T11:05:17.253" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-10T11:05:17.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9847" CreationDate="2016-12-10T17:05:27.333" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my &quot;activities&quot;, I don't see an option for this. Also, couldn't find a meta post for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being relatively new to the &quot;protect&quot; tool, I might've misused it. Now, having learned about it, I'll properly use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T18:21:17.323" Title="Is it possible for me to know which questions have gained or lost protection by me?" Tags="|discussion|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9858" CreationDate="2016-12-10T17:09:03.570" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362879/what-is-the-psychological-term-for-a-person-who-avoids-a-question-by-bashing-or&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, a user suggested that the question should be migrated because of the lack of expertise in this forum in the area that the OP was requesting a term for. However, the user tagged the question with an existing tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a single word request that asks for a word within a field that has an existing tag need to be migrated? Examples of tags are legal, animal, psychology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, medical, and many nore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T09:59:39.693" Title="Migrating word requests within a field with an existing tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|appropriate-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9845" CreationDate="2016-12-10T18:08:33.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is almost certainly only available via a query on the database. The available dataset is updated &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;weekly on Sundays&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's one query: &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/449043/my-unprotected-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/449043/my-unprotected-questions&lt;/a&gt; Its two authors are both moderators, which lends support to the view that the data is not available by other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll need to enter a user id in the box before pressing &quot;Run Query&quot;: yours is 50044.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T18:08:33.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9845" CreationDate="2016-12-10T18:08:55.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new feature was introduced on Nov. 18, 2016 and you can review a list of protected questions as indicated in the Meta SE post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273882/show-10kers-a-larger-list-of-recently-protected-questions&quot;&gt;Show 10kers a larger list of recently protected questions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As of this morning (Nov. 18), there is a new 10k tool under &lt;code&gt;/tools&lt;/code&gt; that provides a list of protected questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to review unprotected questions unless you use SEDE. You can get some help in the following link, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/310573/where-can-i-find-the-list-of-questions-i-un-protected/310574#310574.&quot;&gt;an answer to Where can I find the list of questions I (un-)protected?&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow Meta.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The following feature request is still pending. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269628/please-add-the-list-of-questions-un-protected-to-the-profile-page&quot;&gt;Please add the list of questions (un-)protected to the profile page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T18:21:17.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9757" CreationDate="2016-12-10T19:35:03.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should all be very careful about duping and voting to close in general. I’ve always been, I think. My guess is that most of us are―at least most of the time. But there are at the time of posting 388 users with the right to cast close votes. I suppose there will be among these some that are a bit hasty, or are having a bad day, or are even told in their dreams to go and vote to close the first question they see by anyone with a name starting with &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess wrongful votes will be cast now and then. A good course of action is to argue one’s case with the voters in comments first. If there is an unfortunate coincidence of five wrongful votes then the rest of us will reopen the question. I see this was not necessary on this occasion as all close votes have now been retracted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suppose this is something we have to live with. But in the meantime think twice before casting a close vote and abstain from it altogether if you’re having a hangover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131779" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T19:35:03.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9835" CreationDate="2016-12-10T20:54:18.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the mere fact that a question is about emoticons does not warrant closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way emoticons are used makes them part of our language. You can look at usage, track etymology, and assess how well-known or obscure a particular emoticon is. In fact, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&amp;amp;q=emoticon+linguistics+english+language&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plenty of linguists&lt;/a&gt; researching emoticons already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015&lt;/a&gt; was .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, emoticon usage is impacted by the language of the speaker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;While geography matters in determining the emoticon&#xA;  style, language has a higher impact. In the Philippines and&#xA;  Indonesia, where English is in common usage along with local languages, users utilized horizontal style emoticons as in predominantly English speaking countries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;European users were multi-cultural in terms of emoticon&#xA;  usage with both vertical and horizontal styles being employed&#xA;  in tweets.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/viewFile/6132/6386&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that some parts of emoticon usage are shared with other languages doesn't actually matter. English gets most of its words from other languages already (what are we going to do, ban questions that happen to be about words that are cognates?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this doesn't mean certain emoticon questions shouldn't be closed, like any other question, when they fail to meet certain standards. The question &quot;what does this emoticon mean&quot; is something better solved with basic search skills, and should be closed as general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the particular question you're asking about, it was reasonable to close as unclear. I looked around; there are a few style guides that mention emoticons, but they all fail to go into more detail than how (in)frequently emoticons should be used. It's not clear what sort of style guide they were expecting the answer to come from. It fits under some of the other options, as well, depending on how you look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there's no &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; way to use emoticons in English, answers will tend to be opinions (&quot;this is how &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; do it&quot;), or long lists of many different ways (too broad).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T02:05:01.893" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T02:05:01.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-11T07:39:57.313" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was asked years ago and was rightly closed  as off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a mod. noted at that time the content is useful. It was just posted on the wrong site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mod note: This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. Ordinarily, we would lock such a question; however, because allowing the answers to be edited and voted on greatly enhances its value, we have chosen not to do so. Please do not vote to reopen or delete this question; such actions will be reversed. – waiwai933♦ Sep 17 '12 at 0:54&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T08:12:04.390" Title="Should the following question be moved to Meta?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2016-12-11T08:12:04.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole &quot;resource questions on meta&quot; thing is misguided in my view. Content about the English languages is supposed to be on main, not on meta. The on-site search doesn't search through meta posts, and new questions on main can't be closed as duplicates of questions on meta. Meta is for meta discussion, not for questions related to the subject matter of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we really won't accept such questions on main any longer, there is no place for them on either site. New ones should just be closed and deleted. And old ones that are significant, like this, should be on main and locked. That's exactly what a historical lock is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this post by &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/103/should-we-make-a-canonical-resources-question/142#142&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino♦&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm seeing these &lt;em&gt;list-of-resource&lt;/em&gt; questions being posted in meta as&#xA;  a way to somehow &lt;em&gt;allow&lt;/em&gt; questions that would otherwise not be allowed&#xA;  on the main site. Meta is meant to provide support for the operation&#xA;  of this site and we cannot let it morph into an alternative type of&#xA;  subject Q&amp;amp;A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a better solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the community does not want excessive resource questions on the&#xA;  main site, you can come to a consensus (in meta) that a select few&#xA;  would be allowed (on the main Q&amp;amp;A). Incidentally, we are considering&#xA;  ways to administer a limited number of these &quot;big list&quot; in much the&#xA;  same way network wide. But in the meantime, posting them on meta is&#xA;  not a viable solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we limit these question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As for sending a mixed message to new users that asking broad resource&#xA;  questions is fair game, you can add conspicuous notice to the top of&#xA;  these posts (we have a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;historical lock&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; if the thread gets&#xA;  unmanageable) that essentially says this is an exceptional situation&#xA;  and not be use as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In either case, posting these types of questions in meta is only&#xA;  moving the problem to &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site; i.e.  you would be eliciting a type&#xA;  of question by example that you would otherwise would not allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:43:57.850" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T08:12:04.390" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-11T10:12:30.903" Score="-12" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I provided an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224868/etymology-of-cut-someone-some-slack/224902#224902&quot;&gt;Etymology of &amp;quot;cut someone some slack&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got equal number of downvotes as upvotes, 3 vs 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a similar question on the origins of {cutting a deal}, where a comment expressed doubts how biblical usages of words could have influenced English as late as the 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to remind you doubters that there are many yiddish words and yiddish influenced phrases in English. Yet, they were beginning to influence the English language only after the world war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many yiddish speakers are there compared to the number of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish pastors/rabbis, and yet you are unable to defend why such a comparatively small number of yiddish speakers could popularise so many yiddish words and anglo-yiddish phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because you hate, or are indignantly in denial of, the idea that the Bible could have such a huge and pervasive influence on the English language, right up to the present moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably did not experience the explosion of evangelical and rabbinic English usage during the 1970s. This explosion was soon propagated across Asia, and later in Spanish and Portuguese in South America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You too would have to answer, how could WoodStock have contributed to the patterns of English usage. You were not in existence then, I see, so you can't explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you have to keep your hatred of the Bible in check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18962" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T06:43:48.187" Title="What could be your problem in accepting the biblical origins of many common English phrases?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9853" CreationDate="2016-12-11T10:37:08.823" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;[This became too long for a comment. However the additional space allows me to preface this answer by saying that I had not seen the answer before this Meta question; and as a practising Catholic I have no issue with the Bible being cited.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One issue with the answer is that the two most influential translations of the Bible in English are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biblestudytools.com/tyn/genesis/15-18.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tyndale&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biblestudytools.com/kjv/genesis/15-18.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KJV&lt;/a&gt; (in which Shakespeare is believed to have had a hand). Neither uses &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; in Genesis 15:18.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And that same daye the LORde made a covenaunte with Abram (Tyndale)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram (KJV)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, OED indicates that &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &quot;make, fashion&quot; (cut a deal, cut a joke) has only been in English since the 16th century, influenced by Shakespeare &amp;mdash; who may have been influenced by Hebrew and his work on the Bible, who knows? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to draw a conclusion from Hebrew without a corresponding influence &lt;strong&gt;in English&lt;/strong&gt; such as the Tyndale or KJV Bibles, or even a Shakespeare play, looks a leap too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T10:37:08.823" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-11T20:56:14.060" Score="8" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm running a project to detect low-quality posts on EL&amp;amp;U, but with a distinct lack of experience here I don't know what counts as a low-quality post. Help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the few days since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/3995/tim-post&quot;&gt;Tim Post&lt;/a&gt; made some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9809/146139&quot;&gt;tweaks to the spam system&lt;/a&gt;, I've been running a fork of &lt;a href=&quot;http://charcoal-se.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SmokeDetector&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/49820/thusian-studies&quot;&gt;this chatroom&lt;/a&gt; to try to catch some of the abusive posting patterns EL&amp;amp;U has been seeing. It's caught a good number, and the number of incoming posts has slowly reduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, SmokeDetector is a stop-gap. It was designed for spam, and the monkey-patches I made to apply it to this situation are... fragile, shall we say. It's nowhere near a permanent solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, together with an idea from tchrist, gave me the slightly questionable idea of starting up a machine-learning project to detect &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; low-quality questions on EL&amp;amp;U, not just this recent wave. Great, awesome, I've written half the code already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem is, I don't have a whole lot of experience here on EL&amp;amp;U, so I don't actually know what constitutes a low-quality question here. This is where I need some help from more experienced people here - what's low-quality? For example, do questions that show no research effort count as low quality? Homework (do you even get any of that)? For the sake of this project, we'll define &lt;em&gt;low-quality&lt;/em&gt; as things that should be closed and deleted, to make it easier to define.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's low-quality here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="146139" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T04:18:58.013" Title="What defines a low-quality question on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9853" CreationDate="2016-12-12T02:02:29.623" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt;&quot; rules say &quot;assume good intentions&quot;. I don't think you're acting in accordance with that when you assume everyone who downvoted your answer was motivated by &quot;hatred of the Bible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your entire argument in this post is illogical. It seems to me to be structured like this: &quot;Many English words and idioms have biblical origins. Therefore, this particular English expression must come from the Bible, and if you doubt that, you're a hater.&quot; If this type of argument worked, we would have to also say that this expression comes from Yiddish (because you say &quot;there are many yiddish words and yiddish influenced phrases in English&quot;) and from Shakespeare, because many English words and expressions come from Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You give more evidence in your answer on Main, but people have pointed out in the comments there and on this post that your argument is not unimpeachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's your responsibility to provide good arguments and evidence in your answers to convince people that what you say is true. If people think your answer is wrong, downvoting it is doing a service to future visitors to this site. You won't change their minds by complaining on Meta. You might be able to if you edit your answer to add more evidence and argumentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T02:02:29.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9853" CreationDate="2016-12-12T06:43:48.187" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your problem (besides your irrational accusations) is one of evidence. Please explain how the Hebrew word &lt;em&gt;כרת&lt;/em&gt; (k-r-t), which can mean cut and which is idiomatic with covenant, could possibly have influenced English usage, which has had the meaning of &quot;to fashion or shape by cutting&quot; since the 1600s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Andrew Leach points out, the influence of the Bible came through translations, which did not retain the literal of the Hebrew. If you have evidence of Hebrew influence on early Modern English, present it. I doubt you have any more of that than you have of &quot;rabbinic English usage during the 1970s&quot;, which I don't believe is even a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would probably help if you didn't refer to Yiddish (which you should probably capitalize), since Yiddish and the languages of the Bible have little to do with each other except that they both use the same alphabet. It is no secret why Yiddishisms entered English: Jews were disproportionately represented in the entertainment industry, particularly in vaudeville and the early days of film and television. And really, how many of these are there compared to the estimated 200K+ non-Yiddish words in the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &quot;WoodStock&quot;? Is that the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival of 1969? If so, it didn't &quot;contribute to patterns of English&quot;, although it may have publicized some. And yes, I was in existence then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T06:43:48.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9846" CreationDate="2016-12-12T09:59:39.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags are ad hoc. That one exists and has been added to a question has no bearing on whether the question should or should not be migrated, closed, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T09:59:39.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-12T12:36:25.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using do for emphasis / Why do you use &quot;do&quot; before another verb?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do-support for emphasis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/323/did-shoot-vs-shot&quot;&gt;“did shoot” vs “shot”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T12:36:25.270" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-12T12:36:25.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T08:16:53.757" Score="4" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question, titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268623/what-does-the-phrase-a-real-word-mean&quot;&gt;what does the phrase &quot;a real word&quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt;, from Sept 2015 has been closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11455/what-are-the-criteria-to-adopt-new-words-into-english&quot;&gt;What are the criteria to adopt new words into English?&lt;/a&gt;, from Feb 2011. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the suspect timing, with more than a year lag between the asking and the determination that my question was a duplicate, my question asks about the meaning of a phrase (&quot;real word&quot;), while the proposed duplicate asks, reflexively, what the criteria are for adopting (existing?) words into English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a legitimate intersection between the two queries. The same ground isn't covered in the answers; the two questions are disparate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this more careless duping? Why, and how, did it come up so long after the fact of the asking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T08:16:53.757" Title="'Duped' again...is that a &quot;real word&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-13T11:47:49.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;If I were&quot; vs &quot;If I was&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When do you use &quot;were&quot; after if and which is correct between &quot;were&quot; and &quot;was&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/if-i-was-or-if-i-were-which-is-more-common-and-which-is-correct&quot;&gt;“If I was” or “If I were”. Which is more common, and which is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T11:47:49.967" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-13T11:47:49.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T23:49:40.333" Score="7" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314565/55623&quot;&gt;Why do I pronounce &amp;quot;horrible&amp;quot; so harrhibly?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; a while back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It hit the HNQ and generated a lot of attention and chatty comments. Those comments were subsequently removed by a mod as distracting (I assume), which is to be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there were a couple comments posted under the question which I found helpful, and now I need to reference them to research a new question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a mod post a screenshot of the deleted comments here, or move them to a (frozen) chat room, or otherwise make them available to me? If the comments were removed because someone got nasty later on, or something, feel free to redact at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Not sure if this is the best way to ask, but I figured the &quot;contact us&quot; form is to get in touch with SE, Inc., itself, not the local EL&amp;amp;U mods.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:35:22.027" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:35:22.027" Title="Can a mod send me a screenshot of the comments which were under this question?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-14T00:48:53.537" Score="5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149730/addressing-a-formal-letter-to-multiple-people-with-unknown-names&quot;&gt;Addressing a formal letter to multiple people with unknown names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I set a bounty on that question.  User @JOSH wrote an answer, which I was going to award the bounty to.  There were two parts to his answer.  The second part of his answer, I felt, addressed my question satisfactorily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I received an automatic reminder today, went to the question, planning to award the bounty to the answer, since the deadline is coming up tomorrow, but the answer had disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If @JOSH doesn't want his answer associated with his user ID for some reason, okay, I'd like to repost the basic idea. But I need to read his answer again to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers are not worthy of the bounty, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the moderators help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it turns out I won't be able to award the bounty to the answer I wrote, even though I'm not the OP.  Sigh.  Hopefully JOSH will reinstate his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T04:31:48.227" Title="Answer I was going to award the bounty to disappeared" Tags="|support|deleted-posts|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9863" CreationDate="2016-12-14T01:18:08.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need 10K or more rep to see deleted content. You currently have ~9K on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/362334/55623&quot;&gt;answer you liked&lt;/a&gt; read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I often see the following expression in letters that have no specific&#xA;  recipient: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/to-whom-it-may-concern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To whom it may concern&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the appropriate recipient for this message, as in I didn't know who&#xA;  was responsible for these complaints so I just addressed it “to whom&#xA;  it may concern.” &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;This phrase is a formula used in letters,&#xA;  testimonials, and the like when one does not know the name of the&#xA;  proper person to address.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  [Second half of 1800s ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Dictionary.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if you want to be more specific and address the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businesswritingblog.com/business_writing/2009/11/dear-john-et-al.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;members of a&#xA;  Board&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Dear Board Members &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is an appropriate form you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(www.businesswritingblog.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that Josh's MO is to delete content which isn't enthusiastically received, improve it, and then undelete the new and improved post, hopefully addressing all the concerns which have been raised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest giving him a day or two to follow that procedure here, before posting an overlapping answer (plus, I don't think you can award a bounty on your own answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T01:23:24.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9863" CreationDate="2016-12-14T04:16:03.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to @DanBron's great answer, you need to note that the system gives you &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68050/a-grace-period-of-one-day-to-award-the-bounty-after-expiration-without-remainin/74037#74037&quot;&gt;approximately 24 hours (grace period) additionally to award an answer&lt;/a&gt;. That means it is actually not seven days, but eight days to award an answer if there is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers are not worthy of the bounty, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't find any answer helpful, you don't need to do anything. The system will automatically award the bounty as indicated in the linked Meta SE question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the bounty starter accepted an answer during the bounty period,&#xA;that answer is awarded the bounty (provided that the answer was also&#xA;posted during the bounty period). Answers created or accepted before&#xA;the bounty period are not eligible to be awarded the bounty&#xA;automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the bounty is awarded to the highest-scored answer out of&#xA;those which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...were posted after the bounty was started&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...have a score of at least +2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...were not written by the bounty starter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two or more eligible answers have the same score (if their scores&#xA;are tied), the oldest answer is awarded the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If none of these conditions apply, the bounty is not awarded to any&#xA;answer, and is not refunded to the bounty starter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Automatically-awarded bounties are half of the amount originally&#xA;offered, unless the answer is accepted - accepted answers always&#xA;receive the full bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T04:16:03.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2016-12-14T04:47:16.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Difference between verb + preposition and phrasal verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: look for something vs look something up (something). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112646/difference-between-verbpreposition-and-phrasal-verbs&quot;&gt;Difference between verb+preposition and phrasal verbs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T04:47:16.163" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-14T04:47:16.163" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9862" CreationDate="2016-12-14T09:21:44.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, the answer is No, a screenshot is not possible. A screenshot will contain information which has never been publicly available; moderators don't release such data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving deleted comments to a chatroom is not technically possible. In that regard, once they're gone, they're gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undeleting comments is technically possible in some &amp;mdash; but not all &amp;mdash; circumstances. Generally the text of comments needs to be manually copied and pasted somewhere else. It &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be possible and appropriate to do this for one or two &lt;strong&gt;identifiable&lt;/strong&gt; comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were getting on for three dozen chatty comments, so it's unlikely that any moderator will have the time (or the destination) to copy them all, particularly since that effort is largely wasted effort as you might only find one or two useful, if that. &lt;strong&gt;Comments are ephemeral.&lt;/strong&gt; They should not be treated as important or retrievable under any circumstances. If the information is either important or necessary, comments are the wrong place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="25030" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T09:24:45.660" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T09:24:45.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-14T09:36:41.140" Score="11" ViewCount="573" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under an answer to the following question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/363133/what-is-a-good-alternative-for-the-reverse-of-a-boycott/363138?noredirect=1#comment846058_363138&quot;&gt;What is a good alternative for the reverse of a boycott?&lt;/a&gt; a user has posted a couple of comments that I find discriminatory, to say the least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@JOSH On what basis do you say &quot;be easily and intuitively understood as the antonym of boycott&quot; given that you are not a native speaker of English? – &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@grimely JOSH is not a native speaker, so I wouldn't know on what basis he can judge whether neologisms would be &quot;be easily and intuitively understood&quot; in context – &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users seems to suggest that I, as any other non native speaker, am not entitled to express my view on the usage of a term because I lack the quality of &quot;nativeness&quot; that is , according to his comments, an indispenseble prerequisite  to make a credible comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen poor quality posts both by natives and non natives but if discrimination is going to be a theme on ELU, what about the level of schooling one has received?  the place one was born and the language their parents speak? would a first generation immigrant be less welcome than a second generation one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am really and sadly surprised by the acrimony that this issue still generates in some users on a site  like ELU which, by tradition and vocation, is supposed to be a truly  international one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T17:50:32.013" Title="Does ELU allow &quot;discriminatory&quot; comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2016-12-14T11:18:56.353" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, such comments are not helpful. They contain &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks, basing an opinion on a characteristic of the person rather than his argument. This violates the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice policy&lt;/a&gt;. It's not acceptable to make comments about someone based on a person's perceived status or some other property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is eminently deletable on that basis, either by sufficient user flags or moderator agreement. It's entirely unsalvageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered editing the first one to read &lt;i&gt;@JOSH On what basis do you say &quot;[&lt;/i&gt;procott &lt;em&gt;would not be] easily and intuitively understood as the antonym of boycott&quot;?&lt;/em&gt; but that would be to initiate a conversation in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Both have been deleted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments such as these are alluded to in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging&quot;&gt;FAQ on flagging&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Offensive language in comments and posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What’s offensive is threatening behaviour, ad-hominem attacks, and using curses and swearing to intimidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I think everyone who likes the colour blue should be shot.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    You are a typical bluey, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if you had blue blood.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Just the thing a fucking blue-baby would write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Comments which are otherwise inappropriate&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What’s not constructive is suggesting that someone’s question or answer is good or bad based on some feature that is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Well, of course all blue-lovers think like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The line between what’s “not constructive” and “rude or offensive” can be a fine distinction to make. Looked at objectively, this comment is a general comment about a group of people. It’s disparaging, but it’s not violent or hateful, a direct ad-hominem attack or swearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether one treats the quoted comments as offensive or not constructive doesn't make a great deal of difference here. They fall foul of one class or the other. As they are directed at an individual, I consider them to be &lt;em&gt;ad hominem.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T11:18:56.353" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2016-12-15T03:11:59.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;English was originally a mishmash language.  Now, it has become the international language of science, which gives it more rich opportunities for bringing in influences from other languages.  Many of the countries where it is spoken as a native language, including but not limited to the United States, have substantial populations of people who were born elsewhere.  This rich exchange with other languages is a strength of English, and we can celebrate that here at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I became bilingual as a young adult, having been hired right after my Bachelor's degree in a provincial town in Mexico.  Interestingly, learning another language thoroughly deepened my understanding and appreciation for my first language (English).  I have seen that non-native speakers of English who participate on ELU have plenty to contribute, that a native speaker might not think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, hurray for our own particular type of diversity here.  What a boring place ELU would be without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make sure all enthusiasts of the English language feel comfortable participating here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T03:11:59.627" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9855" CreationDate="2016-12-15T04:18:58.013" Score="9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I need a word that means such-and-so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) But I'm not going to tell you what I've considered so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Or: I'll tell you what I've considered so far, but I won't tell you why that word doesn't do the trick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Or: I won't give you an example sentence to show you how I want to use the word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a very basic grammar question which with 99% probability has already been asked and answered, if not on ELU, then on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for good measure, when I ask the question, I won't share what efforts I've made to figure out the answer.  Just hand it to me on a silver platter!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I came across a sentence or paragraph I don't understand.  I will ask what it means, without &quot;thinking out loud,&quot; i.e. sharing the process by which I &lt;em&gt;tried&lt;/em&gt; to make sense of it, or the specific part that I just can't figure out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a possibly interesting question, but I can't be bothered to spell-check or proofread my question... or even write a complete sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have about a dozen somewhat related questions, and I will hodgepodge/shoehorn them all into one Question.  (I guess this doesn't often happen here; I see it fairly frequently on Academia SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please proofread the following.  (This is different from asking whether one specific fragment or usage holds water.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(This one will be hard to detect automatically.)  Why the heck does English do such-and-so specific illogical thing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did I miss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I would be grateful if you would use your programming skills for something slightly different: could you please make us a Question Wizard, and an Answer Wizard, that could be used optionally?  But once they're working well, we could &lt;em&gt;strongly encourage&lt;/em&gt; new participants to use them.  Also, once the close votes and the downvotes start coming in, you could automatically send a message to the participant with the suggestion that he go through the checklist to improve his post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you would also like to know what distinguishes a poor answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here's a word you might like.  Just take my word for it, it's a great word.  I won't tell you what it means, and I won't link to a dictionary definition.  I won't show you how to use it, either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have some great information for you, butIwillrunitalltogetherinoneunformattedparagraph.  Or I'll use a ton of boldface type.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(This one is controversial.  I haven't figured out my opinion about this yet.)  I will answer this for you, even though it is a poorly posed question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Reasonable edits to this post are encouraged.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T04:18:58.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2016-12-15T05:01:07.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's be guided by the fact that the stakes here almost nonexistent. So much so that, continuing the tradition of a previous post of mine, I will be prefixing pejoratives in this discussoin with the double-dagger to indicate that in theory a negative connotation would apply, but not, in practice, in this forum. Are the comments in question &amp;ddagger;deplorable? In theory, but what's really deplorable is the treatment of Syrian refugees. Comments in ELU, not so much.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an immediate consequence of 1 (q.v.), let's all drag our fainting couches to the street for removal by the refuse haulers. I'm talking to you @JOSH (&lt;em&gt;more than &amp;ddagger;pathetic&lt;/em&gt;), @MaryLouA (&lt;em&gt;&amp;ddagger;deplorable&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;personal &amp;ddagger;attacks&lt;/em&gt;), and @AlanCarmack (&lt;em&gt;incredibly &amp;ddagger;hypocritical&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stop the word games, @JOSH. You're building on the meaning of &lt;em&gt;&amp;ddagger;discriminatory&lt;/em&gt; as merely differentiating, to bring a case that you have been deprived of an opportunity or benefit based on that differentiation. No one claims that you are &quot;not entitled to express&quot; your views on usage; no one claims that status as a native-speaker is an &quot;indispensable prerequisite to make a credible comment.&quot; How could such claims, were they to be made, be enforced?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And while we're on the topic of enforceability, how about losing the slippery slope to drama? Are you really concerned that ELU will demand birth certificates of its participants or enquire of the languages spoken by participants' parents?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While we're at it, can we at least get the term &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; correct? (This is for you @AndrewLeach.) An &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; counter-argument is a rebuttal that cites opponents' identities or opponents' characteristics &lt;em&gt;that are not relevant to the opponents' arguments&lt;/em&gt;. Impeachment may be a weak counter, but it is not necessarily an &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt;. We may dismiss those who claim that moonlight is a physically cooling light by noting that they belong to the fraternity of people who have never studied physics. We also wouldn't have to take @JOSH's mother's word for her son's intuitive grasp of language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stop stirring the pot. (I'm talking to you @Rathony.) Even if you found a charge of &quot;criminal&quot; plagiarism &amp;ddagger;shocking, this topic doesn't belong in this discussion. But while we're on the topic, @AlanCarmack, plagiarism is not a criminal matter, at least in the US. The only way it would be involved is in false licensure or fraud, the latter requiring illegal financial gain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(This is an aside, @AlanCarmack, but it amuses me so much, I just have to mention it. In the US, defamation is the (legally-defined) publishing of damaging and (legally-defined) falsity. There are several ways in which nominally-damaging statements might fail to be actually damaging. (See 1, for instance.) But a false accusation of criminality is presumed to be damaging. It's called libel &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. Nice going.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The real problem is the weakness of the arguments. On the one hand, easy and intuitive understanding is difficult to quantify. On the other, whatever truth there is to native speakers having an easier and more intuitive understanding, it is statistical truth; it doesn't help on a sample of one. @JOSH can always point to Józef Teodor Korzeniowski&lt;sup&gt;&amp;ast;&lt;/sup&gt;, who didn't speak fluent English until his third decade of life and still managed to become one of the foremost masters of the English novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, let's stop pretending that disparaging non-native speakers is foreign to ELU or surpising to find here. It's how we roll.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;ast; Better known as Joseph Conrad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T05:01:07.990" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-15T11:05:54.073" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unable to ask or answer a question because I am missing some key information or because I am misunderstanding the information presented. So how does one increase one's reputation points, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211029" OwnerDisplayName="Pamela Ariel" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T11:26:09.070" Title="I am very interested in using this site, but even after reading the response to how points can be earned," Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-12-16T04:06:40.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9876" CreationDate="2016-12-15T21:13:52.563" Score="9" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;After promoting / converting one's own comments to an answer, should one delete or leave the original comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 1: Avoid redundancy by deleting my comments that are now in an Answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 2: Preserve context by leaving my comments so other comments around them still make sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/363580/207698&quot;&gt;the comments and answer&lt;/a&gt; in my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first consulted these meta posts on commenting to make sure that my question was not a duplicate, but did not find clear answers after reading them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4557/answering-questions-in-comments/&quot;&gt;Answering questions in comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5090/how-to-handle-questions-with-acceptable-comments-as-answers-but-no-answer-itself&quot;&gt;How to handle questions with acceptable comments as answers but no answer itself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4984/unanswered-questions-with-comments&quot;&gt;Unanswered questions with comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2653/why-are-answers-being-posted-in-the-comments-on-the-question&quot;&gt;Why are answers being posted in the comments on the question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4224/how-to-handle-old-questions-with-answers-stuck-in-a-comment&quot;&gt;How to handle old questions with answers stuck in a comment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207698" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T02:04:15.677" Title="Converting comment to answer: when to delete the original comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2016-12-15T23:58:45.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me offer my opinion (as you appear to be offering yours).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments quoted are hostile. However, the point they so clumsily make can be made, I think, generally and perhaps more acceptably: that answers (and comments) ought to provide as much relevant information as reasonably possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reference to &quot;intuition&quot; when discussing language may easily give impulse to a mental leap on the part of OP and others, that the person making the reference is in fact a native speaker. Even if it is irrelevant to the subject matter whether or not the user making the reference is a native speaker or not, the unspoken assumption of nativeness may easily be established by such a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, if the assumption were made, it would be false in this particular case. If relevant to the OP at all, the OP would be misguided. I've seen many posts on this site that &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; seek to consult native speakers. This is apparently not the case, and the only incentive for the putative inclusion of the information about the &quot;nativeness&quot; status is the reference to intuition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not being a native speaker, I know only too well that some of my &quot;intuitions&quot; about English may have been implanted long time ago by a teacher (or textbook), a favourite author, a catchphrase, etc. and cemented by relative lack of exposure to the live language. I might still refer to my intuition, but then I might, in turn, take rebukes about my intuition seriously (especially if politely made).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I asked about Eskimo words for snow, for example, then I would perhaps anytime prefer the intuitions of a native speaker with exposure to the phenomenon to any amount of education or research of non-natives. (Whereas if I wanted to dicsuss comparative phonology of Eskimo languages, native-ness would be irrelevant.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand you were hurt by those comments. As you point out,  background of users who provide opinions here matters; native-ness (even if vaguely understood) is just one important part of one's background. Although, of course, I am not trying to argue that the &lt;em&gt;intuition&lt;/em&gt; of any native speaker trumps everything a non-native speaker may contribute here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105642" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T23:58:45.713" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9874" CreationDate="2016-12-16T17:16:58.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often let my (partial answer in) comment be, in case where its removal might render neighbouring useful comments contextless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remove a comment when I feel that it's clearly obsolete, since my new answer addresses the matter that was discussed in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, life expectancy is too short for a comment. Comment-threads get purged every day. So, I'm not really that bothered about comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/363566/is-there-an-opposite-of-want/363580#comment846813_363580&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; is highly upvoted, so I say, let it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T17:22:15.560" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T17:22:15.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2016-12-16T17:50:32.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does ELU allow “discriminatory” comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, never allowed it, won't ever allow it. Been on ELU for three years, and I'm no native speaker either. I never came across any discriminatory post that was aimed at me. Or at anyone, for that matter. So I don't see it becoming a theme or a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T17:50:32.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9880" CreationDate="2016-12-16T22:44:52.517" Score="9" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175025/synonyms-for-default&quot;&gt;I asked this question a while ago&lt;/a&gt;, and I still disagree with it being closed as off-topic. The reason given for closing the question is that commonly-available references can answer it. I mentioned in the question that the commonly-available references all point to the legal definition. I think it should be reopened. If not, can you help me understand why it should remain closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T18:31:21.857" Title="When commonly available references are deficient, should a question be closed on that basis?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2016-12-16T22:58:54.970" Score="15" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Historical Resources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are books of possible interest to people who are investigating word and phrase origins and want to know what meanings those words or phrases were said to have at various times in the past. Several of them do not show up in a direct Google Books search by title. I've run into the hidden ones by chance while searching for a particular word or phrase that they happen to contain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dictionaries before or overlapping Samuel Johnson's&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Cawdrey, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Table Alphabetical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1604)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Bulloker, &lt;em&gt;An English Expositor: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Used in Our Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=u_1mAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP13&amp;amp;dq=%22Complete+Dictionary+of+the+English+Language%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1616)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nPhmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP3&amp;amp;dq=%22Complete+Dictionary+of+the+English+Language%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1641)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=7ovSEBlI7ooC&amp;amp;pg=PP5&amp;amp;dq=%22Complete+Dictionary+of+the+English+Language%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revised and corrected by W. S. (1656)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CwJnAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP7&amp;amp;dq=%22Complete+Dictionary+of+the+English+Language%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourth edition (1667)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BOdiAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT8&amp;amp;dq=%22Complete+Dictionary+of+the+English+Language%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth edition (1676)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Ilt2zQzGEP4C&amp;amp;pg=PP7&amp;amp;lpg=PP7&amp;amp;dq=%22John+Bulloker%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=WGJQEA9yRR&amp;amp;sig=0WVdq9hDSP1C-TKJnQDDtsJxPbk&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiy0rPxq7TVAhUCwlQKHUDxAp8Q6AEIMjAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22John%20Bulloker%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sixth edition (1680)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry Cockeram, &lt;em&gt;The English Dictionary: or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=5PhmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1626)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6SlKOcaihg8C&amp;amp;dq=%22English+Dictionarie%22&amp;amp;q=art#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=art&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth edition (1637)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CvlmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT185&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventh edition (1642)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=KudiAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT271&amp;amp;dq=%22lumber%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwADgyahUKEwiRvLORhJ3IAhWJQYgKHZYlBk8#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22lumber%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ninth edition (1650)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=wfhmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP9&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tenth edition (1651)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=DvdmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eleventh edition (1658)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Blount, &lt;em&gt;Glossographia: Or a Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=QctmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA4-IA1&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1656)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=cvxmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP13&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third edition (1670)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hP1mAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP7&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourth edition (1674)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Blount, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8jYP-B1Q9a0C&amp;amp;pg=PT234&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Or, A Dictionary, Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language, as Are Present Used in the English Tongue, with Their Etymologies, Definitions, &amp;amp;c.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1707)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edward Phillips, &lt;em&gt;The New World of English Words, or a General Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=RR9lAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT120&amp;amp;dq=%22first+draught+of+a+picture%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1658)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=erH11Z_Iy-YC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1662)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edward Phillips &amp;amp; John Kersey, &lt;em&gt;The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=PHBUAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT246&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sixth edition (1706)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=tp4NAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventh edition (1720)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elisha Coles, &lt;em&gt;An English Dictionary, Explaining the Difficult Terms That Are Used in Divinity, Husbandry, Physick, Philosophy, Law, Navigation, Mathematicks, and Other Arts and Sciences&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=n_5mAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP11&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1676)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=fvpmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA7-IA22&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1692)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=O4wNAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT220&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1717)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen Blancard, &lt;em&gt;The Physical Dictionary: Wherein the Terms of Anatomy, the Names and Causes of Diseases, Chirurgical Instruments, and Their Use, Are Accurately Describ'd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=bTcpJsjZTK0C&amp;amp;pg=PA97&amp;amp;dq=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1693)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pEtfAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA112&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourth edition (1702)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zY1hAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA133&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventh edition (1726)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Kersey, &lt;em&gt;Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum: Or, A General English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=t01gAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT504&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1708)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=beoIAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1715)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=wdhUAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT606&amp;amp;dq=%22quim%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CFQQ6AEwCTgyahUKEwjCn6CF3NLIAhXJKogKHY85D0M#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22quim%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third edition (1721)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Kersey, &lt;em&gt;A New English Dictionary: or, A Compleat Collection of the Most Proper and Significant Words, and Terms of Art Commonly Used in the Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=QBxEAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT215&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourth edition (1739)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8aNhAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT255&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventh edition (1757)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nathan Bailey, &lt;em&gt;An Universal Etymological English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=UeUIAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT259&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1724)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=a_tIAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT674&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth edition (1731)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=QQZgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PT601&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourteenth edition (1751)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=3AF4CmukzQYC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventeenth edition (1757)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pn0SAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twenty-first edition (1770)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=lCw5AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twenty-third edition (1773)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bailey, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CoRZAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP512&amp;amp;dq=%22Distemper+which+provokes%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjq-rq2qfTaAhWmi1QKHYm4DLAQ6AEIODAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Distemper%20which%20provokes%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionarium Britannicum: Or a More Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (1730)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nathan Bailey, &lt;em&gt;An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, Containing an Additional Collection of Words (Not in the First Volume)…Vol. II&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/universaletymolo02bailuoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third edition (1737)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nathan Bailey, [&lt;em&gt;The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NgdgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT111&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth edition (1760)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=meYIAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA35-PP7&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventh edition (1776)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Dyche &amp;amp; William Pardon, &lt;em&gt;A New General English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=l0JgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT844&amp;amp;dq=%22WIFE+(S.)+a+woman+that+is+married%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjvm_rvx7PTAhVoqVQKHTavDfs4ChDoAQgnMAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22WIFE%20(S.)%20a%20woman%20that%20is%20married%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1735)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=D6zrCVym1XsC&amp;amp;pg=PT722&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third edition (1740)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=sKEky8zxAtsC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourth edition (1744)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=m-JhAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT330&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eighth edition (1754)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Y5lgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR8&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ninth edition (1758)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gecIAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA11-PT503&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eleventh edition (1760)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=vQVgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR6&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourteenth edition (1771)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BAVgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT8&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sixteenth edition (1777)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=X1AauKMhO8QC&amp;amp;pg=PP5&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eighteenth edition (1781)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E. Chambers, &lt;em&gt;Cyclopædia; Or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences&lt;/em&gt; [predecessor to Encyclopedia Britannica]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2UpOAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT864&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth edition, volume 1 (A–K) (1741)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[fifth edition, volume 2 (L–Z) (1743) [https://books.google.com/books?id=ciiIaFU06vMC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;f=false)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samuel Johnson, &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=cNrI9Y4bY_QC&amp;amp;pg=PP254&amp;amp;dq=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 1 (A–K) (1755)&lt;/a&gt; (with full citations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=kyRWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT596&amp;amp;dq=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 2 (L–K) (1755)&lt;/a&gt; (with full citations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionaryofengl01john#page/n573/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 1 (A–Z) (1756)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionaryofengl02john#page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 2 (L–Z) (1756)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Slang dictionaries and glossaries before or overlapping 1900&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Head, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Yv4BAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA47&amp;amp;dq=%22vocabulary%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=VzBIU7PFFaaOyAGDj4GgBg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22vocabulary%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canting Vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The English Rogue, Described, in the life of Meriton Latroon&lt;/em&gt; (pages 47–53) (1665)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G.L., &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=X8BYAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA3&amp;amp;dq=%22canting+academy%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjn8Ium5fbNAhWJKWMKHXesCH4Q6AEIMTAF#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=%22Pedlars-French%22%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Canting Academy or Pedlars-French Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Amorous Gallant's Tongue Tipped with Golden Expressions&lt;/em&gt; (pages 111–118) (1674/1741)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.E., &lt;a href=&quot;http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A39/A39127.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;New Dictionary of the Canting Crew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1699)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Hitching, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2T1fAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA9&amp;amp;dq=%22regulator+or+a+discovery%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjC8-b_5_bNAhVV6GMKHavvCewQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22names%20of%20the%20flash%20words%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The names of the Flash Words now in Vogue amongst Thieves&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Regulator&lt;/em&gt; (pages 19–20) (1718)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Saman, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=9i9fAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Golden+Cabinet+of+Secrets%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjlrpqhxrPQAhVU42MKHUQxD2wQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Comprehending%20all%20the%20material%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Compleat Canting Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Aristotle’s Legacy, or His Golden Cabinet of Secrets Opened&lt;/em&gt; (pages 145–156)  (1720)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=A6NWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A New Canting Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1725)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francis Grose, &lt;em&gt;A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zLAJs0_prpwC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1785)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=4HoSAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1788)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LXMKAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revised and corrected by Pierce Egan (1823)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francis Grose &amp;amp; George Cruikshank, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=iDsJAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1811)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francis Grose, &lt;em&gt;A Provincial Glossary: With a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=31oJAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22provincial+glossary+with+a+collection+of+local+proverbs%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=XHhIU5zrI8LcyQHO64CgDQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22bited%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1787)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Ml8UAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1790)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TPMtAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revised by Samuel Pegge (1839)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gradus Ad Cantabrigiam: Or, A Dictionary of Terms: Academical and Colloquial, or Cant, Which Are Used at the University of Cambridge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0YoSAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1803)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8Qk3AAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1824)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Andrewes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BKNWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;q=cove#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=cove&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1809)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ZR1dAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA6&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Flash Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (1821)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jon Bee [John Badcock], [&lt;em&gt;Sporting Slang&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=KKNWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA99&amp;amp;dq=%22hookey%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=wfwmVdf0PMX6oQS_yIDgAw&amp;amp;ved=0CEwQ6AEwCTgK#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22hookey%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Slang [of the Sporting World]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1823)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rCBTAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA171&amp;amp;dq=%22to+rule+the+roost%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CBsQ6AEwADiWAWoVChMIzZu7i77kyAIVAdFjCh0fSAL4#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22to%20rule%20the%20roost%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sportsman’s Slang; a New Dictionary of Terms Used in the Affairs of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, and the Cock-Pit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1825)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bemjamin Hall, &lt;em&gt;A Collection of College Words and Customs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1GkCAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1851)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=M7AWAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1856)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Matsell, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=07NZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vocabulum or Rogue’s Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1859)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Hotten, &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words&lt;/em&gt; aka &lt;em&gt;The Slang Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Zhk9h-w1negC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1859)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=XCRKAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition (1860)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CwL7bqZKFaYC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1864)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=d04SAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1865)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pyBTAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1869)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BYZPAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1870)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=X2sRAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1872)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=EKJGAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1894)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Fox, &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuc.1814828_001;view=1up;seq=15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Slang Dictionary of New York, London and Paris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ca. 1880)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albert Barrère &amp;amp; Charles Leland, &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon &amp;amp; Cant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ZY8VAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 1 (A–K) (1889)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=n8YRAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 2 (L–Z) (1890)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0JsOAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 1 (A–K) (1897)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1NjWAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 2 (L–Z) (1897)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John S. Farmer &amp;amp; W. E. Henley, &lt;em&gt;Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CbATAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 1 (A–Byz) (1890)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=a6NBAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 2 (C–Fizzle) (1891)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=n7FZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 3 (Fla–Hyps) (1893)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hrATAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 4 (I–Myz) (1896)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=prATAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 5 (N–Raz) (1902)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JKRBAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 6 (Rea–Stozzle) (1903)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zrATAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume 7 (Stra–Z) (1904)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Maitland, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=uLNZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The American Slang Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1891)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T03:55:01.683" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T03:55:01.683" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-16T22:58:54.970" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9878" CreationDate="2016-12-16T23:31:42.923" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted some synonym dictionaries, and I can confirm Nathan L's research results: most dictionaries focus on the failure/forfeit sense of &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &quot;automatically selected preference&quot; (which originated as a computer-related term but has subsequently gained traction in more-general use) first appeared in the &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; series in the tenth edition (1993), which indicates relatively recent mainstream adoption of the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest adjectives to &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; in the relevant sense that I can think of are &lt;em&gt;go-to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fallback&lt;/em&gt;, and neither of those is an especially good match for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to know how the computer meaning arose. My guess is that it originated in the sports metaphor of advancing to the next round in a bracketed tournament because the listed opponent forfeited the match. I can imagine a computer programmer treating a user's declining to alter the program's baseline settings as a kind of forfeiture of the opportunity to customize the settings, for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is quite aside from the legitimacy Nathan L's question about what words might serve as synonyms for &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; in its new sense. As far as I can see, it isn't a general-reference question. I therefore support his request to reopen the original question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, three of the four reasons given by close-voters seeking to reclose the original question cite its lack of an example providing context. To repeat a comment I made beneath Nathan L's original question, he seems to be asking about a situation in which, for example, &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; is used as a noun, as in &quot;The 'Sell my personal data to anyone on the Internet who wants to buy it' option is the &lt;strong&gt;default&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; But a similar question could be asked about the use of &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective, as in &quot;Clicking 'Revert' causes the program to revert to its &lt;strong&gt;default&lt;/strong&gt; settings.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T18:31:21.857" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T18:31:21.857" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9878" CreationDate="2016-12-17T00:07:37.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should go without saying that if you can show that commonly available references do not provide the information that you need, your question should not be closed, and if it is closed, you have every right to ask for it to be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in your particular case, it is hard to see what good it would do. If there were a good single-word synonym for &lt;em&gt;default value&lt;/em&gt;, it would be listed in thesauri and other reference works, and software developers would already be using it. Also, the fact that you have already accepted an answer does nothing to help your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastEditorUserId="194338" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T02:00:48.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T02:00:48.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T20:46:10.997" Score="18" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;A poster asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305273/retriable-or-retryable/305433&quot;&gt;Retriable or retryable?&lt;/a&gt; on February 9, 2016. It was closed for lack of research on February 15 of that year. On November 9, site participant sumelic edited the question to include a bit of research; but on November 14, three other site users deleted the question altogether. (As far as I can tell, deletions occur on EL&amp;amp;U without explanation.) The original question had received 8 upvotes, and attracted two answers (one by me) that had also received upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today a poster has just asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/364277/which-spelling-is-preferred-retriable-or-retryable&quot;&gt;Which spelling is preferred: “retriable” or “retryable”?&lt;/a&gt; The question is essentially a duplicate of the earlier one, but has problems of its own: the poster gives an example of how he would use the word (which would be good enough for an SWR question) but shows no research into the question (which I believe is required for questions of this kind). Site participant FumbleFingers points out the original question (visible only to users with 10,000+ reputation) in a comment beneath the probable duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the decision to delete the earlier question is unaccountable. Eight people thought the original question was worth upvoting, and sumelic's edit of the closed question seems to have removed the basis for its closure. But even if it should have remained closed, I don't see why it was deleted. The latest question shows continuing independent interest in the question the earlier question raised, and it seems to me that the only thing we've accomplished by deleting the original question is to leave site visitors with no guidance on the substance of the question—and of course, to set up another questioner to have his question closed for failing to jump through the necessary hoops to have his post qualify as a legitimate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask site participants who have the power to vote to undelete deleted questions to consider voting to undelete and reopen the original &amp;quot;Retriable or retryable?&amp;quot; question. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2023-12-03T01:38:26.427" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T01:38:26.427" Title="Request for undeletion and reopening of a question on the main site: &quot;Retriable or retryable?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T16:01:33.917" Score="10" ViewCount="1717" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently using Online Etymology Dictionary, it mostly tells me how the word evolve from its ancient form to how it looks in modern times rather than tells me other words stemming from the same origin/root.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a site that can show you words base on the same origin or root of whatever word you enter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211629" OwnerDisplayName="user211629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T16:12:46.443" Title="Is there a site that you can search for words of the same root/origin of the word you enter?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9885" CreationDate="2016-12-19T23:43:40.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; gives all words from the root -- as well as nearby words / related searches. It also has a History and Origin section for entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on other related resources online see the comprehensive meta thread here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207698" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T16:34:36.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9883" CreationDate="2016-12-20T11:27:35.237" Score="-7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it &quot;marriable&quot; or &quot;marryable&quot;? Is it &quot;hillariable&quot; or &quot;hillaryable&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find two issues on this type of question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  As you indicated in your answer, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's impossible to say that one spelling is correct and the other is incorrect&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which means we can't tell which one is correct. Also, it can be changed as time goes by. @Josh answered, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Retryable is the more correct spelling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=retriable%2C+retryable&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=6&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cretriable%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cretryable%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate &quot;retriable&quot; was used far more often than &quot;retryable&quot; at the end of 20th century. It may change in years to come. Nobody knows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Whether to use &quot;retriable&quot; or &quot;retryable&quot; should be researched on the internet as there is no answer to that question. English Language and Usage (ELU) users don't have any objective and definitive way to tell users which one is more appropriate in what context. When a question reads &quot;Which spelling is the correct one?&quot; the answer should be &quot;You decide it because you will have the consequences. Not a bunch of strangers on the internet because we don't know which is correct.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be no dictionary that lists both words. I believe a question asking about correct spelling between &lt;em&gt;two relatively new words&lt;/em&gt; should be closed as lack of research or primarily opinion-based. The linked checklist on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260648/stack-overflow-question-checklist&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you went from &quot;something's not working&quot; to &quot;asking a question&quot; &lt;em&gt;in less than 10 minutes&lt;/em&gt;, you probably haven't done enough research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not proposing ELU should apply the 10-minute guideline on ELU. But ELU should focus on &lt;em&gt;answerable questions&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;unanswerable questions&lt;/em&gt; which can't be answered definitively with supporting research and references. ELU should focus on building library of helpful and &lt;em&gt;definitive&lt;/em&gt; questions and answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Since the question has been reopened, I will move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:21.993" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T15:04:19.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T19:10:59.497" Score="4" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes someone complains of a specific moderator action in meta (action known, mod unknown), and the responsible party does not reply. For the sake of transparency, teaching, and trust-building, should they? Or would it cause unwanted/unneeded animus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that moderation is a team activity, guided by an accepted and well-spelled-out philosophy, is often done by consensus and by precedent. Any moderator can answer most any meta question, and indeed, two or three mods, especially @Andrew Leach, are very good about answers. But they may not be the mods who actually performed the action the OP has posted about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some here know I'm a mod elsewhere on this network. My philosophy is to try to answer any questions about the reasoning behind my behavior.  (By the same token, when someone asks, &quot;Why was my question closed?&quot;, if I was one of the close voters I usually try to answer the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do it for the reasons listed above: I want my moderation to be transparent; I want users to know I'm doing things according to established SE policy; I want to assuage people who take things personally that this was done without bias, etc. Sometimes it's done so other mods aren't blamed for my actions (if it was done without consulting the others.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it makes me a better mod (I may be wrong, of course, and I still make mistakes.) at times, it has caused me to reevaluate my position on something (for example, one particularly contentious post changed my approach to handling of comment threads.) Personally, I believe in taking responsibility for my actions, and wonder why some don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the site where I mod is slow, while this one is not, and we only need three mods whereas this site requires a good deal more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question remains: is it a reasonable expectation that when someone complains of a particular moderator action, that mod should reply? Mind you, I'm not interested in having any mod raked over the coals, and I'm aware that meta is about issues, not individuals. But moderation is critical to the culture of a site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interested in violating anyone's privacy (no explanation needed about suspensions, etc.) I'm thinking more of why iffy questions were closed by one moderator, etc. . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I have no issue currently with any of the moderation on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T05:18:42.843" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T19:35:09.393" Title="Should specific mods answer for their actions when called to task in meta?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9874" CreationDate="2016-12-22T02:04:15.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are considered to be ephemeral on ELU. Here's one source from a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral and will continue to be ephemeral, so if you have something you think is worth keeping around, then post an answer or propose an edit to an existing answer rather than leave a comment.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5034/142322&quot;&gt;- Kit Z. Fox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After promoting / converting one's own comments to an answer, should one delete or leave the original comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since comments are ephemeral, whether and when to delete the comment is completely up to you, subject to mod actions. I suggest the following rule of thumb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE is intended to be used as a reference repository. If you think the comment helps provide context or is otherwise beneficial to future visitors to the page in question, leave it in. Otherwise, delete it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.760" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T02:04:15.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-22T02:37:57.647" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/364022/3394&quot;&gt;What exactly is different between &amp;quot;outspoken&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;softspoken&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;unspoken&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;misspoken&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was the community so eager to shut down my question? I don't get it. It's so frustrating.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What &quot;research&quot; were they expecting to see? My Googling didn't turn up anything useful...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3394" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T08:42:33.460" Title="Why was this question closed? (q/364022)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9893" CreationDate="2016-12-22T05:23:47.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why was this question closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please include the research you've done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&quot; – Hot Licks, Phil Sweet, NVZ, Rathony, Helmar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why was the community so eager to shut down my question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/a&gt; I don't think this community was so &lt;em&gt;eager&lt;/em&gt; to shut down your particular quesiton. It judged your question lacks research effort and it could be answered using commonly-available references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What &quot;research&quot; were they expecting to see? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts would understand what those words mean. Outspoken comes from speak out and when you speak out, you are candid, straightforward. Softspoken comes from speak softly and when you speak softly, you are gentle and not loud. Unspoken comes from &quot;un (not) speak&quot; and when something is unspoken, it is not expressed in words. Misspoken comes from &quot;mis + speak&quot; and mis indicates &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;. When you misspeak, you speak wrongly or inaccurately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the explanations above, what is it that you can't find in the dictionary or on the internet? Your interpretation of three words other than &quot;outspoken&quot; is correct. Then, you should have focused on the meaning of &quot;outspoken&quot; with an example sentence that bothers you most. There are many example sentences on the internet and what makes you think it means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I hear X is &quot;outspoken&quot;, I interpret it as meaning that X is spoken of (or X does speaks) but the speech tends to be drowned out by others' voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You asked a total of 8 questions. It's too broad.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Can someone explain what is going on? (2) Shouldn't the consistent usage and the &quot;-en&quot; conjugation mean X is the subject?&#xA;  (3) Why exactly is different about these from a language standpoint that makes their meanings so seemingly unintuitive grammatically? (4) Is there some way I can train myself to &quot;predict&quot; the correct meaning ((5) are they in different tenses? (6) are they following different grammar rules?), or (7) are they just random exceptions to the language that I have to memorize in every single case? (8) Is there a name I can use to describe or read more about this phenomenon? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is too broad and can't be answered definitively. One question per post is the guideline of Stack Exchange. Answers to your questions (from No. (3) to (8)) are as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Their meanings are not confusing. Grammar has nothing to do with their meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) You can always &quot;predict&quot; the correct meaning if you get yourself familiarized with the meanings of those prefixes &lt;em&gt;un (not)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mis (wrong)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;out (opposite of in)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;soft (not hard, not loud)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Tense has nothing to do with their meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) Again, grammar has nothing to do with their meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) I don't think they are random exceptions. Yes, you have to memorize them, but it would be far easier if you know the prefixes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8) I don't understand the question. You can read some articles on prefixes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question would not have been closed if you had focused on what bothers you most with your own research efforts and an example sentence with which you are confused. Please consider editing your question so that we can consider voting to reopen it. Good luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user140086" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T08:42:33.460" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9891" CreationDate="2016-12-23T14:31:34.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like the idea that individual moderators should be required to appear in the dock (be placed in the stocks?) here on meta. If a mod &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; to publicly explain and defend their own specific actions, I wouldn't argue against that, but it shouldn't be the default / expected response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderation is supposed to be a collectively coherent process, both in that each mod stands for the whole team &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; that the team represents the whole user community. If mods disagree among themselves, and can't resolve things internally, I would expect them to raise the matter here on meta (focusing on the &lt;em&gt;issue&lt;/em&gt;, not the individuals) and give a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of weight to the opinions and votes of the user base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The idea of &quot;naming and shaming&quot; individual moderators is a &quot;divide and conquer&quot; tactic that would only encourage the idea there's some kind of ongoing &quot;war&quot; between we the users and our &lt;em&gt;(elected)&lt;/em&gt; moderator team. It would only promote discord; let's not go down that path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T14:31:34.013" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-23T18:44:29.637" Score="-7" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were only five comments to my answer below.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9883/request-for-undeletion-and-reopening-of-a-question-on-the-main-site/9888#9888&quot;&gt;Request for undeletion and reopening of a question on the main site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know why only my comment to @J.R. was deleted. It was neither rude nor offensive and it was even upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it automatically deleted because it was flagged by multiple users? If so, I think this feature should be changed or cancelled because (1) it might have been flagged maliciously or (2) it's not something new on ELU that there are multiple users who use multiple accounts to vote each other. Even if they get caught, the punishment seems to be too weak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know whether it was deleted by (1) a moderator or (2) multiple flags automatically. If the answer is No. (1), I'd appreciate explanation from one of the moderators. If it is No. (2), I will raise another issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T19:23:31.413" Title="I'd like to know why only my comment was deleted when there were only five comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9891" CreationDate="2016-12-23T19:35:09.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand that moderation is a team activity, guided by an accepted and well-spelled-out philosophy,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that there's a &quot;well-spelled-out&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;philosophy for moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For everyone's amusement, let me quote a few provisions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, &lt;strong&gt;as little as possible&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators are human exception handlers&lt;/strong&gt;, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever possible, [moderators should] try to leave frequent comments on posts where [they]'ve taken (or considered taking) a moderator action, explaining the reasoning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ideal moderator does as little as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But where on earth do you get the idea that the ELU moderation team is guided by this policy? Moderation is constant, obtrusive, arbitrary, and mostly without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But moderation is critical to the culture of a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly is. &lt;em&gt;Circumspice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't think moderators form an &quot;evil cabal&quot;. As I've noted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9285/125330&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, what we see is the inevitable result of self-nomination for positions of small power -- the petty tyranny of hall-monitorism. (I think for Brits, the term would be &lt;em&gt;head-boyism&lt;/em&gt;.) The fix for this cannot be accountability by review, not least because of people like me who love he sound of their own voice having the last word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am certainly in favor of transparency, and I mean radical transparency, for everything. That includes actions and threats of action on disciplinary matters. Yes, that would dispense with the absurd idea of the local right to privacy. Every user can be anonymous, and in effect, just about everyone is anyway &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@FumbleFingers has here expressed the opinion that in theory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;each mod stands for the whole team and that the team represents the whole user community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but in practice what happens is that each mod hides behind the anonymous collective, and no one can tell whether mod actions represent the community. The more light the better, and if that means some see figurative docks and stocks, then so be it. Perhaps that would concentrate some minds and change some attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here now follows today's reading from my biography. Recently, I was taken to task by a mod (in a private chat room, of course) for an alleged violation of the Orwellian command to &quot;Be Nice&quot;. Since I had no idea what my offense was, I took exception. (The words &quot;absolutely reject&quot; were employed.) My posting concerned some pejoratives that other posters had employed (on meta) about their colleague's comments. It turns out that this mod had mistaken my citations of others' words as epithets. In other words, as characterizations of the posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I explained the situation and asked whether I should edit my answer to make it clearer that I wasn't calling anyone names. Do you suppose an apology was forthcoming for a &amp;ddagger;false accusation? Lacking that, do you think that there was an &quot;Oops! I misunderstood&quot;? Do you imagine there was even an answer to my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eight days later, the chat room was frozen for lack of moderator activity. If you'd like to know the mod, his or her name is Legion. And don't think I consider myself singled out. I have no doubt my experience is typical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would complete transparency help or considering the law of unintended effects, would it hurt? I don't know, but I'd like to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T19:35:09.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9896" CreationDate="2016-12-23T19:58:59.990" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your comment was deleted because its content was flagged by one or more community members in good standing acting in good faith.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because users are unable to downvote or edit comments, when they do chance upon objectionable content there, their best recourse is to raise flags against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the guiding principle that Stack Exchange comments are passing ephemera not lasting artifacts worthy of preservation, in most cases comments so flagged are simply deleted forthwith, be this by moderators or by the system itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who find that our community consistently disapproves of their comments might dwell upon how best to avoid similar disapproval in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T19:58:59.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9896" CreationDate="2016-12-23T21:13:09.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answer by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2085/tchrist&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users who find that our community consistently disapproves of their&#xA;  comments might dwell upon how best to avoid similar disapproval in the&#xA;  future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can one avoid &quot;similar disapproval&quot; if they have no clue as to the cause of said &quot;disapproval&quot;???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Submitted as an &quot;answer&quot; so as to not be &quot;ephemeral&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T21:13:09.217" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9901" CreationDate="2016-12-23T22:06:19.120" Score="15" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of 2015, there was a welcome spurt of frivolity on ELU Meta.  I refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7427/shall-we-just-toss-the-winter-hats-into-the-bin&quot;&gt;Shall we just toss the Winter Hats into the bin?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7490/please-air-your-grievances-here&quot;&gt;Please air your grievances here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought maybe this outburst of rampant off-topic-ness was a one time affair, regretted and deplored by the poohbahs of the site, but in 2013 there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4356/oh-the-horror-hat-club-2013&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Oh The Horror&amp;quot; Hat Club 2013&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this behavior biennial and not due to flower again until 2017?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T02:28:45.623" Title="Is there to be no end-of-year frivolity this year?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2016-12-24T07:30:35.287" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bloody well hope so, 2016 has &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; been the cheeriest of years. Bring on the frolic and frivolity ☺ ☻ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ ○ ◘ • (I only discovered yesterday how to do 'em on the keyboard) ♂▬!,7BMXc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Avyh3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Avyh3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, the world's worst Christmassy hat ever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Merry Christmas EL&amp;amp;Uers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2016-12-25T09:47:11.627" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T09:47:11.627" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9903" CreationDate="2016-12-24T13:51:26.407" Score="20" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7903/what-process-is-required-to-get-the-help-center-text-changed&quot;&gt;What process is required to get the Help Center text changed?&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9577/proof-reading-questions&quot;&gt;Proof reading questions&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9556/does-the-proofreading-close-reason-cover-questions-that-do-identify-specific-w&quot;&gt;Does the &amp;quot;proofreading&amp;quot; close reason cover questions that do identify specific words or phrases?&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the &amp;quot;proofreading&amp;quot; close reason is for&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help text advising against proof-reading questions currently reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Is this right?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Are there any mistakes?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;), unless the source of concern is clearly specified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been a number of attempts to &amp;quot;clearly specify&amp;quot; the source of the concern in questions, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explicitly asking &amp;quot;Does this sound right?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Including &amp;quot;(verb)&amp;quot; in the question title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking &amp;quot;Have I used the right verb?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of those are what I believe &amp;quot;clearly specified&amp;quot; was intended to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Does this sound right?&amp;quot; is inherently opinion-based, as both &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; answers are possible, and even justifiable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simply including &amp;quot;(verb)&amp;quot; in the question title doesn't say anything about the answer which is actually needed in the circumstances, quite apart from being unduly abrupt and demanding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can't say whether the right verb has been used, because there is no context to describe what the sentence is attempting to say.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the clear specification required is to say &lt;strong&gt;what the actual doubt is:&lt;/strong&gt; to state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which particular word is in question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what might be wrong about it and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;why it might be wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the verb right in &amp;quot;He has run the company for five years now&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has run the company for five years now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the verb &lt;em&gt;has run&lt;/em&gt; correct here? If &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; is still in post, the action is still in progress, so should the verb be a continuous/progressive verb like &lt;em&gt;He has been running&lt;/em&gt;? Does the inclusion of &amp;quot;now&amp;quot; make a difference here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the Help text could be altered to make that clear. While it is unlikely to stem the tide of proofreading questions, it does mean that the &amp;quot;Proof-reading&amp;quot; close reason could be amended to point to the Help page, which it currently doesn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading&lt;/strong&gt; questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how should the Help page be amended in order to help here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've provided an answer which you're able to vote on; other answers about the proof-reading help we offer are welcome, too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T11:40:36.273" Title="Should we amend the help text to expand on proof-reading?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|help-pages|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9902" CreationDate="2016-12-24T13:51:26.407" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is &lt;strong&gt;Yes, we should expand the help text,&lt;/strong&gt; and this is my proposal...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;on-topic&amp;quot; Help page&lt;/a&gt; currently has three principal parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What notation and symbols are commonly used here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose, first relegating the &amp;quot;What notation&amp;quot; part to the end, and then adding an explicit part about proof-reading, which could be linked from the relevant &amp;quot;Please don't ask&amp;quot; line in the first section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I ask about correcting my text?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What notation and symbols are commonly used here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How can I ask about correcting my text?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correcting a text is &lt;em&gt;proof-reading.&lt;/em&gt; This site does not offer a proof-reading service where the community will read a text and suggest corrections. If you would like that, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=online+proofreading+service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online services available&lt;/a&gt;, a few of which are free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this site can answer &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; questions about a &lt;strong&gt;particular&lt;/strong&gt; point in your text. You need to quote the passage, highlight the word you're uncertain about, and then explain why you're not sure about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the verb right in &amp;quot;He has run the company for five years now&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has run the company for five years now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the verb &lt;em&gt;has run&lt;/em&gt; correct here? If &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; is still in post, the action is still in progress, so should the verb be a continuous/progressive verb like &lt;em&gt;He has been running&lt;/em&gt;? Does the inclusion of &amp;quot;now&amp;quot; make a difference here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question &amp;quot;Is the verb &lt;em&gt;has run&lt;/em&gt; correct here?&amp;quot; highlights what the question is asking about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;The action is still in progress, so should it be a continuous-aspect verb?&amp;quot; explains the quandary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Does &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; make a difference?&amp;quot; provides additional information about the question which answers might touch upon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you should also include &lt;strong&gt;your own research into the query.&lt;/strong&gt; The example indicates that a little research may have been done with &amp;quot;Should it be a continuous-aspect verb?&amp;quot;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043&quot;&gt;research is needed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T13:51:26.407" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2016-12-24T19:30:44.520" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frivolity? Please. This is a site for &quot;linguists, etymologists, and &lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt; English language enthusiasts.&quot; (Emphasis mine.) And if you don't believe me, you can seek confirmation from those in the first two categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of them ever show up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125330" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T19:30:44.520" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2016-12-24T22:15:44.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the subject of hat-engendered frivolity, I offer you the papakhi, which I have just learned is &quot;a male wool hat worn throughout the Caucasus.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hat_styles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hat_styles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and I just got a Yoda hat for &quot;use the site's search functionality on 3 consecutive UTC days&quot;. May the force functionality be with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T20:41:27.897" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T20:41:27.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-25T20:11:02.487" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/348064/163363&quot;&gt;confused in using ON or Open&lt;/a&gt; (submitted three months ago) was merged with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/347603/circular-sent-to-parents-by-school&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that was deleted at some point in time after the merge action. It still cannot be answered or edited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the right course of action with this question? Re-open it? Or perhaps migrate it to ELL SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T20:11:02.487" Title="&quot;confused in using ON or Open&quot; merged with deleted question" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2016-12-26T00:55:46.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I like hats.  But what is more fundamental than a hat?  What underlies, supports and surrounds a hat?  &lt;em&gt;Hair.&lt;/em&gt;  And if you don't think hair can outdo a hat, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=extreme+hairstyles&amp;amp;biw=1237&amp;amp;bih=642&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;imgil=mWh7rRpfplRfzM%253A%253BfkqtfWyBLfGTRM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Ftwirlit.com%25252F2013%25252F05%25252F20%25252F9-hilariously-extreme-hair-styles%25252F&amp;amp;source=iu&amp;amp;pf=m&amp;amp;fir=mWh7rRpfplRfzM%253A%252CfkqtfWyBLfGTRM%252C_&amp;amp;usg=__z5mrSaxM0ZtubRVTnrVnibjsfy4%3D&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjB4o3d0ZDRAhUFSCYKHe63ANkQyjcIKQ&amp;amp;ei=GGlgWMH2I4WQmQHu74LIDQ#q=extreme+hairstyles&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;tbs=rimg:CZloe60aX6ZUIjh55Uc2NaVikl9rz8WmQ8e4KA6Vh1WCYPvf1ztO3axEJUoZxD9PRo-OpyGAMdyzvaodmVqttX4TRyoSCXnlRzY1pWKSEU7uSgER1lLLKhIJX2vPxaZDx7gRh8y77yjAXqYqEgkoDpWHVYJg-xFu5ewiZ6QQsSoSCd_1XO07drEQlEUfKpSznomjJKhIJShnEP09Gj44RXoXginEioY0qEgmnIYAx3LO9qhFpN7qMYBLl1SoSCR2ZWq21fhNHEf8oRKoceULb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Extreme Hairstyles&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T00:55:46.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2016-12-26T01:51:22.250" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not right that Kit should miss the Hat Dash.  I think this &quot;hat&quot; expresses how we all feel about you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FWF0J.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FWF0J.png&quot; alt=&quot;Kit with hat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T01:51:22.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-27T12:43:40.450" Score="8" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update: the question has been re-opened and has started getting answers. Thanks to everyone for your votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requesting votes to remove the hold tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/365365/55623&quot;&gt;this question I had posted&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made the required edits to bring clarity as well to bring it within the scope of the forum. It's already got 2 re-open votes, it just needs 3 more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212005" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T12:11:15.320" Title="I've clarified my question about mondegreens; can we re-open it? [resolved]" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-27T19:09:21.097" Score="-4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a quote from or about the Christmas Truce of 1914.  I &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/q/34551/16438&quot;&gt;asked on History SE&lt;/a&gt; and have so far not gotten any reasonable bites.  Is it possible to reframe this to post on ELU?  (I would of course delete the question over there first.)  Is asking for quotations on topic on ELU?  (I would have thought yes, since asking for idioms is allowed....)  Any specific reframing advice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:53.907" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T19:38:19.153" Title="How to ask a question seeking a quotation?" Tags="|support|quotes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2016-12-27T20:15:50.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to be absent to be present, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139435" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T20:15:50.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9914" CreationDate="2016-12-28T00:34:55.760" Score="12" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/365458/1&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; made me think of the question. This particular question is either a learner's question better suited for ELL, or a low-quality question. It made me think of the question of whether irrelevant images should be flagged, in questions or answers that are otherwise acceptable, and if so, what the appropriate flag is. Is it spam? That is, should the posting of an irrelevant work of art be considered promotion of that work of art, or of the user as an artist? I did not see anything in the flagging process that jumped out at me, except the possibility of &quot;in need of moderator intervention.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T16:45:31.827" Title="How (and whether) to flag a post with an irrelevant picture" Tags="|discussion|flagging|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9913" CreationDate="2016-12-28T16:21:52.563" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I see some blatantly irrelevant picture, text, or link in an otherwise okay post, my first choice would be to edit it out. I'd also maybe kindly let the user know why I did that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then if I see a potential for an edit war, I'd definitely flag it for a moderator's attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if I see that a post is itself not relevant for ELU's audience, with and without the attached irrelevant picture or spammy link, I'd choose some other flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T16:21:52.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9911" CreationDate="2016-12-28T19:38:19.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I don't think there is any way to make this kind of question a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a good idiom request, the criteria are generally only partially subjective, such as &quot;the idiom should convey this meaning&quot; or &quot;the idiom should be formal (or informal)&quot;. There can be disagreement about things like this, but in general, people should be able to come to an agreement about whether or not a suggested idiom meets criteria like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your question seems to have very subjective criteria: you want a quote that is emblematic or inspiring. Opinions on this are likely to vary  a lot between different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the most important objective criterion seems to be establishing the historical accuracy of a specific quote. I don't think questions about this are on-topic here, although maybe there are some that I just have never noticed. A question like &quot;was this expression used in this time period&quot; seems to me to fall within the scope of this site, but asking things like &quot;did this particular person say this particular quote&quot; doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T19:38:19.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9918" CreationDate="2016-12-28T23:07:45.917" Score="8" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is: Generally, when there is a minor disconnect between the question title and the question body, is it okay to infer intent from the body of the question, or should the literal interpretation of the question title take precedence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/365437/a-word-for-something-that-used-to-be-unique-but-is-now-so-commonplace-it-is-no-l&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; I recently answered, I was informed in a comment that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The correct course of action when presented with a poorly delineated single word request is never to guess at an answer. This is a misuse of the site. // An answer is incorrect if it doesn't answer the question as written, not as might possibly have been intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the point: The question holds useful information for future users of the site seeking answers. If the answer does not address the question as asked, the utility of both the question and answer is diminished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular discussion, the question was originally titled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Looking for a word that means something that used to be unique but is now so commonplace it is no longer noticed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some reflection, I reasoned that &quot;the question as written&quot; is aimed at the word &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; in the title. I then believe the comment asserts that a correct answer would have to provide a word that connotes &lt;em&gt;used to be unique&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I first answered the question, I did not take &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; in the literal sense. Since the body of the question post made no other mention of previous uniqueness, I reasoned the intent was that the requested word should be applicable in such a situation. I think this was the initial disconnect I had between the quoted comment and my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I have since edited the title removing the word &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;, although leaving in &quot;used to be unique&quot;. This still makes the comments objecting to the answers still relevant, while loosening the constraint in the original title.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T16:04:26.060" Title="Is it wrong to answer the intent of the question?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9920" CreationDate="2016-12-29T03:19:00.820" Score="6" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/365408/what-other-words-could-be-found-for-intelligent-design&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed twice.  The OP responded to many, many comments at about the time of the first closure and edited her question so that it is clear (at least to me) what she is asking.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator said that the comments had been moved to chat.  But they haven't been; they are all still there, cluttering up the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't the best question on the site, but the questioner is trying, and if the (now irrelevant) comments are removed someone may be interested enough to give a worthwhile answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T15:27:54.060" Title="Is there a glitch....why have comments not been removed to chat as moderator intended?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9916" CreationDate="2016-12-29T16:04:26.060" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's fine to try to infer intent. The real problem this answer ran into is that it's answering a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;guessing game question&lt;/a&gt;. The question in a nutshell is &quot;what is the word that I can't currently remember, ending in -ous and maybe meaning too commonplace to be noticed&quot;. While such questions are common (and popular), and several SE sites tend to attract them, they are off topic for several reasons discussed in the linked article. To summarize, they are generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unneeded&lt;/strong&gt;. A trivia contest, not a practical problem. An important hurdle for any question is whether the answer is &lt;em&gt;needed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfindable&lt;/strong&gt;, even if there were other people with the same question. The point of this site is to &lt;em&gt;help future visitors&lt;/em&gt;. If you forgot the same word, how would you construct the web search that would bring you to this Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfair&lt;/strong&gt; to answerers. The question inflates the reputation of the person who guesses right, not the person who wrote the best, most comprehensive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uneducational&lt;/strong&gt;. There's nothing to be learned from the answer about the process of coming up with it, because there's no process. Either you knew the answer or you didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unfairness of the question explains why your correct answer attracted some flak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T16:04:26.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9917" CreationDate="2016-12-29T19:39:57.503" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a moderator moves comments to chat, he has the option to purge the comments at the same time (other than the &quot;these were moved to chat&quot; comment).  This is a box that must be explicitly checked.  Most likely, the moderator who handled this one &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; he had checked that box but didn't, or misclicked, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can still delete those comments one at a time.  A meta post (like this one) or a flag on the post is the best way to request that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T19:39:57.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9917" CreationDate="2016-12-30T15:27:54.060" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There wasn't a glitch. The moderator (me) did not say that the comments had been moved to chat. The request was that further conversation take place in chat. When such a request is made, the comments so far are always copied to chat to provide context. The originals are then often, but not necessarily, purged. In this case they were left standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T15:27:54.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9923" CreationDate="2016-12-31T11:19:55.200" Score="11" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/365945/186126&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, or many others on EL&amp;amp;U where someone answers in comment and OP, despite have got an answer in comment,will satisfactorily forget that question will still remain open and appear in unanswered list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone who is answering isn't sure, definitely he can use comments. But when OP receives answer in comment, should he request the commentator to post that as an answer (as in the link I mentioned in); or simply he himself post the answer, so that the question gets some closure. I don't know which one is right approach but, definitely I don't think this is to be done by everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here is the question-what to do with such type of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T14:45:18.700" Title="What to do with those questions which have received answers in comments?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9921" CreationDate="2016-12-31T11:53:29.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the behaviour of site users that needs to change, but this is rather like trying to herd cats. This is my own experience as an inveterate poster of &quot;answers as comments&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stage 1&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nag them into posting real answers instead of answers as comments. If this works, job done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stage 2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they refuse to give up their evil ways, you could post their answers for them as community wikis (crediting them, of course). This is a highly effective technique (and has worked with me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stage 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they post real answers, but without any supporting evidence, nag them into providing fully documented answers with links to reference materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stage 4&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they comply with the above request, job done.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they decide to leave the site and get a life, job also done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they decide to go on strike and refuse to provide simple answers to straightforward questions...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Epilogue&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now spend a lot of my time on chat. There, I can provide single-word answers to straightforward questions. No one moans and the customers are (usually) delighted. What's not to like?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastEditorUserId="194338" LastEditDate="2016-12-31T14:55:26.763" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T14:55:26.763" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9921" CreationDate="2016-12-31T18:28:46.973" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange encourages the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11474/what-is-the-etiquette-for-modifying-posts&quot;&gt;editing of answers for improvement&lt;/a&gt;. This carries the corollary that Stack Exchange recognises that answers may be initially offered in a form that is less than ideal. However, as with some other high-traffic SE communities, the ELU community tends to penalise unsubstantiated answers. Note also that one person's fully-substantiated answer can be another's sketch-of-an-answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside - if you consider a comment to be a good answer, conveying your appreciation of their comment is often enough to prompt a proper answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the OP, answer location (comment-answer or answer-answer) is often secondary to having their question answered in a reasonable manner. For simple answers to simple questions, leaving them as comments is fine. There is always the risk, however, that comments may be removed without prior notice. To simply preserve comments, copy them into wiki-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the database, and for more substantial community involvement with answers, answer-answers are preferable. Feel free to post answers even if your answers are based on existing comments. When you do, common courtesy suggests that you provide proper attribution. It should go without saying that your answer-answer should have a sufficiently-high standard of substantiation, particularly when compared with the corresponding comment-answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T23:21:39.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9934" CreationDate="2017-01-02T09:46:51.463" Score="8" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewing Low-Quality Posts on EL&amp;amp;U I often find that someone has previously reviewed it and posted the relevant comment '&lt;em&gt;from Review&lt;/em&gt;'. When I come to recommending deletion, should I re-post the needed comment (for the sake of analytics and emphasis) or just recommend deletion without a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, I just up-vote the previous comment and recommend deletion; is this the best course of action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that, instead of creating a new comment, the system automatically up-votes the comment that is already there, like the duplicate system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="184766" LastEditDate="2017-01-05T17:41:23.813" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T04:15:29.733" Title="Should I double up on an LQP review comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|low-quality-posts|deletion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9924" CreationDate="2017-01-02T18:41:25.990" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Normally, I just up-vote the previous comment and recommend deletion; is this the best course of action? What do you do? My only worry with doing that is if it skews the analytics of which option has been chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I almost always upvote comments I agree with, and then choose &quot;no comment needed&quot; when I &quot;recommend deletion&quot;. If there isn't one already, I'd post a comment myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time I post comments using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/2116/37743&quot;&gt;&quot;SE auto comments&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Chrome extension, other times I use ELU's canned comments &quot;from review&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the analytics, I have no idea. Maybe a moderator can answer that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible that, instead of creating a new comment, the system automatically up-votes the comment that is already there, like the duplicate system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system neither adds a duplicate comment, nor upvotes the existing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:46.197" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T04:15:29.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-02T19:15:58.683" Score="11" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, as a newbie editor, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being asked to approve an edit to a post from a contributor of long standing (actually a moderator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested edit was from a contributor with low rep. The edit removed some extraneous material, some so-called noise, which had nothing to do with the actual topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rejected the edit, thinking &quot;if Mr Moderator wants to put in a little announcement, who is this fractious fellow to naysay him&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On checking the post again later, I saw the edit had been approved by another (and presumably wiser) head than mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as it turns out, the fellow was a programmer from Stack, who I suppose was following strict site guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I have followed the guidelines and approved the edit, or are we allowed to cut people some slack now and then if they would like to make an announcement? I know such should go in the comment section, but I really felt like I was in a difficult place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2017-01-03T20:02:52.820" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T17:34:25.437" Title="Feeling bashful about approving edits to a moderators's question" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9926" CreationDate="2017-01-02T20:33:02.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without seeing the post in question, it is difficult to judge.  It sounds as though you declined to approve an edit to a completely understandable post which, however, wandered slightly off the point in a human sort of way.  The edit was subsequently approved by someone who wanted to stick to the letter of the rules.  The fact that the OP is a moderator or has a very high rep should only make you wonder if maybe he knows something you do not, but it should not make you tug your forelock in deference. (Now that I've seen the question and the edits, I know I would have done as you did.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-01-03T00:36:57.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T00:36:57.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9926" CreationDate="2017-01-02T22:51:48.130" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see why you might feel uncomfortable approving such an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would also say you shouldn't reject a proposed edit that conforms to the site guidelines—at least, not in a case like this, where it's clear that the original poster is still active on this site and able to decide whether or not to accept the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the third option is best: skip this item in the review queue and let other people deal with it. (This is generally a good option whenever you feel a review task is too difficult.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T22:51:48.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T21:23:25.807" Score="14" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the community welcome a proposed change to this close reason which would broaden and clarify it, with the goal of making it more generally useful both to questioners and to people voting to close?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Rationale&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arguments arise about closing “proofreading” questions because the close reason does not clearly explain why questions are not welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions are being closed “proofreading” when the question should actually be closed for writing advice or criticism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are more types of question that could be usefully added to the close reason, because they should be closed for the same reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is plenty of room to lengthen this close reason: custom close reasons, including markdown, are limited to roughly 400 characters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Proposal&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Before:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading&lt;/strong&gt; questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;After:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;writing advice and criticism&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;naming&lt;/strong&gt; (including naming of variables), and &lt;strong&gt;schoolwork&lt;/strong&gt; questions are examples of questions that do not help anyone but the asker. They are off topic. The only exception is when there is a clearly identified source of concern about an aspect of the English language which would be interesting and useful to many future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;References&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta questions where arguments or suggestions relevant to this proposal have been posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;What the “proofreading” close reason is for&lt;/a&gt; (phenry)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental question around closing posts like these is whether answering the question will help anyone other than the person asking the question. (MrHen♦)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9556/does-the-proofreading-close-reason-cover-questions-that-do-identify-specific-w&quot;&gt;Does the “proofreading” close reason cover questions that do identify specific words or phrases?&lt;/a&gt; (suməlic)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Have I used flonk correctly?&amp;quot; is a question which will benefit only its asker. (Andrew Leach♦)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4078/inappropriate-general-reference-and-proofreading-close-votes&quot;&gt;Inappropriate “general reference” and “proofreading” close votes&lt;/a&gt; (Bradd Szonye)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question just asked which to use, which looks like writing advice to me. (FumbleFingers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4580/what-exactly-are-the-specific-concerns-that-are-acceptable-in-the-proofreading&quot;&gt;What exactly are the “specific concerns” that are acceptable in the Proofreading closure?&lt;/a&gt; (David M)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questioner is clearly more interested in getting an answer than in understanding the answer (i.e., if it smells suspiciously like a &amp;quot;do my homework for me&amp;quot; question), I usually vote to close as Proofreading. (phenry)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8047/is-it-valid-to-discuss-freeform-non-grammatical-slang-on-elu&quot;&gt;Is it valid to discuss freeform non-grammatical slang on ELU?&lt;/a&gt; (Alok)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion of proofreading is appropriate if the question were along the lines of &amp;quot;Have I used slang correctly in the following...&amp;quot;. (Chenmunka)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8215/are-low-quality-questions-and-answers-here-to-stay&quot;&gt;Are low quality questions and answers here to stay?&lt;/a&gt; (J O S H)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U isn't a proofreading service. No one but you cares or will ever care about the particular sentence you just brought up. So it makes no sense for us to clog our archives with one-off questions like this one. (Sven Yargs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T00:10:55.440" Title="Amend the “proofreading” close reason" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9929" CreationDate="2017-01-03T23:56:59.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the help text has been amended as a result of the recent question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9902/should-we-amend-the-help-text-to-expand-on-proof-reading&quot;&gt;Should we amend the help text to expand on proof-reading?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, it's quite likely that all that is required is a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help text&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also has the advantage that the help text is relatively easier to maintain and able to contain more help than the close reasons. The close reasons require two moderators to effect a change, whereas the help text can be edited by one; the help text is effectively unlimited in length whereas the close reasons do have a limit. I can't remember what the limit is, but I suspect that the suggested text will approach it, if not actually exceed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unfortunate that it's not possible to have in-page anchors within the help text, which would make a link like &lt;code&gt;/help/on-topic#proofreading&lt;/code&gt; possible, so it will be necessary instead to refer to the relevant section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest a simple rewrite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proofreading&lt;/strong&gt; or text-checking (&quot;Is this correct?&quot;) questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified. Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; for information about this sort of question, under &lt;em&gt;How can I ask about checking my text?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it's necessary to include &quot;writing advice and criticism, naming (including naming of variables), and schoolwork questions&quot; explicitly. We get &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt; fewer of those questions than &quot;Is this correct?&quot;/&quot;Which is right?&quot; questions, and the general/write-in close reason can be used. That reason also adds a link automatically to a relevant help page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;star; &lt;em&gt;If the suggested text is too long for the space allowed, then&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Is this correct?&quot;) &lt;em&gt;should be removed first, followed by&lt;/em&gt; or text-checking &lt;em&gt;if further reduction is necessary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T00:10:48.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9929" CreationDate="2017-01-04T00:10:55.440" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like the direction of your proposed close reason, but the exception leaves its application being rather subjective. Can we instead make the close reason apply to the format of the question: if it's formatted like proofreading/writing criticism, then the close reason applies. In order for a question to be open, it must be formatted instead as a grammatical/lexical/etc analysis question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here's how I'd distinguish the formats: any question asking &quot;is this correct/good/grammatical?&quot; are proofreading/criticism. A question should instead ask whether rule A applies to text B, whether rule C can account for text D, how rules E and F which seem to be contradictory can account for text E, or something else along those lines. Questions about found text rather than original text are also allowed, usually along the lines of whether the text is grammatical in some dialect or whether it is a mistake.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We probably don't need schoolwork being listed - pretty much all school work questions can be closed for lack of research already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T00:10:55.440" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9935" CreationDate="2017-01-05T05:04:48.573" Score="16" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recent, well-formulated questions may be closed as duplicates of older, more poorly formulated questions. The answers given for the latter may pose as answers for the former. However, a well-formulated question may invalidate those answers&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;including an accepted answer. Should the more recent, well-formulated question be closed as a duplicate in such circumstances? I think not; the more recent, well-formulated question is more likely to attract 'good' answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After facing a dilemma with respect to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13406/origin-of-the-word-bootleg&quot;&gt;Origin of the word “bootleg”&lt;/a&gt;, wherein the answers are patently (or should I say smugly, because they're based on uncritical adoption of general reference research) wrong, perhaps primarily because the question is so poor (no research at all), I looked at meta questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2165/is-it-appropriate-to-mark-an-earlier-poorer-question-as-a-duplicate-of-a-later&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to mark an earlier, poorer question as a duplicate of a later, better one?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4041/tests-of-duplicity&quot;&gt;Tests of duplicity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;Etiquette on duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt; for guidance, without resolving the dilemma. The closest thing I got to guidance from the existing meta posts was from the first, but the answer seemed to address dealing with &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; questions with 'duplicate' characteristics, rather than &lt;em&gt;creating&lt;/em&gt; 'duplicate' questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dilemma initially presented as this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could edit the old question to include research, but doing so would invalidate the answers, including the accepted answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatively, I could ask a new question, including research and focusing the question, but in doing so would certainly be asking a 'duplicate' question (with all the fuss and bother of &quot;yes it is&quot; and &quot;no it isn't&quot; that entails).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having taken in the meta posts, I found my dilemma was now a trilemma. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could mark the old question for closure, which it richly deserves, but...the question is now close to six years old.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T01:12:22.000" Title="Undercutting the old duplicity" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9926" CreationDate="2017-01-05T17:34:25.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said, if the edit sticks to the site's rules then it is fair enough for it to be approved. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, the message you allude to was a commemorating the OP's 999&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; question and mentions how long they've been a part of the community. When this is taken into account, the edit does seem a little cold-hearted, particularly calling the innocent message &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/366148/revisions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;non-question noise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nonetheless, I think that it is fair enough that we remove the message as this is something that is done without a thought to lower rep users and it is just hypocrisy if we let some get away with it but not others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a compromise, I would approve the edit but recommend in the comments that the OP write a comment celebrating the post and their service to this community which we can all up-vote and congratulate them on without it getting in the way of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T17:34:25.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9924" CreationDate="2017-01-05T17:57:18.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Hold the phone!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just voted in the same way as the person before me in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/216212&quot;&gt;a LQP review&lt;/a&gt; and I can confirm that, at the moment, when you double up on a vote...  nothing happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the premise of this question is sort of undermined; just go ahead and double up on a vote, nothing bad is going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T17:57:18.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9932" CreationDate="2017-01-05T18:49:41.880" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The weakness of the answers to the old &quot;Origin of the word 'bootleg'&quot; question is not reasonably attributable to the question asker's failure to show any research in the posted question. Rather it reflects the &quot;post an answer in 15 minutes or less&quot; research standard that dominated English Language &amp;amp; Usage back in 2011. (I should note that the second answer on that page, though far from comprehensive, shows genuine research and isn't merely an off-the-top-of-one's-head throwaway answer. It shows above-average effort for the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be counterproductive to close questions like that one for failing to meet current research standards for the site. Instead, I think we should treat them as legacy artifacts—and try to supplement the existing quickie answers with answers that involve actual research into available primary-material databases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, I had been putting together an answer to this bootleg question a couple of days ago. Let's just say that nineteenth-century news accounts identify a lot of things that got pulled out of bootlegs before the first illicit bottle of liquor did. There are also early slang instances of &lt;em&gt;bootleg&lt;/em&gt; as a noun referring to coffee and as a verb meaning (I think) &quot;to  try to deceive or put something over [on someone].&quot; Unfortunately, my computer crashed and blew away the answer I was constructing, so now I have to decide whether to start over. But that's neither here nor there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I recommend that site participants adopt two measures in connection with questions like &quot;Origin of the word 'bootleg'&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leave the original question open, unmolested, and exactly as it is—a simple, unresearched request for information.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Respond to that question with a well-researched answer, even if—especially if—it upends the old, superficially researched answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever a late answer corrects or otherwise outshines an earlier accepted answer, English Language &amp;amp; Usage and anyone who visits the relevant page stands to benefit. To me, it doesn't matter that a poor answer is check-marked, because the check mark is both idiosyncratic (reflecting the question poster's opinion about what is most useful) and historical (limited to the options available at the time it was assigned). Also, in my experience, it isn't terribly unusual for the person who posted a question long ago to switch acceptance to the new answer if it clearly brings useful new information to the table. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the strongest reason not to write up and then answer a new, more nuanced question about (in this case) the origin of &lt;em&gt;bootleg&lt;/em&gt; is that an indeterminate number of site visitors are likely to encounter the old question (which will still not have a good answer attached to it) instead of the new one. Almost 14,000 people have opened the &quot;Origin of the word 'bootleg'&quot; page already. I hope that future site visitors will find a more comprehensive answer there when they do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T18:49:41.880" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2017-01-05T21:53:30.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's some more deserving frivolity...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Who wore it best?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/opJwF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/opJwF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/au845.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/au845.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d2ICl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d2ICl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gNZL8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gNZL8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.1 Andrew Leach♦ No.2 David Richerby No.3 RedGrittyBrick and No.4 tchrist♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T21:53:30.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2017-01-05T21:56:55.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Who wore it best? #2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VM6a.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VM6a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WnVc9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WnVc9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Q3qp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Q3qp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8uvgc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8uvgc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.1 Hank;  No.2 Balpha; No.3 MetaEd♦; No. 4 Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T18:37:45.933" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T18:37:45.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9932" CreationDate="2017-01-06T01:12:22.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an option and feature request, it might help if we could actually tag a comment as &quot;related&quot;, and have those pinned to the top of the comment section. Having a weaker option as part of the system might reduce the rate of weak closures. Seeing all the related links at the top of the comments section might speed up new members' efforts to perform due diligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second issue with weak duplicate closures is it seems to be just a bit too easy to pile on after an earlier vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will doubtless be a splitter vs lumper debate over this question, so I'll note that I am a splitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that we allow a question to be re-asked specifically in order to supersede existing questions. I did that recently here -   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/366141/would-like-for-you-to-would-want-for-you-to-would-need-for-you-to-would-wish&quot;&gt;Would like for you to, Would want for you to, Would need for you to, Would wish for you to&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I purposely bent the question a bit to try to avoid having it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T01:12:22.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2017-01-06T11:29:13.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be completely boring and actually (part) answer your question: The 2015 Meta frivolity was caused by people trying to gain hats which required specific actions on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there were no meta-based hats this year (that I can think of), people didn't flock to Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for rectifying that with this question. :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T11:29:13.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2017-01-06T18:31:08.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who wore it best? #3 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s4WiL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s4WiL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/89iDU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/89iDU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rt4Wi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rt4Wi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GjrRY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GjrRY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.1 Mick; No.2 bleh; No. 3 Andy F; No.4 WS2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T02:28:45.623" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T02:28:45.623" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-01-08T02:28:45.623" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9900" CreationDate="2017-01-08T02:27:32.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who wore it best? #4 &#xA;(last day of Winter Bash 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7k3Oe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7k3Oe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m08Nj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m08Nj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFXKS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFXKS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VRreI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VRreI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.1 Andrew; No.2 StoneyB; No.3 snailplane ♦ (ELL) No.4 Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T02:27:32.370" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-01-08T02:27:32.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-08T18:26:17.590" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several tags that are associated with the background of a word:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/etymology/info&quot;&gt;[etymology]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/origin-unknown/info&quot;&gt;[origin-unknown]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/phrase-origin/info&quot;&gt;[phrase-origin]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/history/info&quot;&gt;[history]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/historical-change/info&quot;&gt;[historical-change]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-change&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;historical-change&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;historical-change&lt;/a&gt;, both the definition page and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-change&quot;&gt;tagged questions&lt;/a&gt; don't indicate to me that it merits distinction from either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; nor &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;.  I therefore recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-change&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;historical-change&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;historical-change&lt;/a&gt; be merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;, since it is the closer of the two.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone see a use for keeping them separate?  If so, clarification of the distinction(s) between them should be added to their respective info pages (linked above in bullets).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214201" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:24:01.077" Title="Merge [history] and [historical-change] tags" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2017-01-09T13:33:45.413" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm back. The cancer was fully resected with no follow-on care necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T13:33:45.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-09T19:10:21.560" Score="8" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a program/website that allows me to input text to describe an idea and find the word for it? I use The Sage and Lingoes but they're not ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, a little while ago I asked Google for a 'word for repeating received ideas' and settled on 'stereotypical'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214341" OwnerDisplayName="David Brear" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T04:32:16.330" Title="Free-form dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9944" CreationDate="2017-01-10T11:53:24.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best bet is probably the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/WordsAndLinguistics.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Words and Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; section of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolfram Alpha&lt;/a&gt; search engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a number of ways of entering searches and can return words matching requirements.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I find this to be an excellent resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T11:53:24.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9947" CreationDate="2017-01-11T11:14:40.920" Score="7" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is the question in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/367634/214511&quot;&gt;Defining the word Enterpriser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this yesterday, and gave the information for the question that seemed relevant to me.  However the comments seem to be that I should provide links and information for things only peripherally linked to the question in question.  (specifically links to how &quot;Entrepreneur&quot; has negative social/cultural connotation in my area)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read through the guide on asking question relevant to this forum, and as far as I can understand my question falls within the guidelines.  However since it's been closed I'm left wondering how to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couple people clarify or expound on the guide or rules to help me better understand what is wrong with my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it just 'back lash' because I suggested that 'entrepreneur' has negative connotations in my social/cultural environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T12:31:45.533" Title="Asked Question, Got closed. Seems to meet with Guidelines, how to re-ask" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9946" CreationDate="2017-01-11T17:58:36.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been edited by OP (thank you), re-opened by the community, upvoted, and has already attracted an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T17:58:36.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-11T21:38:53.040" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/367810/which-is-the-correct-form&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; today and was going to flag it, but I wasn't sure what flag category to use. It is fairly basic, so it likely belongs on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the comments, a user mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/73264/turn-down-the-volume-or-turn-the-volume-down-phrasal-verb-structure/73276#73276&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; on ELL of which this question is a duplicate. There are also no direct duplicates on ELU that I can find immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would be the best practice in a case like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To simply flag the question to be migrated to ELL, and allow them&#xA;to sort out whether the question is a duplicate once migrated?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To add a flagging option that allows users to mark a question as&#xA;a duplicate of an ELL question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another course of action entirely?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my first post on Meta, so please let me know if this is not within the scope. I just thought it might be a good topic to bring up. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182960" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T02:45:15.260" Title="Flagging a Question as a Duplicate of an ELL Question" Tags="|discussion|flagging|duplicates|ell|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9644" CreationDate="2017-01-12T00:05:30.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project is drawing to a close, and I am planning to take down the annotation interface this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much to everyone who helped out, and thank you for all the valuable feedback and suggestions. Hopefully the collected annotations will lead to the development of better duplicate question detection systems, especially for StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168184" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T00:05:30.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9946" CreationDate="2017-01-12T12:31:45.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm extremely tempted to vote-to-close again, for &quot;Show your research&quot;. The question as it currently reads says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looked for enterpriser without success, online dictionaries don't have a listing for it (And I don't own a physical dictionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can say is that you can't be very skilled at internet research. I typed &quot;enterpriser&quot; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/#q=enterpriser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google&lt;/a&gt;, and the first four results are dictionary definitions of the word!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T12:31:45.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9949" CreationDate="2017-01-12T17:13:36.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer - I'm answering this from the ELL perspective, so this answer says nothing about how the ELU community would like to handle these sorts of situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're aware that there is a question on ELL that might answer the question on ELU, I would suggest that you link it in a comment as was done for the example here. There are lots of questions on ELL that have links to relevant ELU questions even though it's rare that we migrate a question. I view this as similar to being able to find an answer elsewhere on the Internet. Just because there is something that you could read somewhere else that answers the question doesn't mean that there is no potential value in an answer from this site's community of experts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that having both questions on ELL would be good because they're asking the same thing in different ways, go ahead and migrate it after you leave a link. I think the example here is a good candidate because it asks about &quot;turn off&quot; instead of &quot;turn down&quot;. Even though the &quot;turn off&quot; question is answered in the &quot;turn down&quot; question, having the &quot;turn off&quot; question makes the answers easier to discover. If you don't think there's much value in that exact question being migrated over the ELL in light of the potential duplicate you've found, then the link and maybe a nudge to check out ELL is enough in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just suspect there is a duplicate, but don't know for certain, go ahead and migrate it and we will sort it out. I think it goes without saying, don't migrate complete junk. If a question is off-topic here because it's proof-reading, or unclear, or too broad, it will be off-topic on ELL as well. If it's off-topic because the author is obviously looking for an ELL-style answer and not an ELU-style answer, or isn't fluent enough in English to meet the research standards on ELU (but has written to the best of their ability and asked an answerable question), send it on over. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T19:21:37.267" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T19:21:37.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9955" CreationDate="2017-01-13T16:51:30.403" Score="14" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled across the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26765/what-is-the-meaning-of-many-a-mickle-makes-a-muckle&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of “Many a mickle maks a muckle”?&lt;/a&gt; which is a question about a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scots language&lt;/a&gt; proverb. The thought occurred to me that although the Scots language is closely related to and somewhat intelligible with English, it is a distinct entity and as such should questions on the Scots language be answered here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19081" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T20:46:14.420" Title="Should Scots language questions be considered in the English language community?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9954" CreationDate="2017-01-13T17:39:29.757" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the status of the Scots language with respect to English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing&#xA;  languages from dialects, &lt;strong&gt;scholars and other interested parties often&#xA;  disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots&#xA;  and particularly its relationship to English&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that even among experts, there is no consensus, and some linguists consider Scots a dialect of English, my vote is to continue treating Scots as on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there evolves a more acute pain to be addressed, like being inundated with poor-quality or under-researched question on Scots, or a better place to address these questions is launched on SE, we can always reconsider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, these questions aren't causing us any trouble, and there's no better home for them, so we might as well keep them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T18:16:05.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T18:16:05.233" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9944" CreationDate="2017-01-15T04:32:16.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OneLook&lt;/a&gt; lets you perform &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverse lookups&lt;/a&gt;. This means that you can type words that you expect to be part of the definition of a term, and terms whose definition contains those words will be listed in order of match quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be used in a way that's pretty close in practice to just typing a description of the word you're seeking, and the site actually encourages using it that way (&quot;this tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you must not expect any actual understanding of &quot;concept&quot;: no &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural language processing&lt;/a&gt; is involved, which could narrow down the results considerably but also fail to yield anything meaningful in a majority of cases, and would also be much more difficult to implement. This is ultimately just an unusual but simple type of dictionary search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186875" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T04:32:16.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9979" CreationDate="2017-01-15T05:42:36.007" Score="12" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently flesh out answers from new users; adding relevant dictionary definitions, links and usage examples. Almost every time I do that, the answer immediately gets a -1 score. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some new users might think that it's a downvote from me, because they can see &quot;edited by NVZ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand only that it's the system punishing the VLQ answer, but I don't understand why it's done after it's improved? How can I prevent this? I feel discouraged from improving answers somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:12:37.857" Title="How to prevent automatic downvotes on an answer after editing it?" Tags="|discussion|editing|answers|low-quality-posts|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-15T18:07:13.383" Score="5" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user recently answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141837/had-they-have&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; querying the syntax of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Had they have&lt;/strong&gt; gone to the same place, they would have talked to one another&lt;/em&gt; with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;what about the usage of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Have they had&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;sic&lt;/strong&gt; - that's the exact text)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly that's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an answer, and I can't see much hope of it being successfully edited to meaningfully address the question. Anyway, it turned up in the review queue as &lt;em&gt;first answer posted by a new user&lt;/em&gt;, where I realised I don't actually know what my preferred course of action should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event, I chose to flag it for moderator attention, citing &quot;Not an Answer&quot; (note that the clarification text for that option gives &lt;em&gt;It should possibly be an edit, a comment, &lt;strong&gt;or another question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as potential reasons for flagging).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I wouldn't be interested in seeing it posted as a separate question anyway (though the question: &lt;em&gt;Do mods &lt;strong&gt;ever&lt;/strong&gt; convert such posts into questions?&lt;/em&gt; comes to mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my understanding is that as a general principle, high-rep users are supposed to use their enhanced voting powers &lt;em&gt;to save mods from having to intervene&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - did I do the right thing? Or should I have simply downvoted - in the expectation that others would do likewise, so that soon the system would automatically have offered us the option of deleting the post without bothering the mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T09:27:25.393" Title="Should mod-flagging be a &quot;last resort&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9958" CreationDate="2017-01-15T19:15:59.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flagging is an option in the 'First Post' queue, and the usual reasons are available, including Not An Answer. Since this post could have been written to illustrate what the help page means when it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;commentary on the question or other answers asking another, different question&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it seems likely that four other NAA flags will close the post, and in due course, if not edited into propriety, it will be deleted; all without bothering a mod unless one happens to look at the review queue or this question in the meantime (obviously very unlikely (?)).  If you wish to flag for mod attention you could do so, but I see no need, this is unfortunately far from the worst they will have seen recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T19:15:59.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9965" CreationDate="2017-01-15T23:45:11.397" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need help coming up with a tricky simile.  I tried asking on Writers SE but it got closed.  I was advised to ask on Writers Chat, but there has been no response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a workable way of setting &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/26051/13494&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; up on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:24.260" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T18:02:56.013" Title="Is there an acceptable way of asking this question on ELU?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9958" CreationDate="2017-01-16T09:01:06.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;High rep users, with +20K, have the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;moderator privilege&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Voting to delete answers with score of -1 or lower&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a low quality answer has been downvoted, the delete button appears underneath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ktck2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ktck2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the button, and you'll see your vote has been recorded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHcX9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHcX9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For high rep users, the flag option,  &quot;Not an Answer&quot;  isn't necessary if you believe that it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T09:06:24.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9958" CreationDate="2017-01-16T09:14:16.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what my preferred course of action should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leave a comment along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language &amp;amp; Usage. Note that we follow a strict question-and-answer format and questions posted as answers will be deleted. Note that before asking this as a separate question, you have to add more information as to what your concern is and what you already understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will tell the poster how to best proceed and reviewers what you think is wrong with the post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag the post as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt; (NAA). This will place the post in the low-quality queue and where users above 2 k reputation can decide upon its deletion. If six users recommend to delete the post from this queue, it will happen. In my experience, this is the most effective way for a post to be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that flagging as &lt;em&gt;very low quality&lt;/em&gt; (VLQ) will have almost the same consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post flagged NAA or VLQ was in this queue for some time (fifteen minutes, IIRC), it will also appear in the moderators’ flag queue. This rather short time span was made for Stack Overflow, and most moderators are aware of this and will leave the flags to be handled by the low-quality queue. Anyway, it’s not your fault that moderator time is wasted with this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answer has a non-negative score¹, downvote it to facilitate the following:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have 20 k reputation, and the post has a negative score, also cast a delete vote. &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com/q/273410/255554&quot;&gt;If you ask me, this should happen automatically when you cast a NAA or VLQ flag and vice versa&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn’t. If three 20 k users cast a delete vote, the post will be deleted. However, this rarely happens without the low-quality queue (from which delete votes can also be cast).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or should I have simply downvoted - in the expectation that others would do likewise, so that soon the system would automatically have offered us the option of deleting the post without bothering the mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. While downvoting enables 20 k users to cast delete votes (see above), it does not bring the post to the attention of anyone who could do so². Flagging as NAA/VLQ does exactly this: It places the post in the low-quality queue, where even 2 k users can cause it to be deleted. (Sidenote: Most such posts are automatically placed in the low-quality queue by heuristics, but I would not bet on this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;¹ and untraceable +1 notifications in the reputation tracker caused by the post being deleted do not bother you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;² well, there is &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=delete&amp;amp;daterange=last30days&quot;&gt;a list of recent delete votes in the 10 k tools&lt;/a&gt;, but from my experience it is rarely used&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastEditorUserId="42471" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T09:27:25.393" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T09:27:25.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9964" CreationDate="2017-01-16T13:13:02.323" Score="6" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I was looking for the meaning of 'Roger' in radio conversation then I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44220/whats-the-meaning-of-the-word-roger-over-and-out&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. What's strange is that it is marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31929/what-does-roger-mean-in-war-movies&quot;&gt;What does “Roger” mean in war movies?&lt;/a&gt;, but this question has been removed! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This subject has already been discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/283203/duplicate-question-removed&quot;&gt;StackOverflow's Meta&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure what should be done to the &lt;em&gt;duplicate question&lt;/em&gt; (of no other, currently). Should it be also removed? Should it cease to be a duplicate (is that even possible)? Leave everything is it is now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139185" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T13:52:00.880" Title="Question is marked as 'Duplicate', but the original has been removed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9963" CreationDate="2017-01-16T13:52:00.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time it was marked as a duplicate, it was a duplicate. The system &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239597/184638&quot;&gt;has been amended&lt;/a&gt; to inhibit the deletion of such questions (that is, target questions can no longer be deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to remove the duplicate label is to re-open the question; but since it already has relevant and correct answers, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; it would simply be closed again as general reference, there's no point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the &quot;removed&quot; question is still there, although it's not shown to those without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;Access to moderator tools privilege&lt;/a&gt; (that's 10,000 rep), so that label does serve some useful purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may an argument for deleting the question that's still there, although its presence did presumably stop you asking a similar one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.983" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T13:52:00.880" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9960" CreationDate="2017-01-16T18:02:56.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking users to come up with an original simile, would only invite close votes for being POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to overcome EL&amp;amp;U's straitjacket would be to focus on the expression &lt;em&gt;passing grades&lt;/em&gt; used in the official document, which makes a &quot;true&quot; point, but fails to tell the whole picture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could ask for the name of a rhetorical device which presents a fact as being representative of the truth, when it clearly omits key details. You could also ask if there is a common idiom which describes this form of bias or slant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could create your own simile/metaphor and ask if a known one already exists— this could however lead you onto a slippery slope, and users might argue that the question is POB, or too broad. On the other hand, if the question ignites interest and good suggestions, it's rare a popular question gets closed on its first day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T18:02:56.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-17T00:41:43.467" Score="5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/367715/when-do-i-use-each-word-notes-notices-updates-status-releases-announcement&quot;&gt;When do I use each word? Notes, notices, updates, status, releases, announcements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question, and it got marked on-hold, and then closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to edit it to make it more specific, but nothing changed. I don't know how to understand what's going on and what I did wrong, nor what I could do better next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone please help me and point me how to improve this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214594" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T00:48:00.347" Title="Could anyone please provide me a feedback on my effort to improve my question?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9968" CreationDate="2017-01-17T19:20:47.473" Score="10" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site has so many poor questions on front page that it's becoming tiresome. Is there a way to filter the question only from users above a certain amount of rep? (say 1500.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking to stop new users from asking questions, but to have, sometimes, the possibility to isolate the interesting content from the &quot;noise&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As it stands, I'm spending more time requesting to close questions than answering or reading nice posts and therefore I'm coming less an less to this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the technical side, it could be a tag that's only available to some users or a multi-criteria filter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it doesn't exist, do you think it would a nice feature or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42481" LastEditorUserId="42481" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T20:10:34.290" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T15:50:58.723" Title="Any way of filtering questions by user rep? If not, why not?" Tags="|feature-request|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9967" CreationDate="2017-01-17T20:46:17.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to create a data.SE query to get this for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/616934/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Questions by users with high rep&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I arbitrarily chose the most recent 20, and rep &gt;= 20,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T15:50:58.723" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T15:50:58.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-17T23:57:56.780" Score="8" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a nautical vocabulary question ELU, and then realized that people with practical experience about boating might be able to answer it better over on Great Outdoors.  I got &lt;a href=&quot;https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/14933/8000&quot;&gt;the answer I needed&lt;/a&gt; there (in a comment to the answer, actually).  I think this means I should delete the question here.  Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be okay with leaving both, and posting links at each to the other, but I'm afraid I may get in trouble at some point, so I'm asking now, before I get in trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The other question got closed, by the way.  But the responses I got there were more useful than the ones I've gotten here, so my preference would to keep the one there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:01.363" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T00:46:40.737" Title="Should I delete my question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9971" CreationDate="2017-01-18T00:26:07.653" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should I delete my question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/368493/112436&quot;&gt;Description for a verbal tic that is vernacular among young people in the U.S&lt;/a&gt;?  Should I post a new one?  Should I rewrite the original one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an important mistake in posing the question.  I described the mistake in an edit to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T09:48:22.340" Title="Should I delete a question if I made a crucial error in it?" Tags="|support|questions|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9970" CreationDate="2017-01-18T09:48:22.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot delete that question. You can only delete a question while it is unanswered, or it has only one answer which has not been upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where you can delete the question,&lt;/strong&gt; it is reasonable at least to consider doing so. The system allows it. If it has an answer, you should bear in mind the effort taken in providing it. You may not feel any pang of conscience over a one-line answer; but you should seriously consider whether an answer with quite a lot of research behind it should simply be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should avoid editing a question which has already been answered, if your edit would invalidate the answers, or require them to be edited too. People have answered the question you asked, in good faith. If your edit does not invalidate the answers, it's reasonable to make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that questions should stand on their own as a coherent whole. You should not mark edits with the word &quot;Edit&quot; &amp;mdash; the edit history is available to see previous versions. It shouldn't be necessary for readers to do their own mental editing (&quot;Oh, I know the answer to that! Ah, the question's changed; now, which bit does that affect?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it's not possible to change the question without invalidating answers, by all means ask a new question. Reference the original, and make it clear that the new question is different (so it doesn't get closed as a duplicate). I would recommend a structure such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my question [link], I asked X and answers explained Y and Z. However what I should have asked was A. Answers Y and Z don't answer that because B. What is the answer to A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T09:48:22.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9954" CreationDate="2017-01-18T10:26:13.210" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically it might be an ethnolect, but it is just a word that was coined to avoid too heated political discussions. While ultimately I believe the decision is for people using it to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A 2010 Scottish Government study of &quot;public attitudes towards the Scots language&quot; found that 64% of respondents (around 1,000 individuals being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) &quot;don't really think of Scots as a language&quot;, but it also found that &quot;the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, aside of the fact that this kind of studies should be treated rather advisory, it unveils the most important aspect of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, as a non-native English speaker, have been taught standard British English. That education allowed me to interact with people from variety of countries and consume media created in even bigger number of places. Plethora of American accents and dialects came quite naturally to me, as did South African and Australian. Back then, however, there's no hope I would be able to understand Scots, neither spoken nor written. And on that note: the aforementioned study shows that 72% of Scottish non-Scots speakers think of it as a language, and that is most likely because they cannot understand it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally there is the aspect of cultural identity. From my own backyard the Kashubian and Silesian languages are also topics of heated discussion - members of those communities believe those are languages, and yet that status is not granted them, despite there being only very limited mutual intelligibility, and the reasons are strictly political, verging on unhealthy understanding of &quot;national unity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only fair assumption is to treat Scots as a separate language, at least until there is a referendum that would Scottish people determine democratically their stance. I guess we might actually see it happen, should Scotland become independent and be given a chance to legally sort out variety of topics concerning its own identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer the question: Scots language questions should be either separated from English language community, or the name of the community should change to be inclusive of related-but-separate languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="215695" LastEditorUserId="215695" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T14:02:20.767" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T14:02:20.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T15:55:58.457" Score="16" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/368686/infamous-for-an-event/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about why the first Selma-Montgomery march is called &quot;infamous&quot; was put on hold a day or two ago for lack of research. The asker has now quoted the dictionary definition that was consulted, including a link (dictionary.com).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that this is a case where consulting the dictionary definition helps—in fact, rather the opposite. While it's true that the word &lt;em&gt;infamous&lt;/em&gt; is regularly used for events and locations that are not, in themselves, evil, most dictionary definitions strongly suggest or even flat-out state that the word is used for people or events that are &quot;bad&quot; either inherently or in action. Examples tend in this direction, as well. For example, the definition that pops up from a Google search is (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;well known for some &lt;strong&gt;bad quality or deed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;an infamous war criminal&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  synonyms: notorious, disreputable; More   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wicked; abominable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &quot;the medical council disqualified him for infamous misconduct&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A third, technical legal definition is even more confusing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this emphasis in dictionaries on badness of the thing described as &lt;em&gt;infamous&lt;/em&gt;, it seems reasonable to me that someone would be confused about whether it is appropriate to call an event that was attacked, rather than the attackers, &lt;em&gt;infamous&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The questioner said early on that they were confused about the definition, and has since added the requested definition, and has stated what is confusing about that definition vis-à-vis the specific usage. I think this meets all of our requirements for an on-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T15:42:37.480" Title="I think the question about *infamous* being used for neutral or positive events deserves a second look" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9954" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:02:26.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Weighing in late here, but this appears to be Scots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Lord’s my herd, I’ll want for nocht,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   He gars me tae lie doon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In girsie howes, an syne I’m brocht&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Faar wimplin burnies croon.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An fan for ither joys I craik,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   An wanner faur frae God,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He airts me, for His ain Name’s sake,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Intil his ain richt road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ay, an I gang throwe yon dark glen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Faar waesome shadows faa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He’ll keep near-haun me, and I ken&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   I’ll hae nae fear ava.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tho mony faes aroon me staun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   His kindness nivver fails;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He spreads my table, an his haun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Fills my cup till it skails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Een sae, gweed guidin an gweed-gree&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Gang wi me ilka day:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in God’s Hoose faur up on hie&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   I fain wad bide for aye. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fairly obviously related to English: &quot;I'll want for nocht&quot; is &quot;I'll need/lack nothing/nought&quot;; and &lt;em&gt;gang throwe yon dark glen&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;go through that dark valley&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it English? No. [Of course, it may not actually be Scots either, in which case I'm predicating this answer on the wrong example! If that's so, I'll delete it.] Is it intelligible? Actually, probably not: I know this is Psalm 23, and can work that from the first line, but something like &quot;Een sae, gweed guidin an gweed-gree&quot; in isolation is unintelligible to the point of its being difficult to work out what language it might actually be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could a question based on this language be on-topic on ELU? Perhaps, but it's doubtful. Someone asking about the rest of verse 3 is not asking about English. It may be conceivable that a question might be asked about the relationship between &lt;em&gt;gang&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;go,&lt;/em&gt; but would a question about the relationship between the German word &lt;em&gt;gang&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ging&lt;/em&gt; and the English verb be on topic? I think that's unlikely. And what about a word like &lt;em&gt;skails&lt;/em&gt; (overflows)? I'm not sure that has any cognate in English: is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/skail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;scatter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; related? Again, unlikely. Such questions would need to be very carefully worded to be about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would lean towards Scots being generally off-topic and only exceptionally on-topic. That exception is when the Scots word is very close to its English equivalent, or a Scots expression (like &quot;Many a mickle...&quot;) is common in English. And if that's the case, then a dictionary is likely to go a long way to answer a query &amp;mdash; so the question is probably still off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T17:02:26.293" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9976" CreationDate="2017-01-19T10:06:09.383" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/218364&quot;&gt;review an edit suggestion&lt;/a&gt; for the [multiple-choice] tag wiki excerpt. I chose to &quot;reject&quot;, adding custom comment &quot;unnecessary tag&quot;. Coincidentally, another senior user had also done the same, minutes before me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I just went ahead and removed the tag from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-choice&quot;&gt;only 8 questions it had&lt;/a&gt;. Which I hope didn't mess up the &quot;active&quot; feed for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the 8 questions had some sort of learner vibe to it, asking to select a word from a list. But we already have a better tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; for it. The one remaining question is locked by community, as it's the ghost of a migrated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, shall we delete the tag? If not, why should we keep it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T10:33:23.643" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:23:57.890" Title="Remove the [multiple-choice] tag, shall we?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9975" CreationDate="2017-01-19T18:23:57.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone, presumably a mod, removed the tag from the migration stub. Thus, the roomba will take care of the tag. So the issue is solved. It's always better to consolidate on an existing tag than allow the creation of new tags. That's one of the reasons why the 10k tools offer a section about newly created tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The taxonomy got a bit better. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:23:57.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9954" CreationDate="2017-01-21T20:46:14.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t see any value in having a general policy either way on this. I would definitely be against a blanket policy against questions about Scots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9955/77227&quot;&gt;Dan Bron&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there evolves a more acute pain to be addressed, like being inundated with poor-quality or under-researched question on Scots, or a better place to address these questions is launched on SE, we can always reconsider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, these questions aren't causing us any trouble, and there's no better home for them, so we might as well keep them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many questions on Scots, or even just on Scottish English, do we get here? Very few—few enough I think that each can be evaluated on its own merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific example you cite, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26765/what-is-the-meaning-of-many-a-mickle-makes-a-muckle&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;Many a mickle makes a muckle&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, is I think certainly on-topic. It is about a proverb that is clearly used in English-language contexts, not just by Scots speakers. Four of the six words in the proverb as the OP gives it are clearly English words (despite your alteration of “makes” to “maks” in the title of this question, that's not how the OP spelled the expression, and it’s just your opinion that “the original question spelled the phrase wrongly”). The other two words are attested in dialectal English and have entries in English dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site covers many language varieties aside from standard English; e.g. questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shakespeare&quot;&gt;Shakespearian&lt;/a&gt; English and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/old-english&quot;&gt;Old English&lt;/a&gt; are on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T20:46:14.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9966" CreationDate="2017-01-23T00:48:00.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since relevance is not an issue in the case of your question (it's about the English language and its usage), what remains is to &lt;strong&gt;express the essence of your question in such a way that can be answered definitively within a few paragraphs&lt;/strong&gt;. In the process, you'll need to do some research of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few things to try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look up the definitions in dictionaries, wikipedia, etc. Here are some links to resources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/142322&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Piece together as much as you can from step 1 about the similarities and differences among the words you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Select &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; pair of words that you find most puzzling, and identify what's missing in your understanding about that pair.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask a question about that specific pair of words, linking to definitions and examples etc from step 1 that are relevant to illustrating your point of confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question should include enough information that answers won't need to repeat what you already know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T00:48:00.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9957" CreationDate="2017-01-24T07:12:37.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Andrew Leach ♦ for the link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/266436/309993&quot;&gt;Shog9 ♦'s answer&lt;/a&gt; on MSE, part of which is applicable here also. Emphasis added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The system will now revoke the automatic downvote if, after the [VLQ] flag is marked Helpful, the post later gets an upvote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, the automatic downvote essentially exists because folks use this [VLQ] flag in cases where they should be downvoting. As such, it serves an important role... But should still be considered weak compared to actually downvoting the post in cases where there is conflicting information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A situation where the post isn't actually deleted (either because the post was edited or because it was simply undeleted) and goes on to attract positive feedback is clearly a situation where the flag itself is weak signal, and it no longer makes sense for the system to impose an automatic downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:12:37.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:47:26.847" Score="7" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to post on english.SE to get suggestions for a word (I've pasted my real question at the bottom of this post), but the question is related to writing a story. So I went to writers.SE, but their rules advise against asking for word suggestions. Would a question like the one below work on english.SE, or does such a question just not fit in the SE world? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I'd like to post (&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I've changed the question below from its original; perhaps it is closer to a good SE-style question?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;---------&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have this sentence: &lt;strong&gt;After catching his breath, he commands them, &quot;Don't worry guys, problem solved.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he's not commanding them. I can't think of a word. He's not exactly imploring. &quot;Says to them&quot; is too generic, and &quot;reassures them&quot; is too specific about his intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49084" LastEditorUserId="49084" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T16:04:01.813" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T17:03:51.513" Title="Looking for word suggestion, related to writing a story, but doesn't work on writers.SE" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9980" CreationDate="2017-01-24T17:03:51.513" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; of question which is on-topic on ELU, &amp;quot;What's a word or phrase for...?&amp;quot; and we even have a tag for it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, along with its counterpart &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's very important to follow the tag advice when asking the question.&lt;/strong&gt; Many people doubt that these questions are a good fit, in that they are simply a look-up service. It's also easy to be lax in your specification of what you really need, which results in a large number of answers; many of those answers will be a waste of effort because they don't answer what you actually wanted (but failed to ask for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community has become more strict on requiring&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the [ -request] tag be used, or added where the question author hasn't already;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the tag guidelines be followed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particular requirement which is often missed is a sample sentence, or the particular nuance of meaning required. This is actually missing in your suggested question; you've said what is not required — which is good information and should certainly be stated — but you haven't actually described what your word is attempting to relay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about the details of what you actually want your word to say can often lead you to use just the right word in the question. That's fine: if you realise you have it, we've actually helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because tag guidelines are amended periodically, there's not much point in quoting them here, especially when they are easily available from a link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;Word requests&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/phrase-requests/info&quot;&gt;Phrase requests&lt;/a&gt; — phrase requests are very similar to word requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the &lt;strong&gt;checklist&lt;/strong&gt; at the bottom of each guide is very important. Help the community to help you by being as specific as possible in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your specific example, when you are considering what the man is doing, you might plaintively write, &amp;quot;...he's simply telling them something.&amp;quot; And that gives you your word, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tells&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. If it doesn't work for you, add that to the &amp;quot;not suited&amp;quot; list and say why it doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T17:03:51.513" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9973" CreationDate="2017-01-25T15:42:37.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought it was a great question, and had already voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, with your rep, you are also allowed to vote to reopen. You're not listed as one of the people who reopened it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it has attracted a further two votes-to-close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T15:42:37.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T20:15:24.500" Score="9" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;While doing some reviews, I was made aware of the existence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subjective&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subjective&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subjective&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Given that we are a Q&amp;amp;A site which focuses explicitly on answering questions as objectively as possible and discourages subjectivity, this seems like a tag that should go the way of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opinion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;opinion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;opinion&lt;/a&gt; tag that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7885/burninate-opinion-please&quot;&gt;recently removed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;don't-ask page&lt;/a&gt; does allow that some subjective questions are permissible, but I don't see how tagging a question as subjective actually helps except to mark it for probable death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, of the mere 10 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subjective&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subjective&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subjective&lt;/a&gt;, at least 3 should probably be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nominative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nominative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nominative&lt;/a&gt; instead (except we don't have a tag for that at the moment...); the questions that are really asking for a subjective opinion are at least 2 1/2 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;question list:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/370376/what-would-i-call-an-instance-that-handles-animations-animator-or-animater&quot;&gt;What would I call an instance that handles animations; Animator or Animater?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/328413/him-vs-his-in-an-subjective-phrase&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Him&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;His&amp;quot; in a gerund subject phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/327887/preposition-genitive-vs-non-genitive-subjects-gerund&quot;&gt;preposition + genitive vs non-genitive subjects&amp;#160;+ gerund&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/102028/what-is-the-difference-between-he-seemed-to-be-angry-and-he-seemed-angry&quot;&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;He seemed to be angry.&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;He seemed angry.&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5580/how-common-is-thrice&quot;&gt;How common is &amp;quot;thrice&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/154368/does-hopelessly-lost-sound-awkward&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;hopelessly lost&amp;quot; sound awkward?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85603/word-for-held-up-well-over-time&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;held up well over time&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32363/what-are-comparative-strong-points-of-online-dictionaries-and-other-useful-refer&quot;&gt;What are comparative strong points of online dictionaries and other useful reference sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/976/what-are-some-good-books-on-articulation&quot;&gt;What are some good books on articulation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2161/what-is-the-most-eloquent-way-to-transition-into-pointing-out-a-major-flaw-in-so&quot;&gt;What is the most eloquent way to transition into pointing out a major flaw in someone&amp;#39;s thinking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T20:25:50.550" Title="Should we burninate the [subjective] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2572" CreationDate="2017-01-27T00:57:57.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3811/add-ell-to-list-of-sites-for-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;Normally migration paths are not set up until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the target site is out of Beta.&lt;/a&gt; I think the idea is to avoid swamping smaller sites and to give them space to determine their scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think Linguistics SE will graduate anytime soon, though, so it's a bit of an odd situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T00:09:48.467" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9985" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:44:23.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm answering because, from my experience on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opinion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;opinion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;opinion&lt;/a&gt; question, no one feels they have the authority to do more than vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So go ahead and remove all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subjective&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subjective&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subjective&lt;/a&gt; tags from those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, I not believe it's in our power to blacklist the re-creation of the tag. We'd need a StackExchange employee to do that (not even an CM; I believe a developer has to do it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T20:25:50.550" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T20:25:50.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9989" CreationDate="2017-01-27T19:28:34.207" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/370197/107408&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; got put on hold for &quot;asking others to name a variable&quot;, which it does not. You could argue that the question at first was borderline rule-breaking, but the thing is that I edited the whole question, so it now no longer even mentions programming and just asks for a hypernym and two hours LATER it got put on hold for the aforementioned reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in the comments (which have been moved to chat by the moderator &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/52473/discussion-on-question-by-kim366-is-there-a-word-that-includes-encompasses-both&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) three people mention that it is fine after a short debate of it breaking the rule before my large edit, after which the general consensis was that the question is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the moderator right in this case? Did they not even read the question and just put it on hold because there were mentions of rule-breaking in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107408" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T20:20:48.740" Title="My question got put on hold unfoundedly while three people agree that it is fine" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2017-01-27T20:20:48.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm usually one of the more close-happy users on this site, but I think your question is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may have been originally inspired by your programming needs, but the way it's framed, it's not constrained to that context and any answers will be generally applicable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually think it sets a good example of the &lt;em&gt;right way&lt;/em&gt; to ask &quot;how do I name this thing&quot; on EL&amp;amp;U: by framing it as an English question which will be helpful to anyone who takes an interest in English!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I'll go vote to re-open now.&lt;/s&gt; Never mind, it looks like I had already voted to re-open. Someone else has, too. You only need 3 more votes. I suspect you'll get them as a result of this Meta-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;All that said, since we're on Meta, let me offer a meta-answer to your question: I suspect there is no satisfactory word which can describe both a mouse button and keyboard key.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T20:20:48.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9991" CreationDate="2017-01-28T02:33:26.707" Score="8" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/q/370490/26083#370500&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/q/370490/26083&quot;&gt;Is there any word for “killing someone by conspiracy”?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;got into &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/219646&quot;&gt;the Low Quality Review queue&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;where it got six “Recommend Deletion” votes (and no others)&#xA;and the review is labeled as completed&#xA;(at 2017-01-27 15:29:15Z — 10 hours ago). &#xA;It currently looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Review completed 10 hours ago:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/users/160305/cascabel&quot;&gt;Cascabel&lt;/a&gt; reviewed this 10 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/users/42471/wrzlprmft&quot;&gt;Wrzlprmft&lt;/a&gt; reviewed this 10 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/users/168678/spagirl&quot;&gt;Spagirl&lt;/a&gt; reviewed this 12 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/users/50044/nvz&quot;&gt;NVZ&lt;/a&gt; reviewed this 14 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/users/26083/scott&quot;&gt;Scott&lt;/a&gt; reviewed this 19 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/users/53711/nathaniel&quot;&gt;Nathaniel&lt;/a&gt; reviewed this 20 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet the answer is not deleted. &#xA;(Neither the &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/posts/370500/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; nor the &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/posts/370500/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;indicates that it was deleted and undeleted.) &#xA;Why is this answer still extant? &#xA;Is it just because none of the six voters&#xA;has &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;delete privilege (≥ 20K rep)&lt;/a&gt;? &#xA;Is it because the answer got three upvotes (and one downvote)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T02:39:45.567" Title="Six votes recommending deletion, but not deleted" Tags="|discussion|bug|answers|review-queues|deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9990" CreationDate="2017-01-28T02:39:45.567" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because it had a net positive score at the time that six recommends were racked up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a notice on it. Eventually if the user doesn't return pretty soon and fix it up, it will probably be deleted, either by three 20k users once it's negative, or by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T02:39:45.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9969" CreationDate="2017-01-30T00:46:40.737" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you get the answer you needed, mark the answer as &quot;accepted&quot; by clicking the checkmark under the vote section in the answer post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not delete&lt;/strong&gt; the question, as other users might have the same question and you post already has the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149199" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T00:46:40.737" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-01-31T14:53:25.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T07:01:04.010" Score="11" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think so—and it just so happens that we have a candidate that was asked in September 2013: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/127144/the-meaning-of-the-american-idiom-pot-calling-the-kettle-black&quot;&gt;The meaning of the American idiom &amp;quot;pot calling the kettle black&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, because the question originally asked for survey-type responses (although none of the answers it drew attempted to respond to the survey aspects of the question), it was closed in December 2014. Even so, the question has attracted 11,763 unique viewers, so there is evidently substantial interest in the question. (Admittedly the poster erroneously describes the expression as &quot;American.&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the working assumptions of close voting at this site is that if a question is fundamentally worthwhile but happens to be asked in a way that is sufficiently flawed to justify closure, some question asker will eventually come along and ask it in an acceptable way. But in the present case, the edited question no longer suffers from the fault that the closer cited in closing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the objectionable survey features of the question vanished more than a year ago, through subsequent editing of the question, and the question (as I write this) has received three reopen votes (again). I hope that site participants who have question-reopening privileges will consider voting to reopen this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U does have one related open question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45205/pot-calling-the-kettle-black-but-what-if-the-kettle-isnt-black-figurativ&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Pot calling the kettle black&amp;quot; ... but what if the kettle isn&amp;#39;t black (figuratively speaking)?&lt;/a&gt; That question has attracted 2,529 viewers since it was posted in September 2011—but it focuses on a different (and I think, much narrower) issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for considering this request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T07:01:04.010" Title="Shouldn't this site have an open question about the meaning of &quot;the pot calling the kettle black&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T16:23:53.990" Score="12" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed lately that a lot of people are taking every opportunity they have to take a negative topic and reference the newest US President, Donald Trump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I'm trying to get people to stop bringing it up, but it got me thinking about other topics, completely irrelevant to the OP, that are thrown into answers and comments as pure jabs to the topic/person, Donald Trump being the latest target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any topics that are frowned upon in answers/comments or is anything fair game as long as it doesn't start up a conversation about said topic, deviating from the OP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I don't think this is a duplicate&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reply&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;That's because Trump hasn't made it an executive order yet.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Would this answer work for an email format, as well?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reply&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Sure, Hillary, just make sure you use the correct email account.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it may be funny, just seems like it wasn't needed and shows new users it's okay to say anything you want, regardless of it's relevancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T19:37:48.013" Title="Are there any topics that are off limits in answers/comments?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|comments|answers|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9994" CreationDate="2017-01-31T16:42:40.543" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If something is irrelevant to an answer, it should be edited out. If something is only relevant as an example, but the example is too inflammatory or distracting, it should be changed. &lt;strike&gt;The fact that Donald Trump is Hitler Jr doesn't make that pertinent to answers.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T18:21:25.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:21:25.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T20:45:17.727" Score="7" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/when-does-a-question-about-what-a-person-meant-becomes-a-try-to-guess-game&quot;&gt;When does a question...&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to focus mainly on how to determine when a &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt; is worthy of a close vote for lack of context, inciting only guesses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My curiosity is with the answers to these questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should &quot;guesstimated&quot; answers be treated when the OP has not given enough context for educated answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about &quot;guesstimations&quot; to questions that check the right boxes but not enough facts exist to not add opinions/estimations to the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm referencing is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/368679/what-does-societys-finest-mean/368682?noredirect=1#comment861427_368682&quot;&gt;question like this one&lt;/a&gt; what were never edited to provide more context. While the most popular answer is a plausible and likely one, I feel that answers should not be provided for incomplete/non-compliant questions. Am I wrong in thinking this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:58:24.737" Title="How do deal with answers to a &quot;try to guess&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|answers|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:43:27.530" Score="7" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a strange discussion today which I would like explained. I'm not emotional and I hope I don't appear emotional; I'm just mystified. I posted an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371200/what-is-a-word-for-not-seeing-obvious-warning-signs/371202#371202&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It appears it was first. Hank proposed edits which I could not understand, which removed most of the cited uses of the word &lt;em&gt;oblivious&lt;/em&gt;, although I was told the edits would not do this. Another user (Hot Licks) claimed that I posted after him and copied his citations, although in fact I posted first and cited my source, Merriam-Webster, one of the most widely cited authorities on the English language. I don't even agree that the proposed edits were an improvement (although Hank has a reputation of 1976 and I have a reputation of 128). Who can explain what it going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:46:59.297" Title="Wanting More Guidance on Today's &quot;What is a word for not seeing obvious warning signs?&quot; Discussion" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9997" CreationDate="2017-01-31T23:07:14.227" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy to find out who posted when. You answered at 20:48:54Z; Hot Licks at 20:59:12Z. You answered first, by 10 minutes and a few seconds.** However, you had no links, no MW definition until your first edit at 21:07, 8 minutes after @Hot Licks. So the accusation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is a busy site and two people are often in the process of writing an answer simultaneously. These two answers were posted closely enough that assuming the worst on the other party's part is &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; unwise. If you see a pattern of such behavior, you can comment, or flag a moderator who might look at the user's pattern of answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often use Merriam Webster and so do many others; it's a popular dictionary and this was probably a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit actually was an improvement to your answer (in my opinion); it linked your definition and formatted it well, in a manner that is quite common on the site. The removal of several instances of the use of the word &lt;em&gt;oblivious&lt;/em&gt; did not detract from your answer; the definition and a good example or two is usually enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you feel anything untoward was done to your answer, you can always roll back to the original; that is always your right as the OP. But I would not take this edit personally at all. I'm certain it was kindly meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. This kind of activity is not par for the course as far as I'm aware, though I haven't been following much for a few months. I'm sorry for your bad experience, and hope it doesn't get repeated. The last bit isn't really common behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**&lt;sub&gt;Unless there's something about timestamps that I don't know; in that case, I'm out of line here and owe someone an apology big time.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;I owe an apology to @Hot Licks,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;big time&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm sorry for impugning your character. I was utterly wrong, and I stand corrected. @sumelic is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T04:04:00.067" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T04:04:00.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9997" CreationDate="2017-02-01T02:15:55.727" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that Hank added a link to the relevant page of Merriam-Webster Online; if so, that was a significant improvement to your answer because it enables people reading your answer to jump directly to the source of the material you quote. Hank referred to it as improving the formatting, which is a reasonable way to express it. The important thing was adding the link (which as far as I can tell from looking at the edit history wasn't there before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hank also removed some examples from the MW entry for &lt;em&gt;oblivious&lt;/em&gt;, which you had included in your block quote. I'm not sure why he did, but I imagine he was trying to make your answer more succinct. I would not have done that—partly because I'm long-winded myself, and partly because I think judgments about how much material to include from a quoted definition are properly the poster's to make. But of course you can still make that choice, simply by reinstating the examples that you had originally included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an edit makes useful improvements but exceeds what you approve of, you can put it right either by rolling it back to your original version and then reintroducing the useful points from the edit or by accepting the edit and then reediting the post to reintroduce the lost portions of your original wording that you feel were useful and worth preserving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the dispute over who's on first, what's on second, and I don't know's on third, I share medica's disappointment that such a controversy blew up on one of your first efforts to contribute to the site. The problem, I believe, is largely with the popularity of single-word requests in situations like this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the commentary here and the answers and comments on the page in question, it appears that four different participants suggested or were in the process of suggesting &lt;em&gt;oblivious&lt;/em&gt; within a few minutes of each other. This happened because (not to be dismissive of anyone's efforts) it is a pretty obvious (and suitable) answer to the poster's question. The reality is that the answer doesn't belong to anyone. Four people saw the question at an opportune time to respond with &lt;em&gt;oblivious&lt;/em&gt; as a suggested answer—one (Mark Hubbard) in a comment; two (you and Hot Licks) in formal answers, and one (Hank) in a formal answer that he declined to post because you two got there first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that English Language &amp;amp; Usage is a trivia game where whoever presses the button first gets to claim a particular answer, there are liable to be occasional bad feelings when someone answers just ahead of someone else—particularly since answers are never of exactly equal quality. But if everyone takes a step back and doesn't worry about the rep points that are rightfully theirs, I think they will see that there is little reason to get excited about the fact that a fairly obvious answer occurred to multiple people at virtually the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that your future experiences at EL&amp;amp;U are more pleasant, Chaim. Welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:46:59.297" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:46:59.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9997" CreationDate="2017-02-01T02:17:35.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is what I see in the edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;20:48 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/371202/1&quot;&gt;First draft of Chaim’s answer&lt;/a&gt; posted, with no MW link or quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;20:59: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/371205/2&quot;&gt;First draft of Hot Licks’ answer&lt;/a&gt; posted, with a link and quotation from MW.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;21:07: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/371202/2&quot;&gt;Second draft of Chaim’s answer&lt;/a&gt; posted, with updated content including MW quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, none of the other edits that were made were relevant (edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9999/77227&quot;&gt;Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt; pointed out that Hank added a MW link to Chaim's answer, which was useful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaim, if I'm reading these correctly, your answer was first, but Hot Licks' answer was the first to link to and quote Merriam-Webster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt;&quot; policy requires users to assume good intentions.&#xA;So it would not be right to accuse Chaim of improper behaviour. However, this assumption of good intentions must also be applied to Hot Licks' comment. It seems to be factually true that Hot Licks provided the MW definition first, and while saying that Chaim copied this might be interpreted as an accusation, I don't think it needs to be. Personally, I've never considered it wrong to edit one's answer to incorporate useful information from other answers. Hot Licks may have assumed that is what Chaim did, and this assumption may have been mistaken. So I think it's quite possible that nobody did anything wrong, and it's just a misunderstanding. That is what I will assume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hank's edits changed an introductory sentence before the quotation, and removed some examples. The edit summary may have been misleading: &quot;Formatting for better reading&quot;. Chaim, you should keep in mind that you can look at the actual edit as well, in addition to the summary. Hopefully that will help you avoid approving edits that you don't agree with in the future. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9998/77227&quot;&gt;medica&lt;/a&gt; said, I don't think Hank did anything malicious, and in my opinion removing some of the examples did in fact improve the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T02:25:31.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9996" CreationDate="2017-02-01T15:08:46.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions (especially from new users) often lack the required details to help us narrow down the list of possible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd normally do is vote to close as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;, and also, if I have the time, leave comments to guide the new user, or upvote other constructive comments. I might also suggest a few possible answers (without enough references) in the comments section under the question, as that may help the OP in their research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a new user attempts to answer it, I'd welcome them to the site, but also inform them that such &quot;unclear&quot; questions often get closed and eventually deleted, and that their effort might go to waste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user with a high reputation attempts to hazard a guess and answer it, I'll probably assume that they have a better understanding of the question than I do, and that they know the possible outcomes of their actions. I'll most likely &lt;strong&gt;just let it be&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T15:08:46.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9997" CreationDate="2017-02-01T15:30:16.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start by saying I hope none of my comments or actions offended you but I will gladly explain them all, along with all of my edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I said Hot Lick's answer &lt;strong&gt;&quot;was delivered in a much better way&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is because he posted a link to the definition that he included, formatted his answer in a way that is more pleasing to the eyes, allowing for easier reading, and he added an explanation of his opinion on that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first draft, on the other hand, only included a mention of the word, used in a sentence to explain its usage very minimally, a quote of someone using the word, and two other word suggestions. It didn't provide enough structure and support for people who may be wanting to know more about the word. Some &lt;strong&gt;&quot;definitions, proper formatting, and examples&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, once included in your post, improved the appearance and readability of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the edit I suggested after your additional information, the information I deleted was over the top. You clearly copied and pasted the whole word entry and it had 5 different examples of usage; that many are not necessary. I also formatted it slightly, as to provide a better look to viewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sole intention was to make edits to improve your answer and give you the best chance of receiving up-votes, not to cause any distress. Although this may be an opinion and not a rule of thumb, I personally prefer assisting someone who beat me to an answer over posting my own in a better way, even if it would have information the initial answer lacks. That is why I decided to discard my answer, instead of trying to outshine yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As everyone else suggested, regardless of my intentions or opinions, the final decision is always &lt;strong&gt;YOURS&lt;/strong&gt;. Even if others agree there is nothing wrong with my edits or suggestions, &lt;strong&gt;YOU&lt;/strong&gt; still have the final say. IF you want to revert back to having 5 example usages, then go for it. If you think my edits diminished the intended effect of your answer, then change it. We don't want you to get the impression that you are being bottle-necked, especially when nothing you posted was officially &quot;wrong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206168" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T15:58:26.223" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T15:58:26.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9996" CreationDate="2017-02-01T19:58:24.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are certainly not alone in your thinking; many people feel that rewarding a poorly-framed question with a thoughtful and detailed answer is not only futile, but in fact is actively detrimental to the site because it grants legitimacy to the poor question and encourages other questioners to let fly with whatever idle wondering crosses their mind, instead of putting some effort, consideration, and research into the asking process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, some feel that not only do such questions deserve a close vote, but answers to them (generally answers from higher-rep people who &quot;should know better&quot;) deserve a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation, though, is not to judge the answer on the quality of the question.  If the answerer has made sense of a question phrased so poorly that you could not tease meaning out of it, good for them; if you can then understand how they arrived at that understanding, all the better; and if they have given a solid answer to what they think the question is, better still.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then too, if the answerer had to make some assumptions in order to come up with a potential answer, as long as they have spelled out those assumptions and encouraged the asker to confirm or invalidate them, I see no reason to downvote.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if the quality of the answer itself is questionable, due to unstated assumptions, or to addressing an issue that I cannot find in the actual question, or to simply being wrong in some way, would I consider applying a downvote to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, our ultimate hope is not that &quot;poor questions get closed and deleted&quot;, but that &quot;poor questions get improved and answered&quot;.  If the &quot;answer&quot; part comes before the &quot;improvement&quot; part occasionally, it may help guide whoever ends up improving the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:58:24.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T13:50:39.427" Score="16" ViewCount="573" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/10004&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T21:05:00.540" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2017" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-02T13:50:39.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/64ZpZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T13:50:39.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:04:12.683" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BeN5I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Explore the roots of English at the Latin Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53711" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T14:04:12.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:32:58.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/168&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6LjbP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Come to Writer&amp;#39;s Chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T14:32:58.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:14:17.377" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vHHqU.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Language Learners&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:14:17.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:36:02.553" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NZswo.png&quot; alt=&quot;Interested in applications of language?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastEditorUserId="87724" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T23:04:00.640" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T23:04:00.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-02T18:27:04.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M1ZO7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Language Learning Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155782" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T18:27:04.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10014" CreationDate="2017-02-02T20:12:59.207" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recent days have got me wondering how questions of usage should be settled. Is this a well-established issue on the forum, so that I can just be directed to the record of that discussion? I sought but I did not find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that a lot of the possible arguments would fall into four categories: (1) technical distinctions, the jargon of language, and language authorities, (2) quotations of good writers, (3) logical justifications (such as the avoidance of ambiguity), and (4) our own private sensibilites about how the language is usually used. I think that my own ear is usually my final arbiter. I don’t think that I would follow advice that sounded wrong to me, unless I was writing for a course that required MLA Handbook style, or a publication that followed the Chicago Manual of Style, or something like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I notice that lots of other people, with reputations in the tens of thousands, spend their lives in the first category: technical distinctions, the jargon of language, and language authorities. They just write in what I should probably not term “grammatical mumbo jumbo.” They use lots of words for different parts of speech that I never heard about in School House Rock. And they don’t cite writers. To judge from Hank’s fabulous edit of my recent post, the omission of almost all citations makes a post much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? I hope I don’t hurt any feelings (or precipitate another analysis of hurt feelings), but the suggestions that grammaticality hinges on the mass/count and singular/plural distinctions on the noun, and the classing of words as adjectives or determiners, and whether they can be modified by adverbs or adjectives or not at all, whether rules for pre-modification of determiners were explored in classical grammars, all got me nowhere. How do you know that eloquent people really do what those rules suggest? How do you know that those rules are really helpful? Why should we follow those rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this first category is the weakest, while quotations of good writers seem an almost unanswerable argument: just look. That’s why I usually try to cite good writers in my posts to the main forum. Their words illustrate well-crafted English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why am I so out-of-step with the dominant culture here, where sensibilities are obviously the opposite of my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T18:29:24.083" Title="Ways of Settling Questions of Usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T23:53:20.430" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;A high-rep user recently closed his account, with no effect on my rep. (I am sorry to see him go.)  I know that he gave me at least several upvotes and at least one acceptance.   When low-rep users close their accounts, the upvotes they awarded are negated.  I've seen a few small drops in my rep because of this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the dividing line between a low-rep user and a high-rep user in negating/not negating upvotes when his account is closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T07:07:38.223" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T07:07:38.223" Title="What is the dividing line between a low-rep user and a high-rep user in negating/not negating upvotes when his account is closed?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|user-accounts|votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-03T06:26:38.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;//stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/english.stackexchange.com/bounty.png&quot; alt=&quot;See all questions with active bounties&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11394" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T06:26:38.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10011" CreationDate="2017-02-03T18:02:44.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the first category is the strongest:  Scholarly citations from educated people, describing a grammatical feature that has been studied and confirmed to be the way that words get used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotes from respected authors that confirm that usage, or that demonstrate how usage has shifted, are definitely helpful, but are not as convincing to me as as a technical explanation.  Sure, the few well-respected authors being quoted have said things that way, but what about a few million other respected authors?  I expect and believe that the scholarly studies have taken a LOT more data into account than a few cherry-picked quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logical justification is also useful for explaining how a grammatical feature came into being, but there's a lot of illogic in English, so we can't really rely on it too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal experience, while it is the most immediately available, is also the most subject to invalidation; &quot;John, can you borrow me your screwdriver?&quot; is apparently perfectly common in Minnesota when you're asking to use John's screwdriver, but not in most other parts of the country&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and there are huge differences between Indian English and American English.  Not to mention that I have no idea of your education level or whether anybody else in your geographical area actually talks that way; maybe it's just you and your mother who think that sounds good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the site as a whole strives for objective answers to objectively-answerable questions (as much as possible where an inherently personal thing like language is concerned, anyway) giving the most weight to scholarly research, and the least to personal preference, seems reasonable and natural to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;I live in Minnesota now and I &lt;strong&gt;hate&lt;/strong&gt; hearing &lt;em&gt;borrow&lt;/em&gt; used this way.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T18:29:24.083" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T18:29:24.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9817" CreationDate="2017-02-03T19:21:14.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Gerund vs. infinitive for verb complements&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;My favorite pastime is to cook&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;My favorite pastime is cooking&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Try to rotate your knee&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;Try rotating your knee&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329&quot;&gt;When should a verb be followed by a gerund instead of an infinitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T19:21:14.033" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-02-06T05:05:46.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-07T13:43:26.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E7oXg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Language Learning Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218988" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:43:26.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T10:21:12.007" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning English and facing many sentences which I can't understand, so I post here. When I read the answers I suppose that the person who answers is a native English speaker so I accept his answer as a true one and memorize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why can't I ask more than 6 questions per day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219072" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T10:27:50.577" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T10:53:24.650" Title="Are most of the people who answer our English questions native English speakers?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2017-02-09T10:53:24.650" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have any statistics on whether members of the ELU community are native speakers or not, and that's deliberate. There have been a number of Meta questions asking whether that sort of identification would be useful, but they have always been voted down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that, while there are a large number of native speakers here, not everyone is; and the skill in explaining &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; something is done is generally exhibited by those who have had to learn it rather than those who have gained the knowledge by immersion and osmosis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also native speakers who have actually formally learned it as well as picked it up natively, of course (we have at least one professor in English on the books, and quite a number of people who have studied English to degree level and beyond); as well as those who can explain without having the formal learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also people who post incorrect and unsubstantiated information, and they could be native speakers too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, nativeness is no &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; guarantee of quality or correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question limit was introduced in 2014 to help new users learn the ropes on the site and provide good questions. It also means that you do not wear the community out with lots of questions &amp;mdash; this can reduce the quality of answers and influence voting. There are a number of Meta questions from the time about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/50-question-per-month-limit?s=1|0.5142&quot;&gt;50 question per month limit?&lt;/a&gt; (27 February 2014)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4558/follow-up-to-ffs-question-on-50-posts-limit?s=2|0.4066&quot;&gt;Follow up to FF&amp;#39;s question on 50 posts limit&lt;/a&gt; (3 March 2014)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5048/do-we-want-to-enable-post-limits?s=3|0.2790&quot;&gt;Do we want to enable post limits?&lt;/a&gt; (24 July 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that not only is there a limit of six questions per day, but also a limit of fifty questions per month. I did some analysis in an answer on the July question to show the effect on one prolific poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do have a look at a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;research requirements&lt;/a&gt;. Six &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; questions per day would indeed be prolific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're learning English, you may be interested in our sister site for &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T10:53:24.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T14:06:42.827" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking about the pros and cons of this (that's a different question) but rather simply whether or not this is permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is explicitly permitted or disallowed, please provide a supporting reference, e.g. link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find any guidance in Help about it so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69071" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T16:01:05.450" Title="Is posting an embedded image as part of the answer (e.g. for a word definition) against the site rules?" Tags="|support|images|quotes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10020" CreationDate="2017-02-09T16:01:05.450" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is &quot;Yes, it's allowed&quot;, but if the answer consists &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; of the image, then the answer is likely to be downvoted as &quot;Not useful&quot;, since the information can usually be presented textually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the image is &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of an answer, and actually illustrates something &amp;mdash; rather than being simply an example of laziness in not bothering to transcribe content &amp;mdash; then I don't see a problem, myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any image has to be relevant, made accessible to screen-readers (with the correct alt-text), correctly attributed and not a blatant breach of copyright (i.e. fair use applies, as an illustration of a point). &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/87557/what-is-the-name-of-the-truck-shown-in-this-picture/87560#87560&quot;&gt;Here's one I prepared earlier:&lt;/a&gt; I'm sure there must be other examples, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An image which is not relevant and which can be edited out without affecting the answer should not be included and can be justifiably removed by anyone with editing privileges. There aren't many examples of those because they've all been dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T16:01:05.450" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-09T20:31:29.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27cPL.png&quot; alt=&quot;No general reference, please!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T20:31:29.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T12:21:11.190" Score="8" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a discussion around the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguities&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have an &lt;em&gt;ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;. You can remove it by &lt;em&gt;disambiguation&lt;/em&gt;. But &quot;disambiguity&quot; isn't a word. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.disambiguity.com/is-disambiguity-a-word/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;, should this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguities&lt;/a&gt; be a tag-synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguities&lt;/a&gt; be renamed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguation&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="206168" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T14:13:21.770" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T16:55:46.407" Title="{Disambiguities} needs disambiguating" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-12T00:12:48.237" Score="6" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two questions, both about adjectives being used as adverbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350255/walk-slow-vs-walk-slowly&quot;&gt;Slow vs slowly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/119020/when-to-use-easy-over-easily-as-an-adverb&quot;&gt;Easy vs easily&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former was asked in September, got one answer quickly and another in December (neither accepted), and was recently bumped to the home page. The latter was asked a day ago and summarily migrated to ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have thought the second question was a good fit for the site; nevertheless, I'm not &lt;em&gt;challenging&lt;/em&gt; the migration. The rules are what they are, and if the second question is unsuitable here, that's okay. I'm merely trying to get some clarity for myself regarding said rules: to understand what makes that query unsuitable, particularly when the first is worthy of being featured on the home page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37040" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T00:40:01.317" Title="What is the difference between these two questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10024" CreationDate="2017-02-12T00:40:01.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference, at least as I saw it, is that in the case of the migrated question, the asker was an English-language learner who wanted to know whether they simply had to learn certain collocations by heart or whether there was some other way.  The &quot;learner&quot; part seemed to call out for ELL to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, their question seems to be confusing the &quot;talk slow&quot; or &quot;play rough&quot; scenario of a flat adverb from the &quot;rest contented&quot; and &quot;become angry&quot; scenario of verbs that simply take adjectival complements to describe their subjects not their verbs, and so no adverbial application should be imputed of them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I was expecting too much of the ELL community's strengths in explaining that, but I was thinking that the asker would be better served on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it’s worth, I didn’t override the community here: it had already had the requisite three votes for migration before I came upon it. I could have blocked the migration by closing it in some other way, but barring a moderatorial override it would almost certain have been migrated there anyway. I figured it was better to hurry it along the path that the community had already weighed in on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T00:40:01.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10023" CreationDate="2017-02-12T03:47:37.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt; Regarding Words&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I do not presently remember if there are any explicit preexisting rules on the website preventing neologisms from being tags. If there is not, whether it would or would not be wise to implement such a rule it is arguable. On the one hand, the tags &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, I am not really sure if I trust your citation against it being a word for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, noun endings to words prefixed with the word dis- exist, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disillusion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disillusion&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disenchantment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disenchantment&lt;/a&gt; in Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, even if it does violate the rules of morphology, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathon-owen/yes-irregardless-is-a-wor_b_4434749.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complete abominations such as irregardless have been considered as words to a greater or lesser degree by reputable sources&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, based upon the definition of the word provided in Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition, the Oxford English Dictionary does not contain all &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/lexeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexemes&lt;/a&gt; in the language. That would require it to contain every single word as a subset, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford openly admits they do not have every word in the O.E.D.&lt;/a&gt; due to the sheer impossibility of the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, given that Wiktionary is a sanctioned and sometimes even recommended resource on this website, this suggests that it may be a word sanctioned by usage. No, it is not on their webpage currently, but it meets their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Criteria_for_inclusion#Idiomaticity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;criteria of inclusion&lt;/a&gt;. The most relevant portions, which are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0 license&lt;/a&gt;, are as follows (sans footnote indicators):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General Rule&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means. This in turn leads to the somewhat more formal guideline of including a term if it is attested and, when that is met, if it is a single word or it is idiomatic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attestation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Attested” means verified through &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;clearly widespread use, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year (different requirements apply for certain languages).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to prove that it meets this criteria here are three quotations from printed books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sense of order is founded in the disambiguity between the individual and the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;(Stockhausen 1952: 18)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=bqwH9bjWepEC&amp;amp;pg=PT51&amp;amp;dq=disambiguity&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiHiuHNuInSAhVHxGMKHaEnCkY4ChDoAQg_MAc#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=disambiguity&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes edited by David Roesner, Matthias Rebstock&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To assign semantic disambiguity and define the intended meaning of these definitions, a formal semantics can be employed as a next step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=seU5I66OjdkC&amp;amp;pg=PA100&amp;amp;dq=disambiguity&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiv0qn4u4nSAhUKwmMKHWpXABE4ChDoAQg5MAc#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=disambiguity&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ontologies-Based Business Integration by Michael Rebstock, Fengel Janina, Heiko Paulheim&lt;/a&gt;, page 100&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, for those who remain skeptical of the assertion that direct resistance messages are not offensive to males and who put a premium on politeness, an untested but intuitively attractive compromise can be suggested: if the assumption is that an indirect resistance message is more acceptable because it lets him down more gently, or some such, then it might be useful to combine the presumed softness of the preferred indirect message along with the disambiguity of a direct message. For example, instead of &quot;You know, it's getting late,&quot; try &quot;You know, it's getting late; &lt;em&gt;we need to stop&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=tdkgAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA141&amp;amp;dq=disambiguity&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiv0qn4u4nSAhUKwmMKHWpXABE4ChDoAQg0MAY#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=disambiguity&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Studies in Applied Interpersonal Communication edited by Michael T. Motley&lt;/a&gt;, page 141&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, just for good measure, here is an instance of it being used as a pluralized count noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Used here are the translator's mark on the translation, the signature &quot;solves&quot; the personal ambiguities and disambiguities of language in translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=R-MlSXP5304C&amp;amp;pg=PA4&amp;amp;dq=disambiguities&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjQ8ZvOwInSAhUFyGMKHYXhCfYQ6AEISjAJ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=disambiguities&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wittgenstein in Translation: Exploring Semiotic Signatures by Dinda L. Gorlée&lt;/a&gt;, page 4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;So even though it is not presently on Wikitionary, it probably should be added, and if it ever is that would make it somewhat hypocritical of us to bar it from being considered a word when we could use wikitionary to corroborate an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/is-it-a-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;is-it-a-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;is-it-a-word&lt;/a&gt; question. All that needs to happen is for it to be adequately defined according to its usage and included on their website, which does not seem too hard. If it is not the direct antonym of ambiguity, then it is probably the state of being unambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you are not persuaded by this evidence that disambiguity is a word. I have trouble believing it myself, even though if I am the one making the proposition. However I am doing it so more so to play the role of the devil's advocate. We could argue all day over what constitutes a non-word but until we can agree upon what constitutes a fast rule of what constitutes a word for the purposes of tagging most of us can agree upon, such as &lt;em&gt;it must appear in the Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, I doubt we can objectively disqualify disambiguity from being considered a word. As such, we should not yet delete it on that basis alone and I would suggest that we make another question regarding what kind of words may be used in tags to settle that matter, if one does not already exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Other Factors&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think there might be justification for its removal. The tag is not especially popular and has no usage guidance, so unless we can find a distinct purpose for it, it probably should be removed in favor of a more popular tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me as if a number of questions tagged as ambiguities would be better served by other, more popular tags. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298701/jam-jelly-and-jello-in-ameng-vernacular&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;jam,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;jelly,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jello&amp;quot; in AmEng vernacular&lt;/a&gt; for instance. It is the top voted for question with this tag, and where it uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguities&lt;/a&gt; tag it would probably be better for it to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second most voted for question with the tag, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314674/word-meaning-its-meaning-stands-alone&quot;&gt;Word meaning &amp;quot;its meaning stands alone&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. That seems like it should be tagged as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, rather than any of the tags it has now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No other questions with this tag presently have five or more votes, and there is not more than a page of them which isn't very promising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is only a single page worth of questions with this tag, I would recommend retagging the questions as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; or maybe &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguities&lt;/a&gt; where applicable. Then we can analyze the remaining questions, and see if they have anything in common worth keeping a separate tag. If they do we should probably just leave them alone, and if they do not, then there is no harm in deleting it to simplify the process of categorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T04:07:48.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10023" CreationDate="2017-02-12T16:55:46.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the questions, grouped by how they appear to me upon cursory examination. I'm not going to unilaterally change so many at once. I'll leave it to a mod. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this suggestion is sound, then we'll have no more questions under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguity&lt;/a&gt; tag, and it can be summarily dismissed. I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguity&lt;/a&gt; needs to be kept when we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confusables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confusables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confusables&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions were closed at the time of preparing this answer. It's arguable that we should just delete the tags from closed questions. But since they might be reopened at a later stage, I've just grouped them along with open questions of the same category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fits the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt; tag (one word/thing with multiple meanings). Replace with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt; in the question's tag list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/297116/disambiguation-of-fluff-vs-chiefly-ameng-lint-vs-chiefly-breng-bobbles-v&quot;&gt;Disambiguation of &amp;quot;fluff&amp;quot; vs. chiefly AmEng &amp;quot;lint&amp;quot; vs. chiefly BrEng &amp;quot;bobbles&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;pills&amp;quot; for French &amp;quot;peluches&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/308783/usage-of-the-verb-squinch-in-ameng&quot;&gt;Usage of the verb &amp;quot;squinch&amp;quot; in AmEng&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175681/grammar-style-ambiguous-it&quot;&gt;&amp;lt;Grammar/Style&amp;gt; Ambiguous &amp;quot;it&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (note: this has a single meaning of &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, but multiple things it might refer to)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350756/expect-how-to-disambiguate-dual-meaning&quot;&gt;Expect: How to disambiguate dual meaning?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/260808/need-words-to-resolve-the-ambiguity-of-interface-in-oop-it-can-mean-either-a&quot;&gt;Need words to resolve the ambiguity of &amp;quot;interface&amp;quot; in OOP. It can mean either a type defined with the keyword &amp;quot;interface&amp;quot; or an object&amp;#39;s accessibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314216/what-does-s-mean-at-the-end-of-someones-name&quot;&gt;What does &amp;#39;s mean at the end of someone&amp;#39;s name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152898/the-cleanest-vs-cleanest-article-containing-adverb-phrases&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;the cleanest&amp;#39; vs &amp;#39;cleanest&amp;#39;: article-containing adverb phrases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/203606/how-to-handle-ambiguity-caused-by-long-clause-and-compound&quot;&gt;How to handle ambiguity caused by long clause and compound?&lt;/a&gt; (note: this question already has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;, so we can just delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguity&lt;/a&gt; from its tag list)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;References multiple words that can be easily mixed up - should replace with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confusables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confusables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confusables&lt;/a&gt; according to the notes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298701/jam-jelly-and-jello-in-ameng-vernacular&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;jam,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;jelly,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jello&amp;quot; in AmEng vernacular&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/317781/why-is-salt-being-referred-to-as-sodium&quot;&gt;Why is salt being referred to as “sodium”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332061/using-differential-as-a-synonym-for-difference-sounds-wrong-to-me-am-i-justifie&quot;&gt;Using differential as a synonym for difference sounds wrong to me. Am I justified or also wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315842/varietal-vs-various-vs-varied&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;varietal&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;various&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;varied&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Referencing ambiguities doesn't help - delete the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disambiguities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disambiguities&lt;/a&gt; tag from the question's tag list altogether:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/314674/word-meaning-its-meaning-stands-alone&quot;&gt;Word meaning &amp;quot;its meaning stands alone&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/305108/trade-for-business-deal-transaction-in-north-american-vernacular&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;trade&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;business deal; transaction&amp;quot; in North American vernacular&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/341838/term-for-disappointment-beyond-all-expectations&quot;&gt;Term for disappointment beyond all expectations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/369941/help-with-too-many-and-and-or&quot;&gt;Help with too many “and” and “or”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270536/when-the-boss-is-a-way&quot;&gt;When the boss is a way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disambiguities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/221911/minutes-minutes-vs-short-minute-of-a-meeting&quot;&gt;minutes minutes vs short minute of a meeting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T16:55:46.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T21:43:17.270" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do definition questions need an example sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373540/what-antonyms-are-there-of-lexis&quot;&gt;Is there a term equivalent to &amp;#39;mute&amp;#39; but at the level of &amp;#39;lexis&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.. If not I just feel like it's a personal issue &lt;em&gt;with me&lt;/em&gt;, even-though that is absolutely absurd, so ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T05:05:48.493" Title="Do definition questions need an example sentence?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T18:23:57.610" Score="13" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just my impression, or are some folks (blindly) closing every single question that appears in the &lt;strong&gt;Close Votes&lt;/strong&gt; review queue? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/history&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/history&lt;/a&gt; (Note only users with 10k rep will see a site-wide history, users with less will see only their own)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also cast our vote to keep a question &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373391/how-would-i-describe-this-situation-on-a-cv-to-an-interviewer&quot;&gt;How would I describe this situation on a CV/to an interviewer?&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed for being POB, well you might as well close 70-90% of all SWRs. But wait, that question wasn't a guessing game; it had context, it supplied a possible solution, a good sample sentence, it followed all the guidelines to a T. But only one user voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/222280&quot;&gt;to keep it open&lt;/a&gt; in the review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a community, and we do not necessarily have to agree on everything. I'm not saying the users who cast their close votes were wrong to do so. I'm just saying. to anyone who wants to listen, if a question isn't shockingly low quality, consider casting a vote to keep it open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T22:04:42.900" Title="The close vote in review queue is meant to be cast judiciously" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|review-queues|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2017-02-14T18:58:54.663" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's much less bad than you can see in your view.  Moderators can also see which reviews were deliberately skipped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell you specifics, but on average for every two or three entries you do see, there's another you aren't seeing where the reviewer has deliberately passed on a review decision because they've elected to skip it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T18:58:54.663" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10028" CreationDate="2017-02-14T21:13:48.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know exactly what you mean by &amp;quot;definition question&amp;quot;, so this question is difficult to answer, but here are my thoughts on your given example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to be categorized as both a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; and should be tagged as such. Although I am not sure if this applies to all &amp;quot;request&amp;quot; type questions, single-word-requests &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/1JNV2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;presently require an exemplary sentence&lt;/a&gt; pursuant to this tag data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word that fits a meaning. To ensure your question is not closed as off-topic, please be specific about the intended use of the word. YOU MUST INCLUDE A SAMPLE SENTENCE demonstrating how the word would be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;That is because by seeking an antonym, you are seeking a word with a meaning that is opposite of the original word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including an exemplary sentence shows us both that the word is needful, increasing the possibility that such a word exists, and more importantly it provides us with context that helps clarify which particular word or phrase is best suited for the context. Most questions that do not provide the exemplary sentence will be closed as &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, regarding CuriousDanni's statement that &amp;quot;Definition questions are off topic period.&amp;quot; I do not think I can fully agree with that opinion, given that &amp;quot;definition questions&amp;quot; could mean any number of questions where we use a dictionary definition to corroborate our answers, but there is a good point to be had there in that &lt;em&gt;a certain category of question&lt;/em&gt; is not allowed on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage is not a substitute for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;commonly available resources&lt;/a&gt; that can &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;definitively&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; answer a question, and questions which can be answered in that manner are strictly forbidden by our hosts on the entire Stack Exchange network, because they do not encourage sufficient participation. Please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Are Some Questions Too Simple&lt;/a&gt; for a more detailed explanation. Moreover, our help center page entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;contains the following prohibition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The meaning of words, or synonyms for words, unless you have first looked them up in a dictionary or thesaurus. See below for suggestions about simple and basic questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do the research and clearly explain why the answers provided in such a resource are lacking, we should be glad to offer our insight on the matter though pursuant to this clause in the simple and basic questions subsection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if your question isn't adequately answered by these resources, feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt; here on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange. Be sure to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043&quot;&gt;mention the research you've done&lt;/a&gt; and what you're still hoping to learn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way we presently enforce this policy is with the the following close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I believe that question would have been better served if it checked thesaurus.com to see if Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition had antonyms in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/vocabulary?s=ts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/lexis?s=ts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexis&lt;/a&gt; entries. Proving that no such entry exists in a given resource goes a long way towards a question having a more positive reception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T05:05:48.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2017-02-14T23:29:25.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One small factor to remember is that while four or five &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; votes are often needed to take a question out of the queue, only three &lt;em&gt;keep open&lt;/em&gt; votes are needed. So even if the queue was balanced with questions that should be closed vs those which should be kept open, there would be more close votes. But of course most good questions never appear in the queue so it is far from evenly split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I don't visit the queue for a few days I've often come back to it and almost all of the twenty reviews it gives me are questions which already have four &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; votes, and if I choose to close vote then that makes five. Because of the current backlog if you visit the queue less than daily this will be a common occurrence. Such times would make my review history look especially suspect, but I'd assume that several questions reached the three &lt;em&gt;keep open&lt;/em&gt; vote threshold in the days when I didn't visit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T03:07:39.040" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T03:07:39.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2017-02-15T01:19:50.660" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps some review queue reviewers who feel that the site is overrun with cruddy questions are loath to waste any of their allotted 20 daily review votes on keeping acceptable questions open, since doing so would mean having fewer votes left to close unacceptable questions with. If so, they may be inclined to skip questions that, if they had unlimited votes to cast every day, they might vote to keep open. The result would be a voting record that skewed strongly toward close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My review voting record looks injudicious in the opposite direction, but it isn't because I skip questions that I would vote to close if I had unlimited votes. In many instances I enter the close vote queue because I want to defend a particular question that someone has nominated for closure. So I go to the close vote queue to look for it—which means wading through a bunch of questions that I don't care about one way or the other, as well as through some that were nominated for reasons that I oppose on philosophical grounds (&quot;lack of research effort&quot; or &quot;general reference&quot;) and a few that are under scrutiny for what I consider to be valid close reasons (true duplicates and questions of no interest to anyone but the poster) until I reach the one I really care about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually skip most of the questions along the way—and very rarely expend all of my day's votes. But occasionally I find myself on a slippery slope where one question nominated (wrongly, in my view) for closure leads to another and another and another, and I end up voting to keep open even some questions that I would normally just skip. But if that's a problem and if the powers that be ever want to sharply reduce my participation in the close vote review queue, all they have to do is add a &quot;keep open&quot; option next to 'share', 'edit', 'close', and 'flag' beneath individual questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T01:19:50.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2017-02-15T04:26:33.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am working through a queue, it is precisely &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; I am judicious that you'll see four closevotes from me in three seconds. It's because I haven't looked at four questions in three seconds, I've looked at twelve and skipped eight, in some cases merely because they had more than two lines of text in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not labor in the queues; I swipe the low-hanging fruit. If one wishes to plod sequentially through the list, one is free to do so, but I have encountered no such expectation, and will demur. We the low-hanging fruit swipers are in the queue for a minute here, two minutes there while we're waiting for an upload or for our boss to get off the phone. I choose to spend that time voting on obvious cases rather than mulling improvements to a few questionable ones. I am not a moderator, and as a community member, this is a more efficient way to contribute now that the queues have gotten under control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better if we were given better tools to triage— to see all the questions with closevotes listed at once, to be able to return to a question after we have skipped it. Alas, the powers that be have seen fit to give us only a skip button. Skip I shall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; questions that are obvious keep-opens. Maybe I sense that conventional references will fail, or that a non-native will find them more interesting than I do, and those I do vote to keep open. It just happens that they are far rarer than the obvious duplicates, bizarre rants, and unsalvageable wrecks in the queue that can be identified in under a second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T04:26:33.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T23:07:16.717" Score="14" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today is the second time I had an &quot;English Language&quot; question and visited this forum based on the result of a Google Internet search using a query such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;proper use of the word _______&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both times links to your forum were at the very top of the results list and both times reading the brief summaries of the web page caused me to be confident that I would find the explanation I needed. Both times I was delighted to find the thread to which I was redirected contained enough information for me to properly use the word that was causing me grief. Unfortunately, both times the threads containing answers to my questions were denoted OFF TOPIC and the author was chastised for failing to read the preamble to this forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For eighteen years every question I asked my father drew a response that never included an answer, chastised me for not thinking properly, not looking in any of the right places, not asking a more inquisitive question. At an appropriate age these gyrations would have been valuable learning experiences. At five and six years old, they were cruel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the bear that does not go near the tree with the teeth in the grass that mauled his leg, I will post my question on a forum with nicer folks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220558" OwnerDisplayName="Joe Coletta" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T03:20:11.647" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T13:26:48.270" Title="I am worried about being off-topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|new-users|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10035" CreationDate="2017-02-16T03:18:57.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry to hear that our community made you feel unwelcome somehow. But let me tell you, you are not alone in this. Many visitors, including myself, have had bad first impressions. But that feeling won't last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stick around, get involved in the daily activities of the community, and you'll soon find that there are many good things we can offer you, and you us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T03:18:57.377" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10035" CreationDate="2017-02-16T17:58:05.480" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like you, I stumbled on this site by accident. My own first interactions were less than felicitous: I was chastized (rightly, as I see it now) for a sloppy answer, and never officially &quot;on-boarded&quot;. I actually have left off using the site twice for extended periods for personal pique over other matters. In spite of difficult beginnings, I persevered, and I feel that I am immeasurably richer for having been here for a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I have learned to be more philosophical about the reception my questions get. My own top-voted question was once closed for off-topic, and then re-opened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself may also be guilty of being over-zealous in closing answers which I did not feel were up to the standards of the site, and if I have given offense to anyone who feels I was not fair with them, I apologise. Some of us are still feeling our way around the &quot;culture&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should realize that this is a loose association of unruly participants from divergent backgrounds and beliefs: what holds us together is our interest in the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Management of the site works like a self-appointed committee, and I think I am quoting Stalin when I say that an octopus is a horse designed by a committee. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T13:13:41.257" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T13:13:41.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-02-17T01:30:59.493" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/92736.png&quot; alt=&quot;Join the Interpersonal Skills site proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T06:55:25.760" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T06:55:25.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T02:08:25.723" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cast the fifth VTC on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373914/word-for-the-best-way-to-move-from-point-a-to-b&quot;&gt;Word for the best way to move from point A to B?&lt;/a&gt; without reading all the comments.  To my dismay, the OP had provided context in a comment I overlooked.  (Oh, the guilt!)  I edited the question, and voted to reopen.  It is a deserving question, and needs only two more votes to open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T02:08:25.723" Title="Can we reopen Word for the best way to move from point A to point B?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T15:24:53.463" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;While doing some cleaning up  on a number of old answers of mine the system blocked me after the fifth  deletion. I have not been able to  find this daily limit among the help center rules. Is it a recent introduction? and, most of all, is it a useful limit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have already deleted 5 of your own posts today; further deletes are blocked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T16:37:29.803" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T20:04:28.960" Title="Why is deletion limited to 5 posts a day?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10041" CreationDate="2017-02-17T20:04:28.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;that questions regarding certain topics that are common to all stack exchange websites are probably better suited for Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; than English Language and Usage's meta website and this especially pertains to the software restrictions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/199272&quot;&gt;This question has been answered there by Shog9.&lt;/a&gt; It is meant to prevent mass deletion by frustrated users, which would cause the loss of many possibly useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do remember that Stack Exchange does not consider our posts to be our sole property, but rather a valuable communal possession. Aside from requiring everything we post to be subject to a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license as indicated on the bottom of every page, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16114/delete-accepted-answer&quot;&gt;users may not delete accepted answers&lt;/a&gt; and anything we post and later delete is subject to be undeleted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;by users with access to moderator tools&lt;/a&gt;, which aside from the formally elected moderators, also applies to a lesser extent to people like yourself with ten thousand or more reputation points. If a whole bunch of these disappeared, it would take quite a bit of effort to track down the good posts and make them publicly viewable to people who may benefit from them again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reducing the number of questions a user may delete to a reasonable number probably makes it easier to spot problematic deletion and reverse the damage before it becomes too bad. Five may not seem like very many to long time users, but we also have newer users with fewer posts to consider and it seems to me like it is usually more than enough if you are only noticing this now, as Shog9's answer is over a year old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T20:04:28.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T23:27:13.063" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering that Peter Shor said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Except that it's not an exact duplicate. This question deals with &quot;these kind of X&quot;, with a plural determinant and a singular word from kind/type/sort, and those questions deal with &quot;this kind&quot; or &quot;these kinds&quot;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Janus Bahs Jaquet said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'This is decidedly not a duplicate of the question it’s been marked as a duplicate of. It’s a completely different question, and none of the answers in the dupe (or the related questions in Matt’s comment) address this question.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why is the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70341/these-sort-of-things-is-it-grammatical-2-670-000-hits-on-google&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;These sort of things&amp;quot;: is it grammatical? (2,670,000 hits on Google)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;closed as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T09:13:15.317" Title="&quot;These sort of things&quot;: is it grammatical? (2,670,000 hits on Google) | Does reopening my question seem justified, and will you help me do it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-18T16:34:58.853" Score="9" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question got migrated from EL&amp;amp;U to ELL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/119865/is-may-be-not-correct&quot;&gt;Is “It may be not” correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at this question as people who just give &quot;yes, that's grammatical&quot; or &quot;no, that's not grammatical&quot; type answers to users, then we might indeed want to move this question to ELL. However, if this is a site for linguists and serious language enthusiasts, this question belongs on this site here. The reason is that the syntax behind this question is quite sophisticated and is of significant interest to linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It concerns why these sentences are grammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob is happy but Ben is not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob might be happy but Ben might not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob might be happy but Ben might not be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these sentences are ungrammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Bob has been happy but Ben has been not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Bob might be happy, but Ben might be not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Bob wants to go, but Ben wants to not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want to know why? Erm, we'd better get this question reopened over here then - because this question will need several good answers from knowledgeable respondents to do it justice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please could we get this question back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T17:28:26.653" Title="Could we get this question back from ELL, please?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:04:18.407" Score="6" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to get downvotes just because the downvoters' point of view differs from yours, no matter how many valuable references you have provided? Please see this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373692/where-is-the-subject-in-this-sentence/373696#373696&quot;&gt;Where is the subject in &amp;quot;as was traditional for unmarried women&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (Comments included, if possible, as proof of my efforts to reach consensus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T22:42:39.603" Title="Being penalized because of their reluctance to admit a different point of view?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10045" CreationDate="2017-02-19T06:17:24.523" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;People may downvote whenever they think an answer is not useful. Sources are good in general, but they aren't guaranteed to be useful. It's possible for sources to be incorrect, and some people might judge an answer that cites incorrect (in their view) sources as &quot;not useful&quot;. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Your answer currently has a net positive score, and it was at a disadvantage because the sources were not present initially (didn't most of the downvotes occur before you edited the question to add references?). I don't think it is likely to keep accumulating downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main analysis you present, that &quot;as&quot; is a relative pronoun, seems to be disputed by several recent analysts. I understand that you don't fully endorse this analysis, you are just describing it, but I think you may put too much emphasis on Fowler. Fowler was an influential figure for the &quot;prescriptive grammar/style/usage guide&quot; tradition, but as far as I know he is not actually considered a particularly important analyst of grammar from a linguistic perspective. (This isn't intended as a knock on Fowler—I own the new printing of the first edition, but see for example this &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagehat.com/the-bookshelf-fowler-classic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Hat post about David Crystal's introduction to this edition&lt;/a&gt;.) Fowler is also not especially recent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your answer might gain more points if you made a new edit that focuses more on Simon-Vandenbergen and Noël's summary of the viewpoints of various more recent grammarians, which seems very helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you certainly don't have to do this. As I said, I think your answer is fine as it is, and I will be surprised (and disappointed) if its score decreases significantly in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T06:17:24.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10048" CreationDate="2017-02-19T20:54:51.460" Score="4" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious and intrigued, not outraged.  Has the situation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373768/is-there-an-idiom-available-that-is-exactly-opposite-to-cake-walk-or-childs&quot;&gt;Is there an idiom available, that is exactly opposite to &amp;quot;Cake walk&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Child&amp;#39;s play&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; happened before?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer has a net of 47 downvotes (12 upvotes and 59 downvotes). When I first noticed it, it had been accepted and had a net 13 (or maybe 11) downvotes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many commenters disagreed; the user continues to defend his answer against all comers.  I don't want to debate the virtues or lack thereof of the answer, nor ask what can be done, which is probably nothing.  (The OP has left the planet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, all I am asking is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this a first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it curious that the delta in the answerer's rep because of this question remains slightly positive (even without the +15 for acceptance) as the total number of votes increases, and wonder if anyone has any insight as to the psychology of the voters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum:&lt;/strong&gt;  I am starting to think of bear-baiting. It is time to discreetly offer the answerer an out.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T04:27:23.273" Title="Has anything like the Cake Walk question happened on ELU (or any other SE) before?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10047" CreationDate="2017-02-19T21:14:17.633" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to the ostensible question &quot;Is this a first?&quot; is &quot;Yes, probably&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to view &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?page=3947&amp;amp;tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aa&quot;&gt;answers with lowest votes&lt;/a&gt;, and that answer heads &amp;mdash; or ends &amp;mdash; the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Cake walk&quot; answer is currently the lowest-voted accepted answer by quite a long way; the next lowest is &amp;minus;25 for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190273/enjoy-the-rest-of-your-day-what-is-the-name-for-such-expressions/190515?s=197310|0.0000#190515&quot;&gt;'Enjoy the rest of your day'. What is the name for such expressions?&lt;/a&gt; which (at the time of this answer) last received a downvote in March 2015; since then it has received three upvotes. That answer's vote split is currently &amp;minus;30/+5. It's the accepted answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an answer to have received &lt;em&gt;such&lt;/em&gt; a negative aggregate in four days is probably unprecedented. Unfortunately, plotting the timing of votes on posts is horrendously expensive and difficult: it's possible that there have been other posts which went downhill very quickly and have since been redeemed by upvotes to wind up further from the end of the voting list. It's difficult to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as psychology of voters is concerned, I can only speak for myself. J.R's comment is apposite and I upvoted that when I downvoted the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just because adulting &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; hard doesn't mean &lt;em&gt;adulting&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;means&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;hard.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;This task is really adulting?&quot; Oh, please. &lt;em&gt;Adulting&lt;/em&gt; is hardly &quot;exactly synonymous with ... strenuous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer doesn't answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T21:14:17.633" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10045" CreationDate="2017-02-19T22:42:39.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was somewhat involved with this business, and down votes mean little to me. For me , it is the practice of grammar that is important, not the theory, or, theories. Without proper care, grammar theory can take precedence over grammar practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had some difficulty adjusting to the protocols of this community. I am trying to adjust, and making some progress. If someone wishes to slap a down vote on me, that is not my business. My business is  improving how I practice English, if I can.  My only concern with down votes is they often come with no explanation. This practice seems pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206690" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T22:42:39.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T15:34:12.613" Score="-2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374510/is-there-an-idiom-phrase-which-contains-the-word-head-to-mean-thinking-hard-t&quot;&gt;This recent question&lt;/a&gt; had too many tags, probably because there were pairs of tags (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;) that were synonyms of each other, and the poster didn't know which one to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we make these pairs of tags into synonyms, so that there's less tag proliferation? That is, make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; synonyms, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:43.433" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T17:07:08.237" Title="Make [idioms] and [phrases] synonyms with their respective [-request] tags?" Tags="|feature-request|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10050" CreationDate="2017-02-20T16:04:53.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view: &lt;strong&gt;absolutely not.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; tag is not the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; the first is for questions about phrases, the second for requesting phrases. Similarly for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idioms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idioms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;: they are related as they are both about idioms, but a &lt;strong&gt;request for&lt;/strong&gt; an idiom is not the same as a &lt;strong&gt;question about&lt;/strong&gt; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prompted by this question, I've edited a couple of the tag info pages to make that distinction clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is wrongly tagged, the solution is to edit it [or suggest an edit, if you have less than the 2000 rep required for a direct edit].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T17:07:08.237" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T17:07:08.237" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10035" CreationDate="2017-02-20T17:48:20.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two pages you found you took as representative of the site as a whole. I get that. Yours is not so much a question as it is a bug report on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage community, or at least those two pages. As a moderator, I am here to investigate such reports, but it’s hard without seeing the search terms and the resulting links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried anyway. I googled queries matching your pattern until I found two with our site high in the search results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=correct+use+of+the+word+eponymous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;correct use of the word eponymous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=correct+use+of+the+word+decimate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;correct use of the word decimate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting questions, answers, and commentary all seemed appropriately collegiate: respectful and honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49281&quot;&gt;One question&lt;/a&gt; has an accepted answer, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198997&quot;&gt;the other&lt;/a&gt; is closed pending the asker showing their prior research results. This type of closure might seem unfriendly to first-time visitors. However, showing research results is a precondition for asking experts on any Stack Exchange site. It helps both the asker and the experts, and is unlikely to ever go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T17:48:20.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10054" CreationDate="2017-02-20T23:11:33.500" Score="7" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a VLQ flag on a one-liner answer with no definition, reference or link, and which had been answered with the same word more than three years earlier.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/119844/noun-for-a-person-who-deeply-appreciates-aesthetics/374517#374517&quot;&gt;Noun for &amp;quot;a person who deeply appreciates aesthetics&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word you're looking for may be &quot;aesthete&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;deleted from review 7 hours ago  by NVZ, Dan Bron, pyobum, Glorfindel,&#xA;  Skooba, Hank &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;answered 18 hours ago    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7  This answer has already been posted, and with a definition, source&#xA;  and link. – ab2 18 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just puzzled!  Did my flag come too soon after the answer was posted and so was automatically declined because I gave the poster no opportunity to improve his answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T02:49:52.700" Title="Puzzled: why was my VLQ flag declined on this answer, which was not only VLQ but a duplicate of an earlier answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10053" CreationDate="2017-02-21T08:56:13.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;On your 'flag summary' page, ab2, check to see whether the reason that the moderator gave for declining the flag looked like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—because that's the message I received in response to my VLQ flag on the &lt;strong&gt;very same question&lt;/strong&gt; you ask about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a mod got annoyed that we flagged the post instead of marking it for deletion (although it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; deleted just 11 hours after posting). Or maybe the mod was just having a bad day. Or maybe there has been a sea change in mods' tolerance for flags that don't &quot;require their intervention.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had always imagined that when an answer garners enough delete votes to trigger deletion, any flags associated with the answer switch off (meaning that mods don't have to deal with those flags at all), and that flags remain live only when too few delete votes are recorded to delete the answer within some arbitrary period (say, a week). If that's the case, I don't know why any moderator should have been made aware of our flags in this particular instance, since that should have happened only if the answer were still live after the arbitrary period had elapsed—unless we had flagged the answer for spam, rude/abusive, or a customized reason, which we did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flaggers have also received advice from moderators at various times to flag answers that don't seem salvageable, as for example in these comments by MetaEd to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9536/why-was-my-vlq-flag-rejected&quot;&gt;Why was my VLQ flag rejected?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider that a Very Low Quality flag is a flag for deletion. But a wrong or unreliable answer is still valuable to readers because it attracts downvotes. A downvoted answer warns a reader “don’t go this way”. A deleted answer does not have the opportunity to warn readers of anything. Also, moderators have been told we are not arbitrators of whether an answer is wrong. That decision is left to the whole community by way of up- and downvotes. Deletion is for answers on which a downvote would be wasted: answers that are not even wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, if the answer is right or wrong, reliable or unreliable, vote it up or down. Otherwise, if unsalvageable, flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I can't both flag a bad question and vote to delete it (unless I leave the review queue), I have often flagged rather than voted to delete VLQs and NAAs. That way, if the votes cast for deleting a bad question don't reach its threshold for deletion, a moderator will see the flag for reviewing the still-live answer after it has been up for a week and can judge whether to delete it anyway. On other occasions, I jump to the original answer and both flag it and vote to delete it; however, if you try to do this in the wrong order, you'll find that you can't do both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the moderator's reason for declining our flags represents a shift in policy by EL&amp;amp;U mods as a group, I will submit fewer flags in future. My intention never was to make work for moderators; it was to reduce the likelihood that bad answers might slip through the review process unscathed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (2/22/17)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a series of comments below this answer, Janus Bahs Jacquet clarified what must have happened to the VLQ flags that ab2 and I left on the original post in question. In the event that his explanation gets deleted for some reason, I will reproduce it here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The flags we're dealing with here were definitely declined by a mod, not a queue: the reviewers unanimously voted to delete, and a decline reason was given, which is only an option for mods. But that reason makes no sense whatsoever for a VLQ flag since those do not require moderator intervention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be quite out of character and completely pointless for any of our mods to decline a flag that requires no mod action with a statement that flags should not be used to make mods aware of things that do not require their intervention. The only logical conclusion is that the message was [not] in response to ab and Sven’s flags, but to a “requires moderator intervention” flag which we obviously cannot see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I remember mods saying in the past that when declining flags, it is not possible to do so individually: all pending flags are declined at once; so declining an incorrect “requires moderator intervention” would automatically also decline ab and Sven’s correct VLQ flags. [See &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4446/disputing-flag-reviews/4449#4449&quot;&gt;Disputing flag reviews&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot is that the moderators weren't annoyed at the VLQ flags from ab2 and me in connection with this post, and their standards for finding such flags helpful haven't changed. Instead, the VLQ flags that ab2 and I submitted got bundled with a flag that required a moderator response—and when the moderator rejected that flag, the other flags on the same post got rejected, too, en masse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for solving the mystery here, Janus!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T02:49:52.700" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10053" CreationDate="2017-02-21T13:57:38.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your flag was most likely declined by a moderator who might have considered the answer to be technically correct (so NAA flag would be declined) and salvageable by fleshing out the answer (so VLQ flag would be declined).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has happened to me at times when I flag such duplicates as VLQ. The response I get varies as does the moderator who handled the flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T13:57:38.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10053" CreationDate="2017-02-21T14:01:53.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a duplicate answer posted hours later adds nothing new to what is explained by existing answers, then it should be removed to reduce clutter. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/21059/309993&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to think such duplicates don't deserve VLQ or NAA flags, as they often are valid answers, albeit of &lt;em&gt;okay&lt;/em&gt; quality. And I was reluctant to downvote them and thereby give up my brownie points, as such answers are not technically incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had at times used a custom flag, and elevator pitched mods to remove a duplicate, and I'd say there's a 50/50 chance of getting my flag declined, and if so, sometimes with a message that goes like &quot;use standard flags for this&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nowadays I lean more towards 1, but sometimes I try 2, where I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote and leave a comment about how it's a pointless duplicate, perhaps guilt-tripping the answerer into deleting it. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1096/how-should-we-deal-with-duplicate-answers#comment31883_15979&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take the risk of getting flags declined and go ahead with a standard VLQ flag for borderline low quality duplicates, hoping that the community's review queues handle the matter before some mod decides to visit the moderator's review queue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I had 20k points, I'd maybe try replacing 2 with &quot;use my own delete votes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I were asked to make a feature request, it'd be something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six or so &quot;pointless duplicate&quot; standard flags from users with 3k or so should automatically delete the duplicate answer, given that it has less than a certain score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T14:01:53.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10035" CreationDate="2017-02-21T23:02:04.203" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a reader and a rare asker, not an answerer, so basically I'm one of those &quot;eternal newbie&quot; types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the problem that you brought up is pertinent to any Stackexchange subforum, not this one exclusively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A while back I had to leave the financial subforum for a similar reason... I naively came in with a succinct question about making an anonymous payment that stemmed solely from my social anxiety problems, and instead was treated essentially like the greatest scum of the Earth and a sponsor of terrorism, or at least a druglord-wannabe craving to launder some blood money. It happened well over a couple of years back, and I am still deeply shaken by the reception that I got there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always seemed to me that the main &quot;secret sauce&quot; of the Stackexchange forums was spurring competition with their upvote/downote system, along with badges, bounties and the inevitable &quot;fight&quot; for getting your answer accepted... which on the one hand results in nice and detailed answers, while on the other brings some degree of hostility, tension and dare I say, occasional herd thinking, to the table making the forums more stressful than more &quot;traditional&quot; forums like Wordreference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you stick around and cast your own votes on what you consider good questions, though! During my limited stay I've witnessed some very nice and insightful users on this particular subforum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57332" LastEditorUserId="57332" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T23:07:21.627" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T23:07:21.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T09:48:50.867" Score="4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just asking out of curiosity, and this is probably nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who decides what font to use for a particular community?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm assuming, an SE employee.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why was Georgia, a serif font, chosen for our site over, say, a sans-serif like Arial?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm assuming ELUers are avid readers and most books use serifs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T13:49:34.600" Title="About the font used on ELU" Tags="|discussion|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T11:19:55.607" Score="-10" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll assume &lt;strong&gt;Upvote&lt;/strong&gt; = &quot;Yeah, why not!&quot; &lt;strong&gt;Downvote&lt;/strong&gt; = &quot;No! That's unnecessary.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10058/50044&quot;&gt;learned&lt;/a&gt; that our site's (serif) font &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2813/50044&quot;&gt;Georgia&lt;/a&gt; was chosen by a designer (employed by SE), and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/400/50044&quot;&gt;purpose&lt;/a&gt; of choosing a serif font over a sans-serif (e.g. Arial) was to &quot;feature beautiful typography and invoke a vintage/warm feeling&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that reasoning, and that most of our users are &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&quot;, and that most users here are avid readers, and are therefore used to serif fonts that are believed to improve readability (at least for long passages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that is true, I feel like I agree more with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/415/50044&quot;&gt;nohat ♦&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;by adopting the proposed site style we run the risk of misleading new visitors that we are a bunch of obstinate old fuddy-duddies who reject anything newfangled and eschew modern approaches to linguistic questions&quot;. And I thought exactly that when I was new here, 4 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that sans-serif fonts appear more modern (at least to me), and that our relatively new sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; uses it, and that our mobile apps do too. I don't know what (and why) other SE sites use serif fonts, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we change our fonts to look more modern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B.&lt;/strong&gt; This is not a feature request. This is not a recommendation for Arial. The site font does not really affect me personally, because I frequently tinker with CSS, and mix and match different fonts and themes for ELU. This is only out of curiosity. So vote. Vote up or down. Don't hesitate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T02:16:27.330" Title="Should we change our fonts to look more modern?" Tags="|discussion|font|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10058" CreationDate="2017-02-23T13:48:19.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are seriously suggesting we abandon our site’s signature look, one deliberately reminiscent of &lt;em&gt;“a book tastefully set in a serifed face and proper text figures”&lt;/em&gt;, then you may be shocked at how passionately people can feel about matters of aesthetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, recommending Arial betrays so stunning an insensitivity to typesetting that little short of a change to Comic Sans might risk leaving us more open to derision and scorn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Graphic Design SE site&lt;/a&gt;, which has several questions related to this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T13:49:34.600" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T13:49:34.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10059" CreationDate="2017-02-23T13:56:39.813" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get what you’re saying: the message of the Georgia font is that the site’s old-fashioned. Every element of a graphic design has a message, and that’s not the message you want to send.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that’s not the message I got when I first visited the site. I liked the font because English is beautiful and has a long and interesting history. That fact was acknowledged by the choice of Georgia: it is both readable and beautiful, and celebrates the history of the written language. I knew I was “among friends”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suspect that this font is attractive to many English experts and serious enthusiasts for the same reason. These people love the beauty and history of English, and are exactly the people we want to attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that I would oppose a font change. Georgia has some real technical problems and limitations. But let’s not go more modern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T13:56:39.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T15:36:31.853" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I saw this today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/375128/typo-in-an-important-email&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/375128/typo-in-an-important-email&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had identified an typo error in a mail which I just sent (like sending wrong date for an event), what should be my best correction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example : Please read it as 'A' instead of 'B' Please ignore 'A' it is 'B'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which was rightly closed as &amp;quot;Primarily Opinion Based&amp;quot; by 5 different users, including a diamond moderator. In defense of his question, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/375128/typo-in-an-important-email#comment879130_375128&quot;&gt;OP replied to the closure&lt;/a&gt; with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I marked this under &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/email&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;email&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;email&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; – sudheer maddula 1 hour ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I went and looked, and yep, indeed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/email/info&quot;&gt;the tag wiki for [email]&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any queries concerning the language, &lt;strong&gt;or appropriate use of words in emails&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. greetings, salutations, body, or farewell words. Generally on words acceptable or not or its proper usage relating to emails&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to directly invite off-topic POB (subjective) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only 36 questions with this tag. I haven't looked through all of them individually, but unless someone can make the case that there are kinds of legitimate, non-subjective questions which can be asked about emails specifically (as opposed to any other medium), &lt;strong&gt;I'm going to burninate this tag&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want this tag burninated, downvote and make an argument in the answers (or upvote an existing answer which makes an argument you agree with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this tag is unlikely ever to add value to the site and is better burninated, upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T05:01:19.353" Title="Is the 'email' tag obsolete?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10062" CreationDate="2017-02-23T15:52:20.310" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki seems to invite requests for email writing advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requests to proofread or help write emails are off topic. Requests to critique writing style are off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this tag would rightly be applied to good questions about salutations, closing words, and other elements of correspondence where the questions and answers are reusable by other visitors. And we do answer questions about style in the sense of register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see many tagged questions which essentially want to know about differences between how salutations and closing words are used in email and print mail, and generally how using email instead of paper mail affects register, especially formality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not always good questions, but that is not the fault of the tag nor does it prevent someone from writing a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe the right solution is to clarify the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T16:25:31.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T16:25:31.013" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10059" CreationDate="2017-02-23T20:40:17.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first encountered English Language &amp;amp; Usage (by stumbling over it during a Google search), three things about it immediately appealed to me: the design of the page I found myself on seemed warm, pleasantly subdued, and uncrowded, as though the designer expected that the content could stand on its own and speak for itself without fancy effects; there was no advertising to distract my attention and compromise the experience; and one or more of the people who had posted answers on the page I visited seemed to know what they were talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think EL&amp;amp;U's design (including the choice of fonts and the layout of additional linked material) shows remarkable skill and refined aesthetic awareness. Whoever did the design work did a superb job, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only changes to this website that might make me rethink my participation here would be an influx of advertising or a hostile takeover of the answering function (both in the form of answers submitted and in the form of upvotes and downvotes assigned) by people who are clueless about what constitutes an informed and accurate answer to questions posted here. Nevertheless, I appreciate EL&amp;amp;U's page design every time I visit the site and submit content to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T20:40:17.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T22:36:11.463" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see my normal custom avatar up in the top bar and on my profile, but when I edit or answer a question, some horrid little blue square with white dots around the edges appears next to my attribution-box now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that this behaviour is quite new (as in the last day or two; I just noticed it this morning, and thought I'd give it a little time in case it &quot;self-corrected&quot;), not related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9509/users-lost-avatars&quot;&gt;Users' Lost Avatars&lt;/a&gt; question from last fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to my black-eyed photo?  Where did I go?  Will I ever come back, or am I trapped behind a blue box forever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:02:41.727" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T16:58:13.857" Title="Where did my custom avatar go?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10059" CreationDate="2017-02-24T02:16:27.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georgia&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a modern typeface, released in 1996, designed specifically for &lt;em&gt;clarity at low resolutions on the screen&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221516807_A_Study_of_Fonts_Designed_for_Screen_Display&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A 1998 study&lt;/a&gt; found it superior to Times New Roman, and although study participants subjectively preferred its sans-serif contemporary Verdana, Georgia had the superior performance for readability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the same token, this upstart is not especially beloved by us type fuddy-duddies. Compare EL&amp;amp;U with &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Christianity.SE&lt;/a&gt; and its employment of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lusitana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lusitana&lt;/a&gt;, a typeface modeled on lettering from 16th-century manuscripts. It's not a choice I would have made. There are reasons why &lt;a href=&quot;https://designforhackers.com/blog/why-you-dont-use-garamond-on-the-web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you don't use Garamond on the web&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern seems to be that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; serif font used online communicates a lack of modernity, &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Ask Patents&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt; notwithstanding. I would say first, that this is not the case, and second, that looking modern should not be the controlling factor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arial was designed to match the metrics of Helvetica, which was developed for print in the 1950s. Its long tenure in corporate communications may have led the public to associate it with stability, but to me, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.printmag.com/typography/swiss-style-principles-typefaces-designers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swiss Style&lt;/a&gt; is about as modern as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stlouiscarmuseum.com/blog/2014/12/04/history-of-the-tailfin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tailfins on a Cadillac&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the era of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fastcodesign.com/1670323/the-higgs-boson-announced-in-comic-sans-reveals-a-failing-of-modern-type&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CERN Comic Sans kerfuffle&lt;/a&gt; (at least it wasn't a CERN kerning kerfuffle), I appreciate that legibility is far from the only, or even the most important, factor in selecting a typeface. Most of our visitors are not typography geeks; their reaction to the look of the site will be visceral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do believe that our current aesthetic is well-balanced, not unlike the underlying tone of our regular participants. Although we may characterize positions as &lt;em&gt;prescriptivist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;descriptivist&lt;/em&gt;, even the most lenient descriptivist does not favor total anarchy, and even the most rigid prescriptivist does not want to realign the language along Johnsonian, much less Jonsonian lines. Similarly, we want to communicate authority but not dogmatism, and modernity without faddishness. I think we do that well enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Stray observations: SE seems to have changed its default font stack for themed sites to start with Open Sans, which is more or less the Arial of the post-Microsoft world. &lt;a href=&quot;https://android.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Android.SE&lt;/a&gt; uses Roboto, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Sharepoint.SE&lt;/a&gt; uses Segoe UI, which seem appropriate, but Ask Different has not moved to &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/visual-design/typography/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;San Francisco&lt;/a&gt;. Slab serifs are much in vogue, but only found in a couple of places, for which I applaud the restraint of SE's designers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:54.117" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T02:16:27.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10066" CreationDate="2017-02-24T16:58:13.857" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your image's address is &lt;code&gt;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08e5993e7842278d5a35f526c6a285e2?s=32&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/code&gt;, so your image was uploaded via Gravatar. The problem is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; new; it started months ago (6 to be exact) and has gradually been affecting more and more users. Gravatar is having issues, so everyone with an image through them should switch (including those with an Identicon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should upload your image again through Imgur so it ends up on &lt;code&gt;i.stack.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt;, which is guaranteed not to change or die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had this problem too (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/283643/323179&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;), and that was how I solved it. If you check, you'll see my image's address is &lt;code&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D2CgS.png&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T16:58:13.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10062" CreationDate="2017-02-25T05:01:19.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand what makes electronic mail distinct enough from paper mail that it deserves its own tag. I do not deny that there are things that you might find in a piece of electronic mail, that you will not find in a written letter, but the status of &quot;A.O.L. speak&quot; and emoticons being a part of the English Language is questionable, and even if we posit that it is a part of the English Language as defined by our website, these things are scarcely &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; to email, as they can be found in other forms of internet discussion. If we really need to discuss such things, which is a discussion that is probably better saved for another meta-question, a more general internet tag would be more appropriate for discussing these topics on the whole, or maybe specific tags for emoticons or 1337.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason I can think of for somebody to tag a question with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/email&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;email&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;email&lt;/a&gt; is because the question is motivated by a desire to write one. However, a tag made for the sole purpose of describing a person's motivation for asking a question is probably a meta-tag and meta-tags are against Stack Exchange policy as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;The Death of Meta Tags&lt;/a&gt; which was written by one of the website's co-founders, Jeff Atwood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Meta Ed that there are aspects of written correspondence that might be well suited for this particular website, since the form of it differs slightly from typical English. However they would be better categorized under a more general tag name. I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correspondence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correspondence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correspondence&lt;/a&gt; tags are better candidates for such topics though. Some of the more recent questions with those tags also have or should (which I only write for lack of a better word) have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/email&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;email&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;email&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt; is by far the more popular of the two alternatives, I actually suggest making &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/email&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;email&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;email&lt;/a&gt; synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correspondence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correspondence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correspondence&lt;/a&gt;. One reason for this is that the letter-writing tag is a little more ambiguous and has clarification the correspondence tag would not need which is &quot;(that is, a written communication between people, not the writing of individual alphabetic characters)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards, I would also propose correspondence be given the following tag information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions regarding the unique aspects of written English in correspondence, whether it is in the form of e-mail or a paper letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, I suppose correspondence technically indicates that such communications are being mutually interchanged, but I doubt that this would make much of a practical difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is later decided that we should excise all such questions for being primarily stylistic, and hence opinion based, I think it'll be easier for us to remove just the one tag than to hunt down all three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T05:01:19.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-25T13:14:04.773" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question here was rightly closed as a duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/375299/which-is-grammatically-correct-there-is-tea-and-juice-or-there-are-tea-and-j/&quot;&gt;Which is grammatically correct: &amp;quot;There is tea and juice&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;There are tea and juice&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has currently been linked to the following three other questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58676/should-i-say-there-is-a-handful-of-or-there-are-a-handful-of&quot;&gt;Should I say &amp;quot;there is a handful of...&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;there are a handful of....&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141192/there-is-a-lot-of-food-and-fruit-vs-there-are-a-lot-of-food-and-fruit&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;There is a lot of food and fruit&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;there are a lot of food and fruit&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140854/there-is-there-are-depends-on-plurality-of-the-first-list-element-or-not&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;There Is&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;There are&amp;quot; depends on plurality of the first list element or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These appear in a different order on the original page. Now my feeling is that numbers (1) and (2) here are about Determiners and mass nouns. The Determiners in these examples have an impact on whether we see plural or singular verb inflection. Another main issue is the mass nouns involved. The coordination is a supplementary issue in only one of the questions and not a main concern of either of these questions or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the third question is a genuine duplicate because the main issue in these two questions is the coordination appearing as the Complement of the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt;. Can we change the links so that the question is only linked to number (3), please? It would reduce the spagetti junction of question links and also provide a more reliable final landing page for readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T11:57:35.557" Title="Can we change the linked-to question here, folks?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5270" CreationDate="2017-02-28T19:34:43.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The value of doing this is highlighted by today's Imgur downtime. We have questions like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374768/a-pronunciation-question-of-slough&quot;&gt;A pronunciation question of slough&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which make no sense without the embedded image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem for sighted users today, and it's a problem for blind users all of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T19:34:43.050" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10075" CreationDate="2017-02-28T20:19:38.307" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a situation today where a post was answered by 6 different people. One of the users who posted an answer, the highest voted answer, decided to comment on each of the other answers asking for each of them to upvote the others' answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this seems like it would be frowned upon from the community and mods. I see this as a very minimal variation of fraud, as upvotes are supposed to signify usefulness to the user voting, not just as a reward for the users posting, and especially not as an empty reward. I have links to the post and pictures but do not want to single out anyone in case there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not looking to blast anyone, just genuinely curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon further reading, it appears the comment was made as a joke, kind of. The post is related to redundancy and it looks like the comment was made on all answers in an attempt to be redundant, which isn't necessarily any better. The comments have been deleted but it still doesn't answer my question of how the community feels about something of this nature...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206168" LastEditorUserId="206168" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T20:49:29.047" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T17:52:53.210" Title="Users who answer a question and ask for upvotes" Tags="|discussion|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10073" CreationDate="2017-02-28T21:54:20.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doesn't sound particularly worrisome to me. The comments you saw were maybe not useful (probably why they were deleted), but it's not like posting a comment asking for upvotes on certain answers (if I'm understanding this correctly?) is anything like, say, using sock-puppets to upvote or downvote answers. Leaving a comment doesn't affect the score of an answer or force people to vote one way or another. To say more I'd have to know the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T21:54:20.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10073" CreationDate="2017-03-01T01:59:20.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I can say is, it's only comments possibly meant as a joke and not an actual case of voting fraud. And since people don't necessarily like being told what to do, I'm sure most people won't care to upvote others' answers that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And flag such comments as &lt;em&gt;no longer needed&lt;/em&gt;. Enough flags will remove them without requiring a moderator's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T17:52:53.210" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T17:52:53.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10035" CreationDate="2017-03-01T13:19:30.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago I used to participate in Usenet discussions, which routinely degenerated into &quot;flame wars&quot; and other silly useless stuff. And I see the good in the Stack Exchange ambition to set aside this space for a narrower and constructive purpose. It's philosophically interesting to note how badly it works, with well-meaning, intelligent, hard-working people implementing such capricious and absurd judgments with so little relation to consistency or merit. (I am thinking of the Stack Exchange in general, and not one exchange in particular.) I guess that it teaches the same lesson that many life experiences teach: we find less agreement than we expect and a greater demand for patience, kindness, and the courage to be derided for trying to communicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastEditorUserId="214952" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T13:26:48.270" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T13:26:48.270" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-03T07:53:59.107" Score="-1" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376106/whats-the-most-commonly-used-opposite-of-im-happy-for-you/376109#376109&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold as too broad. Actually out of the 10 answers  posted. after 5k plus views, users seem to suggest that just three are on spot and useful. OP is asking for the more common expressions and the choice doesn't seem so broad in the end. &#xA;I think that the question and the answers are useful and productive for present and future users. &#xA;As a side note, there are hundreds of questions on ELU that have attracted more than 10 answers, should we VTC them all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T21:56:20.313" Title="Please VTR the &quot;I am happy for you&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10078" CreationDate="2017-03-03T14:29:23.890" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;“If this is not Too Broad, nothing is”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not believe that the question under discussion was a good one for our site or format, and I thought this for more than one reason alone, but I can honestly assure you that its number of views forms no part of my reasoning and position in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its asker asks us two “questions”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first of those two questions asks whether the 3×2 suggestions given there &lt;em&gt;“sound idiomatic to native speakers”&lt;/em&gt;. Boolean proofreading questions that just need to run something past a native (or indeed, simply a competent) speaker of English are never a good fit for “our site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts” as our site-description runs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second of those two questions invites whether “there’s any better alternative(s)” to the 3×2 possibilities already offered by the question. If there exists a clearer example of the sort of questions which the &lt;strong&gt;Too Broad&lt;/strong&gt; close-reason was invented for, I am unaware of it.  It is soliciting suggestions, and everyone and their dog will have one, as the ten answers given to date prove, not to mention the scores of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These are not questions&lt;/strong&gt;: instead, they are respectively requests for proofreading and for writing advice, even conversation advice. Requests for suggestions can have no correct answer. They are lightning rods for drive-by posters from across the network and across the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naming no names, I would ask that our members without prejudice please look over the various existing answers on that question for the effort invested in crafting those answers, the scholarship and original words behind them. Does that seem fitting and proper—right, to you? Are their scores indicative of appreciation for the effort, for the quality of those answers, or are they merely a “yeah, man!” popularity festival of agreement?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how many of those so-called “answers” are in fact nothing but &lt;strong&gt;curt copypasta snippets&lt;/strong&gt;, a linkfest elaborated upon with little to no reasoning, explanation, or original words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, nothing that contributes to the quality of our site. If that question is reöpened, then I’m sure we can easily triple its answer-count in no time flat.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn’t make this a question that fits our site well, and it doesn’t make its supposed answers ones we should admire as sterling examples of the sort of thing we wish to see more of.  Indeed they are almost all of them the very opposite of that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everyone has an opinion&lt;/strong&gt;, an opinion which they are perfectly happy to provide us with in spans fitting well within the trademarked 140-character stultiloquence of the Twitterverse, with room to spare. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not why we are here. Network-wide, the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A format aims higher than one would expect of Yahoo Answers or Twitter, and our site is no exception to that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s keep it that way, shall we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:55:24.757" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:55:24.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10087" CreationDate="2017-03-03T18:48:00.310" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that some questions are unnecessarily placed on hold. A short question like this one (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376574/word-for-a-person-who-often-use-technical-professional-words-with-others&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376574/word-for-a-person-who-often-use-technical-professional-words-with-others&lt;/a&gt;) is not necessarily unclear, and wordy ones are not necessarily clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way in which &quot;ordinary users&quot; can express their view that the question does not deserve or need to be kept on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T08:58:08.347" Title="Is there any way to counteract votes placing a question &quot;on hold&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10078" CreationDate="2017-03-03T20:04:20.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I disagree with some of the already presented reasons, I actually agree that the question should not be reopened in its current form. However, I deeply believe wherever it is reasonably possible, that the community should strive to get questions reopened since in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;The War of the Closes&lt;/a&gt; post by Stack Exchange's Vice President of Community Growth, Jay Hanlon one of the main reasons for closure is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The goal was always for some closures to drive an edit, improve, re-open cycle. The user gets helped, gets better at asking, and the community gets useful content. Unfortunately, since there was no way to know when a question had been improved, this almost never happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;The question is defective, and until it is improved I think it should remain closed. The remainder of this answer will explain some of the reasons I think it is defective, and what might possibly to fix it in the hopes of facilitating our edit to improve and reopen principle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;The comparative analysis of the six phrases in question seems to be a daunting enough task that none of the existing answers tried to address it, instead deciding to skip the matter entirely in favor of only proffering answers to the second question. Despite only technically answering half of the question, these answers garnered many votes for them.  Now I am not strictly of the opinion, that there is a strict finite limit to how many comparisons you may request in a question. After all, we generally prefer longer answers, with facts, reference or [express] expertise to back them up. However there is a vague limit to what's reasonable to expect of us, and what's fair to other people competing for page space and the top answer, which is laxly defined as needing less than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;the length of an entire book to adequately explain the answer by our help center&lt;/a&gt;. Now I don't imagine that both of the questions, even when combined do that much, &lt;em&gt;but nevertheless, when all of the people answering are willing to skip one half of it to answer the other, and the voters find that generally acceptable, it seems to me as if you are asking for too much of us all at once.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&amp;emsp;Also, I am not presuming that the high vote count is strictly because it is an especially meritorious question, but because like the now retired Rathony has often suggested to me, that many questions become &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot; and receive a disproportionate amount of attention as a result of being on the front page. This compromises the fidelity of the raw voting results as an indicator of the sort of questions we want people to ask on this website it is meant to be. We should preferably compare questions with a a similar number of views, so we know just as many opportunities to vote exist. Moreover, because votes for a question and votes for its answers are separate counts, I think the votes for the question should be the ones counted as being representative of its quality, and not the votes for its answers. When I checked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/320976/in-the-book-the-wealth-of-nations-what-does-it-mean-to-receive-money-by-tale&quot;&gt;In the book, The Wealth of Nations, what does it mean to &amp;quot;receive money by tale&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; it had 1449 views and 15 votes for it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169092/why-soft-drink&quot;&gt;Why &amp;quot;soft&amp;quot; drink?&lt;/a&gt; it had 3875 views and 17 votes for it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/285112/english-idiom-or-proverb-equivalent-for-if-everybody-is-doing-it-i-will-also-d&quot;&gt;English idiom or proverb equivalent for &amp;quot;if everybody is doing it, I will also do it&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; it had 5820 views and 20 votes for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;Now a sampling of three probably is not the best for making this determination, but I'll stop there because it's time and space consuming to provide more examples. It seems to me that view to vote ratio is comparatively bad for this question. However, if we applied the view to vote ratio to some of the answers, this does weigh out favorably and for the lowly rated questions, it's harder for late answers to garner votes, so I think tchrist's assertion that the answers are just bad is a little odd.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&amp;emsp;I even wanted to write an answer myself, regarding which of the words I think were better, and which I think were worse, although I decided against it when I realized I did not possess enough of the explicit knowledge necessary to give them the proper treatment, since it seems more syntactic than semantic to me (I can't quite express why &quot;I'm bad for you&quot; feels like something's missing, for instance).&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&amp;emsp;However there is another problem, which I also learned from Rathony. Strictly speaking, we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/222735/can-i-ask-only-one-question-per-post&quot;&gt;one question per post rule&lt;/a&gt; on the Stack Exchange Network. The two distinct questions should either be presented as one if possible, or one of the two questions should be eliminated before this question should really be considered for reopening. I would suggest something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've heard that you won. I'm happy for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An opposite context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've heard that you lost. _________________________&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to fill in the blank that should have the opposite sense of &quot;I'm happy for you&quot;. What's a good expression for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;I think this would &lt;em&gt;sufficiently&lt;/em&gt; narrow down the scope of the answer to reopen it, without invalidating any of the answers. If O.P. reduces the post to just this much, I do not think this question is inherently worse than what we require of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&amp;emsp;Now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;I realize that many of us have our gripes about S.W.Rs.&lt;/a&gt; but much of that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9795/124936&quot;&gt;because we disagree with the manner in which they are being asked&lt;/a&gt; than anything else. More relevantly and importantly, they are also presently considered as valid category of question for the website, so it would be only fair to treat this question like other topical questions of its sort.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&amp;emsp;It has to be the O.P. that edits the question though. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Our editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt; forbid changing the meaning of a question, and the portion I suggest gutting out is almost assuredly the main question. Unfortunately, I doubt the O.P. will be motivated to do this when there is a highly rated accepted answer.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&amp;emsp;As for the O.P's. other question, maybe it could be split off made into a valid &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-choice&lt;/a&gt;. I vaguely remember &lt;em&gt;wanting&lt;/em&gt; to answer it until I realized that I lack the express knowledge to convincingly explain why a phrase like &quot;I'm bad for you.&quot; seems like something is missing, and I felt as if I should not even try because of it. However, exactly what else, if anything, needs to be done to fix it eludes my comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, this question is closed as too broad, because it is too broad, and should stay closed as too broad, until is no longer too broad, if it is ever not too broad, and then it should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T21:56:20.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2017-03-03T20:57:33.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For users with sufficient reputation, it is possible to review close votes using the review tools. I don't know the exact mechanics, but enough &quot;keep open&quot; votes can, I think, counteract close votes on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T20:57:33.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2017-03-03T21:27:52.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO, a question title that consists of twelve words which are then repeated in the question body, deserves to be put on hold for &lt;strong&gt;lack of research and effort&lt;/strong&gt;. Always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if low-rep users want to reopen a question,  the next best thing they can do is visit meta, and ask the community if they agree with the closure. If users (or the mods) believe the question has merit, they will reopen it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is the case here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10029/the-close-vote-in-review-queue-is-meant-to-be-cast-judiciously&quot;&gt;The close vote in review queue is meant to be cast judiciously&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:32.080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T21:27:52.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10085" CreationDate="2017-03-04T10:59:09.950" Score="-7" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it extremely frustrating to find &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67145/how-and-when-should-i-use-by-now&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181106/word-for-words-that-sound-like-the-sound&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt; with the statement &lt;em&gt;&quot;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information&quot;&lt;/em&gt; without going on to actually provide such a link. The statement says to me &quot;boy, this is so easy to answer you shouldn't waste our time with it&quot;, but I feel that if it's so easy to answer, then go ahead and answer it already by providing &quot;a single link to a standard internet reference source&quot;. It reminds me of being in fifth grade and asking my teacher &quot;how do you spell pterodactyl?&quot; and being told &quot;that's what the dictionary is for; look it up.&quot; I never found it because I was looking under &quot;T&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that close explanation statement has been revised and is now more like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic&quot;&lt;/em&gt; but I still feel the same way about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fine with me if we want to close general reference questions as not worth arguing about or spending lots of time on or featuring in results or whatever, but I think it is rude and unhelpful (and has a good chance of being incorrect as well) to say that this question is easily answered elsewhere without providing a link to such an answer. It's almost tautological: if the answer is easy to find, it shouldn't be a burden to require adding it as an answer or comment before closing the question, and if it is too big a burden to find an answer to link to, then &lt;em&gt;ipso facto&lt;/em&gt; answering the question here is worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we at least add a feature &lt;em&gt;allowing&lt;/em&gt;, if not requiring, the people voting to close as General Reference the ability to provide a link to an answer to the question, in a manner similar to how duplicate questions are handled? Over on Stack Overflow we had plenty of people answering questions with LMGTFY before it was banned, and while I don't agree with using Google search results as answers if for no other reason than that they change dramatically over time, those answers showed that there were people willing and able to provide links to answers to trivial questions. Let's at least facilitate that as a possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T16:09:19.803" Title="Answer General Reference Questions with a link anyway" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10084" CreationDate="2017-03-04T16:14:04.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions are not closed like that any more. The close reason for &quot;General Reference&quot; does indeed link to a list of references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376640/which-of-the-2-sentences-is-correct&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T16:14:04.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10084" CreationDate="2017-03-05T08:41:37.937" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just looked at the last seven questions put on hold, just to see what I would find. Every one of them had helpful comments below the closed question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These comments weren't always left by the same people who did the voting, but why should they be? Sometimes I've voted to close after someone else left a helpful comment; sometimes I've left a helpful comment while others were voting to close a question. I can't see any reason why those doing the voting should be the ones who leave comments. I think the community works better when such duties can be voluntarily divided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I see this as a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T08:41:37.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2017-03-05T08:58:08.347" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way for an ordinary user to save a question is by making an edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/376574/revisions&quot;&gt;question you used as your example&lt;/a&gt;. In my mind, this question is badly flawed for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title is too long &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is too scant (it's not even a complete sentence)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are grammatical errors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No example usage is given&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No indication is given whether this should be a complimentary or disparaging term&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all these strikes against it, I think it was probably right to put the question on hold. I've never thought we ought to coddle users who put such little effort into their questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you are asking what can be done. I say, if you really think this question is interesting enough to salvage, then the best course of action would be to click the edit button, and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give the question a better title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expand the body of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fix the grammar/punctuation problems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide an example usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicate whether or not the term should be endearing or disparaging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, you'll have to use a little guesswork when it comes to that last one, but you can always leave a comment saying that if you've guessed wrong, the O.P. is welcome to clarify with another edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing this, you won't just be salvaging the question – you might also be providing a model that can be used by the O.P. in future questions, thereby bettering the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:44.380" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T08:58:08.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10084" CreationDate="2017-03-05T11:35:27.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question title proposes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Answer General Reference Questions with a link anyway&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the OP visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/155980/help-readers-understand-what-link-only-answer-is-in-canned-comments-sent-from&quot;&gt;SE Meta&lt;/a&gt; and propose the same remedy that they recommend for EL&amp;amp;U, and then listen to their responses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before a question is closed on Stack Overflow for being trivial, users must post an answer, in the form of a code or link, it doesn't really matter if the answer isn't 100% correct or accurate,  as long as it helps the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see how the recommendation might be abused, or be seen to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; unhelpful, on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; SE site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links without any explanation, or clarification are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not helpful&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to users or visitors.  This is why answers with just nude links are frowned upon and usually deleted. And, if I'm not mistaken, on EL&amp;amp;U  the user still has to overcome the 30 character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S If had you clicked on the link above, the meta question posted in 2012, contains the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While this link may answer the question, &lt;strong&gt;it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here&lt;/strong&gt; and provide the link for reference. &lt;strong&gt;Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two solid reasons why providing a link is not always helpful and could result with more frustrated users and visitors. Further on,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A link to a potential solution is always welcome, but &lt;strong&gt;please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there.&lt;/strong&gt; Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some background history on LMGTFY on Stack Exchange&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;sub&gt;AKA &lt;a href=&quot;http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/let-me-google-that-for-you-lmgtfy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Let Me Google That For You&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2009 a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15650/ban-lmgtfy-let-me-google-that-for-you-links&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was posted on SE Meta, which contained the telling introduction (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've just asked a question on Stack Overflow which was a prime candidate for googling. &lt;strong&gt;I admit it was a poor question and with a little bit of research I would have found the answer&lt;/strong&gt;. It annoyed me that someone put a let-me-google-that-for-you link in the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user posted the following comment underneath&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions with an answer that is trivial to find on Google are not helping the SO community&lt;/strong&gt;. They are generating superfluous reputation, lowering the bar for asking genuine questions, and generally wasting people's time. Furthermore, the answers to these questions are almost always summarized, plagiarized or synthesized from the Google search results. Posting a LGTFY link is like tough love. It points the user to the right answer and does it in such a way that they will hopefully turn to Google for simple questions and SO for their more difficult questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That comment received a staggering 334 upvotes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile in the EL&amp;amp;U meta archives, I found the following concerning LMGTFY and link-only answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The short and sweet answer is, &lt;strong&gt;LMGTFY links are not filtered here because barely anyone ever posts them in the first place.&lt;/strong&gt; (And should you run into one, flag it for mod attention and it will be dealt with.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3512/44619&quot;&gt;@RegDwigнt♦&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In 2011...&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find 'link' answers to be somewhat rude; if you were going to bother to do the google search to create a link in an answer, at least some explanation should be added.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/973/44619&quot;&gt;@Mitch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In 2012...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers are for on-topic questions. You should not answer in the comments of an on-topic question. It is true that link only answers are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/970/what-should-be-done-with-answers-that-contain-just-a-link&quot;&gt;frowned upon&lt;/a&gt; for many reasons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  General reference questions are expressly off-topic. It is also true that &quot;the definition of a GR question is a question that can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link.&quot;   [...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, that said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General reference questions are off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Off-topic questions should be closed and not answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Posting a comment with the link that justifies the general reference close reason is appropriate and welcomed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3379/44619&quot;&gt;@Kit Z. Fox♦&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reply as to whether lmgtfy comments should be blacklisted &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(I don't encourage commenting by lmgtfy.com at all or even a google search or even the link that a google search gives in the first hit, but it is very annoying to see a question, google for the obvious, and find that first-link answer, a rudeness in itself for the OP to not have done that minimal research)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3528/44619&quot;&gt;@Mitch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, leaving a link-only-answer can backfire. It might be construed as being rather rude by the querent. The page linked might leave the OP more confused than ever before because they don't know how to extrapolate the information. The link might rot, this happens, and it is very very frustrating. And lastly, it might encourage visitors to post  off-topic questions, inasmuch as any answer is better than no answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:28.940" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T16:09:19.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10089" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10090" CreationDate="2017-03-05T18:18:35.563" Score="1" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;The statistics is available for users with sufficient rep, but not everyone can see what happens behind the scenes, so here's a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3jdRJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3jdRJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not concerned with the number of questions closed by tchrist, who is ELU's mod, many of the questions closed were well deserved and a few were left open. I am, however, very surprised by the number of questions reviewed. Have I been sleeping under a rock all these weeks? Is this typical? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought there was a daily limit, a maximum of twenty reviews then SE blocked users  from continuing. It's happened to me many a time, you get into the swing of things and then -BANG- I'm blocked and I can't review until the next day. Personally, I think twenty questions is too low a number, and experienced users, if so inclined, should be allowed to handle  a greater &quot;workload&quot; &lt;strong&gt;But isn't 82 reviews too many for any user?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried digging in SE Meta to find an answer, and I discovered that &lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow users can close up to 40 questions per day.&lt;/strong&gt; Is it the same for EL&amp;amp;U users? Has this limit been increased, and are mods exempt from this limit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5212/what-are-the-limits-on-how-i-can-cast-change-and-retract-votes&quot;&gt;What are the limits on how I can cast, change, and retract votes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, I went through the review queue to see what my limit was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yqBZ2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yqBZ2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says: &lt;em&gt;Thank you for &lt;strong&gt;reviewing 20 close votes today&lt;/strong&gt;; come back in 13 hours to continue reviewing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But tchrist's answer suggests that that number is 24. I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We should probably be like the way that the more trafficked sites and each have 40 close votes per day, not the current 24.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.243" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T10:47:58.077" Title="Gosh! 82 Close Vote Reviews in one day" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10089" CreationDate="2017-03-05T21:54:39.413" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The direct answer is that yes, moderators can cast unlimited numbers of votes to close, reopen, delete, or undelete posts because these are considered moderation activities. You must just have been unaware of this, but it has always been that way. Actual votes are still limited in the normal way, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time I don’t use the review queues for casting my votes, but today the queue was really high, so working the queue directly was the most efficient way to address this. I did a variety of things while running the queue, including not just closing but also skipping, editing, migrating, voting to leave open, and commenting. In a few cases I changed the close reason or edited the duplicate list. Just a lot of maintenance, really, stuff that needed getting done. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2085/tchrist?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=all&quot;&gt;See here for details&lt;/a&gt;. In very few cases was mine the only close vote, and in many mine was the fourth or fifth. If you disagree with something, please feel free to speak up. I might even agree with you. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t believe I’ve ever blown much past the more customary daily 20 reviews before, let alone by a couple of doubles. I did so today because the review queues had been swelling into the triple digits again. This is happening because the posting rate is much higher than the reviewing rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should probably be like the way that the more trafficked sites and each have 40 close votes per day, not the current 24.  There’s also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/266500/153355&quot;&gt;a proposal under review by the Powers That Be&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;scale the number of close votes per day by reputation&lt;/strong&gt; up to some reasonable finite limit like 100 or 200. (In which case I’d likely be at 80–100 just by reputation alone.    But even if that proposal does get implemented we’d still need more people reviewing, which is a lot more important than how many votes someone has, because it's the only thing that's sustainable, the only thing that scales, and the only thing that doesn’t risk burning somebody out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven’t pitched bumping us to 40 a day yet because I was waiting for the other proposal to see some movement in 6–8 time-units.  Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;long-term close percentage seems to have levelled out at about 60%&lt;/a&gt;, which really is quite high compared to most other sites on the network, so I’ve also been thinking about several other specific things we could consider doing to help improve the experience for all these first-time posters who continually post low-quality questions. However, that hasn't gelled into a concrete proposal yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T21:54:39.413" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T22:52:31.110" Score="16" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;New users often give answers that are too short or that have other problems that may cause them to be considered &quot;very low quality&quot; (which means they are often flagged for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6564/deleting-an-answer/6565#6565&quot;&gt;deletion&lt;/a&gt;). People can leave comments about this, but sometimes it's hard to figure out the right way to explain what a &quot;good&quot; answer should include, and it takes some effort to compose a comment. It would be nice if we had a linkable, easy-to-find page on this site that lays out the expectations for answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new user might expect to find this information at the Help Center page &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; but in fact it doesn't really say much about how to write an answer that will be considered &quot;good&quot; by the members of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That page seems more like it gives a basic explanation of what &quot;answers&quot; are supposed to be on a Stack Exchange site. It tells people not to write &quot;thanks,&quot; to answer the actual question posed, to be civil, to not just post a link, and to avoid answering unclear or otherwise unsuitable questions. I would say this is an explanation of how to write an &lt;em&gt;acceptable&lt;/em&gt; answer, not a &quot;good&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, it does not tell people that a good answer should be more than a single line, and should include an explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the answer is correct. The main hint about this is the line &quot;Links to external resources are &lt;strong&gt;encouraged&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;—the word &quot;encouraged&quot; indicates that links are not in fact a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful&lt;/strong&gt;, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. &lt;strong&gt;Brevity is acceptable&lt;/strong&gt;, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that different people will have slightly different opinions about how short a good answer can be, but I really don't think the quoted portion gives a clear, accurate representation of what most active high-rep users on this site judge as &quot;acceptable&quot; for an answer. See the following Meta question and its responses: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8040/on-deleting-low-quality-single-word-request-answers?rq=1&quot;&gt;On deleting low quality single-word-request answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we have another Help center page that actually explains how to write a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer? (Or edit this one so that it does?) By &quot;good&quot; I don't mean anything fancy. I mean &quot;an answer that is not likely to be deleted for being low-quality.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's unrealistic to expect users will read the Help Center before posting, but I think we have a responsibility not to mislead the few who do. It would also be useful to be able to link to a page that explains the general expectations of high-rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a brief mention of the need for research and/or details in the pop-up shown to new users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Your Answer&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for contributing an answer to English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack&#xA;  Exchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Please be sure to &lt;em&gt;answer the question.&lt;/em&gt; Provide details and share your&#xA;  research! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But avoid …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Making&#xA;  statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal&#xA;  experience. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To learn more, see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;tips on writing great answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it doesn't go into any depth, and you can't actually learn more about how to do research in the tips for writing &quot;great&quot; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Examples&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of the types of things I am talking about. I am not saying that we should tell new users that every answer needs to have an elaborate explanation or a linked citation. I am saying we should tell them that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of  explanation is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following are real posts I saw in the &quot;low quality posts&quot; queue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems correct, but you could also ask &quot;Have you been to the cinema recently?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is brief, which the Help Center says is acceptable. It tries to get the OP going in the right direction: the Help Center says this is useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Evacuate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the operation field A is evacuated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's brief, but it gives a definite suggestion and so it's quite likely that the poster thinks it will &quot;get the asker going in the right direction.&quot; If we're just going by the Help Center's explanation, it's easy to conclude this is a &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone left a comment below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language and Usage. We are looking for longer answers that include references and citations. If you need assistance in framing an answer, please visit our Help Page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;&quot;How to write an answer&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit March 11&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting some answers to try out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5086/lets-draft-better-help-center-pages&quot;&gt;community wiki drafting process&lt;/a&gt; mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10091/can-we-write-a-better-help-page-on-how-do-i-write-a-good-answer/10103#comment40375_10091&quot;&gt;200_success's comment&lt;/a&gt;. Here is the way it works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;post a Community Wiki &quot;answer&quot; containing the original text of the page. Please try to reproduce the markup as faithfully as you can. Then, everyone can start editing it! (Be sure not to edit your own post within the first five minutes, else your modifications will be incorporated into Rev 1.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote for any answer you feel is an improvement, and post your own if you have your own idea for what should be on the Help Center page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T15:28:54.530" Title="Writing a better help page on &quot;How do I write a good answer&quot; [updated]" Tags="|discussion|answers|new-users|help-pages|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T18:50:17.207" Score="8" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short time back there was a question called &quot;I am worried about being off-topic.&quot; I answered, and I've been brooding over that answer ever since. I can't really imagine what can come of this, but now that you've finally dealt the &lt;em&gt;coup de grace&lt;/em&gt; to my question about Waltzing Matilda, perhaps the proof will be in the pudding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There seems to be an idea at the back of Stack Exchange that if we just allow people to judge all contributions, the highly-regarded answers will rise to the top and their authors can be judged the best authorities. But in Statistics, large numbers are an important distinction. And the flaw in the Stack Exchange model is that the numbers are very small. A few people read most of the posts, and threads can be closed by just a few people. Stack Exchange lacks the benefit of large numbers. It seems clear to me that the author of &quot;I am worried&quot; was correct: tons of interesting questions are quashed for reasons that make sense to only a very few people, including neither him nor me. It would make sense to change the rules to require a greater consensus before dropping the ax.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Exchange routinely involves us in a kind of judgment at which people are simply not very good:  judgments about the merits of other people’s reasoning and writing. A wise person hesitates before expressing the judgment that other people are confused. But the game-like nature of the Stack Exchange, the awarding of points and the (apparently) resultant competition to be the first to say something, the bickering over the propriety of saying the same thing that someone else said, etc., bring out our darker angels. Hanging judges cast about for any old reason, pointing to characteristics of almost all posts (it contains a typo, it received several answers, you didn't respond for a few hours) or offering reasons plainly counter-indicated by the rules (dialect is an offensive topic), apparently because they won't turn their backs on a gut-level reaction that a thread is no good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no clear statement of the intended level. For example, I understand only a very small portion of what happens on the math stack. There’s nothing wrong in setting aside a forum for sophisticated people. But I’m a math teacher, and I imagine that less than a couple percent of Americans are much more sophisticated than I am mathematically; is it really the intention that I (and so, presumably, the great majority of the people in the country) cannot post there? When I try to post to the math stack, I’m asked to clarify a given question again and again and again; or I receive incomprehensible or curt responses or no response at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no business-like response to bad behavior. Businesses have to respond to customers in the spirit of endearing them, not alienating them. If Stack Exchange were a business whose traffic were its customers, it would not issue these curt, cold &quot;drop dead&quot; letters. It would have a policy of closing far fewer threads, and only for much more clearly defined reasons. If a post were more appropriate to the English Language Learners, for example, the response would go like this: &quot;Unfortunately this is outside of our competence. We feel comfortable answering questions about English in general, but if you're learning the language we're afraid we couldn't do a very good job responding. But we could post your question to that forum. Would you like us to do that?&quot; That would not give the unpleasant (and ridiculous) implication that your rejection of a question reflected an important flaw in the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Chaim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T08:28:39.473" Title="The Unmysterious Case of Waltzing Matilda" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-03-23T17:59:31.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:25:07.420" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're asking for two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A requirement for more close votes before a question is closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A change in wording for questions deemed off-topic but which are on-topic on ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(your other two points might be debatable: that we don't clearly indicate the scope of the site, and that people rush to close questions in order to score points, using any old justification - Aside from noting that there are no points for closing, I won't address these two concerns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, requiring more close votes. It's possible that requiring more close votes would prevent questions from being undeservedly closed. But the problem with small numbers strikes again here: relatively few users have enough reputation to be able to cast close votes. Making the number too high will make all questions uncloseable. It's possible there is some tweaking to be made, but I don't feel it would have the effect you think it would have, unless you are basically objecting to closing any questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it's definitely possible to change the wording of the close reasons. The wording as it currently stands is already a softened tone from what the site used to have. Now it says something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;put on hold&lt;/strong&gt; as off-topic by user1, user2, user3, user4, user5 44 mins ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the research&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&quot; – user1, user2, user3, user4, user5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, the message is pretty business-like and straight-forward. It tells you that this question was deemed in its current form to be off-topic. It tells you why it was judged as off-topic and what you need to do to fix it: either include the research you've already done, or post it on ELL. It tells you not to bother asking us for dictionary definitions, because one of our stated goals is to not be a giant slow proxy for people looking stuff up. Finally, it tells you that you can edit the question to get it reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is edited, it shows up in the review queues, which will allow it to be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this perfect usability? Probably not. There appear to be two problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users don't read the message at all. &amp;lt;- I'm not sure what we can do to help these users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users read it but don't notice that the &quot;edit the question&quot; is a link that leads them to the editing. I think it would make sense to make the edit feature stand out more, especially for the question author. I've heard people complain that once the question was closed they couldn't find a way to do anything with it. But given that many users don't even read the notice at all, improving its wording won't help much.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:25:07.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:45:57.437" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title question is &quot;Why is Waltzing Matilda so rich with distinctively Australian words?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unanswerable definitively because it's just idle speculation. Easily closable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The body explicitly asks a number of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Was it deliberately written with a lot of Australianisms?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, asking for idle speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Or does the use of a lot of Australianisms reflect something about social class, the way Cockney English would?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be a good question about sociolinguistics, what the preceived class of Australianisms is. I think the answer is they are considered a little lower class but not as bad as Cockney.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do Australians think it's funny because of this quality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Funny' is fairly opinion-based which is considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The question is really whether that manner of speaking is artificial or natural...My question is whether anyone ever naturally phrases his thoughts the way the singer does.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretation of song lyrics is considered off topic because it is so opinion based. But it is nothing special about English to realize that song lyrics/poetry in general are not natural no matter what. But the vocabulary? Sure, some of that vocab is still 'correct'; for example, a lake formed by a cutoff river loop is still called a billabong. Is that what you want to know for each of the 'peculiar' vocab items? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then maybe you could reword your explicit question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T21:28:37.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T21:28:37.813" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-07T20:41:40.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reporting a bug, your question should include what you did to discover the bug, the steps required to reproduce the problem, the given system output, and the expected system output. If necessary to document or explain the issue, please include a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on writing good bug reports, see the detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/bug/info&quot;&gt;tag-guidance&lt;/a&gt; on MSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-06-03T12:45:49.383" LastActivityDate="2023-06-03T12:45:49.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-07T20:41:40.343" Score="0" Body="Indicates you've found an erroneous or unexpected behaviour in the system that needs to be fixed." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2023-06-15T12:50:11.577" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T12:50:11.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2017-03-08T08:21:09.557" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376562/why-is-waltzing-matilda-so-rich-with-distinctively-australian-words&quot;&gt;Is Waltzing Matilda comprehensible outside of Australia? In Australia?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question as it now stands is answerable. Please reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It now &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;shows&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;research&lt;/strong&gt;, but it never asked for the meaning of the lyrics, users can verify it for themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps only an Australian etymologist or lexicographer can provide a satisfying answer, but on EL&amp;amp;U we have users who have answered questions on different English dialects from their own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it counts for anything, I believe the question is interesting for experts and useful for future visitors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDENDUM  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also argue that technically speaking, the question was not closed by the community. Two users voted to close it but the third, and decisive, vote was cast by a mod, whose decision was probably misled by the title of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T08:28:39.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10101" CreationDate="2017-03-09T21:56:06.920" Score="6" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading through the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/377158/whats-a-good-idiom-or-saying-to-say-dont-leave-your-current-job-before-gettin&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not quitting one job before the next one was lined up&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and I noticed that two different users left answers about new and old shoes. Both were deleted by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In dutch we have a saying &amp;quot;Don't throw away your old shoes before you get new ones&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch you have a saying: Don't throw away your old shoes before you've got a new pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why these were deleted! First of all, I've never been opposed to using &amp;quot;loan idioms.&amp;quot; I've learned a few from ELU over the years, and I have no problem using an idiom from another culture if it's readily understandable and quite applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, before one of these answers was deleted, one commenter said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also, it's not a common Dutch saying (I never heard of it before).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert on Dutch idioms, but I did find this on an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.special-dictionary.com/proverbs/keywords/shoes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English dictionary page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;85 Proverbs about Shoes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't throw away your old shoes until you have got new ones. (Dutch Proverb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think there's a good chance this really is a Dutch proverb that has been used in English before, and it definitely fits the O.P.'s bill: that is, it would be an excellent idiom to use when advising someone to make sure their next job is lined up before they quit their current one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have simply voted to undelete the post, but, since both of these were deleted by mods, this was not an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would respectfully ask the moderation team to reconsider their deletions in this case and letting one of the answers stand. It's a good suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:56:11.430" Title="Why did mods delete two answers to 'Quitting your job too early'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10098" CreationDate="2017-03-09T23:00:12.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/377399/77227&quot;&gt;reposted by another account&lt;/a&gt;, apparently not the same person, so I think in this specific case the best thing is to let the deleted, unsourced answers lie where they are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yes, I agree with you that the original posts didn't need to be deleted. (It's not like they were the worst suggestions on the page, in my opinion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel too strongly about it, however. The question is the type that naturally attracts a stream of short answers of dubious quality. I imagine the other, un-deleted answers will serve the OP about as well. Still, if we're going to have idiom-request questions on this site, I don't see how it helps anyone to restrict answers to idioms from one particular cultural tradition, or to insist that answers must document the history of the suggested idiom, when what really matters is if it gets the idea across in an easily understandable way to modern-day listeners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T03:39:11.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10098" CreationDate="2017-03-10T00:27:32.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's quite simple. This is a site about English, not Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers posted are just a translation into English of a Dutch proverb, without any evidence that it is actually &lt;strong&gt;used&lt;/strong&gt; in English. The one version which remains actually admits that, which makes the answer slightly more useful than a simple bald suggestion of a Dutch proverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar situation would be to suggest &lt;em&gt;Het regent katten en honden&lt;/em&gt; in Dutch instead of &lt;em&gt;Het regent oude wijven.&lt;/em&gt; The English don't characterise rainstorms in terms of old women; the Dutch don't think of cats and dogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer on this site suggesting an idiomatic phrase does actually need to supply an English idiom, or a sentence which is based on an English metaphor &amp;mdash; like the answer about climbing a ladder. Climbing a ladder is a fairly common metaphor in English for progression in employment. It would be good if some objective evidence was adduced for that suggestion, but it is based on an idea which can be identified in English usage. The Dutch phrase can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any answer which is simply translating a foreign idiom might usefully be a comment, though. The information may be of interest, but I don't think it can be an answer for an English phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T00:27:32.067" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10098" CreationDate="2017-03-10T02:21:25.083" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is as voracious a language as any other, I imagine, and its tendency to gobble up words and expressions from other languages is surely encouraged by the fact that in many predominantly English-speaking parts of the world (such as North America) the language is constantly being enriched by contributions from immigrants who speak other languages and who add anglicized versions of words and sayings from their native languages to the local or regional English mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently I was not greatly surprise to discover that Wolfgang Mieder, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=AbJ1tVGmiTgC&amp;amp;pg=PA734&amp;amp;dq=%22throw+away%22+%22old+shoes+before%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjjldCm6srSAhUW0mMKHWMdBK4Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22throw%20away%22%20%22old%20shoes%20before%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of American Proverbs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1992) includes this proverb, collected in Ontario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't throw away your old shoes before you get new ones.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a Google Books search, most matches for the expression (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JLk970sm5NQC&amp;amp;pg=PA369&amp;amp;dq=%22throw+away%22+%22old+shoes%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwig_5nR4srSAhUDxmMKHQEiAmI4UBDoAQg6MAc#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22throw%20away%22%20%22old%20shoes%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one from 1893&lt;/a&gt;) note that it is originally Dutch, or are by Dutch authors writing in or translated into English (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=awrRLUr4HesC&amp;amp;pg=PA199&amp;amp;dq=%22throw+away%22+%22old+shoes+before%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjjldCm6srSAhUW0mMKHWMdBK4Q6AEILDAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22throw%20away%22%20%22old%20shoes%20before%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one from a 1970 article on quantum physics&lt;/a&gt;—one of two instances in the same article), or are datelined from the Netherlands (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=tUAEAAAAMBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA16&amp;amp;dq=%22throw+away%22+%22old+shoes+before%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiD_sGr6srSAhUeHGMKHV-VDN04ChDoAQgZMAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22throw%20away%22%20%22old%20shoes%20before%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one from &lt;em&gt;The Rotarian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; [Chicago, April 1935], datelined Utrecht). But this example from Roger Welsch, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=_OaQN5GMSygC&amp;amp;pg=PA64&amp;amp;dq=%22throw+away%22+%22old+shoes+before%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwibm4nN18rSAhVizlQKHdEXBXUQ6AEIMTAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22throw%20away%22%20%22old%20shoes%20before%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mister, You Got Yourself a Horse: Tales of Old-Time Horse Trading&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (University of Nebraska Press, 1981), appears to be straight-down-the-fairway U.S. English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Luther wasn't a bad sort but a man who would &lt;strong&gt;throw away his old shoes before he had any assurance that he could hang onto his new ones&lt;/strong&gt; was none too promising as a credit risk. Still, I thought, his foolishness was the means of making me near a thousand dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, &quot;Senex,&quot; a letter writer to the editor of the &lt;em&gt;[Melbourne, Victoria] Argus&lt;/em&gt; (August 16, 1880), uses this form of the expression in a column titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/5953019?searchTerm=%22old+shoes+before%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Religion in State Schools&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If one cobbler hid supplied him with a pair of ill fitting shoes, he says that he would apply to some other to make him a better. But that implies the existence of another cobbler whose shoes had been proved to be better. I ask him to name the cobbler and to produce the shoes. &lt;strong&gt;To cast off the old shoes before we have found our cobbler, would be to go barefoot&lt;/strong&gt;, and I don't wish our children to go morally barefoot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is &quot;Don't throw away your old shoes before you get new ones&quot; really an English proverb? Probably not, unless your standards for what constitutes an English  proverb are extremely easy to satisfy (as Mieder's seem to be). But is it an expression that has appeared multiple times in English over a period of many years, and does it make sense as a proverbial saying when read in English, and do at least some English speakers treat it as an aphorism? Yes, yes, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denying that something is a part of English just because it didn't start in English is so dubious a position that I doubt anyone here would endorse it. And just because I may be unfamiliar with an expression doesn't mean that it isn't part of everyday English speech in some part of the English-speaking world. These considerations lead me to think that answers suggesting English versions of proverbs from other languages may well be useful to people who ask questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/377158/whats-a-good-idiom-or-saying-to-say-dont-leave-your-current-job-before-gettin&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a good idiom or saying to say &amp;quot;don&amp;#39;t leave your current job before getting another&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, as here, the suggested expression may turn out to have appeared in numerous English-language publications in the past and may be a legitimate English expression. But even if it had never been used by native English speakers, that doesn't mean that the figurative expression from Dutch, when translated into English, wouldn't be worth considering as an effective way to express the idea in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, I oppose deleting such suggestions, unless they appear without any supporting documentation or explanation. (And of course, our standard practice in instances where an answer lacks adequate support is to ask for such content, rather than to immediately delete the answer.) Not only are these suggestions from other languages  potentially useful to the question asker, but sometimes they turn out to be established in English already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T05:39:17.297" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10098" CreationDate="2017-03-10T18:56:11.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers to the post were word for word what was given, without any supporting documentation or explanation. It's common practice to delete answers that are a single word with filler text on single-word-requests. This is the same as that. All of these answers should have at least a reference source, if not some indication of usage, frequency, and appropriate contexts. Idioms are not an exception to the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has nothing to do with being of Dutch origin, although that certainly doesn't help anything. There was another answer &quot;dont leave the house without umbrella&quot; which no one seems to mind being deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:56:11.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10091" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:48:52.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for taking the time to contribute an answer. It’s because of helpful peers like yourself that we’re able to learn together as a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Before writing an answer...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Use votes to &amp;quot;pay it forward&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying “thanks” is appreciated, but it doesn’t answer the question. Instead, vote up the answers that helped you the most! If these answers were helpful to you, please consider saying thank you in a more constructive way – by contributing your own answers to questions your peers have asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;well-asked&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...solicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;opinions&lt;/a&gt; rather than facts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt; and answered many times before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are not about English language and usage as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;defined in the help center.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;deleted.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Have the same problem?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still no answer to the question, and you have the same problem? Help us find a solution by researching the problem, then contribute the results of your research and anything additional you’ve tried as a partial answer. That way, even if we can’t figure it out, the next person has more to go on. You can also vote up the question or set a bounty on it so the question gets more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;While writing an answer...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Read the question carefully&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. It's valid to say “don’t do that,” but a good answer should also include “do this instead”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Explain your answer&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/since-it-isnt-in-the-faq-are-we-as-answerers-expected-to-appeal-to-any-of-the&quot;&gt;A good answer should be based on evidence.&lt;/a&gt; This can be as simple as your own experience, but often it will be more helpful to cite a reference such as a dictionary, or to give examples from the works of respected writers. You should clearly indicate the origin of the evidence you choose to include: give some context if it is from your experience (&amp;quot;As an Australian English speaker, I've heard people say...&amp;quot;), and name the sources of any quotations you use (as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;linking&lt;/a&gt; to the source if it is online). Do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Write to the best of your ability&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't expect every answer to be perfect, but answers with correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar are easier to read. They also tend to get upvoted more frequently. Remember, you can always go back at any time and edit your answer to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Always be polite and have fun&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s fine to disagree and express concern, but please be civil. There’s a real human being on the other end of that network connection, however misguided they may appear to be. We’re here to learn from our peers, not yell at each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T06:14:23.233" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-12T05:48:52.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10091" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:52:34.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for taking the time to contribute an answer. It’s because of helpful peers like yourself that we’re able to learn together as a community. Here are a few tips on how to make your answer great:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pay it forward&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying “thanks” is appreciated, but it doesn’t answer the question. Instead, vote up the answers that helped you the most! If these answers were helpful to you, please consider saying thank you in a more constructive way – by contributing your own answers to questions your peers have asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Have the same problem?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still no answer to the question, and you have the same problem? Help us find a solution by researching the problem, then contribute the results of your research and anything additional you’ve tried as a partial answer. That way, even if we can’t figure it out, the next person has more to go on. You can also vote up the question or set a bounty on it so the question gets more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Write to the best of your ability&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't expect every answer to be perfect, but answers with correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar are easier to read. They also tend to get upvoted more frequently. Remember, you can always go back at any time and edit your answer to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;well-asked&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...solicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;opinions&lt;/a&gt; rather than facts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt; and answered many times before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are not about English language and usage as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;defined in the help center.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;deleted.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Always be polite and have fun&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s fine to disagree and express concern, but please be civil. There’s a real human being on the other end of that network connection, however misguided they may appear to be. We’re here to learn from our peers, not yell at each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T05:52:34.287" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-12T05:52:34.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10091" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:54:48.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for taking the time to contribute an answer. It’s because of helpful peers like yourself that we’re able to learn together as a community. Here are a few tips on how to make your answer great:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pay it forward&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying “thanks” is appreciated, but it doesn’t answer the question. Instead, vote up the answers that helped you the most! If these answers were helpful to you, please consider saying thank you in a more constructive way – by contributing your own answers to questions your peers have asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Have the same problem?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still no answer to the question, and you have the same problem? Help us find a solution by researching the problem, then contribute the results of your research and anything additional you’ve tried as a partial answer. That way, even if we can’t figure it out, the next person has more to go on. You can also vote up the question or set a bounty on it so the question gets more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. You are encouraged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/since-it-isnt-in-the-faq-are-we-as-answerers-expected-to-appeal-to-any-of-the&quot;&gt;cite references such as dictionaries, experts and style guides&lt;/a&gt;: a good answer is not just based on opinion or personal biases. If your post includes a quote, be sure to include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;name of the source&lt;/a&gt; in your post. Do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Write to the best of your ability&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't expect every answer to be perfect, but answers with correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar are easier to read. They also tend to get upvoted more frequently. Remember, you can always go back at any time and edit your answer to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;well-asked&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...solicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;opinions&lt;/a&gt; rather than facts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt; and answered many times before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are not about English language and usage as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;defined in the help center.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;deleted.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Always be polite and have fun&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s fine to disagree and express concern, but please be civil. There’s a real human being on the other end of that network connection, however misguided they may appear to be. We’re here to learn from our peers, not yell at each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T20:37:27.097" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-12T05:54:48.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2017-03-14T15:47:36.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Proof-reading questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As English is currently the international language of business and cross-language communication generally, many new users, both non-native and native speakers, desire a service to proof-read their texts for any errors. They see &quot;English&quot; in the title of the site and make the assumption that they can receive that service for free here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment(s) below explain proof-reading is not offered on EL&amp;amp;U, and give the reasoning, so that people making a reasonable assumption but who haven't taken the time to read the rules don't feel attacked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We don't offer proof-reading services here. The goal of the site is to ask and answer questions which will be helpful to a variety of people in a variety of circumstances, and thus to build up a library of knowledge people can easily find. Proof-reading a particular text will only ever help one person, and so it does not advance the aims of the site. You can read more in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the text the OP wants proofread also contains spelling errors, or orthographic errors like lowercase &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt;s, then you can add an additional sentence at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We don't offer proof-reading services here. The goal of the site is to ask and answer questions which will be helpful to a variety of people in a variety of circumstances, and thus to build up a library of knowledge people can easily find. Proof-reading a particular text will only ever help one person, and so it does not advance the aims of the site. You can read more in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. Oh, and before asking anyone to do proof-reading elsewhere, it would be polite to run your text through an automated English spell-checker first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T21:11:02.757" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-14T15:47:36.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T19:44:10.740" Score="20" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;ScotM was an active (and top-notch) participant at this site for about seven months (December 2014–July 2015), but he last answered a question at EL&amp;amp;U on July 20, 2015, and his profile lists him as &quot;Last seen Jan 10 '16 at 8:27.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I want to resolve involves his answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224868/etymology-of-cut-someone-some-slack/&quot;&gt;Etymology of &amp;quot;cut someone some slack&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which he posted on February 1, 2015, and edited on February 6 of that year. Somehow, in looking for an early instance of the expression &quot;cut [someone] slack,&quot; he fell into a Google Books glitch-trap and repeated its erroneous attribution of a quotation that included the phrase &quot;cut slack for others' dumb opinions&quot; to Frederick Douglass's &lt;em&gt;My Bondage and My Freedom&lt;/em&gt; (1855). In fact, the quotation comes from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=tdR_nYc7P6AC&amp;amp;pg=PT34&amp;amp;dq=%22cut+slack+for+others+dumb+opinions%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi1-vO19-fQAhVK_WMKHWrLAvEQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22cut%20slack%20for%20others%20dumb%20opinions%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;novel published in 2001&lt;/a&gt;. The earliest published instance of &quot;cut [someone] some slack&quot; that I know of is from 1968—113 years later than &lt;em&gt;My Bondage and My Freedom&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three months ago, I added a comment to ScotM's answer, pointing out the error and suggesting an edit that would remove the mistake and leave the rest of his otherwise very good answer intact—but he's not around to make the change. Meanwhile, casual readers who visit the page in question (it has racked up 10,616 page views so far) are going to come away with a seriously mistaken view of how old the expression is and where it came from, unless they read through ScotM's long answer &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; my comment at the end of it &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; my long answer (which follows his).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, should I just take matters into my own hands and delete the first 92 words of ScotM's answer? Or is it better to leave things as they are and hope that ScotM will eventually revisit the site and correct the unfortunate error at the beginning of his answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T14:38:52.663" Title="How to deal with a significant substantive error in an otherwise good answer by an absentee answerer?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2017-03-14T19:57:39.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than remove the quotation entirely, it might be better to properly attribute it. Although the correct citation is much more recent than Frederick Douglass, it still provides reasonable orientation for the reader in the sense that it suggests &quot;that cut slack for [me] is compressed into cut [me] slack&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T19:57:39.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2017-03-14T20:04:54.720" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that taking matters into your own hands is appropriate at this point.  You found a factual error (and have attributions to back it up), you notified the original author, you gave them plenty of time and opportunity to incorporate the suggested change.  Since they have not been available, doing it for them now seems like 'the neighborly thing to do'; a little clean-up and improvement that should be welcomed if and when they come back to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T20:04:54.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T21:24:30.287" Score="6" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;... which is now on ELL : &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/122505/need-help-with-understanding-the-sentence&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/122505/need-help-with-understanding-the-sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the following comment by the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I personally agree with the second option (seems more logical to me), but my teacher said that by some &quot;word order rules&quot; &quot;successfully&quot; can only refer to &quot;raises&quot;, so I asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggested editing the question to reflect that aspect of it, so that it wouldn't be &quot;help me understand this&quot; but something like &quot;are there priority rules with respect to the ordering of adverbs that force one interpretation of this sentence&quot;; this strikes me as a much more interesting question, and one I don't know the answer to (I'm guessing it's 'no' but I would like to know more). I wasn't sure whether I should edit the question myself if OP didn't do it soon, and before I could decide it got migrated to ELL, even though with the edit I think it would have been appropriate for ELU. (I note that a search yields a number of positively upvoted questions about word order here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have a few questions, some relating to this specific post but others more general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the protocol for editing other people's questions; would this edit have changed the question too much to be acceptable? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I right to think that with this edit it would be an interesting question deserving of other answers and/or appropriate for ELU? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This isn't the first time I run into a question that as posed I know the answer to and isn't that good, but is very close to a question I don't know the answer to and am curious about; are there specific criteria or protocols in those cases on whether one should edit it, make a new question, or what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T02:35:05.710" Title="On the recently-migrated question &quot;Need help with understanding the sentence&quot;" Tags="|discussion|migration|specific-question|ell|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10110" CreationDate="2017-03-14T23:03:59.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I definitely would have edited the question to add the comment. It isn't putting words in his mouth because it is something the OP said himself. It doesn't change the meaning of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the post would still be understandable and would, as you said, be more interesting and also show more about the motivation for the question (the teacher's comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am learning English and can't fully understand the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue successfully raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is to what words relates &quot;successfully&quot;?&#xA;  Should I understand the sentence as &quot;(Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue successfully) raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ.&quot; or &quot;Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue (successfully raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I personally agree with the second option (seems more logical to me), but my teacher said that by some &quot;word order rules&quot; &quot;successfully&quot; can only refer to &quot;raises&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P.S. The sentence is from The Guardian article (caption of the first figure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T23:03:59.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2017-03-15T21:49:17.517" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a delicate problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving the post in its current state violates&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt; the policies regarding attribution&lt;/a&gt;, and being aware of the problem obliges us to fix it not only as a matter of policy but also ethical duty to the author of the quotation. Deleting that portion of the post would change the meaning of the post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;which violates editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, and cause the answer to unravel as it acts to introduce and justify the relevant dictionary definitions. Changing the quotation has a similar effect to deleting it, unless we are 100% certain that Scot would analyze the replacement quotation identically, which would probably require his co-operation. If we could get his co-operation, it would be clear that we should insist that he should edit the answer to fix the problem in a way that he sees fit. I imagine that he would be more than willing to fix the problem if he knew about it and was able. Deleting the an otherwise meritorious post due to a slight mistake made by the original poster seems like too severe of a course of action to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, I think there is a good compromise between deletion of the segment and maintaining the original intent which does not require us to delete the whole answer. Stack Exchange has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;a few fancy hypertext markup language tags&lt;/a&gt;, so we can &lt;s&gt;strikethrough&lt;/s&gt; the incorrect text and leave [an editorial note in brackets]. The note should state that his original attribution was wrong, and properly attribute the original source. Surely these tags were intended to serve some sort of purpose, and I think this is an instance where they may come in useful. Since the way he originally presented the answer would still be visible, the meaning of it would remain intact while making it evident that something is wrong with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a perfect solution. Aesthetically the amount of text that needs to be stricken out is large, and the editorial note interrupts the flow of the post. It also draws attention to the fact that the quotation was misattributed, and is not as useful of a resource as ScotM originally thought it was, which may lead to a few votes against an otherwise merituitous answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like to reitterate that this is probably the best compromise we have got in terms of satisfying all relevant policy, short of deleting the answer altogether, and I can't say &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; votes against an answer that did not perform the requisite fact checking are unmerited, especially given that many people are probably already under the impression that it was a 19th century quote, instead of a 21st century quote. We should also note that the probable cause of the error to mitigate against the effect to prevent the effect from being &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; severe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T01:34:01.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2017-03-16T01:49:16.807" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a great shame, the amount of work and research ScotM did was admirable. The answer is extremely well written, and I liked the cooperage theory, it at least explained what the &lt;em&gt;slack&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;cut me some slack&quot; could have referred to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer has been unaccepted &lt;del&gt;and the upvote retracted&lt;/del&gt; because the entire post hinged on that single citation dated 1855, I hadn't realize  at the time, I was enamoured by the care and originality that ScotM had taken into crafting his answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really sorry, and if it had been me I would now be banging my head on the desktop, beating my chest, tearing out my hair and trying frantically to find another 19th century, or early 20th century citation. But the answer is not mine, and I don't think anyone can repair the crack. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion until its author returns, the answer is irreparable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is unfair to downvote an answer when its author is not available to rectify the error, and even more so when the ‘error’ originally lies with Google Books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VGKXx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VGKXx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inside cover says that &lt;em&gt;My Bondage and my Freedom&lt;/em&gt; was originally printed in 1855. So That's one piece of the mystery cleared up. But I cannot find the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;slack&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; cited anywhere in the 2008 reprint, nor in the 2001 novel &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.it/books?id=tdR_nYc7P6AC&amp;amp;pg=PT34&amp;amp;dq=%22cut%20slack%20for%20others%20dumb%20opinions%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22cut%20slack%20for%20others%20dumb%20opinions%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hauntings of Hood Canal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which contains the citation, according to  Sven post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lygne.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lygne.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T14:38:52.663" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T14:38:52.663" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10110" CreationDate="2017-03-16T12:49:36.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't reasonably edit someone else's question to to raise a follow-up point, however interesting; moderators and others fight a ceaseless battle to prevent ELU turning into just another forum , with threads meandering off rather than questions being answered. Essentially you have two options: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to improve the question, suggest to OP that a particular form would be both more interesting and more likely to solve his particular problem. He may take the hint, or say that he agrees but cannot think how to phrase it (in which case you have a green light to make your own edit), or he may say &quot;that's not what I was asking&quot;. There may be no reply, or (as in this case) events may overtake you; but you have done what you could&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you yourself would like an answer, ask a follow-up question yourself, citing and probably linking to the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T12:49:36.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10118" CreationDate="2017-03-16T23:41:19.830" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a compulsive footnote reader, I wish the default footnote font was larger.  See, for example, the footnote in this good answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/378793/what-do-you-call-someone-who-is-good-at-everything/378796#378796&quot;&gt;What do you call someone who is good at everything?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a footnote is worth reading (as this one is), it should be readable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Don't know what tag is appropriate.  I need support to read tiny, tiny type.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T04:26:05.597" Title="Technical question: Why is the default footnote type so tiny?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10110" CreationDate="2017-03-16T23:54:16.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What is the protocol for editing other people's questions; would this edit have changed the question too much to be acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center allows us to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;add edits&lt;/a&gt; to a post to clarify the meaning of the post so long as we do not change the meaning of it. Among ways to determine the poster's intentions is reading their comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an express help center provision in the editing guidelines that allows people to add information from the comments to the question, so that all pertinent information to the question are found in one place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Also there are specific provisions in the help center that allow us to clarify the meaning of a post for the express purpose of saving it from closure. I find it &lt;em&gt;strange&lt;/em&gt; that this is in the section regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;how to answer&lt;/a&gt;, but it is still a help center guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being closed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; It should also be noted that before you get 2,000 rep, all of your edits get pushed into a review queue. People with over 2,000 rep review your edits before it is applied, so if they think your edit goes too far, they'll select the relevant rejection reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who are working the review queue see a set of stock rejection reasons. One of those rejection reasons is that even drastic edits should respect the original poster's intention. This implies that drastic edits are permitted within certain limits. What you need to ask yourself is if you are changing the fundamental nature of the question in a manner that excludes the type of answers the questioner might be interested in seeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's hard to know that&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;unless you are the questioner&lt;/em&gt;, which mitigates heavily against editing the question in most cases and more favorably in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;leaving a comment&lt;/a&gt; as you did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given what you are telling us is based upon a comment the questioner made, you have a basis to believe that this is part of what the questioner wants to learn about in the answers. I would opine the edit you are proposing in this case is probably okay, but you would need to add a note like &quot;Adding information from the comments pursuant to help center guidelines&quot;, and it should probably be a word for word copy/paste so that the reviewers don't outright reject your edit automatically as undue meddling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Am I right to think that with this edit it would be an interesting question deserving of other answers and/or appropriate for ELU?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; I don't know because I don't fully understand why we have two websites, but my guess would be no. The questioner expressed they were an E.S.L. learner and E.L.L. was designed primarily with such people in mind. Whoever migrated the question probably thought the O.P. would be better served there. Also, if the question was not considered merituitous on some level, it should not have been migrated because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can&quot;&gt;E.L.L. is not supposed to be a trash can&lt;/a&gt;. Many reputable members of English Language &amp;amp; Usage are also members of E.L.L. such as StoneyB, Cerberus, Fumblefingers and Mari-Lou A so if they take interest in the question, they'll answer it there. There are also good members at E.L.L. who might be more able to help answer a question in a way that satisfies the needs of learners because that's what they try to specialize them. If your answer remains the only answer to the question, I think it's unlikely anybody else would have taken interest in answering it if it had remained here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This isn't the first time I run into a question that as posed I know the answer to and isn't that good, but is very close to a question I don't know the answer to and am curious about; are there specific criteria or protocols in those cases on whether one should edit it, make a new question, or what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; I would recommend asking a follow up question, mentioning the related question and thoroughly explaining what makes your question different from the original, so that your question does not get closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T02:35:05.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10115" CreationDate="2017-03-17T04:26:05.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no official formatting for footnotes on this site. What you saw is not default formatting for footnotes, but an abuse of the subscript and superscript tags. It is very unlikely that the way these tags function will be changed. You can click on the &quot;edit&quot; button to see the text in a normal-sized font, although it will be surrounded by visible &amp;#60;&gt; tags like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;polymath&lt;/strong&gt; (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, &quot;having learned much&quot;)&amp;#60;sup&gt;[1]&amp;#60;/sup&gt; is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;#60;sup&gt;&amp;#60;sub&gt;1.  The term was first recorded in written English in the early seventeenth century Harper, Daniel (2001). &quot;Online Etymology Dictionary&quot;. Retrieved 2006-12-05.&amp;#60;/sub&gt;&amp;#60;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;#60;sub&gt;[Wikipedia][1]&amp;#60;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T04:26:05.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T05:36:00.810" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/378787/can-either-coordinate-more-than-two-alternatives&quot;&gt;One of my recent questions&lt;/a&gt; (about the use of &amp;quot;either&amp;quot;) was understandably marked as a duplicate. The question that it duplicates &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40950/is-either-only-used-with-two-options&quot;&gt;can be found here&lt;/a&gt;. While it is correct to mark my question as a duplicate, I'm afraid that the answer to the original question is probably incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning is simple. The Merriam-Webster dictionary contradicts the accepted answer in the original question. Merriam-Webster has more authority than EL&amp;amp;U. Not only that, but the EL&amp;amp;U answer makes use of nothing more than Wiktionary and Wikipedia to back up its assertions, and even the Wikipedia page is misleading, as it has no information on the relevant topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the Merriam-Webster entry which contradicts &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40950/is-either-only-used-with-two-options&quot;&gt;the accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;either&amp;quot; can only be used &lt;em&gt;informally&lt;/em&gt; to correlate more than two alternatives. You will see  nothing about &amp;quot;formal&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;informal&amp;quot; in this entry. There is no evidence for making the claim that the accepted answer made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/either&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;either&lt;/a&gt; (conj)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—used as a function word before two or more coordinate words, phrases, or clauses joined usually by or to indicate that what immediately follows is the first of two or more alternatives [can be used &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; as a guest room or as an office]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about &amp;quot;either&amp;quot;, expressed in both threads, is an interesting question that deserves an accurate and verifiable answer. Currently, there is no such answer. What should we do about this? We can't un-accept the answer in the original question, can we? It's my understanding that only the OP can do this. In which case, could my question be unmarked as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T15:41:06.257" Title="I think the question about &quot;either&quot; needs revisiting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T14:56:51.450" Score="0" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U someone is editing other peoples questions. It seems, this is only to achieve points as there often is no real difference between before and after editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without having to openly point to the person doing this, whom can I tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171455" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T03:06:21.743" Title="Editing without reason" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10119" CreationDate="2017-03-17T14:58:27.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the actual content of the question, there are multiple meta issues here 1) what an 'accepted' answer implies about the answer, 2) the whole nature of duplicates and answers among them, accepted or not, and 3) the authoritativeness of the different dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an 'accepted' answer is what the OP (the person who asked the question) chose. That person asked the question because they didn't know. Being in a state of lack of knowledge, it is very plausible that they are not the best judge of what a correct or even good answer is. Just because an answer has been 'accepted' doesn't mean it is the authoritative correct answer; it's just the one the OP chose as what they think helped them the most (and that is a paraphrase of the balloon help on the 'accept' button for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;duplicates, though closed, are not expected to be eventually deleted. They are expected to stay around as a linked collection of all the possible answers (if some answers to the duplicate still got through). There's lots of meta discussion on what duplicates mean here and on main meta that you can follow. If you think a better answer should exist, then it can be done on the question that hasn't been closed as a duplicate. If you think you can produce a good answer, you can do that on the non-duplicate (that is not bad form).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holy crap, Wiktionary is the worst. It is not authoritative, it either ---steals--- screen scrapes from random other online dictionaries, or worse, they do it from Wikipedia, a wholly idiocy of the masses enterprise (actual Wikipedia has some good spots). I'm sure very good people are working tirelessly on it but with the effect of an eyedropper on the ocean. It's like they're coming up with definitions from scratch, without considering the many instances of various nuances of a word. In effect it is much like ELU where sometimes you will get a well-researched, highly nuanced authoritative answer written by someone with actual knowledge ... sometimes, but most of the time you just get some random person off the web that quickly spouts off a non-wrong unnuanced comment, or a cut and paste from parts of other web pages with no explanatory commentary that gets accepted as though  it is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer when it is only tangentially related to what the OP wanted. At least Urban Dictionary doesn't pretend to be an authority.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end, the points above are not an answer to your explicit question, but I think that question is misdirected. You're right, it's not up to anybody else other than the OP to accept an answer; the community can't decide to unaccept something. Yes, the community could vote to reopen your duplicate but it's pretty obvious to me that the questions are duplicate, so I don't expect that that would be a successful campaign. This meta post is a good enough re-visiting of the issue and if there are people (including yourself) who are motivated, they can post what they think is a better answer to the open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Josh mentioned (in comments) that a reasonable next step would be to open a bounty on the open question with the bounty reason being that the current answers aren't currently sufficient (or something to that same effect). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T15:41:06.257" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T15:41:06.257" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10121" CreationDate="2017-03-17T15:00:16.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please flag a post that has been edited in such a way, using the &quot;other&quot; flag, and explain about the editing in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators will receive the flag and deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T15:00:16.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10121" CreationDate="2017-03-17T23:34:04.637" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Tonepoet has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10121/editing-without-reason#comment40487_10121&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; on the question, this may have nothing to do with rep-scoring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with more than 2000 rep do not get points for successful edits, and they can edit without the verification of other users. Users who do not yet have 2000 rep can suggest edits which have to be reviewed and approved. Approved edits award the editor +2 rep, but you only get that for your first 500 edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange encourages the editing of content&lt;/a&gt; to improve its curation. Questions from new users, especially, can include greetings and signatures, &quot;Thanks in advance,&quot; and the like: all of these are superfluous and can (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;and should&lt;/a&gt;) be removed. Markdown syntax for formatting can be esoteric, and there are particular conventions on this site &amp;mdash; using italics for mentions; not using code formatting &amp;mdash; which may not be known. Direct quotations should use the &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; quote formatting, and using it to offset examples from commentary is also useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, these are minor; but the minor alteration to the post can yield a disproportionately large improvement in its overall quality and contribution to the site, making it more businesslike and easier to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system does have a lower limit on editing, and edits by users other than the author or moderators have to change &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140288/why-should-edits-be-at-least-six-non-space-characters&quot;&gt;at least six characters&lt;/a&gt; in order to be accepted. So really trivial edits aren't possible. This does have the side-effect that you can't make some necessary changes like adding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; where it was wrongly omitted&lt;/a&gt;, or a single-character typo which might drastically alter the intended meaning: but in those cases it might be best to leave a comment anyway, asking whether the author &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; meant what he wrote. That also serves as a warning to other readers that there may be something wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the edit does seem abusive, do flag as Matt &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10123/18696&quot;&gt;suggests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T03:06:21.743" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2017-03-18T03:22:27.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest cutting &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; some slack. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just add a editorial one-liner at the top of his answer, saying that the Google Books citation was a red herring, but that it doesn't affect the force of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is based on the answer's assertions that starting point of the etymological trail isn't very visible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Douglas's usage, cut slack seems to be used as a metaphorical set phrase, but the literal underpinning of the expression is not obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no conclusive evidence establishing any of these scenarios as the etymological source for Cut me some slack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the rest of the answer is solid, I don't mind the admission of conjecture about the start the trail. Since conjecture has been admitted anyway, it doesn't hurt too much that the opening example serves only as motivation for the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T03:22:27.763" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4021" CreationDate="2017-03-18T11:06:01.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The members of the list of migration targets are chosen by the mods and members of ELU (in this case), and can change over time, which is why the the SE-wide mechanism is as it is. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, before anyone excitedly proposes to add Writers.SE (again), bear in mind that sites still in beta are not valid targets, presumably because their ambit is still under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T11:06:01.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T20:02:59.817" Score="4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;The above is a famous riddle from &lt;em&gt;Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;by Lewis Carroll,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65800-mad-hatter-why-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ref1]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2083,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ref2]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://io9.gizmodo.com/5872014/the-answer-to-the-most-famous-unanswerable-fantasy-riddle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ref3]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/#q=%E2%80%9CWhy+is+a+raven+like+a+writing+desk?%E2%80%9D&amp;amp;*&amp;amp;spf=2002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ref4-&amp;infin;]&lt;/a&gt;, …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But seriously,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;unlike&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently reviewed &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/227203&quot;&gt;this suggested edit&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;which added the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/q/65793/26083&quot; title=&quot;writing style - Difference in male vs female use of the English language&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;which already had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt; tag. &#xA;And I scratched my head and looked them up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt;     18 followers, 732 questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Questions related to the use of proper writing style in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The style of a sentence, phrase, or construction,&#xA;  is its general expression of meaning as a whole,&#xA;  apart from the actual categorical meaning of the constituent words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions asking about the style&#xA;  of a particular sentence, phrase, or construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt;      22 followers, 387 questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This tag is for questions specifically related to written English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Examples of questions using this tag&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/4893&quot;&gt;If an insertion in parentheses ends with a smiley,&#xA;  how do I distinguish between the two?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/177&quot;&gt;Should you always use the accent in foreign words like “résumé”?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Cont’d) …                  &lt;sub&gt;[Order changed for effect.]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, I thought, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt; refers to&#xA;the thoughtful authoring, composing, preparing and rendering of&#xA;ideas, information, knowledge, etc., into prose words (or, perhaps, verse)&#xA;intended for non-vocal delivery and/or presentation,&#xA;while &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt; refers to the physical/visual representation of text. &#xA;But the list goes on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… (Cont’d)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/10522&quot;&gt;Capitalisation of nouns in English in the 17th and 18th centuries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/9479&quot;&gt;Why, in old books, are dates often given with the years redacted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/8964&quot;&gt;Which variant of English should I use&#xA;  when my target audience is the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so I wondered, why isn’t &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/capitalization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;capitalization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;capitalization&lt;/a&gt; the most appropriate tag&#xA;for a question about capitalization? &#xA;Why isn’t &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/date&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;date&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;date&lt;/a&gt; the most appropriate tag for a question about dates? &#xA;And why aren’t &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-style&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-style&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dialects&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dialects&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dialects&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;the most appropriate tags&#xA;for a question about which variant of English to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, if we need tag(s) for the physical/visual representation of text,&#xA;what’s wrong with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; (8 followers, 132 questions),&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt; (26 followers, 1.1k questions) and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/symbols&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;symbols&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;symbols&lt;/a&gt; (4 followers, 97 questions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick scan of recent &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot;&gt;questions tagged [writing]&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;reveals questions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;document (e.g., bibliography) formatting&#xA;(which should probably be covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style-manuals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style-manuals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style-manuals&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;although that has no tag wiki / usage guidance yet),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;formality (e.g., use of pronouns in papers for publication) &#xA;(which should probably be covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/formality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formality&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/style-manuals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;style-manuals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;style-manuals&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;politeness (e.g., salutations in letters and emails) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politeness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politeness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politeness&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indentation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;typography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word choice (an issue for spoken English as well as written,&#xA;covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use of “a” &lt;em&gt;vs.&lt;/em&gt; “an” before symbols&#xA;(which is an issue for spoken English as well as written,&#xA;and probably covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/symbols&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;symbols&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;symbols&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;punctuation (which is also a tag: 44 followers, 1.9k questions),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. &#xA;It’s a tag about everything, so it’s a tag about nothing. &#xA;(By the way, of the 387 questions tagged [writing],&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style+writing&quot;&gt;52 are also tagged [writing-style]&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing&lt;/a&gt; tag be deleted? &#xA;Or should it be defined to something useful? &#xA;(I guess questions currently bearing that tag&#xA;would need to be revisited/re-evaluated either way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;//english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3783/26083&quot;&gt;Should the typography tag and typesetting tag be merged?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:29:06.353" Title="“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T10:42:17.017" Score="7" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user asked this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/378841/what-would-you-call-a-person-who-is-obsessed-with-being-normal&quot;&gt;What would you call a person who is obsessed with being &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the text body they asked for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;someone who cannot bear to be different from other people&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and got plenty of good answers for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then edited it to give an example which doesn't seem to touch on normality, and changed it to be about somebody wanting someone &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; to be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This late change completely invalidates answers with a +80 score!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've voted to close as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;. Am I doing the right thing? I'm now thinking that I should possibly revert the addition of the example, and request to the user that if they want to ask a substantially different question from the original one, they should ask it as a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T10:42:17.017" Title="Significantly changed question" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10127" CreationDate="2017-03-20T13:08:38.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Writing&amp;quot; should definitely disappear. For the rare question for which it would be appropriate, for questions on written registers of English and their differences from spoken English, &amp;quot;written-english&amp;quot; would be a much clearer tag. Or maybe it could be renamed, I just don't know how many questions would then be mistagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Orthography&amp;quot; is a separate topic. I'd suggest that it be used for discuss how the Latin script has come to be used to transcribe spoken English. This topic has a lot of history and quirks and many very interesting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've suggested this for the wiki for writing-style because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/writing-style/info&quot;&gt;the current wiki&lt;/a&gt; doesn't really make sense. But the edit was knocked back. Anyone want to make some improvements to it and then we can try again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing style is hard to define definitively - but when you see good style, you know it. Good style is elegant rather than clumsy, powerful rather than weak. It takes practice to develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions asking about the style of a particular sentence, phrase, or construction. But be warned, many of these questions are what we call Primarily Opinion Based, and are likely to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:29:06.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-26T03:45:25.113" Score="0" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the English language and would enjoy participating in a forum such as this, if only I could find the one that includes everyone--without the snide comments and the personal attacks that I see here.   Shame on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227081" OwnerDisplayName="poetlaureate" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T01:23:16.447" Title="Why are all the contributors here so nasty to each other?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-26T11:04:54.330" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/116151/glorfindel&quot;&gt;profile page&lt;/a&gt;, my newest badge was shown: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/4/cleanup?userid=116151&quot;&gt;Cleanup&lt;/a&gt;. However, it linked to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/6/116151&quot;&gt;wrong question&lt;/a&gt;; I actually earned it for rolling back the vandalism in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/379771/116151&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. The link on the badge page itself &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; correct. The wrong question has a very low post ID (6) which I think is not a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, it can't be verified anymore, because my newest badge is now Quorum, which – oh, the irony – I earned with this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0mQg3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0mQg3.png&quot; alt=&quot;profile page with wrong link&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A0H51.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A0H51.png&quot; alt=&quot;badge page with correct link&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T16:27:31.450" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T16:27:31.450" Title="'Newest badge' links to wrong post" Tags="|bug|badges|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10132" CreationDate="2017-03-26T15:07:49.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;@poetlaureate     My advice is to give the site a little more time.  You will need patience and perseverance to learn how to enjoy participating here.  One of the traps that people can fall into is not taking time to really take in what someone is saying, which then leads to an unhelpful and judgmental response. Another trap is to react emotionally,  unproductively or self-righteously to something that strikes you as inappropriate or sloppy.  There is plenty here that does not deserve careful attention and criticism.  Save your energy and give your time to something that looks as though it will help you to spend time on it.  It may take a little time to learn to spot the opportunities.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been here for just under two weeks.  This is my first experience of participating in a collaborative online project. It is fascinating to see how the site functions and to have a chance to work with other people in a process of striving to reach the best possible answer to a question in an area of mutual interest — in this case the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What may be slightly lacking here is an awareness that the process of pursuing excellence in the form of the &quot;best answer&quot; itself needs to be excellent. A mediocre process can hardly lead to an excellent result.  So we need to strive for a mutual understanding of an excellent process.  Some thoughts on this follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Built into the project is an awareness that collaboration can help us to reach excellence.  This means that we need to allow ourselves to be (publicly) corrected, and that it is responsible to correct others.  However, we are human beings, and all of us need encouragement and respect for the efforts we have made.  The current culture of the site may be slightly biased towards linguistic and scholarly excellence at the expense of the human processes we are engaged in as we pursue that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been very struck by how much people's feelings and attitudes can be expressed and sensed in the comments, up and down voting and so on.  This is real communication!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is exciting to me to improve myself and to &quot;meet&quot; people here whom I like and respect, I also sense the potential for participants — as in other areas of life — to voice themselves self-righteously and to take the notion of status too seriously.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find myself attracted to those voices that are seriously listening (here reading), but at the same time not taking themselves too seriously.  I am not attracted to anything that smacks a little too much of eagerness to police the site or of self-righteousness. The most articulate and intelligent of us may be among the most susceptible to these weaknesses, I suspect. We might enjoy ourselves much more if we were to appreciate that excellence in the sense of being &quot;right&quot; needs to be tempered by excellence of a different kind.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, there is never going to be a &quot;best answer&quot; for many of the questions.  The point is to enjoy the process of exploring questions intelligently in order to find answers that are as helpful as they possibly can be at a given point in time.  Let's try also to be as helpful to each other as possible in this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being serious about what we are doing can be fun.  If it doesn't feel fun to me at a given moment, then I am in need of helpful feedback — from myself or from some person out there who finds it fun to be helpful.  My experience on this site has been giving me the sense that the goal of making sure that we are able to receive and give feedback in a healthy way may ultimately be more important, interesting, and difficult than the goal of reaching the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry there are no references here!  My personal feeling is that they would not be helpful in answering this particular question. Or perhaps I need to be told by someone from above that this is not acceptable...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225356" LastEditorUserId="225356" LastEditDate="2017-03-26T16:49:46.927" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T16:49:46.927" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10132" CreationDate="2017-03-26T19:21:41.473" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth bearing in mind that Stack Overflow sites aren't meant to be &quot;forums&quot; or &quot;chat sites&quot; (people are supposed to come here to &lt;em&gt;ask and/or answer questions,&lt;/em&gt; not for the social interaction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As implied by the upvotes for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10132/why-are-all-the-contributors-here-so-nasty-to-each-other#comment40612_10133&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;, it's quite possible at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; new visitors here experience &quot;rejection, rudeness&quot; because they're asking basic questions on the wrong site (questions that would be better received on ELL). Perhaps it's the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; that's being rejected, not the &lt;em&gt;querent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for overt and sustained hostility between established users (or towards those newcomers who've correctly identified this as the right site for their question), all I can say is I don't see much of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the written word is far inferior to face-to-face interaction in terms of how easy it is to know how your contribution to a discourse is being perceived at the receiving end. And if people perceive their primary purpose here to be giving or getting &lt;em&gt;information&lt;/em&gt;, they might not always pay as much attention to the limited feedback they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get as if they were here to make and interact with friends. Get over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T19:21:41.473" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10132" CreationDate="2017-03-26T23:06:55.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It took me a while to figure this out, but here's what I figured out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the participants on the site share the responsibility for politeness, and the way to exercise that responsibility is by flagging and writing comments.  (The moderators play a special role by making decisions about the flags.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you can make flags as soon as you have 15 reputation points.  It's hard to say much of anything specific without examples.  Examples can be provided in a variety of ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a link&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;text copied from a problematic comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a screenshot taken of a problematic comment, in context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T01:23:16.447" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T01:23:16.447" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-28T08:34:47.327" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211163/whats-a-word-for-a-thing-that-makes-one-sleepy&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a word for a &amp;#39;thing that makes one sleepy&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt; has attracted a good number of upvotes and a series of interesting answers IMO, but users appear to think that it is still off-topic. I tried to VTR it more than once after it was edited  adding the  sample sentence and the required previous research, but...nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think  it is an interesting question and the answers offers a really exhaustive  variety of options.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it not be re-opened? What more is necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T16:11:05.350" Title="Is this question still off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10139" CreationDate="2017-03-28T11:18:29.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would think the principle reason for leaving &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions open is because it allows users to submit new information, new suggestions, and new answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that 14 answers is a pretty &lt;strong&gt;exhaustive list&lt;/strong&gt;, the accepted answer itself contains &lt;strong&gt;a list of fourteen words&lt;/strong&gt;! Five out of the fourteen posts have been deleted by mods / the community, which hasn't harmed the question in the slightest. The answers were all very low quality and/or repeating suggestions submitted earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's remind ourselves that closed questions are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not hidden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from view, anyone can look up the question and find that extensive &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thesaurus list&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. A closed question just means new answers cannot be submitted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that such a bad thing? Why? If the OP can provide a convincing argument, I'll happily VTR. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is this question still off topic?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;it is still off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit, written by a different user than the OP, states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/sleepy?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thesaurus.com&lt;/a&gt; doesn't give anything which leads to a suitable noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not true! I clicked on the link and it has the following &lt;strong&gt;list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;somniferous  somnolent  soothing   soporific  soporose  trance-inducing   torpid&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;drowsy      lethargic   listlesss  sluggish   asleep    comatose  draggy   hypnotic&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Included in that list are the words &lt;em&gt;hypnotic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;soporific&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;drowsy&lt;/em&gt;. Amazingly, the accepted answer provided a &lt;strong&gt;list&lt;/strong&gt; of drugs and agents (&lt;em&gt;dwale&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;somnifacient&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;somnivolency&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;somnolency&lt;/em&gt;)  which induce sleep (or death!), which boggles the mind but the OP &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; said he was looking for an adjective or a noun to describe &lt;em&gt;sleepy&lt;/em&gt;. It seems he was looking for the names of medicines or the agent responsible for making one sleepy. In which case, the question, as it stands, is &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt;, and ergo off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T12:25:52.437" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T12:25:52.437" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10139" CreationDate="2017-03-28T15:57:47.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it should be re-opened. It's not a great question, but leaving it closed is pointless, and I agree with what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10139/is-this-question-still-off-topic#comment40687_10139&quot;&gt;Mitch said in a comment&lt;/a&gt;: closure should be made a temporary status as often as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Functionally, closure acts to prevent anyone from answering a question, and enables deletion. The &quot;closed&quot; status shouldn't be used as an eternal badge of disapproval for questions that are seen as &quot;lazy&quot; or otherwise subpar. That's what downvotes are for. (I just downvoted the question; I'm surprised to see that only one other person has done so so far, even though there were five close-voters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions that are valuable should be historically locked, closed questions that are impossible to salvage and have no valuable answers should be deleted, and bad but salvageable closed questions should be edited and then reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to fall into the last category. (There are no delete votes, so evidently high-rep users don't think the page should actually be removed from the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows, maybe someday someone will post another useful answer. We shouldn't block this. Yes, there are existing answers that seem adequate, but it's hard to figure out if that means there are no other possible good answers. Many open questions on this site have accepted answers or a similar number of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T16:11:05.350" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T16:11:05.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10146" CreationDate="2017-03-30T09:46:46.857" Score="-4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/378068/how-do-americans-refer-to-their-non-metric-system-in-everyday-circumstances&quot;&gt;How do Americans refer to their non-metric system in everyday circumstances?&lt;/a&gt; , a moderator has posted under the question, and under the top five answers the following message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. &lt;strong&gt;FURTHER COMMENTS WILL BE DELETED&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a question really need to have a comment left with both caps lock and bold six times, especially when the problem was simply posts with too many people adding comments, as opposed to hate speech or harassment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried replying to the moderator, but the individual hasn't responded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T13:41:16.557" Title="Very shouty moderation messages" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10144" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-30T11:51:42.897" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T11:51:42.897" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T11:51:42.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10145" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-30T11:51:42.897" Score="0" Body="For questions about the bounty system, which allows users to spend some of their reputation in order to draw more attention to a question." OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T07:58:08.163" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T07:58:08.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10142" CreationDate="2017-03-30T13:41:16.557" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a Q&amp;amp;A network not a discussion forum, but this question has repeatedly drawn opinionated side comments. There are currently more than 150 deleted comments on that question and its answers. Moderators are instructed to intervene to keep the site within the Q&amp;amp;A framework rather than letting it turn into a discussion forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have only so many tools at our disposal in this regard. One of them is moving discussions to chat where they belong. Another is deleting them without notice. A third is to lock the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first measure did not suffice to dissuade discussion.  The second measure was becoming tedious, so I updated the message to make clear that discussion would be deleted out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third measure has not been applied yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T13:41:16.557" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T22:10:31.023" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/369872/is-there-a-word-in-english-for-a-man-who-leaves-his-pregnant-wife-and-child&quot;&gt;Is there a word in English for a man who leaves his pregnant wife and child?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar, highly-rated &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26990/a-word-to-describe-people-i-care-about?rq=1&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13317/is-there-a-word-for-somebody-who-cares-for-his-her-child-too-much?rq=1&quot;&gt;do&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26990/a-word-to-describe-people-i-care-about?rq=1&quot;&gt;exist&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems no more or less specific than those, so I can't understand why this one in particular was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206596" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T23:58:01.510" Title="Why was my question closed as being &quot;too broad&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10147" CreationDate="2017-03-30T23:58:01.510" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because there are many words for someone who does something like this. A few that quickly to mind include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abusive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asshole&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bad-mannered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;barbarian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;barbaric&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;barbarous&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;beachcomber&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blackguard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;boor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;boorish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;borrower&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bounder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;brash&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;brusque&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;brutish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;capricious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cheeky&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;churl&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;churlish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;criminal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;crook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;crude&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;culprit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cur&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dawdler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deadbeat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;derelict&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;desperado&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;devil&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do-nothing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;evil&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feckless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fickle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flighty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fly-by-night&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;freeloader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;good-for-nothing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;goof-off&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;graceless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;heedless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;heel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hobo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hoodlum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ignorant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ill-considered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;immature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;immoral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;imp&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;impertinent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;impolite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;impudent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inattentive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;incautious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inconsiderate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indelicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indifferent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indiscreet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insensitive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insolent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jerk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;laggard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lawbreaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lax&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;layabout&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lazybones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;loafer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;loose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lounger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;louse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lout&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;loutish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lowlife&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maggot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;malefactor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;malingerer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mendicant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;miscreant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moocher&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ne'er-do-well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neglecter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neglectful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negligent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no-account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obscene&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;outlaw&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;panhandler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peremptory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;primitive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quitter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rascal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rash&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reckless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reprobate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rotter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rounder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rude&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;runaway&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rustler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scalawag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scamp&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scoundrel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scrounger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scurrilous&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;self-centered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selfish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shiftless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shirker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slacker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sloth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slouch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sluggard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sponger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stinker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;supplicant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thoughtless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tramp&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unaccountable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unanswerable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncareful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncaring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unceremonious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncivil&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncivilized&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unconcerned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncouth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncultured&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;undependable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ungracious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vagabond&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;villain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vulgar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wanderer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wretch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any other “sort of person” that we wish to badmouth, English offers no shortage of ways of calling other people bad names. These questions come up constantly, and they do not lead to single “correct” answers, just plenty of nasty things to say about other human beings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T23:58:01.510" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-01T17:30:53.930" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2637/fumblefingers&quot;&gt;FumbleFingers&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/380276/term-for-offering-something-just-out-of-reach/380282?noredirect=1#comment897891_380282&quot;&gt;Term for offering something just out of reach&lt;/a&gt; evokes too many images. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qyg88.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qyg88.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Dangling a carrot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding an image may help an answer by replacing few or all of the words. It also helps anyone remember it for a long time. I've done it a few times. Got a great response. But I am capricious and I couldn't resist adding a visual aid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is how much help would it be if the image provided above was used as an answer for the mentioned question ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71659" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T17:01:33.690" Title="What if an image was used to answer the question I've provided below?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10149" CreationDate="2017-04-01T18:12:54.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a picture is very helpful. But the answer should contain an explanation also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picture-only answers are strongly discouraged. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9914/50044&quot;&gt;Irrelevant pictures are not welcome&lt;/a&gt;, and may be removed by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/308144/50044&quot;&gt;following answer&lt;/a&gt; to a question I once posted. It explains well, and the added picture is very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UWUh2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UWUh2.png&quot; alt=&quot;This is an accepted answer with 41 score and an image of what appears to be a batter riding a horse with a carrot on a stick in the crook of his arm, and a baseball bat spanking the horse&amp;#39;s buttocks. The text of the answer reads: &amp;quot;Here, *the carrots* refer to attractive features that might lure you into adopting the new version. It comes from the idiom *carrot and stick*. To induce someone to do something you can promise as a reward, the carrot, threaten punishment, the *stick*, or do both. There&amp;#39;s an analogy here trying to make a horse or donkey go forward. Thanks to Todd Wilcox for the picture suggestion.&amp;quot; The artist&amp;#39;s signature, and a publication date of 2013 is to our lower right, but I can&amp;#39;t quite make it out. It looks like Dave Contu.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:41.913" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T17:01:33.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10154" CreationDate="2017-04-04T13:12:03.210" Score="9" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;In particular, I've been looking into the word &lt;em&gt;strike&lt;/em&gt; and all of its noun senses. That led me to look at &lt;em&gt;lightning strike&lt;/em&gt;, which seems to be defined only in a metaphorical sense in both the OED and Merriam-Webster's Unabridged (online).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every dictionary I've looked at, &lt;em&gt;strike&lt;/em&gt; has the sense &quot;the act of striking&quot; listed (with minor variations from dictionary to dictionary). But in citations and illustrative quotations the one doing the striking is either a) some kind of intentional agent like a person or animal, or b) a clock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seriously doubt that I've sussed out a brand new sense of &lt;em&gt;strike&lt;/em&gt; from the very common phrase &lt;em&gt;lightning strike&lt;/em&gt; that the editors of major dictionaries have somehow overlooked. I wanted to ask the community if they would consider &lt;em&gt;lightning strike&lt;/em&gt; to be covered in the sense of &quot;the act of striking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be more detailed in my actual post than I have been here. But my question is not so much about the use of &lt;em&gt;strike&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;lightning strike&lt;/em&gt; and more about how it is accounted for in monolingual English-language dictionaries like the OED and Merriam-Webster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38737" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T13:22:28.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T13:49:18.390" Title="Are questions about lexicography appropriate here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10153" CreationDate="2017-04-04T13:49:18.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual it depends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yes, questions about lexicography (in general and in particular) are welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;factual questions about a particular dictionary's editorial policy and how particular entries hold to that policy are most likely on topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions simply judging the accuracy of dictionary entries are problematic because they are likely to be simply opinionated. As long as they can be supported somehow (probably by scholarship of other dictionaries) they should be OK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all that, I think your question would be on-topic (and welcome).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T13:49:18.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T17:48:57.237" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a made up word (being used as brand name for a project I'm working on) and I know how it is pronounced and I can write it phonetically, but I need to know how to write the pronunciation with the correct 'notation' as used in dictionaries. Please pardon my ignorance when it comes to terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a valid question to ask on this site? If not, does anyone know where I can find the information please? As it's a made up word I can't use a dictionary to copy it from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149502" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T13:29:12.720" Title="Are questions about pronunciation notation ok?" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T18:26:27.393" Score="-7" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/381972/wont-contraction-or-not&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been edited and it appears to be on topic now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP is simply asking if &quot;wont&quot; is an acceptable wariant of &quot;won't&quot; and if , possibly, there are difference in that respect in AmE vs BrE. To the question I just added some research  but I didn't change its nature. The Google findings are not necessarily that obvious to any user and stylistic variants might be found in literature or in informal writings. What's so horrible, unacceptable, and shameful about that question? It is a decent, reasonable doubt. There are a lot of exceptions to the rules in the English language. Why is this &quot;unaskable&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T20:41:49.017" Title="Please reopen the &quot;wont&quot; question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10157" CreationDate="2017-04-06T16:48:35.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to reopen this question in its present form, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/381972/1&quot;&gt;its proper form.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I am not against &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;editing a post to save it&lt;/a&gt;, even if it means adding research. However the cases where we can add research without changing the meaning of the post are few and far between because we don't know what kind of answer the questioner is seeking. Changing the meaning of a post is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;a violation of the help center guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, and contradicts a review queue rejection reason (two actually, as this also has the character of an attempt to reply).  It may prove to be especially problematic if the guess as to what piqued interest in the question was wrong altogether, the answer accrues presumably valid answers as the result of a premature reopening and gets edited by its poster in a manner that invalidates the efforts, by clarifying the desired result. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an off-topic question is asked that piques your own interest in such a way that you are willing to make such a drastic edit that it has a different meaning, I would suggest making your own question instead. Even if the only reason you want to reopen the question is so that you can provide an answer please do remember that &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;you may answer your own questions&lt;/a&gt; if you think you have genuinely helpful information to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe if you could adequately explain how you deduced the questioner's intent from the text provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8194/should-why-can-we-use-inadequate-but-not-inspecific-be-reopened&quot;&gt;as I had here&lt;/a&gt;, or provided evidence that you have somehow read their mind I would reconsider, but I doubt you can. I think this is all relatively baseless supposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commentators point out other problems too: It is overly broad to ask about every example occurring on Google Books; we need more particular examples. It may even be primarily opinion based if the plethora of recommended and actual examples regarding whether to use the apostrophe are not sufficient evidence, although there may be mitigating factors. Questions about style also often tend to be closed as Primarily Opinion Based, because most stylistic choices are optional, and lack any systematic rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not even sure if this question is validly about English, or Google Books software. Google Books treats punctuation apostrphes weirdly. Type in won't into the ngrams viewer and you'll get the message &quot;Replaced won't with will not to match how we processed the books.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.it/books?id=MZSaECHWlZ8C&amp;amp;q=%22they+wont%22&amp;amp;dq=%22they+wont%22&amp;amp;hl=it&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjv_rPdoZDTAhVH8GMKHb8xCpkQ6AEIIzAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The very first example I see on Google Books is clearly a transcription error.&lt;/a&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.it/books?id=4M0B-Hi1co4C&amp;amp;pg=PT126&amp;amp;dq=%22they+wont%22&amp;amp;hl=it&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiJ-o7Uo5DTAhUCymMKHVBAAZAQ6AEIKTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22they%20wont%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second example almost omits punctuation altogether.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to roll this edit back so that the close reason matches the body of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is not difficult to understand the question in its base form, but that question is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;textbook general reference&lt;/a&gt; question, even if we posit the dictionary entries on reasonable searches aren't enough (which is doubtful) because they don't provide a complete explanation or comparison in a single link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that Grammarly is a sufficiently reputable resource specifically designed to answer this type of question, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.is/o/sMOMt/https://www.grammarly.com/blog/wont-vs-wont/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gives an answer&lt;/a&gt; which appears on the first page of any reasonable google search you could perform. Here are archived search results for &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/E1Njx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Won't&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/1qqmh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wont&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/sMOMt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;both words put together.&lt;/a&gt; These results make the answer &lt;em&gt;obvious enough to warrant closure&lt;/em&gt;, especially since the first and most reasonable search supposed by this edit returns many more congruent results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the stuff you establishes gives new meaning to the question by adding meanings that were not there before. How do you know for a fact that The Grammarist's answer is dissatisfactory? I doubt we do. In a perfect world, we would be able to infer that they would not bother to ask us, but in practical reality questioners accept general resources to questions frequently and they garner many votes for them as well, despite the fact that they simply are not a productive use of Stack Exchange's efforts. This is why we have a close reason like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like to make it clear that I am not saying the question is necessarily horrible, shameful, ridiculous, unsalvagable or even unworthy of being asked. I am just saying that it is that in light of the above consideration, it is the responsibility of the poster to show us that this is not the answer. However the edited question may be less clear than the original, so when they do, they should also add why it is not a sufficient answer, preferably by providing the context that casts sufficient doubt on the common knowledge. Perhaps a quotation by a famous author that frequently escapes the clutches of editors might save the question, e.g. the lack of capitalization in the writing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nxPnBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=ee+cummings&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj__di7-JDTAhWqqlQKHQAuC34Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E.E. Cummings&lt;/a&gt; might cast sufficient doubt on the common knowledge. It'd still have to survive the other close reasons to be reopened though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd provide an example of a question that asked whether his name should be written with or without capital letters, but I can't find it right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:42.127" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T20:41:49.017" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T22:27:25.950" Score="9" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/382115/eating-people-is-wrong-but-its-wrong-to-eat-people-why&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt;  was originally titled &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why &quot;Using X is better&quot; but &quot;It's better to use X&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first title edit incorporated  two of four example questions expressed by the OP in their actual question,  namely &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why &quot;Using a keyboard is better&quot; but &quot;It's better to use a keyboard&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this edit to be helpful; and again  it contains  two  of four sentences actually used by the OP in the question body.  But later the same user (not the OP)  edited the title to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Eating people is wrong&quot; but &quot;It's wrong to eat people&quot; - Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I don't see a good reason for, since any import of such a title may be lost on the OP, and others,  but mainly because it loses the explicit &quot;teaching moment&quot; of using two sentences provided by the OP in exchange for one of entire different substance... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T22:27:25.950" Title="So this question title was edited with no seeming or expressed reason?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10156" CreationDate="2017-04-07T11:05:10.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phonotactic constraints of English will strictly circumscribe what the pronunciation of your brand name is (so, for example  /sdæ/ will be impossible, but /stɑ:/ would be perfectly fine). In addition, the conventions for the transcription of English are language-specific and not applicable to the phonemic transcription of other languages. So long as your brand name is not already a recognised word (or a homophone of a recognised word)&amp;mdash;in which case you can just look the word up in a dictionary and copy the transcription&amp;mdash;the question should be on topic for this site. That's how I see it, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T11:05:10.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10156" CreationDate="2017-04-07T13:29:12.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, in general, questions about pronunciation notations and their correspondence with actual pronunciation are on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you question could easily be off-topic for other reasons, eg 'How do you pronounce this word I made up?' is considered off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be somewhere in the middle. To make it more on-topic, you'll want to steer things towards the differences between the notations, rather than the specifics of your word. But it would be on-topic to use your new word as an example of the differences between notations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or for a specific question 'How do I notate my new word in the system that Merriam-Webster does?' you can always ask on chat and maybe get a quicker answer (or possibly not, depends on who's there when).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T13:29:12.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-10T00:43:11.300" Score="-7" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/320758/is-hangman-a-gender-neutral-term&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;hangman&amp;quot; a gender neutral term?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question seems silly or obvious, but I found some information related to it that I think is interesting, and I'd like to be able to post an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed for two reasons: &quot;lack of research&quot; and not conforming to the prescribed format for single word requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree it should have shown more research. But this question has already been posed and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/171412/daniel-b&quot;&gt;the OP&lt;/a&gt; was last seen on this site in 2016. Closing it evidently did not have the helpful effect of motivating the OP to show more research. I don't think there is any benefit to having the question remain on this site in closed form rather than reopening it so that I can post my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the single-word-requests front: while I agree that the question isn't good as a single word request, it has some other facets to it. If you look at the title alone, it's not even obvious that it is a single word request at all. People who visit this page in the future may just want to learn information about the specific word &quot;hangman,&quot; and I think I could add some valuable content about this topic, even though I can't contribute a useful single-word replacement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical matter, I doubt any future visitors to this site will look at this question to determine what constitutes an acceptable post on this site. It has a low profile: only 110 views. Also, it hasn't been purged from the site or anything: it's still visible to the public and indexed by Google. The argument that keeping it closed helps deter people from asking bad questions in the future relies on the idea that new members of the site will notice the closure banner and understand its significance, which I think is dubious considering that it seems many people only skim the text of questions. See Grace Note's post here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/a/150&quot;&gt;https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/a/150&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see my posted answer on the linked page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions I found that I think are similar and that aren't closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/247400/a-non-gendered-word-for-fishermen&quot;&gt;A non-gendered word for fishermen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362383/do-all-major-occupations-ending-man-have-a-gender-neutral-option?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Do all major occupations ending -man have a gender-neutral option?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T18:48:59.627" Title="Could &quot;Is “hangman” a gender neutral term?&quot; be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10162" CreationDate="2017-04-10T12:20:06.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Considerations:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: In the time that I've been gone, the question has actually been reopened so much of the foregoing might not make as much sense as I would have wanted it to have when I wrote the bulk of it, but I still think it is worth consideration.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire body of the question is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4351/124936&quot;&gt;No answers are valid responses to those.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grace Note's post is a reply suggests that setting an example is not sufficient reason to prevent &lt;em&gt;deleting&lt;/em&gt; questions. That is different from reopening them just for the sake of reopening them. Also, there are at least some possible exceptions to the two possible state rule, and one is a duplicate. Duplicate questions are deemed to be helpful as potential search targets to a canonical question. Also worth note is that some very important, yet unsuitable posts are kept around as examples under historical lock, and don't always delete wrong answers because they serve as exemplars of what advice to avoid taking. Now the principle of every question having two fates, reopening or deletion, may have some hypothetical appeal, but  the practical reality of the situation is that we have 21,255 closed questions dating back since the beginnings of the website in 2010 and that list is probably growing rather than shrinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of that, setting a good example for future users was a secondary point of mine at the most. The most important thing regarding these sorts of closed questions is their value to future viewers, as the ultimate goal to every stack exchange website is &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;to build a high quality library of detailed answers to every question about&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; its subject. There are some considerations to take into account regarding how we can best achieve this goal. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222&quot;&gt;The community bot does not just go on a rampage, deleting &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; closed question that is even over a year old&lt;/a&gt;, but rather checks for votes and acceptance too. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199860&quot;&gt;It has this check for a reason: Decent answers to  have value to people who see them, even on closed questions.&lt;/a&gt; The reason this question has not yet been purged in this case is because Meta Ed's answer had some positive reception presumed to be worthy of archiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, when you suggest the reason that reopening this question would be innocuous is because nobody is looking at it, this is somewhat of a double edged sword. You want to place the great answer you worked so hard on making on the very highest and hardest to reach bookshelf in the least visited section of the library where nobody, except the few of us reading this meta-thread, will even read it. I suppose that is better than complete unavailability, but by how much and for what purpose? This may be one of the reasons the help center asks us to answer well-asked questions. The questioner has already gotten their answer, and you seem to be of the opinion that they will never revisit the website, so it probably is not for their benefit, despite however admirable that would be in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also not all too much of an underlying principle of fairness to it. We close questions and prevent &lt;em&gt;all incoming answers&lt;/em&gt; to them frequently irrespective of their potential merit. If the closure was unfair, and the O.P. could still benefit from seeing the answer, perhaps I could see arguing to reopen it on that basis, but the question was rated fairly, has not been fixed and won't be fixed for the sake of nobody. The close reasons are still applicable. Are we going to start reopening old questions of all sorts? There is also a rather good chance that you might be wrong. New users stumble into old questions frequently, and do silly things that cause us to trigger protection with prejudice. I would also like to repeat that it is not at all useful to the questioner, unlike many of the questions we could probably be petitioning to reopen now on the basis that say, perhaps, research on their part would have been fruitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reopening a bad question in light of these considerations seems like it would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;optimizing for sand, not pearls.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Alternative Solutions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; like to see your question officially published, but in this case, I think there are better ways to go about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; the member who originally visited can be safely presumed to never return, I see little to no good reason to keep this question under their stewardship. After almost a year, this appears to be their only post on the website, and it has been negatively received. Recording their contribution has no bearing on the perceived quality of any other post on the website, or any further presumable importance to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see three possible courses of action that might be reasonable to take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to delete&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a Duplicate and Make it Canonical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a Duplicate to Merge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option number one makes the most procedural sense, and can be done without diamond moderator intervention, because the question has a negative score, but it costs us MetaEd's answer. This would cost him a small bounty's worth of reputation, which is unfortunate, but is the answer currently worth keeping in its current state? It barely makes a reference to ngrams, and the link to the primary citation of the Canadian government rotted away from the face of the internet. It is unfortunately perhaps, a pretty good example of why questions that can be fairly closed should not be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not well versed in the differences between options 2 and 3, other than the fact that they do require moderator intervention and seem somewhat abusive. These options would allow us to preserve MetaEd's answer if it has any lasting value to the website though, and it does not seem like it would be too hard to persuade him to make the extra effort to keep an answer he bothered to write if he still considers it worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the benefits to these solutions over reopening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No editorial constraints regarding O.P's intent: We could change the whole scope of the question if we wanted to do so, to make it better than it was before: Better, stronger, faster than it was before with research, quotations and an exemplary sentence of our choice. The higher quality may garner more views in the grand scheme of things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A member who more frequently visits the website would have control over the acceptance marker if ownership of the post changed. This allows us to have better discretion over it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a new question, it should receive more publicity in the here and now, especially with a fresh slate. Even if we lost a good answer now, if that answer could be reposted it might get more attention in the long run with the improvements in place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in this case, perhaps answering a well asked question, as par help center advice, will yield better results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T18:48:59.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10168" CreationDate="2017-04-10T15:16:17.493" Score="4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been a couple of spam-like or at least extremely low quality 'answers' today - firstly one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/383723/what-does-it-mean-to-have-a-quick-wit&quot;&gt;What does it mean to have a quick wit?&lt;/a&gt; (which has now been deleted) and now one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/366478/finding-a-word-to-describe-that-which-is-fundamentally-real&quot;&gt;Finding a word to describe that which is fundamentally real&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;hi i am piper kimbrel i have a best friend named ella&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't actually existing &quot;only to promote a product or service&quot;, but it is at best trash and at worst clogging up the user experience for the rest of us and clogging up the servers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this merit a 'spam' flag, or is 'not an answer' good enough?  Or is there no difference between them and how they are sorted? It appears to me to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/what-are-the-spam-and-rude-or-abusive-offensive-flags-and-how-do-they-wor/58035#58035&quot;&gt;gibberish&lt;/a&gt;, and though not actually “fsdguejgkfdlk&quot; would merit spam, but is a 'spam' flag a little too hardcore in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T14:28:28.677" Title="The rise of the spammers. Or not?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10164" CreationDate="2017-04-10T15:23:56.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag that best matches the &quot;hi i am&quot; answer is &lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt; (NAA). It's not gibberish (LQP), and it's not spam, but it's completely out of place on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:23:56.147" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T02:45:15.120" Score="14" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just run into a problem involving a question with an accepted answer that is demonstrably (albeit circumstantially demonstrably) untrue: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75719/we-can-predict-everything-except-the-future&quot;&gt;Who first said &amp;quot;We can predict everything, except the future&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;. The complication in this instance is that the question has been closed, thus effectively locking out competing answers that might be more accurate and therefore more useful to site visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the question and answer persist in their current states—the question closed as off topic, with a single answer given and accepted—EL&amp;amp;U is playing host to a kind of hermetically sealed error. Since no further answers are permitted, the most another site user can do to combat the misimpression that the accepted answer leaves is to respond to it in comments—unstable and (often) short-lived though they be. I have done so in this case, but the result isn't very satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To his credit, the answerer clearly identifies where the longer quotation that he offers as the source of the poster's question came from: &quot;I found this on a mailing list and someone had posted it.&quot; Nevertheless, he incautiously argues that &quot;it appears to have been written by John Galsworthy&quot; because &quot;wikiquote seems to suggests his work &lt;em&gt;Swan Song&lt;/em&gt; (1928) Pt. II, Ch. 6 for the last line.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality the block quote that the poster attributes to Galsworthy is a gallimaufry of sayings about the future from disparate sources (most of them unknown), concluding with a sentence from &lt;em&gt;Swan Song&lt;/em&gt;. One of the earlier sayings in the compendium is the one that the OP was interested in tracking to its origin—so that wording receives the answerer's &quot;done by Galsworthy&quot; sticker too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest solution to the problem would be for moderators to delete the question and answer (if it's possible to delete questions that are closed but have accepted answers). But I'm not persuaded that this question (which was closed back in July 2012) is off topic by current site standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP asks for the source of &quot;we can predict everything but the future&quot; as a quotation (and uses the 'quote' tag as his tie-in to approved English Language &amp;amp; Usage topics). EL&amp;amp;U regularly fields questions that ask about the origin of sayings or expressions or proverbs or (in some cases) quotations, without rejecting them out of hand. In fact, the quote tag has the following thumbnail description: &quot;Questions related to (semi-)famous quotations.&quot; The saying that the poster asks about seems to me to fit squarely into the area of inquiry that the 'quote' tag expressly covers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write this, only 545 people have visited the page over the course of 4 years and 8 months, so civilization is unlikely to mourn its loss if the question does get deleted. Nevertheless, since our site put the misinformation out there in the first place, I think we have some responsibility not merely to erase the infamy but to correct the record. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if one person casting about for the source of &quot;we can predict everything but the future&quot; came to the conclusion that it was probably written by Galsworthy, others might—by the same or similar missteps—reach the same erroneous conclusion. May we not therefore consider it an act on behalf of truth, justice, and the [adjectival form of your beloved country goes here] way to cast at least a feeble ray of light into that obscure corner where misapprehension has so long dwelt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend reopening the question so that interested people can submit better answers to it. Failing that, I recommend deleting the question. It doesn't do our site's credibility any good to entomb fatally flawed answers so that they lie rigid and authoritative in the vaults of closed questions, ready to waylay unwary solitary wanderers who may happen upon them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:45.127" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T04:41:52.707" Title="How to deal with an erroneously answered question that has been closed with the faulty answer accepted?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10166" CreationDate="2017-04-11T04:06:26.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this needs to be judged on a case by case basis to be fair and free of prejudice. However with that having been said this case shows that perhaps we should be more careful when closing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/BsQnT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I doubt that this question should have been closed for being off topic according to the scope defined by community standards&lt;/a&gt; in the help center in the first place, because Etymology has always been an applicable topic for this website as far as I know,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/2880/4&quot;&gt;we have been defining etymology as the origin of words and phrases since 2011&lt;/a&gt; and the question in question was asked in 2012. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, although the original question did not prove its research, the fact that the only provided answer is wrong and received positive reception vaguely serves the same purpose as the research requirement. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;The maladies gen. ref. seeks to prevent do not apply&lt;/a&gt; and shows that the question was not easily answerable using the sort of &quot;commonly available resources&quot; that are mentioned in the present close reason text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Misattributions are often found within the sort of resources that are designed to handle this topic too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly the question shows little effort, which is something the other users might not support but the intent is clear enough from the basic question that we can fix it up easily with some superficial &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;edits&lt;/a&gt; that make it look nice, without changing the intention at all. Including a few examples of the sort of unattributed contemporary sources people might see commonly around the internet would make it look much more presentable than it appears at a glance. [I just went ahead and tried to gussy it up a little myself.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you in this case Sven. I think we should work to reopen this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T01:31:46.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T01:31:46.680" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10164" CreationDate="2017-04-11T10:08:06.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Stack Exchange Employee &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/what-are-the-spam-and-rude-or-abusive-offensive-flags-and-how-do-they-wor/58035#comment816748_58035&quot;&gt;animuson ♦&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've established in past discussions that &lt;em&gt;abuse of the system&lt;/em&gt; qualifies under the offensive flag. Posting gibberish that doesn't mean anything is definitely abusing the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have to be careful in situations where it's not as clear what the intent of the user is. Someone mashing their keyboard to get a bunch of random letters into a box is clearly abusing our system and they should be flagged and blocked. Someone who looks like they may have just ended up in the wrong place and have no idea what they're doing... well, flagging them as an abusive user and blocking them outright might be a bit much. If you're &lt;em&gt;absolutely sure&lt;/em&gt; they're intentionally trying to be abusive, by all means. Otherwise, you may want to just stick with not an answer. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10164/the-rise-of-the-spammers-or-not/10168#comment40840_10168&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My educated guess is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/383769/50044&quot;&gt;following example&lt;/a&gt; is definitely abusing the system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hi i am piper kimbrel i have a best friend named ella&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also okay to flag them as Not An Answer, or Very Low Quality. But doing so will send the post to the review queues, and will require at least 6 other reviewers to recommend it for deletion. Why waste their time? Flagging it as &amp;quot;rude or abusive&amp;quot; by at least a few users will remove the post automatically (and penalize the poster).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the example given above is not spam, and it should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be flagged as &amp;quot;spam&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post was actually useful, but then if it had some additional irrelevant text or gibberish, instead of flags, please just edit out the useless parts from the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, do provide guidance to newcomers, as that will greatly reduce any further low quality posts from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/383728/50044&quot;&gt;second example&lt;/a&gt; is simply Not An Answer. It is not gibberish in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we can eat prime rib it has to go through a process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T14:28:28.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10180" CreationDate="2017-04-11T15:18:54.610" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have attempted to simplify this post further, with question first and background second:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question to the community gurus&lt;/strong&gt;, in the interest of providing best help and lively conversation, what is the best way to encourage more specificity of the genre or &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; usage of the language in the questions and answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm new to the forum, but I have noticed a tendency, in some questions, to provide reasonable context and research without any information about what form the language is going to take. Yet, those questions receive definite-sounding answers from the community with no idea as to whether the OP is planning to address a professor or their grandma. This has an effect of watering down the conversation (in some instances) or encouraging idle grammar policing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to compensate for this, I can ask the OP for generic information directly (which seems to be the consensus) or add a series of ifs and buts to the end of my answers like this: &quot;If you're writing a speech, or if you're talking to grandma, but not on a college term paper, etc.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If this topic is just too meta then let me know. I'm new here and just wanted this question on the table to see how the group might address this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153699" LastEditorUserId="153699" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T14:26:49.370" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T15:35:23.833" Title="Getting Some Context About The Application" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10172" CreationDate="2017-04-11T18:37:28.610" Score="8" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did search but couldn't find an answer... so hope this isn't an exact duplicate... as that would be rather embarrassing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw a question closed today by two users, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Community&lt;/em&gt; ♦&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point does the Community user decide to get in on the act?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it some kind of literal string for string comparison? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T08:28:01.690" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T08:28:01.690" Title="How does the Community user close a question as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10171" CreationDate="2017-04-12T02:46:14.960" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is all explained on Meta.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/250981/323179&quot;&gt;New UI encourages askers to confirm or dispute duplicate votes&lt;/a&gt;. Here's a summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is at least one duplicate close vote on their question, the author sees a banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BtT34.png&quot; alt=&quot;This question may already have an answer here: dupe link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on that button (and confirming) closes the question as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why Community?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shog9 explains in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250981/new-ui-encourages-askers-to-confirm-or-dispute-duplicate-votes#comment819394_250960&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the effect is the same in this (one, narrowly-defined) scenario, question owners &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; have binding close votes on their own post - I believe such a feature would likely introduce a great deal of confusion unless also coupled with binding reopen votes, which would of course introduce either an opportunity for abuse or a ton of extra rules for voting. The system is closing the question, not the user who confirmed the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T02:46:14.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-12T10:20:57.520" Score="5" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to ask a question on using separate fonts to represent distorted or alien speech, &amp;lt;or enclose some kind of bracket to represent talking in another language&gt;, how well would that question be received?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219667" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T10:37:39.957" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T20:46:15.110" Title="Are questions about representing distorted voices via different typefaces and different languages represented by enclosing brackets welcome here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10173" CreationDate="2017-04-12T10:37:13.020" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; here, as it doesn't specifically deal with the &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the context of your question (it might be good to add it!) but if you're writing a book, you might want to visit our sister sites &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T11:45:09.767" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T11:45:09.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10175" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-12T10:41:32.220" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T10:41:32.220" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T10:41:32.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10176" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-12T10:41:32.220" Score="0" Body="Use this tag when examining what is on-topic or off-topic, and why. " OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T02:52:46.537" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T02:52:46.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10173" CreationDate="2017-04-12T20:33:19.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that kind of question is on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Glorfindel's suggestion to consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;, since the help center says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on these topics are welcome here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-fiction, technical, scholarly, or journalistic writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing fiction, poetry, or song lyrics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General copywriting, &lt;strong&gt;style,&lt;/strong&gt; and organization.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility for questions about typography is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Graphic Design&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, keep in mind that questions that seem like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1271/do-the-on-topic-rules-fit-non-fiction-particularly-technical-writing/1272#1272&quot;&gt;idea generation&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (per the Writers help center) or &quot;Brainstorming or idea gathering&quot; (per the Graphic Design help center) are broadly off-topic on all Stack Exchange sites. So make sure your question is narrow enough in scope to avoid falling into one of these categories. For example, rather than asking &quot;How can I use typography to indicate talking in another language?&quot;, which if taken literally could be answered with anyone's opinion, you might ask &quot;What techniques are commonly used in published novels/graphic novels to indicate talking in another language?&quot;, which implies that answers should be based primarily on facts rather than on opinion and which narrows the scope to whatever category of literature you're interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/typography&quot;&gt;typography&lt;/a&gt; are on-topic for ELU. The exact lines are probably blurry, but I would say that the main thing that makes a typography question on-topic here is some element of specificity with regard to the English language; it also helps if the question is clearly objective and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:19.427" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T20:46:15.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10166" CreationDate="2017-04-12T21:36:34.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think this is just another (if more attractive) incarnation of the &quot;wrong answers must be deleted&quot; heresy that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7739/8019&quot;&gt;I battle against constantly&lt;/a&gt; (and more canonical sources, including Jeff Atwood, have pronounced anathema on many SE sites). The correct response to an incorrect post is to downvote and (if you find proof of error) to comment with a link; both are still possible, and if two people downvote any future archaeologists will discover that, though the OP thoughtlessly accepted this answer, the wiser heads of ELU disapproved it; that is the way a Stack is supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question can be brought up to standard, it can of course be re-opened and re-answered. But personally I will take a lot of convincing that it is not Primarily Opinion-Based: does anybody really believe that &quot;We can predict anything except the future&quot; has a single identifiable source before which nobody ever expressed the thought and since which every use since has been a quotation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T21:36:34.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-14T09:39:15.270" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/382397/word-to-describe-the-list-of-people-that-i-have-a-crush-love-and-lust&quot;&gt;Word to describe the list of people that I have a crush, love, and lust&lt;/a&gt; was closed here as Primarily Opinion Based. Meanwhile, the asker cross-posted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/124645/a-common-word-or-group-or-description-of-all-the-following-love-lust-crush-i&quot;&gt;nearly identical question to English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; (and added a bounty). It is apparently on-topic there. The OP has not responded to my request that they comment on what, if anything, was wrong with the answers that accumulated here before the question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a little bit tempted to copy my answer over, but that seems...not in the spirit of the thing. I can't find very much about this topic, but the up-voted comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237835/when-a-question-is-cross-posted-should-the-answer-be-cross-posted&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; (there is no upvoted answer) suggests that perhaps our version of the question should be migrated to ELL, where it could then be merged with the version there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can/should we migrate the question? And a secondary question, if we do, is there anything special that needs to be done to get them merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And a third question that just occurred to me: It's probably too late for any such action to affect the bounty, but if it's not should we delay until after the bounty closes?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T09:39:15.270" Title="Should we migrate this (closed) duplicate question to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2017-04-15T15:35:23.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you've posted your question to the right place. Questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the main site are on-topic here. Now, on to the substance of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've come across many questions that lack basic context, let alone research. So if a question provides both &quot;reasonable context and research&quot;, it's already ahead of the pack. Given both research and context, it wouldn't be too far fetched to expect to distinguish between &lt;em&gt;grandma&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;magna carta&lt;/em&gt; fairly easily. Many regulars would probably be happy to infer the register at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if there is any doubt about it, that's what comments are for. I abuse the comment section by logging less than fully substantiated/argued answers there, but the comment section &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the appropriate place to ask the asker or respondent to clarify their post. &lt;strong&gt;Dropping a comment with a request for clarification is &quot;the best way to encourage more specificity&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that due to time zones and work/sleep/etc habits, it might take quite a while to get a reply to comments. Some people even go away permanently. In that case, if the detail is important enough (and that can be subjective), it would be appropriate to ask your own question or post your own answer. If you do this, it would be courteous for your post to link to the more generic post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more controversial approach is to edit the post to make the clarification, &lt;em&gt;so long as you believe your edit maintains the intent of the original poster&lt;/em&gt;. It would be nice to also drop a comment to say what you've done - at least, that's something &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; would like if my post was significantly edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overarching principle is that Stack Exchange intends to be a repository of expert answers to on-topic questions. Requesting clarification and editing for clarity is encouraged and is very much in line with the way the site is intended to be used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;- EL&amp;amp;U tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T15:35:23.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10184" CreationDate="2017-04-19T15:05:05.240" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/382486/a-question-about-the-proper-usage-of-articles&quot;&gt;A question about the proper usage of articles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my post I sought for comments about a grammatical aspect of a statement; the question was about a sequence of the articles in the statement--namely, whether they actually supported a meaning explained in the post or not. The question has been closed as being 'primarily opinion-based'. In my opinion, an answer to the question is not just a matter of opinion but allows either a Yes or No answer. Could someone help me in clarifying the matter?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="229295" LastEditorUserId="229295" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T15:42:02.327" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T02:56:28.353" Title="Seeking for clarification: Does my question actually comply with the category of primarily opinion-based?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T15:47:59.920" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first encountered &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/385267/how-do-i-be-adjective-vs-how-to-be-adjective&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it seemed like the ordinary struggles of a non-English speaker learning the language, so I flagged it to be migrated to ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the original poster's comments rolled in, it became clear that wasn't the case: they neglected to put an important condition into the question, a condition that substantially changed what they were asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to change my flag from &quot;migrate to ELL&quot; to &quot;too broad&quot;.  Both are sub-flags of &quot;should be closed&quot;.  It wasn't possible to click on &quot;Should be closed&quot; to get to its sub-flags; that option was was disabled.  I retracted the flag, but found that once you'd done that you couldn't re-flag with that reason (some of the other flags were still available).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to change the sub-category of a flag?  If you can't currently do that, would it be possible to add that functionality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163930" LastEditorUserId="163930" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T19:23:07.450" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T19:23:07.450" Title="How do I change the subcategory of a flag?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10182" CreationDate="2017-04-19T15:48:22.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was clear and, indeed, easy to answer by a yes or a no. There was nothing wrong with it and it should have remained open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But only 5 people (with a sufficiently high reputation) are needed to close a question; if 95 others see the question during that period, there is nothing they can do to prevent it from being closed. Only afterwards could they try to reopen the question; but I think 99% of all views of a question occur during the first couple of hours, which is why reopening is difficult and rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has grown tremendously over the past 7 years, but the number of high-reps needed to close a question has not increased: it's still only 5.  Moderators have been swimming along with the current; they've been closing more and more questions, too, over the years. The ratio of closed questions has continued to grow. Now around &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36715454#36715454&quot;&gt;60%&lt;/a&gt; of all new questions appear to be closed&lt;/strong&gt; within a couple of hours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="3036" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T15:55:23.027" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T15:55:23.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2017-04-19T17:23:46.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot change the reason given on a close vote. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915&quot;&gt;retract&lt;/a&gt; the vote if you choose &lt;em&gt;Close&lt;/em&gt; a second time, but you cannot then re-vote to close until the earlier vote expires &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250223&quot;&gt;per the aging algorithm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a &quot;right&quot; reason a question should be closed, and you accidentally choose the &quot;wrong&quot; one, I would not be overly concerned. The reason for the closure that is displayed is based on whichever receives the most votes, and I believe so long as others choose &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;, it would be closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you are concerned that others will pile on and result in a bad migration, I'd simply retract the vote, and hope that other active reviewers or a moderator close it without the need for your vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281010/324097&quot;&gt;flags can be retracted&lt;/a&gt; as well now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T17:23:46.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10182" CreationDate="2017-04-19T21:03:52.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I probably should have closed it as proofreading, but it is not a good question for our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask for only a yes/no answer do not further the goal of building up a library of expert answers.  It doesn't take an expert to say yes or no: it takes a coin-flip. There will be nothing there that will help others in the future.  There was no research provided. It’s not going to draw a quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T21:03:52.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10189" CreationDate="2017-04-20T21:04:21.633" Score="-4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question (on the non-meta ELU site) about the term &quot;native speaker,&quot; after several other answers had been posted. Immediately everything is gone. Was the question deleted? Is my inability to find the question (and my answer) supposed to be my only clue to what happened? Why was it deleted (or whatever)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastEditorUserId="214952" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T21:11:55.637" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:29:01.513" Title="What Just Happened?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2017-04-23T02:53:54.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10187" CreationDate="2017-04-20T21:13:21.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your most recent ELU answer, deleted or otherwise, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/378565/2085&quot;&gt;this one from the Ides of March&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no record of anything newer than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:13:21.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10187" CreationDate="2017-04-20T21:20:28.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question wasn't asked on EL&amp;amp;U, it was asked on &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;, and you answered there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/127265/10446&quot;&gt;What defines a native English Speaker?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not deleted. You didn't see it because you were simply looking on the wrong site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A useful tool to know about is your &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/9754610/chaim?tab=activity&quot;&gt;Network Profile&lt;/a&gt;, which can be used to find a timeline of all your activity across all sites on StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find your network profile by clicking on your own username, then &lt;em&gt;Network Profile&lt;/em&gt; in the top right near your gravitar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your activity timeline is the 4th tab on that page. It's worth bookmarking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T21:29:01.513" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:29:01.513" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-21T05:47:30.593" Score="2" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332997/an-idiom-for-using-power-of-position-to-get-things-done&quot;&gt;An idiom for using power of position to get things done&lt;/a&gt; looks clear and provides a sample sentence where to use the expression requested. It got four decent answers and a few upvotes, so why was it deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the text for the users  who are not allowed  read deleted posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not nepotism as nepotism is possible because they use their power and it is use their power which I want to replace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example situation would be getting into someplace by force, like a concert, restaurant or other event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example would be delaying a plane because they can't make it on time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The politician often ______ and people aren't pleased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need a verb idiom only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T12:23:09.843" Title="Why was the following question deleted?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10190" CreationDate="2017-04-22T12:19:05.100" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certain users have been misbehaving so we have deleted certain posts related to this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately your answer got caught up in the clean up. If you believe the question is truly worthy of EL&amp;amp;U then please repost it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T12:19:05.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10190" CreationDate="2017-04-22T12:23:09.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There hasn't just been one question closed there have been perhaps &lt;em&gt;dozens&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, some of these questions had three or more answers posted, and they were also upvoted. I'm not going to post the links because the users responsible for this shambles would be easily identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I comprehend the rationale behind the deletions, it's a punishment. The accounts associated with the users should not earn rep from cheating.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about those users who posted original answers in good faith? Should their efforts be swept aside too? Does &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/384023/44619&quot;&gt;one or two bad apples spoil&lt;/a&gt; the whole site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there no better solution than deleting?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T12:23:09.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-22T15:18:11.850" Score="12" ViewCount="845" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/385740/210913&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/385740/210913&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is  my understanding that SE answers are meant to  be answers from experts in the given field, here, &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/em&gt;, and thus that answers should be written primarily in one's own words, reflecting one's expertise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, is plopping down a Quora answer here, with minimal comment, and some bolding, an acceptable way to answer a question posted on SE: ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T16:48:42.793" Title="Is it acceptable to paste a Quora answer here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2017-04-22T15:47:29.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/about/tos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora's terms of service&lt;/a&gt;, more specifically the section &lt;strong&gt;Quora's Licenses to You&lt;/strong&gt;, which starts with the words (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to these Terms, Quora gives you a worldwide, royalty-free,&#xA;  revokable, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to re-post any of&#xA;  the Content on Quora anywhere on the rest of the web provided that the&#xA;  Content was added to the Service after April 22, 2010, and provided&#xA;  that the user who created the content has not explicitly marked the&#xA;  content as not for reproduction, and provided that you: (a) do &lt;strong&gt;not&#xA;  modify&lt;/strong&gt; the Content; (b) &lt;strong&gt;attribute Quora by name&lt;/strong&gt; in readable text and&#xA;  with a human and machine-followable link (an HTML  anchor tag)&#xA;  linking back to the page displaying the original source of the content&#xA;  on &lt;a href=&quot;http://quora.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://quora.com&lt;/a&gt; on every page that contains Quora content; &#xA;  (c) &lt;strong&gt;upon request&lt;/strong&gt;, either by Quora or a user, &lt;strong&gt;remove the user's name&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  from Content which the user has subsequently made anonymous; (d) &lt;strong&gt;upon&#xA;  request&lt;/strong&gt;, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content,&#xA;  make a reasonable effort to &lt;strong&gt;update a particular piece of Conten&lt;/strong&gt;t to&#xA;  the latest version on &lt;a href=&quot;http://quora.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://quora.com&lt;/a&gt;; and (e) &lt;strong&gt;upon request&lt;/strong&gt;, either&#xA;  by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;reasonable attempt to delete Content that has been deleted or marked&#xA;  as not for reproduction&lt;/strong&gt; on quora.com. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can, under certain specific conditions (please read the entire section &quot;Quora's Licenses to You&quot;), reproduce answers submitted to Quora. As always when you reproduce content that is not your own, it should be very clear what the source is, and what you actually reproduce (by using quotation marks, quotation markup, ...) and what you add of your own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, due to provisions c, d and e, reproducing Quora answsers that are not your own does not look very attractive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: Added provisions c-e in response to a comment by Tonepoet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163363" LastEditorUserId="163363" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T16:48:42.793" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T16:48:42.793" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10182" CreationDate="2017-04-23T02:56:28.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Proper&quot; according to who?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no language academy to tell us what our language is meant to be. Any question asking what is &quot;proper&quot;, unless it refers to some specific style guide, should be closed as opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid this problem, ask what is &quot;natural&quot;, ideally with a specific dialect of English (US, UK, Australia, Indian, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T02:56:28.353" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T02:40:43.720" Score="11" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of you have noticed a bunch of deleted questions on the site lately, and have asked why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened is that there was a voting ring of users running sock puppets to post simple dictionary- and thesaurus-type Q&amp;amp;A they used to unfairly drive up each other’s reputations with.  We’ve asked some of these users not to return, while others have been given an extended break from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cleaning this up, we’ve deleted most of the questions being used to drive it. Our apologies for any deleted answers that got caught by our mopping-up job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T02:40:43.720" Title="Please pardon our mess" Tags="|support|deleted-posts|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2017-04-24T16:35:01.003" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange plagiarism meta-question explains that &lt;strong&gt;your answer should be your own work&lt;/strong&gt;, not someone else’s. “A post that consists only of copied text is not your work.”&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot; title=&quot;“Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?” at meta.StackExchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; So, when writing an answer, it should be your own expert answer. Do not post answers from elsewhere on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side note: the SE plagiarism policy applies equally to questions. When writing a question, it should be your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T20:53:17.583" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T20:53:17.583" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T15:24:55.987" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first question on EL&amp;amp;U has generated a surprising amount of answers, discussion and difference in opinion. As the person who asked it, and accepted a controversial answer, I would like to present my thoughts on the answers. Is it therefore acceptable to edit the original question with a summary of responses with some discussion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen this type of thing on the more code-based StackExchanges, where a poster has added the most suitable code snippet at the end of the question and maybe the reason why it works. Of course, this forum is less technical, so people aren't searching it for a quick and objective answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what are the alternatives? Should I respond to each post with its merits individually and then reference others in the response? This would be more difficult, given the brevity and lack of formatting options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232901" LastEditorUserId="232901" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T15:37:23.277" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T17:26:56.530" Title="Is it acceptable to summarise answers in the question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10200" CreationDate="2017-04-25T17:26:56.530" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95?m=36915720#36915720&quot;&gt;moderator has already answered this for you&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;putting the discussion in the question would be a distraction from the question. It could be helpful to future people with the same question if you want to leave a comment under the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of the site is to have well-formed questions with good answers. It's not meant for an extended discussion in the form of edits. If you want to explain your reason for voting an answer up or for accepting it, you can do so in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases it is also worthwhile to answer your own question if your final answer differs from the other answers posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T17:26:56.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10203" CreationDate="2017-04-25T19:38:40.057" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I KNOW I AM NEW TO THIS SITE, SO PLEASE EXCUSE ANY UNINTENTIONAL LAPSE OF PROCEDURE /ETIQUETTE ON MY PART)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following recent question that has now been voted close is the subject of my query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/384041/a-word-phrase-idiom-for-a-woman-who-refuses-to-concede-to-pressure/384063#384063&quot;&gt;A word/phrase/idiom for a woman who refuses to concede to pressure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP obviously posted a sensitive topic, and also did some controversially irregular editing (which has now been rolled back by moderator.)  However, many honestly indignant members of EL&amp;amp;U got sucked into a heated debate on gender politics which may be an important social and ethical topic but is (in my humble opinion) both irrelevant to and far beyond the scope of this English language and usage website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time the dust cleared,  the OP's question read something like 'what is a word/phrase/idiom for a woman who does not yield to pressure' although 'a woman who does not see reason' was the sense of the original post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken in isolation, both forms of the question appear no more off topic, nor 'a matter of opinion', than many other single word requests and usage questions seen on this website.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I could not understand the reason for closing the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question was closed because many members found its content, tone and editing objectionable. If so, &lt;strong&gt;why close it as off-topic; why not close it as objectionable?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constructive answers would help me to understand how this excellent site regulates itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T21:51:28.063" Title="Off topic or objectionable?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10202" CreationDate="2017-04-25T21:51:28.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFTER looking at all the versions of the question, it's clear that the question even in its original form would have required answers primarily based on opinion.  Moreover OP edited and almost entirely changed the question in ways that took it well within the definition of &quot;off topic.&quot; Hence the question was voted closed by 5 members including the OP. Detailed discussion within the comments section helped me to understand the reasons for closing the question, thereby resolving my own question in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T21:51:28.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T03:33:10.017" Score="17" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question : &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386593/no-man-or-woman-is-an-island&quot;&gt;No man (or woman) is an island&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My basic question is whether the following two sentences are correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“No man is an island.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “No woman is also an island.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my own thinking and other answers, these seem to be good alternatives for the second sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“No woman is an island, either.”&#xA;  “Also, no woman is an island.”&#xA;  “No woman is an island, also.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, users have taken the satirical source of the sentences (an article in the New Yorker) and voted to close it. Hence this metaquestion : &lt;strong&gt;Satire source is enough to close a question ?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I checked the Description of the close-vote, it is about &quot;explain logically something that was written as satire and which is not intended to make sense syntactically or semantically&quot; : Well, I am not asking to explain. I know what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking how it might be written correctly (say, in a newspaper, in some non-satirical way) so I think the close votes are not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58798" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T09:37:02.977" Title="Satire source is enough to close a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2017-04-27T08:03:08.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue has two aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, &lt;em&gt;Quora&lt;/em&gt; has its terms of use and if I understand them correctly, its content may be used if credits are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about &lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt;. I wouldn't consider Quora as a separate case because it's just another external resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, if there is content that completely covers the OP's question and just a short quote does not suffice, &lt;strong&gt;a link to it may be given in a comment&lt;/strong&gt;. If you have something more to say or if to answer the OP's question, you have to use excerpts from an external text and give additional comments, than it deserves to be a full-fledged answer and &lt;strong&gt;credits should be given&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing just copy&amp;amp;paste and bolding essential phrases without additional comments seems to be a waste of space. Doing it without giving credits seems to be unethical and smells of plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the aforementioned applies to any external resource, not only Quora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52777" LastEditorUserId="52777" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T08:26:25.947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T08:26:25.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T18:59:49.427" Score="18" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible to address comments to posters and also other people who have left a  comment underneath a post. In this situation the commenter or poster gets pinged and is alerted to the message. Occasionally, someone edits a post and quite often  I would like to communicate with them&amp;mdash;whether it's my post or someone else's. I am certain that this is something that other members have experienced too. Being able to address comments to editors would be useful for seeking clarification, getting advice, querying aspects of the edit and so forth. This would also stop off-topic comments underneath editors' other posts where people have gone to ping them about a completely different post that they've edited. Would it be possible, please, to enable comments to editors in the comments section so that they get pinged? And would other members appreciate this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit note:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently this feature exists in the sense that editors can be pinged if you continue to type  in the editor's name&amp;mdash;but editors don't pop up automatically in the list of people who are pingable.  It's clear that most users don't know this and it isn't intuitively obvious. Can we have a system whereby the editor's name pops up in the comment box so that everybody knows that they can be straight-forwardly communicated with, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T13:55:20.263" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T05:00:44.163" Title="Commenting to editors" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T21:10:56.333" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386596/help-the-onus-is-on-me-what-do-you-call-whatever-it-is-im-supposed-to-do-wi&quot;&gt;Help, the &amp;quot;onus&amp;quot; is on me! What do you call whatever it is I&amp;#39;m supposed to do with it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has several answers. The two most upvoted ones are actually the same answer, presented differently. Regardless of whether I accept one of them (I might not, there's an interesting discussion in the comments): The less-upvoted one is more detailed and well-researched, but the other one got got an initial upvote lead of just 1, and gradually that increased. I tend to believe it is merely by being the first to appear on the page - and people are naturally biased against voting for the second appearance of the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually a more general issue, I suppose (meta.SE.com?), but at least in this context - can I do something about it? That is, how can I promote the &quot;better duplicate&quot; answer over the &quot;worse duplicate&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16510" LastEditorUserId="16510" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T21:33:48.073" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T10:37:42.563" Title="Two &quot;same&quot; answers, one more detailed but other building a vote lead" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10206" CreationDate="2017-04-27T21:23:47.197" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;You actually can already do this; you have to manually figure out the editor's username, rather than having it &quot;pop up&quot; for you, but if you guess correctly the editor will be pinged. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-do-comment-replies-work&quot;&gt;meta FAQ here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who can be notified with this feature?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&#xA;  - Any user who has edited the post (does not include pending or rejected edit suggestions).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Why do some names not appear in the auto-complete box?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Additionally, only users who have commented on the post are ever populated into the list. Editors and other users from the post's history will never appear there, even if they are able to be notified by typing manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now tried it myself, so I can attest that it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T05:00:44.163" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T05:00:44.163" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10207" CreationDate="2017-04-27T22:38:44.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Original Poster of the question, you have the power to accept the answer you think best, or to offer a bounty, intending to award it to the answer you  favour but do not think best (I believe in some cases bounties can be offered by others, but I am not sure of the details); you do not have the power to put the answers in order beyond that, nor do I see any reason why you should have. Like any other member, you can also upvote or suggest an edit to improve the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T22:38:44.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10207" CreationDate="2017-04-28T07:46:00.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where's the problem? Select the answer you preferred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be the shorter one, which normally appeals to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=TL%3BDR&quot;&gt;TL;DR crowd&lt;/a&gt;, it's to the point.  Or choose the more detailed post whose answer doesn't immediately &lt;strong&gt;pop up&lt;/strong&gt;, precisely because it is longer and contains more detail at the specific request of the OP, if I understood correctly. You therefore have one user who listened, and responded to the request for clarification, compared to another who has not edited their answer in any way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third option—perhaps safer—don't choose any of the two, there is no obligation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to influence visitors to select the more detailed answer, then accept it, before the question runs out of steam. It's rare for a question on EL&amp;amp;U to have a shelf life greater than 48 hours. By shelf-life, I mean its viewing peak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T07:52:36.007" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T07:52:36.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10207" CreationDate="2017-04-28T10:37:42.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like to abandon an answer when the OP has difficulties with it, as is the case here, especially when the answer became unwieldy because of my attempts to improve it.  My answer should (and could) be completely rewritten to address all the OPs concerns, but I am going on a trip starting tomorrow, and won't have the time to do anything more with it until mid-May.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is an answer that solves the OP's problem, he should accept it.  If there is no answer that solves his problem, then he is under no obligation to accept an answer.  If he wants a fresh perspective on the question, he can offer a bounty.  The question is interesting and has provided several of us with quite a few rep points and a challenge, for which we should be grateful to the OP.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T10:37:42.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-29T15:21:50.123" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/295357/287826&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; relating to the usage of an English phrase on Meta and would appreciate the opinions of ELU folks.  (I'm not sure if I can stop with that, or if I should repeat the question here.  Also I'm not sure if I should ask people to weigh in here or there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T16:17:47.200" Title="Please weigh in on this SE Meta question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10216" CreationDate="2017-04-29T15:40:57.743" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the 15 reputation given for answers isn't subject to the daily 200 limit on reputation.  I also know that if you have maxed out reputation for the day, and then you lose reputation by downvoting or being downvoted, you can earn that reputation back until you hit your max for the day (although this doesn't occur retroactively, and I think it should).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you also earn back reputation you give in a bounty, or is that treated as totally separate from the reputation you earn or lose in a given day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T09:31:10.340" Title="If you give a bounty, can you earn it back without counting toward the daily rep limit?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10212" CreationDate="2017-04-29T16:17:47.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that &amp;quot;Asking Help&amp;quot; is a slightly awkward phrase because it &lt;em&gt;looks like&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;asking &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; help,&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;Asking for Help&amp;quot; wouldn't convey the same meaning as &amp;quot;Asking Help.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Asking help&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;Help with asking.&amp;quot;  It would be akin to having a sign that said &amp;quot;Writing help&amp;quot; at a literacy center.  In that sense, you can even use it in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to the literacy center for &lt;strong&gt;writing help&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I clicked on the link for &lt;strong&gt;asking help&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also intended to be short and succinct, which &amp;quot;help with asking&amp;quot; is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So IMHO, it's probably fine as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T16:17:47.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-29T16:45:14.867" Score="3" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;A member has already raised a similar question on meta, and makes some pertinent points with which  I agree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Extracts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) When people who are struggling to learn English find a site about English, they see it as a lifeline of sorts. However, depending on who you ask, many resulting questions do not necessarily fall under ELU's intended umbrella. To address this problem, an English Language Learners was proposed in Area 51...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2)...the creation of ELL hasn't (however) seemed to stem the tide of novice questions pouring onto ELU. Some have recently pointed out that, as things are going now, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the two sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3)If the O.P. is actually only interested is knowing which of those seems more grammatical or sounds more natural, then it was probably an ELL question. However, if the O.P. is indeed interested in learning more about limiting modifiers and the proper placement of elements with focus, then ELU was the right place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4)Lastly, it matters not to me how this conundrum ultimately resolves itself – we can keep the two sites, or abandon one and keep the other. If we keep them both, though, I would hope there would eventually be considerably fewer ELL questions – and ELL answers – on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Many thanks to J.R. who posted this meta question at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4306/roses-are-red-apples-are-green&quot;&gt;Roses are red, apples are green&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that we are not migrating a huge number of questions that appear to meet the criteria for ELL questions (as in simple and basic questions, usually from beginners, pertaining mainly to correct grammar, asked with the intention of clearing confusion and improving the standard of written and communicative English; whose answers are likely to be very obvious to native or experienced users; &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; concerned with etymology, grammatical theory, language research, literary allusions, the fine shades of difference in meaning between expressions, etc.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This topic has been discussed a great deal on meta...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7128/should-we-have-a-migration-path-to-ell&quot;&gt;Should we have a migration path to ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7849/closing-the-loop-on-migrations-to-ell&quot;&gt;Closing the loop on migrations to ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6764/ell-vs-non-ell&quot;&gt;ELL vs. non-ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7595/what-should-and-shouldnt-be-migrated-to-ell&quot;&gt;What should and shouldn&amp;#39;t be migrated to ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but the ELL type of questions remain on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the 50+ questions that I have tried to answer, only 2 were later migrated to ELL...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Example: a question I answered (Most recently migrated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/127940/is-it-wrong-for-john-to-say-this-is-john&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/127940/is-it-wrong-for-john-to-say-this-is-john&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but at least 20 questions very similar to the migrated ones have &lt;strong&gt;not been migrated.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody explain why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few recent examples of open questions in ELU that could be migrated to ELL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386859/how-to-write-this-sentence-with-correct-manner&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386859/how-to-write-this-sentence-with-correct-manner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386477/how-you-go-with-it-correct-use&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;how you go with it&amp;quot; correct use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386429/i-visited-dan-the-doctor-or-i-visited-dan-the-doctor&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I visited Dan, the Doctor&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I visited Dan, the doctor&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these are necessarily 'bad questions' but they are definitely elementary. Of course I am a new user but it seems to me that we could migrate so many such basic/beginner's questions to ELL and thereby strengthen the (closely related but distinctly different) goals and purposes of both ELU and ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note: having read the meta discussion that ELL is not the trashcan of ELU,  I can well understand the sentiment &quot;don't send us your bad questions&quot; which is what I am saying as well: since ELL seems to have been created specifically to solve the beginners' type of basic questions coming to ELU, should we not be consistent in migrating &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; (rather than &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; of the) questions that are &lt;strong&gt;best suited&lt;/strong&gt; for the aims of ELL rather than ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE 2: some members have argued in meta that there is a case for merging ELU and ELL without prejudice if the &lt;strong&gt;same type&lt;/strong&gt; of questions are going to be answered at &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; ELU and ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9778/proposal-to-merge-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;Proposal to merge ELU and ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4167/should-we-consider-going-in-the-other-direction-with-elu-and-ell/4176#4176&quot;&gt;Should we consider going in the other direction with ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;IN SUMMARY:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Did I get the general impression that many experienced ELU users disapprove of badly constructed basic questions from new users (unknowingly off topic as defined here) being posted on ELU, and consider them inappropriate for &quot;a site of serious language enthusiasts and linguists&quot;) -- sometimes even closing questions as off topic -- and yet they are unwilling to migrate them to ELL? Does ELL not want questions from beginners referred by ELU? Why are a few questions being migrated sporadically while a huge number of other, similarly eligible questions are being retained here? If I am missing something, please enlighten me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users at one or both sites are showing such reluctance towards migrating the appropriate questions then it only seems to strengthen the call by some members to merge ELU and ELL into one mega site &lt;em&gt;ELL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;&quot;English Language Learners and Usage&quot;!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T17:57:26.690" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T18:20:10.517" Title="Too few questions being migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10213" CreationDate="2017-04-29T18:10:16.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the maximum reputation you can ever earn for upvotes in a day is always capped at 200. It doesn’t matter whether you have lost reputation because of starting a bounty, or because people have downvoted you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you spent 100 on a bounty and also gained 200 by upvotes, that's all you could gain from those upvotes, and the order would not matter. You'd still net +100 up for the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T18:10:16.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10215" CreationDate="2017-04-29T18:48:56.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with this.  The problem as I see it is multi-part: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google or duckduckgo return this site early when you search for &quot;English Language questions,&quot; &quot;English Language answers,&quot; or other related terms. Therefore, new users are likely to come here first, and have to be directed to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's more activity on ELU than ELL, so people are possibly motivated to post here because they know they'll get an answer.  This is a potential vicious cycle, because if ELL doesn't have enough activity, people are more likely to turn to ELU, and then there's less motivation to watch ELL and wait for new or active questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people answer questions that should be on ELL even when they're posted on ELU.  I know I've been guilty of this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the way to solve the problem is to facilitate migrating questions to ELL &lt;strong&gt;very fast&lt;/strong&gt; when they're &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; appropriate for ELL.  It should be easier than migrating questions to and from other sites, because of the unique relationship between ELL and ELU.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there could be a &quot;migrate to ELL&quot; button that, when clicked by two users, puts the question on a review queue.  I think if we migrated the questions quickly, it would help establish ELL's presence on the web (see 1 above), increase activity on ELL (2) and decrease the odds that users who should post on ELL will end up getting their answers here and then going on about their day (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T18:48:56.420" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10220" CreationDate="2017-04-30T23:58:53.190" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked the following question regarding the need to migrate more 'beginners type' questions to ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10215/too-few-questions-being-migrated-to-ell&quot;&gt;Too few questions being migrated to ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A senior member suggested that when I came across a question that I felt needed to be migrated, I could vote for its migration, and see if others also voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how is it done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I flag it for moderator's attention and specify that it needs to be migrated to ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many reps do I need to have before I can vote for migration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have around 750 reps at present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T20:34:33.413" Title="How do I initiate a vote to migrate a question to ELL" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10219" CreationDate="2017-05-01T00:49:21.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't flag for moderator attention. There is a dedicated flag pathway for migration. It goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;should be closed...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;off-topic because...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;belongs on ell.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This flag will put the question in the close vote review queue, which brings it to the attention of high-rep users and moderators who can actually carry out the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I would like to repeat from my comment earlier that migration is only appropriate for questions that are truly off-topic here per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center's guidelines&lt;/a&gt;. If enough reviewers think the question is on-topic here, your flag will be rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;3000 reputation points&lt;/a&gt;, you will be able to cast close votes; the interface is similar to the flag interface. Casting a close vote also puts a question in the review queue; once you gain the ability to vote to close, you are not usually supposed to flag questions for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want to guide users to ELL or make sure that they know about the site, a good option is to leave a comment saying something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello! I would like to mention that there is a separate site especially for &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;; it’s possible that this site would better meet your needs. You can learn some more about the differences between the two sites here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/3722&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T20:34:33.413" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T20:34:33.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10215" CreationDate="2017-05-01T01:11:01.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the wider issue of which type of questions need to be migrated from ELU to ELL is open to discussion, I received the following very useful suggestion from a senior member in the above comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@EnglishStudent I don't see the problem then with things as they are. If you think that a question is migratable, then vote to migrate. If others are feel like you they might also. – &lt;strong&gt;Mitch&lt;/strong&gt; 1 hour ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, another kind senior member &lt;strong&gt;sumelic&lt;/strong&gt; has posted a detailed answer in response to my next question regarding the procedure to initiate a possible migration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10219/how-do-i-initiate-a-vote-to-migrate-a-question-to-ell&quot;&gt;How do I initiate a vote to migrate a question to ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Many thanks to Mitch and Sumelic for the guidance!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these inputs, I now understand how to migrate a question, and shall try to use it judicuously,  but the wider confusion regarding which questions should be migrated and why many questions that apparently meet the criteria are &lt;strong&gt;not being migrated&lt;/strong&gt; is yet to be resolved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen a huge number of (mostly unresolved) meta questions here regarding such migration, and urge all members to reconsider the current guidelines for migrating a question to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T15:05:08.583" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T15:05:08.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-01T04:36:20.670" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, firstly I apologise for being a bit pedantic. But I am wondering whether there is a particular reason why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/part-of-speech&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;part-of-speech&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;part-of-speech&lt;/a&gt; is not plural (i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parts-of-speech&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;parts-of-speech&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parts-of-speech&lt;/a&gt;). I only bring this up because it would seem that most tags are plural where appropriate, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pronouns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pronouns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pronouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possessives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;possessives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;possessives&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T11:15:57.227" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T11:15:57.227" Title="Plurality of [part-of-speech] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-22T07:12:34.380" Score="-4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are the words &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/superficial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Superficial'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ostensible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Ostensible'&lt;/a&gt; considered a bad answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/385687/a-word-for-someone-that-deflects-compliment/385697#385697&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, the person who asked the question implied that the compliment receiver inwardly believes the compliment but outwardly denies it, indicating that there is a &lt;strong&gt;deceitful connotation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I think that superficial is a stretch, would ostensible not be more suitable for the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dave(&lt;strong&gt;who thinks it's pretty good himself&lt;/strong&gt;): Nah.. The hairdresser&#xA;should've done a better job on the sides.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be said that Dave is acting ostensibly self-deprecating thus Dave can also be described as ostensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232236" OwnerDisplayName="Reisen" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T23:13:07.410" Title="Why is this answer not suited to the question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10225" CreationDate="2017-05-03T11:24:04.983" Score="-3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/387381/single-word-or-phrase-synonymous-with-single-word-request&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/387381/single-word-or-phrase-synonymous-with-single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recent question for a single word or phrase that can replace 'single word' as in &quot;what is a 'single word' for 'this description of something'&quot; has now been placed on hold as off topic even after I edited the question to make the context clear, giving examples, and after substantial discussion had occurred in comments. &lt;strong&gt;I should like to know why it was put on hold so that I can try to improve the question and bring it on-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I have only now received the earlier very clear explanatory comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it does not attempt to solve an actual problem that someone is having&quot; -- tchrist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assure you it is an actual problem that I am having and not hypothetical. I perceive the use of 'single-word-request' as awkward and wanted to know whether there is any other word or phrase to cover the meaning. For example, since we have the word 'synonym', it would be awkward to read a sentence such as &quot;can you suggest a &lt;strong&gt;same-meaning-word&lt;/strong&gt; for 'elementary?'&quot; -- if no such word/phrase for 'single word' exists, can somebody say so and I'll accept the answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T11:34:30.263" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T11:34:30.263" Title="Why has this question been put on hold as 'off topic?'" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10224" CreationDate="2017-05-03T13:44:46.040" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your post has been edited several times but does not offer a consistent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your title asks for a synonym for 'single-word-request'. Your original question in the last paragraph asks for a single word that could replace 'single-word-request'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first and second edits ask for a word or phrase for 'a single word or phrase' that fits in &quot;What's a _____ for {some word}?&quot; that means &quot;a single word or phrase&quot;. Sentence with a blank is good, that gives us some context to work with. It would also be helpful to describe what you've thought of using and why you feel it doesn't fit in your sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post-script suggests coining a term based on mononym. (We don't generally do that here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, pick which thing you are asking about, 'single word or phrase' or 'single word request'. If you are asking for a single word or phrase, then you need to explain why &quot;single word or phrase&quot; doesn't work, because that is a phrase that describes exactly what you are asking for. If you are asking for a word for single word request, then you need to provide an example of the context so we can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the word you want is &lt;em&gt;term&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T13:44:46.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T06:50:24.703" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have realized I need some advice when choosing a dictionary, a corpus or any other tool assisting in language learning. I can find lists of them on the Internet, but it would be much better to get &quot;live&quot; comments and notes from real users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are ELU and/or ELU Meta good places to ask for such recommendations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52777" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2017-05-04T09:11:33.863" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T19:34:11.710" Title="Are questions on dictionaries, corpora or other linguistic tools acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10226" CreationDate="2017-05-04T18:42:00.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some types of questions about resources can be on-topic. My opinion is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9443/what-is-the-point-of-migrating-all-resource-requests-to-meta&quot;&gt;it's best for resource questions to go on main&lt;/a&gt; but there are enough people who disagree with me to migrate a question to Meta, so that often ends up happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the type of question you describe doesn't sound to me like a very good fit for the Stack Exchange format, or for this site in general (either main or Meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You say you have already found lists, but you want something other than a general list. In a way, this is good, since we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;a list of good resources&lt;/a&gt;. But the problem I see is that it will be difficult for you to specify what you want. People may just end up suggesting things that you've already seen on the lists you found before. This isn't very helpful. You can try to avoid it by explaining where you have looked before and which resources you don't like, but that's a bit of a pain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You say you want advice and &quot; 'live' comments and notes from real users&quot;. In general, Stack Exchange is meant to have a Q&amp;amp;A format where there is a somewhat well-defined question, with a somewhat well-defined &quot;best&quot; answer for people who have that question in general. &lt;em&gt;Advice&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand is best when it is personalized. There used to be a close reason called &quot;Too Localized&quot;. It was removed, but I would say the idea still applies to some degree: people should be able to agree on what the best answer is based on factors other than the personal opinion or personal experience of the question asker. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably ways to deal with both of the issues I mention. List questions are not completely off-topic network-wide, and there are a number of sites that field questions that seem advice-oriented like &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;The Workplace&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Parenting&lt;/a&gt;. However, I feel like most ELU users will resist having questions of the type you mention on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Matt E. mentioned in the comments, you could check if Language Learning SE would consider such questions on-topic. You can also try asking in chat; there are sometimes users there who have experience with dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T18:42:00.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10213" CreationDate="2017-05-05T09:31:10.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Putting a bounty in a question doesn't change the reputation cap, which means that offering 100 of your reputation for a bounty doesn't make your reputation cap for that day 300.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the reputation that you gain with bounties offered to you that don't count toward the reputation cap. It means that if you get 100 points through a bounty, that day your reputation change can also reach 300 (not 200 as usual).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T09:31:10.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10231" CreationDate="2017-05-11T17:08:28.577" Score="8" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found that some questions seem to call for &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-descriptivism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;descriptivist&lt;/a&gt; answers. By that I mean the question is along the lines of &quot;how is this word/phrase typically used?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of how to write a proper (i.e. researched) answer for such a question, or even provide much of an explanation, beyond &quot;This is how it's typically used,&quot; or &quot;No, it's not used in that way.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/388804/the-word-glee-how-prevalent-is-the-aspect-of-schadenfreude-in-normal-use&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a recent example in which a user asks if the word &quot;glee&quot; is typically associated with the concept of &quot;schadenfreude,&quot; without requiring additional context. I believe that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/388804/the-word-glee-how-prevalent-is-the-aspect-of-schadenfreude-in-normal-use#comment916883_388804&quot;&gt;I am correct&lt;/a&gt; in that it is not, but I don't know how one would answer this question authoritatively with research or explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good way to answer such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: the question I've used as an example has apparently been answered, but I think it still serves as a useful illustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187869" LastEditorUserId="187869" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T17:18:19.350" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T07:55:38.977" Title="How do I provide a proper answer for a usage (descriptivist) question?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10230" CreationDate="2017-05-12T06:20:28.140" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three types of tools, if carefully used, may provide evidentiary bases for authoritative answers to the question about 'glee'. Two of those types of tools have already been deployed in the question and its answer, although perhaps they have not been deployed as skilfully as they might be. The two types of tools already deployed are (1) personal experience, and (2) lexical definitions. The third type of tool is (3) the set of available corpora. There again, the tool may be deployed with greater or lesser skill and insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some (of the many) available corpora are accessible through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/corpora.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BYU corpora interface&lt;/a&gt;. Using corpora to answer the question as authoritatively as possible within carefully articulated limits is likely to get as near to a &quot;case closed&quot; answer as is feasible. The limits are both external to the corpora, as imposed by the answerer's ambition, ability and resources, and internal to the corpora along with the interface, as imposed by the essential nature (for example, the types and dates of material in the collections) of individual corpora and any artificial restrictions imposed by the interface on the investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general direction of fruitful investigation has probably already been set by the observed differences between lexical definitions of 'glee' in US English and other Englishs. Weighing against the productivity of going in that general direction are the poorly defined question targets of &quot;in normal use&quot; and the &quot;average native english language user&quot;. Those targets might, however, be profitably defined in any worthwhile answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the answer to a very similar, and recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9440/129681&quot;&gt;What are some good and authoritative reference/data source for modern usage examples of words?&lt;/a&gt;. Note also that questions shown in the &quot;Related&quot; sidebar of this and the linked question may prove informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T07:55:38.977" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T07:55:38.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T17:03:15.177" Score="5" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;We were just having &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/conversation/a-simple-boner&quot;&gt;a little debate&lt;/a&gt; about the question &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/388948/what-does-to-give-someone-boners-mean&quot;&gt;What does it mean to give someone boners?&lt;/a&gt; in chat, and it strikes me as a rather borderline case. The matter under consideration was whether or not enough research had been conducted, and how obvious that research is too obvious for consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the word Boner is the oddest word in the sentence, and it could be reasoned that research for this specific word should have been conducted first. Precise research was not included in the body of the question, and no dictionaries were checked. Any effort to find out what the word &quot;Boner&quot; itself means probably would have made the intended meaning clear, given the context of the statement. Our help center also suggests the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that you should also include your own research into the query. The example indicates that a little research may have been done with &quot;Should it be a continuous-aspect verb?&quot;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed/5043#5043&quot;&gt;research is needed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Based upon the criteria in the provided link to the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;How Much Research is Needed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; meta question, it seems as if it was not enough to really show that the research was done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, our questioner indicated that they had performed a google search, which did not help them.  This is more than many of our newer questioners do and a failure to find results suggests that it should pass the first test provided in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1563/124936&quot;&gt;Are Some Questions Too Basic&lt;/a&gt;. The problem to me seems to be that the questioner thought they were looking for an idiom, rather than an individual word because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; tag was used, and he was thus unable to isolate the word boner from the sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A google query for the phrase &quot;give someone boners&quot; seems like the most probable query given the title of the question, and it only returns only one immediately visible result for me, other than the question itself on English Language  &amp;amp; Usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fwhvn.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The yuuki.la result is not a very definitive resource even for its subject, which is not English and does not really attempt to explain the phrase even if it was. A more helpful link does appear &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you click on the more results link, but Google strongly implies that it's not a helpful result. As a result, answering this question might actually be somewhat more productive than it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be considered that perhaps it would be a good candidate for English Language Learners (E.L.L.). It requires some rudimentary skill in English to be able to answer this question, in order to recognize the form of the sentence, which is something somebody who is just learning might not have, but it is a question that the average speaker would have probably found the answer to easily.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, some rudimentary skill in English is necessary to use even  E.L.L., and they also have a research requirement of sorts, although I do not know the details regarding that research requirement since I mostly just participate on English Language &amp;amp; Usage myself. We should also keep in mind that E.L.L. tends to be frustrated with some of our suggested migrations, as suggested by one of their moderators, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/49844/snailplane&quot;&gt;Snailplane&lt;/a&gt;, in the meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can&quot;&gt;A Friendly Reminder, E.L.L. is not E.L.U's. Trash Can&lt;/a&gt;, so we should exercise some cautious discrimination on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I come here to ask about what should be done with the question: Should it remain open on English Language &amp;amp; Usage, migrated to English Language Learners or just closed period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T19:47:59.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T19:47:59.680" Title="Is this question about Boners too simple for E.L.U. or not, and if it is, should it be migrated to E.L.L?" Tags="|discussion|migration|general-reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10232" CreationDate="2017-05-12T17:41:47.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, as asked, provided no context and no explanation for why the asker was asking, and we can thus only conclude that they are asking for the meaning of a phrase of the form &quot;give someone X&quot;, which IMHO is definitely too basic to be asking here. The OP mentioned, in passing, having done a Google search, but I find it incredible that a search for &quot;boner&quot; would yield no results. In any case, the minimum bar for a question is not &quot;did I find it on Google&quot;, but rather, &quot;Did I find it in a dictionary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the accepted answer merely states the meaning of the word, this question is too basic for EL&amp;amp;U and I'd say also too basic for ELL. It should be closed as Off-topic: please show the research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar questions asking for deeper meanings, metaphors, or listing found definitions and inquiring about further confusion would be allowed but this question does not have those features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:41:47.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-13T22:44:12.887" Score="11" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past two days I've come across two instances of exact duplicate answers that unregistered 1-rep users evidently copied from existing answers and posted as new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two examples I've encountered involve an answer posted 19 hours ago by &quot;Mikala&quot; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/230527/choice-words-meaning/389026#389026&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;choice words&amp;quot; meaning&lt;/a&gt;, which is identical to a one-paragraph answer posted by Kate on March 6, 2016, and an answer posted on April 20 by &quot;deirdre brownlow&quot; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/359005/is-the-spelling-fundraising-fund-raising-or-fund-raising/385562#385562&quot;&gt;Is the spelling fundraising, fund-raising or fund raising?&lt;/a&gt; that copies the final paragraph of an answer that I posted on November 22, 2016. (In this case, however, &quot;deirdre brownlow&quot; added the words &quot;This seems clear:&quot; as a preface to the paragraph copied from my answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A diligent moderator has already deleted the &quot;Mikala&quot; answer, and I expect that the &quot;deirdre brownlow&quot; answer will soon vanish as well—but I wonder whether this is (1) the tip of an iceberg of prank duplicates that has recently hove into the EL&amp;amp;U shipping lanes, or (2) an ongoing problem that I simply didn't notice until yesterday, or (3) a very rare phenomenon that happened to affect two question that I had participated in answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else noticed similar instances in recent days? Is this something that review queue reviewers should be watching for when vetting first answers from unregistered 1-rep posters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T22:44:12.887" Title="Has there been a recent plague of exact duplicate (copied) answers on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10223" CreationDate="2017-05-13T23:13:07.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Uh… for the same reason a chicken can't push a hay-wain or an iceberg fly: just like &lt;em&gt;deceitfulness&lt;/em&gt;, neither &lt;em&gt;superficiality&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;ostensibility&lt;/em&gt; has anything to do with &lt;em&gt;a word for someone who deflects compliments&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Mitch said back there, analytically both share something about appearances which is implied by &lt;em&gt;deflecting a compliment&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;neither… capture anything else about that situation, and that situation isn't primarily about appearances.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitch also explained neither fits because deflecting involves deeper thought than connoted by &lt;em&gt;superficial&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ostensible&lt;/em&gt; adding &lt;em&gt;…both words would be very misleading in the OP's situation&lt;/em&gt;, and that remains true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193296" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T23:13:07.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-14T08:15:44.207" Score="-10" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked two valid legit writing-related questions and they got sufficient downvotes to prevent me from asking any more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this place usually so maliciously hostile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope someone is capable of an honest accurate response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all the reputation hoops and voting restrictions here, I think the votes must be genuine. But I can't see what etiquette my question breached. Was it something as minuscule as using an apparently wrong &amp;quot;tag?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389056/inspired-by-burglary-intent-is-burglary-intent-grammatically-correct/389148#389148&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389056/inspired-by-burglary-intent-is-burglary-intent-grammatically-correct/389148#389148&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236024" OwnerDisplayName="Upettydownvotingtrolls" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-05-15T18:45:54.880" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T18:45:54.880" Title="Is &quot;english stackexchange&quot; full of downvoting trolls?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|new-users|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-05-14T09:15:49.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But this deserves some explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English actually should properly be called Advanced English. Because of the nature of the site there are rules to follow for a correct question. Not complying will create your situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some pointers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;How much research is needed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; will suit you better though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you will find the motivation to pass this difficulty. We run on questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121521" OwnerDisplayName="Bookeater" LastEditorUserId="121521" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T12:24:02.997" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:24:02.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-05-14T23:31:06.717" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage attracts many different types of participants, including hundreds of regular and semi-regular contributors who have accumulated enough reputation to be entitled to upvote or downvote answers. In my experience, it is impossible to know why a particular voter chose to upvote or downvote a particular question or answer. On a more general level, though, questions and answers that suffer from certain common shortcomings tend to receive poor marks at this site. The reason for this negative reception isn't that downvoters view newcomers' questions as so many unwelcome billy goats tramping across their bridge—although to a person unfamiliar with the site's standards, it might seem that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you are Finn3gansMate, you have asked two questions on the main site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/388779/is-there-some-sort-of-database-on-the-net-for-jargon-of-the-different-centuries&quot;&gt;Is there some sort of database on the net for jargon of the different centuries?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389056/inspired-by-burglary-intent-is-burglary-intent-grammatically-correct/389148#389148&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;... inspired by burglary intent.&amp;quot; Is &amp;quot;burglary intent&amp;quot; grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt; As I write this, the first question has attracted 40 views and received 2 downvotes, and the second question has attracted 81 views and received 5 downvotes (some of which may have occurred in the past 14 hours, after you posted this Meta question asking whether English Language &amp;amp; Usage is full of downvoting trolls).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The body of your first question looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any relevant websites would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the body of the second looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not, I would love to hear some alternatives. It does not sound right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These blocks of text provide practically no useful context for the questions you ask. Consequently, anyone interested in responding to either question must guess at what you are looking for—in the first case because you don't explain what you mean by &lt;em&gt;jargon&lt;/em&gt;, and in the second because you don't provide a full sentence (or paragraph) containing the phrase that you ask about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides their lack of context and the absence of any evidence of research on your part (two serious shortcomings at this site), your questions have particular drawbacks that undoubtedly contributed to the poor reception they received. In the case of the &quot;database on the net for jargon of the different centuries&quot; question, the problem is (as Chenmunka points out in a comment beneath the question) that you are making a request for resources—in effect, you are asking, &quot;Where can I find X?&quot; There is nothing inherently wrong with asking such questions, but they are off topic on EL&amp;amp;U's main site. To compensate for that policy, the site maintains an extensive list of resources as a page of EL&amp;amp;U Meta under the title &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, although that page includes a section on &quot;Historical Resources,&quot; it doesn't include a list of resources dedicated to jargon through the centuries. I hope to add information on various reference works dedicated to slang published between 1665 and the present in three major categories: British slang, U.S. slang, and British regionalisms—but I'm not sure whether these would be of any use to you because I'm not sure what sort of jargon you are interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &quot;burglary intent&quot; question verges on being so specific that it may be of no interest to future site visitors. One measure of a question's perceived value at this site is whether it has some likelihood of being useful to people other than the person who posted it. A student struggling to compose a particular sentence or paragraph in an essay for English class might very well benefit from having participants at this site proofread the passage—but no one else has any reason to look at that question or to care about the answer to it. For that reason, such questions are off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about whether &quot;burglary intent&quot; is grammatically correct is framed as a simple yes/no question—though I gather that you are also interested in suggestions of alternative phrases that might convey the same meaning. But the term &quot;burglary intent&quot; is not at all common. A Google Books search returns eleven pages of matches for that wording, but the vast majority of them do not involve &quot;burglary intent&quot; as a set phrase. In fact, only two matches from the search results seem truly on point. From &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=B7tIAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22requisite+burglary+intent%22&amp;amp;dq=%22requisite+burglary+intent%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj0ieeLx_DTAhUDMGMKHf2uBSMQ6AEIJzAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;California Official Reports: Review Granted Opinions Pamphlet&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; part 2 (2002) [combined snippets; quoted language not shown in snippet window]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If he formed the requisite &lt;strong&gt;burglary intent&lt;/strong&gt; while in the kitchen he is not guilty of burglary because he did not have that intent when he entered the kitchen. However, if with the requisite &lt;strong&gt;burglary intent&lt;/strong&gt; formed in the kitchen he enters rooms other than the kitchen he is guilty of a separate burglary offense for each other room he enters, and if he returns to the kitchen with that intent he is then guilty of ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from Lisa Storm, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&amp;amp;tbs=lr:lang_1en&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=%22burglary+intent%22&amp;amp;ei=z9sYWfqYNdSajwO23an4Dw&amp;amp;emsg=NCSR&amp;amp;noj=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Criminal Law By Storm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Burglary Intent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Depending on the jurisdiction, the criminal intent element required for burglary it typically the general intent or knowingly to commit the criminal act, with the specific intent or purposely to commit a felony, a crime, or a felony, grand, or petty theft once inside the burglarized area. The Model Penal Code describes the criminal intent element as &quot;purpose to commit a crime therein&quot; (Model Penal Code 22.1(1)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example of a Case Lacking Burglary Intent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even though the Google Books evidence for the phrase is exceedingly slight, if you had framed your question as something like &quot;What is the normal wording used for the legal concept termed &quot;burglary intent&quot; in Lisa Storm's &lt;em&gt;Criminal Law by Storm&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; I (although probably not everyone at this site) would have considered the question legitimate and of possible interest to future site visitors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone coming to a new site for information or assistance needs to review the site's policies regarding how to ask questions that the site deems useful and on topic. Failing to do so puts the person's questions at risk of being downvoted as off topic or irrelevant to the site's mission and interests. I am truly sorry that you didn't obtain the answers you were hoping for when you posted your two questions at this site; but I hope you can see that part of the reason why things didn't work out well is that the questions you posted didn't meet the site's standards for appropriately expressed, on-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T17:10:10.963" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T17:10:10.963" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10240" CreationDate="2017-05-15T06:57:05.357" Score="8" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a change to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/389156/124936&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question's title today because it clearly asked a question that was different to the actual question the OP asked in the (more expansive and specific) body of their question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning for doing this was as follows: &amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP was clearly asking for a term to specifically apply to 'servers' that are functioning 24/7. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the title was left as is, anyone that finds the question in future would be mislead to thinking that the majority of the answers (that answered the question asked by the OP in the body of their question) applied to the more general case, asked in the title of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The intended meaning of the OP was overtly clear from the body of their question such that there could be no doubt that they had actually asked one question, but titled their question as if asking another far broader question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the specifics: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question title was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what does it call in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original body of the question was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we have some critical servers that have to be running 7 days a&#xA;  week, 24 hours a day and they can't be down even for one second. What&#xA;  does this particular of servers call in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do 'productive' term suit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This title was later improved, by &lt;em&gt;JonMark Perry&lt;/em&gt; to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what is another word for 24/7 in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the body was further improved to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we have some critical servers that have to be running 7 days a&#xA;  week, 24 hours a day and they can't be down even for one second. What&#xA;  is this particular type of server called in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does 'productive' term suit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the title is clearly asking a different question to the body of the question still, although it does at least now make some sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I changed the title further to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is another word for a server that is functioning 24/7?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit is an improvement to the title in my opinion because the question clearly asks for a word or phrase to describe &quot;critical servers that have to be running 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and they can't be down even for one second. What is this particular type of server called in English?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now no doubt the question title can be further improved (I left 'word' in the revised title, which &lt;em&gt;JonMark Perry&lt;/em&gt; added when he made the nonsense original title make sense). The OP didn't specify he was looking for a single word originally, so the title could be further improved to: 'what is the term' etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to alter the title of a question when the question asked in the title is different to the question asked in the body of the question itself, in such examples as this, when the OP clearly meant to ask the question in the body and not the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because Mari-Lou A answered the original title quite well and we got into a discussion about the correctness of fixing titles after the question has already received views. I would like the benefit of peer review here! As I see this as clear cut, but in case I am out on a limb, I'll avoid making such edits in future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T00:55:10.397" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T00:55:10.397" Title="Is it correct to change the title of a question that is broader than the actual question asked, and as such actually asks a different question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|titles|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10239" CreationDate="2017-05-15T09:39:31.910" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original title by the OP was ungrammatical and pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JonMarkPerry's edited title was grammatical but not as specific as it could be. No-one should have been answering based on the title alone, and the question body made it clear that the question was more specific than the title made it appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your revised title was more specific, and in keeping with the body of the question. It was a wholly appropriate edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T09:39:31.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-05-15T10:37:46.573" Score="-11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The shortcomings of OP's original question notwithstanding, this site &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; plagued by anonymous downvotes, with no explanation given and no explanation other than pure malice possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194459" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T10:37:46.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10243" CreationDate="2017-05-16T22:19:09.127" Score="6" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;A low-rep user changed a link in one of my answers from a PDF (with warning), which contains the actual text, to the website from whence one can download the PDF. It's nice to have that link, but I prefer the citation link lead to the actual text. The edit also introduced some ugly formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to &quot;fix&quot; this edit, but since it isn't completely terrible I don't want to penalize the editor. It would be easiest for me to roll back the edit and work from there, but if I do will I remove whatever rep points the user got from the approved edit? If so, I will probably just edit over the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T17:44:11.980" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T17:44:11.980" Title="What happens when I roll back an edit that was approved from the queue?" Tags="|support|editing|redacting-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10242" CreationDate="2017-05-17T05:42:02.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Feel free to rollback the approved edits or improve on the existing revision.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No user will lose reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T05:42:02.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10245" CreationDate="2017-05-17T13:35:34.910" Score="5" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new here (the 100 rep is due to my other account(s) on SE), though I'm not new to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/389649/236530&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; (an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389614/why-is-the-misspelling-of-its-possessive-so-widespread&quot;&gt;Why is the misspelling of &amp;quot;its&amp;quot; (possessive) so widespread?&lt;/a&gt;) deleted? The main point of my answer is that &lt;code&gt;its&lt;/code&gt; really should have been &lt;code&gt;it's&lt;/code&gt;, something that the asker seems unaware of. As for the numbered questions - should a detailed explained answer be given to each one of them? They seem secondary to the main question. Or is (attempted) humor frowned upon here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X3pCU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X3pCU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think that in StackOverflow, &lt;em&gt;deleting&lt;/em&gt; an answer (as opposed to downvoting) is usually reserved for spam/offensive language /etc. Is it different here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And by the way, the question there was marked as a duplicate of quite a different question. It does not look like a duplicate at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236530" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T17:43:53.903" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T17:43:53.903" Title="Why was my post deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10244" CreationDate="2017-05-17T16:55:10.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume it's because your answer starts with &quot;I assume it's because&quot;, and that shows that it's only your assumption, and we don't welcome assumptions in the answer box on the main ELU site. Try the comments box instead, and that we don't usually mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, what you wrote after &quot;as far as I know&quot; is unclear, to me, at least. Try quoting relevant portion of the question inside your answer or, better yet, write sentences, not simply yeses and nos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my canned comments for poor answers is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;explain your answer&lt;/a&gt;, preferably with some supporting statements and &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;. While opinions are valued, they are not of much help as answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;welcome you to ELU&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm sure you’ll get the hang of it after a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:55:10.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10247" CreationDate="2017-05-17T23:59:26.683" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am getting 2 types of web pages for ELU on my android phone(s), one of which seems like the desktop version (see first image below) and the other looks like a mobile version (second image)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aNqRe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aNqRe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FeGT1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FeGT1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2 types of pages have distinctly different design especially with color scheme but also other features, and the first type of page (beige colored) has small fonts and is generally difficult to read on smaller android phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this typical? If not, how can I get my phone to always display the second type of page, which has larger fonts and is generally more legible for smaller screens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T00:04:57.997" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T00:27:12.843" Title="Why am I getting 2 types of web pages (design-wise) on ELU?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10246" CreationDate="2017-05-18T00:27:12.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The technical term for this situation is that your styles got 'discombobulated'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the 'mobile' link below to get the styling intended for a phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SxlT5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SxlT5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T00:27:12.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10204" CreationDate="2017-05-18T05:44:39.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source doesn't matter; we have to consider the question solely on its merits. If the question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, it will be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be exceptional cases once in a while, and for those questions, the senior members will vote to close, then later other members may vote to reopen, and later get closed, reopened, closed, and so on it may continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T05:44:39.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10251" CreationDate="2017-05-18T08:21:57.147" Score="-3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;A small feature request. I would be interested to hear what you think about the idea, and also practically if it would be possible to implement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have placed a comment to an answer, you receive a five minute window in which you can make edits to the comment. If five minutes expire you can no longer make any edits. I think this is sensible and avoids confusion, for instance if someone comments, then a series of chain reaction comments ensue, if the original commenter then edits their comment substantially it could a make a nonsense of the following comments already made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this meta question however concerns the last comment made on an answer. The last comment someone has made does not have the quality of being able to throw into confusion any other comments if edited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently if you are the last to comment and wish to edit the comment after the five minute window (e.g. 6 minutes, 10 minutes later etc.,) then you have to delete your comment and post it again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This creates no confusion as there are no comments after the comment you are reposting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface this might seem not important. Yet, if you are in the process of editing your comment three minutes into the five minute window, you might spend 3-4 minutes on the edit - especially if it is a complicated comment (involving hyperlinks etc). Then you click submit and are told it is too late to edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You then need to copy the comment. Click off the comment. Delete the comment. Create a new comment. Paste your comment. Press &lt;em&gt;add comment&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also from a pure principle of use point of view it seems to me that the deadline for editing comments should be removed from the last comment to an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="187344" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T08:51:45.893" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T21:27:53.140" Title="Can we remove the editing time on the last comment in a series of comments please" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10249" CreationDate="2017-05-18T12:47:06.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think this is a bad idea both practically and theoretically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, it adds complexity for no reason.  If somebody else comments while you are in the process of editing your comment, then by definition yours is no longer the last, so you will gain no benefit. If not, there is no reason to alter your comment that did not exist before, so you could have spent longer writing your comment before posting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And theoretically, this goes against the whole &lt;em&gt;raison d'etre&lt;/em&gt; of Stack Exchange. Comments are for pointing out something relevant or for asking for clarification of the question; they are absolutely not for 'contributing to the debate'. If that is what you want, you should either start a chatroom (which were designed specifically for that purpose) or try one of the dozens (hundreds?) of internet forums where a comment responding to the latest comment will be welcome.  Stack Exchange is not one of the latter, but a question and answer site; the largest typeface on the first help page is for the important point &quot;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&quot;. The five-minute grace period for comments was introduced to allow the correction of typos; anyone using it to continue a discussion without triggering a 'comment chain too long, moved to chat' is misusing the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T12:47:06.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10249" CreationDate="2017-05-18T20:52:27.033" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question (by your own explanatory statements) is not related to the scope or content of comments but &lt;strong&gt;only seeks to simplify the steps / effort required to edit a comment after the expiry of 5 minutes&lt;/strong&gt;. I have experienced exactly what you described in terms of editing a comment and finding that 5 minutes has elapsed, therefore having to &lt;em&gt;copy and paste the edit as a new comment&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; delete the earlier comment to clean up. It is only slightly laborious, IMHO, but I can understand that your suggestion is meant to smoothen the 'flow' of the user experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure you are aware that we can &lt;strong&gt;delete any of our own comments at any time&lt;/strong&gt;, which by itself is sufficient to throw confusion upon the comments that follow. Deleting a comment which was in the middle of a 'discussion / debate' can create as much confusion as editing it.  Hence I don't think there is any real reason for specially allowing the editing of the &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; comment alone, after a specified time period. If editing is to be allowed beyond 5 minutes, then editing &lt;em&gt;all comments&lt;/em&gt; could be permitted without setting any time limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why then did the democratic process at &lt;strong&gt;StackExchange&lt;/strong&gt; in all its collective wisdom set such a limit on editing comments? The senior member has already set out the major reasons in the earlier answer, of which I am mainly convinced by the following (theoretical) point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And theoretically, this goes against the whole raison d'etre of Stack Exchange. Comments are for pointing out something relevant or for asking for clarification of the question; they are absolutely not for 'contributing to the debate'.&#xA;  -- TimLymington (extract; see earlier answer for details)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also infer (again as stated in the earlier answer) that we are meant to edit the comments only to remove typographic errors, or clarify the point, and not to substantially change the content. If 5 minutes have passed after commenting, we shall have no choice but to delete and re-comment. IT WOULD SEEM that StackExchange is telling us, &lt;strong&gt;think before you comment!&lt;/strong&gt; Even if unintended, it is an effective way of discouraging impulsive and possibly inflammatory comments, especially on sensitive issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I shall try to consider a few other, practical problems with actually allowing the editing of 'the last comment' after 5 minutes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) this is possibly the most serious: simply editing the last comment after a few hours without fresh responses &lt;strong&gt;may provoke a fresh round of discussion / debate&lt;/strong&gt;, which is not the intended purpose of comments, as already highlighted in the previous answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) if the last comment was rather contentious, or very interesting, or even simply if someone woke up 6 hours later in a different time zone, somebody might well be composing a &lt;strong&gt;delayed response&lt;/strong&gt; even as you are busily editing your 'last comment'. Now, if that response is posted a fraction earlier, your edit will be automatically denied because yours is no longer the last comment, as has been noted in the earlier answer. (On the other hand...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) if that 'delayed response' to your last comment happens to be posted just after your edit was allowed, then there is a good chance that much &lt;strong&gt;confusion will ensue&lt;/strong&gt; because somebody responded to something in your comment that you (unknowingly) changed by editing it a moment before they (unknowingly) posted their comment! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, the purpose will not be served. And what if some sort of &lt;strong&gt;entirely avoidable chain reaction of comments&lt;/strong&gt; were to occur over such a misunderstanding? I have actually seen that happen here over some controversial topics. That is exactly why no more 'contesting the ball' is allowed in rugby union after the referee has blown the whistle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I hope you will understand why &lt;strong&gt;it was left simple&lt;/strong&gt; as we do it now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T21:27:53.140" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T21:27:53.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-19T13:25:08.390" Score="8" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following recent and very popular question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389385/is-youre-a-better-man-than-i-am-gunga-din-still-considered-a-compliment-in&quot;&gt;Is “You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!” still considered a compliment in English? &lt;/a&gt;&quot; is an interesting case about what is or   should be off-topic on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has clear POB issues,  as suggested by the high rep and highly esteemed OP, but what strikes me most is that all answers are actually about sensible issues such as politics and racism on which we all have our very personal opinions.  As if that were not enough, OP finally accepts an highly upvoted answer which has really nothing to do with the supposed original question (the one about the current usage of the famous sentence). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is all terribly interesting (as shown by users active participation  and upvotes) it is also terribly off-topic, or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does all this mean something new about the site &quot;off-topic&quot; rules or is it just an original exception? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. I am not suggesting the question should be put on hold). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T13:31:48.977" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T22:42:40.323" Title="Is this question a turning point in the &quot;off-topic&quot; history of ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10253" CreationDate="2017-05-20T07:07:37.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly, if the question had not hit the Hot Question Network, it might have been closed as being off topic —&lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; being the operative word here — because the OP herself admitted that the post was bordering on POB territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking if a quotation, once famous, could be used and understood today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, is it still a compliment or have the racist overtones made it obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is asking not only for opinions, but for users to draw upon their own personal experiences. Whether they are familiar with the quotation and use it in their everyday life; whether their friends, family or acquaintances are familiar with its origin, meaning and connotations;  and whether users consider Kipling's ciation to be derogatory or complimentary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a language question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it is. Native speakers, who live in English speaking countries, could either confirm or refute the OP's reluctance to cite the quotation to a stranger, whose youth possibly precluded them from having heard the line or read the poem in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, what purpose would it serve to say &lt;em&gt;carpe diem&lt;/em&gt;, a phrase written in a dead language, if nobody knew what it meant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have no qualms with the question itself. The quotation is in English after all, but I do share the OP's perplexity that the accepted answer with 94 upvotes (thanks HNQ!) does not specifically address the question. What conclusion is a non-native anglophile speaker suppose to draw? Are they supposed to carry a copy of Kipling's poem in their purse o backpack in case they are accused of being rude? Or if the listener looks at them oddly?  Oh wait, we have the Internet, they can type &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=English+Stack+Exchange+Gunga+Din&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;English Stack Exchange Gunga Din&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and show the listener what they meant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-05-20T11:02:27.717" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T11:02:27.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T09:36:52.487" Score="5" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to post a quote as part of a question. The quote includes a portion of a sentence that is underlined and I can't see how to do that here. It isn't under Styling/Headers, and I've tried [u]underline[/u] and that also didn't work. What is the formatting for underline here?&#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237008" OwnerDisplayName="Pasko" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-30T01:29:49.407" LastActivityDate="2022-06-02T03:17:20.467" Title="How do I underline in this forum?" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T16:48:07.460" Score="7" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen comments on a few posts indicating that &lt;em&gt;song lyrics are off topic&lt;/em&gt;. I have no beef with that rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is asking for an analysis of specific lines or portions of poetry always off-topic for the same reason? I enjoy reading poetry and sometimes have questions that might involve figurative interpretation, but which nonetheless seem to me to be questions about English.  I'm unsure if posting them on ELU is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got a mostly positive reception to my question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389202/what-does-this-gil-scott-heron-line-mean-gods-hole-card-has-been-thoroughly-p&quot;&gt;Gil Scott-Heron's Comment #1&lt;/a&gt;, though one person did mention in a comment that &quot;this is why song-lyrics are off-topic.&quot; (It's a spoken-word poem, but I understand why many people referred to it as a song.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a hypothetical example:  I recently read the Emily Dickinson poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/55871&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To fight aloud is very brave&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was unsure of the meaning of the last line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;Uniforms of snow.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would asking about this line be too &quot;figurative&quot; for the site?  Is it &quot;primarily opinion based?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might not be the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; example, because I'm pretty sure it just means &quot;white.&quot;  But as the question title implies, I'm wondering if people can offer general guidelines about how to judge when verse is or isn't appropriate for posting in a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-05-20T17:00:21.643" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T18:01:14.053" Title="To what extent is analyzing poetry or verse off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10255" CreationDate="2017-05-20T19:28:11.287" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Underlining is not supported in user posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason is that underlining in web pages is customarily used for links, and your text would [probably] not be a link. The other reason is that the designers don't like it: underlining isn't used in any Stack Exchange site, as far as I am aware &amp;mdash; even for links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, it's acceptable to find some other form of emphasis. If underlining is only used to draw attention to a few words, then bold or italic will do just as well. However, there are conventions there too: italic is used for mentions of a word, and bold is preferred for emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan Bron has already &lt;a href=&quot;/q/10255#comment41275_10255&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; about using the &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; character as a prefix for a quoted paragraph. Within the quote, you can use any of the available forms of emphasis. But underlining is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: many user agents/operating systems can have problems with special Unicode characters such as those which include or combine to make an underline, or provide small capitals or whatever. Please don't use them. For example, although &lt;code&gt;̲a&lt;/code&gt; appears fine in a monospaced font, it probably doesn't look right in Georgia as used for the body text in this site: ̲a. It certainly doesn't look right in my browser &amp;mdash; this is what I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9hdCq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9hdCq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of combining characters&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T19:28:11.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10256" CreationDate="2017-05-21T17:31:11.637" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the overarching guideline is that questions should be objective enough that they can have a &quot;correct&quot; answer, to avoid being &quot;Primarily Opinon Based.&quot;  Asking for interpretation of figurative language is generally off-topic, because if there is no one correct answer, it can turn into a competetion for what interpretation is most popular.  In this sense, it has less to do with whether the use comes from a song or a poem or prose, but with to what degree the question is about &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some cases where it may be acceptable, as Dan Bron explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a small niche of acceptable questions of interpretation: those works which have received significant scholarly attention, and therefore credible arguments can be made on the strength of a body of expert literature. Some poems fall into this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge with asking for an interpretation of figurative language is described well by Mitch (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is the difficulty with general literary interpretation and poetic language of any kind - it often has little to do with the specific language and &lt;strong&gt;more to do with culture and art&lt;/strong&gt;. Figurative meanings are usually repeatable usages in the language, but also often not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, questions related to often-used expressions and sayings are completely acceptable, as they relate to how the English language is used.  But when a writer uses figurative language to express something in a unique, unprecedented way, this does not necessarily apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this question about the figurative use of &quot;having a beef&quot; with something or someone -- an example I chose because I used this figurative phrase in my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161261/do-you-have-a-beef-with-me&quot;&gt;Do you have a beef with me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is acceptable because the term is not limited to one artist's use and interpretation, but is well grounded enough to be a facet of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are some cases where the interpretation has less to do with an understanding of the English language and is more open to interpretation. In such cases, this is off-topic for a site like Stack Exchange, and better suited for a site about poetic interpretation specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all of this in mind, it seems worth noting that there are no hard-and-fast rules on this site, but as Mitch says, &quot;only suggestions with different strengths.&quot;  Oftentimes, if a question is interesting and asked in a reasonable manner, the community may give the question the benefit of the doubt for the insight it has the potential to yield, even if the question has other weaknesses, such as opinion bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was suggested that I summarize my understanding based on the comments to form my own answer to my own question.  Anyone is welcome (in fact, encouraged) to edit this answer if they see fit and believe there are other important points to take into consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T18:01:14.053" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T18:01:14.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-21T17:46:04.520" Score="5" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/390317/what-does-gentleman-jockey-wins-the-derby-mean&quot;&gt;What does &amp;#39;Gentleman jockey wins the Derby&amp;#39; mean&lt;/a&gt;.   The OP would have found an answer -- or a strong clue -- if he had googled &quot;gentleman jockey&quot;.  There are nine references in the first nine google hits &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=gentleman+jockey&amp;amp;spf=1495387229753&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, although only the last was from something that called itself a dictionary: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gamblingdictionary.net/mobile/gentleman_jockey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gamblingdictionary.net&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question showed no evidence of any research at all.  What is the best way to be helpful to the OP without encouraging questions that show no research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question could be asked about the evolution of the meaning of &lt;em&gt;gentleman&lt;/em&gt;, but this was not that question.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T21:27:45.627" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T18:38:34.240" Title="Is a question that can be answered by trivial googling a valid question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10259" CreationDate="2017-05-22T08:30:47.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange wants to be a place where you can find answers to everything imaginable. So instead of closing questions as &quot;just google it!&quot;, we are encouraged to answer them here itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, ELU aims to have answers to all possible questions about the English language and usage (within the scope defined in its help center).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here's the thing, we don't aim to ourselves become an English dictionary, thesaurus, or a forum for analysis and criticism of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, questions on ELU asking for &quot;what does this word mean?&quot; should preferably also briefly include the context, what dictionary was referred to, what definitions were found, and why that research didn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't mean to close everything by saying &quot;just google it!&quot;. We ask only this, &quot;please &lt;strong&gt;include the research&lt;/strong&gt; you have done&quot; and then we'll guide you from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding that particular question about &lt;em&gt;gentleman jockey&lt;/em&gt;, a quick googling gave me an idea of the meaning, even though I have never heard that in my 25 years on Earth, and even though I'm not a native English speaker. The OP has experience with the SE network, so I'm sure they know how to google things, and should have included in the question body why that did not help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T08:30:47.960" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-22T11:30:02.657" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I first asked a question on this Forum a long time ago about the modern use of the term 'Oriental,'&lt;/strong&gt; as in (i.e.) The Oriental Orthodox Church (composed of several Arab groups, Egyptian (Copt), Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and other Eastern or African groups of Orthodox, Catholic, and Apostolic Christians), Oriental rugs, The Oriental Rite, and other Eastern entities (not Asian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;strong&gt;I also asked about the modern use of the term 'Arabian' as opposed to 'Arab,'&lt;/strong&gt; Arabian more antiquated mostly, with Arab, becoming more commonly used as an adjective, except regarding language (Arabic).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was my first time seeking&lt;/strong&gt; the possibility of &lt;strong&gt;knowledge&lt;/strong&gt; by a member of this Community of my concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was I referred to, by someone, as a &lt;strong&gt;secretive, mystery man&lt;/strong&gt; last time I asked a question?  I found that mildly offensive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who the heck cares who I am?  I am a human who has questions about this most unorderly language of English that I have to speak because it is the most common language in the U.S. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was the purpose of this to make me feel unwelcomed?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user237224" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T18:38:10.027" Title="Norms of this Forum" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10259" CreationDate="2017-05-22T13:45:55.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not exactly an attempt at an official answer but brings up some points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a well-founded but not particularly strong history of ELU attempting to be a complete repository of objective answers to questions, even if such questions are already attempted elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See in particular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;Google is not a general reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the direction there is that ELU should attempt to answer things that may well have been answered elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is also the denigration of cut-and-paste/link answers, those that simply do some google research and cut-and-paste parts from dictionaries and other commentary, the questions whose best possible answer is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=lmgtfy&quot;&gt;LMGTFY&lt;/a&gt; answer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T18:38:34.240" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T18:38:34.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10261" CreationDate="2017-05-22T18:38:10.027" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good day to you, Miguelángel Federico-Hassan. Like you, I am a user who, according to the Stack Exchange's automated script, &quot;prefers to keep an air of mystery about them.&quot; I'm pretty sure that the script is not supposed to be taken as snooty, snobby, or unwelcoming; rather, it amounts to nothing more than a playful (or at least wry) acknowledgment that the person so described has chosen not to fill out the biographical template, as the site would have preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A truly snide or unwelcoming message would say something like &quot;This user has chosen not to promote a friendly community feeling on this site by sharing a little something about himself or herself&quot; or &quot;Apparently, this user prefers not to let it be widely known that he or she has two heads and never matriculated beyond third grade.&quot; Those messages I would have found obnoxious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, it's a point in the Stack Exchange's favor that participants are allowed decline to describe themselves and their background and instead to be (by default) international hominids of mystery. We even get assigned a nice, colorful, recognizable geometrical pattern in place of a photo or illustration of our own choice, if we prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I hope, participants at this site are gauged on the basis of the quality of their contributions (in the form of questions and answers) and not on where they come from or what credentials they may have amassed. Nevertheless, people do like to know more about those with whom they interact over a period of weeks or months or years; and having a sense of the global distribution of English Language &amp;amp; Usage participants is, if nothing else, an excellent curative for parochialism. It's not unreasonable for users of this site to take an interest in such things, nor is it unreasonable to choose not to share details about yourself if you don't want to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is not to take the Stack Exchange automated script seriously. I doubt that whoever composed it spent more than a minute or two coming up with it, and it shouldn't occupy any more of your time than that either. Participation at EL&amp;amp;U is structured in a way that is actually quite respectful of privacy. If my choosing to exercise that privacy option prompts the automated script to attribute an  &quot;air of mystery&quot; to me, it's a negligible price to pay. I know I'm not really mysterious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T18:38:10.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-23T11:04:06.953" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389766/how-to-express-small-small-in-english&quot;&gt;How to express &amp;quot;small small&amp;quot; in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was put on hold as 'not clear' but OP has said 'subcontinental languages' which obviously refers to Indian subcontinental languages, because I have not heard of any other subcontinent. Moreover the tag 'Indian English' has been used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My guess is that this is merely used to express a plural form (...) Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP wants to know &lt;strong&gt;'whether I am is right to think that&lt;/strong&gt; double words like &lt;em&gt;big big&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;small small&lt;/em&gt; indicate plurality?' The title asks: How should I express this in (idiomatically correct) English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is not clear in this question?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Hamilton has written a very confident, correct answer that was supported by 1006a. It says that OP is right to interpret plurality, and the equivalent English term would be 'numerous' or 'many.' I can confirm that this answer is correct, and I ought to know because I am Indian!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MANY USERS MADE WELL-INTENTIONED SPECULATIVE ANSWERS THAT WERE FAR OFF TARGET.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we supposed to present 'educated guesswork' as answers rather than comments? Was that the reason for putting this Q on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, then there is nothing ambiguous about the question and it ought to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:19:03.823" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T21:23:46.933" Title="What's not clear in this question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10264" CreationDate="2017-05-23T13:03:25.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As my comment shows, I was unsure about the question from the start. I ultimately voted to close it because of the flood of answers that showed no attempt to provide a suitable alternative to the Indian expression &quot;small small&quot;, but that instead simply seemed to be guesses about what the words &quot;small small&quot; sounded like they meant to someone who doesn't speak Indian English, or irrelevant facts about how word repitition is used in standard English. Probably I should have just voted to close it earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People asking for words or phrases need to &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; explain the meaning of the desired word or phrase in the question. I don't see this here. &quot;My guess is that this is merely used to express a plural form&quot; is obscure and hard to interpret unless you are already familiar with the usage in question. Many people seem to have just ignored this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at how many wrong or irrelevant answers are voted above John Hamilton's answer, because it wasn't clear to the answerers and voters what the OP was actually looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP doesn't actually know the meaning of &quot;small small&quot; in Indian English, it's impossible to know what the best answer to this question is. It would have been better to ask another question first to establish the clear meaning of this phrase. If the OP does know the meaning of &quot;small small&quot; already, then this meaning needs to be explained better in the question. Rather than a single sentence starting with &quot;My guess is...,&quot; the question needs to emphasize that &quot;small small&quot; is not synonymous to &quot;very small&quot;, but is used to describe a multitude of small things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is obviously attracting many overly speculative answers, and these answers are being upvoted rather than downvoted, there's probably some problem in the wording of the question that is contributing to this. Closing the question is a means of preventing more bad answers from being posted until the problem with the wording of the question is fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T21:23:46.933" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T21:23:46.933" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10264" CreationDate="2017-05-23T13:41:12.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Primarily, the question is unclear as to whether it wants a translation of Indian reduplication, or if it is allowed to do reduplication in English whatever the meaning. So it needs to be edited to clarify which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything that's been written in the ELU question and answers has been speculative or irrelevant (Turkish) or without reference to Indian languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And answers should attempt to come from a position of actual knowledge (like knowing the original Indian language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optimally, the OP should specify which Indian languages (IE derived vs Dravidian) this reduplication occurs in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, in most languages of the world where reduplication occurs, it is usually used as an intensifier translating to 'very'. Indian languages may very well be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is good and interesting but is not clear about which language it is trying to translate from or just if reduplication is possible at all in English. The question itself needs to be edited to remove speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T13:41:12.030" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10264" CreationDate="2017-05-23T13:52:52.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question because, so far as I could tell, all of the top-voted answers were speculative and plain wrong, and the OP was not responding to pleas for clarification. Even if the OP had come back to select an answer as the correct one, without any commentary, I might not have VTC. But as the question stands now, some (non-Indian) Googler out there who wants to know &quot;what is the meaning of the phrase &lt;em&gt;small small&lt;/em&gt; that I keep hearing on my visit to India?&quot; would get entirely the wrong idea if they landed on that question. We aim to offer definitive answers to questions about the English language, so a question that promotes speculative-to-wrong answers is not a good fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking up a lot of examples of the phrase in actual Indian sources, I &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; I knew what the answer was (and you have confirmed that belief). If I had stumbled on the question much earlier, I probably would have attempted an answer, rather than commenting on what I took to be the correct answer. If I were more of an expert in the area and much more confident of the OP's intent, I might have tried to fix the question, rather than voting to close, but I don't feel that my own speculations are definitive enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, I do think that someone genuinely familiar with Indian English would be justified in adding some characteristic examples of usage to the question (especially published examples). So if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; want to edit the question, I would be happy to entertain re-opening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T13:52:52.100" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-24T15:17:35.093" Score="17" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;The active vs inactive checkmarks are very difficult to tell apart on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BQ9H3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BQ9H3.png&quot; alt=&quot;active check&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WOdhU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WOdhU.png&quot; alt=&quot;inactive check&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm scrolling down the page it's hard to tell which answer I've actually accepted (or if there is one). Yesterday I genuinely mistook the inactive check for being an active check on an answer, and I have good eyesight without colour blindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both look greyish upon the yellow background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their &lt;a href=&quot;http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-ratio/#rgb%28129%2C129%2C133%29-on-rgb%2889%2C138%2C30%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contrast ratio with regards to each other&lt;/a&gt; is 1.1:1, or in other words their visual contrast is next to nonexistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(On &lt;a href=&quot;http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a checker that gives us an extra decimal place&lt;/a&gt;, their contrast ratio is 1.07:1. The colours used are #598a1e and #818185.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since someone asked  I thought I'd catalog what the above image pair looks like to color blindness based on simulation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromelens/idikgljglpfilbhaboonnpnnincjhjkd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChromeLens&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b67Y4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b67Y4.png&quot; alt=&quot;protonopia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sqggd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sqggd.png&quot; alt=&quot;deuteranopia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Left: Protonopia, red color blindness. / Right: deuteranopia, green color blindness.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These are the two most common forms of dichromatic color blindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hvOan.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hvOan.png&quot; alt=&quot;tritanopia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XFRnp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XFRnp.png&quot; alt=&quot;anachromatopsia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Left: Tritanopia, blue color blindness. / Right: Anachromatopsia, total color blindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7585" LastEditorUserId="7585" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T19:36:54.080" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T19:36:54.080" Title="The accepted answer check mark is almost indistinguishable between active/inactive" Tags="|bug|design|accepted-answer|accessibility|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10272" CreationDate="2017-05-24T23:32:45.163" Score="8" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both questions are concerned with the pronunciation of 'Sean' but the earlier Q was later closed as a duplicate of the more recent one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has been &lt;strong&gt;asked before&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;already has an answer.&lt;/em&gt; If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68758/why-do-we-pronounce-dean-as-di%CB%90n-but-sean-as-%CA%83%C9%92n&quot;&gt;Why do we pronounce Dean as /diːn/ but Sean as /ʃɒn/?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact it was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; question that was &lt;strong&gt;asked before&lt;/strong&gt; the other and &lt;em&gt;already answered.&lt;/em&gt; Why was the earlier question closed rather than the later one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T23:50:43.113" Title="Why was this earlier question closed as a duplicate of a later one?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10271" CreationDate="2017-05-24T23:50:43.113" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;That’s a fair question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning appears to have been so that the one with better answers was the canonical target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T23:50:43.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T02:02:55.443" Score="12" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have flagged for moderator attention a user's answer (to a meta question) in which this user baselessly questions my nationality and integrity. This flag pending, I realised that the user's answer is further in error for a different reason,  because it does not address the original question. I wanted to flag it again for this reason, but the software does not support it. Is it true that I can have only 1 pending flag on one post at a time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T05:21:06.260" Title="Can I raise more than 1 flag at a time on the same post?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10273" CreationDate="2017-05-26T05:21:06.260" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible to raise only one flag at a time on a post, and generally only one will be entirely apposite. Even where there does exist a possibility of more than one flag, one will be more appropriate than another. Some flags are handled by the community; others go straight into the moderators' queue and don't get presented to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is possible to retract a flag if you want to change it to another, you cannot then flag the post with the same type of flag for a second time. Thus, if you flag a post as spam but then change your mind and flag for Not An Answer, you can't change your mind back and decide it's spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, you need to consider all possible flags and it's advisable to raise the most important flag first. If a post &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; needs a moderator to look at it, then by all means explain what's wrong with it. But if it's simply a low-quality answer, or doesn't actually answer the question, then it can be dealt with by the community. And spam should definitely be flagged as spam because the system itself is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the answer you flagged, you used a custom flag for moderator attention and explained exactly what was wrong. Not only was the post not an answer, it contained unfounded and inaccurate opinion about a particular &lt;em&gt;person.&lt;/em&gt; That was arguably more important than flagging it with the bald &quot;Not an answer&quot; reason. You could possibly have flagged the post as abusive, but the more detailed explanation was better, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as if by magic, the post was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if a post doesn't really need moderator attention, the result of a moderator-action-please flag is not necessarily predictable. Although a moderator may agree that immediate action is necessary, the flag might be declined instead because the post could and should have been dealt with by the community. There are a number of standard reasons for declining a flag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer [comment or vote rather than flag]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention [Not an Answer or another &quot;community&quot; flag was more appropriate]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using standard flags helps us prioritize problems and resolve them faster. Please familiarize yourself with the list of standard flags: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;What is Flagging?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;help pages on flagging&lt;/a&gt; are well worth a read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T05:21:06.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T22:30:47.733" Score="1" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a participant writes a rude or hurtful comment, and a flag is raised, and it's removed.  As far as I can tell, nothing gets communicated to the participant -- the comment just quietly disappears, with nothing else happening.  Sometimes the commenter comes back to that page, and figures things out -- but he might not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how this helps the commenter learn from the mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can all make mistakes; hopefully at some point we start to learn from them.  But the commenter might not even notice that the comment was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a flaw in the system?  Or is there more to the system than I've figured out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be reasonable for me to post a comment, at the same time as making a flag, saying something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@you (whoever it happens to be) - What an unfriendly comment.  Just so you know, I have raised a flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the moderators here in fact use the medium of a private chat, as described by @NVZ, to help them understand?  In the case I observed, the comments were simply deleted with no explanation, leaving the person whose comments had been flagged wondering, &quot;What the heck?  What happened to my comments?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What procedures are recommended to moderators by the SE organization around this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T18:22:34.017" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T10:44:35.013" Title="Flag etiquette and effectiveness" Tags="|support|flagging|moderation|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10275" CreationDate="2017-05-27T07:44:56.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use comments to criticise posts, not users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publicly advising a person can most likely upset them, and the issue is only magnified in the case of online text only exchanges where you do not show your face or body language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across comments that are rude or abusive, just flag them and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are just one or two isolated incidents, just the flags will be enough to remove the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user is continuously posting inflammatory comments, enough flags will bring it to a moderators attention. Or simply custom flag the containing post and explain to a moderator what you have observed in the comments section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators will first remove abusive comments. Next, they'll warn the abusive user in private. Later, if the user ignores the warnings, moderators will suspend the user (the suspension duration may depend on the seriousness of the issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I do not support publicly criticising a user even if you think you are being as polite as a Disney princess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T10:44:35.013" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T10:44:35.013" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-28T16:59:56.220" Score="1" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, it stopped being &quot;fun&quot; for several months now. But as I already said in a comment, which is doomed to be deleted, I am heartily fed up with the general atmosphere that reigns here. And, what's even more worrying, I feel my initial enthusiasm, and delight in the English language has dampened considerable. I have also noticed despicable traits of intolerance and impatience in my own behaviour, for which I apologise. It is best for me leave. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent downvotes on nearly every question of mine, and the votes cast to close them have surprised and disappointed me hugely. I thought, I believed, I had earned some respect among the more senior members. I'm not asking any of you to &quot;like&quot; the questions but voting to close the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391072/why-is-youre-welcomed-wrong&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re welcomed&amp;quot; wrong?&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2877/you-are-welcome-or-you-are-welcomed-or-you-welcome&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;You are welcome&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;You are welcomed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;You welcome&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/386090/perception-versus-reality&quot;&gt;Perception versus Reality&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291995/idiom-for-what-is-apparent-may-not-be-the-truth&quot;&gt;Idiom for &amp;quot;what is apparent may not be the truth&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, were one of last few straws. Today was the last one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh and yes, I had flagged my suspicions about those consistent two downvotes on &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; every question, but the flag has been ignored since &lt;strong&gt;May 14&lt;/strong&gt; at 12:13. My previous flag, not so long ago, was confirmed and that user was suspended for a year. I guess I must generate hostility among you. Must be my fault. I &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/give%20in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;give in&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bye. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T02:04:12.420" Title="I'm leaving, EL&amp;U has stopped being fun" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10253" CreationDate="2017-05-28T22:26:06.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, it's not.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Ms A says, the question is perfectly topical and, as she's wrong about, the lead answer addresses it (albeit from a philosophical and lit-crit angle rather than a post-grad research-of-use one). Disagreeing with the other editors' answers does not make them off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond which, the question is a service to the site. Even if it attracted some completely unhelpful and off-topic responses like the mother's anecdote, other answers addressed nuance of usage and completely misunderstood biblical references in such a helpful way that the path forward—even if there were a problem with the phrasing of the question as 1006a feels—would be editing it into compliance, not having an admin smack it around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171986" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T22:26:06.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10253" CreationDate="2017-05-28T22:37:09.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wow, sorry about that. No drama intended. However, drama ensued. Again, my apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I think twice before posting the question? Indeed, because I respect the site, and did not want to post a question which would be deemed off-topic. However, I was genuinely intrigued by the use or non-use of the phrase in English today. So I took the chance. I knew someone here could answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As if that were not enough, OP finally accepts an highly upvoted answer which has really nothing to do with the supposed original question (the one about the current usage of the famous sentence). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the prevailing opinion on most SE sites is that the OP is free to pick the answer that is most helpful to the OP. That was, in fact, the most helpful answer to &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;. I awarded a bounty on another user who supplied a helpful answer, with a reference to boot. I upvoted every answer. I appreciate that people took time to answer the question. I would have awarded another bounty to another good answer, but the bounty system demanded that I double the bounty award, and I didn't want to suggest that the first bounty recipient's answer was less worthy than a more bountiful bounty's recipient, so I did not do so. But I expressed my thanks in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I apologize for my choice of answers? I'm not too proud to do that. I'm sorry that my choice offended you (whomever was offended.) I sincerely meant no offense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might add that the OP of this meta question was only too happy to jump on the question with an answer which I immediately upvoted. When another answer took the lead, the OP deleted his perfectly acceptable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it leads me to ponder Aesop's &lt;em&gt;sour grapes&lt;/em&gt; in this entire scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... as suggested by the high rep and highly esteemed OP...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't kid yourself. Rep does not confer esteem, and I don't consider myself to be highly esteemed here. If I am - by any - I hope it is/was for better reasons than rep (e.g. integrity would be nice), which is easy to accumulate by an enthusiastic and/or attentive and/or persistent and/or long-time user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...a turning point in the “off-topic” history of ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly I'm missing something here, but that's not a surprise. I missed this question for nine days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T22:42:40.323" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T22:42:40.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10275" CreationDate="2017-05-29T12:49:19.297" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, moderation is only indirectly about teaching people to become good citizens. The goal should be to foster an environment where folks feel free to participate and can enjoy the site. Publicly reprimanding someone is rarely a good way to accomplish that (sometimes it is called for, but not often). If someone just had a bad day or chose their words poorly, making a big deal out of it doesn't help. If someone is malicious, making a big deal out of it actually rewards them with the attention and drama they were hoping for and keeps the negative tone going. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the community, for the most part, that teaches people what sort of behavior is appropriate for the site by modeling that behavior, leaving &lt;strong&gt;constructive&lt;/strong&gt; comments for new users explaining how the site works and what the community standards are, voting, reviewing, editing, and raising flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging does make a difference, even if you don't see the person who left the comment getting reprimanded. All of the flags raised on someone's content are associated with their profile, so the next time something draws the attention of the moderation team, the mods can see whether the behavior is a one time thing or there's a recurring problem that requires more intervention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have already said, it's best to flag it, get on with your day and trust your moderation team to handle it. Engaging with someone who's stirring the pot just makes the problem bigger and harder to clean up. The ideal situation is that the disruption just stops without most of the community even noticing it happened. Your moderation team worries about &quot;repeat offenders&quot; so that you don't have to. If the workload gets too heavy, then it's time to elect additional moderators instead of the community trying to tackle issues they don't have the tools to solve effectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T12:49:19.297" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10278" CreationDate="2017-05-29T13:45:12.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All good things come to an end, and that's an ultimate truth about life, the universe, and everything. Also, expectations lead to disappointments, and that’s why it’s unwise to expect others to respect you, or treat you well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you feel your relationship with ELU is not headed in the right direction, taking a break is fine, and may even be beneficial. Just make sure to come back to ELU after a while. We will miss your contribution. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T13:45:12.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10278" CreationDate="2017-05-29T19:13:27.240" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your questions are often among my favorite on this site.  They're thought provoking and can lead to interesting research, so I do hope you change your mind.  But as others have said, there's nothing wrong with taking a break. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty new to this site but I've already noticed a waxing and waning in the quality of the questions and in the sort of feedback I get to both answers and questions that I post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, in my humble and limited opinion as a new user, I've become aware that asking good questions is difficult.  Sometimes I'll ask a question, get some initially critical comments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/390539/since-when-has-a-hot-minute-meant-a-long-time&quot;&gt;and then a user will blow me away with a phenomenal answer&lt;/a&gt;.  Other times I'll ask a question with a genuine and serious intent and get down votes.  My reaction has been to try not to take it personally.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, these are my thoughts after 55 days of using this site.  I just want you to know that I appreciate everything you contribute to &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; experience on this site with your questions, answers, comments and edits.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T19:28:40.737" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T19:28:40.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10285" CreationDate="2017-05-30T18:10:50.370" Score="15" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't often hit the 200 daily rep ceiling (only 8 times in two years), and am looking for guidance on what to do if it happens fairly early in the day.  Do you compose and save up answers to new questions and post them at 00.01 GMT of the next day, or just say the h--- with it and post them when they occur to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason I am posting this trivial question on Meta is to lighten things up on Meta.  Downvotes on this will not bother me.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T11:58:50.280" Title="The antithesis of a serious problem: What do you do when you have hit 200 daily rep with hours to go, and have a good answer to a new question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2017-05-31T08:34:01.430" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wait with what you consider to be a good answer, someone else might beat you to it. You'll then be posting a duplicate answer, which is Not A Good Thing To Do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that although you may not reap the benefit of upvotes immediately, the answer will continue to accrue votes the following day, and beyond. Would you rather have those future votes, or risk them going to someone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the most important reason to post immediately is that &lt;strong&gt;you are helping someone else. You are contributing to the body of knowledge that is Stack Exchange.&lt;/strong&gt; That's the primary purpose of the network: to be a repository of knowledge in the form of questions and answers. That it's gamefied and you get points is surely a side issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T08:34:01.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T20:57:11.387" Score="-9" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love answering questions on here, but I'm tired of not being able to do anything because of my stinking reputation! It's outrageous. A highly experienced grammarian could answer questions on here but could easily be criticized by high-reputation people who don't know what they are talking about.&#xA;One of my answers to be removed because &quot;it didn't answer the question.&quot; If it were still up, you'd see how good it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're supposed to be providing research, but sometimes the points within a post are so obvious that research is unnecessary. I hate seeing extremely long posts done by people who are afraid of being criticized for lack of research when the question is so simple! We should be encouraging to-the-point answers with some optional research while being able to upvote &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; answers in the forum even if one has low reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Just because one has low reputation does not mean that one's answers will instantly be crappy!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user231780" LastEditorDisplayName="user231780" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T00:28:43.493" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T15:39:45.913" Title="Who else thinks that this site is very reputation-oriented?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10286" CreationDate="2017-06-01T05:42:49.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand your frustration with the low reputation, and I hope you understand that all of us here started from the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now we're here, with thousands of reputation and hundreds of badges earned, not because we're all experts in the language, but because we welcome feedback from the community, in the form of votes, comments and reviews, and make the necessary improvements to our posts, and always strive towards doing our best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as a perfectly obvious answer on a site where a majority of the page views are from people googling for help. What may be obvious to some, may not be for others, and those that don't find things to be obvious, will be unable to understand an answer if there is not enough explanation given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have no way to verify a user's claim that they are an expert, but we can vote up or accept their answers, when we see them post detailed and well-written ones, or with external references to support their assertions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a highly experienced grammarian, as I think is what you are implying, do check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/grammaticality/topusers&quot;&gt;top ranked users on our site&lt;/a&gt;, and see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;how they answer&lt;/a&gt; questions,  and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what kind of questions&lt;/a&gt; they find worthy of their time, and see how some of their answers may not even need an external reference, if that is what you want to achieve, that is to be able to write answers without references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation in real life is not handed to you on a silver platter, and that expression is applicable to the online life as well. So, ignore the comments that target you personally, but welcome and adapt to the constructive criticism about your posts, and in time, your knowledge of various subjects will earn you a reputation as an (online) expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T13:28:18.207" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T13:28:18.207" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-01T12:50:59.150" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read what I thought was an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/391798/112436&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, which got what I thought was an answer-material comment.  The question had one close vote, but seemed to be in a bit of a gray area.  I edited the question to try to make it less gray, and unsuccessfully invited the commenter to write an answer.  (I would like the information provided in the comment to be preserved and searchable.)  The commenter felt that to answer a poorly posed question would compromise the integrity of the site.  I hesitate to lift the material from his comment and put it in an answer.  First, if I can, I'd like to edit the question, to make it well posed by community standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate some help editing the question to bring it better into line with site expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if it's okay in its current form, I'd like some help justifying that the question is well posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T13:01:42.123" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T13:08:37.120" Title="Can this question be salvaged?" Tags="|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10288" CreationDate="2017-06-01T13:08:37.120" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like a request for resources, and I suggest migrating it to meta, since we do accommodate such questions here, albeit &lt;strong&gt;rarely&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T13:08:37.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10278" CreationDate="2017-06-01T14:35:43.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mari-Lou A, it'd be sad to see you go. I hope you'll at least keep your user profile even if it's inactive, and pop back from time to time. Take care!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And feel free to change your mind. The site needs people like you who care for the tone and tenor of the community, not just the data of its Q&amp;amp;As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T14:42:52.923" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T14:42:52.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10286" CreationDate="2017-06-01T15:39:45.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a different perspective might help here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;aims&lt;/a&gt; to be a curated library of questions and authoritative answers within well-defined areas of interest. More to the point, the intention is that the community itself does the curating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the tools and privileges gained by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;rep&lt;/a&gt; relate to moderator tools. Asking and answering questions is open to just about everyone, but closing and deleting questions requires more rep and a voting process. I suppose they had to strike some kind of balance between community involvement and the cultivation and propagation of group norms. It doesn't take much to get involved, but if one is to be entrusted with moderation tools, it makes sense for one to first understand and be accepted by the community. Rep might make a poor proxy for an interview process, but it's reasonable as a first approximation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On research, I see this as primarily giving visitors some objective basis for accepting or rejecting answers. When someone doesn't know enough to evaluate (multiple, conflicting) answers to their question, an &quot;&lt;em&gt;I believe so&lt;/em&gt;&quot; answer isn't as helpful as an &quot;&lt;em&gt;and here's why&lt;/em&gt;&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding dissatisfaction with up/down/close/delete votes, Meta (here) is a good place to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7795/142322&quot;&gt;seek clarification or support&lt;/a&gt;. Looking through the various Meta posts should reveal that rep doesn't really count for much in this process; it's the rationale for or against a post being on-topic (for EL&amp;amp;U) that tends to be more persuasive, not the rep of the person making the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the more established users here tend to be more lenient on newcomers, especially those who take the effort to try to understand the process. Admittedly, the site isn't particularly well documented - or rather, there's plenty of documentation, but finding the relevant piece tends to be tricky! Feel free to jump onto the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat site&lt;/a&gt; if you find it hard to find what you're looking for. The formal moderators (and a number of established users) are often around and are usually happy to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language &amp;amp; Usage! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T15:39:45.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10313" CreationDate="2017-06-01T18:46:28.300" Score="13" ViewCount="1658" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never seen such a reaction to a question on ELU as to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391945/what-does-covfefe-exactly-mean&quot;&gt;What does “covfefe” exactly mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;100k views in a single day, and probably more to come. The question was put on hold at around 70k views but, unlike all other question which generally slow down and exit from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt;, this one  kept the pace and never stopped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the dynamics here? What's keeping this question so active? Why is it behaving differently from all other HNQ questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2017-06-15T13:24:27.487" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T13:24:27.487" Title="What do 100k views in a day mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-01T20:40:31.057" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to leave corrections for answers in the comments regarding grammar on this site? It bothers me that suggested edits have disappeared here. It would be nice to have those. After all, we are all on an &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; website, whether it's support-oriented or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: If anyone cares, and nobody does, I edit pretty much every answer I can get to on Quora. Suggestions are fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user231780" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T13:41:24.000" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T23:08:42.650" Title="Editing Answers in This Site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10293" CreationDate="2017-06-01T21:10:06.070" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can suggest edits to posts on the main ELU site, which will be approved or rejected by users with higher reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, once you've crossed a certain reputation (2000, on this site), the system grants you extra privileges, one of which is that you'll be able to make edits to any post you see, and it will be approved instantly without peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why we have these things like reputation and badges and stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding leaving comments with suggestions, it's actually the very reason we have the comments section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leave constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement wherever you find mistakes, remember to be nice, and avoid posting comments targeting the user instead of their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the privileges to suggest edits or make instant edits on meta, the rules may be a bit different, and probably because meta is mostly for discussion, where users frequently post their own opinions regarding several issues in order to reach a community consensus, and if other users edit these posts, it could mean losing key information. So, unless a meta post is marked &lt;em&gt;community wiki&lt;/em&gt;, or unless you have a certain reputation and the associated new privileges, you cannot make changes to other users' meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the rules and FAQs are available in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-03-15T23:08:42.650" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T23:08:42.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10292" CreationDate="2017-06-01T21:39:04.307" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't it obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a typo from the leader of the free world, who's always in the news, for some bad thing or something worse, and this typo was a funny story, which gave people a break from all the boring scandals and &quot;fake news&quot; and stuff, and naturally, people just took it up and ran with it, all day, every channel, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/5zuagdAF4Is&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;covfefeying the news out of it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's gained more views from Google than it did from HNQ, and I don't​ know it for a fact, I just know it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T06:03:18.517" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T06:03:18.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10292" CreationDate="2017-06-02T00:18:28.900" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been pondering this as well. Since the question was posted, I saw strong arguments for closing the question and now also for reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the typo itself and the question as phrased have nothing to do with English.  No one had heard of &quot;covfefe&quot; before Trump finger-mashed it into existence on twitter.  If we analyzed every typo that landed on the Internet, we'd have our hands full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the level of interest in an &quot;accidental&quot; word has never been so high.  This is uncharted territory in the field of words.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; search engines have placed this post high on a query for &quot;what does covfefe mean?&quot;  It's difficult to argue that the people who click on that top link – ours – benefit more from seeing &quot;on-hold as off-topic&quot; than would benefit from the aggregate thinking of the site.  Although the question yielded some rubbish answers that were downvoted six-feet below the footer, it also yielded some interesting answers, including a computer program analyzing likely words that would yield such a typo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows what else thoughtful users might have come up with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, full disclosure, I answered as well.  But I don't care if people vote my answer up or down (I'm about to give away all my points from that answer in a bounty anyway). I'm just curious what potentially &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; answers might be missed because the post is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will likely downvote this answer, and I'm fine with that.  I fully understand the desire to keep the site serious and the sentiment that questions like this stray from that goal, I just can't help but marvel at the interesting position the site is in by receiving so much attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T01:32:37.953" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T01:32:37.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2017-06-02T09:55:15.050" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is: Get over to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, where your knowledge and experience will be both welcome and well-appreciated and where you'll be able to help budding English speakers flourish whilst earning nice fat juicy rep scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T11:58:50.280" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T11:58:50.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T13:03:13.667" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon for me to post an answer that ends up being below the highest-voted answer.  To some extent, I can assume we all relate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that when I have such a post, high-reputation users tend to use my lower, less-visible answer as a chatroom of sorts.  An example occurred on the notorious &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391945/what-does-covfefe-exactly-mean&quot;&gt;&quot;What does covfefe exactly mean&quot;&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I have no problem with having my answers host a discussion, even if it's unrelated to my answer.  Please don't change your behavior based on this curiosity-based question -- but it's happened to me before as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That high-rep users are doing this suggests to me that there ought to be an easier way for users to ping each other for conversational debate.  Is this a common practice employed as a work-around for the lack of private-messaging on the site?  Or have I just happened to see this on multiple occasions on my own posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to reach someone for this kind of discussion?  Will they hear you if you ping them on the chatroom?  Is there a best practice for trying to reach a user for conversation without drawing public attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10292/what-do-100k-views-in-a-day-mean&quot;&gt;someone recently flagged my attention by tagging me in a similar manner on meta&lt;/a&gt; (on someone else's answer, because I had deleted my own).  Then I found those comments (including my own) deleted.  How does that process work?  Who decided to delete those comments and how did it happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I may not have been clear about my actual question.  My ultimate core question is, What is the best way to get in touch with someone for a brief discourse not intended to be permanent?  I've seen (mostly high-reputation) users commenting at each other for attention, and then deleting all their own comments shortly thereafter.  People have sometimes commented on very old questions I've posted to get my attention, and then deleted those comments (and I followed suit diligently).  Is there &lt;strong&gt;any clear-cut way&lt;/strong&gt; to get someone's attention outright, apart from commenting at them on something that might not be related to the discussion at hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T00:57:18.647" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T13:51:55.373" Title="Is there a better alternative to using low-vote answers for discussion?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10299" CreationDate="2017-06-02T17:44:25.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extended discussions under any post is discouraged, and the right place for such discussions is the chatroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top voted posts tend to have a lot of viewers and their flagging of comments will ensure that mods purge such comment threads much sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ping a user in a chatroom, if they have already been to that room recently, otherwise you may only invite them to it by other ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators, however, can ping any user to any chat room any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally flag all comments as obsolete when I'm done discussing something with someone under some post, and I'd also remove mine myself. Or, I custom flag the post and request a moderator to purge the comment thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your edits, the answer is &quot;no&quot;, there is no clear cut way other than this workaround that we currently do, that is, comment under a user's old post which has no other existing comments. That surely gets their attention, and goes unnoticed by the community, and you can delete those comments later on. Again, comments are not meant for extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T13:51:55.373" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T13:51:55.373" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T22:00:41.930" Score="-7" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I advised a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/231780/sebastian-pojman&quot;&gt;new user&lt;/a&gt; to consider also ELL for his posts. In his &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10286/who-else-thinks-that-this-site-is-very-reputation-oriented&quot;&gt;META post&lt;/a&gt;  OP observed that : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're supposed to be providing research, but sometimes the points within a post are so obvious that research is unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Given that ELL places less emphasis on research compared to ELU, I think that ELL may be a more convenient  place for the OP to start to familiarise with SE English language sites.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mod from ELL complained about my suggestion for no clear reason, and finally my post  was deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is based on my personal experience, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and the issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3230/how-useful-are-references-and-should-their-usage-be-more-encouraged-on-ell&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; on ELL is real and consistent as far as I am concerned.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This difference in emphasis on research is probably due to the different targets that the two sites have, but why was my suggestion rejected? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that we are &quot;kindly&quot; invited to avoid suggesting ELL to new users from now on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T13:36:59.200" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T13:36:59.200" Title="Why was my suggestion to a new user to visit ELL deleted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10299" CreationDate="2017-06-03T00:40:34.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would have noted that the whole discussion in question was (more or less) on topic as a &lt;em&gt;debate on whether the OP's question was off-topic or not.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Yours being a low-vote answer has nothing to do with it&lt;/strong&gt; because I have seen the same type of discussion in the comments section under top-voted answers and even under the question itself. Members will discuss a very interesting topic anywhere and anytime, and it is usually a lively and very useful discussion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note this was by no means the sort of discussion where one user would 'ping' another on a chat page and start discussing some topic. In my recent experience here, &lt;strong&gt;such discussions develop organically from some highly interesting Q &amp;amp; A&lt;/strong&gt; and are facilitated by the presence of many (especially senior) members online at the same time. &#xA;Such discussions do not develop under a particular answer by design, or even for want of a better page, but mainly because it was either that answer or a comment to that answer or a response to a comment that generated the discussion in the furst place. Naturally it would continue there till it is automatically moved to chat by a moderator!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the fact that your answer became an impromptu chat room was &lt;strong&gt;solely related to the topic on hand and the responses of certain members&lt;/strong&gt;. I have known some discussions to continue for quite some time after being moved to chat as well. However, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;with due respect to the stated objectives of comments, I think the main question's page is a better place for such discussion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; than a chat page, as long as the discussion remains on-topic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T01:08:19.520" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T01:08:19.520" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10301" CreationDate="2017-06-03T00:47:29.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally never took exception to your suggesting ELL to a new user. In fact, that’s something I’ve done on this site countless times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I found your conclusion about research inaccurate and misleading. The ELL meta question you link to is not saying research isn’t important. Rather, it’s saying that research need not be &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; and enforced with zeal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I downvoted your ELL meta post based on this one line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should, in that respect, the use of referenced material be &quot;always&quot; used when posting an answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Always&lt;/em&gt; is a strong word. I think both sites should be flexible and situationally dependent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s too bad the conclusion you drew from that ELL meta discussion is that &quot;there is a difference in emphasis on research,&quot; and that &quot;ELL places less emphasis on research compared to ELU.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s a big difference between “not required” and “not important,” and one doesn’t imply the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t moderate on this site, so I can only speculate as to why your comment might have been removed. That said, I’m glad you opened this discussion, because it gave me an opportunity to weigh in on what I regard as a bothersome misinterpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T00:47:29.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10301" CreationDate="2017-06-03T08:51:57.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted it. &lt;strong&gt;Comments are ephemeral.&lt;/strong&gt; No-one should treat &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; comment as lasting, even on Meta (where, in general, a more relaxed attitude is taken to commenting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you may consider also our sister site ELL where there is less emphasis on research. ell.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That comment was flagged and objections were also raised in comments. Answers on ELL should be researched, just as they should be on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Josh Please don't send people to ELL unless they have an interest in our topic, which is helping people who are learning English, not up-voting answers with no credible sources cited. Our leniency on research is for questions. Anyone who is fluent enough to answer a question should be able to support their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the comment was wrong, flagged and objected to, I deleted it. That meant deleting other comments which followed from it, so I did that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, &lt;strong&gt;comments are ephemeral.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T08:51:57.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10275" CreationDate="2017-06-04T17:31:45.047" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose OP &lt;strong&gt;aparente001&lt;/strong&gt; wants to know why a user whose post (question/ answer/ comment) was removed due to flagging should not be sent an automated message or manual explanatory message of warning [from a moderator] such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;your comment [quote comment] posted on this question [link to Q] at 6pm on 33/13/99 was deleted after a flag was raised regarding its inappropriate content. Kindly avoid posting comments that are derogatory, inflammatory or abusive. Please read the site guidelines [link to &lt;strong&gt;be nice policy&lt;/strong&gt;] for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with OP that such a message might be sent to the commenter who was disciplined, &lt;strong&gt;without making it visible to the community.&lt;/strong&gt; It might be even sent 2 days after deleting the comment, if the intention is to avoid an escalation of unpleasantness. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;This type of feedback would help an inadvertently aggressive user to modify his/her posts to conform to community expectations of politeness.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am sure an intentionally &lt;strong&gt;malicious person&lt;/strong&gt; would not learn anything from such feedback, in which case all the 'disciplinary due process' involving moderators mentioned above would be needed to take care of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T19:27:14.993" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T19:27:14.993" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-04T23:14:12.680" Score="8" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a tag-edit that I wanted to improve slightly, while reviewing the &lt;em&gt;Suggested Edits&lt;/em&gt; queue. At the top of the page it says, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Approve, reject, or &lt;strong&gt;improve&lt;/strong&gt; edits suggested by users.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no way, from that dialog, to improve the edit, e.g., to edit either the original or the suggested-edit tag description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking &lt;code&gt;More&lt;/code&gt; didn't help. It showed only this additional text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Approve edits that clearly improve the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reject edits that fail to improve the post or that make it worse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Skip if you are not sure and want to go to the next suggested edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TAF1b.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TAF1b.png&quot; alt=&quot;This is the suggested-edit I was reviewing&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51214" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T13:01:02.570" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T13:01:02.570" Title="When reviewing Suggested Edits queue, how to &quot;improve&quot; the suggested edit?" Tags="|support|design|user-interface|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10292" CreationDate="2017-06-04T23:55:00.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, my question about “covfefe” in Mr. Trump’s tweet attracted 100k views in the first day, and it built up to 257k views as of today. The gross 257k number far surpasses the total number of 156k users of EL&amp;amp;U, which means more than a half of the visitors to my question were coming from Google or other online sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I searched for the word, “covfefe” on Google before posting the question (on May 31st 22:05, according to EL&amp;amp;U), there wasn’t any headings relevant to this word, and that’s why I posted this question in EL&amp;amp;U to get a clue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left home at 09:30 after posting the question, and I was surprised to find around 70k views on my post when I came home around 15:00. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a large part of the visitors approached Google at first to get the meaning of the word, “covfefe,” and found my question at the top of the search results, and then came to EL&amp;amp;U to look for my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user ridiculed me in his answer: It means &quot;a method for increasing your English.SX reputation overnight by leveraging Donald Trump's gaffes,&quot; which was later deleted by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the unconventionally large number of views to my question is simply because it’s the word given publicly (and officially?) by the President of the United States of America, not the word of common people like you and me. The word turned into a monster meme and is walking around the world. You cannot laugh it away as a mere typo. It starts to have a meaning of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3119" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T12:26:51.693" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T12:26:51.693" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10307" CreationDate="2017-06-05T02:59:57.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &quot;improve&quot; edit suggestions, you need the privilege to edit posts, requiring no peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For editing questions and answers, the privilege is granted at 2k reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for editing tag wikis, it's different. To approve or reject suggestions from others, 5k is required. To singlehandedly edit tags, or to &quot;improve&quot; suggestions, you need the &quot;trusted user&quot; privilege, granted to you at 20k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;Edit tag wikis, at 20k&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot;&gt;Approve tag wiki edits, at 5k&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Edit questions and answers, at 2k&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T03:17:32.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T03:17:32.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-05T05:49:31.937" Score="6" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sasha asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/392338/playing-sports-does-swimming-count&quot;&gt;Playing sports - does swimming count?&lt;/a&gt; and indicated her own difficulties with what the question was asking, i.e., (a) I am a professional swimmer, (b) playing sports implies team sports, (c) you don't say 'I play swimming'. (d) So do you answer the question &lt;em&gt;Do you play sports?&lt;/em&gt; if you need to start with 'I do/I don't...'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and added in a comment&#xA;&quot;Ok, so would it be correct then? -Do you play any sports? -I do, I practice swimming.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like Sasha set out in clear terms what his/her difficulties were, and what he/she was asking. And yes, you can go to great lengths (literally) when answering the question, and at least one answer does this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the author of said answer massively edited the post, and included the heading: &lt;em&gt;To clarify the English question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was clear without listing every single possible nuance to &quot;the English question&quot; (whatever that noun phrase means). The added material of the edit is well over 100% longer than the text of the initial question. And it explodes the original question to a protracted analysis that not all answerers are going to agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sasha's question seemed clear enough, and the edit is an unnecessary repackaging of it, so that it is no longer the OP's question. One could unpack what one sees as the issues &lt;em&gt;in an answer&lt;/em&gt;, without having to drastically edit the OP's question. Would that be the preferred course to take, especially since not all possible answerers will address the question as it has been restated and greatly drawn out, per the mind of the editor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T10:17:50.057" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T01:10:23.310" Title="Does the massive edit to &quot;Playing sports - does swimming count?&quot; really &quot;clarfiy the English question&quot;? If so, for whom?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10310" CreationDate="2017-06-05T08:54:12.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the editor of the question, and I edited it after it had received four close votes for various reasons.  It was an attempt to save it from closure.  I tried to address the closure issues without changing the nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After rereading the question many times and considering all the comments, with their diverse interpretations, and my own original confusion, the sources of the closure issues gelled.  The question, taken as a whole, also gelled and was actually clear.  However, the question wording and organization made it easy to miss the actual issue.  It was obvious from the comments, close votes, and my own initial read that it had already happened with many readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left the original question alone so as not to alter the original wording in any way, and supplemented it with a more organized summary of what was presented in the question.  Many of the close votes and comments interpreted various elements of the question as off-topic or tangential.  So I started the addition with a sub-title to indicate that the purpose of the addition was to provide the same information focused in a clearly on-topic way on the English issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clare's question here characterizes the original post as clear and my edit as a repackaging.  I don't know if Clare was among the early readers of the question (pre-edit), or viewed it only after the edit.  If an early reader, and the interpretation of the question hasn't changed, then perhaps Clare was not among those with diverse interpretations.  If the first view was post-edit, then perhaps my summary provided some context that made the original wording clear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, if my summary is seen as a repackaging, then it was successful in not changing the meaning of the question.  That was exactly what I was trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clare's question here describes the summary as exploding the original question and creating context that not all answerers are going to agree with.  I don't believe the summary does that.  It doesn't create anything that wasn't already in the question.  The original problem was that readers were interpreting pieces of the question outside the entirety of the question's context, and that's what my edit sought to solve.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So answerers are still free to diverge in any direction they want, but hopefully there will be less of it based simply on misinterpretation.  And I should point out that if the question went to closure, that point would be moot because there could be no more answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the edit did double the length of the question, the unfortunate price of leaving the original words intact.  Also, my repackaging means that half of the words are not literally the words of the OP.  Sasha hasn't returned yet, and his/her opinion should really be what drives this.  He/she could choose to chop off my edit or rework the question so no restatement is necessary.  Or, the question could have been a fleeting one and Sasha won't return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Clare's question here does raise a legitimate question of, in general,  how much editing is too much, and on this question, whether my edit materially changed the OP's intent and whether it helped or hurt the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can offer two indicators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The close voting stopped.  None of the close voters have returned to retract their votes, but the current four votes accumulated pretty quickly and that action stopped after the edit.  So hopefully, the edit solved the closure issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My recollection is that prior to the edit, the question was at a net voting of approximately zero (+/- 1).  Since the edit, it has gone to a net of +6.  I don't know how much, if any, of that is due to the edit, but just sayin'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would also welcome input and guidance on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94160" LastEditorUserId="94160" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T03:00:57.273" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T03:00:57.273" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10292" CreationDate="2017-06-05T21:40:30.430" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means it got a high rank in Google for some common searches. It's number 3 on the Google searches for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=covfefe+meaning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;covfefe meaning&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+covfefe+mean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;what does covfefe mean&quot;&lt;/a&gt; at the moment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zXK0x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zXK0x.png&quot; alt=&quot;Question is number 3 on Google&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some users may not be especially proud of this particular question, this is a good sign for the site. It means that Google is ranking English.SE highly and drawing traffic for people trying to understand what words and phrase mean. Congratulations on your success!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97308" LastEditorUserId="97308" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T19:15:46.773" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T19:15:46.773" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10292" CreationDate="2017-06-06T10:05:33.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see from the question's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/391945/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;, this post was   Tweeted on Twitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also helped to reach many users from Twitter to visited this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2AlB6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2AlB6.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU Twitter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154058" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T10:05:33.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10310" CreationDate="2017-06-06T13:17:56.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't read an OP's mind, and if they don't respond to comments, it usually leaves their question unclear, or too broad. At times, we have to assume what the OP wants, and try and save the question. Judgement call or something, it's called.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;swimming&quot; question seemed to be heading for disaster until a last-ditch edit by fixer1234 saved the day, and since then it's been only gaining more upvotes, which means the edits helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just keep in mind that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If edits are suggested by a low-rep user, it will undergo review.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If edits are by a high-rep user, we trust them to know what they're doing.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If edits kill a question, several users will notice it, and bring it around.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there's no issue here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a general answer, and not limited to this &quot;swimming&quot; question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T13:17:56.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10310" CreationDate="2017-06-06T17:28:20.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the kind member's explanatory answer here, we can all agree it was a desperate intervention meant to 'save' the question. The more pertinent discussion would be &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what is wrong with the Q that prompted 4 users to vote to close it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it before the 'massive edit' and found it quite clear to begin with, as Clare did. This is how I understood it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When IELTS examiner asks 'do you play any sports', how do you answer that, if you're a professional swimmer? --&#xA;because swimming is not the type of sport you 'play' and I am supposed to answer I do/ I don't for such questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note this answer I gave in comments even before the kind member helpfully made the 'massive edit' to improve this already clear question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q:&lt;strong&gt;Do you play any sports?&lt;/strong&gt; Swimming is indeed a sport, so even if you are not 'playing' swimming, your answer should be &amp;quot;yes I do.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;If that is all the examination format requires you to answer&lt;/em&gt;, then you would 'sit tight' and let the examiner make the next move. If however the format dictates you should give a brief explanatory answer, then you could say &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;yes I do -- I am a professional swimmer.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; YOU CAN GIVE SOME MORE DETAILS. In any case &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;they would be assessing your vocabulary, grammar and fluency in English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; rather than the semantics of whether 'playing sports' includes swimming!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– English Student yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think I missed something? IT IS OP WE MUST BE TRYING TO HELP FIRST. The 'potential' of the question comes next. The insistence on 'research' would be pedantic here: standard dictionaries may not help OP much in this instance because it is a more complex situation. Voting to close a reasonably clear question like this one for 'lack of clarity' or 'lack of research' is a nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is not clear with the question? What is OP supposed to check in a dictionary? Why vote to close in the first place&lt;/strong&gt;, necessitating such kindly intended but ultimately drastic action as this 'massive edit'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I humbly requests members that do not understand a question to leave well alone and let somebody who understands answer it. I therefore appreciate the timely action of fixer1234 to 'save' the question (which was necessitated by such hasty and ill-advised close-voting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T18:09:01.387" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2017-06-07T01:02:58.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation serves many valuable collective purposes by appealing to a powerful private craving: vanity. When the desire to score points leads you to behavior that undermines the good purposes it normally serves, it’s time to turn your pride &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; point-scoring. Here are two ways that’s worked for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I hit the daily reputation cap, I find myself thinking, “WOO-HOOO! I’m on a roll!” It’s easy to take pride in how many points you can &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; to the rep cap—so post as much as you can &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the GMT date changes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But then a deeper insight kicks in, still related to pride. Isn’t the rep cap the universe’s way—or maybe our StackExchange overlords’ way—of telling us that we’re spending too much time posting here? Sure enough, I see that I’ve been neglecting worthy pursuits in which I take &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; pride than my posts here, sometimes even work that earns money for &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; and not StackExchange. Now beholding those reputation points gives me a twinge of shame! &lt;em&gt;Memento mori!&lt;/em&gt; Time now to take pride in humbly heeding the rep cap’s signal to take a break. There are papers to write, copy to edit, a faucet to repair, sunlight to enjoy, email to answer, deadlines to meet, …&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74898" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T01:02:58.043" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T15:04:10.647" Score="5" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I joined EL&amp;amp;U a day or so ago, and at first had no problems, then suddenly earlier today, the site refused to recognise me.  This seemed to be a feature of accessing the site via the Chrome browser, which insisted I log on via google, and I finally got round the problem by switching to the Edge browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One odd thing was that this &lt;em&gt;suddenly&lt;/em&gt; began happening, for no apparent reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else encountered this glitch/bug/problem/feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239282" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T15:04:10.647" Title="Problems logging in to English Language &amp; Usage" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10215" CreationDate="2017-06-07T17:28:23.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, there's no clear-cut formula to categorise what questions deserve to be migrated. Both ELU and ELL have a lot of overlapping topics. You will develop a sense of what's better suited here, and what there, over time, and others may or may not agree with your views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's a time window, after which, migration is not possible, 60 days, it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10250/309993&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it would give you a bigger picture of SE network if you go through &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;all posts tagged &lt;em&gt;faq&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T18:20:10.517" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T18:20:10.517" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T18:45:21.297" Score="12" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;A paragraph ending with a link having a tooltip is wrongly combined with the next paragraph. In some cases, the link is also corrupted and some of the markup shows up as content. At least one page “in the wild” which used to correctly display an embedded image no longer renders properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are several cases which demonstrate the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 1: link with tooltip&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the link is wrongly joined to the next paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[link text][reference1]&#xA;[reference1]: https://example.com/ &quot;tooltip&quot;&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;tooltip&quot;&gt;link text&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 2: link with tooltip containing barelink&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the link is corrupted and some of the markup shows up as content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[link text][reference2]&#xA;[reference2]: https://example.com/ &quot;tooltip https://example.com/&quot;&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;https://example.com/&quot;&gt;link text&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 3: image link with tooltip&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like example 1, but with an image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;![link text][reference3]&#xA;[reference3]: https://example.com/ &quot;tooltip&quot;&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://example.com/&quot; alt=&quot;link text&quot; title=&quot;tooltip&quot;&gt;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 4: image link with tooltip containing barelink&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like example 2, but with an image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;![link text][reference4]&#xA;[reference4]: https://example.com/ &quot;tooltip https://example.com/&quot;&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;https://example.com/&quot;&gt;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 5: example “in the wild”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following post previously displayed an image embed but now displays no image and some of the markup shows up as content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/96967&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/96967&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T20:11:14.127" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T07:05:01.623" Title="Apparent regression in link markdown" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10321" CreationDate="2017-06-07T19:58:46.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how I have always seen it used. I'm not sure why you do it the way you show in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[link text][covfefe]&#xA;&#xA;this is a new paragraph&#xA;this is not a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA;this is a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA; [covfefe]: https://example.com/ &quot;tooltip&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;tooltip&quot;&gt;link text&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is a new paragraph&#xA;this is not a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T19:58:46.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10321" CreationDate="2017-06-08T07:05:01.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or this way. I have never seen it the way it is shown in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[link text](https://example.com/ &quot;tooltip&quot;) &#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&#xA;this should be a new paragraph&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;tooltip&quot;&gt;link text&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this should be a new paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T07:05:01.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10329" CreationDate="2017-06-08T14:32:28.977" Score="27" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while I get a notification that someone has voted on one of my old posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I click the notification, and I notice that the old post has some ... room for improvement. Some are so bad that if I saw it posted today I'd probably downvote it (fortunately there aren't any I've found which I'd VtD or flag for removal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to edit these things into shape, over time. Problem is I personally loathe seeing old posts float to the top of the front page. To me, it feels like &quot;completed business&quot;; it's done, leave it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do others feel the same? Would I be annoying you (yes, you) by creating noise on the front page?  Is there a particular time or day when this would be less intrusive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be an ongoing thing, not just once-off, and whatever policy we land on will likely apply to everyone else who wants to edit their old posts, so considered answers are probably called for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Most of you know me well enough by now that I probably don't need to say this, but no, I am not thinking of editing old posts to get more attention or votes on them. Heck, you may feel free to downvote anything you see rise up just because you feel like it. I won't mind.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T15:37:40.367" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T09:27:14.140" Title="Regrets of a youth misspent" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10324" CreationDate="2017-06-08T15:29:06.627" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not wrong to improve a post by editing it. Let the chips fall where they may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T15:29:06.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10324" CreationDate="2017-06-08T15:43:27.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned (since I ignore edits), more edits would be only a minor inconvenience for browsing new answers (as I usually use the front page, sorted by active to browse new answers). But I could always &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aa&quot;&gt;use search&lt;/a&gt; instead (as a bonus, it also has more signal and stuff). And I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;newest questions tab&lt;/a&gt; to browse new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's well worth it to improve posts, including for other reasons, such as grammar/tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T15:43:27.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10324" CreationDate="2017-06-08T16:21:33.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old questions are going to end up on the front page occasionally just because of the &quot;Late Answer&quot; syndrome (new user posting on a question they don't realize, or don't care, was asked in 2012).  If you're only doing these edits in a &quot;onesy-twosy&quot; fashion, you are not going to add significantly to the front page activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:  Go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T16:21:33.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10324" CreationDate="2017-06-08T17:08:48.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do that all the time, and I'm not talking about just my old posts, I edit whatever comes to my notice, and so far nobody has complained &quot;look at that NVZ guy, fishing for attention&quot;, at least, that's what I assume people would say given the chance, and I have full confidence that nobody will be disturbed with your efforts to improve some posts, and I say, go ahead, and don't stop, ... but do pause for a few hours before you edit another dozen. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Edits should be substantial, which I'm sure is what you (and most users like us) do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T09:27:14.140" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T09:27:14.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10324" CreationDate="2017-06-08T17:37:39.363" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to think of what the risks and benefits of editing old answers would be.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone might judge the modified answer and Downvote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone might believe the edit was self-promotional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone might be mildly and briefly annoyed by the activity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Benefit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The post is improved forever for everybody&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hence, the site is improved forever for everybody.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like all the risks are related to what individual users might believe, and are ephemeral, and all the benefits are related to improving the whole site and are lasting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was a site primarily for catering to a group of frequent or elite users, maybe it would make sense to err on the side of not editing.  But what makes SE unique is that it serves a broad audience of potential visitors and new users interested in learning, helping, and sharing knowledge. According to Jeff Atwood, the mission of Stack Exchange is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to make the internet better&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/25/stack-overflow-gives-back-2010/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/25/stack-overflow-gives-back-2010/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion, therefore, is edit away, in the spirit of making something better!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T17:37:39.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-09T00:46:24.720" Score="8" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that Ngrams feature quite often in threads I've been involved with (I've used it myself) but, allowing that the Ngram program can be useful, how cautious should we be in using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An extreme example is the phrase &quot;fit down&quot;. This phrase was enormously popular in 1800, followed by a precipitous decline through 1820, virtually vanishing as we move from 1820-1840.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fit%20down&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfit%20down%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;fit down&quot; Ngram&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OLis3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OLis3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the tale of &quot;fit down&quot; is entirely the result of the google OCR program insisting in transcribing the &quot;long-s&quot; as &quot;f&quot;. What we are seeing is the ghost of &quot;sit down&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How wary should we be of the Ngram program? In just what ways is it useful? Should there be lodged, somewhere, a &quot;Guide to Using Ngram&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239282" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T10:22:11.887" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T10:22:11.887" Title="How useful are Ngrams in exploring English? (The case of “fit down”)" Tags="|discussion|reference|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-09T18:54:01.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-09T00:15:42.127" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that Ngrams feature quite often in threads I've been involved with (I've used it myself) but, allowing that the Ngram program &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be useful, how cautious should we be in using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An extreme example is the phrase &quot;fit down&quot;. This phrase was enormously popular in 1800, followed by a precipitous decline through 1820, virtually vanishing as we move from 1820-1840.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnDt9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnDt9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The &amp;quot;fit down Ngram&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the tale of &quot;fit down&quot; is entirely the result of the google OCR program insisting in transcribing the &quot;long-s&quot; as &quot;f&quot;.  What we are seeing is the ghost of &quot;sit down&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How wary should we be of the Ngram program?  In just what ways is it useful?  Should there be lodged, somewhere, a &quot;Guide to Using Ngram&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239282" OwnerDisplayName="Robin Hamilton" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T02:51:55.190" Title="How useful are Ngrams in exploring English? (The case of &quot;fit down&quot;)" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-09T03:07:44.940" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10333" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:52:36.973" Score="8" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user just posted a question, and I find their username offensive and inappropriate (I can post the name if necessary). Is there any procedure for reporting a username?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found their question inappropriate, so I flagged it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182960" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:59:13.503" Title="Is there a way to report a rude/inappropriate username?" Tags="|support|moderation|usernames|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10332" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:59:13.503" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should flag the post for moderator attention, and specify why you think the username is inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:59:13.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8015" CreationDate="2017-06-10T00:16:42.060" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact is, NGrams &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be a good tool for examining the language in published books. In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/how-to-use-the-oed/key-to-frequency/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED uses it&lt;/a&gt; as part of calculating word frequency! However, the results may not be accurate unless &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; go and verify they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;OCR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is, Google Books relies a lot on OCR. Unfortunately, there are a lot more OCR errors than just &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/327087/191178&quot;&gt;long s&lt;/a&gt; (which also confuses people who are not familiar with old typography). As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22whot%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1810&amp;amp;lr=lang_en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt; indicates, it's also pretty common in older books to have &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; become &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; (and apparently, &lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt; become &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;). You'll also find that some books are very garbled, especially as you look further back in time. Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=RaICAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PT18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt; from 1880:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ran an 'm'ia 9w twz'mz n'n'rxz “'8 &amp;quot;BL E'BI'“! '8831.133 '9'61'66 'HJBHOBJ Yl'sz'vv az 'oz'v: n'n Lr'rlmz ru 51; &amp;quot;xx: we sn'uu Ht Lrn 13H fla-... “1 . 3 ;._:nm .ag_5 9's M'Isz wot 111st ar'st 1: nu rv'awo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This obviously obscures useful matches and may create false positives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Words spelled the same&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another pitfall I've seen people fall into. They'll try to compare two terms for frequency, and forget to consider matches that have other meanings (such as homographs) or matches that fall into another part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opposite (when one word has many spellings) can become a problem in older texts (although you've usually run into other problems, mainly OCR, before this is an issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Korpus Vokabel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I may have &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; searched for English results &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22das%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1869&amp;amp;lr=lang_en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but did you notice some (all?) of the actual results are in German? (&lt;em&gt;Korpus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Vokabel&lt;/em&gt; are the German words for &lt;em&gt;corpus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you can't trust &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; to only show results in English, I wouldn't trust &amp;quot;British English&amp;quot; to only return results in British English. For example, (looking at modern usage) &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=colour%3Aeng_us_2012%2Ccolour%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Ccolor%3Aeng_us_2012%2Ccolor%3Aeng_gb_2012&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccolour%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolour%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolor%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolor%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this graph for color vs. colour&lt;/a&gt; shows one spelling is &amp;quot;preferred&amp;quot; in AmE and the other in BrE, but it also shows a number of results for the non-preferred spelling in each dialect (which doesn't seem accurate to me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, books written in British English that were published in the US are included in the &amp;quot;American English&amp;quot; corpora. And the reverse is true too. (This is mentioned on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;info page&lt;/a&gt; under &amp;quot;corpora&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, there are some problems with metadata, which also affects the year published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part-of-Speech tagging&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logical solution to categorizing PoS is tagging (not that I've seen anyone else use this). According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NGrams info page&lt;/a&gt;, part-of-speech tagging is usually accurate, but not so much for older English or uncommon usages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part-of-speech tags and dependency relations are predicted automatically. Assessing the accuracy of these predictions is difficult, but for modern English we expect the accuracy of the part-of-speech tags to be around 95% and the accuracy of dependency relations around 85%. On older English text and for other languages the accuracies are lower, but likely above 90% for part-of-speech tags and above 75% for dependencies. This implies a significant number of errors, which should be taken into account when drawing conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part-of-speech tags are constructed from a small training set (a mere million words for English). This will sometimes underrepresent uncommon usages, such as green or dog or book as verbs, or ask as a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;???&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some queries that inexplicably turn up the wrong results. One such query is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bark+up+the+wrong%2Cbark+up+the&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbark%20up%20the%20wrong%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbark%20up%20the%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which shows a noticeable amount of usage for &amp;quot;bark up the&amp;quot; between 1805 and 1830. When you actually click on the search results, it is clear that there were 0 occurrences of the phrase during that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Statistics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't actually a problem with NGrams itself, but nevertheless I feel it is relevant (as I've seen it become a source of error too). Many people seem to lack the statistics knowledge needed to understand some of what's involved with making and understanding NGrams. Luckily, their &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;info page&lt;/a&gt; explains some of what you need to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do I see more spikes and plateaus in early years?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Publishing was a relatively rare event in the 16th and 17th centuries. (There are only about &lt;a href=&quot;http://estc.bl.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;500,000 books&lt;/a&gt; published in English before the 19th century.) So if a phrase occurs in one book in one year but not in the preceding or following years, that creates a taller spike than it would in later years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plateaus are usually simply smoothed spikes. Change the smoothing to 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does &amp;quot;smoothing&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Often trends become more apparent when data is viewed as a moving average. A smoothing of 1 means that the data shown for 1950 will be an average of the raw count for 1950 plus 1 value on either side: (&amp;quot;count for 1949&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;count for 1950&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;count for 1951&amp;quot;), divided by 3. So a smoothing of 10 means that 21 values will be averaged: 10 on either side, plus the target value in the center of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the left and right edges of the graph, fewer values are averaged. With a smoothing of 3, the leftmost value (pretend it's the year 1950) will be calculated as (&amp;quot;count for 1950&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;count for 1951&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;count for 1952&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;count for 1953&amp;quot;), divided by 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A smoothing of 0 means no smoothing at all: just raw data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Many more books are published in modern years. Doesn't this skew the results?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It would if we didn't normalize by the number of books published in each year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't have all the answers. I'm still not sure what's the math behind comparing NGrams of different sizes, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bark+up+the+wrong%2Cbark+up+the&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbark%20up%20the%20wrong%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbark%20up%20the%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this (previously mentioned) one&lt;/a&gt; which compares a 3gram and 4gram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-16T14:38:12.073" LastActivityDate="2022-04-16T14:38:12.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-10T19:25:22.203" Score="8" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt; could use your help. It's up to 250 now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours truly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T08:10:02.667" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T08:10:02.667" Title="Posts pending review, now around 250" Tags="|discussion|review-queues|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10340" CreationDate="2017-06-11T02:26:45.277" Score="8" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was some extended discussion of a question that was on the verge of being closed here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10310/does-the-massive-edit-to-playing-sports-does-swimming-count-really-clarfiy&quot;&gt;Does the massive edit to “Playing sports - does swimming count?” really “clarify the English question”? If so, for whom?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It prompted me to post an answer that really should have been a question.  Essentially it looked to me like a question that was really a valid question might have been close-voted because it began by stating &quot;This is a common IELTS speaking exam question: Do you play any sports?&quot; (The original question is here for convenience: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/392338/playing-sports-does-swimming-count&quot;&gt;Playing sports - does swimming count?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an excellent answer outlining when exam questions are on- or off-topic here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7200/does-this-stackoverflow-forum-answer-questions-related-to-ielts&quot;&gt;Does this stackoverflow forum answer questions related to IELTS?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious what experienced users have observed over time about how IELTS or other exam related questions tend to be treated on the site, and what your reactions tend to be.  Is there any merit to this theory about the votes for closure on the swimming question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here I'll include the text I had originally posted as an answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with English Student that the question didn't warrant close-votes. I suspect one reason for the CVs might be that some users possibly have a knee-jerk reaction to IELTS questions. I noticed that one of the close-votes remaining (one must have been retracted) uses &quot;proofreading is off-topic,&quot; which seems to me to indicate that the close-voter didn't thoroughly read the question, since it has nothing to do with proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious if other more experienced users have insight into this sort of reaction to questions explicitly posted as exam-related. Is that something that tends to warrant closing? Am I wrong in suspecting that the close-vote for proofreading was a mistake, or that it was possibly related to the IELTS context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T02:32:19.393" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T08:47:31.677" Title="How does the community feel about exam or IELTS questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10338" CreationDate="2017-06-11T08:47:31.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite apart from the &quot;Please correct my essay&quot; questions, which are obviously and egregiously off-topic, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to ask questions relating to exams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question asking &quot;How do I pass this exam? What answer is the examiner looking for?&quot; is the wrong way. We are not experts in every syllabus and marking scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question which would be on-topic here would be one asking about the English involved. &quot;What is wrong with my answer to &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;? I encountered that question in an exam and wrote &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;, because &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt;. My dictionary/textbook/course notes include &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; which appear to support my conclusion. Was I right? Is it possible to determine why the 'correct' answer was actually &lt;em&gt;Q&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; Include links to dictionaries and textbooks and even the question if possible. Such a question could be more speculative (&quot;I'm expecting to be asked...&quot;) which might preclude mentioning &lt;em&gt;Q&lt;/em&gt;, but everything else could be included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of being slightly unfair, let's use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/392338/revisions&quot;&gt;concrete example.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a common IELTS exam question: do you play any sports?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you answer that if you're a professional swimmer? In my mind 'playing sports' implies team sports (I play football, I play basketball, etc.), you don't say &quot;I play swimming&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, the the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do you play any sports?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I do/I don't...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, they do expect you to answer &quot;do you...&quot; questions with &quot;I do, I don't...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, I think, is more of the first form than the second, although it's a &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt; better question than a simple &quot;What's the answer?&quot; request. There has been some analysis of the problem. But it is slightly muddled: it's asking whether &lt;em&gt;sports&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;team sports&quot; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; whether team sports includes swimming. It does include my &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; with &quot;'Do you...' questions need 'I do/don't'&quot;, but the main question is explicitly &quot;How do I answer, What is the examiner looking for?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it's possible to explain the problem in a more structured way, I don't think we can get away from the &quot;How do I answer this?&quot; issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A common IELTS exam question is &quot;Do you play any sports?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IELTS expects questions starting &quot;Do you...&quot; to be answered using the main verb (&lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt; in this case) with &quot;I don't&quot; if that's needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you play any sports?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;rarr; &quot;Yes, I play football.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;rarr; &quot;No, I don't play anything like that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my mind, &lt;em&gt;play any sports&lt;/em&gt; implies a team sport like football or basketball. &lt;em&gt;Play&lt;/em&gt; doesn't really work with &lt;strong&gt;swimming&lt;/strong&gt; (even though that can be a team sport with competitive relay races) or pole-vaulting or triathlon. But I need to mention swimming so that any follow-up questions are about something I can speak about. I'm a swimmer; I know nothing about football.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to answer a question &quot;Do you play...?&quot; with an answer about swimming or athletics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is at least a concrete question, although the answer is probably a simple &quot;No&quot;. Arguably, it's still possible to analyse the question as being &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;What is the purpose of this question and what is the examiner expecting me to say?&quot; but I believe that's off-topic, because it's a question &lt;strong&gt;about the exam itself&lt;/strong&gt; and not the principles of &lt;strong&gt;the English in the answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because the question is about a learner's English exam, it may fall into the fairly broad category of &quot;Other practical problems you encounter or face &lt;strong&gt;while learning English&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (my emphasis) which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic on ELL.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer to the question suggesting something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you play any sports?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;rarr; &quot;I'm a competitive swimmer.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;rarr; &quot;I'm a world-class marathon runner.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be Not An Answer. Even though those replies are perfectly reasonable in normal conversation, steering the topic from &lt;em&gt;sport&lt;/em&gt; in general to the particular, they do not fit the criteria they need to. I suppose it might be possible to suggest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you play any sports?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;rarr; &quot;I don't play any team sports, but I'm a competitive swimmer.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but then we need to know whether that would satisfy the syllabus and the expected answer. I don't believe we're collectively qualified to answer that; and even if it were possible the answer might be wrong with next year's syllabus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question such as I suggest in my third paragraph above is likely to be objectively answerable, and the answer is unlikely to change much over time. I think we can answer those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T08:47:31.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10342" CreationDate="2017-06-11T20:15:14.693" Score="7" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10337/posts-pending-review-now-around-250&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which asks for people to help out with the review queue, would it be an advantage for a notification to pop up if the review queue has a certain backlog of questions/answers (for example 50, 100 etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I tend to forget about the review queue, leaving the site faithful to continually review and make this site what it is.  I could use a popup notification (or similar) to let me know if the review queue is becoming unmanageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, I use the desktop site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T02:54:54.353" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T02:54:54.353" Title="Review queue notification" Tags="|feature-request|review-queues|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10341" CreationDate="2017-06-11T21:45:51.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're using the desktop site, you should find a number in a brown background in the site header which shows the number of review tasks which are open to you to do. Here's mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Z2dN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Z2dN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Site header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that your number could be a lot lower than that, or even zero (and not shown) because the different review tasks only become available with privileges from increasing reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't really be necessary to have a pop-up or notification, because that figure is in the page header &lt;strong&gt;all the time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Only moderators get the blue figure, and that number includes things like &quot;Not an Answer&quot; flags which can be dealt with by the community: there aren't 25 flags which need &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; attention at the moment. The &quot;mod&quot; menu you can see in that screenshot isn't shown to everyone, either.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if you have less than 2k rep, you &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; see that there are 192 reviews queued, but you can't do a lot to help at the moment. Your header bar should show a &quot;review&quot; menu entry, but won't have a number beside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKWlg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKWlg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sub-2k review list&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T21:45:51.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10324" CreationDate="2017-06-12T08:42:55.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will you annoy me by bumping an old post to the front page? I'll be honest - quite often you probably will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although if it's a really interesting question/answer, then you wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is set up to allow editing at any time. And I'll edit old posts occasionally. So I wouldn't want to stop you editing something that you think needs editing, as long as its a substantial edit. Bumping an old post for a few typos or formatting wouldn't be worthwhile, but from reading your question you're not suggesting that anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in summary, it will sometimes annoy me but I see absolutely no reason for you not to do it, as long as the edits are substantial and occasional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T08:42:55.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10345" CreationDate="2017-06-12T09:49:10.097" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the first part (Should) is obviously, &quot;No!&quot;, but I'm reluctant to test the possibility for that very reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239282" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T10:55:32.673" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T10:55:32.673" Title="Should/Can one upvote oneself?" Tags="|support|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10344" CreationDate="2017-06-12T10:25:00.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't vote (up/down) for your own post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9L7S.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9L7S.png&quot; alt=&quot;You can&amp;#39;t vote for your own post.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you still can vote to close, reopen or (un)delete your own posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T10:25:00.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10347" CreationDate="2017-06-12T15:18:12.657" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran across an answer today that looked like it could use a little help with accessibility (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/293136/177853&quot;&gt;WBT's answer to &lt;em&gt;Train Station vs. Railway Station&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Specifically, there is a link to &quot;here&quot; that would be better attached to something more descriptive; I thought while I was at it, I'd check to see if it needed image descriptions for the Google Ngrams that make up the bulk of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the images do not include any alternate text. However, they also apparently were not added via the Image button, because the code does not include the usual placeholder for such text. Instead, there is just this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img src=&quot;http://i.imgur.com/uuiT4m4.png&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd still like to add alt text, but I'm not at all code-savvy, and I don't want to disturb the current coding for fear it will make the image go away. Should I copy the source address, add a duplicate picture (with description), then delete the original? Is there a more elegant approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T23:57:43.277" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T23:57:43.277" Title="Adding alt-text to images that don't ask for it" Tags="|support|status-completed|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10346" CreationDate="2017-06-12T16:56:29.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for noticing and helping clean up missing alt-text. As you noted, it is important for accessibility. Your plan to insert a new image using the copied image url (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g9kV9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g9kV9.png&lt;/a&gt;) is a good one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are nervous about it, remember that the post preview will show you what the rendered version will look (and act) like, so you can use that to check whether you've done it correctly. If you are extra nervous, you can also leave the other markup in place until you are sure you've made the change correctly. But don't worry too much. You can always rollback the change if you need to. There may also be some folks in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; who could talk you through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck and thanks again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T16:56:29.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10346" CreationDate="2017-06-12T17:40:43.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Had to jump in and edit it, cuz I couldn't resist it. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's your turn to edit it and insert alt-texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T17:40:43.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T18:12:00.477" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes custom flag questions, asking a moderator to mark it &lt;em&gt;status completed&lt;/em&gt;, because I believe the question served it's purpose, and most moderators mark my flag &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt;, and actually add the requested tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure if that is a good thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, the tag is added mainly on MSE where people ask for new features to be added to the entire SE network, and this tag is added not just for &lt;em&gt;feature requests&lt;/em&gt;, but for questions tagged &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bug&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;support&lt;/em&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-completed/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; reads (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Indicates that a feature request has been implemented, a bug has been fixed, or &lt;strong&gt;another type of request has been processed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of questions deserve a &lt;em&gt;status completed&lt;/em&gt; tag on ELU meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When should I request such a tag? Or should I never?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T18:17:58.723" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:17:58.723" Title="Is it okay to request a status completed tag?" Tags="|support|tags|flags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10353" CreationDate="2017-06-12T21:08:09.787" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/385508/opt-out-or-opt-out/385512&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Opt Out&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Opt-Out&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to understand why this question was marked as off topic so that I avoid asking similar inappropriate questions again in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232353" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T16:36:31.377" Title="Why was this off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10352" CreationDate="2017-06-12T23:59:41.053" Score="13" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;This week I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/393613/236194&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and rather than give a quick answer (technically, just &quot;yes&quot; would have responded to the original question), I explained my reasoning and gave several illustrative examples, so that anyone reading it could see how it applies more universally. I was sure it could count as a helpful answer, as is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a more experienced member has commented that I should have included &quot;supporting evidence&quot;, suggesting that otherwise, we open the arena up to &lt;em&gt;mere opinion&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a brief search, I could find an academic source to back up what I was saying, but was that necessary? I've researched this very question myself in the past (I was an ESL teacher for ten years, and am a native speaker, so I also just know when something sounds right), already knowing that the use of an article like that &lt;em&gt;felt right&lt;/em&gt;, but at the time just couldn't explain why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That past experience allowed me to give the illustrative examples so that it made sense. The explanation itself is what makes the answer credible, rather than the sources I may have used to find it, that I've long forgotten by now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if I know my answer is right, far beyond it counting as opinion, and can explain the logic and give examples, do I truly have to back it up with an academic reference? Or can I at least just say that I'm an experienced ESL teacher and native speaker if credibility beyond the explanation really is necessary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing academic references seems like overkill for something like this, unless I'm making a claim that other native speakers may find dubious. I think more flexibility would be needed compared to making scientific claims for instance, that you'd have to reference some kind of research. As a native speaker, surely if I am very confident that it sounds right, and I can explain why it works a particular way and my explanation makes sense, that's all that's needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this supporting evidence necessity is the policy of ELU, it's unfortunate as it adds an extra step to what would otherwise be a perfectly functional answer. Also, this isn't exactly applied universally. Is it necessary to add supporting evidence for it to be a good answer on ELU, or should we only request it if we actually disagree or doubt the answer or feel like the examples don't hold enough water to stand on their own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7070/what-level-of-obviousness-does-not-require-a-reference-in-an-answer-from-a-high&quot;&gt;another question on the same general theme&lt;/a&gt; that's already been asked, but that takes it as a given that all non-high-rep users would give references, without truly justifying it. The question remains - if an answer addresses the question, and does so thoroughly without leaving potential for disagreement, then why would a reference be needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the answer to that question, which &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; insightful, alludes to someone like me who was frustrated with the idea of having to provide references, but doesn't really address the problem, only saying that a combination of multiple factors including documentation make an answer on the site &quot;useful&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive me for stating the obvious and pointing out a huge irony, but... that point really could have done with a reference or documentation to back up why references in this context are required in the first place. This isn't a humorous attempt at a recursive loop of references that prove that references are worthwhile, but a genuine frustration at feeling like I'm being told &quot;because we said so&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the answer here addresses my point more directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236194" LastEditorUserId="236194" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T16:47:39.067" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T10:10:54.677" Title="Is supporting evidence required in answers, even if it's well illustrated?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10351" CreationDate="2017-06-13T14:50:51.107" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supplying references to questions or answers has nothing to do with site reputation, linguistics or academic experience, but is simply good practice. &lt;strong&gt;Senior members routinely cite standard and special sources in their detailed answers&lt;/strong&gt;. Supportive evidence improves the validity and objectivity of the answer by supplying references to standard textbooks or quoting instances of recorded usage. It removes any possible doubt in the reader's mind that this answer might be primarily based on the author's personal opinions / beliefs regarding the English language, and thus adds greater credibility which in turn helps make the answer 'more authoritative.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The need for supporting citations has originated from the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;large number of incorrect or illogical answers that used to be submitted without any references&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which the hard-working senior members and moderators then needed to downvote out of sight of impressionable learners who might well have been misled by such opinions purporting to be expert fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The practice of discouraging answers that do not cite proper sources is intended to reduce the tendency of members to post such answers, &lt;strong&gt;which ensures that more answers posted here are well-researched and automatically more accurate&lt;/strong&gt;. That is why senior members make it a point to inform newcomers like us that answers are expected to contain adequate citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact I started out here 2 months ago in the same manner that you have done, and just like you was baffled why we needed to supply references to a 'perfectly obvious' answer, but I am now persuaded that &lt;strong&gt;what is obvious to us is often not obvious to someone else&lt;/strong&gt;, and my experience here has convinced me that references are indeed important to establish the validity of our answer, not only when it is read by the EL&amp;amp;U community but also for the benefit of future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I found &lt;strong&gt;it is usually quite easy to find suitable references online to support your points&lt;/strong&gt;, and therefore you can quickly learn to incorporate extracts and citations into your answers as a matter of course, with very little additional effort, thus bringing the benefit of your wide general and specific experience with English to help new learners and non-native speakers better understand the nuances of this admittedly complex but wonderful language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I later found (by sheer coincidence) a closely related question has been asked before on meta, and I invite your attention to the single, excellent answer provided by a senior member, which perfectly answers your own question about the need for citations while writing an answer at English Language &amp;amp; Usage website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7070/what-level-of-obviousness-does-not-require-a-reference-in-an-answer-from-a-high&quot;&gt;What level of obviousness does not require a reference in an Answer from a high-rep user?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T10:10:54.677" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T10:10:54.677" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10350" CreationDate="2017-06-13T16:36:31.377" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed for lack of research. In other words, the community wanted you to be more specific about what official resources you already consulted before you posted the question. That's to make sure we don't cover the same ground and also to help us understand what kind of answer you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, I think it's a fine question and should actually have been closed as a duplicate of a canonical question about hyphenating word compounds, which has a bunch of really interesting information in it. Which I would do, except I can't find the question I'm thinking of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, welcome to EL&amp;amp;U!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T16:36:31.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-13T18:35:29.600" Score="13" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been something that's bothered me since I joined EL&amp;amp;U, but it's not something that can easily be discussed because it's mostly an attitude thing.  We get &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of bad questions here, but there are always more good ones to be asked as the language and its usage is always changing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do some users (usually the high-rep ones, though this isn't a 1-to-1 trend) seem to assume that questions are going to be bad until they themselves are perplexed?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/393476/90265&quot;&gt;An example I noticed recently&lt;/a&gt; came from the hot network bar where lots of users can come to the site and see responses to this curious question that include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;D’you know, that’s actually a really good question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, these imply the assumption that the question was going to be bad before the replier didn't have an immediate answer.  Even if it wasn't intentional, this gives off an air of condescension that is really off-putting to new users of the site.  I like attracting more users so I would like it if a more welcoming attitude was the first thing that they see =) Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90265" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T14:11:08.547" Title="Can we not assume questions are going to be bad?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10354" CreationDate="2017-06-13T20:43:31.410" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with your interpretation that the phrases meant that the assumption was that the question would be bad. To me, it reads more as an exclamation of 'huh, I never thought of that before, and did you also consider these other implications and complexities that add to the puzzle?' But that's neither here nor there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to your fundamental question, yes. We are able to not assume questions are going to be bad. This presents a couple of challenges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't have much control over how community members respond to questions, at least not until I get these nanites working correctly. The methods at our disposal here can provoke heated exchanges about censorship &amp;amp;c., which compounds the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of questions, at least initially, are pretty bad, so making the assumption that questions are going to be bad is pretty reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I know you are wondering what my plan is then, because I did, after all, just now, say that we are able to not assume questions are going to be bad. Here is the plan, which addresses the above challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post a nice, welcoming counter-comment. You don't even need to acknowledge the other comments. You can also upvote. That always takes the sting out of any potentially negative comments. Plus, the more other users see this nice behavior, the more they will be likely to emulate it. In short, be the change you want to see.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take the time to edit the question. We often leave helpful comments suggesting what to do for edits, but often the best thing to do is to show not tell. Is it missing a reference? Add one. Does it need formatting help? You can do that! Did the OP put all the details in a comment instead of the post? Go ahead and incorporate that information in the question, just like you know should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does two things. First, it models good behavior, not just for the poster, but also for other community members. Second, it makes it less likely people are going to see bad questions and therefore assume most questions are bad. Plus also, people are less likely to perceive a question as bad if it's upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T20:43:31.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T20:53:14.600" Score="14" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time I find a post marked [Close]  which I think is deserving of a longer life. It has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10029/the-close-vote-in-review-queue-is-meant-to-be-cast-judiciously/10033#10033&quot;&gt;mentioned in the past&lt;/a&gt; that some people go directly to the Close queue and flip through &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the entries just to find the one they wish to keep open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are trying to be fair, and not tilt the system so much towards &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt;, why is there not an easier way to keep a question open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is and I am just ignorant of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T10:01:50.940" Title="How to vote to &quot;Leave Open&quot; without going through every question on the Close queue" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10356" CreationDate="2017-06-14T21:25:01.580" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the most effective way I have found to keep a question open is to leave a comment explaining why it be kept open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking &quot;leave open&quot; is a fairly weak tool. At most, enough &quot;leave open&quot; votes can end the post's review period and start the closevote aging process. &quot;Leave open votes&quot; do not invalidate or count against closevotes, and the post still shows the number of closevotes against it. So it's not a very influential action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe only mods can see the direct link to a post's current and past review pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some other relevant suggestions in the help center article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T21:25:01.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10356" CreationDate="2017-06-15T10:01:50.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to keep a question open is to edit it in order to render the close reasons invalid. Note that you may need to do quite a bit of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's not a duplicate, say why the nominated question and any of the answers to that question don't cut it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's within the Help centre's listed scope, make that clear.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's possible you might need to provide missing research which proves the question valid. If you can do that without damaging the question, then do that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps you can provide a sample sentence for a word- or phrase-request, based on what the OP has already posted or commented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you pick out the detailed point which the OP is asking about with an &quot;Is this right?&quot; question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is actually about the nuts and bolts of English at a level which would not really help a &lt;em&gt;learner&lt;/em&gt; of English, demonstrate that in order that it's not migrated to ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Off-topic&quot; close votes have a write-in reason too, which will usually point out something specific which the question needs to address if it's to be on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's unclear, provide the detail needed (if that's possible; most unclear questions need the OP to do that. But perhaps the detail has been added in comments)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's too broad, limit its scope (but again, it may not be possible to judge the most important part the OP would like to keep)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it can be answered objectively without being pure opinion, make that clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these actions will negate close votes already cast, but they may cause people who have already voted to retract their vote, and they may prevent others from casting a close vote. And you will have improved the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't actually do any of these to &lt;strong&gt;show&lt;/strong&gt; that a question should not be closed (or rather, put on hold for the OP to clarify if possible), then it probably should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T10:01:50.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10360" CreationDate="2017-06-16T03:58:30.647" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've now been a member of EL&amp;amp;U for 11 days.  For the first 9 days, everything seemed pretty much normal -- a satisfying number of upvotes, a few (probably warranted) downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, over the course of the last two days, SIX of my Questions/Answers were downvoted, some several times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fascinating as it was to watch this pattern emerge, and curious as I was to just why it was happening, I did wonder whether I should respond to one or more of the incidents with a Comment -- in two cases, the obvious comment to make would have been, &quot;Exactly what's wrong with that?&quot; in cases where my answers provided (in my opinion) substantive additions to the thread.  I can understand not upvoting these particular answers, but why the downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not particularly curious as to why the downvotes were lodged -- I'm simply (for the moment) assuming that I've acquired a diligent follower -- but is there any generally accepted response to this situation?  Ignore the votes?  Ask for clarification?  Grin and bear it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239282" LastEditorUserId="239282" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T04:08:27.083" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T14:04:02.750" Title="Etiquette with regard to Downvotes" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10359" CreationDate="2017-06-16T04:18:12.503" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've checked your reputation page now, and it appears to me that those serial downvotes are timed mere seconds or minutes apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing you can do is wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system has in place some algorithm that will automatically detect voter fraud and it'll reverse those votes, and you'll get back the lost reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, after waiting for two to three days, the reversal didn't occur, your next action should be to custom flag one of your downvoted posts and inform a moderator that you have reason to believe it's a case of voter fraud. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can investigate the issue and take necessary action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind, that the investigation is time consuming, and the result you'll get may be a week later, or even later than that if moderators are already too busy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting under your post asking for downvoters to explain themselves is largely futile, since voters don't get notified of new comments under a post, and even if they did see your comment somehow, there's little chance that they'll respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explaining why someone downvoted a post is optional, and if they didn't comment initially, they most likely won't later either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's worth checking your posts to see if they're incorrect, or poorly formatted, because it may simply be that &quot;the post is not useful&quot;, paraphrasing the tooltip of the downvote button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126829/309993&quot;&gt;MSE FAQs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T04:49:54.910" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T04:49:54.910" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-16T13:42:26.587" Score="14" ViewCount="4586" Body="&lt;p&gt;With sad regularity, it seems someone comes to the site looking for &quot;the word&quot; for some very specific relationship. Recently, it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/393903/what-is-the-english-word-for-husband-of-the-daughter-of-my-brother/393905#393905&quot;&gt;What is the English word for husband of the daughter of my brother?&lt;/a&gt;. This morning there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/394252/question-regarding-relationships&quot;&gt;Question Regarding Relationships&lt;/a&gt;, asking &quot;how someone calls the person whom their husbands are biological brothers?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, English isn't very rich in such kinship terms, so the answer is usually &quot;there isn't one; you have to spell it all out&quot; or &quot;it's the same as the name for these other relationships, and then you have to spell out the details&quot;. In fact, the first cited question was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51616/paucity-of-words-for-relationships&quot;&gt;Paucity of words for relationships&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it makes sense to have a single answer where we direct these kinds of questions. The problem is, while useful and interesting, the &quot;duplicate&quot; doesn't actually provide a usable answer for these questioners. The answers there answer the question asked, focusing on &quot;why&quot; and not the terms English speakers actually use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question: would it be appropriate to make a &quot;model&quot; question of this sort, with a model answer, which could be used as the duplicate for this kind of question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would make it a community-wiki question, and while I would also provide an answer I would expect that others could/should chime in to clarify language/correct errors/add helpful information. For example, there may be some obscure/obsolete English terms for specific relationships that would be of interest to &quot;language enthusiasts&quot; even if not all that usable in everyday life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yea or nay? If yea, is there anything in particular I should take into consideration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add, for those who want an answer to the question in the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dark Helmet:&lt;/strong&gt; I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lone Starr:&lt;/strong&gt; What's that make us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dark Helmet:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Absolutely nothing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd_YyFzPD0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spaceballs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to do the &quot;math&quot; (assuming traditional heterosexual norms of monogamous marriage and reproduction, i.e. all siblings have the same set of two biological parents, one male and one female, who are married to one another; and also assuming that unmodified &quot;cousin&quot; means &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; cousin): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your father's brother is your uncle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your uncle's nephew can be either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your brother&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your first cousin on your father's side (son of another sibling of your father and uncle, but not the son of your uncle—that would be your uncle's son, not his nephew)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your &quot;cousin-in-law&quot; (your uncle's wife's sibling's son)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are, by my count, six possible relationships between you and your father's brother's nephew's cousin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You yourself (cousin of 2.3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your brother (ditto)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your first paternal cousin (cousin of 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3—either your uncle's son or the son of another sibling of both your father and uncle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your first maternal cousin (cousin of 2.1 or 2.2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your &quot;cousin-in-law&quot; (cousin of 2.3, on the other side of the family; not a close blood relative, unless you've got a family tree that circles back on itself)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your paternal uncle's wife's sibling's spouse's son (cousin of 2.4; not a close blood relative of you or your cousin)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And of course, the cousin's former roommate could be just about anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T20:42:09.550" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T20:42:09.550" Title="What's the English word for my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate?" Tags="|discussion|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10359" CreationDate="2017-06-16T14:04:02.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another reason could be that, like RaceYouAnytime mentioned, some users downvote answers simply because it's under an off-topic, too-broad, or unclear question, as a means to discourage users from answering them. It's a bad practice, but it does happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T14:04:02.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10361" CreationDate="2017-06-16T14:08:02.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of having a canonical (or what's the word for that) question, which can be made community wiki so that all of us can contribute to it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9817/list-of-faqs-and-canonical-posts&quot;&gt;We already have such questions&lt;/a&gt;, and we close later questions as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go ahead, and make a community wiki question for whatever family relationship terms exist in English, and we can close others as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T14:08:02.660" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10361" CreationDate="2017-06-16T16:03:24.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It feels strange to create a new question specifically to be answered as a reference question especially when there exist questions with answers and duplicate questions already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There already are some canonical high-quality 'kinship term' questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51616/paucity-of-words-for-relationships&quot;&gt;Paucity of words for relationships&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1605/is-there-an-accepted-rule-for-naming-all-of-our-various-distant-relatives-kinsh&quot;&gt;Rule for naming various relatives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either of these (or both, or more) can be added to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9817/list-of-faqs-and-canonical-posts&quot;&gt;list of FAQs and canonical posts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note to the content of these kinship term questions, there is a distinction within how to label a given relationship. There is whether there is single word for it and if not how best/most succinctly describe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the general situation, when a number of similar questions is asked about an area, one of these is already usually the better or most prior one. Why the need to create an arbitrary new question/answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to community wiki, that is pretty irrelevant, one can always add a new answer or edit an existing one. Making them community wiki doesn't incentivize editing one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T18:05:39.100" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T18:05:39.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10361" CreationDate="2017-06-16T19:44:00.250" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/kinship-terms/info&quot;&gt;existing tag-wiki&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;kinship-terms&lt;/em&gt; would be the place I recommend to provide detailed, community-edited background information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only SE regulars may even notice the tags, so I can understand the objection that the tag alone is insufficiently visible. There is nothing to prevent us, however, from adding a reference link to it in the body of the existing accepted and/or highly voted answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, we avoid adulterating the Q&amp;amp;A format, particularly in a thread that new users will frequent, while also improving visibility of the tagging system. Because tag wikis have a higher reputation threshhold for unmoderated edits than community wiki posts, we also theoretically have better quality control while retaining the ability of community members to contribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T19:44:00.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10367" CreationDate="2017-06-16T21:43:02.137" Score="5" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, it seems to be de rigueur to say that reputation is not important.  To a certain extent, I agree.  I have a long list of things to worry about and work on, and my rep on ELU isn't high on the list -- much lower than working on my drop-shot.  But I admit to a mild thrill when I passed 15,000 and I promptly protected a question because I could -- and it needed protection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I play tennis a lot, and it is always more fun to keep score.  I don't play with people who think winning is more important than having fun, or friendship, or everyone feeling good at the end of the match.  But just rallying for two hours without keeping score is, somehow, boring, and we never do it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And keeping score in tennis is less important (at my level) than rep on SE, because a pro can tell in five minutes what level one is at and who would good partners.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do we keep score on ELU, if we distain it so much?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two recent examples of disregard for rep, as requested by @Josh:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10359/etiquette-with-regard-to-downvotes&quot;&gt;Etiquette with regard to Downvotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10284/the-antithesis-of-a-serious-problem-what-do-you-do-when-you-have-hit-200-daily&quot;&gt;The antithesis of a serious problem: What do you do when you have hit 200 daily rep with hours to go, and have a good answer to a new question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T11:11:03.850" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T00:03:08.957" Title="What is the purpose of reputation on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2017-06-16T22:24:38.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you know, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you; it is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you’re talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And scorekeeping keeps this Q&amp;amp;A wonder exciting and competitive and stuff as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point of the whole &quot;we don't care about reputation points&quot; from senior users is to remind others that there comes a time when you get past that excitement (probably around 20k to 25k), and gaining further reputation points won't give them extra super powers, so when they post something, they are posting it purely for the sake of contributing to the community, and not for gaining more imaginary points, or at least, &lt;strong&gt;that's my take on it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T22:39:24.257" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T22:39:24.257" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2017-06-16T23:29:52.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;NVZ's answer is correct and based on the principles of Stack Exchange, but my thoughts are too long to post in comments, so I'll add them as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let's face it, earning reputation is fun.  As English Student pointed out in a comment, the site is designed to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311123/is-there-a-pre-internet-term-for-gamification/311130#311130&quot;&gt;gamified&lt;/a&gt;, and especially for users new to the site, there is a certain thrill to unlocking new privileges and reaching milestones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of privileges, reputation milestones for unlocking new privileges are carefully balanced so as to allow users who are committed to the site to perform necessary tasks involved in managing the various review tasks.  There are other models for managing an open community, and &lt;strong&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/strong&gt; is a good example.  Wikipedia gives some very senior users special privileges, but on most pages, anyone can edit, even without logging in.  The result is that it takes a vast group of serious and committed users to constantly monitor activity and remove vandalism and unproductive edits.  The model works well for Wikipedia because it has a massive user base all dedicated to a single site.  EL&amp;amp;U, on the other hand, is one of many sites on the Stack Exchange network, and it simply wouldn't be practical to allow any user to perform review tasks without regard for their experience on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As NVZ's answer points out, reputation gives users some idea of how much a user is trusted.  Posts should be judged on their merit, not on the reputation of the poster, but for some visitors to the site, a post's merit might be difficult to judge, particularly if they are looking for an answer to a question and land on EL&amp;amp;U by searching.  Voting provides the best measure of particular post's accuracy, but there's an element of usefulness to knowing how experienced a user is on the site, particularly for visitors from other sites on the network who understand how reputation works but are unfamiliar with the members and customs of EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having given these reasons in favor of the usefulness of reputation, I will also agree that reputation shouldn't be taken &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; seriously.  Getting caught up in earning reputation can get in the way of providing quality answers and contributing to the site in other ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T23:29:52.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2017-06-16T23:46:49.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;NVZ has already &lt;strong&gt;hit the nail on the head&lt;/strong&gt; in the earlier answer by making the pertinent point that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) Point of the whole &amp;quot;we don't care about reputation points&amp;quot; from senior users is to remind others that there comes a time when you get past that excitement (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sad but true that I have already 'got past the excitement stage' as the plateau in my reputation graph within the last 10 days illustrates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t1lAc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t1lAc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember I myself commented to Ben Kovitz's answer at ab2's earlier meta question (about 200 rep cap) that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[extracts] &amp;quot;(...) I think of it this way: my time is luckily my own, and I should probably be choosing those activities that both capture [attract &amp;amp; retain] my interest and give me gratification -- if asking, answering and discussing English at ELU were stressful or boring &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;why I should continue?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as we Indians say -- in fact I think the motivation is not really reputation points, but most likely the &lt;strong&gt;linguistic kicks&lt;/strong&gt; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what attracts me to ELU is the focused interaction built around the intricacies of the English language (which I love) -- and I like it so much: thats why I spend a lot of time here!  The fundamental enjoyment of linguistic discussion and debate is only helped by reputation,which cannot replace the basic satisfaction derived from the interesting activity.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this activity should be intrinsically satisfying independent of points, which it currently is, for me. I have become rather more discerning in submitting answers and would no longer do anything solely for collecting rep points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, we should be well aware that StackOverflow sites were designed according to &lt;strong&gt;game theory&lt;/strong&gt; in order to engage users in a friendly competition where good participation is rewarded by reputation points so that members remain interested to keep contributing good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good quality posts&lt;/strong&gt; are rewarded with upvotes that get translated into reputation points, which is a positive reinforcement to modulate and encourage useful behavior -- so, as high-reputation member Josh has rightly said in comments, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what counts is the quality of the questions and answers!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T09:30:57.397" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-17T02:32:59.790" Score="6" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean that can the school studying students (class 10 that i am in) answer questions on stack ?&#xA;If yes then from where and which part ?&#xA;My question pertains not only english but also other subjects (maths.stack , physics.stack)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{Because i dont have reputation points so i can't do much on stack and so i feel it quite boring}&#xA;{this may not be the correct place to post this type of queries but i dont know much about stack and so please dont remove the question before even answering it ...}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219925" OwnerDisplayName="Sristy" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T10:51:55.510" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T19:27:54.220" Title="Is Stack Exchange for students?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2017-06-17T02:52:10.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE doesn't discriminate beyond their policies -- which (I think) are for persons aged 13 and up. I'm sure there must be a significant percentage of SE users who are students, between high school and graduate school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't use SE much as a contributor yet (because I feel I don't have something new to say or add), but I suppose answering questions and other community activities gives you reputation points. This makes sense - reward those who contribute with the ability to make greater contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stick around, explore, answer some questions. All good things will come to those who try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241217" OwnerDisplayName="sukas" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T07:10:15.830" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T07:10:15.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2017-06-17T09:43:08.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language and Users! Feel free to contribute answers and, for that matter, questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing to bear in mind when contributing answers is to put in enough detail for them to stand on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;- tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is set up as a Q&amp;amp;A repository, with the intention that questions and answers would benefit future visitors as well as the person who originally asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, try to back your answers with (as appropriate) logical reasoning, links to authoritative sites, citations, dictionary entries, and relevant quotes from pages that you link to, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions require very little, whereas others require quite a bit of work. If you're not sure about a question, ask in comments for clarification before answering. Don't try to guess - or if you feel you can make a good contribution anyway, make it clear in your answer what your assumptions are. It doesn't take very much to gain enough &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;rep&lt;/a&gt; to write comments. Take this time to look around. There's a lot of information stashed about the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoy your EL&amp;amp;U experience!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T09:43:08.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2017-06-17T10:18:34.430" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, as a network, does not discriminate between users. If you ask thoughtful questions and give useful answers, you will gain reputation, acquire privileges, and become more respected; it does not matter whether you are still at school or are a university professor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;; it is more likely that a professor will provide a good question or answer, since &quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot;, and a certain level of knowledge and research is expected; other sites have similar policies. (The original site, Stack Overflow, was set up for professional computer programmers to exchange views on complex computer problems).  So if your question is &quot;I don't know the answer to question 3 in this week's homework&quot;, it is probably not suitable for SE; you should reread the textbook, look up similar questions, and think about what your teacher expects you to know and to do. If your question is &quot;The point glancingly raised in question 3 seems to be unanswerable: hours of research have produced the answer &quot;Yes&quot; in authority X and &quot;No&quot; in authority Y&quot;, it will be a fair SE question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once your question is asked, though, (or your answer posted) and the authorities (moderators and high-rep users) have decided not to close or delete it, it is up to other users to decide whether it is good or not by voting. This is true of all SE sites, but particularly so of ELU, since the correct use of English is the way English-speakers use it; dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. If you as a new user post a question then I, as a reasonably high-reputation user, might edit it (&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; should be capitalised) or vote to close for reasons set out on the help page (&quot;class 10&quot; without explanation is unclear); those are privileges you do not yet have. I might also vote on it (up or down); but my vote counts exactly the same as that of anybody else, whether you, your teacher, or Professor John Lawler (probably the most respected user on ELU (sorry, Barrie)). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T10:18:34.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2017-06-17T10:21:38.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sristy, Stack Exchange starts with YOU. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Each individual member&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; contributes towards building this question and answer database for the benefit of future readers. Please note that you don't need reputation points to start answering questions here. Once you start giving good answers, you will soon earn enough points to be able to post comments as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am sure there are many questions that you can start answering, but as Lawrence kindly pointed out in the earlier answer, you should first feel confident that your answer is correct, and try to &lt;strong&gt;support it with references&lt;/strong&gt; whenever possible, so that other members can follow your reasoning and also learn more by reading your sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also new here and found that by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;reading all the good answers here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, writing many answers ourselves, and listening to the constructive comments from senior members, &lt;em&gt;we can quickly learn to write clear answers that include adequate citations&lt;/em&gt;. This is a direct case of &quot;learning by doing&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need young members with a genuine interest and enthusiasm for these subjects. Your contribution can &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;greatly help new English learners and non-native speakers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; who post their doubts and questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn not only by answering but also by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions. You can ask your English language questions here and also ask/answer questions at the closely related 'sister site' English Language Learners Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;improved my language&lt;/strong&gt;, communication and writing skills a lot by writing answers here. So welcome to English Language &amp;amp; Usage website and remember, Stack Exchange starts with YOU!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T10:57:22.500" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T10:57:22.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2017-06-17T11:05:25.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One very important reason we have reputation points is to spend them. There are two main ways to spend them: bounties, and downvoting bad answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With 15.2K rep you could give a prize to over 300 answers you thought were particular excellent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With 15.2K rep you could also downvote 15K answers you thought were particularly bad and potentially misleading. With over 200 thousand answers on this site it probably wouldn't be very hard to find 15 thousand misleading ones!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T11:05:25.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2017-06-19T17:56:29.273" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said, welcome to the Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add one piece of advice: people will take your questions more seriously if you take your own questions more seriously. For example, ELU is a site dedicated to &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts,&quot; yet in your question, you wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because i dont have reputation points&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which should, of course, be written as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because I don't have reputation points&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think any Stack Exchange site appreciates well-thought-out questions (as opposed to a hastily-written ones), but the language sites in particular might frown on improper grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, each site on the Stack Exchange has its own &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, including one page explaining what kinds of questions are welcomed, and another explaining what kind of questions you should avoid asking. I'd recommend looking at that information carefully before diving in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thing: I'd encourage you to look on the web for an answer before asking your question here. If people can find an answer to your question in one minute on Google, they will wonder why you didn't do the same thing, and your question may attract downvotes. Many of the best questions on SE don't simply ask the question, but also summarize what research was performed prior to asking, explain what was found, and provide a clear explanation of why the issue is still unresolved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="18220" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T19:27:54.220" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T19:27:54.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T18:43:11.840" Score="5" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that questions regarding word choice and sentence structure are both primarily opinion-based and generally do not have a single right or wrong answer.  I'm curious as to why a question like this is considered acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389648/how-does-one-say-to-someone-that-he-paid-attention-to-something-they-said/389668#389668&quot;&gt;How does one say to someone that he paid attention to something they said?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this question is not:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/394633/how-do-i-handle-a-long-sentence-of-examples/394647#394647&quot;&gt;How do I handle a long sentence of examples?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language, like any other art form is subjective by nature and it seems like with both of these questions, the OP is not interested in a definitive, objective truth but rather is looking for guidance to improve his/her writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238699" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T16:40:14.977" Title="Why are word choice questions considered appropriate for this site but sentence structure questions are not?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10379" CreationDate="2017-06-19T19:53:05.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/389648/50044&quot;&gt;first question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be different solutions to the same problem. We accept word-requests, but conditions apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on &lt;strong&gt;choosing an ideal word or phrase&lt;/strong&gt; must &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;include information on how it will be used&lt;/a&gt; in order to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question is a good example for a word-request, but technically it still &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be answered by idiomatic expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;list of top-voted word-request questions&lt;/a&gt;, to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/394633/50044&quot;&gt;second question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about sentence structure are welcome, but it is not a question about sentence structure. It's a request for proofreading, or to break down the sentences and add proper punctuation. These are not welcome on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And under that question, &lt;strong&gt;choster&lt;/strong&gt; rightly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/394633/how-do-i-handle-a-long-sentence-of-examples/394647#comment934349_394633&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not a writers workshop, and we cannot offer writing advice; among other things, there is no independently verifiable method of saying one technique is superior to another in a given circumstance, which goes against the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sentence-structure?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;list of top-voted questions about sentence structure&lt;/a&gt;, to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T16:40:14.977" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T16:40:14.977" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10391" CreationDate="2017-06-20T14:16:37.770" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been speaking English as a first language for 23 years, I use a dictionary to expand my vocabulary every week, I read a lot, every day, and I actively criticize grammar when I hear it. Because I think about grammar a lot and try to figure out the best way to write and say things, this site naturally attracts me. However, I am not interested in asking simple questions relating to finding a word (because I have a good memory of words) or grammar (because I have an extensive understanding of the rules of grammar). But, it seems that the questions I want to ask on this site are too advanced, because of the close votes I have gotten. I think that is wrong, because if this site can't cater for my advanced questions relating to the English language, then which site can? I think too many simple questions are asked here, when these types of questions (being asked by people still learning how to speak English) should be on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners.SE&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions that have had close votes include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/377210/what-is-the-french-phrase-meaning-that-diners-are-waited-on&quot;&gt;Asking about a French word that is used in English&lt;/a&gt; (undeleted now). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the French phrase meaning that diners are waited on?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the French phrase which means that diners at a restaurant are waited on at their tables (as opposed to going up to a counter)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI, many words from other languages are used in English, such as Latin phrases or words assumed instead of creating a new word, such as &lt;em&gt;déjà vu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;patio&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;masala&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;piñata&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;naïve&lt;/em&gt; (note that even non-standard letters are used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/394723/how-do-most-people-distinguish-between-the-words-socialism-and-communism&quot;&gt;Asking for clarification on the difference between the everyday definitions of socialism and communism&lt;/a&gt; (a very recent question).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This question goes more into depth about the definitions and connotations of those two words in order to truly understand what the words mean. I find that many people throw those words around emotively without stopping to find out what they mean, and, as I mentioned in the comments, this led to it being taught incorrectly in a high school syllabus when the teachers tried to figure out the difference. I asked it on ELU because I thought I would reach an audience comprised of the average English first-language speaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta post is about the conflict I have between the purpose of this site and my needs. I think first-language speakers who want to ask advanced questions about the language should be given more space to ask questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96579" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T17:07:46.657" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T17:07:46.657" Title="Advanced users of English should be more welcome here" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10381" CreationDate="2017-06-20T16:09:05.910" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10374/50044&quot;&gt;Everyone is welcome on ELU&lt;/a&gt;, not just advanced users of English. Quoting TimLymington,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, as a network, does not discriminate between users. If you ask thoughtful questions and give useful answers, you will gain reputation, acquire privileges, and become more respected; it does not matter whether you are still at school or are a university professor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the now-deleted question, asking specifically for a particular French word on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;site dedicated to English&lt;/a&gt;, has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;only a few words in the question&lt;/a&gt;, does not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;include the research&lt;/a&gt; already done, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;lacks enough details&lt;/a&gt; for us to work with,&lt;strike&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;it could be closed&lt;/a&gt; as too localised, as well&lt;/strike&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I'm curious, and I'd like to know what that French word is, perhaps, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/391945/50044&quot;&gt;covfefe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;? ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question is deep, I agree, but it's deeper than English, and it's going to reach a discussion about governments, society, politics and all that jazz. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;over 150 Stack Exchange communities&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm sure there must be one better suited for an in-depth explanation of socialism and communism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's one from Politics Stack Exchange:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/2394/7392&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What are the main differences between different types of Marxism?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T14:35:28.550" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T14:35:28.550" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10386" CreationDate="2017-06-20T21:16:28.470" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently arrived at the rep of 15Ki (where i stands for imaginary, per Dan Bron), and so I am allowed to protect questions.  (Chortle!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rule of thumb has been to protect an old question that popped up on the front page if a new, unregistered user answered it with an answer that I considered VLQ or Not an Answer &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; if it already had good answers.   I haven't gone looking for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I started to ask this question, I saw a similar earlier question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6756/when-is-a-member-expected-to-protect-a-question&quot;&gt;When is a member expected to protect a question?&lt;/a&gt; with this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.Questions that are receiving a lot of poor answers from low reputation (less than 10 reps) users should be protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Point of clarification:&lt;/em&gt;  Why should we wait for a lot of poor answers?  Why isn't one poor answer enough to protect?  Poor answers might attract more poor answers. Nip them in the bud.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T22:17:44.550" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T00:34:53.267" Title="Asking for clarification on when to protect a question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10385" CreationDate="2017-06-20T21:59:44.137" Score="4" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are tip of the tongue questions completely unsuitable here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. I think there's a verb that cashes out &quot;sanatorium&quot;, i.e. means to rest at a sanatorium. May I ask what that is, assuming I have gone through the usual google route. As I just did -- a good answer is convalescence!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T23:56:34.427" Title="Are tip of the tongue questions completely unsuitable here?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2017-06-20T22:56:04.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like blanket prohibitions, except for ones canonized in the Help Center, so I'm not going to say tip of the tongue questions are &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; suitable, just that they are &lt;strong&gt;almost never&lt;/strong&gt; suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;tip of the tongue&quot; question is just a Single Word Question to which the OP already knows, but temporarily cannot access, the answer.  Often, the answer comes unexpectedly hours later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it does not; if the OP is on the verge of madness, and reasonable Googling, which she can summarize, has not worked, then ask the question &lt;em&gt;as a last resort&lt;/em&gt;, but convey your desperation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Full disclosure; I asked a tip of the tongue question when I was young and inexperienced, and was not closed down.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T22:56:04.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10383" CreationDate="2017-06-21T00:18:00.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Dan Bron said, as always:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use your judgement, we trust it, that is the fundamental concept underpinning privileges. You earn them, so we trust you to use them. Also any of the [15k rep] members can unprotect at will. So no harm, no foul, even if you end up stepping on someone's toes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, if we protect everything in the bud, we discourage new members from joining our community. Remember, asking and &lt;strong&gt;answering&lt;/strong&gt; questions are supposed to be free for all, regardless of rep, or anything really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, we don't have to wait for a lot of poor answers, just one or two will activate the &quot;protect&quot; option for us guardians (and I am Groot). Also, iirc, the question has to be at least 2-3 days old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mostly do is protect questions to which I'm reviewing late answers, especially when the question is too old and has already attracted a gazillion views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that end up on the Hot Network Questions will be automatically protected by the Community user, or manually by the elected moderators, to prevent thoughtless and pathetic answers from aliens (I mean good people from other worlds who are unfamiliar with the culture of ELU, but have free association rep to vote up other pathetic answers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T00:34:53.267" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T00:34:53.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2017-06-21T00:44:11.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, if they're too specific, as in, &quot;I forgot this word, it starts with C, and ends with T, had only three letters in it, used for pets, this and that and that and this etc,&quot; they're not a good fit for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes an interesting one comes along, and we all have fun playing the guessing game, until somebody decides to close it, and meanwhile it would've received a lot of views, upvotes and stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to your question, I think it's &lt;em&gt;not that&lt;/em&gt; well defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T00:44:11.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10390" CreationDate="2017-06-21T03:19:41.953" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/394252/what-to-call-women-whose-husbands-are-biological-brothers&quot;&gt;What to call women whose husbands are biological brothers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recent question by a new member was put on hold as unclear, and I edited the question to clarify the meaning. The edit took effect immediately because I have enough rep for that purpose, but I do not have nearly enough rep to vote for reopening. The related flag I raised asking a moderator to reopen was (rightly) declined because it is apparently not the moderator's function to reopen questions. So how do I  proceed? The defect which was the reason for putting the question on hold has been rectified, but it looks like nobody has yet voted to reopen, and the Q remains &quot;on hold.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: my answer has already been accepted by OP but I should like to understand the procedure to reopen questions in this type of situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T03:26:09.153" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T03:47:19.907" Title="How to initiate reopen voting after editing a question to clarify its meaning? [I don't have enough rep to vote to reopen.]" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10389" CreationDate="2017-06-21T03:25:26.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editing any post will automatically push it onto the reopen review queue. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/256572/5832912&quot;&gt;conditions apply&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you already have reopen privilege, just your vote to reopen will push it onto the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with reopen privilege can vote to keep it closed or to reopen it within the review process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or asking on meta, just like you now did, will bring in attention from other users, who can then visit the page directly to vote to reopen it, if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T03:47:19.907" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T03:47:19.907" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10381" CreationDate="2017-06-21T06:12:56.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot say anything about your question on 'the French word for table service'because the Q has disappeared, but I should think your second question regarding 'how most people would differentiate between the meanings of &lt;em&gt;socialism&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;communism&lt;/em&gt;'has been put on hold mainly because your explanation within the question might have created the impression that this is a question about politics rather than English, going by the stated reason on the 'put-on-hold' banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to have managed to understand your point that you are looking not for an academic or political definition but an everyday 'layperson's' interpretation of the semantic difference between the 2 terms -- however, answers that tried to address this aspect would be off-topic here for being considered 'primarily opinion-based.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you have been a member here for over 2 years I am sure you know how Stack Exchange works. ELU has nothing against 'advanced users' of English like you and me, but expects every question to be well-constructed, lucid and focused on some &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; problem, which is not always possible for us to achieve while writing a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having seemed to understand what you were trying to ask regarding socialism snd communism, I have written a comment that attempts to bring out the generic difference in the way I have noted the 2 terms used in ordinary (non-academic) media -- please see the comments section under your original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T06:43:39.493" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T06:43:39.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10394" CreationDate="2017-06-21T10:37:01.260" Score="11" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to discuss some specific behaviors of a particular moderator with the broader mod team, how should I go about doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without going into details, I worry that certain actions may reflect an individual mod's own position on a matter (or matters) rather than the general consensus on the site, and this has the effect of skewing or biasing the site towards that mod's personal tastes or views. Things like selective deletion of comments, selective closure of questions, etc. This is at odds with what I currently understand a mod's role is as a &quot;human exception handler&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand no one has committed murder in the first degree, these are just issues I'd like clarity on, and I'd really rather avoid creating unnecessary drama. It's also certainly possible I'm misreading things, or even if I'm not, it's not a matter worth losing sleep over or bothering the community as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd rather not comment under the questions where I see this activity, nor start a dedicated meta thread, nor whine in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like is a place where I can talk to the mod team as a whole. The specific mod in question is welcome to join or not as they see fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I can chat with just the mod team? Ideally, can this be done as-hoc or on demand? Is there some door in chat I can knock on when I want to discuss stuff?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask about &quot;on demand&quot; because I may not use this facility now. I'd just like to have some guidance on how to access it if I need to. I'd probably use it the next time I see something I consider tendentious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer not to flag something as then I don't know which mod or mods would handle the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear I mean the diamond mods of EL&amp;amp;U, not the community managers or other SE folk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T14:40:32.843" Title="How to discuss something with the mod team privately?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10392" CreationDate="2017-06-21T12:13:04.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once or twice commented under my favourite mod's old or inactive post first making sure there are no other comments before mine, and requested a private chat room for an important or private issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mod responded within a few days, and opened a private chatroom, to which they pinged me in, and within a day or two our mini chat resolved some queries I had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such special chatrooms have a limited lifespan, that is, the mod will delete the room soon after the matter is settled, and only the moderation team, and the invited regular user (in this case, me) will be able to see the archived messages in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T12:13:04.863" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10392" CreationDate="2017-06-21T14:36:58.917" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unusual to request to speak to the EL&amp;amp;U mod team about one of the current moderators. I understand that you are not asking about contacting the community mod team (which you can do by emailing team@stackexchange.com or using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&lt;/a&gt; form), but I would encourage you to do so. The community moderators can then bring your issues to our team with a solution in mind and avoid conflict between team members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your more specific question, we do have a dedicated room for site moderators where we discuss site policy and whatnot. We can create a private room that is viewable by only you and all other moderators. We cannot restrict community moderators or individual EL&amp;amp;U moderators from chatrooms. To request that channel, you can come to main chat and ask a mod there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, with regard to comment deletion, all moderators do comment clean-up and we occasionally have community mods do unannounced clean-up work as well. I would be wary of assuming that any specific mod did any specific comment deleting. In particular, we tend to have other mods review comment chains we are involved in, to avoid the appearance of conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T14:40:32.843" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T14:40:32.843" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T17:39:52.167" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199289/when-is-a-subject-considered-plural&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; that formatted an example sentence as preformatted (monospace) text, rather than as a block quote. I tried to change it, but couldn't, because &quot;edits must be at least 6 characters.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just wondering if this type of edit ought to be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187869" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:40:31.973" Title="Can't edit to change &quot;code&quot; format to &quot;quote&quot; format" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10395" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:29:47.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually I (and others like myself) edit out such blatant misuse of monospace text whenever I chance upon them within the 'active' (or 'newest') question feed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you link to, it's had only about 20 views in 3 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your aim here as I understand is merely to remove the monospace formatting, and even if you'd wanted it reopened, I don't think it needs to be, because it is closed as a duplicate of a much better received question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though 'there are workarounds' for getting past the 6-characters minimum requirement for edits, I'd suggest against waking up the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:29:47.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10395" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:40:31.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's unlikely that we'll change the requirement for edits, but mods (and higher rep users, maybe?) can make small edits. If there is truly nothing more to edit, you can flag it for mod attention and let us know what needs changing. I already made the change you cited here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:40:31.973" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2017-06-21T20:43:02.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This type of question is known across the Stack Exchange network as a “guessing game”. (In this case, guess what word I’m desperately trying to remember). Guessing games often turn out to be a poor fit for what Stack Exchange is trying to do: create a database of expert answers that help future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the founders of Stack Exchange argued in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/02/29/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow blog post&lt;/a&gt; that guessing games are commonly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;asked for no practical reason&lt;/strong&gt; (you should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;asked without doing the necessary research&lt;/strong&gt; (you should document that you’ve invested substantial effort, and give us something concrete that provides us with a reasonable chance of actually guessing the answer)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;useless to anybody but the asker&lt;/strong&gt; (the goal of Stack Exchange is not to construct questions that only help one person)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;unfair&lt;/strong&gt; (do my work for me questions are disproportionate and unfair to the experts on the site; an expert should have at least some confidence that the answer answers the question)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;uneducational&lt;/strong&gt; (no way to learn from the answer about the process of discovery:  the expert just happens to be able to guess the correct answer)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bullet points above are mostly direct quotations from that blog post and this site’s FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, “guessing game questions do not meet our goal of making the Internet better”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; such questions are unfit for Stack Exchange. If the question is &lt;em&gt;practical, answerable, well researched, helpful to future visitors,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;requires real expertise rather than guesswork to answer,&lt;/em&gt; sure, ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T20:43:02.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10400" CreationDate="2017-06-22T08:32:51.923" Score="6" ViewCount="1048" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the review queue, there's the option for 'No Action Needed', 'I'm Done', or 'Skip'.  Is there any difference in what the first and the last do behind the scenes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both move on to the next item, but should I only press 'No Action Needed' if it's an acceptable post, and 'Skip' if I can't be bothered with that one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T09:05:16.363" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T12:12:01.737" Title="Difference between 'No Action Needed' and 'Skip'" Tags="|support|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10399" CreationDate="2017-06-22T09:05:00.190" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In clicking &quot;No Action Needed&quot; you make a judgement, and the system will use your judgement to help decide what action to take in respect of a post. It may be that your click, when combined with other those of other reviewers, tips the system into taking no action (removing the post from the review queue entirely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By clicking &quot;Skip&quot; you are declining to make a judgement, so the system has no additional data and will need to carry on asking others. The post will remain in the queue until there is enough data to decide what to do. In addition, declining to make a judgement will not increment your review count for progress towards review badges: by skipping the post you haven't actually reviewed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the system knows that it does not have to ask you again about that post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T12:12:01.737" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T12:12:01.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10402" CreationDate="2017-05-31T02:59:16.037" Score="7" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of whether an article should be omitted seems to be quite complicated and subject to numerous conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it appears that there are acceptable variations: e.g., both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The electric dipole moment has a magnitude p=qd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The electric dipole moment has magnitude p=qd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may be correct or, at least, acceptable. (The latter variant was suggested to me, in a similar case, by a professional editor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, style manuals, such as The Chicago Manual of Style and New Oxford Style Manual, offer little guidance on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a comprehensive, authoritative, and/or detailed reference for the zero article exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98747" OwnerDisplayName="Jake" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T01:10:53.410" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T01:10:53.410" Title="Is there a comprehensive and authoritative reference on whether or not an article is appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|reference|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10401" CreationDate="2017-06-02T18:23:37.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am simply a vehicle for getting some enlightening but ephemeral comments into an answer. This is all thanks to the incomparable Edwin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it's far from trivial to decide between the definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and an indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt;. For example: 'A/the boomslang is certainly not a snake one would want to be bitten by.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a 100+ page monograph by Collins Cobuild dealing solely with the usages of the articles (including the zero article). And it is far from comprehensive. One largely has to rely on examples in well-written sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Cobuild monograph is the best treatment I've [Edwin has] found, but doesn't even mention the (infrequent) use of 'a' with non-count nouns (A subtle light filtered through the leaves), for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" OwnerDisplayName="aparente001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T21:03:43.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-22T22:43:21.250" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope that the following would be of some interest to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/297523/is-there-an-etymology-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Is there an etymology stack exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T22:43:21.250" Title="For your interest -- [is this an] etymology site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-23T08:48:53.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10405" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-23T06:58:05.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before posting your question, please check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;FAQs&lt;/a&gt;, and do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt; to see if your problem already has a known solution or procedure. If you cannot find an answer, we will be happy to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T16:13:00.507" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T16:13:00.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10406" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-23T06:58:05.020" Score="0" Body="You need help with the use of one or more of the site's features." OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T16:13:33.473" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T16:13:33.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10407" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-23T07:00:03.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before posting your own question, please consult these questions to see if there is already an answer that solves your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T16:13:27.930" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T16:13:27.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10408" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-23T07:00:03.550" Score="0" Body="These questions are the most frequently asked and answered questions on Meta." OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T16:12:49.347" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T16:12:49.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10411" CreationDate="2017-06-23T18:22:10.337" Score="11" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone let me know why an upvote on an answer would yield +4 reputation, rather than the usual +10?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to have occurred for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395190/50044&quot;&gt;one of my answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not concerned about it, I was just wondering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176820" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T20:31:23.297" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T20:47:21.280" Title="Why would an answer receive less than +10 reputation from an upvote?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10409" CreationDate="2017-06-23T19:25:31.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Hank noted, this occurred upon reaching the daily cap. I must have had 4 points remaining when the last upvote occurred. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;Link to reputation page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176820" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T19:25:31.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10409" CreationDate="2017-06-23T19:25:36.847" Score="16" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Congratulations!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have hit the daily reputation cap (200, that is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day from any combination of the activities below. Bounty awards, accepted answers, and association bonuses are not subject to the daily reputation limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you can get these badges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/25/mortarboard&quot;&gt;Mortarboard&lt;/a&gt;- Earn at least 200 reputation (the daily maximum) in a single day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/26/epic&quot;&gt;Epic&lt;/a&gt; - Earn 200 daily reputation 50 times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/27/legendary&quot;&gt;Legendary&lt;/a&gt; -  Earn 200 daily reputation 150 times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T19:33:31.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10409" CreationDate="2017-06-23T20:47:21.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other situation that can result is unusual score changes is when an content that you've downvoted on gets deleted, or a user who has downvoted your content gets removed.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to suss out the details of these actions, they just get rolled up into other score changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157202" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T20:47:21.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T08:42:38.233" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an extension available for Google Chrome called &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AutoReviewComments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which can save you time if you frequent the review queues, or guide new users with your comments, and I've been using it for quite a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Install it &amp;rightarrow; Read instructions &amp;rightarrow; Use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask me questions, when you have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note: This is not a paid promotion. This extension is used by thousands of SE users.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T11:24:50.833" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T11:24:50.833" Title="Auto review comments can save you time" Tags="|discussion|comments|review-queues|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T02:35:48.953" Score="6" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395629/whats-the-word-for-someone-who-doesnt-appreciate-what-he-has-and-wants-more?noredirect=1#comment938107_395629&quot;&gt;What's the word for someone who doesn't appreciate what he has and wants more?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the word for someone who is ungrateful/ not appreciative of the things he has but wants more lavish things? For example, instead of appreciating the little things he has in his life, someone might go on and on, complaining about things like how the scratch on his brand new shoe ruined his day or who wants a new car while complaining about his old one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is erroneously connected as a duplicate to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31221/a-single-word-for-someone-who-is-not-pleased-no-matter-how-hard-you-try&quot;&gt;A single word for someone who is not pleased no matter how hard you try&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a word that means someone (especially a boss) who is not pleased (with your work, attitude etc.) no matter how hard you try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former is related to never being satiated with what you have. The later is never being satisfied by what other people have done. While there are overlapping themes, the answers provided in the later questions are not suitable for the former. There is a clear distinction between these two concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176820" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T02:35:48.953" Title="What's the word for someone who doesn't appreciate what he has and wants more? - Not a duplicate" Tags="|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10354" CreationDate="2017-06-26T14:11:08.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another case where this comment crops up is when the question looks, from the title, like it's going to be mundane, naive, duplicate or something like that, and actually turns out to be much more nuanced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In extreme cases I've been known to only open the question to flag it (I'm &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; sparing with downvotes) but then find it's interesting (where &quot;interesting&quot; has to take into account my state of mind at the time).  I'll normally respond with an answer or a comment on the question material, rather than one of the comments mentioned in the question, because I know I struggle with the tone saying something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48571" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T14:11:08.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2017-06-28T00:03:08.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt; the purpose of reputation on SE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Your (real) Score&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e., use as a metric in an algorithm that divides your reputation by your total post count and somehow fudges that number with page views, so as &lt;strong&gt;to get an accurate representation of your signal to noise ratio&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;People reached&quot; is meaningless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be, People Who Upvoted This Post, divided by People Who Loaded the Page, contrasted against Your Total Number of Posts and Your Tenure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the badge suggests, people who are &lt;em&gt;tenacious&lt;/em&gt; don't care about rep. It's all those FGitWers at +100k, who IMO, reached that level in one of two ways: being a FGitW, or being &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; tenacious (or both). Or the third way: have a 6 or 7 year tenure and just slub along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get &lt;em&gt;just one&lt;/em&gt; upvote every day for seven years, that's over 25k worth of rep. Without a viable metric, and without DVs (-2) carrying the same weight as UVs (+10), reputation, as a datum unto itself, is useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T00:03:08.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10422" CreationDate="2017-06-28T12:02:36.750" Score="10" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to the forum, and I've participated in answering questions and asking them. IMHO esl teachers are in general a poorly trained lot. I strive to develop my understanding of grammar, semantics, syntax and pedagogy in order to be effective as a teacher, and to make sure that the concepts I teach are accurate and useful. While I find the state of esl pedagogy woefully inadequate, I do hope that it will improve over time, and that I may contribute to such progress. I've searched for forums specific to teachers but have found none that are particularly useful. This is by far the best forum I've found to date and while I'm neither a linguist or etymologist, I certainly do qualify as an enthusiast. However, despite the fact that language acquisition is an accepted domain of linguistics, there is little to show of it in this forum. I do hope I will be welcomed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242638" OwnerDisplayName="Ubu English" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T13:27:54.523" Title="Is this forum appropriate for teachers of English as a second language?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10275" CreationDate="2017-06-28T13:31:28.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to attempt an answer to part of the question, now that I've had the chance to read all the constructive answers and comments here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Would it be reasonable for me to post a comment, at the same time as making a flag, saying something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@participant - What an unfriendly comment.  Just so you know, I have raised a flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of helpful things have been posted here, but what helped me the most was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4577/48606&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; made in another SE site by Monica Cellio:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you think you can offer gentle, careful, non-confrontational guidance, you can try that, but remember that you're doing it in public. If the other user doesn't take it well, it's best to back off. [...] Please don't call out the user in a way that could escalate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also learned from Monica's post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want moderators to be able to respond to your message, flag a post -- for comment flags our only options are to delete the comment or dismiss the flag (no other feedback is possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the strange case that sparked my question, the rude commenter escalated in response to mysterious comment deletion.  So I think, if I had it to do over again, I would like to try the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@participant - May I suggest you review the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt; guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the idea of saying nothing, because then the might not realize that his comment was removed, or why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T13:31:28.083" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5126" CreationDate="2017-06-28T14:31:07.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would advocate for each answer being posted separately for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Combined answers may contain one good and one bad answer&lt;/strong&gt;. In those cases, both voters and the OP may be conflicted in designating their votes (or acceptances), since upvoting an answer may be an endorsement of the bad answer, and downvoting a good answer is &quot;throwing the baby out with the bath water&quot;. This lack of precision may serve to detract from participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Combined answers may offer two separate good answers&lt;/strong&gt;. If there are two good answers, the voting by the community can help discern the &lt;strong&gt;best&lt;/strong&gt; of two good options. By combining the answers, this handicaps the Questioner from the benefits of the community input, in an important way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless we are considering a very strict institutionalization of 1 answer per submission, and 1 submission per user, or some modification to the voting process - both of which I would be disinclined to do - we should advocate for 1 answer per submission, and support users to make multiple submissions where multiple, separate answers are given. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One check on &quot;serial equivalent answers&quot; could be adding a flag for &quot;multiple equivalent answers submitted&quot;. A programmed process could combine those answer from a particular user that are flagged. This would be a simple append process, ordering it first by votes received, and then in order of time of post. To manage votes, perhaps we should only keep the highest vote tally, and forfeiture of the vote from the other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176820" LastEditorUserId="176820" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T14:48:41.133" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T14:48:41.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2017-06-28T14:33:21.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the ELU family!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out the posts by of one of our best users, and you'll get off to a good start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15299/john-lawler&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15299/john-lawler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T14:33:21.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2017-06-28T18:34:23.260" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the following statements you made, I believe you will be quite welcome here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've participated in answering questions and asking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strive to develop my understanding of grammar, semantics, syntax and pedagogy in order to be effective as a teacher&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is by far the best forum I've found to date and while I'm neither a linguist or etymologist, I certainly do qualify as an enthusiast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's really about all it takes as a foundation.  The fact that you will be approaching the forum from the perspective of a language acquisition instructor should be no impediment, though there are some things to be aware of as you participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain types of questions and answers that are on and off topic for this site.  You can learn about them by taking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt; or checking out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to also peruse other meta questions to see what kinds of discussions are carried out by experienced users on the site.  The best way to learn is by looking at questions by experienced users and seeing how they contribute, as NVZ pointed out in their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the best way to learn about the site is by participating and seeing what sort of responses you get from different kinds of questions and answers.  Don't let one bad response to an answer get you discouraged about the site.  Keep working, but try to learn from the feedback that you get each time.  Considering that you've put this much thought into your participation already, chances are you'll be an excellent member of the community.  To echo NVZ again, welcome to ELU!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:34:23.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2017-06-28T18:38:50.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; might be what you are looking for if you are interested in the details and nuance of the language. On the other hand, if you are wondering about how to effectively teach certain concepts or if you are seeking understanding of some of the aspects of the language that frequently confuse non-native speakers, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; is a good fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no reason you can't frequent both communities, and I would encourage you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might like to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/254/34&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to a meta topic on the ELL site that I think is a good rough sketch of the difference between the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T04:52:49.057" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T04:52:49.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T20:08:41.413" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question was posted today (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/396244/is-there-any-rule-which-dictates-the-ordering-of-non-proper-non-pronoun-nouns-i&quot;&gt;Is there any rule which dictates the ordering of non-proper, non-pronoun nouns in a list?&lt;/a&gt;) and I thought I remembered seeing a number of older questions with relevant answers, I ended up creating a new tag for them: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list-order?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=30&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list-order?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=30&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm still not sure about the name. I went with &quot;list-order&quot;, because to me it seems like the main connecting idea is how to order coordinated words, and a set of coordinated elements in some order can from my perspective be referred to as a &quot;list&quot; even if it only contains two elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this might not be the most intuitive name (another problem might be the similarity with the older tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sort-ordering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sort-ordering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sort-ordering&lt;/a&gt;, which mainly deals with questions about things like alphabetization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have a good idea for what to call it? I'm going to post a few suggestions of my own as answers so they can be voted on independently of  this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T17:24:13.360" Title="What's a good name for a tag about expressions like &quot;fish and chips&quot; and &quot;red, white and blue&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10423" CreationDate="2017-06-28T20:10:18.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;list-order&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in the question post, I originally went with &amp;quot;list-order&amp;quot; because I want to cover both expressions with two coordinated words (like &amp;quot;fish and chips&amp;quot;) or more (like &amp;quot;red, white and blue&amp;quot;) and the best word I could think of to describe these expressions was &amp;quot;lists&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T20:10:18.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10423" CreationDate="2017-06-28T20:14:01.067" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;freezes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/freezes&quot;&gt;freezes&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; already exists, and has some overlap with the tag I just made. It seems to be a rather vague word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to John Lawler, it is also applied to fixed expressions composed of two words without a linking conjunction, which seem a bit like a different phenomenon to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frozen reduplicative phrases like these, especially ones made of nonsense or phonosemantic roots like &lt;em&gt;riffraff&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;hocus-pocus&lt;/em&gt;, are simply called &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Freezes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in the literature, following Cooper and Ross 1975*, the first study to investigate them thoroughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, freezes like &lt;em&gt;hocus-pocus&lt;/em&gt; don't vary the vowels but the consonants. There is to my knowledge no fancy name for freezes that vary only their vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/80551/77227&quot;&gt;crisscross, dillydally, riffraff, etc&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T20:14:01.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10423" CreationDate="2017-06-28T20:17:05.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;conjunct-ordering&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that this term is used in the paper John Lawler linked to, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/haj/worldorder.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/worldorder.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a good description to me, although perhaps it might seem too technical to some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T20:17:05.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10465" CreationDate="2017-06-29T06:38:19.700" Score="7" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had googled the differences between ELU (English Language &amp;amp; Usage) and ELL (English Language Learners). They mostly say that: &quot;You ask &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;advanced questions on ELU&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;basic questions on ELL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. But I don't get how basic is basic or how advanced is advanced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have a question on proverbs. But it's not an english proverb/idiom, rather a proverb or saying from another language that I wanted to know its equivalent in english. For example, what's the english counterpart to the Japanese saying, &quot;Present salt to your enemy&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I ask that kind of question? Is it ELU or ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user242745" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T14:17:58.690" Title="Where should I ask this question? (ELU vs ELL)" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10423" CreationDate="2017-06-29T11:59:36.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, we don't seem to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/set-phrase&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;set-phrase&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;set-phrase&lt;/a&gt; tag. That would probably be the most recognizable and appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/set_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;set phrase&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  noun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An unvarying phrase having a specific meaning, such as&#xA;  ‘raining cats and dogs’, or being the only context in which a word&#xA;  appears, for example ‘amends’ in ‘make amends’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T11:59:36.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10423" CreationDate="2017-06-29T17:24:13.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;binomials&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to refer specifically to pairs, like &amp;quot;fish and chips&amp;quot;, but perhaps it could be extended to be the general name for this topic since the majority of the questions are in fact about pairs of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T17:24:13.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T10:17:23.283" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fixed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/396541/consumer-spending-on-different-items-in-five-countries/396547#396547&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; by adding a question. In edited form, it appeared to meet the rules of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A high rep user rolled back my changes. Perhaps I added an inappropriate question but he also restored some typos, which I had also corrected. The user did give an explanation, and I am asking here if it is the &quot;party line.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I routinely do &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/11213/regarding-khomeinis-speech-against-usa-in-qom-1964&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; on History SE, where I have a high reputation, and my edits are well accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I act inappropriately for English Language SE? Or did the rollbacker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="10287" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T10:59:22.237" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T12:14:44.557" Title="Why was this question rolled back to an unviable form?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10430" CreationDate="2017-06-30T12:08:55.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read the said post twice, I must say I still have no idea what that OP is asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some percentages, table, and stuff, but no meaningful question in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, the best option is to guide the OP on how to improve their question. Also, closing it as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your efforts to improve the question, but our &quot;party line&quot; (as you call it) is that we are not supposed to put words into OP's mouth (or their post, specifically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T12:14:44.557" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T12:14:44.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T13:32:48.763" Score="5" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Josh asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/396574/did-dickens-really-coin-never-say-never&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the etymology of the phrase 'Never say never'.  I found it interesting, upvoted and commented on it.  My inbox has a message someone sent me regarding it, but when I click on it, I get a 404 error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T13:36:34.937" Title="Where has this question gone?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10432" CreationDate="2017-06-30T13:36:34.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;He deleted it. When you have 10K+ rep, you'll be able to view it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T13:36:34.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9350" CreationDate="2017-07-01T13:44:49.570" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a newcomer surprised by having had a simple word of thanks edited out of my first question, and while I accept the platform and community guidelines on the subject, I wonder if the platform and the community are not missing out on an opportunity to exert a positive influence upon human culture in ways other than the purely academic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Encyclopedias are collections of monologues, each one delivering some information on a subject but in a single direction; from the writer of each article to the readers. Wiki-style encyclopedias are somewhat more flexible in the sense that they allow readers to become writers themselves, but their guidelines encourage articles to be written in an academic manner resembling those of conventional encyclopedias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I, maybe alone, expect to find in a Q&amp;amp;A site is not a collection of monologues but a collection of dialogues, a place where those seeking information and those providing information can engage in bidirectional conversations allowing the seekers to seek, and the providers to provide, further clarifications that may be helpful to future readers. Conventional, academically written encyclopedia articles are generally less accessible to non-academic readers because they require non-academic readers to understand academic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But dialogues typically occur between two or more people; they are a common form of interaction between any two or more human beings (and more desirable, in my opinion, than other forms of interaction such as fighting). So by reading a collection of dialogues one can not only potentially learn about the topics covered by those conversations, but also about how to conduct a dialogue in a civilised manner; how to interact with other human beings in a way that is potentially beneficial for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By removing greetings and especially expressions of gratitude from questions, not only we seem to be striving at writing yet another wikipedia, but we are also failing to help future readers learn how to exchange information in a civilised manner in and outside SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I do accept the guidelines on the subject so I will refrain from wishing you a good day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243399" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T13:44:49.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="69" CreationDate="2017-07-01T14:19:27.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently joined this forum and as an ESL teacher I would like to lend my perspective to this discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This forum, as far as I can see it it, is for people who are rather advanced in their consideration and use of English. I'm pretty sure that why it was created and why it continues to attract the interest of so many advanced and expert participants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we all need to ask a grammar question from time to time and as long as these are interesting questions that require some thoughtful answers, even from experts, then fine. Otherwise, more rudimentary questions can be migrated to a more appropriate site like ELL. That line isn't always clear but I trust that the people on this forum who have the power to migrate will use it judiciously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, questions about learning and teaching English as a second language ought to have a more robust place here. Language acquisition is an accepted field of linguistics these days, and it happens to be quite interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242638" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T14:19:27.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-01T17:38:18.310" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting question in English Language Learners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/134122/how-to-use-since-to-imply-from-the-time-that-not-because-of&quot;&gt;How to use “since” to imply “from the time that”, not “because of”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example given is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Since he left the group, we have worked harder to cover his absence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;etc. (other examples given)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question provoked &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/61421/discussion-on-question-by-cardinal-how-to-use-since-to-imply-from-the-time-th&quot;&gt;quite a reaction&lt;/a&gt;, which is understandable because it has the potential of being very ambiguous (with the causal being confused for the temporal meaning)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer there adds 'ever' in front, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ever since he left the group, we have worked harder to cover his absence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a perfectly good answer, the comment voices my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I notice there is much discussion following the question about the particulars of the grammar. However because this exchange is for helping English learners I believe it makes sense to provide an answer that is easy to understand and that is grammatically correct enough to sound like it came from a college-educated native English speaker. &lt;strong&gt;If the question were asking for a deeper answer it would have been posted on the &quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot; exchange.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is it okay to duplicate the question here, with the idea to get more detail into &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this happens, in a formalised Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;y'know, rather than just a chat...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T19:25:40.833" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T21:12:35.107" Title="Re-ask for more detail in ELU than ELL" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-05T19:29:25.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10437" CreationDate="2017-07-01T19:44:54.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask it on ELU, and don't forget to mention that it's inspired from that ELL question, and request a detailed answer, and give credit where it's due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T19:50:12.060" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T19:50:12.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10437" CreationDate="2017-07-01T21:12:35.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not against the question being re-asked here, as long as it follows these rules/guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proper attribution to the source/inspiration. Even if the ELL question is yours, it's just the right thing to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU likes questions with research. Some online dictionaries have example sentences for each meaning. You may be able to find something relevant to include or you may find nothing—which means you can at least say what hasn't worked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The new question should be more than a simple repost of the original, especially if it had answers. This is important, since you want more details, not to waste time getting the same answers. Explain why the existing answer(s) on ELL weren't enough. In your case, I think the &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; are pretty important. What about the &quot;reaction&quot; made you want to ask this question? Including this information will get you more relevant answers and may count towards the research requirement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the question were asking for a deeper answer it would have been posted on the &quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&quot; exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aww, that's not true. ELL has plenty of great questions with &quot;deep&quot; answers. The question there is well within the scope of ELL (if it was about something like etymology, it would be a different story). Your other option is to start a bounty on ELL (there's no reason you can't re-ask here and start a bounty there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T21:12:35.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T07:52:59.553" Score="-2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reviewing close votes that don't seem to fit any of the available categories for voting to close.  The questions are reasonably good, there's enough background, they don't need to go to ELL (although they might have been welcome there in the first place).  What &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; happened is that they've been briefly and pertinently answered (in comments) by one or two (or four or five) people, the OP has said &quot;thanks&quot;, and there's really nothing more to say.  As closed, they remain re-openable in the event someone wants to pose a more comprehensive answer.  But they're complete, helpful, and finished as they stand.  What about adding a reason like &quot;Taken care of&quot;, &quot;Fully Handled,&quot; &quot;You can put a fork in me, I'm done.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would something like &quot;close because complete&quot; work? Or &quot;We're finished here&quot; or &quot;We Be Done&quot; or &quot;That's All Folks&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T20:09:43.243" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T05:10:18.587" Title="Reviewing Close Votes" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10441" CreationDate="2017-07-02T10:26:08.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion completely goes against the principles of Stack Exchange. Questions are here to stay and if somebody thinks they can provide a better answer than the existing ones, they should always be able to do so without going through the process of reopening the question first. In contrast to many forums, we do not have a problem with old questions being revived for this purpose – there are even badges for this. Questions being solved is indicated by accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing on the other hand is intended for questions where answers cause problems, e.g., because we cannot objectively vote on them (primarily opinion-based, strictly off-topic), there are too many of them, or they are too long (too broad), they create redundancy or fragmented information (duplicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People answering questions in a comment is a problem, but none that we should take care of by closing said questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T10:26:08.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10441" CreationDate="2017-07-02T15:42:00.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;Help center&lt;/a&gt; explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Closing is a democratic voting process where the community identifies questions that duplicate existing content, are unreasonable to answer in their current state, or do not belong on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reviewing a question from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close&quot;&gt;Close Votes&lt;/a&gt; queue, regardless of what partial or complete answers you see in the comments, judge the question solely on its merits, and if it is close-worthy, close it, or if not, don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you notice an on-topic question poorly worded, tagged or formatted, edit to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need closure for a (clearly on-topic) question in the other sense, that is, a sense of resolution or completion, to save it from forever zombieing around in the '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered&lt;/a&gt;' list, you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Properly answer it, while taking advantage of all relevant information available in the comments under it, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;adding sugar, spice and everything nice&lt;/a&gt; to make your answer genuinely yours, and give credit where it's due.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/309993&quot;&gt;community wiki&lt;/a&gt; answer, where you simply quote the most useful parts of the partial (or complete) answers given in the comments, which becomes a great answer somehow, and it is simply a courtesy, not a rule, to not grab reputation off of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Request the users who answered in the comments to make a proper answer, and forever wait for them to really care.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good on-topic questions will always remain open, to welcome new answers with more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting answers 'accepted' under questions from new users is a rare sight, as most of them would simply read some answers and be on their way and never return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T18:44:18.527" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T18:44:18.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10441" CreationDate="2017-07-02T17:02:29.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many questions that are answered only in comments ought to be closed because of the already existing close reasons. Many of these are closed eventually; some are not.  I often answer a question in a comment to help the OP and then immediately VTC.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a user to VTC a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; question because its comments seem to him to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;complete, helpful, and finished as they stand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is....I wish I could think of a kinder word....arrogant.  Just because &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can't think of anything to add to a set of comments doesn't mean that there isn't some aspect I have not thought of (and don't know enough to think of) that could be addressed.  Moreover, we are always hearing that comments are ephemeral; only answers are permanent.  Thus, a question is not answered until it has an Answer.  Then, logically, if one has a VTC reason &quot;completed&quot;, that should apply to a question which has been completely answered by one or more Answers.  Ergo, our aim is to get every question on this site to the point where it can be closed as completed? I think not.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T05:10:18.587" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T05:10:18.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T18:53:30.903" Score="-1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10441/reviewing-close-votes/10443&quot;&gt;meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; about closing questions that were answered in the comments and then turned 'zombie' led to the suggestion that people could answer as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740&quot;&gt;community wiki&lt;/a&gt; (properly citing the comments of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could lead to answers that will probably never be accepted, in the case that the OP left Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can mods 'accept' answers for users, but more importantly, &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; they?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T19:02:26.577" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T19:35:52.247" Title="Can mods accept answers on another's behalf?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10445" CreationDate="2017-07-02T19:35:52.247" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of whether moderators should mark an answer as accepted is moot, because they don't have that capability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But actually, no, they shouldn't do that anyway. The acceptance is a mark that the answer helped the asker. If no answers succeeded sufficiently well, then it's not up to moderators to decide that they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that old questions can be bumped to the front page if no answer has been accepted &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; no answer has been upvoted. I have often thought that it would be good to stop that happening, and a mod &quot;don't bump&quot; checkbox would be nice. But another way is to upvote an answer. If no answer is worth upvoting then I suppose it's arguable that a better answer should be provided, and the bump is a means of getting one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's certainly not up to moderators to decide that an answer should be accepted, and even less so if the only available answers aren't all that good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T19:35:52.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10485" CreationDate="2017-07-02T20:22:28.060" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under &lt;strong&gt;Closing &amp;rightarrow; Off-Topic&lt;/strong&gt;, please update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;http&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;https&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;meta.english&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;english.meta&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta ELU's looks okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T11:57:08.460" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T11:57:08.460" Title="Let's update some links" Tags="|bug|status-completed|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10451" CreationDate="2017-07-03T01:44:25.590" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt; sites. However, when it comes to some questions I am confused on where to ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is the site to ask the below question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the following statement agree with the views of the writer in given passage?&#xA;  You have to answer, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;True: &lt;em&gt;If the statement agrees with the writer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;False: &lt;em&gt;If the state does not agree with the writer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not given: &lt;em&gt;if there is no information about this in the passage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Statement: &lt;strong&gt;Guitar was used in rock and roll from the 1940s.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Passage: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the earliest rock and roll styles of the late 1940s and early 1950s, either the piano or saxophone was often the lead instrument, but these were generally replaced or supplemented by guitar in the middle to late 1950s.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the tutor, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;FALSE&lt;/strong&gt; but I think the answer to this question should actually be &lt;strong&gt;NOT GIVEN&lt;/strong&gt;. The passage says guitar generally became the LEAD instrument in the 1950s, It DOES NOT SAY clearly whether guitars were used in 1940s or not. Hence the answer should be &lt;strong&gt;NOT GIVEN&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which is the correct answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130106" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T06:34:16.193" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T06:34:16.193" Title="Site recommendation to ask a question on disputed answer" Tags="|discussion|site|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10474" CreationDate="2017-07-03T05:36:19.727" Score="1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has any question on ELU ever received three gold badges:  10,000 views; 100 upvotes; and 100 favorites?  The question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;Which word begins with &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; and looks like an axe in this picture?&lt;/a&gt;, is close, and I am rooting for it.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T16:15:26.900" Title="Has any question on ELU ever won 3 gold badges?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10448" CreationDate="2017-07-03T07:45:14.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a 'test of comprehension' question and ought to be on-topic on both ELU (english.stackexchange.com) and ELL as long as you don't specify that it is an &lt;em&gt;examination&lt;/em&gt; question, which does seem to create a bit of confusion as in 'what would be the &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; answer?' I would suggest it is an English Learner's question and therefore better suited for ELL, but I see from your comment that you have (asked it at ELU, deleted it and) asked it on ELL already! So it is clear you have in effect answered your own &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T07:48:48.707" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T07:48:48.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10448" CreationDate="2017-07-03T08:08:58.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually an on-topic question for this site. If all questions were as well formulated, users wouldn't be closing so many off-topic questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have only &quot;one&quot; question. We have context. And the OP clearly explains why he is confused.  The OP also provides the answer supplied by the teacher/book. What more can one ask? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there will always be someone who turns up their nose at an IELTS, TOEFL, or GRE question because... they are native speakers and believe exams are inadequate tools for measuring one's writing and speaking ability in English,  and some (or most) believe that exam questions are misleading, or worse, plain stupid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But English exams are a reality and passing them a necessity for thousands of candidates all over the world. Obtaining the best possible grade is hugely important for candidates who wish to take a Masters in an English speaking country,  or who wish to find work abroad in the US or Australia.  We should do everything we can to help these users who ask &lt;strong&gt;on-topic questions&lt;/strong&gt;, these users are, after all,  among the most motivated we will ever meet up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7200/does-this-stackoverflow-forum-answer-questions-related-to-ielts&quot;&gt;Does this stackoverflow forum answer questions related to IELTS?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10310/does-the-massive-edit-to-playing-sports-does-swimming-count-really-clarfiy&quot;&gt;Does the massive edit to &amp;quot;Playing sports - does swimming count?&amp;quot; really &amp;quot;clarfiy the English question&amp;quot;? If so, for whom?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10338/how-does-the-community-feel-about-exam-or-ielts-questions&quot;&gt;How does the community feel about exam or IELTS questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6901/are-gre-questions-a-good-fit-for-the-site&quot;&gt;Are GRE questions a good fit for the site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2819/are-gre-verbal-questions-not-welcomed-in-this-site&quot;&gt;Are GRE verbal questions not welcomed in this site?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T14:41:44.647" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T14:41:44.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10453" CreationDate="2017-07-03T09:33:53.477" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments add a lot of value to the questions being asked or even to the answers. For example, comments can point out mistakes in the question or give deep insights about the topics concerned! Is there any provision where reputation from comments increases only after certain number of upvotes are received on a comment (say 10 votes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239082" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T10:49:10.487" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T10:49:10.487" Title="Why doesn't the reputation increase for upvotes on comments?" Tags="|support|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10452" CreationDate="2017-07-03T09:44:53.760" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Help center&lt;/a&gt; explains &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; about comments, and is a must read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are temporary &quot;Post-It&quot; notes left on a question or answer. They can be up-voted (but not down-voted) and flagged, but do not generate reputation. There's no revision history, and when they are deleted they're gone for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And go through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And we're a little bit different from other sites. &lt;strong&gt;This site is all about getting answers.&lt;/strong&gt; It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral, and adding a reputation system to comments goes against our values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T09:44:53.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T10:13:36.490" Score="4" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen that usually a number of 30 comments calls for removal, why not this time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please move to chat the extremely long trails of comments posted under this  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture?noredirect=1#comment942258_395382&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and its main answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:47:11.417" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:47:11.417" Title="Speaking of comments" Tags="|support|status-completed|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10452" CreationDate="2017-07-03T13:21:47.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many comments that are not helpful to understanding the question get upvotes because they are funny or clever.  If comments contributed to reputation,   every comment with upvotes above the threshhold would have to be reviewed to see if it was substantive.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T13:21:47.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10454" CreationDate="2017-07-03T13:26:36.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, the comments are too long. They need to be pruned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I make a request for a few specific comments to stay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything I link to directly from the answer, because I'm citing them as evidence, and giving credit to their authors. This was a collaborative effort, and I'd really like future readers to know that&amp;sup1;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Temporarily&lt;/strong&gt;, anything from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395385#comment941355_395385&quot;&gt;this comment by Mari-Lou and lower&lt;/a&gt;, as I haven't had time to incorporate them into my answer yet&amp;sup2;. I will do that when I return from my July 4th vacation. Should be done by the end of the week, then these comments (anything I don't link to from the answer) can also be archived.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And if I may ask a favor, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395385#comment939922_395385&quot;&gt;this comment by AshleyZ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395385#comment940921_395385&quot;&gt;this one by Jaydles&lt;/a&gt;. They were real moments for me during the process of writing up the answer, and I'd like to keep those two comments as momentos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For similar reasons, for gmauch's (the OP's) sake, I'd recommend retaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture#comment941065_395382&quot;&gt;Kevin Workman's comment&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture#comment941829_395382&quot;&gt;his own&lt;/a&gt; under his question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to everyone for both your support and your forbearance on this atypical question. It was an amazing experience and collaboration. In the most visceral, sincere sense, I've never felt more connected to this community. It was quintessential StackExchange.  I won't soon forget it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;For convenience (and because the answer is so long), a listing of these comments is given in the hidden link-references at the very end of this Meta-answer.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;I promise those changes will be my last, and I won't bump the question thereafter. You can believe me when I say I'm drained on this question too. But 3 users did some extraordinary work further tracing the ball, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395385#comment941476_395385&quot;&gt;I feel guilty&lt;/a&gt; not making them whole.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T14:27:54.067" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T14:27:54.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10454" CreationDate="2017-07-03T17:51:39.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are now between 350 and 400 deleted comments, most of which I've moved to chat.  I've rescued a few upon request, but do please feel free to continue your discussions in the allotted chatrooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T17:51:39.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10462" CreationDate="2017-07-04T07:38:15.540" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very weak at articulating questions. I am never happy the way I write and find it very boring. I would like to know if there is a better way to present things than I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/397197/single-word-request-for-a-person-who-speaks-by-even-considering-a-potential-rebu&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, Which is the best place in stack-exchange where I can request to rephrase something? Or even to rephrase a question from any of the stack-exchange sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, Can I request people to edit a question to make it better? I know that moderators have access to edit the content, I am wondering if an explicit request can be made to edit a question or for that matter any answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130106" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T12:53:23.970" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T13:02:10.907" Title="Can I request here to rephrase a question that I have asked in English SE site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="25" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10461" CreationDate="2017-07-04T08:04:56.783" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I observed that up votes for questions in English Meta site are not added to the poster's reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there no separate reputation for meta sites other than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;main meta&lt;/a&gt; site for the stack exchange community ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130106" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T12:47:07.273" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T10:29:44.667" Title="Why upvotes for questions in this meta site not added to reputation?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10460" CreationDate="2017-07-04T08:40:29.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only one meta site has the reputation system; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no main Q&amp;amp;A site in that case.&#xA;That is, simply stackexchange.com is not for questions and answers, but meta.stackexchange.com is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For site-specific metas, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;ours&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Votes on meta do not affect your reputation&lt;/strong&gt;; your meta reputation is the same as your reputation on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (synchronized hourly), &lt;strong&gt;though you earn separate badges&lt;/strong&gt;. You must have 5 reputation to participate on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T10:29:44.667" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T10:29:44.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10459" CreationDate="2017-07-04T18:45:02.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;:  Stack Exchange in general, and ELU in particular (according to our &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; page), are explicitly NOT proof-reading, copy-editing, or writing advice services:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&amp;quot;Is this right?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Are there any mistakes?&amp;quot;), unless a specific source of concern is clearly specified. See below for hints on checking existing texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Technically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://Writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;writers.se&lt;/a&gt; is a writing advice site, but I don't believe their purview extends all the way down to &amp;quot;how do I improve this other SE question?&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a problem with one of your own questions, you can always edit it yourself to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you have a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;, and reasonably &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; question about it, you are welcome to ask about that particular issue here on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English.se&lt;/a&gt;.  Often if you include a link to the post that gave rise to the question, people will be more than happy to offer additional advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many times  people will add comments that offer an edit or some advice or ask for clarification if they see something that they find a bit awkward or difficult to understand. You can always reply to those comments, incorporate something new into your question, and (via comments) invite others to edit further if they believe your text can be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T13:02:10.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-04T21:03:45.053" Score="10" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since obtaining my shiny-new edit privileges, I have been a bit worried of editing too much, too often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly the case with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/397340/describe-features&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/240807/weather-vane&quot;&gt;a user&lt;/a&gt; (with a high reputation on another site) has commented that my edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/397340/revisions&quot;&gt;(Revision 2)&lt;/a&gt; should have been a comment or an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I cross the boundary between making the question more clear, and inadvertently answering it? Personally I don't think so, because it still incorporates the crux of the issue. However, this is for the community to say (and subsequently roll back, if so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T21:30:22.870" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T14:23:06.877" Title="Did I edit too much?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10463" CreationDate="2017-07-04T21:29:13.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I think your insertion of italics into the question is definitely questionable, both for what you did, and for what you didn't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP didn't use italics. It is possible that using italics would make that note clearer, and it could be an answer to do so. You made the note clearer in the question. To this extent, you have changed the author's intent and potentially eliminated a point which might be made in an answer. However, the reformatting of sizes &amp;mdash; including mm and inches &amp;mdash; doesn't affect the question materially: that's OK in my view, even though you could also usefully have used &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;times;&lt;/code&gt; to produce an &amp;times; symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; in the last line is a mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not sure explicit is the right word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything is to be italicised, it should be that word, and you didn't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not sure &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; is the right word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, credit for asking here, but yes: it wasn't entirely successful in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T21:29:13.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10427" CreationDate="2017-07-05T00:41:35.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The real distinction between ELU and ELL isn't really the questions (easy vs hard) - it's the type of answers you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The respective tours say that ELL is for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;speakers of other languages learning English&lt;/a&gt;&quot; while ELU is for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. In theory, you join the community that better describes you. In practice, there are people who have joined both communities and participate actively in both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL includes questions about the mechanics of the language, asking questions like which tense one should use in a particular example. Both questions and answers might include linguistics terms such as &lt;em&gt;object complement&lt;/em&gt; to more precisely express what they're trying to say. It's not a matter of ELL being 'simple'. I'd consider myself an English enthusiast. It's my primary language, one I picked up as a baby, but my formal training in the technical matters of the language extends only to what some might call 'grade school'. When discussing parts of speech, for example, I tend to find it easier to say whether a phrase is idiomatic, or what the phrase means, than to tell you whether it is an object complement and, if so, what kind it is (I'm getting a little better after spending time on both sites, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is not specifically about the mechanics of the language. Ideally, we'd assume that the community is well-versed at parsing sentences and has a basic grasp of common idioms. We'll look at the finer nuances behind similar terms, pick the 'best word' for an occasion, or more generally ask the 'why' questions, more so than the 'how' or even the 'what' questions. It's not that the 'how' or 'what' questions are necessarily off-topic - the site explicitly includes linguists, after all, but if you are already familiar with the language and wish to probe further, you'd probably ask your question on ELU instead of ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I have found some of the most interesting questions on ELU coming from those who aren't native English speakers (but don't call this group 'natives' as others have done - to native speakers, 'natives' tends to refer to totally different groups of people than what was probably intended). Most of us at ELU welcome people from all stages of language mastery, the most important caveat probably being that we need to be able to converse intelligibly with one another fairly easily in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relation to your 'salt' example: as noted in comments to the question, we at ELU enjoy questions about English versions of foreign-language idioms. They are welcome, so long as we have sufficient background to understand (in English) what the idiom is trying to express. The question should not assume that any potential answerer knows anything about the non-English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T00:41:35.297" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10459" CreationDate="2017-07-05T01:30:30.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever you are concerned that your question is not clear and understandable, you may request assistance on the Meta associated with the site where you asked (or would like to ask) a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At ELU you have to be careful not to give the appearance of asking for help with proofreading, or rewriting for the sake of polishing some writing.  I think you might have a slightly easier time over at ELL with getting the sort of feedback I think you might be interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be helpful to take a look at the questions at ELL that have to do with finding resources for improving your English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T01:30:30.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T04:07:13.847" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;To some extent, I think this was an issue that was raised when this question was trending: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/388302/when-was-the-first-print-usage-of-chop-your-own-wood-and-it-will-warm-you-twice&quot;&gt;When was the first print usage of chop your own wood and it will warm you twice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally I've run into similar questions regarding the accurate original version or source of a quote that I've seen that conflicts between sources.  It seems to me like a question that has a correct answer, so it's not too broad or primarily opinion based.  It can also be a valid question after conducting research.  Yet I was thinking about posting such a question and it smelled like something that would be closed fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm here, I'll go ahead and reveal the hypothetical question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Mark Twain quote is shown in various forms, and I'm wondering if one of them is paraphrased and the other is a true quote.  As far as I can tell, neither source specifies the text this quote is drawn from, so I'm unsure where to look to verify the accurate original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5115-loyalty-to-country-always-loyalty-to-government-when-it-deserves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marktwain386139.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BrainyQuote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I promise I'm not fishing for an answer on Meta.  Rather, I'm wondering whether questions &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of this sort&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are acceptable to the community or if they would or should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T04:27:22.670" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T20:46:55.137" Title="Is asking which is an accurate original quotation off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10459" CreationDate="2017-07-05T09:09:21.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As already stated in the earlier answers, English.StackExchange website generally considers off-topic any general request to improve the quality of language in any written passage, which would include a question posted here. On the other hand, we are not concerned with the English expertise of the person asking the question, nor the grammatical correctness of the question itself, provided the point raised by the question is clear and fulfills the criteria for being on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the language of your question and the editing helpfully done by Soha Farhin Pine, it does not seem to me that your competence in English is in any way lacking, nor that there was any pressing need to 'present things better', as you put it. All the corrections made first by senior member Mari-louA and then by Soha Farhin were minor edits intended only to correct a few typos and improve the 'natural flow' of the passage -- in other words, these edits were not necessary to improve the clarity of presentation if your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members with at least a certain (comparatively low) number of reputation points, including myself, are empowered to edit any question or answer to correct errors of spelling/ grammar/ punctuation and generally improve the clarity of the question (which is sometimes necessary to prevent closure or to reopen a question closed as unclear) but IMHO there is no real need to improve the &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of a written piece, which I would leave as it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Style is not central to the validity of any question here, and nor is grammatical correctness. If the question is clear and on-topic, members will usually get down to the business of providing an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 2: you deserve a lot of credit for 'listening to that podcast again' and providing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/397356/231519&quot;&gt;a detailed answer to your own question&lt;/a&gt;. Just looking at your answer, it is &lt;em&gt;just the type of answer&lt;/em&gt; that is expected at ELU and routinely given by senior members. I appreciate and upvote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T10:47:04.113" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T10:47:04.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10467" CreationDate="2017-07-05T09:33:37.803" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't say for sure whether questions of that sort are strictly on-topic at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, if you'd like to know whether a famous quote was misattributed to someone, or challenge the authenticity of something, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Skeptics&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange. Its &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt; page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're working together to build a library of detailed answers challenging unreferenced notable claims, pseudoscience and biased results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask about the accuracy of public claims made in the media or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the top used tags is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quotes&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;quotes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Some top voted questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/34322/30880&quot;&gt;Did Einstein say this about his marriage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/31042/30880&quot;&gt;Did Bill Gates say that vaccines and health care could reduce the population growth by 10-15%?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/37851/30880&quot;&gt;Did Einstein say this quote about war &amp;amp; patriotism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T09:49:51.103" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T09:49:51.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T20:28:58.073" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before asking my question, let me set up the context.&#xA;I'm a non-native English speaker. However, I have used the language for almost all my life. I went to a British school, and I have lived in Australia. Thus, I can say with much confidence that my level of English is fairly good. Nevertheless, my grammar is far from perfect, and I need to take it to the next level because of my job. For that purpose, I took an online grammar English course from where I learned a myriad of rules, and I want to put them into practice. So now I ask the question. Is there a place where I can see paragraphs and not just simple sentences that are analyzed grammatically? For instance, where they point out each part of the sentence and its function, including if it is an adverb clause, noun clause, reduced noun clause, nonfinite clause, complex sentence, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will appreciate any help. I have been looking for a site that fulfills my requirements, but I have failed so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: If you want to correct any of my writing, please do! It would help me a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243899" OwnerDisplayName="Milenko " LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T11:07:38.973" Title="Practice different grammar forms" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10470" CreationDate="2017-07-03T21:50:43.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only site I've found helpful in that regard is &lt;a href=&quot;http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It diagrams sentences and labels the parts and functions. It's far from perfect, but it does help to understand sentence structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another site that helps is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.german-latin-english.com/diagrams.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.german-latin-english.com/diagrams.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116014" OwnerDisplayName="Zan700" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T21:50:43.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10427" CreationDate="2017-07-05T14:12:53.033" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only add this to the comprehensive and excellent answer already provided by Lawrence: Whether the question is being asked at ELU or ELL, you should first read the site guidelines and be sure that the question is 'on-topic' at the chosen site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, there is a loophole here that almost every question that is on-topic at ELL is also on-topic at ELU. So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;when in doubt, you can post the question at ELU&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  where it will most likely remain and get answered; if there is a good reason to migrate it to ELL, then senior members will vote to migrate it and it will get answered at ELL. If the question is marked off-topic, the reason will be specified and somebody will usually guide you how to modify it to bring it on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that my personal advice would be for a member to ask beginners' type of Learners' questions about basic aspects of syntax and grammar at ELL (which site was specifically created for learners to ask such questions) and more complex questions dealing with etymology, word-choice, contemporary usage and linguistics (such as the question about the Japanese proverb) are more suitable to be asked at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T14:17:58.690" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T14:17:58.690" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10467" CreationDate="2017-07-05T20:46:55.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that they're not necessarily off-topic here. Subject to the usual expectations about doing some research first, I would prefer not to shut these questions out (even if they are potentially also on-topic elsewhere&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;). Some reasons for this preference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the question, these questions are about the usage of the English language; present an actual problem/question; are not primarily opinion based, theoretically have &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; answer; and can be subjected to the usual due-diligence requirements for research; to ensure they are not easily answered by a standard reference. In other words, they don't clearly violate any of our standard reasons for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From a purely subjective viewpoint, I find these questions (or more accurately, their answers) to be interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a site that is partially for &lt;em&gt;etymologists&lt;/em&gt; we likely have folks with the expertise and resources to answer these kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to imagine how we would draw the line between etymology of set phrases (which is pretty clearly on-topic) and provenance of unattributed/misattributed &quot;quotations&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the distinction just turn on whether the line is commonly cited as a quotation? That is, if someone started saying &quot;like Mark Twain once said, 'whatever floats your boat'&quot; would &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/345704/origin-of-whatever-floats-your-boat&quot;&gt;a question about the origin of the phrase&lt;/a&gt; suddenly be off-limits?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or does it depend on whether it actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an attributable quotation? If the latter, how do we know whether the question is on-topic until after it has been asked and answered? Should a question about the sports insult &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85659/origin-of-the-phrase-looks-like-tarzan-plays-like-jane/85662#85662&quot;&gt;&quot;looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane&quot;&lt;/a&gt; be closed because it appears to have originated in a political speech?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is especially problematic because many aphorisms that might once have just been &quot;well-known sayings&quot; are now spuriously attributed to whoever sounds plausible; one example that generated an upvoted question and answers is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103851/where-does-the-phrase-of-boredom-punctuated-by-moments-of-terror-come-from&quot;&gt;&quot;boredom punctuated by moments of terror&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. There are also examples of traditional phrases being modified by celebrities, and thus becoming attached to that celebrity, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47182/origin-of-the-idiom-if-ifs-and-buts-were-candy-and-nuts&quot;&gt;&quot;if ifs and buts were candy and nuts&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or the chopping wood example listed in the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work/10250#10250&quot;&gt;&quot;is on-topic at another Stack Exchange&quot; is explicitly NOT a reason to close a question that is otherwise on-topic in the SE where it is asked.&lt;/a&gt; From the MetaSE FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't migrate for the sake of migration.&lt;/strong&gt; We only migrate questions because they are &lt;em&gt;off-topic on the original site&lt;/em&gt;. It is perfectly possible for a question to be on-topic on multiple sites, but that is not a reason to migrate it elsewhere, unless the OP requests migration. As a general rule, if someone asks a question &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, and it's on-topic &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, it should stay &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T20:46:55.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10449" CreationDate="2017-07-06T01:24:50.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of July 5th, 2017, there are seven questions on ELU with three gold badges.  They are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-vs-her-vs-their&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (&amp;quot;his&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;their&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;266 net upvotes///62,062 views///103 favorites///Aug 2010 date posted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;253///102,462///167///August 2010&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/when-should-i-use-an-em-dash-an-en-dash-and-a-hyphen&quot;&gt;When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;226///301,331///122///August 2010&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you&quot;&gt;Did English ever have a formal version of &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;366///103,924///100///January 2011&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This question was at 97 or 98 favorites when the OP asked the Meta question on July 3rd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;132///34,381///152///April 2011  [more favorites than votes] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;What are your favorite English language tools?&lt;/a&gt;  [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;128///12,081///148///August 2010   [more favorites than votes]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;Which word begins with &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; and looks like an axe in this picture?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;378///81,189///101///June 23, 2017 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Mari-Lou A noted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The interesting thing is though, from a statistics point of view, all&#xA;  five [six: one more made the list] stellar badges were awarded at&#xA;  least three or more years after the questions were posted. They&#xA;  accumulated 100 favourites over a much longer span of time than the Y&#xA;  question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @Josh, who compiled the list in his comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T16:15:26.900" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T16:15:26.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10463" CreationDate="2017-07-06T14:25:34.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/397340/revisions&quot;&gt;revisions page&lt;/a&gt; shows that the OP added Revision 3 after your Revision 2, without rolling back your edits. This indicates that your editing hadn't gone &quot;too far&quot; in the OP's view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual substantive edit you made led to the following change, where &quot;provide templates&quot; simply echoes existing terminology from the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while A4 is both in Word and Writer (Version 1 - by OP)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while for A4, we provide templates in Word and Writer (Version 2 - by you)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heart of the question was about the use of the word &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt;. Your editing simply reworded the OP's commentary about the intent behind their choice of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion (and I'm conscious that others hold a different opinion), you have left their main question alone and have improved the English of their commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd therefore consider your effort to be a shining example of good editing on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T14:25:34.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T21:33:49.033" Score="-8" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; contributions from various Members, this Question doesn't at all have a previous Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without explanation, a down-vote can be very like a slap round the back of the head… painful but in no way useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With explanation, a down-vote can be very useful. It would be in no way necessary to identify the down-voter, even though that would fairly obviously be preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would we rather have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until people like Chenmunka, Dan Bron, NVZ, Helmar, or RaceYouAnytime can explain what they think makes &lt;em&gt;Why is it not…? &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Will you please change…?&lt;/em&gt; similar, let alone interchangeable, may we please not pretend this question already has an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even ignoring their own standing or image, hands up anyone who thinks that kind of failure contributes anything useful…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Else, who thinks it helps prevent progress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193296" LastEditorUserId="193296" LastEditDate="2021-08-25T19:40:31.990" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T19:40:31.990" Title="Will you please insist on explanations for down-voting?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ClosedDate="2017-07-07T21:43:02.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10476" CreationDate="2017-07-07T00:05:08.487" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;You want to know a secret?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LdXi3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LdXi3.png&quot; alt=&quot;top 5 questions ever asked on EL&amp;amp;U, all showing downvotes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the literally &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;the top 5 EL&amp;amp;U questions of all time&lt;/a&gt;, and every single one of them has downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you care about who cast those downvotes? Do you care why? Do you think the authors of those questions care why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you &lt;em&gt;even have known&lt;/em&gt; they had downvotes if I didn't show you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;It's not about you&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, of course not. Because they're absolutely &lt;em&gt;drowned&lt;/em&gt; out by the flood of upvotes. Consensus has emerged: these are &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the point. The votes aren't &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; you. They're for &lt;em&gt;everyone else&lt;/em&gt;. They make it easy for the will of the people, &lt;em&gt;collectively&lt;/em&gt;, to be heard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; innovation of Stack Exchange. This is the fundamental mechanism that makes the whole thing work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Separating the wheat from the chaff&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This system of emergent consensus is, and I'm being literal here, why you're here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You found Stack Exchange because you did a Google search and one or more questions came up top of the search results. Or a co-worker told you about it, or sent you a link. Or because you read an article in a blog or news site that linked back here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, how did that happen?  It happened &lt;em&gt;because Stack Exchange &lt;strong&gt;makes it easy to find the good stuff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and ignore the bad stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, when you see a highly upvoted or highly downvoted post, you &lt;em&gt;don't care why&lt;/em&gt;. You care the &lt;em&gt;most people agree&lt;/em&gt;, and that takes a the impossible burden off you to evaluate every single post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting, up and down, is what makes this work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The bad old days&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a corollary, anything that has the effect of inhibiting voting erodes this system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes us return to the bad old days of forums where the title of the thread might be &quot;Got error message #e77q: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395385#comment941324_395817&quot;&gt;too much covfefe in the yatch&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, the exact same error message you're getting, and page 46 of the thread may or may not contain the resolution, but you will never know, because the first 45 pages are nothing but &quot;me too!&quot; and &quot;I googled this and found nothing&quot; and &quot;@captmooseknuckles is a lu$3r!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ydvS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ydvS.png&quot; alt=&quot;obligatory xckd&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Which would I prefer?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which would we rather have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is clear.  Forcing people to type a reason for downvoting will result in fewer people downvoting. Forcing people to disclose their names when downvoting will result in fewer people downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fewer people downvoting is a bad thing.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Who did you vote for?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contend you already know this. And not just from Stack Exchange. Do you ask people who they voted for in the last election? If not, why not?  If so, what is the usual reaction you get when asking? What do you think accounts for the fact that most ballots in major electoral systems around the world are secret?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll tell you another secret. In the last major political election in my country, the candidate I voted for did not win. Do you care who I voted for? Does it matter? The other guy is in office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters is the results. The will of the people has been expressed. And that's the way it's supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Yeah, but what about &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; posts?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the top questions again. They all have downvotes. If you had written those posts, would you care about the downvotes? Would you even notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. It's a handful of malcontents; every crowd has a few, and the normal course of action is &lt;em&gt;to ignore them&lt;/em&gt;&amp;sup1;. Same with downvotes. You're going to get one or two, it's both natural and inevitable and completely unnoteworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only when you get more than a few that you should take notice. It means &lt;em&gt;several people agree something is wrong with your post&lt;/em&gt;. And it's not up to them to tell you what or why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were the one who posted it, right? The &lt;a href=&quot;http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;onus probandi&lt;/a&gt; is on you. Step back, disengage your ego, and look at the post again with a critical eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;I walk through Times Square every morning on my way to the office, and there are literally naked cowboys, creepy Elmos, unintelligible prosthelytizers and topless women.  I don't pay attention to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of them. You'd go crazy if you tried. The good news is, I suppose, being in Times Square, no one would notice you'd gone crazy.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T05:57:38.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T05:57:38.203" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10476" CreationDate="2017-07-07T05:16:50.630" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the one who suggested to you, @Robbie Goodwin, that you should ask this meta question; I agree 100% with you (and I have always believed) that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;anonymous downvoting is very unhelpful&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; because it gives us no feedback on what is to be improved in our post: could there not be a provision to make members at least leave an &lt;em&gt;anonymous comment&lt;/em&gt; specifying the reason for the downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I appreciate your asking this meta question: thanks a lot for raising a point that really made me think and also do some study at meta.SE -- I found that THERE ARE SO MANY META QUESTIONS at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=Downvote+reason&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=Downvote+reason&lt;/a&gt; which echo your sentiment, and the consensus of all the excellent answers given over the years (my own summary) is that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Stack Exchange depends on voting to distinguish the good questions and answers from the huge number of posts: so any rule change that would inhibit the volume of voting (as compelling voters to leave an explanation surely will) is bad for the system.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why leaving a comment explaining the reason for an upvote or downvote remains optional and not mandatory, but of course I learned that only because you raised this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appendix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In order to clarify my thoughts and final position on this matter I reproduce here my 3 comments to Robbie Goodwin's recent suggestion on another page that anonymous downvoting should not be allowed:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Robbie Goodwin by 'anonymous downing not to be allowed', do you just want the downvoter to be identified? I have taken exception a couple of times not to 'anonymous' downvoting as such, but the fact that the anonymous downvoter did not specify the reason for the downvote. Of course leaving a comment as to the reason would immediately identify the downvoter at present, but we could possibly include a stipulation to downvoting that makes compulsory the leaving of an optionally anonymous comment specifying the reason 4 DV. Would you like to invite discussion by framing this as a meta question? – English Student Jul 4 at 0:27 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@aparente001 your very pertinent point adds an interesting dimension to this topic. I forgot an explanatory comment might be rude, but I should prefer even a nasty comment explaining the reason for downvoting, and I daresay Robbie G would as well! There could also be a provision to protect the identity of the downvoter while explaining the reason for the DV. If the reason given does not convince us we shall ignore it. If the comment is offensive we shall flag it. The anonymous downvote is not at all helpful because it offers no feedback and gives us no suggestion to help improve the post. – English Student 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@aparente001 I also believe that if downvoters were required to provide at least an 'anonymous reason' for downvotes (same for upvotes) it would discourage thoughtless and reckless up- and down-voting, although the reputation points would not build up at quite the same rapid rate! I have seen so many mediocre posts including outright wrong answers upvoted for no good reason --some of mine included-- and earning 10 points multiple times for the lucky member. So let users explain the reason for upvoting as well! – English Student 2 days ago   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;End note: after reading the excellent answers to the numerous similar questions asked over the years at meta.SE, I now understand and fully endorse the &lt;strong&gt;community wisdom&lt;/strong&gt; behind leaving the decision (to post a comment explaining the reason for an up- or down-vote) not mandatory but optional.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T06:14:06.387" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T06:14:06.387" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T12:18:31.003" Score="4" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked some questions before but I didn't get any (good) answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I bring it to people's attention again? Can I ask it again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204489" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T09:39:19.077" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T18:37:36.873" Title="How can I rekindle interest in an old question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10479" CreationDate="2017-07-07T12:30:13.310" Score="21" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Don't be duped&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you can't ask it again. It will just be closed as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;dupe&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first rule to remember is that, in general, there is no guarantee you'll get an answer to a question, here or anywhere else in life.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Crave attention&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, here on SE, you have two courses of action open to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;start a bounty&lt;/a&gt; on the question, which is like buying an ad for it&amp;sup1;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&quot;&gt;edit it&lt;/a&gt; to make it more interesting or attractive to answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Be the most interesting person in the room&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions which don't get attention or answers here suffer that fate because they're inherently uninteresting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can make your question stand out, make it interesting to research or to answer, you'll have a much better shot of getting the results you're looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One good way to do this is to edit the question to cover the basics yourself. If it's a question about a word or meaning, tell us what you found in a dictionary. If it's about word choice, tell us what you found in a thesaurus. If etymology, tell us what you found in Etymonline, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do the basic legwork yourself, leaving only the interesting part of the question, that will not only lower the barrier to entry (answerers know they don't have to do the tedious general reference lookup themselves), but it will also make the question itself much more likely to be inherently interesting, because what remains will take either expertise or novel research!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U, and good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;And, like buying an ad, there's no guarantee of results. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/28/magazine/on-language-you-pays-yer-money.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You pays your money and you takes your chances.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T14:12:50.280" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T14:12:50.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10479" CreationDate="2017-07-07T20:33:31.890" Score="17" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Tips for Newcomers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid posting grammar questions at the weekends&lt;/strong&gt;. The majority of regular users are away from their computers and generally have lives outside EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create a memorable, or, provocative title&lt;/strong&gt;, but above all make sure it's &lt;strong&gt;descriptive&lt;/strong&gt;. Titles that say &quot;Is this correct?&quot;, &quot;Please help me with this sentence&quot;, &quot;which is correct&quot; and &quot;Present Simple vs. Present Continuous&quot; are the kiss of death. For example, the following title: &lt;em&gt;Is “the” needed in the following scenario?&lt;/em&gt; tells visitors that the question is about the definite article and nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Place yourself in the native speaker's shoes&lt;/strong&gt;. Would you click the question's title, if it was in your mother tongue?  Does it sound interesting? Would you want to post an answer if you knew it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do your research&lt;/strong&gt;. See Dan Bron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10480/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; for more details. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proofread&lt;/strong&gt; your question, check for typos, missing apostrophes, etc. Avoid text abbreviations such as &lt;em&gt;plz&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wanna&lt;/em&gt;. The majority of users appreciate querents who care about their questions and spend time writing them out carefully. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; Be your worst critic.  Is the question clear? Have you fixed misspellings and typos? Is it focused? Have you shown your research? Speak plainly, include details, but don't go overboard.      &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide a background story&lt;/strong&gt;. AKA context. Explain why you are asking the question. Did a teacher tell a rule but now you see it being broken?  Are you having a discussion with a friend? Do you need this word for your novel? Find a hook, something original to grab people's attention with.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source&lt;/strong&gt;?  Where did you read this sentence or word? Cite the source, its author and include a link whenever possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Study the questions in the HOT NETWORK QUESTIONS.&lt;/strong&gt; There's a reason why single word requests (SWRs) are so popular. They can be amusing. Original. Thought provoking. They don't require brain work. but beware, they're like novelty toys, today they're hot news but in two days' time, nobody remembers them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good SWRs are answerable.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't set the bar impossibly high, this will only lead to disappointment. Don't demand  &quot;a single word&quot; at any cost, be open-minded and flexible, accept also an idiom or a phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, set up a bounty&lt;/strong&gt;. However, if your question has none of the features listed above, don't be dismayed if it is neglected and gathers dust in EL&amp;amp;U's repository.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qR1Ap.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qR1Ap.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T09:39:27.330" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T09:39:27.330" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10479" CreationDate="2017-07-07T22:16:05.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an important question not only because old questions often need better answers, but also because we all need to learn how to ask better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the earlier answers already suggest, &lt;em&gt;editing a question&lt;/em&gt; is likely to raise your chances of getting better responses, but how does it work? I deduced they meant that by improving your question you would attract better answers, which is very true; HOWEVER, it is also true that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;simply editing an old question will &quot;bump it&quot; to the top of the &lt;em&gt;active questions&lt;/em&gt; list, as I tested and confirmed with one of my own old questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/390801/what-is-a-malaphor&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;quot;malaphor&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is indeed a shortcut for anybody who wants to 'rekindle' interest in their old questions without making any major changes, but be warned that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;you are likely to get a better response only if you actually edit it substantially to make it a much better question!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 2: How to write a much better question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explained in the excellent answers provided here by Dan Bron and Mari-lou A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T23:09:48.330" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T23:09:48.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10447" CreationDate="2017-07-07T22:40:40.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good catch. I have updated the two close reasons that needed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it's a Friday night and it takes two moderators to change a close reason, it may be a few hours before the updates go &quot;live&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T22:40:40.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10487" CreationDate="2017-07-08T02:20:29.853" Score="7" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I find the highest ranked ANSWERS on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently was a part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395385#395385&quot;&gt;Which word begins with &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; and looks like an axe in this picture?&lt;/a&gt; and have tried to see other high voted answers (trying to see if this is the All-Time record holder - currently at 753)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was able to sort by highest ranked person etc but not this that I can find...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*the answer was provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/55623/dan-bron&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/55623/dan-bron&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ps&#xA;Does anyone else feel like this is the place where everything u type is going to be seen by the best in the grammar world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243437" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T09:35:54.673" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T09:35:54.673" Title="How to Find the Highest Ranked ANSWER(S) on the site?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10486" CreationDate="2017-07-08T03:43:45.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can restrict your search to answers only with &lt;code&gt;is:a&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; lists this and other advanced search tips) and then click the &quot;votes&quot; tab. You should end up &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aa%20&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, as of now, it's the highest scoring answer... on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the whole SE network? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/692865/all-sites-top-10-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a query&lt;/a&gt; that selects the &lt;code&gt;top 10&lt;/code&gt; answers from each site (including metas). &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aa&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; easily outscores every other site, with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/6083675&quot;&gt;highest-scoring answer&lt;/a&gt; having a net score of &lt;strong&gt;24791&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T03:43:45.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-08T08:17:23.480" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not wish to know the names as I respect privacy. I only want a count. How do I see that? I want to know how many people have actually been impressed enough with my answers to go and check my other answers. It might give me a sense of satisfaction that I have helped the society with my knowledge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239082" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T09:34:55.143" Title="How to get a count of the people who viewed my profile?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10488" CreationDate="2017-07-08T08:58:17.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is reported right in your profile page, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/239082/himabindu-boddupalli&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/239082/himabindu-boddupalli&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1srcz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1srcz.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says &lt;em&gt;76 profile views&lt;/em&gt;, in the screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall if that is the number of unique visits (i.e. the number of different users that viewed the profile since the account was created) or it considers as different the views done from the same user after X hours (e.g. if I view a profile two different days, the number of views is increased by two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any tooltip to explain the value, so it could be either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132688/how-are-profile-views-counted&quot;&gt;How are profile views counted?&lt;/a&gt; but there isn't an answer from a Stack Exchange developer; it doesn't help in knowing for sure how the profile views are counted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It doesn't count when you view your own profile, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12766/can-user-profile-views-not-include-narcissism-please&quot;&gt;Can &amp;quot;user profile views&amp;quot; NOT include narcissism please?&lt;/a&gt; explains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get confused from &lt;em&gt;people reached&lt;/em&gt;, which has a tooltip describing it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Estimated number of times people viewed helpful posts by this user (based on page views of questions and questions where they wrote highly-ranked answers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T09:34:55.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T09:34:55.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2017-07-08T23:02:04.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that ESL teachers as a group will find major areas of disagreement with how semantics is treated on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How pragmatics is treated is more problematic, but that's hardly related to whether or not one has had ELU training: pragmatics grades into style choice and tends to be somewhat subjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when one looks at grammar, one finds different schools of analysis members of which can disagree quite strongly. And as Quirk and Svartvik pointed out, educated Anglophones can even (and quite often do) disagree over the very acceptability of certain constructions. Claiming 'this is correct' is often an arrogation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From previous conversations, I've picked up that there isn't a unified ESL approach to grammar (though some would like us to believe that there is – and possibly even believe there is themselves). A major problem on ELU is that some assume that the terminology / standards of acceptability / methods of analysis they have been taught are unique / universally accepted / unchallengeable / final (or at least post convincing-sounding answers as if they do). In scientific articles, definition of terms as used locally, labelling of hypotheses as such rather than laws, and attributions to those giving theories would be considered mandatory. And if a certain approach was required by some institution, opposing ones would be acknowledged and caveats attached to publications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T13:27:54.523" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T13:27:54.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-09T09:43:17.790" Score="10" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The question is now Undeleted&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; I am very grateful to tchrist, who undeleted the post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;P.S. Several answers, consisting of one liners, have been deleted because they fail to reflect the site's standards that is expected today.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together&quot;&gt;Is there a word for someone who really has their act together?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happened to remember this question and the many answers it received, and I wanted to find it again today. I needed a word or expression that fitted this description. Impossible. The question has been deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily I had posted an answer, so with a &quot;search operator&quot; that I discovered on SE Meta, I managed to track it down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For users who do not have 10K the post is not be visible, so let me describe it briefly. The question attracted 68 upvotes and 1 downvote, and 32 answers were posted. The highest upvoted answer (+81 and -9) suggested &lt;em&gt;hoopy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;frood&lt;/em&gt;. The second and third answers earned 35 and 20 upvotes respectively. Out of 32 answers, only three earned 0 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a word for someone who really has their act together?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Someone who has their time well-managed, is focused, works out, has ambitions,&#xA;  eats right. Not necessarily &lt;em&gt;success&lt;/em&gt;, but there's a kind of trait that leads to it, that I can't quite put my finger on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's strong overlap with people who are competitive or are overachievers,&#xA;  but it's not exactly the same thing. &quot;In the zone&quot; is close, but I'm looking for a more long term or permanent kind of thing&amp;nbsp;— the opposite of a &lt;em&gt;slob&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;slacker&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe there isn't a word, but there should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post was closed by a mod for being &quot;too broad&quot; in August 2013, &lt;strong&gt;two years later it was deleted singlehandedly by a different mod&lt;/strong&gt;. I don't want to name names, besides their names are visible to 10K users, and I'm pretty sure there must be a rational explanation for the deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE dictates that an answer or a question deleted by a mod, can only be undone by another mod. So casting a vote to undelete the question above will resolve nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the question was too broad, that kinda makes sense, but I disagree with its deletion. I would like to know what the SE policy and criteria for deleting questions is, especially posts which have been upvoted and received numerous answers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why was this question deleted–no reason was provided–and is it possible to undelete it in the not too distant future?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CLARIFICATION    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This needs to be stressed; &lt;strong&gt;the question was closed by one mod, not by voting. The question was deleted by a different mod, not by voting.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Centre page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators can delete any question, and users with sufficient reputation can cast delete votes on closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It fails to mention that users cannot cast their votes to undelete a question previously deleted by a mod. If the question closed is “extremely off-topic” (e.g. proofreading), has attracted more downvotes than upvotes, has no answers or answers which have no upvotes, then THOSE are the very questions which should be deleted by the mod team. But a question with 68 upvotes and 32 answers? Can we not agree it is not the same as a wall of text asking users to proofread it? The request is in a completely different league. This is not your typical low-quality question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How many closed questions are there on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=closed%3Ayes&quot;&gt;22,208 closed questions&lt;/a&gt;. According to the canonical SE Meta post unearthed by  tchrist♦  (specific information which is sadly missing from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;) we learn the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;strong&gt;you should generally view a closed question as one that has been nominated for deletion.&lt;/strong&gt; If you think there's a good reason for it to stick around, say something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is me saying something. This is me asking why a mod deleted a popular and useful question without explanation.  Was it unintentional? And finally, can this decision be reversed today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Please upvote this post if you believe the aforementioned question should be undeleted. Thank you. UPDATE: Currently there are three users who have cast their undelete votes. The question cannot be undeleted by non-moderators, but heartened, I too have cast my vote to undelete. Every little bit helps...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T21:03:03.263" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T21:03:03.263" Title="Deleted Upvoted and Popular Question: Why?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="47" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10493" CreationDate="2017-07-09T13:26:01.060" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What’s the policy on deleting closed questions?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions should ultimately be either deleted or else fixed up so they can be reöpened. The one referenced in this question simply went the former route: deleted two years after closure. Here’s another example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/30244/2085&quot;&gt;one of those&lt;/a&gt;. And also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/94100/2085&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three of these accord with the guideline that closed questions should in the long run end up being deleted from the site.  Upvotes are not a solid criterion for non-deletion. We have around 35k deleted questions as of this writing, very many of them with upvotes. Most should stay that way; sometimes some of them should not, so it’s a valid question to raise here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is still whether it should stay deleted and closed — and given that it’s closed, why shouldn’t it be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there can always be exceptions, Stack Exchange has actually provided some general guidance for these situations.  Over on Meta Stack Exchange, there’s a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/65770/153355&quot;&gt;canonical answer&lt;/a&gt; to this provided by  one of our august Community Managers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Do closed questions get deleted automatically after some time?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; there's no activity, questions with a score &amp;lt;=0 can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/81887/what-happens-to-unanswered-questions-from-deleted-accounts/82408#82408&quot;&gt;deleted automatically after a (fairly generous) period of time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that-actually-mean&quot;&gt;Also, once closed, users with &amp;gt;= 10K reputation points can vote to delete it after 48 hours, and users with 20K can vote to delete immediately...&lt;/a&gt;. Moderators can and sometimes will delete questions at any time - closed questions are often deleted on sight as part of a cleanup effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you should generally view a closed question as one that has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/i-move-to-close-this-question/&quot;&gt;nominated for deletion&lt;/a&gt;. If you think there's a good reason for it to stick around, say something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our guidance from the Powers That Be is that you should generally view a closed question as one that has been nominated for deletion. Let’s keep that in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;QED?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make an argument for undeletion, one must argue that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together&quot;&gt;referenced deleted post&lt;/a&gt; really is the kind of question that adds to our growing library of &lt;strong&gt;expert answers&lt;/strong&gt; on our “site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That argument has not been made — quite possibly for good reason. In any event, it &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;remains to be demonstrated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. If that attempt &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; made, one would do well to consider these points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why would we wish a closed question undeleted if we still intend to leave it closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Before someone raises the possibility of a lock, we don’t much care for historical locks and this question does not seem to merit one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It’s marked Community Wiki, so it’s not like anyone’s rep would be affected were it to be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has 32 answers, which are all over the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Its quondam protection did little to stem the tide of random answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Perhaps if there were eventually a Stack Exchange site whose &lt;em&gt;raison d’être&lt;/em&gt; were to create a home for these sorts of English-language guessing games and requests for writing advice — call it EnglishRequests.StackExchange, shall we? — then we could entertain the notion of someday sending it thither. Yet even new sites deserve to create their own community standards about what is and what is not on-topic there. (And even if we wished to, it would take an employee to migrate it because it’s far too old, and I’m nearly certain they would decline the request.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T21:40:37.133" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10493" CreationDate="2017-07-09T15:13:15.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on advice from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;the help center on question deletion&lt;/a&gt;, as well as from these SE Meta discussions... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58842/when-should-i-vote-to-delete-a-question/59054#59054&quot;&gt;When should I vote to delete a question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...it seems well-established that a closed question &quot;&lt;em&gt;that cannot be improved and reopened&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and has been inactive for a long period of time &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that the most relevant question is whether this question ought to be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; when many other single-word-requests that appear equally broad and have more than one possible answer seem to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples might be these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163232/what-term-means-one-who-enjoys-learning&quot;&gt;What term means “one who enjoys learning”?&lt;/a&gt; (9 answers)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65472/word-for-only-caring-about-oneself&quot;&gt;Word for “only caring about oneself ”&lt;/a&gt; (14 answers)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49795/whats-a-word-for-avoiding-a-question-with-a-generic-fake-answer&quot;&gt;What's a word for avoiding a question with a generic (fake) answer?&lt;/a&gt; (17 aswers)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three examples were easily selected by random trial and error, and I have a hard time seeing what makes them less &quot;broad&quot; than the question referenced by the OP.  All three appear to me to have zero close votes and are protected with many &quot;guessing-game&quot; style answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose that EL&amp;amp;U might not be adhering to a strict standard for closure on single-word-requests.  Should more be closed, or should less?  Should the one being discussed here be undeleted and nominated for reopening?  Those are questions the community (and moderators) should stick to a consistent standard on, for the sake of fairness to all questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T15:48:19.077" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T15:48:19.077" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-09T23:24:16.110" Score="6" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is an off-shoot of this Meta question focused on the deletion, and consequently on the closure, of a particular single-word-request question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10493/deleted-upvoted-and-popular-question-why&quot;&gt;Deleted Upvoted and Popular Question: Why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together&quot;&gt;question being discussed there&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;em&gt;arguably&lt;/em&gt; too broad, though that seems to be in dispute to some degree.  But as I submit in my answer there, many single-word-request questions are &lt;em&gt;as arguably&lt;/em&gt; too broad yet they are left open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163232/what-term-means-one-who-enjoys-learning&quot;&gt;What term means “one who enjoys learning”?&lt;/a&gt; (9 answers)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65472/word-for-only-caring-about-oneself&quot;&gt;Word for “only caring about oneself ”&lt;/a&gt; (14 answers)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49795/whats-a-word-for-avoiding-a-question-with-a-generic-fake-answer&quot;&gt;What's a word for avoiding a question with a generic (fake) answer?&lt;/a&gt; (17 answers)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that a standard for broadness on single-word-requests is not well-established. Must a question have an easily acceptable, single answer?&#xA;Should questions that receive more answers than others be considered &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; to a greater degree?  Should upvotes or popularity of the question have any bearing for or against closure? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the necessity of an easily acceptable, single answer, how would this be judged in as objective a fashion as possible when considering close-votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do I think there should be a widely-accepted standard?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like people answering a question, and who are familiar with the rules for what is on- and off-topic, have a reasonable right to judge whether the question they're answering is likely to be closed or not.  Since closed questions are subject to deletion at any time, it would be frustrating to a user to put in the effort to answer a question that seems to be a good question by the general standards of the site, only to have the question and their diligent answer deleted later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason, I'm somewhat skeptical of the argument that questions which attract a huge number of answers are therefore somehow objectively more off-topic.  The rules for broadness say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are either too many &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. [emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure the number of answers that show up over a period of time is an accurate reflection of whether there are too many &quot;&lt;strong&gt;possible&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; answers, especially on questions that garner a plethora of copy-paste one-liners from new users, repetitive answers by users who haven't perused the existing ones, or other Low Quality answers.  A questioner can't control how many low quality answers they'll get, and I don't know that those answers really measure the quality of the question.  Furthermore, an early responder posting a good answer has no way of knowing that the question would be off-topic for this reason until those answers appeared.  It seems to me that off-topic questions should be off-topic questions from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impetus for this question is &lt;em&gt;fairness&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;consistency&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;em&gt;Fairness&lt;/em&gt; because without a predictable standard for whether a question is on-topic, users could feel their questions or answers were unfairly deleted while similar questions or answers were not (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10493/deleted-upvoted-and-popular-question-why&quot;&gt;See the linked Meta question again&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I recognize that this site is for the broad community of visitors, not just users who post, so I also emphasize &lt;em&gt;consistency&lt;/em&gt; for its own sake.  Even if users can't expect their questions to be closed on a purely &quot;fair&quot; basis, which in a democratic forum, they surely can't, it still seems like a worthy aspiration to attempt to our best ability to close questions in a consistent way.  That has the added benefit of providing &lt;strong&gt;a guide by example&lt;/strong&gt; to other users as to what kinds of questions are on- and off-topic.  That in turn can promote better questions, better answers, and a better experience for both users and visitors of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-07-10T19:43:58.780" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:08:37.903" Title="What widely-accepted standards should be used to judge whether a single-word-request is too broad?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|close-reasons|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10496" CreationDate="2017-07-10T14:53:29.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with our other standardized closure reasons, the general guidance is currently stated in the closure reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;too broad — There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; I am not entirely sure what the rationale for this is meant to be, but if I had to guess, it would be keeping the question short enough to be easily browseable, because otherwise it's of no use to anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the applicability of this closure reason, the answers given are not especially long, so the question was probably closed because &lt;em&gt;there are too many possible valid answers&lt;/em&gt;.  As of March 17th, 2015, which is how &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150317145705/https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the last archived version of the post&lt;/a&gt; is dated, there were 30 answers, and MariLou-A's  answer suggested there were a couple more added since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;32 posts is just two answers shy of double the number of answers of the most answered post you exemplified, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10493/deleted-upvoted-and-popular-question-why&quot;&gt;What's a word for avoiding a question with a generic (fake) answer?&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, the question only had approximately 10,500 views. The most answered question in the provided sample is 38,263, which is nearly four times as many for just barely over half of the answers. Additionally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65472/word-for-only-caring-about-oneself&quot;&gt;Word for “only caring about oneself ”&lt;/a&gt;, which only has 14 answers, has nearly two hundred thousand views. Therefore, the closed question has &lt;em&gt;double the average number of answers&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;far fewer than less than half the views&lt;/em&gt; than a question of this sort usually has based upon the sample you provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it is not as if the question was closed because it had 30 answers with 10,000~ views. By &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130828202148/https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123468/is-there-a-word-for-someone-who-really-has-their-act-together&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;August 28th, 2013&lt;/a&gt;, which is as close to the date of actual closure as The Wayback Machine will take me, it had 27 answers in just a week of being open, but only 4434 views. By means of comparison, the other questions being compared gained their total number of answers over the course of an entire five years of being open. These rates of answering simply are not comparable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is furthermore is that not only did everybody and their mother have an answer to this question, but it also had a resurgence of popularity. It was closed on the 30th, so if it has 32 answers, it gained four answers within just two days if I am not mistaken. Now that is not always so unusual, but it is when you consider the fact that the quite was already about a week old, by which point in time most questions would probably have lost what I shall call their &quot;initial interest&quot;, for lack of a better term. This is &lt;em&gt;especially so&lt;/em&gt; when we consider it never had a bounty applied to it, since if it had, we would have seen an answer awarded with the points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In consideration of these facts, this question attracts too many answers at too fast of a rate to be helpful in achieving &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;our goal&lt;/a&gt; of building an archive of useful answers. Therefore, it seems fair to me that at least this particular question should at least be closed until further restrictions are applied. It just gained too many to be useful with no signs of slowing down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would personally advise against inventing a general rule to apply to all &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; from this one case. One of the main reasons for my apprehension this is because it seems to be an inherently &lt;em&gt;rare&lt;/em&gt; and difficult to ascertain circumstance and as such, would be more appropriately left to the discretion of our &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;human exception handlers&lt;/a&gt;&quot; than a general rule. A general rule may be inconsistently applied by the community, and lead to more questions being closed than what is actually helpful if we start seeking to close them with the sort of prejudice I think it would probably encourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T02:29:21.927" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T02:29:21.927" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T07:20:23.503" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for academically-sound, accessible online resources about the influence of Old Danish on Old English in a region somewhere between northern and southern England. It was referred to as &quot;The Dane Wall&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard the process described as the intentional simplification of Old English grammatical features under the influence of Old Danish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It precedes the influence of Norman French on Old English described in Nist's &quot;A Structural history of English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244360" OwnerDisplayName="Rembrandt Klopper" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T16:42:58.437" Title="Academically sound resources about &quot;The Dane Wall&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2017-07-12T09:42:56.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use  &gt;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.autocrit.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autocrit.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarly.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammarly.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://editminion.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;editminion.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244009" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T17:57:16.420" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T17:57:16.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10505" CreationDate="2017-07-12T11:43:39.817" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put, I should like to see whether there is any closed question that has something in it meriting a reopen vote. How do I find the list of closed questions here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T11:49:34.170" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T11:50:05.370" Title="How do I find a list of closed questions at EL&amp;U?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10504" CreationDate="2017-07-12T11:48:50.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use the search term &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3Ayes&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;closed:yes&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (or as Dan Bron suggests, &lt;code&gt;closed:1&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Search page itself contains some tips when you click the 'Advanced Search Tips' link on the right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4To7i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4To7i.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use it e.g. to exclude questions which are closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T11:48:50.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10504" CreationDate="2017-07-12T11:50:05.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pasting Dan Bron's very helpful comment as an answer here because a comment can disappear anytime:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Go to the search bar. Type closed:1. Pick your sort (eg by votes, by newest). Voila&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T11:50:05.370" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10463" CreationDate="2017-07-12T14:23:06.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gone and read the revisions, starting at the original. My thoughts went as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I read the original question. I was confused as to what was available in what format.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I read your edit (revision 2). I found it to be a lot clearer, and worried that you'd set it to your own interpretation, which might be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I went back and re-read the original. And found that your edit was correct: there was only one interpretation, but it needed reading twice to understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, the OP didn't disagree with your rewording, so it clearly was the correct interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your edit was fantastic, and made the question much clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T14:23:06.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T15:03:22.213" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally browse the &quot;hot network questions&quot; and found one in EL&amp;amp;U, which allowed me to post an answer even though I wasn't a member at the time. Somehow, I managed to get &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/11305303/jeff-zeitlin&quot;&gt;this unregistered account&lt;/a&gt; created, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; I've joined under &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; account - can I get the two accounts (and their rep) merged to &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; account (and if so, how)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246168" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T15:03:22.213" Title="Goofed; have two accounts; how to merge?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-07-12T15:28:52.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10496" CreationDate="2017-07-12T16:12:45.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before asking a question on EL&amp;amp;U, the querent should perform a detailed search on the Internet, failing that,  even a perfunctory one is better than none at all. The OP should explain &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;, and in detail, what they need, citing any solutions they discarded during their research (and explaining why) before asking assistance. This should narrow down  the number of &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;acceptable&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Help Center&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;What does it mean if a question is &quot;closed&quot; or &quot;on hold&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;if your question could be answered by an entire book, or has many valid answers (but no way to determine which - if any - are correct), then it is probably too broad for our format&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough&#xA;    detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct&#xA;    questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this&#xA;    question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me a pretty good description, and the parenthetical comment, also explains why generating many, and valid, answers is not always a good thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The next thing to ask ourselves is how many answers are too many? &#xA;Do we fix the number of answers at 15, or at 20? Maybe 25? 30? Or should it be capped at 50? And to put it bluntly, do crap answers count? Does the community consider  an answer consisting of a single line to reflect the standards of the site? And what if the answer contains several suggestions? You know, those thesaurus-like answers. Does each suggestion count as a separate answer?  If each proposal is complete with its own dictionary definition, cited resource and neat little clickable link, is that a high-quality answer? Not for some users it seems: “copy-pasting dictionaries makes for a bad answer”. This user is not alone, it's an observation which has been repeated by both sexes, by veterans and newcomers alike. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And what about the,  &lt;em&gt;if your question could be answered by an entire book&lt;/em&gt;…? Where does that fit in? How much detail in one answer is too much? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T18:08:37.903" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:08:37.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10511" CreationDate="2017-07-12T19:05:09.423" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/399555/217285&quot;&gt;Is the object in “Eighty-six forty-five.” a proper noun?&lt;/a&gt; and if it should be capitalized. One exchange of comments was deleted (of the &quot;did you even bother to google the rule... it took me 10 seconds&quot; variety), and it looks like I've had a total of 3 down votes and one up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case and in another, I've had proposed answers in the form of comments, but so far no actual answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd thought there would be a simple straightforward answer, and the answer would be &lt;em&gt;no, it is not.&lt;/em&gt; It's not a given name, or a well-known nick-name, but the numbering is well known enough that in a discussion or writing related to US politics, a number in the forties would very likely be referring to a president, and so the reference to the individual is clear even though it is not an accepted &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; of the individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm &lt;em&gt;not sure&lt;/em&gt; that's correct. So I've asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas why there's been such a bumpy ride, or if there is something that could be done to improve the reception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T19:14:27.870" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T20:26:16.103" Title="My question is not so well received, why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10510" CreationDate="2017-07-12T19:45:19.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of us here - we are not tech-savvy or willing to visit external links unless we develop an interest in the original post. We read the question as it is written, and use the information that is available within the question's body. External links are great, but also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/are-answers-that-just-contain-links-elsewhere-really-good-answers/8259#8259&quot;&gt;quote the relevant parts of it&lt;/a&gt; within the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Or see Mari-Lou A's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10512/50044&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T20:26:16.103" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T20:26:16.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10510" CreationDate="2017-07-12T19:46:03.830" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP's question in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the object in “Eighty-six forty-five.” a proper noun?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The object in the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Eighty-six forty-five.&quot;&#xA;  refers to the 45th president of the US, as in Bush 41 vs. Bush 43.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The meaning of the verb has been addressed in several answers here (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should forty-five be capitalized? Is it a proper noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who is not American, would have looked at that post and said &quot;gobbledegook&quot; and downvoted for being unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the benefit of users such as myself, until I had looked at the links numbered 1,2,3, and 4. I had absolutely no idea what the question was about. It could have been the numbers of powerball for all I knew. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The object of this sentence is the 45th President? What sentence? Where is the subject and the verb? There is no clause. They're numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I had been you, I would have said what 86 (eighty-six) meant in two lines, and also provided the links. Then I would have said where the combination of numbers (I can't bring myself to call it a sentence) came from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATED  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has since been modified: a much-needed and extremely concise definition of 86 has been included in an edit executed by a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T20:24:16.630" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T20:24:16.630" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T22:20:46.930" Score="-6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's not clear / POB about the first 2 of these recently closed questions? Q1 is clear enough and Q2 is objective enough (even without my edits) that the reasons for closure have been weakly applied in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/399386/what-is-the-term-for-an-elevator-when-it-is-descending&quot;&gt;What is the term for an elevator when it is descending?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/399080/something-which-cannot-be-experienced&quot;&gt;Something which cannot be experienced&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/399262/what-do-you-call-a-lady-being-proposed-to-by-a-man&quot;&gt;What do you call a lady being proposed to by a man&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third Q was closed simply on the technicality that no sample sentence was provided, which I have rectified. [Does every single SWR &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; need a sample sentence when the question is clear enough in context, and do you need to close down a clear enough question &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; for that reason?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also edited the first 2 questions to improve the clarity and specificity, so that the objection of 'not clear' / POB might be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall I found the vast majority of recently closed questions &lt;em&gt;do deserve&lt;/em&gt; to be closed according to the current definitions of off-topic: therefore I salute the hard-working members for repeatedly casting close-votes in the right place to keep ELU on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the few exceptions that I am nominating for reopening, having cast my reopen vote for each case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T00:19:46.283" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T02:27:35.893" Title="Please consider reopening these 3 recently closed questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10513" CreationDate="2017-07-13T07:39:55.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cast my vote to close the 3rd question, which five users have now reopened,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/399262/what-do-you-call-a-lady-being-proposed-to-by-a-man&quot;&gt;What do you call a lady being proposed to by a man&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but  the reason I selected, fitted: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Questions on &lt;strong&gt;choosing an ideal word or phrase&lt;/strong&gt; must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Info&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To ensure your question is not closed as off-topic, &lt;strong&gt;please be specific about the intended use of the word.&lt;/strong&gt; YOU MUST INCLUDE A SAMPLE SENTENCE demonstrating how the word would be used. Please use the &quot;phrase-requests&quot; tag instead if you seek more than just a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[emphasis in bold mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP did not show how they would have used these terms, nor did he explain 'why&quot; they were necessary. Maybe in their native tongue these terms exist, and he was merely curious if there were English equivalents. I could have easily said that the question  lacked any evidence of research, which it still does, in spades. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is put on hold, this tells the OP to fix the question to improve it substantially. You did that courtesy for the OP. This is the edit... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr.A has proposed to Ms.B. In this context,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Mr.A is a ________ , and Ms.B is a ________ .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the sample sentence. That was your best shot?&#xA;I mean it looks like a cop-out. A way of taking that guidance and applying it literally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for the other two questions that were closed. I saw them but I did not cast any vote. I knew that the first question was doomed with or  without my intervention, it had its hours counted. However, if a user had posted a really good answer (but what?)  then I'm sure the question would have survived longer than it did. And I'm sure that answer would have &lt;em&gt;lifted&lt;/em&gt; that question and earned numerous upvotes... well, maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T19:30:15.917" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T19:30:15.917" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10513" CreationDate="2017-07-13T08:02:55.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're not arguing that these questions should be reopened because they're quality questions, but rather because they can't be properly pigeonholed into any of the proper close-vote reasons provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from your comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not concerned with whether these are good or bad questions, but more with the reasons for closing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for closing a question in certain cases can be subjective, but the guidelines generally come from three places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The help center's guidelines&lt;/strong&gt; - these must be interpreted with some level of subjectivity, since no two questions are alike.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community consensus&lt;/strong&gt; - Since users often disagree about what questions deserve to be closed, this will never be truly consistent, although I agree with you that we ought to &lt;em&gt;strive&lt;/em&gt; for consistency, as I argue in my Meta post here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10496/what-widely-accepted-standards-should-be-used-to-judge-whether-a-single-word-req&quot;&gt;What widely-accepted standards should be used to determine whether a single-word-request is too broad?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderator discretion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The options provided to users when they cast a close vote are made available as a convenience and to allow for a &lt;em&gt;reasonably&lt;/em&gt; consensus-based explanation to be given to the user whose question is closed, so that if they wish to, they can improve the quality of the question so that it can be reopened.  But nature of off-topicness is inevitably subjective to some degree. Combine with that the massive number of close-worthy questions that appear on the site routinely and end up on review-queues, and it means that these reasons won't always fit just right.  That in and of itself isn't a reason to reopen a question.  Instead, craft an argument for why the question and its answers provide value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the reasons for close-voting have not always been the same; they have been subject to change based on requests in Meta like this.  For instance, there used to be a close reason called &quot;General reference,&quot; indicating that the question could be easily answered with general reference material and therefore was not suitable for the site.  I believe this reason was replaced with &quot;Please show the research you've done.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perhaps a reasonable request to make on Meta would be asking for the option of closing a question as&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;too narrow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this hypothetical question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; quite the opposite, it's seeking a very specific term, and certainly doesn't have &lt;em&gt;too many possible answers&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; either.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;demonstrates a level of research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comparable to many on-topic questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;unclear what the question is asking&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, in fact, it's very specific about what it is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;about the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;belong on another Stack Exchange site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, like ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;includes information on how it will be used.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly not asking for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;proofreading&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;What is a word for apples and oranges but not avocados or watermelon?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I work for a fruit stand and was wondering what labels to use for my&#xA;  fruit products.  I sell apples, oranges, avocados, and watermelon.  I&#xA;  keep the apples and oranges in one bin, because they're the most&#xA;  popular.  I keep the avocados in a separate bin because they can be&#xA;  bruised, and I keep the watermelon in their own bin as well because&#xA;  they're so large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've labeled the latter two bins &quot;avocados&quot; and &quot;watermelons,&quot; but I'm&#xA;  unsure what label to put on the bin that contains both apples and&#xA;  oranges.  I researched on Google and found a scholarly article that&#xA;  contained this chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z4QcZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z4QcZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gNkACAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA160&amp;amp;lpg=PA160&amp;amp;dq=hypernym%20for%20apples%20and%20oranges&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=QHwGLJaUwK&amp;amp;sig=J69IEuyqyE-MNV9JDNlmzmNBpuc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjIq5bo34XVAhVFFz4KHc55BGEQ6AEIUDAH#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=hypernym%20for%20apples%20and%20oranges&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Advances in Information Retrieval: 26th European Conference on IR Research&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to this chart, the common words would be &lt;strong&gt;edible fruit&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;  However, I searched in &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and found that&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;avocados&lt;/strong&gt; are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; an edible fruit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I express what is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in the first bin with a short label,&#xA;  preferably one word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An example sentence would be: &lt;em&gt;If you're looking for a ____, take a look at&#xA;  bin one, it has both apples and oranges, but not avocados.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point here isn't &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to be playful, but also to point out that there will be close-worthy questions that don't fit just right into any slot of close-vote reasons.  To some extent, users have to use their experience on the site, along with the guidelines and rules applied &lt;em&gt;to the best of their ability&lt;/em&gt;.  If a question is closed and a reason is provided, and one believes that it should be reopened, there is an expectation that significant changes are made to the question to enhance its quality and ensure that it adheres to the standards of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I noticed that a couple of the questions you cited have been reopened, or at least the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/399262/what-do-you-call-a-lady-being-proposed-to-by-a-man&quot;&gt;What do you call a lady who is proposed to by a man?&lt;/a&gt; has been opened as of this writing.  So to that extent, you've achieved your goal.  However, I thought this point about the nature of close-vote reasons is worth noting since there are numerous questions out there about which one could argue for reopening, and numerous questions left open about which one could argue for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This answer is, to some degree, at loggerheads with my own Meta question linked earlier, since I argue there for consistency, and here I'm arguing that consistency is not always possible.&lt;/strong&gt;  I think my overarching view based on the comments and answers I received there and elsewhere on Meta is that some level of reasonable subjective diligence is required, as well as a thorough understanding of the existing rules and guidelines.  Most importantly, we have to be aware that other users have different opinions about what types of questions are preferable for the site, and what types of questions are detrimental to the site, and if we don't take all of those views into consideration when we seek to close or reopen a question, we'll be stuck in a never-ending cycle of closure and reopening.  Such a cycle might make sense on a question whose merits are highly complex and worthy of strong debate, but if we all fought that hard over every question, we'd be constantly distracted and unproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T02:27:35.893" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T02:27:35.893" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T08:12:39.140" Score="10" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;I simply have to ask, and lash out (a tiny bit), about some of the comments and messages I have received on answers I've provided. I've had at least one moderator (I think?) and another senior member hounding me about my answers for the 8 days or so I've been on the ELU site. I will not name names as there is no point and it adds nothing to this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been scolded for improper citation. What is the proper citation form? I do try to cite all of my references when possible or relevant. However, citing a source does not somehow &lt;em&gt;magically protect you from copyright laws&lt;/em&gt;. There is a fair use clause for copyrights. I mean come on. Who doesn't know that? And, 'aha!', Google it? Yes? Sigh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have been told that I've answered questions which really should not be answered for any of the following:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They could be looked up on Google.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are direct dictionary requests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They should be answered and/or asked on the ELL site vs the ELU site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough on #2 and #3. But by this logic, especially #1, then what in God's name (I'm not religious by the way - that's emphatical on purpose and metaphorical) &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a proper question to be answered? By the very nature of the limitation that it must be something you can't Google then virtually no question &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen up folks. I'm not being pedantic and I'm not trying to play a semantic word game. This &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; illogical. Plain as day. What it comes down to is senior members and mods get to decide what they think is &lt;em&gt;&quot;appropriate&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and anyone else, no matter how virtuous their efforts, or intentions, is relegated to some &quot;bastard&quot; status for having answered an &lt;strong&gt;obviously&lt;/strong&gt; ineligible question. My God. Virtually 100% of questions should be ineligible in that case, using this logic, or this vague, &quot;well you have to use an educated guess&quot;, terminology (&lt;em&gt;which is really just code for: &lt;strong&gt;be an elitist member&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) for determining a valid question or answer post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find &lt;strong&gt;ANYTHING&lt;/strong&gt; online. So what in the world is the purpose of virtually &lt;strong&gt;ANY&lt;/strong&gt; question that is posted? Why not tell every user to go research it? Seriously, not just a dictionary request. But virtually anyone who is not an ELL type &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be able to go online and find their answer...period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong. I've said in comments on ELU, and I truly mean it, I absolutely do not mind constructive criticism, nudges, helpful hints, etc... In fact, I welcome those most of the time (as evidenced by very helpful members such as Mari-Lou, English Student, Lawrence, Jim, Yosef Baskin, RaceYouAnytime, sumelic, Andrew Leach, ab2, etc - apologize if I didn't mention you). But this has gone far beyond that and it's very unnerving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm fed up with (and was even commenting to Mari-Lou about that has me ready to leave altogether) is this apparent favoritism and elitism that is going on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what exactly are the factors for determining what is an appropriate question?&lt;/strong&gt; I've answered questions which have multiple upvotes and still gotten flack for that too! It appears to be obvious favoritism and I think it erodes the point of this site, the ability to help it's members who are asking questions, the ability to garner new, useful members, and it takes away a very valuable tool from the users (all of them - askers and answerers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My observation and hypothesis thus far is that there aren't any rules&lt;/strong&gt;. It's up to any of the senior members, or anyone in the senior member's circle of &lt;em&gt;&quot;elitist&quot;&lt;/em&gt; friends, to decide if they think it's appropriate. I find that quite despicable to be honest; so should anyone else reading this if that is the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would very much welcome thoughts, ideas, experiences, and so on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244135" LastEditorUserId="244135" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T21:26:38.250" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T23:30:24.797" Title="About EL&amp;U usage, purpose, and comments" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2017-07-13T09:52:29.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;An appropriate question follows all the basic advice on the &quot;Ask Question&quot; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J2jlN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J2jlN.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;How to Ask&amp;quot; advice from &amp;quot;Ask question&amp;quot; page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It must be about the English language. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There must be sufficient detail to allow a good answer to be provided. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There must be some evidence of prior research so we don't simply repeat what the asker has already easily found (or could easily find). Not showing prior research simply wastes people's time here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about a problem encountered when learning English, which can often be deduced with terms like &quot;Third Conditional&quot;, or the elementary omission of articles, then it may be better migrated to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we are doing users a disservice by assuming that they are intelligent enough to follow that advice, or to look around at how other questions have been asked and voted, or even to &quot;visit the help center&quot; since the link is presented. Or to read the tag info which pops up. Or even to have read the entire Tour (there's a badge for that, so whether someone has bothered to scroll to the bottom of that page is easily verified).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which show effort are generally well-received, upvoted and answered well. Questions which show very little effort tend to attract poor answers which may not help the asker very much, let alone anyone else &amp;mdash; and building a repository of knowledge is, after all, the aim of Stack Exchange. Or, a poor question will gain answers which don't actually give the answer the asker was looking for, because he hasn't been clear enough about what he &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no point in answering poor questions. Vote to close (or flag to close, if you have under 3k rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is primarily intended for &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts,&quot; as the Tour and the Help pages have it. Not every asker will fit into those categories: they have come here precisely because answers might be given by those people. But that description &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; provide some indication of the level of question which is expected: if you're expecting an answer about a specific point of English, then you need to state that specific point clearly. You need to follow all the help we can give through the system in order that your question is stated clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site description should also provide some indication of the level of answer which is expected. Some sites are very strict about removing one-line answers. Perhaps we should do more of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One issue we have is that most of the world's population has &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; ability in English, although most of that number are hardly even enthusiasts, far less linguists. So they find &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; and blithely type a barely coherent question which is eminently closeable under my three bullet points but is so bad that it can't even be migrated to ELL. The general policy is bluntly enunciated as &quot;Don't migrate crap&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; rules, and they &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; stated. Perhaps they could be stated better (suggestions welcome&amp;sup1;). Perhaps there is too much latitude given to questions which don't follow them (which leads to inconsistency and trying to guess how the rules are applied).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view is that &lt;code&gt;english.se&lt;/code&gt; should point to ELL, and that site can migrate to ELU good questions they receive which aren't related to learning the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; I wonder if &lt;a href=&quot;/help&quot;&gt;&quot;visit the help center&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in the Ask Question box might be changed to &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&quot;check your question is on topic here&quot;&lt;/a&gt; since all the other help available is listed in a sidebar. That box can only be changed by staff. (And, just to note, links in the text count towards the total number of characters and we only have a couple of letters or so to spare.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T09:58:32.853" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T09:58:32.853" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T11:55:42.607" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I requested that two accounts (and their rep) be merged; I followed the procedure provided, including the final acknowledgement after activating the two links emailed to me. As of this morning, the merge has not occurred. How long should this take to occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct account (the one I want remaining after the merge): &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/246168/jeff-zeitlin&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/246168/jeff-zeitlin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incorrect account (the one that I want absorbed by the other):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/246167/jeff-zeitlin&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/246167/jeff-zeitlin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246168" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T12:17:42.373" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T12:17:42.373" Title="How long does an account merge take?" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2017-07-13T14:45:30.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything, everything you said, is relatable, so very much, and I was you, three or four years back, and I left for almost a year, and returned when I overcame that initial awkwardness here, and I've stayed here ever since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this an initiation of sorts, like Josh commented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone who joins a Stack Exchange community (not just ELU), will definitely face some resistance at first, in some form or another, be it strongly worded comments, random unexplained downvotes, question closures, trolls, and whatnot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate that some people go away because of that and that we lose so much potential contributions from them, but it is what happens when you allow a lot of people from all over the world to interact online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you get past this phase soon and stay here and turn out to be one of our best contributors of all time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just an op-ed, not the party line here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T14:45:30.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2017-07-13T16:49:35.007" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of meeting your significant other's extended family for the first time around a major holiday. You'd probably sit at the table and observe how some aunts, uncles, and cousins are more soft-spoken while others are more cantankerous; some are more uncouth while others are more polite; some are more amiable while others are more confrontational. But a few years later (assuming you're still dating), you've become used to everyone, and you realize this is just differently personalities crammed into the same room – no one is &amp;quot;playing favorites&amp;quot; and there is no &amp;quot;elitism&amp;quot; going on around the table. And who knows? By then, maybe someone who rubbed you the wrong way that first Christmas is the one you look forward to seeing most next Thanksgiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've wisely refrained from naming names, but you're vague about your examples, so I don't know if you've been the victim of some pedantic tongue-wagging, or if you're simply misreading what was intended as helpful advice. As a new user, you'll probably get some of both, and it's easy to take things too personally and misinterpret the latter as the former. I'd suggest you give most people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are trying to be helpful, even when the comment is terse and seems to be blunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for those things you mentioned specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;They could be looked up on Google or are direct dictionary requests.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the bulk of our questions are too basic, that drives the better users away. Most of us are busy people, and none of the Stack Exchange sites are meant to be &amp;quot;Tier 1&amp;quot; support. Consequently, users shouldn't come here asking what a word means without checking a dictionary first, or come asking for a synonym without first scouring through a thesaurus. And when they have done such research, they should summarize what they found, and explain why they are still confused. Such questions are much more enjoyable to read, analyze, mull over, and tackle. (If you don't believe me, just mouse-over the upvote button on a question at the main site; it will say: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question shows research effort&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;They should be answered and/or asked on the ELL site vs the ELU site.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a comment might be directed at you, but there's a good chance it's meant to be a nudge for the OP as well. Most users who stumble on ELU are not aware of its target audience or of the availability of a site geared for learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I hope that's helpful. Welcome to the table; please pass the mashed potatoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T16:49:35.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-14T07:48:45.533" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;A week or so ago we &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10447/50044&quot;&gt;updated some links&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;strong&gt;Closing &amp;rightarrow; Off-Topic&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, I started noticing something odd under &quot;&lt;strong&gt;off-topic because...&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The close reasons change order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of close votes, usually marked by blue, in the first window does not show up in the next.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This cannot be reproduced at will, because Murphy's law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mlw6D.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mlw6D.png&quot; alt=&quot;window 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jkh5Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jkh5Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;window 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="41761" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T08:28:43.513" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T08:28:43.513" Title="Close window oddity" Tags="|bug|status-completed|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10526" CreationDate="2017-07-15T06:25:38.973" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are a language site, and there's always a lot of off-topic &quot;proofreading&quot; questions incoming, and to those, poor answers from relatively new users, and this taxes our reviewers, and wastes our time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if senior users (with certain badges and reputation) could single-handedly put on hold proofreading questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, users with gold tag badge can close certain questions as duplicates, and other than that there is no existing setup to give regular users such power, and therefore if this was a feature-request it'd be difficult to implement, and such proofreading questions are probably a problem only to the language sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if this was possible though? Would it be beneficial? Or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;It's a snack for thought, not a feature request.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T01:47:55.687" Title="What if senior users could put on hold &quot;proofreading&quot; questions single-handedly?" Tags="|discussion|questions|vote-to-close|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2017-07-15T07:31:23.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few issues at play here. I'll highlight two: repository vs social factors, policy existence vs policy accessibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Repository vs social factors&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange was set up as a reference repository. Although it has now expanded into segregated silos with subject-matter unrelated to its programmer-centric roots, those roots still permeate Stack Exchange, as is evident in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company&quot;&gt;'about us'&lt;/a&gt; link at the bottom of every Main and Meta page (emphasis, mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is the largest online community for &lt;strong&gt;programmers&lt;/strong&gt; to learn, share their knowledge and build their careers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These roots help explain some of the peculiarities about Stack Exchange culture: questions must be &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt;, answers must be &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;, as well as &lt;em&gt;backed&lt;/em&gt; by logical argument or relevant authority, with relevant &lt;em&gt;citations&lt;/em&gt; linked for verifiability. The programmer's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RTFM&lt;/a&gt; reflex is consistent with the loathing that questions of a 'general reference' nature attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the other end of this spectrum, I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9303/142322&quot;&gt;maintained&lt;/a&gt; that social factors are just as important. If everyone came here just for answers, well, there wouldn't &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; any. Likewise, if everyone came here just &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; answer, we'd have the same problem. Furthermore, if everyone was a passerby, community moderation would fall apart. Like it or not, the culture at EL&amp;amp;U is integral to the success of the site. And that culture depends on the people who stay for an extended term. It's vital to the health of the site to welcome new people, share with them why we do things the way we do, and what we value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being nice isn't just something tacked on. It's a core part of the broader Stack Exchange culture. Again, consistent with our programming roots, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;codified&lt;/a&gt; (you can find it in our help pages):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you've come to ask questions, or to generously share what you know, remember that we’re all here to learn, together. Be welcoming and patient, especially with those who may not know everything you do. Oh, and bring your sense of humor. Just in case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Policy existence vs policy accessibility&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/88521/286574&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood's flowchart&lt;/a&gt; is as good as it gets for pinning down an answer to when it's appropriate to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bShE3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bShE3.png&quot; alt=&quot;When to answer - Jeff Atwood's flowchart&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with many other policy matters, it's all there. If you can find it. It helps to have an eidetic memory, but even then, it can be like trying to find jewelry dropped on the beach. You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it's there, but the sand all looks the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information on Stack Exchange can be tucked away in the most unlikely places. For example, EL&amp;amp;U uses the asterisk convention to mark intentional instances of bad writing (used for illustration, say). It records that convention at the bottom of the page called &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;What topics can I ask about here?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many things are decided by voting, then left to the community to implement (and to remember). You can often find stuff by searching the Meta pages. If it gets overwhelming, the regulars are usually quite happy to lend a hand if you ask nicely in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;. If all else fails, post a new question on Meta (note that you're still expected to show your research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it boils down to is this: EL&amp;amp;U is a human community, not just a utilitarian repository. It takes time to find your way around, but people are willing to help. As with most large communities, it's almost expected that there will be differences of opinion. If you feel that things are getting out of hand, flag down a moderator. We have some really good ones here at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contribute answers when you think they'll be useful to later visitors, or if the question piques your interest. For look-em-up questions, a useful rule of thumb is to &lt;strong&gt;ask whether the value is in reading a dictionary or in knowing where to look&lt;/strong&gt;. Recall the anecdote about &lt;a href=&quot;http://calvincorreli.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;knowing which screw to turn&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS: going back to the 'be nice' policy - with respect to being &amp;quot;emphatical on purpose&amp;quot; in your Meta post, could I ask that you express your frustrations in a different way? You might not be religious, but some on this site are.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T23:30:24.797" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10524" CreationDate="2017-07-16T01:47:55.687" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've often thought that a &quot;weak&quot; close would be useful - a way for folks with some knowledge in a given area to quickly take a new question off the table so that it could be discussed, edited, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to prevent abuse would be to make the question re-open instantly if it was edited. Another would be to simply allow anyone with similar experience in the question's topic area to unilaterally &lt;em&gt;re-open&lt;/em&gt; - I've pondered that idea a bit more &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285889/lets-plan-the-second-iteration-of-the-stack-exchange-quality-project/286001#286001&quot;&gt;over on MSE&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said... You can actually get a lot of the benefits of such a feature &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;, without requiring major changes to the system: &lt;strong&gt;just downvote&lt;/strong&gt;. A single downvote on a new question is a pretty strong signal all by itself - it instantly marks the question as problematic when it appears in question lists, on the homepage, etc. If the downvote isn't countered, if no one ever bothers to try fixing it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year&quot;&gt;the system will eventually delete it automatically&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even better, it only takes 4 downvotes to knock a question off the homepage - even five close votes won't do that. The fewer people who see a question, the less chance anyone's gonna bother answering it, which - after all - is the whole point of closing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a sense, downvoting can already be considered a &quot;weak close&quot;, albeit without the automatic guidance and enforcement that comes along with closing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T01:47:55.687" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10529" CreationDate="2017-07-16T21:25:11.460" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user asks to check essay, are we allowed to do that or is that off-topic. I'm a little confused regarding that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227902" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T13:00:09.687" Title="Essay checking for user" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10527" CreationDate="2017-07-17T09:24:12.810" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply &quot;Please check my essay&quot; is off-topic and has been for a very long time. The reason is principally that it only helps one person: Stack Exchange seeks to be a repository of knowledge in Q&amp;amp;A form which will help others in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to check/correct an essay, it's quite likely that we would be assisting in completing some examination or test, which should be one person's sole work. It would be assisting in cheating. There are cases where that won't apply, but attempting to differentiate is Too Difficult, so there is a blanket ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An entire essay is (as Mitch has commented) &quot;way too much work&quot;. Have a look round at some highly-voted answers on  the site, and the amount of work which can be put into answering a seemingly simple, innocuous question. Scale that up to an essay. Which parts of the essay should get that treatment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; possible to apply a level of detail to a &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; point within an essay. The asker should choose a single aspect of a single sentence and ask a well-formed question about that. (Which indicates another issue with text-checking: generally it shows that the asker is lazy and can't be bothered to do any analysis of their own work. That doesn't go down well, as  a rule.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking texts is explicitly mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help pages&lt;/a&gt;, which explain that proof-reading is explicitly off-topic, and show how an acceptable question might be formulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;How can I ask about checking my text?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Checking a text is proof-reading. This site does not offer a proof-reading service where the community will read a text and suggest corrections. If you would like that, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=online+proofreading+service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online services available&lt;/a&gt;, a few of which are free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, this site can answer &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; questions about a &lt;strong&gt;particular&lt;/strong&gt; point in your text. You need to quote the passage, highlight the word you're uncertain about, and then explain why you're not sure about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is, not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Is the verb right in &quot;He has run the company for five years now&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;He has run the company for five years now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Is the verb has run correct here? If &quot;he&quot; is still in post, the action is still in progress, so should the verb be a continuous/progressive verb like He has been running? Does the inclusion of &quot;now&quot; make a difference here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The question &quot;Is the verb has run correct here?&quot; highlights what the question is asking about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;The action is still in progress, so should it be a continuous-aspect verb?&quot; explains the quandary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Does now make a difference?&quot; provides additional information about the question which answers might touch upon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that you should also include &lt;strong&gt;your own research into the query.&lt;/strong&gt; The example indicates that a little research may have been done with &quot;Should it be a continuous-aspect verb?&quot;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/a/5043&quot;&gt;research is needed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't forget to tag the question with tags which are relevant to the particular points you're asking about: [verbs][progressive-aspect] would be a reasonable choice in this example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T13:00:09.687" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T13:00:09.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10534" CreationDate="2017-07-18T01:42:37.760" Score="9" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three recent questions are much more suited for Literature SE, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the question about &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400246/pride-and-prejudice-what-does-decline-the-office-i-will-take-it-on-myself-m&quot;&gt;Pride and Prejudice, what does: “decline the office, I will take it on myself” mean?&lt;/a&gt;, which has an outstanding answer by @Kiloran_speaking, and another &lt;em&gt;P&amp;amp;P&lt;/em&gt; question,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400276/what-does-this-passage-mean-from-pride-and-prejudice&quot;&gt;What does this passage mean from ‘Pride and Prejudice’?&lt;/a&gt;, which has a short explanatory comment by anongoodnurse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt; question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400130/what-does-this-sentence-mean-from-dracula&quot;&gt;What does this sentence mean (from &amp;#39;Dracula&amp;#39;)?&lt;/a&gt;, which two users voted to send to ELL, which is not the correct place to send it. I understand the English in the Dracula question, but I am not sure what the passage means.  This is ideally suited for Literature SE to sink its teeth into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions go through the usual VTC/migrate route, or is there is shortcut?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T11:05:14.437" Title="Should we quickly send questions about literature to Literature SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10530" CreationDate="2017-07-18T05:06:05.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be a shortcut, and it should go through the usual VTC/migrate route. The logic behind the normal route is to prevent what would have happened if a shortcut, to ELL in this case, existed. With the idea of a shortcut in place the &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt; question would have (improperly) been migrated to ELL, and then rejected and returned here. The normal method requires more votes, hence more oversight, which increases the likelihood that only questions that deserve to be migrated &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; migrated, and that the target site is the best choice for that migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user239189" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T05:06:05.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T05:34:12.040" Score="7" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;My recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/400297/timeline&quot;&gt;community wiki answer on ELU&lt;/a&gt;, on migration to ELL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/136642/29183&quot;&gt;changed to normal&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that some people on ELL will think that I'm copypasting others' comments for rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T09:46:44.670" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T09:46:44.670" Title="Community wiki answer changes to normal on migration?" Tags="|bug|migration|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10530" CreationDate="2017-07-18T05:40:30.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has to be a significant number of questions that need migration to a particular site before we include such a site in the usual migration close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've not read those linked questions, but there is this 'shortcut'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to improve it and, if you're sure it's on topic for the target site, custom flag for a moderator's attention and ask for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T05:44:09.673" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T05:44:09.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10530" CreationDate="2017-07-18T08:19:05.780" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literature.SE has a brief list of what's on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about how to interpret a specific scene, quote, theme, plot point, etc. in a work of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specific questions about the publishing process, literary conventions, or tropes in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Story and quote identification questions: if you can't remember a story or a quote, we can help you. Please be as detailed as possible when asking these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two questions you cite don't obviously fit into those categories: they are simply asking &amp;quot;What does this collection of words mean?&amp;quot; and are therefore on-topic here [subject to our rules about prior research etc.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third probably does: that asks &amp;quot;Does he mean that he has made up his mind to become a vampire too if Mina became one, or that he wants to use his love to help Mina ascend to heaven if Mina became a vampire?&amp;quot; That question probably assumes some knowledge of the work, and would appear to fall into category (1) on Lit.SE's list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you mean by a shortcut. &lt;strong&gt;There are no shortcuts.&lt;/strong&gt; Stack Exchange has a defined route for migration, via the close-vote/flag process. In some instances, another site is explicitly mentioned in the close dialog (&amp;quot;This question belongs on...&amp;quot;); in most cases, it isn't. &lt;strong&gt;Beta sites are never offered explicitly.&lt;/strong&gt; This is because they may never graduate — until that point there is no guarantee that the site will stay available as a migration target. It is also the case that there should be a significant number of migrations to a particular site before it's offered as an explicit option. It's not a moderator customisation, and staff will need evidence that the change is justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community involvement is important in migration, particularly while a target site is still defining its parameters. That said, moderators have been elected to make this sort of decision on behalf of the community [among other things], and can do so unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you feel that a question should be migrated, vote to close. Others may well agree with you. If you feel that there is a &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; bad mischaracterisation of a question and it is definitely off-topic on ELU because it requires the specialist knowledge offered by another site, then VTC (with a custom close reason mentioning &amp;quot;...because it belongs on [Literature.se]&amp;quot; and perhaps raise a custom flag as well. Bear in mind that a flag may be declined if a moderator does not feel that a unilateral action is justified; we may well ask the moderators of the suggested target site to see if they will accept the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members with between 15 and 3000 rep can flag to close, which puts the question into a review queue where &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; close votes can be cast. A custom flag for moderator attention can also be raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T11:05:14.437" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T18:44:43.300" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have  the  info pages been introduced recently? (or have I failed to see them so far?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T07:21:48.057" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T02:54:59.013" Title="Information about info pages!" Tags="|support|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10535" CreationDate="2017-07-18T22:06:48.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they are as old as the hills. Looking at the history of the single-word-request info page, for example, there is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/62FFG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/62FFG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tag info history&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That one is over six years old. It's now at revision 17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the pages shown clicking the &quot;Info&quot; link in the tag pop-up, although not every tag has had one written yet:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OPjHl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OPjHl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tag pop-up&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that &quot;info&quot; link needs to be re-worded. I don't know why it's not &quot;more info&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T22:06:48.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10535" CreationDate="2017-07-18T23:07:08.250" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, this feature was introduced in 2010:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2010-07-22: &quot;Info&quot; tab of tags, including a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/create-a-tag-homepage-faq/49723#49723&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57479&quot;&gt;tag synonym proposal system&lt;/a&gt; implemented.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99024/323179&quot;&gt;Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it predates the site by two weeks. This site—and its &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community user&lt;/a&gt;—were created on 2010-08-05.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visibility has also been noted as a problem before, on other sites at least. (Nothing has been changed however.) Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta Stack Overflow: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/323800/6083675&quot;&gt;Should tag wikis get more exposure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/179500/323179&quot;&gt;Highlighting the Tag Wikis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main Meta (after the tag popup revamp): &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/314150/323179&quot;&gt;Accessing extended tag info is almost impossible&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T02:54:59.013" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T02:54:59.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10549" CreationDate="2017-07-19T08:03:06.617" Score="6" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need feedback and an authoritative answer for my question on &lt;em&gt;who/whom&lt;/em&gt;, but I now feel my current bounty is a little small for the purpose. How can I increase the bounty I just posted on this reopened question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading up in this topic, I found that there have been many previous feature requests, especially at meta.SE, asking why a bounty cannot be increased after setting it. In fact the bounties FAQ don't seem to make it explicit that a bounty cannot be increased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I originally thought 100 points is a good bounty and I could raise it to 200 if required. I just don't understand how it could possibly be unfair to the first answerers: increasing the bounty would certainly not make their answers 'ineligible' in any way to receive the increased bounty, would it! [In fact if picked they would be better rewarded with a higher bounty.]&#xA; Because any answer being not good enough is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; my reason for increasing the bounty: I just felt I should have posted a bounty of 200 in the first place, but I realized it a few minutes after posting 100. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it true that a bounty cannot be increased once set; and if so, why not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have added the feature-request tag and am willing to raise it as a separate feature request here if required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Question is reopened, and now there is a 100 point bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400197/how-do-i-choose-between-who-or-whom-when-the-subject-pronoun-is-murky&quot;&gt;How do I choose between ‘who’ or ‘whom’ when the subject pronoun is murky?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T12:57:56.440" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T12:57:56.440" Title="How can I increase the bounty I just posted on this newly reopened question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2017-07-19T09:10:02.343" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't we just prompt the user to provide context? On the page where you write your question, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Share your research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that should be expanded more. It should tell the questioner what is in it for them. For example, &quot;If you want good answers, then you must provide context.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7261" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T09:10:02.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10538" CreationDate="2017-07-19T15:53:18.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When no answer is &lt;em&gt;forthbringing&lt;/em&gt;, sometimes you gotta hunt it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP would like to increase his bounty from 100 to 200 on his &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400197/how-do-i-choose-between-who-or-whom-when-the-subject-pronoun-is-murky&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, according to the answer posted on Stack Exchange meta: &#xA;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138963/opened-a-bounty-for-lack-of-attention-now-i-want-to-increase-the-bounty-because&quot;&gt;Opened a bounty for lack of attention, now I want to increase the bounty because answers lack quality&lt;/a&gt;,”&#xA;once a bounty has been set, it is too late to change it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can't change an active bounty after offering it. Besides technical complications, I imagine it would be unfair to the users contributing answers at the time the original bounty was offered, because by changing it you're telling users that their once-eligible answers are no longer acceptable, thus wasting their effort in a way. […] @BoltClock's a Unicorn, Jul 7 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there is only one answer eligible for the bounty and I highly doubt the poster would protest or be overly upset if the bounty offered were doubled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An even older answer on SE Meta shows that this rule governing bounties has not changed since October 2009. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27839/increasing-the-value-of-a-bounty-after-setting-it&quot;&gt;Increasing the value of a bounty after setting it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To answer your question, no you can not change the bounty after offering it.&lt;/strong&gt;  Your options are to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Keep modifying your question every day of the bounty with new things you've tried to keep it active  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Allow it to run out; award the bounty and re-ask with new question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  @George Stocker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on rereading this answer carefully, I would not recommend either solution! It is not advisable to modify a question once users have posted answers, I would opine that it is unethical. And it is against current guidelines to ask the same question twice. However, the answer posted in 2009 did receive 9 upvotes, and no mod intervened to clarify or correct the statement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T05:05:35.060" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T05:05:35.060" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10538" CreationDate="2017-07-19T20:31:23.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you'll have to wait for the current bounty period to end, and in case you want to offer another one, it will have to be double the previous bounty, and that's by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a concrete answer, let's hope for one from a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See FAQ for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/309993&quot;&gt;more info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T20:31:23.780" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-19T21:41:50.557" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400036/word-to-describe-to-sit-in-quiet-anger/400069#400069&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (since modified, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/400069/1&quot;&gt;this is the version which got templated&lt;/a&gt;) I recently gave had the following template added to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer had included a word to use (&quot;fuming&quot;), a link to Wiktionary, a quoted definition of the word, and a quoted example usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no comment explaining what in particular was missing, no indication (at least on the mobile web site) as to who added it (presumably tchrist based on the post history of the question), and no link to a question on meta describing what to check for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching meta for &quot;context&quot; didn't get any hits about the &quot;answer lacks context&quot; template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastEditorUserId="1420" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T08:59:21.543" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T08:59:21.543" Title="Lack of context with this template" Tags="|discussion|answers|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10543" CreationDate="2017-07-19T22:08:37.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a four word answer: “Fume is another possibility.” Kudos for properly crediting the work of another author that you relied on when you wrote it. All it lacks is the comprehensive explanation and/or supporting facts which would help future visitors understand why it is the best (or a good) expert answer. This is what the template is getting at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for articles on the site which clarify the template, I can point you in two directions. First, the following help pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;how to answer&lt;/a&gt;”, which describes what's meant by providing context, including: “fuller explanations are better”, and “please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is &lt;em&gt;and why it’s there&lt;/em&gt;” (emphasis mine)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;deleted answers&lt;/a&gt;”, which describes some reasons a post might be deleted, including: “barely more than a link to an external site”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, at meta, the relatively recent question posted by a moderator about the specific problem of one-line answers to single word requests, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8040/14073&quot;&gt;On deleting low quality single-word-request answers&lt;/a&gt;”. Here the issue is that the mod queue repeatedly gets clogged with disputed low quality flags over one-line answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T22:45:30.637" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T22:45:30.637" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10543" CreationDate="2017-07-20T03:32:50.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that your answer lacks explanation per se, but that some people argue that your answer should consist of mainly your own words to make it an expert answer, which I agree with, but in my opinion, isn't mandatory every time, because knowing where to look and what to suggest itself require a level of expertise anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution to this I think is to limit answering to only those SWRs that actually require this expertise to identify words that fit the bill, instead of attempting every single request, because most of them are too broad and the possible answers can go up to 20 or 30.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T03:32:50.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10548" CreationDate="2017-07-20T08:42:15.197" Score="6" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt;, there's &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answering-advice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answering-advice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answering-advice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/appropriate-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;appropriate-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;appropriate-answers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/accepted-answer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accepted-answer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accepted-answer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/unanswered-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unanswered-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unanswered-questions&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answer-howto&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answer-howto&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answer-howto&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand what an accepted answer is, and also what an unanswered question is. However, I don't know the difference between &quot;advice&quot; about an answer, what is an &quot;appropriate&quot; answer, or a &quot;howto&quot; for answers. I don't even see how they're much more use than just posts about answers. Shall we burninate &quot;answering-advice&quot;, &quot;appropriate-answers&quot; and &quot;answer-howto&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I can't tell them apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's on-topic for meta, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very small amount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T09:26:45.807" Title="Seeking [answers] about these tags on meta" Tags="|discussion|tags|meta|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10546" CreationDate="2017-07-20T09:26:45.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with any of those tags, and I'm not even certain that the lack of any information for them is much of a problem either, I'm afraid. However, I haven't checked whether the existing questions which use these tags follow common sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these tags serve different purposes, and I believe that apart from the overarching &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; tag, there is not a great deal of overlap. I don't see any harm in grouping &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answering-advice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answering-advice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answering-advice&lt;/a&gt; questions together, and allowing those questions to be distinguished from &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/accepted-answer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accepted-answer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accepted-answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks about answers. Might go with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;support&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;, and could even be paired with other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answering-advice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answering-advice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answering-advice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks &quot;How should I have approached answering?&quot; Might go with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;support&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/accepted-answer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accepted-answer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accepted-answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paired with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;support&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt;, this is for questions like &quot;How do I unaccept an answer?&quot; (also see below) or &quot;Why didn't I get my +15 or +2 rep?&quot;, which would also need the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/reputation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reputation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; tag. Paired with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;, this might be used for &quot;Why was this answer accepted?&quot; or &quot;How do we unaccept an answer which is obviously wrong?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/unanswered-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unanswered-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unanswered-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for Meta questions about questions which do not have an answer (perhaps &quot;Is this question actually answerable?&quot;), or which Community&amp;nbsp;&amp;diams; has bumped because of its criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/answer-howto&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answer-howto&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answer-howto&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for asking about what steps to follow in order to post an answer, or maybe how to accept an answer. It would almost certainly be paired with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;support&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T09:26:45.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10538" CreationDate="2017-07-20T10:42:04.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existing answers by Mari-Lou and NVZ are entirely correct. The canonical FAQ is on MSE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; answer is correct as of the time of posting, and is specific to the circumstances described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties are bounties, and it's not possible to alter them once they have been set. Moderators do have some abilities, but they don't cover amending bounties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some circumstances, it's possible to cancel bounties, but the only circumstances where a bounty might be cancelled are to allow an egregiously off-topic question to be closed, or where the bounty notice is offensive, or some similar exceptional case. Your question is on-topic and there is no reason to cancel the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bounty can be manually awarded by the donor after its period has ended, to the answer the donor feels deserves it. If that doesn't happen within a reasonable time, then the system makes the decision: half of the amount is awarded automatically to the highest-voted answer written by someone other than the donor, scoring at least +2, which was posted after the bounty started. The bounty donor cannot receive the bounty, even if his answer is otherwise eligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, there is an answer which is eligible for that half-bounty award, so it's not appropriate for moderators to take action which could prevent that happening. That is, it would not be appropriate to cancel the bounty only to find that you didn't reinstate it. Indeed, if mods were to cancel the bounty and you &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; reinstate it, that answer would not be eligible for an automatic award based on the increased amount, because it was posted before the new bounty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, one answer will get half the bounty if you don't award all of it. There is nothing stopping you starting another bounty; and, if you want to award the new bounty to a specific answer, there is a bounty notice which explicitly indicates that (&quot;One answer is exemplary...&quot; or similar wording).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: if you think the existing eligible answer is worth more than +100, award the existing bounty explicitly and then start another bounty with the intention of awarding that as well. As NVZ has written, the new bounty will need to be double the previous one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't think the existing eligible answer is worth even +50 of the 100 you have sacrificed, I'm afraid you're out of luck. That's the gamble with bounties: a bounty effectively buys an advertisement, and someone who answers the ad well is eligible for a reward which comes out of that fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you wait for the current bounty to end and then start a new bounty, only answers posted after the new bounty starts are eligible for the automatic half-award. So if you feel that it may be possible to get even better answers with a new bounty, you can encourage them. It's not necessary to post a new question; but if you do feel another question would help, it needs to be sufficiently different that it's not a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T11:09:27.417" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T11:09:27.417" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T11:31:02.070" Score="14" ViewCount="2186" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was some good material in the blog that EL&amp;amp;U used to have. This Meta post brings back some of them, with each blog post preserved as an individual answer below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Index&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10551/142322&quot;&gt;Why did I delete your answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10552/142322&quot;&gt;You Could Look It Up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10553/142322&quot;&gt;Chat vs Comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10554/142322&quot;&gt;Good English = Effective English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10555/142322&quot;&gt;How we talk about future situations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10556/50044&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl Interview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10558/50044&quot;&gt;One Language, Many Voices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10559/50044&quot;&gt;The Give That Keeps On Gifting: The Protean Nature of English Words, and Why That’s A Good Thing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10560/50044&quot;&gt;Much Ado About Possessive Apostrophes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10561/50044&quot;&gt;Looking Up a Gun: Common English Words with Nordic Origins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10562/50044&quot;&gt;Prescriptivism and Descriptivism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10563/50044&quot;&gt;That vs Which: A Pragmatic Approach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10564/50044&quot;&gt;Typography: Striking Language (part 1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10565/50044&quot;&gt;Writing Good ‘Meaning’ Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10566/50044&quot;&gt;Book Review – The Adventure of English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10567/50044&quot;&gt;Getting into the spirit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10568/50044&quot;&gt;Adspeak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10569/50044&quot;&gt;The Basics of Limerick Composition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10570/50044&quot;&gt;Themed Questions: Wars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10571/50044&quot;&gt;Articles: “A” vs. “An”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10572/50044&quot;&gt;What are you on about now? (Prepositions: on vs about)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10573/50044&quot;&gt;Proofreading Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10574/50044&quot;&gt;How to Ask out an Apple&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10575/50044&quot;&gt;Good things from 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T10:36:36.927" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T10:36:36.927" Title="English Language &amp; Usage - Blog Archive" Tags="|discussion|faq|blog|" AnswerCount="24" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-20T11:48:30.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2015/11/why-did-i-delete-your-answer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why did I delete your answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Matt Ellen 2015-11-13, filed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/learning-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine someone has a question about physics, say “How can I figure out the acceleration due to gravity?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A physicist answers with “You can throw a bowling ball from various floors of a multistorey building.” The physicist knows in their head the experiment they would perform. It’s so obvious to them that they skim over the details and say what they see to be the key points, and assume that the person asking will figure the rest out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that a non-physicist has asked the question, and they don’t know the details that the physicist skimmed over. If they did, they maybe wouldn’t have to ask the question. Thus, the person asking the question is little better off than they were before asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine this is a single word request:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Word for staring wide-eyed at a TV&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw my son staring wide-eyed at the television. His face looked so comical to me. Is there a word to describe such wide-eyed staring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’d like to use it like “My son was staring at the TV last night, it was so funny to see.”, but I don’t like staring because it doesn’t emphasise his wide-eyed-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a word that would better describe what I mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there is the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you’re looking for &lt;em&gt;goggling&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you and I know that is a good word for the situation, but is it a &lt;strong&gt;helpful answer&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’re wondering, then let me tell you: it’s not. The Stack Exchange system itself will parse it and flag it as “low quality” and it will garner a comment from a moderator or other concerned member and then, if no improvements are made after a week or so, it will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the asker now has a word to fill their gap, but the answer does not explain why goggling is fit for the purpose. The asker has no context to decide if this answer is the best fit, and no way to generalize the word to fit other situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that important? The thing to remember is that the person who came here looking for an answer is unlikely to already know the answer. You don’t get many people who go around wondering “how many people know the word goggling?” (And I suspect most of those who do are crossword designers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone doesn’t already know the answer, then the details are important. When you suggest a word for a given context, you need to explain why it fits the context so that when they try and use it in the future they have a grasp on how the word works and what its connotations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know many of you might complain that they should look it up in a dictionary. We’re a site for serious English language enthusiasts, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is irrelevant. An answer needs to be complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to entertain that idea for a moment. Most of our users are not serious enthusiasts. Most people come here looking for an answer and leave with one, without ever posting anything. That is the beauty of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why it is so important to leave a complete answer. With only half an answer, people will only half understand how to use a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does a better answer look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you’re looking for &lt;em&gt;goggling&lt;/em&gt;. It’s from the verb &quot;to goggle&quot;, which means to stare at something with your eyes wide open and an amazed look on your face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instantly this answer is a lot more helpful. By adding a definition the answer now gives a clear explanation why the word is suitable. Also note that the definition isn’t from a reference. When giving the explanation a reference can be useful, but if you have your own way to articulate the meaning, then that is fine, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do use a reference it is essential to cite your source. If you copy and paste without citing your source the answer will be deleted as plagiarism. With a reference the answer would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you’re looking for &lt;em&gt;goggling&lt;/em&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/goggle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt;, to goggle means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Look with wide open eyes, typically in amazement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important points to remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are writing an answer for someone who doesn’t know anything about the word you’re suggesting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An answer needs to explain the word in order for it to be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are copy/pasting a definition you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; cite where you got it from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T16:16:38.233" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:16:38.233" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T23:13:57.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-20T14:33:01.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/12/you-could-look-it-up/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You Could Look It Up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by StoneyB 2012-12-17, filed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has been “Closed as General Reference”. That raises more questions: What does that mean? Why was it closed? What should you do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What Does It Mean?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, what it &lt;em&gt;doesn’t&lt;/em&gt; mean. It &lt;em&gt;doesn’t&lt;/em&gt; mean “Your question is worthless. Don’t bother us.” It &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; doesn’t mean “You are an illiterate cretin. Go away” — although some people take it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Closed&lt;/em&gt; means “Closed for repairs”.  And &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt; means “You could look it up.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why Was it Closed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s very easy to answer: we believe that your question (as it stands) can be answered by consulting a standard online reference work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes a lot more sense for you to do that than us. If you look it up you will find not only the answer to the question you asked but also the answers to many other questions you might have intended to ask that we don’t know about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also get your answer faster, since you won’t have to wait for one (or more) of us to perform the lookup and incorporate the results in a Witty and Incisive Response. (Wit and Incisiveness are hard to achieve, and a good Response can take a long time to compose.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And: you may also learn something about what online resources are available to you, and what they offer which might satisfy future needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What Should You Do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends.  Very often people will have posted an answer to your question, or will have posted what amounts to an answer in the comments. If all you’re interested in is the answer, you’ve got it: you’re done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn’t get a satisfactory answer this way, do what the Closed banner tells you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Look it up.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, people will often post a link directing you to an appropriate online reference. If not, a lot of useful references are listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/list-of-general-references&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. These lists are particularly valuable for the comments which accompany them. The works fall mostly into four broad categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dictionaries&lt;/strong&gt; provide far more than just definitions: etymologies, examples, citations, and often brief notes on “standard” usage (debate rages over what exactly that means, but that’s instructive, too). &lt;em&gt;Don’t consult just one&lt;/em&gt;: Dictionaries vary greatly not just in overall quality but in the value of individual entries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thesauruses&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;thesauri&lt;/em&gt;, or even more piquantly &lt;em&gt;thesauroi&lt;/em&gt;) are useful for recalling words you can’t quite remember, but they don’t usually tell you much about which synonym you should use where. But they can be fun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corpora&lt;/strong&gt; provide many more examples of actual use of a word or phrase than dictionaries, and can be particularly valuable guides to when and how synonyms differ.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Style guides&lt;/strong&gt; are the best source for prescriptive rules of grammar, syntax, spelling, punctuation, and documentation. They all differ in many details, however; select the one that is recommended by your school or discipline or (if you are so fortunate as to have one) your publisher.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hint: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OneLook&lt;/a&gt; is a very useful tool: input a word or phrase and it returns you links to many dictionaries and other references conveniently listed on one page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if these references don’t provide you what you need? — no reference work can answer all questions. In that case, come back to ELU and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Fix your question.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; immediately beneath your post and rewrite it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tell us what you’ve found out, and focus our attention on what your research leaves unanswered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If anybody left useful comments, address those.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give us as much context as you can. What is it you’re trying to understand (or say)? Who said it (or to whom do you want to say it), where and when? What &lt;em&gt;register&lt;/em&gt; are you concerned with? — formal, colloquial, vulgar?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don’t forget to change your title Question to fit the new content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more you can tell us, the better we can answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’ve got at least 20 rep, you can pop over to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (the link’s at the top of the ELU page) for help. There’s usually somebody around to hold your hand. And if you fix it all by yourself, come by Chat when you’re done and report it. It takes a moderator or five high-rep users to get your question reopened, so you want to draw their attention to the work you’ve done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trust me. That’s how you get a Witty and Incisive Response—or several. That’s how you get Upvotes and Reputation. That’s how you learn to use resources you never knew about. That’s how you Make Friends and Influence People.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could look it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:25:43.943" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T23:12:26.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-20T14:37:11.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2013/07/chat-vs-comment/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chat vs Comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Matt Ellen 2013-07-11, filed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello my friend! How are you doing? It is good to see you around these parts, the Stack Exchange network is a lovely part of the Internet where we can all help each other to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, though, there are rules by which we should abide if we want to keep this place friendly and free of noise. Hey, now, do not look like that. It is true there are many rules, but they are normally quite useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I want to tell you about how to communicate with your fellow Stack Exchange users. For example: you have seen something someone has written and you disagree. You are a polite person, so you do not think you should just downvote and leave. I admire your style. Communication is good. At Stack Exchange we are allowed to make comments on people’s posts to ask for clarification and to point out mistakes. Obviously we do this in as friendly a way as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh? You cannot comment? I see, I see. Do not be troubled. Comments are a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt;, which is earned by attaining 50 reputation points on this site. It is a mere trifle. You will find that by contributing good quality answers and questions you will be there in a few days, maybe even less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that comments are not permanent parts of the site and they get deleted when they outlive their usefulness. Ideally the useful information in a comment will be integrated into the post the comment is on, thus making the comment redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you should understand that the main site is not for discussion. Comments should not be used to discuss a topic at length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are quite right. Sometimes discussion is useful, or necessary. For that there is another place! It is a wonderful place, really. There is much adventure to be had. We call this place &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. The ability to chat is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt;, but it has a lower bar. Only 20 reputation points are required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is used for discussion, yes, but the discussion can roam from being purely about topics on the main site. Many times people wander in with simple questions, questions that might not be suitable for the main site, and ask them in the chat room. This is fine, encouraged even. There is of course a lot of other discussion going on there too, it can get quite frenetic, but do not be afraid to jump in. Be courteous and not pushy and you will be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One excellent trick you can do with chat is to take a discussion in comments and move it to a chat room. This is useful if you think the discussion will become long. Also, if you would like to chat with someone, but they and you are finding the main room too difficult, you can create your own room. The new room will be public, but people generally do not stray from the main room unless they are invited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, my friend, I hope you stay a while. There is a lot you can learn, and maybe a lot you can teach! We will be glad to hear from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:24:32.797" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T23:14:37.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-20T14:41:59.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/12/good-english-effective-english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good English = Effective English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Barrie England 2012-12-03, filed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech and the written language differ in many ways. Speech developed before writing and we learn to speak before we learn to write. For a long time there was no written language at all, and there are languages that have no written form. That is not to say we can say what we like and hope to be understood. Speech has its rules. In English, we must say, ‘Shut the door’ rather than, ‘Shut door the’ or ‘Shut of door’, and we must say ‘streets’ rather than ‘street, street’ when we mean more than one. Anyone who applies such rules consistently speaks correct English. The only people who don’t are those who have yet to learn them: infants and those who are learning English as a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many varieties of spoken English and there is no reason to suppose that one variety is linguistically superior to any other. At the same time, we do well to use a spoken language that is tolerably close to that of the people with whom we expect to spend most of our lives. For the middle-class, that means adopting the dialect known as Standard English. It can be spoken in any accent, but is often associated with the accent of educated people living in London and the south-east of England. But it’s no more and no less correct than Midlands, Liverpool, Tyneside, Indian, Australian or Caribbean English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written language derives from speech, but we have to make a deliberate attempt to learn it. Some fail to do so, even when they speak their native language fluently. We have to encode our thoughts as arbitrary marks on paper or the screen and interpret similar marks produced by others. Like speech, different kinds of written language suit different circumstances. An email or text message in a variety of language that many of us would not understand is perfectly appropriate between people who do understand such language. The question of whether or not it is correct simply does not arise. However, such language in, say, a job application or a Times leader would be unacceptable, and consequently ineffective, if it was incomprehensible to its readers, or if it simply antagonized them. That seems to me a more important consideration than whether or not it conforms to someone’s idea of correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who commit words to print should consider what they are trying to express, who their readers are, and whether the chosen language will succeed in conveying the message clearly without hesitation, repetition or deviation. And it is helpful if, in writing which is destined to be read by a large number of people whose linguistic backgrounds we cannot know, we agree on certain conventions. These conventions include punctuation, spelling, and choice of vocabulary and structures. In speech we generally know personally our audiences. In writing, too, we will sometimes know our readers and we can adapt our language accordingly. Quite often, we will not. In those cases, a certain commonality is required to avoid chaos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read a sentence I ask not so much, ‘Is it correct?’ but, ‘Do I want to read any more of this stuff?’ ‘Getting it right’ means successfully using language to achieve the purpose intended, not necessarily complying with a set of rules. Achieving the purpose intended includes producing the response on the part of our readers thaty we want them to have. Placing the emphasis on effectiveness rather than correctness seems to me more likely to produce the desired result. The alternative seems to suppose that once you have complied with the rules laid down by this or that authority you have done all you need to. That is far from the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:22:37.377" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T23:14:58.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-20T15:30:13.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2015/09/how-we-talk-about-future-situations/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How we talk about future situations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by tunny 2015-09-07, filed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/category/learning-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People learning English are often confused by the many ways in which it is possible to talk about future events. They are not helped by the fact that some writers (eg, Sinclair {1}) claim that the construction with will in front of the base form (bare infinitive) of the verb is the &lt;strong&gt;future tense&lt;/strong&gt;, while others (eg, Quirk et al {2}) claim that there is &lt;strong&gt;no future tense&lt;/strong&gt; in English. Learners who have read in one book (eg, Thomson and Martinet {3}) that the &lt;em&gt;BE + going to&lt;/em&gt; form expresses the subject’s &lt;strong&gt;intention to perform a future action&lt;/strong&gt; will wonder what intention is present in &lt;em&gt;It’s going to rain&lt;/em&gt;. Some course books appear to claim that there is only one way of expressing the future in any given situation, but learners will meet many native speakers who claim that several ways are often possible, and that there is no difference between them. In this blog post, I hope to clear up some of the confusion. Let’s begin by making two clear points: 1. There is little point in considering that English has a future tense. It is more realistic (and helpful) to think that there are several ways in English of expressing &lt;strong&gt;futurity&lt;/strong&gt;. 2. Although each of the ways expresses a different way of looking at future situations, the speaker often has completely free choice at the moment of utterance, and there can be some overlap of meaning. There is often no single—or even ‘most appropriate’—form for a given situation. Now let’s look at the five most common ways of talking about future situations. We’ll do this by considering what forms are possible for the example &lt;em&gt;“Lindsay (fly) to New York next month”&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. The present simple (non-past, unmarked) tense  – &lt;em&gt;Lindsay flies&lt;/em&gt;…&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, as in many other languages, the so-called ‘present’ tense functions more like a default tense; it is used when there is no need for any additional temporal or aspectual information carried by other forms. The time of the situation denoted by the present simple tense of the verb can be past, present, future, or even unspecified. Let’s look at Lindsay’s future flight. If we imagine the speaker mentally seeing Lindsay’s schedule, and presenting a neutral fact without any of the overtones suggested by other ways of expressing the future (which we shall come to below), we can simply say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;flies&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The futurity is shown by the context (for example, the previous mention of a schedule) or by explicit-markers (such as &lt;em&gt;next week&lt;/em&gt; in the example above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. The present progressive (continuous) – &lt;em&gt;Lindsay is flying&lt;/em&gt; …&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better name for this aspect might be &lt;strong&gt;durative&lt;/strong&gt;, as it is used when the speaker wishes to indicate both that the situation spoken of has duration and that that duration is limited. The fact that the situation has a beginning and an end, and that these are not considered remote in time, is more important than precisely when these occur. Consider these three utterances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. I am writing some notes about the English language. 2. The number 22 tram is running through Florence this week. 3. I am meeting my wife at the pub this evening.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1), the limited duration of the writing is clearly understood from the context. In (2), the known context of the normal route of the 22 tram (which does not usually include Florence) confirms the limited duration of the situation. It is perfectly correct for this to be said at 3 a.m., when no number 22 tram is actually running. I, the speaker, can say (3) because I know that my wife and I arranged the meeting this morning. The arrangement to meet has limited duration – it began this morning and ends when we actually meet. Considered this way, it is useful to think that one of the ways of using the progressive form is to indicate an arrangement. If an arrangement of limited duration is what the speaker has in mind, then the example sentence is now realised as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay is flying to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the present simple, the futurity is shown by the context or by explicit time-markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. BE + going to – &lt;em&gt;Lindsay is going to fly&lt;/em&gt;…&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms with &lt;em&gt;BE + going to&lt;/em&gt; possibly originated in such utterances as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. We are going to meet Andrea at the cinema.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These types of phrases are spoken when we were literally &lt;em&gt;going&lt;/em&gt;, as in ‘on our way to meet Andrea’. At the moment of speaking there was present evidence of the future meeting. This use has become extended to embrace any action for which there is present evidence – things do not have to be literally moving. Consider now these two utterances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. Look at those black clouds. It’s going to rain. 6. Luke is going to see Bob Dylan in concert next year.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (5) the present evidence is clear – the black clouds. In (6), the present evidence may be the tickets for the concert that the speaker has seen on Luke’s desk, or it may simply be the knowledge in the speaker’s mind that s/he has somehow acquired. This explains why, when the grammatical subject of the verb is capable of planning, there may be little practical difference between the use of the progressive form and the &lt;em&gt;BE + going to&lt;/em&gt; form. However, with a grammatical subject incapable of planning, there is a difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. I am meeting my wife at the pub this evening. 3a. I am going to meet my wife at the pub this evening.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. It’s going to rain. 5a. It’s raining. 5b. &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt;&lt;del&gt;It’s raining tomorrow&lt;/del&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (3), the speaker has made the arrangement with their wife. In (3a), the present evidence can be any or all of the speaker having made the arrangement, having been informed by their wife of the arrangement, or having recently made a plan. The circumstances surrounding the situations in (3) and (3a) differ, but the practical result is the same: the speaker has free choice between the two forms. Neither is ‘better’, ‘more appropriate’, or ‘more correct’. In (5), the present evidence is something like the presence of black clouds, or the speaker’s knowledge of the weather forecast. In (5a), it is impossible for an arrangement to be made for future rain, and therefore the progressive form used here cannot be referring to future arrangement. The context will therefore inform us that rain is actually falling as the utterance is made. The addition of a time-indicator cannot make the impossible possible, therefore (5b) is not a grammatical utterance. If the speaker has present evidence of next week’s flight, then the example will be realized as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;is going to fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. Modal will – &lt;em&gt;Lindsay will fly&lt;/em&gt; …&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Will&lt;/em&gt; is a modal and, like the other modals, has two core ideas. The two core ideas for most modals are: (a) the ‘extrinsic’ meaning, referring to the &lt;em&gt;degree of certainty&lt;/em&gt; of the event/state, and (b) the ‘intrinsic’ meaning, reflecting such concepts as: &lt;em&gt;ability, necessity, obligation, necessity, permission, possibility, volition&lt;/em&gt;, etc. The extrinsic meaning of  &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; is exemplified in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;7. Emma left three hours ago, so she will be in Manchester by now. 8. There will be hotels on the moon within the next 50 years. 9. The afternoon will be bright and sunny, though there may be rain in the north.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all three examples, the speaker suggests 100% probability, i.e. absolute certainty; (&lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; would imply possibility, &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; logical certainty, to take examples of two other modals). Note that while certainty in (8) and (9) is about the future, in (7) it is about the present. It is the absolute certainty, in the minds of speaker/writer and listener/reader, that can give the impression that forms using ‘the &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; future’ are some way of presenting ‘the future as fact’. Some writers therefore call this form ‘the Future Simple’. Weather forecasters, writers of business/scientific reports, deliverers of presentations, etc., frequently use &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;, and learners who encounter English more through reading native writers than hearing native speakers informally may assume that it is a ‘neutral’ or ‘formal’ future. In fact the particular native writer or speaker is simply opting to stress certainty rather than arrangement, plan or present evidence. The intrinsic meaning of &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; is exemplified in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;10. I’ll carry your bag for you.   11. Will you drive me to the airport, please?   12. Jed will leave his mobile switched on in meetings. It’s so annoying when it rings.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples show what we might loosely call &lt;em&gt;volition&lt;/em&gt;, the willingness or determination of the subject of the modal to carry out the action. Note that (12) is not about the future, and in (10) and (11) the futurity is incidental. It is context rather than words which gives the meaning. So, our original example can clearly be realized as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay will fly to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without expanded context or co-text, we cannot be sure of what is implied by Lindsay will &lt;em&gt;fly&lt;/em&gt; . If the background has been that she is scheduled to fly next month, but there is an urgent need for her to be in London soon, the speaker of this utterance is indicating Lindsay’s willingness to fly earlier than intended. In a different context, known to both speaker and listener, the speaker is indicating the certainty of Lindsay’s flight tomorrow, possibly even because of the speaker’s own volition. Outside the context of gap-fill exercises this is not a problem. Note that some writers used to insist that for this way of expressing the future, &lt;em&gt;shall&lt;/em&gt; could (Alexander {4}) or ought to (Wood {5}) be used for first person forms. This ‘rule’ was never true except for a minority of speakers of BrE, and can safely be ignored by learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;5. Modal will+ progressive – &lt;em&gt;Lindsay will be flying&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… &lt;em&gt;will be … -ing&lt;/em&gt; can have two possible overtones, both stemming from the combination of the ideas of certainty (&lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;) and limited duration (progressive form). The first possibility is that the speaker is describing a situation already begun, having duration, and not completed by the time mentioned or implied.This would be explicit in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;13. At 5 o’clock tomorrow Henry will be driving up the M6.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second possibility is that the speaker is more concerned with the pure certainty of the action happening than any volitional aspect that might be implied by the use of will by itself. This idea can be illustrated more clearly in the following examples. If someone says “I’d like to know what Joan thinks about this”, responses might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;14. I’ll see her tomorrow; I’ll ask her.  15. I’m seeing her tomorrow. I’ll ask her. 16. I’m going to see her tomorrow. I’ll ask her.  17. I’ll be seeing her tomorrow. I’ll ask her.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all four examples, the &lt;em&gt;I’ll ask her&lt;/em&gt; indicates the speaker’s willingness (confirmed by context). In the first half of the utterance, (14) indicates the speaker’s willingness to see her, (15) the speaker’s knowledge of an arrangement already made to see her, (16) the speaker’s awareness of present evidence of the future meeting and (17) the speaker’s simple presentation of the fact of the future meeting. It is claimed by some writers, with some justification, that the use of &lt;em&gt;will be …-ing&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;implies&lt;/em&gt;, by its lack of reference to intention, volition or arrangement, a ‘casual’ future, the ‘future as a matter of course’ (Leech {6}).. So, the realization of our standard example can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;will be flying&lt;/strong&gt; to London tomorrow.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other ways of talking about the future&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have looked at five common ways of expressing the future. We will now look very briefly at other ways. So far we have considered the five ways of referring to the future that are considered by some to be ‘tense’ forms: Present Progressive, Present Simple,  &lt;em&gt;BE going to&lt;/em&gt;,  &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;will be + …-ing&lt;/em&gt;. There are many other ways of referring to future situations, each with its own particular shade of meaning. Some of these are considered briefly below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BE + to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form is not common in informal conversation. It refers to something that is to happen in the future as a plan or decree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;is to fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common in news reports. In headlines &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; is frequently omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;18. Obama to meet Putin.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BE + about to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form is used to refer to planned future events that are expected to happen soon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;19. 2,300 workers at the Manchester factory are about to lose their jobs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The soon-ness often carries the idea that the subject is very close to the point of doing something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;is about to leave&lt;/strong&gt; for the airport.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other idioms with &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other expressions with BE which have some form of modal-type meaning (&lt;em&gt;ability&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;obligation&lt;/em&gt;, etc), and which point to the future. These include: &lt;em&gt;be able to, be bound to, be certain to, be due to, be likely to/that, be meant to, be obliged to, be supposed to, be sure to&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idioms with &lt;em&gt;HAVE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expressions with &lt;em&gt;HAVE&lt;/em&gt;, such as &lt;em&gt;have (got) to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;had better&lt;/em&gt;, have some form of modal-type meaning (&lt;em&gt;necessity&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;obligation&lt;/em&gt;, etc) pointing to the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay had better fly to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other modals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;, discussed earlier, other modals can also used with future reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;can fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt; (possibility/ability/permission)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;could fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt; (more remote possibility/ability)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;may fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt; (possibility/permission)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;might fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt; (more remote possibility/ permission)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;must fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt; (obligation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;should fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt; (possibility/suggestion)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expressions with &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt;, with some form of quasi-modal meaning (preference) pointing to the future, include: &lt;em&gt;would rather, would sooner, would just as soon&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Verb + &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;- infinitive&lt;/strong&gt; Some full verbs, such as &lt;em&gt;hope&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;, indicate that the action of the complement verb will be in the future (expressing future possibilities). Such verbs are usually followed by the to-infinitive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay hopes to fly to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include: &lt;em&gt;agree, ask, allow, aspire, attempt, cause, choose, consent, dare, decide, decline, encourage&lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; expect, hope, instruct, intend, offer, mean, need, permit, persuade, plan, prepare, promise, propose, swear, remember, tell, threaten, try, want, warn, wish&lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Some verbs (e.g. those marked with an asterisk above) can be followed by object + infinitive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John expects Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;to fly&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small number of verbs are followed by an object + bare infinitive, e.g. &lt;em&gt;have, help, let, make: Have Mr Smiley come in,  please&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verb + gerund&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a gerund follows a verb, or verb + object, the meaning is normally that the situations described are already in existence, i.e. they are not future situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay hated flying.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a small number of verbs followed by a gerund complement point to the future. These include consider, &lt;em&gt;contemplate, fancy, feel like, put off, suggest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lindsay &lt;strong&gt;is considering flying&lt;/strong&gt; to London next week.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 Sinclair, J (1990.255),  &lt;em&gt;Collins Cobuild English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, London: HarperCollins 2 Quirk, R et al, (1985.213),  &lt;em&gt;A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, Harlow: Longman. 3 Thomson, A J and Martinet, AV (1980.184),b &lt;em&gt;A Practical English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, 4th edn, Oxford: OUP 4 Alexander, L G, (1988.178), &lt;em&gt;Longman English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, Harlow: Longman 5 Wood, F T, (1954.219), &lt;em&gt;The Groundwork of English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, London: Macmillan 6 Leech, G (2004.68), &lt;em&gt;Meaning and the English Verb&lt;/em&gt;, 3rd edn, Harlow: Pearson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T16:23:47.473" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:23:47.473" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T23:15:24.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-20T16:04:55.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/grammar-girl-interview/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl Interview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-10-19 by Mr. Shiny &amp;amp; New, filed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who is interested in the English language and word history, I don’t just participate in English Language &amp;amp; Usage, I also read other blogs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl&lt;/a&gt;, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quickanddirtytips.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quick and Dirty Tips&lt;/a&gt;, is a good blog to read for English advice. She recently agreed to do an interview for us. I polled the community and we sent her these questions. Here are her responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did you choose the name Grammar Girl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It just popped into my head, and I liked the alliteration. In retrospect, I think it works especially well because “girl” is a very nonthreatening word, and a lot of people are anxious about grammar, so Grammar Girl seems approachable and friendly. Grammar Girl is someone who will answer your questions without making you feel stupid or embarrassed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do you come up with ideas for podcasts/posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the early days, I tackled what I knew were the most common questions (e.g., who versus whom) or things I struggled with myself (overusing of). Then I went through a phase during which I answered a lot of listener questions–the show often actually began with a recorded listener question. Then, when I started writing more books, I had a lot of guest writers contributing to the show, and they would suggest topics. Today, it’s still a mix of all those things. I mix reruns of the shows that cover the most common problems with listener questions, ideas from guest writers, and topics that appear in the news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What grammar-related question(s) do you get most frequently from your listeners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most common question is how to know when to use affect and effect. There are exceptions, but most of the time, affect is a verb and effect is a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s the most interesting, thought-provoking, or fun topic you’ve tackled lately? On the other hand, what question are you sick of hearing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’ve been doing small research projects lately. They’ve been popular, and I enjoy doing them. For example, I polled my Facebook followers to find out where people say “The car needs washed” instead of “The car needs to be washed.” It turns out dropping the to be is a regionalism, and that led to a lot of other interesting discussions about other regionalisms such as spendy (which is popular in Minnesota and Oregon) and bow up (which is mostly heard in the South). The studies aren’t scientifically rigorous, because the sample is just people who respond to my Facebook questions, but the results are still interesting. Frankly, I’ve answered all the common questions (affect/effect, who/whom, which/that) hundreds–probably thousands–of times, so I’m a little sick of all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems like many common grammar rules have exceptions. Are there any hard and fast grammar rules you believe in firmly, that don’t have exceptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes! A lot is always two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From EL&amp;amp;U moderator nohat: In &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;your article about the word class of than&lt;/a&gt;, you explain the prescriptivist objections to using “than” as a preposition, but also provide some arguments in its favor. In contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3447/i-can-run-faster-than-1-him-2-he/3483#3483&quot;&gt;I answered a related question on our site&lt;/a&gt; using two different corpora to show that than-as-a-preposition is in fact more common than than-as-a-conjunction. Have you considered using corpus-based approaches to answering questions of grammar? Corpus-based approaches have the benefit of bringing cold, hard facts to the table using logic and appeals to authority, but the authority of these facts might be hard to sell to your readership. The argument that “just because everyone says it that way doesn’t make it correct”, though specious, is, sadly, quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Great question! I’ve started doing more corpus-based research since I discovered the Google Books Corpus (Ngram), which then led me to investigate other corpora. For example, I did a Google Ngram search to track the rise of schadenfreude, which showed some interesting spikes that may correlate with a mention on the TV show The Simpsons and the popularity of the Broadway musical Avenue Q, which includes a song “Schadenfreude.” You’re right that many people don’t like the “it’s correct because everyone writes it that way” argument, but like it or not, that is one way language changes, and I’ve been looking through corpora and making that argument more and more lately. This isn’t a corpora-based argument, but on a related note, I recently decided to give up the fight for the traditional logic meaning of begs the question. I searched extremely hard to try to find a correct use in newspapers, magazines, and websites, but the “improper” use (using begs the question to mean “raises the question”) vastly outnumbered the proper uses. I literally searched through hundreds of articles and not one of them used it in the traditional way. When common usage swings that far in the “wrong” direction, it’s a lost cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From user Robusto: Is it ever worth the time and effort to correct someone else’s grating grammatical mistakes? In my experience, even when I phrase my suggestion in the gentlest possible way it never works well and I almost always wind up feeling pedantic, priggish, or even alienated.What’s the general opinion here? Is it best to just let these things slide or to take up the fight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it has a lot more to do with your personality and relationship with the other person than anything else. It’s always going to be fine to correct your children or your students if you’re a teacher, for example. But you start to get on thin ice when it’s a coworker or your boss or a stranger. I almost never correct people unless they’ve asked for help because in most instances it seems rude to me. On the other hand, I know a lot of people do want to correct others, so I’ve actually invited a guest writer who does regularly correct people to write a Grammar Girl podcast on the topic and give advice on how to do it as politely as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From user TRiG: What do you think of gender-neutral pronouns? I prefer the zie/zir set, but when I used them on our Christianity site, all kinds of unpleasantness broke out! Do you think these pronouns are offensive? If so, which set of gender-neutral pronouns do you prefer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’m not offended by the zie/zir set, but I think it’s hopeless to try to get them widely adopted. I strongly believe that they will be fine to use as a singular gender-neutral pronoun in the near future. People already use it all the time (especially in speech), there’s a long history of it in literature, and English desperately needs such a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, why don’t English nouns have gender, the way they do in French and Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don’t know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s your favorite bit of punctuation and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’m fond of the interrobang (‽): a combination of the question mark and exclamation point. An advertising man invented it in the 1960s and held a contest to determine the name. It was almost called an exclamaquest. It’s not on your keyboard, but you can insert it as a special character or symbol in some fonts. (The easiest way to use it online is to just cut and paste it from a site that has one.) I like it because it fills a need (much like they as a singular pronoun that we talked about a couple of questions ago). In English, you aren’t supposed to use both a question mark and exclamation point at the end of a sentence; you’re supposed to pick one of the other, but when it’s a surprised question (you did what?!), the desire to use both is strong. The interrobang fills the need, while letting you stick to the rule of only using one terminal punctuation mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of the other Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts, which is your favorite and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s like asking me which of my children is my favorite! I love them all equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Below are two examples from our top grammar questions. If you click the link you can see the answers our community came up with. What is your take on these questions? Do you agree with any of the answers you see on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/128/how-does-the-phrase-used-to-work-grammatically&quot;&gt;How does the phrase “used to” work grammatically?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the kind of question that people who are learning English often ask. They are much more interested in “what part of speech is this” kind of questions than native English speakers. The question people often ask me is whether the phrase is used to or use to. People have a tendency to slur their speech and drop the d in used, but used to (with the d) is the proper spelling in most instances. I tell people they can remember that by remembering that all regular verbs take an -ed in the past tense and used to is about the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5758/what-does-it-refer-to-in-its-raining&quot;&gt;What does “it” refer to in “it is raining” or “it is 2 o’clock”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5758/what-does-it-refer-to-in-its-raining/5763#5763&quot;&gt;One of the commenters in this thread is correct&lt;/a&gt;; it’s called an “expletive subject.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you think of the Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; site? Is it something you can see yourself or your listeners using? What is your favorite question on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reputation score is an essential part of the site; without that, you’d just have mess of people posting their opinions. I might use the site as a starting point for research, but even with the reputation scores, I’d still always verify anything I found there before using it in my own work. I like the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45054/what-is-the-origin-of-the-term-urban-legend&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the term “Urban Legend”?&lt;/a&gt; because I had never thought about it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On behalf of the EL&amp;amp;U Community, I’d like to thank Grammar Girl for taking the time to answer our questions, and I encourage our readers to check out her site for useful tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T00:10:49.630" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T00:10:49.630" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T11:35:04.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T02:39:32.313" Score="9" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Shall we support systematic A/B (and similar) testing of QI (Quality Improvement) proposals, or would advocating for such research simply lead to frustration, i.e., would it be an exercise in futility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I see what you mean...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an enthusiastic newcomer to EL&amp;amp;U, I quickly noticed a problem most of you have endured for many moons: the plethora of low-quality, help-me-with-this-crossword-clue, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word&lt;/a&gt; questions. I have endeavored to read previous EL&amp;amp;U Meta discussions on this topic, but if my query has been asked and answered before, point me in that direction please. :p)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, my question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Would you support systematic testing of proposed quality improvement methods?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I acknowledge that there are some 'unknowns' here. For example, I don't know exactly what 'systematic testing' would look like. Developing usability and effectiveness tests would require collaboration with the good folks at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;User-Experience.SE&lt;/a&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross-Validated.SE&lt;/a&gt;, in addition to the Stack Exchange staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hypothesis is that some potentially great ideas have not been implemented due to uncertainty or disagreement about their utility and effectiveness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of getting stuck in the deep mud of uncertainty, or in the quagmire of endless debate, let's start systematically testing quality improvement (QI) proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example #1&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to a post from @Shog9 on 15 Nov 2011, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt;, @Unreason suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the first thing that needs to be done is to &lt;strong&gt;make sure&lt;/strong&gt; that&#xA;  we inform the new user what is expected from them, namely that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;they should &lt;strong&gt;show&lt;/strong&gt; research or attempt at research in dictionaries and online encyclopedias&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;if the research failed that they should explain why or how&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many ways this can be incorporated into the site&#xA;  (personally, I am particularly fond of the idea that users under X&#xA;  points should click on 'I have done research' with every question they&#xA;  ask).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can do &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A/B testing&lt;/a&gt; on that idea! (&quot;users under X points should click on 'I have done research' with every question they ask&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example #2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 30 Jun 14, @tchrist posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;A simple proposal towards improving question quality&lt;/a&gt;, wherein he suggested adding a &lt;strong&gt;prominent banner&lt;/strong&gt; to be shown to newcomers on the 'Ask a Question' page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your&#xA;  question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found&#xA;  and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken&#xA;  the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious&#xA;  answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant&#xA;  answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@phenry offered a banner with different wording and hyperlinks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language and Usage! The key to getting a good&#xA;  answer is knowing how to ask a good question. Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Help&#xA;  Center&lt;/a&gt; for our guide to getting the information you're looking&#xA;  for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange works best as a supplement to basic research, rather&#xA;  than as a replacement for it. Many basic questions can be easily and&#xA;  quickly answered by consulting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available-online&quot;&gt;commonly available online&#xA;  references&lt;/a&gt;. If you've researched your question and haven't found&#xA;  an answer, tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs.&#xA;  Sharing your research helps everyone, and will help you get a more&#xA;  specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're not a fluent speaker of English, you may get a better answer&#xA;  if you ask your question at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, our sister&#xA;  community for speakers of other languages learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another A/B test! - Comparing the wording of one banner versus another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could post other examples, but I'm running out of steam and I think you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reiterate: &lt;strong&gt;Would you support systematically testing various strategies to improve question quality?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other great posts!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I also found these posts to pose great questions and/or different (and valuable) perspectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9414/improving-the-newbie-warnings-on-low-quality-answers&quot;&gt;Improving the newbie warnings on “low-quality” answers&lt;/a&gt; (2 Sep 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users&quot;&gt;Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users&lt;/a&gt; (10 Jan 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Am I wearing rose-colored glasses?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. I acknowledge that I might be overly optimistic about conducting such testing, given that similar research seems stalled...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285889/lets-plan-the-second-iteration-of-the-stack-exchange-quality-project&quot;&gt;Let's Plan the Second Iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality&#xA;  Project!&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  by @Tim Post on 17 Oct 2016 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We plan to test a new, 'guided' version of the ask question page soon.&#xA;  This page would essentially break down all of the elements that make a&#xA;  great question, and give the user plenty of guidance as to why it's to&#xA;  their advantage to understand what's needed in each of them, and&#xA;  provide it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll be announcing some tests within the next 3 or so weeks, as well&#xA;  as a survey that's shown to brand new users after they ask their first&#xA;  question. tl;dr; - we think we know how to optimize the ask page to&#xA;  get good results, but we want to confirm that we're correct here - or&#xA;  a really good idea might get shelved due to a series of poorly&#xA;  constructed tests. – Tim Post♦ Oct 25 '16 at 19:04 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did anything come of those tests, @TimPost? – Josh Caswell Jun 10 at&#xA;  16:29 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(no response as of 20 Jul 2017) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When will we hear about the outcome of this initiative/? – Raphael Feb&#xA;  5 at 19:29 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@Raphael 6-8 months/years. (aka the team is busy with other things.) –&#xA;  Shadow Wizard Jul 4 at 9:04 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@ShadowWizard As in, we all wasted our time (it may never happen, or&#xA;  things may be obsolete when it happens). Way to go! Next time, if you&#xA;  ask for several man weeks (?) of community feedback, please make plan&#xA;  beforehand on how you'll close the loop. Thanks. – Raphael Jul 4 at&#xA;  9:17 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nobody wasted time here. More announcements coming this week as things&#xA;  move forward. – Tim Post♦ Jul 4 at 12:12 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@ShadowWizard maybe it's just not yet time to take a stand on these&#xA;  matters – gnat Jul 5 at 6:06 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@Tim with all due respect (and there is respect, lots of it actually&#xA;  :)) the people who posted here wasted their time, and that's a fact.&#xA;  Proof? Let's take the top answer here, with 399 upvotes, posted almost&#xA;  year ago. You did post a promising comment, but those 3 weeks you&#xA;  mentioned turned into over 8 months now. So Robert has the full right&#xA;  to feel he wasted his time. I do not blame you. I do not blame anyone.&#xA;  Just stating the facts here. – Shadow Wizard Jul 5 at 6:16&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242381" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T02:39:32.313" Title="Would you support systematic testing of proposed quality improvement methods?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|research-effort|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T03:56:31.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2013/06/one-language-many-voices/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One Language, Many Voices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Barrie England, 2013-06-13. filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/etymology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘One Language, Many Voices’ was the title of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/learning/news/evolvingenglish.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an exhibition at the&#xA;British Library in&#xA;2010-11&lt;/a&gt; . It sums&#xA;up what English is and always has been. This simple truth is overlooked&#xA;by those who take a one-size-fits-all approach to language. An&#xA;historical perspective may help to set the record straight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has its origins in the various north-west European dialects&#xA;which were spoken by the tribes who invaded England from the middle of&#xA;the fifth century, and which displaced the native Celtic, which remains&#xA;only in a few words like &lt;em&gt;brock&lt;/em&gt; (badger), &lt;em&gt;cwm&lt;/em&gt; (valley) and some place&#xA;names. The surviving literature from the period allows us to identify an&#xA;Anglo-Saxon language, now usually known as Old English. However, the&#xA;texts we have still show dialectical differences, and it seems likely&#xA;that the spoken dialects of Old English were sometimes mutually&#xA;incomprehensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a period, the Wessex dialect was the most prestigious, showing that&#xA;then, as now, any one variety of the language predominates not for&#xA;linguistic reasons, but for political, economic and social reasons.&#xA;However, the language was by no means static during this period, because&#xA;the rule of the Wessex king, Alfred the Great, coincided with the Viking&#xA;invasions, which brought new words and new grammar into English which&#xA;remain with us today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next most significant influence on the language was the Norman&#xA;invasion of 1066. So pervasive was Norman French that it eclipsed&#xA;English for many years in the administration of the country, but&#xA;although Norman French was the official language, we may suppose that&#xA;English, in all its varieties, continued to be spoken by the majority.&#xA;English later resurfaced in public discourse, and in 1362 the Statute of&#xA;Pleading allowed it to be used in Parliament. Soon after this time,&#xA;Chaucer was writing the first great works of English literature in a&#xA;form of the language that is much more recognizably English than its Old&#xA;English predecessor. Chaucer wrote in his own dialect, which happened to&#xA;be that of the east Midlands, spoken in the triangle formed by Oxford,&#xA;Cambridge and London. The language spoken and written at this time is&#xA;known as Middle English, but great literature survives in dialects other&#xA;than Chaucer’s, including William Langland’s ‘Vision of Piers Plowman’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaucer had a stroke of luck when William Caxton, the first English&#xA;printer, came to print Chaucer’s works. Because of the proliferation of&#xA;dialects, Caxton was unsure which to use in his printed books, so he&#xA;just chose the one he was most familiar with, his own. This happened to&#xA;be Chaucer’s as well, so the combination of a great writer and the first&#xA;printer determined the course of English ever after. This particular&#xA;dialect, which was to become the basis of what we now know as Standard&#xA;English, was not chosen because it had some particular linguistic merit&#xA;that other dialects lacked. Any other dialect would have served just as&#xA;well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middle English turned into Early Modern English, the language of&#xA;Shakespeare, but there is evidence from his plays that other dialects&#xA;existed alongside what was becoming the standard one. The conscious&#xA;process of standardisation didn’t begin until the eighteenth century,&#xA;when speakers of English, most of whom until then had probably never&#xA;given the matter a second thought, started to become self-conscious&#xA;about their use of language and sought guidance. As today, there was no&#xA;shortage of self-styled experts willing to help them out. They made up&#xA;rules about English, which reflected their own personal preferences, and&#xA;were based on Latin, a language which has a quite different grammar from&#xA;that of English and other Germanic languages. Their idiosyncratic&#xA;prescriptions remain with us. To some they are as holy writ and are&#xA;stoutly defended by people who know little of their origins. In truth,&#xA;they are shibboleths, whose main purpose is to allow those with a little&#xA;education to show their assumed superiority over those who have been&#xA;unfortunate enough to have had less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the eighteenth century, English has changed, and become more&#xA;widely spoken, in ways that earlier speakers could not have imagined. It&#xA;has absorbed vocabulary from around the world and, thanks first to the&#xA;British Empire and, since the start of the twentieth century, to the&#xA;global influence of the United States, has become the first&#xA;international language since Latin. The history of English is complex&#xA;and long, but this very brief summary is necessary for countering the&#xA;prejudices that all too often typify discussion of the language today.&#xA;It is the failure to appreciate that English exists in many varieties,&#xA;as it has always done, that is behind much misunderstanding. Within the&#xA;United Kingdom alone, some regional dialects can be almost&#xA;incomprehensible to those from other regions, and so can some social&#xA;dialects to those from different social classes. More widely, there are&#xA;varieties of English spoken in Singapore, New Zealand, Nigeria, India,&#xA;Canada and the United States, to name just a few places where English is&#xA;either a first or second language, and within these English-speaking&#xA;communities there will be further sub-varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All varieties, standard and non-standard alike, have an internally&#xA;consistent system of grammar, and speakers of non-standard varieties are&#xA;not, by that fact alone, inarticulate, unintelligent or ignorant. The&#xA;difficulty in understanding those who speak differently from ourselves&#xA;often lies in accent rather than grammar or vocabulary. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/SEtrudgill.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;As Peter&#xA;Trudgill has shown&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, the grammar of nonstandard varieties does not differ so very greatly&#xA;from Standard English. Where it does, it can be more complex. For&#xA;example, as Trudgill says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Standard English fails to distinguish between the forms of the&#xA;auxiliary forms of the verb “do” and its main verb forms. This is true&#xA;both of present tense forms, where many other dialects distinguish&#xA;between auxiliary &lt;em&gt;I do, he do&lt;/em&gt; and main verb &lt;em&gt;I does&lt;/em&gt; , &lt;em&gt;he does&lt;/em&gt; or&#xA;similar, and the past tense, where most other dialects distinguish&#xA;between auxiliary &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; and main verb &lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt; , as in &lt;em&gt;You done it, did&#xA;you?&lt;/em&gt; ’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, some form of commonly understandable norm is essential,&#xA;and Standard English fills the role. It is the variety of the language&#xA;used in published work, and in education, journalism and broadcasting,&#xA;the law and public administration, and by the small minority of people&#xA;for whom it is a native spoken variety. Provided it is understood as a&#xA;neutral term, not implying ‘high standard’, Standard English is&#xA;preferable to alternatives such as BBC English, Oxford English or The&#xA;Queen’s English, and is the one used by professional linguists. If not&#xA;universally spoken and written, it is widely understood, and for that&#xA;reason schools have a duty to teach it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this should be seen as undervaluing the linguistic merits of&#xA;nonstandard varieties. They contribute to the richness of the language&#xA;which we have inherited from those diverse tribes who came to Britain so&#xA;long ago. We should celebrate rather than condemn them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:01:06.673" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T03:56:31.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T03:59:22.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/12/the-give-that-keeps-on-gifting-the-protean-nature-of-english-words-and-why-thats-a-good-thing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Give That Keeps On Gifting: The Protean Nature of English Words, and Why That’s A Good Thing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Robusto, 2012-12-31. filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/etymology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is constantly adding, modifying, and repurposing words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, there’s one right now: &lt;em&gt;repurpose.&lt;/em&gt; According to The American&#xA;Heritage Dictionary, it is officially a word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;re·pur·pose&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;tr.v.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;re·pur·posed&lt;/strong&gt; , &lt;strong&gt;re·pur·pos·ing&lt;/strong&gt; ,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;re·pur·pos·es&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To use or convert for use in another format or product: &lt;em&gt;repurposed&#xA;the book as a compact disk.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymonline cites its usage from 1995, so it is relatively new. It is&#xA;made by adding &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; to the word &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; , which can be either a noun&#xA;or a verb. My money is on noun, because the new construct comes out of&#xA;business or technical jargon and &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; as a verb is pretty seldom&#xA;heard. Not that it would be wrong. In fact, it would not be surprising&#xA;if &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; used as a verb were revived as a back-formation of&#xA;&lt;em&gt;repurpose&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this season of giving, let’s look at the words &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gift&lt;/em&gt; .&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Give&lt;/em&gt; is a verb and &lt;em&gt;gift&lt;/em&gt; is a noun, right? True. But haven’t you ever&#xA;found some mechanical thing to be loose when it was supposed to be tight&#xA;and said, “I feel a little &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; in it”? Of course you have. Verb has&#xA;been nouned. You nouned it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, we’ve all heard someone use the word &lt;em&gt;gift&lt;/em&gt; as a verb: “She&#xA;gifted them all with front-row seats to the concert.” And whether our&#xA;inner fussbudget winces or not when we hear it said that way, it is&#xA;still a legitimate usage. Face it: the traditional verb form &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;doesn’t say as much, and simply isn’t as precise. “She gave them all&#xA;front-row seats to the concert.” That doesn’t exactly carry the&#xA;connotation of presenting them with a gift, does it? She could have been&#xA;paying them back for prior favors, or because she lost a bet — any&#xA;number of non-giftish reasons come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who can forget the “regifting” episode of the immensely popular TV show&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Seinfeld&lt;/em&gt; ? (Hmm, that occurred right around the time &lt;em&gt;repurpose&lt;/em&gt; came&#xA;into the lexicon. Coincidence?) And if we admit that the writers and&#xA;actors on that show were all very &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; , we’ve now adjectived a&#xA;noun. We might even have adjectived the noun very &lt;em&gt;giftedly&lt;/em&gt; , in which&#xA;case we’ve adverbed the adjective. It goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really is nothing to be afraid of. Languages change, and words get&#xA;overloaded, adapted, modified. Some people abhor this condition. Some&#xA;feel language should be as precise as mathematics: see John Quijada’s&#xA;artificially constructed language,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Ithkuil language&quot;&gt;Ithkuil&lt;/a&gt; , if&#xA;you don’t believe me. Me, I prefer the richness of everyday speech, and&#xA;the creative way people adapt words to mean new things. Isn’t it more&#xA;colorful and descriptive to say a basketball player &lt;em&gt;bricked&lt;/em&gt; a shot,&#xA;rather than falling back on the boring and pedestrian &lt;em&gt;missed&lt;/em&gt; ? A&#xA;horrible shot in basketball looks like someone throwing a brick, not a&#xA;ball, and if we verb the noun we get a shot that has been &lt;em&gt;bricked&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is a living thing. Let’s never forget that. If words stop&#xA;changing, a language starts dying, just as our bodies do if our cells&#xA;stop dying and being reborn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we’re on the subject, let’s look at &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; verb: &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; . The noun&#xA;form is, of course, &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt; . Since the 1830s, the noun &lt;em&gt;lifer&lt;/em&gt; has&#xA;referred to a prisoner serving a life sentence. But wait a sec, didn’t&#xA;it have to become a verb first? Isn’t a verb at least implied there:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;lifer&lt;/em&gt; , one who &lt;em&gt;lifes&lt;/em&gt; ? No? Let’s move forward in time and notice a&#xA;shift in meaning: &lt;em&gt;lifer&lt;/em&gt; now includes someone who is serving “for life”&#xA;in the military. I recently read the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0425224740&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Generation&#xA;Kill&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;by Evan Wright, who was embedded with a platoon of Recon Marines that&#xA;participated in the assault on Baghdad in 2003. After Saddam’s army was&#xA;defeated, one of the Marines, Corporal Ray Person, is quoted as he&#xA;grouses about the battalion first sergeant’s return to his meddlesome&#xA;“lifer” ways. Person complains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The second they stop shooting at us, [that] motherfucker’s lifin’ us&#xA;in his stupid fucking retardese.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ahh, there it is. Crude though his statement may be, his verbing of a&#xA;noun that arose from the prior verbing of the same noun is pure poetry.&#xA;And exactly right for the sentiment the soldier wished to express. What&#xA;is a lifer sergeant doing to Marines when he makes their lives miserable&#xA;with a lot of petty regulations? He is &lt;em&gt;lifing&lt;/em&gt; them. And he is doing so&#xA;in the imaginary-yet-somehow-very-real language Cpl. Person vulgarly&#xA;calls &lt;em&gt;retardese&lt;/em&gt; , which consists, presumably, of one stupid,&#xA;ungrammatical statement after another spoken in a near-incomprehensible&#xA;hillbilly drawl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you can’t find any give in my arguments. But I wish to gift you&#xA;with one final thought on the protean nature of English. Wallace Stevens&#xA;said it about poetry, but it goes for language in general as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.&#xA;It has to face the men of the time and to meet&#xA;The women of the time. It has to think about war&#xA;And it has to find what will suffice. It has&#xA;To construct a new stage.&#xA; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it has to be a living, changing entity, continually&#xA;adapting, being adapted, constructing a new stage. Fortunately for all&#xA;of us, it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:03:11.423" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T03:59:22.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:02:20.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Much Ado About Possessive Apostrophes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-11-19 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/kitfox/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by kitfox&quot;&gt;kitfox&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;9&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;  Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/orthography/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orthography&lt;/a&gt; Tagged:&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/possessive-apostrophe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;possessive-apostrophe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apostrophes are lovely little critters, but they tend to boggle the mind&#xA;if you think about them too much.  One of the most common questions on&#xA;EL&amp;amp;U regards proper usage of an apostrophe to indicate possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The basics.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we use an apostrophe to indicate possession?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &lt;em&gt;possessing&lt;/em&gt; noun is singular, add an 's (apostrophe-s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sara&lt;/strong&gt;'s beast&#xA;  friends were all balrogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &lt;em&gt;possessing&lt;/em&gt; noun is plural and ends in s, add an ' (apostrophe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The beasty &lt;strong&gt;balrogs&lt;/strong&gt;'&#xA;  game was very fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, now, that’s pretty straightforward, right? Except that apostrophes&#xA;have this annoying habit of jumping into your brain and scrambling your&#xA;thoughts.  There are lots of ways to get confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if the &lt;em&gt;possessing&lt;/em&gt; noun is plural and does not end in s?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then treat it like the singular case, and add an 's (apostrophe-s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;children&lt;/strong&gt;'s&#xA;  books were tucked away in their cubbies. The &lt;strong&gt;geese&lt;/strong&gt;'s honking alerted&#xA;  the dog to the fox’s presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if the &lt;em&gt;possessing&lt;/em&gt; noun is not plural, but ends in s?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, golly, it turns out this one is complicated. &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1073/what-is-the-correct-possessive-for-nouns-ending-in-s&quot; title=&quot;Singular nouns ending in s&quot;&gt;Generally&#xA;speaking&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, these are treated just the same as other singular nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;glass&lt;/strong&gt;'s rim was&#xA;  cracked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this has not always been the case.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2964/when-did-it-become-correct-to-add-an-s-to-a-singular-possessive-already-ending&quot; title=&quot;Names ending in s&quot;&gt;Historically&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, &lt;em&gt;names&lt;/em&gt; ending in s followed the plural rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;* &lt;strong&gt;Seamus&lt;/strong&gt;' writings&#xA;  were well-known throughout Galway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For proper nouns, this is considered a stylistic choice, but following&#xA;the singular form is more common these days:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Seamus&lt;/strong&gt;'s writings&#xA;  were well-known throughout Galway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’d think with just four rules (which are really just two if you think&#xA;about it) that noöne would have much trouble with possessive&#xA;apostrophes. But those apostrophes sure are pernicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Advanced.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if the possessing noun is a conjoined phrase like “my wife and&#xA;I”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kosmonaut gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/22073/8360&quot;&gt;an excellent&#xA;answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4226/is-my-wife-and-is-correct-or-should-it-be-my-wifes-and-my&quot;&gt;this&#xA;question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Those rules are all well and good, but how do I decide whether the&#xA;possessing noun should be plural or not in the first place?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions about this very sticky wicket on EL&amp;amp;U. &#xA;Some examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36657/users-guide-vs-users-guide&quot; title=&quot;User&amp;#39;s or Users&amp;#39; Guide&quot;&gt;User’s or Users’&#xA;Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1314/user-accounts-or-users-account&quot; title=&quot;User or Users Account&quot;&gt;User or Users&#xA;Account&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76593/users-users-users-group&quot; title=&quot;User&amp;#39;s Users&amp;#39; Users&quot;&gt;User’s/Users’/Users&#xA;Group&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24367/apostrophes-and-caps-in-happy-mothers-day-happy-mothers-day&quot; title=&quot;Mothers&amp;#39; or Mother&amp;#39;s Day&quot;&gt;Happy Mothers’ Day or Happy Mother’s&#xA;Day&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51402/members-benefits-vs-members-benefits&quot; title=&quot;Members&amp;#39; or Member&amp;#39;s Benefits&quot;&gt;Members’ or Member’s&#xA;Benefits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5804/apostrophe-in-beginners-guide&quot; title=&quot;Beginner&amp;#39;s Guide&quot;&gt;Beginner’s or Beginners’&#xA;Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65093/usage-of-apostrophe-in-bakers-dozen&quot; title=&quot;Baker&amp;#39;s Dozen&quot;&gt;Baker’s&#xA;Dozen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the guide belong to one user or many users?  Is the day for one&#xA;mother or all mothers?  Either way is technically acceptable, but&#xA;generally speaking, we consider a single instance and an abstract&#xA;entity.  So one copy of the guide for one abstract generalization of&#xA;user means we usually say “User’s Guide.”  Mother’s Day is trickier&#xA;because we could celebrate all mothers on that day, but it is supposed&#xA;to be a day on which we honor our own mother, so “Happy Mother’s Day”&#xA;unless you have two mommies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we see that possessive apostrophes are disappearing for plural&#xA;nouns that demonstrate affiliation, so it is acceptable practice to use&#xA;phrases like “User Group” instead of “Users’ Group.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a little summary of possessive apostrophes, along with some fun&#xA;links for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:05:26.727" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:05:26.727" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:02:20.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:07:13.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/looking-up-a-gun-common-english-words-with-nordic-origins/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Looking Up a Gun: Common English Words with Nordic Origins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-11-05 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/Luke/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Luke&quot;&gt;Luke&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/looking-up-a-gun-common-english-words-with-nordic-origins/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/etymology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology&lt;/a&gt;   Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/etymology-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; ,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Norse words in the English language are much more numerous than many&#xA;would suspect. Many common words such as &lt;em&gt;gun&lt;/em&gt; , &lt;em&gt;craze&lt;/em&gt; , and &lt;em&gt;equip&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;are of Nordic origin. Because the two languages were so similar, they&#xA;have many loanwords. Often, they were mutually intelligible to quite a&#xA;degree. In this post, I’m going to analyze the origins of these three&#xA;common English words rooted in the Old Norse language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were a two main ways that Old Norse words made their way into the&#xA;English language. First, between 865 and 954 (the Danelaw), the Vikings&#xA;colonized eastern and northern England. During this time, many of their&#xA;Old Norse words entered the Old English and have been in use  since.&#xA;Other words entered the Norman French and were passed on from there to&#xA;Middle English during the Norman Conquest of 1066. The parallels between&#xA;Old Norse and Old English facilitated the trading of words between the&#xA;two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Nordic culture, the name &lt;em&gt;Gunnhildr&lt;/em&gt; was fairly common. It had the&#xA;meaning “war battle maid” and is a cognate to the more modern name,&#xA;“Gunhild”. In 1330, Windsor Castle had an inventory of it’s munitions&#xA;made. In the inventory, a specific siege engine was called the &lt;em&gt;Lady&#xA;Gunilda&lt;/em&gt; , a shortening of &lt;em&gt;Gunnhildr&lt;/em&gt; . Later, the word &lt;em&gt;gonnilde&lt;/em&gt; ,&#xA;yet another variation of &lt;em&gt;Gunnhildr&lt;/em&gt; , became more generalized to mean&#xA;“cannon” in Middle English. By the mid-fourteenth century, these had&#xA;been shortened to &lt;em&gt;gunne&lt;/em&gt; . It did not yet have the modern meaning of&#xA;“gun”, though. It meant simply “an engine of war that throws rocks,&#xA;arrows or other missiles”. So, the ballista and the trebuchet both fell&#xA;into this definition. It wasn’t until the fifteenth century that &lt;em&gt;gunne&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;came to mean “firearm” (because that’s when firearms first came to major&#xA;use). Around that time, it was finally shortened to “gun”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Craze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Norse had a word &lt;em&gt;krasa&lt;/em&gt; , which meant “shatter”.  Around the&#xA;mid-14th century, it entered the Middle French language as the word&#xA;&lt;em&gt;ecraser&lt;/em&gt; , which meant “to squash”. This evolved into both the modern&#xA;French &lt;em&gt;écraser&lt;/em&gt; , and the Middle English &lt;em&gt;crasen&lt;/em&gt; , which meant “to&#xA;break in pieces; to crack”. It also had a  second meaning, “to be&#xA;diseased or deformed”. &lt;em&gt;Crasen&lt;/em&gt; evolved into the modern English &lt;em&gt;crase&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;(now obselete), however, it only carried the first meaning, “to break in&#xA;pieces; to crack”. However, &lt;em&gt;crasen&lt;/em&gt; evolved into another modern English&#xA;word, &lt;em&gt;craze&lt;/em&gt; . This carried the second meaning, “to be diseased or&#xA;deformed”. However, it had evolved into the meaning “mental breakdown”.&#xA;The current meaning of the word is “to become insane; go mad”, not a far&#xA;cry from “mental breakdown”. The first reference to &lt;em&gt;craze&lt;/em&gt; meaning&#xA;“mania, fad” was in 1813. However, the original meaning, “to make&#xA;cracks”, is still in use a with a slightly different meaning,&#xA;“to make small cracks on the surface of”. This is used when referring to&#xA;ceramic pottery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Equip&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nordic word &lt;em&gt;skip&lt;/em&gt; meant “ship”. &lt;em&gt;Skipa&lt;/em&gt; , another Norse word was&#xA;derived from it, with the meaning “fit out a ship”. In the twelfth&#xA;century, it entered the Old French as &lt;em&gt;esquiper&lt;/em&gt; . In the 1520s, it was&#xA;used in the Middle French as &lt;em&gt;équiper&lt;/em&gt; . It meant “to supply, fit out”,&#xA;thus it was no longer specific to ships. In the late sixteenth century,&#xA;it made it’s way into English as &lt;em&gt;Esquippe&lt;/em&gt; . In the seventeenth&#xA;century,  a &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; was dropped and the word became &lt;em&gt;esquip&lt;/em&gt; . Later in the&#xA;century, the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; was dropped and it was shortened to “equip”, as we know&#xA;it today. It was spelled &lt;em&gt;acquip&lt;/em&gt; during that time, but that spelling&#xA;never really caught on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Estimates vary, but range from 15-25% of English words (non-scientific)&#xA;originate from Old Norse. Given the size of the English language, that&#xA;is a quite a considerable amount. Only Latin and French contribute more&#xA;words to English than Old Norse. Our language owes a great deal to those&#xA;ruthless Scandinavian seafarers. Without their contributions, I would&#xA;not be able to say, “He often fumbled for words, which amused people&#xA;greatly.” &lt;em&gt;(Kylfdi mᴊǫk til orðanna, ok hǫfðu margir menn þat mᴊǫk at&#xA;spotti.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://germanic.zxq.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;germanic.zxq.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:07:47.207" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:07:47.207" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:07:13.023" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:09:39.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-descriptivism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prescriptivism and Descriptivism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-10-15 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/Cameron/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Cameron&quot;&gt;Cameron&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-descriptivism/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;13&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you are reading something on the Internet (I know, it’s a&#xA;stretch), and you come across the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to be sure that you and me are on the same page. When you ask&#xA;  how I feel about grammar, you are begging the question, “Are you a&#xA;  prescriptivist or a descriptivist?” The problem is that that question&#xA;  isn’t even something sensible to really ask about. It think it would&#xA;  help you if those definitions were reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you characterize the quality of the writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is just fine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has some style issues&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has some grammar issues&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is horrid writing for a number of reasons, including both style&#xA;and grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the correct answer is… well, hold on, now. It’s not quite&#xA;that simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Prescriptivist’s View&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cringed while reading the example passage above and ached to&#xA;break out the red pen, then chances are that you fall into the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prescribe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;MW definition of prescribe&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prescriptivist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;camp. The general take of a prescriptivist is that there are rules that&#xA;define how language should be used, and that mistakes result from when&#xA;those rules are broken. You might hear this idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;linguistic prescription on wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prescriptive&#xA;linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;described as&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Normative on wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;normative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which means that the rules are based on “normal usage,” and they&#xA;determine the way things (spelling, grammar, etc.) &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be. Some&#xA;examples of prescriptive rules are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don’t end a sentence with a preposition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don’t split infinitives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don’t use the passive voice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don’t use the pronoun ‘I’ in object position&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, not all prescriptivists agree on what the rules (and&#xA;exceptions) should be. Many derive their rules from authoritative works,&#xA;like Fowler’s 1926 work &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Modern English Usage&lt;/em&gt; , or&#xA;Strunk and White’s &lt;em&gt;The Elements of Style&lt;/em&gt; , now in its 53 &lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;year of printing. Others rely on their intuitions, informed by the&#xA;forces of society and class, or aphorisms passed on by their elders (my&#xA;grandmother was fond of saying, “&lt;em&gt;Cakes&lt;/em&gt; are ‘done’, &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; are&#xA;‘finished’!” ). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot; title=&quot;English Language and Usage SE&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage Stack&#xA;Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;site has seen many questions on prescriptivist rules, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/32311/19644&quot; title=&quot;Is using passive voice “bad form”&quot;&gt;Is using passive voice “bad&#xA;form”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/28662/19644&quot; title=&quot;What rules make “Remember me, who am your friend” grammatical?&quot;&gt;What rules make “Remember me, who am your friend”&#xA;grammatical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/16/19644&quot; title=&quot;When is it appropriate to end a sentence in a preposition?&quot;&gt;When is it appropriate to end a sentence in a&#xA;preposition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The keen observer will have noticed that prescriptive rules tend to&#xA;cover not just what is allowed by language, but also (and often) what is&#xA;preferred. The rules are not restricted to grammar, but can extend to&#xA;concerns like spelling and formatting (all of which are, for lack of a&#xA;better phrase, &lt;em&gt;elements of style&lt;/em&gt; ). For example, a prescriptivist&#xA;might tell you that a sentence beginning after a colon must start with a&#xA;capital letter, or that the word ‘like’ should not be used as a&#xA;subordinating conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Descriptivist’s View&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have gotten through the passage at the beginning of this post&#xA;and thought that there was nothing wrong with it. Or, perhaps you&#xA;thought it was not the best prose you’d ever seen, but that there&#xA;weren’t any real “errors,” simply style choices that you wouldn’t have&#xA;made. Maybe you even saw some things that you really didn’t like, but&#xA;know that sometimes people choose to write that way, and as long as it’s&#xA;understandable, you can deal with it. If any of that sounds like you,&#xA;then you are probably somewhat of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/describe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;MW definition of describe&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;descriptivist&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;descriptive linguistics on wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;descriptive&#xA;linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;is that a language is defined by what people do with it. In other words,&#xA;you begin by studying and listening to native speakers. Then, when you&#xA;notice patterns in the ways that they communicate, you can record those&#xA;patterns as guesses about the principles of a language. If you rarely&#xA;(or never) observe someone breaking those patterns, then your guess is&#xA;more likely to be an accurate representation of the language. Those&#xA;guesses are called&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;MW definition of hypothesis&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hypotheses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and when they are well-supported by evidence, they can be accepted as&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;correctness conditions&lt;/strong&gt; for a language. For example, a correctness&#xA;condition about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Standard English on wikipedia&quot;&gt;Standard&#xA;English&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;is the notion of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;SVO on wikipedia&quot;&gt;Subject-Verb-Object&#xA;(SVO)&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;word order. It is very difficult (if not impossible) to observe a native&#xA;English speaker saying something like, “*I an apple ate,” so it is a&#xA;safe bet that if you hear that, you aren’t hearing Standard English. Of&#xA;course, it also means that if enough people start using a new&#xA;construction, then your grammatical model should adapt to accommodate&#xA;it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between a correctness condition and a prescriptive&#xA;rule is that a rule is, by its very nature,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regulatory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;MW definition of regulatory&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;regulatory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. A correctness condition, on the other hand, is&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constitutive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;MW definition of constitutive&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;constitutive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I like to think about it in terms of cooking: If I serve &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/chicken-cacciatore-recipe/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;chicken cacciatore recipe&quot;&gt;chicken&#xA;cacciatore&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;with raw chicken, that’s an error. The dish is still chicken cacciatore,&#xA;but I’ve made it incorrectly. I’ve broken a prescriptive rule that&#xA;governs how to make the dish (specifically, the one that says that the&#xA;chicken should be braised until it is cooked through rather than served&#xA;raw). On the other hand, if I make cacciatore with rabbit instead of&#xA;chicken, that’s not chicken cacciatore with mistakes. It’s simply rabbit&#xA;cacciatore. A descriptivist would look at the situation and conclude&#xA;that cooking &lt;em&gt;alla cacciatora&lt;/em&gt; is defined by searing meat in oil, then&#xA;simmering it with tomatoes, onions, peppers, and seasoning, rather than&#xA;by the choice of meat (perhaps with a caveat that some meats are more&#xA;common than others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Middle Ground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand, you have generations&#xA;of grade school English teachers rightly warning their pupils that&#xA;people might chuckle at them if they use the word ‘irregardless’. On the&#xA;other hand, you have the scientific rigor of the modern linguistic&#xA;community touting descriptivism as the torch-bearer of truth and&#xA;enlightenment. Are you doomed to choose between a democracy of solecisms&#xA;and a library of thousand-page tomes of writer’s regulations? Are things&#xA;really that bleak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course not. You have the luxury of picking the view that suits you at&#xA;any moment. You can leave it to the descriptivists to confirm what makes&#xA;up the language, and the prescriptivists to guide you on how to make it&#xA;flow sweetly and clearly into the minds of others. Members of these&#xA;groups tend to bicker and say that the others are destroying the&#xA;language or poisoning the minds of the children. It is rarely true that&#xA;these claims are valid. As long as you keep your wits about you, it is&#xA;not so hard to tell when a descriptivist is being overly forgiving of&#xA;bad writing or a prescriptivist is blindly spouting advice on language&#xA;that hasn’t been relevant for the last sixty years. Neither is it a bad&#xA;idea to keep an open mind towards new ways of saying something, or&#xA;consult a style manual for tips about how to communicate your ideas&#xA;effectively. As is so often the case, the most important advice in the&#xA;‘prescriptivist vs. descriptivist’ debate is to keep your head up and&#xA;use the right tool for the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Going Further (or is it farther?)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested in diving deeper into the matter? Here are some resources&#xA;that I think are interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Stephen Fry Youtube video&quot;&gt;Stephen Fry on&#xA;Language&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(an entertaining youtube video)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Language Log&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(a blog by some linguists)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97mar/halpern/nunberg.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Decline of Grammar&quot;&gt;The Decline of&#xA;Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(a magazine article by linguist Geoff Nunberg)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97mar/halpern/halpern.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;A War That Never Ends&quot;&gt;A War That Never&#xA;Ends&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(a response to the previous article, by Mark Halpern)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth#Origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Shibboleth origin&quot;&gt;The History of&#xA;‘Shibboleth’&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(an interesting story from the bible about prescriptivism taken to&#xA;the extreme)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_good_word/2012/05/steven_pinker_on_the_false_fronts_in_the_language_wars_.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;On the False Fronts in the Language Wars&quot;&gt;On the False Fronts in the Language&#xA;Wars&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(a piece about how the ‘prescriptivist vs. descriptivist’ debate&#xA;isn’t all that real)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:39:38.667" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:39:38.667" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:09:39.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:14:26.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/tw-a-pragmatic-approach/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;That vs Which: A Pragmatic Approach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-10-01 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/StoneyB/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by StoneyB&quot;&gt;StoneyB&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/tw-a-pragmatic-approach/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;  Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“There’s glory for you!”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;H. Dumpty, founder of linguistic pragmatics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’re looking for a balanced discussion of the &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ho/whom/whose/which&lt;/em&gt; controversy, go&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/78/when-is-it-appropriate-to-use-that-as-opposed-to-which&quot; title=&quot;T/W on ELU&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I’m not interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hundred years ago the Fowlers put forward a modest proposal.&#xA;Linguistic bureaucrats elevated this proposal to a Rule, linguistic&#xA;libertarians resisted; and today the Fowlers’ proposal is an Issue hotly&#xA;contested by Conservative and Liberal ideologues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no taste for political disputation. While my sympathies lie with&#xA;the Liberals (who in the Fowlers’ day would have been the&#xA;Reactionaries), my &lt;strong&gt;experience&lt;/strong&gt; is that I am never profoundly disturbed by the actual usage of&#xA;the Conservatives (who a hundred years ago were the Radicals). And&#xA;neither side is going to budge from its position, each is deaf to the&#xA;other’s arguments and writes or redacts according to its own judgment;&#xA;so I see little point in rehashing the arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like instead to adopt a non-partisan and non-ideological approach,&#xA;and come at the &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; question from a different angle. I’m a&#xA;writer, my concern is to make the most effective use I can of the tools&#xA;which come to my hand. The Fowlers themselves grounded their proposal in&#xA;the economic argument that “if we are to be at the expense of&#xA;maintaining two different relatives, we may as well give each of them&#xA;definite work to do (&lt;em&gt;The King’s English&lt;/em&gt;, 1908).” I may hope, then,&#xA;that others will find some value in exploring the pragmatic and&#xA;non-doctrinal considerations which govern my usage in my writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Writing”, I say; but the spoken language is both historically and&#xA;methodologically prior to the written, and most of us aspire to&#xA;something of the spontaneity and freshness presumed to reside in oral&#xA;usage; so it may be useful to see what ordinary speech tells us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happen to possess a modest corpus of semiformal speech—videotapes of&#xA;impromptu interviews with a dozen college-educated U.S. speakers from&#xA;various regions and callings. Scanning the transcripts for uses of&#xA;relative pronouns (and consulting the tapes where there was any&#xA;ambiguity) yielded three interesting findings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ordinary U.S. speech does not distinguish lexically between&#xA;restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. Indeed, the paratactic&#xA;construction imposed by improvisation makes the distinction itself&#xA;difficult to maintain. How do you categorize a clause which is&#xA;clearly, to the ear, an afterthought, but which could make sense as&#xA;a restrictive clause? —Here’s an example; the speaker is discussing&#xA;a table of numbers (a dash represents a pause):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The difference between 154?—(&lt;em&gt;points&lt;/em&gt;) that is actually&#xA;  available?—and  and the 149—(&lt;em&gt;points&lt;/em&gt;) which the budgeting exercise&#xA;  produced?— is another opportunity for life insurance . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All the &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; forms are very rare: &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is absolutely predominant&#xA;by at least fifty to one. If the &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; forms disappeared from the&#xA;spoken language they would never be missed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again and again I heard &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; after a clause followed by a pause&#xA;(and sometimes repetitions of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;)—and &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; the speaker settled&#xA;on what he was going to say—which might be a relative clause&#xA;(restrictive or not), an adverbial clause, or a clause to which&#xA;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; was entirely irrelevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So—should the written language follow Liberal logic, and abandon the&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; forms altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course not. No craftsman forsakes the use of a tool simply because&#xA;amateurs do not use it. Finding 3. above is instructive: speakers prefer&#xA;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; because it’s the all-purpose tool, adequate in all circumstances.&#xA;But the  writer  has an&#xA;entire workbench of specialized tools, and leisure to choose between&#xA;them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we then unite behind the Conservatives, and use &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;to distinguish restrictive and non-restrictive clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I think not. The usage is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; distinctive either for&#xA;the ordinary reader or for many of the ideologues. And it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; redundant: all of us&#xA;distinguish these clause-types by means of the comma. The &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;distinction is unnecessary here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s instead use the &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; forms where they’re most useful: in &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; relative clause. The&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; distinctions, between &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;whose&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;, allow&#xA;us to signal reference and syntax more clearly and more smoothly. When&#xA;it can be done gracefully, omit the relative pronoun altogether; but&#xA;let’s use &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; as a relative pronoun only under pressure of what the&#xA;Fowlers call “considerations of euphony”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This not only exploits the &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; distinctions more fully, it makes&#xA;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; more effective and efficient, too. &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is horribly overworked:&#xA;it takes 17 columns in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; to discriminate its uses. No word&#xA;except &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is more likely to appear multiple times in a sentence with&#xA;different meanings. As Dumpty noted, that comes at a cost: no word is&#xA;more likely to confuse the reader’s eye and mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have for thirty-five years avoided the use of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; as a relative&#xA;pronoun. I use &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; forms almost exclusively, in &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; contexts: marketing&#xA;copy, stage plays, voiceovers, business proposals, legal drafts,&#xA;training videos, my doctoral dissertation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you know what?—I’ve never been called out for it. Not by clients—not&#xA;by actors—not by academics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I commend this approach to your consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Impenetrability! That’s what &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; say!”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;H.Dumpty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:40:15.597" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:40:15.597" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:14:26.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:17:40.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/09/typography-striking-language-part1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typography: Striking Language (part 1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-09-17 by &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/cornbreadninja/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by cornbread ninja&quot;&gt;cornbread&#xA;ninja&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/09/typography-striking-language-part1/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/orthography/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orthography&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typography is all around us, every minute of every day.  I’m willing to&#xA;bet that, this blog post notwithstanding, there are at least five&#xA;different typefaces within reach of you at this moment.  I’m hedging my&#xA;bet, because it’s probably closer to ten or fifteen.  You may think&#xA;little or not at all of typography, but it is equally important to&#xA;language as the spoken word.  By definition, typography is the study,&#xA;use, and design of identical repeated letterforms.  Throughout history,&#xA;these forms have taken shape and morphed from the shifting popularity&#xA;and availability of writing implements and surfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language itself is rooted in visual communication.  Before we had&#xA;language, we communicated with imagery.  The story of typography begins&#xA;with man’s initial use of petroglyphs (rock engravings), pictographs&#xA;(cave paintings), and pictograms to preserve business transactions, tell&#xA;stories, give warning, and record history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zomZl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zomZl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;fig 1. Sumerian cuneiform tablet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ancestral awakenings of modern typography are found in cave&#xA;drawings, tablets, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, ideography that served to&#xA;support and preserve spoken tales of the joys and threats that comprised&#xA;the daily existence of early man. From the oldest Sumerian cuneiform&#xA;tablets ( &lt;em&gt;fig. 1)&lt;/em&gt; to the digital typefaces of today, written language&#xA;has persevered as a crucial auxiliary to the spoken word.  The written&#xA;word is invaluable as a means of preserving the past and language&#xA;itself.  The beautifully-written word adds a nuance of artistic flair&#xA;and reveals a concurrent history of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English alphabet evolved from the Latin one used by the Romans and&#xA;is thought to have grown from Greek, Semitic, and Etruscan influences. &#xA;Our modern letterforms developed around 100 BCE, and by 100 CE, two&#xA;common forms of Roman scripts were in use.  About one hundred years&#xA;later, parchment and then paper were developed, and their portability&#xA;was revolutionary to the spread of written language and of literacy in&#xA;general.  Over the next few hundred years, the Greeks were writing using&#xA;reed and quill pens with nibs, the changing widths of which altered the&#xA;pens’ strokes and resulting letterforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest form of typographical mass production, relief printing, was&#xA;developed in China around 700 CE.  By 1300 CE it had reached the&#xA;Europeans, who by 1440 CE were using the technology to print entire&#xA;books comprised of woodblock-cut text and images.  A German blacksmith,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johannes Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; set the&#xA;printing world on fire with his invention of a moveable type printing&#xA;press which allowed individual letterforms and punctuation to be set and&#xA;reused again and again.  Gutenberg’s contribution defined the identical&#xA;repetition that defines typography and largely satisfied the printing&#xA;industry for the next 400 years.  Printing technologies from then on&#xA;have advanced to serve the growing literate population that Gutenberg’s&#xA;invention had spawned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a discipline, typography is as complex as any other serious subject:&#xA;the magic of readability and presentation is rooted in an often&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romain_du_Roi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathematically-calculated&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;aesthetic.  In selecting type, the main concern is the matter of&#xA;readability.  More than just legibility, readability is a marriage of&#xA;legibility and good design.  You’re likely reading this post in a&#xA;typeface called&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_%28typeface%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georgia&lt;/a&gt;, a very&#xA;popular face designed for the ease of screen reading.  Just as&#xA;Gutenberg’s moveable type served to facilitate the changing times,&#xA;digital type must capitulate to the limits of the medium to maintain the&#xA;base principle of legibility. &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/1015/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bad type stands&#xA;out&lt;/a&gt; and good type goes unnoticed, quietly&#xA;serving and preserving ideas with beauty and aplomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T04:17:40.457" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:17:40.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:19:34.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/09/writing-good-meaning-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writing Good ‘Meaning’ Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-09-03 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/mahnax/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by mahnax&quot;&gt;mahnax&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/09/writing-good-meaning-questions/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack&#xA;Exchange&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On any Stack Exchange site, a question must be tagged. Here at EL&amp;amp;U, our&#xA;most popular tag is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; tag, with over 2700 questions filed as&#xA;such. Unfortunately, this tag is often misused, and many questions&#xA;bearing this tag are closed, with some being subsequently deleted.&#xA;Luckily, the EL&amp;amp;U blog is here to save the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of criteria for good &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; questions…&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are not General Reference&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are applicable to a wide audience, not just the OP (not Too&#xA;Localized)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ask about…&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;words or phrases that do not make sense when interpreted&#xA;literally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;words or phrases that are ambiguous&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;potentially archaic words or phrases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;words or phrases that have different meanings in different&#xA;dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other things that are generally deeper than a simple definition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Not General Reference&lt;/strong&gt; General Reference questions are questions&#xA;that can be fully answered with a single link to a place that is&#xA;specifically designed to provide the information in the question.  These&#xA;sources include online dictionaries or etymology sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it more simply, a General Reference question is too basic for&#xA;EL&amp;amp;U. In my experience, General Reference is the most common reason for&#xA;question closure. The &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; tag is more likely to be used on a&#xA;General Reference question because the name and description of the tag&#xA;are slightly deceptive, especially to those who don’t speak English&#xA;well; it’s deceptive because &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; sounds a lot simpler than the&#xA;questions should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all definitions are easily found by using search engines or by&#xA;checking dictionaries directly. In most circumstances, asking for a&#xA;simple definition is too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Not Too Localized&lt;/strong&gt; Questions that get closed as Too Localized are&#xA;unlikely to help anyone in the future, meaning that the question at hand&#xA;simply does not apply to many people. These questions can stem from a&#xA;user finding an unfamiliar word or phrase somewhere else on the&#xA;Internet, a news article, etc. EL&amp;amp;U and the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; tag &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; like&#xA;prime places to ask about the meanings of these unfamiliar words or&#xA;phrases, but if that word/phrase has been made up and used among just a&#xA;handful of people, then it likely has no established meaning, and thus&#xA;cannot be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More simply, they don’t mean anything to anyone other than the few who&#xA;use it. Asking about the meanings of these types of phrases is not&#xA;likely to be accepted, either with the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; tag, or without.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. So what &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; I ask about?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, if your question isn’t ruled out&#xA;by criterion #1 or #2, it stands a good chance of being acceptable.&#xA;There are a few final things to be concerned about, but these apply to&#xA;all questions—make sure it’s legible, sensible, and well-written. Be&#xA;certain to clearly state the exact question you have at some point, and&#xA;include research that you’ve done yourself. The list of good question&#xA;criteria is a good place to start, and don’t hesitate to pop into chat&#xA;to ask about your question if you’re not sure it’ll do well. Here are&#xA;two examples of good &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3841/which-day-does-next-tuesday-refer-to&quot;&gt;Which day does “next Tuesday”&#xA;refer&#xA;to?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37236/what-does-information-porn-mean&quot;&gt;What does “information porn”&#xA;mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reading, and good luck with all of your future &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:40:47.737" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:40:47.737" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:19:34.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:21:18.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/01/book-review-the-adventure-of-english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book Review – The Adventure of English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; 2012-01-11  by &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/mattellen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Matt Ellen&quot;&gt;Matt&#xA;Ellen&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2012/01/book-review-the-adventure-of-english/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/etymology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology&lt;/a&gt;   Tagged: &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/book-review/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book&#xA;review&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/etymology-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Adventure of English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;The Biography of a Language&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Melvyn Bragg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am a &lt;em&gt;serious enthusiast&lt;/em&gt; when it comes to learning about and&#xA;understanding my native tongue, I am an amateur with regards to my&#xA;studies. The work, carried out by Melvyn Bragg in writing this book,&#xA;puts anything I do far in the shade. Despite this, he opens the book&#xA;explaining that he is an amateur standing on the shoulders of linguistic&#xA;scholars. This is made clear if one peruses the bibliography at the end&#xA;of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book proper truly is an adventure story. After the introduction, as&#xA;at the start of a Hollywood blockbuster, the narrative thrusts us into&#xA;the heat of battle: barbarians, Romans and Celts fighting for survival&#xA;and supremacy on this fair isle (Britain—if I’m unclear). However our&#xA;hero is no legatus or chieftain. No, we are following the life of&#xA;something far more interesting than any individual: the English&#xA;language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The treatment of English as a character is a clever hook that keeps the&#xA;book interesting by allowing the reader to sympathise with the language&#xA;as if it were a person. Bragg put me on the edge of my seat at many&#xA;points through out the tale. How would English survive the Norman&#xA;invasion? French, with a knife at its throat. What would become of the&#xA;English champions who tried to bring the Bible to the masses? Despite&#xA;its progenitor’s best attempts, how English helped slaves overcome their&#xA;masters on more than one occasion. Bragg gives a good feel to the&#xA;language, making it seem fluid and adaptable yet strong and persistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each chapter tells the story of a different turning point in the history&#xA;of English. This has the added bonus of meaning that the chapters don’t&#xA;have to be read in order, since they are mostly self contained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a book that loves the English language. Despite what the British&#xA;have done, and Bragg chastises us where appropriate, English is always&#xA;held as either a helping hand to the oppressed (as well as a tool of the&#xA;oppressors) or as a means by which the good can triumph. It is better&#xA;than French and Spanish, and more successful than any other language it&#xA;encounters. Even in near defeat by the Normans, Bragg describes the&#xA;English language’s revival as if the vocabulary it picked up were just a&#xA;few scratches, so the language is essentially the same as it had always&#xA;been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story shows us the experiences of people from all walks of life,&#xA;from royalty to scholars, from merchants to explorers, from conquerors&#xA;to slaves, and beyond. We are treated to excerpts from plays, poetry and&#xA;myths, as well as the drier dictionaries and legislation. Every type of&#xA;English has a part to play in its history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thoroughly recommend this book for lovers of history and language. It&#xA;is not a deep scholarly work, insofar as it covers so much so it cannot&#xA;be detailed about everything and it will have to miss some things out.&#xA;Regardless, it is a very informative and entertaining book for anyone,&#xA;especially those looking to start understanding the history of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1611450071&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/The_Adventure_of_English/9781444730050&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blackwells&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T04:21:18.693" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:21:18.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:24:15.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/12/getting-into-the-spirit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Getting into the spirit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-12-20 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/martha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by martha&quot;&gt;martha&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/12/getting-into-the-spirit/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack&#xA;Exchange&lt;/a&gt;   Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/holidays/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;holidays&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/main-site/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main-site&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/themed-posts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;themed&#xA;posts&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… the Holiday spirit, that is. Here’s a selection of Christmas and other&#xA;end-of-year holiday questions that you may find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44588/determining-which-good-sentiment-to-wish-at-each-holiday&quot;&gt;Determining which good sentiment to wish at each holiday&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;– If you have ever wondered why we don’t say “Merry New Year”, or why&#xA;“Happy Christmas” is perfectly fine in Britain but exceedingly odd in&#xA;America, you’re not alone. If you know some of the history behind these&#xA;set phrases, here’s your opportunity to post a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49340/how-many-articles-should-go-in-merry-christmas-and-happy-new-year&quot;&gt;How many articles should go in &amp;quot;Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6831/how-should-merry-christmas-and-happy-new-year-be-capitalized&quot;&gt;How should &amp;quot;Merry Christmas&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Happy New Year&amp;quot; be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;– These questions might come in handy if you haven’t written your&#xA;Christmas cards yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44806/what-preposition-should-i-use-before-christmas&quot;&gt;What preposition should I use before the word “Christmas”?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;– Yes, this is Yet Another Question About Prepositions, but like many&#xA;other commonplace expressions, &lt;em&gt;Christmas&lt;/em&gt; does have its idiosyncrasies,&#xA;so the answers might be worth a read if English isn’t your native&#xA;language, or if you’re puzzled by the usage on the opposite side of the&#xA;pond. Another similar question is &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49880/prepositions-for-wednesday-night-and-the-night-of-christmas-eve&quot;&gt;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/49880/prepositions-for-wednesday-night-and-the-night-of-christmas-eve&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7649/what-method-of-counting-puts-twelfth-night-on-january-6th&quot;&gt;What method of counting puts Twelfth Night on January 6th?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;– OK, full disclosure, this is my question, but I still think it’s a&#xA;good one. And my traditional year-end gripe bears repeating, too:&#xA;however you count them, the twelve days of Christmas come &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Christmas. If you’re taking down your decorations on the 26th, you’re&#xA;doing it wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37394/why-do-some-words-have-x-as-a-substitute&quot;&gt;why do some words have “X” as a&#xA;substitute?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;– This is worth reading just for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37394/why-do-some-words-have-x-as-a-substitute/37395#comment68144_37395&quot;&gt;comment by&#xA;mgkrebbs&lt;/a&gt;, which (in my opinion) quite effectively debunks the notion that&#xA;writing “Xmas” is a nefarious new plot to remove &lt;em&gt;Christ&lt;/em&gt; from&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Christmas&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:41:22.917" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:41:22.917" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:24:15.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:26:03.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/12/adspeak/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adspeak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-12-06 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/martha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by martha&quot;&gt;martha&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/12/adspeak/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7 comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/advertising/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;advertising&lt;/a&gt; ,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/word-choice/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a confession to make: I’m really a prescriptivist at heart. I&#xA;have an idea in my head of how the English language ought to be used,&#xA;and deviations from that ideal bother me. They especially bother me when&#xA;I have to listen to them on a daily basis, courtesy of television&#xA;commercials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one of my first questions on ELU was about the laundry&#xA;detergent commercial tagline of “&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3703/option-vs-optional&quot; title=&quot;Option vs. Optional&quot;&gt;Style is an option. Clean is&#xA;not.&lt;/a&gt;” As I noted, while it’s obvious what they meant, it’s also not quite&#xA;what they said — if &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt; is out of the question, then why would&#xA;anyone ever use this detergent? It would be such a simple fix, too: just&#xA;replace “an option” with “optional”, and you’d have an unambiguous and&#xA;grammatically correct tagline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another recent violator is the luxury car commercial that ends with (for&#xA;example) “More power, more style, more technology, less doors”. (The&#xA;list of &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; adjectives changes with different versions of the&#xA;advertisement.) Every time that ad plays, I swear I can hear the&#xA;collective moan of pain from English teachers and grammar nerds across&#xA;the country. Again, the fix would be simple: &lt;em&gt;fewer&lt;/em&gt; would contrast with&#xA;&lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; just as well as &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; does,  with the added advantage of not&#xA;hurting the ears of potential customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But oddly enough, other misuses of language don’t bother me. For&#xA;example, the economy car ad tagline “unbig, uncar” elicits a grin, not a&#xA;groan. I was wondering why this is, and I think I’ve hit on something:&#xA;“unbig, uncar” doesn’t have an easy correction that would get the same&#xA;idea across using more conventional grammar. “Small, not a car” just&#xA;doesn’t have the same impact. So it’s obvious that this slogan is&#xA;&lt;em&gt;deliberately ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that even for a prescriptivist, a mistake &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;made on&#xA;purpose&lt;/a&gt; isn’t a&#xA;mistake at all. (Warning: black hole, ahem, sorry, tv tropes link.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T04:26:03.877" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:26:03.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:27:47.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/11/the-basics-of-limerick-composition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Basics of Limerick Composition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-11-16  by &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/mattellen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Matt Ellen&quot;&gt;Matt&#xA;Ellen&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/11/the-basics-of-limerick-composition/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;11&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/poetry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; Tagged: &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/edward-lear/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward&#xA;Lear&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/learning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/limericks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;limericks&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/pronunciation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to judge someone’s language proficiency. There are&#xA;plenty of standardised tests, but in my humble opinion, they just prove&#xA;someone can pass a test, not how good they are at using a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two things that can indicate a good grasp of a language, at least in the&#xA;case of English, are the abilities to pun and to rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Punning is probably more difficult than rhyming, since it requires not&#xA;only a good grasp of pronunciation and a swift vocabulary, but also&#xA;knowledge of the meaning of a great many words and idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my favourite British pastimes that involves a lot of rhyming and&#xA;occasional punning, is that of writing limericks. I won’t be&#xA;concentrating on puns, since they are not essential to limericks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see you’re all wondering what this wondrous thing, a limerick, is.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_%28poetry%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia article on limericks&quot;&gt;Limericks&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;are a type of verse, invented as a parlour game. They follow a simple&#xA;pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have five lines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The last words of the first, second and fifth lines must have the&#xA;same rhyme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The last words of the third and fourth lines must have the same&#xA;rhyme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first, second and fifth lines have the syllable stress pattern&#xA;of &lt;em&gt;duh DA duh duh DA duh duh daaa&lt;/em&gt; (approximately).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third and fourth lines have the syllable stress pattern of &lt;em&gt;duh&#xA;duh DA duh duh DA&lt;/em&gt; (approximately).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say that they have five lines, but often limericks are written with&#xA;the third and fourth lines combined into one. It is simpler to learn how&#xA;to write limericks by thinking of them as having five lines. The stress&#xA;patterns should be adhered to as well as possible, but can be fudged&#xA;somewhat in order to include a rhyme. The only strict rule is the&#xA;rhyming pattern of AABBA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think an example will be most illustrative. One of the great British&#xA;poets, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Edward Lear Wikipedia article&quot;&gt;Edward&#xA;Lear&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, was famous for his limericks. Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was an old man who said, ‘See!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have found the most beautiful bee!’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When they said, ‘Does it buzz?’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  he answered, ‘It does,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I never beheld such a bee!’  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can often tell an Edward Lear limerick by how two of the lines,&#xA;usually the first and fifth or second and fifth, make the rhyme using&#xA;the same word (in this instance, &lt;em&gt;bee&lt;/em&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of how being able to rhyme can demonstrate one’s&#xA;proficiency in English, if you look at the third and fourth lines of&#xA;Lear’s limerick, you can see that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; rhymes with &lt;em&gt;buzz&lt;/em&gt; . While the&#xA;pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; is probably one of the earlier things learnt in&#xA;English, it might not be obvious to all due to how the spellings differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is the ability to know which words will best fit the&#xA;stress patterns for the limerick. This is something that can only be&#xA;learnt through extensive practice. In our above example, the words fit&#xA;the stress patterns almost exactly. The fourth line, however, does rely&#xA;on a pause at the end to keep the rhythm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say that for a limerick to be a true limerick it must be salacious&#xA;or rude in some way. I do not agree. I think that beyond the structure&#xA;of the limerick, the main semantic rule is that they should be light&#xA;hearted. A serious limerick is a pointless thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you’re wondering how well your ability in English is coming along,&#xA;try composing a few limericks. The easier you are finding it, the better&#xA;your grasp of English is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:42:07.570" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:42:07.570" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:27:47.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:31:21.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/11/themed-posts-wars/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Themed Questions: Wars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; 2011-11-11  by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/waiwai933/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/11/themed-posts-wars/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack&#xA;Exchange&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/main-site/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main-site&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/themed-posts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;themed&#xA;posts&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/war/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;war&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 11 November 1918, at 11 AM Paris time, the armistice that ended&#xA;fighting between the Triple Entente and Germany in the First World War&#xA;came into effect, and to this day, nations around the world hold&#xA;memorial days on November 11th, no matter what they are called—&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Remembrance Day&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Armistice Day&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Memorial Day&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Veterans Day&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For better or for worse, wars are no small part of human history, and&#xA;that is evident in the questions the English Language and Usage Stack&#xA;Exchange site receives. Let’s take a look at a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18366/how-do-i-say-wwi-out-loud&quot;&gt;How do I say WWI out loud?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most countries observe November 11th in honor of those who died in&#xA;WWI, let’s start with a question about that conflict. How do we expand&#xA;the acronym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our members provide several suggestions: &lt;em&gt;the First World War&lt;/em&gt; and&#xA;&lt;em&gt;World War One&lt;/em&gt; seem to be among the names most commonly used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38326/are-the-allies-always-good-guys&quot;&gt;Are the allies always good guys?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another fascinating question of terminology. The OP perhaps explains the&#xA;question best:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[T]he side described as “allies” is nearly always reserved to the&#xA;  side to which the speaker has sympathy. Although technically the word&#xA;  means somebody in alliance, I virtually never seen the word applied to&#xA;  a supposedly bad side even if that side has an alliance of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45708/word-for-opposing-sides-in-a-war&quot;&gt;Word for opposing sides in a war&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s say we’d like to sidestep the issue of naming each side and just&#xA;use a more general term for the two sides fighting in a war. What are&#xA;our options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Centigonal provides us with our most popular suggestion,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45708/word-for-opposing-sides-in-a-war/45713#45713&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;belligerents&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but Mitch and mickeyf trail close behind, with &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45708/word-for-opposing-sides-in-a-war/45709#45709&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;opponents&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;combatants&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45708/word-for-opposing-sides-in-a-war/45724#45724&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;adversaries&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;as alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44055/when-referring-to-a-specific-war-or-other-named-event-should-the-word-war-b&quot;&gt;When referring to a specific war (or other named event), should the word “war” be capitalized when it appears alone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a broader question. If we’re referring to, say, the Cold War, and&#xA;we use the word &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt; by itself, should it be capitalized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jim opines that &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44055/when-referring-to-a-specific-war-or-other-named-event-should-the-word-war-b/44059#44059&quot;&gt;both can be&#xA;valid&lt;/a&gt;, but both he and &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44055/when-referring-to-a-specific-war-or-other-named-event-should-the-word-war-b/44057#44057&quot;&gt;Barrie&#xA;England&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;seem to prefer that &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt; not be capitalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11070/decimate-has-it-been-used-in-the-classic-sense-in-modern-writing&quot;&gt;“Decimate”: has it been used in the “classic” sense in modern writing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, &lt;em&gt;decimate&lt;/em&gt; is a word commonly criticized that many&#xA;people believe should mean &lt;em&gt;to kill one in every ten&lt;/em&gt; , but very rarely&#xA;do we see it used to mean the execution of a proportion that is anywhere&#xA;near one-tenth. How often is the “correct” meaning used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very rarely, it seems—the answerers only seem to have been able to&#xA;source it a few times. But ShreevatsaR provides us with &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11070/decimate-has-it-been-used-in-the-classic-sense-in-modern-writing/13475#13475&quot;&gt;an interesting&#xA;glimpse of why what many people perceive to be the correct meaning is in&#xA;fact not grounded in historical&#xA;fact.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Fascinating reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter where you live, November 11 marks an important anniversary for&#xA;the human race—WWI is called a world war for a reason. Even as we enjoy&#xA;the remarkable uniqueness of the date (i.e. &lt;em&gt;11-11-11&lt;/em&gt;), we should also&#xA;take a moment to remember the tragedies of the World Wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T04:31:21.437" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:31:21.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:37:11.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/11/articles-a-vs-an/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Articles: “A” vs. “An”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-11-04 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/waiwai933/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/11/articles-a-vs-an/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/articles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/pronunciation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the prevalent questions on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage –&#xA;Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is about whether &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;or &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; is the correct indefinite article to use. It’s a straightforward&#xA;question, but like all questions, there are subtleties that raise&#xA;further questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General Rule&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The question of “a” vs “an” is always decided by the pronunciation of&#xA;the word that follows the article, without exception. Words that begin&#xA;with a vowel sound, such as &lt;em&gt;apple&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;egg&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;owl&lt;/em&gt;, use the&#xA;indefinite article &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ate an apple yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other words, i.e. words that begin with a consonant sound, such as&#xA;&lt;em&gt;cake&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pie&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; use the indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read a book yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vowels, Consonants, and their Sounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some words are a little trickier though, and if you’re not familiar with&#xA;common English pronunciation, you may want to take note of things that&#xA;can trip people up. Note that I said &lt;em&gt;vowel &lt;strong&gt;sounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;consonant&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;sounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; earlier, not just vowels and consonants. There’s a reason&#xA;for this—many people think that vowels and consonants are letters, and&#xA;making it clear that this is misleading is vital. We’ll keep up this&#xA;distinction to reinforce the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, vowels and consonants are sounds. Letters thought of vowels&#xA;(i.e. &lt;em&gt;a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y&lt;/em&gt; ) can have a consonant sound, and&#xA;vice versa, so it just might be a good idea to check a dictionary with&#xA;pronunciations when you’re unsure. We’ll be using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&#xA;pronunciations&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;here, but any good dictionary will have some reasonable pronunciation&#xA;guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aitches&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you have a word that begins with the letter &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, there’s a good&#xA;chance that the &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; is silent (i.e. doesn’t make a sound). For example,&#xA;take the word &lt;em&gt;hour&lt;/em&gt;, which has a pronunciation of &lt;code&gt;   /aʊ̯ɚ/  &lt;/code&gt;, and&#xA;compare it with the word &lt;em&gt;hospital&lt;/em&gt;, which has a pronunciation of&#xA;&lt;code&gt;   /hɒspɪtəl/  &lt;/code&gt; . Note that &lt;em&gt;hour&lt;/em&gt;, even though it begins with a&#xA;consonant, does not begin with a consonant sound as the initial &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; is&#xA;silent; rather, it begins with the subsequent vowel sound. However,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;hospital&lt;/em&gt; does not have a silent &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, and thus the &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced&#xA;as a consonant, and &lt;em&gt;hospital&lt;/em&gt; is used with the article &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was at a hospital for an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wyes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There’s another common problem. Elementary school teachers seem to love&#xA;teaching their students that there are five vowels (i.e. &lt;em&gt;a, e, i, o, u&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;), and sometimes &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is a vowel as well. This is true because &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; can&#xA;have both a vowel sound and a consonant sound, but it’s extremely&#xA;misleading because these same teachers also instill the idea that the&#xA;letters are in and of themselves the vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that’s going off on a tangent—when does &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; make a vowel sound? Just&#xA;like with &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, the answer is &lt;em&gt;when it does&lt;/em&gt; . There are few guidelines&#xA;to work with, but in most cases, when a word begins with a &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; and is&#xA;not a proper noun (in which case you wouldn’t be using an indefinite&#xA;article anyway), it’s probably a consonant sound. Still, you might want&#xA;to check your dictionary if you’re unsure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had lunch on a yacht. /jɒt/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More Vowels and Consonants?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Another corner case I want to point out are words beginning with &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;In a fair number of these, such as &lt;em&gt;uniform&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;unicorn&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;the &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; is actually making a consonant sound that’s much like the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;consonant sound—it’s represented in IPA as &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A unicorn became my very best friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I’ve warned you about these pitfalls, there are more cases&#xA;where vowels and consonants don’t seem to be what they should be, so if&#xA;you don’t know how to pronounce a word, a dictionary can be your very&#xA;best friend (unless you have a dog, in which case the dictionary will be&#xA;your second best friend).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acronyms and Initialisms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ok, so we’ve gotten the basics down. But English isn’t that&#xA;straightforward—what happens when we bump into acronyms and initialisms?&#xA;Remember, the general rule is 100% right—we’re only calling it general&#xA;because we want to look at the corner cases. In fact, this is one of the&#xA;few rules in English that is never violated in Standard English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you pronounce the acronym/initialism directs the article you choose.&#xA;If you say &lt;em&gt;FAQ&lt;/em&gt; as three different letters, i.e. &lt;code&gt;/ɛf.eɪ.kjuː/&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;, you begin with a vowel sound and should use &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;. If you say &lt;em&gt;FAQ&lt;/em&gt; in&#xA;one syllable, i.e. &lt;code&gt;/fæk/&lt;/code&gt;, you’re beginning with a consonant&#xA;sound and should use &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A NATO exercise will begin in thirty minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An AIDS treatment is due to be tested shortly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;N.B.&lt;/em&gt; If you’re wondering why we don’t make the distinction between&#xA;acronyms and initialisms here, it’s because there’s disagreement about&#xA;the exact definition of the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Parenthetical Statements&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Another common area of confusion is parenthetical statements. Imagine&#xA;that you’re reading the sentence. If you include the parenthetical&#xA;statement when you read it aloud, the first word in the parentheses&#xA;decides the article. If you skip it, then use the word immediately&#xA;following the close of the parentheses. When in doubt, it’s usually&#xA;safer to assume the parentheses would be read aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’re wondering when a parenthetical statement might come after an&#xA;article, it most often appears to insert an adjective (e.g. I need a/an&#xA;(lovely) evening to myself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But My Pronunciation Is Different&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You might disagree with some of my examples because you pronounce the&#xA;word following the article differently than I do, and that’s perfectly&#xA;fine. I’ve done my best to choose cross-dialectal examples, but some&#xA;dialects are so different it’s hard to make all examples work. What you&#xA;should keep in mind is that you’re writing or speaking to an audience—if&#xA;they’re all from a specific region, try to use the pronunciations they&#xA;would when you’re choosing articles. If they’re from a variety of&#xA;regions, then choose the most common pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:42:28.693" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:37:11.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:43:00.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-vs-about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What are you on about now? (Prepositions: on vs about)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; 2011-10-11  by &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/mrshinyandnew/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Mr. Shiny &amp;amp; New&quot;&gt;Mr. Shiny &amp;amp;&#xA;New&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-vs-about/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 comments&lt;/a&gt; Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/prepositions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt; ,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/word-differences/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word-differences&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When something has a topic, is it &lt;em&gt;ON&lt;/em&gt; that topic, or &lt;em&gt;ABOUT&lt;/em&gt; that&#xA;topic? This question on, or about, which preposition to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16477/when-should-i-use-a-discussion-of-vs-a-discussion-on-vs-a-discussion-about&quot;&gt;comes&#xA;up&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32629/any-news-for-vs-any-news-on-vs-any-news-about&quot;&gt;fairly&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36368/article-on-vs-article-about&quot;&gt;often&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16477/when-should-i-use-a-discussion-of-vs-a-discussion-on-vs-a-discussion-about/16584#16584&quot;&gt;Martha’s&#xA;answer&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;tries to explain some of the connotations that may be present when using&#xA;certain words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A discussion &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; a topic&lt;/em&gt; — this implies that the&#xA;  discussion was just a conversation, really, and it might not have&#xA;  stayed strictly on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A discussion &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; a topic&lt;/em&gt; — this brings to mind a true&#xA;  discussion, going into all sorts of details of the topic (and only&#xA;  the topic).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A discussion &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; a topic&lt;/em&gt; — here I picture the discussion to&#xA;  be somewhat one-sided, almost a lecture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m afraid to say that I don’t agree with these explanations.  My&#xA;instinct is that “about” and “on” are pretty much equivalent in meaning,&#xA;as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32629/any-news-for-vs-any-news-on-vs-any-news-about/32631#32631&quot;&gt;FumbleFingers&#xA;wrote&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if there are two words, and they both serve a similar purpose, which&#xA;should we choose? People must care about this, because they keep&#xA;asking.  It turns out that EL&amp;amp;U is not the only place people have asked.&#xA;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://twopens.com/beach-reads-the-chicago-manual-of-style/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post on twopens.com asked the Chicago Manual of&#xA;Style&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;editors which was better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She gave a lecture on recycled plastics or about recycled plastics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lengthy discussion ensued until one editor pointed out that it didn’t&#xA;matter at all, since the meaning was perfectly clear and concise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until, of course, you have a sentence like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I once attended a lecture on the surface of Mars. (How did you get&#xA;  there?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we have a pickle. The word “on” has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many&#xA;definitions&lt;/a&gt; , so once&#xA;your sentence invokes one of those other definitions you risk confusing&#xA;your reader. If you’re careful, you can spot the double meanings and&#xA;edit your sentence accordingly. Or, you can be cautious and just choose&#xA;“about” which has less potential for error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you want to just go with the flow, you can simply do&#xA;whatever everyone else is doing. If you can figure out what that is, of&#xA;course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ratio of On to About&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ratio of less than one means About is used more)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Word      Ratio&#xA;[1]News       0.73&#xA;[2]Discussion 0.6&#xA;[3]Lecture    4.82&#xA;[4]Article    2.73&#xA;[5]Book       1.35*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190283&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190220&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190220&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190302&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190302&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190315&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190315&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190338&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=12190338&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Note: Many false positives here, such as: “found the book on&#xA;Amazon.com”, “book on tape”, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my crude Corpus search, it seems that there is no clear winner in&#xA;usage. The numbers for “on” are inflated by the fact that many examples&#xA;are false positives, yet there still is an overwhelming usage of “on”&#xA;for certain phrases. So don’t get too hung up about about, or go on and&#xA;on about on. It’s all okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:43:05.677" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:43:05.677" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:43:00.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:46:53.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-proofreading-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proofreading Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-10-05 by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/waiwai933/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by waiwai933&quot;&gt;waiwai933&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-proofreading-questions/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;  Filed under &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack&#xA;Exchange&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/main-site/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main-site&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to categorize all closed questions on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language&#xA;and Usage – Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; ,&#xA;proofreading questions would be by far the largest category. The fact&#xA;that we get proofreading questions in quantity is no surprise—after all,&#xA;a vast number of people are eager to learn English, which is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“&lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt; of international business, science, technology and&#xA;aviation”&lt;/a&gt; , and&#xA;they want to know if their English is respectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, EL&amp;amp;U-SE has a policy that &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;prohibits proofreading&#xA;questions&lt;/a&gt; . Does this mean that&#xA;we don’t want to help people get better at English and that we’re only&#xA;here for discussing obscure questions about grammar? Of course not! The&#xA;entire point of EL&amp;amp;U-SE, and every other SE site, is to help people&#xA;learn about the subject matter. The reason we don’t allow proofreading&#xA;questions is because there is nothing to be gained by a simple&#xA;proofreading question—true, a sentence will be improved, but the author&#xA;does not benefit from experience, nor does the community benefit, as it&#xA;is statistically unlikely that some other person will come up with the&#xA;same sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, we could identify all the errors in a piece of writing, but&#xA;that doesn’t teach the author about pronoun-antecdent agreement, about&#xA;idiomatic uses, or about the differences between &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt;, and&#xA;&lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt;. We’d love to teach our friends about these things so that they&#xA;can benefit in the long-term. So while we don’t allow &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;proofreading requests, proofreading requests that identify a specific&#xA;area of concern are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, presume the following post was posted on EL&amp;amp;U-SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The cats eating food of cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the errors in the above sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example sentence has at least two mistakes, depending on how you&#xA;count them, but that isn’t our concern right now. Let’s say we were to&#xA;identify the errors for the author. Hopefully, he/she would be grateful,&#xA;but in the long run, the author’s only resource is to continue asking&#xA;us. This doesn’t help anyone learn, and eventually, we’d all get bored&#xA;of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, here’s a good example of a proofreading question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The cats eating food of cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you use *eating* in the above sentence? I don’t see verbs that&#xA;  end in *ing* by themselves in sentences, but I don’t know why that&#xA;  is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of a good proofreading question; an answer could&#xA;discuss verb forms that end in &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. participles and gerunds) and&#xA;why they can’t be used as a verb by themselves (but they can with a form&#xA;of the verb &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; , e.g. &lt;em&gt;was eating&lt;/em&gt;). This way, the author can&#xA;understand better how verb forms work. Note that the author has to take&#xA;the initiative to identify the area of concern; it would be too much&#xA;expenditure of effort if we explained every error when the author was&#xA;only trying to get an editor for free and didn’t care how or why the&#xA;sentence was wrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, most people are kind enough to mention as a side note that&#xA;&lt;em&gt;food of cat&lt;/em&gt; is wrong, and why &lt;em&gt;food for cats&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cat food&lt;/em&gt; are the&#xA;acceptable phrasings. We’re generally able to help with minor issues, so&#xA;long as the original author has demonstrated concern and a willingness&#xA;to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, proofreading questions, &lt;strong&gt;when they identify the area of&#xA;concern&lt;/strong&gt;, are welcome on EL&amp;amp;U-SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T04:46:53.717" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:46:53.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:54:49.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/09/how-to-ask-out-an-apple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Ask out an Apple&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2011-09-20 by &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/mattellen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Matt Ellen&quot;&gt;Matt&#xA;Ellen&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2011/09/how-to-ask-out-an-apple/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;  Filed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/learning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/verb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verb&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/verb-tense/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verb-tense&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello there Paul!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X61Zo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X61Zo.png&quot; alt=&quot;paul saying hi!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand you’re staying in England to learn the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/risO7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/risO7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;Yes I am here for learning English&amp;quot;&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should be “I am here to learn English.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PkMm8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PkMm8.png&quot; alt=&quot;paul saying &amp;quot;Oh. Please to explain me&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you mean “Please explain to me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5wHjf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5wHjf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;OK, thank you. Please explain to me.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you were explaining your reason for coming to the UK. In English,&#xA;we explain our reasoning by saying&#xA;&lt;code&gt;I am [present continuous verb] to [verb]&lt;/code&gt; . For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“I am reading to learn.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“I am running to catch up.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would not say “I am running for catching up”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q1Dgn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q1Dgn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;Thank you!&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Paul, how has your week been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kc2t1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kc2t1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;It has been good. I have a problem though.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh yes? And what is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/os7f5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/os7f5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;Do you mean what is my problem?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, “that” can be used in a similar way to “it” to refer back to a&#xA;previous subject, such as your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqQDQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqQDQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;OK. I meet this other fruit, and I want to ask to take him to dinner, but I am afraid my English is too bad.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I’m not the best person to ask for romantic advice, but I can&#xA;certainly help you ask him out with good English. Tell me what you are&#xA;going to say to this fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BrYvX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BrYvX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;Hello, Angus.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwPOJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwPOJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying “We are hanging out and talking for many times. I would like to eat dinner with you in a restaurant.”&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmm, well, what you want to say is understandable, but there are a&#xA;couple of grammatical errors and the second sentence would be phrased&#xA;differently by a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll deal with the second sentence first. A native speaker would be more&#xA;likely to say “Would you like to come to dinner with me?” This allows&#xA;Angus to answer a question, rather than be faced with a statement of&#xA;fact that needs no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of the two errors I’ll deal with is where you said “for many&#xA;times”. First, the word “for” doesn’t go with the phrase “many times”;&#xA;“many times” just goes by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“I threw the ball many times.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you are talking about two types of event (hanging out and&#xA;talking) that occurred on more than one occasion. English has various&#xA;words to cover this, for example: &lt;em&gt;a lot, often, frequently&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the difference can be characterised like so: When you play squash,&#xA;you hit a ball against a wall &lt;em&gt;many times&lt;/em&gt; . If you play squash each&#xA;week, then you play it &lt;em&gt;frequently&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final thing I would change is the tense of your opening sentence.&#xA;“We are hanging out and talking” means that that is what is currently&#xA;going on, but “many times” means that this is something that has&#xA;happened before. What you want to indicate is that hanging out and&#xA;talking have happened in the past, and each time is complete, i.e. not&#xA;still ongoing. For this, English has a tense called the &lt;strong&gt;present&#xA;perfect&lt;/strong&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“I &lt;em&gt;have been&lt;/em&gt; to the doctor.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“We &lt;em&gt;have gone&lt;/em&gt; on holiday.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“They &lt;em&gt;have eaten&lt;/em&gt; us out of house and home.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To form the present perfect you take &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; and add the past tense of&#xA;the verb. So in your sentence you want to say, “We &lt;em&gt;have hung out and&#xA;talked&lt;/em&gt; “.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Paul, what are you going to say to Angus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tb821.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tb821.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;Hmmm. I think I will say: We have hung out and talked a lot. Would you like to come to dinner with me?&amp;quot;Would you like to come to dinner with me?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excellent. To make it clear that you enjoy Angus’s company, you could&#xA;add “, which I enjoyed very much.” to the end of the first sentence. So&#xA;it would become “We have hung out and talked a lot, which I enjoyed very&#xA;much.” This would emphasise how you feel about Angus, and hopefully&#xA;persuade him to say yes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9qaw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9qaw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paul saying &amp;quot;Thank you very much!&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No problem. Go get him!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T13:15:30.320" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:15:30.320" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T04:54:49.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10550" CreationDate="2017-07-21T05:03:06.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2015/01/good-things-from-2014/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good things from 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; 2015-01-02  by &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/author/mattellen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Posts by Matt Ellen&quot;&gt;Matt&#xA;Ellen&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/2015/01/good-things-from-2014/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&#xA;comments&lt;/a&gt;  Filed under &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/category/english-se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Stack&#xA;Exchange&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; Tagged:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/2014/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2014&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;//english.blogoverflow.com/tag/end-of-the-year/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;end of the&#xA;year&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that hat season is in full swing, we thought it would be nice to&#xA;have a look at some of the good bits of 2014 at English Language &amp;amp;&#xA;Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, some congratulations to members who hit 20K reputation&#xA;this year:*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/1547&quot;&gt;Marthaª&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15770&quot;&gt;Jon Hanna&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/6006&quot;&gt;Mr Hen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119&quot;&gt;Yoichi Oishi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8019&quot;&gt;TimLymington&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/58761&quot;&gt;medica&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666&quot;&gt;kris&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/66974&quot;&gt;Josh61&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2022&quot;&gt;mplungjan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/44619&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/21655&quot;&gt;Edwin Ashworth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/36232&quot;&gt;Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/64985&quot;&gt;ermanen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/16052&quot;&gt;choster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Job well done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a similar note, some of the more interesting gold badges earned this&#xA;year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/161/socratic&quot;&gt;Socratic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot;&gt;Yoichi&#xA;Oishi&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(×6)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/4070/janochen&quot;&gt;janoChen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/305/brian-hooper&quot;&gt;Brian&#xA;Hooper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/35/unsung-hero&quot;&gt;Unsung Hero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/71576/garys-student&quot;&gt;Gary’s&#xA;Student&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/66974/josh61&quot;&gt;Josh61&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/103/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/44619/mari-lou-a&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou&#xA;A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/58761&quot;&gt;medica&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/10041/daniel&quot;&gt;Daniel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/4972/mitch&quot;&gt;Mitch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three questions from this year that caught our attention (in a good way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/185773/why-did-x-change-to-f-in-english&quot;&gt;Why did /x/ change to /f/ in English?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The question exposes an interesting shift in English pronunciation&#xA;and has an answer that gives a nice explanation for how the change&#xA;took place and shows where the sound still exists in other&#xA;languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/214501/who-originated-merry-christmas&quot;&gt;Who originated &amp;quot;Merry Christmas&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;A nice topical question for the time of year. It opens with a potted&#xA;history of the phrase, and the answer takes us the rest of the way&#xA;with some interesting tidbits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215677/is-there-a-general-rule-for-which-types-of-nouns-end-in-archy-vs-cracy&quot;&gt;Is there a general rule for which types of nouns end in -archy vs. -cracy?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;While the question body is somewhat lack-lustre, the most upvoted&#xA;answer is insightful giving a helpful comparison of the two&#xA;suffixes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all our members for helping make EL&amp;amp;U the thriving community&#xA;that it is. Thanks for an enjoyable 2014 and have a happy 2015!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Thanks to the SE team for compiling the list. Since this was done in&#xA;the middle of December more folks may have passed the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93130" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T07:22:28.260" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T07:22:28.260" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-21T05:03:06.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T09:50:34.487" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want a book for English Syntax, I want you to know that I am an elementary student of English Language and I have finished the book &quot;Essential Grammar in Use (A self study reference and practice book for elementary students of English)&quot;, Raymond Murphy, Cambridge University Press. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of this book I encountered some problems in understanding some basic syntax notions. I understand of course what is the subject, object, verbs in simple phrases but when I face something more complex (two phrases in one) I have a little misunderstanding, so I want to freshen some things and to extend my knowledge about syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can anyone suggest a book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244377" OwnerDisplayName="chaviaras michalis" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T12:55:57.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T12:55:57.203" Title="Advice for a book for English Syntax" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T15:36:03.010" Score="15" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my 4 years on ELU, I've sometimes come across questions seeking advice on how to respond to someone in certain situations, and such off-topic questions are closed and deleted, however, in the meantime, I've seen many users helping out the OP in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we have a brand new Stack Exchange community dedicated to helping people on such matters involving interpersonal skills. It should cover topics such as &quot;is it rude to say x to y?&quot;, &quot;how to respond to x when I'm in y?&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From now on, when we close such off-topic questions, please direct the OP to &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Interpersonal Skills SE&lt;/a&gt; and it will help them a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topics allowed there are not yet clearly defined, and I hope that some of our ELU users can help the new community grow, so please do visit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T15:49:13.840" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T10:39:22.847" Title="We have a new community called &quot;Interpersonal Skills&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T00:30:57.033" Score="8" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to discover that @tchrist and others had declared &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/401211/is-the-pronoun-always-necessary?noredirect=1#comment953753_401211&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about language usage off-topic.  The &quot;off-topic&quot; flag description says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about English language and usage&#xA;  within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center specifically includes questions about grammar and discusses nothing about excluding questions about usage.  The fact that there's actually a tag (&quot;conversational-deletion&quot;) that describes the question strongly suggests the question itself was on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly don't understand why the question was declared off-topic.  I was especially disappointed when @tchrist declared that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course it's &quot;grammatical&quot;, since &quot;grammatical&quot; is defined to be&#xA;  &quot;sounds ok to native speakers&quot;. This is what we call&#xA;  conversational-deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, by declaring the example &quot;grammatical&quot; (right or wrong), @tchrist has admitted the question is valid and should not have been put on hold for being &quot;off-topic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I'm familiar with what &quot;conversational deletion&quot; is, but was disappointed to find the tag has no meta information.  I agree that &quot;sounds OK to English speakers&quot; is basically the underlying concept behind the acceptability of conversational deletion, but I'm pretty sure every English teacher in America would disagree with the claim, &quot;'grammatical' is defined to be 'sounds OK to native speakers.'&quot;  That assertion is tantamount to, &quot;there are no rules, this site has no reason to exist.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'm hoping to better understand the rationale behind putting the question on hold.  I'm also hoping to understand how a blank tag justifies downvoting all the answers and, apparently, the question (which appears to be what happened, though I may be wrong about this).  The action appears draconian to me, and I'd like to understand why it was deemed acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246783" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T03:32:41.020" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T03:32:41.020" Title="Declaring a question about English usage &quot;off-topic&quot; in a forum named &quot;English Language &amp; Usage&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10578" CreationDate="2017-07-22T00:39:02.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was placed On Hold for the following reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no research and it is too basic for our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could well have been placed On Hold for a host of other reasons. It is also Too Broad and Unclear. &quot;Is the pronoun always necessary?&quot; was the question in the title. The answer to that is of course &quot;no&quot;. But two different questions appear to have been asked in the body. Not sure which to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that it is not currently a good question for our site in its current condition, which is why I've put it On Hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;We are not a forum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, this is not a forum. It is not for discussion. It is a question and answer site. Question and answer sites are not discussion forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T00:39:02.717" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10581" CreationDate="2017-07-22T03:30:28.610" Score="7" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;DISCLAIMER: This post is merely seeking others' opinions (and whether I was indeed wrong). I am not out to get anyone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello, fellow linguists. I come here with a slight dilemma pertaining to a comment by yours truly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/401117/you-pay-a-payment-and-you-receive-a-what&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was asked by a new user, and the OP seemed able to resolve his question fairly quickly. This was indicated to me by the fact that he had taken a user's commswer (yes, I just coined that word for a comment-answer), quoted it and posted it as an answer. I commented on the OP's answer to welcome them and provide some (what I saw as) helpful guidance for the future. My comment read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi [OP's name] and welcome to ELU! If you feel that your question has been answered, you should mark it as solved by awarding a green tick. It doesn't matter if it's on your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I opened my ELU inbox to find a reply to my comment from another user that read (please excuse the blasphemy):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jesus H Christ @doglover 16 hours haven't even elapsed yet. Selecting an answer greatly lessens the chances of a question getting other, possibly more useful, answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first impression was not great - as a Christian, I did not like to hear such blasphemy. But I definitely took the advice and considered that I had indeed been wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I responded (and, at the time of writing this, do not have a reply):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Three things: 1) Please don't blaspheme. 2) That may be so, but I only commented because the fact that the OP answered their own question indicates to me that they are content with the input they received. Furthermore, the tick is not permanent; it can be changed at any time. 3) The OP is a new user, so I wanted to welcome them and help them for the future. There's no COI since it's not my answer, and nowhere did I say that the OP had to do it immediately. There's no guarantee I could have commented the same thing 16 hours later - the post would probably have disappeared from my feed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I'm not writing this to make enemies - I just want to know whether I'm in the wrong. The above comment is my explanation, so any thoughts on that would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T08:00:21.670" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T05:05:16.507" Title="Was it incorrect or too soon to advise the OP that they could accept their own answer?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2017-07-22T06:18:06.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's ignore the &quot;blasphemy&quot; thing for a second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody is wrong here, technically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You guided the OP on how to accept an answer and why that's a good thing. Accepted answers indicate that the problem is solved, but in this case, OP posting their own answer itself was an indication that the problem is solved. So, here, accepting one wasn't really that important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other user meant to let you know that it's best to delay accepting an answer, and they're right too. When people see an accepted answer, they tend to ignore the question and move on. If we delay accepting, we'll probably get some better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, back to the &quot;blasphemy&quot;. Your first thought should be to look past that and focus on the actual message. If the comment was intentionally very offensive, do flag their comments as &quot;rude or abusive&quot;. Never directly respond to the tone of their comments; that never helps anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T08:46:20.077" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T08:46:20.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10584" CreationDate="2017-07-22T08:34:45.043" Score="12" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;We often migrate resource request questions to meta, and there's no denying that some resources are very useful to the users of this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my attempt at broadly categorising these requests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For resources that help the community in doing research for better questions and answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For resources that help only the OP and are probably useless to others. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see us reach a community consensus. Please express your opinions in an answer. I'm writing one myself, and expect your votes on that answer to show your approval or disapproval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T06:10:34.727" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T19:33:43.933" Title="What sort of resource request questions do we accept on meta?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|meta|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10583" CreationDate="2017-07-22T08:34:45.043" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Requests for resources that help the community in doing research for better questions and answers should be on-topic on ELU meta.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually goes against our established SE policy that meta should be for questions about the main site, but let's make an exception here. We have a user base that are experts in the language, and who else would know about these resources, if not us? If these resources help the main site have better questions and answers, I am all for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I mean, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see this as anything other than a win/win situation. We learn about new resources; the questioner gets what they wanted; our list of resources stays maintained; the main website remains free of clutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I see no harm done: Resource requests only ever come by very rarely so migrating these questions to meta and answering them here poses no major problems, and only regular visitors of the website read meta, so the tolerances can be much higher here. It seems especially harmless because reputation is not earned on meta, meaning that the behavior is not incentivized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H3&gt;However, A Certain Course of Action Should be Kept in Mind:&lt;/H3&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should refrain from telling people on the main site that these requests are answered here. Regular members of the website should know better than that. First, we should see if our existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/50044&quot;&gt;list of resources&lt;/a&gt; already covers it first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it does, just close the question on main, and just guide the questioner to our list instead. It should only be migrated if we do not have an existing category in the thread for the resource request for us to help establish a list of resources for consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever then happens to OP’s question after we are done compiling the resources is unimportant. Keep it, close it, delete it, send it to heck, send it into a black hole, erase it from existence and replace its empty husk of a shell with a torch for all I care. Its already fulfilled its purpose by that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T20:59:27.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T20:59:27.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T08:59:34.760" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just about to comment about some of the first posts on &quot;why 'information' can't be pluralised&quot; And was rather annoyed as one of the first answer that went on about something in the shape of &quot;you should learn English better before you post&quot; I thought it was so rude and opinionated....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recognised the site for using it once before, I think, so looked for my login details...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is when I discovered that I was &quot;in grave danger&quot; of being blocked! &#xA;What a pedantic attitude it is! But I have to grant you that this is your site and you run the way you see fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no debate, no criticism, no alternative, no ... hmm!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why then I can  read such elements in that thread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As said earlier I,also, wanted clarification on the possibilities to pluralise  the word information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born and raised in France the first 27 years of my life and was in Australia for the following 48 years... I do not have a great aptitude to use languages correctly yet I am and always have been keen to find out the why and how (Could I pluralise these too?) of words and their meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also researched the usage and form of same  word in French. It was confusing as it seems to be used mostly in its singular form but appears often in a plural form. I forgot the French ruling on such words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think I do understand I break all your rules and thus I'm unwanted here; so do what you have to do! I'll transfer my queries to more appropriate sites for my enjoyment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To end with my &quot;rant&quot; I wonder why I never did get an email about it and why when one logs in it does not show somewhere in your opening page. Something like a greeting or other form of acknowledgement one is actually logged in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well whatever you do with my, I guess, annoying prose...you're welcome to it! I'm not sure I'll even attempt to log in again, but this is my prerogative, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88402" OwnerDisplayName="Michel Munier" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T09:30:05.140" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T21:31:26.573" Title="Information or informations?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10577" CreationDate="2017-07-23T01:51:58.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to give you all an idea of what kind of questions could be migrated from ELU to IPS, here are some recent ones which have the right subject matters (but may not be specific enough to be migrated to IPS):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/399844/59258&quot;&gt;What do you say when you want to look around in a store and don't need help?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/391376/59258&quot;&gt;What is an appropriate greeting for the US Memorial Day?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/387850/59258&quot;&gt;How to informally inform about upcoming vacation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T10:39:22.847" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T10:39:22.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10599" CreationDate="2017-07-23T20:48:53.367" Score="31" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Enabling selective notifications on ELU&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other busy sites like Stack Overflow have pop-up notifications that trigger&#xA;on various titles and tags, but we do not. For example, this is an outright ban when trying to use a particular word in a title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aBZ18.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aBZ18.png&quot; alt=&quot;i have a problem popup&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a warning pop-up for guidance when trying to use a particular tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gFGEy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gFGEy.png&quot; alt=&quot;regex tag popup&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After years of observation of trends, and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6682/request-for-aggregate-data-regarding-deleted-questions-with-subjects-containing&quot;&gt;some help from staff&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;with the analysis of aggregate data, I would now like to propose some&#xA;simple mechanical measures like these to help guide askers into asking&#xA;better questions. The exact texts and links would be decided if and when&#xA;the community at large decides we should go ahead with either or both of my&#xA;concrete proposals below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two restrictions would only affect questions newly asked or edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Title Ban: “grammatically correct”, “correct grammar”&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that I would like to ban from titles the two strings&#xA;“grammatically correct” and “correct grammar”. If someone attempts to use&#xA;these in a title, they would get a pop-up notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning is that these are nearly always yes/no proofreading questions&#xA;without any research that draw poor answers at best and which are usually&#xA;closed. The notification text is something we’d work on. &lt;strong&gt;It needs to be short to be effective&lt;/strong&gt;, but we can include links to longer pieces for further guidance and examples of good and bad titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If need be, we can use fancier regexes for the strings such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;gram+at+ical+y cor+ect&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;cor+ect gram+[ea]r&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tag Ban: “grammar”&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions that use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag should not do so. That’s&#xA;because they usually have nothing to do with grammar at all. People use the&#xA;tag as a general catch-all equivalent of “language”, a tag which we already&#xA;ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone tries to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag, we can have a pop-up&#xA;notification explain that they should instead use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; or&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; if it’s really about grammar. We&#xA;could also mention non-grammar tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orthography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orthography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/punctuation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;punctuation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/capitalization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;capitalization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;capitalization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This notification would also trigger on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammer&lt;/a&gt; tag, as that is a&#xA;current synonym of the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We current have ~8.5k questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, which shows you just&#xA;what a “garbage” tag it really is! Those existing questions wouldn’t&#xA;be affected by this until&#xA;and unless they should be edited, at which point the ban would force the&#xA;editor to choose something more suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Community Input&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a great idea, a good idea, a so-so idea, or a lousy idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To change our site rules this way requires the collective will of the&#xA;community at large. I’d like you folks to please discuss these two&#xA;proposals below, whether pro or con.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus now that you know what sorts of things are possible, you might even&#xA;have your own, better ideas about such things you might put forward as&#xA;suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if we don’t like how it works out, we can of course always turn it off again easily enough: we could run these on a trial basis if we cared to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T15:19:30.700" Title="Proposal for selective blacklisting" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10585" CreationDate="2017-07-23T21:31:26.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome back to the site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in the comments, I think the message you ran into was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/231118/323179&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which is a warning that you are in &quot;in danger of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;being blocked from asking any more [questions]&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. The exact formula of when this message appears is a secret, as is the formula for the bans themselves. The message itself is intended to be helpful, so that you have a chance to ask better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some advice for this site: It's very important to search for an answer before you post. A simple search like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=relevance&amp;amp;q=parenthesis%20period&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; would have brought up the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/358580/191178&quot;&gt;your first question&lt;/a&gt;. Even if you don't find an answer, you should include what research you've done towards finding an answer (otherwise your question will likely be closed). We have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/191178&quot;&gt;entire page dedicated to resources&lt;/a&gt; that you can look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you might be more interested in another site on the network, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;, which is geared specifically towards people learning English. They're more tolerant towards &quot;basic&quot; questions, and don't have a research requirement like we do here on ELU. In other words, it's easier to post there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the answer, if you are referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/129893/191178&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, it's not rude. Is it a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer? I'd say no; you can dismiss pretty much any &quot;why&quot; question on this site like that, even if there's a good answer out there. (However, the question is probably a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/117552/191178&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, although the answers there aren't very satisfying to me either—I may have to write my own.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will get more tools (i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt;) to handle answers like that when you get more rep: at 50 rep you will be able to comment on the answer, and at 125 rep you will be able to downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T21:31:26.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2017-07-24T16:22:25.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally speaking, even as somebody who cares more about writing an answer convincingly enough to be accepted than I do for it to be highly voted upon by more people, I do not like the practice of advising O.P. on how to accept answers, unless they learn about the feature, can not quite figure out how to do it on their own, and elicit the advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because otherwise, any unsolicited advice comes with the all too strong implication that the commentator would like to see an answer accepted. Although they are not required to act upon this promting, the peer pressure may actually lead the questioner to accept an answer which does not actually serve the purpose of acceptance, which is to indicate what answer works best for them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136951/lets-stop-displaying-a-users-accept-rate&quot;&gt;The acceptance rate feature was removed especially for the purpose of removing peer pressure to accept questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another indication that this might have been done too soon is also found in the guidelines for accepting answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;If you write an answer to your own question, it can not be accepted until 48 hours after it is made, to give us the opportunity to write what may be an even better and more appreciable answer.&lt;/a&gt; Not even half of that time had ellapsed before you gave the advice. This limitation exists even while knowing that the questioner may have enough confidence in their knowledge of the matter to publish their answer alongside their question simultaneously, which can be done by using the checkbox which allows you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no rush, or even a requirement to accept answers, and I think what serves the purpose of Acceptance best is if we give our questioners the fullest opportunity to consider which answers really are the best ones in their opinion. Even if this means some users never end up learning how to accept answers, I think this is a lesser malady than training our newer members to accept answers incorrectly, as the checkmark loses more and more of its significance every time it is applied as a mere formality. Such a decision can never be given too much consideration in my opinion, but it is all too easy to develop a thoughtless habit which does not give the matter enough of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if I recall correctly, I think even the malady of people never learning to accept answers might actually have a formalized reminder built into the system already, in which case I think the advice is practically needless anyway. In this case, people will accept answers eventually, if they really want to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T05:05:16.507" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T05:05:16.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2017-07-24T18:57:03.387" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The odds of my replying to you sooner would have been greater had not my comment disappeared and that without explanation. And my reply would have been a link to the &quot;Questanswer&quot; by J.R. over at English Language Learners meta, which gives a far more thorough reply than I could have come up with.  Though it's on our daughter (sister?) site, I think the points it makes are applicable here, perhaps especially when a new user is the questioner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1307/not-so-fast-when-should-i-accept-my-answer&quot;&gt;Not so fast! (When should I accept my answer?)&lt;/a&gt;. I've used the phrase Questanswer because the question contains remarkable reasoning for waiting at least 24 hours before selecting an answer, and mentions 48 hours. The sun never sleeps on the potential answerers to ELU/ELL questions, but at least one turn of the earth around the sun allows everybody a chance to see and possibly respond to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T19:27:35.803" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T19:27:35.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11177" CreationDate="2017-07-24T19:36:01.230" Score="-2" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment of mine (quoted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10580/was-it-incorrect-or-too-soon-to-advise-the-op-that-they-could-accept-their-own-a&quot;&gt;this meta-question&lt;/a&gt; by Dog Lover), began with what I thought was the innocuous  expression 'Jesus H Christ'. Dog Lover, to whom my comment was originally addressed, took exception to it, asked me not to &quot;blaspheme&quot;, and my comment disappeared with no explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the name/phrase by me was inspired by the intriguing ELU question &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25716/who-is-jesus-h-christ&quot;&gt;Who is Jesus H Christ?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the information in the answer of Peter Shor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The H. was inserted to &lt;strong&gt;avoid committing blasphemy&lt;/strong&gt; by saying Jesus Christ. It's the same phenomenon as replacing damn with darn. So Jesus H. Christ here is presumably  not the son of God but just somebody else with a very similar name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately &lt;em&gt;tone&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;intention&lt;/em&gt; are sometimes not easy to either encode or decode in quick, short written communications. I don't think the expression is any more &quot;blasphemous&quot; than the songs of  &lt;em&gt;Jesus Christ Superstar&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Godspell&lt;/em&gt;. And we English speakers  often say such things as '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/jeez&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeez&lt;/a&gt;' and a multitude of other  invectives, usually without knowing that they are short forms or corruptions or euphemisms of 'sacred  words'.  The first word of my comment (&quot;a very similar name&quot;) was meant to express mild frustration/annoyance  at the advice given by Dog Lover who gave &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10580/was-it-incorrect-or-too-soon-to-advise-the-op-that-they-could-accept-their-own-a&quot;&gt;what I thought was poor advice&lt;/a&gt; to a non-native speaking newbie on the site.   I suppose 'Golly Gee Whiz' or 'geewhillikins' (both corruptions of holy words)  didn't encode the same frustration, and one wonders, casually if the OP would have been offput by either of those words. Whatever the case, those who use the phrase asked about in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25716/who-is-jesus-h-christ&quot;&gt;Who is Jesus H Christ?&lt;/a&gt; might have their comment subject to censorship. Seems to me a curtailing of freedom of speech, but whatever, I'm not here to defend anything or anybody. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also read that offensive words are not allowed to stand in titles (they're replaced by xxxxx). Another sign that Jesus H. Christ is not considered offensive by the mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My entire comment is reproduced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jesus H Christ @doglover 16 hours haven't even elapsed yet. Selecting an answer greatly lessens the chances of a question getting other, possibly more useful, answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Dog Lover for not considering the comment so &quot;blasphemous&quot; as to refrain from reposting it him/herself in their meta-question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/410995/many-people-say-that-sharing-housework-has-a-lot-of-benefits-state-your-opinion?__=1678562699#comment979807_410995&quot;&gt;Related comment&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;by Flater contains &lt;em&gt;Holy sweet Jesus&lt;/em&gt; (since changed to &lt;em&gt;Arrgh&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:40:59.690" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:40:59.690" Title="Why was my comment containing JHC deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10592" CreationDate="2017-07-24T20:48:48.540" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously the answer is Yes: it is so objectionable as to be deletable, &lt;strong&gt;as a comment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system does not show who flagged comments*, but your comment received one non-committal &quot;No longer needed&quot; flag (&quot;This comment is obsolete, chatty, or otherwise unnecessary&quot;), and two &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flags. The last flag was sufficient for the system to delete the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a certain amount  of frustration might be evident in the comment, starting it with &lt;em&gt;Really&lt;/em&gt; might have conveyed it fairly well, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drawing a parallel between &lt;strong&gt;using&lt;/strong&gt;  a term and &lt;strong&gt;mentioning&lt;/strong&gt; that term is false. In order to discuss something, it is necessary to mention it, and that's what you're doing here. It's not the same thing at all as using it in a comment. The &lt;em&gt;use–mention distinction&lt;/em&gt; is something which has come up quite a bit on Meta and is mentioned in the most recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4990/18696&quot;&gt;FAQ post on flagging&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I think Mr Hen's answer on the &quot;Jesus H. Christ&quot; question is far more conclusive than Peter Shor's. My take is that the &lt;em&gt;H&lt;/em&gt; is there &lt;strong&gt;for emphasis:&lt;/strong&gt; it's not a euphemism at all. While that might indicate a transatlantic difference in interpretation, emphasis would definitely make its use in a comment beyond the pale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffice to say, if an expression is not necessary, and it easily could cause offence (or even just a sharp intake of breath) then replace it or leave it out altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&amp;nbsp;Actually moderators &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; get to this data, with the requisite esoteric knowledge and lots of clicks. Deletion data is easier to see. The comment is marked as being deleted by the last flagger who caused its deletion, but that's not generally visible either, so I'm not saying who it is. It wasn't a moderator raising a &quot;binding&quot; flag though: it was one of three community flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T10:39:04.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T10:39:04.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10592" CreationDate="2017-07-24T21:30:00.863" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a multiple things going on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the taboo status of 'Jesus H Christ'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the context of the use of 'Jesus H Christ'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;common decency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About the taboo status, or blasphemy as it has been called, 'Jesus H Christ' is pretty tame along the taboo scale. (note that the following is actually more main site relevant than meta). It doesn't evoke the same shock and distaste as pejoratives and the 'n-word', or expletives like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carlin's 'seven words'&lt;/a&gt; &quot;shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits&quot; (note the lack of religious terms there). Of course there is a history where blasphemy was the worst taboo (the Abrahamic commandment against using the deities name as an expletive) prohibition. In English, this formerly strong blasphemy has become very tame (in contrast, Quebecois French uses all sorts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;religious terms as profanity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, 'Jesus H Christ' is about as blasphemous as 'poop' is an expletive. There is very little shock associated with it. A newscaster will most likely never use it. It is pretty informal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As to the context, the comment, you said&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jesus H Christ @doglover 16 hours haven't even elapsed yet...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By introducing that comment with a mild oath, you have shown how exasperated with @doglover, and it comes across as tendentious or confrontational. That is what made JHC a problem. If instead you had not said 'Jesus H Christ':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@doglover 16 hours haven't even elapsed yet...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it would have come across simply as the common SE advice that it is, just to wait to accept an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may not be a Christian or be aware of the taboos of Christians or any other group, but if you use a term that is taken in a disparaging manner by any group, then it should probably be removed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course a language site and taboo terms are entirely free to be discussed using quotes, but to use them is different (the use/mention distinction). We discuss profanity openly here, but using it in a disparaging manner is discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So consider blasphemy like epithets. It may not be blasphemy to you, but if others are hurt by it, like a racial epithet or any other taboo term, then you should politely avoid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't censorship or authoritarianism, it's just being polite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, 'Jesus H Christ' is not blasphemous (or extremely tame), but using it in the context you did magnified the import.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T13:17:31.767" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T13:17:31.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T21:42:03.597" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I filtered the questions by 'unanswered', and went to the last page, hoping to find some 'comment-answers' to community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my surprise, I found there were questions with lots of (generally around five) answers, although there are only (currently) 300 pages - much less than the 5764 questions in total. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?page=300&amp;amp;sort=unanswered&amp;amp;pagesize=15&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Try it here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is happening here? which questions are being filtered out, if some with answers are still included? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mobile version (not app) if that helps.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T21:42:03.597" Title="Filtering 'unanswered' shows answered questions" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-07-25T07:42:45.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10592" CreationDate="2017-07-25T01:07:05.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is too long to put in a comment, so I'll just share my input here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, as Andrew Leach has mentioned, your comment was not removed by means of one-strike-and-you're-out, so to speak. It was a result of flags from other community members, and, to be perfectly honest, I didn't initially flag. I also made sure to conceal identities within my Meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment didn't offend me personally, per se, but it didn't sit well with me. I am a Christian and was raised as one, and using the Lord's name in vain was extremely taboo. (On a personal note, while I still find &quot;Jesus&quot; as an expletive to be uncouth, I have a much greater tolerance for it. I think adding the &quot;Christ&quot; makes it worse because it's extending the religious reference. I also very much dislike &quot;for Christ's sake&quot;.) While I don't go to church, I have great respect for God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't want to sound like I'm having a whinge, because I'm not. Neither do I want to hold a grudge. All I can say is that - and I admit that I can have trouble restraining myself - you need to be mindful of the words you use and the tone you convey. One of the things I enjoy most about this site is the community, and it's important to Be Nice, in keeping with StackExchange's golden policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the second part. I get that you're upset with your comment being deleted, but that's &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different from a &lt;strong&gt;use-mention&lt;/strong&gt;. The question you have linked to falls under use-mention. The mentions of the Lord's name on that question are used literally, not emotionally. And I think you'll find that if there were a question about the F-word, all &lt;strong&gt;contextual&lt;/strong&gt; mentions of that word would be uncensored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the title of the linked question, it is not censored because it is personifying the entity to whom the expletive refers. Jesus Christ, when referring to the person, is not taboo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks to Dog Lover for not considering the comment so &quot;blasphemous&quot; as to refrain from reposting it him/herself in their meta-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to ignore the tone here and instead focus on your concern. Once again, it falls under use-mention. I am quoting what you commented, so it becomes contextual. The fact that I didn't censor it does not mean that I didn't still find it 'so blasphemous'. As with questions about swear words, censorship can get in the way of appropriate discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114389" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T01:48:15.430" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T01:48:15.430" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10592" CreationDate="2017-07-25T06:43:17.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my tuppence' worth. The link in Dog Lover's meta question directly pointed users to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/401117/you-pay-a-payment-and-you-receive-a-what&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; which led to the offending comment. As a result, there was no anonymity, though Dog Lover omitted saying &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; posted the comment in the meta post, anyone with half a wit knew it was @Clare. With the comment now deleted, it seems that Clare is claiming ownership (we already knew) and wants everyone to know it. Ostensibly, the bemused user  writes enquiring as to the reason behind its deletion. But in a comment, written below Dog Lover's answer, Clare writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not at all upset that my comment was deleted. I also think the appeal to &quot;community&quot; is a laugh, because I don't see any of the SE sites as being that. What's curious to me, in passing, is what gets censored here. And that's the last I have to say on the matter. Even this question was not something I actually wanted an answer to; I just enjoyed writing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment is copied and pasted, in case that too gets flagged...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the spurious deletion of a comment, you'll get used to it. Everyone, that is any user who has been a member for longer than six months, has had at least one comment deleted. Comments don't need to be &quot;blasphemous&quot;, taboo, offensive, racist, sexist, ageist, nationalist, rude, off-topic, irreverent, flippant, or obsolete to merit deletion. Just annoying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T07:00:03.140" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T07:00:03.140" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T13:34:17.507" Score="7" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I answered a question, and several hours later someone posts another answer which addresses the question differently but then also includes my own answer as an alternative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you just let it go, edit the other answer to add &quot;As xxx answered earlier...&quot; or simply remove the plagiaristic paragraph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120686" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T01:33:37.773" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T20:09:39.673" Title="Editing an answer to remove a section plagiarised from your own answer?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|plagiarism|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10588" CreationDate="2017-07-25T15:37:39.600" Score="16" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, yes, yes: just do it already!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested title ban would definitely be a good thing: it places a hurdle on blindly asking proof-reading questions, and might cause posters to think about which part of their text they are actually asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/700788/tag-edits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; shows 3341 questions (at present) where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag has been removed, and that does not include questions which have been deleted. That's a strike rate of around 4% of all non-deleted questions, and that's only those where someone has been bothered to edit the tags. Currently there are 8500 questions which have the tag, and I really doubt whether any of them are actually about grammar: that's around 10% of questions which is probably wrongly tagged with a tag their askers don't actually know the meaning of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the tag description is accurate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about morphology and syntax, the two elements of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...then &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; is superfluous, as questions can be grouped into those dealing with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;, or both. If someone asking a question does not know whether they are asking about morphology or syntax, or is aware that they are not, then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag is inappropriate. The tag description goes on to define its use further, and &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; it is misused:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG IF YOUR QUESTION IS ABOUT WHETHER SOMETHING SPECIFIC IS GRAMMATICAL. For such cases use the 'grammaticality' tag. Also do not use this for punctuation or spelling (orthography); those are not about grammar, and they have their own tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, YES: prevent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag being used, and prevent poor question titles being used too.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T15:37:39.600" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10598" CreationDate="2017-07-25T16:34:28.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You answered it first.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yours lacked depth, details, and formatting, compared to hers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People usually vote up beautifully formatted and detailed answers more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't say she copied yours - maybe she did, but there's not enough evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't go and edit hers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T20:09:39.673" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10588" CreationDate="2017-07-27T00:48:54.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disallowing “grammatically correct” and such would only make it harder to spot the questions that are off topic; they'd just put an even crappier title consisting of gibberish if necessary. I'm all for pop-ups (can't believe I just said that...) but I don't like the words &lt;em&gt;blacklist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ban&lt;/em&gt;. This is too much in one basket; should be like three separate metas. Several metas should decide what is to be 'banned', and another should ask for feature requests to facilitate that, if necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;if you get rid of the grammar tag, how am I supposed to ignore it&lt;/strong&gt; still? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pop-ups +1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arbitrarily banning &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; most succinct word this site could ever have, -1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T00:48:54.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10598" CreationDate="2017-07-27T11:40:17.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of editing is to clarify or otherwise improve a post. Feel free to add citations and attribution when it is clear what the probable sources are (e.g. a direct quote containing many words). &lt;strong&gt;The appropriate mechanisms for noting unproven but suspected plagiarism are comments to the suspected plagiariser and, if necessary, flags to moderators.&lt;/strong&gt; You didn't specify which posts you were referring to, but if they are the ones quoted below, you might want to rethink your claim to priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on @Mitch's link, I gather that these are the sentences you're referring to, quoted verbatim except for line breaks and other formatting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yours&lt;/strong&gt;: A better expressions would be &amp;quot;My aunt/uncle and her/his family&amp;quot; which implies my aunt or uncle and their immediate family. You could use &amp;quot;mother's family&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;father's family&amp;quot;, although this could refer to their parent, grandparents etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hers&lt;/strong&gt;: On a second note, you might consider — my aunt and her family or my aunt's family. Personally, I like the former better: Today I toured around the city with my aunt and her family who came to visit me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you were both answering was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word/phrase to unambiguously refer to “aunt, uncle, and cousins”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of naming a family member and tacking on &amp;quot;and family&amp;quot; is a good idea, but it's possible that she came up with the idea independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you move your mouse over the post's date, a tool-tip appears with the time stamp. Based on this time stamp, we can see that your answer came earlier. However, the following quote from Mitch came even earlier than yours, and mentioned the same idea. Perhaps you should credit Mitch for the original idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/402524/word-phrase-to-unambiguously-refer-to-aunt-uncle-and-cousins#comment955704_402524&quot;&gt;Mitch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Right...it seems like a reasonably common concept, eg visiting the nuclear family of your aunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would appear that all three of you came up with the same idea independently (and I saw at least another further down the comments to the question). It would be poor form to claim attribution in the later answer when you didn't attribute the earlier comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T11:40:17.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10588" CreationDate="2017-07-27T21:49:50.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By all means. But I doubt whether it will have much effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think we need AI to detect a subset of off-topic questions, and will be proposing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T21:49:50.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-27T22:07:46.873" Score="10" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site&#xA;  for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language&#xA;  enthusiasts.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first sentence on the Tour page, yet we are overwhelmed with first posts from non-native speakers or those with poor education asking proofreading questions or basic questions about the language. Most of them get closed (I spend my 20 close votes each day on them) but are visible long enough for other similar posters to think this is norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to do?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prevent them being posted in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to do it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think of these posts as a sort of spam (I know they are not literally spam), then what one needs is a ‘spam filter’. Like on gmail or whatever. So how do real spam filers work? Presumably by ‘training’ or coding them to recognize certain features of emails that indicate they are spam. Are there features of off-topic posts that could be used in a ‘spam filter‘? Many of them contain poor English, so perhaps a grammar checker could be used. Other features might be numbered lists and embedded images. And one could use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to train a program with examples of on-topic and off-topic posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who would do it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit like belling the cat. But surely someone knows somebody’s cousin who has a boy-friend that does that sort of thing. Please, before we all drown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T02:58:51.480" Title="AI as a solution to the deluge of off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10605" CreationDate="2017-07-28T01:18:00.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;somebody’s cousin who has a boy-friend that does that sort of thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cousin's boyfriend would also have to be a Stack Exchange developer and get authorization of their managers to implement a feature like that. Stack Exchange is a closed source platform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that is more likely to help: if those voting to close do not forget to &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; off-topic questions as well, they will disappear from the front page quickly. Posts scoring -4 or less are not shown on the front page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T01:18:00.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T01:32:25.587" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/400069/1420&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; was posted on July 15, received a warning template on July 19, was edited on July 20, and I flagged it to have the warning template removed on the same day, and haven't (as of July 28) received a response - the flag is still marked as &quot;Pending&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the sword of Damocles still hovering over this answer? Is it likely to be deleted before I get a response to my flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T01:32:25.587" Title="I've flagged to remove a warning template, and haven't received a response. Should I panic?" Tags="|discussion|answers|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2017-07-28T09:03:42.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question has been asked, the information in the tag about what is required has been expanded significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back then, all that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/14096/4&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that are about finding a single word to fit&#xA;  a meaning. Describe the intended meaning, connotation, and/or context&#xA;  in as much detail as you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few sample questions that definitely belong in this tag: [five&#xA;  example questions]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus distinguishing the tag from other tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/14096/16&quot;&gt;July 2017&lt;/a&gt;, the tag wiki is much more detailed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word that fits a meaning.&#xA;  To ensure your question is not closed as off-topic, please be specific&#xA;  about the intended use of the word. YOU MUST INCLUDE A SAMPLE SENTENCE&#xA;  demonstrating how the word would be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please use the &quot;phrase-requests&quot; tag instead if you seek more than&#xA;  just a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that are about finding a single word to fit&#xA;  a meaning. Describe the word's intended meaning, its connotation (is&#xA;  it laudatory or derogatory?), and/or its context in as much detail as&#xA;  you can.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1654/50044&quot;&gt;Questions that show no research are likely to be&#xA;  closed.&lt;/a&gt; It's also a good idea to show users how this single word&#xA;  fits in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few sample questions that definitely belong in this tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/241616/whats-the-single-word-for-left-or-right-handed&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the single-word for &amp;quot;left or right handed&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/208756/what-is-a-word-that-means-unforgettable-but-with-a-negative-connotation&quot;&gt;What is a word that means unforgettable but with a negative connotation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158374/aren-t-there-english-equivalents-to-japanese-word-senpai-%E5%85%88%E8%BC%A9-meaning-a-senior&quot;&gt;Aren’t there English equivalents to Japanese word, Senpai (先輩) meaning a senior in school, career, or age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355994/derogatory-term-for-a-nobleman&quot;&gt;Derogatory term for a nobleman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282807/is-there-a-word-phrase-or-idiom-for-a-person-who-stays-too-late-at-an-event-su&quot;&gt;Is there a word, phrase, or idiom for a person who stays too late at an event such as a dinner party?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag should be distinguished from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, which is for questions specifically seeking multi-word phrases rather than single words, though both tags may be&#xA;  used in conjunction when you want a term but don't care if it's a&#xA;  single-word or multi-word term&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;, which is for &quot;versus&quot; questions, when you already have several alternatives at your disposal, but are not sure which one&#xA;  to use &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, which is for more broad questions, e.g. those that ask for lots of words at once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;How to do research for a single word request&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you can think of a word with a similar meaning, you should look it&#xA;  up in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2577/50044&quot;&gt;thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; as part of your research. If there are any&#xA;  synonyms that seem close to what you're looking for, but not quite&#xA;  right, mention them in your question and explain why you don't think&#xA;  these words would fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Relevant details you may want to include&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;connotation: should the word be positive or negative?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;register or level of speech: should the word be formal or informal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;part of speech: do you want a noun, a verb, or an adjective? Or would you be fine with a word in any of these grammatical categories?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Question Checklist&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before making a single-word request, ask yourself the following&#xA;  questions (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2298/8816&quot;&gt;this meta topic about good request&#xA;  questions&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question describe exactly in what context you want to use a single word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question specify the criteria for which the suggested word will be accepted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question list which words you didn't like, and why they aren't suitable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question show that you searched for a suitable word before asking the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this counts as &quot;guidelines that will help us separate the rare wheat from the depressingly abundant chaff&quot;, and this question doesn't need to be featured in July 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T09:03:42.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T13:49:23.883" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31033/is-there-a-gender-neutral-word-for-aunts-and-uncles-parents-siblings&quot;&gt;Is there a gender-neutral word for [aunts and uncles], parents&amp;#39; siblings?&lt;/a&gt;) on the top network list. I thought it was very interesting and every answer had a useful suggestion to offer. I felt that it would be very helpful if someone could compile all of them into a single answer. So I gave &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31033/is-there-a-gender-neutral-word-for-aunts-and-uncles-parents-siblings/402780#402780&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, with due credits and extra definitions if there weren't any in the original answers. But it got downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are compilations of this kind not welcome on ELU?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131029" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T15:12:01.737" Title="Answer which is a compilation of all other answers posted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10610" CreationDate="2017-07-28T15:10:12.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; says &amp;quot;Good answers are voted up and rise to the top.&amp;quot; If you lump all of them together, how do the best of the answers rise to the top of the list? They might all be good, but now we can't vote on them separately so they can be ordered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compilation of answers into one answer makes things more complicated without actually adding any value. If new answers come along or the original answers are improved (or deleted) now the compilation is out of date. As separate answers, I can sort by &amp;quot;oldest&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;votes&amp;quot; which let's me easily focus on the content I want to see first (especially important when you're on the mobile site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to link to (or mention) someone's answer if you want to discuss it or expand upon it in your own answer, but just copying and pasting other people's ideas (even if they are attributed) into one answer isn't useful in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/179/stackprinter-the-stack-exchange-printer-suite#876&quot;&gt;StackPrinter app&lt;/a&gt; is a better way to handle creating a compilation of a question and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackprinter.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.stackprinter.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackPrinter is a website that pulls the main details of a given question, all its answers, comments and votes formatting them in a simple essential printable view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(it has a bunch of other nice features as well)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T15:10:12.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10610" CreationDate="2017-07-28T15:12:01.737" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Hank &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10610/answer-which-is-a-compilation-of-all-other-answers-posted#comment43430_10610&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;, adding a summary just duplicates what's already on the page. Plain compilations of this type don't really help answer the question any better than simply leaving the existing answers up. If you want to improve any of the answers, you can either offer your improvement in a comment to the relevant answer, or edit the answer yourself. If you edit the answer, leave a comment as a courtesy note about your edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception is where answers have been offered in the form of comments to the question. Since comments are considered ephemeral and subject to deletion at a whim, it is an accepted practice to collate useful comment-answers into a proper answer. In this case, the recommended practice is to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cite the original user (e.g. @Hank),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;link to their comment (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10610/answer-which-is-a-compilation-of-all-other-answers-posted#comment43430_10610&quot;&gt;@Hank&lt;/a&gt;), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;turn the answer into a &lt;em&gt;community wiki&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get links to comments from the timestamp of the respective comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;community wiki&lt;/em&gt; checkbox is located beneath the textbox that appears when you first prepare or subsequently edit your answer. Note that turning an answer into a wiki isn't reversible - once it's a wiki, you can't turn it back into your answer. The main difference between answers and wikis is that an answer is intended to be an individual's contribution while a wiki is intended to be a community effort. Voting on wikis doesn't affect your rep score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T15:12:01.737" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10614" CreationDate="2017-07-28T16:54:04.813" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403248/what-does-the-quote-what-is-left-when-honor-is-lost-mean-exactly&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question  has been closed, but the reason for closure that had the most votes was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other: I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because ... 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is '...' a valid close reason? Why does it have so many votes, when it means nothing and won't help the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out it meant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a 'trick' I don't know about yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T19:13:58.387" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T20:06:46.773" Title="Is this a valid close reason?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10613" CreationDate="2017-07-28T19:51:10.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use custom close reasons, it first appears below the question as a comment. And on receiving further close votes for that particular reason, the auto-added comment gets auto-upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On reaching the required votes to close the question, and if the majority of the votes are for that custom given reason, then the question will be closed and the banner will then show a default text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually we write the exact reasons when we use the custom option. But I suppose in this case it was not clear what to write in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And usually the auto-added comment stays under the question for a while. Maybe it was removed by the original close voter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we use such blank close reasons?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Normally, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what to do when we are not sure what reason to write?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When I find off-topic questions for which I cannot pinpoint the reasons, I use the default text shown above as the custom reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, when you get to 10K, you can see a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;list of custom close reasons&lt;/a&gt; used in the last 90 days. It shows me that the default text and it's various paraphrased variants are the most popular ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T20:06:46.773" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T20:06:46.773" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10616" CreationDate="2017-07-29T08:04:48.790" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that six out of the seven questions I've asked here over a six month period were all suddenly down-voted today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a formal SE term for this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A0nKB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A0nKB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only question not suddenly down-voted in this block is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/399555/217285&quot;&gt;Is the object in “Eighty-six forty-five.” a proper noun?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Because my question is closed as duplicate I can't post an additional answer, so I will add this here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems there was &lt;em&gt;more down voting to be reversed&lt;/em&gt; than mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10616/217285&quot;&gt;the accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;. On 2017-09-07 an additional &lt;code&gt;+16&lt;/code&gt; was added to my reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uV3FG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uV3FG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original correction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J3Xyr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J3Xyr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T07:15:19.027" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T07:15:19.027" Title="Is there an SE term for a sudden block down-voting of my questions like this?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-08-01T23:46:42.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10615" CreationDate="2017-07-29T08:14:53.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called &lt;strong&gt;serial downvoting&lt;/strong&gt;; a type of voting fraud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry. The system will reverse those votes shortly. If it doesn't, you can flag your post for a moderator's attention and request them to investigate the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126829/309993&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the votes are now reversed. See your reputation page. It says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Voting corrected (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;learn more&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T15:28:57.530" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T15:28:57.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-30T02:51:31.417" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like we don't need to have both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/premodifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;premodifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;premodifiers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantifiers&lt;/a&gt; tags, because I don't understand what the difference is supposed to be, and I doubt everyone else does either. Neither has a tag wiki to explain exactly what questions are supposed to be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be best in my opinion to have a single tag for all of the questions about &quot;X of Y&quot; constructions like &quot;a number of cats&quot;, &quot;the number of dogs&quot;, &quot;50% of people&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries seem to define &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/premodifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;premodifier&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in an incredibly vague way that includes things like attributive adjectives.&#xA;However, partway through attempting to retag all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/premodifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;premodifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;premodifiers&lt;/a&gt; questions (since they seem to be fewer than &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantifers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantifers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantifers&lt;/a&gt; questions), I decided to stop and pose the question to Meta. It seems vaguely plausible to me that &quot;quantifiers&quot; actually has some inconveniently technical definition that excludes some of these constructions, and so someone would object to using it on all of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people's thoughts about the best way to categorize questions on this subject? It would be nice if the criteria don't require the asker to know the agreement pattern of the construction in question, since lots of the questions are about this very issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T03:03:48.123" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T03:34:49.883" Title="Quantifiers? Premodifiers? What's the best general tag for questions about &quot;X of Y&quot; constructions?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10618" CreationDate="2017-07-30T03:34:49.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP asks the community what they think about the relevancy of two tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantifiers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/premodifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;premodifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;premodifiers&lt;/a&gt; but the meta post comes shortly after another spree of retagging old questions that were tagged sufficiently well in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, the OP has retagged this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/226075/revisions&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; three times since February 2016. Will he please make up his mind once and for all, so users do not see this post bumped a fourth and a fifth time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the slew of posts that have been bumped recently on the active page, how many of them were edited to delete the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/premodifiers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;premodifiers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;premodifiers&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118359/are-vs-is-in-the-following-sentences&quot;&gt;“Are” Vs “Is” in the following sentences&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395445/why-is-a-singular-verb-is-used-after-one-third-of-the-population-while-a-plu&quot;&gt;Why is a singular verb &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; used after &amp;quot;One-third of the population&amp;quot; while a plural verb &amp;quot;live&amp;quot; is used after &amp;quot;70 percent of the population&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395779/why-vote-is-plural&quot;&gt;why &amp;#39;vote&amp;#39; is plural?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226075/a-battery-of-tests-is-are&quot;&gt;A battery of tests is/are&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195862/most-of-what-and-is-or-are&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Most of what&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;are&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186113/shouldn-t-we-use-lots-of-with-plural-nouns-and-a-lot-of-with-singular-ones&quot;&gt;Shouldn’t we use &amp;quot;lots of&amp;quot; with plural nouns and &amp;quot;a lot of&amp;quot; with singular ones?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273585/does-a-percentage-quantity-take-singular-or-plural-verb-agreement&quot;&gt;Does a percentage quantity take singular or plural verb agreement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403465/i-find-it-good-that-50-of-the-american-population-are-or-is-cool&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I find it good that 50% of the American population (are or is) cool.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A new question that has been edited and given five tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the OP is not really interested in a discussion, but in seeking approval for his latest round of edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, the tags &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/premodify&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;premodifiers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/quantifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantifiers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/determiner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;determiners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,  are all related and mean more or less the same. And I doubt that the vast majority of users who asked those questions, to begin with, would even know what they mean, nor care. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T03:34:49.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10623" CreationDate="2017-07-30T15:40:50.343" Score="13" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don't direct me to the Help Page.  I need guidance that the Help Page doesn't give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker, and know only basic grammar. I know when something sounds right, I know when it sounds wrong, and I know when it sounds right even though technically it is wrong. I cannot explain grammar beyond basic grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am discouraged by some of the grammar questions asked here, and I mean discouraged by the &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; questions, because they seem like Greek to me. It seems like learning advanced grammar is like studying anatomy, physiology and biochemistry in order to learn how to walk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough grammar to write a decent grammar question.  And I suspect the Catch 22 is that if I did study grammar, I would know how to research the answers to almost anything that occurred to me.  Or would it take years of study to get to that point?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for writing questions about words or idioms or sayings, almost everything along those lines can be found in a quick Google search.  Thus, I mostly answer (16 Questions vs 392 Answers), and answering is becoming less satisfying.  When I can get 89 net upvotes for seethe (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400036/word-to-describe-to-sit-in-quiet-anger/400042#400042&quot;&gt;Word to describe to sit in quiet anger&lt;/a&gt;), it is too easy.  &lt;strong&gt;I'm not complaining&lt;/strong&gt; about 89 upvotes -- far from it -- but it is excessive and excess cloys. (But never hesitate to upvote me, please! :))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question: &lt;strong&gt;what can I do, short of going to grad school, to write good questions and contribute to the question side of ELU?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T02:09:19.763" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T02:09:19.763" Title="How can I write good questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10621" CreationDate="2017-07-30T16:54:36.610" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This grew too long for a comment, and I don’t wish to encourage comments over posts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is to follow the lead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/161/socratic&quot;&gt;our most Socratic of askers&lt;/a&gt;. Look at the questions posed by the holders of that gold badge, and go thou and do likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP notices that poor questions draw poor answers, and that both are highly upvoted. If you want to write a question that everybody answers and upvotes, that’s a very different thing from asking how to write well-written and well-researched questions covering a previously unexplored matter of English that contribute to our growing library of expert answers. Compare Yoichi Oichi’s questions with the single-word-gimmes, for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400036/word-to-describe-to-sit-in-quiet-anger/400042#400042&quot;&gt;The one the OP drew attention to&lt;/a&gt; is a writing request. I personally believe that such questions should be closed and their copypasta answers deleted. They add nothing to our library of expert answers. As you observe, they can be trivially used for reputation mills, and there have been instances of fraud on the site related to this scam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am hardy alone in my opinion that these questions should be disallowed by revised site rules. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity?cb=1&quot;&gt;We’ve talked about this since time immemorial&lt;/a&gt;. Constantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But nobody wants to pull the trigger on these requests (not questions, requests) for this or that “catchy, fun word that means X sprinkled with Y while gazing into the Z”. Supposedly they’re too “fun” to kill off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to have joke questions and write-my-code-for-me questions. They were incredibly popular. It took serious effort and collective community will, but these terrible, pointless questions were finally given the kiss of everlasting death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They’re offtopic &lt;code&gt;gimme-the-codez&lt;/code&gt; demands, and nowhere else on the network are such questions tolerated. We should expect no less of ourselves regarding these write-my-sentence-for-me requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T17:25:59.683" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T17:25:59.683" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10621" CreationDate="2017-07-30T17:16:48.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Just be yourself&lt;/strong&gt;. You're also keen to learn, which is great. Admit you don't know the terminology, that technical answers should be pared down so you don't need to be a linguist in order to understand, and if the question is interesting, it won't matter if grammar terms are thin on the ground. Eventually, you'll keep hearing the same terms used again and again and they will stick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Include your research&lt;/strong&gt;, or your gut feelings as a native speaker, show you have spent time thinking it through. Be cheerful. Be hopeful, but don't be upset if your question doesn't receive a standing ovation. It probably won't.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's but one example of a non-expert asking a grammar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/90530/whats-wrong-with-ill-open-you-the-door&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ll open you the door&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and here's another question asked by an EFL teacher but it is simple to understand, hopefully, you already know what an &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;infinitive phrase&lt;/em&gt; is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/363763/why-does-i-was-happy-to-do-my-homework-work-but-i-was-tired-to-do-my-homewor&quot;&gt;Why does &amp;quot;I was happy to do my homework&amp;quot; work, but &amp;quot;I was tired to do my homework&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#39;t?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always a good idea to ask users to supply examples, and/or links in their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T17:26:49.110" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T17:26:49.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:37:02.260" Score="7" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been on this site long enough to know from personal experience, but perusing old (and recent) Meta posts like these below makes me wonder if members have not &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; been under the impression that Low Quality Questions are hitting crisis levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7576/extraordinary-spike-in-low-quality-questions-by-1-rep-users/7583&quot;&gt;Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users&lt;/a&gt; (January 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4941/a-simple-proposal-towards-improving-question-quality&quot;&gt;A simple proposal towards improving question quality&lt;/a&gt; (July 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3939/excessive-number-of-fundamental-questions&quot;&gt;Excessive number of fundamental questions&lt;/a&gt; (May 2013)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, users have suggested encouraging senior members to ask good questions as a model for other users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7205/could-more-questions-from-senior-experienced-users-benefit-elu&quot;&gt;Could more questions from senior/experienced users benefit ELU?&lt;/a&gt; (October 2015)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/do-we-need-to-write-the-better-questions-ourselves&quot;&gt;Do we need to write the better questions ourselves?&lt;/a&gt; (October 2012)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very recently there has been significant discussion on ways to reduce Low-Quality Questions, including using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10605/ai-as-a-solution-to-the-deluge-of-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt;, using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10588/proposal-for-selective-blacklisting&quot;&gt;Selective Blacklisting&lt;/a&gt;, banning or limiting single-word-request questions, and other thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observing that low-quality questions seem to have been a complaint on this site for a long time and show few signs of diminishing, I'm inclined to wonder how best to incentivize asking &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions.  One thought would be to attempt to collect some of the best questions for some of the common tags as a model for how to ask insightful and interesting questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't think measuring this by votes really works, since Hot Network Questions can often yield huge numbers of upvotes on questions that are really not exemplary, and likewise, many excellent questions receive very little attention if they fly under the radar.  I imagine there would need to be community discussion on what would qualify as exemplary, perhaps with knowledgeable input from users with gold badges on the tags in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone attempted to create such a collection in the past, a sort of &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt; for asking good questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If not, does anyone think this would be a worthwhile endeavor?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it actually feasible, or am I being naïve?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T01:36:36.993" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T18:28:20.587" Title="Could/Should we create a collection of exemplary questions to encourage high-quality asking?" Tags="|discussion|questions|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10628" CreationDate="2017-07-31T22:47:04.977" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea appeals to me, but in practical terms, I don't think it is really feasible, for various reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mechanical: as far as I know, there is no existing Stack Exchange system that would be ideal for this purpose. The closest I can think of is a list on this Meta with answers that we vote for, as was done with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6902/please-vote-for-the-most-exemplary-single-word-request-questions-to-be-put-in-h&quot;&gt;Please vote for the most exemplary single-word-request questions (to be put in Help Center)&lt;/a&gt;. But this seems like it would quickly get unwieldy as more examples are added (and maintenance would also probably be a problem). Basically, the SE QA format is not designed for long lists, as is well-known.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Social: We all have our own opinions about what makes a question &quot;exemplary&quot;. Even if we all can agree on the general concept that some posts have high scores due to bikeshedding, and other posts have low scores despite being insightful and interesting, we probably won't all agree about which specific questions are examples of this. Reaching a consensus is difficult and takes hard work. There are tons of questions on this Meta site that don't stimulate enough community participation to really achieve this goal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Political: SE has its own &quot;politics&quot; and one thing that fairly often comes up as a concern is the idea of exclusivity by a cabal of high-rep users who want to impose their opinions on the rest of the users of the site. Depending on how this project is carried out, it seems likely that it would be perceived as an example of this. The voting system, despite its faults, seems less susceptible to this kind of criticism due to its democratic nature.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T22:47:04.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10628" CreationDate="2017-07-31T23:41:03.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr - Add links to the tags and point people to the relevant tag info pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; (but very little) precedence for curated question lists. This blog picked out 3 noteworthy questions from 2014:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10575/142322&quot;&gt;Good things from 2014 - by Matt Ellen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could use a Meta post such as your question to house links to canonical questions (I even suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7692/142322&quot;&gt;placing them in the blog&lt;/a&gt; back when blogs were supported on SE). Either create a new answer per curator or (better) a new answer per type of question. This may have been suggested and rejected before, but a quick search didn't produce the original posts. The inverse (list of bad questions) &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7686/142322&quot;&gt;some support&lt;/a&gt;. There was even a chat room for that purpose. The problem is &lt;em&gt;finding&lt;/em&gt; those questions, rather than having to search for each individual question or type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more useful approach would be to &lt;strong&gt;link &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; to representative questions&lt;/strong&gt;, as is done on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;SWR info page&lt;/a&gt;. That is, to edit tag info pages to insert links to good questions relevant to that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also suggest adding a note to the tag's tool-tips paragraph to say that the 'info' link leads to a list of canonical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T23:41:03.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10632" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-01T09:34:19.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag meta posts containing linked lists of best questions. Please detail the reasons you consider the questions among the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T17:05:52.903" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T17:05:52.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10633" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-01T09:34:19.003" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for meta posts containing lists of the best questions on ELU, along with the reasons you consider those questions among the best." OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T17:05:52.903" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T17:05:52.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10628" CreationDate="2017-08-01T16:18:36.913" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an excellent idea, and it probably will help significantly, but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; if it is part of a comprehensive, cohesive, and coordinated effort to improve usability and to ensure (as much as possible) that &lt;strong&gt;newcomers understand the rules.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are also discussing this issue on Health.SE. My and others' suggestions there would help here too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://health.meta.stackexchange.com/q/739/9632&quot;&gt;We need Crystal Clear Rules for Asking Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242381" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T16:18:36.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-01T17:11:12.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag meta posts containing linked lists of best questions. Please detail the reasons you consider the questions among the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of this tag is to promote asking high-quality, insightful questions by users of all experience levels.  To encourage good questioning, use this tag to list questions from a particular date range that you believe are model questions for EL&amp;amp;U.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users can vote on the post to indicate agreement with the nominated questions, and respond in the comments and answers with their own suggestions or opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further discussion on the origin of this tag, see this post on Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10631/228732&quot;&gt;Could/Should we create a collection of exemplary questions to encourage high-quality asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T20:06:23.663" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T20:06:23.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-01T17:11:12.060" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for meta posts containing lists of the best questions on ELU, along with the reasons you consider those questions among the best." OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T17:11:12.060" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T17:11:12.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10628" CreationDate="2017-08-01T21:37:41.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want a nice collection of exemplary questions? That's easy; simply use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: I once praised Yoichi Oishi's questions in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/please-everyone-details-please/465#465&quot;&gt;ELL meta answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, I don't think having this link anywhere will diminish the high number of shoddy questions that continue to plague this site. Still, it might be nice to have a handy link when you are trying to gently nudge a newer user in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing that this question is getting more downvotes than upvotes, I'd like to clarify: The original link is to a list of questions written by one of ELU's most prestigious users, sorted by votes. I'm not saying these questions are exemplary because of what they ask about, I'm saying they are exemplary because of how they are presented and structured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have always thought that Yoichi's questions provide a good example of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;providing background information and context,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;referencing what kind of prior research was done, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearly presenting the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(or, as the OP of this meta question puts it, &amp;quot;a sort of model for asking good questions&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the OP of this meta question talks about Low-Quality Questions, I'm assuming that means questions that provide scant background information and context, don't mention any prior research, and aren't always clear about what is being asked. For example, in the last hour or so, I've seen new users ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403969/does-first-come-first-served-need-to-be-hyphenated&quot;&gt;Does first come, first served need to be hyphenated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is first come, first served hyphenated (first-come, first-served? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403962/i-need-help-with-a-short-phrase&quot;&gt;I need help with a short phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help with this phrase, pls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what does &amp;quot;offering empowering&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403958/word-request-any-other-words-for-delicate-beauty-or-any-similar&quot;&gt;Word request. Any other words for “delicate beauty” or any similar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make it sound that her beauty is the opposite of dangerous, it's delicate but it doesn't perfectly describe what I want to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I type this, all three of these questions are (probably rightfully) getting downvotes, close votes, and/or comments requesting further information, details, context, or comments asking about what prior research was done. If any of these commenters wanted to link to an exemplary question showing how to do this, they could easily pick one of Yoichi's top-voted questions, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40381/who-is-that-guy&quot;&gt;Who is &amp;quot;That Guy&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the term “that guy”, used as “He embarked on a career as a 'that guy',” in the following sentence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/02/07/110207ta_talk_paumgarten&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the article&lt;/a&gt; of the New Yorker (Feb. 7, 2011) titled “the Most Interesting Man in the World”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a recalls of a contentious exchange with Hoffman: “I jumped up and said, ‘Dustin, the reason you don’t like me is because I’m gonna make it and you’re not.’ ” Jonathan Goldsmith eventually made it - out to Los Angeles, anyway—and embarked on a career as a “&lt;em&gt;that guy&lt;/em&gt;,” very often the that guy who gets killed, on television shows such as “Bonanza,” “Mannix,” “Gunsmoke,” “Hawaii Five-O,” ... to name a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don’t understand what &lt;em&gt;that guy&lt;/em&gt; used in quotes means, I checked online dictionaries. Neither Cambridge online, nor Free Merriam-Webster has an entry for “that guy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-of/that-guy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Onlineslangdictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; carries the definition as “any person who does something considered inappropriate,” with an example, “I was going to crack a joke then, but I didn't want to be that guy.” But I don’t think this definition applies to “that guy” appearing in the above sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does “that guy” as a career Goldsmith built up mean? Does it mean a villain (in the film)? Is &amp;quot;that guy&amp;quot; a well-received of its own word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/227627/are-there-similar-expressions-to-the-japanese-saying-i-want-to-die-on-a-tatami&quot;&gt;Are there similar expressions to the Japanese saying “I want to die on a tatami mat”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today most people die in a hospital bed, though many would prefer to die in their own home being watched over by their loving family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have an old saying, “to die on a tatami mat”, meaning to die peacefully in one’s own home — as opposed to dying miserably and bedridden in a hospital while being distressed by the presence of tubes supplying oxygen and nutrients as if one was trussed up with some sort of monstrous spaghetti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, tatami is a floor mat made of woven rush which you may find in most Japanese houses. (The size of a room is quantified in terms of the number of tatamis, e.g. a 6-tatami room or a 12-tatami room.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“To die on a tatami mat” originally meant “to end a peaceful life” without being subjected to such perils as war, fighting, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons as are rife in this country. By extension, we call a reckless person “a fellow who is unable to die on a tatami mat.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I associate “aging in place”, a term which I understand is current these days, with “dying on a tatami mat.” But the connotation is not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any English-language expressions that are similar to the Japanese saying “I want to die on a tatami mat”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that if more users emulated Yoichi in provide such details, the site overall would be a much happier and more interesting place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T18:28:20.587" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T03:33:39.080" Score="14" ViewCount="28549" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious about how often the word &lt;em&gt;gaslighting&lt;/em&gt; (in the contemporary sense of &quot;a form of manipulation through persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying in an attempt to destabilize and delegitimize a target&quot;&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as represented in &lt;a href=&quot;http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/gaslighting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TFD&lt;/a&gt;) is being used compared to other years in the preceding century.  It seems to me that it might be on the uptick in the last decade, but I have no evidence that it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am particularly interested if the question can be answered using an online resource similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;. I'm hoping for an answer that uses an online resource or resources to show authoritative frequency statistics, year-by-year, for use of &lt;em&gt;gaslighting&lt;/em&gt; in journals, popular magazines, newspapers, or online counterparts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would especially like to know how much more often &lt;em&gt;gaslighting&lt;/em&gt; is used in the last couple years compared to 20 years ago and 50 years ago. Before 1944, I would expect that &quot;gaslighting&quot; would be about lighting a room with liquid propane or natural gas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77394" OwnerDisplayName="robert bristow-johnson" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T15:25:39.353" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:53:28.413" Title="Internet resources to research frequency of usage of a word" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10638" CreationDate="2017-07-31T04:12:59.013" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not entirely clear from your question whether your problem with using Google Ngrams is that the data is not recent enough or that it is based on formal writing (books only), or both. But there are a number of other publicly accessible corpora that might suit your needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Corpus of Contemporary American English;&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt; has data from 1990 to 2015, and includes transcripted speech (from TV and radio), popular magazines, newspapers, and journals as well as fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/soap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Corpus of American Soap Operas&quot;&gt;Corpus of American Soap Operas&lt;/a&gt; is based on a smaller data set but runs from 2001 to 2012 and is good for exploring more colloquial/informal speech, albeit scripted rather than real-world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/now/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;News on the Web&quot;&gt;News on the Web&lt;/a&gt; (NOW) corpus is a very large corpus of some 5 billion words covering roughly the last decade of online news reports. It can be downloaded in its entirety free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is also a more or less up-to-date &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia Corpus&quot;&gt;Wikipedia Corpus&lt;/a&gt; based on around 2 billion words from the 4+ million articles of the famous encyclopaedia website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250025" OwnerDisplayName="Daniel Austin" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T04:12:59.013" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10583" CreationDate="2017-08-02T15:30:43.243" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a known &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zQE5AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA95&amp;amp;dq=lexicophile&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj9qPv73LjVAhUFwWMKHY-gAeEQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=lexicophile&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexicophile&lt;/a&gt;, a lover of lexicons, I do hate to be a party pooper since learning about new resources is actually of interest to me, but staff decisions override any community decisions and most other forms of authority, so this really must be mentioned. A while ago in chat a link was provided to &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.meta.stackexchange.com/a/142&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on Meta-S.E. by Robert Cartaino, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/authors/rcartaino/&quot;&gt;who is the Director of Community Development&lt;/a&gt; for Stack Exchange. The most relevant portion of the post is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;sub&gt;administrative note:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;I'm seeing these list-of-resource questions being posted in meta as a way to somehow allow questions that would otherwise not be allowed on the main site. Meta is meant to provide support for the operation of this site and we cannot let it morph into an alternative type of subject Q&amp;A.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;This is obviously predicated on the fact that everything that is not directly related to website policies, or the S.E. software, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;as defined in the help center is off-topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sxQPL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sxQPL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Strictly speaking, this edict was only mentioned on Latin S.E's. website, so perhaps it can be interpreted as only being a binding ruling on their website, but the message comes with the strong implication of applying to the entire S.E. network. If it is binding on the whole of S.E., the corollary effect is that since we locally banned them on the main site, most resource topics may not be posted anywhere on English Language &amp;amp; Usage with the existing policies, including the Meta website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not exactly sure how broad Robert meant to be with this edict, but it seems to me that we simply can't have these topics on meta, unless maybe we have some sort of excuse that gives it a relationship with English Language &amp;amp; Usage's policy or software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our most popular resource topic on meta is probably safe presumably being used to help define what kind of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly available resources&quot;&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic in this custom close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; If that is really the case, I have some objections to some of the resources listed there as being &quot;commonly available&quot;, since they aren't available anywhere online, but that is besides the point. The point is to note that the question itself is somehow related to one of our policies, so maybe it is permitted. [&lt;strong&gt;Sidebar:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;maybe&quot; because I am not exactly sure if he meant that to serve as a qualifier, or if the the broader context of the Latin S.E. subject makes it a general prohibition against all such topics. We should probably seek guidance on that matter.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise we must stop making resource request questions on meta, or migrating them to it because it has a reserved purpose that they do not fulfill. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would also like to mention that we are not currently stuck without an alternative. With all of the options presently available to us, it is worth note that there is a relatively new Language Learning website &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;which expressly allows for resource requests in its help center at this present point in time.&lt;/a&gt;. Keeping in mind the standing restrictions we have here, I would propose we asking such questions there in the future, using their &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-request&quot;&gt;resource request tag&lt;/a&gt;, as well as redirecting newbies who ask them &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; to that website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, instead of writing new resource-requests questions on meta, I propose we add new subjects as needed to the existing list. This has three benefits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everything is centralized, so if it is deemed off topic, it is easier to dispose of one thread, rather than many, preferably with a historical lock.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everything is centralized, so it is easier to locate. Using the share link under the individual answers which categorize topics can be used to direct people to more specific resources, and linking to the thread generally exposes them to other resources they might find available.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, it is arguably related to policy, and arguably allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T19:33:43.933" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T19:33:43.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10638" CreationDate="2017-08-02T21:05:13.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, yes, resources do exist for researching historical word frequency (including contemporary frequency). Here, frequency is defined as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The number of times an event or character occurs in a &lt;em&gt;given sample&lt;/em&gt;; also (the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;relative frequency&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;proportionate frequency&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), this number expressed as a proportion of the total possible number of occurrences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; plain emphasis mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not find that the results meet your goals; the precision is rough if it can be called precision at all, and numerous caveats pertain. For the word you've chosen, 'gaslighting', any comparison will be estimates of estimates, and the results far from statistically precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, 'gaslighting' in the sense of interest to you (the verb with the specific meaning of &quot;a form of manipulation&quot;) is first attested with that sense in 1965 (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). That is barely more than 50 years ago, and it is reasonable to assume that &lt;em&gt;frequency&lt;/em&gt; (in the statistical sense given above) at that time would've been quite low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tools to use for the comparison, additionally, would need to be used in combination. &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COHA&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/now/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NOW&lt;/a&gt;, especially, could be useful to inform an estimate of the relative frequency of use of 'gaslighting' during the time periods you've specified and in the 'genres' of interest (&quot;journals, popular magazines, newspapers, or online counterparts&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those corpora, and particularly the genre-balanced COCA and COHA, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; allow, generally speaking, comparisons of frequency for specific time periods and in particular genres: the genres balanced, however, are only fiction and nonfiction books, magazines and newspapers for COHA, and spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper and academic publications for COCA. NOW is useful only for online news publications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the time periods covered by COCA (1990-2015), COHA (1810-2009) and NOW (2010-yesterday) would make comparisons a matter of using all three corpora to find an estimated frequency for 50 years ago (COHA), 20 years ago (COHA and COCA), and the &quot;last couple of years&quot; (NOW). Only one genre or, fudging it, possibly two genres, namely news[papers] and magazines, is available in all three corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of 'gaslighting', the general imprecision of any results may be balanced by features of the three corpora that allow examination of uses in context, by period. So, false positives for 'gaslighting', that is uses of 'gaslighting' in other senses than the target sense, can be readily identified and discarded from consideration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequency of 'gaslighting' from 2010-2017 in the NOW corpus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OM7g8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OM7g8.png&quot; alt=&quot;gaslighting, NOW&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There being only 231 occurrences in the NOW corpus works in your favor. Each occurrence can be seen in context by clicking the bar in the chart (or click &quot;SEE ALL TOKENS&quot; to see them all at once). Here are the occurrences from 2017B (the last half of 2017; at present, this is only July):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f9fn8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f9fn8.png&quot; alt=&quot;gaslighting, NOW 2017B&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context reveals all occurrences are used with your target sense; the display also shows exact date and country of use, along with the particular venue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, all occurrences from 2017A are in your target sense. Those, 2017A and 2017B were the only sections I examined for the purposes of this answer. Other sections could be examined, however, and false positives could be discounted from the relative frequency as shown on the chart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting aside examination of context to determine sense, and looking back at the frequency chart, it shows that an increase of 0.04 occurrences per million words of sample distinguishes the first and second halves of 2012; an increase of 0.04 is also shown from the last half of 2016 to the first half of 2017. Otherwise, an increase of 0.03 distinguishes the first and second halves of 2016. Altogether, an increase of 0.10 is recorded from the first half of 2015 through the first half of 2017. Such a marked and gathering increase does not occur over any other timespan in the chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing the chart from NOW for 2010-2017 with a chart for occurrences from 1990-1997, 20 years ago is quite simple: no occurrences in any genre are recorded. Two occurrences do appear in 1998. Here they are in context:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZcXKs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZcXKs.png&quot; alt=&quot;gaslighting, COCA 1998&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One occurrence is in the target sense, and it appeared in a popular magazine (albeit with a pseudo-scientific focus). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, that one occurrence would be an increase of 0.01 (from 0.0) per million words, because the corpus size was 103.4 million words in 1998: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/66qCr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/66qCr.png&quot; alt=&quot;gaslighting, COCA 1998 chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same techniques can be applied to find the relative frequency of use of 'gaslighting' in your target sense 50 years ago (0.0, because it doesn't appear in the corpus), by comparing results from the COHA corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oveall, what is expressed by comparison of the results from the corpora, which can be cited as the basis of your estimate, is that &lt;em&gt;use of 'gaslighting' in the sense of &quot;a form of manipulation&quot; increased markedly in the popular press, from near zero fifty years ago to 0.01 per million words twenty years ago to 0.1 per million words in the last two years&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T21:05:13.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T04:49:44.273" Score="5" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers to the question &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403986/a-word-or-expression-for-being-paralyzed-by-fear-or-scare-like-german-schockst&quot;&gt;A word or expression for being paralyzed by fear or scare, like German &lt;em&gt;Schockstarre&lt;/em&gt; [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;have been  merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231531/one-word-someone-so-scared-that-he-cant-move&quot;&gt;One word - someone so scared that he can't move [closed]&lt;/a&gt; because “it is an exact duplicate of that question.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the result is &quot;queer&quot; with a number of suggestions that are repeated in different answers. Plus the latter question was better formulated and did show more effort in giving details about the expression the OP was looking for, while the original was more generic. For those who are convinced that it is an exact duplicate probably the best course of action was to close it as such, or simply delete the whole post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about the next candidate as a duplicate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/274984/paralyzed-because-of-strong-emotion-is-there-an-idiom-or-fixed-phrase-which-co&quot;&gt;“paralyzed because of strong emotion” Is there an idiom or fixed-phrase which conveys this meaning?&lt;/a&gt;; should this question also be merged into the other two? Curiously, those who answered it missed the duplicate issue at that time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T16:18:26.757" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T07:49:20.573" Title="Not sure merging the two questions was a good idea," Tags="|discussion|merged-questions|dupehammer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10643" CreationDate="2017-08-03T07:39:58.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why is it important to close a new question that is a duplicate as soon as possible?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It prevents users from recycling old answers and earning easy rep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instead of one question with a good set of answers, you start having two, three, four questions with &lt;em&gt;identical&lt;/em&gt; answers, which is exactly what happened here. This is one of the most deleterious drawbacks with SWRs. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author of the new question finds his answer sooner.  If none of the answers in the older question satisfy the OP, they can edit the new question explaining why the old answers did not help them and ask the community to reopen their question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;So, just because someone asks the same question using a different wording, doesn't mean it doesn't belong. After all, it is still on-topic; thus, it doesn't have to be deleted. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;It's just that it has been answered already; thus, it should be closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; @RegDwigнt♦ (Oct 29 '10)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is a merged question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Questions can be merged by diamond moderators when one question is an exact duplicate of the other.&#xA;  Users cannot vote to merge questions, but they can flag for a moderator to do so (this should only be done in cases where the answers to the new question make sense as answers to the original, so they really need to be close to exact duplicates).&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/158067/223820&quot;&gt;SE Meta&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Consequently, the right decision was made&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I support 100% the logic that led to transferring the six answers to where they rightfully belong,  on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231531/one-word-someone-so-scared-that-he-cant-move/231532#231532&quot;&gt;older&lt;/a&gt; question. A question which earned 33 upvotes, been visited 14,898 times and attracted 12 answers before it was closed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not able to find an appropriate word to fill in for &quot;scared&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He was so scared, he couldn't move. He turned to stone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He was too shocked. He almost turned to stone and could not move&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be a single word that has &lt;strong&gt;more intensity than scared or shocked&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  A word that can convey the figurative meaning of &quot;he &lt;strong&gt;turned to stone&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[UPDATED Aug, 07]&lt;/strong&gt; There are now &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;del&gt;THREE&lt;/del&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Two answers which suggest &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/231532/44619&quot;&gt;petrified&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;del&gt;Two answers that suggest &lt;strong&gt;scared stiff&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two answers that suggest &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/231568/44619&quot;&gt;immobilise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;immobilized&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two answers that suggest &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/231574/44619&quot;&gt;transfix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;transfixed&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TWO answers added new content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/403991/44619&quot;&gt;Deer in the headlights&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; offered by ab2, and  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/403989/44619&quot;&gt;freeze&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; suggested by Jasper Loy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I suggest that the answers posted on August 2, 2017, which are exact replicas of the aforementioned, be deleted.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the disadvantage of such a measure? It will cause the OP (Josh) to lose 200 rep, an &lt;em&gt;irrisory&lt;/em&gt; number compared to the 143K that he currently possesses. His answer &lt;em&gt;petrified&lt;/em&gt; consists only of a dictionary citation and a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deletion would also affect user Hellion but to a lesser degree, his answer &lt;em&gt;scared stiff&lt;/em&gt; earned 5 upvotes. However, more than any other user, he must have been aware the “Shockstarre” question was a duplicate. His older answer that consisted of nothing but a single link was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;del&gt;He was either &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/petrified&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;petrified&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;em&gt;scared stiff&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(07 Aug, 2017) The answer was edited and now looks like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Petrified&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent fit....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2: to make rigid or inert like stone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a :  to make lifeless or inactive :  deaden&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   b :  &lt;strong&gt;to confound with fear&lt;/strong&gt;, amazement, or awe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381/etiquette-on-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;m-w.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer that might be penalised would be ab2's because the OLDER question asks for a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; while hers is an idiom/expression. Perhaps, therefore, her answer could be transferred to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/274984/paralyzed-because-of-strong-emotion-is-there-an-idiom-or-fixed-phrase-which-co&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;paralyzed because of strong emotion&amp;quot; Is there an idiom or fixed-phrase which conveys this meaning?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;which is still open&lt;/strong&gt;. There is a variant,  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/274996/44619[1]:&quot;&gt;Be like a deer caught in the headlights&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but the two suggestions are sufficiently different to live side by side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T07:49:20.573" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T07:49:20.573" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10643" CreationDate="2017-08-03T11:56:47.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the questions are effectively duplicates. Being paralyzed by fear, and scared motionless are conceptually as synonymous as I can imagine questions being. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main criticism with what happened here is that the old question was closed (albeit for an unusual reason for this question category), and the new question had much more effort put into elaborating the concept. Moreover, the newer question seems like it's also a candidate for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; tag, and seems like it might actually help more people. It's a much better example of how a question &lt;em&gt;should be asked&lt;/em&gt;, and I think tchrist should recognize that given his answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10622/124936&quot;&gt;How Do I Write Good Answers?&lt;/a&gt; I say this because the newer question does seem to follow Yoichi's Oshi's example, or at least it does much moreso than the old one. (Yes, tchrist's answer attracted votes against it, but I think that is for reasons other than this advice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I do admit that there is a certain sort of logic to preferring the older questions too though. Namely, it encourages questioners to actually check for prospective duplicates before randomly asking the same question, and prevents fraudulent duplicates. Generally speaking, I would prefer the older question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the plurality of factors seems to favor changing the canonical question, especially since all of this &lt;em&gt;should most especially be considered with the apparent philosophy that closed questions are candidates for deletion&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;deleted questions don't count as duplicates&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/681/why-is-this-closed-question-not-being-deleted/683#683&quot;&gt;See this post by community moderator Grace Note on Information Security Meta&lt;/a&gt; and the following quotation &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;from our help center's page on question deletion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Over time, closed questions that are not useful as signpoints to other questions may also be removed, as well as questions which have no significant activity over a very long period after being asked. If you want to improve a question to keep it from being deleted, click the edit button beneath it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;This is not exactly my favorite policy, so I am hesitant to cite it, but that is strictly because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10163/124936&quot;&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;preserving good answers&lt;/em&gt; may be worthwhile&lt;/a&gt; even if the question itself is bad and should be deleted. The ultimate goal of the website is to build a library of high quality answers afterall, as indicated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; However, &lt;em&gt;considering that the questions were being merged anyway&lt;/em&gt;, all of the answers would have been preserved too. With that in mind, I think preference should have been given to the new question when merging them together like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, unlike Mari., I'm not factoring in how rep. is affected by the merging. I don't know how that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the next candidate, I would personally leave it alone. Although it is similar, and some of the same answers may apply, it does not regard a &lt;em&gt;specific emotion&lt;/em&gt;, but just &lt;em&gt;emotion generally&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps this is a finer distinction than some people would make, but it's there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T21:49:43.153" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T21:49:43.153" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10647" CreationDate="2017-08-03T15:55:00.703" Score="15" ViewCount="1225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice of commenting with answers is ubiquitous practice on ELU, and the merits/flaws have been discussed at length. However, is it the case that the greater SE is trying to put a stop to this practice? This &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/questions/1272/how-to-respond-to-trivial-obvious-questions#comment3881_1272&quot;&gt;removed comment&lt;/a&gt; suggests to me that this might be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(comments removed) If you have an answer, please post it below. Comments do not have the feature to properly vet whatever you say here so without activity like proper voting and wiki-style editing of content, answering here defeats the purpose of having this Stack Exchange site. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/34933/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino ♦&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'm not levelling judgement on the practice here, I'm just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187869" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-10-07T18:34:38.860" LastActivityDate="2023-10-07T18:34:38.860" Title="Is SE enforcing &quot;no answers in comments&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|comments|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10646" CreationDate="2017-08-03T16:39:12.877" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no new initiative to eliminate answers in comment. They have always been discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Stack Exchange is to get expert, peer-reviewed answers to good questions out on search engines for the benefit of the asker and anyone else with a similar question. Answers in comments cannot be downvoted. Lacking full peer review, they are are really not so helpful to the author as you might think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers in comment are also not indexed by search engines, so they don’t attract future visitors nearly as much as an actual answer post. And, while they might stick around for years, you never know when comments will be silently purged from a question. Comments are truly local and transient. So an answer in comment might never help anybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why Robert Cartaino objected to the answers in comment on the post you linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment threads actually exist to let people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“request clarification from the author; leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post; [or] add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated”.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot; title=&quot;“Help Center &amp;gt; Privileges &amp;gt; Comment Everywhere” at english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help page I’m quoting here goes on to say that “comments are not recommended for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“… answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one)”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this being said, it is also true that this site gets its share of off-topic questions that will soon get closed and deleted – questions which will never be helpful to future visitors anyway. Some of our experts will often post a quick comment on such a question, when they see an opportunity to informally help the author. This practice has always been tolerated, and I personally don’t see a reason to discourage it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T17:10:47.447" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T17:10:47.447" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10651" CreationDate="2017-08-04T02:46:46.337" Score="12" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should I report a user for having three duplicate accounts? And if so, how should I go about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On all three accounts, which are all clearly variations of the same quite specific name, the user has been posting the gamut of answers, ranging from incorrect or low quality answers that could be improved by some research to thinly veiled rants about the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I down-voted and/or flagged many, as well as attempted to make some constructive comments on why they were inappropriate according to the site's guidelines or not sufficient for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not trying to be a serial down-voter, but many of this user's &quot;answers&quot; are just plain bad and harmful to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some of the user's comments and answers have since been deleted, which may mean that the problem is being resolved by moderators. However, I'm still concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to contact a mod privately to disclose the user's usernames, so that they can look into it further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182960" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T03:27:02.967" Title="Reporting a User for Three Duplicate Accounts?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-16T02:54:00.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10650" CreationDate="2017-08-04T03:27:02.967" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just flag any of the posts and explain the problem there. If we need more info, we have ways of contacting you privately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem may have been dealt with already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T03:27:02.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10643" CreationDate="2017-08-04T07:12:45.307" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, maybe it wasn't a good idea to merge the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; for a good but duplicate question with the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; for a question already closed for lack of research and detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I merged the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, and nominated the merged questions for re-opening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone thinks my actions were over-the-top autocratic, I don't agree, but the edited question can easily be rolled back, or edited further. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend discussion of the solution in place here first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T07:12:45.307" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10654" CreationDate="2017-08-04T16:43:17.717" Score="7" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;For awhile I've been confused by the two flagging options for duplicates. What is the difference between selecting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a duplicate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus selecting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;should be closed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;duplicate of...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the flagging menu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the two flags indicate anything different to the moderators who review them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they do anything different in the system? For example, I've noticed that only sometimes does my flag create the automatic comment &quot;possible duplicate of...,&quot; but I can never remember which flagging process resulted in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they work exactly the same, is there a reason that we have both options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it preferred that I use one or the other, or does it not matter whatsoever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182960" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T17:28:04.370" Title="Difference between Flags &quot;A Duplicate&quot; and &quot;Should be Closed... Duplicate of&quot;" Tags="|discussion|flagging|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10653" CreationDate="2017-08-04T16:56:43.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're essentially the same. Regardless of which one you choose, the next window title is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging &gt; Closing &gt; Duplicate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who do not have the &quot;close vote&quot; privileges can still click on &quot;flag&quot; to suggest that a question is possibly a duplicate of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only those with the close vote privileges can actually close questions as duplicates. You can see the button change from &quot;Flag Question&quot; to &quot;Vote to Close&quot; only in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T17:28:04.370" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T17:28:04.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10655" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-04T19:40:49.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T19:40:49.057" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T19:40:49.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10656" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-04T19:40:49.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T19:40:49.057" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T19:40:49.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T15:05:06.663" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403395/what-is-the-meaning-of-when-i-was-in-new-york-i-had-visited-the-statue-of-lib?noredirect=1#comment958743_403395&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; is closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, my question is not so elementary. It is not about the usual use of past perfect as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I came up with the idea of climbing all the statues taller than 100m in the world, I had already visited the Statue of Liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is the past perfect interpreted when it is used with a when-clause referring to a time interval without any other specific time of reference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) When I was in New York, I had visited the Statue of Liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the sentence (b) is more natural than (a).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) When I was in New York, I visited the Statue of Liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is example sentences from CGEL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii(a) He lost his key while he was running home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii(b) He had lost his key while he was running home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two sentences are considered to have the same meaning in the book.&#xA;Then, can (a) has the same meaning as (b)? This is my starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, my question is not a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389079/is-when-i-lived-in-berlin-i-had-seen-the-movie-three-times-grammatical&quot;&gt;my previous question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The answer there  suggests that the past perfect with a when-clause referring to a time interval is appropriate in the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend asked me about the movie &lt;em&gt;Spartacus&lt;/em&gt;. When I lived in Berlin, I had seen the movie thrice. So I could tell him that it was very good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the time reference is his friend asking about &lt;em&gt;Spartacus&lt;/em&gt;. The past perfect is used because his seeing the movie (the point of event) is anterior to the point of reference. Here the when-clause only works as a supplement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My new question is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what context can the sentence (a) be appropriate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My new question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is the past perfect interpreted when it is used with a when-clause referring to a time interval without any other specific time of reference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I have answered the two main reasons of the closure of my question.&#xA;If there are more reasons to answer, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34662" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T00:50:59.173" Title="Please consider reopening my question" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T17:50:33.993" Score="6" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to notify more than one person in a comment? It would be really handy if we could notify more than one person in a comment. Many times it is needed that 2 or 3 persons be named but, as that is not possibility, I have to repeat the comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204489" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T20:39:31.027" Title="How to notify more than one person in a comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T17:53:19.117" Score="-1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked this question and I think a particular person who is a member of StackExchange might have a good answer for it. How can I ask her to see my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204489" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T05:53:27.987" Title="How to ask a person to answer a question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10588" CreationDate="2017-08-05T19:03:05.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Andrew Leach's post for the most-part, and would like to add that I believe the word is much more polysemous than most of us give it credit for being so it is confusing as a tag. You will be hard pressed to find a dictionary which includes only the syntax and morphology definition, and even if we were to insist upon it, since it is marked for linguistics, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Living Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt; both admit phonology and semantics into the list as well. This is to say nothing of the other &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/search/century-dictionary/grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;older definitions&lt;/a&gt; of the word still in use. As a tag, it is confusing and does not serve its purpose of limiting search results to what people want to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However personally speaking, I think we should allow it in titles. Why do I think this? For one thing, it serves us little to no benefit to remove it. I genuinely doubt it causes much confusion in any given context. If we really must do it in some cases, it is easy for us to edit it out of titles. There are even more people who have the privilege to edit answers &lt;em&gt;unilaterally&lt;/em&gt; than those who have the privilege to give a vote towards closure. Moreover, if the word truly is superfluous, it does not change the meaning of the post to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we lose several benefits from excluding the word from titles. One is that we are making it harder for people to name their questions, and I fear that perhaps somebody will drop their question entirely on the sole basis that they are frustrated with being unable to figure out an even better name for it, which is something  we, as a collective whole, can often do with ease. If one of these questions happens to be any good, I think that is one too many questions to lose for such a minor reason. Whatever benefit we get, if any, is infinitesimally small in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly though, much like duplicate questions, this word functions as a search term, and can serve as an entry point for new users to find English Language &amp;amp; Usage through search engines like Google. Now it is granted that we do not have too much difficulty with this already, but a little extra help never hurts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These might not be such great reasons to keep the word in the title either, but I deign them to be greater reasons than whatever reasons we may have for &lt;em&gt;banning&lt;/em&gt; the title, unless there is something I am missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T19:03:05.650" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10658" CreationDate="2017-08-05T19:53:05.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10658/how-to-notify-more-than-one-person-in-a-comment#comment43804_10658&quot;&gt;Richard has commented&lt;/a&gt;, you can't explicitly reference more than one person in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the person whose post you are commenting on always gets notified, so if they are one of the intended recipients, that's good. Just include another intended recipient too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this restriction is that &lt;strong&gt;comments are not for discussion.&lt;/strong&gt; They are simply notifications or requests for clarification. There should never be any need for more than one person to be notified of a comment; and certainly no need for more than one person in addition to the poster to be notified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever feel that the existing @-notification mechanism is insufficient, &lt;strong&gt;you're doing it wrong.&lt;/strong&gt; Include the poster and perhaps the most useful other recipient (if there is one) and leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T19:53:05.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10658" CreationDate="2017-08-05T20:39:31.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I find myself having to repeat a comment to more than one user. Of course, the post's owner is notified, but since my comment is towards two users, I'd follow the following style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Here's my comment to the OP.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@User1 [Here's my comment to user1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(cc: @User2) Please see [my comment above].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for discussion, but it is sometimes found necessary to communicate something with two users usually other than the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T20:39:31.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10659" CreationDate="2017-08-06T05:53:27.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not normally possible to get answers from the particular users you like. But if you are sure said users will appreciate you notifying them of your question, then you may try pinging them in chat (if they participate in chats, that is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T05:53:27.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T02:47:10.747" Score="7" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Should I delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/404434/50044&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; despite a legitimate answer and comments?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before writing this I read posts here about deleting and improving questions (&quot;Should I delete my question?&quot; etc.). I didn't get answers to some of my concerns so I still feel the need to post this. I apologize if I missed obvious answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I posted my first SE question. It was an E.SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first response by @DanBron begins &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Extremely well-posed question&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other folk then left comments. It was clear they were confused. I replied and edited the question twice in direct response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last response at the time I write this is by @David. It ends &lt;strong&gt;&quot;... Why not just delete it before it is closed.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm almost ready to delete my question and to try writing a new question to replace the old one. But &lt;strong&gt;I'd like to read posts by others affirming or rejecting that I should delete it and write another&lt;/strong&gt; because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deleting my first attempt has downsides. In the SE's I usually frequent it's generally considered rude to just delete a question that has sincere responses, especially one that includes a legitimate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If my writing style really is too long format and/or confusing for most E.SE folk then maybe I'd best not waste my time and yours trying to post a question at E.SE again. I hope to have a better handle on that based on any responses I get to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fwiw, here's a list of actions I can imagine taking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Revert to original.&lt;/strong&gt; @DanBron commented that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/404434/1&quot;&gt;the original&lt;/a&gt; was &quot;Extremely well-posed&quot; (and got an upvote, not from me of course). Perhaps my edits ruined an initially good question. Which suggests just reverting it. &lt;strong&gt;But then&lt;/strong&gt; several comments won't make sense to readers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leave as is.&lt;/strong&gt; Do not further edit the question. Maybe don't respond to further comments either. Definitely ask @DanBron to cancel his plan to bounty it. &lt;strong&gt;But then,&lt;/strong&gt; presuming it's as bad as @David says and I now fear, not deleting soon would presumably be fairly inconsiderate towards anyone who reads it, or worse, responds to it, and ultra inconsiderate if I know it's eventually going to be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cut out the &lt;em&gt;Why I'm asking&lt;/em&gt; section&lt;/strong&gt;. I thought it might be helpful to explain what prompted me to ask my question. I personally appreciate such detail in an SE question. But it looks like that was a bust, presumably because it includes computer code (that I thought was simple enough). I could just cut this all out. &lt;strong&gt;But then&lt;/strong&gt; several comments won't make sense to readers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cut out the &lt;em&gt;What I've found&lt;/em&gt; section&lt;/strong&gt;. In my original question I allowed that I might not be right about the meaning of the English word &quot;itemize&quot;. But it looks like I was right about what the English word &quot;itemize&quot; means. (Perhaps @David's misunderstanding about this just reflects how bad my question has ended up.) I could cut out all mention of &quot;itemize&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;But then&lt;/strong&gt; several comments won't make sense to readers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cut out the &lt;em&gt;What, precisely, I'm asking&lt;/em&gt; section&lt;/strong&gt;. My goal is picking a single English word, or having a small list of candidates (i.e. &quot;which word(s)?&quot; is my real question). However, I know some SE's are OK with what I'll call incidental questions and that's what this section was about. I could cut the incidental questions out. &lt;strong&gt;But then&lt;/strong&gt; @ruakh's answer, which I appreciated, won't make sense to readers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete the whole question and try again.&lt;/strong&gt; I generally try to start something like an SE question or answer by investing time into a well researched and written initial post and follow that with improvements in response to feedback (whether good natured or trollish). But @David's comment implies that deleting an entire question is considered OK even if there are (arguably) useful comments and a legitimate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete the whole question and don't try again.&lt;/strong&gt; Perhaps my long and complex writing style is entirely inappropriate for E.SE questions. If you've read this far, thank you, and let me know!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251122" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T04:15:05.607" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T04:15:05.607" Title="Should I stay or should I go; my question clearly went wrong; how wrong?" Tags="|support|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T19:43:59.417" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some user and a moderator marked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/337411/who-or-whom-in-by-other-people-whom-i-know/392135#392135&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400197/how-do-i-choose-between-who-or-whom-when-the-subject-pronoun-is-murky&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, even though the &quot;duplicate&quot; was asked a year before the &quot;original&quot; was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's up with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user231780" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T19:43:59.417" Title="False Duplicate Report" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-08-15T07:22:31.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10673" CreationDate="2017-08-09T00:36:03.287" Score="23" ViewCount="2740" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just asked a question about the phrase '&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/404888/giving-a-d-n-do-you-care-or-not/404920#404920&quot;&gt;give a damn&lt;/a&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been edited, I would say bowdlerised, on grounds that the word 'damn' is marked as offensive in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SUBSEQUENT EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is surprising and shocking. I thought this site took itself seriously. I am &lt;em&gt;astonished&lt;/em&gt; by the sanctimonious objections to my question title.  Do I need to affirm my support for wholesome family values (even though I was not actually swearing or exclaming)?  And how is it that &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question has been allowed to use the 'word' (whisper it!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate guidance about whether I may reinstate the missing letters from my question's title.  How is it decided?  Or do I just play cat and mouse with Tonepoet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103961" LastEditorUserId="103961" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T08:03:09.440" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T19:11:23.760" Title="Is 'damn' offensive?" Tags="|discussion|offensive|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="47" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10672" CreationDate="2017-08-09T03:56:09.690" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand why keeping the site from being offensive is important policy and good practice.  However, I don't believe censoring the word &quot;damn&quot; accomplishes anything besides muddling titles and making the site look unprofessional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently 10 undeleted questions with the word &quot;damn&quot; in the title, assuming I've conducted my search correctly.  The ones which are also not closed are listed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20950/where-does-hot-damn-come-from&quot;&gt;Where does &amp;quot;hot damn!&amp;quot; come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6945/which-one-is-it-damn-or-damned&quot;&gt;Which one is it? &amp;quot;Damn&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;damned&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16577/origin-and-meaning-of-damn-straight&quot;&gt;Origin and meaning of &amp;quot;damn straight&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/327776/is-the-use-of-the-word-damn-to-express-frustration-offensive&quot;&gt;Is the use of the word &amp;#39;damn&amp;#39; to express frustration offensive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80690/how-does-dont-give-a-toss-differ-from-dont-give-a-damn&quot;&gt;How does &amp;#39;don&amp;#39;t give a toss&amp;#39; differ from &amp;#39;don&amp;#39;t give a damn&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41332/what-is-the-meaning-of-i-dont-give-a-damn-for-someone-that-can-only-spell-a-wo&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t give a damn for someone that can only spell a word one way.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, editing all these question titles to use &quot;d--n&quot; instead of &quot;damn&quot; would make the site look unserious.  Major print publications don't use the word &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; unless it's relevant to the context of the piece, but when it is, they do use it.  &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, to my knowledge, has never printed a headline with &quot;damn&quot; used for emphasis or color, but it also doesn't censor the word in its headlines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/arts/music/kendrick-lamar-damn-billboard-debut.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DAMN.’ Earns the Biggest Billboard Debut of 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B05EFDE103DEF34BC4F51DFBF668383649EDE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MOVIE REVIEW Screen: 'Damn Yankees'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/style/damn-daniel-video-vans.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;We Should Probably Have a Conversation About ‘Damn, Daniel’&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for those on the other side of the pond, &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt; follows a similar practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/20/john-mccain-i-dont-give-a-damn-no-waterboarding-under-trump&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John McCain: 'I don't give a damn – no waterboarding' under Trump&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe EL&amp;amp;U can stand on the same footing as major newspaper publications.  We don't use &quot;damn&quot; in a title to add color or emphasis, but when we are examining the language around the word damn, we treat it with mature detachment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean that &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt; or other publications have no standards when it comes to offensive terms.  They allow use of the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt;&quot; only &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in highly contentious quotations and interview transcripts&lt;/a&gt;, where the word is relevant to the information the outlets are trying to express.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one will ever agree completely on whether &quot;damn&quot; is offensive, let alone many of the other potentially suspect words that appear on EL&amp;amp;U for academic reasons. But I would assert that if &quot;damn&quot; is acceptable in a major print headline, then it should be acceptable on EL&amp;amp;U when used in the appropriate context of a discussion on language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T03:56:09.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10672" CreationDate="2017-08-09T04:12:33.393" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This edit does not seem to have been mandated by site policy.&lt;/strong&gt; The most formal &quot;policy statement&quot; that I've found cited is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/981/177853&quot;&gt;a Meta answer by Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;, which reads in pertinent part &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[W]e do ask that you &lt;em&gt;mildly&lt;/em&gt; censor &lt;strong&gt;question titles&lt;/strong&gt; because those can show up on the Stack Exchange homepage and other places where seeing an &lt;em&gt;extremely vile&lt;/em&gt; curse word is definitely not welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bolding in original, italics added.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has also stated in a couple of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1566/177853&quot;&gt;comments on an answer&lt;/a&gt; to another Meta question that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[T]he title has to be &quot;radio-friendly&quot;. . . . Like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_edit#Editing_for_content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_edit#Editing_for_content&lt;/a&gt; except only in the title&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to me that &quot;damn&quot; is &lt;em&gt;extremely vile&lt;/em&gt; as curse words go, and it isn't mentioned in the linked Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going by the &quot;radio friendly&quot; standard, &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; on its own seems to be pretty universally allowed. There's an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2009/08/bleeping_out_words.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Public Radio (NPR) discussion of &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; in conjunction with &lt;em&gt;God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which points out that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ruled that even the longer version is not legally profane. The full phrase &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; more problematic, though, and the NPR folks polled some of their media compatriots to see how they deal with it; NBC apparently most often chooses to bleep out &lt;em&gt;God&lt;/em&gt; but leave &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; on the air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Based on this evidence, I would not have thought &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; needs to be censored in titles, and would favor rolling back to the original title.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T14:54:27.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:54:27.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10672" CreationDate="2017-08-09T04:20:44.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;H3&gt;Regarding Website Policy&lt;/H3&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, Merriam-Webster wasn't quite the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; I did it, so much as an ex-post-facto reference. I reacted upon seeing the word because I know it is policy to avoid them, and it is a somewhat urgent matter that is most especially applicable to new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/975/do-we-really-need-to-add-nsfw-in-question-titles&quot;&gt;Do we really need to add &amp;quot;NSFW&amp;quot; in question titles?&lt;/a&gt; Jeff Atwood wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt; No, but we do ask that you mildly censor question titles because those can show up on the Stack Exchange homepage and other places where seeing an extremely vile curse word is definitely not welcome.&#xA;&#xA;In the body, and the tags, you may do as you see fit.&#xA;&#xA;(for prior art on this, see the &quot;breasts&quot; question, etc)&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MetaEd also referenced this policy somewhat later on in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2357/censorship-of-offensive-questions&quot;&gt;Censorship of offensive questions&lt;/a&gt; a few years prior to his election:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In reality, the decision to censor titles is not open to debate. It is site policy, established by the business which owns the site. See the third question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1561/should-elu-be-removed-from-the-multicollider-etc&quot;&gt;Should EL&amp;amp;U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, where the site policy is clearly articulated by Jeff Atwood, StackExchange CTO. (And that is perfectly appropriate. It's their site and they can establish whatever policy they think is wise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;One of these other places is twitter. Did you know your post was automatically featured &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/27771182979751936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on twitter&lt;/a&gt; ten minutes after I made the edit? Your post is going to reach widespread audiences and different people are going to have different opinions on the subject, and it is probably better safe than sorry in that regard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &quot;'breasts' question&quot; Jeff &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/554/why-did-slang-for-breasts-disappear-because-that-was-a-valid-question-no&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which suggests at one point the community even questioned the use/mention rule. If even a question containing the word &lt;em&gt;tits&lt;/em&gt; was once considered questionable enough to be deleted for being offensive, then it stands to reason that &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; is also off the menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding how I edited the title, and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; the title as per the guideline, I followed a practice I observed before of editing out the middle two letters and using filler to fill in the blank. It is relatively difficult to actually find examples because the symbols used, which are usually asterisks do not appear in search results. However, you can see one such example here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54280/etymology-of-shhole&quot;&gt;Etymology of &amp;quot;sh**hole&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please note that not too long ago we were discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10592/jesus-h-christ-so-objectionable-as-to-be-deletable&quot;&gt;Jesus H. Christ: so objectionable as to be deletable?&lt;/a&gt; with the following quotation from user Peter Shor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;The H. was inserted to avoid committing blasphemy by saying Jesus Christ. It's the same phenomenon as replacing damn with darn. So Jesus H. Christ here is presumably not the son of God but just somebody else with a very similar name.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter seems to suggest that he was trying to censor himself, and by using analogy with &lt;em&gt;darn&lt;/em&gt; he is suggesting that &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; is also worthy of censure. Granted, this was a use/mention violation, rather than a title question, but this represents prior indication that the word is considered offensive to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Regarding General Offensiveness&lt;/H3&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having a relatively difficult time finding what I consider to be good reference to what are euphemistically referred to as &lt;em&gt;four letter words&lt;/em&gt;. Damn is certainly among the list. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/damn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The proposition lacks much contemporary dictionary support for my claim&lt;/a&gt;, but they do not even mark &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/fuck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fuck&lt;/a&gt; as offensive. However it is worth note that there are many euphemisms for the term, including most famously &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/damn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dang&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tfd.com/darn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;darn&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four-letter_word&amp;amp;oldid=781276580&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has to say on the subject of Four Letter Words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt; The phrase four-letter word refers to a set of English-language words written with four letters which are considered profane, including common popular or slang terms for excretory functions, sexual activity and genitalia, terms relating to Hell or damnation when used outside of religious contexts or slurs. The &quot;four-letter&quot; claim refers to the fact that a large number of (but not all) English &quot;swear words&quot; are incidentally four-character monosyllables. This description came into use during the first half of the twentieth century.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Common four-letter words (in this sense) that are widely considered vulgar or offensive to a notable degree include: cunt, fuck (and regional variants such as feck, fick and foak), jism (or gism), jizz, shit, twat and tits. Piss (formerly an offensive swear word) in particular, however, may be used in non-excretory contexts (pissed off, i.e. &quot;angry&quot;, in US English and British UK English ; pissed, i.e. &quot;drunk&quot; in UK English) that are often not considered particularly offensive, and the word also occurs several times with its excretory meaning in the King James Bible. Several of these have been declared legally indecent under the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) TV and radio open-airwave broadcasting regulations.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;Four Letter Word&lt;/em&gt; is also defined in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=four+letter+word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Phrase that refers to any number of &quot;bad&quot; words, often seen in forum posts. Can mean shit, fuck, damn, and even other non-four-lettered-words such as ass and bitch. Can also refer to the basic four letter words with suffixes (ie &quot;ed&quot; &quot;ing&quot;). Usually said by some religious freak or ten year old that will get in trouble if their parents see it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Poster 1 &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Damn man, that shit is fucking awesome! That bitch totally deserved it! &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Poster 2 &lt;br&gt;&#xA;I could've understood what you were saying without all the four letter words&amp;hellip;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; One instance of the phrase I am particularly familiar with can be found on rules of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10672/is-damn-offensive&quot;&gt;the Caves of Narshe forums&lt;/a&gt;, where four letter words are forbidden under section 2 B of its rules. While their rules are not our own, I feel as if mentioning this provision can help to gauge the acceptability of such words on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a book entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=jg-eCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;dq=damn+swearing+america&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Damn!: A Cultural History of Swearing in Modern America&lt;/a&gt; By Rob Chirico &amp;copy; 2014 which capitalizes on the word's iconic status as one of the bad word for recognition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Swearing, cussing, or cursing, out of anger, excitement, or just because, is something most of us do, at least to some degree. Turn on the television or open a magazine, and there it is. Damn! is an insightful and entertaining look at our evolving use of profanity over the last half-century or so, from a time when Gone with the Wind came under fire for using the word &quot;damn&quot; to an age where the f-bomb is dropped in all walks of life. Writer and artist Rob Chirico follows the course of swearing through literature, the media, and music, as well as through our daily lives. From back rooms and barracks to bookshelves and Broadway; and from precedents to presidents, the journey includes such diverse notables as George Carlin, the Simpsons, D. H. Lawrence, Ice T, Barack Obama, Nietzsche, and, of course, Lenny Bruce. If you have ever stopped and wondered WTF has happened to our American tongue, don't get out the bar of soap until you finish Damn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;This book also quotes Gone with the Wind's infamous line &quot;Frankly my dear, I just don't give a damn!&quot; which was quite a powerful line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair though, the word is not one of the words banned by the F.C.C., it only warrants a PG-13 rating in a film and the associated press accepts it, &lt;a href=&quot;http://writingexplained.org/ap-style/ap-style-obscenities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;however they seem to advise only using it in direct quotations&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.ap.org/announcements/too-vulgar-to-print&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their blog article Too Vulgar to Print by Tom Kent from April 9 2014 notes&lt;/a&gt; that although the A.P. advises on spellings for the word now, &lt;strong&gt;even just a couple of decades ago that the word would have been considered unprintable&lt;/strong&gt;. So what seems to have happened is that people became desensitized to it. However it is really quite borderline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to be honest, my prior citation of Merriam-Webster was just an ex-post-facto reference. I acted upon my naturally accquired understanding of the word first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T05:34:33.810" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T05:34:33.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10672" CreationDate="2017-08-09T19:11:23.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original title is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I think so? First principles: the SE network exists to gather expert answers to good questions and make them available worldwide to people who need them. SE management does not, as far as I know, have any religious, philosophical, or “squick” issues with profanity. They just want to avoid practical problems that interfere with their purpose. And profanity has the potential to create problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Profanity is offensive to many people, and can drive people away who would otherwise create content. Solution: SE has said that when there is a way to post without using profanity, that’s what one should always do. For more information, see the Be Nice policy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE management tells us that profanity in titles is caught by content filters that block content (and even entire sites) from being distributed to people who need them. Solution: when it is necessary to post using profanity, as for example when analyzing profanity as an element of language, avoid profanity in titles. Necessary profanity in the body text is not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I observe in this case that there is no evidence of offense (no flags complaining about the post) and no evidence that it is triggering content filters (no feedback from SE management that we need to start taking “damn” out of question titles). Conclusion: the original title is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a provisional judgment, obviously. If we start seeing complaints, then there is a practical problem and the decision could change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this all probably applies also to indecency, but I doubt it applies to obscenity, as defined by the US FCC. Obscenity is essentially nothing other than hardcore pornography, and probably has no place on the SE network for any reason whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T19:11:23.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10682" CreationDate="2017-08-10T05:34:02.010" Score="-1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;At Aug 7 at 1:46 (2017-08-07 01:46:18Z) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/211991/the-dude&quot;&gt;The Dude&lt;/a&gt; asked the question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/404592/26083&quot;&gt;Is there a verb form of the word “agenda”,&#xA;as in, to create a political agenda for or against something?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Is there a verb form of the word “agenda”, as in, to create a political agenda for or against something?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It doesn’t have to contain the root word, but I would like at least a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Aug 7 at 2:23 (2017-08-07 02:23:21Z)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/160746/phil-sweet&quot;&gt;Phil Sweet&lt;/a&gt; posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/404592/26083#comment962523_404592&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If one person sets the agenda, its called demagoguery.&#xA;  If a few people do this, its called oligarchy,&#xA;  If someone gets a bunch of people together and lets them decide the agenda,&#xA;  its called political organizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time, probably between 3:00 and 3:30, I posted a comment. &#xA;It was probably the fourth or fifth comment on the question at the time. &#xA;To the best of my memory, it was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe “plot”, “scheme”, or “strategize”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that these were valid, constructive suggestions&#xA;for answers to the question —&#xA;assuming that it means &lt;em&gt;developing&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;conceiving&lt;/em&gt;) an agenda,&#xA;and not manufacturing a document —&#xA;but clearly not developed well enough to be posted as an answer —&#xA;and definitely in the spirit of Phil’s comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Aug 7 at 3:44 (2017-08-07 03:44:28Z)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/215927/yosef-baskin&quot;&gt;Yosef Baskin&lt;/a&gt; posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/404592/26083#comment962538_404592&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hear what @Scott hears,&#xA;  that the OP is asking about activism, not the open agendas of meetings.&#xA;  More like angling, jockeying, politicizing, planning behind the scenes,&#xA;  and conniving for hidden agendas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I got a ping in my inbox. &#xA;So I came back to the question to see how the conversation had proceeded,&#xA;only to find that my comment was gone. &#xA;Why was it deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Phil’s comment has three votes at the moment, and Yosef’s comment has one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. It’s sad how many questions similar to this one there are&#xA;just on &lt;strong&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt; Meta alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T19:28:44.540" Title="Why was my (“agenda”) comment deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-14T04:52:04.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10678" CreationDate="2017-08-10T08:22:10.583" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;why&quot; for comment deletions. There's just &quot;comments are ephemeral&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's usually tolerated on ELU, it's not technically allowed to post answers in comments. Even if they're unsupported suggestions, technically they're still answers to the question asked, albeit of poor quality. Clearly, such suggestions are not asking for clarification or adding more information to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And comments do not have the feature to properly vet whatever you say here so, without features like actual voting and wiki-style editing of content, answering in the comments defeats the purpose of having this Stack Exchange site. (paraphrasing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt;'s comment after purging a comment thread elsewhere in the network)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All that said, I do post suggestions in comments&lt;/strong&gt;, like you and many other senior users here. What I keep in mind is that these comments can disappear any moment, and all I want is for somebody to make use of that information before it disappears, to post their own answer, which will then be vetted by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer you to Tonepoet's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10681/50044&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; here. It's something I fully agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T19:28:44.540" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T19:28:44.540" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10678" CreationDate="2017-08-10T15:22:30.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, regarding the other comments, they should probably be deleted too. The reason yours was singled out is probably because moderators usually delete flagged comments, because their attention is drawn directly to them and with enough flags a comment can be automatically deleted by the system too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; supposed to be used for making suggestions, giving constructive criticism which relate to the post they address and giving &lt;em&gt;hints&lt;/em&gt; that might lead to an answer, without answering the question. Attempts to answer a question have no place in the comments and there are many  possible reasons for that. You should not be posting suggestions for the word as a comment. You should be writing answers, preferably with an explanation regarding why you prefer those suggestions and evidence to prove those points to make it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system is predicated on answers being posted as answers, and many forms of harm arise when they are posted as comments instead. Most of these harms probably will not make much sense to you, since you may not yet be entirely indoctrinated into the Stack Exchange philosophy but allow me to explain the most important one so it does not seem like an entirely senseless policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments which suggest answers clutter up space meant to address how the question can be made into an answerable question, and especially since they tend to elicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92110&quot;&gt;uninvited extended discussion&lt;/a&gt; regarding the validity of the answer. Also, once a certain number of comments are made, the rest are hidden from unsolicited viewing, and preference towards which comments are displayed are given to the ones most often marked as useful, as agreeable answers often are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This combination of factors makes it harder than is necessary for people to find any comments which are actually serving the intended purpose of our commentary system and most especially the questioner, because they will have to read through all of the comments to see which ones are trying to address problems which may otherwise end up leading to the question's closure for any one of what I believe to be six or maybe seven common reasons. I would list those reasons, but question closure is beyond the scope of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an answer is posted as an answer, it gets its own commentary space for the comments it elicits which are less relevant to the question, and more related to the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you may think you are helping by making quick suggestions which might solve the original poster's problem, but without explaining why those words are good suggestions, and how they can be used to solve their problem they probably will not realize &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; these words solve their problem or how they fit their given context. If it is a common word, they may have already considered it and dismissed it without understanding why it  is the best word for their situation, and if it is a rare word, they probably do not know what it even means without needing to consult a dictionary and may still need further explanation  to validate the answer. Anything worth suggesting here is probably only worth suggesting as a fully independent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NVZ already mentioned that comments are only transient. It helps to keep the website looking neat, and the focus attention on the questions and answers themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information regarding when you should, or should not comment, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;please read the help center's commentary guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T19:25:40.663" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T19:25:40.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10678" CreationDate="2017-08-10T16:04:28.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments aren't always compared one against the other to decide if one should stay or one should go, or even if other comments need to be cleared. If it's flagged and the flag seems appropriate, it goes, either because enough flags were generated on that comment or because a mod pushed a button. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's a comment. Comments are transient bits of information&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and unless they truly serve the purpose of a comment (to ask for clarification, etc.), then don't invest in them emotionally (take it personally when it gets deleted.) They may go; they may stay. It's not personal. There's no judgement on its value. Flagged comments are flagged by users, not mods, and users are legion and have their own reasons for flagging comments. (If the flags are declined often enough, the user will be penalized.) If multiple flags are raised on that post's comments, the mod has the choice to remove the flagged comments, move the whole kit and kaboodle to a chat room, or to delete the entire comment thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not personal. It's just the &quot;mechanics&quot; of Stack Exchange. (I'm not tech-savvy. There's probably a much better word for how a piece of software(?) is written(?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it might seem biased, but honestly, mods don't have a lot of time to check out every flagged comment for how it relates to others. Mostly it's chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What probably &lt;strong&gt;doesn't happen&lt;/strong&gt; is that a mod looks at a comment thread they're interested in and decides, &quot;Hmm. I don't agree with this comment, so I'm going to delete it.&quot; Mods are supposed to be impartial, and exception handlers, and for the very greatest part, most mods are just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a comment is deleted, it's best to just assume someone flagged it for some reason you can't understand and the process just worked the way its supposed to work when a comment flag is raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T16:12:08.530" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T16:12:08.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-11T07:22:03.097" Score="7" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any dictionary or similar for comparing and contrasting related/synonym words, such as for ex. &quot;swing&quot; vs &quot;sway&quot;, or &quot;ask&quot; vs &quot;inquire&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252037" OwnerDisplayName="Aleks Seggen" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T10:36:01.890" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T16:07:52.323" Title="Comparison/contrast dictionaries of synonyms" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10683" CreationDate="2017-08-11T09:22:33.613" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal choices for synonym-related dictionaries are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://synonym.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://synonym.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thesaurus.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://thesaurus.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251975" OwnerDisplayName="kartoniks" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T09:22:33.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-11T12:05:16.110" Score="-1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;One downvote... fine. Normal stuff. Two... again normal (for me it is). But three downvotes for this question?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/405245/the-balled-headed-eagle&quot;&gt;The balled (headed) eagle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because of the title? That's the only fathomable reason I can think of. You can't tell me the question is a duplicate, that there is no research, (but apparently someone disagrees) that it isn't about the English language, or that it's opinion-based. So what is it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to improve the question? A user posted the following comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what is the etymology of &quot;bald&quot;??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And someone has cast their vote to close the question because I didn't “include the research”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is a link to etymonline, I summarized the information it contained in the body. I cited &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionaries&lt;/em&gt;, and  &lt;em&gt;A Middle English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. The question is a result of fact-checking and cross-checking several sources, I carefully avoided copy and pasting a large number of excerpts but... three users think it's not enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now await for the provincial rainfall of DVs on the main page, because I have brought up annoying anonymous downvoting on meta. I know, I'm sick to death of hearing it too, but it's been a long dry summer and I need to quench my thirst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: Users with 1K can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;view count votes&lt;/a&gt; If you have less, you have to trust me when I say the question has three downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the 7 DVs for the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333038/defeat-trump-badly&quot;&gt;defeat Trump badly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; question posted I have no qualms with. It's not my best question by far but at least I know &quot;why&quot; it got downvoted so badly... ho, ho, ho. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T18:16:28.583" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T18:16:28.583" Title="You gotta tell me, what's &quot;balled&quot; got to do with it?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="28" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10688" CreationDate="2017-08-11T12:47:10.520" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if there is a fool-proof angst-o-meter for SE yet, but the way new users with low reputation are treated can serve as a facsimile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My last three questions were roller-coaster rides. Two of the three were met with answers that were then deleted and followed by close votes by the individual who withdrew their answer. &lt;em&gt;I've asked nearly a thousand questions in stackexchange&lt;/em&gt;, and I've only seen this happen three times total. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My most recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/405336/217285&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (where this happened) also shows two up votes, and my score is 19. This means five up votes and three down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was also a victim of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10615/217285&quot;&gt;serial down-vote session&lt;/a&gt;, a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10616/217285&quot;&gt;voter fraud&lt;/a&gt;. The SE system seems to have automatically reversed 4 of the 6 soon afterward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10510/217285&quot;&gt;My question is not so well received, why?&lt;/a&gt; , two active users here nearly simultaneously posted answers and fired off further comments directed at me under each others questions, while simultaneously posting comments directed to me under my original question. It turns out I had given links to three high quality answers here in English SE for a definition of a term, instead of pasting the definition explicitly, and apparently this is not considered best practice here. A single, simple helpful comment could have cleared that up, rather than the barrage of (now deleted) comments I received under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/399555/217285&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my experience, asking questions here is painful and angsty for new users, but that's just my perspective. It seems like there are nice people (remember &quot;be nice&quot;?) and mean people. Pardon my use of child-like terms, but they fit. So angsty and factionated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this only my impression, or has there been some other recognition and discussion of this potential problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/394796/217285&quot;&gt;“Marking a question as duplicate … except when a question is closed as a duplicate…”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/399555/217285&quot;&gt;Is the object in “Eighty-six forty-five.” a proper noun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/405336/217285&quot;&gt;The 'de' in indefatigable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T14:33:16.930" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T19:33:22.433" Title="Is there angst and factionation here, more than most other SE sites?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10685" CreationDate="2017-08-11T16:30:12.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question looks okay. Nothing to worry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a day, your &quot;bald eagle&quot; question has been viewed 2000 times, upvoted 27 times, and answered twice. Those answers are also similarly well received. All this without even entering the &lt;em&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find no reason for those downvotes, but 3 people did. 3 people. Just 3. 3. Let that sink in. 3 down compared to 27 up... 3 is nothing. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so is the case with that one close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's very much possible that somewhere in your four years here, some users were upset by your actions, and they'll forever hold that grudge, and vote down on your stuff. I get that sometimes as well (maybe even on this answer), because I am a murderer of questions and answers, I have closed, flagged, downvoted and deleted thousands of posts. Thousands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T16:30:12.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10686" CreationDate="2017-08-11T19:33:22.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If comments or answers are unprofessional/uncollegiate in tone, please feel free to throw a flag. The moderation team strongly supports the Be Nice policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T19:33:22.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10683" CreationDate="2017-08-11T19:52:55.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Online, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; often has a &quot;Synonym Discussion&quot; under its Dictionary entries that directly compares and contrasts selected synonyms. For example, under the entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/swing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;swing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; it says in part&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/swing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;SWING&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/a&gt; implies a movement of something attached at one end or one side. ⟨• the door suddenly &lt;em&gt;swung&lt;/em&gt; open⟩ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;SWAY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; implies a slow swinging or teetering movement. ⟨• trees &lt;em&gt;swaying&lt;/em&gt; in the breeze⟩&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll need to scroll down past the definition-proper, examples, and etymology to get to this discussion, and not every entry has it. Note that M-W also has a Thesaurus tab, which takes you to a more traditional list of synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-line, many print thesauruses include similar kinds of discussion. Your local library or bookstore likely has a selection of these that you could browse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T19:52:55.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10683" CreationDate="2017-08-12T22:43:25.477" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very nice book which seems to be exactly what you want is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/38252/the-penguin-guide-to-synonyms-and-related-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penguin guide to synonyms and related words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a large number of words it analyses the nuances of the different synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To show you the book structure, I scanned an example page. You can see that for each key word there's a list of synonyms (the full word list can be found in the index at the end of the book), and for each synonym the text discusses its level of formality, its usage etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kCeQH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kCeQH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73795" LastEditorUserId="73795" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T16:07:52.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T16:07:52.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10694" CreationDate="2017-08-13T00:53:24.753" Score="-6" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling this question will get a lot of downvotes... Here it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other day, I received an e-mail from moderation saying that my account had been suspended for seven days. &lt;strong&gt;Because of long discussions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack&#xA;  Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/231780/edna-mode&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/231780/edna-mode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've noticed that you have a pattern of engaging in lengthy&#xA;  discussions in comments, frequently consisting of responses involving&#xA;  multiple, back-to-back posts. Comments are intended as brief messages&#xA;  to provide feedback, add minor information, ask for clarification, or&#xA;  discuss the content of the post. Lengthy clarifications should be&#xA;  edited into the post itself or posted separately as a new question or&#xA;  answer, and extended discussions should be taken to chat. Extensive&#xA;  comment threads tend to be a distraction for other readers. These&#xA;  lengthy discussions are often hard to follow, and can easily hide&#xA;  critical information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Preferring to argue with other users in comments over revising your&#xA;  questions and answers to address their concerns is a red flag to&#xA;  moderators, indicating you may not fully understand the purpose of&#xA;  Stack Exchange: our goal is to provide readers with expert questions&#xA;  and answers, not host discussion or debate. If you desire&#xA;  conversation, stop into the site's chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We hope that you can work with the community on achieving our goals&#xA;  by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking specific, researched, relevant, on-topic questions Providing&#xA;  clear, useful, accurate and well-researched information in answers&#xA;  Treating others with respect and civility We have temporarily&#xA;  suspended your account; you may return after 7 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regards, English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange Moderation Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come on, a week for &lt;em&gt;that?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;And the second slap in the face was that moderation ignored all messages I sent.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep. I sent three e-mails using the contact form and two messages replying to the moderator messages they sent me, which means I spent seven minutes of my life talking to a brick wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situations that I think immediately qualify for 7-day suspensions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inappropriate/rude answers and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pattern of low-quality answers and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Negatively argumentative users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Serial-voting, whether they be ups or downs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The reason was for my suspension was totally accurate, but seven days? An hour to a day would be more appropriate. Hopefully I'm not alone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I'd like to bring up another example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack&#xA;  Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/231780/sebastian-pojman&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/231780/sebastian-pojman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wanted to let you know that we've observed some rudeness in your&#xA;  latest activity. We get it; anyone who's ever tried to engage with&#xA;  others online has probably been tempted to lash out at someone else.&#xA;  This is just a friendly reminder that we require all participants to&#xA;  act in a professional and civil tone when using these sites. If&#xA;  another user has wronged you in some way, please do not respond in&#xA;  kind. Simply flag the content for moderator attention and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this is a simple misunderstanding, no harm done. Sometimes it is&#xA;  helpful to remind ourselves on occasion that keeping things friendly&#xA;  and constructive doesn't have to be at odds with being right — so&#xA;  enjoy the site, bring your sense of humor, and please be tolerant of&#xA;  others who may not know everything you know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have temporarily suspended your account; you may return after 7&#xA;  days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regards, English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange Moderation Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so you think I'm being rude. Any examples? &lt;strong&gt;Nope.&lt;/strong&gt; Any warning e-mail? &lt;strong&gt;Nope.&lt;/strong&gt; Oh! Well how about a response to my messages? &lt;strong&gt;Nope.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is downright insane. I just don't understand this kind of logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user231780" LastEditorDisplayName="user231780" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T20:48:09.347" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T17:44:32.847" Title="Suspensions That Are Too Harsh" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="42" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10692" CreationDate="2017-08-13T10:42:46.733" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;NOTE: &lt;em&gt;I am not a moderator on ELU, but I do moderate on another Stack Exchange site&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about harshness might be better asked on the overall Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seven days might seem overly harsh, but it's actually the recommend suspension length for first-time offenders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8aA6x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8aA6x.png&quot; alt=&quot;suspension length menu&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the reason you got suspended, that's one of the standard template reasons for suspension:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZgBD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZgBD.png&quot; alt=&quot;subset of suspension reasons&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks to me like the moderation team noticed you were being too chatty in comments, picked that reason from the menu, picked the default suspension length, and sent you the boilerplate text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not 7 days is reasonable or &quot;insane&quot; recommendation for first-time offenders could be put up for debate, but, considering these are network-wide (not site-specific) menus, that's more of an SE issue than an ELU issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you alone? I don't think so. The few times I've had to suspend users, I've often overridden the 7-day recommendation with a 2- or a 3-day suspension for first-timers instead. But I wouldn't begrudge or chastise a moderator who merely followed the prompts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for those seven minutes that you felt were wasted, I probably wouldn't have responded to your emails, either. Moderators often feel it's best to simply let a matter rest than engage in protracted or emotional debate. I only have a small pool of examples to draw from, but I'd guess that most replies back to a moderation team go unanswered. (This doesn't mean that they are left unread or ignored; they are simply left &lt;em&gt;unanswered&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anytime the number of comments under a question or answer reaches a certain threshold, a flag is automatically generated for the moderation team. My guess is that this happened on multiple occasions, and, when the mod team went to investigate, they found a large number of comments from you. Eventually, someone decided it was time to get your attention, and simply followed the prompts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for suspensions, I've always appreciated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;these remarks&lt;/a&gt; by SE Founder Jeff Atwood (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be recalculated, and your account will resume as normal. &lt;strong&gt;We don’t hold grudges&lt;/strong&gt;. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the behavior improves, you are welcome back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that, when the suspension ends, you leave fewer comments on the main site and frequent the chat rooms more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T11:38:49.347" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T11:38:49.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10704" CreationDate="2017-08-13T15:49:57.880" Score="-1" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of users here, myself included, find most SWRs of poor quality and sometimes downright annoying (although occasionally they prove entertaining.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought Meta was supposed to be used for problems with the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meta English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is the part of the site where users discuss the workings and policies of English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange rather than discussing English language and usage itself. It is separated from the main Q&amp;amp;A to reduce noise there while providing a legitimate space for people to ask how and why this site works the way it does. Meta is for...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange users to communicate with each other about English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (asking questions about how the websites work, or about policies and community decisions)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      ...English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange users to communicate with Stack Overflow the company (posting bugs, suggesting improvements, or proposing new features), and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      ...Stack Overflow the company to communicate with the community (soliciting feedback on new ideas or features, or discussing policies that affect the whole network)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately (or maybe since the beginning, I don't know, and I don't want to investigate; it would be too depressing) I see questions of a quality similar to SWRs on the main site, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why did I get downvotes on my well received post? (I don't deserve this! Damn this site!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why did my comment get removed? (It was really, really useful and should remain for posterity! Damn this site!!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why was I suspended again‽ (I mean, I know I've been rude and uncooperative, but really, a suspension? Damn this site!!!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This site is soooo unfriendly! (I've only been here for three days, but already I'm fed up! Damn this site!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I raised a flag! Why hasn't a moderator acted on it? (Lazy mods! Damn this site!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Comments with down votes should be mandatory! (Otherwise how can I &lt;strike&gt;argue and retaliate&lt;/strike&gt; improve my question? Damn this site!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why was my f****** expletive asterisized? (People are so d***ed touchy! D*** this site!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these kinds of questions really on topic for this site's meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have one sufficient answer and close all the subsequent similar questions as dupes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we migrate these types of questions (with appropriate edits) to SE Meta? (Or to chat? &amp;lt;- That would be nice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T16:09:43.697" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T16:28:37.283" Title="Cheeses and rice! Meta Equivalents of Single Word Requests" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10692" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:02:46.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A logical reason for fixing the second suspension period at 7 days would seem to be that any subsequent period of suspension is not expected to be &lt;em&gt;shorter than&lt;/em&gt; the earlier period, which I suppose was 7 days. Again it was less harsh than it would appear because the second suspension could easily have been for a month according to the network pattern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself came perilously close to suspension a month back (I now realise, from your case) for excessive discussion in comments, but got a series of fair warnings in comments from moderators and managed to restrict the activity before I ran into any sanctions. Thus I 'lost myself' the habit of engaging in discussion in comments, though I still feel that comments section rather than chat is the more useful place for multiple-member on-topic discussion pertinent to a specific question or answer (while chat is certainly more appropriate for a more general discussion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did I give up extended discussion in comments? Because I got a hunch that continuing in this vein would get me suspended, which is the last thing I want to happen. Also, I got sick and tired of arguing contentious points and trying so hard to convince people who have well-defined ideas about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange is scrupulously fair and liberal&lt;/strong&gt; -- even an apparent punishment such as a suspension is only meant to 'guide' us to conform to the rules, which are the same for everyone. And let's face it: it's not my site or your site, but an online community with established rules of engagement &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; codified expectations of behavior -- in fact we new members are 'guests' here and need to follow the 'house rules', although by spending a few years here &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; accumulating a few thousand more reputation points, we could graduate to the role of 'hosts' (senior members and moderators.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, we need to 'play by the rules' in order to contribute anything here and also derive any benefit from the interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T19:49:34.427" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T19:49:34.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10695" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:32:38.850" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are these kinds of questions really on topic for this site's meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure. These issues pop up on ELU. So... ELU meta to the rescue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we have one sufficient answer and close all the subsequent similar questions as dupes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not an ideal solution. Most titles may seem similar, but the questions usually are about different main site questions. There's no one size that fits all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we migrate these types of questions (with appropriate edits) to SE Meta? (Or to chat? &amp;lt;- That would be nice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, we can. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4smXP46tG4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;But why?&lt;/a&gt; Unless it's a network-wide issue, do not migrate it to MSE. Site-specific metas exist for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an extended discussion happens, moving to chat is necessary. Otherwise, don't. Chat is not well equipped to resolve queries. Not everyone frequents chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T19:32:38.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T12:34:16.497" Score="9" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5126/should-we-encourage-posting-distinct-answers-separately-particularly-for-sing&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I get the impression that there is some agreement that single-word-requests should really only give one answer per post. However, this behavior doesn't seem to be enforced in any way. Should we be flagging, downvoting or commenting on these answers to encourage the correct behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244281" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T16:07:09.287" Title="What to do about single-word-request answers that provide many answers?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10700" CreationDate="2017-08-14T13:42:02.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; possibilities, all of which are equally viable, the question may be in danger of being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;too open-ended&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the appropriate thing to do would be to narrow the question. Place a comment on the question, requesting stricter criteria for the answer they're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile &lt;strong&gt;vote to close&lt;/strong&gt;, as @Kit Z. Fox comments. Select &quot;Off-topic&quot;, then the following from the resulting menu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is closed, the resulting informative banner provides useful links for writing good SWR questions. On EL&amp;amp;U and Stack Exchange more generally, closing a question isn't quite the same as discarding it, (that's reserved for question &lt;em&gt;deletion&lt;/em&gt;, and even &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; can be reversed). If the OP then edits the question, it will be queued for review to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, it can feel quite confronting to find that one's question has been closed. If the OP edits their question suitably in response to your (comment-) request to narrow the question, it would be nice to also retract your vote-to-close. You'll need to click &quot;close&quot; (as if you were going to close the question again) to access the retraction button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T16:07:09.287" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T16:07:09.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10692" CreationDate="2017-08-14T15:16:09.073" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The length of suspension is determined by guidelines, as J.R. kindly elaborated on in his answer. We sometimes make suspensions longer than the initial 7 days, but did not feel that your case warranted a longer suspension. Suspensions shorter than 7 days are non-disciplinary (e.g., user suspects their account is hacked and needs time to regain control). Suspensions are progressive, although sometimes a user will have two 7-day suspensions for infractions of two different rules or because they had suspended accounts that were merged into one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not issue a first-time suspension without a warning to the user, either via mod message or in comments, except in very rare cases where behavior is so egregious it must be immediately and swiftly ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also important to note that while deleted content is not visible to community members (with the exception of 10K+ users' ability to view deleted posts), all deleted content continues to be visible to moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, with regards to your concerns about communication with the moderation team:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you use the contact form, it goes to the community managers. It does not go to our local EL&amp;amp;U moderation team. I cannot comment on what happened with those messages, but I can ask the CMs to look at your post here, if you want.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why it took you seven minutes to write &quot;Fuck you&quot; and I also don't know what response you expected from us when you wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, we aren't changing the suspension guidelines locally, so if you want to suggest new guidance, you should post it on Meta.SE, not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T17:44:32.847" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T17:44:32.847" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10700" CreationDate="2017-08-14T15:32:11.167" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be that some users aren't aware that it's better to post separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have, through the years, guided several users regarding this, and now they post separately, and also limit to the most suitable 1 or 2 suggestions along with respective explanations, instead of listing all synonyms in one go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, like Lawrence mentioned, if the question is actually inviting a list of answers, or if it's too broad, deal with the question first. Guide the asker on how to narrow it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T15:32:11.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10695" CreationDate="2017-08-14T16:28:37.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did I get downvotes on my well received post? (I don't deserve this! Damn this site!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did my comment get removed? (It was really, really useful and should remain for posterity! Damn this site!!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why was I suspended again‽ (I mean, I know I've been rude and uncooperative, but really, a suspension? Damn this site!!!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This site is soooo unfriendly! (I've only been here for three days, but already I'm fed up! Damn this site!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I raised a flag! Why hasn't a moderator acted on it? (Lazy mods! Damn this site!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments with down votes should be mandatory! (Otherwise how can I argue and retaliate improve my question? Damn this site!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why was my f****** expletive asterisized? (People are so d***ed touchy! D*** this site!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are these kinds of questions really on topic for this site's meta?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because this is what they mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand what downvotes mean or how they are used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand how comments are meant to be used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand how the suspension system works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand what the community expectation is, so I don't know why I'm not fitting in here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand how flagging works, especially when combined with moderation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have policy change suggestion and I don't know about Meta.SE or how to search Meta.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand the policy for censoring question titles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these topics are appropriate as they are essentially questions about how the site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we have one sufficient answer and close all the subsequent similar questions as dupes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can. We often do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we migrate these types of questions (with appropriate edits) to SE Meta? (Or to chat? &amp;lt;- That would be nice.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With enough votes, you surely could. However, most of these concern local policies and customs, so moving them to Meta.SE would not help the OP find an answer. Moving them to chat would make it harder to find for future users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T16:28:37.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10706" CreationDate="2017-08-15T03:43:17.147" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have much success searching on ELU or TGO, the only sites I use regularly.  For example today, I wanted to find out what a &quot;well received question&quot; was.  I put the question into the search bar in the Help Center, and many, many questions showed up, all of which started with &quot;What&quot; and none of which talked about a well-received question.  So I Googled &quot;Well received question&quot;, SE and quickly got the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this SOP among those in the know: to go outside SE and google for an SE term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite SE search result:  Looking for a question on the dangers of cougars to hikers and finding this question on mayonnaise &lt;a href=&quot;https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/1265/how-long-does-mayonnaise-last-unrefrigerated-in-the-back-country&quot;&gt;https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/1265/how-long-does-mayonnaise-last-unrefrigerated-in-the-back-country&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, should we just forget about SE searches and go to Google?  Or are there techniques to make the SE searches more useful?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-15T10:03:02.380" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T22:57:27.360" Title="Can searches be more productive on SE?" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10705" CreationDate="2017-08-15T15:53:32.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Help Center really only covers the most basic stuff (the list of privileges is pretty good though). You can get better results by searching Meta. It's worth noting that you'll get more (and often better) results on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the Main Meta&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352065/introducing-channels-qa-for-engineering-teams/352082#comment491517_352082&quot;&gt;working on improving search&lt;/a&gt; as part of the Channels project on Stack Overflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can vouch for the fact that search work will be a big part of this project. We are aware of shortcomings with our search and will be improving it as part of Channels. — &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/2420979/haney&quot;&gt;Haney♦&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure when any of that is going to happen, so I've listed some stuff you can do already to get better results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Native searches&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few places you can search built right in. Some people swear that the Ask a question page is a great way to find things, but you can't use any of the search operators. While it does support search operators, I don't like using the &quot;close as duplicate&quot; search because it only searches for &quot;answered&quot; questions. I like using the regular search bar in the corner (which is what I'm giving advice about here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, make sure you're on the best tab for what you're trying to do. If I think I'm looking for a popular post, I might use the voted tab, for example. The other thing to use is the right search operators. Check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; for a full list of search operators. Here are some worth noting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quotes help you find a specific word or phrase. Quoting a word will keep other &quot;conjugations&quot; from matching (e.g. &lt;code&gt;&quot;word&quot;&lt;/code&gt; will not match &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exclude a word, phrase, or tag with &lt;code&gt;-word&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-&quot;not this phrase&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-[tag]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search questions or answers with &lt;code&gt;is:q&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;is:a&lt;/code&gt; respectively. Searching for answers is helpful when you think a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; is a duplicate, for example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search the title or the body with &lt;code&gt;title:&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;body:&lt;/code&gt; respectively. The title operator is pretty useful in particular because important stuff ends up in the title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag search with &lt;code&gt;[brackets]&lt;/code&gt;. I have not have much luck with this on ELU (because too much is tagged only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;). On some sites, it's really useful (for example, programming language tags on Stack Overflow).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find questions that are closed or not with &lt;code&gt;closed:no&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;External searches&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people prefer to use a search engine like Google. One advantage is that it will return results that use similar words (e.g. you used the word &lt;em&gt;beginning&lt;/em&gt;, you get matches for &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt;) and misspellings. Or, you can use quotes around a word or phrase to get an exact match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good tip is to use the &lt;code&gt;site:&lt;/code&gt; operator to restrict the search to one site. For example, like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aenglish.meta.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:english.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links at the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; will have more information on search operators or advanced search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Searching all of SE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; has a custom Google search bar that lets you search the entire network, including metas. This is the easiest way to search only SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, my advice is to not limit yourself to one method of searching. In fact, it's often appropriate to mix search operators while searching (you can also use the same search operator multiple times in a single search). Experiment and find what works best for you and what you're trying to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a good proactive measure is to &lt;strong&gt;edit, edit, edit!&lt;/strong&gt; Make sure the tags are accurate, make sure everything is spelled right, and make more drastic edits when it makes the post easier to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T15:53:32.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10708" CreationDate="2017-08-16T03:14:40.793" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;This evening I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/405993/summarized-and-traveling-are-not-british-english&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, sumelic has indicated three potentially related questions. They are obviously better equipped than I to handle any duplicate closing in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this got me wondering, how are posts that are duplicates of more than one question handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen instances of questions that link to at least two duplicates on both ELU and ELU Meta; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/334179/changing-usage-of-certain-words&quot;&gt;Changing usage of certain words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5090/how-to-handle-questions-with-acceptable-comments-as-answers-but-no-answer-itself&quot;&gt;How to handle questions with acceptable comments as answers but no answer itself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are multiple duplicate listings achieved? &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it part of the close-vote process?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does flagging influence it at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I see a post that has been closed as a duplicate of a single question and notice that it also references another question, how should I go about notifying others about the additional duplicate? (e.g. a comment, a flag, a Meta post, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Hopefully my pre-ask search was more successful this time than for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10650/reporting-a-user-for-three-duplicate-accounts&quot;&gt;one of my previous questions&lt;/a&gt;! As far as I could tell, this question has not yet been asked.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182960" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T16:25:13.567" Title="How to Mark a Question as a Duplicate of Multiple Questions" Tags="|discussion|flagging|vote-to-close|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10707" CreationDate="2017-08-16T05:04:11.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users with gold tag badge having the privileges to single-handedly close as duplicates, and naturally, all moderators, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291824/309993&quot;&gt;can edit the listed duplicates&lt;/a&gt; once it's closed. It's a new feature actually. See the edit button in the image below:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P1uPk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P1uPk.png&quot; alt=&quot;a link to edit the listed duplicates is shown&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything is fine. Meta post will get you attention from members who visit meta, and most meta visitors are experienced users with high-level privileges. Flagging for a moderator's attention would also work. Comments won't be noticeable if it gets buried under a dozen other comments. Also, the chances of a comment getting noticed are slim if the question hasn't been active recently. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T16:25:13.567" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T16:25:13.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10710" CreationDate="2017-08-16T15:10:22.313" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/404794/verb-do-verb-to-be-ing-form&quot;&gt;Verb do + verb to be + ing form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of proofreading: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific concern in the text is more than clearly identified and specifically asked. What's the explanation for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236327" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T02:21:19.860" Title="Inexplicable closing for proofreading" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10709" CreationDate="2017-08-16T18:25:09.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the moderators of this site like to use the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason when they really mean something like either &quot;I don't think this has enough research&quot; or &quot;I don't think it's clear enough what you are interested in (syntax, natural-sounding usage, etc)&quot;. See Andrew Leach♦'s answer to my related Meta question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9557/77227&quot;&gt;Does the “proofreading” close reason cover questions that do identify specific words or phrases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a fan of this, because I agree with you that it isn't obviously indicated by the special text for the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason: &quot;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&quot; I would prefer using the &quot;unclear&quot; close option (if it's &lt;em&gt;actually unclear&lt;/em&gt; considering the context), or the &quot;show research&quot; close option. But anyway, one person like me cannot control the close culture of this site. The moderators are leaning harder on the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;clearly identified&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; part than I would like (or than you realized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this requirement seems to be interpreted by the moderation team to mean that you must explicitly state what subject (like pronoun use, verb tense etc.) your question is about in the body of the question; don't just leave it implicit from the title, tags and examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't worry about it too much more with regard to this particular question, since it seems to be &lt;s&gt;on track to being&lt;/s&gt; reopened, but in the future, I would advise that you avoid using phrasing like &quot;What is the correct version of this sentence&quot; in your questions, since some people will likely interpret this as meaning your question is a request for &quot;proofreading&quot;, even if you think you have provided enough context to indicate that your question is really about syntax, word usage etc. Try to use more specific wording like &quot;Should I use an infinitive or &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; form in this grammatical context&quot; (Yes, I realize that you have had &quot;Verb do + verb to be + ing form&quot; in the title since the first revision, but as I said, even if you think you have provided sufficient context elsewhere just avoid using &quot;correct version of this sentence&quot; wording. It's like the proverbial red flag in front of a bull).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T19:11:47.210" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T19:11:47.210" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10705" CreationDate="2017-08-16T22:57:27.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Useful tips preserved from comments to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I put &quot;well received question&quot; in the Meta search bar and got relevant results. You have to be smart about which site you're searching for what sort of topic. Discussion on meta is far more likely than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to answer questions about community standards. Once you get the hang of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;search syntax&lt;/a&gt;, SE search is superior for finding SE content. For general queries, Google will usually return OK results with less effort, but you can't refine your search with tags, score, etc., so it's harder to get a short list of good results. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10705/can-searches-be-more-productive-on-se#comment44243_10705&quot;&gt;ColleenV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click on Advanced Search Tips on the sidebar, specifying if you want the words in a body or in a question (for example) usually narrows it down. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=body%3Awell-received&quot;&gt;body:well-received&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion%20well-received&quot;&gt;is:question well-received&lt;/a&gt; – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10705/can-searches-be-more-productive-on-se#comment44245_10705&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T22:57:27.360" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-08-16T22:57:27.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10646" CreationDate="2017-08-17T11:22:11.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment you linked in your question is for a site that is in public beta phase. When sites are in private beta phase, or public beta phase, it's normal for Stack Exchange staff, especially Community Coordinators, to chime in and close questions or remove comments. That is because, in those phases, a site doesn't normally have moderators, who are normally appointed later in the public beta phase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact a Community Coordinator removed comments doesn't mean that suddenly comments are not welcome on Stack Exchange. As the privilege page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says, comments are temporary notes, which should be used for specific purposes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Request clarification from the author&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be used for the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Suggesting corrections that don't fundamentally change the meaning of the post; instead, make or suggest an edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Compliments which do not add new information (&quot;+1, great answer!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticisms which do not add anything constructive (&quot;-1, see previous comments you scallywag!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Secondary discussion or debating a controversial point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Discussion of community behavior or site policies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, long discussions trigger an automatic flag for moderators of the site (which, for a beta site, normally are Community Coordinators) who can remove the comments, or move them to a chat room, if they feel the comments should be preserved for a bit longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for answers given as comments, Stack Exchange is not enforcing the &lt;em&gt;no answers as comment&lt;/em&gt; policy. Clearly, in a Q&amp;amp;A site, the continuous use of comments to write an answer, especially when done from more users at the same time and for the same question, would be problematic, since:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be down-voted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments are hard to read, especially when there are many comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange aims to be a repository of knowledge. It would not be possible to achieve this if blatantly wrong answers are at the same level with other answers, and if the OP would not be able to accept an answer. So, yes, Stack Exchange doesn't like much answers given as comments.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That is also one of the reasons why users are able to comment on questions asked by other users much later than they are able to write an answer. They give the ability to write comments when users possibly understood when to use comments. In a site in beta phase, where the reputation necessary to comment and do other things is lower than in sites out of the beta phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are cases where you can see users writing answers in comments, probably because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't have the time to write more complete answer, and they want to give a hint for somebody else to write a complete answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They want to understand what exactly the OP is asking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They think the question should be closed, but they want to help a little the OP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T06:08:43.497" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T06:08:43.497" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-18T01:19:45.787" Score="5" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user with reputation less than 50 told me that she can see no &quot;reopen&quot; button under a particular closed question. Is it because of insufficient reputations that &quot;reopen&quot; button under closed questions cannot be seen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204489" LastActivityDate="2022-03-07T16:31:33.043" Title="Is it because of insufficient reputations that &quot;reopen&quot; button under closed questions cannot be seen?" Tags="|support|reputation|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10714" CreationDate="2017-08-18T01:57:48.583" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you need at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/view-close-votes&quot;&gt;250 reputation to see and cast close/reopen votes on your own questions&lt;/a&gt; and at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;3000 reputation to do so on any question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a screenshot I took of one of my questions on a site where I have less than 250 reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UMa3A.png&quot; alt=&quot;share—edit—delete—flag buttons&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users can still cause their own questions to be sent to the reopen queue by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/36423/323179&quot;&gt;making a good edit to their recently closed question&lt;/a&gt; and checking &amp;quot;submit for review&amp;quot;. If that doesn't work, then asking on meta is the next step (even users under 5 rep can ask on meta as long as they are asking about something they posted on the main site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-03-07T16:31:33.043" LastActivityDate="2022-03-07T16:31:33.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-19T15:26:13.503" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;While composing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/406526/163930&quot;&gt;this recent answer&lt;/a&gt; I ran across a funny effect of markdown rendering. I wanted to put a quote in bold and italic, and the simplest way for me is to put three asterisks before and after the quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;***&quot;Get 'er done!&quot;***&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which renders as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Get 'er Done!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I accidentally put &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;four&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; asterisks at the beginning, and this turned off all rendering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;****&quot;Get 'er Done!&quot;***&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have expected to see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Get 'er Done!&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first guess was that the markdown engine was parsing all of the special characters as one token, but my last example invalidated that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163930" LastEditorUserId="163930" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T21:09:28.547" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T21:09:28.547" Title="I'm seeing stars" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10716" CreationDate="2017-08-19T16:50:34.327" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a sequence of more than three underscores or more than three asterisks will no longer take part in any emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240354&quot;&gt;balpha the Markdown wizard&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T16:50:34.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10714" CreationDate="2017-08-20T05:54:35.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/191178/laurel&quot;&gt;@Laurel&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10715/194281&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, here's what it looks like when you can close/reopen questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MFR2M.png&quot; alt=&quot;share-edit-reopen-flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T05:54:35.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10646" CreationDate="2017-08-22T10:25:36.690" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to write this in an answer because — although it might be a comment — it needs an image and I can't decide what actually to add a comment to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not flag &quot;for moderator attention&quot; comments which you feel should really be answers.&lt;/strong&gt; If a comment shouldn't be there, use the &quot;chatty or otherwise unnecessary&quot; flag type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oSU7K.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oSU7K.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment dialog&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering in comments is something the community can police for itself: if three users feel a comment should not be present and use this flag type, the system removes the comment. It really does not need moderators to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; see these &quot;no longer needed&quot; flags, but the community can also help to deal with them. Answering in comments is not something that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; moderators can deal with, which is what the last option is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T10:25:36.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-22T14:10:47.993" Score="10" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I saw that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; has this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;Is this right?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless a specific source of concern is clearly specified. See below for hints on checking existing texts.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Writing advice&lt;/strong&gt; (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been wanting &quot;no ghost-writing&quot; to complement &quot;no proof-reading&quot; for a long time now indeed. Glad to see it was added, and more along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sparked me to ask this question about adding additional categories to that page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;transcription requests&lt;/strong&gt;, broadly (&quot;what did he say at 1:12:36 of this movie?&quot;). This is different to &quot;what kind of accent does this have&quot; or other phonemic or phonetic questions (which are on-topic so long as they're about English phonemics and phonetics).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;interpretation of lyrics, poetry&lt;/strong&gt;, or otherwise investigation of semantics (not structure) in deliberately ambiguous or creative contexts. These questions can be on on-topic if the work in question has attracted a body of scholarly  attention, such that people reading answers can have at least some confidence in their relative authority (which helpfully excludes the most common problematic category: the interpretation of modern pop music lyrics).&amp;sup1;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word or phrase comparisons&lt;/strong&gt;, unless the relevant definitions are quoted and referenced by the questioner, who then expresses more nuanced doubts with specific reference to the cited definitions (no bald &quot;which is bigger, a realm or a dominion?&quot;-style questions). We might have some tag burnination to do here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? To be most effective, here's how I propose responses to this meta-question be structured:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;upvotes mean &quot;I agree with the spirit of this question but am not commenting on the details&quot;, and downvotes mean &quot;I disagree with the spirit of this question but am not commenting on the details&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each answer should focus on &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; off-topic area and either:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;argue against the inclusion of &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the above categories; upvotes on such answers are interpreted as &quot;keep these types of questions on-topic&quot;, and downvotes mean &quot;no, these types of questions are off-topic and should be explicitly noted in the Help Center&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;support the inclusion of &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the above categories, and potentially suggest improvements to the language which will ultimately be presented to new users in the Help Center. Votes on these answers should be interpreted in the opposite sense to the previous bullet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;propose a (&lt;strong&gt;single&lt;/strong&gt;) new category of off-topic questions and language used to describe it in the help center. Votes are to be interpreted in the same way as the previous bullet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be a meta-answer and respond to the question broadly (e.g. &quot;I think the Help Center page is long enough already, and already prohibits your categories anyway&quot;; &quot;Clearly you hate kittens and probably steal candy from babies&quot;). Votes on these answers have their usual interpretation on Meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any feedback welcome. Feel free to be brutal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;I believe these topics are &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; excluded by the current language, but I want to have something explicit about lyrics and poetry to point askers to. Suggestions for other concrete subjects, which like poetry &amp;amp; lyrics; are open to interpretation and go to authorial intent, and are therefore distinct from answerable &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning-in-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning-in-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning-in-context&lt;/a&gt; questions are welcome.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T18:01:18.793" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T16:58:22.310" Title="Poll: additional question types that should or shouldn't be added to help/on-topic" Tags="|feature-request|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2017-08-22T15:06:09.007" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-topic:  Transcription Requests.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had discussions about this before, particularly at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5368/exactly-why-is-this-question-off-topic-or-not&quot;&gt;Exactly WHY is this question Off Topic? Or not?&lt;/a&gt;, and as a couple of answers there state, a transcription request is too localized, unlikely to help any future visitors, unsuitable for a broader, more helpful response than &quot;the dialogue was 'X'&quot;, and effectively unsearchable even if it were potentially helpful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T15:06:09.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2017-08-22T16:35:45.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding interpretation of song lyrics or poetry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is merely a suggestion related to the wording of the &amp;quot;song lyrics / poetry&amp;quot; topic.  Please downvote brutally if you disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Literature.SE help page&lt;/a&gt;, they welcome interpretation as defined here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topics that will most likely be considered on-topic include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about how to interpret a specific scene, quote, theme, plot point, etc. in a work of literature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my recommendation is to borrow their language and add to our off-topic list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Song lyrics or other textual interpretation.  For questions about how to interpret a specific scene, quote, theme, or plot point in a work of literature, visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Literature.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wait, is this always off-topic here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been suggested in comments that we might need more clarity on when and whether these sorts of questions actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; off-topic to an extent that would warrant a help center note.  I won't try to answer that here, though I agree with Dan Bron's summary in the second category suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;interpretation of lyrics, poetry, or otherwise investigation of semantics (not structure) in deliberately ambiguous or creative contexts. These questions can be on on-topic if the work in question has attracted a body of scholarly attention, such that people reading answers can have at least some confidence in their relative authority&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer simply addresses how I would suggest wording the proposed bullet on the help page.  It seems to me that &amp;quot;Song lyrics &lt;em&gt;or other textual interpretation&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; indicates that these questions are off-topic when the question is focused on &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; in particular.  Whether or not this is a solid enough rule to be etched into the help center seems like a valid question. I will simply link to some of the relevant Meta posts on this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10256/to-what-extent-is-analyzing-poetry-or-verse-off-topic&quot;&gt;To what extent is analyzing poetry or verse off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4023/meaning-in-the-context-of-a-poem-off-topic?rq=1&quot;&gt;Meaning in the context of a poem, Off Topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/995/are-interpretations-of-song-lyrics-poems-or-other-creative-works-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are interpretations of song lyrics, poems or other creative works on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3170/why-is-the-meaning-of-song-lyrics-off-topic&quot;&gt;Why is the meaning of song lyrics off topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T19:06:41.427" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2017-08-22T18:56:58.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Off-topic: Questions about Interpersonal Skills.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Randomly selected examples:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181651/50044&quot;&gt;How do we refer to body odour delicately?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/346281/50044&quot;&gt;Polite alternative for &amp;quot;none of your business&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions like these were trying hard to fit into the ELU scope, since at the time there may not have been a better place to ask these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10577/50044&quot;&gt;We have a new community called &amp;quot;Interpersonal Skills&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; for such questions now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;scope&lt;/a&gt; is being discussed at the moment. We'll update it here when it's ready, and add a proper help text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T19:02:38.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T04:57:56.100" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read a sentence that used &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; in a way that I found strange (i.e. it seems ungrammatical to me), so I wanted to ask a question about it. Dutifully, I searched if such a question had been asked before, and the answer is yes, many times! However, none of the answers (there are too many questions for me to read all of them at the moment) answer &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; question. Can we get a single canonical question and answer as to how to use &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt;? Additionally, is there any way of reducing the amount of noise about this word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T04:57:56.100" Title="Neither questions, nor answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T20:20:39.580" Score="-6" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question I recently asked, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/407010/what-was-the-joy-of-a-hard-bargain&quot;&gt;What, was the 'joy' of a hard bargain?&lt;/a&gt; has apparently been flagged as offensive by reason of being &quot;political commentary&quot;. I conclude that on the basis of (a) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/251858&quot;&gt;an edit I rejected yesterday&lt;/a&gt;, soon after the question appeared, in which a fundamental example of a social norm was bowdlerized, quite at odds with the intent of the post, by a rewrite of the paragraph presented below, and (b) the recent request from a moderator that I 'delete the political commentary (in the &quot;art of the deal&quot; paragraph)'. The objection appears to be to this paragraph, wherein I example the ambivalent attitude toward the Yankee trader in present-day US: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That ambivalent attitude continues to this day, and is presently represented by the tacit public approval of prominent public figures in the US, whose chief claim to prominence rests on their having successfully cheated many elderly or otherwise vulnerable people through the enterprising practice of what is fondly if falsely proclaimed as the &quot;art of the deal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the paragraph should be interpreted as &lt;em&gt;political&lt;/em&gt; commentary is arbitrary; it is clearly a comment on prevailing social norms involved in unraveling the entirely linguistic question of my post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As evidence of the arbitrary nature of the &lt;em&gt;partisan&lt;/em&gt; interpretation of my question, wherein it becomes political commentary rather than a representation of a widely accepted view of a particular social norm, I'll point out that the phrase &quot;the art of the deal&quot; appears in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=srchls;anyall1=phrase;q1=art%20of%20the%20deal;field1=ocr;op3=AND;yop=after;lmt=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hathi Trust&lt;/em&gt; corpus 2968 times&lt;/a&gt;. For a prominent example dovetailing quite nicely with my use of it, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d01169213e;view=1up;seq=192&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this from the 1994 &lt;em&gt;Harpers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v0fms.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v0fms.png&quot; alt=&quot;artofthedeal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even Socrates gets in on the act, although he was probably not a Yankee, except perhaps in spirit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list presented on the &lt;em&gt;Harper's&lt;/em&gt; cover might, in the 1980's for example, have included PC salesmen (e.g., Bill Gates), etc. There's nothing necessarily political about the paragraph, other than the &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; interpretations involving &lt;em&gt;politicians&lt;/em&gt; who might be implicated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, should the sort of tangential and peripheral interpretations represented by the objection to this question prompt (a) edits at odds with the intent of the post, and (b) moderator response to flags based on those arbitrary and entirely unavoidable interpretations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the sort of tangential partisan bickering represented by objections to my paragraph as &quot;political commentary&quot; should either affect what I include in a question, or prompt moderator requests for rewrites. The latter are nothing more or less than subscription to one particular political viewpoint over another, equally valid viewpoint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be marked as resolved as far as I'm concerned. It's evident that the position of the moderation team has calcified in favor of supporting and condoning politically-motivated bullying. I'll not comply with the bullying. The stakes are too trivial for me to even consider compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2017-08-26T07:16:45.790" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T13:52:11.787" Title="Political commentary: unavoidable? A matter of interpretation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10841" CreationDate="2017-08-23T21:44:28.803" Score="3" ViewCount="713" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you please point me to a good online resource for verb collocations, for American English? Preferably, something with a lot of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143950" OwnerDisplayName="Sus20200" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T23:22:21.417" Title="Good resources for collocations" Tags="|discussion|american-english|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2018-06-03T12:43:22.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10727" CreationDate="2017-08-24T17:10:13.430" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your example reinforces the fact that “art of the deal” = “Trump”, which was unfortunately the opposite of your intention in citing it. The subtitle of the Earl Shorris article refers directly to Donald Trump’s book, &lt;em&gt;The Art of the Deal&lt;/em&gt;. Shorris quotes Trump’s book multiple times in his &lt;em&gt;Harper’s&lt;/em&gt; series. Trump’s book had already been a bestseller for seven years, and the phrase had already become tied to Trump in the public mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tacit public approval of &lt;strong&gt;prominent public figures in the US&lt;/strong&gt;, whose chief claim to prominence rests on &lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt; having successfully cheated many elderly or otherwise vulnerable people through the enterprising practice of what is fondly if falsely proclaimed as the &quot;art of the deal&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you will be understood, regardless of your intention, to be saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tacit public approval of &lt;strong&gt;Donald Trump&lt;/strong&gt;, whose chief claim to prominence rests on &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; having successfully cheated many elderly or otherwise vulnerable people through the enterprising practice of what is fondly if falsely proclaimed as the &quot;art of the deal&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would have had to be writing prior to 1987 for it to be otherwise. In short, this paragraph is, as you put it, a partisan tangent, and needs to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T17:10:13.430" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-25T00:08:23.200" Score="9" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/407080/112436&quot;&gt;question closure&lt;/a&gt;, the reason box displayed was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen because it seemed to me that OP did include information on how the word would be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MetaEd responded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Information on how it will be used&quot; is actually intended to mean not just giving a sample sentence but actually providing all the information on how it will be used that's called for by the linked tag wiki, including research results, part of speech, register, acceptance criteria, etc. In fact, if you see a way to improve on how that close reason is written, you might throw a suggestion onto meta. The mod team can and occasionally does edit the close reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can this close message be improved?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T14:57:07.743" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T05:05:41.470" Title="Is it possible to write a more accurate Close message?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10731" CreationDate="2017-08-25T14:57:23.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a first stab at a revision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For word, phrase, idiom or expression requests, please include a sample sentence, the part of speech and register desired, acceptance criteria, and what you've considered but rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T14:57:23.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10731" CreationDate="2017-08-26T07:29:24.483" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Please show us the context in which you want to use the word or phrase--a sample sentence is often helpful; specify the criteria you'll use for accepting answers; share the research you've already done (trips to the thesaurus, etc.); list words or phrases you've already considered but rejected, and explain why; and provide information about the connotation, register, and part of speech you're looking for.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10731/is-it-possible-to-write-a-more-accurate-close-message#comment-44387&quot;&gt;modified from MetaEd ♦'s suggestion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T05:05:41.470" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-08-26T07:29:24.483" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10727" CreationDate="2017-08-27T13:46:44.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect example of a provocative question, and what's more the author has not provided a single piece of evidence (so far) to support his thesis, i.e that the &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt; does not capitalize the p in President (Donald) Trump.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/407537/us-president-vs-us-president-is-there-a-change-in-what-is-grammatically-corr&quot;&gt;US &amp;quot;president&amp;quot; vs US &amp;quot;President&amp;quot; is there a change in what is grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this their use of poetic license to show their dissatisfaction with President Trump? Or is it a more subtle point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call the above a clear political statement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, should references to Donald Trump be removed in all future posts? Do we begin to censor posts that clearly have a bias nature? Should we expect moderators to intervene and place on hold (IOW &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt;) posts because they disagree with the politics sustained by the author? Or because they are afraid that users will begin bickering and hurl insults among themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is closed as a duplicate. And it is. But if there hadn't been an earlier question, what would have been the policy of the mod team in general?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T13:52:11.787" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T13:52:11.787" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-30T13:51:47.567" Score="1" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context is this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/407950/what-does-drenched-book-mean/407953&quot;&gt;What does drenched book mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, initially, that it was an on-topic question, to which the only reasonable on-topic answer is: &lt;em&gt;no, there is no English definition of &quot;drenched&quot; that aids in understanding this phrase in this context&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speculated it had some meaning to whomever originally scanned/uploaded the book (maybe indicated the software used, or the person who scanned it, or something else). Someone else speculated it indicated the book was disposed of after scanning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in any case, it is no longer a question about the English language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare, if you will, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376196/meaning-of-two-days-either-side-of-a-dash-from-a-motivational-speech/376198&quot;&gt;this closed question about the phrase &quot;two days either side of a dash&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The question was fine, but the answer required knowledge of a particular story/allegory, and wasn't really about the plain English meaning of the words themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or imagine if someone posted a question asking: &lt;em&gt;Someone said to me: &quot;Luke, I am your father&quot;, but my name isn't Luke, and I have no kids. Is there some hidden meaning of the word &quot;Luke&quot; or &quot;father&quot;?&lt;/em&gt; This question clearly has an answer, but it isn't an answer on-topic for English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="642" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T15:42:21.813" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T17:52:52.310" Title="Should this question about &quot;this book is drenched&quot; be closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10737" CreationDate="2017-08-30T16:40:09.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree that either question is not on-topic. One aspect of ELU's purpose is to tease out unusual uses of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/407950/what-does-drenched-book-mean/407953&quot;&gt;What does drenched book mean?&lt;/a&gt; we have a &lt;strong&gt;documented&lt;/strong&gt; highly esoteric use of a word. It's arguably so esoteric as to be wrong. Does that make the question off-topic? &lt;strong&gt;No:&lt;/strong&gt; the meaning of the word has been found and explained. What is missing from the accepted answer is &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; that word was used; but a partial answer is still valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376196/meaning-of-two-days-either-side-of-a-dash-from-a-motivational-speech/376198&quot;&gt;Meaning of &amp;quot;two days either side of a dash&amp;quot; (from a motivational speech)&lt;/a&gt; the answer does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;require knowledge of a particular story/allegory&quot;. It &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be a cultural reference, but it is referring to a typographical mark used in the representation of dates in English. The language problem is distinguishing this &lt;em&gt;dash&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;dash&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;sprint&quot;, and then explaining that the use of &lt;em&gt;days&lt;/em&gt; would be better referring to &lt;em&gt;dates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about &quot;Luke, I am your father&quot; &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; likely to require knowledge of the &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; saga and characters' relationships and history within that world, and then refer that to the asker's situation. That would not be &quot;the nuts and bolts of the language&quot; which I use as a convenient shorthand. However I would argue that the two questions linked here are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T16:40:09.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10737" CreationDate="2017-08-30T17:52:52.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question about a word used by a Library with a large collection of English books and a website in English, however arcane the usage of that word, should be on topic on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the direct approach.  I e-mailed the Library at their &quot;contact us&quot; e-mail address.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Sir or Madam:  The use of the term &quot;This book has been drenched&quot;&#xA;  has aroused great interest on English Language and Usage Stack&#xA;  Exchange, a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and&#xA;  serious English language enthusiasts.  See&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The particular question that brought &quot;drenched book&quot; to our attention&#xA;  is at &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/407950/what-does-drenched-book-mean/407953&quot;&gt;What does drenched book mean?&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;  I am one of the users who attempted to explain the usage, but although&#xA;  I think I know what you mean -- that the book was deaccessioned after&#xA;  being digitized -- none of us know why the word &quot;drenched&quot; was used. &#xA;  Can you kindly explain your selection of the word drenched?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Naturally, if our interpretation is incorrect -- that the books were&#xA;  deaccessioned -- we hope that you will give us the correct&#xA;  explanation.  I am asking for your help as one of the users of the&#xA;  site; I am not an official of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank You.  -- [My Real Name] --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T17:52:52.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T22:53:09.897" Score="-1" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that several high reputation and medium reputation members who used to be regular users of ELU for over 3 years have not posted anything for over 6 months. I don't want to name names but they have made major contributions here.  Frankly I worry that something happened to them, though that is unlikely in the vast majority of such cases. Participating here is of course purely their own decision, but I did notice a few such users become 'active again' after a long absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So should the moderator team try to reach out to them via email on behalf of the community  (as some other websites tend to do)  and if so, what would be an appropriately short generic message?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updated on 7th September 2017:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I expand on my question using these comments I posted in reply to pertinent queries from members here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user profile can easily show the user pattern that led to inactivity. One pattern is typical -- the frequency of posting falls off slowly before no more posts since a certain date. This can be indeed be interpreted as a being a gradual loss of interest in most cases (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other pattern is more perplexing: a more or less abrupt cessation of posting by a previously active member. While I shouldn't suggest anything that goes against established SE policy, &lt;em&gt;these people have been our long-term collaborators in this project...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question to the current members and moderators was simply &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;don't we care that senior members have left the site? Don't we want to know why, if possible? If it was your co-workers at your so-called real-life office that disappeared, will you ignore like this...&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site administrators have the contact details such as email id of all members (...) if the moderators at ELU think it is a good idea (based on the feedback to this question) they can easily send them a pre-formatted generic email such as &amp;quot;dear member so-and-so: this is moderator A &amp;amp; you last posted at ELU over 6 months ago. You have been a valuable contributor here and we should greatly welcome your continued participation. At the very least please consider explaining in an email the reasons you are no longer active on ELU so that we might take steps to improve user experience here.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that &lt;strong&gt;only 20%&lt;/strong&gt; of former regular users even respond to such a message from a moderator with a return email giving the reasons for leaving the site (...) that's still significant and valuable feedback for moderators to understand the possible problems and take any necessary steps to improve the user experience.On the other hand, the way a few members have responded here, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;let them leave - they must have their reasons - why should we care if they leave: they have contributed and the site doesn't need them any more (paraphrase)&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; doesn't seem to be a constructive attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[to sum up] I have simply raised the issue of absent regulars here; and what to do about it (if at all to do something) should be decided purely on the basis of community consensus as expressed by members here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T18:15:07.117" Title="Should we try to contact regular users who are no longer active on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10740" CreationDate="2017-09-02T06:32:14.543" Score="15" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No, it's not our call.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons that experienced users have for the decline in their participation. I can share with you mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How did I get here?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an Indian raised in the Middle East. I know English a bit better than my peers back in India. I'm overly conscious of my words, and make sure I avoid embarrassing mistakes as far as I can before I send a letter to somebody, or submit a project report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stumbled upon ELU 5-6 years ago thanks to Google. Unlike others, this site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&#xA;I didn't even have to ask because Google would take me directly to answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read top quality answers here; clear, concise, understandable, even without citations. It was a great feeling to see that ELU had real language experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one day I decided to join.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How come I don't participate anymore?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing the same questions being asked over and over and over and over again was disheartening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've not given up yet. I decided to take a back seat approach. I'm now here to welcome new users and make them want to stick around, start their journeys here. I moved on from asking or answering to reviewing or moderating (without the diamond, that is), helping users find their way by answering meta questions and stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently stumbled upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10577/50044&quot;&gt;another newborn community&lt;/a&gt; that needed a family to raise it. So I'm spending a lot more of &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1618/345&quot;&gt;my time there&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Should you pull me back here? Nope.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that my participation is reduced. And so are others about theirs. They have left for their own reasons. Some return after a while, and some don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do is welcome new users, and make them want to be the next top participants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change is inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T13:47:14.883" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-03T19:43:10.783" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are some (not all) users closing questions for not being clear just because they don't know the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/408486/can-labour-be-used-literally-for-the-materials-that-need-to-be-worked-upon&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I think that's what's happening there. I think it  a very interesting case of cognitive dissonance, rather than any form of self involvement, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T13:49:35.230" Title="Are some (not all) users closing questions for not being clear just because they don't know the answer?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10742" CreationDate="2017-09-04T02:41:46.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I honestly understood the question quite clearly. It's an interesting one imho. It's unclear to me what's unclear in it. Maybe it's because I'm a non native speaker that I understood OP's thought process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to it is &quot;no, you're sadly mistaken, and here's why...&quot;, then that's a valid answer. And that's a valid on topic question as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it wasn't asked, how would OP know an answer to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EDIT: It slipped my mind that you're the OP. So you have schizophrenia, you say. So that might explain why you can't think as clearly as a native speaker usually does. I hope Edwin's partial answer was helpful to you. I've preserved it in a CW just in case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T13:49:35.230" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T13:49:35.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T19:08:16.480" Score="0" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vote up or down on the question to show agreement or disagreement with the idea. Even better, let me hear your reasoning in an answer. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stack Exchange: &quot;Answers belong only in answer boxes.&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;ELU: &quot;Yeah, right.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10647/50044&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hate to see countless okayish questions covfefeying around, even though most of them are already answered in the comments. Blame the completionist paralysis I grew up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often resort to posting a CW answer copying an impressive answer from the comments, so that the question gets some sort of closure (sense of resolution, that is) because I'm often quite sure it's futile expecting a comment-answerer to post an actual answer, or that it's annoying to beg someone to post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we rethink this? Should we encourage users to post partial answers as CW themselves instead of having users like me doing it for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why I suggested CW. It just came to my mind to make it an indicator that the said user is not willing to defend that answer, and has left it there for the community to do with it as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A downside I see is if the answer is terrible and yet if the OP accepts it, it prevents the Roomba from dancing on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't referring to single-word random shots at answering something. I'm referring to actual answers with some sort of explanation minus the citations and proofs. Such answers in comments often get dozens of upvotes, yet those questions remain orphaned or abandoned. Many expert users here avoid posting them in the answer box fearing that they'll have to defend their answer. Surely, we don't care about the brownie points these days, but saving these answers in the answer boxes will help preserve good information, albeit lacking citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head, some such expert users are FF, EA, DB, ML, JL, TC, M, C, NVZ (lol, me). We could probably try answering them in a CW is what I'm suggesting, as long as it is a meaningful partial answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T12:34:38.033" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T01:22:43.117" Title="Should we promote partial answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10744" CreationDate="2017-09-04T19:42:32.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the &quot;comment&quot; is better as an answer, encourage the user to make it so. If it's only a hint of an answer, as mine often are, then it's fair game for another user to flesh out, and get the rep for. Same if it is an answer and the user won't make it so, other users can, and get the rep for it. No need to use CW in either case, take the rep for writing the answer, even if it's based on a comment that won't become an answer. If the comment really is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer, you can give credit to the user in the answer, but still accept the rep for doing the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, if the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; really is floating around in the comments, it needs to be made into an answer, for the OP and for the community. Avoiding the Roomba is a nice side benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user239189" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T19:42:32.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T20:14:42.543" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question, but forgot to add a link to a reference, so I edited it to add it. I'm not too sure what happened, but it seems to have duplicated the answer, one with the 'correct' one, and the other with no links (there was one before) and no content in the blockquotes (although they are still blockquote blocks)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/408628/adjective-that-means-control-freak/&quot;&gt;Here's the question I'm talking about&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug, or due to a break in connection with my phone? I have no idea how to reproduce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For purposes of working out what has happened, I'm using a phone browser (BlackBerry, don't ask why :P) on the website (mobile version) with WiFi but it's pretty knackered sometimes so I might have blipped connection when it was POSTing to the SE servers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T20:35:30.387" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T20:35:30.387" Title="Bug: Editing my own answer duplicates it" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T07:15:00.743" Score="-2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two weeks ago I was first to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/407440/can-one-correctly-hyperbolize-the-take-with-a-grain-of-salt-idiom/407884#407884&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; but I admit in a very concise way&#xA;(I was new here). The next days I found out that my answer was removed, and in its place there was basically the same citation, but with the reference to the origin of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I asked myself if it was ethical removing completely the original answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to listen to the community about the way someone, being in the same situation, should behave. Post a comment with a link to additional support, leaving it up to the answer's author (so he can get some credits) to incorporate or re-edit completely? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar discussion is at &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17685/etiquette-when-is-it-ok-to-edit-your-answer-to-include-information-from-someone/17693#17693&quot;&gt;Etiquette: When is it ok to edit your answer to include information from someone else&amp;#39;s?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252044" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T11:53:49.777" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T12:08:00.573" Title="Is it ethical / tolerated to cancel, edit and repost an answer" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10747" CreationDate="2017-09-05T11:45:39.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments under Andrew Leach's now-deleted answer, you mentioned that you're referring to the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/407440/50044&quot;&gt;Can one correctly hyperbolize the &amp;quot;take with a grain of salt&amp;quot; idiom?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;One&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/407884/50044&quot;&gt;deleted answer&lt;/a&gt; has the following words, and nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin is from the latin &amp;quot;cum grano salis&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You claim that another user copied information from your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/407936/50044&quot;&gt;the only other answer&lt;/a&gt; there, exactly as it is posted, the whole thing. It has no edits done on it. And the answer in no way copies yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin you can look up and we can discuss it. It is used as you say and so its usage it real. You may find people misusing it merely to emphasize what they hear and not to discount or throw doubt onto it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly •&amp;quot;I heard that restaurant is bad, but take it with a huge grain of salt&amp;quot; would mean that the doubt was great and place was wonderful while the tone made me think it was a terrible place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me if the speaker is altering the phrase I would think that they may not know how to use it but take that with a grain of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see where the issue is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Two&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're referring to an edit suggestion of yours rejected, I see no such thing on your profile at all. This is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/252044/user252044?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user has no suggestions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Three&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're referring to someone using information from a comment you posted there, then that is not possible either. You have not posted any comment there. Andrew Leach (a moderator of the site) has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10747/is-it-ethical-tolerated-to-cancel-edit-and-repost-an-answer#comment44536_10747&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt; that there are currently no comments removed from under that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nothing was copied from you in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T12:08:00.573" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1184" CreationDate="2017-09-06T20:16:16.767" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is far too much downvoting without valid reasons.  I'd advocate that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone downvoting should have to provide an explanation.  That explanation should be published as an anonymous comment by the system, or provided anonymously to the person whose answer has been downvoted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally, high-reputation users should be able to review an anonymous list of downvotes (for other people's answers only) and associated reasons, and veto the downvote if no remotely valid reason has been specified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvoting an answer should reduce your reputation by 20 points instead of just one or two, or perhaps by 1% of your points total instead of by a fixed number of points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252981" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T20:16:16.767" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-06T21:40:43.953" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that I am closing in on a gold badge for SWR. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the logic of counting an answer which has zero or (zero net) votes towards the goal of 200 SWRs answered.  I would have thought an answer should have at least a +1 (or net +1) score.  Can anyone explain the logic?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, one could have lots of bad (downvoted) answers offset by several very highly upvoted answers.  I'm not complaining, but it doesn't seem right to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T12:17:48.860" Title="What is the logic of counting SWR answer with zero upvotes towards the total needed for a badge?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10752" CreationDate="2017-09-06T22:42:05.053" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a points aspect to tag badges, as well as sheer number of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LX6yX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LX6yX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Gold badge description&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must have a total score of 1000 in at least 200 non-community-wiki answers  to achieve a Gold badge. The questions you answer must be tagged correctly before you answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an answer which is not upvoted doesn't contribute to the necessary vote score, and a downvoted answer actually moves you further away from it. There is a reputation element to the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T12:17:48.860" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T12:17:48.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10740" CreationDate="2017-09-07T03:04:09.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U was something like the second or third SE site I found.  (I &lt;em&gt;came&lt;/em&gt; for a specific site and then started exploring and found my way here.)  It was 2011 and I said &quot;hey, I'm good with English (professional writer) -- I can answer questions here&quot;.  And I did, quite a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either I didn't yet understand, or this site didn't yet have clear expectations about, what makes a good answer, particularly the need to cite sources.  Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't.  Some of those answers, if posted today, would be rejected, I'm sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things happened -- other sites on the network drew my attention, and arguments here about scope (particularly beginner questions) made me question whether I actually understood EL&amp;amp;U's goals, and I drifted away without it ever being an explicit decision.  I came back later and ELL was being formed (or had formed) and that left me even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; confused about EL&amp;amp;U's scope, and because I wasn't strongly hooked at that time I drifted away again.  Later still I met a senior user here and during a very pleasant conversation I got an earful about single-word requests, after which I deleted some of my answers.  Every now and then I look at the review queues (EL&amp;amp;U sure has a lot of pending reviews, compared to my other sites), but I feel like I don't know what the norms are any more so I usually skip through the first several and then stop.  &lt;em&gt;It's not you; it's me.&lt;/em&gt;  But because I'm a casual user, albeit one with 15k rep, I'm unlikely to climb the learning curve again unless there's some clear, current guidance that I can read without surveying meta.  (I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic.&quot;&gt;this help&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do get pings from this site occasionally; one of them brought me here tonight, and when I decided to look around on meta I found this question.  I don't think pinging me &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than what naturally arises (comments, rep changes, edits) would change my behavior.  For those who actively left (unlike me), the pings stand a good chance of being annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I've written all that, I'm not sure this case study is actually an answer to this question.  But this is meta so I'll post rather than cancel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T03:04:09.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10740" CreationDate="2017-09-07T17:20:42.180" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU seems to have continuously deteriorated over the past two or three years and so has the number of its enthusiastic members (like myself), quality questions, quality answers, and quality discussions, etc. What do you want to achieve by contacting those who got sick and tired of this poorly-managed and seemingly aimless site? I should not have come back. Hmm...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user253042" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T17:20:42.180" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10744" CreationDate="2017-09-07T19:43:45.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Partial answers are preferable to answers posing as comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have already identified the common reason (other than lack of time, which is surely temporary)  why some members post answers in the comments section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many expert users here avoid posting them in the answer box fearing that they'll have to defend their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the other recent ELU meta question on this topic that OP has so subtly referenced with a tiny footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10646/is-se-enforcing-no-answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;Is SE enforcing &amp;quot;no answers in comments&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This extract from the truly excellent, highly upvoted and accepted answer by @Meta Ed is very pertinent here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no new initiative to eliminate answers in comment. They have always been discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Stack Exchange is to get expert, peer-reviewed answers to good questions out on search engines for the benefit of the asker and anyone else with a similar question. Answers in comments cannot be downvoted. Lacking full peer review, they are are really not so helpful to the author as you might think (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are truly local and transient. So an answer in comment might never help anybody else. This is why Robert Cartaino objected to the answers in comment on the post you linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unsuitability of writing answers as comments has been well explained all over Stack Exchange and especially well recently by Director of Community Development  &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/users/3/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;@Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt; while dealing strictly with several instances on Interpersonal.SE where OP @NVZ is a top user and (unofficial but very helpful) community moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/questions/1272/how-should-one-respond-to-trivial-obvious-questions#comment3881_1272&quot;&gt;comments removed&lt;/a&gt;&amp;gt; If you have an answer, please post it below. Comments do not have the feature to properly vet whatever you say here so without activity like proper voting and wiki-style editing of content, answering here defeats the purpose of having this Stack Exchange site. – Robert Cartaino♦ Aug 3 at 13:43&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta threads on IPS.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/why-was-my-comment-deleted&quot;&gt;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/why-was-my-comment-deleted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1644/please-dont-write-answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1644/please-dont-write-answers-in-comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I am referencing these threads here not because I think that the way comments are treated at IPS.SE is somehow directly related to ELU, but simply because IPS is the only other SE site where I am really active, after ELU, and because I understood that all those points about posting answers as comments are equally &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;applicable to all SE sites&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; though we seem to have evolved our own conventions about it here at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point that was made in those discussions is that an answer posted as a comment cannot be properly peer-reviewed, and can also disappear anytime. Robert Cartaino deleted many such comments on IPS.SE with full justification and thus educated that community to write answers as answers and not as comments. So I myself never post answers as comments anywhere on the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moreover I have requested many members to write up their comments as answers while reminding them that a comment that reads like an answer can get deleted&lt;/em&gt;, and most of them graciously re-posted the comment as a well-developed answer, especially on Interpersonal.SE and Politics.SE but also here on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, SE says that posting an answer as a comment should not be tolerated, and I think it is implicit that senior members at ELU can claim no exemption to this network-wide recommendation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ELU members' reasoning that &amp;quot;some questions are going to be closed and do not deserve a proper answer but we are willing to help OP by writing a brief answer as an explanatory comment&amp;quot; is even more perplexing. I just cannot understand that logic. Don't ask me to discuss this further here but many senior members have reacted thus while explaining why they posted a comment answering an apparently close-worthy question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@NVZ's suggestion to post your 'idea' or 'unreferenced answer' as a community wiki is certainly well-made and we should seriously consider doing that when we are tempted to leave an answer in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But if a member cannot be bothered, then moderators should not hesitate to delete that answer posing as a comment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T00:40:41.460" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-09T00:22:48.260" Score="-2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/409164/112436&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; now that I've given the anti-whom camp a name: &lt;em&gt;descriptivist grammarians&lt;/em&gt;.  Whatever that means.  (Somewhere in the chain of anti-whom comments I saw that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166847/put-me-in-touch-with-whomever-created-it#comment347030_166847&quot;&gt;John Lawler wrote&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;You want well-reasoned, learn syntax first. The actual rule is that &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; is required only when it is the object of a pied-piped preposition. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/Ross_1967.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ross 1967&lt;/a&gt; for details on pied-piping.&quot;  I thought, Well, let's take a look and see what the heck &lt;em&gt;pied-piping&lt;/em&gt; is.  But John's link turned out to be a &lt;em&gt;24 meg pdf&lt;/em&gt; that wasn't even searchable.  That dedicated to understanding English better I am not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T17:33:17.117" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T17:33:17.117" Title="Please reopen this question now that I've given the anti-whom camp a name" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10757" CreationDate="2017-09-09T08:38:41.993" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have asked two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question 1: For those who are in the &quot;whom is almost never truly necessary&quot; camp: when you hear or read something in an old-fashioned but strictly speaking correct way, does it bother you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely the answer to this one is obvious: if they are in that camp they are in it for a reason; it does bother them. However, even if that's not the case, it's a purely binary situation, either &lt;em&gt;Yes it does&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;No it doesn't.&lt;/em&gt; There is little value in this question other than gaining statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question 2: If so (i.e. if it bothers you), why does it bother you? Why wouldn't a tomato-tomahto acknowledgment of personal preference work for you in the who/whom wars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question invites a purely personal response. That means that every answer could be different and still entirely valid. You have given five possible reasons for objecting to &lt;em&gt;whom,&lt;/em&gt; and invite more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is purely soliciting opinion. It's a questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user has assisted by adding an attempt to gain answers which might be objective with the very last sentence,:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;among those for whom &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; is an archaic part of the English language that is better left in history, what's so bad about the word in today's English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and that might be answerable if there is published research on the reasons that it's &quot;better left in history&quot;, but it is more likely to garner individual responses starting with &quot;I think...&quot; Not only that, but he has introduced the mention of research without actually providing any (or even links to it). But if there is that research, then you have your answers already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, the question is purely inviting individual opinions. It appears to fail a number of the tests on whether it falls as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;&quot;good subjective&quot;/&quot;bad subjective&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. The best subjective questions invite explanation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers. The best subjective questions inspire your peers to share their actual experiences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone. The best subjective questions avoid the all too seductive route of ranting and flamebait.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions. Certainly experiences inform opinions, but the best subjective questions unabashedly and unashamedly prioritize sharing actual experiences over random opinions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references. Opinion isn’t all bad, so long as it’s backed up with something other than “because I’m an expert”, or “because I said so”, or “just because”. Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you’ve done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions are more than just mindless social fun. The best subjective questions avoid the social pitfalls of “Getting To Know You” (GTKY) and mindless entertainment. Sometimes people just want to poll a community for ideas that might help solve a problem (best book, best approach). These can be okay when there is actual knowledge in the collection of answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should remain closed. The recent edits have not brought it into the &quot;good subjective&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T16:58:32.900" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T16:58:32.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-09T10:10:15.233" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question here &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/409222/is-there-a-word-for-somebody-who-likes-to-be-taken-care-of-and-pampered&quot;&gt;Is there a word for somebody who likes to be taken care of and pampered?&lt;/a&gt; and it was put on hold because of the following,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; explain how the word will be used. I said a word with that meaning &lt;strong&gt;which does not have any negative connotation&lt;/strong&gt;. The rule above does not say I should provide a sentence. It simply asks to give details of the usage which is exactly what I did. So why was it put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116337" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T10:10:15.233" Title="Why was my question concerning the existence of a word put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-09T17:08:51.033" Score="-5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am seeing many questions on articles: usage in modern-day standard English.  (Should I use &quot;a&quot;, &quot;the&quot;, or nothing in this sentence?  Why does this quote do it like that?) Do you think all (most?) such questions fit better in ell.stackexchange.com than in english.stackexchange.com ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday's examples ... &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/409131/9368&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/409131/9368&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/409204/9368&quot;&gt;Why is the definite article used in each of these places in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt; and two others were already migrated to ELL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastEditorUserId="9368" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T19:28:58.293" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T07:18:10.210" Title="Articles ... send 'em to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10760" CreationDate="2017-09-11T07:18:10.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general, you don't migrate questions that are on-topic for the site that they are asked on even if they are on-topic on another site. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10760/articles-send-em-to-ell#comment44635_10760&quot;&gt;ColleenV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T07:18:10.210" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-09-11T07:18:10.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10744" CreationDate="2017-09-11T07:58:59.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some answers posted as comments summarize succinctly the entire issue, and are worthy of the answer box without any further documentation.  Why not simply promote these to answers?  Would the original commentator object, assuming credit is properly assigned?  Certainly there are brief answers from the sorts of people NVZ identifies by initials who often offer wisdom that deserves some permanence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T07:58:59.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-11T08:18:19.247" Score="10" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 11 questions using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/the-that&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-that&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-that&lt;/a&gt;, without tag wiki, including the following ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/406269/when-to-use-that-instead-of-the&quot;&gt;When to use &amp;quot;That&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;The&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/170112/when-can-one-omit-that-from-a-sentence&quot;&gt;When can one omit &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; from a sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/151586/comma-after-that-midsentence&quot;&gt;Comma after &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; midsentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I could see a use for the tag in the first question, I think that using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/the-that&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-that&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-that&lt;/a&gt; to mean &lt;em&gt;the question is about &quot;the&quot; or &quot;that&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is quite wrong.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For questions comparing &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; the tag could make sense, but I don't think there are enough questions to justify a specific tag when there are already less specific tags, but still specific enough to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really want to keep it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastEditorUserId="252" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T12:03:49.340" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T12:03:49.340" Title="Is there a need of the &quot;the-that&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T11:00:28.903" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/409415/217285&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; for a reason that I do not understand. It looks to be a straightforward question about the usage of word in the English language. What would be the reason for these accumulating votes to close because it &quot;does not appear to be about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because nothing to do with ELL – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8286/fattie&quot;&gt;Fattie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question seems to be well received, has generated positive discussion and two thoughtful answers that have both been well received as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the two answers &lt;em&gt;disagree with each other&lt;/em&gt;, and right now one has 6 up votes and the other has 10. So really, is this not actually &lt;em&gt;quite a good ELU SE question?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, so far this site has not converged on an answer. There is not agreement or consensus here. This is still literally an &lt;em&gt;open question&lt;/em&gt;. How is the goal of SE achieved, and how are future readers best served by closing it so quickly, in this state? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've accepted one answer because it makes the most sense to me, and &lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; it is correct. The problem seems to be with the shorter definitions relying on the term &quot;unclear&quot; without the context of there being an audio recording in which the spoken words might be unclear, rather than the speaker's meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why must further discussion be prevented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9pTKL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9pTKL.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;note:&lt;/strong&gt; There are more comments since this screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T12:15:34.670" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T06:54:43.957" Title="Why would one vote to close my question because it has nothing to do with ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10765" CreationDate="2017-09-12T11:54:18.203" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd welcome additional answers that help me understand why (at least) three other users felt the question should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for one of the votes there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/409415/#comment976329_409415&quot;&gt;definitive answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have no idea what you mean. I typed the words &quot;has nothing to do with ELU&quot; in the www form. As I have said some, seven? times now, I gave little thought to what I typed there. (In the future, to avoid problems like this, I will simply &lt;strong&gt;type nothing&lt;/strong&gt;, which is what almost everyone does.) – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/8286/fattie&quot;&gt;Fattie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; A clearer reason has now appeared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&quot; – David, Rory Alsop, Edwin Ashworth, Josh&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some SE sites if the prior research &lt;em&gt;which is already present in the question&lt;/em&gt; was considered insufficient, a helpful comment asking for it would have appeared fairly quickly, or at the very least the first close vote would have indicated the proper reason, instead of &quot;has nothing to do with ELL (sic)&quot; in this case, which seems to have served more to mis-direct me than to help me improve the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I will try to look deeper into how to discern between insufficient and sufficient prior research. I'd appreciate any helpful comments about how I could have improved it in this case. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T06:54:43.957" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T06:54:43.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T13:16:27.587" Score="-5" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I refer to this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/409158/is-the-sentence-queueing-is-so-thoughtful-of-you-grammatically-correct/409826?noredirect=1#comment976747_409826&quot;&gt;Is the sentence &amp;quot;Queueing is so thoughtful of you.&amp;quot; grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask the person who downvoted my answer, why. I have a guess who may be, since some comments are self-explanatory.&#xA;For example see the answer &quot;If it is a spelling error (which I'm inclined to agree)&quot; says everything about the prejudice. When you don't want to concede something, you deny it.&#xA;In my opinion when there is an evident attack to a person, and not the answer he gives, well that spoils the whole experience of the exchange.&#xA;If the idea is bad, you can downvote it of course, better with a comment, and best if the comment is well argumented.&#xA;I hope that someone can give it here an objective look, and see it through with impartiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am discouraged enough to go on here on this basis.&#xA;For that reason I think I will leave ESE to the people who rule it in this way,&#xA;and let the others enjoy it the way it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252044" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T11:54:08.670" Title="Discussion about grammar" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10767" CreationDate="2017-09-13T14:43:15.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Just because he doesn't ever agree with you doesn't mean he has a problem with you personally&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry you got this impression and it's never something we want to give new users, but I see nothing in his words that leads me to believe he was out of line or insinuates it was a personal attack. He disagreed with your opinion that spelling is grammar, argued why he felt that way, and he kept it civil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/388543/are-spelling-punctuation-and-capitalization-part-of-grammar&quot;&gt;link you commented&lt;/a&gt; on the answer, that post is a testament to how that topic has different views and no definite boundaries; it supports the idea that people have differing opinions on that topic. Honestly, it appears that most took the side of those items &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; being considered grammar. So, if anything, that link hurts your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, we at ELU never want to discourage new or existing users, but we also will not coddle them. People on here have different opinions and sometimes that can be difficult. This is something that will be found anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T14:43:15.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T19:33:25.340" Score="14" ViewCount="1420" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am blatantly stealing an idea from &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1615/345&quot;&gt;IPS&lt;/a&gt;, which in turn was inspired from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1962/17286&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, which in turn was inspired from &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9/17805&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm sure there's more of these network-wide.. I recommend visiting some of these first to get some context: &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8121/50166&quot;&gt;PPCG&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1730/96463&quot;&gt;Code Review&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://health.meta.stackexchange.com/q/322/3534&quot;&gt;Health&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2668/158891&quot;&gt;Unix &amp;amp; Linux&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12991/311435&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7346/59802&quot;&gt;Sci-Fi&lt;/a&gt;. -- While I was initially in strong disagreement with the question on IPS, reading these others got me convinced that there's some benefit to having this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an unusual meta question, but in the spirit of learning about how users relate to the site and what could make the main site better, I believe these stories could be a valuable and on-topic contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear your stories: about how you ended up on ELU, how it has helped you, and perhaps more importantly, what keeps you here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is strictly about your relation to the site, in the sense that reading your story might inspire other users to stay active and become top users here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I should lead by example, but let's assume that my answer to another meta is sorta &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10741/50044&quot;&gt;my story so far&lt;/a&gt;, and if interested, you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1618/345&quot;&gt;my story on IPS&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let us get to know each other a bit better. What do you say? What's your story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T06:36:33.713" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T00:39:39.843" Title="So, what's your story?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10767" CreationDate="2017-09-13T22:38:15.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be getting marked down for calling a spelling discrepancy a grammatical error. Sloppy spelling is no more a matter of grammar than sloppy penmanship is, and for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should avoid taking downvotes on your postings as personal attacks on you rather than judgements cast upon your answer. These are very different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T11:54:08.670" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T11:54:08.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2017-09-14T06:47:20.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm here to learn more about how the English language works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most people around me these days are native Chinese speakers with varying levels of experience with English, I frequently come across situations that put me face-to-face with the English language and how little I understand about it even though I constantly use it both to express and to take in complex concepts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it will take some time to do so, and to get used to interacting with this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I participate in a few different stackexchange (SE) sites and generally ask far more questions than I answer because the amount I want to know is far larger than the amount I do know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each SE site is like a different country with different cultural norms and practices. Participating in several lets me learn more about what is common to all and what is unique to each. Interacting with humans &lt;em&gt;electronically&lt;/em&gt; can sometimes be quite a challenge, so coming at it from different directions required by multi-site participation gives me a bit of new insight and experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE's 'prime directive' of &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; is particularly fascinating. The internet is an opportunity for people to interact with others with a much wider range of differences than ever before. To me, SE is a giant experiment (intentional or not) to see how productive human interaction can be, through the use of a small and carefully curated set of rules. For example, questions must be questions, answers must be answers, and comments &lt;em&gt;should try to be&lt;/em&gt; helpful and productive comments; (ok, or jokes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in addition to my fascination with how the English language works, I've tried to start participating here because in my small sample of SE sites, ELU is a bit of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/288907/217285&quot;&gt;tough room&lt;/a&gt; and therefore there's something to be learned here beyond grammar and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T07:28:20.277" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T07:28:20.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2017-09-15T03:07:39.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Give &lt;a href=&quot;https://typely.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typely&lt;/a&gt; a try. It is a free proofreading application that you can use right away. It has been featured on the frontpage of many news aggregators and is already stable and strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dq4FI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dq4FI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our main focus is not grammar but we do catch a lot of mistakes while performing &lt;strong&gt;over a thousand checks&lt;/strong&gt; on any given document. You can also check your writing’s &lt;strong&gt;sentiment, required education for audience (grade) or reading ease&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241443" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T16:19:49.577" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T16:19:49.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2017-09-16T20:05:18.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to suggest a change to the CSS to make nested quotes more distinguishable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;blockquote {&#xA;    border: 1px dotted rgba(151,151,151,0.43);&#xA;    background: linear-gradient(rgba(248, 237, 218, 0.5),rgba(248, 237, 218, 0.5));&#xA;    }&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the border is only specified for the top and bottom, but it's more obvious if it surrounds the quote. It helps to mark the increased indent of nested quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The background is specified with a transparency, so that cumulative blockquotes accumulate the transparency and become progressively darker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eFJPI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eFJPI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of nested quotes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's subtle, but it only needs to be subtle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;linear-gradient&lt;/code&gt; is not universally supported, but there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7546638/css3-cross-browser-linear-gradient&quot;&gt;browser-specific versions&lt;/a&gt; of that directive. Even if it isn't supported, &lt;code&gt;border&lt;/code&gt; is universal, and it can be preceded by a straight &lt;code&gt;background-color&lt;/code&gt; directive which will be acted on if it's not superseded by the later gradient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T09:30:12.253" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T09:30:12.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10777" CreationDate="2017-09-17T18:21:06.030" Score="9" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that the title to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/410310/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; had been edited, with an explanation of &quot;this now appears on the hot list.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, apparently, the word in the title was OK at first, but now the question appears SE-wide, it no longer is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's fine, but can somebody point to to the rules now, please, since I had no idea that some words can be OK here locally, but not elsewhere on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS Also, I find censorship offensive, but that's probably just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T18:23:57.137" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:18:18.497" Title="What words are offensive in titles? What are the rules?" Tags="|discussion|titles|offensive|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10775" CreationDate="2017-09-18T19:09:41.560" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The title has to be “radio-friendly”.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1561/14073&quot; title=&quot;Jeff Atwood, “Should EL&amp;amp;U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?”&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Potentially offensive words shall be censored in the titles, but can be explicit in the bodies and comments.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/253/14073&quot; title=&quot;Jeff Atwood, “Referencing the existence of words that may be offensive”&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule applies to every site on the Stack Exchange network, regardless of whether the question is currently a hot network question. It can be found expressed in various ways as part of answers and comments on various SE meta sites, as in the examples quoted above. I hope that it will someday be added to the Help Center to make it easier to point to, but there is no question about it being an official rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At issue is that offensive language in question titles can cause Stack Exchange to be blocked by content gateways such as corporate proxies. Stack Exchange views this as a business concern. The Stack Exchange network is only useful and self-sustaining when everyone is able to visit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Radio-friendly” refers to Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibit obscene, indecent, and profane broadcasts.&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-profane-broadcasts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;US FCC, “Obscene, Indecent and Profane Broadcasts”&quot;&gt;³&lt;/a&gt; The assumption is that content gateway filters will probably not be triggered by question titles that would be acceptable on air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If necessary, titles containing offensive language can be “bleeped” with asterisks or hyphens, but the preferred solution is to rewrite to avoid “bleeping”. To cite a past example,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/554/14073&quot; title=&quot;“Why did ‘slang for breasts’ disappear because that was a valid question, no?”&quot;&gt;⁴&lt;/a&gt; “Differences between slang words for breasts” is preferred over “Differences between ‘t*ts’ and ‘b**bs’”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt; is avoided on air, consistent with FCC rules. In this case, the decision to edit the question title is the right one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T19:09:41.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T19:59:14.290" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202642/1920s-terms-for-parents-children&quot;&gt;1920&amp;#39;s terms for parents/children&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesnt strike me as a single word request, and since it's a new user, they probably haven't figured it out yet. To me, SWR means questions like 'What is the word for ...', &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6170/is-there-a-word-or-phrase-for-the-feeling-you-get-after-looking-at-a-word-for-to&quot;&gt;for example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, a mod has edited this post and left it in, so I'm not sure whether I am justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T19:59:14.290" Title="Is this question really a SWR?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-19T11:31:58.883" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very interesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/410345/does-the-phrase-pass-out-also-mean-to-graduate&quot;&gt;question &lt;/a&gt;about a BrE  expression mainly confined to  military usage  which has gained traction on a more popular basis in India. OP appears to be at a loss after having  checked with Google and asked around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is putting the question on hold the best way to deal with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastEditorDisplayName="user66974" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T14:34:59.687" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T14:34:59.687" Title="A question about Indian English usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10779" CreationDate="2017-09-19T11:38:55.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm probably the only one who voted to leave it open, and that's probably because I'm an Indian myself, and I understood what OP was thinking. The question does not include research much, but I must say that it's not easy for such an OP to find the right sense from google results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer is neat, and I don't think it'll need any additional answers. Regardless, I've voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that ELU has an answer to it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=Does%20the%20phrase%20%E2%80%9Cpass%20out%E2%80%9D%20also%20mean%20%E2%80%9Cto%20graduate%E2%80%9D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's the top google result for others to see&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T11:38:55.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10790" CreationDate="2017-09-19T12:21:34.353" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/300829/184638&quot;&gt;new top bar&lt;/a&gt; has upset the ELU banner by pushing the central box down too far. Its ornaments no longer line up with the horizontal line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TKUE2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TKUE2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Box ornaments don&amp;#39;t match the line&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This affects the main site and Meta.ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: not everyone gets to see this (yet). Hopefully it can be fixed before it's generally released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="257967" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T06:19:36.503" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T07:42:40.017" Title="New top bar has introduced a design glitch" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-19T15:02:33.013" Score="8" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone just asked a question about the difference between &lt;em&gt;Creoles&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Mulattos&lt;/em&gt;. A user commented some objection on grounds of racism, and the question disappeared within a few minutes of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how the question was deleted, whether it was by the one who asked or in some other way. But it seems like a terror of words for races, and I just think that it is a pity. There was nothing offensive in the post. The words are now sort of old-fashioned, but still familiar enough to make curiosity about them unsurprising. Lots of people proudly identify as Creole, the word is used a lot especially in connection with food and language, and it's weird that we're not to consider the words precisely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be wrong in allowing a discussion of the words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edit: here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/410665/50044&quot;&gt;link to the question&lt;/a&gt;; only visible if you have 10k reputation.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T18:48:35.267" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T19:34:30.733" Title="The Just-Deleted Question About Creoles And Mulattos" Tags="|discussion|deleting-posts|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10782" CreationDate="2017-09-19T17:36:58.000" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the order of events was the question was posted, a comment was made on it that said it was racist, the author deleted it themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also possibly, around the same time, the question was flagged and the question then marked by a mod as rude or abusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taboo, pejorative, and offensive words are fair game on ELU, but as MrShiny mentioned, the question still needs to be constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading of the question (original and edited, before deletion) was that is was asking earnestly (i.e. constructively) about the difference between two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;both words are innocuous when mentioned in quotes. (by analogy, the word 'fat' is innocuous, but nobody likes being called that)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't recognize any pejorative meaning with one word, and the other may be pejorative but just old-fashioned. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if someone flagged it as offensive, then we must presume they are indeed offended. However, I think the words can be discussed, at a distance, without offense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question, as is, could be easily answered by a dictionary look-up. If more than that is desired then the OP needs to elaborate/clarify.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, if undeleted (which I see no problem with but also based on offense I see no problem keeping it deleted), it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T17:36:58.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10782" CreationDate="2017-09-19T20:57:00.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reviewed the post history. I believe it is true to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with asking about offensive words. You can verify that by searching the site for questions about offensive words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;del&gt;The question was flagged, but not for being offensive. The question was flagged for rude comments.&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was flagged offensive. Rude and otherwise unnecessary comments were deleted, but not the question itself. The question was deleted by the author. The author did not give a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T15:41:20.163" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T15:41:20.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-20T14:35:45.720" Score="11" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;This query had occurred to me when I read of an OP-deleted question being undeleted by 3 voters a few days back, but this happened again to another Q just a few hours ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/410665/what-is-the-difference-between-creole-and-mulatto&quot;&gt;what is the difference between Creole and Mulatto?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta Q has nothing to do with that undeleted-and-then-closed question but I was wondering, if an OP posted a question and then decided to delete it for some reason (maybe because it created confusion, was poorly received or maybe because it was going to be closed) -- once 3 voters have taken the decision to undelete it, for whatever reason, can OP delete it again and choose to keep it deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or will the community decision to undelete be binding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an OP clearly wishes to keep the Q deleted, would members of the community insist on undeleting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I could not find the answer to my specific query on these help pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:21:20.870" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T07:24:15.847" Title="After 3 voters undeleted a question originally deleted by OP, can an OP delete it again and choose to keep their question deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10775" CreationDate="2017-09-20T15:23:37.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw that the title to this question had been edited, with an explanation of &quot;this now appears on the hot list.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by NVZ in a comment on my previous attempt to answer, the user who proposed the edit is relatively inexperienced on ELU but much more active on other stacks. It is therefore likely that they first saw it on HNQ, and so &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; reason for editing is it appearing in HNQ, rather than the appearance on HNQ changing the acceptability of offensive words in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:18:18.497" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:18:18.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10785" CreationDate="2017-09-20T15:53:11.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Without positive trials, a definitive answer is difficult (I've even asked mods on other sites), but from previous experiences I believe the answer is...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undeletion is not binding. An undeleted post can be deleted with sufficient votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One vote by the OP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One vote by a moderator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three votes of other users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deletion is not binding either, unless a moderator has deleted a post. If a post is deleted by other votes, it can be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A deleted post can be undeleted by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One vote by a moderator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One vote by the OP*, if the deletion was not by a moderator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three votes by other users, if the deletion was not by a moderator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a poster wishes his question to be deleted even though the community thinks it's valid, then there is nothing stopping him deleting it while it has no upvoted answers. Alternatively, he could make it a community-wiki post, which will go some way to dissociating the question from his account, or he could request dissociation (both via a flag on the post). CW can be done by moderators, but complete dissociation &amp;mdash; assigning a question to the Community user &amp;mdash; can only be carried out by SE staff. Both will require good reasons. This may mean that it takes a little while, and it may be that the poster will be engaged in a private chat to discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Yes, a post may be undeleted by the OP even if three votes from the community deleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:06:44.187" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:06:44.187" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10781" CreationDate="2017-09-21T06:19:26.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks again for reporting. It now should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DgInX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DgInX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Fixed ornament&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257967" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T07:42:40.017" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T07:42:40.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-21T17:22:50.580" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is there no badge or points for when people &quot;favorite&quot; your question? Or is there, and I just missed it somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243091" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T17:27:39.093" Title="Why is there no badge or points for the number of times a question has been &quot;favorited?&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10791" CreationDate="2017-09-21T17:27:39.093" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are such badges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/38/favorite-question&quot;&gt;Favorite Question&lt;/a&gt; – silver, question favorited by 25 users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/51/stellar-question&quot;&gt;Stellar Question&lt;/a&gt; – gold, question favorited by 100 users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T17:27:39.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10744" CreationDate="2017-09-22T03:47:27.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a not well developed answer because it is late in my time zone.  Two reasons for writing what I once called an &quot;embryonic answer&quot; in a comment: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) It is late in one's time zone and one simply cannot spare the time -- or keep one's eyes open -- to write a well researched answer.  And tomorrow will be busy.  So why not postpone answering until one does have the time?  We now go to (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) For some (not all) questions, there is a stage where something like brainstorming goes on.  Possibilities are tossed out in comments, people read the comments and someone's brain goes &quot;click!&quot; and an answer emerges.  Face-to-face meetings often have a brainstorming stage, before the participants settle down to propose serious solutions.  This preliminary stage would be impossible if everyone had to submit a fully researched answer at the outset. Each person would have too much invested in his answer to consider tearing it up and going off on a tangent inspired by a couple of words of comment from a stranger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be summed up in one word: cross-pollination.  Cut off cross pollination ruthlessly, and you don't get the best flowers (answers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Got to go now.  Fingers aren't obeying my brain. &#xA;t   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T03:47:27.530" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2017-09-23T21:05:00.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101265/constructed-languages?referrer=fFbNgudJWAIbp1PVPExtMg2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/101265.png&quot; alt=&quot;For all those single-word-request word-smiths&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184706" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T21:05:00.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2017-09-24T20:09:11.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been brought up on English although it's not my native language.  Extract from my profile page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was born in India and have always lived here; I was educated in English from earliest childhood at good schools, but I have never been an English grammar-cruncher, preferring to learn the language by feel, usage and a GREAT DEAL OF READING, so as to have developed an instinctive tuning for good grammar and usage without ever having learnt the 'rules and regulations' of good grammar. In fact they don't teach them here, but only teach usage, and students are evaluated by setting them practical tasks in grammar and composition! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;strong&gt;real&lt;/strong&gt; interest is fiction and Literature which are banned here, but it was a thrilling discovery for me to find this vast site dedicated to the English language. ELU was my first StackExchange site and I started out as an excited new user in April 2017, asking and answering questions, and racking up the reputation points for a few months. I have really enjoyed discussing the 'finer points' of the language and usage with a wide variety of members. Made some good friends. My communicative English also improved as a consequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However my interest in ELU has dropped off lately. Reason: this site is too contentious and arguments occur far too often over essentially minor points of syntax or grammar. As @uhoh said in an earlier answer here, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ELU is a bit of a tough room &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question on the meaning of  'tough room':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/288907/question-about-the-meaning-of-the-phrase-tough-room&quot;&gt;Question about the meaning of the phrase &amp;#39;tough room&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta question getting closed as off-topic soon after it was asked proves that to my satisfaction, and this is my take on that point (originally posted as a comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a tough room @NVZ because the dedicated users take the English language (and themselves relative to it) too seriously. Good language is certainly important for good communication but it's not useful to be fanatical about what is essentially a utilitarian invention: being active on a selected very few other Stack Exchange sites gave me the sense of perspective that we have been &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.co.in/search?q=splitting+hairs&amp;amp;dcr=0&amp;amp;oq=splitting+hairs&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;splitting hairs&lt;/a&gt; far too often and for far too many hours, here on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I remain a frequent visitor here and do believe that ELU is a valuable resource both in archive form and in real time, for anyone who wants to make their English better. The large number of generous contributions by senior members towards enhancing our understanding of the language is deeply appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T00:39:39.843" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T00:39:39.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2017-09-24T20:59:43.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble reconstructing the chain that let me to ELU.  Sometime in late 2014 or early 2015 I read an article in, I think (but I am not sure), &lt;em&gt;The New Scientist&lt;/em&gt; on the topic of 15,000 year old &lt;em&gt;ultra-conserved&lt;/em&gt; words.  The story had appeared earlier, in much shorter form, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/linguists-identify-15000-year-old-ultraconserved-words/2013/05/06/a02e3a14-b427-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html?utm_term=.a1a195ca2cf3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Washington Post&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went poking around the Internet to learn more (the concept had a lot of critics), and wound up on Linguistics SE.  Linguistics SE was too specialized for me to contribute to, but, in the course of poking around, I wound up by accident on ELU, where it seemed I could contribute.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere about the same time, I had a vexing question about Federal Income Tax (US), and, again in poking around the Internet, I found Personal Finance and Money SE, where I asked my question and got the answer I needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know which came first -- 15,000 year old words or the tax question; I could research it, but I'm not going to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, I came here circuitously by following Internet links that had little or no connection to English Language and Usage.  I came, I read, I liked.  Moreover, I was under a lot of stress at the time, and ELU was more effective than Xanax in distracting my mind, although it has more side effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I stay?  Probably, but I may not be as active.  The quality of the site seems to fluctuate, and right now it seems down.  Whether it is the site or my perception, I don't know.  I stay for the relatively few good questions, for the perceptive and amusing discussions (dirty word, I know) and for the little glow I get when I can easily solve someone's problem -- sometimes in a comment followed by a VTC.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T20:59:43.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-25T13:18:01.733" Score="6" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding my recent meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10770/50044&quot;&gt;So, what&amp;#39;s your story?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd first seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1615/345&quot;&gt;a similar question on Interpersonal Skills (IPS)&lt;/a&gt; and I was initially the strongest voice against having it on the site, since it was a question more about the users, and not exactly about the site. Few days later, reading the answers and similar questions on other metas, I had second thoughts. The similar metas are asked and answered by their top users and moderators, and are well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understood that those metas had a purpose, that is to engage with the users, to have them open up about the good and the bad about the site and why they keep returning to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is sorta my home site, and I thought I could have a similar question here. But I'm told it's not a good fit for ELU. And cue the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid extended discussion in the comments under it, I've created this second meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What went wrong? Why was my question received poorly?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can it be on-topic here as well?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How may I improve the question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related discussion on MSE; thanks to RaceYouAnytime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/301348/309993&quot;&gt;Is asking for user stories off-topic on meta sites?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general view &lt;em&gt;so far&lt;/em&gt; expressed by moderators of other stacks is that this can be on-topic on those stacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope we can accept this question here as well. What does the community say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T18:27:47.393" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:59:16.383" Title="Why was my one-off meta received poorly?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2017-09-25T16:55:26.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/301348/is-asking-for-user-stories-off-topic-on-meta-sites/301351&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.SE because it seemed to me that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; page being cited as evidence that the question was off-topic doesn't actually address this subject.  The relevant portion is quite vague, in a way that struck me as possibly intentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta is for...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;...English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange users to communicate with each other&lt;/strong&gt; about English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (asking questions about how the websites work, or about policies and community decisions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my reading, this snippet &lt;strong&gt;does not seem to prohibit&lt;/strong&gt; asking questions about users' experiences on the site, &lt;strong&gt;nor does it explicitly condone&lt;/strong&gt; such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't find a definitive conclusion in the help page, and I couldn't find anyone citing why the question was off-topic with any other justification.  I expected that my question on Meta.SE would get squashed, or that my viewpoint would not be shared, but instead (at least so far), the answers on MSE seemed to be largely supportive with the widest consensus being that this is something that has to be &lt;strong&gt;decided by our site&lt;/strong&gt;.  That means our community can choose to allow and accept these sorts of questions, or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want this to be a post cluttered with hand-picked quotes from the MSE page that support my opinion, but there were many interesting and relevant viewpoints shared and I would especially recommend reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/301350/357983&quot;&gt;Catija's answer,&lt;/a&gt; which includes links to relevant comments by community manager Shog9♦.  I will include one of those comments where Shog9♦ seems to interpret the Help Center snippet I pasted above as meaning &amp;quot;whatever the community agrees is acceptable discourse.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;This is the generic &amp;quot;What is meta&amp;quot; description&lt;/a&gt;, @Matt. Purpose #1 covers pretty much anything where y'all are talking to each other. What that means in practice is mostly up to you: if there are things you don't want to talk about, then they're off-topic. My point was simply that this was rather less controversial before the question was asked than it has become afterwards - hence encouragement to cite an actual problem rather than hand-waving at non-existent rules. – Shog9♦ Dec 30 '16 at 2:47&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope users here understand why I posted that question on Meta.SE: It was not my intent to raise a fuss, but rather to get some outside perspective on a vexing question.  Having said all this, below is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; opinion&lt;/strong&gt; on whether the question should be on- or off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the question is on-topic for Meta because the stories it solicits are specifically about users' relevant experiences with the main site.  Discussing the main site is the purpose of Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is true that Stack Exchange is not a social network, but stories about people's background with EL&amp;amp;U and what they value about the site &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;are already a central part of moderator elections&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;  During these elections, candidates essentially give a breakdown of their experiences, background, and vision for the site.  &lt;strong&gt;In my view, the question posed by NVZ is an opportunity for ordinary users to express themselves similarly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the most important point is the one mentioned in this question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understood that those metas had a purpose, that is to engage with the users, to have them open up about the good and the bad about the site and why they keep returning to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, it seems like the original question has the potential to do good for the site, in that it could expose the elements of EL&amp;amp;U that are attractive to ardent members, which could lead to insight on how to keep the site relevant and interesting for serious users with the potential for significant contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T19:49:34.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2017-09-25T16:55:30.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta is explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;Help pages&lt;/a&gt;, which say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta provides a legitimate space for people to ask how and why this site works the way it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta is for...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking questions about how the websites work, or about policies and community decisions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;posting bugs, suggesting improvements, or proposing new features, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for Stack Exchange to solicit feedback on new ideas or features, or discussing policies that affect the whole network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I referenced this in my comments on the other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This certainly is off-topic. &amp;quot;Stories&amp;quot; like this are what the profile page is for. There's nothing wrong with encouraging the use of available facilities, or with asking about how to make rage-quitting or other upsets less likely. Meta is intended for questions about the site, not about users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users' background and goals are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;not on-topic on meta&lt;/a&gt;. Meta is for &amp;quot;asking questions about how the websites work, or about policies and community decisions; posting bugs, suggesting improvements, or proposing new features; soliciting feedback on new ideas or features, or discussing policies that affect the whole network.&amp;quot; Discussions about users don't fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you point to where it says that &lt;strong&gt;discussing users&lt;/strong&gt; is on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, there has been no justification of how discussing users fits into the on-topic subjects which the Help lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This&lt;/strong&gt; question is on-topic. It's asking whether the other one should be on-topic or not. The evidence from documentation is that it should not be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something is on-topic, it's on-topic; if it isn't, it isn't. If something &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be on-topic, then &lt;strong&gt;make the case.&lt;/strong&gt; You can do that in an answer to this question. Say how it encourages better use of the site; if it is actually on-topic, then justify that. But appealing to a &amp;quot;one-off&amp;quot; nature of the question is irrelevant: if it's off-topic but allowed then other similar questions may follow the precedent, which means it won't be one-off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites may still be formulating their own policy, particularly something like IPS which is very new. But that doesn't mean that what might be accepted there should be accepted everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opening the door to off-topic issues, however interesting, however harmless, would take the site out of its scope. I guess there are other more suitable places on SE where this sort of personal disclosures are appreciated and welcome. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10770/so-whats-your-story#comment44810_10770&quot;&gt;Comment by Josh&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I commented elsewhere, there's nothing wrong with encouraging the use of available facilities, or with asking about how to make rage-quitting or other upsets less likely. That is about using the site, and encouraging best practice. Simply getting users to introduce themselves does not encourage best practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; have done was to ask whether such a question would be on-topic (or granted a derogation) &lt;em&gt;before asking it.&lt;/em&gt; Making your case in a  preliminary discussion on whether and how the question was beneficial would have saved you having to mount your rearguard action. If community consensus was that such a question would be beneficial, then there would have been enough in the discussion to allow it to be asked in such a way to steer answers to point to &lt;strong&gt;best practice with the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that you have unilaterally decided to post a question which is off-topic, however superficially attractive it might appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the question has [currently] gained two more close votes since it was re-opened. In total, it's had six close votes (including my moderator vote) and one &amp;quot;Recommend closure&amp;quot; flag, and Review yielded one &amp;quot;Reopen&amp;quot; against three &amp;quot;Leave Closed&amp;quot; votes. The &amp;quot;Reopen&amp;quot; reviewer also cast one of the five reopen votes, along with your good self and one of the answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T16:55:30.147" CommentCount="41" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2017-09-25T20:10:34.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question here is not whether your 'what's your story' meta question is off-topic [it has received 6 close-votes but rather more importantly 5 users think it's on-topic, because it was reopened], but literally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why is a one-off meta looked at with such negativity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At risk of getting a lot of downvotes may I dare to completely agree with your statement @NVZ that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is quite clear to me now that there's an air of negativity on ELU compared to other SE sites, and I understood that only when I participated on some other sites for a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you my Stack Exchange 'home site' was also ELU, but I was uneasy from the first with the overall contentiousness and argumentative atmosphere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally thought ELU users are too passionate about English language and grammar, and that ELU has become a battle ground for the 'grammar wars' but later realised (after following your lead and spending parallel time on some other SE sites while maintaining some regular activity here at ELU) that it is almost in the &lt;em&gt;personality&lt;/em&gt; of [&lt;strong&gt;not all&lt;/strong&gt; but] many dedicated users of ELU to be pedantic, opinionated and argumentative, and they are not very particular to 'be nice' with it either, although their comments might not be crude, but might actually be distinguished by the most polished examples of sarcasm and irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also take ourselves and the English language far too seriously here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think ELU attracts pedantic persons to become regular users.&lt;/strong&gt; So naturally they care more about the letter of the rules than the spirit [Notable exception: posting answers as comments.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedantic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedantic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive me for pointing out that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are often pedantic, @NVZ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I can be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; pedantic myself over so many matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is how it is. We are like this only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is why your one-off meta Q asking about users and 'their story' is 'looked at with such negativity', as you say. Moreover, close-voting a lot has become so ingrained in our culture, as you should know better than anyone else yourself, and at least 5 members will not tolerate any questions that fall outside the strict definition of a clear, narrow, on-topic, non-opinion-based, well-referenced question that (on meta) is concerned only with the ELU website and its workings, or the Stack Exchange network...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely missing the point that &lt;strong&gt;the users are the network.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, 5 members did vote to reopen it; its downvotes are balanced by upvotes leaving a net score of 0 or +1; and at least 3 members have written answers; so the response is not entirely negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why you haven't got more answers, @NVZ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's just that ELU members hate talking about themselves,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I think. The folks are certainly not similarly shy over on IPS.SE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T21:27:46.207" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T21:27:46.207" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2017-09-25T23:37:02.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was interested in Stack Exchange's recreational maths arm, landing at EL&amp;amp;U only via Hot Network Questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me some time to come to grips with the various pockets of information tucked away. Each pocket was fun to explore, though sometimes hard to find again. The 'help' pages are so generic that they're not really all that helpful in terms of how to operate the site ... even if you can find the pages. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blog and chat pockets were perhaps the most interesting to me. Unfortunately, by the time I joined, the blog was just winding down. Matt faithfully maintained a chat room for the blog, sending out periodic invitations to discuss the blog (it was probably automated, but still :) - sadly, &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; works in both senses). I turned up eagerly but I don't think anyone was posting anything of substance by then. The invitations stopped soon after, followed by a long quiescent period, after which Stack Exchange decided to close off blogs site-wide. Ours is still accessible if you know the URL, though that URL is even less accessible than that of the help pages. NVZ and muru helped me migrate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10550/142322&quot;&gt;content&lt;/a&gt; to Meta, where Matt kindly gave it faq status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat was where I got to know some of the regulars here. It was fun to interact with others who have a programming background &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; an interest in the nuances of natural language. If we want to keep ELU alive and interesting, we need to maintain and add to the community of regulars. As with research, it's the collaboration and thrill of learning &amp;amp; discovery that pulls people in and keeps people in. The publishing of results is, in a sense, only a by-product of the community's interactions. Although that by-product is valuable, we wouldn't get nearly half as much good stuff without people wanting to be a regular part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T00:37:51.497" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T00:37:51.497" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2017-09-26T16:37:03.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to the stack exchange network on the recommendation of an engineering programmer colleague, and found all sorts of interesting distractions through the Hot Network Questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming on questions through HNQ they were already well-answered by the time I got to them. This meant that I read a lot of answers before I ever posted my own. The answers I read were both good answers and poor answers, but the comments on the poor answers as to how they fell short of the accepted standards of the site allowed me to avoid making the same mistakes when I did start posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU doesn't help me in any way really. It's an entertaining distraction. But a distraction during the working day isn't really that helpful...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason I stick around is because (in the words of a colleague describing my contributions to my work's intranet pages) &lt;em&gt;I enjoy the use and misuse of the English language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T16:37:03.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2017-09-27T01:30:04.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;about how you ended up on ELU, how it has helped you, and perhaps more importantly, what keeps you here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a huge fan of Justin Bieber and I came here for information about Canadian English. I am doing research. It's provided data related to my research. My research is in the field of sociolinguistics. I never actually drove a Plymouth Satellite. I have a downvote to upvote ratio of 5 or 6 to 1. I dv bad questions. The site is full of them. Thanks for asking. arm fuzzies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T01:30:04.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T12:33:22.450" Score="9" ViewCount="1080" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see a pattern on ELU where someone asks a fairly innocuous question and then many people pile on with answers that seem like just opinions based on what they think, backed up by no real argument or proof, no evidence of usage from the broader corpus, no reference to known, accepted, or respected authorities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you sort the good from the bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you tell if someone here actually knows something about a subject? It sometimes feels like people just weigh in on whatever takes their fancy, irrespective of their credentials, knowledge, or understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259241" OwnerDisplayName="Which Tyler" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T13:04:48.117" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T17:00:46.137" Title="How can you tell if someone here actually knows something about a subject?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10806" CreationDate="2017-09-27T13:26:59.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, many users here are expert linguists or professors of English.  I would recommend looking at the bios of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;some of our top users&lt;/a&gt;.  However, as with every stack exchange site on the network, there is no rule prohibiting &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; person from creating an account and participating by asking questions or answering questions, and potentially accruing high reputation if their answers are consistently upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main two ways to determine whether an answer has veracity, besides using your own judgment, are to observe the reputation of the user who posted the answer and to note the number of up- or down-votes they receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will undoubtedly be cases where a non-expert or poorly-researched answer gets many upvotes. There are also many excellent expert answers that get little attention and few up-votes.  This is an unavoidable aspect of the Stack Exchange model, and other sites on the network are no different in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe an answer is not useful, lacks research effort, or is unclear, you can help our community by downvoting those answers and upvoting answers that you believe are high-quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T13:37:26.967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T13:37:26.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10806" CreationDate="2017-09-27T15:41:03.713" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You bring up a good point about the reliability of answers and author reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see answers that sound authoritative but offer no supporting evidence, or, as you are deftly not putting into these words, sound like they're pulling stuff out of their ass. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I do that. In my (partial) defense, some questions are not covered by dictionaries or style guides or corpus searches. Sometimes all there is is personal introspection (and linguistic science tries to build up beyond that). Other times...now I'm just being defensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU ain't Stack Overflow. You can't compile a sentence to see if it works. A sentence sounds good or not at all or somewhere in between. Also, as a native speaker, you don't have to have a lot of linguistic or self knowledge to tell if some grammar is weird or to come up with a vocab item but you certainly need both to explain well why the grammar or vocab might be appropriate. That is, non-experts can have something useful to add, they just may not be good at backing it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your real question is about how you can trust what people say, or maybe where you're leaning is how you can trust a particular individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure of the SE software is intended to capture what the community (all the other visitors to the site) think about the questions and answers. Reputation is a numerical device that is simply the weight of votes for and against each individual's answers (and questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation is a proxy for reliability. As a proxy, it is not perfect. People vote for things they like, how they're said, if the match what they already believe (confirmation bias), if they sound fancy (appeal to bombast), if they've said smart things before (appeal to authority, which may be a fallacy or not), etc, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of visitors to ELU. Most just read. Some stay and ask questions. Some stay and answer. There's no guarantee of authority, just interest. There is a small handful of experts, actual professors of linguistics, people who are writers/editors. But for the most part, it's just regular people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people give their opinion stated as fact. Some people just cut and paste from Wiktionary or some site they googled, both of which have their own difficulties with reliability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely having a high rep is no guarantee of authoritative knowledge. There are a handful of non-native speakers here who have gained a lot of rep points purely because their questions are so interesting. They are self-acknowledged learners of English and don't consider themselves reliable about English patterns. But they have a high rep. (there are also some non-native speakers who I would trust about their intuition on English, well, maybe &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; as much as my own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some suggested guidelines for writing answers which can make things more reliable. Citations from authoritative dictionaries (like OED or MW), examples of text found, corpus searches (from COCA or NGrams), all having their own qualifications and difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I often see answers that seem like they pulled them out of nowhere or made up as plausible but there is no basis in fact. I find that annoying, and downvote if it is egregious or comment to ask for elaboration. The SE software is set up to deal with this kind of problem. That is, sure, don't trust the first thing you see and question the answer. This ain't as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it also isn't as bad as Yahoo Answers (actually you can rely on YA to be &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; expert advice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I usually fail to notice problems if I &lt;em&gt;agree&lt;/em&gt; with the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that this is not a very satisfying answer. I'm not really saying either here are the desiderata for a user or a particular answer (because the reason you're asking this question is because rep is not very reliable), or on the other side that there are no good measures and it's the wild west and anything goes. Probably the best is a little experience here, seeing which persons write well, the form of which kinds of answers are trustworthy. Reputation points are a reasonable quick first approximation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the moral is that ELU is an attempt to be as reliable as possible given that it is crowd-sourced by a number of people with varying levels of knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T13:39:58.213" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T13:39:58.213" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2017-09-27T16:36:52.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote either way on the close question, but I think the question is probably on-topic for Meta, in the spirit of asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;&quot;how and why this site works the way it does.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Knowing more about users' ELU-relevant background and why users use the main site ought to provide some insight into the many small individual decisions that feed into the character and foibles of the site as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm not surprised that the question was initially closed, and I'm not particularly excited to answer it myself. Taking the last point first, I'm just one of those users who &quot;prefers to maintain an air of mystery&quot;. I don't mind if others want to answer, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For why the question was received as it was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You set yourself up for failure. The very first comment on your question is from you, saying that the question is probably off-topic. That's just inviting close-votes on your own question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You didn't answer it yourself. Instead, you directed folks to another Meta answer of yours whose main point is that you are &quot;disheartened&quot; by ELU and prefer to put more of your time and energy into answering questions on a different site. That's not exactly enthusiastically inspirational.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You didn't (initially) focus on English language and usage. About half of the other similar questions that you mentioned are somewhat tailored to their particular main topic or site. For example: PPCG's question focuses on how the site can better fit into the SE model/system as a whole; Code Review's focuses on how to turn one-time users of the main site into repeat visitors (and why that might not be happening); Worldbuilding asks whether answerers have &quot;any worldbuilding projects going on&quot;; etc. Several of the questions were also asked when their respective sites were in beta, and really still trying to define themselves. Your question in its original form was fairly generic when it could have been more specific. For example, perhaps you could have asked whether folks consider themselves linguists, etymologists, and/or serious English language enthusiasts. For those who don't consider themselves any of the three, what brings them to a site for such folks?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might be overestimating the popularity of these questions on other sites. MathematicsMeta has accrued the greatest number of answers of the questions linked: 29 since the question was asked in March 2014; most of the other linked questions have somewhere around 15 answers, and a couple have only five answers (including WorldBuilding's question, which was asked in April 2015). Your question has so far collected six answers in two weeks, which seems like a respectable response.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is reopened now, with a net positive score, so hopefully it will ultimately serve its intended purpose. I would still encourage you to go ahead and post your own answer, though, for the look of the thing if nothing else. Even if you just move the paragraph about why you're not answering, with links to other answers, out of the question and into an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned above, move your penultimate paragraph to its own answer. Consider saying a few more words about yourself in relation to ELU.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rephrase your specific questions to have something to do with either EL&amp;amp;U the site or EL&amp;amp;U the topic. In particular, &quot;how [the site] has helped you&quot; seems out of place. Ask about something like why people are interested in the English language, whether they mostly ask or answer or just read, where they see themselves fitting in to the official user base of &quot;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts,&quot; etc. If your primary concern is a perceived barrier to becoming a regular user, then focus on that (and maybe link to some of the meta posts that led to your concern).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move your first paragraph, about all the other similar questions, later in the post. Right now you start out comparing us to other sites; let the focus of your question be THIS site. Maybe drop the bit about &quot;blatantly stealing an idea from IPS&quot;, since you will in fact have substantially modified the question and properly attributed it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take all those suggestions with a grain of salt; some folks are never going to like the concept, no matter how you word the question. And of course don't make any changes that you think might invalidate any existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T14:59:16.383" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:59:16.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10815" CreationDate="2017-09-27T23:20:44.210" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've run into many duplicate answers on this Web site that are practically useless because the author of an answer has provided less information and information that was already stated in another more quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have the duplicate flag for questions, but why not for answers? It would be pretty useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, I'm proposing to add the duplicate flag for answers. Any thoughts, anybody?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user231780" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T05:17:06.060" Title="Proposal to Be Able to Flag Duplicate Answers" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10816" CreationDate="2017-09-28T00:42:30.923" Score="7" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411430/is-there-a-word-for-the-joy-a-smart-aleck-feels-when-they-point-out-to-other-peo&quot;&gt;Is there a word for the joy a smart aleck feels when they point out to other people how stupid they are?&lt;/a&gt; got more than 7,000 views, 25 net upvotes, and was favorited 4 times because it got on the Hot Network List.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does a question get on the list, and does ELU have any say in what gets on the list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is a mean-spirited one.  I'm not saying I am offended by it, only that I think it unworthy of being a representative of ELU on the List.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T17:55:08.487" Title="Do we have any control over what gets on the Hot Network List?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10812" CreationDate="2017-09-28T02:15:42.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/325060/323179&quot;&gt;March 2019&lt;/a&gt;, moderators can now kick a question off the HNQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the criteria used for the HNQ can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, there are two actions that would stop a question from being on the HNQ list (closing the question or deleting all its answers). In this case, there's nothing wrong with the question or its answers, so neither is going to happen. Waiting it out is always an option too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related on MSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/284929/323179&quot;&gt;Allow moderators or gold tag badge holders to prevent questions from being on the hot network questions (HNQ) list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/300866/323179&quot;&gt;Kick questions off the Hot Network Questions list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/292711/323179&quot;&gt;Manually heat a &amp;quot;hot network question&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (the opposite)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T17:55:08.487" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T17:55:08.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10811" CreationDate="2017-09-28T05:17:06.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature-request sounds best asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. And it's probably going to be marked a duplicate there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, under those &lt;em&gt;very-late-and-duplicate&lt;/em&gt; answers that add no additional information to the topic, I recommend leaving a comment explaining that so that the reviewers can vote it down or delete it. Or the late-answerer might've not noticed the existing answers, and can therefore edit the answer to add additional information or remove it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a blatant copypaste of existing answers, then flagging for a moderator's attention might also work. Do briefly explain and link to the answer it copied from when submitting the custom flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fhipe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fhipe.png&quot; alt=&quot;duplicate flag; screenshot 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mB8dg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mB8dg.png&quot; alt=&quot;duplicate flag; screenshot 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T05:17:06.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10812" CreationDate="2017-09-28T08:13:23.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question &quot;Do we have any control&quot; is actually Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it's &quot;Yes, but.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that we have control over &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; questions appear, but whether questions appear &lt;em&gt;at all.&lt;/em&gt; It is possible for sites to opt out of having any questions appear on the HNQ list. For that to be implemented, a Meta question setting out the proposal and getting a high degree of support would be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T08:13:23.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10820" CreationDate="2017-09-29T13:19:31.040" Score="7" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just (yesterday or today) started seeing poor text positioning on the close vote dialog, specifically that the already-selected reason's description is overlapping with the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7c3Oy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7c3Oy.png&quot; alt=&quot;off topic because&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OrjoY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OrjoY.png&quot; alt=&quot;primarily opinion based&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Version:       48.0.2685.32 (PGO) - Opera is up to date  &#xA; Update stream: Stable  &#xA; System:        Windows 10 64-bit&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216106" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T23:07:22.933" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T23:07:22.933" Title="Close vote reason display issue" Tags="|bug|status-completed|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10819" CreationDate="2017-09-29T14:00:14.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The related questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/301503/misaligned-options-still-in-the-close-vote-popup-dialog&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357243/text-overlap-in-vote-to-close-dialog&quot;&gt;SO Meta&lt;/a&gt; already have a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does appear that completion does not include actually &lt;em&gt;deploying&lt;/em&gt; the fix, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:00:14.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-29T21:55:31.033" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should cases be handled in which a complex question is posed that is composed of several topics which could each warrant a separate consideration in the forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been struggling for the past few days to try to develop a helpful reply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411841/preoperative-thrombocytosis-may-identifypatients-who-are-at-greater-risk-or-risk][originalQuestion&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Preoperative thrombocytosis may identify patients who are at greater risk or risks of x, y, and/or z?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There are several risks. Should it be risk or risks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a much more difficult question to address than appears to be the case at first glance. The problem is that more than one question is hidden within. I think, at a minimum, the question needs to be broken down into these separate components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &quot;&lt;strong&gt;risk &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (possible outcome)&quot; versus &quot;&lt;strong&gt;risk &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (possible outcome)&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3112&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/02/risk.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;risk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of (list of possible outcomes)&quot; versus &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;risks&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of (list of possible outcomes)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &quot;&lt;strong&gt;at risk&lt;/strong&gt; of&quot; versus &quot;&lt;strong&gt;at risk&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a case like this in which splitting up the question seems advisable, does a suggestion to make a split first need to be raised in a comment to the original post? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does a contributor just take the liberty of modifying the original question and starting new threads for separate discussions? Does a moderator need to do the splitting? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the question first put on hold so that the original poster can modify the question (what if s/he does not return?)? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What happens to answers that may already have been posted to the original question but that are no longer relevant after the original question is modified?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216903" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T22:11:44.027" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T05:04:59.557" Title="Procedure for dividing a complex question into separate questions?" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10822" CreationDate="2017-09-29T22:23:52.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think this question needs to be split up.  It is phrased as one question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be risk or risks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to interfere with the OP's choice of phrasing that as one question. Splitting it into multiple posts could become confusing, and some of those sub-questions might wind up being closed as duplicates of other existing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, speaking generally, if a question is on-topic and there are multiple factors that could be relevant, it's valid to address each in your answer.  I would outline those aspects similar to how you broke them out in this question and then address each aspect.  There's nothing wrong with providing a detailed, lengthy answer to a question when you believe it is worthy of detailed analysis.  That's why one of the reasons that can be selected for posting a bounty is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is widely applicable to a large audience. A detailed canonical answer is required to address all the concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where a question is phrased in a way that is &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; to be answered, the appropriate course, although probably not satisfying if you want to answer the question, is to &lt;strong&gt;close&lt;/strong&gt; it as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and ask the OP to be more specific.  In this particular case, I see no reason to close the question as too broad, since a specific portion of the text and a very specific question is posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T05:04:59.557" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T05:04:59.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10822" CreationDate="2017-09-29T22:24:30.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a case like this in which splitting up the question seems advisable, does a suggestion to make a split first need to be raised in a comment to the original post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, explaining to the OP why it's better asked separately is a good start. Perhaps they'll return to make it separate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, if you believe the question is too broad and cannot be answered properly as it is currently presented, flag or vote to close it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does a contributor just take the liberty of modifying the original question and starting new threads for separate discussions? Does a moderator need to do the splitting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not a good idea usually. If there are 3 or 4 things OP asked, and each answerer chooses to remove any random one of those, that's a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the OP improve the question, make it focused on one thing. Until then, close it, and guide the OP in the comments on how to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the question first put on hold so that the original poster can modify the question (what if s/he does not return?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OPs can modify the question anytime they want. But we put the question on hold to avoid it getting answered &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; OP edits it to clarify the question. Broad questions tend to invite broad answers, which is not a good fit for the SE's Q&amp;amp;A model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they don't return, the &quot;on hold&quot; status gets renamed to &quot;closed&quot; and that's it. If you have a better question you can ask separately. This &quot;unclear&quot; or &quot;too broad&quot; question will be later deleted by the system. (Conditions apply, though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens to answers that may already have been posted to the original question but that are no longer relevant after the original question is modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If improving the question implies invalidating existing answers, then that question didn't deserve to be answered in the first place. That is why we are required to vote to close as early as possible, and thereby avoid such a confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;CLOSE the broad question&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;IMPROVE it&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;REOPEN it&lt;/em&gt;. -- That's the best way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are just minor changes, then simply notifying the answerers of the update is enough. But totally changing the question is not allowed once it has received a number of good answers. It would be better to ask another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T22:33:24.360" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T22:33:24.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10822" CreationDate="2017-09-30T00:23:33.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case you linked to, the basic question is simple: &lt;em&gt;at risk&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;at risks&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you've found nuances that the OP wasn't asking about, you can either note the nuances when you post an answer, or ask one or more new questions of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding editing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit, you are welcome to do so. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;help pages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guideline to bear in mind when editing is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9256/142322&quot;&gt;preserve the OP's intent&lt;/a&gt;. If you can't preserve the OP's intent, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7889/when-a-question-is-interesting-but-too-loose-is-it-better-to-edit-it-even-if/7890#comment32514_7889&quot;&gt;fine&lt;/a&gt; to ask your own question. This also addresses your Q4 - if your editing preserves the OP's intent, it shouldn't invalidate existing &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers. If it does invalidate an answer, then either you're not preserving the OP's intent, or the existing 'answer' doesn't really answer the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T00:23:33.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-30T14:06:11.320" Score="8" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most StackExchange sites, if an item seems to have attracted too many comments, those comments are moved to chat.  (I have my own opinions about this practice, but in any event, that's the practice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this policy still in effect?  I ask because in this case...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411758/how-can-i-order-eggs-over-hard-in-the-uk#comment-982960&quot;&gt;How can I order eggs “over hard” in the UK?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...it appears that the moderator &quot;MetaEd&quot; decided to summarily &lt;strong&gt;delete&lt;/strong&gt; the comments instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7470" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T18:36:00.080" Title="Has the policy on &quot;excessive commenting&quot; changed?" Tags="|support|comments|moderation|deleted-posts|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10826" CreationDate="2017-09-30T18:36:00.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since comments are ephemeral, I'm moving &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10826/has-the-policy-on-excessive-commenting-changed#comment45010_10826&quot;&gt;Dan Bron&lt;/a&gt;'s to this answer. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don’t think there’s a policy that overly-long comments &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be moved to chat. That’s one option for what to do with them, but it’s not the only option. The policy is “overly long or chatty comments are distracting from Q&amp;amp;A and so must be removed”. One way to remove them is to move them to chat; another way is to delete them outright. On EL&amp;amp;U at least we have a log history of simply deleting chatty or obsolete comments. Overall, the guidance is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;comments are ephemeral&lt;/strong&gt; and users must bear this in mind when using the comment feature&lt;/em&gt;. Just remember they’re temporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T18:36:00.080" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-09-30T18:36:00.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10871" CreationDate="2017-09-30T20:33:34.537" Score="10" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rentier, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rentier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M-W&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a person who lives on income from property or securities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rentier, in the case of ELU (or any other SE) means being able to do what one wants (downvote, award bounties) from the income (upvotes) of old answers and questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all get the occasional upvote from an old answer, and someone once mentioned that Barrie England is still accruing &lt;em&gt;badges&lt;/em&gt; from old Qs and As.  If one wanted to spend 1,000 rep a year in downvotes and bounties, one would need an income of 2 answer upvotes per week (on average) from old answers.  Does anyone have an informed guesstimate of how much capital (rep) this would require?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T16:53:09.700" Title="What is approximately the rep at which one can become a member of the idle rich (a rentier) on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10829" CreationDate="2017-10-01T07:41:26.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With due respect, I am already a member of the idle rich on ELU, and I have just over 4000 reputation points collected over a 4 month period from April to August 2017, after which I became one of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-french/the-idle-rich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;les idles riché&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; here. I just posted a bounty of 100 points on somebody's very old question that needs more attention and a definitive answer if that exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At your stated rate of expenditure of 1000 points per year for downvotes and bounties I can reach October 2021 without even earning too many points from late upvotes. So that should answer your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course my reputation score will go down by the same amount that I 'spend' but it should not matter in this situation, because online reputation = &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_money&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;play money&lt;/a&gt; IMHO. Its best use is to post judicious bounties on our own or another user's question. I suppose many members would agree. Moreover, if I were even minimally active here for that long I ought to collect at least 1000 points over that 4 year period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I am not bothered if my reputation score dwindles below 3000 points because I am not interested in retaining the power to perform close-voting.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at high reputation users, I can't really see that even the 'extreme case' of losing 5000 rep (without earning any new rep) over 5 years at your stated rate of expenditure actually makes much of a difference to their 'real standing' in the community: if somebody goes down from 22500 to 17500 rep, that is still a &lt;em&gt;high reputation member&lt;/em&gt; here! Of course each member must decide what site privileges they want to retain, and adjust their 'expenditure' accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a member wants to spend 1000 points a year &lt;em&gt;without losing any reputation score&lt;/em&gt; as a consequence, then they would need to have at least 100,000 (a hundred thousand) reputation points, methinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T16:53:09.700" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T16:53:09.700" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10829" CreationDate="2017-10-01T09:54:55.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The maximum privileges is attained at 25k &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;site analytics&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which, as per my experience on IPS, is useless to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to have and then retain the ability to actually &amp;quot;vote&amp;quot; to delete, and not just &amp;quot;recommend deletion&amp;quot;. So, I figure I need to maintain a minimum of 20k fake points for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I have to spend 1000 for downvotes and bounties per year, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; stick around &amp;quot;deleting&amp;quot; stuff for another 5 years, just above 25k is the number I'll need now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The occasional upvotes are not significant in my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Barrie, since he has a whopping 2,720 answers posted, and that too, for almost all the significant questions ever asked on ELU, the rep gain from occasional upvotes is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;yuuuge.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T10:00:15.220" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-01T15:03:56.907" Score="5" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology &lt;/a&gt;  refers only to the origin of words, while referring to  proverbs/phrases and saying we would speak of their origin, not their etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/etymology/info&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; tag refers both to words and phrases but the description given from the OED clearly refers only to words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-origin&quot;&gt;phrase-origin&lt;/a&gt; but it shows no description. Other tags like “proverbs” and “sayings” do not explicitly refer to their origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following old &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51881/etymology-for-the-phrase-butterflies-in-stomach&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; uses the tag etymology for a phrase, for instance, but there are other instances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that we may easily assume an extention in the usage of the term etymology that encompasses both word and phrases, but as a site language I think we should adopt a stricter, more precise view.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66974" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T03:34:40.367" Title="Is it correct to use the tag “etymology” for set phrases, proverbs and sayings?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T12:29:58.483" Score="7" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3638/is-there-an-apostrophe-in-a-masters-degree&quot;&gt;old question&lt;/a&gt; asks, &lt;em&gt;master's&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;masters&lt;/em&gt;?  The accepted answer (and the only viable candidate) says it has to have an apostrophe.  But Academia SE has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/tags/masters/info&quot;&gt;tag definition for &lt;em&gt;masters&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that shows the usage is more nuanced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Queries related to a master's degree, sometimes referred to as a post-graduate degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_degree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;master's degree&lt;/a&gt; is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duration of a masters degree is about one to two years which may vary because of different educational systems' policies. Masters students may have to conduct a research project as their thesis at the end of their masters level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The linked wikipedia entry, on the other hand, consistently uses the apostrophe.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see an answer that acknowledges the use of the no-apostrophe version, and explains the borders of acceptability, for example, when does &lt;em&gt;master's&lt;/em&gt; look too stuffy?  When does &lt;em&gt;masters&lt;/em&gt; look too informal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;may I write a new question?&lt;/strong&gt;  If that's not considered kosher, the only alternative I can think of is to set a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that when I googled&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;holding a master's degree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(without quotes), Google prominently displayed the accepted answer to the seven year old ELU accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;what's the best way to draw attention to either a new question or a bounty among the Academia crowd?&lt;/strong&gt;  Although I believe the question belongs on ELU, it would be interesting for Academia too.  The way I've seen this handled at Spanish SE is to put &amp;quot;ELU meets Academia&amp;quot; at the beginning of the title.  But that doesn't necessarily catch Academia's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, &amp;quot;interdisciplinary&amp;quot; was the closest I could come up with.  &lt;strong&gt;Is there a better way to express the overlap?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary question is, may I write a new question.  Please consider the other two as bonus content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T22:11:41.113" Title="How to update a seven-year-old question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10834" CreationDate="2017-10-02T14:04:31.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems different enough in scope from the old question to be considered a non-duplicate. What are essentially follow-up questions generally seem to be acceptable here; for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/214340/master-or-masters&quot;&gt;master or master&amp;#39;s&lt;/a&gt; follows up on the same 2010 question. This is preferable to editing an existing question to go beyond what the original questioner wanted and/or in a way that &quot;breaks&quot; existing answers. In this case, the older question seems to be asking for a prescriptive &quot;ruling&quot; on whether an apostrophe should be used or not; you are asking about whether there may be systematic reasons for omitting the apostrophe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do ask a new question, you should note the older question and its answer and then quote the tag text and any other apostrophe-free examples you've run across and ask your more nuanced, descriptive question about casual use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as bringing it to the attention of Academia SE, maybe post a link in their chat or even ask a question in their Meta? If you think the tag description is in error you could ask about that, with a link to the related question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T22:11:41.113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T22:11:41.113" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10838" CreationDate="2017-10-04T01:24:22.717" Score="17" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a newcomer to this forum, I am trying to tread carefully and familiarise myself with the protocols. I realise the question I am about to ask already has been asked in various permutations, but I am primarily asking it in relation to new users of ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen a number of downvotes for newcomers' posts with no explanation about what they have done wrong or any comment on what they need to do - even it's to do a site tour. That seems to me to be a little disheartening, and not very constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412562/using-they-them&quot;&gt;Using they/them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Shouldn't newcomers to this site be afforded some latitude and be given an explanation and a chance to redeem themselves before being downvoted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think explanations are provided in most cases, but I just came across a series of downvotes with no explanation on posts for people who have just joined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I now wait anxiously to see whether I am downvoted on my first venture onto the meta stage!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258304" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T18:03:22.870" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T18:03:22.870" Title="Downvoting newcomers with no explanation or comment" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10836" CreationDate="2017-10-04T02:08:28.170" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my perspective, as more of a longtime user of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, explanations for downvotes are not required, and so shouldn't be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are ... something that different people use differently. There are a few clear rules (don't downvote just for reasons not related to a post's content) but in general, I don't think it's useful to talk about &quot;productive&quot; and &quot;unproductive&quot; uses of downvotes in contexts like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the downvote tooltip for questions. Many people use downvotes to convey this message. It's not necessary to write an additional comment to explain what the downvote means; this is, more or less, what it means. I think it's fairly clear that the linked question does, in fact, show little if any research effort. It's fairly clear, but could benefit from some edits to clarify the source of confusion. People will have very different ideas about if it is &quot;useful&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall, it's not too surprising to me that it was downvoted. As long as Stack Exchange works the way it does, some downvotes on questions like this are inevitable, so I would recommend not worrying about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People nearly always have the opportunity to redeem themselves. Posts can be edited, and votes can be retracted. Both of these actions are relatively rare. Even if the specific person who downvoted doesn't retract their vote, other users' votes on a question can easily improve its score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have different opinions about whether new users should be given more &quot;latitude&quot;. I tend to feel like it's somewhat irrelevant. It's possible that being more lenient on new users will allow them to slowly adjust to the site. It's also possible that it will just extend the period of time when they post low-quality questions, because they don't get quick feedback. That's an empirical question that I don't know the answer to, and I'm pessimistic about my chances for finding it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure the rate of downvoting affects how &quot;friendly&quot; people perceive this site to be, but I don't know the practical effects of that either, and I'd imagine that there is a wide variance in perceptions of &quot;friendliness&quot; from person to person anyway. Some people are quick to see aggression, while other people are thick-skinned and don't care if they seem to have caused offense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I'm somewhat skeptical at this point of the whole concept of voting on questions, and the voting + reputation system in general. Do downvotes really cause users to change their behavior for the better? I have no idea. Maybe they more often cause users to behave worse. But that also isn't clear to me. A single downvote on a question has very little obvious effect on anything: at most, it removes two reputation points, a pretty trivial amount (even for a new user). Note that for new users, downvotes may not even affect the reputation score at all, since you can't go lower than one. That's another reason why I think it isn't worth worrying about downvotes on questions like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, I mainly vote on answers, since that has the clear effect of contributing to the ranking of the answers on a page (and I also vote up questions that interest me, just because it feels natural I guess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have downvoted questions without leaving comments in the past. There were various motivations for this; sometimes the following considerations felt relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;anonymity. If the questioner seems antagonistic or rude and I don't want to get into an argument, I might value the anonymity of a downvote&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not being able to think of anything useful and nice to say. It takes effort to write a good comment. Sometimes, I feel like it isn't worth the effort: e.g. if a question seems likely to be deleted soon, or if it seems so low-quality that I think it's unlikely the user who asked it will become a helpful member of the community. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An expansion on that: in my opinion, too many users on this leave patronizing, mocking, or superior-sounding comments on bad questions. (E.g. beneath a question about some grammar error, someone &quot;cleverly&quot; imitates the error in some comment saying the question doesn't belong on this site). I definitely think I have been guilty of doing this, but I want to try to avoid it. I feel like I'm being more rude if I downvote and leave a comment that can come across as mocking or patronizing than if I just downvote without any comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T02:23:35.687" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T02:23:35.687" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10836" CreationDate="2017-10-04T02:20:21.657" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvoters often do not explain why they have downvoted.  I've gotten downvotes with no explanation on what I think are decent questions and answers (most recently an hour ago.)   I think nearly everyone has.  We call this downvoter the &quot;drive-by downvoter.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen users give guidance to a new user on his/her Q or A, and seen that guidance totally ignored.  And, of course, the opposite is true: downvoters explain why, and the OP responds with an improved Q or A.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question in question showed no research at all, and the downvoter may have been tired of asking OPs to show their research or to at least explain why they are confused.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world, you are right; the experienced users should all be interested in being helpful.  Other users -- or the usually helpful user, when he is tired --  may feel that part of being an adult is figuring things out for oneself, such as what constitutes a good Q or A by reading good and bad Qs and As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My analogy has always been: the new user is encountering a strange new tribe with strange customs and taboos; be an anthropologist.  Part of that is asking questions on Meta, which you have done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T23:20:58.973" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T23:20:58.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10836" CreationDate="2017-10-04T03:08:03.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is truly inexcusable is not that the question was downvoted, but that no one (until me) had voted to close it. If questions are closed quickly then the close message will indicate what is wrong with the question in a more neutral manner that won't imply people are picking on the OP like a meanly worded comment would. (Of course many people in this community write very welcoming and friendly comments, so thank you to all of you who do so frequently!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T03:08:03.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10832" CreationDate="2017-10-04T03:21:27.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists often joke that the best definition of &quot;word&quot; is &quot;a thing you put spaces around&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I don't think it is very productive for this site to separate words and phrases or idioms. It doesn't match what users expect. For example, more than half of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot;&gt;phrase requests&lt;/a&gt; are also tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests+single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single word request&lt;/a&gt; - people often care about requesting a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; word (wrongheadedly IMO), but if they're after a phrase/idiom they're usually happy to accept single words as well. There have been calls for those tags to be made synonyms in the past, and I think that would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of an English lexeme is a common type of question on this site. I can't see how it would meaningfully help to separate out the etymology questions of single words from phrases/idioms. Especially considering some compound words which are freely written as single words, hyphenated, or as two words. The only thing such a separation would support is some kind of linguistic purity, which is not what this site is generally on about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And besides, the tag is already being used for phrases/idioms. The appropriate course of action would be to make phrase-origin a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T03:34:40.367" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T03:34:40.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10728" CreationDate="2017-10-04T03:36:48.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does this link help at all? I just downloaded it and it's working well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freecollocation.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free download Oxford collocations Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258304" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T03:36:48.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10844" CreationDate="2017-10-04T06:11:13.413" Score="3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently closed a question as a duplicate of another. Since I had a gold tag badge, it was instantly closed. The OP of the question had a gold tag badge as well, and decided to reopen it single-handedly. I was confused by this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is quickly re-closed by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this reopening be considered a conflict of interest sort of thing? And should we restrict gold tag badge users from reopening own questions single-handedly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't noticed any patterns of such behaviour anywhere. This is a one-off instance. But I was told by some users to ask this on meta either way, so that we get others' view on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE&lt;/strong&gt;: Answerers, please stick to the subject of &quot;reopening own posts singlehandedly&quot;, instead of going into tangential discussions about my way of closing a question. Thanks. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T12:28:02.453" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T17:52:18.523" Title="Should we restrict gold tag badge users from singlehandedly reopening their question?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10842" CreationDate="2017-10-04T12:37:30.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should this reopening be considered a conflict of interest sort of thing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And should we restrict gold tag badge users from reopening own questions single-handedly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The way it works currently is how the system is supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't prevent users from casting normal close and open votes on their own questions. If we decide to trust gold badge holders to have better judgement than other users about what kinds of question in their tag are duplicates, that should apply to their own questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has already been brought up on SE Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/279436/dont-allow-user-to-use-their-dupehammer-to-reopen-their-own-question&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t allow user to use their dupehammer to reopen their own question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:21:09.357" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:21:09.357" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10842" CreationDate="2017-10-04T14:25:20.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A 'gold tag badge' user is conferred with mod-like superpowers without mod-like training and behavior expectations of all kinds. Surely, when the system was changed, the designers anticipated the possibility of this scenario, but the benefits of the system outweighed the potential 'abuse' (not sure that's the right term) of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's anything that can be done to circumvent this issue without bringing this up in Meta SE. And things are very slow to change from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened and with whom, I don't know, so I can honestly say I'm impartial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's unwise to reopen one's own question. For me, far better the humility of allowing the question to remain closed than the embarrassment of opening it only to have it closed again by five more users. But that's just my opinion as an exceedingly humble person, so much so that I'm well known for my great humility and praised for it all the time.&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel strongly about it, take it to Meta. But it's unlikely to happen often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: As pointed out by others in comments, if you run into this, you can flag it for the moderator's attention; a mod closing is unlikely to be undone. Or the OP can bring it to meta to ask for the question to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;JUST KIDDING!!!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T16:07:51.740" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T16:07:51.740" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10842" CreationDate="2017-10-05T11:30:51.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone with over 250 rep has the right to vote to reopen their own question. They don't lose this right when they get a gold badge, and it would be obscene if they did. If their reopen vote happens to have a golden hammer attached, that's not their fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is simple, it seems to me. One shouldn't be able to golden hammer another golden badge holder's post. Problem solved. If the question is really close-worthy, it will get the necessary 5 close votes from regular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T16:02:13.090" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T16:02:13.090" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10842" CreationDate="2017-10-05T12:20:29.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Stack Exchange were to deny users the earned &quot;right&quot; to cast a reopen vote on their own question because of a conflict of interests, then they would also have to deny them the right to reopen a question that was not theirs but where they had posted an answer, maybe an answer with a heap of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether they had a gold dupehammer or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T17:52:18.523" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T17:52:18.523" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T18:51:56.393" Score="11" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a long time, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta-tags&lt;/a&gt;&quot; have been discouraged on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I ran into the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;, which I think is one of these not-useful tags. Questions about &quot;learning&quot; don't seem to be much of a meaningful group where someone might have expertise. It's not &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; a meta tag because teaching English to learners is definitely somewhat of a skill of its own ... but I feel like people wanting answers that are more &lt;em&gt;holistically&lt;/em&gt; oriented towards &quot;learning&quot; should be asking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt; rather than here. So to the extent that it's not a meta-tag, it seems to be a broad attitude-based tag that has an unfortunate (in my opinion) overlap with other sites. (I don't think all overlap is a bad thing, but this kind of overlap seems pointless.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag has 81 questions and 5 followers, which is not tiny but not huge either. The highest-upvoted question with this tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6209/what-is-meant-by-steep-learning-curve&quot;&gt;What is meant by “steep learning curve”?&lt;/a&gt; (current score 26), seems to have been tagged by accident just because it is about the word &quot;learning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose eliminating the tag &quot;learning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T20:41:34.497" Title="Should we get rid of the &quot;learning&quot; meta-tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10847" CreationDate="2017-10-05T20:41:34.497" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My vote is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;: die tag, die!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd also like to see the very related tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/esl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;esl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;esl&lt;/a&gt;, with 28 questions gone for many of the same reasons.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several types of questions that use the [learning] tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about learning (usually learning English), some of which are recommendation questions&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/321761/191178&quot;&gt;Where do I learn cursive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most, if not all of these questions are off topic: we don't do recommendations (at least not on main... if there's any content of value maybe it can be moved to the big meta post?) and questions about learning English in general should be asked on ELL, not here (from the Ask Question sidebar: &quot;If your question is about learning English, ask it on ELL instead.&quot;) and should be closed, and maybe some deleted. It's more convenient to find these questions while the tag is still on questions, so I wouldn't remove the tag from these questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that involve the word &quot;learning&quot; or other forms&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/388379/191178&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;ardent learner&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is nothing inherently off-topic about these questions, but I think we don't need the learning tag to keep these questions together.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that look pretty normal...but the learning tag was presumably added because the asker is learning English&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is just a English-specific [beginner] tag and [beginner] is called out as a meta-tag in the very blog post you linked. These questions are not inherently off-topic either, so removing the tag is best; you may need to add some tags if there was only the learning tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt; is pretty bad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that are useful for people learning English as a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason to wait to close or delete vote questions that are off topic (as always, make sure to use your powers wisely). As for questions which aren't off-topic and would need editing (if we all agree the tag needs to go), I don't think they should be edited all at once; let's avoid flooding the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T20:41:34.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-06T09:55:29.700" Score="0" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now reopened&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This apparently simple, question about possessive S has been closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412630/the-only-evidence-of-the-species-species-speciess-survival&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The species/species&amp;#39;/species&amp;#39;s survival...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that in this case this was a bit overhasty. This question has hidden depths relating not only to spelling and orthography but also English morphology and phonology. I've added a bit of research. Can we reopen it, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T09:17:28.540" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T03:02:30.493" Title="Let's reopen this interesting question" Tags="|support|status-completed|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10851" CreationDate="2017-10-06T10:30:31.543" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question about a translated Russian proverb sparked my meta: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/412920/50044&quot;&gt;Words are not Sparrows, once they have flown they cannot be recaptured&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412920/words-are-not-sparrows-once-they-have-flown-they-cannot-be-recaptured?#comment985640_412920&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; under it with my own translation of an Indian proverb: &lt;em&gt;A weapon that has left your hand, and a word that has left your mouth - you cannot get them back.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any similar English proverbs yet, which is why I went to using an Indian one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be an acceptable answer as well? Or should it be restricted to the comments section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T10:41:00.190" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T19:03:44.250" Title="Can I answer with translated proverbs or expressions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10850" CreationDate="2017-10-06T10:44:18.010" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that you are answering on the website &quot;English Language and Usage&quot;. An Indian proverb is not part of the English language; a literal translation is not part of English usage (unless of course the proverb has been absorbed into English or there is an English version; but that's a completely different situation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an obvious point and I wouldn't flag such an answer. I might, though, downvote it as unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T10:44:18.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10850" CreationDate="2017-10-06T14:20:28.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My advice would be always check if the saying exists in English as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22words+are+like+arrows%22+back&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGGE_en-gbGB472GB472&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwit2ZDyl9zWAhWkIcAKHYj0A3oQ_AUICygC&amp;amp;biw=1242&amp;amp;bih=615&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Words are like arrows, once loosed you cannot call them back&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a well-quoted saying in English and is wrongly attributed  to all sorts of individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you almost missed out on a giving great answer. Go do it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T14:52:29.717" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T14:52:29.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10849" CreationDate="2017-10-06T16:56:22.837" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the original form is somewhat wrong on a substantive point or two, which weakens my original point. Series is clearly singular possessive, so it is not quite as bad as I originally supposed, mostly because the consensus is not as strong as that. As a result, this question may be askable. This warrants a reassessment of the issue on my part. After doing so, &lt;em&gt;I still suspect it should be closed&lt;/em&gt;, but perhaps it may be salvageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the points remain the same. To reitterate and clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The edit's usefulness in excluding general reference answers is still not apparent, because it addresses a rule written specifically for personal names specifically, rather than common nouns, or even proper nouns generally. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Commonly available resources that should have been checked have not been factored into the question, permitting them to be used as the sole basis of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the scope of the question is narrower than proposed. Although they can be closely related and complimentary, what should be done, and why it is done are two different subjects. I only saw a question asking what should be done, and answers addressing what should be done. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt; suggest we should not change the intention of a post, and I suspect that is what is being attempted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The propensity of this being a duplicate is high, also due to the commodity of the subject matter of using apostrophes with a noun ending in terminal s.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What may be at issue is that because I misparsed a couple of things, my proposed general references referencing the most basic orthographic do not adequately address the matter. That might be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in consideration of that possibility, that does not necessarily mean that the research is good enough in its present form. The standard for general reference is to perform research regarding the question per step 1 of the flowchart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I was proposing before was rather substandard research, to emphasize the hopelessness of the matter if a basic orthographic rule applied. This is something that shows that perhaps the question can be salvaged, but not necessarily that it is good enough in its present form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I perform a reassessment based upon that though, I would like to suggest that the research standard for editors should be higher than for original posters, because getting information from the original posters benefits us in ways that editing it in does not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. It helps us to understand, and address any misapprehensions made apparent by the inadequate research efforts. When we add research on their behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. It helps us to understand what type of explanations and evidence fail to satisfy the questioner. This way, we do not end up repeating what they already saw, or merely use evidence of the same quality. This also promotes further explanation of the issue, beyond what references can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without some indication from the questioner, an editor can only speculate as to what type of answer can satisfy somebody else, so they should assume that any reasonably adequate answer that might be readily found could suffice, and must perform a research effort to see if one exists. You say that this question has its basis in pronunciation, which is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your concerns regarding &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we spell species' the way we do (assuming that is a uniform rule, which I have reason to doubt) are not the same as O.P's. concerns regarding how he should spell it. These are admittedly complimentary subjects, but the requisite for an adequate answer to the question as it is asked is lower for this one, we need to keep in mind what was actually asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any authoritative suggestion regarding how to spell the singular possessive form of the word suffices to answer this question, regardless of whether or not what causes us to spell the word that way is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these factors in mind this respect, we need to consider the question as it was actually asked: A research effort was disclosed, but not included, the intended, adequate context was given, and finally the question was asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be species' or species's ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No reason for suspecting one way or the other is better was indicated by the questioner. I see no reason anybody should have to explain the phonological aspects that may underlie the orthography, or even much effort to address them in any existing answer. Any relatively authoritative suggestion may suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have devised a basic few searches to see if I could find one, and perhaps not for the reason you might suspect. What I am trying to determine is what answers they share in common, so I can know what any one person might have found if they had only used one of the searches. I want to avoid treating google itself as general reference, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2374/google-is-not-general-reference&quot;&gt;it is not&lt;/a&gt; and if it was, that could put us out of a job. I want to see if a general reference result can be easily found using google, qualifying it as a commonly available resource and hence off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, to avoid setting my own potentially biased standards, I interpreted the flowchart given in Are Some Questions Too Basic most literally, and did &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.li/KLuIU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a word for word search for the question as it was asked&lt;/a&gt;. I used series in both of the other searches, to see what the specific rules regarding that word may be. &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/z2Fwp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I used apostrophe in one of the searches&lt;/a&gt;, since that is the name of the mark in question, and hence reasonably derived from the sentence/question as possible (since the actual mark in isolation doesn't bear much upon google search results). I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/9juH1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;possessive instead in the other&lt;/a&gt;, since this regards the possessive form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My three searches bear three interesting results in common:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/344432/singular-and-plural-possessive-of-species&quot;&gt;An older potential duplicate question, with an existing answer.&lt;/a&gt; The duplicate guidelines suggest that preference should be given to this newer question, since it is in an overall better state, but I think this should have been considered before reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A couple of grammarbook entries, from the the website of &lt;em&gt;The Blue Book of Punctuation and Grammar's&lt;/em&gt; (by Jane Straus [deceased]). One is just a gloss over in a pop quiz format, so I shall omit it for brevity, but the more interesting of which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/apostrophes/apostrophes-dueling-rules/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apostrophes: Dueling Rules&lt;/a&gt;, which states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• CMOS adds just an apostrophe when a noun ending in s is the same whether singular or plural. The guidebook offers three examples: politics’ true meaning, economics’ forerunners, and this species’ first record. The GrammarBook.com staff agrees with politics’ and economics’, but prefers this species’s, because in normal English usage, species is just as likely to be singular as it is to be plural—one often hears “a species,” but who says “a politics” or “an economics”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These results suggest that the question is not quite up to standards, since the grammarbook website was a professionally endeavor, designed to address these issues, and makes mention of the Chicago Manual of Style rule considered to be the authoritative answer. The difference of opinion leaves a little room for doubt, but not much if this is a presumably reliable report, given how much more respected the Chicago Manual of Style itself is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now perhaps I am mistaken, but I suspect anybody perhaps research for this question in earnest could have at least found these results. Editing this information into the question would most certainly be barred, as an attempt to reply (as it is meant to answer the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My most preferred result would be for the original poster to include their own research, for the reasons aforementioned in points A. and B. Failing that, especially since it may be harder to coax that information out of a question with an accepted answer, I would really appreciate information regarding what research methodologies went into determining that the question should be reopened. Perhaps that can give some perspective on whether or not the answer is really as readily answerable as I presently surmise, and meritorious enough to merit remaining open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I still recommend closure of the question in its current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T01:14:05.367" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T01:14:05.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10849" CreationDate="2017-10-07T02:45:21.627" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@tonepoet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with your answer here is that you don't seem to be able to distinguish singular and plural nouns. &#xA; Look carefully at the example from the Original Poster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only evidence of the species' survival before &lt;strong&gt;ITS&lt;/strong&gt; rediscovery at the end of the century was an unconfirmed recording.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the pronoun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is referring back to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the species&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This clearly shows that &lt;em&gt;the species&lt;/em&gt; is singular here. If it was plural, the sentence would read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only evidence of the species' survival before &lt;strong&gt;THEIR&lt;/strong&gt; rediscovery at the end of the century was an unconfirmed recording.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically, your post is off-topic, and even had the links and advice not been wonky: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;if the noun is singular, the apostrophe goes before the s&lt;/em&gt;. (This, of course, would result in: &lt;em&gt;this specie's survival&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you would still be missing the Original Poster's problem, which is basically that the possessive form of a word ending in an /s/ and written with an S is usually suffixed with an extra syllable represented in the writing by ['S]. The possessive of &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt; has no such extra syllable - and so should it have an extra ['S] or just be punctuated: species'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T14:37:43.947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T14:37:43.947" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10806" CreationDate="2017-10-07T09:03:04.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to raise an issue (often raised in the Academia) of &lt;strong&gt;authority&lt;/strong&gt; versus &lt;strong&gt;fact&lt;/strong&gt;. Not only clashes may occur between those who would &quot;prefer to err with Galen than be right with Harvey&quot; (e.g. sticking with classic grammarians versus modern usage) not to mention that grammar is not a hard science and facts are more difficult to establish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What disturbs me sometimes in those discussions, is that academic degree, place of birth, etc., seem to matter more than fact and a system of snobism could surreptitiously establish itself, with a ruling class. In that system, people who do not have &quot;credentials&quot; would have to bring more burden of proof than others. In other words, the argument &lt;em&gt;ad personam&lt;/em&gt; would still seem to have currency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the extreme, consulting the &lt;strong&gt;reputation&lt;/strong&gt; of a person instead of the facts pointed out in an answer (with or without learned references), is still argument &lt;em&gt;ad personam&lt;/em&gt; and, from a strict scientific perspective, a fallacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The social mechanism of &lt;strong&gt;reputation&lt;/strong&gt; does have its use however, which (as the word clearly states), tells about &lt;em&gt;social acceptance&lt;/em&gt;. It is used as a &lt;em&gt;proxy&lt;/em&gt; for truth for lack of better, but let's not forget that it is a very imperfect mechanism, just as &quot;peer-review&quot; in Academia. The system has some degree of validity, but we have to live with the risk that some invalid answers may have high rating because they match common opinion, while some good factual ones may be &quot;downgraded&quot; because they don't match that opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As physicist Feynman said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my part, I will lend my full unreserved respect to the answer of any &quot;maverick&quot; born in a non-English speaking town, even with no degree or reputation at all, who can bring about facts in an answer that appeal to my curiosity and which I can endeavour to verify. Otherwise, how could anyone acquire reputation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even beyond this, this tells a lot about the attitude of modern society toward &lt;strong&gt;facts&lt;/strong&gt;. Facts are what is observable, not what authorities, commissions, boards and even academics and teachers &lt;em&gt;tell us&lt;/em&gt; to observe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is not always easy to discern facts from opinion and many people are &lt;strong&gt;asking for guidance&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; where the problem is. The value that we should all cultivate on this forum, is that defined by Immanuel Kant as &lt;em&gt;Enlightnement&lt;/em&gt;, which is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Enlightenment&lt;/strong&gt; is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! &lt;strong&gt;(Sapere aude.) &quot;Have the courage to use your own understanding,&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is my answer to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you sort the good from the bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at reputation, citations and whatnot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;dare to know&lt;/strong&gt;! Use your own observation and understanding! Liberate yourself from the self-imposed nonage of social acceptance and intellectual authority!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a fairly workable mechanism for a forum. It is far from perfect and I would like to commend those who are behind it because they are fully aware of that and permanently trying to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to give credence to the myth that truth will somehow emerge fully formed from a system of social metrics such as reputation and degrees, etc., would reduce these forums (as Feynman would put it) into &lt;a href=&quot;http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cargo cult science&lt;/a&gt;: a series of rituals devoid of substance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh well, I am sure that my words are going to raise discomfort and anger and rebukes as &quot;who do you think you are to think you can think&quot;? But isn't that the lot of any person who wants to trust &lt;strong&gt;fact&lt;/strong&gt; rather than opinion, even &lt;strong&gt;authoritative opinion&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202177" LastEditorUserId="202177" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T09:46:55.663" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T09:46:55.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10836" CreationDate="2017-10-07T16:38:15.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfriendly criticism, or a lower vote of a newcomer without explanation appear to be violations of the rule &quot;be nice&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, offenders can sometimes be found among individuals with a high reputation score. From a human perspective this may be understandable: on one hand they must have been there for a long time and there can be a fatigue effect. On the other, one might get the erroneous notion that social approval affords increased license, or a duty to act as &quot;vigilante patrol&quot; for the good of the forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so: there are &quot;legal&quot; mechanisms of control on Stack Exchange (from putting questions on hold, measures to avoid &quot;me too&quot; answers, up to account termination) and those are to be exerted in case of need; but for the rest, freedom should reign. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is often reminded, &quot;the law is the same for everyone&quot;, for otherwise it would allow the tyranny of those who consider themselves above it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen today a valid first answer downvoted because it quoted a dictionary and someone wrote that it &quot;did not bring anything new&quot;. This type of behaviour appears as arbitrary (opinion and not fact) and likely to undermine the goodwill of participants: by giving them the impression that standards of participation are not only beyond their reach, but also a moving target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202177" LastEditorUserId="202177" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T17:26:17.217" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T17:26:17.217" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10864" CreationDate="2017-10-08T01:21:43.230" Score="10" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please bear with me: I am still a learner in this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/413124/is-this-clause-the-passive-or-present-perfect/%20%22question%20such%20as%20this,&quot;&gt;question such as this&lt;/a&gt;, where a correct answer (well, one I would have given) has been provided and the question seems interesting, is it ok to answer and expound on the comment, giving the person who commented credit of course. Or do people just comment at times because there is a quick answer to the question and they don't want to be downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258304" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T09:17:51.780" LastActivityDate="2023-04-11T13:04:22.063" Title="Protocol when a comment provides a reasonable answer" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-10-21T03:31:42.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10857" CreationDate="2017-10-08T02:47:03.403" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;People leave partial answers in comments for various reasons. Regardless, if you see useful information or partial answers in the comments, you can use that to write a detailed answer yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd be nice to give credit where it's due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T12:58:31.440" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T12:58:31.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10806" CreationDate="2017-10-08T16:32:26.043" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wow, what happened? I write responses to questions when I feel like it. I'm always on point. My responses are casual and targeted. I respond differently if the person posting is an ESL user or a native speaker trying to write a job cover letter. I've noticed some people who write responses here are pedantic and ostentatious for no reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say, go with your gut feeling. If a response seems condescending, then screw it. I received negative votes for pointing out that &quot;waker&quot; is not a noun (as in a person), but if said out loud sounds like &quot;wanker&quot; - British slang for jerkin' off. You can't please everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260830" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T17:00:46.137" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T17:00:46.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10857" CreationDate="2017-10-08T16:53:10.037" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please bear with me: why do you care? :-) If you have information that might help someone who posted a question and got a mediocre or incomplete response, then post your advice. If someone posted anything you think is wrong, then voice it. If anyone downvotes you, who cares? He or she should have the courtesy to at least explain why. If not, well... that just means that he/she has no leg to stand on, or is just lazy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260830" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T17:00:59.157" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T17:00:59.157" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10865" CreationDate="2017-10-08T23:22:34.680" Score="15" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is immediately evident that ELU runs as well as it does, is as informative as it is and stays as courteous as it does because of the hidden contribution that goes on, constantly, behind the scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, to all concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T05:06:21.893" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T05:06:21.893" Title="As a newcomer I would like to say Thank You" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10857" CreationDate="2017-10-09T03:38:58.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will not speak for others but some of why people do it is addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4217/why-do-some-people-answer-in-comments&quot;&gt;Why Do Some People Answer in Comments&lt;/a&gt; on the main Meta Stack Exchange (S.E.) Website. The matter is also addressed in a similar topic here on our local Meta in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2653/124936&quot;&gt;Why Are Answers Being Posted in the Comments on the Question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the the matter regarding what to do has already been addressed on the main Meta S.E. website a few times times before. The canonical question there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117251/what-should-be-done-with-questions-that-have-been-self-resolved-as-a-comment-ins&quot;&gt;What should be done with questions that have been resolved as a comment instead of an answer?&lt;/a&gt; The top rated answer there, by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/147520/iain&quot;&gt;Iain&lt;/a&gt; reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We discussed this on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.serverfault.com/q/1886/9517&quot;&gt;meta.serverfault&lt;/a&gt; a short while ago and decided that you should &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.serverfault.com/a/1931/9517&quot;&gt;Steal comments that answer the question and post them as an answer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; You can always tick the Community Wiki box if you're not comfortable earning reputation for someone else's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;The top rated answers on a meta post are supposed to set the policy&lt;/a&gt;, provided that something else doesn't superscede it. However the secondary answer raises the important point that it is not an excuse for plagiarism, so if you are directly quoting the comment, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;then you should follow our rules for referencing material written by others&lt;/a&gt;. Even though it may seem as if the original source should be obvious, it is still important since comments can become hidden if enough other comments are made, or disappear for no reason whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to consider flagging the comment for deletion, if it really is an answer, because many website mechanisms are heavily predicated upon the premise that comments and answers serving a different scope, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;which is defined by our commentary guidelines&lt;/a&gt;. To closely paraphrase the relevant portions for your convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are for clarification, constructive criticism and minor or transient information, like a related link to a related question. They are not for answering the question, or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer, and an actual answer should be posted instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you flag a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; comment for deletion, you may want to post it as an answer first, because otherwise there is no retrieving it, if it is. I suggest considering using the community wiki tickbox if you post just the comment, so that others may expand upon it, if it does not suffice to stand as an answer on its own merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-04-11T13:04:22.063" LastActivityDate="2023-04-11T13:04:22.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10863" CreationDate="2017-10-09T08:49:48.457" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking on behalf of everyone on ELU,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;You're welcome! :)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's newcomers like you who stick around to learn the site's culture that keeps the site working as it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T08:49:48.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10867" CreationDate="2017-10-09T13:35:01.913" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/413310/50044&quot;&gt;'You were pigged'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This linked question has two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Any idea as to when &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to be pigged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was coined?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is the phrase also used in the US? If not what would be its equivalent? &lt;em&gt;Prank&lt;/em&gt; doesn't seem to cut the mustard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/413311/50044&quot;&gt;answered the part 1 alone&lt;/a&gt;, about the possible origins. My answer is not fully answering the question. I made it CW (Community wiki) in that I don't get any reputation or lose any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is subject to all the usual community moderation, votes, reviews and comments. If it's a bad answer, downvotes and flags can handle it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that I have upset a few users by that. A comment under my answer says: &lt;em&gt;wait a couple of hours before posting a CW, if no one posts a single comment, or no one posts any answer I might understand but this is ... a misuse.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T14:36:59.833" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T19:21:48.767" Title="Is there a guideline that I should not use a CW answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10866" CreationDate="2017-10-09T14:33:38.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your use of CW seems like you don't know what the purpose of CW is for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CW is in a sense to not get any rep for something, intentionally to expect lots of users to share in the creation so that no one is favored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the question and answer content here, there is no expectation of many editors (beyond the usual common expected editing practices to improve q's and a's). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you gave is entirely your answer. You shouldn't be CW'ing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T14:33:38.413" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10866" CreationDate="2017-10-09T16:40:14.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might find the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;The Future of Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt; helpful. Some relevant snippets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of community wiki in answers is to help share the burden of solving a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki is for that rare gem of a post that needs true community collaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation of that is that community wikis are not there for me to write a partial answer and have other folks to fill it in instead of writing their own answer, or for me to take a comment left by someone else and post it as CW answer so I don't get reputation for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A CW is appropriate when a complete answer to a question is a large effort that would benefit from the community working together to fill out and refine it. A good example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/13262/&quot;&gt;this canonical answer on ELL&lt;/a&gt;. Another situation where a CW &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be appropriate is the subject matter is controversial (but on-topic) and voting is likely to be emotional. The wording of the answer might need to be refined to be as neutral/objective as possible. The problem with that is that there could be conflict among the editors that isn't particularly constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, using CWs for reputation consequence avoidance is counter to their purpose. If a comment can answer a question thoroughly and well, the question isn't a very good fit for the SE model. It shouldn't be difficult to take a comment and flesh it out by adding supporting references and discussion. When you make the effort to expand the comment-answer into a real answer, you deserve the reputation that comes from it. This isn't a quiz show where the first person to buzz in gets the points. If all you're doing is copying and pasting a comment into a CW answer, I think that's bad practice that places statistics and rules over actual value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to write a partial answer, just say it's a partial answer. If the community strongly dislikes partial answers and down-votes them ruthlessly, then the solution isn't to avoid the reputation consequences by making a partial answer a CW. The solution is &amp;quot;don't post partial answers&amp;quot;. If I felt the community was opposed to partial answers (which I think are OK), I would come to meta to try to change folks' minds, not post them anyhow and try to nullify the primary mechanism the community has for discouraging things outside of the norms that they've settled on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a quick glance at the highest scored answers in &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/547717/list-of-community-wiki-posts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list of community wiki posts on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; and I remain convinced that CWs are rarely needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I got some help, and Rene worked out &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/738596/community-wiki-answers-with-multiple-editors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query for CWs with multiple editors&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't looked through the data in detail yet, but thought it might be interesting. Of the 577 wiki answers on EL&amp;amp;U only 87 of them have multiple editors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T19:21:48.767" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10836" CreationDate="2017-10-09T18:08:17.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a newcomer too. I've gotten some downvotes without explanation. If a post of yours was on-point, apt, and well-intended, then what can you do if someone knocks it? There are a lot of good writers on here. I say, read their responses. Anyone who downvotes you without explaining why is (insert word here I'd get downvoted for using).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260830" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T18:08:17.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10829" CreationDate="2017-10-10T04:43:16.860" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a good test case for this question. I was very active for the year following my joining - 470 answers between June 2011 and July 2012. For the last five years, I've only posted 45 additional answers, and haven't posted any since August last year. Questions too - out of my 133 questions, 128 of them happened during that first year. My last question is nearly three years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my reputation gain over the last year reflects only votes on posts at least a couple months old, also keeping in mind that over ninety percent of my posts are over five years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Oct 9, 2016 I had 42,677 reputation, and as of Oct 9, 2017 I have 44,844 reputation. That's somewhat over 2k, or just about exactly 5% per year. I have not been active, so this number has not been affected by bounties or my downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say then that you want to have around 20K rep in order to idly fund 1K rep spending per year. Maybe 21K if you want to be sure to retain 20K privileges throughout the year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: OK, so curiosity is killing the cat. I knew there must be a SE data query that would reveal &quot;passive&quot; reputation in some meaningful way -- and sure enough, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/738662/917745/top-users-ranked-by-their-average-passive-rep-earned-per-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is, now&lt;/a&gt;. Check it out. There's quite a significant margin of error between users. Hopefully it's pretty self-explanatory, but what we find is about exactly what my case seems to show. All users earn an average of over 1000 passive rep per year with the exception of two users, until you get below 21K rep total. The chart shows I average over 3K passive rep per year, but remember that is an average over all six years I've been here. Apparently, it slows down as my posts become enshrouded in the ever more distant past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your own standing: you have averaged... wait for it... 999 annual rentier income. KaShazam!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="10041" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T06:27:11.483" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T06:27:11.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-10T12:02:14.043" Score="6" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/369477/is-this-room-was-slept-in-by-milton-grammatical-even-though-sleep-is-an-intr&quot;&gt;Is “This room was slept in by Milton” grammatical even though ‘sleep’ is an intransitive verb?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited my question, which got at least 6 upvotes,  explaining why it was not a duplicate. It received an answer that got &lt;strong&gt;16&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes.  Others suggested merging or reopening procedures. But it's still marked as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the most upvoted answer there does not address the property of intransitive as assigned by the dictionary, which is an integral part of this question. In addition the same answer there is confusing because it says both that transitivity is not a property of verbs and yet ends up talking about transitive verbs. In addition, the same answer does not explicitly deal with verbs other than &quot;sense verbs&quot;. So I'm not sure if that answer applies to to sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T14:18:11.223" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T14:18:11.223" Title="Can we please reopen this question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10872" CreationDate="2017-10-10T12:40:50.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would advise that even if this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate, which is something I am unqualified to assess, your question is better, and so are the answers. This is not only determined by the votes, but the sheer amount of effort put into the posts. The other question doesn't even provide details regarding what type of research was done, or a context to help us understand the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is a far more useful, and exemplary question in its present state, and duplicate question guidelines in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled/&quot;&gt;How should duplicate questions be handled?&lt;/a&gt; suggest that it should be given preference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usually a recent question will be closed as a duplicate of an older question, but this isn't an absolute rule. The general rule is to keep the question with the best collection of answers, and close the other one as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the old question, only Professor Lawler's answer has a positive voting score at 7 votes, and it does not seem to be anywhere near as informative or referenced as tchrist's which has 16 votes for it. I think we should &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; reopen this (if not change the canonical question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as long as I am here, I should add that I do not think the provided answers have bearing on whether or not a question is a duplicate or not. I think that should be determined by the scope of the question, and the answers it is likely to receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T12:59:39.737" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T12:59:39.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-10T15:51:14.120" Score="15" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Clare &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;DEATH.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - Black and White&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XrX8n.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XrX8n.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment was deleted after &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/413325/a-word-or-phrase-to-describe-citizens-of-a-country-who-are-naturally-inclined-to#comment987101_413325&quot;&gt;I asked the commenter for clarification&lt;/a&gt;. I don’t know why it was deleted or by who(m). I hadn’t flagged it.  I don’t feel comfortable receiving such a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HiaHv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HiaHv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA:  (And now my comment asking for clarification has been deleted. I have a screen grab on my device showing that comment as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T18:36:39.400" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T18:36:39.400" Title="What should I do, I receive a targeted DEATH comment?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10874" CreationDate="2017-10-10T17:42:55.430" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you didn't have the opportunity to flag the comment (which is the preferred course of action), raising the matter on Meta is an option. However, it's not usually The Best Idea&amp;trade; to raise this sort of thing in public: the general advice is (a) flag; (b) flag something else of the user's; (c) contact moderators in chat — we can open a private chatroom; (d) use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;Contact&lt;/a&gt; link at the bottom of every page to contact SE staff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment is, on its own, rather cryptic. However, it is (I judge) a violation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;&quot;Be nice&quot; policy&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rudeness and belittling language are not okay.&lt;/strong&gt; Your tone should match the way you'd talk in person with someone you respect and whom you want to respect you. If you don't have time to say something politely, just leave it for someone who does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't be a jerk.&lt;/strong&gt; These are just a few examples. If you see them, flag them:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Harassment and bullying.&lt;/strong&gt; If you see a hostile interaction, flag it. If it keeps up, &lt;em&gt;disengage&lt;/em&gt; — we'll handle it. If something needs staff attention, you can use the contact us link at the bottom of every page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, using the comment system as a private messaging channel — waiting for the notice to appear in the recipient's inbox and then deleting the comment — is an abuse. Comments are provided in order to allow asking for clarification or pointing out an egregious error in a post. Occasionally, a witty remark might be made in a comment and might resist deletion. However, excessive commenting is a template we have at our disposal in moderator messages, and abuse of the system — especially in what may be considered an underhand way — is unlikely to end well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we are not really at liberty to discuss individual users, their age or other personal circumstances or their past history, so I won't. Nor will we comment on this individual case other than the general statements in this answer. There is probably enough here to read between the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T17:42:55.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10880" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:18:42.390" Score="9" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there is a new top banner bar on my SE pages today, and I can't figure out where the help pages went (links to the Tour, Help Center, etc.). What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jVtg8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jVtg8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Current EL&amp;amp;U top banner, showing in top bar, left to right: StackExchange link; Search box; my icon and current score; badges; message icon; awards icon; search queue icon; icon for all other SEs.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T01:25:08.947" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T01:25:08.947" Title="Where did the help pages go?" Tags="|support|help-pages|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10879" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:33:15.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's one link in the site switcher dropdown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LloBF.png&quot; alt=&quot;help, chat, log out&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one under the ? menu (now shown to all users):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/85Qpd.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one in the footer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wwm5D.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here’s the link (since the app doesn’t have a direct way to get there):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T17:11:12.370" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T17:11:12.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:35:34.410" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;On October 4, 2017 was asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412625/is-there-any-difference-in-the-meanings-of-eternal-and-everlasting&quot;&gt;Is there any difference in meaning between ‘eternal’ and ‘everlasting’&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to me about as duplicate as you can get to the question of June 20 (2016) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333434/difference-between-everlasting-and-eternal&quot;&gt;Difference between ‘everlasting’ and ‘eternal’&lt;/a&gt;, which contains two decent answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me if these are duplicates or not, as some of my recent tags have been rejected and I’m wondering if I should retract my duplicate flag on the Oct 4 question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if it is a straightforward dupe, why hasn’t it been voted as such? Do others not vote for possible duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T15:42:53.363" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:04:38.847" Title="Please let me know how this question is not a duplicate of this other one (eternal vs everlasting)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:25:30.523" Score="6" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This bug is little more than a minor nuisance, but it strikes me as something that would be easy to fix and improve user experience if it were changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you set a filter on the review queue, and then you complete all reviews that satisfy that filter, the filter drop-down gets cut off screen because it doesn't fit in the surrounding div.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z7fmP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z7fmP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A scrollbar appears, but it is on the far right of the screen as seen above, so figuring out how to clear your filter is not completely intuitive.  When one does scroll down, the other parts of the surrounding div get scrolled off-screen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yFWiH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yFWiH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the filter drop-down should be able to extend beyond the surrounding div, or the div could have a minimum height that allowed the complete drop down to fit.  Afterall, when you complete a review queue (filtered or otherwise), there is nothing else to see on the screen below, so there is no reason for a drop down to be cut off and require scrolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T16:28:04.797" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T16:28:04.797" Title="Review Queue filter drop-down cut off screen" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10881" CreationDate="2017-10-11T19:37:38.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you are right. I think the questions have the same intended scope, and that answers to the proposed original could be applied to the proposed duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think I can understand why others might disagree: With Nigel's edit, his question addresses a more specific context than the original one does. It could hypothetically be read as &quot;Why did the King James Bible chose to consistently translate the greek olam into everlasting and aionos into eternal?&quot; instead of &quot;What is the usual difference between everlasting and eternal now?&quot; Perhaps there is a difference in meaning that applied in Early Modern English that is no longer used, and if so, that point of interest may encourage &lt;em&gt;separate sets of answers&lt;/em&gt; to each question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are usually pretty forgiving about the whole duplicate thing, if somebody can adequately explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; their question needs a different answer than the original. The duplicate policy mostly exists so that all answers regarding a particular issue can be found in one place, but if there are two separate issues that need to be answered differently, then it makes little sense to close one question as a duplicate as the other, even though they may seem to be the same at face value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I suspect it is a duplicate, I would personally at least like to know which matter Nigel J is interested in knowing before deeming it a duplicate. If it is the issue explained in second half of the question, perhaps somebody could make a clarifying edit could be applied to show that the question is not a duplicate. However, if he really does just want to know the general difference between the two words is, then I would recommend keeping it closed as a duplicate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, due to the nature of the question, I also only mean to address this matter from the matter of if it is, or is not, a duplicate. Determining if it should, or should not be closed for some other reason is a much more complicated matter, due to the half dozen or so closure reasons that may apply. Naturally, if there is some other reason it should be closed, it should be closed regardless of if it is a duplicate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T01:28:34.413" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T01:28:34.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10897" CreationDate="2017-10-11T23:42:11.720" Score="9" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions on EL&amp;amp;U frequently lack context in one form or other, whether to understand the intent of the question or to narrow the scope of answers sought. To counter this, we often refer users to rules and checklists, but it can help a lot to see good examples of what we have in mind. A good example is the recently-updated &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag doesn't provide any examples. I'd like propose the following question for that tag as a model question that we can refer users to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/413735/142322&quot;&gt;Term for being unable to see glaring errors after working for some time on a task?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some reasons why it's a good question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the title clearly and concisely frames the question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is good background information to understand the motivation of the question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;research has been demonstrated;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it notes several discarded options, together with &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they weren't a good fit; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it provides a reasonable level of guidance on the qualities of an ideal answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can just edit the tag myself, but I'm asking this meta question for two reasons. I wanted to highlight the question above - it deserved more than just a +1. I also wanted to seek consensus before effectively laying down the standard and model for the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question fits the OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag, but it could be a model answer more broadly. Perhaps it would be appropriate to link to the question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt; page as well. That page also has a lot of instructions and no examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the cited question sufficiently embody everything that EL&amp;amp;U wants in a question that it deserves a place as a canonical or model question on the help and/or tag information pages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T14:44:49.163" Title="Seeking consensus for a model/canonical question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-12T11:50:08.093" Score="19" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how the top bar appears in October 2017 on my desktop. I like the search box, it's larger and it is clear. But it's off-center, it's like a picture frame that's askew, I want to align the search box either to the extreme right (or left) or place it bang in the centre. I can live with the jet black strip, it's been with us since December 2013 but I do not like the chunky icons. I do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u1SPb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u1SPb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how the top bar and the same question looked in 2013. Simple, elegant and easy to navigate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yDQ7u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yDQ7u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same screenshot but with arrows, notes, and stuff..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GiPeQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GiPeQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, today...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/omZlj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/omZlj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and May 25, 2012 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20120525185211/http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aHpKw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aHpKw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot of a question as it appeared prior 2014 to a user but &lt;strong&gt;it seems to me that the old top bar was far easier to use and navigate for visitors, newcomers and users alike than it is today.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does the developing team at SE prefer weird-looking icons to using actual words? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2wRAr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2wRAr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; •••• &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nf5Mn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nf5Mn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user described the first icon as looking like a square bra, and he's absolutely right! It took me some time to figure out it was an in-tray (mail). And I get that Stack Exchange has that bubble logo divided into layers (nicknamed “hamburger”), but it doesn't &lt;em&gt;tell me&lt;/em&gt; I have to click there in order to switch sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; 22 October 2017&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ten days later, and I still find myself clicking on the StackExchange logo  on the far left to visit meta. Grr... Can we not have an icon meta, like back in 2013? And while we're at it, it seems to me the badges icons are redundant, the numbers are self-explanatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pGOkN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pGOkN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the searchbox could be repositioned, the meta icon would sit nicely next to the SE logo. It looks better, doesn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Azd36.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Azd36.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4300/what-the-f-just-happened&quot;&gt;What the f*** just happened?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T10:19:24.703" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T10:19:24.703" Title="EL&amp;U's top bar stopped being elegant in 2013" Tags="|discussion|design|display|top-bar|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-13T14:37:57.760" Score="10" ViewCount="836" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU attracts a number of kinds of questions that, while superficially ELU material, just don't fit for one reason or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose a set of recommendations that we can give to question askers as to where to go to get their questions answered better, all in the hopes of helping people kindly rather than just turning them away and leaving them bitter. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;elementary grammar - Is it &quot;its&quot; or &quot;it's&quot;? There are plenty of online grammar sites easily found on Google that can answer most of these questions with minimal effort in searching&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Do people really say this?' - really, just Google for it with quotes and see if there are examples. Or, if you're an English learner and want to inquire about a natural way to say something conversationally, you can ask at our sibling site for English learners: ell.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;multi-lingual questions - comparisons of English with other languages - ask on linguistics.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;discussions/open-ended questions/controversies/opinion based situations - chat?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proofreading/grammar check - &quot;I have a passage I'm writing. Can you tell me what's wrong?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing advice - &quot;What's a good word for this?&quot; &quot;How can I make my passage better?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Single Word Requests - thesaurus, then come back to ELU for a more pointed question about nuance (many SWRs could be on-topic, but need a lot of work). Proofreading, writing advice, and SWRs have overlap, so one could be solved by the other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;labels for code, class or variable names - &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EFL test questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;translations - translate.google.com, readlang, babel, lots of on-line dictionaries: dict.leo.de, reverso.fr, lexilog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions about explaining poetry or lyrics or jokes - Plain explaining any of these is off-topic (What did they mean by 'pompatus of love'?&quot;). There are multiple sites that handle it just fine. Parts of these questions can be converted to on-topic ones 'What exactly is the pun?', 'Is this syntax used in regular day-to-day speech?'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;general language learning - hints on how to learn vocab, improve ones accent: go to LL or watch movies/youtube&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;general linguistics - language things that are not specific to English - linguistics.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;technical language - vocabulary that is peculiar to a given technical situation - often people in those areas (like math or biology) will have a much better idea of the nuances. I'm not saying I consider these off-topic for ELU, just more likely an authoritative answer somewhere else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;request for resources - these are off-topic for main but should be welcome on ELU.meta (like this very question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is an incomplete list and, of those here, have poor explanations. I expect answers to this meta question will elaborate and give suggestions on what to do, links or references or rewrites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should also be something that says that some ostensibly &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; questions (that are considered on-topic just by the culture here (maybe editing and adding to the following is enough):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provenance of proverbs or idioms - eg &quot;Who said 'Even the devil can quote scripture' first?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closest corresponding proverb to a foreign proverb - eg &quot;In my native language, there is a saying that goes &quot;rem acu tetigisti&quot; which means something like 'the needle was touched'. Is there something like this in English?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;history of English speaking peoples - as this informs how dialects come about &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comparison of synonyms - ostensibly could be figured out by looking at a/multiple dictionary(ies). But dictionaries aren't that comprehensive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta-questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6798/repository-of-polite-responses&quot;&gt;Repository of Polite Responses&lt;/a&gt; - these are about being polite about poor questions (on- or off- topic), rather than addressing how to off-topic questions answered elsewhere)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What Good Reference Works On English Are Available&lt;/a&gt; - these are about helping to support/give references for on-topic questions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T22:55:05.320" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T18:47:26.483" Title="I have a question, but it's off-topic. Where else could I ask?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="39" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-13T14:44:21.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Discussions, open-ended questions, controversies, opinion based situations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU (and more generally the SE system) is considered to be a Q&amp;amp;A system, where people ask more or less deterministic questions, and people with more experience try to give authoritative answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes questions don't know enough to ask towards a simple answer. The question may be asking for an opinion rather than a fact. Or there may be a lot of nuance that requires back-and-forth between more than one person to extract the nuance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best place to get answers like these is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;ELU chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask in the main site or convert to a room specifically for the subject (in order to talk only about your topic). The main site is usually best because people will usually be just there and willing to help and respond to nuance questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few caveats about SE chat (any of the chats on StackExchange...I don't know about other chat platforms). Though SE chat is ostensibly intended for a back and forth discussion for which a comment chain under a question is unwieldy, it tends to be more of a general conversation. Some chatrooms are entirely on-topic, but ELU tends not to stay focussed. People sometimes pop in to ask quickly 'Is this sentence right?' and get answered fairly quickly with a  little back and forth, but a longer philosophical discussion usually just doesn't happen. It's more likely to slip into the politics of whether the British Empire is to blame with supporting material from SpongeBob youtube videos followed by multilingual puns about how to greet Romanian sharks. And the weather. Not puns about the weather, just discussing the weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of discussability depends on the people. ELL chat may have people that will stay on topic, but it is a bit sparse (people don't hang around there very long to have a discussion. ELU is sometimes sparse, but also sometimes crowded and chaotic, so may be hard to have a satisfying resolution in the conversation because the thread may be difficult to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of ELU I'm not sure where the community would be. If you are a language learner, most of the language learning apps like HelloTalk or iTalk have one-on-one chatting situations which might suffice, but then you are limited to a single point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T13:00:11.960" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-13T14:44:21.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-13T14:52:14.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;H3&gt;Proofreading or grammar check&lt;/H3&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reverso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarcheck.net/editor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammarcheck&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarly.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammarly&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MSWord has a built-in grammar and spell check (of questionable utility). It might be a good first pass in checking number agreement or dangling participles (but not choice of words). Don't rely on it as correct but just as a way to get rid of obvious stuff you missed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are online services for readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://splasho.com/upgoer5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Upgoer5 editor&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://readable.io/text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Readable&lt;/a&gt; Flesch-Kincaid complexity scores&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hemingwayapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hemingway Editor&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Makes your writing bold and clear. It's like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The EL&amp;amp;U-Meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7571/where-can-i-ask-for-free-proofreading&quot;&gt;&quot;Where can I ask for free proofreading?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; has suggestions for a number of proofreading options, including some of those listed above and peer-to-peer options.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T19:09:18.013" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T19:09:18.013" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-13T14:52:14.673" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-13T15:09:13.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Translation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not strictly off-topic, these kinds of questions usually are because they are more readily answered by consulting easily accessible dictionaries or there is just not enough info given in English to explain the nuances of the non-English word or it is sometimes painful to answer 'there is just no such exactly corresponding word in English, because hey, they're different languages'. Also, there may not be any professional translators around on ELU to answer what is actually a translation question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before asking the question of ELU, try out these sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;sites for professional translators answering translation questions (sign-up is required):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.proz.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.translatorscafe.com/tcterms/en-US/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tc terms on translatorscafe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;individual words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://readlang.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;readlang&lt;/a&gt; - translates words you right-click on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leo&lt;/a&gt; - centered on German but translates words to many languages. Start with English, go to German, then off to any of many. Has a really good discussion board for nuances of words and phrases, a lot of the discussion is in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexilogos.com/english/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexilogos&lt;/a&gt; a comprehensive list of language services for many (all?) languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;passages&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translate.google.com&lt;/a&gt; - it's right there in the name. It's fun to make fun of weird repeated letters in some foreign script creating post-modern English poetry, but google gets better and better (especially with common world languages like Spanish (Chinese isn't all there yet but it also is improving).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.babelfish.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BabelFish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.aspx?lang=EN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reverso&lt;/a&gt; like dict.leo but centered on French. But frankly you'd hardly know it. Does everything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you can use the usual translating techniques of following the translation chain of synonyms - English to French back to English and back to French. The common words are probably accurate, or the diverging path means you have a vague word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="100179" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T18:47:26.483" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T18:47:26.483" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-13T15:21:11.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-13T12:37:18.320" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create content for my website but I am not a native English speaker, so I will have a lot of errors for sure. I am wondering if there's a place I can send my writings to be checked and corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask on EL&amp;amp;U? Is there a place specifically for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258750" OwnerDisplayName="Joseph" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T19:07:12.500" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T19:07:12.500" Title="Is there a place i can send my English writing so they can correct it for me?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-10-13T19:46:52.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7571" CreationDate="2017-10-13T13:13:54.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I usually use...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reverso: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or...: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarcheck.net/editor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.grammarcheck.net/editor/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261298" OwnerDisplayName="Spelling.lover" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T13:13:54.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-14T03:49:55.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: I'm learning English and don't understand something&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution: The best way to learn is by talking with native speakers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no substitute for long face to face conversations with fluent native speakers of English. For many people, the easiest/only way to do that will be to take formal language classes with a qualified native speaker. Yes, learning English well will take a lot of time, effort, and often money. But to be fair, it takes all those three for every other language as well, unless you're lucky enough to learn them as a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T06:48:44.057" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T06:48:44.057" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-14T17:45:13.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Meaning of poetry, lyrics, or jokes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or really any passage at all, fiction or not. Plain explaining any of these is off-topic (What did they mean by 'pompatus of love'?&quot;). They are simply too open to interpretation. There is no 'right' answer. (of course there are all sorts of on-topic questions about such passages, just not 'What does this mean?'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of these questions can be converted to on-topic ones 'What exactly is the pun?', 'Is this syntax used in regular day-to-day speech?'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes these are just strange uses of vocabulary or syntax, and that should be amenable to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for 'What does Stevie Nicks mean when she sings 'Thunder only happens when it's raining' when that is just simply meteorologically not the case?' there are innumerable websites just for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, just &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt; google 'meaning lyrics [the lyric in question]'.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T13:14:12.617" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T13:14:12.617" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-14T17:45:13.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-14T17:48:28.360" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Elementary Grammar&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is for interesting grammar questions. If it is an elementary grammar question, one that you would learn by rote in a language learning class, then the best place here on SE is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T19:01:09.573" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T19:01:09.573" CommentCount="11" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-16T17:54:00.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-14T17:52:30.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Comparison of English with other languages&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions that are not specific to English&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions about language in general&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are questionably off-topic. Sometimes it's just fine to ask them here on ELU. But if English is not the center of the question, then it might get a better answer over on &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;h2&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/h2&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T13:11:34.013" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T13:11:34.013" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-16T13:11:34.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10884" CreationDate="2017-10-15T14:44:49.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following a +6/-1 vote on this meta, I've updated the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag info &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/phrase-requests/info&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; with the specified sample question, closely following the introduction of the parallel section on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag info &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T14:44:49.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-15T23:50:06.360" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. Where are you? Staying on-point, have you tried going here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/english-grammar-9-websites-to-learn-and-practice-english-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/english-grammar-9-websites-to-learn-and-practice-english-grammar/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't checked them out, so I cannot vouch for any of the sites listed there. Who is the audience? There are differences between U.S. and U.K. usage, mostly in spelling but also in terms. Example: &quot;Lift&quot; vs. &quot;Elevator&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For international audiences, there's a manual for that. Its base is in what pilots need to know: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260830" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T23:50:06.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10881" CreationDate="2017-10-16T03:04:38.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added the above question after being on ELU for just four days and before I really knew how the site was operated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is a valid one, for I was seeking the idiomatic use of the two words, in order to discover what meanings people, generally, saw in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers were totally in line with what I wanted and were informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have no qualms about closure or deletion or however these matters are managed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not always clear when asking a question whether it has been asked previously - within a large spectrum of the ways in which questions might be worded - and I get the impression that most, like myself, are surprised when they discover they have duplicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:04:38.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10886" CreationDate="2017-10-17T15:45:52.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Hints on how to learn English better&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As that can be time intensive (or impossible), on-line may be more feasible. Generic questions asking for generic advice on how to learn English (&quot;I want to improve my vocabulary/accent/fluency&quot;) only really have answers that are generic (work for any language at all). The answers are things like take a class, listen to youtube videos, repeat over and over, etc. There is an SE site dedicated entirely to such questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some generic responses that might help:&#xA;There are a handful of glib responsesFor example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way people usually learn their first language is by immersion: &#xA;- Be Born with or Adopted by at least one English Speaking Parent&#xA;- Move to an English-only speaking place&#xA;- Immerse yourself into situations where using only English is possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want more feasible options, here are some suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Best progress is made by doing over and over often the thing you want to learn. - For understanding, read read read, whatever it is you like. news, comics, cereal box ingredients. If you like it, you'll be more likely to continue doing so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For vocabulary, read those things with the vocab you want (online news is hugely available).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For listening comprehension, listen to youtube (things you enjoy), with and without captions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For speaking/writing fluency, try conversation services:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.italki.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;italki&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hellotalk.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hellotalk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for more specific language learning questions on the SE system, ask at &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T18:59:51.150" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T18:59:51.150" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-17T15:45:52.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10906" CreationDate="2017-10-19T11:20:20.093" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note the question was reopened but now it's been closed again for being &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;. Yet the OP's words &quot;what would be the best/correct way&quot; are equivalent to &quot;what are the grammatical rules behind these two options&quot;. The question should once again be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391083/a-or-the-in-a-title&quot;&gt;&quot;A&quot; or &quot;The&quot; in a title&lt;/a&gt; was closed when the body read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be the best – correct way to pick for a title of a project: &#xA;  A girl who wanted to be a boy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The girl who wanted to be a boy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Google books shows both versions  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, the OP has added 369 words to the body of the question that give enough detail to afford informed answers. (As an aside  the hyperlinks were also cleaned up in the editing process.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequent to that substantial edit the OP posted another ~500 words of story summary in a comment, since deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note closing the question seemed to come about after one closevote, after which  one moderator closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't think the question should be reopened, please explain why not.  (I assume the DV to this meta-question was given for that reason.) And say what else can be done to clarify the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me an interesting question about the use of definite vs indefinite articles in the title of stories/novels, as opposed to the run-of-the-mill query about lack of articles in headlines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP went to the trouble of including their own research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T17:53:32.863" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T07:31:58.940" Title="Can we please reopen this question (how is it &quot;opinion-based&quot;?)" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10904" CreationDate="2017-10-20T22:08:15.437" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that the times on comments did not square off with the other info on the site.  I took a screen capture (for a different reason), but the times in the comments showed that &amp;quot;tchrist&amp;quot; made a comment &amp;quot;4 mins ago&amp;quot;, while his profile stated that he was &amp;quot;last seen 6 mins ago&amp;quot;.  &lt;strong&gt;Is this a bug or is there a general guideline stating that these times should not be relied on to construct any kind of precise timeline?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xfxPY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xfxPY.png&quot; alt=&quot;comment thread showing this OP commenting &amp;quot;7 minutes ago&amp;quot; and tchrist commenting &amp;quot;4 minutes ago&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232196" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-02-18T12:36:35.887" LastActivityDate="2023-02-18T12:40:01.350" Title="Are the times on questions deliberately or accidentally imprecise?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|timestamps|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10903" CreationDate="2017-10-21T01:56:11.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/261614/323179&quot;&gt;According to Shog9&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;last seen&amp;quot; is only updated every 15 minutes and thus is not as accurate as other timestamps (e.g. post and comment timestamps):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;last seen&amp;quot; date is only updated every &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; minutes, where &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; was 15 the last time I bothered to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when this time is recorded, it won't be updated again for at least another 15 minutes, no matter how many times the user accesses the site during this period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a precise value for &amp;quot;last seen&amp;quot; is no longer shown on other users' profiles (except as a moderator). Anyone who just visited the site will be shown as &amp;quot;last seen this week&amp;quot;. (The network profile will show a little bit more detail — &amp;quot;last seen today&amp;quot;.) It's also vague with other timeframes. For example, looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/232196/grovkin&quot;&gt;OP's meta profile&lt;/a&gt;, I see a specific date in 2019 since I am a moderator. But when I am logged out, I see &amp;quot;Last seen more than 3 years ago&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timestamps shown elsewhere (on questions, answers, comments, etc.) are accurate, though rounded. The timeline of a post (under the vote icons) will show you the exact timestamp, especially if you hit &amp;quot;toggle format&amp;quot;. You can also hover over various rounded dates to get this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-02-18T12:40:01.350" LastActivityDate="2023-02-18T12:40:01.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10903" CreationDate="2017-10-21T06:06:33.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;last seen&lt;/em&gt; is inaccurate intentionally, as mentioned in Laurel's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timestamps on comments, questions, answers are precise. For recently posted ones, the time will be shown as &lt;em&gt;x mins/secs/hours ago&lt;/em&gt;, as seen in your screenshot, and when you hold your mouse pointer over it, you'll see the UTC timestamp: &lt;em&gt;2017-10-20 21:44:42Z&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T10:54:45.873" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T10:54:45.873" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10902" CreationDate="2017-10-21T06:27:56.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is still about “A girl who…” vs “The girl who…”. And the title itself has not changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's simple request is whether one story title is preferable to the other. @Clare provided a solid sound answer explaining the difference between the two, which was also supported by authoritative and esteemed references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a community who cares about the health of this website, and who cares about the English language, we should be delighted that a question which was seemingly opinion-based was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tweaked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;improved&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. From&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best – correct way to pick for a title of a project:  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the grammatical difference between a title of a story called...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why any user would be so hot under the collar over a minor but skillful edit. An edit that respected the OP's intent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that the OP specifically asks about the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;correct way&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which strongly hints they were looking for an answer that offered a deeper analysis than one based on somebody's pure whim or personal preference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question bore two interesting answers, with Clare's answer being the more authoritative, and in my view, more helpful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What harm has been done? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forgot to add, the question as it appears now, should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T06:45:02.807" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T06:45:02.807" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T01:07:57.050" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as a notice, I'm new to this site, and I found a question that I was willing to answer to a certain person, but the system asks me for 50 reputation points. How is this earned? I'm not sure if I am missing anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263236" OwnerDisplayName="Frosty" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T01:13:12.333" Title="How does one get &quot;Reputation&quot; points" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-10-23T07:03:04.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10908" CreationDate="2017-10-23T01:13:12.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the relevant help page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T01:13:12.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10902" CreationDate="2017-10-23T07:31:58.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, apologies if this &quot;answer&quot; would be better as a separate question, but I didn't want to start a separate thread over the same question if it doesn't warrant that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the author of the original answer to the question in question, I've mostly stayed in the background while the debate over re-opening, and whether it is/was opinion-based has gone on. However, perhaps it's time to chip-in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I accept that the original question (after the OP added some detail, but before Clare's first edit) was somewhat opinion-based, but I felt I could make a useful attempt at trying to &quot;codify&quot; some guidelines. This presumably helped the OP since they accepted my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm personally not particularly bothered by Clare's edit to the question one way or the other. It's probably &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; more on-topic post-edit, so if the question is to remain, it probably should be in the edited form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clare's answer (to the modified question) is clearly more researched than mine and overall is probably the better answer (although – biased though I may be – I still believe mine offers a useful, though less formal, viewpoint).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since Clare's first edit to the question, my answer has gone through a roller-coaster of voting, currently having received four up- and four down-votes and leaving it where it started. Clearly consensus is divided as to its usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;So the nub of why I've made this contribution:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if I wanted to, I believe I couldn't delete my answer because the OP has accepted it. However, if the consensus is that the question and Clare's answer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; now worth keeping, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that mine detracts from it (e.g. by making it seem more &quot;&lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;&quot;), then assuming mods/whoever have the ability to do so, I will accept with grace (and only mild disappointment) my answer being deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102510" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T07:31:58.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T21:09:35.613" Score="9" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/415417/is-concomitant-intentional&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question asks whether 'intention attends the usage' of the word &lt;em&gt;concomitant&lt;/em&gt;. The asker was promptly admonished to check a dictionary. That surprised me since I didn't think it was a question that a dictionary could answer. Then I got admonished, and the question got closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one ask a question about a word's usage that won't automatically get closed by those who think the answer is in a dictionary, or more precisely, that not finding explicit support in a dictionary is sufficient to conclude the proposition is wrong? Some words tend to gravitate to certain types of sentences. You don't find this info in commonly available references. And trying to support or refute such propositions can take a lot of tedious research and careful searching in the right places. I found absolutely zero quality answers contrasting &lt;em&gt;concomitant&lt;/em&gt; with it's synonyms when I searched, including earlier threads on ELU. The only hint, and you have to really look for it, is that some definitions for &lt;em&gt;concomitant&lt;/em&gt; include one extra word than the corresponding definition for &lt;em&gt;attendant&lt;/em&gt; - that is &lt;em&gt;conjoined&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early on, I added a word 'usage tag' to the question, but that didn't seem to matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to me to be an excellent question for this site, what am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I personally think the answer to the question is no. But I don't think you can get there by looking in dictionaries, unless they provide a huge number of examples like the OED might.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T02:08:45.747" Title="Where do dictionary definitions end?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T22:09:21.187" Score="3" ViewCount="3099" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to have a list of English words sorted by popularity together with their pronunciations. I need it to learn the words I can't pronounce in popularity order. Is there anything like that I can find online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263398" OwnerDisplayName="VictorMaia" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T05:22:36.860" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T02:32:12.967" Title="Where can I find a list of English words sorted by popularity, together with their pronunciations?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10912" CreationDate="2017-10-24T05:21:58.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vocabulary.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has many lists under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/558097&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;American Heritage Dictionaries normally feature about 70,000 entries. From that multitude, the editors have chosen 100 words that are neither obscure nor outlandish that could give middle schoolers more aplomb and aptitude in their verbal encounters. If you're not sure whether that is something you need, study this list. &#xA;  Words selected by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionaries. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/52473&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Vocabulary.com Top 1000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. &#xA;  To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have picked one at random for illustration purposes:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;GRE High Frequency Words&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Barron's GRE 17th Edition High Freq Words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZ1lO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZ1lO.png&quot; alt=&quot;GRE High Frequency Words&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click on a word, say &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/abate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;abate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it will take you to a page with definitions, examples, possible origins, and pronunciation (if you click the small speaker icon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KezDs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KezDs.png&quot; alt=&quot;_abate_ definition page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T13:07:43.393" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T13:07:43.393" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10912" CreationDate="2017-10-24T14:54:25.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;OED.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Online, yes. Free, no.&lt;/strong&gt; But you may be able to get in via your &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/public/login/loggingin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;library or another institution&lt;/a&gt;. (In my case, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; don't pay for my subscription; my college does.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED is a historical dictionary, meaning that there's a lot of information about the etymology. It has a really nice Advanced Search, which lets you sort by frequency: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xmpBD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sort by: Entry | Frequency | Date&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequency is based off eight &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/how-to-use-the-oed/key-to-frequency/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;frequency bands&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which may or may not be granular enough for your needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each non-obsolete word is assigned to a frequency band based on its overall frequency score. Bands run from 8 (very high-frequency words) to 1 (very low-frequency). The scale is logarithmic: words in Band 8 are around ten times more frequent than words in Band 7, which in turn are around ten times more frequent than words in Band 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a dictionary, it does indeed have pronunciations in each non-obsolete entry (some have more than others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v8BdM.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T14:54:25.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-25T07:51:02.120" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;Name&lt;/em&gt; welcome to yourmathtutor, Maths is a difficult subject for&#xA;  the most and studying it by yourself can be a bit hard, here in our&#xA;  channel we focus on helping you learn the subject faster and from an&#xA;  exam point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We guarantee that you can go through the entire syllabus in under&#xA;  12 hours. We will have syllabus targeted for different universities in&#xA;  later stages and for now, we are starting with &lt;em&gt;University_Name&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So if you are thinking you will not pass the coming exam, now think&#xA;  again isn't it too soon to lose hope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not my first language and this is an introduction that I wrote for the channel.Is there anyway website or discussion forum where I can get peer reviews or get suggestions on making it more expressive and precise &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263634" OwnerDisplayName="Sachin Divakar" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T08:05:17.277" Title="Is there any website for peer reviewing english" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-10-25T08:05:33.680" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T11:47:13.837" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't recall the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was at either ELL or ELU, and it included an example which was (I thought) incoherent. I made some little rearrangement of the words. I think the example compared Beowulf and his big battle with some other change that will not be a big battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, I made the edit and I received that notice that my edit would be reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of that shows up in my network profile under &quot;all activity&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p1T5M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p1T5M.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastEditorUserId="214952" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T18:59:42.997" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T18:59:42.997" Title="I Edited Someone's Question Yesterday; Can I Find That Edit On My Network Activitiy Profile?" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10917" CreationDate="2017-10-26T12:00:51.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would appear in your network profile (under Revisions) if the suggested edit could have been approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact it does appear in your ELU profile under &quot;All actions &amp;rarr; suggestions&quot;, but the author also edited the post while your suggestion was pending, so your suggestion was automatically rejected, and didn't become a revision. It's not clear whether he based his edit on your suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qUyvy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qUyvy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Profile page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/260158&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/260158&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carry on to 2000 rep and you won't need your edits to be reviewed: they will be implemented immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T18:58:28.730" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T18:58:28.730" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10911" CreationDate="2017-10-27T02:08:45.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question as posed is fine, and the included question of another student is a quotation so not in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address OP's actual question, the answer is you quickly thumb up a definition on your phone and then note that a typical dictionary doesn't answer such questions and read your dictionaries definition - could tag on a request for a suggestion of a dictionary that would answer the question. The multivolume Oxford English Dictionary should give examples over the centuries but you probably don't have access to that, however the online Oxford does give you 20 example sentences which provide fuel for an argument about the original student question. But OP is right that this question is beyond the expectation of even the most comprehensive dictionary, as it is impossible to address every nuance of meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving to a different metalevel, such an answer (pair of answers) from the tutor suggests a. that they don't know and are answering defensively (for both the original question and yours), and b. that they are not being fair/honest about dictionaries or are unfamiliar with dictionaries, and/or c. that they didn't understand the jargon implicit in the original question and so side-stepped it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the original student's question, it is posed in jargon and it is a meaningful question and (if c above is false) probably relates to the jargon and subject matter of the class, or some other part of the course the student is doing. The fact that some people have difficulty with (and offer multiple interpretations of) the student's question doesn't affect the ability to answer OP's question about how to respond in such a situation, and what we can expect from dictionaries. In fact, the Oxford sentences seem to answer in the negative - many of the concomitants are not related to human action but to the ontological reality (that is there is not human subject to have intention). However, this does not preclude the observation (which goes beyond the original question) that it is often used in an intentional context or with causal implication (based on empirical study in a corpus - such as the British National Corpus which has concordancing tools to assist in such a study).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us to how I would have answered the original question: That's a difficult question. You may get some assistance from a good dictionary either directly or indirectly via its usage examples (I'd use OED), but it would make an interesting corpus linguistics project to explore the question (I'd use BNC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39262" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T02:08:45.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10926" CreationDate="2017-10-25T18:42:49.243" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading &quot;Dictionary of American idioms&quot; and I was impressed by the way phrasal verbs are explained. For example, the phrasal verbs associated with the word &lt;code&gt;abide&lt;/code&gt; are defined in the dictionary as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;abide by something: to follow the rules of something; to&#xA;  obey someone’s orders.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  abide with someone: to remain with someone; to stay with&#xA;  someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the dictionary is centered on idioms and phrasal verbs alone. It does not include all correct usages of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in a dictionary that includes all the correct usages of words, not just verbs or phrasal verbs. For example, such dictionary would also include the following for &lt;code&gt;abide&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;abide in somewhere: Tom abided in the wilderness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  abide someone: I can't abide Tom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user263741" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T16:26:17.213" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T18:51:19.073" Title="Dictionary that provides all correct usages of words" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|american-english|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10922" CreationDate="2017-10-27T14:21:50.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Short answer:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there's no perfectly correct dictionary, but the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will probably get you what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Longer answer:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of issues you bring up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Correct' for a dictionary is a strange usage. Does one typo make it 'incorrect'? Do a handful of oversimplifications make it 'incorrect'? I don't think you mean or want 'correct'. I think you mean 'relatively more accurate' or possibly 'relatively better at explaining nuances' (those two overlap but are not the same thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given those two possibilities, most general dictionaries are not intended to be explainers but are intended to be references. In a reference, you look at the definition and confirm that yes, that is what I meant, in an explanation, you get the wordy nuanced comparison or history or feelings or context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A dictionary that is intended to have good explanations for each entry is, because of printing constraints (number of pages),  most likely going to restrict itself to a subset of all words, like just slang or just regionalisms or just a particular technical area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A dictionary that is intended to be accurate, also because of page constraints, will attempt to get the most accurate definition in as few words as possible. Which sometimes misses nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your phrasal verb dictionary seems to be high quality for its subset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the general set of all words in English, the best, though not necessarily correct in all dimensions, is the OED. It attempts to distinguish distinguishable meanings of words, and gives many citations that exhibit that meaning over time. It's not perfect, but they're always editing and making it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not confuse the OED with Oxford Dictionaries, which, while associated and may possibly have the same database of definitions way way back in editorial history, do not have the same intent. OED is more scholarly; OD is a general uncomplicated reference which oversimplifies and has way fewer entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, no, there's no perfectly correct dictionary, but the OED will probably get you what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T18:51:19.073" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10930" CreationDate="2017-10-28T23:48:09.973" Score="35" ViewCount="1357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know. When a user is removed, or they delete their accounts their upvotes and downvotes are removed. But tonight I lost 2,134 rep. That's a lot. Seriously. This is no laughing matter. I just wish I could lose weight this easily...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YTGFD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YTGFD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, apart from anything else, I thought the down and upvotes from high rep users were kept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/dont-throw-away-all-votes-when-a-user-is-deleted/268608#268608&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t throw away all votes when a user is deleted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following  answer is written by Shog9♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But we have a system in place to prevent the most disruptive forms of vote deletion, and we've been using it for a while now without major issues. For the foreseeable future, &lt;strong&gt;this is as completed as it is gonna get&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here's how it works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There are two thresholds:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Number of votes cast by the user being deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Number of people affected significantly by those votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The exact values of those thresholds don't particularly matter; they're pretty low, but not so low that you could hit them easily while still hiding fraudulent activity.&#xA;  - If &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; threshold is exceeded, deletion is held up until someone reviews it. Otherwise, deletion proceeds and any votes are discarded.&#xA;  - &lt;strong&gt;If, during review, it becomes apparent that the user is &lt;em&gt;or ever was&lt;/em&gt; involved in voting fraud&lt;/strong&gt;, [&lt;em&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/em&gt;] the votes are discarded as they would normally be.&#xA;  - Otherwise, the votes are preserved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The end result of this is that most users will still see votes being removed along with user deletions from time to time... But rarely if ever will these votes cause a non-trivial drop in reputation or a sudden, wide-spread skew in post scores, which were the primary complaints in the past.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - answered Oct 29 '15 at 1:29&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... is that it? The user who deleted their accounts was involved in some voting fraud? It seems evident that the user had two accounts, so did the user upvote their own questions and answers? For hypothesis' sake, let's say they did, my next question is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why should any innocent user be penalized?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No user should be penalized when the account of a very high-reputation user has been &lt;em&gt;self-deleted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The votes were cast when the account was valid, and any voting fraud behavior the user &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have indulged in &lt;em&gt;subsequently&lt;/em&gt; should not affect the rep of ELUers. The only scenario that may justify the annihilation of thousands of votes –because it's thousands– were if the number of votes was cast by the same voter using multiple accounts. If that were the case (but I seriously doubt this happened) TPTB should discard the votes from the multiple accounts, and restore the votes from the principal account. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S I am perfectly aware who the user is, a user who made a massive, massive contribution to EL&amp;amp;U, and whose main desire was to help newcomers, and deepen his knowledge of the English language. I won't engage in squabbles, the user still has my respect, this question is focused on the significant drop in reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T21:19:23.887" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:19:23.887" Title="erm... I lost 2,134 in reputation" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10927" CreationDate="2017-10-29T00:33:18.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had drafted a question on this subject while Mari-Lou A posted this one.  Just to add my thoughts and a relevant link, I've included my post as an answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've often seen it written that reputation points on SE are &amp;quot;imaginary&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;meaningless,&amp;quot; and I agree to a large extent that complaining about rep changes seems petty.  Please forgive this violation of that principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also well aware that sometimes users are removed and their votes deleted, and I've taken the cut in that past when this has happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised today though when I was notified of a -283 reputation change due to a removed user, because the number seems so high.  Discussions on SE Meta that I have found on this topic seem to be along the lines of what is found in the help center, when you click &amp;quot;learn more&amp;quot; in your reputation history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This removal occurs whenever a user is deleted, unless that user had a very high reputation score. Because high-reputation users have usually cast a great many votes, removing all of them could be that much more disruptive to other users. In such cases, the staff use a special deletion that preserves the votes, resulting in no reputation change for those who had been voted on by that user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/user-was-removed&quot;&gt;Why Do I Have a Reputation Change on My Reputation Page That Says 'User Was Removed'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;I assume that if I lost 283 rep, then plenty of other EL&amp;amp;U users must have taken a hit.  In short, it seems like a lot of votes were deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess my actual question is multi-part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did a lot of you see big cuts in reputation today when this user was deleted?  (It seems that many must have, and the number of votes deleted must be beyond the threshold where  SE policy dictates that they should remain.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we know anything specific about the thresholds at which a user's votes are preserved even when they are removed?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173045/wiping-votes-on-deletion-of-highly-active-accounts-865-points-on-user-was-rem/173071&quot;&gt;Questions on SE Meta like this suggest that when the changes are drastic, deleting the votes is avoided&lt;/a&gt;, but I haven't seen a figure or any numbers describing what the threshold is.  (Again, with more information I don't think there's any question that this user's votes would exceed the threshold).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to learn more about these types of situations when they arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'll edit out this last part of my answer if it's off-topic from the question, but I want to say that I'm extremely disappointed to see this user leave, and if there's any way for them to come back, I would encourage SE to take unique measures to assist them in restoring their account.  If they don't want to come back, I wish them well and express lots of thanks for what they've given my experience on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T00:28:03.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10927" CreationDate="2017-10-29T05:51:08.773" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_(1983)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Saturday&lt;/a&gt; on ELU: when the reputation stock market experienced a seismic shock, and every user felt the impact!  I shall never forget the member who contributed nearly 3500 answers here, almost 750 more than any other member. And I just do not understand the reason to delete the points from votes cast by someone, when their account is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current case of many users losing rep on deletion of an account is also a clear contradiction of the part of the related help center message that states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because high-reputation users have usually cast a great many votes, removing all of them could be that much more disruptive to other users. In such cases, the staff use a special deletion that preserves the votes, resulting in no reputation change for those who had been voted on by that user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/user-was-removed&quot;&gt;Why Do I Have a Reputation Change on My Reputation Page That Says 'User Was Removed'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the actual reputation score of the deleted user does not affect how many reputation points are lost by other users. It's theoretically possible for someone to be a member at ELU for over 4 years, being a very active reader and voter rather than posting too many answers; earning just about 5000 rep but casting nearly their full quota of votes; and when they left the site this same effect could occur, with some outstanding contributors losing 1000+ rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact I found that was exactly the type of case referenced in @RaceYouAnytime's earlier answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User in question had &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; 1710 rep which I don't consider high (easily achieved in 1 month). He just casts relatively a lot of votes: at least 2362 upvotes of which 1716 on answers (and thus generating 17K rep). You might want to reframe the question accordingly. – BalusC [comment under question] Mar 22 '13 at 14:43&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173045/wiping-votes-on-deletion-of-highly-active-accounts&quot;&gt;Wiping votes on deletion of highly active accounts (-865 points on &amp;quot;User was removed&amp;quot;)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a member does not share out upvote points (but only bounties which ironically are not affected) from their own reputation score, and has no rep gain from upvoting either, thus having no vested interest in voting on other users' posts -- and especially since upvotes and downvotes are anonymous by design -- it is perplexing why so many other members should lose their well-deserved reputation points based on deletion of one long-standing account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the above-noted archival Meta.SE post kindly linked in @RaceYouAnytime's earlier answer and was able to locate this notable precedent for reinstating such lost reputation points at moderator discretion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was our screw-up, and preventing large impact deletes like this will be an addition to the code on our side sometime this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I've gone through the database and manually undone the delete action on this user's votes, which is the net impact that should have happened if they were moved to the community user...our normal process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your rep history (and about 1,300 other users) will no longer reflect this user's deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Answer and status update by @Nick Craver♦ on the above linked Meta.SE question.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/173699/362639&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/173699/362639&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless there were some very pressing reasons for &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; doing it this way in this particular case (as in, sending a very strong message to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; members about something of great and crucial importance) I think Stack Exchange as a network should reconsider the official policy and procedure for future such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T00:55:11.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T09:08:16.553" Score="12" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a grammar book similar to &lt;em&gt;Wheelock's Latin&lt;/em&gt;, but for Old English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, is there an equivalent of &lt;em&gt;Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264291" OwnerDisplayName="Alfie González" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T11:48:07.700" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T17:33:43.857" Title="Book to learn Old English" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10927" CreationDate="2017-10-29T18:27:11.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL:DR&lt;/strong&gt;: Don't bother to ask the mods for restitution of points or an explanation. They can't explain, and they probably made an executive decision about the points. Also, points are almost irrelevant (as was so aptly demonstrated in this case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a long answer to the question posed by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while, there's a big to-do on an SE site that gets a lot of attention, and people invested in the site want to know &lt;em&gt;what happened&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually just assume there was a lot of drama behind the scenes that only the mods and the involved party know about. This sometimes leads to meta posts and (not in this case, but I've seen it) accusations aimed at (on another site) &quot;the evil mod cabal&quot;. There are calls for moderation transparency. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a little (or pretty much) about how invested &lt;strong&gt;the mods&lt;/strong&gt; on the site are in how they respect the privacy of the users. I was suspended once when I was miffed (I don't remember now why) and I decided to remove my negative and zero voted answers. I received a polite request not to do it, which I ignored. Additionally, after reaching the 5-a-day limit on deletions, I edited a few to mark them for deletion later (I believe I edited the others as well.) Ha. I was too green even to know that editing them put them on the front page. So I was suspended for 7 days for this nonsense, and though I was outraged, I did, in fact, cool down. None of this became public knowledge (well, it was obvious from my edits) until I explained it in chat. See, I'm free to say what I want about it, but the mods sign a contract that they will keep absolutely quiet on users' actions. Unless &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; release the mods from their obligation, they can't discuss it. Even if I release the mods, they probably won't be likely to discuss it. Who wants a public airing out of dirty laundry? But I can assure you of this: a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; goes on behind the scenes that keeps a site running. A lot of mod messages, a lot of discussion, a lot of escalation to Community Managers, and sometimes deletion of users' accounts when all else has failed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's post is presumably about why rep was lost from a high rep user's deletion when SE normally doesn't punish the innocent. Then an edit acknowledges that there was a history of voting irregularities on that user's part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only scenario that may justify the annihilation of thousands of votes –because it's thousands– were if the number of votes was cast by the same voter using multiple accounts. If that were the case (but I seriously doubt this happened) TPTB should discard the votes from the multiple accounts, and restore the votes from the principal account. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly - and I don't know why, it was a long time ago,  - I (and anyone else paying attention) had all the evidence I needed to figure out that the user had multiple sock puppets. I was paying attention to the site back then. The user would post truly terrible answers (later deleted when I would DV and comment) and before I could write out &quot;instantly&quot;, two upvotes would appear. On a totally crap answer. But this is a busy site, so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should not speculate, though, because I don't know what happened. The point is, &lt;strong&gt;neither does the OP&lt;/strong&gt;. OP, you can not possibly know how many socks this user had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If that were the case (&lt;strong&gt;but I seriously doubt this happened&lt;/strong&gt;) TPTB should discard the votes from the multiple accounts, and restore the votes from the principal account. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, your doubt does not a truth make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, who &lt;s&gt;in their right mind&lt;/s&gt; would wish for some poor soul to go through years of a user's activity and do all that work? (I'm very tech illiterate, so maybe it's not so much work.) But that brings me back to doubts not equaling truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have gotten a moderator's response about this (what happened and why?) and the answer is &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not up for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user wants an explanation, not accepting that Andrew Leach's comments that nothing more is forthcoming, states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think at the very least an on-the-record &quot;no comment&quot; is not too much to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not only a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; but a 'No. Not going to happen.' comment. I doubt it will vanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Points won't bring lasting happiness. In fact (horror of horrors), I think they may be morally detrimental to many users. That's obvious when users invent socks to circumvent the normal voting limitations, or because of high rep, think they have more say in how the site should be run than others with less rep, or who jump on a question to post a crap answer just to be first (not to be helpful), or other less obvious reasons. (Please note that I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; referring to deleted user here, even though it looks that way. I'm thinking of other things I've seen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T18:33:26.103" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T18:33:26.103" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T21:38:07.433" Score="9" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;bið&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as &lt;em&gt;bid&lt;/em&gt; because one is Old English for &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; and the other is an etymologically unrelated word that you can find in any &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eth&lt;/a&gt; here is that search treats &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ð&lt;/em&gt; the same as &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;D&lt;/em&gt;. Just look at this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22Bi%C3%B0%22&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nw7vz.png&quot; alt=&quot;bid is in the search results for bið&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eth is used in many Old English words and is certainly not the same as &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;. Another reason this needs to be fixed is because eth is used in IPA notation to represent the voiced dental fricative (and is not the same as &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; there either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this may affect other sites, I have chosen to report it here (instead of MSE) because it affects us more than the vast majority of sites on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, one workaround is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/748512&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SELECT id AS [Post Link] FROM posts WHERE body LIKE '%bið%';&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another is using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=&amp;quot;bi%C3%B0&amp;quot;+site%3Aenglish.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;bið&quot; site:english.stackexchange.com&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would like to see this fixed in our search because both methods have drawbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T23:04:47.950" Title="To bið or not to bid" Tags="|bug|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T21:44:42.337" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back on August 26, 2012, in response to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3014/why-are-there-so-many-meta-questions-about-how-so-many-main-questions-are-being/3027#3027&quot;&gt;Why are there so many meta questions about how so many main questions are being downvoted or closed?&lt;/a&gt;, Shog9 provided this graph of changes in the numbers of questions, answers, accept votes, upvotes, and downvotes for the preceding month on EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3uVDQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;graph of votes and posts over the past couple months&quot; title=&quot;Horizontal axis labels omitted for TRADITION&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main limitations of the graph are (1) the (intentional) omission of labels on the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;-axis, and (2) the very narrow window of time that the graph tracks (which Shog9 presumably specified in order to make recent day-to-day changes in the numbers visible and distinct).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Shog9's answer, tchrist (commenting as a non-moderator) wrote &quot;I assume that [the graph] isn't something that we can generate ourselves using the Stack Exchange Data Explorer?&quot; and Shog9 replied, &quot;No, no voting data in SEDE.&quot; Subsequently, however, Stack Exchange has made available to 25,000-rep site participants a set of site analytics tools that they can use to create similar charts for number of posts, number of votes, and site traffic for any period of time between August 5, 2010, and the present, with either day-to-day or week-to-week totals graphed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These graphs yield some intriguing information. For example, the number of answers posted weekly in October 2017 appears to be, on average, only slightly more than half the number of answers posted weekly in October 2015, whereas the weekly numbers of posted questions in October 2017 average out to slightly more than four-fifths the weekly numbers for October 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because the analytics tool handles site-wide data without further differentiation, it provides no insight into questions such as &quot;How much of the site's traffic over time has involved questions tagged as 'word-choice' or 'single-word-request'?&quot; and &quot;What do the weekly upvote and downvote totals look like over time if we exclude questions and answers that are tagged as 'word-choice' or 'single-word-request'?&quot; My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do moderators have access to tools that permit this type of more-detailed data crunching and analysis using tag-based criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any prospect that site participants might gain access to such tools?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the &quot;Access to Site Analytics&quot; page remarks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People who run websites use data about how the site is used to make informed decisions. Since our sites are community run, we give the most engaged users special access to some of the data we collect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that queries tied to certain types of tag-based data might uncover interesting EL&amp;amp;U-specific trends that are invisible or masked in the results that the currently available analytical tools provide. They would also permit in-depth data exploration—a potentially significant consideration, given that some valuable long-time site participants have found themselves &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7755/is-the-new-site-analytics-cool-enough-to-bother-about-rep-again&quot;&gt;looking for ways to bolster&lt;/a&gt; their flagging interest in the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T22:49:11.227" Title="Can EL&amp;U's site analytics tools be refined to handle queries that include tag-based criteria?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T21:51:39.347" Score="-1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are hordes of dubiously labeled duplicates on this site. Many tie questions with titles that are so diverse that there is no way a person looking for one the Qs would ever search for the wording in the other. And on the whole, we spend a fair bit of effort doing a basically bad job of managing them. What is the point? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is to be expected to find an answer already posted somewhere on ELU. If Q1 asks what rule applies here and A1 says you use this rule because ..., then it's reasonable that there will be many questions that A1 applies to that are not duplicates. The current duplicate notification bubble states &quot;This question already has an answer here:&quot;. This is a terrible wording because it appears to sanction closing a Q just because there is an answer somewhere else. This notification should only be used on Qs that are not duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose a strong test for duplicate closure - 1. Unless replacing the Q's title with the alternative title &lt;em&gt;improves&lt;/em&gt; the Q, don't close it as a dup. Just point to the alternative as a related Q, and treat A's in the alternative as fair game in answering this Q. (Which might mean a new feature of two be added to make this fair to all.) And 2. The alternative must actually have an authoritative answer. Both 1. and 2. must be true to close, otherwise, the OP should be prompted to consider whether they are dups, and the OP's opinion should be respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What impact would such a strong test have on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would new features be desired to implement it, such as crediting someone &#xA;whose answer to a different question was referred to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is too restrictive, why is it too restrictive? How do duplicate &#xA;closures benefit the site and why would a tight policy not attain those &#xA;benefits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we please change the wording in the duplicate closure bubble so it isn't &#xA;about answers, but about questions?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDED: Laurel's answer linked to an existing blog on the subject - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/16/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/16/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to cover the same issue and does answer one of my questions. The persistence of related questions that may actually have identical answers isn't a problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also points out the putoffish structure that is created when referring a commonly asked question to a funny question that contains a canonical answer. I mentioned this in one of my comments to Laurel's answer as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2017-10-30T03:08:30.297" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T03:08:30.297" Title="Duplicates - A stronger test for duplicate closure" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10938" CreationDate="2017-10-29T21:59:59.357" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Community really approve the awful edits here &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/221888/revisions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/221888/revisions&lt;/a&gt; ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what was Community's role in the edit history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T22:48:21.503" Title="Did Community really approve those awful edits?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10937" CreationDate="2017-10-29T22:48:21.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edits were only approved because a user with edit privileges clicked &quot;improve edit&quot;. When this happens, the Community user gets the credit for approving the original edit because only moderators can unilaterally approve (or reject) edits. The reviewer's own edit is the one that comes immediately after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the review history of an approved edit by clicking &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/suggested-edits/24318&quot;&gt;edit approved&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. You will see something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reviewer reviewed this X hours ago: Edit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Community♦ reviewed this X hours ago: Approve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this screen, the reviewer who decided to &quot;improve edit&quot; is the one listed as taking the &quot;Edit&quot; action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community may take credit for rejecting edits when a user chooses &quot;reject and edit&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/260463&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;'s a recent edit I rejected and edited. You'll see something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reviewer reviewed this X days ago: Reject and Edit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Community♦ reviewed this X days ago: Reject  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;This edit did not correct critical issues with the post - view the revision history to see what should have been changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T22:48:21.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10935" CreationDate="2017-10-29T22:49:11.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although moderators do have access to site analytics that are both broader and more detailed than those shown at the 25k privilege, there’s no facility for masking based on tags included with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that you aren’t asking about votes, and that at least the non-deleted data is in SEDE, one suitably skilled and motivated might well be able to fish out and graph the data you’re looking for by using SEDE directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T22:49:11.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10934" CreationDate="2017-10-29T23:04:47.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yours is an interesting point, but I’m not wholly sure we want this fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technical explanation for what I believe is happening is probably going to either confuse or bore the pants out of most people reading this, but here goes anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m pretty sure that Stack Exchange searches are done using something called the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/tr10-34.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode Collation Algorithm&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;strong&gt;level-one equivalence&lt;/strong&gt;, also called the primary level or strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primary strength here corresponds to “alphabetical” ordering only. That means that case and diacritics don’t count, just the &quot;basic&quot; letters themselves, and indeed many code points wind up being equivalent there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, at the UCA-1 level, all these count as the same letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;U+0044 ‭ D  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D&#xA;U+0064 ‭ d  LATIN SMALL LETTER D&#xA;U+00D0 ‭ Ð  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH&#xA;U+00F0 ‭ ð  LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH&#xA;U+010E ‭ Ď  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CARON&#xA;U+010F ‭ ď  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CARON&#xA;U+0110 ‭ Đ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE&#xA;U+0111 ‭ đ  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH STROKE&#xA;U+0369 ‭ ○ͩ    COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER D&#xA;U+1D30 ‭ ᴰ  MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL D&#xA;U+1D48 ‭ ᵈ  MODIFIER LETTER SMALL D&#xA;U+1D9E ‭ ᶞ  MODIFIER LETTER SMALL ETH&#xA;U+1DD8 ‭ ○ᷘ  COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR D&#xA;U+1DD9 ‭ ○ᷙ  COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH&#xA;U+1E0A ‭ Ḋ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH DOT ABOVE&#xA;U+1E0B ‭ ḋ  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH DOT ABOVE&#xA;U+1E0C ‭ Ḍ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH DOT BELOW&#xA;U+1E0D ‭ ḍ  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH DOT BELOW&#xA;U+1E0E ‭ Ḏ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH LINE BELOW&#xA;U+1E0F ‭ ḏ  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH LINE BELOW&#xA;U+1E10 ‭ Ḑ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CEDILLA&#xA;U+1E11 ‭ ḑ  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CEDILLA&#xA;U+1E12 ‭ Ḓ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW&#xA;U+1E13 ‭ ḓ  LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW&#xA;U+2145 ‭ ⅅ  DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC CAPITAL D&#xA;U+2146 ‭ ⅆ  DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL D&#xA;U+216E ‭ Ⅾ  ROMAN NUMERAL FIVE HUNDRED&#xA;U+217E ‭ ⅾ  SMALL ROMAN NUMERAL FIVE HUNDRED&#xA;U+24B9 ‭ Ⓓ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D&#xA;U+24D3 ‭ ⓓ CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER D&#xA;U+A779 ‭ Ꝺ  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER INSULAR D&#xA;U+A77A ‭ ꝺ  LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR D&#xA;U+FF24 ‭ Ｄ FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D&#xA;U+FF44 ‭ ｄ FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER D&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a way to search exact code points using some sort of quoting trick, but unless such exists, I doubt you’d be able to get SE to change how searching works just for us. I believe they use something called &lt;em&gt;Elasticsearch&lt;/em&gt;, tuned for English only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T23:04:47.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10936" CreationDate="2017-10-29T23:54:08.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Unless replacing the Q's title with the alternative title &lt;em&gt;improves&lt;/em&gt; the Q, don't close it as a dup. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think 1 is a good test. Take for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/4226/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;My wife and I&amp;#39;s seafood collaboration dinner&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. This is a title that would only fit one question on the site, the one it is attached to. This question, however, is used as a canonical duplicate target for many questions including &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/38847/191178&quot;&gt;How do you make the possessive form with &amp;quot;He and I&amp;quot;-style subjects?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/377090/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Each and every one of you&amp;#39;s opinions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. (At this point, I would be against changing the title of the seafood question, because it's memorable as it is and I'd never find it if it changed. For some other questions, it would be beneficial if somebody made edits to their titles, bodies, or tags to make them easier to find or more clear or just plain old &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many [duplicates] tie questions with titles that are so diverse that there is no way a person looking for one the Qs would ever search for the wording in the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually one of the biggest benefits of having dupes. They are signposts to people who search for &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; so they can find the question that answers their question but doesn't mention &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; at all. This is mentioned in the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/16/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One thing I want to be clear about, though, is that duplication is not necessarily bad. Quite the contrary — some duplication is desirable. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find the answer they’re looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be interpreting this far too literally though. Your case would be improved by citing specific examples where what you suggest would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The alternative must actually have an authoritative answer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some extent, this is already a feature. It is not possible to close if the duplicate doesn't have either an accepted answer or an upvoted answer (except under certain conditions, as described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/166707/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). This is one of the reasons it's essential to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand when the system fails and a question is eligible as a dupe target despite the answer(s) being very bad, I am somewhat torn between closing and not. I think I've gone both ways: sometimes I've voted to close, others I just leave a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What to do&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You already have a lot of tools at your disposal to combat wrongful dupes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to reopen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit to clarify why it is not a dupe&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under certain circumstances this sends the post to the reopen queue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment to clarify why it's not a dupe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bring it to meta and give everyone your argument for why the question should be reopened&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People don't do this enough I think&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these tools currently exist and can be pretty effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T23:54:08.413" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10964" CreationDate="2017-10-30T17:13:42.277" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the new UI, I've noticed this issue - only with the &lt;strong&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/strong&gt; menu item:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z7Ea0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z7Ea0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this queue is empty, the menu indicates review needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Version: 48.0.2685.52 (PGO) - Opera is up to date&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Update stream:   Stable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   System:  Windows 10 64-bit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216106" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T00:42:09.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T00:49:40.073" Title="Review Menu not Updating" Tags="|bug|status-completed|review|top-bar|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10945" CreationDate="2017-11-01T03:06:23.683" Score="8" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;A helpful user made some excellent edits to a question I posted on ELU.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I go about directly thanking the user for transforming an admittedly poorly formed question into topic of a great deal of discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also accrued what I think are &quot;unearned&quot; reputation points for the question.  Is there a way to assign those points to the learned editor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank You.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127784" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T01:18:34.883" Title="Credit where it is due for edits by another user" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10943" CreationDate="2017-11-01T06:07:28.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editors don't expect any acknowledgement for their work from the post owners. Also, unless you have something specific to point out, there is no need to contact the editor, let alone say &quot;thanks&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to point out something specific, say, you think some edit was not to your liking, or you have some question to ask, you can add a comment under your own post and tag the editor's name in the comment. You won't see the automatic suggestion of username when you start writing an &lt;code&gt;@username&lt;/code&gt; always, but the editor will be notified regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T06:07:28.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10943" CreationDate="2017-11-01T10:57:49.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this sounds quite strange, but here on Stack Exchange (S.E.), people &lt;em&gt;generally prefer&lt;/em&gt; if you do not thank them. Evidence of this can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;commentary guidelines of the help center&lt;/a&gt; which discourage compliments, and more concretely the network's meta thread &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should 'Hi', 'thanks', taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; They consider it a distracting chatter which detracts from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;one of the stated purposes of the website in the tour.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. &lt;em&gt;There's no chit-chat.&lt;/em&gt; [emphasis my own]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read some more of the details regarding why S.E. is not considered a discussion forum in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums&quot;&gt;Are Stack Exchange Sites Forums&lt;/a&gt;. However, obviously, &lt;em&gt;nobody can speak for everybody&lt;/em&gt;, and perhaps you have reason to believe a certain user would appreciate a personalized thank you. This is more likely to be the case, since the thank you taglines are disliked in large part because they are impersonal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57537/how-do-i-contact-other-users&quot;&gt;you might be able to contact specific users in chat&lt;/a&gt;, if they have participated in it before. This is the most appropriate option you have on this website, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;chat is meant to be a more social (albeit &quot;still roughly on-topic&quot;) environment than the rest of the website.&lt;/a&gt; However, please do exercise discretion while doing this, because the website is intentionally designed not to have a personal messaging system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users may also include alternative contact information, e.g. an email address, on their profile if they are especially receptive towards receiving messages from other users that you might be able to use for writing a thank you letter, or whatever else you may want to communicate with them. You can check to see if that is the case by clicking on the link which attributes the post to their username. I do not believe there is a specific field for this, but it may be included in the &lt;em&gt;About Me&lt;/em&gt; section of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, all editors are accredited with their edits in the editing revision history found on the bottom center of posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T01:18:34.883" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T01:18:34.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T17:53:54.927" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't do this often, but can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/416632/58761&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question please be reopened? The question now shows the required research. It might be a better fit on ELL, but it would need to be reopened to be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/416632/58761&quot;&gt;What's the difference between “to my mind”, “in my opinion” and “in my view”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that it's a great question or has interesting connotations (well, connotations are always interesting to me), or is a really deserving question. It just meets the criteria now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T17:53:54.927" Title="Request to reopen a question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9391" CreationDate="2017-11-01T18:10:17.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had, once upon a time, tried manually retagging some questions without flooding the feeds... Then I gave up. Now, I know there's a feature where we can blacklist tags, or burninate(?) so that they vanish without affecting the posts' activity status... I wonder what would happen if we were to try banning the tag. I don't think there's much harm in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, in my time here, I've found no specific use for the said tag. It's either redundant or mistagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I also think it's time we look into &quot;terminology&quot; tag.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T18:10:17.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-03T05:30:54.483" Score="13" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes a lot of sense to me that if people are more generous with their upvotes—even with questions that are just &quot;okay&quot; and fall slightly short of the standard—then the people asking questions will be motivated to form better ones the next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who uses multiple websites here, I can tell you, undoubtedly, that the sites which reward my questions with more upvotes are the ones where I ask the highest quality questions. The feedback you get with upvotes really does inspire you to write thoughtful questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem here is that, even a thoughtful, well-researched question can receive zero to one upvotes, giving one little incentive to ask thoughtful, well-researched questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples are always useful, so I'll try to come up with some examples. The questions below show basic research but haven't received many upvotes (at least, at the time of writing this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/415627/is-it-undesirable-to-have-two-consecutive-words-end-in-s&quot;&gt;Is it undesirable to have two consecutive words end in &amp;quot;s&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (1 upvote)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/380335/is-leave-out-to-dry-an-accepted-variation-of-hang-out-to-dry&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;leave out to dry&amp;quot; an accepted variation of &amp;quot;hang out to dry&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (1 upvote)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/365760/when-do-you-use-relate-to-versus-relate-with&quot;&gt;When do you use &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;relate with&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (0 upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the problem runs even deeper. Not only are good questions only getting 1 upvote, but single-word-request and idiom-request questions are getting plenty of upvotes. This likely happens for the wrong reasons, i.e., the multiplicity of answers, each answerer upvoting the question merely to get an upvote themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/120310/idiom-for-magic-object-or-idea-that-fixes-everything&quot;&gt;Idiom for magic object (or idea) that fixes everything&lt;/a&gt; (24 upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173471/opposite-of-witty&quot;&gt;Opposite of &amp;quot;witty&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (8 upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/384709/what-are-some-ways-to-say-a-return-to-what-things-were&quot;&gt;What are some ways to say, &amp;quot;a return to what things were&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; (6 upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion / Food for thought&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the influx of bad questions has created a culture of non-voting, which, ironically, has prevented people from asking good questions, since there is less of an incentive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you agree that upvoting more questions that are &quot;good&quot; or &quot;good enough&quot; will eventually produce better questions? That it will motivate askers to form a better question the next time? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39407" LastEditorUserId="39407" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T17:44:20.023" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T00:11:59.330" Title="I think that upvoting more questions will produce better questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2017-11-03T09:31:04.493" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I checked your six examples a couple of hours ago, they had the following vital statistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Group 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Posted 10/24/2017, &lt;strong&gt;45&lt;/strong&gt; views, &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes/&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; downvote, &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; Posted 3/27/2017, &lt;strong&gt;592&lt;/strong&gt; views, &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; upvote/&lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; downvote, &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; answers (&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; up/&lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; down: 2/0 &amp;amp; 1/0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; Posted 12/30/2016, &lt;strong&gt;6,473&lt;/strong&gt; views, &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; upvote/&lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; downvote, &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Group 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Posted 7/24/2013, &lt;strong&gt;6,787&lt;/strong&gt; views, &lt;strong&gt;25&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes/&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; downvote, &lt;strong&gt;12&lt;/strong&gt; nondeleted answers (&lt;strong&gt;142&lt;/strong&gt; up/&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; down: 56/1, 20/0, 19/0, 12/0, 11/0, 10/0, 8/2, 6/0, 4/0, 3/0, 2/0 &amp;amp; 2/0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; Posted 5/24/2014, &lt;strong&gt;2,726&lt;/strong&gt; views, &lt;strong&gt;8&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes/&lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; downvote, &lt;strong&gt;9&lt;/strong&gt; nondeleted answers (&lt;strong&gt;15&lt;/strong&gt; up/&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; down: 2/1, 7/0, 4/0, 1/0, 1/0, 0/0, 0/0, 0/0 &amp;amp; 0/1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; Posted 4/16/2017, &lt;strong&gt;154&lt;/strong&gt; views, &lt;strong&gt;7&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes/&lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; downvote, &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt; nondeleted answers (&lt;strong&gt;12&lt;/strong&gt; up/&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; down: 5/1, 2/0, 2/0, 2/0, 1/0 &amp;amp; 0/0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two closest matches in terms of page views are #3 from group 1 and #1 from group 2. The level of total viewer interest in these two questions appears to be quite close: #3 in group 1 (posted 10 months ago) is only 314 page views behind #1 in group 2 (posted more than four years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the numbers for question upvoting, question answering, and answer upvoting are strikingly different. The group 1, #3 question has received 0 upvotes and has drawn 0 answers, while the group 2, #1 question has received a net 24 upvotes and has drawn 12 nondeleted answers that have received a total of 142 upvotes and 3 downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we explain this tremendous difference in voting and answering with regard to two questions that have received, respectively, 6,473 and 6,787 page views?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can't be that site visitors aren't interested in the group 1, #3 question. At the rate its page views are accumulating, it will surpass the total page views for group 2, #1 by the end of the year. And yet no one has attempted to answer group 1, #3 and no one has upvoted or downvoted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A deep dive into group 1, #3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One theory might be that people who have looked at group 1, #3 have been irrationally unwilling to upvote it even though it is a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; question. Another possibility is that it is a very difficult question to resolve, which discourages people from answering it or upvoting it. A third possibility is that it is flawed in some way that makes it unappealing to people who might otherwise be able to put together a reasonable answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the third theory—or perhaps an amalgam of the third theory and the second theory—is the likeliest to be true. The header asks when one should use &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; and when one should use &amp;quot;relate with.&amp;quot; The body of the question proposes a hypothesis that &amp;quot;relate with&amp;quot; applies to people and &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; applies to things, and then asks for a rule about using one phrase or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the hypothesis in the question, people tend to say things like &amp;quot;how do you relate to President Trump's immigration policies?&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;how do you relate with President Trump?&amp;quot; Some people may divide their usage of &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;relate with&amp;quot; in that way, but in my experience most people do not. Further, I suspect that there is no rule one way or the other governing the use of &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;relate with.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an Ngram of the phrase &amp;quot;relate to him&amp;quot; (blue line) versus &amp;quot;relate with him&amp;quot; (red line) versus &amp;quot;relate to it&amp;quot; (green line) versus &amp;quot;relate with it&amp;quot; (yellow line) for the period 1900–2008:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=relate+to+him%2Crelate+with+him%2Crelate+to+it%2Crelate+with+it&amp;amp;year_start=1900&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Crelate%20to%20him%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crelate%20with%20him%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crelate%20to%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crelate%20with%20it%3B%2Cc0&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the incidences of &amp;quot;relate with him&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;relate with it&amp;quot; very nearly flat-line, while the incidences of &amp;quot;relate to him&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;relate to it&amp;quot; are quite healthy—and track each other fairly closely until about 1980.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you look at the linked matches beneath the chart in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=relate+to+him%2Crelate+with+him%2Crelate+to+it%2Crelate+with+it&amp;amp;year_start=1900&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Crelate%20to%20him%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crelate%20with%20him%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crelate%20to%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crelate%20with%20it%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram graph version&lt;/a&gt; of the chart, you'll find lots of examples in recent years of sentences like &amp;quot;None of the Zambians had any reason to relate to him&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=21bmlRll1EEC&amp;amp;pg=PA125&amp;amp;dq=%22relate+to+him%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi_24jR-KHXAhUM8WMKHZ_LB-gQ6AEIMjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22relate%20to%20him%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1984&lt;/a&gt;) and relatively few sentences like &amp;quot;The more he could get people to relate with him, the more these people would lean in his direction without even knowing it&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Kbg-4jgz3boC&amp;amp;q=%22relate+with+him%22&amp;amp;dq=%22relate+with+him%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi1-tWY-6HXAhVSymMKHXE7B_0Q6AEILjAB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1998&lt;/a&gt;). You'll even find some sentences like &amp;quot;They actually relate with it through the set of elements that they have placed between it and themselves&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LTdRAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22relate+with+it%22&amp;amp;dq=%22relate+with+it%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiEpfrX-6HXAhVK52MKHat4AqoQ6AEIKDAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1998&lt;/a&gt;). Clearly if there is a rule about using &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; with objects and &amp;quot;relate with&amp;quot; with people, a lot of writers aren't following it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is another complication: &amp;quot;relate to him&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;relate to it&amp;quot; don't just mean &amp;quot;feel a connection to [someone or something]&amp;quot;; they can also mean &amp;quot;tell [someone or something] a story or narrative.&amp;quot; Consequently, the Ngram chart is unreliable as a gauge of &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;relate with&amp;quot; in the narrow sense of &amp;quot;feel a connection to [someone or something].&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we're left with anecdotal evidence that writers don't widely follow a rule that &amp;quot;relate to&amp;quot; goes with things and &amp;quot;relate with&amp;quot; goes with people, suggesting that for practical purposes there may not be any such rule, plus an Ngram chart that, though impressive looking, is essentially useless owing to a confounding variable. To my mind, that's a poor basis for a convincing answer—especially if the preliminary data puts the answerer in the position of trying to prove a negative in answer to the posted question. I wouldn't be inclined to submit an answer to group 1, #3 on that basis, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A shallow dip into group 2, #1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Group 2, #3 asks for an idiom that describes &amp;quot;a magic object or idea that fixes everything.&amp;quot; It's a simple question with many possible answers. The obvious single-word answer is &lt;em&gt;panacea&lt;/em&gt;, which happens to be the highest-voted (and accepted) answer.  But there are lots of other possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People love answering questions like this one, and they love to check the answers that others have suggested, and they tend to upvote ones that either match what they would have suggested or strike them as good ideas they hadn't thought of. Back in 2013, I often added my two cents to questions like that one, which is why one of the answers is mine (I also upvoted the question). But there is no mistaking the answers or the question for anything profound or carefully researched. The whole page is essentially fluff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But people like fluff—and they especially like fluff involving single-word and phrase requests. They just do. The idea that questions like group 1, #1, #2, and #3 could become as popular as questions like group 2, #1, #2, and #3 if only people would upvote them more freely is based (in my opinion) on a misunderstanding of the huge difference in voting power and voting behavior between &amp;quot;word and phrase request&amp;quot; voters and &amp;quot;grammar, usage, and etymology&amp;quot; voters. The two groups do overlap to some extent, but in general they aren't engaged in the same activity, and they are looking for very different sorts of entertainment at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Parting advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that people at English Language &amp;amp; Usage upvote questions that they find interesting and that meet or exceed their criteria for baseline acceptability as EL&amp;amp;U questions. I don't think that people would post better questions if those questions received a stronger positive response in the form of upvotes. It certainly doesn't seem to be happening with SWRs/PRs/IRs—and many of them get lots of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question that you think is interesting, and if you can meet the threshold criteria to avoid having it closed, I don't see why you wouldn't post it. A question that is &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; rarely becomes a target of heavy downvoting—and if no one upvotes it, so what? It's there because you care about it—and maybe an answerer will care about it, too, and try to offer a useful answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, I think, is the most that any question asker can reasonably hope for from this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T18:45:26.087" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2017-11-04T10:39:21.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I suggest that what really inhibits someone asking a question on any Stack Exchange sites is not downvotes or lack of upvotes on the question but the very real prospect of your question getting closed for some reason or the other before anybody can write a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Receiving upvotes on a question is certainly good feedback but it is not critical to getting the question answered. As long as I get a satisfactory answer to my question that addresses my main concerns and provides authoritative explanations or solutions, I am unlikely to be bothered by downvotes or lack of upvotes. I won't even mind my question getting closed &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; someone has written at least one very good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the numerous upvotes on SWR questions do not often indicate quality of research and usually simply reflect the very high popularity of single word requests. In any case, most users on English.SE earn a big majority of their reputation not from upvotes on questions they asked, but from upvotes on good answers they have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, the real worry on any Stack Exchange site is our questions getting closed too early, and the real encouragement for asking more questions is getting good answers to our previous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-11-04T11:02:59.353" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T11:02:59.353" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7871" CreationDate="2017-11-04T16:39:05.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am adding this answer because after seeing the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417011/is-there-an-expression-to-describe-a-situation-where-someone-could-have-helped-y&quot;&gt;Is there an expression to describe a situation where someone could have helped you but they didn't?&lt;/a&gt; I came away with some confusion over the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; and questions in my mind whether they were the same--and found this meta question &amp;amp; answer, which addresses some of these same issues--but the suggestions  to merge the two tags hasn't been addressed yet publicly from TPTA, the powers that are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because when I clicked on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expressions&lt;/a&gt; it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about expressions. Expressions are words or phrases used to convey an idea, or else a particular term used conventionally to express something. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; if you are looking for an expression, phrase-meaning if you are unsure about the usage of a given phrase....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but when I clicked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a phrase that fits a meaning. If you're specifically seeking only a single word, see the &amp;quot;single word requests&amp;quot; tag too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I thought to myself &amp;quot;Isn't an &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; the same thing as &lt;em&gt;a phrase that fits a meaning&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; so I went to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; and found &lt;strong&gt;no definition of the tag&lt;/strong&gt;, which was not helpful. So, to answer your question title, I don't know what it's for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the number of questions under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; and they both appeared substantial and the questions with these tags seem to be asking the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my thought was to come here and  ask what the difference was between the two tags (as well as point out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expressions-requests&lt;/a&gt; has no definition. But the software suggested this question here that I am responding to as a possible duplicate, so instead of asking a new question, I'm chiming in with the suggestion that the two tags be merged or somehow differentiated, and in the meanwhile point out that the one tag has no definition. But I don't know if TPTA intend to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-05T01:41:20.810" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T01:41:20.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-05T19:38:07.650" Score="6" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273525/first-secondly-c&quot;&gt;First, … Secondly, … &amp;amp;c&lt;/a&gt;, posted two years ago, asks whether there is any basis besides tradition for preferring &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;firstly&lt;/em&gt;. Five days after it was posted, the question was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113184/firstly-secondly-vs-firstly-lastly-when-listing-just-two-points&quot;&gt;“Firstly, secondly” vs. “Firstly, lastly” when listing just two points&lt;/a&gt;, which asks whether it is acceptable to use &lt;em&gt;lastly&lt;/em&gt; in place of &lt;em&gt;secondly&lt;/em&gt; in a situation where a person is introducing the second item on a list of just two items. The question doesn't ask about &quot;first, second, third&quot; versus &quot;firstly, secondly, thirdly&quot;; indeed, it doesn't mention &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason states &quot;This question already has an answer here&quot; and points to the &lt;em&gt;secondly&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;lastly&lt;/em&gt; question—and indeed the sole answer to that question does glancingly address the question of &quot;first, second, third&quot; versus &quot;firstly, secondly, thirdly&quot; in its final paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, and drop the &quot;-ly&quot; ending after &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt;, etc. It isn't necessary, and it does not make you sound more erudite (in my opinion). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to me that this offhand remark does not come close to justifying the assertion that the question about &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;firstly&lt;/em&gt; &quot;already has an answer here.&quot; I ask that you consider reopening the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273525/first-secondly-c&quot;&gt;First, … Secondly, … &amp;amp;c&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T23:02:49.373" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T23:02:49.373" Title="Request to reopen a dubious dupe" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-06T21:23:46.637" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417321/some-odd-omission-of-who&quot;&gt;Some odd omission of 'who'?&lt;/a&gt; (answer now self-deleted) because one mod has recently  been leaving comments that we shouldn't put answers in the comment field. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417239/can-%C3%A0-la-be-applied-to-ideas-countries-cultures#comment998249_417239&quot;&gt;Here's an example&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA; and here's the verbiage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not use comments to answer (post an answer instead), praise or rebuke (vote instead), discuss (chat instead), suggest edits (edit instead), or comment on site design or policy (post at meta instead). Use comments to ask for clarification, suggest changes, or offer short-lived information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This  is why I made a suggestion in the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417318/pre-paid-card-or-prepaid-card&quot;&gt;&quot;pre-paid card&quot; or &quot;prepaid card?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; rather than provide an answer.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I know at least one respected user who  says that he downvotes answers that answer close-worthy questions (and I used to also do  that sometimes (dv answers that answered really easy questions), but I don't do that anymore because recently I've cut way back on what I downvote). So I am reluctant  to answer a question that is not about advanced English (by that, but I mean proper for  this site),   because I don't want to get a DV for an answer that contains correct information. Does this mean we should be voting to close the roughly 75%-80% of the questions here that aren't about advanced English (by that I mean proper for this site)? And is downvoting an answer that helps somebody because it's too easy a question a legitimate use of the dv? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if we're cracking down both on not answering in comments and not answering questions that could be closed due to their being not advanced enough (ie, proper for this site), what are we supposed to do anymore? I can only vote to close so many questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this whole thing is relevant to older questions, say from 2011 to 2014, when the site seemed to be much more lax about answers including any references or longer than one sentence, and much more lenient regarding questions that show &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; research... Because there a lot of questions from those years that if asked today should be close-voted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T02:57:51.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T14:10:48.090" Title="Should I have answered this question and if no should I be downvoted for doing so?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2017-11-06T23:02:11.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good question, but I don't think there is any clear answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your preferences, you could choose to leave a comment telling the original poster the answer, understanding that a mod might delete it, or you could post an answer, understanding that other users might downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done both of these at different times. Neither has particularly serious consequences. Moderators may delete comments that they feel don't suggest improvements to the question, but I haven't heard of anyone on this site being suspended or disciplined just for leaving answers in comments some of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators may even sometimes leave answer-y comments themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the Angles nor the Saxons nor even the Jutes, let alone the English, invented the letter Y. It comes to us from Greek by way of Latin, not from the fuþorc. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417240/whats-the-history-of-the-english-letter-y-as-a-sometimes-vowel&quot;&gt;What's the history of the English letter “Y” as a “sometimes vowel”?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether or not &quot;SV&quot; is pronounced &quot;ess-vee&quot; or &quot;secondary vertex&quot; is entirely up to the writer. If the writer pronounces it &quot;ess-vee&quot;, he will write &quot;an SV&quot; as it begins with a vowel sound. If the writer pronounces it &quot;secondary vertex&quot;, he will write &quot;a SV&quot; as it begins with a consonant sound. The reader then, in turn, can deduce the writer's pronunciation from the article. If I see &quot;an SV&quot;, I know for a fact I am supposed to read it as &quot;an ess-vee&quot; and not as &quot;an secondary vertex&quot;, because the latter is not English. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/405000&quot;&gt;We are physicists and we are arguing over the use of “a” and “an”&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for downvotes, they affect the score of the answer, but only by one point. The reputation loss is pretty much symbolic for anyone except for an extremely new user. I wouldn't let the prospect of downvotes discourage you if you think you can post a helpful, accurate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't know if I actually act in accordance with the following principle, I feel like I'm more likely to post an answer if I have a lot to say that won't fit in a single comment. If a question seems like it can be answered by merely linking to a dictionary entry, I will usually not make an answer post for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say to also keep in mind the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;comments can't be downvoted, and don't bump a post, so they usually are not &quot;vetted&quot; as well by the community as answer posts. I guess the really responsible thing to do is to always research guesses before posting and to explicitly describe any possible uncertainties in a post, but in any case, if you're posting something that you think might turn out to be incorrect, it's probably not a good idea to put it in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;the existence of upvoted or accepted answer posts prevents a question from being automatically deleted&lt;/a&gt;. If you are certain that the question is going to end up closed, and you think that it would be best if it were deleted after it is closed, keep in mind that posting an answer may make it harder for this deletion to occur (it would have to be deleted manually by votes, or by a moderator).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for old questions that don't meet some present-day &quot;standards&quot;, most people don't seek them out, but if you're editing one it may be good to keep in mind that bumping it to the front page may result in it being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T23:02:11.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2017-11-06T23:12:56.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Giving a great answer to a poor question has been called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254549/how-to-decide-which-questions-i-should-not-answer&quot;&gt;turning sand into pearls&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. It's saintly. If you're going to do that, don't forget to turn the question into a pearl too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting answers to questions that should be closed is not a settled issue. There are good arguments on both sides. See for example: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/194963/171321&quot;&gt;Should one downvote answers to off-topic questions? – Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;”. It's not the way I use my downvotes, but it's not an abuse of the voting system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this particular example (&quot;Some odd omission of 'who'?&quot;), I don't see how any answer, no matter how true, will really be useful. You may be thinking mainly about how to help the person who posted the question. Sure, but also keep in mind the main goal, to build a database of answers that will be used over and over again. If you focus the majority of your time and energy on the main goal, you might conclude it's a better use of your time to pearlize a different sandpile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe that's just a failure of my imagination. That's the beauty of the site design: it's democratic. You decide!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T23:12:56.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2017-11-09T14:10:48.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of principles at play here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, there's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; that says &quot;Not all questions can or should be answered here&quot;, and which goes on to identify some classes of questions that shouldn't be answered. I don't think the question you answered conclusively falls into any of these categories, except possibly the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there's Jeff Atwood's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;note&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;all questions are ultimately in service of the people answering them&quot;, and that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The minimum bar for a question is not “is this on-topic?”, but rather “is this somewhat interesting and on-topic?”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The key determinant is, as the flowchart referenced in Jeff Atwood's blog puts it, whether a question is &quot;complex and interesting for experts&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it isn't immediately obvious that a question is &quot;complex and interesting for experts&quot;, what you can do is articulate why &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; found it &quot;complex and interesting&quot;. (Aside: for a site with a bar low enough to admit mere &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; like me - and I'm not sure I even qualify for the &lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt; bit - the term &lt;em&gt;expert&lt;/em&gt; has to be taken with a grain of salt.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you might have chanced upon a whole series of newspaper articles with similar phrasing, indicating some kind of shift in the way English is used in a particular community. In that case, links to a few of those articles can go a long way towards establishing the reason &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (in the role of an expert on the English language) found the question interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should you have answered the question? Yes, if you can articulate why you found it interesting. No, if you can't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do we do if we're asked to stop answering in comments and to avoid answering closable questions? Answer those you find interesting. Articulate the point of interest or edit the question to do so while retaining the character of the question. Vote to close questions that, in your opinion, are off-topic &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; the site's guidelines and aren't interesting to you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do we do with older questions? If they've been answered, have at least a couple of upvotes, have interesting answers, or have been viewed many times (see the stats in the little box at the top of the column on the right of the question), leave them be - they were deemed interesting at the time, or were somehow sufficiently interesting to have attracted high traffic. Otherwise, particularly if they have languished with no answers or poor answers, treat them as you would any new question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should we downvote good answers to bad questions? My inclination is to say, &quot;No&quot; - if it's a good answer, it's likely to have been objectively &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; the tooltips on the up/down vote symbols) to the OP or others. On the other hand, I now also accept that some consider &lt;em&gt;usefulness&lt;/em&gt; to encompass usefulness to the site as a whole, and that encouraging poor questions isn't going to make the site better. It's a judgement call. For me, I'd prefer to upvote a good answer and downvote / vote to close the uninteresting question, rather than down vote both the uninteresting question and the good answer. This also offers something of a compromise: answers to closed questions are still accessible, and newer questions of the same sort can be closed as their duplicates to discourage uninteresting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T14:10:48.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-09T14:17:35.220" Score="6" ViewCount="1297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find a dictionary book which classifies nouns by category: animals, food, part of body, location, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found lists on Internet, but they are too small and the number of categories are very limited. Ex: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enchantedlearning.com/wordlist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.enchantedlearning.com/wordlist/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A dictionary could offer more specific categories. For example, &quot;car&quot; or &quot;book&quot; (type of book), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="266137" OwnerDisplayName="Barca" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T22:23:50.417" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T18:46:23.317" Title="List of nouns by category" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10931" CreationDate="2017-11-09T14:49:09.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I took Old English as an undergrad we used &lt;em&gt;Bright's Old English Grammar &amp;amp; Reader&lt;/em&gt;, which gives a decent start. I'm sure there are other beginning books you can find, perhaps on Amazon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understand, though, that you immediately plunge into literature, and the survey of the grammar is designed to get you reading—for that is about all there is to do with Old English. In the second semester of the survey course we were already reading &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;, the crowning achievement of Old English lit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a lot else. Compared to Latin, say, the quantity of original texts available is something on the order of a corner store in a rural town to a Whole Foods in Los Angeles. It's possible, for example, to read the entire &lt;em&gt;Anglo-Saxon Chronicle&lt;/em&gt; in a few hours. There are poems, collections of riddles, and so forth, but the sad fact is that we simply don't have a wealth of OE lit bulging the stacks. Some of it you will only see as fragments in places like the British Museum (I recall an interesting set of glazed tiles that formed a kind of &quot;comic book&quot; about the exploits of the boy Jesus, for example) and, if you're lucky enough to get access, in the stacks of academic libraries. If your aim is to be an Old English dilettante, you are going to have to reckon with rather more work than may be comfortable for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the grammar &quot;skeleton&quot; you receive going into your reading will constantly prove insufficient to explain some of the constructions you'll encounter, and you'll wonder if anomalies you see are regional variations or part of a more complicated grammar you aren't privy to or transcription errors—or all three. Such questions, if answerable at all, can require serious scholarship to resolve. You will have to read far more modern English &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the works than you will read the Old English works themselves. (The good news is that probably most questions you will have about the text are answered by annotations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T14:49:09.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10931" CreationDate="2017-11-09T17:33:43.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I studied this as an undergraduate, we used &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0198111789&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer&lt;/a&gt;. It's a long time since I read any of it, and language teaching has come on in leaps and bounds since then, but it seemed to do its job, and it taught me some Old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233354" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T17:33:43.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10958" CreationDate="2017-11-09T19:24:10.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're getting on-line is as good as it gets. A normal dictionary will &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; tag nouns with some category like 'military' or 'medical'. But that depends on the dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more comprehensive source is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordnet&lt;/a&gt;. This gives all the relations that a particular word has with other words (both links to synonyms, and qualifying nuances, which are like the categories you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a dictionary (and Wordnet) is a reference meaning you start with a word and wonder things about it and go to the dictionary as a resource to explain that single word. I have a feeling you're looking for something slightly different  which is a learning source. You would like to study &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the words in a given category, for example words for operating a laptop, or words labeling items in an automotive repair shop. That's what the categorized word lists on-line get you and you just have to keep seeking until you find the one you like (or extend them yourself as you find them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T19:24:10.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-09T22:04:35.443" Score="6" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/64193/2017/8/21&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/64193/2017/8/21&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across @Tonepoet's this defunct chatroom that has been &quot;automatically deleted for inactivity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is an interesting topic I should like to see it revived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is that done here on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 2: the chat section warns users not to create duplicate rooms.  But if such a defunct room cannot be revived is it possible to create a new room to feature the same topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T15:56:19.557" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T22:30:43.017" Title="How to revive a defunct chat room?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10958" CreationDate="2017-11-09T22:37:34.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for is a topical dictionary. These were, apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=aOe2YaiK_MkC&amp;amp;lpg=PA15&amp;amp;dq=%22topical%20dictionaries%22&amp;amp;pg=PA15#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22topical%20dictionaries%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more common in the past&lt;/a&gt;, before the great advantages of alphabetization were fully understood, but you can still find them in modern times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One that might work for you is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0816079471&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Descriptionary: A Thematic Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; by Marc McCutcheon&lt;/a&gt;. The Amazon review says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rather than the alphabetical arrangement found in dictionaries and thesauruses, the &lt;strong&gt;words here are grouped according to general categories, such as animal and insects, food and drink, the human body and mind, and occupations&lt;/strong&gt;. Within these broad areas are subheadings--&quot;environment&quot; has been divided into 30 categories ranging from atmosphere to wind. The word listings in these short sections are alphabetical, and while each has a straightforward explanation, you won't find alternative spellings, a pronunciation guide, or any of those dictionary-standard accompaniments to the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also be able to find it through your library; the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1005477094&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat listing is here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this includes words of various types of speech, not just nouns. Also, you would probably want to combine this with a traditional dictionary, for things like pronunciation guides and more extensive definitions that this book lacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some thesauruses are also organized this way; I used to have one called &lt;em&gt;The Word Finder&lt;/em&gt; that I really liked. It is now out of print, though, and may have been primarily for adjectives and adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have access to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online version of the Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, you can also use this wonderful tool for your purposes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the home page, click on the &quot;Categories&quot; link (just below the main search box) to browse words by subject, usage, region, or origin. This will take you to a page showing the various main categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subject categories include things like Arts, Law, Sport &amp;amp; Leisure, and Transport.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can click on one of these, or hovering over them will show you sub-categories; for example, hovering over &quot;Consumables&quot; takes you to &quot;Food and Cooking&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once you have clicked on a category or sub-category, you will see a list of results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can narrow these down further by using any of the &quot;Refine your search&quot; options (to the right of the results, on my screen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These include narrowing by Part of Speech as well as things like Language of Origin and Date of First Citation. Click on Part of Speech and select &quot;Nouns&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another very useful refinement is &quot;Usage&quot; which has options like &quot;archaic&quot;, &quot;rare&quot;, and &quot;colloquial and slang&quot;. Not all words have such a usage tag (and I haven't figured out a way to &lt;em&gt;exclude&lt;/em&gt; certain usages), but if you especially want rare words or insults, this is a great feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use the &quot;Advanced Search&quot; feature and pre-select all of these categories, rather than narrowing sequentially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-and-oxford-dictionaries/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED is not the same thing as the Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt;; the OED Online is a paid subscription service. However, many libraries and institutions of higher learning have subscriptions, so you may be able to access it that way. You can learn more on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/about/free-oed/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED's page about library access&lt;/a&gt;, or ask at your school or local library. If you don't have institutional access, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/how-to-subscribe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;look into subscribing here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T18:46:23.317" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T18:46:23.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10942" CreationDate="2017-11-10T00:49:40.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be considerably less likely now (still possible, but less likely to occur on a regular basis). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/302226/how-does-the-review-needed-indicator-work-exactly&quot;&gt;Jon and I put together a system of rules&lt;/a&gt; for determining the thresholds at which these indicators are displayed, which we'll be applying on a regular basis (to this and other sites). The critical issue for the LQ queue is that it generally takes 2-3 reviewers per task to dequeue - that's likely to cause tasks to stay in the queue long enough to light up the indicator twice (it cannot light up more than once per hour for each individual). So ideally, we set the threshold just high enough that it usually takes more than an hour to build up the required number of tasks - this then gives more reviewers time to process them when it appears, as some portion of them will be completed each time the indicator draws more reviewers in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T00:49:40.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10962" CreationDate="2017-11-10T15:55:59.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've undeleted the room. If there's some other way I can help, feel free to ping me in EL&amp;amp;U chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T15:55:59.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10962" CreationDate="2017-11-10T22:30:43.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can delete/undelete rooms. Feel free to ask a moderator. Some moderators are frequently seen in the chat rooms. Asking on meta works too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T22:30:43.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10969" CreationDate="2017-11-10T23:13:49.923" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any reason why my horizontal rules aren't working on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417710/is-there-a-specific-word-for-a-genius-who-can-express-themselves-via-original-in&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question? Do they show up for you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, only one appears in my browser. I just checked again, and before, neither was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6DsOw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6DsOw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorDisplayName="user99677" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T23:25:51.937" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T23:25:51.937" Title="Any reason why my horizontal rules aren't working?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-10T23:16:35.780" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had 6 downvotes on different question in the last 24 hours, I assume by the same user. Is that serial voting? I thought it was against the rules to keep downvoting questions from one user, in a short space of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks a little like someone wants to make it clear they don't like my questions, anyway, for whatever reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T23:16:35.780" Title="is the following an example of serial voting?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-11-11T00:21:36.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10967" CreationDate="2017-11-10T23:23:12.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g2Kcv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g2Kcv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T23:23:12.557" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-11T00:04:20.553" Score="8" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329763/can-the-use-of-a-greek-word-in-an-english-sentence-change-which-syllable-in-th&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was deleted as I was editing it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's frustrating, was it automatic? Am I allowed to try and start another question to ask it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorDisplayName="user99677" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T00:07:24.717" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T00:29:40.383" Title="My question was deleted as I was editing it!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10970" CreationDate="2017-11-11T00:29:40.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see the help: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several criteria for automatic deletion. Your question was removed for the reason &quot;RemoveDeadQuestions&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Community user will automatically delete old abandoned/dead questions in the following circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has −1 or lower score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... it will be automatically deleted. These are termed &quot;dead&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that the question was downvoted today, perhaps as a result of being bumped through editing. Once that downvote was received, it would have been deleted whether or not it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script which does it runs around midnight GMT, with other automatic cleanup things like the rogue voting reversal script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask it again, but please make sure it's on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T00:29:40.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-11T01:01:19.833" Score="5" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a subsite of stackexchange where I can ask about the interface between different languages? I tried the following question, both it and the inverse (English words in Greek sentences), and it's only been met with, I think, some annoyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, a linguistics site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that, in a given pronunciation, a word with primary stress on&#xA;  one syllable cannot ever have another syllable stressed instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So e.g. the word tomato in RP, has its stress on the second syllable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/təˈmɑːtəʊ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And there's no sentence you can write in RP in which it falls on the&#xA;  3rd syllable and not the 2nd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the same holds for e.g. the Greek language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is somewhat obscure, apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to know if someone can say a Greek word' e.g. φίλος, which has&#xA;  its primary stress on the 1st syllable, in perfectly Greek accent, but&#xA;  stress only the 1st syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps due to using the word in an otherwise English sentence,&#xA;  coupled with differences in how stress is reflected in English and&#xA;  Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T01:01:19.833" Title="Is there a subsite of stackexchange where I can ask about the interface between different languages?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10977" CreationDate="2017-11-13T18:00:32.783" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greetings fellow ELU enthusiasts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some many months now, it seems a particular user here, has nothing better to do with their time, than follow me around on ELU and comment whenever they get the chance on most things I say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their comments are mostly passive aggressive, and almost always seeking to elicit some kind of negative response from myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In isolation the individual comments just appear almost pointless, but there is most certainly a pattern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to figure out if there is an easy way either for myself or a moderator, to review all the comments this person has addressed to me, or to answers I have made. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sum total of these would I am sure show a marked degree of harassment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The childish behavior wastes my time as I get comment notifications and can not see this particular individual has commented until I view the comment, and also serves to clutter questions with comments needlessly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of research, I have checked out if there is a feature to ignore such users, and it appears there is not. I did find this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3360/ignore-users-script&quot;&gt;Ignore Users Script&lt;/a&gt; - an ignore users script which I will explore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question however relates specifically to identifying comments by this user addressed to me, or in my answers. If there is anyway to easily catalogue them, so that I can then submit them to a moderator for review. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I say individually the comments are just obviously giving incorrect advice, or seemingly pointless, but the pattern, will almost certainly demonstrate harassment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main motivation for me asking this question is that I think on a point of principle if someone wants to waste their own time that is fine, but they should not be permitted to waste the time of other people who happen to be busy but enjoy fruitful questioning and answering on ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T23:14:16.627" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T23:14:16.627" Title="Where possible harrasment is at play is it possible to identify all past comments from a user" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10975" CreationDate="2017-11-13T20:04:24.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find a list of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of a user's (not deleted) comments at &lt;code&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/####?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=comments&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;####&lt;/code&gt; is their id. You can get to this by going to their profile, and clicking on these tabs: Activity &gt; All Actions &gt; Comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can see a list of a user's deleted comments (by going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/134029/323179&quot;&gt;mod &gt; info &gt; comments&lt;/a&gt; on that user's profile).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a list of only the comments that are likely addressed to you, SEDE is the tool (assuming the comments are not deleted). SEDE is only updated once per week on Sundays, so it will not have the most recent information necessarily (but I doubt it matters too much here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/757316?posterID=191178&amp;amp;commenterID=191178&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simple script&lt;/a&gt; that can find all the times a certain user has commented on your posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select c.Id as [Comment Link]&#xA;from Posts p&#xA;join Comments c on p.id = c.postID&#xA;&#xA;where p.id = c.postID and p.owneruserid = ##posterID## and c.userid = ##commenterID##&#xA;order by p.CreationDate desc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just need to have two IDs: the poster's ID (this would be your ID) and the commenter's ID. Just put them in the boxes that appear when you run the script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/757329&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another (even simpler) script&lt;/a&gt; that you can use to check a specific user's comments for a string. In this case you could input &lt;code&gt;@Gary&lt;/code&gt; to find their comments that contain an @mention to you. However, this will also return all the user's comments where other users with the same/similar name are @mentioned, for example, &lt;code&gt;@Gary's Student&lt;/code&gt;. Anyway, here is the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select id as [Comment Link] &#xA;from comments &#xA;where userid = ##commenterid## and lower(text) like lower('%##text##%')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T22:02:48.287" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T22:02:48.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-15T05:02:09.163" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give a concrete example, I was preparing for the writing task for the GRE which has an issue and argument essay. I was confused about the difference and other details about the instructions and wanted to get a concrete answer on what the difference is. Is this the right site to ask this or where may I ask something along these lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note I am looking a right answer about the writing advice. There might multiple but I'd care for any one single answer. Maybe the simplest one I would request on this hypothetical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243064" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T05:02:09.163" Title="Is advice for standardized test allow in the context of writing english?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2017-11-15T20:32:22.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might support your premise if you said that more generous upvotes on truly &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; questions could eventually lead to an overall improvement in question quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I really dislike the notion that I should more generously upvote &quot;okay&quot; questions, as though that will somehow inspire people to write better questions in the long run. I would guess such a change would have the opposite effect: Why would an OP bother to put in extra effort to write a very good question when people are already upvoting their &quot;okay&quot; questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sounds like a strategy that will get the site further mired in the muds of mediocrity, as opposed to one that will lead to substantial improvement across the site over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T20:32:22.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T15:59:13.820" Score="2" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;If “Josh” was put on hold by the moderators and/or quit, why is he still active as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/159691/user159691&quot;&gt;user159691&lt;/a&gt;? (And its clearly &quot;Josh&quot; from his answers on ELL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today he/she/they &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/418845/the-old-switcheroo-where-did-the-eroo-suffix-come-from?__=996439195#comment1001607_418845&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/418845/the-old-switcheroo-where-did-the-eroo-suffix-come-from&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (etymology of -eroo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T16:51:19.600" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T16:51:19.600" Title="If “Josh” was put on hold by the moderators and/or quit, why is he still active as user159691?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10981" CreationDate="2017-11-17T16:52:48.543" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleting a profile and quitting Stack Exchange are two different things, because people can have multiple profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only Stack Exchange policy on multiple profiles that I know of is that they cannot be used to “cheat” – cross vote, for example, or avoid a suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple profiles are useful, not just for technical reasons (such as testing, or organizing one’s tag subscriptions), but for social reasons. Multiple profiles allow a user to project different identities. For example, a person might wish to safely ask about something with a stigma, or otherwise raise a question that might result in an injustice if it was known who asked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is nobody’s business whether &lt;code&gt;Josh&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;user159691&lt;/code&gt; are the same person unless there is cheating involved, and nobody in a position to know will confirm or deny it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T18:19:54.033" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T18:19:54.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10985" CreationDate="2017-11-17T21:03:00.780" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some days nearly the entire front page is questions &quot;on hold&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MfgyK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MfgyK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest/request some mechanism to filter these out of the display. Perhaps a &quot;not on hold&quot; like &quot;newest&quot; and &quot;featured&quot; and the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216106" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T22:04:48.733" Title="Sort by &quot;not on hold&quot; request" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10984" CreationDate="2017-11-17T22:04:48.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change requests like these would have to be accepted by the dev team, and once accepted, prioritized, and once prioritized, delivered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/feature-request/info&quot;&gt;by no means guaranteed&lt;/a&gt;, the second step has to compete with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/301449/2017-teamdag-project-updates&quot;&gt;an existing list of high-priority features&lt;/a&gt;, and the last step alone &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19514/273503&quot;&gt;takes 6-8 time units&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, don't hold your breath.  In the meantime, as as  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10984/sort-by-not-on-hold-request#comment46019_10984&quot;&gt;@Matt E. Эллен said in the comments&lt;/a&gt;, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=closed%3A0%20is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;the &lt;code&gt;closed:0&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;closed:false&lt;/code&gt; etc) operator&lt;/a&gt; in the search bar on the main site to get a list of non-closed questions. If you combine this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;with other sorts and filters&lt;/a&gt;, you can get a front page which precisely like the current one, sans closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T22:04:48.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-19T08:04:38.007" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I request (I think I may?) an exhaustive resource on the use of commas in the English language, for someone whose first language is English. A book resource would be fine, especially if it covers other issues in a canonical way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T09:24:54.693" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T09:24:54.693" Title="Resource request on use of comma" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10991" CreationDate="2017-11-19T13:54:20.317" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is sometimes a problem when a really experienced user is not fielding questions as they come in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If time elapses and there is no expert response to a question it becomes uncertain (for inexperienced users like myself) whether or not a question fully meets the requirements of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the hours pass, it becomes tempting to launch in and become involved in something which is personally interesting to do some research on, but it can (often) be a misguided instinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longer this goes on, the more frustrating it can be for questioner and answerer alike, when the final blow comes and the question is put on hold and the answerer clipped round the ear, for being unprofessional to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sufficiently involved to know the inner workings of the background of the site, but I wondered if there is a rota of highly experienced users (above 10,000 ?) who would act as 'Gatekeepers'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it would be a considerable improvement in what is trying to be achieved and maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T11:55:01.120" Title="What about having a 'Gatekeeper'?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2017-11-19T14:48:26.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have enough reps to see close requests, and issue them yourself. What's the problem with that? You should have enough experience by now to spot dodgy questions. Temptation is the problem, and I admit that I sometimes fall prey to it, and answer questions that are then put on hold while I am busy composing my answers. This tends to happen when they are put on hold by a moderator, rather than the community. The problem is, I knew that they were dodgy when I decided to answer them, so I can't really blame the moderator. As for issuing a close request and then deciding to answer the question anyway, well... where's the sense in that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also fall temptation to posting quick answers as comments, and then kick myself when OPs immediately delete their questions before anyone has a chance to downvote them, having got what they wanted. Posting actual answers to dodgy questions which OPs immediately delete is a mug's game. I've done it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. All is vanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat lector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastEditorUserId="194338" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T15:02:45.070" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T15:02:45.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4718" CreationDate="2017-11-19T17:29:52.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Literature SE site&lt;/a&gt;, that  as of the writing of this answer has been in public beta for 304 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, the scope of the site is not entirely fixed, &quot;but questions have been successfully asked about written stories, comic books, plays, and &lt;strong&gt;poetry.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T17:29:52.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2017-11-19T18:54:50.020" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be good to have questions put into an initial review queue where users could edit (with 2000 rep) or vote to close &lt;strong&gt;or release&lt;/strong&gt; (with 3000 rep), but that would be a major change which would need a concrete proposal and support on Meta.ELU before going to Meta.SE for support. It's a major change to the Stack Exchange model, and it could be difficult to make work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have to work with what we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10989/18696&quot;&gt;Mick has intimated&lt;/a&gt;, the gatekeepers are those with at least 3000 rep as they can actively vote to close poor questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you need to do is check the close reasons and the on-topic list. Dan Bron's heuristics which he listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10988/what-about-having-a-gatekeeper#comment46042_10988&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt; are the short form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would five minutes of an internet search answer this question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it seem like the OP opened a dictionary or did any research at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a non-native speaker who would be ultimately better served by the teaching experts at ELL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a question which would occur to, and be interesting to, native speakers, or would native speakers intuitively and immediately know the answer off-the-bat?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions on these subjects are explicitly on-topic:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar (but note that this is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10588/proposal-for-selective-blacklisting&quot;&gt;narrow definition of grammar&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even on-topic questions can be closeable if they are poorly written or do not take account of guidance contained in the tag popups. If the question fails any of the initial litmus questions, then it's failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions on these subjects are explicitly off-topic:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The meaning of words, or synonyms for words, unless you have first looked them up in a dictionary or thesaurus. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the Help page&lt;/a&gt; for suggestions about simple and basic questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&amp;quot;Is this right?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Are there any mistakes?&amp;quot;), unless a specific source of concern is clearly specified. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the Help page&lt;/a&gt; for hints on checking existing texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;How to improve my English?&amp;quot; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/tags/translation/info&quot;&gt;translation tag info&lt;/a&gt; for details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other questions can be deemed off-topic:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does not demonstrate sufficient (or, often, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt;) research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single-word- or phrase-request without sufficient detail&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not about the English language: perhaps it could go to another site (you need to raise a custom flag for these, but can also write a custom close reason)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A good question about English but which is asked by someone who needs a didactic response: nominate this for migration to ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't recommend migration for poor questions — no site deserves to be given poor questions. If you can improve the question so it won't simply be closed on the destination site, do that first. If the question is unsalvageable, then it should simply be closed on ELU, perhaps with a comment that another site might be better for the question's subject-matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;And other questions can be closed for other reasons:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another question contains an answer which answers it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is fundamentally unclear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is too broad: either it addresses a topic without being specific about the exact problem, or it asks more than one thing, or it invites a list without specifying any criteria for choosing an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers to the question are entirely subjective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What to do when considering a question for answering&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ensure that it is not off-topic or otherwise closeable. If it is, &lt;strong&gt;vote to close it.&lt;/strong&gt; Even if you do this, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; help the asker by leaving a comment addressing his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's on-topic, write a good answer, in particular paying attention to corroboration for what you write. Without it, your answer is just opinion. It needs to be backed up (personal experience is OK; published corroboration is better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Always vote.&lt;/strong&gt; If a question does not show research, downvote it. If a question is useful and asked well, upvote it. Votes are used by the system to help determine what should happen with a question: by casting votes you are helping the system do its job, and helping the community by showing which are good questions and which are not-so-good. &lt;strong&gt;Don't&lt;/strong&gt; withhold — or cast — a vote simply because a question is asked by someone with low reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T11:55:01.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10994" CreationDate="2017-11-19T20:51:16.340" Score="13" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question that boils down to a single word request. The question got 7 upvotes, the answer got 14, but it also has 3 close votes, so it seems to have gotten a very positive and very negative community response at the same time, so its hard to tell if this type of question appropriate for the site or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67920" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T22:42:22.430" Title="Are single word requests bad? Or are they great?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10993" CreationDate="2017-11-19T21:44:00.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The voting interface indicates that the three close votes were for the following reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, then, people are close-voting mainly because you didn't use Google to try to find the answer to your question (or didn't tell us that you did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this kind of thing seems a bit pointless (as Google is not a commonly available &quot;reference&quot; anyway, and the question doesn't seem likely to be easily answered by an actual reference work like a dictionary) but people with voting privileges can decide that a question isn't interesting to them, or that they feel the asker &lt;strong&gt;hasn't shown enough effort&lt;/strong&gt;, and vote to close it pretty much for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't worry about it in a case like this, because as  Mari-Lou A said the question has also received votes to leave it open in the close votes review queue, it seems like you've got the answer that you wanted, and it seems a fair amount of other people found the Q&amp;amp;A useful (based on the scores).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to reduce the chances of getting close votes like this on future questions, just put in some sentence about the research you have done on your own to try to find the answer to your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for single word requests, an example sentence can sometimes be useful, and it also reduces the chance of your question getting closed with the following reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think your question is really unlikely to be interesting for native speakers (which evidently didn't turn out to be the case this time: I doubt all of the upvotes are from non-native speakers) consider asking it on ELL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a big fan of single word requests in general (it's one of the tags I ignore and hide) but I don't see anything particularly inappropriate about your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T21:44:00.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-20T10:19:51.883" Score="8" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419128/who-got-jack-followed-by&quot;&gt;Who got jack followed by?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419128/who-got-jack-followed-by#comment1002491_419128&quot;&gt;a comment from WS2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a native English speaker curious about my own language. I don't use stackexchange frequently, and when I do, I use it anonymously. I don't recall ELL having any presence from the last visit I made to ELU, so I am greatly unfamiliar with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no English professor or college student majoring in ELU, but I'm not foreign to the language either. What site am I supposed to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll quote my problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3723/267685&quot;&gt;From ELU's Meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The proposed solution was to create a new community where &lt;strong&gt;English learners&lt;/strong&gt; could ask their questions without fear of those questions being deemed too basic.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/135&quot;&gt;From ELL's Meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;If your question is about the English language, but is &lt;strong&gt;unlikely to ever occur to a native speaker&lt;/strong&gt; (except in the context of teaching English as a foreign language), you should ask it here.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker and this question has occurred. Where and how do I fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="267685" LastEditorUserId="267685" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T11:58:48.697" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T14:51:36.320" Title="ELL as a native speaker?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10996" CreationDate="2017-11-20T14:51:36.320" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The operational difference between a &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; question by a language learner and a (for want of a better term) native speaker is that the native speaker knows the answer almost instinctively, and is more interested in the deeper issues than whether something is merely grammatically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Barrie England is a respected on this site. He asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/127379/142322&quot;&gt;Can the verb &amp;#39;be&amp;#39; be modified?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, the answer is simply either 'yes' or 'no'; cite some examples and you're done. But the accepted answer looks more deeply, considering the existential vs the copula meaning of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/251561/142322&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;our today&amp;#39;s meeting&amp;quot; wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the question was asked by a respected user. The title of the question seems even more basic, bordering on proofreading had it been asked in the form &lt;em&gt;Is &quot;our today's meeting&quot; right?&lt;/em&gt; However, the question goes on to cite examples of similar questions that don't seem as objectionable. The apparent inconsistency highlights what the OP considered to be the point of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is of a similar nature - something seems odd to you, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is, try explaining what it is that makes it seem strange to you. Between a choice of EL&amp;amp;U and ELL, I'd say these questions are definitely more appropriate on EL&amp;amp;U - I'd go further and say that these kinds of questions are sorely needed here. But we also need to know what it is that you found so intriguing about the subject matter that you'd post a question about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T14:51:36.320" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10993" CreationDate="2017-11-21T11:08:12.440" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the question posed in the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Single word requests are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bad&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T22:42:22.430" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T22:42:22.430" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11001" CreationDate="2017-11-22T02:35:32.857" Score="10" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did research and I'm pretty advanced in grammar and online marketing. I wasn't asking for proofreading and my question was regarding proper grammar usage. I went to read the help section as suggested and it still didn't make sense to me. I have even read through the similar questions for both this question and the referenced question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419275/would-the-phrase-would-you-have-interest-be-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;Would the phrase &amp;quot;Would you have interest?&amp;quot; be grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me. If this is not a community for helping with questions like this, what is a good example of a question that should be asked about grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="268004" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T12:36:27.030" Title="Why was my question deemed &quot;off topic&quot; and &quot;proofreading&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11000" CreationDate="2017-11-22T03:12:18.480" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language and Usage or English.StackExchange.com, also called English.SE, EL&amp;amp;U or ELU. As a new member you cannot be expected by anybody to be an expert at knowing how to ask a question here, but please be informed that questions of the type &quot;is this sentence all right&quot; or &quot;is this phrase all right in this sentence&quot; are considered &lt;strong&gt;'proofreading'&lt;/strong&gt; here, which is a reason to close a question as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the close notice explains, &quot;requests for proofreading are off-topic unless you have raised some specific concern with the text&quot; (paraphrase). Since it would be interpreted as 'proofreading', a member cannot simply suggest a phrase and ask whether it is grammatically correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does the community expect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking your own question as a specific example, the first thing expected is that you must explain &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you have the idea that 'would you have interest' might possibly be grammatically incorrect. Also, &lt;em&gt;what alternative phrase have you considered?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[It's probably not enough to say, &quot;my friend says it is incorrect.&quot; Why does your friend say so? We expect you to find that out and specify it in your question, which you can edit and improve before submitting for reopening, right here on meta.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly&lt;/strong&gt;, and whatever be the nature of any member's question, they need to show what research they have done by themself on this question before asking it here at ELU. Not showing research is itself a reason to close a question. It is also very useful to provide an example sentence to show us how you plan to use the phrase in question. All of that demonstrates that you have a genuine and specific problem with syntax, grammar or usage that persists even after you did your basic research, and also tells us what sort of solution you are looking for here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, this is my suggested outline (not for copying but just to give you an illustration to work on) how the same question might be written in a way that is not a request for proofreading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need to write a recruitment notice and am having some difficulty with the expression 'would you have interest.' My friend says it sounds grammatically incorrect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is no expert and couldn't explain why, but I looked up the usage of the word &quot;interest&quot; online and found the following explanations of how it is usually used: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[please give extracts of definitions, usage notes and examples, with links to the websites that gave the information.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I now have a specific concern whether 'have interest' is the right expression in this situation, as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;would you have interest in taking up this project that pays  three thousand dollars for three months' work and guarantees plenty of quality experience?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My friend thinks that is not how native speakers of English would naturally use 'interest' here. I have considered alternative formulations such as &quot;would you express interest&quot;, &quot;will you be interested&quot; and &quot;would you show interest&quot; but do not understand which is the best choice for this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So is 'would you have interest' the most natural expression in this context? If not, please explain why and also tell me which way 'interest' could be best used here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Nice to see your question reopened @Amber &amp;amp; I am quite sure (as also confirmed by the senior member Sven Yargs in the earlier comment here) that using &quot;would you have interest in this job&quot; is grammatically correct, although &quot;would you be interested in&quot; might be the more natural expression for native speakers of English, as noted in the simple yet excellent answer to your question, written by Jack Woods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a native speaker of English myself and we routinely use &quot;would you have interest&quot; in Indian English. Nobody will misunderstand your phrase and it is absolutely fine to use either variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also particularly appreciate your willingness and effort to improve your question substantially based on community expectations, which convinced the members very much and succeeded in getting it reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T12:36:27.030" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T12:36:27.030" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T09:08:28.337" Score="6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reviewing &lt;em&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/em&gt; this morning when I came across something I often encounter. An answer which states something with authority but completely lacks any references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/84587/what-is-the-name-of-the-small-containers-of-half-half-etc&quot;&gt;What is the name of the small containers of half &amp;amp; half, etc.?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer given (in full), was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The little plastic portion cups are called RAMIKENS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular instance @svenyargs has gone to the trouble of researching the answer for the person that had answered, and posted the fruits of that research in the comments: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello, user268075. You could make your response more of a&#xA;  one-stop-shop answer—and therefore more useful to site visitors—if you&#xA;  added a relevant definition of ramekin from a reputable dictionary,&#xA;  with a link to the appropriate page online (if possible).&#xA;  Merriam-Webster, at least, limits its definitions of ramekin to (1) a&#xA;  baked dish containing cheese, egg, and breadcrumbs, and (2) a small&#xA;  baking dish. – Sven Yargs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this it did not seem right to recommend the answer for deletion, because with the commentary it did seem somewhat relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I so frequently come across these low quality answers, which state a purported truth without any evidence what so ever, that I wonder should we not have a category for them in the low quality post deletion options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an image of the options currently available: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xoEYc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xoEYc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And none fit this frequent type of low quality answer I encounter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could have used &lt;em&gt;no comment needed&lt;/em&gt; but this is an instance where I do think a comment is really needed. Especially if the person that answered knows their answer to be correct, they might be surprised it has been deleted, if they do not understand why evidence is important when answering a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is that a new category be added: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is an answer which has no evidence to support it.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  In order to justify your answer you should include references which demonstrate its truth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or wording of similar effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two linked questions I would also like to ask the community here, so the three questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we have an additional category of low quality post to support the type of low quality post I just described?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we automatically recommend answers such as these for deletion if we do not know if the answer is correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we automatically recommend answers such as these for deletion if we know the answer to be true, but haven't got the time and or inclination to go and research the answer for the original poster and update their question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of MetaEd's very reasonable answer. I think the process of moderating answers could be made smarter, and in turn save us time, but I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having of course run into another of these on the very first post of the next set of &lt;em&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/em&gt; I've entered, I've realized the down and up vote buttons are not accessible from the main review screen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tgIRM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tgIRM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be a great improvement if they were, as it would save us having to come out of the review window, into the question, down vote, then back into the review window. Instead we could just simply click DV, and then move on to the next question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187344" LastEditorUserId="187344" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T18:22:09.213" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:22:09.213" Title="How should we treat unresearched answers and should we have an additional category of low quality post?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11002" CreationDate="2017-11-22T16:15:02.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer which is so short that it won't be much help (no explanation of why it is right) is still an answer if it answers the question. It's just not a very useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new deletion category for this type of answer doesn't really fit with the way the site works. Poor answers that have been downvoted actually help future users. Deleting them is not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deletion is for answers which are &lt;em&gt;not answers&lt;/em&gt;. They are spam, or comments on the question or other answers, or a new question, or gibberish, or something else which is not an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate response to an answer which is not very useful is a downvote. This helps future readers gauge the usefulness of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, if you have the necessary rep, we welcome constructive suggestions for improving the answer, posted as comments on the answer, and we welcome edits which actually improve the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T16:15:02.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T23:52:56.740" Score="16" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, under this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419489/making-an-appointment-with-a-psychologist&quot;&gt;making an appointment with a psychologist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to request an appointment with my psychologist and I was wondering if the following sentence is correct: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;could you please arrange a follow-up appointment for me for the next week? many thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Choster made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419489/making-an-appointment-with-a-psychologist#comment1003663_419489&quot;&gt;masterful comment&lt;/a&gt; which informs the OP not only that EL&amp;amp;U doesn't address specific proof-reading questions, but fundamentally &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;strong&gt;This site is not organized around checking the adequacy of one phrasing or another; rather, we seek to answer questions about underlying principles of grammar or usage&lt;/strong&gt;, so that the answers may help many people. If you can reframe your question to ask about why you think the sentence might not be correct (for instance, if there is a certain rule or guideline you learned which is unclear in this instance), we may be able to assist. Otherwise, this question may be closed as a proofreading request. Please take the site tour and review the help center for additional guidance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the banner which appears when a question is closed for the &quot;proofreading&quot; reason reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think changing the text of this banner to reflect @choster's comment, or something approximating it, would be an enormous improvement. In particular, it would help OPs understand why EL&amp;amp;U doesn't provide a service they come in with a reasonable expectation that it does, and would avoid a significant portion of acrimonious and enervating arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we change the text for the &quot;proofreading&quot; close banner to something more descriptive like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll interpret upvotes on this question as &quot;yes, I support this change&quot; and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvotes as &quot;no, I oppose this change&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think answers to this question would be most helpful if they clearly adopted one or another of these two positions, and laid out their rationale for that position. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer is &quot;Maybe, but ...&quot;, then a helpful approach would be to detail specific critiques of the replacement text, and suggest specific and concrete language that the respondent would instead recommend.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T01:47:09.297" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T01:47:09.297" Title="Potentially improved &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason (for the banner)" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11004" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:38:25.717" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully support a change. The key point is that this site wants questions about &lt;strong&gt;an underlying principle of grammar or usage&lt;/strong&gt;. Many people who have had questions closed complain that they &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; identified a particular source of concern, e.g. &quot;I've said that I don't know whether &lt;em&gt;send a postcard&lt;/em&gt; is correct&quot;, and don't understand that we want them to explain &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; about that phrase (tense, transitive/intransitive, etc.) might be incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggested wording (a hack job of choster's comment) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern (underlying principle, rule or guideline of grammar or usage) in the text is clearly identified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;169 characters&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T14:38:25.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-25T08:53:22.780" Score="14" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;Revisiting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2668/request-to-reopen-literal-meaning-of-gosh&quot;&gt;&quot;Request to reopen “Literal Meaning of 'Gosh'&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, I observe that a few minutes of dedicated research for that question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68336/literal-meaning-of-gosh&quot;&gt;&quot;Literal Meaning of 'Gosh'&quot;&lt;/a&gt;) antedated the earliest &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; attestation (1757) by 36 years (to 1721). Incidentally (perhaps), I observe the context of the earlier use of 'gosh' is Scottish dialect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bawsy.&lt;/em&gt; O gosh! O gosh! Then, Jouk, ha'e at her,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If that be a', 'tis nae great matter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101036886370;view=1up;seq=83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The works of Allan Ramsay&lt;/em&gt;, 1721&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, I have voted to reopen the question, which, although it shows no research whatsoever, attracted three stellar answers in short order, as well as posing questions for which there can be no [easily discovered] general reference answers. I quote the questions from the question:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this just a corruption of the word 'God' or does it have some other provenance? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long has it been in use?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1 is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; answered by &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;'s unsupported etymology, which does not even go so far as to cross-reference 'gosse' (although the latter does cross-reference 'gosh'); &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/gosh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, at least, mentions a &quot;probable&quot; connection with 'gosse', as pointed out in Callithumpian's answer, but does nothing to evidence the claimed probability (unless you count mention of 'losh' as evidence, which I do not). In short, &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;'s etymology begs the question wholesale, and &lt;em&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/em&gt;'s puts a retail price on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2 reminds me, once again, that closing, as general reference, etymology questions that ask &quot;how long&quot;, puts the cart before the horse; &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;'s dating (and so also &lt;em&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/em&gt;'s) is itself frequently out of date. Data available from contemporary corpora routinely antedate their findings. Often, as well, the earlier evidence suggests other origins and specific histories than are proposed by &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, especially in the case of phrases, but sometimes also in the case of single words. This is to say, a claim that &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, posited as a general reference, provides the final say on the earliest date of use for a word or phrase presumes that research beyond general reference has been undertaken and yielded no contradictory evidence. Research &lt;em&gt;beyond&lt;/em&gt; general reference being required, before the cry of &quot;general reference!&quot;, belies the claim that the question can be answered with general reference tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the previous point, I would like to accordingly edit the question to state baldly that &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/em&gt; do not, on the face of it, provide adequate answers. I hesitate to so edit the question, however, because the edit would render one of the answers, an honest answer to the original question, half-foolish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T09:05:19.427" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T09:05:19.427" Title="By &quot;gosh&quot;, the etymological hydra's immortal head unburied" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11004" CreationDate="2017-11-26T01:16:11.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a possibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions asking &lt;strong&gt;whether some phrase is grammatical&lt;/strong&gt; must ① identify one specific issue, ② specify a dialect of English, and ③ explain why you are not sure, such as by quoting conflicting authorities about the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This covers the two problems I see in this kind of question: questions that don't really explain what they're asking about, and questions which don't explain why the OP is unsure. The best way to fix the second is by requiring them to present the conflict as they see it, such as by quoting authorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &quot;authorities&quot; could be replaced with &quot;discussions&quot;. We don't want these close messages to be too wordy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/419711/59258&quot;&gt;Here's a recent example of a bad question I think the proofreading/grammaticality close reason should be covering:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have these three sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Throughout human history, mental illness has been stigmatized beyond&#xA;    belief.  Individuals that have been diagnosed as mentally ill have&#xA;    been subject to social opposition.  Stigma researchers from University&#xA;    of Chicago, Patrick W. Corrigan and Amy C. Watson, conclude these&#xA;    statements and believe that public and self-stigma both affect the&#xA;    society diagnosed with mental disorders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it ok to use the term &quot;conclude these statements&quot; as in the third sentence above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this really must explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the OP is unsure, otherwise they're a complete waste of everyone's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T13:03:14.090" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T13:03:14.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T08:14:49.930" Score="7" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any online pronunciation dictionary which shows conversational version of phrases e.g.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/ə ˈkʌpə tiː/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;instead of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/ˈə ˈkʌp ˈəv ˈtiː/&lt;/code&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111246" OwnerDisplayName="andrei vladislavlev" LastEditorUserId="131620" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:46:19.177" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T13:49:14.873" Title="Online pronunciation dictionary for conversational version of phrases" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11011" CreationDate="2017-10-04T11:20:17.297" Score="4" ViewCount="557" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a FanFiction. However, given that it has long chapters, repitition of certain words makes certain parts tedious to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently saw xkcd's &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simple Writer&lt;/a&gt;, which helps us to use the 1000 most common words in the English Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ask, if there is such a service, but for the 1000/10000/etc most &lt;em&gt;uncommon&lt;/em&gt; words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: If I ask for an UncommonSynonym of 'Unspeakable', I get 'Egregious' or 'Infandous'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224233" OwnerDisplayName="MalayTheDynamo" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:18:10.690" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T19:18:10.690" Title="How to find uncommon synonyms" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11010" CreationDate="2017-10-04T12:01:48.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the question seems clear to me (I say this as there seems to be some confusion in the comments):  get all synonyms of the word in question, and return the ones that are least commonly used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a view on frequency, you could use Google's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngrams viewer&lt;/a&gt;, which has a large corpus of book texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requires you to enter a comma-separated list of words or phrases, so the next step is to generate that list, e.g. from the results of an online thesaurus.  This is relatively easily achieved if you don't mind getting your hands dirty with a bit of Javascript. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaurus/unspeakable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaurus/unspeakable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open the developer console (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ctrl-shift-i&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ctrl-shift-i&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ctrl-shift-i&lt;/a&gt; in Chrome and Firefox).  Click the &quot;console&quot; tab.  This will let you enter some Javascript.  Enter this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$.map($(&quot;.moreAnt .orth&quot;), function(val,i){return $(val).html()}).join(&quot;,&quot;);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will return a comma-separated list of words, which can then be copied into Ngrams.  It looks like Ngrams has a maximum character size, and/or a maximum number of simultaneous searches, so you might want to search the terms 10 at a time, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dreadful,shocking,appalling,evil,awful,overwhelming,horrible,unbelievable&#xA;monstrous,from hell   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inconceivable,unimaginable,repellent,abysmal,frightful,heinous,odious,indescribable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;loathsome,abominable,ineffable,beyond words,execrable,unutterable,inexpressible,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;beyond description,hellacious,too horrible for words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you could just type them yourself, if you don't want to get too technical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99935" OwnerDisplayName="Max Williams" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T18:09:11.650" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T18:09:11.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11013" CreationDate="2017-11-27T16:53:00.583" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about a specific grammatical form, but my question is more of a request for references analyzing the form rather than a usual Q&amp;amp;A. On other SE sites, there is a reference request tag, but I saw that that doesn't exist here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are reference requests off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137765" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T09:56:53.360" Title="Are Reference Requests on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11012" CreationDate="2017-11-27T18:08:48.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The EL&amp;amp;U community has decided, like many stack sites, that reference requests are off-topic on the main site, as being liable to turn into subjective popularity contests / shopping lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it’s also been decided that it’s OK to ask for resources and references here on Meta.ELU. So ask away. You may first like to check the canonical question on EL&amp;amp;U’s recommended resources for various topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/55623&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:21:15.067" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:21:15.067" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-27T18:22:33.243" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for resources analyzing the phrase &quot;if you have questions, I'll be available after class.&quot; Although this is structured like a conditional, and will sometimes be said with a &quot;then&quot; after the comma, it's not actually a semantically reasonable conditional statement. Instead of using the first clause to limit the scope of the truth of the second clause, the speaker is using the first clause to address the second clause to a subset of the audience. I've come across people using phrases structured like this frequently in casual conversation in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137765" LastEditorUserId="137765" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T18:44:02.040" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T18:44:02.040" Title="Reference Request: Analysis of &quot;If you have questions, I'll be available after class&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11009" CreationDate="2017-11-28T15:26:28.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo.com&lt;/a&gt; is a crowd-sourced &quot;pronouncing dictionary&quot; that aims to have recordings of pronunciations for every word in the world. It doesn't use IPA, but if you want to know how a word is pronounced there's no substitute for actually hearing it pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forvo's coverage for English is very good, usually with recordings in multiple dialects for more common words. It also allows you to request pronunciations of words and phrases, so if you don't see what you are looking for you can request it and English speakers will be given the chance to pronounce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/cup%20tea/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searching for &quot;tea&quot;&lt;/a&gt; turns up quite a few phrases, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/phrase/cup_of_tea/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cup of tea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; itself (but lacking an article) and also longer phrases like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/phrase/can_i_have_a_cup_of_tea%253F/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I have &lt;strong&gt;a cup of tea&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/phrase/there%27s_nothing_better_that_snuggling_on_the_sofa_with_a_blanket_and_a_cup_of_tea/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There's nothing better that snuggling on the sofa with a blanket and &lt;strong&gt;a cup of tea&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/phrase/would_you_like_a_cup_of_tea%2C_or_perhaps_a_coffee_instead%253F/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Would you like &lt;strong&gt;a cup of tea&lt;/strong&gt;, or perhaps a coffee instead?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see where in the world the speaker lives—the speakers of these phrases are mostly from the US and Australia (there are several UK speakers &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/tea/#en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronouncing the word &lt;em&gt;tea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in abstract, but somewhat to my surprise not any of the tea phrases that I looked at).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speakers tend to enunciate a bit more than one would in ordinary, casual speech, but I think you will still get a better sense of the &quot;conversational&quot; pronunciations here than in most dictionaries. And, in fact, you can also get pronunciations for slang terms that often aren't covered by dictionaries; relevant to your example, you can find several pronunciations of both &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/cuppa/#en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cuppa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/nice_cuppa_cha/#en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;nice cuppa cha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T13:49:14.873" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T13:49:14.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11017" CreationDate="2017-11-29T15:20:16.190" Score="13" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419783/is-alliteration-adjacent-words-and-or-close-together-words-starting-with-the-sam&quot;&gt;Is alliteration adjacent words and/or close together words starting with the same letter? If words between are permitted then how many?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; I don't understand why my question on alliteration is off topic. It has been put on hold because of this. Alliteration is a stylistic &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; device, a figure of speech and uses &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; and the sounds that the &lt;em&gt;letters&lt;/em&gt; in them produce, to create an effect in the language of a sentence. It was suggested that I migrate this to Literature SE, but although alliteration is used widely in literature, it is the language technique in using it that I was asking about. I also noticed that there are other alliteration questions on this site and have not been put on hold/closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please explain why there was so much uproar over it and why it is now being closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question has now been moved to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/4710/is-alliteration-adjacent-words-and-or-close-together-words-starting-with-the-sam&quot;&gt;Literature SE&lt;/a&gt; and has been deleted by a moderator on ELU&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user268533" LastEditorDisplayName="user268533" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:32:19.793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T01:53:06.903" Title="Why is my alliteration question off topic and put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11016" CreationDate="2017-11-29T20:44:04.753" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Common ground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11016/why-is-my-alliteration-question-off-topic-and-put-on-hold?noredirect=1#comment46228_11016&quot;&gt;commented this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You could ask on Writers, but I don't think you necessarily need to ask on StackExchange at all. This is covered by the general references on rhetorical devices. The famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/A/alliteration.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silva Rhetoricae&lt;/a&gt; has this to say: &lt;em&gt;repetition of the same letter or sound within &lt;strong&gt;nearby&lt;/strong&gt; words&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/alliteration/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryDevices.net&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;It is a stylistic device in which a number of words, having the same first consonant sound, occur &lt;strong&gt;close together&lt;/strong&gt; in a series&lt;/em&gt;. I don't see call for the premise that the words must be seriatim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that was based on the question I remembered you asking, not the one as it exists today. I just visited your question, and you've edited since I first saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Battleground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is alliteration adjacent words and/or close together words starting with the same letter? &lt;strong&gt;If words between are permitted then how many?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, based on feedback from several comments under your question, you seem to accept that some interspersion of non-alliterative words between alliterative ones does not prevent the whole utterance from being alliterative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now, you ask: since variation is permitted, &lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt;?  How many words between &lt;em&gt;buttery bunches&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bananas&lt;/em&gt; may appear before &lt;em&gt;buttery bunches .... bananas&lt;/em&gt; is no longer considered &lt;em&gt;alliterative&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question which has been closed as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, because it is.  Allow me to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419783/is-alliteration-adjacent-words-and-or-close-together-words-starting-with-the-sam#comment1004351_419783&quot;&gt;one comment&lt;/a&gt;, you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alliteration is a language device. I'm not asking for opinion, I am enquiring whether there is a &lt;strong&gt;linguistic rule&lt;/strong&gt; for how apart the words have to be. I have been trying to find a rule for a long time and have been unsuccessful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419783/is-alliteration-adjacent-words-and-or-close-together-words-starting-with-the-sam#comment1004373_419783&quot;&gt;@tchrist responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you mean, &quot;a linguistic rule&quot;? This has to do with &lt;strong&gt;neither syntax nor morphology&lt;/strong&gt;. It also has nothing to do with letters, only with sounds alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, alliteration is a &lt;em&gt;rhetorical device&lt;/em&gt;, and is not governed by grammar, aka the &quot;rules of English&quot; (I think Tom specifically said &quot;syntax or morphology&quot; to emphasize what exactly comprises &quot;the rules of English&quot; and thus what does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under that umbrella).  In other words, you won't find analysis of alliteration in, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/grammar-and-syntax/cambridge-grammar-english-language#2ziSMWoy1GD5HMgB.97&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt;, any more than you would find one of euphemism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is because both devices operate on levels separate from the syntactic one: euphemism works at the semantic level (or pragmatic), and alliteration operates &lt;a href=&quot;http://he%20phonetical%20stylistic%20devices.%20Onomatopoeia.%20Alliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at the phonetic level&lt;/a&gt;&amp;sup1;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, since such rhetorical devices are not governed by the rules of English (grammar, orthography, etc), disputes about what qualifies as use of a device cannot be resolved by reference to the rules of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;High ground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is what the closure as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; was stating. That any answer to your question could not claim to be more than an opinion. At least so far as the rules of English (which is what this site concerns itself with) are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, closure stings, though no one wants it to, and despite the constant abjurations from the SE hivemind to not take question closure personally. And I rush to repeat that abjuration here: closing your question was by &lt;em&gt;no means&lt;/em&gt; meant to be a personal insult directed at you, to disparage you, or even is it an indictment of your question. It simply means that the site is not equipped to answer questions of this sort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is still very legitimate. But we cannot answer it (except insofar as this Meta-answer is an &quot;answer&quot; of sorts, though of course it's moved you no closer to guidance on &quot;what qualifies as &lt;em&gt;alliteration&lt;/em&gt;&quot; than the closure of your question has; it merely provides the same service with more detail).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hunting ground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where, then, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; you get an answer to your question? Who can answer it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, two things to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alliteration is not unique to English. In fact, the word itself was coined in the 15th century in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration#cite_note-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Latin work analyzing its use in Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt; (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/alliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology is itself Latin&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a rhetorical device, alliteration is assessed by its &lt;em&gt;effect on the audience&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate on (2), &quot;style&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://keiapl.org/anec/#style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the parts of language which are left over when all the rules have been accounted for&lt;/a&gt;; it's precisely the part that is hard to quantify. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=jI8muSpAC5AC&amp;amp;lpg=PA92&amp;amp;ots=SGlTMdHFyF&amp;amp;dq=%22ill-defined%20wastebasket%20category.%22&amp;amp;pg=PA92#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ill-defined%20wastebasket%20category.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;timbre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is to music, style is to writing and speaking: critical yet ill-defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, by (1), you might conclude you needn't restrict your search for guidance to English-focused resources. And by (2), you may decide that seeking prescription is misguided, and that resources focused on &lt;em&gt;impact&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt;, would be more helpful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining these insights leads us to two potential places to explore alliteration on StackExchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers.se&lt;/a&gt;, where you might ask &quot;What makes for effective alliteration?&quot; or &quot;What transgressions of consonance or meter can cause an alliterative phrase to lose that character?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Literature.se&lt;/a&gt; where you can ask for historical examples of effective alliteration by notable writers, and perhaps for examples of writers pushing alliteration to or beyond its limits. Maybe they can identify instances of extreme or borderline alliteration, with great gaps in the consonance, that just barely pass muster, and yet still work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proving ground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, ultimately, you may simply be satisfied with the benchmark &quot;It counts as alliteration &lt;em&gt;if you &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/vinnycrack/status/906312903879528449?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;make it work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as alliteration&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwTdk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwTdk.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tweet by @vinnycrack saying *T-pain was only 22 when he rhymed mansion with wiscansin* in response to @DavidLetternan saying *Sir Isaac Newton was only 23 when he discovered the law of gravity.*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;To clarify why the rules of grammar cannot govern phonetic devices, consider an question analogous to yours on a similar phonetic device: &quot;What counts as &lt;em&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt;? How close does the word's pronunciation have to be to the sound imitated to qualify?&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This analogy should make it clear that the answer can't possibly be guided by the grammar of English or any other language (because human grammar is completely independent and ignorant of, e.g. the barking of dogs or the hissing of rain on the pavement), and that the answer &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;If it's similar enough that your audience knows what sound you're imitating without you having to explain it!&quot;, because that's the purpose of onomatopoeia, and thus the only benchmark possible or needed.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T22:26:59.777" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T22:26:59.777" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11019" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T07:33:46.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussion questions are the heart of your community.&#xA;For example: Should a certain question be allowed on the site? For what reason did a moderator lock a certain question? Are said actions setting a precedent?&#xA;Be sure to present your entire case and background information/data so the subject can be discussed fully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269564" LastEditorUserId="269564" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T05:45:16.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T05:45:16.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11020" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T07:33:46.827" Score="0" Body="The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus." OwnerUserId="269564" LastEditorUserId="269564" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T05:45:02.033" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T05:45:02.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11016" CreationDate="2017-12-01T07:55:08.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like your question, which I'll loosely paraphrase as: &quot;When does alliteration lose its echo?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question appeals to me as an English language enthusiast, and while answers wouldn't be able to clinically pinpoint the number of intervening words required to stop similar sounds from 'echoing' for alliteration, they would be able to say things like &quot;when the words in between aren't stressed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, although the question might not have a precise, authoritative and definitive answer in the sense that a hypothetical &quot;You &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; or you &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; does, it's far more interesting, and I don't think it's any looser than, say, Barrie Englands's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/76578/142322&quot;&gt;&quot;Why is American English so wedded to the subjunctive?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or even Antony Quinn's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2998/142322&quot;&gt;&quot;Do most languages need more space than English?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, where the test-string (for 'how much space') is left unspecified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I don't have any better answer to your alliteration question than &quot;you'll know it when you hear it, and if you don't hear it, it's not there&quot;, I'd be interested to read answers from the more reflective among us as about how this can be or has been formalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd vote to reopen this question if I could, but it's been deleted by a mod, so I can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T01:53:06.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T01:53:06.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11012" CreationDate="2017-12-08T09:56:53.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be more of a work-around than an answer proper. Bare requests for papers are a mixed bag - there is some precedent for it, but aside from maintaining the canonical list of references, it's often frowned upon even in Meta.ELU, and definitely off-topic on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers on Stack Exchange are intended to be authoritative, and EL&amp;amp;U tends to insist on that. Being 'authoritative' includes citing and quoting references to accepted authorities (or extensive relevant personal experience, or logical argument, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of asking for references, try asking your question directly, making sure that it's clear you're targeting the &lt;em&gt;linguists&lt;/em&gt; portion of the EL&amp;amp;U community, and close with a request for answers to cite relevant and authoritative papers. This should allow your question to be on-topic, interesting to the community, and still get you the references you're after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T09:56:53.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11025" CreationDate="2017-12-10T02:22:19.950" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/421381/do-i-need-a-comma-when-addressing-someone-in-writing&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; offers a bounty of 100 and the user has a grand total of one point. I'm sure there is an obvious reason and I am sure I shall kick myself when I am told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how does this work, exactly ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T22:39:27.507" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T22:39:27.507" Title="How can a user with only one rep offer a bounty of one hundred?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11024" CreationDate="2017-12-10T02:43:14.423" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation needed for the bounty has already been subtracted, so he had 101 before he placed the bounty. See his reputation history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/270619/user123456798?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/270619/user123456798?tab=reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He got 101 from his association bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T02:43:14.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-12T03:30:53.317" Score="0" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/421828/why-is-medicine-pronounced-differently&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;medicine&amp;quot; pronounced differently?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the Help Centre &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/stackexchange&quot;&gt;Our model&lt;/a&gt; doesn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be honest? Try explaining a downvote with a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194321" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T11:02:23.387" Title="What about my question deserves a negative score?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-12T04:47:09.440" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed this after reviewing an edit by clicking &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0GP0H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;example of &amp;quot;edit(1)&amp;quot; from another site that I stole from somewhere&quot;&gt;edit (1)&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l9oTP.png&quot; alt=&quot;skip is on its own line&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NPWIf.png&quot; alt=&quot;all buttons on same line&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked a couple of other sites, and this is the only site where the skip button is being forced onto another line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-06-21T18:24:54.007" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T18:24:54.007" Title="&quot;Skip&quot; skipped to new line" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|suggested-edits|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-10T09:12:24.260" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested to know the pronunciation of words in the past fifty years or so. Does anyone know any online dictionaries which list the former pronunciation of words in English language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99129" OwnerDisplayName="developer" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T13:53:43.577" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T13:53:43.577" Title="Any online English dictionaries listing the previous pronunciation of words?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11026" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:00:12.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The present-day difference doesn't seem to have any clear cause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is the answer to the &lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; question of the OP: 'Why is &quot;medicine&quot; pronounced differently?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such is the situation often caused by asking &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; questions. All the other information in the accepted answer, as swell as it is, does not actually answer the question as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the answer itself is in jeopardy of receiving a downvote because  it doesn't  answer the question &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; except to say &lt;em&gt;we don't know why&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not voted on either the question or answer. It seems a good strategy if users try to reword their questions so they don't ask &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps even &lt;em&gt;is there a reason for...&lt;/em&gt; is better than a flat out &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; question. At least in this case the answer &lt;em&gt;there is no apparent reason&lt;/em&gt; is an actual answer to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Dan Bron comments, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As English is not designed, a lot of answers to “why” questions are “because that’s how the chips fell, that’s all; there is no rationale beyond ‘a series of accidents of history’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:00:12.073" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11031" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11032" CreationDate="2017-12-16T18:23:23.870" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me why I've reached my question limit on the English Stackexchange site? All my questions are generally positive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it's because I gave out a 50 rep bounty when I was low in rep and the system incorrectly detected that potential downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69949" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T17:08:30.097" Title="Reached Question Limit" Tags="|support|user-accounts|banned|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11031" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:02:03.677" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although moderators are not privy to the algorithm behind this determination, it's unlikely to be reputation related. More likely by far is that of the 12 questions you've asked, only 3 remain open and not deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange management have provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/236568/153355&quot;&gt;a more detailed breakdown&lt;/a&gt; of contributing factors, including this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the system trains on how we'll you've done &lt;em&gt;overall&lt;/em&gt; (either your entire account history, or the last 45 days for newer accounts, dropping the most negatively scored), and how well you've done &lt;em&gt;recently&lt;/em&gt; (the last 15 days). That gets us the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of questions asked in the last 45 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average score of your questions in that time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of questions asked in the last 15 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average score of your questions in that time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average time elapsed between questions in the last 45 and 15 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only ways to improve this situation are to found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/153355&quot;&gt;these instructions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T17:08:30.097" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11038" CreationDate="2017-12-18T16:32:44.180" Score="13" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;We seem to be getting a lot of off-topic questions from new users that are quickly answered by another new user (and sometimes up-voted). Is there anything that we can (or should) do about this, apart from flagging the questions as off-topic, and down-voting both questions and answers (which tend to be brief, albeit correct)? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/422816/what-verb-can-i-use-to-describe-someone-saying-aaah-in-a-painful-way&quot;&gt;What verb can I use to describe someone saying &amp;quot;aaah&amp;quot; in a painful way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've checked for duplicate questions, but I cannot find any that match this particular scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that new users who answer these questions might simply be browsing the site, and when they see a question that they can answer, they do so without understanding the site rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194338" LastEditorUserId="194338" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T17:25:57.947" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T13:12:10.463" Title="New users answering off-topic questions from other new users" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T17:08:44.627" Score="8" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332551/subject-verb-agreement-when-using-singular-they#comment1012270_332551&quot;&gt;Subject-verb agreement when using singular they?&lt;/a&gt; recently popped up in the Reopen Votes queue because the poster returned and edited it in hopes of getting it reopened. It had been closed 18 months ago as a duplicate of two earlier questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204890/is-the-genderless-pronoun-they-appropriate-and-grammatical-for-a-non-binary-ge&quot;&gt;Is the genderless pronoun &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; appropriate and grammatical for a non-binary gender?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-vs-her-vs-their&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (&amp;quot;his&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;their&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the two cited questions and found that (as their headings suggest) they dealt with the more basic question of whether singular &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; is acceptable/correct in current English as a gender-neutral pronoun. Since neither cited prior question dealt specifically with the question of whether &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; used as a singular pronoun should take a singular verb, I voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But longtime EL&amp;amp;U participant sumelic did a much more thorough job of researching the question than I did, and discovered that two previous questions asked about the same issue that the poster's question here did: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207502/why-isn-t-singular-they-used-with-3sg-verb-forms&quot;&gt;Why isn’t singular ‘they’ used with 3Sg verb forms?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226824/subject-verb-agreement-for-singular-they&quot;&gt;subject-verb agreement for singular they&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In pointing out those two prior questions, sumelic modestly asked, &quot;Does either of those provide a satisfactory answer to your question, [OP]?&quot; In my view, several of the answers address the poster's question directly and thoroughly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question remains, however: What is the best way to replace the poorly chosen duplicate citations with the well-chosen ones? Left to our own devices, site participants could reopen the question as not being a duplicate of either the two questions currently cited in the close reason and then reclose it as being a duplicate of the two questions that sumelic points out. But that seems like a rather inefficient way to achieve a simple, objectively desirable result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more direct approach would be for a moderator to step in and replace the off-point citations with the on-point ones. The upgraded citations would help anyone who in future comes across the closed post and wants to read relevant answers to the question it raises. But can moderators make such changes, or is the circuitous path of regular users' reopening the question and then reclosing it with appropriate citations the only way to straighten out the page? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if a similar situation arises in the future (and I'm sure it will), is the best course to flag the issue using the &quot;in need of moderator intervention&quot; flag reason, explain the problem with the &quot;duplicate of&quot; citations in the explanation box, and identify the much better alternative citations that are available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T19:14:09.307" Title="Can moderators redirect links from badly chosen duplicates to actual duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11035" CreationDate="2017-12-19T19:14:09.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators have the ability to edit the list of original questions that the duplicate question links to. They can delete links and also add new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two ways someone could proceed. They could:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag the question and explain the proposed link edit to the mod team.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post at meta and explain the proposed link edit to the community. After peer review, then flag the mod team.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So approach #2 just invites peer review of the link edit before throwing the flag. But the advantage is that the mod team will probably act much sooner. There is less time needed for scrutiny of an edit that has already been peer reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T19:14:09.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T19:35:29.443" Score="5" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to see the lowest voted answers, for science, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Started the search with &quot;is:a&quot;. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aa&quot;&gt;Okay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sorted results by votes. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3Aa&quot;&gt;Okay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chose the last page, viz. page 14383 now. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?page=14383&amp;amp;tab=Votes&amp;amp;q=is%3Aa&quot;&gt;Error?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tried random page, say 1000. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?page=1000&amp;amp;tab=Votes&amp;amp;q=is%3Aa&quot;&gt;Still error?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gbsKK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gbsKK.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot showing zero results&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T19:46:50.383" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T19:46:50.383" Title="Unable to search answers sorted by votes" Tags="|bug|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2017-12-19T20:38:33.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is normal. New users normally do not know how to ask or answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent answers to off-topic questions, we close them as quickly as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To minimize new users asking or answering off-topic questions, out of many things we do, one of them is downvoting bad questions as quickly as possible. A question with -4 score drops off of the homepage (albeit, not off of the &quot;questions&quot; tab), so a casual visitor may not see it and feel inclined to attempt an answer thinking &quot;this is easy!&quot; or to ask a similarly bad one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Protect&quot; hot or controversial questions to prevent new users (without 10 rep on ELU) from answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, leave constructive comments wherever you can. Guidance is key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T09:10:56.633" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T09:10:56.633" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2017-12-20T08:34:26.860" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really think we need to be doing anything more than what we are already doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is question protection which prevents members with less than 10 rep. from answering a question that attracts low-quality answers from people who do not understand the standards. There is also question closure which prevents anybody from answering it if it is so bad that we suppose nobody should even be trying to answer it yet. If answers were written to such an especially bad question, that has a negative as this once did, deletion votes on the question can be cast by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;trusted users&lt;/a&gt; and any reputation gains or losses will be reversed, which more or less makes it a waste of time to have bothered answering. Finally, as a last resort, people who answer a question before it is established that the question meets our standards are taking a slight risk, because if it is edited to meet our standards their answer may very well be invalidated. In that case, voting against the answer may also a valid option, although you would need to reserve your vote because strictly speaking, we only have a few minutes to change our mind about a vote once it has been cast, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; the answer is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these mechanisms may need a little tweaking to work optimally, but I do not think we can control that at the local level, so I do not think we need to be doing anything more than what we are already doing, and I fear that it may be harmful to the website. Although we do insist upon having good questions, this is a secondary concern that is mostly just a means to an end for us, and that end is having good answers. You can read more about the general philosophy in Jeff Atwood's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;Optimizing for Pearls, Not Sand&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we can skip a step and get a high-quality answer, even to a bad question, that is at least of some value. I want you to pay special mind to our original research standard: The general reference standard described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are Some Questions Too Simple&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/a&gt; and how the chart therein affords us every opportunity to answer a question if the answer can be of any use or interest: There are three forks with &quot;Answer the Question&quot; ending in a mostly subjective test, and it is only when all three forks fail that are we recommended to close it as &quot;General Referenece&quot; and even if it should be closed, it is generally left to community discretion to decide if it actually will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My fear is that we already have adequate means to prevent bad answers to questions if we should so choose to use them, so all that remains to be done is to preempt &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers to bad questions, which is actually counterproductive to our ultimate goal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&amp;mdash;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Our Tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, which questions are up to our standards is actually a highly debatable matter. We may actually disagree on which topics are so bad as to which merit a closure reason. Although I agree this question is not up to our current standards, I could not disagree more regarding the reason for that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have suggested that the questioner should a thesaurus, which is often a reasonable request. Yes, I understand: We don't just want people copying and pasting the options out of Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus as shown on thesaurus.com with no further explanation regarding why a word is a good option. &quot;Foox and fooy are synonyms, so you can use foox instead of fooy&quot; is an utterly useless and error-prone answer that could have been more easily found without the need for human intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the thesaurus is a somewhat peculiar tool in regards to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, because people can only use it if they &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; know an applicable word. If a person does not propose a synonym, then the question can not be answered by a thesaurus, as the applicability of either suggestion has to be proven in the first place, which leads to a somewhat higher quality answer than the aforementioned &lt;em&gt;use foox instead of fooy&lt;/em&gt; example I just now gave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is moreover is that it does not constitute an adequate proof to suggest two words are synonyms when the questioner does not even know if either of the words is applicable. The request you are making is not only effectively impossible, but would fail to improve the answers to the question in my opinion, so there are only two options as far as I am concerned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question should never have been closed as off-topic in the first place because it can not be answered by &quot;a commonly available reference&quot; and so such closure serves no purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is bad because it is otherwise off-topic, so even if a thesaurus &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; checked, it should remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to emphasize that I am not casting judgement upon whether the question should be open or closed here. I am merely stating that I disagree with your rationale regarding why it is noncompliant with our standards, and what can be done to make it standards compliant to make a point: There is no safe method to certainly determine if a question is standards compliant or not other than through community consensus, as established by the question's closure status, so we probably should not be penalizing answerers for making that discretionary call by answering &lt;em&gt;still open questions&lt;/em&gt;, which are the only sort of questions that they even &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; (or at least should be able to) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T13:12:10.463" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T13:12:10.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-20T09:11:55.630" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/422909/is-this-a-complete-sentence-the-man-is-looking?noredirect=1#comment1012537_422909&quot;&gt;Is this a complete sentence?: &amp;quot;The man is looking.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No reason was given for the migration which was apparently decided by 5 people, all with the same primary interest (single-word-requests). It is not an ELL question. It is about verbs, meaning, grammar and grammaticality, syntax, semantics, meaning in context, all top tags, and more specifically it concerns complements and predicative complements, also approved tags on this forum. This is not about learning English, it is about grammar (prescriptive/ accepted/ common), it is about semantics, required syntax and idiomatic language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL is not an appropriate funnel for questions people simply don't think are germane to ELU. Moreover, ELL is not a site that serves the interests of teachers and pedagogy. It serves overall as a place where learners can get their simple questions answered. Learners and teachers are really separate communities. It is generally inappropriate for teachers to discuss pedagogy amongst students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a teacher I need a sophisticated understanding of the English language in order that I may present my students with concepts that are simple and comprehensive while also being linguistically coherent. That is my purpose in addressing this crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I joined this forum I asked if this was an appropriate place for me and my interest in the English language, and I was very much welcomed and encouraged to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10417/is-this-forum-appropriate-for-teachers-of-english-as-a-second-language&quot;&gt;Is this forum appropriate for teachers of English as a second language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made some mistakes, and some of my questions have been off the mark, but I don't think this post is one of them, considering the arguments I've presented. It is a deceptively simple question, as the comments indicate. At a deeper level I'm really asking about a pattern in the language where a verbs 'content' correlates to its need for complementation, even when there is sufficient context for a leap of interpretation based on surrounding context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242638" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T09:11:55.630" Title="Why was my post migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11043" CreationDate="2017-12-20T09:23:21.110" Score="-1" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though it is technically possible is it is not against the site rules, I wonder if accepting an answer posted to one's own question is an advisable way to proceed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may look fine, but making one's own answer the &quot;accepted&quot; one seems a bit too stretched and too self-referential to me. It also appears somewhat biased given the &quot;circular&quot; nature of question-answer from the same person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that the information provided and the research shown in the accepted answers are not good but it sounds like the OP already knew  the answer they were looking for was before asking ( so why ask?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. nothing personal with any user, I just would like to understand what's the community view on this issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T15:56:12.373" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T04:53:35.953" Title="Is it appropriate to accept one's own answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11041" CreationDate="2017-12-20T15:41:01.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I am the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/421407/crush-the-spearhead-leek&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I can accept any damn &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/421605/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I choose. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When accepting my own answer I earned no rep. Why did I post an answer? I wasn't particularly enamored by the answers submitted, so I went forth and did my own research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone strongly disagrees, they can award a bounty on a different answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From the comments&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;@DanBron - wouldn't the possible other users' votes be enough in this case? Accepting one's answer is like upvoting oneself.&lt;/code&gt;@user159691 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11041/is-it-appropriate-to-accept-ones-own-answers#comment46351_11041&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No accepting one's own answer is NOT the same as &lt;em&gt;upvoting&lt;/em&gt; it. The single upvote on the accepted answer is not mine, it is someone else's. But the green check mark is, and it's in plain view, as everyone can see. If people disagree or dislike the answer they can downvote it, or upvote any of the other four answers. There is no foul play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;@NVZ- that makes sense. It really looks like &quot;hey, look how good I am&quot;&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11041/is-it-appropriate-to-accept-ones-own-answers#comment46356_11041&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it? There are 4 other answers which have attracted more upvotes. If visitors select to view the highest score first, the accepted answer (mine) will be at the bottom of the pile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;@DanBron - yes, but when it is asked and answered by the same user I wonder which rationale is in play.&lt;/code&gt; @user159691 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11041/is-it-appropriate-to-accept-ones-own-answers#comment46362_11041&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale in play is that the answer(s) didn't fully address the question, pretty much like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/422269/44619&quot;&gt;wardrobe and closet answer&lt;/a&gt; despite receiving 82 upvotes, it didn't get an upvote from me, and I didn't accept it. I was about to write an answer myself when &lt;strong&gt;@1006a&lt;/strong&gt; posted a  wonderfully detailed and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/423148/44619&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;original &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It is a great pity that their effort has passed by largely unnoticed, their answer deserves greater credit and  recognition.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T09:39:00.513" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T09:39:00.513" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11041" CreationDate="2017-12-20T16:58:31.663" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Provided that it is done under the right circumstances, I see nothing wrong with it. One thing that needs to be considered is that it is not as if Stack Exchange has simply neglected the possibility of doing it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/01/06/accept-your-own-answers/&quot;&gt;They are fully aware of what they have done, and actually decided to build in limitations which severely limit the negative effects of any abuse or undue bias.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not come with the usual benefits of an accepted answer: It will neither be sorted to the top automatically, nor will it earn you reputation points. The only thing given to you is a big green checkmark, which means significantly less when self-awarded than it does when it is awarded as a show of appreciation for what somebody else believes to be the single best answer out of all of other tries. Stack Exchange also imposes a 48 hour limit on accepting your own answer, which forces the original questioner to at least consider accepting somebody else's answer if any potentially better ones come along within that time frame. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was something the network designers really did not want you to do under any circumstance, they would not limit it like this. It would be easier to prevent you from being able to do it at all. In consideration of these factors, and the fact that self-accepted answers from the same account are automatically disclosed, I see nothing unethical about it, provided that it is not done from a fraudulent account to abuse the system to gain unfair advantages and give people the impression that your answer is better than it really is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People accepting their own answer may even be somewhat of a boon for us. There are a couple of reasons for this: The first is that the gamification of Stack Exchange is a secondary concern: Our ultimate goal is to teach and learn from each-other, and anything which may facilitate that process is something we want to allow. We want to encourage people to try and research their own questions, and share any &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; information they find with us. That is why we allow &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;answering your own question&lt;/a&gt; in the first place. It is also why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;we allow partial answers to questions&lt;/a&gt;, even from people &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;who are having the same problem&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Just so long as the question is not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; simple&lt;/a&gt;, we want to pick our members' brains apart until everything they are willing to share under any circumstances is archived and on display. If that means indulging some egotism, then so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;answer acceptance&lt;/a&gt; is not an indicator of which answer is the best or most correct to anybody other than the original poster, so if their own answer to their question really does makes the most sense to them, that is the one that should be accepted, until somebody else comes along and persuades them that there is a better answer by providing it. In this respect, a self-accepted answer sets the minimum bar of quality that the questioner expects of future answers, because they surely will not accept an answer that is worse than the currently accepted answer, and especially not when it is their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say it is always a good thing to do. Indeed, accepting too many of your own answers may suggest that your personal bias towards yourself clouds your judgement, which is perhaps useful for letting other members know that they should not necessarily trust you. In order to avoid this perception, before you accept your own answer, you should really try to think long and hard about if your answer really is the best answer, or if your personal bias is clouding your ability to accurately judge it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T04:53:35.953" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T04:53:35.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11041" CreationDate="2017-12-20T20:16:40.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, it's just a green check mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have probably answered a larger proportion of my own questions than any other question asker on EL&amp;amp;U—44 questions, 22 answers. This is how it happens: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I start with a reasonably simple initial question and undertake some research into its particulars so that I can &quot;show research.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(a) The research becomes far too extensive to include in a question, even a very lengthy question; or (b) the research answers what had been the original question but raises multiple followup questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I post the question, showing some of my research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(a) Other site participants post one or more excellent answers that cover some but not all of the issues I asked about or that suggest additional areas of research that I hadn't thought of when doing my original research; or (b) the question draws little interest and only cursory answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(a) I supplement the excellent answers with an answer of my own that cites further information that they did not include; or (b) I fill the void of in-depth answers with a detailed answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, I think that my response is the best answer among the ones posted; in others, I have no doubt that one of the others is better or just as good. But either way, I don't think it's useful to view the posted responses as being in competition with one another for a prize that must be awarded for the sake of completeness. Indeed, the more open-ended or complex one of my questions is, the less I am inclined to accept any answer posted in response to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the reason I've never accepted one of my own answers isn't that decorum or a sense of false modesty about its relative merit (in my opinion) inhibits me—it's that I'm not convinced that a substantially better answer may not still be out there somewhere, awaiting discovery and formulation. But that's just the way I look at answer acceptance. Other people have very different ideas about the importance of identifying the best current answer to the questions they've asked; and if—like me—they sometimes think that their answer is the best one, I see no reason why they shouldn't indicate their preference with a green check mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T04:26:32.447" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T04:26:32.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2017-12-20T21:09:32.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a partial answer, intended to supplement NVZ's answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Take time to teach&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a comment (to quote Faber and Mazlish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/390335/which-one-is-correct-tools-have-no-supports-for-or-tools-has-no-supports/390380#comment921493_390380&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering questions that are poorly posed is frowned upon here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other ways it could be phrased.  To check the tone, read it over, and imagine yourself in their shoes, as a brand new participant.  Would the comment make you want to stick around, and follow the customs here?  Or would it feel hurtful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale: it's not reasonable to expect new participants to figure this out on their own.  At least we should give them the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T21:09:32.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-20T23:07:53.450" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone has had a mis-spent past few years accruing rep on EL&amp;amp;U, and one therefore has enough reputation, one can view the review queue and see who has been voting to close or keep open a particular question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to know is how and whether members can see who originally voted to close a question, and who else  voted to close it &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; it hits the close-vote queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to  access this information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T23:23:23.400" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T01:48:21.777" Title="Can we tell who originally close-voted a question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-02-24T14:39:00.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11046" CreationDate="2017-12-21T01:48:21.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;For 10k Users Only&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With one notable exception, no, immoderatorial users cannot &lt;em&gt;normally&lt;/em&gt; know such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, 10k users are granted added oversight capabilities to help police the site under the principles of scalable community moderation. They are therefore potentially able to see at least some of those pending close-votes by examining recent relevant entries from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/history&quot;&gt;close vote review queue history&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, those will only be the close-votes that happened via that review queue. But it's more than nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please use this power for good, not for evil&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like with anything else on the site that catches your eye as being possibly dodgy, if you think you see anything untoward happening there in the history listing, please custom-flag any (preferably related) post for moderator attention and include your concern in the detailed text you send us with the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because moderators have much greater visibility into site operations than even 10k users have, we can take the ball and quietly investigate your concern more deeply — and, should the situation warrant it, take appropriate action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T01:48:21.777" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1866" CreationDate="2017-12-21T07:45:55.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that no, questions pertaining to pedagogy are not appropriate here. This is not a forum about how to teach English, it is not really intended for teachers per se, rather it is about the language itself from etymological and linguistic perspectives, and overall seems to prefer questions about more sophisticated uses of English. Still, that leaves quite a bit of room for some basic questions, which can be deceptively simple, that pertain to using English more generally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that should not discourage teachers from participating. There's a lot of expertise in this community and as a teacher they've helped me to gain valuable insights into the sometimes very complex issues regarding grammar, syntax and semantics, linguistic concepts and descriptive vs prescriptive grammar. Conceptually, there's a big difference between what is needed to understand and use advanced language (etymology, linguistic analysis, advanced vocabulary, syntax and semantics) and what is needed by second language learners (really broad and comprehensive grammatical concepts that are easy to understand and apply but that also remain linguistically coherent). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found that in order to accomplish my aims as a teacher I really need a deep understanding of English from a linguistic perspective and I've found the members of this forum to be helpful, well many of them, anyway. But it does seem that there are members here that quite a bit more particular about what they think this forum should entertain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242638" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T07:45:55.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4151" CreationDate="2017-12-21T09:09:22.993" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELL has become a funnel through which questions that some ELU users find not to be germane to their interests are gotten rid of, despite that many of such questions are well within the described parameters for ELU. It's my opinion that some members would prefer it if ELU were somewhat of an ivory tower, but others and there are many, do not feel this way. Nevertheless, it is quite easy for certain, perhaps prejudicial, members to work together and migrate posts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some questions clearly do not belong on ELL which is specifically set up for learners. Furthermore, questions about grammar on ELU are treated differently than those on ELL by virtue of the differences between how language instructors perceive grammar (prescirptively), and how ELU members perceive the language (in linguistics terms and descriptive grammars and to some extent what is acceptable and what is not). Instructive grammars, even for basic concepts, are notoriously inconsistent and this fact really compounds the learner's challenge. Linguistic grammar is much more consistent, particularly with regard to the basics. I strive to make any answers I provide to learners, no matter how simplified they may be, consistent with established linguistic explanations of how English actually works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I ask a question on ELU it is not because I lack understanding or sophistication, it is because I want a deeper understanding of the linguistic principles behind it. On ELL answers tend to be overly simple, inconsistent and from instructors and novices who do not have a very deep understanding of linguistics and they are much less helpful to me. Moreover, ELL is for learners, not for teachers, who have very different concerns from learners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242638" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T09:09:22.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11051" CreationDate="2017-12-21T13:21:17.827" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading up on the difference between &lt;em&gt;whoever&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;whomever&lt;/em&gt; today and came across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302859/112436&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; with zero net vote, and no answers.  I thought that the periodic automatic deletion process would delete such a question.  But it was dated January, 2016.  Why is it still there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T13:39:32.353" Title="Why was this question not automatically deleted?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11050" CreationDate="2017-12-21T13:28:20.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minimally? Because it's not closed, and because it hasn't been a year yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact automatic deletion criteria are complex.  See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered, zero-score questions after a year?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T13:39:32.353" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T13:39:32.353" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-22T15:41:00.307" Score="6" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several questions have come up about the definite article vs the null or zero article. I haven't been keeping track of them, but here are some examples from ELU's repository:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423405/142322&quot;&gt;Scientific &amp;quot;control&amp;quot; as uncountable noun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/338286/142322&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;All crocodiles in the Universe are green&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;All the crocodiles in the Universe are green&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411132/a-hero-becomes-a-legend&quot;&gt;A hero becomes (a) legend&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was some discussion about bringing over to EL&amp;amp;U an answer I wrote on English Language Learners that referenced Peter Master's &lt;em&gt;zero--some--a--the--null&lt;/em&gt; progression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/104200/24861&quot;&gt;l am a young king, but l am king — why no article in front of the second “king”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argued at the time that it wouldn't be appropriate to migrate the question to EL&amp;amp;U since the question is on-topic at ELL. However, as similar questions keep popping up on EL&amp;amp;U, I'm now wondering whether it would be useful to copy (cross-post) the answer to EL&amp;amp;U. I'm no linguist, but I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; found the Peter Masters progression to be well-argued and persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="184706" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T12:36:09.840" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T12:36:09.840" Title="On &quot;The&quot; and null/zero articles - cross-post an answer from English Language Learners?" Tags="|discussion|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T14:54:08.480" Score="8" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to flag a question as very low quality, because I couldn't decide between &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; and &quot;asking to do your homework for you&quot;, but then I got this error message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MBdez.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MBdez.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? Why would I get the choice in the list of something I can't choose? And also, is the word &quot;the&quot; OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T14:54:08.480" Title="&quot;You don't have the permission to use this type of flag&quot;" Tags="|bug|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-24T03:59:11.060" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last week, I asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11035/can-moderators-redirect-links-from-badly-chosen-duplicates-to-actual-duplicates&quot;&gt;Can moderators redirect links from badly chosen duplicates to actual duplicates?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer (from moderator MetaEd) was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators have the ability to edit the list of original questions that the duplicate question links to. They can delete links and also add new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to a followup question today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can moderators change a close reason from 'Please show your research...' to 'Duplicate of...'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm asking here about whether, in a discrete case, moderators can go into a question that has been put on hold for the &quot;Please show your research...&quot; close reason and change the close reason to &quot;Duplicate of X,&quot; when the fundamental problem with the question is that it has been asked and answered elsewhere on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implicit in my new question is a viewpoint that many site participants may disagree with: I think that a hierarchy of permanence, definitiveness, and usefulness exists in the close reasons on this site; that &quot;Please show your research...&quot; is the weakest, most formal, and (theoretically) most easily reversed of those reasons; and that &quot;Duplicate of...&quot; is one of the strongest and most useful of those reasons (if the closed question and its antecedent really are effectively identical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing for &quot;Please show your research...&quot; expressly holds out the possibility that, if the poster shows research, the objection to the question will vanish and the question will reopen. In practice, of course, &quot;Please show research...&quot; plays a somewhat different role: It's the go-to justification for preemptively closing a question without having to weigh whether it is substantively interesting, on topic, and unique at EL&amp;amp;U. More often than not, I suspect, questions closed for &quot;Please how your research...&quot; are faulty for reasons other than their lack of visible research—and those other reasons impel reviewers in the Reopen Votes queue to vote to keep an uninteresting, off-topic, or duplicate question closed on the rare occasion when a poster does edit an on-hold question to show research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, one point of view is that the express terms of the &quot;Please show research...&quot; close reason matter very little in comparison with the practical fact that this close reason enables reviewers to close low-quality questions quickly and keep them closed indefinitely, absent some unusual effort by the OP or others to show research &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; to demonstrate the value of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But lost in this tendency to embrace &quot;Please show your research...&quot; as an exceptionally convenient close reason is the problem that using it sometimes forecloses identification of an objectively better close reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case in point arose earlier today. The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419364/can-myself-be-used-as-a-subject&quot;&gt;Can &amp;quot;Myself&amp;quot; be used as a subject?&lt;/a&gt; was closed because (as the first four close voters noted) the poster didn't show any research. In fact, the body of the question consists entirely of this brief text block:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Myself will attend the meeting.&quot; is it grammatically correct? I think Myself can't be used as a subject of sentence. I myself~ is correct, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the close voters had done a bit of research on EL&amp;amp;U, they would have found that the site already has a question with the very similar heading &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188447/myself-as-a-single-subject&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Myself&amp;quot; as a single subject&lt;/a&gt; and the body&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do we use &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt; as the only subject of a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example I once heard some people saying &lt;em&gt;Myself am to be blamed&lt;/em&gt;. Is this grammatically correct? How is it different from &lt;em&gt;I am to be blamed&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear to me that the newer question effectively duplicates the older question (which, by the way, having been posted in August 2014, was not closed for &quot;Please show your research...&quot;). If we were to close the newer question as a duplicate, a reader who later happened upon &quot;Can 'Myself' be used as a subject?&quot; would be redirected to &quot;'Myself' as a single subject&quot; instead of being told rather unhelpfully that the question was closed for lack of research. In my view, identifying the newer question as a duplicate of an older existing question is desirable as a matter of site tidiness and—more importantly—as a matter of objective accuracy: &quot;It's a duplicate of X&quot; is a more definitive and more useful (to future readers) close reason than &quot;Please show your research...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now we get to the procedural time-suck of trying to reopen a closed question so we can close it for a better reason than the one that close voters originally cited when putting it on hold. I can't imagine that very many people care enough about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rectification of names&lt;/a&gt; to pursue the work of reopening a closed question through popular voting in order to assign it a better close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps we don't have to. If moderators have the power to alter close reasons with several clicks of a keyboard, it might make sense for what might pejoratively be called &quot;anal-retentive individuals&quot; (among whom I count myself) to bring the inferior close reason to the moderators' attention by flagging it, explaining why it is less desirable than a different close reason, and requesting that the mods change it to the superior close reason. Hence my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can moderators make such changes? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other alternative to the insane baseline method of voting to reopen in order to clear the way for voting to close for a better close reason?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T09:23:39.190" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T19:18:29.970" Title="Can moderators change a close reason from 'Please show your research...' to 'Duplicate of...'?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11054" CreationDate="2017-12-24T07:34:39.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can change the close reason of a question only by reopening and re-closing it. A moderator confirmed this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/41929352#41929352&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting to reopen (by 5 users) merely for the sake of closing it with another reason is unnecessary. We can leave comments under the question, instead, which will help guide or redirect OP and others to other relevant pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's nice to have reviewers invest extra time to search for possible duplicates instead of closing as &amp;quot;please include your research&amp;quot;, I don't think most reviewers would spend the time to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason &amp;quot;please include your research&amp;quot; pretty much covers the idea that askers should &amp;quot;search, and research&amp;quot; before asking. It includes using the search function of ELU as well, where they would have found the possible duplicates themselves and would've either found what they were looking for or would have had to include why those results didn't help them when asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very well explained in the first part of the help page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;how to ask&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (Emphasis not mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Search&lt;/a&gt;, and research&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;thoroughly searched for an answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T06:14:44.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-24T15:48:06.637" Score="9" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for slang words that would have been in use around 1910 in New York. Anyone know of an online resource that might work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273166" OwnerDisplayName="Susanne Dunlap" LastEditorUserId="114389" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T07:57:31.453" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T05:26:30.683" Title="Best online slang dictionary for old slang" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11063" CreationDate="2017-12-26T23:07:49.973" Score="8" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any dictionaries for African-American English with definitions and pronunciation? I couldn't seem to find any on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271852" OwnerDisplayName="skygate" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T12:34:04.883" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T12:34:04.883" Title="Are there any dictionaries for AAE?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11057" CreationDate="2017-12-28T00:21:18.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://greensdictofslang.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Green's Dictionary of Slang&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a highly regarded and well-curated dictionary that I would feel safe calling &quot;the best online slang dictionary&quot; in a holistic sense.  The website is easy to use, and &lt;s&gt;with a paid subscription&lt;/s&gt; you can access its massive collection of citations, now available for free without a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with &lt;em&gt;GDoS&lt;/em&gt;, the granularity is not to the level of &quot;New York.&quot;  You could search for words or senses formed in the U.S. between 1910 and 1919, and optionally specify cultural context in searching, but if you really want to find slang unique to New York in 1910, you might consider seeking out texts that were published around that point in spacetime, or sociological works specific to that culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T05:26:30.683" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T05:26:30.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11057" CreationDate="2017-12-28T12:25:58.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect your best bet will be to find a print slang dictionary contemporary to your desired time period. Fortunately, many of these will be out of copyright and therefore available online. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=american%20slang&amp;amp;safe=active&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;source=lnt&amp;amp;tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A%2Ccd_max%3A1920&amp;amp;tbm=bks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; is a great way to find these (under &quot;Tools&quot; you can limit your date range to something that seems sensible), and you could also look in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hathitrust.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hathi Trust's Digital Library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is the 1896 &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1NjWAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon &amp;amp; Cant Embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian Slang, Pidgin English, Gypsies' Jargon and Other Irregular Phraseology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (link is to Vol. II). It's a little earlier than 1910, but some of the phrases labelled &quot;American&quot; would probably still have been in use fifteen years later. Entries are labelled with region, including some that are specific to New York and others that are more generally &quot;American&quot;. A sample entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Swartwout&lt;/strong&gt; (American), a verb of local (New York) origin or usage, signifying &quot;to abscond,&quot; &quot;to vamoose,&quot; &quot;to skip.&quot;  A Mr. Swartwout once decamped from that city, carrying with him a large amount of public money—hence its origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dictionary and a few others very tantalizingly cite a &lt;em&gt;New York Slang Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, published by R.K. Fox, which I believe is Alfred Trumble's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuc.1814828_001;view=1up;seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Slang dictionary of New York, London and Paris&lt;/a&gt; : a collection of strange figures of speech, expressive terms and odd phrases used in the leading cities of the world, their origin, meaning and application / collected and arranged by a well-known detective ; containing portraits of celebrated criminals, with sketches of their lives.&lt;/em&gt; (1880; access via Hathi Trust.) The entries aren't labelled with origin, as Trumble's thesis is that &quot;thieve's patter&quot; is exactly the same all over the world(!), but he appears to have done most of his actual collecting in New York City so it may be useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T12:25:58.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11057" CreationDate="2017-12-29T08:38:17.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're just looking for a manageable collection of slang words and phrases that were probably in use around 1910 in New York City, you could do worse than the glossary of terms in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=COXqAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Life+in+Sing+Sing%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjNvdPesIPWAhXjylQKHergCTAQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=geetus&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Life in Sing Sing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &quot;Number 1500,&quot; published in 1904. Since Sing Sing prison is located just 30 miles north of the city, its slang undoubtedly is and was strongly influenced by city slang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 1500 very conveniently sets aside 15 pages near the end of the book (pages 246–260) for a &quot;dictionary of thieves' and convicts' slang.&quot; I can't vouch for the contemporaneity of all of the entries (compilers of slang dictionaries in centuries past had an unfortunate and unscholarly tendency to simply reissue older slang compilations under their own names or to fill out their own efforts with cribbed entries of dubious currency from earlier dictionaries), but many of the ones in Number 1500's glossary seem to be on point and reasonably up-to-date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T01:45:31.687" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T01:45:31.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11059" CreationDate="2017-12-29T09:33:59.917" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in particular in African American slang, two useful mainstream resources are Clarence Major, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=4LNZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22juba+to+jive%22&amp;amp;dq=%22juba+to+jive%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiAx9a57q7YAhUJh1QKHbG4BPkQ6AEIKTAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1994) and Geneva Smitherman, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nNJZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22amen+corner%22+%22hood%22&amp;amp;dq=%22amen+corner%22+%22hood%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiTjL7O767YAhVFj1QKHfcNDfcQ6AEIKTAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1994). Of the two, Majors's book is far more comprehensive and scholarly, but Smitherman's is well worth consulting for slang of its era. Unfortunately, both are now more than 20 years old, and—although they are searchable online—they provide only snippet views of search results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more up-to-date scholarly treatment of African American Slang appears in Maciej Widawski, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=fJzlBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA132&amp;amp;dq=to+leave+is+to+Audi+5000%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj36v7I5qHOAhVCy2MKHZ-rBMwQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=to%20leave%20is%20to%20Audi%205000%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;African American Slang: A Linguistic Description&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2015), which is likewise searchable in snippet view but shows very little of the glossary portion of the book in the full-page previews online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T09:33:59.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11073" CreationDate="2017-12-29T23:05:53.997" Score="7" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several months ago, SE changed the format of the stuff on the top line. I got used to the new format, including the hamburger, except for one thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old format told me at a glance how many items were in each review queue without my having to click on anything. Yes, I am lazy, but I can be &lt;strong&gt;guilted&lt;/strong&gt; into reviewing if I see at a glance that there are 100 close votes to review.  If the heading doesn't tell me that there is content to review, I feel much less guilty about skipping the queues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we get the info-at-a-glance back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T00:13:24.593" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T18:43:26.370" Title="Can we get the information on the number of items in the review queues back, so we can see at a glance how much is up for review?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-30T00:12:34.733" Score="5" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think some high-rep members overuse the &quot;possible duplicate&quot; claim and should be notified about it. &quot;duplicate&quot; means &quot;duplicate&quot;, not merely related. I find that overuse to be unfair on responders who give or want to give nice answers and end up not posting them, or feeling that their answers have been to no avail or unjustly overlooked or underrated. In my opinion, that unjustified obsession with finding &quot;(just in case) possible duplicates&quot; evidences laziness on the part of some such members and even disrespect for members who are able to come up with a fine reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/424293/canadian-english-how-to-relate-duties-to-a-job-role&quot;&gt;Canadian English - How to relate duties to a job role&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419813/do-i-have-to-put-a-comma-before-in-which-here/419818#419818&quot;&gt;Do I have to put a comma before &amp;quot;in which&amp;quot; here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220151" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T11:36:13.550" Title="Overuse of &quot;possible duplicate&quot; claim to evade or disqualify answers?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11054" CreationDate="2017-12-30T19:18:29.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main goal of closing a question as a duplicate is to create a link between that question and another question's answers to make them easier to find. The community can help link related questions by adding a comment with links to those questions so they show up in the sidebar. The &quot;related&quot; relationship persists even if the comment is deleted. This only goes so far, because the mobile version of the site doesn't show the &quot;related questions&quot; section (as far as I can tell).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question was originally closed for a lack of research, it is worth considering whether that question will eventually get a negative score that would cause it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;to be deleted&lt;/a&gt;. If the question was poor quality to begin with, it may not be that useful as a breadcrumb for future visitors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question could be useful as a duplicate, I would edit it to give it a good title, correct any spelling or grammatical errors, format it, tag it properly, comment with a link to my dupe target, up-vote it, and then flag for a moderator to see if they will consider switching it from whatever close reason it has over to a duplicate. If any of the preceding seems like more effort than it's worth, I let it go. I know the up-vote may be controversial, but if the question is &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; as a duplicate, I think the up-vote to keep it out of the jaws of the Roomba is merited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T19:18:29.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11065" CreationDate="2017-12-31T11:36:13.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A duplicate question is not necessarily &lt;strong&gt;identical:&lt;/strong&gt; that would result in the questions being merged (so all the answers to both questions appear in one place, because all the answers are relevant in precisely the same way to both questions). Closure as a duplicate simply points to where an existing answer already covers what's being asked. This is made explicit in the banner at the top of the closed question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ddv8w.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ddv8w.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;This question already has an answer here...&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which points to another question which answers the closed one. It's a subtle difference, but the difference is why there are two mechanisms. Merging questions doesn't happen very often, because it's not often that two questions are identical. It normally applies to one question being asked twice, either by the same person or by a bunch of classmates seeking help with schoolwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question closed as a duplicate means that the linked question contains answers which may be applied to answer the closed question, in much the same way as a tutorial question is answered by the teaching material &amp;mdash; some lateral thinking or application may be required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe that more explanation is needed, create a better answer on the question which is open, covering not only what is asked in that question but also a more general/complete answer which would mean less lateral thinking or application is needed for other questions linked to it. Because you are answering an old question, it will not gain as much attention as a new question, and you will accrue rep from it more slowly; but an answer will bump the question on the home page, and a good answer will gain rep regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your example 1, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/424293/canadian-english-how-to-relate-duties-to-a-job-role&quot;&gt;Canadian English - How to relate duties to a job role&lt;/a&gt;, the question itself is either fundamentally unclear or mere proofreading, &quot;Is it correct?&quot;. The linked question provides the answer &quot;Yes, it is correct, along with the alternative &lt;em&gt;in which&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; That's not an incorrect link: it does answer the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In example 2, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/419813&quot;&gt;Do I have to put a comma before &amp;quot;in which&amp;quot; here?&lt;/a&gt;, you have provided a good answer which has [at the time of this post] a net score of +26. But Peter Shor's answer in the first link says exactly what you do, in a slightly different way: &quot;Use a comma before non-restrictive clauses, and don't use a comma before restrictive clauses.&quot; So that's not an incorrect link either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T11:36:13.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11070" CreationDate="2018-01-01T18:31:28.753" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/424390/75342&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/424390/75342&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if tchrist had added a comment as to &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; it was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;commentary on the question or other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;asking another, different question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“thanks!” or “me too!” responses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;exact duplicates of other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;barely more than a link to an external site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not even a partial answer to the actual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a full answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as using abusive language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Always be polite and have fun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was I rude to?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It’s fine to disagree and express concern, but please be civil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't disagreeing or arguing with anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might trigger it, but still, I didn't aim it at any person or group of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75342" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T20:19:42.780" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T20:19:42.780" Title="My answer meets all the qualifications in the Help Center has a score of &quot;9&quot;, yet was deleted" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11068" CreationDate="2018-01-01T18:42:55.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe your answer didn't meet the &quot;be nice&quot;, the &quot;be polite&quot;, and the &quot;be grammatically correct&quot; criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For users with less than 10K who cannot see deleted posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I use it as &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Original Post&quot; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Original Poster&quot;, depending on what I need at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;OP is an idiot who can't find his arse with both hands, a flashlight and a map!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;What you wrote is true, but does has nothing to do with the OP.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR more likely, some (many?) users objected to the gratuitous use of colorful language in the answer and flagged it to the mods' attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the answer more attentively, I see it also attracted 4 downvotes and some upvoted comments that felt uncomfortable with the OP's example of usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3 Why the rude example? I realize it's in jest and not directed towards any real person, but still @________&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;2 @________ because it's a real-life example of using OP as &quot;Original Poster&quot;. – RonJohn yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;2 @RonJohn Fair enough, although I'm sure it's also possible to find a non-rude example @_______&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T19:08:00.807" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T19:08:00.807" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11068" CreationDate="2018-01-01T19:06:15.257" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted your post because our community here had flagged it, including as being rude or offensive. It read like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use it as &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Original Post&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Original Poster&amp;quot;, depending on what I need at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;OP is an idiot who can't find his arse with both hands, a flashlight and a map!&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;What you wrote is true, but does has nothing to do with the OP.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I judged community’s point was a valid one. The language used there was hardly the language of respectful civil discourse in keeping with our Be Nice policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless I didn’t find the language so bad as to merit the various kinds of automatic penalties which the system would have imposed on you if a sufficient number of similar flags had eventually shown up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So rather than let those flags build up to the point of locked deletion, which has quite a few unpleasant but completely automatic side-effects, I intervened to manually delete it to spare you those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That cleared all pending flags without those triggering a massive hit on your reputation, locking the post and hiding its contents, or blocking you from answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T19:07:23.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:12:25.583" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just had a flag rejected. The 'answer' I flagged as 'not an answer' was 'Yes, it has to be &lt;em&gt;rote&lt;/em&gt;. Thank you' I deduced that this was the OP under a different name. How do I go about discussing this with the moderator involved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T18:29:06.593" Title="Querying a moderator decision" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11071" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:52:49.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We often see new users who get confused and end up with multiple profiles. If that's the case here, and if there's no sign of foul play (such as cross voting), we'll help with merging them together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T17:52:49.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11064" CreationDate="2018-01-02T18:43:26.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a change peculiar to our site; it’s a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/302226/153355&quot;&gt;network-wide change&lt;/a&gt;. You might want to read in more detail how it’s now supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to see the number, simply click the “all queues” link in the toolbar’s popup menu for the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T18:43:26.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11071" CreationDate="2018-01-04T18:29:06.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So my answer to NVZ’s clarifying question in the comment trail can be voted on separately, I'm posting it separately:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@MetaEd Assuming you handled the flags, I wonder why my flag as VLQ was declined for that one-liner. Your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VLQ flags are for posts which are an “indecipherable mess”. VLQ flags may be declined when the post is comprehensible and arguably contains at least a partial answer. For a good discussion of the limits of VLQ, see the following answer, and other answers about VLQ on SE Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/167641&quot;&gt;The limits to a Very Low Quality answer – SE Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale is that good VLQ flags should result in deletion. But we don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to delete answers which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; answers, just less than useful (or even harmful). We want them to be peer reviewed. Downvoted answers are way more helpful to future users than deleted answers. As the old saw goes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Nobody is completely useless; s/he can always serve as a bad example.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the one-liner answer to the linked question, it was a comprehensible answer (and even, arguably, correct, so far as it went). That would be plenty of reason to invalidate a VLQ flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T18:29:06.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11079" CreationDate="2018-01-05T01:14:24.433" Score="20" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a complaint about the overall migration of questions from EL&amp;amp;U. I think taken as a whole, the migration path is a positive thing. I have started to see a few real stinkers getting migrated though, so I want to do a little level setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the proposed duplicate is closely related, this is a discussion and not something that has an answer. I'm not sure what purpose would be served by closing this as a duplicate of a far older question. Folks come and go from both sites and I think it is worthwhile to revisit the migration path every so often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is new information here that isn't in the previous post, and my message isn't &amp;quot;don't migrate garbage&amp;quot;. I think that the folks that are migrating these questions are trying to help the author. I am trying to explain why migrating an off-topic question might not be the best way to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I wrote this post, I had just rejected migration of a question with this as entire content of that question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is &amp;quot; Which cities did you go to?&amp;quot; a correct question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proof-reading is off-topic on ELL, just like EL&amp;amp;U. Migrating this question doesn't help the author of it. It just makes things more confusing because we can't put it on hold while we help the author bring it on-topic. When you see learners, feel free to send them our way with a comment, but please don't migrate one line &amp;quot;is this correct?&amp;quot; questions. They're problematic for two reasons - there isn't enough detail to understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the author is unsure about the sentence's correctness, and they're of limited usefulness for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The migration makes the ELL &amp;quot;on-boarding&amp;quot; process a little tricky because users don't automatically get an ELL account created. Often they end up creating a second account and then they get confused because they can't edit their question or comment on anything. It's not a good experience. If the question is OK to start with, most of the time the &amp;quot;on-boarding&amp;quot; goes a lot more smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're curious about which migrated questions are well-received and which aren't, here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/485239/migrated-questions-from-elu-with-scores-less-than-parameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a SEDE query that let's you examine migrated in a score range starting from a particular date&lt;/a&gt;. The default date of 09/22/2015 is when the migration path opened between EL&amp;amp;U and ELL (before that questions were migrated by moderators). Keep in mind that many of the really poor migrations won't show up in that query, because they've been rejected and roomba'ed by now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This migrated question, for example, was well-received by the ELL community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/148785/&quot;&gt;Does 'yield' still agree with 'the subject' in 'measures can be undertaken that yield/s positive outcomes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a good amount of detail and is about something of interest to many learners. On ELL, enough context/explanation of what is confusing can make up for a lack of research. Ideally, questions would have both context and some demonstrated attempt at research (i.e. not just the statement &amp;quot;I googled and couldn't find anything&amp;quot;), but we can get by if they have one or the other. If a question has neither, please don't migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've also started &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4584/&quot;&gt;a community wiki answer on ELL's meta with links to a few questions that we think are good examples of questions with enough detail&lt;/a&gt; with the hope that illustrations of &amp;quot;good detail&amp;quot; will be more informative than trying to come up with a documented comprehensive guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2024-02-05T18:33:51.380" LastActivityDate="2024-02-05T18:33:51.380" Title="Please don't migrate obviously off-topic questions to ELL - it just makes things harder on the author" Tags="|discussion|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T13:13:29.750" Score="-3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, thirty of the fifty questions visible on the first page have been marked as holds or duplicates, with two or more others apparently awaiting final judgment from whatever local Fates have possession of the scissors. This represents an over 60% rejection rate. I hardly need point out that for a web forum open to the public, this makes a decidedly ungracious impression, especially since the majority of those posting questions are non-native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were this forum a community effort to produce a definitive wiki of grammar and usage, then such stringent gatekeeping might be warranted. Forum posts, however, are by their nature ephemeral. The mere existence of an answer, however verbose or nongermane, from 2011, should not preclude someone asking the same question today. If, however, there is some legitimate need to jettison 60% of the posts, then perhaps a &quot;read before you post&quot; pop-up should be displayed for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="272480" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T00:50:01.553" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T03:44:23.477" Title="Holds, duplicates" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|appropriate-questions|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11075" CreationDate="2018-01-05T17:09:02.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I vote to migrate, I am, quite literally, posting a new question on the new site. I have a duty to meet a site's posting guidelines whenever I post to it. Therefore I vote to migrate ONLY when I am reasonably sure the question meets the new site's posting guidelines and will stay open on the new site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, there's no point in migrating a question that will simply be closed on the new site and get bounced back to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it still another way, I avoid using migrate votes as a substitute for guiding the user to the best site for their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when someone asks for writing advice, I have in the past closed the question off topic and left a comment with some guidance, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For writing advice, take a look at these other Stack Exchange sites, depending on the context of your question: [academia.se], [writers.se], [literature.se], [workplace.se], [interpersonal.se]. If you are learning English, take a look at [ell.se]. If you want to try another site, ask for migration, or else delete here before re-asking the question on the other site. Also check out “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7571&quot;&gt;Where can I ask for free proofreading? – Meta&lt;/a&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T17:09:02.697" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T17:03:59.157" Score="7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to find lists of English words that meet certain criteria, such as having a certain number of syllables, or being intransitive verbs. Is there an online English dictionary that will allow me to search for this kind of grammatical &quot;tag&quot; rather than by specific words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55877" OwnerDisplayName="OldPeculier" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T19:57:17.260" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T19:57:17.260" Title="Where can I find an English dictionary that I can search by number of syllables, transitive/intransitive, and other grammatical markers?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11075" CreationDate="2018-01-05T19:17:59.810" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally try to whip questions that might be well received on ELL into shape by editing the post; fixing typos, tags, and maybe even their titles. If we all did something to make an ELL candidate question at least look presentable that would help enormously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proofreading questions should never be migrated. Bad questions or questions whose answers can be found in a dictionary should be closed for... lack of research. Yes, sometimes that reason is the &quot;best&quot; reason for putting a new question on hold. They should not be dumped at ELL. If a duplicate can be found, even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, good questions that are better suited to ELL tend to attract upvotes and answers on EL&amp;amp;U. Which leaves me to urge the mods to migrate good learners' questions faster, but only &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; some makeup has been applied and a  proper pair of shoes have been provided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T23:13:16.140" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T23:13:16.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11076" CreationDate="2018-01-05T22:07:39.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Holds&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/289830/323179&quot;&gt;data here&lt;/a&gt; shows that ELU had the third highest close rate in 2016 in the Stack Exchange network where 51.87% of all questions asked that year were closed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/306197/323179&quot;&gt;2017's data&lt;/a&gt; is now in and we've taken the top spot for percent closed (out of number asked that year) at 54.82%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the site has pretty much always been this way. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2259/191178&quot;&gt;nearly identical concern&lt;/a&gt; was brought up in 2011. While the concerns are the same, there are some significant differences between then and now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELL was created &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot; title=&quot;ELL is the same age as its community user&quot;&gt;January 2013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;on hold&quot; mechanism was introduced &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/173497/323179&quot;&gt;March 2013&lt;/a&gt;. The important aspects of this change are:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the first five days after a question is closed, questions will display as [on hold] rather than [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edits by the OP within 5 days of closure trigger automatic addition to the re-open queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most (but not all) questions asked by nonnative speakers would be on-topic for ELL, and usually get a better reception there in terms of votes as well. I have not noticed any difference in the quality of answers between our two sites, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Impressions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole idea behind changing it from [on hold] to [closed] for the first five days is to soften the blow and encourage people to edit their posts to fix the problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a problem to have the [closed] label on questions. If a question has been closed, most likely there is a problem with it (if not, see &quot;Reversing Closure&quot;). Closed questions (not including duplicates), in theory, act like a signpost saying that such questions are not welcome—but this is a good thing. We don't want more questions with problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reversing closure&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/36423/323179&quot;&gt;many actions&lt;/a&gt; you can take to help get questions reopened. Of note are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editing to fix the problems it got closed for (this is not always possible for people other than the OP)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cast reopen votes (requires 250 rep for your own post, 3000 for others' posts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a reopen request here on Meta with a link to the question and justification why you think the question should be reopened&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Duplicates&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's incredibly important to note that ELU is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92110/323179&quot;&gt;NOT a forum&lt;/a&gt;. This is a Question and Answer site which strives to be closer to &quot;a definitive wiki&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it is perfectly ok for the same question to be asked multiple times (although the same question for the fifteenth time is...not really ok). The duplicate questions serve as signposts for the original. This has been the idea since &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; day one, since it was one of the ideas behind Stack Overflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Remember, in some cases we may want duplicate questions to stick around …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people &lt;strong&gt;tend to ask and search using completely different words&lt;/strong&gt;, and the better our coverage, the better odds our fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/20/linking-duplicate-questions/&quot;&gt;Linking Duplicate Questions&#xA;  &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question had no answers when it was closed as a duplicate, anyone without an account will be automatically redirected to its duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T03:44:23.477" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T03:44:23.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11082" CreationDate="2018-01-06T04:12:22.470" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;here - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/269683&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/269683&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(lets do the time warp again)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T04:27:52.267" Title="Why did a nine-day-old answer pop up in the new user first answer review queue?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11081" CreationDate="2018-01-06T04:27:52.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the Stack Exchange garbage-collection daemon — who’s affectionately nicknamed &lt;em&gt;the Roomba&lt;/em&gt; — has just had its way with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423926/2085&quot;&gt;this closed question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That delete not just the question but an answer from the again-new user, since it brought the owner of the post in your review down below some new-user threshold, which kicked one of their remaining posts into the FP queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T04:27:52.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-06T15:13:30.760" Score="-6" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the proper time to close questions be: before they've received answers? This one sat open for four days before being closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/424701/any-other-compound-words-with-opposite-meanings-like-bittersweet/425144#425144&quot;&gt;Any other compound words with opposite meanings like &amp;quot;bittersweet&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I also point out that down voting an answer before placing the question on hold, is an abuse of privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273295" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T15:09:30.603" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T15:09:30.603" Title="Proper time to close questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11083" CreationDate="2018-01-06T16:39:16.953" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If questions should not be closed once they have received answers, then the system would enforce that and not permit it. Because it does not, answers are irrelevant to whether a question should be closed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the question is asking for examples — as evidenced by the answers received. List questions are &quot;too broad&quot;: there are too many possible answers, all equally valid and not easily chosen between when accepting an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is &lt;em&gt;preferable&lt;/em&gt; that answerers are spared the trouble they take in answering an off-topic question, it's not possible to maintain a constant vigilance and it may take even months or years. It is better that answerers recognise that a question is too broad and not bother answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rather better course of action, if it's possible, is to edit the question to remove any list-request element and leave a question which is on topic. I don't believe that's possible here, although &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/425129/revisions&quot;&gt;it can be&lt;/a&gt; — but even then it may not be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is also unrelated to placing a question on hold: votes may be cast at any time, immediately after the answer is placed, after years, or at any point in between. Now that you have highlighted your answer here, it may garner further votes (up or down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T16:39:16.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11083" CreationDate="2018-01-06T17:16:38.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be &lt;em&gt;preferable&lt;/em&gt;, since the main reason to close questions is to preempt useless attempts to answer them, but there are vague reasons that questions might accrue answers before they are closed. Some people do not know which questions should be closed, other people do not agree upon what questions should be closed, and the remainder probably choose to ignore the fact that a question should be closed. As Dan Bron mentioned, in order to avoid closing questions prematurely, it takes a consensus of five eligible voters to close a question, unless a trusted member with special privileges (such as a moderator) votes to close it. It takes time to reach such a consensus, and even if we had enough moderators to close every question which should be closed immediately, which  we do not, strictly speaking the preferred &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;role of a moderator&lt;/a&gt; in Stack Exchange philosopy is that of &quot;exception handler&quot; for especially troublesome cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has absolutely no value in remaining in our backlog, it may be deleted under certain conditions, at which point whether or not it was irrelevant. Closed questions are considered candidates for deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the vote,  your answer probably was not voted against because the question was closed because if that was the case, somebody would have also voted against the other answer, which nobody did as of yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presently, I have not voted against your answer, but if I may guess why somebody would do so, it was probably voted against for qualitative reasons. Here on Stack Exchange, we expect members to corraborate and explain their answers per the guidelines outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Basically, you should corraborate your point somehow, even if it is merely with an explanation based on anecdotal evidence. You have not provided even so much as single proof of your claim or a word of explanation, and that is how your answer differs from the other answer, which at the very least least provides us some a basis for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you can improve your answer by showing us that lamp and shade are antonyms in a thesaurus, or explaining which definitions of the word are opposed. I know this seems as if it should be obvious to you, since it seems as if it should be axiomatic, but everybody has to learn something a first time, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;insisting upon this&lt;/a&gt; it is part of how we maintain the credibility and distinct usefulness of our website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, votes should be assigned based upon the overall perceived usefulness of a post. If somebody thinks a question should be closed, that may just be because they do not believe it can be answered usefully, regardless of whether or not a consensus can be reached. Voting against answers you consider useless is not quite an abuse of the privilege: If you place your cursor over the voting buttons, you will see that they respectively read &quot;This answer is useful.&quot; and &quot;This answer is not useful.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some independent consideration as to whether or not they actually are useless, in spite of expectations, should probably be given. Answers are not automatically voted against when questions are voted against or closed are for a reason: The quality of each post is at least somewhat independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T20:37:28.230" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T20:37:28.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11075" CreationDate="2018-01-07T18:47:40.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem would seem to be the mere fact that migration is being treated as a flavor of closure. Why not promote migration as an option out of it's current position buried four levels down in the close tree, to a position of equal standing on the share/edit/close/flag list that appears under the question? That would go a long way to prevent the current 'fire and forget' situation of it being the final click of the task. If 'migrate' was one of the click 1 options, there would be ample opportunity to prompt the migrater to address the concerns of the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible advantages - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scoring can be kept separate from close votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Privilege can be separately managed. Perhaps it should be restricted to those who are registered on the target site, or else those not registered get to jump through a few more hoops. A separate reputation trigger is possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get rid of the built in condescension, ie., it's not good enough for us but maybe it's good enough for them. That's not the right approach, but I feel that is what is being conditioned. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: This is now made a separate meta, titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11089/&quot;&gt;Split migration off from the closure tree?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T13:08:20.210" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T13:08:20.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-08T14:02:34.620" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;RE: &#xA;“marked as duplicate by Mari-Lou A, Edwin Ashworth, tchrist♦, FumbleFingers, RegDwigнt♦ Aug 15 '14 at 14:08&#xA;This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.”&#xA; .&#xA;How do I ask a new question, and what should it be about?&#xA;.&#xA;Crap. That’s two questions isn’t it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="275260" OwnerDisplayName="user275260" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T15:40:12.107" Title="How do I ask a new question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2018-01-08T15:40:12.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your new question, you should ask your new question (presumably with wording that distinguishes it from the prior question), &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; refer to the old question, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; explain how it is not a duplicate. This will help the reader understand the nuances, and help prevent the from closing it as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may turn out that the prior question in fact did cover what you're asking (but no answer supplied it). A new question would not be the right place for new or embellished answers to the the old question. That may be a reason for bumping the old question (many means for this), adding a comment requesting/emphasizing  the additional nuance that you don't see in the given answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T15:40:12.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-09T01:33:35.770" Score="6" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a string of meta questions about ELU migrating low quality questions to ELL. The most recent was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11075/please-dont-migrate-obviously-off-topic-questions-to-ell-it-just-makes-things&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. This question stems directly from that one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help prevent poor questions getting dumped on ELL and others, I suggest that the Migration buttons be removed from the Close tree and placed below the question along with Share, Edit, Close, and Flag .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As things currently stand, ELL Migration is buried four levels down in the Close tree. When an experienced reviewer looks at a question, they most often know, before any clicks, where they are headed. If it's to ELL Migration, then they have to click though the tree, and then the actual migration vote is a 'fire and forget' action. I think the current path/placement is an impediment to segregating bad questions from those that simply belong elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are things I just don't like about it being there.  The decision tree is inherently condescending towards our sister sites. And why should someone opting to close a question be shown the migration vote tallies, given the tendency to just pile on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And apparently, there are some dubious scoring rules as well. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but if the fifth vote is to Close for lack of research, they could inadvertently &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; the question to get Migrated. Wouldn't it make more sense for close votes to inhibit migration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Does the current location of the Migrate button contribute to the poor record of migrating low quality posts to ELL. Does it condition reviewers to migrate poor questions? Does it make it too easy to migrate poor questions? Does having both the migration and close vote tallies presented together muddy what should be a pretty clear distinction between 'bad' and 'wrong place'?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt; If the current location of the Migration buttons is part of the problem, where should they go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T18:58:30.077" LastActivityDate="2024-03-08T19:05:10.593" Title="Split migration off from the closure tree?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11089" CreationDate="2018-01-09T02:50:56.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current placement doesn't reflect the basic logic of how we categorize Close actions and Migration. The distinction between a deficient question and one that's just not in the best place is pretty basic. As things stand, if you cruise through the Close tree looking for an option that fits your thinking, and don't find any, you dead-end at the Migration buttons. Unlike automated phone menus, there isn't an operator standing by to help you if you drop out the bottom of the tree. Migration as the action of last resort is build in to the current structure, and I don't think that is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason that people end up at the Migration buttons is that there is a strong tendency to play follow-the-leader and click on the options that have been voted on previously. Deplorable habit. I'm as guilty as anyone else. It makes no sense to me to expose would-be Close voters to the temptation of piling-on to a Migration vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The review vote count evaluation scheme needs an overhaul (and a nickname). Migration needs to stand on its own, vote-wise. If anything, Close votes should act against migration, or prompt the Migrate voter to review the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think promoting the Migration button to the top level would make it easier to manage migration issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible advantages -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote tally visibility can be kept separate from Close votes.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Privilege can be separately managed.  A separate reputation trigger is possible. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Get rid of the built in condescension, ie., it's not good enough for us but maybe it's good enough for them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Migration could be added as an option to the Flag button&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A separate review queue could be created for Migrations&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T02:50:56.387" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-09T10:35:57.633" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's 10 questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/that&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;that&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt;. It lacks a tag wiki. Is it a useful tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's being used when asking about whether to use &quot;that&quot; or &quot;which&quot;, which has its own tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/which-that&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;which-that&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;which-that&lt;/a&gt; such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223990/that-vs-which-vs-what&quot;&gt;that vs which vs what&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's being used when asking whether to use &quot;that&quot; or &quot;who&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/425483/what-is-the-mistake-in-there-are-many-danes-who-speak-english&quot;&gt;What is the mistake in &amp;quot;There are many Danes who speak English&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's being used to ask whether &quot;that&quot; can be simply dropped: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209718/is-it-required-to-use-that-here&quot;&gt;Is it required to use &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it's useful to have a tag, because you can't google for the word &quot;that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much the same as number 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1420" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T10:35:57.633" Title="Should we have [that] tag?" Tags="|discussion|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11075" CreationDate="2018-01-10T08:40:44.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say that I'm guilty of answering some of these questions, simply because I forgot about the existence of ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the people who ask these questions are learners and non-native English speakers, so could (I feel) benefit from a little more help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving comments such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't anyone dare suggest migrating this question to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sends a negative and confusing message to the asker (especially when ELL might be confused with HELL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The high-rep users who administer this stack are by definition (I'd hope) excellent English writers.  It shouldn't be too difficult to set up some form of standard text that politely and clearly communicates the existence of the ELL stack and how they should go about getting their question answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe including this advice into a new VTC reason might accomplish this goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user195888" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T08:40:44.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11096" CreationDate="2018-01-10T15:38:05.053" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past two days I have run across two one-line answers that were not in English. One &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/425646/177853&quot;&gt;appeared to be in Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/425797/177853&quot;&gt;other in Hindi&lt;/a&gt; (to the best of my ability to tell; I don't speak either language). I used a custom flag for the first, and &quot;not an answer&quot; for the second to avoid bugging the mods, but I'm wondering if there is a better choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, my guess is that both are actually spam (I can't imagine another reason for such answers), but I can't tell for sure. I know that the consequences for spam flags are higher than for some of the other flags, so I'm reluctant to use it in an unclear situation—but on the other hand, perhaps we &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; stronger consequences for such posts (assuming they really are spam).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the custom flag the first time around so a mod could make the decision, but if this isn't going to be a once-in-a-blue moon situation, I'd rather just know what auto-flag to use (or know that the mods think it's appropriate to use the custom flag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T16:55:49.987" Title="What flag is appropriate for non-English, one-line answers?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11095" CreationDate="2018-01-10T16:55:49.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I limit use of the &quot;spam&quot; or &quot;abusive&quot; flags to cases where I realize the post is intentionally abusive of the site or the community. These flags have a punitive effect that probably shouldn't be imposed on a well-intentioned person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the &quot;not an answer&quot; flag for answer posts that do not intend to answer the question. In the case of a non-English answer, that can be hard to determine. The output of &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt; can sometimes be enlightening, when the writing style is not too idiomatic or informal for machine translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a post is indecipherable, so that you can't even determine that one of the flags above applies, a good choice is the &quot;very low quality&quot; flag. VLQ is a rare flag, in theory. VLQ is specifically intended for posts which are indecipherable. It gets abused when people take &quot;very low quality&quot; too broadly. But indecipherable applies pretty clearly to posts that are untranslatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are always welcome to throw a custom flag when you feel the existing flags don't describe the situation accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T16:55:49.987" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-12T06:57:10.920" Score="7" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/425914/50044&quot;&gt;the answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mimpi menjadi kenyataan.? Bukan kah segala sesuatu berawal dari mimpi. Selama mimpi kita Masi di tekuni dengan niat &amp;amp; tekad yang keras, pintu kesuksesan pasti kita raih. Dengan mimpi juga, kita mempunyai alunan hidup yang terarah, mau kemana tujuan melangkah. Sehingga kata mimpi merupakan, salah satu dari tujuan hudup. Nyata &amp;amp; tidaknya dari kita sendiri yang menjalaninya.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After my first delete vote, I pushed it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/270425&quot;&gt;Low Quality Posts review queue&lt;/a&gt; via a NAA flag. And then it had &quot;recommend deletion&quot; from 4 others and 2 &quot;delete&quot; votes. In the end, it shows that it was deleted by myself and two others, and of those, one was a moderator. But nevertheless, my flag was declined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, it is not &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; job to translate into English. Since the post did not answer the question in the language and standard expected by ELU, it did not deserve being preserved here as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know why flagging it NAA was wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T06:47:01.493" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T06:47:01.493" Title="An answer was removed, but my flag was declined nevertheless - why?" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleted-posts|flags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-12T16:57:58.977" Score="-11" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing today to debunk the libelous myth you stipulated without citing a single source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard back from the OED, Please see link below. Upon noticing drastic differences between Google Dictionary's content and that of the Living Oxford Dictionary, one can only assume that Google has updated their source to something more credible, and has furthermore received authority by the OED to provide for creative license with regards to content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They make no claim, and cite no source because they are an oracle and they are not required to divulge their source, which is comprised of many of the worlds most intelligent people who work in the field of applied mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, again: How do you like those apples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/licensing/google&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/licensing/google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please re-open the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11056/is-google-a-lexicon/11058?noredirect=1#comment46472_11058&quot;&gt;Is Google a lexicon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sincerely,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jesse G. Ivy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Looking at you @Clare &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/210913/clare&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/210913/clare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: @MetaEd, please never cite wikipedia. Ever. And be more polite to community members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="215001" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T23:18:45.673" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T23:19:20.190" Title="Google is a Lexicon, How Do You Like Those Apples?" Tags="|discussion|support|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11099" CreationDate="2018-01-12T20:41:16.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pasting in the results of Googling a word is unacceptable on ELU for many, many reasons. This has been covered elsewhere, but here are a few of them, in no particular order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It does not meet the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;network-wide requirements for referencing other’s work&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have to provide a link when pasting in someone else's work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have to cite where the information comes from, and Googling never provides an actual citation of where the original information change from time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not everyone gets the same Googling results as you get.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Googling results can and do change from time without notice or tracking history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LMGTFY is justly banned throughout the Stack Exchange network, so working around that ban is forbidden.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are not a link farm: answers should be mostly your own words. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2160/2085&quot;&gt;Questions that can be answered by mere Googling should be closed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T20:47:57.903" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T20:47:57.903" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11099" CreationDate="2018-01-12T23:19:20.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm marking this &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; because it is not possible for us to re-open a failed migration stub that bounced back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution is simple: if you wish to cite the OED, then by all means please do so. But Googling is not the OED. QED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T23:19:20.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T00:22:16.627" Score="24" ViewCount="715" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;Which word begins with &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; and looks like an axe in this picture?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, the question no longer deserves to be open and was locked on &lt;strong&gt;January 9, 2018&lt;/strong&gt;. Is this a surprise for anyone? Maybe a discussion was held somewhere, maybe on meta, maybe on chat? I don't remember seeing it. Can someone post me the link, please? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question which was &lt;strong&gt;upvoted 440 times&lt;/strong&gt;. An answer that was &lt;strong&gt;upvoted&lt;/strong&gt; an incredible, and jaw-dropping &lt;strong&gt;837 times&lt;/strong&gt;. (I'm counting all the upvotes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, posted on June 23 2017, and  &lt;strong&gt;visited 91,835 times&lt;/strong&gt; is now locked. Seemingly, forever.  No one can ever upvote or downvote any post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't recall any ballyhoo about the quality of the answers posted, but there were a few users who sustained the question was off topic but &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;it was never closed by the community&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Never&lt;/strong&gt;. Despite the thousands of visitors and the hundreds of votes cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the community realise that the question, one day, can now be silently deleted without anyone being consulted? Without anyone knowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should have a discussion, there &lt;strong&gt;should be greater transparency&lt;/strong&gt; between users and elected mods. I would like to hear if there are users who support locking this question, and perhaps, one day look forward to seeing it being deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been pointed out, in the comments below, that locking a question is not the antechamber leading to its deletion. However, if a question is locked because it does not comply with ELU&quot;s standards then it stands to reason that it's more likely to be deleted in the future despite the considerable attention and votes it attracted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10493/deleted-upvoted-and-popular-question-why&quot;&gt;popular questions&lt;/a&gt; with good answers have been silently deleted in the past.  In addition, I submit the following observation where a respected user is undecided which disturbs him the most… &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) that a question '&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; [...] &lt;strong&gt;an ELU level question&lt;/strong&gt; [, and ...] &lt;strong&gt;not answered by English&lt;/strong&gt;, but by contacting certain people about a toy ball' [and not appropriate on ELL either] &lt;strong&gt;took so long to be deleted&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;  (c) that the voting system allows such an endorsement of &lt;strong&gt;a question that so clearly violates the intended purpose of ELU&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I respect this user and his opinion, I appreciate the reasons given for his lack of enthusiasm but would he agree that the question should have been locked or deleted without consulting the community? It's the &lt;em&gt;second most popular question&lt;/em&gt;, vote-wise, on EL&amp;amp;U. This is the point I am trying to make. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it's not just about Dan Bron's answer, some of the other answers on &quot;Y&quot; questions are of a similar high standard. For example, the answers by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395554/44619&quot;&gt;Theraot&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395595/44619&quot;&gt;1006a&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395388/44619&quot;&gt;ab2&lt;/a&gt; were serious attempts at answering the English language question, not about the “toy ball”. Locking the OP hints that Bron's superb research, plus the time and effort spent in crafting his answer should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be held as an example of a &quot;high-quality&quot; answer. Did the mod who locked the post consider this aspect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, the non-native speaker, who posted the question genuinely wanted to know why a child's toy ball had a picture of an ax(e) next to the letter Y. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can someone help me identify which English word is depicted in Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain why that doesn't qualify as an English &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;  January 15 2018 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anything in particular you would like to know via this meta? Is this a call to unlock it? Or just looking for &quot;why&quot; it was locked? Something else? @NVZ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; looking for an explanation as to how the second most popular question (based on the number of upvotes) which  was never closed by the community, that was praised and rewarded by the Stack Exchange team, could suddenly, and inexplicably, be locked from one day to the next without any forewarning. For users who may be interested, please see Andrew Leach's ♦ &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11103/i-didnt-know-the-yellow-ax-question-had-been-locked-did-you#comment46777_11106&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; and tchrists's ♦ closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11103/i-didnt-know-the-yellow-ax-question-had-been-locked-did-you#comment46781_11106&quot;&gt;knell&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T20:45:42.877" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T20:45:42.877" Title="I didn't know the yellow ax question had been locked. Did you?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|moderators|locked-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7052" CreationDate="2018-01-13T01:23:46.410" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. And no. In my opinion Google Dictionary is a citable source. However, this site requires that all sources be cited with an internet link. As ironic as that in and of itself may be, with regards to the credibility of google I have a link that OED UK emailed me personally upon inquiry. Turns out my suspicion was correct and Google Dictionary is one of the Oxford Dictionaries. It is a great one, which is under the control of nerds, and edited by Oxford. Google and Oxford are partners. Unfortunately we can't use it here because google doesn't appear to provide links to their dictionary directly. I suppose the search results link technically does however satisfy the requirement. I'm very disappointed by the rejection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/licensing/google&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/licensing/google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="215001" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T01:23:46.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T02:23:54.720" Score="6" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;User Franklin asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/425492/masters-of-early-childhood-education-or-masters-in-early-childhood-educatio/425495#425495&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Master&amp;#39;s of Early Childhood Education&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;master&amp;#39;s in early childhood education&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but it was closed as opinion-based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answer isn't opinion-based. As I answered, capitalization and the possessive are orthogonal to one another. If you capitalize because you're using the formal name of the degree, there's no apostrophe. If you say &quot;master's degree&quot; informally, you don't capitalize. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, like I said, the field isn't capitalized unless it is a proper noun itself or is part of a formal title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are correct (insofar as language has &quot;correct answers&quot;) guidelines to naming degrees. I think this question should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130346" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T14:56:16.957" Title="This wasn't an opinon-based question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11103" CreationDate="2018-01-14T06:13:12.290" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just my thoughts...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a big fan of Dan Bron's answer &amp;mdash; it's one of a kind, and I've never seen anything like it, and in fact, I think that's the major reason people were interested in the question and how it became a viral hit; a bigger hit than it would have been if it were to hit the HNQ without his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've voted up the answer &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the question, and some other answers along the way, and I'm pretty sure others would've voted up the question similarly, and it was a fun read, and there's no denying that a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of people loved reading it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But imagine seeing such a question: &quot;what is a word that starts with...&quot; and that it did not reach HNQ or get a Dan Bron-y answer, and ask yourself whether you would have considered it on-topic for ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most voters would have closed it, and maybe even said it's like a crossword puzzle that the OP should've asked elsewhere, or that they should contact the manufacturers of the toy ball, who are, in the end, responsible for putting those images against each letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, about the state of a locked question: being locked is not a step closer to getting it deleted since moderators can delete any content anytime anyway, so having it locked or not, I for one think, is not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; convinced about the benefit in having it unlocked and open to new answers, comments or votes: comments would most likely follow the likes of &quot;wow, great, amazing&quot;, and a few extra votes coming every now and then, to the already &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10829/50044&quot;&gt;idle rich&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; users, probably means nothing, and new answers would probably add nothing new to the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside of having it stay without a special moderator notice such as the &quot;historical lock&quot; would be that new users would see the question and think of asking something similar, which would not be received similarly well, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T06:13:12.290" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11105" CreationDate="2018-01-14T12:57:27.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can proffer is that the close voters probably felt as if this is strictly a matter of style that may vary from university to university, or from style guide to style guide, with no one source being so definitive as to disallow the other possible answers. Although I do not necessary agree with this rationale, because the closure reason allows there to be for &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; difference of opinion &lt;em&gt;provided that a sound basis for it can be supplied&lt;/em&gt;. That sentiment is shared by the help center's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What Types of Questions Should I Avoid Asking&lt;/a&gt; webpage, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;the good subjective-bad subjective&lt;/a&gt; guidance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if I were to apply the more stringent test I still agree with you. I agree with you a little too much you see. Upon trying to do my own independent research to try and explain how there might be a plurality of answers I have only really found one, and this gives the question somewhat of the opposite problem. The question is so easy to answer in its present form that it is general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first search I performed was &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/BTutr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;master's degree apostrophe&lt;/a&gt; and the most promising webpages I saw while performing that search were from &lt;a href=&quot;https://wmich.edu/writing/rules/degrees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Western Michigan University&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailywritingtips.com/masters-degree-or-masters-degree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daily Writing Tips&lt;/a&gt; and upon checking those pages it seems as if they both  make the same endorsement. While some of us might not think that Daily Writing Tips is a very authoritative website in and of itself, it does have some writers with disclosed credentials and more importantly it makes reference to M.L.A. style. Thus these resources represent some adequately trustworthy resources, including the university which hands out the degree, the graduates who hold the degree and a highly respected style guide. I do not really think we can add much more value to that, especially since this question is &lt;em&gt;merely asking for the rule&lt;/em&gt;, rather than an explanation of it and we have no way of knowing why this sort of answer is not satisfactory to the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question can be authoritatively answered using readily available resources then the question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;too simple&lt;/a&gt; according to the general reference test and should be closed for the following reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you think that test is too stringent, as you can see from the provided &quot;research&quot; link, many of our members would have it so that a question that does not provide any of its own research should be &lt;em&gt;automatically closed&lt;/em&gt;, seemingly irrespective of whether or not the answer to the question can be easily found, and the questioner has not even tried. This may have influenced some of the votes to close, but the stack exchange system is somewhat flawed in that it usually only displays one of the closure reasons, except in the case of a tie, and that is the one which receive the most votes. (The reason I call this a flaw is  because it makes it harder for people to realize that a given question may have more than one problem that needs solving when trying to have it reopened.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T14:56:16.957" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T14:56:16.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T16:54:17.543" Score="5" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cast the final closevote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/426303/what-is-different-between-ellipse-and-oval?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;What is different between “ellipse” and “oval”?&lt;/a&gt; just now, citing &quot;Lack of research&quot; as my reason. But just to reassure myself that the &quot;difference&quot; really is easy to look up online, I copied the title and pasted it into a google search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, I guess, I found an 7-year-old ELU question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6367/are-there-any-differences-between-oval-and-ellipse&quot;&gt;Are there any differences between “oval” and “ellipse”?&lt;/a&gt; high in the list of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a little surprised to see that the earlier question &lt;em&gt;hasn't&lt;/em&gt; been closed (in fact, nearly 50 votes have been cast on that page, and the question has been &quot;protected&quot;). Which strongly implies that my closevote on the later question was a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if I &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; found that earlier question before closevoting, and had cited it as a duplicate, my reason would have been &quot;outvoted&quot; by the preceding 4 closevotes, so it wouldn't really have made any difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm asking here is the question posed in my title. Without mod intervention, the only way I know to &quot;fix&quot; things is if 4 other users were to join me in voting to reopen the later question, then we could vote to close it again for the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; reason. Which would probably have to involve more than just the original 5 closevoters, since I think the system gets sniffy about repeated open/closevotes from the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T19:19:25.167" Title="Is flagging for moderator attention a reasonable action here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11108" CreationDate="2018-01-14T17:43:23.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, flagging for moderator to change the close reason to be a dupe to the other question is reasonable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T17:43:23.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11108" CreationDate="2018-01-14T19:07:14.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having a moderator involved would definitely be much simpler than convincing 5 or more users to reopen &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; re-close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, since the new dupe has no extra info or a different way of asking essentially the same thing, I for one do not see the need to have it closed as a duplicate and for long stay visible instead of letting the roomba delete it few days after it's closed for lack of research. We &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; guide the asker in the comments too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T19:19:25.167" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T19:19:25.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11112" CreationDate="2018-01-14T19:26:23.463" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/381972/50044&quot;&gt;Wont - contraction or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s4H3f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s4H3f.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of same close reason, twice&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is closed with &quot;please include the research...&quot;, but the reason shows up twice. What caused it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very trivial matter; curious nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T19:57:10.207" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T21:31:30.323" Title="Two identical close reasons?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11111" CreationDate="2018-01-14T19:51:05.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between those is that the first one with three names mentions ELL using an HTTP link, and the second one with two names mentions ELL with an HTTPS link. So they aren't quite the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;s&gt;suspect a bot&lt;/s&gt; see that MetaEd♦ went around fixing these soon after Jul 7 '17 at 22:40, although I'm not sure when those were approved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the text changed between Jul 5 '17 at 19:40 when the last HTTP-mentioning close-vote was cast and Jul 8 '17 at 16:05 when the first HTTPS-mentioning close-vote was cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/295054/153355&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt;, an SE staff member remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ugh, yeah. Pretty much all the custom off-topic reasons are going to be HTTP links because they were likely written that way when they were created on-site (those aren't generated by the system but are just saved Markdown). They'll all have to be edited by devs (not recreated by moderators, so that the changes will retroactively apply to older posts previously closed with those reasons). – animuson♦ Apr 22 '17 at 16:20&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve pinged him asking whether this is (really?) worth bugging a dev into editing for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T21:31:30.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T21:31:30.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:57:56.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people support their answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt; or similar questions by typing their proposed word into Google and copy/pasting the definition or synonyms it provides. This is prohibited by the rules established on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments below can serve as a reminder to people who post such answers, with links to the Meta-questions which established this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A citation to &quot;Google dictionary&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7053/55623&quot;&gt;not accepted as a valid reference&lt;/a&gt; for supporting one's answer, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11101/55623&quot;&gt;a variety of important reasons&lt;/a&gt;. Best practice is to find the reference work Google is passing through (frequently &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt;), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11058/55623&quot;&gt;cite it directly&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In copy/pasteable format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;A citation to &quot;Google dictionary&quot; is [not accepted as a valid reference](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7053) for supporting one's answer, for [a variety of important reasons](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11101). Best practice is to find the reference work Google is passing through (frequently [Oxford Dictionaries Online](https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/)), and [cite it directly](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11058).&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T17:10:10.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T17:10:10.680" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-01-15T17:57:56.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T22:20:30.230" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to delete my comments here on EL&amp;amp;U and leave my answers pristine as I go through them to make sure that I still agree with what I wrote here 2 years or so ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to delete all my comments here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T04:19:26.237" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:51:07.883" Title="How do I delete all my comments?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11114" CreationDate="2018-01-16T04:00:24.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For regular users there is no special tool to remove all comments. You'll have to go thru them all one by one. Or maybe there's some user script that can help simplify matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case removal of your comments makes some of the rest of the comment threads end up obsolete, flag them for removal as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you don't delete the ones that are useful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T04:00:24.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11114" CreationDate="2018-01-16T11:42:50.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;NVZ is the expert of meta, so I expect the system doesn't allow comment deletion &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt;, though a software expert &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to devise a special purpose script to serve your purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I only add that there seems to be a general consensus we should not delete our output all together but only those items that need deletion: in short, the user has discretion to delete individual comments one at a time, and can indeed manually delete thousands of comments one by one in a laborious manner, but your &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of work contributed one question/ answer/ comment at a time is considered valuable by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:51:07.883" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:51:07.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2018-01-16T11:58:29.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requests for candidate words or novel expressions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I have to vote to close this question as off-topic. If a question asks about a recent neologism that thousands of other&#xA;  people can be shown to use, then it is on-topic. But if, as here, it&#xA;  is looking for a 'neologism', or asking if a 'word' or term you have&#xA;  just made up (for example a candidate word, not in the lexis) is acceptable,&#xA;  then the question is off-topic because it is not answerable&#xA;  objectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:33:15.083" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:33:15.083" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-01-16T11:58:29.187" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:12:22.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lack of reasonable research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your&#xA;  question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found&#xA;  and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken&#xA;  the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious&#xA;  answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant&#xA;  answer! Questions lacking clear signs of reasonable research (even&#xA;  links to sensibly chosen articles which fail to help will suffice) may&#xA;  be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; [mainly from Help Center]    [How do I ask a good question?]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:26:40.847" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:26:40.847" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-01-16T12:12:22.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:22:16.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions requesting writing advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I have to vote to close this question as off-topic because it meets the&#xA;  criteria established by guidance given by Stack Exchange Management&#xA;  about closing such questions. We are not a site offering writing-help;&#xA;  we're a site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English-language&#xA;  enthusiasts, set up to look at the essential structure of the&#xA;  language. Other sites (eg WritersSE) are appropriate for the&#xA;  discussion of style, extract/essay/novel structure and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[partly based on a comment of @tchrist's]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:28:45.237" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:28:45.237" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-01-16T12:22:16.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6798" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:26:10.383" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions focusing on trivia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I have to vote to close this question as off-topic because it meets the&#xA;  criteria established by guidance given by Stack Exchange Management&#xA;  about closing such questions. We are not a word-game and&#xA;  crossword-puzzle site; we're a site for linguists, etymologists, and&#xA;  serious English-language enthusiasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[based on a comment of tchrist's]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:31:24.910" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:31:24.910" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-01-16T12:26:10.383" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T13:11:08.470" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;what does 50 reputation mean?&#xA;As a new member I wanted to comment on 'soft bigotry' to the effect that as an experienced graduate teacher at a new school I was informed by the principal on the first day of term that 'these were Q...... High kids and they would never amount to anything'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276577" OwnerDisplayName="Georgie" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:16:25.560" Title="meaning of 'fifty reputation'" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-01-16T19:21:42.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:48:24.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello and welcome to the website. You may want to take a look at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to get a sense of how Stack Exchange is supposed to work.  It is especially important to read the provisions on asking questions, since if they are not obeyed the question will normally be put on hold and eventually closed until it is brought into compliance, but that seems to be irrelevant to the subject at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;Reputation&lt;/a&gt; is a score of points that is associated with your account. It is somewhat like money, in that it serves as an incentive, and represents an assessment of the value of the contribution you have made to the to the website, as determined by votes. You get +10 for each vote for one of your answers, +5 for each vote on one of your questions, and lose -2 for each vote against any answer or a question. Under certain conditions, you can also get +2 for suggested edits that get approved for qualified users. Our members can also pay bounties of various amounts in a bid to attract good answers to a question, or award an especially good existing answer. You do not earn or lose reputation points for questions and answers made at the meta website. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation points are used as a sort of proof of trustworthiness, not only because they suggest that you have a minimum extent of knowledge as determined by the sum total earned through all of your contributions, but are also used to control access to privileges. That is done on the basis that people who have reached a requisite amount should know how the website operates well enough to use them properly and can be expected to do so or face the consequences, without simply being able to create a new account to bypass a suspension or ban to abuse them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;Here is complete list of privileges&lt;/a&gt;,  with the amount of reputation necessary to accesss them. You earn the ability to comment once you earn 50 reputation points. If you contribute a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;good answers&lt;/a&gt; to our website, you should be able to reach that amount of points relatively quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you earn the privilege please keep in mind that on Stack Exchange, comments are supposed to serve a specific purpose. They are not supposed to be used as substitutes for answers, permanently archive information or be used to participate in extended discussions. They are primarily reserved for a sparse amount of constructive criticism which leads to the improvement of a post, with a few secondary purposes which you can read more about on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;the help center page for the commenting privilege.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T14:16:25.560" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:16:25.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11128" CreationDate="2018-01-17T19:19:38.533" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a hypothetical situation.  Suppose someone asks a question requesting traditional regional synonyms for &lt;em&gt;gay/homosexual,&lt;/em&gt; many of which are hurtful, and there's no discernible intellectual reason for requesting the information.  &lt;strong&gt;Would that be considered flaggable?  If so, what would be the right category?&lt;/strong&gt;  On the one hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/what-are-the-spam-and-rude-or-abusive-offensive-flags-and-how-do-they-wor&quot;&gt;What are the “spam” and “rude or abusive” (offensive) flags, and how do they work?&lt;/a&gt; doesn't appear to have anything that would justify such a flag.  On the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt; page seems to support such a flag, with the following as an example of material to be flagged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bigotry of any kind. Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. will not be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T22:11:02.233" Title="Would such a question be kosher or should it be flagged?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T20:04:47.647" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most famous &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391945/what-does-covfefe-exactly-mean&quot;&gt;covfefe&lt;/a&gt; question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, with  nearly  half a million views, has also been locked. Though I have no qualms about its being locked, I wonder  why in this case, unlike the “yellow ax” locked question,   voting  activity is not compromised and users can still happily cast their votes on the question and the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T21:13:02.030" Title="Another epic question locked" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11125" CreationDate="2018-01-17T20:44:23.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The type of lock is different in the two cases, as noted in the lock message. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;yellow ax question&lt;/a&gt; received a &amp;quot;historical significance lock&amp;quot; which does not allow &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; further activity including voting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed. More info: help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...while the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391945/what-does-covfefe-exactly-mean&quot;&gt;covfefe question&lt;/a&gt; received a &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; lock that &lt;em&gt;in this case&lt;/em&gt; only disables answers and comments-under-the-question while allowing comments under the answers and even allowing users to edit the existing answers, but not the question itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post has been locked due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated. For extended discussions, please use chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried voting and found &lt;strong&gt;this lock permits voting on the answers but not on the question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that for regular locks the moderators can customise the features that get locked and the features that remain open, depending on the reason for locking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now also have some locking reasons (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Content dispute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post has been locked due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated. For extended discussions, please use chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are common reasons for locking a post, and in both cases the locking is there to prevent only a small subset of what locking actually stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124749/make-locking-posts-more-granular&quot;&gt;Make locking posts more granular&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator would be able to supply a more definitive answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T21:13:02.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11103" CreationDate="2018-01-17T21:08:56.220" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thoughts on this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had never crossed with a Historical Lock post before, so I firstly tried to understand what it is and what it means.  I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;this reference on meta&lt;/a&gt;. The relevant parts of it, IMHO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is the purpose of a historical lock?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A historical lock preserves content that was very popular when it was originally posted, but is now off-topic or otherwise out of scope for the site it is posted on.  Historically locking a post ends the debate over whether a question should be kept on the site or deleted, and is often the final state of a question that has been deleted and undeleted more than once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence above gives two reasons for a post to be historically locked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very popular when originally posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now off-topic or otherwise out of scope&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;y-axe question&lt;/a&gt; was very popular when originally posted and that's a fact! The 2nd most upvoted in a SE-site with over 90,000 questions and 6 years of age surely qualifies as &lt;em&gt;being popular&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the second point, of the question now being off-topic or out of scope, honestly I don't consider myself qualified to judge that. I'm not much of a contributor here in English SE. Not that many questions or answers. What I can tell is that when I wrote the question it surely was about English Language, after all, I had a ball with 26 pictures with letters and 25 of them were easily recognizable as English words. The ball had no brand, trademarks, nothing that could help me. Stack Exchange is the network I use to solve my questions and English SE seemed like the correct place for it. To imagine that a ball could have 25 English words mixed with a single Swedish one would made me laugh, unless there was a very good, long and detailed detective work, like Dan Bron did. It makes me feel that English SE was the right place to solve that mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely the community, high-reps or mods may all have their own opinions on what's on-topic and on-scope for this site and I trust them to do it. If the y-axe question is now considered off-topic, I'm fine with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly I would like to thank for the question being historically locked, since this is (as stated earlier) &lt;em&gt;often the final state of a question&lt;/em&gt;, so it (probably) won't be deleted. Makes me think that if the question was not that popular because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395385/77227&quot;&gt;Dan Bron's brilliant answer&lt;/a&gt;, it would be rightfully deleted. So thank you mods, honestly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139185" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T03:12:53.040" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11124" CreationDate="2018-01-18T14:54:54.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think it is gratuitously vulgar, why wouldn’t you flag it as rude/abusive? That the community might not agree shouldn’t change your judgement of what is best for the site, and trolling or otherwise disrupting the community is something I think falls under the &quot;abusive&quot; flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think someone isn’t asking in good faith, you could also ask your mod team to take a look. Sometimes mods have information that makes it easier to decide if a question is trolling or genuine. They can also edit a question to make it more likely to inspire English-related answers (and make that edit stick if necessary). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a particular question is the sort of thing the community wants to entertain is up to the community. Your responsibility as a community member is simply to &quot;speak up&quot; when you feel something doesn't belong on the site and be respectful of the folks that disagree with you so there can be a constructive discussion. If you feel very strongly about a specific question, flagging might not be enough. You may need to bring it up on meta and explain why you really don't want that question on EL&amp;amp;U.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T22:11:02.233" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T22:11:02.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:47:27.490" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this from time to time, in questions where &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=bonus%20points&quot;&gt;bonus points&lt;/a&gt;&quot; are offered by low-rep users and even newbies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they talking out of their tuchis and just parroting something they have seen on another site, or is it really possible...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/426965/terminology-what-do-you-call-two-words-that-rhyme-but-whose-endings-arent-spel&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the examples, it is obvious that a bounty was never offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T05:17:20.073" Title="Where do these &quot;bonus points&quot; come from?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11129" CreationDate="2018-01-19T05:17:20.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;bonus points&lt;/em&gt; here most likely is a figure of speech, like the comments suggest. Think of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/brownie-points&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brownie points&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kudos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;kudos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - they're merely a way of expressing appreciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; also refer to bounty giveaways. A 50 rep bounty can be given by this user after waiting the minimum 2 days. They have a 100+ rep. But that extra question, being off-topic, is now removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T05:17:20.073" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11103" CreationDate="2018-01-19T16:17:06.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I didn't know the yellow ax question had been locked. Did you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not until I saw this hot meta post, no. Though I'm glad attention has been brought back to it, I've now re-read it and found a lot of DanBron's later research that I previously missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this &lt;em&gt;[the locking as historic]&lt;/em&gt; a surprise for anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not particularly surprising, no. I think the original question was valid and interesting, but the answers ended up off-topic (and demonstrating that the question itself was probably off-topic). But as everyone loved it so much, keeping it as historic rather than deleting it seems sensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm of the opinion that the best thing has been done. I'm happy with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T17:09:51.120" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T17:09:51.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T21:26:54.503" Score="9" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are now at the point that most questions on ELU get closed. Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;90-day closure rate (10k only)&lt;/a&gt; is sitting at around two in every three. Some days it’s worse than that, some days it’s better, but in the long run we’re at around 65% closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other quality metrics are also telling, albeit perhaps less obviously. Beyond closure rate, the number of answers per question has gone down over time, and we no longer appear to draw the quality questions and more importantly, answers, that we once did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a random assortment of 50 closed questions from the not-too-distant past. Some of these have been deleted so you will need 10k reputation to view, but many have not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/425177&quot;&gt;Another word/phrase for “caught in their mess” or “entangled in their mess”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/417188&quot;&gt;A slogan choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/422996&quot;&gt;A synonym for intimacy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/422303&quot;&gt;A term that can be used to describe a person in this situation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/414310&quot;&gt;Could you please help me with my IELTS task 1 essay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427195&quot;&gt;Could you please tell me If I wrote this wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/425180&quot;&gt;Crimeshifting: The act of accusing your opponent of a crime of which you yourself are guilty in order to shift the discussion to them&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427001&quot;&gt;Enjoy discount by settling full payment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426049&quot;&gt;ESTABLISH A COMPANY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427183&quot;&gt;Explain about the remaining 2 rupees&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/412684&quot;&gt;Formal version of water down&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426945&quot;&gt;He looked at the people from on the building?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426099&quot;&gt;How do I get rid of my feeling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/420216&quot;&gt;I am looking for a word that describes someone who always pawns off work to others and is lazy at work.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/419689&quot;&gt;I AM LOOKING FOR ONE WORD IN ENGLISH …SOMETHING TO SIGNIFY “ENHANCING VALUES ”( VALUE CAN BE ANYTHING THAT Changes life or the organisation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427319&quot;&gt;I just wanted to confirm that the following sentence is grammatically correct or not&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427122&quot;&gt;i ma looking for a name for a character with darkness powers that means or has similiar meaning to “unwanted hate directed at oneself”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426931&quot;&gt;I need the awnser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/425847&quot;&gt;In US Contract law, when there is a disagreement between a spelled out dollar amount and typed numeral, which prevails?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426953&quot;&gt;Is “I am applying at the referral of…” grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423394&quot;&gt;Is there any synonyms for “put in the same category as”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/424875&quot;&gt;Is there a word for someone who does something specifically to use it against someone else?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423862&quot;&gt;Is the sentence “The novel's language is largely prosaic” logically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426751&quot;&gt;Is this sentence complete? Correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/422566&quot;&gt;looking for another way to say “private room”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423733&quot;&gt;May I know what's JAR?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426811&quot;&gt;need help with grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/424485&quot;&gt;Needing a better word or phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427388&quot;&gt;Negative Connotations And Positive Connotations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/425052&quot;&gt;Noun for a person that finishes work on time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427002&quot;&gt;Please help me..I'm a bit confused&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/414512&quot;&gt;Single-word request, or phrase request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423976&quot;&gt;Synonyms for “proficiency with”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/417409&quot;&gt;The Finch House&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426279&quot;&gt;the souls of St. vs soul/s od St. Tammany&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426434&quot;&gt;Topic writing in englsih&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/424613&quot;&gt;using &lt;em&gt;I am not well&lt;/em&gt; when physically injured?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426323&quot;&gt;What does it mean to finally wake up to yourself&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/414601&quot;&gt;What does this word mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/424232&quot;&gt;What do you call a guy who chooses to prioritize beautiful ladies among other customers/clients?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/425385&quot;&gt;What is a more formal but colorful word for the verb 'jam'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/426592&quot;&gt;What is a word for someone who should not use the internet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/412637&quot;&gt;What is one word (noun) of a person who is initiative?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427125&quot;&gt;What is the correct order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/423535&quot;&gt;What is the difference between phlegm, mucus, and snot?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427101&quot;&gt;What is the difference between Speech and Writing ( with examples)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427075&quot;&gt;What is the formal way to ask about salary payment to my boss&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/425928&quot;&gt;What is this article about?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/417471&quot;&gt;Word for someone who is multi-talented&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/424911&quot;&gt;Word the describes someone who takes advantage of vulnerable people&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please look those over as you can.  Then see if you can think of any possible measures that would attract more questions that would draw expert answers instead of ones like those which are doomed to closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T22:35:56.793" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T22:40:12.597" Title="What can be done to bring up site quality?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|low-quality-posts|site-cleanup|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-21T22:34:34.177" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go through swings (or is it moods?), some days I feel more optimistic about EL&amp;amp;U's future and permanence on the Internet, other days I feel the website is just doomed. The last week or so has been simply awful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flood of not low – but &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; low-quality questions – is just too depressing for words. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429332/the-origin-of-hmm&quot;&gt;Hmm...&lt;/a&gt; maybe I should post that statement as a single-word-request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is but one random example from the active page, the question is called: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429924/is-this-sentence-right&quot;&gt;is this sentence right&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this sentence right &quot; this report represents our findings at the times and places of discharging and landing operation only&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question like that, and there are so many more, shouldn't even reach first base. Let alone have someone posting an answer, and hanging around for hours until five users close it for being off-topic. THAT is an off-topic question that cannot be saved. THAT is a question that is useful for only the person asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, the mods close, pardon, &lt;em&gt;lock&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;2nd most upvoted question&lt;/a&gt; in EL&amp;amp;U's history because, and I quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered &lt;strong&gt;a good, on-topic question for this site&lt;/strong&gt;, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If only more newcomers were to write first questions with as much detail, context and care! But 99% of them don't give a sh*t! There's too many of &quot;them&quot; and too few of &quot;us&quot;. By &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt; I mean users (new and old) who do respond, and &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; post supported answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Original Post&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Are perhaps too many questions being closed unnecessarily? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there never the possibility of improving a low-quality question that shows at least some interesting/useful language aspect? E.g The question about &quot;....the cockles of one's heart&quot; was closed before it was edited. The question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427322/use-of-inversions-in-english&quot;&gt;use of inversion&lt;/a&gt; was recently reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T10:21:55.043" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T10:21:55.043" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-21T23:16:48.240" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: This suggestion is now live! You can see the discussion that led up to it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11865/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or experience it for yourself on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask?tags=single-word-requests&quot;&gt;ask question page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't have time yet to go through all the questions, but it seems like a lot of these questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;. This isn't really surprising considering most of our questions (closed or not) are tagged with this tag. In addition, we've had discussions about quality problems in this tag in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite all the discussion, we've not really done anything about the problem that I've seen. So here's my suggestion: &lt;strong&gt;tag warnings&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag warnings (also called &quot;tag tips&quot;) are already a thing on other sites, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/290740/6083675&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. When you are asking a question and add certain tags to the question (e.g. [SQL]), you get a message like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HIU6U.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this would be a great idea to have for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;. We just need to decide what it will say, then have a CM put it in place. I think it should mention at least the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be sure to include a sample sentence and context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you know a similar word, check a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2577/191178&quot;&gt;thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; to see if any words will work. List the words that didn't work in your question and explain why they don't fit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T22:40:12.597" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T22:40:12.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-21T23:29:59.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, you can't do much to change whether or not the first question someone asks is good quality; you can only change whether the second question they ask is better than the first. I have seen good results if questions are closed with the intent of helping the author bring them on topic and are quickly reopened after an author takes the first step toward improving the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to educate someone about community standards is for someone to show them in a concrete way how to meet those standards. Everyone who asks a question is a potential new active member of the community. EL&amp;amp;U could just close questions and tell folks to read the help and come back when they've figured out how to meet the quality standards, or the community could invest in new users with an eye toward turning them into regular contributors of high quality questions (and possibly answers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might involve cutting new users a little more slack if they are making an effort to improve. It will definitely involve some effort on the part of EL&amp;amp;U veterans to help the author figure out exactly what they could do to get their question off of hold. Only about 1 in 7 of the users I've seen get significant guidance from the ELL community end up adjusting the way they post, but the ones that do &quot;convert&quot; tend to actively help other new users improve their question quality. That leads to a positive feedback loop that eventually results in a better balance of quality questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be questions from the folks that just want their homework done and no amount of education or help text will make them put effort into writing a decent quality question. But there are also some folks that jump in without really figuring out how things work that could either be encouraged to become valuable contributors or discouraged from ever posting again because they're not sure how to post a question that would be well-received. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T23:29:59.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-22T04:32:53.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like EL&amp;amp;U and would like to see it survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ColeenV has it right, that it's not the low-quality questions that are the problem, but attracting and developing new users (and keeping the interest of the many people who have already made so many great contributions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange (and its Q&amp;amp;A model) are relatively new and operate in a changing environment--not necessarily entirely suited to the defined scope of EL&amp;amp;U.  So the first suggestion is to be, within the constraints of the model, as flexible as possible within the diverse and changing environment of the use of English in the modern world, and let the site evolve. If it overlaps a bit with writers or linguistics or language learning, so be it. Downvote or ignore the bad questions and forget about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People seeking to improve their English through reading (e.g., fiction without too much dialog) or listening are asking an out-of-scope question, but they're potential contributors to the site--and EL&amp;amp;U might allow itself to provide some guidance on the English language that goes beyond the rules of the books the learners seem to be using for their exams. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speculation, partial answers, and discussion in Comments are interesting and useful, and perhaps should be less discouraged.  (In truth, not much about &quot;what not to do&quot; seems to have been useful in the time I've been here.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although one goal of the site is to be a repository of English-language questions and answers useful to others in the future, it is much more likely to be an evolving response to current interests. It needs to be of interest to current users if it is to maintain its vitality.  (The uncommon interest in how a children's English-alphabet ball came to have one letter with a Swedish picture is actually a fascinating story, whether it will be of interest five years from now or not.)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other matters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;help&quot; section is close to useless--and mostly disciplinary (what not to do).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;search&quot; section is poor, and is now (I haven't been around much since mid-October 2017) close to blacked-out.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't pay much attention to tags, but it seems to me that a tag like &quot;pejorative&quot; only invites the kinds of questions we are not trying to encourage. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't said much of this very well; my apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I think the diversity (backgrounds, geographical) of frequent contributors and what they know and observe about the language is an amazing resource. How do you use that?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T06:33:33.643" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T06:33:33.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-22T12:57:21.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a few thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Improving the site is both a question of quality and quantity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few good questions among a plethora of off-topic LQQs is a quantity problem that affects the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;First&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, as noted, new users just ask, no matter the rules, and to reduce the unavoidable quantity of off-topic LQQs, the only thing that might work,  in my opinion,  is a barrier to entry for new user and very low rep users. Questions posted by new, low rep users shouldn’t be automatically posted on the main page, but rather  enter an  “acceptance” line where they are “validated” by higher rep users. That is what already happens with the VTC, LQQs, First Post etc. lines we already take care of, only that it would be ex-ante , rather than ex-post. In other words, we still do the “dirty” job, but before a question is posted rather than after.  (Btw, what’s  a low rep user? 200, 500 or 1.000? To be decided)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The benefit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would be much less ex-post close votes, a cleaner and a higher quality main  page and a chance that in the meantime new, low rep users will familiarize with the site rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Second&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, higher quality in a more general sense can only be attained, in my opinion, with a more active contribution by higher rep, experienced users. It takes time for new users who love the site to give a significant contribution  in terms of Q&amp;amp;A, but experienced, veteran users who are already familiar with all the workings of the site should probably make an effort in answering, but mainly in asking.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T16:00:32.727" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T16:00:32.727" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-22T20:09:27.013" Score="4" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/420354/how-is-caballito-blanco-expressed-in-english&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; down at EL&amp;amp;U about the correct English word for a child (for example) allowed to play by relaxed rules when competing against adults (for example) with a natural advantage at this activity. (The question's author provides some Spanish words for this privileged weaker player.) This question is protected to prevent &quot;thanks!&quot;, &quot;me too!&quot;, or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the purpose of this protection? I know -- to prevent &quot;thanks!&quot; etc. But when is protection advisable? It seems to me that I've usually encountered this after a series of very good answers. But at the moment, I think, there's only one answer, and it has a score of zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214952" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T21:12:51.010" Title="Why are some questions protected although they have (frankly) low scores and only low-scoring answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2018-01-22T21:09:19.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11138" CreationDate="2018-01-22T21:02:32.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators regularly defensively protect questions that have the potential to cause more noise than signal on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I protected this one because in my experience, guessing-game questions soliciting uncountably many random unsupported one-liner one-and-done answers that wind up having to be deleted just make more work for everyone. We don't need that around here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for questions about controversial, inflammatory, or potentially offensive topics, as well as for those that hit the Hot Network Questions list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is invited to please Protect those as a matter of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T21:06:46.813" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T21:06:46.813" CommentCount="56" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11140" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-22T21:16:39.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;outlined in the help center&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;protecting&lt;/em&gt; a question prevents anon and very new users from posting answers. As this is a blanket constraint that can discourage new participants from becoming more active, there are limits, some covered in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4273&quot;&gt;Why does ELU have a 1-day restriction on protecting questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and the privilege is restricted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moderators&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moderators&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; and community members with 15,000 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reputation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reputation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; (though only a single vote is required).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with this tag may concern best practices for the use of the privilege, ask for explanations why a certain question was protected or unprotected, or discuss the use of the privilege generally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T21:16:39.317" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T21:16:39.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11141" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-22T21:16:39.317" Score="0" Body="Questions about protection, a question status that prevents new and anon users from posting answers." OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T21:16:39.317" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T21:16:39.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-22T22:23:20.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be helpful for all involved to be specific about what constitutes a  &lt;em&gt;high quality&lt;/em&gt; question. Certainly, duplicate questions, questions unrelated to any facet of the English language, or inflammatory questions--fall into the &quot;low quality&quot; (the undesirables) category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course no one wants this place to be treated like a translation service--so I can see questions like &quot;what does such and such mean&quot; get down voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if a question leads to a discussion of (say) the nuance of a word, a phrase, or an idiom, doesn't that help enrich this site? Does the &quot;quality&quot; of the question really matter? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So many times I have seen demands that a user must &quot;demonstrate research&quot;--Well, if one can find an answer by googling (or by scouring dictionaries), why would anyone come here? You know, it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; easier to google for an answer than posting a question here (after creating an account) and then waiting for a response. Is it the goal of this site to become the repository of &quot;tidbits not found anywhere else&quot;? Is it the goal of this site to be the next Oxford (or whatever) English Dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all have encountered situations where we search for the right word, but ESL speakers often simply don't have enough knowledge of the knowledge to find it. Behind a question seemingly lacking in research may be a ESL learning working hard to perfect his/her English skills. Is it going to bring down the reputation of this site for someone to offer an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously: Do people have specific expectations for the kind of questions that enhances this site--maybe questions asked by English majors? How about graduate students majoring in English? If every question must fall within prescribed range, then this place will be nothing but an echo chamber -- and be better off taken over by an English Department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232988" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T22:23:20.060" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2018-01-23T03:35:19.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Mari-Lou A that there may be a tendency to close too many questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having only been here for just under four months and having only reviewed just under 2,000 questions, nevertheless I find it too easy (especially when tired) to vote closure rather than make a definite attempt to rescue a potentially interesting and informative question, especially if the questioner is clearly struggling to express themselves in their second language, not their first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needs a positive outlook and a patient attitude, I am finding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T03:35:19.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11149" CreationDate="2018-01-23T11:39:49.983" Score="26" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time &lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt; has discussions on how to improve the overall quality of the site. The most recent one is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11132/what-can-be-done-to-bring-up-site-quality&quot;&gt;What can be done to bring up site quality?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A not infrequent suggestion in such discussions is that higher rep users should, among other tasks, ask more questions. For example, &lt;em&gt;user159691&lt;/em&gt; states in his or her answer to the 'site quality' question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... experienced, veteran users who are already familiar with all the workings of the site should probably make an effort in answering, but mainly in asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a 20k user I probably qualify as 'higher rep', and could perhaps be asking more questions. However, as a language teacher who has a good set of reference materials and is fairly proficient in internet research, I can generally find an answer to any question I might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;So, finally, to my dilemma:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a question, as I now do (&lt;em&gt;Why is it only fish of all animals that typically do not have a plural form?&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I research it myself and not ask the question (assuming that I find the answer)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I research it myself and ask it anyway even if I find the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask the question without doing any research? (It could be that an etymology expert here can give me a good answer and spare me the time I would need to research it myself. But then I might be admonished to show my research!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of similar questions linked to below, but I would be grateful for an up-to-date answer from a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/asking-questions-you-know-the-answer-to&quot;&gt;Asking questions you know the answer to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/do-we-need-to-write-the-better-questions-ourselves&quot;&gt;Do we need to write the better questions ourselves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your contributions to this discussion. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1094/asking-questions-and-answering-them-immediately&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; provided by @ab2 contains the following text by Stack Exchange pioneer Jeff Atwood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be crystal clear, it is not merely OK to ask and answer your own&#xA;question, it is explicitly encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line — never hesitate to ask and answer your own question on&#xA;any Stack Exchange site. Please do! It’s all part of our shared&#xA;mission to make the internet better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atwood's statement, together with the useful suggestions by @Mari-Lou A and @Tonepoet, has resolved my dilemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T14:03:38.103" Title="The 'higher rep' user's dilemma" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11144" CreationDate="2018-01-23T15:41:16.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principle goals of the Stack Exchange network are to to help disseminate information and settle disputes through productive peer review whenever it is possible to do so, and help future researchers more easily find the answers to whatever questions they may have. It does not really matter how much reputation someone has, just so long as their post helps us to succeed in these goals. The reputation system is mainly meant to help us achieve those goals, rather than to serve as a detriment to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, when deciding whether or not to vote for a question's closure, I would advise &lt;em&gt;ignoring the amount of reputation a person has&lt;/em&gt; and applying the standards just the same. I think the minimal threshold of necessary research varies on a question by question basis, and should be low enough to accommodate newer users while remaining just the same for even the more experienced ones as a matter of fairness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that is just my opinion, and we might not be able to get everybody to agree on that, so it would be advisable for you to do as much as possible anyway. Remember that questions which can be skillfully crafted to generate intrigue will be rewarded with more votes for them than they would be otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such generally speaking I would suggest going ahead and researching the question as if you were attempting to write an answer. Document what research efforts failed, and which ones succeeded. Consider if it was too easy to find the answer to the question using methods you would expect a lower reputation user to use in a valid question, or if it is legitimately obscure information before deciding to post it. Defer to the following flowchart from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are Some Questions Too Simple?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; when deciding if the question should be asked on our website, while keeping in mind that if it should not be answered, it should not be asked either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://zgab33vy595fw5zq-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/interesting-question-decision-tree-flowchart.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://zgab33vy595fw5zq-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/interesting-question-decision-tree-flowchart.png&quot; width=&quot;450&quot; height=&quot;383&quot; alt=&quot;If you do a web search for the question, is the answer in the first few results? If no: Answer the question yes ask the following: Is the answer too slow to load, too hard to parse, or otherwise in need of improvement? If yes: Answer the question. If no ask the following: Is the question basic and trivial, or is it complex and interesting for experts? Interesting: Answer the question. Trivial: Close the question as 'General Reference'&quot; title=&quot;General Reference Flowchart&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that fact that this flowchart gives a question every opportunity to be salvaged if it has any redeeming value. Pay special attention to the last point. It is there for a reason. Maybe there are special circumstances that render the answer to the question especially interesting, such as the conventional wisdom about the matter being wrong for instance. Just keep in mind that the community reserves the right to make the final decision regarding what it considers to be &quot;interesting&quot;, either with or without basis, with its votes though. Preferably, the test should succeed before it ever gets far enough for this to be a consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, use your experience with our website to avoid asking questions that would be closed for other reasons. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Don't Ask&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;primarily&lt;/strong&gt; opinion based questions, or true duplicates. You should also write questions clearly, and explain how any potential duplicates that might be found differ from yours. You know this already though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If after referencing these guidelines you decide that the question can be productively answered, then disclose as many of your failed research attempts as possible in the body of the question. Include as many as you can reasonably fit into the body of the question in order to &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; to others that it is not too easy for people to find the answer otherwise, and prevent others from making unnecessarily redundant research efforts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do find a good answer to such a question, please do not keep it to yourself: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/01/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;Publish the answer alongside its question&lt;/a&gt;, as well as you can possibly document it. &lt;em&gt;We want to learn the answers to difficult or interesting questions&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/05/22/encyclopedia-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;or at least help future visitors who may have the same problem to find them&lt;/a&gt;. There is a checkbox which enables this function to expressly encourage this behavior on every Stack Exchange website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://zgab33vy595fw5zq-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AnswerYourOwnQuestion.png&quot; alt=&quot;A screenshot of the checkbox taken from the Stack Overflow Blog.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have all of the time in the world to document why you think this is the best answer, but it is actually possible that answer you found is not the best one, and it should be submitted for peer review. Simultaneous publishing is expressly provided for and implicitly encouraged with a checkbox that can be found beneath the &quot;post your question&quot; button, which gives you a separate field in which you can start writing an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T14:03:38.103" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T14:03:38.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11147" CreationDate="2018-01-23T16:40:35.187" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I recently started to post questions on ELU. No prob there. Anyways, when I reached about 95 reputation, it started to shrink for some reason until it was about 83. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ignored it, as usual, and everything went back to normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was on a vacation, so I couldn’t go on ELU. After the vacation, I returned home, and saw that 6 reputation has been remouved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to my profile, but it didn’t say anything about me getting downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because my flags was declined for some questions, I wasn’t active or is it automatic when you reach about 90 reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is my reputation shrinking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261298" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T17:06:08.347" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T14:53:58.057" Title="Why is my reputation getting smaller?" Tags="|bug|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2018-01-23T17:04:22.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no automatic rep loss when you reach a certain rep. There is no rep loss when you get flags declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did receive 2 downvotes today (23/1/18) as seen on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/261298/?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;your reputation history&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps that's what you're referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes, if there are many on a post, is usually a sign that there is something odd about the post - and in this case, it's an off-topic question that showed poor &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043/50044&quot;&gt;research effort&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I searched the dictionary but it didn’t give me clear answers. I know it has something to do with medicine and drugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could have mentioned what dictionary you referred to, what definition you found, and how that is not helping you understand the word in question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And keep participating, and only then will you fully grasp the concept of what's on-topic and what's not. It takes a while for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T17:59:20.220" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T17:59:20.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13303" CreationDate="2018-01-23T18:10:54.123" Score="10" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-substitution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-substitution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-substitution&lt;/a&gt; is redundant since we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, if necessary. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-substitution&quot;&gt;60 or so tagged questions&lt;/a&gt; do not disagree with me by much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its current info says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word or phrase which can replace a larger phrase or idea while conveying the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we either delete the tag, or make it a synonym for SWRs. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-02T13:53:49.047" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T13:53:49.047" Title="Should 'word-substitution' be made a synonym of 'SWR's?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11144" CreationDate="2018-01-23T18:29:47.330" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some tips for asking questions if you're a high-rep user (and non) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do your homework&lt;/strong&gt;. Make sure your question has not been asked before, use the search tool to discover possible old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bounty&lt;/strong&gt; If there is a very similar question, don't post your almost duplicate question. Instead, consider placing a bounty if the answers supplied are not to your liking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flip side&lt;/strong&gt;. Sometimes you can ask the same question but in a different way. If the older question asks &quot;why&quot;, ask &quot;when&quot; instead. Link the older question in the new one, and explain why the answers submitted are not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Misdirection&lt;/strong&gt; If you &quot;think&quot; you already know the answer, only share &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of your research and wait to see what happens. Chances are users will reveal or unearth new information that will overturn your preconceptions. This is good!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post an answer&lt;/strong&gt;. If no one answers and you see you have two VTC (votes to close) you could post an answer. A good answer will often act as a springboard and inspire newcomers, or spur veterans, to post their answers too. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Research&lt;/strong&gt;. Always, always show the results of your research. Closing questions for lack of research is probably the No.1 reason why questions get shut down. At this level, users will expect high-rep users to know about &lt;em&gt;Etymonline&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;. If only one or more resources do not have the answer you are seeking, post those links that &quot;show&quot; you did some research prior to asking. If none of the cited resources answer your question, add the links and post that new question immediately! &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T18:36:03.240" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T18:36:03.240" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11151" CreationDate="2018-01-24T16:27:48.423" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my reviewing task today, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/877/what-is-the-plural-form-of-status&quot;&gt;'plural of status'&lt;/a&gt; question came up and I was invited to edit it if I wished it to be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised that it had been closed as it is, to me, an interesting question with informative answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=======================================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note : I have rolled back my edit to where it was before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastEditorUserId="259840" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T13:51:06.393" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T13:51:06.393" Title="Why was the 'plural of status' closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2018-01-24T17:00:57.707" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is almost eight years old&amp;mdash;the very age of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope was not as well-defined back then, and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;simple questions&lt;/a&gt; were often well-received, and it stayed open for almost 7 years. Then one day it was pushed to the review queues, as can be seen on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/877/timeline#review_244744&quot;&gt;its timeline&lt;/a&gt;, which resulted in its closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, why would the reviewers close it? Because at the time of review, according to the site scope of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; time, it was a question that showed no research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope of Stack Exchange websites change over time, and it happens on some of them more-so than some others. Reviewers keep the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; guidelines in mind when questions are reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T14:10:07.737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T14:10:07.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2018-01-25T00:34:04.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was closed because this was the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the plural form of &quot;status&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lazy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Completely unresearched&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nigel J's edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adds research which the OP never performed, to our knowledge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adds his own personal value judgement of this word (cumbersome and unusual inflection (for &quot;-es&quot;, really?)) which we can be &lt;strong&gt;certain&lt;/strong&gt; the OP did not intend&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turns the question into a can-we-trust-the-dictionaries question but without providing any real reasons for distrusting the dictionaries, because he only referenced two, both of which were in agreement. He could have at least cited disagreeing dictionaries!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Effectively invalidates the existing answers because none of them concern the alleged cumbersome nature or &quot;unusual&quot; inflection, nor do they put forward strong enough cases because the question they answered was not calling them to mount defenses for dictionaries. All they thought they had to do was answer a simple lazy question. Half of them even cite the dictionaries now cited in the question, meaning they now look like joke answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is time to &lt;strong&gt;stop using this site's existing questions as a place to prop up your hobby horses.&lt;/strong&gt; There is no value in distorting other people's questions and answers just because you find something related interesting. &lt;strong&gt;Please write your own questions.&lt;/strong&gt; Tailor them to your own personal interests, research, and quirks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of us are mind readers, and if a question does not explain why the OP is unsure, by the OP presenting their own research demonstrating the problem as they see it, &lt;strong&gt;none of us can add it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T04:41:52.457" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T04:41:52.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-25T18:00:52.610" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question which I tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordinating-conjunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordinating-conjunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordinating-conjunctions&lt;/a&gt;. When I posted the question, it was automatically changed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordination&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordination&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordination&lt;/a&gt;. I subsequently made an edit, but it was automatically replaced again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I searched on meta and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9663/coordinating-conjunctions-and-coordination-tags-should-be-synonymized&quot;&gt;this question that explains why&lt;/a&gt; (the tags have been synonymised). However, the wiki/info for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordination&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordination&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordination&lt;/a&gt; is bare whereas it is not for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordinating-conjunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordinating-conjunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordinating-conjunctions&lt;/a&gt;. Shouldn't this be the other way round?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t8Fqa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t8Fqa.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180318" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T18:00:52.610" Title="What's going on with the &quot;coordinating-conjunctions&quot; and &quot;coordination&quot; tags?" Tags="|bug|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T09:47:49.883" Score="5" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427977/what-does-you-like-stick-and-i-like-aerosol-mean/&quot;&gt;What does &quot;you like stick and I like aerosol&quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; has been closed as &quot;Primarily Opinion Based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not opinion-based. There is a clear meaning to those who know that deodorant comes in two (or three) types: stick, aerosol (and roll-on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be better on ELL than ELU, given that it's more about culture than language as such. But it's definitely not a matter of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; - It's been re-opened. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who wants it migrated to ELL or closed for lack of research, have at it. (I'd prefer it to stay open, but those are at least potentially valid concerns...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="91730" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T14:50:52.950" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T17:23:30.953" Title="Re-open request: &quot;Stick vs aerosol&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11154" CreationDate="2018-01-26T10:34:54.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can fugure out the meaning literally but I don't think that's what it really means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence in the question could be taken to mean that the question is a song/poetry interpretation question, which is off-topic, and which would mean it would be appropriate to close it as primarily opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you think it isn't a poetry interpretation question but is actually about the &quot;literal&quot; meanings of the words, IMO it would still be a low-effort, no research question. (I can't remember which close reason I actually used.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think it meets your standards of research, vote to reopen, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T10:34:54.287" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11158" CreationDate="2018-01-27T00:16:21.247" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Monica Cellio's Meta SE answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/303600/is-chat-room-transcript-link-permanent?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Is chat room transcript link permanent?&lt;/a&gt; (from November 2017):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;rooms with little activity are auto-deleted, meaning that only &lt;strong&gt;users with high rep (10k on that chat server) can see them&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't figure out what the process is for seeing the content of deleted chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I clicked on the comment containing the following link to a chat room:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45517/discussion-on-answer-by-graffito-what-does-dis-sho-am-good-mean-in-this-old-a&quot;&gt;moved to chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I only got the &quot;page not found&quot; page, which I assume means the chat room has been deleted. I can't figure out how to view the deleted content, even though I gather I should be able to since my ELU account has more than 10k rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered at first if I had to log in separately for chat (since there was a &quot;log in&quot; button at the top right) but I seem to already be logged in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eUGoQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eUGoQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T00:30:30.287" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T23:25:53.867" Title="How can I view the content of deleted chat rooms that are linked to in moderator comments?" Tags="|support|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11157" CreationDate="2018-01-27T00:25:14.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that your credentials are associated with the https version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45517/discussion-on-answer-by-graffito-what-does-dis-sho-am-good-mean-in-this-old-a&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45517/discussion-on-answer-by-graffito-what-does-dis-sho-am-good-mean-in-this-old-a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And not the http one in the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T00:25:14.873" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11157" CreationDate="2018-01-27T11:46:21.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: Looks like this bug was fixed. If you have 10,000 reputation network-wide you will be able to see the now-deleted chatroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While tchrist is right about HTTP/HTTPS, there is actually a valid link to the chat room on the page. It's just hidden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xoSbh.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Object moved to here.&amp;quot; under the header&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bug and has already been reported on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/302054/323179&quot;&gt;main meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T23:25:53.867" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T23:25:53.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-27T14:36:16.000" Score="15" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This question is somewhat open-ended and prompted more by curiosity than any sort of actionable problem or idea.  It seems to me like an interesting discussion topic, but if people view it as unclear what I'm asking, too broad, or off-topic for any other reason, I will understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question came to mind while I was thinking about tchrist's question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11132/what-can-be-done-to-bring-up-site-quality&quot;&gt;What can be done to bring up site quality?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm both interested in the perspective of users who have been here for a long time, since the early days of EL&amp;amp;U, and in the thoughts any user has about how a site like this moves through different stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any topic, there are some questions about English that are &quot;frequently asked.&quot;  They are the questions that many people wonder about and search for online.  In the &quot;grammar&quot; branch, many of these questions are addressed by sites that write content seeking search engine traffic to promote their brand or make ad money, like Grammarly, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar Girl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailywritingtips.com/category/grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dailywritingtips.com&lt;/a&gt; and the like.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply by virtue of mathematical probability, those questions were often addressed early in EL&amp;amp;U's history, and create many duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/315074/posts-that-are-the-target-of-the-most-duplicate-closures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;, the most frequently duplicated questions on EL&amp;amp;U are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152/when-should-i-use-a-vs-an&quot;&gt;When should I use &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;an&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-vs-her-vs-their&quot;&gt;Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (&amp;quot;his&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;their&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt; -  &lt;strong&gt;17th&lt;/strong&gt; question asked on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/what-s-the-rule-for-using-who-and-whom-correctly&quot;&gt;What's the rule for using &quot;who&quot; and &quot;whom&quot; correctly?&lt;/a&gt; -  &lt;strong&gt;19th&lt;/strong&gt; question asked on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338/are-collective-nouns-always-plural-or-are-certain-ones-singular&quot;&gt;Are collective nouns always plural, or are certain ones singular?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't be too surprising that these highly duplicated questions are all very early questions and, in two cases, among the first 20 questions out of over 91,000.  Their frequent duplication is not because &quot;more time has passed&quot; since they were written (logically speaking, that would ignore the fact that had the questions not been asked, their first duplicate would, theoretically, replace them in that rank).  It's because they are questions &lt;strong&gt;that people wonder about a lot&lt;/strong&gt; and as a result &lt;strong&gt;they got asked very early&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, none of this is surprising, but I just wanted to make that point before moving on to speculate about how this trend affects the experience of answering questions on EL&amp;amp;U over a wide span of time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the site progresses, the questions asked that are on-topic and not duplicates are increasingly likely to be obscure, to the point that we might imagine their obscurity being pinched up against some vague, blurry, unreal boundary where there are no more on-topic questions left to be asked.  Of course, that scenario (&quot;all on-topic questions have been asked--let's pack up and go home!&quot;) is never really going to happen to any subject, but the increasing obscurity of novel questions is certainly more likely to be a problem with a subject as relatively static as the English language (relative to, say, Stack Overflow or Computer Science).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, essentially, could this phenomenon be related to tchrist's observation that more questions are getting closed?  Are there certain tags that are becoming more clunky than others over time?  By my observation, it seems that many of the most upvoted questions today are etymology related or single-word-requests--both categories that, to some extent, are less burdened by the limits of obscurity.  Is that noticeably different from what EL&amp;amp;U was like over different spans of time?  Or am I extrapolating too much from the extreme examples of very early and very &quot;frequently asked&quot; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T17:41:58.677" Title="Is it possible that EL&amp;U has reached or could at some point reach a &quot;mature stage?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11160" CreationDate="2018-01-27T15:42:37.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our aim is and always have been to build a library of detailed answers to every question about the English language and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike other, say, tech or science subjects, the changes happening to the English language may not be easily noticeable enough to warrant more or frequent new questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I for one do think that we might run out of fuel sooner than other stacks before reaching that imaginary finish line. We still have a long way to go, so fear not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More questions are getting closed, and for a variety of reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More and more people are signing up to the internet, googling for answers, finding out about ELU, asking the same everyday questions, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Certain tags are becoming more clunky than others over time. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more people and questions we have here, the more tags that end up disorganised, and since the current user base is not too keen on reorganising tags, the whole thing can seem clunky or ehh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most upvoted questions today really are etymology related or single-word-requests. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They happen to hit HNQ real quick, and bring in the cavalry of upvoters. Of them, some choose to add to the chain of SWRs, because it's fun and well-received in most cases. I bet some people might even think ELU is actually a place &lt;em&gt;mainly for&lt;/em&gt; SWRs than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Noticeable difference from what ELU was like over different spans of time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been lurking on ELU for a very long time, even long before I signed up 4 years ago. ELU answered a lot of my everyday googling. Only noticeable difference to me personally is the absence of Barrie England. I loved reading his quick answers. They were short, lacking most of the links or definitions we require now, but were good, nay great nonetheless. He's unintentionally one of the many reasons I decided to sign up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T16:08:37.477" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T16:08:37.477" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-27T16:33:57.393" Score="7" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone advise on resource that would list verbs most commonly associated with particular words/nouns? I found a website for descriptive words, but haven’t been successful with verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="278490" OwnerDisplayName="Petra " LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T19:15:36.020" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T13:43:34.173" Title="Verbs most commonly used with particular words" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11162" CreationDate="2018-01-27T18:58:24.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're actually asking for here is something that shows common collocations. Most online corpora that offer searches provide some mechanism for determining these collocates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such resource which is commonly used is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt;, normally abbreviated COCA for short. This is a resource that requires some short learning time to get the most from it, but it’s very good for this purpose and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2578/2085&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for other corpus suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T19:17:01.157" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T19:17:01.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11162" CreationDate="2018-01-28T13:43:34.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One very particular method is a corpus search. Google Books, as part of its &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngrams search&lt;/a&gt;, allows you to search with (very limited) wildcards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, to see the most common words that follow 'curry', search there for,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=curry+*&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curry *&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll get the history for 'curry powder', 'curry favor', 'curry and', 'curry favour', etc.  Notice that it returns &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; collocation, a few like 'curry and' are probably not what you are thinking of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a way to restrict the wildcard to parts of speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=curry+*_NOUN&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curry *_NOUN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngrams help page on how to use this&lt;/a&gt;. It's not as general as you might hope, but can certainly get you something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T13:43:34.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T04:13:57.837" Score="11" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's almost February in 2018, which isn't supposed to be the proper time to cycle these, but for this year it'll be once again, so we'll be refreshing the &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt; for this year now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/11167&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T16:27:28.020" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2018" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-02-07T13:27:34.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-01-29T04:13:57.837" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/64ZpZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8566" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T04:13:57.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:52:50.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/117739/semitic-languages&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5g2Mi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Akkadian, Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Punic, Syriac, Tigrinya? Support Semitics.SE!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user44368" LastEditorDisplayName="user44368" LastEditDate="2018-04-28T15:47:43.447" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T15:47:43.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-01-29T10:13:18.057" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vHHqU.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Language Learners&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T10:13:18.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-01-29T13:51:16.693" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BeN5I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Explore the roots of English at the Latin Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53711" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T13:51:16.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-01-29T18:53:41.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dWnyt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Interested in applications of language?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastEditorUserId="87724" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T00:09:19.553" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T00:09:19.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11176" CreationDate="2018-01-31T09:22:31.383" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a screenshot of a recent answer I wrote on my iPad mini using Chrome. Notice that there are two different shades of the same color in the links: the first two are considerably paler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XrdhZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XrdhZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, however, is the same text in edit mode, where the colors are now identical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zyJ18.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zyJ18.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="272480" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T12:24:16.267" Title="CSS Color Weirdness" Tags="|bug|css|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11175" CreationDate="2018-01-31T12:24:16.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is that the &lt;code&gt;.post-text&lt;/code&gt; class, to which the &quot;real&quot; post belongs, has a &lt;code&gt;:visited&lt;/code&gt; pseudo-class for links which alters their colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are editing, the edited text appears in a &lt;code&gt;div&lt;/code&gt; of class &lt;code&gt;wmd-preview&lt;/code&gt;, which does not alter the colour of visited links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that this feature is by design. It may be that the &lt;code&gt;wmd-preview&lt;/code&gt; class should alter the colour of visited links, in order that the preview is accurate. I'm not sure it's actually a &lt;em&gt;bug,&lt;/em&gt; though; or that it's serious enough for developers to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: well noticed. I hadn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T12:24:16.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10592" CreationDate="2018-01-31T20:54:12.260" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the comment was so objectionable as to be deleted. There is such a thing as self-censorship which one might be forced to do to fit into the ethos of a website&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to blasphemy, one might consider the many scriptural passages that indicate the holy status (called taboo in another answer) of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jesus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, in doing so remembering that not everyone in Western culture has a post-Christian mindset; thus one scripture, containing one of the oldest Christian hymns, in other words it is being quoted in Paul’s letter not originated by him, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“For this reason God raised him to the highest place above and gave him the name that is greater than any other name. And so, in honour of the name of Jesus all beings in heaven, on earth, and in the world below will fall on their knees, and all will openly proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. So then, dear friends, as you always obeyed me when I was with you, it is even more important that you obey me now while I am away from you. Keep on working with fear and trembling to complete your salvation,”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul’s letter to the ‭‭Philippians‬ ‭2:9-12‬ ‭(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bible.com/431/php.2.9-12.gnbdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who found the comment annoying, impolite, or even blasphemous, you have my apology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‬‬&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T20:54:12.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11182" CreationDate="2018-02-02T15:57:32.593" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an ESL learner without native English speakers around, it is difficult to know how to say native English conversation or sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the conversation or sentence questions are in daily life and thus the questions could be very basic or easy for native speakers. I feel less confidence if they are proper to be asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am looking for a online forum or place to ask questions of English's conversation or sentence. Could you recommend some of such kinds of services? Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71944" OwnerDisplayName="Cray Kao" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T14:37:34.030" Title="Where to ask about a english conversation or sentence online?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-03T02:36:01.773" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you help me come up with the query for this in Google Ngram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the use frequency of 'I am a Japanese,' not 'I am a Japanese sailor' or 'I am a Japanese citizen,' or any of such sentences in which Japanese is followed by other words. Hence I punched in ((I'm a Japanese) - (I'm a Japanese+_NOUN_)). This came back with negative figures. What query is supposed to be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50925" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T16:29:52.123" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T21:11:35.740" Title="Ngram query for 'I am a Japanese.'" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-02-06T18:35:15.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11180" CreationDate="2018-02-03T05:58:25.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that &quot;(I'm a Japanese+NOUN)&quot; will give you the sum of the frequencies of the string &quot;I'm a Japanese&quot; and the string &quot;NOUN&quot;, which is not what you want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Google Ngram Viewer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;part of speech tags&lt;/a&gt; are marked with underscore characters. To use one as a placeholder for a word, you put underscores on both sides, like this: _NOUN_.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that with part of speech tags, you can only look at 1-, 2- or 3-grams, not 4- or 5-grams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you won't be able to look for &quot;I am a Japanese _NOUN_&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you can do is look at &quot;(a Japanese) - (a Japanese _NOUN_)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use wildcard search with &quot;I am a Japanese *&quot; to see what kind of words most frequently follow this string. One of the top results is &quot;I am a Japanese and&quot;, where it is not followed directly by a noun, although I suppose this could include sentences with unwanted structures like &quot;I am a Japanese and American citizen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;_END_ is a part-of-speech tag, so it has the same restrictions for length: you can search for &quot;a Japanese _END_&quot;, but not for anything longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T21:11:35.740" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T21:11:35.740" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11179" CreationDate="2018-02-03T14:17:16.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http:////ell.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site can probably help with many of your questions. If you have questions that don't fit in with the main site, you can always ask in either &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/di-kmprhnsb-rum&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U's chat room&lt;/a&gt; or come join us in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/24938/language-overflow&quot;&gt;ELL's main chat room&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; for ELL: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language Learners Stack Exchange is for  people who are&#xA;  learning or teaching English as a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best questions are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers&quot;&gt;those that have specific answers&lt;/a&gt;; ELL is not a general discussion forum.&#xA;  In general, ask here if you have a question which covers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Word choice, usage, and meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spelling and punctuation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pronunciation and accents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Other practical problems you encounter or face while learning English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before posting, you may want to take a look at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/976/&quot;&gt;&quot;Please, everyone… details. Please&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  post on meta. It has a lot of good advice for writing questions that will be well received by the community. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4584/&quot;&gt;One of the answers&lt;/a&gt; has links to examples of different types of questions that have appropriate detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T14:37:34.030" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T14:37:34.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-04T14:29:23.837" Score="8" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying English and one of my old friends recommended that I study &quot;How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction&quot; by Curzan and Adam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is an amazing book but the questions are not answered. Thus, I do not know if I am answering them correctly or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I post my questions and answers here to check them? Or, how can I find the answers for the exercises?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user279810" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T14:36:45.963" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T17:48:36.653" Title="Posting questions from &quot;How English Works&quot; and proposing answers" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11184" CreationDate="2018-02-04T15:18:05.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for asking the meta question before posting your English question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I post my questions and answers here to check them? Or, how can I find the answers for the exercises?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step is to determine the appropriate community for your question. There are several Stack Exchange communities dealing with language, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage (this community), which is intended for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;&quot; to ask questions of each other; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English Language Learners, which is intended for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;people who are learning or teaching English as a foreign language&lt;/a&gt;&quot; to ask questions of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can post any question you like, so long as the question would be of interest to the target community. If you post a question that isn't of interest to the target community, the question is more likely to be closed or ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you are a native speaker and you are exploring the nuances of zero articles vs null articles, make your case (directly in the question body) as to why people fluent in English would be interested in your question. It might be a good candidate for EL&amp;amp;U. If you are still learning the language and want to know (say) how to construct a sentence set in the present that references an event in the past as well as its continuation in the future, ELL might be a better place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, go to the community's main page, scroll down to the footer and click &quot;Help&quot;. This takes you to the Frequently Asked Questions, where you can find some basic information on what kinds of questions are considered on-topic for that community, and which aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of where you post, though, search the community for similar questions (the search bar is at the top of the page) and make sure there the question is clear enough that the community has a chance of posting a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is almost always inappropriate to simply post questions and answers (here or at ELL) simply for checking.&lt;/strong&gt; You should first think about what the underlying problem is - and ask that. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10573/142322&quot;&gt;archived blog post&lt;/a&gt; provides more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the help pages, have a look also at the links collated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7913/notes-to-reviewers-trial-version-2-1&quot;&gt;my meta post&lt;/a&gt; related to questions on hold, especially item 1 there about the ELL meta post entitled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/439/24861&quot;&gt;Please, everyone… details&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you again for checking first about asking questions from your textbook. Whichever community you end up posting in, I'm sure the extra thought you put into framing your questions would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T15:18:05.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11188" CreationDate="2018-02-04T22:31:00.360" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11178/112436&quot;&gt;locked question&lt;/a&gt; where I would like to leave a comment (&quot;I think this question would work well at Language Learners Beta; if you repost there, please notify me&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't leave a comment and I can't edit the post.  Help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T15:15:46.900" Title="How to leave a comment to Locked Post? OR: please unlock this question" Tags="|support|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11187" CreationDate="2018-02-04T22:49:11.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question on meta doesn't need to be unlocked; you can simply leave your comment on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/429262/191178&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt; on the main site (which is unlocked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: The question on main has been deleted by its owner, but it looks like you were able to leave that comment before that happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a post is locked due to a rejected migration, the revision history is linked in &quot;migration rejected from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/429262/revisions&quot;&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; hours ago&quot;, which is in the banner underneath the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QITxP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Picture of the banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there, simply click &quot;Return to Question&quot;, which should be at the very top of the revisions history (if the question is deleted and you don't have 10k rep, you will not see this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sDVw8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Return to Question//Migration Rejected//Post Unlocked//Post Locked//Post Migrated Away//Post Closed as Off-Topic&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’re in the app, your first step is to get out of it and into a browser. The mobile site works the same way as the full desktop site; the only difference is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N5J7U.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appearance of the locked notice&lt;/a&gt;, which is very slightly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-02-05T15:15:46.900" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T15:15:46.900" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-07T18:28:51.897" Score="1" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this regards the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/317617/124936&quot;&gt;What is the Difference Between Emoji and Emoticon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed as gen. ref., because it lacked research. I do not necessarily feel as this was appropriate at the time, because there was no resource which directly answered the question, and it took months for this question to be closed with no real general reference being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reopening it today may seem unreasonable. Research efforts made today would lead to an answer from some fairly authoritative resources too, so this is typically the sort of question I would insist should remain closed as a general reference question.  However here I am, suggesting that perhaps it should be reopened anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? Emoji is a word with a Japanese etymology, and that makes it something of special interest to me because I am a member of the western Anime subculture, and we often use japanese derived words to refer to distinctly japanese things. I have also used instant messaging services such as the defunct Microsoft Network and have a forum membership at a couple of internet forums. Based upon my direct experience,&#xA;I have an opinion that is somewhat contrary to the conventional wisdom regarding the subject, and I would very much like the opportunity to eventually express that opinion. I did not do so the first time, simply because of the transience of internet resources I had in mind for using to answer the question at the time, although I have since discovered some archival tools which make me more comfortable with using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems to me that since the question has been asked, that the question regarding what the difference between an emoji and an emoticon is has become quite a prolific subject to cover, so it may still be of some interest for other members of the community. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/42733339#42733339&quot;&gt;Terdon seems somewhat interested at least&lt;/a&gt;, despite my express presumption that it will never be so. He does not feel strongly enough about it to do me the favor of a direct endorsement here though, so I have to do my own dirty work. XP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the general references seem to be in a distinct disagreement with the one answer provided. The answer provides for some overlap between emoticons and emoji, whereas most general reference resources argue, for some reason, that emoticons are textual, whereas emoji are pictorial. With 10 votes, an accepted answer, and a gen. ref. closure, it almost seems as if we endorse the given answer wholeheartedly, which may make us seem a little silly if there are not other answers for the sake of peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few approaches we could take to this. We could consider the matter settled and leave it closed permanently, we could reopen it, or maybe we could even ask a new question with the intent of making a new canonical question in a better mold and wipe the slate clean. What does the community think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall probably wait to cast my own vote on the matter until after reading some other opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:18:22.367" Title="What should be done with the emoticon/emoji comparison question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11190" CreationDate="2018-02-07T19:19:04.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reopened. Never stand in the way of useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is so interesting and useful that someone has an expert answer ready, keeping the question closed to prevent that answer from being posted interferes with the purpose of the site, which is to collect expert answers. It becomes an abuse of bureaucratic power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been articulated many times on the network. See for example Shog9's article here on our Meta site, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2160&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, where he says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&amp;quot;You're not a machine. ... there can be questions that fail [strict guidelines] and yet are still worth keeping around. Use your best judgment.&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That entire article is well worth reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:18:22.367" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11190" CreationDate="2018-02-08T02:51:43.637" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or maybe we could even ask a new question with the intent of making a new canonical question in a better mold and wipe the slate clean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are meant to indicate a specific person's inquiry. Only they can tell us what research they did prior to coming here, only they can explain why the dictionaries they checked (or didn't check as is far too common) don't adequately give them an answer. Only they can tell us why they are still confused despite clear answers existing elsewhere. Maybe they found two dictionaries that have contrary definitions. Maybe they found that all the dictionaries they checked have the same definition, but that several of their fluent English speaking friends swear that the words have different definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you're a mind reader you can't explain for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead the appropriate course of action is to write a new question, and show your own research, with your own explanation of why the matter remains unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T02:51:43.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11194" CreationDate="2018-02-08T03:26:02.583" Score="-6" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been told that users are required to cite sources to prove our answers, but a) barely anyone I've seen does this and can get away with it and b) what if there are no quality websites explaining our answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user280496" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T12:05:37.433" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:22:59.567" Title="References At Bottom Of Answer?" Tags="|support|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-02-12T10:21:31.263" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11193" CreationDate="2018-02-08T15:43:01.170" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a question posted yesterday, there were 64 views, an edit and 2 upvotes of the question. 4 of 7 comments offered answers without reference! 3 answers received 3 upvotes and only 2 of answers had ref/research links. And at great risk of being banned to a scholar's gulag ... many of the guilty are high high reputation members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is supposed to be an answer: &lt;strong&gt;is this is the only site scholarly based ... YES. i think it will remain so.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Is It barely anyone?' err ... yes i have to agree with @grandma&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'@L Yes, a user who has been a member exactly one day, knows that barely anyone cites references in their answers.' agree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another exchange with a 3000+ rep:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;me:  that was a good comment. should have been an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;him/her:  'I don't believe I could have said so conclusively and with specific useful references, so I wasn't willing to post it as an answer'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have followed this forum for years, recently joining and participating. I learned early to do my research ... getting down votes and aking what my research revealed.  Then i read the 'rules'. It helped me appreciate the 'opportunities for improvement'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277355" LastEditorUserId="277355" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T16:22:59.567" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:22:59.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-10T03:08:32.613" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for accredited online/paper dictionaries for phrasal verbs, if anyone here knows of any good dictionaries of that sort, would you please direct me to them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280869" OwnerDisplayName="Yaman H" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T03:34:46.643" Title="Phrasal verbs dictionary" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-02-10T21:14:37.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-10T19:48:42.997" Score="14" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the preferred way to answer a question which asks “Provide me with X”, when it is overwhelmingly likely that X does not exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Assumptions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assume the question is interesting on its own merits&amp;sup1; and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; something like &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4732/55623&quot;&gt;Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he&amp;#39;s amused but the rest of the family isn&amp;#39;t?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assume it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_religion_text/CHAPTER_5_ARGUMENTS_EXPERIENCE/Burden-of-Proof.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;impossible to dispositively prove a negative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assume that it is relatively obvious to the experts on this site that it is very unlikely the question has a positive answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today a question was posted to which my immediate instinct was “there is no such word”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/430501/55623&quot;&gt;Is there a word for punctuation marks favored by individuals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I found the question quite interesting on its own merits, enough to motivate me to pursue a micro-investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That investigation only strengthened my suspicion that there is no such word. So if I were to post an Answer, it would likely take the same shape as the comments I made, something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no single word for a person’s favored punctuation marks. You’ll have to use an adjective to modify “punctuation” or a synonym of that noun. Which adjective you choose will depend on the particular flavor you’d like to lend to the description.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absence of Evidence&lt;/strong&gt; (but not &lt;em&gt;Evidence of Absence&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I say this on the strength of the lack of evidence that the word exists or that there is sufficient need or motivation for such a specific word to be coined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In support of this conclusion, I'll first point out that the general discipline of identifying authorship from patterns, cues and clues in a text is known as &lt;em&gt;stylometry&lt;/em&gt;. If anyone has sufficient reason to coin such a term, it is the scholars of that discipline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that lead, I googled &lt;code&gt;stylometry glossary&lt;/code&gt; and a series of variations on that, both including and excluding &lt;em&gt;punctuation&lt;/em&gt; as a term, and found nothing of interest.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The top hit persisted in being the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on the topic&lt;/a&gt;. I read that article and found the related term &lt;em&gt;forensic linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, and repeated my google searches with that term substituted for &lt;em&gt;stylometry&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Still no glossaries, but I did come across this relatively comprehensive &#xA;  master's thesis with a full literature review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://*INVESTIGATING%20THE%20USE%20OF%20FORENSIC%20STYLING%20AND%20THE%20USE%20OF%20STYLOMETRIC%20TECHNIQUES%20IN%20THE%20ANALYSIS%20OF%20AUTHORSHIP%20ON%20A%20PUBLICLY%20ACCESSIBLE%20SOCIAL%20NETWORKING%20SITE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;INVESTIGATING THE USE OF FORENSIC STYLING AND THE USE OF STYLOMETRIC TECHNIQUES IN THE ANALYSIS OF AUTHORSHIP ON A PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was authored by Colin Simon Michell in July 2017. Per its TOC, the section that deals with punctuation specifically is 2.7.3.3, starting on page 52. Despite the comprehensive nature of the study and the full literature review of the technical discipline that is most specifically pertinent to your search, that section offers no single-word term for “preferred or idiosyncratic punctuation”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consolation Prizes &amp;amp; Work-arounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  However, the thesis does offer us a couple of consolation prizes, multiple-word and/or insufficiently precise though they may be: &lt;em&gt;style markers&lt;/em&gt; (not just about punctuation; general &quot;clues&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;punctuation devices&lt;/em&gt; (not a single word). My instinct is this is the best we will get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bottom line is you’ll have to use an adjective to modify “punctuation” or a synonym of that noun. Which adjective you choose will depend on the particular flavor you’d like to lend to the description. You might say “his &lt;strong&gt;particular use&lt;/strong&gt; of ellipses” or “his &lt;strong&gt;idiosyncratic punctuation&lt;/strong&gt;”, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that Answer answer the Question? Does posting it improve the site for current and future visitors? Should it be posted&amp;sup2;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Methods&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see three obvious potential methods to “answering”&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People post answers, doing their best to give evidence of absence (i.e.  approximation of “proving no such thing exists”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has no actual answer, so the posted Question receives no posted Answers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is closed because there can never be an actual “answer”, so it is barred from receiving non-answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I include this last because it is certainly a possibility, but I would only recommend it when there’s an explicit or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195054/word-that-describes-a-problem-that-is-missing-a-precondition/195061#195061&quot;&gt;tacit premise&lt;/a&gt; in the question which is so obviously flawed that (a) everyone, including non-experts, can see it and (b) it’s impossible to repair (meaning repairing it would effectively &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#%22Unasking%22_the_question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“un-ask” the question&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I’d reserve its use for the questions which are covert rants or otherwise have a hidden agenda which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;already discouraged in the help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves us, so far as I can see it, with the first two options. I can see merits and demerits to both approaches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the general principle “take each question on its individual merits on a case-by-case basis”, which applies to all questions all the time, I'd like to get a sense of the &lt;strong&gt;community’s general preference&lt;/strong&gt;, the default case, for such unanswerable questions&amp;sup3;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the community’s preferred approach?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, please recommend one of the approaches above, or some other, and give a substantiated argument for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommendations which speak to the foundational goals of the site (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;building a curated library of questions&lt;/a&gt;”, ”helping current and future visitors”, “developing a center of expertise on English”, etc) or cite precedent or policy on EL&amp;amp;U or somewhere else on StackExchange&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; will be particularly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;The sought item might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/249150/55623&quot;&gt;lexical gap&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, if it is a &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; lexical gap, then that is a a proper answer to the question and therefore it doesn't fall under this meta-policy's remit. The more interesting questions which do fall under this remit are words which give us some inner, thin hope that they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; exist (because they &quot;should&quot;), which is is &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they're interesting, but for most such questions, it will be &quot;obvious&quot; to English experts that they don't exist, which is the genesis of this policy question.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Based on early feedback to this Mets-question, I've gone ahead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/430780/55623&quot;&gt;posted it as an answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to the question proper. So now you can give direct feedback on the answer itself: if &quot;no such word exists&quot; answers should not be posted, on epistemological or other grounds, downvote it. If you agree with the philosophy outlined in, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11197/55623&quot;&gt;@ab2's answer&lt;/a&gt;, that such answers at least add information, upvote it. If voting won't help you express your position for one reason or another, don't feel any obligation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup3; &lt;sub&gt;That is, assumption #2 guarantees that it is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that someone, someday may find an actual answer. That is, such things are literally &lt;em&gt;open questions&lt;/em&gt;, so the Questions should remain Open (same reason that questions aren't immediately closed when the OP &quot;accepts&quot; an answer; something even better may eventually come along).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Consequently and ironically, then, I’d consider any posted Answer to this posted Question which recommends “taking such questions on a case-by-case basis” a non-answer to the actual question. Twists and loops and braids entangle us.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;If citing non-EL&amp;amp;U precedent or policy on SE, sites which are similar in aim or character to EL&amp;amp;U, or Meta.SE (which theoretically at least provides overarching policy) will lend the most strength to a given case as having more obvious applicability.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; &lt;sub&gt;I've seen all such positions advanced. Consider this exchange in the comments of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5126/should-we-encourage-posting-distinct-answers-separately-particularly-for-sing#comment18658_5126&quot;&gt;an old Meta-question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;@JoeBlow: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;There's no such word&quot; is never a good answer&lt;/strong&gt; to a word request. If that's true, it is adequately conveyed by lack of answers (or lack of positively voted answers). &quot;I don't know of any such word&quot; is actually defensible, but useless, so it's not a good answer either. – Ben Voigt Aug 13 '14 at 16:55&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm afraid I don't agree, Ben&lt;/strong&gt;. If I was asking for a SWR, and &quot;God&quot; (as it were) could decisively tell me &quot;There is no such word&quot; - I'd want Him to tell me. – Fattie Aug 13 '14 at 18:42&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;@Joe &amp;amp; Ben: whether or not to explicitly post a &quot;there is no answer&quot; answer on SWRs is a good question for meta - one of you guys want to post it? (It's worth considering whether finding in the affirmative will encourage &lt;strong&gt;multiple users to post identical&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;there's no answer&quot; answers.) – Dan Bron Aug 13 '14 at 19:29 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T11:06:22.750" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T22:59:09.567" Title="What is the best way to answer a question which has no answer?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2018-02-10T21:44:03.403" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote for #1, because, if done well, it provides information, and could supply the stimulus for someone else to delve further and perhaps discover an answer.  Of course, some (many?) of the answers under Option #1 will be crap, and should be downvoted or converted to comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Options #2 and #3 preclude the possibility of providing any information.  Where would science be if null results were discarded? See, e.g.,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-supersymmetry-dead/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scientific American&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Is Supersymmetry Dead?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T23:53:51.957" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T23:53:51.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2018-02-11T00:09:45.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I know you put plenty of effort into this, but let us make no unproven assumptions. I think part of your problem is that you have over-complicated the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What Do We Desire?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the closure reason we usually apply when we suspect an answer can not be adequately corroborated. Sometimes, it seems to me as if Primarily Opinion Based is misread, as if it was just &amp;quot;Opinion Based&amp;quot; but I do not believe that is the case. As you can see, from the closure reason itself, there is some amount of leeway, for &amp;quot;some degree of opinion&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can base your answer in &amp;quot;facts, references or specific expertise&amp;quot; for us to serve as a basis for our votes, then we welcome it to be audited by our system of &lt;em&gt;peer review&lt;/em&gt;. What we generally try to avoid is answers that are merely &amp;quot;based almost entirely on opinion.&amp;quot;  The definitive post for what constitutes a Primarily Opinion Based question on the Stack Exchange network is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective.&lt;/a&gt;. In my opinion, the standards are not especially high, and I think we can even go all the way down to anecdotal evidence based on the moms4moms example, provided that the anecdote is sufficiently explanatory and relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we dislike is for people to &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; claim &amp;quot;There is no such word!&amp;quot; and without any further reason to believe them. That is just an opinion that does nothing to settle anybody's doubt, since there is a high likelihood that it may very well be wrong. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=UBQUBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PT106&amp;amp;pg=PT106#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Improve Your Speed Reading&lt;/a&gt; by Phil Heartman, a joint Google/Harvard study revealed approximately one million words in the language, and the adult only vocabulary ranges between 35,000–75,000, which only represents about 5% of the typical vocabulary in Phil's approximation. Just to stress how good of a vocabulary 75,000 words is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g33970-d105005-r143773634-Noah_Webster_House-West_Hartford_Connecticut.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noah Webster's magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language contained approximately 70,000 words upon its first publication in 1828&lt;/a&gt;. It took him 26 years to complete, and was the largest dictionary available of its time. I doubt that anybody else is as renowned for mastery of the English Language vocabulary as him, as his surname has become something of an eponym for the very concept of a dictionary in the U.S.A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of my principle interests in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/02/29/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;the Stack Exchange system can be exceptionally good at sussing out especially rare words by crowd-sourcing information&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that &amp;quot;no such word exists&amp;quot; is &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; a good answer. The community has already established that &amp;quot;no such word exists&amp;quot; is a perfectly valid answer to single word requests in these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4349/how-should-we-handle-single-word-requests-that-dont-have-a-matching-word&quot;&gt;How should we handle single-word-requests that don&amp;#39;t have a matching word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5136/for-single-word-requests-should-we-encourage-there-is-no-such-word-as-an-an&quot;&gt;For [single-word-requests], should we encourage &amp;quot;there is no such word&amp;quot; as an answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not against people doing that if they want to do so. It seems like the best solution to the problem, if somebody is willing to do it properly. However, I do not think we should be suspending our normal expectations of what constitutes a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So How Can We Answer Questions Regarding Nonexistence Well?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I do not want to foreclose upon any good methods of doing it, I believe a principle concern in this question is how to corraborate the answer. The way I see it, there are at least a few ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Specific Expertise&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people need certain kinds of words more than others, and are hence more likely to know if a word within a certain category exists than other people, so one way to answer is for such a person to claim no such word exists. This seems to be the approach Professor John Lawler took to answering&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/74147/124936&quot;&gt;Is There One Term for Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling?&lt;/a&gt; Now, I somewhat disagree with the answer and hope to eventually write my own answer arguing that grammar is the best word based on historical usage, and my own interest in the subject matter of what grammar means is why I know of this question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless I still think it serves as a good example of the sort of value that type of answer may have especially since Prof. Lawler is a very well respected expert within our community, and it probably still goes to show that the existence of another such word within the scholarly community is &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; unlikely, since it would not be so troublesome for him to suggest it if he had ever heard of one, and I think most of us can agree it would probably be him if anybody had ever heard of such a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to show that something does not exist is to show that it is not where anybody would expect it to be if it did exist. This is similar to the tactic of looking through the closet and shining a light under the bed to assure to frightened children who do not know any better that the boogeyman is not going to eat them as soon as they are tucked under the covers and close their eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the approach I took with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358654/are-the-paraphrase-brackets-not-square-brackets-used-in-english&quot;&gt;Are The “Paraphrase Brackets” (&lt;em&gt;Not&lt;/em&gt; Square Brackets) Used in English?&lt;/a&gt; With all of the evidence I provided that such a thing is unlikely to exist in our language, my answer received seven votes for it, as opposed to the three Hotlicks received for posting the same conclusion without any evidence at all. Hotlicks has more reputation points than me, and posted his answer earlier too, so it is out of appreciation for my &lt;em&gt;evidence&lt;/em&gt; that my answer outshone his. You and Guildenstem even honored me by providing some direct approbation for my research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;The bit about the Manding languages was really intriguing. I wondered if these languages needed paraphrase brackets because paraphrasing is an important or fundamental part of their discourse (relatively more than other languages, I mean). The question occurred to me because I know there are some languages, like Pirahã, which inflect for the &quot;source of knowledge&quot; (1st hand, 2nd hand, etc), which would be more important in oral-only communities. Sadly I didn't find anything interesting on a quick search, though Wikipedia does mention these communities have &quot;a strong oral tradition.&amp;mdash;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/55623/dan-bron&quot;&gt;Dan Bron&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;What an exceptionally thorough and well-researched answer.&amp;mdash;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/185831/guildenstern&quot;&gt;Guildenstern&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Now this is much more difficult with words than a proper dictionary, since there are so many more of them. However, the place you would expect to usually find those are &lt;em&gt;dictionaries&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, despite however difficult proving an absence may be using this method, it is still hypothetically possible. As incredible as it may seem, there is at least one person out there who have read the entire 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary second edition. Ammon Shea undertook the task by reading eight hours a day for a year, documented the experience in a book entitled &lt;em&gt;Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages&lt;/em&gt;. He was interviewed by reputable news outlets like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93170569&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;N.P.R.&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7654511.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the British Broadcasting Corporation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, this does not have to be a full time job: Despite however many volumes it has, the latest print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is not an especially word entry dense publication &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;with its 218,632 total words&lt;/a&gt; (its many pages mostly contain examples of historical use, with many extra definitions). I think it might be realistic for us to read at least a single volume of an unabridged dictionary. Those advertise word totals ranging from 315,000 like the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, to 700,000 words like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8UkorgEACAAJ&amp;amp;dq=oxford+dictionary+of+english&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiUyOD24Z7ZAhVQ_WMKHcDVBcgQ6AEIKDAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins English Dictionary—Complete and Unabridged&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190611224225/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2017/10/16/how-long-does-it-take-to-read-every-word-in-the-dictionary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Blog&lt;/a&gt; claims that &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190611224225/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2017/10/16/how-long-does-it-take-to-read-every-word-in-the-dictionary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the task of reading the &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionary of English&lt;/em&gt; only takes 41 hours of continuous reading&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit, that is plenty of work, but some people have done it with no real end goal in sight, and if somebody wanted to undertake the task, the result could be widely applicable to the range of word request questions on our site, and constitute a form of expertise that would be unwise to turn away. I have also noticed that people have undertaken the task of reading the whole Oxford Canadian Dictionary, such as Nikki Love (&lt;a href=&quot;https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W-TlyeFak8UJ:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/05/09/reading-the-dictionary-letter-a/+&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/save/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jELDeVK1FtYJ:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/06/22/reading-the-dictionary-letter-b/+&amp;amp;cd=4&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;B&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/save/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BoID8l1pdxgJ:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/07/25/reading-the-dictionary-letter-c/+&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/save/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hvACYvvlyuYJ:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/09/21/letters-d-h/+&amp;amp;cd=6&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;D-H&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/save/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zDETtThdrhcJ:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/11/10/reading-the-dictionary-i-o/+&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I-O&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/save/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UHD6sbHVXh8J:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2017/03/03/letters-p-s/+&amp;amp;cd=3&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P-S&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/save/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NiEHQTMs9DUJ:https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2017/04/13/letters-t-z/+&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T-Z&lt;/a&gt;). Additionally, the use of specialty dictionaries can help to lessen the task or find especially arcane words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the issue of trust has been raised, and I do agree that this is a somewhat legitimate source of concern, since anybody can claim they did something when they did not, but usually, when somebody discloses their credentials, such as being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9/124936&quot;&gt;a native speaker of a certain dialect&lt;/a&gt; or a professional linguist, we give them the benefit of our trust. I don't see why &amp;quot;I read an entire dictionary&amp;quot; should be much different, especially since a skeptic can audit the claim by another reading of the same dictionary. At any rate, if we should verify what a person's credentials are and how we should go about it, is a problem that should be considered separately, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Explaining the Facts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a word is more likely to exist than not simply due to the facts surrounding it, and providing a good explanation may just be able to prove that. It may require the use of some creative logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to exemplify some of what I mean, I submit some answers which I wrote that which take novel approaches with etymology to trying and disprove the existence of a word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should recognize &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/256082/is-lexophilia-a-word/256166#256166&quot;&gt;my etymologically based attempt to disprove the existence of the word lexophillia&lt;/a&gt;. Granted, this is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; but perhaps similar guidance regarding how to disprove the existence of the word can be taken from other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/is-it-a-word&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;is-it-a-word&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;is-it-a-word&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More directly applicable is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376742/is-there-a-word-analogous-to-dual-for-three-or-more-options/376746#376746&quot;&gt;Is *There a Word Analogous to “Dual” for Three or More Options?&lt;/a&gt;, I try to select and dismiss the closest possible match to the question * I claim that if there was to be a word within that series, that it must be trial, and then I show how trial is not the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Propose Alternative Solutions Instead&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes even a good question does not have a good direct answer, but if a question such as the one described is asked well enough, we can explain what the next best alternative is. Although I believe I have adequately demonstrated that there is no perfectly analogous word to the word dual, the other members have tried to suggest would-be synonyms which would match the given context. The accepted answer is Triple, and the top voted answer is Threefold. Stack Exchange encourages this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How Do I Write A Good Answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, if the questioner describes what it is they want well enough an alternative answer may even invoke &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/search/century-supplement/serendipity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;serendipity&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Happy faculty, or luck, of finding, by &amp;quot;accidental sagacity,&amp;quot; interesting items of information or unexpected proofs of one's theories; discovery of things unsought: A factitious word humorously invented by Horace Walpole.[—&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/search/century-supplement/serendipity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia Supplement&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Combining Solutions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although implementing just any one of these solutions should be good enough if done well, there is no need to restrict yourself to implementing just one. Some of these work especially well in combination. For instance, reading an entire dictionary may just give you a sense of how people would communicate the desired concept, if no match for the precise concept exists, and so you can comprehensively document which alternatives you have encountered that seem best to better prove you have undertaken the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addressing the Methods of Dealing with the Problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably speaking, I would prefer for solution 1 to be implemented, if somebody is willing to do it properly. By using the aforementioned techniques, we can actually learn something about the language. If somebody wants to try, I see no really good reason to stop them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in implementing the first solution, we have to acknowledge that solution no. 2 may be the one that is implemented most often in practice, because this is a volunteer run website. Sometimes people just are not going to want to answer a question, especially if it is an odd and relatively insignificant request. As long as a question remains open, it is up to the people who consider answering to decide whether or not they want to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Solution I Think We Should Avoid&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a case such as the one you describe, this option is not one that I would like us to implement this possible solution to the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is closed because there can never be an actual “answer”, so it is barred from receiving non-answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see much merit in this approach to the problem over just ignoring the question. The only benefit I see in it over ignoring the question is that it forecloses upon wrong answers, but &lt;em&gt;some wrong answers&lt;/em&gt;, and other qualitatively bad answers, are supposed to be on the website for the sake of giving meaning to our system of peer review. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;That is why Stack Exchange allows voting against answers, unlike hackernews.&lt;/a&gt; If adequate evidence to the contrary is provided, then we can just let votes sort out any incorrect claims to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;We do not want&lt;/a&gt; to be answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/16/gorilla-vs-shark/&quot;&gt;meaningless questions like&lt;/a&gt; questions like &lt;em&gt;What's Your Favorite Word&lt;/em&gt; that other Q &amp;amp; A. websites without our policies like &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AwrXnCFVRoFaNhQATABPmolQ;_ylu=X3oDMTEyaXF2Z2QwBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwM0BHZ0aWQDQjI1NTlfMQRzZWMDc3I-?qid=20081021193812AA7FGNL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo Answers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-a-favorite-word-What-is-it-and-why&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora gets&lt;/a&gt;, where all answers are equally correct, without any need for explanation. The relevant closure reason has been quite good at keeping our website neat and tidy. It may just be that &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; never got such a question because this type of problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon&quot;&gt;was spotted early on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps all such questions have been deleted, but we do not receive that type of question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another more commonly applicable purpose for this closure reason is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;naming&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; questions, on the grounds that a proper noun could hypothetically borrow from any word, or be created from scratch to address this issue. Whatever these, and other Primarily Opinion Based questions may have, they do not exist for the sake of the pursuit of truth, and may even obstruct it, so Stack Exchange as a whole has decided to eschew them. I have seen these are expressly singled out in our help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I cite those standards, it needs to be remembered that too much closure can be an obstruction to the pursuit of truth too, since the main purpose of it is to preclude all answers to a problematic question. This includes any potential good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The over-application of closure has been a problem for the Stack Exchange network in the past. Stack Exchange noted that also rejected a more specific &amp;quot;too narrow&amp;quot; closure reason to replace it, on the grounds that it is very hard to objectively determine just what people need. Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;the closure system as a whole was reworked in 2013&lt;/a&gt; in part to clarify the reasons for closure, and in part to restrain them. As an example of such restraint, The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185102/responding-to-your-too-localized-concerns&quot;&gt;Too Localized closure reason was long, confusing and over-applied&lt;/a&gt;, and the Stack Exchange network has recanted upon it, and even rejected a network-wide 'too narrow' closure reason as still being too much. Similarly, we used to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/167289/371286&quot;&gt;Not Constructive closure reason&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;This has been reworked into &lt;strong&gt;Primarily&lt;/strong&gt; Opinion Based, which is somewhat more permissive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; If we took the closure approach of trying to answer questions like this, I might not have had the chance to post my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/428850/124936&quot;&gt;What Is A Noun For Something That Edifies Us&lt;/a&gt; during the few days while I was waiting for the questioner to fulfill my request divulge research. In the meantime, somebody suggested no such word exists, and proposed using an &amp;quot;adjective&amp;quot; instead of a noun. With a little bit of luck, and a &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; novel approach, I did very easily find a word that almost no current dictionary contains, with the exceptions being Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary, Third Edition, and its online counterpart. I also almost certainly would not have had the chance to answer the aforementioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358654/are-the-paraphrase-brackets-not-square-brackets-used-in-english&quot;&gt;paraphrase bracket question&lt;/a&gt; which went unanswered for a period from November of 2016 to march of 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worthy of note is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120896/why-do-close-votes-expire&quot;&gt;question closure is &amp;quot;supposed to be a (mostly) spontaneous action&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, so if the community achieves a consensus on a certain point of policy, then it is possible that other positive contributions I have mentioned could be swiftly blocked by a few people who overestimate the worth of their independent vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes good things come to those who wait, and I do not think we should be so fearful of a question that is not being answered anyway that we should foreclose upon it being answered entirely. Denying other people the opportunity to report if they have discovered such a thing does little to reassure people that no such thing exists. It is fine for hypothetically answerable questions to wait for an answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/03/the-horror-of-no-answer-revival-and-necromancer/&quot;&gt;That is why the unanswered questions tab exists.&lt;/a&gt;.  In a case like this, I see no benefit over solution number 3 (closure) over solution number 2 (just ignore it). I think it is needless to prevent answers to a question if nobody is answering it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I think it is also worth noting that we already close most of the questions we receive. I have seen numbers reported as high as 60%. Can we please us not grow even more trigger happy with the closure button than we already are, and lose decent contributions in the process: Please? Pretty please? I'll put sugar on top if I must!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T22:59:09.567" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11200" CreationDate="2018-02-11T22:40:04.393" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a (ridiculous) question + answer purporting to be from myself while I was looking through 'questions from new users'. It was removed, but I think that this reveals a serious flaw in the system. Is it soon to be corrected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T03:59:37.913" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T18:01:18.100" Title="Identity Theft: Shouldn't this be prevented?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11199" CreationDate="2018-02-12T00:39:07.080" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases, it is perfectly reasonable for many users to have the same name, so it doesn't make sense to force them to be unique. For example, I made &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/802281/people-with-the-same-names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a query&lt;/a&gt; to find users with the same display name, and there are 224 &lt;em&gt;Alex&lt;/em&gt;es on the site. (I for one don't like having to add numbers to my display name; others probably feel the same way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not ok to impersonate other users. If you think you see someone impersonating another user, flag for moderator attention with a message like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This user appears to be impersonating [this user](link to profile)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in your case, you can say &quot;impersonating me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user has copied more than just your username (e.g. profile picture, bio text), be sure to mention this in your flag. There's a big difference between two people being called &lt;em&gt;Alex&lt;/em&gt; and two &lt;em&gt;Alex&lt;/em&gt;es with the same profile picture and the exact same bio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, the user posted nothing but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/430648&quot;&gt;trollish content&lt;/a&gt;, which was flagged as abusive and deleted. That, combined with the sheer unusualness of your name, seems to have led moderators to delete the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also Tim Post's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/176687/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accounts aren't tied to display names, they aren't required to be&#xA;  unique. However, if you participate in comments or chat with someone&#xA;  that has the same display name, you'll get a bit of noise in your&#xA;  global inbox if someone mentions one of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What you can't do is &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;impersonate someone else&lt;/a&gt;, or otherwise&#xA;  harass people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances will Subscriber use the Network or the Service&#xA;    to (a) send unsolicited e-mails, bulk mail, spam or other materials to&#xA;    users of the Network or any other individual, (b) harass, threaten,&#xA;    stalk or abuse any person or party, including other users of the&#xA;    Network, (c) create a false identity or to impersonate another person,&#xA;    or (d) knowingly post any false, inaccurate or incomplete material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's a difference between sharing the same name as another user,&#xA;  and pretending to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Barring that, there's no issue if several or more people share the&#xA;  same display name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T18:01:18.100" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T18:01:18.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2018-02-13T02:48:21.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, not only do I think posting the answer you suggested in the question would &lt;strong&gt;absolutely be a good answer&lt;/strong&gt;, I also think it's the kind of insightful, thought-provoking answer that is unfortunately difficult to find in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't misunderstand me here, I don't think there's anything wrong with SWRs, but I think we all know that they tend to elicit &lt;strong&gt;one line&lt;/strong&gt; answers with a &lt;strong&gt;copy-pasted&lt;/strong&gt; (I don't think this qualifies as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/399805/origin-and-usage-of-copypasta&quot;&gt;copy-pasta&lt;/a&gt;) snippets from a dictionary.  The kind of answer you offered as an example brings the process into the equation, which I think is part of what makes &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; yield such interesting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great etymology answers often &lt;strong&gt;tell a &lt;em&gt;story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to provide context for their claim.  The story isn't just aesthetic in purpose; it gives the reader some idea of what process led to the conclusion found, whether examination of corpora, consultation of reputable dictionaries, or other kinds of research.  This buttresses the conclusion and usually gives some idea of what the other possibilities might be and why the conclusion is possibly the &quot;most likey&quot; answer if there are alternative possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this Meta question especially interesting because I've often wondered where the boundary lies for etymology questions—that is, what makes a question &lt;strong&gt;so impossible to answer that it's ridiculous to ask&lt;/strong&gt;.  I've tested that boundary a few times myself.  Some might have seen the +500 bounty I put on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/415034/etymology-of-slang&quot;&gt;the etymology of slang&lt;/a&gt;.  The bounty went to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/416318/228732&quot;&gt;JEL's answer&lt;/a&gt;, which supported the proposition in the question itself, albeit while providing illuminating and informative research in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite example of a no-answer answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/411130/228732&quot;&gt;Sven Yarg's answer&lt;/a&gt; to a question I posted about the word &quot;growler.&quot;  After an epic discussion of the history of the word, Sven concludes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we may be dealing with a term whose source is unfindable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a disappointment if it appeared as a sentence in isolation, of course, but because the answer traverses the process and offers a thorough examination of what possibilities were considered and what history is known, it's a phenomenal answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, your non-answer to a single-word-request is very similar.  You explain the process you went through, you show your research, and you explain why you've concluded that such a word very likely doesn't exist, all while offering close multi-word options as a consolation prize.  I'd love to see analytical answers like that to SWRs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T02:48:21.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2018-02-13T16:48:06.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble wading through your question so I'll answer what's in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just say something like 'There is no &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer' and give reasons, with content, suggesting why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question may be too specific and you can give alternatives for less specific versions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There may be an archaic term which may be an answer for a thousand years ago, but no one would understand it now.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A translation may not be word for word or hit exactly all and only the semantic features, but nearby alternatives may be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since negatives are hard to prove succinctly (there's no word to point at because that's the problem it doesn't exist!), there is some reliance on authority. But we're somewhat anonymous here. Just saying 'no' is not enough. Explicitly say 'no' but give some content reasons as to why you think so. Weasel words, like 'for the most part' or 'it is expected' actually increase accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that existence questions are usually of the questionable SWR variety, where a simple thesaurus look up usually can give you a straight yes or no. So it is likely not a good question to begin with, but maybe your non-answer answer can at least shed some useful light on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T16:48:06.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T12:10:05.997" Score="-4" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the sections in the Help Center is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;How to not be a spammer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that grammatically correct? Isn't it 'splitting the infinitive'? Shouldn't the phrase be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How &lt;strong&gt;not to be&lt;/strong&gt; a spammer&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, do the words &quot;how to&quot; belong together so strongly that the result can be regarded as OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is this something the local mods can change, or do we need to take this up with the SE developers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20947" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T12:05:59.047" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T06:54:00.997" Title="Should the split infinitive in &quot;How to not be a spammer&quot; be corrected or is it fine as is?" Tags="|feature-request|typographical-errors|help-pages|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11203" CreationDate="2018-02-14T13:15:15.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have two questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is “how to not be” grammatical?, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;predicated on (1), how can that wording be changed in the help center?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How to not be ungrammatical&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a fuller analysis of the grammatically of this wording, you should ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Main&lt;/a&gt;. Meta is for settling matters about the site, Main is for settling questions about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None the less, in the interest of discussing question (2), which is about the site, I’ll post this &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=how%20to%20not%20be&amp;amp;year_start=1960&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Chow%20to%20not%20be%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brief summary&lt;/a&gt; of the English question here:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/551D0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/551D0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of Google nGram showing significant usage of “how to not be”&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=63363876&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the COCA&lt;/a&gt;, which is probably the most widely-used corpus of English, which collects a series of professionally published works, including fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D0QYo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D0QYo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the top few results for this construction in the COCA corpus&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think suffices to bring into question (1), which is the premise of (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How to not be irked by the help center&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of the Help Center can be changed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;elected mods on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;; but the parts that are universal across SE sites can only be changed by StackExchange employees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the language “how to not be a spammer” is an example of the latter language, to change it for the domain english.stackexchange.com, the SE elected mods would have to bring a case to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99341/273503&quot;&gt;SE Community Managers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if it’s ungrammatical, presumably you’d want it repaired wherever it’s used in SE help centers, not just on the &lt;code&gt;english.&lt;/code&gt; subdomain. For that, you’d have to bring the case yourself to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta.se&lt;/a&gt; where both the Community Managers and broader StackExchange audience can see it, weigh in on it, and make a final determination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that for either the &lt;code&gt;english.&lt;/code&gt; subdomain as a whole or for a more universal change, you’ll have to &lt;em&gt;bring a case&lt;/em&gt; that “how to not be” is ungrammatical. That is, as I said, your question (2) is predicated on question (1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, given the nGrams I evidenced above, the premise in (1) is looking none too healthy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How not to believe English speakers speak English&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the spark of prescriptivism burns brightly in your soul, and you are dismayed by the absolute ubiquity of this usage, then your best bet is to ask (without prejudice) on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U main&lt;/a&gt; and let our resident grammarians make a case one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:22:17.770" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:22:17.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11203" CreationDate="2018-02-15T00:09:51.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it aint broke then don't (try to) fix it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/if-it-ain-t-broke-don-t-fix-it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;say&lt;/a&gt; the Americans and they are absolutely right. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;How to not be a spammer&lt;/a&gt;&quot; deals with how somebody should take care to &lt;strong&gt;not be&lt;/strong&gt; a spammer. &quot;How not to be&quot; might well be the more widely used construction, and could probably be used instead without significantly changing the emphasis or meaning of the statement, but as already pointed out in the earlier answer by @Dan Bron and in some comments under the question, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/split-infinitives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;split infinitive&lt;/a&gt; when employed as in &quot;how to not be&quot; has become widely enough used over the years &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to not be&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (descriptively if not prescriptively) considered ungrammatical any more by general consensus, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.in/search?q=Pedant&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pedants&lt;/a&gt; can beg to differ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no error there is nothing to repair, and no proposal to send upstairs to SE staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I am no grammarian, nor an expert on how this network works. Those who disagree with my answer are requested to post your valuable inputs in the comments section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T03:37:32.243" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T03:37:32.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11203" CreationDate="2018-02-17T06:54:00.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;They would have different meanings&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to not be a spammer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this page I would expect to see advice for how to avoid being a spammer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How not to be a spammer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this page I would expect to see advice for how to avoid being a bad spammer. Gotta make sure your spams are lit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T06:54:00.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11212" CreationDate="2018-02-19T08:43:20.873" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like this website and use it regularly.&#xA;I have posted a lot of questions and I have attached some pictures to them as well. People on this website have given very good and useful answers to my questions as well.&#xA;But I'm curious to know if any of this stuff will get deleted for any reason possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I basically want to know is that when (if someday) any of the questions/pictures/answers I posted or are posted on my questions will get deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because I don't want to get them deleted ever, until the website exists of course :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269543" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T12:10:25.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T07:51:56.873" Title="When and why will my stuff get deleted? (if it will be)" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11208" CreationDate="2018-02-19T12:03:02.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for being an active user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions, answers, comments, and even user accounts are deleted when they meet the criteria listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;the help centre pages&lt;/a&gt;, mainly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;Why and How Are Some Questions Deleted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why and How Are Some Answers Deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;The Community User Deleted My Question! What Gives?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comment Everywhere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to Reference Material Written by Others&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;Trusted User&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In short, only the bad and unhelpful content is deleted.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as long as your posts are on-topic, fleshed out, and well-received, they will live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading can be found at:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/309993&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T00:37:47.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T13:37:32.627" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just attempting to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/431778/&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t many dictionaries list “would= to be willing”&lt;/a&gt; to make the information added in revision 5 a little more presentable, and something rather strange happened. For some strange reason, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/431778/7&quot;&gt;Revision 7&lt;/a&gt; attributed to me, that happened concurrently with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/431778/6&quot;&gt;revision 6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://s14.postimg.org/lrqw5qae9/simultaneousrevisions.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s14.postimg.org/lrqw5qae9/simultaneousrevisions.png&quot; alt=&quot;This is a screenshot that shows the defect&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not quite sure why this happened. I am relatively confident that it should not have happened for two reasons: One is that usually an editor gets a grace period of about 5 minutes before any additional revisions are added, and these revisions are not even a minute apart. The other is that revision 7 has no content change from revision 6, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10124/124936&quot;&gt;I thought that edits required at least six characters to be changed to prevent trivial edits&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the fact that a moderator decided to close the question as I was applying my edit may have something to do with it, but I do not know what that is. I read the exceptions for the grace period in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-editing-work/21789#21789&quot;&gt;this meta F.A.Q.&lt;/a&gt; and nothing about closure is mentioned. I also only submitted my edit once, so i would not expect any of the conditions to apply anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely doubt that it should have happened, so why did it happen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T13:37:32.627" Title="How Did I Simultaneously Make Two Identical Revisions?" Tags="|bug|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11208" CreationDate="2018-02-20T03:25:24.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;NVZ has already provided links to almost everything you need to know about deletion (and some stuff you don't), so I'm going to just outline the most relevant things about deletion of questions specifically. (Well, I'm trying to outline, but it turned out pretty long anyway...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Being [closed] or [on hold] is the first step towards deletion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;enough rep&lt;/a&gt; can vote to close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The system will automatically delete questions that meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;certain criteria&lt;/a&gt; (this process is called &quot;Roomba&quot;). Some of the questions that get deleted are old and had no activity (including upvotes) yet are not closed, but most of what gets deleted is questions that are closed. Unless it is reopened, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/431788/191178&quot;&gt;this question of yours&lt;/a&gt; is going to get deleted soon by the system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High rep users can vote to delete questions that are closed. (See the privilege pages for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10k+ users&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;20k+ users&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's best obviously to ask questions that don't get closed. The most important thing to do here to prevent the chance of closure is to show your research (I like what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043/191178&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; says).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is closed, you can use some of the steps &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11080/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (see &quot;Reversing Closure&quot;) to try to get it reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are fewer things that can be done if the question is deleted. If you think you'd be able to fix your question enough that it should be undeleted and reopened, ask about it here on meta, and include a link to the question and mention the improvements you want to make. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It's not uncommon for things to get deleted&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you post a lot, even if it's high quality, inevitably stuff gets deleted. In my case, ~2% of my posts are deleted (none of these posts were upvoted, however) and almost all of that deletion was due to answering questions that got closed, then deleted by Roomba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Post deletion is soft deletion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your question or answer is deleted, you will be able to see it if you have the URL. In addition, at the bottom of the lists of your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=questions&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=answers&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; (found in your profile) will have a link to deleted recent questions and deleted recent answers respectively where you can find some of your deleted content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T03:25:24.727" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-20T04:35:49.343" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;An Academia participant felt daunted by ELU and requested that a question be posted at ELL instead of ELU.  But the question is not getting enough attention there despite a good-sized bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty please, you smart ELU folks, take a look, I need your help in figuring this out. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/155543/18523&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/155543/18523&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T22:59:23.263" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T22:59:23.263" Title="Could the ELU experts please look at this question at ELL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11213" CreationDate="2018-02-20T07:28:53.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question would be on topic on ELU (although the edits should not really be identified like that: meld the information into the question, where the edit history shows what has happened to it). I don't think I'd object if it were migrated over here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &quot;need our help&quot; then the question is better here than there, but if the ELL community feels it's on topic there and wants to keep it, that's fine too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T07:28:53.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11208" CreationDate="2018-02-20T07:51:56.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily, comments can be deleted from the main site without a trace, without notice and without recourse. Moderators do have the ability to restore even those, but any post worth preserving should be posted as proper questions or answers ... as well as your own backups, where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T07:51:56.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11217" CreationDate="2018-02-21T08:29:27.463" Score="18" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love this website and use it a lot. The website is really good and awesome.&#xA;I was just wondering how the website actually earns any money, as I don't see any single advertisement at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any donation feature then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly do they earn money? Also, are there any paid workers on the website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269543" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:15:08.273" Title="How does this website earn money?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11216" CreationDate="2018-02-22T00:32:35.023" Score="21" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Advertisements&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advertisers can &quot;purchase a campaign&quot; to run relevant advertising on certain sites. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.selfserve-stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; (also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/243521/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) lists all the sites included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VzQEw.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, ads now run on all main Stack Exchange sites (except MathOverflow). This change was announced &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/329763/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on June 19th, 2019. These ads come from an advertising platform and are not targeted nor vetted as well as the ads from campaigns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ads only run on the main pages, not metas. Advertisements are either for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/advertise/solutions/ad-banners&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;top leaderboard&quot;, &quot;sidebar&quot;, or &quot;mid-page leaderboard&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11167/191178&quot;&gt;Community Promo Ads&lt;/a&gt; are different. Community Promo Ads don't generate any revenue, and require a high enough net score in order to be shown (I believe you need +6). House ads (&quot;ads&quot; for questions on other sites) don't generate revenue either.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Amazon Affiliate Links&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not have noticed, but there is one subtle way this site makes some money: Amazon links. Whenever someone links to Amazon.com, the link becomes a Rads.stackoverflow.com link, which means that if someone clicks and buys a product they know that Stack Exchange referred the person and pay them a small portion of the profit from the sale. Across the network this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/317994/323179&quot;&gt;“paid for far more than [some employee’s salary] each month”&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Site Sponsorship&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/307861/323179&quot;&gt;the post where it was first announced&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sponsorship generally entails enabling ads relevant to the subject and affixing a small &quot;sponsored by...&quot; logo in the upper-right corner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there are some sponsored sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; (sponsored by IBM)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Quantum Computing&lt;/a&gt; (sponsored by Strange Works)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Engineering&lt;/a&gt; (sponsored by Stack Overflow for Teams)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing are (currently) beta sites in almost every respect (for example privilege levels), but they have a design. The sponsorship for Software Engineering, being internal, doesn't directly give any revenue but it does help get the word out for Teams (see below), which does generate profit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is the biggest site in the network and generates the most revenue. The following are Stack Overflow-specific revenue generators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/79448/323179&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Jobs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/277948/6083675&quot;&gt;Sponsored tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/advertise/solutions/podcast-sponsorships&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Podcast sponsorships&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Enterprise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/358943/6083675&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow for Teams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Employees&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company&quot;&gt;250+ people&lt;/a&gt; employed by Stack Overflow. Management is listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company/management&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The Community Managers are listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99341/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what happened to the list of all employees, but you can find an archived list &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150315020003/http://stackexchange.com/about/team&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T22:15:08.273" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:15:08.273" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T18:48:38.333" Score="2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is listed below. I have made necessary changes and I do not think it should be put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431025/non-vulgar-alternative-to-dont-care-a&quot;&gt;Non-vulgar alternative to “Don't care a ____&lt;/a&gt;” [today placed &quot;on hold&quot; for the 2nd time]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for being put on hold, I do not believe my question is &quot;off-topic&quot;(which was the reason listed). After all, my question relates to English. It is clearly not Physical Education! It is about word choice and usage (as I am questioning my word choice of the word shit, and am trying to find a better one that can be used in a more clear way), which is fine to ask about, according to the help center. So could you let me know why my answer was put on hold? Also, I have changed the part about it being too easy to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I went through the steps listed in the help center, I noticed that my question in fine for all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;duplicate – My question did not duplicate any other questions, I checked&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;off topic – My question is about word choice and usage&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;unclear what you're asking – I am clear what I am asking, I say it in a way that does not allow confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;too broad – I am only asking for one word. This is in no way broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;primarily opinion-based – I include links to the research I have done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280648" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T11:33:52.440" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T02:10:02.757" Title="(&quot;on hold&quot; again) Why is this question closed, when the reason listed does not seem to be correct?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11218" CreationDate="2018-02-22T19:48:59.977" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Too broad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; does not necessarily mean you, the OP, are asking for more than one answer. It is saying that there are too many possible solutions, the fact the OP accepted &quot;atom&quot;, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the term &quot;shit&quot; kind of proved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's question is specific, clear, well formulated, and it shows research but it is too broad and invites users to submit answers in lists. One user submitted an answer that contained 18 solutions, which also included the term &quot;atom&quot; but nobody noticed that the last suggestion was copied from another user's earlier answer. This is further proof that the question is too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear I did not cast any vote to close or reopen the question, but the answers are pretty &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, the two top answers were submitted, immediately, after the OP had posted their request on Feb 14 at 3:27. The answer &quot;whit&quot; was posted Feb 14, 3:33 and &quot;not a bit&quot; one minute later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T19:57:58.713" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T19:57:58.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11218" CreationDate="2018-02-24T13:03:53.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Regarding the Main Purpose of Closure&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi Taryn: It's me, Tonepoet again: I was the person who advised you on how to get the question reopened the first time. I was worried this might happen and I hope to be able to help you get it reopened again, if it is possible. Although I can not speak on MetaEd's behalf, I surmise that it should indeed be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is frustrating, but please don't be too discouraged by this, because we intend for closure to be a cyclitic process designed to prevent bad answers from being posted, and overrated while a question is in need of refinement. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; a question can be edited to be within scope, we really do want to encourage such edits. As I said before, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;War of the Closes&lt;/a&gt; explains everything. It helps you to get the most thoughtful and useful answers if you follow our procedures, which is the main reason we have them in place. Well, maybe not you personally at this point: Part of our goal here is to build a library of answers for the future reference of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which do not comply can be problematic for us. As you see, your first formerly accepted answer &amp;quot;don't care a whit&amp;quot; has 88 votes for it which gives it the appearance of winning by a landslide and burdens more suitable answers with insurmountable odds to beat, even though it may not seem to really be what you are seeking based on the fact that you unaccepted it. This is detrimental to the intended purpose of voting, which is to serve as a system of peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Diagnosis&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can not cure a disease without knowing what it is. Now personally, I think the question is good enough in its current state, but others disagree. Based upon the comments, I see a few complaints and I shall try to explain them for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General Reference&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, the only thing that suggested to me that the question might be off-topic is that the answer seemed too easy to find, as demonstrated by a comment by Edwin Ashworth. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/42997071#42997071&quot;&gt;We discussed this in great detail already&lt;/a&gt;, and you have mostly fixed the problem through the inclusion of some research. However, Edwin seems to maintain his complaint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Find the obvious possibilities yourself (though they have been googled for you now). (b) Delete the question here and ask for suggested less obvious alternatives to 'don't care a whit', 'don't care a [wild] fig', 'don't care a bit', 'don't care a dime', 'don't care a feather' over on Writers SE, asking further which of all the alternatives best fits your poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reread the closure reason, you should see that this particular closure reason is not really about whether or not you did research, so much as the types of answers it solicits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;I am not really of the opinion that this is primarily opinion based, because most of the answers are backed up with at least a rudimentary reference, per the closure reason text, and while there are some answers which transgress our usual expectations, that is to be expected with such a popularly viewed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there are a couple of red flags. Although &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/997/124936&quot;&gt;the strongest community consensus suggests that poetry is not strictly off-topic&lt;/a&gt;, we tend to place it under much greater scrutiny due to the tendency to break prosaic rules for the sake of prosodic causes. We don't really want to compromise the semantics of the answer to syllabify it smoothly. English Language &amp;amp; Usage mostly just concerns itself with the grammar of English prose, and we expect answers to take the usual systematic of the language into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, &amp;quot;creative&amp;quot; can be interpreted as meaning just about anything. Somebody could suggest that using a word like whale ironically would be a creative solution, and it is wholly unique, but I assume that is not the effect you desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information about what constitutes the difference between an acceptable and an unacceptable answer under the Primarily Opinion Based closure standards can be read at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What Types of Questions Should I Avoid Asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Too Broad&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MetaEd alluded to the prior closure text of this closure reason, and MariLouA's answer addresses this matter, and I won't retread too much ground. However, for some reason the text of this closure reason was not provided, which makes it difficult to understand, so I shall do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First it is worth noting that because the ultimate goal of Stack Exchange is to build a sort of reference work, that we want the competing answers to be relatively digestible, and easier to sort through than going through every website on google.  That is why the closure reason used to read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291819/371286&quot;&gt;the text of this closure reason has been changed&lt;/a&gt;, in a manner that I do not think is really helpful because it seems like a duplicate of &lt;em&gt;unclear what you are asking&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For our purposes, I am going to assume that it is the former wording that is the cause of concern, due to the sort of analysis given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A Few Suggestions for Improvement&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Remove Reference to Vague Notions of Creativity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is really unnecessary, and while it does encourage unique answers, it encourages primarily opinion based ones too. I suspect this was mostly overcompensation for the fact that the question was closed as being general reference anyway. You may want to consider soliciting explanations, rather than creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Show Us All of the Autofill Suggestions &amp;amp; Explain Why You've Dismissed Them&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would help to further demonstrate that a somewhat reasonable research effort would have been more difficult than it seems and show us that you are not just looking for any old answer. It would give us an idea of what factors mitigate against against a choice, which does not only rule out the suggestions made, but all suggestions which share those factors in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional benefit is that people who want to suggest one of those answers anyway would then need to provide additional explanation regarding why you were too hasty to dismiss these answers in order to justify it. Maybe don't care a whit actually is the right answer for instance, but the single entry at The Free Dictionary does not adequately explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is the right answer. All it provides after-all, is the barest explanation of its meaning. This helps us to make better explanations than the ones already out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would help if you included a screenshot of the options provided, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0sMW.png&quot; alt=&quot;This screenshot shows that the most readily found options on The Free Dictionary in this context are fig, hang, hoot, whit or whoot.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;Read How Do I Format My Posts Using Markdown or H.T.M.L?&lt;/a&gt; for some information regarding how to do that, and feel free to use the screenshot I have provided. I know that getting it can be a little tricky: I had to use a timed screenshot to snag it without dismissing the suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tell Us More About What Kind of Meaning You Want The Word to Signify&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are the poet, and only you know what type of word it is that you want. What we are here to do is to help you find it. If you did this, it would further limit the list of applicable answers to the one which communicates that concept. It encourages our users to try and prove that their word is the closest match to the meaning you want to communicate and in an easily found in pre-existing resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it may be hard to figure out how, but your poem seems to involve the subjects of labor and nuclear power. Perhaps you could explain more about why you chose that subject, and how your word should fit that particular context, instead of leaving it up to community discretion to decide for themselves what constitutes creatively fitting into the poem. As the poet, it is your responsibility to determine what it is you want to express: We are just here to help you determine what the best way to express it is after you decide that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Miscellaneous Notes Regarding Moderators &amp;amp; Reopening Procedures:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am mostly just writing this as a guide regarding how to optimize your odds of reopening the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the diamond next to his name, MetaEd is a moderator, so pursuant to the procedures mentioned in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;What If I Disagree with the Closure of a Question? How Can I Reopen It?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; you may raise a custom flag the question for reopening. This helps to balance out the disproportionate voting power moderators have, without compromising their authority. I would only recommend doing this &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; you have performed the sorts of edits I already suggested, so that the moderator reviewing the flag sees a reason to change his verdict. However, the moderators here also do not seem to like to go over each other's heads, so &lt;em&gt;instead&lt;/em&gt; of flagging the question, you may want to ping MetaEd directly in a comment by typing @MetaEd at the start of a comment. He is now the main person you need to persuade that the question should be reopened, and as such you should definitely heed the advice he gave in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the moderators are still reluctant to reopen the question after you have implemented the suggestions I gave, ping me by commenting under this answer. I'll consider if you heeded my advice well enough, and if you have, without creating other unforeseen problems, then I'll cast my own vote to reopen. The community was already receptive towards opening the question in its present form, so it should not be too hard to get it reopened again, and it should be quite easy to get them to do so again if even more improvements are made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although sometimes moderators have the ability to exercise some exceptionalism if they deem it necessary, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;which is part of why we have moderators in the first place&lt;/a&gt;, the moderators here are usually elected by our members, based upon their understanding and ability to carry out the community's overall will, and hence they tend to yield to the discretion of the general community, so if the community votes to reopen the question again, I doubt we'll see more moderator intervention to the contrary. I can't guarantee it though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T02:10:02.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T15:50:48.533" Score="-4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could a few of you please upvote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/112389/29008&quot;&gt;correct answer&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/112387/29008&quot;&gt;this question about capitalizing municipalities&lt;/a&gt; and/or downvote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/144175/29008&quot;&gt;incorrect one&lt;/a&gt;? This is an common capitalizing error and we don't need to increase the confusion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd mistakenly upvoted the incorrect answer before having read the style guides, pushing the incorrect answer to the top, and ran past the time limit of changing your vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29008" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:53:41.470" Title="Incorrect answer voted to top for city capitalization" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11221" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:13:56.097" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The one you identify as &quot;correct&quot; is a decent answer, and I upvoted. The one you identify as &quot;incorrect&quot; is actually not wrong, but it does lack supporting research. I've offered a supporting document in the comment thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:13:56.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11221" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:53:41.470" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because AP doesn't like the &quot;incorrect&quot; one doesn't actually make it incorrect. It's a style guide, albeit fairly authoritative in American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answer mentions the City of London, and &lt;strong&gt;that use is indeed correct.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;The City&quot; means &quot;The City of London&quot; (a semi-autonomous borough, for want of a more understandable explanation), and does not mean &quot;the city of London&quot; (the entire metropolitan area).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:53:41.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T18:45:29.823" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;This recent highly controversial &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/432371/what-do-you-call-this-clamp-in-english&quot;&gt;question &lt;/a&gt; appears to offer more personal impressions on how the object in question is called rather than a definitive answer. Though   AmE users appear to agree on a single definition (see the upvotes) , there is still a fair amount of disagreement among them, to say nothing  about the BrE definition (see the downvotes), which has found the strongest opposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all that, is this question really helpful for a site like ELU? It reminds me of the more famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;yellow ax&lt;/a&gt; question. Should it be closed or locked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. I posted the first answer just to give a suggestion..the rest is history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T08:54:56.863" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T08:54:56.863" Title="Is this another “yellow ax” case?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11224" CreationDate="2018-02-26T20:26:17.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is this called?&quot; questions are entirely on-topic for ELU. The item can certainly be called different things in different varieties or contexts. The question may be closable for other reasons, like too elementary or no research at all (as NVZ's comment noted, the not-too-old tech of Google image search &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; come close to an answer but is not guaranteed to clarify any nuances).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that one answer, which was entirely correct for one variety, got downvoted considerably (but was upvoted quite a lot), is not a sign of it being a bad &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, but of poor understanding by voters. If anything the lesson from the strange behavior around the question should be to think before you vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to comparison with the 'yellow ax' question, this one is about specialized technical vocabulary, very much on topic. The 'yellow ax' question, as fun as it was, was more about sleuthing a one-off multilingual error, and not likely to help anyone after this on ELU (but if I go to Sweden and need to chop wood...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: the question is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T20:26:17.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11224" CreationDate="2018-02-26T20:28:01.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your main concern is that the existing answers to the clip question are poor, or contradictory, or not getting the votes they should, I think locking the question is the &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; thing we'd want to do. We'd want people to improve their answers or post better ones, and locking the question would make that impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the connection you're making to the ax question. Both tools are familiar objects, so it is a reasonable presumption that each has a common, accepted English expression describing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the questions asked about them are quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question about the clip was simply what's its common name. There is not, as yet, a general reference which will reliably tell you the name of something pictured, so maybe it's a reasonable question. We've answered such questions before.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That's not what was asked about the tool. In fact the asker was readily able to identify it and associate it with the words &quot;ax&quot;, &quot;hatchet&quot;, and &quot;tomahawk&quot;. Adding the qualifier &quot;whose name begins with y&quot; is what put it beyond the pale. Given that the asker already knew what the object is called, and already checked a thesaurus and discovered that there's no English expression that qualifies, that question was undoubtedly general reference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T20:43:09.580" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T20:43:09.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11224" CreationDate="2018-02-26T20:32:01.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I think most of us are not really sure if the Yellow Axe question should have been locked in the first place. It was a case of human exception handling on the part of a moderator, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11103/124936&quot;&gt;when we discussed it on meta&lt;/a&gt;, we either expressed uncertainty or approbation for it. It's not really sound precedence for deciding what's on or off topic in my opinion.  However, for the sake of discussion, I will posit that it should be closed in deference to authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best reason I can see for it having been closed is that Dan Bron's answer revealed that it probably wasn't an English word, and as such had questionable ties to the English Language. At best, it was the English language context (for lack of a better word) that rendered the question as being remotely anything about English, which was determined to be inadequate Sometimes some people also complain about typos on similar grounds, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11125/another-epic-question-locked&quot;&gt;the covfefe question.&lt;/a&gt; The logic seems to be if it is not in the English Language, then it can not be related to the English Language. At the risk of putting one of my better answers on the chopping block, I feel it is necessary to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11196/what-is-the-best-way-to-answer-a-question-which-has-no-answer/11198#11198&quot;&gt;repeat&lt;/a&gt; that this is why I did not try to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/358654/124936&quot;&gt;the paraphrase bracket question&lt;/a&gt; sooner, because it shows that I feel this logic is somewhat understandable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case however, the answers show that there is English terminology, even if it is relatively little known and dialectical which renders other &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/image-identification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;image-identification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;image-identification&lt;/a&gt; questions significantly different in that they have a stronger association with the English. Indeed, it is not in any way unreasonable to assume that something that many English speakers have frequently seen in everyday life &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binder_clip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for over a century&lt;/a&gt; should have its own distinct name. This is a very, very common utensil found in offices, and I remember seeing these items ever since I was a very young child since my mother worked with papers quite often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; go, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/image-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;image-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;image-request&lt;/a&gt; questions may even be among some of the better questions we receive, because a picture objectively demonstrates what it is we are seeking and the need for it much better than a contextual sentence or a personalized definition: A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say after-all. Even though Terdon is otherwise a strict adherent of the contextual sentence requirement, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/conversation/a-contextual-sentence-debate-with-pictures&quot;&gt;he did admit to me that a picture mitigates against the usual necessity of it in a brief debate.&lt;/a&gt; This leads to much more definitive, specific and accurate answers that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;of the sort we are supposed to prefer.&lt;/a&gt; These also have a fairly good chance at revealing some rather interesting lexical items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, among one of the personal favorites of the answers I wrote is the answer to the question I exemplified for Terdon, which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/296280/describe-the-colour-of-raw-liver&quot;&gt;Describe the Color of Raw Liver&lt;/a&gt;. In it I suggest words I happened to chance by terminology from heraldic tradition, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/search/century-dictionary/sanguine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sanguine&lt;/a&gt; (blood red) and its close synonym &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/search/century-dictionary/murrey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;murrey&lt;/a&gt; (the color of mulberries). Sadly, it did not satisfy the questioner so much, so he added to his criteria to exclude similar answers but I think it should be of interest to anybody else looking for a relatively precise word for that color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/403782/124936&quot;&gt;Is There a Word for an Individual Spark in a Firework?&lt;/a&gt; produced some interesting evidence in the top voted answer, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/search/century-dictionary/scintilla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scintilla&lt;/a&gt; looks like a promising answer, even though the commentator who mentioned it suggests is of the opinion that it is wrong. Granted, in that case, I do not really think the picture alone is adequate to identify just what is meant: (Does the questioner mean the head or the tail of the ignited firework, or the combination of both as the circle suggests together?) but the question seems to have promise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only questionable bit I think is if we really should be answering questions regarding concrete nouns, and personally, I think we should be answering questions regarding the entire vocabulary if they are otherwise within scope. While it may seem tempting to suggest otherwise,major lexicographers seem to all admit to the wisdom of addressing these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-case-of-the-missing-o-e-d-words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; for instance decided not to include proper nouns on the grounds that those were more encyclopedic than lexical in nature, and this led to the very glaring Omision of needful words like African. People wrote in to complain, and it was claimed that since this portion of the dictionary was already published it was too late to fix, and it would remain unfixed until the 1933 supplement was released nearly a century later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/plan.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnson's Plan for an English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; makes a compelling case that words of all sorts are needful and merit being addressed in the art of English lexicography, and while we are not quite a replacement for a dictionary, I do believe we intend to serve as a sort of supplement to one when it's necessary &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;since word choice and usage is within scope.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T04:35:24.623" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T04:35:24.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:43:47.430" Score="0" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429142/is-there-a-difference-in-meaning-between-fill-something-in-and-fill-someth&quot;&gt;Is there a difference in meaning between &amp;quot;fill {something} in&amp;quot; and “fill {something} out” in American English?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1514/fill-out-a-form-or-fill-in-a-form&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Fill out a form&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;fill in a form&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former question has recently been rejected in the reopen review queue, so that's why I am asking on meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I see a duplicate of are the phrases cited in both questions: &quot;fill in&quot; and &quot;fill out&quot;. Basically,  the newer question can be &lt;strong&gt;summed up&lt;/strong&gt; in the following inquiry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a subtle or significant difference in meaning between the following?  [&lt;em&gt;fill in&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fill out&lt;/em&gt;}&#xA;  …, is it true in some American English dialects, &lt;em&gt;fill in&lt;/em&gt; means to supply information whilst &lt;em&gt;fill something out&lt;/em&gt; means to complete something in its entirety?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older and more famous question asks &lt;strong&gt;in its entirety&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does one fill out a form or does one fill in a form? I've gotten different answers from the people I've asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the user who had first cast their vote to close the newer question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429142/is-there-a-difference-in-meaning-between-fill-something-in-and-fill-someth#comment1038709_429142&quot;&gt;to explain&lt;/a&gt; but she/he has been absent from the site since their vote was cast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain why the newer question is a duplicate of the older one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older question asked: &quot;Does one &quot;fill out&quot; a form or does one &quot;fill in&quot; a form?&quot; which suggests strongly that the OP believed there was a BEST (i.e more correct) way. There is an answer which says the two phrasal verbs mean the same and are interchangeable while NoHat's answer states that the Brits favour &lt;em&gt;fill in&lt;/em&gt; over the other, but the margin of preference is not as great as the Americans preferring &quot;fill out&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, my question is asking &quot;whether&quot; and/or &quot;why&quot; Americans consider the two phrasal verbs significantly different in meaning. This explains also why I accepted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/429224/44619&quot;&gt;Hot Licks' answer&lt;/a&gt; which did not contain references but the user is an American English speaker, and it is he who answered my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lightbulb moment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now realise where the &quot;real&quot; problem lies, three of the five answers submitted could have been &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; the older question. These answers did not specifically address my question. Nevertheless, they were upvoted by the community, members who probably skimmed the question or jumped to the wrong conclusion. Without those three answers that skirted around my announced perplexity, the weak and &lt;em&gt;unsupported&lt;/em&gt; CW reply would not have a leg to stand on. It is yet another instance when the mods on EL&amp;amp;U generally ignore my meta questions, and I have to settle for a CW answer consisting of a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; posted by a non-mod (&lt;em&gt;which in the meantime has since been deleted, so who knows what else Dan Bron said&lt;/em&gt;), or a comment posted by a mod beneath someone else's answer. See infamous Yellow ax question I posted not long ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, fine. No. It's not. But I have to suck it up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T18:25:56.097" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T21:12:23.037" Title="Is the question asking about the &quot;AmEng meaning&quot; of two phrasal verbs a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11230" CreationDate="2018-02-27T15:05:29.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;They seem the same to me. If there were any situations where you’d prefer one to the other, the answers to the famous question would attest to that. Which is the test for duplicates: would the answers to one also answer the other? Note, the test is not whether the current answers do so, but that the question invites answers which could.&quot; – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/55623&quot;&gt;Dan Bron&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11230/is-this-question-specifically-asking-about-the-ameng-meaning-of-two-phrases-a-du?noredirect=1#comment47485_11230&quot;&gt;21 mins ago&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:05:29.177" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-27T15:05:29.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11234" CreationDate="2018-02-27T21:27:36.657" Score="4" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/433161/hypernym-for-sender-and-recipient-in-terms-of-a-shipment&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was classed as &quot;off-topic&quot; but no reason was stated and therefore the OP had no chance to edit and improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not taking sides and not criticising - I am just asking if this is usual as I do not remember seeing it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T21:37:44.180" Title="&quot;Off-topic&quot; but no reason stated?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11233" CreationDate="2018-02-27T21:37:44.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is in the associated &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/433161/hypernym-for-sender-and-recipient-in-terms-of-a-shipment#comment1040105_433161&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because our Help Center says that picking names for computer software thingies is out of scope for our site. – tchrist♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T21:37:44.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-02-27T22:45:27.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CfBmk.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Writing Q&amp;amp;A&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8816" LastEditorUserId="8816" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T15:55:35.347" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T15:55:35.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11230" CreationDate="2018-02-28T00:42:00.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Addressing the Other Answer Here&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With five votes in favor of it, it places a significant burden of doubt on me, so I feel it is necessary to comment upon it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They seem the same to me. If there were any situations where you’d prefer one to the other, the answers to the famous question would attest to that. Which is the test for duplicates: would the answers to one also answer the other? Note, the test is not whether the current answers do so, but that the question invites answers which could.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this assertion for a few reasons. The first is that many people take a minimalist approach when answering questions, and only address what is explicitly asked of them. Indeed, a question can be closed for having &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; of a scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is that a perfectly adequate answer such as NoHat's vaguely discourages more extensive answers on the grounds that the principle matter had already been addressed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally I think we can take the fact that none of the older answers, except the one Mari-Lou specifically commented upon, addressed this answer as a sign that it does not really seem to invite this sort of answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not Suggesting that such an answer would be clearly disqualified from the questiion in its present form, but I do not think that is adequate in and of itself to merit closure. In the next section, I shall explain why in the following segment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I Don't Think This Question Should Be Closed As a Duplicate of That Older One&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was a matter of what could necessarily be interpreted as a broader and narrower question, I might support closing the narrower question as a duplicate of the broader one, but I do not think that is really the case. I think this is a question of addressing fundamentally different scopes.The old question is about commodity or correctness of one form over the other, with the answers addressing regional usage frequency and is postulated on the notion that they effectively mean the same thing. The new question is about differences in meaning. That is a significantly different scope in my opinion. Now differences in meaning could be used to argue that both forms are appropriate, but originally, none of the answers to the old question interpreted it that way and none of their answers would qualify as answers to the new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled/10844#10844&quot;&gt;According to Stack Exchange Meta duplicate guidelines,&lt;/a&gt; the small amount of overlap does not necessarily mean that your question should be closed. At the very most, your question is at most, a borderline duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Spolsky we should &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;only close real dupes&lt;/a&gt;, and according to Atwood, there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot;&gt;three kinds of dupes&lt;/a&gt;: Cut-and-paste, Accidental duplicates, and Borderline duplicates (requiring judgement as applied by the community.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few factors which should go into deciding which question is a duplicate based on the fundamental goal of duplicate closure mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;Why Are Some Questions Marked as Duplicate&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place. This does not mean that every duplicate will immediately be closed; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;we love (some) dupes&lt;/a&gt;. There are many ways to ask the same question, and a user might not be able to find the answer if they're asking it a different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is is that duplicate status should make it easier to find the answer people answering the question would seek. This is such an important criterion that &lt;em&gt;it is not even possible&lt;/em&gt; to close a question as a duplicate of another question that has not yet been answered, even if it is indeed identical. Moreover, the answers to Mari-LouA's question imply that both are indeed proper, but the opposite is neither necessarily nor currently true. MariLouA's question is of a relatively reasonable scope that makes it easier to find specific semantic arguments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other is that duplicate targets should not be chosen on the mere basis of age, but also on the basis of &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; quality, because we want to be directing people to the best set of answers. On these grounds, if one question must be closed as a duplicate of the other, I would prefer to be directing people to MariLou-A's question, which has much more informative answers overall. Given that the other question is not a dialectical question, the answers to the other question are primarily opinion based in my assessment, with the exception of Nohat's, which has its basis in verifiable usage frequency facts. Now yes, the older question has more votes which normally implies higher quality contributions, but it also has the advantage of more age and more views which give it the natural propensity of having more votes. When accounting for the proportion of time and views both questions have, I think it is clear that the answers to Mari-LouA's have been better received overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I think another solution should be implemented&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I think we have enough clues to deduce what the original questioner asked was meant to be different, so we can make a clarifying edit on behalf of the questioner that would cleanly divorce these questions. The questioner presented usage frequency facts from a questionable source, and accepted an answer based on more reliable usage frequency data. I propose that we change the older question's title to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which Is More Common Between Fill-In and Fill Out?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has two benefits for us. One is excluding answers based on semantics, corralling them over to MariLou-A's question, or potentially a less restricted question about a more widespread distinction if we ever get one in the future. Another is that the extra keyword makes it easier for future researchers coming in from google to find the frequency data Nohat presented to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the answers seem like they would remain equally valid with this change in wording too, except maybe Alan's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/1515/124936&quot;&gt;Both are perfectly acceptable&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; which could probably be changed to equally as suggested by a comment. I am not really too concerned about preserving the validity of an unfounded one liner anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questioner rolls back, and/or makes a clarifying edit of their own which contradicts these reasonable assumptions, then perhaps a reassessment would be in order, but given what we know now, I think this is the  most helpful course of action for all of our future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am wrong on that count, and I would welcome an audit of this opinion if it is too presumptuous. However, if it is so, then I am not sure that we can reasonably assume to know what type of answer the questioner wants, and perhaps the older question should be closed as being unclear instead, in preference of this question which provides a more obvious goal, (alongside a better research effort and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T21:12:23.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11238" CreationDate="2018-02-28T02:52:32.450" Score="5" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topic of answers in comments has been brought up before (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4557/142322&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3629/142322&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2653/142322&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;), with MrHen providing a good summary of the &lt;em&gt;community's&lt;/em&gt; attitude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion on that subject is that answered questions are better than non-answered questions regardless of the question's quality. If the question is &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; enough then it should be closed; but the only time an answer is actually inappropriate is when it is (a) wrong (b) the question is unclear and likely to be edited or (c) you are unsure of your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes handle (a) just fine and comments are appropriate for (b) and (c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4569/142322&quot;&gt;- MrHen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question doesn't intend to rehash old ground, but instead is focused on the moderators' recent efforts regarding answers in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid answers in comments. We get it: standards for comments are low, they get an undeserved privileged position on the page above answers, and they cannot be community edited or peer reviewed. But this discourages people from posting actual answers and defeats the core answer ranking process. A better place to post an answer is in the answer box. See: “Privileges - comment everywhere”, “Is SE enforcing ‘no answers in comments’?”. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429047/one-among-the-few-shops-that-offer-or-offers#comment1029539_429047&quot;&gt;MetaEd♦&lt;/a&gt; Feb 1 at 17:43&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don’t write answers in comments. It bypasses our quality measures by not having voting (both up and down) available on comments, by not being editable by the community for improvement, and by not having a visible edit history.. Comments are to be used only for clarifying and improving the question; please don’t use them for other purposes. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427223/questions-about-the-verb-coin-when-coining-an-idea#comment1027903_427223&quot;&gt;tchrist♦&lt;/a&gt; Jan 28 at 23:08&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I also see moderators posting what looks like answers in comments, such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/433193/142322&quot;&gt;Q&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Can i use past continuous for past habits?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/433193/can-i-use-past-continuous-for-past-habits#comment1040099_433193&quot;&gt;Comment&lt;/a&gt;: Although it is possible to construct a theoretical framing that would allow that sentence, it is not how one would normally express this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's my question&lt;/strong&gt;: what standards are the moderators using to determine whether a comment is deemed to be an 'answer'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When mods deem a comment to be an answer, they sometimes delete the comment. This is a moderator action, so my question is directed to moderators rather than the community as a whole. I accept that comments are treated as ephemeral constructs, and there's no suggestion of the abuse of mod powers here. It would be nice, though, to have the moderators articulate what constitutes 'answers' in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect a quantitatively precise answer, but &amp;quot;I know it when I see it&amp;quot; is too generic for an answer to this meta question. I'd like to see guidelines such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's okay (or &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; okay) to state generic principles in comments;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's okay (or &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; okay) to offer unsupported guesses or hypotheses in comments;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's okay (or &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; okay) to offer personal perspectives like &amp;quot;this phrasing sounds fine/awkward to me&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;people in my area (AmE/BrE/AuE/...) actually do speak like that&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, I used the rule of thumb that only supported answers go into answer boxes; anything else is a comment. This keeps the quality of the repository high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With my recent awareness of moderators' distaste for answers in comments coupled interestingly with greater tolerance for lower standards applied to &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; answers than I'd have previously been comfortable with, I've tried to cooperate. Occasionally, I'd post as an answer something I might have used a comment for before, or I might start a comment but discard it altogether without posting an answer at all. I don't think this improves either the community or the repository, but I'm not sure how else to comply with the no-answers-in-comments policy when I don't have the time or the inclination, or both, to more extensively research a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I saw several instances of what look to me like 'answers' posted by moderators in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where the lines are drawn anymore on this topic, so some guidelines from the moderators would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alternatively, a move to only-good-answers-in-answers would suit me just fine, with comments quietly moved to chat at the whim of any moderator - or even deleted after due consideration. This helps to engage the community and to promote higher quality in answers. Not needing to weigh the absolute or relative 'answeriness' of their own and others' comments makes it a touch easier for mods. It's also easy to explain: only good answers go into answers; everything else goes into comments. Comments can disappear, but while they're up they're fair game to be incorporated into anyone's answers or community wikis.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T17:55:49.720" Title="Qualitative 'boundaries' for what it means to answer in comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11237" CreationDate="2018-02-28T05:10:58.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We expect answers to be substantial, and backed up by references. [⬅️ This therefore is not an answer. :-]&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;—&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2085/tchrist&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt;♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this, I suppose what tchrist means that because his comment does not qualify as an answer, due to a lack of substantiation, that it has immunity from the rules against answers in the comments. This explains part of the reason why he did not post it as an answer: He does not believe it to be one. However, another part of the reason why he did it that way may just be that he intended it to be self-illustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following example in light of the quote above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/427223/142322&quot;&gt;Questions about the verb “coin” when coining an idea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User Comment: To &amp;quot;coin&amp;quot; means to take a piece of nondescript metal and stamp it with a pattern that makes it a recognizable piece of money. In other words, create something of clear, discernible value out of raw materials. Other meanings are metaphors on that concept. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427223/questions-about-the-verb-coin-when-coining-an-idea#comment1027819_427223&quot;&gt;Hot Licks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod Comment (bold in original): @HotLicks &lt;strong&gt;Please don’t write answers in comments&lt;/strong&gt;. It bypasses our quality measures by not having voting (both up and down) available on comments, by not being editable by the community for improvement, and by not having a visible edit history.. Comments are to be used only for clarifying and improving the question; please don’t use them for other purposes. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427223/questions-about-the-verb-coin-when-coining-an-idea#comment1027903_427223&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt;♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hot Licks's comment wasn't answer-worthy, &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; tchrist's note that &amp;quot;We expect answers to be substantial, and backed up by references&amp;quot;. This contrasts with the (earlier) &amp;quot;Please don't write answers in comments&amp;quot; from the same moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need clearer guidelines about what constitutes an &amp;quot;answer in comments&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T17:55:49.720" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-28T05:10:58.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11237" CreationDate="2018-02-28T09:34:16.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that you are actually looking for answers from moderators, but this is how I understand the rule of thumb for answers in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it would be a proper and complete answer to OP's question &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;if adequate references were added&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; then it should be posted as an answer by incorporating those references, and should not be posted as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is an on-topic suggestion that doesn't really answer the question, or if it is a fragment of an answer, or simply points OP in the right direction then it should be posted as a comment and will probably not be deemed as &quot;answering in a comment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple Example: OP asks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which is the largest mammal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blue Whale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an answer in a comment. I should find a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt; to prove that blue whale is the largest mammal, and post it as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is likely to be one of the largest whale species, please read up about Cetaceans online&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it can stand as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, whenever I write a comment providing a suggestion for OP, I immediately review it to see if it could be an answer if supported by the appropriate references: and if so, I post it as an answer and delete the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, ELU has been quite tolerant of users posting answers in comments, based on the unofficial view that an answer in a comment is preferable to a proper answer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;that went unposted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; due to lack of time or inclination to find and cite the correct references. Answers are also posted as comments when a question is obviously going to get closed, in order to help OP without actually answering a close-worthy question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, comments cannot be peer reviewed and that is a very good reason for moderators to insist that answers should not be posted as comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T11:05:00.497" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T11:05:00.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11242" CreationDate="2018-02-28T10:28:07.140" Score="7" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier, I had to wait for 40 minutes in between the posting of two consecutive questions. However, today I was able to ask questions without having to wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have the rules changed? or It's because of my reputation increase or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269543" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T16:38:51.753" Title="Has the wait between asking two questions been removed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2018-02-28T13:07:29.973" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing seems to be wrong or altered here. It is probably because your reputation increased. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;At 9 or fewer reputation points,&lt;/a&gt; you are considered a &quot;new user&quot;, and your ability to participate is severely hampered, probably as a safeguard against spam.  This includes an inability to &quot;ask or answer questions too rapidly&quot;. That restriction is allegedly removed once you have 10 or more points, alongside the inability to post more than 8 hyperlinks, and answer protected questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, at 150 rep. it seems to me that you should have noticed a change much earlier, perhaps when you were presumably notified of the privilege in your inbox, but the privilege is vaguely named because it bestows a few benefits, and I am assuming you did not notice sooner because you simply did not bother to try again until now, under the assumption it would not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T16:38:51.753" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T16:38:51.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2018-02-28T15:32:54.677" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, for users above a certain rep amount, this restriction is removed. The magic number is actually 125:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users with &amp;lt; 125 rep [must wait] &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/322265&quot;&gt;40 minutes since their last question anywhere on the network&lt;/a&gt; (This applies to the user's IP address, not their account. If the user shares that IP with other users, they can be limited by the other user asking a question anywhere on the network.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vr3HC.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you will &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281959/323179&quot;&gt;still be rate limited&lt;/a&gt; on other sites where you have &amp;lt;125 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T15:32:54.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-03T19:46:54.817" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help center &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;makes it very clear&lt;/a&gt; how Community awards bounties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer &lt;strong&gt;created after the bounty started&lt;/strong&gt; with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full amount, if the answer is also accepted). If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bold emphasis there is mine.  And yes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431488/origin-of-to-call-out-meaning-to-decry/431588#431588&quot;&gt;an ulterior motive&lt;/a&gt; prompted this question, but I'm genuinely curious what other people think about the process in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the point of a bounty is often to attract new attention to a question, and I assume that this is the logic behind awarding the bounty to whatever answer received the most votes &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the bounty is posted.  But at the same time, if a user doesn't award their own bounty, that often suggests that they didn't get an answer that satisfied their expectations from anyone.  In essence, their attempt to earn a certain kind of attention for a question failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to award the bounty to whatever answer gets the most upvotes &lt;strong&gt;since the bounty was posted&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;regardless of when the answer was posted.&lt;/em&gt;  This would still prevent old answers from easily earning abandoned bounties because of their high vote counts &lt;em&gt;unless those old answers earned the most upvotes even after the bounty was posted.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is essentially a discussion question, but since it also involves a suggestion, feel free to downvote if you disagree with the suggested approach and prefer the way bounties are awarded now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T01:45:51.420" Title="Might there be a better way for Community to award bounties?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11244" CreationDate="2018-03-04T03:37:04.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think this proposal would  really be a positive change for Stack Exchange for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This does not guarantee that the best answer gets the bounty, because the existing answers probably have the advantage of being sorted, and hence read first. If people get bored of reading the answers and leave before they even get around to reading the new answers, then they will not be able to vote for them, even if they would like those answers better.  This system would still favor existing answers of equal value, and we may perhaps even risk favoring answers of lesser value than the new ones because of this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may discourage posting bounties in the first place because the bounty starter who allows a bounty to lapse is probably  dissatisfied with the existing answers. It risks a bad answer being rewarded in the mind of potential bounty starters. I sure would be disappointed to see my hard earned points go to an answer that I have personally voted against if I ever was to start one, and your system poses a greater risk of that. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Despite claims to the contrary, I do not believe that it is merely more attention that we seek, but the contribution of more information to the website. An existing answer does nothing to contribute new information, unless a substantive edit is applied, and I doubt that the community bot is equipped to rate the quality of an edit. Giving a slight edge to newer posts which do make such contributions and add cross-references to the website makes sense to me, even if those cross-references are disagreeable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two considerations make it so that the change is of questionable benefit and potentially harmful, whereas the third shows that the system as it is currently may even be beneficial, so, at least for now, I think things should stay as they are presently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T01:45:51.420" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T01:45:51.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11247" CreationDate="2018-03-04T12:42:02.823" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presently I can only paste a URL into a comment and the word processor chooses what title to say in red. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I add my own title to the link ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T12:56:57.523" Title="How do I add a red title to a link in a comment?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11246" CreationDate="2018-03-04T14:35:00.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This confused me too, because the style of link used by the graphical user interface tool in questions and answers creates a footnote style link that does not work in the comments. Hypertext Markup Language does not work either, so you need to use &lt;em&gt;inline&lt;/em&gt; markdown links, which I suppose makes sense given the relatively short and transient nature of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inline links are written with square brackets enclosing the text, and parenthesis enclosing the U.R.L., like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Hey! Visit Stack Exchange!](https://stackexchange.com)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result of typing that into a comment should be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Hey! Visit Stack Exchange!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;Markdown formatting options in the help center&lt;/a&gt;, and details about what hypertext markup language can be used in Stack Exchange posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/135909/371286&quot;&gt;at Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T12:56:57.523" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T12:56:57.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11244" CreationDate="2018-03-04T22:26:00.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the person offering the bounty wanted it to go to an existing answer, they can award the bounty immediately. If they don't do that, I think it's safe to assume they aren't particularly thrilled with the existing answers, even if the rest of community likes them. If the bounty poster is unable to log in and award the bounty for some reason, it doesn't seem right to award it to an answer they could have awarded it to when they posted the bounty, but didn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the community bot awarding the bounty is just there to prevent the system from being exploited. For example, I want attention for my question so I offer a bounty, a bunch of folks put effort into answering, and I get lots of good information, but I never distribute the bounty I promised because I'm lazy or think if I don't award it, I will get it back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existing system favors new users and active users a little bit, which is a good thing. Old answers getting up-votes because of the increased attention from the bounty is already giving those answers a boost; when a bounty is abandoned, the person offering the bounty doesn't care who gets it, so why not reward the folks that responded to the bounty instead of the folks that just got lucky and answered a question that ended up having a bounty placed on it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think if someone edits an existing answer in response to the bounty, their answer should be in the running for the automatic bounty award with only votes after the edit being counted. Tracking the timing of the bounty, the edit, and the votes might be tricky, and abandoned bounties seem fairly rare to me, so it might be more work than it's worth however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T22:26:00.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-06T16:05:14.230" Score="-2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot;&gt;[offensive-language]&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vulgarity&quot;&gt;[vulgarity]&lt;/a&gt;.  The former has synonyms including [vulgar].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/offensive-language/synonyms&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt; that [vulgarity] should be a synonym for [offensive language].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48571" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T18:22:55.643" Title="Offensive and vulgar tags -- merge" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11250" CreationDate="2018-03-06T18:22:55.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;vulgarity&lt;/strong&gt; tag's description is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that relate to questioning whether certain words are taboo or if your question relates to the level of appropriateness of a word or its possibility to offend in certain situations and contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;offensive-language&lt;/strong&gt; tag's description is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about offensive language. It is for questions about words or phrases that could be considered offensive. If reason of offensiveness is belittling or painting a negative light instead of 'just offending' CONSIDER using the tag PEJORATIVE-LANGUAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between using language which could be considered offensive and asking whether certain words are taboo. With the former one &lt;em&gt;knows&lt;/em&gt; that there are people who do consider the language offensive, even if there are also those who do not. The latter suggests that you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the words might be offensive, but there is no certainty that anyone actually finds them so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is enough of a difference there for these not to be synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T18:22:55.643" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-06T21:31:55.240" Score="7" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/434202/complaint-vs-blame&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asked about determining the &quot;function&quot; of a sentence, which to me isn't a concrete language construct the way that question implies. Seeking more information, I looked into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/functions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;functions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;functions&lt;/a&gt; tag to see what else existed on this subject and found... a haphazard assortment of questions, most of which did not contain any relation I could recognize to the question I came from. Some sample concepts the tag referred to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/434202/complaint-vs-blame&quot;&gt;Function of a sentence&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. Blame, Complaint)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333999/part-of-speech-in-a-sentence&quot;&gt;Function of words within a sentence&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. Subject, Direct Object)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411385/term-for-a-function-that-is-deliberately-excercising-edge-cases&quot;&gt;Mathematical function&lt;/a&gt; (Arguably off-topic in the first place)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429347/is-this-a-fused-determiner-head&quot;&gt;Phrase categorization&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. &quot;fused determiner-head&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/415513/in-the-phrase-color-spectrum-what-part-of-speech-is-color-what-formal-or-fun&quot;&gt;Part of speech&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. noun, adjective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as some cases where the lines between some of those are blurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that some or even most of these questions actually do have a common thread, or that the distinctions that I see aren't considered meaningful, but to me it seems that it's currently being used quite haphazardly and since it doesn't have any Usage Guidance it's hard to tell whether it is appropriate or not, or generally what sort of questions it should apply to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243336" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T21:31:55.240" Title="What is the meaning of the &quot;functions&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11256" CreationDate="2018-03-07T07:27:17.193" Score="6" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have access to OED through the public library system of the UK and I am aware that others without subscriptions cannot verify my citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/433803/what-part-of-speech-is-say-if-i-were-say-to-use-it#comment1041766_433825&quot;&gt;comment on the second answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/433803/what-part-of-speech-is-say-if-i-were-say-to-use-it&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; in which the commenter makes a page within OED available free of charge. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/171590&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/171590&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How was it done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T14:56:14.373" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T20:30:55.097" Title="How was an OED page made available free of charge?" Tags="|support|online-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11253" CreationDate="2018-03-07T07:28:39.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not possible for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes OED &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; its pages to be seen for free. But if you invoke the same link another time you are likely to find that access requires a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/how-to-use-the-oed/what-is-the-oed-online/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a handful of pages that are permanently open for view&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/52325&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/62251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/52611&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;digital&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/113184&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mammoth&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/276151&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;galactico&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/240489&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ninja&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/136308&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palfrenier&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others popup from time to time, and it seems that the one example 'say' by coincidence was available the past couple days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, you can't do as they've done &lt;em&gt;reliably&lt;/em&gt;. If it were reliable (permanent URLs) it would be totally allowable, even encouraged from the OED side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side, it is considered reasonable (and legal) to post small snippets here, either an image capture or cut and paste of 'Fair Use' sized pieces of text. That is a broader issue that has been addressed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153/does-copy-and-paste-infringe-copyrights/&quot;&gt;elsewhere on meta&lt;/a&gt; (link is only one of many in the discussion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2023-11-17T20:30:55.097" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T20:30:55.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11253" CreationDate="2018-03-07T21:35:23.637" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be my comment, so let me explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every single day, the OED has a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190417074504/https://public.oed.com/blog/why-the-oeds-word-of-the-day-is-special/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word of the Day&lt;/a&gt; that it makes free to the world. Eventually, the whole OED will be free ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in case anyone is wondering whether a subscription to the word of the day means that eventually you will receive all of the dictionary, our calculations show that yes you will – in approximately 753 years, and only if we add nothing in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED can send you an email daily if you &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/emailupdates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sign up&lt;/a&gt;. They also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/oed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter page&lt;/a&gt; that tweets links to the Word of the Day. You can also see some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imogenfoxell.com/?tag=wotd&amp;amp;paged=6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Words of the Day illustrated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can figure out if a page in the OED is freely available by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching in the top bar&lt;/a&gt;, then trying to visit one of the page's other tabs (e.g., &amp;quot;Meaning and use&amp;quot;). You may also be able to use a Google search like this one, which finds &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/dictionary/say_v1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;say, &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;.1 and &lt;em&gt;int&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aoed.com+say&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:oed.com say&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T18:17:04.467" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T18:17:04.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11260" CreationDate="2018-03-10T02:43:33.177" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted an answer that got a lot of votes. Now the question has been marked a &quot;duplicate&quot;, and may be in danger of closing. Would it be alright if I copy and paste my own happily successful answer to the question that is linked as a duplicate of the one I answered first? Also, are these two questions really duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/434655/in-search-of-an-idiom-expressing-to-lay-the-grapes-into-somebodys-mouth/434669#434669&quot;&gt;In search of an idiom expressing &amp;quot;To lay the grapes into somebody&amp;#39;s mouth&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/62142/what-do-you-call-ill-not-feed-you-by-my-own-hand-in-english&quot;&gt;What do you call *I&amp;#39;ll not feed you by my own hand* in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273295" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T07:49:11.420" Title="Is there a rule against posting the same answer on two duplicate questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11258" CreationDate="2018-03-10T03:17:48.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are certainly allowed to copy information from one of your own answers to make another answer post. When questions are marked as duplicates, it can often be helpful to take useful information that came up in the answers to the more recent question and put it in an answer post beneath the older question (if it isn't already on that page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you should check to make sure that the wording of the answer makes sense for the older question, and that the answer is a good fit. As with other answers, people may vote it up if they think it is useful, or downvote it if they think it isn't useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T03:17:48.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11258" CreationDate="2018-03-10T07:49:11.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply copying an answer from one question to another would imply that the questions are also exactly the same, which is rarely the case. The system does in fact raise automatic flags where it detects possible duplication/plagiarism.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that duplicate questions are not necessarily a bad thing as they are linked and that link is shown &lt;em&gt;at both ends&lt;/em&gt; in the &quot;Linked questions&quot; panel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering a question bumps it to the top of the &quot;Active&quot; list which can increase traffic and the number of views your answer gets. That may mean that users also raise flags when they realise there are two substantially similar answers. It will probably mean that your second answer will get a higher level of scrutiny (as a late answer) which means that if it is not exactly right for that question and does not add anything useful to answers already present it will get downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questions really are exactly the same and your answer is a good answer to both which would fit in both places unaltered, it suggests that the questions should in fact be merged, which munges all the answers into one place anyway. If this is the case you should raise a flag on the question so that moderators can take a look and carry out that action if they concur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Of course, copying your own answer isn't plagiarism, but the system doesn't check who wrote the answers. Duplicating an answer is generally Not A Good Thing To Do. There is obviously a threshold for how much common material raises the automatic flag, but I'm not sure that it's published or how it's calculated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T07:49:11.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11262" CreationDate="2018-03-13T10:14:20.980" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I hover over the up button I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and dear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when I hover over the down button, I see that the question is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;undear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this rather endearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a typo no one has noticed, or are my eyes making things undear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T13:56:28.823" Title="It is useful and dear?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11261" CreationDate="2018-03-13T13:56:28.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's definitely &quot;clear&quot; and not &quot;dear&quot;. It would probably help to include details of your hardware and screen settings. If you are using a display which is not set at its native resolution you may experience this phenomenon, especially if your display is anti-aliased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The screenshot below is actual-size, which means that it may look exactly the same as what you see. However, the image is a link to a full-size version, which should allow you see the word &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt;ly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hcqfa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hcqfa.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of up-arrow&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T13:56:28.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11264" CreationDate="2018-03-14T17:47:52.413" Score="6" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please let me know if this question belongs here to the meta page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do many people not refer to &lt;em&gt;reliable dictionaries&lt;/em&gt; of standard English language? Of course I know you should cite the reference properly as mentioned to a previous question but that is not what I mean. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5162/37788&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s up with all these dictionary reference edits?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regularly see strange reference citations which are definitely not part of what was mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/37788&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt; with platforms that people here on ELU.SE suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my humble opinion there should be some common agreement, e.g. if a definition of &quot;cameltarian&quot; in NY Times is a valuable resource. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/345465&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/345465&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what do people think about citing newspapers et al?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37788" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T23:00:40.833" Title="English language citations" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11263" CreationDate="2018-03-14T18:11:20.150" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OneLook Dictionary Search indicates that none of the commonly cited online dictionaries contains the word &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onelook.com/?w=cameltarian&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cameltarian&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, so citing something like Oxford Dictionaries or Merriam-Webster was not an option in that case. I'd say that some kind of citation is almost always better than nothing, unless the source is extremely low quality. Even an Urban Dictionary citation, or citations from miscellaneous blog posts or forum comments, may provide some support to a post in that they show that the suggested word was not just invented by the person who posted the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a separate issue that I think you have indirectly brought up. For any kind of word-request question, answers are expected to suggest words that are appropriate and useful. Even if the information in an answer is accurate, if it suggests a word that you think is inappropriate, you can downvote it to indicate that you don't think the answer is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, just because an answer shows that the word &quot;cameltarian&quot; exists, in the sense that it has been used by English speakers (something that I think that citation does an adequate job of demonstrating) doesn't mean that &quot;cameltarian&quot; is a good answer to the question &quot;Is there a word in-between &quot;vegetarian&quot; and &quot;non-vegetarian&quot;? Is there a different type of style of eating? I want to know the word in English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer with relevant citations generally meets the bar for &quot;should not be deleted&quot;. That doesn't automatically make it a good answer. That's for the voters of this site to judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T18:11:20.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11263" CreationDate="2018-03-14T21:43:12.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's preferable in most cases to cite a reputable dictionary over other sources, I don't think it should be a requirement. It's up to the reader to decide if the answer and, by extension, its sources are any good or not. (As sumelic says, even a perfectly good dictionary doesn't stop wrong answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that even the most reputable dictionaries &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170715053719/http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/08/52-words-really-not-included-dictionaries/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;are not exhaustive&lt;/a&gt;. I've run into several occasions where regular dictionaries don't have a word (or if they have the word, they may not cite that particular use of the word). Other times, there is no definition &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt;, and you have to rely on citing examples of the word being used. I call this the &quot;descriptivist approach&quot; (to see some examples of this in action, see my answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/413116/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/415814/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/415814/191178&quot;&gt;the latter example&lt;/a&gt;, I cited Amazon, eBay, and a random auction site. There's nothing special about any of these sites except for the fact that they help illustrate different phrases in action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if a dictionary defines a word, you might also decide to use a different source (e.g. a blog post or a niche dictionary) if it gives a better definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T23:00:40.833" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T23:00:40.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-15T14:38:40.063" Score="7" ViewCount="1719" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working on natural language processing/understanding for a great many years and sometimes get hung up on trying to figure what superordinate a word belongs to, such as a &lt;em&gt;hammer&lt;/em&gt; being a type of &lt;em&gt;tool&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more difficult example is &lt;em&gt;shade&lt;/em&gt;, such as the shade of a tree. I never have figured out a good superordinate for it. I'm not asking for an answer to this one example. I need a good list as a reference source for many such problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling for lists of superordinate, hyponyms, and word categories has turned up nothing. Looking up words in dictionaries and Wikipedia can sometimes help, but often does not, and is a lot more time-consuming than using a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38896" OwnerDisplayName="user1828" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T09:55:24.327" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T14:06:42.890" Title="Where are lists of hyponyms and their superordinates?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11270" CreationDate="2018-03-16T03:52:14.223" Score="6" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this question after receiving feedback from Edwin on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/435699/meaning-and-etymology-of-the-rhodesia-solution&quot;&gt;a question I asked (and answered) on ELU&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He (re)cites all kinds of rules, which I believe do exist. I have googled some of his exact wordings, got some results, but those pages were deleted, so I could not read them. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help centre&lt;/a&gt; does not include those rules (at least not how they were recited by Edwin), they seemed much looser, so I thought my posts would be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules he (re)cited (I copied them from his comments, they are partial quotations):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.... Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature [ / poetry / song lyrics / TV programmes ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderator @MetaEd has said &quot;Interpretation requests (such as criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature, legal interpretations, and divining the author’s intent – including song lyrics and poetry) are out of scope and may be removed.&quot; Obviously, interpretation of standard usages (semantic and syntactic) is not intended here, but niche ones (like &quot;What is a 'parrot sketch'?&quot;) are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No reference is given in the actual question. And the expression, with a fraction of 4400 Google hits for &quot;Rhodesia Solution&quot; being relevant (and many of those just repeats), is better classed as a nonce usage; it is certainly not an idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know how you think about this case and &lt;strong&gt;consider updating the rules which are publicly available, that way new users know what is expected of them, and more experienced users don't have to waste their time reciting rules over and over again.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the pages I found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=off&amp;amp;ei=1j6rWqTUEYmFgAbMkbaQDA&amp;amp;q=Interpretation+requests+such+as+criticism%2C+discussion%2C+and+analysis+of+English+literature%2C+legal+interpretations%2C+and+divining+the+author%E2%80%99s+intent+%E2%80%93+including+song+lyrics+and+poetry&amp;amp;oq=Interpretation+requests+such+as+criticism%2C+discussion%2C+and+analysis+of+English+literature%2C+legal+interpretations%2C+and+divining+the+author%E2%80%99s+intent+%E2%80%93+including+song+lyrics+and+poetry&amp;amp;gs_l=psy-ab.3...20699.20699.0.23619.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0....0.30INby5k9rU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;, but cannot read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/433965&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/433965/monty-python-off-license-poetry-meaning&quot;&gt;second&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T13:50:42.563" Title="Rules governing when a post is off-topic, try making all of them public" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11269" CreationDate="2018-03-16T05:04:28.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the &quot;rules&quot; about poetry and such are here on meta somewhere (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3173/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/997/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but I don't think they're particularly relevant for your question on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether you're self-answering or not, &lt;strong&gt;the question needs to stand on its own&lt;/strong&gt;. (That is, if the answer wasn't there, the question should still be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/235179/323179&quot;&gt;clear, on-topic, and not too broad&lt;/a&gt;.) Right now, I don't think your question is clear—it just doesn't make much sense the way it is written. You mention one use of the phrase and then ask about another without saying where you encountered that other sense. The structure is confusing and the fact that you don't give any examples is confusing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion (if I understood your question correctly) is to rewrite your question along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While reading/watching/etc. &amp;lt;Name of Source&gt;, I encountered the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;Quote that illustrates usage.&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that it means something like &amp;lt;meaning&gt; because &amp;lt;reasons&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I searched, I did find &amp;lt;other usage&gt;, but this is not the same expression because &amp;lt;reasons&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;Question(s) here&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be ideal to have two or more examples of the expression being used like this in the question. (The more diverse your sources are, the better.) I think that the poetry complaint is because people think it's an expression used poetically in a single work. Right now you have zero examples in your question, but you might be able to use one of the links in your answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the Washington Post article is enough research for the question, if you present it the right way.  In my rewrite, this would be the &quot;other usage&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would remove (or at a minimum rewrite) &quot;In addition to that, what is the relevance of this idiom in today's world?&quot; because this sounds too much like a discussion question. (What you wrote in response to this in the answer is fine though.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, the &quot;two&quot; pages you found on Google both point to the same deleted question. It's not really relevant in any way here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U41a5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an image of the question and its comments to satisfy your curiosity (there are two downvoted answers in addition to what's shown there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T05:04:28.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11272" CreationDate="2018-03-16T11:56:32.597" Score="6" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems I have caused offence in my choice of answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/435761/is-there-a-way-to-describe-the-situation-of-things-being-at-60-to-one-another&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I broken any rules ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T14:12:32.603" Title="Is there a rule that the first correct answer must be accepted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11271" CreationDate="2018-03-16T12:12:08.053" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5234/how-does-accepting-an-answer-work&quot;&gt;faq on Meta&lt;/a&gt; states &quot;The bottom line is that you should accept the answer that you found to be the most helpful to you, personally.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange isn't a quiz show, so it doesn't matter which answer is &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; (as long as the later one isn't plagiarizing the earlier ones), it matters which answer is the &lt;em&gt;most helpful&lt;/em&gt; to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T12:12:08.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11271" CreationDate="2018-03-16T12:40:09.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before comments are deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that important, but my answer was the first to suggest &amp;quot;sextile&amp;quot; – user2922582&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...anyway, a quick search would have given you the same result. Please do your own research before asking. here. Nothing personal! – user2922582&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My choice was based on what I saw when I used the appropriate links and my choice was based on my own aesthetic appreciation and my own personal opinion. A pleasant day to all contributors. – Nigel J&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[emphasis in bold, mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@user2922582 &lt;strong&gt;there's one minute difference between your post and that of Perry's&lt;/strong&gt;, possibly less. IOW you posted the same(ish) answer. What the OP could have done was to wait a couple of hours before accepting an answer to see if other solutions turned up (doubtful in this scenario but you never know) – Mari-Lou A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no rule saying that an OP has to accept the first correct answer posted, but it's good policy to wait a while before doing so, to allow users in different time zones to post their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T12:40:09.580" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11269" CreationDate="2018-03-16T13:37:03.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;almost entirely, there are no rules, just varying strengths of suggestions/guidelines, and context matters. For example, there is a close reason for 'no interpretation of jokes or song lyrics'. But that doesn't mean any question mentioning a joke or poetry is off-topic. Asking 'Is 'orchid' a metaphor for sex or just fleeting beauty?' for a poem is to opinion based or broad, but asking 'The author rhymes 'orange' with 'osage', do they really rhyme?' is very on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;over the years of the site, we have attempted to enshrine all the nuances of the boundary of off vs on topic in the site FAQs. Often it only goes so far as a meta question, and even then there may have been no clear decision, and even many acceptable instances go over the line in both directions. When in doubt, meta is a good place to ask explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Google search seems only to search the main site. To search the meta site, you may have to use the (somewhat inferior) search box on the page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;sometimes it takes experience on a site to learn its rules (or guidelines or suggestions or vague behavioral culture. It is not a particularly satisfying answer but sometimes it just takes time to get used to things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T13:37:03.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11268" CreationDate="2018-03-16T14:06:42.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; is the state of the art ontology (to be described) for basic vocabulary of English. (there are many ontologies out there for technical vocabularies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ontology is a vocabulary along with relations among the terms that support the definitions. One of the most important relations is 'subset' or 'is-a' relation which gives both hypernyms and hyponyms (since the set of dogs is a subset of the set of mammals, the word 'mammal' is a hypernym of the word 'dog', and 'dog' is a hyponym of 'mammal'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this is a tree-like (or really partial order) relation, and there are many relations with other properties, it does not form a simple list. But the WordNet vocab and relations are downloadable as a set of data that you can manipulate by programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as with much of electronic data, it is black and white, and may not encode things exactly as you see them. It may well have a good hypernym for shade, or it may have one that doesn't really suit your intuition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is a difference between the concepts in a relation, and the words or terms used to express them. I.e. there may be a good concept that captures ideas of the dogs, the cats, and the bears, without including the rest of the carnivores, but there is no good existing single &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; for that single coherent concept. In other words, for a possibly very good and very common concept, there just may not be a single word for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/946/how-trustworthy-is-wordnet&quot;&gt;Is WordNet trustworthy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T14:06:42.890" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11271" CreationDate="2018-03-16T14:12:32.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only rules here are the ones enforced by software. I suppose one &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be allowed to vote more than once on a given item, but there is a rule, enforced by the software of SE that you can vote at most once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything allowable is not rule bound. There may well be a strong suggestion or guideline (Like those in close reasons or general behavioral common courtesy), but those are not hard and fast rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem weird to accept a later answer that is almost identical (that's just common courtesy), but maybe the wording of the later one had better references, or made more sense, or didn't have readability problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T14:12:32.603" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11269" CreationDate="2018-03-17T13:50:42.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hear, hear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the deliberately democratic philosophy behind Stack Exchange, a lot of the 'rules' are decided by community consensus. This is done in Meta. Even your &lt;em&gt;post all rules in one place&lt;/em&gt; might become a 'rule' itself one day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help pages&lt;/a&gt; summarise the most important 'rules' - note particularly the two links under &quot;Asking&quot;. You could (technically) search Meta, but it takes some familiarity to know what to look for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd support mods collating the rules within a FAQ Meta 'question', with each rule expressed as an 'answer'. Each rule can then have its own rationale, examples and 'anti'-examples expressed in appropriate detail. There's no need for the list to be immediately complete - they can be added to over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T13:50:42.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11279" CreationDate="2018-03-17T16:51:45.143" Score="0" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/279650&quot;&gt;I added an informative text to a tag which had no excerpt. (click to see the case, should be publicly available) &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this seems a reasonable excerpt which is not &lt;em&gt;superfluous&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;harming readability&lt;/em&gt;. I would even say it informs users of the usage of the tag. The tag in question is the '20th century language' tag, so I added in the excerpt  '1900-1999' and some added text to make it readable. In response, I seem to have received a rather standard answer, which does not tell me why this would be a bad proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be very informative to properly tell users why a proposed edit is bad, otherwise they will make the same mistake (if it actually was one) again. Please provide me (and others) with this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T07:19:00.163" Title="First proposal tag wiki rejected" Tags="|support|questions|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11278" CreationDate="2018-03-17T17:04:46.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Twentieth Century ran from 1901–2000, not from 1900–1999. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T17:04:46.067" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11288" CreationDate="2018-03-17T17:41:10.190" Score="-6" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;This discussion arose (well, for me at least) when I was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11279/71848&quot;&gt;confronted with&lt;/a&gt; one of the definitions used for defining centuries. This definition is relevant for defining community tags on specific centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The two different viewpoints&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two viewpoints are very concisely set out on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century#Start_and_end_in_the_Gregorian_calendar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will briefly point out the differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;View point 1: Strict usage, the first century started in 1 AD, therefore every century starts in '01 and ends at the end of '00&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;View point 2: Usage as defined in ISO 8601, which defines centuries as starting in '00 and ending at the end of '99&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking for community opinions on which definition should be followed within the ELU community. An example which would depend on this definition is the excerpt for tags relating to centuries, e.g. the &lt;em&gt;20th-century-language&lt;/em&gt; tag. Should this be stated as &lt;em&gt;1901-2000&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;1900-1999&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My viewpoint&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue to follow the ISO 8601 standard. That way, decades are associated with centuries, so the first decade of this millennium (2000-2009) is entirely in the 21-st century, rather than being split over the 20th and 21st.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to point out that ISO 8601 is not just something programmers use, to that end I am citing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/century&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Living Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, which acknowledges the use of ISO 8601 in practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, centuries run from 01 to 100, meaning that the new century begins on the first day of the year 01 (i.e. 1 January 1901, 1 January 2001, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In practice and in popular perception, however, the new century is held to begin when the significant digits in the date change&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. on 1 January 2000, when 1999 became 2000. Since the 1st century ran from the year 1 to the year 100, the ordinal number (i.e. second, third, fourth, etc.) used to denote the century will always be one digit higher than the corresponding cardinal digit(s). Thus, 1066 is a date in the 11th century, 1542 is a date in the 16th century, and so on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to end with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11277/71848&quot;&gt;a quote from one of the more experienced users&lt;/a&gt;, because I think it is something that should be held in high regard, deciding democratically on one's own consensus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Due to the deliberately democratic philosophy behind Stack Exchange, a lot of the 'rules' are decided by community consensus. This is done in Meta. Even your &lt;em&gt;post all rules in one place&lt;/em&gt; might become a 'rule' itself one day.&amp;quot; -Lawrence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2021-07-14T15:30:48.877" Title="How does the ELU community define a century? When did this century start 2001 or 2000?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2018-03-17T17:41:10.190" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue to follow the ISO 8601 standard. That way, decades are associated with centuries, so the first decade of this millennium (2000-2009) is entirely in the 21-st century, rather than being split over the 20th and 21st.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to point out that ISO 8601 is not just something programmers use, to that end I am citing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/century&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Living Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, which acknowledges the use of ISO 8601 in practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, centuries run from 01 to 100, meaning that the new century begins on the first day of the year 01 (i.e. 1 January 1901, 1 January 2001, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In practice and in popular perception, however, the new century is held to begin when the significant digits in the date change&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. on 1 January 2000, when 1999 became 2000. Since the 1st century ran from the year 1 to the year 100, the ordinal number (i.e. second, third, fourth, etc.) used to denote the century will always be one digit higher than the corresponding cardinal digit(s). Thus, 1066 is a date in the 11th century, 1542 is a date in the 16th century, and so on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is some confusion as to what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:8601:-1:ed-1:v1:en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 8601&lt;/a&gt; says, let me quote paragraph 3.1.2.23:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1.2.23&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;century&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;time scale unit (3.1.1.7) of 100 calendar years (3.1.2.21)duration (3.1.1.8), beginning with a year whose year number is divisible without remainder by 100&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EXAMPLE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 19th century covers the years 1800 through 1899.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 1 to entry: Century is also used to refer to an arbitrary duration of 100 years, however century is not used as such in this document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T16:35:43.573" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-17T18:06:29.140" Score="2" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/435748/is-the-ever-pronounced-knee&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; ever pronounced &amp;quot;knee&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, it's illogical, and no dictionary or book that I'm aware of has been cited to prove that the consonant portion of &quot;the&quot; should or would ever be pronounced like &quot;knee&quot; by anyone proficient in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I do not believe that was the OP's intent, either. I believe it truly was a usage question, not nearly as technical and complicated as any linguistics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is a Linguistics SE, where these sorts of spirited and fun debates might take place without the risk of confusing ordinary students of English language. That is if they think it would be appropriate at all, therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it does the OP (or other readers) justice, what has happened to their question. Their question for the most part (with one possible exception), has not been properly answered, or edited. In fact the person running off with it, is the same who edited to fit their agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very likely that it should have been migrated to ELL or to Linguistics (if that's really the case) instead, because it most likely is a duplicate anyway. That would have been much simpler, and probably a little boring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just surprised how far this has gone, to the point where someone like me feels the need to discuss it in Meta (something I really have little experience or desire to do, unless absolutely necessary). But I would feel negligent to just let this matter continue like that, without trying to correct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like watching the Emperor strutting around buck naked, while a crowd of servants bow and praise him for his nonexistent pride. Quite embarrassing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additionally&lt;/strong&gt;: I should point out that the original OP was tagged &lt;strong&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt; only, and had the phonology and phonetics tags subsequently added in edits done by the linguistically gifted user who answered the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mention it now, because although I thought it should have been obvious enough to anyone, apparently it's a relevant detail that was completely ignored or overlooked by everyone but me. I've been told that my edit which was intended to reflect the OP's original intent, was the only &quot;major&quot; change made, among numerous edits. But that hardly seems fair criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the matter is settled already. But I feel a fair decision depends on having all the facts laid out from the beginning. Omission only leads to misinformation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please take into consideration that mine was the &lt;em&gt;seventh&lt;/em&gt; edit on the OP, and my sole focus was to clarify the intended meaning. I missed a few details that had been added by other edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OjuLr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OjuLr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Original OP&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bIOUD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bIOUD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Phonological tags added by Araucaria&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mI81g.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mI81g.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;My attempt to reflect the OP&amp;#39;s original intent&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273295" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T17:38:26.330" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T08:18:45.590" Title="I'm speechless: how could this question by an English learner get misinterpreted as a serious linguistics topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2018-03-17T18:13:04.293" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose a new method which will happily be adopted by all communities. First the problems with the two methods, and then, following, the solution that works around both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems:&#xA;- It is so obvious that a century should change with the digits: 1899 goes with the 1800's and 1900 should obviously then go with the 1900's. But...&#xA;- There is no year 0, causing the first year of the first century to be year 1, and then logically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: The second point was explained to all of us in 6th grade history. And we all got used to it. Or some of us got used to it and other's didn't care. Or no one got used to it, but those grade grubbing little bastards at the front of the class with their glasses and their hand-raising and their 'think-they're-so-smart'ing somehow remembered it past the test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solution: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;CREATE A YEAR ZERO OUT OF ONE BC AND SHIFT EVERYTHING BEFORE THEN BY ONE&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implications of this proposal are profoundly simplifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;we'll be able to use 'century' as you suggest and everyone else will be able to label things logically: 1900 is in the 1900's.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for all those people who would complain, having their birthdays all messed up because of the BC year change, hah, suck, you're all dead. Which is to say no one will complain because no one cares.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're all welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next problem: 1950 is in the &lt;em&gt;20th&lt;/em&gt; century? That's messed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T18:13:04.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2018-03-17T22:22:12.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The twenty-first century started on 1 January 2001. 2000 was the last year of the twentieth century, just as 100 was the last year of the first century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hoo-hah over the major change from 1999 to 2000 was not a celebration of a new century, but rather the change from 19 to 20. The so-called &quot;Millennium bug&quot; was a factor in both the hoo-hah and a popular misconception that it's the first two digits which define the boundaries. It's true that ticking over from 1999 to 2000 seems a far greater change than from 2000 to 2001, but it simply means that you have entered the 2000th year; it doesn't mean that you have completed 2000 years or twenty centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISO 8601 is a standard form for data interchange. It doesn't define language. Indeed, it defines an entirely artificial Year Zero and has no specification of centuries anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T12:43:36.550" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T12:43:36.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11282" CreationDate="2018-03-17T23:10:13.373" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the question is currently substantially as asked, and it was your own edit which made a major change (to specify the vowel in &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to the whole word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asked on a site for linguists and those with some expertise, and received a fitting answer. &lt;em&gt;The&lt;/em&gt; can indeed sound rather like &lt;em&gt;knee&lt;/em&gt; in certain circumstances, particularly in the circumstances which the OP provided in a comment — subsequently added to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have assumed that what the author was asking about was not what he actually asked. Araucaria made no substantial changes [that is, the substance of the question was unaltered] and proceeded to answer the question which was asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we can't tell if the OP really did intend to ask the question he did, or the question you believe he did. However, it seems to me that if the OP had actually been asking only about the vowel sound that would have been made clearer in the original question, perhaps by using the word &lt;em&gt;thee.&lt;/em&gt; Even if the OP didn't actually know that as a word in its own right, it's a reasonable phonetic representation of &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; where it precedes a vowel. That he changed the word entirely to &lt;em&gt;knee,&lt;/em&gt; in a sentence where a good approximation of that pronunciation is possible, is telling in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, we do have to make a call on what the question is about. In this case, I'm content that Araucaria has made the right call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T23:10:13.373" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T09:36:45.297" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation requirement to clean up wrong answers is dumb. I agree that under a certain amount your answers should be reviewed, but outright rejecting them is not smart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you argue that following stringent rules opposed to providing an accurate answer to a question is the way to go, you've defeated your own platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288388" OwnerDisplayName="Kenneth Therkildsen" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T10:35:14.870" Title="I don't have questions, I have answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11286" CreationDate="2018-03-18T10:35:14.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that the question you want to answer is protected. Questions are protected occasionally because we get a lot of nonsense answers, especially if the question hits the Hot Network Questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case you want to post an answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76769/why-is-it-called-a-semi-truck-doesn-t-semi-mean-part&quot;&gt;question about &quot;Semi&quot; trucks&lt;/a&gt;. That's great! If you know something others don't, then please share it. &lt;strong&gt;But,&lt;/strong&gt; because that question has fallen foul of untoward attention in the past, we need to make sure that people who post on it are invested in the site: we do that by ensuring that they have at least one other upvoted answer (which gives the required ten rep points).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not OK to edit a post to say it's wrong: that's vandalism and your suggested edits were rightly rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to invest in the site, please create an answer on an unprotected question which can be upvoted. Once that's happened, you will have the required ten rep points to allow you to go back to the first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;protected question&quot; restriction isn't the only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;restriction which new users encounter&lt;/a&gt;, but it is the most obvious one which causes the most issues. Asking a question about it does allow it to be explained, which could also help others in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T10:35:14.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2018-03-18T12:29:36.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of English, one year of resolution for a century is too fine a distinction. With history and English, we're talking about periods that don't correspond neatly to century boundaries. Is an author who started writing in 1890 but didn't get published until 1901 a 20th century author or a 19th century author? You could argue either way, because we're really interested in the environment that influenced their writing, not the precise time that the text was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what good is limiting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/20th-century-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;20th-century-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;20th-century-language&lt;/a&gt; to a particular 100 year range? Was the language in 1899 significantly different from the language in 1901? Is the language in 2001 significantly different from 1999? Old English is considered to roughly go from the 7th century to mid 12th century - would it be more useful to use a century tag corresponding to when my source was written or to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/old-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;old-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;old-english&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/20th-century-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;20th-century-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;20th-century-language&lt;/a&gt; should be ditched and replaced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contemporary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contemporary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;contemporary-english&lt;/a&gt;. The description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/early-modern-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;early-modern-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;early-modern-english&lt;/a&gt; is &amp;quot;late 15th century to the mid to late 17th century&amp;quot;. I don't know if we need to distinguish the 18th and 19th centuries from &amp;quot;contemporary&amp;quot; English, but if we do, I think we should name the time period instead of using century names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-07-14T15:30:48.877" LastActivityDate="2021-07-14T15:30:48.877" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2018-03-18T16:23:53.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130603024618/http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/millennium.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;USNO&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Years of the Gregorian calendar, which is currently in use today, are counted from AD 1. Thus, the 1st century comprised the years AD 1 through AD 100. The second century began with AD 101 and continued through AD 200. By extrapolation we find that the 20th century comprises the years AD 1901-2000. Therefore, the 21st century began with 1 January 2001 and will continue through 31 December 2100. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the sources referenced by Wikipedia. There was no year zero AD. Logically, the first 365 days period in &quot;the year of our Lord&quot; was completed a second after 11:59:59pm, 31/12/0001 so the first 2000 years were completed a second after  11:59:59pm, 31/12/2000. In short, it is not really a &quot;democratic&quot; matter of interpretation or ELU policy: 1/1/2001 was objectively the first day of the 21st century, and that is what we ought to follow here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless this community comes to a consensus decision to follow not that technically correct interpretation of the Gregorian calendar, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;View point 2: Usage as defined in ISO 8601, which defines centuries as starting in '00 and ending at the end of '99&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent suggestion by a member:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since our @1006a has already &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11280/how-does-the-elu-community-define-a-century-when-did-this-century-start-2001-or/11289#comment47677_11280&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt; the clever compromise of saying &quot;the 1900's&quot; &quot;the 2000's&quot; etc to bypass avoidable paradox, we can easily choose to use that terminology here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T18:02:03.570" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T18:02:03.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11291" CreationDate="2018-03-18T15:33:58.217" Score="2" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you hint the best etymology book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to learn new words via their origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288426" OwnerDisplayName="user288426" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T18:27:51.743" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:27:51.743" Title="Best book for vocabulary building through etymology" Tags="|discussion|resources|etymology|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11290" CreationDate="2018-03-18T15:41:22.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norman Lewis: &lt;em&gt;Word Power Made Easy&lt;/em&gt; is one of the best books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827597.Word_Power_Made_Easy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good reads review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288429" OwnerDisplayName="Prafull Kumar" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T18:27:40.777" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:27:40.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11296" CreationDate="2018-03-19T14:14:42.637" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions about commas and many of them are duplicates but some are not so easy to define as duplicates, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/437214/2nd-adjective-phrase-in-a-complex-sentence-comma-rule&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this one&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Then, they seem to mostly be matters of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to state a brief set of rules that indicate when a comma question would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be a matter of opinion so that the ones which are can be clearly voted as such ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T01:06:58.587" Title="When is a comma question not opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11294" CreationDate="2018-03-19T15:01:04.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that every question about he usage of the comma in a particular situation is either fine or can easily be turned into a non-opinion-based one. In each such case, there is a small amount of arguments for or against using a comma (often only for one side) and a good answer can provide them. Like every other question asked in a prescriptivist mindset, we can answer it in a descriptivist way, even without being explicitly asked to do so. You could even go so far and claim that if such questions should be closed as primarily opinion-based, so should everything else on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I can imagine questions on commas that are opinion-based beyond hope like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is using more commas than necessary a sign of character weakness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but those are clearly different from your typical comma question and closing them is hopefully not a matter of debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T15:01:04.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11294" CreationDate="2018-03-19T15:01:38.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking when the “primarily opinion-based” close reason would apply to a question about using commas. The example you link to is not opinion-based. &lt;em&gt;Opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; refers to questions which fail to offer objective answer criteria. Questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is your favorite word?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please write some choice insults I can use to shame my suitemate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;capitalization is stupid. discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the Normans had never invaded England, what would English sound like now?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; is not about having more than one correct answer. Questions which pose objective problems can still have more than one legitimate solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let’s not forget that we do welcome constructive opinion-based questions. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;”, and its companion articles on the Stack Overflow blog, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;” and “&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real Questions Have Answers&lt;/a&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T15:01:38.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-19T19:48:00.243" Score="7" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Problem statement&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following text is shown about voting and suggesting tag-synonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with more than 2500 reputation and a total answer score of 5 or more on the tag, can suggest tag synonyms. Users with a total answer score (total upvotes minus total downvotes) of 5 or more on the tag, can vote for tag synonyms. Suggestions will be automatically approved when they reach a score of 4, and automatically deleted when they reach a score of -2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is fair for tag with many questions (because that probably means there are also many users who can suggest edits and vote on them). For tags with fewer questions (let's say 60 or fewer), the bar is set quite high. Combine that with the fact that almost every user can create new tags, there are quite some tags which could be considered synonymous, but there is nobody to suggest or vote for that to actually happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just two examples, but I'm sure there are more out there: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/german&quot;&gt;german&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/germanic-languages&quot;&gt;germanic-languages&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/oxford-comma&quot;&gt;oxford-comma&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/serial-comma&quot;&gt;serial-comma&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Possible solutions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it would be an idea to change the requirement on suggesting and voting on tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way would be to make the requirement dependent on the number of questions associated with the tag (so more niche tags can be voted on by more non-experts on the tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way would be to allow users with X reputation to suggest synonyms regardless of their score on the tag and users with Y reputation to vote on this (where X is around 10K and Y around 20-30k).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another third idea would be to let users with 10K reputation suggest tags (regardless of their score on the tag) and allow those users to vote on it as well. The voting process would be different, everyone would upvote with their reputation and downvote with MAX(reputation, 15K). A synonym is accepted when the sum of votes exceeds 100K and is rejected when the vote gets below 25K. (the numbers I chose are just to give an indication of the idea)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;This question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is meant to see if this is something the community likes, please post ideas in the answers. This is not a feature-request (yet), because it's unclear if this is something the community wants at all and it's unclear as of yet which solution is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T19:48:00.243" Title="Lower the requirement for voting on tag synonyms" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11294" CreationDate="2018-03-20T01:06:58.587" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote to close most comma questions (and indeed, most punctuation questions, especially ones involving colons and semicolons) as POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ones which specify a formal style guide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ones which ask for corpus statistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T01:06:58.587" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-20T20:07:28.977" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/437161/the-person-or-body-who-vs-the-person-or-body-which&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;...the person or body who...&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;...the person or body which...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, this question does not ask only about whether to refer to companies with &quot;who&quot; or &quot;which&quot;. If the answer to that happens to be &quot;who&quot;, it would resolve the specific example in the question, but the supposed &quot;duplicate&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138110/who-or-which-in-reference-to-companies&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;Who&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;which&amp;#39; in reference to companies&lt;/a&gt;) does not resolve the additional question about &lt;strong&gt;whether to use &quot;who&quot; or &quot;which&quot; after noun phrases of differing animacy that are linked together by a conjunction&lt;/strong&gt; (in this case, &quot;or&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/437161/1&quot;&gt;original form of the question&lt;/a&gt; had a title that made it look like a duplicate, but the text of the question has included the examples with &quot;or&quot; from the beginning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote to reopen the question, or post an answer here if you think it should not be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T09:10:03.870" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T09:10:03.870" Title="&quot;...the person or body who/which...&quot; is not only a question about whether to refer to companies with &quot;who&quot; or &quot;which&quot;" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11290" CreationDate="2018-03-21T09:59:23.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no best book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of this book are available on line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gold, David L. 2009. &lt;em&gt;Studies in Etymology and Etiology (With Emphasis on Germanic, Jewish, Romance, and Slavic Languages)&lt;/em&gt;. Selected and edited, with a foreword, by Félix Rodríguez González and Antonio Lillo Buades. Alicante. Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On reflection, I realize that you need something other than a book on etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have in mind expanding your vocabulary (by learning words coined at any time in the past or now), you need a book that will give you the meanings of prefixes and suffixes that are used to form words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Schleifer's Grow Your Vocabulary By Learning the Roots of English Words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have in mind expanding your vocabulary by learning newly coined words, try this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barnhart Dictionary of New English (at least three volumes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Barnhart Dictionary Companion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284587" LastEditorUserId="284587" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T02:19:40.613" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T02:19:40.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-21T15:56:06.727" Score="11" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose synonymizing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computer&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;25 questions&lt;/em&gt;) with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computing&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;164 questions&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about computers, programming and IT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224606" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T10:19:30.850" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T10:19:30.850" Title="Tag synonym request: [computer] → [computing]" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11304" CreationDate="2018-03-21T18:27:43.240" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I have no idea where to post this, so if it’s off topic or anything, please let me know where to post it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I posted a hand-made riddle on Puzzling yesterday (for which I got 20 upvotes:)). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, today, I come back to see a very increased amount of reputation on &lt;strong&gt;ALL&lt;/strong&gt; of my stack exchange accounts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zsxUW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zsxUW.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in this picture, you can see the (very fast) increased amount of reputation, even though I have only 3 questions (one with -1).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqG9y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqG9y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Interpersonal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; here is the same thing...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it because one of my questions on a different stack exchange site that increase my reputation on all of my accounts, or is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261298" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T13:05:28.020" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T13:05:28.020" Title="Why do I have so much increase in reputation all of a sudden?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11303" CreationDate="2018-03-21T19:04:51.090" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/07/08/cross-site-account-associations/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Association Bonus,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is given to all your associated accounts when you reach 200 points on one of them. You can get to your reputation changes from your user profile page: click on your username in the header bar, and then on &lt;em&gt;Reputation&lt;/em&gt; in the line under the two panels, where &lt;em&gt;Summary&lt;/em&gt; is highlighted on the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2fgcH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2fgcH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot of association bonus&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T19:04:51.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-22T14:03:38.513" Score="-9" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should this new question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/437783/what-do-you-call-a-person-that-wants-to-kill-people-but-doesnt-actually-kill-th&quot;&gt;new OP&lt;/a&gt; be forwarded to authorities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277355" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T03:59:38.443" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T03:59:38.443" Title="Question about homicidal tendencies" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2018-03-22T14:13:11.337" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's asking for a word, not displaying any intention to murder or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP could be a writer, or maybe it's just fun and curiosity behind the question. Either way, it's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T14:13:11.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T15:47:15.150" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in finding a (quite comprehensive) list of words, from which I can extract the dates of first appearance in English. This is so that I can be a /little/ more historically accurate in producing dialogue for a period-piece bit of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I can easily look up etymologies and English-first-use in various dictionaries, but I need to know the words in the first place, and it becomes a bit tedious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can find a trustworthy digital-form dictionary, then I can write a program to simply order the words in order of their first appearance in English, and use that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288430" OwnerDisplayName="crispr" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T00:43:51.970" Title="List of words with the dates they first appear in English?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11307" CreationDate="2018-03-21T09:52:57.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lexicographers are not omniscient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries and other research publications provide not dates of first use or dates of earliest use but dates of earliest-known use, which may change if research uncovers even earlier uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This publication is available free of charge online:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gold, David L. 2005. &quot;An Aspect of  Lexicography  Still Not Fully  Professionalized: The Search  for  Antedatings  and  Postdatings  (With  Examples  Mostly  from  English and Some from Other Languages).&quot; &lt;em&gt;Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses&lt;/em&gt;. No. 18. Pp. 25-69.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284587" OwnerDisplayName="David L. Gold" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T09:52:57.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11307" CreationDate="2018-03-23T00:43:51.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to want a(n electronic) list of words with date of first appearance, in order to write a script that will tell you which words are in or out of style for a given date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I don't think there is a good list out there. One could presumably extract such information from the OED, which has the most reliable 'first appearance' dates on each entry. But OED doesn't have a publicly accessible set of its data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think what you're asking for is too simplified for what you want. words come in and out of fashion over time. Even if there is an inception date, you'd want the expiration date too, but that just belies the whole operation. Words don't all of a sudden one day pop into and then later out of existence. They gradually become popular and also lose popularity slowly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; does a great job of showing popularity over time of given words. They give graphs of frequency of use over time. That is the kind of information you want. You have to use it word by word, but it is something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've seen some automatic analyses of TV scripts (eg Downton Abbey) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.prochronism.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;looking for anachronisms&lt;/a&gt;, maybe there's something there you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T00:43:51.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11311" CreationDate="2018-03-23T16:15:19.130" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be handy to have quick links to other sites when you want to suggest that the question might be better handled there. I know a lot of the abbreviations from the hot questions ribbon, but digging out a link when I need one is a pain. Please use the same abbreviations used in the ribbon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By quick links, I mean just using the square brackets to trigger the link without having to use parentheses and the address. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T03:21:12.827" Title="Can we get a set of quick links to other SE sites that work like [tour]?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11310" CreationDate="2018-03-23T19:29:00.803" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the feature you want already exists, at least for comments (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/290413/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;'s a feature request to bring this syntax to posts too). According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000/323179&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[so]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[su]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[sf]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[metase]&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;[meta.se]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[a51]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[se]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;ndash; link to the given site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/&quot;&gt;Server Fault&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange portal&lt;/a&gt;). Link text is the site name.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[something.se]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;ndash; link to something.stackexchange.com, if that site exists. Link text is the site name. Use &lt;code&gt;[ubuntu.se]&lt;/code&gt; for Ask Ubuntu, and &lt;code&gt;[mathoverflow.se]&lt;/code&gt; for Math Overflow.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To link to a site-specific Meta site, use: &lt;code&gt;[sitename.meta.se]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[meta.sitename.se]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the HNQ site ballon letters would be problematic for several reasons: most graduated sites don't have letters in their icons (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Arqade&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;), some sites have the same letter(s) used (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://health.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Health&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt;), and the icons don't always use alphanumeric characters (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Hinduism&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chess.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chess&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't work for you, you can try &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/6650&quot;&gt;this userscript&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T03:21:12.827" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T03:21:12.827" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-25T12:24:34.843" Score="9" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, when copying and pasting IPA script from sources such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.typeit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ipa.typeit.org&lt;/a&gt; , the symbol for a voiced velar plosive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1tqjF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1tqjF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... gets transmogrified into the following symbol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7hFXQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7hFXQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that different types of symbol, for example &amp;lt; a, ɑ, æ &amp;gt; refer very specifically to different sounds within the IPA system. Recently, phoneticians have started being picky about the use of so-called &amp;quot;goggles-g&amp;quot; (because it looks a bit like a pair of goggles) when what is really intended is the symbol for the voiced velar plosive, which has no closed loop at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;goggles&amp;quot;-g, quite simply does not exist within the IPA set of symbols, but could get pressed into service in the future for the representation of a different type of sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way that we can get the voiced velar plosive symbol to remain in its correct form in posts on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T15:33:03.793" Title="Goggles 'g' . IPA script" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11312" CreationDate="2018-03-25T15:33:03.793" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unicode confusables FTW: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin small letter g: &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin small letter script g: &lt;strong&gt;ɡ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former is regular &quot;g&quot;, which can be either single story or double story depending on font (right now it is double story, hopefully this won't &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/307865/323179&quot;&gt;ch-ch-ch-change&lt;/a&gt;). The latter is a different Unicode character which will always be single story (or it won't display at all, without the proper fonts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=G&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is a list of different Unicode G's. These particular G's are also mentioned on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_stop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T15:33:03.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11314" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-27T02:22:00.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T02:22:00.013" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T02:22:00.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11315" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-27T02:22:00.013" Score="0" Body="Questions about Google's NGram corpus visualiser" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T09:11:47.213" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T09:11:47.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T23:42:42.070" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/438913/term-for-describing-what-you-like-using-particular-adjectives&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; with very specific examples of people describing what they like using redundant adjectives (specifically things like &lt;em&gt;&quot;I like well-written books&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;I like tasty food&quot;&lt;/em&gt;). I'm looking for a term to describe that type of statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184857/is-there-a-word-for-a-comment-which-makes-no-sense-or-adds-nothing-to-the-curren&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about comments in a discussion which add nothing to said discussion. That question is different from my question (mine is a lot more specific, and I'm looking for a more fitting term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate was marked by a single user, without even adding a comment indicating how I would find an answer to my question in the alleged duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear from other users if they think my question is indeed a duplicate or if the decision to mark it as such was erroneous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T23:42:42.070" Title="Question marked duplicate when it isn't (in my opinion)" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11318" CreationDate="2018-03-29T03:23:36.223" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;After visiting a website earlier today and then visiting MW's online dictionary, I found a sample sentence in the MW definition that had a strikingly similar context to results in my earlier search. This is either a weird coincidence, or MW is foisting customized sample sentences on me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: Earlier today, I searched an uncommon collocation &lt;em&gt;negative imprimatur&lt;/em&gt; and landed on this article titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105850683&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diversity 101: What Not to Say to White Colleagues&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. The article is a discussion of race and language in the workplace. I copied the relevant snippet to an answer, got a couple drive-by downvotes, and deleted the answer. I can guess why the downvotes happened. That isn't the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a minute ago, I looked up &lt;em&gt;befuddled&lt;/em&gt; in MW and got the following -  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;: utterly confused or puzzled : deeply perplexed&#xA;  … somebody may be so befuddled and self-destructive as to miss the point entirely. —Anne B. Fisher&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  … &lt;strong&gt;I also believe whites are as befuddled about race as we are … —Nathan McCall&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this reappearance of racial context in MW's last sample sentence is either a really weird coincidence, or MW is feeding me quotes based on what I looked at or reposted. Can someone confirm that everybody gets the same quotes when they look up &lt;em&gt;befuddled&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T14:54:44.167" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T14:54:44.167" Title="Strange coincidence in dictionary sample sentences - or not?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11317" CreationDate="2018-03-29T04:02:19.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the same page, the one that has that quote, both in regular browsing and in incognito, so I don't think MW is targeting you. It's also the same page shown in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mphEBibGPT8J:https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/befuddled+&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google cache&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to just be a static page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like it's even the same quote as NPR has. The only connection between the two that I see is race, which continues to be an important topic (or at least it is in the US).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't see what the benefit would be. Or at least I don't see the benefit being worth the cost. It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pixability.com/video-advertising-101-cookie-targeting/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google and Facebook&lt;/a&gt; that you need to worry about.  Both of these giants serve advertising on &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704373?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; different &lt;a href=&quot;https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/facebook-starts-selling-offsite-ads-targeting-non-users-too/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;websites&lt;/a&gt;, using a variety of techniques to target ads to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T04:02:19.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-29T00:29:51.683" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently I use www.etymonline.com but this reference does not show details. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/pro-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prefix pro-&lt;/a&gt; in the meaning of &quot;in place of&quot; comes from Latin prō- (and not pro-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213063" OwnerDisplayName="tuxestan" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T23:45:07.257" Title="free online etymological dictionary with good coverage of details" Tags="|discussion|etymology|reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-04-01T07:42:30.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11323" CreationDate="2018-03-30T10:35:55.437" Score="8" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while after I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/438575/what-do-native-english-speakers-call-chips-fries-that-are-no-longer-crispy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; a comment was posted to the effect that the question had already been asked and answered on the &lt;em&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/em&gt; site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it my responsibility to check ELL for duplicates before posting an answer on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T13:08:01.703" Title="Is it the ELU answerer's responsibility to first check for duplicate questions on the English Language Learners site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11322" CreationDate="2018-03-30T13:08:01.703" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you have no responsibility to check if a question was answered on another site before answering on a site you're a member of. If an on-topic question is asked on EL&amp;amp;U, the person that asked it should get an EL&amp;amp;U answer, not an ELL answer (or a Linguistics or Language Learning answer for that matter). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took that comment to mean &quot;Hey, here is a link to a question on another site that might be helpful to you.&quot; Not &quot;Whoever answered this question should have checked ELL first.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T13:08:01.703" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11325" CreationDate="2018-04-01T20:00:13.350" Score="6" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way for site participants to disable the &quot;Can I help?&quot; duck icon from the bottom right-hand corner of the screen on EL&amp;amp;U pages? Making the icon available as an option and giving users the ability toggle it off until they want to toggle it back on again would be fine with me, but I would rather not have it setting up shop as a permanent, inescapable resident on my screen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we could make removing it a privilege accorded to site participants who have reached, say, 1,000 rep points and so are not likely to be in dire or constant need of anatidaean assistance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T22:26:07.917" Title="Quacky, the endlessly solicitous bathtub duck—more annoying than Clippy the animated paper clip?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11324" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:06:54.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The option to say goodbye to the duck is on the last screen, so you do have to make use of it in order to get there. Click &quot;I hate this duck&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HoUEL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HoUEL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of option&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April 1 in Stack Exchange lasts from when some part of the world starts April 1 (UTC+14, or 10am on 31 March UTC) until the last part of the world starts April 2 (UTC-12, or noon 2 April UTC), so you will have the opportunity to make use of it (or send it away) for a few hours yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T21:06:54.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:22:07.160" Score="31" ViewCount="1165" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a large number of Meta.ELU questions about answers in comments, but none which definitively settles community opinion, mainly because they are rather old now, but also because they don't canvass votes on all possibilities (and thus generally only gain answer/opinion votes from users who are particularly exercised).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, one user is systematically flagging answers in comments despite there being no clear consensus. As these are custom flags, they fall to moderators to deal with and there are currently over 60 flags outstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no clear consensus, it would be better to use the &lt;strong&gt;standard&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;No longer required&quot; flag, because if other users think the same way then the comment will be deleted by the system (once the minimum number of flags has been reached).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a clear consensus reached in Meta.ELU, moderators may well simply decline these custom flags as there is no reason for moderator action. I'd like to present the opportunity for even the un-exercised to express that opinion by voting for the status quo if that's OK with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: what should the site's attitude be to answers in comments? Answers &lt;s&gt;on a postcard&lt;/s&gt; in the answer box, please. I've come up with a few options which you can vote on; feel free to add more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The options are not necessarily mutually exclusive, so you can vote up more than one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T21:30:56.870" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T13:29:31.200" Title="Answers in comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:22:07.160" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 1. We allow answers to remain in comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the de-facto status quo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is likely to happen for old comments anyway, unless standard flags are used so the community can clear up comments-as-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T21:29:35.963" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T21:29:35.963" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:23:36.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 2: Answers which appear in comments should be &quot;converted&quot; to answers, either by being a CW post or encouraging the commenter to make an answer of their comment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we encourage the commenter to make an answer, there would need to be a time limit for that to happen, after which it's fair game for someone else to make an answer of it. And if the comment is actually a good answer, there's really no reason why it should be a CW answer, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T21:23:36.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:26:45.963" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 3: Answers may be made in comments where the question is off-topic but we still wish to help the asker.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be standard practice; we try to be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T21:26:45.963" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:28:26.880" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 4: No answers should appear in comments AT ALL and they should ALL be deleted with extreme prejudice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most draconian policy. If this ends up as the winner then it will absolutely license the community to use the &quot;No longer required&quot; flag and self-police answers-in-comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T21:28:26.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-02T05:08:47.850" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 6: Partial answers may appear in comments and may be used by anyone who wishes to post a complete answer, with the understanding that mods may still delete the comments at a whim, without notice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This represents the least overhead in terms of 'extra rules everyone must know' because it pretty much stays true to the way Stack Exchange has been set up. The fewer 'special cases' to remember, the easier to follow the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commenters&lt;/strong&gt; may contribute as comments anything less than whatever they deem to be a full answer (see below for more on this).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The community&lt;/strong&gt; may use anything from comments in their own answers or wikis, preferably with attribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everyone&lt;/strong&gt; may 'vote' on comment deletion via the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;no longer needed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; flag (to ease the load on moderators, don't use a custom flag for this) - this is the comment section's equivalent of a down/close vote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators&lt;/strong&gt; are free to do as they wish regarding comments. There is no obligation to remove comments or to preserve them. They can push comments to chat, delete them, create wikis, create answers, or leave them alone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permitting partial answers in comments straddles the following help page &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, going beyond the first but stopping short of the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(DO) Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(DON'T) Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It upholds the primary purpose of comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are temporary &amp;quot;Post-It&amp;quot; notes left on a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This option remains true to the intended nature of comments, promotes a friendly EL&amp;amp;U culture and strikes a good balance between the desire to be helpful and the desire to maintain a good database, with answers held to a high standard. As a bonus, encouraging the community to participate in comment moderation frees diamond mods to handle less routine matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T13:29:31.200" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T13:29:31.200" CommentCount="42" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-02T05:53:06.530" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed as dupe points to closed as too broad.  How is that helpful to anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My knee-jerk reaction is to vote to reopen the more recent one.  Any better ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/439523/112436&quot;&gt;Not a jack of all trades! i stg mark my question as a duplicate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T09:25:30.207" Title="Closed as dupe points to closed as too broad" Tags="|discussion|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11333" CreationDate="2018-04-02T09:25:30.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second question was closed as a duplicate of another question. This is correct: it was a duplicate. That the original question is off-topic is actually immaterial; all it means is that the second version is off-topic too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Im looking for a word used to describe a worker who can do multiple types of tasks not necessairly (ik i spelt that wrong) at the same time but a person who can for example if working in a grocery store can do cash, stock, etc. a person who can work in any position in a company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some examples: flexible, versatile, adversed, adaptable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but I'm looking for a specific word i believe starts with a 'd' not sure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;im looking for a word that describes someone who can work any position in a company not a jack of all trades I'm looking for an adjective to describe someone who can work anywhere an employer might ask in a specific field&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;something like a diverse worker, a flexible worker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;please help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view the first question is the better of the two. Both were correctly tagged by the OP as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; but he didn't follow any of the advice in the tag info (even the short version provided in the pop-up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11333/closed-as-dupe-points-to-closed-as-too-broad#comment47899_11333&quot;&gt;Sumelic&lt;/a&gt; is right that repeat questions by the same OP are generally linked together, usually by closing the second as a duplicate of the first. It is an indication that it's the original question which needs to be dealt with. There might be exceptions, where the second version is markedly better than the first — but in that case it's unlikely to be a duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, since we have a custom close reason for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions, it might have been better to use that. However, the question would still have ended up closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than vote to reopen the more recent one, concentrate on the &lt;strong&gt;better question&lt;/strong&gt; (which might be the earlier version, as in this case). But it needs to be made on-topic, following the tag guidance at least. Once the question is of a standard which is not eminently closable, vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T09:25:30.207" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-02T18:23:06.740" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope it will be helpful if I list the main problems with comment answers. Any proposed solution can be evaluated against them to see how it holds up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone has helpfully numbered these problems for easy reference. The numbering is just for reference and does not imply an order of importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment answers cannot be community edited or peer reviewed.&lt;/strong&gt; They cannot be improved, they cannot be accepted. They can be upvoted, but that does not rank them, and they cannot be downvoted. Without this feedback, askers frequently are satisfied by the first comment answer they receive, and abandon the question, not that knowing the answer they got is actually controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, &lt;strong&gt;comment answers frequently lack substantiation or sourcing&lt;/strong&gt;, that is, they are generally written to a lower standard of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despite the above, &lt;strong&gt;comment answers get an undeserved privileged position on the page above even the best answers.&lt;/strong&gt; This subverts the peer review process – it places unreviewed comment answers above the highest reviewed answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment answers discourage actual answers.&lt;/strong&gt; I have seen numerous comments by people who refuse to repost comments as answers because it would feel too much like rep farming or plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no simple mechanism for converting comments to answers.&lt;/strong&gt; This makes work for reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions with comment answers clog the Unanswered queue.&lt;/strong&gt; Accepting an answer is how that queue gets cleared, and as I pointed out many askers just take away the first comment answer they get and abandon the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The system presents new questions to users who have previously answered similar questions, based on their past answers.&lt;/strong&gt; This feature is subverted when &lt;em&gt;the users aren't posting actual answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, &lt;strong&gt;comment answers are a frequent practice of some high-rep users, despite repeated calls to end the practice by SE employees and community managers&lt;/strong&gt;, which creates an impression that the regulars in our community flaunt the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T19:47:42.187" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T19:47:42.187" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11324" CreationDate="2018-04-03T22:26:07.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Bathtub Duck is &lt;strong&gt;more dangerous&lt;/strong&gt; than the Paper Clip!  Sure, if you are a klutz, drunk, or a small child you can injure yourself with the paper clip particularly if you fool with it around your eye, but bacterial horrors abound in the Bathtub Duck.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://gizmodo.com/scientists-say-your-rubber-bath-ducky-is-probably-gross-1824166700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scientists conclude your rubber bath ducky is probably gross as hell&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s the conclusion of a recent study by a research team from the&#xA;  Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, ETH Zurich,&#xA;  and the University of Illinois published this week in the journal&#xA;  N.P.J. Biofilms and Microbiomes, per the New York Times. The&#xA;  researchers wrote they collected “19 real bath toys (e.g., rubber&#xA;  ducks) from five different Swiss households” and then compared them to&#xA;  a control group, eventually concluding that the real bath toys had up&#xA;  to 75 million bacterial cells per square centimeter of interior&#xA;  surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the Times, Furtwangen University in Germany&#xA;  microbiologist Markus Egert told them, “That’s the same density of&#xA;  bacteria you can find in human stool samples. There are probably no&#xA;  other places on earth with such high bacterial densities.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toilet seats are pristine in comparison.  Read the entire article if you want to be grossed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean for ELU?  Damned if I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T22:26:07.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-04T22:36:24.147" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted Andrew Leach's &quot;Option 3&quot; answer, but I wanted to go into more detail about the comment-deletion policy that I think makes the most sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a difference between the &quot;temporary Post-It&quot; ideal of what comments on Stack Exchange sites should be and how they actually function in practice, and I don't see as much value in trying to stick to the ideal as I see in allowing certain unofficial uses of comments that seem useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that it's not necessarily a good idea for the moderators to take action just because something on the site isn't being used the way it theoretically should be. Theoretically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/180263/306255&quot;&gt;question closure is supposed to be a temporary state&lt;/a&gt;  [except for duplicate questions]--but that doesn't mean that moderators should be expected to delete or reopen at a whim any old closed question that is flagged by a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely clear about what counts as &quot;answering in the comments&quot;, and for this reason, I'm not in favor of the more absolute policies against this practice.  Sometimes, people will posts links (either to other SE posts or to external resources) and a bit of explanation of why the link is relevant in a comment: I think these can be useful, and therefore should not be deleted, but don't necessarily meet the criteria for a full answer (or sometimes, if the external resource is a dictionary, the question may be off-topic, and in that case making an answer post makes it harder for the question to be closed and eventually deleted). I have posted comments like this myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think comments like this that contain a link along with some explanation of why the link is relevant are usually valuable and I would not be in favor of moderators deleting them as a general policy. To give an example, here are two comments that were posted by Edwin Ashworth beneath a question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/439476/in-terms-of-single-or-plural-noun-how-to-tell&quot;&gt;In terms of &amp;lt;single&amp;gt; or &amp;lt;plural&amp;gt; noun? How to tell?&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63965/should-we-use-in-terms-of&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; comes close to being a duplicate. But your example seems really to be about the non-count / count usages of 'structure' (and the like); you could equally well consider 'When talking about structure/structures ...'. – Edwin Ashworth 2018-04-01 14:52:34Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...your question is really about the ways structure/s are used, not about what people use after 'in terms of' (or 'when talking about'). / &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt; gives helpful examples of abstract and concrete usages, going some way to differentiate count and mass usages. – Edwin Ashworth 2018-04-02 10:09:40Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think helpful information would be lost if these comments were deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that it is not very helpful to delete comments beneath closed questions. If a question is closed, then of course the author of the comment has no way to make an actual answer post. The closed status also indicates that the question should either be deleted (in which case the comments will automatically be deleted along with it) or improved and eventually reopened (and the comment might contain information that could help with efforts to improve the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where an open question has unsourced comments that seem to try to answer the question, I would support a moderator (or any other user) re-posting the comment as an answer. Tchrist has done this with many of John Lawler's comments; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a comment, John Lawler wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The meaning of &lt;em&gt;grow&lt;/em&gt; that some might call a 'copula' is the sense of &quot;growing to become&quot; as in &lt;em&gt;She grew tired&lt;/em&gt;. This is not the sense of &lt;em&gt;grow&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Babies grow quickly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/403150/babies-grow-very-quickly-in-this-sentence-is-grow-a-copula-or-a-lexical-ver&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Babies grow very quickly.&amp;quot; In this sentence is &amp;quot;grow&amp;quot; a copula or a lexical verb?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely think this is better than just deleting a comment like this without warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarize, I would be in favor of moderators rejecting flags to delete:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;comments that consist of some explanation along with a link to a related post or external resource&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;comments beneath closed questions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comments posted beneath open questions that don't contain links or point to external references, I would be against moderators deleting them without any other action, but I think it may be worthwhile to post an answer based on the comment. However, it seems inefficient to use a flag to ask a moderator to do this, since any user can post an answer based on a comment. So I think the best course of action for someone who is irritated by the existence of such comments would be to post an answer based on the comment, and then flag the comment for deletion (I suppose the &quot;no longer needed&quot; flag would technically be accurate, but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. My understanding is that comments that have been flagged with this reason are just presented to moderators without any context, so the moderator viewing such a flag might not have any idea that an answer based on the comment has been posted. I have sometimes used custom flags rather than the &quot;no longer needed&quot; flag so that I can give an explanation of why the comment is obsolete; in at least one case, after I raised a &quot;no longer needed&quot; flag that was declined I raised a custom flag that resulted in the deletion of the comment.) Or rather than converting the comment to an answer themselves, some people might prefer to first ask the author of the original answer-comment to post it as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T22:41:37.277" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T22:41:37.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11340" CreationDate="2018-04-04T23:36:17.680" Score="-14" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Purpose of this post (what type of answers do I expect)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is meant to get answers in the form of one or more links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; queries which &lt;strong&gt;list comments that are unnecessary&lt;/strong&gt;. Ideally the comments are &lt;strong&gt;sorted so that more important cases appear first&lt;/strong&gt; (if everyone starts flagging the comments starting at the top of the list, those important cases are removed first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorting by importance can be done in multiple ways, each have their own up- and downsides (this is a non-exhaustive list, numbers are for referencing only, it's not an order of preference):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By date, oldest first (top results don't change until comment is deleted, but comments are probably not read as much today)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By date, newest first (top results keep changing, but those comments are probably read because they are likely to be on newer posts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By view count of question, highest first (top results don't change)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By comment length, shortest comments first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please include links to your proposed queries on data.stackexchange&lt;/strong&gt;. Also indicate what the query returns, i.e. which types of comments it looks for and how they are sorted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that if you don't log in you need to complete a Captcha to run the queries, that restriction is lifted when you log in with standard SE credentials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Scope of comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments I think of that could be found this way are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments which only express gratitude (i.e. small number of&#xA;characters, containing things like 'thx', 'thanks', 'ty', et cetera).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vulgar language aimed at other users (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3175/do-we-have-any-guidelines-for-flagging-a-comment-as-offense&quot;&gt;link to question on offensive comments&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Junk(this is a broad category)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more exhaustive list on unwanted comments, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;help centre page on comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Rewards&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, removing unnecessary comments provides everyone with a better experience. In addition to that, there are some rewards in the form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;badges&lt;/a&gt; for those who systematically flag (awards on 5th of april 2018 in brackets):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/8/citizen-patrol&quot;&gt;Citizen patrol&lt;/a&gt;: first flagged post (3609 awards)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/75/deputy&quot;&gt;Deputy&lt;/a&gt;: raise 80 helpful flags (152 awards)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/103/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt;: raise 500 helpful flags (38 awards)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the number of flags at your disposal every day will increase as well, the number is given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;this formula&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Max(100, 10+Floor(reputation/2000) + Floor((helpful flags - declined flags)/10))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T08:24:19.437" Title="Finding comments that are 'no longer needed' (e.g. 'thank you' and general junk comments)" Tags="|discussion|comments|flagging|self-governance|site-cleanup|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11338" CreationDate="2018-04-05T00:46:27.263" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please do not flag old comments unless they are offensive and hurtful of others. This is not a good use of limited resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T00:46:27.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11338" CreationDate="2018-04-05T01:12:33.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that it's OK to flag even a non-offensive comment as &quot;no longer needed&quot; if you just happen to come across it in the course of using the site--for example, an old question gets bumped and you notice that there is a comment suggesting an edit that the original poster has since made to the question. I've cast 329 comment flags so far, and even though most of the comments I flagged were not rude or abusive, only 18 of the flags were declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if everyone started running queries to try to find flaggable comments, it would be harder for moderators to manage the workload of going through flags. It's true that non-custom comment flags can &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; take effect without moderator action, if multiple users raise the same type of flag, but in general, looking into these kind of flags is still part of the moderator workflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to go through my own comments every once in a while and delete the ones that have become obsolete. This is one action you can take to get rid of some comments that are no longer needed without using the flag system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T01:12:33.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-06T20:33:12.240" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I gain 50 reputations to comment when I have no way of gaining any reputation at all because the screen where I'm to comment says I need 50 reputations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS Your site is most confusing to a tyro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291895" OwnerDisplayName="Robert Hartley" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T20:44:25.490" Title="Reputation to comment" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-06T21:28:45.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11355" CreationDate="2018-04-07T13:50:41.657" Score="6" ViewCount="757" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440343/can-mongrel-be-used-to-refer-to-people&quot;&gt;Can &quot;mongrel&quot; be used to refer to people&lt;/a&gt; is on hold as primarily opinion-based.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, of course true, that in the opinion of &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; people it is OK, even required, to hurl any epithet, insult, obscenity or unkind word at a person different from themselves.  Is this why the use of mongrel to refer to mixed race people was deemed a matter of opinion?  And the context in which it might be OK?  There are plenty of references which give guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone had asked the same question about the n-word, would it have been closed &lt;strong&gt;as a matter of opinion&lt;/strong&gt;?  Closing the question as asking for writing advice might have been just barely understandable; closing it as a matter of opinion is inexplicable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T17:26:33.263" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T01:04:15.267" Title="Puzzled: Is calling a mixed-race person a mongrel really a matter of opinion?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-07T13:53:05.503" Score="4" ViewCount="672" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made the following partial answer a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440423/word-choice-to-parent-somebody#comment1057366_440423&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; to the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/440423/142322&quot;&gt;Word choice: to parent somebody?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One can certainly parent &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; tolerance (and love, and kindness, etc). But the verb &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; isn't ditransitive, so * &lt;em&gt;parents his children values&lt;/em&gt; doesn't work, as @KateBunting pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the backdrop of discussions about &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11326/142322&quot;&gt;answers in comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in mind, I thought I'd ask the community what it considers to constitute a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; answer. Anything less than a complete answer would then be deemed a &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; or incomplete answer, unsuitable for posting in the answer section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no linguistics support for the assertion that the verb &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; isn't ditransitive, by which I mean &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; doesn't license two 'arguments', unlike, say, &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;take (the car) (home)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no Ngram or other support that the phrase &quot;parent with tolerance&quot; works.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Searching for and providing the support mentioned in #1 and #2 above seems to be a little over the top. However, I speak merely as an English language enthusiast, not a professional linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People who answer are supposed to be experts in the field, and those who ask are supposed satisfy the minimum entry bar of &lt;em&gt;linguist/etymologist/enthusiast&lt;/em&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, so #1 and #2 could be considered mere background information that we can freely assume 'everyone knows'. However, one of the few actual experts has recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11184/posting-questions-from-how-english-works-and-proposing-answers/11185#comment47280_11185&quot;&gt;challenged&lt;/a&gt; that view: &quot;&lt;em&gt;The questions are mostly asked by clueless students of English (occasionally by native speakers, but mostly not), and the answers mostly come from them too.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; The observation rings true, and it influences what we consider to be an appropriate &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, let alone a complete &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above as specifics for something concrete to reference, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;does the community consider my block-quoted comment above to be a &lt;em&gt;complete answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? If not, what else is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Item #4 might appear to warrant a separate question, but for the discussion on answer completeness to be meaningful, we need to consider the language proficiency of the participants. When we encounter 'simple' questions that appear to invite 'simple' answers, do we answer them at that level with a lower bar to 'answer completeness', vote to close/migrate the questions, or - since background knowledge can be hard to support - dig deep and pitch to the tour's stated audience? Note that I'm disregarding the option of posting the deeper question separately since that's just a combination of close/ignore + dig deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T13:28:18.637" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T13:28:18.637" Title="In relation to answers in the answer section, what is a &quot;complete answer&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11347" CreationDate="2018-04-08T20:35:02.023" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the active page, I see little black boxes instead of…what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OSbAT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OSbAT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It didn't help that Emily's avatar is almost black too, but &#xA;once inside...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Qb3o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Qb3o.png&quot; alt=&quot;EL&amp;amp;U Question page about *x* and *y* be  real numbers + little black box and *a* be an integer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this black box supposed to be a glyph or an emoji?  I am like that boy in &lt;em&gt;the sixth sense&lt;/em&gt;, I see dead boxes. Am I alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Acck! I read the question, the little black boxes are supposed to be commas or blanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T20:43:45.480" Title="creepy black boxes in question" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11346" CreationDate="2018-04-08T20:43:45.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks  like this is intentional: Kenny LJ used the Unicode character &quot;black box&quot; to mark the places that may or may not need a comma. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T20:43:45.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-08T21:38:17.210" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that the word &quot;query&quot; is pronounced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ˈkwɪəri/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether there is any word in English that sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ˈkwiri/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of reverse pronunciation lookup resource online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66696" OwnerDisplayName="Marcus Junius Brutus" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T22:32:37.310" Title="Is there some reverse IPA dictionary for English?" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|ipa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T00:15:35.583" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see here &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7036/rewording-a-questions-title-and-removing-the-duplicate-flag?rq=1&quot;&gt;question about duplicates&lt;/a&gt; that it is OK to post here when one's question is falsely marked duplicate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is the case with my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/438920/i-was-late-and-so-i-got-fired-can-we-use-two-conjunctions-in-a-row&quot;&gt;“I was late, and so I got fired.” Can we use two conjunctions in a row?&lt;/a&gt;. The question linked as duplicate is regarding a specific aspect of the usage of &quot;and so&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That other question is, word for word, &lt;em&gt;If &quot;and so&quot; connects predicates such that the second is the result of the first, do we need to repeat the same words in the second?&lt;/em&gt; My question is whether it is actually incorrect to use &quot;and so&quot;. I am still convinced that it is ultimately incorrect, while the other question is entirely based on the assumption that it is correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it is proper English or not, no aspect of my question is even &lt;em&gt;hinted at&lt;/em&gt; in the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've edited my question to refute the duplicate claim, but I see it is 1 vote short of being deleted. Is there more I can do than posting about it here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289751" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T00:15:35.583" Title="Not even close to a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11344" CreationDate="2018-04-09T08:59:52.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm translating a &lt;strong&gt;fantasy novel&lt;/strong&gt; into English. In the story there are &lt;strong&gt;a bunch of races&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would cast my vote to close the question a second time, if the question is reopened (which seems likely) because  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's a work of pure fiction and as such an author is free to choose any word that he or she feels is most appropriate. This feels more like writing advice to me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;would it [mongrels] be awkward for humans? I picked this word intentionally to bring &lt;strong&gt;a bad connotation&lt;/strong&gt; to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP clearly knows that the term is often used derogatorily for dogs/animals, it follows that some readers will object but others will just roll with it because the story is fantasy/science fiction. If the OP were translating an essay on anthropology or a sociology paper, EL&amp;amp;U users could provide more culturally sensitive and scientifically appropriate alternatives. As such, the OP is basically asking &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What do you think of the term mongrel to describe an inhabitant of mixed race living on an imaginary planet?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~ You already know mongrel has derogatory connotations. It's your story/translation, no one can tell you what to write. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T08:59:52.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T12:02:34.157" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/439882/what-would-you-say-vs-how-would-you-say&quot;&gt;What would you say vs. How would you say&lt;/a&gt; has been marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/324568/how-do-you-call-vs-what-do-you-call&quot;&gt;How do you call..? vs. What do you call…?&lt;/a&gt;. They can only be duplicates if &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; are grammatically and semantically equivalent in the two questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not the case. &lt;em&gt;Call&lt;/em&gt; is being used as a transitive verb in a request to name a noun (phrase). For example: &lt;em&gt;How/What do you call a person who eats fish but no meat?&lt;/em&gt; Answer: &lt;em&gt;A pescatarian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say&lt;/em&gt; is followed in the other question by a temporal clause. not an object. Its clear purpose is to elicit a complete sentence answer from an English learner in what is called a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;display question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP of &lt;em&gt;What would you say vs. How would you say&lt;/em&gt; states &lt;em&gt;I want to ask a question what someone would say in or about a certain situation&lt;/em&gt;. I don't think she will find a useful answer in the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="11146" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T14:35:01.180" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T14:35:01.180" Title="Another request to reconsider a question marked as a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T12:27:16.777" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a question came up as to whether it's our responsibility to look for previously answered questions on our sister site, English Language Learners.  The consensus was no.  But someone &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11322/is-it-the-elu-answerers-responsibility-to-first-check-for-duplicate-questions-o#comment48044_11322&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not your responsibility even within the same site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether this is the general consensus here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this might not be as cut and dried as a simple yes or no.  That's okay.  But I would like to know to what extent I should check for duplicateness before diving in to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if I see there's been a vote to close, I should look to see if the vote to close reason is &quot;duplicate,&quot; in which case I should look at the proposed duplicate to see if I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification&lt;/strong&gt;: I didn't mean to ask about the responsibility of the asker.  I'm asking about my responsibility if I'm thinking about writing an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T13:48:44.450" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T22:53:25.827" Title="When considered writing an answer to a question, do I have a responsibility to search for duplicates before answering?" Tags="|discussion|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11344" CreationDate="2018-04-09T12:33:21.993" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This metaphoric meaning of the word is so well known that it is mentioned in every dictionary of recent repute. I would have preferred for this particular question to be closed as &lt;em&gt;general reference&lt;/em&gt;, especially since the most highly voted upon answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;exactly the sort of thing the general reference standard was originally implemented to prevent&lt;/a&gt;. A dictionary definition should be furnished to demonstrate that this answer is not satisfactory, and an explanation regarding why this answer is not satisfactory should then be provided to make the source of confusion clear to necessitate the provision of more useful answers than what was already readily available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite the fact that primarily opinion based and general reference typically act in opposition, there are also opinion based considerations which may aply: First when you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What Kinds of Questions Should I Avoid Asking?&lt;/a&gt; on most if not all Stack Exchange websites, you will notice that it is a standard form that seems to delimit the subjectivity standards of the website, and one of the provisions is to not make a rant in disguise, and because the answer is so readily available and well known, it is not difficult to interpret this question as an attempt to suggest that mongrel should not be used to describe humans because it more literally refers to dogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this question may be asked in earnest, but regardless of that, there are a few ways to interpret the question. What does the questioner mean by awkward, for instance? Given the reference to the primary definition of the word, I think the best way to interpret it is &quot;Will describing people as mongrels be confusing to my readers because of the other meaning?&quot; and that is not entirely answerable without a sample of a potentially confusing context. Granted, normally I assume it would not be confusing. The very point of the insult is to act as a metaphor that compares the person to the very sort of dog described, but a sentence such as &lt;em&gt;Look at that mongrel over there, rummaging through the trash for food&lt;/em&gt; might be confusing. Even then, we can not really speak on the behalf of specific groups or individuals with much certainty, and especially not a purely hypothetical readership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you suggest that it might be somewhat understandable for this to be considered a writing advice question. If we posit that it is writing advice, then what better closure reason is there for writing advice other than Primarily Opinion Based? Despite the fact that writing advice is expressly outside of our scope, we do not have a standard closure reason for it because we are limited to three local closure reasons, which we already used for proofreading, inadequate research and incomplete Single Word Requests, plus whatever closure reasons apply across the entire Stack Exchange Network. Perhaps a custom write-in reason could be applied, but outside of the comment would just mark the question as outside of the scope described in the help center with an explanation in a potentially transient comment. Now, I think it is safe to say that our writing advice concerns are more over the fact that they are more opinion based than anything else, so if nothing else is read, the P.O.B. closure reason is more likely to address the problems a writing advice question may have than any other closure reason. This is important for helping the questioner understand what sort of edits need to be applied for the question to be salvaged if that is possible, or helping other members to understand why it is closed if not, especially in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T01:04:15.267" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T01:04:15.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11352" CreationDate="2018-04-09T14:49:13.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, sort of, but 'responsibility' is a bit strong. You can't be expected to know everything; after all, you have a question, that's why you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you should definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; do is, immediately upon waking up from a nap, post a question directly to ELU (or anywhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you should do is first SEARCH GOOGLE. Yes, this is hard to do well, it's the old 'How do I use a dictionary to help me spell a word because I have to know the spelling to find it in the dictionary?' But you're not an idiot, you can at least &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; and that will get you somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching google, if you're lucky, may actually get you links to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suppose that didn't work and you're typing your question into ELU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As you type, SE is giving suggestions about related questions possibly duplicates&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Look at those suggestions.&lt;/h1&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;ACTUALLY READ THE SUGGESTIONS.&lt;/h1&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The keyword search is not necessarily the best, but it'll give you an idea of what might have come before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, on the right hand side of a question is a list of linked questions and 'related' questions (found by the SE similarity algorithm). Look at those too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That's&lt;/em&gt; the kind of research that would be nice for an OP to do. Sure we'd hope that they'd scour all the online dictionaries. &lt;strong&gt;Or effing use a thesaurus once in a while.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But often when I go through the review queue, I'll see a question with a possible close as duplicate vote, and I'll look around at it, and there are suggested duplicates &lt;em&gt;right there&lt;/em&gt; for the OP to have seen. You don't have to try hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wouldn't call it a 'responsibility'. So harsh. Just do a little minimal reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wait, you're asking about it if you're writing an answer? Hm, yes, that is annoying when you write an answer and then that question gets closed as duplicate. I think that &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; there is a close vote already and it's for a duplicate, yeah you should definitely look at the link and consider strongly answering at the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you should probably glance at the 'related questions' to see if there's something relevant there. But I wouldn't call it a responsibility to explicitly check for duplicates. A reasonable idea, but not a responsibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="68817" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T22:53:25.827" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T22:53:25.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11344" CreationDate="2018-04-09T19:07:47.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you that the close reason is not well chosen. It seems highly likely to me that the first close voter selected &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; because it was the prefab close reason that came closest to the actual reason the voter had for wanting to close the question. If the voter had taken the time to write a custom close reason, it probably would have said something along the lines of &quot;I am voting to close this question as off topic because it is a request for writing advice.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger issue that your Meta post raises is whether using the closest multiple-choice close reason when none really fits is a sound practice. Obviously the benefit to the close voter is that it helps move an objectionable question nearer to being closed with a minimum of effort on the close voter’s part. The harm is primarily to the person who posted the question, but also to EL&amp;amp;U's goal of generating better questions. After all, the theory behind identifying a reason for closure (as I understand it) is to educate the person who posted the faulty question—and others—as to what is wrong with it. If that weren’t the point, Stack Exchange might as well permit unexplained, drive-by close voting, just as it does unexplained, drive-by downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer that is objectionable because it is green, and the multiple-choice close reasons available are red, yellow, blue, orange, and purple, a close voter might argue that selecting “I am voting to close this question because it is blue” or “I am voting to close this question because it is yellow” is the most reasonable choice—but that rationale ignores the option of writing a customized answer that identifies what is actually wrong with the question. And of course, if you don't accurately explain a question’s failings, you don’t enlighten the person who posted the question about the question’s real defects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to a second problem with choosing an inaccurate prefab close reason: stringing the questioner along. I see this happen most often with the “show research” close reason. Someone asks a writing advice question or a homework question or too-localized-to-be-of-interest-to-anyone-else question, and close voters respond by voting to close on grounds that the questioner didn’t show any results of personal research. Every now and then, in response to such a closure, a questioner will go back and say “I looked in reference books and couldn’t find an answer to my question” and ask that the question be reopened—and then one of two things happens: reviewers in the Reopen Votes queue decline to reopen the question because they implicitly recognize that the actual defectiveness of the original question was not cured by showing research, or they reopen the question and then they or other reviewers vote to reclose the question on other grounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far too often, we review-queue voters are sloppy, inaccurate, and lazy in our application of close reasons. We would show more respect for everyone concerned if we held ourselves to the standard of identifying what is actually wrong with a faulty question, rather than taking the easy route of selecting the most nearly applicable multiple-choice option, even when it isn’t particularly near. At the very least, close voters who don’t want to bother with providing an on-point justification for their close vote might consider selecting ‘off-topic because...’ &gt; ‘Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)’ &gt; ‘I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because &lt;strong&gt;it’s bad&lt;/strong&gt;.’ They’ll spend only slightly more time voting to close in this way than they do now, and they won’t mislead OPs with spurious nearest-prefab-choice close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T19:34:09.323" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T19:34:09.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11345" CreationDate="2018-04-10T05:24:04.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes I feel like an alternative answer, that has far more information than a comment war[r]ants, helps a question while not being &quot;the best&quot; answer. I would refrain from voting down a lesser answer if helpful , and sometimes vote up multiple answers. However, if someone puts a low effort post into what should be a very good answer and freezes other people out from making nearly the same but more complete answer, that is a problem – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11345/in-relation-to-answers-in-the-answer-section-what-is-a-complete-answer#comment48023_11345&quot;&gt;Tom22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T05:24:04.177" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-04-10T05:24:04.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11366" CreationDate="2018-04-10T06:51:51.787" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question is clearly off-topic here but on topic (though very broad) on the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440886/how-should-english-grammar-be-taught-to-second-language-learners&quot;&gt;How should English grammar be taught to second-language learners?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When voting to close, I would like to have an option to suggest migration to that site. Currently the only options are shown below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NCw7g.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NCw7g.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been a few other questions recently that I would like to have suggested for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4021/proposal-to-fix-the-uselessness-of-the-new-off-topic-close-options&quot;&gt;Proposal to fix the uselessness of the new off-topic close options&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="11146" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T06:56:59.980" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T03:01:42.857" Title="Request for addition to the 'This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network' options" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2018-04-10T07:21:40.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's very few questions that get migrated to Language Learning, and that's why we do not &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; a dedicated migration path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, flagging the post for a moderator involvement would do just fine. Moderators can migrate it if they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, Language Learning is in beta, so such migrations are tricky and usually not permitted for us mere mortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T19:22:31.970" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T19:22:31.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11365" CreationDate="2018-04-10T11:52:45.917" Score="4" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am aware that many users including tchrist ♦, and perhaps eight of the nine &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U mods&lt;/a&gt;, really dislike SWRs (Single Word Requests) but for a mod to shut all three questions as Primarily Opinion-Based is unfair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440924/what-is-the-word-for-sensing-something-is-strange&quot;&gt;What is the word for sensing something is strange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440913/lying-to-my-girlfriend-that-im-hot-and-other-girls-hit-on-me-all-the-time&quot;&gt;Lying to my girlfriend that I&amp;#39;m hot and other girls hit on me all the time&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one's rather good, I think, and perfect for ELL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440800/he-isnt-biologically-my-son-but-i-love-him-as-if-he-were&quot;&gt;He isn&amp;#39;t biologically my son but I love him as if he were&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JV9F7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JV9F7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last one passed the review queue and had received three &quot;leave open&quot;  casts which were ignored... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/284128&quot;&gt;Review completed 44 mins ago:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  jimm101 reviewed this 44 mins ago: &lt;strong&gt;Leave Open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Edwin Ashworth reviewed this 1 hour ago: &lt;strong&gt;Leave Open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  JJJ reviewed this 3 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Leave Open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nigel J reviewed this 6 hours ago: &lt;strong&gt;Close&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(UPDATE: The question was successfully reopened April 12.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be more honest to just ban SWRs outright if they are the bane of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone provide actual facts and numbers? For example, what percentage of questions asked since January 2018 have been SWRs? How many were closed for being POB? How many were closed within one hour of posting? How many were closed for lack of research? etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we add SWRs to the off-topic list once and for all?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to make this proposal here are some of the arguments in favor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt; (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With all the resentment poured out here, one might think poor examples of this sort of question would get body-slammed the minute they showed up...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cheating at crosswords&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Yet... Watching the front page, you could be forgiven for thinking &quot;crossword-solving&quot; was one of the primary functions of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4842/can-anything-be-done-about-mean-spirited-requests-for-terminology&quot;&gt;Can anything be done about mean-spirited requests for terminology?&lt;/a&gt; (2014)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… questions asking about insults or slurs are questions that deserve to be labelled pejorative. It bothered me how many of these there were, and how they tend to draw bikeshedding list responses with no right answer. It doesn’t look good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7470/how-to-save-elu&quot;&gt;How to save EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; (2015)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think one way to massively improve this site would be to start a new Stack Exchange site called something like &lt;em&gt;English Phrase Finder&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Word Finder&lt;/em&gt; or something like that where single word requests, word choices and phrase requests could be answered along with crossword puzzle solutions and the rest. I'm sure it would be a very successful site, perhaps more so than EL&amp;amp;U, and would grow very rapidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10557/would-you-support-systematic-testing-of-proposed-quality-improvement-methods&quot;&gt;Would you support systematic testing of proposed quality improvement methods?&lt;/a&gt; (2017)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an enthusiastic newcomer to EL&amp;amp;U, I quickly noticed a problem most of you have endured for many moons: the plethora of low-quality, help-me-with-this-crossword-clue, single-word questions. I have endeavored to read previous EL&amp;amp;U Meta discussions on this topic, but if my query has been asked and answered before, point me in that direction please. :p)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not, my question is:     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you support systematic testing of proposed quality improvement methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9789/what-s-wrong-with-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;“What’s wrong with single word requests?”&lt;/a&gt; (2016)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My own personal opinion is that we should get rid of these if at all possible, and severely curtail and restrict them if not. It doesn't matter whether the request is for a single word, a phrase, an idiom, a proverb, or any other related “guessing-game style” of request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No matter what guise they take, these are all a drain on our site quality and a drain on our community’s time, both moderator time answering flags and that of the general community running the review queues.&#xA;   […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usually there is no research. People haven’t bothered to look at a thesaurus or even Google. These almost all wind up being thinly veiled requests for &lt;strong&gt;writing advice&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;programming advice&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;shaming advice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3878/reconsidering-the-single-word-request?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Reconsidering the single word request&lt;/a&gt; (2013)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In light of the recent launch of our sister site, English Language Learners, I would like to propose that this site no longer accept questions of the &quot;What is another word or phrase for...?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Single word requests have long been contentious here. They tend to be uninteresting one-offs and rep-feeding frenzies. They also aren't really on topic, are they? English Language and Usage is supposed to be focused on academic questions of English and explaining the nuances of grammar and syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;Against single word requests&lt;/a&gt; (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The consensus of earlier discussions was that these questions are on the low end, but not specifically disallowed. However, the last few months of experience have started to bias me against these questions, so much so that I think we need to reevaluate our decision to allow them. I'm now of the opinion that single word requests should be either &lt;strong&gt;disallowed entirely&lt;/strong&gt; or subject to much more &lt;strong&gt;stringent requirements&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests#comment25885_1661&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; (2015)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I agree, kill &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;. Questions that use an idiomatic two-word phrase to perfectly describe the desired concept without explaining why that two-word phrase is insufficient are useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8040/on-deleting-low-quality-single-word-request-answers/8043#8043&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (2016)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the most part, the first-time posters who submit one-word answers followed by a little filler to meet the minimum character count are not interested in anything more than participating in a quiz-show-format guessing game. […]  very few SWRs have any staying power. Their contribution to the site is like an all-sugar lunch: they draw a big buzz for a short time, and then they crash. In the language of publishing, they have little or no tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are all SWRs a drain? Do we have proof that SWRS are to blame for the lowering of standards? Would banning SWRs improve our site? Where's the proof? Or are SWRs just an easy scapegoat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;strong&gt;Is strongly disliking SWRs and sustaining they are a &lt;em&gt;drain on our site&lt;/em&gt; a sufficiently good enough reason for shutting the three questions listed at the top of the page as POB?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T11:33:48.417" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T22:47:00.653" Title="Three SWRs suddenly closed for being POB" Tags="|discussion|support|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2018-04-10T11:55:48.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beta sites need some space to figure out their identity before we start dropping a lot of questions on them that their community may or may not want. Funneling a bunch of questions to them pollutes the test of whether they are able to build a community around their topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping it so that only moderators can migrate ensures that the site isn't buried in questions that folks outside of that community think should belong on the site. Often when a flag to migrate a question comes in, moderators will ask the mod team of the target site if the question will be well-received before migrating it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should probably hold off on a migration path until after the site has graduated and the community is more well-defined. That way we will have a much better idea of what does and does not belong there. They might not want questions asking for a list of teaching methods. They might prefer that we just direct the author to the site and encourage them to search there before asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T11:55:48.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11359" CreationDate="2018-04-10T13:18:01.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don’t find your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/440924/2085&quot;&gt;first mentioned question&lt;/a&gt; to be so completely awful as to be far out of the bounds of our site, then we really do need to have a talk. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/440913/1&quot;&gt;second one’s&lt;/a&gt; little better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation is getting worse and worse. People show up doing no work who are asking us to do their writing for them. That's not why we're here. We won't do writing requests, nor pick-your-favorite-word contests either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s the thing: it &lt;strong&gt;DOES NOT MATTER&lt;/strong&gt; whether a substantial proportion of the new questions are of those sorts. It also doesn't matter whether a sizable segment of the membership “enjoys answering” those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because those are questions which are fundamentally counter to the entire Stack Exchange model. The guidance we receive from Management not to tolerate those sorts of questions exists to help us keep our site on track, how to continue to be a &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt; question-and-answer site &lt;em&gt;that falls within the Stack Exchange model&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s what people are missing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at it this way. Imagine if a bunch of questions asking for jokes in English showed up, and these gathered a lot of answers and a lot of votes. Everybody is having a good time. Does that mean we can or should allow these sorts of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/30244/2085&quot;&gt;The Dalai Lama’s “Make me one with the universe” pizza question&lt;/a&gt; question proves this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So too with the writing requests and word-guessing parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T13:27:05.797" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T13:27:05.797" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11359" CreationDate="2018-04-10T16:58:02.387" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of one's stance on the desirability of SWRs in general, I cannot see how anyone could fail to agree that at least the first two of the linked questions were unresearched and underspecified, and were therefore totally deserving of closure for several reasons.  (POB is perhaps a poor choice of reasons specifically, but the closure itself is entirely justified.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last one shows a bit more effort and thought, but despite the 'leave open' votes is still, in my eyes, lacking in the required SWR elements.  It may be appropriate on ELL, in which case votes to migrate would be preferred.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T17:05:26.613" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T17:05:26.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-10T17:51:20.903" Score="10" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent comment, @laurel wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's helpful to link to relevant questions on other sites.  In fact, I think it should be taken a step further, with &amp;quot;association banners&amp;quot; like some questions on SO have to Ru.SO questions. (Due to the language difference, these banners are only visible to people with certain browser settings. I'm not sure if there are any plans to bring this feature to the rest of the network unfortunately.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ColleenV, the esteemed moderator of our sister site, English Language Learners, dug up an old SE Meta question proposing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Display other SE site links in the linked questions sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature request was declined, with the following reasoning by Jon Ericson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggested this feature to the dev team. It turns out the linkback feature makes it difficult to implement and expensive to put in operation. Remember, we have 133 (and counting) sites with millions of questions. If a crosslink is added or removed anywhere on those sites, the sidebar on both questions must be updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might possible to optimize this and make it reasonably performant. But remember that these links would only appear on a tiny fraction of questions. So while we think it's an interesting feature, it's not one we will be investing in anytime soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colleen and I have collaborated to try to resuscitate the proposal, Colleen with a comment below Jon's answer, and I with a small bounty on the question.  (Both of these tactics were suggested by someone &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59569/display-other-se-site-links-in-the-linked-questions-sidebar#comment971689_59569&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Support from ELU participants for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/59569/287826&quot;&gt;SE Meta question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/245355/287826&quot;&gt;the favorable answer&lt;/a&gt; would be much appreciated.  (Feel free to write your own answer if you'd prefer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T23:16:32.757" Title="Automated display of relevant ELL links in the linked questions sidebar" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11345" CreationDate="2018-04-10T18:56:50.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At some point after I had collected several thousand points (I'm not sure how), I suddenly started to get in trouble for writing skimpy answers.  Some individuals were not nice when pointing this out to me.  Amazingly, I did not realize that many of my answers had been going to a queue of poor quality answers.  The not-nice critiques said, &quot;Someone with your rep should know better!  Shame on you!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I revamped how I wrote answers, almost overnight.  (Better late than never.  I also learned about flagging.)  Here's what I came up with for how to write a good answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I should back up my answer with some objective evidence.  If I can't find any, then I should present logical reasoning.  Technical terms used in the logical argument should be explained.  Format into paragraphs, indented text, etc., for readability.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I'm citing an authoritative source, I should include a relevant quote &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a link &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the name of the source (e.g. Cambridge Learners Dictionary).  If I want my answer to look pretty, boldface plus hyperlink = authoritative-looking red text!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances should I cite Google's definitions, since we don't know where they originated, and we don't know when Google might change what it displays.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I should not, under fear of the wrath of Edwin (and I'm convinced he's right to insist on this), write an answer to an obviously poorly posed question that is about to get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I should put myself in the shoes of the asker.  If I intuit that the OP would benefit from an explanation of some related aspect, or from some usage notes, I should go ahead and add the supporting information, with examples as needed, written in a pedagogical yet respectful style.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I have a bunch of words or phrases to offer for a word/phrase request, I should pick one or two to showcase and document.  (Then it's okay to sneak in a few more words/phrases as brainstorming.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11345/in-relation-to-answers-in-the-answer-section-what-is-a-complete-answer/11364?noredirect=1#comment48023_11345&quot;&gt;@Tom22&lt;/a&gt; wrote about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11356/142322&quot;&gt;freezing other people out from making nearly the same but more complete answer&lt;/a&gt;&quot; -- if I think someone has written something correct but too abstruse to fix with a bit of collaborative editing, I will go ahead and write my own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have supplemental material that doesn't fit into one or two comment boxes, then I write a supplemental answer, explicitly acknowledging the existing basically correct answer(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T16:01:21.967" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T16:01:21.967" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11359" CreationDate="2018-04-10T19:17:12.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;It would be more honest to just ban SWRs outright if they are the bane of the site.&quot; Exactly so. Sporadically using &quot;Primarily opinion based&quot; as a close reason for single-word requests (and phrase requests and idiom requests and expression requests and proverb requests and—in the old days of this site—word choice [requests]) inevitably involves selective enforcement because, at bottom, all such requests are strongly opinion inflected if not primarily opinion based. And since all questions in this class share the same categorical flaw, using POB as a reason to close some word choice requests but not others can't help but be arbitrary and unfair. Also, taking half-measures to discourage word choice requests will only increase confusion about what is acceptable at EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Araucaria suggested (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7470/how-to-save-elu&quot;&gt;How to save EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;) creating a separate &quot;Word and Phrase Finder&quot; site within the Stack Exchange network, I endorsed the idea because I thought it offered a way to deal with word choice requests fairly and sensibly, while moving them outside the EL&amp;amp;U answer database, where they have little long-term value (because they are so ill suited to key-word searches). My interest then and now is in promoting EL&amp;amp;U as a searchable database of useful answers to questions of long-term interest to future site visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Word and Phrase Finder site would be dedicated to questions like the three highlighted in Mari-Lou A's question. It would also provide an extremely convenient destination for the torrent of word and phrase requests that have been pouring into EL&amp;amp;U since the earliest days of this site. Clicking &quot;off-topic because...&quot; &gt; &quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&quot; &gt; &quot;belongs on wordandphrasefinder.stackexchange.com&quot; would dispatch all such questions to a locale where site participants could happily vie to supply the most appropriate word or phrase or idiom or expression or proverb or word choice to meet the occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think that this would work. Clearly, people love to ask and answer and vote on word choice requests; and it makes no sense for Stack Exchange to ignore that reality. However, to the extent that word choice requests fundamentally differ from other EL&amp;amp;U questions (for example, because the usual &quot;show your research&quot; requirement makes no sense as applied to them), they muddle the site's standards. In addition, I have no doubt that they make searching for evergreen questions and answers on the site more difficult. If we diverted word choice requests to a separate site, the primary housecleaning problem remaining for EL&amp;amp;U would be to identify and retain questions that, despite being tagged as one or another of these types of requests, actually raise substantive issues of grammar or usage and thus ought to be retained on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we aren't willing to move word choice requests to a separate site, I think we shouldn't waste our time trying to eradicate them. Instead, we should treat them as what they are: a major and perennial source of entertainment and site traffic at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. When people beat a shortcut path across a public lawn, you can put up signs urging them not to stray from the paved walkways and threatening to fine scofflaws—but if enough pedestrians take the shortcut anyway, the unauthorized path will never revert to beautiful green grass. And in that case, an enlightened authority might consider paving the de facto path instead of fruitlessly opposing the will of so many passers-by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (April 21, 2018)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent recent example of a formally successful SWR is the recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/442414/is-there-one-word-for-being-deceived-into-complying&quot;&gt;Is there one word for &quot;being deceived into complying&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; This SWR plays by the rules: it asks for one word with a specific (but not excessively specific) meaning, and it provide an example sentence that includes a blank where the sought word would appear. The question has been very popular (5,133 page views and 20 net upvotes in less than three days, as I write this). It has drawn 14 answers that make 19 word or phrase suggestions, and 13 of those 14 answers have received net upvote totals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers read very much like a series of synonyms for &lt;em&gt;deceived&lt;/em&gt; that you might find in &lt;em&gt;Roget's Thesaurus&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;duped&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;misled&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;hoodwinked/bamboozled/hornswoggled&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;lulled&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;tricked&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;cajoled/beguiled&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;manipulated&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;inveigled&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;gulled&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;skuldug&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;blinkered/railroaded&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;be a sheep&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;conned/pressured&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;suckered&lt;/strong&gt;. And yet the top-voted answer (&lt;em&gt;duped&lt;/em&gt;, with 44 upvotes) is not appreciably more correct than the lowest-voted answer (&lt;em&gt;suckered&lt;/em&gt;, with 0 upvotes). The voting results establish that the people who vote on SWRs at this site much prefer to &lt;em&gt;duped&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;suckered&lt;/em&gt;, but nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, the question and the responses it has drawn and the votes those responses have received indicate that there is a wide range of opinion about which word might work most effectively. Ignoring downvotes for the moment so that we can consider how many people thought that each of the suggested answers was a positive contribution to answering the question, we find these upvote totals: 44, 16, 12, 11, 6, 4, 4, 5, 3, 3, 1, 1, 3, 0. That is, voters have cast 113 upvotes for the various answers, and the highest-ranked answer has received 39% of the upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, these results indicate that there is no objectively best word to fill in the blank in the OP's example sentence. Failing that, the question essentially becomes a thesaurus request: it invites answerers to supply a list of word suggestions and invites voters to choose among the resulting answers on the basis of personal preference (which is as much as to say that it asks for primarily opinion-based answers to be adjudicated by primarily opinion-based upvoting and downvoting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would clearly have been off topic at this site if the poster had explicitly asked &quot;What do you think is the best single word for 'being deceived into complying'?&quot; (as a request for an opinion) or if the poster had explicitly asked &quot;What are some single-word synonyms for 'being deceived into complying'?&quot; (as a list request). But because the OP played by the rules, the question I've been discussing is (in my view) clearly valid under the rules governing SWRs on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does the question have any substantial value to future EL&amp;amp;U site visitors? To answer affirmatively, I think, we have to imagine a visitor searching EL&amp;amp;U for a synonym for &quot;deceived [into complying]&quot;—in which case the question and answers are arguably as useful as an entry for &lt;em&gt;deceived&lt;/em&gt; in a thesaurus would be. But if this sort of question (and the answers it draws) is valid, perhaps we ought to rethink our categorical opposition to list questions. We might even use a different tag—&quot;thesaurus&quot;—to clarify why such questions are useful to the site in the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T22:47:00.653" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T22:47:00.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2018-04-11T03:01:42.857" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261196&quot;&gt;traditional guidance for setting default migration paths&lt;/a&gt; focuses on the level of migration occurring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no &quot;right&quot; level for establishing a migration path, but tens or hundreds of migrations with a single digit rejection rate seems safe. Single digit migrations in the last 90 days and/or rejection rates that can order a drink without ID are signs that the path will be a waste of time to establish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While others have pointed out that sites in beta are almost never added as default targets, moderators can still migrate them. And a SEDE query for &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/472000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;questions successfully migrated away&lt;/a&gt; doesn't make much of a case for LL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site         Count&#xA;ELL           2034&#xA;Writers        152&#xA;Linguistics     59&#xA;SuperUser       18&#xA;Philosophy      17&#xA;Mathematics     12&#xA;User Experience 10 &#xA;WebApps          9&#xA;Workplace        9&#xA;SO               7&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, LL is in a 4-way tie with Academia, Cognitive Science, and, umm, Graphic Design, with the last successful migration all the way back at 2017-09-05 08:42:41.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do come across questions that would be a stronger fit for LL, just &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/8109&quot;&gt;flag them for moderator review&lt;/a&gt; as others have suggested, and that will improve the case for the community migration path if and when LL leaves beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T03:01:42.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T21:58:07.337" Score="-4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Viz &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11344/puzzled-is-calling-a-mixed-race-person-a-mongrel-really-a-matter-of-opinion&quot;&gt;the meta-q about can I call certain humans mongrels in a work of fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, I close-voted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440343/can-mongrel-be-used-to-refer-to-people&quot;&gt;actual ELU question&lt;/a&gt; and since then it was re-opened and I would like to closevote it again, but I don't think the system is letting me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can a user not vote anew to close a question that was closed but has been reopened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: And if not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T22:13:54.047" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T22:31:56.127" Title="Can I not vote to re-close a question that I originally VTCed that was since reopened?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11367" CreationDate="2018-04-11T22:31:56.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You can only vote to close a question once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your opinion is known and you have expressed it. Five other people have had a contrary view; you cannot have another bite of the cherry and vote again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been the case since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99234/184638&quot;&gt;at least 2011&lt;/a&gt;, when Jeff Attwood explained&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are only allowed to cast one close or reopen vote on any given post, largely to prevent close/reopen wars involving the same cast of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T22:31:56.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11359" CreationDate="2018-04-12T14:28:35.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think Single Word Requests are &lt;em&gt;categorically&lt;/em&gt; Primarily Opinion Based. Quite the opposite really. I would suggest that a higher degree of Single Word Requests have some basis in, reference because it is so easy to simply pull up a dictionary definition which explains the gist of what a suggested answer means, with a presuambly trustworthy testimony by lexicographical scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have exact numbers, but I trust that most of you see what is actually going on with the Single Word Requests these days. I trust most of us can see that most of our answers have their basis in the most well known example of a reference work, it does not really make sense to be suggesting otherwise with the following closure reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; Moreover, the same sorts of facts that lexicographers use to craft their definitions can easily be applied to most semantic questions if somebody is willing to go through the effort. Treating the whole &lt;em&gt;category&lt;/em&gt; of questions as Primarily Opinion Based makes relatively little sense to me, and of course somebody with relevant experience with the concept in question can always propose what word they would use, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the whole question category derided as Primarily Opinion Based is also somewhat discouraging to somebody like myself, who often goes through the extra effort necessary to thoroughly &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; my point in accordance to the guidelines. It suggests that it does not matter how much effort I undergo to craft a well thunk answer of the sort I usually try to craft, which are to Single Word Requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand why somebody might be under the impression that they are primarily opinion based. Often times, it seems like mediocre answers with a minimal amount of effort put into them often get too much undue attention, and garner votes for them based moreso on the matter of agreement with the conclusion than the convincingness of the argument presented. However, this is a qualitative concern that we should probably handle with solutions such as voting subpar answers down, and perhaps writing a more thorough competing answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do not think that Single Word Requests are &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; prone to the problem of mere agreement versus convincingness. I think it is a problem inherent to the Stack Exchange format that the Primarily Opinion Based closure reason seeks to fix. If Single Word Requests are especially prone to this though, I would suggest that it is actually quite the opposite problem that they have. It is too easy to write a mediocre answer, which then gets the lion's share of the exposure over a more thoughtful answer that would take more time to craft. There have been occasions where I have started to take time to thoroughly write out an answer, and then dropped it just because somebody else made the same suggestion first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, regarding these questions in particular, these seem like relatively common sentiments and I feel like I have a good answer for at least a couple of them on the tip of my tongue, but can not actually remember for the life of me what they are. Nevertheless, at the time they were closed, I would have closed all of those questions for the lack of context disclosure reason we imposed for Single Word Requests in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T19:22:53.000" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T19:22:53.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-04-18T21:06:07.620" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So: what should the site’s attitude be to answers in comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that “the site’s attitude” is of no consequence if it is contrary to Stack Exchange policy on this matter, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2653/why-are-answers-being-posted-in-the-comments-on-the-question/8171#8171&quot;&gt;as I have explained previously&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us be clear. There are certain rules that are within the jurisdiction of individual StackExchange sites — for example what subjects are off topic — and certain which are outside that jurisdiction as integral to the StackExchange model. The following message, which appears in the comment box of every StackExchange site, refers to a general policy which is outside the jurisdiction of the moderators of this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements.&#xA;  Avoid answering questions in comments.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who do not understand how this is integral to the Stack Exchange model are recommended to view the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt; by one of the founders of Stack Exchange. If you don’t like this model, you should set up your own site or go elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have previously been admonished for commenting on ‘comments in answers’, and asked to flag such comments to the moderators instead. This I have been doing, so I may well be the user mentioned in the question. I have had no way of knowing which of the moderators have been disregarding flags that I have raised, but have been encouraged recently that at least one moderator — @MetaEd — has been responding to them according to the clear rules. However, I am now disturbed by what appears to be the attitude of the moderator who made this post, and, as I have stated in a comment to the question, I think that any disregard of these rules by the moderators would constitute abuse of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T14:59:19.270" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T14:59:19.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11379" CreationDate="2018-04-19T16:34:51.733" Score="8" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suggestions are sought for interesting questions or motivators for interesting questions to ask, both general ideas and specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mechanics of the SE system (closing, voting, moderating) have been a good method for policing quality. Encouraging prior research, being specific and clear, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But over the years there have always been complaints about the quality of questions. There is one kind of quality that is not addressed and that is: content, the actual subject matter of the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a history over the years in this direction (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10628/could-should-we-create-a-collection-of-exemplary-questions-to-encourage-high-qua&quot;&gt;links in this meta question&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And like the weather, no one ever seems to do anything about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some suggestions for questions, or general areas of questions from which we could generate a little more easily, ideas for questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this may be a little weird because why ask a question you may already know the answer to since actually asking it may come across as inauthentic. But I think asking interesting questions would be a good spur to ELU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am looking for is suggestion areas to help those with experience here to create questions with &lt;strong&gt;interesting&lt;/strong&gt; content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a vague start:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Log topics&lt;/a&gt; - There's a recent LL post about how people pronounce 'sts' at the end of words. What about 'sks' and 'sps' (as in 'whisks' and 'crisps'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;old William Safire &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/by/william-safire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Language&lt;/a&gt; articles for which he botched the answer (eg all of them?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Things in the news. I personally feel the 'covfefe' question was idiocy (I have stronger words for all the surrounding commentary), but at least it was interesting. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accents produced in media: I'm always watching TV shows that come from the UK (I'm AmE). And so I always have questions about pronunciation and local varieties.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is Yoichi? Those were always great questions even when mechanically off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, we want non-closable questions - ones that aren't simply &quot;Hey, about them funny Brits and the way they talk with their lorries and crisps and lifts and shit?&quot; - and that are more like &quot;Truck in the US, Lorry in the UK: what is the provenance of the different usage and shit?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm not looking for people to copy paste Grammar Girl questions and then answers. More to get inspired by a Grammar Girl question then have people try to answer it without having Grammar Girl do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="100179" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T15:33:47.093" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T15:33:47.093" Title="Where are our new Yoichis or How I stopped worrying and started to love the ELU-ba-bomb" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11376" CreationDate="2018-04-19T19:01:41.383" Score="8" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/442305/is-bachelorette-replacing-spinster-and-other-synonyms&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of an English term&lt;/a&gt; and I finally decide to ask on ELU (English Language &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). I provide some prelimirary  research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) the origin of the term,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;usage evidence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as suggested by Google Books,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) some &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;usage examples&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from current online articles of the term in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interest is on if, how and where the term is becoming &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;more commonly used&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;its usage vs other synonyms&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or closely related terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question attracts a few answers, of which one provides hard evidence about the trend in usage of the term vs other closely related terms,  somewhat confirming my initial impression&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result of all this is a shower of downvotes and closevotes because   the question apparently is not within the scope of ELU site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help understand what exactly is not within ELU scope. On which sites, according to close voters,  should questions about usage of English terms be asked on SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T21:25:54.957" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T20:09:18.560" Title="“Not within the scope of this site”?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11375" CreationDate="2018-04-20T08:19:28.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;User385 &lt;em&gt;randomnumbers&lt;/em&gt;'s statement, the bit about the shower of downvotes, is slightly hyperbolic but the question, as presented, is perfectly appropriate for EL&amp;amp;U. It ticks all the boxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EL&amp;amp;U regular downvoters are doing a superb job of housekeeping and discouraging those few regular users, who still remain, from contributing in the future.  I suppose that is the scope, i.e. their personal mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No wonder then that the general quality of new questions continues to be so low, and no wonder that the number of regular contributors continues to fall. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If newcomers, &lt;strong&gt;especially native speakers&lt;/strong&gt;, are stressed out by guidelines, norms, and demands that linked sources be attributed, etc. etc. they will think that the site is run by a set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=anal%20retentive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anal retentive&lt;/a&gt; busybodies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T08:19:28.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11374" CreationDate="2018-04-21T01:07:03.247" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a lovely question with lots of potential that just got closed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/442708/112436&quot;&gt;How did Trump supporters construe his bugaboo term, &amp;quot;corruption&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could people interested in Mitch's question, and Mitch too of course, please take this sad orphan of a question as a guinea pig and try to rescue it for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I would like to see an answer here that describes how someone learned to write a well-posed ELU question, similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11364/112436&quot;&gt;answer I wrote recently&lt;/a&gt; (which has a whopping net vote of 4, double that of its nearest neighbor), where I described how I learned to write a well-posed ELU answer.  (I'm not the one to write a full answer here, since I clearly haven't yet learned how to write a well-posed ELU question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T13:40:51.850" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T13:40:51.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11374" CreationDate="2018-04-22T05:30:14.230" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I become disappointed with the inflow of current questions on EL&amp;amp;U, I resort to one of two strategies—neither of which involves worrying about how to improve the quality of new questions. Either (1) I plunge into the unanswered questions queue to see whether there may not be an overlooked, answer-worthy question lurking in there, or (2) I look into old questions—especially from the 2010–2012 era, when answers tended to be considerably more off-the-cuff than they are today—in search of one that has not drawn a thoroughly researched answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions languishing in the unanswered questions queue for more than a week or two tend not to be especially fascinating, but they have escaped closure—and that automatically makes them a better bet for answering than any arbitrarily selected question in the new questions lineup. You never have to worry about a question disappearing on you midway through your answer, and it is fairly rare for such questions to be closed after you answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very old questions, meanwhile, are often very good and quite interesting, despite (in many cases) not meeting the &quot;show research&quot; requirement that has emerged in the past three or four years and now dominates close voting. Because many of these old questions were originally disposed of in answers of one or two short paragraphs with no supporting references, answering them more rigorously can improve the long-term value of EL&amp;amp;U to future site visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the dwindling proportion of good incoming questions, I observe that every good question that appears on English Language &amp;amp; Usage reduces the universe of nonduplicate good questions by one. After eight years of at least occasional good questions, it is hardly surprising that new good questions seem to be coming in at a diminishing rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, I think that imposing the &quot;show research&quot; requirement has made it harder for questioners to ask questions of the type that Yoichi Oishi has asked for many years here, without being gadded by demands to show what they've already found out elsewhere in trying to answer their own question. As a matter of fact, Yoichi Oishi himself has had to deal multiple times in recent years with such demands. Many of his questions take this form: &quot;I have encountered [some expression] in [some publication]. Here is the paragraph in which it occurred, for context. I would have thought that the expression meant [something] because [some reason], but it seems to have some other meaning here. Can someone explain what is going on?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that these are great questions, and often they require considerable effort to answer well. But by imposing &quot;show research&quot; as a central requirement of all new questions, we make asking such questions unduly burdensome and we represent ourselves as fundamentally hostile to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For several years now, we've tried to upgrade the quality of posted questions by slapping the &quot;show research&quot; requirement on everything in sight, but it seems to me that doing this has not improved the quality of the questions we receive. So maybe the time has come to get rid of that close reason and to bring back &quot;too localized&quot;—a close reason that actually goes to the merits (or demerits) of a question, rather than throwing out questions without even reaching the question of whether they are useful, difficult, or otherwise interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of a recent Yoichi-like question that is on the verge of being closed for lack of research, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/442091/what-is-the-difference-between-served-and-given&quot;&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;justice served&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;justice given&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; If you think that the answer is obvious, you haven't looked at dictionary definitions of &lt;em&gt;justice&lt;/em&gt; and tried to work out which ones apply to which of the two expressions asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, EL&amp;amp;U gets lots of harder-than-they-look questions, but our reflexive inclination to throw them out if they don't show adequate research discourages people from coming back and asking additional questions—and I suspect that many close voters consider that a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T04:23:12.897" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T04:23:12.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11383" CreationDate="2018-04-23T13:31:58.040" Score="-2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/443013/was-nabi-tajima-died-this-week-at-117-born-in-the-19th-or-20th-century&quot;&gt;Was Nabi Tajima born in the 19th or 20th Century?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within no more than seven hours, over one thousand people (or fewer people many times) thought the question was worth looking at; three people provided answers; twenty up-voted one answer; ten up-voted another; four up-voted the third and comments indicated a lively interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was achieved by putting this question on hold, may I humbly ask ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T15:45:49.570" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T15:45:49.570" Title="Why was a question generating a thousand views in seven hours put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11382" CreationDate="2018-04-23T14:09:49.540" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be frustrating to have one's question summarily dismissed. Let me try to provide some measure of objectivity from the perspective of a bystander.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is essentially the same as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/338499/142322&quot;&gt;Does the nth century contain the (100n)th year?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which deals with the century associated with a year ending in &quot;00&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that question is fairly well-known: centuries start with the x01 year and end with the y00 year, where y=x+1. I didn't participate in the closure of this question, but I gather that this 'common knowledge' was what led to the closure of both questions for lack of research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The numbering of centuries is only tangentially related to the English language. It's arguable that the Romans, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/338504/142322&quot;&gt;lacking the zero&lt;/a&gt;, began this numbering scheme, and they didn't use English as their primary language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T14:09:49.540" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-23T17:17:28.647" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Help Center only has information on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reset-password&quot;&gt;resetting a lost password&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I lost my password; how do I reset it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have lost your password, please visit our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/account-recovery&quot;&gt;account recovery page&lt;/a&gt; and enter the email address that you signed up with. We will email you a list of your account credentials and a link to reset your password.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T17:33:18.903" Title="How do I change my account password?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11384" CreationDate="2018-04-23T17:33:18.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/210913&quot;&gt;profile page&lt;/a&gt; on the main site, click on the following options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings &gt; My Logins &gt; change password&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T17:33:18.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11363" CreationDate="2018-04-25T23:16:32.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The following was blatantly plagiarized from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4680/41273&quot;&gt;my answer on ELL meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an idea how this could work. Currently there are two sidebars that show related questions: &quot;Linked&quot; and &quot;Related&quot;. If there was a third, it could contain links to questions on another site (or a few sites). You'd see something like this on each site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r9FH7.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU showing ELL Linked Questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sidebar would be limited to one or two sites where the content overlaps heavily. I don't think it would be helpful to have links from all of Stack Exchange since a lot of those links will be to comments along the lines of &quot;edit your answer because according to [link] the grammar is wrong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record (again) the comment of mine you're quoting &lt;em&gt;wasn't about this feature&lt;/em&gt; at all. What I was referring to is an actual banner that shows up underneath the question that announces that a duplicate exists on another site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZJoWX.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Translation: This question has answers on &lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow in Russian&lt;/strong&gt;: Unresolved external character reference (possible causes)”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is what Russian speakers (meaning that Russian is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Accept-Language&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) will see when they visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/12573816/6083675&quot;&gt;that particular question&lt;/a&gt; (i.e the feature already exists, connecting English Stack Overflow to Russian Stack Overflow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know Russian or Google Translate, you can read more about this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BE%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F-%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2&quot;&gt;[ассоциация-вопросов]&lt;/a&gt; tag on the Russian site's meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T23:16:32.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11396" CreationDate="2018-04-27T20:26:59.717" Score="10" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: how to address low-quality posts by new-users without being a jerk or otherwise scaring them away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Introduction&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing this question after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1&quot;&gt;this Stack Overflow blog on the need to be more welcoming&lt;/a&gt;. This blog focuses primarily on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40124781&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implicit bias (links to accessible BBC article)&lt;/a&gt;, which I have not perceived as a problem here on ELU (note that I'm not saying it isn't a problem here, I just haven't consciously experienced it as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual reason I am writing this is not the SO blog, it is because of some run-ins I've had with new users. The problem I experienced is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a new user posting a &lt;strong&gt;well-intentioned answer&lt;/strong&gt;, however, it doesn't meet the standards because it doesn't answer the question or it lacks sources (or both).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past I have pointed out my concerns, asking the user to add sources or point out that their answer is interesting but doesn't answer the question. I see how this may come across as somewhat passive-aggressive: in their view they have taken the time to sign-up, write an answer and then I barge in saying I (we, the community) expect them to have higher standards. Obviously I can take a bit more time and &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sweet-talk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sweet talk&lt;/a&gt; it a bit, but that doesn't change my message: you (the new user I am addressing) have to put in more effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of expressing my concerns is the following comment I made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please edit your comment in your answer. Also add sources to support your answer if possible. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/443621/is-there-a-word-for-the-stopping-of-a-downward-movement-specifically/443648#comment1065845_443648&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment is concise, not impolite, but also stone cold, it comes across as ordering the new user around. The new user doesn't feel very welcome and I come across as the bad guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then some other community members add comments, I will cite those as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi Adam, welcome to the site. It's good that you're enthusiastic (15 posts already!) but I'm afraid they're not being well received as they don't match our site's standards. This site aims for questions to be answered &amp;quot;the way an expert would&amp;quot;. This means explaining your answers and justifying them with dictionary definitions and links to them. See e.g. Nigel J's answer for a good example of how to do this.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/443621/is-there-a-word-for-the-stopping-of-a-downward-movement-specifically/443648#comment1065878_443648&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answers are appearing in the Low Quality review queue and are at risk of being deleted if they're not improved.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/443621/is-there-a-word-for-the-stopping-of-a-downward-movement-specifically/443648#comment1065941_443648&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U. As AndyT said, there are rules for the site and the whole SE network. You can check these out at the help center or take our tour and visit the English Language &amp;amp; Usage Meta. Thanks! &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/443621/is-there-a-word-for-the-stopping-of-a-downward-movement-specifically/443648#comment1065956_443648&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two users are polite, but I don't think it comes across to the new user as very welcoming. Putting myself in their place I could read into the three comments as follows (in order of the first to the third; playing devil's advocate): 'nice try, but we expect (even) higher standards', 'they are even appearing in the low quality queue now, at risk of deletion', 'here are some links: go educate yourself'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could easily &lt;strong&gt;vote down, delete or otherwise deter those users&lt;/strong&gt;, but that's not very welcoming. Furthermore, it &lt;strong&gt;counteracts&lt;/strong&gt; the many &lt;strong&gt;calls for attracting more users&lt;/strong&gt; who are willing to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Defining the problem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting it briefly, the problem, I think, is how we (myself included) approach these new users. We (tend to) come across as bossy, ordering them around and saying they aren't doing well enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not blaming myself or any of the other community members because it really is difficult to say you expect higher standards &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; not come across as bossy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tackling this problem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am proposing to open a discussion to look into ways of telling new users that their answer doesn't meet community standards &lt;strong&gt;without scaring them away&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so, I think we need one or two good sentences conveying this and a more extensive explanation in the help centre or on this Meta. Since there are many of these well-intentioned answers we can easily copy these two sentences and a link to the extensive explanation to those new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: if you think I am reading too much into things and you don't perceive this as a problem then don't hesitate to add a comment (or even an answer if the mods will allow it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found this post on Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6798/repository-of-polite-responses/11120#11120&quot;&gt;Repository of polite responses&lt;/a&gt;. It provides many good template comments, however, I still think it might be a good idea to have some Meta or help centre post to link to (to make sure the new user doesn't feel scolded). There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;, but that might need to be extended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it doesn't mention (low) quality at all. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/search?q=quality&quot;&gt;Searching the help centre for 'quality'&lt;/a&gt; doesn't yield results explaining 'low quality &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt;' (there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/quality-standards-error&quot;&gt;entry for low quality questions&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T17:13:59.107" Title="Becoming more welcoming to new users, how?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|etiquette|new-users|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11388" CreationDate="2018-04-28T08:35:24.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider this the most important part of the blog post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Too often, someone comes here to ask a question, only to be told that&#xA;  they did it wrong. They get snarky or condescending comments for not&#xA;  explaining what they’ve tried (that didn’t work). They get an answer…&#xA;  but the answerer gets scolded for “encouraging ‘low-quality’&#xA;  questions.” They get downvoted, but don’t know why, or called lazy for&#xA;  not speaking English fluently. Or sometimes, everything actually goes&#xA;  well, and they get an answer! So they thank the poster… only to be&#xA;  told that on Stack Overflow, “please” and “thank you” are considered&#xA;  noise. All these experiences add up to making Stack Overflow a very&#xA;  unwelcoming place for far too many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's striking that SO experiences the same problems as EL&amp;amp;U, as expressed in a variety of posts on EL&amp;amp;U meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility is that there's something wrong with the basic model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model is entirely based on discipline--what you must do, what you must not do--not only as a new user, but as an experienced and frequent user, one who, as Dan Bron points out, provides and curates the entire content. Scolding, admonishing, instructing.  Telling users, new or not-so-new, what we do not do (homework, proofreading, SWRs without a sentence, reference questions, things easy to look up, etc. etc. etc.) and what we must not do (especially answering questions in comments and failing to provide references).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all done in an effort to improve the quality of the questions and the answers, but the process itself--the curating--is time-consuming, mind-numbing, and productive of an annoyance that starts to show up in comments.  (Did you look up those words?  And just what was it that you didn't understand? Where is your research?)  And these comments are the main reason for the perception that the site is unwelcoming.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would recommend an experiment: Give up all the negative feedback and the instructions.  Ask a questioner to clarify only if you really want additional information so you can answer. Ignore any questions you consider too poor or confused to pursue.  (While avoiding negative feedback, I'd accept using the voting tools. Let people go to the help pages to figure out why a question or answer was downvoted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clean up the leftovers with a couple of programs--delete any questions that have no comments after 48 hours (or whatever), delete any questions with no answers after 3 days or so.  Let the voting do the curating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T08:35:24.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11388" CreationDate="2018-04-29T12:56:46.110" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there is the occasional rude individual, perceived but unintended slight, or even an otherwise polite user acting out of frustration, I suspect that the lion's share of the tension comes from a mismatch between who the site says it's for and who actually turns up to ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; says EL&amp;amp;U is for: linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who turns up: mostly, people who &lt;strong&gt;aren't&lt;/strong&gt; linguists, etymologists or serious English language enthusiasts. By some accounts, the number of EL&amp;amp;U users in the first 2 categories can be counted on one hand with fingers left over.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's time to rethink the wording in the tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T12:56:46.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-29T14:41:50.120" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand the impulse to vote to close any new question about the use of &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; as a duplicate, since most of them are. However, I don't think that any two questions about &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; are necessarily duplicates of each other: we ought to take care to link questions that are actually asking about similar situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think people neglected to do this when &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/416408/will-divide-the-people-who-whom-most-need-to-be-brought-together&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;...will divide the people (who/whom) most need to be brought together&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (formerly titled &quot;Tricky who vs. whom question&quot;) was closed as a &quot;duplicate&quot; of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/190011/whom-or-who-for-object-of-a-subordinate-clause-inside-a-relative-clause&quot;&gt;“Whom” or “who” for object of a subordinate clause inside a relative clause&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (which is itself (correctly) closed as a duplicate of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181992/the-use-of-nominative-whom&quot;&gt;The use of nominative &amp;quot;whom&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;“Whom” or “who” for object of a subordinate clause inside a relative clause&quot; deals with a complicated edge case where &quot;who&quot; is traditionally preferred, and by prescriptivists considered the only grammatical option (although some descriptivist grammars such as Huddleston and Pullum disagree and say that &quot;whom&quot; should also be considered grammatical in this context for certain speakers). An answer talking about this complicated topic is mostly irrelevant to the question of whether &quot;who&quot; or &quot;whom&quot; should be used in sentences like &quot;With a two-party system, our nation will divide the people (who/whom) most need to be brought together.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize Simon Kuang says &quot;I feel like it should be &quot;whom&quot; as it's the object of the main clause&quot;, but if you look at the pattern of bolding in his question, it seems to me that this was actually a mistaken or confused  way of saying &quot;not the subject of the relative clause&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel like it should be &quot;whom&quot; as it's the object of the main clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The interviewed several candidates &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; he thought&lt;/strong&gt; had the experience and qualifications he required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, John Lawler's answer doesn't seem to directly address the matter of case assignment not being based on the role of the antecedent in the main clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the current situation of this question being marked as a duplicate of &quot;“Whom” or “who” for object of a subordinate clause inside a relative clause&quot; is not very good. For this reason, I have voted to reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/416408/will-divide-the-people-who-whom-most-need-to-be-brought-together&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;...will divide the people (who/whom) most need to be brought together&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;; if people think it ought to be closed, I would suggest marking it as a duplicate of some other question, like the general question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56/what-s-the-rule-for-using-who-and-whom-correctly&quot;&gt;What’s the rule for using “who” and “whom” correctly?&lt;/a&gt; or some more specific question that is actually about the same kind of situation like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14761/a-patient-who-is-or-a-patient-whom-is&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;a patient who is&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;a patient whom is&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a moderator feels it is sufficiently uncontroversial, I suppose I would also be satisfied with the duplicates list being edited to add one or more of these questions (I'd prefer it is the &quot;“Whom” or “who” for object of a subordinate clause inside a relative clause&quot; question was actually removed from the duplicates list, but I can understand that a mod might not want to take that action unilaterally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-04-29T15:02:00.033" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T15:02:00.033" Title="Not all &quot;whom&quot; questions are interchangeable duplicates" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11388" CreationDate="2018-05-01T07:24:49.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is undeniable that the minimum site expectations of an acceptable answer must be clearly explained to the new member:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) it should answer the question as asked by OP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) it should be adequately supported by appropriate references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we only need create a standard message that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;says just that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and is prefaced by a welcome to ELU. This standard message can be easily copy-pasted as a comment by any user. This type of thing is being done to guide both answers and comments from new users on Interpersonal Skills SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sample message (comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language &amp;amp; Usage and thank you for posting this answer. Please note that answers on this site should actually answer the question (rather than be a commentary or anecdote) and answers need to be supported by adequate references. Could you update your answer to follow these guidelines? Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; for more details.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am not saying anything about &quot;high standards&quot;, &quot;low quality&quot; or &quot;linguists&quot; so there is only a focus on the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; expectations of an answer from this website. This sort of comment can only rarely be interpreted as unwelcoming or hostile to a new user. We are simply pointing them in the right direction and I don't see any &quot;negative&quot; wording here. Can you think of any other &quot;minimum requirements?&quot; -- if so, then please point out in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="231519" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T07:37:34.463" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T07:37:34.463" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11395" CreationDate="2018-05-01T11:58:07.247" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post on this Meta and on this SE, so apologies if this is out-of-scope. Feel free to delete / close / downvote, but any advice is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this post is the latest blog post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I come from StackOverflow (the programming sibling) and have noticed that there is a &lt;strong&gt;huge&lt;/strong&gt; variation in what people consider welcoming / helpful responses to SO questions and sarcy / dismissive responses. The &lt;em&gt;same response&lt;/em&gt; is considered by one set as the former and another set as the latter!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it becomes a long-winded argument with no answer. I have a specific question about whether the &lt;strong&gt;tone&lt;/strong&gt; of an answer is dismissive / disrespectful. I'm not talking about dictionary definitions of words used, but specifically about whether sarcasm / irony in a dismissive tone is evident in an answer. &lt;strong&gt;Is this in scope for StackExchange English Language &amp;amp; Usage?&lt;/strong&gt; I considered Interpersonal Skills, but I'm not sure it's a good fit there either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can either link to a specific question &amp;amp; answer, or paste it into a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/366050/9209546&quot;&gt;this is the answer&lt;/a&gt; I would want considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;this is not about moderation&lt;/em&gt;, it's about considering whether and how we can improve the way we communicate. If the consensus is the answer is well-meaning and welcoming, so be it - no work needs to be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="294704" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T15:19:25.390" Title="Can English Language &amp; Usage help with making StackExchange more welcoming?" Tags="|discussion|questions|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2018-05-02T08:50:33.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11393" CreationDate="2018-05-01T13:44:40.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking multiple questions which I hope others will also attempt to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's your title question &quot;Can English Language &amp;amp; Usage help with making StackExchange more welcoming?&quot;. This is a bit broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's your main content question &quot;Is it in scope for ELU to judge tone for a question or answer somewhere on SE?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is the link to a given answer to a &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; question that you want judged&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One, for the title question, sure, ELU can help by itself being more welcoming. ELU has some analogous problems to SO: we get lots of single word requests, synonym requests, writing advice, when to use 'a' or 'an'. Many of these are frivolous or could have been done much more easily using an online dictionary or thesaurus. And for these drive-by 'do it for me' requests can be handled abruptly or with finesse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two, there is the question of adjudication, should ELU be a place to judge the intention/sarcasm/tone of SO questions. Whether on SO or on the web or in life in general, things like tone are just too context dependent to have a specific process to handle, it's sociology. I don't think it would be useful for ELU to be the mediator. &lt;strong&gt;It should be handled by mods; that's what mods are for&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not like people on ELU are necessarily good judges of tone themselves just because they know the history of the word 'post' back to PIE or they know the difference between a fricative and an affricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three, for the linked answer, it is an answer &lt;em&gt;on meta&lt;/em&gt;. People on meta are expected to be experienced and understand the culture of that site. So being factual or abrupt, while it may be construed as confrontational on main, is the most informative. Of course, being a jerk is uncool anywhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think main.ELU is a good place to judge specific questions on main or meta anywhere SE, or anywhere anywhere (meta.ELU would be OK for discussion about a 'main' situation). There may be more detailed question about a particular word and its taboo status or genderedness, etc or general question about what is a marker of sarcasm, those are totally on topic on main.ELU. But to act in the position of a mod discussion for the other sites is silly. Let the mods do it or bring it up in that site's meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T13:44:40.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11393" CreationDate="2018-05-01T15:19:25.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take is that some of these issues could fit on EL&amp;amp;U (main), but they would need to be very carefully posed to be about a specific English usage issue. We have a general &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-proofreading-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;no proofreading&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4515/what-the-proofreading-close-reason-is-for&quot;&gt;&quot;unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), so just posting the text of a comment or answer and asking &quot;is this OK, and if not how can it be more welcoming&quot; would be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, we've had a number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=scare%20quotes&quot;&gt;questions and answers about &quot;scare quotes&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, most of which were on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you wanted to ask a question about alternatives to such uses of quotation marks I think that would probably be on-topic. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking when the use of quotation marks will be perceived as &quot;scare quotes&quot; rather than just quotation is more borderline. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking if they're ever OK is probably off-topic (too broad, primarily opinion-based, etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a more &quot;meta&quot; (in the non meta-vs-main sense) language use question you would probably want to vet that here. It might be on-topic, but might be a better fit at Writing.SE or Interpersonal Skills (though my experience there is that if you're looking for a scientific approach you probably won't get nearly as many responses as more general questions get--see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/q/9847/378&quot;&gt;Is there any research showing whether sandwich feedbacks are more effective than other forms of feedback?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T15:19:25.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11388" CreationDate="2018-05-01T15:34:45.203" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I'm not sure that this'll count as an answer. Or even be useful. It's just my ramblings based on the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep, I totally agree that experienced users commenting can come across as condescending. I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; I'm guilty of it - hell, two out of your three example quotes are mine! (That said, I thought I'd done a better job than normal on those of avoiding condescension... apparently not!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why does this happen then? Mainly it's because I come across a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of low quality answers (this may be due to frequenting the LQP review queue...), and what I want to do is downvote them into oblivion as being useless. But that often seems mean to an innocent newbie who's only trying to help. So I try and bottle my frustration and write helpful comments instead... but they are often still coloured by my frustration. Often I'll write a comment and then delete it (and skip the review) when I realise I can't Be Nice while saying what I want to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, canned comments can help with this, as at least they'll have been written by someone in a calm state of mind. I think canned comments on the &quot;review answers from new users&quot; would be useful. And a bank of canned comments (much bigger than that you linked) would be useful. NVZ had some good ones (though maybe he's more active on ELL than ELU? I'm not sure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mari-Lou A in comments has suggested &lt;a href=&quot;http://idownvotedbecau.se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idownvotedbecau.se&lt;/a&gt; as a good site for canned comments. On SO people will just post a link to the relevant page from that site. One from there that's very relevant to us is &lt;a href=&quot;http://idownvotedbecau.se/noresearch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idownvotedbecau.se/noresearch&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;[Note that I've seen these a few times and thought they were fake/joke links, and the &quot;no research&quot; in the comment was the whole message. If you follow the link there's actually a nicely written out explanation of why &quot;no research&quot; is a problem.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the real problem is that the barrier to posting as a new user is too low. Users can come in from google, read a question, and decide to post an answer &lt;em&gt;without knowing anything about the site&lt;/em&gt;. They don't even need to read any other answers on the page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to get people to edit their answers to fit our Standards, after they think they'e already done, is not going to make them happy. We need to enforce Standards &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; they post. We need to tell them, up front, something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please don't post an answer unless it meets these criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It adds something new that others haven't already covered&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's backed up by evidence. Dictionary definitions, properly referenced (see [here]{link} for how to reference), are often the best way to do this. Alternatively examples of actual usage may be good, but again they need to be referenced. NOTE THAT YOUR NATIVE EXPERIENCE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existing info when you try and enter an answer is minimal. If a newbie tries to enter a one word answer, they get told that it's too short. But they don't get told &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's too short. (Or do they? I may be wrong. I think it just says &quot;we're looking for answers with some sort of explanation&quot;? Maybe we need to be less polite here and more forceful: &quot;*If your answer doesn't meet the minimum character limit, it's because your answer is  &lt;strong&gt;no good&lt;/strong&gt;. A one word answer may be wrong or it may be right. We want answers that &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; they're right, with explanation and research to back it up.*&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem is that many users simply don't care. For your linked example there was a &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt; answer already, but the newbie didn't follow its example. I then pointed the newbie to the model answer, but he chose to ignore the suggestion to incorporate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence why I think we should make posting harder. Will it put people off? Hell, yes. But those who are prepared to understand the Standards are those who we want to join, because they'll actually respect the Standards. The lazy ones who want to post their one word idea and leave aren't who we want anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how implementable my ideas are, or whether they'd require SO staff to write something specific for ELU. This whole post can probably be disregarded as rambling. I feel better for writing it, and considered not posting it. But I've decided to go ahead and post it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="91730" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T09:28:58.337" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T09:28:58.337" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11400" CreationDate="2018-05-02T05:52:07.597" Score="9" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, this question was migrated from EL&amp;amp;U to Linguistics.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27845/syntactic-trees&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27845/syntactic-trees&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this type of question is &lt;em&gt;expressly&lt;/em&gt; disallowed by the Linguistics posting guidelines.  Here is the relevant meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/529/should-we-make-questions-about-specific-syntax-trees-off-topic&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/529/should-we-make-questions-about-specific-syntax-trees-off-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be done to prevent similar questions from being migrated to Linguistics in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27100" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T12:04:15.630" Title="Please don't migrate &quot;help me draw a syntax tree&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11401" CreationDate="2018-05-02T12:12:44.233" Score="-1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;A cardinal guideline across all SE sites is the dictum to &quot;be nice&quot; in one's comments and responses. Based on my limited time on &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; it would appear that participants to this site are in compliance with that policy but appearances can be deceiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to &quot;take the temperature&quot; of &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; as suggested in the query title would be to release information wrt to &quot;negative behaviors.&quot; Obviously the question then becomes how best to define and measure &quot;negative behaviors.&quot; The next question concerns the time frame for any reporting, e.g., past month? past year? since site inception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to choose a single metric for &quot;taking the temperature&quot; of the site it would be to summarize the number of comments that have been &quot;flagged&quot; for not being nice and break that down by reputation segment including collapsing some of the bigger segments down to 10,000+ to maintain privacy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/poYSh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/poYSh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is probably best answered by the site moderators but the opinions of other participants are, of course, welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="146418" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T16:46:05.623" Title="&quot;Taking the temperature&quot; of EL&amp;U" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11397" CreationDate="2018-05-02T12:49:45.543" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I migrated that question in response to an explicit flag on it from a serious contributor to the Linguistics SE site specifically asking for the question to be migrated over to Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being myself no more than at best an infrequent contributor to the Linguistics site, and seeing as how the flagger was more than that, I took that flagger up on their request without further investigation. They’re someone who knows what they’re talking about in matters of general linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you “stop” such things is easy: you politely ask that the ELU mod team please coördinate more closely with mod teams of other sites as needed before migrating questions to sites they are not themselves themselves frequent contributors to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this means talking to Alenanno, who was sleeping at the time. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T12:49:45.543" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11399" CreationDate="2018-05-02T16:46:05.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only database tool available is SEDE, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schema-documentation-for-the-public-data-dump-and-sede/2678#2678&quot;&gt;quick look at the schema&lt;/a&gt; shows that comment flags do not feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are, of course, in the main database used in by the Stack Exchange engine; the &quot;reporting database&quot; made available via SEDE does not include this data. I believe that the &lt;code&gt;PostsWithDeleted&lt;/code&gt; table is available to moderators (and may well not include 10k+ users), but that's the only nod to what we might wish to search for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only flags which are included are post flags raised by users who cannot vote (and which are thus a surrogate for close/reopen votes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PendingFlags.FlagTypeId ⋈ FlagTypes.Id&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   :   &lt;br&gt;&#xA;   :  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;   :  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite apart from this rather fundamental problem in providing the data, I would question the premise in focusing on &quot;Rude/Abusive&quot; flags. They may simply be raised by someone who is thin-skinned, or (as has happened) as a vendetta against a particular user. &lt;em&gt;Accepted&lt;/em&gt; flags might be a reasonable metric, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T16:46:05.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11388" CreationDate="2018-05-03T03:14:07.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the first introduction to your pages. Pretty nice, &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;? Nowhere does it say &quot;Please begin your tour by looking at our standards for answers and questions. Then dive in. You will be encouraged to modify either your questions, or answers, or comments along the way. We hope you find it inviting enough to return and stay awhile.&quot; (Can you tell I wrote ad copy at one time?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fXeSb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fXeSb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="292469" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T03:14:07.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T08:17:19.140" Score="5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised. I did this without any intention to be offensive. Yet I was told I was deeply offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: @RobbieGoodwin &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441779/can-most-native-english-speakers-pronounce-the-alveolar-trill-the-r-in-its-mos?noredirect=1#comment1067755_441779&quot;&gt;posted&lt;/a&gt; an anecdotal comment under my question, saying that he has failed to show native Korean and Japanese people the difference between sounds L and R. He also said that specialists suggest foreign sounds may be impossible for adults to learn. I appreciated the comment and found the problem interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the comment was an anecdotal one and did not provide citations, I felt that I can only &quot;dig deeper&quot; in this problem if I ask a separate question, which this problem mandates. I &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/3533/is-it-possible-for-an-adult-to-learn-sounds-of-completely-unrelated-languages-th&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; this question on Language Learning SE. I quoted @RobbieGoodwin's comment there. I felt that, while asking a question, I was supposed to explain the basis of my doubts (&quot;share your research&quot;) and also that posting a valid anecdotal story can help attract better answers (since, I felt, the prevailing opinion on LLSE was that it was a myth that adults couldn't learn foreign languages well enough, I thought people would think twice before simply restating this opinion when faced with a valid story of grave difficulties in this regard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt in right to quote @RobbieGoodwin's comment there since: (a) this comment, as everything on this site, is public anyway; I'd never publicly quote a PM; (b) I thought the quote added value to my LLSE question; (c) I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/41100/are-records-of-peoples-deaths-and-births-from-ancient-times-wildly-unreliable&quot;&gt;done&lt;/a&gt; something similar before and the author of the quoted comment hadn't taken offense; (d) I did this in good faith, not meaning be offensive in any way to @RobbieGoodwin, but only meaning to dig deeper into the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, unfortunately, @RobbieGoodwin took offense. He said that what I had done had been an &quot;offensive disgrace&quot;; suggested to take the issue to the Moderation; asked me to, IIUC, delete my question on LLSE and promise the whole community to never do anything like that in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I must say I'm kind of an... interpersonal relationships oaf. It's by far not the first time I'm doing something in good faith, only to see (to my surprise) other people very angry at me. For this reason I'm asking this question... to learn if I've indeed gravely run afoul of etiquette. I'm deeply sorry if anyone takes even more offense from this question – it is, again, not my intention to offend anyone – but I'm figuring that asking this question is the only way to learn if I've indeed done something wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if it turns out that I indeed was offensive, I'm going to delete my question on LLSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final note: I'm not sure if I should ask this question on English SE meta or LL SE meta. I chose this site, (though I'm not sure if this is the correct choice), because if I did anything wrong, I did so against English SE folks and not against LLSE folks; so if I am to apologize and ask if I have indeed wronged; I should do so before English SE and not LLSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113589" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T15:08:16.467" Title="Is it offensive to use someone's comment as a basis of another question on its own?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|etiquette|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2018-05-03T09:12:27.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Objectively, what you did seems to be above board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjectively, the use of the word &quot;Sadly&quot; in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/q/3533&quot;&gt;new question&lt;/a&gt; may have been taken to have cast aspersions on the commenter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sadly, this comment comes without a proper citation, even though it cites &quot;developmental (whatsit)ologists&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary reason for offense given by the commenter seems to be explained by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441779/can-most-native-english-speakers-pronounce-the-alveolar-trill-the-r-in-its-mos?noredirect=1#comment1068219_441779&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s hardly the point. You appear to have taken a Comment posted here in good faith, transferred it to a different Stack - where it seems to have garnered 3 upvotes - and then attempted to disparage it as though it had been intended as an Answer. Shame on you! Further, you attempted to transliterate a guarded suggestion into a contentious statement, then disparage that by irrelevant comparisons. Please, don't do that again, to me or to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be worthwhile to note to the commenter that your 'sadness' was related to your desire to research the topic further, rather than a reflection of the commenter's lack of citation &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the 'sadly' aside (quoted above) from your new question doesn't obscure what you're asking in that question, but it does help remove the appearance of mocking the commenter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T09:40:32.750" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T09:40:32.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2018-05-03T11:11:58.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your title here is very misleading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is ok to quote a comment or part of an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is bad about your LL question is the framing. You're disparaging the contents of the quote. You're coming across like the commenter has done a terrible thing by not providing a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you needed to say was that you're &lt;em&gt;looking&lt;/em&gt; for references for the contents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T11:11:58.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2018-05-03T13:29:01.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly the person you quoted was offended, as I take from this quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441779/can-most-native-english-speakers-pronounce-the-alveolar-trill-the-r-in-its-mos?noredirect=1#comment1068209_441779&quot;&gt;from this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gaazkam, what you seem to have done there appears very deeply offensive. You need both to rectract it and to apologise and more usefully please, promise the community you will never again do anything like that. More&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The offended user (I will refrain from naming because I don't mean to aggravate te situation) explained in subsequent comments why they felt offended (they actually used for than two comments, but I think these comments sum it up well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441779/can-most-native-english-speakers-pronounce-the-alveolar-trill-the-r-in-its-mos?noredirect=1#comment1068219_441779&quot;&gt;First comment I cite on this:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s hardly the point. You appear to have taken a Comment posted here in good faith, transferred it to a different Stack - where it seems to have garnered 3 upvotes - and then attempted to disparage it as though it had been intended as an Answer. Shame on you! Further, you attempted to transliterate a guarded suggestion into a contentious statement, then disparage that by irrelevant comparisons. Please, don't do that again, to me or to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441779/can-most-native-english-speakers-pronounce-the-alveolar-trill-the-r-in-its-mos?noredirect=1#comment1068221_441779&quot;&gt;second comment I cite on this:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You alone suggested a “consensus among specialists”; wholly fair if you alone take the criticism. You alone introduced both “completely unrelated languages” and “never heard before”. Quite how you thought “recognize them in hearing” differed from “hear them” is for you to explain… You alone added to Korean or Japanese and English for example English, Persian or anything else derived from Proto-Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My opinion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When first reading your question on LL, I didn't think it was particularly offensive, you quote the comment with attribution (which you are allowed to do under the cc-by-sa 3.0 licence the comment was provided under).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even after reading the offended user's explanatory comments, I don't think you did anything wrong necessarily, given that ELU is (advertised as) a site for English language professionals and the user presented their comment as a fact, even using the term &amp;quot;Developmental (whatsit)ologists&amp;quot;, which they later explained was an &amp;quot;obvious, hopefully humorous attempt&amp;quot; but initially that might not have come across that way to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What you might change&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that you change your question a bit. Firstly, you could be less suggestive in your question, for example phrase it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any truth to the statement I quoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly you might replace the &lt;strong&gt;sadly&lt;/strong&gt; (in your LL question), I don't think it's particularly offensive personally, but some people here seem to think it is. Therefore, you &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-censorship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;could self-censor&lt;/a&gt; by rephrasing it a bit nicer, for example like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cited comment might have been anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there might be any truth to it, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T13:29:01.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2018-05-03T13:56:56.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it offensive to use someone's comment as a basis of another question on its own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question as posed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sad but true&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; that a member cannot really object if their comment is quoted with proper attribution anywhere on the Stack Exchange network, and is made the basis of a new question, answer or comment. Jeff Atwood's canonical &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; on attribution makes it clear that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all the content contributed to Stack Overflow or other Stack Exchange sites is cc-wiki (aka cc-by-sa) licensed, intended to be shared and remixed. We even provide all our data as a convenient data dump, seeded by us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But our cc-wiki licensing, while intentionally permissive, does require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should always provide the link to the original content and if it is a comment, try to quote the full text of the comment within your own post, because the original comment can get deleted or moved to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard guidelines for attribution when &lt;em&gt;other sites reuse&lt;/em&gt; material originally generated &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; reflect our expectations of appropriate practice and could just as well guide us when we quote others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, this is considered &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot; by Stack Exchange rules and etiquette as long as you don't misquote the author, and there are many examples of such usage, at least one of which involved my own &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/414440/a-single-word-for-non-domesticated-animals-that-live-among-humans#comment990387_414442&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;, which I was very pleased to see was turned creatively &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39758/is-it-illegal-to-own-a-rabbit-in-queensland-unless-youre-a-magician#comment164783_39758&quot;&gt;with attribution&lt;/a&gt; into a very well-received question on another SE site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39758/is-it-illegal-to-own-a-rabbit-in-queensland-unless-youre-a-magician&quot;&gt;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39758/is-it-illegal-to-own-a-rabbit-in-queensland-unless-youre-a-magician&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is considered good manners to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;inform the author&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; yourself in a comment, before &lt;em&gt;or after&lt;/em&gt; the event, as the user kindly did in the &amp;quot;rabbits&amp;quot; case. Since you &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441779/can-most-native-english-speakers-pronounce-the-alveolar-trill-the-r-in-its-mos?noredirect=1#comment1067975_441779&quot;&gt;did that as well&lt;/a&gt; then you are all right here. If they take offence at the content or tone of your post, as occurred here, then you can only apologize and assure them that you meant no harm. You can also try to correct the defects perceived by the author. That doesn't mean that using someone's post with correct attribution is in any way against the etiquette of Stack Exchange websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;It is sad but true that expressions like  &amp;quot;sadly&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sad but true&amp;quot; can create dire interpretations not intended by the writer. They are not important expressions but only &amp;quot;typical&amp;quot; terms and readers should not read meanings not made explicit by the writer, but you can consider avoiding such &amp;quot;controversial&amp;quot; expressions in future posts on Stack Exchange.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T15:08:16.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11409" CreationDate="2018-05-03T20:53:13.527" Score="7" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/444372/87426&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I believe duping it to a question that was closed as off-topic is a bit disingenuous. I believe there was general consensus the question itself was on-topic. Is this really okay? Wouldn't it have been better to let the on-topic question stand on its own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87426" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T12:48:45.070" Title="Closing on-topic questions as duplicates of questions closed as off-topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|specific-question|dupehammer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11408" CreationDate="2018-05-03T21:24:33.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A kind golden hammer wielding participant has reopened my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we have/develop a rule or procedure for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point of closing questions, I thought, was to make it easier to find authoritative answers to clear questions, so we wouldn't be reinventing the wheel all over the place, with some wheels coming out better/more useful than others, and the whole site looking like spaghetti code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how closing a question with a closed question helps with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(However: if there's something &lt;em&gt;inherently&lt;/em&gt; bad about the way the new question is posed, then by all means guide the OP (in this case me) toward improving the question, including closing it if necessary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T21:24:33.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11408" CreationDate="2018-05-03T21:58:37.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that the &quot;off-topic&quot; close reasons include our three custom reasons, and that &quot;off-topic&quot; simply means &quot;does not conform to one or more expectations&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, one of those expectations is that the question should be of a type &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;allowed in the list in the Help pages&lt;/a&gt;. But other expectations are explicitly stated in the close reasons, and these appear in the banner on closed posts. &lt;strong&gt;You need to read the banner text.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Questions on &lt;strong&gt;choosing an ideal word or phrase&lt;/strong&gt; must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the question may well have conformed to the list in the Help, but it didn't meet the standards required for its tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, it has answers. Those answers may well suffice for other questions, such as the one you reference here. If they do not, then questions which are closed as duplicates should be edited to say why the nominated duplicate doesn't provide an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly reasonable for questions which are on-topic but lacking in detail to be nominated as duplicates, if the answers are reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be more of a grey area where a nominated duplicate has no answers and has been closed already. However, it's also entirely possible that closing as a duplicate of such a question is exactly the right thing to do (eg in the case where both questions are of an equal standard). In such a case, the closure serves as a pointer to question quality: &quot;Look, here's a question just like yours which was closed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe a general bar on nominating closed questions as duplicates is unsustainable. That must be permitted. (And if it were A Bad Thing, then the system would not allow it at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case in point &lt;strong&gt;here,&lt;/strong&gt; there's probably enough in the question not to close it for want of a sample sentence; and it's probably sufficiently different from the &quot;duplicate&quot; that reopening is reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T21:58:37.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11408" CreationDate="2018-05-04T12:48:45.070" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duplicates should point to a question that has at least one good answer that answers the question being closed as a dupe. In my opinion, the quality of the answers of the proposed duplicate are a bigger problem than the question being closed. The scoring of the handful of answers for the proposed dupe target seemed pretty low for EL&amp;amp;U, which means to me that the community wasn't that involved and the answers are suspect. If the questions are truly duplicates, the one with more community participation should be the &quot;master&quot; question in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a simple thing for a mod to reopen a question that was closed for other reasons and re-close it as a duplicate to allow the higher quality question to thrive and attract answers that are better vetted by the community. A question that was closed for lack of research can be closed as a duplicate of a question that does have proper research without somehow tainting the well-asked question with &quot;off-topicness&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only hard and fast personal rule I have for choosing duplicates is that I never choose a question that has no significantly up-voted answers unless the questions are exact duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T12:48:45.070" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11416" CreationDate="2018-05-09T02:14:16.357" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently exchanging communications with several German English learners. We correct each others mistakes and try to explain why they are mistakes if it's not a cut and dry solution like conjugation etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've sent a few explanations I think clarify their subjects clearly but I want to get secondary opinions from somewhere to make sure I'm not mistaken myself or leaving anything out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw the suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question is about learning English, use ELL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the site and it seems like it's for the learners themselves so I don't think it's appropriate for my intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I start posting my explanations and get blasted for not following the rules intent of the forum I figured I'd ask if it was appropriate first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping to use some SE site because I find the answers to be the best found in a general from a Google Search but I'm new to this site in particular and want to make sure I'm using it correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus: If this is not the place for posting questions like the ones I laid out, could you point me in the right direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank in advance for any feedback you provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297645" OwnerDisplayName="W.Harr" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T18:21:51.667" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T18:21:51.667" Title="Appropriate Usage of English Language SE Forum for English Tutoring" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11417" CreationDate="2018-05-09T15:40:12.633" Score="8" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should we do with comments in languages other than English? This isn't about referencing specific non-English terms. It's about comments that are completely written in a language or languages other than English. For &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/445392/what-is-the-word-for-the-plastic-cover-you-so-often-see-protecting-products?noredirect=1#comment1070578_445392&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; (user names suppressed here; UPDATE: the referenced comments have since been deleted):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hmm... meinst du nicht, der Krug hat wiedermal eine kleine Entkalkung verdient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ja, aber es ist eine WG und der Krug gehört mir nicht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Krug, oder Bild?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;das Bild hat eine Entkalkung verdient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ah, ja, kenn ich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recognise that we live in a multicultural society, so anyone can use any language we like (there's always google translate); or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;note that Stack Exchange communication is typically conducted in the English language, so everyone &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; use English as the 'trade language'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I suppose it's something of a non-sequitur to point to the E in EL&amp;amp;U and require discussions to be in English since the &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; being English doesn't necessarily require the &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; about that topic to also be in English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:43:06.753" Title="Comments that are not in English" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11421" CreationDate="2018-05-09T15:52:44.827" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of this question was edited substantially changing the nature of the original query, making the existing answer nonsensical, and rendering the question a duplicate of other questions on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/444325/is-were-scattered-a-construction-of-passive-voice-or-a-simple-past-tense&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;were scattered&amp;quot; a construction of passive voice or a simple past tense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Original question asked if the sentence was past simple or passive - it is in fact, of course, both of these. The pertinent and important point here is that if the sentence was past simple, the Original Poster needed to include it in their corpus of past simple sentences from the original source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurpisingly and unfortunately, as the title had been changed top make it a duplicate, it was then closed as such. The linked to questions do not address the Original Poster's concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to revert the title to its original form and reopen the question - or alternatively link it to a duplicate of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T14:06:39.993" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T14:06:39.993" Title="Can we reopen this question or link it to an authentic duplicate, please? [reopened]" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11412" CreationDate="2018-05-09T16:08:26.493" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is based on the test case you posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/445332/142322&quot;&gt;Difference Between Since and For When Referring to Past Event&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is straddles the border between EL&amp;amp;U and ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL isn't just for English language learners to ask questions of each other. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;ELL tour&lt;/a&gt; says that it's for questions &quot;&lt;em&gt;about learning the English language&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. That makes your (main site) question squarely on topic at ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is for questions &quot;&lt;em&gt;about English language and usage&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. As written, I think your (main site) question is phrased a little too heavily as something of a dialogue for the community to check. The primary question statement in the body of your question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to be sure that what I have told them is correct. If I'm missing any piece to this answer, then please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a little too close to proofreading for comfort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you reword your question slightly, processing it a little to highlight the issues in the question's title and adding some links to justify your assertions, you might have a direct question that the community can sink its teeth into, as opposed to just &quot;Yes, you got it right&quot;, or &quot;No, you missed such and such&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;such and such&quot; part is the crux of the matter - answers should relate directly to the question you actually pose, rather than be a general discussion that is merely &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; to the question you pose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that you use the conversation to simply provide context to your question, but then frame the core of your question separately and clearly. If you do this consistently, you would be following in the footsteps of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot;&gt;Yoichi Oishi&lt;/a&gt;, a non-native English speaker who probably holds the record for number of EL&amp;amp;U questions posted, and whose questions have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/please-everyone-details-please&quot;&gt;cited&lt;/a&gt; as examples of well-posed questions (the citation is on ELL, but it also applies to EL&amp;amp;U).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T16:08:26.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11414" CreationDate="2018-05-09T20:01:50.630" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dan Bron’s comment on the question is very practical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments aren’t meant to be private conversations between individual participants, but a public conversation about the post they’re attached to, which anyone can contribute to. Given, yes, the “E” in “EL&amp;amp;U”, the only language we can rely on all participants here sharing is English, so comments should be in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We needn’t be martinets about this, an occasional comment here or there in a non-English can be tolerated (e.g. for two users to quickly signal they have a common linguistic background, Latin jokes, etc), and certainly no need for reprimands, but extended conversations should be &lt;em&gt;verboten&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why the help pages specifically recommend English “to the best of your ability” for questions. The only language you can assume that all site experts will know is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, other languages in comments sometimes come in very handy when trying to clarify a question with someone who is not a native English speaker. There is not and should not be a hard and fast rule about this, particularly in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T14:32:52.580" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T14:32:52.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-10T14:30:31.377" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;New member here. Why do some people answer the question in the comment section? What is the difference between a comment and an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user297810" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T09:05:51.513" Title="What is the difference between a comment and an answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11419" CreationDate="2018-05-10T14:42:33.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 2/3 way down is an explanation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short Answers are meant to answer the question.  Comments are to ask for more info or clarity regarding the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296960" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T14:42:33.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11415" CreationDate="2018-05-10T20:30:02.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been reopened and the title now reflects the OP's original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T20:30:02.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11419" CreationDate="2018-05-11T09:05:51.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange aims to build a database of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;community-specific&lt;/a&gt; questions and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/277445/4983400&quot;&gt;good answers&lt;/a&gt;. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;'good' answer&lt;/a&gt; should address and actually answer the question, provide good reasons for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is a good answer (dictionary definitions complete with links and citations, or logical reasoning, etc), answer &lt;em&gt;good questions&lt;/em&gt;, and be expressed clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments to the question, on the other hand, are intended to be brief messages aimed primarily at improving the question: requests for the OP to post research they have conducted, requests for context or other clarification, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd venture to say that the EL&amp;amp;U community is just about in full agreement on the above. The problem lies with answers that don't meet all the criteria for being 'good' answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, otherwise-good answers to 'bad' questions are sometimes voted down. Answers that are correct but unsupported are sometimes voted down. Even if we discount the voting (they are 'meaningless internet points', after all), there is the issue of whether an unsupported answer achieves the aims of building the long-term Stack Exchange database. There is, of course, the question of how high individuals consider the bar is for the answer section - this varies from individual to individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do some people answer the question in the comment section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These 'not-quite' answers don't fit anywhere but they especially don't fit in the answer section. Hence people post them in the comments section. There is a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about what to do with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more direct question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11237/142322&quot;&gt;the moderators' views on comments in answers&lt;/a&gt;, one moderator deliberately &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11237/qualitative-boundaries-for-what-it-means-to-answer-in-comments#comment47496_11237&quot;&gt;posted&lt;/a&gt; a not-quite-answer as a comment. This appears to validate (to some extent) similar not-quite-answers in comments on the main site. Another moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11237/qualitative-boundaries-for-what-it-means-to-answer-in-comments#comment47520_11237&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt; that he is looking into this topic more comprehensively, and will perhaps provide something more definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T09:05:51.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11388" CreationDate="2018-05-11T17:13:59.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;SO could help with &lt;strong&gt;setting an expectation of required editing&lt;/strong&gt; of OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&amp;quot;We understand that if you are confused or stuck it might be hard to word your problem on your first attempt (but please try! (link to how to ask a question) you will get better results)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&amp;quot;Most questions will need clarification from you - please be prepared to quickly edit your question especially in the first hour after asking based on comments you receive asking for more information. You may need to make multiple edits to your question.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&amp;quot;It is natural for volunteers expect the return courtesy of contributing time to improving a question and the overall quality of the site benefits from clear questions with clear answers that will be useful to others in the future.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&amp;quot;Insufficient answers can also be a problem. Please do not be offended if another answer very similar to your own but with more detail is added if your answer is less complete or insufficient to the guidelines of the given SO forum&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that last point, I think a culture shift here to encourage a more complete version of the same general answer could be encouraged rather than discouraged because it came in later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, a comment might give a person a window of time to improve an insufficient answer but rigid rules about that would not make sense - that is more a matter of board custom.  Also, two of the same 'answer' could both be useful with different information for each and rather than voting one down and one up, perhaps people could be more inclined to vote both up or remain neutral on one and vote for the one they feel is more complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T17:13:59.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-11T20:36:29.207" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/166215/would-stative-verb-in-past-an-exception&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was migrated to English Learners site. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; (though &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Learners Help&lt;/a&gt; center also says it) it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this seems like a perfectly reasonable question and I think it belongs better on English Language  &amp;amp; Usage as opposed to those learning English. Why was the reasoning behind the migration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="229008" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T21:36:03.743" Title="Why was this question migrated" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11424" CreationDate="2018-05-11T21:36:03.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I migrated it because it was from someone who is trying to learn English, and didn’t understand a would-be “rule” they were presented with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T21:36:03.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11427" CreationDate="2018-05-13T18:41:32.950" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'am editing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/445959/what-is-the-difference-between-is-and-are&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, can I replace the default edit summary with my own edit summary of rollback? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What way should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298438" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T19:14:04.717" Title="Can I replace the default edit summary of rollback with my own edit summary?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11426" CreationDate="2018-05-13T19:14:04.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's how to add an edit summary to a rollback:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Open up the revision history on the post you wish to roll back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Click &quot;edit&quot; on the revision you wish to roll back to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Type your reason for rolling back into the &quot;Edit Summary&quot; field.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/41954/323179&quot;&gt;Shog's answer to Could we be permitted to provide a reason for rolling back?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so that it's clear, the revision history can be found by clicking on (e.g.) &quot;edited 2 hours ago&quot;. (For your question that should take you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/445959/revisions&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you don't have full editing privileges, which are unlocked at 2,000 reputation, you will only be able to do this on your own posts. If you did need to do a rollback on someone else's post, you can get the markdown of the revision you want to rollback to with the &quot;source&quot; link in the edit history, then edit like normal, replacing the body with what you copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T19:14:04.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-13T14:48:37.003" Score="9" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;They ask me about the grammar and I don't know how to explain. So I need a book to teach me how to teach them how to write and why I make the changes I tell them to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241330" OwnerDisplayName="hossein" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T15:57:36.473" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T17:00:27.010" Title="As a native English speaker, what source should I use to teach non-native speakers writing?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2018-05-13T19:51:33.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Requests for teaching resources are arguably off-topic for this site, and are even explicitly off topic for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; (see 'Requests for resources' &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). On the other hand, they may be on-topic for &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Language Learning Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, the ELL StackExchange has a Resources List on its meta, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/735/resources-for-learning-english&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as books that explain to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; the systematics behind why certain changes seem necessary to you as a native speaker, I would recommend a good comprehensive descriptive grammar of English. At present, the most authoritative one is arguably &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt;. And if a topic is not covered there, it may well be covered in CGEL's predecessor, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0582517346&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ComGEL&lt;/a&gt;. A third well-known modern comprehensive grammar is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0582237254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman&lt;/a&gt;. Another one that's worth a look is&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0198612508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OEG&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among English grammars that are not comprehensive, but also not specialized to one area of grammar, look at e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0415287871&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Downing&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521612888&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huddleston and Pullum (Student's)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I want to mention two books that deal with specialized areas of grammar. For the articles, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0003705617&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins COBUILD English Guides: Articles&lt;/a&gt; is unparalleled. And for intricate details about the English tense system, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/311018589X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar of the English Tense System&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155553" OwnerDisplayName="linguisticturn" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T21:45:57.083" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2018-05-13T22:04:44.373" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They ask me about the grammar and I don't know how to explain. So I need a book to teach me how to teach them how to write and why I make the changes I tell them to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very difficult to explain grammar to non-native speakers. You might try using English language elementary school textbooks as sources for their writing exercises. Many really good basic education textbooks are available online, and free for public use (no copyright limitations). You should get some excellent teaching ideas from them, and could copy relevant pages for use in the classroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=j.+c.+nesfield&amp;amp;sin=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=j.+c.+nesfield&amp;amp;sin=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these have helped generations of Americans learn English in public schools:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=dick+and+jane&amp;amp;sin=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=dick+and+jane&amp;amp;sin=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there is much to be learned from vintage school textbooks (or &lt;em&gt;old-school&lt;/em&gt;, if you will).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273295" OwnerDisplayName="Bread" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T22:04:44.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2018-05-15T00:09:52.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just some suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once they get started, you might want to try FCE/CAE/CPE materials. In addition to the four 'talents' you mention, they also focus on use of English, which is all about using the correct prepositions and idiomatic use of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.examenglish.com/CAE/cae_use_of_english1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this example cloze test at CAE level&lt;/a&gt;. Just by letting them fill in those tests and discussing them afterwards they will come across a wide variety of idioms and it's much more fun to learn by practicing than by having a list and repeating them over and over again (speaking from experience here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another great way to learn is by listening (including video). Suggest to them to listen to BBC radio (Radio 1 is fine, doesn't have to be BBC 4, although the latter has more talking and less music). If they have the time, tell them to binge television series or current affairs (including US late night shows), whichever they like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remind them that they can listen to music while doing other things like commuting or sporting. Also tell them to find television programmes that they like, so they can watch them to relax rather than it being one more 'work/study' thing they have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also check if your / their university library has some books on for ESOL (aimed at learning English as a foreigner / non-native).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T00:09:52.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11433" CreationDate="2018-05-15T13:16:59.720" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using phonemic script, it customary to put the IPA inside slanting brackets, like this: /slɑ:nti brækɪts/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, these often seem to break across lines on SE posts, so we get the following kind of problem occasionally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;blah blah blah blah blah /&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;slɑ:nti brækɪts/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks particularly bad if there's only one phoneme in between the brackets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;blah blah blah blah blah /&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to stop this happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T15:16:04.280" Title="Slanty brackets" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11432" CreationDate="2018-05-15T15:16:04.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE Markdown appears to filter out &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;nobr&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags, although browser support for this element seems to have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/nobr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;removed anyway&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Unicode solution appears to be the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode10.0.0/ch23.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word joiner&lt;/a&gt;&quot; character, inserted after the opening slash and before the closing slash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Word Joiner.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; U+2060 &lt;code&gt;word joiner&lt;/code&gt; behaves like U+00A0 &lt;code&gt;no-break space&lt;/code&gt; in that it indicates the absence of line breaks; however, the &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;word joiner&lt;/em&gt; has no width. The function of the character is to indicate that line breaks are not allowed between the adjoining characters, except next to hard line breaks. For example, the &lt;em&gt;word joiner&lt;/em&gt; can be inserted after the fourth character in the text “base+delta” to indicate that there should be no line break between the “e” and the “+”. The &lt;em&gt;word joiner&lt;/em&gt; can be used to prevent line breaking with other characters that do not have nonbreaking variants, such as U+2009 &lt;code&gt;thin space&lt;/code&gt; or U+2015 &lt;code&gt;horizontal bar&lt;/code&gt;, by bracketing the character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character does appear to be supported by the font in use at EL&amp;amp;U, though I cannot speak for others used elsewhere on SE: /&amp;NoBreak;A&amp;NoBreak;B&amp;NoBreak;C&amp;NoBreak;D&amp;NoBreak;E&amp;NoBreak;F&amp;NoBreak;G&amp;NoBreak;H&amp;NoBreak;I&amp;NoBreak;K&amp;NoBreak;L&amp;NoBreak;M&amp;NoBreak;N&amp;NoBreak;O&amp;NoBreak;P&amp;NoBreak;Q&amp;NoBreak;R&amp;NoBreak;S&amp;NoBreak;T&amp;NoBreak;V&amp;NoBreak;X&amp;NoBreak;Y&amp;NoBreak;Z&amp;NoBreak;&amp;amp;&amp;NoBreak;⁊&amp;NoBreak;Ƿ&amp;NoBreak;Þ&amp;NoBreak;Ð&amp;NoBreak;Æ&amp;NoBreak;a&amp;NoBreak;b&amp;NoBreak;c&amp;NoBreak;d&amp;NoBreak;e&amp;NoBreak;f&amp;NoBreak;g&amp;NoBreak;h&amp;NoBreak;i&amp;NoBreak;k&amp;NoBreak;l&amp;NoBreak;m&amp;NoBreak;n&amp;NoBreak;o&amp;NoBreak;p&amp;NoBreak;q&amp;NoBreak;r&amp;NoBreak;s&amp;NoBreak;t&amp;NoBreak;x&amp;NoBreak;x&amp;NoBreak;y&amp;NoBreak;z&amp;NoBreak;ƿ&amp;NoBreak;þ&amp;NoBreak;ð&amp;NoBreak;æ&amp;NoBreak;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can enter the character using the HTML entity &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;NoBreak;&lt;/code&gt;, which seems to be to be the friendliest for both author and future editor. Entering the character directly and it will be unseen, to frustrate and to get deleted; entering the numerical entity is friendly for machines, but not humans who are not insufferable Unicode pedants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/&amp;amp;NoBreak;slɑ:nti&amp;amp;nbsp;brækɪts&amp;amp;NoBreak;/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /&amp;NoBreak;slɑ:nti&amp;nbsp;brækɪts&amp;NoBreak;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T15:16:04.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11435" CreationDate="2018-05-17T11:09:13.240" Score="9" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a question asking for the original source of a quotation. Some digging around the 'net has thrown up an &lt;em&gt;avenue for further exploration&lt;/em&gt; but not an answer. What I've found (and their links) would probably take at least a couple of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post what I've found as one or more comments, risking a &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt; &quot;don't answer in comments&quot; response (even though it's not [yet] an answer)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post what I've found as an answer, even though it isn't really. The details &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; lead to answer, but &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; lead down a blind-alley.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't post anything because I don't have a full answer. The problem is that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; probably can't take the digging any deeper, but someone else might be able to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither, as asking for the source of a quotation is off-topic (doesn't seem to be specifically allowed or disallowed; may depend on how wide the &quot;&lt;em&gt;and Usage&lt;/em&gt;&quot; part of the site is taken).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102510" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T11:32:35.617" Title="Comment(s) or Speculative Answer?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11434" CreationDate="2018-05-17T15:49:11.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you've come up with an answer, even a partial answer, it's better as an answer so it can be peer reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it isn't really even a partial answer, but it would help the asker do more research, it's better as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T15:49:11.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11414" CreationDate="2018-05-19T02:35:00.947" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No restrictions on language choice whatsoever please, so long as the content of the language is appropriate. United States and UK are the exception as far as it being unusual for people to mix languages in their discussions, and I see no a priori reason to treat a peculiarity of these two societies as a default rule of conduct for this website. In fact, it would enrich the website greatly if we had more contributors from Anglophone, multicultural countries like Nigeria or India, presenting questions and discussion on World Englishes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is commenting in German, you should probably know German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T02:35:00.947" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11414" CreationDate="2018-05-21T05:22:56.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I comment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should submit a comment if you want to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Request clarification from the author;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virtually all other uses of comments are either specifically forbidden, discouraged, or at least not recommended, and thus flaggable (as &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot; if nothing else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these criteria, I would think that comments in languages other than English would make sense when they facilitate either of the two first recommended uses for comments. That is, if it seems likely that the author of the question or answer will better understand either a request for clarification or an offered constructive criticism if it is in some language other than English, then go for it. Of course, if it turns out that the OP does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; speak the language of the comments, then they aren't going to serve any useful purpose and should go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, since the &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt; of EL&amp;amp;U is English, it makes sense to use English for the third use of comments (adding info to the post), since that info ought to be available to all users of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other uses of comments are inherently deprecated here, regardless of whether they're in a specific language or not. So, for example, having a back-and-forth in some language other than English might make it more obvious that users are having a &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Secondary discussion&lt;/strong&gt; or debating a controversial point&amp;quot;, which ought to happen in chat instead of in comments, but it's the nature of the comments that is the main issue, rather than the language in which they're occurring. Users should feel free to flag such conversations or not, using the same judgment as if the comments were in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T05:22:56.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2018-05-21T17:00:27.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a TEFL trainer, I always found R. Murphy's  English Grammar in Use very useful, especially for new native Engish speaking teachers who didn't have much knowledge of their own grammar, as they learnt the names of tenses and constructions from it along with their students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/gb/cambridgeenglish/catalog/grammar-vocabulary-and-pronunciation/english-grammar-use-4th-edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cambridge.org/gb/cambridgeenglish/catalog/grammar-vocabulary-and-pronunciation/english-grammar-use-4th-edition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one I recommend for more advanced students is Practical English Usage, by Michael Swan, which was recommended reading on my RSA Dip. TEFLA course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295655" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T17:00:27.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-22T11:05:37.770" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to ask such questions when it comes to the CAE exam, for example? &#xA;How do I come up with a title? &#xA;Do I just say &quot;Help with Reading Part 6 CAE&quot; or &quot;This CAE transformation&quot;... has anyone had experience with posting such questions? Can you give me some tips?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258531" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T11:05:37.770" Title="Questions that have to do with exam tasks" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11441" CreationDate="2018-05-22T18:29:12.670" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I give bounty points for a question and then I delete my account in the future will those bounty points be lost by the answerer when my account is deleted ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T18:32:45.080" Title="Are bounty points deducted on account deletion?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11440" CreationDate="2018-05-22T18:32:45.080" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, bounties remain: they just get transferred to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=bounties&amp;amp;sort=offered&quot;&gt;Community user&lt;/a&gt;. This is how Community has those &quot;83 Offered bounties for 10,650 reputation&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/89614&quot;&gt;employee's post on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user94657" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T18:32:45.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T10:21:27.630" Score="-2" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;Issues with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag have been discussed for years now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/986/the-plan-for-grammar&quot;&gt;12 April 2011&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6568/rename-the-grammar-tag&quot;&gt;29 January 2015&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the general consensus is that the tag is problematic as best and blacklisting it was brought up in both posts. Yet today, it is still the most frequently used tag with already 62 used this week as of now (as compared to, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, which only as 41). Not to mention, many of those questions are about basic English grammar (agreement, basic sentence structure, etc.) that any elementary textbook would cover and thus not acceptable by Stack Exchange standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not help that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Tour page&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; explicitly mention &quot;Grammar&quot; as something you should ask about either; most people with ELL questions have the term &quot;grammar&quot; on their minds so that green check mark is practically a magnet for ELL questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I think blacklisting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, shifting &quot;Grammar&quot; to &quot;Don't ask about...&quot; in bother the Tour page and help center, and including links to ELL there* will at least reduce the number of unwelcome and inappropriate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the potential downside of such actions, I really have not seen a case for the value &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; adds. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/grammar/info&quot;&gt;Its info page&lt;/a&gt; states that it is for &quot;questions about morphology and syntax,&quot; but both &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; are existing tags so I do not see how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; is supposed to be helpful. Moreover, in all three example questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; adds nothing to what the other tags already cover. Of course, if anyone has an example in which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; is indispensable I would be very interested in seeing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;*Just in case anyone gets upset over this (I have seen the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7784/a-friendly-reminder-ell-is-not-elus-trash-can&quot;&gt;ELL not being EL&amp;amp;U's trash can&lt;/a&gt; discussion), I am aware that placing more links to ELL will increase the number of poor questions (lack of basic research, help-me-do-this attitudes, etc.) there, but fact is, every community will have to deal with bad questions on their subject matter. And while questions like &quot;Should I say 'John likes Mary' or 'John like Mary'&quot; are bad in any Stack Exchange, they are clearly bad ELL questions and not bad EL&amp;amp;U questions. I'm not saying they should be moved to ELL if they do land here, but them landing here in the first place is not fair to the EL&amp;amp;U community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299653" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T18:26:30.607" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T07:33:36.247" Title="Removal of both the [grammar] tag and its mention in the ELU tour and help center pages" Tags="|discussion|ell|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-27T22:54:56.573" Score="14" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been lucky enough to have answers upvoted; from time to time I get downvotes without any comments that might explain them. Generally the ups outnumber the downs. Sometimes I can see where an answer might fall short, and (if I have not done so already) I amend or edit it. Sometimes I just plain can't see why someone gave me a negative result. How do more experienced users deal with this? Just move on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44946" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T13:48:33.537" Title="Coping with downvotes" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2018-05-28T04:07:36.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons posts get down voted and most of them you can't really do much about. If you've looked over your answer and feel it's clear, addresses the question being asked, is supported by credible sources, doesn't have any polarizing language, etc. then I would assume the down vote is for some reason other than post quality and let it go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few of the things I imagine might be the cause of stray down votes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone is reading on their phone, and they went to scroll and fat fingered the down vote arrow without realizing it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone is having a bad day and spreading the misery to perfect strangers over the Internet makes them feel better for some weird reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone thinks I down voted one of their posts and is getting some petty revenge. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone's numerologist told them some number would mean good luck if it showed up and they're manipulating their reputation to make it happen and my post was just collateral damage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so many reasons for unexplained down votes that have nothing to do with what you've written, so if you're happy with your answer don't let a single drive-by down voter cause you to second guess yourself. If you're getting multiple down votes, then take a closer look. Often there are clues in comments and other answers that might point to things in your answer that are contrary to what the community is thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add that while I think you should review your answer if you're seeing some down-votes, I don't think they should cause you to change it if you're happy with it. You may want to tighten up phrasing that could be misinterpreted, or look for more supporting sources, but if the down-voters don't want to explain why, there's no use in speculating about it. Maybe the down-voter doesn't like posts that have contractions in them, or paragraphs with an odd number of sentences, who knows? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T13:48:33.537" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T13:48:33.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-29T07:00:47.920" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Spanish Language&lt;/a&gt; someone is asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/26407/12637&quot;&gt;what are the English terms used to designate the Spanish verb tenses&lt;/a&gt;. Some people (myself included) have closed the question as off-topic, because we cannot make translations from Spanish to other languages. But other people are asking to reopen the question as it is about the Spanish language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/1067/12637&quot;&gt;another question about the Spanish names of the same tenses&lt;/a&gt; the OP asked about, but that question seems not to answer theirs as they are asking for the English terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would like to ask you: would such question asking for English terms used to designate the Spanish verb tenses be on topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280768" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T14:54:44.710" Title="Would a question asking for English terms used to designate some aspects of the Spanish language be on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11447" CreationDate="2018-05-29T14:03:18.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO, as you're asking about field specific jargon, a more specific site would be more appropriate. Normal conversational English may not have terms for every Spanish grammatical term, but the jargon of &lt;em&gt;linguistics&lt;/em&gt; would. Asking for translations of linguistics terminology is something that would best be asked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the same way, if anyone wants to know the English translation of some Spanish legal terms, please point them to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Law site&lt;/a&gt;. Etc. etc. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T14:18:26.223" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T14:18:26.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11447" CreationDate="2018-05-29T14:54:44.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions might be on topic at more than one SE site. Yes, asking for help identifying the correct English word for something is on topic here. As curiousdannii pointed out, it might also be on topic at some other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose what you believe to be the most relevant site, and post your question there. If you do not get an answer, and you want to try another site, ask for migration, or else delete the original before re-asking the question on the other site. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068/171321&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site? – Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;”, an article from the Stack Exchange FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T14:54:44.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10728" CreationDate="2018-05-29T23:22:21.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some more references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED online&lt;/a&gt; At the end of an entry are usually pairs of words starting with the target word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get free access to the OED online if you have a public library card number in the US or UK). You may have to access &lt;em&gt;through&lt;/em&gt; your public library's website rather than directly through OED's sign-on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Book NGrams search&lt;/a&gt; If you search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=road+*_NOUN&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;road *_NOUN&lt;/a&gt; you'll get a list (and graph of historic frequencies) of all pairs of words that are 'road' followed by a noun (and you can change the obvious pattern to look for others). Note that this only gives you the highest frequency ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T23:22:21.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2018-05-29T23:56:22.820" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since down votes seem to be so frequently accidental or otherwise irrelevant to the quality of the work being judged -- why not &lt;strong&gt;eliminate all down voting&lt;/strong&gt;, and just allow up voting only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down voting is so negative and sometimes even aggressive or senseless, yucky. Especially when it's done anonymously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more positive venue might be really good for this place. Couldn't we at least try it for a period of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that most of us are a bit lazy when it comes to up voting, which is usually fine, because it's no big loss. And some popular answers get lots of votes anyway, which sort of makes up for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But down voting encourages too much negativity for those who are more sensitive to that kind of thing. There will always be a few immature, grudge-holding, or overly-competitive people who would make a warped game of systematically 'abusing' someone they've taken a personal dislike to, with their only weapon: down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just doesn't make sense to allow that sort of anonymous (therefore passive-aggressive) behavior at all. And it encourages such a negative, unpleasant, unfriendly environment -- which can't be that good for the site's general well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about this (why not eliminate down-voting) for several weeks now, and I hope this is a good time to present the idea, in response to this very important question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider eliminating down-voting as something which many of us might find produces a much more satisfactory experience on EL&amp;amp;U SE, while sparing us from asking these sorts of questions (i.e 'how to cope with it').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than forcing us to cope with something so negative, it would be better to proactively fix the problem somehow. Maybe eliminating down-voting is the right answer after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273295" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T23:56:22.820" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-29T21:25:21.557" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a good dictionary of collocations. On Amazon I found these two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MacMillan Collocations Dictionary&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oxford Collocations Dictionary for students of English&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any other dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300938" OwnerDisplayName="Tron43" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T01:08:22.150" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T13:26:31.857" Title="dictionary of collocations" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-31T01:35:53.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11452" CreationDate="2018-05-30T13:26:31.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might look into using corpora, some of which have excellent searching options once you learn their respective syntaxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find &lt;a href=&quot;https://corpus.byu.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BYU corpora&lt;/a&gt;, though lacking in curb appeal, to be excellent for collocations. Downside: You may need to create an account and/or limit your number of queries per day unless you're willing to subscribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299777" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T13:26:31.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T14:20:29.143" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can users edit what information is collected about them by SE, in particular information collected about them when they are NOT on EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you use the Stack Overflow Network, both Stack Overflow and third parties will use cookies to track and monitor some of your activities on and &lt;strong&gt;off&lt;/strong&gt; the Stack Overflow Network, and &lt;strong&gt;store and access some data about you, your browsing history&lt;/strong&gt;, and your usage of the Stack Overflow Network. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/cookie-policy&quot;&gt;[Link here]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users may be uncomfortable with SE collecting information about what they do when not on the SE metwork, or about them selling this information to  third parties whose behaviour they cannot control (privacy policy or no privacy policy). I have looked at my account settings from the &quot;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings&quot; tab and cannot see any way to do disable this there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T04:17:54.223" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T04:17:54.223" Title="How do I edit what information is collected about me by SE cookies?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11455" CreationDate="2018-05-30T23:07:54.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're asking about what SE has made available to you because of the recent GPDR laws in Europe (May 25, 2018).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your user profile and settings are still editable as you noted by the usual way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cookies are really an browser webpage device that helps among many things maintain state (so for example you won't have to log on again if you close the tab). It is not an editable thing. It keeps track . You may not be able to edit it but you can certainly delete it for any site so that a new cookie will be generated or turn them off for a site altogether. This may affect performance of that website. Each browser (Firefox, TE, Safari, etc) has it's own Cookie manager hidden somewhere deep inside that browsers settings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As to user frequency info, SE has a web page to download it at&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/prediction-data&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/prediction-data&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/prediction-data&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/users/prediction-data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these links give you the same file. The json file that gets downloaded has the data for all SE sites. It's not really visiting behavior but more which tags you have more points with (which is behavior of a sort).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that like cookies, this is not data you can edit, it's just a passive recording of what tags you have points with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in no way a representative of the SE dev team, so I do not know if this is it, or if more personal information will be added to this file (from inspection, my understanding of this file is that there is &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; more information about individual user behavior on this site that should be exposed per GDPR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T23:07:54.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T12:50:11.667" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love to browse through bookstores. You stumble across things you had  never considered or even thought of. You find books whose existence surprises you. It's always an adventure. I'd love to do the same with this site, but HOW? How do you browse through the archives of this site? Incidentally, I have to say that the tag requirement makes this a very user unfriendly site. I had to go through 15 of your pages before I could find tags that might be acceptable. I found four. I used these four, YOUR four. Guess what? They were rejected.  I was told to use tags, or something to that effect. What do I have to do to get something posted. It can be done. Others have done it. I should be able to do it. I just can't, not, at least in four days of trying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174939" OwnerDisplayName="Warren Jones" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T14:56:32.177" Title="How to browse through this site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T19:50:07.873" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Unanswered Questions queue is now 136 pages long, when viewed at the maximum setting of 50 questions per page. The link options at the base of page 1 of the queue make it very easy to jump to pages 2, 3, 4, 5, or 136 of the queue; and if you click the link for page 5, you gain easy access from the bottom of that page to pages 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 136 of the queue. Clicking the link for page 7 there fetches quick links at the bottom of that page for 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 136; and so on. And if you click the link for page 136, you'll get quick link to pages 1, 132, 133, 134, and 135.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This arrangement allows you to step through the entire Unanswered Questions queue—eventually—by clicking successive links. But if you want to see what's on page 70 of the queue (for example), the stepwise method is clearly unsatisfactory. The URL for page 1 of the Unanswered Questions queue is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered&lt;/a&gt;, which doesn't offer an obvious way to insert a different page number into the URL. But if you click the link for a page of the queue other than page 1, you'll find a more useful URL. The one for page 5 of the queue, for example, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?page=5&amp;amp;tab=votes&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?page=5&amp;amp;tab=votes&lt;/a&gt;). Once there, you can replace the number of the page identified in the URL with the number of the page that you want to visit (such as 70—that is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?page=70&amp;amp;tab=votes&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?page=70&amp;amp;tab=votes&lt;/a&gt;); double-clicking the altered URL will then take you straight to the desired page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my question: Is there a more direct way to accomplish this jump to a specified page of the queue, via a page search box or some other method that I'm not aware of? My approach works pretty well, but it does take two steps—clicking a link to a page other than page 1 of the queue, and then replacing the page number in the URL there with the desired page number and double-clicking the URL or pressing Enter/Return. A page search box would get me there in a single step. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T15:04:30.473" Title="Navigating the 'Unanswered Questions' Queue" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11462" CreationDate="2018-05-31T22:40:23.107" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;When my main account's reputation is 40, the meta account still shows me as 28 reputation. Where is the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298438" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T10:45:17.963" Title="Meta reputation is not in sync with the main reputation" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11461" CreationDate="2018-06-01T10:45:17.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes some time for the reputation to update. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/284058/7443472&quot;&gt;Reputation shown different in Stackoverflow and Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation takes time to update between websites. You just hadn't waited long enough. You see this sometimes even between SO and MSO - there is a time delay between when you receive reputation and when your profile on other sites will display it. Waiting ~15 minutes should give it enough time to update. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227655" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T10:45:17.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11460" CreationDate="2018-06-01T11:06:03.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another way of searching through the &lt;em&gt;unanswered&lt;/em&gt; questions. By using the advanced search tips on the main site, I entered  the following criteria in the search box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;answers:0 duplicate:no closed:no &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led me to this page &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=answers%3A0+duplicate%3Ano+closed%3Ano+&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=answers%3A0+duplicate%3Ano+closed%3Ano+&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there are 4,852 &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; questions with &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; answers that's a &lt;strong&gt;total of 98 pages&lt;/strong&gt; if one selects the fifty results per page option. The most upvoted question with 16 upvotes is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3123/what-is-the-plural-of-the-word-index&quot;&gt;What is the plural of the word &amp;quot;index&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it was merged with  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61080/plural-of-index-indexes-or-indices&quot;&gt;Plural of &amp;quot;index&amp;quot; – &amp;quot;indexes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;indices&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the search items may need further tweaking, by clicking on the options available you can get very different results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;4,852 results       relevance   newest   votes   active&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To narrow the results further still, add &lt;strong&gt;views:900&lt;/strong&gt; in the search bar, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=answers%3A0%20duplicate%3Ano%20closed%3Ano%20hasaccepted%3Ano%20views%3A900&quot;&gt;the number of pages&lt;/a&gt; will reduce to a more mangeable four pages, twelve pages if one sets the limit to 15 questions per page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T15:04:30.473" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T15:04:30.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11460" CreationDate="2018-06-01T12:16:31.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited a SEDE query aimed at finding unanswered question on Stack Overflow. This is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/370061/old-unanswered-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original for SO&lt;/a&gt;. My version can be &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/858158/questions-without-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;found here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes four inputs (the may be changed under the &lt;em&gt;enter parameters&lt;/em&gt; heading):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;start (lower bound for date when the question was posted, default early 2010)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;end (upper bound for date when the question was posted, default 2025, so there is no current upper bound unless the date is changed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;minvote (lower bound for vote count, defaults is 0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;minview (lower bound for views, default is 0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output is a list of questions (title of the question which serves as a link to the question), the view count and the score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the unanswered section on the main site also considers questions with only negative scored answers. This query only considers questions with no answers at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T12:16:31.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11467" CreationDate="2018-06-03T03:31:12.747" Score="7" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11444/coping-with-downvotes&quot;&gt;meta post on coping with downvotes&lt;/a&gt; in which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11446/299653&quot;&gt;ColleenV made an excellent point&lt;/a&gt; about how receiving multiple downvotes warrants a closer look at the post in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/448758/single-word-verb-for-to-do-from-scratch&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which has since gotten two downvotes (both of which were received after the two edits I made for clarity). I tried examining the question myself but was unable to find anything wrong with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I would appreciate any input pertaining to how I could have done it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addressing existing criticisms&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br/&gt; Some criticisms that were received as comments in the question include (1) why I couldn't just use multiple words and (2) that the question was trivial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue the first point is not a valid fault with the question because single-word requests are one of the most common topics on this platform and it's not like I was asking for a bizarrely specific concept. For the record, I did provide an explanation as to why I wanted a single word, but the impetus for a question shouldn't impact it's validity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user who made the second point apparently did not understand the question as the suggested &quot;obvious&quot; answer was not valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299653" LastEditorUserId="299653" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T03:44:52.707" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T12:35:00.807" Title="What is wrong with my question and how could I have done it better?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11167" CreationDate="2018-06-03T12:26:51.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xv8GC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Constructed Languages SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217886" LastEditorUserId="217886" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T16:27:28.020" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T16:27:28.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11465" CreationDate="2018-06-03T12:35:00.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the following points are very good advice, follow these tips and your question should be &quot;safe&quot; and always appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SWR questions are a very controversial issue on this site. There are users who would happily ban such requests from this site because they think they generally are poor quality questions of quiz-like nature. Anyway, &lt;strong&gt;one way to improve a question&lt;/strong&gt;, any question, &lt;strong&gt;is to show your research by adding links to dictionaries explaining why your findings didn’t answer your question&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… &lt;strong&gt;the points you are making now, if included in your original post, would have helped understand the nature of your question and possibly attracted less objections&lt;/strong&gt;. Always show your “research efforts” and explain why they didn’t bring the results you are looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In your case, you could google “from scratch” and look for synonyms and see what the results are. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11465/what-is-wrong-with-my-question-and-how-could-i-have-done-it-better#comment48634_11465&quot;&gt;@user3850720&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T12:35:00.807" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-06-03T12:35:00.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-04T23:24:54.610" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;When asking a question that lays out a complicated premise, and then asks why would that premise be wrong, one inevitably comes off rant-y.  But there are legitimate language questions (especially questions about new language constructs and neologisms) in which perspective is legitimately part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would this be off topic?  It seems like legitimate inquiry about language usage.  I honestly don't understand why someone wouldn't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232196" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T06:42:30.903" Title="Why are the questions of the &quot;correct me if I am wrong, but...&quot; nature off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11469" CreationDate="2018-06-05T06:42:30.903" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you said, asking a question of the format &quot;Isn't X Y?&quot; is likely to come across as ranty. So why not use a different format: use a title like &quot;Is X Y&quot; or &quot;Does X mean the same thing as Y&quot; or &quot;How is X different (in meaning) from Y&quot;? Those don't carry the same implication that you already think you know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a good idea to &quot;show your research&quot; on this site, which in the context of a question about the meaning of a word usually means quoting dictionary entries and explaining why they don't resolve your question. This can help show that you have a real question, and are not just trying to rant about some usage that you understand but dislike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good way to find some relevant online dictionary entry is to enter your word into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onelook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OneLook Dictionary Search&lt;/a&gt; and read all of the linked definitions. If you don't find anything relevant, you can show that you did research by saying something like &quot;None of the dictionaries indexed by OneLook Dictionary Search have anything relevant to say about (this meaning of) [word]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking a question about some contemporary usage of a word that you think is too recent to be in any dictionaries, you could quote a specific example to illustrate the usage that you want to learn about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T06:42:30.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11476" CreationDate="2018-06-09T09:06:13.250" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/437435/80007&quot;&gt;What is the moment when all oscillators aligned to make a jump called?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  was migrated without my knowledge. It seems perfectly fine on this site. The consequence is that it got rejected and therefore automatically deleted, even though it had 2 upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not sure why it was closed for being unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;closed&lt;/strong&gt; as unclear what you're asking&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Related:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;The Community user deleted my question! What gives? - Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/10249/260800&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T10:32:25.860" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T19:52:23.410" Title="Why did this question get migrated?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|migration|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11475" CreationDate="2018-06-09T19:52:23.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the important parts of the timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/q/47970&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; on Signal Processing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You got &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/a/47974&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You left the following comment on said answer:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] If you think there is no word for this, I think this question is better suited in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter K., a moderator on Signal Processing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/posts/47970/revisions&quot;&gt;migrated the question&lt;/a&gt; to ELU. (Whether this was due to your comment or something else only he can answer.) Nobody else on that site voted to close or migrate (otherwise their names would be listed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On ELU, the question attracted &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3jljc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many comments&lt;/a&gt;, none of which were from the people who close voted. One person, however, said that it would be &quot;better asked&quot; on another site and suggested the math or physics site. In my opinion, the close reason &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; can probably be taken at face value—anyone who hasn't seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fourier_series_square_wave_circles_animation.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an animation&lt;/a&gt; probably won't know what you're talking about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was closed on ELU, which rejected the migration, causing the ELU copy to be locked, and the Signal Processing one to be unlocked. A month later the question (again, on ELU) was deleted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt; because it was &quot;more than 30 days old, and ... it was migrated &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; a different site, and then &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;rejected&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Unfortunately, because the question here is locked, only a moderator can do anything with it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the above explains what happened. The next obvious step in this case, since it looks like some terminology request questions have been well-received on Signal Processing (examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/q/46601&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/q/47207&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;), is to see if it really is off-topic there (which seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1574&quot;&gt;exactly what you're doing&lt;/a&gt;). If not, then you can flag for a moderator here for it (and all the answers) to be unlocked and undeleted. At that point it could be edited and reopened by you and other regular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T19:52:23.410" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11478" CreationDate="2018-06-09T20:03:08.553" Score="4" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've felt that encouraging alternate answers that are helpful, but not necessarily definitive, addresses some of the concerns with 'answers in comments' meta-discussions. Very often there is more to add to another answer than fits in comments, and really those longer comments should be vetted too by other users... confusing to do when a point is not included in the answer added to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, however, a useful addition might be helpful, but include one or two words that move it from helpful to'wrong'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this answer ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/447948/213359&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/447948/213359&lt;/a&gt; ) the author starts with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best way to clarify the statement is to use direct speech instead of indirect speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, the 'answer' or perhaps 'approach' isn't dead wrong and could be a good work-around. As an answer, it allows comments on its merits or shortcomings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately &quot;best&quot; is an unnecessary contention - and makes it &quot;wrong&quot; (we have voting for that anyway)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is editing a &quot;best&quot; contention fair/good/polite practice ?  Say from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The best way&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;One way&quot;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think down-votes discourage alternative answers, AND 'best' reinforce the idea that there needs to be a &quot;winner&quot; . Clearly BAD approaches still deserve a down-vote and occasional gaming to down-vote a mediocre answer that is appearing above what someone feels is a far better answer might occasionally be justifiable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, just curious on others' thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213359" LastEditorUserId="223618" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T18:27:50.077" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T18:27:50.077" Title="Should we make minor improvements to answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11477" CreationDate="2018-06-10T00:18:57.900" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minor improvements in general: yes, please! Like typos. However, the big caveat is: only change something &lt;strong&gt;if you feel confident that the poster would agree that it is an improvement&lt;/strong&gt;, or if it is truly objectively an improvement (such as a typo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, while I understand where you're coming from, I am absolutely not convinced that the poster will necessarily agree with your change, so I would strongly recommend that you should not apply it. The best (hah!) approach would probably be to make a suggestion in a comment, or just let it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-06-10T12:04:04.333" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T12:04:04.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11477" CreationDate="2018-06-10T15:14:39.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making minor improvements of some sorts, such as fixing typos is why we have the ability to edit other people's posts in the first place. However the golden rule of editing another person's post is to respect the intentions of the author, which you can only suppose from the way they express their sentiments. Changing that sentiment should be avoided. Stack Exchange usually has more emphasis on individual post ownership than a website like Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are so many improvements to add to an existing answer that you can not reasonably suggest a fix in the comments, I would instead advise writing your own &lt;em&gt;better version&lt;/em&gt; of the answer which incorporates all of the requisite improvements. It should be distinct enough to not be confused for an identical answer if there are that many suggestions to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not seem to be the case in your example. You only seem to take minor issue with the wording. If I felt the same way you do, I might write a comment like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I agree that this is a way to do it, and perhaps it is a good suggestion but your answer does not convince that it is necessarily the best way to do it, so claiming that it is makes the answer seem &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;too opinionated for the Stack Exchange format&lt;/a&gt;. Would you please add some explanation regarding why you think it is the best way, or at least revise the statement to make it less opinionated?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all of the proofs are furnished, you can then judge whether or not the answer changes your persuasions, and vote based upon that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, you can do so in good conscience, because Once somebody receives this sort of complaint, that person can know that that there are issues other than proposing an alternative solution that might cause votes against the answer, and be less quick to blame that one possible cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-06-10T15:26:24.373" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T15:26:24.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-11T09:33:19.887" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to find some good reference books in English. Especially, the books which explain tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="302781" OwnerDisplayName="vavilala Aravind kumar" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T18:06:36.497" Title="Are there any best books to learn tenses in English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-06-12T05:23:48.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T14:21:40.703" Score="5" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Stack Exchange collect information about what EL&amp;amp;U users browse when they are not on the Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this information sold or passed on to third parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for example, a user happens to support an environmental activist charity (for example Greenpeace), are they going to find themselves turned down for visas for countries which regard such charities as terrorist organisations because SE has handed over data to some unscrupulous company who has likewise passed it on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:21:40.703" Title="What information does SE collect about users exactly?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-15T00:05:34.493" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/get-be&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;get-be&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;get-be&lt;/a&gt; tag seem to be about the &quot;get-passive&quot; construction. For example, the top-voted question in the &quot;get-be&quot; tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3072/why-is-to-get-sometimes-used-where-to-be-could-be-used&quot;&gt;Why is “to get” sometimes used where “to be” could be used?&lt;/a&gt;, asks about &quot;got uploaded&quot;, &quot;got thrown&quot;, &quot;got caught&quot; vs &quot;was uploaded&quot;, &quot;was thrown&quot;, &quot;was caught&quot;. So I think it would make sense to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/get-be&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;get-be&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;get-be&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/get-passive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;get-passive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;get-passive&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find &quot;get-passive&quot; preferable as the target because it seems slightly broader, but the possible slight difference in meaning does not seem enough to warrant the existence of separate tags. But maybe &quot;get-be&quot; could be better as a target because then the tag would cover a few types of similar constructions where &quot;get&quot; is used with something other than a past participle. What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T14:44:41.280" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T14:44:41.280" Title="Proposed tag synonym: &quot;get-be&quot; as a synonym of &quot;get-passive&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7052" CreationDate="2018-06-15T10:02:23.700" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Don't cite Google as a dictionary.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google has licensed two of the dictionaries from &lt;a href=&quot;https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Languages&lt;/a&gt; for their search product:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't bad dictionaries, mind you.  The ODE is a large single-volume dictionary which gives very good coverage of Present-Day English, including many examples taken from the corpus Oxford used to assemble the dictionary.  The NOAD is a version of this dictionary, not quite as good, which focuses on American English.  The ODE and NOAD are not called by these names online; instead, they've been rebranded as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; (formerly Oxford Dictionaries, or Oxford Living Dictionaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you call them, it's confusing.  The OED is a very different dictionary – a large multi-volume historical dictionary, not specifically focused on Present-Day English – but the acronym is very similar to ODE, so they're easily confused.  And the &amp;quot;Oxford Dictionaries&amp;quot; name is likewise confusing, as the OED is the most well-known Oxford dictionary, but it isn't available at the Oxford Dictionaries website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's a bit of a mess.  But &lt;strong&gt;referring to these as the &amp;quot;Google dictionary&amp;quot; just adds to the confusion.&lt;/strong&gt;  Although Google has the license to present these search results without attribution, they haven't compiled their own dictionaries, and if you don't name the actual source, it's difficult for people to learn about the dictionaries themselves – their advantages and disadvantages, how they were compiled, what their purpose and coverage is, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's worse, &lt;strong&gt;Google doesn't return these results to all users&lt;/strong&gt;.  Many users on this site use Google in languages other than English, but the English dictionary results are not shown to all of these users.  If someone cites the &amp;quot;Google dictionary&amp;quot; with a link to a Google search, the link simply won't work for many of the users on this site.  That means &lt;strong&gt;the link is not a proper citation&lt;/strong&gt;, and it should not be used on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even worse, &lt;strong&gt;imagine Google licensing another dictionary in the future&lt;/strong&gt;.  Apple did this with the Japanese language dictionaries included with its operating system a few years back, dumping one set of dictionaries and replacing them with another when it made financial sense to do so.  Since Google doesn't name their sources, you can imagine this could turn out to be terribly confusing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking to a Google search is just a bad idea.  &lt;strong&gt;If you want to link to the ODE or NOAD, please link directly to the Oxford Dictionaries website, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28567" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-01-23T13:58:09.597" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T13:58:09.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-15T16:21:44.167" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last couple of days, I've been experiencing a bug in the ELU chat room using Google Chrome. Would you please fix this bug? it's very annoying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The bug is :&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From time to time, when I was chatting in ELU, a big space appears after the previous conversation, which means the chat moved to the top of the screen and left big space between them and the place where I can write my chat.&#xA;In addition, I can scroll up to see more of the previous conversation; also I can scroll down to hide that big space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pb6o3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pb6o3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KsR3K.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KsR3K.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47286" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T07:31:33.293" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T07:31:33.293" Title="Bug in the ELU chat room" Tags="|bug|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2018-06-17T01:00:03.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation you have is not always your &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; reputation. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are at 10,000 reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You gain 200 reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer gets deleted (e.g. because the question gets deleted altogether)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your reputation is recaculated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You go back to 10,000 reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because the answer/question is deleted. There are 3 reasons that your answer gets deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You deleted your own answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A moderator deleted your answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question gets deleted altogether&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298438" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T01:00:03.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-20T04:07:41.930" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems as if I see a question like this at least once a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the difference between &quot;X is&quot; and &quot;X will&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should I use &quot;X is&quot; or &quot;X was&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Between &quot;X was&quot; and &quot;X had been,&quot; which is grammatical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an actual example, the most recent of this type is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451046/what-does-this-achieve-vs-what-will-this-achieve&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;“What does this achieve?” vs “What will this achieve?”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these questions seems to get an answer, and each answer always points out how verb tenses are used—and that both sentences are grammatical and it's up to the person to use whichever one they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific answers are always a bit different, because people pick different words or phrases to ask about, but the general answers are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these repeated questions add any value? Or would it be worthwhile to find (or create) a generic post about the differences between verb tenses and grammar and simply mark all such questions (where there is no ambiguity) as a duplicate of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If specific questions actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have an answer beyond that post, then they could be kept open on a case-by-case basis. (Or reopened if the questioners can demonstrate something unique about their own questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After finding and reading a post from six years ago that asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2641/maybe-have-a-tag-for-verb-tense-choice&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maybe have a tag for verb tense choice?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I added the &lt;em&gt;tenses&lt;/em&gt; tag to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451046/what-does-this-achieve-vs-what-will-this-achieve&quot;&gt;achieve&lt;/a&gt; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering if we should go further than &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; tagging all of these that way—assuming somebody does even that. Or does the existing system, with so many repeated questions of the same generic type and with the same generic answer, make sense as it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T12:45:46.977" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T19:56:25.030" Title="Should &quot;What's the difference between tense A and tense B?&quot; questions be marked as a duplicate of something generic?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11489" CreationDate="2018-06-20T08:03:19.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The repeated questions add no value, and generally it appears that they can be marked as duplicates of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's what I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other questions about using the present tense to indicate the future* (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94019/i-hope-it-rains-or-i-hope-it-will-rain/94020?s=25|25.1787#94020&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;I hope it rains&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;I hope it will rain&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;) or the subjunctive mood* (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/when-to-use-if-i-was-vs-if-i-were&quot;&gt;When to use &amp;quot;If I was&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;If I were&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;). These are two examples among many which might be used as duplicate links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Yeah, yeah. English doesn't have a proper future tense or a subjunctive mood. But they are convenient terms for English even if English behaves differently to, say, Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T08:03:19.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11489" CreationDate="2018-06-20T19:56:25.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a big fan of the practice of marking basic questions that are about some general, but fairly broad and complex topic (like tense) as &quot;duplicates&quot; of some &quot;canonical&quot; (so to speak) question about that topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, I don't really like using duplicates in such a loose way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For another thing, the &quot;canonical&quot; questions are often pretty old, and the supposedly &quot;canonical&quot; answers may not have been maintained very well. Even if the questions are related, the answers to the older post might not resolve all of the issues or possible sources of confusion that are brought up by the newer post. Rather than directing learners to brief, possibly over-simplified Internet posts like this, I think I would prefer to tell them to look at what a &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; about English grammar says about the use of tense. (There are many such books, aimed at teaching people of many different levels of English proficiency.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it makes just as much sense to vote to close questions like this using the close reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think duplicates are more useful for less broad categories of common questions, like &quot;When should I use “a” vs “an”?&quot; You can write a book about the use of English tenses, but you can't really write a book about the use of &quot;a&quot; vs. &quot;an&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T19:56:25.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11538" CreationDate="2018-06-23T19:45:09.597" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question on English Language &amp;amp; Usage, and it was received poorly. Now, I have nothing against criticism, but I just wonder why. Here's the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451553/what-should-i-use-when-introducing-dialogue-hyphens-en-dashes-or-em-dashes&quot;&gt;What should I use when introducing dialogue, hyphens, en-dashes or em-dashes?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no comment notifying me about my question's flaw(s). I'm not saying it was perfect, I'm just asking guidance for asking better questions, and what I did wrong in this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239612" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T19:34:43.527" Title="Why was my question downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11508" CreationDate="2018-06-24T05:27:46.607" Score="8" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;9.42% - That's the percentage of questions on EL&amp;amp;U.SE that are marked as duplicates. These are other SE sites' duplicate percentages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow: 2.4%&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Super User: 3.26%&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Server Fault: 1.66%&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reason for EL&amp;amp;U.SE having so many duplicates is that most questions don't have searchable titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example scenario of why non-search-friendly titles are bad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always try my best to find out if my question has already been asked before asking it. I usually can't find an existing one, so I ask my own question. Later on, a notice appears on my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is or are - &quot;The most preferable length of the internship is 3 months but 2 is also acceptable&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Closed as duplicate of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If your car has 4 wheels, it's drivable. 3 wheels (is/are) a safety hazard.&quot; Which conjugation of &quot;to be&quot; is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I have possibly known about the question that mine was closed as a duplicate of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question titles on EL&amp;amp;U.SE either ask about the correct usage of word(s) in a specific context, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;1 or 2 friends {was/were} eating {a sandwich/sandwiches} at the park. Which is correct?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The rock was uplifted vs. the rock had been uplifted?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What's the prepositional phrase in this sentence: The lights were bright in the room on Monday?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or their titles are stupidly vague, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is this part of speech called?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why is this word used here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is this sentence grammatically correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone does research prior to asking a question, it's highly unlikely that they'll find what they're looking for. And they'll probably write their own question's title with the same issues, later being closed as a duplicate of another question with some obscure title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit question titles from this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is it &quot;the tiger is endangered&quot; and not &quot;a tiger is endangered&quot; when referring to all tigers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..to this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;When should I use a definite article with a generic noun?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we title our questions to optimize for searchability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="125969" LastEditorUserId="125969" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T05:14:46.677" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T05:14:46.677" Title="Should we give our questions titles with greater searchability?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11500" CreationDate="2018-06-24T08:15:53.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/451716/revisions&quot;&gt;edited your question&lt;/a&gt; recently, I didn't give an explanation in the edit summary; I'm sorry about that. Here's an explanation of why I prefer more specific titles (with the exact sentence in question) rather than more general titles like &quot;Plural noun with singular verb&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A number of broad topics have tags that can be used to narrow a search. For example, you used the tag &quot;grammatical-number&quot;, and I edited your question to add the tag &quot;verb-agreement&quot;. These tags communicate a fair amount of information in their own right, so I feel like the title should be used to provide some details about the specific sentence/example that you are asking about. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/verb-agreement+grammatical-number?sort=frequent&amp;amp;pageSize=30&quot;&gt;look through lists of the other questions that have these tags&lt;/a&gt; (and try different filters like most frequent or highest upvoted) and see if any of them seem to relate to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of complicated parts to subject-verb agreement and so often it's impossible to write a short answer that adequately covers a general topic like plural nouns used with singular verbs. Your recent question deals with plural noun phrases like &quot;5 votes&quot;: these don't necessarily behave the same as other kinds of noun phrases that could be considered &quot;plural&quot; in some way, like &quot;the United States&quot; or &quot;six out of ten students&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6904&quot;&gt;data&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/94140&quot;&gt;blue-green algae&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. When I'm looking for a specific question to use as a duplicate target, I find vague or very generalized titles make it more difficult to find a relevant question because I don't know if the question is about the right type of &quot;plural noun&quot; (or whatever) before clicking on it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would say your title should certainly describe the issue that you're facing, but I think you want to avoid using a title that is too similar to the titles of many other questions that don't necessarily have the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T08:30:50.933" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T08:30:50.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-25T23:39:34.467" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some brand motifs for a project I'm working on, and I want to ask the community for input on interesting names. Is English Language and Usage the best place to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51426" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T01:20:26.340" Title="Is this an appropriate place to ask for name brainstorming?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11502" CreationDate="2018-06-26T01:20:26.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would not be a good place to ask. The Help Center page &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; says questions about &quot;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&quot; are out of scope for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking more generally, brainstorming questions of any kind are generally a poor fit for the Stack Exchange format and culture. A common viewpoint is that a Stack Exchange question ought to have some kind of single &quot;best&quot; answer that is not primarily opinion-based and that will be useful to future site visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T01:20:26.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11500" CreationDate="2018-06-26T13:17:16.213" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer but an explanation of the difficulty of making the titles more general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a very recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/452007/two-and-in-a-sentence&quot;&gt;Two &quot;and&quot; in a sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's essentially asking how to distribute adjectives over 'and'. That is, if you have A C, A D, B C, and B D as things, can you say &quot;A and B  C and D&quot; to get the four pairs more succinctly by multiplication, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that by the time you're able to articulate/specify the question in generality (using variables, knowing the term 'distribute', etc), you probably have enough thought on how to answer the original very specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this 'distribution' question more than once. Searching specifically through tags I found &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188932/using-and-twice-for-four-items&quot;&gt;Using and twice for four items&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Surely there are a few more similar ones, but without knowing what to look for it's hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difficulty is removal of stop words in the SE search. Eliminating the high frequency terms in indexing text is a huge resource saver in document search techniques. Indexing 'the' and 'and' and 'a' can take up half the space of an index if they're not excluded from the process. So most document indexes ignore these highly frequent terms. Unfortunately for ELU, those terms are usually the grammatical ones people care to ask questions about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T13:17:16.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11500" CreationDate="2018-06-26T22:00:48.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Titles are an integral part of a question.  It may be a poor idea to alter them later; and when written, the original poster may not know how to make the question searchable in ways that would be useful to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, making answers (as well as questions) searchable is a major task that the site has not yet addressed.  Search in the search box for &quot;who whom&quot;: you get 1,436 results, the second of which is irrelevant, as many others are no doubt also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But search Wikipedia for &quot;who whom&quot; and you'll get an immediate relevant hit with subsections; search just for &quot;who&quot; and you get a disambiguation page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better indexing would prevent the many duplicates (many questions are in fact duplicates and have been answered more than once, in greater or lesser detail) and remove the frustration of regular users who try to identify suitable answers, decide whether to provide brief help and vote to close, etc.  It would also reduce the questions on meta that complain about questions closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T22:00:48.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11500" CreationDate="2018-06-27T05:09:10.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we give our questions titles with greater searchability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least three stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As the OP avoid obvious faults in the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never cause people to click to see what the question is, IE: no &quot;What is this called?&quot;, at least provide a shape, approximate size or some other relevant information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Include relevant parts of the text in the title - this will vary greatly; from question to question and site to site - as the OP simply try to do your best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be certain to include the subject in your title and any unique words from the text which differentiate your question from another whenever possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A longish title is far better than one which is too short. If it takes two sentences, preferably just a comma, that's OK; a few sentences or paragraph are almost certainly not acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a subsequent reader, please correct gross errors in the title or request changes using comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Misspellings of keywords in the title should be quickly corrected. There's no purpose in indexing misspellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a wordy title shorter is helpful, but don't go past &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aresearchguide.com/write-lab-report.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;point form&lt;/a&gt; and reduce it to a collection of keywords. Use appropriate style guides for the particular SE site and subject matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know what is meant but clearly understand the subject a comment is appropriate. Deleting them afterwards is often appreciated too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an expert, or ones whom reads after the dust has settled, a constructive comment or edit should be welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be cautious about changing the meaning or offering no improvement - either is fair grounds for a rejection flag. Read twice if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/archaeological&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archaeological reader&lt;/a&gt; if there's an improvement to be made your help is welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes new technology and words or terminology are developed - adding these to the title is very helpful as it prevents new questions duplicating matters long settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes lengthy reflection or a better understanding of things can lead to an enhanced ability to refine the title. If the OP hasn't revisited the site in years it's your job to correct it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of popular keywords and ones which differentiate one question from another enhance both the human user and search engine, saving time and effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad titles (and poorly chosen first couple of sentences) make humans uncertain if the result is relevant and if another obviously relevant result appears nearby it's certain to be chosen over something that is vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we want the best possible titles, and first couple of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246019" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T05:09:10.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11517" CreationDate="2018-06-26T12:28:34.150" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is not my native language - I've learned it since I was a kid at school. I thought I know it quite well until I've tried to watch British videos and listen to native British speakers. Since then British way of speaking became a subject of slight fascination to me, and so I ask - can you name some good resources that almost fully (!) cover differences between different kinds of English, that teach you specifically British/Canadian/Australian English (pronounciation/words/phrases/slang etc.), assuming that you have some background in English? Resources that cover to some degree history of British English language are welcomed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: The title might be confusing, &quot;American&quot; part specifically - I've written my question like this because I think (and some English teachers here also say so) that the kind of English that I know and see everyday on the Internet/media is the most popular kind - American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304888" OwnerDisplayName="Romulus" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T00:15:19.443" Title="What are the best resources that cover British/Australian/Canadian English for those who speak mostly American English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-29T16:43:46.557" Score="5" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I know why we cannot see who upvotes or downvotes our question. It might lead to unfavorable confrontations were people ask other people why they voted the way they did. It might also ward people away from voting, due to the lack of anonymity. But I don't see why we cannot see who favorites our questions? Now, I don't doubt there's a good reason, I just want to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely seeing who favorites a question or yours doesn't lead to bad confrontations. Or am i wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239612" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-10-16T14:49:15.340" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T14:49:15.340" Title="Why can't we see who favorites our question?" Tags="|discussion|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-01T04:08:46.133" Score="1" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is a &amp;quot;soft&amp;quot; subject. There are topics need to be understood but there is not always an answer. For example, how a phrase is used in a paragraph or meaning of a paragraph in a story, a song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion is needed to understand them, without discussion, all just resemble reading from books or searching from database. However, this site is Q&amp;amp;A and not allow &amp;quot;discuss type&amp;quot; question. It's very usually the frustrating case when one tries to understand something and people just say it's off topic, this happens a lot in all strict Q&amp;amp;A sites like this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way for askers to understand those topics on Q&amp;amp;A site like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I go to understand those topics then? (I can only see some random forums, is there a stackexchange site for this purpose?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;Update:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hi all, this question asks for a guideline or best practice for the situation when people need discussion for understanding. I think that is a valid situation for the good of humanity and currently lacks of information. Please be objective.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where do you often go to for discussion? Reddit/Quora accept all kind of discusion but the communities are very broad and there are many sub-communities. Practical guidelines are appreciated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="249860" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T12:49:16.487" Title="Where to discuss about English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ClosedDate="2018-07-12T20:34:18.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11512" CreationDate="2018-07-02T03:46:48.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we had &amp;quot;bookmarks&amp;quot; (née &amp;quot;favorites&amp;quot;), it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; possible to view a person's bookmarks via search, their profile, and most robustly the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/query/299308/favorite-users-by-question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;. For the minute details see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/11514/3&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/382019/323179&quot;&gt;Saves&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, they are completely private. In fact, other than the badges that are awarded when enough people save a post, there's no way to tell how many people saved the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was done due to the prevailing opinion that it was weird, unnecessary, and unexpected that it would be public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible to &amp;quot;follow&amp;quot; a post, which allows you to get notifications for it. This is also private (and always has been).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-10-16T12:39:20.893" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T12:39:20.893" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11513" CreationDate="2018-07-06T12:49:16.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;knew&lt;/em&gt; there was somewhere here that at least &lt;em&gt;attempts&lt;/em&gt; to answer this question. And that's because I asked it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10886/i-have-a-question-but-its-off-topic-where-else-could-i-ask&quot;&gt;&quot;I have a question, but it's off-topic. Where else could I ask?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of online links there, but also general non-link advice. It gives 'chat' as an answer (haha again my answer to my own question), which I think is not that accurate on reflection. I will update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T12:49:16.487" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-07T20:58:41.973" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm familiar with the idea of choosing one question as an (informal) &quot;canonical&quot; target for duplicates, but I was surprised to find that for questions about the difference between &quot;can&quot; vs. &quot;may&quot;, the &quot;canonical&quot; question is apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4919/can-may-will-you-help-me-with-this&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Can/may/will you help me with this?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As waiwai933♦'s answer points out, &quot;May you help me with this?&quot; is a strange sentence that wouldn't often be heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect the main dupe target for can/may questions to deal with a normal example like &quot;Can/may &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; do this?&quot;, not an odd example like this. I don't think the answers to this question are useful enough to warrant closing a bunch of a other questions as a duplicate of this one. Can it be changed? I have voted to reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54340/difference-between-can-and-may#comment1092763_54340&quot;&gt;Difference between &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;may&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which has an answer by J.R. that cites the NOAD. I think for most site visitors who are looking for information about the use of &quot;can&quot; vs. &quot;may&quot;, J.R.'s answer there is more likely to be helpful than the answers to the question about &quot;Can/may/will you help me with this?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T20:58:41.973" Title="Why are all the can/may questions marked as duplicates of the question about the weird sentence “Can/may/will you help me with this?”" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11509" CreationDate="2018-07-12T00:15:19.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning varieties of English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are only three ways I know to expand one's knowledge of English variants&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Visit those countries for at least three months and keep your ears and eyes open, read books by authors from those countries or watch movies and TV shows from them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how interpreters do it. English has much more in common across most varieties than it has differences. For example, keep a pen and notebook handy when reading, travelling or when watching media, and jot down expressions and usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an American English speaker, I pay very close attention when watching Australian movies/shows and have managed to gather quite a lot of useful information. For instance, the Australians use &quot;G'day&quot; or &quot;good day&quot; quite a lot, and, refer to journalists as journos. They also call 4x4 that are open at the rear, utes. So now I'm ready to interpret from Aussie English to French! (Joke).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the OP meant &lt;strong&gt;he or she has been learning English&lt;/strong&gt; since he or she was a kid at school. Presumably this process is ongoing, whence my use of PP continuous to mention this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The internet has tons of sites about Australian English and just about every other type as well. However, if you really want the best dictionary resource, treat  yourself to a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary (not the learners' one, the real one). There is simply nothing else as exhaustive as it anywhere. (I know we are not supposed to tout products here but really the OED is an institution.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100179" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T00:15:19.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T21:09:21.407" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just wondering how long &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/379047/when-was-the-term-web-site-or-website-first-used/454323#454323&quot;&gt;this stinkeroonie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was going to hang out...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1UgR7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1UgR7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It reads like some drunken rant, in which it appears he claims responsibility for coining the term &quot;internet&quot;. My flag was marked as &quot;helpful&quot;, and yet, there it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we could ask: What happens to VLQ flags? How long do they last? How many people need to flag as VLQ for the system to take action? And if a minor edit to a question or answer after being flagged renders the flag ineffective, how do we avoid this misuse of the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T15:52:20.023" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T15:00:34.447" Title="How long do posts flagged as VLQ reside after my flag has been called &quot;helpful&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-14T21:34:29.223" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought answers given in other than English were dis-allowed. (comments maybe, I always find them interesting)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I marked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/178900/another-word-for-carrying-pole/453706#453706&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; as &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot;. It was disputed and still&#xA;remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a nice and very short word in Sinhalese for &amp;quot;Pair of baskets with carrying pole&amp;quot; 1. singular &amp;quot;KADA&amp;quot; 2.Plural &amp;quot;KATH&amp;quot; 3. the person carrying &amp;quot;KATH KARAYA&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1483/when-is-a-flag-marked-as-disputed&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, and evidently it takes only 1 dispute to disqualify ALL &amp;quot;deletes&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One invalid flag causes all flags on that post to be disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While quite interesting, I still do not think it belongs there, unless perhaps the author can connect them with a a similar word in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it belong there, or should I flag it again? And if I do, is it allowed in the system to flag something twice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:07:55.640" Title="Why was this flag disputed?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|flag-reviews|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-16T09:54:06.230" Score="10" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often find erroneous responses on Stack Exchange. Is there a way to flag these as wrong or false?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I am not really sure how reputation works...  You have to have reputation before you can do anything?  Seems like a pretty big barrier to making sure answers provided are correct...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308634" OwnerDisplayName="Ol Musky" LastEditorUserId="14666" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T08:12:38.293" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T14:10:44.167" Title="I often find erroneous responses on Stack Exchange. Is there a way to flag these as wrong or false?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11518" CreationDate="2018-07-16T15:00:34.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you flag a post as VLQ, the post is moved to the VLQ Review Queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a post is in the VLQ review queue, it is simply down to the reviewers.  Once the appropriate number (I believe it is six on ELU) click on &lt;em&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/em&gt; within the review process, the post is deleted.  Or, of course, if the consensus is &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt;, the post leaves the review queue and is kept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/161391/236563&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; on the Main Meta has more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NAA (Not An Answer) flag also puts the post into the VLQ review queue but also raises a notification to the moderators.  In this case the moderators are more likely to see the post, and delete if necessary, but NAA requires different criteria to VLQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64632" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T15:00:34.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2018-07-16T15:31:36.867" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Option X:  Require some significantly higher qualifications to comment on questions.  Something like &gt;1000 rep, and a particular badge (say, Commenter) that requires passing a little course and test that demonstrates that you do understand what comments are for, and what they are not for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="302407" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T15:31:36.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11520" CreationDate="2018-07-16T17:46:20.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why was this flag disputed&quot; is tough for anyone to answer but the person(s) involved, but I can address the underlying issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag answers for deletion only when they are not answers – they're actually new questions, spam, vandalism, so unintelligible that you can't tell &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; they are, etc. Specifically, when an entire post is written in a language other than English, it's fine to flag &quot;not an answer&quot; because it's unintelligible to the community it's posted on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when an answer is an answer, but it's wrong, not helpful, misleading, etc., don't flag for deletion. Downvote it. Remember, a downvoted answer is much more helpful to everybody that comes after than a deleted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer post is clearly an answer, and it's in English. Any English speaker will easily see what the answer is. You might feel that it's not a helpful answer, because this site is not only &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; English but also &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; English and maybe you feel the asker wanted an English term. In that case use your downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:12:04.183" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:12:04.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T08:13:14.337" Score="0" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;After learning a new words in English and I am making a new sentence to remember But I need to know this sentence is correct or not. Do you know any free website or community check like this sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anybody know any information about that. Can help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298699" OwnerDisplayName="DuyguDemirkiran" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T09:36:26.000" Title="Do you know any free website to check my own sentences in English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-07-17T09:36:36.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-19T21:35:43.737" Score="9" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I come across questions or answers that I appreciate and believe deserve an upvote. The question or answer, though, already has ten or more votes. The post, I believe, is good, but is it good enough for fifteen upvotes, for twenty? Has the post already received its fair share of attention and votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is voting a simple operation of asking yourself whether a post has merit, and voting accordingly?&#xA;Or is voting an attempt to, as part of a crowd, give the question a proper rating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter seems simpler, but this means that number of votes is no indication of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than a tenth of my total reputation comes from my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/402576/why-do-the-titles-of-scholarly-works-sometimes-begin-with-the-word-on/402590#402590&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt;. My answer wasn't particularly good, but the question was, for whatever reason, well trafficked. I suppose I am appreciative of the added rep, but I can't at all confidently say that answer deserved six times the recognition of my next best answer—and probably it is inferior to many of my one vote answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59495" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T03:14:53.987" Title="Should you vote based on how others voted?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-20T02:11:06.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's totally for you to decide whether or not you vote (either way or not at all). On the one hand, you may decide not to vote on a post with a high score because you think its score is high enough. On the other hand, you could up vote because the post is useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T02:11:06.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2018-07-20T05:14:08.387" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word and phrase requests are the most interesting part of this site in my opinion. It's the only time I see idioms and expressions and words I've never seen before and learn new ones. It's always enlightening to have that &quot;I didn't know there was a word for that&quot; moment. It also accustoms you to expressions and idioms from other languages from which the OP is trying to translate or find an equivalent for. If unreferenced or single sentence answers are the problem, just enforce a standard, the way we enforce the requirement for example sentences for word-requests. There's no need to throw out an entire category subject because of some bad answers or even lively dissent in the comments, which of course is one of the most interesting parts also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we get rid of these types of questions what we have left are matters of English grammar mostly (I think), which can be quite dry, and is a subject over which even grammarians and grammar books don't agree. So this will result in either a single high-reputation-user answer going mostly unchallenged by the majority, or result in the same entanglement of argumentative comments which we're supposedly trying to avoid in implementing this change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These types of questions really stimulate some hard thinking about the meanings and contexts of language use, challenge our understanding of the meanings of expressions and idioms, and expose many readers or participants to the addition of new tools in their vocabulary toolbox. I think it makes us wield a wider vocabulary and better prepared for speaking or writing our thoughts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the answers are quite subjective and invite disagreement, but we're talking about language here, not maths where there's a correct answer. If the only questions allowed are questions with definitive answers then grammar questions also will be a sticking point, compounded also by regional variations of language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176164" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T05:14:08.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-20T18:38:15.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a post already has a lot of votes that agree with yours, your voting signal is diluted. It's maybe a bit less helpful to future visitors. But I really only make that calculation when I'm running out of votes for the day. At that point, I might consider reserving my remaining votes to signal usefulness of posts that have received less attention. Otherwise, I just go ahead and vote'em as I sees'em.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:38:15.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-20T19:42:09.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just upvoted your answer and the question and a couple of other answers because I wanted to signal my joy at literate Qs and As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I think the second answer was better than yours, but it came in several hours later.  The early bird does get more worms, deserved or not.  There is much craziness in the voting here: my best question got only four upvotes, and the answer, which required some admirable research, got only four or five votes.  Asinine drivel can get many, many votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my answer to your question is to express your opinion, and not pay attention to the opinions of other people.  And....if you really like an answer, and it already has 20 votes in one day, postpone your upvote to the next day (or even the day after that) so your vote will count. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T20:45:23.703" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T20:45:23.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-20T21:08:28.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;People are people, that is, they're not simple algorithms, devoid of context. People are irrational or rather they are rational within their own virtually continuous set of prior data that is nonetheless bounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an SE user votes, they're doing it in the context of reading the words, but also questions they've recently read, the current set of votes, how other things have been voted on in the past, and on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, psychologically, a voter may like an answer but think 'Hmm...I don't really need to vote, it has enough already', or oppositely 'Lots of people have voted up, I think I will too' or contrariwise 'This is a terrible answer but someone down voted once, and that's enough of a signal' or.... all sorts of other,  let's say, not playing by exactly the nominal rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, one of your answers was super upvoted, beyond what you think it's worth? That may not be such a psychological thing as that it got on the Hot Network Questions queue that every site sees, and so it attracted a lot more traffic than normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the rational thing to expect is that the quality of questions and answers is judged in an unbiased, context-free manner. And that's just not the case, here or in other reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T21:08:28.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-21T11:47:15.807" Score="7" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title in one of the sidebar boxes isn't right. I hadn't noticed this before, so it may be new, although I don't think we've had any tweaks recently. Or perhaps it's just me and my browser (Chrome 67.0.3396.99 (64-bit) on Windows), or it may be a moderator thing if the &lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt; link is restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;Favorite tags&quot; should be centred, with the decorative thingies right on the edge of the box, like the one below it. I'm not sure where &quot;edit&quot; should appear. Perhaps something like&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Edit | Add a favorite tag&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GPcVS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GPcVS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Favorite tags sidebar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That box has now been superseded by a different one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFmb0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFmb0.png&quot; alt=&quot;New &amp;quot;Watched tags&amp;quot; box&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the CSS spacing appears to have been applied to the bottom of the &quot;Watched tags&quot; box rather than the top. So it's still a bug, just a different one. And I really dislike the crude image of binoculars which doesn't match anything else in the theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least &quot;Watched tags&quot; means that the spelling of &quot;Favourite&quot; is no longer an issue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T09:41:10.123" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T09:41:10.123" Title="Watched tags: design flaw" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-21T16:59:14.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I have to address the phenomenon, aka the elephant-in-the-answer box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first things, first. Voting on the worthiness of a question is not the same as voting on whether an answer to a question is good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For answers, I upvote an answer based solely on my understanding of the question and deciding on which answer best fits the bill. Sometimes, two answers may be good or cover more ground together than separately. So I upvote two different answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon that drives me round the e-bend  is: upvotes on answers that are completely off track when a good answer is present but has gone unrecognized by all the upvoters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call this: the null-set or shiny-pretty-thing bias.  That is a polite way of saying the upvoters simply don't have the knowledge to know either way whether an answer is actually really good. They read an answer, don't know the subject matter, and upvote because everything &quot;sounds good&quot;. They vote for the shiny, pretty thing. The incredible part of this is that often this occurs in a context where a really good answer is present and overlooked. When I really do not know the subject matter, I do not vote. Period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other phenomenon is that the right answer is completely different from what most readers (voters) are able to recognize, and, not only do they  upvote what everyone else has upvoted, they downvote what is actually a good answer but  one they simply do not understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is a lemming effect, and people do seem to sometimes just follow the crowd. What other explanation can there be to explain a huge number of unmerited upvotes for certain answers? And also, the converse: a large number of unmerited downvotes on certain answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note: I only am commenting here on answers, and not on questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re this question: I think it is useful, so I am upvoting it.&#xA;Re the answers: I think they all say something useful, so I am upvoting all of them; they each add some interesting insight on how people vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100179" LastEditorUserId="100179" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T13:06:47.637" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T13:06:47.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-22T22:50:44.750" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/456894/name-for-this-sort-of-word&quot;&gt;Name for this sort of word?&lt;/a&gt;.  I didn't understand the reason they gave.  And how do you find the &quot;chat&quot; dept.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this isn't in the right &quot;dept.&quot;, then please move it.  If it's in the wrong dept., then it's bec. I don't see any others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanx!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T02:25:55.783" Title="Why was this question moved?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11534" CreationDate="2018-07-23T02:25:55.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question wasn't moved at all. In addition, I don't see anyone suggesting it should be moved nor are there any close votes (of any type).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're referring to is probably the message that says &quot;Please avoid extended discussions in comments. Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat?&quot;, which is automatically shown after you've had a certain amount of back and forth in the comments section (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/300466/323179&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, it's triggered when two users have four comments each, responding to each other—it looks like Mari-Lou A is the other user in this equation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you need 20 reputation to chat. (Yeah, the system is messed up, but there's apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/98791/323179&quot;&gt;a reason it can't be fixed&lt;/a&gt;. Still, I remember being in this exact same situation when I first started.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing you can do right now is to &lt;strong&gt;edit your question&lt;/strong&gt;, which can be done by going to the question and clicking &quot;edit&quot; (you should end up &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/456894/edit&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and adding the relevant information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/456894/name-for-this-sort-of-word#comment1099536_456894&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/456894/name-for-this-sort-of-word#comment1099510_456894&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; into the post, then delete the comments. You could also delete most of the other comments, since it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot; title=&quot;see &amp;#39;When shouldn&amp;#39;t I comment?&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;not necessary&lt;/a&gt; to leave compliments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unrelated tip: when you're commenting to reply to another user, make sure to prefix their name with &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; to ensure they'll be alerted to your comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, welcome to the site. I hope you'll stick around and earn the privilege to chat ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T02:25:55.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-25T02:20:10.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not necessarily the best answers that get the most votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People vote on many different factors. Each to their own. One thing to bear in mind is that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; people vote on which answers were &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to them, rather than focusing only on the quality of the answers or the research (and expertise) required to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recent answers may give more insight than older ones but these were not a candidate for earlier voters or to be selected as the &quot;acccepted&quot; &#xA;correct answer. Similarly votes given long after the question is given will be a result of search queries for problems they encounter or questions they want answered as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may not even have the expertise themselves to judge whether an answer is reliable. I think this works well in programming and Math SE sites where it is possible to evaluate whether the solution works yourself. Whether this model applies well to Linguistics and Language is a matter for a longer debate elsewhere. There are cases where it works well and other matters (such as best word choice or translation) that are arguably too subjective to be put to a vote. The Japanese language site in particular has encountered issues with this and discussed it more on their Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177859" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T02:20:10.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-26T03:06:21.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Might I suggest that you completely ignore any votes on any question or answers and just do what you think best (not what you think the community might think is best)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it matter that the vote count is already high if it's a really good answer? Good answers deserve to be upvoted. Upvote the way &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; feel and think. Upvote by your own criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does an answer need to be useful to me to be upvoted? Not at all. I can think of no particular usefulness for one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395385/58761&quot;&gt;top voted answers&lt;/a&gt; but it was so well researched and entertainingly written that relativism has no place in voting. If I came across another well researched and well written answer not nearly as entertaining, I'd still upvote it. It doesn't matter what other people do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see if you were new here wanting to understand how voting works, but you're not. What does take more time, though, is realizing how little reputation matters. So don't overthink it. It's not like you're parceling out food, clothing, housing, or career opportunities. It's more like you're handing out tiny bits of approval. If you approve for any reason, give it an upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T03:06:21.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11499" CreationDate="2018-07-26T11:50:48.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The negative reaction might have been precipitated by any one of three different elements of your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, while I don't see any obvious flaw with the core question about which kind of dash should be used if you're &lt;em&gt;choosing an unorthodox writing style&lt;/em&gt; that uses them for dialogue, the way you presented the question - &quot;I have always use [sic] the hyphen when introducing dialogue&quot; may have been a bit confronting. The reaction might have been along the lines of &quot;that's not standard English so this is a bad question.&quot; Even the title seems to presuppose that the three options are &lt;em&gt;acceptable alternatives&lt;/em&gt; to orthodox quotation marks - a view that some at least might disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, you might have diffused some of this negative reaction by reminding everyone that punctuation is a matter of &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; rather than grammar - and perhaps linking to a few answers by senior users who often make this very point. Perhaps emphasising that you acknowledge the standard approach to dialogue but you're interested in alternative styles. Are there any famous works in English that use dashes in this way? [Emily Dickinson used ubiquitous em dashes, but not for dialogue &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you added &quot;Also, a little side question. Is it normal, and acceptable to use hyphens and dashes as dialogue starters?&quot; It's possible you may have received a downvote for this: questions should not, as a general rule, have multiple components or &quot;little side questions&quot;. Stick to the issue in the question title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, your closing sentence &quot;I'm not looking solely for your individual opinions, as that is off-topic, but rather &lt;strong&gt;numbers on what the majority prefers&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; [my emphasis]. Uh-uh, that's a survey, and definitely out of bounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unfortunately, your interesting question included multiple triggers for a negative reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, don't be dismayed! Your question also had many positives: you received 4 upvotes, there was useful commentary, and your question resulted in two answers, one of which you liked enough to tick. You've asked for advice here on Meta, and hopefully this will assist in eliminating the danger points in future questions. Don't be put off by downvotes, and keep honing your craft as an ELU user :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T11:50:48.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-26T12:59:05.457" Score="11" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17601/where-did-im-jonesing-get-its-meaning-from&quot;&gt;old question&lt;/a&gt;, probably off-topic by current standards, has attracted a couple of posts which, in my opinion, don't provide an exhaustive enough answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would the more appropriate way to proceed be in this case if I wanted to have more answers and attract more attention to it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the idea of placing a bounty given the &quot;poor&quot; content of the question, so I could probably ask a new one providing more details about what I am looking for, citing the current question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the best way to go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T13:04:13.833" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T22:50:43.067" Title="What's the best way to go to re-ask an old question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11539" CreationDate="2018-07-26T14:08:06.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The old question is clear, but it lacks ‘research’. You could add some. The editing would bump the question to the top of the queue, attracting attention and possibly better answers. That’s probably the least invasive method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next step would be to add a bounty to the beefed-up question. You can “express what [you’re] looking for” in the bounty’s notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the heart of the question is satisfactory and you just want to add the trimmings to make it a ‘good’ question by today’s EL&amp;amp;U standards, I don’t recommend posting a new question unless your intent is to eventually have the old question closed as a duplicate of your new question. That can be tricky to accomplish and you might end up with your new question closed in favour of the old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing questions to improve them is firmly within the norms and design intent of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T14:08:06.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11539" CreationDate="2018-07-26T16:12:40.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal preference for resurrecting old questions like that is to write a new question, referencing the old one, but with your research and specific criteria for a satisfactory answer. You will probably also want to include the usual explanation of why your question isn't a duplicate (your additional/different criteria, reasons why the answers there aren't satisfactory even if they do adequately answer THAT question, and so forth). I especially prefer this approach when, as here, the OP is no longer around to edit the question or accept an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; edit the question, and add a bounty to generate greater attention. But without any possible input about your changes from the OP, whose original question was fewer than thirty words &lt;em&gt;including the title&lt;/em&gt;, you will likely have changed the question to the point where it's more yours than the OP's. And no matter how great an answer might be generated in this way, it will never get a green check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be extra-conscientious, you could ping the (upvoted) answerers of the old question and invite them to answer your new, related-but-different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T16:12:40.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11539" CreationDate="2018-07-26T22:50:43.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether it makes more sense to edit an old question (as Lawrence recommends) or to write a new one (as 1006a suggests) depends on the particular circumstances involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the old question is in danger of closure and your additions are true to its original intent (which is not as difficult to ascertain as some EL&amp;amp;U participants seem to think), I believe that bringing the question up to current standards does everyone involved—and the site as a whole—a service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the old question is not in danger of closure, I favor answering it as is, and trusting in the good sense of EL&amp;amp;U site participants not to close a perfectly good question by retroactively imposing anachronistic standards to it. My impression is that people on this site do not ignore new answers to old questions—and good answers receive a surprising number of upvotes over time. The many Necromancer badges (1,659, at this writing) that site participants have received for &quot;answer[ing] a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more&quot; support that impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A further consideration is the benefit to readers of consolidating answers to the same question in a single place. Anytime an old question has already attracted some reasonably good answers (which is most of the time), answering the old question on the original page is a major convenience for future site visitors, because it keeps the good answers together in one place instead of scattering them across multiple pages. Bear in mind that questions about usage and word or phrase origins often draw multiple useful answers—it's one of the things that distinguishes our subject from subjects in which a given question tends to have only one correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to answer a question that is tangentially related to the original question but is not closely enough connected to it to justify parking my answer there, I either post a new question that focuses on the issue of interest to me or I give up on my planned answer. Whether the connection between the question I want to investigate and the question that actually exists is sufficiently close to bear critical scrutiny is a judgment call, of course, and it's tempting—very tempting—to try to shoehorn intriguing information into a question that doesn't exactly ask for it. Still, at some point, even I have to admit that material I've dug up belongs somewhere else, or nowhere at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T22:50:43.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11545" CreationDate="2018-07-27T04:14:34.977" Score="7" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/457558/is-there-a-word-that-means-a-group-containing-just-1-member&quot;&gt;straightforward &quot;is there a word for concept X&quot; question&lt;/a&gt;. One commenter made some opinionated and, arguably, condescending comments directed at me and the question. I resisted the urge to respond, but another user did, and it has spawned a 20+ comment argument that includes insults and other behavior that I'm pretty sure violates the code of conduct. Not to mention totally hijacking the question and probably turning away potential answerers. All this from a couple of critical comments that were just plain factually incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the question (rather than trying to flag 20+ comments individually) for moderator attention, asking that the comments be deleted. Is that the best way to handle the situation and get my question &quot;back?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="278383" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T09:18:28.097" Title="What is the best way to get out-of-control comments to stop and be removed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11520" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:31:10.707" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So much ado about not having privileges.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user was &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt;, with a rep of &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; and so &lt;strong&gt;did not have&lt;/strong&gt; comment privilege, but was eager to share what they considered was relevant and interesting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that the &quot;answer&quot; needed was to post a comment saying &quot;This is not an answer.&quot; Why blow the issue over?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users rushing to say something tend to use the &quot;answer&quot; option; this is a very commonly observed &quot;breach&quot; but is understandable.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T08:31:10.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11543" CreationDate="2018-07-27T09:03:39.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's fine, and it's been done in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are for clarification of the question. In &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; cases where the question really doesn't merit an answer on this site it can be helpful to provide an answer in a comment, but &lt;strong&gt;comments are not provided to allow a forum for discussion.&lt;/strong&gt; If people have even the germ of an answer to an on-topic question, they should write an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how the system handles authors' flags on their own posts: marking such a flag &quot;Helpful&quot; shouldn't ding the author, and I hope that doesn't happen. Your flag was helpful, so I marked it as such. To avoid any untoward effects, there is nothing inherently wrong with taking the trouble to flag each comment which you don't consider helpful: it only takes a certain number of flags for the comment to disappear without moderator intervention, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; it helps the system keep track of troublesome commenters. Moderators receive automatic flags to have a look at commenters' behaviour once they have received a number of user flags. However, it's a good idea to do this as early as possible, before things get really out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T09:18:28.097" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T09:18:28.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11499" CreationDate="2018-07-29T12:16:13.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No research was indicated in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=What+should+I+use+when+introducing+dialogue%2C+hyphens%2C+en-dashes+or+em-dashes%&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google your question title&lt;/a&gt; for a start. The results are plentiful and include at least four related questions on this very site, as well as other sites chock full of information.  Tell us which sites you checked, what information you obtained, and why that information was not sufficient. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;How much research is needed?&lt;/a&gt; and the fine answer by moderator Andrew Leach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T19:34:43.527" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T19:34:43.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11521" CreationDate="2018-07-29T14:14:57.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have to have reputation before you can do anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without reputation, you can write questions and answers. This is also how you earn reputation, which will soon allow you to do other things, such as vote, comment, participate in chat, and edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to flag answers, but as has been said in comments, this is more for process violations than for incorrectness (I like that phrasing, and shall adopt it henceforth; thanks, Lawrence). If you see a wrong answer, the best thing to do for now is to ignore it and simply write your own, if you can. If yours is better supported, the voting patterns will probably place it above the wrong one anyway. If you can’t write your own answer, simply ignore it for now and come back when you have enough rep to downvote and comment. It doesn’t take long to earn rep if you provide good answers. And there will be plenty of questions you can answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking interesting questions is also a good way to gain reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastEditorUserId="1696" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T09:07:39.353" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T09:07:39.353" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11521" CreationDate="2018-07-29T19:09:05.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary question here is about the quality of the content of answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the central question, how you notify others on SE whether an answer is correct, the oversimplified answer is that you vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many mechanisms built in to the SE software to indicate some kind of quality. There's spam or vulgar which can be flagged; there's off-topic or not the right place which can be close-voted, and there's helpfulness or correctness which can be voted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think an answer is wrong you should downvote it (likewise if you think it is correct you should up-vote). And if you think just a downvote is not enough (it is swamped by upvotes by people you think are wrong), you may add a comment. Or better, you may want to give what you think is the correct answer, so that your presumably correct answer gets upvoted more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the primary working of SE voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to address reputation, there are small qualifications. In the design of SE, the designers wanted to not only assess the answers, but also people. For that, there is the concept of reputation, which one gets from having questions and answers voted on (the first thing mentioned). Once you get enough reputation (answer enough questions that get upvoted), then you pass some thresholds which enable certain extra features, like the ability to comment, the ability to downvote, and so on. If you don't have enough reputation, you probably don't have enough experience with the site, and so aren't expected to be able to use those tools as expected. The idea is that people with enough rep are invested already in the quality of the site and will use those features in a quality manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have enough rep, you'll be able to do more things, like downvote or comment to say something like &quot;This is entirely wrong&quot; (but of course you will want to be responsible and give reasonable justification, not leaving it at such a bald statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'barrier' or thresholds to getting features are laid out in the FAQs somewhere. At the beginning those features may seem daunting, but all it takes is a small handful of activity (getting used to the system too), and then you'll have enough rep to do all sorts of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T19:09:05.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2018-07-30T03:14:53.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does it mean when a post (question or answer) is up- or down-voted? Does it mean it's a good post? It's a high quality post? It's a funny post? It mentions cats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe everyone has their own reasons for voting and that there is no consensus on what a vote means or why you should vote or should refrain from voting. Voting is highly subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've only ever cast two downvotes, so I won't discuss those. I upvote questions if I have (almost) the same question, or the question is really thoughtful, i.e. now that I've read the question, I'm curious too and would like to know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I upvote answers when they fully answer the question and are not repeating previous information, i.e. the earliest answer that satisfies my curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't upvote simply because others have upvoted, but because I believe it deserves to be upvoted, however, if there are a lot of answers, I don't always read all of them, leading to the top answers being more likely to receive an upvote from me, simply because I don't see any potentially good answers further down. Sometimes I sort the answers by age to try and mitigate this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, feel free to upvote just because the post mentions cats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T03:14:53.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11521" CreationDate="2018-07-30T11:12:35.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are limited options for dealing with wrong answers on Stack Exchange, especially if you have not earned any reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answering (no rep needed)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to have reputation before you can do anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It definitely can seem that way, but reputation is actually required more for the minor site functions than the major ones. New users can make question or answer posts right away. As TRiG says, if you can post an answer of your own, that would give you a place to discuss the errors in the earlier answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, as Kris pointed out in a comment, knowing that an answer contains errors doesn't always imply knowing the correct answer to a question. Using an answer post just to correct another answer is not allowed, so if you can't answer the question, this is not a possible course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other ways of dealing with bad answers—flagging, comments, and downvoting—all require you to earn some reputation, and the first two are subject to fairly heavy moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Flagging (15 rep needed)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flag&lt;/a&gt; system allows answers to be flagged for four reasons: &amp;quot;spam&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;rude or abusive&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;in need of moderator intervention&amp;quot;. None of these is really applicable to a question that is merely incorrect. The &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; flag is sometimes raised on egregiously wrong answers, but the general consensus on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185073/how-do-i-properly-use-the-not-an-answer-flag&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is that this flag should only be used for posts that do not even attempt to answer the question, not for posts that try and fail to answer the question correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Edit: as Tonepoet's answer mentions, there is also a fifth flag option, &amp;quot;very low quality&amp;quot;, that is only available for certain recent answers. Its meaning is a bit unclear, but it also shouldn't be applied to posts that try and fail to answer the question correctly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, flagging is rarely the right way to respond to erroneous answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Comments (50 rep needed)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constructive criticism is one of the intended uses of the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comment Everywhere&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; privilege, so in principle, you should be able to use comments to point out errors to the author of an answer. However, diamond moderators have the ability to delete comments, and they often will in circumstances where they feel that a comment chain has become a discussion, or if they think that it's unlikely that the post author will respond productively to the comment. A commonly expressed sentiment on Stack Exchange is that comments should be thought of as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312001/how-are-comments-ephemeral&quot;&gt;ephemeral&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;unimportant&amp;quot;: although I don't really agree with applying this model to comments that point out errors, it's still likely that moderators will take this perspective when dealing with your comments. Maintaining a polite tone will reduce the chance of your comments being deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments by themselves don't have any effect on the answer, but a comment may serve as a visible note to readers that lets them know about the errors (this is especially true if the comment gets upvoted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Downvoting (125 rep needed)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;Downvoting&lt;/a&gt; is the least restricted, and most encouraged way of dealing with incorrect answers. But it also has the highest reputation limit, and each downvote on an answer costs a point of reputation. Voting affects the relative ranking of the answers to a question, and answers with a sufficiently low total score get &amp;quot;grayed out&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of downvotes is somewhat subjective: the tooltip for downvoting answers merely says &amp;quot;This answer is not useful&amp;quot;, while the Help Center says &amp;quot;Voting down, also known as &amp;quot;casting downvotes&amp;quot;, is how the community indicates which questions and answers are least useful. [...] Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are subject to moderation only in the sense that voting abuse (like &amp;quot;serial downvoting&amp;quot; a particular user's posts, sock-puppetry and the like) is investigated and perpetrators may be disciplined. Aside from these obvious exceptions, it's up to each user to decide whether an answer ought to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A downvote may optionally be accompanied by an explanatory comment. This is never required (although the site reminds users of this option in some circumstances), and opinions about when to do this vary greatly between Stack Exchange users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T13:55:30.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11521" CreationDate="2018-07-30T13:49:45.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is not. You shall have to wait until you earn the reputation to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a flagging system, and a Very Low Quality flag that seems like it should allow you to flag some answers as false, but it is really meant for posts that are completely incomprehensible. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/167641/371286&quot;&gt;It is not for wrong answers.&lt;/a&gt; If I recall correctly, some restrictions have even been placed on when a Very Low Quality flag can be raised, because of how easy it is to misunderstand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason there is no flag for a wrong answer is that flagging is primarily meant to alert moderators that a post should be outright deleted due to some major defect, but an answer simply being wrong does not merit deletion. The Stack Exchange system is meant to have some wrong and otherwise bad answers so that community consensus can sort their place appropriately through the voting system, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;because knowing which answers are poorly received can also be instructive&lt;/a&gt;, and not just for the people who want to know the answer to the question, but also for people who want to know how to write better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation limits on voting are there to help ensure that voters are trustworthy. It ensures that voters have at least some rudimentary knowledge regarding the subject, enough of an investment in the website to be expected to vote in good faith before they have the ability to do so and are not suspended for exhibiting immediately poor behavior (since a person's reputation is reduced to one point for the duration of suspension). Otherwise, you might have some random passerby voting against a whole bunch of answers just for laughs, or just out of spite. People can still do that even with the limits unfortunately, but fewer people will do it than they would otherwise, and at least it is restricted to people who have made an otherwise positive contribution to the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation threshold for voting is relatively low though and if you start contributing to the website to prove yourself, I would suppose you could earn the privilege relatively quickly. Being awarded one bounty, five votes for your answers or fifty edits would be enough to let you cast your first vote against an erroneous answer. It would only allow you one such vote since voting against answers actually detracts from reputation, but it is only by a single point, so if you continue making positive contributions, this will eventually be rendered into a relatively insignificant amount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T14:10:44.167" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T14:10:44.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11553" CreationDate="2018-07-30T16:57:57.113" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/458009/is-there-an-official-name-for-a-wooden-spiked-wall&quot;&gt;A question was migrated&lt;/a&gt; from Writer.SE to our main site. There it was placed on hold for unclear. I agreed with a comment placed there from Lawrence (from our own community), but when I tried to up-tick it I received a message from the AI:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This comment is not eligible for voting or flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never seen this before, so I tried another question (also on hold) and there were no problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody know what is going on here? Is it because it was migrated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T17:01:19.163" Title="Why can't I up-tick comments on a certain closed question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11552" CreationDate="2018-07-30T17:01:19.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's because it was migrated.  More specifically, the migration was rejected, which automatically locked the question.  This is done so that only one copy of the question is in play at any given time; the copy of the question on Writing was automatically unlocked when it was locked on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lock prevents you from upvoting comments, or really taking just about any action on the post, and that's why you get the error you do.  It could be a little more descriptive, perhaps something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You cannot upvote this comment because the post it's under is locked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want that to happen, you'll probably have to post it as a separate feature request.  Most of the other actions you can take have more descriptive errors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post has been locked; locked posts can't be voted on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that one in particular is lacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28567" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T17:01:19.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-30T17:29:00.790" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a more historical perspective on how we ended up with the orthography we have today and why it differs from pronunciation. E.g., the letter &quot;t&quot; does the sound originally symbolized by thorn along with its normal sound because printing presses didn't have the thorn character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where could I find a book or website that explains this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297107" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T02:56:19.687" Title="Historical explanation of relationship between graphemes and phonemes" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-30T17:45:35.410" Score="7" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only been on this site for a week, but I've noticed that an awful lot of questions that should go to ELL go to ELU.&#xA;I also notice when I google: &quot;English stack exchange&quot; that the first hit I get is ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B5Wyu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B5Wyu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beneath the ELU heading a number of subcategories are then listed; English Language Learner;questions; ask a question; word usage; single word requests and a couple of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is if I were learning the English language and had a question, my instinctive response would be to click 'questions' rather than ELL. But then I land at ELU, which isn't necessarily appropriate.&#xA;I'm not a techie, but wonder is there some way to fix it so that ELL is not listed in the top google hit as a subcategory on the same level as questions (which are ELU questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="309795" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T08:45:33.700" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T08:45:33.700" Title="ELL and ELU -- problems in distinguishing when googling" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-30T18:54:17.933" Score="7" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an answer to a moderately controversial question that was just deleted by Community as spam/offensive. The answer was highly-voted (last I checked, +14/-7) and appreciated by OP as indicated in a comment. The content was not offensive or disingenuous in any way, but was the sort of thing that MRA troll types don't like to hear, and the deletion, along with a string of downvotes, happened right after a hostile user created a new account on the site just to argue in the comments. It seems likely all the deletion votes were from people associated with this user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from flagging for moderator attention, is there anything that I should do? Are there mechanisms that should be put in place to prevent this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the answer here for users who can see deleted answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/457848/10593&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/457848/10593&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And text copied here (first line answering the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/457553/is-there-a-gender-neutral-equivalent-of-manspreading&quot;&gt;Is there a gender neutral equivalent of “manspreading”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While there are words that carry the meaning of sitting in a way that takes up too much space, an essential part of the meaning of manspreading is the connection to a culture of male entitlement and the power dynamics of gender and personal space. If this is the meaning you intended to convey, you should keep it. It is not &quot;misandry&quot;, and claims of &quot;misandry&quot; should be treated as highly suspect of being misogynist in nature (denying the reality of gendered power dynamics). There are cases where the word &quot;misandry&quot; is a meaningful criticism (e.g. denying that a man could be the victim of sexual assault or claims that men are not suitable as single parents) but this is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10593" LastEditorUserId="10593" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T19:00:39.520" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T19:19:51.020" Title="Answer wrongfully deleted by brigade of trolls?" Tags="|support|deleted-posts|trolling|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11556" CreationDate="2018-07-30T19:15:01.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer seems like a legit post, it attempts to answer the question (no is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4349/how-should-we-handle-single-word-requests-that-dont-have-a-matching-word&quot;&gt;viable answer to single word requests&lt;/a&gt;), you provide a solid argument (it isn't merely a comment) and it isn't covered by other answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, as far as I know, new users cannot really delete posts. Normal downvoting requires 125 rep and certain flagging (which as you mentioned also carries a down vote) requires 15 rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you can actually vote to undelete your answer (should be an option next to the edit button). Since you already opened this post on Meta (and flagged for moderator attention), I think it's time to wait for high rep users or a moderator to come into action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T19:15:01.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11556" CreationDate="2018-07-30T19:19:51.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a long time user here, I don't see anything egregious in your answer to warrant voting to delete. It does not seem opinionated, but then I agree with most of what is said. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sociolinguistic assessment is hard to keep objective (being &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the situation often means being on one side of a situation). I note that as of deleting time it had 14 upvotes and 10 down, which is about as controversial as you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difficulty I see is that it may be stylistically a bit abrupt with the 'No' and that may have triggered a lot of casual viewers (it hit the HNQ list which makes the question known to many people across the SE network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't think this requires a colluding set of 'trolls' to explain being closed. Just a number of unrelated opinionated people to decide to flag...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wait... it was just undeleted. So sanity prevails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T19:19:51.020" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11554" CreationDate="2018-07-30T19:43:07.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you'll get a single contained book that explains why sounds and writing diverge or describes the history of that failing correspondence. The closest might be a perusal of any general history of the English language where all sorts of anecdotes might explain a number of spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, one could follow a number of on-line references which do both at a linguistic level. For English, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt; covers a number of vowels (but not all vowels and not all dialects). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a practical level, such as for every single strange spelling like why 'laugh' is pronounced /læf/, an explanation would need to be discovered for any individual sound change/orthographical instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T19:43:07.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T10:23:22.983" Score="-3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked this [question]  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/458136/is-there-a-word-which-describes-something-being-both-beautiful-and-ugly-at-the-s&quot;&gt;Is there a word which describes something being both beautiful and ugly at the same time?&lt;/a&gt;) on Stack Exchange English and I suspect the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/14666/kris&quot;&gt;Kris&lt;/a&gt; is receiving upvote because he has uploaded some troll pictures and he has high points. I already commented him saying that his answer is not related to my question. He is not replying to why he answered it. Also, the answer which I accepted and which is actually relevant is under looked. I don't want that other users should get wrong answer when they look my question. &#xA;I have also tried Flagging the answer, but one was declined and other is pending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have high regards for stack exchange and I need answer for this question.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user310619" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:49:59.633" Title="I find this answer is irrelevant to my questions" Tags="|support|flags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11561" CreationDate="2018-07-31T10:40:16.350" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer you have selected has the green checkmark, and that answer will always be displayed first. This is you telling the community that your question has been answered, and as far as you are concerned, it is the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But people can disagree, and upvote another answer. The fact that you don't like one answer does not give you the right to ask the moderators to intervene in some way (how?) or (worse) delete the post. As long as the post submitted &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on-topic and has, preferably, supporting references; it is an answer. Consequently, it should stay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T10:49:59.633" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:49:59.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11565" CreationDate="2018-07-31T19:51:02.113" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new here, and want to ask a question about the questions.  Would that be at &quot;meta,&quot; and if so, how do I access it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why are there so many already &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions in the 'unanswered' section?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="310740" OwnerDisplayName="Jerry A. Trik" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T20:58:08.110" Title="How do you access &quot;Meta&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-08-07T13:12:36.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11563" CreationDate="2018-07-31T20:18:53.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the text on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=newest&quot;&gt;&quot;Unanswered Questions&quot; tab&lt;/a&gt; explains, that listing is of &lt;em&gt;questions with no upvoted or accepted answers&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Np8ze.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Np8ze.png&quot; alt=&quot;questions with no upvoted or accepted answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be questions which have therefore received one or more answers, but these answers have neither attracted the approval of the original poster or other members of the community. The system &quot;bumps&quot; those questions periodically in the hopes of attracting new attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also cases where the original poster receives an answer from elsewhere, or from a comment. The &quot;question&quot; is &quot;answered,&quot; but in terms of the Stack Exchange system, unless an answer is posted in the Your Answer box and either accepted or upvoted, it may as well not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T20:38:49.083" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T20:38:49.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11563" CreationDate="2018-07-31T20:58:08.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the first part of your question, yes: you should ask questions about the site on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can access Meta more or less directly by clicking on the StackExchange icon at the far right of the top nav bar, and choosing your current site's Meta site that is listed directly underneath it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UuyxZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UuyxZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T20:58:08.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T23:03:26.827" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to edit someone's question, and was told that there was already another edit on hold, and that I'd have to wait till that one was reviewed.  How do we get the privilege to review proposed edits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastEditorUserId="167518" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T23:10:33.383" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T23:56:09.170" Title="Reviewing Proposed Edits" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11554" CreationDate="2018-07-31T23:33:40.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend the seven (as of Aug 1 2018) fully accessible, popularizing books by Columbia Univ Prof. John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=vKqTCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&amp;amp;source=gbs_toc_r&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt; on p. 135&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A Vowel Is a Process: &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Words Start Sounding Different&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, of &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1627794719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Words on the Move&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt;. It explains English's Great Vowel Shift without IPA and presuming any knowledge of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T23:33:40.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11566" CreationDate="2018-07-31T23:56:09.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;full list of privileges&lt;/a&gt; and at what reputation you earn them in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you earn the privilege &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;to edit questions and answers&lt;/a&gt; without peer review, you also earn the privilege to review suggested edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T23:56:09.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11554" CreationDate="2018-08-01T02:56:19.687" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend David Crystal's books, and especially his Cambridge Language Encyclopedias:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521736501&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language&lt;/em&gt; (3rd edition)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521530334&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (2nd edition)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's practically no overlap between these two, which are both available in folio-size paperback. The second one has a section on the English alphabet, with a full page devoted to each letter, its history, its variants, its extensions, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For total coverage, try Daniels and Bright's monumental &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Writing_Systems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World's Writing Systems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T02:56:19.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-01T12:04:45.270" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked one simple question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/458328/are-there-any-general-rules-or-guidelines-for-using-newly-coined-words&quot;&gt;Are there any general rules or guidelines for using newly coined word(s)?&lt;/a&gt;) and it was put on hold. Nobody answered it and the moderator says that it will generate opinion. I doubt that. On the contrary, I have received 5 upvotes, so people are interested in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user310658" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2024-01-05T14:30:56.813" LastActivityDate="2024-01-05T14:30:56.813" Title="Why was my question on neologisms put on hold?" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11570" CreationDate="2018-08-01T13:20:25.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe you could try asking the question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://writing.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may allow it to be discussed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure as I haven't looked at that forum. (As a writer, perhaps I should!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184130" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T13:20:25.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11578" CreationDate="2018-08-01T16:52:44.120" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've received quite a number of badges, but although I've searched in meta and in the main English site, I couldn't find what the point of badges is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T02:07:25.123" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T21:35:43.870" Title="Purpose of Badges?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11573" CreationDate="2018-08-01T20:24:48.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are akin to getting &quot;achievements&quot; in computer/console games. Badges are one of many ways that Stack Exchange games you to participate more in it, as are points, privileges and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T20:24:48.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11577" CreationDate="2018-07-29T19:00:58.450" Score="5" ViewCount="1100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether this question about spoken English fits here or not, but it's fully about English language &amp;amp; usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a person from Asia, I think I can read and write English decently, but am &lt;strong&gt;much worse&lt;/strong&gt; at &lt;strong&gt;spoken English&lt;/strong&gt;. And I suppose this has a strong relation with the fact that English is featuring in &lt;strong&gt;word stress, tone and intonation&lt;/strong&gt;. None of these factors is emphasized in Asian languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of clearness, I ask the question in this new paragraph: are there some really good and helpful books/tutorials about these? And how can I effectively improve my English in these aspects? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308500" OwnerDisplayName="W.W." LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T08:47:26.990" Title="Good books or tutorials about English stress, tone and intonation" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11575" CreationDate="2018-07-29T22:55:20.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would listen to podcasts, and BBC radio 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;maybe the world service, but not sure how much of that, is uk content, or locally produced content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even watch old television episodes on youtube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As no book is going to be as good as actually listening to native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246350" OwnerDisplayName="WendyG" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T22:55:20.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11575" CreationDate="2018-08-02T13:17:28.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an excellent question, mostly because the answer is unfortunately that there aren't any. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistics and language instruction (related but distinct things) spend a lot of time and scholarship with pronunciation and grammar. It is universally recognized that there is little research done on sentence prosody, the 'music' over a complete sentence. All you get is maybe a paragraph about how yes/no questions having rising tone, and other questions falling. You certainly get a lot of instruction on word stress but that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are surely book length linguistic analyses of sentence intonation for many languages but they are comparatively few. As to language instruction, you get a few hints here and there maybe but rarely anything concentrated in say a chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a practical manner if you want to improve your intonation, do all the usual language learning things to improve pronunciation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;listen to native speakers (youtube is good for this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repeat it back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;record yourself doing so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;play that back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repeat, fixing what you think is wrong&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to look at and ask at &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Language Learning.SE&lt;/a&gt; where they may have more advice and references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T13:17:28.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11573" CreationDate="2018-08-02T21:35:43.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Badges reward good behavior&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/07/12/stack-overflow-badge-feedbac/&quot;&gt;The blog post&lt;/a&gt; that first announced badges describes their purpose thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our goal with the badges is to encourage people to a) &lt;em&gt;have fun&lt;/em&gt; and b) use the Stack Overflow website in ways that make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/12/16/badges-positive-only/&quot;&gt;second blog post about badges&lt;/a&gt; says something along the same lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Badges exist to reward and encourage the kind of positive behavior we want in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Badges help indicate participation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's not mentioned in the aforementioned blog posts (due to changes that happened in 2015 after those blog posts were written), there is another place badge count... counts. The &quot;Candidate Score&quot;, which is shown for each person running during each moderator election, is based on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/252643/323179&quot;&gt;combination of reputation and certain badges&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1 point for each 1000 reputation up to 20,000 reputation for a maximum of 20 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1 point each for Moderation badges - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/32/civic-duty&quot;&gt;Civic Duty&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/4/cleanup&quot;&gt;Cleanup&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/140/deputy&quot;&gt;Deputy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/54/electorate&quot;&gt;Electorate&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/160/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/169/reviewer&quot;&gt;Reviewer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/119/sportsmanship&quot;&gt;Sportsmanship&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/185/steward&quot;&gt;Steward&lt;/a&gt; - for a maximum of 8 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1 point each for Editing badges - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/65/copy-editor&quot;&gt;Copy Editor&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/246/explainer&quot;&gt;Explainer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/5/organizer&quot;&gt;Organizer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/247/refiner&quot;&gt;Refiner&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/12/strunk-white&quot;&gt;Strunk and White&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/73/tag-editor&quot;&gt;Tag Editor&lt;/a&gt; - for a maximum of 6 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1 point each for Participation badges - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/1974/constituent&quot;&gt;Constituent&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/901/convention&quot;&gt;Convention&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/enthusiast&quot;&gt;Enthusiast&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/61/investor&quot;&gt;Investor&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/900/quorum&quot;&gt;Quorum&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/13/yearling&quot;&gt;Yearling&lt;/a&gt; - for a maximum of 6 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For badges that can be awarded multiple times only 1 point is granted for each badge type, thus ensuring a maximum score of 40 points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People of course are free to vote however they want, but higher scores look better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On sites where users leave &quot;welcome&quot; comments for new users, it is often suggested (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://bicycles.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1028&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) to only suggest a new user take the tour if they don't have the &quot;informed&quot; badge (which is given for taking the tour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges also give a quick indication how much a user has participated on meta, which doesn't have its own (visible) reputation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T21:35:43.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2018-08-03T04:13:03.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of all of the topics on this site, this is the one that I enjoy the most. When it's done well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing worse that having a question asked without a clear set of guidelines for what type of thing is being looked for, and what words have already been considered and rejected and why. When that happens, anybody can throw out hundreds of possibilities from a dictionary and thesaurus search. Sometimes, you can guess—and it's nice when you come up with something exactly right and both the person asking the question and everybody else looking at it and feels the same way. However, that's &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; just blind luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't be about luck. If the question is well defined, then it's not about random answers. It's about making use of general knowledge and doing some investigate work into meaning and semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site shouldn't just be about grammar and etymology. While that's somewhat interesting, it's not as interesting to me as &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; words are used and how a slight change in something can produce either a subtle or a drastic change in overall meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best questions are those whose answers require either a specific synonym with a subtle difference in meaning from the rest—or something that is not in a list of synonyms but that you have to dig for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are some bad questions. And there are also some questions that just aren't all that interesting. But there are also some really good questions that &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; mindless and which do stretch vocabulary and innovative thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you've already decided you don't want these questions, now it's time to step up and make them go away... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I'm not one of the people being spoken to here. I like many of these questions, and I look forward to seeing them. I'd like to see the overall quality improve—but I'd rather see &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; of them than none at all . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: I was asked in a comment to add an example of a well-built single-word request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to be as objective as possible, I based this on a tag search of questions and answers that received a high number of votes and also had accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps appropriately, an excellent example is also one whose accepted answer was given by the commenter who spurred my search:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/327748/291924&quot;&gt;Is there really no English equivalent to German's “Fachidiot”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T13:40:51.167" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T13:40:51.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-03T05:34:10.857" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/454082/is-post-script-p-s-still-relevant-in-the-age-of-email&quot;&gt;Is Post Script (P.S.) still relevant in the age of email?&lt;/a&gt; on ELU few days back which resulted into closing and locking of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My version&lt;/strong&gt;: Why it happened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closing of question&lt;/strong&gt;: I disagreed with the suggested thoughts by commenters on the question in comment section. &lt;em&gt;May be, it resulted because I was not able to expression my thought successfully or make it more clear&lt;/em&gt;. Then, it was put on hold for providing further explanation which I did and later they closed with a reason: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;closed as primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Locking of the question&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;I deleted by description twice.&lt;/em&gt; I thought no body was paying much attention to the description and drafted their comments or answer which they thought is correct. Mostly, the comments and the answer were favoring informal use of P.S. in a email.  In description, I stated saying that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postscript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;  article on it and my question is on &lt;strong&gt;formal email&lt;/strong&gt; and not about &lt;strong&gt;informal email&lt;/strong&gt;. On seeing confusion, I later updated same in my description, before I deleted description completely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I was miffed by the way my question was handled and I snapped back at @MetaEd saying, if you want to ban me then please go ahead, but I will not give up on this one, because I tried making it clear many a times that it was about formal email: why we need to use P.S. in formal email communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought to update my question, but I was locked, hence I can't update it now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question (concern)&lt;/strong&gt;, is it possible to unlock the question, so that I can update question making a proper sense? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228908" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T19:37:14.273" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T23:56:47.807" Title="Why is my question locked?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|locked-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11580" CreationDate="2018-08-03T09:26:28.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22228/what-is-a-locked-post&quot;&gt;locked&lt;/a&gt;&quot; it means that it cannot be unlocked by normal voting procedures and new answers cannot be posted. In this case, the community is also prevented from voting on the locked question but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; on its answers (so it's really &lt;em&gt;punishing&lt;/em&gt; the OP). Users are also prevented from editing the post itself. &lt;strong&gt;Only diamond moderators can lock or unlock posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish your question to be unlocked you should address the reason for its closure and remove the &quot;stumbling block&quot;. In your case, five users (myself included) said that the question is opinion based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What does POB mean?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It stands for Primarily Opinion Based, which means there cannot be a right or wrong answer to the OP's question, only answers based on personal opinions. The owner of the locked post should address that specific issue by raising a flag or by posting on meta. Only a mod can unlock the question, so the owner has to &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; convince them, but a general consensus from the community might also be persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original question, the OP asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it make any sense to use P.S. these days while drafting an email?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is not a question asking for &lt;strong&gt;users' opinions&lt;/strong&gt;, however well-informed those opinions might be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, when the OP (@Looper) deleted all its contents and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/454082/7&quot;&gt;replaced it&lt;/a&gt; with (entire text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is Post Script (P.S.) still relevant?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is Post Script (P.S.) still relevant? I am expecting any answer here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they didn't help the situation. But they did successfully boil it down to a single phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use common sense. If writing a P.S. is acceptable in chatty emails, and you acknowledged it was, then it's a matter of opinion if it's acceptable in formal correspondence. You probably could add a P.S in an email addressed to a university professor, but less so to a CEO or to your boss. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no references that I could find which support my idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T19:21:43.430" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T19:21:43.430" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-06T19:57:49.983" Score="-1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373119/use-of-have-had-had-had-has-had&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been brought to the attention of the community. The question is clearly off-topic despite the upvotes and the correct answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that from time to time Mr. Community  bring to the attention of users questions with no answers or with no upvotes, but what’s the purpose for this question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T21:44:58.573" Title="Why has Mr. Community pushed the following question to the top of the active line?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11584" CreationDate="2018-08-06T21:44:58.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, an unregistered user (listed as 'Community') made an edit which was approved, hence bumping the question to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Community's usual activity (in this context) is simply to churn the list by bumping questions that have no upvoted answers. There is no &quot;purpose&quot; to this mechanical process; if the question is still open, it is eligible to be bumped to the top of the list.  So if you think a question should be closed, there actually is a purpose in closevoting/flagging it, even if it is (apparently) safely off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T21:44:58.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11580" CreationDate="2018-08-06T23:56:47.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry this is such a long answer, but I think I can help by clearing up some misconceptions about what happened and what the English Stack Exchange is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why was the question locked, and can it be unlocked?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was locked after it was defaced twice. Questions should not be defaced. Defacing means modifying so that the original question is gone. The community and the moderator team enforce this. Some tools at their disposal are: unediting (reverting) the question, locking the question, and suspending the account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unlocking the question, so that it can be edited again. But please, if you have a different or related question, do not change the original question. Instead, create a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why was the question closed, and can it be reopened?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see several problems with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking for discussion of your belief that the use of P.S. in formal emails is now obsolete and not necessary. Stack Exchange is for questions that can have a &quot;right&quot; answer. When a question is more of a statement of opinion and a request for other opinions from the community, it is usually closed as too subjective to have a &quot;right&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be the same as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101029&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to add a postscript to an email?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. When two questions are the same, one is closed as a duplicate of the other, or else the two questions are merged. This is done even when the earlier question is closed or does not have a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking how a good formal business email should be written. The experts here are experts on what English &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;: the linguistics of English, or you could say English as a technology: its words, grammar, etymology, pronunciation, spelling, punctuation, and variations. Questions about the art of writing or what the English language &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt; are outside the scope of this site. I think this is why the answers did not satisfy you. You hoped to discuss what the use of postscripts &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt;, but the answers were more about what the use of postscripts &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of these problems, probably the community will leave the question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Then what can be done?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages have different variations for different social situations. This is referred to as register, or formality. Your question touches on register. Instead of starting a discussion of how &quot;P.S.&quot; &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt; used, would it be helpful to you to ask about how &quot;P.S.&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used? In current usage, where does it fall on the spectrum of formality? Is it still used formally, or has it shifted and become mostly ironic, or archaic/super-formal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that would help you, maybe try posing a new question. I cannot promise that it would be well received, but I think it would avoid some of problems that this question had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T23:56:47.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-07T12:59:57.510" Score="19" ViewCount="773" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I resort to Stack Exchange I literally experience a level of indecision and reluctance as so many of the threads scream disdain.  And its such a shame too, because there could be infinite possibilities, with the many different language, expression, vocabulary sub-topics, so many individuals who contribute that have so much knowledge to share. Ironically, so much that it sure seems everyone knows everything about everything, albeit to the distasteful point that many Stack exchangers redefine ultracrepidarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The knowledge here is amazing and perplexing, but I'm just being honest--quite frankly the condescending attitudes here are reporting: &quot;I'm just being honest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite certain my thoughts here will not be accessible for any more than a brief moment, if even that! No one on this holier-than-thou site will ever be accepting of this constructive criticism.  That said, I'm done pissing in the wind. If you people could lighten up just a tiny bit, you might be surprised how much more pleasant the site would be. Just my observation, thus MHO. Good day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="311538" OwnerDisplayName="Plazzy" LastEditorUserId="25574" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T17:15:03.773" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T17:39:27.573" Title="I want to share a very basic and somewhat troubling observation" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2018-08-07T13:26:56.237" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The attitude you describe is well-known and many in the community actively work against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best course of action when you find obnoxious posts is to flag them (click &quot;flag&quot; and select the appropriate objection). The moderators keep a close eye on flags, and some flags automatically delete comments if a few people flag the comment the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, Stack Exchange operates somewhat differently from other Q&amp;amp;A sites. It has a long-term objective of becoming a repository of questions relevant to individual communities, answered by experts from that community. This sets up an expectation that questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; relevant and answers &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aside&lt;/strong&gt; The site started as a Q&amp;amp;A for programmers, with EL&amp;amp;U and other communities added later. The programmers  were keen to help fellow programmers, but weren’t interested to be a free ‘do my homework’ service. It is considered rude for an asker to demand that the community “just show me the codez” without having tried to solve the problem first. This generalised to what is now termed the ‘research’ requirement. For EL&amp;amp;U, this includes basic references such as dictionaries, as well as checking the EL&amp;amp;U repository itself to see if the question has been asked and answered previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T03:24:58.063" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T03:24:58.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2018-08-07T14:16:36.480" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;And someone downvoted your post too... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm relieved you wrote this comment. I was of a mind to collect the snarky, condescending, conceited, truly unhelpful comments I keep seeing and write a post comparing such with the New Code of Conduct. But it would be too depressing and it's not how I really want to spend time on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find particularly disturbing is that such comments are often not from one-time troll users, but from people who have been here for years and accumulated respect points in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU seems to have a structural problem in that a lot of the questions directed here should be directed to English Language Learners. So a lot of the posts are not at a level that ELU users would find of interest. This should not be a reason for anyone – 'respected' or not – to publicly take their frustration out on such language learners. It is often through no fault of their own that language learners end up on ELU. Ultimately a snide, hostile climate damages ELU itself (imho as an upstart who's been around for a couple of weeks) since it will also put off exactly the kind of users I imagine they would like to attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume it goes without saying that this site can be really informative and that the vast majority of commenters do give helpful, informative advice. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth the time it takes to complain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="309795" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T07:47:59.840" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T07:47:59.840" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2018-08-07T14:17:33.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, you can flag comments. Unfortunately, flagging isn't always effective. There are some subtleties where comments aren't helpful, but they are also not obviously &quot;offensive&quot;; yet, in an overall pattern, they still do represent the type of negativity described. Where it's, individually, a &quot;close call,&quot; flagging them more often than not results in a &quot;not helpful&quot; result—and this can lead to a feeling of futility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the broader scheme, negativity always seems to be perceived more strongly than positively. You can be at a place that has eight friendly people, and two negative ones, and still think of the place as negative—because more weight is assigned to negativity. But, in reality, those who are being negative are in the minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I simply choose to ignore any negativity (unless it's obvious and I am able to report it), and focus on the positivity which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; exist, even if it might not seem as prevalent in the face of our natural emotional reactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update #1&lt;/strong&gt;: This is interesting. As I was going through comments of old posts, I discovered one thing and realized another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of the types of comments that I might have relayed here (or at least paraphrased) are now gone. I'm hoping this is a good sign and that they are being cleaned up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of all of the examples I could think of, they now seem to be covered by the new &quot;unfriendly or unkind&quot; flag—which I consider to address sarcasm and snide offhanded remarks. (Previously, as I indicated, they didn't fit the &quot;offensive&quot; flag as they weren't that bad.) But now I believe I could simply use the new flag. It does, after all, include flagging comments such as &quot;You could Google this in 5 seconds.&quot; Which is the type of subtle dig I'd been referring to here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will continue to monitor this, and mention anything I see that isn't covered by the new Code of Conduct. But I'm now optimistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update #2&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I finally encountered an example of a comment that's a &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; subtle put-down. Even if it's not meant in a negative way, it, on its own, is not &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What makes you think that only one version could be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While quite possibly meant to be helpful, I can also see this kind of rhetorical question being said with a sarcastic tone of voice. To improve it, and make it apparent it's not being used in a sarcastic way, the comment should provide additional feedback. Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They actually both are but are used differently. If you can expand on your confusion, this difference can be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only the first one is correct because of X. Is this what you were asking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the response to the comment could lead to an actual answer—which is something that the single-line version doesn't really do; it's more like just punting the question back rather than trying to get clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is an example of a comment that cannot be flagged in any way because while it's an example of a poor comment, it's certainly not an example of anything obviously negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T17:39:27.573" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T17:39:27.573" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-08T02:37:13.100" Score="15" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture&quot;&gt;yellow axe question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;on its face&lt;/strong&gt; is about English.  As I said in a comment under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11103/i-didnt-know-the-yellow-ax-question-had-been-locked-did-you&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A's question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question was about English. (Is there an English word that starts&#xA;  with Y and means the thing in this picture?&quot;) The answer did the&#xA;  almost impossible job of proving a negative. &quot;There is no English word&#xA;  that starts with Y and describes the thing in this picture.&quot; the&#xA;  answer then went on to explain how a Swedish word crept in. If any&#xA;  future user can write a question which will lead to a comparable level&#xA;  of detective work about English, have at it! If any future user can&#xA;  come up with an English word that answers that question, I want to&#xA;  hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mari-Lou presented even more cogent reasons why the question is about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, with 1.5 billion or so people speaking some form of English, the large majority of which are non-native speakers, perhaps we should expand our territory from English usage to English misusage. To some extent, we already do, with tags for different varities of English, although I am not suggesting that a dialect is a misuse of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Draakhond brilliantly summarized how English might have been misused &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395817#395817&quot;&gt;in this case&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to debate the disposition of the YAQ -- Mari-Lou has done that --&#xA;only to suggest that our boundaries should not be so inelastic that serious, well framed questions that elicit brilliant answers can be easily dismissed as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T13:01:25.267" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T21:30:15.517" Title="Why isn't the yellow axe question (YAQ) about English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11591" CreationDate="2018-08-08T09:11:37.273" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The part of the question that isn't about English is actually probably the part that most people found interesting about the question: What word was the creator of the ball thinking of? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see from the existing answers that many people were more interested in explaining how the ball came to be than in finding an English word that fit: the accepted answer suggests the picture is meant to represent the Swedish word &lt;em&gt;yxa,&lt;/em&gt; and another highly upvoted answer mentions the Chinese word &lt;em&gt;yuè.&lt;/em&gt; Other answers suggest that the creator of the ball simply made a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't hold answers to this criterion, then the question becomes the extremely broad (and in my view, not particularly interesting) &quot;What English words start with a Y and can be used in the description of this picture&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't think the question is &quot;off-topic&quot; for this particular site so much as it is an example of a type of question that is problematic on any Stack Exchange site. It's a question about something that makes a lot of people feel curious, but that is pretty much impossible to answer definitively (and it would require special knowledge, not just ordinary expertise in some particular subject matter, to give a definitive answer). Nonetheless, it's accessible enough to make it easy to come up with a large number of speculative answers, many of which seem convincing enough to attract a fairly large number of upvotes. At the time it was locked, the question had 18 undeleted answers, and 8 deleted answers. (This doesn't imply that it was necessary to lock it, of course—&quot;protection&quot; can also be used to deal with questions that attract an excessive amount of answers, and regular users and diamond moderators can moderate low-quality answers to any questions.) Dan Bron's detective work is very impressive, but it seems to indicate that this is not in fact a question dealing with any kind of usage (not even &quot;mis&quot;usage) of English, so it's hard to see how additional answers from English speakers would be able to add useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you've said, there has already been debate about the YAQ. I don't think it's accurate to say that it was &quot;easily dismissed as off topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T15:09:16.667" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T15:09:16.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11595" CreationDate="2018-08-08T20:14:20.817" Score="8" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/459388/negative-question/459392#459392&quot;&gt;Negative question&lt;/a&gt; on the English.SE, received a downvote. I want to become a part of this community, and I accept that we all sometimes make mistakes, but on SE it's often the case that the mistakes we novices make are often quite hard to understand because of the almost unspoken rules of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I just wondered if anyone would be able to explain to me what is wrong with my answer, for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it too long?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it too broad in scope?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it not address the actual question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it poorly written?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or any other faux-pas that I may have unwittingly made. I only ask so that in the future I can raise the standard of my answers on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282159" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T08:14:05.713" Title="What about my response was inappropriate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11591" CreationDate="2018-08-08T21:30:15.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right in your comment: the post asks people to come up with an English word that starts with Y and means the thing in the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a puzzler, or what we call a “&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/02/29/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;guessing game&lt;/a&gt;” question. This type of question is off topic on Stack Exchange sites.¹ Examples of guessing game questions: puzzlers, trivia questions, &quot;help me remember the name ofs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are obviously a fun question category. They often attract a lot of attention. But Stack Exchange explicitly rejects that kind of question because Stack Exchange has a different goal in mind. Stack Exchange's goal is to &quot;contain the same information as a library of reference manuals, in the form of millions of questions and answers&quot;.²&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, EL&amp;amp;U is English experts building a reference library that tells you anything you might want to know about the technology we call the English language. Many types of question you might think are English language-related are actually off-topic on the site, starting with the common types identified in the online help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proofreading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to improve my English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;translation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;naming things&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;literary criticism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;basic questions that could be answered using a dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions that can have multiple answers, such as requests for ideas, opinions, or discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions that are only for fun (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;we hate fun&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The yellow axe question, then, does not belong here because it is not a request for an expert answer about the English language as a technology. It's a puzzler/guessing game question that can have multiple answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You might think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling&lt;/a&gt; might allow questions that incorporate such a thing. But they too explicitly refuse guessing games: &quot;we explicitly don't want riddles because they could have multiple opinion-based answers, making them a guessing game.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Joel Spolsky, founder and CEO of the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T21:30:15.517" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2018-08-08T21:44:04.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice the question was closed as a duplicate. That gives me an idea of why your answer might have been downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some members of the community tend to downvote answers to duplicate questions. I believe that's as an attempt to discourage the practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joel Spolsky, the co-founder and CEO of the SE network, gave a pretty good explanation of why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeah, you might earn a couple of points of reputation, but, because you are duplicating content, you are actually making the internet worse. Why? Because that answer might be true today, but as technology changes, it might not be true tomorrow. There are almost certainly thousands of wrong facts on Stack Overflow already, which may have been true when they were written but are no longer true. These facts will pollute the Internet for years. This problem is not tractable if we allow Stack Overflow to become just an endless river of questions and answers. It has to be more like a Wikipedia of Questions and Answers, with canonical answers that can be edited in one place, if we are ever going to stand a chance of keeping all the information that we expose to the Internet at least reasonably correct.&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So avoid answering duplicate questions – questions that have already been asked. The fact that you wrote a long and detailed answer clearly says you want to contribute something of lasting value to this site. A better way is to search and see if the question already exists, and if it does, link the new question to the existing question as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the question you have asked here on Meta is also a duplicate, because you're nowhere near the first person to run into this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My challenge to you is this: research here on Meta, find a duplicate, and get this question closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;:-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T21:44:04.380" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T06:39:39.863" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/459182/less-aggressive-synonym-for-left-the-company&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;, and although I got multiple answers, it became clear that no such word exists.&#xA;Now, I'm unsure what to do with my question. Do I pick the answer that gets the closest to what I want, even if it's not a single word? Or do I just delete the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question differs from the reported duplicate, in that this question is addressing the topic from the perspective of the OP (asker) rather than a contributor who is answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="311551" LastEditorUserId="51991" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T14:50:43.500" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T14:50:43.500" Title="What to do when my question is unanswerable" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-08-09T11:18:54.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2018-08-09T23:03:19.947" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question/observation comes up now and then on EL&amp;amp;U Meta, and I think that real and perceived rudeness will never not be an issue at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. Undoubtedly the edge of challenge (sometimes grading into hostility) with which some commenters greet particular questions and answers on EL&amp;amp;U needlessly hurts the feelings of innocent posters and inhibits prospective askers and answerers from contributing their own useful posts to the site. Such clubbishness (and sometimes outright rudeness) does the commenters no credit and prevents the site from being as friendly and welcoming as it could be.&#xA;Nonetheless, I don't despair of the site's capacity to improve or of newcomers' ability to find a comfortable niche here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the best way to get beyond the rudeness problem is to recognize that EL&amp;amp;U is the opposite of a monolithic community. Many regular participants at this site are helpful, good natured, and considerate; they want to make the site better and to help visitors find the information they seek. But just as it's harder to remember a polite store clerk than a rude one, it's easier to remember a dismissive or hostile comment than a neutral or helpful one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point worth keeping in mind is that EL&amp;amp;U participants bring extremely varied interests to the site—both with respect to the specific language topics that they care about and with respect to the roles they like to play on the site. Some people gravitate to chat; some focus primarily on posting formal answers to questions; some spend a great deal of time vetting the various review queues; some mainly upvote/downvote posts and kibitz in the comments; and some wax philosophical on Meta. A few become moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly, different task categories draw people with different inclinations. In particular, many of the people who work the review queues and who moderate seek to maintain site standards (as they understand them) and to protect the site from being overrun with lousy questions. A number of these people seem predisposed to view themselves as sentries on the walls of a city under siege, and their constant exposure to low-quality questions may encourage them at times (or frequently) to respond curtly and aggressively to all strangers who approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site managers and moderators generally try to maintain a consistent, acceptably respectful tone when they comment on questions and answers that they find lacking in substance and effort, but it's impossible to get all of the commenters on the site to speak with one voice—and a few zealots are quick to take umbrage at posts that they find deficient and to respond intemperately to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice for dealing with the unpleasant fallout from this phenomenon is to remember that commenters who presume to speak for the site are in many instances speaking for nothing more than their own predilections, tastes, and preferences. This should be evident from a look at the disparate rates of upvote totals versus downvote totals that various well-established site participants have accumulated over the years, or from a survey of the perennial disagreements over whether particular questions should be closed, reopened, reclosed, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no overwhelming consensus on standards at this site. Far more often, there are discrete judgments made by a shifting series of district courts or (often enough) by a single self-appointed magistrate—with very little continuity from case to case. This goes for standards of upvote-worthy and downvote-worthy questions and answers and for standards of comportment. Some comments are clearly beyond the pale to any objective reader, but many that one reader may find unduly brusque will strike others as being concise, direct, and unobjectionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like researching and writing questions or answers about English language and usage, and if your posts, on balance, draw upvotes or positive comments from other site participants, you probably belong here. Don't let occasional snide comments from individuals posing as arbiters and spokespeople for the site dissuade you from enjoying your time at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T17:43:01.563" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T17:43:01.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T10:17:27.510" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen many questions asking about the punctuation of words ending in possessive S. There are also many questions asking about the pronunciation of possessive S when a noun already ends in an S. And there are also some answers here and there which give the rule for the S clitic/suffix in general (as when applied to plurals). However, there are no questions that ask about, or answers that give&amp;mdash;so far as I'm aware&amp;mdash;a full and clear account of the pronunciation of possessive S and when and whether this clitic is actually applied. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such a question kicking around somewhere?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-08-13T08:18:30.053" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T08:18:30.053" Title="Do we have a canonical post on the pronunciation rules for the /s, z/ possessive clitic?" Tags="|support|canonical-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11598" CreationDate="2018-08-10T15:11:33.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question asking about the pronunciation of words spelled with &lt;code&gt;'s&lt;/code&gt;—and you posted an answer to it back in 2016! The answer addresses the basic allomorphic alternation between /s/, /z/ and /ɪz/. It is somewhat short, so I think it would be possible to update it with a section about &quot;when and whether this clitic is actually applied&quot;, even though the question doesn't explicitly ask for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/308046/whats-the-rule-for-pronouncing-s-as-z-or-s&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the rule for pronouncing “’s” as /z/ or /s/?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T15:11:33.793" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11575" CreationDate="2018-08-11T01:24:16.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many EFL books which have good sections about English prosody. There are fewer which deal specifically only with intonation (which covers both stress and pitch). One of the very best is by Professor John Wells, of UCL, world famous for his groundbreaking and comprehensive work on accents of English, the IPA conventions for the transcription of English, the world-class and gold standard Longman Pronounciation Dictionary, the invention of Lexical Sets, and many other achievements in the fields of phonetics and phonology, especially in the phonetics of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Intonation-PB-Audio-Introduction/dp/0521683807&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Intonation: An Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not let the &quot;introduction&quot; part of the title put you off. It's just shy of 300 pages long and very detailed and well-explained. It comes with an audio CD too. It's the most comprehensive guide you'll every find. I've used it with my students, very successfully, for years now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fill your boots!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T08:47:26.990" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T08:47:26.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-11T15:06:51.153" Score="6" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/459661/is-the-convention-for-reporting-football-results-universal&quot;&gt;Is the convention for reporting football results universal?&lt;/a&gt; off-topic because it is not about English, but about the reporting of match results (game scores). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broader issue, at hand, of course; but whether this particular question is on or off-topic will help me know how to vote on future, similar questions. Someone might ask, for example, when discussing a marble collection, whether to mention the clear marbles first or the swirled ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T20:13:24.493" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T20:26:27.107" Title="Can we close 'Is the convention for reporting football results universal?' as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11601" CreationDate="2018-08-11T15:55:44.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we probably should close it. I am having difficulty conjuring up more than an incidental relationship to English as a language. It does not seem to suggest that it is an English specific practice in any way, and the question is not asking how this should be done in English. Most importantly, even if a case can be made, answering it requires knowledge outside of the English language or even its etymological ties to other relevant languages (unless we expand the definition of etymology to be more than the history of word or phrase derivation). Even if we did expand the definition for our purposes, the best we could probably do is explain the history of how our particular scoring convention came to be, and not what scoring conventions other languages use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maybe&lt;/em&gt; this could more clearly be phrased as a question regarding whether or not specific dialectical difference between British and American scoring conventions, and specifically ask for verification regarding what the usual American system is. However the title of the question is presently asking if the convention is universal, and if we're counting all of Europe and the football playing world then the scope of the question is much broader than just English. However, I suspect that this is more likely to be divided on a league by league basis than a dialect by dialect basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a moderator can helpfully migrate it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://sports.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the sports stack exchange beta-website&lt;/a&gt;, where they would probably be better equipped to answer this sort of question. A person who regularly watches games and keeps track of the scores in different countries and leagues would be much more likely to be able to provide an accurate answer to this question than any linguist, let alone a specialist in a particular languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T16:06:24.797" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T16:06:24.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11601" CreationDate="2018-08-11T20:21:18.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think questions like this must be considered individually, and I give this one a pass. It is of very wide interest, and if there is a predominant practice, it can't really be deduced from any sort of first principles. It is like many style related questions, some do have have answers and widely accepted prescriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figure this is the &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; part of EL&amp;amp;U. Also, this seems like the perfect repository for those questions that have do have answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zaIxf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zaIxf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gu8xK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gu8xK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T20:26:27.107" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T20:26:27.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-12T16:19:57.470" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a fruitless search here, to see if this has already been asked:  Can a person post more than one answer to the same question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T16:19:57.470" Title="Posting more than one answer" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-08-13T08:38:51.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11613" CreationDate="2018-08-14T07:33:50.353" Score="0" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are really a plague on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460044/when-did-escort-become-an-euphemism-for-prostitute&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been downvoted and criticized for “no reason to be” by one of the usual harassing commenters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we have to waste time and energy with such guys? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; anything about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:24:35.897" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:24:35.897" Title="Can somebody please stop the harassing commenters!" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11605" CreationDate="2018-08-14T08:31:53.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes: &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; can do something about it. The community is supposed to be self-policing, and flags allow you to do that. If other people agree with you and also flag comments, then the comment will be deleted, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; if that happens too often to one user's comments then moderators are informed automatically too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment flags are no longer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mystery meat&lt;/a&gt;: click the little flag to the left of the comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39gwS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39gwS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment actions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to get the new, &lt;strong&gt;enormous,&lt;/strong&gt; comment flag dialog. (The number of flags available to you may be less than 100.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tXGlt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tXGlt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment dialog&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a word of advice: I don't see anyone else's comments on that question as needing flagging for being unfriendly. Disputing the premise of a question is not intrinsically unfriendly (although it should really go in an answer). Asking whether someone really lives on this planet probably is unfriendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T08:31:53.497" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11608" CreationDate="2018-08-14T10:33:03.310" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been watching the count of questions on EL&amp;amp;U for the past few days. Currently, it's at 99,972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that 100,000 is a bit of a milestone. Should there be some kind of recognition of this once we hit that mark?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case we wanted to do something special to commemorate the 100,000th question, how would we determine which question that actually was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do deleted question lower the count? I'm assuming that using the ID would be ineffective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Congratulations to Mitch!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized I'd missed the ticker hitting the magic mark, so I counted backwards to find what it might have been. And found his answer (or question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T04:11:58.547" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:24:21.553" Title="Counting up to 100,000 questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11607" CreationDate="2018-08-14T12:37:54.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose a 100,000th question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What will English sound like in 500 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and mostly &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt; goes in answers: syntax, phonology, vocab, new and old dialects, speculation about world politics that affects language use. Yes, it is POB but we should expect some connection with reality and historical language patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously CW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what the question might look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will English look like in 500 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English started off on a small island off the northwest coast of Europe in the Early Middle Ages with some German tribes swimming across the channel and killing a bunch of poor Celts. Then some Vikings killed some of them, and then some French (who had recently also been killed by Vikings) killed some of those guys. So a lot of killing happened, but as of the early third millenium it feels like things have settled down for a few hundred years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The killing may be constant but other things never stop changing. Nominally, early modern English is dated to late 16th century, for example Shakespeare. The vocabulary and turns of phrase are only slightly different, we're used to the fancy biblical syntax and might be able to read that with study and thought, but I think it would take some time to be able to understand that speech out loud. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New patterns are adopted, old ones are slowly forgotten. Ask not what people can say in speeches, ask what your speech will say to people. Kids say things strangely these days, but then they think old people talk funny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think English will be like at the end of the next 500 years? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider anything: the classic linguistic areas like phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, dialectology, etc, but also sociolinguistic things like how world politics or science or the internet might change things, or really anything at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please attempt to be scientific. Yes, this is entirely speculative, but there are principles of language change that are clear from study of the past trends that can then be extrapolated going forward. As to future history, try to be both plausible and original (it's probably easier to do both).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK maybe I need to edit out all the killing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Postscript: Here it is, or rather was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460128/question-100-000-what-will-english-look-like-in-500-years&quot;&gt;Question 100,000: What will English look like in 500 years? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, that was a failed experiment. I gave some objective examples, and it got one answer that basically said there will be no English. Then closed as POB. The people who closed must not have recognized the intent of the question. I blame myself (which is code for I blame myself only the slightest and even then what others might call mistakes were legitimate alternatives).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all this was worse than Quora, and that really stings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of course&lt;/strong&gt; I wrote an answer myself, but I waited too long to post because that would have made it too obvious I did this all for myself. So these are the kind of speculations I was expecting from others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will English be like in 500 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, sociopolitically, because that will have more effects on the actual changes rest than anything, I expect in 500 years for the UN countries to be mostly stable. There won't be a singularity, technology won't encourage changes in the language in any significant way (slang will come and go as usual), except to flatten any differences. There won't be any significant movements of populations which would create mixed societies. Basically I'm saying sci-fi has got it all wrong, they either ignore that changes will occur, or the make up weirdo patois with unlikely features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, China will, and this is very speculative, in one hundred years (early 2100's), adopt pinyin (a roman alphabet) as official alongside traditional ideographs. This will hasten the demise of traditional Chinese writing and within 50 years no one will bother learning or writing it. These will increase the adoption of English words and quasi-English neologisms. Because of English's intellectual parochialism (and also because the Chinglish neologisms are just plain awful), these won't be adopted into mainstream English. This is all to say that there will be little adoption of Asian languages into English despite what Blade Runner or Firefly think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now more specifically to English, there will be fewer dialect differences and any current trends will slow down (OK that'll be the case for Spanish and Chinese too), but in 500 years some will accumulate. There will still be AmE and BrE and ScotsE and AusE, but differences within those areas will fade away &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; in 500 years. No more Scouse or Geordie or 'Estuarian', no more Texas drawl, AAVE, Spanglish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to space colonies  (Mars, asteroids, Ganymede, etc), for possible creation of dialects by isolation,, the development and population growth there will be very slow, at most 5K off-worlders by 2250, 100K by 2500 (it just won't be that lucrative) and VR communication, even with a half-hour delay, will be so good that there really won't be any isolation. English and Chinese will be the primary languages there and there will be very little pronunciation difference from Earth. There will be some short lived slang different from Earth, but very little permanent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that was the sociolinguistic set-up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some specific changes that I expect will occur. I am limiting myself to American English, because I am more of the trends there, and am not sure if they apply to BrE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cot-caught merger everywhere - it really serves no purpose and most people have it anyway. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lenition of intermediate t entirely: eg, water-&gt; /war/, bottle -&gt; /bal/, button -&gt; /bun/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; will adopt the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_English#Phonology_and_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Northern cities vowel shift&lt;/a&gt;. If we time-traveled we'd still be able to understand what they're saying but we'd all be really annoyed at them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Y'all&quot; will become the accepted formal 2nd person plural (I don't really think this will happen, I'm just putting it here because it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; happen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and that's it!!!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vocab:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because everyone will have early onset Alzheimer's because of the aluminum bomb testing in the pacific, English will become more periphrastic. Eg It will be more common to say 'I did go' instead of 'I went' and latinisms will fall out of favor to phrasal verbs. For example, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The sun will emit a plethora of gamma radiation.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The bright sky ball is gonna send out a shitton of scary stuff&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To distinguish thirteen/thirty through nineteen/ninety, the 'teen's will shift stress to eg thir-TEEN.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Randall Munroe's &quot;Thing Explainer&quot;, a dictionary using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or &quot;ten hundred&quot;) most common words, will become a government enforced vocabulary standard for everything. Keeps things simple for everybody. THere's no word for it, it don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really expected that there'd be a lot more trends but that's all I got&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:24:21.553" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:24:21.553" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-14T13:09:25.657" Score="6" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been assumed that questions about resources are off-topic because they aren't questions about the language &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/460077/142322&quot;&gt;I&amp;#39;m looking for a tool for comparing the meaning of synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following Meta.ELU question looks like a duplicate (of this Meta question), but it's not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1095/142322&quot;&gt;Are questions about online resources on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question asks &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; questions about resources are on-topic, but I'm interested to know &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; a visitor would look to know that 'resource' questions are off-topic (if indeed they are). The accepted answer there recommends asking at Writers.SE, but the attempt to do so was apparently rebuffed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following Meta.ELU question also looks promising:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4218/142322&quot;&gt;Should questions about resources be asked on main or meta?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was answered by a current mod (although he wasn't one at the time the answer was proffered), and offers the opinion that 'resource' questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on topic. He prefers that they be asked on Main, but concedes that by the time he joined EL&amp;amp;U, the decision had already been made that 'resource' questions should be asked on Meta rather than Main. However, that answer doesn't indicate what standard documents (FAQ, for example) a visitor could browse to know that 'resource' questions are off-topic on Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where in the documents accessible from the question-mark menu does it indicate that questions requesting resources are off-topic on Main.ELU or Meta.ELU?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's no good pointing to a consensus on Meta.ELU because that would be like looking for a needle in a needle stack for new visitors. A consensus answer on Meta.SE would be even worse - the visitor might not even be aware of that particular needle stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T14:07:46.457" Title="Where does it say that resources are off-topic on main?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11609" CreationDate="2018-08-14T13:35:24.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic help page&lt;/a&gt; says what questions are welcome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Word choice and usage&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;•  Grammar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;•  Etymology (history of words’ development)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;• Dialect differences&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;• Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;• Spelling and punctuation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would indicate that questions for resources are not welcome. In fact, such questions are ephemeral because resources which might be available and suitable to answer one request may not cover the topic or even exist six months later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An upvote for this answer would support a case for altering the Help page to explicitly direct resource requests to Meta. (Alternatively, write an answer here saying we shouldn't answer them at all, or provide some other solution.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource requests will need management, and I would suggest that a question asking for a resource which compares the meaning of synonyms should be answered on a basic &lt;em&gt;thesaurus&lt;/em&gt; question which could be a canonical target for duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T13:35:24.803" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11607" CreationDate="2018-08-14T18:35:19.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anticipating this, I was looking into the history of the phrase &quot;round number&quot;. It's a fairly old usage, predating the useful range of Google Books and Ngrams. I wasn't able to figure out whether rounding up and rounding down preceded, or came after &lt;em&gt;round number&lt;/em&gt;. Also couldn't decide whether the term was in common use before mathematicians started writing down formal definitions such as &quot;made up of a lot a small numbers as factors compared to it's neighboring numbers&quot; which isn't what most of us think of as a round number. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@99,994 as I wrote this, so not much time to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T00:32:18.043" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T00:32:18.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11607" CreationDate="2018-08-14T19:34:14.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a question on the &quot;long scale&quot; vs &quot;short scale&quot; for large numbers in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &quot;billion&quot; vs &quot;thousand million&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be the hundred thousandth post in both scales, but it's thematically appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130346" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T19:34:14.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11605" CreationDate="2018-08-14T22:21:05.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I share your exasperation. By any reasonable standard, the question you use as an example qualifies as an acceptable one at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. It is annoying to post a carefully researched, painstakingly written question or answer only to have it marred by the equivalent of a negative Yelp review—particularly one that the critic seems to have spent a minute or less formulating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see the &quot;It's no longer needed&quot; comment removal option expanded to read &quot;It's unsupported, unhelpful, or no longer needed.&quot; The expanded removal reason would make it easier for question and answer posters to request that negative, unhelpful, minimum-effort POB remarks not remain attached to their efforts in perpetuity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a change might encourage critical readers to leave higher-quality, more carefully considered comments, to the advantage of the question and answer posters—who, according to Stack Exchange theory, are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of those comments. It might also make the tone of the site seem less unfriendly to site visitors, by lowering the level of visible negativity. It might even encourage some commenters to compose their own formal answers instead of simply caviling about other people's. But failing all that, it would at least make it easier to remove unwelcome barnacles from the hulls of legitimate questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T22:38:35.320" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T22:38:35.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11609" CreationDate="2018-08-15T13:44:50.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Resource requests are &quot;shopping list&quot; questions, and are inherently unsuitable for all SE sites, not just EL&amp;amp;U. The reasons why are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/158810/273494&quot;&gt;discussed on Meta&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/23/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/&quot;&gt;a blog post by Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary from the linked answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They are open-ended; there is never one perfect answer to them.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They outdate incredibly quickly. This was what turned me against shopping list questions: if you look around on Stack Overflow, you will find plenty of 2010 &quot;what's the best xyz&quot; questions whose answers are hideously outdated now.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They tend to attract a lot of spam and/or link only answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does make a lot of sense to me to maintain a list of resources that the community of experts for a site deems helpful for whatever the site topic is, but I think those sorts of questions are problematic on the main site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T13:44:50.660" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11609" CreationDate="2018-08-15T14:07:46.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Form the help centre's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; page (I quoted only the relevant parts):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resource request seems to fall in that category. Indeed, every resource is an 'equally valid' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T14:07:46.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:18:16.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alternative point: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interrogating a rationale for a +4/-1 answer state is not worth the effort.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes get downvotes on my posts.  As long as I am not net -3, I don't care; if I get to net -3, then I can claim a Peer Pressure badge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are going to downvote for any number of personal or accidental reasons.  For example I once brushed the down arrow bobbling my tablet on the train and was locked from changing my vote.  I felt bad, but, it happened.  A user with rep has the right to downvote for any sum of reasoning in their interpretation of the Q or A, including simply being cranky in the moment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123403" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:18:16.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11619" CreationDate="2018-08-17T00:51:27.777" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;English language and usage&quot; reputations and badges subsume reputations and badges of &quot;English language and usage meta&quot; because they have the same user number?.I do not know whether my question is worth considering,But I wanted to work out my total achievements myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399603" OwnerDisplayName="user315231" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T10:59:08.947" Title="My inquisitiveness about my achievements" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2018-08-17T08:14:05.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;All that was needed was a directive to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/double_negative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Double Negative&lt;/a&gt; on ODO. (In which sense the question itself was a GR.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hypothesizing was neither necessary nor correct.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T08:14:05.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11617" CreationDate="2018-08-17T10:59:08.947" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No: although each site's Meta shows your points on that site*, badges are separate between Main and Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my Main and Meta scores as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nt9kP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nt9kP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Main site score&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eeCHa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eeCHa.png&quot; alt=&quot;Meta site score&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badges represent different achievements, and those achievements differ in each environment. It's not possible to get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/130/single-word-requests&quot;&gt;gold badge&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; tag on Meta, for example, because that tag doesn't exist on Meta. Other badges, like &lt;em&gt;Reversal,&lt;/em&gt; do exist on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/50/reversal&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/50/reversal&quot;&gt;Main&lt;/a&gt; — but they are still counted separately in each environment. At the time of this answer, no-one's yet been awarded a Main site &lt;em&gt;Reversal&lt;/em&gt; badge in ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; is a special case as that is really a &quot;main&quot; site in its own right and is not really related to stackexchange.com in the same way. My rep score on those two sites is very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The score shown in Meta is updated less frequently than in the main-site environment and may lag behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T10:59:08.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11623" CreationDate="2018-08-17T13:06:30.353" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;There used to be a differentation between visited and not visited links in the main EL&amp;amp;U site (Not the EL&amp;amp;U Meta site) Hot Network Questions column, today all the links are the same color (#333333).&#xA;The unvisited link used to be #ae3737.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ZPBT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ZPBT.png&quot; alt=&quot;How the page looks currently&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;How the page looks currently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried both chrome &amp;amp; firefox (latest versions), also a complete page refresh (Ctrl + F5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an intentional change or an error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70486" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:05:37.973" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T20:17:28.300" Title="Have there been any CSS changes in the last week?" Tags="|bug|css|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11620" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:51:46.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unaware of a recent change. My browser presents two colors for links in that sidebox. Visited links are #555. Unvisited links are #333. They are hard to differentiate visually. Here is the relevant CSS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.question-hyperlink, .answer-hyperlink {&#xA;    color: #333;&#xA;    line-height: 1.3;&#xA;    margin-bottom: 1.2em;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;.question-hyperlink:visited, .answer-hyperlink:visited {&#xA;    color: #555;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:51:46.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11620" CreationDate="2018-08-18T05:57:17.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the colors for the HNQ have changed. But visited and unvisited links are different colors for me on main, so I need to ask: Have you clicked any of those links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the Wayback Machine for &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20180816094926/https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;August 16&lt;/a&gt; on the main site and it shows this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/faOOP.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a particular surprise, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/309349/323179&quot;&gt;it was announced ages ago&lt;/a&gt; that there would be changes to themes (among other things) across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently (on the main site) I see this unvisited links in the HNQ as #333 (which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/3108860/6083675&quot;&gt;the same as #333333&lt;/a&gt;) and visited links as #555 (again, aka #555555), same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11622/191178&quot;&gt;MetaEd&lt;/a&gt;. These colors are the same colors that are used for question titles (e.g. on the main page):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aNLbR.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In case you don't have superhuman vision, the top one was visited.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta, I see both visited and unvisited HNQ links as #0C0D0E. (Actually, like main, titles links are also this color):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v1Doe.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the HNQ links might be the same color on all metas, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This really needs to be changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm mentioning changes in link colors, I'll also state that I just noticed (on both meta and main) that the preview (e.g. of an answer you're composing) now shows a difference between visited and unvisited links like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q75tp.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is probably a good change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T20:17:28.300" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T20:17:28.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11624" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-18T14:06:19.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T14:06:19.230" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T14:06:19.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11625" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-18T14:06:19.230" Score="0" Body="On Meta, this tag is for discussion of single-word-request questions asked on the main site." OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T14:06:19.230" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T14:06:19.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2018-08-19T02:49:30.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: Less than 24 hours after posting this response, here is what has happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make that -7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2 &quot;points&quot; or whatever that number is, related to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/458140/why-do-blank-stackexchange-profile-bios-use-them&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt;. I cannot work out what occurred or who &quot;voted&quot; to bring that about, where or why—and, frankly, I don't care. It won't prevent me from participating in a positive way with positive people who are likewise enamored with the English language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What disturbs me is the non-coincidental cowardice / retaliation, and passive-aggressive childishness. Perhaps you folks with the SE chops might want to look into this, though, because this is exactly the behavior in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for speaking up, OP. I was so turned off after being on ELU for only a couple of weeks, that I took a hiatus because of a flurry of horrid responses. The only reason I've returned is because of the email about the new Code of Conduct and the acknowledgement that this is a problem. I will give it another try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a newbie and non-programmer type, fwiw, I posted a legitimate and sincere question, only to witness a storm of diva-type frustration and downright rude comments by several on here. I had done my due diligence before posting, by reading and trying to be cognizant of the rules, and posted a simple observation/question on meta where I thought it belonged. I am happy to say that some of the worst things written have been removed, or at least I don't see them anymore. But here is a sample of what remains: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Respectively, you is wrong. And this is a dup from many sites, including both ELU and MSE.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for telling me unequivocally that I am wrong. And redundant. The sarcasm is a nice touch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;...apparently they're nerdy enough to feel strongly prescriptivist in this matter (words' definitions should remain static, and using them in new ways is wrong) instead of descriptivist (definitions change to reflect how people are actually using the word).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making assumptions is rarely a good idea. I am neither of the above, but this would have made a good point for respectful discussion—instead of third-party public comment, as if I did not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Respectfully, &quot;them&quot; is not plural here. It is quite clearly singular. What are you even on about?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it wasn't at all &quot;quite clearly singular&quot; to me, or I wouldn't have asked. And I was &quot;on about&quot; asking a legitimate question. BTW, inserting &quot;respectfully&quot; does not negate disrespect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Even if the OP thinks 'using them in new ways is wrong' they shouldn't have a problem with singular they as it is about as old as singular you!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, making assumptions and putting words in someone else's mouth is rarely wise. I did not know there was a singular &quot;they&quot; or I wouldn't have asked. If everyone knew everything, then we could simply close up shop, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Strange that a self-declared Enlish &quot;ubernerd&quot; would not recognize singular &quot;they.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely unnecessary comment. And those who profess to be such &quot;experts&quot; might pay more attention to proofreading before posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Duplicate of meta.stackexchange.com/q/261359 english.stackexchange.com/q/48 QUESTION FORTY EIGHT!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No need to yell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to conclude by thanking several users who were polite, stood up for the question, defended my intentions as someone who was simply asking a question, replied with thoughtful points of discussion, and otherwise acted honorably and with the kindness and respect we all must strive to both give and receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy to be back, and will know to flag this kind of nonsense in the future. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291915" LastEditorUserId="291915" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T03:33:39.170" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T03:33:39.170" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-19T11:49:36.017" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first item under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems this is OK when talking about how to describe the usage of a product, for example. But some people seem to object to questions about language and word choice in user interface design. I have seen questions closed as off-topic and down-voted for, as far as I can tell, this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems wrong to me; good communication in user interfaces is important (for ease-of-use and sometimes even for safety reasons). This could be text on a graphical user interface or error messages issued by a program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those objecting to this sort of question just confused by the rule about not asking about &quot;Naming, including programming variables/classes&quot;? Or should we not ask questions about how to express things as clearly and concisely as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, should the use of English in UI design be in scope or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a seen a few cases where someone is asked &quot;Is this to do with programming&quot; (where it isn't obvious from the question but one might read between the lines) and if they say yes, the question is rapidly closed for being &quot;off topic&quot;. (Even if it raises interesting questions of grammar or usage.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, perhaps a related question is: is any question that has &lt;em&gt;any connection at all&lt;/em&gt; to programming automatically off limits? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a related question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1105/use-of-elu-as-a-lazy-programmers-resource&quot;&gt;Use of EL&amp;amp;U as a lazy programmers resource [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't mind if a questioner wants help choosing suitable terms for his application to display (for example, when presenting user choices). But I really can't see why EL&amp;amp;U should concern itself with choice of variable names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would basically be my position as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184130" LastEditorDisplayName="user184130" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T14:19:37.953" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T15:25:57.163" Title="Questions about user interface design/wording" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11630" CreationDate="2018-08-19T15:25:57.163" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've gathered through various comments etc on EL&amp;amp;U, here are the main objections posed by those who have been associated with the site longer than I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site exists as a repository for future reference, so questions that are left open should be those that show promise of helping future visitors - that is a distinguishing factor between Stack Exchange's philosophy and that of discussion boards. It's been expressed that naming one person's variable or UI control doesn't help with naming that of someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; doesn't matter in this cases. For programming variables - and the same applies to some extent to the naming of UI elements - the actual name given doesn't really matter. You might call a variable &lt;em&gt;index&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;englishlanguageandusage&lt;/em&gt;, and it will increment/assign/etc just as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On #2, setting aside the issue of readability for the time being, I think it's important to consider whether we're really talking about English &quot;as she is spoke&quot;. Traditionally, we'd consider the context of 'English' to be phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so on. But with UI elements, there's also the visual aspect. For example, a control might be labelled &quot;Left&quot; or &quot;Previous&quot; or &quot;Prev&quot; or &quot;Before&quot;, but it might just as well be labelled &quot;&amp;lt;&quot; or be given a graphical overlay. The issue here is where to draw the line between English and UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That line is really the heart of the matter. EL&amp;amp;U was intended as a community for fluent English speakers (&lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; the tour: &lt;em&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/em&gt;) to discuss the language. Whether the label still fits is a separate issue, but to me, the fundamental criterion for a question to be considered on-topic is that it must fundamentally address the English language. That's not to say that other criteria don't apply; it's just that if a question is more about UI aesthetics than about English, then it's on shaky ground. If it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; fundamentally about English, then whether UI comes into play as well is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll comment on a couple of recent examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/448080/142322&quot;&gt;Is there a word that encompasses the concepts of configuration and selection?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks for a word for a menu item to &quot;merge the configuration and the selection steps in the UI development&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's ignore the menu item and consider the language-related content of the question as it stands at the time of this Meta answer. All that is left is a request for a hypernym of &lt;em&gt;configure&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;select&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single word requests are much maligned as it stands. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;checklist&lt;/a&gt; provided in the tag info, together with other advice about asking such questions to help keep such questions relevant to the community's charter, but these guidelines are often ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no discussion about the sense of each term or what nuance the hypernym should elicit, and there's no sample sentence or linguistic context in which the term should fit. This is a common failing of 'naming' questions - the lack of an &lt;em&gt;English language&lt;/em&gt; context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question had followed the guidelines of the SWR checklist, it might have clarified why &lt;em&gt;configure&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;select&lt;/em&gt; should have a meaningful hypernym and highlighted the point(s) that would have interested &quot;linguists, etymologists, [or] serious English language enthusiasts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/417548/142322&quot;&gt;Clear/reset unsuccessful attempts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks whether &quot;clear&quot; or &quot;reset&quot; works better within the phrase &quot;clear/reset unsuccessful attempts&quot; and invites short alternatives that express the idea &quot;sets the count of unsuccessful login attempts to zero&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the question uses specialised technical terms (e.g. using &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; to mean &quot;set to zero&quot;), there is significantly more English language content to this question than to the previous question. I think this question would require a lot more justification for someone to vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt; Whether a &lt;em&gt;naming&lt;/em&gt; question is on-topic depends heavily on whether the question justifies itself as being about the English language in a 'language' context, as opposed to merely deploying English terms as labels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T15:25:57.163" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11635" CreationDate="2018-08-19T22:04:56.800" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answers to questions here, I keep seeing text enclosed in pink boxes.  I searched in vain for how to format that.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460896/is-magnanimous-right-in-this-context&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QgRf5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QgRf5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastEditorUserId="167518" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T22:31:43.917" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T22:38:24.857" Title="How to make the pink boxes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11634" CreationDate="2018-08-19T22:38:24.857" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see those as pink; however, they are &lt;strong&gt;quotations.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotations are indicated in Markdown by prefixing the paragraph with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; This is a quotation.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately-adjacent paragraphs are joined together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a second paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to separate paragraphs you don't actually want to be joined together with a dummy tag like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;//&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an unrelated quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see more about this if you click &lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; below, which will show you the source (but please don't commit any changes!) and there's a more comprehensive help in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;Meta.Stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T22:38:24.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11644" CreationDate="2018-08-20T12:14:56.413" Score="18" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently informed by one of our moderators that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're looking for answers from experts in the field, not experts at&#xA;  Googling. :) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;&quot;You have to write an actual answer, in your own words. A&#xA;  post that consists only of copied text … is not your work”.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually answer word requests in the following manner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;SUGGESTED WORD&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Definition of the suggested word from a reputable source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Source Link] - Source URL spelled out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this type of answer not up to community standards?&lt;/strong&gt;  I feel like adding &quot;my own words&quot; will just be adding fluff to what should otherwise be a straightforward answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I understand that this is a passionate topic for some, but please try to be respectful, especially to those whose opinion you may not share.  Please don't forget to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback&quot;&gt;be nice.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastEditorUserId="51991" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T19:28:22.360" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T13:31:25.857" Title="On Answering Word Requests" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-20T13:22:24.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is a good &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; to an answer and probably what should be necessary for a SWR. A suggestion, a quote of a respected resource plus a link to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not sufficient for a good answer. Anybody can do a dictionary or thesaurus lookup to answer an SWR. It's simply cut and paste and is only a good answer if everyone else blinks at your answer to satisfy an expert's confirmation bias. Also it shows that, if that reference has a link, the answer was easily googlable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer is one that &lt;em&gt;explains&lt;/em&gt; things, tells why a suggestion is good, adds more than the existing dictionary entry or thesaurus list gives. The readers, whether native or non-native speakers, may not be aware of nuances or even the major denotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is secondary, but not unimportant, the point about 'is not your work'. Your answer, while quoting a dictionary in fair use, is not talking about copy-pasting an explanation. That is bordering on plagiarism, or if referenced, empty googling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; to knowledge, not just repeat it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T13:22:24.823" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-20T20:42:48.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you. You have made your own contribution to the answer by selecting the word to suggest. I don't agree with having an absolute &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; for including more explanation than a quotation from a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you can, it's good to use your own words to explain why the suggested word would fit into the example sentence(s) given in the question, or the specific scenario described in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Remember, you still have to write an actual answer, in your own words. A post that consists only of copied text, even when attributed, is not your work either. Use quotes sparingly, to support your own words&amp;quot; is a quote originating from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/160078/15&quot;&gt;2016 revision&lt;/a&gt; of an old community wiki answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange Meta question&lt;/a&gt; about (how to avoid) &amp;quot;plagiarism&amp;quot;. It was not originally written as a policy for answers to SWR questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of prior discussion on this site's Meta about when mods should delete one-line SWR answers without adequate citations (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8040&quot;&gt;On deleting low quality single-word-request answers&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;There's a difference between a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; and an acceptable answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't disagree with the examples given in ab2's answer, Mitch's answer or&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;J.R.'s answer of how additional explanation can improve an answer. I just think that the value of various types of additional explanation, beyond suggesting a word and citing a definition, is subjective enough that it should be up to the author of the question to decide which other components to include in a SWR answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading of tchrist's comment and answer is that he is not just saying that an answer with a word, definition and link &amp;quot;could be improved&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;is not a good answer&amp;quot;. He's implying that it is unacceptable for the site and that it is subject to deletion at the discretion of site moderators. This is what I am trying to push back against with this answer. I don't have anything against &lt;em&gt;encouraging&lt;/em&gt; people to put more thought into their answers to SWRs: I'm against the imposition of a standard for &amp;quot;minimally acceptable&amp;quot; SWR answers that I don't think has been established by the consensus of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Quoted material must always be put in quotation marks/block quotes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One piece of advice from the Meta SE &amp;quot;plagiarism&amp;quot; post that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; definitely applicable to SWR answers is that quotes should have special formatting, either with quotation marks (&amp;quot; &amp;quot; or ' ') for short snippets of text, or with block quote formatting for longer quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;block quotes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when you have attribution and a link, you shouldn't just copy and paste text without any quotation formatting. Using formatting to separate your quotes from the rest of the post makes it easier for readers to distinguish the parts of the post that were written by you from the parts that were written by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T22:43:27.987" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-20T20:47:44.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea behind SE is to get experts to answer questions, and an expert in English should be able to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the word they've chosen is better than all of the other choices out there. Anyone with a little skill with Google and/or a thesaurus can figure out a word and link a dictionary definition. I don't find the definition-only &quot;guesses&quot; at what the author is looking for very valuable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think an acceptable answer has some explanation of why the author chose to offer that word as an answer. How does it fit the criteria? Are there any of the criteria it doesn't meet very well? Is it a common word? Are there any connotations? Is there an alternative for it if you don't want those connotations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T20:47:44.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-20T22:20:43.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learn best from examples, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/350816/rosa-parks-is-a-symbol-for-the-civil-rights-movement/350820#350820&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is an example of a good answer to a SWR. Of course there are many other answers that could serve as examples of good SWR answers, but this one was easy for me to find because it was mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer proposes &lt;strong&gt;icon&lt;/strong&gt; to describe Rosa Parks, and gives the dictionary definition of the word.  It then briefly discusses the history of icon, and explains why the religious origin of the word makes it suitable to apply to Rosa Parks.  The answer goes on to give other, completely secular, meanings of icon in modern life, and then returns to the applicability of the word to Rosa Parks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer had given only a dictionary definition, it would have been a poor answer.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T22:26:00.217" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T22:26:00.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-20T22:32:15.757" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your response contained nothing of your own words. That's the problem. You have to write a real answer, not just copy others' text. We are not a pasta factory: we expect original content. You didn't provide any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE model is about building up a library of expert answers to real problems that people have so that others with the same problem will be able to save time by finding the answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing &amp;quot;expert&amp;quot; in being able to Google. Without original content, you haven't answered. And if that's all a question draws, it should have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Meta Stack Exchange, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/160078/153355&quot;&gt;“Remember, &lt;strong&gt;you still have to write an actual answer, &lt;em&gt;in your own words.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; A post that consists only of copied text, even when attributed, is not your work either. Use quotes sparingly, to support your own words.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, SWR responses with only copied-in text, howsoever duly attributed, are not actual answers anywhere in Stack Exchange. You haven’t written anything, so you were given notice of this in order that you might have the opportunity to do something to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts without original content risk being deleted.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our official guidance from Stack Exchange management about this matter is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T12:07:05.547" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-21T04:14:48.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one-word requests shouldn't be on the site, then set that as a policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I believe that providing a word with a citation and its dictionary definition is a completely acceptable answer for this type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, the dictionary definition is, on its own, insufficient to explain why you thought it was good. In that case, exposition is definitely needed. But, at other times, the definition itself is clear and concise—and anything else would just be taking up space. The person asking the question, and voters, will determine the worth of the answer beyond that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find the phrase &quot;not experts at Googling :)&quot; to be misleading and subtly demeaning. The smiley symbol afterwards does nothing to dismiss that message—it might even make it worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I rarely ever use Google to find a word. I spend time thinking about it and coming up with one from my own vocabulary. After which, I cite it and sometimes expand on it. It comes from my own &quot;expert&quot; knowledge of English and is unrelated to Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dismiss these efforts in such a way is a hasty generalization and unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T04:14:48.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2018-08-21T10:23:41.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a big difference between SE for tech questions and SE for English language questions. While high and low quality questions can appear in both types of forums, technical questions and answers seem to be rather more black and white - this works/this doesn't // this is correct/this is not // this tech works better as a solution than something else, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the English language (any language really) there is very little that is black and white - it's mostly grey and opinions tend to be the rule rather than facts. Prescriptive grammars (the whole lot of them) are derived from linguistic descriptive grammars which are diverse in terms of theory, concepts and terminology. Grammarians, enthusiasts and instructors, and indeed learners and even linguists too, often disagree or think they do because they are using different approaches to understand and explain the same language phenomena. In my experience, many of the experts (John Lawler for example) on ELU and ELL have a deep appreciation of this issue and get around it pretty successfully and others do not. Hence the rudeness and perceived rudeness, or much of it anyway. Despite the inadequacy of using linguistic grammars for instruction, people tend get very invested in and defensive of the way &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; understand how language works, which, when you think about it, is totally understandable given how hard won such understanding often is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion as an ESL teacher, this issue will probably never go away as long as language instruction, particularly non native instruction, relies on linguistic concepts and formulations, and prescriptive grammars for instruction. We seem to forget that language is inherently a subconscious function of the mind and brain, while at the very same time we rely on conscious memorization of inordinately complex (and necessarily inconsistent and contradictory) grammar concepts and rules and exceptions to rules, and vocabulary and translation for instruction and learning. You can learn a language that way but it's pretty useless in terms of acquiring fluency, which is ultimately the subconscious use of language, such as we all have with our native tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242638" LastEditorUserId="242638" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T08:58:35.957" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T08:58:35.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-21T10:39:53.787" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;SWRs are here to stay (for the time being). We've had this discussion a zillion times before. SWRs are not banned. Most users like SWRs. SWRs are often the plague/joy of HNQs, they often attract huge visitors because everyone likes games, and very often the people making a single-word-request learn something new. And sometimes hundreds of casual visitors learn something new from an answer posted on a SWR. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Next time&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the OP cites from the venerable OED, otherwise known as the Oxford English Dictionary. Whenever I have seen answers that are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; copied and pasted directly in the answer, I have not seen any finger-wagging by any moderator.  The OED is a fine book, it is a masterpiece but not everyone has access to it. Personally, I cannot afford the absurd annual subscription fee. I live in Italy, and there are no more libraries in the town where I live. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I shall continue to provide answers with links and full quotations from a varied and vast selection of online dictionaries. Sometimes I pad out the answer, and sometimes I take a break and just quote the definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anyone has ever accused me of being lazy i.e. “copypasta”, but in the past I have accused regular users whose answers &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; consisted of dictionary links and definitions. That rarely happens now. I think things have greatly improved in the last three years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a significant difference between finding &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; best solution and posting it along with a link and its definitions, and someone who posts and quotes from only dictionary and Wikipedia links ad infinitum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please mods, give contributors a break if they don't feel the urge to write a treatise each and every time. Sometimes, a short answer does the job fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T13:31:25.857" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T13:31:25.857" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11645" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T17:27:30.690" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asked less than 14 hours ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461095/is-there-a-single-adjective-for-mercenary-like-attitude&quot;&gt;Is there a single adjective for “mercenary-like attitude”?&lt;/a&gt;. The question has +10, and there are six answers as of now. But the question shows no research. Why is it that the users here don't immediately closevote the question for lack of research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:30:31.237" Title="Why do people upvote (+10) SWRs and users answer them (6+ answers) despite the OP showing zero research?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T19:33:29.407" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this a valid question under computer tag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461170/is-there-a-word-for-each-component-of-a-time&quot;&gt;Is there a word for each component of a Time&lt;/a&gt;. There is no description or guidelines for  computer tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how to use this tag, if there is no guidelines available? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt; : My suggestion for the &lt;code&gt;computer&lt;/code&gt; tag is accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228908" LastEditorUserId="228908" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T11:05:14.860" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T11:05:14.860" Title="Is this a valid question under computer tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11646" CreationDate="2018-08-21T20:23:06.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It looks OK to me.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see anything wrong with the question.  The scope is a little narrow, but it could potentially be useful to others in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T20:23:06.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11646" CreationDate="2018-08-21T20:30:36.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like the question (as of Revision 2) isn't about computers specifically, so I wouldn't have added that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The [computer] tag, I think, should be used for (English) questions about computers (including smartphones with nearly all the capabilities of a PC), computer accessories (such as charging bricks), computer interface things (such as checkboxes), etc. There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/programming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;programming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;programming&lt;/a&gt; which should be used for (English) questions about programming (and the computer tag is optional I think on these questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag should not be used for questions where the computer (or programming) aspect of things can be removed, which is what happened in the linked question. Also note that &quot;[n]aming, including naming programming variables/classes&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off topic&lt;/a&gt;. (I would not consider the linked question off topic because it has an example sentence.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T20:30:36.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11646" CreationDate="2018-08-21T20:33:37.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can think of a tag as a way to steer your question to a particular group of experts. Experts have the ability to filter questions by tag and see just the questions they will be good at answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;computer&quot; tag has no description, and there are only 41 questions across the site with that tag. So it's a good bet that it's not going to help you get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T20:33:37.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-08-21T22:12:52.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this meta question seems mired in contentiousness, as if the community as a whole should either embrace and welcome such answers, or else reject them outright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps we are simply dealing with a loaded question about a controversial subject: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Is this type of answer not up to community standards?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a better, more constructive question would be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Could this type of answer stand to be improved?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(If so, what are some ways to improve it?)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of a few different ways a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; answer could go beyond the &lt;em&gt;word-definition-link&lt;/em&gt; trio you've described. For example, one might: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;include some example usages by credible sources, such as news articles or published books&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;comment about how obscure or familiar a word might be (or how regional, colloquial, formal, antiquated, dated, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;explain how or when the word is typically heard conversation, or caution about when it might be inappropriate&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;add some notes about the word's etymology or history&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use multiple definitions, instead of just one, thereby providing a richer definition of the word itself&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;suggest multiple words, instead of just one, and then discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and appropriateness of each&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;think outside the box; that is, suggest an apt idiom (even if the OP originally requested a single word), or give a two-for-the-price-of-one answer, where one answer is more playful or humorous, while the other is more serious (I tried doing that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/255298/swf-seeks-strong-single-word-synonym/255377#255377&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, e.g.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's any need to wrangle over whether or not &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; SWR answer &lt;strong&gt;needs&lt;/strong&gt; to have such supplementary information, but I think most of us would at least agree that including &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; extra information &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the time would be better than refusing to paste anything more than one definition from a single dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that the moderator's original comment was intended to exhort you to do better, and thereby help make the site better. I think that's a worthy goal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T22:12:52.660" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11645" CreationDate="2018-08-21T22:58:32.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question you link to is all that bad. In fact, one might even call it exemplary, especially when compared to questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461214/word-means-to-pretend-to-be-strong&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D83iZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D83iZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least the mercenary question was specific, had an example sentence, and used the word &lt;em&gt;mercantile&lt;/em&gt;, explaining why that word wasn't suitable (thereby at least hinting at some prior research).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of upvoted questions that cause me to scratch my head in wonder, but the one you cite wasn't one of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T22:58:32.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11645" CreationDate="2018-08-22T00:29:48.287" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderator MetaEd wrote in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Research can take many forms: checking references such as an online English dictionary, thesaurus, or grammar, searching this site for similar questions, searching the web, or putting substantial thought into the question on your own. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039#5043&quot;&gt;How much research is needed? – EL&amp;amp;U Meta&lt;/a&gt;”. &lt;strong&gt;And the requirement is that the results of this effort be posted as part of the question.&lt;/strong&gt; (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;strong&gt;ab2&lt;/strong&gt; states in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the OP had to do was to Google mercenary and he would have found that mercenary is both a noun and an adjective. At that point he should have scrubbed his question or explained why he did not want to use mercenary...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this, especially that poster of the Question could easily have (a) consulted a thesaurus or two and (b) posted the results of such research as part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, as for SWR questions, MetaEd says in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Word requests must also include: (i) objective criteria for accepting answers, including connotation, register, and part of speech; (ii) the exact context – generally we want the sentence you’re writing; and (iii) words you’ve already rejected, and why. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity – ELU Meta&lt;/a&gt;”; “&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real Questions Have Answers – SE Blog&lt;/a&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and regarding a new user's first question, MetaEd says in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd advise against leniency and instead give kindness. I think it's actually unkind to ignore site guidelines on a new user's first question, because the new user learns nothing about how to use the site from that experience. Then later on when they've asked their third or fourth question in the same way, and get stomped, it's very confusing. Instead, kindly explain what's expected of all users and invite them to edit their question. That's much kinder, even though it is not lenient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that 'The fight against mediocrity question' is seven years old, it's my guess that most users here are unaware of what things are required of SWRs, despite that the wording of the tag makes it clear; and/or they do not think about (or care about?) site quality and the quality of SWRs. That it is easy to rack up rep points with answers to SWRs. That SWRs are among the easiest questions to answer, although the quality of answers has also come under scrutiny, and probably more than once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the mods who care about site quality could close all SWRs that do not indicate what research has been done. We have had recent action that asks for better answers to SWR. Or the rep point system could be edited so that rep could be taken away for answering blatantly off-topic questions: a downvote or two by users trying to send a message not to answer such questions is not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folks, I feel there are at least two schools of thought here: the first seems to want to help users by answering off-topic questions (even ones that are very poorly written); the other wants to improve site quality. There doesn't have to be a divide between these two schools. People can be free to write excellent answers to questions that meet minimum on-topic guidelines (indicate a modicum of research; and with regard to SWRs, read the tag and edit the question per what it says there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T01:30:31.237" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:30:31.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T01:08:58.040" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I preface my question with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340335/grammar-many-much#comment783852_340339&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; by five-year member &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/47827/janus-bahs-jacquet&quot;&gt;Janus Bahs Jacquet&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No it's not. Neither version is correct, because both lack subject-auxiliary inversion. &lt;strong&gt;Additionally, the question shows no research effort at all and is therefore off topic here; answering questions that don't belong on the site is not the kind of signal we want to send, so it is better not to answer at all if a question is off topic like this one.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the question I concern myself with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BqVna.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BqVna.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen cap of &amp;#39;In this sentence which is correct couple or couple of&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question title is &lt;em&gt;For most patients, he will monitor you once every couple months&lt;/em&gt; and the actual question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this sentence which is correct &quot;couple&quot; or &quot;couple of&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;24-hours ago I asked about answering a SWR that had no research (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11645/2085&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). Now I am asking about a question that was so poorly written that it has got(ten) 4 close votes as early as an hour after it was posted. That is the good news. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I cannot understand is why such a poorly formed question (so that it is obviously off-topic and should not be answered nevertheless gets answered? Are members (even if they have 10K+ rep points) unaware that off-topic questions should not be answered (although as a courtesy they can be answered in the comment field)? To me this is part of Site 101. How the site works. I am glad we are stressing Nice-ness and friendliness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that we need to do a better job of informing folks when &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to answer a question... How can we do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added:&#xA;Editing the question addresses the question-side of the issue. It does nothing to educate users on what questions to not answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="210913" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T23:13:01.247" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T17:35:41.723" Title="How can we do a better job of having users not write answers to blatantly off-topic/not well-written questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11653" CreationDate="2018-08-22T01:29:06.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Help OP to improve the question, either through suggestions or edits.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will answer, either through a genuine desire to help people, or through a desire to score points in the gaming system.  People will answer the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept this as an inevitable truth, it seems the best approach the problem is not recrimination for those who answer, but rather assistance for those who ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help OP to make the question better.  Edit it yourself if you feel comfortable doing so.  If OP doesn't like what you've done, she/he can restore the question easily enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51991" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:29:06.347" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11653" CreationDate="2018-08-22T01:36:40.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Lumberjack provides a solution for non-duplicate questions. If the question is (also) a duplicate of another question, it is best to close the lower-quality one as a duplicate of the other. That way, users are directed to the best question and the answers are located in one place, rather than spread across different questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:36:40.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11653" CreationDate="2018-08-22T01:55:45.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because a question is poorly formed does not make it off topic or unworthy of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered that question because I thought it was interesting (I didn't know the answer myself off the top of my head; at least not more than just an intuition) and because, poorly formed or not, it was obvious from the comments that the person asking the question was making an honest effort to clear up her confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't always need a question to be well formed in order to understand what someone wants to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly feel that people are too quick to pull the &quot;badly written&quot; or &quot;I don't like it&quot; card. Especially when it comes to new users to the site—which this person was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a new user, I give them more slack and do what I can. (This is not always true; some questions clearly &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; off topic or too confusing to be answered.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if it were a user with 10k+ who had asked exactly the same question, I highly doubt I would have gone to the trouble to provide an answer—not without asking them to flesh things out in a way that they knew was appropriate from their experience here. But we can't apply exactly the same standards to new users as we do to more experienced users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, at a basic level, I feel that this site is about imparting useful information. I also feel, in the spirit of the updated Code of Conduct, that, everything being equal, there should be a greater effort to be inclusive and supportive rather than quickly dismissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I feel like devoting time and energy into doing that, then that's my choice. I'm going to keep on doing that. Obviously, other people make different choices; I respect what &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; choose to do (or not do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I care almost nothing about the reputation from this site. (Although the additional tools I have access to because of it is useful.) I am here only because I am learning a lot through participation and because I enjoy helping other people who feel the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:55:45.317" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11661" CreationDate="2018-08-22T09:56:04.280" Score="8" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that we all sometimes think our answer is good or acceptable when in fact it isn't. Sometimes we fool ourselves in the moment, other times we stubbornly hold to our position. I've been a contributing user on and off since March of this year. I have no doubt that people sometimes vote out of rancour for another user, or sometimes to balance out a perceived unjustified up or down vote. There's not much we can do about these, and the lower rep users are powerless as voting is anonymous, and doesn't require a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this because it's been only in the last two or three days that I've noticed an increase of downvotes on my answers, and apparently this is the only the place to raise such a concern, out in the open. I'd like to give a bit of background: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was arguing with another user about the connotation of a word. At one point they stopped responding to me after I specifically asked them for proof of a claim they made. It seemed to me that in a moment of pique they decided to stop responding to me. OK, I understand that. But then hours later I start getting comments from this user and downvotes to my answers from them. In fairness, some of those answers might have been bad, one of them had a clear error, whatever, I'm not concerned with those initial downvotes. When I bring up the point that they're specifically targeting me to look for errors or reasons for their disapproval, they tell me that I have a &quot;persecution thing&quot; going. Only minutes later they tell me that they're a high rep user(a bit over double mine) and I'm a low rep user, and that they're just browsing my answers, seeing as I have a tendency to give &quot;questionable advice&quot;, and that they'll stop when they get bored. I've given 205 answers since March and only about 7 had a negative vote count of -1 or -2 before this feud started; now there are a couple more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can give a short list of downvotes I find unwarranted:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461040/sardony-sarcasm-irony-satire-or-what/461122#461122&quot;&gt;Sardony sarcasm, irony, satire, or what&lt;/a&gt; My answer is a synonym of the other answer, yet a user decided to downvote mine and leave the other untouched.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460922/a-word-to-describe-things-that-reduce-control/460942#460942&quot;&gt;A word to describe things that reduce control&lt;/a&gt; A single-word-request. If you read the fill-in-the-blank section to the OP's example sentence in my answer, I suggest you'll find it fits very well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460924/informal-and-maybe-even-childish-word-for-warranted/460943#460943&quot;&gt;Informal and maybe even childish word for &amp;quot;warranted&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; Make of this one what you will, I don't know if it's bad, but it seemed a reasonable suggestion.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also others that have been downvoted by this user, but I only bring up these last three, as my other answers may well be bad answers, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it'd be typical to say this in my defence, but I'm not at all intransigent, I'm happy to accept I'm wrong. I've made friends with at least two users with whom I've had long not-so-happy disagreements with. Just yesterday I had a long exchange with a user, which wasn't friendly, where in the end I conceded their point, upvoted their answer and gave a supporting comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess I'd like a diagnosis of whether I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. Either way it'll be a good self-discovery thing for me despite the actual result. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176164" LastEditorUserId="176164" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T15:24:04.807" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T13:43:29.577" Title="Are the downvotes against my answers fair?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2018-08-22T10:50:30.047" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are my thoughts on some things that could be improved in the posts you linked. I believe the best response to an unwarranted down vote is to improve my answer to attract up votes from other people to offset it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461040/sardony-sarcasm-irony-satire-or-what/461122#461122&quot;&gt;Sardony sarcasm, irony, satire, or what&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it wouldn't cause me to down vote, I don't up vote answers that aren't written in complete sentences. I think it's a good idea to give some indication of the question you're answering in case the original question gets edited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460922/a-word-to-describe-things-that-reduce-control/460942#460942&quot;&gt;A word to describe things that reduce control&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't up vote answers that are guesses? (Although I don't down vote them because of that unless there are other issues.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460924/informal-and-maybe-even-childish-word-for-warranted/460943#460943&quot;&gt;Informal and maybe even childish word for &amp;quot;warranted&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is better in terms of complete sentences, but it is written like a guess instead of an authoritative answer. I wouldn't down vote it, but I wouldn't up vote it either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, I can see how someone could decide to down vote those answers based on the content and not necessarily because they're trying to get back at you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you can do is state your answer with more confidence. Here is how I would rewrite one of your answers to be something that might cause me to up vote it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A word that &quot;describe(s) that which reduces control or produces the opposite of control&quot; is &quot;difficulty&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's defined in Oxford Living Dictionaries as state of being difficult or something that is difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Difficult&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    1.Needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    1.1 Characterized by or causing hardships or problems.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/difficult&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Living Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a good match for &quot;things that which have a chance of preventing the intended or desired result&quot; because a &quot;difficulty&quot; makes things harder to accomplish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is how it would fit into your example paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;When a users interact with software there are always &lt;strong&gt;difficulties&lt;/strong&gt;. If you're designing a software tool you want to&#xA;    minimize &lt;strong&gt;difficulties&lt;/strong&gt; to provide the user a reliable tool. But if&#xA;    you're making a game you need &lt;strong&gt;difficulty&lt;/strong&gt; to make it exciting for the player.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I rarely find arguing back and forth in comments to be productive. In my opinion, you should have disengaged long before it got to the &quot;Prove it!&quot;. Accept the feedback, or accept the rejection of feedback you've provided and only go back and forth if someone is asking you to clarify (which is different from disagreeing with you). Or at least that's what I aspire to do - sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the moment. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:50:30.047" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11662" CreationDate="2018-08-22T16:57:06.813" Score="2" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need help with solving verbal analogies, but don't know which forum would be the right one.  ELU?  ELL?  Puzzling?  Also, would I need to cite the source?  And could I do several in one post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NBIYT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NBIYT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="310740" LastEditorUserId="310740" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T17:44:10.393" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T18:28:21.507" Title="Posting a verbal analogy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2018-08-22T17:24:21.633" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely no way to know &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; downvoted something or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;—unless they say so in a comment. (Such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/461314/291924&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, assuming that the comment is still there when checked.) Anything else is pure speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A staff developer—not a moderator—with access to the database &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; determine who voted for something, but will only do so in extreme and highly unusual circumstances which go well beyond just one or two routine downvotes. Even then, it won't tell them &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the voting happened that way, even if inferences can be made from a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the answer I linked to above, the commenter said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DV for answering a question that shows no research by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with the quality of the answer itself. It could have been the most amazing answer ever written, and upvoted by hundreds of other people, but still downvoted by this one person for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/215397/389569&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, in response to a similar question about downvoting, Tim Post says that &quot;the answer was down voted because I lost my keys.&quot; He also says that some people attribute downvoting &quot;to various phases of the moon.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are possible reasons for a downvote. They're not likely, but they serve to underscore the point that downvoting (or upvoting) need not actually be rational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of these cases, the downvote may not be a reflection of the content of your post at all. Or, even if it is a commentary on your post, it may simply be something along the lines of &quot;I don't agree with that answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't necessarily mean that your answer isn't a good one, or that you need to do something to improve in the future, it may simply be that &quot;it is what it is.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of the three answers you linked to, I see that you also received an upvote. That means that for each person who &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; like what you were saying, somebody &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; like what you were saying. That's worth keeping in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have a good overall reputation. That reputation is the net result of all of the people who have thought you've been doing a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be people who downvote. Unless you agree that there actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; something wrong with your posts, don't take it to heart. So long as you keep getting upvotes, you can be confident in your participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, myself, have answered some questions quite simplistically without (relatively speaking) putting a lot of effort into them; several of them have received a surprising number of upvotes (30+).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I've also literally put hours of work into some complex answers that I've been very proud of—only for them to net a low-digit or even negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, I would want to see those two sets of results reversed. That only seems &quot;fair&quot; to me. But that's not the way things work. I've also learned not to take any of it personally—it's just the nature of an audience whose members don't all perceive things the same way that you do. Some of them will agree and some of them will disagree (for whatever reason), and the votes will reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try not to obsess over one or two particular cases but focus instead on the bigger picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T17:56:24.050" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T17:56:24.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11660" CreationDate="2018-08-22T18:28:21.507" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a question like this could find a home at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for advice to help the question fare well, I'd say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The community prefers the question and answers be typed out, not merely posted as a screen shot. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should cite the source. It helps to know where you got the question from. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, you shouldn't do several in one post. That just makes it harder to fully answer your question with a single answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Insomuch as you can, you should try to tell us what you can about which answers you've eliminated, or what hunches you may have. If you're utterly stumped, that's fine, but at least say as much, so the entire community isn't wondering where you stand on the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adding your research will also help. At the very least, you could tell us what you found when you looked up some of the words in the question in few dictionaries. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it seems the two words are being compared by shape. Dimples are concave, pimples are convex. The fact that they rhyme is a red herring. The fact that they also can both be seen on the face might also be misleading; I think the analogy makes more sense if you think of dimples on a golf ball, and remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordnik.com/words/pimple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pimple&lt;/a&gt; can mean (among other things) &quot;a little elevation or protuberance of any kind.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T18:28:21.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11653" CreationDate="2018-08-23T11:02:12.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like the flip-side of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10953/142322&quot;&gt;your meta question&lt;/a&gt; last November. I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10957/142322&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to that question is still relevant here, and I'd encourage you to review it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange relies on two things to thrive: a well-curated database in each community, and a healthy community of subject-matter experts that 'buys in' to the SE goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this means that someone will find a point of interest in an otherwise poor question. I do this occasionally; others (notably Sven Yargs), a lot more often. This is part of the SE philosophy, too, as I noted in my linked answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question about how to discourage answers to poor questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider the answer. If it identifies a nugget in the question, it can redeem the question. In this case, leave it be, and even up-vote the answer. Edit the question if you wish, even extensively, but maintain the original intent of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answer itself is trivial &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the question is poor, and you decide that the answer is therefore &quot;not helpful&quot;, you can down-vote the answer and leave a comment pointing to the &quot;Answer well-asked questions&quot; section of the FAQ on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Answering&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is set up as a democracy of sorts. Vote and comment. The comment is important. If others agree, they might add their weight to the action. If not, they might even go so far as to up-vote the answer. That is part of SE's style of self-moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing: if we want EL&amp;amp;U to succeed (good database + good community), it's the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; part we need to work on. When you leave mod-like comments, point out the relevance of Stack Exchange goals and philosophy. I think the founders did a good job with the way they set things up, and sharing these underlying 'whys' can motivate others to change the way they interact here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T11:13:24.947" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T11:13:24.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2018-08-23T12:01:57.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, your question conflates two issues, and also assumes that one or both applies here on what appears to be insufficient evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anonymous &lt;strong&gt;Downvoting&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; is an intrinsic and deliberate part of the site, which is not going to go away. There are many discussions and objections on this meta site (over 400 last time I checked), but the fundamental point is that everybody with sufficient rep has a right to vote, and has no duty to justify an opinion. If your post gathers more downvotes than upvotes, you should probably consider whether your point or expression of it could be improved; if it gathers a few downvotes among the upvotes, then that is a normal part of the criticism process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abusive downvoting&lt;/strong&gt; is indeed a problem; if one user has downvoted a lot of your posts in one day, that is more likely to be personal than justified, and should be corrected. There is a script that checks each night for an excessive number of votes (up or down) from one account on another, and sometimes reverses such votes. If you think this has happened but has not been picked up, ping a moderator. &lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;: firstly, it really does need to be a lot of posts; downvoting three answers in one day is not abuse even if they did all come from one source. And secondly, neither you nor the mod have any idea whether the downvotes actually did come from one source, let alone who it was; anonymity, as I said, is an important feature of Stack Exchange. If the mod investigating sees a large number of single votes on your answers over a short time, it may be worth escalating to a member of SE staff, who can pierce the veil of anonymity and check whether abusive voting has taken place (I say single votes because it is common for several users to downvote an answer in quick succession, and for an answerer who is already feeling persecuted to take this as further evidence. By definition, this is not abusive). Abuse can lead to suspension, but the reasons for any suspension are confidential; all you will learn is that (perhaps) downvotes on your posts have been reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T12:01:57.643" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11653" CreationDate="2018-08-23T17:35:41.723" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the only way of achieving SE’s goal of only having “high quality” questions and answers is to put all questions in a moderation queue so they can be QAed, and only allow certified / qualified members to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expecting people to “magically” meet your exacting standards is probably pointless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184130" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T17:35:41.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11668" CreationDate="2018-08-24T08:32:32.527" Score="-2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for SE or SE ELU answer writing guide. Recently, my (accepted) answer was edited – screenshots removed – with this comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the information contained in this post requires additional references. Please edit to add citations to reliable sources that support the assertions made here. Unsourced material may be disputed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know, what are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;reliable sources&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and how to use so-called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;reliable sources&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; while writing an answer on SE ELU. Normally, I do share hyperlink related to words for citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was accessing SE ELU on my mobile device and thought to share a screenshot of Babylon dictionary (translator &amp;amp; dictionary) for citation, it was quite easy for me and described the words with greater detail, but now it is removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to avoid a similar situation in the future, I want to learn more about proper guidelines by &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228908" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T12:06:09.073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T12:06:09.073" Title="Are there any proper guidelines to write an answer?" Tags="|discussion|resources|answer-howto|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11666" CreationDate="2018-08-24T08:49:00.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Accessibility&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;Discrimination&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/459532/revisions&quot;&gt;I removed your pictures of text and requested an actual citation&lt;/a&gt; in their stead because text should be represented as text, not as pictures.  It all comes down to accessibility. We’re trying to be accessible to as broad an audience as possible here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, please do not post pictures of textual citations. Those cannot be searched. They also are useless to people who because of visual impairment or other hindrance are using screen readers and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/textual/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W3C’s Web Accessibility initiative&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Images of Text&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Images of text display text that is intended to be read. With the current CSS capabilities in most web browsers, it is good design practice to use actual text that is styled with CSS rather than image-based text presentation. Genuine text is much more flexible than images: It can be resized without losing clarity, and background and text colors can be modified to suit the reading preferences of users. Images are more likely to distort and pixelate when resized. In those rare situations where images of text must be used, the text alternative must contain the same text presented in the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Why is this important?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Images and graphics make content more pleasant and easier to understand for many people, and in particular for those with cognitive and learning disabilities. They serve as cues that are used by people with visual impairments, including people with low vision, to orient themselves in the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, images are used extensively on websites and can create major barriers when they are not accessible. Accessible images are beneficial in many situations, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;People using screen readers&lt;/strong&gt;: The text alternative can be read aloud or rendered as Braille&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;People using speech input software&lt;/strong&gt;: Users can put the focus onto a button or linked image with a single voice command&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;People browsing speech-enabled websites&lt;/strong&gt;: The text alternative can be read aloud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mobile web users&lt;/strong&gt;: Images can be turned off, especially for data-roaming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Search engine optimization&lt;/strong&gt;: Images become indexable by search engines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not wish to discriminate against the types of users and uses which that list enumerates. But your images said only this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![enter image description here][1]][1]&#xA;[![enter image description here][2]][2]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That unedited &lt;code&gt;enter image description here&lt;/code&gt; template bit is not acceptable alternate text: you must write in what it really says. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better yet, do not use pictures of text in the first place: use real text only, not pictures of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T08:57:02.577" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T08:57:02.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11666" CreationDate="2018-08-24T12:45:59.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As to what are reliable resources, the meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are Available&lt;/a&gt; gives many resources, often with some comment about their reliability and quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is only a list of suggested resources and is not like an official Scrabble dictionary-like 'only accepted' authority. Even if not in doubt it is often good practice to &lt;em&gt;check more than one resource&lt;/em&gt; in order to corroborate a claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to what is good practice for presentation of an answer, it of course depends on the particular kind of question. The general strategy is to answer with data that is possible to be confirmed. For example, for an SWR, quote some dictionary definition for which one can check against other dictionaries and avoid link rot, give a link (to confirm), and give explanation why this definition and its connotations apply to the request (because reading a definition is not self-explanatory, the OP doesn't necessarily know enough to recognize all the implications/connotations/collocations of the word, otherwise a link to a thesaurus would be the 'answer').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a template for each kind of question, I don't think there is one or necessarily should be one, but common sense, deeper thought, and looking at other &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T12:51:49.837" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T12:51:49.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8015" CreationDate="2018-08-24T19:26:57.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the header asks broadly &quot;How reliable is Ngram?&quot; I thought it might be useful to point out a significant aspect of using Ngram as a search tool that casual users may not be aware of: the results change within the same period of years depending on what date range you set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ngram's default range is 1800–2000, but the tool permits you to set the endpoints to as early as 1500 and to as late as 2008. In my experience, however, the broader the date range you set beyond 1800–2000, the greater the number of matches from the default search will drop out of the Google Books search results available through the links beneath the Ngram graph. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H+Christ&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H%20Christ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search for &quot;Jesus H Christ&quot; for the period 1800–2000&lt;/a&gt; yields (false positive) matches from 1804, 1805, 1817, and 1831, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H+Christ&amp;amp;year_start=1500&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H%20Christ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;same search extended to the period 1500–2008&lt;/a&gt; returns only the 1805 match from this group. On the other hand, shortening the date range for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H+Christ&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=1900&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H%20Christ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search to 1800–1900&lt;/a&gt; yields not only the original four matches but five additional (false positive) matches—from 1840, 1842, 1843, 1847, and 1853—not included in the the results returned for either of the other two searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these examples, you might suppose that the more narrowly you define the time frame, the more numerous the results will be within that time frame. But that is not the case. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H+Christ&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=1870&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H%20Christ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search limited to the period 1800–1870&lt;/a&gt; provides no new matches compared with the 1800–1900 search, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H+Christ&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=1865&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H%20Christ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search limited to the period 1800–1865&lt;/a&gt; yields matches only for the 1804, 1805, and 1817 false positives; inexplicably, all of the 1831–1853 matches vanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means in practical terms is that, if you want to use Ngram as a search tool to find texts published within a particular time frame of interest, you have to adjust the date parameters (sometimes repeatedly) to maximize the matches that Google Books returns. In the case of &quot;Jesus H. Christ,&quot; the additional matches from the period 1840–1853 turned out not to be helpful, which is not surprising considering that the earliest publication year for any confirmed match for the phrase that I've been able to find is 1880. But in the course of this particular research effort, running multiple searches with different end years led me to focus eventually on the period 1860–1925, and Ngram's Google Books &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H+Christ&amp;amp;year_start=1860&amp;amp;year_end=1925&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H%20Christ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searches from that period&lt;/a&gt; yielded a number of highly relevant matches that did not appear in the search results for the default 1800–2000 time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T01:31:37.107" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T01:31:37.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11672" CreationDate="2018-08-24T19:34:56.693" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried finding an answer by searching, but in vain.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we flag a comment or a question, do we lose rep pts.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T20:21:33.060" Title="Flagging &amp; reputation points" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11671" CreationDate="2018-08-24T19:36:55.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You do not lose reputation points for flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correctly flagging helps the site and is even encouraged. You start out with 10 flags and you get more flags according to the following rules (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;the help centre&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you start out, you are allotted 10 flags per day. This number may increase to up to 100 flags per day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get one bonus flag per 2000 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are awarded additional bonus flags when you flag correctly - one bonus flag for every ten net helpful flags (helpful flags minus declined flags).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T19:44:16.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11671" CreationDate="2018-08-24T19:38:40.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flags do not cost reputation. We do not want to discourage flags in any way, except when they are misused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T19:38:40.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11671" CreationDate="2018-08-24T20:21:33.060" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have stated, flags cost no rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as a counterpoint to encouragement to use flags, you should probably be using up your daily allotment of &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; on qs and as well before you get to the flag limit. Same for voting to close (in both directions). That is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;upvotes &gt; downvotes &gt;&gt; votes to close &gt;&gt;&gt; flags to mods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where each extra '&gt;' means a lot greater than). That flag limit is for the rare instance for an extreme situation, not the average. You want to hit your upvote count everyday. You don't want to expect to hit your flag max any day unless something really bad is happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T20:21:33.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11677" CreationDate="2018-08-24T22:10:54.620" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a lot of comments get hidden, including mine sometimes.  What is the rationale for hiding them?  I couldn't find the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T05:26:44.887" Title="Why do comments get hidden?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T22:13:53.510" Score="9" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewing first posts I noticed there are two scrollbars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/94XlI.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W8mez.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are links to some reviews that I saw this on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303268&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303268&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303259&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303259&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303519&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303519&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303618&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303618&lt;/a&gt; (answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw it happen on some posts both before and after the post was reviewed, but (because I think it's caused by the new user indicator) it goes away after a week. The bug is not fixed because I'm seeing it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/304754&quot;&gt;new reviews&lt;/a&gt;. However, I'm still using the old navigation (i.e. no left sidebar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is completely unnecessary, as there's not even anything further down when you scroll the inner one. In any case, the correct behavior is to only have one of the scroll bars (i.e. the outer one which scrolls the entire page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/303395&quot;&gt;one review&lt;/a&gt; that has a double scrollbar and a single horizontal one. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BTkE0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a screenshot. This is also pointless and annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I have now spotted this very same thing on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/466880/191178&quot;&gt;page outside the queue&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HcYoe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just checked some other sites (Stack Overflow, ELL, Skeptics) and I didn't see this happening. And I don't think I see it happening on all posts in that queue either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've checked some other metas and saw that people have also reported this bug on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3284/83293&quot;&gt;UX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://webmasters.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1576&quot;&gt;Webmasters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see this fixed. My setup here is Chrome on Mac (on the &quot;old&quot; site design). Is anyone else seeing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T20:18:00.873" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T20:18:00.873" Title="Double scrollbar in First Posts Queue" Tags="|bug|design|review-queues|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11675" CreationDate="2018-08-24T22:23:46.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you haven't already, you might want to check out this article on the comment privilege: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&lt;/a&gt; -- mainly the thing to remember is that comments are transient and are really just a feedback tool to the author: &lt;em&gt;clarification requests&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;suggestions&lt;/em&gt;. Once a request or suggestion is resolved, the comment trail is no longer needed, and might get cleaned up the next time the post gets reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271233/what-is-the-order-of-comments-for-each-post-in-all-stackexchange-communities/271234#271234&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange, comments with no upvotes are hidden when the comment thread gets long. &quot;Long&quot; depends on the site. I don't know what &quot;long&quot; is set to for EL&amp;amp;U but possibly we could find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T22:44:25.173" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T22:44:25.173" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11675" CreationDate="2018-08-25T05:26:44.887" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the very beginning, when it was just Stack Overflow, there were no comments. Then, when comments were added, they were all hidden by default. Finally (but still a really long time ago), the system changed again so that the top 5 comments would be shown, for reasons explained in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/23/comments-top-n-shown/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; by &amp;quot;former&amp;quot; co-founder Jeff Atwood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a grander plan with comment voting, and that plan was to promote some of the best voted comments to the question page. The default sort order is votes, descending, then date; we pick the top 5. Why did we do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are often important clarifications and addendums left as comments that substantially improve the original post. It seemed a shame that these sort of comments were all locked behind the “expand comments” button, and every reader had to click on that link (or know they should click on it) to get the benefit of those comments. Information was being lost!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The comments were not being indexed for web search, as they were hidden behind JavaScript and loaded dynamically via AJAX. More relevant search terms on the page means more people can potentially find the answer to their programming questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While I don’t want the site to devolve into a one-liner contest, some of the comments are quite witty and still on-topic. Our fellow Stack Overflow users who manage to “edutain” us deserve to have those comments seen and appreciated by a wider audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/410/323179&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt;, Jeff elaborates that the reason for only 5 to be shown is so you &amp;quot;never have to read more than a page (in this case, a page is 5 comments)&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number shown by default is still 5 on the main site, unless there are (I think) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/139777/323179&quot;&gt;30 or more answers&lt;/a&gt; posted, in which case 0-score comments are also hidden. On Meta, comments start to be hidden after 15. We have what is now the &amp;quot;default&amp;quot; hiding behavior, but sites are indeed free to change these numbers (and some have, such as The Workplace).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T05:26:44.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-18T00:23:11.710" Score="2" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a comprehensive dictionary of abbreviations out there or, failing that, a document wherein one can find the accepted &quot;rules&quot; to abbreviate words in the English language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, let me thank you in advance for your continued support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30390" OwnerDisplayName="José Hdz. Stgo." LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T23:21:01.533" Title="The abbreviation of words" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11679" CreationDate="2018-08-18T09:20:43.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's certainly no &lt;em&gt;comprehensive&lt;/em&gt; dictionary of abbreviations, as any individual, company, or even fandom can easily have its own abbreviations on top of any standard ones. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is probably your best bet for a &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; complete list, but this will still be missing a lot of more specific abbreviations. For example, as of right now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acronyms:_D#DM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DM&lt;/a&gt; is missing the definition &quot;direct message&quot;, which is common in Discord chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English uses many sorts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abbreviations&lt;/a&gt; (which are generally considered to include acronyms, etc., especially in common speech), and there really is no set rule to how to abbreviate. As such, most &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarbank.com/abbreviation-rules.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt; on &quot;abbreviation rules&quot; list how to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; abbreviations rather than how to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; them. Those that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/media_wysiwyg/University%20of%20Oxford%20Style%20Guide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;do&lt;/a&gt; tend to say &quot;these are the categories&quot; with no rules on how or when to apply each category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me lay out the most common forms of abbreviation, based on both &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/media_wysiwyg/University%20of%20Oxford%20Style%20Guide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford&lt;/a&gt; and personal experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing everything except the first syllable. (Example: &quot;Sat&quot; for &quot;Saturday&quot; or &quot;Eng&quot; for &quot;English&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing vowels and duplicated consonants (Example: &quot;sml&quot; for &quot;small&quot; or &quot;rng&quot; for &quot;range&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking only the first letter(s) of the word(s) (Example: &quot;M&quot; for &quot;Monday&quot; or &quot;UAE&quot; for &quot;United Arab Emirates&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Combining the first syllables of multiple content words (Example: &quot;satnav&quot; for &quot;satellite navigation system&quot; or &quot;SECNAV&quot; for &quot;Secretary of the Navy&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing the middle of a word, leaving only a few letters from the beginning and end (usually one each) (Example: &quot;st&quot; for &quot;saint&quot; or also &quot;street&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, which type of abbreviation is called for is decided entirely by the individual word, and many words have multiple abbreviations. On various calenders, for example, &quot;Thursday&quot; may be abbreviated &quot;Thurs&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.123calendars.com/images/2018/January/january-2018-calendar-1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thu&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://omextemplates.content.office.net/support/templates/en-us/lt04068896.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Th&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://calendarzone.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Calendar-1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, or even &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mvcc.edu/student-announcements/news-story/t-is-for-tuesday-r-is-for-thursday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (to keep it straight from Tuesday). Not to mention, there are also words that use different sorts of abbreviations, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, because abbreviations are not standardized, but rather created out of convenience, there really will never be a complete list of every abbreviation in English, nor comprehensive rules for how to make abbreviations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="312636" OwnerDisplayName="Drazex" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T09:20:43.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11683" CreationDate="2018-08-29T19:59:34.133" Score="5" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have authored an answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/462217/87426&quot;&gt;SWR&lt;/a&gt;. While I believe my suggestion provides a near precise answer to the asked question, it seems to be rather unliked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the word may be rare, but an unusual word usually does not generate a lot of controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could get some help understanding how the answer should be improved, or why the answer is considered such a bad one, that feedback would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87426" LastEditorUserId="87426" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T20:06:43.113" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T12:18:44.090" Title="Please help me improve my babel answer?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11682" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:54:13.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer has eight up-votes and four down-votes, so it's more &lt;em&gt;controversial&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;. I suspect the controversy stems from your discussion of &quot;babble&quot;, since some commenters disagree that it's not the same as &quot;babel&quot; in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try adding a definition of &quot;babble&quot; to support your position, or (if those definitions don't pan out), you could soften your statement to list &quot;babble&quot; as a similar (etymologically unrelated), but potentially more ambiguous, term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I would tend to agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/babble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;babble&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is an OK term here; the relevant ODO definition is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;[i mass noun]&lt;/em&gt; The sound of people talking simultaneously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I also agree with you that there is a greater connotation of rapidity, as seen in the first definition of the verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Talk rapidly and continuously in a foolish, excited, or incomprehensible way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T20:54:13.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-30T01:59:40.393" Score="17" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something awful has happened to the top of all our pages. Earlier today they looked like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N79qT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N79qT.png&quot; alt=&quot;old page header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now it has shrunk to a nearly unreadable proportion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pjrTX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pjrTX.png&quot; alt=&quot;new page header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new version is completely shrunken, which also destroys the stroke width in the logo with the now-misshapen small caps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s also grossly off-centered compared with the list beneath it: Questions / Tags / Users / Badges / Unanswered / Ask Question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here you can see that the letters are randomly assembled! Look how the E and the N don't share the same base line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w4UbC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w4UbC.png&quot; alt=&quot;meta bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the G is floating down in comparison with the E, and the N is floating up. There's also something wrong with the S. Here you can see the weird hovering effects better, as well the bad keming between the N and the G, something which shouldn’t even be possible with proper letterspacing of the font’s small caps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n1La7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n1La7.png&quot; alt=&quot;just the English&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wOqJA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wOqJA.png&quot; alt=&quot;just the Language&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eRVL8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eRVL8.png&quot; alt=&quot;just the Usage&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did someone try to hand-set small caps as images instead of letting the builtin letterspacing rules in the font for those handle everything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the baseline on the first bullet of true small caps below, completely uniform and with correct letterfit between them (no bad keming here!), you’ll see how things &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Dmz3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Dmz3.png&quot; alt=&quot;small cap demo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="314285" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T16:24:53.667" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T16:24:53.667" Title="The Incredible Shrinking ELU Banner" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|images|top-bar|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11684" CreationDate="2018-08-30T02:07:30.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a file path issue that's happening unintentionally while we prepare new theming assets. It'll be taken care of first thing tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314285" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T02:07:30.880" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11682" CreationDate="2018-08-30T12:18:44.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Provide some historical references to accentuate the legitimacy of the usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176820" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T12:18:44.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-30T20:04:15.573" Score="-2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462261/i-or-me-at-the-end-of-a-list&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.  The link they dismissed it with did &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answer the dismissed question.  So, how do we non-mods request that the dismissal be reversed?  (I did not post the dismissed question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastEditorUserId="167518" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T20:14:34.063" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T05:21:17.987" Title="Question was WRONGLY dismissed (not closed) as &quot;already answered&quot;" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2018-08-30T20:27:40.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been answered numerous times. A good starting point for researching what would be the best older question to link this one to is this search: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bpersonal-pronouns%5D+i+me&quot;&gt;[personal-pronouns] i me&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older question it's been linked to isn't exactly the same -- the older one is put as a question about word order. But nohat's answer does answer the newer question because it was very helpfully written to cover more than just what was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good existing answer also by nohat is this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4556/who-wants-ice-cream-should-i-say-not-i-or-not-me/4655#4655&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Who wants ice-cream?&amp;quot; — Should I say &amp;quot;(not) I&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;(not) me&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T20:27:40.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2018-08-30T20:39:59.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is a duplicate of one or more different questions (in this case it looks like a duplicate of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1047/191178&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;), then the best fix is to get the attention of either a moderator or (if any exist) a matching gold tag badge holder to change the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291824/323179&quot;&gt;duplicate list&lt;/a&gt;. This can be done any number of ways: chat, flags, meta, comments (but only if they've left a comment on the question), etc. Flags or meta are usually preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it might take some time for the change to happen, it doesn't hurt to leave a comment pointing to the correct duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's no duplicate and you think the question should be reopened, you can cast a reopen vote when you have the privilege to do so. Until then, a good course of action might be to edit the question, if you can improve it. Sometimes a change of wording can make the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that would likely be closed anyway (for another reason) I generally leave instructions for the author on how to improve the question so it can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T20:39:59.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-30T21:24:03.080" Score="22" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;The jaded user is myself. The new contributor is (was) Replica Foxtrot who posted this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/462422/1&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the phrase 'Putting the Spring' mean?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am reading the book about the Simpsons and I don't understand this line 'Putting the Spring in Springfield'. Can anyone please explain to me what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After several exchanges between myself and Replica Foxtrot, the user adds the research, adds the effort, and explains what they think the sentence means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I retract my vote to close the question, and upvote it. We now have a half decent question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462422/what-does-the-phrase-putting-the-spring-in-springfield-mean&quot;&gt;What does the phrase &amp;#39;Putting the Spring in Springfield&amp;#39; mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am reading the book about the Simpsons and I don't understand this line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;'Putting the Spring in Springfield'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The line is the title of chapter from the book. I suppose the line 'put the spring' means breathing life or revival or something like that. Regarding the meaning of the word 'spring', it means grow out, put out, bubble up or occur. I am not sure whether I'm right or not, so that's why I'm here. Does it mean breathing life to Springfield? Can anyone please explain to me what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One minute later a mod closes it for being POB and adds this comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Avoid asking what a text or utterance means. Interpretation requests (criticism, discussion, analysis, and divining the author’s intent) are out of scope and may be removed. This applies to all English texts and utterances, including (but not limited to) song lyrics, poetry, and legal documents. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;“What topics can I ask about here? - Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that question is POB then they have to explain why this question isn't also POB.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462430/what-does-all-senses-cocked-mean?noredirect=1#comment1115707_462430&quot;&gt;What does “all senses cocked” mean?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a comment I left beneath Yoichi's post (now self-deleted because copied here verbatim)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@MetaEd why is this question not POB but What does the phrase 'Putting the Spring in Springfield' mean? is? Look at the title, same wording. Basically, you have two non-native speakers asking about the meaning of a phrase. But one gets closed while the other remains open. Sorry, Yoichi I have nothing against your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S some of the comments between myself and Foxtrot were deleted. I didn't flag any, and I don't think the new user did but maybe they did. I don't know. I said their question lacked research, effort and for that I had voted to close it. I also added that unfortunately their question was one of many spoon-feed questions that are being posted, probably by 16-year-olds. Initially, newcomer wasn't pleased, said I had to push my ego down, I understood that reaction but at the same time I wasn't offended, so we got talking. Success, they improved the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End result? The question gets closed and Replica Foxtrot is going to ask their question on Reddit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;REQUEST&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we please reopen the question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been reopened. Thank you to everyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T23:32:00.977" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T23:32:00.977" Title="Jaded user meets new contributor…" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|comments|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11690" CreationDate="2018-08-30T22:16:01.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll just limit myself to being transparent about why I did what I did, and leave it to the community to either leave things as is, or reopen one or close the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to collect definitive &lt;em&gt;facts&lt;/em&gt; about what English words and phrases mean, when a good dictionary or thesaurus is inadequate. The &quot;what topics&quot; help page invites questions about the meanings of words, provided the asker has already looked them up and is still puzzled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we do not want to collect &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; about what an author meant by a particular utterance. The same &quot;what topics&quot; help page discourages requests for&#xA;literary criticism and analysis of texts, and we have consistently closed such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this creates a boundary, maybe with a gray area, between two kinds of &quot;meaning&quot; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;those which are possible to answer correctly, adding new true facts to our collection of facts about the English language, and are more the domain of English language experts, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;those which are a matter of opinion or personal interpretation, and are more the domain of writers, poets, and literary critics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the question about &quot;Putting the Spring in Springfield&quot; boiled down to interpretation: what did the author intend by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question about &quot;all senses cocked&quot; boiled down to facts: is that an idiom in the English language and if so what is its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T22:16:01.317" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2018-08-31T05:14:43.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that both of these are bad duplicate targets. (I would immodestly suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/313/when-do-i-use-i-instead-of-me&quot;&gt;When do I use &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;me?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which I posted an answer to, as a better dupe target for this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the &quot;Should I put myself last?&quot; question, although explicitly about word order and not about case from the beginning (the first version said &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;regardless of the &quot;me&quot;/&quot;I&quot; usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;), attracted a number of answers about case. For example, nohat's answer is almost entirely about &quot;and me&quot; vs. &quot;and I&quot;, and only addresses the actual question in the final paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the question was later edited to have the misleading title &quot;&quot;My friends and I&quot; vs. &quot;My friends and me&quot; vs. &quot;Me and my friends&quot;, and many questions about &quot;me&quot; vs. &quot;I&quot; were subsequently marked as duplicates of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end result is that the question has become somewhat established as a &quot;dupe target&quot; for questions about &quot;me&quot; vs. &quot;I&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;who wants ice cream&quot; question is also a favorite dupe target for any kinds of questions about case for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that links to these two questions don't actually suffice to answer any and all questions about the use of &quot;me&quot; vs. &quot;I&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No offense to nohat, but his answers to these two questions were posted very early on in the site, and they don't have any citations or discussion of complicating factors, alternative analyses, or terminological issues. &#xA;A rule like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, in English, accusative (also known as “objective”) pronouns (like me) are the “default” form. That is, unless there is a specific syntactic rule requiring use of a different case, such as nominative (I), genitive (my/mine), or reflexive/intensive (myself), in English you use the accusative case &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;doesn't actually answer any questions about specific constructions, because it doesn't tell you whether there is any &quot;specific syntactic rule&quot; requiring the use of some other case in whatever context--e.g. after &quot;and&quot;, or after &quot;is&quot;. Because any particular grammatical context may have a different pattern of case usage, it makes sense to have separate questions about different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T05:21:17.987" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T05:21:17.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T17:38:19.703" Score="-23" ViewCount="2315" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't see it right now, that's by design! We're hoping to get feedback from you before rolling it out to everyone permanently. If you'd like to review it, here's how:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I enable it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/preferences&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; and check the &quot;Beta test new themes&quot; option. This will turn on the new theme for all sites that have one in testing, including this one. &lt;em&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314542/opt-in-to-beta-testing-new-themes&quot;&gt;more info&lt;/a&gt; on how to opt in.&lt;/em&gt; You can uncheck the box to revert to the older theme until the site is live for everyone (note, it will take a few minutes to go into effect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What type of feedback do we need?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On this post: Bugs related to this site's design elements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help us look for issues/bugs related to the theme design and how we have mapped the old theme to the new. This needs to be done within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307862/ch-ch-ch-changes-left-nav-responsive-design-themes&quot;&gt;limits of the new unified theme&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Meta Stack Exchange: General concerns about left nav or theming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav or the overall approach we are taking to theming, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/310908/live-left-nav-new-theming-and-responsiveness&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; is the right place for feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you may notice, there are some unique design elements like voting arrows and tags that are being standardized in this process. Keeping these custom elements makes our ability to maintain the sites too complex and, while we're very sad to see them go, we're in a difficult position of needing to make the site designs work together so that we can continue to address feature requests and bugs that will make your Q&amp;amp;A experience better. This is addressed in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314799/why-we-initiated-the-latest-round-of-design-changes-and-the-role-of-meta&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; if you want more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What new themes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like, &quot;What the heck are you talking about?&quot;, then you should read the Meta Stack Exchange post entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312365/rollout-of-new-network-site-themes&quot;&gt;Rollout of new network site themes&lt;/a&gt; (and maybe the posts it links to for the full background).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thanks so much for your constructive feedback!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T07:31:40.007" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T21:26:17.047" Title="English Language &amp; Usage's updated site theme is ready for testing!" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="26" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-08-31T18:51:14.687" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because I want to be the first to say it. Me no likey :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original EL&amp;amp;U theme used to be &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt;. In 2010, the site's designer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/400/english-site-design&quot;&gt;explained&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Alex and I agreed on the design direction for the site. &lt;strong&gt;It should feature beautiful typography and invoke a vintage/warm feeling.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2018, the new flat theme is dull and one dimensional. The elegant Georgia font has been sacrificed. The quaint antique style and flourishes have been replaced by bands, lines and boxes. The theme colour, which was charming and reminiscent of a bygone era, now succeeds in accentuating this blandness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the always-awful jet-black top bar, which never matched the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10885/elus-top-bar-stopped-being-elegant-in-2013&quot;&gt;original theme&lt;/a&gt;, is unchanged. We are left with the main page resembling one of England's worst-tasting and garish-looking sweets (candy), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=liquorice%20allsorts&amp;amp;num=20&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjLqfDhw5jdAhXFsKQKHcHPAJ8Q_AUICigB&amp;amp;biw=1327&amp;amp;bih=619&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;liquorice allsorts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our once glorious ampersand (the Baskerville's italic ampersand symbol) has shrunk and become incongruous with its new austere surroundings. The website completely lacks personality and is superbly anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;With the left navigation disabled&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e279g.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e279g.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the featured page (bounty page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYAlm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYAlm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The heading ‘Top Questions’ is too obtrusive. It completely swamps the banner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; theme&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xeaoS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xeaoS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, I don't mind the meta page, maybe the grey matches the black top bar better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZEQl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZEQl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last one seems an improvement but &lt;em&gt;sigh&lt;/em&gt; we're losing our beautiful theme design and font. &lt;em&gt;Sigh&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;BUGS/DEFECTS&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless we enable the left navigation on the new theme, we do not see the preview of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previews of questions are not visible by design on the &amp;quot;home&amp;quot; page - the page that you get when you click on the site logo or the &amp;quot;Home&amp;quot; link in the left nav/left hamburger. This is the way the site has always behaved. If you want to view the Questions page, that's in the left nav hamburger dropdown or the left nav bar and you can see that view as you normally have. ~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QH5Gz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QH5Gz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With the &lt;strong&gt;left navigation &lt;em&gt;disabled&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, there is no access to the ‘Questions’ page, which means...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is incorrect. As stated in the previous note, this is in the left hamburger menu in the top bar. This menu &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the left nav, in menu form. It only exists if you have left nav disabled or if you're viewing a page that doesn't have left nav at all. ~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fdvek.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fdvek.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links on the main page displaying &lt;em&gt;badges&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;frequent&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; and our greatest self-promotion asset,  &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt;, are invisible. Casual visitors might risk not seeing  EL&amp;amp;U's top questions and the corresponding top answers, which would be a disaster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the &lt;strong&gt;left navigation &lt;em&gt;enabled&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Access to &lt;em&gt;Newest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Featured&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Frequent&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Votes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Active,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Unanswered&lt;/em&gt; is restored&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E2oKD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E2oKD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot of the main page complete with left navigation and coal black top bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jq4AX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jq4AX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the web site's name pushed to the left?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because all sites must have this placement moving forward. The goal of this update is to make the base LESS/CSS for the entire network as similar as possible, which requires that the logos all have the same positioning. Having these elements be the same makes it so that we can more easily roll out some of the feature requests that have been sitting around for years without risking breaking a chunk of the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253359/list-of-communities-with-base-css-updates-completed&quot;&gt;similar but much more minor update&lt;/a&gt; back in 2015/16 but it wasn't enough to prevent bugs from happening constantly. It made it possible for the network to upgrade to new profile pages and other long-standing requests. Rolling out new features is fun but it's much less fun if you spend the next months fixing bugs because 60+ sites all have slightly different code bases. ~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the subheading larger than the actual logo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subheading sizes are standardized across the network. Initially, the logo was somewhat limited by length relative to height in order for the logo to fit on phones as small as 320 px wide. Sites with longer names will tend to have smaller fonts to accommodate this. There are solutions for this that are being looked into. ~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do we have different fonts on the same page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What was the reason for downsizing the ampersand?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we please eliminate, replace or shrink the ornamental floral elements to their former size?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will that dead space in the left margin one day be filled? Ads? Jobs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a great number of plans for the left sidebar, many of which are yet to be decided or even thought of. We're absolutely open to suggestions for what to put there. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312781/custom-question-lists-finding-questions-you-can-answer&quot;&gt;Custom Question Lists&lt;/a&gt; are one of the things that will live there in the future. These elements, however, aren't complete yet and won't be available on sites until the left nav is on the site. As far as I'm aware, there's no plans to put ads in the left nav and Jobs content/ads, which only exists on Stack Overflow, lives in the right sidebar other than the link to the Jobs site. ~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CVEpN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CVEpN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another way to access the &lt;em&gt;questions page&lt;/em&gt; without enabling the left navigation, there's a hamburger menu (☰) on the top left of the page this allows you easy access to the &lt;em&gt;Questions&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tags&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Users&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Unanswered&lt;/em&gt; pages. I would recommend disabling left navigation and using the left hamburger logo/icon to switch pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not understand why there are now &lt;strong&gt;three ‘hamburgers’&lt;/strong&gt;, and why the hamburger on the left does not brighten when it is clicked. In my modest opinion, due to its gloomy appearance, it is easily missed and its utility overlooked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zzKYX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zzKYX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CTfCd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CTfCd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Titles of Questions are not in red&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you visit a page, the question title is not red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New Theme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B0t28.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B0t28.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(ii) &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hasaF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hasaF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original Theme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/06CAM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/06CAM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(ii) &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r9YhE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r9YhE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it is a bug or by design. Also worth pointing out, the new theme finds long titles particularly difficult to handle. See (i)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Many thanks to @Laurel who showed me where to find the hidden hamburger)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T19:09:26.103" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-08-31T19:10:06.590" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a weird problem causing the offset letters in the banner. It's being looked at but will be fixed (on all of the sites getting hit by it). The status completed tag on tchrist's bug report was because the site theme was fixed back to what it was, not that this version of it was fixed. There was an odd slippage of the image for the new version of the site into the old/current site design - that's what was fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the general banner, the placement of the site name has to be on the left, not centered, but I've seen a mockup of an updated version that I really hope y'all will like (more, anyway). It is, essentially, identical to what it currently is, but not centered. This includes making it slightly larger than the disliked version but still a bit smaller than the old, to fit in the new top bar height.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11684/the-incredible-shrinking-elu-banner&quot;&gt;tchrist's objection&lt;/a&gt; to the quality of the image has not been corrected, despite the [status-completed] tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MdJq0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MdJq0.png&quot; alt=&quot;New banner&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letters are all over the place (and why is &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; set in Georgia rather than the title font?). It's better, but I would suggest still not right, in Main:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mibvz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mibvz.png&quot; alt=&quot;New banner&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ornaments cry out for centring, but everything is just pushed to the left. It's horrible. It's not just bland, it's cheap and nasty, and not a patch on the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; design. That was centred and used a larger distressed font with authentic spacing and was &lt;s&gt;obviously the work of a talented designer&lt;/s&gt; really well-designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yDQ7u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yDQ7u.png&quot; alt=&quot;Original distressed font&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given that the overall concept is a done deal, however badly envisaged, I suppose we will need to make the best of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't make my living from design, I think I would suggest losing the ornaments altogether. That will allow the lettering to be made larger, like Christianity's header, and possibly mean that Caslon Antique can reappear, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c3HII.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c3HII.png&quot; alt=&quot;Christianity&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be really good if something could be used on the right-hand side, like the Christianity cloud. Perhaps one of the ornaments could go over there — larger and cropped, as a nod to the old style? Or maybe an artistic scan of part of a page of H.W. Fowler's &lt;em&gt;Modern English Usage,&lt;/em&gt; since the first edition is well out of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; good is the decorated border, but it's not enough to detract from the overall blandness, I'm afraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T01:07:53.650" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-08-31T19:51:34.303" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;See al­so these re­lat­ed and some­what more pa­tient MSE posts of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/316196/153355&quot;&gt;Why do some parts of the stan­dard theme use dif­fer­ent fonts than the rest of the site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316797/153355&quot;&gt;Un­chang­ing font size, lead­ing, and mea­sure in­com­pat­i­ble with dy­nam­ics of re­spon­sive de­sign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/317237/153355&quot;&gt;Ran­som-note prob­lems with IPA and Greek un­der new font stacks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/317141/153355&quot;&gt;Track­ing set too tight on up­per­case text-trans­form CSS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/317356/153355&quot;&gt;Ren­der­ing bugs with smart quotes in de­fault font stacks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as these very close­ly re­lat­ed posts of mine over on Graph­ic De­sign’s &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3547/8859&quot;&gt;Graph­ic De­sign up­dat­ed site theme is ready for test­ing!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3548/8859&quot;&gt;Ren­der­ing Re­gres­sion Bug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3549/8859&quot;&gt;Good para­graph-re­flows now&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Dis­card­ing Geor­gia for Ar­ial is un­ac­cept­able&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’ve lost our el­e­gant Geor­gia face on most of the site. It’s been re­placed by Ari­al of all things. Those two faces are &lt;strong&gt;ɴᴏᴛ ᴍᴇᴀɴᴛ&lt;/strong&gt; to go to­geth­er, and they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; not. Geor­gia is sup­posed to pair with Ver­dana, not with Ari­al. Other­wise the char­ac­ter is all wrong, like &lt;em&gt;chalk and cheese&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This im­pacts site us­abil­i­ty be­cause the x-height in Ari­al is con­sid­er­ably small­er than the one in Ge­or­gia for the same point size. That makes ev­ery­thing small­er and hard­er to read. Why would you de­lib­er­ate­ly choose to do that with­out com­pen­sat­ing for the new size? Notice how the small capitals that it pulls from Times New Roman are the wrong size and stroke width for the surrounding Georgia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uNR5i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uNR5i.png&quot; alt=&quot;demo of existing paragraph with small capitals for ɴᴏᴛ ᴍᴇᴀɴᴛ part&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;    If after click­ing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uNR5i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that im­age to see it at full width&lt;/a&gt;, its text &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; looks &#xA;    too small, that’s prob­a­bly be­cause the new “re­spon­sive” de­sign is&#xA;    &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316797/153355&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not ac­tu­al­ly re­spon­sive&#xA;    enough&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to rec­og­nize&#xA;    large view­ports and re­size the type­face and ad­just the mea­sure &#xA;    com­men­su­rate­ly — and you’re us­ing a wide-screen mon­i­tor like I am.&#xA;    This is all cov­ered in the afore­men­tioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316797/153355&quot;&gt;linked MSE post&#xA;    № 2&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;    &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why this is a bad pairing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ex­ist­ing site had a lit­tle bit of Ari­al, but the new one is most­ly&#xA;Ari­al as I will show in im­ages be­low. Some have asked why it’s ug­ly to mix&#xA;these. In &lt;em&gt;The Ele­ments of Ty­po­graph­ic Style&lt;/em&gt;, Rob­ert Bring­hurst writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Us­ing what there is to best ad­van­tage al­most al­ways means us­ing less than what&#xA;  is avail­able. Basker­ville, Hel­veti­ca, Palati­no, and Times Ro­man, for &#xA;  ex­am­ple – which are four of the most wide­ly avail­able type­faces – are four&#xA;  faces with noth­ing to of­fer one an­oth­er ex­cept pub­lic dis­agree­ment. None&#xA;  makes a good com­pan­ion face for any of the others, be­cause each of them is&#xA;  root­ed in a dif­fer­ent con­cept of what con­sti­tutes a let­ter­form. If the &#xA;  avail­able pal­lette is lim­it­ed to these faces, the first thing to do is&#xA;  choose &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; for the task at hand and ig­nore the oth­er three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uMOgD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uMOgD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Bringhurst specimen of Basker­ville, Hel­veti­ca, Palati­no, and Times Ro­man&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About which he says the following (excerpts only):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Basker­ville is an English Neo­clas­si­cal face de­signed in Birm­ing­ham in the&#xA;    1750s by John Basker­ville. It has a ra­tio­nal­ist ax­is, thor­ough­go­ing&#xA;    ge­om­e­try and a del­i­cate fin­ish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hel­veti­ca is a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Swiss re­vi­sion of a late nine­teenth&#xA;    cen­tu­ry Ger­man Real­ist face.  ... The heavy, un­mod­u­lat­ed line and tiny&#xA;    aper­ture evoke an im­age of un­cul­ti­vat­ed strength, force, and per­sis­tence.&#xA;    The very light weights is­sued in re­cent years have done much to re­duce&#xA;    Hel­veti­ca’s coarse­ness but lit­tle to in­crease its read­abil­i­ty.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Palati­no is a lyri­cal mod­ernist face with a neo­hu­man­ist ar­chi­tec­ture, ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Time Ro­man – prop­er­ly Times &lt;em&gt;New&lt;/em&gt; Ro­man – is a his­tor­i­cal pas­tiche ... It&#xA;    has a hu­man­ist ax­is but Man­ner­ist pro­por­tions, Baroque weight, and a sharp,&#xA;    Neo­clas­si­cal fin­ish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For rea­sons I won’t get in­to here, what he says about &lt;em&gt;Hel­veti­ca&lt;/em&gt; you can&#xA;ap­ply in equal mea­sure to &lt;em&gt;Ari­al&lt;/em&gt;, and what he says about &lt;em&gt;Times New Ro­man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;you can ap­ply to Georgia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s fine to mix sans and serif for dis­tinct sec­tions (like cap­tions for&#xA;ex­am­ple), but &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; pick two type­faces that have the same no­tion “of what a&#xA;let­ter­form &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; So they should both be from the same tra­di­tion, in our case prefer­ably an old-style Re­nais­sance one with a hu­man­ist (oblique) ax­is,&#xA;large aper­ture, crisp ter­mi­nals, and with an ital­ic equal to and&#xA;in­de­pen­dent of the ro­man rather than just an oblique with a slant ver­sion&#xA;of the same ro­man let­ters. And both should have old-style text fig­ures and&#xA;such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgia you can say much but not all of that about; Ari­al noth­ing. An ex­am­ple hu­man­ist pair­ing would be some­thing like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FF_Scala_Sans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FF Scala Sans&lt;/a&gt; to go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FF_Scala&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FF Scala&lt;/a&gt;. I re­al­ize those two in par­tic­u­lar are not avail­able to us, but they pro­vide a sound mod­el to em­u­late in pair­ing two linked faces done in the self­same hu­man­ist tra­di­tion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please put our el­e­gant Geor­gia back wher­ev­er you’ve smashed us in­to a bland sans, with­out even prop­er text fig­ures.  Why would you change this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GBC9K.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GBC9K.png&quot; alt=&quot;old dup close&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nfp8t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nfp8t.png&quot; alt=&quot;new dup close&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sticks out like a sore thumb now. It doesn’t make sense giv­en that we’re a serif site. This looks like a mis­take. It cer­tain­ly does not look good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is ugly and wrong for our site theme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bcp0Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bcp0Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;looks like shit&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BOlGF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BOlGF.png&quot; alt=&quot;looks right&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is hap­pen­ing all over the place, from cra­dle to grave. So here’s what we used to greet peo­ple with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/waC4J.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/waC4J.png&quot; alt=&quot;old greeting page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now they get this, which has noth­ing to do with our site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPb7O.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPb7O.png&quot; alt=&quot;new greeting page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the tour is all messed up. Where once we had this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ul6Ms.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ul6Ms.png&quot; alt=&quot;old tour&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we have this, which again looks alien to the site theme, and there­fore un­wel­com­ing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyDrU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyDrU.png&quot; alt=&quot;new tour&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s al­so ly­ing: we aren’t dif­fer­ent from any­body else. &lt;code&gt;We are ex­act­ly the same.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we don’t even have an ital­ic font. The new sans has no ital­ic on­ly oblique, so you don't have the right let­ter­form for the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, just an a that’s slant­ed. Use some sans that has a re­al ital­ic for good­ness sake! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what hap­pened here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvwhD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvwhD.png&quot; alt=&quot;new tag page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is sup­posed to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4jm3M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4jm3M.png&quot; alt=&quot;old tag page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what hor­ri­ble thing has hap­pened to all of our pro­files? This:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWjME.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWjME.png&quot; alt=&quot;old profile&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has become this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p7X8L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p7X8L.png&quot; alt=&quot;new profile&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; that stuff is, but it isn’t &lt;em&gt;English Lan­guage &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;. It’s com­plete­ly re­moved all site flair al­to­geth­er. This is just a beige ver­sion of Stack Over­flow. It is not taste­ful and it is not el­e­gant. It is the op­po­site of those things. Why? What does de­stroy­ing our fonts buy some­body that is so im­por­tant that we should suf­fer this ig­nominy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;This all seems care­less and wrong, a gross mis­take. It’s harm­ful. Why?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geor­gia and Ari­al don’t even go to­geth­er. They’re from dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions. You need to pair one hu­man­ist/old-style face with an­oth­er. Or even a neo-hu­man­ist or tra­di­tion­al pair. But you don’t mix chalk and cheese. This is all out of whack. And no, you can­not pair Times New Ro­man with Hel­veti­ca ei­ther, for the same rea­son. Nei­ther of those sans faces pair with ei­ther of those serif ones. Please read Chap­ter 6 of &lt;em&gt;The Ele­ments of Ty­po­graph­ic Style&lt;/em&gt;, “Choos­ing &amp;amp; Com­bin­ing Type”, for why this mat­ters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Us­ing a sans font on ELU — in par­tic­u­lar, this new hodge-podge ran­dom mix­ing of Ge­or­gia and Ari­al with nei­ther rhyme nor rea­son — looks like crap. If we can’t have Geor­gia, just be hon­est and make it Com­ic Sans and watch peo­ple re­sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m se­ri­ous. Stick­ing us with some bor­ing, in­el­e­gant font that &lt;strong&gt;is not&lt;/strong&gt; our site’s font is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;non-ne­go­tiable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. We need no sans here any­where we didn’t have it be­fore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is ob­vi­ous­ly some­thing that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be fixed. And should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus for the sans, pick one that has an ac­tu­al ital­ic, not an oblique. Pick a serif and a sans that ac­tu­al­ly &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;G O  T O ­G E T H E R&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for good­ness’ sake. That usu­al­ly means by the same de­sign­er, the way Geor­gia and Ver­dana were made to be paired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please&lt;/em&gt; restore all the new sans places back to the old serif!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-11-04T14:56:08.380" LastActivityDate="2018-11-04T14:56:08.380" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:06:19.690" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The contrast here on the &quot;load new answers&quot; bit is completely unreadable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/88DF6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/88DF6.png&quot; alt=&quot;more shitty design&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of tools out there that tell you whether the contrast is tolerable or not. Please use them, because this clearly is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T20:26:02.543" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T20:26:02.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:22:00.860" Score="3" ViewCount="703" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started looking for this feature to start an answer for: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462476/tete-a-tete-commonly-known-in-english&quot;&gt;Tete-a-tete commonly known in English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure Dictionary.com used to have a little side bar where it said something like &quot;most English speakers probably know this word.&quot; I don't know whether it was reliable or not, I haven't used it in years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I can't find it anymore. Did they get rid of this feature? I can't find any articles announcing its retirement, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130346" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T15:10:35.563" Title="Did Dictionary.com get rid of its difficulty index?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11699" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:50:17.903" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Archive.org, the difficulty meter was still live on their site as of &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171123064337/http://www.dictionary.com:80/browse/definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;November 23rd, 2017&lt;/a&gt; and gone on &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171205075344/http://www.dictionary.com:80/browse/definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;December 5th, 2017&lt;/a&gt; (and thus it was removed sometime between those dates). As you can see from those two links, they also used to have something telling you the word's score in Scrabble and Words with Friends, which was also removed (though at an even later date). If you still want the information, you can check Archive.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of 2022 (maybe earlier), it looks like they've added back this information. Some entries &amp;quot;show[] grade level based on the word's complexity&amp;quot;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/premillennialize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;premillennialize&lt;/a&gt; is &amp;quot;post-college level&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember looking for as much information as I could on this pre-2018 and finding no information on how they actually came up with the difficulty whatsoever (thus preventing me from trusting it). I also don't think the difficulty information was available via any API (which would have been nice news for programmers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-05T15:10:35.563" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T15:10:35.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-08-31T22:44:36.460" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't broken; why did you fix it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T22:44:36.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-01T02:39:27.067" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site logo is a little drunk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XSjrv.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XSjrv.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Animate image of the site logo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Made by Shog9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T02:48:06.383" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T02:48:06.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-01T14:52:25.893" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;More colours have been introduced unnecessarily. Quotes have changed colour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wRg0L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wRg0L.png&quot; alt=&quot;New site&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VEj4v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VEj4v.png&quot; alt=&quot;Old site&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually they have completely lost the ELU styling and gained the bog-standard styling. This is a retrograde step. But even if the &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of a left bar had to be adopted, I see no reason to change the colour. After all, the background colour of the page is specific to ELU, so there is a site-specific style sheet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And links have been underlined, although that might make sense for accessibility purposes. I can't see that introducing another colour into the site palette does that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T14:52:25.893" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-01T17:54:01.717" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;‘Interestingly tagged’ questions tantamount to invisible&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a follow-on to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11703/2085&quot;&gt;Andrew’s observation that our colors don’t make sense now&lt;/a&gt;, I’ve found a related problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the &lt;code&gt;old-english&lt;/code&gt; tag marked as an interesting tag, so that shows up in a distinctive color. What’s happened is that the &lt;code&gt;tagged-interesting.background-color&lt;/code&gt; CSS value has gone from &lt;code&gt;#fffbec&lt;/code&gt; before to &lt;code&gt;rgba(255,245,222,0.7)&lt;/code&gt; now — so a &lt;code&gt;#fff5de&lt;/code&gt; with a 70% opacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the old theme, that looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ezidr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ezidr.png&quot; alt=&quot;old theme interesting-tag highlight-demo&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But under the new theme, it now looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BFsVG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BFsVG.png&quot; alt=&quot;new theme interesting-tag highlight-demo&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The would-be “interesting” question is now virtually&#xA;indistinguishable from the rest of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I observed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11698/2085&quot;&gt;another answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;, you &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; run contrast-analysis tools on your color pairings to know whether they are usable. This one is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;This is a major contrast failure against our default background color, and cannot be seen.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T21:26:17.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-02T04:46:24.503" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to repeat Andrew's recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11703/44619&quot;&gt;observation&lt;/a&gt;, and mention there appears to be other design flaws&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted text on the NEW theme is... &lt;em&gt;yellow&lt;/em&gt;? What shade is that? I wanted to indent the quotation, however, two thick vertical lines appeared and are very conspicuous. Is this deliberate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SbNvn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SbNvn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how it appears on the ORIGINAL theme. The extra lines are horizontal but very faint. The colour of the quoted text is more &lt;em&gt;soothing&lt;/em&gt; to the eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mssv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mssv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T06:39:27.953" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T06:39:27.953" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-02T17:58:56.220" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Our design is too irresponsive&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our measure (line length) is still set far too long to be comfortably read on the desktop site. Short story is that the measure should be set between 40 and 70 ens, with 66 widely considered comfy. Ours seems to be set at 100, which violates all known page layout rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve just posted about this on MSE because it’s a network-wide problem, not just ours alone. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/315025/153355&quot;&gt;this post on MSE&lt;/a&gt; for copious details and examples, including proposed fixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T22:30:46.160" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T22:30:46.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-02T23:16:25.243" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like the new theme. This answer focuses on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;main page&lt;/a&gt;, the primary purpose of which is to display a list of questions. For before-and-after visuals, please refer to screenshots from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11694/142322&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A's answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subjectively: the main page looks like a data listing. It no longer feels inviting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The gratuitous borders around the '&lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;' number and '&lt;em&gt;active|featured|hot|week|month&lt;/em&gt;' draw attention away from the question text-blocks, which should be the highlight of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The font has shrunk. This might be to accommodate the extra nav-column, but I just bought a larger monitor as a concession to my aging eyes. Shrinking the font isn't welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T23:21:31.803" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T23:21:31.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-04T18:53:19.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many things I don't like about it, but there were many things I didn't like about the old one, too. You make do with what you have. At least I try to.  I don't like complaining.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But there is one item of the new theme I'd like to complain about.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe it was there on the old one, too -- I haven't looked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;HOT META POSTS&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; box on the right. I rarely look at either side -- that's where ads appear and I've gotten good at ignoring them on other sites -- but when I do look it's pretty damn silly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T18:53:19.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T20:18:24.693" Score="25" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11693/english-language-usages-updated-site-theme-is-ready-for-testing&quot;&gt;&quot;ELU updated site theme is ready for testing&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been vigorously voted on. It turns out that currently it is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;25 down and 10 upvotes.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;34 down and 13 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a net of -21 votes, it is automatically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; displayed on the Questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This meta-question is simply to make it more visible and easily reachable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also on the 'Featured on Meta' sidebar, which frankly I hardly ever pay attention to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might consider this a feature request to &lt;em&gt;not have negative net votes render a question hidden on Meta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T07:31:28.560" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T07:31:28.560" Title="&quot;ELU updated site theme is ready for testing&quot; is ready for voting, but still not visible" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-04T20:45:15.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could those ornaments which are now like galling cut-off Daisy Dukes with no legs, be extended in some way (hearts, clubs, horseshoes, hand-grenades?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is &lt;em&gt;OK&lt;/em&gt; now, not sure it needs the extra line (it loads slower too, you might want to pack it up with the logo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BEjwW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BEjwW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3122" LastEditorUserId="3122" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T13:07:55.270" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T13:07:55.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-04T23:11:07.823" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Mari-Lou A's comment about the new color of the block quotations being less attractive and less consistent with the background color than the old block quote color. Since the formatting of these quotations is being discussed, I also wanted to bring up an issue that I think existed before the redesign, but that I hope might be able to be fixed now: the indentation per level is too small, making it difficult to see it. (As tchrist♦ said in a comment, the line on the side which might be intended to provide another way of separating the blocks is very low contrast.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see more indentation per level. I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7813/77227&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; earlier on about this, to a question that also received a helpful answer by Andrew Leach♦ suggesting that block quotations have borders on all sides, rather than just on the sides or the top and bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eFJPI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eFJPI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of nested quotes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T23:11:07.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-05T01:55:38.383" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Rows are out of alignment&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers and the words of the middle set are out of line with the other pair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fk1yT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fk1yT.png&quot; alt=&quot;bad old way&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notice how &quot;answers&quot; is on a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;different baseline&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from &quot;votes&quot; and &quot;views&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the first 3 is on a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;different baseline&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from the second 3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the way it is supposed to look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GKnZo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GKnZo.png&quot; alt=&quot;good new way&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notice how &quot;answers&quot; is on the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;same baseline&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as &quot;votes&quot; and &quot;views&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the middle 3 lines up with the 0 to the left and the 3 to the right.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And notice, of course, that the 3 has a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;descender&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the way it is supposed to, &lt;strong&gt;consistent with our site theme&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T19:06:44.543" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T19:06:44.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11719" CreationDate="2018-09-05T09:09:07.813" Score="5" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;You completely misunderstood a question, you no longer have a valid answer to supply, yet your stupid mistake has to hang around for everyone to see FOREVER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of what I see, please excuse the quality of my redacting. See I only have 2,348 rep yet I can see somebody else's deleted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ngb36.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ngb36.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246350" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T21:37:03.497" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T14:59:03.753" Title="Why can't you actually delete your own answer?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11717" CreationDate="2018-09-05T11:36:19.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar question was asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/107986/387405&quot;&gt;on Meta&lt;/a&gt;. The only feasible way to permanently delete it is to have it removed from the database. That cannot be done by regular users or mods here, but you could &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact SE directly&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if they will delete (your) posts just because you ask. You have a better chance if it involves personal information violating your rights or those of someone you represent (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens_en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;under GDPR rules&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this is not so easy is because &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;you don't retain all rights to the content&lt;/a&gt; even if you're the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On IPS SE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since IPS is still in beta, you &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;only need 2k rep to see deleted posts&lt;/a&gt;. That's why you saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T14:59:03.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11717" CreationDate="2018-09-05T22:35:40.557" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think ColleenV's advice (in her comments beneath the posted question) makes perfect sense. In effect, she suggests that you perform these steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Undelete the answer that you don't want to be visible to every person with sufficient reputation who happens to come across the relevant page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the old answer by replacing the original answer with a simple, polite explanation along the lines of, &amp;quot;I was unhappy with my original answer to this question, so I've decided to delete it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Save the edited version of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delete the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this means, you will shield your original answer from anyone who isn't morbidly curious about its previous wording—which is to say, 99% of all passers-by who would otherwise be able to see the original deleted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most disturbing thing to me about your situation is that (you report) &amp;quot;I did that once and the post was edit back and I got told off for 'sabotaging' my own post.&amp;quot; I see no legitimate reason for a moderator or high-reputation site user to make that criticism. Deletion isn't an act of sabotage—it's simply a matter of removing an answer from the discussion associated with a particular question. And editing away an embarrassing answer before deleting it isn't an act of sabotage either—it's just a way to put maximum distance between an ill-conceived answer and prying eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that if you want to bury something you previously wrote, you ought to be able to do so, to the extent described above, without being labeled a saboteur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T00:12:35.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11724" CreationDate="2018-09-06T00:41:40.207" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you go to a high-enough-rep user's Activity page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/191178/laurel?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;here's mine&lt;/a&gt;) and click on the privilege progress bar, you'll see a popup like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lDHY6.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That button should be on the same line as the dark blue stripe but the font seems to be too wide. It displays fine if the user doesn't have much reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EZKg4.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Chrome on Mac. Also, I have not enabled the &quot;updated site theme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T01:35:07.663" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T06:34:35.210" Title="&quot;Learn More&quot; button misplaced in privilege tracker popup" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11722" CreationDate="2018-09-06T06:34:35.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like it's prepared for the new design. The font will change when it's completely rolled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dislike this over-use of Arial. It's not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g96wX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g96wX.png&quot; alt=&quot;New privilege box&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(New theme in Chrome on Windows)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T06:34:35.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-07T07:28:45.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's an Improvement…&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still dislike the general layout, and I feel that EL&amp;amp;U would benefit from a different colour scheme but the logo does look much better now (centred would be best). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you (the graphic team) for listening and fixing the logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now visitors will clearly identify which site they are on. Here is a screenshot set at 110%&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cHXCj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cHXCj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T10:11:17.190" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T10:11:17.190" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-11T11:57:22.447" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;post-signature owner grid&lt;/em&gt; is sometimes too small. I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/451587/71848&quot;&gt;this question for reference&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old theme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJc6t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJc6t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the new theme (notice how the &lt;em&gt;721&lt;/em&gt; is not in line with the bronze dot):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xVzC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xVzC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T11:57:22.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-13T14:23:46.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Sticky Site Banner&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a bug &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but while the programmers are working on the UI, would it be possible to keep the site banner (e.g. &amp;quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&amp;quot;) in the top menu or left menu? Clicking on the banner is a natural way to return to the home page of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the site name scrolls away when scrolling down the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T14:23:46.823" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-13T15:58:03.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there's this (I assume this is a temporary bug, but lol so I had to post it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K7CS8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K7CS8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130346" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T15:58:03.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11730" CreationDate="2018-09-13T22:49:26.900" Score="0" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to upload images. I've tried a few times over the past hour or so, with no luck. I tried uploading an image that I've previously added to an answer with no problem, and tried in both Chrome and Firefox, but no joy. Also tried on another SE (I'm posting here because this is the main site I use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can drag and drop the file to the Imgur window fine, but when I click the &quot;Add picture&quot; button I keep getting the same error (&quot;Failed to upload image; an error occured at imgur&quot;). It even happened when I tried to &quot;provide a link from the web&quot; with the link to an image from an ELU post &lt;em&gt;hosted on Imgur itself&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd post a screenshot of the error message, but...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T23:23:14.137" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T23:23:14.137" Title="Imgur error: &quot;Failed to upload image; an error occured at imgur&quot;" Tags="|bug|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11729" CreationDate="2018-09-13T22:53:53.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I can't reproduce the problem. I'm having no trouble adding a picture. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yEEUS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yEEUS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T22:53:53.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-09-14T17:14:39.683" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ask.metafilter.com/68980/Story-about-why-an-expert-giving-a-simple-fix-to-a-complex-problem-still-deserves-to-be-paid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parable of the mechanic's hammer&lt;/a&gt;? I kinda feel like single word answers are the same sorta thing: it's not how much effort it takes to produce the answer so much as knowing the perfect answer in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt; . . . in the parable, the ship owner can immediately evaluate whether the fix was effective. The story is powerful because even someone with no experience in ship repair can evaluate the difference between a functional engine and an engine that isn't working at all. The mechanic's &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; might be obscure, but not his results. That's not at all true for single word answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, if you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bsingle-word-requests%5D+answers%3A2&quot;&gt;SWRs with 2 or more answers&lt;/a&gt; how do you know which answer is best? Well, if you already have a masterful grasp of English vocabulary, it may be that the best word will lock into place like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But what if you don't know what the words mean? Or what if the perfect word fits because of the way it's been used in literature not everyone has read? Or what if the word is perfect because someone imported it from some other language  where it has that special &lt;em&gt;je ne sais quoi&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the dictionary definition &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; help sometimes, but not always. Adding a definition that doesn't explain why you picked the word is busywork, devalues your answer and doesn't help the asker or future readers. If you picked the word because of some obscure meaning, by all means quote the dictionary. But don't use the dictionary to provide cover for an answer that would otherwise be pure opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Words are powerful&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's always bugged me that the mechanic in the story didn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://jericson.github.io/2015/03/23/customer-support-2.html#1-fix-everything-two-ways&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;look for root causes&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, nearly the same thing happened to me a few years ago. My truck wouldn't start so I called AAA. The tow truck driver asked me about the symptoms so that he could decide whether to jumpstart or tow. After I explained, he went into his toolbox, pulled out a hammer and started banging on my fuel tank. (He also rocked the truck back and forth for good measure, but that breaks the parallelism.) Then I started the engine and he told me to drive to a mechanic's shop right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, the teeth on the plastic gears in the fuel pump had sheared off in one spot. If I got lucky, they would line up properly the next time I shut the engine. But if I got unlucky, I'd need to hope the hammer trick worked again. I might have kept a hammer in the bed of the truck &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; I could just fix the problem. Since the tow truck driver was good at his job, I had the information to make that choice. (I got the pump replaced, if you were wondering.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, handing someone a &lt;strike&gt;hammer&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; might help their immediate problem, but won't solve the deeper question of how meaning is expressed in our wonderful, complex, sometimes-confounding language. If you suggest a Latin phrase and I try to use it in my country western song, it's possible there was something missing in the answer. (It's also possible I have no business being a songwriter, but that's a different story.) Tell me, in general terms, when your word choice is appropriate so I won't get booed off the honky-tonk stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, word choice is subjective. Maybe that's why popular quotations are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so often misquoted&lt;/a&gt;. If the original doesn't quite fit our need, we change it. (Whether knowingly or not is unimportant.) But allow me to (accurately) quote from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;useful treatise on subjective questions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.&lt;/strong&gt; The best subjective questions &lt;em&gt;invite explanation&lt;/em&gt;. If you’re asking for a product recommendation of some kind, you want answers to contain detailed information about the features and how they can be used, and why you might want to choose one over the other. “How?” and “Why?” has more lasting value than a bunch of product-feature bullet points or a giant enumerated list, no matter how extensive. In contrast, the bad subjective questions let answerers get away with hit-and-run answers that maybe provide a name and a link&amp;mdash;but fail to provide any sort of adequate explanation, context, or background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Show your work and encourage others to do the same&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read the title of a SWR, I often think of a word straight from my gut. It just &lt;em&gt;feels right&lt;/em&gt;, you know? I want to quickly type an answer and get the glory that comes from having &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.redd.it/owuf476syvb01.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exactly the right word&lt;/a&gt; for a situation. But then I read some of the answers and see how they argue for their word choice. And as often as not, there are better words than mine and the explanation opens my eyes. Or, there are words that work better in situations I hadn't considered. Other times, the explanation fails to convince me, which is better than no explanation at all. If I were to answer, I'd want to dig a bit more to find out &lt;em&gt;why I like one particular word&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see an answer that doesn't back up its opinion, there are several choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote (or at least don't upvote).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a probing question in the comments: &quot;How did you pick this word?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to delete.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you feel generous, edit the answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, write your own answer explaining why the word fits. (And please don't suggest that reusing &lt;em&gt;a single word&lt;/em&gt; is plagiarism! If you don't want someone to steal your work, back up your answer.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes it's a sign the question itself needs edits or deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-12-25T14:35:51.383" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T14:35:51.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-14T21:31:48.873" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was rather hoping for something along these lines...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ks15g.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ks15g.png&quot; alt=&quot;Suggestion for masthead&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tools I have available aren't professional-level and the font size might be adjusted in line with other sites in the SE family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that the textured border to the masthead is good, and it's a pity it's currently lost because the superfluous box uses it. There's a border to the heading; it's not necessary to add more. An unadorned title can happily sit left-justified as here, or centred if that's what the mobile theme does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't particularly like the new design philosophy (although it's still unstated, there's enough evidence of it around now) I do believe it's important to match it in its simplicity. But it's also hugely important &amp;mdash; and, what's more, possible &amp;mdash; to provide more than a nod to the heritage of the site in the design. I've looked hard online and not found the excellent original font Jin used, which would be preferred, so I've chosen something close in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/chriscostello/letterpress-text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letterpress Text&lt;/a&gt;. I'd &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; some image on the right of the header to match other sites (like Meta.SE, Music, Christianity and Academia, which I can see) but I don't think that text or book pages would physically fit well and still be obvious or legible. Perhaps it's possible to come up with something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T16:42:15.667" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T16:42:15.667" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11636" CreationDate="2018-09-15T15:57:10.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should leave plagiarism, or intimations of plagiarism, out of &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; discussion.  Plaigiarism is something else entirely than writing a dictionary (or other source) definition, &lt;strong&gt;and properly attributing the source&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/144939?redirectedFrom=plagiarism#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; (Emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;plagiarism is: The action or practice of taking someone else's work,&#xA;  idea, etc., &lt;strong&gt;and passing it off as one's own&lt;/strong&gt;; literary theft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism is far, far more serious than writing a poor answer.  I would be livid if even tangentially accused of plagiarism if I had written a &lt;em&gt;copypasta&lt;/em&gt; answer, &lt;strong&gt;with proper attribution&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let's keep in mind that people make mistakes, and inadvertently leave out the attribution. (I did, but remembered it several hours later.) In such cases, point the error out in a polite comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiariam has no place in &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; discussion.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T16:20:04.957" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T16:20:04.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-16T07:35:28.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;C A N   W E   H A V E   T H I S   B A N N E R ?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1B6YO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1B6YO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;P L E A S E ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saved the web­page on my lap­top, and when I opened the file some­thing&#xA;won­drous oc­curred. The thick black lines had dis­ap­peared, and the lo­go&#xA;im­me­di­ate­ly ben­e­fit­ted. Without that tug-of-war pole, the whole lo­go looks&#xA;un­fet­tered, it’s eas­i­er on the eye. Am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More­over, I still dis­like the font used on “All Ques­tions”, it’s jar­ring.&#xA;Why can’t we have the same font used in the ban­ner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2018-11-04T13:55:52.540" LastActivityDate="2018-11-04T13:55:52.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-16T08:58:19.230" Score="14" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;…&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztZI2aLQ9Sw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;absolutely nothin'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, I have nothing against tags per se, they have their use but why does EL&amp;amp;U need that monolithic &quot;Watched Tags&quot; box on the right-hand side? The two boxes take up so much S…P…A…C…E. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what users (will) see on the new theme when it rolls out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vNIYh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vNIYh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we get rid of those chunky binoculars, please? No one on EL&amp;amp;U is a tag watching &lt;em&gt;enthusiast&lt;/em&gt;, this is not Stack Overflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U (and ELL) tags are useful for categorizing but useless for discovering intriguing thought-provoking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe EL&amp;amp;U users select questions according to tags but on Stack Overflow they do. SO users answer questions on the programmes they specialise in. It makes sense that they have a list of ignored tags and can have the option of hiding questions they feel unqualified to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta, the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312180/favorite-tags-is-now-tag-watching&quot;&gt;Watched Tags&lt;/a&gt; has generally received favourable reviews by users who are primarily contributors on &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• I like this. I've had a love/hate relationship with Internet Explorer for about 2 decades... I follow the &quot;#InternetExplorer&quot; related tags to see what crazy things appear and to help out lost souls that venture into IE quirkyness... but &quot;favorite&quot; was always a bit weird... IE is not my favorite.* @scunliffe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• I do not want to be a &quot;Negative Nancy&quot;, but the new tag-&gt;flyouts are hideous. When I scroll down the page with the mousewheel, the tags pop-ups are annoying as heck when you momentarily pause. Next the &quot;Watched Tags&quot; and &quot;Ignored Tags&quot; now take up 5 times the vertical real-estate than the original simple tags widget did. Why do you people think making the page pop-out like neon on the Vegas strip is wanted -- or even a good idea for that matter? We have now lost 2-full questions of space at the top with the latest change there, bigger is not always better. If it's not broken -- don't fix it. @David C. Rankin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• Adblock-Block Element-Poof – @TaW &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• I really like this update. The tag description is easier to read and interact with, the layout is lighter, and makes Watched Tags more understandable in general. @DarkCygnus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about users who are not active in the following communities: Stack Overflow, Code Review, Cross validated, Math Overflow, Mathematics, Server Fault, or Super User?  What about the users in the other &lt;strong&gt;160+ sites that do not exploit or track tags&lt;/strong&gt; in the same way?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, when you do select which tags to &quot;watch&quot; and which to &quot;ignore&quot;, the boxes do not disappear. The white search boxes with the red &quot;add&quot; buttons are eye-catching, so obviously the developers want to encourage users to fill that tank with tags, and then what? Questions containing those tags are highlighted in that barely noticeable yellowy tone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yx9uF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yx9uF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you see which questions are highlighted above? How many users even &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that graphic element even existed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't those tag filters be put to better use on the page that is actually dedicated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; rather than being permanently on display? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an idea, place the &quot;Watched Tags&quot; and the &quot;Ignored Tags&quot; boxes on the right-hand side of the &lt;em&gt;tag page&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would EL&amp;amp;U and ELL users miss the Watched Tags boxes on the main pages?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11532/watched-tags-design-flaw&quot;&gt;Watched tags: design flaw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(the aesthetic problem appears to have been resolved under the new theme.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312180/favorite-tags-is-now-tag-watching&quot;&gt;'Favorite Tags' is now 'Tag Watching'&lt;/a&gt; (SE Meta)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/315597/put-the-right-column-into-the-new-themes-left-column&quot;&gt;Put the right column into the new theme&amp;#39;s left column&lt;/a&gt; (Lawrence's feature request on SE Meta)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T07:55:29.063" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T04:25:19.477" Title="Tags! Huh, what are they good for?" Tags="|discussion|design|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11737" CreationDate="2018-09-17T19:27:31.510" Score="2" ViewCount="2856" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is an open data &quot;verb list&quot; of all (or many) of the English verbs. A search reveals many &quot;Top 100 English Verbs&quot; or &quot;List of Irregular English Verbs&quot; and related content, but I'm looking for a large list of say 10,000+ verbs if possible (just present tense is fine). I doubt there is a &quot;complete&quot; list, but something that collects as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I would like the top 10,000 (or more) verbs in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79672" OwnerDisplayName="Lance Pollard" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T20:50:14.877" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T07:22:49.643" Title="Top 10,000 English Verbs (Open Source List)" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11736" CreationDate="2018-09-17T21:29:05.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/advancedsearch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary Online Advanced Search&lt;/a&gt; allows you to search by part-of-speech; a search for verbs returns 32,366 results. Confining the search to &quot;senses marked as current&quot; (as opposed to &quot;obsolete&quot;) narrows the list to 22,209 results. I imagine that's as complete as you'll get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the OED is subscription-only, and it's fairly expensive. However, many institutions including virtually all public libraries in the UK and most higher-ed libraries in the US provide free access, so it is worth checking to see if you can access it through any library with which you are affiliated. (And if you act fast, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/oed90th/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special subscription rate this year for the OED's 90th anniversary&lt;/a&gt;—good until the end of March, 2019.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T21:29:05.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11739" CreationDate="2018-09-17T23:22:40.293" Score="0" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there are any books (ideally novels of some sort, but poems might be nice instead too) that are explicitly dedicated to demonstrating as many features of English as possible. A typical example of a poem in this similar category is &lt;a href=&quot;http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chaos&lt;/a&gt;, which demonstrates absurdities (basically) in the English language. Wondering if anything like that exists but for features of English, so it uses lots of grammatical structures and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not explicitly dedicated, a book that is rich with complex grammatical structures would be good too, a complex book that is well regarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79672" LastEditorUserId="79672" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T23:27:48.263" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T01:34:18.200" Title="Novel that demonstrates all of English" Tags="|discussion|list-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-09-19T08:47:03.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11738" CreationDate="2018-09-18T01:25:29.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fear that there is no such single work that attempts to, in the course of exposition, touch all the aspects of English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To attempt to interpret your wants as loosely as possible, you'd like any literary work that uses (not mentions) grammatical aspects, somewhat in analogy to the Chaos poem which exposes a number (but not all) of idiosyncrasies of English spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This necessarily would attempt some kind of constrained writing, in the manner of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oulipo&lt;/a&gt;, which is taking some arbitrary composition rule, and writing an entire work that doesn't break the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many examples of such constrained writing, but none that I know of that attempt to run through all grammar rules of English intentionally. Generally those works tend towards either spelling, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'A Void'&lt;/a&gt; which doesn't use the letter 'e' and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Ella Minnow Pea'&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an epistolary novel&lt;/a&gt; which drops letters used one by one in each successive chapter (and this is meaningful to the plot), or to style, like 'Exercices de Style'](&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules seem to be nowhere near grammar. But the lack of an 'e' does eliminate &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; use of '-ed' past tense words, which is a huge grammatical restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are works which are not exactly part of the mostly francophile Oulipo movement but still address grammatical things, though somewhat narrowly. Most literary works are past tense and reported (talking about other characters). But a few works use just the present tense (or some sci-fi works which play with neologistic tenses for speaking about time-travel. And other works play with the second person (all talking &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; the reader &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the reader), or I suppose some works could be considered written in first person (naturally somewhat autobiographical or stream of consciousness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not at all what you were asking but possibly may end up being relevant are works that use a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eyedialect&lt;/a&gt;, that is written in a way that if pronounced out loud gives the accent of a local dialect. Mark Twain's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huckleberry_Finn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Huckleberry Finn'&lt;/a&gt; is famous for writing major characters with distinct local dialects. Then there is Irving Walsh's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainspotting_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trainspotting&lt;/a&gt;, where all dialog is in Scots or Scots English (narration in standard English). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this is not the direction you say you want, but I'm telling you that it is most likely what will get what you want, except not in a single written work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though they are didactic, explicitly intended to teach grammar, the set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schoolhouse Rock&lt;/a&gt; songs that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!#Grammar_Rock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cover grammar and parts of speech&lt;/a&gt; with accompanying short videos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=schoolhouse+rock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schoolhouse Rock!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may well be the closest to what you want. It only covers the subjects minimally in the very outdated/inappropriate latinate seven parts of speech. These are all very entertaining but still at a very elementary level of grammar. For example, it might be nice to have one on phrasal verbs (verbs that come with a preposition which changes the meaning greatly, e.g. call off/call out/call in, put up/put out/put down/put on, etc), or how modals differ (can, will, may, might, would should, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T01:34:18.200" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T01:34:18.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11741" CreationDate="2018-09-18T03:48:19.960" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched the convention tag, but the top google &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=convention+tag+english+stack+exchange&amp;amp;client=ms-opera-mini&amp;amp;channel=new&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search result&lt;/a&gt; says, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;the convention tag has no usage guidance.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea which sense does this tag relate to. When should I use this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295228" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T04:20:53.863" Title="When should I use &quot;convention tag&quot; in EL&amp;U?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11740" CreationDate="2018-09-18T04:20:53.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; tag has no usage guidance&quot; means that the tag has no tag wiki/excerpt. You can see the full wiki by clicking on a tag, then clicking on &quot;Learn more...&quot;, which in your case should take you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/convention/info&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like this tag is used on questions that have next to nothing in common. &quot;The way things are done&quot; isn't a particularly descriptive category. In other words, it doesn't look like a good tag, so my advice is to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use it. In fact, it could probably be burninated, if enough people care to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T04:20:53.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-19T02:40:53.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also, this has bugged me forever, but can we have a link from a Meta question to the main site home? Clicking on the banner doesn't do it, and right now it's buried under the top-right hamburger menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130346" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T02:40:53.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-19T07:08:30.413" Score="-1" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/464804/when-did-a-buck-start-being-used-to-mean-a-unit-of-100-e-g-a-buck-fifty-f/464807#464807&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has attracted a fair amount of comments with anecdotal personal evidence about if and when the expression in question was originally used.&#xA;There is even an answer based on such personal evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand  that statements  such as the following  may sound entertaining:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'm sure that I heard that expression in the '70s, or in the '80s....sorry, my wife says it was in the '90s....so it must be the '90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I guess it was in Dallas where I first heard it used, or..wait..no, it was San Francisco, sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but, if questions and answers are meant to be  useful for present and future users, I think that  considerations based on nothing else than  personal memories&#xA;should be avoided and possibly removed,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and while it is true that dictionaries tend to give dates about first usages which are later than actually spoken usages for obvious reasons, I think that the two quoted dictionaries are reliable and the dates that they suggest are to be taken seriously, unless written evidence that proves them wrong is produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T20:04:19.493" Title="Supported reliable refererence vs unsupported anecdotal evidence" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2018-09-19T07:53:28.280" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really see a problem here, and so I'm confused about your goal with this Meta question. It seems that you find these comments annoying, but you aren't obligated to respond to them, and I don't see how they do any real harm. In fact, I think that they contain some valuable information, although that's just my viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both citations and personal experience can be valid sources of information. The citations in your answer are not rendered worthless by the comments based on personal experience that suggest that the expression was in use earlier. The comments just add some additional information that readers are free to evaluate for themselves. You answer hasn't been downvoted by anyone, which to me seems to indicate that the users who left the comments don't think that your answer is useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the comments would have to be done by a moderator (or by multiple flags being raised). If you want that to happen, I think your most effective course of action would be to raise a flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T20:04:19.493" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T20:04:19.493" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2018-09-19T13:43:29.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are the downvotes against my answers fair?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, seeing as you asked... in the cases you cite, I think &lt;em&gt;yes, they are&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461040/sardony-sarcasm-irony-satire-or-what/461122#461122&quot;&gt;Sardony sarcasm, irony, satire, or what&lt;/a&gt; The question is unclear to me, which doesn't help, but I'm fairly sure that whatever the OP was asking, your response of &quot;non sequitur&quot; doesn't answer it. Yes, the sentence is a non-sequitur, but a non-sequitur has nothing to do with sardony, sarcasm, irony or satire. And yes, the other answer is pretty much as bad as yours.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460922/a-word-to-describe-things-that-reduce-control/460942#460942&quot;&gt;A word to describe things that reduce control&lt;/a&gt; I don't find your answer fits very well, at all. As a native speaker of British English, I can't reconcile the noun &quot;difficulty&quot; with something deliberately engineered to give a challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460924/informal-and-maybe-even-childish-word-for-warranted/460943#460943&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460924/informal-and-maybe-even-childish-word-for-warranted/460943#460943&lt;/a&gt; In this case, no, it didn't deserve a downvote; it seems like a reasonable answer to me. There might be better words (I'd have used the verb &quot;to deserve&quot; myself), but it was ok.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, if I was going to give you those downvotes I'd explain why in a comment. As you can see from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11661/91730&quot;&gt;Jason's answer&lt;/a&gt;, I'm a fan of doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the serial downvoting, I think other answers here have already covered that sufficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T13:43:29.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2018-09-19T15:07:18.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment feature exists to help the community collaborate with the writer to improve the post by attaching:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clarifying questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;constructive suggestions and offers of relevant information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;constructive explanations of actions taken – votes, edits, flags, etc. – when the actions might not be understood without an explanation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Summarized from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments you describe are offers of relevant information. For now they should be left in place, to give the people involved a chance to reflect and decide what to do with the information. Later on, comments which will not be useful to future viewers can be deleted (or flagged for deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T15:07:18.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2018-09-19T20:52:16.427" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anecdotal evidence like in your question should not be posted in comments. Some reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cannot be independently verified by other users or visitors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users cannot downvote the comments to express disagreement or other issues. Therefore, bad anecdotes remain on the site and are prone to mislead visitors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anecdotes lower the site's quality. For ELU to be successful it needs reliable information. If visitors need to double check everything it's no better than any other website out there.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T20:52:16.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2018-09-20T04:32:55.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue that comments like these are not against the rules because they're &quot;suggestions for improvement&quot;, but I think that would be missing the point. (An answer only supported by anecdotal evidence such as this would be a different story, but I don't see that being a problem here, since the only anecdotal answer, the one that gives an &quot;answer&quot; of &quot;I never heard this&quot;, is heavily downvoted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments like these shouldn't be deleted until they are made obsolete (e.g. if someone someone verifies it with evidence in an answer). I'm aware of all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6534/42375&quot;&gt;relevant reasons we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; keep comments like these&lt;/a&gt; (due to the way the Q&amp;amp;A system works or is supposed to work), but I think I'd rather keep them to help in the name of etymological research*. Plus, there's nothing particularly dangerous about these comments (unlike at a site such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1697/8354&quot;&gt;Interpersonal Skills&lt;/a&gt;). Nor is it always easy enough to find an answer with sources to back up these comments. And how much stock is put in a comment like this that has &quot;memory&quot; as a source is up to each individual. In any case, it's very unlikely that we'd get any troll comments, since it requires 50 rep to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* There's one compelling reason why I feel these comments help etymological research instead of hurting it: OED Appeals. Many Appeals are posted because anecdotal evidence suggests the date of first occurrence is earlier than what editors have been able to find. (For examples where they say this see &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/appeals/bromance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/appeals/parmo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T04:32:55.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2018-09-20T08:32:38.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pieces of &lt;em&gt;unsupported anecdotal evidence&lt;/em&gt; were not posted to criticise the OP's answer. They were testimonies from American English speakers who expressed incredulity about the dates supplied, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; by the OP&lt;/strong&gt;, but by the references cited by them in their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some other comments (some have since been deleted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly decades older than this. I recall hearing it as a child, long before the 1990s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@(X) I agree. I'm pretty sure I learned heard it growing up in the 60's and 70's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think that considerations based on nothing else than personal memories should be avoided and possibly removed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If competent native speakers and experienced contributors to the site cannot freely express their doubts about the validity of some posted references, in a perfectly civil manner, because their comments might get flagged then we really are taking CoC (code of Conduct) to its absurd limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T08:32:38.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T10:44:32.647" Score="5" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a regular palaver on Meta about the declining quality of questions, the endless flood of questions by English language learners, the proliferation of poorly evidenced SWR answers. Like many others, I miss the &quot;old days&quot; when there was a greater proportion of questions that probed the wonders and conundrums of our unique language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What a delight then, to find a genuinely interesting and challenging question - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/464442&quot;&gt;Verbs after 'as well as'&lt;/a&gt; - with a good range of answers (declaration: mine is one of them), some degree of agreement that none of us quite know what the right answer is, and even an open bounty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why has it only received three upvotes (and even a downvote!)? Where have the language lovers gone? Do we really, secretly, prefer to whinge than to upvote? Is there no grammarist or other specialist to come to our rescue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not after votes for my own answer; maybe it's not the right answer anyway. But this is a bit of a bump for a question that I truly think deserves more attention and greater recognition. So perhaps, as a meta question, I'm also asking whether the lack of votes indicates that that kind of &quot;advanced question&quot; is genuinely unpopular on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T01:17:12.153" Title="Have the purists all gone on holiday?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:55:05.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While anecdotal evidence is the least reliable, it's not worthless, especially when it comes to language and history. Where do you think some of the stuff that gets written down comes from if not from people recalling and sharing things they've experienced? We all know slang was in use long before a lexicographer thought to create an entry for it, although now that so many of us have access to the Internet, we should be able to do more accurate tracking of the origin and spread of slang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, the people posting those comments could have a faulty or vague memory, but as long as it's obvious it's anecdotal and less reliable, it's not harmful. What's wrong with knowing that there may be some significant differences in the first date that we can validate a usage and when it was actually being used in spoken English? We might not be able to say &quot;it was in use in 1968&quot;, but we can say it may have been in use at least 20 years before it got recorded in the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was in school, one of our history projects was to interview our family members and record their recollections about our family's history, then see what we could corroborate with other sources. Hard data is important, but anecdotes can help us discover facts so they can be verified, and help us put them into context, which helps us remember them. Anecdotes may not be suitable support for answers, but as comments I think they can be worthwhile additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T16:42:18.390" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:42:18.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-25T05:56:28.853" Score="2" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need links to some websites containing the comprehensive list of English language grammar rules, all possible sentence and question structures, etc. for research purpose. &#xA;Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="317396" OwnerDisplayName="Kshitiz " LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T19:16:20.327" Title="Where can I find a comprehensive list of English grammar rules, sentence and question structures?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11753" CreationDate="2018-09-25T07:24:20.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There will never be a complete list of grammar rules. Even the &lt;em&gt;Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (Quirk, et al.), which weighs in at over 1700 pages, does not contain all the 'rules' that are intuitively known by an adult native speaker. Nevertheless, one book that does claim to meet your needs is &lt;em&gt;Complete English Grammar Rules: Examples, Exceptions, Exercises, and Everything You Need to Master Proper Grammar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is different for possible sentence structures. There is a limited set of structures that are considered grammatical in English. So, for example, SVO (subject-verb-object) is grammatical but OVS is not. The following page on the &lt;em&gt;Grammar in English&lt;/em&gt; site lists and gives numerous examples of the 5 basic sentence patterns in English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammarinenglish.com/sentencepattern/?lesson=examples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.grammarinenglish.com/sentencepattern/?lesson=examples&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" OwnerDisplayName="Shoe" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T07:24:20.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11750" CreationDate="2018-09-27T01:17:12.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I should provide an update, but it seems more appropriate to post it as an answer rather than as an edit to the original question. My apologies if this is not the preferred practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;Have the purists all gone on holiday?&quot; was deliberately provocative and ironic, but while it did note the long-standing debate about our site's proclivities, the core intention was &lt;em&gt;to raise the profile of an under-appreciated question.&lt;/em&gt; The comments on my meta post were constructive, and an edit to the title of the [prescriptive-grammar] question resulted in a substantial surge in views/votes/comments. Those comments appear to have stimulated the asker and several of the answerers to further refine their posts, creating a virtuous cycle of repeated bumping and additional views/engagement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm delighted to report that the [prescriptive-grammar] question eventually achieved a significant response. Here are some stats on that question, as of 27 Sept 2018:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Total views: 366&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Votes on question: 23 total (19 up, 4 down, net +15) [previously    +3/-1 = +2]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Answers: 6 [previously 4]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Votes on answers: 40 total (24 up, 16 down)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Comments: 44 total&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Votes on comments: 45 total&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gives an overall total of 158 separate contributions (answers, comments, votes), not counting all the edits to both question and answers. My assessment: while it took a bit of nudging, the question eventually achieved a substantial response from the EL&amp;amp;U community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to report that the prescriptive-grammar question has now been resolved, but unfortunately I don't think that's the case. As John Lawler &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11750/have-the-purists-all-gone-on-holiday?noredirect=1#comment50240_11750&quot;&gt;notes in his comment&lt;/a&gt;, the question itself is confusing, and involves &quot;incorrect presuppositions&quot;; to make matters worse, the OP edited in new elements in an attempt to clarify the issue but which only complicated the issue further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I have a dilemma.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the core question - does the conjunction &quot;as well as&quot; require a gerund-participial in the subordinate clause - has not been resolved. Generalist grammar sources simplistically say &quot;the second verb takes the &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; form&quot;, and this appears to be support in CGEL, but opposed by Fowler. But the original question brings in other elements that result in other examples &lt;em&gt;which don't involve subordinate clauses&lt;/em&gt; being discussed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there's the matter of &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; and whether there might be regional variation. I'm interested in whether the MW example - which sounds wrong to my Australian ears - is standard American usage, and whether British English prefers the gerund-participial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would appreciate your thoughts on whether a new EL&amp;amp;U question, strictly focusing on the &quot;core&quot; question above (but linking to the previous question and referencing the relevant points in it), would be&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(a) regarded as a duplicate of the previous question, and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(b) too broad if it also asked about variation in regional usage?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T01:17:12.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11735" CreationDate="2018-09-27T04:25:19.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too long to post as a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11735/tags-huh-what-are-they-good-for#comment50171_11735&quot;&gt;MariLou's comment&lt;/a&gt;. I was intrigued by the statement &quot;297 watchers of SWR tag is a pitiful number, it just proves my point that tags on this and on ELL's site has a limited use&quot;, and I thought some further (very basic) research on the top tags at a selection of SE sites might be instructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first number is the number of &lt;em&gt;watchers&lt;/em&gt; for that tag. To be able to compare between different sites, the number after the tag name is the number of &lt;em&gt;watchers per 10,000 users&lt;/em&gt; (from the &quot;total users&quot; given in the reputation leagues page)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt; (228,904 users)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;301 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; = 13.1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;241 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; = 10.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;199 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; = 8.7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;199 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; = 8.7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; (213,441 users)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;195&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; = 9.1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;174&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; = 8.2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;132 &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; = 6.2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;120&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stackoverflow&quot;&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt; = 5.6&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt; (146,750 users)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;694 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; = 47.3  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;492&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-field-theory&quot;&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/a&gt; = 33.5  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;390&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt; = 26.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;307&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt; = 20.9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/strong&gt; (63,613 users)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;77 &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; = 12.1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;45&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt; = 7.1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;41 &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; = 6.4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;37&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; = 5.8&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this limited selection, it seems that the proportion of users watching tags is roughly similar on ELU, ELL and Meta SE, but all three sites have less than a third of the tag-watching activity of Physics SE. My suspicion is that other &quot;specialist&quot; sites would have high levels of tag-watching as well. [Yes, sadly I'm consigning EL&amp;amp;U to the &quot;generalist&quot; category. It would be interesting to compare EL&amp;amp;U with Linguistics SE...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T04:25:19.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-28T15:45:52.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constructive suggestion: &lt;strong&gt;consider removing the boxy outlines&lt;/strong&gt;. They are drawing attention away from the important content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing UI:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5425B.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5425B.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Existing UI&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UI under test:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IfbSe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IfbSe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;UI under test&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T21:18:44.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T21:18:44.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-09-28T20:36:49.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badge tracking on profile page looks wrong (when completed). The &lt;em&gt;track the next one&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;let us pick&lt;/em&gt; buttons (and their bounding box) appear too low and interfere with the tabs.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/si2nB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/si2nB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta it looks fine (but that could be because I haven't completed the badge task):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYBpp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYBpp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T20:36:49.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11736" CreationDate="2018-09-30T07:22:49.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moby Project&lt;/a&gt;'s Part of Speech file is in the public domain, and you should not have any copyright concerns as a result (not technically &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/node/878&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt;, but you can &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171108211141/http://icon.shef.ac.uk:80/Moby/mpos.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[u]se, sell, rework, excerpt and use in any way on any platform&lt;/a&gt;&quot;). Instructions for the list can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3203/pg3203-images.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The list of words with parts of speech can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3203/files/mobypos.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and you will need to parse the list to get all the verbs, but that should be easy for anyone with any programming experience. Here's a regex that should work: &lt;code&gt;^([^\\]+\\[\S]*)[tVi]&lt;/code&gt;. You will need to use the &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;lobal and &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt;ultiline regex flags for it to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T07:22:49.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-30T19:21:31.713" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this site a forum and if it is can anyone tell me this sites sponsors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="318265" OwnerDisplayName="Axel" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T20:36:27.970" Title="Is this site a forum? And if it is Can anyone tell me its Sponsor or sponsors?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11761" CreationDate="2018-09-30T20:36:27.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of how this site makes money was already answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11217/191178&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; by me. In summary: English Language and Usage doesn't make money but it is instead supported by the sites elsewhere in the network that have ads, plus some things that are Stack Overflow specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this site counts as a forum depends on how you look at it. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/01/24/adventures-in-delclusionism/&quot;&gt;original idea&lt;/a&gt; for Stack Overflow (which is the oldest site in the Stack Exchange network of sites and shares the same format as this site) was that it is a hybrid of several things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CwbIqb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Quad Venn diagram of Wiki, Digg/Reddit, Forum, Blog&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big difference I see between this site and a forum is moderation. Questions must be on-topic and answers need to answer the question. There are even rules for comments. Users who gain enough reputation earn &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; which (among other things) enable them to moderate the site by doing things such as upvoting, downvoting, flagging, voting to (un)delete, voting to close/reopen, etc. There are also some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderators elected by the community&lt;/a&gt; (usually referred to as &quot;diamond moderators&quot; because they have a diamond next to their name) that have powers above and beyond what regular users get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, just look at this question. Questions about the site don't belong on the main site, so a diamond moderator moved your question to the meta site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions about what I said, feel free to ask in the comments below this answer. Also, you may want to check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt;, which explains the basics of how the site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T20:36:27.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-01T12:42:12.243" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have subscribed to Merriam Webster, dictionary.com, and a few other online dictionaries to send me words daily, but frankly, they send me vocabulary that I have never come across in my life and never seen in any book or article. Practicing these words is fun, but I've realized it's undermined my ability to talk in a simple fashion that everyone can understand. Is there a service that sends the most common advanced or intermediate vocabulary daily?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241330" OwnerDisplayName="hossein" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T18:21:35.013" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T18:21:35.013" Title="A service that delivers common vocabulary daily?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-03T18:27:01.493" Score="1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/466677/when-did-optics-begin-to-mean-appearance-or-perception?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; about the early usage of optics meaning  “point of view” has been improperly merged into an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80574/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-optics-thats-prevalently-used-now-in-politics&quot;&gt;older similar question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please restore the new original question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T19:53:09.310" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T19:53:09.310" Title="Improper merger" Tags="|support|specific-question|merged-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9602" CreationDate="2018-10-04T07:24:41.700" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What is plagiarism?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;: I do not consider my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/466077/origin-meaning-and-derivation-of-boof-as-a-verb-in-u-s-slang&quot;&gt;Origin, meaning, and derivation of &amp;#39;boof&amp;#39; as a verb in U.S. slang&lt;/a&gt; to be an example of plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't plagiarism on the first draft because I clearly stated who the author of the Vox article was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How Do I avoid it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;: I believe I did everything by the book &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the opening introduction,  I wrote (unedited)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could have summarised the article below but it's late and I would have made a poor job out of it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Vox article, written by Alex Abad-Santos, briefly outlines the history of boof:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I formatted the excerpt correctly, using block quotes, to show that I was not the author and the answer was not &quot;mine&quot;. I did everything to attribute the article correctly and unequivocally, I posted the links to several sources that were cited and I even supplied the date of the Vox article, which I considered highly relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two days ago (October 2 2018, 15.56)   I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/466091/3&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; and posted a reference to a famous cult movie and posted a link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The civil exchange between @Knowtell and myself was then completely deleted, presumably, by someone in the mod team. I myself had flagged four comments for deletion–in the meantime, two other users had intervened–but I did not flag Knowtell's two comments nor my replies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I address it when I see it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;: Leave a comment informing the user she or he has violated the guidelines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have since added several other references but this did not deter the user who repeated her accusation a second time (October 3, 05.43) and posted another link referencing MetaEd♦'s position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This answer violates this meta-post about how users should post their own answers, not copy and paste them from other sites: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10193/is-it-acceptable-to-paste-a-quora-answer-here/10198#10198&quot;&gt;Is it acceptable to paste a Quora answer here?&lt;/a&gt; – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/466077/origin-meaning-and-derivation-of-boof-as-a-verb-in-u-s-slang/466091#comment1126301_466091&quot;&gt;@Knowtell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second link is his answer to her meta question. Which I'll quote almost in its entirety. [Emphasis not mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange plagiarism meta-question explains that your answer should be your own work, not someone else’s. &lt;strong&gt;“A post that consists only of copied text is not your work.”&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot; title=&quot;“Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?” at meta.StackExchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; So, when writing an answer, it should be your own expert answer. Do not post answers from elsewhere on the Internet.– MetaEd♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will now quote the opening introduction of the Stack Exchange Meta answer which  MetaEd♦ linked to. Did you miss it? Look again.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[Formatting not my own]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;What exactly is plagiarism?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the context of Stack Exchange sites, &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; copying and pasting of any amount of text or code that wasn't written by you is plagiarism if you try, explicitly or implicitly, to pass it off as your own work. For a more detailed definition, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to post on Meta and personally ask the community of Stack Exchange whether they consider my answer, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the recent additions and edits, to be an example of plagiarism. If the general consensus or any one of the mod team agree, then I will immediately delete my answer because neither the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/466091/1&quot;&gt;first draft&lt;/a&gt; nor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/466091/3&quot;&gt;second&lt;/a&gt; are examples of plagiarism and I will not modify them out of sheer principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T17:17:13.193" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T17:17:13.193" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-06T18:27:48.330" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posting here because I don't have a profile in the right state to repro on other sites, but if it can be confirmed to be elsewhere please migrate to MSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;track the next one&quot; bar after earning a tracked badge overlaps the tab bar below it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ShV6P.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ShV6P.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the issue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14499" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T18:27:48.330" Title="Graphical issue on the activity profile page" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-07T09:07:28.520" Score="4" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question below seems to be very simple at first glance and swifty got closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/467058/are-articles-pronouns&quot;&gt;Are articles pronouns?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answer is not as clear as it seems at first glance. For those of us well versed in twentieth century grammar, it seems clear that the word &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is a different kind of word from the word &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, things are not so clear cut upon close observation. The Original Poster compares the words &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt;. Not many people will argue with the fact that &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; seem to be the same type of word in examples like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I couldn't find any books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I couldn't find a book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here most people would agree that &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; are both determinatives. However, we also need to consider examples such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I couldn't find any books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I couldn't find any&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many writers, the word &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; in the examples above is the same word. The choice that most of these writers make is that it is a determinative in each case. However, this is just based on an extremely short period of historical fashion. It is not unreasonable, to argue that the word &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; there is the same kind of word as the word &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I couldn't find any.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I couldn't find them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the examples above &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; is indefinite, and &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; definite. However, they appear to be doing exactly the same kind of job, and would be analysed by many as being the same type of word. And if this is true, and the word &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; is the same kind of word in both the examples above, and the word &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; is the same kind of word as the word &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in the original two examples, then it would follow that the words &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;  are the same kind of word. And according to the literature this is what is argued by several modern scholars and was originally thought by a few writers such as Ben Johnson, before finicky twentieth century writers came along and invented the term &lt;em&gt;determinative&lt;/em&gt; (some writers use the term &lt;em&gt;determiner&lt;/em&gt; instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this question is not unworthy of an English linguistics site such as ours. Let's resurrect it. It needs your reopen votes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T16:11:41.247" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T16:11:41.247" Title="Determiner question" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T04:03:51.880" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I came to know that there are 336 prepositions in English via reading an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.oup.com/2007/08/prepositions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OUP blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... . And now the lowly preposition is finally getting the attention it deserves with The Preposition Project (TPP), a monumental undertaking that systematically describes 673 distinct senses for &lt;strong&gt;334 prepositions&lt;/strong&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried my best to find over 330 prepostions in English, but could find a PDF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pdfdrive.com/english-preposition-list-e32281720.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; (written by Josef Essberger) that just provides 150+ prepositions, from which 40% are phrasal prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any book which can provide over 300 single-worded prepositions? I am from &lt;strong&gt;Pakistan&lt;/strong&gt;, and I hope that those books would be available on major cities like &lt;strong&gt;Karachi&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Islamabad&lt;/strong&gt;. If it's not feasible, what PDF documents are there to fit this need? Can you yourself provide over 300 prepositions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295228" LastEditorUserId="295228" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T04:10:53.837" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T01:26:37.363" Title="Any book or PDF for over 300 single-worded prepositions" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T16:43:55.143" Score="13" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Retreading old ground&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been batted around several times before on Meta, but I think it's worthy of a periodic refresher. With that in mind, it would be counterproductive to duplicate-close this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, concretely, and with reasonably immediate results, can the long-time or regular users (and mods, in their dual capacity as users) do to &lt;strong&gt;attract new interesting questions from new or less-regular users&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In search of novelty&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to emphasize &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;.  We get plenty of new questions every day; on that score EL&amp;amp;U is among the most productive non-trilogy sites in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the most part, the kinds of questions we see are workaday questions from (mostly) non-fluent users of English who are trying to solve small, practical problems. And, for the most part, looking at it from a more abstract lens (which regulars, perforce, do), most of them are repeats, falling into a handful of higher-level patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we regulars, having seen so many of these, tend to find them terribly dull, and not only not engaging, but to a good extent off-putting&amp;sup1;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Navigating the woods&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are enough questions about reducing or redirecting this stream, though, with no clear solution in sight, so instead I'd like to focus this question on improving the ratio of novel-interesting-questions : banal-questions by raising the numerator, rather than lowering the denominator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'd like to focus on concrete, relatively immediate suggestions.  Given that this has not organically occured, it suggests there's a investment of our own time and effort in order to reap the benefits of a more engaging and less disheartening experience on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Drawing a treasure map&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what can we do?  Ideally, I'd like to see answers in the form of suggesting and elaborating a single idea (one idea per answer), along with the commitments we (the regular users) would have to make to realize this benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask new and interesting questions ourselves (like Mari-Lou and Josh [sorry I forget your new numeric ID] make an effort to do)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this scalable? Seems to me we need consistent infusion of fresh voices with novel, interesting questions to sustain the flow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reach out to groups with similar interests (e.g. the communities around LanguageLog, etc) and market EL&amp;amp;U a bit (organically, so people are attracted over the long term)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relax rule X or constraint Y (e.g. permit and encourage questions of new usages, slang, or jargon which haven't been firmly established in reference works yet, in full knowledge this will make it more difficult to substantiate answers).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.  I'm open to anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the objective is to collect concrete ideas for which there will be a relatively immediate return in the proportion of &lt;strong&gt;novel, interesting questions&lt;/strong&gt; asked by newcomers, given a specific, documented investment by the regular-user community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Self-empowerment&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This section was added after the fact, inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11774/55623&quot;&gt;Sven's first suggestion&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11776/55623&quot;&gt;Lawrence's recent suggestion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had a couple of suggestions for &lt;em&gt;improvements to the site&lt;/em&gt; which could -- almost certainly would -- improve the number of novel, interesting questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are good ideas, and I endorse them, and I've upvoted them. But I would like to ask future answerers to keep the focus on &quot;self-actualization&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;i.e. changes within the power of the community&lt;/strong&gt; (and the mods, sans diamond hats) &lt;strong&gt;to effect ourselves&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this because SE has a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19514/273503&quot;&gt;standard 6-8 week waiting period&lt;/a&gt;&quot; to implement new features, which in practice results in an effective delay of between 6-8 &lt;em&gt;months&lt;/em&gt; and eternity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, they are currently focused on other projects (which are &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;covered on the big Meta&lt;/a&gt;), so I'm even less hopeful such feature requests will get priority over the next couple of quarters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think it would be most helpful for &lt;strong&gt;answers to focus on change we can make ourselves&lt;/strong&gt;, and in particular change that requires some sacrifice on our behalf, because it's my firm belief that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Quotations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you get what you pay for&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;Meaning this question, of course, is asked in a terribly self-interested spirit.  I love EL&amp;amp;U and I've loved participating here. But my participation falls off week by week, inexorably.  I don't want that to happen; I've extracted so much joy and learning from this site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;But the gamification system (rep and badges and votes) has failed to motivate me since, I don't know, 2K?  And where once I saw every new question with fresh eyes, found some element to pique my interest (remember when you'd see a comment from @DanBron at the top of almost every question chain?), that has long since faded too. I'm as jaded as the next 25K user. I've seen it all, and all I can taste is dust.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T16:35:58.970" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T22:05:43.217" Title="Attracting new and interesting questions in 2018" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2018-10-08T22:35:48.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One idea I've had for a while (but never got around to posting, as far as I remember) is that we should hold a periodic contest. Lots of other sites have contests like this, although the rules vary from site to site. Some sites even hold multiple separate contests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contests like these usually only require a small amount of rep to participate (depending on the format 5 rep is usually the minimum and 125 is nice to have), although it seems pretty unlikely any new users would participate anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what exactly the best format for a contest would be. Here are some things to think about though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would we be asking questions around a topic? A topic could be anything ranging from prepositions (tag based) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bullokar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bullokar&lt;/a&gt;'s grammar books. This would mean we would have a featured meta question asking us to vote on topics before the actual contest runs. For non tag based topics, it also means that people need to keep a list of the questions that were posted about that topic, unless we decide to make a tag specifically for the contest. In any case, I like the idea of topics because I'd like to see more questions on subjects I like. Also, I'm interested to see what interesting things others can think of for topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would we decide winners based on different categories? What I mean specifically is that it might be nice to have categories such as &quot;best question asked by a new user&quot; (Depending on how many people participate, this may not be practical to do every time.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would we decide who wins? Some sites use a hard metric like number of votes on main and others post candidates on meta and the winner is the one who gets the most upvotes on meta. Or would the goal just be to all participate together? Winning wouldn't mean much, although validation is nice to have. Some sites have answer contests where the reward is a bounty, but this makes less sense when we're looking at questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How often would we hold the contest? And how long would we be collecting submissions for it? Some contests happen only in January and look at everything that was posted in the past year, although I personally think this is much too long a time frame for this purpose. We don't have to always have a contest active either. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would we want to look at anything other than questions? The obvious other thing to include would be answers, but it might be interesting to look at the more invisible forms of participation, such as edits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the first question to answer is: &lt;strong&gt;Would the community participate?&lt;/strong&gt; If the answer is no, this isn't something we should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some links to contests that were held on other sites for ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3376/183281&quot;&gt;Ask Different&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7206/104611&quot;&gt;Code Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literature (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1086&quot;&gt;Topic Challenge&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1084&quot;&gt;Best Q &amp;amp; A&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4784&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9423&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programming Puzzles and Code Golf (&lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14737/66025&quot;&gt;Language of the Month&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14511/66025&quot;&gt;Best of PPCG (yearly)&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6478/25084&quot;&gt;Puzzling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not a comprehensive list by any measure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T22:35:48.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2018-10-08T23:15:14.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should be more careful about labeling a question a duplicate.  I don't have statistics, or even examples, but my impression is that a significant number of Qs labeled as duplicates vary enough from the &quot;original&quot; that they may bring forth worthwhile answers, and/or the answers to the &quot;original&quot; are not very good.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a Q is labeled a duplicate, that is usually the end of it.  And there is the follow the leader syndrome, where once one person says duplicate, four more say &quot;Yep, duplicate&quot; possibly after agonizing analysis, but, I suspect without enough thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to do:&lt;/strong&gt;  Pledge to ourselves to read the original and the accused duplicate and its answers skeptically, and write a cogent &quot;no its not a duplicate&quot; on the proposed duplicate, unless it is.  And vote to reopen, with comment, if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I wish I could give good examples, but I often think that people who vote duplicate are missing important nuances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T23:15:14.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11769" CreationDate="2018-10-09T01:26:37.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I haven't tried it myself, it looks like you can download the list of prepositions that your link is talking about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.clres.com/db/registration.php?download=tpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; by filling out your name, email, etc. I'm not convinced that the list only contains prepositions because I searched their page &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.clres.com/cgi-bin/onlineTPP/find_prep.cgi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; and got a lot of phrases such as &quot;by the name of&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't work, then you could try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searching &lt;a href=&quot;http://dante.skxmlbox.idm.fr/dante/search/Result.html?queryId=65830914&amp;amp;queryDescription=Advanced%20search%3A%20preposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dante&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Moby Project's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3203/files/mobypos.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt;. Following the method I outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11760/191178&quot;&gt;a previous answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;, that ends up being these 162 words/phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a la,abaft,aboard,aboon,about,above,across,adown,aff,afore,after,against,alongside,along,amidst,amid,amongst,among,anear,anenst,anent,around,aslant,astraddle,astride,as,athwart,atop,atween,at,a,barring,bar,bating,before,behind,below,beneath,ben,besides,beside,between,betwixt,beyond,but,by,chez,circa,concerning,considering,contra,cum,d',despite,des,de,di,down,during,ere,excepting,except,ex,failing,fer,forby,fore,fornenst,fornent,forth,for,frae,from,inby,inside,into,in,lacking,less,like,malgré,maugre,midst,mid,minus,natheless,near-hand,near,neath,next,nigh,notwithstanding,o' ,o'er,o',off,of,onto,on,opposite,opuscule,outshout,outside,outwith,out,over,pace,past,pending,per,plus,pro,qua,reference,regarding,respecting,re,roundabout,round,sans,save,saving,secundum,senza,since,sine,sith,sur,syne,tae,than,thro',throughout,through,thro,thru,thwart,till,touching,towards,toward,to,underneath,under,unless,unlike,until,unto,up-and-down,upon,up,versus,via,vice,visard,wantage,wanting,while,withal,within,without,with&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The OED's advanced search, assuming you have a subscription or are willing to pay for one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T01:26:37.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2018-10-09T02:26:35.503" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As most Meta readers know, an EL&amp;amp;U site participant who earns a gold badge in a particular tag category gains the ability to unilaterally close duplicate questions (the &quot;golden hammer&quot;). But this is essentially a negative capability. I would like to see English Language &amp;amp; Usage introduce a complementary positive capability: a &quot;golden shield&quot; to protect good questions from closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I propose: High-rep users—people who have a gold badge in a given tag category or who have a threshold number of reputation points overall plus a silver badge in a particular tag category—should have the ability to protect from closure any question in one of their gold or silver tag areas that they consider good and interesting, regardless of whether the question &quot;shows research&quot; and regardless of whether it may look like a duplicate or seem primarily opinion-based to reviewers who have far less reputation or demonstrated interest in the tag area involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, 78 EL&amp;amp;U site users have 20,000 or more reputation points, 45 have 30,000 or more, 31 have 40,000 or more, and 21 have 50,000 or more. On the tags side, site participants have received 32 gold badges (19 of them for single-word requests) and 218 silver badges (78 of them for single-word requests). At some point, it seems to me, we ought to be able to trust the judgment of such users when they say that a question is interesting and answer-worthy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the &quot;pronunciation&quot; tag: Today, four site participants—tchrist, Peter Shor, sumelic, and Araucaria—have a silver badge for this tag (no one has a gold badge yet); all four also have at least 30,000 reputation points on this site. I would completely trust the judgment of any of those four people if they said that a question tagged as &quot;pronunciation&quot; was interesting and worth answering. Enabling participants to protect good questions that fall within their main areas of interest might also give people who have not yet earned certain silver badges more motivation to ask and answer questions in those areas, in order to gain the power to protect relevant questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T02:39:42.757" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T02:39:42.757" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2018-10-09T02:39:49.627" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize that many site participants view bad question inflow as the central problem facing this site; but I think that unintentionally discouraging good question inflow may be at least as serious a problem—and it's one that we have largely ignored or, at best, sought to remedy by making all questions harder to post. For several years now, we have used the &quot;show research&quot; requirement as a key component of our question-filtering system, and yet I see no evidence that this approach has yielded a higher proportion of good questions than we used to get under the previous system (where, at one point,  &quot;too localized&quot; was a close reason instead of &quot;insufficient research shown&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my second suggestion is to abandon the &quot;show research&quot; close reason and restore the &quot;too localized&quot; close reason in its place. Why not see whether assessing the worthiness of a question on its inherent interest, rather than on its ability to pass muster under a test fundamentally unrelated to its inherent interest, leads to an increase in the numerator of good questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T06:42:17.230" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T06:42:17.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2018-10-09T16:20:05.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently tried to get a user to improve their question by referencing the help pages, but the promising &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; FAQ was so bland as to be almost useless for showing a visitor how to actually ask a good question on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be examples of good and bad questions, examples of what we mean by each closure reason, and notes about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; those examples are good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J.R.'s &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/please-everyone-details-please&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please, everyone... details. Please&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; on Meta.ELL is an excellent starting point. The mod-editable page &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; also has some good material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fully implement this suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beef up the existing &quot;How do I ask a good question?&quot; help page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Point new users with off-topic questions to that page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found that some users are open to improving their questions if given specific information while others opt to delete their own off-topic questions. Both help. This approach also reduces the 'hey, who do you think you are?' and 'it's not so bad' reactions by pointing to an objective standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to point to a single area that would improve questions, it would be enforcing the &quot;show your homework&quot; requirement. This should be front and center in any guide purporting to give advice on how to ask a good EL&amp;amp;U question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T16:20:05.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2018-10-09T22:05:43.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But for the most part, the kinds of questions we see are workaday questions from (mostly) non-fluent users of English who are trying to solve small, practical problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet the site seems to be content with this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could probably post many examples, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/467518/look-up-vs-look-for-phrasal-verb&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; will do just fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's by a new user. As I'm composing this, the profile plainly shows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this user is from Croatia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this user has been a member since today&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll admit, the question is an interesting one, but, given that it was something encountered on an English exam, I figured someone might think to give ELL a mention. Yet no one bothered, and this seems to be par for the course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six years ago, RegDwight proposed a new exchange for English Language Learners, primarily because of the high influx of questions from that demographic. Three years later, the site &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41665?phase=beta&quot;&gt;graduated from beta&lt;/a&gt;. Yet when new ELU members drop in and post a learner's question here, it seems they are much more likely to get an answer or two than any kind of comment nudging them toward ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's fine, if that's what this community has decided it wants to be. But if you're looking to spice things up with novel, interesting questions, the community might start with a more concerted effort to be who they claim to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I visit ELL, I &lt;strong&gt;expect&lt;/strong&gt; to find questions from people struggling to learn our wonderfully vexing language. Because of that, I very much enjoy the good ones. But when I visit ELU, I, like Dan, am hoping to find something refreshingly different. Instead, I often hunt hard to find a few novel gems sprinkled among many questions written by learners who seem to have stumbled among the wrong exchange – and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/467431/which-of-these-questions-about-the-duration-of-a-course-is-correct&quot;&gt;no one seems to notice or care&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T22:05:43.217" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11780" CreationDate="2018-10-10T01:29:33.840" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, reputation increases by 10  if an answer gets 1 upvote, 15 if an answer is accepted, and 5 if a question gets 1 upvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on this website, reputation increases by 1 for some of my questions. I'd like to know how reputation increases by 1. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="319007" OwnerDisplayName="Math Wizard" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T16:12:09.027" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T23:10:50.347" Title="Why does reputation increase by 1?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-10T03:38:20.163" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ought &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374995&quot;&gt;different vs differential (adjectives, not nouns)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be deleted here because it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/57880&quot;&gt;also posed to ELL&lt;/a&gt;? Why not just close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Viewpoints appear to differ. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/65943/226001&quot;&gt;Charles Stewart's answer here&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65931&quot;&gt;Cross-posting on StackExchange sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/65945/226001&quot;&gt;Wikis' answer&lt;/a&gt; in the duplicate &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65931&quot;&gt;Cross-posting on StackExchange sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; approve of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T21:54:45.803" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T13:53:18.953" Title="Ought cross-posted questions be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleting-posts|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11778" CreationDate="2018-10-10T04:30:58.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it's not particularly clear when looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/319007/math-wizard?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; (because the events didn't happen in this order), the complete summary of your reputation on this site can be summarized as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Association bonus: +100&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 upvotes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/467058/191178&quot;&gt;Are articles pronouns?&lt;/a&gt;: +35&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 downvotes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/467058/191178&quot;&gt;Are articles pronouns?&lt;/a&gt;: -14&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accepting an answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/467058/191178&quot;&gt;Are articles pronouns?&lt;/a&gt;: +2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote on this question on main: -2&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because it was migrated to meta where votes don't affect rep (also downvotes are reversed when a question is migrated), this rep change will be reversed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/323179&quot;&gt;when the question is 30 days old and gets deleted automatically&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, I think you're getting confused seeing the net +21 from upvotes and downvotes on the one question. Under normal circumstances it's unusual to see a post with such a large yet equal number of upvotes and downvotes, but I believe it's due to the fact the question was mentioned on meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11768/191178&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, you need to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;1000 reputation&lt;/a&gt; on this site to see the vote breakdown directly, although there are some other solutions, such as a SEDE query or a userscript (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/318347/6083675&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more info). However, unless you reach the daily 200 rep cap (or it's a meta question) it is usually easiest to calculate it via equations, where u is # of upvotes, d is number of downvotes, t is total net rep gain from votes (in this case +21), and s is net score (in this case 0):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If question: 5u - 2d = t&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If answer: 10u - 2d = t&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;u + d = s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You have to make sure that you account for reputation from accepted answers, which is +2 if you're doing the accept or +15 if you get the accept. This isn't too hard of a calculation IMHO, since I do it all the time in my head for users who have only one post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the question and this answer were written before the November 2019 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers&quot;&gt;retroactive change to make question upvotes worth +10&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-11-17T23:10:50.347" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T23:10:50.347" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11779" CreationDate="2018-10-10T04:31:32.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, cross-posts should be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should not have been posted in the first place, and thus their proper state of existence is none at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/374995/revisions&quot;&gt;diamond moderator, acting in that capacity, who deleted your question&lt;/a&gt;. Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374995/different-vs-differential-adjectives-not-nouns#comment1128865_374995&quot;&gt;his comment regarding that action&lt;/a&gt;&amp;sup1; (&lt;strong&gt;bold emphasis&lt;/strong&gt; mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for being persistent, but &lt;strong&gt;avoid reposting or cross-posting to get more attention&lt;/strong&gt;. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7046/how-do-i-get-attention-for-one-of-my-own-questions-without-a-good-answer&quot;&gt;How do I get attention for one of my own questions without a good answer? – Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;” If you want to try another site, ask for migration, or else delete the original before re-asking the question on the other site. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site? – Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;”. – MetaEd♦︎︎ 8 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don’t need more affirmation than that as to the disposition of this site towards that action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not cross-post&lt;/strong&gt;; if you choose to ignore that injunction, than you should not be surprised or cavil at the obvious consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We — specifically you and I, you asking, me answering — &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5303/55623&quot;&gt;have discussed this before, on this very site&lt;/a&gt;. In the selfsame question you are asking about, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374995/different-vs-differential-adjectives-not-nouns#comment879787_374995&quot;&gt;I brought that discussion back to your attention&lt;/a&gt;. We do not need to discuss it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That policy outlined here, on Meta.EL&amp;amp;U, is more pertinent and binding on EL&amp;amp;U than any other statements, pro, contra, or otherwise, that you find on MSE or any other meta site you care to reference&amp;sup2;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1;&lt;sub&gt;For users &amp;lt; 10k who cannot see it; I’m aware that as OP you can see your own deleted question, and have already read it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;And if you insist on doing so, &lt;em&gt;you should use the normative link the moderator who deleted your question provided to you in the comment he left when doing so&lt;/em&gt;. The very same link I provided to you &lt;em&gt;four years ago&lt;/em&gt; when we discussed this the first time. The topmost and accepted answer is “no”, where both the question and the answer has more votes, thus more consensus, thus more weight, than the two &lt;em&gt;contra&lt;/em&gt; posts you cite. The answer is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;. You’re going to have to accept that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T06:06:22.147" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T06:06:22.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11778" CreationDate="2018-10-10T04:43:29.917" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your reputation may increase by 1 if an answer you downvoted is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see all the individual events that affected your reputation by going to your Profile-&gt;Activity-&gt;Reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194459" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T04:43:29.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11784" CreationDate="2018-10-10T05:49:12.150" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not too long ago, I unlocked the cast close and reopen votes privilege... on ELL. Here on ELU I've had that privilege for a pretty long time, since I just recently unlocked the very last privilege (site statistics at 25,000 rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, getting to 3,000 reputation is a pretty significant milestone. It's an important way that users can influence the site, and the influence is greater than the sum of its parts when you have it on both ELU and ELL because of how linked the two sites are. More significantly, people who have close votes on ELL should have a decent knowledge of the scope of the site, which is important when deciding if a question is off-topic: is it on-topic on ELL (making migration an option) or is it off-topic on both sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, my question is: which users have close/reopen privileges on both ELU and ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T16:00:38.923" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T16:00:38.923" Title="Which users have close vote privileges both here and on ELL?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|ell|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11783" CreationDate="2018-10-10T05:49:12.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Through the magic of T-SQL I've found the answer. You can run my query &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/909289/users-with-privileges-elu-vs-ell?RepuationThreshold=3000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, with the data being updated weekly. There are currently 57 users with close/reopen privileges on both sites (not including CMs, except Catija because she has the rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, with this query I did one better than what I asked: it works for any privilege. Simply enter a number in the &quot;RepuationThreshold&quot; corresponding to the privilege level you want to see users for. For example, 500 shows users with the minimum review privileges, 3000 is close/reopen privileges, 10000 is users who can see deleted posts &amp;amp; vote to delete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another significant thing I learned from this query is that there are 5 people who have attained 25,000 on both sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's teh codez:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;create table #Yall (&#xA; globalid int,&#xA; ELUid int,&#xA; site varchar (3)&#xA;);&#xA;&#xA;use [StackExchange.English]; -- Just to be sure&#xA;&#xA;insert into #yall select accountid, id, 'ELU' from users where reputation &amp;gt;=##RepuationThreshold##;&#xA;&#xA;use [StackExchange.ELL];&#xA;&#xA;insert into #yall select accountid, 0, 'ELL' from users where reputation &amp;gt;=##RepuationThreshold##;&#xA;&#xA;use [StackExchange.English];&#xA;&#xA;select ELUid as [User Link] from #yall where site='ELU' and globalid in (select globalid from #yall where site='ELL')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T05:49:12.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11778" CreationDate="2018-10-10T06:38:38.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's also possible that you've reached the reputation maximum for the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general you can only gain 200 reputation per day (although some things bypass this: bounty awards, accepted answers, and association bonuses). For instance, if you were already at 199 (somehow), then getting an upvote would only give you one more point (+1), not ten (+10), even though it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have given you the additional nine points if you hadn't reached the daily maximum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T06:38:38.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T07:44:19.297" Score="4" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;  December 20, 2019&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;I decided to undelete the question because users, old and new, had better be aware of the suspension penalties.&lt;/sub&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new contributor was recently suspended for twelve months in order to &quot;cool down&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no point in me posting the user's name or the question where this lively debate took place. Nearly all the comments have been deleted in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all fairness, the user was stubborn and sometimes borderline rude in their replies. In one instance, the user considered my suggestions and Janus Bahs Jacquet's observations to be patronizing and condescending, despite clarifying our positions he persisted and we both &quot;left&quot; the scene of battle. However, when I returned a few hours later, I saw their reputation had been reduced to 1  wherein I automatically suspected, &lt;em&gt;a week's suspension&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, the suspension was for a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not having the diamond next to my name–so I have no way of knowing–I believe this is the user's first suspension.  Although the user's attitude did deserve a warning and perhaps also a penalty, isn't one year a bit too much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I ask whether this was the user's first suspension? If so, why was such a severe penalty exacted on them, a &lt;em&gt;new contributor&lt;/em&gt; whose only account, as far as I can tell, is on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-12-29T16:31:45.187" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T17:18:50.947" Title="One year suspension for a new contributor to &quot;cool down&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|suspension|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11779" CreationDate="2018-10-14T00:40:29.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think questions should be deleted &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; because they were cross-posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If non-mod users can migrate questions between the two sites, then vote to migrate one of them, and make a note to members of the &lt;strong&gt;other&lt;/strong&gt; site to close it as a duplicate of the purported cross-post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose &quot;X&quot; on EL&amp;amp;U was cross-posted as &quot;Y&quot; on ELL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;migrate &quot;X&quot; to ELL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leaving a comment on &quot;X&quot; to ask ELL members to close &quot;X&quot; as duplicate of &quot;Y&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's the theoretical possibility that both will be migrated both ways, but I don't think it would happen all that often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise (i.e. if non-mod users can't migrate questions between the two sites), the question ought to attract different kinds of answers on both sites (e.g. EL&amp;amp;U and Physics), so it should be treated independently on each site. Each site can deal with its own question independently: keep open, close, dupe, delete, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T13:53:18.953" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T13:53:18.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T22:43:31.877" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seek an answer to a question about my account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that I can not comment on an entry until I have 50 points. How do I accumulate said points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320162" OwnerDisplayName="Amber Mac Craig" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T04:40:13.670" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T04:40:13.670" Title="How do I accumulate 50 points?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-10-15T06:32:32.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T20:58:47.627" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/468502/when-was-the-word-terrorism-first-used&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; as an example, but it's only one amongst many.  Specifically, she already cites 1794 in her question, so I figured you can't rehash that date (relating to the Jacobins) in your answer.  If she's not satisfied with 1794, then evidently (?) she wants a different answer.  So, my question is, when is it OK to simply elaborate on a partial answer already provided in the question, and when is it redundant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167518" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T11:02:01.090" Title="Repetition in answer of what was already mentioned in original question" Tags="|discussion|support|request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11789" CreationDate="2018-10-15T21:09:16.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You try to give the correct answer. Whether that answer has been discounted by the asker is kind of beside the point. Except that an explanation of why you disagree might help you to get the answer accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T21:09:16.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11789" CreationDate="2018-10-15T22:52:47.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer provides information not given in the question and it was the first answer, so I assume that's why it was accepted by the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site (unlike other sites, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2512/37236&quot;&gt;Skeptics&lt;/a&gt;) doesn't technically require an answer to have any sources, so the answer doesn't require any further moderation. You can, however, take one or more of the following actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote other answers you like (if any exist)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post your own answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't particularly like answers that don't give a source, so in this case I did the third option: I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/468509/191178&quot;&gt;my own answer&lt;/a&gt; with sources.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T22:52:47.953" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-16T13:06:43.077" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the following quote today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A lexicographer's business is solely to collect, arrange, and define the words that usage presents to his hands. He has no right to proscribe words; he is to present them as they are.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noah Webster, lexicographer (16 Oct 1758-1843)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wondered to what extent the gist of this quote matches the ethos of &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103961" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T03:33:29.233" Title="Can anything go?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11792" CreationDate="2018-10-16T16:42:31.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are asking whether the EL&amp;amp;U community are willing to pass judgment on how English should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these answers are true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, of course we don’t judge. We’re objective.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our job is to give right answers to questions about how the English language works. Suppose you want to know what &lt;em&gt;ain’t&lt;/em&gt; is a contraction of. We’ll offer an expert answer (originally “am not”, then it drifted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We sort of judge, but we don’t actually take sides.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social implications of language elements are necessarily a part of the language. So we are quite prepared to answer questions about them. Suppose you want to know whether &lt;em&gt;ain’t&lt;/em&gt; is appropriate to a given social situation. Based on the situation, we’ll try to let you know objectively if it identifies you as a member of the in-group, or is likely to cost you prestige.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, of course we judge. That’s what humans do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange network is a social setting. Vocabulary, grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, writing style – your readers cannot help interpreting them and making judgments. How you use &lt;em&gt;ain’t&lt;/em&gt; in a question or answer will identify you as a member of the in-group, or cost you prestige.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not only do we judge, we prescribe correct English.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know anyone with any level of English skill might have a good question. And the skills of our visitors run the gamut from virtual illiteracy to complete mastery. We do not expect questions to be written in perfect English (whatever that might be). But to make questions as clear as possible to our experts and other visitors, we ask in the help pages for &lt;em&gt;correct use of English spelling and grammar to the best of your ability&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly we advise that &lt;em&gt;answers with correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar are easier to read&lt;/em&gt;. If you use &lt;em&gt;ain’t&lt;/em&gt;, you best include the apostrophe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, when the help pages prescribe correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, the question becomes, correct according to what standard? After several years on the Stack Exchange network, I’d say the standard is loose. We do not prefer BE, AmE, or any specific variety of English. We lean towards a “professional” or “academic” style, but at the informal end. We use contractions, we inject humor. It’s language more appropriate for a casual team meeting between peers, than for a lecture, job interview, or business proposal. We aint snobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T20:56:02.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11789" CreationDate="2018-10-17T10:50:44.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would advise against repeating a suggested answer if all you intend to do is spite the dismissal. However, in some cases answering the question with its own answer may help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point of answering a question is to help the questioner and future visitors interested in the question solve whatever problem that they are experiencing. Sometimes a dismissed answer may be a good answer if you can address the reason it was dismissed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases the questioner may misunderstand some of the vital circumstances regarding his or her problem, and in that point you can try to clear up the misapprehension so that they can realize why the dismissed answer is correct. In other cases the questioner may have good comprehension of what they know, but remain unconvinced by inadequate evidence, in which case you may be able to allay their doubts with more thorough proof that it is the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question provides a dismissal, but does not explain why it was dismissed, I would probably advise closing the question. Closure prevents people from posting answers which are useless, at least until a point in time when a better answer can be pondered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wonder why such a question should be closed, there are actually a few reasons: It may be a sign of inadequate research, suggest that the question is primarily opinion based, or at the very least make the underlying source of the problem unclear, and hence unable to be addressed. In these cases, choose the closure reason that best fits the circumstances, and maybe leave a comment explaining why a rationale for the dismissal should be provided if you can helpfully articulate your precise concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is also important to properly parse the question, and I suspect that your example is not a good one to address the concern because I see nothing to suggest that the questioner intends to exclude either of those possibilities. Annie Chen merely provides a pair of conflicting answers to demonstrate that the answer to the question is uncertain, so any date would be a valid answer if it can be proven to be the first usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T11:02:01.090" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T11:02:01.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11792" CreationDate="2018-10-18T02:41:47.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no insight into &amp;quot;the ethos of &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; but I do want to respond to the suggestion that Noah Webster's view of language amounts to &amp;quot;anything goes.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his introduction to &lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (1828), Webster offers the following thoughts on &amp;quot;words of recent origin&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;vulgar words, and term of art&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the admission of words of recent origin, into a Dictionary, a lexicographer has to encounter many difficulties; and it is not easy, in all cases, to determine whether a word is so far authorized as to be considered legitimate. Some writers indulge a licentiousness in coining words, which good sense would wish to repress. At the same time it would not be judicious to reject all new terms; as these are often necessary to express new ideas; and the progress of improvement in arts and science would be retarded, by denying a place in dictionaries, to terms given to things newly discovered. But the lexicographer is not answerable for the bad use of the privilege of coining new words. It seems to be his duty to insert and explain all words which are used by respectable writers or speakers, whether the words are destined to be received into general and permanent use or not. The future use must depend on public taste or the utility of the words; circumstances which are not within the lexicographer's control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexicographers are sometimes censured for inserting in their vocabularies, vulgar words, and terms of art known only to particular artisans. That this practice may be carried too far, is admitted; but it is to be remarked that, in general, vulgar words are the oldest and best  authorized words in language; and their use is as necessary to the classes of people who use them, as elegant words are to the statesman and the poet. It may be added that such words are often particularly useful to the lexicographer, in furnishing him with the primary sense, which is no where to be found, but in &lt;em&gt;popular use&lt;/em&gt;. In this work, I have not gone quite as far as Johnson and Todd have done, in admitting vulgar words. Some of them are too low to deserve notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any notion that Webster believed that the lexicographer's role is purely descriptive, as one might suppose from the quotation in Dan's question—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lexicographer's business is solely to collect, arrange, and define the words that usage presents to his hands. He has no right to proscribe words; he is to present them as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—must be based on careful cherry picking from the writings that Webster left behind. As his remarks in the introduction to his 1828 dictionary make clear, he considers the lexicographer's task to be, in part, &amp;quot;to determine whether a word is so far authorized as to be considered legitimate.&amp;quot; And he considers that, &amp;quot;Some [vulgar words] are too low to deserve notice.&amp;quot; Ultimately, he seems to believe that the obligation of the lexicographer &amp;quot;to collect, arrange, and define the words that usage presents to his hands&amp;quot; extends only to words that &amp;quot;are used by respectable writers or speakers.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you might expect from the foregoing, many a sturdy English four-letter word is not to be found in &lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;. But Webster also omitted a number of other words that he considered insufficiently English (or inappropriate for other, unnamed reasons), such as &lt;em&gt;jounce&lt;/em&gt; (attested to the 15th century), &lt;em&gt;kilter&lt;/em&gt; (1628), &lt;em&gt;slush&lt;/em&gt; (1641), and &lt;em&gt;squaw&lt;/em&gt; (1634). As for the meanings he assigned to words, consider the entry in Webster's 1828 dictionary for &lt;em&gt;Yankee&lt;/em&gt;, a term of some familiarity to Americans going back to the American Revolution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YANKEE,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; A corrupt pronunciation of the word &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; by the native Indians of America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting etymological note—although not one that Merriam-Webster endorses today—but the entry doesn't really try to define the word that usage presented to Noah Webster's hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noah Webster's attitude toward language was far from laissez-faire. He ignored words he deemed illegitimate. He proscribed words he deemed excessively vulgar. He sought changes in orthography strictly on the basis of what (in his view) was good for the language. These are very strongly prescriptivist tendencies. His willingness to accept whatever words and forms of usage happened down the pike is far less expansive than the quotation in Dan's question might lead you to believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T02:41:47.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11792" CreationDate="2018-10-19T03:26:15.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your quote has 2 sentences, the first of which defines a lexicographer's business and the second &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/proscribe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proscribes&lt;/a&gt; them proscribing words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U doesn't really proscribe words, except that we should try to keep things civil, on-topic and in good taste. There's also been some talk about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316934/286574&quot;&gt;how our question titles are perceived by the general public&lt;/a&gt;, but that is a site-wide matter across Stack Exchange, not EL&amp;amp;U-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that something is proscribed at all as a binary decision, I suppose EL&amp;amp;U doesn't subscribe to the proscription of proscription when it comes to lexicographers. But that's because EL&amp;amp;U doesn't have a position on lexicographers, so it wouldn't even proscribe &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. It isn't quite &lt;em&gt;anything goes&lt;/em&gt;, but EL&amp;amp;U does admit a fairly wide range of content matter that relates to the English language and its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T03:33:29.233" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T03:33:29.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-10-21T17:14:37.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just today opted-in to new beta designs, and now I see the new EL&amp;amp;U design everyone is griping about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this isn't what you'd call &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314089/what-does-constructive-criticism-of-a-design-change-look-like&quot;&gt;constructive criticism&lt;/a&gt;, but: &lt;strong&gt;It's ... ugly&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zNeKPm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zNeKPm.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of EL&amp;amp;U main with &amp;quot;opt-in to new beta designs&amp;quot; enabled&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm no design snob. I couldn't tell a Helvetica from a Garamond if they both bit me on the derriere.  Which it seems like they have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in the spirit of &lt;em&gt;trying&lt;/em&gt; to suss out what's bugging me, and seperate it from the chaff of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-segment---dana-carvey-as-grumpy-old-man/n9948&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'm old, and I'm not happy. Everything today is &lt;em&gt;improved&lt;/em&gt;, and I don't like it!&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, with high probability of duplication and overlap of prior gripes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the EL&amp;amp;U banner supposed to be off-center like that?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need the heavy ornamental box around it?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need &quot;TOP QUESTIONS&quot; in 48,000pt font?  Why is that information so critical?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the individual questions need to be so tall (i.e. big y value), so you can see so few at a time?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it intended the almost-static right sidebar needs to be so conspicuous, at the expense of the central focus of the site, the question list?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need a huge box showing all my watched tags? I rarely if ever change them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HqfI0m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HqfI0m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Old Man Yells at Cloud&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the plus side, I super-duper like the much clearer and more conspicuous *ask question&quot; button, in burgundy. That is a &lt;em&gt;fantastic&lt;/em&gt; change.  You can leave that one on my lawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T17:30:02.027" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T17:30:02.027" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11800" CreationDate="2018-10-23T20:11:44.767" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431925/epithet-sobriquet-and-moniker-whats-the-difference&quot;&gt;a small bounty on a question&lt;/a&gt;.  So far, the bounty hasn't attracted much attention, and my current bet is it still won't before the bounty expires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an existing answer on the question before I posted the bounty, and it's fine, but it's not up to snuff (in my eyes), which is why I posted the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other answer posted, which is reasonable, in that it took the bounty stipulations of being &lt;em&gt;authoritative&lt;/em&gt; to heart (if a little flat and lacking in color and character), was posted by a user who has since deleted his account&amp;sup1;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, at the expiration of the bounty, this is the only answer meeting the stipulations, what is best practice?  I can of course award the bounty to it (at least I believe I can), the bounty having served its primary purpose of drawing attention to the question.  But I feel that fails another, lesser, though not unimportant purpose: rewarding the user who rose to the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure deleted accounts can't &quot;hold&quot; rep.  And even if they can, it's still useless, as that rep won't do anyone any good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's best practice here&amp;sup2;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;Or anyway the account is one of those &quot;user#####&quot; accounts with no links to a profile, so it was deleted, but I don't actually know the user did it himself or something else happened.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;Of course, the question un-asks itself if &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; posts a better answer, which is canonical and authoritative, but also rich, colorful, educational, and perhaps even entertaining.  Wink wink, nudge nudge.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt; I [almost] always hold out on awarding bounties til the last minute anyway, in order to maximize returns.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T20:33:51.643" Title="What happens to bounties where the user who posted the only eligible answer deletes their account?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11798" CreationDate="2018-10-23T20:25:32.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say award the bounty to the deserving answer, if there is one, regardless of whether it's by a deleted user. Even if nobody earns rep, the award will still serve to show future visitors what a good answer looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T20:25:32.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11798" CreationDate="2018-10-23T20:33:51.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can award the bounty to a deleted user's answer, but deleted users don't have rep, so the only thing that does is put the blue bounty amount next to the answer. (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/86395/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This isn't what happened, but I guess I'll also mention that if a question is migrated any answerers without an account will look like deleted users except they might have a username. Awarding a bounty to such an answer &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; increase the answerer's rep when they create an account.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having that little blue bounty counter next to the answer sends the signal that the answer is good, so if you don't like the answer, you shouldn't award it the bounty. But ultimately it's your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing changes and the bounty expires nobody will get any of the rep because none of the answers score above 2 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/323179&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T20:33:51.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2018-10-24T03:55:18.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don’t switch our question scores to the weird light-on-dark, blurry-and-bold “wrong-green-for-our-theme” boxes.  This is a CSS problem that affects Macs but not Windows boxes. I write about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316797/153355&quot;&gt;blurry-on-bold problem here&lt;/a&gt;, but the solution is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fix this, you probably need these bits of CSS for Macs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s still the wrong color, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was tasteful in the current theming that you’re trying to get rid of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lernm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lernm.png&quot; alt=&quot;old demo of scores&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this in the new theme is quite ugly and perhaps even harder to read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GaGkf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GaGkf.png&quot; alt=&quot;new demo of scores&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And yes, it really is this tiny, only about 12mm!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how very much easier it is to read the serifed word ”answers” there in the old theme compared to trying to read the sans-serifed word “answers” in the new theme. Flip back and forth between my two images: it’s obviously much worse now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also notice how in the new site theme, you’ve chosen a shade of green that has nothing to do with our site theme’s color palette. Too many colors makes things confusing and garish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even worse, by switching from the dark-on-light figures to light-on-dark, you’ve run afoul of the webkit font smoothing problem that makes light-on-dark text all bold and blurry on a Mac under webkit. I’ve mentioned this problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/317190/153355&quot;&gt;here on MSE&lt;/a&gt;. It looks completely awful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don’t like that you’ve force-fed the wrong font on those score and view figures there, too. Proportional text figures are in keeping with our theme; tabular lining figures are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T03:39:15.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-24T19:27:14.073" Score="8" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, following on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11770/attracting-new-and-interesting-questions-in-2018&quot;&gt;Attracting new and interesting questions in 2018&lt;/a&gt;, I may have a theory, but I don’t have the necessary knowledge to figure out if it’s correct or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory is that &quot;interesting questions&quot; are slowly migrating naturally to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that every time I comment with &quot;you might find more resources on ELL&quot; or &quot;try asking this on ELL&quot;, I’m not just pointing a mere beginner to ELL, I’m migrating a potential strong user there. Everyone was a beginner once, and most (?) beginners will shy away from being told they’re wrong on their first forum post. So I’ve redirected a potential to ELL and there they stay, gaining competence in English, asking interesting questions, comfortable in the knowledge that they won’t be told they’re too much of a noob on that site. And nobody ever says &quot;hey, this is a decent question, you should post it where the linguists hang out&quot;. Also, rather than redirect, the linguists there will simply answer the question, because it’s less effort, the user gets an answer, everyone is happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the flow is mainly in one direction, there’s a chance ELU will wither. But I’m not familiar enough with ELL to know if that’s the case or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is the flow in one direction? Are there stats to show migrations? Or anecdata from users? Should I carry on redirecting, even though I fear I’m partially responsible for a brain drain to ELL? Or should I just spend time there to discover I’m mistaken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="283332" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T01:38:50.933" Title="Does ELL migrate questions to ELU?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11802" CreationDate="2018-10-24T22:36:39.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the stats (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats&quot;&gt;10k+ link&lt;/a&gt;), two questions were migrated here from ELL in the last 90 days:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/468953/191178&quot;&gt;How did &amp;#39;by&amp;#39; semantically shift to denote &amp;#39;succession&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/464595/191178&quot;&gt;Why use singular they? Why not make a new word to distinguish its meaning?&lt;/a&gt; (migration rejected and Q deleted; 10k+ link)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, 205 questions were migrated to ELL from here (12% rejected) in the last 90 days. I'm not going to list these :P, but you can probably find most of them via &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=migrated%3a1&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU users can vote to migrate questions to ELL but ELL users can't migrate questions to ELU. So, it is necessary for a moderator to do the migration. It was suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2638/41273&quot;&gt;in 2015&lt;/a&gt; for there to be a migration path from ELL to ELU but nothing happened and I doubt this would change since they don't grant such requests unless there are lots of questions being migrated by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/151890/323179&quot;&gt;not yet 60 days old&lt;/a&gt; that you think belongs on ELU, you can flag it for moderator attention requesting it to be migrated here. Make sure that that the question is actually off-topic for the site it's currently on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth thinking about sites other than ELL that might have questions that are worth taking. I'm not aware of any that have a significant number, unfortunately. (Except perhaps Writing, but I think the mods there are already doing a good job at migrating things, giving us 15 questions, although 40% was rejected, in the past 90 days.) I do know that History has a few English questions that they've closed but not migrated but I'm not sure if they're too old or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an SEDE query that can find undeleted migrated questions from a specific site. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/916428/migrations-from-specified-site-to-this-one?FromSiteURLStart=english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; the query for questions that were migrated from ELU to ELL. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/916428/migrations-from-specified-site-to-this-one?FromSiteURLStart=ell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; the same query for ELL to ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T00:30:21.047" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T00:30:21.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11802" CreationDate="2018-10-24T23:24:36.860" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is migrations, in either direction, are relatively rare, and consequently don't have an impact on the bottom line. Furthermore, a net migration of questions from EL&amp;amp;U to ELL was &lt;em&gt;always expected&lt;/em&gt;, and intended, and will remain the pattern as ELL matures&amp;sup1;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The plural of anecdote&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, empirical analysis is always nice, even if it's only to set our minds at ease. With that in mind, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/916381/migrations-analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I threw together this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the results, broken down by quarter, of questions migrated from here to ELL and vice-versa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DbAIQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DbAIQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;chart of migrations&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing you'll notice is that your instincts are correct: there indeed has been a recent trend of net migration away from ELU to ELL.  But there are two important caveats.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Peanuts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first, let's look at the data tabularly, as it's hard to get a solid, immediate sense of scale from the chart. I'll only post the last 3 years this way; the table gets too long otherwise, and data before that is less relevant, which we'll come back to in the second caveat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focus on the last column, the number of questions we &quot;lost&quot; to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|CalendarQuarter|Departing|Arriving|NetDepartures|  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY18Q4         |35       |1       |34           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY18Q3         |22       |0       |22           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY18Q1         |13       |0       |13           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY17Q4         |10       |0       |10           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY17Q3         |9        |0       |9            |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY17Q2         |2        |4       |-2           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY17Q1         |10       |0       |10           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY16Q4         |12       |2       |10           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY16Q3         |14       |1       |13           |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY16Q2         |6        |3       |3            |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  &#xA;|FY16Q1         |6        |0       |6            |  &#xA;+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+    &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the order of magnitude is &lt;em&gt;10&lt;/em&gt;.  Over the course of a &lt;em&gt;quarter&lt;/em&gt;; that's &lt;em&gt;90 days&lt;/em&gt;. To put that in perspective, EL&amp;amp;U gets an average of 54 questions per &lt;strong&gt;day&lt;/strong&gt;.  Even the highest &quot;loss&quot; quarter, the one we're in, we only migrated 34 questions to ELL.  That's about one every 3 days, or about 0.7% of all the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Peanut Gallery&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;, you reasonably ask, &lt;em&gt;isn't it alarming that the trend is indeed increasing&lt;/em&gt;?  Ah, this brings us to our second caveat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It was always envisioned to work this way&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  Before ELL was set up, the EL&amp;amp;U community realized it had a problem: trying to serve two separate audiences with two distinct sets of needs.  We had questions from the nominal audience (linguists, etymologists, and English-language enthusiasts), and even more questions from another audience (people learning English as a second language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't mix well; it made the people in the first audience grumpy, and people in the second audience frustrated.  Thus, ELL was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it takes time to start, build, and establish a site.  Rome wasn't built in a day.  So while ELL was cutting its teeth, ELU still received dozens of questions a day from the audience we hadn't yet totally migrated to ELL.  Now that ELL is mature, more of that is happening.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hope is, over time, Google results and other organic forces will eventually result in ELL-style questions being asked on ELL from the get-go (and, likely, we're going to have to make some additional, less organic adjustments&amp;sup1;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But until that Halcyon day, we'll continue to receive these questions, and continue migrate them.  That's all.  This is to be expected&amp;sup2;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Silver Lining&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it still worries you, maybe you can be consoled by another fact.  If you remove the &lt;code&gt;WHERE mSite=N'ell'&lt;/code&gt; from the SQL query above -- that is, count up migrations to and from &lt;em&gt;the entire network&lt;/em&gt; -- over the last 3 years, we've been &lt;em&gt;gaining&lt;/em&gt; about 8 questions every quarter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;However, organic changes as ELL matures will likely not be sufficient to totally shift the ELL-asking population to asking on ELL in the first instance.  This is because there are several strong signals to Google and other entry points to StackExchange that EL&amp;amp;U is the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; place to ask these questions.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;These include the body of such questions already existing here -- ironically, to fix that, we need to &lt;em&gt;increase&lt;/em&gt; the number of migrations we make to ELL -- but also things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5194/55623&quot;&gt;our canonical URL being &lt;strong&gt;english&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Having said all that, all this goes to &lt;em&gt;decreasing&lt;/em&gt; the number of &quot;ELL-style&quot; questions on the site. But that does not, of course, help us &lt;em&gt;increase&lt;/em&gt; the number of EL&amp;amp;U questions.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11770/attracting-new-and-interesting-questions-in-2018&quot;&gt;We need a seperate remedy for that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt; Contrariwise, it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to be expected than an ELL user, intentionally posting on ELL, frequently asks a question that requires the expertise of ELU.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And if and when that happens, I wouldn't begrudge the ELL community keeping it, should they decide to do that. The answering community there are also experts in English, and I'm sure they like a meaty question now and again to sink their teeth into.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T01:38:50.933" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T01:38:50.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-25T03:01:24.603" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want someone to take a look and check if the meaning is correct. It's for a professionnal page so I need to be as good as possible...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note here, I get the point]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot for your time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321557" LastEditorUserId="321557" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T03:17:20.260" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T03:17:20.260" Title="Verification of the meaning for professional page" Tags="|discussion|translation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-10-25T05:24:02.180" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-27T22:18:01.737" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm looking at an answer to a question that I asked, I find it hard to tell whether I've accepted that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1wkhk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1wkhk.png&quot; alt=&quot;english-unchecked&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;vs&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QxTym.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QxTym.png&quot; alt=&quot;english-checked&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is clear when they're placed next to each other, but not in isolation. The dark gray (#817f84) of the unchecked accept mark is more pronounced against the background than the lighter gray (#b5b5b5) of the inactive voting button, so if one doesn't a priori expect the check mark to be green, it might well mean that the check mark is active. Conversely, the green (#459718) is a bit washed out, so it isn't completely obvious that the check mark is active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't had this problem on other Stack Exchange sites. For example, on a beta site, it's&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Va4Gt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Va4Gt.png&quot; alt=&quot;beta-unchecked&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;vs&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jSqbc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jSqbc.png&quot; alt=&quot;beta-checked&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;The unchecked mark is the same shade of light gray as the inactive voting button, and the checked mark is a more pronounced green, so each is obvious in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there's a positioning glitch with the check mark on English.SE: it moves a few pixels towards the left when you mark an answer as accepted. Neither positioning of the check mark looks wrong to me in isolation, but it's weird that the position depends on the state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tweak the colors of accept marks to make it easier to tell whether they're active or not. Less importantly, please settle on one vertical alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T09:48:55.967" Title="It's hard to tell whether I've accepted an answer" Tags="|feature-request|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-10-28T17:52:21.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11806" CreationDate="2018-10-28T09:48:55.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the old and once beloved (&lt;em&gt;sniff, sniff…&lt;/em&gt;) theme, accepted answers look like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eDogm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eDogm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the new theme, which will take over, accepted answers will look like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ud0UQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ud0UQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As anyone can tell, the green checkmark is super chunky and a bright vivid green. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that nothing can be done to modify the elements in the old theme because nothing will done. The OP can switch to the &lt;em&gt;beta test theme&lt;/em&gt; via their &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/preferences/1165&quot;&gt;profile page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T09:48:55.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13179" CreationDate="2018-10-28T21:13:06.500" Score="21" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know anything about user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/21655/edwin-ashworth&quot;&gt;Edwin Ashworth&lt;/a&gt;? A somewhat exigent and at times infuriating stickler for standards, I find myself missing his droll comments. He's been “missing” since July.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T15:11:06.610" Title="News about Edwin?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T00:10:48.447" Score="4" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;One user in particular here has looked into the area of Pig Latin. How can I contact that person? I cannot comment on the original Pig Latin thread without 50 points, whatever that means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="322021" OwnerDisplayName="Evertype" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:17:52.337" Title="How can I get in touch with a particular user about Pig Latin?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11810" CreationDate="2018-10-29T01:50:17.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a different question about Pig Latin, then you should ask a new question. This can be done at any reputation (obviously). You may not get a response from &lt;em&gt;that particular user&lt;/em&gt;, but you're likely to get an answer from &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still want to contact that specific user you have several options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check their profile by clicking on their name and see if they've listed contact info for anyone who want to ask them questions about their posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Get reputation and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;20+ rep: Ask them in chat, if they are active there. Search for users &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The reputation needed for chatting in this site's chat rooms is the sum of all your rep on different sites (which is currently 9). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;50+ rep: Leave a comment. Sometimes you get an answer from OP and (much more rarely, especially on older posts) someone else helps you. You can either earn 50 rep on this site or get 200 rep on any other site in the network and earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/141648/323179&quot;&gt;association bonus&lt;/a&gt;, which is +100 given to all your accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earning reputation works the same on every site in the network. It's mostly about posting good questions and answers (+10 per upvote), but there are other things that you can do to earn it. (Note that your question was migrated to Meta because it is about the site, not English and you don't get reputation for votes on Meta.) The full explanation for reputation is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T22:17:52.337" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T22:17:52.337" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2018-11-02T19:04:43.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Off-topic: interpretation of legalese&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should &lt;em&gt;absolutely not&lt;/em&gt; be offering users legal advice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions should be directed to their attorney or, if of more general interest, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions should be closed with alacrity, to avoid less-experienced users posting possibly damaging legal advice which the OP is no position to assess the authority of. This is regardless of whether the answerer sets out with &quot;IANAL, but&quot; or other meaningless disclaimers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-11-02T19:33:09.293" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T19:33:09.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2018-11-02T19:08:40.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Off-topic: Interpretation of deliberately or accidentally ambiguous language&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common example is asking whether a range given in a text (numeric range, date range) is inclusive or exclusive of the named boundaries. For example, this question of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/471277/what-does-the-closing-date-mean-exactly&quot;&gt;admissible dates for a contest submission&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are &lt;em&gt;primarily-opinion based&lt;/em&gt;, by definition. They aren't questions of English, and for most questions of this type, which are aimed at solving some practical problem (e.g. &lt;em&gt;dates when a contest is open&lt;/em&gt;), the best and often only solution is to &lt;em&gt;ask the author of the text in question&lt;/em&gt;, or his agents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-11-02T19:30:24.623" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T19:30:24.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2018-11-02T19:23:36.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Off-topic: Ghostwriting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ghostwriting&lt;/em&gt; should be explicitly noted as off-topic in the same bullet as proofreading (as its obverse). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good indicator that an OP wants ghostwriting is the phrase &quot;What's the best way to express....&quot;.  A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/471261/not-all-the-synonyms-are-interchangeable&quot;&gt;particularly egregious concrete example&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you speak and elaborate that &quot;not all the synonyms can be replaced in some sentences&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be your competitive sentences examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all &quot;help me write this email to my boss&quot; questions fall into this category (or into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10725/55623&quot;&gt;off-topic interpersonal skills category&lt;/a&gt;). Those are even more sensitive to context we have no access to, including the person's boss, their relationship, the culture of his organization, and the regional dialect and register of his location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are &lt;em&gt;primarily-opinion&lt;/em&gt; based as creative exercises where there's no right answer. The search space of &quot;all possible phrasings&quot; is too large, and it is the responsibility of the asker to constrain the problem to something small, practical, and objective (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-11-02T19:30:03.573" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T19:30:03.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11809" CreationDate="2018-11-02T21:44:23.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's likely that anyone who knows would say nothing out of a respect for user privacy. Unless we hear from him personally, I think this is the answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From this perspective, when you ask if the two downvotes on the question show lack of concern, actually the opposite might be true.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T15:16:37.467" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T15:16:37.467" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11827" CreationDate="2018-10-31T21:22:24.493" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my situation: I'm currently proof-reading something a colleague of mine has written. The content is all okay, but his use (or non-use) of &quot;the&quot; is all over the place, because I assume his native language (Persian) doesn't have definite articles. (I'm not a native speaker either, but German has very similar grammar, so I guess it's easier for me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I realized that I don't have a quick and easy rule for when &quot;the&quot; gets used and when it doesn't. Especially in the context of scientific writing. Some techniques or procedures get a &quot;the&quot; and some don't. For example you'd say &quot;We apply Principal Component Analysis to our data&quot; but you'd say &quot;We then use the Fourier transform to...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good source I could refer my colleague to so he can brush up a bit on his usage of &quot;the&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7622" OwnerDisplayName="Lagerbaer" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-10-31T22:33:39.287" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T22:33:39.287" Title="What is a good source on the use of the definite article for non-native speakers?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11810" CreationDate="2018-11-04T02:43:35.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We actually do find some personal information or 'leads' in the user's profile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is the user's pseudonym, not their real name, but it might be something they've used more often. Second, we know they've studied pig Latin to the extent the user described as &lt;em&gt;&quot;significant reading on Pig Latin as part of my research&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining that with our third observation, the link in the profile to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language blog&lt;/a&gt;, we can safely assume that the user has a strong connection with that blog and the university (group) behind it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible courses of action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contact the blog via &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/languagelog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their Twitter account&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contact the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ircs.upenn.edu/about/contact-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;university department behind the blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ircs.upenn.edu/people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the list of people affiliated with the department&lt;/a&gt; and email those that might fit the user's profile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, explain the situation, perhaps by providing a link to your meta question and hope for the best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/747/are-there-any-english-language-conferences-to-which-se-could-sponsor-a-member/803#comment1382_803&quot;&gt;participated in the ISLE2 conference in 2011&lt;/a&gt;, perhaps that helps narrow it down or could be something you can mention in your search. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2018-11-04T23:27:20.073" LastActivityDate="2018-11-04T23:27:20.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11820" CreationDate="2018-11-05T03:41:28.590" Score="7" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/469017&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; from a new user asked if 'MSc holder in psychology' was grammatically correct. She noted, &quot;This is for my personal statement for my cv&quot;, so it was of no trivial importance to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/469017/msc-holder-expression#comment1132319_469017&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; said &lt;em&gt;&quot;Yes, it is as perfectly grammatical as &quot;colorless green ideas sleep furiously&quot;. It is also just as funny.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; I thought this was somewhere between mockingly insensitive and downright rude, so I flagged it. I am very surprised to find that my flag has been declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves me in a dilemma. Am I seriously misunderstanding the Code of Conduct, and in particular our obligation to take special care to provide a welcoming environment for new users? Have I misunderstood the injunction &quot;No subtle put-downs&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've correctly understood the Code of Conduct, could I have misread the comment?  I dunno - I'd have thought that describing as &lt;em&gt;&quot;funny&quot;&lt;/em&gt; an inexperienced speaker's attempt to describe their qualifications is not merely a subtle putdown, it's blatantly insulting. The only thing that isn't clear is whether they were being mocked for their poor language skills, or it was the actual qualification that was being laughed at. My heart goes out to poor Jana. What a brutally insensitive response. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if I've correctly understood the Code of Conduct, and the comment itself can reasonably be seen as a &quot;subtle putdown&quot;, then it would seem that the problem is one of enforcement. The Code of Conduct encourages us to report unacceptable behaviour, and says &quot;We take your reports seriously.&quot; Yet my flag was declined, and the nasty comment has not been removed. &lt;strong&gt;Why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T03:47:07.763" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T00:01:28.880" Title="Understanding the Code of Conduct" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11818" CreationDate="2018-11-05T06:39:11.380" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the only conclusion is that the moderators of this site don't interpret the Code of Conduct the same way as you. Subtle put-downs seem to be OK, as long as they can be interpreted as educational or informative. I guess some people may think of this kind of tone as just being blunt and not rude. As JJJ said, a lot of this kind of stuff is &quot;open to interpretation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a similar experience a while back when I raised an &quot;unfriendly or unkind&quot; flag on a comment in thread that contained wording like &quot;You wouldn't say any of these things. And if you did you'd just sound helpless for not knowing that this is such a common and specific thing in literature that it has a dedicated term...&quot; and &quot;If only you would read my answer: &quot;no, you wouldn't say that&quot;. We are offering alternatives because what you have is no good. If it were fine, nobody would say you must use something else instead.&quot; Apparently, this is sufficiently kind and friendly for the moderators of this site: my flag was declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T06:39:11.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11818" CreationDate="2018-11-06T00:01:28.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment was flagged a few hours ago – I presume it came as a reaction to this meta post. This time the flag came to my attention and I deleted the comment. I didn't see the original flag and don't know why it was declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always feel free to ping me if there is a problem. Most weekdays I can be found in the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Chat&lt;/a&gt; room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T00:01:28.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11834" CreationDate="2018-11-06T15:57:04.183" Score="12" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently been taking a look at the French language site that corresponds to ELU.  I am struck by a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the ELU is often swamped with questions that involve helping someone to find a single word for some elaborate notion, or is looking for the best way of expressing something relatively straightforward, and that many of the questions have to be put on hold or closed down for lack of research, duplication, or some form of irrelevance.  That is not to mention the input from questioners whose English is weak or who have to be redirected to ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look at the French site, it seems to me that far more of the questions are serious questions about grammar, more often than not by people who have some grasp of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In part, of course, this reflects the fact that English is THE universal world language, whereas French is A world language but not in the way that English is.  Perhaps also, the grammatical side of the teaching of English is more rigorous in France and French speaking countries than it has been till recently in at least the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But (here comes the question), are there any ways to reduce the 'noise' that have not already been tried?  I am sorry if this sounds élitist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252455" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T19:12:41.907" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T14:45:18.733" Title="How Could ELU Be as Rigorous as the French Language Site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11810" CreationDate="2018-11-06T19:11:53.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I contacted Mr. Everson by e-mail and put him in touch with Kosmonaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed at the response he got here. This whole situation could have been avoided if there were a way for users to direct message each other. But there is not, and that's too bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the best approach is just to be a kind, helpful person and not get bogged down in complicated site mechanics or obscure cyber-stalking techniques. But the best approach is not always possible, though I think some deference is due to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Everson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;leading light&lt;/a&gt; in matters where linguistics and technology converge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T18:25:06.423" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T18:25:06.423" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11821" CreationDate="2018-11-07T00:38:11.213" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a shot in the dark, but I believe the difference you have witnessed is down to the inherent properties of descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French language is officially regulated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;l’Académie française&lt;/a&gt;. Both grammar and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_l%27Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; are prescribed and are to be obeyed by every French speaker in France. Same goes for many other languages and countries, such as (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;de facto&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accademia_della_Crusca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Language_Institute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt;. That means it is easier to provide a definitive answer to a grammar rule, and there won't be nearly as many grey areas and uncertainties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, on the other hand, has no formal regulator which, while encouraging greater linguistic diversity and faster changes, does result in much greater confusion in what people perceive as a &quot;norm&quot;. This leads to more heated arguments over seemingly trivial questions and multiple contradictory answers none of which are &quot;wrong&quot; per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the latter kind of language forums is much more interesting to both read and participate in, but others may disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised this answer received so many upvotes as it was meant to be more of an extended &quot;I wonder if&quot; comment. I don't personally believe this is the only (or even the biggest) reason why ELU users vote-close on more posts and generally act more demanding (and occasionally mocking) with submitted Q&amp;amp;As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU has a special place among all language communities on StackExchange as it is the only place here whose users are not expected to be bilingual to communicate, which greatly influences its audience and the kind of questions they find interesting, making all comparisons to other SE communities difficult in many regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, ELU is the most searchable language community here, so many new users come here directly from Google in hopes to get a &quot;quick fix&quot; for whatever writing problem they're having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the comments to the question and this answer for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57332" LastEditorUserId="57332" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T08:19:58.940" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T08:19:58.940" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-08T20:29:48.023" Score="18" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that the community doesn't really agree with itself on the subject of what's on topic and off topic when it comes to the amount of research needed. I'm seeing this on questions that would only be marginally on-topic for a site like ELL because they're about etymology or phrase history. What's particularly worrying is that some of these questions include research (even if it's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/softball&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Def #3 from Random House&quot;&gt;softball&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; research). And it's not just &amp;quot;that one guy&amp;quot;; between these examples, there are at least four different users involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd like to see fewer etymology questions closed even when they actually have no research because the research itself is so often outdated. Or the information available is super vague. Or the good information can only be found behind paywalls. Or there's a ton of misinformation (folk etymology). This is apparently relevant so I'm expanding on it below under &amp;quot;about why even the best sources aren't enough&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Stack Exchange format doesn't fix all these problems, it provides a pretty great solution: Post a new, better answer. This, of course, only works when the question is open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I'd like to open the discussion for this particular class of questions and also the specific examples here. I only have two examples because time tends to ruin examples via deletion and aging away of close votes so you would have to be keeping track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case 1&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I edited a question to add &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; in the hopes that the question would be reopened, then cast a reopen vote to put it into the reopen queue. Much to my confusion, three users voted to keep the question closed, which caused the question to be removed from the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Reopen?&lt;/s&gt; Reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/462470/191178&quot;&gt;Where does the term &amp;quot;on the nose&amp;quot; come from?&lt;/a&gt;. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/310627&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the reopen queue review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case 2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more recently, I added &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; to a different question to prevent it from being closed. I think it had one close vote when I did that. Later, I find it in the review queue with a total of three close votes, one of which was cast from the review queue. This means that two people voted to close it after the research was added. (Since then, one of these votes was either retracted or aged away.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing that needs to be done per se about this question since it's not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/471195/191178&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the origin of &amp;quot;hung for a toad&amp;quot;? Where is it used?&lt;/a&gt;. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/311533&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the close vote review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Honorable Mention&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Stolen from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7868/191178&quot;&gt;this post mentioned in the comments&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a bit different from the others, since it was closed for &amp;quot;not being about English&amp;quot;. Twice. It was also deleted at one point, for some reason. The other difference is that it included research from the very first revision. After looking at it, what happened isn't really a mystery, although I disagree with the closure. &amp;quot;What is the origin of these words&amp;quot; is always an English question in my book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Reopen?&lt;/s&gt; Reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307852/191178&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the &amp;quot;half your age, plus seven&amp;quot; phrase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About why even the best sources aren't always enough&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a silver badge in etymology, but I'm not a professional. Despite this fact, I've found that I'm often able to beat the Oxford English Dictionary when it comes to earliest quotation, particularly when it comes to phrases. Sometimes, this can be done with what I consider a simple Google Books search (quote marks plus date range, sorted by date). The reason for this is simple, although it took me a while to figure it out: &lt;strong&gt;etymology is a field of continuous research&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As technology progresses, more and more old texts are being digitized, and OCR is getting better and better. The senior executive editor of the OED (Johnathan Dent) mentions the importance of technology in etymological research &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/blog/raking-dunghill-rehabilitating-dunghill-duck-september-2018-update/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There's a lot to research, so many of the OED pages are horrifically out of date, but you can't know this unless you have access to the individual page (it's a bit confusing, but it will say &amp;quot;This entry has not yet been fully updated&amp;quot; although there may be some info that's up-to-date, namely &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/173414#eid1258425030&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;draft additions&lt;/a&gt;). Other sources don't even mention when their research was done, so it's impossible to know how good it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, even if a search appears to bring up the right information, you may not be getting the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About me adding research&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent any confusion in advance, there are several reasons why I don't just take the question and ask it better myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question already has an answer (applicable to both now, although only case 1 had an answer when I edited it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't answer clarifying questions (applicable in case #2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would make me feel like I'm &amp;quot;stealing&amp;quot; the question. You can't really &amp;quot;steal&amp;quot; an idea or a CC-BY-SA post that you properly attributed, so this is all about perceptions and personal ethics and such. No judgement though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fixing things makes me feel good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done this in the past and it's successfully reopened at least one question. I've also seen others doing the same thing. It's like a necessary evil given our close vote culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T20:05:50.323" Title="Why are etymology questions that show research getting/staying closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|etymology|research-effort|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11824" CreationDate="2018-11-10T19:34:18.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some thoughts I have on the matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The probable reason&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that needs to be considered is that it takes time for things to be processed through the review queue, and even if a question is rendered acceptable by community standards, there is no guarantee that it will get enough exposure. That the questions were reopened here at meta suggests to me that this was probably why it remained closed after your edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some Other Reasons for Concern&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that there are conflicting ideologies regarding the research guidance. It seems to be roughly down the middle between the philosophy of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1546/basic-questions-are-not-so-basic&quot;&gt;General Reference Standard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; wherein a commonly available resource that adequately answers the question needs to actually exist for a question to be closed, and  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed/5043&quot;&gt;Show the Research Standard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; where any question which fails to produce research is closed. Each proceedure has its own pros and cons. However, it should first be noted that they both share the same common motivations of addressing overly simple questions, and even some of the same outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding those common outcomes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we can rule out the Oxford English Dictionary as being the reason for closure. In the first case, questions are given impunity from a research requirement when a direct authoritative answer is not readily available to the general public, and even when the O.E.D. does authoritatively answer a question, its text is not made readily available. In the latter case, we presume that the questioner's own research efforts are enough to prove that just any ol' answer is not enough, almost irrespective of what resources they choose for their research. Either way, lack of accessibility is not a concern here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding those common motivations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are mostly explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are Some Questions Too Simple&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jeff Atwood, and the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/598/should-we-require-some-reasonable-research-being-done-aka-questions-that-can-b&quot;&gt;Should We Introduce A Reasonable Research Standard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  We are trying to prevent questions that can be can be &quot;definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference site &quot;&lt;em&gt;with no additional explanation necessary.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and to &quot;draw the line in order to avoid English Language &amp;amp; Usage becoming an aggregator of other online resources&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Specific Thoughts Regarding Case 1&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am concerned about the outcome of this case. My own cursory research, to determine if the question complies with the general reference flowchart, was to check to see what the search results for &lt;em&gt;&quot;On the Nose&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Origin&lt;/em&gt; was on  &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/vNENv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.fo/vuVI9#selection-533.49-533.150&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;duckduckgo&lt;/a&gt; and bing (which won't archive unfortunately). In all three cases I got the phrasefinder's answer within the first three results. It was the top answer on Bing and Google. In this respect, your edit in the first case failed to serve the purpose of our closure reason.  I believe that these are reasonably obvious search terms, and if I am not mistaken in that respect, any question regarding this subject &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; include that article in its research and explain why it is suspected to be inadequate, because it is the first place any reasonable effort would have looked.  Just to be clear, I do not mean to suggest that anything that can be found with the aid of a search engine should be barred,  but it should not be from a trusted resource within the first few results of the most cursory search for the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did not want to do that, because you thought it would be overly transformative and put words in the questioner's mouth. I do respect that, because that has its own problems, and as such would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;against editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt; that prohibit changing the intention of the post. If I recall correctly, one of the reasons an edit can be rejected in the review queue is because it attempts to answer the question, which is effectively what adding research often seems like it tries to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a result, the phrasefinder's answer was also included in an answer that simply aggregated theories with no further user input, which is precisely the sort of thing we wished to prevent. I do not mean to be too harsh. I commented upon that answer, and I do agree in part with the response provided with Sven Yargs and user in that there is some value in comiling resources to demonstrate the current state of affairs to demonstrate a present lack of consensus. However, at the same time I believe this is moreso the responsibility of the question than an answer to one, and especially so if the answer does not even attempt to express the conclusion it is trying to support, and why the competing theories  are all equally plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do remember that the help center guidelines for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;referencing material written by others&lt;/a&gt; in an answer requests that we do not merely copy text from external resources, but use select portions to support our own hypothesis. Our contributions need a somewhat personalized touch in order to truly be ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the people we are trying to help are not the direct questioner, but people who share the questioner's concern doing a search engine query that will lead them to the webpage. I think that we should leave the impression that we are a distinctly useful resource that is worth checking to them.&#xA;Now I agree that sometimes even the best of resouces are not enough. I may even agree that questions of origination are a matter of continous research that can not be &quot;definitively and permanently answered&quot;.  However, we have to have a reasonable expectation regarding what constitutes &quot;enough&quot;. When a &lt;em&gt;presumptively correct&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;readily available&lt;/em&gt; answer exists,  disaster can still strike.&#xA;People will exercise faith in the best of resources which are assumed to have rigorously researched the matter, unless it is shown beforehand that any pre-existing available information  is inadequate, so these sorts of questions may garner many votes for them under the presumption that they are correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this is at its very worst, what we end up with is a potentially &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; answer that has an overhwelming amount of consensus expressed through faithful votes, and accepted by the user, making it practically pointless for anybody to try and write a better answer to compete with it on our website, because it will be little viewed and perhaps forever doomed to live in the shadow of the overrated answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it is at its very best, the answer is correct but this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;optimizing for sand, not pearls&lt;/a&gt; and detracts from the distinct usefulness of English Language &amp;amp; Usage as a resource. It also fills the internet with needlessly redundant information, making the truth just that much harder to research because our search result may push a better one down a rank, and displace it onto another page. These are still undesirable consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a direct answer to the question does not already exist, this is not as much of a problem: There is no general reference to exercise faith in, so people trying to answer the question need to thoroughly explain their own hypothesis and exercise some effort in compiling their own evidence to prove why it is likely to be the best one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When questioners include the research themselves to it establishes a minimal standard of evidience. It means an equivalent resources is dissatisfactory to submit as an answer all on its own, because it may be no more truthful than what they already provided. The accepted answer will probably require more thorough treatment, and the people auditing the answers may have an idea that the post is not exactly doing anything to actually help address the concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either of those cases, I would personally grant a question impunity from this type of closure because for all practical intents and purposes, the problem is solved. However, I can not say the same about unilaterally imposed edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I am wrong, but &quot;softball&quot; research by editors does not seem to actually fix the problem much at all. It neither disproves the existance of a problematic general reference answer, nor does it inform us as to what the questioner considers acceptable evidence. Because of these considerations, I would only propose that we edit questions to include research if we can &lt;em&gt;thoroughly prove&lt;/em&gt; that the question is presently unsettled. I do appreciate that you were not trying to make an overly transformative post, but by editing in intentionally weak research, there is a considerable risk that a general reference answer will become the accepted answer because the questioner who did not do that research is still in control. That is purportedly the very last thing that we want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Other Thoughts Regarding Proceedure&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our proceedure does not effectively address the concerns we meant for it to address, then we may as well not have the closure reason, &lt;em&gt;for lack of any practical purpose&lt;/em&gt;. It can only serve to obstruct potentially interesting answers from being given to potentially good subject matter. We should not be doing something so harmful unless there is an overriding benefit to us, such as the ones aforementioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not to say I do not sympathize with your concern that we may be overly zealous with our closure reason. Similarly to your concern for questions of origination as a matter of continous research, I wish people took word comparison questions more seriously, since those often do not have any sort of &lt;em&gt;directly documented answer&lt;/em&gt;. The dictionary is not at all designed to directly compare words and it almost always takes some extra work to explain out what difference the definitions impart, if they even address the concern at all.&#xA;However, despite that and the fact that I think the most commonly checked resources may be in error, I would not encourage reopening a word-comparison question if my cursory research had shown that the question was already addressed by a commonly available existing resource, such as a dictionary of usage, unless I had a reason to suspect that the given answer was wrong and wanted to add my own answer. I do not see you answering the On the Nose Question, and I do not know the full extent of why you so for all we know the Phrasefinder's answer may be the best information currently possible, particularly since it makes reference to a specific dated document, and may be treated as such unless otherwise is proven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, in the future, what I would advise that if you want to have a question reopened without cajoling the questioner into editing the question themselves, that you do is perform a reasonably thorough research effort demonstrating your interest in the question, and consult meta with your planned edit to determine if your interpretation of the post is reasonable by consensus. This way, critical eyes can audit the proposal and determine if iyour proposed edit honors the meaning of the original question, and meta has the chance to audit whether or not the edit solves the problem.&#xA;This is what I tried to do when I asked if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8194/124936&quot;&gt;Why Can We Use Inadequate but not Inspecific&lt;/a&gt; should be reopened, and I only took action once I got the go-ahead after waiting for a consensus to be established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T20:05:50.323" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T20:05:50.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11824" CreationDate="2018-11-11T09:07:37.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Etymology questions are no different from any other on-topic question. If they show no effort and no research, they should be placed on hold until the OP, or someone else, fixes/improves their post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Etymology questions that show research and are not duplicates, should not be closed except in those instances when the answer can be easily googled (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laurel states [emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's particularly worrying is that &lt;strong&gt;some of these questions include research&lt;/strong&gt; (even if it's &quot;softball&quot; research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case 1&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want to see what this question originally looked like when it was closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/462470/1&quot;&gt;Where does the term, &quot;on the nose&quot; come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where does the term, &quot;on the nose&quot; (to mean accuracy) come from? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question consisting of a single line. The OP did not even try to research the answer or if they did, they hadn't shown it. There's a good reason why we ask users to share their research or at least show they attempted. If we didn't, EL&amp;amp;U would become a Q&amp;amp;A etymology dictionary free of charge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To Laurel's bewilderment, despite adding the requisite research&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;…three users voted to keep the question closed, which caused the question to be removed from the reopen queue&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;research&lt;/strong&gt; was &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; softball, minimalist, it suggested restraint. It hinted that the hi-rep editor knew where to find an answer or could have provided more content.  And I suspect that was one of the reasons why the edited question was rejected in the queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it fair to reject it?  No, it wasn't. But the question only supplied the etymology of “nose”. Not impressive detective work by a high-rep user to say the least but perhaps I can guess why Laurel's research was a &lt;em&gt;squishy sponge ball&lt;/em&gt; attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users complain vociferously when a question they consider off-topic is edited. They accuse editors of tampering with the question or making such radical changes that the newly edited question bears no resemblance with the original (usually a wild exaggeration) But users such as myself, @user240918, @Sven Yargs, @JEL, and @sumelic have all, at one time or another, attempted to save or reopen questions we believed were either important for the site or closed unfairly for being off-topic. &lt;strong&gt;There's nothing wrong with adding research on a question to make it on-topic.&lt;/strong&gt; A question that if left alone would rot in the catacombs of EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Honorable Mention&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my very opinionated view, it should never have been closed in the first place, and it's a disgrace it was ever deleted in the first place. The OP had included the research from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/307852/1&quot;&gt;beginning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tZqW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tZqW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone, a hi-rep user, objected [emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question&lt;/strong&gt;, despite being interesting, &lt;strong&gt;has nothing whatsoever to do with English&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;How far is it to the Moon?&quot; has as much to do with English. Asking for its etymology doesn't mean it has a linguistic history, which it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, common sense prevailed, the incriminating term &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt; was switched to &lt;em&gt;origin&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/307852/what-is-the-origin-of-the-half-your-age-plus-seven-phrase&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the &amp;quot;half your age, plus seven&amp;quot; phrase?&lt;/a&gt; is now reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Google's role&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If Googleable information shouldn’t be posted just on the assumption that it is “too easy to find” (the OED included) then a new set of rules should be drawn to state what paper-based information we all should refer to @user240918 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask about the origins of phrases, catch-phrases, slogans, and idioms are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; on-topic if the user (or new contributor) &lt;strong&gt;shares their research&lt;/strong&gt;. If the question has not been asked before, it must stay open on the condition that the user has shared or shown that their research efforts have been fruitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The research doesn't have to include several different sources, even one reference is enough, just as long as it makes it clear why the question is being asked. Personally, I do not count as research the excuse “I Googled but couldn't find an answer” (We also get that here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Let's Use Common Sense&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should a question about the history and meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22to%20be%20or%20not%20to%20be%22%20origin&quot;&gt;“to be or not to be”&lt;/a&gt; be left open? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the exact phraseology from Case 1, someone might post the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where does &lt;em&gt;“to be or not to be”&lt;/em&gt; come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's on-topic, it's an extremely common &lt;em&gt;slogan&lt;/em&gt;, and what's more, it has never been asked on this site either. But is it too easy to answer and &lt;em&gt;Google&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undoubtedly, &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;. So, closure is the only sensible option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the following hypothetical question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does ‘a man's best friend is his dog’ mean?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that question be on-topic today on EL&amp;amp;U? Would a question that didn't even attempt to look up its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/a-dog-is-a-man-s-best-friend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; survive longer than a couple of hours on the main page? Then why should it be any different if the question is about its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/mans-best-friend.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;origin&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing, EL&amp;amp;U users are expected to look up definitions on the Internet, and it's the easiest thing in the world to do. Can't find an answer? Then say so &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the question. SHARE the research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the OP &lt;em&gt;explained&lt;/em&gt; their confusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean a dog is a “best friend”?&lt;/strong&gt; (title)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I often see or hear the saying &lt;em&gt;“A dog is a man's best friend”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why is it only &quot;man&quot; and not &lt;em&gt;men and women&lt;/em&gt;?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Why isn't it &quot;pet&quot;? How can a dog be &lt;em&gt;a friend&lt;/em&gt; to a person?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my culture dogs are said to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_animal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unclean&lt;/a&gt; and I think they are also very dangerous animals, so I do not understand this phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to none research but it matters less. The question seems to be quite &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;, and the answer is not easy to Google unless you know where to look. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP explained why they are asking, and answering the question would include its historical origin and a grammar explanation. That would be quite a good question for &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site, pity I can't post it here myself. If I did, users would shut it down within hours because I am a high-rep user who should know better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T18:39:23.867" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T18:39:23.867" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11816" CreationDate="2018-11-11T17:17:01.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of the definite article is not what you want. What you want is to learn about the quality of &lt;strong&gt;Definiteness&lt;/strong&gt;, and this is not wrapped up in the use of the definite article but in the use of definite noun phrases. No one has yet come up with a single theory that accounts for all uses of definite noun phrases in English. Much of it has to do with what the speaker assumes about his interlocutor (hearer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a start, you could consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/298746/210913&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on the main site; which is partially based upon Birner &amp;amp; Ward's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~ward/BLS94.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uniqueness, Familiarity, and the Definite Article in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (pdf); Abbott's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.msu.edu/user/abbottb/def_and_indef.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definiteness and indefiniteness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (pdf); Epstein's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~israel/Epstein-DefArt-01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The definite article, accessibility, and the construction of discourse referents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (pdf); important also is &lt;a href=&quot;http://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/4994/b14798487.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indefinite &quot;this&quot; and the givenness hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; (pdf); (while teaching helps such as &lt;em&gt;Over Usage of the Definite Article Among Speakers of English as a Second Language in Sri Lanka: Reasons and Solutions&lt;/em&gt; and other resources &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Definite_Article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; may also be of help); after that, you can do searches for other resources.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plethora of resources and the linguistic and metaphysical theories that inform them is why this is not a topic that can be summarized in a pithy manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T17:17:01.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T12:04:35.993" Score="5" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Bounties increase exposure and visibility” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, and I'm the queen of Sheba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/471762/was-lukewarm-a-way-of-saying-warm-warm&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, and was thrilled to receive answers from a Frisian and a Dutch speaker. I was so thrilled because the two answers were original and included references too, so I felt compelled to award &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/471908/44619&quot;&gt;@Janne B&lt;/a&gt; a 50 rep bounty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could offer a second 50 rep bounty to @Henno Brandsma I would do, but it's against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/105639/223820&quot;&gt;bounty regulations&lt;/a&gt; and more of that later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was still in/on the HNQ list, it had earned 19 upvotes, the first two answers posted had already garnered consensus but I felt it was a pity that two answers from two new contributors seemed to be largely ignored. I wanted greater attention for &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; answers. They deserved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I placed the bounty with anticipation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MASSIVE SLUMP IN VIEWS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of views slowed to a limping snail's pace. However, @JEL did post a rather &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/472147/44619&quot;&gt;fantastic answer&lt;/a&gt; so not all was in vain but still... neither did his answer earn the recognition it deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each and every time I fall for this idea that bounties help increase a question's visibility and exposure. And no, I'm not forgetting its &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/223820&quot;&gt;main scope&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A bounty is a special reputation award given to answers. &lt;strong&gt;This feature was designed to motivate answerers, and help questions get the answers they deserve&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting that elusive answer is an important and fundamental requisite and a perfectly natural desire. But you're more likely to receive a higher number of answers and &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; answers too if the question enters the HNQ. (You hit the jackpot if your question is answered by tchrist, Sven Yargs, JEL, Araucaria or Janus Bahs Jacquet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bounties &lt;em&gt;on EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt; do not guarantee exposure or visibility, not anymore&lt;/strong&gt;. They're like the kiss of death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, bounties on EL&amp;amp;U are not as effective as they once were. Leaving aside off-topic and VLQ questions, if an on-topic question does not get those invaluable three or four upvotes and an answer in the first 2 hours (?), the post will likely disappear from the main page. One solution is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/48578/what-can-cause-a-question-to-be-bumped&quot;&gt;&quot;bumping&quot;&lt;/a&gt; because a post is more likely to get some kind of response if it stays on the first page. This tactic isn't necessary if the post hits HNQ because the traffic it attracts is very powerful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm left with a dilemma, award a 100 rep bounty to @Henno Brandsma and then 200 rep bounty to JEL's answer. I wish I could award three bounties of 50 rep each. What to do....what to do....?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please discuss. And please provide data to either confirm or refute my assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;  17/11/2018&lt;br&gt;&#xA;JEL is awarding a 100 bounty rep to Henno Brandsma's fine &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/471968/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T19:39:01.197" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:39:01.197" Title="“Bounties increase exposure and visibility” Do they?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11828" CreationDate="2018-11-13T13:14:51.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Ludomania!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11828/bounties-increase-exposure-and-visibility-do-they?noredirect=1#comment50701_11828&quot;&gt;I said in my comments&lt;/a&gt;, we all know the answer to this question (and we know the fundamental flaw in the question, too).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;FOR SCIENCE!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForScience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ꜰᴏʀ sᴄɪᴇɴᴄᴇ!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; here is some data anyway.  I ran the query in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/238906/273503&quot;&gt;the MSE post I pointed you&lt;/a&gt; to on the current EL&amp;amp;U SEDE database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the material results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bounty?  N        avg_score  avg_max_score  accept_rate  avg_views &#xA;-------  ------   ---------  -------------  -----------  --------- &#xA;No       109,471  2          4.61           0.458        7,253&#xA;Yes      941      4.2        15.36          0.672        15,041     &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;bountied questions get, on average, &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt; the number of views&lt;/strong&gt; as non-bountied questions, and their scores (+1s) also increase commensurately. Which means you're reaching people who have +1 privs who &lt;em&gt;do not usually vote&lt;/em&gt; (low-rep users and users from other stacks, like with the HNQ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, what about answers then?  Same deal.  Here's stats for the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; questions before and after bountying them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;rel_date  N      avg_score  bountied_rate  accepted_rate &#xA;--------  ----   ---------  -------------  ------------- &#xA;before    2,573  8.5        0.114          0.111         &#xA;after     3,835  2.2        0.178          0.099         &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than &lt;strong&gt;a thousand answers were posted as &lt;em&gt;direct responses&lt;/em&gt; to bounties&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Gambling twice doesn't double my stack?!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, turning to the idea that you considered posting &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; bounties on this question, I'll just quote the conclusions Jon Ericson♦ drew in his more expert analysis of a much larger dataset:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bounties certainly increase attention (as designed). There is some indication that a single bounty also increases answer quality, &lt;strong&gt;but multiple bounties probably don't increase anything but attention&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm only looking at Stack Overflow, but spot checks other sites show similar results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Caveat gamblor&amp;sup1;!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the data bears out everything we thought it would.  To which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11828/bounties-increase-exposure-and-visibility-do-they/11829#comment50706_11828&quot;&gt;you responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that was posted fours years ago and it's not valid for EL&amp;amp;U. ... I'm saying ~Bounties on EL&amp;amp;U do not guarantee exposure or visibility, not anymore~ Emphasis on not anymore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, no, emphasis on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do not guarantee&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  There are &lt;em&gt;no guarantees in life&lt;/em&gt;, not here on EL&amp;amp;U nor anywhere else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question boils down to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/56299/273503&quot;&gt;exactly the same complaint users &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; post&lt;/a&gt; about bounties when they didn't get the results they wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it's the same complaint people have made to their marketing folks &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en/resources/blog/half-money-i-spend-advertising-wasted-trouble-i-dont-know-which-half&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;since advertising was invented&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not paying for results. &lt;strong&gt;No one can guarantee you results&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/28/magazine/on-language-you-pays-yer-money.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You pays your &lt;s&gt;money&lt;/s&gt; points, and you takes your chances.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;I thought &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-meaning-of/latin-word-e9ee6da5754332bbadf12f76ec7b37b1bc7c1012.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lusor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would be funnier, but ran a real risk of being taken the wrong way.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T13:37:36.947" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T13:37:36.947" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11810" CreationDate="2018-11-14T08:46:21.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I get in touch with a particular user…&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;added restriction&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;…who is no longer active on the main site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, as a normal user or new contributor, &lt;strong&gt;you can't&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3985/feature-request-private-messaging&quot;&gt;Private messaging&lt;/a&gt; is not allowed on EL&amp;amp;U. There is no quick surefire way of contacting an absentee user unless that user has an email address on their profile page (some do) or you happen to know someone on ELU who has that person's private email address.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how could a new contributor possibly have access to this kind of information? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By posting on meta the OP struck lucky, someone who read their request and (more importantly) recognized their identity, felt particularly ashamed by some of the responses supplied by experienced and thoughtful users and sought to contact the OP privately.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's a cringing embarrassment, like the one you feel when watching a journalist try to tell the Dalai Lama a joke about the Dalai Lama ordering a pizza&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question remains: would the same user have still intervened if the OP hadn't been   “&lt;em&gt;…a leading light in matters where linguistics and technology converge.&lt;/em&gt;”? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T09:15:11.000" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T09:15:11.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T10:36:17.567" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/471897/what-is-the-best-word-for-a-menu-item-on-a-website-for-a-page-that-shows-how-to/471906#471906&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asking for a suitable &quot;one-word menu title&quot; has recently been closed (&quot;off topic&quot;). One of the reasons given in a comment is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...because each word request needs to be set in a textual context (a sentence or a paragraph)...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an accurate interpretation of ELU guidelines - words can only be discussed on ELU if they are part of a sentence or paragraph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103961" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T18:55:03.523" Title="Are menu titles off topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11831" CreationDate="2018-11-15T10:59:23.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the help center &quot;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&quot; is listed as off-topic, which might lead some people to think that the &quot;What is a one-word menu title for such a menu item?&quot; is off-topic. That's not really the question here though - the question is &quot;What is the English equivalent for this German word that we use in this situation. If y'all don't want it, that is perfectly on-topic on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T10:59:23.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11831" CreationDate="2018-11-15T11:37:34.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted the comment you’re referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not necessarily the case that words can only be discussed in the context of sentences or paragraphs. We can talk about the etymology of a word without much context, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, word requests are a bit of a contentious topic here. I think they can be quite interesting, but some hold the view that they should be considered off-topic, particularly when it starts to blur into “give this thing a name”. After all, there’s little difference between asking for a variable name (which is explicitly off-topic) and asking for a menu title. And the ‘best’ title might not even be an English word - it could be an icon or emoji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compromise is that if something is really a question about English rather than about UI etc, it should be set in a ‘literary’ context. That’s what gives rise to the request for a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T11:37:34.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11821" CreationDate="2018-11-15T14:17:29.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There might also be &lt;strong&gt;causes of these questions intrinsic to the two languages themselves&lt;/strong&gt;: the French language has grammar rules that may &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; more difficult, because they are more explicit (words and modifiers have more inflections). English, by contrast has a vast and varied corpus, with words and terms coming from different origins, with frequent overlaps (see &lt;em&gt;nimble&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;agile&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;freedom&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;liberty&lt;/em&gt;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many explanations for this, one being that English was born as a spectacular collision of different languages in a very short period of time, and that today there are no absolute references for English language (hence British English, American English, etc.). As a first-degree approximation, we could say that English is much more &quot;distributed&quot; and &quot;equalitarian&quot; (this is not a moral appreciation, this is a statement of fact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, French evolved as a slow process of absortion of Frankish into Latin, which gave it a much more homogeneous vocabulary. Furthermore, the reference for French is, geographically, &lt;em&gt;Paris&lt;/em&gt;, and a higher degree of institutional normalization (indeed, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-dictionnaire/la-9e-edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française&lt;/a&gt;, but other ones). There are national and regional variants, but almost all French native speakers over the world will recognize a hierarchy of grammatical and lexical norms, with Paris at the center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reflect the &lt;strong&gt;increased lexical complexity&lt;/strong&gt; of English, dictionaries have a feature that French dictionaries often lack: the &quot;synonym study&quot;, which explains the differences between words, sometimes in great detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French dictionaries do not have this feature, presumably because that language includes new words much more sparingly, and frowns on &lt;strong&gt;lexical doublets&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. words that mean almost exactly the same thing (&lt;a href=&quot;https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/sesterhenn_karen_e_201605_ma.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see article on it&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is my take: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The number of lexical questions (right word, expression, what's the meaning of, etc.) on this exchange is bound to be much higher on this forum than on a French equivalent&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no helping it, because it is intrinsic to the reality of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second part has to do with the &lt;strong&gt;etiquette involved in asking a lexical question&lt;/strong&gt;. Since there are many sources on the English lexical corpus, such as dictionaries or thesauruses, etc., not to mention StackExchange, it is expected that a person with such a question should make a little research before asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with this? With education, and sometimes with a gentle slap on the hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fun Fact&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another approach: back in an earlier geological era (early 2000s) when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;usenet&lt;/a&gt; was the dominant form of exchange on the Internet, there was a running gag on a French newsgroup : for some unknown reason, the most asked question was &quot;what is the derivation of &lt;em&gt;autant pour moi&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;. The approach to that question was humorous: it became &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.langue-fr.net/spip.php?article28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a race to invent the most extravagant or surreal explanations&lt;/a&gt;, always imparted in the most serious and learned way. It was an unending source of fun for us...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were much more libertarian times and furthermore &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.langue-fr.net/spip.php?article183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there was no way to silence the jerks&lt;/a&gt;. I suspect that in this present era of ponderous seriousness and academic soul-searching, giving a surreal answer would be frowned upon and downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point being that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://By%20contrast,%20English%20is%20much%20more%20%22distributed%22%20and%20%22equalitarian%22%20(this%20is%20not%20a%20moral%20appreciation,%20this%20is%20a%20statement%20of%20fact).&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;being rigorous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; should be understood as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Characterized by or adhering to strict standards or methods; exacting and thorough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adhering strictly to a belief or ideology; uncompromising or inflexible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgetting to be serious about it, could sometimes go a long way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202177" LastEditorUserId="202177" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T14:45:18.733" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T14:45:18.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11831" CreationDate="2018-11-15T18:45:00.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. There is no &lt;em&gt;blanket&lt;/em&gt; rule that questions about words are off-topic &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; because the context is other than a sentence, such as a label of a menu tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of EL&amp;amp;U is to maintain the definitive list of English language frequently-answered questions (and even the long tail of infrequently-answered questions). Some basic required properties of an on-topic EL&amp;amp;U question are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question is about the the English language: word meanings, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, history, etc.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closed question has this property.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question is about English, not about learning English (see ELL) or about this site (see ELU meta).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closed question has this property also.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An English expert could give the question an objectively correct answer. That is, it does not merely solicit ideas, items, opinions, and discussion. When answered, the question is properly part of an English FAQ. And it is not dependent on expert knowledge of fields other than English to answer it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the closed question can have an objectively correct answer. Essentially it wants the prevalent English word used to title the &quot;how to get to our office&quot; section of a website. For context, it explains that in German, there is such a word, &quot;Anreise&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could be improved by changing the last sentence, which currently makes it more of a German translation question (and therefore dependent on expert knowledge of German to answer it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the asker really does have a subjective question that is looking for ideas, items, opinions, and discussion, great! A welcoming place for that discussion is our &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Chat&lt;/a&gt;. Refer them there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The asker has already done the research preliminaries and is not using the site to avoid making an effort.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closed question is weak in this area, but looks like it could be reopened with not much work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question already mentions the words &quot;arrival&quot;, &quot;journey&quot;, and &quot;location&quot;, but has not explained why they were rejected. &quot;Sound odd&quot; and &quot;only one I can think of&quot; is not enough. Otherwise the question did a pretty good job of giving the context. It should also point to the specific reference works consulted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, adding constructive comments asking for the missing information often turns a question around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a word request, you can refer the asker to the single-word-request tag wiki, which details the information needed. What we want on any word request is research details, especially solutions already rejected, and why, plus the desired connotation, register (formality), part of speech, and exact context in which it is to be used, including the exact enclosing sentence or passage (in this case, not applicable). This is the information that can make a word request clear and narrow enough to be answered objectively, not just responded to with ideas, items, or opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastEditorUserId="14073" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T18:55:03.523" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T18:55:03.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11842" CreationDate="2018-11-16T04:35:56.150" Score="23" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;This new user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/324324/airport-chariot-car-and-limo&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/324324/airport-chariot-car-and-limo&lt;/a&gt; has a user ID that nakedly promotes a car-hire service. In the last day or so they've posted a dozen or more answers and edits of very modest quality, a result of which is their product has been conspicuously displayed on multiple pages on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raised a mod flag for this as follows, but my flag was declined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This user has posted a half-dozen answers in the last 5 hours but&#xA;  they've created their user ID to promote a product so all their&#xA;  answers are spam. – Chappo 16 hours ago   declined - a moderator&#xA;  reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand. So we're vigilant in rejecting questions and answers that promote a commercial product, but it's ok to create a user ID that could be interpreted as a Trojan horse for getting your product promoted on every question, answer and edit that you post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to add some additional information and clarifications in light of the many answers and comments here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I had searched on the SE Meta site for guidance on this issue but failed to come up with anything meaningful, no doubt because my search for &lt;em&gt;spam user ID&lt;/em&gt; wasn't precise enough. ColleenV found the following relevant links: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/41621/273494&quot;&gt;Does a username qualify as&#xA;spam?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/37947/273494&quot;&gt;Policy on Display&#xA;Names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/61249/&quot;&gt;Usernames as Advertising or&#xA;Spam?&lt;/a&gt; (and in&#xA;particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/100922/328829&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino's&#xA;answer&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/303746/328829&quot;&gt;Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for&#xA;mods to deal with profile&#xA;spam?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/297993&quot;&gt;What is the policy on destroying users with very spammy profiles but&#xA;have not posted spam&#xA;yet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I posted on EL&amp;amp;U Meta in the first instance because, in the first instance, this was a question about how my flag was handled. As it turns out, I think here &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the right place to post it. If I'd had more time, I might instead have ping'd a mod on Chat and received similar advice, but ultimately that would have had a more limited audience. The information here is more easily found than on a historic Chat thread.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If - as appears to be the case - there is no SE prohibition on creating a personal profile that includes your business name (as username), business description and business contact details - then so be it. I'm not entirely comfortable with such a policy, but there are plenty of other things about Stack Exchange our user community has expressed discomfort about as well. It takes more than the odd shard of glass to create a broken window effect. &lt;em&gt;Move on; nothing to see here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This was a question about site policy, and was not intended as a personal attack on the individual user. I've edited my question to remove any unintended suggestion of &lt;em&gt;motive&lt;/em&gt; on the users's part. I certainly welcome any user who shares with me a delight in the English language and an enthusiasm for building the value of our site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11836/why-is-promoting-your-product-through-your-user-id-not-spam/11849#comment50740_11836&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;, the user asked &quot;Will you stop chasing me all over Stack sites now?&quot; This is an unfounded slur: I have not targeted the user on any other site and had not even been aware of their activity on other sites until I'd read the answers here. My actions towards the user on EL&amp;amp;U have consisted of voting to delete some system-identified posts on the LQP queue, rejecting a spurious edit in the Suggested Edits queue, raising a spam flag (&lt;em&gt;which was accepted!&lt;/em&gt;) on an answer, posting a general mod flag when it appeared there were multiple similar posts (see above flag rejection) and posting this question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T00:44:42.063" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T00:44:42.063" Title="Why is promoting your product through your user ID not spam?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11836" CreationDate="2018-11-16T06:22:41.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems this has been raised several times over the years, such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/217778/flag-offensive-user-profile?s=7%7C59.4310&quot;&gt;Flag offensive user profile [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;. But they mostly get closed as duplicates of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1323/flag-abusive-users&quot;&gt;&#xA;Flag abusive users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least a couple that weren't marked as duplicates, however, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/303746/spam-profiles-are-getting-my-goat-could-we-have-better-tools-for-mods-to-deal-w?s=13%7C49.1841&quot;&gt;Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/297993/what-is-the-policy-on-destroying-users-with-very-spammy-profiles-but-have-not-po&quot;&gt;What is the policy on destroying users with very spammy profiles but have not posted spam yet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consensus seems to be that it's only a problem if a &lt;em&gt;post&lt;/em&gt; contains spam. And if you go to the trouble of bringing up such a profile, it may or may not be dealt with. The impression I get is that it's not really a big deal if it's only in the profile itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I just used &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=spam%20user%20profile%20is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; basic query. I also didn't look at every result. (If this question is migrated, it will likely get closed as a duplicate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T06:22:41.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11840" CreationDate="2018-11-16T06:46:48.400" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it considered rude or bad form to either comment on or edit an original poster's question title in order to fix a grammatical error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324324" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T07:32:52.187" Title="Edit to the OP's question title" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-11-21T12:32:52.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11836" CreationDate="2018-11-16T07:21:49.487" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is nothing new, really. Across the network there have been similar users time and time again, and I think there's a consensus: unless there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;spam&lt;/a&gt; (or some other serious misbehavior) &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; the username/profile, it is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I've seen, the user is acting just like a regular user. I haven't seen any &quot;covert spam&quot; (which would include sneaky links that only link one character&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/320786/6083675&quot;&gt;,&lt;/a&gt; or answers that are plagiarism + link to website). I would attribute the &quot;very modest quality&quot; of the content to newb mistakes (as all new users are wont to do), but the user has been good responding to feedback so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite justification so far for allowing this type of username/profile is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/100922/323179&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt;'s. In order for a user to get their name out there, they have to actually do good things for the site. When we &quot;trick&quot; people into writing great answers to questions and such that's just &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/810/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mission f—ing accomplished&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It might be different if the product being sold were lewd or illegal or if it was offensive in some way, but that's not what's happening here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T07:27:50.543" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T07:27:50.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11838" CreationDate="2018-11-16T07:32:52.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire point of allowing anyone to edit posts is so that mistakes can be fixed. Because your edits will need to be approved by other users, make sure you fix as many problems with the post as you can. Try to leave as good an edit summary as possible, since edit summaries are public (the original poster is likely to see it, so don't be rude!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the very basics, so if there's anything else you want to know feel free to ask me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For extremely in depth information see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/76251/323179&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T07:32:52.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11836" CreationDate="2018-11-16T09:14:49.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user name is not expected to be educational or unbiased. Putting a product name in that space, rather than some other handle or arbitrary string of numbers, doesn't detract from the informational content of this site. There is no implication that Stack Exchange endorses or recommends things mentioned in user names (outside of the very general principle that users with offensive names might be forced to change them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't see any sign of deceptive behavior here, which is something else that is particularly emphasized as unacceptable in the Stack Exchange page on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;How to not be a spammer&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Putting your product in your username seems like a particularly obvious form of promotion and disclosure of affiliation; I don't see how it could be described as &quot;Trojan horse&quot;-like or &quot;covert&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, using your real name as a username could be seen as a way of &quot;promoting&quot; your own personal brand, but this is certainly not forbidden behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T09:19:54.187" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T09:19:54.187" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11836" CreationDate="2018-11-16T12:30:22.777" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed this user yesterday and I will be keeping an eye on them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to profiles, self promotion is acceptable there. Profile links are &quot;nofollow&quot;ed, so shouldn't be indexed by search engines, so the only people who see it are people who visit it deliberately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been in two minds about the user name, as that is clearly advertising, but, at the same time, it's not a link to anything and it's not offensive. I consulted other moderators and there wasn't a clear consensus about resetting the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules on user names have been discussed on meta meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/41621/273494&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/37947/273494&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (Thanks to ColleenV.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T11:42:07.427" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T11:42:07.427" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11836" CreationDate="2018-11-17T00:46:40.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our help center policies regarding how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;How Not to Be A Spamer&lt;/a&gt; are somewhat lenient since it actually allows limited certain cases of self-promotion, and actually prefers a disclosure of affiliation in cases where it is relevant to the question. The main restrictions are for the posts to be germane, to not mention your product in every post and to disclose your affiliation when it is relevant to the answer. The poster seems to be honoring that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably also worth noting that the username is neither a permanent nor a unique identifier, so its purpose is merely ornamental. Your permanent and unique identifier is your user I.D. number, which you can not select yourself. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Asking questions and getting answers with no nonsense on the other hand, is the very core purpose of this website&lt;/a&gt;, so it is important to keep them relevant. You could argue that the username and web-avatar are distracting, but I doubt they are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt;  any &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; distracting than &lt;em&gt;any other user name or web-avatar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user is proliferating answers which are just answers, rather than being fact or reference based but this is a common mistake for new users, and the help center has no requirement that answers actually be fact or reference based.  It specifies that questions should solicit answers that are fact or reference based. If the answers are just bad, vote against them as you would against any other user (don't serial vote) and if the community deems that too many are rated negatively then an automatic answer ban will be imposed. The ornamental value is of comparatively lesser importance compared to other websites,  because  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92110/371286&quot;&gt;we are not a social internet forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user is determined to be making an overall positive contribution to the website, then I see little to no practical reason to take special measures against usernames that seem to be fiscally motivated. This very same proliferation of answers would actually be a very much desirable outcome because first and foremost we aim to provide good answers to unanswered questions to help everybody learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine for a moment that this was not an obscure limousine service, but it was instead Oxford University Press trying to make a coporate identifier so that they could contribute the fruits of highly esteemable research as a teaser for the sort of information you might want to find within the pages of their books? I doubt many of us would object to that with adequate verification, and it would be very similar in nature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if a large corporation like Coca~Cola or Pepsi wanted to sponsor a full time expert to answer questions in order to proliferate their brand name for a relatively low cost, then I see very little reason to see that as much other than a mutually beneficial arrangement, provided that other policies were obeyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not to say there is no reason. I remember earning &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/reduced-ads&quot;&gt;the reduced ads privilege in the past&lt;/a&gt; and allowing advertising to show up kind of betrays the people who have earned it and would rather not see any advertising, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;but I do not see it listed in our local help center&lt;/a&gt; for some reason, so I am unsure of its direct relevance to English Language &amp;amp; Usage. Also, I could see why corporate might decide that they would not want to allow it for fiscal reasons, but corporate can tell us if they want to disallow it for that reason. I would also be concerned that scammers might pose as a legitimate business to defraud our users in some way, which calls for some moderator scrutiny over the profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, if a user is not causing active harm by violating our other policies, then I see no real point in prohibiting sponsored user I.D. and profile information. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/52760/371286&quot;&gt;This is especially the case for the profile page in particular, which is meant to be a place where a user can post whatever they want&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, provided that it does not violate the code of conduct (note the higher rated answer). Also, if you are clicking on a username which identifies the user as a limousine service, then I doubt the profile information found there would come as any sort of real surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T04:42:37.123" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T04:42:37.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T08:36:36.867" Score="7" ViewCount="511" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to request more reopen votes for the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105530/does-a-person-have-two-masters-degrees-or-two-master-s-degrees&quot;&gt;Does a person have two “masters’ degrees” or two “master’s degrees”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described clearly in the question post, it is not answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3638/is-there-an-apostrophe-in-a-masters-degree&quot;&gt;Is there an apostrophe in a master&amp;#39;s degree?&lt;/a&gt;, which doesn't discuss the placement of the apostrophe in the plural form of &lt;em&gt;Master's degree.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m grateful for the additional votes: the question is now reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T19:11:11.740" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T04:57:18.077" Title="&quot;Masters degree&quot; vs. &quot;Master's degree&quot; is not the same question as &quot;Master's degrees&quot; vs. &quot;Masters' degrees&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11844" CreationDate="2018-11-17T12:11:23.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is not a duplicate for that reason, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;it does not show the questioner's attempt at research&lt;/a&gt;, and more importantly to me it may even be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;General Reference&lt;/a&gt;, so I do not think the community should cast votes to reopen it. In my general reference check, the first thing I thought to check is &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/YQhLU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;master degree plural possessive&lt;/a&gt; and I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jhsph.edu/news/style_manual/d.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johns Hopkins Bloomburg School of Public Health's style guide&lt;/a&gt; as my third result on google, which has the following advice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Multiple master of arts (or master of science) degrees&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances is the form &quot;masters&quot; (an &quot;s&quot; with no apostrophe) appropriate.&#xA;  Use the plural form as follows:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have master of arts degrees in English and history.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have masters' degrees in English and history.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The School offers masters' programs in public health, health science and health administration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example seems to demonstrate that the plural possessive form of masters' would be used for multiple degrees, even if there is only one possessor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I would rather not reopen a question just to risk having what may be a general reference answer posted to it. Are there more reasonable search terms that would be more likely to be used in a cursory search, or do you find that answer to be inadequate in some way? Do you want to post a better answer? If you can explain why you think it is not general reference despite this cursory check, then I will consider casting my vote, but otherwise I do not think the question should be left open long enough to post an answer, and the community is slow to close questions that should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a moderator could reopen the question and swiftly reclose it, so that the right closure reason shows and people are not redirected to the wrong target question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T12:21:45.993" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T12:21:45.993" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T16:25:26.220" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Full disclosure: I have the currently top-ranked (4 UV) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP asked for a single-word meaning &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473345/looking-for-a-word-for-not-up-for-discussion/473348#473348&quot;&gt;not up for discussion&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. I posted the first answer, and four others (2 nearly identical to each other) were posted after. All the answers are fairly synonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the proper protocol here?&lt;/strong&gt; I could improve my answer to include the other words, but that feels petty. Should I do it anyway? And of course the OP could pick their preferred word, but since all the answers are valid, that seems both misleading accuracy-wise and unfair reputation-wise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This linked question didn't show up in my initial research, I'm guessing due to my use of different phrasing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5126/should-we-encourage-posting-distinct-answers-separately-particularly-for-sing&quot;&gt;Should we encourage posting distinct answers separately? (Particularly for [single-word-requests])&lt;/a&gt; As the top answer suggests, a collective answer with very little distinction between them, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/327756/english-equivalent-for-the-persian-expression-to-keep-ones-face-red-with-slap/327762#327762&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, is acceptable but a single post with highly varied answers is not. However, I think my question here is distinct enough to not be a duplicate since we individually added to the laundry list of valid answers (barring an improved question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99792" LastEditorUserId="99792" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T04:49:22.410" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T04:49:22.410" Title="Should we compile synonymous answers?" Tags="|discussion|answering-advice|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11846" CreationDate="2018-11-17T16:46:29.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you decide to take an idea from another answer, that’s acceptable as long as you properly credit all work by others that you include in your post. There’s detailed information in the site help about how to give credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the period of time when a question is actively being worked on, write the best answer you can and leave others to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, at least on high value questions, the community will sometimes act as curators, editing and improving the question and answers. At the same time, we might delete answers which clearly add no value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a great Q&amp;amp;A that gives several different points of view on curation of high-value questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/103053&quot;&gt;How aggressively should we maintain and improve very popular questions?&lt;/a&gt;”, from &lt;em&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T16:46:29.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11846" CreationDate="2018-11-17T20:30:02.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking an idea from another answer to make a better answer would be good as Meta-Ed mentioned, but it should also be noted that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;we disallow exact duplicate answers&lt;/a&gt;. While an answer that compiles other answers would not be an &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicate, it would be very similar in principle if you have nothing to additional to contribute of your own beyond what was already written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also fail to see any good reason for just compiling the other answers. They are already compiled on the same webpage under the question, so it would not really serve any unique beneficial purpose. If somebody wants to see all of the suggestions, then they can just scroll further down the page in most cases. It takes up extra space for no extra benefit insofar as I can imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, answers which suggest multiple unrelated suggestions kind of defeat the point of our democratic system of peer review. If you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt;, you will note that it states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;up vote&lt;/h3&gt;  &#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good answers are voted up and rise to the top.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The best answers show up first so that they are always easy to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if there are any bad answers, then we are supposed to vote against them in part to achieve the opposite  effect, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;in part to serve as a warning that negatively rated answers are problematic.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sorts of answers may be voted down the list despite having good information because it is lumped in with bad information, or bad information could be voted up it because it was lumped in with good information, and, unless our readership is telepathic, with the extra special ability to read the minds of people who may be thousands of miles away, sight unseen, we are left with no certain recourse to determine for what people voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compiling the suggestions should probably only be done if you want to do it in a manner that helps to prove why your answer is right. Maybe one suggestion can serve to prove a point about your own, or maybe you want to disprove that the other suggestions are as applicable as your own to make your answer more definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would advise against compiling just for compilation's sake. As a matter of fact, even if you have multiple suggestions of your own, then it is probably just better to write multiple answers for sorting purposes. (Yes, I realize I have answers that have multiple suggestions: I was copying other people until I saw another meta question which raised that particular issue and really thought about it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T20:35:27.107" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T20:35:27.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11836" CreationDate="2018-11-17T23:34:07.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has sort of rubbed me the wrong way, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there isn't a policy prohibiting advertising in profiles, I would at least hope that there would more effort put into answers on the exchange than into details included in the advertisement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the answers posted by this user thus far have seemed hastily put-together, often consisting of nothing more a couple short examples or a single sentence, without any corroborating research: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fly-on-the-wall observation is an observation technique where you can place yourself in a non-obtrusive position and observe from a distance. ...&quot; - loft.io  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473180/is-there-a-word-meaning-to-assess-from-afar-or-something-similar/473208#473208&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The word you are seeking does not exist, it's just a noun phrase. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473018/what-is-the-name-for-noun-phrases-similar-to-pound-of-flesh/473057#473057&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You were advised that your prescription would be ready by 12 noon and asked if it would be okay for it to be delivered, you agreed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473132/is-this-sentence-correct/473137#473137&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That place was a legend! That place was a tradition! &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/471881/looking-for-a-word-that-describes-a-place-or-experience-that-means-something-dif/473199#473199&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I will be out of the office starting tomorrow until 20th Nov,2018&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I will be out of the office from Nov. 16th to Nov 20th, 2018&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473048/i-am-out-of-office-from-tomorrow-to-20th-nov-2018-is-this-correct-grammatic/473050#473050&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A comma would be not be completely out of place if the sentence was worded: Dr. John Smith, of the University of Chicago, is the visiting professor. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/473055&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plunged into darkness.  Plunged into night.  The city was plunged into darkness.&#xA;The planet was plunged into night. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473100/word-or-phrase-for-a-sudden-change-of-day-to-night/473210#473210&quot;&gt;→&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a grand total of 147 words in seven answers, compared to over 150 words in the profile-advertisement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if the answers had been more substantial and detailed, this would have been less of an issue. It's hard not to question one's motives when the ad is so thick compared to the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest beefing up the answers and toning down the ad for the time being, but that's merely a suggestion. If nothing else, it might show that the person is truly interested in helping the community rather than coming on board primarily to get some free advertising. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18220" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T23:34:07.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-18T23:18:28.190" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why I am Asking&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/85948/discussion-between-tonepoet-and-robbie-goodwin&quot;&gt;a little editorial dispute&lt;/a&gt; between me and another user, who was not the original author of the question. The complaintant was requesting clarification from the author, because he felt inadequate information was provided by the links. I added the information I felt to be relevant, but asked me from where everything I did came, and after I explained he indicated that either me or the questioner should have done some google searching. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/85948/conversation/commentary&quot;&gt;The exact details regarding the exchange can be seen in this transcript&lt;/a&gt;, if anybody is curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite that, at least for now, I have rolled back the question because I am not the original author either, and I want to be sure that my contribution was represntitive of the original question, permissible, and most importantly left the question in a better state than how I found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dispute regarded &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473555/how-old-is-the-use-of-steal-for-non-rival-goods&quot;&gt;How Old is the Use of Steal for Non-Rival Goods?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What I am asking&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking about three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the information in the links originally provided by the questioner adequately explain the questioner's circumstance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/473555/2&quot;&gt;Revision 2&lt;/a&gt; an overall improvement to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/473555/1&quot;&gt;revision 1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did I go overboard with the edit, or was it compliant with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What I (Suppose I) Did&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, I did a few practically meaningless things, because when we edit posts, we are not supposed to change the meaning. However I thought the changes I made were useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I added details regarding the linked articles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I included a quotation from a linked Wikipedia article to help try and define a term of the art, which I supposed would clarify its meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I added requisite CC-BY-SA legal information for the quotation in a footnote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I subdivided the question into a few portions to account for the extra length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment requesting&lt;/a&gt; these changes since I have the edit everywhere privilege, and I figured everything I was doing was reflective of the questioner's understanding of his problem. My edit was drastic, but I tried to preserve the originally intended meaning of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because the relevance of my own answer to the question has been questioned, perhaps I misunderstood. I am not sure how I could have possibly changed the meaning of the post,  since I derived almost everything from author provided resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My Basic Understanding of the Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anybody wondering if I can explain my interpretation of the problem, there is a debate regarding whether or not theft and stealing are appropriate words to use in the context of copyright infringement. Some people believe that the words are too harsh, because they indicate depravation of non-deprivable resources and add needless severity to the crime as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner does not want to know if this meaning is applicable. He wants to know for how long these words like these, most particularly steal have been used in specific reference to non-deprivable resources, which are called rival-goods in economic terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Desired Outcome and Finishing Thoughts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If consensus determines that my edit was a permissible improvement, nobody cares to try and do any better, and the original author does not object, I would like my edit reinstated, but only if all three of these conditions are met. If they are, it should probably be done manually since there was a small typo in my edit anyway. &#xA;Besides wanting to have the edit reinstated, if appropriate, I think guidance here may help me to be a better editor. I defer to community judgement and look forward to your opinions regarding this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T23:52:39.130" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T23:52:39.130" Title="Editorial Questions Regarding the Question about Stealing Non-Rival Goods" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11852" CreationDate="2018-11-19T10:24:02.407" Score="8" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What's that word?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's happened to everyone one of us, and it happens to each and every one of us more and more frequently as time passes by. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What was that great word I read the other day?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know there's a word but you just can't recall it. You think it has the letter &quot;p&quot; in it; it sounds foreign; it's really informal, maybe it was slang; you think it was an academic term, maybe a linguistic word, etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one go about researching a word they don't remember but it's somewhere dormant in their brain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote to reopen the following question, which I believe is a valuable addition (is that the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; word?) to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473611/word-for-a-cushy-position-awarded-to-a-crony&quot;&gt;Word for a cushy position awarded to a crony?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to recall this word. If I recall correctly, it's of French origin. My search has so far been fruitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or please explain how any user, let alone a new contributor, should research a word they cannot remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example, in this instance the OP (a native speaker and new contributor) read the banner but was left feeling confused/bemused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473345/looking-for-a-word-for-not-up-for-discussion&quot;&gt;Looking for a word for &amp;quot;not up for discussion&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[text]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit: Please excuse my failure to follow the proper format. I believed that the word began with a &quot;v&quot; but to cite where I searched? Seemingly everywhere online. I found numerous options including &quot;out of bounds&quot; and &quot;off limits&quot; but not the one word that I knew existed. My search brought me here so clearly I'd been looking for a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some will argue that these type of questions (SWRs) should be banned from the site altogether. But for now, they're not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what solution or friendly guidance can we, as a community, offer to new contributors looking for that elusive &quot;word&quot; that is on the tip of their tongue?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fodder to chew on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4921/general-reference-general-clairvoyance&quot;&gt;General Reference = general clairvoyance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/is-it-really-so-important-in-english-to-find-a-single-word-to-express-a-single-c&quot;&gt;Is it really so important in English to find a single word to express a single concept?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9916/is-it-wrong-to-answer-the-intent-of-the-question&quot;&gt;Is it wrong to answer the intent of the question?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10384/are-tip-of-the-tongue-questions-completely-unsuitable-here&quot;&gt;Are tip of the tongue questions completely unsuitable here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11731/44619&quot;&gt;An answer&lt;/a&gt; by Jon Ericson, Community Manager on Stack Exchange, to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11636/on-answering-word-requests&quot;&gt;On Answering Word Requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T10:01:31.607" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T21:38:09.303" Title="When you don't remember a &quot;word&quot;" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11851" CreationDate="2018-11-19T15:43:42.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I agree that there is not a great &quot;reverse dictionary&quot; easily available for researching this kind of question, so &quot;lack of research&quot; isn't necessarily a great close reason. I do think it's still very helpful when OPs with this sort of question include information like &quot;I thought of X and looked at its synonyms, but none of those match&quot; or &quot;I tried googling &lt;em&gt;fancy word for an easy job&lt;/em&gt; and didn't get anything&quot;, to help avoid false-positives and so that answerers can avoid duplicating the OP's efforts, but it's not always necessary and any vote-to-close for lack of this research probably ought to be accompanied by a comment requesting the info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;this particular case&lt;/em&gt;, though, the question has at least three duplicates, one of which was asked just over a month ago, so I think it should properly be closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/172307/177853&quot;&gt;What's the Word for a Token Job?&lt;/a&gt;, asked May 22 2014, accepted answer by Affable Geek posted that same day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinecure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinecure&lt;/a&gt; is a &quot;cushy&quot; job that is usually given as a reward. It literally means &quot;without care&quot; and is a job without the cares of actual results. It is typically given for reasons of status, prestige, or patronage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441588/word-meaning-a-job-someone-is-installed-in-where-they-don-t-do-anything&quot;&gt;Word meaning a job someone is installed in where they don’t do anything&lt;/a&gt;, asked Apr 13, 2018, accepted answer posted that day by GEdgar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sinecure&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;A position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    ‘political sinecures for the supporters of ministers’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sinecure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and most recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/468233/177853&quot;&gt;Fake job given as appeasement?&lt;/a&gt;, asked October 14, 2018. It apparently hit the HNQ so its accepted answer, posted that day by Robusto, managed to gain 60 upvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word you're looking for is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sinecure&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1. A position or office that requires little or no work but provides a salary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/sinecure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TFD Online.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any particular added value in yet another &quot;the word you are looking for is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sinecure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; answer. So by all means don't close this question for lack of research, but do close it as a duplicate. Every marked dupe helps increase the odds that a future searcher will find the right answer, and also gets the current OP to the right answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we're at it, let's close that October one, too, for tidiness' sake. It garnered two or three close votes, but that was after it left the HNQ and they have since aged away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T15:43:42.533" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-22T16:32:13.640" Score="-2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally with StackExchange, new users can click on the &quot;take the tour&quot; button to take the tour and earn the associated badge. But on this meta, it takes me to english.stackexchange.com/tour on the main site, not english.meta.stackedchange.com/tour on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the activity page, after clicking on the &quot;take the tour&quot; button, the badge offer remains on my profile. The mouseover link points to english.meta.stackexchange.com/tour, but redirects to the main site's tour at english.stackexchange.com/tour. Even entering the meta site's tour URL redirects to the main site's tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No action from this button can make it go away when clicked on the meta page as it does when clicked on from the normal site page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I make it go away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0jZ6e.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0jZ6e.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tour button&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug or what else is going on? What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315731" LastEditorUserId="315731" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T08:01:51.890" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T10:09:36.563" Title="What do I do about the &quot;take the tour&quot; invitation on the new meta account to make it go away?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="24" ClosedDate="2018-11-27T16:41:32.120" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11851" CreationDate="2018-11-23T17:40:56.813" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Regarding Our Research Requirements&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that I very much prefer the philosophy of the reading material provided, General Reference based posts are not reflective what the moderators consider to be standing policy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standing position of the moderation staff, and the top voted answer regarding our research requirements on meta, is that &lt;em&gt;all questions&lt;/em&gt; should require at least some amount of research irrespective of subject matter or how readily available the answer is. The following reading material helps to demonstrate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/6144/elu-mod-privileges-summit&quot;&gt;The English Language &amp;amp; Usage Moderator Privileges Summit Chatroom&lt;/a&gt; Users with over 3,000 rep. discussed what the policies should be predicated on the assumption that close voting patterns set policy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7376/is-it-really-helpful-to-tell-a-user-to-look-something-up-in-a-dictionary&quot;&gt;Is It Really Helpful to Tell Users to Check a Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; Andrew Leach specifies that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions require cursory research, even beyond just the dictionary ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;How Much Research is Needed&lt;/a&gt; Andrew Leach Specifies our research requirements more precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5416/124936&quot;&gt;Reword General Reference to Include Research ELL&lt;/a&gt; (Mentions some other research relevant questions and tallies up their votes for the purposes of devising a new research closure eason) The closure reason is rephrased to imply that research is required. Andrew Leach tallies up votes from meta-questions to establish how it should be written.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5459/new-close-reason-include-the-research&quot;&gt;New Closure Reason: Include Research&lt;/a&gt; Kit Z. Fox announced that the new phrasing supplants General Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10085/124936&quot;&gt;Answer General Reference Questions With A Link Anyway&lt;/a&gt; Matt E. Эллен explains that the &quot;definitively answered by a single link&quot; standard no longer applies, and provides the text of the new closure reason instead, as an explanation for why the proposal is not a good idea. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do doubt the assertion that &lt;em&gt;closure voting patterns&lt;/em&gt; set policy rather than being restrained by it, especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;since setting policy is the role of &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; votes&lt;/a&gt;, but even if we assume that the single highest voted answer regarding a subject on meta establishes policy, then it would still be accurate to state that it is presently the policy that is in effect is Research Required, because Andrew Leach's answer to &lt;em&gt;How Much Research is Required&lt;/em&gt; outscores Jeff's answer to &lt;em&gt;Basic Questions Are Not Not So Basic&lt;/em&gt; by a margin of four. Thus this type of closure comes as no surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this interpretation of policy is correct, then these questions were appropriately closed.&#xA;That more questions are not closed is really the exceptionalism, but even so that has more so to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;the nature of moderators on the network&lt;/a&gt; and that is another subject altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T14:21:29.143" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T14:21:29.143" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11854" CreationDate="2018-11-24T08:05:19.787" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This indeed seems to be a UX-related coding bug discussed elsewhere.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;But, you can make it go away by getting the &quot;Autobiographer&quot; badge.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this happens automatically. If not, you might try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Meta's Activities page, click on &quot;Main User&quot; &gt; &quot;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings&quot; &gt; any &quot;Save changes...&quot; button... then wait a few minutes for the servers to populate. You should have the &quot;Autobiographer&quot; badge soon, thus the message will go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CMG4i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CMG4i.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are neither profiles nor tours on meta sites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315731" LastEditorUserId="315731" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T10:09:36.563" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T10:09:36.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2018-11-24T08:21:07.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract:&lt;/strong&gt; They are generally not considered a good fit for Stack Exchange format generally but we should allow these, because of practical enforcement issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;They probably aren't&amp;hellip;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/02/29/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;Let's Play the Guessing Game&lt;/a&gt; by Jeff Atwood. The gist of the article is that identification questions, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; which aim to identify a person's sentiment as being the signification of a word, are impractical to answer, unfair to experts and uneducational to anybody, and that this is especially so when they merely constitute lazily vague decriptions of something that even the questioner only just barely remembers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that Jeff Atwood describes how perfectly reasonable answers can be dismissed just because they don't happen to be the right, thing reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shbgRyColvE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this sesame street skit&lt;/a&gt;, where Cookie Monster insists that what is in Kermit's mystery box must be a cookie based on the descriptive clues, despite the fact that Kermit knows otherwise and is fully aware of what is in the box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes them poorly suited to our system of peer review. Keep in mind that people will be voting for or against answers based on how closely they match the description, even if they are not strictly the correct answer and a premature vote can give that answer a pretty strong consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff is not alone in his distaste regarding guessing games. It is a common complaint levied against Single Word Requests, and I have noticed that at least three of the other Stack Exchange subdomains have taken steps to restrict if not outright ban identification request type questions, including Anime &amp;amp; Manga, Movies &amp;amp; Television and Arqade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is presently no network-wide closure reason for it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185102/responding-to-your-too-localized-concerns&quot;&gt;Too localized might have been considered the right reason in the past but it was too problematic, and too narrow was still considered too restrictive and inspecific for the S.E. format&lt;/a&gt;, so what were given instead are the ability make specifically out of scope questions with three prefabricated closure reasons and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;a write-in closure reason that explains why a question is otherwise outside of scope&lt;/a&gt;. We do not currently have any obvious restriction on this within the help center, or a corresponding closure reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could add a restriction to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-words-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-words-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-words-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag to correspond with its closure reason, and I am tempted to do so as a compromise with the half  of the community that detests them to avoid the category from tipping past the brinking point of contention and into a ban for the whole category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;hellip; but we should allow them anyway&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find a ban to be inadvisable for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These Questions Have Definite Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that it gives the wrong impression of what the community wants from questions. One of the complaints most commonly levied against them is that they lack definitive answers and that we may be left on a wild goose chase searching for a word that may not even exist, because it describes such a strangely specific sentiment. Closing questions just because they actually have a definitive answer is contrary to the purpose of other closure reasons, and sorting out when we want questions that have a definite answer and when we do not seems like a recipie for disaster that will only confuse everybody involved and lead to uninentional side-effects that are best avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Enforcing Such a Policy Would Be Impractical and Unfair&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other much more important factor is that. There is very little distinction between this type of question and the typical single word request, and it all boils down to the reason the questioner is asking. Any rule against a tip-of-the-tongue question would be unenforceable against anybody who knew it as a result, and could only serve to be an infuriating beginner's trap. Questioners could easily just disguise their question as a broader Single Word Request, simply by omitting the reason for asking and we would be none the wiser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any policy that punishes innocently ignorant souls and rewards the knowing criminals, or can be easily defeated by writing a less descriptive, informative and answerable question is not a good policy to endorse.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, for as long as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; are allowed, these should be too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T23:56:34.427" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T23:56:34.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-24T21:35:39.663" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to request permission to use an image posted on this site.  The image is of twining vines which would be used in section transition pages, to suggest twining of content between chapters, in a book entitled &quot;Spatial Thinking in Environmental Contexts:  Maps, Archives, and Timelines&quot; to be published in 2019 by CRC Press (a division of Taylor &amp;amp; Francis).  The url for the image, as found on your site, is:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mKZba.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mKZba.jpg&lt;/a&gt;  Please advise with granting of permission and desired form for citation.  Thank you.  Sandra L. Arlinghaus, Ph.D., Editor, Spatial Thinking in Enviromental Contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="325594" OwnerDisplayName="Sandra Arlinghaus" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T21:58:37.767" Title="Permission to use image" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11858" CreationDate="2018-11-24T21:58:37.767" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=intertwined%20vines&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;tbs=simg:CAQSlgEJcFQBhQVguG0aigELEKjU2AQaBAgUCAMMCxCwjKcIGmEKXwgDEielBvgB0QueEu0KWtsO7AqhBLgZ4CzBIIokqTjaKac4liSZJKg48zcaMF8ifTLTavH3c0nn8lYi7cMzwe1rru79Hl9dopyxRfC_1obBl-TclHgDlulvEzeQ-iCAEDAsQjq7-CBoKCggIARIENB_1EuQw&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjRlNecge7eAhVwhOAKHReyD5cQ2A4IKigB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverse Google image search&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that the photograph is owned by Ian Sauer of the blog website &lt;a href=&quot;https://carolinawandering2.com/tag/intertwine/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carolina Wandering 2&lt;/a&gt;. I would try contacting him directly. (You can refer to the comments below the &lt;a href=&quot;https://carolinawandering2.com/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About page&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, it doesn't appear as if Stack Exchange or anybody who posted to Stack Exchange holds ownership of the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T21:58:37.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11851" CreationDate="2018-11-25T17:24:10.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answer of Andrew Leach in the 3rd link can be boiled down to show what you found. &amp;mdash;MariLou-A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is mostly accurate, although it should be noted that this necessitates that you try to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, at least in the case of the first question, that Sue F., who asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473345/looking-for-a-word-for-not-up-for-discussion&quot;&gt;Word for Not Up For Discussion&lt;/a&gt; did not show us that she found anything when it was closed. The original form of the question that Sue F. provided reads entirely as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am looking for a single word that means &quot;not up for discussion&quot;, &quot;will not discuss this topic&quot;, a topic that is out of bounds. noun/adjective?  Example, &quot;Several months ago, our daughter made talking about her weight _______&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything else was edited in &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; summery closure by MetaEd, which he did because &lt;em&gt;she did not show us that she found anything&lt;/em&gt;. If this was &quot;It's fixed and now it should be reopened&quot; that's one thing, but I interpreted this question as expressing surprise over it. Perhaps I was mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, what she did after the question was closed that lead to it being reopened makes the question an somewhat interesting case study for what could be done in the future, as do a few of the other facts regarding the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I wrote for your review so far MariLou-A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except in cases where the questioner misremembered, which would render such a question de-facto unanswerable, since the word would not actually exist if so, these questions all share something in common:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be that the questioner encountered the word before, and may know in what kind of circumstance that the word is likely to have been used. Perhaps the questioner does not know what circumstances the word is used in, but then again, if the questioner does not know that, I am not really sure how somebody else is supposed to do much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering these factors, questioners should have the ability to retrace their steps for the purpose of finding the exact circumstance in which they have last encountered the word. They can therefore explain to us how they have tried to do this or explain why they can not do this, and then show us that they have checked analogous sources where the word is likely to be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing somebody could do is ask around with any friends, family or acquaintances who are likely to know it, and this is what our questioner explained that she tried to do in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473345/looking-for-a-word-for-not-up-for-discussion&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Looking for a Word for Not Up for Discussion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. She claims that she found her answer independently of us by asking her 82 year old mother what the word was. If she had tried this first, then there would have never been a need to consult us about it. I do not know if that's a good thing or not since we want questions, but it is a fact to be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questioner was unable to ask her mom directly, perhaps because her mother was out of reach, then she could shown us a quotation from a source that she believed to be likely to use the word based upon her knowledge of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Phenry expressed his consternation at people closing questions as being &lt;em&gt;General Clairvoyance&lt;/em&gt; he assumed total ignorance of the answer and asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Really!? How &amp;hellip; is the guy supposed to look up the answer when he doesn't know the name of the thing he's supposed to look up? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I would at least sometimes agree with this sort of rationale, it does not really apply in these cases, because the questioners claim to have at least partial knowledge of their desired answer, and if we look to the information she provided us, then we can see that Sue may have had some clues regarding what she could have used as a basis of her search. I most particularly look to the title of her question, and the fact that she was talking about subjects of discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/VjcAF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If I plug the search term &quot;this topic is not up for discussion&quot; into Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, passage I find this excerpt from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;q=%22this+topic+is+not+up+for+discussion%22&amp;amp;=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fixer-Upper Man: Turn Mr. Maybe into Mr. Right in 5 Easy Steps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Cooper Lawrence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;When my mother starts asking me when I'm going back to medical school, I walk away and don't see her for a period of time until she learns she can't talk to me about that every time she sees me. Now I just say, 'I love you but &lt;strong&gt;this topic is not up for discussion&lt;/strong&gt;,' and she lets it go.&quot; One thing you can do is let your Fixer-Upper know that temporarily excluding someone from his life in order to get a message across is okay. Another thing is getting him to realize that you can't have a sit-down with everyone; some folks in his life will need action, not words. As Theodore says, &quot;consequences,&quot; and now his mother has learned that there are certain topics that are verboten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon reading the word, I presume her memory may have been sparked without need of further explanation. Personally, I would suppose that verboten is often collocated with &quot;not up for discussion&quot; as an emphatic reiteration of the sentiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that I have only derived the first revision of the question, without the extra benefit of knowing that a mother is likely to be involved, and that extra clue was not even available to us until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question was closed. Since she decided to consult her mom, I therefore presume she had the benefit of this additional knowledge which may have been used as an additional aid to her efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am not insisting that somebody should have tried this exact method of finding the answer. It is just that I also do not want us pretending as if questioners are completely clueless and unable to help themselves if evidence suggests the contrary, and my goal with this example is to demonstrate that useful search terms could have been derived from the nature of the query, especially since I borrowed them from it almost word-for-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover people should probably try to find where they encountered the word before, or at least show us that they have at least tried to find it by showing an analogous context which might have contained the word before resorting to enlisting the aid of many strangers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a possible comment I might use if I wanted to suggest this should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome Sue! &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039/124936&quot;&gt;We have a research standard&lt;/a&gt; which requires that our questioners provide basic research while consulting us, mostly to avoid us giving out redundant data. Would you please mention any steps that you may have taken to remind yourself which word you want? Did you ask someone what it was, or read anything that might contain it? Knowing what you have done may even give us clues that help us to find the word, even if you can not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I like about this comment is that it gives a reason why it is mutually beneficial for both the questioner and us to have such an effort documented, which may increase the likelihood that we will be obliged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the research requirement is just to show us where you looked to show you put a modicum of effort into it yourself, then that should be reasonable in my opinion. It is not unreasonable to expect somebody to take steps to at least &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; and remember something that he or she has forgotten before asking anybody else, since the person in the best position to do that it is the person who forgot. This applies even more-so when somebody is trying to enlist the help of a group of strangers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-25T17:30:02.647" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T17:30:02.647" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11851" CreationDate="2018-11-26T21:38:09.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange actively discourages requests for help remembering something you have forgotten, or any other request for guesses or ideas, as opposed to &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. This is because Stack Exchange is developing the exhaustive list of correct answers to questions future visitors will need answered. Suppose a person asks “what is the word that I am trying to remember”. Even if the person is satisfied by the answer, &lt;em&gt;nobody else will ever want to consult Stack Exchange to find out what word escaped that person&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test for this type of question is: &lt;em&gt;Can answer correctness be checked objectively?&lt;/em&gt; You know you have a problem if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A key criterion for answer correctness remains hidden in the mind of the asker&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To earn the the green check for the right answer, you have to guess correctly&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To vote on an answer, you have to mindread the asker&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it may be possible to turn such a request into a good Stack Exchange question. The asker might be willing to rewrite the question so that it is objective enough to have a clearly “right” answer no matter who is asking. This makes the question useful to future visitors, and makes it possible for experts to answer objectively and to peer review other answers as “right” or “wrong”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, good places to ask for help remembering a word you have forgotten:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tip of My Tongue&lt;/a&gt;” dictionary search&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TOMT&lt;/a&gt;” subreddit&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Further reading&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game/&quot;&gt;Let’s Play The Guessing Game – Stack Overflow Blog&lt;/a&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real Questions Have Answers – SE Blog&lt;/a&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T21:38:09.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-27T04:17:38.173" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the reason behind the highest number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; questions (users questioning) in English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (EL&amp;amp;U)? I wonder that the following tags haven't overpassed it ever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that the users requesting single-words want to improve their vocabulary? Or does it mean that they just love having the words they don't know and/or the words having no existence at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the ELU &quot;Tags&quot; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xI0pC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xI0pC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen capture of &amp;quot;Tags&amp;quot; page showing tags in decreasing order of popularity, with the number of tagged questions listed in the header. The first line reads &amp;quot;single-word request x 15846 meaning x 13667 grammar x 10477 word-choice x 9968&amp;quot;.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295228" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T21:30:43.920" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T21:08:36.073" Title="Is there a reason the “single-word-requests” tag have the highest number of questions in EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11862" CreationDate="2018-11-27T05:13:45.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it’s pretty simple: for most English speakers, there are more occasions where they are uncertain about how to word something than where they are uncertain about the meaning, usage or grammar of a word that they already know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speakers of any level may have questions about vocabulary, whereas questions about grammar tend to come from either ESL learners (who have the alternative of asking at the ELL site, and are often encouraged to do so) or people interested in studying grammar for its own sake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T05:13:45.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11862" CreationDate="2018-11-27T05:57:32.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the nature of those types of questions means they're more likely to stick around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The criteria for a question to remain open are easier (giving example sentences with placeholders is easier than thoroughly demonstrating why your research didn't give you an answer to your grammar question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's harder to demonstrate that one really is a duplicate of an older SWR question when you have different askers with different intentions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They're easier to answer, so less likely to be removed because of low activity and no answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T05:57:32.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11866" CreationDate="2018-11-27T22:21:34.800" Score="48" ViewCount="1015" Body="&lt;p&gt;As everyone probably knows, very few people actually follow the main rule of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;YOU MUST INCLUDE A SAMPLE SENTENCE&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus we have many low-quality questions, many of which get closed. I think we could prevent some of this by warning people with tag warnings (also called &amp;quot;tag tips&amp;quot;, originally introduced &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/274632/6083675&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), which show up when asking a question and adding a tag that has a warning. It won't stop it completely, but I think that it would definitely be a help, since so many people are receptive to make the change after they're told &lt;em&gt;manually&lt;/em&gt; by someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can easily see this feature on other sites, for example with [font-identification] on &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Graphic Design&lt;/a&gt; (you don't need an account there to test this either):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CHAuF.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we come up with a wording most of us agree on, a CM can put this in place for the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would probably be good to include some other information such as a suggestion to check a thesaurus if relevant, or a link to the tag wiki. However, it can't be too long. I'm not sure what the maximum is (do note that RPG for example has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7358/42375&quot;&gt;warning with 455 characters&lt;/a&gt;), but there's also a limit to what people can reasonably be expected to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answers &amp;amp; Voting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to give a suggestion in the question so that voting is more clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Votes on this question signal whether you are for or against a tag warning in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a suggestion for the wording, post an answer. Voting on answers expresses agreement/disagreement with said wording. If you have a minor change, leave a comment on that answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; reorganized so that the information people need to see is at the top instead of at the bottom after they've already run out of patience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm pretty sure most people correctly tag their questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; (or a synonym) when they ask it. The query below tells me that as of the last update, there were 12260 questions that started out with the tag. Checking the tags page tells me that there are 15851 questions with the tag &lt;em&gt;right now&lt;/em&gt;. This gives ~77%, but some of those original 12260 questions that originally had the tag don't have it anymore, so it's more of an upper bound. Deleted questions would also affect the numbers. Feel free to mess around with the data, but I think what's important right now is that we get a warning on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swr&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swr&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swr&lt;/a&gt; ASAP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/890068/1105740&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Query&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select postid as [Post Link], userid as [User Link], text&#xA;from posthistory&#xA;where posthistorytypeid=3 /*&amp;quot;initial tags&amp;quot;*/ and text like '%single-word%'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T21:39:03.963" Title="Warn people of the rules for [Single-Word-Requests] before posting" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|tags|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2018-11-28T20:58:51.320" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per Laurel's request, this is one potential wording. The answer is Community Wiki so please feel free to edit for brevity, clarity, and felicity (but if you fundamentally disagree with the listed requirements it might be better to make a comment or a different answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Single word request questions must include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A sample sentence demonstrating how the word would be used&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2577&quot;&gt;thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; searches you've tried&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Clear criteria for choosing the &quot;best&quot; word (e.g. register, connotations, part of speech)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What words you've considered, and why they don't work for you&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Whether a compound word or phrase would be acceptable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Review our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;full requirements&lt;/a&gt; for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list is primarily taken from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;, in particular paraphrasing the &quot;Question checklist&quot; at the bottom. The bolded item is taken word-for-word from the main tag info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't want to follow the links, the &quot;thesaurus&quot; and &quot;dictionary&quot; links go to the appropriate answers in our reference works Meta FAQ. The &quot;full requirements&quot; link is to the tag wiki (same as the link in the paragraph above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T23:21:16.010" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T23:21:16.010" CommentCount="18" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-11-28T20:58:51.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11862" CreationDate="2018-11-28T21:08:36.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s a matter of available tools. Reverse dictionaries simple aren’t as good as asking a group of people with a large vocabulary. Even a thesaurus will fall short when you can only express the meaning as a sentence. And use of an incorrect word is potentially really embarrassing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are grammar resources available and grammar mistakes do not necessarily obscure intent. English grammar is often difficult, so mistakes are common and don’t have the same potential for embarrassment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="283332" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T21:08:36.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2018-11-29T05:15:38.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a qualm with this, in that we need to consult a community moderator. That makes altering these rules harder if ever deemed necessary. I dislike that the contextual sentence requirement can summarily close a question, despite however much better it might than other single word requests be in other respects, and suspect that it actually lowers average question quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that would not be so much of a problem if we had higher compliance in the first place, so I do offer my tentative support for this plan of action. I have my doubts that it will work though: The &lt;strong&gt;how to ask&lt;/strong&gt; sidebar has not really seemed to help us get people to consult dictionaries for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of dictionaries, the normal sort do not really help somebody to find a word, unless you expect questioners to go through the bother of reading every word contained within one and reverse dictionaries are of questionable value, so I advise against the mention of those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the contextual sentence requirement exists so we can determine a word's register, part of speech and the such so I do not think we should bother the questioner with that responsibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we have a separate tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; to indicate which the questioner would prefer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to keep this restricted to common reasons a Single Word Request might actually be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to phrase it, I like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All Single Word Requests must include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An illustrative fill-in-the-blank context, showing how the word might be used&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A detailed description of the word's desired meaning and use&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consultation with a cited &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2577/124936&quot;&gt;thesaurus&lt;/a&gt;, and why its suggestions were rejected, if requesting a synonym or antonym.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think removing the extraneous details makes it easier to parse, and more likely to be read in full. It also helps it to fit if we have character or list item limitations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T05:27:21.603" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T05:27:21.603" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T09:53:13.257" Score="0" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to write a texts every day and checking them for mistakes. I thought about some site where you can check others' textes for mistakes on your native language (russian), and others check your text. Thaks for the attention, and sorry for the REALLY BAD ENGLISH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326040" OwnerDisplayName="Lev Puvlishin" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T21:41:54.850" Title="Do you know some sites or resources to checking text for errors?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-11-29T22:06:39.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T00:55:34.287" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a good word for change in velocity, but not over time? That is, position is to displacement as velocity is to what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83449/word-for-change-in-velocity/83503#83503&quot;&gt;This old question&lt;/a&gt; (2012) came up in suggested results. While it is a single word request, I would consider it to be more physics-oriented than EL&amp;amp;U-oriented given the topic and its narrow usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's not hurting anything here on EL&amp;amp;U, should I flag it for migration? As one commenter remarked about the accepted answer, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is essentially a science question, not about language. See below:&#xA;  Δv is a notation, not a word in the English language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how should we handle such overlap in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99792" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T22:22:45.850" Title="When science and English overlap, who wins?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11871" CreationDate="2018-12-01T02:03:08.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's older than 60 days old, it can't even be migrated by a diamond moderator (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/151890/323179&quot;&gt;Disable migration for questions older than 60 days&lt;/a&gt;). You'd need a Stack Exchange employee (i.e. a CM), and they won't do this except in very special conditions (e.g. a site closing down). If you flag the post, your flag is likely to be declined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's on topic here, it shouldn't be closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're not familiar with a site, don't suggest people move questions there. In far too many cases, I've seen people be wrong with their suggestions. I've never posted on Physics, but from what I read on their meta, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1083&quot;&gt;most questions about terminology are off-topic&lt;/a&gt;, so I doubt this one would be on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-01T18:23:17.513" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T18:23:17.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11871" CreationDate="2018-12-01T22:22:45.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By 'English', in contrast to 'science', I expect you mean informal language as opposed to formal, stipulated, technical language. If the technical meaning is not requested, then it is totally on-topic and  &lt;strong&gt;both meanings are appropriate to discuss here&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a &lt;strong&gt;question about stipulated technical meaning&lt;/strong&gt; will get more accurate answers on a specialty website, and a suggestion as such is an appropriate comment and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;be reason for migration&lt;/strong&gt;, but it is not a necessary thing. But the answers here will certainly be better at the in the informal or OED-style meanings rather than giving a technical definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T22:22:45.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6892" CreationDate="2018-12-03T22:49:30.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;On the desktop website&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rightmost icon in the top bar (which is a greyscale version of the Stack Exchange logo) opens a menu and &quot;log out&quot; is nearly directly underneath, on the same line as the name of the site you're on, next to the links for &quot;help&quot; and &quot;chat&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RF4Gi.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Picture of what I just described&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an unregistered account you might instead see &quot;register&quot;. If you don't want to lose all access to your account you need to register, otherwise you can delete your cookies to log out, or use this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/logout&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/logout&lt;/a&gt;. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9392/323179&quot;&gt;How do I logout from a non-registered account?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On the apps&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swipe from the left edge to the right to reveal the navigation drawer. At the bottom, under &quot;Other&quot;, is &quot;Log Out&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T22:49:30.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4716" CreationDate="2018-12-03T23:13:45.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can fix your mistake by retracting the flag, then reflagging with the fixed message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ekslI.png&quot; alt=&quot;this is the flag you currently have raised, retract flag button&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't remember what you wrote, you can check your flag history. Retracted flags are shown as &amp;quot;self-removed&amp;quot;, but you can still see what you said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gG8QL.png&quot; alt=&quot;under the post name is the flag text, your name, and a timestamp&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that retracted flags still count against your daily flag count — they're not free. Fortunately, most people have more than enough flags each day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature was added in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281010/323179&quot;&gt;2016&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-06-10T15:02:52.207" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T15:02:52.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T14:45:42.483" Score="10" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an announcement for those who do not frequent Meta Stack Exchange (MSE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 7 December, every site on the Stack Exchange network will adopt the new theme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;With the final transition of the entire network to Responsive Design on December 7th&lt;/strong&gt;, we can start rolling out new features for the entire network - Custom Questions Lists and Saved Searches - and doing research into others, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319274/responsive-design-themes-what-can-sites-customize-and-how-can-they-get-changes?cb=1&quot;&gt;like updating user profiles to play nice with the new responsive layout&lt;/a&gt;, for example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;December 2, 2018 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say &lt;em&gt;Goodbye&lt;/em&gt; to the classic EL&amp;amp;U theme and &lt;em&gt;Hello&lt;/em&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11693/english-language-usages-updated-site-theme-is-ready-for-testing/11694#11694&quot;&gt;responsive theme&lt;/a&gt; complete with left navigation panels, triple-hamburger menus, and the peculiar &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11697/44619&quot;&gt;mix-match of fonts&lt;/a&gt; (no mention that this issue has been resolved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On December 4&lt;/em&gt;, users on Meta were invited to fill in a form explaining what they may dislike about the profile page. Yes, just the profile page. Suggestions, comments, ideas, and confused mumblings of dissent may be read here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319375/help-us-improve-the-user-profile-and-settings&quot;&gt;Help us improve the user profile and settings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a snippet of the announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;We need your help&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We’re kicking off these changes by conducting user research about what people like and dislike about the profile, and how it might be improved. In addition to the folks on Meta, we’ll be talking to people sourced from our Research email list. The intent is to get some preliminary knowledge about what kinds of updates would be most beneficial to the most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you can spare a few minutes, please fill out this survey. Among other things, it asks questions like:  [&lt;em&gt;blah, blah, blah,…&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We recognize that Meta folks are probably more likely to use the profile and settings regularly, which is why you’re one of the first groups of people that we’re talking to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATED &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please fill out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfhOFRPeAv33yp-U3x0HRzCjjkeXzUhUtTTj_aodeVKBlbDzg/viewform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;survey&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;strike&gt;Friday, December 7.&lt;/strike&gt; Thursday, December 13.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stroll over to Meta or click on the survey link above and let your voice be heard but hurry, this opportunity will expire on December &lt;strike&gt;7th&lt;/strike&gt; 13th. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;HOT NEWS&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The survey deadline has been extended, we actually have time to say what changes, if any, should be made to our profile pages. And we might as well discuss and/or suggest any aesthetic changes to the new theme while we're at it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 2     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catija, our Community Manager, is bringing us up to speed in her recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11878/addressing-the-responsive-elu-site-theme-moving-forward&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;, far better than I attempted here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 3  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314979/rollout-of-responsive-design-site-themes-tracking-post&quot;&gt;It's live&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It's happened. It's here. The new theme has befallen us… &lt;em&gt;sob&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="2637" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T17:57:56.510" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T21:08:15.340" Title="We have until December 13" Tags="|discussion|profile-page|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T21:14:03.533" Score="4" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Hello, English Language &amp;amp; Usage Denizens!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I know you don't &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; inhabit this site, but hi, anyway)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;First, an apology:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site was probably the hardest site for me for a variety of reasons. I'm still learning how to accept criticism without being hurt by it and this site design failed you all in a way that I wasn't prepared for. I appreciate and treasure your clear care for this site and wanting it to feel like home - and a place you want to be. I want you to be here, too, and want you to feel welcome and comfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it seems like I disappeared for a while, I did. I've been on parental leave for the last six weeks - you might notice there are now two adorable boys in my avatar rather than one. I've still been thinking about this site in the interim and trying to figure out how best to address your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the silence while I was out and my limited interaction before that, I apologize. I hope that, moving forward, we can work together to make the site design something you enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Site Redesign going live on Friday&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Friday, this site's design will be live for everyone, not only those in the beta test. I'll be reviewing my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11693/english-language-usages-updated-site-theme-is-ready-for-testing&quot;&gt;ill-fated meta post&lt;/a&gt; to see if there's anything else we can easily fix for you before Friday but this will be moving forward because Winter Bash will be starting next week and we need the entire network updated by the time it starts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take a minute, if you haven't already, to read my Meta Stack Exchange post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319274/responsive-design-themes-what-can-sites-customize-and-how-can-they-get-changes&quot;&gt;Responsive Design Themes - What can sites customize and how can they get changes implemented?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11693/english-language-usages-updated-site-theme-is-ready-for-testing#comment50099_11695&quot;&gt;tried to encourage some of this&lt;/a&gt; back when I first was talking with y'all about the site design here but I don't think I was clear about what we were looking for. I hope this helps better explain it. In particular, consider the discussion on Database Administrators about their &lt;a href=&quot;https://dba.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3077/suggestions-for-a-better-headline-graphic&quot;&gt;top banner&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that we were having was sort of like a &quot;too many cooks in the kitchen problem&quot;. We had several people weighing in on what the banner should look like and we were trying to address that and then having some people like the change and others dislike it. We could have gone on with that for weeks, which wasn't doable because we had dozens of other designs to redo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the parts of &lt;em&gt;this site's&lt;/em&gt; theming that you all want us to revisit, I'm encouraging you to start a new question here on EL&amp;amp;U meta about it and work through what you all think is a good solution to that specific problem. Then, once it's discussed, we can work on changing it. If you have questions about what's possible, ask them in an answer to this question or on the MSE post if you think they're more broadly applicable to the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do understand that I'm talking about the EL&amp;amp;U theme, specifically, not the elements that are network-wide like left navigation, the fonts used (unless y'all make the unexpected decision to switch to sans), and the positioning and styling of the other navigation elements. Here's the list from that MSE question of the sorts of things I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Arqade&lt;/a&gt; (among other sites) - Artwork in footer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Photography&lt;/a&gt; - Photo of the Week box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; - their robot, Slartibotfast, was a major part of their site identity, so we were sure to incorporate it into the design by letting it float at the bottom of the page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Sidebars/backgrounds can have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://travel.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;light-colored solid&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;pattern/texture&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;fade&lt;/a&gt; or even a &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;combination&lt;/a&gt;. The left navigation text is black everywhere on the network and the navigation column does not have a separate color background, so the background must be light enough and without overly-distracting artwork so that it is of sufficient contrast and legible. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Header banners are required (you can't drop them entirely a'la &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;) and the dimensions are fixed but the content of them can be pretty varied. Do keep in mind that on some smaller screen widths (think mobile) elements like images are either dropped to not clash with the site logo or will be obscured by it. This is why some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;busier images seem to stop half-way across the screen when viewing on a desktop&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/315762/why-do-some-parts-of-the-standard-theme-use-different-fonts-than-the-rest-of-the&quot;&gt;Fonts are set network-wide&lt;/a&gt; with either a serif or sans-serif stack. Which fonts are in the stack may change as we're realizing the current stack isn't optimal for all of our sites, both technically and for design reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Colors can be customized to a degree (and many have been adjusted through this process). This includes buttons, OP indicator boxes, link colors (visited/unvisited), voting arrow colors, tag colors (background &amp;amp; text), question titles (in the questions list, not on question pages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you think the new logo is horrible, start an EL&amp;amp;U Meta question about it here and come up with a solution - it doesn't have to be a perfectly-rendered drawing of what it should look like. If the top banner is too plain and you'd like some artwork up there, or in the footer, same thing. Have a discussion about what sort of thing you'd like to see there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it relates to other things like the mixture of serif and sans-serif fonts, the choice of fonts, the sizing of the headings - these aren't going to change at this point and, while we may revisit some of them in the future, we're not going to be able to do that this year, particularly not before Friday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Thanks&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, thanks for listening, thanks for taking the time to care about the site. It means a lot that you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T04:07:52.410" Title="Addressing the responsive EL&amp;U site theme - moving forward" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11878" CreationDate="2018-12-07T21:29:58.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My original post misunderstood the purpose of this question. I've since moved most of that content to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11883/177853&quot;&gt;new question&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm leaving this here as I think some of the discussion in comments is useful for understanding the process going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T04:07:52.410" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T04:07:52.410" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T00:51:21.917" Score="9" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new theming does not seem to be to anyone's taste, but we can't go back to the way the site used to look. Some features like fonts and page layout are now set across all sites, and we just have to live with what we've got. However, as a trade-off there is an opportunity here to add design elements in places that previously were almost design-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is specifically about the borders of the site: the top banner (not the black bar with the icons, the one below that where our site name is), the sidebars/background, and the footer. These can be customized within certain restraints (which can be found in more detail in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11878/177853&quot;&gt;Catija♦'s announcement here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Header&lt;/strong&gt;: The site name must be left-aligned—unfortunately, our lovely logo with the site name centered won't work with the new theme. Any additional  graphic will be placed on the right side of the banner, and will slide over and then disappear as the window is resized. For is currently that just means that the &quot;anchoring bar&quot; on the right gets shorter, as we don't have a graphic other than the box around our name and the bars that stick out on either side.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/an0l2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/an0l2s.png&quot; alt=&quot;Role-Playing Games.SE header at various widths, from widest with image right-aligned to narrow with image behind title to narrowest possible width, with no image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (click image to see full size)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The background for the header can be part of the background of the sidebars (as in the RPG example above), or its own separate element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sidebars&lt;/strong&gt;: The text has to be in black, so the background has to be light and un-busy enough to accommodate that. On some sites the background seems to be static, so that the pattern or fade doesn't change as one scrolls down the page; on others, the background seems to also scroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZ8iF.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZ8iFs.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Animated gif showing background scrolling in Worldbuilding.se&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J5Omw.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J5Omws.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Animated gif showing static background with other elements scrolling in front in Puzzling.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (click to see larger scrolling versions of these)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Footer&lt;/strong&gt;: The text color options seem to be more variable, so there are more color choices. Again, this can be a continuation of the background in the sidebars or a separate element. The footer can include an illustration, either behind the text if it's legible or &quot;intruding&quot; into the top (as in Worldbuilding) or bottom of the box.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r76Q6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r76Q6s.png&quot; alt=&quot;Footer of Travel.SE with globe illustration behind text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4SfkK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4SfkKs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Footer of Arqade.SE with video game illustration at bottom&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (click for full size)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question: What could we do with our title banner, sidebars (or background) and footer to improve and extend the theming of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yxszr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yxszr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of current EL&amp;amp;U theme with Title, Banner, Banner illustration, Sidebars, and Footer labelled&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T11:52:38.603" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T08:08:17.463" Title="New theme: Banner, sidebars, footer" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11877" CreationDate="2018-12-08T01:20:37.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for the alert. I've been focusing on other things and completely missed the original announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoyed our quirky corner of Stack Exchange while it lasted. The new theme seems to work for some sites, but I'm still not used to it on EL&amp;amp;U and put it off for as long as I could. I used to look for gems in the rough; now the landscape itself seems rather unappealing. Perhaps it would feel better if the font size for the content was larger and the side menus unified or at least formatted to not waste so much horizontal space. Anyway, the UI has been panned so much that the programmers probably consider this whining rather than constructive criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about that time of the year in any case, so I might take a bit of a break from being an EL&amp;amp;U regular. I'll still drop by from time to time, but something about the site has changed - and perhaps it's me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T01:20:37.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11883" CreationDate="2018-12-08T03:21:26.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility: Make the page look a bit like an illuminated manuscript. An &quot;illumination&quot; illustration in the side bars in some kind of low-contrast, light-on-light pattern could coordinate with a more elaborate, potentially more highly-colored illumination in the top bar. Illuminated manuscripts aren't specifically English, so perhaps we could especially draw inspiration from the nineteenth century illuminations of William Morris:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AaEWS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AaEWS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of William Morris&amp;#39;s title page illumination of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Morris_-_The_Works_of_Geoffrey_Chaucer_(The_Kelmscott_Chaucer)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See at Wikimedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This style would lend itself to our existing color scheme; the banner could remain black-on-buff with red highlights, and the side bars could perhaps be something like buff-on-cream. We probably could also incorporate some part of the existing decorations into the pattern, or riff on the iconic ampersand, if we wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of Morris's work is out of copyright now, so we could borrow pretty freely. If an actual artist were designing something from scratch, I'll note that rhubarb apparently stands for &quot;advice&quot; in the language of flowers, so if we wanted to include a leaf motif rhubarb leaves might be apropos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T04:06:35.380" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T04:06:35.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11883" CreationDate="2018-12-08T03:23:50.637" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A second possibility: Do something with words or dictionary entries as an all-over-pattern in the sidebars in a light, low-contrast color scheme. It could be an image from an old (out of copyright) manuscript, or something more modern like a word cloud (perhaps with some of our tags as the component words). A quick &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11887/177853&quot;&gt;google image search&lt;/a&gt; suggests some of what I'm thinking, though we'd probably need much lower-contrast than most of these for the sidebar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/59XBh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/59XBh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google image search results for &amp;quot;words background&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could perhaps be combined with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11887/177853&quot;&gt;Lawrence's suggestion of a library&lt;/a&gt; image in the banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T03:23:38.103" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T03:23:38.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11883" CreationDate="2018-12-08T10:28:37.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think rich banners make the new theme work much better visually. Have a look at the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://money.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Personal Finance &amp;amp; Money&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Movies &amp;amp; TV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Photography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem to fit in much better with the new theme than our much-adored but now overstretched text-and-tape. In contrast, look at the following text-dominated beta sites - they look clinical and unappealing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lifehacks.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Lifehacks Beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Interpersonal Skills Beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even fairly 'small' or plain graphical elements can help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For EL&amp;amp;U, consider using a (faded? beige? sepia? wood-dominant?) picture of an old library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=old%20library&amp;amp;search_source=base_search_form&amp;amp;language=en&amp;amp;page=1&amp;amp;sort=popular&amp;amp;image_type=all&amp;amp;measurement=px&amp;amp;safe=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to) a collection from shutterstock. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/amsterdam-netherlands-january-28-2017-panoramic-575506906&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expansive panorama of the Rijksmuseum Library&lt;/a&gt; gives a flavour of what I'm talking about. (Please excuse the lack of pictures; I'm not familiar with shutterstock's policies regarding reproducing images on unrelated sites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having an &lt;em&gt;olde worlde&lt;/em&gt; picture as the banner would also lend a touch of class to the site, perhaps subtly encouraging questions and answers to live up to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T10:59:08.443" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T10:59:08.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13517" CreationDate="2018-12-09T10:01:08.767" Score="19" ViewCount="563" Body="&lt;h2&gt;EL&amp;amp;U needs rescuing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A few days ago I posted the following&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new theme still sucks. There I said it, and in American English, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ty0ct.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ty0ct.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an overall sense of claustrophobia, oppression, the lines... so many lines… everything at the top is squished and then you have this relatively &quot;huge&quot; space where the words,  Top Questions, stand majestically and unfettered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this graphic raises a smile or two because I don't want to go all melodramatic...I really don't. I'm trying my very very best. But it's awful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without my squiggles and the top bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZ2CS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZ2CS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing needs a revamp, a new makeover. Everything needs to be changed, color,  decorative elements, and those ugly horizontal poles which are strangling the logo.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's agree to keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/black-lion-banner/the-history-of-the-ampersand-c81839171940&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baskerville Italic Ampersand&lt;/a&gt;, please. That is sacred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after posting this answer (which I've edited for clarity and style) the Community Manager informed me that I was doing it all wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It didn't change. The whole point of this post is to encourage y'all to take the time and start a discussion about what you want. We're not going to keep changing things and having people like or dislike it. We need some sort of place to start from. Go start that discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confused, I replied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Catija I thought I did?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;So, if you think the new logo is horrible, start an EL&amp;amp;U Meta question about it here and come up with a solution - it doesn't have to be a perfectly-rendered drawing of what it should look like&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; @Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't come up with a solution, I'm not a graphic designer. I don't know what's possible and what isn't. That should be the job of someone who is. I've identified what doesn't work for me. That's a start @Mari-Lou A &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon after, user 1006 also posted an answer. Users with less than 10K can now see 1006's wonderful effort here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11883/new-theme-banner-sidebars-footer&quot;&gt;New theme: Banner, sidebars, footer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, please pay a visit and contribute with ideas and solutions, I know that a number of users are (or were) graphic designers, and EL&amp;amp;U's theme necessitates high-quality professional assistance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the Community Manager's response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11880/44619&quot;&gt;1006a's post&lt;/a&gt;, who had also made the mistake of posting an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The other answer  [Mari-Lou A] here is, essentially, &quot;the new site theme sucks, fix it&quot; but telling us to fix it - well, we tried to fix it and y'all still hated it. We can't fix it if we don't know what y'all would consider an improvement. We could redesign it a dozen times and you still wouldn't be happy... but if y'all think of something you like, we can make a design that uses what you like and fits our limitations. And if you have questions about what can be customized, you can ask that here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of things that I find irritating about this reply, it's difficult to know where to begin but I'll try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;   “&lt;em&gt;we tried to fix it&lt;/em&gt;” &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contest that the developers tried their &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt;. They enlarged the logo and reintroduced the same decorative poles that had been removed in the earlier version. The space below the logo was reduced and the font used for “Top Questions” is lighter. I'm not sure how many hours of work were required in order to achieve this but I don't think it could have been many. I might be wrong. I am neither a developer nor a web designer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o3lCi.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&#xA;version #1&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LAM5U.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&#xA;version #2 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt; “&lt;em&gt;We can't fix it if we don't know what y'all would consider an improvement.&lt;/em&gt;” &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site provided an abundance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11697/44619&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;input&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11703/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11707/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11726/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11715/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11705/44619&quot;&gt;Explanations&lt;/a&gt; and possible improvements and solutions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11734/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11732/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11695/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11757/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11801/44619&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; from the end of &lt;strong&gt;August&lt;/strong&gt; right through to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11797/44619&quot;&gt;October&lt;/a&gt; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third&lt;/strong&gt; “We could redesign it a dozen times and you still wouldn't be happy...”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about if you (the Community Manager uses &quot;we&quot; throughout, so I am not attacking her personally) had redesigned it with thought, care and &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; attention to detail in the first place? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything was stripped bare. EL&amp;amp;U never had fancy icons for badges. EL&amp;amp;U never had a decorative footer. EL&amp;amp;U never had quirky voting arrows. EL&amp;amp;U never had an image on their banner or in the background to begin with. But what delicate flourishes and small details EL&amp;amp;U had were stripped away until the site today looks flat, unappealing and uninviting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fourth&lt;/strong&gt; “&lt;em&gt;but if y'all think of something you like, we can make a design that uses what you like and fits our limitations&lt;/em&gt;.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Stack Exchange asking EL&amp;amp;U users to improvise as web designers? I'd like to point out that the many of its users are not computer scientists, engineers, designers or website developers. We're not that kind of site. It says so in the banner &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE Monday February 18, 2019&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silence. No communication/confirmation/update whatsoever from anyone on the SE team. If you're familiar with feature requests and constructive criticisms about User Interface, e.g. the many many suggestions to improve HNQ that are posted on MSE (Meta Stack Exchange), this is pretty much the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE Sunday 23 June, 2019&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still silence, only interrupted by the sound of rustling tumbleweeds. &#xA;Is it just me or has the &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; of questions by new contributors dropped even further? Is there a way to measure this statistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, speaking purely for myself, I have greatly reduced the number of contributions I make to the site because of LQQs and because I find the site's desktop theme frankly depressing. What about others? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T08:06:34.057" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T02:50:52.297" Title="“we tried to fix it”" Tags="|discussion|community|theme-2018|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T03:54:40.303" Score="8" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;The logo banner for English Language &amp;amp; Usage used to be centered. It was designed to be centered, way back when these things were created. How can I tell? Because it exhibits bilateral symmetry in a big way. The bar has matching bookend ornaments and a line motif extending from the ornaments to each side of the viewport. Even the typeface is all-caps, completing the symmetrical effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we have now is not centered, and looks like a mistake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tYrY7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tYrY7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Uncentered banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we should (at least) have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L50EC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L50EC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Centered banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You really ought to be able to see that centering is an improvement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the change will be quite simple. You only need to replace one line of CSS, from &lt;code&gt;justify-content: space-between;&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;justify-content: center;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.site-header .site-header--container {&#xA;    width: 100%;&#xA;    min-height: 70px;&#xA;    max-width: 1264px;&#xA;    margin: 0 auto;&#xA;    padding: 0 8px;&#xA;    display: flex;&#xA;    align-items: center;&#xA;    /* justify content: space-between */&#xA;    justify-content: center;&#xA;    background-color: transparent;&#xA;    background-image: none;&#xA;    background-position: bottom right;&#xA;    background-repeat: no-repeat;&#xA;    background-size: auto;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" OwnerDisplayName="Robusto" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T04:28:15.583" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T04:28:15.583" Title="Can EL&amp;U please get its logo banner centered (again)?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11889" CreationDate="2018-12-10T04:28:07.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry. This is something that I explained back in September on the site's announcement post regarding the updates. It's under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11694/121385&quot;&gt;bullet point #1 in Mari-Lou's answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is the web site's name pushed to the left?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because all sites must have this placement moving forward. The goal of this update is to make the base LESS/CSS for the entire network as similar as possible, which requires that the logos all have the same positioning. Having these elements be the same makes it so that we can more easily roll out some of the feature requests that have been sitting around for years without risking breaking a chunk of the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that things like site logos &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be in the same position everywhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T04:28:07.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T07:54:21.293" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon trying to create a tag I get the messsage &quot;ags do not already cover this topic&quot; apearing in the top left hand corner of the screen in a box that is unresponsive to my mouse, the &quot;post your question&quot; button (as do all others) becomes unresponsive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened a couple of months ago once, and I took it to be an anomalie, however it is an insurmountable barrier today, what's up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a screenshot, but apparently the forum interfaces with neither dropbox nor 4shared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61803" LastEditorUserId="61803" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T08:38:56.000" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T08:38:56.000" Title="Trying to create a tag, gettting weird message" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11883" CreationDate="2018-12-10T12:09:05.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the modern interface does not lend itself to images of delicacy, and ornate details. &lt;strong&gt;The layout is an asymmetrical container&lt;/strong&gt;, the logo must be positioned to the left and the left navigator is the default when a visitor joins the site. The icons on the top bar (Yes, we &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; this cannot be changed…) are not placed in a symmetrical or aesthetically pleasing order. Thus the banner and the side panels/background need to counterbalance this disequilibrium OR embrace it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, inspired by the theme of &quot;words&quot; suggested by 1006a, I was thinking maybe mastheads taken from different newspapers across the world, e.g. the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and India. This would illustrate how English is a truly International language. Newspapers are vestiges of the past but the English used is (usually) standard, modern and extremely flexible as can be seen in headlines. With skill, creativity, sensitivity and the right editing tools, I believe my proposal could work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I tried searching online for a collage of International English newspaper mastheads, I didn't find any at all and I do not possess a photo editor that allows me to fade the images as much as I would have liked to, so please use your imagination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jAJo2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jAJo2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fiC2b.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fiC2b.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cached.imagescaler.hbpl.co.uk/resize/scaleWidth/1248/cached.offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk/news/OMC/4350B22C-DCF8-C2D9-8C0123A2967CF032.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6QukI.jpg&quot; height=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&#xA; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oi1Wy.jpg&quot; height=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/former-daily-editor-says-up-to-80-per-cent-of-uk-local-newspaper-journalism-jobs-have-gone-since-2006/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T08:08:17.463" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T08:08:17.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T15:44:05.497" Score="7" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what I hope is the correct spirit of bringing concrete, actionable suggestions for changes and updates to the new theme, I would like to ask for the fonts to be harmonized as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11697/2490&quot;&gt;tchrist went into great detail about here.&lt;/a&gt;  (tchrist covered it most excellently, I cannot hope to improve upon that explanation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T16:08:42.230" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T16:08:42.230" Title="New theme: fix serif-vs-sans font combinations" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11888" CreationDate="2018-12-10T16:07:38.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Foundation&lt;/strong&gt;: When you already have an identifiable 'image' identity, you want to either completely scrap it, or work off of the main familiar iconic elements. The main question/responses here are focused on &quot;Have we done that?&quot;. My response is - no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This banner was pieced together, not designed. Design (at it's simplest base) is about function and ease of usage. The elements used are not current, and have too many small particulates that do not translate well on most (even HD) screens it is seen on. (The overall image is that this site belongs to an outdated library collection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see if we can get any agreement first on &lt;em&gt;what is the primary function of EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some options are: &lt;strong&gt;Is it&lt;/strong&gt; a broad question and answer community based on bringing clarity and fluidity to members involved in; a) seeking to understand and/or improve their English Language skills?, b) creating contextual understandings of English communications? c) [write your own].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Majority agreement here doesn't mean making everyone happy. It is about attaining efficacy in resolving the question - for now. Should the basic group/site functionality change, it would need to be asked and answered again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from a background of 40+ years of leading groups, being involved in visual branding &amp;amp; designing materials and environments, and connecting group activities to result in achieving desired (planned and deliberate) results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Foundation:&lt;/strong&gt; When I was going to Art School, they had a Foundations program which was loosely based on the question - &quot;What do you know about art?&quot; for the first year students to rethink their choices for going to Art school. I also worked at an experimental art/music/video/poetry/dance gallery exhibition space. Getting to the basic question on functionality became the 'go to' starting place for moving forward. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="292469" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T16:07:38.817" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T22:19:47.630" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;On other sites I see buttons/tabs for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;Newest&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Frequent&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Votes&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Active&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;Unanswered&lt;/code&gt;.  I thought I used to see similar on EL&amp;amp;U also. Now I see only &lt;code&gt;Active&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Featured&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Hot&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Week&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;Month&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What gives me what I used to get with &lt;code&gt;Newest&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while I'm at it, what are the equivalents of &lt;code&gt;Frequent&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Votes&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;Unanswered&lt;/code&gt;? (FWIW, I don't think I care about &lt;code&gt;Featured&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Hot&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Week&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;Month&lt;/code&gt;, unless some of those are somehow synonyms for some of the previous choices.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; such a change? Does it provide any benefit? A downside is that it can confuse/lose users.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updating this with a related question (well - really the same underlying question): &lt;strong&gt;How can I get Stack*, and specifically EL&amp;amp;U, to take me to &lt;code&gt;Questions&lt;/code&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Newest&lt;/code&gt; by default&lt;/strong&gt;, whenever I choose EL&amp;amp;U (main or meta) from the &lt;code&gt;A list of all 174 Stack Exchange sites&lt;/code&gt; drop-down menu? (You know - the one at the far right, which looks more like a hamburger menu than the officially knighted hamburger menu at the far left)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want such menu items taking me systematically to &lt;code&gt;Top&lt;/code&gt; questions, which  doesn't even show me a tab for &lt;code&gt;Newest&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;em&gt;I want to go to newest questions&lt;/em&gt;.  I'm willing to configure this for myself, if easy, and if I don't have to do it separately for each of the 174 sites or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully I'm just missing something simple - something that would be obvious to a guru UX designer, but is not obvious to this ordinary user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51214" LastEditorUserId="51214" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T23:22:16.697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T00:01:51.823" Title="How to see the most recent questions?" Tags="|discussion|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11895" CreationDate="2018-12-10T23:00:48.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new design moved things around. The &quot;Newest&quot;, &quot;Frequent&quot;, &quot;Votes&quot;, &quot;Active&quot;, and &quot;Unanswered&quot; tabs are on a different page than the home page. You can get to that page by clicking on &quot;Questions&quot; in the left sidebar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hF6eS.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't see this sidebar there will be a hamburger menu (☰) in the top left corner that you need to click to show it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will lead you to either one of these pages: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;main&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the navigation works this same way on all sites in the network. They changed the design to make it more unified and maintainable across the network and the reason they decided to switch to a left sidebar specifically is because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; for Teams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that the interface was confusing &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the switch, so moving everything only made it worse. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/303756/323179&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for details of what I mean.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered this exact same question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13140/153006&quot;&gt;Arqade&lt;/a&gt;, and the graphic I made for that answer might clear up some confusion. This image is a photoshop of the old and new designs (on Arqade), with lines showing where the links moved to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zhFu9.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T23:21:35.640" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T23:21:35.640" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T18:55:25.147" Score="5" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's reopen the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/475309/passfingport-is-it-a-bad-use-of-interjection#comment1147876_475309&quot;&gt;Passf***ingport&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm not sure why it was closed, but I am sure it has been redeemed (if redeeming it needed) by the answers.  Moreover, and perhaps more relevant, is that an edit brought it square on-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T22:46:42.470" Title="Let's reopen the question about Passf***ingport" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T19:36:10.140" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just confused by something in the layout:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question or answer that has been edited. picture has just one example). The person who most recently edited the question is first, the originator of the question comes second. Also, that second listing is darkened. These too items make the name of the originating author much less noticeable and the latest author very noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FVvzC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FVvzC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems very counter-intuitive to me. The primary author of a piece is the one who first submitted it. Edits are expected to be minor and fix typos, add secondary matter, extend content, or otherwise &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; change the general intent. The original author is the one who set the tone for everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there is a justification for the difference, like 'It was easier to implement with the new changes', or 'Oh, I don't think it matters'. To be clear, it is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; counter-intuitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a feature change in the new layout (i.e. did the new layout change things from the one it replaced)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the justification for the change stronger than ... &lt;em&gt;clears throat&lt;/em&gt; ... common sense?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is all to say...can we change this egregious solecism back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T19:36:10.140" Title="New Layout: Editor _before_ author?" Tags="|feature-request|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-12T12:17:46.657" Score="4" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just a personal impression or after the implementation of the new layout on ELU traffic both in terms of question and answers is well below average? &#xA;I realize it is just a few days but views on posts appear to be quite low. &#xA;Can anybody who has access to analytic  tools  confirm or deny this slowdown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T12:29:22.793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T03:29:24.833" Title="Has traffic on ELU decreased recently?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11903" CreationDate="2018-12-12T19:31:34.360" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;When one of my old answers receives an upvote or a downvote, I go back and reread the posted answer—mainly because the elapsed time enables me to approach the post as an editor rather than as its author, and I can see errors in it that escaped my attention earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I reviewed my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162813/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-a-mountain-im-willing-to-die-on/353088#353088&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the phrase &amp;quot;A Mountain I&amp;#39;m Willing to Die On&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; and was surprised to discover that, of the seven links cited in the answer, five (the first three and the last two) appear underlined and in maroon type but two (the fourth and fifth overall) appear underlined and in black type. It took me a moment to realize that the black links were in fact links (as opposed to underscored regular text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else see this inconsistent treatment of the links? If so, why is it happening? Is it a bug or a feature of the new site design? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T19:48:54.850" Title="Inconsistent link treatment in old answers under the new design?" Tags="|discussion|bug|formatting|style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11904" CreationDate="2018-12-12T19:43:40.553" Score="-1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are we getting hats this year, and if so, where and when will they be announced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am told that my first draft (the sentence above) did not meet ELU's quality standards.  Funny, I thought brevity was the soul of wit.  Well, to pad things so that my question completely describes my problem:  Are we getting hats this year, and if so, where and when will they be announced? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T20:24:24.380" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T20:24:24.380" Title="Where are the hats?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11901" CreationDate="2018-12-12T19:48:54.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a feature. Whenever you visit a link, your browser remembers it. Then, if a website is programmed a specific way, a link you visited will be a different color than a link you didn't visit. (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://universalusability.com/access_by_design/links/differentiate.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more explanation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see this here by clicking on only one of these links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11901/191178&quot;&gt;Link 1&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11901/OTHER&quot;&gt;Link 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you clear your browser history the links will all be the same color again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links on ELU have always changed color when you visited them, but before it was a less noticeable pink/red color:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ynn3f.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T19:48:54.850" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11902" CreationDate="2018-12-12T19:58:26.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hats are already on this year! It's running from  December 12th through January 1st this year. You can find a list of hats and how to get them &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/319838/323179&quot;&gt;here on MSE&lt;/a&gt;. Alternatively, you can go directly to the Winter Bash site &lt;a href=&quot;https://winterbash2018.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Anyways, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/319846/323179&quot;&gt;knitting&lt;/a&gt; is where it's at this year.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that you don't hate hats by clicking on the snowflake in the top right. If you see something like the following you need to click on the &quot;I Love Hats&quot; button and then there will be HATS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N6BU8.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T20:24:40.880" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T20:24:40.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-12T20:26:13.833" Score="14" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to change the color of visited links in main-site questions and answers from the current blackish purple to some color that is more clearly distinguishable from the surrounding black of regular text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent five minutes or so earlier today looking up the source of a quotation in an old answer of mine because I thought I had failed to include a link for it—not realizing that the link (involving an article called &quot;Dig It&quot;) was already there but that I had previously viewed it, which had caused the link to recede into near color uniformity with the surrounding text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here is the “before”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o1kJG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o1kJG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the “after”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyuqV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyuqV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T12:55:42.497" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T16:02:47.510" Title="New theme: Color of visited links" Tags="|feature-request|design|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11888" CreationDate="2018-12-13T14:58:47.267" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cn69P.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cn69P.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Banner updating&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; This is a processed revamping of the EL&amp;amp;U banner topper. This builds off of the current banner to maintain the 'branded' formulation already identifiable as ELU. The ampersand is set into a Romanesque central arch block icon shape. The block was used for providing structural support to the wall elements which surround it. The rest of the design is crisp and clean with minimal embellishments.&#xA;I have no direct access to what is available to do full page backgrounds which I have seen on other StackExchange sites, but, that is another option for the group to consider adding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This group is centered on providing support, guidance and information to both old and new users. That is its clear intention &amp;amp; group mission. I offer this work as both a starting point, and a balancing beam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="292469" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T02:50:52.297" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T02:50:52.297" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11900" CreationDate="2018-12-13T18:25:29.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer, if we're going by raw numbers, is pretty clearly: &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;, the stats don't show numbers dropping recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to help all the lazy 25k users out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a link to the site analytics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Views follow a pretty steady pattern: Fridays always have the fewest visits, Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday have the most, and the other days are somewhere in between. Neither the hills nor the valleys seem to have trended either way since summer nor since the new left nav was introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data for how many posts we get is far more chaotic. However, since the start of December, the number of answers has been trending upwards. The number of questions isn't doing bad either. In any case, both of these are within the range I'd expect them to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The real problem is how many questions are closed.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/289830/323179&quot;&gt;51%&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/306197/323179&quot;&gt;54%&lt;/a&gt;. Those are the percentages of questions asked here that were closed for 2016 and 2017 respectively. How long has this been a problem? What will the numbers be for 2018? Everyone with 10k should be able to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which only shows the numbers for up to the last 90 days. (As of the time of posting, the close percent for the last 90 days is 37.76%, but it's higher than that if you look at shorter frames.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, we need some solutions for this problem. Ones that will actually be &lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt; and have an effect. And apparently we needed them before I even joined this site (i.e. in 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two of my ideas that I think are worth highlighting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11865/191178&quot;&gt;Warn people of the rules for [Single-Word-Requests] before posting&lt;/a&gt;. Please vote on the answers or post your own!!! If this goes well for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swr&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swr&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swr&lt;/a&gt;, it could be effective for other tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316489/323179&quot;&gt;Can the advice page be customizable on each site?&lt;/a&gt; This idea I feel is currently severely underrated. I will hopefully eventually get around to reposting this as a question on Meta ELU, and maybe some other child metas where this would be handy so that I get the maximum support. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T16:35:17.317" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T16:35:17.317" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-12T15:43:06.827" Score="-1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/quora-insincere-questions-classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaggle&lt;/a&gt; competition I would like to decontextualise a list of questions. One way I am planning to do it is to replace &lt;strong&gt;any noun representing a group of people&lt;/strong&gt; with a placeholder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of such nouns are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;women males Muslims democrats conservatives racists feminists veterans&#xA;  vegans moguls Britons minorities Asians leaders &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this StackExchange I would like to find out where can I find a list of words that represent a group of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proper nouns is not a big problem as the module I use (&lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#entity-types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spaCy&lt;/a&gt;) can detect them as NORP (nationalities or religious or political groups) because of their capitalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope we can get all the words that appear in a standard dictionary, especially those that end with -ist, -er and -an.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327893" OwnerDisplayName="HK Tong" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T14:47:18.520" Title="List of nouns representing a group of people" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-14T04:20:19.500" Score="7" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be able to read the question I'm referring to at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/464595/191178&quot;&gt;Why does English use singular they instead of making up a new word for this?&lt;/a&gt; (currently re-reopened).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime a while ago there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/179978/revisions&quot;&gt;a question asked on ELL&lt;/a&gt; (deleted) that was migrated to ELU by one of the ELL moderators. It got answers, one of which was mine. It was Hot, but then it got closed (by two regular users and an ELU moderator) as opinion based, causing the question on ELU to be locked. Eventually (as happens to all questions in this state), it was deleted along with its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I want the question to be unlocked, then undeleted, then reopened. I need a moderator at the very minimum to unlock the post; undeleting and reopening would be appreciated too, although I don't expect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking on meta just in case I need those extra people to undelete and reopen this. Looking at the number of high rep users who either answered or expressed interest in reopening the question, I think there's enough demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the answers are low quality, and mine includes references to back up almost everything I said. (If in the future you do see a bad or poorly supported answer, please downvote it; one poor answer among many good ones doesn't mean the question should be closed.) The question scores at least a 4/6 on a scale of how &amp;quot;good subjective&amp;quot; it is (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;). Good subjective means don't close!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also need my answer so that I can reference it. The subject comes up in passing frequently enough that I've already wanted to do this and couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, I did probably lose reputation from this deletion, but I didn't notice. At this point in time, I'd rather have the ability to realize when a nontrivial amount of my reputation goes away, but undeleting the question wouldn't give me this ability back :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, here's the text of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why use singular they? Why not make a new word to distinguish its meaning?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does English use the singular they instead of making a new word for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my native language there's a word &lt;em&gt;dia&lt;/em&gt; which has the same meaning as he/she, but it doesn't give information about the gender of the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen questions close to this, but they don't provide the reason of not making a new word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot of my answer (which is loooong): &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G5gUj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image link&lt;/a&gt;. I edited it recently with the quote from the book &amp;quot;What is Morphology&amp;quot;, which I just happened across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshots of the other answers available by request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-03T22:23:11.657" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T22:23:11.657" Title="Unlock &quot;Why use singular they?&quot; then reopen" Tags="|discussion|support|status-completed|closed-questions|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11910" CreationDate="2018-12-14T12:56:06.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why a post that was upvoted and received five answers could be deleted for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZDQTF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZDQTF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;premise for deleting posts&lt;/a&gt; as explained on Meta, emphasis mine &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abandoned, unanswered questions&lt;/strong&gt; can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, &lt;strong&gt;at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will be provided&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff Atwood's answer then provides a list of circumstances for a question to be deleted that do not apply here, until we arrive at the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it was migrated from a different site, and then rejected&#xA;  ... it will be automatically deleted. Internally, these are termed &quot;dead&quot; questions (&lt;code&gt;RemoveDeadQuestions&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;RemoveMigrationStubs&lt;/code&gt; in the case of a migration stub, or &lt;code&gt;RemoveRejectedMigration&lt;/code&gt;s in the case of a rejected migration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusing issue of rejected migrations is explained in some depth in&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A question can also be rejected by the target community after it has already been migrated if it gets closed (except as a duplicate) or deleted on the target site. &lt;strong&gt;When a question which was already migrated gets rejected later, the entire process of the migration is reversed, except the original question will remain closed as off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt; All the answers are returned to the origin site and undeleted* and are subsequently deleted on the target site. &lt;strong&gt;Also, the rejected question on the target site will be locked, then automatically deleted 30 days later.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here we have a question that was not downvoted, which received five quality answers. Why should any post that received quality answers be deleted for any reason, even if the migration process was rejected? I don't get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[to be completed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T13:18:36.157" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T13:18:36.157" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11909" CreationDate="2018-12-14T14:47:18.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This kind of question turns out to have more traffic over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a request for a software process to help with Named Entity Recognition (NER). Try asking there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as an aside, to hint towards possible answers informed by the linguistics you expected here, &quot;any noun representing a group of people&quot; almost sounds like &lt;em&gt;any plural noun&lt;/em&gt;. Sure, you probably don't want 'ducks', but you know how they are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've given you some extra keywords to help with your search. Off the top of my head I'm having a hard time expecting a word list with exactly the kinds of groups you're thinking of. With these sorts of tasks you very well may be successful generating that list yourself and providing it to the community (you already have a good start).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T14:47:18.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11917" CreationDate="2018-12-15T16:47:47.087" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason, or was it merely oversight, that no hat is awarded for getting a gold badge?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a hat for getting a silver badge (which I have and like), but there should be an extravagant lollapalooza of a hat or fascinator for getting a gold badge!  Which I have just got (for the type of answer that tchrist routinely inveighs against.  Oh, the guilt!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-23T02:52:58.317" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T02:52:58.317" Title="Love hats; slightly miffed. Why no hat for getting gold badge?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11900" CreationDate="2018-12-15T20:54:09.280" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it just a personal impression or after the implementation of the new layout on ELU &lt;strong&gt;traffic both in terms of question and answers is well below average&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is &lt;strong&gt;“yes”&lt;/strong&gt; but the decline didn't start this December, and it's not the fault of the new theme. This downward spiral had already begun sometime around 2015 and safe to say the introduction of the new theme hasn't helped matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpGgh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpGgh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seized this SEDE query from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/319883/223820&quot;&gt;Jon Ericson's ♦ post&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to query, &lt;strong&gt;Posts per month&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/941812/posts-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/941812/posts-per-month#graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reply to Laurel's &lt;em&gt;“In order to help all the lazy 25k users out here…”&lt;/em&gt; it's important to note that it's not immediately obvious where these statistics are available. For the clueless 25k users out there, the stats can be found by clicking on REVIEW QUEUES then “tools”, which is written teeny-tiny at the top right-hand corner, then scroll down the page until you reach a list of links, click where it says &lt;strong&gt;site analytics&lt;/strong&gt;. Why these statistics are hidden behind &quot;tools&quot; is anyone's guess but I'm sure there is a logical explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those users who do not have this privilege, I have taken the liberty of uploading a few screenshots. The first graph shows the number of questions and answers posted between January 1, 2014, and December 30, 2018. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fdy7a.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fdy7a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second graph should also display the number of views during the same period but the data shown is limited between February 05, 2018 and December 30, 2018. Again I'm sure there is a logical explanation but I don't know what it is. In the week starting November 26, 2018, the number of views peaked at 3,201,406. For the week starting December 24, the number of views has dropped to 1,987,245.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x7t9S.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x7t9S.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T16:32:05.577" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T16:32:05.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11916" CreationDate="2018-12-16T14:18:34.607" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was bold enough, in a post of mine on English Language and Usage, to contend that language is political, whether we like it or not, and I feel that since then, my account has been 'frozen' in some way, intentionally ignored... Am I right or is it just an impression I am under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58319" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T19:23:35.273" Title="Is ostracism a common practice of the administators of this website?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11915" CreationDate="2018-12-16T18:25:41.197" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sake of an answer here, I’ll repackage and expand on the comments of ColleenV and Andrew Leach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it helps for credibility, I represent a “trusted user” (ie, with &gt;25k rep points) and thus have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;all the powers SE can grant to non-mod users&lt;/a&gt;, and Andrew Leach is actually a mod here, who has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;all the powers SE grants to non-employees&lt;/a&gt;. Similarly, ColleenV is actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&amp;amp;filter=month&quot;&gt;a mod on our sister site, ELL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11915/is-ostracism-a-common-practice-of-the-administators-of-this-website#comment51144_11915&quot;&gt;to echo Andrew&lt;/a&gt;: we could help you better if you were a little more specific and concrete on exactly what symptoms you’re feeling which you have described as “ostracization”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11915/is-ostracism-a-common-practice-of-the-administators-of-this-website#comment51143_11915&quot;&gt;following Colleen’s logic&lt;/a&gt; and inferring by ostracizing you simply mean that your posts don’t seem to be attracting the kind of attention (in terms of votes or comments or both) that you expect or have experienced on previous posts, that’s not a power anyone here has: not low rep users, nor high rep users, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/75189/273503&quot;&gt;nor even elected diamond moderators&lt;/a&gt;&amp;sup1;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, I suppose it’s possible that SE the company has some “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shadowban&lt;/a&gt;” mechanism, but if they do, I’ve never heard it mentioned before, and I read the Meta sites pretty regularly, so if it existed, I’d expect to have seen &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; complain about it, even if the company itself doesn’t want to publicize its existence&amp;sup2;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if they do have it, I think it very unlikely they’d apply it for political reasons. SE as a company would only really care if there were commercial or PR impacts, and I doubt some post about language being political creates that kind of risk for them. Plus, historically, they’ve handled PR snafus through the normal mechanisms of deleting, redacting (only in extreme cases), and shutting down accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So absent some grand conspiracy at work... no, no one is deliberately ostracizing you. As you spend time here, you’ll note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/331618/55623&quot;&gt;posts you spend a lot of time and expertise composing&lt;/a&gt; get relatively few views, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/255969/55623&quot;&gt;popular responses to simple questions you fire off in minutes&lt;/a&gt; get a flood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C’est le vie. Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt;In particular, the publicly &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/158215/273503&quot;&gt;enumerated powers of the various classes of SE employee&lt;/a&gt; that rank above “elected moderator” (like Community Managers) don’t  include shadowbanning, meaning it’s likely that only SE developers with database access or the executives that can direct them have the power to shape the site in the way that worries you.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup2; &lt;sub&gt;Unless the shadowban worked really, really well, of course...&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T19:23:35.273" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T19:23:35.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11913" CreationDate="2018-12-17T14:53:41.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not at all official, but my vague understanding is that to keep things fresh and interesting, they try not to repeat hat-earning criteria year-to-year; so any activity that was worth a hat last year probably isn't this year.  (But it may well be again in another year or three.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T14:53:41.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11902" CreationDate="2018-12-17T15:03:58.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hats are &lt;em&gt;here again&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://winterbash2018.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://winterbash2018.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kDH8F.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kDH8F.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Winter Bash header showing a knitted wintry scene&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T15:03:58.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11897" CreationDate="2018-12-17T15:21:54.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has now been re-opened!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9001" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T15:21:54.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11922" CreationDate="2018-12-18T12:08:59.230" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through the new tags and spotted &quot;very&quot; and &quot;snowclone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder how tags are deleted, since I couldn't find a button anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does one have to go to each question the tag is mentioned and remove it manually, or do moderators have the tools to do batch-removals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should one even be able to remove tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328329" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T20:23:35.180" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T20:23:35.180" Title="Can tags be removed?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11920" CreationDate="2018-12-18T12:32:24.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags can be removed, but the way to do that is to remove them from every question. Once a tag is no longer used, it doesn't exist. For a tag which has only been used once, that's not difficult. Just edit it out; editing without review does need 2k rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags can be blacklisted so they don't reappear, but for that to happen it's necessary* that it no longer exists in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/473466/very-afraid-or-very-much-afraid&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt; to which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/very&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;very&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;very&lt;/a&gt; has been attached seems to be more about &lt;em&gt;much,&lt;/em&gt; which is already covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adverb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adverb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adverb&lt;/a&gt; tag. I've removed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm ambivalent about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/snowclone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;snowclone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;snowclone&lt;/a&gt;. It might be useful as a tag: normally questions generate an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/snowclone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;using the word&lt;/a&gt; rather than the question already knowing what it's talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;*Well, I believe that special dispensation might be allowed for a common tag which has become meaningless, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T12:42:39.807" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T12:42:39.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11920" CreationDate="2018-12-18T14:57:47.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;tags can be removed, as Andrew noted, by removing all tags from each individual item that has it. An unintended consequence of attempting to do so is that a change in tag on a question is considered an edit, and any edit moves it to the top of the activity queue, so any en masse removal of an unliked tag would push off new questions and answers from the top of the high activity queue. For a tag attached to only a couple questions, that is ignorable. But for more than 5 or so, the new questions/answers would be almost pushed out of existence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as to those two particular tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'very' is a strange tag to have because it is about a single word. I don't know if ELU should have a subset that is essentially a dictionary. But for that particular question the word 'very' is searchable without the tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'snowclone' is a new submission of mine. It is a viable linguistic term that should be useful here. That is hasn't been used before is mildly surprising to me only because I feel like there have been enough questions here on ELU with that theme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the tag editing system on ELU is, as much work as has been put into it, in need of augmentation. It might work for SO (differentiating questions by programming language), but here ... there just doesn't seem to be enough utility (in correspondence to the effort to edit).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T14:57:47.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11925" CreationDate="2018-12-19T09:00:44.020" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing the various sites on Stack Exchange and noticed some having a &quot;Subscribe to newsletter&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a thing exist here? Are there reasons why there isn't one, in the case there isn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328329" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T13:19:46.733" Title="Does EL&amp;U have a newsletter?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11897" CreationDate="2018-12-19T10:50:49.097" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only my opinion:&#xA;The question cannot be answered in a few hundred words. By the time I was 10 years old, I understood the mechanism in question here. In another 15 years I think I understood that the mechanism should not be employed except by those authorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Essentially, it took a lot of years to gain a basic understanding of &quot;authority&quot; in this regard.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the military a person directly overseeing some activity might declare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Afuckinbout face....get adamnboard!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There would normally be no question of his authority to insert intensifiers inside a word.  However, were a senior officer present within hearing distance, this &quot;authorized person&quot; might consider his authority had some limits, and, abandon the intensifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hundreds of such examples might be offered to explain &quot;authority&quot; here. The only possible written answer would be &quot;don't do it&quot; , at least until solid understanding of &quot;authority&quot; be gained. That would required years of English language experience.  &quot;Unauthorized&quot; use can lead to being put &quot;afuckinpon&quot; by some who do not recognize the user's &quot;authority&quot;, as in fact happened to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206690" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T22:46:42.470" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T22:46:42.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11923" CreationDate="2018-12-19T13:19:46.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mea culpa, ELU &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a newsletter, and, as you suggested, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; automated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1iGfk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1iGfk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;preview of EL&amp;amp;U newsletter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can subscribe to the EL&amp;amp;U —&#xA;or any other SE site — newsletter here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/newsletters&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/newsletters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U can be found under “Culture”, in the right column. You may have to click “show more Culture sites” at the bottom of that column. Or you can use the search field at the top left and type in “English”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In case it’s of interest, I tracked this down by going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;MSE&lt;/a&gt;, searching for “newsletters” (plural in the hope to find only posts about newsletters for all sites), clicked the first result, saw the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newsletter&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newsletter&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newsletter&lt;/a&gt;, clicked on it, sorted by “votes”, and found this MSE post: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96758/weekly-site-newsletters&quot;&gt;Weekly site newsletters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T13:19:46.733" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-19T16:30:59.643" Score="7" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the “Help new users ask better questions” Wizard has been in the works on SO for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/378057/2562182&quot;&gt;It has officially entered the testing phase&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth keeping an eye on. If it works there, I’d imagine SE would want to roll it out to other sites as well, probably in order of traffic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19514/273503&quot;&gt;6-8 time units&lt;/a&gt;, we might be getting a little extra help here on EL&amp;amp;U keeping the garden tidy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the first screenshot shows a selection of options for “what type of question”, including “software recommendations”, which are &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; on SO, so they can be nipped in the bud. I imagine we could apply that here, to, say, proofreading requests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good stuff, I’m excited. One of the most prominent developments in the SE software I’ve seen in the last 2 years, honestly &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/354125/2562182&quot;&gt;aimed at improving question quality&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T16:30:59.643" Title="Something to keep your eye on: Question Wizard" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-19T22:40:23.670" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know questions about finding resources are off-topic on the main site, however, this puts users like me in a bind. Frequently, questions are flagged as easily answerable with the right resource (often online), but unless you're an expert with subscriptions to many language sites, you don't even know what resources are out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently (as in this week), I'm interested in the etymology of irregular plurals, in particular ones with a Germanic origin (Latinate and Greek ones are easy to find information on). I don't think I've ever seen a dictionary that gives plural etymologies, as it's assumed that in most cases it's simply adding '-s' to a regular noun, or alternatively, the plural form is listed separately without any additional etymology. It &quot;just is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find these resources so I can get the answers without posting off-topic questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T22:34:25.373" Title="Finding resources within the site guidelines" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11927" CreationDate="2018-12-20T18:38:59.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you specifically would like to be directed to a good reference work on an English language topic, you've come to the right place! Reference requests are off-topic on the main site, but they're on-topic for ELU.meta (that's not a general SE rule, but it is the rule locally). First have a look around to see if what you want has already been discussed here—the reference FAQ question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/177853&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to start—and if you don't see it, ask a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you have a specific question about the English language and/or its usage, but you're concerned that it might be easily answered in some reference work you've never heard of, you should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do some digging for the answer in the works you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know. We mostly expect people to be familiar with dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias—or at least know how to search Google for &quot;define [term]&quot; and &quot;[term] synonyms&quot; and how to use Wikipedia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do a basic search in EL&amp;amp;U to see if your question has already been answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you didn't find what you were looking for in 1. or 2., ask your question on the main site, being sure to describe the research you've already done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:38:59.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T19:19:46.237" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused by the following notice on my answer to a question which is basically &quot;we do this thing where we promise something; what would you call that?&quot; to which I provided several good words with definitions. Apparently this was too short and concise and without explanation. What would I need to add for it to be acceptable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, I also post the top answer, which to my mind seems very very similar and concise. But obviously I am missing something here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fvXOo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fvXOo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O34e4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O34e4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="325084" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T20:22:53.950" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T21:16:59.153" Title="Why is suggesting words on word suggestion questions insufficient?" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11929" CreationDate="2018-12-20T21:04:10.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I placed those notices. The reason why we’re looking for longer answers that supply your own explanations is perhaps best answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11731/2085&quot;&gt;this recent guidance from the Stack Exchange CM team&lt;/a&gt; about this, especially in the context of the perpetual “help me guess a good word” twenty-questions games that we have here on our site and what it means to add something of unique value. Just picking a word doesn’t do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want your answer to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;your own work written mostly in your own words&lt;/a&gt;, and to be a substantial contribution not just random suggestions from a thesaurus with links or copied text from some dictionary. That doesn’t add any unique value to our site that they can’t get elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/single-word-requests-crosswords-and-the-fight-against-mediocrity&quot;&gt;earlier CM team input&lt;/a&gt; about single-word requests and the fight against mediocrity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T21:04:10.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11929" CreationDate="2018-12-20T21:16:59.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see two problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) Your answer is a list of ideas, suggestions, or opinions, not a definite answer. A Stack Exchange answer answers the question, or at least part of the question, once and for all. If you are unsure what the asker is looking for, first ask for clarification in the comment box on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) Your post must be mostly your own work. An answer which consists almost exclusively of copied text is not your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rest assured you aren't the only one in the boat. Many of the answers to this question suffer from the same problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T21:16:59.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-22T03:28:47.853" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ed Chu's question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/478041&quot;&gt;Is “I was having a walk” correct?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed (with just one vote plus mod) for supposed &quot;proofreading&quot;. I think the proofreading flag was inappropriate here, as the question is clearly about &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;, and the conflicting comments by @MichaelHarvey and @Kris indicate there are clear differences in usage, no doubt regionally based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, @microenzo suggests in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/478041/is-i-was-having-a-walk-correct#comment1154123_478041&quot;&gt;a later comment&lt;/a&gt; to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5976&quot;&gt;“I am going to have a walk”&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; question has two answers that more or less address the issue in the closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view the better option would have been to close Ed Chu's question &lt;em&gt;as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt;, since one of the purposes of keeping duplicates in the system is to enable multiple search solutions to direct towards the one good question. Note that currently the first entry returned in a search for &quot;having a walk&quot; is the &lt;em&gt;closed question&lt;/em&gt;, but as it hasn't been closed as a duplicate, it doesn't direct users to the &quot;good&quot; question, and there's a small risk of it being deleted entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what should happen in this situation, i.e. &lt;em&gt;what action should be taken&lt;/em&gt; (other than posting here) in the best interests of our site. I don't want to edit the closed question to change it from &quot;proofreading&quot; to a valid question on usage, so that it can then be reopened - I would then have to flag it as a duplicate, as should have happened in the first place. Editing would therefore be a waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Meta question is therefore: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way - perhaps at moderator level - to change the closure&#xA;  from &quot;off-topic/proofreading&quot; to &quot;duplicate/link-to-question&quot;&#xA;  directly, rather than me having to engineer a tiresome&#xA;  edit-reopen-flag-close process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-23T02:52:30.103" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T12:48:39.100" Title="How to change a closure from &quot;proofreading&quot; to &quot;duplicate&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11932" CreationDate="2018-12-22T11:44:34.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators have to re-open a question in order to close it with a different reason. We can't just swap the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, the question &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a proof-reading question, and it's off-topic for that reason. It should not have been asked here in that form. There is no reason to re-open it. Comments have been correctly used to give advice on the question, including one from a mod (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a question asks for proofreading or rewriting (“how should I write this?”, “is this correct?”, “which is correct?”), that is out of scope for this site and may be removed. See: “What topics can I ask about here? - Help Center”. If there is an unstated specific concern, such as “What does (word) mean in context?” or “How does (grammar or punctuation rule) apply in context?” &lt;strong&gt;try asking that question instead.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a reason to re-open it if it's edited to be on topic. If it's on-topic and a duplicate, then it might be closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T11:44:34.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11927" CreationDate="2018-12-22T22:15:05.910" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of our definition of &quot;commonly available&quot; means accessible to the general public. If a website is members only or the answer is only found in some offline book, then it is not commonly available. This is part of the principle behind which Stack Exchange itself was founded. It was originally meant in part to be an alternative to the subscribers only Experts Exchange service. We also provide a list of commonly available resources in the text of our closure reason as 1006a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do a search on google, show us some of the things that turned up and if something promising turned up, explain why it is not adequate. In all likelihood your question will remain open if you do at least that much, since we then have reason to believe that a commonly available answer is not easily found, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, generally speaking, if you look and show us that the best results were inadequate, we'll give it a pass because &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;part of the Stack Exchange's goal to aid in the dissemination of good information.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise against asking for resources on meta. It is off topic. If it was within our jurisdiction to set the policy like normal like normal, it would not be off-topic, but our proprietors do not allow us to dictate the scope of meta-websites. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10641/124936&quot;&gt;I have explained most of the reasons I believe this here,&lt;/a&gt; and though it is not a popular opinion I still believe it to be the correct one, especially considering that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange has a history of removing features to curtail abusive use such as harboring otherwise out of scope questions.&lt;/a&gt; The lack of reputation point gains on meta is not a valid excuse for asking out of scope questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a future where Stack Exchange decides that to curb P.O.B. resource requests that they require all meta posts to be made on the main S.E. wide meta where people more judiciously vote to shut down off-topic questions. We would lose our ability to autonomously legislate, which would be a great detriment to our ability to decide our own scope. Moreover, the people who visit a section of any website have the right to expect that posts will be germane to that section, and too many off-topic posts will drive them away. That much is basic internet etiquette and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;a major reason why we decide to allow some questions but not others&lt;/a&gt;, and the lack of irrelevant chit-chat is a such major predeliction of Stack Exchange that it is in every website's tour, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;including ours&lt;/a&gt;. I fail to see what makes a resource request any better here than on the main website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that having been said though, &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;certain kinds of resource requests may be asked on Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;, because unlike us their community decided to make such questions within scope on the main website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a list of commonly available resources that 1006a already provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T22:34:25.373" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T22:34:25.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11932" CreationDate="2018-12-23T23:07:37.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I thought this should have been an open and closed (as duplicate) case, but apparently not. A moderator could reopen then immediately reclose the question as a duplicate in under a minute &lt;em&gt;were they convinced they should do so&lt;/em&gt;. So I think bringing it to meta was the right option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I definitely think it should be closed as duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is very clearly asking if the verb “have” is correct in “having a walk”. This is most clear in the body of the post; you might think that it was asking for everything to be proofread from the title but that’s just because someone other than op edited it. Nonetheless I think that the edit was reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question asks about “going to have a walk”, but it seems sufficiently close to be a good duplicate. It has more answers (none really felt definitive so I posted my own... with evidence!) and those answers paint a more complete picture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case Ed Chu’s question should not be considered proofreading. The question checks off all the boxes for &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; proofreading as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;defined by the help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Passage quoted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific source of concern mentioned (the verb in “having a walk”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reason for concern included (colleague said it was wrong)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also checks off one box not explicitly mentioned but important nonetheless (mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-proofreading-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;): it is the type of question that is statistically likely to occur to other people. Because it’s a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing missing would be research, but the ideal, most helpful close reason here is &lt;strong&gt;duplicate&lt;/strong&gt;. This way people (both the op and anyone else) can easily find answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2018-12-24T12:48:39.100" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T12:48:39.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-28T06:38:56.457" Score="3" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/478667/what-does-mansplaining-mean&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt; was originally closed for the lack of research closure reason. Hotlicks voted to close with the claim that the answer could easily be found with a google search, and Dan Bron voiced similar concerns in a prior comment. The chatlog with the relevant comments can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/87606/discussion-on-question-by-naser-khsoravi-what-does-mansplaining-mean&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was the last person to vote to close this question, with the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi Naser. We have policies in place &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;to prevent the proliferation of questions which are likely to have a freely available and adequate answer elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, so we can be of real help. If you can consult &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mansplain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a dictionary definition&lt;/a&gt; and tell us why it confuses you or explain any doubts you have regarding it, we would probably be willing to help, but in the question's present state we can't really be sure of how to help you understand the word much better than a dictionary can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, this was because Google's top result for just the word mansplain led me to Merriam-Webster's website which contained an adequate enough definition of the word alongside a few illustrative quotations, which at the time made me presuppose that the question not only lacked research, but also met the general reference criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would all be good and fine if the answer imparted adequate understanding, but continuing conversation indicated that this was not quite adequate for the needs of our questioner, who made a couple of subsequent edits to include what he found on google and made the following comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;  Thanks. I found some example and definition but they were ambigues. So I searched in english.stackexchange and I didn't found any question like mine.So I thought it will be good ask this question here for getting good expressive example or definition from some masters.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;@Hotlicks I updated my question. I think mansplaining is some think like saying hey you are a woman and you can't understand it. for example: a female have an idea about football, and a man answer women don't understands football.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not speak for the other close voters, but if the question had originally included this information, and the research provided in revision 4, I would not have voted to close the question. I made a couple of edits to make the question read more fluently, make proper citations and include information from the questioner's comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hotlicks and Dan Bron made comments suggesting that the found definition represented an adequate explanation of mansplain, but I have a touch of disagreement, and suppose there may be merit in answering the question. Naser does not seem to be fully convinced, and his newfound understanding of the word mansplain is close, but I suspect it is not quite right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man's mansplanation is usually a more subtle dismissal of a woman's wits through a condescending explanation that would presumedly not be profferred to a man due to its obviousness to anybody who has knowledge. &quot;Women don't understand football&quot; may be a misogynistic jeer, but personally I believe it is too direct and not explanatory enough to be called mansplaining. Maybe if a woman states something like &quot;The Cowboys should have won&quot; and a man named Captain Obvious states something more along the lines of &quot;Whomever scores the most touchdowns wins&quot; that might be a mansplanation, if it is assumed to be the sort of jeer that The Cap'n would not make make to the guys at the pub, predicated on the assumption that men understand the game better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am mistaken, since mansplain is not really a word I hear often or use at all, but that is my own impression of it based on what little exposure I do have to it. Perhaps both cases are mansplaining, or I am entirely mistaken, but if I am right then this needs addressing in an answer by somebody with an adequate understanding of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also appreciate of Naser's efforts to cooperate with our recommendations and work to get the question reopened, and I would like to see him get the help he desires for that reason too. This sort of cooperativeness in getting a question reopened is a principle purpose of the closure reason, and it has been for quite a long time something we have had trouble achieving with new users. This is something Jay Hanlon wrote about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;The War of the Closes&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems like the motivation for  many of the recent changes such as new user notifications and the recent revision of be nice into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;new code of conduct&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am not quite sure what to do about it. Strictly speaking, the question seems to comply with our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043/124936&quot;&gt;research requirements&lt;/a&gt; (except for the check multiple dictionaries portion, which  is never enforced) and perhaps for that reason alone it should be reopened. However,  these definitions may be adequate for most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That combined with the fact that this question is predicated on preparation for going into the international social space, might make it more along the lines of what E.L.L. was founded to handle. Now I do not think that this is a bad question in its present state, at least if I can safely assume that I have not overstepped my bounds with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt;, but provision B for Cerberus's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/467/28088&quot;&gt;Policy For Questions that Are Entirely Answerable with A Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; makes it seem like this might bar the question from the website, and it is the question linked in one of their local question closure reasons. On the other hand it seems to be exactly the sort of question J.R. was talking about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1102/28088&quot;&gt;his answer to &lt;em&gt;This Isn't English Morphosyntax Learners&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Unlike Cerberus J.R. is a moderator there and that answer is more highly voted upon and newer answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not yet contributed much to English Language Learners, so I am not sure what questions are likely to be closed and hence thrown back to us if we do choose to migrate it, but I figure it is worth consideration given these factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that neither English Language &amp;amp; Usage &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; English Language Learners have many posts with the word mansplain or mansplaining, and no questions on either website seem to be within the scope of explaining its meaning. Either website may stand to have an open question regarding that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we reopen the question, should we migrate it, does it need further improvement for a reason I have neglected to notice, or is there no chance that this answer can be reopened suggesting that it should be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T15:30:55.890" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T15:30:55.890" Title="Should &quot;What Does Mansplaining Mean?&quot; be reopened or migrated? (Reopened)" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|migration|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11936" CreationDate="2018-12-28T14:57:28.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is an easy inference to think that if a question is easily answered by google that it is off-topic by 'general reference' or 'Please do you research first' close reasons. And that holds for many questions, but I think it is naive to assume it for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may not be &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers out there (I'm looking at you, Urban Dictionary), and that is what ELU is supposed to provide: thoughtful, authoritative, substantiated (as much as may be possible) answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it easy to VTC questions that are poorly written and are easily googled, but that answers that are surely already out there don't necessarily attempt quality explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular instance, I think ELU can do better than google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T14:57:28.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-01T02:46:31.533" Score="13" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges&#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.&#xA;To that end, here is how the moderation done here on English Language &amp;amp; Usage breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                 Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                 14         48&#xA;Users destroyed                                 515          0&#xA;Users deleted                                    29          0&#xA;Users contacted                                  35          0&#xA;User suspensions lifted early                     1          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue           134      7,121&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue               58      4,420&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue         13     15,846&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue               21      3,705&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue                17     17,119&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue              200     23,899&#xA;Tags merged                                      24          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                            35          2&#xA;Tag synonyms created                             38          1&#xA;Questions unprotected                             3         13&#xA;Questions reopened                              154        154&#xA;Questions protected                             911        203&#xA;Questions migrated                              469        459&#xA;Questions merged                                 20          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁴                               69      5,634&#xA;Questions closed                              4,343      6,418&#xA;Question flags handled⁴                       1,413      4,290&#xA;Posts unlocked                                   12        179&#xA;Posts undeleted                                  57        423&#xA;Posts locked                                     38      1,854&#xA;Posts deleted⁵                                2,447     12,477&#xA;Posts bumped                                      0      7,274&#xA;Escalations to the CM team                        4          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                              121          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                321      8,651&#xA;Comments deleted⁶                            10,775     16,694&#xA;Comment flags handled                         3,536      5,436&#xA;Bounties canceled                                 1          0&#xA;Answers flagged                                 290      8,970&#xA;Answer flags handled                          5,990      3,270&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat            224          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T20:27:09.890" Title="2018: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T08:39:57.327" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every question lacking in research becomes closed by being flagged by the users in any community of Stack Exchange network; I am encountering this since I joined Stack Exchange network. But there's exception to this that in past, though there were some flaggable posts (lacking in research) on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage (EL&amp;amp;U), the moderators did not closed those posts. See the following screenshot:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aiz5W.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aiz5W.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of a post&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;In addition to this, following are also the posts lacking in research (but were not closed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574/how-are-i-e-and-e-g-pronounced&quot;&gt;How are “i.e.” and “e.g.” pronounced?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2544/how-many-spaces-should-come-after-a-period-full-stop&quot;&gt;How many spaces should come after a period/full stop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14/which-words-in-a-title-should-be-capitalized&quot;&gt;Which words in a title should be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/877/what-is-the-plural-form-of-status&quot;&gt;What is the plural form of “status”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the reason they were not flagged? Were the users not able to flag any post? or there were not any moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295228" LastEditorUserId="295228" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T09:18:53.073" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T00:13:17.397" Title="Why were the past flaggable questions not flagged in EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-05T15:33:20.977" Score="13" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question currently up on EL&amp;amp;U illustrates the problem exactly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/479994/2303&quot;&gt;Is exist one word to express &quot;beliefs and value&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave it to Janus Bahs Jacquet to illustrate what's wrong with the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is ‘beliefs and value’ supposed to mean? You can’t just put two random words together with no context and then ask if there’s a word that expresses them – why should there be, if they’re just random words? There isn’t a word to express ‘sheep and coffee’ either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So often this is the case. Question-askers assume there simply &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be one single word to express two (or more) disparate concepts. (One wonders why they have such a burning need for this kind of economy and precision when the rest of their prose so often demonstrates neither.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the antonyms tag is full of misguided requests (often an effort to name categories in software applications, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/474086/2303&quot;&gt;Antonym of outcast&lt;/a&gt;). In many cases, the question assumes that for every noun or verb in English there must exist an exact, perfect antonym. What is the opposite of &quot;bottle&quot;? Of &quot;to fry&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, such questions often invite a flood of attempts to answer. Often these are one-word answers, or nearly, and often they are not even remotely on the mark. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to step up and close such questions as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;—for that is what the rafts of guessing-game answers demonstrate—more promptly and completely (in video game parlance, even four close votes leave a question 100% combat effective). Either that or establish a new closing reason that addresses them more specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T03:56:25.213" Title="Can we get a bit stricter on SWR combo and antonym requests?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-07T00:51:41.430" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/480123/what-is-the-difference-in-connotation-between-relentless-and-ruthless&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first a critic felt that I had not done enough research. But it turned out that he had I were using the same dictionary definitions, except that I &quot;equated&quot; two definitions that he thought were rather different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also hypothesized a &quot;nuance&quot; not found in most dictionary definitions; that &quot;relentless&quot; was more &quot;honorable&quot; than &quot;ruthless.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever its initial shortcomings, the edited question clearly shows my research and meets at least the &quot;formal&quot; requirements for inclusion on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that my definition may be wrong and the other person's may be right. But isn't the whole point of the ELU site to separate what's &quot;right&quot; from &quot;wrong?&quot; As long as I spell out my assumptions (flawed or otherwise) so that they can be identified and addressed, should my question be acceptable on this site? Or do &quot;flawed assumptions&quot; automatically make a question &quot;poor&quot; and &quot;off topic&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A defender (with over 10,000 reputation) wrote: &quot;If you just use Google Books or some other corpus and check usage, both past and recent, you will find they are often synonyms. In most cases, ruthless is being used hyperbolically in place of relentless. It is frequently found anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. I completely understand the confusion here. This question shouldn't be closed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another high ranked user pointed out that some authorities consider the two words &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/ruthless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synonyms.&lt;/a&gt;(See answer below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps this site is to too &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4692/has-anyone-thought-about-changing-the-name-of-this-site/11944#11944&quot;&gt;&quot;advanced&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for my question, and that it is best asked on ELL instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="10287" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T17:00:33.233" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T17:05:30.957" Title="Are &quot;poor questions based on flawed assumptions&quot; acceptable on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11942" CreationDate="2019-01-07T06:52:45.787" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the main problem is that you didn't include your research &lt;em&gt;in the question&lt;/em&gt;. Including said research (and probably some context about how that research relates to your question) would fix the question, since the close reason specifically states (emphasis in original): &quot;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the research&lt;/strong&gt; you’ve done...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you don't include your research, people are liable to repeat what you know as answers, which isn't a good use of anyone's time. Including your research raises the bar for answers and makes the question much more interesting. That's why we require it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the claims of it being &quot;based on a flawed assumption&quot; and that the words are &quot;not synonymous&quot;, I'm just going to point to the first thesaurus I checked, since it includes the two words as synonyms: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/ruthless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Thesaurus&lt;/a&gt;. This would also be a good point to include in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T06:52:45.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4692" CreationDate="2019-01-07T08:39:36.437" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both sites are about &quot;English.&quot; But &quot;ELL&quot; is about &quot;elementary&quot; English (which is reasonably well defined by &quot;learners&quot; and ELU is about &quot;advanced&quot; English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a good name for this site would be &quot;Advanced English,&quot; with or without &quot;Usage.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently got into hot water by posting a &quot;basic&quot; question here. The median user was far more &quot;advanced&quot; than the question, which was heavily criticized. If I had it to do again, I would post it on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10287" LastEditorUserId="10287" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T16:58:11.960" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T16:58:11.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11942" CreationDate="2019-01-07T16:27:53.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two are confusing because they can both arise from a single decision or commitment if the circumstances are right, which means there are times when they can be switched without raising any eyebrows, but also times when they can't be. Your critic has jumped on the later cases. You confusion stems from the former cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start with the dictionary defs. &lt;em&gt;Ruthless&lt;/em&gt; can mean cruel, or without pity towards others, or it can mean without remorse. And the latter is actually closer to its original meaning based on the old word &lt;em&gt;rue&lt;/em&gt;. By implication, the ruthless one must have done something that would typically evince remorse in other people or in different circumstances. So a person can be ruthless as a matter of standard operating procedures, or they might occasionally be ruthless in exceptional circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Relentless&lt;/em&gt; is a bit easier to handle. MW has it as &quot;showing or promising no abatement of severity, intensity, strength, or pace.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone promises to pursue something to the ends of the earth in the face of conflicting attitudes from others, it's going to create strife. If their attitude is - well, that's their problem - then this avowed lack of pity deserves to be labeled ruthless as well as relentless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the two are separable as well. A ruthless act can occur in an instant, without any sense of relentlessness. And some examples of relentlessness won't even begin to accept ruthless, for instance &quot;One of Mother Teresa's great strengths was her relentless focus on the core mission of her organization: helping the poorest of the poor.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://govleaders.org/one-person-at-a-time.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gov Leaders.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site's rules and structure make it difficult to handle muddy questions. This one turns out to be very sensitive to context. You can try to rescue the question by providing examples of usage from reputable authors which you find confusing. I'm glad you stuck with it as long as you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T17:05:30.957" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T17:05:30.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11948" CreationDate="2019-01-08T17:05:47.427" Score="4" ViewCount="9137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a free dictionary in one text file or in a database format that I can download please?&#xA;Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="331104" OwnerDisplayName="Antsamotady" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T19:42:06.807" Title="English Dictionary in one text file" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11947" CreationDate="2019-01-08T18:56:15.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally use &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionarymid.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DictionaryForMIDS&lt;/a&gt;. It's excellent.  If you use android, it is available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.kugihan.dictionaryformids.hmi_android&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Play&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172114" OwnerDisplayName="Karlomanio" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T18:56:15.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7853" CreationDate="2019-01-09T13:42:18.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is to preserve some comments from a relevant comment-thread discussion from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11946/142322&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; that was about to be deleted. The thesis is highlighted below (emphasis, mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Aynonomus is correct in suggesting that most purely etymological questions asked at this site are closed as general reference/lack of research, with a terse recommendation to consult Etymology Online. We have many question that are tagged as 'etymology' but are in fact permitted to remain open because they ask about when the word or phrase was first recorded in a published work. I find it interesting (and inconsistent) that EL&amp;amp;U now has a tag for 'phrase-origin' but still doesn't have one for 'word-origin'; in effect, we use 'etymology' to characterize the latter type of question. – Sven Yargs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@SvenYargs I'm curious, what do you mean by &amp;quot;purely etymological questions&amp;quot;? (I've always understood &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; to refer to the origins and history of words, but I assume there is a more technical definition I don't know.) – 1006a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@1006a: I mean the derivation of English words from other languages, as for example this first paragraph from the entry for etymology at Etymology Online: &amp;quot;late 14c., ethimolegia 'facts of the origin and development of a word,' from Old French etimologie, ethimologie (14c., Modern French étymologie), from Latin etymologia, from Greek etymologia 'analysis of a word to find its true origin,' properly 'study of the true sense (of a word),' with - logia 'study of, a speaking of' (see -logy) + etymon ... – Sven Yargs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... 'true sense, original meaning,' neuter of etymos 'true, real, actual,' related to eteos 'true,' which perhaps is cognate with Sanskrit satyah, Gothic sunjis, Old English soð 'true,' from a PIE *set - 'be stable.' Latinized by Cicero as veriloquium.&amp;quot; This entire analysis is concerned with tracing the roots of the current English word etymology from other languages, not with identifying when the word came into English. In a subsequent paragraph, the entry suggests a first occurrence date in published English of &amp;quot;mid-15c,&amp;quot; but that is a relatively minor aspect of the entry. – Sven Yargs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;em&gt;My point is that if someone were to post a question at EL&amp;amp;U that asked &amp;quot;What is the etymology of the word etymology? it would almost certainly be closed as general reference/lack of research; but if someone cited the Etymology Online discussion of the word etymology and then asked &amp;quot;What is the earliest known instance of etymology in English?&amp;quot; the question might very well pass muster. (I would try to keep it open, anyway.) &lt;strong&gt;I don't know what the scholarly definition of etymology is, but I'm confident that etymology as a study isn't primarily concerned with first occurrence dates.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; – Sven Yargs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@SvenYargs Ah, I see the distinction. I think to the extent that the term has stretched to include word origins within English, &amp;quot;first instance&amp;quot; questions do occasionally count as etymology—&amp;quot;covfefe&amp;quot; comes to mind as a word coined (or at least turning up like a bad penny) directly in English. But I agree that questions asking about history prior to importation into English are likely to get the cold shoulder, either as general ref or &amp;quot;not about English&amp;quot; or because the pursuit of a word's &amp;quot;true meaning&amp;quot; based on origin is now often called the etymological fallacy rather than etymology. – 1006a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T13:42:18.017" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-01-09T13:42:18.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2019-01-10T02:47:28.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Through lack of recent practice I'd forgotten how to embed a Google Ngram chart in a post, and in my search for where I'd read it on Meta - which I finally found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1171/how-do-i-insert-an-actual-ngram-chart-into-my-post/1173#1173&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - I came across this old question. As Google Ngrams now have substantially added functionality, I thought it would be worthwhile to post an updated answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can now easily compare frequencies between the British and American English corpora &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in the one chart&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In the &quot;comma-separated phrases&quot; field, insert the &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt; corpus selection operator after the search term, followed by the shorthand for the corpus (e.g. &lt;code&gt;eng_us_2012&lt;/code&gt;), add a comma and repeat the search term with section operator and the shorthand for the other corpus (e.g. &lt;code&gt;eng_gb_2012&lt;/code&gt;). You can do this with more than one search term, to see which appears more frequently in each corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, compare the expressions &lt;em&gt;take a walk&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;go for a walk&lt;/em&gt;. A basic Google Ngram using the search {take a walk,go for a walk} &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=take+a+walk%2Cgo+for+a+walk&amp;amp;year_start=1860&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctake%20a%20walk%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cgo%20for%20a%20walk%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shows&lt;/a&gt; that the former has always occurred more frequently, but the latter has been growing in usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/08Uch.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/08Uch.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;take a walk&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;go for a walk&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I wanted to look at transatlantic differences in frequency, I'd search for {take a walk:eng_us_2012,go for a walk:eng_us_2012,take a walk:eng_gb_2012,go for a walk:eng_gb_2012}. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=take+a+walk%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cgo+for+a+walk%3Aeng_us_2012%2Ctake+a+walk%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Cgo+for+a+walk%3Aeng_gb_2012&amp;amp;year_start=1860&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctake%20a%20walk%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cgo%20for%20a%20walk%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctake%20a%20walk%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cgo%20for%20a%20walk%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;resulting chart&lt;/a&gt; reveals that &lt;em&gt;take a walk&lt;/em&gt; has declined in frequency in the GB corpus over time, to such an extent that &lt;em&gt;go for a walk&lt;/em&gt; has been the more common term (albeit narrowly) since about the mid-1930s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DKDjP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DKDjP.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;take a walk&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;go for a walk&amp;quot; for U.S. corpus vs G.B. corpus&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngram Viewer info page&lt;/a&gt; provides not only the shorthand codes for the different corpora, but also a summary of all the other useful &quot;Advanced Usage&quot; options, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wildcard search (shows the top 10 substitutions for the word, e.g.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;University of &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inflection search (e.g. &quot;book_INF a hotel&quot; gives results for &quot;book&quot;,&#xA;&quot;booked&quot;, &quot;books&quot;, and &quot;booking&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Part-of-speech Tags (really useful! E.g. differentiate tackle_VERB vs&#xA;tackle_NOUN, or find all expressions of the form &quot;read (determiner)&#xA;book&quot; with &lt;em&gt;read _DET_ book&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a range of even more advanced and complicated search functions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T02:47:28.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11941" CreationDate="2019-01-10T03:56:25.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions may be frustrating to moderators, but they are legitimate questions. After all, why is there a tag for them? (single-word-requests) I see two inconvenient truths that are resisted on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English is the world's Pidgin. There are more English speakers in China than in U.S., for example. Deal with it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All disciplines have a need to name things and there is no nomenclature SE, so there will always be cross-disciplinary traffic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nomenclature questions aren't any more opinion-based than other types of licit questions here. The &quot;opinion-based&quot; gambit frequently gets abused on this site to exclude users who have less than native English proficiency. People with bad English often ask good questions that can stump native speakers. Let's try to be more inclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T03:56:25.213" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2019-01-10T13:28:23.830" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The message needs to be short and easy enough for less competent speakers to understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To get the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answers, please include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/241616/whats-the-single-word-for-left-or-right-handed&quot;&gt;sample sentence&lt;/a&gt; showing how the word would be used&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Provide as much detail and context as you can&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tell us which words were discarded after using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2577&quot;&gt;thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; or a dictionary, and why.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the word you're looking for is an adjective/noun/pejorative/slang, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T07:55:14.773" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T07:55:14.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T17:54:23.533" Score="6" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please post your personal tips, ticks, and best practices for finding interesting questions to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These can be tags to watch, searches you do (even for really old questions, even for old, &lt;em&gt;answered and accepted&lt;/em&gt; questions), anything at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T09:15:42.070" Title="Tips for finding interesting questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11953" CreationDate="2019-01-11T07:44:59.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid affirmation bias (the illegitimate cousin of confirmation bias), I attempt to answer most every question I read...in my head. The most interesting questions are often those which initially I find least engaging, but which, once engaged, unfold (okay, blossom) to reveal unsuspected depths and challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legitimate cousin steps in and starts a brawl when I read only the likely questions, that is, questions about phrase-origins,  etymology, linguistic history, slang, and etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question title may prompt me first, either to scoff (a challenge I make myself) or become curious. After that, the more well-defined the question the happier I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to avoid guessing game questions. What did Stein say about television? Anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T07:44:59.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11956" CreationDate="2019-01-11T15:43:39.400" Score="4" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlative-comparitives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlative-comparitives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlative-comparitives&lt;/a&gt; should be changed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlative-comparatives&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlative-comparatives&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlative-comparatives&lt;/a&gt; because the former isn't properly spelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to do it myself, but then I realized there's a tag synonym that probably shouldn't be messed with so I need a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T16:33:31.357" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T16:33:31.357" Title="Fix [correlative-comparitives]" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11955" CreationDate="2019-01-11T16:33:23.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks, this should &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlative-comparitives?sort=newest&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;all be fixed&lt;/a&gt; now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T16:33:23.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2019-01-12T20:48:49.753" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think an available option should be no action. I don't perceive any sort of problem with the current flow of SWR questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T20:48:49.753" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-13T01:04:05.867" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the pointer hovers over a tag, a tag popup appears. This is fine if you move the pointer to the tag, but it is a nuisance if you scroll the page and the tag slips under the pointer. Can you work it so that scrolling doesn't trigger the popup, but moving the pointer still does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T01:24:00.937" Title="Annoying tag description popup" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11962" CreationDate="2019-01-13T01:24:00.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;strong&gt;No, please don't.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rather have a consistent site that always shows these descriptions when my cursor is on the tag, than one were these descriptions sometimes don't pop-up. Adding this feature will cause a lot of unnecessary confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These tag buttons are really small. If occasionally my pointer ends up on one of the tags after a scroll, I am willing to just move my mouse a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="331698" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T01:24:00.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9607" CreationDate="2019-01-13T21:45:28.450" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're able to follow the following steps, your question is most likely on-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a sentence where you'd use the word. (And not some weaselly sentence like &amp;quot;I should call it _____.&amp;quot;) If you're able to come up with a sentence but it sounds tortured or weird, you may not want to post the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You think that there's an existing word or phrase that covers the meaning you're looking for. (Questions that give a list of five unrelated character traits and ask for a word that expresses all of them don't tend to do well, for example.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have too many unnatural restraints. Trying to enforce things like &amp;quot;must sound creative&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;must be shorter than 8 characters&amp;quot; generally doesn't go over too well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you should check out the guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;in the tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't really special rules; they should apply to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; SWR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T15:27:20.867" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T15:27:20.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2019-01-15T03:44:58.300" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) Description of a circumstance&lt;/strong&gt; that could benefit by taking &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&quot;an exact string of words&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and reducing it to a single one. Then provide &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3) an example sentence&lt;/strong&gt; containing either a [blank] or &quot;that exact string of words&quot; to be replaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem &gt; Overly wordy idea &gt; Box your solution has to fit in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provide a description of a circumstance that could benefit by taking &quot;an exact string of words&quot; and reducing it to a single one. Then provide an example sentence containing either a [blank] or &quot;that exact string of words&quot; to be replaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has to meet those three criteria. A description, &quot;a reverse definition&quot;, and a place to put the imaginary word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A fill-in-the-blank context can't just be a blank. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/481627/single-word-to-replace-allowed-to-be-missing&quot;&gt;&quot;allowed to be missing”&lt;/a&gt; is just a blank. Where's the rest of the sentence?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="68817" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T16:19:18.380" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T16:19:18.380" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T15:04:20.883" Score="-2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/481213/191178&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, in my opinion, seems to be concerned with parallelism. I would definitely consider parallelism as part of grammar. The comments are being needlessly specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I don't think anyone says &quot;on first date&quot;. People usually say &quot;on first dates&quot; or &quot;on the first date&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During job interviews , ON FIRST DATES , and when meeting new coworkers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During job interviews, first dates, and personal introductions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During a job interview, a first date, and a personal introduction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When getting interviewed for a job, going on a first date, and meeting new coworkers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48322" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T18:17:28.600" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T18:20:15.230" Title="We cannot ask questions about parallelism?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11966" CreationDate="2019-01-15T18:20:15.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does this look like a question about parallelism to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Which is correct , on first dates or on first date?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is correct to say &amp;quot;on first dates&amp;quot; ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or the correct form is on first date ? Is it suppose to be &amp;quot;on first few dates?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/481213/1&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the version of the post that the first comment was asking about, as you can see from the timestamps (i.e. the first comment was posted 11 hours ago, the clarification was given 10 hours ago, and the question was edited 3 hours ago). As most of the comments indicated, adding the context here mattered. Now that the context was added, all of the comments can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does have close votes, most of which (currently 2/3) are voting for migration to ELL. This seems like a fair decision to me considering the nature of the question and the proficiency of the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T18:20:15.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11900" CreationDate="2019-01-16T03:29:24.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;English language&quot; topic is just mismatched with the question-and-answer format, so it's probably not something that can be fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People go to the programming-related SE sites because they are stuck with something at work or on a project. At those sites the banal questions are cherished because they are the locus for authoritative answers to common problems. The top contributors tend to be professional programmers, including consultants who use their contributions as a kind of portfolio showing off their knowledge base. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are some other sites (board games, movie trivia, whatever), where all the users just like to spend time discussing their hobby. They won't ever reach the traffic of the programming sites because they don't touch on common problems. But that's not a concern because the sites provide an online community in the more traditional sense. The questions tend to be subjective and it's not too crucial which answer gets accepted, but the format works reasonably well. I doubt anyone is using the sites for personal gain. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are the topics that have both enthusiasts and casual users with practical problems. Let's take things like Cooking and English language as examples. Yes, there is such a thing as a professional chef or restaurateurs; and there are English professors and linguists, but the site experts very often do something other than Cooking or English for a living. The site doesn't help their careers, so they don't get much out of answering noob questions. The people with practical problems tend to be people who are learning English, or people who don't know which kind of onion to buy. Their questions often don't interest the experts. In fact, the moderators have been actively trying to drive them away by making unreasonable demands on question quality. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think SE works well for the third category of topics:  you can't incentivize the skilled people to provide free advice like in the first category, and the Q&amp;amp;A format doesn't facilitate useful discussion between experts, like in the second category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31341" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T03:29:24.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11973" CreationDate="2019-01-17T10:13:26.327" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing through the questions and found so many abandoned [on hold] questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These wracks clutter up the site and pull attention away from the good questions on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anything be done to remove questions that will most likely not be edited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328329" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T18:18:45.380" Title="Can we do anything about abandoned &quot;on hold&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11969" CreationDate="2019-01-17T15:02:55.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;Once you get to 10,000 rep&lt;/a&gt;, you get the additional moderation privilege of &lt;strong&gt;voting to delete&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can access many more moderation tools at the moderation icon in the menu or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;at the direct URL&lt;/a&gt;, where, if you have enough rep, you can vote to close, reopen, delete, undelete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T15:02:55.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2019-01-17T15:48:34.470" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sample sentence should be sufficient.  The questions you're closing often aren't of low quality.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The foreclosure of discussion based on the form of a question reduces the utility of this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment to this and similar answers has been the mantra &quot;this is not a discussion forum, it's a question and answer site.&quot;  But asking questions and receiving answers is a type of discussion.  Does anyone doubt that James Lipton's or Oprah Winfrey's interviews are discussions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a restatement of the concept without key words that appear to illicit a stock response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The foreclosure of discourse based on the form of a question reduces the utility of this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163056" LastEditorUserId="163056" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T09:28:49.487" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T09:28:49.487" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11969" CreationDate="2019-01-17T17:38:15.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions meeting certain criteria are automatically deleted by a scheduled script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complete criteria are available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered, zero-score questions after a year?&lt;/a&gt;, but the quick summary is that there is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a daily check for abandoned closed questions (&gt;10 days old, no net&#xA;upvotes, no accepted answer, no recent activity)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a weekly check for abandoned questions (&gt;365 days old, no net upvotes, no accepted answer, low view rate)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a weekly check for dead questions (&gt;30 days old, no answers, negative score)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a weekly check for migration stubs (question moved to another site)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a weekly check for rejected migrations (question came from another site but was rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they're closed but don't fall into any of these categories, then as Mitch said, the best way to get rid of them is to Vote To Delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T17:38:15.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11969" CreationDate="2019-01-17T18:18:45.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On hold/closed questions are removed one of several ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They meet the requirements for automatic deletion described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/323179&quot;&gt;MSE deletion FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Probably the most important thing to remember is that &quot;[t]he system will automatically delete closed, unlocked questions with zero or negative score having no positively scored or accepted answers or pending reopen votes, that were closed for any reason other than duplicate nine or more days ago and haven't been edited in the past nine days.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People vote to delete them:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10k+ users can vote to delete a closed question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;2 days after it was closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;20k+ users can vote to delete a closed question if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;it has a score of ≤-3&lt;/a&gt;. (Remember that 20k+ users are also 10k+ users!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question author can delete a question if certain conditions are met, also outlined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/323179&quot;&gt;MSE deletion FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. If the question meets these requirements, it can be deleted instantly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can delete a question no matter what&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is reopened. I know I've done edits so that other people's questions can be reopened, sometimes years after the question was closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a user with deletion privileges, I tend to NOT vote to delete in these circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was newly closed and could be fixed by the author. You don't know who will respond to a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with good answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Interesting questions, especially those I can fix. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duplicates. These can be very helpful when you're trying to find a specific question but don't remember the words used in that specific question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're searching you can exclude closed questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=closed%3ano%20is%3aq&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;closed:no&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You may also want to exclude locked questions with &lt;code&gt;locked:no&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T18:18:45.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11978" CreationDate="2019-01-18T15:58:16.770" Score="5" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am &quot;constantly&quot; running out of closevotes. It used to happen just once or twice a month, but I've now I've hit it for the second time in a week. To be clear, I am referring not just to running out of reviews, but total closevotes; I run through not only the close vote review queue as far as I can go, but also can't vote to close questions I encounter in the low-quality queue or from organic browsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been searching and searching MSE and MSO on the basis for the limit, which is theorized to be an anti-bot in purpose. I can't locate a definitive question, just complaints that the limit should be raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see references to SO having a limit of 40 or 50 closevotes, rather than 20. This may be a special exception for SO, since their review queue numbers in the thousands rather than the low hundreds, but if this limit can be adjusted, I'd like to petition for it for EL&amp;amp;U as well. While our queue is smaller, we also have correspondingly fewer reviewers, and while we have very diligent moderators, during holiday periods the number of pending reviews still grows noticeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T21:25:28.717" Title="Is it possible to have closevote limits increased for EL&amp;U?" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|review-queues|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11977" CreationDate="2019-01-19T16:52:37.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/87291&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood's answer to &lt;em&gt;Should Available Close Votes Be a Function of Inflation or Rep?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, made in 2011, I surmise that the answer to the titular question is yes, it is possible. Sci-Fi and Super-User had 24 close votes back when the default number of close votes was 12, meaning that the number can be set on a per-site basis if nothing has changed since then, and based on the simplicity of his answer it seemed like all Jeff had to do was increase some values to make that the network-wide standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T16:52:37.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:17:43.530" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;We’ve recently had a change in UI, resulting in a mostly blank left menu bar, among other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have huge numbers of posts that don’t seem to be coming from the people that the EL&amp;amp;U tour claims as EL&amp;amp;U’s intended audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could do something about both by copying the charter paragraph from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; into the left menu. Here’s what it says (emphasis, mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about &lt;strong&gt;English language and usage&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should also list the migration sites we can vote questions into: ELL and Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, visitors can self-select to post a question on EL&amp;amp;U, knowing that they’d be holding themselves to be part of the intended audience; or if they don’t think they are part of EL&amp;amp;U’s intended audience, they have a couple of other common places they can go to with a single click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we copy the blurb from the EL&amp;amp;U tour into the left menu, and link to both ELL and this Meta. We could even show the ELL blurb next to the ELL link so that it is clear how the two sites differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T02:32:17.487" Title="Show the tour’s summary on the left menu" Tags="|feature-request|theme-2018|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11979" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:33:51.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While using the left menu may be attractive, it's not applicable to all visitors to the site, only to those who want to ask a question. There is currently a huge box once the &quot;Ask Question&quot; button is clicked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1No9N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1No9N.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;How to Ask&amp;quot; panel&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I doubt that another similar panel in the left-hand space would be any more effective at stemming the tide of basic questions which should go elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T18:33:51.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11979" CreationDate="2019-01-19T20:48:02.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This blurb is already shown on most pages to new users who haven't dismissed it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B6P6F.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't do any self-selection, though. It mostly annoys people who just want to read answers to existing questions (I encounter this all the time on other sites, for example). And for some of the people who are asking questions, it makes our site look very attractive, especially compared to ELL. Many people don't want their questions answered by learners; they want the &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt;. (Of course it is perfectly acceptable for anyone to ask and answer questions on ELL, but that didn't stop someone from asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2857/41273&quot;&gt;Why are native speakers here?&lt;/a&gt; on ELL Meta.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want people to know the rules, we have to tell them the rules instead of expecting something vague to guide them. For example, I'd support having some version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/369682/6083675&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Question Wizard&lt;/a&gt; if that feature ever goes anywhere. Alternatively, I'd support a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316489/323179&quot;&gt;customizable advice page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T02:32:17.487" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T02:32:17.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11953" CreationDate="2019-01-20T08:07:34.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my tip&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you recently seen  a good answer by a user? Is that user a veteran by any chance? Check their answer history and visit their most upvoted posts, they will probably have posted answers to questions &lt;em&gt;they have found interesting&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no particular order of preference, &lt;strong&gt;a very subjective list&lt;/strong&gt; of users whose answers &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; nearly always find interesting. The following users tend to be selective (&lt;em&gt;picky&lt;/em&gt;?) about questions, and it's worth mentioning their best posts are usually not their most upvoted ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/76472/araucaria?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;Araucaria&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2085/tchrist?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/18220/j-r?tab=answers&quot;&gt;J.R.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/272480/karlg?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;KarlG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/449/kosmonaut?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;Kosmonaut&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/547/colin-fine?tab=answers&quot;&gt;Colin Fine&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11146/shoe?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;Shoe&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15770/jon-hanna?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;Jon Hanna&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/47827/janus-bahs-jacquet?tab=answers&quot;&gt;Janus Bahs Jacquet&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/39/nohat?tab=answers&quot;&gt;nohat&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/77/shreevatsar?tab=answers&quot;&gt;ShreevatsaR&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/28567/snailboat?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;Snailboat&lt;/a&gt;  (check out their questions, too)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/57102/f-e?tab=answers&quot;&gt;F.E.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the many answers, you're bound to read dozens of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions, when you do, visit that OP's history. If they have posted one solid and intriguing question, chances are they have done likewise with their other posts. You might even find that hidden gem that no one has posted an answer to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T09:15:42.070" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T09:15:42.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-20T20:40:13.857" Score="1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;By accident, I clicked Edit on someone else's post. I saw my error immediately, because I wanted to edit MY post, not someone else's. Then I wondered, why in the world is this site allowing people to edit each other's posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="332780" OwnerDisplayName="Alana Forsyth" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T06:45:51.717" Title="Why can I edit someone else's post?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11983" CreationDate="2019-01-20T20:56:45.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is answered in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Help pages&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why can people edit my posts? How does editing work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All contributions are licensed under Creative Commons, and this site is collaboratively edited, like Wikipedia. If you see something that needs improvement, click edit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You simply found that you were one of the &amp;quot;people&amp;quot; editing a post they themselves hadn't written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T20:56:45.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11983" CreationDate="2019-01-20T21:06:41.547" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it arises from the peculiar view that every question has just one right answer, at least for the areas of knowledge that are allowed pride of place on Stackexchange.  Opinion doesn't matter -- only knowledge counts.  (But of course that's just my &lt;strong&gt;theory&lt;/strong&gt;.)  So if a question or answer is correctly amended, this cannot be a misrepresentation.  The Truth cannot be questioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106784" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T21:06:41.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11977" CreationDate="2019-01-20T21:25:28.717" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen many interesting and worthwhile questions closed.  Closing a question punishes those who could answer it and deprives the questioner of advice.  What if you're wrong?  There is no legitimate purpose for this arrogance.  If you're running out of close votes, it means the community needs protection from you.  Stop voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106784" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T21:25:28.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11983" CreationDate="2019-01-20T21:41:22.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's true that anyone can edit posts, it's a bit more complicated than just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone under 2,000 reputation can only make suggested edits to other's posts. This means that the edit needs to be approved by one or two 2k+ rep users before it is applied to the post. This prevents many bad edits and trolling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone over 2k rep can edit posts freely. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, any edit that gets applied to the post bumps the post onto the home page. This means edits by even 2k+ rep users are being watched by the community. In addition, nontrivial edits also notify the post owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific guidance on when to edit can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some common reasons to edit are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages&#xA;  to add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged&lt;/strong&gt; - try to make the post significantly better when you edit, correcting all problems that you observe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there are some special cases where editing works a little differently. English Language and Usage &lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt;, which is where your post was migrated to, does not allow suggested edits, so users need 2k+ rep to edit others posts here. For more info see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;Edit Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt; privilege&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot;&gt;Approve Tag Wiki Edits&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;Trusted User&lt;/a&gt; privileges&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T21:41:22.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12036" CreationDate="2019-01-21T10:59:39.783" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions that seem valid and interesting seem to just pass people by&amp;mdash;it has happened to some of my own questions, and I have seen it with other questions too. Often, I think it is a matter of how the question is phrased, so that if it were phrased in a (completely) different way, people would be more prone to answer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question now is: if someone posts a question, and realizes after some months or so that no-one is interested in answering it, is it acceptable for this someone to delete their question altogether, and then post it over again, but in a whole new shape, as it were&amp;mdash;that is, phrased in a better way, with clearer examples and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10479/how-can-i-rekindle-interest-in-an-old-question&quot;&gt;How Can I Rekindle Interest in an Old Question&lt;/a&gt;; I could explain why, but instead I shall quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/124936/tonepoet&quot;&gt;Tonepoet&lt;/a&gt;, who has already explained it very succinctly in a former comment to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is a related question, but the relationship is only incidental at best, so I would not consider it a duplicate. That asks for a variety of good methods to rekindle interest, whereas this asks if a specific method is permitted or doable. No answer to that question has, as of yet, addressed deleting questions first then reposting them (keep in mind that deleted questions are not duplicate targets), and probably shouldn't even consider doing so unless this question is answered first to know if it is a valid option which may be done in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284727" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T17:44:04.530" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T08:12:17.987" Title="Can we delete and re-post unanswered questions?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10479" CreationDate="2019-01-22T18:37:36.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One method that has not been mentioned yet is creating a &lt;strong&gt;list of bounties with no deadline&lt;/strong&gt; as a post on meta. Several other sites have done this so far, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.meta.stackexchange.com/q/629/800&quot;&gt;Language Learning Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Whereas ordinary bounties may expire before you get a good answer, the bounties in the proposed list would remain valid. Of course, the meta post would need to be a featured question for some time so people find out about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of list is especially useful for questions that require more research than usual and on sites that (unlike ELU) don't have a lot of traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163363" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T18:37:36.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:48:32.473" Score="8" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;2019 is here! And with the new year, as usual, comes a new iteration of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;! Let’s refresh these for the coming year :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/11991&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T15:58:40.763" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2019" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-03-05T10:54:13.070" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:48:32.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackenglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/64ZpZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T11:48:32.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-01-23T13:39:39.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BeN5I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Explore the roots of English at the Latin Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53711" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T13:39:39.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-01-26T09:50:14.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dWnyt.png&quot; alt=&quot;The application of language!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T09:50:14.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-01-28T06:31:38.380" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vHHqU.png&quot; alt=&quot;English Language Learners&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T06:31:38.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11983" CreationDate="2019-01-28T06:45:51.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason Stack Exchange encourages constructive editing of posts is that it aims to be a reference site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be well-formed, within the charter of the relevant community. Answers must be coherent, should be objectively correct, and must stand on their own even if material on linked sites change or become inaccessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times that the author of a post formats the post poorly because they don’t understand the text editor’s formatting conventions; or the author disappears without cleaning up their typos. That post would then look untidy to future visitors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help improve the quality of posts (and hence the reference site as a whole), the community is encouraged to make edits to improve clarity and correct typos etc. The only proviso is that the intent of the post should be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T06:45:51.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-01-29T11:51:39.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wiktionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u0sTB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wiktionary: Help write the free dictionary&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3080" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T11:51:39.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-29T20:42:40.217" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/482828/difference-between-and-or-after-you-can-use&quot;&gt;Difference between and/or after &amp;quot;you can use&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my question, I asked whether &quot;and&quot; and &quot;or&quot; can have the same meaning if they are used after &quot;you can use&quot;, and if so, if one of them would be preferable. However, the question was put on hold for not being &quot;about English language and usage within the scope defined in the help center.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center says that questions on &quot;Word choice and usage&quot; are welcomed here. Please help me understand why my question is considered to be off-topic, and if there is a way to fix it to make it on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333565" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T18:38:33.947" Title="Why is my question on the usage of and/or not about English language and usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11998" CreationDate="2019-01-30T18:38:33.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is certainly about the English language, and it is on topic. However, excluding the OP,  for whom is the question and its answer(s) &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;? And is the post &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the question boils down to the meaning of the conjunctions &quot;and&quot; and &quot;or&quot;. The question will not strike native speakers as being particularly intriguing or thought provocative, and I have rarely come across any non-native speaker who was confused over the meanings or usage of these two conjunctions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Take the red and the yellow pencil (take &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; colours) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Take the red or the yellow pencil (&lt;em&gt;pick&lt;/em&gt; one colour)   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it should have been migrated over at English Language for Learners. The OP formatted correctly the post but it still lacked substance and research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP can edit their post and include the definitions of each conjunction and explain why they think joining two elements with &quot;and&quot; may suggest that either one is a possible option that might pique the interest of five users and convince them to cast their vote and reopen the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T18:38:33.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T23:12:40.693" Score="6" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, this is the dividing line, the line between what is appropriate for this site, and what is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know how it is possible that we have become the site to post trash in the name of free speech, instead of the place to ask serious questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the continuing existence &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/483283/what-is-this-poetic-rhyme-scheme-as-used-in-hip-hop-called?noredirect=1#comment1166924_483283&quot;&gt;of this question on the site&lt;/a&gt;, I can only conclude that either there are no standards, or they are not the ones I would agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I digress strained and perplexed ingrained in vertex climbing tittys insane and perfect draw the curtains she deigns to get whipped by a leverton and she's still dick flirtin, a tit bitch like a protagonist in the next Tim Burton agonist while Kim's flirting with a faggot bitch, tits sagging rich she hits my digits quick I can't help but dick fidget my midget dick and rim her ridge her cricket pitch, swim in the smidge of her teen wickets her green spleen thickets I bone her with my boner as she roams and groans as I grope her open like a roman at a gladiator dome and dive in thrice like a vice oh let me scope in,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is misogynist, homophobic, and objectionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no prude; I am an ex-pat New Yorker ex-military that manages to get FUCK into every sentence. still...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times when we get asked serious questions about neologisms, as well as  new usages still unaccepted by the mainstream, but I believe there must be a limit to our tolerance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen several posts which I would consider offensive, and I have flagged them as such, but I think that the effort to draw in new users has possibly taken preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an unregistered user posts what I consider to be a thinly disguised attempt to publish their own &quot;ramblings&quot; as literary or lyrical stream of consciousness, we should take more care to preserve the integrity of the site: we have not done that in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an unknown author is looking for a &lt;em&gt;critique&lt;/em&gt; of their work, this should not be the place to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T03:58:19.593" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T10:59:54.290" Title="Where is the limit for posting filth in the name of creativity?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12000" CreationDate="2019-01-31T01:07:51.547" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: I've reconsidered: I don't think the post meets our site's standards. The solution is to flag the question as &quot;rude or abusive&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first read the offending question (pun intended), my reaction was (a) it's not trolling but (b) it's misogynist and offensive but (c) so is a lot of rap and (d) there's a legitimate question of language usage here, even if the example given is awful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted a comment straight away, because I think it's important that men speak up against the misogyny of other men. I downvoted the question, because I thought its merits as a legit question are outweighed by how inappropriate the &quot;example&quot; is. And I upvoted Mitch's answer because it's a good &lt;em&gt;generic&lt;/em&gt; answer that skilfully avoided reference to the unsavoury elements of the question's text - and I loved the clever irony of &quot;[freestyling is] a stream of consciousness flow through any of the usual hip hop subjects, from self-aggrandizement to the travails of life to explicit bodily functions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But I didn't flag it, because I thought we should try to be liberal about these things.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Meta post has given me an opportunity to reassess. The issue is not the question itself –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the rhyme scheme called where near rhymes flow into pure&#xA;  rhymes then back into near rhymes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– but rather the example provided. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/483283/what-is-this-poetic-rhyme-scheme-as-used-in-hip-hop-called?noredirect=1#comment1167078_483283&quot;&gt;Mr Lister commented&lt;/a&gt;, it's likely that the OP has used their own self-written &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/483533/167396&quot;&gt;doggerel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there's no rule against providing your own self-written example to illustrate the question, and the example itself does indeed illustrate the rhyme scheme being asked about. And like Cascabel, I'm no prude: if someone wants to ask about the correct use or etymology of an offensive phrase, or they have offensive personal views but ask a legitimate question, I can accept that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I agree with Cascabel that this particular post seems to cross the line. The question is, &lt;em&gt;what action should be taken?&lt;/em&gt; There seem to be four broad options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Downvote, and move on&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a cop-out. If it's a legit question, why the downvote? If it's bad enough to downvote, then I think that points to it being bad enough to remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Edit out the offending elements&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is an option, as some of the offending words form part of the rhyme scheme. In any case, the OP could roll back the edit. Someone could replace the entire example with another example of freestyle rap, duly attributed, that wasn't (so) offensive. But again, the OP could roll it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Flag it as &quot;should be closed&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really an option, since it's not unclear, it's not off-topic and it's not POB. Which just leaves...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Flag it as &quot;rude or abusive&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag's guidance says this is used when &quot;A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse&quot;, and links to the Code of Conduct. The latter describes the following under the heading &lt;em&gt;Unacceptable behaviour&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No bigotry&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or&#xA;  alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion&#xA;  — and those are just a few examples. When in doubt, just don’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be no doubt whatsoever that the OP has chosen to include an example that is likely to &quot;offend or alienate people&quot; based especially on gender but to a lesser extent on sexual orientation. I think we have a duty to call out this kind of language, in the same way that we call out racism. The integrity of our site as a safe place for all classes of people must take precedence over any interest in adding another question to our library. And I think the gratuitous nature of the offence is pertinent, since the OP could easily have chosen (or written) an example that perhaps might have used vulgarities but wouldn't have denigrated entire classes of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon reflection, I agree with Cascabel that this particular post is unacceptable and should be removed from our site. It clearly meets the requirements of the &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flag, and I have therefore raised that flag. As a community-moderated site, it's up to our EL&amp;amp;U community to decide whether to flag, close and delete the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T01:07:51.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12000" CreationDate="2019-01-31T01:55:09.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the mostpart, offensive language is not permitted anywhere on the Stack Exchange network, except in accordance with specific exemptions. The most significant of these exceptions is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4990/124936&quot;&gt;use/mention&lt;/a&gt; distinction which permits offensive language when an analytical &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; for using it exists, and ev. Censoring a word makes it difficult to discuss that word in the body of a post seriously. From the recently updated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/conduct&quot;&gt;code of conduct&lt;/a&gt; we have this provision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No bigotry.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion—and those are just a few examples. When in doubt, just don’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No harassment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar provisions were in the old be nice policy too, so this should be nothing new or surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cumulation of borderline offensive words is pretty bad on its own, but words like &lt;em&gt;b—h&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/561/what-should-we-do-about-question-titles-containing-vulgar-words&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are words that we have always censored from titles because of their sexist connotations, the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/281787/it-s-time-to-retire-the-term-rep-whore?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=1%7C121.5485&quot;&gt;rep. whore&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was retired for similar reasons and we don't even allow boobs. &lt;em&gt;F—t&lt;/em&gt; is widely considered one of the three very most offensive and alienating slang words in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, just &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; if we were informed that this was a quotation and its necessity to the question was explained, we could let it slide as use/mention distinction, but the questioner did not make the specific need for using this particular language clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that determining what type of &lt;em&gt;rhyming scheme&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;near rhymes flowing into pure rhymes and back&amp;quot; is requires the use of any particular words, let alone vulgar language. We should probably devise our own rhyme of similar nature and edit the old one out if the question is worth keeping, or delete the question altogether if it is not. I am leaning moreso towards the latter since making a rhyme of this nature may prove to be more trouble than it is worth for us, and I believe the current answers are predicated on a misunderstanding of the question: Neither answer is related to identifying the described &lt;em&gt;rhyming scheme&lt;/em&gt;, unless I misunderstood Mitch's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag it as rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T01:55:09.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12000" CreationDate="2019-01-31T18:42:38.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that &quot;question&quot; a minute or two after it was posted, and I immediately downvoted it. I didn't &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;closevote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, because I thought that was unjustifiably &quot;dignifying&quot; it - imho, closevotes are supposed to at least admit of the possibility that a badly-presented question could be edited and thereby made acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't bother to actually flag it for moderator attention either, because I assumed it would very quickly get many more downvotes (perhaps naively, I also assume mods automatically get notified if a question rapidly starts attracting downvotes, &lt;em&gt;for this very reason&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what bothers me what one of the mods wrote in a comment quite some time later...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this is an answerable question about a particular genre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;upvote this answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; if you agree with me that the particular mod involved there (who ordinarily I have the greatest respect for) needs to re-examine his thinking in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T18:42:38.990" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12000" CreationDate="2019-02-01T10:59:54.290" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once again freedom of speech is curtailed on the site that ostensibly explores language and usage. The question was legit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't like the content of the question? Move on, like you would with any other question.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the post was illegal to say in public. And the proffered text illustrated the type of verse the question was asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T10:59:54.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T19:45:23.300" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm researching the difference between &quot;prefer to do&quot; and &quot;prefer doing&quot;, and came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79962/prefer-to-do-something-vs-prefer-doing-something&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which asked about the difference in meaning between those two specific forms. It was locked as a duplicate and linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/329/when-should-a-verb-be-followed-by-a-gerund-instead-of-an-infinitive&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which asks about the difference between verb + gerund and verb + infinitive in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's certainly a useful reference to know in general what the difference between these two patterns in, but I disagree that this is a duplicate, because this is significantly wider in scope than the original question. The OP arguably wasn't interested in the general difference between the two grammatical structures, but rather in the specific differences in meaning between &quot;prefer to do&quot; and &quot;prefer doing&quot;. And indeed, the answers to the duplicate question have nothing to say about this specific difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why this is important: differences in meaning cannot always necessarily be generalised and applied to other situations. In cases like these the distinctions are often subtle, and to most native speakers exactly the same, but there are differences for example between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I like playing football&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I like to play football once a week&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the specific difference between &quot;like doing&quot; and &quot;like to do&quot; is that &quot;like doing&quot; is used to express enjoyment at the activity, whereas &quot;like to do&quot; is used to express a habit, custom or preference. The second sentence doesn't exclude the possibility that you enjoy football, but the focus is more on the fact that you do it to achieve an end result, whereas the first sentence focuses on your inherent enjoyment of playing football.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone asked about the difference between these two forms (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21498/i-like-to-do-be-something-vs-i-like-doing-being-something&quot;&gt;as indeed someone has&lt;/a&gt;), it would be entirely inappropriate to redirect them to the &quot;gerunds vs. infinitives&quot; question, as that's far outside the scope of their question. As it happens, the majority of answers to that question in particular attempt to give lists for which verbs can be followed by gerunds and which by infinitives, rather than exploring the general differences in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my conclusions are two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) In this specific case, I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79962/prefer-to-do-something-vs-prefer-doing-something&quot;&gt;&quot;prefer to do&quot; vs. &quot;prefer doing&quot; question&lt;/a&gt; should be re-opened, as it is decidedly not a duplicate of the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) In the general case, I don't think we should encourage marking questions as duplicates when the &quot;duplicate&quot; question is far wider in scope, and doesn't answer the specific question OP is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58189" LastEditorUserId="58189" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T22:49:35.807" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T22:50:56.357" Title="Why do we allow a question to be marked duplicate when the &quot;duplicate question&quot; is much wider in scope than the original?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12005" CreationDate="2019-02-01T22:35:56.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Generally Speaking&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is possible that this specific case is an exception to the rule, it probably is not unless we are given specific reason to believe it is exceptional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few things we are trying to do here by closing narrower questions as duplicates of broader ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answers are the same, it helps us get you and other new users to a preexisting collection of answers to the question faster if the same general rules &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; apply. Collecting as many answers and users as we can into one place, makes it easier for everybody to find all relevant information. In other words, as the help center specifies, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;We aim for our website to be a long term archival work&lt;/a&gt;, and duplicate closure helps to maintain our database as such. If we can redirect people to good, pre-existing answers, it gets more views for people who originally answered the question, and encourages us to maintain the original page for anybody who might find it, instead of neglecting it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If questioners believe that their cases are exceptional, it gives them and potentially other viewers the chance to read the existing answers to the older questions, and explain how narrowers case are exceptional and require a different answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We stop needlessly redundant answers from being submitted to the website and the internet in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all of that in mind, we should only close questions if they are real duplicates. That is to say, we should have reason to believe that the answers to the proposed duplicate suffice to answer your question without much additional effort. In the Long &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;Tail of Wikipedia Programming Questions&lt;/a&gt;, Stack Exchange co-founder and C.E.O. Joel Spolsky writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt; It is OK to edit a question to make it more general. With the power of editing comes the power to take someone’s selfish, very specific question, and edit it a little bit until they’re asking the more general question that hundreds of people encounter. For example, if someone asks, “I set up a web server at home but I can’t access it from work,” it’s OK to rewrite the question as, “What things should I check when a web server running at home is not visible on the Internet?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the abstract principle of each question is practically identical, and we can help more people with a slightly broader question of reasonable scope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;If you’re going to close a user’s question as a duplicate, it has to be a real duplicate. For example, if a user asks, “What does the IP address 128.0.1.1/24 mean?” it’s OK to close that as a duplicate of a more general question like “What do IP addresses of the form a.b.c.d/e mean?” But it’s not OK to close it as a duplicate of a twenty-seven page guide to netmasks. That’s the moral equivalent of saying “RTFM.”&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case there are many principles to consider and it may be too difficult to locate and identify which portion is relevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding points 4 and 5 in my aforementioned list, how frustrating would it be if somebody prematurely wrote a generalized answer submitted to a specific case in which which it did not apply? It is better to have the question put on hold until the precise need for it becomes evident for that reason. If you or somebody else can explain how your question is distinct from its potential duplicates, then we will consider reopening it. This is what I did when I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8194/should-why-can-we-use-inadequate-but-not-inspecific-be-reopened&quot;&gt;Should &amp;quot;Why can we use inadequate but not &amp;#39;inspecific&amp;#39;?&amp;quot; be reopened?&lt;/a&gt; The original question was closed as a duplicate question suggesting that in- is used to negate words of latin origin, whereas un- is used for germanic derived words,  implying that inspecific is germanic, even though both specific and adequate are latin in origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind that, if &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; among the question's viewers can spot the difference between your newer question and the older one to make a detailed case for it being reopened like that, then we might not even know how to help you any better anyway. Please keep in mind that unless a moderator is involved, it takes a consensus of five people who have earned the privilege to close a question, so nearly half a dozen people eyes evaluate most duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A narrower question being closed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/29/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot;&gt;a duplicate of a broader question is&lt;/a&gt;, by definition a category 3 borderline duplicate, which relies on community discretion to decide if and when they should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding This Case&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I agree that the supposed duplicate is not really duplicate of its linked question. The linked question is a question regarding when each construction is syntactically permissible, whereas the supposed duplicate inquires about semantic question. Even if there was no difference between the meaning of each forms, which does not seem to be the case by the way, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is the principle which should be explained, and not when each form may be used. There are many questions regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=gerund+infinitive&quot;&gt;gerunds and infinitives&lt;/a&gt;, so a hasty generalization may have been made by accident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the supposed duplicate does seem to be a duplicate of the other question you provided: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21498/i-like-to-do-be-something-vs-i-like-doing-being-something&quot;&gt;“I like to do (be) something” vs “I like doing (being) something”&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;and other questions seem to be of a similar nature too. In this case, we should probably reopen the question to mark it as a duplicate of that, unless or until somebody has a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; reason to object, or a better duplicate can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T22:50:56.357" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T22:50:56.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T22:43:28.023" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/483810/are-there-any-words-other-than-cactus-and-octopus-where-the-plural-is-I&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; shows no research and it would be appropriate to close it were it posted by an adult.  But the OP is in the sixth grade!  Should we not cultivate this budding linguist instead of dismissing her/him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly this is a homework question, but I'd give someone with the user name of mathlete the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T17:08:29.447" Title="Do we want to cultivate sixth graders or cut them off?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12007" CreationDate="2019-02-02T01:01:43.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, generally speaking, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_grade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sixth grade&lt;/a&gt; is too young for membership without special parental consent, unless the member has been held back. Compulsory education starts in kindergarden at age 5, and should be counted grade 0, then increment the grade by one for each passing year. Being in sixth grade means you have been in school for 7 years, and 5+7 is 12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#age&quot;&gt;Our terms of service require members to be at least 13 years old&lt;/a&gt; to join. The reason this is done is to comply with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/complying-coppa-frequently-asked-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Children's Online Privacy Protection Act&lt;/a&gt;, which forbids websites from collecting any information from people any younger without written parental consent. Now it is possible that C.O.P.P.A. violates the first amendment of the U.S. constitution, but I do not think the Stack Exchange network is willing to risk putting itself into a position where it has to contest that point in a court of law. We may need to suspend this person for a year, if not only for legal reasons. Since tchrist saw that post and it is his job as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;moderator&lt;/a&gt; to act as a liaison for corporate, he should probably consult upper management to verify whether or not this member has the requisite parental consent to even be among us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second of all, wanting to educate schoolchildren is a noble goal, but it is not precisely &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; goal, and we should not lower our standards to accomodate people outside of our intended user-base, 'lest we want to risk losing our focus. Part of the reason we have this rule is to keep our list of incoming questions relatively clear of frivolous content which is of no interest to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&amp;amp;q=children%27s+online+protection+act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expert linguists, etymologists and English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;. I see no more reason to favor sixth graders than we do E.S.L. learners, and as a matter of fact, there is even less reason to do so since somebody in grade school should have a tax-funded schoolteacher aiding them with their education, which is a luxury that some impoverished E.S.L. learners may not have. Also may be possible that this person should probably be redirected to E.L.L., keeping in mind that the reason it had its name changed from E.S.L. was to be at least somewhat inclusive of native speakers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8811&quot;&gt;based on what I read in the Area 51 proposal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, lowering our standards for children may be underestimating their abilities. Young people start learning how to use computers as young as age 3 these days, and by the time you're 12 you should be expected to have some amount of proficiency in using them. Young people often have &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; grasp of basic computer knowledge than adults. I believe it is reasonable to expect that twelve year olds surfing the web and asking a question like that should be able to devise search terms to the effect of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/TmWy9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of words plural words that end in i&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_irregular_plurals_ending_in_%22-i%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary page&lt;/a&gt; just as well as anybody else. Now normally, I wouldn't consider wiktionary Gen. Ref., but Wikipedians are very good at making lists, and I have no reason to believe we can do any better than they do. Even if we can, perhaps that effort would probably be better spent improving the Wiktionary list, especially since this question is too broad for the S.E. format anyway and it may be seen by more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourthly, part of the goal of our research standard is to prevent impractically redundant questions from being asked. &lt;em&gt;Maybe&lt;/em&gt; somebody should link this child to the Wiktionary list in a comment, but unless we can do better then we're just making the internet harder to navigate by needlessly competing with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, identifying people by age is very difficult, especially since the S.E. corporation is prohibited from doing so without user consent by the terms of the privacy agreement. What's to stop me from claiming I'm in third grade, and not researching any of my questions if the sixth grader can get away with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, don't get me wrong. If a precocious young child who has the requisite permissions wants to be a member of our website, I think that would be great, but only if he or she plays by the same rules as the rest of us, and we should use comments to guide such users into improving their questions in the same manner as we would any other user, so that they may learn to ask questions properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote Jay Hanlon in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;War of the Closes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The goal was always for some closures to drive an edit, improve, re-open cycle. The user gets helped, gets better at asking, and the community gets useful content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T13:14:44.983" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:14:44.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12007" CreationDate="2019-02-02T17:08:29.447" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Children who want to participate in activities with adults should be expected to play by the same rules, unless the rules make it impossible for them to participate (usually that only happens for physical activities though).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be helping all new members learn how the site works and what the expectations are, and we should be doing it in a kind way, so I don't see any reason why children would need to be treated differently. If you are being harsher to a new user than you would if you knew they were a child, maybe you should be kinder.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ELL we often will try to help a new user get their question up to standards without immediately closing it, but once the help has been given and the user has some experience with the process, our expectations go up. Often, people live up or down to what's expected of them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T17:08:29.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12012" CreationDate="2019-02-02T23:02:59.567" Score="11" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once, an English teacher shared with me a website where you can see how certain words are used with others. For instance, you would see the type of words with which &quot;mandatory&quot; and &quot;compulsory&quot; are commonly used and also the frequency of each pair. This is a great tool to understand how people use words in a language that isn't yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't remember the website. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know one that gives the possibility to do such research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279022" OwnerDisplayName="Marine Galantin" LastActivityDate="2022-04-20T01:12:19.303" Title="Website to see frequency of use of words together" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12010" CreationDate="2019-02-03T03:04:43.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google n-grams viewer&lt;/a&gt; provides some of that information. It shows the frequency with which 1, 2, 3 and 4 word combinations appear in a corpus of books, and additionally, shows the frequency against the year of publication of the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can also search for wildcards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mandatory+*&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mandatory *&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9x3Rq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9x3Rq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or restricted to just the nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mandatory+*_NOUN&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mandatory *_NOUN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wcr9V.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wcr9V.png&quot; alt=&quot;mandatory noun&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strangely enough, the first link to NGrams has links to google books search of examples and the second one, limited to nouns, does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28950" OwnerDisplayName="user02814" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T15:17:15.317" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T15:17:15.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12010" CreationDate="2019-02-03T06:29:44.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English-Corpora&lt;/a&gt; provide the function you want. The English-Corpora interface, and the concepts involved, may present you with a steep learning curve, but the tools there are powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &amp;quot;words with which&amp;quot; a given word is &amp;quot;commonly used&amp;quot; are called &amp;quot;Collocates&amp;quot;. If you go to the English-Corpora page (linked in the first paragraph of this answer) and click on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/now&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;News on the Web (NOW)&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; link, then select &amp;quot;Collocates&amp;quot;, you can put &amp;quot;mandatory&amp;quot; (no quotes) into the entry box left of &amp;quot;Word/phrase&amp;quot;. Put nothing or an asterisk in the entry box next to &amp;quot;Collocates&amp;quot;, then select the number of words of interest left or right of &amp;quot;mandatory&amp;quot; in the scale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7znnA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7znnA.png&quot; alt=&quot;NOW interface set up for collocate search&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the image, I selected 2 both left and right of &amp;quot;mandatory&amp;quot;. Next, clicking the &amp;quot;Find collocates&amp;quot; button below the scale produces this graph (cropped at collocate 19), sorted by default by frequency from highest to lowest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4GVll.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4GVll.png&quot; alt=&quot;NOW collocates of &amp;quot;mandatory&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Clicking the image above will display a larger version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many parameters can be tweaked; for example, if I'm only interested in words one word to the left of &amp;quot;mandatory rules&amp;quot;, I can set up the interface like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rCpy6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rCpy6.png&quot; alt=&quot;NOW collocates, different parameters&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That setup produces the following graph (cropped at collocate 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tERk0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tERk0.png&quot; alt=&quot;NOW collocates, results for &amp;quot;mandatory rules&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All features and the methodology are documented at the English-Corpora site, although it may take you a while to find what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the asterisk in the entry box next to &amp;quot;Collocates&amp;quot; can be replaced with a given collocate of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in &amp;quot;the types of words&amp;quot; with which a given word is commonly used, rather than simply the words with which a given word is commonly used, you can select a part-of-speech from the dropdown list produced by clicking the &amp;quot;[POS]&amp;quot; next to &amp;quot;Collocates&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2022-04-20T01:12:19.303" LastActivityDate="2022-04-20T01:12:19.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11905" CreationDate="2019-02-04T16:05:59.773" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem is even more apparent if you look at the colours used in the list of questions itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two questions on ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/trioZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/trioZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELU—visited links&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already visited &quot;Irreponsible person&quot; but I've yet to visit &quot;why the use' much of which ' in the following sentence is incorrect?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My normal routine is to copy the title of the question I know I've last visited, refresh the page, and then search for the title of that question. Either that or try to remember its title myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differentiation between the two colours is so minimal, I doubt I'd ever spot it based on colour alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, compare the difference in colours used at ELL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1MQTg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1MQTg.png&quot; alt=&quot;ELL—visited links&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ELL, I can spot the difference and not worry about losing track of what questions I have and haven't already looked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not certain if this needs to be broken down into visited versus non-visited link-text colours in different areas, but I'm hoping a single feature request can cover a review of the colours used in all areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: I finally got so tired of this, I implemented a workaround of my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I installed the Firefox extension &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stylus&lt;/a&gt;. (It is also available for &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrome&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then created the following style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lgREu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lgREu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stylus style&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In text, that is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a.question-hyperlink:visited {&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        color: grey !important&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  }&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Applies to:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  URLs matching the regexp: https://.*.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  URLs matching the regexp: https://.*.stackexchange.com/questions\?sort=newest&amp;amp;page=\d*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on those Stack Exchange pages that list questions, every link to the questions I've visited are in grey text. I no longer have a problem knowing where to start looking when I review new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T16:02:47.510" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T16:02:47.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-02-05T15:58:40.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/121280/catalan-language&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BWBRo.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37429" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T15:58:40.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11442" CreationDate="2019-02-14T18:23:58.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag should be blacklisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not useful: a question about grammar will almost certainly be able to find more specific tags, and new users simply think that &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; is covered by &quot;grammar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, a tag must be eradicated before it can be blacklisted, but in this specific case I think there are simply too many questions to do that. One way to proceed is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not edit the questions to remove the tag, but blacklist it to prevent its use (and subsequent recreation once it is eradicated)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like that course of action, please vote on this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T18:23:58.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11442" CreationDate="2019-02-14T18:25:06.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag should be blacklisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not useful: a question about grammar will almost certainly be able to find more specific tags, and new users simply think that everything is covered by &quot;grammar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, a tag must be eradicated before it can be blacklisted, but in this specific case I think there are simply too many questions to do that. One way to proceed is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask SE staff to remove the tag from all questions with a database update; and blacklist the tag so it can't be recreated. This will probably not bump all the questions to the front page(s) of the site, but it will result in quite a number of untagged questions. That actually has some merit, because by using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; the question is effectively untagged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like that course of action, please vote on this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T18:25:06.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11442" CreationDate="2019-02-14T20:02:14.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem I see with blacklisting or removing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag is that when I go to edit a question to remove the tag, I'm stuck trying to think of some other tag to put on the question. Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; as its sole replacement doesn't feel better, but that's the tag that people will go for if they can't use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;. Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; ok to use as the sole tag for questions asking if something is grammatical? Should everything under the tag just be retagged with either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind that many of us here never formally studied English (much less linguistics). My only qualification is that I'm a native AmE speaker, which in practice means that I'm worse off than nonnatives with knowing what things are called (with a good example being names of tenses). Many of the tags excerpts do not give a good enough explanation for me to be certain that I'm applying the right tag. This means that I need to spend 5+ minutes researching to determine what tags are right when it should take no longer than a minute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need better guidelines for what tags should be used before this goes any further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the suggestion of just deleting the tag completely has come up, I'd like to point out that this will leave over 3,000 questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt;. This is bad, so if you have the time and expertise you should see if you can retag any of the questions tagged with only &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;. I made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/984836&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; to find them (keep in mind that SEDE is only updated once a week):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select id as [Post Link] from posts where tags = '&amp;lt;grammar&amp;gt;'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...shifting &quot;Grammar&quot; to &quot;Don't ask about...&quot; in bother the Tour page and help center&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see this doing anything. Grammar &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, assuming the question meets our basic quality requirements. The Help Center should give instructions for creating a good question (or link to somewhere that does) instead of confusing people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T20:02:14.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11442" CreationDate="2019-02-15T00:54:58.433" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've mentioned this in chat before, but it seems like higher academia tried, and failed to redefine the word grammar to have a more restrictive set of categories in the late 19th century through to the early 20th. You can see evidence of this in the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, the earliest printings of the Oxford English Dictionary and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least part of it is predicated on the notion that only spoken language is real language because it is the core component of what constitutes language , with writing being an optional representation, as argued by grammarian Leonard Bloomfield. I hypothethize that part of it may also be based on etymological grounds (language is derived from the latin lingua for tongue). If there is an etymological component, it neglects to note that the gramma in grammar is  essentially derived from the greek word for letter/character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically speaking, the categories of grammar are include  etymology (as in the &lt;em&gt;overall&lt;/em&gt; art of word derivation), prosody, orthoepy (if not considered a part of prosody), orthography and syntax. Moreover, the word is somewhat polysemous, so in addition to these categorical arts there are definitions of it such as optimal use of a language, et cetera. You can see this in sources such as A Grammar of the English Tongue by Samuel Johnson, or The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown. I could list more sources, but for the purposes of meta, I trust that suffices, so for the sake of brevity and convenience I won't. This is also only accounting for the primary definition of the word, as the word is also somewhat polysemous, and has also been used to describe optimal usage of language and things pertaining to grammar, such as grammar books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that some of you are quite attached to the word grammar as specifically meaning syntax and morphology, but this not only neglects most of the word's overall historical usage in the English Language, but also the common definition of the term as held by the common man, which was likely been forced upon them as schoolchildren. Worst of all, it also leaves people who have use of the broader sense of the word with a lexical gap. This is contrary to the tenets traditionalism, populism, and the only justification for this is basically just because a few pedants say so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you may disagree, and if so we don't have to settle what the word grammar should mean here. I only wish to touch upon why people find this so confusing and why the effort to make people use the grammar tag &quot;correctly&quot; may be so futile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, despite however much I may personally disagree with her conclusion, Snailboat made a rather compelling case that grouping syntax and morphology together can be useful in her answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/70700/what-is-meant-by-grammar/73051#73051&quot;&gt;What is meant by &quot;grammar&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; over at English Language Learners. Syntax and etymology are intrinsically linked, because if you change the termination of a word or reduce it to its root form, you may change its part of speech which would necessitate different syntactical treatment, which is to say nothing of the fact that affixes are generally only applicable to one or two parts of speech. We are not the only ones to note how problematic the word grammar is though, and a neologism meant to refer strictly to the interaction of these two categories exists, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/morphosyntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morphosyntax&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Solution I Recommend&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not need a category in our tag taxonomy as broad as grammar can be when interpreted broadly. Even when interpreted narrowly it is more useful for questions to be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; if they only pertain to one of the two domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag as it is presently defined only makes sense if a question specifically regards the interaction &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; syntax and morphology. Therefore, I propose that we should create a morphosyntax tag, and make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a technical word invented to serve a specific technical purpose, morphosyntax is a word that will probably appeal to serious linguists. It does not come with the connotations of the word grammar, and its construction deters misuse, especially by those people who do not even know what it means. This solution also helps us to avoid being bereft of tags to help isolate the specific nature of the question. We also don't need to consult upper management to create a tag synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I really dislike about this solution is that a new master tag would inherit all of the mistaggings of the old one, and grammar is one of our most used tags so correcting the tag taxonomy would require an extensive effort. However, this is something we could fix with enough time and effort, and it wouldn't be all that much worse than it is now, especially since we don't even have a morphosyntax tag at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, grammar shouldn't be moved to the &lt;em&gt;don't ask&lt;/em&gt; section of our scope, because questions regarding grammar, in both its broader and narrower interpretations are, at least for the most-part, on-topic. We should simply delete the word grammar from the list of accepted topics, and replace it with separate syntax and morphology bullet points, in both the tour and our help center's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-02-15T01:03:25.707" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T01:03:25.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11442" CreationDate="2019-02-15T07:33:36.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Removing the &amp;quot;grammar&amp;quot; tag is unnecessary.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't strongly object to the blacklisting or removal of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag, but I don't think it would be very helpful either, and I'm a bit concerned about the large number of questions that would have to be de-/retagged with the &amp;quot;remove by database update&amp;quot; plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the existence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag has a meaningful effect on the quality of questions that are posted on this site. Many people don't read anything before posting here: consider that we get proofreading questions fairly regularly, even though the Help Center explicitly says that they are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Laurel that people will likely just use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; tag more in compensation for the lack of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see why the tag might seem pretty useless, but there is evidence that some members of the site do in fact treat it as a valuable piece of information. It has 274 watchers; I don't know how many people have it as an ignored tag, but I know at least some people have used that option also. So some people seem to have found it somewhat useful as a filter for questions that they are interested in or not interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange tags are never going to be perfect, and this might be worse than most, but calling it &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot; is a pretty strong claim. I'd prefer to see more justification for this claim aside from the argument that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morphology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morphology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; could replace it, or that new users use a fairly broad definition of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T07:33:36.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T07:15:55.473" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;RE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/485888/take-advice-of-or-from&quot;&gt;Take advice OF or FROM&lt;/a&gt; (the comment from Jim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than any other Stack I use, English.SE users have the habit of answering questions in comments.  I've seen a lot of them over the time I've browsed this stack, the example from Jim, cited above, is just one example.  I've seen it done by new users and veteran users alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common habit is to not answer the question when someone has fundamentally already answered it in a comment.  Regrettably, this is a disservice to the entire community as I believe comments are not equal to answers when it comes to search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the preferred behavior when other users find these pseudo-answers that can't be downvoted, edited, flagged for quality by the community, or commented upon without cluttering up the question comment chain?  Should we flag them for moderator attention (or another reason)? or should we ignore them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246783" LastEditorUserId="246783" LastEditDate="2019-02-17T08:43:46.470" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T18:40:35.000" Title="Should answers-as-comments be flagged?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answer-howto|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-02-17T18:46:01.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12021" CreationDate="2019-02-17T18:40:35.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, comment-answers should not be flagged for moderator attention. This is a problem that can be solved by regular community members. Incorporate the information from the comment into a proper answer, then flag the comment as no longer needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not answers, so a comment should not prevent you from answering a question that meets ELU’s quality standards and is on-topic. If a question should be closed, leave the comment-answers until the question has been edited to correct whatever issue it had. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It only takes three “no longer needed” flags to remove a comment if people haven’t up-voted it, so up-voting comments compounds the issue by making them more difficult for the community to remove once the information in them has been acted on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T18:40:35.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12024" CreationDate="2019-02-17T05:46:19.877" Score="2" ViewCount="979" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen posts where the OP states a problem, and it is closed as being unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an engineer, I've been trained to &amp;quot;State the Problem.&amp;quot; A question does not necessarily need to be answered the way it was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, a problem is a &amp;quot;more open&amp;quot; question than an open ended question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Do you know what the speed limit is?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A: 55!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem: May pain level is very high and it slows me down!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a question. It does not have an answer. It has multiple &lt;em&gt;solutions&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Perhaps, the question should be: How can I stop my Pain? Or it could be: How do I work faster? It could also be: Can you give me more time to complete the task?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can anyone explain to me the difference between a &lt;em&gt;Problem Statement&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Asking a Question&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="334724" OwnerDisplayName="Scottie H" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T16:24:18.120" Title="What is the difference between &quot;Stating a Problem&quot; and &quot;Asking a Question&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12023" CreationDate="2019-02-21T16:24:18.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a practical point of view, your example &quot;problem statement&quot; doesn't give us any clue what kind of response the speaker is looking for. Do they want information on how to reduce the pain? Or how to increase speed in the face of the pain? Maybe they just want some commiseration and a hug? We can't tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In real life, or on a discussion forum, that might not be a problem, because we can just keep offering solutions until the person with the problem either gets what they want or goes away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on Stack Exchange we want to all members to be able to judge and rank answers, independently of the original poster. Without a clear question, it's impossible for anyone but the OP to say whether a given response is anywhere near the target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T16:24:18.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T23:29:36.197" Score="-2" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you would review the question....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/486426/what-is-the-first-date-of-documented-usage-and-attribution-of-the-term-white-ra&quot;&gt;What is the first date of documented usage and attribution of the term &amp;quot;white race&amp;quot; and/or &amp;quot;white races&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains racially charged and unnecessary quotes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_de_Gobineau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur de Gobineau.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The white races are, further, distinguished by an extraordinary attachment to life. They know better...&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This  question was actually proposed by the user in another form: &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46760/who-is-the-first-person-in-the-17th-century-to-describe-themselves-as-a-white&quot;&gt;Who is the first person in the 17th century to describe themselves as a “white” person and who invented the term “white race”?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; in June of 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer by congubongus was pretty clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no need to post the &lt;a href=&quot;http://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/primary-source-131-gobineau-the-inequality-of-the-human-races.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gobineau quote&lt;/a&gt; here on EL&amp;amp;U.SE. It is recognized as an extremely racist document written by an extremely ignorant person: however, the OP managed to post it here as a &quot;valid&quot; argument to support an &quot;earliest&quot; usage for the  basic research requirement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, on the suggestion by several commentators that the offensive quote be pared down, I did that. The edit was then rolled back by the OP. For some reason, the user &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; the offensive material in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not the first to make an objection to this user’s posts: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/486088/cheaper-by-the-dozen-phrase-origin&quot;&gt;&quot;Cheaper by the dozen&quot; phrase origin?&lt;/a&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U actually came about as some sort of response to a “repugnant etymology” (sic) in a comment by the user 271314 on Politics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the repugnant comments as noted by agc in the &quot;Cheaper&quot; question: the implication in user 271314's answer to that question, that African-Americans are inbred: and the blatantly racial and unneeded full publication of the Gobineau paragraph in the question, it becomes obvious that there is a pattern. It is insidious, but pervasive in many of the user’s posts: they seem to be racially charged for some reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the user need to post this here? Is there some hidden agenda?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T21:17:42.967" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T09:39:56.130" Title="veiled racist question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12025" CreationDate="2019-02-22T08:04:53.340" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't actually matter if if the user is a Neo-Nazi. Or the opposite of one, whatever that is. The only thing that matters is the content in the user's contributions. It would be better to say what's wrong with the posts, instead of the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, although it contains a quote from a racist source, looks OK. The quote is needed as research for the question, so it shouldn't be removed. (Paring it down might be OK.) It's not a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; attempt to find the earliest use, but not everyone is good at etymology. (There are people I know that wouldn't be able to do etymological research if I gave them instructions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, asking English questions about controversial, vulgar, and just unpleasant things is OK as long as it's done in a respectful, clinical tone (and the question seems good on this). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something good certainly came of it: a good answer by someone who knows how to do etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked answer has problems (I won't go into too much depth; many of them were already mentioned somewhere, either in the comments, in chat, or somewhere under this very question on meta). However, since the question itself was spawned because of something the user said, it ironically makes it worthwhile to keep the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dick Gregory quote is a bit explicit, but it might be &quot;the one and only source of the meaning of that phrase&quot; to quote the answer (though I see no mention of the word &quot;cheaper&quot; in the video).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part that talks about &quot;anglophiles/englophiles&quot; is both unrelated to the issue at hand and also accusatory, so that part justifies removal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder of the answer doesn't seem offensive, although it doesn't always do a good job of regulating its tone (which again is supposed to be clinical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T08:04:53.340" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12025" CreationDate="2019-02-22T16:22:43.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the excerpt used to support a question or answer is exceedingly vulgar, racist or otherwise offensive, but not gratuitous, it would make sense to put a fig leaf over it so that people can choose whether to be exposed to it. We can enclose it in spoiler blocks, or trim the length of the excerpt and link to the fuller context from somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T16:22:43.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12025" CreationDate="2019-02-22T20:17:33.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word and phrase origin questions are interesting for a number of reasons, including their inherent complexity. &quot;Cheaper by the dozen&quot; demonstrates how hard it is to construct a satisfactory origin story. First, we have the mystery of why &lt;em&gt;dozen&lt;/em&gt; itself caught on instead of some term for a group of ten (say, &lt;em&gt;dixet&lt;/em&gt;). Then we need to determine whether &quot;by the dozen&quot; was a set phrase before &quot;cheaper by the dozen&quot; became one—because if so, the addition of &lt;em&gt;cheaper&lt;/em&gt; doesn't seem an especially earth-shaking development. Then we need to figure out when &quot;cheaper by the dozen&quot; began to appear in written English—and in what context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having done all that, we have still dealt only with the written record. What about oral traditions concerning the phrase's origin? This is where the question and one of the answers posted on the main site come into sharper focus. They seem to argue for an origin story for &quot;cheaper by the dozen&quot; rooted in the U.S. slave trade of the 1800s that is based primarily on oral tradition. That is, citations to explicit written evidence go back no farther than Dick Gregory in the 1960s or 1970s, although some later writers echo and amplify his analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to be skeptical of folk etymologies—not because they are inherently devoid of any truth, but because they tend to be too neat and convenient in reducing a messy history of usage to one simple point of origin. Nevertheless, we are stuck with the reality that most slang and many idioms originated in spoken English and only later were assimilated into written English. It is thus problematic to depend on written English for definitive proof of a phrase's origin, especially if the phrase is obscene, profane, or otherwise offensive, or if its origin goes to an unsavory past that polite company would not wish to acknowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in weighing the merits of an oral-tradition-based claim regarding a phrase's origin, you have to balance the possibility that written acknowledgment of the origin may have been suppressed for various reasons against unsentimental consideration of what actually appears in the written record. An origin story that claims usage going back to 1840 in a particular context is not refuted by an absence of any mention in print of that usage in the relevant context until 1966—but it is subject to reasonable doubt for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case in point is the phrase &quot;cheap dozen[s],&quot; which site participants mentioned several times in the course of the &quot;cheaper by the dozen&quot; discussion as a peripheral term in the context of nineteenth-century slave auctions. I searched Google Books and Elephind for instances of this phrase in the context of selling enslaved human beings in a group of 12 at a discount and couldn't find any reference to such sales from earlier than 1974—in Middleton Harris, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gW0MG0LH0nIC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Black+Book%22+%22Middleton+Harris%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi35cGeqNPgAhVPtZ4KHaeZAckQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Black Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, cited in Lisa Green, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=bcpuNbPu-LgC&amp;amp;pg=PA135&amp;amp;dq=%22the+dozens%22+Smitherman&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjTldG2h8ngAhVLr1QKHQLpDiEQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Harris%201974&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;African American English: A Linguistic Introduction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2002):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On some accounts, the term &lt;em&gt;dozens&lt;/em&gt; was used to refer to the ill or old slaves who were sold in groups of twelve (Harris 1974).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest explicit use of &quot;cheap dozen&quot; that I’ve been able to find in this context is from Mona Lisa Saloy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=jNBMDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT72&amp;amp;dq=%22cheap+dozen%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj1kPK1gcngAhUQx58KHXLxAJoQ6AEIPTAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22cheap%20dozen%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Still Laughing to Keep from Crying&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1990), quoted in &lt;em&gt;Uncle John's New &amp;amp; Improved Funniest Ever&lt;/em&gt; (2018):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Dozens has its origins in the slave trade of New Orleans, where deformed slaves—punished with dismemberment for disobedience—were grouped in lots of a &quot;cheap dozen&quot; for sale to slave owners. For a Black to be sold as part of the &quot;dozens&quot; was the lowest blow possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So again we have a term with a claimed origin that is more than a century older than the first (known to me) print instance of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how professional historians appraise the legitimacy of factual claims rooted in oral history; but in the context of word and phrase origins, I think we are on far solider grounds when we focus on identifying support for such claims in the written record—the older the better, in the case of actual usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I was very pleased when the poster who had provided a largely oral-tradition-based answer to the question about &quot;cheaper by the dozen&quot; followed up a day or two later with a question about the earliest occurrence in written English of the phrase &quot;white race[s]&quot; in the context of racial theory. This is an area where EL&amp;amp;U participants can offer potentially useful information: not in propounding some claimed oral tradition that ties race-focused thought in English to the origin story in &lt;em&gt;Heimskringla&lt;/em&gt;, but in identifying when and where early instances of the phrase in question appear in the written record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T02:38:36.227" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T02:38:36.227" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T20:33:34.870" Score="-3" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12025/veiled-racist-question&quot;&gt;My original question&lt;/a&gt; was possibly badly-worded. I do not know how to make it better except to post a new question. If I could, I would delete it, but there are now too many answers to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not the first to make an objection to this user’s posts: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/486088/cheaper-by-the-dozen-phrase-origin&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Cheaper by the dozen&amp;quot; phrase origin?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; on EL&amp;amp;U actually  came about as some sort of response  to a “repugnant etymology” (sic)  in a comment by the user 271314 on  Politics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such as…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“forcing prisoners of war to impregnate their mother, resulting in a &quot;dozen&quot; &quot;cheap&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;children with severe birth defects.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User 271314 then went on to justify their questionable etymology by posting a heavily-downvoted answer  at EL&amp;amp;U.SE which seemed to have little to do with the &quot;Cheaper...&quot; question. (-21, and counting) For some reason, this was awarded the bounty by the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the “answer” that serves as the supporting argument for the comments which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/169900/agc&quot;&gt;OP user  agc&lt;/a&gt; had originally found objectionable, user 271314 manages to convey the idea through their “facts” that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;African-Americans are inbred,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; thus  continuing the commentary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/486426/what-is-the-first-date-of-documented-usage-and-attribution-of-the-term-white-ra&quot;&gt;origin of the phrase “white races”&lt;/a&gt; was a logical jump, but the usage was badly researched, and &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; to come from paper-based text. Who on Earth would have a paper-based (or at least PDF) &#xA; copy of Gobineau’s clearly racist commentary? I edited the quote to remove the excess garbage which had little to with argument. [By the way,  each sentence had been laboriously copied by hand, with the little wedgies [&gt;] to make sure all were in block quote.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.startpage.com/do/search?cat=web&amp;amp;language=english&amp;amp;query=gobineau&amp;amp;pl=opensearch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the quote from Gobineau&lt;/a&gt;, it is “revealed” that the “white races” are racially superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…he claimed that aristocrats were superior to commoners and that they possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;less interbreeding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with inferior races.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT] The question about &quot;first use of the term&quot; &lt;em&gt;white race&lt;/em&gt; was actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46760/who-is-the-first-person-in-the-17th-century-to-describe-themselves-as-a-white/46781#46781&quot;&gt;posted at History.SE about 9 months ago&lt;/a&gt;, so the OP was fully aware of the answer. Moreover, they were aware that the first use was long before Gobineau.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the repugnant comments as noted by agc, the overly long and unnecessary implication that African-Americans are inbred, and the blatantly racial and unneeded full publication of the Gobineau paragraph in the question, it becomes obvious that there is a pattern. It is insidious, but pervasive in the user’s posts: all seem to be racially charged for some reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&gt;The question is, what is the reason?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been noted by Ian Fleming: “'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action'”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.startpage.com/do/search?cat=web&amp;amp;language=english&amp;amp;query=gobineau&amp;amp;pl=opensearch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.startpage.com/do/search?cat=web&amp;amp;language=english&amp;amp;query=gobineau&amp;amp;pl=opensearch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/486088/cheaper-by-the-dozen-phrase-origin/486133#486133&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Cheaper by the dozen&amp;quot; phrase origin?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/169900/agc&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/169900/agc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T17:29:42.010" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T08:08:04.950" Title="veiled racist question (2nd part)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="22" ClosedDate="2019-02-27T04:12:35.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2019-02-23T23:06:33.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Mitch, I'm confused about what exactly you want to ask here. I don't see why this user's posts would prompt you to open a conversation about what is appropriate for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what I've seen of this user's interactions, they wouldn't be interested in having such a discussion. (Note the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/330272/guest271314&quot;&gt;reference to &quot;free speech&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in guest271314's profile, and the fact that guest271314 has already been &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/21216/guest271314&quot;&gt;suspended from the Politics SE site until Jan 23 '20&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to discuss this user with others before taking action on posts that you find objectionable: you can do things like your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/486426/revisions&quot;&gt;edit of the user's post&lt;/a&gt; on your own initiative. For actions that only mods can do, you can flag. So what is there to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motivations of this user are not obvious, and as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12027/77227&quot;&gt;Laurel said&lt;/a&gt;, the user's motivations don't actually matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, my interpretation of the user's motivations is different from yours, and I guess I'll share it in case it helps to alleviate your concerns that this site is being used by white supremacists to promote racist propaganda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My read is that the reason guest271314's posts are all racially charged is because  guest271314 sees racism and white supremacy as a pervasive feature of American society, and doesn't think that this is a good thing. The quotation of extremely ugly viewpoints is certainly intentional, but doesn't seem to be approving: rather, guest271314 seems to be trying to make the point that the idea of a &quot;white race&quot; originated in racist thought and is inherently racist. I don't see any indication that guest271314 meant for the Gobineau quote  to be understood as a &quot;revelation&quot; rather than as the nonsense that it obviously is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that guest271314 was trying to convey an idea like &quot;African-Americans are inbred&quot; because in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47972/why-were-blacks-still-victimized-in-the-northern-states-after-slaverys-abolitio/48017#48017&quot;&gt;History SE answer&lt;/a&gt;, guest271314 approvingly quotes sources that reject the idea that race can be coherently defined in terms of biological or genetic criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to &quot;birth defects&quot; is part of an answer where guest271314 refers to &quot;horrendous practices of englishmen in the western hemisphere&quot;: I'm pretty sure it was intended to be understood as a negative effect of racism, not as a justification for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who on Earth would have a paper-based (or at least PDF) copy of Gobineau’s clearly racist commentary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given guest271314's obvious interest in the history of racism and white supremacist ideology, this wouldn't be suprising even if they don't agree with Gobineau. guest271314 also quotes the black comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T17:20:07.607" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T17:20:07.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2019-02-23T23:59:01.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Bottom line&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12033/55623&quot;&gt;@sumelic’s answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I have to add at this point is I believe this series of Meta-questions is shedding more heat than light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s focus on what we want to achieve, and the tools at our disposal to effect change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Concrete action&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As non-diamond users, we have a limited selection of concrete actions we can take here. And they’re all focused on posts, not users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who wants to can and should vote on the user’s posts here on EL&amp;amp;U. That includes downvoting, delete voting, and close voting. If that doesn’t seem enough, flag the posts. If there’s something objectionable in those walls of text, flag as “offensive”; else flag for mod attention and make a brief but clear point about what you think needs doing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings us to the diamond mods. They &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; sanction users. I believe these two meta-questions have brought their attention to this user and his posts, and they can decide what to do about it, if anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is still not satisfactory, you can bring it to the attention of the CM team with the “contact us” link in the footer. That’s where the buck stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Meta-discussions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know what further Meta-discussion is going to accomplish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the issue has been raised, let the community, mods, and CMs do what they think best, and let’s put this discussion to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T23:59:01.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2019-02-24T00:38:53.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I'm able to write an answer based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12032/veiled-racist-question-2nd-part#comment51659_12032&quot;&gt;your comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@JJJ I think there is a problem here...perhaps I am not expressing myself well. I thought most users would catch on to what I was saying...obviously, not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading your two questions, their answers and some other comments I think the 'problem' you have is very similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3800/18862&quot;&gt;problem I had a month ago&lt;/a&gt; (almost exactly to the hour). To summarise, sometimes people don't live up to our (yours, mine, the community, etc.) standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phillip (a mod on Politics.se) had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3801/18862&quot;&gt;very good answer&lt;/a&gt; which I am not going to repeat. Instead, I am going to repeat his ending, which I think is to the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MMSth.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MMSth.png&quot; alt=&quot;someone is wrong on the internet&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;image source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xkcd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final words of advice, do what you have to (downvote, flag, report, whatever you think is appropriate and worth your time) and then, to end my answer to your question about disinformation with a slogan by the Ministry of Information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On#Design_and_production&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;keep calm and carry on&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T00:38:53.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11988" CreationDate="2019-02-24T08:12:17.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, you can either edit your original question or delete it and post a new one. To attract more attention you can place a bounty on your questions. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/159691/user240918&quot;&gt;user240918&lt;/a&gt; Jan 21 at 11:31&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Editing the question will already move it to the top of the list of active questions, so people who have not seen it before will see it for the first time. I would also suggest creating a list of bounties with no deadline on meta and turning that post into a featured question. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/163363/christophe-strobbe&quot;&gt;Christophe Strobbe&lt;/a&gt; Jan 22 at 18:42&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the only difference that you would accomplish from the extra work is to gain the attention of those people who are using the Newest sort order, rather than the Active sort order. That is, you would bother people who were specifically not wanting to see old posts again. Therefore, it's probably better to just edit it rather than delete and re-ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="332702" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T08:12:17.987" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-02-24T08:12:17.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2019-02-24T17:21:53.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the links the user posted on his &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/486133/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, shall we? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a racist, a neo Nazi, or/and a white supremacist post &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dza75447VDc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube&lt;/a&gt; video: &lt;em&gt;Gil Scott-Heron, Winter In America, Central Park Summerstage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gill Scott-Heron was an African-American soul and jazz poet, musician, author who is said to be the godfather of rap. He was likened to Bob Dylan and an active member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arts_Movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Arts Movement&lt;/a&gt; during the 1960s and 70s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Apartheid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medical Apartheid&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a history of medical experimentation on African Americans. From the era of slavery to the present day, this book presents the first full account of black America's mistreatment as unwitting subjects of medical experimentation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Gregory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dick Gregory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gregory was active in the civil rights movement&lt;/strong&gt;. On October 7, 1963, he came to Selma, Alabama, and spoke for two hours on a public platform two days before the voter registration drive known as &quot;Freedom Day&quot; (October 7, 1963).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1964, Gregory became more involved in civil rights activities, activism against the Vietnam War, economic reform, and anti-drug issues. As a part of his activism, he went on several hunger strikes and campaigns in America and overseas. In the early 1970s, he was banned from Australia, where government officials feared he would &quot;...stir up demonstrations against the Vietnam war.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Gregory ran for President of the United States in 1968 as a write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, which had broken off from the Peace and Freedom Party. He garnered 47,097 votes, including one from Hunter S. Thompson...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never heard of the guy but I found his biography to be fascinating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;YouTube &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWigLcAkZCI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;The History Of Male Slave Rape (Buck Breaking) And The Word MotherFucker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Which talks about white slave owners raping black slaves in front of their families and fellow slave workers “…in order to break his spirit, in order to break him down as a man. In order to show dominance against him. In order to show the rest of the black population that ‘This is not your leader. I just made your leader submit to me sexually’”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/creole_art_african_am_oral.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;African American Oral Traditions in Louisiana&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Snippet  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Toasting, a modern and primarily urban form of Black oral lore, has its roots in older traditions like signifying and playing the dozens. A toast is a lengthy, recited narrative or poem describing a series of exploits by a central character. Focusing on the main character's heroic acts and exercises of wit, the toast presents values through actions.[…]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp;The African American tradition of dueling rhymes is evident in many oral art forms. Toasting, rapping, signifying and playing the dozens are all demonstrations of verbal skill. Today's rapping is closely related to toasting, which in turn has much in common with signifying, an exhibition of aggressive wit and indirect verbal assault on a victim. Signifying and toasting also share elements of the dozens.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;&quot;The Dozens&quot;&lt;/em&gt; are an elaborate insult contest. Rather than insulting an opponent directly, a contestant derides members of the opponent's family, usually his mother. &lt;strong&gt;The dozens has its origins in the slave trade of New Orleans where deformed slaves—generally slaves punished with dismemberment for disobedience—were grouped in lots of a &quot;cheap dozen&quot; for sale to slave owners.&lt;/strong&gt; For a Black to be sold as part of the &quot;dozens&quot; was the lowest blow possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these links prove that the user is a veiled racist, of the white supremacist kind,  then I'm a misogynist. &lt;strong&gt;I have &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; upvoted his answer because he supported his answer with numerous reliable references&lt;/strong&gt;, the links were the best part of their answer. I said in a comment, now deleted, that I hoped their answer would not get deleted because of the links. The links are instructive, important and a reminder to everyone the acts of abject cruelty against planation slaves in the past and the acts of racism committed against American blacks which persist to this day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sELD5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sELD5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T16:06:05.797" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T16:06:05.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11940" CreationDate="2019-02-24T21:45:44.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Summarizing the comments, since they just expound at length on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions you're asking about predate the rule you're asking about by a significant margin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specifically, all four were posed in 2010.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;General Reference&lt;/a&gt;&quot; was implemented early in 2011.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;no [or inadequate] research shown&quot; became a close reason at English Language &amp;amp; Usage in December 2014. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5459/new-close-reason-include-the-research&quot;&gt;New close reason: include the research&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="332702" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T00:13:17.397" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T00:13:17.397" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-02-24T21:45:44.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4224" CreationDate="2019-02-24T22:12:28.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do answer a question in a comment if I think the question is marginal and worthy of closing. I consider this a kindness and an expediency. Kindness because I'm giving the benefit of my knowledge, expediency because I don't have to write a dissertation on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, and I think this is why so many here still gnash their teeth over this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact remains, though: not all questions on this site deserve (or can even use) a thorough answer. Here's one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/487665/2303&quot;&gt;I'll handed off to him VS. I'll hand it off to him from movie 'Spotlight'&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which I commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is obviously a typo. The verb form is always infinitive when used with a modal auxiliary. &quot;Handed&quot; is almost certainly a mishearing or mistyping of &quot;hand it&quot; in that context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the answer, right there, but the question was so lacking in usefulness to the site that it certainly didn't deserve its own space as an uppercase &quot;Answer&quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T21:00:48.687" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T21:00:48.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T04:25:58.030" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a word to encompass position, size, and vector in a cartesian plane, their common characteristic being that they're all expressible as a pair of scalar values. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202974/a-single-word-that-collectively-means-volume-shape-and-size&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is somewhat similar. The OP is looking for a word to encompass volume, shape, and size.  The question is problematic already, given that volume and size are the same thing.  Further, it's over four years old. (And of course, none of the answers really work for my question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I poked around here on meta to get some guidance, and I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10479/how-can-i-rekindle-interest-in-an-old-question&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer about rejuvenating old questions. I'm not sure it applies here, as I am not the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I edit the old question such that it makes more sense, so it will move back into the active questions, or just ask my question independently and make it clear that I'm not asking the same question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, here's how I would word it--the first paragraph asks my specific question, while the second broadens it to include the original question, minus the problematic part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A single word to encompass the concepts of point, size, and vector&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a word to encompass position, size, and vector, their common characteristic being that they're all expressible as a pair of scalar values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing for a fairly mathematical audience, and it would be great to make them think I'm smarter than I really am, so rather than a pair of scalars in a plane, a word for any generic n-tuple of scalars in an n-dimensional space will do just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49084" LastEditorUserId="49084" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T04:31:50.050" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T17:55:21.667" Title="Should I edit this problematic question and fold my own somewhat similar question into it, or just ask my question separately?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T22:47:57.280" Score="-2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/487141/177853&quot;&gt;What is the wife of a henpecked husband called?&lt;/a&gt;, asked five hours ago as I write this, has currently generated a list of highly gendered pejoratives, from &lt;em&gt;shrew&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;cow&lt;/em&gt;, with virtually&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; no caution or commentary about why any of them might be the least bit problematic to actually use in today's society. The latest offering, which is from a new user and reads in full&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about these : bitch or cow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;already had an up-vote when I saw it. That could be because, while low quality in terms of sourcing and explanation, it's actually an appropriate answer to the literal question. I hope it's that, and not that someone got really excited by the license to call his wife a bitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've flagged the question to at least be protected (now that it's on the HNQ), but I really would more appreciate some of the regulars around here stepping up to include some usage notes about the history and likely offensiveness of their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think these answers are completely un-problematic, ask yourself, what's the gender-flipped equivalent of a hen-pecked husband and his emasculating wife? The answer is that there isn't one, because it has never been considered particularly problematic for men to browbeat, bully, and intimidate their female romantic partners (let alone for women to put up with such behavior). Put another way, the defining characteristic of a hen-pecked husband is that he obeys his wife's dictates. Compare that with the traditional wedding vows, which literally required women to promise to obey their husbands as a prerequisite to being a wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking that the question be closed, or anyone's answer be deleted (except possibly that last one, if it's not improved to the community's minimum standards). I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; asking that at least a few of the answerers/commenters include any information at all about the social implications of actually using these terms. That kind of commentary would go a long ways to making that question look more like a Q&amp;amp;A about English usage, and less like the bulletin board in a very stuffy boys' club.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/487152/177853&quot;&gt;One answerer&lt;/a&gt; did include a comment disavowing &quot;the history of sexism&quot; of the terms in question, and while I was composing this another user added a cautionary comment to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/487161/177853&quot;&gt;lead answer&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks, @TaliesinMerlin and @Todd Wilcox.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T22:54:01.787" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T20:31:09.943" Title="This is what we mean by problems with the climate*" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-26T03:07:30.343" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/429000/gender-neutral-alternative-to-sir-madam&quot;&gt;Gender neutral alternative to Sir/Madam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's odd that it was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a very specific question, and given typical everyday context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree - would like to clarify why it is opinion based? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T03:07:30.343" Title="This question asking for a gender neutral alternative should be reopend" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12040" CreationDate="2019-02-26T05:16:50.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would just leave the old question alone and ask a new one. You should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;the instructions&lt;/a&gt; for [single-word-requests] (you are missing a sample sentence, for one).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to the old similar question and mention how the question is different and why the answers don't work. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes with none of these downsides that you would have if you just made an edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The edit may invalidate the answers (because it's not the same question exactly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The owner may rollback the changes at any time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old bumped questions don't get the views that new questions do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't get notified (or reputation gains) on posts you edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accepting an answer is out of your control&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question would have to be reopened (it was closed sometime between me first posting this answer and now)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T17:55:21.667" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T17:55:21.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2019-02-26T07:49:15.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For some reason, this was awarded the bounty by the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question already had enough attention; the sole reason for that bounty was to reward that outspoken answer.  The answer remains useful in that it offers recent instances of a peculiar usage and divergent concept of the phrase, which I wouldn't have known of otherwise.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question probably wouldn't have rated so many upvotes without the interesting quote from &lt;em&gt;guest271314&lt;/em&gt;, and since his perhaps too rambling answer was not commonly recognized as folkloric, it seemed right to use a surplus to help balance a deficit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course awarding a bounty is not the same thing as &lt;em&gt;accepting&lt;/em&gt; an answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(While it's not inconceivable that a given centuries old familiar phrase has a sinister secret origin that's been accurately preserved only in oral folklore, it's no less conceivable that a more modern folklore could exaggerate its pedigree.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169900" LastEditorUserId="169900" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T08:08:04.950" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T08:08:04.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12025" CreationDate="2019-02-26T09:39:56.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why does the user need to post this here?   Is there some hidden agenda?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a question about the earliest usage of a specific term &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; in a specific sense &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;.  The quote in question provides the earliest usage that the OP knew of.  This is generally the best practice, since if the &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; used some later instance &lt;em&gt;X+n&lt;/em&gt;, an answer might post the known &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; usage, (which the &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; already knew about), rather than an &lt;em&gt;X-n&lt;/em&gt; usage which is the thing required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, an &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; who wished to avoid alarming sensitive users might ask for an earliest usage &lt;em&gt;excepting&lt;/em&gt; usages pertaining to some offensive subject &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt;.  But when the offensive subject &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt; is racism, and the term &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; exclusively pertains to &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt;, there's no possible way to ask or answer the question.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's no hidden agenda on &lt;em&gt;Guest271314&lt;/em&gt;'s part, and that supposition at best implies having deeply misunderstood the question.  &lt;em&gt;Guest271314&lt;/em&gt; is a scholar interested in the origins of racism, particularly in US, European and African history, and the ensuing impacts of that history which still persist.  In one way or another racism harms everyone, and we should applaud (not suppress) attempts to better understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169900" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T09:39:56.130" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12048" CreationDate="2019-02-26T12:42:37.300" Score="22" ViewCount="4489" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/486892/3559&quot;&gt;recent answer&lt;/a&gt; demonstrates its point with lyrics from a Lou Reed song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has prompted a flag to be raised, calling the lyrics &quot;offensive and unwelcoming&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a comment, with 20 comment votes, that suggests using the lyrics to &quot;the wheels on the bus&quot; instead of Lou Reed's lyrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one (or more) of us has been upset by the lyrics and there is a valid alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: are the lyrics a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me they don't seem to be, but Lou Reed himself &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/columnists/david-lister/no-one-is-safe-from-political-correctness-even-lou-reed-120832.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;changed the lyrics&lt;/a&gt; when he performed live, later in his career, so perhaps they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help from the community determining the correct action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="8286" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T17:27:42.780" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T15:43:21.727" Title="Is using &quot;colored girls&quot; as an incidental example offensive or unwelcoming?" Tags="|discussion|offensive|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="38" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-26T14:27:05.297" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem for Lou Reed was, &quot;people of color&quot; just didn't scan. Apart from &quot;the N word,&quot; the casual use of which should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be discouraged, the way to refer to African-Americans has changed over the years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NAACP is The National Association for the Advancement of &lt;strong&gt;Colored&lt;/strong&gt; People; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used the word &quot;Negro&quot;; &quot;black&quot; was the easy, catch-all term one heard chanted and saw on signs promoting &quot;Black Power&quot; ... yet now black people use the term &quot;people of color&quot; and, in the U.S., &quot;African-American&quot; quite a lot. It's been hard to keep up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for us seems to be &quot;What words are safe and respectful to use?&quot; I'd suggest that on this site, quoting what a songwriter wrote in 1972, which was certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; thought of as offensive at the time (for comparison, see also the 1976 play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Colored_Girls_Who_Have_Considered_Suicide_/_When_the_Rainbow_Is_Enuf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide&lt;/a&gt;, written by an African-American woman and first performed four years &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the Lou Reed song), should not be considered offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel we are not responsible for legitimate references our users employ in their answers if those appear to be well-intentioned and offered in the spirit of inquiry (i.e., not written to troll the site). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if we had received 42 flags calling something in an answer offensive (as compared with the 42 up votes and two down votes the answer received), there would be cause for concern. I'd chalk this up to hyper-vigilantism on the part of whoever complained, and I would hope we don't react to censor in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's bookmark this discussion and resurrect it when someone starts talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nigger_of_the_%27Narcissus%27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a certain Joseph Conrad novel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt; The OP had a different example originally, and it was my comment that caused him to add the Lou Reed lyric. Apparently it was the easiest thing he could think of off the top of his head where &quot;go&quot; was demonstrably used to mean &quot;said&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T16:27:52.417" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T16:27:52.417" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-26T16:34:48.787" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a woman of color (but not Black), and find the use of this example offensive and, in particular, unwelcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Americans do NOT use &quot;colored&quot; in the twenty-first century, and we don't refer to grown women as &quot;girls&quot;. If you think that the fact that those terms were considered socially acceptable by some people in the past means that no one will find them &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/125542/58598&quot;&gt;&quot;jarring and uncomfortable&quot;&lt;/a&gt; when encountering them out-of-context now, I refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ralph_Northam&amp;amp;oldid=885132254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ralph Northam&lt;/a&gt; et al.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't find the existence of the lyric offensive (it is a product of its time, though that's not at all clear from the answer). I do not find discussion of the term offensive (this is a site dedicated to discussing the English language, and discussion of offensive language is part of that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find problematic, and the reason I raised the flag, is that it's a cherry picked example, out of many possibilities, specifically chosen to illustrate a point about a language construction used mainly with children (the question is about the construction &lt;em&gt;dog goes &quot;woof&quot;&lt;/em&gt;). There's no commentary on the lyric, or even a date to show just how long ago it was written—literally before I was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WHY? Why use this example in this context? What possible utility does this example, which contains language known to be hurtful to a large swathe of people and which could easily be replaced by dozens or even hundreds of other examples of the construction &lt;em&gt;[people] go [sound]&lt;/em&gt;, serve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe [I think to myself] it's just the first example the poster could find, and they didn't want to put too much effort into the answer. I'll be as helpful as I can, and find a possible alternative! The answer is focusing on song lyrics, so I'll look for some that match. Oh, hey, here is a song lyric in the same general genre as the question's lyrics, which contains examples of the usage for a thing making a sound, a person saying words, and a proto-person making a sound! I'll offer it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested alternative is not taken up, or commented on in any way. I raise a flag, which ends up in a Meta question where the main response so far is &quot;eh, history. Language police are stupid.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this feels very much like the author of the post and the community in general don't give a hoot (maybe that should be &lt;em&gt;won't go &quot;hoo&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) about whether women or people of color who come across this site feel that they can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine one of my children asking me &quot;Mama, why does this book say 'the dog &lt;em&gt;goes woof&lt;/em&gt;' and my other book says 'the dog &lt;em&gt;says woof&lt;/em&gt;'?&quot; If I didn't have a good explanation off the top of my head I would google it. I would find that page. I would read the top-voted answer, which starts out sounding very useful but ends with a slap in the face. And I would immediately move along, resolved not to use the site again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, wait, maybe I'm a non-native speaker, or a white man! So instead of realizing there was a slap in the face, maybe I share the answer with my child, who could then go to school saying &quot;My heart goes &lt;em&gt;boom&lt;/em&gt;! Colored girls go &lt;em&gt;doo doo&lt;/em&gt;!&quot; Explosions and poop and cooties and a relic of America's abhorrent past, all rolled into one &quot;English&quot; lesson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, this isn't about &quot;policing people's language&quot;. This is about thinking about what we write, and how it will affect other people. Of course it's harder to think about how it will affect people who aren't like us than people who have the same reactions we do. But every day when I come to this site I am reminded, in ways small and large, that it's mostly a bunch of highly educated, high income, racial majority men, who mostly don't much care if that's deeply uncomfortable for those of us who don't tick all those boxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177853" LastEditorUserId="177853" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T20:39:35.280" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T20:39:35.280" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-26T23:57:54.460" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you get feedback that someone finds an example you used offensive, and the bit they find offensive isn’t crucial to your answer, you should find another example. For every person that feels comfortable speaking up, there are likely many more not saying anything being distracted instead of helped by your example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I like the Lou Reed example because the song conjures warm memories for me, as an illustration it may not be the most suitable example because for some it detracts from instead of enhances your point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I don’t think it is necessary to determine whether the lyrics meet or don’t meet some threshold of offensiveness in this context. That they are controversial to some, and easily replaced should be enough reason to change them out. A question about the offensiveness of “colored” in modern usage might be interesting as an English question on the main site though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T03:22:22.593" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T03:22:22.593" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-27T06:35:33.173" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another sortie in the ancient battle between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prescriptivist&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;vs.&lt;/em&gt; descriptivist models of language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The prescriptivists wish to make the world a better place, and believe this can be more efficiently achieved in part by deprecating certain &quot;bad words&quot; and ignorant constructions believed to transmit bad thoughts and wrong ideas, thus helping prevent a multitude of bad deeds.  For them, Language is man-made,  artificial and ever more controllable, so it would be reckless and irresponsible not to employ it to prevent needless future evils.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which spirit many of the users on ELU firmly believe, (as taught in many academies), that the censoring of words like &quot;colored&quot;, &lt;em&gt;et al&lt;/em&gt;, (and censuring insensitive usages of such words), is the most ethical policy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The descriptivists doubt that such methods can ever be feasible, and consider Language as a natural object in of itself, no more &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; controllable than the oceans or dreams, but hope that through close and careful observation it might be learned how to better to navigate within it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For them such &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo#KonMari_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;konmari&lt;/a&gt; diction is much like the sort of germaphobic overindulgence in antibiotics that weakens gut flora and breeds super-bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once there were no descriptivists, only prescriptivists that disagreed with other prescriptivists.  Side &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is disgusted by things Side &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; says, and &lt;em&gt;vice versa&lt;/em&gt;, and so on for every set of opposing factions since creation.  Their respective strengths wax and wane, endlessly, and that day's victorious wincers pay the piper and call the tune.  An oscillatory stasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169900" LastEditorUserId="169900" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T06:17:17.870" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T06:17:17.870" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-27T16:23:46.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Preliminary Thoughts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I somewhat disagree with 1006a's rationale. Objectively speaking, although there was a drop in usage after 1970, Google ngrams shows that colored people is still used in the 21st century, and it is used almost as often as it was during the 20th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=african+americans%2Cblack+people%2Cpeople+of+color%2Ccolored+people%2Cethnic+people%2Cminority+groups%2Cracial+groups&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cafrican%20american%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cblack%20people%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cpeople%20of%20color%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolored%20people%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cethnic%20people%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cminority%20groups%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cracial%20groups%3B%2Cc0.png&quot; alt=&quot;This image contains a Google Ngrams chart comparing black people, minority groups, people of color, racial groups, colored people and ethnic people and african americans, dating from 1800 to 2008 (the latter of which being the cutoff date for ngrams). It shows that as of 2008, in order of popularity black people is the most popular term, people of color is almost on par with people of color, and racial groups is almost on par with colored people, with ethnic people and african-americans &amp;#39;almost&amp;#39; flatlining.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I restricted this to multi-word phrases predicated on the assumption that single words tend to be more popular than phrases in general, and generally more polysemous. Minorities is far more popular than any of these terms, and has applicability to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/outreach-initiatives/resources-minority-faculty-students&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathematical contexts&lt;/a&gt; for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 2008, we can see that minority groups is almost on par with people of color, and people of color is far more popular than the closest equivalent, which is ethnic people, despite the fact that minority groups can include other classes of people. Moreover, unlike other racial terminology, the term's purpose was never inherently offensive. I do not think that use of the term in and of itself merits a flag, especially considering that it is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more popular than the closest equivalent, ethnic people, which almost flatlines. Also, considering how usage of black people and minority groups also dipped in a similar timeframe to colored people, the reason colored people is used less often today than it was in the past seems likely to be that we are discussing race less often than we were back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/128169&quot;&gt;The closest thing I have found on our website to suggesting colored people is offensive&lt;/a&gt; is attributed to William Safire writing an unspecified October 28th 2001 article for the New York Times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's possible that the president coined the phrase; if so, it was on the analogy of women of color, a description adopted by many nonwhites. (Though colored people is dated and almost a slur, people of color is not in the least offensive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggesting that the term is dated seems almost contrary to my findings on ngrams, but more importantly there is a considerable difference between what is almost, and what is. It is a true statement, just as much as colored people isn't a slur. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_ethnic_slurs&amp;amp;oldid=885369669#C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It does not presently show up on Wikipedia's List of Ethnic slurs&lt;/a&gt;, which makes sense since, insofar as I know, it was never meant as a slur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far more popular than the questin citing William Saphire is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/7264&quot;&gt;this answer citing George Carlin&lt;/a&gt;, who suggests that colored people and people of color should be considered equally offensive (or inoffensive), and prefers that we refer to africans in particular as black people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I take from all of this is that if we are going to appeal to contemporary sensibilities, you should use black people to refer specifically to africans, but colored people is probably acceptable in a broader sense. In my opinion, people of color and colored people are &lt;em&gt;at worst&lt;/em&gt;, on the level of minced oaths, which makes sense considering that they were seemingly devised as euphemisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not talking about words that are as inherently offensive as the ones mentioned the last time a similar issue came up recently, and I don't think we should react anywhere near the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What I Think Should Be Done in This Particular Case&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I nevertheless suggest editing that example out of the post, &lt;strong&gt;despite my preliminary thoughts&lt;/strong&gt;. Preferably &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; doing the poster the favor of replacing that example with a nonracial equivalent so that voting is not adversely impacted, or at least a comment explaining the edit. Minimally, a comment should be left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rationale for The Suggested Course of action&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that this is a minor transgression, likely made by accident and undeserving of any punitive action or answer deletion, but that it is nevertheless a transgression in need of editorial remedy in accordance to our policies. The quote should be removed, and preferably replaced with an equivalent context (pop song lyrics in this case) by the editor.  I am less concerned about the language being used, and more concerned with &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it is being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My overall interpretation of Stack Exchange's code of conduct is that we have very, very low tolerances for prospectively rude or demeaning behavior. Strictly speaking, the code of conduct has zero tolerance wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No bigotry.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion&amp;mdash;and those are just a few examples. When in doubt, just don’t. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes analytical need overrides that in the academic community because our first responsibility is to accurately representing the truth as we understand it, whereas politeness is our secondary responsibility. I think it would be detrimental to our credibility have a zero tolerance policy and I believe Jeff Atwood afforded us some amount of leniency in recognition of this while he was in charge which we may interpret to be standing orders unless and until instructed otherwise, but in consideration of the zero tolerance language of the Code of Conduct, I do think we need strict compliance guidelines, similar to the ones we have for lack of attribution and misattribution: Edit to fix as a first resort if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be wondering why I am referencing this policy if I do not think the word is &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; to offend. Well, it is not so much what words are being used, and &lt;em&gt;how the words are being used&lt;/em&gt; which I find to be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Random House Webster's Dictionary, Second Edition there is a basic manual of style, with a subsection called &lt;em&gt;Avoiding Insensitive and Offensive Language that Excludes or Unnecessarily Emphasizes Differences&lt;/em&gt; spanning from page 2223 to 2225, and this guidance given on page 2225 seems like the compromise we should use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reference to age, sex, religion, race, and the like should only be included if they are relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The racial example given is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of[__________________________________]Use&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Arab man denies assault charge[_________________]Man Avoids Assault Charge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example a racial epithet is being removed because it is irrelevant to the principle message, despite the fact that, at least in and of itself, Arab is not considered an offensive word in English, and especially not so when this was likely to have been written, between the years of 1989&amp;ndash;2001 (initial and final copyright dates of my copy), meaning that was likely written in a pre-9/11 world. Given that this section is not part of the addenda, I think it is even probable that the provision was written in '89.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now yes, an assault charge is different from saying &quot;doo doo doo&quot;, but that merely affects the severity of the generalization, and I don't see why colored people would be used except to emphasize a distinction. Such generalizations are often considered offensive, even in nonracial contexts, and the fact that a racial generalization is being made transgresses these guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in accordance to this guidance, we should weigh the prospective offensiveness of the term to the necessity of its use. First of all, in context, the necessity of the racial epithet, the manners of the time and the history of the word may render the quotation mostly, if not completely inoffensive, but that does not necessarily translate into the here and the now at Stack Exchange. We are not lyricists; we are analysts of the English Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our capacity of analysts of the English Language, I think that it is necessary to &lt;em&gt;accurately&lt;/em&gt; quote external sources in order to accurately analyze the language, but that &lt;em&gt;the selection of quotations is also subject to the code of conduct&lt;/em&gt;, which would mean that &lt;em&gt;the analytical necessity of the quotation the answer must also be considered when considering our code of conduct&lt;/em&gt;. If the quotation is not needful, then the use of the racial epithet in the post is not needful by proxy. Since our first responsibility is to analyze th English Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does not specifically regard that particular quotation, racial language in general or historical use, and the answer makes no effort to uniquely analyze that specific quotation to explain how the word go is being used on context or even how the usage pertains to personal experience with the language. As it stands, the answer makes no effort to analyze or explain the presence of any of those quotations at all in fact, and merely provides them as evidence of usage and axiomatic applicability. As a matter of fact, I have trouble seeing the utility of the answer, since it is simply General Reference, with a couple of seemingly random examples of usage added to disguise the fact. That makes them all interchangable with quotations from similar contexts of similar fame and quality, and means that the meaning of the answer is not impacted by the removal or replacement of the quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; effort to integrate the quotation into the answer was made, I would suggest leaving it in this case, especially since the choice of words is not &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; offensive, but since no attempt to integrate it into commentary was made, I really see no reason for this answer to contain a racial generalization of any sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the quality of the answer would be adversely affected, since this would constitute the removal of evidence, and only if no replacement is furnished. In order to avoid this changing the results of voting, on an otherwise well received answer, the courteous thing for an editor to do would be to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. Explain why the edit is being made in the editing summary, so that a the answer isn't rolled back without due consideration.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;B. Find an equivalent quotation to replace it so that the answer can be rated just the same as it would be prior to the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T15:43:21.727" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T15:43:21.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-27T19:48:33.793" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a &lt;em&gt;completely gratuitous&lt;/em&gt; choice of example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at #1006a's answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged it. I'm a woman of color [ ], and find the use of this example offensive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm saying the same thing, but in a couple of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We (we, society) avoid choosing (say, incidental examples) of historic language that contains historic-offensive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an interesting example totally unrelated to racism.  The agricultural plant oilseed is also called &amp;quot;rape&amp;quot;.  Around small children, I don't refer to it as &amp;quot;rape&amp;quot; - I just use the word &amp;quot;oilseed&amp;quot;.  It's just a word coincidence, but for what possible reason would you use a very adult, disturbing, word around 7 year olds?  It would be silly and pointless to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, yes, in today's world when you choose an incidental example, indeed don't choose one that contains historically racist language -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;For example - very simply - when you choose an incidental example, you don't choose one that is vulgar.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is that simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, you no more choose incidental-examples that include historic-racist language, that you would choose incidental-examples that are vulgar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you can - if you're Beavis &amp;amp; Butthead.  Hah hah, I got to say &amp;quot;Arse&amp;quot; in front of Teacher .......... because I was quoting Churchill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean it's that level of immaturity, or just lack of style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T19:56:36.877" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12041" CreationDate="2019-02-27T20:31:09.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question attracts a long list of answers, that usually means it is subjective – more of a poll or request for suggestions or ideas. If it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; intended to be a request for suggestions or ideas, then as written it is unclear and being mistaken for such a request. In any case, it should be closed to prevent it from continuing to attract suggestion after suggestion. I believe at last count we had 19 answers already posted on this one. See: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real questions have answers, not items or ideas or opinions&lt;/a&gt;”, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2160&quot;&gt;Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity&lt;/a&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14073" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T20:31:09.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T21:11:25.837" Score="7" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/487141/what-is-the-wife-of-a-henpecked-husband-called/487334?noredirect=1#comment1176778_487334&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (now on hold) and the moderator's repeated observation that the answers, and question, are opinion-based. Isn't the issue that synonyms (like translation questions) are going to have a certain nuance in the answer? I would think half of the questions here have to be closed if a brief unique correct answer, in the style of a high-school math assignment, is required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31085" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T22:27:14.410" Title="If every answer is improper, doesn't that suggest standards are wrong or moderator is wrong?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12055" CreationDate="2019-02-27T22:27:14.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're correct that synonyms may have different nuances. The main issue I see with hazoriz's question is that it doesn't specify what kind of nuance is desired. The provided sample sentence (&quot;That woman is a henpecker&quot;) doesn't show whether a word with e.g. positive or negative connotations is desired. It doesn't show whether hazoriz is looking for a somewhat polite, or a highly insulting term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has already caused confusion: in the comments, Jason Bassford suggested that &quot;the question itself is perfectly neutral&quot;, but in fact, it's evidently ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;tag guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, word request questions are supposed to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;specify the criteria by which the suggested word will be accepted &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;show that you searched for a suitable word before asking the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T22:27:14.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T16:40:40.027" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/487141/what-is-the-wife-of-a-henpecked-husband-called/487171?noredirect=1#comment1176759_487171&quot;&gt;What is the wife of a henpecked husband called?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No idea why you are classifying my response as plagiarism.  Really none at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201835" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T17:41:18.833" Title="Henpecked by MetaEd" Tags="|discussion|content-disputes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12058" CreationDate="2019-02-28T17:19:24.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principal problem is that you did not cite your quote. I've done that for you on this occasion in order that the post can be undeleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quoting from a search engine is insufficient.&lt;/strong&gt; You need to cite the original source. This is explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;Meta.SE question&lt;/a&gt; to which MetaEd linked in his comment and in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;ELU Help page on referencing&lt;/a&gt;. We also have relevant questions on Meta.ELU: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4973/what-to-do-about-missing-source-attributions/4981?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=2|13.3313#4981&quot;&gt;What to do about missing source attributions?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/new-attribution-rules/5196?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=1|20.3402#5196&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;New attribution rules&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;— Oxford Dictionaries &#xA;  ([Definition](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/harridan) &#xA;  and [synonyms](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/harridan)) &#xA;  via [Bing](https://www.bing.com/search?q=harridan&amp;amp;PC=U316&amp;amp;FORM=CHROMN).&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Oxford Dictionaries (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/harridan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definition&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/harridan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt;) via &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bing.com/search?q=harridan&amp;amp;PC=U316&amp;amp;FORM=CHROMN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also what the Meta.SE page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Remember, you still have to write an actual answer, in your own words. A post that consists only of copied text, even when attributed, is not your work either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may mean that your post will be deleted again, even with the attribution added. In order to avert that possibility, edit it to explain &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; you like &quot;harridan&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;a strict, bossy, or belligerent old woman&quot; is someone who henpecks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T17:41:18.833" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T17:41:18.833" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T18:51:34.673" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it'd be interesting to statistically find this out. One could take samples from every year of EL&amp;amp;U and compare the amount of average upvoted and downvoted questions to get a more concrete comparison, but looking at even a few years ago questions were getting upvoted a lot more frequently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211991" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T18:51:34.673" Title="Is EL&amp;U experiencing diminishing returns of question quality?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-28T19:24:53.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer really should have been a question, so I posted it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12063/80039&quot;&gt;Does cited material merit special consideration when the content is offensive or unwelcoming?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m going to add another answer because I think it would be worth getting community feedback on the idea in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12046/is-quoting-lou-reeds-use-of-colored-offensive-or-unwelcoming#comment51876_12046&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;offensive or unwelcoming&quot;, that's POB. Does it violate the be nice policy? Can anything &quot;quoted&quot; ever violate it? If an answer doesn't align with your views, it is at your discretion to DV it. But if at anytime I'm disallowed to cite what someone else once said, that's censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote on this answer (and comment if you like) based on your agreement with the idea that citing what someone else has said is held to a different standard than original text from the author of a post when it comes to violating the CoC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s assume the citation is not gratuitous. For the sake of discussion, the citation is relevant to the answer and the author feels that particular citation is critical to their answer but a significant number of people find it unwelcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s also not get hung up on the “censorship” part of the comment and focus on whether we should treat citations differently. Are there any mitigating qualities, like length, historical significance, etc that would cause us to keep a citation that we would remove if it wasn’t written by someone other than the author of the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T23:31:42.763" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T23:31:42.763" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-02-28T20:57:33.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is: are the lyrics a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. This discussion illustrates why they are a problem, and it should have been clear that they were a problem from the first complaint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is trying to write an instructive answer, clarity and focus are two key rhetorical demands. A broad readership needs to be able to understand answers on this site. A little humor in a selected example can help emphasize a point. In contrast, a controversial example may distract from the answer, diminishing the level of focus that answer has. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an answer's example leads to an extended comment discussion (or meta question) about that example, or when I notice that the usage may inadvertently alienate readers, that should be a sign for further review. At that point, I'd propose three criteria for moderators to decide on the appropriateness of the example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the controversial word / phrase / idea integral to answering the question? (Some questions could conceivably be valid in themselves but require the treatment of distasteful content. If its importance is unclear, the answer needs revision.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can no other examples be used to make just as effective an illustration of usage? (Sometimes examples may be rare or in a context that lends itself to no better example. If other examples are available, the answer needs revision.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the phrase cross &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;the Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; on bigotry below? (If it does, and the answer does not adequately address its example's potential to alienate its readers, then the answer needs revision or deletion.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. &lt;em&gt;When in doubt, just don’t&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, my own reckoning of this example would work like so: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, the controversial word is incidental to whether &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; can be used to introduce direct discourse. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No. Other examples are available. There are at least hundreds of popular examples of &quot;go&quot; being used in this manner, and many more common ones, like several verses in &quot;The Wheels on the Bus.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This has offended or alienated people (including 1006a) on the basis of race, and it's neither integral to the answer nor unique in its use. As of this writing, the answerer makes no effort to address the elephant in the room. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the lyrics are a problem. At minimum, I would downvote the answer and recommend it be edited in the comments. If the comment were not already under scrutiny, I would also flag the comment. Finally, if the answerer did not respond, I would be able to edit the answer myself, just as someone may edit my answer for formatting, typos, or information to make it more effective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T20:57:33.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12070" CreationDate="2019-02-28T23:30:54.450" Score="6" ViewCount="525" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12061/80039&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; to the discussion of Lou Reed's lyrics and I realized later that it should have been a question in its own right. I’m reluctant to delete that answer because of the comments and votes on it, but I will if it’s confusing the issue. I’m asking whether the EL&amp;amp;U community feels that citations of potentially offensive or unwelcoming content should be treated differently and not whether a particular instance is offensive. I realize some folks are tired of talking about the discussion I referenced here, but this isn’t a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be worth getting community feedback on the idea in this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;offensive or unwelcoming&amp;quot;, that's POB. Does it violate the be nice policy? Can anything &amp;quot;quoted&amp;quot; ever violate it? If an answer doesn't align with your views, it is at your discretion to DV it. But &lt;strong&gt;if at anytime I'm disallowed to cite what someone else once said, that's censorship.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12046/is-quoting-lou-reeds-use-of-colored-offensive-or-unwelcoming#comment51876_12046&quot;&gt;– Mazura&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should citing what someone else has said be held to a different standard than original text from the author of a post when it comes to violating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s assume the citation is relevant to the answer and the author feels that particular citation is critical to their answer but a significant number of people find it unwelcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any mitigating qualities, like the length of the citation, historical significance, etc. that would cause us to keep a citation that we would normally remove if it had been original text? What factors would cause us to keep a question about source material that is deeply offensive to some portion of the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider from one of the comments on the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some more food for thought. What if you quote something that is acceptable now, but not in 10 years time? Or for that matter, something that was acceptable a few years back but no longer now? Especially when talking about etymology it may well be that (almost) everything on a subject is no longer acceptable, but that shouldn't mean it's automatically out of scope. That's like not teach history because it may be construed as offensive. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12046/is-quoting-lou-reeds-use-of-colored-offensive-or-unwelcoming/12061#comment51918_12061&quot;&gt;– JJJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to separate (if we can) the actual incident here with a more general discussion of what kinds of factors should be taken into account when citing potentially offensive material, keeping in mind that the goal is to make EL&amp;amp;U as welcoming and inclusive as possible without undermining its primary purpose as a knowledge sharing site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-06-13T14:31:01.903" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T14:31:01.903" Title="Does cited material merit special consideration when the content is potentially offensive or unwelcoming?" Tags="|discussion|offensive|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-03-01T14:04:13.533" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all I'd like to thank everyone involved in the discussion here for their respectful behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I asked the question I was thoroughly conflicted. On the one hand there was an answer with a quote that didn't seem controversial to me, and on the other there was a flag that clearly stated the quote was unwelcoming. For some reason I could not make a decision. I even asked other moderators their opinions about the quote, which eventually led me to asking the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem as I see it is that the question has never been about the quote in isolation. Without the wider context of the answer and the question it is posted on, the context of how words affect other people, and the context of how our members see themselves, evaluating the quote is nonsensical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically my initial understanding of the situation was ignorant, so I asked a question to get less ignorant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having interacted with many of our more academically minded members in chat, I knew some people would decry the idea of censoring a quote. What I needed was the perspective of people I hadn't already interacted with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very grateful to 1006a for speaking up, as well as ColleenV. Thanks to them and others I was able to get a more rounded view of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The understanding I've come to is that there is no catch all for this sort of flag. As a moderator I need to try and understand the context of the situation. I can't just say &quot;someone is upset&quot; and change or remove the quote, and at the same time I can't just say &quot;quotes relevant to the post are benign&quot; and dismiss the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance, because there is a valid alternative and because the language has upset at least one of us, the best course is to ask the person who posted the quote to change the quote to either the one suggested or something else without language that demeans a marginalised group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T14:04:13.533" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-03-01T16:55:14.007" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We completely support everything &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12066/3995&quot;&gt;Matt said in his answer&lt;/a&gt; and want to point out that he led proactively and diligently by asking for help when he knew he needed to hear more voices. We will be giving moderators even more information about the emotions that come with having the perspective of being a person of color, or non-binary, or Latinx and a myriad of others. We'll be giving this to the Internet as a whole, as we're able, and adapting it to the caveats of our system in guidance on how to apply and interpret it. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's okay to not know everything as long as, if you lead, you know when to ask for help.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't add much more to the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; context than what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12048/3995&quot;&gt;1006a did in her answer&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, you don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to hear me reiterate her answer, what matters is I support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were other thoughtful answers posted as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were things that weren't ideal. There will always be things that aren't ideal. Let's just keep getting progressively better at having these discussions and responding to these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A few thoughts from a more general sense, based on concerns folks vocalized:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our language is the road to culture past, and what we use to push forward. Papering over words that were once bad &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; bad, because it looks like an attempt to try to &lt;em&gt;hide&lt;/em&gt; the hurt and harm that words once caused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; talk about language that was a problem in the context of why it was problematic; the history of our language &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; often just as problematic as the events that led to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Academic discussions are different than everyday speech.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we should, as far as sensibilities allow, be able to objectify a word for the purposes of talking about the problems it created. You can't &lt;em&gt;talk&lt;/em&gt; about racial segregation or the Jim Crow period without talking about &amp;quot;Colored&amp;quot; entrances. And there's a whole lot of literature around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some exceptions could apply, our need to talk about stuff has to be carefully weighed with people's need to not have unnecessary emotional triggers in their daily lives. If the front page was dominated with questions surrounding rape, murder, torture, etc - well, I think you see how unlikely that would be, but it's unlikely because we understand discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;We do not, however, couch insensitive phrases in pretend objectivity.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No post is worth the harm that it does in the forms of people not feeling supported and made safe by this community, or by us as a company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or any other language that goes against our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;code of conduct&lt;/a&gt; needs to be removed once pointed out. Our position is that providing people with an environment that doesn't deliberately make them feel unwelcome isn't a political one, but a moral one, and such things violate our shared moral contract that forms the basis of our expectations and our accountability as a company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Censorship was a red herring here.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not a government, we're a community with rules on what you can and can't post. If your contributions violate our code of conduct &lt;em&gt;but seem like they were made in good faith&lt;/em&gt;, we're going to point out what's wrong and help you find a way to make your contribution lasting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't sit well with you, then we're happy to remove your contribution because we wouldn't want your name on something that doesn't represent your views. We're just not under any obligation to provide a platform for those views, especially if they're misaligned with our sense of social accountability as an organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3995" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T13:49:52.737" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2019-03-01T20:03:26.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Tim Post &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I don't run the risk of being suspended myself if I ask why guest271314's account has been banned across the entire network for five years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell, the suspension seems to stem from their long, often rambling, at times controversial, posts on EL&amp;amp;U and on Politics SE. The two answers posted by @guest271314 have been deleted by Tim, (only visible to 10K users); however, the contents of their posts didn't appear to be harmful or disrespectful to any minority group in particular. As a contributor they posted questions on EL&amp;amp;U that interested them and in comments they simply aired their opinion. If several people disagree strongly with someone or dislike their contributions that should not make them liable to suspensions. Well… not for five years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add that I disagree &lt;strong&gt;with the company's decision to suspend said user for that length of time and the brusque and abrupt deletion of the incriminating EL&amp;amp;U post which this discussion led to&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Thursday (28/02/2020), the EL&amp;amp;U community was suddenly made aware that the SE team was following the contentious issue closely but instead of allowing us to arrive at a resolution at our own pace,  you (Tim Post) took command, and informed everyone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We don't want to pressure you, but this is an issue that demands an extremely high sense of urgency, so a consensus on how to move forward needs to be clear to us &lt;strong&gt;by Friday afternoon&lt;/strong&gt;. I have 100% trust that you'll do it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we had known beforehand that there was a time limit maybe, maybe, the EL&amp;amp;U community would have reached a compromise or greater consensus sooner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember that thousands of users and visitors saw the incriminating answer and didn't find anything objectionable about it. In fact, it was highly upvoted despite the c-expression (&lt;em&gt;colored girls&lt;/em&gt;).  There were no comments chastising the author. None. If the quote had been interpreted as abuse or an insult, rest assured more than one user would have openly voiced their disgust or expressed their concern and reservation in the comments. The answer would have been downvoted and then, possibly, deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, some may not be aware that the song, &lt;em&gt;Walk on the Wild Side&lt;/em&gt;, talks about transgender people, homosexual prostitutes, drag queens, and drug addicts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The song is all about acceptance and recognizing those who were considered “weird” or “different” as being “normal”.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Reed wrote &quot;then he was a she&quot;, &quot;Little Joe never once gave it away&quot;, &quot;Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets&quot;, &quot;Jackie is just speeding away&quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKsIkAw61c8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“coloured girls go ‘Doo do doo do doo do do doo…’&lt;/a&gt; he was not insulting black American women, or any of the characters in his song, he was celebrating all of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SE sites start deleting posts that contain quotations that were cited in good faith, the company will be digging itself a deeper and deeper hole. Delete a post that was utterly and completely non-racist for quoting a Lou Reed's quote then where do we draw the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that, I want to apologise to 1006a if my numerous comments hurt or caused her any pain or distress, it was the very last thing on my mind. She has my uttermost admiration (for putting herself on the frontline) and respect, I am but a clumsy middle-aged clot who has still a lot to learn about people and about Americans.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whenever I see something, which I consider unfair or biased I cannot shut up. This is going to be a problem in the near future, I can tell.  And, frankly I'm worried, it seems that the environment on EL&amp;amp;U and SE  is quite oppressive and intolerant (see the Twitter Vs. HNQ debacle back in October) despite all the reassurances about inclusivity and mutual respect for every person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T10:14:25.033" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T10:14:25.033" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12063" CreationDate="2019-03-03T13:32:41.407" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question that inspired this one has resulted in an &quot;enough with the politics&quot; remark. I understand, it's human nature to want to analyze situations from every possible angle. At the same time, I'm surprised this stack hasn't addressed this very issue once and for all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who has visited for the last 8 years, I've always felt that quoted references should be considered safe. They are part of a learning process. The same words appearing in another stack might quickly be edited out or an answer fully deleted, but here, one would expect that examples of language usage is very much on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you phrased the question, &quot;Does cited material merit special consideration when the content is potentially offensive or unwelcoming?&quot; I'd suggest that, in the same manner the supreme court once stated &quot;I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it,&quot; I don't doubt that there are times a quotes can actually be offensive and worth deleting, but, to that point, that's what DVs are for, and flags, and Mod's judgement. While my approach would be that from the question that spawned all the recent discussion, most quotes would be acceptable. The truly offensive ones, the inevitable exception. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's especially difficult is the moving target that's English. We agree, N-word is bad. Can I ask the question along the lines of &quot;In Twain's day, was the N-word as verboten as it is today, and he still put it in his writing, or was it just another word that had no negative/insulting connotation?&quot; That would be the kind of contextual question that might reference a quote, or a book of a different era and trying to understand the nature of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, context for the word itself is everything. The member that objected to 'colored' also objected to 'girls'. To my mother in law, 'the girls' will always be her daughters, now in their 60s. To my wife, 'the girls' are her female friends, the same age range. I cite the member's objection to this word as an example of how even the word 'girl' can be something to be offended by. And to that, I'd say that this whole discussion points to a very slippery slope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general rule should be the same as on other stacks, &quot;Be nice&quot;, and the system that's in place should continue to be used to handle the tiny fraction that crosses a line. The simple response to the Lou Reed quote? (If one feels compelled to remark at all) &quot;Yes, I know that song. 46 years ago, it was a classic, just be aware, that word in that context is offensive today&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to talk about an issue while standing so far away that we can't repeat the words that offended a member. I'd suggest that citations hold a certain level of immunity. A student walks in and says &quot;Max just called Ms P a dumb b**** and got sent to the principal.&quot; I don't reprimand the student for bad language. That said, if a member is noted to purposely find otherwise offensive citations where they are starting to appear gratuitous, I'd call that out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5784" LastEditorUserId="5784" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T15:16:35.260" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T15:16:35.260" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12063" CreationDate="2019-03-04T16:37:45.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a duplicate of the 'colored girls' question because it is asking a general question (ie are quotes or cited material) that is only one aspect of the other question (ie is 'colored girls' in a quotation offensive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting or citing is not the same as using or calling or referring but it is not entirely invisible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quoting and citation are not identical but are similar enough for this issue)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the old use-mention difference. Calling someone a taboo word to their face is confrontational, but telling someone else that you said that is not confrontational to the listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is what most people here stop at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The further nuance that I think people are missing is that a mention only weakens the taboo nature, not eradicates. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I opened the door, I saw the $$$ $$$$ $$$ chainsaw start $$$$$ing into the $$$$$; the b$$$$$$$ of $$$$$, the gurgled screaming, the maniacal $$$$$. Then silence, And then $$ $$$$$ $$$ $$$ dental $$$$$ $$$ $$$$$$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was all intentionally bowdlerized, but give you some mental conceptions of something awful. It is (probably) acceptable here but even without any identifiable taboo it is obviously a taboo subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note that there is no black and white; tabooness is a continuum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all in the context of disinterested (as much as that is possible because it is never totally possible) discussion/research of words, where we sometimes need to discuss these taboo words. In public discourse about politics or race relations... ugh it's so complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not about political censorship at all (or at least I don't see that). It's about common courtesy, realizing that others may be hurt by incidental, unnecessary things that the speaker doesn't realize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR A quote/citation of a taboo term is not bad in the same way as a direct use is, but the taboo is only weakened, not eradicated entirely. You can still see the word (a quotation is not a black box, you are intended to understand the contents, but just not directed at you). Context must be explained to make the use of the taboo terms acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are related contexts with different levels of shock involved. The strength of taboo blasphemy, slurs, bodily functions (sex, excrement, illness/incapacity) can be reduced but not removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;strong/weak&lt;/strong&gt; - there is a continuum of strength of tabooness for words for the same concept: 'shit' is much more taboo than 'feces', but the latter is still not the best dinnertime conversation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;used vs reported/mentioned/discussed&lt;/strong&gt; - a slur yelled at someones face is much stronger than reporting that someone else yelled the slur, but &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;necessary/incidental&lt;/strong&gt; - if you are specifically discussing the taboo nature of a term, that is exactly when you have to have the term 'mentioned'. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;contemporary/historical&lt;/strong&gt; - the strength of a term may be different than what it used to be (and is not necessarily linear).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the speaker&lt;/strong&gt; - using an epithet about oneself (or group) is much weaker than using it about others (though still troublesome).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;artistic/non-artistic&lt;/strong&gt; - an artistic composition has a certain social cachet that protects it somewhat from every-day taboos. For example, nudes in art are tolerated more than nude walking down the street.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sarcastic/sincere&lt;/strong&gt; - a sarcastic use is less direct than a sincere one. But sarcasm is easy to miss.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;language itself/implication&lt;/strong&gt; - In 'shit' vs 'feces', the strength of taboo is inherently part of the word 'shit'; in 'feces' it is only implication.  There is nothing taboo about the terms 'God', 'is', and 'dead', but their implication in a sentence could start wars, depending on whose god you are impugning. Note though that changing or removing an implication can be thought censorship (which has strong implication), but for language taboos, that is limited to politeness censorship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;literal/metaphorical&lt;/strong&gt; - Dog breeders often use the term 'bitch' simply for 'female dog'; people who are not dog breeders rarely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;written/spoken&lt;/strong&gt; - speaking a taboo term is much stronger than just reading about it. But then again, writing is much less temporary and can be repeated several times to many people, and the spoken version is only heard by those at the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These dichotomies can be used to help evaluate the strength of a taboo, but if you start with some taboo, there will always be some hint of taboo left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T22:36:21.550" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T22:36:21.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12063" CreationDate="2019-03-05T21:02:53.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is part of a piece by Robert Henderson, Peter Klecha, and Eric McCready 2017 in which they address the handling of linguistic material involving the n-word, as an inroad into a general discussion of how to handle the treatment of slurs in general and the putative distinction between use and mention. It may throw some light on this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;[...] Slurs are generally words which have a history of being used to inflict serious emotional distress. Setting aside how it is that they come to do that in first place (which surely must have something to do with both their literal meaning and with their issuers’ hateful intent), they come to have a perverse second effect, as we understand it: they viscerally remind their victims of the hurt they have experienced due to prior use of the word, as summed up by the Langston Hughes quotation excerpted by Geoffrey Nunberg’s post, or by Ice Cube in his recent discussion with Bill Maher: “When I hear a white person say it, it feel like that knife stabbing you, even if they don’t mean to.” And importantly, what we have read and heard from people who have been victimized by these words suggests that any depiction can be such a reminder, whether it is use, mention, quotation, or even just phonetic overlap, as in the very obvious case of an idiom containing a slur, or less obvious cases like similar-sounding but historically unrelated words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy, consider someone who has been the victim of repeated axe-violence — someone who has been attacked with axes over and over again over the course of their life, and has been threatened with such attacks even more often. If such a person were to come into contact with even just a depiction of an axe or axe-violence, it would be responsible to assume that the person may well become upset, and maybe even re-traumatized. And importantly, this is independent of anyone’s intent — it wouldn’t matter if I showed such a depiction to such a person with the virtuous intent of wanting to rob these depictions of their power to hurt the victim, for example — it would still very likely cause pain. There would be no reason to expect that that pain would be in any way a function of the depicter’s intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, any depiction of a slur creates the risk of causing hurt to those people who have been historically victimized by the slur, regardless of speaker intent. In this way, the slurring effect of a slur is more like Grice’s (1957) natural meaning than his non-natural (communicative) meaning; it is something the hearer derives from the utterance independent of grammatical convention or of their recognition of the speaker’s intent. See also this discussion of research &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/sunday/when-is-speech-violence.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the physiological effects “mere words” can have&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the standard linguistic analysis of slurs, though, the word’s power does not come from mere taboo (i.e., a social prohibition on using or mentioning the word as we see with expletives like &amp;quot;shit&amp;quot;). The word literally has as part of its semantic content an expression of racial hate, and its history has made that content unavoidably salient. It is that content, and that history, that gives this word (and other slurs) its power over and above other taboo expressions. It is for this reason that the word is literally unutterable for many people, and why we (who are white, not a part of the group that is victimized by the word in question) avoid it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] There seems to be an unfortunate attitude — even among those whose views on slurs are otherwise similar to our own — that we as linguists are somehow exceptions to the facts surrounding slurs discussed in this post. In Geoffrey Nunberg’s otherwise commendable post on July 13, for example, he continues to mention the slur (quite abundantly), despite acknowledging the hurt it can cause. We think this is a mistake. We are not special; our community includes members of oppressed groups (though not nearly enough of them), and the rest of us ought to respect and show courtesy to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sad fact is that linguistics as an academic field has severe diversity issues. These problems are not helped by the strategy above which, while in the abstract might have its merits, in practice is only hurtful, and only serves as a barrier to those who might find its use painful or insensitive. Certainly, the taboo-ignoring strategy [...] is not going to be helpful in solving the problems our field has with lack of diversity. These problems are further evidenced by the fact, mentioned above, that we, the authors, are white, so we cannot directly understand what it feels like to be affected by the slur under discussion. Writing this [... piece] discomforts us in light of this fact, but we feel that we have a responsibility to try to further this discussion, and acknowledge that our understanding of the actual harm that comes from the n-word is indirect. For all of us who are not targeted by particular slurs, understanding can only really come from listening to those who have been harmed by them. We strongly encourage everyone to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[O]ne of the main points of this note is that speaker intention is not always relevant to these matters.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T23:19:47.760" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-03-06T23:02:40.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-08T22:59:12.643" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488793/insult-for-someone-who-doesnt-know-anything&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: Insult for someone who “doesn't know anything”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I VTC'd on the basis of Unclear What You are Asking, because I didn't find any context.  Is the person to be insulted lazy, or dyslexic, or all thumbs with anything mechanical but a genius in the most abstruse mathematics, or disabled, or a dreamer?  Is this for a story the OP is writing? the OP says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;someone who doesn't know anything (meaning not the simplest/basic or&#xA;  obvious things)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I doubt that he has tested this person in all fields of human knowledge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel uncomfortable with this question, partly because it is a flawed question, but mainly because it could be a mean question, although that is not clear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4842/can-anything-be-done-about-mean-spirited-requests-for-terminology&quot;&gt;five-year-old question&lt;/a&gt; about how we should deal with questions asking how to insult people, which did not come to much of a conclusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, what we can do is VTC such a question that is flawed for standard reasons.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recast my question so it is not a duplicate of the earlier question.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T01:01:49.063" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T01:01:49.063" Title="Is this question, asking for an insulting term, clear enough to provide a good answer as opposed to a laundry list?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12063" CreationDate="2019-03-10T08:32:42.583" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love it when shit like this happens after many criticised an answer containing the line “the colored girls go &lt;em&gt;doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo&lt;/em&gt;” and a  Stack Exchange director deleted the entire post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today a new contributor (just a coincidence or a provocation? Who knows.) posted a question about punctuation, on the usage of ellipsis at the start of a quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...The witness for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption---the evil assumption---that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption that one associates with minds of their calibre.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay if I used ellipsis like this? (@OP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is an interesting example, because the speaker in the quotation is not defending those racist views, they actually define them as being &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot;; however, the first lines that jumped out to me, a casual visitor/reader, were the lines that contained &amp;quot;negroes&amp;quot;. And those were the lines that made the greatest impact on me because  they are totally disgusting, although someone else might not find them so volatile or insulting. In eight hours there have been no comments criticising the content of the quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the term &lt;em&gt;negro&lt;/em&gt; less offensive and insulting than &lt;em&gt;colored&lt;/em&gt;? Or are they equally offensive?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The quote contains racist material but the speaker denounces those views. Should the quotation be allowed to stay?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the example actually relate to the OP's question about punctuation (ellipsis) in a meaningful way? Does it contain an example of its usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If any of the answers to the above is &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; then should users intervene (edit) and  change the quote, or should the entire post be summarily deleted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another option aka passing the hot potato&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OMG I've just realised my &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; is also problematic. Do I use asterisks in place of the offensive terms? But wouldn't that risk making it sound even more offensive if I did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...that all ******* lie,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or leave the first letter alone and then use asterisks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…that all N****** are basically immoral beings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know what? It looks much, much more offensive and unwelcoming now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the community leave it alone?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it  edit or replace the quotation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we downvote it and if we have the necessary rep, vote to delete the post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T19:08:58.350" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-12T01:45:53.973" Score="9" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing a research closely related to dialectical terms.&#xA;I am aware of DARE which is the dictionary of American regional English. It shows the dialectical terms by region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any Canadian version of the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339759" OwnerDisplayName="asdasdads" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T17:36:50.930" Title="Is there any Canadian version of dictionary of American regional English (DARE)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12075" CreationDate="2019-03-12T04:12:13.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dchp.ca/dchp2/pages/welcome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd Ed., DCHP-2&lt;/a&gt; approximates DARE for Canada. It is not paywalled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regional Canadian dictionaries, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/#3720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Newfoundland English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; online, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/dictionary-of-prince-edward-island-english/oclc/992509075/editions?editionsView=true&amp;amp;referer=br&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in print and electronic formats, might also prove useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an term illustrating the scope of DCHP-2, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dchp.ca/dchp2/Entries/view/parkade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'parkade'&lt;/a&gt;. Note especially the associated Internet domain and provincial frequency breakdowns, at bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" OwnerDisplayName="JEL" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T17:36:50.930" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T17:36:50.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12063" CreationDate="2019-03-13T15:53:10.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the law of diminishing returns applies here. The more we go down this rathole, the less light we are going to see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some in the community, aided by The Powers That Be, have chosen to delete a highly upvoted answer to a question that had nothing to do with race, simply because the user who wrote the post responded to a comment of mine by quoting the first use he could think of which used &quot;go&quot; as a synonym of &quot;said&quot; (and refused to change it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user stated his reasons for refusing to change his answer to accommodate Tim Post's threat to remove his post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not intend to go into lengthy debate over this. You may lie to yourself that this is not censorship, but it is. I did not address anyone, so if anyone is offended, it is purely for political reasons. I did not choose to make this a political issue, but if it must be, then it's an issue of free speech vs. censorship. Choose your side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a clear statement. Tim Post made his position similarly clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeah, see, I don't see decency as being a political issue. The words you wrote are hurting people. Hard stop. I think it's best that we just remove your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rather admire &lt;code&gt;michael.hor257k&lt;/code&gt;'s fearless stand in this, but my approbation is immaterial. This game room we call English Language &amp;amp; Usage is owned and operated by people who have the final say in these matters. That they can be wrong is also immaterial. The person who holds a gun may be wrong, but can still shoot you. Tim Post called this an issue of &quot;decency&quot; and called up his grave responsibilities, as representing his company, to his communities and shareholders. And he used that to remove the post in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So TPTB have outed themselves as being willing to champion the offended for even the slightest infraction. I can't think of many slighter infractions than the Lou Reed lyric, but I'm sure they exist and if someone attempts to use them in an answer &lt;em&gt;for whatever reason&lt;/em&gt; you have seen a demonstration of what will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Japanese have a saying: 出る釘は打たれる (the nail that sticks out gets hammered in). You have been warned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: All this discussion is beside the point, because it isn't going to change a goddamn thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T15:53:10.523" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-16T20:12:59.333" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/490004/whats-the-correct-word-to-refer-to-a-believer-of-scientism?noredirect=1#comment1182418_490004&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the correct word to refer to a believer of scientism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what's unclear with this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wait... what is scientism exactly? It sounds like a very particular form of philosophy. Is scientism related to Christian Science or Theosophy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in case that was unclear, I already explained in my own question what is scientism!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is, therefore, the correct term Scientist, or is there any more&#xA;  precise term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A ___ believes that science is the only legitimate source of&#xA;  knowledge.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As opposed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A scientist has won the Nobel prize for discovering a vaccine against&#xA;  cancer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is still unlcear, here is the relevant Wikipedia link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in summary: Scientism is, roughly speaking, the belief that the only legitimate knowledge is scientific knowledge and all other sources of knowledge - like religion - should be rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in my language (Polish) there are two distinct terms: &quot;naukowiec&quot; - which means a scientist (the person who conducts scientific research and who can win a Nobel prize for discovering a vaccine against AIDS) and &quot;scjentysta&quot; - which means a person whose worldview is in accordance to scientism (so &quot;scjentysta&quot; will reject all arguments that are not scientific in nature and will condemn religion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, how to say &quot;scjentysta&quot; in English? Since what I want is a believer of scientism, I would say &quot;scientist&quot; BUT - this will cause confusion since not every practicioner of science believes in scientism and not every person whose worldview is in accordance with scientism will have PhD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is my only option still &quot;scientist&quot; or is there any better word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113589" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T11:58:05.973" Title="Why is my question closed as &quot;unclear&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12083" CreationDate="2019-03-17T21:18:34.653" Score="-2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/129681/jel&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; user  posted this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/460613/is-there-any-adjectival-form-of-audit/469231#469231&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; in October 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an issue with the link they have provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has provided a definition from the OED and a link that takes you to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED's homepage.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, you have to pay £/$90 or 7.50/month to &lt;em&gt;access&lt;/em&gt; the OED's definitions.  I raised this issue in the comments, stating it wasn't a commonly-available reference since it's paywalled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, the user thinks that the OED &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a commonly-available reference, mentioning that s/he could find &amp;quot;7.50 a month down the back of my sofa&amp;quot; etc.  I then informed him/her that this is an unnecessary addition that could be considered offensive by some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then&lt;/strong&gt; they call me out for 'trolling' and subsequently delete their comments, but the chat transcript can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/91184&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Is it right to call the OED a commonly-available reference?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Was I wrong to call this out?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h3&gt;They could've easily linked the &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; Merriam-Webster instead.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is what I feel is wrong:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt; 1) They have quoted the OED and linked the &lt;strong&gt;homepage&lt;/strong&gt; (?)&lt;br&gt; 2) They picked the OED over Merriam-Webster (easily-accessible)&lt;br&gt; 3) After I mention this, they edit the question &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; deliberately ignore my suggestion and leave the OED homepage sitting there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FWIW, I do have access to the OED)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:26:46.423" Title="Commonly-available reference issue" Tags="|discussion|support|general-reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12082" CreationDate="2019-03-17T21:47:48.187" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED is paywalled, but many people in the US and UK can get access to the OED for free through their local public libraries. This unfortunately leaves out quite a few people of the world. However it is a strong ELU guideline that if something like the OED is used or likewise any free on-line services, that &lt;strong&gt;both a quote &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a link is given&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say you're wrong to point out that the OED is paywalled but that's more a complaint to OED, not to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a hard call. The OED is the absolute best reference for multiple entries, obscurities, etymology, subtleties. pretty much all the others are missing something or don't provide the detail that OED does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is if you can't get a link somehow to the OED (I do through my local public library; I have to jump through some hoops (clicking a bunch of times, hoping I typed in my library ID number correctly), but it's worth the few moments of trouble), you should google for the definition &lt;strong&gt;and read &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the definitions&lt;/strong&gt;. Assuming the first definition that proves your first point is walking a wobbly tightrope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T22:03:19.577" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T22:03:19.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12082" CreationDate="2019-03-18T00:54:04.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a problem with quoting from non-free resources if all the rules are followed. Specifically, we require answers provide enough content in the answer that it doesn't matter if the link works, to prevent link rot. It's not even required to link to the source as long as the source is named and there's enough information to find it (after all, we do allow people to quote dead trees—aka books). In any case, the linked answer is following the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a paywalled source is just better than what’s available freely. If not, there's also nothing wrong with suggesting another source for an answer but you shouldn't get into an argument. One comment should be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fun fact: Even if you do link to the OED, the link will not even work for everyone who has access. This is because some institutions have their own URL scheme where instead of OED.com, it’s something like oed-com.myorg.org. (This is why I only link to publicly available OED pages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth mentioning that on ELU &amp;quot;commonly-available reference&amp;quot; has a specific meaning used in this close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you've done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &amp;quot;commonly-available references&amp;quot; link lists the OED, I would not consider it one because it is not freely available. Questions should not be closed simply because the OED has the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T17:26:46.423" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:26:46.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12086" CreationDate="2019-03-18T02:58:04.933" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I was surprised to see an additional 175 points added to my rep as someone had, apparently, voted up a whole series of my past questions (but not, notably, any of my answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today that was reversed, I assume automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to do anything myself ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to make any declaration about not having any sock puppets (which, by the way, I do not have) or any agreements with other parties (which I also do not have) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T10:28:23.653" Title="Serial voting reversal" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12085" CreationDate="2019-03-18T10:28:23.653" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mari-Lou A is quite correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The detection was automated. You're not under suspicion of anything. No need to declare anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes someone will give out a lot of votes to one other person, up or down, in quick succession, and then the automated process kicks in to reverse it as looks like the voter is voting on the person, not the content of the posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible you gave someone a very helpful answer and they wanted to pay you back with a lot of up votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't give it another thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T10:28:23.653" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2028" CreationDate="2019-03-19T02:30:34.263" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281010/323179&quot;&gt;2016&lt;/a&gt; this is possible for post flags but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285003/323179&quot;&gt;not comment flags&lt;/a&gt;. Simply click on &quot;flag&quot; on the post to bring up the flag dialog, then &quot;Retract Flag&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ekslI.png&quot; alt=&quot;What it looks like when you have a mod flag you can retract&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T02:30:34.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4051" CreationDate="2019-03-20T14:07:17.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's how it works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta sites don't have migration options.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every main site has the ability to migrate to its meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can singlehandedly migrate questions to any site, meta or main. Both meta and main questions can be migrated. If you see an off-topic question that was posted within the last 60 days that is on-topic elsewhere, flag it for moderator attention and it can be migrated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users can post a meta question asking for more migration targets to be added. An example of such a request is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7128/191178&quot;&gt;Should we have a migration path to ELL?&lt;/a&gt;. Migration paths are only created if there are a lot of questions being migrated manually by moderators. Typically, beta sites are not given migration targets nor are they allowed to be a migration target for another site. Currently an exception to that is Writing can migrate questions to ELU (the only exception I'm aware of, actually).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A site can only have four sites besides its meta as options.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU has never had the option to migrate to Writing, best I can tell. The migration path to ELL was added September 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably what you're thinking of is just the custom reason. Anything within the character limit can be put in it and it will be seen as a suggestion to other close voters as well as being posted as a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vffZm.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T14:07:17.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T14:49:50.307" Score="26" ViewCount="757" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of the first questions on this site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/when-to-use-if-i-was-vs-if-i-were/6699&quot;&gt;&quot;If I was&quot; vs &quot;If I were&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, there are a slew of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question had a somewhat more recent (Feb 2018) spate of activity with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/429514/4972&quot;&gt;a very authoritative, nuanced, and reliable answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to that time (and even up to yesterday) the highest voted answer, done on the day of the question 9 years ago, upvoted at a whopping 93, was basically &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/662/4972&quot;&gt;Just use 'were'&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is all in the past. Sometime in the past day or so, the answer was flagged (I am not a mod so I don't know the flag reason), and a mod deleted the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the life of me, as much as I might disagree in fact with the answer, I see nothing that is flaggable or deletable in the answer. It's not very deep, not really the best quality, not exactly supported with data. But it is a highly upvoted answer, and I think that should stand for something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I hardly know the difference between a spate and a slew, but I think I know when the subjunctive is used in English, and that is... well it's complicated. Some people still use it, mostly young people have never heard it and bridges still seem not to collapse any more often. Sometimes my lumbago really flares up when I hear kids trampling my lawn saying &quot;If I was a rich man...&quot;, but when I put on my linguistics hat, the subjunctive is mostly dead in English (just like 'whom'!), so I think of the answer as 'mostly wrong'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems like a misuse of flagging. What is there to flag? There's nothing rude or spammy, it's totally an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't go against the operation of the system, use the system. Downvote that sucker if you don't agree with it. Those guys back then only had one vote each like you, they all liked the &quot;If I were...&quot; always answer. Just like you might on another question. You want your votes deleted? More importantly, you want 100 upvotes for your answer deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please undelete that answer. Comment on the answer and down vote it and say it is wrong (but please give reasons and don't just say 'you are wrong nyah nyah nyah') and up vote the answer you think is right (It's tchrist's. Really).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a case to be made that a judge should be able to override a jury. But if thats the case, the precedent you want to make, there's a boatload of old questions, starting from Aug 2010, that we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to go through and delete because those old people are effing &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like people not to vote &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; about the subject, subjunctive, but about whether a mod should hammer delete a highly upvoted question that some people in comments disagree with. And I hope you vote here to have the question reinstated so we can downvote it and upvote ones you think are right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update Mar 25, 19: Thank you mods for undeleting. Everyone: act on that question as you would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T13:13:55.350" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T17:59:20.737" Title="UNDELETED: Deleting a highly upvoted but questionably correct answer (the one with the subjunctive)" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2019-03-20T15:10:10.993" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit I'm no linguistic scholar, not by a long shot, so my judgement could easily be off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning for deleting the answer was that many our members that I believe to be professionally involved in linguistics thought the answer was misleading &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the answer had a lot of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment that really caught my attention (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/when-to-use-if-i-was-vs-if-i-were/6699#comment1183477_662&quot;&gt;available to 10kers&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question will recur and will get the same kinds of idiotic answers because there are more idiotic answers available than sane ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could easily be seen by someone else like me, who doesn't know what the correct answer is, as the correct answer. Which meant to me that the answer was noise, and should be silenced, because it would be a long time before anyone got around to down voting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit for clarity&lt;/em&gt;: If the community is against what I've done, I'll undo it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T11:09:10.090" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T11:09:10.090" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2019-03-20T19:43:26.527" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I’ve looked over the guidance I can find about incorrect answers and what to do about them (especially if they’ve been accepted or have attracted a lot of votes) on the main meta. The consensus appears to be :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a correct answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote incorrect answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave comments on incorrect answers explaining why they are incorrect &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/143576/273494&quot;&gt;Should I nominate incorrect answers for deletion?&lt;/a&gt; seems to be “downvote don’t delete”. Even for suggestions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/122534/273494&quot;&gt;Requesting review of technically inaccurate answers&lt;/a&gt; the answer is downvote, comment, and maybe ask a moderator to put a notice on the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting an answer that has no other problem than it is old, highly scored and possibly incorrect does not seem to be a supported method of dealing with this well-known issue. Not one of the highest scored answers to these questions suggests taking steps to delete an incorrect answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also suggest that even though I personally don’t believe anything untoward was going on, there is an appearance of a conflict of interest when a moderator has a competing answer. At a minimum, the possibility of deleting the answer should have been discussed on meta before it happened. There was no urgency in removing it (as far as I can tell) so I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be brought up for discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize my concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vast majority of guidance, particularly discussions where Stack Exchange employees have been involved, discourages deleting answers because they are wrong. I don't see a clear and compelling reason to contravene that guidance, especially when the recommended methods of dealing with the issue were already applied.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has been protected to prevent answers from new users, but it's not clear to me why that protection is permanent.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The accepted answer has a good score and also has a bounty awarded to it which gives it plenty of credibility and weakens the argument that the other answer is dangerously wrong.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A moderator decided to remove an 8 year old highly scored answer without clear consensus from the community, based on a flag from another user whose answer to the same question was criticized, and where a moderator has a competing answer, which makes the whole thing look a bit shady (even though I am confident that there were only good intentions involved here). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T16:25:57.513" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T16:25:57.513" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2019-03-22T05:08:49.230" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is disturbing when a dubious answer far outscores a careful and authoritative answer. However, a number of factors suggest to me that the present case is not an especially hard one to judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the key elements in the controversy are a no-research-shown question posted on August 13, 2010; a brief (four lines) but confident-sounding no-research-shown answer also posted on August 13, 2010; and a lengthy, serious, carefully argued answer posted on February 24, 2018. There are also nine other live answers that have received at least one upvote, and five other answers that were deleted in the more distant past after earning net scores of 1, 0, –1, –3, and –4. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noteworthy that of the nine also-ran answers, two (one posted on August 13, 2010, and the other on September 8, 2010) are only three lines long and two others (coincidentally also posted on August 13, 2010, and on September 8, 2010) are only four lines long each. The extreme brevity of these answers and their paucity of reasoning or corroborating evidence reflect the standards of the time, obviously. But it bears noting that the only indisputable qualitative difference between the now-deleted brief post and the four still-live brief ones is that the deleted one had received a net upvote score of 93 (103 up and 10 down), while the four extant shorties have net scores of 30 (30 up and 0 down), 13 (26 up and 13 down), 13 (16 up and 3 down), and 4 (5 up and 1 down). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this record, it appears to me that the 93-vote short answer was deleted not because it was worse than the other four short answers, but because it was more popular than they and the other posted answers were—so popular, in fact, that it was getting in the way of the obviously superior (and longer and much more recent) answer that arguably deserves to have the most votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by remarkable good luck the original poster came back at least seven and half years after posting the question and awarded the green check mark to the long, high-quality answer. As a result, the long, better answer now sits at the top of the series of answers, in immediate view of anyone who wants a detailed analysis of subjunctive use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under those circumstances, I don't see how we can argue that the short, superficial answer is keeping the long, deep answer down. It simply isn't in a position to do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that anyone is disturbed that the old, short, opinion-based answer has substantially outscored the better longer answer, all I can say is, that's how it goes at this site: a lot of people (including a number who cast upvotes and downvotes) prefer short superficial answers to long closely argued ones. (In fact, one voter disliked the long answer enough to downvote it, leaving it at the moment with a net score of 45 upvotes [46 up and 1 down].) If you don't like the results, I recommend that you (1) upvote the answer you think is good, (2) downvote (if you must) the ones you don't like, and (3) call attention to the answer you think is especially meritorious—perhaps by presenting it with a bounty for being exemplary and deserving of more recognition (it already has had one bounty awarded to it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think the deleted answer should have been deleted. I think it should be reopened and subjected to the same vicissitudes of the voting public's opinions that all other answers are, assuming that they satisfy the criteria for answers prevailing when they were posted. In my opinion, if the deleted answer were reinstated, the longer and much better informed answer would gradually gain ground on it anyway, thanks to its inherent merits and to the boost it will continue to receive from being the answer accepted by the original poster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;---------&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (3/28/19):&lt;/strong&gt; In the eight days since Mitch opened this Meta discussion, the detailed, comprehensive answer has received 5 additional upvotes and no additional downvotes; the brief, highly upvoted, temporarily deleted answer has received 2 additional upvotes and 6 additional downvotes. The gap in net upvotes between the two answers has thus dropped from 48 to 39. It will be interesting to see how voting on these answers proceeds in the longer term, now that the immediate controversy has subsided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T17:59:20.737" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T17:59:20.737" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2019-03-22T12:27:02.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For users who do not have 10K rep and cannot see the deleted answer, here it is. And, yes, I had already downvoted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oR5O1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oR5O1.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the deleted answer transcribed below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, always use the &lt;strong&gt;subjunctive&lt;/strong&gt; mood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will make you sound &lt;strong&gt;smarter&lt;/strong&gt; and it is &lt;strong&gt;technically correct&lt;/strong&gt; since &amp;quot;the subjunctive mood is used to express a wish or possible situation that is currently not true.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the top upvoted answer took its time before it hit the 90 mark&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20111124085404/http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/if-i-was-or-if-i-were-which-is-more-common-and-which-is-correct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;November 24, 2011&lt;/a&gt; it had a score of 22.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20140923064835/http://english.stackexchange.com:80/questions/660/if-i-was-or-if-i-were-which-is-more-common-and-which-is-correct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;September 24, 2013&lt;/a&gt; it had a score of 41.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20140923064835/http://english.stackexchange.com:80/questions/660/if-i-was-or-if-i-were-which-is-more-common-and-which-is-correct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;September 23, 2014&lt;/a&gt; it had a score of 48.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150404064658/http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/if-i-was-or-if-i-were-which-is-more-common-and-which-is-correct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;April 04, 2015&lt;/a&gt; it had a score of 51.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170629042456/https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/when-to-use-if-i-was-vs-if-i-were&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;June 29, 2018&lt;/a&gt; the score rose to 80.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T17:28:27.740" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-03-22T12:27:02.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2019-03-22T22:25:12.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am disturbed by this deletion. The answer &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; not have been a good one (although the number of upvotes clearly disputes that)—but, in all other cases, whether an answer (or question) is good is reflected by the community. Only if an answer (or question) clearly violates the code of conduct should it &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; be deleted by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, even then, there is nothing in the rules of this site that says that X number of downvotes should result in deletion. Further, in this case, it was the opposite. This answer received a great many &lt;em&gt;upvotes&lt;/em&gt;. The community, as a whole, appreciated it and thought it was a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a moderator objects to something at a &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; level, they should do what everybody else does: comment on it, provide an answer of their own, downvote it, or vote to close it. That is no different than what anybody can (and should) do. For a moderator, &lt;em&gt;personal opinion&lt;/em&gt; should weigh no more nor less than personal opinion for anybody else. Just because a moderator has the &lt;em&gt;ability&lt;/em&gt; to wield moderator tools that should not give them the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only in the most extreme of situation should an answer actually be deleted. This answer doesn't meet any of the objective criteria for actual deletion. It doesn't matter if it wasn't liked by some people, or if some people thought it shouldn't have been provided. Deletion of answers (and questions) should only be done for objectively obvious violations of posted and acknowledged rules. Being considered poor is simply &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; something that makes a post worthy of deletion. (Even &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a majority of people consider it to be poor. And, in this case, that &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; wasn't the case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad to see the community weighing in to have this undeleted. At least on the face of it, I am appalled that it was deleted in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all of that, I want to reaffirm my claim that things may have gone on behind the scenes that I'm not aware of, and there may have been justification for its deletion that can't be made public. I certainly don't want my answer to be taken as any kind of personal attack. I just want to express what my take on this is, based on the facts I'm aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T22:33:50.183" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T22:33:50.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12099" CreationDate="2019-03-26T01:08:59.850" Score="13" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would exchanging &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quotation marks in the German tradition&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English#Orthographical_considerations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conventional English quotation marks&lt;/a&gt; be considered a constructive edit on English Language &amp;amp; Usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I mean by German style quotation marks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;„Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit ut aliquam.“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening quotation marks sit near the baseline. The closing marks ascend. I've seen this German style a few times while making other edits and wasn't sure whether to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only on this site that I've encountered this style used with modern English.  If there is another name for it I am unaware of it. I'm going by what I read in researching whether it had some special significance (I found none.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; The comments and answers so far persuade me to change this quotation style when it is encountered while submitting other substantive edits.  As that's based on only about a day's opportunity to respond though I've also posted an answer that calls for not changing them.  If there is a case to be made for the opposite position, or to agree with that case, you can make use of that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question is on topic for Meta:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Meta is for English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange users to communicate with each other about English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange (asking questions about how the websites work, or about &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;policies and community decisions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;)&amp;quot; [Emphasis added]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question is distinct from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4128/formatting-a-quote&quot;&gt;Formatting a Quote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That question primarily considers the appropriate instances to use &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; or &amp;quot;quotation marks.&amp;quot;  This question takes on the case when quotation marks are definitely to be used, but must they be changed to &amp;quot;these&amp;quot; or remain „those“ ― perhaps both are acceptable, but one is strongly preferred.  Perhaps not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Further that question points out that choosing between  conventions which are common in English is largely a subjective preference. This discussion considers an uncommon practice that―as far as I know―comes primarily from a different language.  It is intelligible in English, but may not be the best practice for a site devoted to English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question is distinct from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2183/single-vs-double-quotations&quot;&gt;Single vs Double Quotations&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That question does not touch at all on German style quoting.  It considers only whether it's constructive to favor one common English convention for setting apart words used as words, etc, over another widely used convention (e.g. American, British, or Canadian). The German style is...&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;encountered for quoting passages from other work;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not common in any English style―or at least so far no one has argued that it is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163056" LastEditorUserId="163056" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T11:52:59.007" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T11:52:59.007" Title="Is changing quotation marks from German style to English style a constructive edit?" Tags="|discussion|editing|etiquette|style|quotes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12097" CreationDate="2019-03-26T16:54:15.870" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;In and of itself, yes it is constructive. The &quot;German&quot; quotation mark style is not used in any version of English that I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's not a substantive edit. If there are other formatting issues, then go ahead and make the edit, including the quotes. If that's the only issue, it's not worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T16:54:15.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12097" CreationDate="2019-03-27T09:09:26.360" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not change &quot;German&quot; quotation mark style in the course of making other substantive edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;This answer is here to provide a quick way to register disagreement with the selected answer (i.e. change em).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163056" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T09:09:26.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12102" CreationDate="2019-03-28T19:53:11.680" Score="-8" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/491663/what-s-a-single-word-that-means-contagious-happiness?noredirect=1#comment1186297_491663&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;What’s a single word that means Contagious Happiness&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; was recently put on hold. But before it was put on hold, I commented on how I personally found it mildly offensive, and how I felt certain other people might find it even more so. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am searching for a single word that means contagious happiness or infectious happiness  . . .&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That part of the question is just fine. But then it continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; . . . this is as I am wanting it for a name of a Dane crew consisting of Down syndrome kids &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context behind this is unclear. It's &lt;em&gt;conceivable&lt;/em&gt; that the question really was asking for something related to a very specific group of people. (Although I find it unlikely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in my mind, and especially because of the smiley face at the end, I immediately found it to be at least be &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; offensive. (Taking it at face value, I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; offended.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case my comments disappear, this is what I had said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, with the smiley face at the end of the sentence, Down children are being made the object of ridicule. It's taking a medical condition and saying it's an example of &lt;em&gt;contagious happiness or infectious happiness&lt;/em&gt;. I find it disrespectful and minimizing. I'm not saying it's intentionally offensive, but it bothers me and it might bother those people who have actual experience with Down syndrome even more. But that's also why I asked for clarification. The smiley face makes it &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; like a joke at the group's expense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've known people with Down syndrome, and their families and caregivers. As with any other group of people, they don't like being lumped together and characterized in a particular and stereotypical way—it depersonalizes them. It's fine to say that a person is one way or another, but it's not fine to say that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all of them&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; are that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't have Down syndrome myself. Nor does anyone in my family or any of my friends. (But, as I said, I have spent time with people who've had Down syndrome.) So, maybe that doesn't give me the right to object on their behalf. I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know that when that when a recent answer that referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/486892/3559&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;coloured girls&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was posted (it can only be seen by those who have 10K reputation), that answer was deleted because it offended somebody—even though that wasn't its intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example used in this question (at least without good clarification as to context) offends me. Perhaps not as much as the other answer offended the other person, but I still &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; find it offensive to some degree, I suspect some others might find it more so, and I'm wondering why it should not be treated in the same way as that answer (which was was deleted when its poster refused to rephrase it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am arguing to have that particular portion of the question deleted, replaced, or clarified by the original poster. Alternatively, I feel that the question itself should deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that this is essentially any different than the answer about  &lt;em&gt;coloured girls&lt;/em&gt;. It's not even an objective song lyric, but a potential&#xA;joke told at somebody else's expense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: I wanted to give this question, and its answers, some time to settle before adding anything else. I have a few comments to add at this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This really has nothing to do with what anybody's &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; opinion is about the phrasing used in the question. It's somewhat irrelevant if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think it's offensive. The real question (or how I'd intended it to be take) was what are the criteria for dealing with a question that &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt; finds is offensive—even if that's subjective. As such, it doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I object to the phrasing in this question (so, there is no point in debating or defending that point), it simply matters that I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm perfectly happy knowing that a majority of people &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; find the question, as it's phrased, offensive. That's a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm still curious why modifying the question to remove a specific reference that doesn't seem to be relevant to the question is a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would be very helpful if the person who actually posed the question would weigh-in. As it stands, it's pure speculation as to what their intent was. Even as I've said in my comments, I can see certain contexts where everything asked &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; relevant. It just seems that, barring actual clarification, it's dubious. And people making &lt;em&gt;assumptions&lt;/em&gt; about the intent or target of the question (myself included!) are doing just that—making assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm still unclear as to the difference between the disposition of this question and the disposition of the answer I referenced. That answer got deleted on the basis of a single person complaining. Granted, it had a better community reception for its deletion. If that's the guiding principle, I'm fine with that. I'd just like it to be spelled out so that there's some objective criteria that's made known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm not advocating to have this question reopened—or even deleted. I'd simply like it edited to remove the piece I (still) find to be questionable. Barring input from the person who posed the question, it doesn't seem as if it would harm it to have the reference to Down syndrome children (specifically) removed. I understand that it's closed, and it may mostly be a moot point, but I'm debating the principle more than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T22:51:09.573" Title="Does anybody else find this question questionable?" Tags="|discussion|offensive|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12101" CreationDate="2019-03-28T21:41:57.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my (admittedly hot) take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need to know that the children in this dance crew all have Down's Syndrome to answer the request for a &quot;word that means contagious happiness or infectious happiness&quot;. That the word is going to be used for the name of a dance crew of children is important context though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wanted to keep the question, we should just remove the reference to Down's Syndrome. Any dance crew of all kids can be in the business of spreading happiness and removing the stereotype doesn't (in my opinion) significantly damage the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this stereotype is so harmful that we need to edit it out without engaging the author. I do believe though that if someone is distracted by something that isn't crucial to your answer or question, that it just makes sense to try to remove that distraction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, naming things is explicitly off-topic, even if you disguise it as a single word request, so I don't think this question as it stands should be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T13:01:34.583" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T13:01:34.583" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12101" CreationDate="2019-03-28T23:06:35.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is off topic (e.g. lacks a sample sentence), but it's not offensive. It's asking for a word that can be used as a name for a group of people that makes other people happy with their happiness. This was almost certainly intended as a compliment (otherwise it would make for a terrible name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not talking about anyone besides a single group (who the author likely knows personally), so it's not stereotyping. The emoji was there probably because the author is happy. It can be removed, along with any mention about kids or Down Syndrome from the question, since none of that is necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T23:06:35.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12101" CreationDate="2019-03-29T23:43:37.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree that the information about Down's Syndrome is irrelevant to the question.  It should be kept, because it would better inform the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no expert on Down's Syndrome children (DS children), but one of my closest friends has a DS child, whom I have known since she was about 10.  She is now 26 or 27. I have known several other DS children and their mothers, although not as well.  Thus, I know more than zero, but I am certainly not an expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's question clearly telegraphs her love for the DS children in the dance troupe, with which she seems to be somehow involved, even if only as a spectator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The DS children that I have known and/or observed are uncommonly happy and cheerful.  (I am sure there are times when, like all children, they are angry, stubborn, and thorough PIAs.)  &lt;strong&gt;And their joy is contagious&lt;/strong&gt;, particularly when they have mastered a skill they found difficult.  I saw a DS girl incandescent when she landed her first jump on ice skates.  Her joy was contagious and humbling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The OP asked a question about a particular kind of joy transmitted by children who one might think have little to be joyful about.  This is why the datum that they are DS children is relevant to the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers, and the comments, say nothing about the experiences of the writers with these children.  The whole thread seems to be an abstract discussion about whether ELU should keep anything that might be offensive to someone, written by people who have no understanding of this particular issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am astonished that I am writing this answer, because I actually don't much like the young of Homo sap.  Any other species, yes, adorable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that the question is a good question, but it could be made into a good question, &lt;strong&gt;particularly&lt;/strong&gt; with the DS information included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-03-30T02:19:19.547" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T02:19:19.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12101" CreationDate="2019-03-30T00:14:55.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the objection itself, I think the OP wanted to highlight a specific quality of the group. One might argue with more justification that it's the reference to nationality that's unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether Stack Exchange posts should be edited for political correctness - that merits more consideration. When the yardstick is personal offense, moderation becomes intractable - not least because there is enough diversity in the community that just about anything can offend at least one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is precisely that SE moderators are there to be 'human exception handlers'. Their job &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; to make value judgements about site content. It is difficult enough for an individual moderator to maintain consistency of judgement over their tenure. Having a moderation team is healthy as it provides for moderation to be done within a context of accountability. This has worked so far partly because our moderators do, on the whole, have pretty good judgement regarding content, and partly because we have a fairly stable stable of moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to require moderators to wield their power at the behest of individual members of the community who feel offended isn't wise because it ignores and short-circuits the moderators' own system of values. Their value judgements form the entire basis of their 'exception handling' policy. If their value judgements don't matter simply because one person asserts offense, we might as well give golden hammers to everyone for everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; things about which the community might hold different views from the moderator panel. Given the tiny number of moderators compared to the number of people making up the community, that's probably to be expected. The community-moderation powers (granted incrementally by rep) are the appropriate mechanism to express that disagreement. The community can place posts on hold, vote them up or down, and even delete posts. Community members can disagree with each other, some moving one way, some the opposite, and even try to persuade others via meta posts. Done with decorum, the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the lone offended person? Shouldn't their feelings count? Yes. And they can express their feelings by appropriately modifying (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; defacing) the question or the answer. But others have feelings, too, and &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; might feel strongly enough to reverse the revisions, under the watchful eyes of the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, no one wants to be on the 'losing' side, and I think the moderators try to balance the preferences of the one with the preferences of the many. It helps that this site (English Language &amp;amp; Usage) isn't primarily a platform for polemic. It's narrowly focused on particular topics, so we can return to a basic test of, &quot;Does it ask a question properly about one of those topics?&quot; and &quot;Does it properly answer a site-relevant question?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is this: Stack Exchange is a community, and the way it responds to complaints needs to be done 'in community' in such a way that preserves a spirit of community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T00:14:55.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11865" CreationDate="2019-03-30T16:37:46.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adapt the &lt;em&gt;Question Wizard&lt;/em&gt; from Stack Overflow. When (new) users ask a question they will be met by a Wizard who inquires about their question. When the Wizard establishes the asker has a single word request they will be met with something that looks like this (picture taken from Stack Overflow Meta):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C7HRk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C7HRk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1: summarising the problem is something that should be done here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2: inquiring about prior research is something that should be done here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 3: the &lt;em&gt;show some code&lt;/em&gt; question should be removed and in case of a single word request it should be replaced by asking users to provide an example sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T16:37:46.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12101" CreationDate="2019-03-30T22:51:09.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm still curious why modifying the question to remove a specific reference that doesn't seem to be relevant to the question is a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether something is relevant or not is also subjective. Maybe in this case it isn't, but at least in the general case it's not a good idea to start removing stuff if only one person finds it to be offensive and thinks it's not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, had the question (in a general case) been on-topic and not closed than the author may well have rolled it back and be right to do so. Subsequent edits removing and putting it back in are referred to as an edit war and might require a mod to lock the question (either with or without the text, depending on their judgement and perhaps community input via meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T22:51:09.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-07T03:29:06.300" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;With eJoy pages, I can see the word's &lt;em&gt;word link&lt;/em&gt; information like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CLRt3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CLRt3.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of word link on the webpage&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This info really helped me memorize vocabulary. Do any dictionary sites provide this information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167379" OwnerDisplayName="naive231" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T05:06:53.557" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T06:01:40.607" Title="Where can I find the word link of a word?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12109" CreationDate="2019-03-07T06:22:20.030" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On dictionary.com, if you go down to the &quot;Word Origin&quot; of a word you can see the different pieces of the word like in your screenshot of eJoy. You have to actually click on the different pieces to see the meanings though, and there is much more information included than on eJoy, so it might be a bit of an information overload. It may help you however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYPWT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYPWT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Origin of word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TKCvF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TKCvF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Then if you click on &amp;#39;icon&amp;#39; you can see its definition, like on eJoy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339140" OwnerDisplayName="Based God" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T06:33:55.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T02:45:24.457" Score="3" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/493141/what-do-you-call-words-made-from-common-english-words&quot;&gt;recent question about what to call words made of other words&lt;/a&gt;, one particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/493143/4972&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; is just a one liner. Amazingly, it currently has 8 up-votes. I downvoted it because the length of the answer was of just one line. I requested that they write an entire answer here on english.stackexchange. Their answer just provided a link to wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the entire answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They’re called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compound words&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this answer follow the guidelines of ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone started arguing that the answer is okay and later I found that the same answer received one more up-vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Answer has been updated by the user: user240918 with reasonable explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228908" LastEditorUserId="228908" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T14:34:16.327" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T13:27:32.820" Title="How should users answer on EL&amp;U?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12111" CreationDate="2019-04-09T21:04:44.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general answers in any subnet of SE should follow some specific guidelines. These should also be a must read (or even better a forced read) for every user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally for example didnt even read them at all (neither did I bother to even look them up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the initial question: There is nothing inherently wrong with one line answers (as long as they are not unarguably wrong content-wise) (for example the programming sites of SE have masses of oneliners just because there are often questions being asked that are simple / trivial enough to be easily answered in one sentence or line (of code). Although providing atleast one full (ever so short but full) sentence as an answer should be minimum-requirement. Especially for single word request questions this is in my opinion acceptable as long as the word in the oneliner is most definitely acceptable to be common knowledge. In contrast more unusual, old, very creative or outright obscure answers should be as always be very well explained / documented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a summary and food for thought think about the following somewhat related question: What is the minimum acceptable length for a Ph.D thesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer one of my professors gave me on that was the following story: &#xA;The shortest thesis he's aware of comes in at ONE (1) A4 page! How is that possible? The thesis was written by a mathematican and was a proof for some really old and (in the math-scene) well known (until then) unprooven theorem... And that proof took the math guy in fact all the time of study on the subject. Then the mathematic-notation, in a short and concise manner maybe even using specially just for the purpose defined symbols do the rest in shrinking everything down. And as long as it was either self explainatory from an algorithmic point of view or as long as the math guy could explain it during the approval session everything is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="338277" LastEditorUserId="338277" LastEditDate="2019-04-10T13:27:32.820" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T13:27:32.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-10T13:03:36.200" Score="13" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions about language have single answers that are incontrovertibly the case for all speakers of the language (for the standard (yes this is somewhat circular)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But English is large, it contains multitudes, there are a number of standard varieties: there's British, there's American, there's Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, etc. numerous sub-varieties in each of these places, World English, Globish, colonial diglossia, code switching, etc, etc, etc. And is 'standard' really, an artifact of an unconsciously consistent community or of an explicit government supported education system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if an ELU question has more than one perfectly acceptable correct answer, different for different varieties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years, I'm sure I've been caught several times giving what I expect everyone who shares my standard language (AmE) would agree wholeheartedly with, but then there is some other answer that seems to be highly-upvoted, commented as 'this is the right answer', and my answer commented 'Your answer is nonsensical animal speak'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, one kind of speaker speaks one way, and another kind of speaker speaks another. My answer is not wrong, it is totally correct for a large group of people, but totally wrong for another group of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and neither of us know what the other uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do? How should &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; deal with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-exhaustive possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answer only for your own variety, no acknowledgment of the others, let the chips fall where they may (others can give the answers for their own variety).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answer only for your own variety, acknowledge other possibilities, let the chips fall where they may&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answer for UK and US, acknowledge no other possibilities (sorry Canada)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;combine answers into one mega answer (either your original answer, the other correct answer, or in a totally new ecumenical answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comment to the OP that there are different viable answers (pointing out the labels of the varieties)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some other possibility either combining old features or introducing new ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary difficulties I see is that it's hard to know other varieties confidently &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the SO software intentionally doesn't allow 'accepting' more than one answer. But surely there are other difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this was inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/493078/can-one-use-the-word-majority-for-the-leading-alternative-in-a-three-way-spli&quot;&gt;a recent question about the largest proportion when it is less than 1/2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this question should have been meta-addressed in September 2010 (the second month of ELU), but scanning I couldn't find anything and there are too many possible topics that I can't find anything by search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T00:16:17.470" Title="How should we deal with questions whose answers are different for different varieties of English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12113" CreationDate="2019-04-10T13:40:00.917" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/344739/18696&quot;&gt;I've done it in the past&lt;/a&gt; is to make the answer explicitly locale-specific. Tags can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPOk7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPOk7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of british-english tag in answer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding this at the start has the several advantages of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearly identifying the answer's applicable locale/dialect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;heading off any potential disagreement from users from other locales&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appearing in search results using the tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose this comes under &quot;answer only for your own variety, acknowledge other possibilities,&quot; since it allows other answers headed with other tags (or even the same tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asker will accept the answer which helped them the most; others will upvote if they find the answer useful. Clearly identifying the locale should mean that the answer is not &quot;not useful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the question would include a dialect tag, or edited to include one after the fact. Even if it's edited in to be specific to a different sort of English, that doesn't mean that the existing answer isn't useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T13:40:00.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12118" CreationDate="2019-04-14T00:00:51.133" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently left a &lt;strong&gt;Comment&lt;/strong&gt; below an &lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt; to a post (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/493460/why-do-we-use-in-in-the-phrase-in-front-of/493476?noredirect=1#comment1191872_493476&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - altho' the actual comment &amp;amp; post are irrelevant to the issue raised here).     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment was intended for the &lt;strong&gt;author of the original Question&lt;/strong&gt;. I did &lt;em&gt;not include&lt;/em&gt; the name of the original questioner in my comment because I thought that the original questioner would automatically be notified of the comment. I have subsequently learnt that that is not the case, and that only the author of the &lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt; immediately above the comment would be auto-notified of the comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not questioning that practice, but it seems to me that the 'Help' information for a Comment is ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'Help' drop-down for a Comment reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6lFk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6lFk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I did actually read that advice when choosing whether expressly to notify the original Questioner in my comment - but, clearly, I misunderstood it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the statement that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The post &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt; will always be notified of your comment.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be slightly ambiguous: did that refer to the author of the original Question and/or to the author of the respective Answer, under which the comment was being made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I felt that the next sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To also notify a previous commenter, mention their user name&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;clarified that ambiguity and clearly indicated that I needed to mention a name &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; if my comment was intended for a previous commenter: &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; if it was intended for the author of the original question or the author of the respective Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now, of course, know that I was wrong!  &lt;strong&gt;But may I suggest that the wording of the 'Help' drop-down for a Comment should be clarified.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;post &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; in obviously unclear: I assumed that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;post&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; referred to the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;entire Question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the need to &quot;mention [a] user name&quot; &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;a previous &lt;strong&gt;commenter&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; adds to that ambiguity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Possible&lt;/em&gt; re-wording suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The &lt;strong&gt;author of the Question or Answer immediately above&lt;/strong&gt; will always be notified of your comment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;To also notify a previous commenter &lt;strong&gt;or the original Questioner (when your comment is below an answer),&lt;/strong&gt; mention their user name: ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T23:32:45.333" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T23:32:45.333" Title="Notification of Comments to &quot;post authors&quot; : ambiguous advice in 'Help'" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12117" CreationDate="2019-04-16T22:51:12.977" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;While on a &quot;search and destroy&quot; mission for my own errant comments, I noticed that this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9776/looking-for-a-poem-i-have-mostly-forgotten#comment1191874_493782&quot;&gt;&quot;Looking for a poem that I have mostly forgotten&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was originally posted on the main site, and then &quot;migrated&quot; to Literature.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did that happen? Is it something only Mods have access to? The VTC menu only seems to allow for migration to meta, or ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T23:02:20.563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T23:41:57.763" Title="How did migration from the main to Literature.SE happen?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12116" CreationDate="2019-04-16T23:41:57.763" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, mods are able to migrate questions to other sites than those available to non-mods. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/493782/revisions&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; shows that I did this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T23:41:57.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12115" CreationDate="2019-04-19T02:41:30.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for sharing your experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12115/notification-of-comments-to-post-authors-ambiguous-advice-in-help#comment52448_12115&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach&lt;/a&gt; notes, the site uses the word &quot;post&quot; as the hypernym of &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;. However, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12115/notification-of-comments-to-post-authors-ambiguous-advice-in-help#comment52451_12115&quot;&gt;you observe&lt;/a&gt;, this isn't necessarily obvious to new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think what's needed isn't to change the term &quot;post author&quot; unless it's to something like &quot;author of the post&quot; to avoid implying some kind of pre/post semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's needed is a help page about &quot;What is a Post?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/search?q=What%20is%20a%20Post%3F&quot;&gt;searched the help pages&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;What is a Post?&quot;, I didn't see any relevant explanation. The closest was the top link returned: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/locked-posts&quot;&gt;What is a locked post?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My suggestion&lt;/strong&gt; is (for whoever can do this) to create a help page called &quot;What is a Post?&quot;, define it appropriately with examples of question posts and answer posts, then link all instances of the word &quot;post&quot; to this newly-created help page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes about how comments are treated, and why comments aren't posts, can be linked or textually included in that help page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T02:41:30.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-19T04:07:43.797" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never studied grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if something is a sentence, but don't know enough grammar to describe it and so ask a general question. Only, I think, create analogous sentences (I think?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorDisplayName="user99677" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T06:08:48.827" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T08:37:15.603" Title="Is it ok to ask &quot;is this a sentence&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12119" CreationDate="2019-04-19T08:02:35.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I you're having trouble learning English, then please look up the English Learner's Stack Exchange Site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to know if your question is on topic, you need to be more specific in your question here. Strictly speaking asking if a particular collection of words is a sentence is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your question is &quot;Is &quot;A green baby&quot; a sentence?&quot;, then that is off topic, as the definition of a sentence is something easily looked up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if your question leaves some kind of ambiguity in the definition of a collection of words as to whether they form a sentence then it's probably on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also be worth your time looking up &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, as they might have a similar type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T08:37:15.603" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T08:37:15.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-21T15:33:04.457" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for sites or communities where I can post my writings for reviews free of charge. Is there any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="344701" OwnerDisplayName="Anonymous001" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T20:04:15.617" Title="Resourses for reviewing writings" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12122" CreationDate="2019-04-21T20:04:15.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only link I can find on ELU is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;already in the Help&lt;/a&gt;, and simply assists with searching for services. Because services might start up and shut down without warning, it's impractical to maintain a list on this site — unlike with online dictionaries, which have proved their longevity and are actually helpful to on-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link is to a Google search: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=online+proofreading+service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=online+proofreading+service&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T20:04:15.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12125" CreationDate="2019-04-22T08:05:39.110" Score="7" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar question was asked here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/163/should-we-correct-or-point-out-language-errors-in-questions&quot;&gt;Should we correct (or point out) language errors in questions?&lt;/a&gt; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree with the advice given in the accepted answer in respect of grammar and the occasional spelling mistake. But what about posts in which the questioner seemingly shows no regard at all for writing conventions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me,   the original author in such cases is not showing respect to the community that he or she is expecting help from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I typically quickly click away from such posts, but this recent one was bad enough to prompt my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/494758/usa-english-but-im-not-from-there-so-a-have-a-lil-issue-with-that-langueage&quot;&gt;USA english ,but im not from there so a have a lil issue with that langueage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should I correct, point out or ignore egregious mechanical errors in questions where the asker has made little effort to follow writing conventions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T09:41:32.983" Title="Should I correct, point out or ignore egregious mechanical errors?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12124" CreationDate="2019-04-22T16:56:07.873" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that you should feel free to put as little effort into a post as the author did. If you think it could be salvaged into a question you’re interested in answering, then whatever effort you put into it is for you and the community, not for the author. I don’t think you should feel obligated to spend time fixing a question if you feel that the value added wouldn’t offset the time spent explaining or correcting the issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ELL, if a question is borderline, and the user gave some indication that they’re not just a drive-by, I will sometimes leave a comment asking for details or suggesting an edit to see if they are engaged with their question. If they make some effort to respond, then maybe my time wouldn’t be wasted if I helped them get their question shaped up. However, we have a good portion of our community that accesses the site mostly from mobile devices and they’re EFL learners, so we’re probably more tolerant than might make sense for an ELU audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T09:41:32.983" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T09:41:32.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-22T23:31:15.113" Score="-8" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for valid reasons for the downvote to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/494872/why-does-but-i-later-realized-have-no-car-seem-better-than-but-i-later-real?noredirect=1#comment1194665_494872&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have raised this question, on meta, for three reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the question's OK, should be answered, and I still desire an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to learn how to use stackexchange, and elu stack. And,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it may reflect wider voting patters on elu stack at least.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the comment I left, which asserts my present thinking on the downvote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i don't think this question should be downvoted. it's clear, and i&#xA;  just won't easily find the answer. the voter seems to act like a meta&#xA;  voter, i.e. voting down because they disagree with something said in&#xA;  the question. that, imho, debases the use of the site, as well as&#xA;  being a misuse of it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has now received comments from four users myself included, and a vote to close for being off-topic (!). So, I think the issue &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; relevant, even if the meta question doesn't have wider appeal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the question is being voted as &quot;off-topic&quot;. But, also, that I am unable to convince anyone it is, despite not understanding how at all it could be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorDisplayName="user99677" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T00:20:29.240" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T23:15:27.163" Title="Looking for valid reasons for the downvote to this question" Tags="|discussion|questions|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T01:40:53.420" Score="-4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the best way for non-professionals to have an opinion on questions about grammar that are not settled? I mean anyone who thinks about unsettled or live questions in grammar when there is no consensus (and are not doing new research). An obvious, and I hope pertinent, example is the Oxford comma. Another is whether punctuation is part of grammar. Or (to take a generic example from this site) is word x a y part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; (you need an opinion on the Oxford comma really), I simply don't understand how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking partly due to a wish to study the science of correct usage (not just ask questions and understand answers on ELU I mean), applied linguistics, so apologies in advance if this is a bad fit for meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section is an aside to show that I am not misunderstanding what I'm asking, or what academics study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be best thought of as a matter of &lt;em&gt;applied linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, rather than pure linguistics, in the same way that physics involves applied mathematics, which physicists must work with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DyNbA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DyNbA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google says that the difference between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics, even today, is &quot;thin&quot;, implying that you can't get away from one and study the other. So I'm interested in learning about both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also interested in both &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/788/why-does-linguistics-focus-on-spoken-languages-rather-than-written-ones&quot;&gt;written&lt;/a&gt; (with &lt;a href=&quot;https://articles.c-a-s-t.com/punctuation-1-the-linguistic-side-9ba8eb11fbf2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;punctuation&lt;/a&gt;) and spoken English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/site/0937073466.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geoffrey Nunberg challenges&lt;/a&gt; a widespread assumption that the&#xA;  linguistic structure of written languages is qualitatively identical&#xA;  to that of spoken language... Analyzed in its own terms, however, punctuation manifests a coherent linguistic subsystem of “text-grammar” that coexists in writing with the system of “lexical grammar” that has been the traditional object of linguistic inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But less so its application to anything but correct usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorDisplayName="user99677" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T14:11:38.577" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T16:58:38.133" Title="What is the best way for non-professionals to have an opinion on questions about grammar that are not settled?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T03:24:03.533" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not clear why this question has been migrated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the sentence &quot;Thora went to the shop for how long?&quot; grammatically&#xA;  correct? I'm concerned that it sounds too awkward, too expressive of&#xA;  dismay to make grammatical sense and be parsed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Apologies for not attempting an answer, I don't know enough about&#xA;  grammar. In context, it is obvious that I don't know how long Thora&#xA;  went to the shop for (it's not an exclamation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as I am a native English speaker, with excellent reading comprehension, even if I struggle to ask clear questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One comment answered the question I was asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is grammatically correct. Whether it means what you want it to mean&#xA;  is unclear. If you are expressing incredulity at the length of time&#xA;  then it's perfect. If, instead, you are just asking a question, the&#xA;  idiomatic wording would be along the lines of: &quot;How long did Thora go&#xA;  to the shop for?&quot; Or &quot;How long was Thora at the shop?&quot; Or &quot;How long&#xA;  was Thora gone&quot; -depending on which timespan you're interested in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as I was pointed out for my comment in reply, it's not clear if that &quot;incredulity&quot;, making the sentence grammatically correct, applies if the sentence I'm asking about is a rhetorical question, one that I still need an answer to (for two hours). So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think Thora's been gone ages!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She's back now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thora went to the shop for how long?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have preferred it if someone had told me that they were moving the question to English learners. I am not trying to undermine anyone's authority, if that's what this is about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I deleted the question after it was moved to english learners, as it wasn't that sort of question (what I was actually asking seemed even less apt to be understood there), and partly because I felt it may offend some people there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has since been deleted (by me) and then locked (by admin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/206635/is-the-sentence-thora-went-to-the-shop-for-how-long-grammatically-correct&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/206635/is-the-sentence-thora-went-to-the-shop-for-how-long-grammatically-correct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastEditorDisplayName="user99677" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T06:56:38.057" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T12:00:49.633" Title="I'm unclear why this question was migrated to ELL" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12128" CreationDate="2019-04-23T12:00:49.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pretty much any question that says 'Is this correct?' is much more appropriate for ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you're a native speaker or not, if you're unsure about a language thing and your concern is &lt;em&gt;correctness&lt;/em&gt;, then ELL is the place for it. They are much more likely to give answers there that address correctness appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T12:00:49.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12127" CreationDate="2019-04-23T13:17:00.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to your analogy with philosophy, there are academics and laypeople. Academics have one set of principles (study of the history of philosophy, rigorous argumentation, etc), and laypeople have another much less rigorous set ('I feel like I have free will') and little in between those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for language opinions, there are more categories, and more continuous gradation between them. There are formal academic linguistics, there are professional wordsmiths (people who speak or write for a living), and then there are laypeople who speak or write formally and informally things like emails or texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;academic linguists don't study writing &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. There's very little to say about this; it may be shocking to people who've never considered it but spelling and punctuation are fairly recent man-made inventions and not particularly interesting for linguists. The language opinions here are made by rigorous study &lt;em&gt;of many speakers&lt;/em&gt;. They are inherently descriptivist (look it up!) meaning they just try to figure out what the rule is that people actually follow (not what the rule &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be). And part of this rule construction process is finding how variable it is (is it a strict rule or are there two patterns that people switch between, or do rich white people say it one way and everyone else another). That is, linguists are totally cool with multiple rules. They still want rules, but they want to know exactly how people are not following a rule (which turns out is another kind of rule).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;wordsmiths - any academic writers or newspapers or teachers (teaching intermediate writers like highschool). Here everything is fair game for a rule (Oxford comma in the US, no such thing in the UK) so as long as everybody in the community follows the same fashion, everything is cool. As an aside, linguists don't &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; punctuation but they certainly &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; it in an academic fashion like these others. The opinions lean towards prescriptivist (look it up!). You &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; follow the one rule. Different people may still have different rules, but the editors/schoolteachers will have you fired/take off points if you don't follow their rule. Are there books for these? Some institutions have &lt;em&gt;style guides&lt;/em&gt; (like is it 'naive' or 'näive'). Mostly, even though these rules are mostly learned in middle and highschool (US), stylistic differences are picked up by following what everybody else does (and you can see that because as a professional you're constantly seeing and judging other's writing).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;everyday writers - CEOs, someone texting, your mom (not necessarily mutually exclusive here or with the other categories). These kinds of people may have strong language opinions but they will be more chaotic, inchoate, unreliable (those do necessarily overlap but also are distinct). They might be good sources (if done in bulk) for 'does this sound right?' but individuals may not be able to articulate a coherent reason for their answer. A lot of implicit rules are followed here simply by osmosis; a native speaker picks up the nuance without thinking, verbing nouns with abandon, lolling in silence, commaing before 'and's in a list of three or more just because they've seen others do it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a point about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've never read a complete book of scholarship (and many authors seem to at least try and settle live issues) on grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings up what 'grammar' means. Informally, 'grammar' means 'anything language-rule like' which includes punctuation. But most people in the first two categories think of grammar as only word order and getting the tense right, and things like spelling an punctuation are in their own separate category. So to address your point, there are many textbooks on grammar by linguists, none of which will come close to things like the Oxford comma. There are probably textbooks that do discuss punctuation, but they are likely to be addressed to middleschoolers (in the US, ages ~10-14).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, on ELU we aspire to be like linguists, leaning towards recognizing multiple rule possibilities. Rather than trying to be enforcers of single rules, we try to point out where some rules are merely made up or just style preferences. But as writers on a wiki-like site, we try to hold people to writing standards within reason. And voting is intended to collect the inarticulate but on average informed opinion of everybody. Orthography (spelling and punctuation), while not considered part of the category of grammar, is still very much on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T16:58:38.133" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T16:58:38.133" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T14:30:41.013" Score="2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use ELU to find out if something is unusual but correct usage: &lt;em&gt;is that OK&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not whether it sounds natural, but if the sentence conveys the meaning I intend, and whether that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; proscribed in any existing (rather than imagined) prescriptive grammars. Ideally with an explanation of &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; it isn't proscribed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that make sense and is it a misuse of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99677" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T17:08:13.687" Title="I want to use ELU to find out if something is unusual but correct usage: is that OK?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12131" CreationDate="2019-04-23T17:08:13.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU, like other Stack Exchange sites, is designed to produce &lt;em&gt;the correct answer&lt;/em&gt;, rather than the musings (or varying value) found on internet fora. So as long as you can clearly define 'correct' and explain where your phrase would be used, I don't see a problem with this (though you may find the former requirement easier said than done). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why it isn't proscribed&quot;, though, is probably unanswerable. English wasn't designed using a set of meta-rules*; if a phrase makes sense and does not breach the codified rules that avoid ambiguity and assist the audience (whichever code you subscribe to), it's legitimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Except in the sense that when the Tower of Babel fell, certain peoples were granted the English language as a special favour; all others had to make do with inferior tongues&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T17:08:13.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T20:16:17.833" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it only me, or has anybody else noticed that many, if not most of the “nasty” and “mean spirited” requests for pejorative language occur on the weekend? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from filtering for “pejorative” tag, how can we correlate with date? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that “nasty” is subjective….but I think we all recognize them. Most of them involve “What is your favorite insult?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;example from a now-deleted comment on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/494640/im-looking-for-a-less-misognystic-but-equally-insulting-word-as-b&quot;&gt;now-closed question...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;evil is good enough, anyways. i guess this was closed cos i'm in effect asking for your favourite insult haha –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT] the question has been deleted for &quot;moderation purposes&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SEE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4842/can-anything-be-done-about-mean-spirited-requests-for-terminology&quot;&gt;Can anything be done about mean-spirited requests for terminology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-04-28T22:41:23.183" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T22:41:23.183" Title="Are there more requests for disparaging language on the weekends?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12133" CreationDate="2019-04-23T22:48:23.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data.SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/1036937/posts-tagged-pejorative-by-day-of-week#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/1036937/posts-tagged-pejorative-by-day-of-week#graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where it shows that the marked max is the middle of the week, Wednesday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you remove the 'where' clause, you'll get &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; posts, and you'll see that it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; has its max on Wednesday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be a psychological thing, where on the weekends where there are fewer posts altogether, the few pejorative ones might just stand out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T22:48:23.303" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12126" CreationDate="2019-04-28T01:45:32.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Down-votes are like mosquitoes: You can watch them alight and then blow them off, or you can slap at them and make a bloody mess. Best solution is to put on a good repellent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-04-28T01:59:44.580" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T01:59:44.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12126" CreationDate="2019-04-28T23:15:27.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignore the requirement to show research, earn downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T23:15:27.163" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2019-04-29T11:48:07.337" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No-one answers a question without having first been stimulated. Surely, as a mark of respect to questioners (and of commitment by answerers), each new answer to a question should entail an &lt;em&gt;automatic&lt;/em&gt; upvote for the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change would not preclude &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; upvoting questions they think worthy.  Nor, obviously, would it stop criticism (using comments), down voting or voting to close poor quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is 'average' or poor quality then no-one is forced to answer it (unless they are chasing points). Helpful  observations/criticisms of such poor quality questions can be made as comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to &lt;em&gt;automatic&lt;/em&gt; upvoting of the question when an answer is posted, perhaps, before an answer can be posted, the answerer could be &lt;em&gt;invited&lt;/em&gt; to upvote the question (to remind them that they might)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103961" LastEditorUserId="103961" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T21:40:21.577" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T21:40:21.577" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-29T21:15:40.403" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a requirement on the main to give attribution for quotes and text from other sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in some cases a question needs an image to help clarify what is wanted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to an answer from Mod Andrew Leach addressing  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/new-attribution-rules/5196#5196&quot;&gt;&quot;new attribution rules&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (2014), we should be giving attribution to images also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;new attribution rules&quot; apply specifically to quoted material. A simple link to further reading does not require attribution, but where there is material reproduced from elsewhere it is not sufficient merely to provide a link.&#xA;  A comment has reminded me that &quot;quoted material&quot; need not always be textual. The rules apply to text &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and images.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meta: if it's obvious where material has been quoted from, perhaps because there is a link to it, then by all means edit the post to include the source in plain text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3535/including-copyrighted-images-in-questions-answers&quot;&gt;Including copyrighted images in questions/answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now some may think it is sufficient to provide a link to the website using those images, but it is possible that may not be enough. Many blog posts and amateur websites post images &quot;borrowed&quot; from the web via Google image search, and often do not give attribution, or they strip the meta-data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[For those of you who do not know how to find image info, hover the cursor over the image, right click and then select &quot;view image info&quot;...If you want to see meta-data on an original image, use an exif viewer such as Opanda. Meta-data for your own images is available in &quot;properties&quot;.](Windows users only...I don't use Linux or Apple OS)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what is messing some people up here is the difference between imprinting a &quot;watermark&quot; on an image, (like a Getty Photos, or ShutterStock image), and a copyright for an image. All image copyrights are due to the original author, unless sold. Professionals post a copyright in the original meta-data, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The  following is an example of a properties search on an image included in a  popular question of the moment. Notice it is marked &quot;Associated text:  image taken from the TV programme &quot;Restoration Man&quot;. From what I understand of copyright law, that is the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/49kkV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/49kkV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This next is an example of meta-data of an original foto in an exif reader: notice that it  has the author listed as &quot;artist&quot;, and it is copyrighted 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1bLG4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1bLG4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of the information available of  a thumbnail with stripped data. Beyond the dimensions, nada..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zuwvM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zuwvM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Even here on SE, there are violations of users copyrights...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Context: I encountered an image I made (which was fully copyrighted and published in a blog post) in an answer here on the StackExchange network. The user luckily had his email in his profile and we resolved it without any issue. Still the fact that this happened and that the user in question had no idea that he had just published the image under a CC license felt wrong. I mean, I personally wouldn't mind publishing that image under a CC license (like with all my content on SE), but that should be my decision, not somebody's elses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/327478/make-it-clear-that-you-need-to-have-the-right-to-license-any-pictures-under-cc-b&quot;&gt;-David Mulder on Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/327528/are-we-allowed-according-to-the-tos-to-exempt-a-part-of-our-post-from-the-cc-lic&quot;&gt;&quot;Are we allowed according to the ToS to exempt a part of our post from the CC license?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without playing the &quot;blame game&quot;, or &quot;name and shame&quot;, I think there are many of us here who have done this. We tend to see &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; image we scoop up in Google to be fair game, and view it as public domain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are people not giving a separate attribution to images in plain text, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;or is the image info and/or meta-data considered good enough, as it usually contains a link to the source and author?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T20:51:08.547" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T20:51:08.547" Title="Are we remiss in giving attributions to published images?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-30T09:31:15.000" Score="-3" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah... we should. Why not? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been on a spree of downvoting off-topic and very low quality questions (LQQs), so I was expecting to see my reputation drop but it didn't. I also downvoted six answers on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/496496/what-word-means-to-make-something-obsolete&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e2vYg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e2vYg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that ‘forgot’ to include supporting evidence, links etc. with the result that I was down -6. But I don't care about the rep, I care about the quality of posts and about fairness, and I think if I downvote a question I should also lose -1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DqfVd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DqfVd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having immunity is an open invite to downvote questions without ever having to explain why. Yes, there's the tooltip message that appears if you hover the cursor but that's just a catch-all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta Stack Exchange has the following info in a FAQ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/7238/223820&quot;&gt;How does “Reputation” work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before May 2011, downvoting questions cost the downvoter one reputation point (source). (Since May 2011, there is no cost for downvoting questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an explanation for the disparity is supplied here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93023/why-do-i-not-lose-reputation-when-i-downvote-posts&quot;&gt;Why do I not lose reputation when I downvote posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvotes on &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90324/should-downvotes-on-questions-be-free&quot;&gt;are free&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This was done in an attempt to encourage more people to vote on questions, and so far, it appears to be working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Downvotes on &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; still cost you -1 rep point, just as you expected […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Cody Gray (May 28 '11)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All very well but this is not Stack Overflow so their huge influx of off-topic questions (literally &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;thousands&lt;/em&gt; of questions&lt;/a&gt; posted daily) is not comparable to ours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over at Stack Overflow the 2011 change made sense, they needed desperately to separate the wheat from the chaff, but is it fair &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why downvoting a question should cost the downvoter -1&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, it's fair and balanced. Lose -1 for downvoting an answer, the same ‘price’ goes for downvoting a question.  It also carries greater weight and responsibility. It's easier to downvote a question without giving it two thoughts if you don't sacrifice something in return. And if we're convinced a question is low quality &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U it should either be edited to meet minimum standards and migrated to ELL or be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The most effective tool we have to deal with off-topic LQQs is close votes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Casting a vote to close doesn't carry any penalty, doesn't cost the voter any reputation. If the OP cares, they will come back and edit their post. If the attempt is successful, users should cast to reopen the question. Sometimes a question is reopened but it doesn't happen very often, as anyone can tell if they visit the reopen review queues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last 90 days, EL&amp;amp;U has closed around 45% of questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;Stats page&lt;/a&gt; (only visible to 10K users)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions Closed:  Asked:        percentage:&#xA;2334 Questions     5263Close     44.35 %&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number one reason for closure is &lt;strong&gt;lack of research&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Closed   % of total  Edited  % of closed   Reopened    % of closed  Edited and Reopened    % of edited&#xA;705      30.21 %      33      4.68 %        5          0.71 %             2                    6.06 %&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be absolutely clear, I am asking why downvoting an answer detracts -1 but not for a question. Is it fair? Is this system working for EL&amp;amp;U? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand why no rep detraction was a necessity on SO  but on much smaller sites such as Parenting, Travel, Christianity and on sites that do not have the same impressive numbers as SO, e.g EL&amp;amp;U, is following SO's lead the solution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps losing -1 might encourage more users to consider fixing low quality questions &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;that show potential&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; rather than casting a downvote in order to get rid of it from the home page, which is a chimera because only &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/48578/what-can-cause-a-question-to-be-bumped/48579#48579&quot;&gt;questions with a score of -4&lt;/a&gt;  actually disappear from the homepage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, despite the opposing arguments, I don't see these LQQs being downvoted. Why? Maybe because they're on the cusp, they're on-topic but they don't show much effort, if any. Maybe regular users are hesitant to downvote these type of questions. Maybe users are not aware they can downvote without losing rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's hear some ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T19:06:31.707" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T15:20:49.663" Title="Shouldn't we lose 1 rep for downvoting questions?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13140" CreationDate="2019-04-30T13:13:37.807" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me turn this around and ask: what impact does the existing -1 penalty for downvoting an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; have on user behaviour? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, for a high-rep user who might be accruing (say) 3 upvotes a week from their historic answers, they can cast 30 downvotes on answers and their total rep remains unchanged. And they already have access to all the tools/privileges available to an ordinary user. No impact whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a low-rep user, it's a very different story. Unless they're very active and on a meteoric rise up the rep league tables, every single downvote on an answer is a real sacrifice, delaying their acquisition of the next set of privileges. In the end, the user has to decide: squander their precious rep on this aspect of community moderation, or focus on building their rep to unlock the next set of community moderation tools that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have a rep penalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been using this site for 8 years now, and I've been a registered user for 3 years. I spend a lot of my time on review queues and posting (hopefully) helpful comments. I used to downvote bad answers, but I mostly stopped doing so because any points I'd gain from posting an answer quickly disappeared. And on the other sites I have even lower rep on, I almost &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; downvote answers: I can't afford to spend a rep point or two a week (50-100 pts a year) when I don't have the expertise (e.g. on Physics) or the confidence (on Astronomy) or the time (ELL) to build my rep with Q's or A's of my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, when I finally got to within sight of the magical 3000 mark here on EL&amp;amp;U, I actually went back through every downvote I'd cast and &lt;em&gt;undownvoted&lt;/em&gt; those I could (i.e. that had been edited). Picked up a surprising amount of &quot;lost&quot; rep, catapulting me towards my next set of privileges!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend we keep in mind how valuable every single rep point is for low-rep members of our community, and how important it is for them to be able to participate in one of the essential community moderation tasks – downvoting a bad question. A -1 penalty for casting such a vote would inevitably discourage downvoting, and transfer even more of this community moderation burden to high-rep users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you think bad questions are getting closed and/or downvoted, go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt; and scroll down to those with 0 votes (roughly &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=unanswered&amp;amp;page=36&quot;&gt;page 36&lt;/a&gt; if you're seeing 50 per page). It's staggering how many questions there are on where a comma should go, or can you use past and present tense in the same sentence, or &quot;which of these sentences is right&quot;. No votes; no answers; sometimes not even any comments; none on hold or closed; slowly clogging up our site. Why would we want to add a disincentive to downvoting questions when we're not downvoting enough of them already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T13:13:37.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13140" CreationDate="2019-05-01T02:03:08.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don’t need more LQQs. We need fewer. The best way to deprioritize the ones we get, and preempt getting any new ones is to downvote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T02:03:08.770" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13144" CreationDate="2019-05-01T18:03:53.453" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;By way of example, I have just come across this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462860/when-you-are-at-school&quot;&gt;When you are at school&lt;/a&gt; as having been &quot;bumped to the homepage by Community&quot; with the comment &quot;This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way should we &quot;review&quot; it: ideally to prevent it being bumped periodically for the indefinite future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should point out that I have read the question &amp;amp; answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9564/the-community-bump-what-are-the-rules-and-are-these-rules-proper&quot;&gt;The Community bump- what are the rules, and are these rules proper?&lt;/a&gt; and have noted that certain actions, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;up-voting or down-voting the zero-scored, sole answer would stop it from getting bumped&quot;, but also that &quot;up-voting and down-voting ... should be based on an appropriate assessment of the answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my current example, a comment shows that the original questioner was clearly happy with the answer - but they did not formally 'accept' or up-vote it.  I am also not inclined to up-vote (or down-vote) the answer.  Neither am I inclined to vote to close the question: in fact I propose to edit the question for 'tidiness' &amp;amp; clarity.  I note, from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9564/the-community-bump-what-are-the-rules-and-are-these-rules-proper&quot;&gt;Meta question linked above&lt;/a&gt;, that I could &quot;request to have [the question] locked&quot;, but what are the grounds for locking a question, and how would I do that if appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked Meta question also states that &quot;What's relevant ... is whether the question is on-topic and of a sufficiently high quality.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9564/the-community-bump-what-are-the-rules-and-are-these-rules-proper&quot;&gt;example question&lt;/a&gt; is clearly &quot;on topic&quot; (although probably more appropriate for ELL) and the answer is brief and too the point -- but certainly not &quot;high quality&quot;.  I could propose it for closure on the grounds of lack of research, or that it belongs on ELL - but that would, of course, require others to agree.  Or should I just leave the question 'as-is' for periodic auto-bumping &lt;em&gt;ad infinitum&lt;/em&gt;?  The problem with that is, of course, that the number of periodically auto-bumped questions will also grow &lt;em&gt;ad infinitum&lt;/em&gt;, with the increasing risk of everyone ignoring them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43980" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T18:14:28.243" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T23:27:34.407" Title="Bumped to homepage for review - What 'actions' should we take?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13143" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:24:17.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few things you can do that you haven’t mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the question, tags and title so that it will attract more answers that could lead to one being up-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Write your own answer that resolves the things that you believe make the existing answer not worthy of being up-voted. Ideally almost every question worth answering on a site would have at least two answers. Explaining things from different perspectives helps people understand them better. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Put a bounty on it to attract better answers. It’s a great way to give new users an opportunity to earn more privileges by tackling an unloved question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T17:24:17.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13140" CreationDate="2019-05-04T10:58:02.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few things that need to be considered here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that questions are easier to ask than answers, and answers have more innate value than questions. Everybody has questions, and anybody can ask, but answering a question correctly requires knowledge. As such losing a questioner is not going to be as much of a problem as losing an answerer. The aim of the voting system as it pertains to questions is to help guide our users to the better questions so that they do not get bored of the website. Jeff Atwood mentions that the website has a preference to answerers in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Are Some Questions Too Simple&lt;/a&gt;, and goes into greater detail regarding the principle in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;Optimizing for Sand, Not Pearls&lt;/a&gt;. Things were equal, but he rebalanced them to be reflective of the value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing is that questions and answers are motivated differently. Questions are inspired by a desire for knowledge, and receiving a satisfactory answer is reward enough irrespective of what other people think. Answers on the other hand are motivated by the desire to be helpful, and if people indicate that you have done more harm than good, then they might stop to think why should they even bother trying to help? Voting against answers has a greater prospective harm against user participation than voting against questions, so there are a number of protections against it that Jeff mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;The Value of Downvoting&lt;/a&gt;. Jeff also notes how indifference is also a valuable data point there, so the penalty against voting down &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; discourages voting against answers simply because they are not great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third thing is I doubt that closure is really supposed to be the mechanism that separates the good questions from the bad ones. Closure reasons are usually implemented because certain categories of questions are so problematic that they are likely to receive problematic answers. Also there is a penalty for everybody involved, in that answers can not be submitted to a closed question, and we can not simply ask a new question free of defect because the closed one remains a potential duplicate target. The end result does not only punish the questioner in a much more real way than reputation deductions ever could, by possibly denying them the best answer, but our entire community. Any insightful person who might wish to answer the question can not do so, and our general readership, including thousands of non-contributors, are unable to benefit from it. On Stack Exchange, questioners are not considered the sole beneficiaries of a question, or even the most important ones, so closure needs to be used in a way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having questions in a permanently closed state is perhaps the very worst outcome for our website, since it is letting one rotten apple spoil the whole bunch. The system was designed so that closed questions would either be eventually deleted or reopened, as noted by Gracenote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86046/off-topic-questions-should-be-deleted-rather-than-closed/86056#86056&quot;&gt;Off-topic questions should be deleted rather than closed&lt;/a&gt; &#xA; (top voted answer at general S.E. meta; supported by Shog9) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/681/why-is-this-closed-question-not-being-deleted&quot;&gt;Why is this question not being deleted?&lt;/a&gt; (Security Information meta), and while she does mention the term &quot;off-topic&quot;, that is term unlikely to carry its usual meaning. Every closable question is considered off-topic in the context of Stack-Exchange, even if it would be within the scope of the subject matter. Evidence to this is found in the closing and flagging interfaces, which have &quot;off-topic&quot; submenus, and to a lesser extent in the subjectivity guidelines which also show that &quot;opinion based&quot; questions are subject to possible deletion on that basis alone. As a matter of fact, the help center page that mentions this presently has a U.R.L. that titles the page as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;dont-ask&lt;/a&gt;&quot; [sic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this, if we were to introduce a new deduction, I would prefer for it to be imposed on close voting until the question is either reopened, in order to encourage commentary, or deleted, in order to encourage clean-up that permits new questioners to try and ask again until &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt; gets it right, if possible. Yes, closing questions is more effective at eliminating bad questions, but in the same way that a bomb is more effective at causing destruction than a handgun: The greater potential for unintended collateral damage is very, very large and we should probably have a preference for the more selective weapon, that only targets the questioner with negative feedback, rather than denying others the opportunity to teach and learn. I would greatly prefer if we reserve closure for questions which must be fixed in order to be productively answered in accordance with our goal of sorting the best answers to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final thing is that there is a distinct difference between our corner of Stack Exchange, and the network as a whole. We have a general reference type closure reason, but that closure reason is not a network wide closure reason, and it never was. Other websites which opt against having such a closure reason may still need a way to deal with under-researched questions, and may have a greater need to vote against them with impunity. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86043/introduce-a-general-reference-close-reason&quot;&gt;Jeff thought we set a bad example for what a Stack Exchange website should be&lt;/a&gt;, we kept ours as a custom closure reason due to special need (dictionary questions, mostly), and that merely voting against answers is the way other websites are meant to deal with poorly researched questions as evidenced by the tooltip. The first point is important because we probably won't persuade the rest of the network to implement a general reference closure reason, and the latter point is important because it demonstrates a difference in attitude towards closure (we're one of the most agressive sites to my understanding) and how a difference in closure reasons changes the dynamics of voting: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a relevant closure reason, other websites are expected to vote against under-researched questions as the primary method of quality control in that regard, as the tooltips for voting for and against questions explicitly mention research efforts on every website and for those rare occasions when a question is really bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way we do it has merits for very well documented sciences, where persuasive answers from authoritative sources like dictionaries are immediately on-hand, since the risk of a useless or outright harmful answer can outweigh the prospective benefit of a rare gem of an answer. We want to sort the best answers to the top after-all, but that might not happen if we merely repeat a trusted, yet incorrect or under-detailed source. However, at the same time I suspect that the current state of affairs, where closed questions are left to simply languish lowers the average site quality since it prematurely forecloses upon good answers, and for other subject matter that is less well documented that closure reason is a pretty bad fit. When misapplied, our system can be counterproductive to Stack Exchange's general goals of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/09/16/five-years-ago-stack-overflow-launched-then-a-miracle-occurred/&quot;&gt;making the internet a better place&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creating a comprehensive reference work indexed by google&lt;/a&gt;. Having a general reference closure reason makes sense in our case because language, and especially the English Language is already a very well documented science, and we merely aim to be more of a supplement to existing works because there is no need to tread the exact same ground twice. However, I would not recommend our approach for less well documented subject matter: Anime and manga does not currently have such a closure reason, and I would recommend against them implementing one if I were to see the matter brought up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, my point in bringing the difference in closure reasons up now is that the voting system as it currently stands is balanced for the network as a whole, and not just in consideration of our specific circumstances, and  while you could perhaps make an argument for per-site voting scores, you would also have to make an argument against having a consistent scoring system giving users a consistent experience across the entire network. When votes are the only practical control against some categories of questions, more aggressive use of the voting system is needed to sort out the good from the bad, and I believe that the 0 point score is intended to encourage that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/44619/mari-lou-a&quot;&gt;Mari-LouA's comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is nothing easy about writing good questions, I sometimes spend hours, for example, in doing research before writing the final draft A good question will nearly always receive at least one answer, and if it doesn't it will nearly always be upvoted, it will generate excitement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree Mari-Lou A, but to clarify, &quot;easier&quot; as I put it earlier, is not necessarily the same thing as &quot;easy&quot;. The assessment is comparative in nature, and generally holds true irrespective of how hard the question is to ask. Why do I say that? Part of the reason is because many of the difficult aspects of both are shared in common, however in addition to those it is because a research effort is an effort to find an answer. Answering a genuine question requires an extra bit of knowledge that asking the question does not, which is the answer itself. All of the effort a person may put into researching those questions which remain genuine before asking them here are an effort to produce the answer that have failed, so there is no need for me to &quot;test drive it&quot; because it has already been tested. When people show us everything they have tried, it shows us how hard it is to satisfactorily answer a question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in those cases where you ultimately do find an answer, then the only reason you would ask a question here is to share it in recognition of how hard it was to find in the first place, in the hopes that your question would make the answer easier to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, there are other factors which make writing good answers hard, such as proper presentation, so it is not my intention to over-marginalize the value of good questions, however factors such as presentation apply equally to answers, and, we are discussing the penalty systems, so good questions are a secondary consideration at best. We are primarily concerned with the bad ones, since somebody voting against a question is of the opinion that it does more harm than good, and is hence bad. Good questions are only a concern for cases when that assessment is incorrect, and our solution for that is to hope that the aggregate sum total of votes corrects for the marginal defect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeah, Stack Exchange does not value questions b/c on SO answers are far easier and quicker to verify or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't even really see why that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The system is flawed, downvoting doesn't work. The flood of L.Q. banal-beyond-belief questions continues uninterrupted. The site still looks horrible, there is no incentive to answer because these drive-by users drop their questions and leave the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stopping the questions isn't the sole goal of voting. Votes serve as a system of feedback which help users to improve, and also affect sorting. If I see a question that is rated 11, and a question that is rated 10, I should be able to presume that the question rated 11 is of greater interest than the question rated 10, which is to say nothing of questions that end up going into the negatives. People don't really have to bother clicking into a question if they suspect it's going to be bad from the start, and the system even sorts negatively rated posts away from the front page so you don't even have to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that it isn't stopping some bad questions. We'd only know if that is a fact if the change was implemented and the rate of bad questions didn't exceed the projected expectations of the current system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some questions appear deceptively easy when in reality they are reveal more complex issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know that. Sometimes I spend days trying to write detailed answers to seemingly simple questions, and sometimes I am greatly disappointed to see those questions closed before I can even post them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just because a question has some deeper interest does not necessarily mean that it will be conducive to our goals. The problem with deceptively easy question is that they are deceptively easy, which has a detrimental effect on the ability for votes to sort out the best answer. The obvious answer can be given immediately, even if it is problematic, and place a burden on more insightful answers that get less exposure later down the line. Closure gives us a chance to fix the deceptiveness by establishing that further insight is needful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one of the main reason I often insist that some questions should be closed. Voting alone can't be trusted to sort out insightful answers from uninsightful ones. Ultimately, closing a question puts a stop to answers, not questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are no upvotes, only when a question hits the HNQ. Note, it's called Hot Network Questions. Then answers consisting little more than a line can be wildly upvoted. Some answers can be brilliant and enlightening but if they don't see the HNQ they attract maybe 5 upvotes from the same users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H.Q.Ns. are a separate issue in my opinion, but my opinion of them is that they break the balance of the system. They generate a whole bunch of artificial interest in a question, only to have them rated by people who are less likely to possess insight regarding the subject matter, since their fields of interest and expertise regards other subjects on the network. I don't think they're very conducive to our goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paying 1+ for downvoting a question is peanuts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every penny adds up. If you vote against as many questions as you can in a day, it costs 40 rep, which is 80% of the lowest bounty. Since we have so many poor questions in need of remedy, there is no need to risk making the system even less effective than it already is by adding an associated cost to one of the controls against poor questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the same thing can be said about voting against answers. The only difference is that we have more reason to penalize that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T15:20:49.663" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T15:20:49.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13149" CreationDate="2019-05-06T22:58:12.223" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;A line OA of length r starts from its initial position OX and  traces an angle AOB=alpha in the anticlockwise direction.It then  traces back in the clockwise direction an angle BOC=3 theta (where alpha is greater than 3 theta).L is the foot of the perpendicular form C on OA .    I want to understand what this means. Will this question be on topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="343525" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T09:07:58.097" Title="Will this question be on topic here?" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13147" CreationDate="2019-05-07T02:04:39.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not 100% sure on this and I would like to see what the other members think, but in an advisory capacity I would say probably not. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Our scope&lt;/a&gt; specifically addresses word choice and usage, etymology, syntax, dialectical differences, pronunciation, spelling and punctuation. Asking us to interpret an entire paragraph exceeds those bounds by a considerable margin. I do not even think we would answer a question regarding how to interpret an entire sentence, except maybe for syntactical purposes: Just specific portions of a sentence. We might ask for more than that in some circumstances to get a sense of the general context though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of excess, there are limits to what a Stack Exchange question may address, and if you can not restrict the scope of the question to a reasonable extent, then the question can be closed as too broad irrespective of where you ask it on the S.E. network. The guidelines for what constitutes too broad are somewhat vague though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;too broad&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most confusing thing about this paragraph seems to be the abbreviations, and the question may be closed as unclear if they turn out to be context sensitive abbreviations which are indecipherable out of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it does not seem like something within our field of expertise. Granted, in some cases we may address the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; of other arts, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;our website is for etymologists, linguists and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/a&gt;, whereas what you are asking is something that sounds like something that needs the help of a geometry expert to fully understand. Now perhaps we might have a geometry expert, but if we do then their existence here is more or less incidental. &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geometry&quot;&gt;There is a geometry tag at Mathematics S.E. though,&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic]&quot;&gt;their scope includes a number of related S.E. subdomains&lt;/a&gt; you might consider for more specific subject matter. Granted, I am not a member of their community, so I am even less sure about what exactly is acceptable there, but it seems like a better bet there than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if you are having trouble interpreting a specific portion of those sentences, we may or may not be able to help you with that, depending on the portion that is giving you trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, it should also be noted that there are certain guidelines for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;quoting material written by others&lt;/a&gt;. Every post utilizing quoted material should include the quotation to be delimited with either  quotation marks or markdown, and cited with both the name of the author and the title of the source. Would you please inform us of that information, or at least let us know if your teacher wrote that as part of a homework question or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T02:04:39.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13147" CreationDate="2019-05-07T08:58:55.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP's question doesn't look to be on topic for this site. The excerpt is too long. Questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; is usually reserved for single words, expressions or short phrases, see the results &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to get a better idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excerpt is relevant to mathematics, right? No?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching the keywords &lt;em&gt;alpha, theta, angle&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/search?q=alpha+theta+angle&quot;&gt;Mathematics.SE&lt;/a&gt; site reveals that is probably the most suitable site. Their help page doesn't explicitly forbid questions that ask about &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;; in fact it says questions that ask about &lt;em&gt;understanding&lt;/em&gt; is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Understanding mathematical concepts and theorems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; offers alternative sites that the OP may find fits the bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, in the OP's shoes, I would first ask mathematics.meta before posting this type of question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-05-07T09:07:58.097" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T09:07:58.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13151" CreationDate="2019-05-07T22:30:31.070" Score="9" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last few minutes, an anonymous user has twice attempted to edit an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117540/why-koran-changed-to-quran/117546#117546&quot;&gt;old answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; by inserting irrelevant material that appears to be pushing some political, religious, or nationalist point of view (I don't understand what they mean, and I can't tell what view they are pushing.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have twice rejected the edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything that can be done to stop this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; Screenshots added, as requested in a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qXtbv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qXtbv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot - top half&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KcSwB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KcSwB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot - bottom half with the first offending edit&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="547" LastEditorUserId="547" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T07:55:54.947" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T00:02:49.890" Title="Irrelevant and contentious edits" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13150" CreationDate="2019-05-09T00:02:49.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you were right to reject the edits. With enough rejected edits, anonymous users will &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/118213/323179&quot;&gt;get that IP blocked&lt;/a&gt; from suggesting edits. Were any bad edits to be approved, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/295028/323179&quot;&gt;retroactively reject them&lt;/a&gt; because you own the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the second edit, you could have flagged for moderator attention asking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/22229/323179&quot;&gt;temporary lock&lt;/a&gt; on the question, which would prevent votes, comments, and — most importantly — edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since it's been a day since the second edit was suggested and the user has suggested nothing more, it doesn't seem like any action needs to be taken. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T00:02:49.890" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-09T22:04:36.717" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having successfully transitioned from being an English language learner to an appreciator of the language, I am part of both the ELL and this stack exchange. And I am proud to be part of both vibrant communities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the recent days, I have noticed an increasingly large amount of question about basic syntax and vocabulary, that are clearly better addressed in the ELL forums. While the mods have been great at their migration duties, it is not enough; they are mere mortals after all, and there is a massive influx of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose an automated system to detect whether this question could be an ELL worthy question, or an English Stack question. How would this be done? Well, there are key terms that tend to appear more frequently in one area than the other. This might not have to do with the complexity of involved words, or the correctness of the user's syntax (although those could be secondary decision features). Take the word parachute. An English learner might ask about its parts of speech, and its meaning/ definition. An appropriate question here would be concerning the historical phonetics of the word, or its etymology and evolution. These key words are more likely to be in questions relevant to this site. We can train our AI model on sample questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No system is perfect, but we need a way to sort the questions before they are out, and not after. Then we can turn our focus to truly enjoying the nuances that the English language offers for us here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253203" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T17:51:35.380" Title="Artificial Intelligence to Detect ELL worthy questions" Tags="|feature-request|ell|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13152" CreationDate="2019-05-10T12:24:55.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions should only be migrated if they are both off-topic for the site and on-topic on another site, so not only would the AI have to detect whether it was off-topic here, it would need to detect whether it was on-topic on ELL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL tolerates questions with less research because it's hard to ask a question in a language you're still learning. It's a lot easier for us to help learners get their question into shape if they ask directly on ELL, because putting a migrated question on hold rejects it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better use of AI would be detecting whether someone asking is likely to be someone learning English as a foreign language, and then leaving a comment directing them to ELL where their questions might be better received. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the point of migrating a low quality question? Migrations are really confusing for new users, especially if they don't already have an account on ELL. Migration should be used for questions where there is something of value to preserve, like clarifications in the comments, or where the question has plenty of context and detail, not for one line &quot;which word do I use?&quot; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrations, in my opinion, should never be done without human involvement. The rules aren't clear enough that we can get people to agree more often than not on what should or shouldn't be migrated or closed, and standards change as the community changes. Computers are not good at judgement calls and interpretation; they're good at detecting patterns and there's no clear pattern for questions that are off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U and on-topic on ELL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a query to look at ELU to ELL questions. If you set the minimum to -50 you should get all the migrations that haven’t been roomba’ed yet. I like to set the minimum to 3, which represents a decent amount of engagement with the question by the ELL community. The default start date is when the migration path opened, but more representative results would probably be restricted to just the past year. Be sure to run the query against ELL. The default is Stack Overflow, and we don’t migrate many questions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/485239/migrated-questions-from-elu-with-scores-less-than-parameter?StartDate=09%2F22%2F2015&amp;amp;MaximumScore=50&amp;amp;MinimumScore=-50&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/485239/migrated-questions-from-elu-with-scores-less-than-parameter?StartDate=09%2F22%2F2015&amp;amp;MaximumScore=50&amp;amp;MinimumScore=-50&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past year, we had about 613 migrations and only 17% of the migrations have a score of 2 or higher after migration. I don’t think that is a great success rate, but not terrible considering that only 2.8% were scored negatively. The stats include rejected migrations and those closed as duplicates (that’s not a rejection). I’d have to do more work to sort out the rejections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-05-10T15:40:57.170" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T15:40:57.170" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-10T20:19:14.283" Score="12" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;On August 27 of last year, a poster on the main site asked &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462001/what-does-the-idiom-funny-as-hell-mean&quot;&gt;What does the idiom “funny as hell” mean?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Four days later, the question was closed for a familiar reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As currently worded, the &quot;funny as hell&quot; question reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I really don't understand this idiom, hell is supposed to be a horrible place. I understand the saying which is present in dictionaries “hot as hell”, but I could not find “funny as hell” in any online reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An editor added the sentence &quot;I could not find 'funny as hell' in any online reference&quot; on November 28, 2018, presumably in hopes of signaling to potential close voters that an explanation of the exact phrase &quot;funny as hell&quot; (the particular phrase that the poster was interested in) was not easy to find online. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I acknowledge that some EL&amp;amp;U participants believe that editing a question to help it avoid closure for lack of research constitutes cheating, defacement of the original post, vandalism, outrageous presumptuousness, insupportable interference with a poster's (1) right to ask questions that contain close-worthy flaws and (2) status as the only person with the necessary insight to resuscitate them, etc. This has, I believe, always been a minority view at EL&amp;amp;U—and it seems to be fundamentally at odds with any rationale that might explain the site's decision to let people other than the poster edit a poster's question—but nevertheless it persists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, the question was closed on August 31, 2018, for the &quot;Please include the research you've done...&quot; reason, notwithstanding the question's containing the &quot;could not find 'funny as hell' in any online reference&quot; showing of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite its closure, the question has attracted (to this point) 7,156 page views in just 8½ months. Evidently, the poster isn't the only person wandering the internet who wonders why people say &quot;funny as hell.&quot; The number of views suggests that the question is of broad interest to site visitors. It is also clearly a question about English usage. And finally, it involves a more subtle issue than the close voters may have realized—namely, that &quot;[blank] as hell&quot; is a surprisingly slippery construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highest-voted answer points out that &quot;as hell&quot; frequently serves as an intensifier in situations where, objectively, hell makes no sense as a simile for the thing being intensified—&quot;happy as hell,&quot; say, or &quot;devout as hell.&quot; But in some cases, the expression does work as a simile: &quot;hot as hell,&quot; for example, is perfectly coherent as a simile (as the OP points out); and readers of Dante could make a case for &quot;cold as hell&quot; as a simile, too. Likewise, &quot;cruel as hell,&quot; &quot;treacherous as hell,&quot; &quot;murky as hell,&quot; &quot;painful as hell&quot; (or &quot;hurts like hell&quot;), etc., are far from irrational as straight similes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in this light, I think, that we should view the poster's curiosity about why &quot;funny as hell&quot; works in English even though it obviously fails as a coherent simile. I think it's a good question of broad interest, and I ask that site participants who have the power to vote on such questions &lt;strong&gt;consider voting to reopen it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T20:29:05.817" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T20:29:05.817" Title="Hell is hot, but is it funny?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13154" CreationDate="2019-05-11T02:36:53.930" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't deny that the matter of the phrase is without interest. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/50120879#50120879&quot;&gt;I commented on the nonsense of the term cold as hell in chat recently&lt;/a&gt;, and Robusto linked me to his answer. Naturally, I knew it was being used as an intensifier but hell is hot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am opposed to editing questions to misrepresent research, but less so for most of the reasons you mention, and moreso because I fear the nature of the question being misrepresented in the edit. I suppose you could say that I think presumptuousness is an accurate representation of the problem, but it is not even that the questioner is the only person who has the insight to fix problems with a post. I may be satisfied if an editor adding research explained to us how the edit &lt;em&gt;clarifies&lt;/em&gt; the meaning of the post, rather than &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt; it, pursuant to general S.E. editing guidelines. Stack Exchange is not quite Wikipedia, and one of the things that makes it different is that it is designed to have a system of peer review so that constructively crafted competing ideologies regarding the specific inquiry can be peer reviewed. As such it also offers a greater degree of post ownership assigned to their original posters post owners is a very critical component of that, so we should take respectful caution in terms of how a question is represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the problems with this particular question is that because of the extremely simple form, Robusto's answer is a perfectly reasonable response, and if this question is of deeper than face value, then any &lt;em&gt;much more insightful&lt;/em&gt; answer would have to overcome the burden of 60 votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the how a question is interpreted can bias the given answers and the voting patterns while risking answer acceptance which is at odds with the body of the post. It also kind of damages our ability to service genuine questions because we are really replacing them with our own somewhat different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I principally object to is how adding research can change the subject-matter of a question. I feel like changing subject matter is a job better handled by a newer better question, asked by somebody who knows what inspired them to ask in the first place. An appropriately asked question may also draw in more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are going to open questions because they are genuinely of greater interest, then I would prefer it be done without need of falsified research which does practically nothing except give people a mistaken impression of what the questioner really wanted to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I d not believe it is not at odds with any reason we might have for being allowed to edit other people's posts. We expect our website to be used as a formal reference work, and it has to be presentable as such. Making edits to improve readability or bring posts into compliance with academic standards by doing things like adding attribution are perfectly valid reasons to edit our post. Also, aside from avoiding the aforementioned pitfalls, asking new questions helps to better index our website because the direct inquiry may exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since it's bound to come up, the editing privilege doesn't mean we are absolved from editing restrictions. It comes because by the time we make enough contributions to earn it, we are expected to know how the website is supposed to work well enough to be trusted to honor them. That's probably why we're given &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;a link to them to them&lt;/a&gt; in the inbox when we earn the privilege. We are a stack exchange subdomain, so their rules are our rules too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, none of this is to be construed to mean that the questioner is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; person who can make edits to questions generally, even if some added research is required. Sometimes clarifying a question requires an interpretive call. However, those edits should have some basis in the original form of the question which are more considerably more probable to be correct than other interpretations. However, if we have no existing reason to believe that a certain interpretation is probable, that's when a question should remain closed. In this particular case the question does raise a point of concern that suggests some basic understanding of the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only does asking a new question bypass the aforementioned problems, but it also improves the website's indexing. So before we reopen that question, I also want to ask something: Are we really interested in the same subject as the questioner and think we can do better than existing resources, or is there a better question we could ask that more accurately represents what we really want to know? Is it really a matter of meaning as the question presently asked suggest, or moreso one of phrase history and derivation. We have a procedure for asking near-duplicate questions which involves linking to the old one and explaining the difference, so if we could use that, it might be preferable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, that is a question of genuine interest. I think most of us are familiar with the phrase, but if it is merely an intensifier or if there's a particular lingual theme here that might merit some addressing. Sometimes funniness is associated with morbid suffering. Sometimes things are considered so funny that it hurts, or people can supposedly die laughing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the difficulty of answering that particular question, I'm kind of split on that one in this case. The phrase itself isn't very well documented, but that is probably because standard reference works have chosen to address the broader phonomena instead. The Free Dictionary by Farlex does have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/as+hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as hell&lt;/a&gt; entry, and use of an intensifier is noted in standard dictionary resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should probably be noted that for the purposes of voting, I am not endorsing a particular plan of action in this specific case. Instead, I simply mean to address the talking points brought up, since meta is more permissive of discussion than the main website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T02:36:53.930" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13152" CreationDate="2019-05-11T13:34:54.960" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the link &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/485239/migrated-questions-from-elu-with-scores-less-than-parameter?StartDate=09%2F22%2F2015&amp;amp;MaximumScore=50&amp;amp;MinimumScore=-50&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/485239/migrated-questions-from-elu-with-scores-less-than-parameter?StartDate=09%2F22%2F2015&amp;amp;MaximumScore=50&amp;amp;MinimumScore=-50&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that Andrew provided, I noticed that such an idea perhaps might be feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand many of your concerns about mass-migration and destroying valuable content, however I believe we can work together to set a system that balances precision with efficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, I will begin exploring options to develop a prototype of an ML based classifier (starting with something like Bayesian statistics). Ultimately, the AI will show us what it can offer, and we the community will be the final judges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever has any suggestions or input, please do comment them. Upvote this answer if you support the development of a text classifying bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253203" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T17:51:35.380" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T17:51:35.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13161" CreationDate="2019-05-14T05:48:08.857" Score="6" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent tag (about 1.5 months ago) was added under the name &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/difference-in-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;difference-in-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;difference-in-meaning&lt;/a&gt; and is now used by 5 questions, but I believe it is a duplicate of the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt;, used by 3,513 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With so few questions impacted, the easiest course of action could be to have a users with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit privilege&lt;/a&gt; (2,000 reputation) directly replacing the tag in those 5 questions. Otherwise, an alternative could be to make those tags synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129136" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T09:08:53.823" Title="Merge tags [difference-in-meaning] and [differences]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13160" CreationDate="2019-05-14T09:08:53.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can get rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/difference-in-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;difference-in-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;difference-in-meaning&lt;/a&gt; as it is being used inconsistently as a synonym for either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are so few instances I've gone and cleaned them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T09:08:53.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-16T03:01:14.700" Score="8" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/498591/what-are-the-constraints-on-replacements-of-the-slang-holy-shit&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that has been viewed only 4 times so far. But shortly after I've asked it, someone down-voted every post I've made on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HPkte.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HPkte.png&quot; alt=&quot;:(&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's not much of a change in reputation, but it just doesn't feel good when you ask a question, your other posts get down-voted as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can do about it? Isn't there any way to prevent these serial down-votings from happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240907" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T11:56:21.143" Title="Serial down-voting after I asked a question" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-05-20T17:34:15.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13162" CreationDate="2019-05-16T11:56:21.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a given that the Stack Exchange script would notice this behaviour as being suspicious-looking. In my experience, the system kicks into play when  five or more posts have been downvoted in rapid succession, sometimes as many as four posts by the same user can be downvoted within a single minute. In this instance, it appears that the downvoter at least read the posts. As the OP's posts are not that particularly long, they won't need more than a minute to read at most. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to guess that the downvotes will probably stick. That's not to say I agree with the downvotes, but it could be that a user probably took offence to  the OP's newest post and the type of language used. The phrases &quot;holy fuck&quot; and &quot;holy shit&quot;, despite being commonly heard in everyday speech, still carry a taint of blasphemy. It seems probable that a user was offended by that language and wanted to express their disapproval more emphatically. There have been instances where posts on EL&amp;amp;U and ELL were flagged for being offensive and non-inclusive because they talked about &quot;Down syndrome kids&quot;, &quot;least gay&quot;, &quot;masturbation&quot; and &quot;tits and boobs&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like anywhere else in the world, EL&amp;amp;U has its share of straitlaced people but does that mean those four downvotes are inexcusable? Maybe if you disagree with its premise, but we don't know for certain the motivation behind the downvotes, unless the downvoter would care to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, and I'll add one final point, if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13140/shouldnt-we-lose-1-rep-for-downvoting-questions&quot;&gt;downvoting questions&lt;/a&gt; were not free (because they are)  perhaps the user would have paused a fraction longer or be dissuaded from hitting that down arrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T11:56:21.143" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-16T18:48:38.357" Score="6" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that once upon a time, there existed on the menu of possible reasons for closing a question one that was labelled &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;. While the label may not have been perfect, it was generally understood that the reason was supposed to be invoked when the question concerned highly idiosyncratic use of English language, which was confined to a particular person, or a particular organisation, or a particular text. The idea behind the reason was that answering such a question would not provide any general insight into English language and usage, and would thus clutter the site with something that does not serve its intended purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also understand that the reason was removed from the menu by the central Stack Exchange ‘headquarters’. I was not, however, able to find on the meta-ELU site any consensus on what was then supposed to happen, within ELU, with the questions of the kind that would have been closed as too localised before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several possibilities occur to me of what one might do with such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) One may downvote the question and/or explain in a comment that it is too localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) One may answer the question, and make it a part of the answer that it is too localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) One may flag the question (or, if one has sufficient reputation, vote to close it) using whichever other reason on the menu seems the closest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) One may flag the question as needing a moderator’s attention (the only available option that allows for an open-ended explanation of the reason), specifying that it is too localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these options seem satisfactory. The first one is unstable: even if some people choose it, chances are that somebody else will try to answer the question, as long as it remains open. The second one increases the clutter on the site; moreover it legitimises such questions and so encourages more of them, which in turn increases the clutter further. The third one is disingenuous, which is unfair to the person who asked the question, and may contribute to the impression that the stated reasons for closing questions are, in general, not the real ones. The fourth one creates unnecessary work for the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is one supposed to do with such a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T20:03:26.617" Title="What is the best way of dealing with the questions that are too localised?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13164" CreationDate="2019-05-16T20:19:32.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your option #1 seems the best, but you need a tailor-made comment explaining why you voted to close.  But first, think whether you could edit the question to make it more widely relevant, without grossly distorting the question.   If this is not possible, then VTC with the tailor-made comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say the downside of this is that others might answer the question, but this is true of any VTC, and it happens often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the menu answer that seems closest is not fair to the OP, and teaches him nothing, particularly because the menu answer will probably be &quot;opinion based&quot; which, IMO, is overused already.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T20:19:32.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13164" CreationDate="2019-05-16T20:24:49.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that I sometimes do is vote to close and then note, as a customized close reason, the fact that the question is too localized to be of any possible interest to anyone other than the poster. Clearly, if the goal of English Language &amp;amp; Usage is to build up a searchable database of well-researched, well-informed answers to questions of broad and enduring interest, it makes no sense to clog the site with questions involving unique factual scenarios that no one else will ever encounter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clogging becomes a problem when a site visitor tries to search for a particular word or phrase and must sift through numerous irrelevant matches to try to find a useful match. This is a tolerable burden when the extraneous matches are to questions that are of substantial value in their own right—but not when the matches are to questions that no one (including, at this point, the various individuals who originally posted them) cares about and that are just taking up digital storage space. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The removal of &quot;too localized&quot; as a standardized close option is, in my opinion, one of the worst decisions ever made by TPTB at Stack Exchange on the topic of closing questions. The fact that this valuable and relevant close reason was effectively replaced at EL&amp;amp;U by the deeply flawed &quot;show research&quot; close reason only makes matters worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T20:03:26.617" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T20:03:26.617" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13164" CreationDate="2019-05-16T22:08:56.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you really think a question is of such little use to anybody other than the poster that it is detrimental to the website, then I would suggest voting against it. We want to maintain the interest of our community by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;optimizing for pearls over sand&lt;/a&gt; and the voting system is balanced to accomodate for liberal votes against questions for this reason. The voting score reflects the community's aggregate interest in the question, and helps people just finding it to evaluate of how much interest the question is before they even click into it for more details. However closing questions is different, because if done without due discretion it can prevent a gem of an answer being contributed. In other words, it can optimize against both sand and pearls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that there is not really much of an appropriate measure: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Commentary&lt;/a&gt; is mostly reserved for constructive criticism which should lead to the improvement of the post. If the subject matter is inherently uninteresting, then no amount of feedback is going to improve the question, and if you have a suggestion to make the question more interesting then it would probably be better received if you focus on that instead of discouraging the reader by prefacing it with the narrative that the question isn't worth the trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Flagging&lt;/a&gt; and close voting is mostly reserved for content that is problematic to the extent that it should be outright deleted from the website if it remains in its current state but too localized questions likely do not merit such extreme measures. It is not like we are a paper resource which is bereft of space to address every possible question, and it is part of our mission statement here at Stack Exchange. If a question is &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt; well-asked, and possible to answer in a constructive manner, it is effectively harmless and its removal only denies the people who are interested in the question the opportunity to address it. &#xA;Something which absolutely needs to be kept in mind is that Too Localized was a network-wide closure reason which was not merely imperfect, found to be highly problematic. It was one of the closure reasons that was eliminated as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;a result of the war of the closes&lt;/a&gt;, because it covered too many vague circumstances. You could argue that if we bar questions that are &quot;only relevant to a small geographical mass or specific point in time&quot; that most of our questions dialectical or historic usage should be discarded, which is something I very much doubt that most of our current intended user-base wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best reason we had for too localized is perhaps because some questions were of too little interest. However the problem with that is that it is &lt;em&gt;too much of a judgement call&lt;/em&gt; to reasonably make with any degree of consistency, which is why &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185102/responding-to-your-too-localized-concerns&quot;&gt;a more restricted too narrow closure reason was rejected as a replacement&lt;/a&gt;. If somebody was interested enough to ask in the first place, then it isn't too much of a stretch to assume that other people may take interest in the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If other people do not take interest in the same problem, then the question will probably remain unanswered anyway, meaning that there is not even so much as a need to close the question. Moreover, these unanswered questions may serve to our benefit later if we are proven wrong and somebody comes and decides to answer it with a compelling answer, but if we close those questions prematurely, then we are denying the possibility of that even happening. This is all the worse if the answer reveals matters deeper interest.&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;That is why we have an unanswered questions queue&lt;/a&gt; and possibly even the necromancer badge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about it this way. Should we really have a closure reason that is simply a coded method of saying &quot;this question bores me for no certain reason?&quot; Honestly, I think not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if we had a finite amount of space at our disposal, that could be harm us by interfering with our ability to address more noteworthy subject matter. However we are not so constrained. We are not like formal dictionaries and other early reference works, since we are not limited by how many pieces of paper can be bound together in a few volumes. A few such questions here and there doesn't really seem harmful, so long as we're not getting them so often that it noticeably detracts from the overall usability of the website, and if we are, we can probably categorize the questions more meaningfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if answering a question is effectively &lt;em&gt;meaningless&lt;/em&gt; and risks doing more harm than good in its present state, I can understand closing it for that reason, but the too localized closure reason never really did anything to identify such a fundamental problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/358654/are-the-paraphrase-brackets-not-square-brackets-used-in-english/381003#381003&quot;&gt;if I decide spend a few hours pouring through references and explaining that there is no such thing as a paraphrase bracket in the English Language&lt;/a&gt; of my own volition, is that really such a bad thing that you really have to take active preventative measures against it? That question went unanswered for months, and I genuinely doubt that it is a matter of broad interest that will make a meaningful impact on many people's lives since most people probably don't even think about paraphrase brackets. However, I had myself wondered about how to appropriately paraphrase before, and the few people who do take interest in the matter seem to appreciate my answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, if we expect to operate in a community of people who help each-other learn, then answering the boring questions some other people might have, where possible may actually inspire the people who receive constructive answers to pay the favor forward, and serve to exemplify how that can be done. It's also a very good way to potentially pay back the other members who have decided to help us with questions of ours that they may have also found to be inane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another concern is that there is already very little middle ground between the Primarily Opinion Based and General Reference criteria, and I don't think we really need to narrow that ground even further by taking a very severe approach against questions which can only be vaguely described as &quot;too localized&quot;. Voting against a queston's score seems like enough of a corrective measure here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we use the questions and answers format to suss out which questions are of interest, and need addressing, but there is a certain price to be paid for that. The unique appeal of a questions and answers website to questioners, who we certainly do need, is that they might be able to gain some personalized assistance. It seems obstructive to that purpose to just uniformly block questions with no discernable problem other than what may just be personal disinterest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T06:18:58.053" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T06:18:58.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T12:40:07.887" Score="4" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I edited a question that had been closed for 14 months as a duplicate of:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332943/whats-the-source-of-shipped-in-a-romantic-sense&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the source of &amp;quot;shipped&amp;quot; in a romantic sense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title was edited and changed to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/432720/is-shipping-todays-equivalent-of-matchmaking&quot;&gt;Is “shipping” today's equivalent of “matchmaking”? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inspiration behind the original post was left intact but I decided to broaden it, and ask whether today's &lt;em&gt;shipping&lt;/em&gt; was possibly related to &lt;em&gt;matchmaking&lt;/em&gt; and if movie/film fans of yore ever used it the same way that “shipping“ is used today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In less than 12 hours the entire post was deleted by a script. Unfortunately, three users in the review queue voted to keep it closed, and in that short space of time, it also earned a downvote. This was enough for an unintelligent script to delete the post for being  a ‘dead question’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is deleted, and it remains closed. I posted an inquiry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/328351/can-duplicate-questions-be-deleted&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; thinking that maybe the issue was a bug. I mean, deleting an edited  post after only 12 hours is a bit nonsensical, if you ask me. And how could it ever receive an answer if it was closed for over 14 months? But apparently the script does not care if a question is a duplicate or not, as long as it has a negative score and there are no posted answers with a positive score; no question is exempt from the wrath of the script. &lt;em&gt;Worth bearing in mind before any of us votes to close any SWR question in the future as a duplicate.&lt;/em&gt; So much for Artificial Intelligence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to hear from the three users who voted to keep it closed, their reasons for doing so. Did they consider the newly edited post to be still a duplicate? Was it off-topic? Low quality? Did it lack research? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T03:39:15.443" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T15:06:25.810" Title="My “shipping” question has been sunk" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T17:13:32.313" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may have been discussed before, but I didn't find anything relevant with the search function. I'll be happy to delete if someone directs me elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a limit to how much can be earned in a day, so what about also putting an absolute limit on how much can be earned for a single word request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The payoff for the work put into answering a single-word request can be exponential and it's usually extremely disproportionate when compared to the payoff for the effort invested in more complicated interesting questions. &#xA;My suggestion would be to cap it at say 200 or so per SWR. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="309795" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T02:28:38.347" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T15:20:39.207" Title="Suggestion: Capping points that can be earned for a single-word request" Tags="|discussion|reputation|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13170" CreationDate="2019-05-18T17:53:17.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on exactly what you mean, which is 95% clear, but not 100% clear.  I'm going to assume you mean capping at 200 rep points for each single word answer, in which case, thinking out loud here, I agree, especially since simple answers tend to rapidly accumulate all the rep points they are going to get, and thus naturally cap out at 200 or maybe 400. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, on second thought&lt;/strong&gt;, there is always the major exception, the prime example of which is the answer of @Dan Bron to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-word-begins-with-y-and-looks-like-an-axe-in-this-picture/395388#395388&quot;&gt;what word begins with a y and looks like an axe&lt;/a&gt;.  IMO, this is one of the greatest answers on ELU, and fully deserves whatever number of rep points Dan got from it, which of course is far less than [10 x 830 upvotes], which, if there were no daily 200 rep point cap from all questions and answers, would be 8,300 rep points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, after thinking about it, I disagree, partly because of the example I just cited, but mainly because I don't see your proposal as a disincentive to asking or answering SWRs.&lt;/strong&gt;  There is clearly no disincentive to asking, if only because many of the askers, being inexperienced on SE will not know or care about any rep ceiling.  There is very little disincentive to answering because, ditto, and because for the more savvy answerers, 200 rep points is nothing to sneeze at. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there are many types of questions which amass answers of more than 200 rep points -- sorry, don't have an example to point to.  We maybe could ban SWRs from the Hot Network List, but I'm in favor of keeping things simple rather than introducing exceptions and prohibitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum in Response to a Comment from the OP:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've also never needed more than a few seconds to think of the answer to a SWR that I have answered, but writing a good answer with convincing back-up that isn't just block-quoting has always taken me at least more than a few minutes. I think a better approach is to briefly &quot;answer&quot; a trivial Q (not all SWRs are trivial) in a comment and then VTC  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T18:23:48.127" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T18:23:48.127" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13170" CreationDate="2019-05-19T05:32:49.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a pretty substantial risk that it would have the opposite of the intended effect if this solution was to be implemented. People who are motivated by easy reputation gain will not stop posting low effort answers until the reward is so low that they do not even think it is even worth writing a low effort answer. If we make the prospective reward so low that it isn't worth writing a low effort answer, then it stands to reason that it would not be an incentive to high effort posts either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, those high effort posts may stop being worth the effort &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt;, before the low effort ones do, so instead of just getting fewer answers overall, we would get a higher proportion of low effort posts to high effort posts if the limit is too high to stop the low quality posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, once you reach the limit the system would stop you from earning reputation at later dates, which discourages writing answers of lasting value in favor of answers which help you reach the limit immediately. That would probably still be the easy low effort posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To demonstrate the problem, suppose we have two posts submitted on the same day. One mediocre answer manages to get 25 votes during the question's prime, and another much answer is a little late because spending the effort took a little more time, so it only manages to get 20. At that point the net effect would favor the user who spent more effort slightly, by making the early user's score less inflated by means of comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, now we have to consider that the network aims to be a long term archive of questions and answers: Ideally we hope for everybody to visit that question to find its answers in perpetuity, and continue to vote upon the questions therein with the hope that ultimately, the best answer will rise to the top. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;It's all in the tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we also have to consider how we reward a person &lt;em&gt;over time&lt;/em&gt; for writing an answer that will beat worse answers to the top. Both answers have already exhausted their reputation limit, so if the better answer was to get 10 extra votes later on and the mediocre answer was left to stand where it is, now the better answer would suffer greater disadvantage (-100 vs. -50), and both posts would still be rewarded equally for the amount of effort put into each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the difference with the daily cap is that it isn't it is relatively difficult to reach and rather than being post-bound it's time-bound and resets itself, so even if  by some freak occurrence you do  get 200 reputation on a single post,  you still stand to get however many  points there may be the next day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, perhaps some people do not care so much about the reputation system but those people will not change their habits irrespective of how it is balanced or what kind fof answer they prefer to write, so it is almost as if they may as well not exist for the purposes of balancing the reputation system, unless it can be demonstrated that they exist in unequal proportion to those who are motivated by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T09:58:23.667" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T09:58:23.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-19T08:07:22.597" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is a list of English words for free download (i.e. public domain, not creative commons), that contain either rhyming words, the syllable count/breakdown for the word, or the part of speech. Perhaps it is in the form of a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word frequency list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Corpus annotation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if anything such exists. Preferably not ShareALike or Creative Commons as it has restrictions. But would still be good to know of Creative Commons examples in case a public domain version doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found a list of english &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; (no definitions), but nothing like rhymes/syllable count/POS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79672" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T17:10:45.630" Title="If there is a list of English rhyming words, syllable count, or parts of speech for free download (public domain)" Tags="|discussion|data-dump|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-05-24T02:28:41.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13169" CreationDate="2019-05-19T16:21:21.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure since our version of the help center has lacks some information, but it seems like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt; does take pending reopening votes and duplicate status into consideration, but only from the time it is first old enough to be eligible for deletion until the time it is a month old. Those factors are no longer considered after that, which is likely in consideration of the notion that we should have had enough time to edit the question or determine that it has at least some content worth keeping by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do keep in mind that while some duplicates are useful for the purposes of drawing in new users and redirecting them to the original question, this does not necessarily apply to every duplicate.  If two questions were written in exactly the same way it seems obvious that we should delete one of the two or merge them. You can extrapolate this principle to suggest that a closed post without value should be deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, principally, a score of zero is either supposed to represent a question that either has no distinctive value, or does as much harm as good, and hence isn't worth keeping. The system is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; liberal regarding what's preserved. It seems like the system will preserve any question with a positive score or an answer, if it is more than a month old. Now I'm not saying that the question was utterly without value in its present form (I wouldn't have tried to answer it otherwise), but the bot can't read your question to know the difference, so it was just crunching the numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further complicating matters is that yes, you edited the post so that it was no longer fully a duplicate, but in doing so you changed the scope from an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; question to  a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; question. If the second half of the revised question had been posted as its own question, I think it could've stood on its own without being nominated as a duplicate. That may have have been better for the site since the old question could still serve as a redirect, and the new question could have drawn more attention to itself, and be rated freshly on its own merits rather than having its score intermingled with the old one. However, that's not really my point: My point is that the people who designed the bot probably anticipated it operating on questions that were more similar to their original form than dissimilar, so it's no surprise that making such a transformative edit might break the system, in hindsight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened here seems like a freak accident, and nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the main feature of the question, perhaps I should not speak for others, but since nobody else is offering any insight regarding why it was closed, here are a couple of problems I see with the question as it stands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that it still seems like a partial duplicate. Why? Well you left the entire first half of the question completely unedited, so it still contains some overlap with the scope of the older question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;If it's an established slang expression, how on earth did it come about?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What are its roots?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I said, right now the question reads much moreso like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that the question is very, very broad. It seems like it should be broken up into two or maybe even three separate questions. One is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; question that it originally duplicated. The bulk of your edit seems like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally this portion at the end is more like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did movie/film fans of yore ever used “matchmaking” the same way that “shipping“ is used today? If not, what was said instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really aren't supposed to ask multiple questions in a post, for the purposes of indexing and keeping questions manageable. Questions which ask multiple questions were always meant to be closed as Too Broad. Also, I'm not sure if you folk noticed since we rarely ever use that closure reason, but it was changed to try and clarify its purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I almost didn't answer the question at all, because I struggled to think of the words that might match, and I didn't want to leave a partial answer. Thankfully I remembered reading the Variety article in the past which served as a helpful reminder. People with more specialized knowledge probably shouldn't feel like they have to contribute three distinct pieces of knowledge in order for their answer to be useful. Yeah, I know that Stack Exchange does &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;technically encourage partial answers&lt;/a&gt;, but sometimes I feel as if there are some very exacting standards here and a partial answer is never really &lt;em&gt;ideal&lt;/em&gt; if we could have a complete one instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has a narrower scope, it also helps to write shorter answers that are more readable, or at least give the matter extra thorough treatment for posts of the same length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you already know, reviewers will usually elect to keep a question closed if they observe even one applicable closure reason, since each user can only vote to close or reopen once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now personally, I don't even mind the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; at the end too much because it has enough of cognizable relationship to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; question to fit into a single narrative regarding the word's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;. It implies that you want to know what purpose the newly clipped word uniquely serves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, etymology falls under an almost entirely different scope than meaning, and since we already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; question, my advice would be to edit the question to remove the listed questions regarding the term's roots, so that people can submit distinct answers trying to antedate the X-Files watchers or Dengeki Pikachu readers to the earlier question. It would help to narrow the scope and avoid the impression that it is a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T16:33:12.460" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T16:33:12.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13173" CreationDate="2019-05-19T16:54:26.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably you are looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;all of these. That is, you want a word list with pronunciation &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; part(s) of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it seems you also want frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;file(s) that is easily manipulable programmatically.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could cobble these all together from different sources (say from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cmudict&lt;/a&gt;) for pronunciation, or many places for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=part+of+speech+word+list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a part of speech word list&lt;/a&gt;, but there is one source that has a bunch of those files together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moby word lists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the quality, it's not being updated anymore, and you'll have to extend it yourself to get 'rhyming' (just search for ends of words matching the end of your target word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be prepared to deal with pronunciation variations. I think cmudict and moby both follow GenAmE, which is not necessarily your target audience. It is theoretically possible to programmatically 'translate' to other accents (using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical sets&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;possible mapping&lt;/a&gt;), but I think it will be difficult to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T17:10:45.630" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T17:10:45.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-20T14:08:46.977" Score="1" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13154/hell-is-hot-but-is-it-funny?cb=1#comment53778_13154&quot;&gt;this comment from Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt;, I think we should consider making it clear to users what research we expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often see a poorly researched question and assume the research would be easy. Sometimes I try it and find out it's not. In order to save me doing the same thing the OP did, it'd be better if they stated exactly what they tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per Sven Yargs's comment, I think we can make it easier by telling users who have their questions closed for lack of research, what exactly constitutes &lt;em&gt;tell us the research you've done&lt;/em&gt;. Too often they edit in something generic: e.g. &quot;I searched for it and didn't find anything&quot;. What's &quot;it&quot;? Did they include quote marks in your search to make sure google knew it was a phrase? Did they check reputable dictionaries? Did they only check US dictionaries or only UK dictionaries? As far as they're concerned they've done research and proved it, and thus met our &quot;show your research&quot; criterion; as far as I'm concerned they've done minimal research and proved nothing and not met my interpretation of the criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest something like this (based on Sven Yargs's wording):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you can't find any information, please identify your search term(s) and at least three references you checked that were not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastEditorUserId="91730" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T09:28:42.420" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T12:14:00.943" Title="Replace &quot;Please show the research you've done&quot; with a clear threshold requirement" Tags="|feature-request|research-effort|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13170" CreationDate="2019-05-20T15:20:39.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't strongly disagree with what you're saying, but this would be  a fairly extreme change to how the Stack Exchange reputation system works. So I don't think it's feasible in practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic of restricting rep gain from single answers has been discussed before on Meta Stack Exchange, the meta site for the whole network: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/155862/shouldnt-rep-gains-from-old-questions-answers-eventually-stop-or-at-least-re&quot;&gt;Shouldn&amp;#39;t rep gains from old questions &amp;amp; answers eventually stop (or at-least reduce)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132021/a-cap-on-reputation-from-a-single-answer-not-daily-but-forever?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;A cap on reputation from a single answer (not daily, but forever)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72212/why-not-switch-to-an-answer-based-reputation-cap?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Why not switch to an answer-based reputation cap?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a generally unpopular idea. These questions don't bring up the option of having a per-answer rep cap only for questions with certain tags, but I don't think that changes the dynamics of the mechanic too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T15:20:39.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13176" CreationDate="2019-05-20T19:20:32.723" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a still admittedly somewhat lengthy attempt to summarize my more detailed thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree with some of AndyT's concerns, but questions which are difficult to research should be answered, in order to achieve Stack Exchange's goal of disseminating information.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Proving a negative is harder than proving a positive. It is at least hypothetically possible for somebody to try and do research and have absolutely nothing to show for it, or at least nothing worth showing, which leaves them with little to no recourse for reopening the question, even if it is worth answering. This is most particularly the case for when people who do cursory research with a search engine and find no reference websites with their search, and other forms of research can be harder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I doubt delimiting strict expectations will do much to help us. It would be one thing if the clarification could raise compliance with our standards, but we have enough difficulty getting people to do much of anything without asking even more of them than what we presently enforce, and any amount of shown research shows that they did the least they could do for the people bothered by that. We would probably only see more questions closed and fewer questions reopened, because it will require more work to keep them open or mend them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the main purpose of the research requirement is to reduce the number of answers that solely rest on an appeal to authority from a readily accessible resource, on the basis that questions which can be answered that way do not merit our personalized assistance, then one reference usually suffices to highlight the uselessness of answers that just duplicate co-equal resources, since the veracity of information of one co-equal authority like can not be trusted more than another like it without further proof or explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, in cases where no productive results are found on a search engine, the questioner providing us with their search terms probably does little to nothing to help us, even under unlikely optimal circumstances. They will not always reliably produce the same results that the questioners and other visitors may find, even in the best case scenario, so we gain little to no insight regarding the nature of the problem. It also requires us to manually double check anyway, and if we are going to bother doing that, then I trust we are capable of devising our own and evaluate if answering the question is needful for ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add that there may be ways to improve the phrasing of our current closure reason, but I doubt delimiting stricter standards as suggested will help for these reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, I know that strictly speaking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;the present research standards&lt;/a&gt; endorse checking multiple resources, but we have never actually gone so far as to enforce it to my personal recollection, and it may just be too high of a threshold to be reasonable, so I do not think we should start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I have difficulty seeing much of a practical benefit, if the of our research standard goal is simply to bar questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;that are too simple&lt;/a&gt;. If a user checks even just one authoritative reference work, then I think it does enough to solve the problem of an overly simple question because who's to say,for example that &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; defines a word better than &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of English 3rd edition&lt;/em&gt;, or vice versa, without a more thorough examination of the circumstances and facts that can be used as a basis to explain which one did a better job? Moreover, if all of the dictionaries are in perfect agreement, then checking one is more or less effectively the same as checking them all anyway. My opinion is that checking even just one reference work should be enough, but we often have difficulty persuading new users to even do just that and I think the community would be elated if we found a way to encourage even just that. Referencing even just one authority does enough to prevent merely making an appeal to an equivalent authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, we often have difficulty persuading people to edit questions to add any any amount of research, and I think we would be very happy if they did. We should keep in mind that if the research standard is &lt;em&gt;too high&lt;/em&gt; that we may start losing questions that could have been answered very well to other resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, more importantly, I doubt making the standards clearer and stricter solve the problem you are experiencing anyway. I think the root of the problem may be that they are too clear, and too strict for us, because they inadvertently cause a problem. Questions are just closed whenever they lack research, without any effort on our part to determine if research would have much practical benefit. Now do not get me wrong: I am of the opinion that a question with research is better than a question without it, but consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Showing an absence of evidence is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; harder than proving a positive. How should people even show just one reference to a question which doesn't have an answer, let alone three? Do they give us a link to a nonexistent webpage? Do they read an entire book that might be expected to have the answer so they report that it does not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally the research standards were established as a preventative measure for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;questions that are too easy to answer&lt;/a&gt; with &quot;commonly available resources&quot;, but the way it is now, where we needn't necessarily check for ourselves if such is the case may also inadvertently bar questions which are &lt;em&gt;too hard&lt;/em&gt;, except I do not even think that was ever the intention of it. That does not mean that there are not some questions which are too hard to answer, but we have separate guidelines for those which are handled by different closure reasons specifically designed to ensure that we only close questions that are too hard to answer when answering them is not productive, which are &lt;em&gt;Too Broad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Unclear What You Are Asking&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it could be argued that those questions are P.O.B. for lack of reference, but I think the guidelines for P.O.B. are more sensitive and fine tuned than that, since &lt;em&gt;other forms of corroboration&lt;/em&gt; can be used in lieu of direct reference. The way the research standard is set up now seems like we may only answer questions if an answer exists in an easily found reference work that somehow fails to explain the matter sufficiently. I think there are many more questions of interest that we should be addressing than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fixing that problem may actually require experienced and privileged users to exercise more responsible discretion with the vote to close options, and actually check to see if a commonly available resource actually even exists more often, rather than &lt;em&gt;just assuming&lt;/em&gt; that it does not whenever the questioner fails to provide research pursuant to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1563/124936&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood's guidance in Basic Questions Are Not So Basic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11190/124936&quot;&gt;The initial closure of the Emoji/Emoticon comparison question&lt;/a&gt; would have been averted if we did that for example, and that's not the only time it has been a thorn in my side, as somebody who has not as of yet even asked a question, and usually tries to write lengthy in-depth answers. Sometimes I think we need to concern ourselves more with answer potential than question quality if we want this to be the best website it can be. (Which is not to say that question quality should be ignored, but again, I doubt that raising standards even higher than they are now will help much with this particular problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another half of the proposal, regarding sharing search terms. Unfortunately, irrespective of what our research standards are I do not think that will help us very much, because even if we know all of that, it might not help us very much. The problem is that they are inconsistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way they can be inconsistent is from search engine to search engine, since they are all competing to deliver better results than the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even on the same search engine, if they are personalized according to location or search history. Google, which is the most popular search engine right now, does personalize search results somewhat. The C.N.B.C. tech article &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/17/google-tests-changes-to-its-search-algorithm-how-search-works.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;We sat in on an internal Google meeting where they talked about changing the search algorithm—here’s what we learned&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, written by Jillian D’Onfro and published on September 17th 2018 states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other times, ideas for algorithm changes come from broad company directives or priorities. For example, some employees have long argued that Google search results should be more personalized, Nayak said. Right now, there is very little search personalization and what exists is focused on a user’s location or immediate context from a prior search. (If you Googled something related to baseball followed by “The Giants,” the results wouldn’t surface the football team, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we take this statement at face value it has significant consequences. For the purposes of verifying research, it is problematic enough that somebody in the United States of America might not get the same results as somebody in the United Kingdom for dialectical questions. It also seems possible that we might get different results for people who study punctuation more as opposed to people who study syntax. Ellipsis is often used as a syntactic term which refers to the practice of dropping words out of sentences, but then there is the ellipsis as a punctuation mark that represents the omission of words from quotation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we take steps to reduce or eliminate the amount of personalization in our search engine by changing Google's user settings or using Duckduckgo instead, the results are also transient. They change with time as search engine optimization improves and websites pop in or out of existence. Over time, some questions which are likely to be general reference today might not be general reference a year from now, or questions which need answering today might be general reference a year from now. In the latter case, I believe it is better if we get to the question first: General reference often offers sparse explanation and rests on the authority of the source, and we can give questions much more thorough treatment and share our evidence if we get to them first, so every time we are beaten to the punch represents a wasted opportunity to optimize the utility of our answers not only through quality, but through earn greater exposure and offer better timeliness than more slowly updated references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing we should keep in mind is that one of the founding principles of Stack Exchange is to make the internet a better place by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;making it easier to find information through search engines&lt;/a&gt;, so we should probably keep an eye out for when we can serve that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since search engine results can not reliably communicate to us what the questioner did or did not see, they don't prove to us that the questioner couldn't find anything useful. Our audit of those search terms also won't be able to prove that they could have easily found something useful, or what they are likely to have seen. I will admit that it is perhaps somewhat more useful than nothing at all, but again, I fail to see much practical benefit because it does not offer much more information for achieving our practical goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing it really does is give us a starting point for an audit, but if we are going to go through the effort of doing an audit, we can probably do nearly as well through some cursory guesswork, and decide how to handle the question from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T12:14:00.943" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T12:14:00.943" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11809" CreationDate="2019-05-21T15:11:06.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are tools to check on this. Here's a click as of this morning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8b0wP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8b0wP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Edwin Ashworth in the flesh, 2019-05-21&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T15:11:06.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13176" CreationDate="2019-05-22T21:56:44.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with most of what @Tonepoet said, but I would like to try a simpler answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything more complicated than a &quot;clear threshold limit&quot; of non-zero will be too complicated to define and enforce, and the sensibleness of it will vary from type of question to type of question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions simply go away before ever being asked if the OP does a quick search; I have often thought I had an interesting question to find that a few minutes on Google answered it.  So I didn't post the Q.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like more such trivial questions to be self-aborted by the OPs.  But we don't want &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions or even &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; questions to be self-aborted, and many will be with the suggested three references rule.  So, I would edit the proposed comment of the OP to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can't find any information, please identify your search term(s) and the  reference(s) you checked that were not helpful&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T21:56:44.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2950" CreationDate="2019-05-23T06:10:09.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Language Corpus Data&lt;/a&gt; on Peter Norvig's website provides a file containing 1/3 million (333,333) of the most common English words ordered by frequency. The data is obtained by an n-gram frequency analysis of Google's Trillion Words Corpus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;'s dataset). The data from Google is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256527" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T06:10:09.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T06:27:18.257" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard a joke in &quot;the vicar of Dibley&quot; (most episodes do end up with one told by Dawn French, the vicar, to her not so bright friend...) And I could not understand it. I kind of found the answer here. But did not agree with some of the statements about the explanation. When I clicked on &quot;Comment&quot; I was told I did not have enough &quot;Credits&quot; may be! My question is how will I get these credits if I'm not allowed to write comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88402" OwnerDisplayName="Michel Munier" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T13:20:45.893" Title="how can I get 50 (something) if you won't let me write one because I have not 50 'credits' I think?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-05-23T10:09:26.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13183" CreationDate="2019-05-23T12:57:25.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;Reputation&lt;/a&gt; points are earned by asking or answering questions. When you do that, those posts can be voted upon by other users. When somebody votes for your answers or awards you a bountty, you gain some, and when somebody votes against them you or you vote against an answer (but not a question) you lose some. A vote for a question gets you five; a vote for an answer gets you ten; a vote against one of your posts loses you two and a voting against an answer costs 1. Less often you might get your answer accepted  by the questioner which gives you 15, or win a bounty from another user, at their cost, which can be awarded in increments of 50 up to a limit of 500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt; that you have to earn because we are focused on questions and answers, so we do not just want people commenting willy nilly. We want people to have some familiarity with the website so they know how to comment. You can read the full commentary guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The major ones are no answering in the comments (which is important, but often ignored), and to focus your comments primarily towards leaving constructive criticism, or leaving behind transient information which may be deleted later like relevant links to related resources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you might do well to read as much of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt; as you can prior to contributing because we have many similar expectations which can catch users off-guard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T13:20:45.893" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T13:20:45.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13169" CreationDate="2019-05-24T03:25:23.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the users who voted to keep the question closed, and Tonepoet's answer explains the deficiencies in the question that I too had been concerned about. There'd been fair opportunity to edit it so that it was no longer a duplicate, but I'd also been concerned that the question was trying to cover too much territory: far too broad. If you counted them, there were &lt;em&gt;nine separate questions&lt;/em&gt; in the body of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was therefore disappointed to see today that it had been reopened/undeleted but no effort had been made to address those quality issues that Tonepoet had articulated. As a result, I voted to close the reopened question for being too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm glad Mari-Lou has had the good grace to overlook the unnecessary terseness of my original answer here (a bad night's sleep is a poor excuse), and the resulting edits today have both addressed my concern about broadness and substantially improved the quality of the question, so I've retracted my VTC. And (as as encouraged to do) I've posted my &quot;null&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T15:06:25.810" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T15:06:25.810" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-24T04:07:57.760" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/483825/334589&quot;&gt;What do all the different meanings of 'as' share in common?&lt;/a&gt;, which originally finished with the three following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How did &quot;all so&quot; or &quot;so&quot; (alswa) proliferate to all these different meanings?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What semantic idea or concept underlies this polysemy/polyfunctionality?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do all these different meanings have in common?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recieved the following comment from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/167396/chappo&quot;&gt;Chappo&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Antinatalist, I notice you've been asking your questions related to this book on Literature and Writing as well. There's no problem with asking questions, but please make sure they're useful, alswa asking too many questions in the one post risks it being closed as &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed shortly thereafter with the &quot;too broad&quot; closure reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I received the following comment from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/327070/taliesinmerlin&quot;&gt;TaliesinMerlin&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question 1 is an interesting question and one I could answer. Question 2 feels odd and I don't know how to answer. Question 3 is either trivial (they have a common history in common) or unanswerable. I voted to close because the range of those three questions is too broad to answer in a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/483825/2&quot;&gt;I decided to edit out the third question from the list in an attempt to fix the question.&lt;/a&gt;  Is it narrow enough now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T17:46:10.517" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T19:45:48.973" Title="Is my question regarding all of the different meanings of 'as' fixed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13186" CreationDate="2019-05-24T05:22:59.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not quite think so. It is difficult to fix that question in terms of  it being too broad, even if you reduced it down to literally one question. The problem is with how specific the question is. The precise text of the closure reason was changed, but it used to read that we will not address questions which  could cognizably have an entire book written about them, and the help center still makes reference to this in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What Types of Questions Should I Avoid Asking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope we usually aim for is generally closer to a few paragraphs per answer, or perhaps sometimes a page's worth of information. That keeps the answers in a comprehensible form that can be easily &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/05/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;indexed by and referenced through a search engine&lt;/a&gt;. It also makes it so that it is easy enough to read the various answers and use the voting system as a means of peer review and sorting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its present state it would require us to cover more or less the entire history of the word, and  anywhere from about a little over a dozen definitions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/as&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the American Heritage Dictionary 5th edition&lt;/a&gt; to a little under three dozen different definitions by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finedictionary.com/As.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia's&lt;/a&gt; count. That is of course assuming that there is even a common theme between them &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;, and semantic drift does not always work out that way. Some elements of a word's primary meaning can be lost in contexts where it was chosen for secondary aspects, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fallacyfiles.org/etymolog.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so the most literal signification may be entirely lost by the time you get to the most recent meaning.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this will suffice for the others, but editing the question's title to &quot;What do the different senses of as generally share in common?&quot; and point one to &quot;How did 'all so' or 'so' (alswa) proliferate to these different meanings?&quot; to match might help. Once that is done, then we could make more generalized statements, and if you notice any major discrepancies, you could ask followup questions to address those by making reference to this question and noting the more specific issue in the new ones more usefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T19:45:48.973" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T19:45:48.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13191" CreationDate="2019-05-25T17:00:44.490" Score="8" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not a duplicate of the 2017 question mentioned.&lt;/strong&gt; That question was about an event on ELU alone, involving a well known (to ELU) single user, and easily comprehended.  This question is about a mysterious SE wide event, involving many sites, and causing widespread confusion across SE. &lt;strong&gt;The core of this question explicitly asks whether the event, first noticed by the OP on TGO, involved other sites. The earlier question did not ask about an SE-wide problem.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TGO info on this topic:&lt;/strong&gt;  See the answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1474/what-is-happening-with-the-recent-massive-loss-of-upvotes-affecting-many-users/1475#1475&quot;&gt;TGO Meta&lt;/a&gt; which answers, and has links to other answers, on this point, which, summarized, is &lt;em&gt;easy come, easy go.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the past day or two, I lost 75 rep on ELU and 205 rep on The Great Outdoors (TGO).  And, 15 other users on TGO lost a total 0f 3,379 rep on TGO. In all, as of a few minutes ago, the &lt;strong&gt;average loss&lt;/strong&gt; on TGO was 224 rep points for 16 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's stipulate that rep is imaginary and of no real value.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nevertheless, this widespread large rep loss seems like an anomaly, arguing that there may be a malfunction, or a malicious hacker or user -- something that should be corrected, and restitution made, if possible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rep losses were explained as &lt;em&gt;User Removed&lt;/em&gt;, which we all know is a valid reason for losing a few rep points.  However, under &lt;em&gt;Learn More&lt;/em&gt;, SE states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This removal occurs whenever a user is deleted, unless that user had a&#xA;  very high reputation score. Because high-reputation users have usually&#xA;  cast a great many votes, removing all of them could be that much more&#xA;  disruptive to other users. In such cases, the staff use a special&#xA;  deletion that preserves the votes, resulting in no reputation change.&#xA;  for those who had been voted on by that user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, let's not discuss whether rep can buy you a beer or impress a girl- or boy-friend.  Something is odd in at least TGO, and &lt;strong&gt;the object of this question is an attempt to find out if the oddness is also on other sites.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T21:18:50.897" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T21:18:50.897" Title="Have any ELU users experienced a recent large loss of rep explained as &quot;User Removed&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13189" CreationDate="2019-05-25T20:37:13.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “oddness” which the OP speaks of is network-wide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Workplace.SE someone asked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/have-lots-of-users-been-removed-recently&quot;&gt;Have lots of Users been Removed recently?&lt;/a&gt; dated May 19 2019&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past few days, I've seen a few notifications that &amp;quot;User was removed&amp;quot; in my Achievements list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some removed points, some added points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume I would see only a single &amp;quot;User was removed&amp;quot; message per user? So should I conclude that at least 3 users were recently removed for some reason? And if so, is some sort of program going on now to remove users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another User removed today. Very odd. I hadn't seen any removals for years. Now four in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica Cellio, a mod, posted this answer [emphasis in bold mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no program from the moderators' side. Sometimes users request deletion of their accounts, and there are thresholds above which those requests require human review by a community manager. This is particularly true for accounts that have voted a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm speculating, but &lt;strong&gt;I suspect the CMs review requests in batches or on a set schedule, which could lead to several events in proximity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each notification reports the reputation change caused by one deleted user. Moderators aren't privy why users request deletion, nor do we know which users were deleted unless we come across posts that now contain user numbers instead of profile links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, hot from Meta.SE press, comes this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/328674/223820&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (snippet) from Animuson♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voting fraud being involved is only one of the most common reasons that we would refuse to preserve votes. It is not the only reason, and voting fraud existing doesn't even always mean we would refuse - it's just incredibly likely that we would refuse. So to everyone: &lt;strong&gt;Please do not assume that votes not being preserved was due to voting fraud.&lt;/strong&gt; It is not always true.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/328650/223820&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; by @Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog, one of Meta's most assiduous users and contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T20:37:13.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-26T02:13:31.067" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/499706/what-is-the-world-that-best-completes-the-sentence-and-why-please&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what is the world that best completes the sentence and why please&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there are those .... the world cup is a month of volcanic excitement&#xA;  and others who see it simply as alot of quadriennal balls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A/of whom B/for whose C/whom for D/whose for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is it asking for us to do the OP's work, it's a defective question (or defectively copied).  This is an incredibly common occurrence on EL&amp;amp;U.  There needs to be a straight-forward way to close these outright (rather than have to route them off to E2L or say &quot;lacks research&quot; or some such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T12:33:37.413" Title="Could we maybe have a &quot;stupid test&quot; closing code?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2019-05-26T03:06:47.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210314/categories-other-than-off-topic-should-allow-custom-close-reasons&quot;&gt;We are limited to three local closure reasons&lt;/a&gt; in the off-topic submenu, and we are using all three. If we want to add a homework/testing close reason, then one of the Research, Single Word Request or Proof Reading closure reasons needs to be deleted. I do not think homework questions are common enough to merit that at this point in time, especially since we decided to accept homework questions sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it should be noted that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/how-to-deal-with-homework-questions&quot;&gt;although homework questions are allowed, they are only allowed conditionally and that we do have standards for homework questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have three network-wide closure reasons, unclear what you are asking, primarily opinion based and too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rarer reasons a post may violate to meet the website's requisites for a post, you should use the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; write in option and leave a comment regarding why, preferably with a link to the established policies, and an explanation regarding what might be done to bring the question into compliance with the site's minimal requisites, if even conceivably possible. Leaving a link to the established policy helps others know why they should help you close the question, and they'll see your closure reason in the menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thorough explanation is especially necessary so in these cases since the other closure reason only leaves a generic &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; message that links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;the help center's scope&lt;/a&gt;, which does not currently mention our homework standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T13:26:51.403" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T13:26:51.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2019-05-26T07:18:59.247" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about off topic; other; and then explain—e.g., “answers not suitable to question” or “question not clear.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the instant case, with three typos in the question and likely one word transposition in the answers, this is casual to the point of expecting others to provide not only the answers but the question as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No added categories are needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T07:18:59.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="526" CreationDate="2019-05-26T16:06:10.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On some sites, ads are shown above the question (&quot;top leaderboard&quot;), beneath the question (&quot;mid-page leaderboard&quot;), and in the sidebar; these are the ads that are affected by the &quot;reduced ads&quot; privilege. However, ELU doesn't have these ads so there is no privilege to remove them. (It's also relevant to note that meta sites never have ads, even if the main site does.) See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11217/191178&quot;&gt;my answer here&lt;/a&gt; for more information about advertising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that we could get ads in the future. Some sites right now are in the process of getting ads, even though they're not technology sites (which is where the ads have been up to this point). The process for those sites will go something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, there's a testing phase, which will be announced with a meta post. During this phase, it seems to be just Stack Overflow for Teams ads that are being shown. It also doesn't seem to be possible for advertisers to buy ads for sites that are testing advertisements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://money.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2713&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, the reduced ads privilege will likely be available on those specific sites after they finish doing the testing. (Probably when it becomes possible for advertisers to buy ads.)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case it's not obvious, the thresholds for privileges are based off your total rep, so you will be able to get the privilege immediately if you have 200 or more rep on that site. (I don't remember when this site last got new privileges, but Stack Overflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/356564/6083675&quot;&gt;briefly had new privileges with Documentation&lt;/a&gt; that made this obvious.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T16:06:10.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T00:33:29.760" Score="8" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOTE: MY USE OF MIGRATION AS A TERM IS INACCURATE IN THE QUESTION, SEE MY ANSWER OR COLLEEN’S ANSWER FOR MORE ACCURATE APPLICATION OF THE ALGORITHM.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a followup post to my last post (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13152/artificial-intelligence-to-detect-ell-worthy-questions&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence to Detect ELL worthy questions&lt;/a&gt;) where I asked about the feasibility of making a machine learning algorithm to offer suggestions to migrate certain questions to our sister site, ELL, given that there are plenty of answers that should have gone, but remain. (in the future this can be extended to an algorithm that detects hw questions, lazy questions etc, but this is beyond the scope of this post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the subject generated debate, I have taken liberty to use Colleen's generously provided query as a basis to train an ML pseudo-Bayesian model as an attempt to provide a proof of concept for you guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, note that I am not a mathematician, nor am I a statistician or a data scientist, I'm a bloke with too much spare time on his hands. As a result, I used the most rudimentary of techniques, and modified a Bayesian classifier algorithm to work with the limited data set that I have, and my own technical limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, this is how this algorithm works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I took a practice sample of questions that were positively received on ELU, and counted word frequencies. (sample size approx 3k)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I took a practice sample of questions that were migrated to ELL and positively received there, and counted word frequencies. (sample size approx 3k)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I selected a random test sample of questions (the ones you see below) from ELU, and the algorithm, using a modified version of Bayes Classification, compared the words in each question in the test sample, to both practice samples. The score was determined based on which practice set it resembled more. A higher score for a question meant my algorithm deemed it resembled migrated questions more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, the algorithm sorted the questions based on score. Therefore, the ones that appear first have low &quot;ELL migratability scores&quot; and are more suited to this website. As you go further in the questions, you will notice they get more suitable for ELL, or even closure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I chose the 25% as a potential arbitrary cutoff point, where the ones above above are ELU standard, and those below are more likely ELL. This is just a guess, and you will find questions of both types on both ends of the fence, as mentioned in the comments. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you agree that the algorithm did a good job in finding a general gradient pattern for the eligibility of migration, albeit a few odd choices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without further ado, the rankings of my test sample (from most ELU to most ELL): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314221&quot;&gt;314221&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310252&quot;&gt;310252&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308130&quot;&gt;308130&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309133&quot;&gt;309133&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499455&quot;&gt;499455&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/305003&quot;&gt;305003&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310769&quot;&gt;310769&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499265&quot;&gt;499265&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300221&quot;&gt;300221&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310832&quot;&gt;310832&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307706&quot;&gt;307706&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309252&quot;&gt;309252&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300478&quot;&gt;300478&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309577&quot;&gt;309577&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302802&quot;&gt;302802&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304714&quot;&gt;304714&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/305169&quot;&gt;305169&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304639&quot;&gt;304639&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307852&quot;&gt;307852&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/301554&quot;&gt;301554&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307789&quot;&gt;307789&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302209&quot;&gt;302209&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499522&quot;&gt;499522&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308004&quot;&gt;308004&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307748&quot;&gt;307748&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307459&quot;&gt;307459&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499714&quot;&gt;499714&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/303864&quot;&gt;303864&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307555&quot;&gt;307555&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499348&quot;&gt;499348&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/301579&quot;&gt;301579&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302328&quot;&gt;302328&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302507&quot;&gt;302507&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309586&quot;&gt;309586&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499164&quot;&gt;499164&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310768&quot;&gt;310768&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310803&quot;&gt;310803&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302117&quot;&gt;302117&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499608&quot;&gt;499608&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304679&quot;&gt;304679&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499598&quot;&gt;499598&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/301556&quot;&gt;301556&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304316&quot;&gt;304316&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302478&quot;&gt;302478&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304397&quot;&gt;304397&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309749&quot;&gt;309749&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499588&quot;&gt;499588&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300596&quot;&gt;300596&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309484&quot;&gt;309484&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309070&quot;&gt;309070&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302908&quot;&gt;302908&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/305074&quot;&gt;305074&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499435&quot;&gt;499435&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/303861&quot;&gt;303861&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307493&quot;&gt;307493&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304551&quot;&gt;304551&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/301446&quot;&gt;301446&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309373&quot;&gt;309373&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300015&quot;&gt;300015&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310853&quot;&gt;310853&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/312053&quot;&gt;312053&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309752&quot;&gt;309752&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/311955&quot;&gt;311955&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499591&quot;&gt;499591&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499663&quot;&gt;499663&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499179&quot;&gt;499179&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499557&quot;&gt;499557&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300510&quot;&gt;300510&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300056&quot;&gt;300056&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309543&quot;&gt;309543&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499301&quot;&gt;499301&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307534&quot;&gt;307534&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309825&quot;&gt;309825&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/303854&quot;&gt;303854&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304886&quot;&gt;304886&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304948&quot;&gt;304948&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302531&quot;&gt;302531&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499097&quot;&gt;499097&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499278&quot;&gt;499278&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499613&quot;&gt;499613&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307806&quot;&gt;307806&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309518&quot;&gt;309518&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499515&quot;&gt;499515&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499644&quot;&gt;499644&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499465&quot;&gt;499465&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499698&quot;&gt;499698&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310811&quot;&gt;310811&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499271&quot;&gt;499271&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499587&quot;&gt;499587&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499239&quot;&gt;499239&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308371&quot;&gt;308371&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/301853&quot;&gt;301853&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300305&quot;&gt;300305&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300419&quot;&gt;300419&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304125&quot;&gt;304125&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499601&quot;&gt;499601&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499527&quot;&gt;499527&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499676&quot;&gt;499676&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304983&quot;&gt;304983&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/312102&quot;&gt;312102&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499554&quot;&gt;499554&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499643&quot;&gt;499643&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499500&quot;&gt;499500&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314249&quot;&gt;314249&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499567&quot;&gt;499567&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304080&quot;&gt;304080&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302832&quot;&gt;302832&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310234&quot;&gt;310234&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304013&quot;&gt;304013&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499253&quot;&gt;499253&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499211&quot;&gt;499211&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499339&quot;&gt;499339&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300498&quot;&gt;300498&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308476&quot;&gt;308476&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307837&quot;&gt;307837&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310619&quot;&gt;310619&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499657&quot;&gt;499657&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307436&quot;&gt;307436&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304567&quot;&gt;304567&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499518&quot;&gt;499518&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304109&quot;&gt;304109&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499316&quot;&gt;499316&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499540&quot;&gt;499540&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499548&quot;&gt;499548&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309069&quot;&gt;309069&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499571&quot;&gt;499571&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499020&quot;&gt;499020&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a 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href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499224&quot;&gt;499224&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499356&quot;&gt;499356&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499199&quot;&gt;499199&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499066&quot;&gt;499066&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300095&quot;&gt;300095&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499351&quot;&gt;499351&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307938&quot;&gt;307938&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499648&quot;&gt;499648&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499590&quot;&gt;499590&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499623&quot;&gt;499623&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499519&quot;&gt;499519&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499189&quot;&gt;499189&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309318&quot;&gt;309318&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499402&quot;&gt;499402&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499421&quot;&gt;499421&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499262&quot;&gt;499262&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499429&quot;&gt;499429&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499706&quot;&gt;499706&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300317&quot;&gt;300317&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499460&quot;&gt;499460&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499679&quot;&gt;499679&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499085&quot;&gt;499085&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310636&quot;&gt;310636&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499147&quot;&gt;499147&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499568&quot;&gt;499568&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499219&quot;&gt;499219&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310631&quot;&gt;310631&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499382&quot;&gt;499382&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304529&quot;&gt;304529&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/311933&quot;&gt;311933&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309693&quot;&gt;309693&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499256&quot;&gt;499256&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/306279&quot;&gt;306279&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302748&quot;&gt;302748&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499373&quot;&gt;499373&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/306157&quot;&gt;306157&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499578&quot;&gt;499578&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499251&quot;&gt;499251&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499041&quot;&gt;499041&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310627&quot;&gt;310627&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499297&quot;&gt;499297&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304341&quot;&gt;304341&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499016&quot;&gt;499016&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499190&quot;&gt;499190&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300516&quot;&gt;300516&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499551&quot;&gt;499551&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499456&quot;&gt;499456&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499222&quot;&gt;499222&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499314&quot;&gt;499314&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499035&quot;&gt;499035&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499193&quot;&gt;499193&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304248&quot;&gt;304248&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499439&quot;&gt;499439&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499383&quot;&gt;499383&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499099&quot;&gt;499099&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310298&quot;&gt;310298&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300120&quot;&gt;300120&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302610&quot;&gt;302610&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300324&quot;&gt;300324&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302250&quot;&gt;302250&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499669&quot;&gt;499669&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307865&quot;&gt;307865&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499090&quot;&gt;499090&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304824&quot;&gt;304824&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308138&quot;&gt;308138&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309718&quot;&gt;309718&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499666&quot;&gt;499666&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314316&quot;&gt;314316&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499662&quot;&gt;499662&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310313&quot;&gt;310313&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499220&quot;&gt;499220&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/312081&quot;&gt;312081&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499536&quot;&gt;499536&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499472&quot;&gt;499472&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499427&quot;&gt;499427&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302095&quot;&gt;302095&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308046&quot;&gt;308046&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/311867&quot;&gt;311867&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499615&quot;&gt;499615&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499555&quot;&gt;499555&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499417&quot;&gt;499417&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499675&quot;&gt;499675&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/306331&quot;&gt;306331&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/314213&quot;&gt;314213&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300417&quot;&gt;300417&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499284&quot;&gt;499284&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/303920&quot;&gt;303920&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304697&quot;&gt;304697&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307730&quot;&gt;307730&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499504&quot;&gt;499504&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499664&quot;&gt;499664&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499238&quot;&gt;499238&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499116&quot;&gt;499116&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499559&quot;&gt;499559&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499244&quot;&gt;499244&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499057&quot;&gt;499057&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300210&quot;&gt;300210&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499207&quot;&gt;499207&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499102&quot;&gt;499102&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499653&quot;&gt;499653&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499690&quot;&gt;499690&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499641&quot;&gt;499641&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499318&quot;&gt;499318&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499089&quot;&gt;499089&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499625&quot;&gt;499625&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499616&quot;&gt;499616&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304274&quot;&gt;304274&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499046&quot;&gt;499046&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309281&quot;&gt;309281&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499660&quot;&gt;499660&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499539&quot;&gt;499539&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499650&quot;&gt;499650&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304751&quot;&gt;304751&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499392&quot;&gt;499392&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304281&quot;&gt;304281&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499100&quot;&gt;499100&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499010&quot;&gt;499010&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499570&quot;&gt;499570&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499646&quot;&gt;499646&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499300&quot;&gt;499300&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499115&quot;&gt;499115&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499537&quot;&gt;499537&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499358&quot;&gt;499358&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499394&quot;&gt;499394&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499404&quot;&gt;499404&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499261&quot;&gt;499261&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499561&quot;&gt;499561&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499487&quot;&gt;499487&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499523&quot;&gt;499523&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499137&quot;&gt;499137&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499408&quot;&gt;499408&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499194&quot;&gt;499194&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499079&quot;&gt;499079&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499445&quot;&gt;499445&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499649&quot;&gt;499649&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;25th PERCENTILE POSSIBLE REJECTION POINT&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300092&quot;&gt;300092&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499218&quot;&gt;499218&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499697&quot;&gt;499697&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499560&quot;&gt;499560&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499491&quot;&gt;499491&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499149&quot;&gt;499149&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/302628&quot;&gt;302628&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499260&quot;&gt;499260&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499312&quot;&gt;499312&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300334&quot;&gt;300334&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499120&quot;&gt;499120&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499014&quot;&gt;499014&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499076&quot;&gt;499076&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499467&quot;&gt;499467&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499709&quot;&gt;499709&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499545&quot;&gt;499545&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/303804&quot;&gt;303804&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/300187&quot;&gt;300187&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499299&quot;&gt;499299&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499604&quot;&gt;499604&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308668&quot;&gt;308668&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499032&quot;&gt;499032&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499634&quot;&gt;499634&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/304387&quot;&gt;304387&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499520&quot;&gt;499520&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499175&quot;&gt;499175&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499257&quot;&gt;499257&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499173&quot;&gt;499173&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499213&quot;&gt;499213&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499345&quot;&gt;499345&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/303928&quot;&gt;303928&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499201&quot;&gt;499201&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499618&quot;&gt;499618&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499067&quot;&gt;499067&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499438&quot;&gt;499438&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499680&quot;&gt;499680&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499371&quot;&gt;499371&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499324&quot;&gt;499324&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309434&quot;&gt;309434&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499672&quot;&gt;499672&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499547&quot;&gt;499547&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499051&quot;&gt;499051&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499483&quot;&gt;499483&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499529&quot;&gt;499529&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499186&quot;&gt;499186&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307526&quot;&gt;307526&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499379&quot;&gt;499379&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499400&quot;&gt;499400&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499678&quot;&gt;499678&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499132&quot;&gt;499132&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310217&quot;&gt;310217&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499549&quot;&gt;499549&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499336&quot;&gt;499336&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499619&quot;&gt;499619&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499677&quot;&gt;499677&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499127&quot;&gt;499127&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499639&quot;&gt;499639&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499168&quot;&gt;499168&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499661&quot;&gt;499661&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499287&quot;&gt;499287&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499342&quot;&gt;499342&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499056&quot;&gt;499056&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499283&quot;&gt;499283&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499694&quot;&gt;499694&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499015&quot;&gt;499015&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499635&quot;&gt;499635&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499626&quot;&gt;499626&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499340&quot;&gt;499340&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499229&quot;&gt;499229&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499236&quot;&gt;499236&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499575&quot;&gt;499575&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499444&quot;&gt;499444&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499452&quot;&gt;499452&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499044&quot;&gt;499044&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499338&quot;&gt;499338&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499655&quot;&gt;499655&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499163&quot;&gt;499163&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499624&quot;&gt;499624&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499528&quot;&gt;499528&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/309813&quot;&gt;309813&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499424&quot;&gt;499424&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499171&quot;&gt;499171&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499288&quot;&gt;499288&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499328&quot;&gt;499328&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499565&quot;&gt;499565&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499092&quot;&gt;499092&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499185&quot;&gt;499185&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499167&quot;&gt;499167&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499172&quot;&gt;499172&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/307553&quot;&gt;307553&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499152&quot;&gt;499152&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499387&quot;&gt;499387&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499033&quot;&gt;499033&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499322&quot;&gt;499322&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499329&quot;&gt;499329&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499031&quot;&gt;499031&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499162&quot;&gt;499162&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/308567&quot;&gt;308567&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499370&quot;&gt;499370&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499461&quot;&gt;499461&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499482&quot;&gt;499482&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499027&quot;&gt;499027&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499309&quot;&gt;499309&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499048&quot;&gt;499048&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499148&quot;&gt;499148&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499538&quot;&gt;499538&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/310614&quot;&gt;310614&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499535&quot;&gt;499535&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499249&quot;&gt;499249&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499508&quot;&gt;499508&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499055&quot;&gt;499055&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499713&quot;&gt;499713&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499259&quot;&gt;499259&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499183&quot;&gt;499183&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499001&quot;&gt;499001&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499691&quot;&gt;499691&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499248&quot;&gt;499248&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499117&quot;&gt;499117&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499692&quot;&gt;499692&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;++ Please note that I do not have a defined plan with what to do with questions detected by the tool, my only claim is that most of the questions below the 25% mark are not suitable for ELU. While I see they are better on ELL, some decided they should be closed. We agree on one thing: they do not belong on this site. And it is alarming that 25% of randomly selected questions do not belong here. That is why I decided to launch this idea in the first place&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253203" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T11:15:15.350" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T15:53:59.797" Title="Follow up to AI to detect ELL migratable questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13198" CreationDate="2019-05-29T12:19:58.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very cool way to detect questions that should be put on hold, but not a great way to detect questions that should be migrated. The problem is a good measure of “well received”. Both sites’ communities love to answer word or idiom requests, and those often hit the HNQ, so the amount of engagement with them tends to not correlate with how valuable they are to the site. Questions that make it into the close queue, and therefore become candidates for migration tend to be low quality. I’m not sure we have the data for whether the migration was controversial or not, but that might be another data point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would make sense to select exemplary questions from each site for the training data instead of migrated questions. We have a post with some &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4584/9161&quot;&gt;examples of questions with good detail on ELL’s meta&lt;/a&gt;. Any question similar to those would be welcomed. Maybe it would make sense to look at how many times a question was added to someone’s favorites? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we don’t want migrated are questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499014/80039&quot;&gt;Listening is to hearing as learning is to?&lt;/a&gt; There’s no explanation of what the author has thought of as a possible answer. The author isn’t new to Stack Exchange and should know how to ask by now. They appear to be very fluent in English based on their other questions. We don’t want those sort of questions migrated, &lt;strong&gt;especially when the author isn’t in our target audience&lt;/strong&gt; (people learning English as a foreign language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2670/9161&quot;&gt;older discussion of migrations on ELL’s meta&lt;/a&gt; where I left some examples of good and bad (in my opinion) migration candidates. At the time J.R. had a more lenient view than I did on low quality migrations if the user was new to Stack Exchange. I am less opposed to migration of low quality questions for new users, but I think directing them to ELL instead of migrating their question goes more smoothly. Migration can be confusing for new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:19:58.777" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13198" CreationDate="2019-05-30T10:49:59.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been a privilege to have the opportunity to engage in debate with you guys, and I thank you for giving me your time. After fruitful discussion, I have learned more about what exactly it means to migrate a question, and this might need us to re-examine the scope, and training set, of such an intelligence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one of you pointed out, I do not have much reputation here, but I still think I can make a few observations that most would agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The unsuitable questions for the ELU site come from 3 distinct classes:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fluent English speakers who ask poorly-researched questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Language Learners who ask well-researched questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English language Learners who ask poorly-researched questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a 4th class of Fluent English speakers asking relevant, well-researched questions, but that is obviously within the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The methods of dealing with the three classes?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Class 1: Closure/Hold&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Class 2: Migration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Class 3: This one is tricky. As many of you stated, we cannot just move the question; it does not meet ELL standards. At the same time, the user is a language learner, and we do him/her no favor by not redirecting him to the site that he seeks. Even if his question is poor, the user's content is in line with ELL. If a question asked a bad programming question here, we wouldn't migrate his question to stack overflow, we would redirect him there. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The problems?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a large quantity questions of all classes 1,2, and 3. A shocking amount are not being closed/migrated/put on hold, and are receiving several answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a large amount of new users (1 reppies) coming in and asking questions of class 3. Closing their questions does not solve their problems; rather they must, as people, be redirected to ELL because that's what they are seeking. Over there, they will learn how to meet their question standards.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What the algorithm ended up doing:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The algorithm was trained using two data sets, one with questions from from class 2, the other with questions from and class 4. It cannot distinguish between class 1 and class 4 questions, nor can it distinguish between class 3 and class 2 questions . In essence, the algorithm, in its current state, judges strictly how likely the speaker is to be a native or a learner. It cannot tell whether the question is formulated for either site, as you may have noticed. And I think it did a good job at sorting these questions based on where the user more likely belongs, barring a few odd choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion and proposed solutions, based on what we discussed:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A modified algorithm has potential to be put to work in forming review queues, easing the burden from the community (Colleen and Mitch). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As I mentioned before, and as you can see in the results, the algorithm can currently separate the questions into two pools: classes 1,4  and classes 2,3. The questions from class 2 belong on ELL, and so do their askers. The questions fromm class 3 do not belong on ELL, but their askers are learners, and thus do belong to ELL. Therefore, the algorithm effectively distinguishes not between good and bad questions, but between user English proficiency.  So I propose that when a user is preparing to send a question, the algorithm checks it. If it deems that the English of the question is more in line with a learner's level, it simply informs him of the ELL site, leaving the choice to the user. I think this could be a huge solution to the flood of new users who are actually seeking the ELL. We do them no favor by closing their questions; a wizard to help them reach the ELL before they even send their question would do everyone a great favor. Of course, a native English speaker who the AI erroneously perceives to be a learner can just dismiss the message.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both solutions keep the HITL, and take into consideration the level of the user, and the research of the question. What is to  be implemented, I leave to the community to decide. I'm not aware how implementation happens here, but when/if you're ready, I'll happily release the algorithms and do my part in the process.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253203" LastEditorUserId="253203" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T17:37:50.537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T17:37:50.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-01T00:08:24.150" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144639/generic-term-for-sunrise-and-sunset&quot;&gt;Generic term for sunrise and sunset&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350270" OwnerDisplayName="user84614" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T00:40:01.990" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T00:40:01.990" Title="Why can’t I answer my first question" Tags="|discussion|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-06-01T08:39:00.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13201" CreationDate="2019-06-01T00:39:25.293" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can now. I’ve unprotected it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T00:39:25.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13143" CreationDate="2019-06-01T18:50:03.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462860/what-page-are-you-working-on&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt; that the OP of &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; meta question linked to is a very poor question.  (This meta question is fine.) I am usually creative on editing to make a poor question passable, but I see no option here other than:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o Briefly answer in a comment, as an act of mercy to the OP.  Non-native speakers deserve all the help we can give them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o Then, immediately VTC.  No matter who wrote the linked question, a question so poor should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly an English linguist could transform the linked question into a deep and subtle question, but if so, it should have happened by now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just voted to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T23:27:34.407" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T23:27:34.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-01T20:20:38.633" Score="6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, we have seen a spate of cross-posted questions on ELL and EL&amp;amp;U (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/500476/you-havent-felt-the-fire-had-a-little-fun-hadnt-had-a-smile-in-a-little-whil&quot;&gt;such as this one on EL&amp;amp;U)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the frustration of a new user looking for an immediate answer to their question, but as we all know it does not work that way here. Posting on either site requires a certain patience,&#xA;yet many newbies  seem to have  to have such  an urgent problem which, if not answered in the first hour, well... they go off looking for alternatives. And sometimes that comes back to the english.SE in 2 or 3 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are possibly a little unique on SE: we have a split personality. Usually,  most new users come here first, and are only directed to ELL when it is obvious that their issue is too basic for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, sometimes new users post on ELL first, and when they do not get an immediate response they start banging away at the keyboard in desperation, looking for an answer. For most internet surfers, that's the way things usually work and they end up here on the main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6790/cross-posting-simultaneously-on-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;some opinions on the topic of cross-posting,&lt;/a&gt; most notably from Jeff Atwood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing cross-posting is a slippery slope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you might have slightly better odds of getting an answer by posting it on two sites, well, by gum, why not maximize your odds by posting it on twenty sites!&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some questions which fall into grey areas between sites, and I think it's OK to ask and delete, then re-ask if you feel you have asked on the wrong site.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as a general rule, do not cross-post questions, please. Pick a site and go with it.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site, cross-posting is more than discouraged: it seems to be a reason for closing. [Sorry cannot post a screen shot of the close reasons as they get deleted on close]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a number of exchanges of comments on the topic (Jason Bassford, Janus Bahs Jacquet,and others) I found this to be more pertinent from Mary-Lou A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Cascabel the thing is, the same question could be posted if the OP hasn't received any answers on the older post but they shouldn't hide this information AND they should wait at least two days before cross posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users are active on both sites;  and they seem to be most aware of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is cross-posted on the same day on both sites, Which gets closed first? The first with no answers, the one most apt for the site...and who makes that judgement? Not everyone participates on both sites, so it seems that on EL&amp;amp;U we are closing based on the cross-post in ELL... but is that the best approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[BTW] Most users are probably not aware of it, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11802/does-ell-migrate-questions-to-elu?rq=1&quot;&gt;ELL users CANNOT vote to migrate to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T17:47:55.087" Title="Cross-posting on ELL: which to close first?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13204" CreationDate="2019-06-01T23:31:45.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't very important which is closed first. It's more important that each question and answer community moderate according to its own scope as to what's on topic there and so forth.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff Atwood's slippery slope argument isn't very persuasive. &quot;Why not maximize your odds by posting it on twenty sites?&quot; Indeed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IRL do we never solicit opinions from more than one point of view?  Should technology not extend that reach as well as the opportunity of a community of interested human beings to voluntarily curate, moderate and ― most importantly ― respond. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many newbies seem to have to have such an urgent problem &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great to worry less about a poster's motivation and focus on whether posts are good, on-topic questions to which good answers can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163056" LastEditorUserId="163056" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T17:47:55.087" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T17:47:55.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13204" CreationDate="2019-06-02T01:39:30.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest flagging it for moderator attention and letting them sort it out. Normal users do not have the tools necessary to ensure that the closure sticks on a website even after it is decided which website should host the question, but moderators do, such as locking, question deletion that sticks and possibly even suspension for users who are especially uncooperative. They should also be intimately familiar with the scope of their own website, and consult with moderators of the other website to determine which website is best. Once they decide, they can immediately reopen one question and delete the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, cross-posting questions is bad for more or less the same reason duplicates are usually bad, so I do think one of the questions should be closed. The one that remains open should be the one that is better suited to the website it was posted at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that determination is too hard to make, then I suggest closing it here as soon as possible for at least a couple of reasons. One is that it is the preference already expressed in our research standard, and we can consider it as if the questioner had already considered that their question suits E.L.L.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done, &lt;strong&gt;or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other, we do not have a split personality. It is more like we have a sibling. Indeed, people often call E.L.L. our sister site. The point here is that E.L.L. is fully autonomous, and even if we would like them to close first, we can not force them to do so, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068&quot;&gt;even if we remind them that our patron/father Stack Exchange forbade his daughters from engaging in polygamous relationships&lt;/a&gt;. Adherence to the rules is each website's own responsibility to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question ends up closed on both websites for this reason, then it really is not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; big of a loss.  Closure exists in part so that we have the time to address any problems a question may have, so it gives us time to consider which website would be better at addressing the question before it is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Always flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider which website the question is better on yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is too close of a call to make, then vote to close it here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2019-06-03T04:27:17.580" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T04:27:17.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13143" CreationDate="2019-06-02T02:14:44.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unable to evaluate this particular question. Generally speaking though, it is not important that the question has been bumped by the bot. Just treat them like you would any other question. Also, keep in mind that Stack Exchange is primarily concerned with the long haul, so questions are not meant to be buried and never seen again. If the bot occasionally nudges a question it is really no big deal in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might disagree, which is fine, but do keep in mind that this is probably happening because &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/03/the-horror-of-no-answer-revival-and-necromancer/&quot;&gt;questions that have posted answers that have no votes are basically considered unanswered questions, because it has not yet been found to have a satisfactory answer by anybody.&lt;/a&gt; If none of the answers are satisfactory, then you might want to try answering it yourself, if you can. There is a pretty good chance that questioners might appreciate the effort, and given that these are unpopular questions you might find that you have more time to research an answer for submission than you would with a freshly asked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T02:14:44.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-02T03:26:41.460" Score="-1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does form not offer &quot;other&quot; or sumsuch option when flagging a Question for a mod to move?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I choose &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;, if it's not obvious how a question about Latin inflection relates to English. That's not the problem. It's just that I keep looking for a minute whether my mobile display is hiding the missing option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326936" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T12:58:36.557" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T13:34:48.140" Title="Flag &gt; Should be closed &gt; Off-topic &gt; Belongs on another SE site &gt; Meta or ELL; but no other option" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13209" CreationDate="2019-06-02T11:32:19.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's true that for users with less than 3000 rep (or 500 on beta sites), &amp;quot;Other&amp;quot; is not available as an option for a &lt;strong&gt;flag,&lt;/strong&gt; whereas it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a close-vote option above the rep threshold. The only people who can deal with &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; flags are moderators, so you need to use the &amp;quot;moderator attention&amp;quot; reason. There aren't usually two routes provided to a particular action. Flags are dealt with by moderators (on the whole), so since you can't vote to migrate you can only ask moderators to have a look at the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, once you gain the reputation to vote to close questions (rather than merely flag), you do get the &amp;quot;Other&amp;quot; option and can write in a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be closed by casting close votes if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are sufficiently similar to existing questions and would be answered identically to them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are unclear, too broad, or otherwise problematic to identifying the problem in a way that can be properly addressed by answerers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are sufficiently off-topic, as outlined in the help center.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that once you gain the reputation to vote to close, you should no longer flag for moderator attention to have questions closed or migrated. It is your responsibility to vote now. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.superuser.com/questions/3154/how-should-my-flagging-change-when-i-gain-the-ability-to-vote-to-close&quot;&gt;How should my flagging change when I gain the ability to vote to close?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That implies that if you cannot vote to close, you should flag for moderator attention instead. That should offer you a write-in box for your reason for flagging: please be as specific as possible. Note that even the full vote-to-close options do not include any other sites except ELL and Meta.ELU, so if you believe a question should go to a different site you will still need to raise a flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T13:34:48.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13227" CreationDate="2019-06-02T12:19:18.407" Score="9" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came upon a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/351813/interesting-vs-fascinating&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt; that suggested there was a simple answer to the question &quot;What is the specific difference between 'fascinating' and 'interesting'?&quot;. The question was closed as off-topic because the question &quot;could be answered using commonly-available references&quot;. When I looked at my dictionary (OED) I got a completely different and contradictory perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas &quot;fascinating&quot; could be distinguished from &quot;interesting&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fascinating&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge dictionary&lt;/a&gt; merely by a difference in intensity, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provided histories of usage of the words which distinguished them by connotation and a more accurate (in my opinion) description of usage. For instance, meanings of &quot;interesting&quot; in the OED dealt somewhat generally with being invested in something and being curious or excited by while meanings of &quot;fascinating&quot; dealt historically with notions of bewitchment and spellbound attraction. &quot;Fascinating&quot; could be simplified to appear to simply be a more intense version of the word &quot;interesting&quot;, but the connotations are clearly different contextually. The words have different flavors, just as words tend never to be perfect synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I came across this question, the closed stackexchange thread was the first result I came across, but it was entirely unsatisfactory to me. I was frustrated that the question of why someone might think these words were different was being dismissed as too simple, when it would only take someone with a modicum of access to expensive reference texts to find fascinating or interesting answers to the question and differences beyond mere intensity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of these &quot;what is the difference between 'X' and 'Y'?&quot; questions have much more valuable answers than can be found using commonly available references. The OED is not commonly available and I only have access to it as a university student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;commonly available&quot; references are conclusive substitutes to the extent that they shut down questions, isn't the ELU stackexchange implicitly limiting its scope in answering these questions to content which is already available and not generating new and better answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350377" OwnerDisplayName="Dawson Baker" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T07:12:41.983" Title="Are &quot;commonly available&quot; reference dictionaries too simplistic to answer questions on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13213" CreationDate="2019-06-03T19:58:41.917" Score="10" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7998/deleting-answers-with-a-positive-rep-balance&quot;&gt;Deleting answers with a positive rep balance&lt;/a&gt;, which popped up in the Meta queue today, reminded me of a question I've long had about deleted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, some background. When a moderator (or automated mechanism) deletes a question and its associated answers, site participants who posted now-deleted answers to that question may receive two forms of notification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your answer has received net reputation points (for example, it might have received one upvote and one downvote, meaning that the net vote total is 0 but the net rep count is +8), notice of the change in reputation will show up—temporarily—in the daily reputation change listing on the reputation tab of the activity page of your user profile. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not your answer received any upvotes, it will appear—again temporarily—in a list headed &quot;Deleted recent answers,&quot; which you can find by clicking the 'deleted recent answers' link at the bottom of the list of answers that appears in the Answer tab of the activity page of your user profile. As far as I can tell, EL&amp;amp;U does not call your attention to such deletions in instances where your answer received neither upvotes nor downvotes; you just have to check &quot;Deleted recent answers&quot; periodically to find out that the deletions occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how long a recently deleted answer remains visible on the &quot;Deleted recent answers&quot; page, but the duration seems to be brief. For example, on May 26, two questions that I had answered got deleted and, at first, appeared in my &quot;Deleted recent answers&quot; page; but when I checked that page today (eight days later), the listings were already gone. More mysteriously, the entry on my rep page for May 26—which had initially noted a net loss of 16 rep points (reflecting one upvote and one downvote for each of the two deleted answers)—vanished within a couple of days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think what purpose the very brief tenancy of deleted answers on the &quot;Recently deleted answers&quot; page serves beyond meeting some minimum standard of notice to the poster, followed by disappearing the answers down the memory hole out of respect for the principle of &quot;out of sight, out of mind.&quot; But perhaps, from the perspective of the powers that be, even that level of notice is a courtesy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for the &quot;Deleted recent answers&quot; page and the daily reputation change page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is actually about all of my answers that people (other than me) or automated routines have deleted over the years. Some of those answers were (I thought) pretty good, and I would like to be able to review them to see whether I couldn't rework them in response to a question less flawed than the one that got deleted—or perhaps to attempt to rehabilitate certain deleted questions themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does EL&amp;amp;U archive the content of deleted questions (and their associated answers) following their deletion, or do those questions and their answers—and the record of their ever having existed—simply disappear into the ether? If the questions and answers still exist somewhere on the EL&amp;amp;U servers, is there any way for me to obtain a linked list of my lost answers? Basically, I'm asking for an &quot;All deleted answers&quot; list to supplement or replace the &quot;Recent deleted answers&quot; list that already exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T12:50:55.850" Title="Where can I find a linked list of my answers to deleted questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13212" CreationDate="2019-06-03T20:05:34.510" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the special search term &quot;deleted:yes&quot; along with &quot;is:answer&quot; should return a complete list of your deleted answer posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/298842/306255&quot;&gt;this Meta SE post&lt;/a&gt;, this search option is only available to users who have enough reputation to acquire the &quot;View deleted posts&quot; privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how much reputation you have, deleted posts that aren't yours won't show up as search results (unless you are a diamond moderator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T20:05:34.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-04T21:58:02.813" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new member.  Can I answer an unanswered closed question?  If so, how?  I have an answer for a closed unanswered question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350617" OwnerDisplayName="Ray Knowles" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T22:03:02.143" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T13:38:04.910" Title="About closed questions" Tags="|support|closed-questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-05T01:55:21.600" Score="-1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/499608/is-there-any-verb-for-making-a-girl-more-girly/499620&quot;&gt;Is there any verb for making a girl more girly?&lt;/a&gt; is closed, but I am having difficulty placing my finger on just why that is. I am not suggesting that it is a great question, but it does seem to meet the bare minimum requisites of the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding Research&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first three close votes were for lack of research, and in the comments there was the following exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Have you looked up feminize in a dictionary? What did it say?&quot; &amp;mdash;Juhasz  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Google Dictionary says that it should be used on male.&quot;&amp;mdash;Salman Khan (The Questioner)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing that the questioner had done some research, and the source of confusion was explained in that second comment, I felt confident that I could lend a helping hand congruent with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange's editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, which encourage us to edit in relevant comments and related resources. I did not comment because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange's commenting guidelines advise against suggesting corrections that do not fundamentally change the meaning of the post.&lt;/a&gt; As such the best option seemed to be to lend the user a helping hand with using the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack exchange also requires citation for any &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;material written by people other than the poster&lt;/a&gt;, but English Language &amp;amp; Usage specifically has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7052/124936&quot;&gt;local guidelines prohibiting the citation of Google's dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. This is not because the Google Dictionary is a bad resource; we know they presently license their dictionary from Oxford University Press. It is moreso because they are neither the primary resource, and they have been historically unreliable and nobody can say if or when  they will decide to change allegiences to say, Merriam-Webster if a better deal comes along. They used to use some Cabridge definitions if I recall correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in knowing that the definitions were the same, I instead decided to cite an Oxford University Press source instead of google. When given the choice, I prefer to cite an indelible physical textbook, to safeguard against linkrot. It shouldn't make much diference to the meaning of the post in my opinion, since the information is provided is the same. To verify that assertion, here is a screenshot I took of the present Google results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.postimg.cc/59s45Knq/Feminize-Define.png&quot; alt=&quot;feminize Verb Make something more characteristic of or associated with women *induce female sexual characteristics in (a male)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly not a case of the questioner having have claimed to read something they did not since the comment matches the secondary definition. The specific citation I chose was the Oxford Dictionary of English, Third Edition. I chose that particular source to safeguard against &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/link-rot&quot;&gt;link-rot&lt;/a&gt;. The idea here is that if Oxford's definitions should ever be taken offline, then a skeptic could verify the research using one of the many indelible hard-copies of the book. I also like citing the book, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=anecAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA642&amp;amp;pg=PR6#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it gives specific credits to the members of the lexicography team behind it&lt;/a&gt;. I figured changing the choice of citation would not matter so much just, so long as the information was the same as what the questioner saw, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=anecAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA642&amp;amp;pg=PA642#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;we can check to see on Google Books to see that it is&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, yes, I realize that we are not supposed to answer general reference questions. but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1563/124936&quot;&gt;part of the test to determine if something is General Reference&lt;/a&gt; is not just if the resource is found through a web-search, but if it is well presented and easy to interpret. The questioner demonstrated difficulty parsing the resource, and I believe it is because the commonly available resources are poorly presented. Moreover, the present research standard exists in part to help prove that a question is not just general reference. If other people reach the same misunderstanding, I think a proper answer to an issue such as this can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, everything &lt;em&gt;seems to be&lt;/em&gt; in accordance to due procedure for all practical intents and purposes in this regard, except for perhaps one thing. Usually we expect questioners asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; to look in a thesaurus to make sure there are not any immediately obvious synonyms. Perhaps it is for this reason the question is closed, but it is worth noting that if there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; synonyms, they probably would have been listed alongside Google's definitions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crossreference with these google define results for beauty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.postimg.cc/7LcygVnQ/beautysynonyms.png&quot; alt=&quot;A screenshot showing synonyms for beauty when used as a noun, including beautiful woman, belle vision, charmer, enchantress, venus, et cetera.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps just as importantly, if not moreso, if we check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thesaurus.com/misspelling?term=feminize&amp;amp;s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thesaurus.com results, which are based on Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus 3rd edition&lt;/a&gt; it still shows no synonyms. Oxford Dictionaries sometimes lists synonyms, but again none show up there. I think the questioner's efforts would have returned a result here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the problem, would I be correct in assuming that &quot;no results found&quot; does not conflict with the questioner's intention, and that we could rectify this with an edit, or would this be beyond the scope of editing because the questioner had not expressed this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding Single Word Request Requirements&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the minor thesaurus problem, which is more of a research issue and a debatable one at that, everything seems to be in proper order here. The closure reason reads as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;About single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now admittedly, this is not the most detailed question in the world, but it has all of the core elements regarding context specified in the questions checklist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question describe exactly in what context you want to use a single word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a quotation which demonstrates the sort of context being used. This also serves as the exemplary sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question specify the criteria by which the suggested word will be accepted? (How will you choose the best word? What is &quot;best&quot;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer should be accepted if it is a verb that can be used to describe making females more feminine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the question list which words you didn't like, and why they aren't suitable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feminize was considered, and it was discarded because consultation with a dictionary implied that the word in question could not be used for females.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the question show that you searched for a suitable word before asking the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that while the information states that there must be a sample sentence, it does not suggest that it must be in the form of &lt;em&gt;a fill in the blank sentence&lt;/em&gt;. For all intents and purposes, i think the exemplary context provided suffices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like this question should certainly not be closed for this reason. Am I mistaken, and if so, why? I mean I know the question is short, but I do not think we have strict guidelines on length beyond the minimal character count. This might not be a great question, but closure seems like an extreme and purposeless response in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding Formatting&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I titled the question this way is that besides the reasons that affect open/closed status, there was also a slight editorial dispute regarding my personal revision of the question, regarding how I formatted the quotation. I specifically wrote it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make (something) more characteristic of or associated with women&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;as office roles changed, clerical work was increasingly feminized&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Induce female sexual characteristics in (a male).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/291924/jason-bassford&quot;&gt;Jason Bassford&lt;/a&gt; launched a complaint regarding this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most recent edit to the question is conflating two different senses of the word in a way that is misleading. The source material shows a square before the secondary meaning of the word, delineating the fact that the second sentence is a secondary meaning—not part of the definition of the same sense. This is made apparent by looking at the online definition that was provided in an earlier comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do admit that there was some intent behind the particular way I formatted the question. However, it was not to mislead anybody. Instead, I was concerned with properly representing the Cause of the problem, which I believe to be poor presentation. I do not believe either Google or the Oxford Dictionary of English do a very good job of formatting the entry in question, I could not figure out how to represent the square even if I wanted to copy oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, I specifically wanted to format the quotation in a way that represented what the questioner saw, which is how it is presented on Google. If you re-examine the above screenshot, you will see that there are three lines that are squished relatively close together, and there are limited tools in markdown to represent that. Perhaps on second thought I could have formatted it like this to try and get the bullet point in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make (something) more characteristic of or associated with women&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;as office roles changed, clerical work was increasingly feminized&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Induce female sexual characteristics in (a male).&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not only does that look ugly, at least as rendered in my browser (the Windows 10 64 bit Firefox version 67.0), but it looks very different from what Google presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after Jason made the complaint, a third party editor decided to clean things up, which is congruent with editing guidelines like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make (something) more characteristic of or associated with women   &quot;as office roles changed, clerical work was increasingly feminized&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Induce female sexual characteristics in (a male).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also obscures the problem somewhat in my opinion. Is this a legitimate concern, and if so what sort of solution do I have available for that? Would it be permissible to include a google screenshot as a related resource, and if so what would be the best way to do that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not going to bother asking about it, but I figure I might as well since I am asking about it on meta anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In closing there are three issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is wrong with the provided research, do &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt; allow us to fix it ourselves given what we know, and if so how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does this fail to meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; requirements?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best way to format this question to accurately represent what the questioner saw?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T08:59:35.107" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T08:59:35.107" Title="What is the appropriate state of this question regarding feminizing girls?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|editing|research-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13214" CreationDate="2019-06-05T02:59:24.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the website. You might want to take some time examining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;our help center&lt;/a&gt;. Click the question mark icon on the upper right-hand side of the screen and you can find it. In it there are a few of relevant such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;What Does it Mean if a Question is Closed&lt;/a&gt;. Navigating website policy can be rather complicated, though, so let me give you a tour of most things you should know about closure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the short answer is that questions that are closed or on hold can not be answered. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91928/371286&quot;&gt;There is an exception&lt;/a&gt; for people who had already started writing an answer on our website before the question was closed, if they submit their answers in a timely enough manner, but if you first encounter a question when it was closed or have to reload the page, then it can not be done, unless it is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are closed when enough privileged users who have 3,000 reputation points, or sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt;, believe that a question should be closed for one of a few established reasons. These include not being asked clearly enough for prospective answerers to reliably answer, outside of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;our established scope&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;when it has already been asked&lt;/a&gt;, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;violates objectivity guidelines or if it happens to be too broad for the format&lt;/a&gt;. If you are wondering what is too broad, think that a comprehensive answer should be somewhere between a couple of paragraphs long to maybe a page's worth of information, depending on the nature of the question and how many answers it is likely to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We here at English Language &amp;amp; Usage only handle subjects expressly listed in our scope of Word Choice and Usage, Grammar (with a restricted meaning), Etymology (history of words’ development), Dialectal Differences, Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology), Spelling and Punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we will not handle certain subjects, even if they fall under that scope: First, note that we &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;we have local research standards&lt;/a&gt; aimed at prohibiting questions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13214/about-closed-questions&quot;&gt;are too simple&lt;/a&gt;. We do not perform generalized proofreading; you have to explain what part of a sentence is problematic. We do not do literary analysis or criticism. We do not handle naming questions. We do not translate for you. We do handle some homework questions, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/how-to-deal-with-homework-questions&quot;&gt;only pursuant to certain conditions&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closure is not generally meant to be permanent. It is meant to be a status that puts a question on hold. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;We hope for questioners to address most problem by editing the questions if it can be brought back into scope&lt;/a&gt;. In these cases, closure is usually meant to stave off problematic answers that might not be productive towards answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions are not reopened &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86046/off-topic-questions-should-be-deleted-rather-than-closed/86056#86056&quot;&gt;then they are supposed to be candidates for deletion&lt;/a&gt;. Deletion rarely ever comes, and we might keep an off-topic question if it has some vindicating purpose, but that is supposed to be the general principle. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;We have an automated script to help remove some questions from the backlog to help with the task though.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions are inappropriately closed. If after studying our policies you believe that to be the case, there is some recourse to have it reopened described in the another help center subject about closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;What if I Disagree with the Closure of a Question? How Do I Reopen It?&lt;/a&gt; Those guidelines are also helpful for trying to get a question reopened if it was closed appropriately, but edited to remedy whatever problems it had since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/conduct&quot;&gt;code of conduct&lt;/a&gt; violations have more severe repercussions than mere question closure, so above all try not to be rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T13:25:58.423" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T13:25:58.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13214" CreationDate="2019-06-05T05:09:30.323" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way many people here approach that situation is to put the answer in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this you need to have 50 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also improve the question and try to get the question reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T13:38:04.910" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T13:38:04.910" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:12:38.337" Score="3" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/499670/112436&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; which is, I am told, &quot;not in compliance with local attribution guidelines.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, if anything, do I need to do to this answer to bring it up to code?  Do I really have to add &quot;Wiktionary licenses its text under CC-BY-SA 3.0 terms&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T18:47:39.593" Title="What's the bare minimum I need to add to this answer to meet specs?" Tags="|support|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13215" CreationDate="2019-06-05T21:21:47.063" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, I am seeing no major objections to reopening the question. Just votes to reopen it. Mum's the word on why or why not, so either nobody feels very strongly about this or I made a compelling case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/50573350#50573350&quot;&gt;I solicited chat a six hours ago&lt;/a&gt; just to be sure that I am not missing any important factors, and give anybody else who might have been writing an answer some extra time to submit one. All I see is that the question has been sitting at four reopen votes for a few hours now, so I am going to go ahead and do four things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is to make use of the helpful information Andrew Leach gave me to format the  the question as it is seen in the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Feminize&lt;/strong&gt; (also feminise) &amp;#x25b6; &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt; (with ob.) | Make (something) more characteristic of or associated with women &lt;em&gt;as office roles changed, clerical work was increasingly feminized&lt;/em&gt; &amp;FilledSmallSquare; Induce female sexual characteristics in (a male).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;I would personally rather use the screenshot since that is what the questioner saw, but the consequence of that may be a double citation, which would not only look sloppy but risk violating the blacklisting of google. If my assessment of the Oxford Dictionary of English is right, this should adequately represent the problem. The system of using squares to separate definitions is noticeably nonstandard. Most other dictionaries use a numbered list with lettered subsenses. This should also address the concern expressed in the comment, while keeping the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is to reopen the question. I can not wait a full 24 hours without risking the first close vote, which made immediately after I asked this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136989/how-do-close-votes-age-away&quot;&gt;aging away&lt;/a&gt;. This comes second because I suppose it may be good for a closed question to be edited before it is reopened, just to show that something changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is to write this answer to help mark this as a settled matter, if people have no further objections and see if people think this in particular was the right course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T21:21:47.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13218" CreationDate="2019-06-05T23:20:37.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the &lt;strong&gt;bare minimum&lt;/strong&gt; for attribution in terms of Stack Exchange policy is just a link and the name of the original author. Your post left out author names. Also, it's preferred to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help#links&quot;&gt;inline links&lt;/a&gt; with names that correspond to the names of the sources (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5196/77227&quot;&gt;inline links with unspecific names like &quot;here&quot;, &quot;this&quot;, &quot;ref 1&quot; or &quot;source&quot; are not sufficient as attribution&lt;/a&gt;) rather than bare URLs, but I'm not sure whether that is considered a &quot;requirement&quot; for attribution links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert on CC licensing, but I don't think you need to include information about the license in your post. Setting aside the matter of fair use exceptions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-creative-commons-licenses-affect-exceptions-and-limitations-to-copyright-such-as-fair-dealing-and-fair-use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which apply to CC-licensed works just as much as to conventionally copyrighted works&lt;/a&gt;), all user contributions to this site are distributed under the same license (as you can see at the bottom of the page). So in the post itself, I think you only need to give attribution (which is required not only by Wiktionary's license, but also by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange's policy for citing references&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see on the linked page, the Stack Exchange requirements are pretty simple: include a link if the source is a web page, mark quotes as quotes (and only use quotes of a reasonable length), and &quot;provide the name of the original author&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last requirement is maybe the least clear part of the policy, since for some works it makes more sense to include the name of the publication as well (e.g. newspapers), or instead (as for anonymous works, where you can't include the name of the author). I don't think dates would ever be required, but sometimes I try to include them when they seem relevant, or when it seems like they would help to find the quotation (e.g. for newspaper quotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate recommendation that I have for formatting is to put each example in its own block quote, or to use quotation marks instead of block quote formatting, rather than using one quote block for all of them. I like to use bullet points for this kind of list, so I would format that part of your post something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parenthetical note: Here are some examples of varied uses of &lt;em&gt;girlify&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;girlification&lt;/em&gt; (there are plenty more -- the variety is pretty endless):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polly Toynbee recently gnashed her teeth over Girlification's triumph&#xA;  over Feminism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polly Toynbee on Girlification&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Candy Gourlay, &lt;em&gt;Notes from the Slushpile&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Girlify (def.) - take something ordinary and turn it into something&#xA;  feminine and pretty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://littlebungalowbythebeach.blogspot.com/2013/03/girlified-man-shirt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Girlified Man-shirt&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Melissa Heath, &lt;em&gt;Little Bungalow by the Beach&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The writer never does get around to explaining how girls should&#xA;  girlify if they want to snag &quot;good (meaning marriageable) men.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2017/07/26/cory-farley-freelance-writer-who-lives-verdi/513548001/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can't debate people who are too far away from reality&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Cory Farley, &lt;em&gt;Reno Gazette Journal&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;verb To make girly. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordnik.com/words/girlify&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordnik&lt;/a&gt;, from Wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T00:40:53.377" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T00:40:53.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13218" CreationDate="2019-06-05T23:22:09.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sorry for the mishap earlier. Formatting was only a secondary concern, but when we &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; posts we are encouraged to improve them as much as possible. I guess I misinterpreted your intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current guidelines are expressed at &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/what-is-plagiarism-how-do-i-avoid-it-how-do-i-address-it-when-i-see-it&quot;&gt;What Is Plagiarism? How Do I Avoid It? How Do I Address It When I See It&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/new-attribution-rules/5196#5196&quot;&gt;The New Attribution Rules&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to Reference Material Written by Others&lt;/a&gt; and the related links provided therein. It is worth noting that we have an excalating proceedure for dealing with this which can lead up to answer deletion and suspension for noncompliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My complaint with your post is that you have quotations and bare links, but no textual attribution. To demonstrate the problem, the way your post is using quotations is like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polly Toynbee recently gnashed her teeth over Girlification's triumph over Feminism. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Each quotation should also have &lt;em&gt;attributions&lt;/em&gt; like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poly Toynbee on Girlification&lt;/em&gt; by Candy Gourdlay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polly Toynbee recently gnashed her teeth over Girlification's triumph over Feminism. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Complicating matters is that we do not seem to have guidelines for newspapers and blog type posts, where attributing a publisher like the Reno Gazette Journal is just as important in identifying the source as the author. Maybe the moderators can help clarify that matter for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, under present guidelines, you can can get away with just citing the name, or an abbreviation, if you are citing a reference work, so as a matter of Stack Exchange policy the Wiktionary attribution is fine, although perhaps not by Creative Commons standards, but that is another subject. Hence either &lt;em&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;O.E.D.&lt;/em&gt; can suffice if you are citing a dictionary. Whether or not you may use an abbreviation depends on whether or not it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-and-acronyms-noad-esl-pie&quot;&gt;commonly known abbreviation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiktionary citation for Princessify is fine by English Language &amp;amp; Usage's attribution standards (albeit perhaps not by Creative Common's licensing terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth further note is that Wordnik is a meta-dictionary. The present English Language &amp;amp; Usage guidelines insist that you cite primary resources. Wordnik themselves is citing Wiktionary for the definition you took from there, and you should be too. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6741/is-tfd-a-rtfm-online-source/6743#6743&quot;&gt;Is TFD a RTFM online source?&lt;/a&gt; for details regarding that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&amp;amp;q=cc-by-sa+3.0+terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0 terms&lt;/a&gt;, that is more of a legality concern than a citation concern. If you check the terms of the license it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt; Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're only making use of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license if you adhere to its terms verbatim. The actual legal terms allow for fair use as normal, but determining what is and is not fair use relies on a number of complicated factors. The fact that the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license is so easy to comply with for us may be a mitigating factor against fair use. The license only requests so little, without need of direct consultation after-all. It also needs to be kept in mind that at least one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;U.S.C. &amp;sect; 107&lt;/a&gt;'s four factors of fair use work against us, since we are both aiming to be volunteer maintained reference-works and hence share an extremely similar nature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Stack Exchange does also license its content under CC-BY-SA 3.0 terms, the disclosure they provide only applies to user contributions. Users can't legally relicense content they don't own on a whim, so we may need to denote other sources to be in strict compliance, because it does not make it clear that Wikimedia's text is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; licensed under those terms. It is also something I always do when working with CC-BY-SA 3.0 content to protect &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt; from culpability, even when I act as an editor of another person's post, since I am then taking responsibility for its contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realistically it will probably never happen, but theoretically Wiktionary could try to sue, or at least try to get content taken down through a D.M.C.A. takedown notice. The point of the viral licensing is to try and ensure that even if they try, they fail, since we have express permission to use the work as provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather not go into all of the sticky legalities right now though. Sorting through the law is a very complicated matter. However, it is worth noting that Wikipedia does have a page regarding the degrees of licensing compliance, and this graph represents is what they expect from people using &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; content, just like how we expect people to honor what we want when they are using &lt;em&gt;ours&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cx9F3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cx9F3.png&quot; alt=&quot;a chart showing different degrees of compliance with CC-BY-SA 3.0 terms&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A selected screenshot from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CC_BY-SA_Compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia:CC BY-SA Compliance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; terms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfect compliance is probably unreasonable for the format, but &lt;em&gt;a little tagline&lt;/em&gt; consisting of little more than a few abbreviations does not seem like too much for them to be asking, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;especially sinced Stack Exchange asks for similar in Attribution Please by Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we require that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&quot;&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Show the author names for every question and answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&quot;&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T14:34:29.910" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T14:34:29.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13211" CreationDate="2019-06-06T14:38:40.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question appears interesting to you, you are welcome to offer an answer that expresses that point of interest. Some questions have been 'redeemed' by good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T14:38:40.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13211" CreationDate="2019-06-06T15:19:30.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The research that demonstrates why the question couldn’t be answered by looking up the words in a dictionary should have been included in the question. Regardless of whether the question was closed for the root cause (no research) or the secondary effect (seems like it could be completely answered with a dictionary), it should have been put on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were edited to include research showing that it’s not quite so simple when using freely available resources, maybe it could be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T15:19:30.730" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13218" CreationDate="2019-06-06T16:21:05.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Y'know, in all of this I forgot to mention something that could be entirely its own answer. Whatever attributions we require are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; triggered when we have &lt;em&gt;direct quotation&lt;/em&gt;, according to Andrew Leach's post in The &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/new-attribution-rules/5196#5196&quot;&gt;New Attribution Rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;No; the &quot;new attribution rules&quot; apply specifically to quoted material. A simple link to further reading does not require attribution, but where there is material reproduced from elsewhere it is not sufficient merely to provide a link.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only direct quotations need a citation. A poster's own words do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If just the visible content of the post can be reproduced without losing the source of a direct quotation, then the citation is acceptable.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Meta: if it's obvious where material has been quoted from, perhaps because there is a link to it, then by all means edit the post to include the source in plain text. But there's no need to do that if there is no actual quotation; and if it's not obvious then all it is possible to do is comment.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the absolute objective &lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt; that could be added to comply with &lt;em&gt;our actual citation guidelines&lt;/em&gt; (rather than possible legal requirements), if that is the desired outcome, is actually none. Aparente could &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt; the quotations, and that would work just as well. The least intrusive manner by which it could do so is probably something more like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parenthetical note: Here are some examples of varied uses of girlify and girlification (there are plenty more -- the variety is pretty endless):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2008/04/polly-toynbee-on-girlification.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://littlebungalowbythebeach.blogspot.com/2013/03/girlified-man-shirt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://littlebungalowbythebeach.blogspot.com/2013/03/girlified-man-shirt.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2017/07/26/cory-farley-freelance-writer-who-lives-verdi/513548001/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2017/07/26/cory-farley-freelance-writer-who-lives-verdi/513548001/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordnik.com/words/girlify&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wordnik.com/words/girlify&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This demonstrates a variety, without quoting anything written by anybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; Typically we do encourage that you quote all relevant material to &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; links, as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How Do I write a Good Anwser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the importance of the quotations that exemplify usage of &lt;em&gt;girlify&lt;/em&gt; is debatable, since you specified in a comment that you do not want to legitimize it. The way the answer is written, with this portion marked as a parenthetical note, it simply seems to list of links for further reading rather than evidence supporting the main assertion, and those quotations are not a core element of your answer, which endorses Princessify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I edited first the post, I did not actually know what Aparente meant to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey, thanks for trying to clean up my answer. I'm going to roll back, though, because your new version changes my original intention (e.g. I rejected girlify but your version proposes it as a viable option). If it means a lot to you to fix some little formatting things, etc., I don't mind if you want to do some minor editing of my question. But I'd like to keep the original style and tone. For example, I'm not a footnote sort of person, in the SE context. Your approach to writing an answer is great but it's not my style. So -- you do you, I'll do me, okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My relatively newfound understanding of the situation is that Aparente does not mean to legitimize &lt;em&gt;girlify&lt;/em&gt; is a valid option, so information regarding that is largely extracurricular, and what really matters is that the links show a variety of usage. If they go &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;, all of the core information is intact, and none of the quoted material written by others goes unattributed, because there wouldn't be quoted material in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, whether or not this is the &lt;em&gt;ideal&lt;/em&gt; solution to the problem has yet to be determined, but it is the least that can be done to fix the problem of attribution without drastically changing the contents, because just like the attributions, the quotations would not outlive the links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing in this solution's favor is that seeing a word in use tends to legitimize it, which is to my understanding contrary to the intent, so it might help achieve the intended result better, if I am not mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it seems like the main importance of this section is merely to &lt;em&gt;demonstrate that there is a variety of usage&lt;/em&gt;, more-so than to demonstrate that the word is in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course, ignoring whether or not a CC-BY-SA 3.0 notice is actually required, but licensing and citation are two separate concerns and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;the Stack Overflow Public Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; place any legal responsibilities for a contribution's content on each individual contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T18:47:39.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13211" CreationDate="2019-06-06T19:00:59.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one level, a person could look up &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; in, say, &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (2003) and find these entries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fascinating&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt; (1638) : extremely interesting or charming : CAPTIVATING&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;interesting&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt; (1768) : holding the attention : arousing interest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those definitions are, as Mr. Spock might say, interesting but not fascinating. They indicate that people may use &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; to convey the idea that something is at the high end of interesting or, on the other hand, that it may involve some level of involuntary appeal. But the two definitions in this general reference offer only a very brief description of how the words differ in practical meaning, and provide virtually no discussion of any underlying difference in tenor or implied direction that they may possess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get a sense of those differences, a person might consult &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms&lt;/em&gt; (1984), which goes beyond the general-reference dictionary to identify a group of words that a particular word falls into. As it turns out, &lt;em&gt;MWDS&lt;/em&gt; puts &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; in different groups of synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fascinating&lt;/em&gt; appears in a group with &lt;em&gt;charming&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bewitching&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;enchanting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;captivating&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;alluring&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;attractive&lt;/em&gt;, with a link to the following discussion of the verb form &lt;em&gt;fascinate&lt;/em&gt; in an entry under &lt;em&gt;attract&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attract&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;allure&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;charm&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;fascinate&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;bewitch&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;enchant&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;captivate&lt;/strong&gt; mean to draw another by exerting an irresistible or compelling influence over him. The same distinctions in implications and connotations are observable in the adjectival forms of these words, &lt;strong&gt;attractive&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;alluring&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;charming&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;fascinating&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;bewitching&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;enchanting&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;captivating&lt;/strong&gt;. ... &lt;strong&gt;Fascinate&lt;/strong&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;charm&lt;/em&gt;, implies the casting of a spell, but it usually suggests the ineffectiveness of resistance or helplessness to escape from from the one that fascinates [examples omitted]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Interesting&lt;/em&gt;, meanwhile, appears in a group with &lt;em&gt;engrossing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;absorbing&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;intriguing&lt;/em&gt;, with this comment about what the words have in common:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;interesting&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;engrossing&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;absorbing&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;intriguing&lt;/strong&gt; mean having a quality or qualities that secure attention and hold it for a length of time. Interesting implies a power in a person or thing to awaken such a mental or emotional reaction involving attention as curiosity, sympathy, a desire to know or understand, or enthusiasm, but unless the adjective is qualified or there is a fuller explanation in the context, the degree or the cause of interest is not clear [examples omitted] As applied to a book, a play, or a narrative the word usually means entertaining, diverting (compare verbs at AMUSE) exciting, stimulating, or provocative (compare verbs at PROVOKE), but if the context provides no real clue as to the precise implication, the word may fail to hit the mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the essential difference in the orientation of the two words, according to &lt;em&gt;MWDS&lt;/em&gt; is that &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; at its core involves attraction whereas &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; at its core involves attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S.I. Hayakawa, &lt;em&gt;Modern Guide to Synonyms and Related Words&lt;/em&gt; (1968) provides a somewhat dated but still useful treatment of the adjective &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; (which Hayakawa bundles with &lt;em&gt;charming&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bewitching&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;captivating&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;enchanting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;entrancing&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;winning&lt;/em&gt;) and the verb &lt;em&gt;interest&lt;/em&gt; (which he bundles with &lt;em&gt;entertain&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;amuse&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;divert&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;charming&lt;/strong&gt; [etc.] All of these words are superlatives used mainly to describe the pleasing manner of an attractive person, usually a woman. ... &lt;strong&gt;Fascinating&lt;/strong&gt; has perhaps suffered less from overuse as a superlative than these other words. Although more general in application, it still can suggest, like &lt;em&gt;entrancing&lt;/em&gt;, a prospect that is almost hypnotic in its inviting quality. It applies to men as well as women, to any attractive scene or view, or to any idea or thing that is extremely interesting. In all cases it is like &lt;em&gt;captivating&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;winning&lt;/em&gt; in suggesting the ability to overcome resistance, however strong: [example omitted].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;entertain&lt;/strong&gt; [etc.] These words have to do with activity that draws the attention and makes time pass agreeably. ... Interest is the most general of these words. To interest someone is to excite or hold his curiosity or attention, for whatever reason. [Examples omitted.] But the specific sense in which interest compares with the other words in this set involves an awakening of attention by some &lt;em&gt;entertaining&lt;/em&gt; expedient: [example omitted].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, as with *MWDS'*s treatment of the two words, the essential difference seems to relate to the notion that &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; is based on attraction and &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; is based on attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, all questions about the differences in meaning between two words are susceptible to the criticism that the question asker should simply have looked up the two words in a dictionary and see how the definitions given there differ. In my view, this argument gives short shrift to the complexity and subtlety of word meanings and word usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that consulting reference works that focus on distinguishing particular words from others with similar meanings is a far more fruitful way to reach an understanding of how two words differ in meaning than simply checking the entries for the two words in a general-reference dictionary of the sort that any visitor to English Language &amp;amp; Usage may be fairly presumed to possess. Indeed, the reason that the &amp;quot;differences&amp;quot; tag isn't banned at EL&amp;amp;U is that in many instances a general-reference dictionary is not especially helpful in clarifying such differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons I completely agree with Dawson Baker that it is a mistake to assume that a general-reference dictionary will satisfactorily answer a serious question about the differences in meaning between two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T07:12:41.983" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-06T21:52:02.177" Score="20" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/500910/can-we-use-legalisation-word-instead-of-attestation&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; (now deleted) about the difference between the terms &lt;em&gt;legalization&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;attestation&lt;/em&gt; was posted yesterday. It was posted simultaneously with a self-answer. I thought it was spam immediately, but in a comment was told that self-answers are encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xQtQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xQtQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;answer&quot; provided by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/176690/datt&quot;&gt;OP&lt;/a&gt; was linked to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pecattestation.com/?utm_medium=stackexchange&amp;amp;utm_source=dd&amp;amp;utm_campaign=hqbl&amp;amp;utm_content=doc-legalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PEC website&lt;/a&gt; as a definition and &quot;proof&quot; of usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to do a little digging, and this is what I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dattdongare.com/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;technical director for BTW Group&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.btwgroup.co/businesses#btw-visas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BTW Group owns PEC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is tricky, but it looks like spam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-06-08T14:53:44.097" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T13:10:43.643" Title="Is this type of spammy Q&amp;A permitted here?" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13228" CreationDate="2019-06-06T22:30:51.897" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, the links contain more than just a link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;?utm_medium=stackexchange&amp;amp;utm_source=dd&amp;amp;utm_campaign=hqbl&amp;amp;utm_content=attestation&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UTM stands for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bytefive.com/blogs/understanding-utm_source-utm_medium-and-utm_campaign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urchin Tracking Module&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;utm_source: As the name suggests this custom variable allows marketers to track the source that is sending the visits. If you have partnered with a website then you can track visits from the website using&#xA;&lt;code&gt;?utm_source=...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the links appear to be part of a campaign to drive traffic to their website, and the author does not disclose his affiliation with that site, I'm content that whatever the actual worth of the answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/promotion&quot;&gt;it fits Stack Exchange's definition of spam&lt;/a&gt;. I've dealt with it accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T13:10:43.643" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T13:10:43.643" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13232" CreationDate="2019-06-07T13:52:34.713" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only been active on Stack Exchange for about a month and achieved a reputation on ELU of more than 500 which gives me access to the review queues.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Other than the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt; is there any further guidance on reviewing?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Can I see what seasoned reviewers have actually done?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there any check on reviewing, in other words reviewed by more than one person?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am worried that I am marking questions that appear to me to be OK &quot;No further action&quot; when they should be commented / edited / rejected for some technical reason of which I am unaware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347686" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T23:45:43.630" Title="Help with review queues" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13231" CreationDate="2019-06-07T15:18:47.510" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excellent question. In general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't be a jerk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give the benefit of the doubt. Don't assume that the question or answer on the review queue is terrible just because it is on the queue. Someone thought it was questionable, but mods and flaggers can have different supportable opinions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment how you would like to be commented to. (or more likely, avoid commenting in ways that you would not like.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't press a button just because you can. Sometimes (often) you don't need to do anything (even is something is leaning towards the poor side of things). Comment (nicely!) before voting to close or delete or whatever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, these are suggestions for general behavior, but as you get more moderation powers, you really learn how to be more moderate, literally. The tools seem to be about throwing out the trash, but really it's about cleaning up. Oh, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; some trash that needs to be thrown out, but you often don't see it because of moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for suggestions to close:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Duplicate' is not an admonition to 'stop it and go away' (like some of the other close reasons tend towards), it's just a 'no need to repeat ourselves'. Very easy to see that something is the same. If the new question is asking for a nuance that is different from the suggested original, then it's questionable to close (on leniency's side, keep open and encourage addressing the difference?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask for clarification/more detail/research before voting to close for 'do your own research'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything like 'is this grammatical/correct?' or 'question from a multiple choice test' is (usually) not good for ELU probably not good for ELL either prefer vote to close outright as poor rather than to migrate to ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For first posts: Be nice! It's natural for when you know something and the other person doesn't to get a bit of competitive feeling and want to ... win. But the other person is not an adversary, you're trying to help them out. But you will also have the feeling that they're being lazy sometimes (and sometimes that is definitely the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearners.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; really is a better place for such questions. Suggest that rather than voting to migrate (unless it is totally obvious; there is good overlap between ELL and ELU, but elementary 'How do you conjugate X?' is obviously ELL).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as to cultural rules specifically for ELU:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are no &lt;em&gt;strict&lt;/em&gt; rules - they're more like guidelines. Like say for a SWR, an example sentence would make things much much better, but if they explain things well enough, maybe if it is missing then give it a pass (or just request one). Or answers really should have links &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; original content (it's 'fair use' not stealing or plagiarizing), not just one or the other, but maybe sometimes it's obvious (OK, rarely). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are lots of specific things that can be gleaned from a history of meta. For example, obscene words really should be *'d out in titles, quoted in the body, and never used directed at anyone. Too many to list here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to some of your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Can I see what seasoned reviewers have actually done?&quot; Yes to some extent - going through the queue means someone has done something initially to put it on the queue, so there may be some votes already recorded (they show as a number on the close reason). After you have done some actions, if you back up through the queue, you can see, for example who and what direction has voted to approve/disapprove something like edits or reopens (but that's after you've chosen).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is there any check on reviewing, in other words reviewed by more than one person?&quot; Yes, it takes five votes to close, three to delete (after being closed). I think 'leave open' votes do something but am not sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I am worried that I am marking questions that appear to me to be OK &quot;No further action&quot; when they should be commented / edited / rejected for some technical reason of which I am unaware.&quot; It's your call. Sometimes doing nothing is the right thing. There are multiple votes need for everything so that a single person who reads things in a certain way different from everybody else won't unnaturally sway things. (some people who have a lot of rep in something may eventually get a superpower to need only one vote, but that takes a while).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow meta to get an idea of what the community thinks in general of some things, explicit requests for reopens. You won't learn everything in a day, but don't worry and be lenient and understanding. Sometimes you close something because 'what a godawful question to ask' (and there are those), but then comments and discussion make you realize it really wasn't so bad after all and you can vote to reopen (or possibly even rescind your down vote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T19:58:21.397" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T19:58:21.397" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2019-06-08T23:48:46.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the solution is to require new participants to use a wizard in posting a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be implemented as a web form that has more than two boxes (right now we have two -- the title field and the body), where each box is required, and there is a tiny specific help feature that pops up for each box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we would need to do in order to implement this would be to first come up with a list of the most common types of question, and then draft the input box prompts and help bubbles that would elicit a reasonably well posed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for &lt;em&gt;single-word-request&lt;/em&gt;, there would be a box for &quot;show us the research you attempted, and include at least one link as well as an explanation of why your research left you unsatisfied.&quot; (The wording can be improved -- that was a very rough draft.)  There would also be a box for the sample sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There would be a link to a canonical q-a (perhaps on Meta) showing two examples of well posed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the VERY BEGINNING the participant would be asked, &quot;Are you a beginning English learner?  If so, please don't post here.  There is another site made just for you!  (link to ELL)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experienced users (above a certain rep specific to question formulation) would not be required to use the wizard, but everyone should have the option to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T23:48:46.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13231" CreationDate="2019-06-09T23:45:43.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Mitch's answer: &lt;strong&gt;don't overthink it&lt;/strong&gt;. There's nothing you can do to really break the system (well, not until you get a load of rep so you can delete stuff, but even then it's pretty balanced).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't Stack Overflow where there will be fake reviews known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/review-audits?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=15&quot;&gt;audits to test that you're reviewing right&lt;/a&gt;. That's great, what you see is what you get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, review as you like. Use the tools at your disposal as you see fit. Try to guide new users by adding comments and voting. Flag low-quality stuff and spam and try to make everyone's experience a little bit better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T23:45:43.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-09T04:05:56.467" Score="-2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you look up a word in the dictionary you usually get a &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;sentence&lt;/em&gt; rather than 1 word. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt;: a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there is a dictionary that simply translates 1:1 words, that is free, public domain, and available for download as computer text of some sort. For example, it would be a list like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;word,palabra&#xA;hello,hola&#xA;cow,vaca&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if any such &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; translation resource exists. I know you can get this info from Google Translate, but it costs money to do in bulk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in any language, particularly the major ones listed in Google Translate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79672" OwnerDisplayName="Lance Pollard" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T00:41:32.950" Title="If there is a dictionary translating 1:1 a word in english to a word in another language" Tags="|discussion|translation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13235" CreationDate="2019-06-09T06:28:01.600" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's never going to work, even for simple words and applications. Think of &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt; for example. Many meanings, some of which don't have single word translations in other languages (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordreference.com/enfr/bow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;). I chose this example because even a five year old would use at least three distinct meanings, including some that translate to a phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://translatr.varunmalhotra.xyz/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translatr&lt;/a&gt; is probably your best bet (it's hard to search for because Google assumes you've misspelt &quot;translate&quot; and points you to its own tool). For my example above, fed simply &quot;bow&quot; and told to give me French, it returns just &quot;arc&quot;. Fine if you're doing archery, or referring to rainbows, not much use if you're taking about the front of a ship, or a decoration on a present. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48571" OwnerDisplayName="Chris H" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T06:28:01.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-10T20:39:46.313" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard about cases where people have voted for the closing of a question based on different reasons than the one they clicked on when close-voting. The reason for this is because their reason wasn't listed. This, to me at least, is a very bad problem. The ability to close question's main function is to remove bad questions from the site, but isn't it (if minorly) negatively affecting the site when the listed reason for the close doesn't coincide with the actual reason. How are the OPs supposed to know what they did wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is only scratching the surface, but there is an option I think should be added to the list: &quot;there is no discernible research done before asking the question&quot;. It doesn't need to be written exactly like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe a sizable amount of questions are closed for this reason, and having a close-vote being labeled as such would be good. I believe the options there already are too vague to be substitutes for this, especially if new users are in the picture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you disagree, please enlighten me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239612" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T20:57:39.343" Title="There should be a close-vote option labeled as: &quot;there is no discernible research done before asking the question&quot;" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|close-reasons|request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13237" CreationDate="2019-06-10T20:57:39.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, this is only scratching the surface, but there is an option I think should be added to the list: &quot;there is no discernible research done before asking the question&quot;. It doesn't need to be written exactly like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is such a reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it can be seen as one of the close reasons on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/501363/what-is-the-opposite-of-much-is-it-less&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, because two different reasons were given by at least two users each, both reasons are shown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dZltI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dZltI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T20:57:39.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2019-06-11T12:33:37.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see the problem. The asker types their question, copying it &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt; from their test (or whatever) and either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they type it correctly, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they type it incorrectly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user sees the question and thinks &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Well, there are blatant typos in there&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. But at this point, it is not clear whether the typos have come from the question itself or from the typing of the question. The asker will not necessarily be able to identify typos in the source material. So, if a VTC is cast, it has to be &quot;Unclear...&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, at this point, I'd add a comment to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There may be typos in your post. Please check it. If there aren't any mistakes in your quoted source text, then there are typos in your source material. Don't worry about it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if this could be automated because this type of question is reasonably regular. I know there's a &quot;needs editing&quot; option on stack exchange, that seems like an appropriate option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="283332" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T12:33:37.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13241" CreationDate="2019-06-11T20:20:18.243" Score="14" ViewCount="1903" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't know when this happened, but Oxford &lt;em&gt;Living&lt;/em&gt; Dictionaries is no more. It is now called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (powered by Oxford) whatever that means… &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tsk! You'd think they'd have the decency to consult us before changing the name of their online dictionary… &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt; (rolls eyes).  Now what do we do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All those citations, attributions, acronyms: EOD, OED, OD, OLD, ODO, OMG do we have to change them all? Arggghh! Visit any &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/484089/44619&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; that bears a direct link to Oxford Dictionaries (online) and the name &lt;strong&gt;Lexico&lt;/strong&gt; will now pop up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and it's changed colour too. It's now green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tHa1O.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tHa1O.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-06-15T06:56:10.630" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T06:56:10.630" Title="RIP Oxford “living” Dictionaries" Tags="|discussion|resources|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13240" CreationDate="2019-06-12T00:05:43.077" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mehhhhhhh, the name change isn't worth doing mass edits over. Nor is the change in URL, since you can click on most old URLs and be taken to the right page on the new site. There are many thousands of posts that link to oxforddictionaries.com (more specifically ~&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Aoxforddictionaries&quot;&gt;11k&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of these links are still good and don't really need editing, since they just redirect to the current lexico.com site. Most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-critical issues like this, I fix them when I fix other issues on the same page, or if the question is already bumped and on the home page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some links have been broken by this change, which is a more critical issue, so it might be a good idea to do some active editing, as long as we don't flood the home page. Right now, I see that the change has broken many (almost all?) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Ablog.oxforddictionaries&quot;&gt;blog links&lt;/a&gt;. I don't know if they're planning on reposting these articles on the new site, so I'm preparing for the worst. Not all of these URLs were saved in either of the archiving services I know of, so I've been saving Google's cached version of the page into &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt; (the cached page is most easily found by searching &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.is/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.is&lt;/a&gt;).  Unfortunately saving any URLs that have not been backed up needs to be done as soon as possible, since Google caches don't last forever :/ (Yes, my method is complicated, but I do it this way for a reason.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are some links to the regular dictionary entries that were broken a while ago by a different URL change, which can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Aoxforddictionaries.com%2Fview%2F&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Plus, some URLs were also broken when another one of Oxford's dictionaries (the OALD) changed URLs; a list of posts affected by this can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Aoald*&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. While I'm on the subject, I'll also note that there are old broken Google NGrams links/images in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Agooglelabs&quot;&gt;these posts&lt;/a&gt;. I've been fixing these every now and then for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the new Lexico site, another thing I noticed is that there is now only one dictionary instead of two (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160926042339/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Dictionary&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160926014854/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/bid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Dictionary (US)&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, switched via the dropdown at the top of the page). This really isn't as much of a loss as it sounds, since both dictionaries were very close in content (see links above). Therefore I would consider this another non-critical issue for &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a couple of questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; dictionaries, especially here on meta, that could use updating (even if the links aren't technically broken) such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/499643/191178&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the relationship between various Oxford dictionaries? (OED vs ODO vs ODE vs NOAD)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/147/191178&quot;&gt;List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7052/191178&quot;&gt;Is Google Dictionary a valid definition reference (in particular in answers)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T00:05:43.077" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13245" CreationDate="2019-06-13T12:10:55.043" Score="6" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been &quot;instructed&quot; to come here and sort out my issue with bolding and italicizing text. Look at these words after the colon: &lt;strong&gt;just look&lt;/strong&gt;. Do you see those terms, that is, &quot;just look&quot; in bold? I used the icon to insert double asterisks and NADA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I go to ELL, and use the bold function, the words I mark in bold do indeed show up in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, on ELU, all my comments and posts appear bold to me. How can this be an issue with my computer when the same computer bolds text fine on ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody edited a recent answer of mine to make it more readable (on ELU). Well, even after s/he did that, I still cannot see it as bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's a body to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate answers that assume I know very little about the technical aspects of this. Otherwise, I will not understand the answers. Please keep it simple. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I am using Chrome, Windows 7 Home Premium and I do not have all the Georgia fonts. Only Georgia Bold Italic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100179" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-06-16T12:06:26.480" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T12:06:26.480" Title="My computer does bold on ELL but not on ELU" Tags="|support|status-completed|font|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13198" CreationDate="2019-06-13T15:53:59.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to this site, but I thought you had an interesting approach and wanted to give my feedback. As you already learned, there are many aspects to look at. I may answer in more ways than was thought as on-topic. Especially the &quot;other solutions&quot; might be interesting as the &quot;feature-request&quot;. (Note: Since the actual goal of the project is not fully known, I decided to say &quot;moderation&quot; rather than &quot;migration&quot;. It is still meant as a placeholder without limitations.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Machine learning&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I much liked your approach to it; trying instead of accepting the status quo. You also seem to have an incremental, fast paced development cycle and willing demo early, with things not being perfectly ready. The idea of using existing data, already processed and judged by humans, is clever. And I think the accuracy can become good, but it may take a lot of tweaking to get it near human level. BTW, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/05/06/predicting-stack-overflow-tags-with-googles-cloud-ai/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; that may be useful to show those trying to understand more of how machine learning works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did this to educate yourself and to spend time, I definitely encourage you to go ahead. Understand more about the selected method. Look into other methods (perhaps RNN and LSTM) that are also already available as implementations. Possibility to classify for more types? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More parameters that should be useful as input (number of words in post, age of account, number of posts on ELU and ELL)? More data available for training? Pre-train with other corpus of &quot;first language&quot; and &quot;second language&quot; English? Split data set into Train, Validation and Test sets. Use the known Validation set to get accuracy benchmark instead of relying on the &quot;after the fact&quot; test-set you used. How is your cut-off-point working when you have only &quot;good&quot; test samples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you train and act on &quot;first version&quot; posts or the (community) edited &quot;final state&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Collaborate with others to learn more. If you have a wider interest, go on to make it into a tool chain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Bots&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forum is built for people and volunteers made themselves an identity here. There will naturally be hesitation or opposition when a bot is about to interfere. &quot;How can bots do a better job? Do I need to find another hobby?&quot; But if a bot can be shown to improve the forum, it will eventually be accepted. Looking at Wikipedia, the bots writing articles on their own are not as well received as the bots merely assisting moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should most likely learn from the experience of other before you go for it. I googled &quot;stackexchange bot&quot; and found a dedicated external site with several bot projects running on SO. They didn't seem to want marketing links, so find it yourself. Also check posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261172/present-and-future-of-bots-on-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Policies&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review the available post and moderation policies. Are they changing a lot? How old data can you use as training samples? Review a selection of training samples, do they adhere to the current policy or will you learn an unwanted bias? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely every moderator/user has different standards of what is accepted. The fuzziness of the group forms consensus. A bot can certainly act fuzzy, but perhaps better to set a threshold that acts only on posts that everyone agrees on. Set acceptable levels of false positives to use in evaluation and discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with different moderation standards is that it will be difficult to make everyone happy. Some will think it judges too hard, others that it's too nice. As an experiment it would be interesting to ask 10 moderators to &quot;annotate&quot; a number of samples to see how much agreement there is. Even if there is no bot in the end, this may help the community improve moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Volunteering&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful when you find yourself using words as &quot;shocking amounts&quot;. You may have a too narrow view of the purpose of the site and the moderation practices. If you are curious about the moderation process, you should probably have a go and learn. That's the best way to get to know the community, to learn what tools already exist and to find the most critical problems to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before making a live bot, I'd suggest you to try it manually. Take ten examples as pointed out by the bot and evaluate if you agree. Then tag it manually for moderation. See if the moderator outcome agrees with your assumption. Or do the action yourself and see what the discussion and result is. Learn from the experience. See this as your learning curve, rather than &quot;introducing the bot&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Re-scope&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a slightly different task that moderators would like to get help with? Training to detect low quality questions is probably an easier target. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the idea to use the proof-of-concept to pitch it as an official feature from SE, or just to highlight a problem you see? What is the usual outcome of a &quot;feature request&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other solutions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a problem with misplaced questions, maybe there are more fundamental changes that would more easily prevent it &quot;before it happens&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say that I'm personally not all for having so many different sites. As a user, I'm confused. I find the different sites have a fairly unclear scope. The &quot;home&quot; view are just questions, straight up, nothing about guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELU have a hint next to the question form: &quot;If your question is about learning English, ask it on ELL instead.&quot; It doesn't say &quot;if you learn&quot; or &quot;if you don't know&quot;, it's: &quot;&lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; learning&quot;. Yet, &quot;practical problems you encounter&quot; is only a small part of ELL and there's even &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;LL&lt;/a&gt; for that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;ELU Tour&lt;/a&gt;&quot; says &quot;for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&quot; which says more about the users than the questions. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&quot;on-topic&quot; post&lt;/a&gt; is more specific, but I don't remember that post being promoted very much. Most of the categories fit both sites. Most questions are about &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; some thing about English language. Nowhere did it say ELU requires &quot;first language&quot; or &quot;better grammar&quot;. So what are the difference: On ELU you ask for linguist sources, while ELL gives simpler answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more or less wild suggestions on what could help:&#xA;* Create an admittance test, verifying proper skills when creating account on ELU. &#xA;* Require higher reputation score to post questions on ELU, to make users more familiar with the site before posting.&#xA;* Better clarify the separation of the sites in FAQ.&#xA;* Have the &quot;on-topic post&quot; linked beside the question form or add a check-box &quot;Read and understood&quot; with it.&#xA;* Add a tag &quot;linguist-only&quot; to be used by those who really care about the distinction of ELU towards ELL. The most serious users can ignore all other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348255" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T15:53:59.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13243" CreationDate="2019-06-13T16:39:02.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: Added proposed solution and workaround at the bottom of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably too little information as of now, but I'll start an answer to build from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;assume I know very little about the technical aspects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard answer to any strange computer problem is to &lt;strong&gt;restart computer&lt;/strong&gt;. It's a great suggestion, because it strangely often works and it requires no technical knowledge. Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A100179%20bold&quot;&gt;history shows&lt;/a&gt; that you've had the problem for months, I wont ask you to do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In fact, on ELU, all my comments and posts appear bold to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been clarified that it is only &lt;em&gt;appearing&lt;/em&gt; so &lt;strong&gt;for you&lt;/strong&gt; while others (at least in this case) do see your highlight as intended. You're not doing anything wrong in your posts, we have to look beyond that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lambie now &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13243/my-computer-does-bold-on-ell-but-not-on-elu/13245?noredirect=1#comment54281_13243&quot;&gt;more clearly indicated&lt;/a&gt; that it also affects other users' posts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13199/348255&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; has &quot;especially when the author&quot; and some more in bold, if you want to verify if you see that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you see &lt;strong&gt;all text bold&lt;/strong&gt; rather than &lt;strong&gt;no text bold&lt;/strong&gt; indicates to me that the problem is perhaps font configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can this be an issue with my computer when the same computer bolds text fine on ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be clear, it is not a problem with your computer in itself, but in software configuration. It is difficult to analyse and assist with those problems without having access to the actual system, but let's try. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say that ELU but not ELL is affected, I agree that it's surprising. It is however explained by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13243/my-computer-does-bold-on-ell-but-not-on-elu/13245?noredirect=1#comment54279_13245&quot;&gt;use of different fonts&lt;/a&gt; on the sites. One could say the the two sites &lt;strong&gt;are designed&lt;/strong&gt; to look different, although your problem was not the intended behavior. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know any simple site specific font override setting you may have accidentally done, but there are browser plugins that can do it. There are also plugins that sometimes destroy pages accidentally (e.g. ad-blockers and such). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Simple Suggestion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use another browser for ELU. Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://getfirefox.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Firefox&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/chrome/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrome&lt;/a&gt; to begin with. &#xA;If that doesn't work it is likely a problem outside the browser or plugins, but sometimes different browsers display pages differently, because of how they are coded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;More complex&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at font settings, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chrome://settings/fonts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrome font setting&lt;/a&gt; to see if they seem ok.&#xA;Install new font package, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/0BHsf1pGNjc?t=29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(YouTube link)&lt;/a&gt; instructions for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably don't want to try &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/280075/site-specific-font-override-in-browsers&quot;&gt;Stylish plugin&lt;/a&gt;, but if you for some reason have it already, know that it (and similar plugins) can affect appearance per site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Investigate&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my suggestions didn't help, or if they did so you can provide more info, the next step is to do deeper investigations on the problem. Ask a techie you have around to help. I'd start with looking at &quot;source view&quot; in the browser debugger of each page to see if there are font differences coming through, and if the markup is there as intended or stripped somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrome debugger (on my Windows 10 install) shows that web coding (CSS on each site) instructs text of type &quot;.post.text&quot; to have &quot;font-family: Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;&quot; on ELU, but &quot;font-family: Arial,&quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;,Helvetica,sans-serif;&quot; on ELL. They both override &quot;body.ask-page.unified-theme&quot; that have &quot;font-family: Arial,&quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;,Helvetica,sans-serif;&quot;. This hidden instruction tells the browser which font to use, on ELU starting with any installed variant of &quot;Georgia&quot;, falling back to &quot;Times New Roman&quot; etc. if not available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both font instructions work well in my Chrome browser, so you seem to have a conflicting font installed. Do you see 4 good looking variants of Georgia font in &lt;code&gt;C:\Windows\Fonts\Georgia&lt;/code&gt;? They should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/georgia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;installed with Windows 7&lt;/a&gt;, but may have been corrupted. See if the font  Georgia works in WordPad (search for &quot;whether the problem occurs in a new document&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/918791/overview-of-fonts-and-how-to-troubleshoot-font-problems-in-microsoft-w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this guide&lt;/a&gt;). There are also instructions how to repair a broken install, try that at your own risk. I recommend doing a backup of the Georgia folder before you remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Workaround&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If installing Georgia font (see investigation section) didn't help, I've prepared a workaround that should be fairly easily applied, even though this is a bit techie to understand fully. (Also be careful to trust internet downloads in general.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Install Stylish: &lt;a href=&quot;https://userstyles.org/help/stylish_chrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://userstyles.org/help/stylish_chrome&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Install dedicated style: &lt;a href=&quot;https://userstyles.org/styles/172723/use-arial-on-all-stackexchange-sites&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://userstyles.org/styles/172723/use-arial-on-all-stackexchange-sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Refresh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348255" LastEditorUserId="348255" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T08:41:00.217" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T08:41:00.217" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13248" CreationDate="2019-06-15T07:07:02.983" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/501883/i-seek-a-word-for-the-expectation-that-a-group-of-people-exhibit-a-singular-sta&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. I followed the requirements, I thought. Thanks for any help. I guess I should wait a while before I delete it, so someone can look at it. Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49084" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T14:31:00.743" Title="Vote to close! I will delete the question right away, I'm sorry. Please, can someone tell me what not to do next time?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13247" CreationDate="2019-06-15T14:31:00.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not worry so much about it next time. If you did anything &lt;em&gt;so bad&lt;/em&gt; as to merit outright deletion of the question and profuse apologies, then it probably would have been flagged by the user and deleted for you for some major rules violation such as spam, rudeness or plagiarism. Also, keep in mind that if you want to delete a question, that you usually only have the option to do so before people start answering it, because de-publishing their answers on another person's whim usually is not fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting to close a question is different. Most of the time when people are voting to close it is for a minor infraction that is held against the question, rather than the questioner, and what we aim to do is to have any outstanding issues with the question fixed so that we can appropriately address it. You can read &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;The War of the Closes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for some information regarding the purpose of closure and what we hope for it to achieve. These sorts of minor infractions are only something that might be held against you if you showed a regular pattern of such infractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also note that Stack Exchange is not quite like other websites. Enforcement of the rules is typically a responsibility &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;which is communally shared by people&lt;/a&gt; who have earned enough reputation points to have the requisite privileges. This can lead to some rather inconsistent enforcement in practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that should be closed remain open, and more relevantly some questions which should be open get closed, in which case there is an appeals proceedure. One vote to close is not indicative that you have actually violated any policies. The person who voted to close your question is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;a formal moderator&lt;/a&gt;, or else the question would have been closed immediately rather than being left open for further peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; vote to close you got so far was labeled as &lt;em&gt;&quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and because you were observant of the Single Word Request requirement all that really means is that you have managed to confuse somebody regarding the nature of your problem. That could mean your post is genuinely confusing and should not be addressed until it is understandable, or it could mean that the voter lacks the cognitive skills to comprehend your post, which would not be your fault in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not going to cast judgement one way or the other on that, but if it is your error, rather than the voter's, then you might want to see if there is anything you can do to make the post easier for other people to understand. It looks like you have already tried though, so there is not much to do other than wait and see if other posters agree with the closure rationale, or observe if the question has other defects which may merit a closure vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is closed, you will get a message informing you as to what is wrong with the question and what you might try to do to get it reopened. You can also ask for advice regarding closed questions here on meta, as you seem to be aware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You tried to do everything right from the onset though, so it should probably be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T14:31:00.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13243" CreationDate="2019-06-16T12:06:02.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In comments, Lambie answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy to report that I re-installed the regular and italic Georgia font (I only had italic bold before) and now I can see this bolding: &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;. &amp;quot;on ELU starting with any installed variant of &amp;quot;Georgia&amp;quot;, falling back to &amp;quot;Times New Roman&amp;quot; etc. if not available.&amp;quot; So, it read Georgia as available, when in fact only Georgia Bold Italic was available.So &lt;strong&gt;thank you very much, JAG&lt;/strong&gt; :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The family was not there. I only had: bold italic. I installed the normal font, the italic and the bold. Thanks very much for solving this mystery,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T12:06:02.667" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13252" CreationDate="2019-06-18T00:59:15.980" Score="10" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a question about the history of English like “When did [some thing] become incorrect?” or “Was [some thing] different during [some time]?”, would that be off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="332980" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T06:26:10.543" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T12:48:01.233" Title="Are questions about how English worked at a certain point on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13228" CreationDate="2019-06-18T01:58:33.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the risk of muddying the waters with (more) facts,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/176690/datt&quot;&gt;the user in question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has been a member of EL&amp;amp;U Stack Exchange for three years,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where he has posted two (other) questions, which&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;were not self-answered,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contained no links,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contained no self-promotion that I could see, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appeared to be legitimate, on-topic questions&#xA;(although neither was high-quality, and one was a dupe).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has been a member of Stack Overflow for seven years,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where he has over 500 rep (based on 6 questions and 17 answers):&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A spot check of these indicated that they were legitimate,&#xA;spam-free posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I cannot see deleted posts, and I have no idea&#xA;whether he has any history of violating rules or causing trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a malicious, deliberate rule-breaker / spammer? &#xA;Or is it a person who has a lot of plates in the air,&#xA;and forgot the rules of a site he uses only a few times per year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even if that’s true, does it change anything? &#xA;  Past good behavior doesn’t mean you get to break the rules&#xA;  and engage in self-promotion without being transparent about it. &#xA;  Sudden “spammy” activity after a long period of inactivity&#xA;  may indicate the account has been compromised,&#xA;  although I don’t think this is the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13228/26083#comment54354_13251&quot;&gt;comment by ColleenV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that it makes a difference. &#xA;I believe that it’s appropriate to look at intent and patterns of behavior. &#xA;A lot of the spam that we see&#xA;is the first post from accounts that are less than a week old. &#xA;When Datt joined Stack Exchange,&#xA;I doubt that that he rubbed his hands together&#xA;and said “Now all I have to do is wait seven years,&#xA;and then I can post a link to a company&#xA;that’s owned by the company I work for,&#xA;and maybe I’ll get away with it.” &#xA;If (and I say &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; because I don’t know)&#xA;it’s a first offense from a user with a long, clean record,&#xA;it might be appropriate to delete the answer (or edit out the link?)&#xA;and give him a warning. &#xA;Wiping out all his rep on EL&amp;amp;U seems excessive. &#xA;Banning the user (which hasn’t happened [yet] but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13228/26083#comment54200_13230&quot;&gt;was suggested&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;seems like it would be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one point &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240839/195817&quot; title=&quot;The NEW new “Be Nice” Policy (“Code of Conduct”) — Updated with your feedback&quot;&gt;the “Be Nice” policy said&#xA;“Be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions.”&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;The language may have changed,&#xA;but this still seems to be the spirit of the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if the account has been compromised,&#xA;how does it make sense to punish the legitimate owner of the account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastEditorUserId="26083" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T21:19:15.557" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T21:19:15.557" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13250" CreationDate="2019-06-18T12:48:01.233" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, history of the language is very much on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?page=125&amp;amp;tab=Newest&amp;amp;q=old%20english&quot;&gt;mentions of Old English&lt;/a&gt; has ~6200 results, asked starting from the very inception of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is an exact duplicate but here's a meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2048/are-old-and-middle-english-questions-really-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are Old and Middle English on on topic? &lt;/a&gt; (full disclosure: the main answer there is mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T12:48:01.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2019-06-19T00:11:59.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my very eminent professors at MIT (in quantum mechanics) said that &quot;there are no bad questions&quot;.  Of course, that was about quantum mechanics, and in the late 1950s, when it was still often said of quantum mechanics that &quot;nobody understands it&quot;.  Expanded to any question about anything, his statement is, of course, not true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is true enough to be relevant to this Meta Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By this I mean that some mediocre questions on ELU and other SE sites give rise to surprising and deep answers.&lt;/strong&gt;  It is always hard to find an example when one needs one, so I offer one of my questions on Motor Vehicle Repair and Maintenance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/68110/how-to-do-an-amateur-repair-of-a-tiny-ding-on-my-almost-new-car&quot;&gt;repair of a tiny ding&lt;/a&gt; as an example of a mediocre question, with a great answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, when a question leads to a exceptional answer, it deserves at least an upvote from the person who answered it (as my ding question received.)  I find a situation where a question with few or no upvotes gives rise to highly upvoted, excellent,  answers....perverse.  The question is the mother of the answer; the question sparked something in the answerer.  That should be acknowledged, for sure by the answerer, and by at least a few upvoters of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am not talking about poor questions that elicit perfunctory answers, or answers in comments.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T00:11:59.330" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13255" CreationDate="2019-06-16T20:15:32.510" Score="4" ViewCount="992" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any tools/APIs that provide this service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(After) Free &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free beer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free pizza &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free stuff&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Before) Beer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Craft Beer &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draft Beer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Beer &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cheap Beer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="351840" OwnerDisplayName="sri" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T18:30:37.353" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T16:57:48.487" Title="Is there a tool that provides/suggests words that come before or after a word?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13254" CreationDate="2019-06-19T03:44:19.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My favorite tool for this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/help/changeCorpus.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English-corpora.org&lt;/a&gt;. Although there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/faq.asp#x10a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;API access&lt;/a&gt; due to copyright, it is a very powerful tool, at least once you understand how to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nouns after &amp;quot;free&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=76965612&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;free _nn*&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjectives before &amp;quot;beer(s)&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=76965795&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;_j* BEER&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freecollocation.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Collocations Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; uses data from one of those corpora: the BNC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-06-20T16:57:48.487" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T16:57:48.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13254" CreationDate="2019-06-19T12:39:20.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books NGram search&lt;/a&gt; allows searches with wild cards where you can specify part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, searching there for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*_ADJ+beer&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*_ADJ beer&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'beer' preceded by any adjective, returns a chart of the most frequent such pairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k3z1a.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k3z1a.png&quot; alt=&quot;ADJ_* beer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For help on specifying these wild cards (it has a lot of restrictions) see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books NGram help&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But be wary of all the difficulties with Google books: the lack of specification of the corpus, OCR errors, dating problems, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also be aware that what you think the collocations are going to be like aren't necessarily what actually are the most frequent. And I don't think you can get beyond the top ten. The history graph is very pleasing but COCA will be much more informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T12:39:20.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13254" CreationDate="2019-06-19T18:24:36.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, What you're looking for is Word2vec. This is a machine learning method that learns a large corpus (e.g. one or more books) and stores a dictionary of words as vectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a context, e.g. a sentence with a gap, it computes which words are most likely based on the corpus it's trained on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more in-depth description.  I suggest considering this &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/9785/predicting-a-word-using-word2vec-model&quot;&gt;question on datascience.SE&lt;/a&gt;. And for a deep dive, I'd suggest looking into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-embeddings&quot;&gt;[word-embeddings] tag&lt;/a&gt; on that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to ready-to-use tools, by making the embeddings yourself, you get to choose the theme. For example, Google's corpus considers a wide variety of texts, which is great for general insight. On the other hand, if you're interested in a specific field, you could build embeddings on texts from that field only, making the results more relevant for your context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:24:36.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-21T15:44:06.370" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the subject question which was closed for being POB -&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/502387/are-us-detention-centers-in-the-us-mexico-border-concentration-camps&quot;&gt;Are US detention centers in the US-Mexico border &amp;quot;concentration camps&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has room for improvement, but I feel it is fundamentally on topic. I'd like to see the Ocasio-Cortez quote properly put in context. And regarding the terminology, delimit which of the government's detention centers we are talking about and correctly identify the government agencies involved in operating these facilities. Would these changes pass the bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote was apparently directed at an effort to reopen a facility at Ft Sill to house unaccompanied youth that have illegally immigrated to the US. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The funding for various programs such as healthcare and education at these facilities is in the public domain and has been reported on by nation media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Department of Health and Human Services is on record regarding this and other proposed sites such as Malmstrom AFB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the minds of many, the term concentration camp has been inseparably linked to the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany since those atrocities became public knowledge after WWII.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The government has coined a new euphemism for these places, calling them &quot;temporary emergency influx shelters&quot;, the adoption of which has been spotty at best, and making it impossible for me to not reference George Carlin's classic routine &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we tighten up this question a bit and get it back open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &lt;em&gt;concentration camp&lt;/em&gt; be used today in a way that doesn't invoke Nazi Germany's genocide? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better way to opt out of the currently proffered euphemism? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T21:05:11.930" Title="Let's fix the concentration camp question and reopen it" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13258" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:08:52.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Principally I find the sentiment that there is a good question underlying this understandable, but I doubt we have the right to alter the question's scope unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem here may be rooted somewhat in the research standard, since in conjunction with the P.O.B. closure reason, it presents us with a catch 22 situation. If you require somebody to check references to prove that there is an ambiguity and preclude one from being used as the sole basis of an answer, then it is very easy to assume that once they actually &lt;em&gt;do so&lt;/em&gt; that the answer can not be reference based at all, hence making it closer to a Primarily Opinion Based question.  Unless we want to close &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the questions there has to be some leeway on one side or the other, and I am not so sure that English Language &amp;amp; Usage's treatment of the &lt;em&gt;network wide&lt;/em&gt; subjectivity standards and the relevant closure reason entirely accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/&quot;&gt;War of the Closes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the Not Constructive closure reason was changed to &lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/em&gt;, and eliminated language regarding polling, debates and extended discussion. The change suggests that we need not have a &lt;em&gt;certain answer&lt;/em&gt;, so much as an answer that can be coraborated. There are two proofs of that. The first proof is that there is good subjective in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective; Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;, and the second is that the language which remains is all based on types of corraboration that can be proferred:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it should be noted that references are not &lt;em&gt;the only type&lt;/em&gt; of corroboration in that. We could try to argue a case based on facts, or relevant expertise if no adequate reference exists. Relevant expertise could come from a border patrol agent, a newspaper reporter, a legislator, a prisoner of war or just about anybody who is likely to have experience with the word and willing to disclose any relevant qualification which enable them to speak on the particular subject with greater authoritative guidance than the average person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other, and perhaps much more convincing way way to do so is to examine the facts of &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;. It is in our very name folks. We could be examining collocates. A cursory example of that is looking up &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=good+concentration+camp%2Cevil+concentration+camp&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgood%20concentration%20camp%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;good concentration camp, evil concentration camp&lt;/a&gt; with the Google ngrams tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, no singular concentration camp is described as evil according to the chart, but even more tellingly is what you get when you check the book results from the 1970s through 1991. The first page of results show that the word good is either used ironically, or with its particular sense of effectiveness, rather than benevolence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From page 5 of the 1973 United States Congress Senate Judiciary Committee we see the report U.S.S.R. labor camps: hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt; When his father was arrested, the K.G.B. tried to press his mother to become a secret agent by telling her that, if she provided good information father was arrested, the KGB tried to press his mother to become a secret agent by telling her that, if she provided information about neighbors, his father would be sent to a &quot;good&quot; concentration camp. His mother refused. His father was sent to Kolyma Complex where he died after ten years. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1985.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting what a &quot;good concentration camp&quot; is in perspective is this little snippet from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=D4uQVNZeElwC&amp;amp;pg=PA18&amp;amp;dq=%22good+concentration+camp%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi42oaWg_viAhUpiFQKHTRlC2UQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22good%20concentration%20camp%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Grand Tour&lt;/a&gt; by Jerry Herman, ‎Michael Stewart and ‎Mark Bramble - 1980 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Either they put me in a good concentration camp or a bad concentration camp. If it's a good concentration camp that's not exactly good but it's bearable &amp;hellip; but if it's a bad concentration camp there are still two possibilities &amp;hellip;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=R-slAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22good+concentration+camp%22&amp;amp;dq=%22good+concentration+camp%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi42oaWg_viAhUpiFQKHTRlC2UQ6AEISDAG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black education and the inner city&lt;/a&gt; by Marva Collins et all (the names are blurry and hard to make out) for the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education&#xA;Lincoln Institute for Research and Education (1981).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there is a lot of noise going on in room 5 where Miss Wilcox is in charge, she's likely to be in trouble. She will be told that she's not able to maintain discipline. The idea behind this ancient motto is that a good classroom is a quiet classroom. I would like to revise that and say that a quiet classroom is a good &quot;concentration camp.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were strictly being asked to arbitrate between the Oxford and Merriam-Webster definitions, then I would suggest that this evidence favors &lt;em&gt;Oxford's&lt;/em&gt;, although perhaps a more comprehensive look into the matter is merited than the cursory check I provided as a proof of concept. This particular collocate is also perhaps biased towards this particular finding. Why would we describe internment camps in terms of good or evil, for instance, unless we considered them a moral issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point in the question's favor, in this regard, is that it specifically requests objective evidence of some sort, so at the very least, not all answers are &quot;equally valid&quot;. Some will be better than others dependent on how convincing they are. This is not a &lt;em&gt;What's Your Favorite &amp;hellip;?&lt;/em&gt; Type question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question being asked is not our own and its scope is not ours to reshape. The ultimate principle behind &lt;em&gt;editing&lt;/em&gt; a post is that ultimately, the poster has final sayso over the contents of that post. Stack Exchange has a greater emphasis on individual post ownership than Wikipedia, which is part what makes it a more appealing format for making contributions than Wikipedia. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/04/the-great-edit-wars/&quot;&gt;The Great Edit Wars&lt;/a&gt; for reference. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Editing guidelines specify that we should edit to clarify the meaning of a post &lt;em&gt;without changing it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can suggest improvements to the question through commentary, but ultimately the goal of a question and answers website is to answer people's legitimate problems, and so ultimate arbitration regarding what constitutes the best answer to the questioner is left to the questioner, with answer acceptance, which will bring any answer the &lt;em&gt;questioner&lt;/em&gt; likes best immediately to the top, even if that is judged on an entirely nonlingual basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I think the core issue is &lt;em&gt;distinctly outside of scope&lt;/em&gt;. We may be able to tell you which meaning of the word is better, or what terms are more accurate to describe a particular concept, but if Oxford is correct, how do we evaluate whether the Mexican Internment camps are adequate facilities for their purposes using standards of evidence relevant to our field? Whether or not a person is being treated humanely is a subject that we can not determine using words or syntactical structures alone, and the question in its present form solicits that information in particular. we'll have more of a political debate than a lingual one. That not only requires us to know the conditions of the camps, but evaluate them in terms of how adequate those facilities are equipped to do their job, perhaps relative to other facilities in other nations. Why should a grammarian be expected to know any of that? Any answer to the question without that information will be incomplete, and anybody answering this question will be tempted to address that issue, leaving whatever legitimate linguistic basis this question might have as a secondary factor for determinations made by luchonacho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questioner would like to change the title of the question for us, with an understanding that we will not make that particular determination, then sure, we should reopen it. If not it should probably stay closed. Otherwise I fear that the question may constitute a political &quot;rant in disguise&quot; that lacks &quot;a constructive, fair and impartial tone towards determining the subject-matter of interest&quot;, against our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;subjectivity guidelines&lt;/a&gt; and that the final determination will be based moreso on personal opinion than fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &lt;em&gt;original poster&lt;/em&gt; edits the title to something along the lines of &lt;em&gt;Are Inhumane Conditions a Necessary Part of What the Term Internment Camp Means?&lt;/em&gt; then I would be glad to cast the question a reopening vote, but otherwise I think I shall decline, and advise that &lt;em&gt;somebody else&lt;/em&gt; make a more focused version of the question instead, with reference to the original and its problematic framing. We are unable to really be sure what a question aims to achieve beyond the questioner's own input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T19:37:04.497" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T19:37:04.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13258" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:39:43.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;concentration camp&quot; has been in use since at least the 1890s. Evidence from contemporaneous newspapers suggests that it arose in connection with the relocation, under guard, of farmers, villagers, and townspeople in Cuba during an insurgency that eventually prompted the Spanish-American War of April–August 1898. During that war, the term was also used to characterize the mustering points for U.S. forces that were preparing to fight in Cuba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the question that the OP asks is whether a term that very early on had two rather generic meanings has subsequently become so narrowed by a particular application (to the Nazi German forced-labor/death camps of World War II) that it has effectively lost all other meanings. A case could be made that the word &lt;em&gt;holocaust&lt;/em&gt; has undergone precisely this kind of narrowing in the past sixty years. (An interesting EL&amp;amp;U page is devoted to that development at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/106031/who-coined-the-term-holocaust-to-refer-to-the-nazi-final-solution-for-the-je&quot;&gt;Who coined the term &amp;quot;Holocaust&amp;quot; to refer to the Nazi &amp;quot;final solution&amp;quot; for the Jewish people?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the OP's question objectively, it seems to me, we should look at the definitions of the term &quot;concentration camp&quot; that have appeared in dictionaries over the past century to see whether and how they have changed. Further we should look at what sorts of detention or holding facilities the expression has been applied to in past and recent real-world usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, researching these issues is not trivial or general-reference or reliant on &quot;opinion-based&quot; argument. That being the case, I think that the question is entirely on-topic at EL&amp;amp;U, and I think that we should reopen it as asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:39:43.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-21T19:51:52.707" Score="-3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised that this question was migrated to ELL:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/215588/9161&quot;&gt;Is there a word where ‘w’ can not be replaced?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed to generate some interesting answers, and other than maybe a lack of research (which can be fixed) I don’t see any reason why it would be off-topic. It’s not off-topic or unwelcome on ELL; I am just curious why y’all didn’t want to hang on to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been closed, or shouldn’t have been migrated. I just wanted to understand why it wasn’t interesting to EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-06-22T10:58:47.060" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T10:58:47.060" Title="What makes this question off-topic for ELU?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13261" CreationDate="2019-06-21T20:34:15.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well the noted lack of research is one thing. Our research standard implies that E.L.L. may be a better place for unresearched questions, irrespective of whether it is true or false so that may account for much of the reason. More importantly though, note that this question is not asking &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;, but rather &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the two are interchangeable. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/34011/&quot;&gt;I see that at least one other question regarding the relationship between V and W was unilaterally closed by a moderator as General Reference&lt;/a&gt;. (Not &quot;Please include the research&amp;hellip;&quot; mind you, but General Reference, so that is an old closure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am on meta, I also feel free to posit some unproven guesswork: The pronunciation of each consonant is very distinct, and even if somebody lived in a region where the dialect rendered these indistinct, I suppose that they would at least understand that this is quite non-standard, if not only because other people would point out the distinct feature of the accent which renders these continents confusable. This is sufficiently demonstrated by the common word pairs of the top voted answer, and the fact that it mentions a 19th century Cockney accent, rather than any contemporary one. I struggle to think of any one word where the two letters sound &lt;em&gt;just alike&lt;/em&gt;, including the granted examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, even in cases where its letters phonetically interchangable, the orthography of English is mostly settled, with most of the differences between American and Commonwealth orthography being in the termination. Normally, nobody would replace the c in cat with a k, even if the end pronunciation is the same. The answer to &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; is clear by means of commonly shared knowledge among native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am ignorant to how the orthography of other languages works, but  this seems like a question that is much more likely to be devised by, and hence useful for nonnative speakers just starting to learn English starting from a language with less rigid orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T20:50:32.913" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T20:50:32.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13264" CreationDate="2019-06-23T18:23:06.177" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;For anybody without 10K reputation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/502647&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spelling mistakes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 'sticking plaster' word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary. It is one the three words which make up most American sentances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is that last word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;orthography&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its current state, it shows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was marked as spam or rude or abusive and is therefore not shown - you can see the revision history for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;deleted by Community♦ 11 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was deleted as spam or offensive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this was far from an ideal question as it was written, I can't see anything about it that would obviously cause it to run afoul of our automated script. There were also no links embedded in the question that would have led to it being thought of as some kind of self-promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see &lt;em&gt;huge gaps in their vocabulary&lt;/em&gt; in relationship to Americans as being rude, and even possibly offensive enough to some people to have them want it rephrased, but that seems more a matter of opinion than something our &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt; would automatically pick up on through its algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the text of the original message that caused it to be deleted doesn't also cause &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question to be deleted, does anybody know what would have triggered this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the vote count was at -4. Here, also, are the two comments that still exist with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is unclear. Are you asking about the misspelled word &amp;quot;sentances&amp;quot;, which should be &amp;quot;sentences&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uh, what does &amp;quot;It is one the three words&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, here is what our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; says about flags and post deletion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spam and abusive flags are designed to automatically eliminate truly disruptive posts through the collaboration of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 flags -- post is banished from the front page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6 flags -- post is locked, deleted, and the owner loses 100 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T00:27:52.770" Title="Why was the following question automatically deleted as &quot;spam or offensive&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13263" CreationDate="2019-06-24T00:24:15.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts that have been deleted with that indication next to them were not deleted because of the automated script that deletes certain old questions, sometimes known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;the Roomba&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, that indicator says that it was locked and deleted because it had received ‘enough’ flags that it &quot;was marked spam or rude or abusive&quot;. This usually takes six such flags from the community at large before this happens on most SE sites, but on our site it only takes three such. A moderator flag would be binding, so the total flag count would not matter in that instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my eyes, this was not unsolicited commercial advertising. However, I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; say that it’s pretty rude.  Beyond that, it isn’t a real question. It looks like a puzzle with a zinger answer. We don’t do puzzles here, least of all ones whose answer is at the expense of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all honesty it seems to me to be some sort of rant or troll. Even if someone were to somehow clean it up, I cannot at this point see it ever becoming a good fit for our site.  I may be wrong about that, but that’s what my instinct tells me. If somehow an argument to the contrary that’s sufficiently convincing to the community can be made, then we could always resurrect it if that were the sense of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T00:27:52.770" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T00:27:52.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13321" CreationDate="2019-06-24T00:38:07.463" Score="15" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned after posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13263/why-was-the-following-question-automatically-deleted-as-spam-or-offensive?noredirect=1#13264&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It currently states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spam and abusive flags are designed to automatically eliminate truly disruptive posts through the collaboration of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 flags -- post is banished from the front page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6 flags -- post is locked, deleted, and the owner loses 100 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13264/291924&quot;&gt;confirmed&lt;/a&gt; that, in reality, it only takes 3 such flags to delete a post on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our help page should be updated to reflect the actual situation here. (I'm assuming that we go straight to deletion without front-page banishment at first.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T21:20:04.120" Title="Our help page incorrectly states that it takes 6 spam / abuse flags to delete a post" Tags="|bug|status-completed|deleted-posts|help-pages|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-24T20:29:39.420" Score="16" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I posted an update which asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;UPDATE Sunday 23 June, 2019&#xA;  […] Is it just me or has the quality of questions by new contributors dropped even further? Is there a way to measure this statistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Furthermore, speaking purely for myself, I have greatly reduced the number of contributions I make to the site because of LQQs and …&lt;em&gt;blah, blah, blah …&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I have found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/989886/question-scores-over-time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;query&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that tells me the answer. It ain't good news.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WdQtp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WdQtp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare those results with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; Worldbuilding&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MJHF6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MJHF6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; Puzzling&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3WZoq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3WZoq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about Stack Exchange's flagship, how is that faring? Oh, much worse, much worse but it is by no means a consolation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; Stack Overflow&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6hzpf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6hzpf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts and prayers? &lt;em&gt;Yikes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can anything be done to stop the erosion of quality on EL&amp;amp;U? Is it too late? Can we come up with a good idea that will foster better and/or more interesting questions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the community upvoting fewer questions? Why are fewer hi-rep users posting questions? (Don't all look at me)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the blame lie solely on Low Quality Questions (LQQs) or have we become a jaded and cynical band? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for EL&amp;amp;U's ‘oldest’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61080/plural-of-index-indexes-or-indices&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;, it was  migrated from Stack Overflow on  March 13, 2012 but first asked Jun 16, 2009 and it just turned 10 years old. Sugar, we should have thrown a party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-06-29T11:53:01.010" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T11:53:01.010" Title="What's the average score for questions in 2019?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|voting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2019-06-24T23:50:18.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can anything be done to stop the erosion of quality on EL&amp;amp;U? Is it too late? Can we come up with a good idea that will foster better and/or more interesting questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Easy solution: confirm my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swr&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swr&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swr&lt;/a&gt; HNQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13266/whats-the-average-score-for-posts-in-2019#comment54439_13266&quot;&gt;hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;. Then consider the option to ban &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swr&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swr&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swr&lt;/a&gt; from HNQ. In the new HNQ system, the mods have the authority to remove questions from HNQ. A community consensus could be reached to authorise mods to remove any &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swr&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swr&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swr&lt;/a&gt; question from the HNQ. This is a good option because it will push other interesting ELU questions to HNQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why is the community upvoting fewer questions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an indication of fewer upvotes in absolute terms. For that, we would have to look at absolute vote numbers. As an extension, we could look at vote numbers by active users (for each year consider only users active in that year) and plot over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the blame lie solely on LQQs or have we become a jaded and cynical band?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without having looked carefully at the data to support this, I think this is a sensible hypothesis. Furthermore, there's a domino effect. If quality goes down, other things go down too (fewer new users with subject experience stick around, settled users leave or are less satisfied than they would otherwise be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-06-25T13:22:42.437" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T13:22:42.437" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2019-06-25T13:56:39.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need to accept the fact that the only way to significantly reduce the flood of low quality questions is to not allow users to post until after they’ve earned some reputation. That, however, has unwanted side-effects and is not within the community’s power to implement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think getting rid of the low quality questions is as important as attracting and elevating the sorts of questions that are desirable. Some sites do scheduled events to generate and promote content or encourage a particular activity. Maybe organizing an event for the community will work better than Mari-LouA trying to single-handedly to seed the site with quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know exactly what that event should look like- whether it should it be asking questions, or finding gems in the rough, or swarming the low quality questions to get them closed- the important part is to get the community rowing in the same direction and making use of the power we do have to affect the site. If the community doesn’t respond, then we have a better idea where the problem is, and can start working on some community building solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mi Yoda has a “best answer” contest, why not a “best question” contest? It probably shouldn’t be score based, but maybe nominated and voted on in meta, to avoid the HNQ effect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no silver bullet that will solve this problem in one fell swoop. The underpinning of a healthy SE site is the community that curates the content. If it’s too small and the amount of content coming in is too much for it to handle well, that’s a problem. If it’s large enough to handle the content, but everyone has different ideas about what kind of site it should be, that’s a problem. If there are a lot of members, but they aren’t engaged with the site and actively curating content, that’s a problem. All of those problems may have similar looking symptoms and completely different root causes and solutions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know the solution, but neither does anyone else. We have some guesses, but until we actually try something and see what impact it has, we won’t know. Trying something will give us more information about the problem than speculation ever will. It doesn’t matter if it’s this specific idea, but we need to organize a committed effort to attempt some incremental step toward solving some aspect of the problem instead of trying to come up with the perfect solution in theory.&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;  It will be easier for us to try things if we start with things that we can do as a community without much assistance from the SE team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* &lt;em&gt;Yes, the programmers here will think “Hey, that sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agile&lt;/a&gt;”. I am in fact a certified scrum master. I am willing to either Kanban or Scrum the shit out of almost anything&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-06-25T15:22:38.510" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T15:22:38.510" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2019-06-26T13:34:11.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not contesting your observation that question quality is dropping, but I'd like to offer a different view of the data. As @ColleenV notes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It’s interesting that the trend is always down, probably due to older questions having more opportunities to get voted on, although how fast it drops varies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so I thought it would be worthwhile to check how 2019's questions are doing compared to, let's say, the situation for 2018's questions &lt;em&gt;on June 23rd, 2018&lt;/em&gt;, and so on. That's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/1070364/average-question-score-ytd#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query does&lt;/a&gt;, and the trend is indeed downwards. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt; hasn't yet cleaned up abandoned questions from 2019, which might influence the average (SEDE doesn't take deleted posts into account).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o2EMd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o2EMd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other sites in your question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/1070364/average-question-score-ytd#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding shows an upward trend&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/puzzling/query/1070364/average-question-score-ytd#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Puzzling's progress seems to have stalled&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1070364/average-question-score-ytd#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; is (very) slowly going down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T14:12:15.367" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T14:12:15.367" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2019-06-27T00:16:32.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anything be done to stop the erosion of quality on EL&amp;amp;U? Is it too&#xA;  late? Can we come up with a good idea that will foster better and/or&#xA;  more interesting questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is the community upvoting fewer questions? Why are fewer hi-rep&#xA;  users posting questions? (Don't all look at me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the blame lie solely on Low Quality Questions (LQQs) or have we&#xA;  become a jaded and cynical band?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) I like Mari Lou's idea of showcasing answers, and suggest that you might want to go further by taking a stab at fulfilling the goal of providing a source of definitive answers on the English language and its use.  Right now searching is limited mostly to strings, making it hard to find answers suitable to questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, individuals with expertise in a particular area might want to curate the questions and answers in a given area and provide a summary article with links to the relevant q&amp;amp;a's.  This amounts to writing an annotated Table of Contents for a book and filling in the content with links to existing material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to do it?  Maybe like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--The volunteer for a particular chapter creates a question (or the question is asked by an account called &quot;English Enthusiast&quot;) and answers it himself or herself.  The question and answer define the topic, cover misconceptions, and break the topic down into subparts with introductory/summary material and curated links to good questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, supposed John Lawler could be persuaded to answers sometime like &quot;What's with these modal verbs, anyway?&quot;  This answer then defines modal verbs, covers misconceptions, and goes on to explain. (What is a modal verb and what's happening to them?) (Ten things about modal verbs your ESL teacher got wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology (and the major fallacy: what you don't know about etymology that can hurt you) is another topic someone could take on that's not so broad that it becomes impossible to handle.  Inevitably the &quot;answer&quot; is going to include a list of links to other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another Q: I'm determined to use a, an, and the properly--but I also want to know when I can go naked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I think a little humor or jazz is important; the audience is, after all, probably under 25.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developing a list of people willing to take on a slice of what's already on EL&amp;amp;U, and discussing how to circumscribe the &quot;chapters,&quot; is the first task. But the whole thing need not be done at once.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The virtue of the above is that it follows the standard SE format of q&amp;amp;a. A link to an overview document on the questions asked by &quot;English Enthusiast&quot; could be placed on meta. It would also reveal areas of weakness where new questions needed to be asked.  Second answers would be available for additions and updates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The LQQs generate a lot of work.  Possibilities to reduce them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Refrain from answering the questions in a comment, even to help out and then vote to close.  It is so tempting.  I am guilty, guilty, guilty.  If I don't do it, someone else will.  And one wants to help. Yet, it gives the drop-ins exactly what they want:  a quick (and usually quite expert) answer.  I know tchrist campaigned on this for a while and gave up.  But no one really disagrees about the consequences of feeding stray cats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Automate the closing of questions by closing anything that's been open and unmodified for 48 hours and has nothing but &quot;off topic&quot; and comments--or something to that effect.  Get from the in basket to the out basket not necessarily faster but with less work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Consider, while resolutely ignoring questions that don't belong on the site, opening up a little in terms of what's on-topic.  Some questions come up about how to become more fluent in English, what to read that's fiction without too much dialogue, good references on, e.g., grammar, the meaning of vocabulary or phrasing in current political debates, and the like.  Some of these posters are potential contributors, and current contributors have a lot to offer them on these topics. This can be managed by upvoting a question and answering it even though it's a bit of a stretch.  EL&amp;amp;U, assuming it survives, will look vastly different in five years than it does now; how do we let it morph? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh well.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="223618" LastEditDate="2019-06-27T02:30:02.000" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T02:30:02.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-22T17:46:30.653" Score="1" ViewCount="738" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Initial-stress-derived noun&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix.) This process can be found in the case of &lt;em&gt;several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs&lt;/em&gt; and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English dialects, but it is not present in all. The list of affected words differs from area to area, and often depends on whether a word is used metaphorically or not. &lt;em&gt;At least 170 verb-noun or verb-adjective pairs exist.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reasonably complete compilation of such words? The Wikipedia page only lists a handful, nowhere near 170. I'm most interested in American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79843" OwnerDisplayName="MiCl" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T02:22:21.013" Title="List of initial-stress-derived nouns" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13271" CreationDate="2019-06-22T19:27:32.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently the Wikipedia page previously had such a list, but it was removed on June 11:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;absent · abstract · accent · access · addict · address · affect · affix · alloy · ally · annex · array · assay · attribute · augment · belay · bombard · combat · combine · commune · compact · complex · composite · compost · compound · compress · concert · conduct · confect · confine(s) · conflict · conscript · conserve · consist · console · consort · construct · consult · content · contest · contract · contrast · converse · convert · convict · costume · cushion · decrease · default · defect · desert · detail · dictate · digest · discard · discharge · discount · discourse · dismount · embed · envelope · escort · essay · excise · exploit · export · extract · ferment · finance · foretaste · foretoken · forward · frequent · gallant · impact · implant · impound · import · impress · imprint · incense · incline · increase · indent · inlay · insert · insult · intercept · interchange · intercross · interdict · interlink · interlock · intern · interplay · interspace · interweave · intrigue · invert · invite · involute · mandate · mentor · mismatch · misprint · object · offset · overcount · overlap · overlay · overlook · override · overrun · overturn · perfect · perfume · permit · pervert · prefix · present · proceed(s) · process · produce · progress · project · protest · purport · rebel · recall · recap · recess · recoil · record · re-count · redirect · redo · redress · refill · refresh · refund · refuse · regress · rehash · reject · relapse · relay · remake · repeat · reprint · research · reserve · reset · retake · retard · retract · retread · rewrite · segment · separate · subject · survey · suspect · torment · transfer · transform · transplant · transect · transport · transpose · traverse · undercount · underlay · underline · underscore · update · upgrade · uplift · upset &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79843" OwnerDisplayName="MiCl" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T19:27:32.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13258" CreationDate="2019-06-29T21:05:11.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the British first used camps to concentrate mainly rural Boer populations, in the context of the British attempts to deny sustenance to the Boer forces.  This scorched earth policy left Boers homeless and they had to be 'concentrated' in camps.  Wikipedia has a good article on the topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people had been forcibly removed form their home and made to live in what turned out to be appalling conditions.  Much the same can be said about the Nazi version, except that forced labour and genocidal murder were added.  Nevertheless, the two have in common the destruction of property, the removal of important (or all) civic or civil rights, and forced removal from their homes of a large native population and removal elsewhere into camps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However unpleasant they may be, border detention centres are not like that, even if in some respects they may share some similar features.  They do not involved forcible removal of people from their homes, removal of all their property, denial of the civic rights to which they are entitled by birth.  That does not mean that they are not unpleasant, or that would be immigrants or asylum seekers are properly treated in them by modern international standards.  Nor does it mean that the detention centre is necessarily the best way to deal with the arrival through a country's borders of large numbers of people from a neighbour.  But it is an attempt, right or wrong, to solve a real problem of how to keep a grip on who is a citizen and who is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If enough of these centres are baldly and unjustly conducted and managed to do harm to those that are in them, the gleam of euphemism will soon tarnish, without needing to resort to the word 'concentration camp'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am truly torn about whether the use of 'concentration camp' was 'off topic'.  Euphemisms, like the poor, are always with us:  but so are 'kakophemisms', used by all of us when our sense of outrage cries out for a stronger expression than the one at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam Webster and Oxford give virtually no example to the use of the phrase outside the context of Nazi and Japanese camps in the second world war.  Perhaps the usage will broaden to other sorts of institution, including detention centres.  But it does not appear to have done so yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252455" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T21:05:11.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-29T22:16:36.980" Score="2" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be too funny to be the subject of a valid question, but see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/06/29/europe-heroically-defends-itself-against-veggie-burgers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Economist's&lt;/em&gt; article &lt;em&gt;Silly Sausages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of June 29, 2019.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Silly sausages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Europe heroically defends itself against veggie burgers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And there are plenty more misleading words it should ban&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE EUROPEAN UNION gets a lot of flak. All right, it isn’t literally&#xA;  blasted with anti-aircraft fire, but you know what we mean. One&#xA;  ongoing battle (OK, nobody died) involves the use of words. Earlier&#xA;  this year, the European Parliament’s agriculture committee voted to&#xA;  prohibit the terms “burger”, “sausage”, “escalope” and “steak” to&#xA;  describe products that do not contain any meat. It was inspired by the&#xA;  European Court of Justice’s decision in 2017 to ban the use of “milk”,&#xA;  “butter” and “cream” for non-dairy products. Exceptions were made for&#xA;  “ice cream” and “almond milk”, but “soya milk” went down the drain,&#xA;  lest consumers assume it had been extracted from the soya udder of a&#xA;  soya cow. The court has yet to rule on the milk of human kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Greens are mounting a campaign against the committee’s decision, which&#xA;  they suspect is supported not only by linguistic purists but also by&#xA;  the meat industry. This newspaper thinks the parliament is quite right&#xA;  to protect citizens from the confusion they would no doubt feel were&#xA;  they to find that no part of a “veggie burger” was made of the flesh&#xA;  of a dead animal. Indeed, this praiseworthy initiative needs to go&#xA;  further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Escalopes” pose a clear danger to consumers, who might well recoil in&#xA;  horror when, taking a mouthful of one, they discover that it is made&#xA;  not of the scallops from which it got its name but of chicken or veal.&#xA;  “Sausages” should refer only to heavily salted meat, whence the term&#xA;  derives; for clarity, consumers should be informed that the item is&#xA;  encased in animal intestine. Steaks should be sold only on a pointed&#xA;  stick, on the grounds that most shoppers will rely on the&#xA;  proto-Indo-European etymology. Any confusion could be avoided if kebabs&#xA;  were, as their Arabic root suggests, always sold burned. The&#xA;  production of burgers should be restricted to the butchers of Hamburg,&#xA;  long ago deprived of their intellectual property by a shocking failure&#xA;  of linguistic regulation. The same right should be extended to makers&#xA;  of Frankfurter sausages—sorry, meat-filled gut. And “meat” itself&#xA;  should apply to all food, sweet or savoury, which would make the term&#xA;  historically accurate, if useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=steak&amp;amp;source=ds_search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etomonline, steak&lt;/a&gt; for the explanation why steak should be confined to meat served on a pointed stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Economist article (link above) goes on to recommend reforming modern English to misunderstandings on budgetary vocabulary, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Discussion of computers should be limited to clerks who do budgetary&#xA;  calculations, while that of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/ict/bloc-4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;digital single&#xA;  market&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  should apply only to sums that people can do on their fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same article cites some geographical issues that need addressing to avoid confusion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the Mediterranean is not the centre of the Earth; there is no&#xA;  horticulture in the Big Apple. They need renaming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a paragraph about the confusion that will result in the minds of readers when encountering &quot;a level playing field&quot; -- no, it is not a massive geoengineering project to move the Alps to fill in the low areas of Europe -- the Economist article concludes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Treaty of Rome speaks of the need to respect member states’&#xA;  culture (no, nothing to do with yogurt) and bind them together (please&#xA;  put the string away). In view of those aspirations, Europe’s leaders&#xA;  need to get on board with this reform. Not literally, obviously. It’s&#xA;  not a ship. Never mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who thinks (s)he can summarize this article in their own words, and preserve its je ne sais quoi, please try! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now for the Meta Question:&lt;/strong&gt;  Is there a question here for the Main Site?  My thought is that there is a wider question here, which is Creeping Bureaucratese (CB).  Bureaucratese is a dialect of English, with many sub-dialects, even within a single country.  (To its credit, the US Internal Revenue Service website is pretty good at plain English, but the US Social Security site less so.)  &lt;strong&gt;So the question might be, has CB ever been reversed, and if so, how?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrow question might be, &lt;strong&gt;did the EU embark on its linguistic reform on any evidence that consumers were confused by, e.g. soya milk?&lt;/strong&gt; (See article on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2017/01/05/Silly-sausages-German-Ag-Minister-criticises-vegetarian-products-with-meaty-names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Agriculture Minister&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, see the question of @Mari-Lou A on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/478302/is-it-technically-correct-to-call-an-almond-drink-milk-in-English&quot;&gt;almond milk&lt;/a&gt;, to which this Q is related, but not a duplicate.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T18:22:43.947" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T22:06:20.797" Title="Revised: Is a question about the Economist's article &quot;Silly Sausages&quot; on topic, or are we too serious to enjoy a linguistic laugh?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-30T00:39:08.603" Score="15" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here it is, whether we're ready for it or not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chosen by algorithm, according to sources, so&lt;br&gt;&#xA;one must assume they're ranked in order of greatness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T19:33:41.740" Title="Have you seen ELU's Greatest Hits Page?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13275" CreationDate="2019-06-30T16:51:28.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a good find and a useful concept. The small selection I looked at could be termed 'questions saved by good answers', but they really were good saves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/61338/142322&quot;&gt;Difference between “résumé” and “CV”&lt;/a&gt;, for example, goes beyond &quot;they're synonyms&quot;. I might have known the difference once, but if I did, I'd relegated that knowledge to the dusty archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latest question I found was dated 21/3/2019: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/490666/142322&quot;&gt;What is the English pronunciation of “pain au chocolat”?&lt;/a&gt;. It was worth browsing just for the humorous reference to &quot;panno chocolate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be happy for Stack Exchange to link to the page from the menus - perhaps in the hamburger on the right, just below the link to EL&amp;amp;U Meta. Some filters to sort by date, views, votes and so on would be helpful, as would a flag to search &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; within the 'greatest hits'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a community, we have tended to focus on the quality of questions, or the lack thereof. These examples give us a balancing side: finding diamonds in the rough and posting &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that showcase points of interest. These are the kinds of pages that make EL&amp;amp;U an interesting site, particularly for the more established users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for posting the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T16:51:28.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13275" CreationDate="2019-06-30T19:33:41.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I think the list may be misleading. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/10312/191178&quot;&gt;One of the questions&lt;/a&gt; listed there actually has +1012 / -2001  in terms of anonymous feedback:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/313HG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Presumably it’s in the greatest hits list because people anonymously upvoted its answers, but still.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This image is from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback/summary?filter=all&quot;&gt;post feedback 10k tool&lt;/a&gt;, more specifically the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback/least-helpful?filter=all&quot;&gt;“least helpful” of all time list&lt;/a&gt;. These pages are very similar to the greatest hits page, but they are easier to understand and are also more powerful: they can show you what posts were anonymously &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback/most-helpful?filter=day&quot;&gt;upvoted&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback/least-helpful?filter=day&quot;&gt;downvoted&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;today&lt;/strong&gt; (but not how many anon votes were cast) instead of just things that have been collecting Google votes for almost a decade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T19:33:41.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-01T13:45:32.403" Score="3" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question  was asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/503601/what-are-the-different-grades-of-beautiful&quot;&gt;ranking the strength of the synonyms of 'beautiful'&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed very quickly as 'Primarily Opinion Based'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is misguided. Questions about nuances of words are about as on-topic as possible here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explanations of word nuances can very easily be objective. They are explained and then people can agree &lt;em&gt;with the factual content or not&lt;/em&gt;. That's not the same as opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not asking about people's opinions, whether they like a word or not, they are asking for an objective comparison. Vagueness is not an opinion. It's a factual recognition that things aren't exact, not what one's personal preferences are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here is a scaling of determiners by how much is implied by each one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ab17c.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ab17c.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;ordering of determiners&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;https://slideplayer.com/slide/1530756/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://slideplayer.com/slide/1530756/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ordering is substantiated by data (although it is a self report questionnaire of internal feelings):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/npg2v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/npg2v.png&quot; alt=&quot;ordering of determiners experimentally&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zonination/perceptions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perceptions of Probability&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all words or concepts can be so ordered but many can and while their meanings aren't always exact, a range of the vagueness can be stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T23:02:05.073" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T11:13:46.040" Title="Vote to reopen 'gradations of beautiful' question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13282" CreationDate="2019-07-01T20:11:07.670" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/503654/whats-the-meaning-of-theres-no-stinkin-way-in-this-paragraph&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about the phrase &lt;em&gt;no stinkin' way&lt;/em&gt; has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the tag description for translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Determining English equivalents for words or phrases in other languages (that is, translation into English). We don't actually do translations: we can try and help you with your own translation. Please see the detailed tag info for guidance on what to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that it is a translation - I would consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-meaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-meaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-meaning&lt;/a&gt; tags more appropriate. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T16:59:48.743" Title="Is this a translation question?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13278" CreationDate="2019-07-01T22:43:33.107" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree it isn't opinion-based. Just because the ranking of these words will differ from place to place, age to age, it will not differ between the typical members of the different demographics. The words have different connotations, the existence of which is an objective fact, not subjective. Though, these connotations will differ from the different ages and nationalities. This only means that the one who answers will have to feature all of those different consensuses. This is an ungodly big task, and I doubt anyone would bother. Still doesn't warrant a close, although everyone is entitled to ignore the question, as it asks quite a lot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to add, the definitions Google provided for the words &lt;em&gt;comely&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gorgeous&lt;/em&gt; were these: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comely&lt;/strong&gt; - (typically of a woman) pleasant to look at; &lt;strong&gt;attractive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gorgeous&lt;/strong&gt; - beautiful; &lt;strong&gt;very attractive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Google, a trustworthy source, defined one word as &lt;em&gt;attractive&lt;/em&gt; and the other as &lt;em&gt;very attractive&lt;/em&gt; shows that the words are connotatively gradable, which means they are objectively gradable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what does Collins Dictionary have to say about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comely&lt;/strong&gt; - A comely woman is &lt;strong&gt;attractive&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/comely&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gorgeous&lt;/strong&gt; - If you say that something is gorgeous, you mean that it gives you a lot of pleasure or is &lt;strong&gt;very attractive&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/gorgeous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There most definitely is a gradation to be found. Just because the answer to something differs doesn't mean there isn't an objective answer(s). Because if those giving one answer belong to a certain classification, there only means there is a finite amount of answers, belonging to those classifications. So I believe the answer has a right to remain on this site, though I completely understand anyone who doesn't want to go through the extensive, graph-filled research required to fully answer this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; You will find that the dictionaries differ a bit in the definitions, as any good dictionary should, but you still see the same pattern of gradation. One word is clearly defined as stronger than the other. Merriam-Webster described &lt;em&gt;comely&lt;/em&gt; as, among other things, &lt;em&gt;not homely&lt;/em&gt;. MW then defined &lt;em&gt;gorgeous&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;showily brilliant and magnificent&lt;/em&gt;. One is clearly superior to the other, hence there being an objective gradation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239612" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T22:43:33.107" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13278" CreationDate="2019-07-02T03:00:21.280" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not asking about people's opinions, whether they like a word or not, they are asking for an objective comparison. Vagueness is not an opinion. It's a factual recognition that things aren't exact, not what one's personal preferences are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tad disingenuous, I feel. You're stuffing &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;people's opinions&quot;) into the very small jar labeled &quot;whether they like a word or not.&quot; That is not the only  nor the entire domain of opinion. Your feeling, say, that &lt;em&gt;gorgeous&lt;/em&gt; is a more profound or marked expression of beauty than &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt;, or that you can rank all the synonyms of &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt; that you can pull out of a hat, is absolutely an opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to have created a great big Pentecostal tub-thumping show here for a rather poor question. I don't dispute that nuances of word meaning are real and can be discussed objectively (sufficient to this site, let us say), but I really don't see why you are devoting all that effort and attention to a lazy, profoundly unnuanced candidate, which on the main site would be seen for a &quot;gimme da codez&quot; question without a second glance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="2303" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T12:42:47.307" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T12:42:47.307" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13279" CreationDate="2019-07-02T16:59:48.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been changed now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The translation tag is just a mistake. The OP is asking for its meaning not for its translation. – user240918 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T16:59:48.743" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-07-02T16:59:48.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13287" CreationDate="2019-07-03T06:19:46.037" Score="6" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve come across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.it/books?id=fXrlvr_kPXwC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=it#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revd A Smythe Palmer's &lt;em&gt;Folk Etymology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (first published 1882) which defines itself as a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of verbal corruption or word perverted in form or meaning by false derivation or mistaken analogy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an interesting reading, but is it reliable? Could it be cited as reference on ELU for instance? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T06:25:47.983" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T00:08:47.627" Title="Is this Folk-Etymology Dictionary a reliable source?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13278" CreationDate="2019-07-03T14:13:26.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the so-called data:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of the 'data' in the first chart is highly dubious. For example, the determinative &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; is listed as going with uncountable nouns. This, of course, is clearly wrong because &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; inherently considers a group as a number of individual things. Whilst it can occur with nouns that are often used with uncountable meanings, it can only be used with these when they are being used in their countable senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it compares proportional terms with purely quantative ones. So for example, &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; tells us about a proportion not a quantity. &lt;em&gt;Most&lt;/em&gt;  might refer to three people out of five, but nobody would argue that &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; was many. &lt;em&gt;Many&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand tells us about quantities but nothing about proportions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point on the usefulness of the data presented by the OP here, notice that the data from the first diagram, which contains items like &lt;em&gt;any, few, most&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt;, does not apply to the second diagram, which compares items like &lt;em&gt;dozens, scores&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hundreds&lt;/em&gt;. The two do not compare like for like terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On beauty:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the quantitative semantics of functional determiners is often fixed&amp;mdash;so, for example, &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; must mean more than two, and &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; must mean more than 50%&amp;mdash;the meanings of terms such as &lt;em&gt;easy-on-the-eye&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;picturesque&lt;/em&gt; have no pre-determined or set multal degree of beauty involved. Whilst some might agree that &lt;em&gt;gorgeous&lt;/em&gt; is probably more beautiful than &lt;em&gt;pretty&lt;/em&gt;, whether one views &lt;em&gt;hot&lt;/em&gt; as implying more beauty than &lt;em&gt;luscious&lt;/em&gt; is definitely a subjective question. In addition, the number of terms to be considered has not been specified by the Original OP. The question, even had it had some intrinsic merit, is therefore unwieldy and inevitably invites list-like answers due to the number of items potentially up for consideration. Some possible contenders include but are by no means limited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;alluring, appealing, blossoming, charming, cunning, delightful, engaging, fascinating, glamorous (also glamourous), prepossessing, elegant, exquisite, glorious, Junoesque, lovely, magnificent, resplendent, splendid, statuesque, sublime, superb, flawless, perfect, radiant, dainty, delicate, personable, pleasant, presentable, chocolate-box, pretty(ish), desirable, dishy, dollish, foxy, hot, luscious, nubile, pulchritudinous, seductive, sexy, toothsome, hunky, studly, arresting, eye-catching, flamboyant, flashy, glossy, showstopping, showy, slick, snazzy, splashy, striking, zingy, photogenic, telegenic&lt;/em&gt; (mostly snarfed and barfed from Webster's)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, had the OP set out a limited list off say, three, different adjectives or adjectival phrases to be ranked, this might have been an unobjectionable question, had the adjectives been clearly and unobjectionably different in terms of the degrees of beauty implied. However, this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T11:13:46.040" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T11:13:46.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13274" CreationDate="2019-07-03T15:19:56.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it wouldn't be on-topic on Main, but I would welcome it anyway just this once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows, it might even make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits&quot;&gt;greatest-hits&lt;/a&gt;; no violence intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T15:19:56.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13283" CreationDate="2019-07-03T18:40:47.977" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find Smythe Palmer’s dictionary almost impossible to use, in part because he presents the argument for a folk etymology in a deadpan way and only occasionally points out a fundamental flaw in that argument. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=fXrlvr_kPXwC&amp;amp;pg=PA30&amp;amp;dq=%22blancmanger+the+latter+part%22&amp;amp;hl=it&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwimz4qBp5njAhXkJDQIHZK5AA8Q6AEIKzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22blancmanger%20the%20latter%20part%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his dictionary’s entry for “blancmanger”&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BLANCMANGER : the latter part of this word is said to have no connexion with &lt;em&gt;manger&lt;/em&gt;, to eat. The old spelling was &lt;em&gt;blanc-mangier&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;blanc-mengier&lt;/em&gt;, a corruption of &lt;em&gt;ma-en-sire&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; “fowl-in-syrup,” which is the chief ingredient of the dish in old recipes, Its other names—&lt;em&gt;Blanc Desire&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;i.e. de sire&lt;/em&gt;, “of syrup”), &lt;em&gt;Blanc desorre&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Blanc de sorry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Blanc de Surry&lt;/em&gt;—are of similar origin.—Kettner, &lt;em&gt;Book of the Table&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 211–218. But where is this &lt;em&gt;ma(?)-en-sire&lt;/em&gt; to be found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for a reader is how to tell (1) where the entry’s content (prior to the question at the end) comes from and (2) whether any of it is valid in any way. Is Kettner responsible for everything before the final question? Is anything in the first part of the entry valid? For example, is it true that the old spelling was &lt;em&gt;blanc-mangier&lt;/em&gt;? Was “fowl-in-syrup” the chief ingredient of blancmange “in old recipes”? Are “Blanc Desire,” “Blanc de Surry,” etc., really old alternative names for blancmange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/blancmange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/a&gt; offers this entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;blancmange&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;jelly-like preparation in cookery,&quot; late 14c., from Old French blancmengier (13c.), literally &quot;white eating,&quot; originally a dish of fowl minced with cream, rice, almonds, sugar, eggs, etc.; from &lt;em&gt;blanc&lt;/em&gt; &quot;white&quot; (also used in Old French of white foods, such as eggs, cream, also white meats such as veal and chicken; see &lt;strong&gt;blank&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt;.)) + &lt;em&gt;mangier&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to eat&quot; (see &lt;strong&gt;manger&lt;/strong&gt;). Attempts were made nativize it (Chaucer has &lt;em&gt;blankemangere&lt;/em&gt;); French pronunciation is evident in 18c. variant &lt;em&gt;blomange&lt;/em&gt;, and &quot;the present spelling is a half attempt at restoring the French&quot; [OED].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Smythe Palmer’s observation that “the latter part of this word is said to have no connexion with &lt;em&gt;manger&lt;/em&gt;, to eat” simply reports some unnamed person’s erroneous understanding of the word’s etymology, but the subsequent claim about the spelling &lt;em&gt;blanc-mangier&lt;/em&gt; seems to be accurate, but the claim that &lt;em&gt;blanc-mangier&lt;/em&gt; is itself a corruption of &lt;em&gt;ma-en-sire&lt;/em&gt; appears to be bogus, and the remarks about “Blanc Desire” and related forms are therefore (presumably) unfounded. And we still don’t know how much of this folk etymology argument is the work of Kettner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, Smythe Palmer’s treatment of &lt;em&gt;blancmange&lt;/em&gt; is not very helpful because it mixes accurate details with inaccurate ones, without specifying which are which, and because he doesn’t clearly identify the source of each etymological claim made in the body of the entry. These problems arise over and over again in his dictionary. I doubt that I've cited it more than once or twice in my many etymology-related answers at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-07-04T00:08:47.627" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T00:08:47.627" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-05T00:05:37.203" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/503977/looking-for-a-succinct-way-to-describe-a-book-one-can-never-grow-tired-of-readin&quot;&gt;this &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the following moderator post notice was added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prompted me to post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/330508/were-looking-for-long-answers-that-provide-some-explanation-and-context-was-a&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; to Meta about why &lt;em&gt;automated&lt;/em&gt; responses to short &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; should trigger such a message about &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, this is not something that is automated, but something that is manually applied by a moderator. (And the text of which is questioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240254/applying-insufficient-explanation-post-notice-to-one-line-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves me asking: Why was this post notice left in response to this question? Are moderators not able to change the text of such messages? (In this case, &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; should have been changed to &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;.) But perhaps more to the point, why was the original question deemed to be too short and, therefore, worthy of this (misleading) post text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question wasn't clear, shouldn't there have been a more relevant comment made, or shouldn't it have been closed as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="176164" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T03:24:03.317" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T03:24:03.317" Title="I'm questioning this odd post notice" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13288" CreationDate="2019-07-05T01:00:58.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, moderators cannot change the text of the notice, although I believe that the Community Management team can if our community decides we prefer another wording. But that’s never per-posting; it’s site-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added it in the wan hope that it might guide &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to write a real answer — instead of the typical single-word non-answers devoid of context or reasoning or the least bit of original content that such questions routinely get stuck with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this one had already started to attract. Those are not answers because we are not a thesaurus. Answers here are expected to be more substantive than ones which a thesaurus or dictionary alone would provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is all a question is soliciting, then it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T01:00:58.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13278" CreationDate="2019-07-05T01:41:31.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to this, it may be that there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ordinal_scale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ordinal scale&lt;/a&gt; for beauty. To illustrate this, consider a more obvious example: countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can rank countries by many measures to get an ordinal scale, for example by alphabetical order, by population, or by size. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd argue that beauty isn't one-dimensional, then how would one rank words describing it? It's hard to substantiate this with examples, but it's certainly different from your &lt;em&gt;perceptions of probability&lt;/em&gt; (though, shouldn't that be &lt;em&gt;probability of perceptions&lt;/em&gt;?) which can be quantifiable to the real number line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all words or concepts can be so ordered but many can and while their meanings aren't always exact, a range of the vagueness can be stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vagueness is ill-defined, opinion-based and extensive. That might be doable for a single comparison (between two words), but many words describing beauty is too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T07:10:50.727" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T07:10:50.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13293" CreationDate="2019-07-08T03:19:15.247" Score="4" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this is on-topic, but I'm giving it a shot because it's a useful tool in hearing how different people pronounce words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a site I used to use where I could type in a word into a search box and it would show the results of all the Youtube videos where that word is spoken, with the video loaded just at the relevant point. It obviously works by searching the captions (either the auto-generated or user-generated ones). This should be an easy find, but I can't find it. I'm sure one of you knows the address of the site. I would like to use it to hear people pronounce a word in a way that sounds strange to me, but that nevertheless, apparently, is rather a common pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176164" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T06:09:08.173" Title="How can you search pronunciations of words on Youtube?" Tags="|support|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13291" CreationDate="2019-07-08T06:09:08.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youglish.com/search/eczema&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youglish.com/search/eczema&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the site because I once asked a question about the &lt;strong&gt;different pronunciations&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;eczema&lt;/em&gt; and @Atai Voltaire &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/236106/44619&quot;&gt;posted an answer&lt;/a&gt; that had a link to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example where you can actually choose which &lt;strong&gt;accent&lt;/strong&gt; you want. I chose &lt;em&gt;hyperbole&lt;/em&gt; in British English:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://youglish.com/search/hyperbole/uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youglish.com/search/hyperbole/uk&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also search &lt;strong&gt;phrases&lt;/strong&gt; using quotation marks-. In one answer I posted, I used this tool to find instances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://youglish.com/search/%22could%27ve%20went%22/null?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;could've went&quot;&lt;/a&gt; For the record, there are just 8 results.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T06:09:08.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13295" CreationDate="2019-07-08T09:02:45.447" Score="6" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system tells me I have 'reached' about half a million people on EL&amp;amp;U in 21 months, which is quite a remarkable figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me if this is done on the basis of IP addresses, that is to say does it tell me about 'readers' of EL&amp;amp;U who are not logged-in members ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it just a count of 'page-access' incidents from within EL&amp;amp;U by logged-in members of the site ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T12:43:09.470" Title="A question about &quot;people reached&quot;" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13294" CreationDate="2019-07-08T09:53:14.373" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/were-working-on-a-new-stat-to-help-convey-the-reach-of-your-posts-here&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're working on a new stat to help convey the reach of your posts here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,  the following snippet taken from the announcement posted December 2, 2014, shows that the data displayed is only an estimate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Views of pages where your helpful posts had some decent probability of being seen.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean we &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the visitor scrolled to your post, or that your answer helped them - we simply don't track that. But we should be able to estimate the likelihood of a given question or answer been seen as useful by viewers without enabling the 25th answer on an insanely popular post to get a lucky up-vote and credit all the views to the new author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's how we got to the current method, which counts views on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-deleted only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers&lt;/strong&gt; - Views of the parent question for answers that are:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-deleted AND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score &gt; 0 AND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Also meets one or more of the following criteria:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In the top 3 answers OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is the Accepted Answer OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score at least 5 OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Has at least 20% of the total vote count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several SEDE (Stack Exchange Data Explorer) &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries?q=People%20helped%20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;queries&lt;/a&gt; available for those curious to find the &lt;em&gt;total number of views&lt;/em&gt; any one person's contributions have generated. For example, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/810217/people-helped-public-prototype-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; shows between 2011 and 2019,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/12952/barrie-england&quot;&gt;Barrie England's&lt;/a&gt; answers have &lt;em&gt;helped&lt;/em&gt; a staggering &lt;strong&gt;48,552,008&lt;/strong&gt; people/visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244261/what-is-people-helped-and-why-does-it-exist-at-all?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What is &amp;quot;People helped&amp;quot; and why does it exist at all?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/305316/whats-the-formula-for-the-impact-figure-on-my-user-profile-page&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the formula for the &amp;quot;impact&amp;quot; figure on my user profile page?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T12:43:09.470" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T12:43:09.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-13T07:04:30.387" Score="14" ViewCount="5824" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that not long ago (in June) Oxford University Press changed the server that hosted what they used to call &quot;Oxford Living Dictionaries&quot;. I used Oxford Living Dictionaries a bit in the past. It's not the official OED (Oxford English Dictionary), but instead described itself as an up-to-date online dictionary that would be reflective of contemporary English as it's spoken both formally and colloquially.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dictionary content in Oxford Dictionaries focuses on current English and includes modern meanings and uses of words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionaries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Living Dictionaries (how it described itself).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to cite this dictionary as &quot;Oxford Living Dictionaries&quot;, as that's what it was called. However I don't think this name exists anymore. Whereas on the old page the top home button was titled:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oxford &lt;em&gt;Living&lt;/em&gt; Dictionaries&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and was hosted at:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, the same dictionary's top home button is now titled:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;LEXICO&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Powered by OXFORD&quot;&lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and is hosted at:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.lexico.com/en&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on Oxford Dictionaries describes the change like this:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In June 2019, the free-of-charge monolingual dictionaries of English and Spanish were moved to Lexico.com, a collaboration between OUP and Dictionary.com.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the FAQ of the Oxford dictionary the FAQ gives the following information:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q.Why has Oxford Dictionaries changed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A.We have partnered with Dictionary.com to ensure we give users the best possible experience.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q.Why has the URL changed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A.We have recently partnered with Dictionary.com, to offer our free English and Spanish dictionary content through www.lexico.com rather than en.oxforddictionaries.com.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q.What does Lexico mean? What is it?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A.Lexico is the new domain for our free dictionary content, hosted by Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com is licensing the content from our English and Spanish Oxford Dictionaries sites (lexical content, non-lexical content, and blog content) and using it to develop and build a new consumer website, freely available around the world, as a separate site to dictionary.com.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q.Is the dictionary content the same, who writes the definitions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A.All definitions and translations are written by Oxford lexicographers.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dictionary.com is based on Random House Unabridged Dictionary, and I have a feeling that this change has been a financial decision rather than anything else. But anyway, I've seen people citing this Oxford dictionary as &quot;Lexico&quot; or &quot;lexico.com&quot;. I was confused at what this Lexico actually was, and quite a few seem to have been also, if the FAQ is anything to go by. Seeing as this is just a domain name, and the dictionary is still created by Oxford lexicographers and the Oxford University Press, it should be cited Oxford dictionary or something along those lines rather than &quot;Lexico&quot; or something similar? I used to cite it as Oxford Living Dictionaries or OLD, distinguishable from the OED, but I don't think that name exists anymore. How should it be cited now? If it's just cited &quot;Oxford Dictionary&quot; or &quot;Oxford Dictionary online&quot; it'll be even more prone to being mistaken for the OED, which was even a problem when it was the Oxford Living Dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: My question has been identified as a duplicate. I have read through that &quot;duplicate&quot;. The question merely alerts people that the site that hosted what used to be called Oxford Living Dictionaries is now at the lexico.com domain name. The answer is directed to the potential effects the change might have on links for existing citations. As to my question on how we should cite this dictionary now that it's changed url and is no longer called by its former name there are only a few comments in that question that touch on this subject. One user suggests to simply cite &quot;Lexico&quot;, as that is the &quot;source&quot;. Another user disagrees with this (and I concur). I think a dictionary definition should be cited with the name of the dictionary the definition is from. Lexico is NOT a dictionary. I was wondering if there was going to be consensus on this or if we're just going to go our own ways according to individual preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176164" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-07-15T03:59:41.473" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T04:37:57.583" Title="How should the new Lexico-hosted Oxford dictionary be cited?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-13T07:31:37.790" Score="2" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose we kill the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;list-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;list-request&lt;/a&gt; since it is not a good fit for the ELU scope. These questions tend to be too broad or primarily opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta was prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/504911/50044&quot;&gt;this recent question on the main&lt;/a&gt; (now deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I later noticed that the tag description says it's off topic. But then how can we prevent users from asking those questions, given that most don't read descriptions, and this time myself included, since tag descriptions are not visible though the mobile application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-07-21T05:32:32.133" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T17:40:32.267" Title="List request tag review" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13298" CreationDate="2019-07-13T08:03:23.020" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest we use the name they would prefer, that is &lt;em&gt;Lexico&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would advise against editing old posts just to rename the previous citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I previously used &lt;em&gt;ODO&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/em&gt; and later &lt;em&gt;OLD&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Oxford Living Dictionaries&lt;/em&gt; in my answers. I would prefer to use the name as it is on the site at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-07-15T04:37:57.583" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T04:37:57.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13298" CreationDate="2019-07-13T16:12:44.233" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we are talking about Oxford University Press, you presently have a couple of options here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Minimalistically&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is if you are citing the website directly, you should cite Lexico by name. This is easy, relatively painless and adequate under our given policies. Do not change old citations that were valid at the time they were made. Not only is it inconvenient, but a citation should reasonably represent the resource the post author actually checked, just in case there is variance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That same possibility for variance is also why we should discontinue use of the old names and abbreviations for posts made after the change. Inaccurate citations can be an inconvenience to other people, if for any reason the information changed between, causing possible confusion as to which source said what and when without deeper scrutiny, which would be best to avoid where possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you want to invoke the Oxford name, then I suppose Lexico by Oxford might be adequate. In this case Lexico is like the title of a book, and Oxford is the sole entity authoring the entries, and this is as specific as we get in terms of authorship information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, dictionaries are only required to be cited by name in accordance to the principles outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/new-attribution-rules&quot;&gt;The New Attribution Rules&lt;/a&gt;. Those also allows for abbreviation, if the abbreviation can uniquely identify the work, but I think L. is too vague and Lexico is short enough that it should not need to be abbreviated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Going the Extra Mile, When Willing and Able&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of which, thats leads into the other option: I take issue with citations to online dictionaries because their veracity is only as permanent as the website though and all websites are subject to untracable changes or even worse, going permanently offline. At that point, we lose the benefit of veracity because the citation is only as good as our faith in the poster to accurately report information. Given that approximately half of the purpose of citing sources is to allay such doubts, that is not an ideal situation, and we hope to provide answers of enduring worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However sometimes you can also find that an online dictionary shares its information with offline resources, and in those cases we can try to cross-reference and cite another source instead, if the relevant information is &lt;em&gt;identical&lt;/em&gt; to that seen in the online entry. In the case of Oxford's dictionaries there are at least a couple of resources that I have seen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=anecAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PR3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of English, third edition, (&amp;copy;2010)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Vm_mNJiflwgC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of Difficult Words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Sidebar:&lt;/strong&gt; Take notice of the added preposition and word transposition in the title. The Oxford Dictionary of English [O.D.E.] is a distinct work from the Oxford English Dictionary [O.E.D.]. The O.D.E. is O.U.P's. largest single volume dictionary with full size print. The O.E.D. in its second edition normally spans 20 volumes (there are compact editions with shrunken text), and the third edition only exists online.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-referencing these books is a little more inconvenient, but for anybody willing to perform the extra effort, citing a printed textbook adds stability to the citation that a website could never hope to achieve, because unlike a website a book is exstistentially independent of both Oxford University Press's willingness and ability to maintain the work and the information contained therein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you cite a book with multiple editions with multiple editions, then I would also recommend including some uniquely identifying information. In the O.D.E.'s. case, Something like (3rd ed.) or (&amp;copy;2010) can help distinguish the most recent edition from prior editions, and thus explain discrepancies which may arise as a result to anybody willing to go through all of the trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ancillery benefit to this is that offline dictionaries usually have a credits page with attribution to each member of the lexicography team, so this is also better in terms of giving credit where credit is due and validating the expertise exercised in the creation of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the New Oxford American Dictionary that might be worth checking too. Although I do not personally possess it, I do have good reason to believe that it is very similar to the O.D.E. in terms of content, the abbreviation is better known and the name is more distinct, which lessens the amount of potential confusion. Unfortunately, this will only be an option for those of us who do have direct access to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T16:39:51.783" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T16:39:51.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13299" CreationDate="2019-07-13T17:33:06.763" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, listing questions are not strictly off-topic at Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anime Stack Exchange shows how they deal with lists in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/348/what-is-the-status-of-list-questions-on-this-site&quot;&gt;What is the Status of List Questios on This Website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4171/how-did-list-questions-become-off-topic&quot;&gt;How Did List Questions Become Off-Topic&lt;/a&gt; [A: They didn't]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is off-topic are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;open-ended and unreasonably scoped questions where there are any number of potential answers, and no way to discern which one best solves the given problem are&lt;/a&gt;. There is admittedly a tendency for the two to go hand-in-hand, but certain questions requesting a &lt;em&gt;closed list&lt;/em&gt; of words are cognizably ask-able.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a hypothetical example that might be more relevant to our scope, I would not take issue with a question asking for a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.feetcare.sg/blog/2016/8/16/different-parts-of-a-shoe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all of the words naming each different part of a typical shoe&lt;/a&gt;, because it is a list that cognizably has an end between ten and twenty parts. There might be a couple of parts missing from that list, like the insole and the aglets of the shoelace and maybe a few others, but I could not imagine that there would be very many more. The best answer would of course be based on comprehensiveness and veracity of the list provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More concretely the often absued &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/vocabulary/info&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag is supposed to be used for list of words related to a particular profession, and exemplifies these questions as a good fit for it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1115/&quot;&gt;Terms for collections of animals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/953/&quot;&gt;Informal terms for money amounts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/13915/&quot;&gt;Words for different types of leatherworking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think a better solution in this case is to change the vocabulary tag to be a little broader in its intended scope so that it is not strictly related to professional terms (the money question isn't even such a question) and make the list-request tag a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;. This will not only eliminate the problematic tag, but it should also seed the vocabulary tag with more of the sorts of questions it is meant to have. The money question is just as informal as it is professional in nature anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T19:04:31.723" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T19:04:31.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11148" CreationDate="2019-07-15T11:52:00.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the upvotes on the question imply that we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; make these two tags synonyms, I have proposed the tag synonym here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote it up, in the link, if you agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T11:52:00.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-16T19:21:58.847" Score="2" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to reformat a recent post which calls for superscript to a footnote, and I will be danged if I can see how to do it without getting into (sup) with the little wedgie thingies — which doesn't seem to work here: as soon as I put them in the text they disappear, like this: 11 (that was &lt;code&gt;1&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;1&lt;/code&gt;) — or rewriting the entire block of text in HTML.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example..&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/505250/what-is-the-first-documented-usage-of-the-gay-culture-term-daddy/505257?noredirect=1#comment1221510_505257&quot;&gt;see this answer and last para as well as the comments below it&#xA;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9424/can-we-improve-our-sub-and-superscript-or-footnote-formatting&quot;&gt;An unanswered question on the topic.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How the heck do you do superscripts, at the beginning and also the end of text? And why don't we have a button to make it more convenient? Or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T07:05:39.263" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T07:05:39.263" Title="How the heck do you do superscript (and subscript)?" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13304" CreationDate="2019-07-16T19:57:15.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do it with regular HTML notation in accordance with the following coding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;sup&gt;1&amp;lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you use this code in your post, it produces a 1 that looks like this: &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2019-07-16T21:08:00.690" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T21:08:00.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13304" CreationDate="2019-07-16T20:04:51.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Markdown supports a limited subset of HTML. Superscript and subscript tags are included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Text &amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;up&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt; Text &amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;down&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text &lt;sup&gt;up&lt;/sup&gt; Text &lt;sub&gt;down&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some fonts come with a full or nearly-full set of superscript and subscript glyphs. Georgia Pro, the font used here, doesn't; but it does come with numbers which you can enter using Unicode references. Exactly how depends on your operating system; you may be reduced to using charmap or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use a utility such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://yaytext.com/tiny-text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://yaytext.com/tiny-text/&lt;/a&gt; which will create Unicode characters for you. It has to make some assumptions and not every character is available. It also ends up a bit small here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text ˢᵘᵖᵉʳˢᶜʳᶦᵖᵗ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However another utility at the same site does a reasonable job of small capitals, which aren't easy otherwise and which are useful in dictionary references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over, &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; ᴄʀɪᴄᴋᴇᴛ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably worth adding that if you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; an angle-bracket to appear, you either need to enclose it in code-quotes (that's the backtick quote) or use the HTML entity &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;lt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T20:04:51.353" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11148" CreationDate="2019-07-16T20:35:54.017" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the description as quoted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word or phrase which can replace a larger phrase or idea while conveying the same meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is asking for synonyms of a &lt;strong&gt;stated&lt;/strong&gt; word or phrase, where the answer could simply replace the word(s) the OP doesn't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single-word-request questions tend to be the &quot;What's the word for my daughter's boyfriend's ugliest uncle?&quot; type questions or &quot;What is this part of the object in this picture called?&quot;, which don't fit the same pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonym-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonym-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonym-request&lt;/a&gt; tag, but it seems to me that that's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-substitution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-substitution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-substitution&lt;/a&gt; should be linked to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may well be that most if not all of the current questions are actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-request&lt;/a&gt;questions, but just because the wrong tag has been used is not a reason to synonymise them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T20:35:54.017" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-18T04:29:46.917" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to advertise &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/500718/334589&quot;&gt;How did &amp;#39;consideration&amp;#39; shift to signify grounds and the act of deliberation, then inducer of a grant or promise?&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't know how else to ask this, but there being no answer still, I don't want the +50 bounty to expire in 12 hours and go to waste. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus how can I alert people who may want to try to earn the bounty? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T07:13:17.480" Title="Payable bounty, but no answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13309" CreationDate="2019-07-18T04:59:16.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;General suggestions would be to improve the question, show the research, add a bounty etc, which I think you have already tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is unfortunately no other way to attract more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, even with a bounty, a question might not grab the attention of many. Your question appears to be an example of this. Even a month and a bounty later, it has only managed to attract 61 views, as of now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's only then the possibility of it jumping on to the Hot Network Questions. From my experience, a question does not simply go to HNQ, the HNQ takes the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's wait.. Maybe the right answerer hasn't seen the question yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-07-18T05:05:54.317" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T05:05:54.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13309" CreationDate="2019-07-18T07:13:17.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s a book that might help: Fried, Charles. Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligations 1981&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the real problem here is that this is a question of changes in legal terminology, and might get more response on the law forum of stackexchange.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T07:13:17.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-19T05:20:11.260" Score="9" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/505463/112436&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it valid to use &quot;We will be pending for her return&quot; instead of, for example: &quot; We look forward to her return&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to vote to close but then I noticed a comment that said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please upvote. To VTCers...if you cannot find duplicate please do not close for &quot;lack of research&quot;. Just ain't fair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this.  Has something changed on ELU?  Is it no longer required to show what you've tried and where you got stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-07-20T00:50:29.547" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T00:50:29.547" Title="Has anything changed regarding voting to close for lack of research?" Tags="|discussion|questions|vote-to-close|research-effort|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13312" CreationDate="2019-07-19T13:55:22.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been silently migrated to ELL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense to me that it would be a good fit there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the comment about it not being &quot;fair&quot; to close the question here at ELU has unfortunately not participated yet here.  For now at least, based on the discussion that has occurred here so far, I conclude that there is nothing unfair about closing questions of that type here at ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T13:55:22.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13312" CreationDate="2019-07-19T19:33:36.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, ain’t this a turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing on the site has changed; but maybe I have. I am usually being called to task as an overly enthusiastic VTCer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the original commenter quoted  from that post, and I think we could have handled the question better. When I said “unfair”, I guess what I meant to both the site and the new contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although we are a Question and Answer site, our main purpose is not really to help out users; that is secondary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case nobody has looked at it recently, the &quot;Tour&quot; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question was interesting and could have done with some research, but I did not see any invitation to the OP to review the site guidelines before it was foisted upon ELL, which BTW, also has a requirement for basic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usage was unusual, and although from a learner, thought-provoking.  There were  long-time users who found the question sufficiently interesting to post comments, as well as one real answer. I only converted a comment from a distinguished user into a community wiki answer, based  on the suggestion of another long-time user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a minority of users here who strongly oppose posting answers &quot;in comment&quot;, and I am one of those often guilty of that “offense”,  especially when I think that the question, although still deserving of a good answer, will probably get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the most important activity on the site is asking questions: a single good question can gather a lot of good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to find a mid-ground somewhere in between closing a question for lack of research (which I do a lot) and migration to ELL (something which I almost never do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should have fixed the question on EL&amp;amp;U. We could have done a better job communicating our requirements. It is possible that users mis-intrepreted this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T21:37:52.360" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T21:37:52.360" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13312" CreationDate="2019-07-20T00:49:57.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree in principe with Casabel's answer around this quote from the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, however, this isn't something that the community seems to work toward and it's not what this site is for. After all, to be a complete repository of knowledge on a language requires starting with the basics. But as I've been told, quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13266/whats-the-average-score-for-questions-in-2019/13268#comment54475_13268&quot;&gt;Dan Bron in a comment last month&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not general purpose, the audience was mooted and clearly identified: linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. IE word-nerds, people invested in studying English qua a language. The idea that it’s “general purpose” is precisely the myth that we have to quash, and also convince Google’s SERPs to quash thorough diligent curation and prevention and removal of “general purpose” Qs, and encouragement of interesting, deep questions. Like the LanguageLog and similar blogs for lovers of English as a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two are somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, you can aim to build a complete reference work. On the other hand, you can serve an expert audience that wants to delve deeper into the language and its facets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To combine the two is like putting toddlers and university graduates together with the idea that they can learn from each other. It's nice in principle, but it's not efficient in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say you have to choose between the two, do you want a broad audience or do you want a specialised audience? Now, I say that's the question but as pointed out by Dan, it's already been decided from the get-go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I think it's good to migrate to ELL &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; a question fits or can easily be made to fit their question requirements. Otherwise, it will have to be closed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't understand this. Has something changed on ELU? Is it no longer required to show what you've tried and where you got stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I wouldn't focus too much on research but shift the focus to standards. If the question is too basic then it should be closed or diverted to ELL and otherwise it's fine here. And the bar for what's basic could be determined by community consensus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the average high school graduate in an English speaking country can be expected to answer a question sufficiently then it's not on-topic here. If it goes beyond that in level or in depth of investigation (while showing research that the basic aspects are understood) then it's a good addition to our repository of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, the focus shifts from question quality to overall quality (of the question and possible answers combined). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T00:49:57.207" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13299" CreationDate="2019-07-20T16:40:50.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrew Leach asked what we can do about those 43 questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;list-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;list-request&lt;/a&gt; tag, and more specifically what to do with those that have just this one tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following a downvote from me for being &quot;not useful&quot;, about 5 out of the 43 questions got eaten by the roomba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further cleanup, I'd suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Close and Delete these 6 questions with just the one tag; since these are not useful enough to be kept around any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(removed from list following an edit to better fit our scope) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(now deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(now deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(now deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(removed from list following an edit to better fit our scope) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(now deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;These 2 questions &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; stay, but on meta with the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt;, or we could close these as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(removed from list following the removal of the tag)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(removed from list following the removal of the tag)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The 30 remaining questions can survive without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;list-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;list-request&lt;/a&gt; tag, so let's bring in the Infinity Gauntlet and snap the tag out of existence. Note that only a powerful being with a diamond can wield the Gauntlet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; All clear. Requesting deletion of the tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T17:40:32.267" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T17:40:32.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13318" CreationDate="2019-07-22T04:34:08.947" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a review and, when I realized it didn't really &quot;look okay&quot;, I wanted to take a second look at it. But this is the screen shown -- the question body is not shown below the review result. This seems unusual. I had to then manually go to the post to take appropriate action. Other review results are fine. Looks like this is just for this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/343439&quot;&gt;review result&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/505785/50044&quot;&gt;the actual post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XzWRL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XzWRL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T04:39:17.453" Title="Review result page did not show the actual post" Tags="|bug|low-quality-posts|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13317" CreationDate="2019-07-22T04:39:17.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now after checking through review results from many of my past reviews, it seems to me that this is by design for reviews of Questions - so no actual post is shown in the result page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the reviews of Answers show the actual post under the result page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just posting this here for anyone who might come across a similar situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T04:39:17.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T04:45:49.627" Score="-4" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m reporting @tchrist for the abuse of his mod power, for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deleting comments that were helpful but didn’t serve &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/505698/how-did-to-wish-that-come-to-hate-the-present-tense-in-the-subordinate-clauses&quot;&gt;his question&lt;/a&gt; well:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the comments from different users above were deleted. I want to believe this was a simple “decluttering” but he/she did not move the comments to chat like they had previously done before. He said &lt;em&gt;“I did the move to chat, I don’t know what you’re talking about”&lt;/em&gt; in the transcript but as you can see the above comments were never transferred (I was referring to the comments above and that is the reply they gave after I decided to bring it up to them). A link to view &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lhF9U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[image 1]&lt;/a&gt; is there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deleting comments of an instance where I reported said moderator for rude behaviour and inappropriate comments and inferences about my “grammar”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I didn’t manage to screenshot this :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned in chat that I noticed that he deleted these messages and he replied in a rather repetitive-spam like manner and decided to look at all my chat history, answers, questions or comments to compile a list of “my mistakes”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the chat telling me to be consistent with BrE and AmE spellings but later saying “defense” and “offence” in the same sitting. I then proceeded to say “some people are hypocrites” (which was deleted) and I was unfairly banned on chat for 29 days - when said moderator was the one sending me spam like messages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to me the appropriate behaviour of a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have linked the following transcript &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/96438/discussion-on-question-by-tchrist-how-did-to-wish-that-come-to-hate-the-presen&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note several things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I did not say tchrist caused my ban but I had stated that said moderator was showing digressive actions towards me &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; I was unfairly banned for what &lt;strong&gt;initially said&lt;/strong&gt; 29 days and was changed to 24 hours at around the time I posted this question. A link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TIwfB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[image 2]&lt;/a&gt; is there. It has been questioned that this could be a bug but I have contacted SE and they will provide more information &amp;lt;&amp;lt; I will leave this matter at that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A finding:  It seems that a moderator can ban a user for any set amount of time. It doesn't show that there is an automatic 30 min suspension when a user is suspended, but at the discretion of a moderator. If you think a 29 day suspension is implausible, how about a 3250 year suspension (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271267/a-guide-to-moderating-chat/271270#271270&quot;&gt;A guide to moderating chat&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm editing my answer for the sake of cleanness. The images of screenshots can still be found if needed as e.g. [image 1]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm also editing and putting the images in links since, people have seem to forgot that the comments (whether they were fairly deleted or not; we cannot know as we cannot read the mind of a moderator and whether those deletions were biased or not. For example, if they were decluttering why delete all of them and not keep the useful ones? Those comments in [image 1] are just part of the comments deleted) and &lt;strong&gt;that was not the only act of regression&lt;/strong&gt;. In effect:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happens if a user violated any of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Be nice policies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in regards to the reasons I'm reporting said moderator? They could potentially be suspended or banned. But if a moderator violated these actions, it seems there is no recourse for them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260868" LastEditorUserId="260868" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T02:24:44.490" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T02:24:44.490" Title="I would like to report an abuse of mod power" Tags="|support|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="39" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13319" CreationDate="2019-07-22T05:21:12.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/28869/389569&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the Meta post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28867/what-recourse-do-i-have-if-i-believe-a-moderator-has-abused-their-privileges&quot;&gt;What recourse do I have if I believe a moderator has abused their privileges?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's often best for you to try to work things out at as low a level as possible.&lt;/em&gt; If you have a problem with one moderator, it's faster for you to reach any of the other elected &quot;Diamond Moderators&quot; on your site as they have the most experience with your specific site and may even have seen other actions you have taken that give context to the issue at hand. Sometimes you want to go above someone's head (or even straight to the top) with a complaint or request, but realize that the recipient will wonder why this person with a complaint couldn't resolve it with the team of moderators that were put in place to do just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier in the answer, it says how to contact another moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flag for moderator attention and request a second moderator to have a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you flag would be something as closely related to the problem as possible—the question, the answer, or one of the (still existing) comments under one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was some interesting information in the comments under that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is an (unwritten?) rule that, if you complain about a specific moderator, then that moderator will not handle a flag that is about them, and will leave it for other moderator(s) to look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/306740/195817&quot;&gt;Can moderators handle flags cast on their own content?&lt;/a&gt;  — “But Moderators are bound by &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt; prohibitions against conflict of interest.  If a Moderator were to find themselves in the middle of an incident in which they find themselves a party, &lt;strong&gt;we ask that they recuse themselves and find another Moderator to resolve the conflict.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without going into details at this particular time, I recently had a similar experience with regard to an abusive comment directed at me by a moderator—which was then deleted, but not before I had flagged it as abusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not knowing if my flag would survive the deletion of the comment or not, I raised a custom flag against a still-existing comment, and (in the space provided) mentioned the name of the particular moderator, hoping that it would be handled by somebody else—as indicated in the information provided above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turned out, both my original flag and then subsequent custom flag were marked as &quot;helpful.&quot; This tells me two things. First, that my original flag &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; survive its deletion. (That's good to know.) Second, and mainly because my custom flag wasn't processed until many hours later, that it was likely handled by a different moderator. Of course, it was good to know that I seem to have been warranted in raising my concern about the violation of the code of conduct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I suspect that this is the best way of bringing such things to the attention of other moderators—just raise a flag, and it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be looked at by somebody other than the person involved. So long as others are aware of it, they will deal with it in the background as they should. (So far, I've had no reason to lose faith in the underlying checks and balances that should be in place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be tricky when the person you have a problem with is a moderator, but I suspect that we should still handle things in the same way as we would if they weren't a moderator. Probably there is more so-called fear involved in this specific case—but I'm going to choose to think that it's mostly unwarranted so long as you handle &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt; politely and professionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T05:37:39.403" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T05:37:39.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13265" CreationDate="2019-07-22T21:19:47.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked at your recently deleted posts and there's very few that were deleted as spam or abusive - in general, you average about 1-2 per day from what I can tell, which isn't a lot, and far fewer than other sites on the network get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After thinking it over a bit and talking with people about it... based on the recommendations here and those I got from other discussions and the data, &lt;strong&gt;we're raising the flags needed to delete spam and rude posts back to the six flag default&lt;/strong&gt; to make the help center page correct without changing it. Yes, this is a backwards way of completing this request but... eh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect y'all to see any real changes for a couple of reasons. The ability we have to find and flag spam and abusive content is much better than it was when this was changed back in December of 2016, thanks in large part to the work of some great users who are part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/291301/can-a-machine-be-taught-to-flag-spam-automatically&quot;&gt;Charcoal project&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for some reason, you see content - particularly abusive content - sticking around longer than it used to, please let me know so we can review. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for starting this discussion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T21:19:47.550" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T23:17:23.200" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s hard to locate a chat room by topic (question or answer) by chat-room title, as the title area is taken up by introductory material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the intro be shortened to show some content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched “chat room” and didn’t find anything relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="223618" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T00:32:29.463" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T11:13:52.080" Title="Chat Room ID feature request" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13322" CreationDate="2019-07-23T11:13:52.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So if I understand you correctly, you would like for the name of the chat rooms where comments have been moved to be changed from something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Discussion on answer by aesking: How did “to wish that” come to hate the present tense in the subordinate clauses it governs, and why is it alone in this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How did “to wish that” come to hate the present tense in the subordinate clauses it governs, and why is it alone in this? Discussion on answer by aesking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest solution to make the titles &quot;browseable&quot; would be to ask the mod team to get in the habit of renaming the chat room to move the &quot;Discussion on...&quot; text to the end of the name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you just want to find all of the chat rooms for a question and its answers, you can put the question ID in the &quot;filter&quot; box. The process of moving the comments to chat puts the question URL in the description of the chat room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T11:13:52.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13325" CreationDate="2019-07-23T11:58:37.717" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewing questions, it is sometimes apparent that they would be best asked in a different (Mathematics, Biology, Law etc) SE from EL&amp;amp;U. However when I try to flag this I am only offered ELL and this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can do is leave a comment to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this option above my pay grade or should I flag it for moderator attention and specify what I believe is needed there? I don't want to waste the moderators' time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been suggested that this is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/600/extend-the-list-of-se-sites-presented-when-a-question-is-being-closed-as-off-top&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; and indeed it is very similar. However the answer is about migration to one specific beta site. It does not address the option to request migration to &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; other appropriate SE site rather than a very restricted set of options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347686" LastEditorUserId="347686" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T20:26:16.360" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T22:36:25.310" Title="Moving questions to other SE" Tags="|discussion|migration|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-07-26T16:35:13.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13324" CreationDate="2019-07-23T12:53:26.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migration paths can only be set up by the Community Mod team, and a site is only allowed to have 4. Every site can migrate between the main site and its meta site. The other paths are harder to get set up and require demonstrating that there are many questions getting asked that are migration candidates. For the occasional migration, community members should flag for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions usually shouldn’t be migrated unless they are off-topic on this site and on-topic on the site they’re being migrated to. There’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;more about migration in this post on Meta&lt;/a&gt;. There’s a lot of good information in that post - a relevant excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't migrate for the sake of migration.&lt;/strong&gt; We only migrate questions because they are off-topic on the original site. It is perfectly possible for a question to be on-topic on multiple sites, but that is not a reason to migrate it elsewhere, unless the OP requests migration. As a general rule, if someone asks a question here, and it's on-topic here, it should stay here.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be familiar with the destination site.&lt;/strong&gt; If you are not familiar with the destination site, read through its about page and help center thoroughly and make sure the question actually belongs there. Don't just look at the name of a site and automatically assume that the question can be asked there. Each site has its own rules, and rules vary greatly across sites.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don’t try to sort questions so they are asked in the “best” place. Presumably if they are asked here, the author would like the question answered from the perspective of the experts in this community. If the question isn’t getting any suitable answers and the author feels like another site might be able to help them more, they would raise a flag for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggesting another site that might be helpful to the question’s author in a comment is usually the best course. Migration is confusing, especially if the author of the question is new to Stack Exchange and doesn’t have an account on the target site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T22:36:25.310" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T22:36:25.310" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-24T10:42:07.657" Score="1" ViewCount="2576" Body="&lt;p&gt;All Canadian English dictionaries appear to be under a paywall &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T15:00:30.483" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T15:00:30.483" Title="Is there a free online Canadian English Dictionary?" Tags="|support|online-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="28" ClosedDate="2019-07-26T16:35:27.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13326" CreationDate="2019-07-24T18:04:59.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2alpha/alpha-eng.html?lang=eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TERMIUM Plus®&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Government of Canada’s terminology and linguistic data bank.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  TERMIUM Plus®, one of the largest terminology and linguistic data banks in the world, gives you access to millions of terms in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. You can find terms, abbreviations, definitions and usage examples in a wide range of specialized fields. The data bank is an essential tool for understanding an acronym, checking an official title, finding an equivalent in another language, and much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dchp.ca/dchp2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As an historical dictionary, this work shows changes in the meanings of words over time, using dated quotations to illustrate these shifts. Thus, DCHP-2 includes words that have become outdated or obsolete and lists for the sake of historical completeness words and meanings that are considered offensive or derogatory today. These words, however, are clearly marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T18:07:46.990" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T18:07:46.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13326" CreationDate="2019-07-24T21:40:52.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles&lt;/em&gt;, which Mari-Lou A mentions and links to in her answer, you may occasionally find Margery Fee &amp;amp; Janice McAlpine, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=aRUkAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq=editions:ghL6L9ZtFOYC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Oxford] Guide to Canadian English Usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; helpful. The second edition (2007) is available in searchable snippet view only—but that may be enough in some instances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, a search for the word &quot;hospital&quot; yields &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=aRUkAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq=editions%3AghL6L9ZtFOYC&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=hospital&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three snippet matches&lt;/a&gt;, including this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Five youths clad in just T-shirts and sweat pants were &lt;strong&gt;in hospital&lt;/strong&gt; yesterday after police found them running around in the snow in -20 C temperatures. [—]&lt;em&gt;Province&lt;/em&gt; (Vancouver) 26 Nov. 1990: 6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the quotation appears in the context of a discussion of whether Canadian English accepts &lt;em&gt;clad&lt;/em&gt; as an alternative to &lt;em&gt;clothed&lt;/em&gt; as a past participle of the verb &lt;em&gt;clothe&lt;/em&gt;, it is at least circumstantially relevant to the question of whether Canadians say &quot;go to hospital&quot; because typical US English usage would (I believe) have included a definite article between &quot;in&quot; and &quot;hospital&quot; here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...were in &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; hospital yesterday...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, Fee &amp;amp; McAlpine is a serious and useful work—and it is available online in a limited form that permits snippet searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T22:02:22.743" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T22:02:22.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13330" CreationDate="2019-07-27T07:48:52.890" Score="6" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;On May 20 at 18:47:13Z I raised a flag on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/499042/260836&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; concerning a possible migration to the comments section due to a lack of authoritative evidence. It has been 2+ months and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there have been no attempts by the answerer to improve their post&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;my flag has still not been processed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I flagged for moderator intervention as I originally decided that a not-an-answer flag could potentially be easily dismissed (from experience on other SE sites). After looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Privileges: Flagging&lt;/a&gt;, I realised there is no specified time limit on such moderator flags, only that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You'll be required to enter a comment clearly explaining what the problem is. After that, these moderator flags go in a special high priority queue visible to all moderators. (Users with the Moderator Tools privilege cannot view these flags.) We take moderator flags quite seriously; rest assured that they are all followed up on!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this problem be addressed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260836" LastEditorUserId="260836" LastEditDate="2019-07-29T07:24:20.033" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T07:24:20.033" Title="Flag has not been processed for 2+ months" Tags="|discussion|comments|flagging|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13329" CreationDate="2019-07-27T19:06:24.010" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text box used for providing comments supplies these specific guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid answering questions in comments.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We therefore do not normally convert answers to comments for reasons like being too short or being wrong, or for lacking documented references.  Migration would not automatically make them comments requesting or providing clarification on the post to which they would be migrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, migration would make them &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answers posted in comments&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, something that interferes with the mechanisms Stack Exchange uses for searching and for critical quality-control measures such as auditing, voting, and improvement by the community at large.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is something we should not do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has been invited to improve their answer. Meanwhile, the community should feel free to make use of existing quality control measures such as editing and voting, or if need be, even voting for deletion, always remembering that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T19:52:37.793" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T19:52:37.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13332" CreationDate="2019-07-28T07:51:55.050" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related questions have been asked. But clearly the answers are not ordered by the most votes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39751/where-were-should-shall-and-must-in-the-18th-century&quot;&gt;Where were &amp;quot;should&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;shall&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;must&amp;quot; in the 18th Century?&lt;/a&gt;, are in arbitrary order by vote total: 85, 5, 93.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many questions the highest-voted answer is first, but the others are not ordered in any discernible way.  Does protecting stop the resort? Just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you&quot;&gt;Did English ever have a formal version of &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;has answers with votes as follows in the order they appear: 557, 23, 14, 48, 53, 111.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;perhaps the sorting occurs only after certain events, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="223618" LastEditDate="2019-07-28T08:03:57.643" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T11:37:00.430" Title="Best answers (most highly voted) rise to the top? Not always. Why not?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13331" CreationDate="2019-07-28T08:29:18.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You sorted your answers by activity. If you click the &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; button as shown below, it should sort them by votes in descending order, with the accepted answer on top (in most cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eZ2db.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eZ2db.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T08:29:18.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13331" CreationDate="2019-07-28T11:37:00.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers that have been accepted by the author of the question  as the most helpful (as indicated by a green check mark) are always at the top unless the author accepted their own answer. Answers with the same number of votes are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/107098/273494&quot;&gt;sorted randomly&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The order you describe only happens for me if I have sorted by “active”. When I select “votes” it sorts 85, 93, 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T11:37:00.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-29T16:37:27.110" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you remember back in the day when you could navigate easily between pages showing &lt;em&gt;newest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;featured&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;frequent&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;unanswered&lt;/em&gt; questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ca. 2017  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BxFiy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BxFiy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Introducing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/07/25/introducing-custom-filters/?cb=1&quot;&gt;Custom Filters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the arrival of the new &lt;em&gt;custom filter&lt;/em&gt; feature on July 25 2019, two of those buttons are now hidden from view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zkKsg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zkKsg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;featured&lt;/em&gt; button is named &lt;em&gt;bounties&lt;/em&gt; on this page and the buttons &lt;em&gt;frequent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; have vanished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Click on the “more” button&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XY8e5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XY8e5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is a great shame that the page showing the most upvoted questions is now shoved away. New visitors will not easily find this button, and I suspect they will lose interest in EL&amp;amp;U sooner rather than later. On a personal level, I fell in love with EL&amp;amp;U when I began visiting the most upvoted questions. I remember voting on these “old” questions and answers  and thinking I had found something really special and useful for me. Nowadays not so much...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we ask the developers to make the &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; button appear on the &lt;em&gt;All Questions&lt;/em&gt; page as it did two years ago? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else find the hidden &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; button to be more harmful than helpful to the site's health?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that EL&amp;amp;U is falling on the sidelines, its losing users, apathy is rife and it has no voice on Meta (or maybe it never did) that champions its cause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; opinions about the custom filter? How useful is it for &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-07-30T02:51:11.503" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T02:51:11.503" Title="Introducing the &quot;custom filter&quot;" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|hidden-features|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-30T00:27:39.210" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post is part of the hidden-feature series &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13334/71848&quot;&gt;started by Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;. These posts highlight features of this site that not everyone may know about but can certainly help get an insight into our content and allow users to find what they're looking for more easily.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, we're focusing on post feedback to find hidden gems and overrated posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not have heard about anonymous, but they do a lot of voting around here. The way this works is that visitors who are not logged in and users who haven't earned the voting privilege still have their votes recorded, they just don't affect the score on the posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, these statistics are part of the 10K tools, so I don't know exactly how many votes (in absolute or relative terms they are responsible for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who are fortunate enough in terms of reputation, find out &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback&quot;&gt;on the post feedback summary page&lt;/a&gt;. Notice that the top-right corner has time-based filters for &lt;em&gt;day&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;week&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;month&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;year&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;all-time&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This overview also provides underrated and overrated posts. The tooltip on these read: &lt;em&gt;No votes in the last year, helpful&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;No votes in the last year, unhelpful&lt;/em&gt;, respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This overview also provides helpful and unhelpful posts. The way these posts are selected seems to be based on anonymous votes only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, this overview can be very helpful in finding hidden gems as well as overrated and controversial posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is a meta question, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Should 10K users use this tool to be able to exert more quality control in an effort to raise the user experience on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you envision? Should we share posts that may need some more votes (one way or the other)? Other SE sites sometimes have competitions where people can suggest posts on their main site. To make this a bit more fun, perhaps such competitions work well here by setting a monthly tag-based or original post-time based theme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-07-30T02:50:30.677" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T02:50:30.677" Title="Reminder: 10K tools on anonymous post feedback" Tags="|discussion|self-governance|10k-tools|hidden-features|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-31T07:07:17.650" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/50720&quot;&gt;Deleted Recent Questions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; page exhibits no questions tagged [psycholinguistics], but I thought I asked one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T08:03:44.487" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T20:30:30.310" Title="Did I ask a question, now deleted, tagged [psycholinguistics]?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13336" CreationDate="2019-07-31T08:03:26.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Recently deleted list only goes back a month or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators do have access to the &lt;code&gt;deleted:1&lt;/code&gt; search criterion, but there seems little point &#xA;in reproducing the output here. If it's mod-only data, we're actually prohibited from doing that; but you may be able to see deleted questions in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/50720/greek-area-51-proposal?tab=questions&quot;&gt;questions list&lt;/a&gt; and deleted questions there may be available to 10k users too. If not, I'm afraid that's too bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; say that I can't see a question from you tagged  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psycholinguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psycholinguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psycholinguistics&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking that tag link shows only three over the last four years, and none that have been deleted, which is slightly odd because there are actually seven. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/497057/&quot;&gt;One of those is recent&lt;/a&gt;, but it was asked on a different account. The question was closed as opinion-based after a week and then automatically cleared up ten days after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T20:30:30.310" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T20:30:30.310" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13341" CreationDate="2019-08-05T13:31:33.910" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not that I want to exactly, I just noticed there is no option to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/507384/what-is-the-grammarical-topic-of-this-sentence&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ln3ny.png&quot; alt=&quot;why no edit?&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have the edit privilege as of writing - what's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T15:35:54.573" Title="Why can't I edit this question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T13:49:58.533" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt; tag has no description yet.  Is it intended to be used for a question that asks for a reference where one might learn more about a certain topic, or document one's intuitive understanding about a topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, Academia has a tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot;&gt;&quot;reference-request,&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and that's how I see it used there.  The official description says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions requesting an answer supported by reliable evidence and including citations to said evidence. This is in contrast to questions requesting answers based mainly on personal experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T19:45:38.813" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T19:45:38.813" Title="What is meant by the tag &quot;reference&quot;?" Tags="|support|feature-request|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13339" CreationDate="2019-08-05T15:35:54.573" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was probably a pending edit. I think the mobile templates don't show that there's a pending edit, just hiding the edit text entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T15:35:54.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13344" CreationDate="2019-08-07T11:45:30.893" Score="7" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across this question in review, in the Reopen Queue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/318402/why-do-we-say-i-would-appreciate-it-if-you-paid-in-cash-but-not-i-will-appre&quot;&gt;Why do we say “I would appreciate it if you paid in cash,” but not “I will appreciate it if you pay in cash”? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as off-topic, but I'm not sure why. It has positive votes, and a semblance of research, so I'm curious about why it is regarded as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is off topic about it, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be reopened?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T06:21:18.497" Title="Why was this closed? (And should it be reopened?)" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13343" CreationDate="2019-08-07T17:57:33.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All the votes to close were &quot;send it to ELL&quot;, but I can't see if it actually went and was rejected (which would certainly end up closed as off-topic), or if it was closed before that path was available (which would simply have closed it).&lt;/em&gt; – Andrew Leach♦ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="15661" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T22:08:50.283" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T22:08:50.283" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-08-07T17:57:33.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-08T21:49:49.563" Score="-1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two users said they had a rescue edit in mind for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/507464/112436&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghost, I sheet you not. I'm so ready for Halloween&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but they didn't follow through with attempting to rescue the question (which is now at 4 close votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally don't know how to edit and rescue it.  But if someone else does, please do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T10:50:07.123" Title="Is a rescue edit possible for this question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13345" CreationDate="2019-08-10T10:50:07.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too long to post as a comment, but it is not strictly true that jokes are off topic on E&amp;amp;LU there have been a few in the past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152704/i-dont-get-this-joke-is-it-some-kind-of-play-on-water-too&quot;&gt;I don&amp;#39;t get this joke. Is it some kind of play on &amp;quot;water, too?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/324699/why-is-this-joke-about-elephants-and-quarts-funny&quot;&gt;Why is this joke about elephants and quarts funny?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14949/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-sentence-structure-she-looks-as-though-shes&quot;&gt;Is there a name for this type of sentence structure: &amp;quot;She looks as though she&amp;#39;s been poured into her clothes, and forgot to say &amp;#39;when&amp;#39;&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Admittedly the OP wasn't asking the community to explain the joke, but it is still a good one-liner.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45521/please-explain-this-joke-about-two-nuns-in-a-bath?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Please explain this joke about two nuns in a bath&lt;/a&gt; (personal favorite)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now listen up all you close-voters. Yes, I'm talking to you. You know who you are,  users who staff the review queues and VTC half-decent questions along with the truly crappy ones, but treat a strayed &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; question as if it was a mongrel by virtue of its presence. Don't think about closing any of the questions listed above, they're not hurting anyone, and most of the answers are better than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I note that two perfectly correct and highly-upvoted answers in the two nuns joke were deleted sometime in 2016. What was wrong with them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T10:50:07.123" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13348" CreationDate="2019-08-10T15:53:50.457" Score="10" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186272/the-meaning-of-did-not-immediately-respond-to-requests-for-comment&quot;&gt;The meaning of &quot;did not immediately respond to requests for comment&quot; [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, was closed by the following users, &lt;em&gt;in this order&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Janus Bahs Jacquet, tchrist♦, Rory Alsop, user66974, FumbleFingers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's tchrist♦ doing in the middle? I thought that when mods decided to close a question, their vote was binding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderator votes are binding. Any place we have voting — close, open, delete, undelete, offensive, migration, etc — that vote will reach the threshold and take effect immediately if a single moderator casts a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How has this happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T16:52:30.913" Title="Can mods cast non-binding close votes?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13347" CreationDate="2019-08-10T16:52:30.913" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can't cast non-binding votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before moderators were moderators, their votes were ordinary votes and listed in exactly the same way as other votes (that is, in the order received).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a moderator is elected, &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; mention of their name gains a diamond. Having existing comments and votes suddenly gaining a diamond is something which candidates [should] consider when running for election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that list of users, you can see that &quot;user66974&quot; isn't actually a user. This is the same mechanism: the account which was active in July 2014 isn't now, and &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; mention of it now bears its generic ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; that by the same token, if a moderator gives up that role, the diamond is removed from every mention of their name: this could result in questions appearing to have been closed by fewer than five votes with no mention of why that happened (which the diamond would explain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T16:52:30.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-13T22:30:20.550" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to look this up on meta, and found no good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If comments have been self-deleted, are they gone forever? And if so...what about all the revisions permitted in the first 4-5 minutes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excuse me, I am new to 10K mod privileges, and trying to feel my way around here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T07:03:50.470" Title="Can Mods (or anyone) see deleted comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-14T02:16:19.627" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/443121/55623&quot;&gt;There is a question of mine&lt;/a&gt; that sometimes makes me chuckle. A trivial, very non-urgent question with little to no practical value. A question on why names starting with &quot;J&quot; are more common than words starting with &quot;J&quot;, within the English language naturally. I expected to perhaps have to put a bounty on it, to ever get a good answer, but quite surprisingly, the question gained a lot of attention. Ninety-something upvotes, 15K views and many answers/comments, the top one scoring 150 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have pondered over why, and my most reasonable explanation is that the question is quite unique, requesting information that users on this don't usually have to access. I am not quite sure about that one though, as the top answer I believe dealt a lot with Hebrew etymology, which is quite commonplace in the English language. Perhaps it was the format? I don't know, what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; User Mari-LouA let me know that most likely the bulk of visits came from HNQ, but she also had a point about why the question might have summoned curiosity in the readers. She laid up two camps, a) Native speakers who weren't aware of this difference, and b) People who were, and upvoted due to their pre-existing curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which camp do/did you belong in? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239612" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2019-08-14T16:28:04.053" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T16:37:32.823" Title="How did this question ever get so much attention?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13351" CreationDate="2019-08-14T07:03:50.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85442/&quot;&gt;Moderators can see deleted comments.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98036/&quot;&gt;Moderators can undelete comments&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; if the comment was deleted by a moderator. Moderators cannot undelete comments which the commenter has deleted himself or which have been deleted by flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19757/184638&quot;&gt;Moderators can see a comment's revision history&lt;/a&gt; for comments edited after October 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are moderator-only privileges, I'm afraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably you have found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges page&lt;/a&gt; and the information on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10k moderator tools&lt;/a&gt;? The page is a bit buried, and the tools page even more so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T07:03:50.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13353" CreationDate="2019-08-14T16:37:32.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an answer for Camp A votes:  It never occurred to us that people's names beginning with &quot;J&quot; was more common than in other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216106" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T16:37:32.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2019-08-18T12:21:38.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11693/42471&quot;&gt;design changes for enabling responsive design&lt;/a&gt; included unifying the formatting on quotes network-wide, which solved this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42471" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T12:21:38.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T00:32:24.700" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;There used to be another option: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Low Quality&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F5QeF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F5QeF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did it go? Is it only me? Or am I confused? It happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T04:27:10.377" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T04:27:10.377" Title="What's missing on the answer flag options?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13359" CreationDate="2019-08-19T00:42:03.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can only flag as very low quality on new posts, I think the limit is one week old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/317881/256282&quot;&gt;Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt; an upvote if you think older posts should still allow VLQ flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T00:42:55.897" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T00:42:55.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13359" CreationDate="2019-08-19T03:51:48.587" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93606/&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood's answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/93595/&quot;&gt;Is the Very Low Quality Flag Too Ambiguous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; more or less explains why this happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, very low quality flags can only be applied to posts that are less than a week old &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; have a score of zero or less because it was found to be too confusing and often misused. It is meant to be used on posts which utterly lack usefulness and are beyond any potential salvage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needs to be noted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;that flagging is marking a post for outright deletion&lt;/a&gt;, and there are a limited number of reasons to delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt;. This is perhaps because utility in the Stack Exchange system is of a broad concept. Bad answers have theoretical utility &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;in being sorted from best to worst&lt;/a&gt;, and can hypothetically be improved through editing and commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post is not literally incomprehensible, then the odds are that you are not supposed to be flagging it for that reason, so it is hidden away to prevent people who mistakenly think otherwise from doing so. See how S.E. staffmember &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/50049/tim-post&quot;&gt;Tim Post&lt;/a&gt; explains &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/111112/371286&quot;&gt;how the flags are meant to be used&lt;/a&gt;, most relevantly including this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a moderator investigates a very low quality flag and sees an answer that is readable and seemingly relevant to the question, well. there's not much evidence of a quality issue. If we can see why someone might think the post was problematic, we generally mark the flag as helpful (after editing or removing the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even posts that we may personally deem to be very low quality, such as unreferenced single line answers, do not meet the definition of &lt;em&gt;unreadable&lt;/em&gt;, and should have other remedial action taken. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/276982/rename-very-low-quality-in-unintelligible&quot;&gt;It should probably be renamed to unintelligable&lt;/a&gt;, or something similar, because the present name is somewhat fallicious as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These metrics are probably chosen in part because an unreadable post would almost certainly net a negative score and be deleted right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also needs to be noted that trusted users only have the ability to act on a post that has a net negative score, so at the point a post has a net positive score, only a formal moderator can actually delete it. Consequently, a very low quality post, might qualify for a moderator intervention flag in the rare event that you see a post that actually qualifies as Very Low Quality flag that has that option unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you should keep in mind that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160754/why-are-the-moderators-being-so-strict-with-quality-related-flags-recently&quot;&gt;moderators are under instruction to interpret the flagging reasons strictly&lt;/a&gt; to maintain each flag's communicative effect, so your flag might be declined even if you chose the wrong reason on a delible post, it can still be declined which can count towards an automatic &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/flag-ban/info&quot;&gt;flagging ban&lt;/a&gt;, even if that post is deleted, so be sure that the flagging reason applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T04:11:36.933" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T04:11:36.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13648" CreationDate="2019-08-19T21:42:25.427" Score="9" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;My recollection is that the old Oxford Dictionaries site had entries in both American English and &quot;British &amp;amp; World English&quot;, which could be accessed through different urls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; has British &amp;amp; World English entries, whose addresses have the format &lt;code&gt;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/&lt;/code&gt; followed by the headword. Is there any way to access Oxford's American English entries through the Lexico site? Much of the information is the same, but the American English pronunciation guides are often different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T00:20:11.547" Title="Does Lexico have dictionary entries in American English?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13362" CreationDate="2019-08-19T21:46:43.503" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico FAQs&lt;/a&gt; say that this is no longer possible in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When searching in the English Dictionary, a toggle between US and UK English is no longer provided. We treat all of English as one dataset, but default with British and World English (which is equivalent to the UK Dictionary toggle selection). That means when you look up a word, you will most likely find the British and World English spelling and pronunciation. However, some US English words don’t exist within this dataset, and in that case, you may come across a US entry for a word as there is no British and World English option. The main spellings and pronunciations for the US entries will be US English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are looking for a British and World English/US comparison, feel free to use Lexico for your British and World English needs and Dictionary.com for US spelling and pronunciation comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T21:46:43.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-20T06:41:43.427" Score="-5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm uncertain why it was voted to close after my edits. How can I clarify or improve &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/508151/50720&quot;&gt;How did &amp;#39;despite&amp;#39; semantically shift to signify &amp;#39;without being affected by something&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T12:22:39.650" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T19:33:33.973" Title="How to improve &quot;How did 'despite' semantically shift to signify 'without being affected by something'?&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-21T03:20:45.130" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just going over the badges which I have received and I tried to track my next one. I found that I need to ask 5 well received questions on different days. My badge shows 7/5, but still it is in the recommended section. Why haven't I received the badge yet? (Picture attached) &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZprM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZprM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Picture&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162061" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T03:32:33.983" Title="Why am I not able to receive the &quot;Curious&quot; badge?" Tags="|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13365" CreationDate="2019-08-21T03:32:33.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may have also posted some other poor questions (downvoted, deleted) leading to not having a positive question record. The formula for one's question record is given in this quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/67399/387405&quot;&gt;from Meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A positive question record means you don't have too many Closed, Negative, or Deleted questions overall. The formula is (TotalQuestions - Negative - Closed - Deleted) / TotalQuestions ≥ 0.5. Questions that qualify as Negative and Closed and Deleted count three times in this calculation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to have a positive question record the left hand side of the formula must be at least 0.5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T03:32:33.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13370" CreationDate="2019-08-23T17:46:21.683" Score="8" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/509355/why-is-be-often-used-instead-of-are-in-slang-phrases&quot;&gt;this question on dialect&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/509355/revisions&quot;&gt;(specifically) its edit history&lt;/a&gt;. While I can&amp;rsquo;t say that I approve of the original question&amp;rsquo;s choice of example, I think that the &amp;ldquo;revision&amp;rdquo; (really, replacement of the entire question), though a better question to ask, was done inappropriately. Are there any established guidelines for this sort of situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246168" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T17:21:53.527" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T17:21:53.527" Title="Inappropriate replacement of question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13364" CreationDate="2019-08-23T19:33:33.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could, as the closure screed suggests, clarify what you're asking. At present the question gives several citations to show that &lt;em&gt;despite&lt;/em&gt; meant and means 'in the face of' or 'no matter what can be done to prevent' and one to show that it also has a sense of &quot;notwithstanding&quot;. So far so good, but you then see that &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; has a meaning of &quot;without being affected by&quot; and find some contradiction. I don't know why you say that &quot;'scorn, contempt' is the polar opposite of 'without being affected by'&quot; and you give no reason for the belief. You also assume (or appear to assume) that if one meaning of one word is the same as one meaning of another word, the two are synonyms, or in other words that equality is transitive among English words; the falsity of this is well-known to anyone who has studied the language. Finally, I myself have literally no idea what you mean by &quot;What semantic notions underlie 'scorn, contempt' and 'without being affected by something'?&quot; beyond the dictionary entries you have already cited. You obviously have a question in mind, and it may be a good one; but at present there is no way to tell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One possibility that occurred to me while writing this is that you think &quot;without being affected by&quot; in the definition is the same as &quot;without having any feelings about&quot;. This would not be entirely unreasonable, since both could be expressed as &quot;without caring about&quot;; but it would be wrong.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T19:33:33.973" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13367" CreationDate="2019-08-23T19:59:55.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's two separate issues going on here. One is my edit, the other is the original content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. My edit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I saw this question, my reflex was downvote and close vote, but I decided to edit &lt;strong&gt;based on the title&lt;/strong&gt;. The question there was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is used &amp;quot;be&amp;quot; in this sentence instead of using &amp;quot;are&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I considered reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Jeff's comment, which I have upvoted, made me think this could be 'fixed' - there was no close votes at this point, and 4 downvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is dialect, rather than standard English, and should be approached with that in mind. – Jeff Zeitlin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help section says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits are &lt;strong&gt;expected to be substantial&lt;/strong&gt; and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post&lt;/strong&gt; (without changing that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a stretch, but that's what I thought I was doing. Making the post better, and showing the user how we like them here. There was an aspect of wanting to turn around a negative question for selfish reasons, but I picked the question badly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The content&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The original content is offensive.&lt;/strong&gt; That's why I removed it (and didn't include it as an example).  This clearly wasn't the right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It wasn't a question we want on this site.&lt;/strong&gt; There was no research, no explanation, and the user hasn't taken the tour. Miracles may happen, but we have enough 1-rep users with poor questions for me to doubt any valued activity from them on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading Mari-Lou's comments, I don't think I went about this the right way - the user now has 21 rep and a &lt;code&gt;student&lt;/code&gt; badge, which they wouldn't have got previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should have flagged it as offensive, and voted to close too (no research?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave it to the moderators and community to decide on the fate of this specific question, and accept the rap on the knuckles about 'fixing' offensive questions in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have followed Cascabel's advice and rolled it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T21:02:42.650" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13367" CreationDate="2019-08-24T22:39:43.503" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have deleted the question and merged the good quality answers into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/212282/be-like-usage&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Be like&amp;quot; usage&lt;/a&gt;. This is one of the more complicated moderator actions I have done recently, so my apologies if I didn't handle it perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T22:39:43.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-24T22:08:06.850" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a database containing words that were not only once common but also now archaic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to have a list of, say the 100 statistically most frequently used words in 17th, 18th and 19th Century English but filter out all words still in common use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So,  for instance, the 'hath' formation would be fairly common in  17th C English,  and would appear on such a list,  but 'the' wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably one with coding knowledge could use Google Books/ngram data to generate this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: I am aware that there are loads of lists of vocabulary already out there: I want one with some statistical basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171770" OwnerDisplayName="tardy pigeon" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T05:28:22.430" Title="Is there a database containing a list of once common, but now archaic words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-25T12:00:52.393" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a comprehensive reference book that includes definitions and examples of the terms used in grammar analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this would have 'adverb' and 'verb' and their various types, the tenses and the moods and so on. This would be a hierarchical treatment of categories, a browseable collection rather than an alphabetic listing of fine-grained definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website comes very close to what I'm looking for. &lt;a href=&quot;https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the headers such as &quot;Adjectives&quot;, &quot;Adverbs&quot;, &quot;Conjunctions&quot; and then under those headers the various types of Adjectives, Adverbs, Conjunctions. However the items under the headers are a mixup of definitions with quizzes and workbooks so it's a bit of hodgepodge with a schoolroom cuteness that I find off-putting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300049" OwnerDisplayName="Stephen Boston" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T07:59:23.187" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T13:17:10.683" Title="glossary of grammar terminology" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13372" CreationDate="2019-08-25T12:32:26.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a simple Google search of &quot;glossary of grammar&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford English Dictionary - Glossary of Grammatical Terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/how-to-use-the-oed/glossary-grammatical-terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://public.oed.com/how-to-use-the-oed/glossary-grammatical-terms/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want it in book form, then order it.  Or even just print it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115101" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T12:32:26.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13372" CreationDate="2019-08-25T14:47:57.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best one I know of for every day usage would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-dictionary-of-english-grammar-9780199658237?cc=gb&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bas Aarts, Sylvia Chalker, and Edmund Weiner&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oxford University Press&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T14:47:57.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-25T20:35:23.583" Score="13" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/509540/rhoticity-in-speech&quot;&gt;a recent question,&lt;/a&gt; a new user asked how to classify the accent as heard  in a video clip from youtube. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that required going off-page to hear it, and some users objected to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to edit to paste &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkIUGHnIrzw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the clip&lt;/a&gt;, but was informed by the system that the source format was unacceptable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I have done this on other sites, such &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/51218/is-the-title-the-walking-dead-referring-to-the-main-characters-of-the-series/51219#51219&quot;&gt;as in this answer on Movies &amp;amp; TV.SE&lt;/a&gt;, simply by going to the [image] icon and pasting in the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why can't I do that here on EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, language consists of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;spoken utterances&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, less often written symbols of some sort, and Sign Language, not excluding non-verbal communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we talk about English skills, it usually includes speaking, writing, reading, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and listening.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we would like to fully participate in the discussion of English Language and Usage, we should be able to entertain questions about accent &lt;em&gt;based on the embedded audio&lt;/em&gt;, not a transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this is not the first time this question/request has been raised: there is a post on Meta going back 7 years, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/152282/embedded-audio-player-on-language-sites&quot;&gt;recently updated by Colleen V.&lt;/a&gt; Please help us by up-voting her post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there may be objections even here in our own community based on &quot;abuse&quot;, but it should not be different to handling the type of spammy images we sometimes deal with. It would just require some judicious attention to the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefits would out-weigh the costs in time, and just as still photos and screen shots are sometimes needed, this feature could eventually come to be seen as indispensable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT] Serendipity, happenstance, I don't know, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/509924/they-have-some-background-strong&quot;&gt;a new question popped up&lt;/a&gt; in which the &lt;em&gt;off-page&lt;/em&gt; link to the audio clip helped identify the dialect and flavor of the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T22:49:34.810" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T22:49:34.810" Title="Why can't we add video (or even audio) clips to posts?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13375" CreationDate="2019-08-25T22:17:09.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is because different SE sites are differently configured with respect to whether they allow for the direct embedding of sound or video clips in posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most but not all SE sites configs forbid it, including ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T22:17:09.987" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-27T12:42:02.297" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;tag still something we want to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10062/is-the-email-tag-obsolete/10069&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt; is more on-topic than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/email&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;email&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;email&lt;/a&gt; tag, but that was 2 years ago, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Interpersonal Skills&lt;/a&gt; started as public beta &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/92736/interpersonal-skills&quot;&gt;around 2 years ago too&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that most of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt; questions could be more on topic on Interpersonal or Workplace SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stats&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot;&gt;166 Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=Relevance&amp;amp;pagesize=15&amp;amp;q=%5bletter-writing%5d+closed%3ayes&quot;&gt;67 Closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=Relevance&amp;amp;pagesize=15&amp;amp;q=%5bletter-writing%5d+is%3aquestion+score%3a..0&quot;&gt;85 with 0 or less votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any questions that are on topic here that wouldn't be on Interpersonal or Workplace?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the the tag generally on topic with the site these days?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T08:00:10.777" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T08:00:10.777" Title="Is letter-writing still on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13383" CreationDate="2019-08-27T18:11:29.387" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing Stackexchange was set up as a public beta 8 years ago, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1623/writers&quot;&gt;has pretty good stats&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/509705/what-is-the-expression-you-make-trying-not-to-smile&quot;&gt;they can migrate to us&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;migrated from writing.stackexchange.com 8 hours ago&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This question came from our site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a few questions with comments recommending migrating to Writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it worth having a migration option as a close vote option? Is there a basal rate of off-topic-here-but-on-topic-there questions? If so, what's the standard way of setting it up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T07:59:42.410" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T07:59:42.410" Title="Would it be worth migrating questions to Writers.SE?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13378" CreationDate="2019-08-27T19:54:11.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been regularly discussed here over the years (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/600/8019&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;); the difference now is that, with Writers out of Beta, it is a practical possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to persuade the moderators here that we receive enough questions that are off-topic here but would be on-topic at Writers.SE to justify the work of setting up a migration path; you would also need to convince the mods at Writers.SE that we won't flood them with opinion-seeking, unclear or plain badly-written questions, but that should be comparatively easy.  The best way forward would be to compile a list of fairly recent ELU questions that you think should be/have been transferred to Writers, and get a consensus of opinion. I suggest a community wiki question here as a starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once there is enough of a groundswell of opinion on ELU, our mods can put a request in to the Stack Exchange programmers to set up a migration route, and add it to the list of closevote options. &quot;Enough&quot; here means literally 'sufficient that the improvement to the SE network will be worth the time and trouble, and possible collateral problems'; nobody really knows how much that is, so just provide as much evidence as possible. It won't come as a surprise, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add a note of caution; there actually was such a path for a short time, in 2011 as I recall. But Writers.SE did not then justify the hopes placed in it; it was reverted to Beta, and the path automatically ceased to exist. Transferring questions that are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; there than here will improve both sites; but just offloading stuff we don't want is both discourteous and counter-productive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2019-08-27T20:22:33.293" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T20:22:33.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13378" CreationDate="2019-08-27T20:22:22.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writers.SE welcomes the following types of question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have questions about writing techniques, style, usability/readability, planning and organizing, research techniques, publishing, and related topics, your questions are welcome here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-fiction, technical, scholarly, journalistic, or professional blog writing, including the presentation of examples, charts, and diagrams.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing fiction, poetry, scripts, or song lyrics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General copywriting, style, and organization.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions asking for help expressing a concept or an idea, within limits. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1401&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; for more information.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The publishing and editing process itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions about specialized writing tools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13379/194281&quot;&gt;@TimLymington's suggestion&lt;/a&gt;, here is a list of questions that would be on-topic at Writers.SE, but are closed as off-topic here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/319275/how-to-refer-to-myself-in-a-research-paper&quot;&gt;How to refer to myself in a research paper? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Apr 13 '16 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/370608/proper-citation-style-online#comment866996_370608&quot;&gt;Proper citation style online [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Jan 27 '17 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70094/cite-a-powerpoint-presentation&quot;&gt;Cite a Powerpoint Presentation [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Jun 6 '12 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153991/ibid-source-citing-source&quot;&gt;Ibid source citing source [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Feb 25 '14 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234687/which-one-is-the-correct-dialogue-punctuation-format&quot;&gt;Which one is the correct dialogue punctuation format? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Mar 20 '15 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/196319/is-writing-very-long-sentences-which-waste-much-of-the-readers-time-reading-it&quot;&gt;Is writing very long sentences which waste much of the reader's time reading it and understanding it's meaning a bad thing, or is it good? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Sep 14 '14 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/440473/when-to-use-direct-speech-vs-indirect-speech-in-a-story&quot;&gt;When to use direct speech vs indirect speech in a story? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Apr 7 '18 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204633/how-to-show-people-voicing-their-opinions-in-essays&quot;&gt;How to show people voicing their opinions in essays [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Oct 26 '14 - On topic under 'questions asking for help expressing a concept or an idea, within limits.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/326810/mla-style-i-need-help-citing-an-old-article-i-found-in-a-website&quot;&gt;MLA style: I need help citing an old article I found in a website [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, May 20 '16 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125568/has-or-had-past-and-past-perfect&quot;&gt;Has or Had / Past and Past Perfect [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Sep 6 '13 - On topic under 'Writing fiction, poetry, scripts, or song lyrics.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/131274/can-forcibly-be-used-in-an-action-that-a-person-performs-to-himself-herself&quot;&gt;Can &quot;forcibly&quot; be used in an action that a person performs to himself/herself? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, Oct 13 '13 - On topic under 'questions asking for help expressing a concept or an idea, within limits.', and 'writing fiction, poetry, scripts, or song lyrics.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I've used &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/edit/1097342&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this data query&lt;/a&gt; to search for all comments with &lt;code&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/code&gt; in them. This is a non-exhaustive list.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, almost all the users who asked the questions have &gt;200 reputation. If we could redirect the questions to a place where they would be better received, there might be better user retention. The questions are fairly high quality, they just aren't what we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T05:09:02.953" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T05:09:02.953" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-08-27T20:22:22.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-28T13:03:49.383" Score="6" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;What resource do you use to research usage of computer terms, such as &quot;checkbox&quot; versus &quot;check box&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="359040" OwnerDisplayName="user359040" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T09:35:27.940" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T09:35:27.940" Title="Usage of computer terms?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13381" CreationDate="2019-08-28T13:28:54.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you can learn about the usage of technical terms by Googling them. For example, you'll find that &quot;checkbox&quot; has more hits than &quot;check box.&quot; Since you're asking for a specific resource, I suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.webopedia.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webopedia&lt;/a&gt;, which has a definition for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/check_box.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;check box&lt;/a&gt; (two words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24993" OwnerDisplayName="Andrew Brēza" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T13:28:54.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13378" CreationDate="2019-08-28T20:24:25.213" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261196&quot;&gt;important criterion for community migration paths&lt;/a&gt; is the level of migration that occurs already by moderator action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no &quot;right&quot; level for establishing a migration path, but tens or hundreds of migrations with a single digit rejection rate seems safe. Single digit migrations in the last 90 days and/or rejection rates that can order a drink without ID are signs that the path will be a waste of time to establish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opening those migration paths is fraught, as sometimes low-quality questions that should be closed get migrated instead (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7191/&quot;&gt;constant frustration&lt;/a&gt; already on the part of ELL.SE members), or questions that are answerable here get migrated unnecessarily. Moderators are expected to be more knowledgeable and careful than the community, on the whole, so if they do not deem many questions worth moving, there is no cause to throw that open to a wider constituency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A SEDE query for &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/travel/query/472000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;questions migrated away&lt;/a&gt; turns up these results since the EL&amp;amp;U epoch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site        Count  Latest Migration&#xA; ELL          3676  2019-08-23 13:00:32&#xA; Writers       166  2019-08-22 14:55:45&#xA; Linguistics    65  2019-07-01 03:07:07&#xA; SuperUser      21  2019-01-14 13:21:33&#xA; Philosophy     19  2019-01-23 17:11:37&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Writers.SE was &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/146&quot;&gt;renamed Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt; in January 2018, after &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1356&quot;&gt;several months&lt;/a&gt; of discussion; presumably some SEDE table needs updating. Literature is at #6, with 17, but I think that includes migrations from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6426&quot;&gt;failed 2011–12 incarnation&lt;/a&gt; as opposed to the currently constituted Lit.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is skewed somewhat by the age of the available targets (why else would we have more migrations to Mathematics.SE than to LanguageLearning.SE?), 10K users can also see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats&quot;&gt;90-day migration statistics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site        Count  Stats&#xA; ELL           175  6% rejected&#xA; Meta.ELU       12  16% rejected&#xA; Writing         4&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;followed by eight singletons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The migration rate to Writing is two orders of magnitude below that of ELL by either measure, which doesn't make a compelling case in my view, though of course I am just an ordinary community member with no larger insights. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across questions that would be better-answered at Writing.SE, it sounds like we should step up our efforts to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/8109&quot;&gt;flag them and have moderators move them&lt;/a&gt;. The case for community-driven migration will be much stronger once we can demonstrate that adding that path will be beneficial for both communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T20:36:15.747" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T20:36:15.747" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13381" CreationDate="2019-08-28T21:51:26.670" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are trying to get a sense of the relative frequency over time of two or more alternative spellings, you may be interested in the Google Ngram tool, which reports on the frequency, year-by-year, of specified search terms in the Google Books database. Here, for example, is the Ngram chart for &quot;check box&quot; (blue line) versus &quot;checkbox&quot; (red line) for the period 1975–2005:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=check+box%2Ccheckbox&amp;amp;year_start=1975&amp;amp;year_end=2005&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccheck%20box%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccheckbox%3B%2Cc0&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ngram tool uses the year of publication specified on the title page of each book included in the search in gathering data for the frequency plot. You can also see examples of the search terms in situ by clicking on of the year intervals listed beneath the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=check+box%2Ccheckbox&amp;amp;year_start=1975&amp;amp;year_end=2005&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccheck%20box%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccheckbox%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram graph here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T21:51:26.670" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13381" CreationDate="2019-08-28T21:54:43.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few starting points if you're making a decision about the usage of computer terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Writing Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (formerly the &lt;strong&gt;Microsoft Manual of Style&lt;/strong&gt;), which they pitch to people who write about computer technology, is a comprehensive guide for computer terminology. They have articles like &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/a-z-word-list-term-collections/c/check-check-box-check-mark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; that provide guidance for &lt;em&gt;check box&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use check box, not box or checkbox, to refer to a check box in UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/styleguidelines/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IBM Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, while older, has a lot of recommendations on specific usage, and approves of the form &lt;strong&gt;check box&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A11Y Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; provides guidance on web design. While it is more focused on design, it models usage: it has an entire section on forms, where it refers to &lt;strong&gt;checkboxes&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/style/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Developer Documentation Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; provides comprehensive guidance on usage, including a &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/style/word-list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word list&lt;/a&gt; that prescribes &lt;strong&gt;checkbox&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;check box&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.apple.com/us/book/apple-style-guide/id1161855204&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apple Style Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; may also be useful, but I've never used it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other companies may also have their own style guides, whether they are internal or shared for use with the public. As you can see, even with a simple example like &lt;strong&gt;check box&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;checkbox&lt;/strong&gt;, they disagree on usage. If you are writing for a small company or a venue that lacks its own style guide, my advice is to compare results, decide on your own preferred usage, and apply that usage consistently in your own documentation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T21:54:43.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13381" CreationDate="2019-08-29T00:27:11.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to consider a dictionary that's carefully curated and recent. The more recent it is the more likely newer terms will be listed and updated usage is covered. Careful curation is necessary because terms may have different meanings both outside the field of computer science (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity#Computer_science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kilo meaning 1000 vs 1024&lt;/a&gt;) and even different definitions within computer science (e.g. the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glitch&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest Wikipedia as a source that's recent. It's not carefully curated per se but since everyone can add to it, it's very likely that a term you're looking for is mentioned, possibly in different contexts. In addition, it's a good start as it probably links to other sources (depending on what you're searching for those may be original papers that coined a phrase or came up with some new word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more curated reference is a dictionary from an established publisher. For computer science, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199688975.001.0001/acref-9780199688975&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Computer Science (7 ed.)&lt;/a&gt; published by Oxford University Press. It's fairly recent with this (latest?) version dating from 2016. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T00:27:11.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-30T15:40:36.437" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please refer to me the seminal or the most popular book for practicing &lt;strong&gt;Morphological word structures (English) with tree diagrams&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="359262" OwnerDisplayName="Aadreeto" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T07:59:07.630" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T07:59:07.630" Title="English Morphology" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13390" CreationDate="2019-09-01T07:04:30.667" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have two versions of the header on the mobile version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The standard main site one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dmhJR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Standard site header&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And another one, visible in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; pages and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0MkWF.png&quot; alt=&quot;alternative header&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the alternative header be made default?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Easy access to reviews&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to the help pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Design consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fabulous ELU ampersand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links to 'questions', 'tags' 'users', 'badges', and 'ask' could go below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Hello there, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11878/addressing-the-responsive-elu-site-theme-moving-forward&quot;&gt;community mods&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T19:05:25.040" Title="Could we have this header on the mobile site?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|mobile|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13389" CreationDate="2019-09-01T19:05:25.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most pages in the full site work well on mobile with “responsiveness” enabled. You can always switch between the full site and the mobile site using the links at the bottom of every page. If you currently have the &quot;full site&quot; enabled you will see a choice for &quot;mobile&quot; and vice versa. There is also a &quot;Disable/Enable Responsiveness&quot; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T19:05:25.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-04T12:54:31.913" Score="17" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eternal September&lt;/a&gt; doesn’t end, but does wax and wane with the school season. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/510565&quot;&gt;It’s waxing again&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be prepared to spot and quickly VtC unvarnished orders to do others’ homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also please downvote, so that unacceptable questions don’t sit on the front page, creating an open invitation for yet more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the quality ones which show effort, an eagerness to engage, and a clear and well-posed question, consider either pointing OP to ELL in a comment, or for the best examples, vote to migrate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be civil, polite, and firm. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1236/10446&quot;&gt;Do not feed the bears&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T13:06:26.317" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T06:00:05.380" Title="It’s September again" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13372" CreationDate="2019-09-05T13:17:10.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is as close as I feel likely to find :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishgrammar101.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.englishgrammar101.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is developed for schools but is not cloyingly cutesy. It is well organized and simple enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300049" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T13:17:10.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13396" CreationDate="2019-09-06T08:51:20.447" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking because I found a similar question on meta.stackexchange.com (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92064/is-there-somewhere-to-complain-about-offensive-moderator-behaviour&quot;&gt;Is there somewhere to complain about offensive moderator behaviour?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been a StackExchange user for years, and contributed to a few different Exchanges&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many of you know, the platform has a reputation for some moderators being too &quot;gatekeepy&quot;.  Which I can appreciate, as somebody who uses stackexchange literally tens of times a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never have I had a problem, but I'm honestly pretty confused with the behavior of an anonymous moderator here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came to this Exchange to ask a question, and decided that I should also try to give back and answer a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open-ended title from this question intrigued me, so I went in:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/510519/is-there-a-word-or-short-phrase-used-to-describe-being-impressed-with-someones/510531#510531&quot;&gt;Is there a word or short phrase used to describe being impressed with someone&amp;#39;s accomplishment while also clearly expressing a lack of understanding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading the OP's story, I had an answer in mind, so I tried my best to convey the merits of my answer.  I just have a bachelors in a completely unrelated field, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to provide an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was pretty quickly downvoted twice, though the OP commented, saying that my answer was exactly what he was looking for.  He accepted my answer, and I replied to his comment, telling him that I expected downvotes because I'm not an English expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are cool, I must've not followed the rules exactly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The problem I have is that somebody then came in and deleted all the comments on my answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask, why?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or AITA here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182844" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T17:42:32.107" Title="Not a regular in this Exchange, wanted to report weird Moderator behavior, is this the right place?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13395" CreationDate="2019-09-06T17:42:32.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments were making conversation; they were not asking for or providing any sort of clarification &lt;strong&gt;about your answer.&lt;/strong&gt; They were justifiably deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To head off cries of &quot;But you left these comments...&quot; moderators can't do everything. If comments which aren't fulfilling their purpose are brought to moderators' attention, they are likely to be deleted at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments can also be removed by ordinary users: just flag as &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oRabC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oRabC.png&quot; alt=&quot;It&amp;#39;s no longer needed: conversational&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It can take as few as one flag to remove a comment; flags of this sort may take two, or more if the comment has been upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system is designed for users to police it themselves, but that doesn't stop moderators from getting there first on occasion. You may simply have been &quot;unlucky&quot; in that a moderator viewed your post and found the comments. But it certainly wasn't weird behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T17:42:32.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13399" CreationDate="2019-09-08T05:24:18.383" Score="3" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no longer a regular on this site. But, in the past I frequently would answer a question for one of the lost souls who accidentally stumbled onto the kllling floor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are usually ELL quality questions which have easy answers to a native speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this wrong?  I feel that I'm doing proper duty by voting to close and explaining in the comments why I did so. But, answering the question feels like the neighborly thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking because someone commented on my having done so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T04:07:23.797" Title="Is it wrong to answer a question that you've voted to close?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13398" CreationDate="2019-09-08T09:59:40.197" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you cast a vote to place a question &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; because it's off-topic, and then you post an answer. What is the message you are sending?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that the question is too basic for EL&amp;amp;U, so you cast your vote to migrate it to ELL. In the meantime you post an answer, if the OP is migrated, the answer will remain useful for the ELL community. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the question is off-topic and cast a vote to close it but you feel sorry for the OP because you understand where their dilemma is stemming from, so you post an answer that will only be useful to the OP and no one else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the question is off-topic, so you do the right thing and cast a vote to place it &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt;. However, you also post an answer: that way the OP gets an answer and everyone is happy. As an added bonus, the next time the OP posts &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; off-topic question on EL&amp;amp;U they can be confident knowing that someone will post an answer even if their question gets closed because that's how we roll on EL&amp;amp;U. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/rinse_repeat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wash, rinse, repeat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't vote to close…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the question is off-topic, but you don't cast a vote to close it. Instead, you post an answer; the OP receives their answer and added bonus, you earn easy reputation points. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer 1. is acceptable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answers 2-4 are well-intentioned, misguided, harmful and/or counterproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T04:07:23.797" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T04:07:23.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-08T17:25:27.510" Score="-3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;My meta-question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/510882/comparison-of-arbitrary-and-vague?noredirect=1#comment1239651_510882&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please pardon me for any mistake and kindly correct me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Unclear is synonymous with Vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand how is my question vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I not clearly asking whether it is correct or not to interchange vague and arbitrary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356033" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:47:34.527" Title="Close reason. Unclear" Tags="|discussion|support|closed-questions|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T01:50:10.420" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In yet another seemingly hallucinatory experience, I am being called to task by some users because I &quot;voted&quot; to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/510714/word-for-something-that-used-to-be-popular-but-not-anymore&quot;&gt;a question as a duplicate&lt;/a&gt; in a very questionable VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can remember, I voted to close the question as &quot;unclear&quot;.&#xA;The problem is that the action is &lt;em&gt;no longer in my EL&amp;amp;U.SE history&lt;/em&gt;, so I cannot prove it one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that a Mod action can delete a user history? I am seeing a gold-badge claim on the close, so does that make  difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have checked the &quot;All Actions&quot; history &lt;em&gt;three times with my glasses&lt;/em&gt;, and still I do not see it. However, there is this under &quot;closure&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SI5s.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SI5s.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments can disappear from user history, but is it possible for close/delete/re-open/ votes and reasons to disappear? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T15:57:25.403" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T17:53:30.000" Title="Is it possible that some action or someone altered my history?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13402" CreationDate="2019-09-09T02:21:33.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sake of your sanity, I can confirm that you really did use the &lt;em&gt;Unclear what you’re asking&lt;/em&gt; close-vote reason. You should be able to see your own close-vote history via &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/160305/cascabel?tab=votes&amp;amp;sort=closure&quot;&gt;this personal link&lt;/a&gt;, but that doesn’t include the type of close-vote. That, though, I can see, and your memory is fine. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens is that when there are different kinds of close vote, unless it’s subtypes of “Off Topic”, it just lists that winning close reason along with all the people who close voted no matter what specific type of close vote they themselves personally cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But which close reason “wins” the listing when more than one type is cast? The answer is that absent a binding vote, whichever reason was cast by the most voters is the one that gets listed, and in the case of a tie (2-2-1 or 1-1-1-1-1) the last one wins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s also how it works with a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;binding vote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Binding votes are duplicate votes cast by a gold tag-badge holder in one of the question’s existing tags, or any vote whatsoever by a diamond moderator. These kinds always “win”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, all those things happened, so it was my binding vote that made it seem to you like you voted differently than you did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are often surprised by this, and it has not always worked the same way as it does now. There are various bug reports and feature requests aimed at changing the current or some past behavior. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/172654/153355&quot;&gt;Could the close vote banner please be made less... well, wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/54917/153355&quot;&gt;Distinguish close votes by reason&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/269073/153355&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t say I marked something as a duplicate when I didn&amp;#39;t&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T17:53:30.000" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T17:53:30.000" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13401" CreationDate="2019-09-09T17:47:34.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is unclear because you have done some research and come up with an answer, and have not advanced any cogent reason why what you found is unacceptable. Thus you have answered your own question, and it's not clear what more is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you found is unacceptable because you have identified &lt;strong&gt;your own research&lt;/strong&gt; as not meeting your high standards (say, because Lexico is not the OED) then either do research which does meet your standards, &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; find and present other reliable evidence which might contradict what you found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mention &quot;reliable evidence&quot; to exclude teenage or potentially badly-translated blogs or other sources of dubious quality. Your reliable evidence might show that there is a regional/dialectal difference from Standard English; but at the moment your own research has shown that in Standard English the two words are not synonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unclear questions tend to collect a lot of comments as people discuss how they should be answered. Yours currently has &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;forty,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which is one of the largest number I've seen on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:47:34.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13407" CreationDate="2019-09-13T09:52:58.367" Score="18" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the problems that keeps coming up is that many first time users of the site ask questions that are either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;better suited for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't have enough information for us to help them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites on the network have interstitial advice pages for first timers that appear after clicking on &quot;ask a question&quot; but before getting to the page for inputting the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/ask/advice&quot;&gt;meta meta advice page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can have one too! The Powers That Be are ready to go ahead, but need a little bit of input from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the section above the &quot;Search and Research&quot; section we can put a site specific message. What should it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T15:30:30.243" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T15:30:30.243" Title="We need a site specific message for our advice page" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13406" CreationDate="2019-09-14T15:19:47.493" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In EL&amp;amp;U, the problem is not that the standard Stack Exchange advice for writing good questions isn't appropriate. It's that some visitors don't have enough patience or enough facility with the language to wade through all that advice. I suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;help visitors decide quickly whether EL&amp;amp;U is the best place to ask their question; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;since we can't offloaded the boilerplate to a separate page and then link to it from &amp;quot;Tips for writing good questions&amp;quot;, add a horizontal dividing line to help visitors better identify the bite-sized portion above the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the existing text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’d love to help you, but the reality is that not every question gets answered. To &lt;strong&gt;improve your chances&lt;/strong&gt;, here are some tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;lengthy Stack Exchange boilerplate&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider stating the intended audience for this site, and linking to Stack Exchange communities that are more suitable for common questions that are off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site for &lt;strong&gt;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; - for ESL students and teachers (English as a Second Language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt; - for more general second-language acquisition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt; - for professional writing, editing and publishing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Literature&lt;/a&gt; - for scholars and enthusiasts of literature (Shakespeare, tropes, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; - for linguistics research and theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tips for writing good questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;lengthy Stack Exchange boilerplate&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T13:38:42.957" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13406" CreationDate="2019-09-14T21:14:40.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my suggested text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're learning English as a second language, please go to English Language Learners [provide link].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before you ask a question, search for an answer on this site, We have many good answers to questions already asked! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also look up words and phrases in on-line sources.  Tell us what you learned and why you still have a question.  It also helps if we know where you're coming from—some context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here are some links for looking things up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Three dictionary links (not including Lexico or OED), one phrase finder, one etymology]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We don't do proofreading, test prep, or homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're a linguist, etymologist, or serious English language enthusiast, welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T21:17:00.827" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T21:17:00.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-15T17:12:09.700" Score="22" ViewCount="1235" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reaction to high failure rates of questions with titles containing the&#xA;word &quot;problem&quot;, the Stack Overflow community long ago forbade these.  You&#xA;couldn't ask a new question with the word &quot;problem&quot; in its title, nor could you save&#xA;an edit to an existing question with the word &quot;problem&quot; still there. If you tried to&#xA;either of those, a red popup appeared telling you why this wasn't allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking that ELU might benefit from something similar, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6682/2085&quot;&gt;four and a half&#xA;years ago I collected&lt;/a&gt; aggregate data on how many questions with&#xA;certain title words in them were getting closed or deleted. Those ancient&#xA;data showed failure rates of around 50% for candidate titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that time, the associated failure rates have exploded dramatically:&#xA;the current failure rates are almost half again as bad as they were&#xA;then, closer to 75% now overall, not just the 50% of five years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Enough is enough!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow implemented their title bad on the word &quot;problems&quot; when the&#xA;associated failure rate was a lowly 20%, a mere pittance compared to what&#xA;we are now suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore formally propose to the ELU community that we ban from our&#xA;titles certain words and phrases with demonstrated failure rates above 50%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that the community at large can reach consensus here via voting, please&#xA;give answers that are either (1) in favor of this proposal or (2) against&#xA;this proposal.  Be sure to include any comments or concerns in those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If community consensus is to implement this ban, we'll then decide what text we want on the red popup messages that the ban will trigger. Those are details we'll hammer out as a community under a separate post here on meta later on down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here follow the raw data, taken today, ordered using four different&#xA;criteria to help you better assess the impact these questions are currently&#xA;having on the health of our site and of our community. The column headers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;IN TITLE: which word or words in the question title these data are for&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TOTAL: how many such questions in total, irrespective of state&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OPEN: how many such questions have been neither closed nor deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;!OPEN: how many such questions have been closed, deleted, or both&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FAIL %: the percentage of how many such question are no longer open and undeleted on the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remember&lt;/strong&gt; that Stack Overflow banned &quot;problem&quot; when it &lt;strong&gt;was at only 20%&lt;/strong&gt;. We're at much greater than 50%, often 80% or more. These should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Sorted by how many were closed or deleted (!OPEN)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IN TITLE       TOTAL  OPEN !OPEN  FAIL %&#xA;-----------------------------------------&#xA;correct         9282  2946  6336   68.26%&#xA;help            1827   352  1475   80.73%&#xA;grammar         1681   361  1320   78.52%&#xA;please          1375   214  1161   84.44%&#xA;grammatically   1468   403  1065   72.55%&#xA;right           1434   534   900   62.76%&#xA;which is        1401   578   823   58.74%&#xA;which one        867   225   642   74.05%&#xA;help me          617    68   549   88.98%&#xA;grammatical      916   399   517   56.44%&#xA;wrong            893   387   506   56.66%&#xA;which one is     638   153   485   76.02%&#xA;problem          649   219   430   66.26%&#xA;correctly        600   200   400   66.67%&#xA;please help      288    19   269   93.40%&#xA;incorrect        405   186   219   54.07%&#xA;please help me   204    10   194   95.10%&#xA;ielts            161     6   155   96.27%&#xA;need help        195    48   147   75.38%&#xA;is wrong         148    55    93   62.84%&#xA;problems         173    80    93   53.76%&#xA;mla               91    15    76   83.52%&#xA;grammer           69     1    68   98.55%&#xA;trouble          107    45    62   56.07%&#xA;the below         65    10    55   84.61%&#xA;gre               64    18    46   71.88%&#xA;your help         30     4    26   86.67%&#xA;urgent            27     4    23   85.19%&#xA;have a problem    16     5    11   68.75%&#xA;shit              12     2    10   86.67%&#xA;having trouble    15     5    10   66.67%&#xA;troubles          10     2     8   80.00%&#xA;grammarly         11     3     8   72.73%&#xA;corect             7     0     7  100.00%&#xA;grammaticaly       6     0     6  100.00%&#xA;grammatic          7     1     6   85.71%&#xA;plz help           5     0     5  100.00%&#xA;grama              3     0     3  100.00%&#xA;gramar             2     0     2  100.00%&#xA;fuck               5     5     0  100.00%&#xA;need your help    17    17     0  100.00%&#xA;plz               22    22     0  100.00%&#xA;urgently           3     3     0  100.00%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Sorted by failure rate (FAIL %)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IN TITLE       TOTAL  OPEN !OPEN  FAIL %&#xA;-----------------------------------------&#xA;corect             7     0     7  100.00%&#xA;grammaticaly       6     0     6  100.00%&#xA;plz help           5     0     5  100.00%&#xA;grama              3     0     3  100.00%&#xA;gramar             2     0     2  100.00%&#xA;plz               22    22     0  100.00%&#xA;need your help    17    17     0  100.00%&#xA;fuck               5     5     0  100.00%&#xA;urgently           3     3     0  100.00%&#xA;grammer           69     1    68   98.55%&#xA;ielts            161     6   155   96.27%&#xA;please help me   204    10   194   95.10%&#xA;please help      288    19   269   93.40%&#xA;help me          617    68   549   88.98%&#xA;your help         30     4    26   86.67%&#xA;shit              12     2    10   86.67%&#xA;grammatic          7     1     6   85.71%&#xA;urgent            27     4    23   85.19%&#xA;the below         65    10    55   84.61%&#xA;please          1375   214  1161   84.44%&#xA;mla               91    15    76   83.52%&#xA;help            1827   352  1475   80.73%&#xA;troubles          10     2     8   80.00%&#xA;grammar         1681   361  1320   78.52%&#xA;which one is     638   153   485   76.02%&#xA;need help        195    48   147   75.38%&#xA;which one        867   225   642   74.05%&#xA;grammarly         11     3     8   72.73%&#xA;grammatically   1468   403  1065   72.55%&#xA;gre               64    18    46   71.88%&#xA;have a problem    16     5    11   68.75%&#xA;correct         9282  2946  6336   68.26%&#xA;correctly        600   200   400   66.67%&#xA;having trouble    15     5    10   66.67%&#xA;problem          649   219   430   66.26%&#xA;is wrong         148    55    93   62.84%&#xA;right           1434   534   900   62.76%&#xA;which is        1401   578   823   58.74%&#xA;wrong            893   387   506   56.66%&#xA;grammatical      916   399   517   56.44%&#xA;trouble          107    45    62   56.07%&#xA;incorrect        405   186   219   54.07%&#xA;problems         173    80    93   53.76%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Sorted by total questions asked (TOTAL)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IN TITLE       TOTAL  OPEN !OPEN  FAIL %&#xA;-----------------------------------------&#xA;correct         9282  2946  6336   68.26%&#xA;help            1827   352  1475   80.73%&#xA;grammar         1681   361  1320   78.52%&#xA;grammatically   1468   403  1065   72.55%&#xA;right           1434   534   900   62.76%&#xA;which is        1401   578   823   58.74%&#xA;please          1375   214  1161   84.44%&#xA;grammatical      916   399   517   56.44%&#xA;wrong            893   387   506   56.66%&#xA;which one        867   225   642   74.05%&#xA;problem          649   219   430   66.26%&#xA;which one is     638   153   485   76.02%&#xA;help me          617    68   549   88.98%&#xA;correctly        600   200   400   66.67%&#xA;incorrect        405   186   219   54.07%&#xA;please help      288    19   269   93.40%&#xA;please help me   204    10   194   95.10%&#xA;need help        195    48   147   75.38%&#xA;problems         173    80    93   53.76%&#xA;ielts            161     6   155   96.27%&#xA;is wrong         148    55    93   62.84%&#xA;trouble          107    45    62   56.07%&#xA;mla               91    15    76   83.52%&#xA;grammer           69     1    68   98.55%&#xA;the below         65    10    55   84.61%&#xA;gre               64    18    46   71.88%&#xA;your help         30     4    26   86.67%&#xA;urgent            27     4    23   85.19%&#xA;plz               22    22     0  100.00%&#xA;need your help    17    17     0  100.00%&#xA;have a problem    16     5    11   68.75%&#xA;having trouble    15     5    10   66.67%&#xA;shit              12     2    10   86.67%&#xA;grammarly         11     3     8   72.73%&#xA;troubles          10     2     8   80.00%&#xA;corect             7     0     7  100.00%&#xA;grammatic          7     1     6   85.71%&#xA;grammaticaly       6     0     6  100.00%&#xA;fuck               5     5     0  100.00%&#xA;plz help           5     0     5  100.00%&#xA;grama              3     0     3  100.00%&#xA;urgently           3     3     0  100.00%&#xA;gramar             2     0     2  100.00%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. Sorted alphabetically (IN TITLE)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IN TITLE       TOTAL  OPEN !OPEN  FAIL %&#xA;-----------------------------------------&#xA;corect             7     0     7  100.00%&#xA;correct         9282  2946  6336   68.26%&#xA;correctly        600   200   400   66.67%&#xA;fuck               5     5     0  100.00%&#xA;grama              3     0     3  100.00%&#xA;gramar             2     0     2  100.00%&#xA;grammar         1681   361  1320   78.52%&#xA;grammarly         11     3     8   72.73%&#xA;grammatic          7     1     6   85.71%&#xA;grammatical      916   399   517   56.44%&#xA;grammatically   1468   403  1065   72.55%&#xA;grammaticaly       6     0     6  100.00%&#xA;grammer           69     1    68   98.55%&#xA;gre               64    18    46   71.88%&#xA;have a problem    16     5    11   68.75%&#xA;having trouble    15     5    10   66.67%&#xA;help            1827   352  1475   80.73%&#xA;help me          617    68   549   88.98%&#xA;ielts            161     6   155   96.27%&#xA;incorrect        405   186   219   54.07%&#xA;is wrong         148    55    93   62.84%&#xA;mla               91    15    76   83.52%&#xA;need help        195    48   147   75.38%&#xA;need your help    17    17     0  100.00%&#xA;please          1375   214  1161   84.44%&#xA;please help      288    19   269   93.40%&#xA;please help me   204    10   194   95.10%&#xA;plz               22    22     0  100.00%&#xA;plz help           5     0     5  100.00%&#xA;problem          649   219   430   66.26%&#xA;problems         173    80    93   53.76%&#xA;right           1434   534   900   62.76%&#xA;shit              12     2    10   86.67%&#xA;the below         65    10    55   84.61%&#xA;trouble          107    45    62   56.07%&#xA;troubles          10     2     8   80.00%&#xA;urgent            27     4    23   85.19%&#xA;urgently           3     3     0  100.00%&#xA;which is        1401   578   823   58.74%&#xA;which one        867   225   642   74.05%&#xA;which one is     638   153   485   76.02%&#xA;wrong            893   387   506   56.66%&#xA;your help         30     4    26   86.67%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, overall since the site began we have a failure rate of 53.17%, with 60,707 deleted questions, 28,561 closed but not deleted questions, and 78,613 questions that are neither closed nor deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T23:32:58.457" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T12:57:45.320" Title="Please vote on this proposal to ban from question titles certain words whose posts we usually end up closing and deleting" Tags="|feature-request|question-closure|titles|question-restrictions|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-15T18:30:59.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; adopt this proposal!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote this answer up to say that you think the proposal has merit and should be adopted. You can vote it down to say that you don’t think so, or you can vote up &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13411/2085&quot;&gt;the corresponding nay-answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also feel free to add your own answer if you would like to fine-tune the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T02:52:57.427" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T02:52:57.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-15T18:32:56.133" Score="20" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, we &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; adopt this proposal!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote this answer up if you think the proposal &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; be adopted. If you disagree, upvote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13410/44619&quot;&gt;corresponding &lt;em&gt;aye&lt;/em&gt;-answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Feel free to add your own answer if you have improvements that would make the proposal acceptable to you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T09:17:49.443" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T09:17:49.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-15T19:42:40.613" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, with proper scrutiny&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be a new meta post in which (an updated version of) the list of banned words is posted as an answer, for everyone to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That post should have a separate community-wiki answer where users can propose new words to be added to and removed from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is that some words may well be part of a good title, even though it doesn't look like it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T19:42:40.613" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-15T19:56:27.710" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some problems with this proposal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that this is a website about English Language &amp;amp; Usage, so every word we outright ban is going to be a word that can not be used in the title of a hypothetically legitimate question about the word. It'd be hard to talk about the origin, usage or orthography of &lt;em&gt;plz&lt;/em&gt; if it's removed altogether. Sure, that might not seem like a large loss, but we've had serious inquiries regarding the discussion of abbreviated webslang before, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;What is the Meaning of Z.O.M.G.&lt;/a&gt;, and if we do not already have a question regarding plz (I can't find one at the moment), then surely one has potential. Perhaps we can delete the multiple word strings without risking too much lost potential, since they seem fairly literal and hint more towards the nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And look, I get it: I've played some online multiplayer games in the past, most relevantly including Realm of the Mad God. &quot;Plz gimme X&quot; is often considered a pretty frustrating sentiment for a variety of reasons I don't think need explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this leads into the other problem which is even if we assume that questions using these sorts of questions only have &lt;em&gt;marginal&lt;/em&gt; potential, we still need to ask ourselves if the benefits outweight the detriments, and to be honest the only benefit I am seeing is aesthetic. Otherwise, not only does banning single words as this proposed change suggests obstruct asking questions, but it also makes it harder to identify questions which should be closed for being proofreading, or too opinion based. Once the questions are closed, the better solution to make the site prettier is to simply delete them if they are utterly lacking in merit. It's more dirty work sure, but it is also work that needs to be  done in accordance to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/broken-windows&quot;&gt;broken windows&lt;/a&gt; theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bitch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tits&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nigger&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;faggot&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cunt&lt;/em&gt; and maybe &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; should be added, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/975/do-we-really-need-to-add-nsfw-in-question-titles/981#981&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange has prohibited such words because the detriment offensive language cussing has on the network as a whole&lt;/a&gt;, in the form of getting the website on automated blacklists and making the network inhospitable to the broader S.E. membership, is more trouble than it is worth. It would save the community a whole bunch of hassle in editing these words out of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10672/is-damn-offensive&quot;&gt;if we don't even think damn should be censored in the titles&lt;/a&gt; because the website can't function properly or be taken seriously at that level of censorship, then what does removing innocuous words like incorrect or grammar, or even polite words such as please, say about us? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have less of a problem with blocking the multiple word phrases like &quot;having trouble&quot;, &quot;have a problem&quot;, &quot;need your help&quot; or &quot;please help me&quot; since those are fairly extrenuous phrases that do little to help and speak to the nature of the question, but even I doubt it would help much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T20:11:23.807" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T20:11:23.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13414" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-15T21:14:44.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T21:14:44.017" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T21:14:44.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13415" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-15T21:14:44.017" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions and discussions about restricting types of questions, question topics, and specific text within a question's title or body." OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T23:33:30.337" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T23:33:30.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-15T21:33:14.347" Score="29" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, but not for &lt;s&gt;trusted users&lt;/s&gt; the 'old hands'&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ban should only be implemented for &lt;strong&gt;new users&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that users with the &lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;Established User&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;Close/Reopen&lt;/a&gt; privilege should not be limited, in the event that there is a legitimate question to be asked with any of the above words. (Thanks for the suggestion, @tchrist)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These users are already having a vote in whether such questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; exist, so should be &lt;em&gt;au fait&lt;/em&gt; with what is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean users with more than &lt;s&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1,000 reputation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/s&gt; &lt;strong&gt;3,000 reputation&lt;/strong&gt; would be exempt from the ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some open questions on there, and as addressed in the comments, some words have other meanings (&lt;em&gt;troubles&lt;/em&gt; for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T10:04:19.127" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T10:04:19.127" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-16T11:34:11.233" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you consider questions by failure rate then it's really just showing that questions riddled with typos stay closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't measure at all the number one problem on this site: utterly unresearched questions. What if we prevented questions that didn't contain at least one link or block-quote from being submitted? That wouldn't solve the problems on this site, and it would still let through thousands of bad questions, but it would filter a lot of extremely poor ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent examples that wouldn't meet that simple criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/512744/1&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/512744/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/512746/1&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/512746/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/512741/59258&quot;&gt;Does having a temper make you angry or calm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T12:05:14.487" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T12:05:14.487" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-16T21:54:55.373" Score="5" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a few users who feel it necessary to scold others for their comments.  For example, admonishing people for answering questions in the comments section.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/512486/is-the-the-pirate-king-another-structure-of-the-king-of-pirates-interchange?noredirect=1#comment1242882_512486&quot;&gt;The comments section on this question in particular.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something people feel is flag worthy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind the comments section is for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Requesting clarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding information or suggestions to people's questions/answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clever quips that are not answers, but add to everyone's enjoyment of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers that are not quite worthy of a full answer, but might set the OP on the right track or provide fodder for someone else to do a properly researched and cited answer to the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 is something that I've seen high level users and mods do quite frequently, so it's clearly an acceptable practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we remove the statement from the comment box telling people not to answer in the comments so we don't have to be admonished by people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7R7WZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T00:51:29.917" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T16:24:53.430" Title="Is scolding other users in the comments section worthy of a flag?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-17T02:48:40.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it, that those words tend to be found in unsuitable questions? Does anybody know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because the person asking tupically ‘needs help or has a problem’ (that seems to be the main theme)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Does that then indicate questions that are ‘please help me with my homework?’ Or are from people whose literacy currently happens to be at a level which means that the question is poorly formed and can’t really be answered properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to hear, from those who often close questions, as I have rarely done that, so I don’t have a feel for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than ‘banning words’, which I sense people feel is a bit contra to the ethos of the site, how about flagging up the title to the asker, before they post? (Similar to what happens when you try to post a 3 word comment). An error message could come up, guiding the asker to the help text and making suggestions for proper usage. It could also suggest the Learners site if that seems more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="270624" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T02:48:40.157" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T04:48:54.083" Score="-4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/512708/why-is-wong-a-bad-word&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; recently posted by a new user should be reopened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/512708/142322&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;wong&amp;quot; a bad word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning the OP is looking for is not present in any available online dictionary. Apart from the Urban Dictionary (an unofficial source for ELU) which gives an unclear and somewhat confused definition, it seems that only Green’s Dictionary of Slang (a source that for some reason is not Googable) provides a more clear definition and origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T07:01:17.610" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T14:41:58.793" Title="Please reopen the question about the meaning of 'wong'" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13422" CreationDate="2019-09-17T05:35:04.290" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone asks a question it's imperative that they provide their own research. Only they know what they've read, what they haven't. Only they know what options they've tried and found inadequate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You added in research the OP never indicated they read. How does that help anyone? Why didn't you add in the research you posted in your answer? Because then there'd be no point in having &lt;em&gt;your answer&lt;/em&gt;. I consider your edit to be fraudulent, and I'm suspicious of your motives, seeing as you have an answer to that question. To be above board you should have edited in all the research you did, not a token link to one dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T05:43:15.310" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T05:43:15.310" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-09-17T14:28:33.623" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, but we should commit to reviewing policy effects in a few months.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I agree with the urgency of the issue. When a significant portion of questions are moderated, we should look for tools that increase the quality of questions. Yet, I see a few potential issues that we should commit to examining a few months after implementation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Convenience&lt;/strong&gt;: Is this a nuisance to existing users, who could conceivably ask good questions with several of these terms? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Effectiveness&lt;/strong&gt;: Does the rate of closed and downvoted questions decrease? (Related questions that may be more difficult to assess quantitatively: Are users getting around the filter? Do they genuinely end up asking better questions? Do they give up?) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Being Welcoming&lt;/strong&gt;: Do we decrease the rate of upvoted questions from new users? (They may try to ask a legitimate question with the word and grow discouraged by the filter.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Studying these three factors would ensure we're not discouraging high-effort contributions by new and existing users in aggressively filtering low-effort contributions. The method is proven in the main Stack Exchange, but they also have higher volume and a different demographic, so we should commit to being appropriately cautious. Especially with 2 and 3, I think comparisons of rates some months after implementation should be used to fine-tune the filters or take additional actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T14:28:33.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13422" CreationDate="2019-09-17T17:24:41.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't really the best question in the world. A major point against it is that it opens up based on a false premise that &lt;em&gt;wong&lt;/em&gt; can be used as a legitimate alternative to wrong. However, it would probably be more appropriate to fix this through a comment recommending the removal of extraneous information, or pontificating upon the point in an answer explaining the discrepancy between the intended meaning and the actual signification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see no reason why it should be &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;. It is not a general reference question for reasons user067531 explained in what seems to be a now deleted post regarding politeness. Granted, the question did not originally provide research, but that defect is fixable with an edit which had been appplied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, I would be against a third party adding research for similar reasons to CuriousDanni, since I would presume it would prejudice the answers by foreclosing upon possible answers, and because of the risk of a problematic answer being accepted. Indeed, I think the problematic answer has been accepted and it is an answer that is readily available in a Google search. However, there are reasons why I find this case to be exceptional:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that this is one of those cases where I suspect that even if the appropriate proceedure had been followed, that it would not have changed the result. The few readily accessible and reliable dictionaries which accept wong as a word, which is mostly just restricted to the Merriam-Webster series, refer to a presently unused definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/wong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; only cites an older public domain Merriam-Webster dictionary, which is something The Free Dictionary only does when its usual sources like Random House, Collins, or the American Heritage Dictionary are lacking information. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;filter=dictionary&amp;amp;dictionary=en&amp;amp;query=wong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico, which I presume to be the most likely dictionary to be used, has no results for the word at all&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only readily avaiable reference work which attempts to give it an offensive meaning is Urban Dictionary, and it is anybody's guess as to whether the information on Urban Dictionary is actually accurate or not in the first place, so I do not count that as a general reference resource. Indeed, if I &lt;em&gt;had to guess&lt;/em&gt; I would suppose that this is one of those Urban Dictionary listings, which is deliberately inaccurate. Even if The Urban Dictionary had been consulted, asking here may have been merely a method of seeking reaffirmation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Green's dictionary is certainly &lt;em&gt;reliable enough&lt;/em&gt; to be general reference when it can be readily consulted, but it is not readily found enough, so it fits into  Stack Exchange's goal of proliferating obscure information through the use of Google as a search engine. Indeed, when I check google now, this is the last result on the first page is now this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other, and much more important, reason is that because out of the General Reference dictionaries, not one of them actually gives an answer regarding why the word would be offensive. Fields are not inherently offensive, and the word is not marked as derogetory within that meaning, but rather just simply obsolete. Referencing Merriam-Webster should not influence which answer is considered most acceptable to anybody. Although &quot;changing the meaning of a question&quot; is prohibited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, I fail to see how this edit can be construed to do that, and &quot;adding related links and resources&quot; is an &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt; acceptable reason to edit a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also should be noted that although I believe the wrong answer is accepted, that an accepted answer is not necessarily the right answer, and even if the advised proceedures had been followed by the questioner, it is very much possible that the question would be in the same state it is now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now personally, I have a &lt;em&gt;slight&lt;/em&gt; disagreement with MariLou A. Despite the lack of attestation, I think the reasons wong is considered offensive would generally be considered common knowledge. It is basically one of many euphemisms for penis, and something of a combination of &lt;em&gt;schlong&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wang&lt;/em&gt;, and despite its euphemistic status, the intended playerbase for roblox is just so young that even euphemistic language and minced oaths may be objectionable to some people. We are talking about &quot;Ha, you said underwear&quot; levels of maturity here. I think this may be the main resistance to reopening the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there is a lack of readily documentation regarding this subject matter, and considering the purposes of the Stack Exchange Network, I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1546/&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1546/124936&quot;&gt;Joel Spolsky&lt;/a&gt; would have wanted an answer to exist on the Stack Exchange network, because &lt;em&gt;answering this question makes the internet a better place&lt;/em&gt;, which is very much the main goal of the network, as mentioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/13/changes-to-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;Joel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/09/16/five-years-ago-stack-overflow-launched-then-a-miracle-occurred/&quot;&gt;Jay Hanlon&lt;/a&gt;. At the very best, keeping this question closed seems to be letting one bad apple spoil the whole bunch, and even though I think that is a very bad reason to keep a question closed in and of itself, it even lacks a correctional effect on user behavior, since the questioner's acceptance of an answer suggests personal satisfaction even if things stay as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now perhaps this is not an expert level question on the level of what linguists and etymologists would find interesting, but even if not, that is very much supposed to be why we have &lt;em&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/em&gt;. Everybody has to learn something a first time, and with the provided research, I do believe that this question should &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; meet their minimum requirements with the edit in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I already voted to reopen the question when I read user067531's other post. We can sort out which site it's better suited for later, if it's reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T14:41:58.793" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T14:41:58.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13420" CreationDate="2019-09-17T21:24:38.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the titular question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;the code of conduct&lt;/a&gt; forbids &quot;subtle putdowns&quot;, &quot;unfriendly language&quot;, &quot;Name calling&quot;, &quot;personal attacks&quot; (which &quot;includes terms that feel personal even when they're applied to content [e.g. 'lazy']&quot;) and &quot;harassment&quot;, so generally speaking, the answer is going to be yes, that &lt;em&gt;scolding&lt;/em&gt; a user &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a flaggable offense, and the flag that best matches a code of conduct violation is &lt;em&gt;unfriendly or unkind&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flagging guidance for the &lt;em&gt;unfruendlly or unkind&lt;/em&gt; flag even provides a link to the code of conduct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's unfriendly or unkind.&#xA;  This comment is rude or condescending. Learn more in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it needs to be noted that there is a way that conducting yourself in a polite manner to advise users with constructive criticism is not necessarily the same thing as scolding. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/scolding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Noah Webster defines scolding as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Railing with clamor; uttering rebuke in rude and boisterous language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; Therefore, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the sentiment is expressed is important, and this sentiment is reflected in these slightly reformatted examples taken from the code of conduct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfriendly: “You could Google this in 5 seconds.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Friendly: “This is called Invariance and Covariance. If you Google it, you’ll find tutorials that can explain it much better than we can in an answer here.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfriendly: “If you bothered to read my question, you’d know it’s not a duplicate.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Friendly: “I don’t think this is a duplicate. My question is about cement board, while the question you linked is about drywall.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfriendly: “Are you speaking English? If so, I can’t tell.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Friendly: “I’m having trouble understanding your question. I think you’re asking how to add a swap after system installation. Is that correct?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfriendly: “I came to get help, not to get my question edited.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Friendly: “Thanks for trying to help, but your edit isn’t what I meant. I’ve removed your edit, and have updated my question so it’s clearer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The quotations are verbatim, but I can not textually sort them into columns)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="124936" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T16:24:53.430" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T16:24:53.430" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13432" CreationDate="2019-09-18T10:40:54.690" Score="6" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Brit, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70685/why-is-taking-a-biscuit-a-bad-thing-in-the-uk&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; rude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hxdnh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hxdnh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the post and the flag was declined, which is fair enough, but I'd like to know what degree of insulting towards the British is acceptable light-hearted banter and what is considered to cross the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The insult in the wording of the post is subtle (&quot;In the USA we're rational&quot; — i.e. in Britain they are not rational) but the context shows a pattern of intention to rile — shown by the OP accepting a heavily downvoted answer and the following comment below that answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find this explanation to be the most convincing thus far; and, after seeing Life of Brian and other perverse films from this region I'm inclined to think it is inline with their culture. Good job doing the research required.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7128" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T09:18:45.397" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T09:32:07.123" Title="How far on the right side of the 'rude' line is implying that British people are irrational?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13431" CreationDate="2019-09-18T11:26:01.060" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I read it is that Evan is giving us the benefit of the doubt. His question reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do people in the UK hate biscuits, and how did the saying &quot;take the biscuit&quot; come to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So despite the allusion to how we Brits are &quot;irrational&quot;, he assumes we are &quot;rational&quot; in asking why we hate biscuits, because it's only rational to hate biscuits if taking one is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact asking the question at all assumes there is a response that makes sense, so I can't really see Evan as believing that Brits are irrational, just being a bit provocative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the line of offensiveness. I take it case by case. The whole question could be trolling, Evan is a known troll, but I'm not a mind reader and I'm currently assuming good intent, since the question (about the history of the phrase) is a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only go by how a question makes me feel, and I'm open to hearing other opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T11:26:01.060" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T07:45:56.050" Score="5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most situations, fixing a broken link is a good thing. But a couple of times in the last month I've been unsure whether to approve an edit in the Suggested Edits Queue where the only change was to repair a link in an &lt;strong&gt;old, low-quality, low-vote post&lt;/strong&gt;. Since an approved edit immediately bumps the question to the top of our site's Home page, there's good reason to be a bit selective. But the available guidance isn't much help when it comes to selectivity on link-only edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged&lt;/strong&gt; - try to make the post significantly better when you edit, correcting all problems that you observe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that's no help in this situation. Fixing a broken link is not so clearcut: in most cases I'd say it's useful to have a functional link, but not always - so what's our tolerance? Is there any guidance on how we should value a functional link in an &lt;strong&gt;old low-quality answer&lt;/strong&gt; we might normally prefer to downvote or delete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On what basis would you reject the suggested edit? None of the available options to select from really suit this kind of edit. It's certainly not &quot;spam or vandalism&quot;, or &quot;no improvement whatsoever&quot;, or &quot;clearly conflicts with author's intent&quot;, or &quot;attempt to reply&quot;, or &quot;irrelevant tags&quot;. That just leaves &quot;causes harm (enter a custom reason)&quot;, and I find it a bit awkward to argue that bumping a LQ post to Home page &lt;em&gt;&quot;causes harm&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4516/why-are-some-users-with-10k-rep-allowing-minor-and-i-mean-very-minor-edits&quot;&gt;This EL&amp;amp;U Meta post&lt;/a&gt; offers the views of some of our highest-rep users, but mostly focuses on whether to approve edits that remove &quot;thanks&quot; messages (etc). &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4516/why-are-some-users-with-10k-rep-allowing-minor-and-i-mean-very-minor-edits#comment15105_4516&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou's comment&lt;/a&gt; seems instructive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The comment which explains the rejection says: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;This edit is too minor; suggested edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I think that basically covers it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4516/why-are-some-users-with-10k-rep-allowing-minor-and-i-mean-very-minor-edits#comment15140_4541&quot;&gt;comment from J.R.&lt;/a&gt; also offers some intuitive guidance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I remember seeing a comment some time ago that said, essentially, &lt;code&gt;@user - stop fixing quotes&lt;/code&gt;. (Evidently, that particular user had gotten into the habit of changing quotes &lt;code&gt;&quot;quotes&quot;&lt;/code&gt; into smart quotes &lt;code&gt;“quotes”&lt;/code&gt;, a purely cosmetic change.) I can see why someone would shrug, think to themselves, &quot;Why not?&quot;, and click approve after the first few instances. But when the practice persisted for three or four days in a row, one might get tired of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/167396&quot;&gt;MrHen's ranking of edit types&lt;/a&gt;, which certainly puts hyperlink improvements in the &quot;worth approving&quot; group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, none of these address the question of whether we should discriminate against link repairs on &lt;strong&gt;old, low-quality posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Two actual examples to consider:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/441588/word-meaning-a-job-someone-is-installed-in-where-they-don-t-do-anything/441593#441593&quot;&gt;This April 2018 answer&lt;/a&gt; has zero votes, is a low-quality cut&amp;amp;paste, and answers a question with only 154 views that's been closed as a duplicate. The post's author approved the edit, which is understandable, but I would probably have rejected the suggested edit if I'd seen it, on the principle that sending this post up to the Home page actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; cause a degree of harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95462/when-is-christmas-eve-eve/364404#364404&quot;&gt;This Dec 2016 answer&lt;/a&gt; has just 2 upvotes, it's mostly cut&amp;amp;paste, and there was no attempt in the edit to improve the capitalisation, punctuation or formatting. There's also no author to come to the rescue and approve the edit, so it was approved by 2 active users. This one is tougher to decide, especially as the question is popular (viewed 10k times), but there's an accepted answer with 12 votes and a 200-pt bonus, so my feeling is that fixing the link in this LQ answer is probably more on the side of trivial than useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate some guidance, especially from our diamond mods and high-rep users!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make it abundantly clear, I'm not saying there's a particular problem with the suggested edits or the review queue process. I think it works well! I'm asking about the &lt;em&gt;specific situation of a suggested edit that fixes a broken link – &lt;strong&gt;but nothing else&lt;/strong&gt; – in an &lt;strong&gt;old, low-quality, low-vote, low-views post&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Should we approve such an edit, even if the question has been closed as a dupe? What if the edited post has a negative vote score? Is there some point at which you'd draw the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked through my own activity on the Suggested Edits review queue. In the last 6 weeks I've reviewed 24 edits. I approved 15 of those, of which 8 were hyperlink-only amendments; one of the latter edits was rejected by the votes of 2 other users. I rejected 9, of which 2 were for &quot;causing harm&quot; (link-only edit to old LQ post); those 2 rejections failed due to approvals from other users. My vote was &lt;em&gt;consistent with other users in 21 of the 24 reviews&lt;/em&gt;, but the 3 in which I was &quot;outvoted&quot; all involved broken-link-only edits. I think it's reasonable to ask for Meta guidance on how to approach this particular minority category of edits, given my own approach seems to diverge from others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2019-09-21T13:49:07.417" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:29:51.993" Title="When is it reasonable to reject a suggested edit that fixes a broken link in a LQ post?" Tags="|discussion|review-queues|hyperlinks|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-19T08:44:28.007" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new in this forum but I have already 101 reputation points from other stackexchange sites. There's no absolutely no help in this subject! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: The above problem regards a question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11087/word-for-stating-the-obvious?newreg=58d7c42e1e0b41808b06eb3b1e04158f&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;stating the obvious?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362064" OwnerDisplayName="Apostolos" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T18:14:13.507" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T18:14:13.507" Title="Why there's no box (for me) to answer a question?" Tags="|support|reputation|answer-howto|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-11-20T18:13:40.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13434" CreationDate="2019-09-22T15:40:38.490" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Mari-Lou A wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Several links in my posts have been fixed by this user, and I've always given the green light. Fixing a corrupt link is nearly always a good thing, regardless of the post or author's status. I don't think the edits have got out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Sven wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edits are supposed to make a post significantly better, and correcting a bad link is one type of &quot;making better&quot; that I think we can all agree isn't subjective or presumptuous or disrespectful of the original poster's Stack Exchange–given right to fail to meet the site's criteria for an acceptable post or to express him- or herself badly. In view of that fact, I think Mari-Lou A's point is exactly right: &quot;Fixing a corrupt link is nearly always a good thing, regardless of the post or author's status.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Araucaria clarified: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only situations in which one would not want to fix a link would be&#xA;  if the link is clearly inappropriate or spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T16:29:51.993" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:29:51.993" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-09-22T15:40:38.490" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13431" CreationDate="2019-09-23T09:24:21.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have posted an answer. In the meantime, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/70852/44619&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;, which is absolute hogwash, continues to attract a few distracted upvotes. Evan Carroll, the OP, posted the following comment. He clearly enjoys being a provocateur...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yoIjn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yoIjn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fairness, it could be a reaction to an earlier comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOqPj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOqPj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T09:32:07.123" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T09:32:07.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13439" CreationDate="2019-09-23T17:56:41.793" Score="7" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to endorse a good answer to a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70685/why-is-taking-a-biscuit-a-bad-thing-in-the-uk&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;taking a biscuit&amp;quot; a bad thing in the UK?&lt;/a&gt;) that currently has a seemingly bad answer as the accepted answer—but unfortunately I attached the bounty to a different question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/512708/why-is-wong-a-bad-word&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;wong&amp;quot; a bad word?&lt;/a&gt;) whose accepted answer is perfectly acceptable. (I have since opened a second bounty on the originally intended question.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to undo the erroneous bounty offer? In particular, I am concerned that the misdirected bounty inaccurately criticizes the accepted answer in that case. Sorry that I can't seem to do simple things correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T19:31:55.640" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T11:15:34.297" Title="Can I undo a bounty that I accidentally opened for the wrong question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13438" CreationDate="2019-09-24T11:15:34.297" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can refund your bounty. Flag for moderator attention and explain the situation. This is something mods only do in rare cases, but one accidental bounty on the wrong question in a period of years seems like a reasonable ask to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T11:15:34.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-26T04:01:26.753" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70685/why-is-taking-a-biscuit-a-bad-thing-in-the-uk/&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;taking a biscuit&amp;quot; a bad thing in the UK?&lt;/a&gt; has an answer which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is heavily downvoted (with a score of -19 last I saw), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;describes activities many people would consider very disgusting, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doesn't cite any sources or otherwise back up its claim in any way,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has several comments refuting it, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is currently the question's accepted answer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't see any reason why this answer could be worth keeping, so I flagged it as &quot;rude or abusive.&quot; Somebody reviewed my flag but decided to leave the answer up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we do something about this particular answer? Is there any reason we shouldn't just delete it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19334" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T17:46:33.493" Title="Should we do something about the heavily downvoted answer on &quot;take the biscuit&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13442" CreationDate="2019-09-26T17:46:33.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heavily downvoted bad answers should be preserved as feedback for visitors, not deleted. They demonstrate the sorts of answers that are not welcomed by the community, and may prevent such answers in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, deletion of the answer may lead someone to believe the “soggy biscuit” thing has not been brought up before and cause them to post it again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will constantly require community intervention if we assume the soggy biscuit thing can’t be a credible answer, (which is what the comments seem to indicate) and we will lose the history of the previous, unaddressed criticisms of such an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T17:46:33.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13449" CreationDate="2019-09-29T10:22:36.533" Score="-4" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/513993/seeking-clarification-on-the-use-of-they-them-their-as-a-personal-gender-prono&quot;&gt;Seeking clarification on the use of “They/Them/Their” as a personal gender pronoun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is the total question. I asked another question in Meta asking why my post was closed and how I can find feedback on why those who down-voted / set as 'off topic' did so. There was only one respondent, but that person stated that no actual feedback is given nor is any detail required to make the vote / call in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely that must be incorrect - or is it indeed true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastEditorUserId="8019" LastEditDate="2019-09-29T11:58:58.810" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T11:58:58.810" Title="Is it really true that those who down / up vote and/or close a question do not have to provide any reason why?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-09-29T12:37:21.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13448" CreationDate="2019-09-29T11:15:34.310" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither up- nor downvotes require a reason, and this, together with the anonymity of voting, is an important part of the Stack Exchange model. You can find a good number of discussions around this if you look, but there is no point arguing about it. Partly this is beacause nobody on the site has the power to change it, and partly because argument is itself alien to Stack Exchange; you can if you wish put forward reasons to support your post, but other people's opinions do not require your approval, and indeed a poorly-phrased 'justification' may be perceived as whining and inability to accept criticism, and lead to further downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closevotes do require a reason, but one of the commoner reasons is &quot;off-topic; not about English within the scope defined in the help center&quot;.  If you had actually believed that and checked what the help centre says, you would have found that ELU (and other Stack Exchange sites) do not welcome discussions or &quot;seeking clarification&quot;; clear answers are given to clear questions, and, ideally, the correct answer is accepted. &#xA;The reason you were given is thus sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T11:15:34.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13451" CreationDate="2019-09-29T22:55:10.070" Score="-6" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an 'answer' to question I posted (link below) and it's no longer showing. Is there anyway to know whether is this a result of the user deleting the answer and/or removal from admins. If it's the later, is there anyway to find out way why an answer has been removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/513993/seeking-clarification-on-the-use-of-they-them-their-as-a-personal-gender-prono&quot;&gt;Seeking clarification on the use of “They/Them/Their” as a personal gender pronoun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastEditorUserId="362933" LastEditDate="2019-09-29T23:29:22.987" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T03:34:53.370" Title="Answer no longer shows?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2019-10-12T18:25:49.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13450" CreationDate="2019-09-30T01:28:09.923" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it happens, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ElU0l.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that question has never received any answers whatsoever&lt;/a&gt;, for there are zero deleted answers on the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/513993/2085&quot;&gt;Seeking clarification on the use of “They/Them/Their” as a personal gender pronoun&lt;/a&gt;.  Why it should be axiomatically impossible to discover why something that never happened happened I shall have no choice but to leave as a possible exercise to the reader to discover on their own should they happen to be so inclined. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T03:34:53.370" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T03:34:53.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13453" CreationDate="2019-10-01T16:29:03.893" Score="6" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this on meta because I think it's POB and more of a discussion of site behavior than on the actual usage of the word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequently on this site, the word &lt;strong&gt;grammatical&lt;/strong&gt; is used to mean &lt;em&gt;correctly used&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/grammatical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grammatical&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; actually mean this?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well formed; in accordance with the rules of the grammar of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the word means proper grammar has been applied.  &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; That proper case, tense, punctuation, etc. has been employed.  Not necessarily that the words are being used correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does the line between grammar and word-choice lie? The example question that led me to my question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/514188/cheddar-goes-good-with-burgers-can-go-be-seen-as-a-verb-of-the-senses&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.  Would the usage of the word &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; instead of the word &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt; be an example of ungrammatical or improper usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T13:24:38.290" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T13:24:38.290" Title="Grammatical vs incorrect usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13452" CreationDate="2019-10-02T02:50:54.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Grammar = Morphology + Syntax&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; refers to either of these two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to fit together elements of meaning &lt;em&gt;smaller&lt;/em&gt; than a single word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to fit together elements of meaning &lt;em&gt;larger&lt;/em&gt; than a single word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;b&gt;sub&lt;/b&gt;-lexical constituent components referred to by the first category are the language’s &lt;em&gt;morphemes&lt;/em&gt;, and so this part of a language’s grammar we call its &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It’s how to fit little pieces of words together to create individual words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think &lt;em&gt;thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;be, am, art, is, are, was, wert, were&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;see, sees, saw, seeing, seen, foresee, unsee, unforeseen, unforeseeable, unforeseeably&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unreflected, infelicitate, disadvantaged, irredeemability, antiretroviral&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;b&gt;super&lt;/b&gt;-lexical constituent components referred to by the second category are the language’s &lt;em&gt;syntactic constituents&lt;/em&gt;, often multiword phrases that together act like a single thing within a larger hierarchical structure, and so this part of a language’s grammar we call its &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think about the difference between &lt;br&gt;  &lt;em&gt;The dog bit the man&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt; versus &lt;br&gt;  &lt;em&gt;The man bit the dog&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt; versus &lt;br&gt; &lt;em&gt;The man bit the dog that bit the cat that bit the mouse that scared the man the dog bit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar &lt;strong&gt;isn’t&lt;/strong&gt; about accent, or spacing, or choice of font, or spelling, or the color of text, or capitalization, or indentation, or anything else that a blind illiterate cannot say and hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; about how the real language — the spoken one — fits together, not about whether your boarding school’s penmanship teacher approves of how you write that cursive  in your full name’s signature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Famous examples of puzzling yet perfectly grammatical sentences include everything from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as in uffish thought he stood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      And burbled as it came!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many more besides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T03:01:34.113" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13454" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-02T11:36:41.823" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T11:36:41.823" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T11:36:41.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13455" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-02T11:36:41.823" Score="0" Body="Comments are small addenda to each question or answer, intentionally limited in size and formatting and intended to prompt clarifying edits." OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2019-10-04T17:33:16.797" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T17:33:16.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13456" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13459" CreationDate="2019-10-03T04:21:00.120" Score="-7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a question of mine migrated from the English Site to the Linguistics site (link below). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question relates to the field of Computational Linguistics which is an amalgamation of Language, Linguistics, Mathematics, and Computer Science (at the very least). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate and understand that some may feel this is a linguistic styled question, however I very specifically wanted to obtain answers from the perspective of Language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure what the process is here, but could  I please have the question re-instated and/or re-ask on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/33717/what-frameworks-are-there-for-computational-linguistics?noredirect=1#comment73294_33717&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/33717/what-frameworks-are-there-for-computational-linguistics?noredirect=1#comment73294_33717&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T07:56:43.587" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T07:56:43.587" Title="Migration of question" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13458" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13461" CreationDate="2019-10-03T05:17:32.310" Score="-4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a number of unnecessarily rude responses to questions that I've made. Although there appears to be 'flagging' options for some elements, I am unable to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this due to having a low reputation point score? and if so, is there a way to report rude comments and/or have them discussed in the meta section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T07:55:44.370" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T07:55:44.370" Title="Reporting rude comments" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13456" CreationDate="2019-10-03T06:42:52.363" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please do not simply ask the same question again. It's already been judged as off-topic and better suited to a different site (where comments indicate it's been reasonably well-received).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you specifically want to ask about the English language, that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be on-topic here; but I would suggest that you wait until you have a general answer upon which to base a more specific question — and then it will probably be better to ask it on Linguistics where there is a community who could narrow down their focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way of having a migrated question re-instated is to have the recipient site send it back. That will mean that it's off-topic on that site. But — as it's also off-topic on this site — it will simply end up closed and require five votes to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator who cast the vote to move your question does in fact know quite a bit about language, linguistics and computer science (and probably maths), and given that it has been well received and Linguistics.SE actually have a [computational-linguistics] tag and we don't, I suggest it's left where it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T06:42:52.363" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13465" CreationDate="2019-10-03T06:57:51.007" Score="-2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm  very much trying to understand how this site operates as it feels very inconsistent. In another post (link below) it was stated that a post is somewhat deemed 'well received' if it has comments. This is important as when asking why a given post is migrated/closed/etc the nature of it being 'well received' seems to be used as a metric. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any official documentation on how 'well received' is formally defined and assessed. And with regard to 'Language' are there specific rules that apply for determining 'well received'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13456/migration-of-question/13459?noredirect=1#comment56742_13459&quot;&gt;Migration of question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T07:56:14.487" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T17:05:18.097" Title="Is it correct that a post is deemed 'well received' if it has comments?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13458" CreationDate="2019-10-03T07:55:13.650" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can flag posts at 15 reputation. Flagging comments is not mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; list, so it's either the same or possibly even as low as 1. Or it may come with the &quot;comment everywhere&quot; privilege you get at 50 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can flag comments, then it will be via the little grey flag on the left of each comment. The up-arrow is to vote agreement with the comment, rather than add an explicit &quot;Me too&quot;. [These used to be &quot;mystery meat&quot;, appearing only on mouseover; it looks like that's changed.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qlmWr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qlmWr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that comments are brief and can be brusque. That's not rudeness. There are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging&quot;&gt;guidelines on flags&lt;/a&gt;, which — although they probably need updating after five years — still hold true. &lt;em&gt;Insults&lt;/em&gt; are rude and flagworthy, and moderators will deal with those; a criticism which is simply &quot;directly expressed&quot; is a judgement call. Moderators try to be consistent, but we're only human; and some have thicker skins than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't flag, then I would suggest comments really aren't worth complaining about. You may find that others flag them (and comments can disappear with a fairly low number of flags) and too many flags raised for any particular user also gets brought to moderators' attention by the system. But the easy answer is just to ignore any you don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T07:55:13.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-03T03:17:39.433" Score="2" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/514110/191178&quot;&gt;“He 'is to be' here by six o'clock.”&lt;/a&gt; (deleted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an account some days ago trying to find out the answer to a question about what the name of the verb conjugation be + infinitive (is to be, are to run, was to call) is called and have been checking back for an answer and answering questions here and there and had gotten about 50 points and now I check today and my question and my account don't exist anymore and when I try and ask why  on some &quot;meta&quot; site it says I can't because I don't have enough points and because that question doesn't exist but it made this account when I tried so I'm asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was my question and account deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user363331" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T14:27:06.870" Title="Why was my question and account deleted?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2019-10-03T12:26:05.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fear there is nothing that can be done. I hope I'm mistaken, but once an account has been deleted that's it. If a moderator deleted an account by mistake then there is a glimmer of hope…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/283926/223820&quot;&gt;No, this is not possible. Once a profile is deleted, it is gone forever&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can restore past content to a new profile, but we only do so for users who were deleted erroneously, usually due to a moderator making a mistake (I've done it a couple of times myself). If you requested the deletion in any way, then the content will remain anonymous forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@animusan♦ Aug 27 '16&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T12:46:07.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13467" CreationDate="2019-10-03T13:00:53.910" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wondered whether it was possible for a user without flagging privileges to cast flags on their own posts, like how users can delete their own posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason being some people accidentally post on ELU, without knowing about ELL/Linguistics/Writing. Some questions are reasonable, but just better suited elsewhere. I think it would be beneficial for users to take ownership of their things, rather have the Big Scary Users move it without them wanting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's by-the-by; what I'm asking is whether it is possible on this site - there is an answer on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/228288/should-1-reputation-users-be-able-to-flag-their-own-posts&quot;&gt;StackExchange Meta&lt;/a&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I'd suggest to evaluate this on a per-site basis. I'd leave this ability enabled for most sites, but it might be rather useful to disable it for high-traffic sites like SO where it causes more problems than it solves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this possible? If not, should it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T19:47:47.583" Title="Can sub-15 rep users flag their own content?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2019-10-03T16:11:58.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Reception and commentary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The existence of comments on a question do not indicate one way or another that a question is well received. Neither does the absence of comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s possible and observed that well-received questions can have comments or no comments. Equally, it’s possible and observed that poorly-received questions can have comments or no comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of those comments might, and often do, indicate how the community is receiving your question. As any commentary anywhere in life is used to praise, critique, or criticize works and behaviors. You have to read what they say. And you have to read them &lt;em&gt;in good faith&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Assessing reception more generally&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to determining the reception of a particular Q: upvotes and in particular a net positive score indicate positive reception. Downvotes, a net negative score, close votes, actual closure, delete votes, and actual deletion all indicate negative reception (in that order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also flags which anyone can cast but only mods can see and act on which are typically used for significantly inappropriate content (eg spam, abuse, insults, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On net-zero-scored questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A net zero score, with no other indication to go by (positive or negative comments, closure votes, etc) usually indicate a question which has just passed the bar for an acceptable question, and there’s not much more you can say for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually these are “meh” questions, of no particular interest to anyone but the OP, but they’ve nonetheless abided by the relevant standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, for rules (eg banning), badges, and a variety of other algorithmic applications on the site (as opposed to in people’s mental representation of the question), typically net zero-score questions are classified as “poorly received”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Take-away advice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason, and because it’s not very hard to do, question authors should strive to learn to ask questions that consistently attract at least one or two upvotes (more precisely: a net score above zero), and which do not attract any close votes (whether or not the question is ultimately closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of that, it’s best not to worry if you get a couple downvotes, every question attracts some, they’re inevitable, and they don’t matter so long as overall there are more upvotes than down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T17:05:18.097" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T17:05:18.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13471" CreationDate="2019-10-03T19:26:52.213" Score="5" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sociolinguistic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sociolinguistic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sociolinguistic&lt;/a&gt; should be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sociolinguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sociolinguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sociolinguistics&lt;/a&gt;, to be consistent with general styling of the word and the related tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psycholinguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psycholinguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psycholinguistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar request to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/968/rename-homophone-in-homophones&quot;&gt;rename homophone to homophones&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; (and also closed, but don't look at that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-10-04T05:13:58.303" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T05:14:13.423" Title="Proposal to rename 'sociolinguistic' tag to 'sociolinguistics'" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13464" CreationDate="2019-10-03T19:47:47.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/514486/testing-for-a-meta-question&quot;&gt;Yes they can&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A one-rep user can flag the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am flagging to report this question as...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should be closed...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;This question is completely unclear, incomplete, overly-broad, primarily opinion-based or is not about English language and usage as described in the help center, and it is unlikely to be fixed via editing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a duplicate...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;This question has been asked before and already has an answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in need of moderator intervention&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;A problem not listed above that requires action by a moderator. Be specific and detailed!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T19:47:47.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-03T23:39:20.180" Score="-2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a user comment on a question I posted that there was a 'Report' on myself. He/she deleted the comment fairly quickly, but it left the question as to whether what he/she said was correct? and if so, is there any way to find out if there is a report on a given user and it's status/content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are reports formed on users? and what is the process associated with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T14:04:46.097" Title="Is there any way for a user to know if there is a report on them?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2019-10-05T12:35:52.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2019-10-04T01:37:31.480" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the information I've garnered so far on the Meta Page, there is no required feedback nor defined structure in which a moderator can act. There are processes that are put into place to review decisions, but from what I've seen so far it's essentially a pointless endeavour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post such as this is the best you can hope for, but if you hope to find out exactly why this action has been taken you just have to hope the moderators/high rep users feel inclined to tell you. There is no burden on their part to actually quantify their actions on users to the users themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362933" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T01:37:31.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13466" CreationDate="2019-10-04T05:14:13.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is all done now, renamed and merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T05:14:13.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13469" CreationDate="2019-10-04T14:04:46.097" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the context, I believe what you mean by &quot;report&quot; is whether a flag has been raised on a post or comment that you wrote. The answer is no. If I have misunderstood what you are asking, please edit your question to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T14:04:46.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2019-10-04T14:27:06.870" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is our policy that when a user account is suspended, any accounts that are created to circumvent that suspension are deleted without notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have further questions or if you want to appeal the decision, you can contact  SE staff: english.stackexchange.com/contact&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T14:27:06.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13476" CreationDate="2019-10-04T17:25:43.353" Score="12" ViewCount="557" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology?cb=1&quot;&gt;very unpopular sacking&lt;/a&gt; of a very popular moderator on Stack Exchange, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7513&quot;&gt;it seems that&lt;/a&gt; &quot;about 35 moderators have either resigned in protest or gone on strike in relation to the chain of events&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this the reason for the recent loss of at least one EL&amp;amp;U moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T15:48:09.780" Title="Have we lost some moderators as a result of recent events?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13474" CreationDate="2019-10-05T01:15:28.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like MetaEd is no longer on the list (which was news to me until just now), but I haven't seen any indication that the absence is related to the recent controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't think this particular absence is anything to be worried about specifically, I'm honestly surprised there's been no meta discussion here of the changes and proposed upcoming CoC so far—something that we &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; need to be worried about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel&quot;&gt;Monica&lt;/a&gt; was a moderator of &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt; (and other sites), and there's been a lot of discussion about that there—as well as about all of its remaining moderators &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2245/do-we-have-any-diamonds-left)&quot;&gt;quitting or stepping back in protest&lt;/a&gt;, I would have thought the issue of the use of pronouns would have been a hot topic, both in this meta and at ELL's (which has had nothing posted to it the last time I checked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2019-10-05T01:22:00.570" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T01:22:00.570" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13474" CreationDate="2019-10-05T15:48:09.780" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Two moderators lost their diamonds (MetaEd and Waiwai933) because they have not been active (in moderator terms) for more than 6 months. This is the standard practice, and is completely unrelated to the turmoil elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I can safely say, the EL&amp;amp;U mod team was sad to see the diamonds go, but we understand that SE need to enforce the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say what caused the two mods to have to reprioritise their mod/life balance, but I hope everything is getting better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T15:48:09.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13478" CreationDate="2019-09-21T00:38:32.033" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Helping someone with a book title.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The best words (like &lt;em&gt;Distilled&lt;/em&gt;) are ones he has found people don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me there might be some sort of resource for that: plug in a word and it would tell you how commonly known it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5389" OwnerDisplayName="Clay Nichols" LastActivityDate="2019-10-07T13:36:32.460" Title="How to know how well known (by average american) a word is?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13477" CreationDate="2019-09-21T01:10:39.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a first approximation, you can try looking up word frequency lists online. If you want more curated results, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&lt;/a&gt;, where you can query one word followed by the other, and see how many results those searches bring up. This service is limited in the number of searches you can make (maybe 20 per day or month) unless you make a (free) account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also try &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com/ngrams&lt;/a&gt; (choose &lt;em&gt;American English&lt;/em&gt; as your corpus and don't go beyond the default year range), where you can separate two or more words by commas in a single query. You can make as many queries as you'd like here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user71740" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T01:10:39.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-09T03:39:21.747" Score="20" ViewCount="864" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, this whole mess started with a dispute about &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; using the pronoun a person wanted to be used to refer to them, but using instead, their name or some other neutral and polite designation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the preferred pronoun, or whatever its correct name is, confined to singular they, or are there some new pronouns that people are insisting on?  If so, are these new pronouns in the OED?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for singular they, because I used it twice above, I am clearly OK with it, provided it does not introduce ambiguity or weirdness. It is better than he/she.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was horrified when, as an ELU newbie, I first encountered singular they in the Profiles, but shortly thereafter there was a Q about it and I learned that it has a long history of respectable usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I am very unhappy with the way Monica has been and is being treated, I don't know how I feel about the exact English usage that was the ultimate cause of this mess (other than the Orwellian aspect) because that is a mystery.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T19:26:01.450" Title="Do we have any information on what the &quot;preferred pronouns&quot; are?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13481" CreationDate="2019-10-09T06:23:53.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A preferred pronoun is basically anything a person might prefer to be referred to in place of the normally assigned third person pronouns, and the only way  to know somebody's preferred pronouns is to be informed on a per-individual basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gdA7AAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA12&amp;amp;dq=preferred+pronouns&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiA2ffgu47lAhWPpZ4KHYt8CWg4ChDoATABegQICRAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=preferred%20pronouns&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue&lt;/a&gt; by Nicholas M Teich&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns can be a bit more complicated than just &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;. Because we know gender is on a continuum, in a way, pronouns are, too. The vast majority of trans and nontrans individuals use he or she. Some people may prefer &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; (used as a singular pronoun) or a host of other words. It can be very difficult to remember to use nontraditional pronouns, but it is important to respect people's wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8Hl0DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT168&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwipv6meu47lAhUUvJ4KHb5XCbMQ6AEwB3oECAkQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=preferred%20pronouns&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Social Work Practice with LGBTQIA Populations: An Interactional Perspective&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On Pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot assume that you know anyone's pronouns, and therefore, it makes sense to ask every new client what their pronouns are. You may want to start by introducing yourself with your pronouns the first time you meet any new client (i.e., 'Hello, my name is Kate, my pronouns are &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hers&amp;quot;), giving space for your client to then respond with their pronouns. By introducing yourself and identifying your pronouns, you are not only clarifying the client's pronouns for your own use, but also modeling the use of inclusive language, which benefits all clients. When inquiring about a person's pronouns, avoid asking a client what their 'preferred' pronouns are. Asking a client for 'preferred' pronouns implies preference over truth. A person's pronouns are their pronouns, it isn't about preference at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes more than just the standard set of pronouns. It includes any number of spivakian pronouns which is defined by &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/trans/alliestoolkit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trans@mit's &lt;em&gt;Trans&lt;/em&gt; and Gender Variant Terminology* glossary as&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New terms proposed to serve as gender-neutral, thirdperson, singular, personal pronouns in English. See also “hir” and “ze.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more complete but non-exhaustive list of examples can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wou.edu/wp/safezone/pronouns/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Western Organ University's Safezone Webpage for Pronouns&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.postimg.cc/5tCQdmJy/lesscommonpronouns.png&quot; alt=&quot;This is a Partial Screenshot of The Western Organ University's Pronouns Webpage Displaying the Pronouns.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T07:44:11.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13481" CreationDate="2019-10-09T09:08:06.047" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those interested in delving deeper;  Monica Cellio's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology&quot;&gt;dismissal&lt;/a&gt; as moderator on &lt;em&gt;six&lt;/em&gt; sites, including Meta, stems from the updated CoC (Code of Conduct) which Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps&quot;&gt;plans to release&lt;/a&gt; this coming Thursday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has led to flurry of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;resignations&lt;/a&gt; (16) and a formal &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334575/dear-stack-exchange-a-statement-and-a-letter-from-your-moderators&quot;&gt;moderators' letter&lt;/a&gt; as well as numerous posts on Meta.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there are three questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%22singular+they%22&quot;&gt;the ‘singular they’&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd Personally like to thank @ab2 and @Lawrence's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13474/have-we-lost-some-moderators-as-a-result-of-recent-events&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; for bringing this to the attention of the EL&amp;amp;U community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2019-10-09T09:13:36.683" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T09:13:36.683" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13481" CreationDate="2019-10-09T14:55:32.840" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Code of Conduct did not specifically state a preference for using pronouns when a user's pronouns are unknown. I personally use singular they for this purpose. Others might use a different pronoun, and &lt;em&gt;that's ok&lt;/em&gt;, when the user's pronouns are not known. In that sense, there is no &quot;preferred pronoun&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the user's pronouns are known (particularly if they are expressly stated by the user), everyone is expected to make a good faith effort to use them. This isn't a &quot;preferred&quot; pronoun either. It's the person's pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, using &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is easy to understand. Most people are familiar with those pronouns and are polite about being corrected. For instance, we can understand not wanting to be called &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; when we're actually &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, even if we don't really mind if that happens to us specifically. So that part of the policy -- let's make sure we respect people's pronouns -- makes sense to pretty much everybody. If you know I'm &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; and you consistently refer to me as &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, even after I have asked you not to, that violates our fundamental &quot;Be Nice&quot; policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it gets harder is when we talk about gender identity. Online, we're just usernames. I can tell you I'm &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; without any baggage of your perception of my gender, and we're not sharing a bathroom, so I'm not in a position where I have to justify my identity. I can just be &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; because I said that's who I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not everyone feels like they fit neatly into a binary gender pattern, meaning they don't necessarily feel like &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; fits right. They might feel gender-neutral, or gender fluid (their experience changes over time), or somewhere sort of in-between &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, and we call this &quot;nonbinary gender&quot; (or enby). I can't describe the enby experience because I'm not, but all I really need to know is that they feel like a different pronoun is the right pronoun for them. That's commonly &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; -- it's by far the most common amongst all the enby people I know -- in part, I think, because we are already used to using singular they when gender is unspecified or to specifically obscure gender. There are also neopronouns, which Tonepoet has linked resources for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe these usages are in the OED, but even if they are not, I encourage you to use them when asked. Here is the thing. It's not about whether a person's pronoun is &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; in your perception of what's proper. It's about that person's identity as a human being. I would be hurt and upset if other people argued whether it was &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; to refer to me as &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, and if they were further offended when they offered to refer to me by some other pronoun that was &quot;proper&quot; so long as it was not that one and I said no because I'm &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; not some other pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the change to the Code of Conduct is not intended to punish people who are trying. We know it's difficult, especially for non-native speakers and especially for non-native speakers of gendered languages. The important thing is that we all try to respect people's identities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for asking. I know that many, many, probably all of my transgender and genderqueer friends are tired of having to explain it to everyone. I have done my best to accurately represent their viewpoint in an effort to spare them having to do it again, but I welcome education if I have missed the mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T14:55:32.840" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-09T15:35:48.927" Score="10" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this has been asked in one form or another, but I think I'm trying to put a new spin on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We seem to have a chronic issue of people who just don't seem to understand the culture and purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These people typically fit into one or more of the following categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Language Learners and would be better served by ELL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users seeking for us to do their homework. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise intelligent individuals from educated backgrounds who don't understand that their posts might be asked for clarification or clarity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users of more typical online forums who aren't used to the burden of proof/research we require. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trolls&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to help these users and have gotten the reward of nasty comments in return, etc.  Lately I've been referring people to our tour page. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&lt;/a&gt;  But, it doesn't really mention what we're seeking in terms of quality, etc.  This is especially true for answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we improve upon this?  For example an expression of what comments are used for ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is there a way to force new users to read the page before activation of their new account or posting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59527" LastEditorUserId="59527" LastEditDate="2019-10-09T16:15:25.710" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T17:45:44.580" Title="Do we need a better guide to culture than the tour?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13485" CreationDate="2019-10-09T17:45:44.580" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the tour's example question about &quot;nosebleed seats&quot; had never existed and were posted as a new question today, I would expect English Language &amp;amp; Usage site participants to close it within a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, where is the research? &quot;I've never heard of this idiom before today&quot; doesn't qualify under even the most minimal interpretation of this requirement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, consider this entry for &lt;em&gt;nosebleed&lt;/em&gt; in the general-reference &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (2003): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nosebleed&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt; (1978) extremely or excessively high {seats in the &lt;em&gt;nosebleed&lt;/em&gt; section} {&lt;em&gt;nosebleed&lt;/em&gt; stock prices}.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition explicitly ties adjectival use of &lt;em&gt;nosebleed&lt;/em&gt; to extreme or excessive height. Armed with that information, the poster would logically have had to narrow the question to something like &quot;Why is &lt;em&gt;nosebleed&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective associated with extreme or excessive height?&quot; I would then expect new-question reviewers/close voters to argue that the question wasn't about the English language but about human physiology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the tour's example of a good typical question to ask at EL&amp;amp;U would, under current EL&amp;amp;U standards, be rejected because (1) it shows no research; (2) it's general reference; and (3) what's left of the question after the research and general-reference problems are resolved isn't a question about the English language but about the connection between altitude and nosebleeds. No wonder the handful of new question askers who actually take the tour before posting a question are likely to have a completely erroneous idea of what the site's current standards are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, one might try to rehabilitate the question by homing in on the &quot;origin&quot; aspect of the question to say something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; gives a first occurrence date of 1978 for &lt;em&gt;nosebleed&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective in the sense of &quot;extremely or excessively high.&quot; Where and in what context did this usage arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That version of the question would at least arguably be on-topic at EL&amp;amp;U: it shows research; it asks a question that isn't answerable by consulting a general-reference work; and it asks a question of a type that tends not to be closed as off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U. However, if anyone other than the original poster were to edit the question in this way, a vocal contingent of question reviewers on this site would strenuously object to the editing as an outrageous usurpation of the poster's ownership of the question. It would therefore seem appropriate to include a warning in the tour that revising an off-topic question to bring it on-topic is primarily (and perhaps exclusively) the original poster's task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide an accurate picture of what EL&amp;amp;U expects of new questions in order to consider them valid, we would need to supply an example that satisfies all of these conditions. Perhaps even more usefully, we might consider adding a commentary (like the one in this answer) beneath the tour's current example question to give prospective question askers an accurate idea of what's in store for them if they ask a question like the one given there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T17:45:44.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13481" CreationDate="2019-10-10T12:24:11.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people use &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; online to obscure their gender for safety or social reasons where they might use a gendered pronoun in real life. I don't think I have much to add, but it seemed like this was a completely separate point in the discussion, so I made a separate answer for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T12:24:11.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13481" CreationDate="2019-10-12T18:23:22.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the preferred pronoun, or whatever its correct name is, confined to singular they, or are there some new pronouns that people are insisting on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it's not confined to singular they. Yes there are new pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/334900/387405&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Official FAQ on gender pronouns and Code of Conduct changes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/336374/387405&quot;&gt;now deleted by Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q9: Do I have to use pronouns I’m unfamiliar or uncomfortable with (e.g., neopronouns like xe, zir, ne... )?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if those are stated by the individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/336380/387405&quot;&gt;updated answer to a newer post&lt;/a&gt; was given by SE community manager Cesar M (emphasis in quote as in original, please don't edit; see link for full context):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We believe that all participants on Stack Exchange’s websites have the right to participate using the gender pronouns that reflect their identity. You cannot knowingly misgender people. This is what the CoC update is about at its core. Our intention is not to tell you what to think or force you to act in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Interacting with people online is often confusing and distressing. We want to minimize this for everyone. When users are in a situation that makes them uncomfortable, they can always step away or ask for help (raise a flag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the CoC doesn’t require someone to go out of their way to use pronouns. If someone prefers to omit pronouns entirely, they’re welcome to do so, as long as it’s not used in an obviously unnatural way. For example, you can change &amp;quot;The OP wrote in his question&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;the OP wrote in the question&amp;quot; this is a non-obvious rephrasing. If you're writing &amp;quot;The OP wrote in the OP's question&amp;quot; for a user who asked you to refer to them with a neopronoun, that is more clearly discriminatory unless this is your default way of writing.  &lt;strong&gt;No matter the case, no one can knowingly misgender people, so if/when you use third-person pronouns for someone, use their stated pronouns.&lt;/strong&gt; – Cesar M♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was horrified when, as an ELU newbie, I first encountered singular they in the Profiles, but shortly thereafter there was a Q about it and I learned that it has a long history of respectable usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry about it too much, the FAQ has you covered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q3: What should I do if I make a mistake and use the wrong pronouns?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make a mistake, apologize and correct your mistake if possible (e.g. by editing your post). We recognize that this may be new to many people, particularly members of our community who do not speak English as a first language, and so mistakes will happen as we all learn together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T19:26:01.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13409" CreationDate="2019-10-14T12:57:45.320" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No: I believe this proposal will do little to further the goals of the long term survival of the human species.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it this is horribly elitist.  After reflection is it manifestly sick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the one proposal to allow trusted users to circumvent  I think most of the people with 1-3-20k reps no longer need this site, they are here to help others so offering them tools to circumvent a novice ban is kind of pointless.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I know is that every time another SE proposal comes along to bash bad questions on any of the stacks I loose a lot of respect and have to spend valuable time trying to justify why I provide my time to a system that is scared of 'bad' data.  My proposal to all these reactions has always been the same because the basic problem does not seem to be understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The solution is to hide the scum from those that suffer from the righteous indignation about it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disk space is cheap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are not offended by weak, poor, sloppy questions if they are&#xA;browsing SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost all visits to SE are as a result of a internet search.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even bad data is data and even if a question only helps 2 people it was worth having.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let the now rep members spend time editing, patching up and answering the bad questions and working for reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is to have a flag, something like &lt;strong&gt;Beneath Me&lt;/strong&gt; that makes a question &lt;strong&gt;invisible&lt;/strong&gt; to fussy users.  Have this flag triggered by a &amp;lt;99 rep user asking a question, a bad word in the title or the text, a &gt;100 rep user setting the flag or &gt;3 down votes.  Questions with the flag set are not shown to users with rep &gt;1000 by default and they can rest easy, &lt;em&gt;all bad questions gone&lt;/em&gt; and site back to pristine operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestions as above generally gain down votes but very few explanations of why it is not good policy to first be kind and avoid waste.  It may be because people feel they have some personal vested interest in the site because they have volunteered for a long time and answered a lot of questions and have no desire to suffer fools gladly or otherwise.  I do try to remind all the people that want to be elitist on the site that &lt;strong&gt;they are the product&lt;/strong&gt; and the site is the marketing and they have no need to feel too much pride if the site also caters to others less wise than they are.  The site will not crash or fall over or fail to work if it has junk in it.  Google already knows how to direct people to the questions that have useful answers and there is no shame in having a good answer to a bad question.  StackExchange is not paying you a salary, why are you victimising people to maintain standards that are not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if anyone has a valid reason to down vote this then PLEASE share it with me as I also want to learn.  Otherwise take up the crusade to stop victimising bad data for the sake of invisible appearances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120547" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T12:57:45.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-19T20:26:43.650" Score="30" ViewCount="581" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more of an announcement than a question. But it's intended for Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;http://websites.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/ALLclass/Englishclass.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a class I'm giving&lt;/a&gt;, I've recently made up links to my answers here,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on various grammatical topics. This list is on my web site at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://websites.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/ELUanswerlist.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/ELUanswerlist.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The individual topics covered, so far, are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20relative%20clause&quot;&gt;Relative clauses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20negative%20polarity&quot;&gt;Negative Polarity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20cleft&quot;&gt;Cleft Sentences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20quantifier%20float&quot;&gt;Quantifier Float&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20particle%20shift&quot;&gt;Particle Shift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20whiz%20deletion&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Whiz&lt;/em&gt;-Deletion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20reflexivization&quot;&gt;Reflexivization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20conjunction%20reduction&quot;&gt;Conjunction Reduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20there%20insertion&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;There&lt;/em&gt;-Insertion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20passive&quot;&gt;Passive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20dative&quot;&gt;Dative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20extraposition&quot;&gt;Extraposition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://websites.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/ALLclass/English1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of basic terms and concepts&lt;/a&gt; of English phonetics and syntax&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(two of the things not covered in most English classes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be more, depending on demand.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As always, everyone is invited to make use of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2023-04-07T15:46:38.130" LastActivityDate="2023-04-07T15:46:38.130" Title="John Lawler's ELU answer links, by topic" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-20T16:35:44.977" Score="-5" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/515897/what-is-a-word-for-the-feeling-of-constantly-wanting-new-possessions&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, besides being formulated in a much more detailed way, offers a lot of good information in answers that the “supposed original one” does not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2019-10-30T10:20:32.537" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T10:20:32.537" Title="Thanks for re-reopening the following question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13493" CreationDate="2019-10-20T23:21:17.087" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please stop attempting to solicit people to break this community's self-determined quality standards. This question should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And don't you dare try to edit it. Only the OP can know the context they want to use it in in order to show us how they want to use it. Only they know if they want a noun, adjective, or verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T20:16:45.940" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T20:16:45.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13493" CreationDate="2019-10-25T19:02:55.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I'm not a fan of single-word requests, I am a fan of due process, and the process established at EL&amp;amp;U for closing a question involves identifying—from a menu of rationales for closure—some specific fault in the question and closing it for that reason. Once that fault is corrected, however, the specific rationale for closure loses its validity and there is no reason, as a matter of due process, for the question to remain closed under the no-longer-applicable close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, the question poster seems to be quite interested in satisfying the formal requirements for a question at this site. Evidently, close voters have already closed the question for two separate reasons, each of which has subsequently been addressed through edits of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the current closure is eventually overturned, it is certainly possible that a third close reason—such as &quot;duplicate of an existing question&quot;—may justify closing the question a third time. But I hope that site participants don't adopt as their attitude toward question closure the view of a hanging judge in a frontier town: &quot;I don't care if he's guilty of the specific charges that the prosecution laid against him; I just care that he gets hanged.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T19:02:55.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13499" CreationDate="2019-11-03T21:01:37.220" Score="53" ViewCount="1482" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monica Cellio, an active and valued member here for years and a moderator on several other sites, was abruptly dismissed last month, without any reason given but apparently because Stack Overflow (the company) wrongly thought she was in breach of a new policy on pronouns. This was unfair (not just my opinion, but an admission and apology by the relevant manager) and possibly illegal, but Stack Exchange, despite promises, has taken no action either to reinstate Monica or any of the other moderators across the network who resigned in sympathy, or to clarify whether users can in future be banned because an SE employee thinks they might do something that the company does not like. It appears the managers have completed their investigation, and are hoping that if they do nothing the fuss will die down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not suggesting that every ELU user should support Monica (though you can probably guess where my sympathies lie), but I do think all users should be aware of the problem, if only so as to understand some otherwise-cryptic network occurrences. The &quot;Monica situation&quot; has spilled widely across Meta Stack Exchange; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/336526/628816&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to start, particularly if you're  thinking &quot;This doesn't affect me. SE is basically a good company and if I behave properly, nothing bad will happen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8019" LastEditorUserId="71848" LastEditDate="2019-11-28T03:08:53.573" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T03:08:53.573" Title="Support for Monica Cellio" Tags="|discussion|community|policy|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="37" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13498" CreationDate="2019-11-07T17:20:45.823" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question has not been closed or deleted, I'll offer an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While visibility of the problem is (kinda) important, if you &lt;strong&gt;really want to support persons who have been treated poorly by owners of a particular network&lt;/strong&gt;, remember that old saying that &quot;money talks&quot;. Visit the donor page(s) of persons who have been treated poorly and open your wallets, because that is what persons who have been treated poorly will need to prevail against a particular network in a defamation lawsuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He said/she said/they said&quot; won't really amount to a hill of beans compared to money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58761" LastEditorUserId="58761" LastEditDate="2019-11-14T20:55:54.663" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T20:55:54.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13498" CreationDate="2019-11-11T01:24:57.987" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;An obvious requisite step for all reasonable parties to gain understanding about this kerfuffle is to hear Monica’s side of the story.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFiQPkdb5Qs&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This podcast interview ala Tyler’s Tech, in which Monica is given full reign to explain what happened, is excellent.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="215080" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T01:24:57.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-13T00:15:14.890" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it disrespectful to use abbreviations like sth to ask questions on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="366889" OwnerDisplayName="Ali Hosseinzade" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T01:55:37.723" Title="Using Abbreviations In The Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-11-13T02:16:46.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-14T21:25:04.160" Score="1" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I found my total rep increased by some four thousand points. I felt it must have been some sort of miscalculation but later I saw this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/&quot;&gt;blog post about rewarding the question askers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have these gifts to users anything to do with the ongoing situation on MSE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2019-11-15T03:55:23.767" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T20:15:09.430" Title="A few thousand rep points more in one single day are a nice thing, but why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13503" CreationDate="2019-11-15T04:13:18.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the recent return to the original scheme of awarding ten points per upvote to question and answer alike wasn’t done in reaction to anything that recent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know exact timelines, but based on communications from the community management team to network moderators, the company had been thinking about doing this for a good while now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means it was something being considered for longer than what’s been going on over on MSE just this autumn.  I wouldn’t try to read any sort of cause-and-effect conspiracy into what prompted this return to the original values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T04:13:18.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13503" CreationDate="2019-11-15T04:21:26.907" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. This change has been in the works since August (according to the date of the initial spec) and we'd been considering it for several months before that. Personally I've been hoping for this change for years. (And I'm not the only one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the first version of the communications plan, the change was planned for Oct. 29, but it was delayed until yesterday because of scheduling conflicts and vacations. (As a part of that plan, I notified the moderators of the change a few weeks ago to get their feedback on how to present the change to their communities.) In order to meet our quarterly targets, we needed to complete the project before the upcoming holidays. Since the prep work was ready, the sooner the change was made the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason for the change was to correct what we believe was a mistake to change the reputation payout in the first place. That it also makes people feel better is something of a pleasant side-effect. Since people tend to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loss averse&lt;/a&gt;, we only considered changes that would let people gain reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T04:21:26.907" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-15T21:32:56.967" Score="8" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/518157/why-youre-laughing-vs-why-are-you-laughing&quot;&gt;Why you&amp;#39;re laughing vs Why are you laughing?&lt;/a&gt; asks (paraphrasing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the word order &quot;Why you're laughing?&quot; acceptable in colloquial spoken English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152323/african-american-vernacular-english&quot;&gt;African American Vernacular English&lt;/a&gt; asks (also paraphrasing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've attempted to write several sentences in African American Vernacular English; are these sentences correct AAVE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, these questions don't seem to be related in any way. The first question is a question about using &quot;subject, verb&quot; (SV) word order in a &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-question, and has nothing to do with AAVE. The second question is a question about AAVE, and has nothing to do with SV word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we dig a little deeper and look at the questions more closely, can we find a significant similarity between them? I think the answer is still no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I brought this up in the comments on the first question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/21655/edwin-ashworth&quot;&gt;Edwin&lt;/a&gt; pointed out something I didn't know, which is that SV word order in &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-questions is a feature which is sometimes found in AAVE. But it's a feature which isn't even mentioned at all in the second question. In other words, nowhere in the entire thread of the second question is the topic of the first question even mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more, I really don't see how &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question could reasonably be marked as a duplicate of the second question. It's a very specific question, asking if these particular sentences (written by the asker) are correctly written. The only way another question could be a duplicate of it is if that other question &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; asks if a particular sentence is correct AAVE, and the sentence is substantially identical to one of the sentences in the second question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But apparently 5 people, including a moderator, all saw a significant connection between these two questions that I have failed to see. What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19334" LastEditorUserId="19334" LastEditDate="2019-11-17T21:08:50.313" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T20:02:45.900" Title="Is this word order question a duplicate of this AAVE question? If so, how?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13509" CreationDate="2019-11-16T18:12:22.047" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(1) The need for subject-auxiliary inversion in &lt;strong&gt;standard&lt;/strong&gt; English in sentences like &quot;Why are you laughing&quot;  (a) has been well covered before on ELU and (b) is quite possibly of ELL rather than ELU standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The question about the overall acceptability of question forms such as  &quot;Why you're laughing?&quot; must hinge upon the register under consideration. Since this is a recognised form in AAVE (regardless of sub-register), it seems very reasonable to look at acceptability within this framework ('echoing [AAVE} or merely a re-invention'). I asked OP whether this was relevant (ie whether this answered their question satisfactorily). There has been no response to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have corrected OP's question 1a to standard English (as I believe is intended) at the thread on AAFE referred to. The acceptability of AAVE can be checked by looking at the dedicated article in Wikipedia linked to in the AAVE thread. Included is the comment 'Educators traditionally have attempted to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system, perceiving the dialect as grammatically defective.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP is merely asking &quot;Is this acceptable within standard English?&quot; the question should merely be closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/287126/why-the-sky-is-blue/287148#287148&quot;&gt;'Why is the sky blue?' vs 'Why the sky is blue?'&lt;/a&gt; (unless the 'more suitable for ELL' consideration is deemed to take precedence). Not re-answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2019-11-16T18:24:09.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T18:24:09.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-17T06:34:15.253" Score="-4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/512828/334589&quot;&gt;How can a word for &amp;#39;the act of Xing&amp;#39;, semantically shift to mean &amp;#39;the thing Xed&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt; isn't a duplicate. I ask about obligation, never mooted at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/438974/334589&quot;&gt;How did &amp;#39;consideration&amp;#39; semantically shift to mean &amp;#39;something given in payment&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2019-11-17T19:34:52.860" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T22:47:06.703" Title="Reopen &quot;How can a word for 'the act of Xing', semantically shift to mean 'the thing Xed'?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13503" CreationDate="2019-11-17T20:09:49.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never appreciated the mantra of @Dan Bron:  &quot;Rep points are imaginary&quot; until now.  Until  this change, especially the retroactive part, I took pleasure in seeing rep grow, like a healthy flowering plant.  Now, it has become utterly meaningless -- a plastic flower.  And the timing of the change feels, rightly or wrongly, clumsy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;strong&gt;directly address the OP's question,&lt;/strong&gt; there was, briefly, a leaked rationale for the change, which placed great emphasis on making questions easier for women to ask.  &lt;strong&gt;As a woman&lt;/strong&gt;, I find this rationale disingenuous and insulting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2019-11-17T20:15:09.430" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T20:15:09.430" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13511" CreationDate="2019-11-17T22:47:06.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's not a duplicate, but it's not clear to me how your question could reasonably be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A priori&lt;/em&gt;, any word can undergo a semantic shift to any meaning. As far as I know, there are no known &quot;laws of physics&quot; that would prevent any particular word from undergoing any particular shift. But since you're asking &quot;how can the word 'obligation' shift to mean 'the thing one is obliged to do,'&quot; you must have some reason to think that this shift would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; happen. The only way we could possibly answer the question of &quot;how can that happen?&quot; is to refute your reasoning why it would not happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By way of analogy, suppose someone asked, &quot;How is it possible for the English word for &lt;em&gt;Felis catus&lt;/em&gt; to be 'cat'?&quot; There's no reasonable way we could answer this. But suppose they went on and said, &quot;I thought that words for animals in English had to start with a vowel.&quot; Then we could answer this question by pointing out that English has no such rule.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for your question, I'm &lt;em&gt;guessing&lt;/em&gt; that your reasoning is that in order for a word to undergo a semantic shift from X to Y, X and Y must be similar concepts—not merely closely related, as the concepts &quot;act of considering&quot; and &quot;thing considered&quot; are, but &lt;em&gt;actually similar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't think of any reasonable way your question could be answered, besides merely saying, &quot;Actually, words can shift to meanings that aren't similar.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19334" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T22:47:06.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2019-11-18T20:25:00.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is found immediately below the question itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;protected by RegDwigнt♦ Jan 1 '13 at 13:46&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is protected to prevent &quot;thanks!&quot;, &quot;me too!&quot;, or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see you have not earned any reputation on this site (barring the initial 1 for joining), so you do not have the requisite 10 rep. points to answer that question. I recommend answering some other questions on this site (many are not protected) to earn the necessary points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user363661" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T20:25:00.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11888" CreationDate="2019-11-20T13:17:29.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just so this post won't be bumped by  Stack Exchange for the third and miserable time. I'll post an answer and accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We can't fix it if we don't know what y'all would consider an improvement. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11878/addressing-the-responsive-elu-site-theme-moving-forward/11880#comment50967_11880&quot;&gt;We could redesign it a dozen times and you still wouldn't be happy...&lt;/a&gt; but if y'all think of something you like, we can make a design that uses what you like and fits our limitations. And if you have questions about what can be customized, you can ask that here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Catija ♦ Dec 7 '18 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Message received, the design is here to stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S Upvote the &quot;answer&quot; if you don't want to see the question bumped next month or in 2020. Even one upvote is enough. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T13:17:29.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-20T03:49:44.757" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a fun educational book about English language with a wide spectrum of knowledge and facts. I did some research but there are too many books and too many directions, I cannot read them all. I hope there might be some folks on this forum who already read some gems, or heard of some bestsellers. I am ESL person, but you can ignore that. Many native speakers as I understand could benefit from a great book telling them about the language they speak. I expect something that is humorous, captivating, instructive, knowledgable, useful, educational, encompassing things from grammar to style, from punctuation to perhaps some history, from fine details to bird-eye-views - just a word cloud of descriptive things. I bet such book would be a bestseller, because it would be just popular among many types of readers. A cool book about some deeper sense of English language for those who wish to learn and have different backgrounds. A book to satisfy many tastes and inspire many minds. I came by an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by Benjamin Dreyer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40063024&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40063024&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . but honestly - this might be too hard for some ESL folks - I mean his extremely witty references that only seasoned native speaker can get. Any other ideas of perhaps some classics for broader audience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144644" OwnerDisplayName="iLie" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T13:30:10.630" Title="Fun educational book about English language with a wide spectrum of knowledge and facts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2019-11-20T23:46:44.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BYU corpora&lt;/a&gt; are web corpora. And the best part is that it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/iweb/?c=iweb&amp;amp;q=81776801&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freee!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iWeb: The Intelligent Web-based Corpus    &quot;14 billion words from the Web&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;News on the Web (NOW) &quot;8.7 billion, Web news, 2010-last month&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) &quot;1.9 billion, Web, 20 countries&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia Corpus  &quot;1.9 billion, Wikipedia&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE)  &quot;53 million words, Web genres&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T23:46:44.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-22T18:26:34.530" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time, people come to this site to seek confirmation of something that they already believe about some aspect of English language. That is, they post questions of the following kind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have noticed this linguistic phenomenon: . . . . I think that the explanation of this phenomenon is . . . . Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the hypothesis that is proposed within the question is wrong, an answer can be given that explains why it is wrong. If the hypothesis is incomplete in some way, an answer can be given that develops it. If the question is off topic, it can be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is to be done if the question is on topic, the hypothesis proposed within it is true, and it fully explains the phenomenon? In such a case, the correct answer would be ‘Yes, you are right’, but such a short, simple answer would be below the standards of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving the question without a posted answer creates an impression that it is somehow unanswerable or extraordinarily difficult, which may not be the case. More importantly, the absence of an answer that confirms the questioner’s hypothesis creates a vacuum, which sometimes ends up being filled with wrong, misleading, or otherwise unhelpful answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T23:28:41.520" Title="What should be done with the questions that contain their own answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13509" CreationDate="2019-11-22T19:22:36.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not really clear to me if the question is asking about &quot;standard&quot; spoken English or &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; dialect of English. From the context of the question, it looks like the OP is not a native speaker, so I'd assume the first. But either way, the African American Vernacular English question is not a good duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard English:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't give an answer for standard English, for obvious reasons. (And therefore adding such an answer would be inappropriate.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dialects of English:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't explain anything about whether &quot;Why you are...?&quot; is acceptable in AAVE. In fact, &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; has really presented any evidence that this is acceptable in AAVE. I am not an expert in AAVE, but I could not find any evidence that &quot;Why you are...?&quot; specifically is used, even though other similarly structured questions are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &quot;Why you are...?&quot; is acceptable in another dialect, nobody can post that answer to the AAVE question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's more, I really don't see how any question could reasonably be marked as a duplicate of the second question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah the AAVE question is clearly a proofreading question, so it's technically off topic. And AAVE is pretty different from standard English, so the request for specific rules for AAVE is also very broad (I'm pretty sure books have been written about it). However, the question's also 5 years old so I don't really care about closing it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T19:22:36.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13520" CreationDate="2019-11-22T23:28:41.520" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Yes you’re right” isn’t a good answer but “yes you’re right and here’s some evidence...” usually is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s almost always a way to get evidence for an answer, be it etymology/history, ngram statistics, or expert opinions. (The exact course of action, of course, depends on the specific question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T23:28:41.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-24T07:33:36.503" Score="1" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a decade and more than 100k questions and related answers, to what extent has ELU reached its goal? which, as stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; link, appears to be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent MSE events appear to have distracted a number of regular users from their usual activities on this, as well as on other SE sites (apart from MSE)  and everything considered, we might take the opportunity to assess the situation on ELU so far, possibly to try to understand what lies ahead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T07:39:08.600" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T18:06:35.753" Title="Has ELU accomplished its mission (so far)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-27T11:20:10.500" Score="15" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read a couple of answers on the same question where both users used Google Trends as evidence of word/phrase usage. The problem is that Google Trends shows &lt;em&gt;search&lt;/em&gt; trends, not &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; trends. Should we do anything about this or just trust voting to take care of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/519215/73636&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;to go berserk&amp;quot; used by native speakers or is it obsolete?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/519282/73636&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/519282/73636&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/519289/73636&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/519289/73636&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastEditorUserId="73636" LastEditDate="2019-11-27T11:47:27.437" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T15:36:10.743" Title="Should we do anything about people answering with Google Trends?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13524" CreationDate="2019-11-29T10:55:45.080" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the answer is clear about what it is, I don't see a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see an answer saying it shows usage, I'd suggest editing it to say it shows &quot;searches (which may be indicative of usage)&quot;. If the answerer objects and reverts, then downvote and comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91730" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T10:55:45.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13527" CreationDate="2019-12-04T15:48:48.753" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, folks are going to get their rep for questions adjusted. This has already happened for some users. When will this process be complete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="112436" LastEditDate="2019-12-29T08:10:27.210" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T08:10:27.210" Title="Rep for questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13526" CreationDate="2019-12-05T03:11:21.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The change was announced &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/&quot;&gt;November 13, 2019&lt;/a&gt; and it took &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/338199/323179&quot;&gt;a couple of days&lt;/a&gt; for everything to sync up. But that was still weeks ago, so I guess you just didn't notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change was retroactive, so it's like upvotes on questions were &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; worth 10 points. Therefore, there's no sudden jump in anyone's reputation graph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Yoichi Oishi, for example (who probably gained the most from this, at least on this site): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190702031311/https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;35,124 rep&lt;/a&gt; on July 2, 2019&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20191205025244/https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3119/yoichi-oishi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;68,121 rep&lt;/a&gt; on December 4, 2019 (today)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;≈ 33k rep gained&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glorfindel &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/1151034/reputation-gained-by-2019-11-13-change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote a query&lt;/a&gt; so that you can estimate how much reputation you gained from the change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T03:11:21.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13523" CreationDate="2019-12-05T18:06:35.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site tour's assertion that &quot;we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about English language and usage&quot; is clearly not the aspiration of the actual site, as we users administer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The split between theory and practice is largely a consequence of the unreasonableness of the goal of &quot;answering every question about English language and usage.&quot; For example, any question about what a word means is a question about English language and usage—and yet we reject any question that a person could answer by looking up a word in a standard English dictionary. Likewise, many English class homework questions are questions about English language and usage, as are millions of questions about, say, subject-verb agreement, each one unique in its particular details (&quot;asparagus is&quot; or &quot;asparagus are&quot;?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We fairly consistently (and rightly, in my opinion) reject such questions, although we don't always clearly explain why, at bottom, we consider them unsuitable for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we also reject a number of questions that cannot be thoroughly answered without considerable research or special insight into English (such as questions about the origins of idioms, slang words, proverbs, or particular meanings of standard words)—on the grounds that the person asking them didn't demonstrate having done any research before posting the question at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. This, it seems to me, imposes a completely unnecessary limitation on our ability (or willingness) to provide detailed and useful answers to difficult and interesting questions of potentially broad and continuing interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U has the potential to evolve into a free, accessible, Internet-era version of the great British periodical &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; (which still exists, by the way), but doing so would require us to adopt a more sensible and accurate approach to distinguishing between good questions and bad ones. The starting point for this would be to recognize that what makes a question bad is its excessive specificity (which makes it uninteresting to anyone other than the person who asks it) or its ease of being answered satisfactorily by a general-reference resource (since we don't aim to reproduce the contents of a standard English dictionary), whereas what makes a question good is its enduring interest, and its resistance to being resolved by a quick, easy answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the goal of building &quot;a library of detailed answers to every [good] question about English language and usage&quot; may not be realistic, I still find it appealing; and I would like to see this site continue to move, in its shambling, fitful way, toward fulfilling it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T18:06:35.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13524" CreationDate="2019-12-09T15:36:10.743" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a data point. Its usefulness is in the eye of the beholder, but unless there's a systematic problem with the data itself coming from Google, I'd say it's fine as-is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112846" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T15:36:10.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-11T18:34:14.217" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/517774/what-did-mr-tester-mean-by-saying-to-dennis-muilenberg-that-you-are-pivoting&quot;&gt;what did Mr. Tester mean by saying to Dennis Muilenberg that you are &amp;#39;pivoting&amp;#39; in the Congressional testimony of 737 Max?&lt;/a&gt; It was closed nine days ago with the following explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closed.&lt;/strong&gt; This question needs details or clarity. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add details and clarify the problem being solved. This will help others answer the question. You can edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make clear what the poster is talking about, I transcribed a portion of the dialogue leading up to the use of the term of interest to the poster and added that transcript to the posted question. As a result, I think, the question now has the necessary &amp;quot;details or clarity&amp;quot; that (according to the close voters) it previously lacked. If I'm correct, the close reason no longer applies and the question should be reopened. Please consider voting to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T04:26:05.190" Title="Please consider reopening a question about a fairly recent, politics-specific meaning of 'pivot' [Question has been reopened]" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-13T00:30:32.620" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry I have been unable to delete due to lack of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="367496" OwnerDisplayName="The Riveter" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T13:19:05.847" Title="I cant delete my question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13533" CreationDate="2019-12-13T08:59:27.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's always a good idea to include a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/520535/revisions&quot;&gt;link to the post you're asking about&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally there's a list of possible actions under the tags, opposite your user card. Here's the moderator list, and not everyone will have all these options; but &lt;strong&gt;delete&lt;/strong&gt; is included where it can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GEa6E.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GEa6E.png&quot; alt=&quot;Delete action on question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Delete button/link should be under your post using the website [using the app it probably won't be], there are restrictions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, people with less than 20k rep need to wait two days to remove a question. If a question is worth asking, it's worth answering. Since you asked the question, it must be worth asking. If you have a change of heart, you need to wait and see if anyone will in fact answer it. If there aren't answers which disqualify it from deletion, you can delete it once the time limit has expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the time limit, with less than 10k rep you can only delete your own question if there is at &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; one answer and that answer has no upvotes. That restriction is there because people have worked on answers which the community have thought to be worthwhile. Just because you're no longer interested in getting answers to your question should not allow others to lose the rep they have gained through their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members of the community who have the post-delete privilege (at least 10k rep) can still vote to delete the question if it warrants it. It takes at least three votes, possibly more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that vandalising a question is &lt;strong&gt;very bad practice&lt;/strong&gt; and will normally result in the question being reverted. That's far too complicated to do here (where the edited question has been migrated, and the migrated question is useful), but &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question should not be regarded as a precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-12-13T13:19:05.847" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T13:19:05.847" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-16T06:45:14.593" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read that some lyrics questions are on topic and some are not.  Is it the same for subtitles?  This could come up if someone watches a movie in a language other than English, and has a question about an English subtitle.  Is this another &quot;it depends&quot; situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112436" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T17:30:33.147" Title="Are questions about film subtitles (translated into English) on topic here?" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|translation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13537" CreationDate="2019-12-17T15:59:48.417" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a policy about political messages in usernames?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the answer should be the same regardless of whether I agree with the message.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question applies in general.  This time it was prompted by the username &lt;code&gt;Tiago supports GoFundMonica&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T13:23:52.350" Title="Is there a policy about political messages in usernames?" Tags="|discussion|policy|usernames|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13536" CreationDate="2019-12-17T16:33:10.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no rules specific to EL&amp;amp;U regarding usernames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over on main Meta I could find 3 possible prohibitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117596/possibly-offensive-usernames&quot;&gt;offensive usernames&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/274129/can-user-names-have-a-filter-on-whacky-chars&quot;&gt;usernames with weird characters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/61249/usernames-as-advertising-or-spam&quot;&gt;usernames as advertising&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic guidelines seem to be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you find a username offensive, flag it and a mod will deal with it at their discretion. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weird characters in usernames would be actively prohibited if developer time allowed, but there's no need to flag usernames with such characters unless you find it offensive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Advertising in usernames is acceptable. A username is essentially treated as part of the profile for this content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with regard to &quot;Tiago supports GoFundMonica&quot;, that name seems to fall under &quot;it's OK on the profile, so OK in the username.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a period where actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338270/why-is-se-removing-links-and-community-ads-about-legal-issues&quot;&gt;links to Monica's GoFundMe were deleted from profiles&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure of SE's stance on simply mentioning it. Until they say one way or another I will assume it's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13536/is-there-a-policy-about-political-messages-in-usernames#comment57251_13536&quot;&gt;ColleenV commented&lt;/a&gt;, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/339999/273494&quot;&gt;SE meta thread&lt;/a&gt; on this subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T13:23:52.350" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T13:23:52.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13535" CreationDate="2019-12-17T17:30:33.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13535/are-questions-about-film-subtitles-translated-into-english-on-topic-here#comment57246_13535&quot;&gt;Mitch's sentiment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As with anything, it's on topic if it's on topic already by other principles. If you question is &quot;Is this subtitle 'blah blah blah' correct for 'bleuh bleuh bleuh'?&quot; with no link and no explanation of why you think it is wrong, and no context of the other language and the question not being primarily about the English, then no it is not on topic. If the question is about the idiomaticity or register or grammatical structure of the English result (you should specify the details desired and the details of the nuance of the original) then I'd go in the direction of 'yes'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have more than enough rules or conventions about what is on-topic. It shouldn't matter what the source material is; if the question is on-topic, it's on-topic. It might &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; to have a link to the right point in a video clip, but since video can't be searched and isn't particularly accessible, the question should contain everything it needs in plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the text of the question makes it clear it's a good question, that's fine. If the text of the question indicates it's a bad question, it can be dealt with accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the specifics of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13535/are-questions-about-film-subtitles-translated-into-english-on-topic-here#comment57247_13535&quot;&gt;what prompted the question&lt;/a&gt;, translation issues &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be on-topic, but it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/translation/info&quot;&gt;not easy to get right&lt;/a&gt;. Plot inconsistencies don't relate to the nuts and bolts of the English language and are more-or-less guaranteed to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T17:30:33.147" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-20T08:57:41.133" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/516777/334589&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/516777/334589&lt;/a&gt; closed? I would've accepted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/516777/what-did-groucho-marx-mean-by-i-wouldn-t-want-to-be-a-party-to-any-contract-whe#comment1254776_516777&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; if posted as answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The usual Groucho Marx quote is &quot;I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.&quot; I have always taken it to mean that if a club will accept even him as a member it must have low standards and thus not be worth joining. He meant it humorously. It is said that Abraham Lincoln made a similar statement about marriage. – nnnnnn Oct 29 at 6:45 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user50720" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T16:28:58.513" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T16:28:58.513" Title="Why was my Groucho Marx question closed?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13540" CreationDate="2019-12-20T11:26:54.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question itself was not closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange as a whole has automatic systems in place that delete questions that meet certain criteria. (Affectionately known as the roomba.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can review the criteria here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/147791&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/147791&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question came under point 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The system will automatically delete negatively-scored, unlocked, and unanswered questions (both open and closed, including as duplicates) that are older than 30 days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has had a score of -1 since October the 29th, and was deleted on November the 30th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T11:26:54.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13543" CreationDate="2019-12-22T08:12:31.840" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not able to ask any further questions on English language and usage while I just asked three questions and all of them are short and brief. Thus, whatever I do, nothing happens and I'm really confused about what I should do to gain this privilege back. I would really appreciate it if you indicate my problems there. I've done all sorts of things that the site wanted me to lift the ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user356655" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T10:33:42.093" Title="I can't ask any question" Tags="|support|banned|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13542" CreationDate="2019-12-22T10:19:12.403" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not the case that you have only asked three questions. The thirteen other questions which are now deleted also count towards the way the system calculates whether or not to accept any more questions. You will have seen a warning about post quality (although I'm not sure what that actually says).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the number of deleted questions compared to the number of questions which remain will make it very difficult to correct the situation. You need to improve your deleted questions and get them undeleted (you should easily be able to undelete the ones you deleted yourself). They then need to be upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's a system behaviour, there's a lot of advice on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; which it would be imprudent to reproduce here — the advice may change from time to time, and it's better to have it only in one place. However, your question here is useful as a pointer to others about where to find the information; and there is also relevant information in our own Help pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that moderators cannot lift the ban: it's an automatic system thing, and you need to convince the system algorithm that your questions are good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't remove the ban by improving your existing questions, it will last six months*. But after that time, you will need to post good questions which can be upvoted. A downvoted question, and especially one which is deemed off-topic for lack of research or any other reason [like proof-reading, &quot;Is this correct?&quot;] will adversely affect your chances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997&quot;&gt;What to do about a post ban&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU Help: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;Why are questions no longer being accepted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU Help: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What's on topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ELU Help: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;What's a good question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the ban on this site doesn't affect your ability to ask questions on other sites, it does stop your questions being migrated here if they are off-topic elsewhere. That will affect your question score on that site (because the question will have been downvoted and closed as off-topic). Questions about English are likely to be on-topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, but that site's community have their own rules about what is on-topic and what form a question needs to take, which are very similar to this site's. Do check their &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help pages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*At least, our help pages say that. Meta.SE says it will never expire. In any case it's good practice to rectify what's wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T10:33:42.093" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T10:33:42.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-22T13:47:37.033" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find some pretty good diaries for men, from the war. But I'm not sure what a reliable source is for female American vernacular of the '40s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Movies of the time sanitize conversations, and use mid-Atlantic speech, so they're a questionable source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any resource used to teach students of linguistics or history about how people talked in the 1940s? I'm sure there's something present day Hollywood uses, to research accents and dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any direction on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370278" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T13:47:37.033" Title="What is a good resource for how American women talked in the 1940s?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|research-effort|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6819" CreationDate="2019-12-26T23:36:16.087" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, the owners are of a different opinion! :D We might prefer five questions a day, but they would sure as hell prefer 50! It's the Internet, so, whatever floats your traffic! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, no one would like to see frowning red lines saying, &quot;We don't do this, we won't accept that, etc.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people have short attention spans and are just looking for a quick answer in a relevantly-titled forum. A lot of the traffic flow is owed to these individuals. Make it too hard for them, and they'll leave for another website. Suggest something to entice, rather than deter, and the supermods will more likely listen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195517" LastEditorUserId="195517" LastEditDate="2019-12-27T18:17:01.410" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T18:17:01.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T02:50:33.450" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges &#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. &#xA;And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? &#xA;So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on English Language &amp;amp; Usage over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                  Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                  17         46&#xA;Users destroyed³                                 316          0&#xA;Users deleted                                     15          0&#xA;Users contacted                                   53          0&#xA;User suspensions lifted early                      1          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue             68      4,748&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                10      2,784&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          19     10,627&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                 5      2,949&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                  9     13,145&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue               138     14,094&#xA;Tags merged                                       34          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                             52          1&#xA;Tag synonyms created                              52          1&#xA;Revisions redacted                                 3          0&#xA;Questions unprotected                              1          5&#xA;Questions reopened                               115         66&#xA;Questions protected                              362        262&#xA;Questions migrated                               519        234&#xA;Questions merged                                   8          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁵                                63      2,772&#xA;Questions closed                               3,093      4,970&#xA;Question flags handled⁵                          937      1,917&#xA;Posts unlocked                                     4        120&#xA;Posts undeleted                                   44        311&#xA;Posts locked                                      13      1,355&#xA;Posts deleted⁶                                 2,261     14,707&#xA;Posts bumped                                       0      3,929&#xA;Escalations to the Community Manager team         16          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                               104          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                  67      7,155&#xA;Comments deleted⁷                              6,884     14,763&#xA;Comment flags handled                          2,110      5,102&#xA;Bounties canceled                                  3          0&#xA;Answers flagged                                  349      7,376&#xA;Answer flags handled                           5,734      1,991&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat             155          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &quot;Community&quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &quot;destroyed&quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11939/2018-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2018: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222019%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341507/2019-a-year-in-closing&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6437" LastEditorUserId="6437" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T02:20:24.710" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T02:20:24.710" Title="2019: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2020-01-01T10:38:22.017" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quite honestly, following the ISO 8601 will make no good at all.&lt;/strong&gt;  If you follow that, the current century (21st century) will be 2000-2099.  Over a billion people already define a century as a 100-year period starting on a year ending on a one, and ending on a year ending on a zero.  In this view, the 21st century will always be 2001-2100, with no exceptions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, the year 2020 had just started, and are you going to consider that we have entered a new decade already?  So, the &quot;previous&quot; (?) decade (2010s) was 2010-2019?  I've never heard &lt;strong&gt;anyone&lt;/strong&gt; having an idea to define a decade like this - a ten-year period starting on a year ending on a zero, and ending on a year ending on a nine...?  So, this &quot;decade&quot; is 2020-2029?  All completely false.  We are still on the 2010s (2011-2020), and the 2000s ran from 2001-2010.  So the 2020s will be 2021-2030.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth pointing out that &lt;strong&gt;there is no such thing as a &quot;year zero&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;  Thus the first year was year 1, not zero.  And, if you define a century like how you usually would, the first century would have only 99 years.  And the first decade would have only nine.  Also, millenniums would progress as 1-1000, 1001-2000, 2001-3000, etc.  So it was a massive, sadistically enormous issue when billions of idiots celebrated the new millennium on the year 2000, while billions of other people had done so on the year 2001 which is the valid time to celebrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You notice, this is a huge, serious problem.  There was no &quot;year zero&quot; and if you persist to believe in ISO 8651, decades would last for 9-10-10-etc, centuries would last for 99-100-100-etc, and millenniums would last for 999-1000-1000 years.  We need to consider every decade/century/millennium to last for 10/100/1000 years with no exceptions at all.  So the ELU defines a century as how I've explained (the &quot;strict&quot; method), and the 21st century (the current century) will be pretty much (?) unanimously defined as 2001-2100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the current decade/century/millennium will be marked as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Decade: 2010s (2011-2020)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Century: 21st century (2001-2100)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Millennuim: 3rd millennium (2001-3000)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user370931" LastEditorDisplayName="user370931" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T13:04:59.887" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T13:04:59.887" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-02-23T13:04:59.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T17:42:04.820" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit I'm not overly familiar with how these banners work, but I was reading &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/521738/what-is-the-word-that-is-used-to-describe-the-oversimplification-or-non-academic&quot;&gt;What is the word that is used to describe the oversimplification or non-academic discussion of a complex issue?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and noticed that the question and many of the answers have a banner stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Want to improve this post?&lt;/strong&gt; Provide detailed answers to this question, including citations and an explanation of why your answer is correct. Answers without enough detail may be edited or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question looks fine to me. The top answer, which also has a banner, looks great: it suggests a word, provides a definition sourced from a legitimate dictionary, and includes a link to a source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also quite confused about what the banner is even trying to say. The bolded part seems to be implying that the banner is specifically about editing an existing question or answer. The rest of it, which I would expect to be supporting information, seems to be completely unrelated, and reminds me of the guidance that used to be posted on top of high traffic questions that were attracting low quality answers. That aside, the unbolded text seems to be providing guidance for new &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. Put together, bolded 'heading' and unbolded support, they make no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this banner trying to say, and was it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; necessary it include it six times on the page? It's highly distracting. (And oddly enough, the much lower quality answers ranked lower don't have it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22667" LastActivityDate="2022-03-28T11:04:00.783" Title="Why does (almost) every answer in this question have a banner?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-04T20:16:36.537" Score="-1" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/521984/he-must-be-asleep-for-there-is-no-light-in-his-room-what-does-for-mean-here?noredirect=1#comment1269790_521984&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/521984/he-must-be-asleep-for-there-is-no-light-in-his-room-what-does-for-mean-here&quot;&gt;He must be asleep for there is no light in his room. What does “for” mean here?&lt;/a&gt;, tchrist writes to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Calling a stranger &lt;em&gt;dear&lt;/em&gt; is at best horribly patronizing with condescending paternalism -- and at worst super-creepy like an internet stalker someone should report to the authorities. Never do this again, honey, for it's far too liable to be taken for micro-aggressions bordering on sexual harrassment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to which I replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was using 'dear' like billions use it in Asia, including India, Bangladesh, Iran, etc. Its use is ubiquitous, friendly, natural, normal, and does not include any sort of the things you mention. I find your objection to be provincial (maybe you can learn an English not restricted to 10 miles from your house) and bordering on harrassment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice it was tchrist who used the word &lt;em&gt;honey&lt;/em&gt; when talking with me, which in some places and among some people (although not all people in the southern USA) may find offense and replete with the sort of stuff he mentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;dear&lt;/em&gt;, I make no apologies and expect that asker of the OP received the word in the way it was intended &lt;strong&gt;by me&lt;/strong&gt;. If that is not the case, then yes let's delete my comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;dear&lt;/em&gt;, let us look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/14840&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; dated October 30, 2015 to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14832/what-is-being-translated-as-hello-dear-and-why&quot;&gt;What is being translated as &quot;hello dear&quot;, and why&lt;/a&gt; from SE: Linguistics, and note the following about &quot;dear&quot;. My list contains direct quotes from this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1  such an expression is common in many languages of Europe, Central Asia and South Asia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2  In Turkey, Arabia, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia and South Asia, words like &lt;em&gt;habibi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aziz&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; (Turkish spelling) that can all be translated as dear are very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 It is fine between men, even those who don't know each other, a bit like &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is backed up by my personal experience actually talking and chatting with people (including &quot;men who don't know each other&quot;) from areas such as, again, Iran, India, Bangladesh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than be taken to task for my choice of word to the asker, I think I should be congratulated and even--in this case at least--emulated, for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BEING NICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and welcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jczV3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jczV3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39aFE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39aFE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210913" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-01-05T08:57:05.453" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T00:20:45.540" Title="About the use of international English (namely the word 'dear')" Tags="|discussion|community-building|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13552" CreationDate="2020-01-05T00:03:05.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you do on your own street-corner in your own native language is of no concern to us, but never again do this here. It doesn’t work in our culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people feel like they're being hit on, it makes them extremely uncomfortable — and that’s exactly how it comes across as when you call strangers by intimate pet names like &lt;em&gt;dear, darling, honey, sugar, doll, babe, sweetie,&lt;/em&gt; and all the rest of them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping you would take the hint by my calling you &lt;em&gt;honey&lt;/em&gt; so you would see how creepy what you're doing is, but since you have not, let me be perfectly clear: the Stack Exchange network has a network-wide zero-tolerance policy towards sexual harassment of any kind whatsoever, &lt;em&gt;even perceived not intended,&lt;/em&gt; and this language falls under that umbrella. It has no place here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T00:03:05.470" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13552" CreationDate="2020-01-05T04:26:00.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @tchrist . I'm a Brit and English is my first language and I would have found such a comment to be condescending, overly familiar and possibly an attempt at intimacy. I think it is important on the internet to be even more careful (not less careful) than in daily conversation as there is no body language, facial expression and tone of voice to assist in interpreting ambiguous remarks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T04:26:00.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11278" CreationDate="2020-01-05T16:19:37.727" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11280/how-does-the-elu-community-define-a-century-when-did-this-century-start-2001-or/&quot;&gt;follow-up question:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When did this century start? 2001 or 2000?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up for a debate - the 21st century started on 2000 &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; 2001.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would argue to follow the ISO 8601 standard. That way, decades are associated with centuries, so the first decade of this millennium (2000-2009) is entirely in the 21st century, rather than being split over the 20th and 21st.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example question: &lt;em&gt;Did the 2000s decade run from 2000-2009 or 2001-2010?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start counting from 1BC, the 0s decade (first AD decade) contains the years &lt;em&gt;1BC, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.&lt;/em&gt; This makes 10 years. Then the 2000s decade contains the years &lt;em&gt;2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.&lt;/em&gt; Again, 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you start counting from 1, the 0s decade then contains the years &lt;em&gt;1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.&lt;/em&gt; We still have 10 years. The 2000s decade then contains the years &lt;em&gt;2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A century is a period of 100 years - which means it has 10 decades. If you start counting from 1BC, the 1st century will be made of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;0s (1BC-9)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10s (10-19)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;20s (20-29)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;30s (30-39)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;40s (40-49)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;50s (50-59)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;60s (60-69)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;70s (70-79)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;80s (80-89)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;90s (90-99)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start counting from 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;0s (1-10)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10s (11-20)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;20s (21-30)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;30s (31-40)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;40s (41-50)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;50s (51-60)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;60s (61-70)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;70s (71-80)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;80s (81-90)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;90s (91-100)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the 20th century ran from 1900-1999 if you start counting from 1BC, or from 1901-2000 if you start counting from 1.  The 21st century runs from 2001-2100 if you start from 1, or from 1BC, 2000-2099.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELU community appears to define decades, centuries, and millenniums as one-indexed (years are counted from 1) rather than zero-indexed.  I prefer to count starting from 1 as well, but if you want to start counting from 1BC, then it's your choice - but, take it elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fd1FY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fd1FY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user370931" LastEditorDisplayName="user370931" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T07:19:00.163" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T07:19:00.163" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-01-26T14:09:50.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-10T14:23:09.030" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/522328/as-adjectives-not-in-math-different-vs-differential/522375#522375&quot;&gt;terminology - As adjectives, not in math: 'different' vs 'differential' - English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, has been marked as closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no explanation, other than &quot;This question is off-topic&quot; was given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a legitimate question about the different &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; of the &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; words &quot;different&quot;, and &quot;differential&quot;.  (So much so that I answered it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was it considered off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357203" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T18:48:39.753" Title="Why was a question about two English words closed and returned to another site, without comment?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2020-01-10T14:52:16.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/522328/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline for the question&lt;/a&gt; (which may not be available to everyone¹) shows that it was closed as off-topic, with one of ELU's custom close reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Off-topic → Please include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573&quot;&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the new close banner hides that text from members who do not have enough rep to cast close votes (3000). That change was definitely unhelpful; I can't see any reason to differentiate between who can see the detailed reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a migrated question is closed as off-topic, its migration is cancelled. This makes sense, because it's been judged to be off-topic on the current site. In this case, it's off-topic because it's a poor question for ELU as it currently stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant text in the images should have been typed out (which isn't strictly necessary for topicality, but is definitely helpful and more likely to leave readers well-disposed), and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; into the two words should certainly have appeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of passing interest may be the relationship between the person asking the off-topic question you answered, and the person asking the meta question about research five years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ The timeline is available via a clock icon in the column under the voting arrows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T14:52:16.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-12T00:55:34.533" Score="18" ViewCount="1037" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many sites in the network are currently considering whether they would like reduced close/reopen vote requirements, from 5 down to 3, for a one month trial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the close vote queue almost always has at least 100-200 questions, I thought this could be a site that could benefit from that. This would allow those who do use the review queues to get more done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that both vote requirements would be changed together, so while it will be easier to close questions, it will also be easier to reopen them if the community thinks the closures were not warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Community Managers are working to implement this now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: The trial is now active&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-03-30T09:25:09.453" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T17:52:06.677" Title="Would ELU like to start a trial of needing only 3 votes to close/reopen a question?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|vote-to-close|review-queues|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-12T07:32:58.713" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is broke, and this would be worth at least trialling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently there are over 160 questions in the review queue. I confess I don't use the queue much; I simply don't have the time and since my vote is a binding vote and designed for exception-handling, I would far rather that the community policed itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there aren't sufficient members who are prepared to do that then reducing the threshold seems a good thing to do, or at least to try out. There are certainly a &lt;strong&gt;huge&lt;/strong&gt; number of questions which are borderline in terms of closeworthyness, and if they are closed and then roomba'd that is probably a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth adding here thanks to those who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; use the queues and work on them. While the top close-vote reviewer is [now] a moderator, there are many who aren't, and we do now have nearly 150 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/126/steward&quot;&gt;Steward badges&lt;/a&gt;. Please keep up the good work. In the meantime, let's reduce the burden a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T07:32:58.713" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-12T17:31:11.060" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although implementing this proposal carries obvious risks, it is worth trying because it promises to reduce the number of questions that are closed after being answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of closing seems to be to prevent the questions that do not belong to this site from being answered on it. When the concept of closing was built into the framework of the Stack Exchange, it was probably expected that closing would, in most cases, take place before anybody attempts to answer the question. On ELU, however, closing accomplishes that purpose only very poorly, because voting to close takes time, while answering doesn't. Many questions that eventually get closed thus get answers, sometimes several answers; quite a few of these answers even get upvoted, and some get accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of a large number of such questions is awkward. While the regular, core contributors to this site attach great importance to closing, that importance is not obvious to casual visitors. Such a person may come to a particular page on this site from a general-purpose search engine, read the question and the answers to it, note which answer is accepted and which ones are upvoted, and not pay any attention to the annotation that the question is closed (which may strike them as some piece of bureaucratic boilerplate). In other words, a casual visitor's experience of reading the answers to a closed questions is not significantly different from the experience of reading the answers to other questions; from their viewpoint, these answers are all equally parts of what this site offers. The point that the core users are trying to make by closing a question is lost on the casual visitors, as long as some answers to it have been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets worse, though. It sometimes happens that the answers that are posted to a question before its closing are all problematic. Closing then effectively protects these bad answers by preventing better answers from competing with them. Casual visitors who do not understand how closing works may be left with the impression that the problematic answers that somebody managed to post before closing are the best answers that can be made to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if some question really deserves to be closed (and when that is the case is a separate topic), it is far better that it be closed before anybody posts an answer to it. Reducing the number of votes required for closing will probably significantly reduce the time that it takes for a question to be closed, and thus the awkwardness created by the questions that are answered before being closed (although it, of course, won't eliminate them completely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T17:31:11.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-12T22:22:56.190" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was recently posted, but closed for the reason that insufficient research had been done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/522710/do-i-say-butthole-or-butt-hole&quot;&gt;Do I say butthole or butt hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T07:34:09.243" Title="Can a post not be closed for the reason that it is gratuitously disgusting or offensive?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13562" CreationDate="2020-01-12T22:40:00.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If something is offensive (as the middle edit of that question was) then it should be &lt;strong&gt;flagged as offensive&lt;/strong&gt;, not close voted. This will delete the post as well as severely penalising the user (if they have any reputation) and if it happens many times, prevent them from posting further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T22:40:00.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13562" CreationDate="2020-01-13T07:34:09.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My approach is a little more subtle than others, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a collaborative effort. If a question can be edited to remove the offensive part, then that's the right thing to do. Once that's done, it's no longer offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question might then be closed for other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even after the edit, you could still flag it as offensive, because flags are recorded and can be an indicator of trolling activity. Such a flag should be marked helpful, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a penalty would be applied. The penalty is only really applicable if &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the content is offensive and the post cannot be salvaged, in which case deletion for offence is the right course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T07:34:09.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2020-01-13T16:58:22.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic: Matters that Involve Specialised Substantive Knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People occasionally come to this site to seek explanations of various passages that they find difficult to understand, without pausing to consider whether their difficulties are due to some feature of English language or to the complexity of the subject matter. Difficulties of the latter kind often arise when somebody attempts to read a text that is written for people with advanced knowledge of a particular field of science or scholarship, without having such knowledge. Resolution of such difficulties requires that the person be provided with substantive education in the relevant field, and providing such education is outside the scope of tis site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It should be noted that the form of a question is not dispositive as to whether the question is really about the language or about some substantive subject matter; a question about anything can be worded as question about the language. Somebody asking ‘What does the word &lt;em&gt;electricity&lt;/em&gt; mean in English?’ (without further explanation) is effectively asking what is electricity, and is much more likely to profit from consulting an introductory physics textbook than a dictionary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T16:58:22.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-14T09:59:55.063" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would ELU like to start a trial of only need 3 votes to close/reopen a question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update April 30, 2021&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Managers are working to implement this now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;No, thank you.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To close a question all that is needed are five users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;at least 3,000 rep&lt;/a&gt;. Just five people out of hundreds or maybe thousands of regular users. Users can cast up to 24 votes per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Andrew Leech, the system &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; broken not because on January 14, 2020, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;148 questions&lt;/a&gt; in the review queue, which is a TINY drop in the ocean compared to Stack Overflow's +3K,  but because the site struggles to find twenty 3k users who feel invested enough to help moderate and keep the site clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the community should invest time in encouraging newcomers to stay, and start upvoting their efforts more often?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some EL&amp;amp;U users who only close posts in the review queues, it's very rare that they care enough to edit and keep a question open. I suspect these users will support the initiative wholeheartedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Practicalities&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Banner&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if three close voters close a post for three different reasons, e.g. &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;: lack of research, and &amp;quot;needs more focus&amp;quot;? Which of the three reasons is shown to the author? Will all three reasons be displayed on the post notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan Bron, in the comments below, pointed out that the first vote is selected as the reason for closure when there is no clear majority. Here is the relevant excerpt, please note the significant drawback to this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;questions closed without a consensus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… And it’s even more problematic because of how we determine the displayed reason: we pick the oldest vote. So if someone picks a bogus reason, that gets discussed a bit and then two other people pick two better reasons… We show the bogus one. @Shog9 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390083/3618829&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reopen Queue&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lest we forget, the author of a question that has been closed by the community can cast a vote to reopen it. Currently when a question enters the review queue it drops out when three users have agreed to keep it open. Will that same number remain or will it be reduced to two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Migration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to migrate a post to ELL there must be at least 3 votes in favour, by reducing the number of close votes to three you effectively reducing the number of posts that are eligible or suitable for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A little history and an update&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of January 22, 2020, the number of questions that need to be reviewed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/review&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;a staggering 4.8k&lt;/strong&gt;, little wonder, then, the  one-month long experiment &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/388313/experiment-ended-closing-and-reopening-happens-at-3-votes-for-the-next-30-day&quot;&gt;promoted by Shog9&lt;/a&gt; to reduce the backlog  was greeted with overwhelming consensus and success in August of last year and then finally &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/391832/we-re-lowering-the-close-reopen-vote-threshold-from-5-to-3-for-good&quot;&gt;adopted on December 3, 2019&lt;/a&gt; by Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pknakl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pknakl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390083/threshold-experiment-results-closing-editing-and-reopening-all-become-more-eff&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Review Queue on English Language &amp;amp; Usage does not have anything comparable to the above. In the ten days following the OP's proposal, the backlog has been reduced to &lt;strong&gt;126 questions&lt;/strong&gt;. This site needs more users willing to muck in that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T09:52:02.957" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T09:52:02.957" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-14T23:59:43.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a frequent close voter, and I think it's worth a try. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a double-layered effect where misdirected questions often get answers that are of poor quality, which further increases the queue length. This will prevent some of those from ever getting in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began focusing more on cleaning that answering when I noticed that google hits on nonsense material began overwhelming the useful content. I don't agree with all close votes. There are some legitimate differences of opinion on what constitutes an opinion question, whether single-word-/phrase-requests are valid in general or require more research, and what type of questions should be moved to ELL.  However, there is a deeper issue on stackexchange that &lt;em&gt;closing&lt;/em&gt; doesn't always mean a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; question. Duplicates are intended to push answers to the same question into the same pile. You don't have your question deleted, it's another possible entry point to finding an answer. The you-didn't-include-an-example-sentence is a call to clean or clarify a post, not eliminate it (and not something that I always feel is entirely necessary). I think welcoming new users would be easier if there were some clarity around the phrasing of &quot;close&quot;--even calling it &quot;closed for new answers&quot; would help, or having different &quot;fix&quot;, &quot;close&quot; and &quot;deleted&quot; categories. I realize this isn't the question on the table, but any calls to reduce the number of close votes can be met with calls to give reviewers a sharper instrument to work with. There is a broken window syndrome that can be hard to recover from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, stackoverflow has a similar issue I've noticed growing over time. Duplicate questions often rank higher on google search results than the original, and often contain more updated information (tech is evolving much more rapidly than language). They are closed, but not until people give fairly substantial answers. This has the negative effect of spreading the knowledge over multiple pages. Hopefully a 3-vote-close rule will reduce that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS--Two clarifications. The queue counts you're seeing do not include items you've already voted on, but haven't yet reached the close limit. Also, you can cast up to 20 close votes per day on any given queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108286" LastEditorUserId="108286" LastEditDate="2020-01-15T04:31:56.283" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T04:31:56.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-15T18:57:15.620" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't deny I've been remiss in not going through the review queue so often lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; tackle the &quot;Closevote&quot; queue, I invariably hit my daily limit (20 VTC), because the queue is so long. And that &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; irritates me, because it means I can't VTC against &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; questions, as they arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I should post my thoughts as a &quot;Feature Request&quot; here on Meta, rather than an &quot;Answer&quot; to this specific question. Whatever - my suggested solution is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a user runs out of closevotes while working on the review queue, award them &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;extra votes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the detail, perhaps they could be &quot;special&quot; VTCs that aren't valid for continued queue review (only to be cast against questions in other contexts). And maybe the &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; of such additional votes could be limited to the number of &lt;em&gt;queue&lt;/em&gt; VTCs cast in the most recent session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T18:57:15.620" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-15T21:06:27.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The evident purpose of this proposal is to make it easier to close bad questions quickly. To the extent that it would promote that goal without producing undesirable side effects, I have no objection to it—and I can't imagine that any other EL&amp;amp;U participant would object to it either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that EL&amp;amp;U's built-in options for voting to close a question do a very poor job of distinguishing bad questions from good ones. The primary culprit here is the &quot;show research&quot; close reason, which was instituted several years ago to make it easier to close bad questions quickly (sound familiar?) but which in practice makes no distinction between a cruddy question of no interest to anyone but its poster and a question of potentially widespread and enduring interest whose only supposed flaw is its failure to provide background research. Now we have another attempt to make closure easier. If adopted, it will surely increase the number of interesting questions that get kneecapped for a reason unrelated to their quality as questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Responses to &quot;show research&quot; closure vary. In some instances, the original poster tries to satisfy the &quot;show research&quot; requirement; in other instances, other site participants attempt to do so (and thereby incur the wrath of certain close voters who consider such efforts to be an exercise in shamelessly presumptuous  audacity); in still other instances, reopen voters simply decide that the &quot;show research&quot; close reason shouldn't prevail against a question that they approve of; and in many cases, the question is simply abandoned to its fate. But whatever the outcome, the closure experience is likely to have a discouraging effect on the poster. The natural result of having a fundamentally interesting question closed for a reason unrelated to its inherent quality is to be less inclined to post another question on the site—a point worth considering the next time you wonder why EL&amp;amp;U has so much trouble attracting good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U has an earnest and vocal contingent of site participants whose main interest in the site is in maintaining or raising its standards for acceptable questions and answers. In pursuit of this interest, they seek to disqualify as many bad questions as possible as quickly as possible. But their desire for quick disqualification of bad questions has led them to adopt standards that don't distinguish truly bad questions from good ones. The current proposal accelerates this process without improving the qualitative discernment of the site's approved close vote reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interest in this site does not primarily involve keeping out the barbarian hordes. Rather, it involves trying to answer good questions. For that reason, I am more concerned about protecting good questions from closure than about closing bad questions quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (as seems likely) EL&amp;amp;U is poised to make question closure easier, without simultaneously replacing the &quot;show research&quot; close reason with a close reason (such as &quot;too localized&quot;) that actually goes to the fundamental badness of the suspect question, I would like to see it also take a significant step to protect good questions from quick closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of two simple ways to accomplish this. One would be to link the close voting privilege to demonstrated interest in the area(s) that a question asks about. That is, we could adopt a requirement that, to be entitled to vote to close a question, a site participant must have some baseline score—say, 50 upvotes—on at least one of the tags associated with that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second option would be to give site participants who do have a substantial interest in the area that a question asks about the power to protect it from closure. That is, we could permit site participants who have accumulated some baseline score—say, 100 or 200 or 400 upvotes—on at least one of the tags associated with a closed question the power to reopen the question with a single vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either of these changes would give site participants who have demonstrated an interest in a particular category of EL&amp;amp;U questions a greater ability to weigh in on the merits of posted questions related to that area and to preserve good questions that are at risk of being caught up in the crude dragnet of &quot;show research&quot; closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2020-01-15T22:46:05.987" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T22:46:05.987" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-17T07:03:59.123" Score="-1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking for general recommendations, but specific criticism due to the recent deletion of a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a Question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/521601/why-is-the-word-cervix-relating-to-the-neck-not-anywhere-near-the-neck&quot;&gt;Etymology of *Cervix&lt;/a&gt; Why was my comment about the &lt;em&gt;neck&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uterus&lt;/em&gt; deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile a similar comment remained, elaborating on tangents from a distantly related language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, the note about English not having a proper translation for these words might be off, if it is I who misunderstands e.g. &lt;em&gt;throat&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;neck&lt;/em&gt;, as an ESL at that. But how &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; exactly? What's your problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One general problem is surely that I will frequently speculate about cognates, like compare &lt;em&gt;throat&lt;/em&gt; and Ger &lt;em&gt;Trichter&lt;/em&gt;, which, if you look it up in wiktionary is not an established relation at all. Mentioning it is therefore too highbrow for some or too low effort, at the same time. It is topical nevertheless, but uncanny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So many a people are downright offended if the majority opinion is challenged. Of course it's often preferable to make that a fully fledged answer, but at the same time challenged answers are often no less superficial, perhaps in an appeal to authority, or out of common ignorance. This is agreeable, if the best one can do is collect the factual evidence. But if an interpretation is offered, it seems instructive to offer a counterpoint for sake of the argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not even do that here. And if I do, then rarely with the intent to discuss, but with a hope for more material contributions. Specifically, if a word for &lt;em&gt;neck&lt;/em&gt; is likely to be used figuratively, it's likely that the word for &lt;em&gt;neck&lt;/em&gt; itself was derived from figurative usage and that other such words are parallel developments, which can be informed by looking at analogous developments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a reason, this must appear arrogant or something. One may not even be aware of it, but criticizm implicitly requests more work be done, which is agitating. I think I know. I mean, I had commented under the answer, too, that were deleted. So I think I'm not alone at fault, because I personally wanted to flag comments under my own answers just because I didn't like them and more so because I felt personally responsible to keep my answers clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is a bit subjective, but I found the given answer too weak and wanted to stimulate a better one. Should I have made that clear, or should it be implicitly understood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it seems that the reaction is to wilify the difficulty of etymology with a slight of hand. So it does not seem recommendable to bring up everytime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, my writing can be unbearable. My grammar is subpar, and I can hardly ever resist the chance to make an obscure reference. Like, if &lt;em&gt;cervix&lt;/em&gt; was from *'ker- and then some, giving &lt;em&gt;head, heart, horn&lt;/em&gt; and more, and if that reminds me of an utterly idiomatic meme that is the heart-cutout as peep hole in dixie toilets, then I cannot not mention it, if it's the second time in a week, even if I rejected it the first time and thus don't remember what prompted that thought--that's also one reason to note it, so I wont forget it again--because it might be corresponding as much as &lt;em&gt;Hals&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;throat&quot;) corresponds to &lt;em&gt;hole&lt;/em&gt;, if that is the case. Alas, I shouldn't trash the place, so much that I wont find anything back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in this instance I don't really care about the missing comment. But I thought it was informative, even if the German and Polish examples were mere calques. I could have written a proper question about word-choice, if that was a concern, but I didn't really imply a question. At best I implied that it's nearly impossible to explain it(?) without difficulty in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to rephrase the question: How can I be any more specific in 512 characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326936" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T10:31:00.260" Title="How can I improve my contributions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|etymology|content-disputes|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-17T07:27:08.733" Score="-1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was under the impression that drafts of edits were saved. Is that not the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I lost one of my better answers in its inception because being on mobile and a bit clumsy I sometimes accidently hit the submit button and occasionally continue by editing, and then have to go back in the browser to e.g. to read the question body again. What drafts are and are not saved is not well documented anyhow, and might be subject to change. I'm just curious if I misremembered because the browser will have the text cached if going back and forth, but reloading by clicking the edit link will apparently refresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm tagging this feature-request, too, just to nag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326936" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2020-01-31T05:46:37.490" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T23:12:38.550" Title="Drafts should save in Edit forms" Tags="|support|feature-request|editor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13549" CreationDate="2020-01-17T17:25:59.777" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I very much dislike that type of banner and and its location. I find it confusing, if not actually contrary to the message it's trying to convey. The problem is that its interpretation is subjective in many cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; feel it should be given only a single time, and it should be at the bottom of the question, not at the top. (And, perhaps, it should be reworded a bit.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've argued (unsuccessfully) with a moderator about its use in the past. But, unfortunately, I can't recall the meta topic where it came up, so I can't link to it here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the gist is it's meant to be an instruction to anybody answering the question to provide a long (or at least complete) answer. It's not meant as an admonition of the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;—or even necessarily of any individual answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem is that it's applied on a per-case basis by a moderator. The choice of applying it or not is also subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2020-01-17T17:31:29.833" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T17:31:29.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13571" CreationDate="2020-01-17T18:05:12.173" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's utterly pointless to complain about comments being deleted. It's perhaps even more pointless to be upset by some being deleted while others remain. That just leads to wasted emotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemeral. They are not meant to be permanent. Don't ever assume that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of them will continue to exist at any given moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to say something that you think is relevant and important—and worthy of permanence—then you should be leaving an answer, not a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I often leave comments. Some are asking for clarification of a post. Others, I consider to be minor points that are not asking for clarification, but nor are they significant enough to be actual answers. I don't expect any of them to continue to exist for long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T18:05:12.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2020-01-17T18:41:53.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following up on a comment I'd originally made, I have enough reputation here to see and do everything that anybody short of a moderator can see or do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look at a question that's been closed, I normally see a banner that indicates why it's been closed and who voted to close it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fnqBa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fnqBa.png&quot; alt=&quot;Closed with detailed banner.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, it indicates this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Viewable by the post author and users with the close/reopen votes privilege)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I look at this particular question, that level of detail is missing from the banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JRn0B.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JRn0B.png&quot; alt=&quot;Closed without a detailed banner.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is the parenthetical information about who is allowed to view the details shown in the banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference between these two questions is that the one that shows a banner &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; detailed information is a question that originated and was migrated from a different site before being closed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I've noticed this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally, between the time I'd posted my original comment and this reply, I came across another closed question that had been migrated from elsewhere and then rejected when closed by our site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wJNGI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wJNGI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Closed without a detailed banner.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if it's a &lt;em&gt;migrated&lt;/em&gt; question that's been closed, nobody (moderators aside, apparently) gets a banner with details. I can still see some additional information by looking at the timeline, but it's not the same as with questions that have not been migrated (and then rejected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me if this is intentional or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my personal perspective, the fact that it's been &lt;em&gt;returned&lt;/em&gt; to the original site is sufficient banner information for me. Note that it's not possible to reopen a rejected migration—so knowing the details can't matter for that purpose, and it can't be updated to make it on-topic as that part of the regular banner text says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I can't see why providing more detailed historical information would be a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2020-01-17T18:48:39.753" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T18:48:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13571" CreationDate="2020-01-18T10:31:00.260" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't repeat what Jason has written (but I did upvote it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment did not really touch upon the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In German these would translate as &lt;em&gt;Hals,&lt;/em&gt; (Gebärmutterhals, also Flaschenhals &quot;bottleneck&quot;), whereas &lt;em&gt;Nacken&lt;/em&gt; exclusively describes the back of the neck, as in Red-Neck. &lt;em&gt;Hals&lt;/em&gt; in that sense is understood as a kind of &lt;em&gt;tube&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. &lt;em&gt;throat&lt;/em&gt;; cp &lt;em&gt;im Halse steckend&lt;/em&gt; &quot;stuck in the throat&quot;. I never understood why you have no good word for &lt;em&gt;Hals.&lt;/em&gt; I have no idea about &lt;em&gt;cervix&lt;/em&gt; however, except that I like to compare &lt;em&gt;vortex&lt;/em&gt; at any chance; cp Ger &lt;em&gt;Wirbel&lt;/em&gt; &quot;vortex, whirl, vertebra&quot; (the sections or nodes of the spine, i.e. the neck if you will).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You start &quot;In German...&quot;; you continue &quot;I never understood why you have no good word for &lt;em&gt;Hals&lt;/em&gt;&quot;; &quot;I have no idea about &lt;em&gt;cervix&lt;/em&gt;&quot; [the word being asked about]; &quot;I like to compare &lt;em&gt;vortex&lt;/em&gt; at any chance&quot; [completely irrelevant].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing here which is actually relevant. All you are saying in this comment is &quot;English is deficient,&quot; which &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; be a basis for an answer, in the right circumstances; but as a comment is almost certainly worthless. Comments are by nature ephemeral, and are liable to deletion. This is particularly likely if they are irrelevant to the post they're attached to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One general problem is surely that I will frequently speculate about cognates, like compare &lt;em&gt;throat&lt;/em&gt; and Ger &lt;em&gt;Trichter&lt;/em&gt;, which, if you look it up in wiktionary is not an established relation at all. Mentioning it is therefore too highbrow for some or too low effort, at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is indeed a problem.&lt;/strong&gt; Why speculate about cognates which are already known? &lt;em&gt;Throat&lt;/em&gt; is cognate with the Old Frisian &lt;em&gt;throt&lt;/em&gt; and the obsolete German &lt;em&gt;Drosse&lt;/em&gt;; it has something in common with the English &lt;em&gt;strut&lt;/em&gt; (as in &quot;strut about, make a show&quot;. Speculating on cognicity is neither too highbrow nor low-effort; it's just pointless. Actually presenting research demonstrating a previously unrecognised cognicity would not be too highbrow or low-effort either — and it would be hugely useful, albeit probably better presented first in an academic paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem is a bit subjective, but I found the given answer too weak and wanted to stimulate a better one. Should I have made that clear, or should it be implicitly understood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never assume anything should be implicitly understood. I'm given to understand from your posts that English is not your first language (although for a second language it is rather good). Implication and subtlety is an art not easily mastered in a native language, let alone a second. Be bold [but polite!] — don't be afraid to say &quot;I don't understand&quot;. It's probably better to ask leading questions like &quot;What about...&quot; rather than make a statement which has no obvious relationship to the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes it seems that the reaction is to wilify the difficulty of etymology with a slight of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people here certainly don't want to vilify anyone. This answer is long, and while mildly critical, I hope it's constructive criticism [and you did ask!]. If you're complaining that the sleight of hand was the simple deletion, then no: there's no difficulty of etymology here because the etymology is known, and the statement you made was not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, to rephrase the question: How can I be any more specific in 512 characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use comments for what they're intended for. Make them relevant and explicit. If they serve their intended purpose they will result in an edit being made to the post, or they will result in being expanded into an answer. But for the latter, the comment would have to be applied to the question and it needs to be obvious that it is at least a partial answer to the question being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to your subsequent comment,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But it seems on-point to point out that neck and cervix are not strictly synonymous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED has for &lt;em&gt;cervix&lt;/em&gt; (probably from 1889, but still in the Third Edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The neck, esp. the back part of the neck. Hence applied to a similar part in various organs, as the neck of the womb (&lt;em&gt;cervix uteri&lt;/em&gt;), of the bladder (&lt;em&gt;cervix vesicæ&lt;/em&gt;), of the thigh-bone (&lt;em&gt;cervix femoris&lt;/em&gt;), and of a tooth (&lt;em&gt;cervix dentis,&lt;/em&gt; ‘the line of junction between the crown and the fang’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are exactly synonymous, although the emphasis has moved down the body in 150 years. Perhaps now that &lt;em&gt;cervix&lt;/em&gt; is primarily assumed to be the &lt;em&gt;cervix uteri,&lt;/em&gt; the neck should be &lt;em&gt;cervix capiti.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T10:31:00.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13581" CreationDate="2020-01-19T22:07:10.513" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13558/73636&quot;&gt;Would ELU like to start a trial of only need 3 votes to close/reopen a question?&lt;/a&gt; mentions that the review queue is too long, approximately 160 posts. Since reading that, I have upped the number of posts I have reviewed from zero to 60 (but it took me longer than 10 seconds!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It now looks to me as if there are 137 posts that need reviewing (some new ones have been flagged). However, the ones I have voted on are no longer included in the total shown to me. Not all of the ones I voted on had reached the threshold, so were still waiting for other users to vote on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I see how many posts are really waiting to be reviewed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ECUeF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ECUeFm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T10:57:08.043" Title="How can I see how many posts are truly in the review queue?" Tags="|support|review-queues|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-21T04:58:02.867" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a user wants to post their first question here, are they told that our sister site English Language Learners exists and they should consider which of the two sites would be most appropriate for their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, should this be the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T08:24:17.900" Title="Are users told about the existence of English Language Learners on their first post?" Tags="|discussion|site|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13578" CreationDate="2020-01-21T07:41:26.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a user wants to post their first question here, are they told that our sister site English Language Learners exists […]? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact they are, on the right hand side of the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask a question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; page  there is a notice. But whether new contributors  &lt;em&gt;notice&lt;/em&gt; or acknowledge its existence, despite the bold formatting and the link in blue, is open to debate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y650U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y650U.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about learning English, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com/https://&quot;&gt;ask it on ELL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2020-01-21T08:24:17.900" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T08:24:17.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2020-01-22T01:57:44.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like the close threshold to stay at five for any question that gets more than 100 views (an arbitrary threshold, pick one). My concern is that there are some subjects that just attract close votes like magnets, often as a result of a quote that has a political angle, religious angle, or deals with some other sensitive subject. There was a time when no question that mentioned the military, no matter how tangentially, stood a chance, but that seems to have relaxed a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option would be to close after three close votes &lt;em&gt;from the review cue&lt;/em&gt; or five total (review cue + close button).  This might just encourage a few more to use the cue and ought to be fairly simple to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T01:57:44.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13577" CreationDate="2020-01-22T02:38:36.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest way is to open the review page in an incognito/private browser window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T02:38:36.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13577" CreationDate="2020-01-22T10:57:08.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is another way to view the review numbers without having 10K rep, I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but nevertheless it worked for me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, as a 101 rep user I proposed four separate edits on Stack Overflow, of which two were accepted. I then visited my profile page and clicked on: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;activity&lt;/em&gt; –&gt;&lt;em&gt;all actions&lt;/em&gt; –&gt;&lt;em&gt;suggestions&lt;/em&gt; –&gt;&lt;em&gt;rejected edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the top left hand corner of the page, click on the &lt;strong&gt;Review&lt;/strong&gt; link, and voilà this will take you to the review page, and you (pl) will see all the numbers of impending reviews for each task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T10:57:08.043" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-29T05:49:01.207" Score="19" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that this has been discussed before, and that this problem is never going to go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been going through the review queues since a recent Meta.ELU post about too many questions needing review. Most of the questions in the close queue qualify for &quot;Please include the research you’ve done&quot;. I also feel that a vast number belong on ELL, and then should be closed anyway for being too unclear to answer, or for being duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ELU is in a unique position within Stack Exchange of having a sister site where the main distinguishing factor is whether it's a &quot;beginner&quot; question or an &quot;advanced&quot; question. As such, it feels as though all new users should be directed to ELL, and only if their question doesn't fit there should they ask it here (assuming it's on topic here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to write an introductory note that covers the common cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Before asking your first question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you learning English? Please ask your question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is your question about finding the meaning of a word? Have you looked in a dictionary first?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you looking for a word with a particular meaning? How would you use that word in a sentence?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible to do? Would it be helpful? If it was done as an introductory questionnaire with only one question asked at a time, the user could be directed to take the correct action after each question had been answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you learning English? [Yes / No]&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if Yes, prompt user to go to ELL instead&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is your question about finding the meaning of a word? [Yes / No]&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if Yes, prompt user to look in a dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you looking for a word with a particular meaning? [Yes / No]&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if Yes, prompt user to provide an example sentence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T05:49:01.207" Title="Too many questions that qualify for &quot;Please include the research you’ve done&quot;" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13584" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13590" CreationDate="2020-01-29T23:33:10.123" Score="18" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;I participate in a number of StackExchanges, and ELU stands out in a negative way compared to the rest: &lt;strong&gt;lack of upvotes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/523883/alternative-for-tone-deaf&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  At time of writing, six (6) users apparently found it interesting enough to spend some time answering, yet the question has garnered zero (0) upvotes, one unexplained random drive-by downvote, and four close votes for being off-topic (!?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: ...and now it's closed despite including a clear rationale for why I need a synonym and research done. Sigh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/why-are-questions-answered-with-no-upvotes&quot;&gt;previous discussion about this from 2014&lt;/a&gt;, but in light of the rep changes in late 2019 (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/&quot;&gt;We're Rewarding the Question Askers&lt;/a&gt;&quot;), I though this was worth raising again, because we sure as hell aren't rewarding askers on ELU.  &lt;strong&gt;How can we fix this culture?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66022" LastEditorUserId="66022" LastEditDate="2020-01-31T00:03:38.787" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T21:59:46.170" Title="Why do ELU users upvote so little, and how can we fix this?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13584" CreationDate="2020-01-31T04:54:16.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do ELU users upvote so little, and how can we fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that there is a problem with how users are voting. I would say (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13583/73636&quot;&gt;and have said&lt;/a&gt;) that there is a problem with too many low quality questions being asked on English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fix the problem of poor quality questions being asked and you'll fix the &quot;problem&quot; of the upvote rate being low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering your non-Meta question: it has attracted a flurry of low quality answers, many not backed up by references. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tags are very low hanging fruit. Your question fits into at least one of these categories even though it is currently not tagged as such (correction: another user tagged it as both as I was writing this). Users find these questions easy to answer with little to no thought, and they can be a &quot;fun guessing game&quot;! Throw the spaghetti against the wall and see which answer sticks! Use the shotgun approach: the more words you can suggest quickly, the higher the chance that the OP will like one of them and award you the coveted green tick!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim of Stack Exchange has always been to build a library of answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Meta.SE tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meta Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&amp;amp;A websites. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to &lt;strong&gt;build a library of detailed answers&lt;/strong&gt; to every question about the software that powers the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;English.SE tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to &lt;strong&gt;build a library of detailed answers&lt;/strong&gt; to every question about English language and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it doesn't say is that those questions and answers should meet a minimum quality standard. After all, isn't that what attracted you to Stack Exchange in the first place? That you could get good answers and not just speculation and opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's focus on getting enough good quality questions asked. If we get that right, the rest will come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T04:54:16.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13572" CreationDate="2020-01-31T05:49:03.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the app (iOS at least) edits are saved as drafts. Here’s an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qyQNy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qyQNym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a screenshot that says question edit&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don’t have to do anything special to save a draft; you can close the app and it will still be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that the app is a better mobile experience than the website in some ways like this, but a horrific unmaintained mess in many other ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T23:12:38.550" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T23:12:38.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13584" CreationDate="2020-01-31T22:49:57.330" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's entirely understandable that a question poster might wonder why people who have upvoting privileges at English Language &amp;amp; Usage and who bothered to compose full-fledged answers to the question didn't consider the question itself worthy of upvoting. In recent years, I've tried to limit myself to answering questions posted on the main EL&amp;amp;U site that I find interesting and worth researching. Using that baseline for answering, I almost always upvote the questions I answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this leads to a split in my approach to questions. When I don't think a question is particularly interesting, but I have an idea of how to answer it briefly and without research effort &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I don't want the question poster to go away empty handed, I post the answer as a comment. (Note that doing this is widely condemned at EL&amp;amp;U as an abuse of the comments box; nevertheless, I persist in doing it because I fundamentally disagree with the argument that answering a simple question in the form of a comment damages the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other site participants, of course, take different approaches to the questions they answer/comment on. The four people with upvoting privileges who answered your question may or may not have upvoted it: the question has now attracted four upvotes and two downvotes, and there's no telling where any of those votes came from. But it would be perfectly reasonable for people to answer a question they don't consider good enough to reward with an upvote. And indeed, the official position of the site is that such answers should take the form of answer box answers, not comments box answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion that a chronically grudging attitude toward upvoting at EL&amp;amp;U discourages people from asking good questions here may be true, but in my view it pales in comparison to the negative effect of closing legitimate questions on knee-jerk technicalities. My sense is that most people who ask questions here do so because they want their questions answered by people who know what they're talking about. The whole reputation/reward angle is a sideshow that matters little to most question posters, I suspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why site participants are less inclined to upvote questions here than on other Stack Exchange sites—assuming that they are—I have no idea. One of the lowest-scoring questions I ever posted on this site (a question that I also answered shortly after posting) has been viewed more than 800 times, and both it and the answer have received only one upvote each. And yet that answer is also the only thing I've ever posted here that got cited in a news article in the &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question that you think is good, and you are genuinely interested in having it answered by (one hopes) well-informed people, you should feel justified in asking it at EL&amp;amp;U. If it gets closed, it may be that (1) your idea of a good question is a bad match for this particular site, or (2) your question, although promising, has a serious flaw that you need to fix, or (3) some trigger-happy close voters have inappropriately closed it. In the first case, you're probably asking on the wrong site. In the second case, you need to clarify something that is missing or unclear in the question as originally posted. In the third case, the site truly is shooting itself in the foot by rejecting a valid and potentially valuable contribution for no good reason. But in all of these cases, the prospect of being rewarded by EL&amp;amp;U's upvoting system is objectively unimportant. I hope that you won't let it determine your interest in and future contributions to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T22:49:57.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-01T14:20:03.287" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want this to be seen as a personal criticism of the relevant commenter, since I'm often guilty of the same &quot;careless&quot; behaviour myself. But I think there's something not quite right about how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/524193/what-do-you-call-a-person-whose-ideology-is-derived-from-several-opinions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What do you call a person whose ideology is derived from several opinions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't have the rep to see the post (now deleted by the OP), the entire text of the question was...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there is a word for a person whose ideology is derived from several people's opinions/thinking/ideology?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comment posted before deletion was...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Uh, &quot;normal&quot;???&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of those relatively rare cases where &lt;em&gt;le mot juste&lt;/em&gt; is fairly clear-cut &lt;em&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/eclectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eclectic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - deriving ideas, style, or taste &lt;strong&gt;from a broad and diverse range of sources&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), so I don't think it really matters whether the OP has provided an &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; context in which to use the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not putting up this post just to try and get the question reopened (though that would be good). My point here is that the only reason I can think of for the OP closing his &lt;em&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;unanswered&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/em&gt; question must be that he felt it/he was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;unwelcome&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, may I respectfully suggest that we all&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; make a bit more effort to avoid posting a &quot;flippant, sarcastic&quot; (potentially &lt;em&gt;dismissive&lt;/em&gt;) comment as the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; reaction to a question from a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;new user&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. If that new user might not see the funny side, it's probably inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Okay, I know lots of established users here would rarely if ever do this kind of thing, so they don't need to change their ways. But I think that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; do, and so do several others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T14:20:03.287" Title="Off-putting comments to new users" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-03T01:49:50.377" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new here, but I've seen a bunch of questions closed for being &quot;off-topic&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I click on the off topic link, the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing that ever seems to apply would be that the question belongs in English Language Learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, would it not be better for moderators to just move it to ell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, then possibly a better tag that off-topic, perhaps a cluster of tags to point at the specific reason why it's off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm part of a bunch of SE groups. I've seldom been confused as to closed questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41430" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T01:49:50.377" Title="Need for alternative/addition to &quot;Off topic&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13584" CreationDate="2020-02-05T17:59:24.110" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As another newbie to SE I've found this group unwelcoming to the point of hostile.  @Sven Yarg's point about &quot;closing legitimate questions on knee-jerk technicalities&quot; is spot on. To that I'd add editing, downvoting and pedantic criticism of people who are still finding their feet.  My very first answer here was down-voted not because it was wrong, but because I didn't quote sources. Yes, I can hear the cries of &quot;you should have read the guidance more carefully first&quot;, but doesn't the guidance also say that down votes are supposed to be a last resort ?  I've also had a question re-written completely, seemingly to give that person an excuse to write a six paragraph answer, including graphs and arrows, to a question I never asked. Most recently I've had a comment amended to suggest that I add sources - this time I apparently need to provide hard evidence that I've found the plural of &quot;cow&quot; to be &quot;cows&quot; (yes, really). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re: the quality of questions, I get it. I understand, I've been on Yahoo Answers :-(  But there's a balance to be struck and in my opinion ELU isn't getting it.  Whether that makes this group unusual, I don't know but I doubt it.  In the few SE groups I've visited so far, I do see a common theme - specifically a small number (maybe &amp;lt;10) of presumably intelligent and well-intentioned people, who see these groups as their personal fiefdoms.  They watch everything coming in and feel obliged to comment on practically everything. If they can't answer a question, they think they can at least 'add value&quot; by nit-picking and tearing it apart. Based on the up-voted answers above, I'm on the losing side here.  The problem isn't with the group, it's &quot;the questions need to be better&quot;.  I don't agree. The truth is, the questions are what they are. You don't like one, or you don't know the answer ? Then leave it alone.  Say something actually constructive or say nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also suggest that people take a look at their answer/question ratios. There's practically a God complex to some of them. Finally I'd recommend that downvotes shouldn't be anonymous. I can see how this could lead to more arguments, but A. downvotes are supposedly a last resort and B. you should be prepared to stand behind your position, positive or negative. Basically, I don't see myself staying here long because I don't like the exclusive tone of the group. I wonder how many others have come to the same conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372060" LastActivityDate="2020-02-05T17:59:24.110" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-06T22:33:01.737" Score="5" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/237092/why-dog-eats-dog-cannot-be-a-phrasal-adjective-but-dog-eat-dog-can&quot;&gt;post &lt;/a&gt; quickly migrated to ELL? I think the question posed is just apparently an elementary  one. It may well find a proper answer on ELL, of course, but why was it out of place on ELU? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T22:33:01.737" Title="Quick migration to ELL" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-08T18:10:58.843" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;When working with the review queue, the windows that actually contain the Close Button are sized and designed so that you have to scroll down to get to the Close Button. There is usually plenty of white space, so there is no reason for this. Can we get the Close Button to appear on the screen unless there is such a roster of options that it gets pushed off the screen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3voAF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3voAF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastEditorUserId="160746" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T01:01:42.170" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T01:01:42.170" Title="Irksome review pop-up window size/design" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-09T10:00:06.970" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a resources which can provide related English idioms/phrases. For instance, if I were looking up 'to help out', I would find 'to pitch in', etc. Does any such resources exist online (or offline)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264221" OwnerDisplayName="ChaimKut" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T14:44:18.407" Title="Search engine for English idioms?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13584" CreationDate="2020-02-10T10:05:41.223" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't talk about the wider implications, as I don't really notice votes at all on these sites. I only care about votes enough to get privileges, and even then I don't need most privileges--just upvoting, downvoting, commenting, and editing. Those are sufficient to participate in the Q&amp;amp;A portion of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the case of the particular question, a reason why people might not upvote is that they believe the premise is faulty. &#xA;As far as I know, the term &quot;tone deaf&quot; is not generally seen as offensive to those with hearing problems, as the term doesn't describe a hearing problem. The idea that it is &quot;ableist&quot; because it contains the word &quot;deaf&quot; and is used negatively is a completely new idea that has not caught on in the wider world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with the premise, then the Question itself has no need of being asked. And I know I at least upvote questions based on whether I think they are useful. I do hold them to a minimum quality standard, but I see no need for quality to matter more than that--the point of a Q&amp;amp;A site is to have good answers to questions being asked, not whether the question has been asked in the best possible way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I did upvote your question here, as I believe this is a question that needs to be asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78353" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T10:05:41.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13599" CreationDate="2020-02-13T05:56:00.247" Score="7" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a question about the grammaticality of a specific two-word phrase. The information &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/grammar/info&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; explicitly instructs me to use the tag &lt;code&gt;grammaticality&lt;/code&gt; for such questions. But the question was closed because &quot;proofreading questions are off-topic.&quot; Five different people appear to have voted to close it so I assume it really is off-topic somehow, which is fine, but I'm at a loss to understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message does stipulate &quot;unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified,&quot; which &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; give me the impression that it's intended to prevent requests for general proofreading except for the fact that my question involved only two words, the minimum necessary to have a grammatical relationship at all, and that's as specific as one can be. Unless I've misunderstood what's meant by &quot;a specific source of concern?&quot; Perhaps it means that I didn't specifically identify which grammar rules I'm concerned about? But if this is the case it would seem a needlessly burdensome requirement. It would discourage lay people like myself from engaging with the site, which would serve to increase the technicality of the questions but not really their quality. Questions don't have to be esoteric to be high quality. A policy like this would eliminate the possibility of questions from people who don't know what they don't know. E.g., in my case, the most I can say about the phrase is that it's prepositional. I rely on instinct and experience to write and have long since forgotten most of the actual rules. I thought my usage was correct but I wasn't certain and I wanted to know if there was something I didn't know (it turned out there was). If I had to specify which rules I was concerned about and why I was concerned about them I wouldn't be able to ask at all. And if I was able then I probably wouldn't need to. However, this seems unlikely to be the case unless this Exchange is intended only for English professionals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read around a bit before posting and gathered that confusion surrounding this closure reason is not uncommon. I have the idea that some mods may be rather indiscriminate in their usage of the &quot;proofreading&quot; tag so perhaps the issue is something else entirely? If this is the case I have to wonder about the wisdom of such a confusing practice. It's led me on a wild goose chase. But even if I disregard the stated reason I still can't come up with a reason why the question would be off-topic. What could be more germane to a forum about English language usage than a question about the proper use of the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. Hopefully they're helpful. Ultimately, my question elicited exactly the information I wanted. All the respondents understood me perfectly and I got the answer quickly. Personally, I can't imagine a better result or more appropriate use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Reading around some more, I've begun to think that this Exchange may in fact be intended for professionals and esoteric questions are preferred. If this is the case then perhaps my question is off-topic because it's too basic? Some of what I've read suggests &quot;is this usage correct&quot; questions are not wanted. If this is so, while it leaves me wondering what a question about grammaticality could be apart from correct usage, I'm happy to put any questions in the appropriate place. It seems there's some disagreement about what kinds of questions are appropriate and where. The &quot;Learners&quot; Exchange doesn't seem like a fit for me as I'm as mastered a layman as you're likely to find but, being a layman, I may not fit here either. My goal &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; to learn something about English though so perhaps ELL makes sense? I guess it really doesn't matter so long as I know which one to go to though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145171" LastEditorUserId="145171" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T04:20:35.143" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T04:20:35.143" Title="Grammaticality and Proofreading" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13598" CreationDate="2020-02-13T20:09:02.563" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason is supposed to apply to questions that seek either confirmation of the grammatical legitimacy of a specific piece of writing or help in correcting or improving its language. So if your question had been something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have written this sentence: &quot;John was inculcated with certain ideas.&quot; But it sounds a little odd to me. Is it okay as written? If not, how can I improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &quot;proofreading&quot; close reason would have been entirely on point. The reason that English Language &amp;amp; Usage doesn't permit questions of this type is that they effectively turn the site into an editing/proofreading service, responding to questions that are unlikely to be of any interest to anyone other than the question's poster (because only the poster cares about the particular sentence &quot;John was inculcated with certain ideas&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your question, it seems to me, is about whether the verb-preposition combination &quot;inculcated with&quot; is standard or approved or normal sounding or widely used in English. On the one hand, close voters at this site might reasonably take the view that some strands of that question call for &quot;opinion-based&quot; answers—another standard close reason on this site. But on the other hand, whether &quot;inculcated with&quot; commonly appears in published English writing and whether it has appeared in published English writing for many years are objectively answerable in the historical record, and therefore do not ask for opinion-based answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems to me that you may not be the only site visitor who wonders whether &quot;inculcated with&quot; is well established in current English and, if so, what its pedigree is. For that reason, I think your question passes the crucial test of breadth of interest: a question that multiple people may have is not &quot;too localized&quot; (a close reason that this site used to make available as a prefab close option and whose loss I mourn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The objective validity of a canned close option in a particular case depends entirely on the care with which close voters select it. The point of having prewritten close reasons is to make it easier for close voters to identify a serious problem in a question that justifies their voting to close it. But to the extent that the official reason given for closing a question is supposed to guide the question's poster's efforts to improve or correct it, selecting a close reason that is ill matched to the actual weakness (if any) of the question is extremely unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2020-02-14T23:28:50.810" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T23:28:50.810" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13584" CreationDate="2020-02-13T21:59:46.170" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote when I see a question or answer that is very good or very bad. Probably my threshold is different from most on this site, because apparently I cast only about 350 votes a year, call it about one a day with a couple weeks vacation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ratio is ~5:2, up to down, and ~1:1 questions to answers. Note that I lean toward indulgence with up votes and away from censure with down votes. Your question or answer has to be very, very bad for me to vote you down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I mentioning this? Because you asked. But let me add that, apart from what SE makes visible to you, my behavior in this matter is really none of your business, nor are the reasons I vote the way I do. If you want to get more votes here, post better questions and answers. There is no SE-sanctioned remedy (assuming that is what you seek) that is going to make me vote any more or any less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T21:59:46.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T00:15:18.990" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just went through the close review queue and found the following questions which are typical of a problem I've been seeing recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/525280/73636&quot;&gt;&amp;#39;In tone&amp;#39; meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/525272/73636&quot;&gt;A question that relevant to commas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither question has any upvotes, both have close votes, both have answers in the comments, both have thank you messages from the OP stating that their question has been answered (by said comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in thinking that a question should either be answered or closed, but not both? I see users, often with very high rep providing answers in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep hearing the same arguments against answering in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments bypass the quality controls because they can't be downvoted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments can't be accepted as an answer forcing the next user to read the comment chain to find the answer (something that annoys me about most non-Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A sites because most comments are irrelevant to the answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, from what I've seen, if the question has been correctly answered (either in an answer or a comment) people are less likely to post an(other) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason why these arguments are invalid on English.SE? Is answering in comments acceptable? If not, how do we encourage users to stop doing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T00:15:18.990" Title="Why are (advanced) users answering poor questions in comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|answers|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-02-17T16:40:23.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-17T04:02:53.947" Score="-10" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on EL&amp;amp;U which was taken upon negatively. It is linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/1280809?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: “&lt;em&gt;Is &quot;tell advice&quot; not idiomatic over &quot;give advice&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look up the definition of &quot;idiomatic&quot; from the OED:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1a) Relating to or exhibiting the forms of expression, grammatical constructions, phrases, etc. &lt;em&gt;used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety, formerly especially those considered nonstandard or colloquial.&lt;/em&gt; Now usually spec.: established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/91033?redirectedFrom=Idiomatic#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/91033?redirectedFrom=Idiomatic#eid&lt;/a&gt;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research people did not accept Google books/websites/etc. to be a good reflection of ‘idiomacy’, so I consulted Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) where “tell advice” &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was challenging a statement that it was not used by native speakers at all. This is extremely misleading. It’s like saying Standard English is the best so we will ignore all other dialects. A person notes that this could be “hyperbolic”, that people do but only a small minority, “microscopic in fact”.  However to me, exaggeration doesn’t mask a false truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The OED definition mentions &lt;strong&gt;nothing about native speakers&lt;/strong&gt;. So perhaps people should just focus on less on whether a person is a native speaker, but on the wider sense of “idiomatic”. How is idiomacy tested? Is it impossible for a non-native but fluent speaker to speak idiomatically?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My evidence does show that native speakers are using from COCA. Google also showed 50,000 cases of where “tell advice” is used. Of course there are some questionable cases. It’s almost impossible to validate every source, however I feel like among the mass of 50,000 that it would be wrong to predict that there is not a single native speaker out there. What is undetermined is the actual % of 50,000 cases is “tell advice” being used by a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some dictionary definitions of idiomatic mention “native speakers” but I feel this is too simplistic of a definition as mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If only a minority of native speakers is only using it, does that make it negligible or removed as an option at all? Because people are alluding to the latter, completely disregarding the alternative and justifying  their use of “give advice” only on the basis that it is used more, not considering other options; even though “tell advice” violates no grammatical rule.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would say: &lt;strong&gt;It is idiomatic in the community&lt;/strong&gt;, that “tell advice” is being used. Perhaps not idiomatic in Standard English, but still in a community of native speakers or dialect - however small attesting its use. I think this fits in line with OED’s definition:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Relating to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or exhibiting the forms of expression, grammatical constructions, phrases, etc. &lt;em&gt;used in a distinctive way in a particular language, &lt;strong&gt;dialect&lt;/strong&gt;, or language variety&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what CJ Dennis said in chat, which I complete agree with, particularly the second paragraph. :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There could arise some population of native English speakers for whom &quot;tell advice&quot; is idiomatic. It could become idiomatic in every English variety. However, it isn't at present and there's no evidence it ever was. &quot;Long time no see&quot; is ungrammatical but idiomatic, and therefore &quot;good&quot; English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So there's no argument from a grammatical perspective to proscribe the use of a particular phrase, only the descriptive approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What baffles me is that people failed to see the merit of my question and just downvoted. If you look at the question I acknowledged from the get go that “give advice” was the most common variant, yet people focused more on disputing the evidence against  “tell advice” as opposed to “give advice” saying it’s not natural and unidiomatic. COCA says otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t understand why a perfectly good question is being treated like this. People are voting to close with no good basis or proper reason other than to incite that they do not like the usage of “tell advice”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, it is a question well within the scopes of “English Language &amp;amp; Usage” but it’s not being given the merit of what it deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Why do I have a reputation change on my reputation page that says &quot;voting corrected&quot;?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a single user continually votes (up or down) on many of your posts within a short period of time, the system considers these votes to be invalid and removes them. This could happen for a variety of reasons, &lt;strong&gt;such as a user finding a user's great answer and visiting all of their posts to upvote them, or a user getting into an argument with another user and downvoting their posts indiscriminately in revenge&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;No matter the cause, this sort of systematic targeted voting is not considered normal behavior and the system will not allow it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If such a voting pattern continues to happen between two users mutually or from one user towards another, or otherwise falls outside of normal voting patterns, moderators and/or developers may investigate the matter; intentionally voting merely to reduce or inflate another user's reputation is considered abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such votes will generally be invalidated as part of an automated process that runs every day, but may also be invalidated manually by the staff after an investigation. When the votes are invalidated, the reputation gain or loss from the votes is undone, which results in a record in the recipient's reputation history labelled &quot;voting corrected&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had instances where my other answers have been downvoted simply because they did not like the question I asked above or that I was 'right'. If the down-vote are &lt;strong&gt;persistent&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;down-votes are from the same group people&lt;/strong&gt; - that can be construed as &lt;em&gt;voting abuse&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, &lt;strong&gt;while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information&lt;/strong&gt;. The more that people vote on a post, the more certain future visitors can be of the quality of information contained within that post – not to mention that upvotes are a great way to thank the author of a good post for the time and effort put into writing it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My post doesn't contain wrong information, is not poorly researched and does not fail to communicate information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it was to contain 'misinformation'* which is subjective, a user argues here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I agree the wording &quot;extreme cases&quot; is very wrong here. A post providing misinformation is not an extreme case, it happens every day. &lt;strong&gt;That section in the help center wants to point out you can use down-votes as last resort when helping improving through comments doesn't help, and that is a good thing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/280651/contradictory-guidelines-for-downvoting&quot;&gt;Contradictory guidelines for downvoting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*My question does not 'misinform' anyone. I say that &quot;give advice&quot; is the most common usage and that the grammatical 'tell advice' is just as valid as its counterpart and I have used evidence to support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help section says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you vote down, you are nudging that content &quot;down&quot; the page, so it will be seen by fewer people. &lt;strong&gt;Voting down answers is not something we want you to take lightly&lt;/strong&gt;, so it is not free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the alternatives to downvoting?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  The upvote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Downvoting should be reserved for extreme cases&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Instead of voting down:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the post is spammy or offensive, flag it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the question is duplicate or off-topic, flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260868" LastEditorUserId="260868" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T18:08:37.153" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T00:47:17.173" Title="Voting abuse - why is a perfectly good question being down-voted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13602" CreationDate="2020-02-17T07:20:16.600" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP, @aesking, told the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To me “to give someone advice” is the most common variant &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/525349/44619&quot;&gt;but it sounds phrasally and unidiomatic&lt;/a&gt;. However, to be politically correct I think “tell some advice” is more appropriate as &lt;strong&gt;personally in my grammar&lt;/strong&gt; you cannot “give X advice”, &lt;strong&gt;you can only &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; physical objects&lt;/strong&gt; but you can tell or speak advice/words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about  “&lt;strong&gt;to give information&lt;/strong&gt;”? What about “&lt;strong&gt;to give an opinion&lt;/strong&gt;”? What about “&lt;strong&gt;to give an answer&lt;/strong&gt;”? Isn't any response to a request or question, written or spoken, &lt;strong&gt;supplying&lt;/strong&gt; that which was asked?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's rational and justification is theirs to  follow but they have yet to prove that &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt;  idiolect or that of other native speakers, &lt;em&gt;tell someone advice&lt;/em&gt;, is the most &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;common&lt;/em&gt; in the English-speaking world, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/idiomatic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idiomatic&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've given an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/525458/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the OP, which I hope will clarify further. Unfortunately, due to the number of downvotes, their post no longer appears on the homepage. And my upvote has not helped to budge it out of oblivion; I'm also curious to see whether more users agree with the other answers posted, which are all basically saying that &quot;tell someone advice&quot; is uncommon in idiomatic speech. Not one answer has claimed it to be &lt;em&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt; and I seriously doubt that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/11146/shoe&quot;&gt;@Shoe&lt;/a&gt;, as noted by @aesking, claimed otherwise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T11:23:19.990" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T11:23:19.990" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-18T20:06:45.437" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definition lookup in Google will show the origin or etymology of a word, usually based on root. Is there an application, web or otherwise, that returns composite words for any given root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227090" OwnerDisplayName="pgayed" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T23:05:06.477" Title="For any word, see constituent roots; for any root, see composite words" Tags="|discussion|etymology|resources|reference|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13604" CreationDate="2020-02-18T23:04:39.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the Oxford English Dictionary web application provides this service. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37791&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;look up the word &lt;em&gt;composite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in the OED, it reveals that its etymology is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymology: &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;compositus&lt;/em&gt;, past participle of &lt;em&gt;compōnĕre&lt;/em&gt; to put together. Compare French &lt;em&gt;composite&lt;/em&gt; (in Archit.). Introduced first in the architectural sense (2), the only one recognized by Johnson, 1755–73.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you go to its advanced search page and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/search?case-sensitive=true&amp;amp;f_0=Etymology&amp;amp;f_1=Etymology&amp;amp;nearDistance=1&amp;amp;o_1=OR&amp;amp;ordered=false&amp;amp;q_0=compositus&amp;amp;q_1=comp%C5%8Dn%C4%95re&amp;amp;scope=ENTRY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;look for either of those two Latin forms in the Etymology section&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p2GYw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p2GYw.png&quot; alt=&quot;search screen example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which run produces 17 hits, of which the first few are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfYny.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfYny.png&quot; alt=&quot;results example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is behind a paywall because it’s meant for scholarly research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll need a library card from a participating library (such as from the UK) or from an institutional membership (like a university), or else an individual subscription of your own, which runs $90 per year for their “specially discounted” price or $295 without the discount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" OwnerDisplayName="tchrist" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T23:04:39.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13602" CreationDate="2020-02-19T00:47:17.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post starts off OK. &amp;quot;I was told &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is true. I have found evidence to support the opposite, that &lt;code&gt;¬X&lt;/code&gt; is true.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, instead of ending with &amp;quot;Is my argument that &lt;code&gt;¬X&lt;/code&gt; is true reasonable (therefore invalidating &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;)?&amp;quot; you end with &amp;quot;Please back me up and support my opinion that &lt;code&gt;¬X&lt;/code&gt; is true&amp;quot;. (Note this is paraphrasing and not to be taken literally.) Your question was asked unscientifically. It did have evidence, but that evidence was very low quality (being based on Google search results). The subsequent edits have not shown &lt;em&gt;substantial&lt;/em&gt; support for your position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science often requires the &amp;quot;5 sigma&amp;quot; standard, which is a less than 1 in 3.5 million chance for the raw data to have occurred from random fluctuations. While some evidence exists that some native speakers have occasionally uttered &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot;, there's no evidence that any native speakers use &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot; in preference to &amp;quot;give advice&amp;quot; or that &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot; is used by any speaker on a frequent enough basis for it to be considered idiomatic. However, the support for &amp;quot;give advice&amp;quot; (which you asked it to be compared to) is undeniable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot; could simply be a speaker saying &amp;quot;Let me tell you some&lt;s&gt;thing&lt;/s&gt; advice&amp;quot;. At the start of the sentence they planned to say &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; but changed their mind after they had already said &amp;quot;tell&amp;quot;. Is that plausible enough to throw doubt on that evidence? Yes. Is it guaranteed to be true? No. More study would be needed to separate accidental use of &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot; with intentional use of &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot;. It can't be proved either that it was intentional or accidental, so we don't know whether we can include that evidence or not. What we do know is that all humans make mistakes, and even the best speaker occasionally says the wrong word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is not enough &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; evidence to &lt;em&gt;reasonably&lt;/em&gt; support the position that &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot; is idiomatic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say yourself in this Meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what CJ Dennis said in chat, which I complete agree with [...]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could arise some population of native English speakers for whom &amp;quot;tell advice&amp;quot; is idiomatic. It could become idiomatic in every English variety. &lt;strong&gt;However, it isn't at present and there's no evidence it ever was.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you completely agree with my statement &amp;quot;['tell advice'] isn't [idiomatic] at present and there's no evidence it ever was.&amp;quot; So I don't know why you keep arguing the opposite position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has been taken seriously by everyone who posted answers, comments, or edited your question. However, you have rejected every reasonable argument against your opinion. A question that only exists to support an unreasonable position is by definition a bad one and deserves downvotes (not you, the OP, just the question itself). Votes let users who have never seen the post before see how valuable other users have judged it to be so they can make a decision whether to read it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask that you don't take this personally. I can tell you're very emotionally invested in this question. Had it been asked from an enquiring position with a mind open to the opposite position, it might have been received more favourably. I would also suggest that you take some time away from English.SE to cool down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had several long (multiple hour) chats with you recently. You seem like a nice person. It's just that on this issue you won't budge. You really need to have an open mind to see the value in the responses you got. You need to be able to judge the evidence objectively, and not from the viewpoint of an assumed conclusion. Refusing to give up a bad assumption is bad science and makes for a bad question. Not all evidence is equally valuable. It can also be very difficult when you are very emotionally invested in the assumption. If you backed down and admitted you were wrong you might feel very foolish, however, I don't think many people (if any) would think less of you for that. I for one would not judge you on that. I would admire you for overcoming your emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is not so much about whether you think &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;¬X&lt;/code&gt; is true, it's about whether a random reasonable person with no prior exposure to the question would judge &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;¬X&lt;/code&gt; to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really hope this post has helped you understand the dynamics of voting (that for most users it's based on evidence and presenting a reasonable argument) even though I haven't explained voting that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck, and all the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T00:47:17.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-19T06:01:03.097" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I admit; I like quotative verbs. Of course, I would prefer to avoid using 'said' all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK there is no canonical question asking for &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; alternatives to 'said'. I've compiled quite a list (over 400 so far), and am wondering, would it be interesting to &quot;ask&quot; a question to turn into a community wiki collecting verbs that can be (ab)used as quotatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or, is there such a question already that I haven't found?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216063" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T13:35:40.000" Title="Other words for 'said'?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13607" CreationDate="2020-02-19T13:35:40.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're asking about is compiling a thesaurus. They already exist, and are in the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;reference works which should be consulted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While lists are not expressly mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help&lt;/a&gt;, they do fit into one of the unwelcome categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recommend asking such a question. (But asking &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; asking the question is entirely the right thing to do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T13:35:40.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-19T06:04:38.703" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I need to list all of the family of words for the &lt;em&gt;giver&lt;/em&gt; like gift.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For &lt;em&gt;bleed&lt;/em&gt; the list would include &lt;em&gt;blood&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; the list would include &lt;em&gt;speech&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For &lt;em&gt;stick&lt;/em&gt; it would include &lt;em&gt;sticky&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the list would include &lt;em&gt;knowledge&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out from my mind I can come up with one or two max. Is there a tool for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="337744" OwnerDisplayName="Juan Pablo Fernandez" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T01:56:07.830" Title="How can I come up with the family words from a specific word?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13609" CreationDate="2020-01-19T12:10:53.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The related words you describe include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, in English it is quite easy to create a verb from a noun (basically you place 'to' in front of the noun to get the infinitive and generate regular cases and other aspects from there). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if there was a new noun &quot;flub&quot; you could have the new verb &quot;to flub&quot; with present continuous &quot;flubbing&quot;, past participle &quot;flubbed&quot; and so on. You could also create the adjective &quot;flubbish&quot; (like a flub) and the adverb &quot;flubbishly&quot; (in the manner of a flub, whatever that might be). This is the basis of forming the family of words that you are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately there are two problems with this approach when you are thinking about existing words: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly there are quite a lot of verbs which are irregular in some way; a good example is &quot;blood&quot; for which the normal verb is &quot;to bleed&quot; not &quot;to blood&quot; (there is a verb &quot;to blood&quot; but it is quite rare and it doesn't mean to let blood out of your body). There are other verbs which don't have the regular structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly not all words have only one meaning. For example the noun &quot;stick&quot; means a long thin piece of something (usually wood and often still with the bark on it) but &quot;to stick&quot; has nothing to do with long thin pieces of stuff and means &quot;to adhere&quot;. This means that the adjective &quot;sticky&quot; and the related noun &quot;stickiness&quot; are related to the verb meaning &quot;to adhere&quot; and not to the noun meaning pieces of wood. This gives us the English riddle &quot;What's brown and sticky?&quot; With the answer &quot;A stick&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are examples of the difficulty of finding a tool to do what you asked, whatever any logical tool tells you has to be checked against the real language for anomalies and there is no way to find the anomalies by logical thought. I don't believe that you will find a logical tool to do this reliably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191850" OwnerDisplayName="BoldBen" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T12:10:53.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13609" CreationDate="2020-01-19T14:50:49.560" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what you are looking for  WordHippo:&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordhippo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wordhippo.com/&lt;/a&gt;  Word Forms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="334969" OwnerDisplayName="Anshan Today" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T14:50:49.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-24T15:00:16.297" Score="10" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reference as to how &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.wou.edu/mla/mla-blockquote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;block quotes&lt;/a&gt; used to look like on EL&amp;amp;U before the the theme was overhauled, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11707/44619&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage's updated site theme is ready for testing!&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7804/make-blockquotes-inside-blockquotes-better-distinguishable/7813#7813&quot;&gt;Make blockquotes inside blockquotes better distinguishable&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pre-December, 2018&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mssv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mssv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since December 2018&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SbNvn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SbNvn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/343919/some-improvements-to-blockquotes&quot;&gt;Meta announcement&lt;/a&gt; dated February 19, 2020, this will soon change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some improvements to blockquotes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’re making a few changes to blockquotes soon. […]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We’re proposing we switch to a single gray bar in our blockquotes. This should fix those theming issues and make it easier to distinguish between quotes, spoilers and code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will also improve blockquote nesting, since our current nesting is a mess because the darker yellow bar is barely noticeable on the paler yellow background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of how the proposed change will look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C5Ym6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C5Ym6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Yes, I could've cropped it better)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the grey sidebar is used on similar sites&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Qpkd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Qpkd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text says:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;There is a lot of prior art out there for this approach. GitHub has styled theirs this way for a long time. So has Slack&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U, which has a yellow theme,  it should look something like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uye6K.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uye6K.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is a cropped image taken from a much larger one found &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/npLwJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Developer/employee, Aaron Shekey♦ concludes with this message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know what y’all think. I think these changes will be an improvement, and I hope you do too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, seeing as many users on EL&amp;amp;U are probably unaware of the proposal, because I haven't seen any announcement on EL&amp;amp;U meta,  please make yourself heard on META (Stack Exchange) and post what &lt;em&gt;y'all think&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T16:24:17.397" Title="Changes to block quotes in the pipeline" Tags="|discussion|design|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2020-02-25T23:06:52.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the way I handle some of these, from another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this medium, where writing and typography has to express speech and sounds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I use italics and boldface like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I use plain italics &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; for citing examples and titles. &lt;strong&gt;Never&lt;/strong&gt; for emphasis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I use boldface for emphasis. These are words that would be &lt;strong&gt;LOUD&lt;/strong&gt; in my speech. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I use bold italics for technical terms, usually with capitals, and links if I have them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I also use bold italics in examples to point out individual parts that get mentioned in the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I use single quotes only for glosses, and double quotes for actual quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lushootseed /gʷidəq/ 'geoduck'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.&quot;  -- Chesterton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also use bullets for examples, which I use a lot of; examples are &lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt; more useful than descriptions when discussing grammar, since nobody ever uses grammatical terms the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T23:06:52.150" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-02-25T23:06:52.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-25T23:26:47.013" Score="11" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those of you who have been following or peripherally aware of the drama around the network the last few quarters, a new chapter has opened, and it seems a brighter one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/343890/the-company-s-commitment-to-rebuilding-the-relationship-with-you-our-community&quot;&gt;hired a new Head of Product &amp;amp; Community, Teresa Dietrich&lt;/a&gt;, and so far it seems she is really committed to repairing the relationship between the company and the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, she explicitly recognizes the value of the long term users, in their role as curators, and has started driving new features to help them do their jobs. This is refreshing after years of telling the company that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354125/help-set-qa-teamdag-product-development-priorities&quot;&gt;question quality is our #1 gripe&lt;/a&gt;, and seeing no investment in fixing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She seems to be moving fast, and has already outlined a roadmap for 2020. You can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/344178/273503&quot;&gt;her summary on MSE&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/02/25/sharing-our-first-quarter-2020-community-roadmap/&quot;&gt;the whole thing on the SO blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wanted to call attention to one point that I think is of particular interest to the members of EL&amp;amp;U, as it’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11137/55623&quot;&gt;brought up regularly here on Meta&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are making fundamental changes to how our close question system works so that it’s a friendlier experience and more educational for post authors, while making it easier to edit and reopen closed questions, and reduce the burden on curators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions that get voted to be closed will be hidden&lt;/strong&gt;, giving authors the opportunity to improve their questions in private. Our hope is to make it easier on everyone by providing clearer guidance and encouraging better questions. This project is broken down into a series of improvements that will be rolled out iteratively over the next few months, during which time we’ll be measuring to ensure each change contributes to overall question quality and to improved reopened questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this will be an enormous improvement&amp;sup1;. I think it will also, counterintuitively, please the “be more welcoming to newcomers”&#xA;camp, who are usually in opposition to the close-voting contingent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/344181/273503&quot;&gt;one answer on the MSE summary observes&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[W]hen I was active in curation, &lt;strong&gt;we'd often downvote closed questions just to get them hidden from the site's front page. That sucked for everyone involved&lt;/strong&gt;. This new approach has the potential to be much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there will be less incentive to downvote in tandem with our closevotes, improving the experience for the OP, and making it less likely that a negative experience scares them off, rather than sticking around, engaging in the comments, and improving their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for those fly-by-night OPs who still remain, well, at least their questions won’t be clogging up the front page anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;sup1; &lt;sub&gt; Now, it’s not stated that this change will be rolled out to all sites, but given the procedural UX unification we’ve seen from SE recently, I wouldn’t rule it out. But even if it’s only applied to SO initially, note that that’s true of the “Ask A Question” Wizard too, and the same roadmap notes that this going to be rolled out to the international SE and network sites this month, so if it’s effective, we’ll see it too, eventually. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="5385" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T23:43:30.597" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T14:04:38.903" Title="Coming soon: improvements to close-voting" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13615" CreationDate="2020-02-28T13:17:49.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this could be a huge improvement, especially because it allows a CV to hide the LQQ before a Points Hog or ignorant newbie has a chance to post an answer it wasn't in a fit state to receive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A surprising number of LQQs never end up getting the 5 CVs needed, but don't get edited to improve them either, so they just linger on. Thankfully, unanswered questions with zero votes get auto-deleted after a year (or, with a negative score, after just a month). What really damages us, though, are the LQQs with a LQ answer. The answer effectively protects the question from deletion, other than by high-rep users or mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this may well be the solution we've been looking for: hiding the LQQ until it's either edited back into the Light, or vote-cast into the Pit of Closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only question, then, is ... what happens to a hidden question that doesn't get edited but doesn't get enough CVs to be closed? Should we call this state Purgatory, or Limbo? [Or for those who prefer a modern equivalent to Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps the Twilight Zone?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2020-02-29T06:05:49.020" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T06:05:49.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13613" CreationDate="2020-03-04T16:24:17.397" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why the [expletive deleted] would anyone think that removing the different background color from blockquotes is in any way, shape, or form a good idea? Just because everyone else is jumping off a cliff doesn't mean we should, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't tell me &quot;because theming&quot;, because any theme worth the name will have a contrast background color available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grrr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T16:24:17.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T10:53:52.413" Score="5" ViewCount="831" Body="&lt;p&gt;2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources related to the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/13618&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T06:40:13.707" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2020" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-06-17T09:54:42.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13643" CreationDate="2020-03-06T05:26:38.827" Score="6" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Issues&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encountered two related issues within the last 24 hours.  I'm only using these instances to highlight what some contributers who do not have a high reputation get met with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier today there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/526958/how-to-say-the-digits-after-the-decimal/526967?noredirect=1#comment1285439_526967&quot;&gt;a comment to a question&lt;/a&gt; stating that it is fine to answer questions via comments, insinuating there was a Meta policy supporting this.  Yesterday, I had a now-deleted altercation with a different high reputation user that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/526820/helping-others-is-a-good-habit-which-part-of-speech-is-helping-others-her/526821?noredirect=1#comment1285323_526821&quot;&gt;my answer was not substantial and it belonged in a comment&lt;/a&gt;.  As a user of this site as a whole for nearly 8 years and this stack for nearly 6 (despite this account's 6 months), I find it odd that high reputation users would insist on using any Stack in a way that is inconsistent with site-wide policy or in an undocumented manner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see a definitive answer or agreement to what the policy is.  Previously asked questions on the topic do not give a clearly stated answer and community resources conflict with this assumed policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I ask two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is ELU's policy on answer quality and location?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where is this policy documented?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an attempt at discussing, defining. and documenting this policy.  To be clear, &lt;strong&gt;this is not necessarily asking for a change in policy&lt;/strong&gt;.  I am only asking for the policy to be clearly defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What Do Available Resources Say&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13601/why-are-advanced-users-answering-poor-questions-in-comments&quot;&gt;3 weeks ago&lt;/a&gt; a user asked for clarification on the policy and it was closed as a duplicate of this question answered by &quot;off-topic questions can be answered in comments&quot;.  This indicates that this is the currently active policy.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194963/should-one-downvote-answers-to-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;There has  been discussion&lt;/a&gt; on SE Meta that off-topic questions should be closed without answers to prevent people from asking bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every new user is suggested to take &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt; before posting their first question or comment.  The tour specifically calls out the area for questions, and the area for answers.  It also clearly states the following (emphasis is not my own):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our goal is to have the &lt;strong&gt;best answers&lt;/strong&gt; to every question, so if you see questions or answers that can be improved, you can &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use edits to fix mistakes, improve formatting, or clarify the meaning of a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt; to ask for more information or clarify a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE Meta has a post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17447/answer-or-comment-whats-the-etiquette&quot;&gt;Answer or Comment&lt;/a&gt; etiquette that is over a decade old.  This etiquette policy, to my knowledge, has never once changed.  Answers should be answers.  It also brings up a secondary reason: answers are always indexed by search engines while comments aren't necessarily indexed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;SE Meta's help page&lt;/a&gt; is very clear on their stance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When shouldn't I comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background Information&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Skip this if you don't want greater context for the history of these policies on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone stays active with the meta boards for a particular stack, so some policy changes or clarifications may have slipped under people's radars, or they may have taken a break from ELU while change occurred.  Here's a very brief, non-exhaustive history of the policy that I could put together while I was researching this policy myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was discussion of answer policy dating back much farther, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4557/answering-questions-in-comments&quot;&gt;6 years ago&lt;/a&gt; the policy was clearly stated (with 12 votes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[You] should not answer in comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only time an answer in comments is appropriate is if you are unsure of your answer or if you are confused by the question and need further clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a few-year period where some discussion happened with a bit of line-moving but no substantial change.  Skip ahead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9921/what-to-do-with-those-questions-which-have-received-answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;3 years ago&lt;/a&gt; and a major change in the policy received 10 votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange encourages the editing of answers for improvement. This carries the corollary that Stack Exchange recognises that answers may be initially offered in a form that is less than ideal. However, as with some other high-traffic SE communities, the ELU community tends to penalise unsubstantiated answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For simple answers to simple questions, leaving them as comments is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I see it clearly stated that answering in comments is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;2 years ago&lt;/a&gt; the top voted answer with 29 votes was &quot;answers may be made in comments where the question is off-topic but we still wish to help the asker.&quot;  This more narrowly defines the policy than the entry above: answers in comments are only appropriate for off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11237/qualitative-boundaries-for-what-it-means-to-answer-in-comments&quot;&gt;Also 2 years ago&lt;/a&gt; the top voted answer with 6 votes was created as a community wiki entry.  The following answer really requires context, so I suggest reading it directly from the link.  I've pasted the answer here for completeness, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;We expect answers to be substantial, and backed up by references. [⬅️ This therefore is not an answer. :-]&quot;&#xA;    —tchrist♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By this, I suppose what tchrist means that because his comment does not qualify as an answer, due to a lack of substantiation, that it has immunity from the rules against answers in the comments. This explains part of the reason why he did not post it as an answer: He does not believe it to be one. However, another part of the reason why he did it that way may just be that he intended it to be self-illustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider the following example in light of the quote above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Question: Questions about the verb “coin” when coining an idea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;User Comment: To &quot;coin&quot; means to take a piece of nondescript metal and stamp it with a pattern that makes it a recognizable piece of money. In other words, create something of clear, discernible value out of raw materials. Other meanings are metaphors on that concept. – Hot Licks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Mod Comment (bold in original): @HotLicks Please don’t write answers in comments. It bypasses our quality measures by not having voting (both up and down) available on comments, by not being editable by the community for improvement, and by not having a visible edit history.. Comments are to be used only for clarifying and improving the question; please don’t use them for other purposes. – tchrist♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hot Licks's comment wasn't answer-worthy, per tchrist's note that &quot;We expect answers to be substantial, and backed up by references&quot;. This contrasts with the (earlier) &quot;Please don't write answers in comments&quot; from the same moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We need clearer guidelines about what constitutes an &quot;answer in comments&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This occurred concurrently with the previous post, is a community wiki post, and also calls for more clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find any more recent policy-related questions beyond those from two years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="361344" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T02:48:27.000" Title="What is the current policy for answering questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13615" CreationDate="2020-03-06T13:35:04.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting development. Hiding a post on the first vote to close sounds more practical than hiding it only upon closure. Here are some thoughts about hiding the question early:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there should be a mechanism for voters to easily find the posts they voted on - they might decide to check on the post, or perhaps have second thoughts and now want to retract their vote;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;hiding questions becomes easy, maybe too easy - they should consider hiding a question only after it gets 2 (or 3) votes to close;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the 'court of appeal' would be the community's meta site - it would help new users if their hidden posts included a link to meta together with some advice about how to post an appeal;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Item deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there will be very little interaction with a post that has been hidden - the reason for voting to close should be made visible when votes are cast; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;since a single vote to close changes the status of the question, should be a 'vote to keep open' button on the question page that does the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T14:04:38.903" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T14:04:38.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-08T01:36:16.200" Score="10" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;While going through the review queue, I've seen a few word/phrase request questions being marked for closure because of being opinion based. Since English is such a rich language, almost every word/phrase request will have multiple potentially correct answers. It is entirely appropriate for these questions to be opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would whoever is voting to close these questions as opinion based please stop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close queue is already overloaded, and unnecessarily adding questions to the close queue is slowing down the quality moderation of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions are asked by first time users. Arbitrarily punishing them for asking an on topic question will drive many of them away. Hopefully we still want new users, and are willing to smooth off their rough edges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastEditorUserId="73636" LastEditDate="2020-03-16T04:52:09.590" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T04:52:09.590" Title="Can we stop voting to close word request questions as opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-08T21:51:13.673" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago, I noticed that the Help Center page, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; contained a long list of things that users shouldn't ask about. However, there is a different Help Center page that's supposed to be about what types of questions not to ask. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if that list of &quot;don't ask&quot; topics could be moved from the former Help Center page to the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163930" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T22:27:39.680" Title="Move &quot;dont ask&quot; list out of the &quot;do ask&quot; help page" Tags="|feature-request|help-pages|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13622" CreationDate="2020-03-08T22:27:39.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between &quot;What &lt;strong&gt;topics&lt;/strong&gt; shouldn't I ask about?&quot; and &quot;What &lt;strong&gt;types of question&lt;/strong&gt; shouldn't I ask?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first covers the subject matter; the second the actual questions which are asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's actually shown in the lists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The meaning of words, or synonyms for words, unless you have first looked them up in a dictionary or thesaurus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Proofreading (&quot;Is this right?&quot;, &quot;Are there any mistakes?&quot;), unless a specific source of concern is clearly specified. See below for hints on checking existing texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Writing advice (see Writers.SE instead) or critique requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;How to improve my English?&quot; (this is not constructive anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Translation and non-English languages — please see the translation tag info for details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jokes that do not rely on the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are topics which explicitly do not fall into the &quot;What can I ask about?&quot; valid subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other list covers questions which might be asked about valid topics, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your question is just a rant in disguise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no: the two lists are orthogonal and seem fine as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T22:27:39.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13621" CreationDate="2020-03-09T02:04:47.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions meeting the criteria outlined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;tag's about page&lt;/a&gt; should not be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions almost meeting the criteria should be improved through edits and asking for clarifications in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are far off should be flagged to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="361344" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T02:04:47.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13621" CreationDate="2020-03-09T03:32:17.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question appears to conflate a number of very different issues, so the simple answer would have to be &quot;No&quot;. The more comprehensive answer would be &quot;It depends&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flagging vs voting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one with the 3,000 rep required for close-voting should be flagging a question for closure, they should simply VTC. If the question is whether a user with less than 3,000 rep should flag a SWR as POB (don't you just love acronymic answers?), I think the benefit of having a user actively involved in community moderation far outweighs the minor downside of a few questions that might inappropriately be directed to the Review Queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a close flag is inappropriately raised, one possible outcome is that it will expire after an algorithm-determined number of days. I'm not sure what the system interaction is between Review Queue votes to &quot;Leave Open&quot; and the original flag; it would be preferable that if sufficient Leave Open votes are cast and the question is removed from the Review Queue, this also results in the close flag being registered as &quot;declined&quot;, because this provides a feedback mechanism for the flagger. [&lt;strong&gt;Can anyone confirm if this is the case?&lt;/strong&gt; If it's not, I'll post something recommending it as a system fix.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC on SWR as POB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one should be systematically voting all SWRs as POB, as this would suggest that they're not reviewing each question on its merits. The issue is therefore whether a particular SWR could reasonably be viewed as POB. The Help Centre offers the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;following guidance&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• &lt;strong&gt;Opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; - discussions focused on diverse opinions are great, but they just don't fit our format well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than on facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It’s often possible to rewrite opinion-based questions to focus on a more fact-based line of questioning. If you see a way to do this, consider editing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the correct approach is to examine the question's actual wording, and in particular assess what kind of response it's seeking. If it's likely to result in a &lt;em&gt;correct, evidence-based answer&lt;/em&gt;, then it should not be closed as POB [but it might still warrant closure on other grounds such as being off-topic or too broad or undefined]. However, if the wording is likely to generate &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;solutions&lt;/em&gt;, the appropriate action would be either to edit the post to &quot;fix&quot; it, or VTC as POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm writing an article about using tools, and I want to capture that feeling you get when you know how to use a tool, e.g. 'When I use a tool properly, I feel _____.' Please tell me what your favourite feeling would be.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have no hesitation in closing such a question as POB. Compare that with a slightly reworded example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm writing an article about using tools, and I want to capture that feeling not just of satisfaction but to a degree smug superiority when someone is adept in the use of a particular tool e.g. 'There's nothing better than the _____ of being expert in one's tool selection and usage.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly seeking a specific word that would be the &lt;em&gt;best fit&lt;/em&gt; for the intended usage. Users can vote the question up or down based on its &lt;em&gt;usefulness&lt;/em&gt;, but it's a legitimate question and is unlikely to generate &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/strong&gt; opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting vs closing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth making one final point: the idea of requiring &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; votes to close a question is to ensure that any action is representative of the broader EL&amp;amp;U community's preferences rather than being subject to individual and subjective interpretations or sensitivities. There are plenty of questions that people have voted to close, often for an objectively sensible reason, but which never receive sufficient VTCs and therefore fall off the review queue, the votes having expired. I don't see this as a problem.  If we get to the point one day that reasonable SWRs are regularly receiving the five votes required for closure as POB, we should certainly have a further discussion here on Meta. But I don't see any indication that we're heading in that direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T03:32:17.647" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-09T03:36:44.627" Score="-2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did this 1 rep user (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/334696/phillip-mitchell&quot;&gt;Phillip Mitchell&lt;/a&gt;) who has asked no questions and posted no answers manage to post a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/118368/#comment1168193_118368&quot;&gt;Opposite of benefit of the doubt?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T04:23:49.467" Title="How did a 1 rep user post a comment?" Tags="|bug|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13626" CreationDate="2020-03-09T04:23:49.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it’s not a bug. This one has a simple answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Bc3s.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Bc3s.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of deleted answer and notice&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T04:23:49.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13618" CreationDate="2020-03-11T17:38:54.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dWnyt.png&quot; alt=&quot;The application of language!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T17:38:54.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-12T04:05:08.277" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this yesterday: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/527418/is-say-me-really-correct-english&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;say me&amp;quot; really correct English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only was it downvoted, which is weird in itself, but it was actually closed a &quot;off-topic&quot;. This time, I simply &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to know: what is off-topic about asking about English in the &quot;English language &amp;amp; usage&quot; category of this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, I at least have a &quot;gut feeling&quot;, but not this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="377466" OwnerDisplayName="Linford Ropiak" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T11:40:21.450" Title="Why was this highly on-topic question closed as &quot;off-topic&quot; and downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2020-03-12T11:30:28.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m sure that you understand the vagueness of, e.g. “the 14th century” and realise that nothing here is going to clarify that vagueness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a century is, as per OED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. A period of one hundred years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t matter when it starts: “In 1848 the family was one of the richest; a century later that had changed.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another sense, and the one you mean - OED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.a. Each of the successive periods of one hundred years reckoned forwards or backwards in time from a conventional starting point, esp. the date traditionally accepted for the birth of Christ. Frequently with preceding ordinal numeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Since the traditional year of the birth of Christ is a.d. 1, the first century is traditionally regarded as a.d. 1–100, the twentieth century as 1901–2000, the first century b.c. as 100–1 b.c., etc. However, more recently a ‘century’ in this sense has been popularly taken as spanning the years in which the last two digits of each year range from 00 to 99 while any preceding digits remain the same; in this reckoning, the twentieth century is regarded as the years 1900–99 inclusive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;em&gt;the first century is traditionally regarded as a.d. 1–100&lt;/em&gt;” is probably better understood as “&lt;em&gt;the first century runs from January 1, 1 a.d. to December 31st, 100 a.d.&lt;/em&gt;” In practical terms, and accepting Christ’s birth as Dec. 25th 1 a.d., we see that the birth had a retroactive effect on the “a.d.” designation of preceding months, although the “real” a.d.1 was very short indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus “&lt;em&gt;Since the traditional year of the birth of Christ is a.d. 1,&lt;/em&gt;” is probably better understood as “&lt;em&gt;Christ’s birth signalled the start of those years labelled “a.d.”&lt;/em&gt;” (As Christ and Herod were allegedly alive at the same time, and as Herod died in 4BC, it is all pointless anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such references as “the 14th century” is not helped by (i) Christ’s birth being taken as December 25th, (ii) the Roman year starting on January 1st at the time of Christ’s birth, and (iii)years, in the English speaking world, often starting in March to coincide with the start of Spring and the agricultural year and thus the financial year – in the UK the financial year still runs from 1st April. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/year-history.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/year-history.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with “the ISO 8601 standard” is that the vast majority of earth’s population has never heard of it and they continue to refer to centuries as they see fit. It is accepted that “century” is a vague term - it is never used in contracts or where money is concerned without a clear definition that uses actual dates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this universal freedom to define as one sees fit, it should also be noted that the actual definition is usually unimportant and would create controversy only in reference to people and events between XX99 and XY01. For these, a slight rewording to avoid “century” is probably in order – either that or use your own interpretation. If anyone argues, refer them to this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T11:30:28.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2020-03-12T11:40:21.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't consider the question to be low-quality. But it does lack a source, it does lack &lt;em&gt;evidence&lt;/em&gt; of research. So, quickly,  here is what I might have posted if I had been a newcomer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Can you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;say me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; where the nearest inn is situated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really something that would be asked by a native English speaker? I read it in a cartoon from the 1990s where a tourist (apparently native English, but possibly not) says that exact phrase to a couple of Swedish peasants standing by their road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched on Google the expression &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Can%20you%20say%20me%22&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk00RwZBJKfPeF16dxzed_NvCqoKhCg:1584012189675&amp;amp;ei=nRtqXqLqKIeI1fAP95KQ0As&amp;amp;start=20&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjirIqf6ZToAhUHRBUIHXcJBLoQ8tMDegQIFhAu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Can you say me&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and it did not come up empty-handed. Here are a few examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please, can you &lt;strong&gt;say me&lt;/strong&gt; what is the present situation of the renovation construction here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hello, can you &lt;strong&gt;say me&lt;/strong&gt; if the cottage rooms are ronovated [sic]?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hello, can you &lt;strong&gt;say me&lt;/strong&gt; what is the difference between standard and deluxe roms.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet online I found evidence which suggested “say me” is ungrammatical but they didn't explain &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tell&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/how-use-say-tell-and-ask&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tell is usually followed immediately by a person.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Said&lt;/strong&gt; is not:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;He told me where to go.&lt;/em&gt; (NOT He said me...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishforums.com/English/ToWriteSayToMeOrSayMe/bvxzww/post.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; native speakers explained: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Tell me ...&quot; is natural.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that in the past English native speakers said &quot;say me&quot; but then it fell out of fashion? Why didn't the tourist ask the Swedish villagers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Can you &lt;strong&gt;tell&lt;/strong&gt; me where the nearest inn is situated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T11:40:21.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13621" CreationDate="2020-03-12T22:06:44.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's talk about what &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; actually means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than [on] facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the wording from the Help Centre and the review queue are almost identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reviewing a question, this is the text you see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been flagged as:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally this is what appears on a question closed for being opinion based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closed&lt;/strong&gt;. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. This will help others answer the question. You can edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common keywords are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;facts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;references &amp;amp; citations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's consider an example question (ignoring all quality issues except whether it's opinion based or not):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a word meaning &amp;quot;great in size&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be answered factually? Yes. Can this be answered with references and citations? Yes. Is it a matter of opinion whether any word means &amp;quot;great in size&amp;quot;? No. If you believe as a matter of principle that all meanings are a matter of opinion, you shouldn't be voting to close these questions. Ignore them and let others handle them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/big&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;comparative&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;bigger&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;superlative&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;biggest&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of great size, large.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly &lt;strong&gt;factual&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;cites&lt;/strong&gt; a reliable &lt;strong&gt;reference&lt;/strong&gt;, and is therefore not opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that some users think that if a question can have multiple right answers (e.g. big, large, huge, enormous, etc.) it is opinion based. The whole point of Stack Exchange is to get multiple correct answers and upvote the best ones. English is no different in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems that there are a lot of users who think that all word request questions are low quality and reduce the value of the site. This has been discussed many times before and the consensus has always been that they are on topic. While they are on topic I will support them, as long as they have no other quality issues. If they ever become off topic I will assist in closing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think certain users are very biased against word request questions, and are voting to close them not based on the merits of the question in question, but from their own prejudices. Please stop doing this. You don't have to like everything. Accept that these questions are on topic, ignore them, and focus on what you do like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T22:06:44.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2020-03-13T22:31:16.667" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It comes down to the motivation of the asker. If they say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Person X did Y to me. What word Z can I call them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it seems like this is asking for verbal ammunition. If we could be 100% sure of their motivation, we could close the question as not relating to learning about English. I am careful not to accuse people of bad intentions, but I do occasionally write a comment directing them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Interpersonal Skills&lt;/a&gt; (which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; about helping people, not hurting them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree we shouldn't help people hurt other people. However, words can be used for all sorts of things, and just discussing them can be OK. For example, one swear word is &quot;fuck&quot;. I didn't swear myself just then because I am only discussing the topic, not using swear words right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we need to be careful. It's your choice whether you respond to such a question or not. I usually don't because I don't like these questions but I'm not going to flag them for closure or removal unless there is something else seriously wrong with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T22:31:16.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T12:55:32.117" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are requests for analyses, interpretations,  restricted to single sources (eg McCawley, CGEL) acceptable on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of McCawley, and all of Huddleston and Pullum, for instance, are not available to the majority of contributors. But a bigger problem I have with such questions (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/525003/how-is-compound-noun-defined-in-cgel&quot;&gt;How is 'compound noun' defined in CGEL&lt;/a&gt;) is that they focus attention on one treatment, which, whether the treatment is optimal or not, seems unscholarly to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of the three answers given to the cited question at this time can be seen to be strictly non-answers; one begins 'I don't have CGEL, but I'm going to answer anyway.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T16:43:49.177" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T16:43:49.177" Title="Are requests for analyses restricted to single sources (eg McCawley, CGEL) acceptable on ELU?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T20:14:21.243" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for resources to follow online for language and single-word hobbyists as myself. Do you have any good suggestions? Mailing list subscriptions, twitter feeds, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250649" OwnerDisplayName="Kat Sosnick" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2020-03-18T14:22:08.973" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T05:24:25.650" Title="As a single-word enthusiast, what links/blogs should I follow?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13638" CreationDate="2020-03-17T13:53:14.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word of the Day page&lt;/a&gt;, where you can also subscribe to a daily email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2020-03-20T05:24:25.650" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T05:24:25.650" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-17T13:53:14.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13638" CreationDate="2020-03-17T13:55:09.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordsmith.org/words/today.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Word A Day&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordsmith.org/awad/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a subscription for a daily email&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T13:55:09.170" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-17T13:55:09.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13638" CreationDate="2020-03-17T14:17:33.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The New York Times's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/column/learning-word-of-the-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word of the Day&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T14:17:33.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13638" CreationDate="2020-03-17T14:42:34.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/word-of-the-day.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Club&lt;/a&gt; offers phrases, idioms, phrasal verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T14:42:34.677" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-17T14:42:34.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13619" CreationDate="2020-03-20T02:48:27.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two weeks after your question was posted and still no answers. I think this is because there is currently no consensus here on ELU about answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the official, written rules as encoded by the site software itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid answering questions in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we have the unofficial, mostly unwritten (or at least hard to find) rules that some users follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No wonder new users are confused when they arrive here! If this is their first Stack Exchange experience, they will be guided by the software, not knowing any differently. If they've used other Stack Exchange sites before, they'll expect some sort of consistency. Most other sites are in line with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your questions directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is ELU's policy on answer quality and location?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It depends who you ask.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is this policy documented?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The official policy is documented in the tour, the help centre, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unofficial policy is documented sporadically in ELU.Meta posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the tour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This site is all about &lt;strong&gt;getting answers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The person who asked can mark one answer as &quot;accepted&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Accepting doesn't mean it's the best answer, it just means that it worked for the person who asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;You earn reputation when people vote on your posts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your reputation score goes up when others &lt;strong&gt;vote up&lt;/strong&gt; your questions, answers and edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Improve posts by editing or commenting&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our goal is to have the &lt;strong&gt;best answers&lt;/strong&gt; to every question, so if you see questions or answers that can be improved, you can &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt; to ask for more information or clarify a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour's definition of an answer is one that can be accepted (comments can't), one that earns you reputation (comments don't), and one that can be edited by anyone (comments can't). It also says that comments should be used to &lt;em&gt;clarify&lt;/em&gt; a question or answer. It doesn't say that comments should be used to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; a question or &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; an answer, and the hover notification on &quot;add a comment&quot; says: &quot;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. &lt;strong&gt;Avoid answering questions in comments&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 17 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/search?q=comments&quot;&gt;results for &quot;comments&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in the help centre including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Privilege: comment everywhere - Leave comments on other people's posts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are comments? Comments are temporary &quot;Post-It&quot; notes left on a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/someone-answers&quot;&gt;What should I do when someone answers my question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are meant for requesting clarification, leaving constructive criticism, or adding relevant but minor additional information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;What does it mean if a question is &quot;closed&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Closed questions cannot be answered, but can be edited to make them eligible for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope, consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, either we accept that the rules that were put in place originally are still valid, or we petition Stack Exchange to change the official rules for this site. The current situation where common practice is at odds with the official rules is too confusing and creates conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for answering questions in comments, it's really hard to stop yourself from doing it. I saw a question today in review that I close voted, and I nearly answered it in a comment too. I had to remind myself that since I considered it off topic, it would have been inappropriate for me to answer it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a philosophy that responsible citizens don't have the privilege of breaking laws they disagree with while they're trying to get them changed. If you want a different set of rules to be legal, convince the Powers That Be to change the official rules before changing your behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T02:48:27.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4658" CreationDate="2020-03-23T20:01:39.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but the language of philosophy is on topic ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T20:01:39.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4658" CreationDate="2020-03-25T17:14:34.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no sharp line separating the present-day philosophy of language from linguistics. Some of the theories developed by the philosophers of language, over the last hundred years or so, can illuminate many specific problems concerning English language and usage. The questions that concern &lt;strong&gt;application&lt;/strong&gt; of such philosophical theories to &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; problems of &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; language should thus be welcomed here, and, in fact, have been welcomed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the questions that concern the theories of the philosophy of language in the abstract (the questions that could be asked about any language), are probably better asked at some other site, such as the Philosophy Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a question that involves the application of Gricean maxims to a particular locution is probably within the scope of this site. On the other hand, a question that calls for an interpretation of Heidegger's thesis that the language is the house of being would be off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted the questioners may not be aware whether their questions involve philosophy of language. The questioner may sometimes be simply puzzled by some feature of the language, and it is only in answering it that the philosophical undercurrents of that puzzlement become explicit. For example, the questioner may have never heard of Gricean maxims, but they may turn out to play the crucial role in a good answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2020-03-25T17:46:42.633" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T17:46:42.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-25T13:45:39.407" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a website or something that would suggest me some books to read after assessing the level of English skills I have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378714" OwnerDisplayName="luqman" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T10:01:35.080" Title="Suggestions about books after assessing the level of English I stand at" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T00:55:06.170" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of potentially poor quality questions when I go through the review queue, but I don't know how I'd recognise a good quality proofreading question. The close message says a specific source of concern must be mentioned for it to be on topic. But what would that look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone provide an example of a good quality proofreading question, preferably linking to one that has been answered? Can you explain what makes it a good question and not a &quot;do my work for me&quot; question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T00:55:06.170" Title="What's an example of a good proofreading question?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13362" CreationDate="2020-03-30T00:20:11.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The American English dictionary is back again in its full form. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About | Lexico&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. How can I switch between the UK and US dictionaries?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When performing a search, select the drop-down menu next to the search bar (or below the search bar on mobile) to select the dictionary you'd like to use. This drop-down menu also allows searches of our grammar articles or the thesaurus. The selector will remember your preference for subsequent searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This update seems to have happened sometime in February 2020.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confusingly, though, the entries of the British dictionary is under &lt;code&gt;https://www.lexico.com/definition/...&lt;/code&gt; while the American dictionary is under &lt;code&gt;www.lexico.com/&lt;b&gt;en/&lt;/b&gt;definition/...&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old links to the American dictionary on Oxford Living Dictionaries (&lt;code&gt;en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/...&lt;/code&gt;) now redirect to the corresponding pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194620" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T00:20:11.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13650" CreationDate="2020-03-31T22:12:49.690" Score="7" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/529300/how-many-common-proper-collective-personal-nouns-in-letter&quot;&gt;A question was posted&lt;/a&gt; (no longer visible) , and another user took exception to the format and edited to provide what I would consider to be a defacement. It was certainly never the OP's intent, and may in fact have contributed to the deluge of DVs it received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be rolled back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T21:33:22.263" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T21:33:22.263" Title="How did this bizarre edit come to be approved?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13649" CreationDate="2020-04-01T07:20:13.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. It's a defacement of the post. I've rolled it back (which I hope will also remove the +2 &quot;edit approved&quot; rep reward). I also removed the answer which reinforced the poor edit without actually being an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the question has now also been deleted (not by unilateral vote; mine was the last of the three required).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T07:20:13.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-01T17:49:27.623" Score="11" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without naming and shaming… we have a “newish” and very enthusiastic user on the main who seems to suffer from impulse control and keeps posting LQ “answers”. Many of these answers are critiques of the OP's questions. In spite of the encouragement from some of us suggesting that they abide with site standards, this user  insists on cluttering up the site with LQ and NAA posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Anyone that participates here on a regular basis knows exactly who I am talking about.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of their answers are literally “I don’t know, but maybe someone here does”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, they are also trying to edit other posts in a fashion which can only be described as “bizarre”. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13649/how-did-this-bizarre-edit-come-to-be-approved&quot;&gt;One of these &lt;em&gt;edits&lt;/em&gt; was called defacement by one Mod, and was rolled back..&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have flagged 10 of their answers as NAA (8 approved, 2 still on the LQ queue), and I am sure that many other users have flagged these as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the system kick in at some point and “warn off” this type of user? Is there a number of NAA and VLQ flags which will result in Mod notification, or even suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to discourage new users, but I feel like I am cleaning up after a puppy that insists on peeing inside, even though the door is open, and the garden is sunny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T21:42:21.367" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T00:17:57.317" Title="Does the system track and chastize a user after a certain number of NAA flags?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2020-04-02T07:00:42.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the system kick in at some point and “warn off” this type of user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, while there is a warning before automatic question-ban, I don't think there is a warning before answer-ban. The user will only notice when they cannot post an answer anymore, as stated on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/answer-bans&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a number of NAA and VLQ flags which will result in Mod notification, or even suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the number of flags are recorded, there is no automatic Mod notification nor automatic suspension due to the number of flags only. Though, mods might notice the issue when observing their mod queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;review outcome&lt;/em&gt; from flags may help because deleted posts (in addition to downvotes) are also counted for triggering automatic post-ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, use the custom mod flag and explain clearly the issue and provide some more examples as possible to help mods notice it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94616" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T07:00:42.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-02T09:37:02.123" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why has the &amp;quot;belongs on&amp;quot; message changed to Yoda speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;english.meta.stackexchange.com belongs on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ell.stackexchange.com belongs on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3LstU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3LstU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T07:39:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T09:37:02.123" Title="english.yoda.stackexchange.com belongs on this question does" Tags="|bug|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2020-04-04T00:17:57.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think helpful NAA/VLQ flags have weight &lt;em&gt;themselves&lt;/em&gt; towards a ban. (After all, you may have helpful flags on posts that used to be bad, but were later fixed.) But flags make the post be reviewed (usually &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/247658/323179&quot;&gt;by the review queues&lt;/a&gt;), and what happens there to the post can cause a ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ban is caused by having enough answers that were downvoted and/or deleted. But good (i.e. upvoted, non-deleted) answers help prevent an answer ban, so it can take a while for some users (especially those with &gt;500 rep) to actually get banned. (We don't know the exact logic here, to prevent people from gaming the ban.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases like these, it can be better to flag for moderator attention, giving them evidence of the problem (e.g. from your flag history if you can find it). There is a specific suspension reason for users with many low-quality posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/86998/323179&quot;&gt;the MSE guide to bans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T00:17:57.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11282" CreationDate="2020-04-04T08:18:45.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first read &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is &quot;the&quot; ever pronounced &quot;knee&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assumed it meant &quot;is &quot;th&quot; ever pronounced &quot;n&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not the only one - Herrison at March 17 2018 thought the same thing and actually went as far as answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that was the original question, then the OP should have been given a short time to clarify that they meant &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is the &quot;e&quot; in &quot;the&quot; ever pronounced as the &quot;ee&quot; in &quot;knee&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T08:18:45.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13657" CreationDate="2020-04-11T14:36:20.757" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious, but when I opened the site this morning I noticed that my rep had dropped by 32 points, and impact by 1K. There was no notification in the &quot;Recent Achievements&quot; icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other icons do not seem to be affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T15:01:14.487" Title="Why did my rep and impact drop?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13656" CreationDate="2020-04-11T15:01:14.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happened is that the migration stub for your question asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/526938/2085&quot;&gt;Does 'booze' include wine and beer?&lt;/a&gt; was automatically deleted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/173513&quot;&gt;the Roomba daemon&lt;/a&gt; fourteen hours ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6kFII.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6kFII.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen capture of deleted migration stub&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/239721&quot;&gt;Does the definition and usage of 'booze' include wine and beer? Does it depend on the geography?&lt;/a&gt; over on ELL last month by five community members, leaving only a bare stub hanging out on ELU as a pointer for a month. After that, it gets reaped by the clean-up daemon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you lost 34 points, not 32, which is completely accounted for by subtracting the three downvotes at two apiece from the the four upvotes at ten apiece for a total of 34 points gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T15:01:14.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-12T11:19:12.457" Score="2" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/489085/37273&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/489085/37273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already raised flags on it - it has -4 votes, but isn't deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is by a high reputation user here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37273" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T19:12:46.630" Title="Why is this abusive answer not deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deletion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13658" CreationDate="2020-04-12T15:51:37.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks for a &quot;Gender neutral alternative to Sir/Madam&quot; and the answer suggests one. It's even backed up with a citation, an example of a use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus it is an answer. If you don't think it's a &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt; answer, and the asker should really disregard it, then downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flag is primarily intended for posts which are directly abusive of a particular person [an &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attack*], or abusive of the system (thus cocking a snook at the entire community). The answer given does not fit either of those criteria. The fact that in certain circumstances using the answer might cause you to abuse someone by calling them &quot;Thing&quot; does not make the answer itself abusive. It's merely not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flag on the answer was declined in November 2019: &quot;a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it.&quot; That's a canned response available to moderators with a radio button, as it's usually self-explanatory. However, perhaps this answer explains the lack of evidence found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*For example, the various snide comments made against various American presidents, which I for one flag and remove on sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T15:51:37.657" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13661" CreationDate="2020-04-15T11:33:48.733" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, I'm thinking about the behaviour of someone I know, and something tells me there's a word to qualify that behaviour. However, I don't seem to remember any word that would suit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask for that kind of question here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking I already stumbled on such question in the Hot Network Question, but I can't remember if it was on site site or another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="316345" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T13:33:22.063" Title="Can I ask for the &quot;identification&quot; of a word depending on a meaning?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|appropriate-questions|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-04-15T12:52:36.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13660" CreationDate="2020-04-15T13:33:22.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can make &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;. Please read our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;guidelines for such questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the most important things to do are to provide a sentence you want to use the word in and provide any words you have discounted as unsuitable, and why they are unsuitable, so that people trying to answer have good insight into your thought process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T13:33:22.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13658" CreationDate="2020-04-15T16:18:37.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've deleted this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not about whether it's correct or incorrect, it's downright offensive. We don't allow offensive content on this site (with a very few specific exemptions for discussion of offensive things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that there's some disagreement of whether this is offensive or not - which... I don't agree with but I accept that it exists. To that end, I will offer that there is no value in retaining an answer that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; consider offensive and that's downvoted so much and that lacks an actual example of usage - characters in a book named &quot;Thing 1&quot; and &quot;Thing 2&quot; is not the same as referring to an actual person on the phone or in person or in an email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you don't consider it offensive, it is, at minimum, not an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following that open interpretation, I've deleted it the normal way, not flag deleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T17:22:42.373" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T17:22:42.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13658" CreationDate="2020-04-15T19:12:46.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the comments, I assume that the answer was posted as a joke and not to make anyone feel bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the wording of the answer, when looked at in the context of the question, gives the impression that it’s making fun of (ie mocking) OP, people who want to be politically correct, or perhaps even people with gender-neutral voices. And the core of the answer (being a joke) isn’t a good answer to the question, so it’s not really worth trying to reword it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s why I think it should be deleted (as has been done).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;If the question was looking for an insult, the answer may have been ok—with additional references. Such a question should be worded as to avoid bigotry though.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T19:12:46.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13665" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T13:33:15.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is used by staff when sharing concepts in the Discovery phase relating to product or configuration changes. In most cases a direction and/or goal has been established, and there has likely been some amount of time invested into discovery work and research. The post is being presented to the Community for feedback to be taken into consideration. Where possible, the post includes specific questions to help guide Community feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13666" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T13:33:15.850" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the post shares product or configuration change concepts during the Discovery phase. Open to receiving feedback from the Community preceding implementation." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Title="product-discovery" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-28T12:37:01.130" Score="-1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, recommend me a book where I can find all(!) English grammar.(literally all grammar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="382937" OwnerDisplayName="John Dee" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T04:21:59.817" Title="Where can I find a book about the whole grammar?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-04-30T15:15:16.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2020-04-28T12:45:51.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I cannot guarantee that you will find a book that has everything there is to know about English grammar. You will have to learn by speaking and listening to native speakers as well as using grammar books to guide you. Also, English is ripe with exceptions to any rule you may learn, which you will have to master as you become more fluent and have more exposure to the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for a start, try Jean Yates's &lt;em&gt;Master the Basics: English.&lt;/em&gt; You can buy it here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/s?k=jean+yates+master+the+basics&amp;amp;ref=nb_sb_noss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/s?k=jean+yates+master+the+basics&amp;amp;ref=nb_sb_noss&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is for learners of English as a second language, and covers parts of speech, typical verb patterns in all tenses, verb tenses, rules for combining sentence elements, and rules for capitalization and punctuation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contained in the book are a pretest with answers, exercises with answers for every section, part of speech, and verb tense, as well as charts and examples to illustrate English language patterns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You really do not need a book that is completely exhaustive, what you need is exposure to the language and it's rules and exceptions, and a good solid grammar book to guide you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380801" OwnerDisplayName="Naomi" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T12:55:55.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2020-04-29T04:21:59.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No such book would ever be agreed upon in its entirety by everybody who speaks English—or even by a majority of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike French, for instance, there is no universal authority on the rules of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best, you can find a handful of sources that detail many possible grammar rules. Some, even many, of those might be commonly agreed upon—but not always, and certainly not by everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also doesn't help that grammar can be localized. UK English can have different &lt;em&gt;specfic&lt;/em&gt; rules (or conventions) of grammar from US English, for instance. And certain regions in various geographical locations, or certain people in various cultural groups, can have their own idiomatic conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T04:21:59.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-03T11:31:52.013" Score="20" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Before asking this question here on Meta, I did search for duplicates. There are similar questions, but I found no exact duplicates. If they do exist, please direct me to them, and I will delete this question. I did find this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4249/this-question-appears-to-be-off-topic-because-it-is-better-asked-on-ell&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;This question appears to be off topic because it is better asked on ELL.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; It provides excellent discussion, but I'm still looking for consensus or a more concrete answer. I find that I'm tending more often to use comments to answer questions because I am concerned that if I go ahead and provide a formal answer, more established users may downvote it because the question itself was too simple and not appropriate for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just commented on this new question: &quot;What's the difference in (&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;) could and will in the future?&quot; The author of the question provided a sentence using each word and asked about the difference in meaning. The sentences were &quot;Will it happen?&quot; and &quot;Could it happen?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first step was to search for a duplicate question. I found questions about differences between future and conditional verb forms, but nothing that referred specifically to &quot;could&quot; used in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My next step was to answer the question. Instead of writing an answer, I chose simply to write a comment, because I had a doubt as to whether the question was off-topic for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm rather new to the site and have this doubt fairly often. Are there any objective criteria I should be using to decide whether to go ahead and answer fairly simple questions like this one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="381816" LastEditorUserId="381816" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T11:56:19.127" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T11:56:19.127" Title="I'm sometimes unsure about whether to answer a simple grammatical question or to suggest that it is more appropriate for ELL. What are the criteria?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T20:34:01.580" Score="6" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think a meaningful distinction can be drawn between the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/look-alikes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;look-alikes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;look-alikes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confusables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confusables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confusables&lt;/a&gt;. There is no category charter for the first; the second defines &lt;em&gt;confusable&lt;/em&gt; as words and phrases which are easily confused with one another, which would seem to include look-alike words (a question about &lt;em&gt;affect&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;effect&lt;/em&gt; prompted me to delve into this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about words or phrases that are easily confused with one another. This might be due to similar pronunciation. Examples are THEIR and THERE. If your question is about a word or phrase with multiple meanings consider the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ambiguity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ambiguity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ambiguity&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only 11 questions tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/look-alikes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;look-alikes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;look-alikes&lt;/a&gt;, and aside from one closed question, the last time any new questions were tagged with it was 2011. I propose it be merged into the larger and more current &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confusables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confusables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confusables&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T20:34:01.580" Title="Difference between [look-alikes] and [confusables]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-07T02:29:28.393" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year I asked a few questions related to proofreading. I was a newbie and did not know about this question ban related thing. I have been wanting to ask one question from last one month but cannot ask due to question ban. Today I read about question ban and found that&lt;strong&gt;after 6 months an account holder can get opportunity to ask new question.&lt;/strong&gt; Now my concern is that my question ban is more than 6 months old and I have not yet received my question. Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="301873" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T06:35:31.063" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T06:35:31.063" Title="question ban not lifted even after 6 months" Tags="|support|closed-questions|banned|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13673" CreationDate="2020-05-07T06:32:54.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell when your question ban was imposed. It's an automated ban imposed by the system and moderators cannot do anything to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found that you posted a question on March 25, after seeing a warning about the quality of past questions. You deleted that question after eight minutes, but — although I can't see when the ban was imposed — I suspect that that used the opportunity to post which is made available after six months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I put it like that because you stopped asking after eight poorly-received questions in May 2019. If that was when the ban started, then you would have been able to post in November 2019. You used that privilege in March 2020.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleted questions count towards the quality calculation. This means that deleting downvoted questions cannot stave off the ban: those questions have still been asked. Your most recent question was neutral, not downvoted or upvoted; however, it was still posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you were able to post on March 25, the next opportunity will probably be on September 25.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More detail is available in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13542/i-cant-ask-any-question&quot;&gt;another Meta question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T06:32:54.540" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-09T15:11:22.253" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/533256/is-there-a-specific-verb-for-when-a-person-goes-um-and-ah-while-they-are-thi/&quot;&gt;Is there a specific verb for when a person goes &amp;quot;um&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ah&amp;quot; while they are thinking what to say?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;locked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should probably be closed as a dup of the linked question, but why would it be locked in the meantime? (I'm used to at least a comment on contentious or disruptive questions saying why they are being locked, but here I just see a bunch of answers of varying quality.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123190" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T08:46:33.150" Title="Why was &quot;Is there a specific verb for when a person goes “um” and “ah” while they are thinking what to say?&quot; locked?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13676" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:28:53.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were sixteen comments, all now deleted, thirteen of which garnered flags and most of which are reproduced in actual answers to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lock discourages similar contributions, and encourages people who may have germs of answers to expand them into real answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:28:53.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13681" CreationDate="2020-05-09T21:54:45.273" Score="9" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use Grammarly almost daily for work and I almost feel like I'm cheating at some points, because I can be a total dunce when it comes to the English language and I can simply never trust myself to send any sort of document to a high-ranking executive at the company where I work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would members of this site suggest using Grammarly? What is your general opinion of it? Do you believe it is helpful? As I believe a lot of the members on this site are quite invested in the English language, it wouldn't surprise me if they had a negative opinion of it because it enables people to cheat their way into job interviews and other similar situations when ultimately they'd be unqualified.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Through my experience in human resources, I've encountered many seemingly illiterate people who nevertheless provided perfectly worded CVs. I've certainly found this to be interesting over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="384540" OwnerDisplayName="Ethan" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T11:48:38.080" Title="What's the general consensus on &quot;Grammarly&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13678" CreationDate="2020-05-11T08:43:59.933" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you used &lt;em&gt;Grammarly&lt;/em&gt; to help you with your post, I see no evidence that you are &quot;&lt;em&gt;a total dunce when it comes to the English language&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Quite the contrary. In any case, if using &lt;em&gt;Grammarly&lt;/em&gt; is cheating then so is having someone proofread your writing - which is always a good idea with high-stake texts like CVs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the question about the general consensus on &lt;em&gt;Grammarly&lt;/em&gt; on this site. It seems that those with high reputations do not use it and make negative comments on grammar checkers in general, including the one provided by &lt;em&gt;Microsoft Word&lt;/em&gt;. The negativity has nothing to do with cheating, but with the often very questionable or simply wrong advice given by the checker software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you can find an answer to the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/428454/does-grammarly-predominantly-give-the-correct-use-of-english&quot;&gt;Does Grammarly predominantly give the correct use of English&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; which includes a link to the discussion of the issue by Professor Pullum, co-author of  &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="11146" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T08:54:36.967" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T08:54:36.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13684" CreationDate="2020-05-13T02:56:38.837" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reference for this is the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/534107/291924&quot;&gt;delete a question on here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 1: The actual answer seems to be that the user wasn't registered. However, this is not listed as a requirement on our question deletion &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2: I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/347821/389569&quot;&gt;requested&lt;/a&gt; that we update our help page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't view it, it's because it's already been deleted, but I have a screenshot of it from a certain point. (I redacted the name of the user in case they don't want it known that it was them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gwYca.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gwYca.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;unable to delete own post&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several things to note about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not what the question originally was. I saw it appear in the new question list with a different title, but by the time I viewed it the content had been changed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This user started to ask a question, then decided they didn't want it on the site after all—so they tried to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear if they self-edited the content before or after the deletion attempt, but it was clearly done within 5 minutes, because there is no edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The user seems to be logged in with a user account. They have a username (although edited out in the picture here), appear as &lt;em&gt;New contributor&lt;/em&gt;, and have a reputation point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The links &lt;em&gt;share&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; appear under the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question has no votes and there are no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; link.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, at the time that I'm writing this question, the post has two votes to close it on the basis that the question is off topic on main, and that a &quot;how to delete a question&quot; question belongs on meta instead. (And now one vote to close it on the basis that it lacks clarity …)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has also been advised that they should raise a flag for moderator attention, in order to have the post deleted for them. (If a moderator is reading this, please check the current status of the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have any idea what could be causing this? I can't think of any situation this post falls into that would prevent the user who posted it from deleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing I thought of is that maybe you need a minimal amount of reputation to delete your own posts, but that's not listed on the privilege list, and I've never heard of that being the case. (Nor is it mentioned in our help pages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T05:59:23.147" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T12:53:00.113" Title="Why can't a user delete their own question that was just asked and has had no activity?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13683" CreationDate="2020-05-13T03:18:47.163" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I tried to say in the comments, only registered users can delete their own posts. If you check a user’s profile and you see this, they are not registered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9leV0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9leV0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;username (unregistered)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this user has chosen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WavDC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;post as a guest&lt;/a&gt;. There is an orange banner at the top of the page that says “finish signing up for your account” and that’s what needs to be clicked to register the account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not listed as a privilege because you don’t need any reputation to register your account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For feature requests to make this less confusing see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/273440/323179&quot;&gt;Allow unregistered accounts to delete their own posts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/361285/323179&quot;&gt;Tell unregistered users why they can&amp;#39;t delete their post with a disabled delete button&lt;/a&gt; (which was inspired in part by this question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is almost always why a user can’t find the delete button. In most other cases, the button is there and pressing it tells you why you can’t delete the question. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/323179&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T12:53:00.113" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T12:53:00.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-12T21:41:30.850" Score="8" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Salutations to all during this tragic time where all feels quite, quite down,&#xA;Firstly I hope all are well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, onward to my question: I have, for the past half-year or so writ a play based in London 1660s--It is a period piece and my distinct and wrathful convictions to historical accuracy are most vicious, to say the least--now, I have thoroughly studied the time period (period documentation and poetry writ during the time) and regardless I have quite an obsession with Shakespeare and Milton, so in other words, I am rather decently rooted into the overall essence of writing in the period's &amp;quot;feel&amp;quot;--but it has come to the point where I am looking for just a simple rulebook that gives the important grammatical rules for the period: so, for example, when to use the root -th (riseth, giveth), distinctly how to follow words such as &amp;quot;thou,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;thy&amp;quot;, etc. with (thou wouldst, thou couldst)--so on and so forth--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to go over the play and check the rules to see if everything is as &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; as it may be.&#xA;Any sort of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;collected guide to the period's rules&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; would be extraordinarily appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378662" OwnerDisplayName="Vincent Grim" LastEditorUserId="378662" LastEditDate="2020-10-08T16:30:30.377" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T00:01:45.350" Title="Resource for grammatical rules pertaining to mid-17th century English" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T10:09:59.140" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bump into &lt;a href=&quot;https://fonetika.ff.cuni.cz/studium/stranky-kurzu/english-phonetics-phonology/transcription-exercises/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; on Google, and it has pretty good examples of IPA transcripts with allophones and intonation; however, I could not find such elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am grateful for the recommendations that have similar things preferably in American accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271701" OwnerDisplayName="PandoraU.U.D" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T07:26:35.803" Title="Allophones and Intonation transcripts" Tags="|discussion|american-english|pronunciation|ipa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13678" CreationDate="2020-05-21T00:57:05.237" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;How’s your penmanship? &#xA;Is your handwriting legible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s that you say? &#xA;You &lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; the things you write &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on a keyboard?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Is that ‘cheating’?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’re applying for a job where you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; use Grammarly&#xA;(or a similar tool), like a press secretary or a spokesperson,&#xA;where you need to be able to make ad-hoc statements in a grammatical way,&#xA;then it does seem a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; deceptive to use it to prepare your résumé —&#xA;although your skill with improvised speech&#xA;should still be revealed by an interview. &#xA;Otherwise, it’s fair to showcase the work you can do&#xA;when you have the appropriate tools. &#xA;(Would you expect a carpenter or a plumber&#xA;to demonstrate how well they can do their job with bare hands?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never seen Grammarly in use&#xA;(other than the demo in the incessant advertisements). &#xA;I use Microsoft Word. &#xA;I don’t follow its grammar suggestions blindly, because they’re often wrong. &#xA;But I always look at them, because sometimes they’re right;&#xA;so they are helpful to me. &#xA;I guess that Grammarly is no worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T00:57:05.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13694" CreationDate="2020-05-22T03:37:06.293" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/370388&quot;&gt;this edit&lt;/a&gt; rejected, where someone was using the nonsensical syntax of &quot;f***ing around&quot; instead of &quot;fucking around&quot;. Two of the three reviewers rejected the edit with the following rationale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is using real spelling not making readability, and more importantly, findability? If you were looking for questions about alternatives to the various ways in which &quot;fuck&quot; can be used, you would want to find this question. But you won't, because without my edit, the word &quot;fuck&quot; doesn't even occur anywhere in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30560" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T08:15:57.917" Title="Are questions better if they contain the actual words they reference?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13693" CreationDate="2020-05-22T08:15:57.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While editing the body of the question does make sense, we are not allowed to have swearing in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title rule is covered here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10775/what-words-are-offensive-in-titles-what-are-the-rules?rq=1&quot;&gt;What words are offensive in titles? What are the rules?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion of offensive words, and including those words in the text of the discussion, has been acceptable here for a long while: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253/referencing-the-existence-of-words-that-may-be-offensive?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Referencing the existence of words that may be offensive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T08:15:57.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13678" CreationDate="2020-05-22T11:48:38.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people have a mental block about proofreading, because they see what they &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to type, not what is on the screen.  Using a mechanical aid to help with that is not a moral failing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grey area starts when you slavishly obey a grammar checker about things you didn't realise were problems.  Grammarly is more sophisticated than the original MS Word feature everyone disabled 20 years ago – it won't make your text &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; – probably – but it is prescriptive, and basic, and it can undermine your confidence in how &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; mean to express yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For learners, I imagine it is useful to have a textbook that magically looks things up for you.  But underneath the slick software, that's all Grammarly is: an intermediate-level textbook.  It can't give you the style guidance you'd get from Strunk &amp;amp; White, or the Talmudic detail of the Chicago manual, or the expressive ability that comes from being confident in your own voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are writing to consistent 100% approval from Grammarly, then your writing is likely anodyne, and you would be doing everyone a favor by moving on.  If you need the mechanical proofreading help, I'd suggest at least writing first, then pasting to Grammarly, rather than letting it carp at you while you type.  Or just work at better proofreading habits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr I doubt anyone posting on this forum has bad enough English to get $130/year worth of improvement from Grammarly, and most are good enough writers that it could make them worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82540" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T11:48:38.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2020-05-23T13:40:27.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just experienced this 5 minutes ago. I was answering this question: &lt;em&gt;What nouns can be used to mean someone who is angrily inciting hatred in a public area against innocent people?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then saw that the question had been closed because it was a duplicate. The OP, who was indeed a new user, specifically wanted a term for someone who was trying to arouse hatred in a crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earlier questions that this one was considered to be duplicating did not specify this. Here are their titles:&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/43822/word-for-someone-who-loves-to-create-and-organise-noisy-lively-chaotic-events&quot;&gt;Word for someone who loves to create and organise (sic) noisy, lively, chaotic events&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72649/word-for-someone-quick-to-blame-others&quot;&gt;Word for someone quick to blame others&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere did either OP for these questions specify that the people in question needed to have a nefarious motive or an intent to manipulate the sentiments of the public, or even that they needed to be angry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As background on what I was planning to write today, one person had suggested words including &lt;em&gt;rabble-rouser&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;provocateur&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;demagogue&lt;/em&gt;, and my answer would have focused on a nuance differentiating &lt;em&gt;demagogue&lt;/em&gt; from the other terms that might have made it the best choice for responding to the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a process for disputing a decision to close a question? I suppose I could do something similar to what @FumbleFingers has suggested here, but is that the only alternative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After writing this message here, I went back and flagged the question, asking if it was appropriate to question a decision to close a question and explaining my reasons for wanting to do so in this case. I hope it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="381816" LastEditorUserId="381816" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T23:20:56.540" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T23:20:56.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-24T19:53:37.963" Score="1" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;My issue: I am a new member on English Language &amp;amp; Usage. The day before yesterday I asked a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/535251/nice-came-from-nescius-meaning-stupid&quot;&gt;Nice came from nescius meaning stupid?&lt;/a&gt;) here. I then closed out the site as I was busy. Yesterday I saw that someone had answered my question. There were two answers to my question. One of them was pure copy paste from Google but I thanked the answerer twice and apologized to him twice for not accepting his answer. I did so because his answer had more votes than the other answer, if I didn't let him know, he would feel bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had copied his answer from the first two results from a first google search. Here is the search link (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=origin+of+nice&amp;amp;oq=origin+of+nice&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3.1745j0j1&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=origin+of+nice&amp;amp;oq=origin+of+nice&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3.1745j0j1&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&lt;/a&gt;). He had copied and pasted from the first two links in the above google search. (1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/nice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etymonline.com/word/nice&lt;/a&gt;     2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/e/nice-guys/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dictionary.com/e/nice-guys/&lt;/a&gt;). Before asking my question I had already read these. If I needed these easily available results why would I ask my question on Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologized to him twice for not accepting his answer. He told me something I don't remember but I apologized again. He said &quot;read the facts&quot;. I in turn told him &quot;read the facts&quot;. I confess it was rude but I had apologized twice. After a few minutes minutes, he deleted his answer and I got &quot;-14&quot; on my question. I had asked a legit question and apologized to the answerer for not accepting his answer yet he gave me -14 in no time. Is this supposed to be normal? Did I do anything wrong? I am sure there must be something staff can do to see the deleted comments and answer. I told him I couldn't accept his answer because I had already read that. I was invited to Stack Exchange by my friend and he told me that answerers give excellent answers and are nice to questioners. But I didn't see that. I got offended in my first days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I knew about -14 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/385888/everywhere-english?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;in my profile&lt;/a&gt;. Now it is -16.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are other new members also treated the same? Should I move on and keep accepting such kind of answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question here &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; but they didn't want it there and downvoted it immediately. I hope THIS is the right place now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user385888" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T13:06:32.237" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T20:31:07.260" Title="Biased downvoting because I told the truth to the answerer" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13697" CreationDate="2020-05-26T20:31:07.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I needed these easily available results why would I ask my question on Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this shows me that you’re already in the the right mindset to be here. (You might be surprised how many people don’t put one modicum of effort into asking a question and don’t even search beforehand.) You should just include more of the results you found as you ask your question and then you’ll get better answers (or maybe just prevent answers telling you what you know). Of course, writing the perfect question is something that comes with experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll also probably find that searching ELU for the answer before asking will be good (sometimes answering your question and other times leading you to unrelated albeit interesting questions), though the site search is somewhat unreliable so YMMV. It’s not a big deal to have a question get closed as a duplicate as long as it’s not happening to many of your questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has a net positive score so I wouldn’t worry about the reputation. (Note that the -10 was from an unupvote which means that someone who upvoted previously undid their vote — unusual but you can just think of it being like they never upvoted at all.) It seems like no matter how good a question is it will still get at least one downvote (at least on ELU), so it seems likely to me that the downvotes are real and came from different people (also it’s against the rules to use multiple accounts to vote for someone). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rj394.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the comments&lt;/a&gt; (as any user with 10k+ reputation can do) and I feel you’re thinking it’s a bigger deal than it actually is. Nothing there looks even remotely offensive or problematic to me. Also, you don’t need to explain to anyone why you didn’t accept their answer (or how you voted) and you’re not obligated to accept an answer at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not really worth taking any further action against the comments there (especially since they’re on a deleted answer). If you encounter an offensive comment in the future, you can always flag it as such and a moderator will see if it needs to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T20:31:07.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13700" CreationDate="2020-05-28T11:40:05.603" Score="11" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just edited a one-sentence question. After editing, I clicked on the link in the body of the question. It led to a survey posted on the web site of a large fast-food chain: nothing to do with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hesitated between simply going back in to delete the link and flagging the question for the moderators as spam. I ultimately decided to flag the question as spam. I also called attention to the link in a comment on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning was that it might be useful to leave a record of the spam issue for the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I instead have edited the question to delete the link? Or did I do the right thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: While I was writing this post, another person made changes to my edits and removed the link. No harm, no foul, but my original question still holds, particularly since the link is still visible in the edit history. My flag was also accepted as helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I still could have saved a few people a little time and just deleted the link myself. Is it useful for moderators and users who read edit histories to know about spam occurrences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="381816" LastEditorUserId="381816" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T11:55:28.860" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T14:19:22.287" Title="Is it better to remove spam links when editing or to flag them for moderators?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|editing|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13699" CreationDate="2020-05-28T11:53:11.127" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question, the general guidance in this case is to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; edit the post. Looking at the answer below it's different; you stumbled upon a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/371133&quot;&gt;suggested edit adding spam&lt;/a&gt; and inadvertently approved/improved it &amp;ndash; the right course of action is to &lt;strong&gt;reject it as spam/vandalism&lt;/strong&gt;, and only then edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue (whether to edit spam or not) comes up frequently and the reasoning for this can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/110031/295232&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, since it applies to all sites in the network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why shouldn't we edit spam posts?:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Usually spam is easy to spot, and gets removed very fast. 6 spam flags deletes the post. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Moderators can easily see (or search for) the links posted by spammers, and can blacklist sites once it is posted enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spam doesn't usually stay there long enough for it to be cached by search engines or to have random users stumble upon it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/users/20088/nhinkle&quot;&gt;nhinkle&lt;/a&gt; says, most links do not even need to be removed, unless they are linking to porn, viruses, or disturbing content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If a post is flagged after being edited, those flags will be invalidated &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/how-does-the-spam-flag-work&quot;&gt;if the post is rolled back&lt;/a&gt;; unless your edit actually results in a post that &lt;em&gt;shouldn't be deleted&lt;/em&gt;, you're just creating an opportunity for someone to make the post stick around longer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, the community is usually &lt;strong&gt;too fast for spammers&lt;/strong&gt;, so by the time anything can happen out of it, it's already gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just flag it as spam, down-, close- or delete-voting is entirely optional. See the following references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/193916/295232&quot;&gt;Why shouldn&amp;#39;t I downvote spam that I&amp;#39;ve already flagged?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/283948/295232&quot;&gt;Should we vote to delete spam posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/96007/295232&quot;&gt;Vote to close or flag as spam (or both?)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T14:19:22.287" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T14:19:22.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13699" CreationDate="2020-05-28T13:27:05.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular item of spam was not part of the original post. It was a suggested edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spam wasn't posted by the question asker, so if I had flagged the post as spam it would have put a black mark against the wrong person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I edited out the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad you didn't edit out the link and flagged it, because that made it easier for me to find the culprit and get rid of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T13:27:05.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13704" CreationDate="2020-06-04T14:00:57.237" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I quote from an online dictionary I like to duplicate the formatting as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using standard &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; block quoting I can't find a way to have a new line without inserting a blank line.  Adjacent lines are run together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I use a &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; prefix followed by several blanks the lines are formatted as I enter them, without running adjacent lines together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I do this the standard &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;**&lt;/code&gt; delimiters for italics and bold don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to get around this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is one line&#xA;This is the next line&#xA;This line contains *italics* and **bold**&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T17:47:10.720" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T17:47:10.720" Title="How to duplicate formatting of dictionary extract, with italics?" Tags="|support|formatting|quotes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13703" CreationDate="2020-06-04T17:47:01.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/editing-help#linebreaks&quot;&gt;Editing Help&lt;/a&gt;, you can use two spaces after each line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; This is one line  &#xA;&amp;gt; This is the next line  &#xA;&amp;gt; This line contains *italics* and **bold**&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is one line&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is the next line&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This line contains &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can put an HTML line break (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) after each line, but that's more work to type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T17:47:01.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T15:28:37.283" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's fairly common knowledge that OED lists senses of a given headword in the chronological order research has found printed evidence for: it is a &lt;em&gt;historical dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally conveniently, the order adopted by (I'd say most of the) other respected English dictionaries is &lt;em&gt;frequency of use [as found by surveys]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yourdictionary.com/lurid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition [2014]&lt;/a&gt; contains, for instance, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lurid&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(1) RARE deathly pale; wan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(2) glowing through a haze, as flames enveloped by smoke&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(3) • (a) vivid in a harsh or shocking way; startling; sensational&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• (b) characterized by violent passion or crime: &lt;em&gt;a lurid tale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that this dictionary is also historical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a resource (article?) showing which English dictionaries are historical, which arrange senses in the order they deem reflects frequency of usage, and any other types?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T15:28:37.283" Title="Criteria specific dictionaries use to decide on ordering of different senses of a given headword" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13707" CreationDate="2020-06-07T10:16:23.763" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I asked this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/536834/precise-names-for-parts-of-a-day-revisited&quot;&gt;Precise names for parts of a day (revisited)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's only 1 question and 1 answer. Nevertheless it's been locked &quot;on comments&quot; and the rest of the interaction open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a) Who locked it (a moderator or the system).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b) If it's a permament or temporal locking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c) What is the reason for that locking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is closed you see the voter's names and the reason they voted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for comment-locking, I don't know how to know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it is my fault, I apologize. I didn't want to offend anybody by asking that. I was just asking terminology for times of the days. I thought that was suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="303938" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T16:09:34.203" Title="Why my question has been locked on comments if it has 1 comment and 1 answer only?" Tags="|support|comments|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13706" CreationDate="2020-06-07T14:08:48.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was the one who locked out comments on that question. You can see this by clicking on the little clock icon beneath where scores are shown, here just to the left of your opening “There's this old question” paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0xHE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0xHE.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of top of comment-locked post showing clock icon&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gives you the public timeline for that post, which is currently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4ZsTH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4ZsTH.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of public timeline for the post in question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ELU mod team delete what are frankly incredible numbers of comments, mostly in response to flags of varying varieties. Few weeks go by when we don’t delete hundreds of comments, and we’ve deleted between 50 and 100 thousand comments over the history of the site. That’s a lot of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I responded to automatic comment flags on posts with more than twenty comments and ended up deleting dozens and dozens. Sometimes I moved deleted comments to chat, sometimes I just deleted a few  here and there that were no longer relevant or which were answers hidden in comments, and sometimes I just &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt; deleted them all. On some posts I thought likely to generate further off-topic comments, I set comment-only locks, usually for a week or for ever, depending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours ended up being one of those posts. Although there weren’t a lot already deleted, it seemed to me like one destined to accumulate lots of highly localized comments that should have gone in the answer box instead. That’s the reason for the comment lock in this instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T16:09:34.203" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T16:09:34.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-08T18:00:34.467" Score="9" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a procedure for alerting moderators (without whining) when a commenter appears to be singularly obstinate and disagreeable? I'm thinking, for example, of when a commenter keeps insisting that something is in an OP that actually is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be happy to be more specific, but I'd like to be sure that I'm respecting site rules first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="381816" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T18:00:34.467" Title="Dealing with obstinacy of commenters" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13710" CreationDate="2020-06-12T11:11:59.197" Score="-2" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at at profile &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/373235/theguradian&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/373235/theguradian&lt;/a&gt; my questions weren’t answered at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assumed that my questions fit the requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did I go wrong, and why do I hurt this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to know how to properly contribute to this site please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373235" OwnerDisplayName="TheGuradian" LastEditorUserId="373235" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T23:48:39.367" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T23:48:39.367" Title="Why aren’t my questions being answered" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13709" CreationDate="2020-06-12T14:29:08.397" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try and help by reviewing some of your questions and pointing out what might be putting people off from answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/536310/why-are-most-interjections-a-variation-of-god-jesus-name&quot;&gt;Why are most interjections a variation of God/Jesus’ name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It presupposes that most interjections are a variation on God/Jesus' name. This is not true. Starting a question from a false premise makes it difficult to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could try to reformulate your question to ask something regarding the history of blasphemy as an interjection in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/536013/words-that-express-surprise-disdain-anger-etc&quot;&gt;Words that express surprise disdain anger etc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks for a list of words across a spectrum of emotional states. Such questions are usually off topic as there is no one correct answer. If you were searching for a specific word for use in a specific context then that would be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really do want a list, you can consult a thesaurus (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://thesaurus.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://thesaurus.com&lt;/a&gt;), and you'll find lists of words that have similar meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/532371/how-and-why-do-words-change&quot;&gt;How and Why Do Words Change?&lt;/a&gt; [deleted]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very broad question, as articulated by John Lawler. This site is not suitable for questions that could take an entire book to answer. Also, the question would be better suited to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://linguistics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; site, because it applies to all languages, not just English. Although, again, it is too broad for that site to address adequately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is something of more narrow focus about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/semantic-shift&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;semantic-shift&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;semantic-shift&lt;/a&gt; in the English language that you'd like to know, I'm sure we have eager users dying to answer you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that was helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some tips on asking questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We really like it when people research their questions and present their findings along with the question. We have a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;commonly available reference works&lt;/a&gt; that can help. Also, the question might have already been asked, so be sure to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt; our archives, just in case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep the question focussed. A question asking for the history of the usage of a word in a given context is fine, but asking for all the different ways a word could be used is far too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for phrase or word requests: you must at least provide an example sentence. For these types of questions context is everything for getting to the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T14:40:40.193" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T14:40:40.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-13T07:10:44.863" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Increasingly, I'm finding that when I click on 'Post a comment', the comment box refuses to open. Is it something about my computer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90320" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T07:10:44.863" Title="I can't post comments" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-20T12:47:31.973" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/521163/modern-politically-correct-english-guide&quot;&gt;Modern politically correct English guide&lt;/a&gt; (10k only, screenshot below) was deleted. I am asking for help from the community here to understand why this question was deleted, and how I could have formulated it better. The question is visible only to me (and users with 10k reputation) so I am attaching a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the comments I received was snarky without being helpful, in my opinion - it betrays an ignorance of goings-on around the world. For example, see this - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/tech-industry-has-an-ugly-master-slave-problem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/tech-industry-has-an-ugly-master-slave-problem/&lt;/a&gt; for more information on why certain terminology is offensive. That is what the question was about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nQ4ZP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nQ4ZP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10068" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T13:21:04.570" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T13:21:04.570" Title="Need help in understanding why my question was deleted" Tags="|discussion|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13713" CreationDate="2020-06-20T13:19:46.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was deleted by an automated process known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has −1 or lower score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has no answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... it will be automatically deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a]bandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly-small chance that an answer will be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendations are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/158809/295232&quot;&gt;not a very good fit for Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;; some sites explicitly declare them off-topic, on other sites they're closely as Opinion-based. On English Language &amp;amp; Usage, we have these kind of questions &lt;em&gt;here on Meta&lt;/em&gt;; you could take a look at the various questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; tag to see if your question has already been asked before, and if not, give it another try here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T13:19:46.653" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13717" CreationDate="2020-06-23T12:31:38.527" Score="5" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;10 days ago I asked this one well received question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/537510/to-avoid-repeating-one&quot;&gt;To avoid repeating &amp;quot;one&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, there are a lot of questions on Stack Exchange sites that have dozens of comments. 20-30 comments and even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That one question had only about 8 comments, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/2085/tchrist&quot;&gt;tchrist&lt;/a&gt; moved them to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/109356/discussion-on-question-by-john-c-j-to-avoid-repeating-one&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... OK. Though is was really weird. I had noticed it about 9 days ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the comments were really useful. Right then I left two additional comments there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wow, it is really strange that comments were moved to chat room. Someone was in a bad mood?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I should say &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot; to all you guys! The suggestions above are really useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no spam, no flood, no violence etc. in that chat room. And only 8-10 comments. And some of them were really useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as I discovered today, that chat room was deleted. For what reason? Could it be restored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273573" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T15:18:47.350" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T15:18:47.350" Title="Comments were moved to chat room, chat room was removed?" Tags="|support|comments|moderation|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13715" CreationDate="2020-06-23T16:15:01.667" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chat room was deleted automatically for lack of activity. I'm a little surprised that that happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been undeleted, since that's possible, but there's no guarantee it won't disappear again. &lt;strong&gt;Comments are ephemeral.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-06-23T16:15:01.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13715" CreationDate="2020-06-24T09:57:39.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the OP's bewilderment, I do. A similar thing happened to me some years ago: I had posted a question which attracted a fair number of comments, the comments were nearly all on-topic and I thought really useful for anyone intrigued by my question. But the list of comments continued to grow until a moderator transferred all of them to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look back at the chatroom created in 2015, there is the following public message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This room has been automatically frozen for inactivity&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The last message was posted 1669 days ago.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, if I visit the OP's chat room I can see the system has deleted it again. And yet, I can read all of its contents. I have no idea why this is so, maybe because I have &amp;gt;10K in reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uv9ga.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uv9ga.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I look back to the 2015 chat room, and find a valuable clue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sAgch.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sAgch.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bingo! If numerous comments were posted and transferred to chat, the room will not be deleted, it is, instead “frozen”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further digging reveals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#retention&quot;&gt;Chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt;: (emphasis mine)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Rooms will exist indefinitely, so long as there is at least one person actively talking in the room. A room is considered worth retaining if it has more than 15 messages by at least 2 users.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rooms not worth retaining&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;which are inactive for 7 days will be deleted.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Rooms worth retaining which are inactive for 14 days will be frozen. Frozen rooms do not allow any new messages to be sent, and are not shown in the default room list to prevent cluttering the rooms interface.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from userZizouz212's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/267015/223820&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Exchange Meta (2015) Things may have changed since then...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think the OP's recent edit replicating the very comments which he found most helpful, is rather distracting and a reader might be forgiven in thinking that they are part of the answer. Speaking personally, if the contents of the room are visible to everyone, I would leave them in the chat room or I would write an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; which also acknowledged the help of different users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T09:57:39.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13719" CreationDate="2020-06-26T06:50:46.180" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is in reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/538933/291924&quot;&gt;Which is the Best Engineering College in Bangalore?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was deleted, but here is the text for anybody who can't view it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i recently completed my 12th class i wanted to do engineering kindly suggest me best engineering college where i can full fill my dreams.some one suggested me couple of colleges please give me suggestion to select the best of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has nothing to do with English, but is a request for college suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before it was deleted, I started to edit the tag to replace it with something appropriate, but realized that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; nothing appropriate. Nor can a question have no tags at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, short of the question simply never having been asked in the first place, what should the resolution to this be? At present, it seems we have to live with a tag that is simply wrong. However, that pollutes the tag corpus. (Although in the case of it actually being deleted, that might not be a huge concern.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching Meta, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/110089/389569&quot;&gt;What tags for a totally off-topic question?&lt;/a&gt; The answer there is that all tags should be removed and replaced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt;. That, in addition to raising a moderator flag to have it deleted, helps to bring attention to it—or at least it used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; still the recommended method for this? If so, can a moderator change the tag on this particular question to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T08:06:46.687" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T08:06:46.687" Title="What tag should be used when a question is completely off topic?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13718" CreationDate="2020-06-26T08:06:20.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't add &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; to a question; that tag only appears when a question is migrated (and none of the original tags exists on the destination site) or when all tags on a question are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/48418/295232&quot;&gt;pruned&lt;/a&gt;. If you try to add it on an existing question, you'll get an error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tOmKp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tOmKp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Meta.SE post you found is rather old, I'll update that answer or post a new one there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked to is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/256709/295232&quot;&gt;spam seed&lt;/a&gt;; if it's not closed soon enough, the same person will post an answer (usually with a different account, to make it look like a real answer) with promotional content. IMHO, you shouldn't bother editing those questions, it's a waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T08:06:20.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-01T14:32:00.520" Score="8" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most recent posts I can find on this subject date from 2015 and earlier. Does anyone know the authoritative up-to-date advice on whether that which is posted to the EL &amp;amp; U site constitutes &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot;? What is the advice from SE on this matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T14:32:00.520" Title="What is the legal position re cut &amp; pasting OED entries?" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2020-07-02T21:31:46.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one (admittedly contrived, legalistic) argument that can be used to excuse the practice of answering some questions in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that somebody, in good faith, asks a reasonable question concerning English language and usage (broadly understood), but the question, interpreted in the most obvious way, still does not belong to this site. The questioner seems to be a nice person who, by accident, walked into a wrong room, and so doesn’t deserve to be treated dismissively. One could then write something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question, taken at face value, could be answered in the following&#xA;way: . . . . Is this all that you have in mind? If it is, then the&#xA;question is off-topic on this site, and will be closed. If there is&#xA;something else that you are looking for, then please edit the question&#xA;to clarify what that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody could possibly object to this being posted as a comment: it is a request for clarification, and seeking clarification is the primary purpose of comments in the Stack Exchange framework. However, writing all this out many times over would be quite tedious, and would make the comments even more cluttered. To avoid that, one may choose to abbreviate a comment of this kind to just what is represented by the ellipsis here, that is a provisional answer to the question, but with the understanding that a request for clarification, along the lines that are explicated here, is still implied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how many of the answers currently posted as comments can plausibly be regarded as such &lt;strong&gt;implied requests for clarification&lt;/strong&gt;, but in so far as at least some can, it can be argued that so posting them is not inconsistent with agreeing that it is, as a matter of general principle, undesirable to post answers as comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T21:31:46.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-05T12:00:10.267" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a way to export the results/ count the frequency of a specific word 'homeless' in News articles in my country over the past 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of Google Books NGram viewer for book results, but I need NEWSPAPERS only.&#xA;Other corpus sites such as Full Text Corpus data change large amounts for this work. Is there no free alternative? Or easy DIY way to export Google results? (I have tried this with no success).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390860" OwnerDisplayName="Beth C" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T18:53:56.057" Title="Using internet search engines (Google/Yahoo) 'News' results to count frequency of a word" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T03:24:19.777" Score="-7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3838/viruses-or-virii&quot;&gt;A specific question&lt;/a&gt; has been locked inappropriately and without good reason.  How can the lock be removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the question I am asking is not a typical question and would fall foul of the rules if posted on the main site rather than &lt;code&gt;meta&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;[edited: it was originally posted on the main site, but then moved to &lt;code&gt;meta&lt;/code&gt;]&lt;/em&gt;, but if you allow arbitrary decisions to be made by moderators without any kind of transparency, you need to explain yourselves; otherwise, you can expect more of these kind of completely-off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please provide an explanation with any downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390907" OwnerDisplayName="Jake" LastEditorUserId="390907" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T04:23:42.873" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T08:33:25.200" Title="How to remove an inappropriate lock on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13723" CreationDate="2020-07-06T06:51:59.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be helpful if you edited your question to indicate why such a lock might be inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I locked it in October 2016 following a number of close votes and a flag suggesting the historical lock: it was off-topic by even the then-current standards as it shows no evidence of research. The historical lock indicates that the question has historical value, both because of the existing answers and to show that standards do evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lock is &amp;quot;closed but&amp;quot;, as the post notice indicates. If that question were asked &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; (or even in 2016) it would be closed in short order because a simple dictionary search provides the answer, as the top answer demonstrates. However, leaving the question on the site allows other people who don't do research (or who rely on Google for &amp;quot;research&amp;quot;) to find it and not ask it again. Given that &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;virus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;mot du jour,&lt;/em&gt; that was probably the right decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asked ten years ago and has post number 3838. We're now at over 530,000. These days, given the volume of questions on the site, the community is &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt; less tolerant of people who do not show &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; evidence of research. Stack Exchange can usually help where all else has failed, or where research is particularly difficult for some reason (although it still has to be shown). Here, it's particularly easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the question were to be left open, it would certainly be protected: there are a number of deleted &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; on that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that pointing to a similar question which has not had this treatment as evidence that &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; question should not be locked is not likely to have the desired result. It's far more likely that the unlocked question you find would actually be locked or simply closed or maybe even deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hm. I realise I haven't answered the specific question! To get a lock removed, ask here on Meta.English with detailed reasons about why the lock is inappropriate. There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;standard MSE post&lt;/a&gt; which is relevant to that process, and another which &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;explains the historical lock itself&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T08:33:25.200" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T08:33:25.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13722" CreationDate="2020-07-06T18:53:56.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've collated sites from the comments, and added one more. It's not clear to me how many of these include actual word-frequency counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://elephind.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elephind&lt;/a&gt;: Search the world's historical newspaper archives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chronicling America&lt;/a&gt;: Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The British Newspaper Archive&lt;/a&gt;: The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and findmypast to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection over the next 10 years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/now/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NOW Corpus&lt;/a&gt;: The NOW corpus (News on the Web) contains 10.4 billion words of data from web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T18:53:56.057" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-09T15:20:33.027" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The font size I am getting for ELU is too small.  I do not recall that it was like this before.  Have I somehow made a change to my profile that will reduce the size?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The font size for ELU is smaller not only that other SE sites, but smaller than ELU meta.  Samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4KDUC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4KDUC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;meta&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DwPy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DwPy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;ELU&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T17:47:49.467" Title="Can I control the font size?" Tags="|support|display|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2020-07-09T17:47:49.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is definitely a browser setting. It's not part of your Stack Exchange or ELU profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrome shows this behaviour. If you zoom by using &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt;-mousewheel, that zoom is set &lt;strong&gt;for that site,&lt;/strong&gt; on any tab in the browser. Since all sites (including meta sites) have their own URL, you can set different sizes for any site. It looks like you have set a size of less than 100% for ELU Main, which will affect only that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other browsers may behave in a similar fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T17:47:49.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13723" CreationDate="2020-07-11T05:23:11.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it should be unlocked: locking prevents us from voting and editing (for example, that quote from Wiktionary no longer exists). There is nothing exceptional about that question, so the normal solution, closing, should have been used. I think it should be unlocked and then immediately closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T05:23:11.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13730" CreationDate="2020-07-12T08:08:37.947" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/540328/365490&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; I had given on EL&amp;amp;U was missing something. When I pressed the edit button, I saw that I had written a V and enclosed in &lt;strong&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt; i.e.  &lt;strong&gt;&amp;lt; v &amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (without spaces) but it just wouldn't show up. It's not showing up here either -&amp;gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  (press edit to see)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/miF8M.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/miF8M.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; but when I submitted the answer, the 'v' didn't show up in the answer. It was fine back then. Is there something wrong with the formatting? Am I formatting it incorrectly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="365490" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T09:23:41.667" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T13:03:57.853" Title="Why doesn't a letter show up when enclosed in &lt; and &gt;?" Tags="|bug|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13729" CreationDate="2020-07-12T09:23:04.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system is interpreting &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; as an HTML tag, and therefore it's not shown. Not all HTML tags are supported, but e.g. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, to make things bold, works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;test&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;test&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the tags seem to have gone here as well, but in this case they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have an effect. For a list of supported tags, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/1777/295232&quot;&gt;What HTML tags are allowed on Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/85886/295232&quot;&gt;may indeed be rather confusing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to use &amp;lt;v&amp;gt; in regular text, if you replace the opening &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/code&gt; with its HTML entity &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;lt;&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T13:03:57.853" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T13:03:57.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-14T18:23:05.500" Score="0" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just can't help it. I tried and seems I can't explain well maybe because my English sucks. I understand that maybe my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/540775/are-these-two-specific-use-of-a-phrase-and-a-word-giving-incorrect-false-informa&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is not written well and it is not fitting well here, but I quite don't understand if you can't ask such problems here and on especially English Language Learners, what's the point of these sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think a compromise would be someone please help me edit it better. Because I'm really struggling. The problem is genuine. I know it's not easy to answer but if it weren't a problem at all, why would I ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149277" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T18:23:05.500" Title="Can someone please help me edit my question better?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-22T19:41:11.820" Score="10" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, we have two categories for flagging of posts that should be deleted ASAP: &amp;quot;spam&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;rude/abusive.&amp;quot; Posts so flagged get the bum's rush on out of here as soon as possible. Other flags (other than &amp;quot;moderator attention&amp;quot;) go into the standard &amp;quot;when we get around to it&amp;quot; hopper and may never be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we do, then, about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/541549/2303&quot;&gt;this kind of answer&lt;/a&gt;? I quote it in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lay lay lay lay lay lay lay - all the way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although one might argue that the poster is making a good-faith effort to answer the question, it seems not to be a very serious effort. In my view, it's more than a &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; flag should handle. I would characterize it as trolling or vandalism. It is just a deliberate waste of everyone's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add a &amp;quot;vandalism/trolling&amp;quot; flag reason with automatic escalation such as happens with rude/abusive and spam flags? Or at least to broaden the definition of &amp;quot;rude/abusive&amp;quot; to include those offenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-07-23T14:44:24.633" LastActivityDate="2020-07-23T14:44:24.633" Title="Can we add a category to the current flagging imperatives?" Tags="|feature-request|flags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13736" CreationDate="2020-07-22T20:14:28.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add a &amp;quot;vandalism/trolling&amp;quot; flag reason with automatic escalation such as happens with rude/abusive and spam flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me ask a counter-question: how do you intend this flag to be handled &lt;em&gt;differently&lt;/em&gt; than a rude/abusive flag? I'm not a ♦ moderator here, but when a post like this gets flagged as rude/abusive on English Language Learners, I think that's a good call from the flagger. (I realize other moderators may have a different opinion on this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will probably &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; the post (thereby marking the flag as helpful); there is a (very) small chance the author doesn't really understand the culture here and may become a good contributor in the future. A rude/abusive flag cast by me would prevent them (for a month or so) to submit more posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 'Not an Answer' or 'Very Low Quality' flag will put the post in the Low Quality Posts queue, where the community will handle it. You can also downvote, refresh the page and vote to delete (the refresh is necessary in this case since you can only vote to delete answers with a negative score). Three votes to delete (by 20k+ users) will get rid of the post as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-07-23T11:32:20.800" LastActivityDate="2020-07-23T11:32:20.800" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13738" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:12:55.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug report with this tag is neither declined nor destined for implementation/fix. When such a decision has been made, the tag will be changed accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple factors that may leave a report under review. There could be consideration of whether the proposed feature or bugfix is feasible or useful. There could be investigations on the complexity of the necessary solution. There could be insufficient information in the feature or bug report as presented. Site developers may provide additional comments to request more information or to provide status updates as appropriate to the status of the review, until such time as the decision for approval or decline is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by staff and ♦ moderators; the latter will only use this tag as part of the escalation process described here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/348642/295232&quot;&gt;What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T17:32:31.843" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T17:32:31.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13739" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:12:55.883" Score="0" Body="Indicates that a change in functionality is currently under consideration, or needs further investigation." OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T17:32:34.580" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T17:32:34.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13742" CreationDate="2020-08-01T16:03:12.437" Score="4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about two languages. I want to compare them because they are related to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which SE site fits this type of question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in other words, an SE site for asking about the language, not about how to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="366925" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T14:02:55.853" Title="How to ask questions about the languages themselves?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13741" CreationDate="2020-08-02T21:40:29.800" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt; is very welcoming of cross-language questions - comparisons of syntax, lexical semantics, phonology, sociolinguistics, practice, theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt;, however, is not as enthusiastic. Let's say that a cross-linguistic question is welcome on ELU if it is primarily about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the etymology of an English word is entirely on-topic here but if the word was borrowed from Latin, and the question is about the provenance of the word in Latin before the borrowing, then some people grumble here that it is off-topic but it could go either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, many questions involving two languages would be welcome on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="59258" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T14:02:55.853" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T14:02:55.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13744" CreationDate="2020-08-04T06:29:35.693" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking on behalf of someone who is locked out of their account due to problems with their Internet Provider and the fact that their email address is with said Provider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to access their account, now that the old email address is no longer valid ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they start a new account can they merge accounts and keep their reputation score ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T06:52:46.007" Title="Can an old account be 'merged' if it is no longer accessible by the user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13743" CreationDate="2020-08-04T06:52:46.007" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merging has to be done by staff, following the procedure laid out in the Help (although it assumes that the later account was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;created accidentally&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Create and register an account, and then while logged in use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact form&lt;/a&gt;, selecting &amp;quot;I need to merge user profiles&amp;quot;. Fill in the form, giving as much information as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help panel says &amp;quot;We will reach out to confirm your ownership of each account, then complete your merge,&amp;quot; which does indicate that SE staff will email both attached addresses to confirm. That might be a problem. But there is a box to explain the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would definitely help if the user can provide details which are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; publicly available, for example the approximate date and reason for contacting staff in the past, or any moderator messages they received, or suspensions, or even [possibly] the content of deleted comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's all done by staff, they will either decide that they have enough confidence that the accounts are owned by the same person, or that they don't. Since it would be catastrophic to merge two accounts where the requester is actually impersonating the other account-holder and claiming that no communications will be successful, I expect they will err on the side of caution: it's a high bar to get over. Providing details which only the account-holder can know can only help (although it's no guarantee of success).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T06:52:46.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13747" CreationDate="2020-08-05T07:34:45.167" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have accepted an answer to my question, but my reputations didn't increase by 2. Why did that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't reached the daily reputation limit; I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="366925" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:00:11.127" Title="Accepted an answer but didn't receive the two reputation award" Tags="|discussion|reputation|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13746" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:00:11.127" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You received &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; reputation points by accepting the answer to your &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/527480/why-are-host-and-hostile-lookalike-while-they-are-of-different-meanings&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; but someone downvoted your post and you got &lt;strong&gt;-2&lt;/strong&gt; so it didn't show up (i.e. +2 -2 = 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your initial reputation was 101 then you received +10 from an upvote and your reputation became 111 then you accepted the answer and got +2 from that and then someone downvoted your post (-2) so the total reputation became 111.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot of the votes on your question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpIn9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpIn9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Votes on OP's question&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="365490" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:00:11.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13618" CreationDate="2020-08-16T06:40:13.707" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://languages.codidact.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VtEMD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Languages and Linguistics Codidact: the community-driven open-source Q&amp;amp;A platform&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3461" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T06:40:13.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13752" CreationDate="2020-08-18T17:35:16.970" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;My hobby is to write lyrics on &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genius.com&lt;/a&gt;. I mostly listen to Hip Hop music.&#xA;Sometimes I find it somewhat challenging to understand what they're saying because a lot of rappers do not enunciate the words properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a question could be as following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part of the song, did they say &amp;quot;bed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this other part of the song, did they say [slang term]. What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can I make a post on &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;english.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; asking for clarification on lyrics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user352103" LastEditorDisplayName="user352103" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T06:34:05.787" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T06:34:05.787" Title="Can I ask for help in lyrics for songs?" Tags="|support|feature-request|questions|help-pages|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13751" CreationDate="2020-08-18T20:25:32.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U is not a transcription service, bluntly, but in the past we have entertained questions which ask about phonological phenomena and accents that can be demonstrated in a clip, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/426473/is-d-glottalization-a-plausible-explanation-of-ambiguity-in-donald-trump-intervi&quot;&gt;Is D-glottalization a plausible explanation of ambiguity in Donald Trump interview with WSJ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/483327/peculiar-pronunciation-of-architecture/483360#483360&quot;&gt;Peculiar pronunciation of &amp;#39;architecture&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/376233/british-politicians-pronouncing-hear-hear-oddly/376260#376260&quot;&gt;British politicians pronouncing &amp;quot;hear, hear&amp;quot; oddly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a question like &amp;quot;did she say &lt;em&gt;my bad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;my bed&lt;/em&gt; at T2:43?&amp;quot; will be viewed askance, but one that asks &amp;quot;in what situations would &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bed&lt;/em&gt; use the same vowel, because in this clip…&amp;quot; might be received more favorably—provided the other criteria of a good question (useful, demonstrates initial research effort) are also present. For simple transcription help, you might try asking in Chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As user121863 notes, lyrics as an artistic expression are subject to interpretation, and there often is no definitive way to answer why a certain word was chosen or why a matter was phrased a certain way, other than that it sounded good to the author. Additionally, the author is granted considerable &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;artistic license&lt;/a&gt;; as in poetry, the words may depart from standard grammar, spelling, or pronunciation in all manner of ways, or simply be interesting-sounding nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T20:33:13.207" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T20:33:13.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-20T16:20:44.510" Score="4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the rationale for locking &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/544220/291924&quot;&gt;What's the word for something that is purposefully generalised and understated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is, the question is lacking a degree of necessary detail. My immediate response would be to add a comment asking for clarification, and then &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; vote to close it, although, in this case, only if clarification wasn't forthcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to provide an answer, because I can interpret the question in several different ways, which only the person who asked it can clarify. And that clarification would normally have to come in comments, or in an edit to the question that has been prompted by comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, what's wrong with the word &lt;em&gt;understatement&lt;/em&gt; itself, as used in the question? To me, what's being described &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; understatement; however, I would not provide that as an answer without knowing why it had been rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its current state, the question merely exists in a kind of limbo until the lock period is over and comments for clarification can finally be posted again. (Unless people want to start providing answers that may or may not be appropriate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T19:10:34.620" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T23:01:10.423" Title="Why was &quot;What's the word for something that is purposefully generalised and understated?&quot; locked?" Tags="|discussion|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13754" CreationDate="2020-08-20T21:43:26.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I locked it because users had already begun to offer their suggestions in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This causes a lot of cleanup burden that we have no other way to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T21:43:26.670" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15233" CreationDate="2020-08-21T18:27:38.363" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/542411/planets-of-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;Planets of the Solar System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA; &#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, this is the only question I have asked on English Stack Exchange. But my question is downvoted to -1. I asked this question weeks ago and I have not received any answers. I have only received some comments. I just wanted to know what has been going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383248" LastEditorUserId="383248" LastEditDate="2022-02-28T18:22:24.393" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T16:46:58.127" Title="My first question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2020-08-22T07:30:11.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some IPA symbols have HTML entity codes with more or less logical names/abbrevations, so you can type them in plain ASCII:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;aelig;&lt;/code&gt; becomes æ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;eth;&lt;/code&gt; becomes ð&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;ntilde;&lt;/code&gt; becomes ñ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most of them, like the schwa, only have numbers, which will be hard to remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#601;&lt;/code&gt; becomes ə&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full list is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-charts/ipa-symbols-with-html-codes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5295/18673&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T07:30:11.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2020-08-22T07:51:44.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Android, I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardgreve.ipakeyboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA keyboard&lt;/a&gt;, but when I'm on PC, I write them using &lt;a href=&quot;https://ipa.typeit.org/full/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Type IPA symbols' website&lt;/a&gt; and copy-paste them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to read &lt;a href=&quot;http://93.174.95.29/main/1455000/628151e1090055f40f476902a06520c3/Anna%20Wentlent%20-%20Alfred%27s%20IPA%20Made%20Easy_%20A%20Guidebook%20for%20the%20International%20Phonetic%20Alphabet-Alfred%20Music%20%282014%29.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred's IPA Made Easy: A Guidebook for the International Phonetic Alphabet, Author(s): Anna Wentlent&lt;/a&gt; (PDF), it has all the IPA symbols with examples in English, French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;http://93.174.95.29/main/439000/576146f0a4bfcf891afbe9c21c19ce9a/International%20Phonetic%20Association%20-%20Handbook%20of%20the%20International%20Phonetic%20Association%20_%20A%20Guide%20to%20the%20Use%20of%20the%20International%20Phonetic%20Alphabet-Cambridge%20University%20Press%20%281999%29.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet,&lt;/a&gt; (Author(s): International Phonetic Association, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Year: 1999)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="365490" LastEditorUserId="365490" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T16:37:30.233" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T16:37:30.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T01:46:33.213" Score="10" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Overview&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/544530/291924&quot;&gt;What is the difference between “[I] may [be] …” and “even though … ”?&lt;/a&gt; was recently locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/544530/what-is-the-difference-between-i-may-be-and-even-though?noredirect=1#comment1337962_544530&quot;&gt;the following comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; normally implies the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;possibility&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of something—it means &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/might&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;might&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Even though&lt;/em&gt; implies the absolute existence of something, where something else happens despite it. Why do you think they mean the same thing here, and what is the meaning that you are ascribing to both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to posting that clarifying question, asking why the the original poster thought there was a difference, I &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; voted to close the question as lacking research. (And if the original asker had said, &amp;quot;Oh, my mistake,&amp;quot; I would have left my close vote, in favour of closing the question as poor quality rather than having any actual answer provided at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, I was not providing an answer to the question in any way. I was looking for additional information. In order to &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; that information, I had to provide some references and common definitions. I might also have retracted my close vote and then posted an &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; answer had the question been clarified, based on my comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, the question was locked immediately after I received &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/544530/what-is-the-difference-between-i-may-be-and-even-though?noredirect=1#comment1337981_544530&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@JasonBassford Please don't write answers in comments; they are harmful to our site. Doing so bypasses our community-moderated quality measures by not permitting community editing or paired up- and down-voting available on comments, as well as having &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1644/3171&quot;&gt;other problems detailed on meta&lt;/a&gt;. Comments are for clarifying and improving the question; please don't use them for other purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As my comment indicated, I &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; posted it for clarification of and improvement to the question. In order to actually answer the question, I needed more information that could only be provided in response to the comment I posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13754/291924&quot;&gt;a previous post&lt;/a&gt; on this meta, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13754/why-was-whats-the-word-for-something-that-is-purposefully-generalised-and-unde#comment58201_13755&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, that's not an actual policy. Second, even if it were, it's never been applied consistently before. Third, that's awfully subjective, and it makes no sense for you to start locking question when you simply don't like the comments. If you really think that should be something that should be done going forward, you should decide that with the other moderators, probably user input, and announce a policy change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link that to the Meta discussion, is merely a link to a Meta &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt;. It is not any sort of official Stack Exchange policy, nor is it a stated policy of English Language &amp;amp; Usage in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been no official adoption of it, nor have any kind of guidelines been laid out as to when a comment is not a comment but an answer, nor if a comment is disallowed if somebody actually votes to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, my own comment clearly sought clarification on the part of the person who'd asked the question. I didn't just post a statement and then leave it at that, but I also asked for an explanation. Also, I voted to close the question—thereby &lt;em&gt;preventing&lt;/em&gt; me (on principle) from also providing a proper answer even if I wanted to (without retracting my close vote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we're now going to provide &amp;quot;supporting&amp;quot; evidence for what is and isn't allowed, I shall reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;Answers in comments&lt;/a&gt;, as posted two years by @Andrew Leach, a moderator here, to this particular meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that question, a poll was taken, where the community was asked to vote on how comments should be handled. All other results aside, the most clearly popular viewpoint was the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 3: Answers may be made in comments where the question is off-topic but we still wish to help the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barring my comment being just one of clarification, even if it &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; interpreted as an actual answer, my vote to close the question as off topic would have warranted the information I provided in the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I shall repeat my previous question. Why are questions now being &lt;strong&gt;locked&lt;/strong&gt; when a particular comment is simply not liked? This procedure (which is not an actual policy), seems to do more harm to questions than good—because it prevents any kind of clarifying comments that could lead to a worthwhile refinement of questions, or, thereby, to any resulting &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; answers of good (and relevant) quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Specific questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is it objectively determined when a comment is an answer &amp;quot;in disguise&amp;quot; and not just a clarifying comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why are questions being locked rather than the comments (which are always considered ephemeral anyway) simply deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question has been voted to be closed, why has the community sentiment of still being able to say something in the comments to help the questioner been ignored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despite protestations to the contrary, why has this behaviour of locking questions for comment answers suddenly been introduced? I have only seen this being done by one moderator, only in the past couple of weeks, and also in an inconsistent manner. This is not something that has occurred on any kind of regular basis in the past several years at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291924" LastEditorUserId="291924" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T13:33:52.270" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T15:02:45.533" Title="Why was &quot;What is the difference between '[I] may [be] …' and 'even though … '?&quot; locked?" Tags="|discussion|locked-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13759" CreationDate="2020-08-24T03:45:55.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts are not locked when comments &amp;quot;are not liked&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts are locked when people cannot hold back from answering in comments, or when comment chains become discursive.  Doing those things makes our site worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be searched.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be selected as having answered the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be community edited.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments have no community-visible edit history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be downvoted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments have to be waded through to find answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers worth keeping go in the answer box. This is not open to debate or voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither moderators nor the community at large may change the policy that answers go in the answer box, not in the comment box. That’s because Stack Exchange was created for the express purpose of having question-and-answer sites where all these problems did not happen. We are not at liberty to change those founding principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not to your liking, other places on the Internet may better serve you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every day moderators are greeted with dozens of comments flagged for deletion because they contain answers. This is a great help because it saves us the trouble of finding those ourselves. Please continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephemera. They work against the Stack Exchange model. They are subject to deletion without notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you need to do is stop putting answers in comments, and questions won't have their comments purged, moved, or locked to prevent that from happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T03:45:55.543" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2020-08-24T16:23:00.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're on a Macintosh, then Unicode characters are built in and easy to use, including the entire International Phonetic Alphabet, and plenty of nonce characters for phonetic and phonemic entities. You can find them all under the title &lt;code&gt;Emoji &amp;amp; Symbols&lt;/code&gt;, at the bottom of the &lt;code&gt;Edit&lt;/code&gt; menu, to the right of the &lt;code&gt;File&lt;/code&gt; menu, in all Mac applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for Microsoft products -- Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They don't conform to Mac application standards, because Microsoft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That menu choice brings up a &lt;code&gt;Characters&lt;/code&gt; window containing separate lists of all the alphabets available, special characters like math symbols, enclosed characters, bullets and stars, box drawing, etc, and lists of Favorites and Frequently Used characters that can be customized.  The box includes search, unicode symbol, symbol names, accentuation, and font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any character available can be inserted into any document this way, and most Macs come with all world alphabets, abugidas, and abjads installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T16:23:00.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13759" CreationDate="2020-08-25T13:55:39.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comment locks are not permanent. Locks are generally for a short duration intended to encourage people to use the answer box for answers, cool tempers, or redirect discussions to chat. They may be made permanent if the question continues to attract answers-in-comments or extended discussions. A permanent lock can be appealed by posting a request on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments have long been a battleground on this site. Some members are very attached to this mode for all types of communication. We've even had long-time users ragequit over having a comment deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My theory is that some people become used to the chat room discussions or are generally adapted to texting, and so using the comment box feels conversational, inclusive, friendly, and informal. And who wouldn't like to have a friendly chat about a topic of interest? Especially because if we're chatting about it, nobody needs to do the hard work of posting fleshed out research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is, however, that comments defeat the purpose of the question and answer format because the site itself was designed for people to read a question and then the various answers to it. A transcript of a discussion in the comments makes it nearly impossible to figure out the nuances of the various suggestions and sidebars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the trouble is that we have long-term users who don't want to put a lot of effort into answering the kinds of questions we get these days, but do want to continue contributing to the site. Unfortunately, they don't seem to understand the harm they do. They set a bad example for others as many askers feel satisfied by the comment discussion. They've gotten their answer except that now we have &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; that cannot be community improved, cannot be community edited, cannot be community up- or downvoted upon, and cannot be pulled out from the rest by an Accepted mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They become sadly orphaned questions left in the Unanswered section of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with that in mind, here are your questions again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is it objectively determined when a comment is an answer &amp;quot;in disguise&amp;quot; and not just a clarifying comment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not &amp;quot;objectively&amp;quot; determined, since actual people are doing the work. However, generally &amp;quot;Will X word work?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Why doesn't X word fit?&amp;quot; would be an answer in disguise. &amp;quot;This is the answer to your question&amp;quot; is also a good indicator that it's an answer in a comment. Additionally, we also remove comments that are requests for clarification when the post has been edited to provide that clarification, and we also remove clarifying comments when the clarification has been edited into the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are questions being locked rather than the comments (which are always considered ephemeral anyway) simply deleted?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you ever been on the open ocean with a hole in your boat and a very small bucket?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question has been voted to be closed, why has the community sentiment of still being able to say something in the comments to help the questioner been ignored?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what you are asking here. The question is not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Despite protestations to the contrary, why has this behaviour of locking questions for comment answers suddenly been introduced? I have only seen this being done by one moderator, only in the past couple of weeks, and also in an inconsistent manner. This is not something that has occurred on any kind of regular basis in the past several years at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have only seen it recently because we have had the ability to do so only for a short period of time. You've seen it done by one moderator because there's just a few of us and he's the one here most often. He has the full support of the other moderators. It may seem sporadic and inconsistent to you, but we have to direct our efforts to maximum effect, so it's applied to questions that are Hot Network Questions or may become so, and generally also single word requests, and also questions where many members are offering answers in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be beneficial if users who no longer wish to answer but still wish to contribute spent time spiffing up existing questions and answers rather than commenting. Save that for the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastEditorUserId="8360" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T14:14:48.617" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T14:14:48.617" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-26T16:04:53.063" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/544518/etc-etc-usage&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as being &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;. But I thought that usage questions were on-topic for this site. After all, the asker says &amp;quot;Is there any rule…&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;How do you personally feel about…&amp;quot;. Should it not have been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="205493" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T16:04:53.063" Title="Was the question &quot;etc. etc. usage&quot; closed correctly?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T13:40:25.473" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new here since this year; this question is to help me understand the culture. I answered a new question, asking for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/544853/equivalent-of-catalan-gent-jove-pa-tou-or-young-people-soft-bread-referring&quot;&gt;equivalent of Catalan &amp;#39;Gent jove pa tou&amp;#39; or &amp;#39;Young people soft bread&amp;#39; referring to being too young for certain tasks&lt;/a&gt;, with a US idiom-phrase. Later, however, I began to doubt whether this is an officially supported kind of question. A quick search for &amp;quot;proverbs&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;multi-word idioms&amp;quot; on ELU Meta seemed to mostly point to posts related to SWRs. The closest that I found was a comment at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7719/is-the-elu-community-generally-more-receptive-to-idiom-requests-that-seek-english&quot;&gt;Is the EL&amp;amp;U community generally more receptive to idiom-requests that seek English equivalents for foreign phrases?&lt;/a&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts + idiom (single-word) enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Which is copied more or less from the mission statement).&#xA;But other comments there, as well as the OP, mention that there are many well-received questions about multi-word proverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like these questions a lot, as they have a sort of human interest element, bu they tend to be rather subjective and regionally specific, as my answer at the &amp;quot;soft bread&amp;quot; question is. Up-votes aren't everything; my most-voted answer so far was for a SWR on which I spent very little work, only copying a dictionary definition and an example use in the NYT. It was up-voted only because it answered the question, not because it is a High Quality Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10098/why-did-mods-delete-two-answers-to-quitting-your-job-too-early&quot;&gt;Why did mods delete two answers to &amp;#39;Quitting your job too early&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;, a question asking for a proverb is discussed in harrowing detail, and even answered. However, no official consensus about &amp;quot;proverbs&amp;quot; is invoked, except that they should be &lt;em&gt;in use in English&lt;/em&gt;, not just borrowed on the spur of the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are these proverb questions officially supported, or are they considered Low Quality or simply Off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="371882" LastEditorUserId="371882" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T13:46:23.670" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:11:23.813" Title="New user asks: Are requests for proverbs and sayings (as opposed to single-word idiom requests) on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T15:08:42.260" Score="7" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts look different: the most immediate and obvious change is that line-spacing has changed. Quotes are now indented a bit more, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old (from &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/13764&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w0GOW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w0GOW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Previous formatting, close spacing&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q17MY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q17MY.png&quot; alt=&quot;New formatting, wider spacing&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What just happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T15:08:42.260" Title="What's happened to post formatting?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13765" CreationDate="2020-08-27T15:08:42.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE have implemented a new formatting regime which has also included changes to spoilers (which now require a click rather than hover, so they're more consistent across platforms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the gory details are on MSE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/353446/new-post-formatting&quot;&gt;New post formatting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question and answer is provided purely as a pointer to the main article as not everyone will see the Featured post link.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T15:08:42.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13764" CreationDate="2020-08-28T14:59:08.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, proverb or idiom analog requests are very much on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, like SWRs, there may be in practice lots of ways to ask these badly and attract too many poor answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For proverb/idiom requests, if they are looking for a corresponding one from another language/culture, please give the original language version (the answer may be very close to a translation) and give the cultural context (many European languages have different wordings for the morals from Aesop's Fables).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as with all questions, give what your research may have already found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T14:59:08.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-30T02:09:18.037" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/387446/217285&quot;&gt;dog-leg, dogleg, or dog leg?&lt;/a&gt; has one well-received and &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; accepted answer but was quickly closed for lack of research. It was only my second question here, over three years ago now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd accepted the answer after the question was closed, the possibility of other answers having been blocked by the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the comment &amp;quot;What do dictionaries say&amp;quot; I'd replied, but I didn't realize that responding quickly in comments was insufficient and that I was required to report what &amp;quot;dictionaries say&amp;quot; in the question itself to prevent closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course now if I follow the close reason instructions &amp;quot;Please include the research you’ve done...&amp;quot; it would be awkward because it could appear to be copying information from an answer back into a question, or changing the question after an answer was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However keeping the question closed &lt;em&gt;blocks the entire community from posting any additional answers.&lt;/em&gt; While closing may have seemed punitive at the time, or a way to encourage editing the question, it is now having the effect of preventing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to allow for the possibility of additional answers, but I'm uncertain how I can modify the question in such a way as to still be fair to the existing answer. How might I proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted someone may argue that the existing answer is &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; and no additional answers are possible, but we don't know that yet. Reopening the question offers an opportunity to see if a better or at least supplementary answer is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T02:09:18.037" Title="How can I edit this question and start the reopening process to make additional answers possible?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-02T19:13:59.497" Score="0" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to write a paper for a class of mine, and it's about the definition of a word and its usage through time. I was assigned to write about the word &amp;quot;naughty&amp;quot;, and I am trying to find credible sources that aren't blogs and are free and reliable. I did look in Merriam Webster's dictionary (Online and in the hard copy), but that isn't enough for a full research paper. Any advice or leads? Gratefully yours,&#xA;-Anonymous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397540" OwnerDisplayName="Landen Oba" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T10:58:17.640" Title="I'm trying to find credible sources for the etymology of the word &quot;naughty&quot; Any tips?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13769" CreationDate="2020-09-02T20:09:57.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always find Google Books to be an exquisitely insightful source for finding early uses of a distinct word, as their catalog is so vast, and has scans of so many antiquarian and scarce books which otherwise would be neglected, that it is sincerely &amp;quot;The stuff that dreams are made on&amp;quot; for any bibliophile, whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=naughty%20%22naughty%20%22%20naughty&amp;amp;num=100&amp;amp;lr=lang_en&amp;amp;tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:Dec%2023_2%201454,cd_max:Dec%2031_2%201800,lr:lang_1en,sbd:1&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk01EiWpeNlPLtoxkb8RRJbMFOAuHMg:1599075791476&amp;amp;source=lnt&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwizgpTEncvrAhXVeisKHazwA9kQpwUIIQ&amp;amp;biw=1811&amp;amp;bih=854&amp;amp;dpr=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books: Books (written in English) with the word &amp;quot;naughty&amp;quot; used therein, from the years 1455 to 1800&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest use of &amp;quot;Naughty&amp;quot; as far as Google book's catalog is concerned (certainly, not the earliest use by any means, as Online Etymology Online, dates it back to the late 14th century, and I am not even certain if the initial connotation fo the word is the one you are seeking) is a delightful little rarity by the name of: &amp;quot;The Commendation of Matrimony&amp;quot; printed in 1534, so quite early for English books, seeing how &amp;quot;Raoul Lefevre's The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye&amp;quot; from 1473 seems to be the first, or at the least, one of the first books imprinted in our English tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is the coinınon sentence and judgement of lawiecs , that he hathe an vncertayne father , and a &lt;strong&gt;naughty&lt;/strong&gt; mother , whiche is not bome in ma trimony (1534)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you may certainly go to Google Books advanced search, and change what you want to find in their catalog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also try looking for the word, or early variants of the word in early English Bible translations: Tyndale, Geneva, Bishops, etc.&#xA;Usually, Bible search websites allow you to choose which translation you would like to find a verse in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. also insightful in this study: Master William Shakespeare uses the word 15 times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;thou naughty varlet&amp;quot; (Falstaff, Henry IV, Part I, act ii, scene iv)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;but a naughty orator&amp;quot;(Lafeu, All's Well That Ends Well, act v, scene iii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Prithee, nuncle, be contented! 'Tis a naughty night to swim&#xA;in.&amp;quot;  (The Fool, King Lear, act iii, scene iv)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Naughty lady&amp;quot; (Earl of Gloucester, King Lear, act iii, scene vii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked a facsimile of the First Folio and found Shakespeare (or at least Hemminges and Condell), spelled &amp;quot;naughty&amp;quot; the same way as we do today, so at least from as far back to 1624, the word was being spelled thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4S4d.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4S4d.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S here is a delightful archaic spelling for &amp;quot;naughty&amp;quot; from &amp;quot;A Brief Censure Upon Two Bookes Written in Answer to M. Edmonde&amp;quot; from 1581:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one litle sentence with &lt;strong&gt;noughtie&lt;/strong&gt; ade againt his will&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this one from &amp;quot;The Fourme and Maner of Making and Consecratyng, Bisshops&amp;quot; (1559)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which beim middest of this &lt;strong&gt;naughti&lt;/strong&gt; World&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378662" OwnerDisplayName="A Tormented Worm" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T20:23:06.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13769" CreationDate="2020-09-03T10:58:17.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED gives 96 variations of the spelling of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;naught/nought&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; (of which not one is &amp;quot;nort&amp;quot;) For the word &amp;quot;naughty&amp;quot;, it gives a mere 12 varieties but this is probably quite low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is not remarkable as English spelling did not seriously start to become regular until the 17th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nought/naught&lt;/strong&gt; (in any of its spellings and functions) originates from ne(adverb ~ not) + aught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest record of &lt;strong&gt;Nought/naught&lt;/strong&gt; is as a pronoun = nothing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eOE (Mercian)   Vespasian Psalter (1965) xxxiii. 9 (10)   &amp;quot;Timete dominum omnes sancti eius, quoniam nihil deest timentibus eum : ondredað dryhten alle halge his for ðon &lt;strong&gt;nowiht&lt;/strong&gt; wonu bið ðæm ondredendum hine.&amp;quot; (eOE approx 700 - 900)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aught&lt;/strong&gt; is recorded about the same time in the translation of Gregory Pastoral Care in the late 9th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;King Ælfred tr. Gregory Pastoral Care (Hatton) (1871) xviii. 133   Ðonne bið ðæt æðeleste hiw onhworfen, ðonne se &lt;strong&gt;æht&lt;/strong&gt; ðara godra weorca, ðe he ær beeode, bið gewanod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its original meaning, &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;aught&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; = Estimation, value; opinion; reputation. [Also: deliberation, council]. (OED) and thus &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;ne aught&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; negates that, and the adjectival phrase thus becomes &lt;strong&gt;unesteemed; of no value unesteemed; not worthy of having an opinion of.&lt;/strong&gt; or as OED says &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;naughty&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Of behaviour, an action, etc.: bad, immoral, wicked&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noughty/naughty&lt;/strong&gt; does not have seem to have reached the language as an adjective until sometime during the 14th century, when it was used as a moral evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. 1380(?) Cleanness (1920) 1359 (MED)   Hit is not innoghe to þe nice al &lt;strong&gt;noȝty&lt;/strong&gt; þink use, Bot if alle þe worlde wyt his wykked dedes. &lt;em&gt;[it is not enough for the foolish and bad people, we think, except if the whole world knows about their wicked deeds. My translation]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T10:58:17.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-04T08:09:38.073" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work as a copywriter. Sometimes I have several options of a phrase and I want to check which one is more widespread and more commonly used. Surely, I  can google it, but google will search everywhere and everything. I want something like a corpus that will be able to give me usage examples right away. No corpus is good for my purpose, because they usually only have bookish texts while I need live usage. Is there a service that can, say search the internet for exact phrases and give examples in the results?&#xA;Tried googling, but haven't found anything of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I need to check &amp;quot;ad trackers&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;internet traffic&amp;quot;.&#xA;When I google any of the phrases, it only gives me the results that I search for, it doesn't give me any idea if it is common or not. It doesn't give me an understanding if &amp;quot;ad trackers&amp;quot; is more common as &amp;quot;ad trackers&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;AD trackers&amp;quot;. It doesn't give me understanding if &amp;quot;internet traffic&amp;quot; is more commonly used as &amp;quot;mobile internet traffic&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;mobile traffic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://ludwig.guru/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thing&lt;/a&gt; kinda has the potential for all that I described above, but it's a paid service and it doesn't see any difference between upper and lower case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linguee.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thing&lt;/a&gt; is free, however it only gives translation results, not the native language usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while corpora are good, they have a mostly static database of texts. They change too slowly, while real language changes much quicker and richer in professional branches. Corpus is good for language research, but not for word (especially not for case) choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something that combines everything in one and has a free plan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211904" OwnerDisplayName="Vladimir Markiev" LastEditorUserId="211904" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T08:18:08.343" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T08:18:08.343" Title="Is there a service to find out if my phrase is used online like corpora, but not exactly?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13772" CreationDate="2020-09-04T18:58:28.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google is usually my go to source for finding examples of specific expressions. You can enclose your expression in double quotes and it will make it match it verbatim. (Google Search’s number of hits will not be accurate however unless you go to the last page of results.) You can use the same search in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book tab&lt;/a&gt; to get hits in books. You can also specify a year range in Google Books which is not possible in normal search. However Google Books can be a mixed bag as you are searching both academic texts and novels that contain informal dialogue (though academic texts don’t typically come up when searching for informal expressions). Note that Google NGrams uses Google Books for its data and will even link to searches at the bottom that will be for specific time frames. Also note the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8015/191178&quot;&gt;limitations with Google NGrams&lt;/a&gt; that various people have pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also try a different BYU corpora, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/iweb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iWeb&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GloWbE&lt;/a&gt;. It’s exactly the same interface as COCA/BNC but there’s a lot more words and it’s all from websites so it’s noticeably more casual usage. I used iWeb in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/464606/191178&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; when comparing relative frequencies of different pronouns and it gave noticeably more hits than COCA (which had few to no examples) because I was looking for words that are really only used informally, on the internet. I also needed to use the powerful features (wildcard matching) of the BYU engine so Google would not have cut it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T18:58:28.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13778" CreationDate="2020-09-08T06:47:00.757" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking up some things in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/a&gt;, and was trying to find the earliest occurrence of a word pattern.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any way of seeing publication dates of the sources given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that is possible on their website?  I'd like to be able to see dates, and also sort by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/323179&quot;&gt;XY problem&lt;/a&gt;, so if anyone knows of a way to find the earliest occurrence of a given phrase that doesn't use the BNC, I'd be glad to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T20:39:08.853" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T18:42:55.503" Title="Is it possible to get publication dates from the BNC?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-09T14:50:39.743" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a strangely deep admiration for archaic language and its usage and find that when working on period-piece writings, sources (catalogs of old books) for researching words used in the period (And how the words are used in context therein) are exceptionally helpful. Does anyone know of any more hidden-in-the-web catalogs that would be useful for finding old words in books? (kind of like Google books, but perhaps less-popular sites which don't get too much attention but are worth keeping for a rainy day.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. by &amp;quot;early uses of words&amp;quot; I refer to the periods in the English language from the 15th century to the 18th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much so, any insight would be humbly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378662" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T15:57:54.817" Title="Resources for finding early uses of words?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13764" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:11:23.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no rule that specifically prohibits such questions, and there is, &lt;strong&gt;in principle&lt;/strong&gt;, no reason why there should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proverbs, however, tend to be very much culture-bound, so the correct answer to such questions will very often be 'There is no analogous proverb in English'. Such an answer would, however, not satisfy the standards of this site, so it won't be posted. Instead, the question will likely generate a number of answers offering English proverbs that don't have quite the same function, but are in some way similar. The page then turns into a contest on who can come up with an English proverb that is the clos&lt;strong&gt;est&lt;/strong&gt; to the original one, which is, I think, what @Yosef Baskin was pointing out in his comment. Determining which proverb 'wins' the contest will often (but not always) be a matter of opinion. These questions may thus, &lt;strong&gt;in practice&lt;/strong&gt;, be at odds with the policy of avoiding questions that cannot be given definite answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:11:23.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13775" CreationDate="2020-09-09T22:47:26.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer seems to be no, you can’t sort by date in the BNC. If anyone knows otherwise, then I’d be interested!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might get a date for a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; hit by clicking on it though this may end up being “(1985-1994)” which is useless for any purpose I can think of. When that happens I try to see if Google can find the context by searching for part of the excerpt in double quotes, though this is hit and miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I can tell you is that &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; corpora on the site do have a way to group by date. You just go to the chart tab and “see frequency by section” and your results will be broken down by into time frames. (Sometimes it’s not granular enough though so you would have to search through a bunch of hits to find the earliest, but it’s there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nGBFm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nGBFm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;picture of search page on chart tab&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only some of the corpora will do this, such as COCA, COHA, and Hansard. Other times, as is the case with the BNC, the chart will use some other metric, such as spoken vs academic vs other types of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact I researched for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/545637/191178&quot;&gt;this etymology answer&lt;/a&gt; by searching EEBO via english-corpora.org. In the case of EEBO, there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://eebo.chadwyck.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another website&lt;/a&gt; that I was using before that I liked better for a number of reasons, but you can’t use it without a subscription. (Nowadays I usually use the free, no account needed &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=simple;g=eebogroup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UMich EEBO search&lt;/a&gt;, which allows you to sort by date except when there are too many results.) Some of the other corpora may also have other ways to access them, though I don’t know if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-03-21T18:42:55.503" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T18:42:55.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13776" CreationDate="2020-09-10T00:47:17.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like the perfect job for the &lt;strong&gt;Early English Books Online&lt;/strong&gt; corpus which is 755 million words covering the 1470s to 1690s. You can access this via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BYU website&lt;/a&gt;. It’s very easy to use for basic searches, though there’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/queries.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a lot more that you can do&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For late in your time frame (late 1700s+), try newspaper databases. The only problem with that is these older sources tend to not to be easily searchable, as the OCR tends to just produce garbage. Still you can try &lt;a href=&quot;https://elephind.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elephind&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chronicling America&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T00:47:17.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-12T07:30:42.040" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a question from a new user: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/546366/about-the-word-race-when-talking-about-bike-headset&quot;&gt;About the word &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; when talking about bike headset&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks unclear, and currently has four close votes for &lt;strong&gt;Please include the research you’ve done&lt;/strong&gt;.  It came up in the Review Queue, and I edited it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the original, plus a minor edit from @KillingTime:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About the word &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; when talking about bike headset&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any definition of &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; in its use for example on this&#xA;page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headset_(bicycle_part)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headset_(bicycle_part)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on Cambridge or Oxford dictionaries...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone can tell me where this word comes from ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave it this edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Origin of the word &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; in the context of bearing races&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; has the following definition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lexico.com/definition/race&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to&#xA;lexico.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A smooth ring-shaped groove or guide in which a ball bearing or roller bearing runs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/race&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge doesn't show this definition at&#xA;all&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it is used in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headset_(bicycle_part)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bike&#xA;jargon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of this meaning, and how did it derive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume this is what the OP meant, I think it's a fair question.  &amp;quot;Race&amp;quot; has a lot of meanings and history, and I am curious where this meaning came from (I couldn't see it on Etymonline).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my edit is closer to what the OP wanted, however in respect to the &lt;strong&gt;four existing answers&lt;/strong&gt; I have rolled it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like people are interpreting the question as &amp;quot;please look this word up in the dictionary for me&amp;quot;, but they said &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Someone can tell me where this word comes from?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, so I think not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the best option?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave it as is, to get closed probably&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit as per my edit, invalidating the existing answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a new question, and maybe close as a duplicate if that is what the OP meant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194281" LastEditorUserId="194281" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T07:39:37.810" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T10:39:10.657" Title="Let's discuss this edit" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13780" CreationDate="2020-09-12T14:26:53.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s my side of things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I saw the question (before any major edits) and wanted to quote some of the Wikipedia article for context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I tried to do that but stopped when it looked like the edit would have answered the question, by having a link to a page with a definition of the term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was at that point that I voted to close the question, the fourth close vote on the question, I think for “needs research”. (What I chose probably couldn’t have made a difference as to what the close banner said as I believe all three votes were also for “needs research”.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a shadow of a doubt in my mind if the question was also asking about etymology, so I left a comment in the hopes that OP would clarify things. (It really is strange that OP couldn’t find any definition, particularly when &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/546370/191178&quot;&gt;one answer&lt;/a&gt; was a definition from one of the sources that OP said didn’t have the definition.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To answer your question&lt;/strong&gt;: I think that we need to be more confident that it’s an etymology question before drastically editing it like that. Looking at two of the answers in particular, it’s clear that I’m not the only one who saw this as a question of meaning. But if OP clarified that they were asking about the etymology of the term it would be fine with me to reapply the drastic edit and reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not so much about invalidating existing answers (you’re not supposed to answer unclear questions for that very reason), it’s about the possibility that OP could come back and say that it wasn’t an etymology question at all, which would make it even harder to decide what the correct moderation decision would be, not to mention it would be a little unfair to anyone who thought they were answering a clear etymology question because of the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T14:26:53.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13776" CreationDate="2020-09-12T21:41:47.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U Meta's very own community-wiki-based question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt; includes an answer headed &amp;quot;Historical Resources&amp;quot; that consists of sections devoted to early (pre–Samuel Johnson) general dictionaries and somewhat early (pre-1900) slang dictionaries. That answer is currently at 15 upvotes, so you have to scroll through some more highly upvoted answers to get to it—but you may find the dictionaries cited there to be useful resources for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T21:41:47.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13776" CreationDate="2020-09-14T15:57:54.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One valuable resource is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexicons of Early Modern English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (LEME) from the University of Toronto, which has searchable full-text of early printed English lexicons from 1480-1755. Using that and Early English Books Online (EEBO) together is a powerful combo for helping to date specific uses of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to go earlier, the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English Compendium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from the University of Michigan Library hosts the Middle English Dictionary, a Bibliography of texts cross-referenced with the Dictionary, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus&lt;/a&gt; of full-text Middle English works. The corpus is tricky to search because of the non-standard spelling and the fact that searches will also pull results from their modern book introductions, but I find them useful for deeper dives into texts than the Dictionary allows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T15:57:54.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T17:44:32.533" Score="7" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;FYI, I noticed this on ELL this morning, and it shows up here as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i0FP0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i0FP0.png&quot; alt=&quot;This question doesn't meet a [sic] English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange guideline.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question doesn't meet a [sic] English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/354233/grammar-error-in-review-does-this-affect-several-se-sites&quot;&gt;Eddie Kal has posted on Meta SE about it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216106" LastEditorUserId="216106" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T19:10:34.743" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T13:12:25.320" Title="Grammar error in Review" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-23T14:51:46.563" Score="6" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking specifically for works that discuss the sense of a cessation of quarrels as found in oed.com's definition for the verb &amp;quot;atone&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1555   W. Waterman tr. J. Boemus Fardle of Facions i. vi. 92   Those battayles are attoned by the women..For when they be ones comen into the middle..the battaile sodenly ceaseth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also be pleased to be pointed to a work that discusses or explores why the KJV bible translators stuck with atonement (Romans 5:11) when so many of their peers in the field of translation chose to use the traditionally accepted word &amp;quot;reconciliation&amp;quot; when rendering the Greek καταλλαγή into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399502" OwnerDisplayName="wirenaught" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T21:44:20.953" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T21:44:20.953" Title="I want to study the various usages of the 17th and 16th century verb &quot;atone&quot;. Other than oed.com, where can I study this verb and adverb?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|translation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13785" CreationDate="2020-09-23T15:11:36.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For primary source research, &lt;em&gt;Early English Books Online&lt;/em&gt; is an excellent resource for searching among a corpus of printed texts from the period. There are two free ways to access this: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EEBO Text Creation Partnership&lt;/a&gt;, which has basic search tools across the whole corpus of texts, and the more selective &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EEBO corpus on the English Corpora site&lt;/a&gt; that has been tagged in such a way that you can search for things like parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a commercial version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://eebo.chadwyck.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EEBO&lt;/a&gt; (through ProQuest) that some libraries and individuals subscribe to. This site has a more comprehensive selection of images for each book, whereas EEBO-TCP relies on transcriptions. If you have access to it, absolutely use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T15:11:36.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-26T05:50:49.853" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: The question in question has been reopened.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/546392/what-s-the-origin-meaning-of-from-belt-buckle-to-shoe-sole&quot;&gt;'What’s the origin/meaning of “from belt buckle to shoe sole”?'&lt;/a&gt; was closed because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Biden consistently gives the origin - his uncle. The absence of any other source indicates that the phrase is part of an idiolect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in a closure comment subsequently supported by at least three other closers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The given reason for closing a question asking about origins and meaning of a phrase is &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; nonsensical, and seems to be trolling the hapless asker, who has, unsurprisingly, not been seen since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T16:21:03.500" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T16:21:03.500" Title="Why was a question about the origin and meaning of a phrase closed because the origin is known?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13790" CreationDate="2020-09-24T18:34:46.687" Score="8" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was using Google Ngrams to investigate whether feminine pronouns have been used more often in English literature over time, relative to masculine pronouns. I was surprised to find that the percentage of all pronouns out of all words being written dropped steadily from 1800 to 1980 and then shot up between 1980 and 2020 &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=he%2Cshe%2CHe%2CI%2Cwe%2Cit%2Cthey%2C%20you&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Che%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cshe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CHe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CI%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cit%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthey%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cyou%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Che%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cshe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CHe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CI%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cit%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthey%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cyou%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this graph&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dccJa.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dccJa.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Google Ngram&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could explain why the prevalence of all pronouns would change in parallel with each other? Does it reflect real change in usage or is it an artifact of the Ngrams archives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399691" OwnerDisplayName="Paul Martin" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T01:44:35.883" Title="Why does Google Ngrams show pronoun usage drop and rise over time?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13789" CreationDate="2020-09-24T20:55:50.543" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be just weirdness with Google Ngrams, though I’m not sure what specifically is causing it. I don’t trust Google Ngrams: See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8015/191178&quot;&gt;discussion of Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; here for why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparison, looking at the “Chart” in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COHA&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;PRON&lt;/code&gt; I get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JICcp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JICcp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;COHA chart&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, pronouns are between .65 and .77% of words in the corpus, depending on the year, which isn’t that much variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" OwnerDisplayName="Laurel" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T20:55:50.543" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-12T20:53:40.257" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not very long ago, quite a few questions on this site were 'protected', i.e. they were closed to the visitors with no reputation, but were otherwise open. Nowadays one doesn't see that anymore, and there doesn't seem to be anything on meta-ELU that would explain the disappearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the option of 'protecting' questions has been withdrawn by the 'headquarters' of the Stack Exchange, is there any consensus on what is supposed to be done now with the questions that, in the past, would have been protected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What prompts my curiosity about the matter is that I am getting an impression that many questions are now closed, not because there is anything really wrong with them, but because they happen to attract low-quality answers from one-time visitors, i.e. because they are the kinds of questions that would have been 'protected', but not closed, in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T18:46:10.790" Title="What happened to 'protecting'?" Tags="|discussion|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-08T14:21:16.340" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want an online dictionary where I will look for a word and it will show the definition with the word family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: If I search &amp;quot;Enigma&amp;quot;&#xA;It will show the definition along with the other parts of speech; enigma, enigmatic, enigmatical&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341251" OwnerDisplayName="Lutfur Rahman" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T00:08:30.087" Title="Online Dictionary that shows &quot;Word Family&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13792" CreationDate="2020-10-13T18:46:10.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Protected questions haven’t gone anywhere. There are ~9600 protected questions on ELU, three of which were protected in the last week. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/58416/191178&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;give an exam&amp;quot; grammatical for &amp;quot;writing the answers to exam&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tools to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/protected-questions?filter=week&quot;&gt;stats about protected questions&lt;/a&gt; are unlocked at 10k rep and protection itself is unlocked at 15k rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that protection is shown on each question is what’s changed. The banners for protected questions are now blue and at the top of the post instead of the bottom. For me they read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highly active question. You have enough reputation to answer or unprotect this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact message is determined by what privileges you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T18:46:10.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14795" CreationDate="2020-10-14T20:15:56.230" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/549115/extremism-what-s-the-cultural-history-of-this-word&quot;&gt;this  post&lt;/a&gt; has suggested that &lt;em&gt;autism&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mutism&lt;/em&gt;  are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;defects&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Extremism” sounds like an ideology, by analogy with Marxism for example; or possibly it’s more akin to a behavioural state like &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mutism or autism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; - a kind of &lt;strong&gt;pathology or defect.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might I remind the rest of the community that this is offensive to many of us. In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/02/greta-thunberg-responds-to-aspergers-critics-its-a-superpower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greta Thunberg has said that ASD is her &amp;quot;super power&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has been warned by none other  than diamond star user (Mod)   Andrew Leach that the question &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with Cascabel. While I hesitate at the 100-rep penalty, you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; edit this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, that has not happened. Can we please edit, or close / delete this post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T17:33:25.830" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T17:33:25.830" Title="Can we please close this offensive question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|offensive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14794" CreationDate="2020-10-15T08:17:21.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have deleted it until the content is changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T08:17:21.853" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14797" CreationDate="2020-10-16T10:29:44.497" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder, what was the first Stack Exchange site? I use Stack Overflow and Server Fault quite a lot. Their names suggest that you have a problem and you need to solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those were among the first ones, then later sites are kind of breaking the theme. English Language and Usage, if it were to follow the theme, might be called “Tongue Tied”. This would then have the same connotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148016" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T19:57:13.280" Title="Theme of stack exchange sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-10-18T17:31:16.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14796" CreationDate="2020-10-16T19:57:13.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You describe a pattern that never existed or which was abandoned very early on; Jeff Atwood's only criteria in the beginning were that 1) he &amp;quot;like&amp;quot; the name, and 2) the name be available. The proposed sysadmin-oriented site was initially called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/01/14/coming-in-march-it-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;IT Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; before &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/16/it-stack-overflow-update-naming-is-hard/&quot;&gt;Server Fault was adopted&lt;/a&gt; in March 2009. The third site was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/31/the-stack-overflow-trilogy/&quot;&gt;named Super User&lt;/a&gt; because he was able to obtain the domain name. The fourth site was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/28/cmon-get-meta/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, which isn't even a play on technical terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cleverness of a Stack name is to some extent correlated with age, as in the early days of the company there was more interest in developing community, and greater resources put into not only the community names but in having distinctive visual styles as well. Soon, however, there was pushback that the network was becoming fragmented, and that it was too inefficient to spend so much time on names and designs. Nothing To Install was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/10/05/domain-names-the-wrong-question/&quot;&gt;reverted to Web Apps&lt;/a&gt;, and while a few communities retained their brands (e.g. Seasoned Advice, Cross Validated), the decision was made to favor succinctness and commonality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 2013, the policy was that all sites would be &lt;em&gt;[Subject] Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt;, and I believe a few names were actually reverted to that format (&amp;quot;Travel Answers&amp;quot; comes to mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T19:57:13.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-21T12:36:41.457" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;My wife wants to improve her English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a paid site to learn english&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://id.engbreaking.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://id.engbreaking.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any like that that is free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10063" OwnerDisplayName="user4951" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T12:12:39.527" Title="What are the free resources to learn english online?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-01-08T17:28:29.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14798" CreationDate="2020-10-22T12:12:39.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is more relevant to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; and indeed it's well answered with lots of resources in the Meta on that site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/735/resources-for-learning-english&quot;&gt;Resources for learning English&lt;/a&gt;. Some of the resources mentioned there are free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mechanics of migration and closing as a duplicate mean that leaving this question here as a signpost to ELL is worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T12:12:39.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-23T00:36:48.263" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can you delete a question on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="403468" OwnerDisplayName="nickel" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T02:06:17.477" Title="Delete a question on this site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-10-23T07:03:06.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T00:59:31.770" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non-native English speaker I pronounce &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;bomb&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;climb&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;thumb&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; etc... with a clear &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; at the end. I know I shouldn't, but it's automatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I was interested in asking if native English speakers would understand such wrong pronunciation, or how weird it would sound... however, since listening comprehension is an individual phenomenon, such a question seems inherently &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; and therefore off topic. Is it possible to formulate a question regarding the comprehension of a wrong pronunciation without it being opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179649" LastEditorUserId="179649" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T12:35:25.360" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T12:35:25.360" Title="How to avoid an &quot;opinion based&quot; question regarding listening comprehension?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|subjective-topics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14802" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14804" CreationDate="2020-11-01T18:20:57.707" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably off-topic, but recently Ngrams made a &lt;em&gt;schlimmbesserung&lt;/em&gt; on their site, and now I cannot find snippets before 1800.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;example&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=broadcast&amp;amp;year_start=1500&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;case_insensitive=true#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=broadcast&amp;amp;year_start=1500&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;case_insensitive=true#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should be the right way...but on the original URL it shows this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sngy6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sngy6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and continues to show the same thing. My browser is Firefox, if that makes a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I click on years before 1800 to find snippets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find an etymology of the word &amp;quot;broadcast&amp;quot;, which seems to date to 1767 according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=broadcast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=broadcast&amp;amp;year_start=1500&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;case_insensitive=true#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; shows hits well into the 1600s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read through the Help page on Google, and cannot find any suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T20:21:24.640" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:36:10.993" Title="Finding snippets on Ngrams before 1800" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2020-11-01T18:58:43.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click on a button; doesn't matter which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kqtce.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kqtce.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Ngram date buttons&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change the date range to the dates you want:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BnKja.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BnKja.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ngram results date range&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0z1A.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0z1A.png&quot; alt=&quot;New date range&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presto. Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all the standard caveats about what these dates actually &lt;strong&gt;mean&lt;/strong&gt; still apply!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T18:58:43.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2020-11-02T21:08:00.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment, it was suggested that I change browser. I did that and the same problem presented itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a little noodling around with Ngram in &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Chrome and Firefox, I was able to determine that the site works a little differently from the way I remember before the &amp;quot;update&amp;quot; . Perhaps it is a bug, or perhaps it was always that way and I just never noticed, but I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, I have always set searches in a linear fashion, working from top to bottom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;erased the Einstein Frankenstein etc. stuff&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;type in my search word or phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;select date range, case, and smoothing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hit search button or [Enter]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site then produced a search for the related data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it seems that it is necessary to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;select date range, case, and smoothing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;type in search string&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hit [enter]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, if you have already typed in the search string first the way I used to do, and then change parameters, it is necessary to click back on the search line and hit [Enter] &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt; to refresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem seems to be in the &amp;quot;Apply&amp;quot; button on the date range search. It's either buggy or does not update immediately.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2XBGJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2XBGJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:36:10.993" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:36:10.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-04T02:53:45.590" Score="8" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/48276/how-are-astronaut-nametags-printed-when-their-family-name-is-first/48277#comment155957_48277&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; I wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because of the inherent implications of &amp;quot;maiden&amp;quot;, these days &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_name#Maiden_and_married_names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;née is often used instead&lt;/a&gt; though it still caries a gender reference, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunita_Williams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;e.g. Sunita Lyn Williams (née Pandya; born September 19, 1965) is an American astronaut and United States Navy officer...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to explore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aspects of modern English usage of the term &amp;quot;maiden name&amp;quot; including its potential sexism and other negative connotations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether née can be used instead in all cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but at the same time avoid too much commotion about the question being off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are successful questions about sex- and other isms here (see below) so this might be possible. But before I ask in the main site I'd like to ask here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I ask &amp;quot;Is X sexist&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Can Y replace it?&amp;quot; in the same question? Should I in this case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can I do to improve it's chances of being well received and minimize distracting irrelevant side discussions, in order to keep the focus on the question itself?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Successful&amp;quot; question examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/349376/217285&quot;&gt;Is the term &amp;quot;nagware&amp;quot; considered sexist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/107095/217285&quot;&gt;What does “Swish of skirt” mean? Why is it a sexist expression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/457553/217285&quot;&gt;Is there a gender neutral equivalent of “manspreading”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/5610/217285&quot;&gt;Just how offensive are the terms &amp;quot;retarded&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;gay&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T16:50:15.640" Title="Would &quot;Is 'maiden name' now considered sexist&quot; be off-topic? Can I ask if née replaces it in the same question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|asking-questions|subjective-topics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14805" CreationDate="2020-11-04T15:45:08.347" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for questions to elucidate the nuance of meaning in words is one essential use of ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not asking for opinions about the meaning (whether you like or support the situation or not). And it is not asking about the just the social situation and how things have changed. It is asking for knowledgeable responses about the words in relation to the social change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nuance and strength of meaning are sometimes considered 'opinions' but be assured they are not. There may well be a lot of inter-person difference and that is accounted for in the SE system by allowing more than one answer. If you disagree with an answer, that is not a disagreement of opinion, it is a disagreement over facts. True, these facts are introspective judgements of your understanding, but they can be judged by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:45:08.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13780" CreationDate="2020-11-06T10:39:10.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume this is what the OP meant,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what should have been done. Despite the poor syntax, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me where this word comes from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t see that there is much that is unclear about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a matter of whether or not the OP comes back – EL&amp;amp;U is creating a reference source, so, for what it’s worth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word starts in English as a rush of water and/or the channel that contains it.&#xA;The use of “race” is then split into the several attributes of speed and power, and a channel or pathway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Race&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (n.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymology:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; early Scandinavian (compare Old Icelandic rás , Norwegian regional rås , Swedish regional rås running, rush (of water), course, channel, way), cognate with rese n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I. With reference to a person, animal, etc.: forward progression, running, or movement; an instance of this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;†1. A rush, onset, charge; a raid. Obsolete.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c1330  (▸?a1300)    Arthour &amp;amp; Merlin (Auch.) (1973) 3990 (MED)   Wiþ gret ras King Ban þai hitten alle at ones. [King Ban rushed them all at once.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the same time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;II. A path, channel, or course, and related senses.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.†a. The course, line, or path taken by a person or a moving body. Also figurative. Obsolete.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c1390  (▸c1300)    MS Vernon Homilies in Archiv f. das Studium der Neueren Sprachen (1877) 57 274 (MED)   &lt;em&gt;To toune I renne þe deueles ras.&lt;/em&gt; [To town, I ran  along the Devil's path]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There then developed the idea of a figurative sense of a narrow path:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;†4.a. figurative or in figurative context: a person's progress through life or some part of it. Obsolete. The metaphor of life as a [competative] race is now more commonly understood as the figurative use.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a1450  (▸c1412)    T. Hoccleve De Regimine Principum (Harl. 4866) (1897) 1448 (MED)   &lt;strong&gt;I whilom þoghte Han ben a prest; now past am I þe raas.&lt;/strong&gt; [I had thought for a while that He was a priest, I am now persuaded &lt;em&gt;[that He is]&lt;/em&gt; the pathway (through/of) life]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As water-power became more popular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;gt;5.b. A channel or bed (of a stream); spec. an artificial channel leading water to or from a point where its energy is utilized, as in a mill or a mining claim. head-, mill-, tail-race: [etc.]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1570   in J. Raine Depositions Courts Durham (1845) 212   &lt;em&gt;The [law-] suit..for the raic [e] of the said water corne myln.&lt;/em&gt; [The [law suit..for the race of the said water-powered corn mill.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change from a straight or direct pathway/channel to a circular one did not arise until quite late:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED at &amp;quot;wheel&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Compounds C1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wheel-race&lt;/strong&gt;  n. &lt;strong&gt;the part of a mill-race in which the mill-wheel is fixed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1825   ‘J. Nicholson’ Operative Mechanic 104   &lt;em&gt;The wheel-race should always be built in a substantial manner with masonry.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, with the invention of ball- and roller-bearings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8.c.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Mechanics&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Either of the two grooved rings between which run the balls of a ball bearing or the rollers of a roller bearing. Recorded earliest in ball race (see ball n.1 Compounds 2), roller race (see roller n.1 Compounds 5).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1896   Bangor (Maine) Daily Whig &amp;amp; Courier 13 Nov. 4/4   &lt;em&gt;One of the novelties that will be sure to attract attention at the coming bicycle shows is an ingenious arrangement for conducting oil to the ball race.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus we can see that, in the sense of &lt;strong&gt;head-race&lt;/strong&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Head&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; = highest; most important (Cf &amp;quot;headmaster&amp;quot;) and the word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;race&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; has returned to (or never left) its origins of being &amp;quot;a constraining channel through which something rushes&amp;quot;, i.e. the bearings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T10:39:10.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14805" CreationDate="2020-11-07T16:50:15.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mitch has already explained why the question would be within the topic of this site and the upvotes, together with the absence of downvotes, suggest that there is a considerable agreement about that. The OP, however, seems to be really interested in how to 'minimize distracting irrelevant side discussions'. Apart from being as clear and focused as possible in formulating the question (which is, of course, something that one should always do), there is, however, not much that one can do to ensure that. Any discussion that one may have about that here, ahead of the question actually being asked, is likely to be futile; the answers to the meta-question cannot be made binding on those who see the question itself and feel inclined to make some irrelevant side-comment (most people who see the question itself won't have seen the meta-question anyway). The most efficient thing to do is to just ask the question and deal with any problems if and when they arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would, however, be a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42887&quot;&gt;What’s “maiden name” all about?&lt;/a&gt; (which specifically asks whether the term might be offensive), unless special effort is taken to differentiate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T16:50:15.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-11T03:55:30.293" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/551376/what-were-are-the-rules-regarding-relative-pronouns-from-c-1800?&quot;&gt;asked a question regarding archaic English grammar&lt;/a&gt; and one of the comments recommended that I make a resource request here on the Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for any books or websites that comprehensively explain the grammar of English spoken around the 1700 or 1800s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="323564" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T03:55:30.293" Title="Are there any resources for 18th and 19th Century English Grammar?" Tags="|discussion|questions|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-15T16:16:38.997" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a simple example of the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What is a word that describes someone who covers the ground quickly&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with that? Well we don't know what part of speech is required. We could give a &lt;strong&gt;noun&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;runner&amp;quot; or we could give an &lt;strong&gt;adjective&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;speedy&amp;quot;.  Both of these &amp;quot;describe&amp;quot; the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that people almost never say whether they want a noun or an adjective, or some other part of speech, is there some way we can tie them down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offer an obvious possibility. It is to get rid of the &lt;em&gt;single-word&lt;/em&gt; tag and instead have  &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T17:29:16.197" Title="Single-word requests. The annoying and constant problem of inexactitude" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13687" CreationDate="2020-11-17T23:29:50.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A great resource is &lt;strong&gt;Google books&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can specify a number of parameters including dates and key words - even key phrases if you enclose them in quotes. You will get plenty of hits although there may be duplication. Often the first hits for this period are from the Bible but scrolling down will find other publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example with the parameters, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;but thine eyes are&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jan 1600-Jan 1700&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g6aoF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g6aoF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127726" LastEditorUserId="127726" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T23:35:03.683" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T23:35:03.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-21T01:53:53.737" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions about local dialects necessarily &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;? (If not, I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/551465&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; was closed without proper justification)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36050" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T20:57:36.597" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T23:07:05.633" Title="Are questions about local dialects necessarily &quot;opinion-based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14813" CreationDate="2020-11-21T06:07:51.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about local dialects are not necessarily opinion-based. However, you're in a looking-glass world here at ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions are considered opinion-based if they're likely to attract &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; based on personal, rather than 'expert' opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your question may be considered likely to attract answers based on personal opinions, primarily because you either haven't done any basic research to answer your own question, or if you have done such research, the question doesn't mention what (exactly and specifically) that research was and why it wasn't sufficient to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not the originator of the guidelines behind the 2 points I mention, nor am I able to justify or explain the reasons for them. I have merely observed the effects in operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two points can only be considered guidelines. More or less obviously, some questions cannot be adequately researched by the people who have the questions. Equally, the points are only considered operative for a subset of &lt;em&gt;questioners&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt;: some of the participants here are considered 'above the fray' and so are given special privileges and considerations. The members of that privileged subset appear to me to have been chosen by 'behind the scenes' activity, in the chatrooms and presumably elsewhere, along with longevity on the ELU site in conjunction with general acceptance of whatever elaborate fictions those privileged members choose to promote about themselves and their 'expert' status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I've voted to reopen your question because the research necessary to answer it is somewhat daunting, and the applicable resources are not generally or easily accessed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="365490" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T14:18:32.443" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T14:18:32.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14813" CreationDate="2020-11-23T00:38:40.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is, that question is totally on-topic. It is asking about the regional dialect meanings of a word. What's &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; on-topic about that? It is not asking for opinions (or if this question is then -all- questions on Stackoverflow are opinions - just because people might disagree doesn't mean they are opinions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might arguably be closable for not presenting say a dictionary definition of 'yankee' which includes the first two items and some claim that you cannot find any evidence for the last three. But that is a nit-picker's close reason... if you really feel that is necessary it'd be easy enough for the close-voter to instead do the edit themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; sound like a fabrication though - the last line sounds too much like a punch line in its seeming absurdity. Either way, it is certainly so specific (and otherwise not publically documented) that it warrants a question on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T00:38:40.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14813" CreationDate="2020-11-23T17:47:31.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be relevant that the existing menu of possible reasons for closing doesn't very well articulate all the reasons that may actually lead people to vote to close. It thus often happens that somebody feels that a question should be closed, clicks 'close', and then selects whichever reason seems to be the closest, even if it doesn't quite reflect the real reason. This leads to the posted reasons for closing being confusing and misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it is possible that the last line of the quoted text led some people to perceive the whole text as a joke, and that they then voted to close the question because they treated it as a request that the joke be explained. As there is nothing on the menu that quite captures that reason, they selected 'opinion-based' as the closest available option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it is time for the established contributors to this site to reflect on how frustrating and alienating to questioners it is when they see their questions closed with posted reasons that make no sense. I realise, though that revising the menu of the reasons for closing may be a daunting project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T17:47:31.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14819" CreationDate="2020-11-25T10:31:02.763" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I click the &amp;quot;needs improvement&amp;quot; option I don't see any option to migrate to another website. Is this a mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZWrjy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZWrjy.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MVJtK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MVJtK.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T11:42:16.730" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T12:38:00.833" Title="The &quot;needs improvement&quot; close reason doesn't contain an option for migration" Tags="|support|close-reasons|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14818" CreationDate="2020-11-25T11:41:08.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The migration option is under &lt;strong&gt;A community-specific reason&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4CKWg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4CKWg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on 'This question belongs on another site ...' reveals another problem: Philosophy isn't listed in the so-called &lt;em&gt;migration paths&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m5YX9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m5YX9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only ♦ moderators can migrate questions to arbitrary sites in the network, so you'll have to raise a custom flag, as indicated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10250/295232&quot;&gt;FAQ about migration&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list is kept short for reasons mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/96345/295232&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; there's room for three more sites. Based on data from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats&quot;&gt;the 10k tools&lt;/a&gt;, adding Literature could make sense, but it's a beta site, and historically no migration paths to beta sites are created (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/354124/295232&quot;&gt;As of 2020, is it possible to set up migration paths to beta sites?&lt;/a&gt;). Other migrations are simply too rare to warrant a migration path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AHPPg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AHPPg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T12:38:00.833" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T12:38:00.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T00:36:42.070" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25428/article-when-there-is-an-adjective-before-a-noun&quot;&gt;Article when there is an adjective before a noun&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;There is a banner saying that this question is already asked some other place but link to that other place is absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="343525" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T07:21:46.670" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T10:47:37.243" Title="Apparent missing link to the original question" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14821" CreationDate="2020-12-02T10:47:37.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The link is there, but it is not in the banner, it is just below it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way duplicate close banners are displayed was updated a while ago, I'm not sure when exactly, but after this question was closed. All duplicate banners should have been updated accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question, however, had its duplicate banner edited (http to https in the link) before the update and I assume that this little change somehow tripped up the algorithm that changed all the banners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will reopen and close the question, and that should fix the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T10:47:37.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14811" CreationDate="2020-12-08T17:29:16.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a conjunction of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tags are manually entered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The problem suggests that the posters in question aren’t inclined to read instructions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Said instructions can be a little out of the way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quite a number of posters don’t have sufficient facility with the language or the site - or just can’t be bothered - to look up things like instructions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, replacing one tag with several compounds the problem. Posters would need to chance upon the right tag or tags. Even with the tag-suggestion mechanism we already have, I don’t think we’d solve the problem by offering greater choice. It would be better to stick with a default tag-suggestions list that includes the dreaded SWR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some things to try instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comment to ask for clarification, as Andrew Leach suggests in comments to your question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if none appears within a reasonable period, edit the question to add a sample of your own that is in keeping with the spirit of the question, and add a comment to invite the OP to review your sample; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if it’s unclear which way the question leans, vote to close the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T17:29:16.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:01:14.047" Score="6" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Ask Question&amp;quot; form currently suggests tags in the placeholder text: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;. I would &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt; that these are the most common tags used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZLHhe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZLHhe.png&quot; alt=&quot;Placeholder for tags, showing default suggestion&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, are they the &lt;strong&gt;most useful&lt;/strong&gt; examples to offer? I think we should probably offer tags which are likely to produce the most improvement in a question. The questions with the greatest likelihood for improvement are (I think) those whose authors should read the help available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps we could also offer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tenses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly don't think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammaticality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammaticality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt; should be offered &lt;strong&gt;at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we had the opportunity to change this helper text, what tags would you like to see here? Please add &lt;strong&gt;one per answer,&lt;/strong&gt; and upvote/downvote according to how &lt;strong&gt;suitable for question askers&lt;/strong&gt; you feel the suggestion would be. [Suggesting a tag in an answer should be assessed as a single upvote by the author.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can get a tag to appear in an answer and be clickable by using the syntax &lt;code&gt;[tag:etymology]&lt;/code&gt; to get &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T16:04:53.837" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T11:32:10.833" Title="Should we change the default suggested tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|questions|new-users|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14826" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:01:14.047" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions seeking a single word that fits a meaning. To ensure that your question is not closed as off-topic, please be specific about the intended use of the word.  INCLUDE A SAMPLE SENTENCE demonstrating how the word would be used.  Click on &amp;quot;Info&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;View Tag&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Learn more ...&amp;quot; for more information. Please use the &amp;quot;phrase-requests&amp;quot; tag instead if you seek more than just a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We should probably edit that excerpt for the new tag display)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:01:14.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14826" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:02:42.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prepositions are function words like &amp;quot;to&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;over&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;through&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;in&amp;quot;. The meaning of a sentence can be dramatically altered by choosing the wrong preposition. Questions need to include enough information for the intended meaning to be deduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:02:42.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14826" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:04:09.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tenses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A set of forms taken by a verb to indicate the time and/or completeness and continuance of the action in relation to the time of the utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:04:09.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14826" CreationDate="2020-12-10T11:32:10.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt;, the explanation is short and it tells the author to use SWR if they don't know the word they're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T11:32:10.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14831" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14832" CreationDate="2020-12-10T15:25:55.863" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was very glad to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5364/screenshots-in-questions-what-should-we-do-to-discourage-such-behavior&quot;&gt;an ELL question on screenshots&lt;/a&gt; and I totally agree. While reading it I tried to guess &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;when the use of screenshots would be actually allowed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but I would really like to read a concrete guidance on this. Are we not to use screenshots at all? I did search &amp;quot;screenshots&amp;quot; in the help center index but there was nothing there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T15:34:56.600" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T15:57:46.587" Title="When can we use screenshots?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14831" CreationDate="2020-12-10T15:57:46.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pictures are, in general, &amp;quot;inaccessible&amp;quot; — that is, they can't be searched for, and they can't be read by screenreader software. Someone who relies on having the internet read to them because they can't see it will be at a loss with a picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would agree with the main point of the ELL answer you pointed to, but would have a little more nuance, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Screenshots are &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; unacceptable.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where all the information in a screenshot can be presented in text, it should be. That doesn't mean that a screenshot of the original piece could not appear as well (as corroboration), but a screenshot should not be the only way that data is presented. We have a number of particularly egregious examples where a question is just a photograph of a test paper. Similarly, answers should not simply be screenshots of an online dictionary: the text should be reproduced in the answer (with a link in that case, as the screenshot actually adds nothing the link does not). Someone asking a question won't be directed to a previous similar question if the system can't find the words involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshots are OK when they provide &lt;strong&gt;additional&lt;/strong&gt; information which &lt;strong&gt;cannot be reproduced in text,&lt;/strong&gt; for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/552222/18696&quot;&gt;an answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;; but even then some description is necessary to explain what that image is actually showing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What to do about pictures:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/97531/&quot;&gt;Kevin&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5365/74&quot;&gt;ELL answer&lt;/a&gt; is difficult to improve upon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, we have three options for dealing with problematic content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvote. Nearly anyone can downvote any question, there is no rep cost, no justification is required, and it is anonymous. Downvoted questions are less likely to be answered, will eventually drop off the front page, &lt;a href=&quot;/help/roomba&quot;&gt;may be deleted automatically&lt;/a&gt;, and users who post a lot of downvoted questions are &lt;a href=&quot;/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;automatically banned from asking any more&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote to close. This requires a reason, and has a minimum rep requirement. &amp;quot;Needs details&amp;quot; is often an appropriate fit for these questions, depending on how much information is present, but you could also use a custom reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote to delete. This has a higher minimum rep requirement. In most cases, this is probably unnecessary as the system automatically deletes downvoted questions without answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're feeling charitable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's just a sentence or two, edit it into the question and remove the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's longer, leave a comment asking the questioner to type their question in words without using images of text. They may decide that they don't really need the entire image after all, which may make it easier to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see the same person post a lot of questions like this, or if you have other concerns not addressed here, flag it for a moderator's attention and explain the problem in detail. Moderators can reach out to problem users directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T15:57:46.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14834" CreationDate="2020-12-12T20:00:43.490" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across questions that became debates and users got evidently irritated in their answers or comments (I am not the one to judge if on good grounds or not). Is this enough reason to flag them as unfriendly? Or is this too harsh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T17:18:22.640" Title="When users express irritation in their answers or comments, is this enough reason to flag them as unfriendly?" Tags="|discussion|flags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14833" CreationDate="2020-12-13T07:48:19.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. One can disagree agreeably. It is &lt;em&gt;disagreeable&lt;/em&gt; disagreeing that should be flagged ‘unfriendly’. Likewise with irritation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T07:48:19.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14833" CreationDate="2020-12-15T17:18:22.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you read a comment, and you feel that it could be perceived as unfriendly, you should flag it. The primary goal of the &amp;quot;unfriendly&amp;quot; flag isn't to punish the person leaving the comment, but to remove the sort of comments that could make people not want to participate on the site. If a discussion has gone off the rails, just flag one of the comments for moderator attention instead of flagging a bunch of comments as unfriendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that only repeated unfriendly flags have an effect on someone's account, so if someone is just having a bad day and isn't usually unfriendly, your flag doesn't hurt them. It does get the unfriendly comment looked at by moderators, and acted on if they find it necessary. If someone is consistently being unfriendly in comments, the moderators should be made aware. The least disruptive way to do that is for people to flag comments they think are unfriendly and let the moderators sort it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guideline in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237978/a-guide-to-moderating-comments/237980#237980&quot;&gt;A guide to moderating comments&lt;/a&gt; from the network Meta site is &lt;em&gt;if it is more likely to upset readers than it is to inform them, it qualifies&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even comments between two users who know each other and are OK with the tone of the discussion can be candidates for an unfriendly flag. The site's content should be  for everyone, and snarky comments can leave a bad impression on users who aren't familiar with the community. The discussion can always be moved to chat where it doesn't detract from the answer or question the comments were under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T17:18:22.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-15T18:24:51.610" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2016, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/44619/mari-lou-a&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt; asked a question appropriate for the times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/365706/2016-the-year-of&quot;&gt;2016 The Year of ...?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;2016 is drawing to an end, and nobody can say it was an unexceptional year. On the contrary, it was extraordinary and at the same time a year of great tragedies.... &lt;em&gt;I would like a word, an expression or short phrase that sums up this historical year.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I look back on those years and think &amp;quot;Wow, we were so innocent then&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This past  year has been much more extraordinary...and more than tragic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't we do something similar this year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;I would like a word, an expression or short phrase that sums up this historical year.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T19:37:42.767" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T19:37:42.767" Title="Would it still be on-topic to ask a question to define the year? i.e. 2020: The year of...?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14836" CreationDate="2020-12-15T20:32:37.443" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, yes, yes!&lt;/strong&gt;  I looked at the answers for the earlier year (2016), and they confirmed my guess that any word that adequately described 2016 fails miserably to describe 2020.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first stab at a word for 2020:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;periapocalyptical&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-peri,&lt;/strong&gt; from the Oxford English Dictionary, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/140847?rskey=Oz1FG2&amp;amp;result=2#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;forming adjectives referring to a region, structure, etc situated or&#xA;ocurring around or near a part specified by the second element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the definition and examples in the OED, -peri is so used mainly in the medical and the &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot; sciences, but I see nothing that says it would be inappropriate for this social science question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Q makes it to the List of Questions, I'll add a definition for apocalyptical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether the question has already been asked, as @user 66974 maintains, I see his/her point, but what happened in 2016 was, horribly, business as usual compared to what happened in 2020, and the likely after-shocks of 2020 -- both bad and good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T23:02:35.253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T23:02:35.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14813" CreationDate="2020-12-15T21:22:15.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I scanned the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/231174?rskey=zUkw61&amp;amp;result=1#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary full definition of Yankee&lt;/a&gt;, and it supports the first several definitions given in the @MaxB question.  However, I did not see any mention of Vermont or pie.  The OP probably does not have to go to the OED to find the non-Vermont and non-pie answers.   So the question really reduces, after summarizing some research, to about Vermont and pie, and an answer from a bona fide long-time inhabitant of New England would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That is, answers based on authentic personal experience are useful even if not supported by a quotation.&lt;/strong&gt;  I remember fascinating answers from people who reported on the dialects of their local areas or language spoken by their grandparents, although I cannot easily find an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="121061" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T23:07:05.633" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T23:07:05.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-05T05:08:00.360" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of Randall Munroe's tool used to determine whether a word is one of the most common thousand words in English (&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/&lt;/a&gt;), I'm wondering if there is a tool that could determine whether a word is one of the most common 2,000 words, or 5,000 words, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159867" OwnerDisplayName="Alan McBee" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T01:02:30.427" Title="Is there a tool to check whether I'm using the top N most common words" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14839" CreationDate="2020-12-05T10:02:39.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know a little programming (in R or Python, say), there are very easy ways to do this, which I can describe if you want. Otherwise, try using Find on some of the frequency lists given in this page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407557" OwnerDisplayName="legatrix" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T10:02:39.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14857" CreationDate="2020-12-07T09:07:00.080" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I started reading a new book and want to highlight unknown words in it. So this service collects my known words and filters them from the others (unknown), then highlights new words (with possible translations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, I can create my own set of vocabulary, and keep words that I have to learn (export them via CSV or print as PDF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After learning new words I can move them from the 'unknown' list to the 'known' list, and in the next text (that I'm reading), I will see only new 'unknown' words to continue reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407743" OwnerDisplayName="Sasha B." LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T17:27:35.707" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T17:27:35.707" Title="Are there any good online services or tools for reading text and catching new words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14836" CreationDate="2020-12-16T17:27:57.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[For the sake of debate, I am adding the comments from user 66974.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could probably find an answer to your current question among those posted to the older question. The risk is of duplicate and POB issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions ask for a term or a phrase for a bad year, with a lot of negative events. I don’t see how the older question doesn’t fit the “new” one. In any case the POB issue still remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T20:09:53.053" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T20:09:53.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T18:47:47.950" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a text or book that discusses the history of the English alphabet, as in, how the shapes of the alphabet came to be, why certain sounds are associated with certain letters, and how the ordering of the alphabet came to be, and other topics. If this is not the right stack exchange for this question, then it should be migrated to another stack exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92112" OwnerDisplayName="user107952" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T19:11:03.327" Title="Reference for the history of the English alphabet" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:34:05.660" Score="0" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't having a tag such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/italian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;italian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;italian&lt;/a&gt; inviting questions requiring at least some knowledge of Italian? Isn't 'loan-words' sufficient? Aren't cross-language questions more appropriate on Linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T06:40:42.853" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T17:58:04.283" Title="The appropriateness of having an 'Italian' tag (no slight intended: I've just become aware of this particular flag)" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14849" CreationDate="2020-12-19T15:14:32.620" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Few days ago I asked a question whether to use the hyphen or the en dash in cases like &lt;em&gt;Anglo-Saxon England&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Washington–Moscow hotline&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/143547/whether-to-choose-the-hyphen-or-the-en-dash-in-cases-like-anglo-saxon-england&quot;&gt;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/143547/whether-to-choose-the-hyphen-or-the-en-dash-in-cases-like-anglo-saxon-england&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had wrongly supposed that this question is related to typography but thanks to Billy Kerr who answered it, it is now obvious that it is actually about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it better to move it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273573" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T15:33:57.870" Title="Move a question about hyphens and dashes from graphicdesign.stackexchange.com" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14848" CreationDate="2020-12-19T15:33:57.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be on-topic, but it would be closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/when-should-i-use-an-em-dash-an-en-dash-and-a-hyphen&quot;&gt;When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anglo-Saxon&lt;/em&gt; is a hyphenated compound; &lt;em&gt;Washington–Moscow&lt;/em&gt; indicates two ends of a connection. Those instances are similar enough to what's in the existing question to answer yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NB:&lt;/em&gt; This isn't intended to be dismissive of your question! Indeed, it's already been asked and it would be on-topic on ELU if it is not on-topic on GD.SE. You can certainly ask the moderators there to migrate it here, and linking it to a prior question would not reject that migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T15:33:57.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14846" CreationDate="2020-12-22T06:26:00.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding, and use, of tags differs from what is suggested by your question. I apply tags after composing the question, primarily as a means of facilitating the attention of others who might be interested in answering the question, or at least interested in reading it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be primarily an expression of your disinterest in etymology questions, or questions &lt;em&gt;involving&lt;/em&gt; other specific languages but not &lt;em&gt;centered&lt;/em&gt; on that other language; many questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; might want a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-language-other-than-vanilla-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-language-other-than-vanilla-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-language-other-than-vanilla-english&lt;/a&gt; (hereafter called &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slotve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slotve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slotve&lt;/a&gt;)content or subject tag, because that other language (or dialect; Scottish, for example, is sometimes considered a dialect) might be, or be said to be, a source, supply an etymon, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, I don't think questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slotve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slotve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slotve&lt;/a&gt; are &amp;quot;invited&amp;quot; by the tag; no, I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/loan-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loan-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loan-words&lt;/a&gt; is entirely sufficient for everybody's purposes here; and no, cross-language questions about &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; etymology (among other subjects bearing on English &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;) may not be more appropriate on Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall (through a veil of mild indifference) that it has been established on ELU Meta that there is some disagreement among ELU participants about whether or not etymology (or phrase-origin, etc.) questions are on-topic. This disagreement is sometimes reflected in overly aggressive close-voting by participants with &lt;em&gt;little or no interest in, or expertise on, the topic&lt;/em&gt;. I also seem to recall that the perfectly good suggestion for dealing with these circumstances is for &lt;em&gt;those with little or no interest in, or expertise on, a topic to &lt;strong&gt;recuse&lt;/strong&gt; themselves from close-voting questions on such topics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not I personally use a tag, have an interest in, or expertise on, a topic, I don't see attempts to do an end-run around disagreement about whether the topic is on-topic at ELU by foreclosing on tags that might be useful to those who do have such an interest, or systematically close-voting questions about the topic, as at all legitimate. Neither are such attempts, at least with respect to foreclosed tags, likely to be successful, because anybody with a certain reputation is likely to simply add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slotve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slotve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slotve&lt;/a&gt; tag back in if they think it's salient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of example, I note that 10 of the 32 questions now tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/italian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;italian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;italian&lt;/a&gt; are also tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;; 13 of the 80 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/german&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;german&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;german&lt;/a&gt;; 9 of the 64 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spanish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spanish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spanish&lt;/a&gt;; etc. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; tag also frequently co-occurs with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slotve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slotve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slotve&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T19:23:44.883" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T19:23:44.883" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14846" CreationDate="2020-12-23T01:02:00.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An argument can be made (and I believe that at least one prominent EL&amp;amp;U contributor has made it many times) that the tags used at EL&amp;amp;U are completely useless and a waste of time. If so, focusing on which particular foreign language tag(s) should be dumped is rather like trying to to decide which particular deck chair(s) to throw overboard now that a collision with an iceberg seems inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view of tags is that they can be helpful in noting particular areas of relevance within a question. For example, a memorable question posted in 2015 asks where, when, and under what circumstances the U.S. English term &amp;quot;pizza pie&amp;quot; originated. Since the word &lt;em&gt;pizza&lt;/em&gt; by itself is of Italian origin, it would seem reasonable for the poster to have included a tag for &amp;quot;italian&amp;quot; among the other tags (which currently consist of &amp;quot;etymology,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;american-english,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;food&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I am broadly interested in the English language's amoeba-like ingestion of words from other languages, I am particularly interested in instances where the appropriated words have undergone some degree of transformation in the course of their incorporation into the body of popular English. In such cases, having a tag that identifies the source of the appropriation as &amp;quot;italian&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;yiddish&amp;quot; or whatever it is) may be quite useful to readers whose etymological interest doesn't extend to all source languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more general note, I think it is worthwhile to appraise the value of tags not in isolation but in the context of other tags that may appear in the same question. The fact that posters are permitted to include as many as five tags with a question suggests to me that the people who adopted that policy imagined that posters might use some tags to refine others—as might happen when someone uses a tag such as &amp;quot;italian&amp;quot; to provide greater specificity to a more broadly applicable tag such as &amp;quot;etymology.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T17:58:04.283" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T17:58:04.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-23T18:37:41.780" Score="15" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I (and others) have noticed that there is a trend to 'lock' new questions. I understand that there is some dispute about &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the appropriateness of answering in comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; many here are guilty of that (myself included) especially when there is a lack-of-research, and the question could be explained by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General Reference&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-the-top-of-the-head&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Reverse dupes&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if there are other issues such as non-compliance with the requirements of the SWR tag, it becomes impossible to let the OP know. This seems counter-productive. Consider this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/555640/191178&quot;&gt;recent post&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O0bIu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O0bIu.png&quot; alt=&quot;locked for 22 hours // &amp;quot;single word requests&amp;quot; tag&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can we encourage the OP to do more research, or provide a sample sentence? If this is a change in policy, or a re-enforcement of an older policy,  could someone explain it to me? Some of us are frustrated with this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-02-21T20:42:13.317" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T20:42:13.317" Title="What's up with locking new questions?" Tags="|discussion|locked-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-23T18:37:49.483" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/555579/differentiate-it-is-said-from-it-has-been-said?noredirect=1#comment1369253_555579&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it was closed only temporarily and I assumed that it was not a duplicate (otherwise it would have been closed as one). So I went on and did my research and posted an answer. But then a rushing mighty wind came and I was downvoted because the question &lt;em&gt;WAS&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate. [I don't see why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7460/why-is-this-same-type-of-question-able-to-be-asked-on-two-different-sites&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt; was not considered as a duplicate, when it was asked on two sister sites. This matter was addressed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7460/why-is-this-same-type-of-question-able-to-be-asked-on-two-different-sites&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After less than half an hour, after a little discussion in the comments to my answer, the question was closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand why a duplicate question is closed, I still wonder: is this enough reason to downvote an answer that is perfectly correct and upvoted by others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="407211" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T20:06:58.557" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T20:06:58.557" Title="Is the fact that a question is a duplicate a good reason to downvote?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14852" CreationDate="2020-12-23T19:48:41.567" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is part of an effort to elicit genuine answers, meaning ones posted&#xA;using the answer box where they belong.  It seeks to address a particularly&#xA;pernicious variant of the age-old &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/308302&quot;&gt;Fastest Gun in the&#xA;West&lt;/a&gt; problem that afflicts our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our variant involves shot-from-the-hip, one-liner comments containing&#xA;proposed answers.  These often hit the site within the first ten minutes of&#xA;the question being posted. After five or ten of them, nobody bothers to&#xA;post an actual answer, suborning the Stack Exchange model of how SE sites&#xA;are intended to operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be working.  Now instead of using the comment box for&#xA;answers, people post actual answers instead, answers that can be voted on,&#xA;edited, searched for, have a public revision history,  contribute&#xA;to badges — and, dare I say, sometimes even seasonal hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T19:48:41.567" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14842" CreationDate="2020-12-29T13:47:12.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural language processing&lt;/a&gt; might make this achievable. One could filter a corpora of their messages, literature, tweets, etc. (after clean-up) using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Subtracting that set from all the words in the dictionary (or a book) would yield the &amp;quot;unknown&amp;quot; (or, more accurately, &amp;quot;unused&amp;quot;) words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would have to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Provide and tidy up the data&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pick a suitable model&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Interpret the results&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though a tool can help, I wouldn't recommend this for primary vocabulary building because it is unnatural. It takes considerable time and patience. Moreover, one needs intermediate programming skill and a good grasp of data science and mathematics to implement this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are still considering it, I would recommend watching &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvqsFTUsOmc&amp;amp;ab_channel=PyOhio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407392" LastEditorUserId="407392" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T18:05:26.737" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T18:05:26.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14852" CreationDate="2020-12-29T14:10:51.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;On another site I have seen a moderator's template comment along the lines of &amp;quot;Comments that attempt to answer the question have been deleted. To answer the question, please use the Answer Box&amp;quot;. Wouldn't this be a better solution than locking a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T14:10:51.120" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14842" CreationDate="2020-12-29T19:01:00.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two different kinds of resources of which I am sure there are many other instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for something for you yourself to mark words that are new to you, to remember them in a list maybe for language learning, there is the Chrome extensions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://readlang.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Readlang&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you add it to your browser, it allows you to click on a word to translate it between any two languages. YOu can then add this word to a flashcard list for review later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for new words for everybody, or at least for one large publication, there is a twitterbot called&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/NYT_first_said&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New New York Times @NYT_first_said&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which describes itself as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tweets words when they appear in the New York Times for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not perfect: the corpus is not huge (just the NYT), it includes some obvious misspellings, one-off foreignisms, , and anything goes in quotes. But it is just what is wanted for that 'first citing' for OED as a place of record for neologisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T19:01:00.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14862" CreationDate="2020-12-29T20:17:57.853" Score="4" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand there is a need to close duplicate answers, but shouldn't there be some clear instructions about what one can do to appeal? I'm not talking about the option to edit (which is clearly identified), I'm talking about the OP disputing that the question is a duplicate in the first case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55234/is-walk-on-foot-acceptable?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;walk on foot&amp;quot; acceptable?&lt;/a&gt; was deemed a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17943/by-foot-vs-on-foot&quot;&gt;by foot vs on foot&lt;/a&gt;. My question has nothing to do with the correct preposition to use in this phrase; it is focused solely on the repetition of the ideas 'walk' + 'on foot', on whether its redundancy is acceptable in spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, surely, there must be other users who find it disconcerting that one's question is not only mis-read, but one is also forced to edit rather than give a chance to state your case. At least provide a link to a list of actions to take when edit is clearly not an option!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14048" LastEditorUserId="14048" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T20:30:36.950" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T22:00:40.503" Title="How does one appeal a closed question, duplicate?" Tags="|support|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-29T20:19:17.157" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I cannot access the chat room. I only get this forever message ( I have left it for up to 24 hours and it still hangs) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZyVg3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZyVg3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This started after the last updates around 4-5 months ago. Possibly it is my browser, but I kinda doubt it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to this post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1974/chat-hangs-while-loading..&quot;&gt;Chat hangs while loading&lt;/a&gt;. but even Jeff Atwood could not answer it to my satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Firefox...this should not be an issue. &amp;quot;Clearing the browser cache&amp;quot; is not clear for the casual user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate some helpful advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T22:03:03.980" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T22:03:03.980" Title="Problems loading chat: hangs forever" Tags="|discussion|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14860" CreationDate="2020-12-29T21:14:12.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The browser cache should usually be suspected in cases like this. Of course, if you're used to programming your own router and everything, you probably don't need the level of detail here, but it may help someone else...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have another browser installed, you can attempt to get to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-and-usage&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; with that (you don't have to be signed in on that browser; the chat room will load whether you're signed in or not). That won't do anything with your normal browser, but will at least confirm whether you can access the room from your computer at your location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's OK, then you can do things with your browser's cache. The cache is a storage area where the browser stores static files like images and JavaScript scripts, because it's faster getting them from that local storage than it would be to fetch them over the internet each time they're needed. However, if the local copy gets corrupted, strange things can happen: the browser doesn't know something's gone wrong; it simply carries on using the local copy because it's there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many browsers, including Firefox, clearing the cache clears everything which has been downloaded from any site. You may not want to do that. However, you can at least check whether the cache is involved without clearing it completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What follows works for Firefox, Chrome and Edge; it may also be the same for Safari and other Webkit or Chromium-based browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go to the chat room: you'll get the message and not much else. Then use key combination &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt;+&lt;kbd&gt;Shift&lt;/kbd&gt;+&lt;kbd&gt;I&lt;/kbd&gt; (that's &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt;) to open the &lt;em&gt;Inspector&lt;/em&gt;. Click Network (this image is from Firefox):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8XwKM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8XwKM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inspector's Network tab&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then over to the right, check the &lt;code&gt;Disable cache&lt;/code&gt; checkbox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6RENO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6RENO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inspector's Disable cache checkbox&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then reload the page. This forces everything in the page to be reloaded from the internet, without touching the local cached copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that works, you may find it's fixed it permanently — even though you disabled the cache, the browser may well have replaced what was there with what it's just downloaded. Uncheck &lt;code&gt;Disable cache&lt;/code&gt; and try again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all is well, you've fixed it. You can close the Inspector using the × just above the cogwheel (see the second image above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;checking&lt;/strong&gt; that checkbox made no difference, it's not the browser cache and you can stop reading here: you'll need to try something else. Make sure the checkbox is unchecked, and close the Inspector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If checking the checkbox worked, but reloading with it &lt;strong&gt;unchecked&lt;/strong&gt; didn't work, then you will need to clear the browser cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close the Inspector with the × button, and then from the &amp;quot;hamburger&amp;quot; menu in the top-right corner of the screen, choose &lt;code&gt;Options&lt;/code&gt;. It has a cog-wheel icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ta59P.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ta59P.png&quot; alt=&quot;Hamburger menu&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the menu on the left, click &lt;code&gt;Privacy &amp;amp; Security&lt;/code&gt;, then scroll down the right-hand page to &lt;code&gt;Cookies and Site Data&lt;/code&gt;. Click the screen button &lt;kbd&gt;Manage Data...&lt;/kbd&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will show a list of websites/domains for which Firefox holds data. Find &lt;code&gt;stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; (you can use the search box), highlight that line and click the screen button &lt;kbd&gt;Remove selected&lt;/kbd&gt;. Click the screen button &lt;kbd&gt;Save changes&lt;/kbd&gt; and then &lt;kbd&gt;Remove&lt;/kbd&gt;. &lt;b&gt;Caution: This will also remove your login cookies on every SE site. You will be logged out.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this &amp;quot;nuclear option&amp;quot; will completely reset everything your browser knows about Stack Exchange sites. While you will need to log in again, all pages, scripts and images will have to be fetched shiny and fresh and should no longer be corrupted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T21:14:12.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14859" CreationDate="2020-12-29T22:00:40.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are generally two courses of action possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there are no answers which will be invalidated by an edit, then &lt;strong&gt;edit the question&lt;/strong&gt; to make it clear exactly what you are asking about. You can phrase the question in such a way that it cannot be answered by the nominated duplicate. That is, don't say, &amp;quot;This question is not a duplicate of X because I'm asking about...&amp;quot; but instead just make it clear what it is that you are actually wanting to know. By doing that you will eliminate question X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is the course of action recommended by the system:&lt;/strong&gt; you should see an &amp;quot;Edit question&amp;quot; button in the duplicate-question banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;Help on closed questions&lt;/a&gt; and specifically on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;duplicates&lt;/a&gt;. This even says &amp;quot;If you see a question and do not agree that it truly is a duplicate, edit it to highlight the differences, then try to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;get it reopened&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;casting a reopen vote&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But,&lt;/strong&gt; if there are already answers which are valid for the question as it's currently written (even though it may not be what you &lt;strong&gt;meant&lt;/strong&gt; when you wrote it), it's bad form to invalidate them. A substantial edit may even be rolled back in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there are answers which would be invalidated by such an edit, but there are no answers which tell you what you want to know, then ask another question, making it clear exactly what it is you're asking about. You could even reference the first question, saying &amp;quot;I asked question X but didn't make myself clear...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example you link to, the question isn't very clear. &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; know what you're asking about; but everyone else has only the words you write to go on; your thoughts don't travel well through the ether. The question could say that you're concerned about the redundancy of &amp;quot;on foot&amp;quot; when using the verb &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt;. You've added that in a comment, so presumably it was actually necessary to state it — it should have gone in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer appeared 25 minutes after your question, which actually explains exactly what you wanted to know: &lt;em&gt;on foot&lt;/em&gt; is indeed redundant. You've accepted the answer: it's answered the question you actually had (and not the one you wrote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;this case,&lt;/strong&gt; the duplicate is irrelevant. You asked a question and you have the answer you were looking for. In this case, the pointer to a duplicate is merely a &amp;quot;See also&amp;quot; for anyone who has a similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the current duplicate was in fact suggested in November 2015, but failed to get the necessary votes in the required time. That it has come round again is suggestive that the question is not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T22:00:40.503" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14864" CreationDate="2020-12-30T15:15:07.913" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/556123/what-is-it-called-to-use-random-error-as-evidence&quot;&gt;What is it called to use random error as evidence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this ever marked duplicate? Why not just migrate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164125" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T20:41:33.207" Title="Why marked duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14863" CreationDate="2020-12-30T20:06:29.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathize with your dilemma, but  please note that our site is user-moderated for the most part. Your question on the main has a couple of issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unclear to the average user on EL&amp;amp;U. (hence the &amp;quot;incoherent&amp;quot; answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is too localized for our site and probably not suitable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3K users cannot vote to migrate except to English Learners.SE , or EL&amp;amp;U meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only diamond mods can  migrate Qs to sites other than those already cited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that takes time. Patience is recommended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T20:41:33.207" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T20:41:33.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-31T12:41:19.457" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just Googled 'damn or damned' and was presented with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/124678/18696&quot;&gt;a post on your site&lt;/a&gt;. Imagine my absolute horror when I saw in the explanation you gave, a grammatical error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You write 'Damn'is a verb.....and can be used on it's own'. This literally reads 'and can be used on it is own' which is nonsensical. I fail to understand how a site about English grammar can make such a blatant error. Unfortunately, it is a very common mistake, along with they're and there that I notice in even professional writing. I despair. This surely is basic English grammar taught in the primary school.&#xA;I would appreciate an answer and explanation. Do you not proof read your site insertions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="410079" OwnerDisplayName="Kathryn Thomas" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2020-12-31T14:00:37.250" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T19:15:04.873" Title="Blatant Grammatical Error" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2021-01-29T14:51:08.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14865" CreationDate="2020-12-31T14:02:43.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As can be seen from comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can edit the post and correct it. Different users of different backgrounds post here so mistakes are unavoidable. Sometimes the speed of people's posting can be challenging and some mistakes may be overlooked unintentionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you yourself point out, common mistakes are unavoidable even for English native speakers, let alone for foreign eager learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post has already been corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T14:02:43.903" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14865" CreationDate="2020-12-31T19:15:04.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the nature of this site. The OP says 'you write . . .', apparently addressing the community of this site as a whole. The answers on this site are, however, not written by the community as a whole; they are written by individuals. It is the individual whose username appears below the answer that is responsible for the content of that answer, not the community as a whole. Any criticism of a particular answer is thus expected to take the form of a comment posted below that answer and/or downvoting the answer (or in the case of simple mistakes, such as this one, editing it). Admittedly, one cannot do any of that immediately upon joining the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T19:15:04.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T20:01:38.507" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/556484/inversion-in-relative-clause&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was classified as a duplicate. Is it not a bit stretched? I can see the similarity, but the structures present in the body of each question are in fact different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on which grazed a few cattle and sheep (where the predicate &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;graze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; precedes the subject without the dummy preliminary subject &amp;quot;there&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit (where the structure is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;there + verb + subject&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that the first structure does get attention in the other question later in the answers and comments, but still, I don't see why two questions about different structures were treated as duplicates. What am I missing, can someone help me understand the principle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="407211" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T20:15:49.873" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T21:15:23.550" Title="Why is this question a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14869" CreationDate="2021-01-03T20:41:08.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because I believe that fixating on the expletive &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; mistakes the forest for the trees.  Pretending that 1 and 2 are fundamentally different seems unproductive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From the door came a cry for help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From the door there came a cry for help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the door from which came a cry for help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of case 3 I’ve reopened it, but the existing answers don’t seem to hit the nail on the head.  Too many words, too little meat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T21:15:23.550" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T21:15:23.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14872" CreationDate="2021-01-04T15:10:25.570" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/96767/401123&quot;&gt;Should personal pronouns always be placed at the end of a list?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed eight years ago as duplicate of some other question. That question is not visible. Why is it so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xwJln.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Screenshot of the question: 'Should personal pronouns always be placed at the end of a list?' The linked question is absent.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xwJln.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot; title=&quot;Screenshot of the question: 'Should personal pronouns always be placed at the end of a list?' The linked question is absent.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401123" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T15:22:26.753" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T08:06:58.063" Title="Linked question is absent in &quot;This question already has answers here&quot; banner" Tags="|support|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-01-04T16:16:03.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14871" CreationDate="2021-01-04T15:21:53.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; old duplicate closures, look e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=duplicate%3A1+lastactive%3A..2013-02-03&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back then, the duplicate banner was edited into the post itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YI4AJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YI4AJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can start to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/96767/edit&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; the post to see the 'source code' of the banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to solve this is to reopen the question, and close it again as a duplicate (and edit out the original banner). We do this sometimes on Meta Stack Exchange (there are many people with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/231212/295232&quot;&gt;dupehammers&lt;/a&gt; there); on main sites, basically only ♦ moderators can do that. But as you can see, they would have to do that on many posts. I don't think that's an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T08:06:58.063" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T08:06:58.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-05T12:35:53.357" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have already Oxford Advanced Learner´s Dictionary, which I use at my home, but I want another one to my office. So I decided to take rather American dictionary but which one?&#xA;After reading some reviews my favourites are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;number 2 is longer and has more definitions,&#xA;but generally what is the difference? What is more appropriate? Because when I read books about English grammar, authors recommend that first one - Collegiate, never recommend second one. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I´m level C1, btw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thx&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="410522" OwnerDisplayName="don" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T13:32:37.353" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T23:10:47.163" Title="dictionary for American English" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14873" CreationDate="2021-01-05T20:15:33.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (2003) is now eighteen years old, and—as far as I know—Merriam-Webster has no immediate plans to issue an updated &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Collegiate&lt;/em&gt;. The gap is striking, since previous editions of the &lt;em&gt;Collegiate&lt;/em&gt; series tended to come out at ten-year intervals. Here are the dates of release of the eleven editions of the &lt;em&gt;Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First edition: 1898&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second edition: 1910&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third edition: 1916&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth edition: 1931&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fifth edition: 1936&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sixth edition: 1949&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seventh edition: 1963&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eighth edition: 1973&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ninth edition: 1983&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tenth edition: 1993&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eleventh edition: 2003&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the longest previous gaps between editions were fifteen years between the third and fourth editions, fourteen years between the sixth and seventh editions, and thirteen years between the fifth and sixth editions. It is also noteworthy that the backbone of all editions of the &lt;em&gt;Collegiate Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; since the seventh edition (1963) has been &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (1961), which is now sixty years old. The release dates of major revisions of this full-size dictionary and its predecessors going back to Noah Webster's first &lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;: 1828&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, second edition: 1840&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;. new revised edition: 1847&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An American Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, royal quarto edition: 1864&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Webster's International Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;: 1890&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Webster's New International Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;: 1909&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Webster's Second New International Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;: 1934&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Merriam-]Webster's Third New International Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;: 1961&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, new editions of &lt;em&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; have appeared in the following years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First edition: 1969&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second [College] edition: 1982&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third edition: 1992&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth edition: 2000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fifth edition: 2011&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of years ago, the consultancy where I work as a freelance editor switched its in-house dictionary from the &lt;em&gt;Eleventh Collegiate&lt;/em&gt; to the fifth-edition &lt;em&gt;AHDEL&lt;/em&gt;, specifically because the staff editors there were concerned that the &lt;em&gt;Eleventh Collegiate&lt;/em&gt; was falling out of date and was less likely than the &lt;em&gt;AHDEL&lt;/em&gt; to be refreshed in the near future. We shall see whether a sixth edition of &lt;em&gt;AHDEL&lt;/em&gt; comes out in the next two or three years and justifies that decision. In any case, &lt;em&gt;AHDEL&lt;/em&gt; fifth edition is eight years younger than the &lt;em&gt;Eleventh Collegiate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the many U.S. publishing houses that I've worked for over the years have used either the Merriam-Webster &lt;em&gt;Collegiate&lt;/em&gt; series or &lt;em&gt;AHDEL&lt;/em&gt; as their in-house dictionary. Another major U.S. dictionary option is &lt;em&gt;[Random House] Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (2001), which is an update of earlier full-size Random House dictionaries (from 1966, 1987, and 1993).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2021-01-09T23:10:47.163" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T23:10:47.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-07T19:29:32.550" Score="9" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;For new users...&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;serial&lt;/em&gt; down-voting  is strictly discouraged.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It requires a certain amount of venom and dedication to go through another  user's list of questions and answers and then methodically DV as many as they can find. I am not sure of the consequences for the DVer, and  &lt;em&gt;I would like to know what site policy is regarding these (ab)users&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latest violation of this site policy, someone got pissed off enough to DV at least 28 of my posts. They were of course reversed the next day without my even being aware of it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5F4YT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5F4YT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I pissed someone off enough that they felt this passive-aggressive attack was cute. Instead, it created more work for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have angered some other user so much that they felt that this was their best recourse, I am saying that I would like to iron this out in a better way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing the  honest taking of  the  proffered olive branch, I would like to know who it was so that we can talk about  it in a reasonable manner without violating site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there some way I can discover who is mounting this attack on me?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T20:26:02.263" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T07:05:07.107" Title="Is there any way of knowing who is serial down-voting me?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14875" CreationDate="2021-01-07T21:45:57.083" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Voting is private, although details are logged in the database. Access to the details of that data is restricted to staff. Even if you undertake your own detective work and try to see if your rep changes are matched by rep changes on another user [since downvotes on answers cost you 2 points and the voter 1 point], that's a lot of work and is unreliable — because the system is designed to make it very difficult. Don't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the system has various built-in safeguards which can trap this targeting and reverse it. (Targeted voting is aimed at a user rather than what they post. It can be downvoting as here, presumably in revenge for something; or upvotes as a favour. Both directions can be caught and corrected by the system.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15942&quot;&gt;Moderators have access to very limited information&lt;/a&gt;, and cannot correct anything. However, if the system doesn't deal with it (as it has here), then we are able to nudge it upstairs for staff to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Targeted voting isn't allowed, and if it does become obvious then users who do that will receive a message and can be suspended. Please don't take matters into your own hands: let the system deal with it, and if it continues and isn't corrected after a couple of days, let moderators know so they can take an initial look. You can do that in chat, or by raising a flag on one of the posts which has suffered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In this case,&lt;/strong&gt; the system has done exactly what it's designed to do and undone any harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further information is on MSE, since it's a network-wide phenomenon (and handled identically by the system on every site):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27534/see-who-is-upvoting-downvoting-my-question-answer&quot;&gt;See who is upvoting/ downvoting my question/answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12984/is-there-a-way-to-see-who-voted-on-your-posts&quot;&gt;Is there a way to see who voted on your posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28756/what-can-i-do-if-im-the-victim-of-serial-downvoting/28758#28758&quot;&gt;What can I do if I&amp;#39;m the victim of serial downvoting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-01-07T23:26:35.767" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T23:26:35.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-08T16:47:41.340" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I replied to a poster who asked me to supply a list of words in a particular category, that this was not allowed in the rules. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/271507/which-verbs-call-for-to-and-which-dont?noredirect=1#comment506414_271507&quot;&gt;See&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I tried to search for the rule, I couldn't find it (or indeed any list of rules for answers). Am I wrong? I'm sure I've seen other commenters state that this was the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90320" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T17:52:06.390" Title="Are word lists forbidden in the rules?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14878" CreationDate="2021-01-08T17:52:06.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139618/are-list-questions-off-topic&quot;&gt;this meta meta post&lt;/a&gt; covers the issue of lists in general. That is, no, lists are not allowed because each answer is equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We used to allow list questions on EL&amp;amp;U so long as they were Community Wiki (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1287/why-are-list-questions-supposed-to-be-community-wikis-usually-those-questions-d&quot;&gt;see this meta question&lt;/a&gt;). I think they've been outlawed due to their subjective nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example you've linked to does ask for a list, but I think it can be answered without one. I don't think providing the list would be helpful (so very very long) or even achievable, as the list would inevitably change as the language evolves, and may be different depending on dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T17:52:06.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14875" CreationDate="2021-01-08T19:21:50.677" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.   If someone is serial downvoting it means they should see a rise in their points.  Now I believe there is a systemic way SE handles a habitual serial voter - whether up or down - that does not revert point back to the serial voter.   So this may not work for someone serious about their serialness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the person that does not get their points given back should in theory face some sort of suspension so you could scan the active user list to see if anyone got suspended - it could be just on the SE site in question.   These methods aren't foolproof and have to be done quickly but gives you a decent chance to figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also if you get a mod that will tell you - I have had a couple let me know before which I understand they are not supposed to)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51137" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T19:21:50.677" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14883" CreationDate="2021-01-08T20:56:15.023" Score="7" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is ELU tag guidance required to &amp;quot;accord&amp;quot; with tag guidance at Linguistics.SE? I ask because a recent update-change I made to the tag guidance for etymology was rolled back by a moderator, with the comment &amp;quot;Make sure the usage-guidance excerpt accords with &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/tags/etymology/info&quot;&gt;the one used on Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My effort was intended to update existing tag guidance to conform with actual &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of the tag on ELU. I changed the guidance to the 'loose definition' of etymology offered by Gerald Cohen in the preface to &lt;em&gt;Etymology and Linguistic Principles&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search for the origin of linguistic features: words, idioms, morphological elements, writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag guidance was (before I changed it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology is the history of the origin of words and phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My change seemed to cover the range of legitimate uses of the etymology tag here at ELU, and especially included &amp;quot;idioms, morphological elements, writing systems&amp;quot;, that is, linguistic features of English that are left out of the current guidance, which is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their forms and meanings have changed over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my ignorance, I (1) didn't know our tag guidance had to &amp;quot;accord&amp;quot; with the guidance at Linguistics, (2) don't see how the change I made doesn't &amp;quot;accord&amp;quot; with and even improve on the Linguistics tag guidance, and especially (3) think questions focused on &amp;quot;history&amp;quot; are more appropriate at History.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T20:17:59.950" Title="Is ELU tag guidance required to &quot;accord&quot; with Linguistics.SE guidance?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14875" CreationDate="2021-01-09T00:51:39.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Others have responded to the core of your question, i.e. (how) can you find out who is serially downvoting you. I thought a slightly broader perspective might also be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that SE uses algorithms to detect &lt;strong&gt;suspicious voting activity&lt;/strong&gt;, which doesn't just include serial &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;voting, but also serial &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;voting. The underlying principle is that posts should receive votes based on their usefulness (or lack thereof) rather than on the identity of the poster. Serial voting of any kind is not only unfair, it undermines the integrity of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some serial voting can be somewhat innocent, committed in ignorance of the algorithm and lacking insight into how their activity is unfair. For instance, an inexperienced user might like another user's post, and upvotes it; they click on the username to read their profile, and they discover that the profile page lists other posts by that user. They click on some of these posts, like what they read, and upvote these posts too. It's an innocent act, and if it's only a couple of posts voted on then it's harmless enough. But if they upvote (say) a dozen posts by that user, this is giving that user an unfair boost in votes; thankfully, the algorithm is likely to identify this as serial voting and will automatically reverse the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it can also happen somewhat innocently with &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;votes. For example, I might notice that a particular user has been posting ignorant, misinformed and incorrect answers. &amp;quot;Who IS this obnoxious person?&amp;quot; I ask; I look up their profile, and look through their recent posts, which only confirms my view about them, as I DV more of their answers. The point is that even if I'm assessing each of their posts on its merits, the fact that I'm selecting &lt;em&gt;just their posts&lt;/em&gt; for review means I'm serially voting, and if the combination of the pattern of my voting and the number of votes cast meets the algorithm's parameters, it will automatically reverse those votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that the system does &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; alert the mods when it identifies suspicious voting behaviour and reverses a user's votes. I know this because two years ago I became concerned about a particular user whose poor (and in some cases, glaringly ignorant) answers were consistently receiving many times the number of votes that my own awesome answers were getting, and when I looked at their posting timeline in their profile I could see not only that there was an obvious pattern to the significant upvotes they were receiving (which regularly exceeded 100 rep points a day), but there had been several very large voting reversals in the last six months. I could also see that there were several occasions where serial voting was clearly occurring but wasn't enough to have triggered a system response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether the user had created fake accounts, or was using the keys to the legit accounts of other household members, but the upvoting was too concentrated to have been from a more innocent cause such as in response to them tweeting their answer. They were clearly cheating. But looking at the size of some of the reversals - 500 rep points or more! - I was amazed that the user hadn't been suspended. I learnt that I had to flag one of the user's posts and &lt;em&gt;alert the mods to my concerns&lt;/em&gt;. I'm pleased to say that when the activity continued, the user ended up being suspended for a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that (a) mods aren't alerted when the system picks up serial voting and reverses the votes, (b) the system doesn't pick up &amp;quot;less egregious&amp;quot; serial voting, (c) mods can and will take action if you alert them to obvious serial voting (although if you can't identify the user, their only recourse is to refer it &amp;quot;upstairs&amp;quot; to staff), and (d) if a user knows about the system algorithm and genuinely wants to target you, it's not too hard for them to structure their serial downvoting (or, indeed, upvoting) so that it flies below the system's radar and cannot be detected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from flagging your concerns to the mods, the best defence against serial voting is for &lt;em&gt;all of us to &lt;strong&gt;vote vote vote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. If all useful posts are receiving plenty of upvotes, then on any individual post a single DV from an antagonist will be lost in the wash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2021-01-09T07:05:07.107" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T07:05:07.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14881" CreationDate="2021-01-09T20:17:59.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my view, the &amp;quot;history of the origin of words and phrases&amp;quot; wording currently associated with the &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; tag does not provide an accurate or helpful description of the sorts of etymology-related questions that pass muster at EL&amp;amp;U. To the contrary, a question that asks primarily about the linguistic history of a word is extremely likely to be close-voted either as being &amp;quot;not about the English language&amp;quot; or as being &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot;—more often than not with a recommendation to consult Etymology Online or the OED for relevant etymological information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core problem is that the sorts of questions that amateur researchers can usefully answer with hitherto undiscovered information skew much more toward what I would call &amp;quot;word origin&amp;quot; details (first published occurrences and early meanings) than toward &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; as a linguist would be likely to understand that term. For that reason, I think the site would be much better served if, going forward, we replaced the &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; tag with a &amp;quot;word-origin&amp;quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, EL&amp;amp;U has so many &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot;-tagged questions at this point that I can't imagine anyone would have the time and inclination to review them individually to determine whether changing the &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; tag to &amp;quot;word-origin&amp;quot; would make sense in each case—even assuming that a majority of EL&amp;amp;U participants agreed that such a change in nomenclature was a good idea in the first place. At the same time, I don't recommend imposing a blanket conversion of &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; tags to &amp;quot;word-origin&amp;quot; tags because a close examination of the thousands of &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot;-tagged questions at EL&amp;amp;U would surely turn up quite a few instances of questions that really are about &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; in its narrower linguistic sense of evolutionary antecedents of modern-language words and yet—for one reason or another—have not been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the past year or so, I have been adding the tag &amp;quot;phrase-origin&amp;quot; to questions that ask about first occurrences and early applications of various idioms and other set phrases. I think a similar effort on behalf of a new &amp;quot;word-origin&amp;quot; tag would be quite useful for similar questions about single words—slang words and professionl neologisms, in particular. But it is extremely late in the day to try to separate questions about the linguistic lineage of modern English words from questions about when and under what circumstances particular words began to appear in English writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, I think that JEL's effort to revise the tag guidance for &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; to reflect the sorts of questions that EL&amp;amp;U participants are generally willing to leave open on this site is the most reasonable way to achieve a reconciliation between the formal guidance that the site offers its visitors about on-topic &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; questions and the close-voting practices that EL&amp;amp;U site participants actually enforce. I don't see any real-world benefit that would result from insisting that the description of &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; as applied at EL&amp;amp;U must accord with the description of &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; as applied at Linguistics.SE, given that close voters at EL&amp;amp;U consider &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; in the Linguistics.SE sense to be almost wholly off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T20:17:59.950" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-10T13:03:09.730" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an answer to a single word request question. It was exactly what the OP had asked, but the answer provides only an article about the single word, no actual definition from a dictionary, or a resource that actually explains it clearly proving his choice to be the right one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I be entitled to give the same answer with different research, or this is a &amp;quot;no go&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T18:18:20.070" Title="Should we post an identical answer if we provide different (maybe better) research?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14884" CreationDate="2021-01-11T18:18:20.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;New answers should contribute something significant to the existing set of answers, not just a dictionary definition. Comments are more appropriate for offering constructive criticism on how to improve an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing to add a citation to support an answer could also be appropriate. The author can roll it back or improve upon it if they choose, but some people are touchy about edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T18:18:20.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-11T20:12:50.733" Score="9" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112038/home-page-or-homepage&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Home page&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;homepage&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; was closed seven years ago on the following grounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a perusal of Hugo's carefully researched answer to the question indicates that the answer is by no means &amp;quot;definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source.&amp;quot; To the contrary, readers who go to merriam-webster.com or to the link provided beneath the posted question by one of the close voters for a definitive and permanent answer will encounter a fundamentally misleading answer to the question—an answer that treats &amp;quot;home page&amp;quot; as the only legitimate spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tangential issue here is whether the question is of enduring interest to site visitors. In that regard  I note that, despite its having been closed for the past seven years, the question has been viewed more than 51,000 times by visitors to EL&amp;amp;U. Clearly, a lot of people are interested in an informed answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, Hugo's answer is extremely useful and is a model of the kind of effort that makes English Language &amp;amp; Usage a valuable online resource. It is certainly more useful and valuable than any fifty open single-word request questions and answers selected at random from the pages of EL&amp;amp;U. Please consider voting to reopen this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T04:50:39.553" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T04:50:39.553" Title="Would it be appropriate to reopen the &quot;'Home page' or 'homepage'&quot; question from seven years ago?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14896" CreationDate="2021-01-12T23:46:21.813" Score="-1" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two questions of mine &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/3450/4&quot;&gt;were&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/3447/12&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; to change &amp;quot;grammatically correct&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;grammatically acceptable&amp;quot; in the title and similarly in the body by the same moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To seek understanding, and rather than merely reverting the edits, I searched here on Meta for any information about this issue and I was unable to find anything &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; relevant. I did find &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6680/1421&quot;&gt;this tangentially relevant answer&lt;/a&gt; (written by the same moderator) which suggests that both the words &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;grammatical&amp;quot; should be forbidden from questions due to those words being strong signal that the question is unlikely to be useful to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one of the title edits didn't remove the word &amp;quot;grammatical&amp;quot; at all, and this seems to be an implicit acknowledgement that the particular content of that question does make it of more general applicability and usefulness to other readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions are attempting to ask about a &lt;strong&gt;general&lt;/strong&gt; grammar principle, and the particular words in the example sentences used are largely unimportant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To discuss garden path sentences productively, it seems inadequate to merely define them, and better to offer examples. I believe the example sentences my question presents for review don't stand alone as mere one-offs but are in fact generally instructive of garden-path principles by &amp;quot;showing instead of telling.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the question about comparison sentences, the word choice also doesn't seem problematic to me. &amp;quot;I am [comparison]-er than [nominative or accusative pronoun]&amp;quot; just isn't a helpful way to ask that question, and would miss garnering site visitors or internet searchers who don't know those terms into the question to learn something interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, I knew before asking the garden-path question that the sentences were grammatical; the precise point of asking the way I did was to try to capture an interesting phenomenon &lt;em&gt;from the perspective of a person who was in doubt about them as a class&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here's this meta question as an attempt to hear from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why revert the changes? Because from where I sit right now, having seen no discussion or explanation, I don't really like them. To me, my questions were not improved. It could be argued that in the one title, &amp;quot;grammatically correct&amp;quot; can just change to &amp;quot;grammatical,&amp;quot; and I'd be open to that, however the places where the body was changed from &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;acceptable&amp;quot; don't sit right with me. If there is some requirement that askers of questions on English.SE categorically &lt;strong&gt;may not&lt;/strong&gt; say &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;acceptable,&amp;quot; then from my current solo perspective without hearing any rationale, it is unlikely I would want to continue participating on this site—it is important to me for my own particular character to remain in my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is some way that I can edit my own questions to make them more generally applicable, I'm totally open to hearing suggestions and then working to improve them. The edits in question, however, don't seem to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Admittedly, the first question says &amp;quot;Feel free to edit my grammar. No comment necessary.&amp;quot; And yet, I'd like to understand how the edit does in fact improve the grammar or avoids &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt; grammar. (Ba-dum-kshhh!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastEditorUserId="1421" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T19:29:18.097" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T20:02:37.070" Title="Questions are now being edited to say &quot;grammatically acceptable&quot; instead of &quot;grammatically correct&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14887" CreationDate="2021-01-13T02:13:58.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was cleaning up incorrectly applied tags, and ended up fixing a few bits of infelicitous wordings here and there as I noticed them along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’re always free to edit whatever you want here, and this is no exception, so if you don’t fancy an edit I’ve made, do whatever you feel you need to do to return it to a state that doesn’t get on your nerves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s why I made some of those changes, though, just so you understand my own thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We endeavor to present ourselves as an SE site containing expert answers written by English linguists and enthusiasts. There’s another site altogether for learners. That one can focus more on right-and-wrong exam questions. Notice how many questions asking whether something is grammatically correct just want us to proofread somebody’s spelling and punctuation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly all people really want to know when they ask that question is to learn whether it’s ok for them to say or write something without others thinking less of them for using unpopular forms. Will they sound unlettered? Will their thesis get marked down for clumsy language? Does this align with what the AP Style Guide says you should or should not do? Things like that. That isn’t very interesting, and certainly is of no interest to experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linguists don't really do “correct”&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a prescriptivist term that has nothing to do with scientific descriptions of human language. It’s more a term you find used in normative education programs, like for marking off points on some ESL test or for teaching very young children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now go find someone with professional credentials as a working linguist and ask them what “correct” means. You may be surprised at their answers. Linguists are never going to pass moralistic judgments about how people “should” and “should not” use language. (And yes, we have at least half a dozen such professionals in our membership here, and quite possibly considerably more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not what linguistics is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore here reproduce &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14887/questions-are-now-being-edited-to-say-grammatically-acceptable-instead-of-gra/14888?noredirect=1#comment59738_14887&quot;&gt;John Lawler’s insightful comment&lt;/a&gt; on the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that there is a Higher Authority in charge of &amp;quot;correctness&amp;quot; is a familiar one. &lt;em&gt;Correct&lt;/em&gt;, as a description of the grammar of some sentence or chunk of sentence, is a schoolroom term suitable for children learning their catechism or times tables. When used by adults about adults' English, it's just a social judgement and doesn't have anything to do with the grammar, since it's usually based on nonsense, like split infinitives and passive resistance. So linguists avoid the word, except when it's used in very specific contexts, which is not the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s certainly true that sometimes linguists use notations like a * or % or ? or ?? to indicate different levels or types of unacceptability of a word or phrase or sentence.  That’s because scientific descriptions of actual language often take into account sliding scales of acceptability that vary by speaker, register, context, and many other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; moral judgements. That’s not a scientist’s job. A scientist’s job is, among others, to make sense of how some aspect of the universe actually works and describe what they’ve learned to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T20:02:37.070" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T20:02:37.070" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14890" CreationDate="2021-01-13T03:42:09.217" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/552652/what-is-the-difference-between-an-account-and-an-approach#comment1367262_552652&quot;&gt;What is the difference between an account and an approach?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is on-topic on ELU and received two answers. The accepted answer says that the usage of &amp;quot;account&amp;quot; is not common, and is better replaced by &amp;quot;model&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;. However, I feel that all three words are actually used commonly within the philosophy circle, suggesting that there are specific contexts where &amp;quot;account&amp;quot; is a better word choice than the others. Therefore, I think migrating the question to Philosophy SE would reveal more subtle things that most folks in ELU may not be aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one mod said that doing so kind of pooh-poohs the work done by users here. They recommend me asking the question at Philosophy.SE, pointing to this one, explaining how I need a more nuanced answer. I don't object doing that, I just still don't get that why migration is a bad idea in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Stack Exchange we strive to provide &lt;em&gt;the best answer&lt;/em&gt; for every question. I suppose users who submitted answers would be happy if they saw a better answer than theirs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;There is a similar question, but it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4424/80007&quot;&gt;specifically for ELU → ELL migration&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastEditorUserId="80007" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T13:15:11.247" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T13:15:11.247" Title="Is it good to migrate questions which are on-topic and have answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|migration|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14889" CreationDate="2021-01-13T10:13:06.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reasoning for not migrating is as you have stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods are advised against migrating questions that are on topic where they currently are and have positively received answers. (Moderators can see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/migrating-questions&quot;&gt;help article&lt;/a&gt; on migration, point 1. For some reason SE think the details need to be kept secret.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to ColleenV for pointing out &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/10249/273494&quot;&gt;this meta meta post&lt;/a&gt;. The accepted answer has a flow diagram that explains how to make the decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KtToU.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iexrfh.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since those conditions are met for your question I do not think migrating is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="80007" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T13:08:05.783" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T13:08:05.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2021-01-13T12:10:03.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the POV of a new user (since 2019): I can't see how the question should have ever been upvoted. Of course, I wasn't around back then. Maybe there was no &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;how to ask good questions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; page in 2011? It looks like one VTC reasons is dated from that year: (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/939/how-to-respond-to-dictionary-general-reference-questions&quot;&gt;How to respond to dictionary/“general reference” questions?&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;But the question shows no basic research at all. It was attractive because of basic animal urges, not because of any particular intellectual value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="371882" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T12:10:03.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-13T16:36:59.353" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find a large corpus of contemporary English writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a computer programmer, and I would like to execute a program which searches the corpus for certain text-patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to restrict my search to books.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We can ignore news articles, essays etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, a corpus of book titles is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had a list of 10,000 titles and authors, I could easily obtain digital copies of the books themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am open to alternative suggestions, but maybe I could use a list of the titles of all books which have ever appeared on the New York times best seller list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After obtaining a list of NewYork times best-sellers, I can look-up the year of publication for the first editions of each book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our goal is to obtain a list of contemporary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to remove &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; (1851), etc... from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I can eliminate all books whose first edition was published before the year 1960.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both fiction and non-fiction are acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I obtain a list of the titles of all books which have appeared on the New York times best seller list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The New York Times website mostly has only reports weekly and monthly data, not cumulative lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387992" OwnerDisplayName="Samuel Muldoon" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T19:50:41.237" Title="Where can I find a large corpus of contemporary English writing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2021-01-16T15:53:14.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14892" CreationDate="2021-01-13T17:40:14.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/terms_of_use.html#embedding-or-wrapping-our-site-or-contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gutenberg.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Website Terms of Use&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Audience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is intended for human users only. Any perceived use of automated tools to access this website will result in a temporary or permanent block of your IP address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you want to &lt;strong&gt;download many books&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e., more than ~100 per day) manually or using an automated download software, download them from one of our mirrors, not from the main site. See the &lt;a href=&quot;//www.gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of PG mirrors&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;/policy/robot_access.html&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;roboting guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you want a &lt;strong&gt;list of all our books&lt;/strong&gt;, download and save the &lt;a href=&quot;//www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gutenberg index file&lt;/a&gt; It can be opened with any browser or word processor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you want a &lt;strong&gt;machine-readable database&lt;/strong&gt; of all our books, read the &lt;a href=&quot;/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html&quot;&gt;Offline Catalogs and Feeds&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2022" OwnerDisplayName="mplungjan" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T17:40:14.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14892" CreationDate="2021-01-13T18:41:39.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Corpus of Contemporary American English (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt;) is exactly that, and it can be downloaded in its entirety. (On the landing page, there is a place that says 'Download the corpus (and corpus-based frequency data) for offline use'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The same website&lt;/a&gt; hosts several other corpora of English, e.g. the British National Corpus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(BNC)&lt;/a&gt;, the TIME Magazine Corpus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/time/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155553" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T18:41:39.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14892" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:50:41.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt; that does what you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T19:50:41.237" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14887" CreationDate="2021-01-14T02:53:57.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about 'correctness', 'acceptability', 'appropriateness', 'preference' (all of which are normative terms) are quite suitable on ELU. They are in the proper (hah) domain of sociolinguistics, which is itself &amp;quot;a branch of linguistics&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Answering such questions &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt; may require great expertise and familiarity with the subject (English language usage); additionally, &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; such questions &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt; may require great expertise etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody other than the author changing the meaning of questions by editing them doesn't fit in the SE model, as mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;guidance&lt;/a&gt; given at SE Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt; that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my point of view, the edits questioned are (a) not substantial, and (b) a (substanceless) change to the meaning of the question that might be seen as having the effect of privileging one discourse domain over another. Either case might rightly be seen by the author of the questions as not true to their individual voice and original intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastEditorUserId="129681" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T09:53:59.573" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T09:53:59.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T06:41:20.913" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a user who's been posting pointless, off topic comments where I post genuine questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday they chose to necropost on a 3 years and 4 months old question of mine, in a clear attempt to start a comments war over something that had nothing to do with what I asked proper. They also acted unfriendly and out of the blue began flaming at the comments. To me they seemed like infringing the code of conduct in several ways, so I flagged all of their comments  and they all got removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At around the same time they came to my newly asked question, specifically, a word request: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/557728/whats-the-word-for-someone-who-takes-a-conceited-stance-in-stead-of-their-bosse&quot;&gt;What's the word for someone who takes a conceited stance in stead of their bosses in order to appear important?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although in a milder tone, the attitude here seems the same: trying to discredit whatever I gave as an example and trying to drag me into an argument. It started with a comment on my question, then an answer. As I ignored them, another comment along the same lines on their own answer, then another, then another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged their answer as not being an answer and it was not removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be, since for 2 reasons I see it clear that it's not an answer to my question and was never meant to be, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They altogether avoided the central point of my question, clearly trying to discredit the situation I used as an illustration rather than trying to provide a solution to my doubt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They clearly write as if attempting provocation, intent on me answering/getting angry so as to start a fight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mods may not see it like that, but that's exactly how they started a war at my other question's comment section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think SE is not a place for such attitudes, but rather a curated knowledge repository. Just check my other profiles on the network and see I only come here with genuine questions that, if answered, I earnestly think will produce genuine knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These stupid quarrels and off-topic provocations belong in Reddit, not here. Allowing people, especially an older and supposedly experienced user to keep going on posting such, not only encourages their behaviour but overall contributes to a decrease in standards within the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, I feel it's not just to keep that on, i've been called out for much less on SE and in my eyes this answer clearly violated the code of conduct, no so much by it's content (which is irrelevant anyways, as it does not answer the question), but by tone and intent expressed. Namely, &lt;em&gt;starting a quarrel.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254019" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T21:06:19.770" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T21:06:19.770" Title="What should I do if mods declined a flag I think was legitimate and regard violation of the code of conduct?" Tags="|support|flag-reviews|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14897" CreationDate="2021-01-19T09:09:58.817" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the immediate issue, I declined your Not An Answer flag because I judged there was no evidence to support that conclusion. The answer is an answer. It's OK for an answer to challenge the premise of the question, or to answer part of it. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185073/how-do-i-properly-use-the-not-an-answer-flag&quot;&gt;MSE posts on this flag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not like the answer. That's fine; you don't have to accept that one. You can even downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be wrong, and raising a Meta post is fine. Another moderator will take another look, although there may be timezones to consider. It's possible the answer will be removed; it's possible it won't be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are quite right that Stack Exchange is not a place for quarrels. The first rule of apparently being targeted is &lt;strong&gt;If you feel you're being goaded, don't rise to it.&lt;/strong&gt; However, moderators will look into all reports of bad behaviour, including here. You may not see what actions are or are not taken: we don't make interactions between moderators and users public — except where a user raises a concern, as you have here, in which case our interaction &lt;em&gt;with you&lt;/em&gt; needs to be made public to answer the concern; or where the result is a suspension (and even then, the reason given for suspension is couched in rather general terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been said in the comments, Real Life has to take precedence; and in interactions between users and within the moderator team (yes, we do use chat to talk to each other), timezones also come into play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T09:09:58.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T17:17:47.340" Score="7" ViewCount="91" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pU1Al.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on English Language &amp;amp; Usage over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;354&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;53&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,821&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,771&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;22&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,306&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,595&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10,944&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;362&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,963&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;26&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;70&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;171&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;178&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;441&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;245&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;54&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,571&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,482&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,052&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;845&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,753&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;274&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;33&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;247&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;374&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,157&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,925&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,380&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,282&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;126&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;60&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,208&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,113&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9,078&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,760&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;513&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;232&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,159&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,044&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,356&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;175&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13547/2019-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2019: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222020%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/359735/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big thank you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/620/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/459488/brian-nickel&quot;&gt;Brian&lt;/a&gt; for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2021!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T11:31:30.780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T11:31:30.780" Title="2020: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-20T14:48:52.667" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I was last active on SE in general. Now, in the last weeks I've been super pensive about the role of language in my life, especially the ones I learned as a grown up, in particular, English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been having lots of questions in my head, but I want to re-read the rules before I can ask some of the, because I'm not sure they belong in SE or if they do, how I frame them so as to get the most productive outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254019" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T16:54:12.463" Title="Where can I find the rules of the English SE?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-20T15:43:12.550" Score="-7" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common theme on English Stack Exchange is someone who has a certain well-known word in their vocabulary, who understands this word may have undesired negative undertones for certain groups of people, and this person seeks a neutral substitute word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/558105/politically-neutral-version-of-master&quot;&gt;Politically neutral version of &amp;quot;master&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20565/politically-correct-term-for-someone-who-is-internet-challenged&quot;&gt;Politically correct term for someone who is Internet challenged?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21935/is-grammar-nazi-politically-correct&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;grammar nazi&amp;quot; politically correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/291225/politically-correct-term-similar-to-red-neck&quot;&gt;Politically correct term similar to &amp;quot;red neck&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not asking about politics, the question is not asking if it is &amp;quot;politically correct&amp;quot; (plus, who knows what that means anyway?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead these people believe they are using what I call an &lt;em&gt;unword&lt;/em&gt;, and they seek alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a subset of [single-word-requests], [phrase-requests], [idiom-requests], [expression-requests], [epithet-requests] and [proverb-requests].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call this an &lt;em&gt;unword&lt;/em&gt; based on Orwell's notion of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unperson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;unperson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an individual who usually for political or ideological reasons is removed completely from recognition or consideration&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unperson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;m-w.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think &lt;em&gt;unword&lt;/em&gt; could be well understood on first glance. Some people may object to usage of a word not found in dictionaries yet. Another choice could be &lt;em&gt;deanthropormorphize&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;deanthropormorphized&lt;/em&gt;. The same criticism applies, but maybe less so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66182" LastEditorUserId="2490" LastEditDate="2021-01-22T15:23:57.540" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T15:23:57.540" Title="Proposed tag: unword or deanthropomorphize" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14901" CreationDate="2021-01-20T17:00:07.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unwords&lt;/em&gt; they are not, for even words that may have recently come to be perceived as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/taboo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;taboo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by certain groups or in certain contexts under the cyclic grind of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;euphemism treadmill&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; remain words nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T17:00:07.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14900" CreationDate="2021-01-21T16:54:12.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the sources suggested by ColleenV, in the comments, are helpful, there is probably no substitute for spending some time browsing around the site and picking up its culture, which can never be fully captured by explicit rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T16:54:12.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14906" CreationDate="2021-01-21T16:40:02.287" Score="1" ViewCount="610" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions on this Stack Exchange asking &amp;quot;What is a hypernym for ___ and ___&amp;quot;. Is there somewhere you can enter a list of words and it will suggest hypernyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question will likely become the dead-end for this search until one is made. I can't believe there isn't one already!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46157" OwnerDisplayName="xxjjnn" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T22:49:57.750" Title="Website for finding Hypernyms" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-01-23T13:29:23.637" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14904" CreationDate="2021-01-21T18:13:50.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.powerthesaurus.org/100_examples_of_hypernyms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.powerthesaurus.org/100_examples_of_hypernyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following quotations are from ThoughtCo.com, and they give good information about hypernyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymology&lt;/strong&gt;: from the Greek, &amp;quot;extra&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;name&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples and Observations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;[A] hypernym is a broad, superordinate label that applies to many members of a set, while the members themselves are the hyponyms.&#xA;&amp;quot;Hyponymy is a hierarchical relationship, and it may consist of a&#xA;number of levels. For example, dog is a hyponym of animal, but it is&#xA;also the hypernym of poodle, alsatian, chihuahua, terrier, beagle and&#xA;so on.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Jan McAllister and James E. Miller, Introductory Linguistics for Speech and Language Therapy Practice. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A hypernym is a word with a general meaning that has basically the same meaning of a more specific word. For example, dog is a&#xA;hypernym, while collie and chihuahua are more specific subordinate&#xA;terms. The hypernym tends to be a basic-level category that is used by&#xA;speakers with high frequency; speakers usually refer to collies and&#xA;chihuahuas as dogs, rather than using the subordinate terms, which are&#xA;consequently of relatively low frequency.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Laurie Beth Feldman, Morphological Aspects of Language Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The foot of footstep narrows down the type of step being expressed to the step made by a foot. A footstep is a kind of step;&#xA;or, in more technical terms, footstep is a hyponym, or subtype, of&#xA;step, and step is a hypernym, or supertype, of footstep. . . .&#xA;Doorstep is also a hyponym of step, and step is a hypernym of&#xA;doorstep.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Keith M. Denning, Brett Kessler, and William Ronald Leben, English&#xA;Vocabulary Elements. Oxford University Press, 2007) Hypernyms,&#xA;Hyponyms, and Connotations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hyponyms are more likely to carry strong connotations than hypernyms, though this is not an invariable rule. The word 'animal'&#xA;can carry negative connotations in metaphors such as 'He behaved like&#xA;an animal.' However, more specific connotations can be carried by the&#xA;use of more specific words. 'He ate like a pig.' 'You rat!' 'She's a&#xA;bitch.'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Maggie Bowring et al., Working with Texts: A Core Introduction to Language Analysis. Routledge, 1997)&lt;/strong&gt; A Method of Definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The most illuminating way of defining a lexeme is to provide a hypernym along with various distinguishing features—an approach to&#xA;definition whose history can be traced back to Aristotle. For example,&#xA;a majorette is 'a girl' (the hypernym) 'who twirls a baton and&#xA;accompanies a marching band.' It is usually possible to trace a&#xA;hierarchical path through a dictionary, following the hypernyms as&#xA;they become increasingly abstract until we arrive at such general&#xA;notions (essence, being, existence) that clear sense-relations between&#xA;the lexemes no longer exist.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, 2003)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32623" OwnerDisplayName="rhetorician" LastEditorUserId="32623" LastEditDate="2021-01-22T02:02:25.147" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T02:02:25.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14904" CreationDate="2021-01-22T22:49:57.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordnet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gives all sorts of semantic relations for a word, including hypernyms and hyponyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the hypernyms for 'lie' are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=&amp;amp;o5=&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=&amp;amp;o3=&amp;amp;o4=&amp;amp;s=lie&amp;amp;i=6&amp;amp;h=11000000000000000#c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;falsehood, falsity, untruth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to find the lest common hypernym of two words, which is often the desired end of these questions, you may have to do some clicking around on both words separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T22:49:57.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T06:43:22.310" Score="6" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/552652/80007&quot;&gt;How is “account” be different with “theory”, “model” or “approach”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is closed for being off-topic. One close-voter says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m can voting to close this question. A dictionary offers different synonyms of a word, because each applies differently. If one fits where others don't, what is the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? The problem is that I don't know where they are different, and when to use each of them correctly. I thought this kind of question is popular in this site? From &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;, word choice and usage is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T12:03:38.237" Title="Why are questions about the usage of synonyms off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14907" CreationDate="2021-01-24T12:03:38.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such questions are not off-topic, &lt;em&gt;per se.&lt;/em&gt; You have generalised from the particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's a &amp;quot;write-in&amp;quot; reason for casting a close vote, then it doesn't get mentioned in the close banner, but it can be inferred from the question timeline and the list of comments under the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four close votes (the original plus the three comment up-votes) used this reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m can voting [sic] to close this question. A dictionary offers different synonyms of a word, because each applies differently. If one fits where others don't, what is the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other effective close vote used the standard &amp;quot;not enough research&amp;quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your question needs to show your research.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: the comments on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/78554&quot;&gt;version on Philosophy.SE&lt;/a&gt; are also telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This belongs on ELU, not here. The accepted ELU answer is correct, except for the last line: 'account' is commonly use in intellectual circles for descriptions that don't rise to the level of a formal theory or model. But no one's perfect. There's no sense starting a cross-site debate, so I'm voting to close this. – Ted Wrigley &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/78554/how-is-account-be-different-with-theory-model-or-approach#comment218968_78554&quot;&gt;Jan 13 at 16:09&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Ted. &amp;quot;Account&amp;quot; is something more than &amp;quot;approach&amp;quot; but that does not rise to the level of a &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;model&amp;quot; is rarely used this way in philosophy. But the use is vague and not regimented, it is more of a colloquial choice. – Conifold &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/78554/how-is-account-be-different-with-theory-model-or-approach#comment218990_78554&quot;&gt;Jan 13 at 21:26&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have already accepted an answer, which was given even though the question needs to show more research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T12:03:38.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-25T16:09:24.603" Score="10" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen at least 10 (and counting) &lt;strong&gt;proposed edits&lt;/strong&gt; on the review queue from the same lower-rep user. For the most part, they are deleting the [etymology] tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/392443&quot;&gt;as seen in this post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dUL9r.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dUL9r.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the change is noted only as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;More accurate?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this user (name not included) doing this on their own initiative, or has there been a policy change I am not aware of that restricts the tag use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other reviewers are approving them, but I've been rejecting them...shouldn't  I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T22:27:34.983" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T21:51:08.883" Title="Why are older posts being edited to remove the [etymology] tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14909" CreationDate="2021-01-25T23:11:21.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ever since this came up in a recent meta post, I've been thinking about it. Could we just end this once and for all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merge both into a new tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology-and-phrase-orgins&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology-and-phrase-orgins&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology-and-phrase-orgins&lt;/a&gt; (tm). Long, but fits within the 35 character tag limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More accurat&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe even most accurat&lt;em&gt;est&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No more debate about whether or not &amp;quot;etymology&amp;quot; can cover something with hyphens or spaces or even both with (*&lt;em&gt;gasp&lt;/em&gt;*) commas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No need to retag anything. (Let's face it, a lot of questions asking about phrases use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; and there's no way they can all be retagged.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody has to lose their hard-earned &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; tag badge (don't believe anyone has a gold &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-origins&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-origins&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-origins&lt;/a&gt; badge).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see etymology/phrase origin as requiring the same skills to answer. I don't see any real benefits to keeping them as separate tags, either. The fact that we already tag both word origin and phrase origin questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; makes me think that I'm not the only one who thinks that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I ask, in this answer, does anyone see a reason why we shouldn't merge these tags together and end all the discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T23:11:21.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14909" CreationDate="2021-01-26T02:28:14.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it’s worth, I’ve just trimmed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/etymology/info&quot;&gt;the burgeoning tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; down considerably. This should make it much simpler and less confusing and controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The abstract now reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about tracing out and describing the elements of an individual word, as well as the historical changes in form and sense which that word has experienced over its history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the main body now reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to be confused with the buggy &lt;em&gt;e&lt;b&gt;n&lt;/b&gt;t&lt;b&gt;o&lt;/b&gt;mology&lt;/em&gt;, according to the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;etymology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1a.&lt;/strong&gt; The process of tracing out and describing the elements of a word with their modifications of form and sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1b.&lt;/strong&gt; An instance of this process; an account of the formation and radical signification of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1c.&lt;/strong&gt; The facts relating to the formation or derivation (of a word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;. That branch of linguistic science which is concerned with determining the origin of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Gram.&lt;/em&gt; That part of grammar which treats of individual words, the parts of speech separately, their formation and inflexions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English borrowed the word from Medieval French &lt;em&gt;ethimologie&lt;/em&gt; (now &lt;em&gt;etymologie&lt;/em&gt; in Modern French), which had in turn adopted it from Latin &lt;em&gt;etymologia&lt;/em&gt;, who themselves pinched it from the Greek &lt;em&gt;ἑτυμολογία&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;ἑτυμολόγ-ος&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology therefore concerns the process of tracing out and describing the elements of an individual word, as well as the changes in form and sense of that word over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T21:51:08.883" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T21:51:08.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14913" CreationDate="2021-01-28T16:50:36.227" Score="7" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have, for some time now, had all 6 gold Steward badges for 1000 reviews of each type.  These badges explicitly say they are awarded once per review type only.  (And I haven't made 2000 reviews of all 6 types, even if they did say &amp;quot;once per every 1000 reviews&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, today I was just awarded 6 more steward badges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T9Vgs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T9Vgs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I have 12 gold Steward badges total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DFGCP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DFGCP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I don't appreciate the extra recognition, but the extra badges seem to be an error.&#xA;Anyone know why I got them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T11:52:29.083" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T11:52:29.083" Title="Just doubled up on gold Steward badges... badging bug?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14912" CreationDate="2021-01-28T17:01:43.853" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rules are being changed; you're getting one Steward badge for every 1,000 reviews in a queue. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360194/steward-badges-being-re-awarded-suddenly#comment1201991_360194&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; by Stack Exchange staff member @animuson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's supposedly an announcement about review updates coming out today, if it hasn't been published somewhere yet. Seems the code is getting ahead of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there seems to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360194/steward-badges-being-re-awarded-suddenly#comment1202005_360194&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;, so you might lose some of them shortly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my bug, caused by a temporary issue with and old batch job running after a migration took place. I have a fix I can roll out in a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastEditorUserId="116151" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T17:33:55.893" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T17:33:55.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14919" CreationDate="2021-02-01T13:41:40.397" Score="8" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do questions on EL&amp;amp;U need to contain the text that forms the topic of the question, or can they essentially be just a link to a video?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/559190/142322&quot;&gt;What does the woman say in the movie?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It asks, &amp;quot;What does the woman say in the movie?&amp;quot;, and gives a link to the movie, or perhaps to the relevant section. The question is impossible to answer without going into the link. Relying on links, of course, leaves the post at the mercy of link rot and the like. Link-only questions tend to get short shrift at EL&amp;amp;U, and even across other SE sites for this very reason. This could be considered sufficient reason to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, audio-to-text transcription is by nature difficult to reduce to text in the asking. Aside from that (and from the &lt;em&gt;research&lt;/em&gt; requirement), it fits the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;FAQ guidelines&lt;/a&gt; of being reasonably scoped, answerable definitively, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some research on this meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3155/142322&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the right way to ask a question about a scenario in a TV program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1907/are-questions-about-gestures-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are questions about gestures on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;TV program&lt;/em&gt; question relates to subtitles, but that doesn't help here because subtitles &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; reducible to text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other case, gestures were ruled out because they weren't English, but with the transcription question, we're dealing with English all the way through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ... is the transcription question on-topic at EL&amp;amp;U?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T12:19:13.347" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T12:19:13.347" Title="Are audio- and video-only questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14917" CreationDate="2021-02-01T16:47:45.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking off my moderator hat for a moment, i.e. chipping in as a regular member of the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Video or audio only questions must be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with link rot is a big one. However SE does not host videos, so an external link is the best we can hope for. On the other hand, I would never trust a link to a document on Google drive. Seems like a security nightmare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main issue, as J.R. explains well in the meta question you have linked to, is the lack of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a minimum the post should have a best guess transcript, with questionable words left as blanks to be filled in, title of the work, and time stamp would be enough to keep the question relevant even if the link rots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a personal recording, then I doubt the answers would be helpful to anyone but the OP, so I would suggest we limit questions to works that might be called &amp;quot;noteable&amp;quot;. I don't think we want to answer questions about your voicemail, but maybe local TV news is OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know where the limits should lie, exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T12:49:46.237" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:49:46.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14917" CreationDate="2021-02-01T17:04:22.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related to this are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10722/poll-additional-question-types-that-should-or-shouldnt-be-added-to-help-on-top/10723#10723&quot;&gt;Poll: additional question types that should or shouldn&amp;#39;t be added to help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5368/exactly-why-is-this-question-off-topic-or-not&quot;&gt;Exactly WHY is this question Off Topic? Or not?&lt;/a&gt; which refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209174/help-me-understand-the-pronounced-phrase&quot;&gt;Help me understand the pronounced phrase&lt;/a&gt; (now deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1857&quot;&gt;Are questions about what heard in an audio clip always welcome?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of those indicate that transcription requests are off-topic, principally because &lt;strong&gt;there is no general point which can be drawn:&lt;/strong&gt; in the old-style close reasons, such questions are &amp;quot;too localised&amp;quot;. These days we'd need to use the write-in vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be time to formalise the guidance and update the help text to include transcription requests as off-topic, as that was the runaway winner in 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T17:04:22.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14923" CreationDate="2021-02-03T06:18:37.327" Score="8" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although a long-time reader of various SE sites, I'm new to active participation and still learning the rules and conventions. My question here is about the possible stock reasons for rejecting edits to closed questions &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;, not about the specific question I'm using as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Background:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;While traversing the Internets unrelated to ELU, I stumbled across a question here &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/315198/does-ethernet-need-to-be-capitalised&quot;&gt;about the capitalization of &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. After reviewing the reasons for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closing questions&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/315198/timeline?filter=WithVoteSummaries&quot;&gt;debate in the comments about the closing of this particular question&lt;/a&gt;. That led to more internet searches, after which I was of the opinion that the &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; question was not as straightforward and easily answerable by other sources as appears to have been suggested by its closers. Genuinely convinced this question was both relevant and significant (and, I admit, lured by the possibility of reputation points), I edited the closed question. My edits were &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/392939&quot;&gt;rejected&lt;/a&gt; with what I assume is a stock response that &amp;quot;This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;My &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; question is, if closed questions can't be answered, why is one of the choices for rejecting edits to a closed question that the edits should have been a comment or an answer? Is it simply to prevent low-rep users, who cannot comment, from attempting to reopen questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Additional note which may actually be a separate question but that I don't want to risk asking a low-quality question about:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Admittedly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/392939&quot;&gt;my suggested edits&lt;/a&gt; were a complete overhaul of the &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; question rather than edits for clarification, but they were responding to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/315198/timeline?filter=WithVoteSummaries&quot;&gt;comments in reference to the question's closing&lt;/a&gt; and guided by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;advice on reopening questions&lt;/a&gt;. So perhaps I have a meta-question to the above meta question: should I ask a separate meta question if I wanted community feedback as to how to appropriately reopen the &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; question specifically, given that I genuinely think there's an underlying question there, which hasn't been answered in other sources and is appropriate for ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="413085" LastEditorUserId="413085" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T01:11:40.353" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T01:11:40.353" Title="Why can edits to a closed question be rejected as &quot;should have been written as a comment or an answer&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|reputation|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14920" CreationDate="2021-02-03T11:43:44.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question somewhat similar to the &lt;em&gt;ethernet&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; question that piqued your interest popped up ages ago in connection with the World Wide Web words &lt;em&gt;internet/Internet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;web/Web&lt;/em&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/644/should-the-words-internet-and-web-be-capitalized&quot;&gt;Should the words &amp;quot;internet&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;web&amp;quot; be capitalized?&lt;/a&gt; A later question that asked only about &lt;em&gt;internet/Internet&lt;/em&gt; was closed as a duplicate. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26082/capitalization-of-internet&quot;&gt;Capitalization of &amp;quot;Internet&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Neither question was accompanied by significant research—as was often the case in the earliest years of this site—and the first of the two questions remains open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strikingly, the answers given to these two questions are very nearly obsolete, as, over the past decade, the world of publishing has shifted strongly toward lowercasing both &lt;em&gt;internet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the web&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;webpage&lt;/em&gt;). A carefully considered, up-to-date answer citing current reference works and formatting preferences would be quite useful to EL&amp;amp;U on the &lt;em&gt;internet/Internet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;web/Web&lt;/em&gt; questions, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that &lt;em&gt;ethernet/Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; is a similar case—but it's difficult to gain a hearing for it because of EL&amp;amp;U's one-two punch of (1) don't ask a question like this without showing your research, and (2) if the reference work you consulted answers the question, why shouldn't we close the question as general reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most straightforward path forward would be to reopen the question as one of inherent interest (7,000 page views in five years) that isn't particularly well served by a rote application of the &amp;quot;show research&amp;quot; requirement (both Merriam-Webster and American Heritage treat &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; as referring to a particular proprietary protocol or family of protocols that, therefore, should be initial-capped; but even 20 years ago, the word lists at the computer magazines that I worked for distinguished between narrowly specific &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; and generic &lt;em&gt;ethernet&lt;/em&gt;—and I doubt that the generic sense of the term has diminished in more recent years). But reopening the existing and keeping it open would require persuading any number of close voters NOT to apply their usual standards to a question and NOT to leave the factually dubious but appealingly forceful and concise one-line answer to the closed question in place as the only EL&amp;amp;U answer to the closed question. That would not be easy to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To pose a closure-resistant question such as &lt;em&gt;ethernet&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; on this site, you would have to cite multiple reference works that disagree about the answer, or you would have to cite reference works that say one thing and usage data that point in another direction. That's asking a lot of a typical question asker who may not know where to look to find the components of a detailed and reasonably comprehensive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, EL&amp;amp;U's institutional position is that the best way to distinguish a good question from a bad one is to require the question's poster to present a bunch of research to prove the question's worthiness. I don't think that this works, and I think that it causes a lot of perfectly reasonable questions to get closed for reasons that have nothing to do with their potential usefulness to future site visitors. But it's the world of English Language &amp;amp; Usage as we now know it, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. My meta question is, if closed questions can't be answered, why is one of the choices for rejecting edits to a closed question that the edits should have been a comment or an answer? Is it simply to prevent low-rep users, who cannot comment, from attempting to reopen questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canned argument asserting that you should have submitted a comment or answer instead of editing the question was almost certainly formulated without any thought that someone might use it to reject an edit of a closed question. Rather, the option was devised to thwart attempts by editors to mess with open questions rather than responding to them in a comment or with an answer. The fact that this particular canned rationale for rejecting an edit doesn't make sense as a practical matter when it is directed toward someone who can't respond to the question with a comment or an answer BECAUSE IT'S CLOSED is merely incidental fallout from the site's heavy dependence on prefab rejection reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Should I ask a separate meta question if I wanted community feedback as to how to appropriately reopen the Ethernet question specifically, given that I genuinely think there's an underlying question there, which hasn't been answered in other sources and is appropriate for ELU?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you need to ask your second question in a separate posting. The issue of how much revising an editor should do to make a closed question reopenable has been contentious at EL&amp;amp;U. Some site participants vigorously oppose any effort to put words in the mouth of the original poster, which they consider presumptuous and disrespectful of the poster and of the integrity of the question that doesn't meet the site's guidelines for remaining open but by God does say what the original poster wrote down. Other site participants are more sympathetic to your inclination to see certain closed questions as imperfectly expressed but worthy of rehabilitation through clarification or refocusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice, however, is to start over with your own new question, marshaling enough visible evidence of research to avoid the closure Scylla and enough contrasting or conflicting data to avoid the closure Charybdis. What you (probably) don't need to worry about, if you do those two things, is that someone will come along and say, &amp;quot;Hey this is a duplicate of that old question about &lt;em&gt;Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;ethernet&lt;/em&gt; that we closed five years ago! Let's close it as a duplicate!&amp;quot; Logically, you shouldn't have to worry about that happening because, whereas the &lt;em&gt;ethernet/Ethernet&lt;/em&gt; question from 2016 was closed for lack of research, you will have provided sufficient research to jump safely through that flaming hoop. But of course—as we saw with the Catch-22 recommendation that, instead of editing a question that you can't answer or comment on, you should answer or comment on it—logic doesn't always win the day. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T11:43:44.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-03T13:03:44.530" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in describing &lt;em&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; by E. Huddleston and G. K. Pullum as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;modern grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;? It makes a distinction between &lt;em&gt;complements&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;adjuncts&lt;/em&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is the case, a grammar that would rather use the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;adverbial&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, would it be considered traditional? Could someone indicate a book following this model that has authority in the field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T13:03:44.530" Title="traditional versus modern grammar book" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14920" CreationDate="2021-02-03T13:07:43.077" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A one line, low effort question should not be reopened. Even if the author was still engaged with the site, they shouldn't be rewarded for the extensive rewrite needed to salvage it unless they did the salvaging. If the question only needed a slight shift in focus to bring it on-topic, that would be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better to write a new question that meets EL&amp;amp;U's quality standards and incorporates the feedback from the comments, then link to the closed question for context. Looking at your suggested edit, I think you probably should also answer the new question and share your research that way. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17463/can-i-answer-my-own-questions-even-if-i-knew-the-answer-before-asking&quot;&gt;Can I answer my own question, even if I knew the answer before asking?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new question is well-received attracts good answers, I think it might be worthwhile to close the old question as a duplicate of the new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T13:07:43.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-08T10:25:51.717" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see that users are voting to close the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/559819/where-does-martian-meaning-inhabitant-of-mars-come-from&quot;&gt;Where does Martian meaning inhabitant of Mars come from?&lt;/a&gt; as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s  the problem with the above question? or is it just a question of grumpy users as a commenter has suggested?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264641" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T11:45:44.257" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T21:23:30.120" Title="Why is the question off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14924" CreationDate="2021-02-08T21:23:30.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Close votes happen, even on etymology questions that show research, which are arguably some of the most on-topic questions for this site. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11824/191178&quot;&gt;That’s nothing new,&lt;/a&gt; though in this case I really have no guess as to why, not with the specific close reason given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You could have written an online etymology dictionary and you would still have gotten 3 close votes on your etymology question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, if the question gets closed, you have my reopen vote. (I’m sure I’m not the only one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T21:23:30.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14927" CreationDate="2021-02-10T23:34:56.950" Score="10" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/559641/alternative-to-trumped&quot;&gt;Alternative to trumped&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed for being opinion-based. However, the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; has 300+ pages of questions similar to mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; if questions that use it are closed? My question was not horrible or unusual, it had research and I specifically asked for one word in a given scenario. There are hundreds of these questions on this site - yet mine specifically got closed while many others stayed open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a faulty tag which should have further clarified guidelines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a separate rule I don't know yet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;or was my question closed for a different reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1654/against-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;Against single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9789/what-s-wrong-with-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;What's wrong with single-word-requests?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11865/warn-people-of-the-rules-for-single-word-requests-before-posting&quot;&gt;Warn people of the rules of single-word-requests before posting&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to say that questions with more thought/research and a sample sentence in them could stay open. I thought mine had a decent amount of research to it and it had a sample sentence so those wouldn't have been reasons of closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also sounds like high rep users in this community dislike single-word-requests, which may make sense: but we should have further clarification on this. If it is an &lt;em&gt;unspoken rule&lt;/em&gt; to not ask these types of questions, could we make that more clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is tough for a user like me to spend time asking what I thought was a high-quality question, and then having it closed with very little communication behind what I did wrong.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: The question has now been reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="404149" LastEditorUserId="404149" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T01:23:59.187" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T01:23:59.187" Title="Single-word-request rule clarification needed" Tags="|discussion|tags|close-reasons|question-closure|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14926" CreationDate="2021-02-11T23:24:38.283" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14926/single-word-request-rule-clarification-needed#comment59924_14926&quot;&gt;Andrew Leach's comment&lt;/a&gt; that closure as &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; is a bit odd, given that to some degree all SWRs are seeking an opinion on what might be the right word to use. However, I'm guessing that what triggered the VTC was the question being based on your own purely personal (and possibly idiosyncratic) opinion, i.e. that an alternative to a word with a very specific meaning is necessary because you have a personal bias against a person who happens to have that word as their surname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ask for an alternative word in that context is like asking for an alternative word for &lt;em&gt;coronavirus&lt;/em&gt; because you don't like a certain brand of Mexican beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, perhaps the question could have been left open but heavily downvoted as &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot;, which is how Stack Exchange would expect us to treat such posts. And (again, in my opinion) the best answer would have been &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Trump&lt;/em&gt; has a very specific meaning in card games [insert definition, etymology etc here...], and &lt;strong&gt;there is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; alternative that would make sense&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given the heightened political sensitivity regarding the former POTUS, and the likelihood that on our site in particular the question was therefore likely to elicit answers motivated by political views rather than answers responding to the word's contextual usage, I suspect closure is a good outcome, and if &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; wasn't the right reason, then &amp;quot;lack of research&amp;quot; (regarding the use of the word in card games, its etymology, and why no alternative is recognised in that context) may also have sufficed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T23:24:38.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:43:18.543" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one decide which tag to use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History&lt;/strong&gt;: Questions about the history and trends of the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Historical Change&lt;/strong&gt;: For questions about how the English language has changed over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between &amp;quot;history and trends&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how … changed over time&amp;quot; is too subtle.&#xA;These descriptions sound like rewordings of each other, and there doesn't seem to be any significant difference between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357203" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T13:42:12.110" Title="What is the difference between the &quot;history&quot; and &quot;historical-change&quot; tags?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14928" CreationDate="2021-02-13T21:08:23.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The two different versions presented below were written to draw deliberate attention to the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;historical changes&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;which the lexicon of English, and in a few places its syntax, has undergone following the historical event of William’s Conquest in 1066, for no other event in our language’s long&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;history&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;has brought so much change to our language as that one did.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On tallying the toll of years&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don’t know; there likely is no unsameness for you to tease out&#xA;between them. Did you see how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-change%2bhistory?tab=Newest&quot;&gt;some seven-and-fifty of those&#xA;askings&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;come clad with not one but indeed both your two tags?  As with all&#xA;ELU’s tags, our folk have always put these to a bubbling hotchpot&#xA;of misfired goals all unalike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bid a mingling of the twain that would leave us one named tag in&#xA;their stead, for I do not know how best to sift free the shiny seeds&#xA;of those tags from the unwanted chaff that wraps and hides them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First we had best hone this new tag’s meaning, no? Shall we not try&#xA;to say here and now what we wish this tag to be for, if we can?&#xA;Rightly speaking, what shall we hold the “history” of English to&#xA;be for us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it that tale begun by the Ænglisc-sprǽcende boaters who leaving&#xA;their homelands in the eastern marshes dared the narrow sea to reach&#xA;Britain anent fond hopes that they might settle those lands left&#xA;fallow after the crumbling western “Imperium” of Old Rome had little&#xA;by little withdrawn from them, whether these had been wholly emptied&#xA;or otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the tale spun of their tongue alone, or is it also to be that&#xA;of their folk as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I foresee your answer will be that it is to be of their tongue&#xA;alone, but even this leaves much turf untilled.  Is it about how&#xA;their writings looked once we had foregone our forefathers’ &lt;strong&gt;ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;for that way of writing followed by the “Romans” who had lingered&#xA;long in those lands before we roamed thither?  Shall it be only of&#xA;the words, whether those be spoken or written, or shall it also be&#xA;of their meanings? Even so, then for either end I can but deem our&#xA;clearly-Greek tag “etymology” well and good, and enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it also to be about the many shifting ways these words have&#xA;come to be put together as Father Time has worked his whittling&#xA;ways upon our living tongue as it has grown, such as by setting&#xA;first one word before the other but then later only the other before&#xA;the first, as well as how these ways have themselves wandered wide&#xA;over the strands of tide and time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it that this should also be about their sounds, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you have us do about all this? It is, after all, your&#xA;very own webhome to do with as you will or nill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On accounting for the ages’ changes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good question! There’s probably no real difference for you to discern&#xA;between members of the pair.  Did you notice how &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/historical-change%2bhistory?tab=Newest&quot;&gt;some fifty-seven of those&#xA;questions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;were labelled with not just one but both your two tags?  As with all ELU’s&#xA;tags, people have always chosen them really randomly according to whatever&#xA;purpose had suited them at the moment. They’re really all just circumstantial&#xA;accidents that have already occurred. Don’t imagine they signify anything&#xA;profound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we simply merge the two tags so that just one would remain,&#xA;because I’ve really got no idea how to separate the desirable kernels we&#xA;would see retained from the bland exteriors enclosing them that we’d rather&#xA;discard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First we should decide what we prefer this new tag to be used for, no?&#xA;Properly speaking, what shall we consider a theoretical question-tag about&#xA;the changing history of English to denote in our site’s context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the story that commenced when those initial English-speaking inhabitants&#xA;departed their villages from the humid terrain to our east to traverse the&#xA;channel separating Europe from Britain, aspiring to establish new domains&#xA;left unguarded after the Western Roman Empire disintegrated and gradually&#xA;departed, even when that didn’t leave the countryside completely unpeopled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the history of their language alone, or should it also be the history&#xA;of their people whose many arrivals and departures have so altered our&#xA;language’s subjacent and its surface textures alike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I anticipate your response will be that it’s supposed to just be about&#xA;their language only, not those using it, but even this provides too much&#xA;terra incognita.  Is it about the language of the scribes who copied&#xA;ancient manuscripts after we’d discarded our ancestors’ runic alphabet in&#xA;favor of the Latin script used by the local Romanized middle-class that&#xA;preëxisted before we emigrated to those places?  Shall it be only of the&#xA;forms written or spoken, or should it also extend to cover their various&#xA;denotational or connotational senses?  If so, I lament to report that I&#xA;must judge our current Greek-looking etymology label sufficient for such&#xA;purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it also to be about the changing syntax of how to assemble pieces of&#xA;words and entire words in toto to produce more extensive phrases and&#xA;sentences as immortal Chronos has manipulated our nascent language like&#xA;changing the normal orderings we use to place our words in, and how those&#xA;strategies and traditions have evolved across the aeons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume this should also be about their pronunciations, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you prefer for us to do about all this? It is, after all, your&#xA;very own website to do whatever your please with, however this should prove to suit your fancy or fable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T13:42:12.110" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T13:42:12.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-28T07:12:43.570" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago, I asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/560848/is-the-diphthong-a%CA%8A-generally-realized-as-%C9%91%CA%8A-in-british-english&quot;&gt;Is the diphthong /aʊ/ generally realized as [ɑʊ] in British English? [closed]&lt;/a&gt; (now closed). I did not receive any answer which is fine but I don't see why this is opinion-based. In the question, I am asking if the diphthong phoneme /aʊ/ is generally realized as [ɑʊ] in British English (I apologize for using such a vague term as &amp;quot;British English&amp;quot;, but I'm sure it is understandable that I am talking about the accent known as &amp;quot;Modern RP&amp;quot; as most of the pronunciation question that ask about &amp;quot;British English&amp;quot; are about that particular accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the close-voters actually read and understand my question correctly or did they just threw their votes randomly? Can anyone explain why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NOTE: there are so many questions which are not only vague, but really opinion-based and are still open.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user387044" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T10:57:00.310" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T10:57:00.310" Title="Why is a question about pronunciation &quot;opinion-based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14933" CreationDate="2021-02-28T10:56:29.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; generally means &amp;quot;there are a large number of answers which are possible and all of them will answer the question in some way or other.&amp;quot; Which answer is given and accepted is purely subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation is not standard, even within what might be termed &amp;quot;RP&amp;quot;. Narrowing it down to &amp;quot;Southern British&amp;quot; is not particularly exact, as many people in southern counties will pronounce a word like &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; with (what I approximate as) [øu] rather than [aʊ] or [ɑʊ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about &amp;quot;British English&amp;quot; is even less specific, as while many south of, say, Nottingham will pronounce &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt; with /sɪŋə/, many north of there will say /sɪŋgʌ/ or even /sɪŋgʌʳ/. Indeed, even &lt;em&gt;sing&lt;/em&gt; has [ŋg] in Birmingham and the Black Country, and maybe elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your current question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/561469/what-will-happen-if-i-attach-the-suffixes-ize-and-ify-to-a-word-that-end-i&quot;&gt;What will happen if I attach the suffixes &amp;quot;-ize&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;-ify&amp;quot; to a word that end in /ŋ/? Will they make it [ŋg]?&lt;/a&gt;) is similarly afflicted. It &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be possible to generalise, but how someone pronounces a word they haven't seen before is really a matter of idiolect, and any answer is likely to be generalising from the particular. [Admittedly it does &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; to narrow down to /sɪŋə/ because that is restricting to a particular existing pronunciation which may influence how novel words are pronounced.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T10:56:29.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-22T18:55:35.063" Score="6" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I'm unsure about which prepositions can be used with a verb or adjective and how they change the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any resources to help me with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples of tricky preposition I'm collecting when I run into one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be curious &lt;strong&gt;as to&lt;/strong&gt; something&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doing right/well/best &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; someone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2299" OwnerDisplayName="peoro" LastEditorUserId="2299" LastEditDate="2021-12-26T14:15:45.310" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T14:46:56.110" Title="Are there any resources to find which prepositions are appropriate for a given verb/adjective and how they change the meaning?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-04T07:43:08.910" Score="3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a non-native speaker of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I do not understand a word (because I have never seen it before for instance), I look it up in a dictionary. The dictionary will give me the meaning and hopefully everything will be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also face the case where I am not sure about the actual usage of a word. This is typically the case in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/560308/what-is-the-contemporary-meaning-of-consensual&quot;&gt;What is the contemporary meaning of &amp;quot;consensual&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I understand, &amp;quot;dictionary-speaking&amp;quot;, what this word means, I specifically ask about native speakers use this word today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can this not be &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such questions are out of scope - why is there the word &amp;quot;Usage&amp;quot; in the name of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53753" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T07:43:08.910" Title="Why are questions in SE ELU closed because they are &quot;opinion-based&quot;" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14940" CreationDate="2021-03-05T09:33:15.327" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am preparing a question which might include an audio sample. It seems the only host I could find is Spotify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask a question that includes a link to Spotify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211208" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T16:38:43.150" Title="Is Spotify an acceptable way to host audio sample?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-06T11:08:44.333" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there are guidelines or common practices for citations to style guides that I haven't been able to find searching meta-ELU. Perhaps it's a non-issue and I've only thought about it because I'm apparently attracted to questions (I see as being) about style, but I'm working on an(other) answer for which it seems appropriate to cite &lt;em&gt;The Chicago Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt; and want to make sure I'm doing it in a way that accords with general consensus, if there is one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Citing other style manuals seems pretty straightforward since most have online versions or third-party websites covering a guide's approach to common questions. But &lt;em&gt;Chicago&lt;/em&gt;, as far as I know, is paywalled other than their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;quick guide&amp;quot; for Chicago-style citations&lt;/a&gt; and some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/latest.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pre-selected questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;. This probably makes it not an ideal source to use in the first place in terms of publicly accessible educational resources, but on the other hand it's a pretty darn common reference, not to mention widely considered authoritative, so ignoring or excluding it doesn't seem to be a service to SE readers either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given those caveats, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; one is citing &lt;em&gt;CMS&lt;/em&gt;, what's the best way to facilitate source verification (by a reader with full access)? I've used what I think is properly referred to as section number (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed17/part2/ch06/toc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6.38 is the part of Chapter 6 dealing with &amp;quot;Commas with dates&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; along with the html &amp;quot;section&amp;quot; symbol (§) to denote that I'm referring to a section.†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In lieu of a hyperlink, the section reference seems to allow for quick verification of the source, but I'm curious if there's a preferable or more standard way to go about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;†My question is written in a tense that suggests I've already cited &lt;em&gt;CMS&lt;/em&gt; this way, but now I can't find the example I was thinking of. But my question here remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="413085" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T11:08:44.333" Title="What's the preferred way to cite The Chicago Manual of Style?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|style|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14937" CreationDate="2021-03-09T16:38:43.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spotify is not on the banned list; you can link there if relevant to your question as much as any other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, please note that transcription requests, accent or pronunciation reviews, and similar requests that require playing a video or audio clip are not accepted, as they are unlikely to be helpful to future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T16:38:43.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14956" CreationDate="2021-03-14T10:25:34.723" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surfing the internet and chanced upon &amp;quot;The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English&amp;quot; edited by one Tom Dalzell. Notwithstanding the praise for the book itself, I couldn't find much about the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, the books appears to be an interesting find for a linguaphile. For example, &lt;em&gt;abercrombie&lt;/em&gt; is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a person devoted to prep-school fashions and style&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;US, 2004&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Abercrombie is a gorgeous but terminally preppy boy (often blond)&#xA;who looks like he just stepped out of the pages of A&amp;amp;F Quarterly.&lt;/em&gt;  — Brittany Kent, O.C. Undercover, p. 137, 2004 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;someone who strives at creating the impression of knowing&#xA;all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;US, 1945 • — Lou Shelly, Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, p. 7, 1945&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;abercrombie noun 1 a person devoted to prep-school fashions and style US, 2004 • An Abercrombie is a gorgeous but terminally preppy boy (often blond) who looks like he just stepped out of the pages of A&amp;amp;F Quarterly. — Brittany Kent, O.C. Undercover, p. 137, 2004 2 someone who strives at creating the impression of knowing all US, 1945 • — Lou Shelly, Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, p. 7, 1945&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm pretty sure the book teems with many more such colorful descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I searched the above word in other online dictionaries none of them seemed to define the word in such a colorful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which then, instead of giving me goosebumps, leaves me doubtful as to the authenticity and merit of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any word maven here to comment on the merit of the book? And is this one those books that should be on every linguaphile's shelf? Thanking you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further research gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/The-Concise-New-Partridge-Dictionary-of-Slang-and-Unconventional-English/Dalzell-Victor/p/book/9780367606312&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Routledge website&lt;/a&gt; has a potted Biography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom Dalzell – Senior Editor -- Recognized as one of the leading expert on American slang,　 Tom Dalzell’s most recent publications include Damn the Man: Slang of the Oppressed (2011), Far Out Depends on Where You’re Standing (2012) and Vietnam War Slang: A Dictionary on Historical Principles (also published by Routledge, 2014).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His books, all slang related, can be found here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/search?author=Tom%20Dalzell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.routledge.com/search?author=Tom%20Dalzell&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="405662" OwnerDisplayName="user405662" LastEditorUserId="36710" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T13:48:18.187" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T13:48:18.187" Title="Is Tom Dalzell's book &quot;The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English&quot; authoritative?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14942" CreationDate="2021-03-14T15:14:20.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should probably avoid the entire question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Slang and unconventional English&amp;quot; is a notoriously slippery and mutable subject. Slang constantly changes, and by its nature is not universal. Individual communities constantly adopt their own usages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best, any attempt at recording and explicating slang will be a snapshot of usage at a particular time, and usually of a particular community or clique. As an obvious example, slang within the white community is generally different from slang within the black community, although the widespread popularity of rap and hip-hop tends to provide a certain amount of levelling between the groups. Likewise, slang among rich and poor tends to be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a publication date of 2008, the Routledge dictionary is almost certainly hopelessly out of date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77787" OwnerDisplayName="WhatRoughBeast" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T15:14:20.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-14T16:57:16.763" Score="-7" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every question you ask gets showered with people pointing and berating. This is the most toxic Stack Exchange community I've experienced. Better chances on Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="312882" OwnerDisplayName="fer0x" LastEditorUserId="91338" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T22:35:41.847" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T09:47:31.110" Title="Why is this community so elitist?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14944" CreationDate="2021-03-14T17:36:25.417" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the information given at the Help Center, one sees that the site is aimed at linguists, those with a certain proficiency in the language. Other sites are available if people want to ask more basic (ELL.SE), or English- but not specifically language-orientated (eg Literature.SE, Interpersonal Skills.SE, Writing.SE ...) questions. Language Learning.SE and Linguistics.SE are not merely English-language-specific.   Guidance on how good questions should be framed (with reasonable research in most cases), and on what constitutes a good and on-topic question, is given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are close-vote privileges given to those who, over time, have been awarded sufficient 'reputation' status. Often, such contributors feel it would be helpful to point out the reason they close-vote, rather than leave someone wondering. Sometimes, answers to off-topic questions are added in 'comments', as people often want to help while not encouraging such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with on-topic questions, answers may be challenged, or clarification sought. This is debate, not personal invective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T17:42:01.463" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T17:42:01.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14944" CreationDate="2021-03-14T18:06:26.440" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a common human error to suppose that correction of an error, reasoned disagreement with an opinion, careful explanation of a criticism, or helpful reference to alternative sources are personal criticisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site aims to help people by doing all or any of these things in an atmosphere of robust debate and mutual self-improvement; you seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking them directed at you personally rather than at the modes of thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I dispute your opinion or I ask you to back up argument with evidence I am trying to help you improve your knowledge, strengthen your viewpoint, or engage in reasoned debate; I may even hope to learn from you; I am not insulting you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, people on this site do not criticise the way you eat asparagus. To do so would indeed be an insult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Code of the Woosters&amp;quot; Gussie has insulted Spode in a notebook, writing that Spode's mustache was &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;like the faint discoloured smear left by a squashed blackbeetle on the side of a kitchen sink&amp;quot;, and that the way Spode eats asparagus &amp;quot;alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Spode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91338" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T18:06:26.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14954" CreationDate="2021-03-19T21:36:53.973" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/562839/17712&quot;&gt;Where does the use of &amp;quot;deck&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;set of slides&amp;quot; come from?&lt;/a&gt; shows research. However, it was closed with the reason &amp;quot;Please include the research you’ve done&amp;quot;. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17712" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T21:11:17.493" Title="Why did this question showing research was closed with the reason &quot;Please include the research you’ve done&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14951" CreationDate="2021-03-21T21:11:17.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll summarize the answers the question received in the comments: 1) The question has been reopened. 2) the last close voter didn't think but instead just simply followed the previous close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's been reopened – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4972/mitch&quot; title=&quot;65,940 reputation&quot;&gt;Mitch&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14951/why-did-this-question-showing-research-was-closed-with-the-reason-please-includ#comment60032_14951&quot;&gt;yesterday&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that 4 out of the 5 CVs were cast before the link to Etymonline was added (showing minimal research effort) . The last CV was actually cast much later when the question was already in the hotlist, probably on traction of the other CVs. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/159691/user-66974&quot; title=&quot;53,431 reputation&quot;&gt;user 66974&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14951/why-did-this-question-showing-research-was-closed-with-the-reason-please-includ#comment60033_14951&quot;&gt;yesterday&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, most non-closed questions on this website do not show any research and the close reason is applied very much arbitrarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17712" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T21:11:17.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-22T07:26:21.857" Score="-7" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/562548&quot;&gt;Why are service or maintenance contracts called &amp;#39;warranties&amp;#39;, when they aren&amp;#39;t Legal Warranties?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;needs to be more focused&amp;quot;? I asked two questions. Do you want me to divide into two separate questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/14954/416586&quot;&gt;Dr. Franck Dernoncourt observed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, most non-closed questions on this website do not show any research and the close reason is applied very much arbitrarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user416586" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T10:47:31.907" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T20:44:37.953" Title="How does my question need to be &quot;more focused&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14942" CreationDate="2021-03-22T21:02:40.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My earliest acquaintance with Tom Dalzell's work involved two books he wrote for Merriam-Webster: &lt;em&gt;Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang&lt;/em&gt; (1996) and &lt;em&gt;The Slang of Sin&lt;/em&gt; (1998). Both are rather scattershot presentations of their subjects, with little documentation of early print occurrences of the slang terms listed. As a result, I very rarely cite either of these books in my EL&amp;amp;U research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A much more impressive work is &lt;em&gt;The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English&lt;/em&gt; (2006), co-edited by Dalzell and Terry Victor. This is a massively researched resource—it's more than 2,000 pages long, with citations to print occurrences of virtually every term listed and with years of first occurrence for most. Although this work invokes Eric Partridge's &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Snag and Unconventional English&lt;/em&gt;, which went through eight editions from 1937 to 1984, it is not really a revision of Partridge's dictionary but a companion piece to it, focusing on slang from the past 60 years (Partridge died in 1979).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Partridge Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; is encyclopedic and quite useful. For the word and phrase origin research that I tend to focus on, I find it less helpful than J.E. Lighter's &lt;em&gt;Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang&lt;/em&gt; (1994/1996, which consistently includes citations to the earliest print occurrence of each slang term it covers, but which also has the grave shortcoming that it covers only the letters &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; through &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt; of the alphabet, evidently owing to some sort of dispute between Lighter and the publisher), but it is a valuable resource that I regularly consult along with Jonathon Green's excellent &lt;em&gt;Chambers Dictionary of Slang&lt;/em&gt; (2008), the eighth edition of Partridge (1984), and the Wentworth &amp;amp; Flexner/Chapman &amp;amp; Kipfer editions of &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of American Slang&lt;/em&gt; (1960–2007). Green has an even larger dictionary of slang that I can't afford to buy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For older slang, I recommend Farmer &amp;amp; Henley's voluminous &lt;em&gt;Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present&lt;/em&gt; (1890–1904) and the resources listed in the slang portion of the &amp;quot;Historical Resources&amp;quot; answer to the EL&amp;amp;U Meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question reminded me of a question that I asked on the main EL&amp;amp;U site back in April 2014: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181695/can-anyone-authenticate-the-claim-that-grungy-was-used-to-mean-envious-or-jea&quot;&gt;Can anyone authenticate the claim that &amp;quot;grungy&amp;quot; was used to mean &amp;quot;envious or jealous&amp;quot; in 1920s slang?&lt;/a&gt; In attempting to answer that question, I found that one of the earliest authorities to assert the 1920s &amp;quot;envious or jealous&amp;quot; meaning of &lt;em&gt;grungy&lt;/em&gt; was Dalzell's &lt;em&gt;Flappers 2 Rappers&lt;/em&gt;. Although I tried to check all of the sources that Dalzell identified for the Flapper slang portion of that reference work, I couldn't find a relevant entry for &lt;em&gt;grungy&lt;/em&gt; in any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the much better-documented &lt;em&gt;New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English&lt;/em&gt; makes no mention of the supposed 1920s slang usage of &lt;em&gt;grungy&lt;/em&gt;, either because that dictionary doesn't cover old slang or because the editors revisited their original sources of Flapper slang and found no corroboration of the old usage. Whatever their reason may have been, they give a first occurrence date for &lt;em&gt;grungy&lt;/em&gt; of 1965.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T16:16:45.627" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T16:16:45.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14955" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:23:17.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The banners that purport to state the reasons for closing on this site are, more often than not, misleading. This is because (1) the banner displays only one 'reason' from a short menu or standard reasons, which is chosen by some algorithm out of the different reasons that different voters may have picked from the menu, and (2) people often vote on the basis of some gut feeling that the question ought to be closed, and then choose whichever reason on the menu seems close, even if it only very roughly reflects their gut feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an unfortunate state of affairs because it is frustrating and alienating to new contributors, who often take the posted reasons at face value. Numerous meta-questions about the reasons for closing make it clear that this is a real problem, but it is unlikely to be remedied any time soon, because revising the menu of the standard reasons for closing is a daunting task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that in this case the real reason why the question was closed is that the answer to it is far too obvious (the sense that the word has in everyday contexts is not the same as its techical sense in the law of contracts), but that's only a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T20:44:37.953" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T20:44:37.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T05:26:58.933" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;i was practicing for my English exam next which is to be conducted next month but i don't  have any idea where can I get suggestions on the essay. I only need to know if my essay sounds interesting not much issue about the grammar can any one help me out with any website which does help in this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="418588" OwnerDisplayName="spark anonymous" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T15:11:23.927" Title="essay checking recommendations" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14960" CreationDate="2021-03-26T10:00:49.593" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have today seen two examples of a newcomer’s question being downvoted without explanation. It is true that both questions needed improvement, and comments were made to that effect before the downvote appeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of such mute and spiteful negativity can only be to discourage newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is therefore that downvoting of newcomers with reputations below some small and yet to be decided threshold should not be possible. In this way we might encourage newcomers to improve their manner of asking questions by commenting and closing in the usual ways, while not discouraging by treating them so primitively as naughty 1920s infants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add to the extensive and balanced discussion in previous questions, is there any support for such a specific suggestion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91338" LastEditorUserId="91338" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T17:31:23.660" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T20:45:26.303" Title="How do we deter unexplained downvoting of newcomers’ questions?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14959" CreationDate="2021-03-27T15:23:28.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the regular contributors to this site would probably agree with Anton &lt;strong&gt;in principle&lt;/strong&gt; that the newcomers to this site should feel welcome. His post, however, makes a couple of assumptions that are debatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Anton seems to assume that everybody who posts one or two things on this site is eager to learn its customs and become a long-term contributor to it. That does not seem to be the case. Trolls and spammers have already been mentioned in the comments, but there is a much larger number of those who are used to participating, and who enjoy participating, in the sites of some different kind, and who post something here in the mistaken belief that this is yet another site of that kind. As soon as they realise that this is not the case, they, understandably, lose interest in it. Are they newcomers, in the sense that is relevant here? Incidentally, the mistakes of this kind can be easily avoided by 'lurking' on the site for a little while, and familiarising oneself with its nature, before posting something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Anton, as many other, but by no means all, regular contributors to this site regards providing feedback to the poster as the primary function of voting. The proposal that the newcomers should not be downvoted is then based on an analogy with the lenience that a teacher may display in grading beginning students. &lt;strong&gt;Voting, however, also has another function: it is a signal to those who may come across the post later of how worthy of their attention it is.&lt;/strong&gt; It is, at least, debatable which of these two functions is more important. The site is already designed so as to soften the impact of the downvotes on the poster who receives them, in that the downvotes have only one fifth of the influence on the poster's reputation that the upvotes have, while having the same weight in affecting the displayed net votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if anything on this site deserves to be characterised as 'mute and spiteful negativity' that discourages newcomers, it is not downvoting, but the closing of questions with the 'reasons' that are bewilderingly unrelated to the question. 'Mute' downvoting seems more respectful to the questioner, and may feel much less like stonewalling, than the blue banner that is not quite mute, but instead speaks in an Alice-in-the-Wonderland manner. Paradoxically, the main reason why the closing banners so often confusingly obscure the real reasons for closing is that those who formulated them were trying too hard to be polite, encouraging, and euphemistic; the standard formulations of the reasons for closing that were in use some years ago were more blunt, but their clarity may have made them, on the whole, less frustrating to the questioners than the current ones are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T20:45:26.303" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T20:45:26.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-28T05:58:51.607" Score="5" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197882/how-is-whinge-pronounced/197883&quot;&gt;How is &amp;quot;whinge&amp;quot; pronounced?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as being off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once noticed somebody spelled &amp;quot;whine&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;whinge&amp;quot; and thought it was an egregious and hilarious typo. But it turns out that &amp;quot;whinge&amp;quot; is an acceptable spelling among writers of the &amp;quot;Queen's&amp;quot; (British) English (I've never seen it written that way by an American).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: how is &amp;quot;whinge&amp;quot; pronounced - the same way as &amp;quot;whine,&amp;quot; with a long &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; (but a silent &amp;quot;g&amp;quot;)? If it is pronounced otherwise, is it a long or short &amp;quot;i&amp;quot;? And is it a silent &amp;quot;g&amp;quot;, a soft &amp;quot;g&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;j&amp;quot;) or a hard &amp;quot;g&amp;quot; (as in &amp;quot;goat&amp;quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; indicates that pronunciation questions are on-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; section contradicts this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native U.S. speaker who occasionally reads British literature, I've run across the term and had a similar reaction and the same pronunciation question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is&lt;/em&gt; this question actually off-topic for this site?  If so, why, and should the help center be updated accordingly?  If not, why would it have been closed as such?  Is this part of a category of questions that a segment of the community views as off topic which the majority of the active community disagrees with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="316609" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T08:40:04.900" Title="Why was this question about a single word's pronunciation (&quot;whinge&quot;) closed as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14961" CreationDate="2021-03-28T07:29:02.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; help center page implies, but does not outright state, that simple &amp;amp; basic questions that can be easily answered by looking them up are off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is simple and can probably be easily answered by looking it up, then you may find common online internet resources to be of some help. View our &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1482/what-are-your-favorite-english-language-tools&quot;&gt;list of community recommended resources&lt;/a&gt; to find some that may be of help to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try a &lt;strong&gt;dictionary&lt;/strong&gt; if you want to know what a word or phrase means, how it evolved, or how it is pronounced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try a &lt;strong&gt;thesaurus&lt;/strong&gt; if you want to know words or phrases that have a similar meaning to one you already know.&#xA;Of course, if your question isn't adequately answered by these resources, feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt; here on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange. Be sure to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/a/5043&quot;&gt;mention the research you've done&lt;/a&gt; and what you're still hoping to learn!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center page references an &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/a/5043&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039&quot;&gt;How much research is needed?&lt;/a&gt;, which goes into further detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly reasonable for reviewers to assume that a common expression can be explained by consulting ordinary reference works. They shouldn't have to do that search. If it can't be, it's up to the asker to demonstrate that it can't be. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing the research may find something relevant, but it might be unintelligible or not completely helpful. In that case, &lt;strong&gt;show what you found.&lt;/strong&gt; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In common with other Stack Exchange sites, ELU should not simply be asked &lt;em&gt;gimme the codez&lt;/em&gt; — we expect an amount of independent research, and understanding of what the problem is, to be evident in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &amp;quot;how much research is needed?&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;Enough to show:— that you have done some; that you understand what you are asking about; and you can explain all of that to people who have no prior knowledge of the problem at all.&amp;quot; Every question needs at least one of those criteria to be satisfied; most need more than one and many need all three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a bit unexpected to me as my primary Stack Exchange history is with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, which doesn't spell out nearly this same level of required research in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;its help center&lt;/a&gt;.  Granted, evidence of effort is required, but in programming a lot of time some times just the problem statement (requirement and expected output) is presented, as it may not be at all obvious for the asker how to even begin solving the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't obvious from my initial reading of the help center page that such questions would be considered off topic for this site.  A section titled &amp;quot;Where can I find answers to simple and basic questions?&amp;quot; doesn't seem obvious to me that it's defining community expectations, especially when that expectation isn't even stated there — it's stated within a link titled &amp;quot;mention the research you've done&amp;quot;.  Both of these facts make it super non-obvious that it's defining community expectations for on-topic suitability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it seems like it would be helpful to explicitly call out the unsuitability of such topics within the help center  Ideally, this would be in either of the bulleted sections, as those are the obvious place to check.  I'm specifically referring to the bulleted lists preceded by &amp;quot;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here&amp;quot; &amp;amp; &amp;quot;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="316609" LastEditorUserId="316609" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T08:40:04.900" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T08:40:04.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-22T13:20:11.990" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tangledindesign.com/demos/type-pseudo-elements/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See this webpage/demo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've seen this &amp;quot;technique&amp;quot;(?) being applied both in print and online.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I want to know if there's a specific style or guide that recommends it, or if it's just common practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_(typography)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emphasis (typography) - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It mentions that &lt;strong&gt;boldface&lt;/strong&gt; is one of the methods to add emphasis. Nothing about what parts should be emphasized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-bold-type-effectively-1074100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Guide to Using Bold Fonts Effectively in Page Layout&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;In a print context, follow these best-practice ideas&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't talk about topic sentences specifically and does not mention who has set/recommended these &amp;quot;best practices&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tangledindesign.com/using-first-line-and-first-letter-to-draw-people-into-your-copy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Using first-line and first-letter to draw users into your copy - Tangled in Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simply suggest emphasizing the first &lt;em&gt;line&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to sentence) of each section.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;APA Style: &lt;a href=&quot;https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/font&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Font&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/accessibility/typography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Accessible typography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No mention of boldface or emphasis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also checked (among others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://libguides.newcastle.edu.au/writing-paragraphs/structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paragraph Structure - Writing strong paragraphs - LibGuides at University of Newcastle Library&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/paragraphs-and-topic-sentences.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paragraphs &amp;amp; Topic Sentences: Writing Guides: Writing Tutorial Services: Indiana University Bloomington&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="418299" OwnerDisplayName="dreamski21" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T08:14:30.207" Title="What writing style/guide says to emphasize (using a bold font) topic sentences?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-04-17T13:25:08.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-09T19:34:35.463" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/562966/the-us-declaration-of-independence-states-that-all-men-are-created-equal-was&quot;&gt;the historical usage of &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; to refer to human beings generally&lt;/a&gt;  was closed as off-topic. It seems to fall under usage and perhaps even etymology, two of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;listed acceptable topics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question is obviously duplicative of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44991/can-man-always-be-used-to-mean-both-men-and-women&quot;&gt;Can &amp;quot;man&amp;quot; always be used to mean both men and women?&lt;/a&gt;. I've seen questions closed as duplicates that were (in my view) considerably different in substance from their identified duplicates, so this one could have been trivially closed as duplicative. Why was it instead closed as off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="413085" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T07:52:55.870" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T07:52:55.870" Title="What makes a question about historical usage of a word off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14964" CreationDate="2021-04-10T08:14:30.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;TinfoilHat &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14964/what-writing-style-guide-says-to-emphasize-using-a-bold-font-topic-sentences#comment60079_14964&quot;&gt;identified&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411267/name-for-making-the-first-few-words-in-a-chapter-small-caps&quot;&gt;a main-site question&lt;/a&gt; about capitalising the first few words in a sentence, and although that asked for the name of the &lt;em&gt;technique,&lt;/em&gt; one answer identified a principal proponent as Robert Bringhurst, in his seminal &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elements_of_typographic_style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elements of Typographic Style&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/411323/18696&quot;&gt;answer there&lt;/a&gt; quoted Bringhurst:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common practice to set the first word or phrase after the versal in caps, small caps, or boldface, as a bridge between versal and normal text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also included an image of the examples from &lt;em&gt;Elements&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A linked answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/35128/4215&quot;&gt;GraphicDesign.SE&lt;/a&gt; shows a bit of history; the practice is actually centuries-old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T08:14:30.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-13T20:35:03.150" Score="18" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/564936/419763&quot;&gt;first answer&lt;/a&gt; on ELU, I encountered difficulty in answering succinctly, due to a &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt; built into the site that removes so called “pleasantries”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question concerns how to write “salutations” in emails. Naturally, my answer begins with (my perceived) correct salutation, “Dear Prof. Smith...”. However, this “Dear Prof.” is forcibly removed, and cannot be put back, even in an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I could have experimented with other ways to start the answer. Perhaps beginning with “I would write: “Dear Prof...”” would override the bug. However, I did not try, since that would involve adding unnecessary fluff in my answer, which is exactly what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9351/419763&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is designed to remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose either the program should be improved, or there should be some way of manually overriding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="419763" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T05:53:03.827" Title="Over-zealous anti-pleasantries algorithm" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bug|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14967" CreationDate="2021-04-14T04:23:09.357" Score="4" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can put an empty HTML comment at the beginning of the post with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. This will suppress the detection of pleasantries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this does require you to add extra stuff yourself and I don't think SE will turn it off for a situation that's probably almost never encountered. But at least the answer won't have extra fluff around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; don't actually do this; follow Andrew Leach's advice; this technically works but it's a worse idea than just writing a more complete and stand-alone answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243044" LastEditorUserId="243044" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T07:34:44.710" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T07:34:44.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14967" CreationDate="2021-04-14T07:07:13.743" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The workaround to your issue is to write a complete, stand-alone answer which does not start with &amp;quot;Dear Prof Smith&amp;quot; or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer as it currently stands does that, with an introductory phrase explaining how to write a salutation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct salutation would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Prof. Smith, Prof. Johnson, Prof. Lee, and Prof. Chun,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note the “and”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not rely on undocumented features like HTML comments as they may well be removed in the future; HTML comments are invisible and are therefore more &amp;quot;fluff&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T07:07:13.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14972" CreationDate="2021-04-14T19:26:53.260" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/564574/correct-way-to-say-apply-powder-on-skin-of-child/564575#564575&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that consisted entirely of the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yeah apply the poweder okay&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously not an answer, but I also think the answer was posted in bad faith, as I mentioned in the custom flag I raised&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the non-answer, the username, the spam links in the comments, and now deleted rude comment, I don't think this answer was posted in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag was declined with the reason that I should have raised a standard flag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;declined - Using standard flags helps us prioritize problems and resolve them faster. Please familiarize yourself with the list of standard flags: see What is Flagging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that from what I understand, standard flags are meant to be used when the content being flagged &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; falls into one of the flag categories. The only flag that fits this case is NAA, but I think a harsher penalty was warranted (for reasons I explained in my flag) than just the answer being deleted. Of course, I would raise a R/A flag to indicate something like that, but based &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; on the answer, I don't think it's rude or abusive. Perhaps this answer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; considered R/A on English Language &amp;amp; Usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point here is the word &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt;. My understanding of the mod tooling is that comments (deleted or otherwise) are not shown automatically, which means the spam links and rudeness in the comments might have gone unnoticed. The advice I've been given is that in cases where it might not be &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; to the moderator what the issue is, a custom flag is preferable. However, this advice was given by moderators on Stack Overflow, where they deal with considerably more flags than on other sites (from what I've heard), and so they tend not to look at all the information they have access to when dealing with any particular flag. Perhaps it works differently on English Language &amp;amp; Usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did I do wrong here, and what should I have done instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378991" LastEditorUserId="378991" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T19:31:57.773" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T07:17:50.130" Title="Why was my custom flag declined?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T01:02:17.963" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked what I thought was a reasonable and simple question:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/564686/are-there-historical-examples-of-unchartered-territory-used-correctly/564749#564749&quot;&gt;Are there historical examples of &amp;quot;unchartered territory&amp;quot; used correctly?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It received 2 down-votes and 2 votes-to-close, with no explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only answer it received made no attempt at all to answer the question, yet it got 4 up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any reason why anyone would misunderstand the question, much less why several (between 4 and 8) people would do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain what happened here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357203" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T19:18:16.677" Title="Why was this simple question so misunderstood?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14970" CreationDate="2021-04-15T07:17:50.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for causing confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate flag for content that is just nonsense is &amp;quot;rude or abusive&amp;quot; because posting nonsense is rude (deliberately unhelpful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging it as &amp;quot;rude or abusive&amp;quot; also helps get it deleted automatically, the same as a spam flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unsure if someone is either deliberately posting nonsense or trying but failing to be helpful, the low quality flag is the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T07:17:50.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T16:22:47.617" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there is a tool that can provide the answer to questions like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are common adverbs used to describe thinking?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the most common adjective used to describe a knoll?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With answers like (&amp;quot;fast&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;slow&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot;) and &amp;quot;grassy&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google ngrams&lt;/a&gt;, or simply googling can be very useful in establishing a popularity ranking between two or more options, but I can't think of a way to adapt them to start from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420644" OwnerDisplayName="gnarrithas" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T23:35:49.610" Title="How can I figure out (the most) common modifiers used with a given word?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-19T04:46:00.067" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/174087/formatting-two-adjacent-footnote-indicators-in-the-body-of-the-footnoted-text&quot;&gt;Formatting two adjacent footnote indicators in the body of the footnoted text&lt;/a&gt; saved my day back in January this year, and I am disappointed it's still closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has had a massive 12k views in 6 years, meaning others have very likely benefited from it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347162" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T07:04:50.810" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T07:23:39.897" Title="Reopen question about how to format footnote references?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14975" CreationDate="2021-04-19T06:40:55.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was correctly closed as off-topic and should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be re-opened. It has nothing to do with English language or usage: the same problem exists if you're writing in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a site where this kind of question would be on-topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt;. The site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; says that &amp;quot;Questions about specialized &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1101/a-broad-guideline-for-questions-about-writing-specific-software&quot;&gt;writing tools&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; are welcome. While there has been some debate on that site about whether to accept such questions, the deliberate linking of the help topic with the &amp;quot;writing tools&amp;quot; question on their Meta site is no doubt intended to make it abundantly clear that such questions should be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option would be to put it to our EL&amp;amp;U moderators that the question should be migrated to Writing.SE rather than remaining on our site. There are many complexities involved in mods using their special migration powers, but there's no harm in asking for them to consider it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, you could go to the Writing.SE site yourself, do a search to see if someone has already asked a similar question, and if you can't find one, ask the question yourself. To save reinventing the wheel, you could even copy the text of the EL&amp;amp;U question and paste it as the body of your question on Writing.SE, provided you acknowledged the source (e.g. hyperlinking to the EL&amp;amp;U question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T06:40:55.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14975" CreationDate="2021-04-19T07:23:39.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/14976/18696&quot;&gt;Chappo answered&lt;/a&gt;, it's not a question for ELU: it's not about English. But as asked, it's not for Writers either: it's a question about how to get MS Word to behave sensibly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers' questions about formatting of footnotes refer to how to format the &lt;strong&gt;citation itself&lt;/strong&gt; (in MLA format, for example). Questions about how to get MS Word to behave sensibly are off-topic there too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is more on-topic on Superuser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have said you've found it useful, but that's not a reason to re-open a question if it's off-topic. It is a reason to migrate it. However, there is already &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/1576016/ms-word-365-multiple-footnote-references-same-word&quot;&gt;a question about this&lt;/a&gt; on SU, so it's likely to be closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While migration will leave a stub here, even if one or other of the SU questions is closed as a duplicate, I don't think there's any real harm in leaving it here as a closed off-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note other moderators may disagree and can move it unilaterally. While doing that may be &lt;strong&gt;right,&lt;/strong&gt; I'm finding I'm becoming more pragmatic/phlegmatic as I grow old.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T07:23:39.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14979" CreationDate="2021-04-19T08:39:40.567" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would the below question be on-topic? One may argue that it's better suited in Philosophy SE, but I guess that it's more about my English comprehension, therefore it's fine to ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;. I do notice the &amp;quot;Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature&amp;quot; in the off-topic section, but in this case it isn't literature, and explaining what the text says isn't discussing or analyzing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/#SSH2aii&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autonomy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideal of the autonomous individual could only be created by abstracting from the relationship of dependency between men and women. The relationships which people require to nurture them are considered private, and not truly relationships with outside others. Thus the other is reduced to an appendage of the subject – the mere condition of his being – not a being in her own right. The individual who cannot recognize the other or his own dependency without suffering a threat to his identity requires the formal, impersonal principle of rationalized interaction, and is required by them. (Benjamin 1988, 197)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me explain it in simpler terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80007" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T21:59:46.820" Title="Are questions about explaining what the text mean on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14978" CreationDate="2021-04-19T21:59:46.820" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally such questions are off topic, unless the text is used merely to illustrate some general feature of English language and usage, and the question is formulated so as to make it clear what that general feature is, and how the question is about &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; (and not about the subject matter of the text). It doesn't seem that any such question could reasonably be asked about the quoted passage: there is nothing in it that obviously needs an explanation, so far as its use of English words, and the structure of its sentences, are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is, of course, still difficult for an average English speaker to understand. But the text is not written for an average English speaker; it is written for an audience that has a certain background that comes from studying many such texts over a considerable time. For such an audience the terms such as &lt;em&gt;autonomous individual&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the other&lt;/em&gt; are rich in associations that contribute to their appreciation of the point of the passage, the point which is likely to be lost upon those that are not familiar with such literature. Note that this is not because the words mean anything different here from what the dictionary says they mean; it is because the point that is made by these words presupposes familiarity with a certain theoretical background. Explaining such a background is outside the scope of this site, because it is not a matter of English language. It is probably outside the scope of any Stack Exchange site, because it usually can't be done within a couple of paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, a passage of this kind was not intended by its author to be analysed and discussed in isolation; it is a part of a larger work and, to fully appreciate it, one needs to read it in the context of that work as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people attempt to read such a text and fail to understand it, they often misdiagnose the problem as due to something about the language used, rather than to their lack of familiarity with the background that the author presupposes. This leads them to seek an explanation of the text on this site, even though it is not well suited to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T21:59:46.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14967" CreationDate="2021-04-24T05:53:03.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously you were &lt;em&gt;presenting&lt;/em&gt; the words &amp;quot;Dear Prof. Smith&amp;quot;&#xA;as part of your answer, rather than issuing a greeting. &#xA;This distinction is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;use–mention distinction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;It's conventional, when you mention words, to quote them. &#xA;If you had quoted the words you were mentioning&#xA;(by either of the common methods), you would not have had a problem,&#xA;and that would not have been considered &amp;quot;unnecessary fluff&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UV6tm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UV6tm.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshots of answer that begin with &amp;quot;Daer Prof.&amp;quot; (quoted)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26083" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T05:53:03.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-03T13:36:34.427" Score="-3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've updated my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/566319/is-there-a-better-word-for-boss-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;Is there a better word for &amp;quot;boss” in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt; as requested, explaining why “boss” is not suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please check and vote to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="422033" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T18:09:38.747" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T22:03:09.327" Title="Can my question be re-opened now that it's edited?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14982" CreationDate="2021-05-04T17:39:22.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt your question will be re-opened. The bottom-line reason is that the question is unlikely to occur to anyone else, and any answers won’t provide insight about English as a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain that in a bit more detail. The place to start is to understand that our mission on the StackExchange network is to build a vast and long-lasting library of Q&amp;amp;A which will be as useful to &lt;em&gt;as many people as possible&lt;/em&gt;, now and in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The StackExchange Model&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The models to contrast are a reference work vs a help desk. We are a building a reference work: a single resource many people can consult to solve a wide variety of problems on their own, as opposed to a help desk, dealing with each individual’s problems one at a time¹.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure we are working to advance the former goal (reference work) and not the latter (help desk), a variety of administrative features and processes were introduced. Closure is primary among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;An Example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify this a little, it might help to draw a parallel which is less personal, so you can see the bigger picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow (SO), the grandfather of all the StackExchange sites, including EL&amp;amp;U, set the model for our Q&amp;amp;A format, and was the driving force behind the question closure process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among its curated set of standard closure reasons (each one introduced to deal with a particular kind of question which pulled the site away from “reference work” towards “help desk”), SO has a standard closure reason for “question asking about a problem arising from a typographical error”. This is designed for the situation where, e.g., a program refuses to compile, the programmer comes here to ask why, and someone points out they simply missed a semicolon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason these questions are closed is because they’re unlikely to help anyone else; that particular program with its particular typo will never re-occur, and the “solution” won’t help anyone reason about the programming language, the compiler, or gain knowledge or insight to solve any other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we try to rescue the question by generalizing it, there too we founder, because the question doesn’t contain a grain of generalizable insight to expand upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “solution” to the “generalized problem” is nothing but “understand your language’s syntax and how to read compiler error messages, which point to where you made a typo”. As you can see, this advice is &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; general it’s all but useless, and thus, too, not valuable as a Q&amp;amp;A pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Model Applied to Your Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so, too, with your question. The impetus for the question is, instead of a “typo”, a “thinko”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the misconception that the word “boss” in English necessarily indicates a high-ranking executive in a suit and tie, rather than anyone who is in charge of other people².  I imagine this confusion was born of taking English as a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with that, as in the missing semicolon example, is there’s nothing generalizable about it. There’s no insight to be drawn. If it were a common misconception, it might have been worth addressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it’s not common: it’s unique to you; the mental equivalent of a typo. Which means it doesn’t help us predict what misconceptions the next person who comes along might have, what words might confuse them, such that we could answer &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; question in a way that helps both you &lt;em&gt;and them&lt;/em&gt;. It’s a one-off, and thus any answer can’t be reused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, an answer might help you, but it won’t help anyone else reading it in the future, and those are exactly the kinds of questions which closure is designed to prevent. To allow us to be a vast, long-lived, reusable reference work, without devolving into a help desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Reference Works&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we're on the topic of reference works, it's worth pointing out there's a good way to test if your question fits EL&amp;amp;U's charter before asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing you should do before asking here is see if your doubts can be cleared up by referring to the more familiar types of reference works: in particular dictionaries and theasauri.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we're a reference work, we don't want to simply recapitulate the knowledge contained in other, professionally-curated references.  So questions which can be answered by a dictionary or other &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot; are similarly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the gloss for &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt; from Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; (the first dictionary I happened to check):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of boss (Entry 1 of 6)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1: a person who exercises control or authority&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;specifically : one who directs or supervises workers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which supports just what people have been telling you in the comment-discussions: &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt; is a perfectly suitable word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am not accusing you in any way of not checking a dictionary.  Rather, I suspect what's going on is you have English as a second language, and the reconciliation of these sorts of glosses with usages you see in the wild is much more difficult than it would be if you had spent every waking hour since birth practicing the language like native speakers have.  Without that kind of familiarity, it may indeed seem to a non-native speaker that this gloss actually &lt;em&gt;supports&lt;/em&gt; your discomfort with this word in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in other cases, referring to the dictionary, or better, cross-checking a couple, may indeed clear things up for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm really raising this point not only to ask you to check general references before asking, but to point out that we have a site &lt;em&gt;dedicated&lt;/em&gt; to those learning English as a second language, who are very familiar with the common hurdles learners have to overcome to master English in all its messiest aspects: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; (aka ELL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider asking any future questions on ELL, because they are familiar with similar struggles, are practiced in coaching learners through them, and are less insistent that askers check the dictionary/thesaurus/etc before posting a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, EL&amp;amp;U's target audience is &amp;quot;linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts&amp;quot;, so it can be harder to navigate without a native- or near-native command and fluency in the language³.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, EL&amp;amp;U is for questions which would occur to or interest native speakers (or equivalent fluency), and ELL is for helping those learning English overcome the many hurdles English puts in their way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, what might be closed here on EL&amp;amp;U as &amp;quot;unlikely to occur to a native speaker&amp;quot; often becomes a poster-child kind of question which receives a lot of attention and assistance on ELL, because what might help one learner might help another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while I'm not sure they would accept your &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt; question either, for the same reasons as I laid out above, I suspect they might.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Fate of Closed Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14982/can-my-question-be-re-opened-now-that-its-edited#comment60160_14982&quot;&gt;a comment, you ask&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is the difference between this closure and if some one replies and I accepted the answer and marked it with tick mark? the one you closed will not appear in stackexchange? or any other difference&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short story is: because your question is (a) closed and (b) has no posted answers, one of StackExchange's bots (lovingly called &amp;quot;Roomba&amp;quot;, after the robot vacuum cleaner) will delete it within a couple weeks.  You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-or-duplicate-question&quot;&gt;read all the details here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that so long as you have the link, you can always revisit the page and &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; will be able to see the question, as could anyone on EL&amp;amp;U who has the link and 10,000 reputation points or more, but otherwise it will be invisible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't show up in searches, and no one else (with less than 10K rep on EL&amp;amp;U, i.e. most of the world) will be able to see it if you send them the link (this &amp;quot;deletion means hiding as opposed to obliteration of the data&amp;quot; is called &amp;quot;soft deletion&amp;quot;; there is a mechanism for hard deletion, but it's only used for actively harmful posts, and only StackExchange employees can do it; users, even diamond mods, cannot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;——&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt;But, you might ask, &lt;a href=&quot;https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;why not both?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  First, because having a pile of one-and-done helpdesk questions will bury the re-usable reference questions, making them harder to find (even with advanced search technology like Google), and second, to ensure people are working on high-value activity (helping as many people as possible), instead of spending that same time on low-value activity (helping only one person with a point problem).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² &lt;sub&gt;Note that in many fields, one gets the opportunity to lead people by &lt;em&gt;doing the job exceedingly well yourself&lt;/em&gt; for a period of time, such that the higher-ups say “hey, if that guy can teach and manage other guys to be as good as he, then we’d be a lot more productive. Let’s give him a team to train and manage”. Et voila, you’re a boss. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt; But then of course you’re also an expert in the subject matter to a degree your staff may not be, having less experience than you do, so you may be called in to solve problems they’re unable to handle. So yes, the boss may have to check the breaker box from time to time.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ &lt;sub&gt;Note this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to say non-native speakers are unwelcome or not present on EL&amp;amp;U: in fact several of our moderators, and many of our regular and high-rep users, learned English as a second language.  But you'd never be able to tell from reading their prose; they have achieved native-level fluency.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T22:03:09.327" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T22:03:09.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2021-05-05T17:17:27.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reviewing the stats, it looks like this change has been very much beneficial for you all. While you had been doing in the 40-80% completion range for questions gaining at least one flag or vote to close, you're now consistently in the 80-100% range, though it's been dipping a bit recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/STDoQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/STDoQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Graph showing the percentage of questions that receive one flag or vote to close that are handled. From September 2019 until April 2021 the averages bounced around unpredictably between 40% and 80%. Since this feature was enabled in May 2021, it's been consistently above 90% handled.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, while the mods were never doing a significant portion of the work, they're needing to participate less than they were, with the community doing most of the work themselves. Note, the numbers in the graph below are more volatile because they're quantity, not percentages - this means that they vary greatly based on the quantity of questions that are closed and reopened - it's also nice to see a slightly higher number of questions reopened after closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1QDug.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1QDug.png&quot; alt=&quot;Graph showing the questions closed and reopened per month over the last two years and indicating whether the closures were done by moderators or community members. Prior to this change in May 2021, the moderators would close 100-300 posts on average - since then, the most they've closed is around 150 in a month, with most months under 100.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to call this a success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of you may have noticed the Meta Stack Exchange post - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites&quot;&gt;Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites&lt;/a&gt; (it's linked in the featured on meta sidebar) - we've finally got this project under way and English Language &amp;amp; Usage is one of the sites we'll be running the test on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting tomorrow, I'll be changing the site setting and closing and reopening will require only three votes. This test will run for 45 days and will be turned back to five votes to close and reopen while I review the data from the 13 sites. After we've seen the impact, I'll be posting results and, if there aren't negative impacts, we will change the setting to three permanently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few weeks into this, I'll be posting a question here on meta to ask for your thoughts about this change, so you will have an opportunity to discuss the impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much for your patience while we got this prioritized and scheduled. There's a lot more information in the MSE post, so please review it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2022-04-11T16:14:57.713" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T16:14:57.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2021-05-05T19:37:59.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one will be very ready on shortened &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;reopen tools&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that that tool page looks at all possible reopens, not just those that are on the most recent queue (notice the different UI). Also, it allows you to look at the &lt;strong&gt;delete&lt;/strong&gt; queue (and undelete queue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the tools that are available! (but also don't abuse the tools) Just because there is a button to press doesn't mean you should press it (and thankfully there's an 'unpress' button).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T19:37:59.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-08T22:13:22.333" Score="4" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has been participating on the main recently  will understand what I am asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment sections for many Q&amp;amp;As are being inundated by 20-30 comments per.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/566424/what-parts-of-speech-are-the-words-about-and-how-in-this-sentence/566442?noredirect=1#comment1405106_566442&quot;&gt;In questions such as this&lt;/a&gt;, I have deleted recent answers because  the number of inbox pings exceeded what I would like to see in the morning. Most had nothing to do with me, just cross-argument between experts who chose my thread to post on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spend a lot of time doing Search&amp;amp;Destroy on personal comments, and often on those of other users...but it is out of control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T15:57:43.807" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T15:57:43.807" Title="Why are the comment sections not being moderated better?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14988" CreationDate="2021-05-09T02:25:38.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caedite eos: novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t tell you. Perhaps moderators have been distracted by other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; tell you is that I just deleted nearly 300 flagged comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t look at them: ain’t nobody’s got time for that dreck. So I shot them all, sight unseen. Most went to chat rooms, and those that did shall never return — for such posts are forevermore barred from comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-05-09T02:30:53.163" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T02:30:53.163" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14988" CreationDate="2021-05-09T10:03:39.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR&amp;gt; Obviously, Cascabel here is flagging comments, and others do that too. But not enough people are chipping in to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to tchrist's answer, note that moderators are &lt;strong&gt;exception handlers.&lt;/strong&gt; The community is charged with moderation; moderators — unless they step in to nip something in the bud — deal with what the community cannot decide on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a comment is no longer necessary, flag it. Yes, it will go into the moderators' flag queue; but another flag (or maybe two) from members of the community will deal with the comment and remove it from moderators. If particular users get too many flags on their comments then moderators might get to know of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, please don't &lt;strong&gt;search out&lt;/strong&gt; comments to flag, particularly from posts which are years old. Those are unlikely to be flagged by others and will simply languish for moderators to deal with. Flags like that are more likely to be dismissed as unhelpful — the comments have been around for ages without harm and you've just dumped a load of ancient stuff on moderators' laps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, everyone would benefit if those who debate answers in comments actually wrote their own answer that could be voted on, and those who answer in comments actually wrote a real answer. If that's not done, then any pearls of wisdom may well be lost forever when moderators simply clear their queue. The community can help here by actively flagging recent comments which don't follow the guidance: it doesn't take many flags for a comment to be removed automatically, and after a while people may get the idea that comments are intended for a certain purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing an answer which might &amp;quot;normally&amp;quot; go in a comment &lt;strong&gt;is still providing an answer.&lt;/strong&gt; It may not be entirely complete, and others are free to build their own answer on that foundation; but if you're going to provide an answer, any answer, then put it in the answer box. Even if it's only a foundation for others, if it's actually useful it's unlikely to be voted down (I hope).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible to copy an answer-in-comment to the answer box and provide an actual answer; and flag the comment as No Longer Required. It would be good practice to acknowledge the source, but whether or not to make it a Community Wiki answer is up to the person who bothers to write the answer. Again, serial answerers-in-comments might get the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14988/why-are-the-comment-sections-not-being-moderated-better#comment60173_14988&quot;&gt;Mari-Lou says&lt;/a&gt;, sometimes a simple reminder to users to get off your lawn is suffice for two users who are having a discussion or seem to be bickering between themselves. By all means flag such exchanges: moderators may deal with them before the community accumulates enough flags, but flags on comments are counted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T10:03:39.823" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13558" CreationDate="2021-05-10T13:42:39.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirements for close-voting have only been reduced recently, but already I have experienced expedited closure for off-topic questions, and I can say it's already an improvement.  Much better user experience from a moderation perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-11T17:52:06.677" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T17:52:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-10T18:52:44.890" Score="6" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/566803/191178&quot;&gt;answer to the  question Is there a term for a child born after the death of its sibling?&lt;/a&gt; appears to hurt the feelings of a few sensitive users.&#xA;Though I am sorry for that I don’t see how one can take this issue personally. I am just citing an expression used in scientific papers.&#xA;This is a language site (is it?) so what has  perceived rudeness got to do with it? Swear as well as taboo words have been dealt  with before on this site, so what’s the problem with my answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that an  increasing number of users appear to be upset by my answer, and given that every single word may be percieved as inopportune and offensive to different people in different contexts I think we should probably create a new tag which automatically will appear under every question and every answer (old and new) which says that: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO OFFENCE WAS MEANT TO ANYONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I deleted my answer because I don't like to see  that people are offended by words I posted, even though  words are the pure and only essence this site is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T06:19:47.377" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:01:09.277" Title="Am I being rude if I answer a question with a documented expression?" Tags="|discussion|offensive|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14992" CreationDate="2021-05-11T02:22:19.087" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a site like this that addresses all of English, it's inevitable that there will be content that talks about offensive, rude, and vulgar language. That's fine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What your answer needs is just one thing: mention that it's not appropriate to use the expression in all situations (ie, say that it's used in scientific papers and may be considered rude outside of that). Since you didn't, having a comment along those lines was useful to prevent the readers with little proficiency in English from making a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... the tone of some of the comments went too far and there was no reason for there to be so many. Hopefully a moderator can sort it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Endgame: undeleted, edited answer with most or all of the comments removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T17:01:09.277" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:01:09.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-20T12:58:15.153" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a Programmer and working on a NLP project that suggest adverbs to the adjectives and verbs in the sentence. I need grammar suggestion regarding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can tell the way or resource to find the words list and their corresponding adverbs that can be used with that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example: Like I have time related words, whenever user inputs a sentence and I see a verb or adjective that is related to time, I suggest to him the adverb list that can be used with time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to cover all that categories be it time, speed, linking adverbs, commonly used adverbs, etc. So I want to first have type of words and corresponding adverbs list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="423778" OwnerDisplayName="DevPy" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T14:12:25.780" Title="How to find list of adverbs with their usage related to corresponding verbs and adjectives" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-27T04:56:18.917" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about comma usage: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/567890/comma-in-if-in-addition&quot;&gt;Comma in &amp;quot;If in addition&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was closed as a duplicate. The question that my question is a supposedly a duplicate of is about parentheses and brackets, not commas. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333047" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T12:00:52.487" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T12:00:52.487" Title="Question closed as duplicate but it wasn't" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-30T08:34:57.237" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/568107/is-the-word-adjectival-used-in-this-context&quot;&gt;Is the word &amp;quot;adjectival&amp;quot; used in this context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a straightforward question about grammar, asking if &amp;quot;adjectival clause&amp;quot; can be used in the same way as &amp;quot;adjective clause.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T13:21:15.737" Title="Why was this question labeled &quot;off topic?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14998" CreationDate="2021-05-30T13:16:00.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn’t vote on this question, but those who did nominated &lt;em&gt;lack of research&lt;/em&gt; as the reason to put the question on hold or to close the question. The reason is provided in the banner at the top of each closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Exchange, there is an expectation that people who ask questions show what they’ve found. This is partly a courtesy to answerers so that people don’t waste time detailing what the asker already knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another part has to do with the history of the site, which started as a Q&amp;amp;A for programmers. They wanted to avoid the &lt;em&gt;gimme the codez&lt;/em&gt; mindset. In today’s context, it can be described as a &lt;em&gt;do my homework for me&lt;/em&gt; approach, which isn’t what Stack Exchange is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange was set up to be a repository of good questions on a specific topic, together with expert answers to those questions. Requiring ‘research’ helps to keep questions interesting and at a high quality, which in turn helps retain experts within the community. It also helps to pinpoint the specific issue so that future visitors can drill down to answers addressing that specific issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the answerers are almost all volunteers, there is no financial obligation for them / us to stay (to help provide good answers). Each topic or community will typically have a pool of common questions, and scrolling through essentially the same question over and over again isn’t particularly interesting or captivating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if someone has tried to find an answer to their own question, the contradictions or puzzles that emerge are often interesting and worth thinking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T13:21:15.737" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T13:21:15.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-01T23:23:18.677" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/285777/what-is-the-difference-between-they-and-it-for-people-especially-for-those&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/285777/what-is-the-difference-between-they-and-it-for-people-especially-for-those&lt;/a&gt; has moved to ELL. I actually wanted to know more about third person pronouns in English, if possible linguistic and historical knowledge, rather than focusing on gender issues, and I got help from the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;, Avoid migrating answered questions. I think the migration goes directly against this. At the time of migration, I had already adopted one answer, and the question had several other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to send it back to ELU. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="371854" LastEditorUserId="371854" LastEditDate="2021-06-01T23:47:00.443" LastActivityDate="2021-06-02T02:22:02.333" Title="Why was my question migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15000" CreationDate="2021-06-02T00:40:38.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/568283&quot;&gt;Done&lt;/a&gt;, albeit not without some hiccups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-06-02T02:22:02.333" LastActivityDate="2021-06-02T02:22:02.333" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-02T15:26:33.487" Score="-2" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question with the following title appeared on the main site yesterday:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/568241/meaning-of-giddy-up&quot;&gt;meaning of &amp;quot;giddy-up&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As innocent as that sounds, a quotation used in that question contains harsh language (namely the n-word). I flagged it for moderator review, but the flag is still pending. I also suggested an edit - where I replaced the word with &amp;quot;n*****&amp;quot; - which also has not been reviewed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the use of the word is completely unnecessary to the understanding of the question. I get that the author is quoting, but it still seems to me in direct violation of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;, as we as a community (even despite having a CoC) should reflect inclusiveness and neutrality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the author of the question identifies as a person of colour, the use of the word seems inappropriate to me, as the SE platform is about information, not individuals and individual points of view, customs, or morals, and that information should be neutral and accessible by everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the way to handle this, both from a user- and moderator perspective?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize there have been related questions here on Meta (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), all of which don't really address a similar case.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9688/whats-the-best-way-to-address-an-antisemitic-slur-suggested-as-an-answer-over-a#comment37971_9688&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9688/whats-the-best-way-to-address-an-antisemitic-slur-suggested-as-an-answer-over-a&quot;&gt;one of the questions&lt;/a&gt; references the &amp;quot;quotation policy&amp;quot;, but I can't seem to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's more than a week later, and still no one has given any proper response to this, even though the 'answer' that was written on the basis of a misunderstanding has been upvoted 5 times.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now, returning to check for new comments, I see my question is in the process of being closed. For being opinion-based. Well, of course it is, that's why I asked it, and that's why a policy that addresses these matters needs to be present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the seven moderators of English.SE, can at least one please properly respond to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326523" LastEditorUserId="326523" LastEditDate="2021-06-11T20:25:42.817" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T10:52:36.390" Title="Ethnic slur in question: what's the procedure?" Tags="|discussion|questions|offensive|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15002" CreationDate="2021-06-02T16:56:48.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has traditionally recognised the difference between using abusive / inflammatory language and asking / commenting about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage of such language is frowned upon, to put it lightly, but genuine questions and comments about such language has been accepted. If that were not so, your own Meta question would need to be censored to keep the policy consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where such language forms part of the question, the normal courtesy would be to keep question titles child-safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the question you’re asking about, it would appear that the title is innocuous and the inflammatory use of the term is a quotation that the poster is asking about. As such, EL&amp;amp;U norms would not normally require the question to be censored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2021-06-02T16:56:48.193" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-04T16:19:24.537" Score="2" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/312110/a-friend-to-all-is-a-friend-to-none-aristotle-what-does-this-exactly-mean&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A friend to all is a friend to none&amp;quot; - Aristotle. What does this exactly mean?&lt;/a&gt; was closed five years ago, roughly a week after it was posted. The argument in favor of closing it (to judge from several people who posted comments beneath the question) seems to have been that the poster should have asked it on the Philosophy Stack Exchange site because Aristotle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question is about what the expression (which is proverbial in English as well as in other languages) means as used by English speakers—not specifically what Aristotle meant when he said something similar 2300 years ago. Arguing that asking about the meaning of &amp;quot;a friend to all is a friend to none&amp;quot; in English is off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U because it may have originated in ancient Greece and may have philosophical overtones is like arguing that asking about the meaning of &amp;quot;sour grapes&amp;quot; in English is off-topic here for the same reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that some close voters may have seen the question as inviting opinion-based answers, but that is arguably a danger of any &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot; question—and we have lots of open ones on this site. As long as a question boils down to &amp;quot;What do people generally mean when they use [a particular idiom, proverb, or other phrase in widespread use in English],&amp;quot; I think it is properly on-topic at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most strikingly, although the question was open on EL&amp;amp;U for only a very brief time, it has drawn more than 49,000 page views over the ensuing five years. Either a lot of philosophy majors have wandered onto the wrong Stack Exchange site by mistake or there is a lot of interest in the posted question as one of English language and usage. I think the latter explanation is the likelier one, and I think the question should be reopened. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T23:25:26.737" Title="Should this question about the meaning of &quot;a friend to all is a friend to none&quot; be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15005" CreationDate="2021-06-04T17:40:52.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;ερχόμαστε με δώρα&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me start by saying: Your meta appeals have historically and consistently identified mishandled posts and invited the correct call to action; and where I’ve seen them and could take those actions, I have (so far as I remember for all of this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On the topicality of the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can’t see my way towards this particular appeal; the linked question is asking about a &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt;, and is more or less divorced from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, the original proverb was Greek, and has been inherited by English and many other languages. This tells us the host language is more or less irrelevant to answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your (characteristically) scholarly, meticulous, and detailed answer there attempts to make the question about English by tracing its etymology into our language, but I note that by doing so it answers a question which wasn’t asked. I'll further note that the answer he &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; seeking is &lt;em&gt;embedded in the quotes&lt;/em&gt; you marshal in your recitation of that history, not the timeline you have organized it along, and those are related to English only in that that's the language they are written in.  They'd shine an equal light on this topic if they were written in any other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is: the answer OP needs is that loyalty must be selective by definition. And that answer is unrelated to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I adduce to this case the fact that that &lt;em&gt;all the other answers interpret the question this way and provide this conceptual guidance&lt;/em&gt;, the same as the authors of the quotes you cite in your own answer.  And excepting that very answer with its etymological bent, no one else touched on &lt;em&gt;English qua a language&lt;/em&gt; in their responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Contesting popularity&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to your point on pageviews: I think that’s a red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those views are undoubtedly coming from people searching the term itself (likely bare and without reference to “English” in any way) using Google, and that reliable servant dutifully offering up that page as being rich in hits for the phrase, which just happens, through an accident of history, to have been posted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The searchers who click that link, and read the question and answers, don’t know about EL&amp;amp;U and very likely don’t care about the platform it was posted on. The pageviews would be the same if it had been posted on Reddit or Quora or Philosophy.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quite doubtful that the readers started their journey here by encountering the phrase, being confused by it, having the thought &amp;quot;there must be some trouble with my understanding of English; I should consult a site about English&amp;quot;, finding and coming to EL&amp;amp;U, and finally using our search bar to search that phrase.  No, that's a bridge too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is what they're doing¹:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xVDq8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xVDq8.png&quot; alt=&quot;google search result for &amp;quot;a friend to all is a friend to none meaning&amp;quot; giving EL&amp;amp;U as the 2nd result&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, I really don’t think this is a question about &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;².&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt;Worth noting that I visited the other results from this search, and the platforms they're discussed on universally categorize them as under &amp;quot;quotes&amp;quot; (e.g. r/quotes) or &amp;quot;phrases&amp;quot; or in various quote compendia; none categorize it under English in any cognizable fashion.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² &lt;sub&gt;To be as fair in this analysis as possible to the question and its OP, he &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; explicitly ask &lt;em&gt;Is &amp;quot;being friendly&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;being a friend&amp;quot; being differentiated here?&lt;/em&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a question of English and does constrain his context to the quote. So if we must debate the topicality of this question, I would focus our efforts on determining if &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; sub-question serves as a sufficient saving grace.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2021-06-04T18:19:37.130" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T18:19:37.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-04T18:54:18.827" Score="17" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE: While the testing period has ended, this change has been well-received by the community so we have opted to not reset the votes needed to close/reopen to 5 while we look at data.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know if you have any concerns about this change in the planned process or if you feel the number of votes should be changed back at least temporarily. I'll be back in a few weeks with the results of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of understanding the impact of three-vote closure is to understand what impact it's having on y'all. I'd like to ask anyone who feels up to it to &lt;strong&gt;write an answer to this question&lt;/strong&gt; and to tell us about your experience over the past few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sorts of things I'm interested in knowing (feel free to address all or none or add your own) -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did this help?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did it hurt?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you prefer to go back to 5?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be permanent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would you like me to look into when it comes to analyzing the data from the test?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were there any side-effects (good or bad) that you want me to be aware of?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are merely prompts, so feel free to add anything I'm missing that you think is worth saying. This is focused on how you're feeling about it and what data you want me to look at, so don't feel like you need to analyze the data over the last 30 days - though you're welcome to if that's how you figure out what you feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any outstanding questions, also feel welcome to ask them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test will run until about Monday the 21st of June, at which point we'll be resetting the votes to close up to 5 while I review the responses here and dig into the data that we've been collecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2021-06-29T19:54:39.263" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T20:18:53.050" Title="3-vote close - how's it going?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-06-04T22:15:36.517" Score="19" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did this help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, unequivocally. As John Lawler as commented, &amp;quot;the chaff is getting winnowed out sooner, and that's good.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did it hurt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. It's only done good for the site. It's possible that some new contributors' questions may seem to have been treated harshly, but getting &amp;quot;Not here&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Not enough information&amp;quot; feedback more quickly might actually be kinder than having a poor question hang around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A diamond makes these rather difficult to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would you prefer to go back to 5?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should it be permanent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, definitely.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact it should be left at three until &lt;em&gt;your review&lt;/em&gt; decides that three is A Bad Thing and the number should change (and I'm confident it won't find that). That would be akin to withdrawing a drug from patients on a clinical trial in order to assess the results, even though the treatment is immediately seen to be massively effective and the patients would die without it. Approving the drug after that will treat the disease, but there will be casualties in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would you like me to look into when it comes to analyzing the data from the test?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since only three votes are required to re-open, it's easier to re-open questions which were over-zealously closed. It would be worth investigating the number of three-vote closures which three other people thought were wrong and re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be worth seeing the number of five-vote closures which got to three but didn't make it to five: these are questions which probably should be closed but five votes was too onerous to accumulate. You could compare that to the number of three-vote questions with aged-away votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another metric might be the number of closures or re-opens where a moderator voted before the final vote, hastening the process. I &lt;em&gt;suspect&lt;/em&gt; that both have happened less often under the three-vote regime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to see how many five-vote closures were re-opened with three. I would suggest that this is a contra-indication, and a lot of these means it's too easy to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a statistician, but these strike me as measures which might bear some examination (and probably some tweaking to provide useful figures). And I note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15007/3-vote-close-hows-it-going#comment60295_15007&quot;&gt;Mitch has commented that his review habits have changed&lt;/a&gt;, so the conditions are not the same for direct comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Were there any side-effects (good or bad) that you want me to be aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One side-effect is that the number of re-open votes needed is also reduced. That could be a bad thing. It might be a good thing. Which it is could be determined by the re-open analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;On the whole, subjectively it’s a huge improvement which I’d like to stay.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T22:15:36.517" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-06-05T20:40:18.603" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think of the stream of questions posted on English Language &amp;amp; Usage as falling into four categories: uninteresting off-topic questions, uninteresting on-topic questions, interesting off-topic questions, and interesting on-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site benefits tremendously from removing the uninteresting off-topic questions as quickly as it can—and reducing the close votes required to do so from five to three certainly serves that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second-largest category of questions posted on EL&amp;amp;U are uninteresting on-topic questions—duplicates and near-duplicates of the same 250 &amp;quot;grammar&amp;quot; issues that question posters have asked about here for the past decade, single-word requests of marginal utility, etc. Review-queue participants will undoubtedly disagree about whether a particular question is interesting or not, but I doubt that many question answerers feel much disappointment at the prospect that an arguably on-topic question of little interest is more likely to be closed today than it would have been in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of interesting questions posted on EL&amp;amp;U on a given day is usually quite small, and some of those questions are disqualifyingly off-topic. For example, MrHen, an early stalwart at EL&amp;amp;U, asked the on-topic question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/133010/where-did-duck-duck-gray-duck-come-from&quot;&gt;Where did &amp;quot;duck, duck, gray duck&amp;quot; come from?&lt;/a&gt; back in 2013, and its suitability for this site has (as far as I know) never been doubted. But the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60442/when-did-duck-duck-goose-migrate-from-sweden-to-america&quot;&gt;When did “Duck, Duck, Goose“ migrate from Sweden to America?&lt;/a&gt;—although it might be reworked as an on-topic question about the English language (if, say, it asked when the phrase &amp;quot;duck, duck, goose&amp;quot; as the name for a children's game first appeared in North America)—is, as posed, properly a History Stack Exchange question, not an EL&amp;amp;U question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting on-topic questions may be the rarest category of all—and unfortunately their suitability for EL&amp;amp;U isn't always immediately evident. For example, the interesting on-topic question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/568267/the-phrase-do-the-lions&quot;&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;do the lions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, asked four days ago, quickly drew two close votes (out of the three needed to close it and prevent further answers from being posted) before the historically proverbial aspect of the expression—which the question poster had addressed in the original post—received any serious attention. This isn't to criticize the two close voters in this case: they had probably never encountered &amp;quot;doing the lions&amp;quot; as a proverbial expression (I never had either; it seems to have died out sometime in the early twentieth century) and so were inclined to see the question as a general-reference query about geography and the verb &amp;quot;do.&amp;quot; But the very fact that these well-informed site participants had never heard of a once-commonplace proverbial phrase is evidence in favor of the posted question's worthiness. If Andrew Leach and I had not independently inquired into the history of usage of &amp;quot;doing the lions,&amp;quot; the question would almost certainly have been closed as an off-topic irrelevancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A larger number of interesting, on-topic questions have this quality than you might suppose. And to the extent that close voters vote on the basis of what they are familiar with, without checking to see whether a particular question asks about a past or present meaning or usage that they are simply ignorant of, they put these questions in jeopardy. Shifting from five-vote closure to three-vote closure significantly narrows the widow of opportunity that an answerer has to research and post an answer to such a question without having to post a question/argument on Meta advocating that site participants reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have argued &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13558/would-elu-like-to-start-a-trial-of-needing-only-3-votes-to-close-reopen-a-questi/13570#13570&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; that interesting, on-topic questions already tended to be closed too often and too quickly under the five-vote closure system; moving to a three-vote closure system clearly doesn't improve that situation. But just as clearly, the change from five-vote closure to three-vote closure isn't aimed at interesting questions that may or may not be on-topic; instead, it is aimed at the flood of uninteresting, obviously off-topic questions that pour into the site each day. Since I have no quarrel with quickly closing questions that fall into that category, I accept the reality that the three-vote closure system is an efficient and popular way to dispose of such questions. Nevertheless, I reiterate my earlier recommendation that the site also consider ways to make it easier to protect interesting, arguably on-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to do this (which I've mentioned before) might be to grant site participants who have demonstrated a site-defined threshold level of competence and interest in a particular EL&amp;amp;U topic special privileges to prevent closure of questions on that topic that are open but in danger of being closed or to reopen closed questions on that topic single-handedly. Another, less radical option would be to give such site participants the ability to post answers to closed questions, after which they could post a Meta question arguing that the answer provides evidence that the question is on-topic and should be reopened. The request might be voted down, and the question might remain closed, but at least the answer would be in place and visible to future site visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T00:43:44.380" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T00:43:44.380" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-06-06T11:02:03.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My observation is that low-quality questions are now closed more quickly, while questions that have some substance to them tend not to be significantly affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With reopen votes also reduced, it's easier to correct any over-enthusiastic closures. I haven't noticed any close/reopen wars, but consider checking the number of questions that have been toggled between closed and reopened within a short interval (say, a week). If there is programmer bandwidth available, it might be useful to increment the number of close/reopen votes required for a given question each time the question gets reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T11:02:03.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-06T18:26:37.930" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last few years I have noticed that  there is always  a  &amp;quot;big red dot&amp;quot; next to that item on the list, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;no matter what.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HYtQq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HYtQq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;even though the queue is supposedly cleared.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iXlv4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iXlv4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a bug, or does it indicate something else?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T20:40:17.830" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T11:34:59.613" Title="Why is there always a 'meatball' next to the LQ posts item on the review queue?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15011" CreationDate="2021-06-06T20:18:34.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that particular review queue is especially in need of grooming; that is, that it has grown quite long. (Exact thresholds vary by queue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either that or you’ve been staring way too long at a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cyan-tinted green stoplight&lt;/a&gt; so now its red afterimage won’t ever go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T20:18:34.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15005" CreationDate="2021-06-06T20:54:31.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why the question is off topic is not 'because Aristotle', but because what the questioner is curious about is the &lt;strong&gt;subject matter&lt;/strong&gt; of the sentence, rather than the English words and grammatical constructions used in formulating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about anything can always be formulated as a question about English, but that doesn't mean that it is within the scope of this site. Suppose that someone posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody explain to me what the word &lt;em&gt;electricity&lt;/em&gt; means? I have looked it up in a dictionary, and it says that it has something to do with charged particles of some kind, but I don't understand what that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question would be promptly closed as off-topic, and rightly so. Even though the question is, on the surface, about the meaning of an English word, it would be obvious that what the questioner needs is a lesson in physics, not a scholarly account of how the word entered the language. The question about friendship is like that: what the questioner needs is a &lt;strong&gt;substantive&lt;/strong&gt; discussion about friendship, not a scholarly account of the history of this particular &lt;strong&gt;form&lt;/strong&gt; of expressing the idea in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; such a question had just been posted, I would wholeheartedly agree that it ought to be closed. With the current three-vote threshold, chances are that it would be closed before anybody posted an answer to it, and that it would be deleted soon after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I do not think that it is irrelevant that this question received several answers and that it has been viewed thousands of times. Mr. Bron is probably right that most of those who viewed the page came to it from a general-purpose search engine, and that they are not the language enthusiasts of the kind that the regular contributors to this site are. But this doesn’t mean that their visits should be disparaged. Chances are that at least some of these people have learnt something from that page, and one of the purposes of this site is precisely to help and educate such casual, one-time visitors; it doesn't exist solely for the benefit of a couple of hundreds of regular participants. Yes, the same question could have been posted on Reddit or Quora, but it is unlikely that it would have received there as interesting a response as was provided by Mr. Yargs on this site. While I understand the importance of keeping this site on topic (by closing off-topic questions before they are answered), I fear that excessive preoccupation with guarding its boundaries sometimes gets in the way of its benefiting the general public as much as it can. Closing old questions that have already received a lot of activity (or insisting that they remain closed) seems to me a manifestation of such unproductive preoccupation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I share the attitude to such questions that was expressed in a comment by Mitch, but I thought that it deserves to be formulated in a full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2021-06-07T23:25:26.737" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T23:25:26.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15011" CreationDate="2021-06-07T11:34:59.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This queue has been cleared&amp;quot; means that you've done all you can reviewing there for now (good job!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The red dot remains because other people need to do reviews: it takes at least 3 reviewers to handle a post in the low-quality queue. (The red dot is calculated for the site, not for you personally, except I think that it's hidden for you for an hour after you view the drop down.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This inaccuracy has been reported before, and it won't be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's therefore no good way to know when there's new reviews for you to do, so you have to keep on checking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T11:34:59.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-07T17:20:37.380" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/217534/17712&quot;&gt;“By the end of today” or “By the end of the day”: which expression is is correct?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as opinion-based. However I don't see any opinion there: the OP is just asking for which expression is correct and whether one of them happen to be &amp;quot;more correct&amp;quot; than the other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough rep to cast a reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17712" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T18:42:43.497" Title="Why was the question “By the end of today” or “By the end of the day” closed as opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15017" CreationDate="2021-06-07T18:42:43.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From some of the comments, I understand that the issue was that the question was posted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I corrected the mistake I reposted it on ELL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/288372/3023&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/288372/3023&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17712" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T18:42:43.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15024" CreationDate="2021-06-08T18:13:39.627" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/568721/is-the-phrase-final-solution-used-in-the-field-of-software-development/568739#568739&quot;&gt;Is the phrase “final solution” used in the field of software development?&lt;/a&gt; on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the first version of the question was poorly worded, it was then edited to improve the scope and objectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question was closed after that. I cannot understand what’s wrong with the question in its current form in order to ask better questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know why it was closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now updated my original question with some extra context, so the wording of the question now is not the same as when I made this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147720" LastEditorUserId="147720" LastEditDate="2021-06-10T13:29:37.883" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T13:29:37.883" Title="Why was this question on phrase usage closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|down-votes|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-08T18:36:16.110" Score="3" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a chat room by mistake, and wish to delete it. Is there any way I can do that as the room owner? If not, can I ask someone to delete it for me? The chat room can be empty, or it can have some comments in it, but I would like to delete it. Is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-06-08T18:36:16.110" Title="How can a chat room be deleted?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15022" CreationDate="2021-06-09T14:45:05.610" Score="7" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was confronted with rude, acid comments from a certain user, just because I mildly protested for editing the OP after I'd answered, in a way that rendered my answer invalid. The user swiftly deleted the rude comments after a few seconds. The last one looked something like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdJtB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdJtB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see I managed to flag it seconds before the user deleted it. Will the flag still be addressed? It is not the first time I was confronted with such an attitude from the same user. I do not wish to embarrass the user by exposing explicit information here, I just think we can behave a bit more maturely and without anger. If I am expected to do something, please advise. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T15:59:58.190" Title="What happens when you flag a rude comment, and then the author deletes it?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15021" CreationDate="2021-06-09T15:59:58.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag is recorded against the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no action to be taken, because the comment has been deleted. However, you flagged it as unfriendly and that is recorded; the system does notify moderators of a clutch of unfriendly flags, once a threshold has been reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll reiterate @ColleenV's comment, since it's worded well and fits in the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at your flag summary, it should have been marked helpful [and that is the case — AL]. Pinging you with an abusive comment to put it in your inbox, then quickly deleting it is behavior that should be flagged for a moderator if it happens repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T15:59:58.190" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-09T19:06:33.100" Score="8" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was all news to me. But then, what do I know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+exchange+sold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+exchange+sold&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T20:53:08.083" Title="What effect will the sale of Stack Exchange have on ELU (and others)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15019" CreationDate="2021-06-09T19:24:52.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actual question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any instances of this particular phrase in technical publications or communication from international tech corporations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is on topic, in my opinion. I've re-opened the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T19:24:52.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15023" CreationDate="2021-06-09T19:33:27.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-to-tech-investor-prosus-for-1-8-billion/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ars Technica&lt;/a&gt; seems reassuring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky blogged about the purchase, and&#xA;Stack Overflow CEO Prasanth Chandrasekar wrote a more official&#xA;announcement. Both blog posts characterize the acquisition as having&#xA;little to no impact on the day-to-day operation of Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How you use our site and our products will not change in the coming&#xA;weeks or months, just as our company’s goals and strategic priorities&#xA;remain the same,&amp;quot; Chandrasekar said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spolsky went into more detail, saying that Stack Overflow will&#xA;&amp;quot;continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place&#xA;that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the&#xA;exact same business practices. Don't expect to see major changes or&#xA;awkward 'synergies'... the entire company is staying in place: we just&#xA;have different owners now.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which I will add just what you said: &lt;em&gt;But then, what do I know?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T19:33:27.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15023" CreationDate="2021-06-09T21:21:13.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short version&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;quid pro quo&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember not so long ago when Zuckerberg acquired Whatsapp, and many were wondering...&amp;quot;What does he get out of this?&amp;quot; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well as it turns out, it was profitable as a source of data. Data mining  was very useful for analytics, especially when collated with FaceBook public pages and other not-so-well- known Zuckerberg acquitions... I'm not so sure about private information...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Think about the 'public' information you have posted on the Bio.SE page, and the access to your email and personal websites&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, I expect targeted advertisements based on our personal information.  Tag data would also  be very informative, as well as our voting history. Think of the cross-links  to other sites. What about 'get arounds' for AdBlockers and info on preferred Browsers? &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it could speed up searches...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The longer view...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our new 'owner' is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.prosus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prosus&lt;/a&gt;,  a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/venturecapitalist.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'venture capitalist*'&lt;/a&gt;: most  journalists shiver when they find out their &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Publisher&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; has been bought out by &lt;em&gt;one of those&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What often happens to small hometown newspapers in these cases  is that the column length of advertisements is  increased, and the actual local news content reduced. What normally happens is that the paid editorial staff is downsized, as well as the news desk content. &lt;strong&gt;The object is no longer content, but a return on investment. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, we are a minor hometown news publication: our community is defined differently, that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/venturecapitalist.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*Venture Capitalists&lt;/a&gt; do not normally give away money, but there have been movements on the exchange and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/telecoms-and-technology/prosus-to-use-tencent-proceeds-for-new-acquisitions-and-stock/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prosus now has a huge cash surplus&lt;/a&gt;; the purchase of SE made only a dent in their recent expansion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/365050/what-does-the-recent-sale-of-stack-exchange-mean-for-the-community&quot;&gt;this from Shog9 on meta:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than anything, the site is now a Product. That's not a euphemism; someone bought it, it's a product, they bought it for a purpose and just as the man who buys a steak knife but needing a saw will see that 2x4 cut through even if it takes all night... The Product will serve its buyer's purpose. The site we saw spring into being 13 years ago, whose first and primary purpose was to facilitate communication between programmers... That's not what this is anymore. It might continue to serve that role - I sure hope so! - but that is officially, definitively not its defining reason for existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who has the rights to these 'products'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the important thing for us as users is the issue of authorship and rights. As I originally understood the vague &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;licensing  contract**&lt;/a&gt;, we as authors of posts retain our rights to the contents, and agree to share those with SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can that be changed, and then we lose rights of re-publication? For example, there are some truly well-written posts by  authors here that deserve to be published as an anthology... will they be denied that right?**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they still retain rights of editorship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a book by Sven Yargs with just an anthology of  their etymologies posts...or HotLicks and their wacky and wise comments could be compared to some Woody Allen books. Or indeed some of the exchanges here in comment between Dr. Lawler, BillJ, Edwin, and other linguists are often priceless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the  contributions we make of our time and love  be monetized? What does that make us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**I just saw this at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia in a recently updated entry&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On September 2, 2019, the terms of service (and the footer of every page served) changed to referencing the &amp;quot;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike&amp;quot; (CC BY-SA) license's 4.0 version instead of its 3.0 version.[38] &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users were puzzled as to how Stack Overflow acquired the rights for this relicensing of their past contributions,[39] with some users explicitly stating that they did not intend their contributions to be licensed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; under CC BY-SA 4.0.[40][41] Users were concerned that, if the relicensing was found to be a breach of CC BY-SA 3.0, Stack Exchange would have made itself unable to distribute the content under any CC BY-SA license (and that the footer's license statement could be erroneous), and would have to rely on its &amp;quot;perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works and store&amp;quot; the content instead.[42] &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On September 27, an official Stack Exchange reply stated it had been an &amp;quot;important step&amp;quot;, but declined to discuss with the community the legal basis for the relicensing.[43]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which I think might be the most heavily down-voted post ever by Tim Post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many older users here are still wondering about the changes in the old contract i.e. &amp;quot;CC BY-SA 3.0&amp;quot; in favor of the  new contract &amp;quot;CC BY-SA 4.0&amp;quot; Nothing that is happening here is very re-assuring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-06-15T20:53:08.083" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T20:53:08.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-09T22:07:29.057" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a tag that can be applied to questions about letters/characters (such as &lt;em&gt;How did the names of the letters in the English language come about&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Why do capital I's and small l's look the same with some fonts?&lt;/em&gt;)? Not sure if there is one already out there and I haven't seen it, or if it doesn't exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425405" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-06-10T05:47:42.867" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T06:01:44.427" Title="Is there a tag that can be used for questions about letters/characters?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15019" CreationDate="2021-06-10T01:44:19.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written extensively on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/126252/discussion-on-question-by-hb20007-is-the-phrase-final-solution-used-in-the-fie&quot;&gt;the question's chat page&lt;/a&gt; about why I don't think this question is good or useful for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the upshot: &amp;quot;what's wrong with the phrase x&amp;quot; would be a good question for english.SE; &amp;quot;what are some alternatives to x&amp;quot; would be a good question (and already exists), even &amp;quot;is the phrase x in widespread use in a technical context?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's not what this question turned into (after several edits). The way it is written, its now basically &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;can someone with better Google skills than me find me a couple of obscure examples of people using this phrase in a technical context&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, I don't know if you're trying to win an argument with someone at work that told you not to use this phrase or something, but finding a couple of isolated examples, even in technical publications by major companies, tells you &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; about how broadly used (or acceptable) the use of this phrase would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="642" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T01:44:19.600" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15027" CreationDate="2021-06-10T06:01:44.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&lt;/a&gt; you can search for tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags currently existing which include the string &lt;code&gt;letter&lt;/code&gt; are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-writing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-writing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-writing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/silent-letters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;silent-letters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;silent-letters&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/letter-names&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;letter-names&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;letter-names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do actually have a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37411&quot;&gt;Where did the names of English letters come from, and why are they all monosyllabic (except for &amp;quot;w&amp;quot;)?&lt;/a&gt; which is treated as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20803&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of the English alphabet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about the similarity of I and l in certain typefaces is not restricted to English and is off-topic. It &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be on-topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Graphic Design&lt;/a&gt;, but it's probably opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T06:01:44.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15023" CreationDate="2021-06-11T01:36:45.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don’t know. But there are two things to consider: the Stack Exchange philosophy, and the nature of VCs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we think of Stack Exchange as a public square where conversations are recorded for posterity, there is a sense in which we the contributors decide the direction of the content, regardless of the change in ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica showed that there is a limit to the power of the corporate shell, at least in the short term. In the long term, though, if they can attract enough support, it is possible to fundamentally change things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That brings us to the topic of the SE philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange distinguishes itself from online-hep and chat sites by seeking to be a publicly-curated repository. It affects the kinds of questions the community considers to be worth answering and worth keeping, which in turn affects the people who end up staying with the community. This Style of curating requires work from the public and support from the management.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With new ownership, there will be uncertainty whether the ideals of Jeff Atwood and other founders would still drive SE. There have already been some changes, especially with Jeff’s departure from SE, but having new owners makes the (new?) philosophical underpinnings more uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other factor to consider is the nature of VCs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Venture Capitalists have a duty to their investors, usually in the form of financial returns. They don’t necessarily have a deep understanding of the organisations they acquire, nor a desire to hold and manage the organisations for the long term. The word “exit” is part of the VC mindset from the start - if there is no profit to be eked out of from the parts, the whole, or the partnership synergies, there is no incentive to acquire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parts of SE, as others have noted, include an extensive mailing list. The whole could be considered a huge platform of eyeballs that have gotten used to not being on the alert for advertising. Partnership synergies include the Teams efforts already underway. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VCs can sometimes leave management in place while they get the hang of things, but the one thing VCs don’t do as a matter of course is leave things be. They actively change things to make them more profitable - that is how they work. I am not familiar with the new SE owners. The ‘good’ VCs will coach the management and provide support so that they can be more profitable. The ‘raiders’ probably quickly acquire a reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new owners can expand the Teams line of business, it is possible that SE can continue to function as the ‘free’ arm, using the business model that some Linux vendors use - free product + free community support + paid staff support + paid consultancy. This model would leave SE somewhat as it is, with the existing community and (some? of its) management continuing to subscribe to its ideals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what will happen to SE and ELU? We don’t know. It’s up to the new owners, and time will tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unasked question is what &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; should do. Those who are in the know and can make a (successful) case for disclosure should keep the community informed about how the larger SE enterprise is earning its keep. As for the public, we can put together a list of community principles that we want to retain. Beyond that, it’s another case of ‘wait and see’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T01:36:45.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-11T05:47:47.687" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/568790/among-this-translations-of-the-bible-which-one-has-the-meaning-of-being-intoxic&quot;&gt;Among this translations of the bible, which one has the meaning of being intoxicated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this question asks if the following phrases all mean the same or not. I cannot understand why this is not on topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;too much to drink&#xA;a lot to drink&#xA;drunk freely&#xA;are drunk&#xA;have drunk freely&#xA;have well drunk&#xA;had plenty&#xA;have well drunk&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also ask which of the phrases is the correct translation of the word &lt;em&gt;methiosin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again. Translation is on topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone says that because this question is on topic in Hermeneutics it shouldn't be on this site; this reasoning doesn't make any sense. So what if this is on topic on hermeneutic.SE? I may ask the same thing over there too but I want to know what secular English language experts think. People in Hermeneutics see the Bible as some special book. I want a more natural perspective. Is &amp;quot;phrase A the translation of word B?&amp;quot; kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is a confusion because English word &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; can mean past participle of drink or inebriated. In Indonesian it can mean &lt;em&gt;mabuk&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;minum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is a very legitimate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One comment says that the translation is appropriate because it talks about hypothetical case and is deliberately vague and the Bible transcription is not bowdlerized. That is precisely the kind of analysis I want to avoid. I don't care if the word if the book is the Bible or not. I don't care if the word &lt;em&gt;methiosin&lt;/em&gt; only shows up there. I don't care if it's a bowdlerized version or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want perspective from someone that don't care about all those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay I care. But I want answers from those that don't care first. That issue I can ask in Hermeneutics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All I care is if all those phrases mean the same thing and if not what's the difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I care which of those phrases means inebriated by alcohol instead of just drink.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I care if those phrases is the best translation of &lt;em&gt;methiosin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all 3 issues are on topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I get those answers, I will compare the answer to the answer on Hermeneutics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I am not looking for super expert opinion. Just normal unbiased honest answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10063" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-06-11T06:51:54.397" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T07:27:38.297" Title="Why is this question closed? I am asking if the English word is a good translation of koine Greek" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15033" CreationDate="2021-06-11T07:14:07.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/translation/info&quot;&gt;full help&lt;/a&gt; on translation questions is worth a read, although it may not be easily accessible from the tag pop-up (I have a userscript which helps there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ask a question with a good chance of a good answer, you need to indicate what the word or phrase &lt;strong&gt;is intended&lt;/strong&gt; to mean, together with any connotation it carries (for example, is it pejorative or adulatory?) This is an essential part of any translation question. &lt;em&gt;[My emphasis]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where the question fails: you're asking about the intention, but &lt;strong&gt;you need to supply that.&lt;/strong&gt; Once the intention is known, we can help mould that into good English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the French phrase &lt;em&gt;Il pleut des cordes&lt;/em&gt; literally means &amp;quot;It's raining ropes&amp;quot;, but it refers to heavy rain which appears to be ropes falling from the sky. A good English translation would be &amp;quot;It's raining stair-rods&amp;quot; (which carries the same image of extended tracks of each droplet), or &amp;quot;It's raining cats and dogs&amp;quot;. Once we are told what the nonsense literal translation &lt;strong&gt;means,&lt;/strong&gt; it's possible to suggest a  couple of idiomatic English phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; tag is that this community &lt;strong&gt;does not know the source language:&lt;/strong&gt; it's necessary for you to supply the context and general intention of the source phrase. You cannot assume a knowledge of koine* Greek and ask which meaning of &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; is intended for a particular Greek word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct place to ask about the intended meaning is on BH.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; if all you want to do is ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does English have a word that unambiguously means to be intoxicated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then that's a reasonable question, and a probable answer is &lt;em&gt;drunk,&lt;/em&gt; because  — as I commented — people cannot be imbibed, whatever Douglas Adams may have imagined†. If someone is drunk, they are intoxicated. However, there may be other words which do not have that potential ambiguity. &lt;em&gt;Intoxicated,&lt;/em&gt; perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if that's the case, we don't need all the guff about Greek. It's a couple of sentences of background at most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Note that it's &lt;em&gt;koine&lt;/em&gt; in English, not &lt;em&gt;coin.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;† &lt;em&gt;Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;It's unpleasantly like being drunk&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What's so unpleasant about being drunk?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Just ask a glass of water.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-06-11T07:27:38.297" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T07:27:38.297" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-11T14:39:31.657" Score="9" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am truly impressed with this site. It encourages so many good things as positive curiosity, research, mutual help, voluntary service, elegance and nobility, but also honesty. I am grateful for what I learn and for the diversity of approach to language issues. At first, I was somewhat taken aback by some of the rules of this site, but I gradually came to understand that these rules are its strength to keep up the quality of the information offered and avoid chaotic random communication. Whoever made this site has benefitted many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wondered if here is a good place to say it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THANK YOU!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="407211" LastEditDate="2021-06-11T15:38:36.160" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T15:38:36.160" Title="Is there a place on this site where users can express their admiration and gratitude for this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15002" CreationDate="2021-06-11T21:21:35.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I regret I wasted my time writing an explanation when you apparently just want a rule citation. So, as Andrew mentioned in the comments, read the most recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging&quot;&gt;guidance on flagging&lt;/a&gt;. If you care what the community thinks (although it doesn’t seem like you do) there’s some relevant discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12063/80039&quot;&gt;Does cited material merit special consideration when the content is potentially offensive or unwelcoming?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-06-13T10:52:36.390" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T10:52:36.390" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-17T09:54:30.300" Score="3" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;September update:&lt;/strong&gt; Community Ads are now live network-wide. All ads with a score of 6 or higher, or with a score of 4 or higher &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; no downvotes will be displayed (except for any that have a note from the CM Team explaining why it wasn't selected). Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;the main post on MSE&lt;/a&gt; for a list of the ads that are being displayed. And stay tuned for 2022's edition for the next opportunity to submit more ad proposals!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AUGUST NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; This post has now been locked and new submissions are not being accepted. Ad submissions are now undergoing review by the Community Team, and this question will be updated once the ads are live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're almost halfway through 2021, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;in case you missed it&lt;/a&gt;, Community Promotion Ads are gonna be a bit different this time! &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: submit and vote for ad proposals before August 2nd!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, or on other sites in the network. They can show up in the right sidebar, or in banners in question pages. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be considered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99341/208518&quot;&gt;the Community Management Team&lt;/a&gt; to be displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. The goal of this initiative is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. You may want to promote external resources, or Meta guidance for newcomers, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This initiative has an added goal of providing your community with &lt;em&gt;an opportunity to showcase exemplary questions from your main site, as well as frequently-linked-to guides from your Meta site&lt;/em&gt;. While the latter makes sense to be shown solely on this site, the former can be shown all across the network. These should avoid hot button topics, and instead focus more on evergreen questions that show what your community’s all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. Historically, we've reset the ads every year — since this is the first run of a new format, we'll run the ads collected in this post through the end of 2021 and reassess the rotation cycle then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a previous exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there restrictions to the ads I can post?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All proposed ads need to abide by &lt;a href=&quot;/conduct&quot;&gt;our Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/advertising/guidelines&quot;&gt;Our ad creative guidelines&lt;/a&gt; also generally apply (note that the first 2 bullet points on the “Tracking” section do not apply, and a lot of the guidelines surrounding claims, comparisons, proof, etc., while still applicable, may not be particularly relevant). Finally, ads can not be promoting products nor soliciting programmer time or resources for: knowledge sharing or collaboration tools for technologists, or for sites where ad buyers are primarily targeting technologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Each answer must relate to a single ad submission.&lt;/strong&gt; Please do not post multiple ad submissions in the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers must be in one of the below formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have an image for the ad you want to display on this site (must be the case for ads to external sources):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Image name. Example: &amp;quot;community_ad_name_300x250&amp;quot;][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://image-url&#xA;  [2]: https://clickthrough-url&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to create an ad for a question from your main or meta site, to be advertised on this or other sites in the network (staff will generate a frame for the ad with this site's theme, for brand consistency):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Question title  &#xA;Question URL&#xA;Ad size (right sidebar or banner ads)&#xA;Site(s) to be displayed in. Can be:&#xA;  - &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed on this site&#xA;  - &amp;quot;all&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed all over the network&#xA;  - a specific subset of sites&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels for right sidebar ads or 728 x 90 pixels for banner ads. Images can be double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF, PNG, or JPG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Selection process&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This post will remain open for ad submissions and voting until August 2nd&lt;/strong&gt;. At that point, the question will be closed/locked, and no more ad submissions will be accepted. For ad submissions to be considered for selection by the Community Management Team, they must have &lt;strong&gt;a minimum score of 6 at the time the post was closed/locked for submissions.&lt;/strong&gt; Given this is the first run with this new format, we may adjust the score threshold to be a bit lower if we see ads struggling to get to it (especially if the ads are not getting downvotes) by the time submissions and voting are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reporting statistics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this cycle is over, at the end of 2021, the Community Management Team will provide you with reporting statistics, as described in the &amp;quot;reporting&amp;quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to use the question's comment section to ask for any clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T11:32:42.220" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T11:32:42.220" Title="Community Ads for 2021" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15038" CreationDate="2021-06-17T11:42:23.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;title: What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;url: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3722/what-is-the-difference-between-elu-and-ell&quot;&gt;What is the difference between ELU and ELL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites to be displayed in: self, ell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T11:42:23.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15038" CreationDate="2021-06-17T11:43:42.127" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Title: What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites to be displayed in: self&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T11:43:42.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-17T19:39:55.077" Score="7" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my old answers has been nagging at me — probably too much time for thought during the pandemic.  It needs expansion, not so much with the English but about the context, which is archaic Greek sculpture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer was &lt;strong&gt;archaic smile&lt;/strong&gt;, which IMO was 100% the correct answer, or at least better than any of the alternatives (e.g., &lt;strong&gt;smirk&lt;/strong&gt;). I'm not aiming for points, just to get this off my mind.  The edit would be a few sentences, not an essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this edit be OK, or should I just discipline myself to let this go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121061" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-06-17T23:41:26.153" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T23:47:58.027" Title="Is editing a very old answer of one's own OK?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15041" CreationDate="2021-06-17T23:47:58.027" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go, make your posts better! The people deserve the best posts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only a few cases where you &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; edit to improve an old post (neither of which seems relevant here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're replacing the content instead of building on it (for example, on a single word request, deleting the original word you suggested and replacing it). Nondestructive edits are fine, as is posting new answers when appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You've already edited a lot of old posts within a very short period (like more than 10 posts). You should allow other posts to have a chance to be seen on the homepage. In this case, you should come back another time and do your other edits then.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T23:47:58.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15044" CreationDate="2021-06-18T11:42:34.787" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been noticing this comment a lot and most of the time, different users post exactly the same comment. The comment goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; you will be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment on any post&lt;/a&gt;; instead, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214173/why-do-i-need-50-reputation-to-comment-what-can-i-do-instead&quot;&gt;provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker&lt;/a&gt;. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/405160&quot;&gt;From Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a few hyperlinks (which I think is a bit time consuming to do manually). I'm wondering if this is generated somewhere I don't know. I read about the review queues in the help center but I may have missed it or information about it might not be present there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone shed some light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user387044" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T13:24:37.250" Title="How is this message in the Review Queues generated?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15043" CreationDate="2021-06-18T13:24:37.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the comment says, it's generated from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/&quot;&gt;Low Quality Posts Queue&lt;/a&gt;. In that queue, simply click on Recommend Deletion (or Delete, for those with delete votes) and you'll get a pop up that allows you to select a reason for the post to be deleted. If you're the first one to choose the reason, then it posts a comment for you in your name. If you're not the first, it upvotes the existing comment for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment is special too, because it notifies the post author even after their post was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T13:24:37.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-06-20T09:13:05.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always held reservations about lowering the number of close votes to three. My principle fear being that one or more reviewers would  cast their votes in autopilot mode. This would mean questions would be closed far too early, even before the author had any idea their post was at risk of closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well for now that doesn't appear to be happening. I'm relieved to report that there are also reviewers who cast their votes to keep questions open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whenever I looked at the reopen queue, I used to see one reviewer who would cast only &amp;quot;leave closed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TrxIK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TrxIK.png&quot; alt=&quot;recent reopen reviews&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SRDoW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SRDoW.png&quot; alt=&quot;recent reopen reviews 2021&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This voting pattern did not happen after the announced change, it was already like that in 2020 and the year before that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/viDFr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/viDFr.png&quot; alt=&quot;2020 reopen reviews&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/szlGw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/szlGw.png&quot; alt=&quot;2019 reopen reviews&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, and I searched several pages, each and every vote cast in the reopen queue was &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;leave closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It makes you wonder whether the user even bothered to look at any of the posts before casting their vote. This wasn't such a problem when to &lt;strong&gt;reopen&lt;/strong&gt; a post you needed &lt;strong&gt;five votes&lt;/strong&gt;, sure the ‘automaton’ made it more difficult for the community but if the post had potential and especially if the OP improved their post because they had listened to the comments and understood the reason for closure, there was some hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hrRto.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hrRto.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the reduced number of votes which we see is open to abuse,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;and due to the very limited number of reviewers active, should we consider some form of auditing&lt;/strong&gt; to be sure that users are actually &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt; posts before casting their votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2021-06-21T06:13:23.003" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T06:13:23.003" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-20T17:04:40.953" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can learn terminology related to specific areas of knowledge ('AOK's') by reading wikis and online encyclopedias. This is because exploring any AOK always involves learning terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are topical dictionaries which focus on a particular AOK or small group of interrelated of AOKs. (e.g. Dictionary of Gems and Gemology)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any online dictionaries that allow users to select a topic and see a comprehensive list of its related terminology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="426351" OwnerDisplayName="Ryan McDade" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T17:28:32.127" Title="Online dictionaries that group terminology by topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-20T21:18:33.937" Score="-3" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that there are members that edit their posts over and over and over again just to add small and petty things for example to italicize a single word or to add a comma or a full stop etc. and it bumps the question to the top again and again which is somewhat annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really didn't want to mention someone in particular, but just to prove my point, see this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/569240/a-better-word-than-cathouse-for-an-outside-shelter-for-1-cat&quot;&gt;A better word than &amp;#39;cathouse&amp;#39; for an outside shelter for 1 cat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go to its &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/569240/revisions&quot;&gt;Edit history&lt;/a&gt;, you will see that it has been edited &lt;strong&gt;17 times&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most of the edits are trivial (probably intended to bump the question), for instance, the recent edit made was just to embolden a single word (I suspect it was done to emphasize the word which was already emphasized/italicized)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize and I should not have brought it up, but it is not a single time. I have noticed this many times...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we handle this? Should I just move on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="426367" OwnerDisplayName="META" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-06-20T21:57:43.600" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T15:57:28.240" Title="How to deal with someone that edits their post from time to time just to bump the question to top?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15047" CreationDate="2021-06-20T21:27:53.553" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/569240/a-better-word-than-cathouse-for-an-outside-shelter-for-1-cat&quot;&gt;A better word than 'cathouse' for an outside shelter for 1 cat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a writer, but I have also worked as an editor on a few publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a regular participant here on EL&amp;amp;U, I often need to switch hats  to provide good posts. Production is a creative process, while 'Editing' is almost always a &lt;em&gt;post-production&lt;/em&gt; effort. Anyone that writes for a living will understand that the creative process  is stifled if the writer is editing mid-stream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I made many edits. Serious comments are always helpful, and on  this post there were many. I try to respond to constructive criticism because &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;our purpose here is not to gain reputation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; rather it is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to prepare an authoritative resource of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I actually do pretty much the same thing on other user's posts that I 'adopt'. In fact, I think I have edited almost as many other user  posts as my own posts, please see my actual [edit] history, and stop cherry-picking)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with refining a question or old answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15041/is-editing-a-very-old-answer-of-ones-own-ok&quot;&gt;This is actually on-topic on meta at this moment&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually cringe when some of my posts  get bumped...but as an old guy sometimes my eyesight is not so good, and I make typos, but out of OCD I just can't let them go unfixed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if you check the history of this very answer, you might see that I edited like a dozen times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*...and KannE is right about the glasses (they only cost 2 dollars), actually, I buy mine at Dollar. I'm kind of stingy that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-06-24T20:09:54.930" LastActivityDate="2021-06-24T20:09:54.930" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15047" CreationDate="2021-06-20T21:45:21.803" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Improving posts by editing is always regarded as desirable on Stack Exchange, regardless of whether the improvements are minor or substantial. A minor improvement is still an improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one finds it objectionable that every edit bumps the question to the top of the front page, one should criticise the feature of the Stack Exchange format that makes such bumping impossible to avoid; one shouldn't criticise the contributors who are trying to improve their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many regular contributors to this site, including those who frequently make minor edits to their posts, would probably welcome it if that feature were changed by, for example, giving the users an option to prevent their  edits from bumping the question, or by making the automatic bumping take place only after the edits of, say, at least 100 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2021-06-25T15:57:28.240" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T15:57:28.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15047" CreationDate="2021-06-21T01:03:58.323" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I probably edit my own old posts more frequently than anyone else at this site does theirs. Before posting a new question or answer, I read it over for obvious mistakes—but in my experience it is almost impossible to perform a high-quality edit of my own writing immediately after having written it. I don't know whether the problem is mental fatigue, overfamiliarity with the material, or the difference between reading something as a writer and reading it as an editor. But in any case, I don't see everything that is wrong with the post when I first put it up. I leave out links; I mess up the punctuation; I say something not just inelegantly but semi-illiterately. And that's quite aside from my often coming across information later that I didn't have when I submitted the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might not think so from looking at a randomly selected answer of mine, but I'm a pretty good editor. The trouble is that editing and writing require very different approaches to written content. I often tell writers that their great disadvantage as the writer—and my great advantage as the editor—is that they know what they're trying to say, whereas all I've got to work with is what actually appears on the page. (That, of course, is all that every subsequent reader will have to go by, too.) Given enough distance from something I've written, I can read it as an editor and see faults in it that I couldn't see immediately after I first wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that the fact that an edited post moves to the top of the question or answer queue (unless you filter the queue to show only the most newly submitted questions) invites suspicions about my motives. But my conscience on this point is clear: I would behave in exactly the same way toward my old posts if the Stack Exchange system left those posts right where they were before I edited them. My interest is in making the posts clearer and more accurate, not in gaming the system to score more points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot is that I'm guilty of the conduct that the poster here complains about, but I'm not remorseful. The best I can do is regret that anyone who doesn't want to see my posts more than once—if that—has to endure repeat engagements of the same old (but marginally improved) content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T01:03:58.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-22T18:40:16.640" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/569618/is-there-a-word-category-for-those-kind-of-words-and-if-yes-where-can-i-find-a-c&quot;&gt;Is there a word category for those kind of words?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been redirected to a question about a-adjectives, but the question includes other parts of speech. This has been hastily dismissed as something it is not. Can we get the question reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-06-23T11:16:28.763" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T11:16:28.763" Title="Improper duplicate closure of another prefixes question" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-25T10:34:15.280" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/569766/217285&quot;&gt;Term for wavelength-restricted or filtered light having a fairly pure color besides &amp;quot;colored light&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed with the advice to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. This will help others answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking for help from the English SE community to help me find a word that can potentially fit here. Maybe &amp;quot;light of a pure color&amp;quot; is as close as there is in English, but maybe there's something better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all closing does is block potential answer authors from the opportunity to post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see how to edit this question as I'm the author and I took some time to do my best in explaining the question. So I'm asking for some advice and feedback;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this question honestly unanswerable with facts and citations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How might this question be edited, and does it really need to be edited at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217285" LastEditorUserId="217285" LastEditDate="2021-06-25T10:57:35.183" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T10:57:35.183" Title="Is this synonym request truly unanswerable with facts and citations? Does it need to be edited? If so, how?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-06-26T21:01:07.040" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to post an answer from the viewpoint of a relative outsider. (For context, I'm on-and-off active in ELU's review queues, with 3 Steward badges here, but I have less than 5k rep and less than 100 posts, almost all answers. On other sites I have two moderator diamonds and 335k network reputation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking a question on ELU is a daunting prospect.&lt;/strong&gt; I realise that you all see a lot of poor or undesirable questions, and I've participated in closing hundreds of them myself, but my perception is that jadedness has set in to the extent that it's hard for almost &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question to survive without at least one or two close votes. My last three questions here (2016, 2019, 2021) have all entered the Close Votes review queue, although I can't see now how many close votes were cast altogether. I'm a native English speaker with an interest in etymology, linguistics, and advanced language issues - surely an ideal ELU asker. With over 1000 questions across the network, I think I have some knowledge in how to ask a good SE question, but this site is the only one where I'm too put off to post questions and deal with the seemingly inevitable close votes and criticisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all this in mind, I did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; welcome the change to 3 votes required for closing. I accept the views of those more invested in this site that the change is a positive one for overall site health, but those very invested users might be the ones furthest removed from the outsider perspective; from a quick skim through this meta thread, it seems &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15009/87724&quot;&gt;Sven Yargs&lt;/a&gt; is the only one who raised this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My fear is that &lt;strong&gt;requiring only 3 votes to close may make this site even more daunting to askers&lt;/strong&gt;, as it now takes fewer people to quickly close questions, which may then need to be actively defended or edited to get reopened even if they're interesting or on-topic. I know I'm not the only active SE network user who feels that &lt;strong&gt;asking on ELU simply isn't worth it&lt;/strong&gt;, even before the 3-vote change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not active enough here to have noticed any reception or behaviour changes due to the 3-vote change, so this is just a note of warning, perhaps one that active reviewers and close-voters may heed. An optimistic thought: now that every close-vote is a bigger percentage of a closure (33% rather than just 20%), maybe &lt;strong&gt;reviewers will now think more carefully before casting close votes&lt;/strong&gt; - in the same way that diamond moderators need to be much more careful about their close-votes which are each 100% of a closure. That would be an ideal outcome, but I fear that many people's thought processes are more likely to be &amp;quot;oh good, now we can close stuff faster&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;more responsibility, now we must think more before close-voting&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastActivityDate="2021-06-26T21:01:07.040" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-30T14:36:03.707" Score="-1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570097/what-is-another-word-for-historical-figure&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about naming Abraham Lincoln something other than &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;historical figure&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/218770/meryl-streep-is-a-as-a-big-compliment&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which tries to find a compliment for Meryl Streep (!), but I honestly do not see how the answers of the second can apply to the first. The tags of the question include &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;history&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;terminology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, so I doubt the OP is looking for a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe I am missing something, so I just post this here in case someone can enlighten me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T22:49:55.220" Title="Abraham Lincoln and Meryl Streep, are they the same?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15055" CreationDate="2021-06-30T22:49:55.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mari-lou A has indicated in the comments that the question was closed because it lacked research. You seem to be assuming that it was closed as a duplicate because it has a &amp;quot;Does this answer your question?...&amp;quot; but if the post notice doesn't actually say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question already has answers here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it wasn't closed as a duplicate (Even the really old questions that don't show which questions they are a duplicate of have that text). Unfortunately, if it was closed for one of the ELU custom reasons, the post notice isn't very informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/339733/273494&quot;&gt;an answer to New Post Notices are live network-wide&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, with the new post notices, questions closed with custom close reasons now simply say they were closed as off-topic. There’s no explanation of why they're off-topic, and in many cases the questions are about subjects that are entirely topical for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Laurel pointed out in the comments, if ELU would like more informative close reasons displayed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/362584/273494&quot;&gt;we would need to come up with the appropriate text for each type of post notice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T22:49:55.220" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-01T18:19:59.877" Score="-6" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody just edited my post, saying they removed &amp;quot;fluff&amp;quot;. What they really removed was me briefly introducing myself, saying I am new and will take feedback, and me saying &amp;quot;Thanks!&amp;quot; at the end of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user427065" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-07-01T21:29:56.213" LastActivityDate="2021-07-01T21:29:56.213" Title="Linguistic redundancy vs being polite" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15057" CreationDate="2021-07-01T19:33:35.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ethos of Stack Exchange is &lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Answers.&lt;/strong&gt; Just that. While the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; expects the community not to be rude or unpleasant to each other, no-one needs any more than a question to which they give an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's actually in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt; (if you take the Tour and read all the way to the bottom you get another badge):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5105.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5105.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, the context to a question might be needed and that might even be a bit about you: &amp;quot;I was kayaking down the Amazon and someone shouted...&amp;quot; but generally we don't need any introduction as it's not usually relevant to the question; and we don't need &amp;quot;Thanks&amp;quot; or anything. You can express thanks by upvoting (when you have the rep to do that). &lt;strong&gt;That's all that's expected.&lt;/strong&gt; Anything more than just a question and its answer is superfluous and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;can be edited out&lt;/a&gt; by any user [some users will need to suggest an edit and have it approved].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-07-01T19:33:35.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15057" CreationDate="2021-07-01T20:14:28.730" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's worth bearing in mind that StackExchange is closer to Wikipedia than it is to social media sites like Facebook. People come to these sorts of site to ask questions and get knowledgeable answers. It would be very strange to go to a Wikipedia article and be greeted by something like &amp;quot;Hi, I'm Bob, this is my first Wikipedia edit, I'm single and have a house full of cats. Thanks for reading!&amp;quot; at the start of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that 'fluff' gets edited out is because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It obscures the real details of questions and answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It becomes dated – Questions and answers on the site are intended to have longevity and be available over long periods of time. It might be your first post &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; but a year or two down the road and it's just another post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Personal introductions belong in your profile page – People who are interested can read all about you there. People who aren't, don't have to see it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People providing answers will assume that you're grateful so there's no need to add &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;thanks in advance&amp;quot; to a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141210" LastEditorUserId="141210" LastEditDate="2021-07-01T20:49:25.577" LastActivityDate="2021-07-01T20:49:25.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15065" CreationDate="2021-07-03T10:11:55.637" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any website that assesses how rare or common are the words I used in my essay? Something like this picture below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7P5L9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7P5L9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425420" OwnerDisplayName="Mohammad Salehi" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T19:52:14.950" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T20:52:35.367" Title="Website for lexical resources assessment?" Tags="|discussion|resources|online-resources|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15060" CreationDate="2021-07-03T14:07:43.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google NGrams&lt;/a&gt; could give you a hand. It gives you instances in written texts and that is good for an essay. It is not 100% reliable, but it can provide precious help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can find information on how to use the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="407211" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T14:22:40.990" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T14:22:40.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-03T14:39:45.610" Score="-3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, there has been an answer to a question asking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570199/a-word-gesture-or-expression-for-a-confident-shrug/570212?noredirect=1#comment1417678_570212&quot;&gt;'A word, gesture or expression for a confident “shrug” '&lt;/a&gt; which invites and was presented with a captioned photograph illustrating this. The caption was not, in my opinion, an idiomatic expression. Are non-verbal answers acceptable? Does the 'gesture' tag need a caveat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T14:50:55.290" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T19:36:13.813" Title="Are non-verbal answers (and questions soliciting them) acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15062" CreationDate="2021-07-03T17:46:56.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;nothing to hide&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is really seeking, fundamentally, body language (and not &lt;em&gt;terms for&lt;/em&gt; body language), as in, the only way to answer is with a photo, then no, off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, seems like the OP is an author looking for ways to phrase a certain idea for his readers, i.e. he's looking for &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;. Now, if this were simply &amp;quot;ghostwriting&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;what's the best&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;clearest&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;interesting, colorful way to phrase this idea&lt;/em&gt;, etc), my stance is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10722/poll-additional-question-types-that-should-or-shouldnt-be-added-to-help-on-top/11814#11814&quot;&gt;that is also off-topic&lt;/a&gt; (and I think I'd get general support for this from other regulars; maybe it'd be on-topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers.se&lt;/a&gt;, I don't know, but it should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the way this is phrased, it's equivalent to the question offering a picture and saying &amp;quot;what is the English term for this?&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198083/what-is-an-adjective-to-describe-what-this-baby-is-doing&quot;&gt;which is on-topic&lt;/a&gt; in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;everything to gain&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given the question I just linked in support of that view -- which I also answered, you'll note -- is closed, on what strength do I make that assertion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On long-standing consensus on EL&amp;amp;U on what makes a good question.  In short, they (a) well-specified and admitting of objective answers, and (b) providing those answers requires &lt;em&gt;expertise in English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking &amp;quot;what does the word &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; mean&amp;quot; is off-topic, &lt;em&gt;because finding the answer to that question is trivial on one's own&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. checking a dictionary, which are tools dedicated to that specific task.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But asking &amp;quot;What is a word which has the meaning &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot; is on-topic, because this is a non-trivial task which &lt;em&gt;requires expertise and a strong command of English as a language&lt;/em&gt;, which is the core competency EL&amp;amp;U offers to the world.&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For those with a CS background, (1) above corresponds to a &lt;code&gt;O(1)&lt;/code&gt; operation (handwaving a bit about the hashing function); (2) here is at the &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; least &lt;code&gt;O(n)&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt; being the 0.5-1 million words in the English language) if the phrasing you're looking to map happens to correspond to the way a dictionary has glossed it.  But since English is generative, the odds of that are low indeed; I expect that this task is actually NP-hard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given this state of affairs, the site historically has been &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; receptive to such questions:&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; is our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=popular&quot;&gt;top tag&lt;/a&gt; and it also has popular cousins (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be disingenuous to say that &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; likes these types of questions or that there haven't &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9789/55623&quot;&gt;been appeals on Meta to limit or eliminate them&lt;/a&gt; (as &amp;quot;guessing games&amp;quot;); nonetheless a broader consensus has developed and maintained keeping them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even with that caveat in mind, there's another class of questions which doesn't seem to cause much, if any, contention on Meta; in fact, this class seems to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/332602/are-there-english-proverbs-that-warn-against-speaking-up-in-front-of-people&quot;&gt;appeal&lt;/a&gt; even in our most jaded and/or conservative constituency: &amp;quot;In French, we say &lt;em&gt;avoir le cul bordé de nouilles&lt;/em&gt;; what's the English equivalent?&amp;quot;, aka &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd argue &amp;quot;what is the English word for this gesture/face/body language&amp;quot; is much more analogous to the latter than the former, because we know, in advance, the &lt;em&gt;specific meaning we are seeking&lt;/em&gt; (a foreign phrase or a gesture has a &lt;em&gt;known meaning&lt;/em&gt; which allows for a &lt;em&gt;canonical answer&lt;/em&gt;), and so doesn't fall afoul of the &amp;quot;guessing game&amp;quot; trap (where the question invites answers which are more like design than engineering; the querent has some vague impression of what he wants, but will only know it's right &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;when he sees it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; it cannot be perfectly specified in advance).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;exceptions prove the rule&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, having said that, while the argument above makes the case that there's no reason to foreclose such questions &lt;em&gt;as a class&lt;/em&gt;, it is still possible that a particular &lt;em&gt;instance&lt;/em&gt; may be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if someone posted a picture of a person smiling, and asked &amp;quot;what's the English word for this facial expression?&amp;quot;, we should close it as off-topic under our standard rubric of &amp;quot;questions which would not occur to a native speaker; or which a native speaker would immediately and intuitively know the answer to&amp;quot; (aka &lt;em&gt;too basic&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should treat such questions as generally equivalent to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;translation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; questions at best (some of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117493/is-there-english-counterparts-to-japanese-old-saying-present-salt-to-your-en&quot;&gt;favorites&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10361/whats-the-english-word-for-my-fathers-brothers-nephews-cousins-former-roomm&quot;&gt;mixed views&lt;/a&gt;) at worst, aka &lt;strong&gt;on-topic by default&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, just like always, questions can be off-topic for more than one reason, and that a question passes muster under some rule doesn't mean it doesn't fall afoul of another, so each should be considered on its individual merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;PS: in re the specific Q/A you cite as motivating this more general question:&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;I agree with your core critique on that answer. That is, I don't see the issue here as that the Q is off-topic (it's not), nor that the answer included a photo (that's fine; usually doing so adds color to otherwise flat text), but the phrase &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;nothing-to-hide&amp;quot; gesture&lt;/em&gt; doesn't carry any particular currency, and that some person out there once titled a particular photo with that phrase doesn't count as &amp;quot;authoritative support&amp;quot; in my view. The usual response to answers we disagree with on the platform is to downvote them, and that's usually the extent of our reach.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Which is to say, I don't think answers to &lt;em&gt;this meta question&lt;/em&gt; apply concretely to that main-site question or the answer you've linked to.  If you don't like the answer, that's fine; downvote it, if you like, and move on. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T19:36:13.813" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T19:36:13.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-03T19:07:02.343" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before the beginning of the 2019 pandemic, I regularly saw older and even lower-rep  3K users welcoming noobie users  on the main   with at least some kind of boiler-plate comment such as...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Welcome to English Language and Usage, etc...&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrases such as that may sound like a form letter; however, to the new user it is an indication that we are at least considering their request...&#xA;and I think it is just common courtesy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot remember the last time I have seen that here, and I cannot remember the last time I said it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have some very good people joining the community  recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...is this for the new formatting? Or are we getting more surly for  cabin fever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to get back to being a &lt;strong&gt;more-welcoming culture&lt;/strong&gt;...how do we accomplish that, &lt;em&gt;going forward into the future&lt;/em&gt; of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A radical suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;...why don't we take the time we used to spend on the Queues prior to the 3-vote rule, and devote it towards  bringing  interesting but badly-worded questions on-topic through judicious editing and helpful advice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be profitable for the site; It's basically a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;win-win-win&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-07-04T01:26:35.357" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T16:08:36.893" Title="Onboarding new and valuable users" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15060" CreationDate="2021-07-03T20:16:14.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I've never used this tool but it looks interesting enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chuta.cegloc.tsukuba.ac.jp/flc/index.html#:%7E:text=The%20Frequency%20Level%20Checker%20is,word%20frequency%20levels%20of%20English.&amp;amp;text=It%20can%20also%20be%20used,a%20certain%20group%20of%20learners.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequency Level Checker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It assesses the frequency of English words in sentences: level one contains the 1,000 most common terms and their derivatives, level two the next 1,000 words and level three the 800 words most commonly used in higher education which are not found in levels one and two. Then there is something called “outside levels” which are words not in levels 1, 2 or 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the term &lt;em&gt;weaknesses&lt;/em&gt; is classified as &lt;em&gt;outside level&lt;/em&gt; but words such as &amp;quot;would&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;many&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;for&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;be&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;and&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;not&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;go&amp;quot; are classed as level one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qp9Na.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qp9Na.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chuta.cegloc.tsukuba.ac.jp/flc/tool.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simply add the text and click &lt;em&gt;enter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the results will open in a new page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://global.longmandictionaries.com/vocabulary_checker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman Vocabulary Checker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; allows you to choose the frequency level. I selected&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;●●○ &lt;em&gt;mid frequency words – which indicates the next most important 3,000 words&lt;/em&gt; in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is from George Orwell's novel, &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-four&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wzVQD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wzVQD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I measured it against the Academic word list it failed to score a single hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the following scientific text scored quite highly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At subsequent passages, the virus grew rapidly. A conclusion was drawn that during these experiments either virus cross - contamination may have occurred, with RQ contaminating the RM stock, or that a variant virus emerged from the RM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u8aYt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u8aYt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are dozens of similar tools online, it's a question of using the most relevant search terms. Mine were: &lt;em&gt;checker, vocabulary, level, frequency, tool&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T20:52:35.367" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T20:52:35.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15064" CreationDate="2021-07-03T20:26:27.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am glad you address this issue, I almost left the site in the beginning because I first mistook the professionalness and high standards of the site as sheer rudeness and elitism. It takes a while to get used to it and come to appreciate it. And although nobody told me &amp;quot;Welcome to the EL&amp;amp;U&amp;quot;, it was the kindness of some users that made me understand that there is more to the site than I thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not only about saying &amp;quot;Welcome to the EL&amp;amp;U&amp;quot; and then smash the person to pieces with criticism and irony (we do that too often), even if it is deserved because of a poor answer or question. It is about kindess, and luckily, some users here have plenty of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am really glad I stayed, and I have expressed gratitude in another post, although one does come across acid comments now and then. The value of the site outweighs such small inconveniences. I will not name other sites, but I confess I tried other large language sites or forums which were not as &amp;quot;tight&amp;quot; let's say, when it comes to rules or standards. And I must say that I was so disappointed by the repetitiveness of the answers, the amount of reliable information so insignificant in comparison with what one user called &amp;quot;fluff&amp;quot; (introductions, jokes, thanks, etc.) and lack of resources... It is at that point that I wrote my grateful post here, because then I understood how special it is. It is competitive, and I find it very motivating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of new users, people do get easily offended, more nowadays, and I do agree, surprisingly, with a user who got very angry this week. Agree on what? Well if something offended you and you are given the link of the tour, you click on it and read &amp;quot;We are a little bit different from other sites&amp;quot;, I do agree it can be interpreted very wrongly as the opposite of what it is intended to mean. I know, the site cannot please all, but maybe an introduction less liable to misinterpretation might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might come to add things later. But my main thought is, maybe a slight change in our general &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tone&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; might give the site a more welcoming &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;feel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way or the other, I am staying! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T20:26:27.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7899" CreationDate="2021-07-04T07:40:37.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Came to suggest the removal of these two tags and found this proposal to merge them together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Five years&lt;/em&gt; after this original proposal was made, neither &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternative&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternative-words&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternative-words&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternative-words&lt;/a&gt; have been used whatsoever. It seems everyone still uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/synonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;synonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove both of the &amp;quot;Alternative&amp;quot; tags as they're unused&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderate/edit posts to start making use of the &amp;quot;Alternative&amp;quot; tags when appropriate, to show publicly that they're to be used when relevant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would favour (1), as I'm not convinced there is a difference between the &amp;quot;Synonym&amp;quot; tag and the two &amp;quot;Alternative&amp;quot; tags, or indeed any difference between the two &amp;quot;Alternative&amp;quot; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Synonym tag description states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A synonym is a word that means the same, or almost the same thing, as another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is surely describing an &amp;quot;alternative&amp;quot; word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126751" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T07:40:37.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15064" CreationDate="2021-07-04T16:08:36.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are all here familiar with the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, and the need to take both into account in interpreting what people say or write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at 'Welcome to English Language and Usage . . .' from the viewpoint of semantics, it is, well, welcoming, and that is a good thing. Looking at it from the viewpoint of pragmatics, however, the matter is not so straightforward. It may be relevant that most of the occurrences of 'welcoming' phrases on this site are within boilerplate comments that get automatically posted when somebody reviewing a first post finds a fault with it. Even apart from being thus associated with criticism, a 'welcoming' comment draws attention to the fact somebody has recently joined the site and that may make the person self-conscious. It may, despite being superficially friendly, convey a subtly condescending attitude on part of the regular contributors to the new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treating new contributors the same way as established ones, by engaging with the substance of their contributions may be a better way of making them feel welcome than routine posting of expressions of welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T16:08:36.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-04T22:43:39.263" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my question posited yesterday on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570318/origin-of-stating-indirect-object-by-sentence-structure-and-no-pronoun&quot;&gt;origin of indirect object placement&lt;/a&gt;, I early on received 16 reputation. However, I have not been able to figure out where these points come from. Have I been given them incorrectly? I have attempted viewing it both through my profile as well as via the timeline, but cannot figure out how this happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200388" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T22:43:39.263" Title="Why have I received 16 invisible reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-07-06T10:04:11.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15077" CreationDate="2021-07-05T18:58:48.080" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570155/is-the-hyphen-in-the-adjective-phrase-just-past-participle-mandatory&quot;&gt;Is the hyphen in the adjective phrase “just-[past participle]” mandatory?&lt;/a&gt; currently stands at +3/-6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has seen some activity in the last few days, but it only received more downvotes. So it does not seem that the downvotes are from an older phrasing of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;guidelines to asking good questions&lt;/a&gt; as much as possible, such as including a title that summarizes the question, including definitions, and being specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to ask better questions in the future, does anybody know why this question was heavily downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147720" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T02:09:36.710" Title="Why is this question on hyphen usage downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-07-06T06:01:26.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a keen SE reviewer, and I have certainly noticed the difference on EL&amp;amp;U in the elimination of massive close queues. But there's an outcome that seems to have received little attention: fewer bad questions getting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an unfortunate fact that a number of users, even some with high rep, will leap to answer a question but ignore its obvious deficiency in (especially) lack of research or lack of basic fluency. The question rightly ends up getting closed, but if either the question or any answer has a net positive score, our lovely site-cleaning roomba can't complete its &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;auto-delete function&lt;/a&gt; nine days later, and the question will then sit for ever in our library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've noticed is that the ability to close questions more quickly means there are many more of them that don't get answered at all before they're closed, and if there's no further activity, they quickly shuffle off this mortal coil. &lt;strong&gt;As a result, &lt;em&gt;far, far fewer&lt;/em&gt; closed questions are now accruing long-term in our library.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try these three searches (which exclude migrated questions and duplicates) to compare for yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=closed%3a1%20AND%20duplicate%3a0%20AND%20migrated%3a0&quot;&gt;current closed&#xA;answers&lt;/a&gt; – I count 34 between June 30 and July 5, which is &lt;strong&gt;over 6 per day&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;still within the above page, use the tab at the bottom to bring up a page showing 9 days earlier, and you'll see what a difference a roomba makes: &lt;em&gt;no questions with zero or negative score and zero answers&lt;/em&gt;. Alas, what's left stays in our library for ever (or until some action either reopens it or allows roomba to delete it). Even so, I counted 41 from 4-25 June inclusive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?page=32&amp;amp;tab=Newest&amp;amp;q=closed%3a1%20AND%20duplicate%3a0%20AND%20migrated%3a0&quot;&gt;closed answers from June 2019&lt;/a&gt; – I count 62 from the same period 4-25 June two years ago. That's 50% more than the equivalent period under the current 3-VTCs rule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastEditorUserId="167396" LastEditDate="2021-07-06T07:20:57.927" LastActivityDate="2021-07-06T07:20:57.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-06T18:06:53.953" Score="24" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first question here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570413/when-and-where-did-the-new-sense-of-normalize-begin&quot;&gt;When and where did the new sense of &amp;quot;normalize&amp;quot; begin?&lt;/a&gt;, has been closed due to being &amp;quot;off-topic.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR summary of the question: There is a recent sense of &lt;em&gt;normalize&lt;/em&gt; that means &lt;em&gt;to make something abnormal into a new norm&lt;/em&gt;, rather than the conventional sense of &lt;em&gt;to make something abnormal conform to an existing norm&lt;/em&gt;. I'm interested in tracing the history of this recent meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this question having many upvotes, and an accepted answer of, at the current time, 18 upvotes, it has been downvoted by members and closed. Thanks to the answer by tchrist, I was both made aware of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/normalize-normalization-meaning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article on Merriam-Webster.com&lt;/a&gt; and, through a quotation he referenced, I was led to discover an &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hhHYDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA90&amp;amp;lpg=PA90&amp;amp;dq=%22These%20attempts%20to%20normalize%20despotism%20display%20the%20impotency%20as%20well%20as%20the%20malignity%20of%20the%20Executive.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=-Fh2O-eJt6&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1xMmewipElzvT3nZ58osk_xm_tlQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjy0-zMiM3xAhVSs54KHVYuC1YQ6AEwAHoECAIQAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22These%20attempts%20to%20normalize%20despotism%20display%20the%20impotency%20as%20well%20as%20the%20malignity%20of%20the%20Executive.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;academic text on language evolution&lt;/a&gt; with an entire section that deals with the very question I asked. Now, it would seem that if both the people at Merriam-Webster, and a group of academic language researchers think this question is interesting enough to write articles about, it cannot possibly be &amp;quot;off-top.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After getting tons of upvotes, the naysayers started in the comments, giving various explanations to the effect of &amp;quot;it has always had both senses.&amp;quot; They seemed to frame this as a problem with the question, rather than a potential answer. In the comments, it was asked if they felt the same reasoning fit words like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;radicalize: to make radical&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; but no one deigned to give a response. If indeed the word &lt;em&gt;normalize&lt;/em&gt; has always had what I'm referring to as the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; sense of the word attached, by all means, answer my question with your logical arguments and evidence as to why. This is literally the point of the question: to get to the history of the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, not one single person claiming that the novelty of the sense in question was mistaken bothered to give an answer. Conversely, Merriam-Webster poses the question in a way that assumes this meaning is &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; and says &amp;quot;Recently, we've seen it used to describe a change in what's considered standard.&amp;quot; The authors of the study in &lt;em&gt;Corpora and the Changing Society&lt;/em&gt; describe the word being used in this sense as a &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/V540/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neoseme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot; Both groups having done their research, one single quote from 1864 can be produced where the sense seems to be the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; sense in question. (It's worth noting that &lt;em&gt;normalization&lt;/em&gt; is only attested from 1842, and as a neologism being used by an American journalist might have been used in a peculiar way, since there is no evidence of this meaning again until 2015.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason given by the first member voting to close: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I’m voting to close this question because it's based on a misunderstanding of existing definitions, including meaning #2 in the MW definition cited in the question itself.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, not only is this something that he could have dealt with in an answer to the question by giving examples of the word being used in the sense the question is curious about, but there's another problem here: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;meaning #2&amp;quot; is: 2 : to make normal (as by a transformation of variables)&lt;/strong&gt;. This clearly refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailysmarty.com/posts/easy-way-to-understand-normalization-in-statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statistical normalization&lt;/a&gt;, by which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...normalization of ratings means adjusting values measured on different scales to a notionally common scale, often prior to averaging. In more complicated cases, normalization may refer to more sophisticated adjustments where the intention is to bring the entire probability distributions of adjusted values into alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, when we investigate &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statisticssolutions.com/transforming-data-for-normality/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transformation of variables&lt;/a&gt;, we find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most common assumptions for statistical analyses is that of&#xA;normality, with nearly all parametric analyses requiring this&#xA;assumption in one way or another. While not all normality assumptions&#xA;pertain directly to an individual variable’s distribution (i.e., the&#xA;assumption of normality for a regression is that the regression’s&#xA;error is normally distributed, not that all variables in the analysis&#xA;are normal), it is often easier to meet the assumption if each&#xA;variable in the analysis is &lt;strong&gt;normally distributed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence here to support this term being used to indicate &lt;em&gt;changing the norm to accommodate variability or abnormality.&lt;/em&gt; So, it seems that it is the other user who either does not understand the question or does not understand the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second member voting to close says: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I'm voting to close this question because it's based on an unfounded, false premise, specifically that the so-called &amp;quot;new sense&amp;quot; of &amp;quot;normalize is new, which it's not. The Latin root from which it was derived included and includes that definition. That definition likewise exists for cognates in other languages, like &amp;quot;normalizar&amp;quot; in Spanish and &amp;quot;normaliser&amp;quot; in French. Anglicized as &amp;quot;Normalize,&amp;quot; it was imported with said definition, so the question is based on an unfounded premise that is false.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (It's worth noting this user has an incredibly high reputation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, rather than using this an answer and backing it up with evidence, he simply votes to close. He claims the meanings of the Latin root and two cognates support the sense in question always being used. If this is the case, evidence is needed, as cursory searches for these terms do not uncover the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; sense of &amp;quot;making the norm conform to the abnormal.&amp;quot; This is not remotely authoritative, and is ostensibly incorrect about the meanings of the French and Spanish terms, which hardly indicate how a word is used or has been used in English at any point. And if he believes etymologies support the fact the term entered English with the sense, all the more reason to write an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then at some point since last night, the question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is going on here? This is obviously a pertinent question that strikes at a phenomenon currently underway: either the introduction of a new sense of the word or its take-over from more common uses of the word. It creates a linguistic environment where we can no longer be sure whether &amp;quot;We need to normalize the behavior of these troubled teens&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;We need to bring their behavior back into accepted standards&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;We need to change our standards so their behavior is seen as normal.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cultural problem on this site is far more pervasive than this single question, though. One of my first interactions with a high reputation user was in a thread asking about the grammar of &amp;quot;adjectival clause&amp;quot; being used in contrast with &amp;quot;adjective clause.&amp;quot; This question was shut down because the high-reputation user claimed that adjectival/adjective clause were not a valid category of clauses (despite this term being used on this very site by many high reputation users). When it was pointed out to him that the question was about the grammatical use of an adjectival form versus a noun adjunct, he refused to understand and doubled down on &amp;quot;there's no such thing as an adjective clause.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on and on about the irrational behavior of high reputation users. As a new user who is genuinely passionate about investigating language, it is very off-putting to see this repeated, obstinate, tone-deaf form of one-upmanship consistently perpetrated in post after post, usually upvoted by some cohort of people who seem more interested in explanations that sound smart rather than ones that convey knowledge. Debate is not encourage on the site, so seemingly unchallenged but incorrect comments from high reputation users often have the definitive say, even when they are clearly unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I submit, the site is useless to new users. Unless we can clarify the guidelines for these types mentioned above, it's a hostile environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Responses that ignore that this is primarily about the type of environment the behavior creates and that blame users for being upset by this behavior are part of the broken culture that needs to be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastEditorUserId="424411" LastEditDate="2021-07-07T16:09:13.623" LastActivityDate="2021-07-08T06:12:26.367" Title="Why is the culture here so broken?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|code-of-conduct|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="44" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15075" CreationDate="2021-07-06T19:52:21.473" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is important to note that the first review was three votes to leave the question open, so maybe the problem isn’t some pervasive broken culture but a different problem caused by “close” votes being stickier than “leave open” votes. I think it also needs to be pointed out that this terrible new user experience is about a a hot network question that was closed for an entire two hours before it was reopened and apparently there was some unwelcome commentary. Maybe the problem is the comment system, not the close vote system. Regardless, I already headed down the close vote path, so I’ll just leave the rest of this as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone votes to close a question, they are voting to prevent people from being able to answer that question. Thinking about why closing a particular question would be good for the site instead of thinking about how the question fits a particular close reason might make it easier to decide whether a question truly needs to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can skip the list to get to my conclusions about the culture issue. It’s just explaining my view of reasons why questions should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sorts of situations is it good for the site to close a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; If it is likely that the community will be unable to provide original, high-quality answers and effectively rank those  answers relative to each other, the question should be closed. If the issue that made the answers difficult to provide or rank is resolved, the question should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the question will generate answers that are all equally valid. This subverts the main function of a Stack Exchange site, which is to provide answers that the community has ranked by how well they answer the question and how credible/correct the information in them is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the question needs to be clarified so that every answer is answering the same question. Answers that have different interpretations of a question can’t easily be compared, so they can’t easily be ranked, which subverts the main function of an SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When a question can be completely answered by a dictionary or other general reference. There is little value in maintaining a copy of another reference’s information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When a question has already been answered on the site. Answers can not be effectively ranked across questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When a question is blatantly off-topic. The community was created to answer certain types of questions about certain topics. If a question is not within the community’s area of expertise or of the type of questions they signed up to answer, they will be unwilling or unable to provide good answers and rank them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the last point is where we have the most trouble. English is a broad topic and different people have very different interests and areas of expertise, so there is a lot of disagreement about “Is this the sort of question that belongs on ELU?” I think the flood of low quality questions (LQQs) has made it hard for some to entertain the idea of leaving a question they don’t care for open for other people who might like it more to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think lowering the close vote threshold will actually help, but we have to get through the turbulence that comes with any change first. Close voters just need to adjust to their votes carrying more weight, and feel the LQQ tide recede.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These “cranky” old timers have been fighting to keep ELU standards high for a long time now and it can feel like a never-ending losing battle, which can lead to some babies getting tossed with the bath water. The only answer is for the community to communicate with each other about what is and is not an off-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mistakes get made, but they can be corrected so long as we treat each other respectfully, especially when we disagree. Most community members who take the time to interact on meta care about this site and are trying to do what’s best for it, even though we might disagree about what that entails exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-07-07T18:28:42.343" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T18:28:42.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15071" CreationDate="2021-07-06T22:49:08.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about punctuation may run afoul of some EL&amp;amp;U participants' preferences in several ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and most obviously, punctuation is strictly relevant to writing, not to spoken language—and for at least the past sixty years a central tenet of linguistics is that spoken language &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; language, while writing is merely a kind of artifact of language. It follows that questions about writing in general and punctuation in particular are not really questions about language αυτος. At best they raise a relatively trivial subclass of issues ancillary to developing a scientific appreciation of how language works, and at worst they constitute an actively harmful distraction or impediment to meaningful inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, because systems of punctuation are matters of convention rather than of grammatical rule, particular punctuation choices ultimately reflect stylistic preferences rather than necessity. But preferences are matters of opinion, and opinion-based questions are (mostly) off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U, so some site participants may downvote punctuation questions in order to discourage people from asking them. For those downvoters, asking whether a compound modifier that appears before a noun should be hyphenated may seem as pointless as asking whether writing should proceed horizontally left-to-right, horizontally right-to-left, vertically top-to-bottom, or vertically bottom-to-top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, some people may downvote questions that bore them—and a lot of people find questions about punctuation and other matters of style boring. Moreover, very few people are knowledgeable about the details of multiple style guides, and acquiring such knowledge is both time consuming and (frequently) frustratingly difficult—factors that may encourage them to be even more dismissive of the whole enterprise. After all, if you think that astrology is just booshwah anyway, why knock yourself out trying to master the minutiae of the pseudoscience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that many style questions are legitimate at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. In my view, questions that inquire into the details, the reach, and the internal logic of widespread conventions (such as those that apply regionally or throughout the English-writing world to various matters of punctuation and spelling) are worthwhile and on-topic to the extent that they seek information about a prevailing real-world practice or understanding. Others here disagree—and some of them downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2021-07-06T23:08:58.380" LastActivityDate="2021-07-06T23:08:58.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-06T23:20:56.540" Score="8" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;h3&gt;motivation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a recent increase in activity on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this encouraging, because my sense is while a quiet Meta can indicate a site running smoothly, lacking drama, in my experience on SE more broadly it tends to indicate a site which undergoing user attrition. And I was worried that was happening to EL&amp;amp;U; but recent months have indicated to me that there is still an active, engaged community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side of that, the last few Qs on Meta, ranging from Catja's solicitation of feedback on VTCx3, re-open requests, generalized feedback (positive and negative) from new and existing users, has indicated to me that there is still a range of opinions on &amp;quot;what we want to be&amp;quot; as a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we've discussed this any number of times on Meta, but times and audiences change, so, and the mentioned Meta activity indicates now might be a ripe time for a fresh airing of our thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:  &lt;strong&gt;What elements do you like to see in questions, and what elements do you not like to see?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way, what makes you upvote (or even star) a question, and what makes you downvote (or even closevote)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;purpose and advice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a scientific study.  It's more of a town hall: an open-ended topic meant to allow you to express yourselves, and what you want to see in the site (either more or less of).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to recommend that everyone ignore votes (real or projected) on your answers. Votes are not going to be used to set policy or justify changes.  Just express what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, precisely because there is a range of opinions here, I expect answers may engender commentary. That's fine; just open minded, civil, and cordial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T09:47:43.597" Title="What do you like to see in questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-07T01:27:20.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like questions I have never considered. Those are the ones I upvote. Of course it helps when they are articulately worded and well-researched going in. Questions that I want to know the answer to, questions that I would be willing to research myself—those are the ones I enjoy the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T01:27:20.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15071" CreationDate="2021-07-07T02:09:36.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the excellent list of reasons mentioned by Sven, your question is asking about hyphenating a phrase that would more naturally be placed after the noun: The target can be resolved through one of the record types &lt;strong&gt;just mentioned&lt;/strong&gt;. Since your question doesn't leave room for this option, which I think almost any native speaker would prefer, it is quite likely someone would downvote based on that. There is no need to do this style of hyphenation, and it does not look or sound natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T02:09:36.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-07T08:52:43.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like questions that teach me something new, or that provoke answers that teach me something new, even if they seem simple or even dumb. I upvote for the same reason. I will also upvote a question or answer very well written, with wit (or astuce as the French like to say) and humour, but I will not upvote arrogance, even if it is &amp;quot;bewildering&amp;quot;. The fact that you know better does not give you the right to despise anyone still learning. I will upvote if a truth I know or a query I have finds a better expression on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely downvote, and I like to leave a comment before I do that, especially to beginners who have no idea what the site is about. Same with voting to close. I try to prompt the users to edit their question so that it can be salvaged, and after a while, if they don't, then I vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which questions do I think should be closed? Of course duplicates, and then irrelevant questions. As for opinion-based, sometimes I must say I regret some very interesting questions with much potential get closed as opinion-based. Sometimes, even if the question may seem that way, some good answers may come on perfectly justifiable linguistic grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never rush to close a question, because I know that once you vote to close, two other votes will be quick to follow, even if the other two users would not have thought to close it if my vote had not prompted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do hope more senior users will express themselves here, I always learn from them new ways of appreciating or protecting the site .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="407211" LastEditDate="2021-07-07T14:37:39.903" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T14:37:39.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-07T08:56:23.620" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I want in a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's about the English language, now or in the past, within the rules we have set out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help section&lt;/a&gt; and here on meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It demonstrates that the asker has already looked into getting an answer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For example &amp;quot;I have found [definition] in [dictionary], but this usage does not seem to match&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;[This sentence] has a structure I don't understand, specifically [this bit], because I would expect [it to follow some rule]. [Preferably with an explanation as to where they found the rule.]&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's formatted readably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want people to get the help that they need, that we have offered to provide, but I don't want to spoon feed people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T08:56:23.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-07T13:03:45.777" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t like to see questions without any context, especially single word requests that read like crossword puzzle clues. &lt;em&gt;What’s a word that starts with “t” that means easily irritated?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not an answerer on ELU, so when I read the questions, they’re more interesting to me if they explain why they can’t be answered with a thesaurus or by searching the usual sources most people know about. Here’s a couple examples of questions I thought were very interesting. They don’t need paragraphs of excerpted research to have enough context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9780/80039&quot;&gt;Did English ever have a formal version of &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/322562/80039&quot;&gt;What was “Herbal Tea” called before ‘tea’ was introduced in Europe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T13:03:45.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2021-07-07T15:11:15.677" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in my other Meta Q &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15075/why-is-the-culture-here-so-broken&quot;&gt;Why is the culture here so broken?&lt;/a&gt;, I'm seeing lots of questions being close-voted by high-reputation users who clearly do not understand the question, are intolerantly devoted to their own foibles on these issues, and are unwilling to consider even scholarly evidence against their reasoning. For this reason, I think the number of required close-votes needs to raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T15:11:15.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-07T19:40:15.550" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like questions that are about the English language, and are not derived from popular superstitions about it. I get tired of telling people about them, and who wants to learn they're wrong, after all? So I usually avoid them, and single-word requests, except for comments in egregious cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never downvote, and often upvote even questions I vote to close.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will, however, vote to close any question of the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of the following is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;.....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;.....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without looking further. Similarly for advice on advertising or names, and opinionated rants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly I use comments instead of Answering, because most questions don't warrant a full answer (which takes some work, after all), and almost always what I put in a comment is what I've already put elsewhere. If nobody finds the answers, I don't worry much about the diff between answers and comments. Nobody finds those, either, but they're easier and arguably seen by more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am usually unconcerned about the actual answer the OQ thought they should get, since almost always the question is phrased in a way that contains several wrong assumptions. In an answer, I try to find some aspect of the question that can be talked about in a more factual way, often ignoring the principal question as it's phrased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I offer a money-back guarantee -- subject, of course, to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/disclaimers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Usual Disclaimers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T19:40:15.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15075" CreationDate="2021-07-08T06:12:26.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question made me think about the ways in which English Language &amp;amp; Usage has changed since 2012, when I first visited it. Although the resulting commentary doesn't directly address the poster's central concerns, some readers might be interested in a (fairly) longtime site participant's perspective on the evolution of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage in 2012&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been a more or less continuously active participant at this site since January 2013, but I first came here in spring 2012, answering nine questions over the course of two weeks before wandering off. As nearly as I can recall, the reason I dropped out then was that I couldn't remember the password for the original account I had created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2012, EL&amp;amp;U had already been in existence as a full-fledged Stack Exchange site for a couple of years. It had no &amp;quot;show research&amp;quot; requirement for questions, and the vast majority of answers were fairly short and, as it were, undocumented. Even then, however, some users produced extensive, detailed answers that showed signs of considerable independent research. In this regard, I was especially impressed by the contributions of tchrist, Hugo, StoneyB, and Jon Hanna, although many others provided thoughtful and obviously well-informed answers as well. What I liked most about these answers was that they took the questions they answered seriously. Researching a question shows respect for it, and I appreciated that these posters were taking the time to respond thoughtfully to the questions they addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was by no means a universal feature of answers at EL&amp;amp;U in 2012. Many answers were one- or two-sentence responses that came across as peremptory at best and dismissive at worst. Obviously, when answers consist of bald assertions of fact, it can be difficult for a non-expert to know whether they are authoritative or merely idiosyncratic. In 2012, the predominance of short-form answers may have heightened the importance of site reputation, since such answers rarely included any independent corroboration of their conclusions. And this, in turn, may have encouraged a sharpness of tone in answers challenging other uncorroborated posts that a particular answerer disagreed with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2012 it was still not unusual to see posts by questioners and answerers who came to the site armed with supreme confidence in arbitrary rules of grammar and usage that they had learned in school—the sort of superstitions that Theodore Bernstein devoted his book &lt;em&gt;Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins&lt;/em&gt; (1971) to demolishing. I wish that I could report that the better-informed answerers of 2012 dealt with these assertions of Thistlebottomed rules gently and judiciously, but in fact they often did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The abiding tone of some prominent posters amounted to not suffering fools gladly, and in some instances the asperity of their responses crossed the line from laconic bluntness to overt rudeness. Perhaps some well-informed site participants felt that harshness was the only way to drive out wrong-headed competing answers in a setting in which the only guide to reliability available to uninformed site visitors was the net upvote totals that answers received. Whatever the precise cause, the results were more conducive to clubbishness than to generosity of spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the change in tone since 2012 at EL&amp;amp;U may not have had anything to do with the rise of documentation in answers, I like to imagine that it did. A more likely source of improvement may be the sustained efforts of various site participants during the mid-2010s to encourage a kinder and more welcoming attitude toward newcomers (and oldtimers). In any event, it seems to me that harsh and flippant answers are far less frequent in 2021 than they were in 2012. To the extent that such responses still occur, they gravitate toward comment boxes rather than answer boxes, and even there they tend to be more restrained than their predecessors were. If nothing else, this evolution indicates that the overall tenor of even as large and amorphous a site as EL&amp;amp;U can move in a positive direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage in 2021&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As free-form and off-the-cuff questions and answers have become less common at EL&amp;amp;U, the site's vetting of questions and answers has become more stringent. This is a mixed blessing. First-time visitors who read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;official site tour's explanation&lt;/a&gt; of how the site works are likely to come away with a fairly good idea of how the site operated in 2012—but a rather mistaken idea of how it works today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years of effort to accelerate the process of filtering out bad questions (in particular) have resulted in the introduction of several site policies that are at odds with the breezy example question and answers that appear under the subhead &amp;quot;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&amp;quot; near the top of the tour. And nowhere in the main text of the tour page does the word &lt;em&gt;research&lt;/em&gt;—as in &amp;quot;questions must indicate the research that the poster has done prior to asking at this site&amp;quot;—appear. (The closest it comes to mentioning this requirement is in the form of the rather opaque phrase &amp;quot;Include details about what you have tried...&amp;quot; Huh?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, even newcomers who take the tour—who I imagine account for a very small percentage of all newcomers who post questions or answers here—are not well prepared for the hoops that they must jump through in order to satisfy the posting requirements that reviewers actually enforce at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great many questions posted at EL&amp;amp;U fail to meet site standards on grounds that I think are objectively legitimate—such as because the question can be answered by consulting a standard dictionary or because the question involves a specific issue that is of no interest to anyone other than the poster (a request for proofreading assistance, for example). I see a connection between this large number of flawed questions and what seems to me to be a tendency of some site participants to close-vote without careful deliberation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person scrolling through a review queue in which most of the questions lined up for vetting clearly fail to meet the site's requirements may develop a degree of bias in favor of closing any question that appears in the queue—a presumption of closeworthiness that the question must overcome, rather than a presumption of acceptability unless the question shows itself to be clearly deficient in some meaningful way. And nowadays only three people have to vote to close in order for the closure to take effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, overzealous question closure seems to have become a substantially bigger issue in the past five or six years than it was in 2012, even as many more site participants are empowered to vote to close questions and (most recently) as the number of close votes required for closure has dropped from five to three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is separate from the question of why some individual site participants challenge the legitimacy of questions or answers that other site participants consider perfectly acceptable. The latter issue, it seems to me, is simply a hazard of community or open-source site participation and site moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were the despot of EL&amp;amp;U, I would impose somewhat different standards for question closure than currently exist, I would quickly overrule closure decisions that (in my tyrannical opinion) were bad, and in general I would try to minimize the various things about the site that annoy me. I daresay that every site participant who has been here long enough to have endured a clueless comment from another user or a bad decision by the powers that be would do likewise—although very likely not along the specific lines that I would prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, each of us has chosen not to set ourself up as absolute ruler of our own independent domain. Instead, we have tacitly elected to subordinate our particular preferences to the rule of a virtual city of site participants, whose insight, judgment, and diplomacy are all over the map. The results of this cession of power can be infuriating, and challenging the bad decisions that occasionally result undoubtedly requires extra effort, but the rewards are not insignificant: access to an array of interesting questions, fruitful exchanges with intelligent co-participants, and a large audience of potential readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the final analysis, I don't think that the culture at EL&amp;amp;U is broken. In fact, in practical terms, I'm not even sure that there is a coherent culture here. At a minimum, a coherent culture implies a distinct and fairly homogeneous ruling class that consistently articulates, prescribes, or dictates what is acceptable, admirable, and correct, and what is not—and I don't see that at EL&amp;amp;U. What I see is a kind of anarchic wildness in which a multitude of individual actors pursue their inscrutable and often conflicting goals, barely restrained by a small cadre of moderators and a somewhat larger group of self-appointed post reviewers, each, in turn, enforcing personal standards of judgment in service to a personal vision of what the site should be. Under the circumstances, it's astonishing that the system works at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to sound pessimistic or fatalistic about the shortcomings of English Language &amp;amp; Usage. I think that the great majority of participants at this site who stick around for any considerable length of time contribute positively to the site, and I think that the trajectory of the site is toward greater civility and tolerance. But it's a long trip, and the best way to move forward, in my view, is to model the behavior that one would like to see prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, that means trying to practice tolerance, politeness, and reasoned argument. It also means accepting that my preferences may not win out in the short term or in the long term. As long as my experience at this site is, on balance, positive, I will continue to participate; if it ceases to be positive, I'll stop. In the meantime, as much as possible, I will focus on the things that I can control: the research I do, and the questions and answers I post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2021-07-08T06:12:26.367" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-08T08:38:35.763" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for some fine English dictionaries for intermediate use.&#xA;Hope someone can share some dictionaries which provides definitions that easy to comprehend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="427724" OwnerDisplayName="undxrrated" LastActivityDate="2021-07-08T09:56:47.040" Title="What's the best Dictionary for intermediates?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2021-07-13T17:58:10.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-09T13:24:13.083" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pretty simple. Asked a question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/570659/94742&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a word to describe adding something unless it already exists, in which case I retrieve it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got locked right away. Not even sure why. No comments are anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll gladly edit my question to make it fit the site, though locking first and commenting (maybe?) later seems a bit harsh. What can I do here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94742" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T13:24:13.083" Title="Why did my question get insta-locked?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-09T13:53:21.703" Score="-1" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of lengthy comments sections being moved &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt; to chat. The reason I discovered this site and began relying on it and eventually joined it was because of a comment by tchrist on the Q &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96434/pronunciation-of-aunt-in-the-us&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of &amp;#39;aunt&amp;#39; in the US&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must second @JohnLawler’s plea: please please please use standard notation. IPA is not that hard, at least for English phonemic purposes. I believe the five American pronunciations of the word aunt are /eɪnt/, /ænt/, /ant/, /ɒnt/, and /ɔnt/. See, those aren’t that hard, are they? And now we all know what everyone is talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been indispensable in explaining concept of the &amp;quot;two&amp;quot; pronunciations of &amp;quot;aunt&amp;quot; to people when it comes up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the comments provide clarification that is never recorded in the question or answer, or they provide counter-evidence as to why the answers are not complete or possibly incorrect entirely. Many times they address side issues that do not directly answer the question, and thus, cannot be offered as answers. Trying to pack all that additional information into the question, likewise, can lead to confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving the entire thread to chat loses this nuance that is essential to the usefulness of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is chit-chat, off-topic commenting, or extended conversation happening, those individual comments need to be removed independently of the often vital comments with useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a guideline be established?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-07-10T15:09:58.940" LastActivityDate="2021-07-13T16:32:36.667" Title="Why are we moving all the comments to chat?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15089" CreationDate="2021-07-10T16:05:25.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has already been pointed out above, objections to such moving of comments to chat (or their outright deletion or blocking of further commenting) keep appearing regularly on this meta-site. The standard response has been that the moderators are overworked and cannot spend the time to separate the 'chit-chat, off-topic commenting, or extended conversation' (which the OP agrees should be removed) from the more worthwhile comments, so when they see too much of chit-chat etc. under a post they delete or remove everything. This response makes the practice understandable (the moderators are indeed overworked), but it doesn't really alleviate the sense of frustration that many participants feel about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underlying the conflicts about deleting comments and moving them to chat is a more fundamental disagreement about the role of comments on this site. In the original design of the Stack Exchange, the comments were meant to be analogous to Post-It notes, i.e. temporary. The idea was presumably that, when one thinks that a question or an answer needs clarification/correction/expansion, one would post a comment to that effect and the original poster would then either modify the post accordingly or briefly explain why a modification is not necessary; after that is done, the comment would be of no further significance. Some contributors to this site stick with that original conception of the role of comments, and therefore argue that nobody has any ground to complain about any deletion or removal of comments, because they have never been intended for anything permanent anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the comments still sometimes perform this role that they were originally intended for, they have over time evolved into something different. As the OP points out many of the comments that appear on this site deserve to be permanent, and it does often happen that what appears in the comments is more illuminating, insightful, and helpful to future visitors than what appears in the answers on the same page. Telling people that whenever they have something important to say on a topic they must post it as an answer doesn't work, because one often has an argument as to why somebody's answer is incorrect or incomplete, without having an alternative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is ever going to be a resolution of the problem that the OP brings up, it will depend on whether the original 'Post-it' conception of the comments continues to be insisted on, or it is accepted that it has been overtaken by how the site has developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2021-07-10T16:05:25.843" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15089" CreationDate="2021-07-10T17:11:24.127" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're probably expecting lasting discussions here because of how common discussion sites are on the internet. What you may not realize is that we are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;supposed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to be something quite different from that! There are many other places on the internet that provide suitable forums for discussions, but Stack Exchange is not one of them. If you make it one of those, you'll break what it &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; good for, what it was founded for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how much they might wish to do so, site users, including volunteer moderators, are no more able to change the &lt;strong&gt;key corporate policy&lt;/strong&gt; that discussion goes only in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage-multi-layered-discourse-room&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, not in ever-growing comments to a question or answer, than we are able to change the policy that meta matters do not belong on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange was created to solve a particular problem: the way discussion forums hide &amp;quot;meaningful nuance&amp;quot; in comment threads, and this makes it impossible to find actual answers to actual questions. All else follows from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it is not possible to turn our question-and-answer site into one that's a conversation forum, because doing so would violate the very reason that SE exists since it runs counter to those founding principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-07-10T17:11:24.127" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-10T19:52:07.293" Score="-2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a question on the proper name of an operation that performs a double complement migrated to a software forum. This question was not a software question, but merely a question about terminology. If I had thought this question was appropriate for a software forum, I would have asked it there. Furthermore, there are very similar questions to mine posted on this forum which were upvoted and answered multiple times. Here is one similar question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/278188/what-is-an-antonym-for-refactoring-with-regards-to-programming?rq=1&quot;&gt;What is an antonym for &amp;quot;refactoring&amp;quot; with regards to programming?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question is centered around the context of software, does not mean it is a software question, it is inherently a question about the English language. And in fact, in this case, it should be rightfully downvoted and removed as off topic in such an environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my question was titled &amp;quot;I'm looking for an antonym of “complement” in the context of a programming language&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not acceptable here, then please explain to me why the linked question is okay and even upvoted while mine is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user206315" LastActivityDate="2021-07-10T21:46:22.643" Title="Why was my question about proper english terminology migrated to a software engineering discussion?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ClosedDate="2021-07-14T10:33:38.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15092" CreationDate="2021-07-10T21:46:22.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I migrated it because it is off-topic on our site, but I had hoped that it might be acceptable elsewhere. It is off-topic here because we do not accept requests for help in choosing names of elements of computer programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing names for operators in a programming language is off-topic here even when it’s one as trivial as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/727516&quot;&gt;unary plus&lt;/a&gt;. You’ll find that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/727516&quot;&gt;actual experts&lt;/a&gt; disagree about its behavior, let alone its name. This just goes to show that just because you can formulate a question &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; English does not suffice to make it on-topic for ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect a site that’s actually about computer programming to be the one to know programming-specific terminology, not one about English. Few of us here, if any, have the &lt;em&gt;bona fides&lt;/em&gt; to be considered experts in computer programming languages or in the domain-specific terminology used in discussion those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself cannot help wonder whether you are aware of the actual bit patterns that IEEE uses to represent positive and negative infinity in its various floating point formats, and why casually flipping their bits will not negate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, these are not questions to be answered by linguists, only by technologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First you would have to explain to our English experts that you are using the word &lt;em&gt;complement&lt;/em&gt; in a domain-specific manner that they would think of as negation not as complementation, and so you were asking about what to call negating a negation, or undoing an undo. You would also have to explain all those other terms you're throwing so casually about as though everybody here would already know what they mean. That you would first have to explain all this for a linguist or other English expert to be of any help to you shows why yours is not a good fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you expect help, you should first define the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/term_of_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;terms of art&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; from your post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;operator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;operand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unary operator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bits in an integer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one’s complement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two’s complement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;logical complement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;logical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;complement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;character&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;type coercion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;type&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;coercion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a linguist know those all those bits of jargons in the senses that you have used them? They would not.  So unless you first define all those, too, people won't know what you are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own guess is that you'd likely soon find that you'd then have to explain what a &lt;em&gt;noop&lt;/em&gt; is to them, too, for the definitions you provided would quickly lead to other terms known only to computer scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may not be an SE site for that specific question, but that does not make it a question about the English Language and its Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-07-10T21:46:22.643" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-11T02:51:43.203" Score="-6" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, questions about nomenclature, including language for use in coding, are considered off-topic at EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? What was the rationale for deeming them as such? And does that rationale still hold all these years later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of anything more mission critical to our survival as a species than ensuring our codebases are readable and understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Programmers are standing by for our EL&amp;amp;U help — not just with naming variables and functions but with ways of thinking about readable, short-form English language that distills the human experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, where, and to whom can I present an argument for allowing that which is currently not allowed here — that is, asking questions about &amp;quot;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the process? Who decides the rules here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206976" LastEditorUserId="206976" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T04:38:27.023" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T20:53:57.757" Title="Why can't we help programmers with English language usage?" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-11T03:03:49.060" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; questions — any questions. But they are few and far between here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When virtually every question is closed or migrated, the powers-that-be might want to ask themselves whom or what they are serving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206976" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T03:03:49.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-11T14:31:45.863" Score="-9" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570739/if-an-apple-is-bad-and-there-are-5-apples-of-the-same-type-of-the-apple-mention&quot;&gt;If an apple is bad and there are 5 apples (of the same type of the apple mentioned before) that are bad, then which of the below sentences is correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked the question and before I received any answers to the question, the question was closed by a person based on his wish and will. My question does fall dutifully under the topic. One, based on his wish and will, cannot close another's question. &lt;strong&gt;one's wish and will is not present in the agreement between me and english.Stackexchange.com.&lt;/strong&gt; He has also asked me, in his private feedback, to &amp;quot;consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better&amp;quot;. He has also asked me to include my research, that he has claimed, that I have done. &lt;strong&gt;The question that I have asked is fair, right and complete.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;I do not need to include anything that does not fall under the said agreement.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;He has sent this as private feedback&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.&#xA;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Closed 1 hour ago.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here by using the word &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; he has commented the degree of my post against the said agreement, again reflecting his actions is based on his wish and will. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My contractual agreement with english.stackexchange.com is frustrated because of his action&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;As of now, I want my question to be allowed to be answered. I need the answers urgently.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When I click &amp;quot;Ask Question&amp;quot; I get this message&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You have reached your question limit&#xA;It looks like you might need a break - take a breather and come back soon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked 2 questions recently, some of which have not been received very well by the community. Everyone learns at their own pace, and it’s okay to make some mistakes. However, the reception your questions have received thus far might ultimately block your account from asking questions entirely.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;==========================================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, in this message, I have been told that I am might ultimately be blocked from asking questions. &lt;strong&gt;This is wrong, wrongful, bad and unreasonable. None of my questions, I have asked so far breaks any rules of english.stackexchange.com.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving forward, as of now, I want my question to be opened for receiving answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards&#xA;joee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425817" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T19:13:33.737" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T19:13:33.737" Title="My questions are wrongly closed and I am not allowed to ask questions, even before my questions were answered" Tags="|support|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2021-07-12T17:00:45.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15096" CreationDate="2021-07-11T16:27:25.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your questions have not been “wrongfully closed”. Please read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site tour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our Help Center's guidance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;why some questions are closed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our Help Center's guidance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;how to ask questions here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our Help Center's guidance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;the sorts of questions you should avoid asking here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Stack Exchange network's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;theory of moderation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Stack Exchange network's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;frequently asked questions list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997&quot;&gt;What you can do when getting “We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account”.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that you are new both to the Stack Exchange question-and-answer network in general and to our site for English experts. This probably accounts for why you're misunderstood how things work here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, not a single one of the several messages you have cited was ever sent to you by an actual human being, malicious or otherwise. Every single one of them is an automatic message provided by the software that runs things here, ones sent when certain patterns are detected by that software's algorithms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570739&quot;&gt;your most recent question&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; closed by unpaid members of our community here, actual humans acting in concert to moderate the site. In this instance, three close votes, each from a different community member, sufficed to close your question. The same circumstances also apply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/569090&quot;&gt;your previous question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you step back and read up on how things work here via the links I have placed at the top of this post to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your questions do not meet the quality standards&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; that we have established for our site. They were closed because of this. Contrary to your assertion, they are not well-formed questions at all, because you have not presented any research whatsoever. Most questions here of the form &amp;quot;Which one is right, A or B?&amp;quot; will be quickly closed by the community with no more thought than you put into it while typing it. These are personal proofreading requests that will never help future visitors to our site looking for expert answers to their own questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be someone learning English. Probably our site for English linguists and English-language experts and enthusiasts is not well-suited to your needs. As the guidance given you suggests, you may be better served by our sister site for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;. But they, too, have formal  research requirements, and so as currently written your questions would probably be closed just as quickly there as well. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have to show some real effort here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and you have failed to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, your legalistic verbiage about your &amp;quot;contract&amp;quot; is not a matter which  our community of unpaid volunteers can possibly answer. Once you start rattling the chains of righteous umbrage in a lawyerly contractual fashion as you have done here, you have moved far beyond any area that can be addressed by the community of unpaid volunteers. You &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;will not and cannot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; receive legally binding responses from our community of unpaid volunteers here. That can come only from the company proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead you must take your &amp;quot;grievance&amp;quot;, such as it is, to actual paid employees who are legally allowed to speak for the company under guidance of their general counsel, (highly) paid attorneys versed in the matters of contact law that you allege the company to be in violation of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To initiate that communication, use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;Contact Us&lt;/a&gt; link at the bottom of every page here. You may also deliver them a written letter by post to their corporate headquarters if you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T16:27:25.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15094" CreationDate="2021-07-11T17:05:50.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Baby-naming doesn’t fit the SE model&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt you'll gain much traction here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because naming programming elements such as directories, files, classes, functions, and variables is no better a fit for the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A model than naming babies, companies, products, and websites is, and for exactly the same reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amongst others, there can be no expert answers to these personalized requests to help future visitors to our site, nor are there objective criteria by which proffered suggestions can be judged and ranked. And nobody is going to return to provide objectively better suggestions later on down the road. That isn't how suggestions work; it is, however, how matters of programming and science, including linguistics, work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it like picking your favorite movie title. It isn't something the SE model is set up to address. Baby-naming does not fit our model, and this is no different from that. For that you have “social media”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T17:11:21.080" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T17:11:21.080" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-11T17:16:10.267" Score="9" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like, in the past few weeks, suddenly lots of questions are being &amp;quot;locked&amp;quot; to disable/hide comments.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570743/what-does-back-up-mean-in-this-context&quot;&gt;Eg&lt;/a&gt;) To my knowledge there was no &amp;quot;comment war&amp;quot; or such for these questions, they were just arbitrarily locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some reason for this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain what metrics are being used to decide which questions to lock?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main complaint is that all comments are (at least temporarily) erased, hiding valuable contributions to the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's also the point that this change in policy occurred rather suddenly, with no explanation.  It leaves contributors feeling that management of the site is incredibly arbitrary, turning on the whims of a few big-wigs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastEditorUserId="70861" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T21:47:21.020" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T17:55:42.523" Title="Why are so many questions suddenly being locked?" Tags="|discussion|locked-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-07-12T17:01:04.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15099" CreationDate="2021-07-11T17:21:11.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no metrics. There is only the decision of individual moderators. If this were something an algorithm could do without human judgement in the loop, it would. But it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim is to encourage actual answers to questions asked. We are a question and answer site, not a question and comment site. Comment abuse breaks the SE model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as soon as people stop abusing the comment system by putting answers there and getting into long chats, then comments will no longer need to be deleted, moved, locked, or all of those. But while this abuse continues, they will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;strong&gt;standard answer&lt;/strong&gt; to all gripes about comments, and &lt;strong&gt;it will not change&lt;/strong&gt; until the commenters do. Probably we should dupe-close all such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will not fight the forever war. Expect future answers to be shorter than this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T17:28:25.430" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T17:28:25.430" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15099" CreationDate="2021-07-11T21:00:05.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First and foremost:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not a discussion site,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;by charter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, the common failing of other sites for hackers was that good suggestions were often hidden in the flow of comments from well-intentioned contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a Question/Answer site&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, created with the idea of providing real and workable answers--not just suggestions buried like tiny flecks  of gold in a never-ending stream of dross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go back into the history of the site, you  will see that SO was designed to resolve this issue, and we are only a minor subsidiary of Stack Overflow. A user should come here looking for a specific answer to question; if the question resonates with many other users it gets up-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We accept that question provided it is not already here as a duplicate, or easily found in General References, and is absolutely off-topic based on  &amp;quot;gimme da code&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers get up-voted if they are helpful for other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are supposed to help provide clarification.&#xA;On other sites that I participate on, comments are just deleted, without even being archived in chat. I think moving to chat  might be a better solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think chats get deleted after a few months if there is no activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T17:55:42.523" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T17:55:42.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15094" CreationDate="2021-07-13T13:02:49.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary mission of Stack Exchange is to build a reference library of objectively ranked answers to questions about a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question isn’t the sort that has answers that can be ranked by something other than an individual’s opinion, it is out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question requires expertise in something other than the site’s topic to answer, it is out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question can be answered completely by a general reference like a dictionary or thesaurus, it is out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that are out of scope aren’t bad or valueless, they are just not what this community signed up to do. There was an &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1269/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;extensive process to decide the scope of the site&lt;/a&gt; when it was proposed, and then an extended “beta” period where it was demonstrated that the scope was viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Labeling functions, table columns, or GUI elements is inherently subjective, and often involves coining new terms. No English expertise beyond an extensive vocabulary is required, but familiarity with programming concepts and math is often required to fully understand what is being named. Answers would be ranked either on how creative they are (subjective) or whether they use the most accepted terminology (requires expertise in something other than English), so they’re out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make more sense to try to expand the scope of a software development related site to cover naming things than to try to convince a community of linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts that naming code doohickeys is where their expertise is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-01-28T20:53:57.757" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T20:53:57.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15089" CreationDate="2021-07-13T16:25:35.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who gets to decide which comments get to stay and which comments go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no reliable mechanisms for the community to rank comments. They can’t be downvoted. They can only be flagged to be removed, not to be “pinned”. It is not feasible to ask a few volunteer moderators to singlehandedly curate hundreds of thousands of comments and preserve the “valuable” ones with no real consensus from the community, especially when the tools available to them for moderating comments are not designed for that task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community finds comments that are too valuable to risk losing, the only sanctioned way to handle that is to capture that information in an answer or question on the main site or meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-07-13T16:32:36.667" LastActivityDate="2021-07-13T16:32:36.667" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-14T03:39:35.313" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once discovered a post on this site that had a very comprehensive list of English word research tools, but I am having difficulties finding it again.  Apologies for a potentially off-topic or closable question, but could someone help link the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was inspired by a recent post which included the Google Ngram tool - very fascinating!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306973" OwnerDisplayName="Balaz2ta" LastActivityDate="2021-07-14T07:20:33.827" Title="List of English word research tools" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-07-14T08:01:17.047" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15078" CreationDate="2021-07-15T09:47:43.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In truth I like the discussion (the comments) on questions that evoke different approaches or reveal some peculiarities on what at first appear to be obvious constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical information on how something has been used over time interests me, whether in comments or a long answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the questions themselves often include incorrect assumptions and thus cannot be directly answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there’s no curating of the many answers that may be relevant to a particular topic, it’s difficult to put together from the site an idea of the major trends, unresolved issues,and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am always disappointed when comments are moved to chat or a question is frozen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T09:47:43.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15107" CreationDate="2021-07-17T12:54:40.680" Score="8" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scrolling down the long list of closed, migrated and duplicated questions today, I eventually found &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/571036/is-there-an-english-word-for-to-make-valuable&quot;&gt;a gem&lt;/a&gt; only to see it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourteen users had up-voted what seems to me a rather interesting question so I added my own to make it fifteen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I also added my votes to one of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it really necessary to close a question such as this, just on a technicality ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259840" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T15:16:19.420" Title="Why was this high-voted question closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15106" CreationDate="2021-07-17T18:10:39.327" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has viewed more than 2,000 times already.  The reason it has received so much attention is because it ranks high on the Hot Network Questions list. Such ranking always invalues a question to passersby.  :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it had enough context given already, but others disagreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;To address their concerns, I have myself provided many example sentences for it so that it can't be justifiably closed for lacking those any longer.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have removed those examples upon popular demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP appears to not work on the weekends. We should give him time to return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prove my point, I have removed the lock against comments on all posts there. Everyone is now free to abuse the comment system again by getting into long arguments where they don't belong.  Which is what is going to happen. Again. You'll see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-07-18T14:30:04.843" LastActivityDate="2021-07-18T14:30:04.843" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15109" CreationDate="2021-07-17T18:33:32.443" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had a very &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/570935/takes-advantage-of-their-head-rope-runs-the-risk&quot;&gt;interesting question about an old translation&lt;/a&gt;. I posted an answer which was partly inaccurate, but then I received a lot of good suggestions and I was able to combine those into a fairly authoritative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a collaborative effort, yet when I tried to convert to a Wiki answer (twice!) by checking the box and saving,  it did not take. Did I do it wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of restriction on Wiki conversion i.e. time, number of edit, etc that prevented this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T18:56:39.080" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T19:08:37.713" Title="Converting post to Wiki answer" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15108" CreationDate="2021-07-17T19:08:37.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know, but I've fixed it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T19:08:37.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-19T08:27:56.963" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really not a complaint, I am just trying to understand. Could someone explain to me why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/571185/which-pronoun-is-used-for-spirit-or-ghost-and-is-there-a-rule-that-says-we-must&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is considered opinion-based? The OP is actually asking for an explanation of tendencies of English translations of the Bible, not for opinions on the choice of pronouns to replace &amp;quot;the Holy Spirit&amp;quot; in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong to think that the fact that &amp;quot;spirit&amp;quot; has more than one interpretation (and thus can be replaced with different pronouns accordingly) was mistaken for an opinion-based issue? Or am I missing something here? I can see that the notion of &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; is still blurry in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T12:46:01.187" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T12:46:01.187" Title="Justification for 'opinion based' closure on translation question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-24T13:54:48.990" Score="4" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/571447/are-there-cases-where-a-closing-quotation-mark-has-no-matching-opening-one&quot;&gt;Are there cases where a closing quotation mark has no matching opening one?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; was closed with the reason &amp;quot;This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one case I have found where this often happens is in wide usage and I can provide as many examples in print as anyone wishes. I don't understand how opinion enters the picture. I would like to know if my case of where you will see an unmatched closing quotation mark is the only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer#:%7E:text=Yes!,to%20answer%20their%20own%20questions.&amp;amp;text=To%20encourage%20people%20to%20do,time%20you%20ask%20a%20question.&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I answer my own question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer&#xA;their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the&#xA;answer to, and you would like to &lt;strong&gt;document that knowledge&lt;/strong&gt; in public so&#xA;that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly&#xA;okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To encourage people to do this, there is a checkbox at the bottom of&#xA;the page every time you ask a question. If you have more than 15&#xA;reputation and already know the answer, click the checkbox that says&#xA;&amp;quot;Answer your own question&amp;quot; at the bottom of the Ask Question page.&#xA;Type in your answer, then submit both question and answer together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you may go back and add an answer to your own question&#xA;at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I based my question on this one, which is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; closed, is obviously about punctuation usage, and has received three answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/492642/are-guillemets-used-at-all-in-english&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are guillemets used at all in English?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (It turns out that they are in one case: telepathic communication in SF.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can my questioned be reopened, or can anyone suggest a way to rephrase it so it is acceptable? If so, I can posted that question together with my case as one answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="428602" LastEditorUserId="428602" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T16:15:41.437" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T21:28:26.687" Title="Request to reopen a closed question (or get suggestions for rewording)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15106" CreationDate="2021-07-25T15:16:19.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer seems to be given by the OP when he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@lly Haha, fair enough, though it answered my curiosity well. &lt;strong&gt;I didn't have a specific context in mind&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will note that, because of this, no answer can be correct such that another person, seeking the answer to the same question, could reasonably say &amp;quot;Ah yes! The word I want &lt;em&gt;in this context&lt;/em&gt;* is &amp;quot;xxx&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T15:16:19.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-28T03:15:19.953" Score="-6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/571633/word-that-describes-a-stand-in-or-a-frontman/571636#571636&quot;&gt;Word that describes a stand in or a frontman?&lt;/a&gt; was referred to another question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/265902/word-for-powerless-position&quot;&gt;Word for Powerless Position?&lt;/a&gt;, which apparently did not answer the question, as the questioner selected my response as the one they were seeking on their question, an answer not offered for the other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424411" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T07:17:55.260" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T13:59:33.223" Title="Can we get this unlinked?" Tags="|support|duplicates|question-closure|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15115" CreationDate="2021-07-28T13:32:13.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What has happened is that the 1st question was closed as a duplicate of the 2nd. The system of closing is what made the link (by the choice of the user who closed it, who, by the design of the system, was allowed to do this as a single person).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To undo this link, you'd have to get the closed question -reopened-, by the usual means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the suitability of reopening, I think you need to make a reasonable case for it. Your justification is a bit hard to follow and what of it that I do follow is not very convincing. Just because a questioner approves an answer doesn't mean it is 'correct' and subsumes all possible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T13:32:13.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15115" CreationDate="2021-07-28T13:33:03.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would we want to split answers between the same question asked slightly different ways? If someone is looking for a “word for someone who holds a position but they have no real power” they should be able to see &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the answers we have to that question on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question as a duplicate doesn’t affect your answer or its acceptance by the author, so I’m not sure what you would hope to accomplish by having it reopened. The link would in theory make your answer more visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T13:59:33.223" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T13:59:33.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15113" CreationDate="2021-07-30T08:54:13.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: Let's be clear that there are valid reasons for considering this question opinion-based. It's also ok to argue that these reasons don't apply to this question. EL&amp;amp;U is (or at least strives to be) a democracy, which is why we &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt; on these matters. If it turns out that mine is a minority view and I'm outvoted on closure vs opening, then this is simply EL&amp;amp;U working as it was designed to do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with someone asking an &lt;em&gt;on-topic question&lt;/em&gt; that hasn't been asked before, even when their intention is to post an answer to that question. They are simply fulfilling the Stack Exchange objective of creating a library of useful and on-topic questions matched by detailed and authoritative answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue with the question I voted to close is that it doesn't suit our library, because the nature of the question invites subjective opinion rather than authoritative answers. I made this clear when I posted a comment explaining my vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Punctuation is a matter of style. If you want to, you can reverse the&#xA;usual style, although this may limit you to self-publication, since&#xA;99% of publishing houses, newspapers etc will correct your&#xA;orthography. Running counter to convention will also make the reader's&#xA;task more difficult, which most writers try to avoid. In any case, my&#xA;view is that most questions about punctuation on this site are&#xA;off-topic as they can only be answered as opinion (there being no&#xA;&amp;quot;right&amp;quot; answer on style). For further guidance, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt;. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there was some further lively discussion by other users in comments, I added the following, to explain in more detail the position I'd taken:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@DjinTonic you say &amp;quot;I'm new here&amp;quot;, so you'd be unfamiliar with the&#xA;usual process of users voting to close a question without offering any&#xA;explanation via a comment. I remember what it was like starting here 5&#xA;years ago, so I make the effort to add a comment. I recommend you&#xA;spend some time on our site to get a feel for what's accepted here.&#xA;Questions about punctuation invite opinion, rather than objective fact&#xA;supported by authoritative reference. The only &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; answer would&#xA;be based on a specific style manual (eg CMS, APA, MLA), but that would&#xA;suggest lack of research by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's answer lists examples where the opening quotation mark has been omitted at the start of a chapter. This is simply the publisher's &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt;: there is no &lt;strong&gt;correct&lt;/strong&gt; approach to such opening quotation marks. How is this useful and on-topic on our site? Would it be on-topic to ask whether there are examples of authors' names being entirely in lower case? Perhaps we should entertain a question on which countries prefer the em dash to the en dash? Or, whether there are examples of borrow-words like &lt;em&gt;soupçon&lt;/em&gt; being published without the cedilla?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be interested to know whether we support such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167396" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T08:54:13.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15113" CreationDate="2021-07-30T21:28:26.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This meta question raises two very different topics that I think are worth exploring at some length: whether questions about punctuation are inescapably opinion-based and therefore off-topic at English Language &amp;amp; Usage; and whether it is appropriate or inappropriate to ask a question at EL&amp;amp;U with the intention of answering it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Punctuation questions as questions of English language and usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you spend any considerable length of time at EL&amp;amp;U, you become aware of the prevailing view here that &amp;quot;English language&amp;quot; refers to spoken English and that written English is merely a more-or-less flawed system of recording actual (spoken) language. In this view, matters of orthography and punctuation, in particular, are mere trappings of the language—not things to be understood as having &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;incorrect&amp;quot; status in any scientific sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, questions framed in terms of correctness—as in &amp;quot;Is 'thru' an acceptable alternative spelling for 'through'?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Is it okay to end a series of simple declarative sentences with exclamation points (for example, 'I went to the store to buy a loaf of bread! They were out of rye, so I had to buy pumpernickel! The price was about the same, though!&amp;quot;)?&amp;quot;—inevitably run afoul of review queue reviewers because they invite primarily opinion-based answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if punctuation questions framed as matters of correctness are doomed to be read as solicitations for opinion-based answers, does it follow that all punctuation questions are inherently and unavoidably off-topic at this site? I think not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to undervalue matters of orthography and punctuation as critical components of communicating a language—because it's easy to undervalue the extent to which people depend on writing in such communication. As far as I know, I've never spoken a word to anyone who regularly visits this site, and yet I've read and written many thousands of words from and to site participants. It thus seems arguable, at least, that the fundamental language by which we communicate at English Language &amp;amp; Usage is written English, not spoken English. And because we lack the ability to rely on vocal cues, timing cues, and visual cues to help convey our meaning, we must depend to a considerable extent on the regularity of the spelling and punctuation we use to convey our meaning clearly and accurately. Indeed, regularity in the forms of spelling and punctuation that we use may be more important to coherence than the particular forms spelling and punctuation that we adopt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people who ask questions about correct spelling or correct punctuation suppose that there is a universal right and wrong about these matters, which makes it easy to dismiss their concerns as being based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of spelling and punctuation. There is no Academy of Proper Written English, we tell them, so any view of what is right in these areas is ultimately arbitrary—and then we close their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, however, a predominant convention exists in written usage regarding a particular matter of spelling or punctuation; and even when there is strong disagreement over how to handle a particular situation, one may be able to identify a distinct and definite range of possibilities that enjoy substantial real-world support. People care about predominant conventions of spelling and punctuation for the same reason that they care about predominant conventions in word meanings: they want to express themselves clearly and avoid being misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that questions that ask about predominant forms of punctuation usage, widely supported alternative forms, and ranges of established options are legitimate questions of written English usage and can be objectively answered by citing evidence drawn from multiple style and usage guides and—in cases where predominant usage is clear—from levels or degrees of real-world usage. Some people writing in English do write in all-uppercase or all-lowercase letters, for example, but it is not merely a matter of opinion that most people writing in English use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and do so in accordance with various identifiable and consistent conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to how to ask a question about punctuation in a way that maximizes its chances of surviving the review queue without being closed, my advice is to frame it in a way that inquires into real-world usage (for example, &amp;quot;Under what circumstances do English-language writers and publishers commonly omit an open quotation mark in a phrase, sentence or block of text in which they include a close quotation mark?&amp;quot;) or into the range of available style manual advice (for example, &amp;quot;In what circumstances (if any) do style guides approve of omitting the open quotation mark of a pair, despite including the close quotation mark?&amp;quot;) Neither of these questions asks for an opinion. One asks for factual information about predominant usage in the wild, and the other asks about the (possible) range of advice that style guides—a category of widely used normative reference works—offer on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking a question that you want to answer yourself&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every now and then, I think of a question about English language and usage that I would like to investigate. My first step in such instances is to search the EL&amp;amp;U archives to see whether someone else has already asked it. If so, I check the answers to see whether they dispose of my original question. If they don't, I research the issue myself and, if I uncover something that seems worth sharing, post an answer myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, however, my question is sufficiently different from one that has already been asked and answered on EL&amp;amp;U that it doesn't make sense to shoehorn an answer to it into the existing question. And sometimes no one at EL&amp;amp;U has asked anything remotely similar to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases, I do some preliminary research to see whether my question shows signs of leading somewhere interesting. If it does, the next decision I have to make involves determining where and when to cross over from presenting the question to composing an answer. This is not an easy matter to resolve. In the old days of EL&amp;amp;U, you could lay out the question in a paragraph or two and then start trying to answer it. But in order to escape the review queue in one piece under the show-research regime, you have to present some account of some amount of research that you've already done toward answering the question yourself—and there is no bright line between research that establishes the legitimacy of a question and research that helps provide a thorough and nuanced answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some instances, I end up doing all of the research into a question that I can before posting it. Then I go back and break off my account of the research at a certain point, posting part of it in the question and the remainder as an answer. This can result in the question and the answer going up on the site within minutes of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other instances, I find a natural stopping point for the question part of the research and post the question before proceeding with research into an answer. In those cases, I may not post an answer for several days—or ever—even though I had intended to do so. And of course sometimes another EL&amp;amp;U participant will offer an answer that is better than the one I've been working on, at which point I'll either abandon the answer or post parts of it as supplements to the better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I have never been tempted to do is to give my own answer a green check mark. In the first place, practically all of my answers—and certainly all of my answers to my own questions—rest on publicly available information, rather than personal expertise of some kind. Consequently, my answers aren't definitive; they merely present the results of the research I've done and are limited by the shortcomings of that research (e.g., limited access to various archives; failures to look in the right places; errors in interpreting the material I do find). And as with editing your own writing, assessing the comprehensiveness and value of your own research is a minefield in which the bombs are buried precisely where you are least likely to detect them yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the green check mark is essentially a thank-you to a poster who has taken the time to provide a strong answer to a question you've asked. I still regret not having accepted a good answer to one of my questions, which, I suspect, led the poster to withdraw the answer at some point. In any case, there is an element of absurdity in thanking yourself for answering your own question well. If you feel strongly that your answer is the best of the ones your question has elicited, my advice is to refrain from accepting any answer—just leave it to the community of upvoters and downvoters to rate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One goal of EL&amp;amp;U is to provide well-informed answers to good questions asked by people who don't know where to find those answers themselves. Another goal is simply to provide well-informed answers to good questions. In the latter case, it doesn't matter who asks the question; it only matters that the question and the answer(s) are worthwhile. It follows that you should not avoid asking good questions and trying to answer them yourself at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T21:28:26.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-03T16:08:59.093" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;My recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/571983/92922&quot;&gt;Are phrases of the form &amp;quot;A &amp;lt;possession&amp;gt; of &amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&amp;#39;s&amp;quot; grammatically correct?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as allegedly already having an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/302861/double-possessive-a-friend-of-stevens&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first issue with this substitution is that, unless one already knows what a double possessive is, one is unlikely to think that this is of any relevance. The second issue is that the only answer to this question is utterly unhelpful: when applied to the specific example I gave in my question, it implies that &amp;quot;a metaphor of Saul's&amp;quot; is a shortened version of &amp;quot;a metaphor of Saul's metaphors&amp;quot;, which makes no sense in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, and rather ironically, this question had itself already been 'closed as duplicate' with respect to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/55355/92922&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; where one may figure out what the answer to my question is if one reads the various answers. Even so, this question's chosen answer is predicated on a dubious claim of inverse meaning (that is not just my opinion, as shown by the comments) and it is not obvious that there is a clear answer to my question here (i.e. of comparable clarity and directness to the answer posted to my question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my question should be closed as a duplicate, could you at least find one with an answer that clearly works here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as a general principle, if a question is being closed for having been answered elsewhere, should not the link be to that specific &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, rather than the question? As a question may have more than one answer, and some of them may be irrelevant or simply wrong, linking to the question may create ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92922" LastActivityDate="2021-08-03T16:08:59.093" Title="Poor Choice of Prior Answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-04T04:22:08.623" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm referring to this post I had from earlier: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/572135/collocations-for-litigation&quot;&gt;Collocations for litigation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by the comments, which were helpful, let there be no mistake about that, I appreciate any and all such input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get right into it though, I feel this question of mine had a clear scope and the solution space was narrow enough for this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't dispute I could have clearly written the post itself better (or even the example!), but pragmatically speaking, we had everything we needed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clear identification of problem: unsure of collocations with the word&#xA;'litigation'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clear answer scope: use 'several' and 'litigation' in some kind of&#xA;permutation that reads smoothly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, there may be a bit of discretion with what other words to place in there, but given the example sentences in the post, there should be little confusion as to the direction of the sentence. In my mind, an answerer with knowledge on how to use these words together would be able to make short work of this task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only grounds I can see for closing it was it does not conform 100% to something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;, where I have posted many well-received questions. Nonetheless, I think given that tag wasn't even included, I had no delusions of what my question was after. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/collocations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;collocations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;collocations&lt;/a&gt; tag surely can entertain these trivial bits of latitude, reconciling the usage of 2 words in a small part of a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To their credit, commenters flagged some overarching problems with my writing. And again, I don't dispute that, but these concerns are besides the point. My understanding of this website has always been, the style/profisionalism of OP was a black box: maybe it's good maybe its bad -- doesn't matter. Our only aim is to zero in on what the question was and humor them -- even if we are opposed to certain elements of the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if the question has a clear, reasonable scope, perhaps we can just humor OP and answer the question in a vacuum. Then, if we really wanted to, we could flag other issues in the comments and suggest another SE if that should be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just one voice though, I'd be curious to see how others weigh in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250744" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T11:14:35.923" Title="Closing a question: tag specificity and the merits of viewing the question in a vacuum" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15122" CreationDate="2021-08-04T11:14:35.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not every answerable question is a suitable fit for this format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s no objective way to rank all of the possible answers to a “help me write this sentence so it sounds good to me” and those sorts of questions are unlikely to be of much use to more than a few other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single word requests fit this format better if the sense of the word being sought is explained with enough specificity. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/445184/80039&quot;&gt;A word to differentiate “major” and “minor”&lt;/a&gt; is something potentially useful to many people, and it is something more easily discoverable through a search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T11:14:35.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15125" CreationDate="2021-08-05T14:11:28.463" Score="-1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see this question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/572267/omission-of-if-in-a-conditional-phrase/572268#572268&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Omission of if in a conditional phrase&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as being the duplicate of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48819/must-conditional-sentences-begin-with-if&quot;&gt;Must conditional sentences begin with “if?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Yet this is the stated reason for the closure of the question. The answer of the supposed duplicate is scarce and does not deal with subjunctive really. Also, the closed question has a second query that has just been glossed over as non-existent. Is that on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we not too quick to close? Just wondering...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2021-08-05T14:30:24.467" Title="Should this question be really closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15124" CreationDate="2021-08-05T14:30:24.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is not a full duplicate. The older question only covers part of this question. I have voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2021-08-05T14:30:24.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-09T14:54:34.003" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a NLP researcher and am looking for a English dictionary dataset to train a language model? Any suggestion? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) right meets my need, but it seems that they rarely reply to anyone's demands. So is there any subsitution? At least containing words, senses and corresponding quotations(more than 2 is better).&#xA;Thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="430195" OwnerDisplayName="Charles" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T16:08:43.303" Title="Any good structured English dictionary dataset?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-13T14:18:02.353" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in cataloguing the most common malapropisms in current spoken English. Examples would be mistakes like tenet/tenant, pundit/pundint, specific/pacific, etc. Does anyone know of a resource or site that lists these by frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288865" OwnerDisplayName="kandyman" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T14:44:46.090" Title="Looking for a list of malapropism by frequency of occurrence" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15127" CreationDate="2021-08-13T21:57:56.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a -frequency- sorted list of such mistakes. But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may also want to consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eggcorns&lt;/a&gt; which are are a similar kind of error as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;malapropisms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may want to start by listing some eggcorns, malapropisms, or other mistakes that you yourself have heard of, ie make your own list of ones you think are common, or google for a list (there are many recognized ones, you may want to pare down the list).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do a google search or google NGram search on such phrases including them and identical phrases but with the malapropism substituted and look at the # of google hits. For example,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=for+all+intensive+purposes%2C+for+all+intents+and+purposes&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfor%20all%20intensive%20purposes%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfor%20all%20intents%20and%20purposes%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copmarison of 'for all intents and purposes' vs 'for all intensive purposes'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't perfect - you need to look at the examples it returns and multiple pages of the hits to confirm that things are being found correctly. Just putting in 'tenet' and 'tenant' isn't going to find errors, you have to give the context for the first one (which could be a lot) to force the meaning for the error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You requested 'spoken'. That's quite a tall order. That's going to be much tougher to do than written. It's pretty tough for -any- frequency question if spoken because there's not database of all &lt;em&gt;spoken&lt;/em&gt; utterances by everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is to say that I don't expect there to be an easy reference for this and that you might need to create it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T21:57:56.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4676" CreationDate="2021-08-14T02:49:09.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;English was heavily influenced by Greek, Latin and French. If you want to leverage your knowledge of English to learn other languages, some (though by no means all) of your English-language intuitions and vocabulary would carry over to learning Greek, Latin and French, as well as other languages heavily influenced by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You speak of a 'scientific' knowledge of English. If by that you mean that you have memorised particular paradigms and vocabulary but haven't internalised the language, then that knowledge will be less useful in helping you learn another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T02:49:09.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15127" CreationDate="2021-08-14T14:44:46.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your examples are eggcorns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-for-all-intensive-purposes-intents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'For All Intensive Purposes': An Eggcorn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5075&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an eggcorn forum&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an eggcorn database&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an easier research project, just search &lt;code&gt;top 100 eggcorns&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206976" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T14:44:46.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-15T02:17:27.013" Score="2" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a tangent from my original task of finding out how to underline text when posting on Stack Exchange sites, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10255/how-do-i-underline-in-this-forum&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer.  I've followed the same set of formatting conventions for a little more than a decade professionally speaking, but I can't recall whether I had arbitrarily established said convention or if I had referenced some formal standard somewhere.  Is there a more suitable (or commonly adopted) format for this use case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="335843" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T04:05:13.933" Title="Is there a formatting convention when referencing a document name, or otherwise similar &quot;object&quot;/attachment?" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15131" CreationDate="2021-08-15T04:05:13.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot think of anything you would need to talk about here that&#xA;would ever need something other than capitalization, italics, or&#xA;quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Documents are typically referenced by being set in roman under the normal&#xA;casing rules of English titles: the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, the&#xA;Stamp Act, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the&#xA;Emancipation Proclamation, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Treaty of&#xA;Versailles, the Maastricht Treaty, the Paris Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a few documents such as papal bulls are set not in roman but in&#xA;italic: &lt;em&gt;Inter gravissimas, Pastor aeternus, Misericordiae vultus.&lt;/em&gt; Then&#xA;again, those are also in Latin which might well be the cause of the italic&#xA;use. Notice these use sentence case, not title case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to titles of books, plays, long epic poems like &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, films like &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt;, television series,&#xA;periodicals, and the like, these are all supposed to be set in italic under the&#xA;capitalization rules for English titles. The only time you would underline&#xA;these is when you are writing something out in longhand rather than&#xA;mechanically, or when italic is not available to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short works like short poems and individual sections of full works should be set&#xA;in roman but placed in quotation marks. This includes names of chapters&#xA;from a book or of a particular episode from a serial of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are simply the normal typesetting conventions of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You virtually never see anything underlined when reading history books,&#xA;novels, or newspaper articles. Underlining is mostly a handwriting thing, where people are not used to using two different hands to correspond to what we use roman and italic for when setting words in type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T04:05:13.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15135" CreationDate="2021-08-30T16:05:07.437" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13265/our-help-page-incorrectly-states-that-it-takes-6-spam-abuse-flags-to-delete-a&quot;&gt;Our help page incorrectly states that it takes 6 spam / abuse flags to delete a post&lt;/a&gt; is a documentation report stating that the mention of six flags is wrong and it should be three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that this has gone back to six: it took six flags to delete an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226650/is-it-correct-to-say-we-start-tomorrow-shouldnt-it-be-we-are-starting-tomor/573878#573878&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; recently (now deleted, so 10k-only to see).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the reduction from six to three was done by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9809/a-temporary-tweak-to-work-around-abusive-posting-patterns&quot;&gt;executive fiat&lt;/a&gt; in December 2016, there's been no notification that the reversion is intentional, and I don't see why it would be. It seems likely to be related to other changes made recently to review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be corrected so that only three spam flags are required for deletion, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="121385" LastEditDate="2021-08-30T21:35:10.637" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T11:38:31.183" Title="More than three flags are unexpectedly required to delete spam" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|deleting-posts|spam|flags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15134" CreationDate="2021-08-30T21:37:16.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Makyen says, this has been in effect since I had Shog change the site setting in July 2019. This is documented in the answer linked to in the post in your question, so it's not quite correct to say that this was unannounced - I didn't create a new question, that's true, but I did explain the change and why it was made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dzIO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dzIO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of site settings showing that the site setting to override the default of 6 was changed to 3 on 7 December, 2016 and that override was removed on 22 July 2019.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I confirmed the date it was switched to 6 (or that the override to 3 was removed, anyway) and it was indeed back in 2019. If you're confused about why you haven't seen many spam flags, it's because of Charcoal. They find and flag most spam posts within minutes, rarely needing moderator intervention - they are, actually, why we felt it was safe to raise the number of flags back up to 6 - and your experience seems to show that this hasn't had a negative impact on the site over these last two years, which I'm glad to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T21:37:16.723" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15134" CreationDate="2021-08-31T11:38:31.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has by far the worst spam handling that I’ve seen. Maybe Charcoal does handle a lot of spam almost immediately, but all the spam I see takes forever to be deleted. Here's how long it took from the time the spam was posted to the time it was deleted, for the last 6 things I flagged as spam:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;13:26 - 13:56 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/567934/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/567934/191178&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0:27 - 8:03 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/565809/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/565809/191178&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This wasn't even deleted by the community. The user was destroyed and that caused the post to be deleted. If everyone who voted to close had instead done the right thing and flagged the post, it wouldn't have taken &lt;strong&gt;seven and a half hours&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;14:52 - 15:50 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/565789/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/565789/191178&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4:00 - 5:11 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/561977/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/561977/191178&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;12:51 - 12:54 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/561757/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/561757/191178&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10:17 - 11:51 &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/560499/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/560499/191178&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go further back. In fact, this pattern of terrible spam handling must predate the switch back to 6 flags, as I posted the following as a reaction to how slowly spam is handled here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/324617/323179&quot;&gt;How can I get spam deleted faster?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be corrected so that only three spam flags are required for deletion, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that makes spam not stick around for hours, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T11:38:31.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15138" CreationDate="2021-08-31T20:50:11.863" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is, assuming it may matter to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I deleted an old question of my mine with no answers; but when I viewed it under Recently Deleted Questions, it showed that it had one (displayed &amp;quot;1&amp;quot; in the answer box).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought for a sec that I had missed it somehow, and that the rule regarding deleting answered questions had changed; but no, it didn't have any formal answers (i.e., answers not in comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, so I undeleted it and redeleted it to recheck the answer box, and it still populated it with &amp;quot;1&amp;quot; even though it was never answered, formally. But it goes back to &amp;quot;0&amp;quot; when undeleted (listed under the Questions tab).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find little things like this from time to time, but I don't know if anyone else cares or already knows or where I should mention such a thing in any case. Perhaps here since &amp;quot;bug&amp;quot; is a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user294180" LastEditorDisplayName="user294180" LastEditDate="2021-08-31T20:55:46.660" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T23:50:48.390" Title="Where do you report minor glitches in the system? Here?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15137" CreationDate="2021-08-31T23:50:48.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using my power of obscenely high rep, I can confirm that there is one answer under your question. It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/401086&quot;&gt;deleted from review&lt;/a&gt;, so you can't see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like a duplicate of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt; MSE question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/193756/323179&quot;&gt;Answers count in &amp;quot;Deleted Recent Questions&amp;quot; page taking into account deleted answers I can&amp;#39;t see&lt;/a&gt;. The reason this happens is because it's not worthwhile to calculate exactly what answers a user can see under their deleted question. (You can self-delete when there is only a single answer without upvotes, and closed questions with answers can be deleted by high-rep users. Under either of those circumstances, the answers that were deleted because the question was deleted should be visible to the person who asked the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T23:50:48.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-04T18:34:51.477" Score="12" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a fun factoid to entertain you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now you should know not to put too much stock in Google Ngrams result graphs, and insist on a deep dive into the individual results.  I thought I'd share a new kind of weirdness I encountered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had been curious as to which of the various spellings of McGuffin (referring to the plot device) was more common. My initial search yielded many results from the 19th Century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I settled on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+mcguffin%2Cthe+macguffin%2Cthe+maguffin&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2Cthe%20mcguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthe%20McGuffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20McGuffin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cthe%20macguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthe%20MacGuffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20MacGuffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTHE%20MACGUFFIN%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20Macguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bthe%20macguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bthe%20Macguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cthe%20maguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthe%20Maguffin%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bthe%20maguffin%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt;, utilizing the definite article to eliminate persons named McGuffin or whatever. There were still 19th- and early 20th Century results!  One was a Theodore McGuffin (abbreviated as The.) but even weirder things showed their heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, Google's OCR algorithm does not know how to recognize books printed with multiple columns on one page. So, in a two-word Ngram, you can get a result if one word in one column is near the other word in the other column, purely by coincidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RqOPh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RqOPh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;mcguffin the&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163930" LastEditorUserId="100179" LastEditDate="2021-09-18T14:27:22.660" LastActivityDate="2021-09-18T14:27:22.660" Title="Google Ngrams, an object lesson" Tags="|discussion|ngrams|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-09T02:14:43.527" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574587/desriptor-as-simultaneously-an-adjective-and-an-adverb-retaining-truncated-into&quot;&gt;desriptor as simultaneously an adjective and an adverb, retaining truncated into one-ish. E.g.: &amp;quot;ornate, ornately furnished&amp;quot; ↦ “ornate, -ly furnished”&lt;/a&gt; got closed on the basis of being &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;. I have two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; about it? The fact that there exists more than one possibly valid answer (which fits the definition more closely of &amp;quot;lacking focus&amp;quot;), or some word choice used therein, something else, or a combination? The former reason is true to some extent for many if not a majority of questions; is this particular Question-post phrased in such a way as to preclude an answer?, or what be the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Less than a few hours after its closure (which occurred just an hour or so after my posting it), my question-asking privilege from English.SE got suspended. Now, I don't know how closely connected the two are, but would someone (ideally, among whom a Mod) mind weighing-in (with any suggestions or elucidation)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="431877" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T02:31:28.210" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T03:56:46.723" Title="my Question about adjective-adverb &quot;double duty&quot; got closed" Tags="|support|closed-questions|close-reasons|vote-to-reopen|suspension|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15140" CreationDate="2021-09-09T03:56:46.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What is ‘opinion-based’ about your question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three members of our community cast individual votes to close your&#xA;question.  As none of them has said anything else in the matter, the&#xA;close-reason of “Opinion-based” is all we have to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking only for myself, I agree with their collective action to close&#xA;your question for the close-reason given. Your question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How might you give an accolade regarding it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No deep reading is needed to determine that that question&#xA;can only draw answers that are mere opinions of personal&#xA;preference. It is not answerable by facts and citations.&#xA;It is therefore not a valid question from the point&#xA;of view of the Stack Exchange question-and-answer model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why was your question-asking privilege suspended?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No moderator took any action here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the software that powers Stack Exchange determines that a new user is&#xA;not doing well, it usually first offers guidance for how to improve before&#xA;it starts &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243460/rolling-question-rate-limits-are-now-network-wide&quot;&gt;imposing rate limits on that user&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently you have managed to run afoul of whatever proprietary metrics it&#xA;uses for this.  These metrics are believed to include asking many questions&#xA;in a short time that were variously downvoted, closed, or deleted by the&#xA;members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential trigger for this may be a form of automated quality&#xA;analysis, the exact details of which are also unknown. But it &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have noticed&#xA;the many, many spelling mistakes, questionable grammatical constructions,&#xA;rather long sentences, and the generally unfavorable readability score any&#xA;mechanical analysis tool will have assigned it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://app.readable.com/text/?demo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One such&#xA;tool&lt;/a&gt; identifies around 100 issues&#xA;needing attention in your posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m afraid that that’s really quite poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of your post, which is supposed to be a question, is not a&#xA;question.  It is also manifestly incoherent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;desriptor as simultaneously an adjective and an adverb, retaining truncated into one-ish. E.g.: &amp;quot;ornate, ornately furnished&amp;quot; ↦ “ornate, -ly furnished”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You “buried the lede”, as journalists call it: your actual question did not&#xA;appear until nearly 150 words into your posting, and it was a meandering&#xA;and bewildering slog to get there.  If we use the standard typesetter’s&#xA;line length of 65 ens, that’s at around the 17th or 18th line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people will have given up reading your post by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for those who did manage to persevere, they find that you have ended your&#xA;posting with yet another clearly off-topic solicitation of opinions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is best way / are the best ways ,to wordsmith ’em?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions are not answerable by facts and citations, so they do not belong on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me conclude by observing that just as we saw in all this post’s text right from the very beginning in&#xA;its title, even this last sentence requires a serious copyedit pass before it becomes&#xA;sufficiently well-formed that it no longer distresses the eyes of our reader community here—and perhaps even those of certain system algorithms about which I have no personal knowledge to speak of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243460/rolling-question-rate-limits-are-now-network-wide&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;You’ll just have to write better questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T03:56:46.723" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-15T08:12:05.973" Score="0" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know the name of some English Grammar books, in which :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The Voice Change (Active to Passive and vice-versa)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The Narration Change&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;have been discussed in details with examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="433163" OwnerDisplayName="User_New2021" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T09:08:08.230" Title="English Grammar book on 'Voice Change' and 'Narration Change'" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-21T17:43:44.660" Score="10" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Moderator note&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;After a period for voting including as a featured question, votes have been tallied on this question as of 16:50UTC on 19 October, and the results are as follows. Note that &lt;i&gt;only upvotes have been counted&lt;/i&gt; as this is a binary choice. There is a clear winner.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The third option is interesting but was not part of the original SE proposal.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;li&gt; Answers should appear only in order of score (this is the new behavior on Stack Overflow)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;The accepted answer should appear on top (this is the status quo)&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;&lt;b&gt;21&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;li&gt;Pinning the accepted answer below the top voted answer&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;li&gt;The accepted answer should appear on top&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;li&gt;Answer making an argument for unpinning&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;li&gt;Pin the accepted answer&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;The MSE question has been updated with this result.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Andrew Leach ♦&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the full background, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/369568/273503&quot;&gt;this MSE question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, currently, if the question-asker “accepts” one of the answers, that answer is “pinned” to the top position, shown to all visitors at the top of the page, the rest of the posts appearing in order of score, so that the highest voted post, if different, appears directly beneath it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was noticed on StackOverflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/411352/2562182&quot;&gt;this caused problems for that site&lt;/a&gt;. The most pressing problem for  SO, which is technically oriented, is that old, obsolete, or dangerously outdated answers could and would be shown before more updated or correct ones. SO posts often get thousands of views by voting users long after the original question is posted, and so new answers often rapidly accrue votes and over-take highly upvoted, previous, out-of-date answers. Therefore now SO shows answers (if using the default sort) strictly in descending score order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This turned out to be popular for that particular site, and so now the Powers That Be are asking their other sites for their preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we want to take the option? Would you prefer the status quo, where the OP-accepted answer is shown first (except where the OP themself posted the answer, of course), or should we switch to strictly score-based sorting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To inform your decision, you can view the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/1466399/questions-with-accepted-answer-pinned-above-highest-scoring-answer-on-elu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complete list of which answers would be affected on Main&lt;/a&gt; (6,888 answers; average score difference between accepted and top-voted = 4.6 pts) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.english/query/1466399/questions-with-accepted-answer-pinned-above-highest-scoring-answer-on-elu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; (137 answers; average score difference between accepted and top-voted = 4.25 pts). Note that the settings for Main and Meta are independent; we can unpin on Main and keep the pin on Meta, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; It would be best if answers to this question took a concrete, binary stance — keep pinned or unpin — and optionally, but encouraged, a rationale.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod note (Andrew Leach ♦): Because there is a binary stance, only vote up the answer you support. &lt;strong&gt;Only the upvotes on each stance will be counted.&lt;/strong&gt; If you vote up one answer and vote down the other, you effectively double your vote, which is undesirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2021-10-25T09:49:00.637" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T09:49:00.637" Title="Should accepted answers appear first, just above the highest scored answer, or should answers now appear only in order of score? (Vote by Oct. 19)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="50" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15144" CreationDate="2021-09-21T17:56:13.250" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Answers should appear only in order of score (this is the new behavior on Stack Overflow).&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mandate of SE in general is to create a “&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/343338/273503&quot;&gt;library of reusable knowledge&lt;/a&gt;”, and each site attempts to do that in its subject area by attracting and retaining domain experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those experts become “the community”, and the community expresses its will — and that very domain expertise — principally through voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it advances our agenda to allow one question asker — who, by definition, does not know the correct answer to his question — to outweigh the aggregate opinion of this expert community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “accept” button should and does express “this is the answer which most helped &lt;em&gt;the OP&lt;/em&gt;”, and it still will, even after this change. The difference will be the first-listed answer will be more likely to &lt;em&gt;help anyone else who has the same question&lt;/em&gt; down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more practical level, I really only see situations where the accepted answer having a lower score than some or most other answers when the OP came in with an axe to grind and accepted the answer which &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/70852/55623&quot;&gt;best flattered his preconceptions, despite everyone else disputing it&lt;/a&gt;. There are even cases where a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/190515/revisions&quot;&gt;diamond moderator had to delete the accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; (10K+ only link) because it was highly controversial and didn’t meet the standards for an “answer” on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T23:27:19.267" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T23:27:19.267" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15144" CreationDate="2021-09-22T15:02:41.060" Score="18" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The accepted answer should appear on top (this is the status quo).&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the opposite problem to Stack Overflow. Answers on SO often get thousands of views and votes by active voting members long after a question is posted. New posts can therefore easily overtake an early accepted answer. Here, however, the number of views by active voting members bombs after about 48 hours. The only way of promoting a later, superior, more helpful answer and making it easily visible to readers is through the 'accepted answer' mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are on the verge of having many of the best answer posts on EL&amp;amp;U suddenly consigned to obscurity under a pile of mediocre early answers, reducing the value of this site to readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An accepted answer says that it was &lt;strong&gt;the &lt;em&gt;most helpful&lt;/em&gt; to the author of the question&lt;/strong&gt; regardless of the number of votes it may have accrued. It tells the community that to all intents and purposes the problem has been solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the differences in scores, the author of the accepted answer may have understood the OP's dilemma better than a higher scored answer. And sometimes the OP may change their mind and accept a better, more nuanced answer that was posted days, weeks or even years later.  If I am the author of the question I would like to &lt;em&gt;thank&lt;/em&gt; the user by accepting their answer and seeing it pinned at the top of the page. This shows my gratitude and it has the given advantage of being read first, and it will lead to more upvotes if it is seen at the top of the page rather than lost in a sea of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the top answer is not necessarily the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot;. HNQ visitors are not always the most objective or knowledgeable in the field of language. Native speakers have an instinct that is matchless to any artificial intelligence software or language learner but that doesn't mean they are able to explain or understand why one answer is superior to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, this question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/422265/closet-vs-wardrobe-why-is-the-first-more-common-in-the-us&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Closet&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Wardrobe&amp;quot; Why is the first more common in the US?&lt;/a&gt; posted on December 14 2017 at 12:49 has three visible answers. The “best” answer, with &lt;strong&gt;87 upvotes&lt;/strong&gt;, was posted on the same day at 13:39. But the author of the question accepted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/423148/44619&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; which was posted six days later. Was the author of the question wrong to accept an answer with only &lt;strong&gt;13 upvotes&lt;/strong&gt;? Does that answer not deserve the top position?  You be the judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason for pinning the accepted answer at the top is that &lt;strong&gt;it keeps the two most significant answers at the top&lt;/strong&gt;, namely, the accepted answer and the most popular of the other answers. And it does so without additional programming, compared to sorting by votes and then pinning the accepted answer below the top-voted answer (if they are different answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2021-10-08T06:33:17.283" LastActivityDate="2021-10-08T06:33:17.283" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-09-22T15:02:41.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15144" CreationDate="2021-09-23T13:08:13.273" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting idea on Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/370156/273494&quot;&gt;suggesting pinning the accepted answer &lt;strong&gt;below&lt;/strong&gt; the top voted answer&lt;/a&gt;. That system might give an advantage to the accepted answer over other highly scored answers, but never over the top voted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if anyone thinks that would be worth testing. We may not be able to choose that option for this effort, but if there's interest we might be able to get it on SE's radar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2021-09-23T13:08:13.273" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15144" CreationDate="2021-09-24T00:56:55.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The accepted answer should appear on top!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I urge readers to vote to pin the accepted answer at the top of the page. This feature does a lot of silent good work whilst the very few annoying instances where an OP picks a (seemingly) obviously wrong answer are very scarce indeed, however memorable these are (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5010/should-the-answer-that-appears-on-top-be-the-ops-accepted-answer-or-the-ans/5015#5015&quot;&gt;Cag51's post on Academia and the information therein&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the terms &lt;em&gt;voting&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt;, there is a severe problem in terms of how democratic the voting system is. Early posts get voted on a lot, later posts much, much  less so. Around 48+ hours after a question is first posted, the number of views by active voting members drops off significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinning the accepted answer allows relatively 'late'-arriving but excellent and helpful answers to be recognised and pinned to the top of the page where they currently benefit readers. Without this feature some of the best and most helpful information on the site will languish unseen  underneath a list of earlier mediocre answer posts. This current system still retains the benefit of having the highest-voted answer directly beneath the selected one. The new one will see many existing good posts vanish into obscurity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another benefit of the current system is that the Original Poster is the only member who is routinely alerted to new answers, especially those that arrive weeks, months or years after the question is originally posted. Because of this, they are in by far the best position to curate their own question page, and, if appropriate, accept a late answer. Certainly, the slew of voters on the original few answers  will not be notified and will not get the chance to vote anew on the full range of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the current system affords some respect and agency to people who ask questions on the site. Whilst there are always vaguely annoying members in every aspect of the daily life of every SE site, we don't allow this to destroy or make us abandon useful and helpful features of the site. Where the odd muddle-headed OP might select the wrong answer, this is rarely anything more than an annoyance, and a rare one. In contrast if we in essence lose the selected answer feature, users will lose the benefit of many excellent posts and the helpful information that they provide. The vast majority of people asking questions here are sensible adults fully capable of making appropriate decisions regarding selected answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some SE sites, for instance SO, get thousands and thousands of views by active voting members. So, for example, the highest voted answer on SO has over 33,000 votes. On these sites a very high number of votes over a quite sustained period may be the best indicator of the accuracy and helpfulness of an answer. Here, however, this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The voting system on &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; is a good thing. However, it is not perfect for many reasons, including those detailed above. The 'accepted answer' feature helps provide checks and balances within the system. In particular it defends against the unintended and unwelcome tyranny of the early upvoted answer. Just like a healthy democracy, where second chambers and the separation of the legislature, the judiciary and the police provide safety in the form of checks and balances, the same is true of the accepted answer feature in its current form. Vote to keep it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2021-10-08T22:20:09.290" LastActivityDate="2021-10-08T22:20:09.290" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-25T16:01:27.607" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if book recommendations are allowed, but I'm looking for a reference book that contains details about a wide variety of languages, written for linguists. For example, let's say I wanted to know the word order of Polish, or the written script of Urdu, or the basic grammar of Korean, etc. A book that contains a reasonable summary of the nuts and bolts of most languages. Not as a resource for learning the language, just as a reference for an overview of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288865" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-09-27T16:27:55.440" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T16:27:55.440" Title="Book recommendation about languages from the linguist's perspective" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-29T14:22:56.567" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I upload here a audio clip of English,like .mp3 or .wma&#xA;so that some native speakers may help me with its transcription&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="411061" OwnerDisplayName="Sakura tn" LastActivityDate="2021-09-29T16:14:42.310" Title="How can I upload a short audio clip of English so that I can ask for help with its transcription" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2021-09-30T06:53:39.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15144" CreationDate="2021-10-01T18:36:38.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just posting this as an answer to make an argument for unpinning. Please upvote Dan Bron's answer to practically indicate support for unpinning according to the rules Andrew Leach laid out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of unpinning because the current system has no good way for anyone but the original poster to adjust the position of the pinned answer, and aside from situations where the original poster is mistaken or biased (which Dan Bron mentions, and Araucaria argues are rare), I think it's not uncommon for the original poster of a question to just not be active on the site any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Araucaria's answer talks about situations where there is a not-so-good (or even outright incorrect) early answer and a late better answer. I agree that the voting system isn't set up to handle this well, but there is always at least some chance for the newer answer to catch up by votes over time, especially if people use tools like bounties to draw attention to it. However, if the not-so-good early answer was accepted and the OP is no longer around, there's absolutely no way for the late answer to reach the top spot under the current system of pinning accepted answers (short of the drastic step of special diamond moderator intervention). So I don't think pinning accepted answers is a good solution to the problem of early answers having an advantage relative to late answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T18:36:38.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15155" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-10-07T20:52:40.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T20:52:40.257" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T20:52:40.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15156" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-10-07T20:52:40.257" Score="0" Body="Questions about the topic of homework questions, including but not limited to questions about whether or not they fall within the scope of this site (and if so, what level would be acceptable)." OwnerUserId="21450" LastEditorUserId="21450" LastEditDate="2021-11-01T22:05:05.293" LastActivityDate="2021-11-01T22:05:05.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-07T22:47:11.190" Score="-4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow—where questions get often hundreds of votes every week for many weeks—has recently stopped showing accepted answers at the top of the page, deciding instead to use only votes by users as a measure of the usefulness of an answer. No special prominence is given to accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amongst other reasons, SO is affected by answers which can often rapidly become out of date so that a previously accepted answer is often no longer the most appropriate. When newer up-to-date answers appear they are highly upvoted because of the large volume of voting users who continue to visit the pages. &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; does not work like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new practice was going to be rolled out to all sites. Now it won't happen unless a site specifically asks for it. I argue we should not! Here is my offering to the debate. If you find you agree with my points below, or disagree with them, please go and vote, or change your vote here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15144/should-accepted-answers-continue-to-appear-first-even-when-they-are-not-the-mos&quot;&gt;Should accepted answers appear first, just above the highest scored answer, or should answers now appear only in order of score? (Vote by Oct. 19)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The accepted answer should appear on top!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I urge readers to vote to pin the accepted answer at the top of the page. This feature does a lot of silent good work whilst the very few annoying instances where an OP picks a (seemingly) obviously wrong answer are very scarce indeed, however memorable these are (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5010/should-the-answer-that-appears-on-top-be-the-ops-accepted-answer-or-the-ans/5015#5015&quot;&gt;Cag51's post on Academia and the information therein&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the terms &lt;em&gt;voting&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt;, there is a severe problem in terms of how democratic the voting system is. Early posts get voted on a lot, later posts much, much  less so. Around 48+ hours after a question is first posted, the number of views by active voting members drops off significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinning the accepted answer allows relatively 'late'-arriving but excellent and helpful answers to be recognised and pinned to the top of the page where they currently benefit readers. Without this feature some of the best and most helpful information on the site will languish unseen  underneath a list of earlier mediocre answer posts. This current system still retains the benefit of having the highest-voted answer directly beneath the selected one. The new one will see many existing good posts vanish into obscurity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another benefit of the current system is that the Original Poster is the only member who is routinely alerted to new answers, especially those that arrive weeks, months or years after the question is originally posted. Because of this, they are in by far the best position to curate their own question page, and, if appropriate, accept a late answer. Certainly, the slew of voters on the original few answers  will not be notified and will not get the chance to vote anew on the full range of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the current system affords some respect and agency to people who ask questions on the site. Whilst there are always vaguely annoying members in every aspect of the daily life of every SE site, we don't allow this to destroy or make us abandon useful and helpful features of the site. Where the odd muddle-headed OP might select the wrong answer, this is rarely anything more than an annoyance, and a rare one. In contrast if we in essence lose the selected answer feature, users will lose the benefit of many excellent posts and the helpful information that they provide. The vast majority of people asking questions here are sensible adults fully capable of making appropriate decisions regarding selected answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some SE sites, for instance SO, get thousands and thousands of views by active voting members. So, for example, the highest voted answer on SO has over 33,000 votes. On these sites a very high number of votes over a quite sustained period may be the best indicator of the accuracy and helpfulness of an answer. Here, however, this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The voting system on &lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt; is a good thing. However, it is not perfect for many reasons, including those detailed above. The 'accepted answer' feature helps provide checks and balances within the system. In particular it defends against the unintended and unwelcome tyranny of the early upvoted answer. Just like a healthy democracy, where second chambers and the separation of the legislature, the judiciary and the police provide safety in the form of checks and balances, the same is true of the accepted answer feature in its current form. Vote to keep it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Why have I posted this here instead of on the original page? I originally gave an answer there, but had arrived at the debate too late!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T23:19:29.347" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T23:19:29.347" Title="Be a bastion of democracy! Let's pin accepted answers at the top of the page!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-10-08T08:19:17.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15157" CreationDate="2021-10-07T23:03:31.363" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pinning accepted answers to the top, has been how this entire network has worked for 13+ years. While I appreciate that there's support for doing that on this site too, many people are also strongly opposed. I don't think there's enough evidence that this community of thousands of users (of whom only a couple dozen have &amp;quot;voted&amp;quot; on this issue) wants this change badly enough. In the absence of an overwhelming majority of active users clearly wanting to switch the site's behavior, I think we ought to keep the site the way it is and not tamper with what's not broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I'm very glad that you made a new Meta post here, because the other one was posted on Meta.SE, where the majority of people come from StackOverflow and want this behavioral change to be implemented network-wide. We have no idea how many of the upvotes on the &amp;quot;unpin&amp;quot; option in the other post, came from such users outside of this community (anyone with at least 200 rep on any other site, can vote here even if they haven't really participated much).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21450" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T23:03:31.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15144" CreationDate="2021-10-08T22:17:55.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Pin the accepted answer. Point by point:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer feature constitutes one of the checks and balances to the voting system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Highly upvoted answers are often just early answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Highly upvoted answers which later prove to be wrong will no longer be able to be superseded by demonstrably correct well-evidenced and well-researched answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Late answers, however good, however correct, do not get highly upvoted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question posters are not thickos who are unable to recognise a later well-argued and well-evidenced answer to be better than an early one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The current proposal is a disincentive—especially for experts in that area—for members who wish to post late answers. They may not expect to accrue lots of upvotes, but they can at least hope to be more widely read if their answer is accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given that early answers, even those which are highly upvoted, are often subsequently proved wrong, the proposal will condemn later correct answers to obscurity and promote misinformation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of the, correctly, highest voted answers to important, popular and useful questions are so precisely because the OP was able to accept the answer and promote it to a more prominent position where it was read more frequently and thus upvoted. This will no longer happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users are unable to downvote answers which they previously thought to be useful after a better, more well-informed, well-researched answer comes along (unless it is edited).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question posters are the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; users who are routinely alerted when a new answer is posted. The thousands of users who already saw the question and voted on the smaller number of answers do not routinely get the opportunity to revote when a later answer appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because of the point above, question posters are the only users who are in a good position to curate their question pages. No one else will do so and then revote as new answers appear, often years later. They are in an ideal position to decide which answer should be at the top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many good answers are the result of detailed or diligent research. See, for example, answers by Sven Yargs, StoneyB, Tchrist,  Mari-Lou A, JEL, Janus Bahs Jacquet. However, research takes time. If these folks give a stellar answer after a few days research, one of the ways future readers can benefit from it is if the OP selects it over an older, not well-researched but highly upvoted earlier answer. The current proposal disincentivises research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE has done a lot of work to promote the role of question posters on the SE network. For example, they recently increased the rep for votes on questions so that it matches the rep for votes on answers. The current proposal is a step backwards, demoting the importance and the agency of people who ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some SE sites, for instance SO, get thousands and thousands of views by active members. So, for example, the highest voted answer on SO has over 33,000 votes. On these sites a very high number of votes over a sustained period may be the best indicator of the accuracy and helpfulness of an answer. Here, however, this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are many types of question on the EL&amp;amp;U network. A prominent one is Single Word Requests. The current proposal would be very appropriate for a single-word-request site. However, this is not what EL&amp;amp;U is meant to be. The current proposal will not be supported by serious and dedicated contributors to EL&amp;amp;U (in terms of content), apart from &lt;strong&gt;answerers of single-word-requests&lt;/strong&gt; and similar type questions. Serious SWR askers, who research their questions, such as Mari Lou A, and serious askers and respondents of more linguistics-based, etymology-based questions will not be in favour of this proposal. Indeed it will reduce their contributions. If you wish to see less from Sven, JL, Mari Lou, or you wish to see less future contributors like Stoney, etc then vote for this proposal. Also do this if you want to see more people misinformed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The voting system of SE and EL&amp;amp;U is a GOOD THING. However, it is not perfect for many reasons, including those detailed above. The 'accepted answer' feature provides a balance to this system. Just like a healthy democracy, where second chambers and the separation of the legislature, the judiciary and the police provide safety in the form of checks and balances, the same is true of the accepted answer feature in its current form. Don't vote to remove this! Keep true democracy alive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2021-10-08T22:34:37.630" LastActivityDate="2021-10-08T22:34:37.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-19T20:49:38.580" Score="5" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think someone may have set the parameters controlling serial voting detection a little awry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, I got a notification that 10 rep had been deducted because someone had been serially upvoting my posts. However, my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/427999/paxdiablo?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;current history&lt;/a&gt; here consists of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jul 12, 03:37, association bonus, +100.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jul 12, 06:28, upvote on my first question, +10.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oct 19, 19:06, reverse serial voting, -10.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I suppose you could technically argue that it's a suspicious pattern that 100% of all my upvotes came from a single account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure you can intelligently call something serial behaviour when there's only been a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; occurrence. Otherwise, &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; murderer would be a serial killer :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd be interesting to know the rationale behind the decision. I'm not asking for the rep to be reinstated, I don't really care about it other than having enough to do certain things on the site (which, on this site, is really just asking the occasional question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tagged this &lt;code&gt;bug&lt;/code&gt; as that seemed to be the most appropriate from the defaults given, but it may not actually &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; a bug (apologies in advance if that's the case), we'll have to wait and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="427999" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-10-20T07:15:33.067" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T14:06:11.057" Title="Reversal of serial voting a little too aggressive?" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15160" CreationDate="2021-10-20T14:06:11.057" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to get gold badges, some people write scripts to upvote 40 random posts across different sites every day. This is against the rules, so when it's discovered, the votes need to go. When the offending account can't be deleted (because the user has content on the site in question), then the votes are reversed. This is explained on the main meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/362020/323179&quot;&gt;Non-serial voting corrected&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're definitely not the only one who was affected by this. This is happening on other sites, and it has to be the same incident. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/371020/323179&quot;&gt;Why did I get serial voting only for a vote on a post?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, this is only the second time this type of reversal has happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T14:06:11.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15166" CreationDate="2021-10-24T09:54:06.120" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please help me find an ONLINE singular to plural (and visa versa) converter that will convert a list of words at once? I've found plenty that do one word at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so many online text/word manipulaters out there, I'm surprised that I can't find one for singular and plural conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436941" OwnerDisplayName="Zvi Twersky" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T19:49:55.383" Title="Convert plural to singular and visa versa" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15164" CreationDate="2021-10-24T12:20:11.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found .NET PluralizationServices and Humanizer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Humanizr/Humanizer/blob/main/readme.md#pluralize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Humanizr/Humanizer/blob/main/readme.md#pluralize&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436941" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T12:20:11.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15164" CreationDate="2021-10-24T19:49:55.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my PHP peeps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the Laravel function &lt;a href=&quot;https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/helpers#method-str-plural&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Str::plural()&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You can even &lt;a href=&quot;https://phpsandbox.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;run Laravel code online&lt;/a&gt;, no downloads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The code for this is very simple. I may edit to include it later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T19:49:55.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-27T07:19:46.710" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently purchased a book called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bookdepository.com/Describers-Dictionary-David-Grambs/9780393346169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Describer's Dictionary : A Treasury of Terms &amp;amp; Literary Quotations&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an incredible book, but it's about &amp;quot;things&amp;quot; rather than, other words. Yes, I know that there is a thing called a thesaurus, but I also know that thesauruses have very general words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does anyone know of websites, books, forums, YouTube channels... Any type of resource that provides synonyms that are complex and involve more than one word?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been looking for a long time and generally all I can find is 1 or 2 posts every now and then for very specific words.&#xA;Any help would be really great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="437225" OwnerDisplayName="Miffy" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T13:41:42.403" Title="Resources for increased complexity in writing" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-28T13:19:09.920" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a strange thing just now. I have a browser extension that creates and downloads an internet shortcut file (.url) of the current page. I used it on the following page, and the extension broke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/21846/62442&quot;&gt;How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I examined the question title (and later the contents of the question), I noticed that there are many unnecessary &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;shy;&lt;/code&gt; entities in the post. Here's a screenshot of the post content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6R18K.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6R18K.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extension is using the window/document title as the file name, and these entities are not allowed in a file name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the edits and saw that the last edit introduced these &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;shy;&lt;/code&gt; entities, and I seem to fail to understand the need for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm curious. Was this intentional? Or is it the result of some glitch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62442" LastEditorUserId="62442" LastEditDate="2021-10-28T14:27:54.873" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T18:00:34.310" Title="Why is this question full of &amp;shy; entities?" Tags="|bug|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15168" CreationDate="2021-10-28T17:46:19.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Observe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OUItb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OUItb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q2chB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q2chB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44946" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T17:46:19.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15168" CreationDate="2021-10-28T18:00:34.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your extension should be sanitizing whatever it uses for the file name. These are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;soft (or shy) hyphens&lt;/a&gt;, which create breaks inside words as needed, and there's no reason they couldn't be in post titles. (Much worse could also be in post titles...) These hyphens are just a typographical nicety like accents on letters or smart quotes. I'm sure the edit was intentional, as I've seen tchrist make similar formatting edits before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T18:00:34.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-10T20:08:31.273" Score="4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/578260/revisions&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; about the usage of a particular phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what regions or countries would this usage be considered correct, and where would it be considered incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I attempted to word the question so as to permit a reality- rather than opinion-based answer; I may or may not have been successful in that. But either way I feel like the theme of the question was emphatically on-topic at ELU, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word choice and usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dialect differences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have been migrated to ELL. Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;ELL's &amp;quot;what is on-topic&amp;quot; page&lt;/a&gt; lists exactly the same bullet points as ELU's, minus &amp;quot;etymology.&amp;quot; But from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10250/441995&quot;&gt;the meta.SE answer discussing migration&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't migrate for the sake of migration.&lt;/strong&gt; We only migrate questions because they are &lt;em&gt;not a good fit on the original site&lt;/em&gt;. It is perfectly possible for a question to be good fits [&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;] on multiple sites, but that is not a reason to migrate it elsewhere, unless the OP specifically requests it. As a general rule, if someone asks a question &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, and it's a good fit &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, it should stay &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was in no way about learning (I know what the phrase means) or correctness in general (the phrase &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; correct, in my dialect, and I know that fact). It was about regional variance and prevalence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421933" LastActivityDate="2021-11-11T21:33:23.433" Title="Why was this question on usage migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|appropriate-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15172" CreationDate="2021-11-11T17:13:50.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question has been returned from ELL and is now closed on ELU.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands it's a list question, which is specifically discouraged because every answer would be equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what regions or countries would this usage be considered correct, and where would it be considered incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try to make the question on-topic. &amp;quot;What makes X incorrect in Standard English, when it's fine in my dialect?&amp;quot; is a form of question which would appear to be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-11-11T17:13:50.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15172" CreationDate="2021-11-11T21:33:23.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is fine here. Given the comments, it seems to be about a definite regional difference. And it's not a trivial-to-explain one at that, again going off the disagreement in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar question asking about where an expression is used: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/377705/191178&quot;&gt;Using anymore in the positive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2021-11-11T21:33:23.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15178" CreationDate="2021-11-22T01:00:45.317" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/578791&quot;&gt;Why are English words are so hard to spell?&lt;/a&gt; was initially closed as being opinion based, which is a little strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps people seeing that it could not be answered simply chose a random close-reason before it degenerated into too many wild shots in the dark? I don’t know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I have switched the close reason to something that seems to fit better. It still really isn't something that can be answered in its current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let’s fix that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we help the asker improve his question so that it becomes something that can be answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-11-25T19:21:37.520" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T19:36:59.260" Title="Why was the question &quot;Why are English words are so hard to spell?&quot; closed as POB, and how can it be fixed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|spelling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15177" CreationDate="2021-11-23T20:35:55.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As no one else has both­ered to do so, I have rewrit­ten the&#xA;ques­tion to more clearly re­ﬂect what I be­lieve the asker&#xA;was re­ally ask­ing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be­cause I be­lieve a suc­cinct an­swer to this ques­tion&#xA; be made with­out wax­ing so en­cy­clo­pe­di­cally&#xA;pro­lix that it would ex­ceed SE’s length lim­its on posts,&#xA;I have both reöpened and  the ques­tion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is that this new at­ten­tion will draw a&#xA;high-qual­ity, canon­i­cal an­swer that we can use&#xA;when­ever the same ques­tion comes again later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really should­n’t not be too ter­ri­bly hard to an­swer:&#xA;merely enu­mer­ate per­haps 8–12 con­tribut­ing fac­tors,&#xA;each with as much or as lit­tle de­tail as you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2021-11-25T19:36:59.260" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T19:36:59.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15182" CreationDate="2021-11-24T09:59:29.203" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/578934/theres-the-term-honest-mistake-so-dishonest-mistake-is-synonymous-to&quot;&gt;There&amp;#39;s the term &amp;#39;honest mistake&amp;#39;, so what is &amp;#39;dishonest mistake&amp;#39; synonymous to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not really sure I have anything to say in the body besides the link except that the question was closed and probably deservedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91759" LastEditorUserId="91759" LastEditDate="2021-11-24T14:46:27.840" LastActivityDate="2021-11-24T18:15:04.130" Title="Please help me improve my question on 'dishonest mistake' (re the term 'honest mistake')" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|editing|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-24T11:38:49.957" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an English teacher, I want to be able to quickly identify words in a given text that are NOT on the General Service List (GSL) or the Academic Word List (AWL). This will help me understand which words my students might have trouble with. What are some efficient options for doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288865" LastActivityDate="2021-11-30T03:50:53.000" Title="Workflow for finding words in a text that are not in GSL or AWL" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15180" CreationDate="2021-11-24T12:46:27.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a tool that does this well: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/profiler/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EAP Foundation Vocabulary profiler&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288865" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-11-30T03:50:53.000" LastActivityDate="2021-11-30T03:50:53.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15179" CreationDate="2021-11-24T18:15:04.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To improve your question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;arrange your thoughts in a logical order;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make it easy to follow and &lt;strong&gt;concise;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; address individual comments either in comments or identifiably in the question: edit your question to take them into account and then flag the comment as &amp;quot;no longer required&amp;quot;. Editing your question could involve a complete re-write, depending on what the comment says and how that affects your logical order. Once you complete an edit, your question should &lt;strong&gt;look&lt;/strong&gt; as though it's just been asked, without &amp;quot;Edit&amp;quot; headers, addenda or afterthoughts. [However, don't invalidate existing answers! There could be a fine line to tread.]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not &lt;strong&gt;entirely&lt;/strong&gt; applicable here, but you might want to have a look at my answer about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5043/18696&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; because it is tangentially relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-11-24T18:15:04.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-24T22:18:03.373" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;We live in tumultuous and troublesome times; some of us have suffered  personal losses while  others are counting their  successes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever side  of the cosmic fortune cookie  we crumble into, we should find time to put aside our differences, sit together (at least in spirit), tilt a jar and thank Providence for our continuing survival...if only for 24 hours in any time zone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most cultures have a harvest festival, a celebration of life and its promise for the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... from our culture in the Americas...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy Thanksgiving to All,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but we have to do better for our children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be far fewer Thanksgivings in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2021-12-13T21:03:52.237" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T21:03:52.237" Title="Wherever you are... Happy Thanksgiving" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2021-12-03T09:13:38.957" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-30T17:42:28.077" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/579393/resistance-decreases-with-temperature-how-to-interpret-this-sentence&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Resistance decreases with temperature&amp;quot;. How to interpret this sentence?&lt;/a&gt; doesn't seem like an unreasonable question to ask on ELU, but it's been summarily closed with the &amp;quot;justification&amp;quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...because it belong [sic] to an SE site on physics or EE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might have been acceptable to migrate to ELL, but I personally wouldn't be inclined to do that with this exact question. Imho it's not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; obvious that &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;X increases / decreases with Y&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; implies that both variables always change &amp;quot;in tandem&amp;quot;. Noting &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/303179/the-closer-humans-get-to-them&quot;&gt;the closer humans get to them&lt;/a&gt; as recently asked on ELL, I suspect some people might assume that the construction involved here simply means &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If X changes then Y changes&lt;/strong&gt; (but not necessarily in the same &amp;quot;direction&amp;quot;).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I won't keep on. If you agree with me that the question is acceptable (it's &lt;em&gt;What do these words mean?&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;What are the laws of physics?&lt;/em&gt;) then please vote accordingly - &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to reopen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, on the linked question on the Main site, not &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; this Meta question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-11-30T23:23:57.527" LastActivityDate="2021-11-30T23:23:57.527" Title="Request to reopen &quot;Resistance decreases with temperature&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15193" CreationDate="2021-12-06T08:51:52.980" Score="4" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I say &amp;quot;mention&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;mentioning&amp;quot; I mean it as in the &amp;quot;use/mention distinction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &amp;quot;slur&amp;quot; I mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A derogatory or insulting term applied to particular group of people. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/slur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Lexico]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to get me to ask this question? A user quit the site when they found that our site finds it acceptable to mention the n-word, even though it is relevant to the post at hand. This led me to question our current stance, because if this user was vocal about the issue, how many good contributors leave without me knowing? How many good contributors are suffering without me knowing? I want us to be more inclusive of people, and maybe that means a bit of bowdlerising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to cover the first objection: yes, similar topics have been discussed in the past (1, 2). But they were broader, about offensive phrases in general. I specifically want to talk about slurs. Also the posts are old, and I think it is good to get a fresh perspective on our entrenched ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had a question this year (3) about slurs and the answer restates what is current policy. That's not a criticism, but I really think we need a second look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time this came up (4) is where I will draw from what I think our current policy is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more thorough treatment of offensiveness can be seen in Andrew Leach's answer about flagging. (8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise: our current policy is that we should avoid mentioning slurs unless they are particularly relevant. Don't leave them in quotes unless you are specifically talking about the slur. Don't mention a slur, unless the post is specifically talking about that slur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is a good policy. It is similar to the policy on the RPG site (5). Most other sites I have looked at don't consider slurs by themselves, but have this rule applied to profanity in general (6, 7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: can we improve upon it? The answer might be no. I will post my answer, proposing a stricter policy of bowdlerising no matter what. I hope to see others, as well as healthy respectful discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253/referencing-the-existence-of-words-that-may-be-offensive&quot;&gt;Referencing the existence of words that may be offensive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/446/offensive-nsfw-words-what-are-the-boundaries&quot;&gt;Offensive/NSFW words: what are the boundaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15002/ethnic-slur-in-question-whats-the-procedure&quot;&gt;Ethnic slur in question: what&amp;#39;s the procedure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12046/is-using-colored-girls-as-an-incidental-example-offensive-or-unwelcoming&quot;&gt;Is using &amp;quot;colored girls&amp;quot; as an incidental example offensive or unwelcoming?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11247&quot;&gt;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11247&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11898/is-it-acceptable-to-use-an-nsfw-word-in-a-question&quot;&gt;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11898/is-it-acceptable-to-use-an-nsfw-word-in-a-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22232/are-expletives-cursing-swear-words-or-vulgar-language-allowed-on-se-sites/22233#22233&quot;&gt;Are expletives (cursing, swear words or vulgar language) allowed on SE sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging/4990#4990&quot;&gt;Do we have any general guidelines on flagging?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2021-12-14T09:33:14.517" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T01:26:48.837" Title="Proposal for a policy on mentioning slurs" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15186" CreationDate="2021-12-06T08:51:52.980" Score="-15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Policy: always censor slurs, even when mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quoting Huckleberry Finn:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By and by they fetched the [n-words] in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talking about a slur&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was called [t-slur] by passers by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why is this better than the current policy?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are leaving the site because we mention slurs. We can talk about slurs without mentioning them. If we stop mentioning slurs then we will upset fewer people. More people can feel comfortable using our site. We help more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What problems does this cause&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three that I can think of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ambiguity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think everyone knows what &lt;em&gt;n-word&lt;/em&gt; means, but what about &lt;em&gt;t-slur&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;f-slur&lt;/em&gt;? We would need a way to allow people to know what we mean. One possible solution is a meta thread where each slur is mentioned, explained and the Bowdlerised form is given. Please let me know other solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words no longer being slurs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was a kid &lt;em&gt;spastic&lt;/em&gt; was a slur against people with cerebral paulsy. Apparently it's not that anymore. How can we tell when a slur stops being a slur? If we adopt this policy then I would expect another meta discussion to try to figure this out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we go back and censor old posts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. We can't be more welcoming if the words are still there. The whole point is to make the text easier for people to read now and in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this policy seems radical, and to some it seems anathema to the site, but as we've revisted policies now, this could be revisited in the future, so I say it's an experiment worth having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-12-06T08:51:52.980" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15186" CreationDate="2021-12-06T13:29:15.877" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wholeheartedly against a policy of censoring the mention of &amp;quot;slurs&amp;quot;. &lt;strong&gt;It is anathema.&lt;/strong&gt; Sanitising question titles is a matter of expediency in order that the entire site is not banned in certain circumstances; that's a rather different [and technical] matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wholeheartedly supportive of a policy which censures the &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; of &amp;quot;slurs&amp;quot;. Using such language against people on the site (or outside it) is unacceptable. This is already codified in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4989/do-we-have-any-general-guidelines-on-flagging/&quot;&gt;latest advice on flagging&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in order to ask a question about derogatory words, it's necessary to mention them. It should not be necessary to refer to a key. You cite the issue of ambiguity in your answer: I can think of at least three &amp;quot;n-words&amp;quot; which Mark Twain could have used: which one is it? How on earth is a site which is (or should be) devoted to the academic discussion of language supposed to deal with the progression of meaning between form N1 and N14 via N3 and N57? Or the different uses to which F6 can be put? (Does each use of word F6 get a separate entry in the glossary?) I have no idea what &lt;em&gt;t-slur&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to be; I can think of several candidates. Such a requirement is unworkable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps instead of a Meta post with a glossary the words should be called out within the post in order that each can be coded within each post. N1 in one post might be different from N1 in a different post. But that requires a sentence or a list somewhere, of the kind &amp;quot;When I use N1, I mean...&amp;quot; — which actually draws attention to the word, rather defeating the object. Perhaps that could be set in a spoiler, but carry on reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say &amp;quot;The whole point is to make the text easier for people to read now and in the future,&amp;quot; which I'm afraid is self-evidently false. It's &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt; harder to read about N1, N14, N3 and N57 than the actual forms of a particular word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that there are people who are triggered by certain words. That's unfortunate, but I don't believe it can be avoided; nor, in fact, &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; it be avoided. If you don't like a word, move on to a different post. It could be a site about language is not for you, just as a site about maths is not for someone who is traumatised by a symbol like 8, or a site about engineering which uses a symbol like μ. [That sentence is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; flippant: it's the same issue.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal is censorship, pure and simple. It's not expedient sanitisation; it's explicitly banning certain words in &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; circumstances. It's completely alien to a site about language, in exactly the same way as Physics.SE could not ban μ. If you don't like a word, move on to a different post: don't try and stop &lt;strong&gt;other people&lt;/strong&gt; seeing that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a hill I'm prepared to die on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; I wouldn't be against — in fact I think I'd be in favour of — putting a &amp;quot;trigger warning&amp;quot; somewhere which could be shown as people join the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-12-06T13:29:15.877" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15186" CreationDate="2021-12-06T16:02:02.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we do need a policy on how to handle slurs that are necessary for a meaningful question or answer and a recommendation for what to do when a slur is part of some source material, but knowing the exact slur is not necessary to understand the point being made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think we should get distracted by trying to determine what words count as &amp;quot;slurs&amp;quot;; there are some words that are obviously slurs that are recognized as deeply offensive. There are some slurs that people who aren't familiar with them would likely agree shouldn't be used gratuitously once they've been informed of their impact on others. If someone objects to the classification of something as a slur, we use our already established mechanism for resolving that - we discuss it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, I'm going to assume we're talking about words and phrases most of us agree are slurs. I’m not talking about swear words like ‘fuck’ or pejoratives like ‘idiot’. I’m talking about the words that newscasters hesitate to repeat on-air even when quoting someone. &lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-4910.2019.tb00044.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This isn’t a novel problem&lt;/a&gt; and since this site is a community and not a newspaper or scholarly journal, I think we can agree on some accommodations to make this a more comfortable place to interact without sticking a knife in the heart of free expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;When we don't really need to know the exact words&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we remove it completely? Use an ellipsis like ... or trim the quotation to begin it after the slur or end it prior to the slur.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does completely removing it make the sentence difficult to understand? Replace it with neutral language in brackets that conveys a similar meaning. For example, instead of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By and by they fetched the [n-words] in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By and by they fetched the [workers] in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the fact that it was a slur important to the meaning? Replace it with  &amp;quot;slur&amp;quot; or with a neutral language description of the type of slur, if that is important to the meaning:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suit alleges that she was called &amp;quot;[misogynistic slur]&amp;quot; by her boss on multiple occasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;When we do need to know the exact words&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Describe the use in neutral language, then hide the actual usage in spoiler text:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;This is just an example. I'm not making any assertions about the offensiveness of the lyric or the necessity of using the possibly-offensive part of it. If we decide to go this direction with the policy, it should be replaced with a better example.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-known example of this structure is in the lyrics of Lou Reed's 1972 song &amp;quot;Walk on the Wild Side&amp;quot;. (Some people might find the outdated language here offensive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; And the colored girls go&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-12-13T12:43:36.250" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T12:43:36.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15186" CreationDate="2021-12-06T18:49:57.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our current policy covers slurs well enough, and we don't need an additional policy specifically for ethnic, religious, LGBT-related, and other identity-based pejoratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current policy summarized is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should avoid mentioning slurs unless they are particularly relevant. Don't leave them in quotes unless you are specifically talking about the slur. Don't mention a slur, unless the post is specifically talking about that slur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sometimes necessary to include slurs in posts, and it is not necessary to obfuscate them when written in the context of an academic discussion about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2021-12-07T14:51:09.430" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T14:51:09.430" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-12-06T18:49:57.243" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15186" CreationDate="2021-12-14T09:32:55.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to everyone for participating, especially Andrew Leach and ColleenV, and thanks to the people who helped me to prepare the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that the community, on the whole, doesn't want to change our policy on slurs, so the current policy will remain in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2021-12-14T09:32:55.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-13T04:39:45.617" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unsure what dictionary nowadays has translations of Middle English. As of my research, the language has changed rapidly in that time as of settlement and like migrations from other countries in that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially the Wycliffe 1380 Bible has been translated into the East Midland dialect of Middle English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might be the best book to help me understand that Bible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A special word I have tried to lookup in dictionaries is: nouyt. But there are of course more and as well from other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of books I suppose to be available may be rare — I don't want to try and buy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="440976" OwnerDisplayName="lollisoft" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-12-17T03:57:59.667" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T15:26:01.187" Title="What dictionaries can help translate the Wycliffe bible?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15194" CreationDate="2021-12-17T04:28:07.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My primary recommendation is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. It's freely available on the web, pretty comprehensive, and easy-to-use. I use it quite a lot, and while it may not have all Middle English words, you can get far with it. Sometimes I've had the need to break down or re-spell words when searching, but that's pretty rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When other dictionaries give you nought, the Middle English Dictionary  gives you &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED29933&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nought&lt;/a&gt;, because you're searching for &amp;quot;nouyt&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for other dictionaries, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; is good too, but it requires an expensive membership or organizational subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For extra help in translating the Bible specifically, I recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BibleHub&lt;/a&gt;. While this only has more recent translations (KJV being the oldest), sometimes that's all you need to recognize a weird spelling change. Sometimes it's the commentary on the original text that's helpful, or the information on how interpretations changed over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2021-12-17T15:26:01.187" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T15:26:01.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-21T23:18:01.103" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back, I was blocked from asking questions on the English Stack Exchange, which struck me by surprise. Having never been banned from a site on the Internet before, this was new to me. On the English Stack Exchange, I would often ask questions related to issues I'd think of while editing a book. Based on the information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;, my guess is that my questions were too specific to what I was editing to be useful for everyone. I'd like to return to the site, now as a useful member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here on, what can I do to avoid getting blocked a second time? Once I make my next post, will my reputation on the site determine whether I'll be able to continue posting afterward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="351468" LastActivityDate="2021-12-21T23:18:01.103" Title="How to avoid a second ban on English Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|banned|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-21T23:53:38.637" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/581562/163011&quot;&gt;Word for &amp;quot;about the way everything is connected&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments were moved to chat, but the chat only has one comment (the same one as is on the question right now)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What were all the comments beforehand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163011" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T00:33:55.910" Title="What were the comments on this question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15197" CreationDate="2021-12-22T00:33:55.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The old comments were deleted as policy violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the (other) comments beforehand were answers misposted to the comment box by members who know better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any in good standing are free to post their answers using the answer box where such belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T00:33:55.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-29T03:15:44.123" Score="0" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Stack Exchange, so I haven't had many experiences with it yet, but something that I am finding problematic is a lack of comments to explain downvotes or recommendations to delete answers. It seems to me that requiring explanations for these types of actions would help users improve their answers, and prevent voters and reviewers from voting or reviewing against someone without valid reason. Has making explanatory comments for these actions mandatory ever been discussed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user442862" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T23:51:33.123" Title="Lack of comments to explain downvotes and recommendations to delete" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15199" CreationDate="2021-12-29T05:13:32.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to EL&amp;amp;U. Requiring comments for downvotes is probably the single most commonly made suggestion among new users across Stack Exchange, and one that has consistently been rejected since the beginnings of Stack Overflow. See e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325416&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t providing feedback mandatory on downvotes, and why are ideas suggesting such negatively received?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135&quot;&gt;Encouraging people to explain downvotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6521&quot;&gt;Allow users to leave an anonymous comment when voting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastActivityDate="2021-12-29T05:13:32.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15199" CreationDate="2021-12-29T10:38:14.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason comments explaining downvotes are not required is that there is plenty of help available already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How to write good answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to write good questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow that guidance, particularly with regard to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5279/does-a-question-which-shows-no-research-no-effort-deserve-a-downvote?answertab=votes#tab-top&quot;&gt;prior research&lt;/a&gt; and good documentary support of an answer, and you're less likely to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2021-12-29T10:38:14.170" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-02T09:59:42.410" Score="0" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning new vocabulary and I thought it would be helpful if there's a tool to take specific words as input and form a meaningful paragraph from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="422765" OwnerDisplayName="Ehab" LastActivityDate="2022-01-02T10:33:53.873" Title="Is there a tool or website that can form paragraphs or sentences from specific words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14935" CreationDate="2022-01-05T14:46:56.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Find examples in use&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of different ways to go about this, with the difference being the quantity and the quality of the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Searching Google will give the most results, but many aren't of high quality and it's sometimes hard to get the results you need. However, you might find a single good result explaining the phrase, which is all you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Searching a corpus will give better results. A corpus like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt; is extremely powerful, even if some of that requires some knowledge to use. In your case, &lt;code&gt;curious *&lt;/code&gt; is all you need to input and you'll find &amp;quot;curious as&amp;quot; in the top results, which you can expand to see is really &amp;quot;curious as to&amp;quot;. Unfortunately, I find that I don't always agree that the language in COCA (or other corpora) is idiomatic or correct, even when there are a dozen matches for a phrase. Part of speech tagging is automated and therefore frequently confused, so I tend to not search by PoS. One of the other useful features here is the ability to search for words that occur near other words, even when they're not right next to each other (collocations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Someone out there realized that corpus searches produce valuable results and did the work for you. The result is called a collocation dictionary, and it lists a number of words that are often used with specific words, usually sorted by part of speech. For your example, looking up &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ozdic.com/collocation/curious&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curious&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; gave me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as to&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She was curious as to why he was there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with something like prepositions, you're not guaranteed to find an existing example even when something really is idiomatic. Language works on patterns as much as exact collocations, so try similar words to see what you find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Define&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking up prepositions in dictionaries is tedious because there are always so many definitions, but this also means that you're more likely to find what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I looked up &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/as&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as to&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With respect to; concerning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the correct meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;After that?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've gone through all that and still don't have an answer you can be confident in, you've set yourself up to be able to ask a good question. Make sure there's not already an open duplicate question before starting, and include your research when you ask. ELL is the safer choice if you think the question would be obvious to a native speaker — note that both ELU and ELL have very advanced or native speakers who answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T14:46:56.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15199" CreationDate="2022-01-06T23:51:33.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the point of downvoting were to help posters post better questions and answers, requiring downvoters to explain the thinking behind their downvotes might make sense. But in the Stack Exchange scheme, downvoting is primarily a tool for creating separation between perceived good/useful questions and answers and perceived bad/useless questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some downvoters do provide explanations for their downvotes that point to discrete, correctable faults in the posted question or answer. But it seems to me that most downvoters are more interested in lowering the score of what they consider to be unhelpful, low-quality, or harmful posts than in helping a poster improve a faulty post: they downvote not to instruct the poster in any practical way, but to leave the post with a worse score than it had when they first encountered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this connection, it may be worth observing that downvoters (like upvoters) need not have any actual expertise, insight, or even interest in the content of the questions or answers they vote on. Post a couple of moderately popular answers to single-word request questions, and boom—you've got the 125 reputation points that qualify you to cast a downvote in response to any question or answer on the site. (The threshold for casting upvotes is even lower—just 15 rep points—suggesting that the designers of the Stack Exchange system judged that uninformed upvoting poses less of a problem for its sites than uninformed downvoting. Or perhaps they viewed malicious downvoting as a likelier systemic problem than malicious upvoting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some downvotes reflect serious problems with a post. Others represents nothing more than a voter's subjective judgment that the post is &amp;quot;not useful.&amp;quot; If a post receives multiple downvotes and few or no upvotes, it seems fair to interpret the negative reaction as evidence that the post has serious flaws; but if the post attracts only one downvote, or if it attracts substantially more upvotes than downvotes, I see no reason to view the downvoter's opinion as authoritative unless it is accompanied by an explicit and cogent rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing I want to emphasize here is that downvotes don't necessarily come from language experts and well-informed enthusiasts. Some undoubtedly do, but others come from people who don't know any more about the topic than the poster does—and perhaps know somewhat less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For posters with high reputation point totals, unexplained downvotes are at worst a minor irritant and at best a prompt to review the post with fresh eyes and, if possible, to improve it based on one's own judgment of its possible flaws. For posters with very few accumulated reputation points, however, downvotes can be much more discouraging because they may seem to express the collective opinion of the site, as a unified cohort of language experts, that the post is deficient in some particular (but unexplained) way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never accepted the Stack Exchange's thesis that downvotes are necessary to create separation between good answers and bad answers. If downvotes didn't exist at all, I think that voters would be much more inclined to create separation between better and worse answers by more regularly upvoting the better answers; truly bad answers, meanwhile, could be removed through deletion. But downvoting is fundamental to the Stack Exchange system, so newcomers to the site must either learn to deal with the baffling and discouraging phenomenon of unexplained downvotes or walk away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My chief concern in this regard is that potentially productive site participants like user442862—who evidently wanted to know how to correct specific problems with specific posts that had received downvotes—will find EL&amp;amp;U so inexplicably negative and unwelcoming that they will choose the latter option. Every time we lose a thoughtful, well-intentioned EL&amp;amp;U participant, we diminish what this site could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T23:51:33.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-11T08:31:29.107" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a Chinese. I want to find a friend from abroad to practise English. I think that it will be better to learn a language by communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate it if you know some ways or some platforms.&#xA;Thank you for your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443959" OwnerDisplayName="lz9866" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T10:09:50.883" Title="How to find a partner to learn English together?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-11T14:01:58.703" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this should be in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt; but I'll try here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had this idea for a long time but productivity has never been part of my character. I'll take full credit of the idea and I am willing to recieve the Nobel Prize for it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jokes aside, I have often daydreamed about writing a computer-script that would look up the etymology of words, e.g. Latin or Germanic, in a book and give me their roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having done that I would ask the script how many words are rooted in Germanic if the book is translated from a German novel vs. a French novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: are translators biased towards the original languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is that if a translator translates a French medieval text, it would have a higher ratio of &amp;quot;fancy&amp;quot; Latin words than if it was e.g. the Icelandic sagas... and vice versa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a known &amp;quot;issue&amp;quot; in the field of literary translations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a native English speaker and no background in any field related to these issues so pardon my French and excuse me, the daydreaming slouch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21101" OwnerDisplayName="AWE" LastEditorUserId="438716" LastEditDate="2022-08-16T00:50:50.120" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T00:50:50.120" Title="Etymology of words in translations" Tags="|discussion|etymology|translation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-12T14:54:19.463" Score="10" ViewCount="122" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZntT.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on English Language &amp;amp; Usage over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;50&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;336&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;33&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,273&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,868&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,712&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,240&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,322&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,036&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,374&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14,905&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;43&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;44&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;126&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;291&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;105&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;200&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;315&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;465&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;96&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,151&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,514&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,913&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;822&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,386&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;25&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;472&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;33&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;323&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;426&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,232&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,217&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,240&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,614&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;215&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;82&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,065&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,931&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9,004&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,678&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;474&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;192&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,748&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,275&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,681&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;151&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14899/2020-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2020: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222021%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/374784/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastActivityDate="2022-01-12T14:54:19.463" Title="2021: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-14T16:44:24.897" Score="-4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why I should be banned from asking question on English Language &amp;amp; Usage. May you remove the block, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140628" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T17:40:05.573" Title="Why banned from asking question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15208" CreationDate="2022-01-14T17:40:05.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's not possible for staff or moderators to manually remove an automatic block.&lt;/strong&gt; There's a lot of information about question banning on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;. Users who post a lot of poor questions will usually get a notification warning them about post quality. It appears you haven't had one of those — that's unusual and a little unfortunate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way of reversing a question ban is to improve your existing questions to get them upvoted. When the system next examines them, it may decide to remove the ban, or perhaps to allow a limited number of questions per week. You might get one question every six months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a list of questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/140628/sapiens?tab=questions&quot;&gt;in your profile&lt;/a&gt; and at the bottom of that list a link to deleted questions. Of your ten questions, half are either downvoted, closed or deleted&#xA;— or even downvoted, closed &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you edit your questions to improve them (and vote to undelete them if necessary), they will be bumped on the front page and will gain more attention. This can be good! But the extra attention could also mean you get more downvotes if you don't improve them enough or rectify their on-topic-ness. You may want to re-compose the questions offline and then edit them when you're completely happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T17:40:05.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-19T06:31:50.177" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can language tools (typically, but not exclusively, software tools) be asked about on English SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about how I can work out &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; a term is used. It's along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common use case is to see if a term or phrase is used just in one's own area (whether that be defined as their city, state, country, other), or if it's recognised in other parts of the world too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some interesting words to look up could be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;my bad&amp;quot; - common expression in Australia to say &amp;quot;oops, my fault&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;nonce&amp;quot; - means a &amp;quot;unique number&amp;quot; in American computer terminology, but it's a rude term in Britain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;jumper&amp;quot; - a garment warn for warmth on one's upper body in some parts of the world, but not a term used often (at all?) in the US.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are random examples for demonstration purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any tool that can provide this geographic breakdown of &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; a word/phrase is used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347162" LastEditorUserId="347162" LastEditDate="2022-01-19T09:58:15.580" LastActivityDate="2022-01-19T09:58:15.580" Title="Would a question about a specific English language tool be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15210" CreationDate="2022-01-19T09:40:06.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a reference or resource request. We don't allow them on the main site, but we do answer them here (i.e. english.meta). Just tag your quesiton &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2022-01-19T09:40:06.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15212" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-01-19T09:47:10.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2022-01-19T09:47:10.793" LastActivityDate="2022-01-19T09:47:10.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15213" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-01-19T09:47:10.793" Score="0" Body="Questions about finding resources for learning or researching the English language." OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2022-01-19T09:47:10.793" LastActivityDate="2022-01-19T09:47:10.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-28T19:41:06.120" Score="7" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just suggested that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/583705/when-and-where-the-phrase-blue-alert-was-originated&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, regardless of edits, might never be on-topic here, because &amp;quot;When did this phrase first appear in print&amp;quot; isn't really etymology, or even linguistics; it's history. How did a phrase evolve and mutate, yes; how did the use of one phrase come to be replaced by another, sure, but a simple question of &amp;quot;This phrase exists; its usage has a definite starting point; who and when was it?&amp;quot; seems like more a matter of historical research than linguistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/583803/what-is-the-origin-of-the-joke-a-freckle-past-a-hair-when-one-is-asked-the-tim&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which seems quite warmly received, although it's essentially the same thing (even worse, since it's a folk aphorism, whereas the recent &amp;quot;blue alert&amp;quot; has some hope of being well documented). And moments ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/583818/first-appearance-of-ran-over-a-cockerel-joke&quot;&gt;here's another&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no vested interest, and am personally curious about all those cases, but I wonder how others feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425655" LastActivityDate="2022-01-29T21:37:42.053" Title="Do we cover history *of the use* of phrases? &quot;Who-said-it-first&quot; research questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15214" CreationDate="2022-01-29T10:43:34.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying I particularly like the question I edited: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/583705/when-and-where-the-phrase-blue-alert-was-originated&quot;&gt;When and where the phrase &amp;quot;Blue alert&amp;quot; was originated?&lt;/a&gt; but I am pleased to see it has been  reopened, especially if an earlier source can be found. On numerous occasions, users on EL&amp;amp;U have traced the origins of a word years earlier than chronicled by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; about the history of the word; its origins, how its meaning and usage has changed over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how do we measure this development? Etymologists record the paths of words from its infancy to the present day, and this includes when these expressions first appeared in &lt;em&gt;print&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Lexico&lt;/em&gt; (formerly &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionaries&lt;/em&gt;) defines it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;throughout history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2022-01-29T10:43:34.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15214" CreationDate="2022-01-29T19:41:41.200" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my EL&amp;amp;U activity statistics, I have asked 15 non-wiki questions and answered 239 non-wiki questions tagged as &amp;quot;phrase-origin&amp;quot;—so obviously I find them both interesting and enjoyable to ask and answer. In fact, I think that first-published-occurrence questions and answers are among the most useful posts that appear on this site, for two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, most general-reference resources (such as standard dictionaries) do not focus on the origins of phrases to the same extent that they do on the etymology of individual words and the first published occurrences of individual words. As a result, accounts of phrase origins tend to be less readily available and less thoroughly presented than accounts of individual word origins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the emergence of searchable online book and periodical databases over the past three decades has made it possible for amateurs (like the vast majority of participants at this site) to find earlier instances of specific phrases than the earliest ones that professional researchers (like those at OED) have reported. Consequently, to the extent that anyone cares what the earliest documented occurrence of a particular phrase is, amateurs can contribute to the body of current knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of such research isn't to claim to have identified the very first time a phrase was ever used or the very first time it ever appeared in print. Rather, it is to provide documentation that the phrase was in use as of the date noted and, if possible, to clarify how it was being used in one or more particular instances of such early use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limitations of this type of research are obvious: it depends on written sources; it extends only to the publication databases that the researcher has access to; and it depends on the researcher's ability or good luck in anticipating antecedent wordings or spellings that might reveal the evolution of the phrase in question before it arrived at the exact form that a posted question asks about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't subscribe to any pay-walled book or periodical databases (of which there are many online) and since I don't have access to academic resources that are limited to university researchers, I have no illusions that the relatively small pool of online database content available to me for free is likely to yield the earliest instances of a word or phrase that a more extensive search might produce. Nevertheless, I think that any incremental progress in documenting earlier occurrences of a phrase than were heretofore identified makes the effort worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the posted question above observes, phrase-origin questions are fundamentally questions of history. But to my mind, posing such inquiries under the category head &amp;quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&amp;quot; makes much more sense than posing them under the category head &amp;quot;History.&amp;quot; Several first-rate dictionaries—including the OED, the &lt;em&gt;Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Americanisms&lt;/em&gt;—have embraced the notion of formulating and presenting their content &amp;quot;on historical principles.&amp;quot; I take it that they see the &amp;quot;history&amp;quot; aspect of English as being both compatible and deeply intertwined with the &amp;quot;language and usage&amp;quot; aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2022-01-29T21:37:42.053" LastActivityDate="2022-01-29T21:37:42.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-07T12:00:39.273" Score="28" ViewCount="1585" Body="&lt;p&gt;Happy new year!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; there will be a moderator election some time in March. Start thinking about if you'd like to be elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; The community management team have let me know they are working on scheduling it and will be sharing information regarding the election soon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; Question gathering will start on the 7th of March, with nominations starting on the 14th of March.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may or may not have noticed, but we have not had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;moderator election&lt;/a&gt; for quite some time. It's been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;six years&lt;/a&gt; since our last one. The main reason for this is that the moderators have felt that we can cope with the level of work required without extra help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of last year SE staff approached the moderator team and asked if we wanted extra help or if anyone wanted to step down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I have been thinking about this for well over a year, and I've decided it's time to end my run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been moderating for eight years, and after a while I stopped enjoying it. I did some introspection and asked myself why I was still doing it and the honest answer was that I liked the extra respect that moderators get and I like being a part of the moderator community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially I like the power but not the job, which doesn't seem like a healthy place to be. So I told SE that I would like to step down, and the moderators have decided that we should at least replace me, so there has been an election scheduled for some time in March. I've said I'd like to stick around until the newbie is comfortable, but then hand in my diamond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're thinking about running let me give you some insights into what it's like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I ran for moderator, I had high hopes that being a moderator means being able to drastically reshape the site and turn it into exactly what the community wants. This is not true. We mostly try to incrementally improve the quality of content on the site. Deleting, closing, editing. Like not being a mod, but with less oversight. We get access to the flag queue, which is a list of posts and comments that users have flagged for some reason. When I started there were a lot more flags, I could handle 20 per day and there would still be dozens left over. These days there are far fewer, but participation in the site has declined as well (check the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11939/2018-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2018: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15207/2021-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2021: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag handling, of course isn't all moderators are good for. One of the most satisfying parts of the jobs for me is destroying spammers. A few clicks and the account is gone, taking the spam with it. We also have to intervene with users who are not happy for some reason, perhaps they're removing their content, or maybe they're stirring up trouble. Talking people down is a useful skill to acquire. I'm not sure if I've truly got it, but I feel like I've improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user moderation task is finding sock puppets that are being misused. I am not too good at this, so I let other moderators handle it. Some users are so problematic and widespread that there is a coördinated effort between moderators of multiple sites to find them and stop them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, handily, brings me on to my favourite part of being a moderator: the moderator community. I will be very sad to lose this connection (this and unlimited editing time for chat messages). These are knowledgeable and friendly people, this includes the community managers that SE employs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mod community is very important as you often find yourself not knowing or forgetting how to do something, and they will know. Also, you'll probably happen upon tools you didn't even know existed, thanks to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can recommend being a moderator, if only for a bit, just to get a good perspective on how SE works behind the scenes. You can always stop when you've had enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for having me as a moderator. It's been a ride!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="3559" LastEditDate="2022-03-09T22:38:59.120" LastActivityDate="2022-03-13T13:10:25.537" Title="Who will take up the mantle?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="38" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-31T09:06:57.740" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I asked a metaphor related question, that is now closed, I was told to read the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/ways-of-looking-at-a-metaphor-1691815&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; by Richard Nordquist about the different metaphor types. I am now looking for a more authoritative reference to read more about it as I don't feel like I am quite grasping the classifications here. Can anyone recommend me a book or give me a name of the field that studies metaphors in detail and classifies them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, there was mention of one more metaphor type called a 'universal metaphor' that is not covered in the above article. What is meant by a universal metaphor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="440528" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Munta" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T13:14:05.310" Title="Metaphor classification" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-03T08:43:02.687" Score="1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I had found one that was pretty good (Parts-of-speech.info), but I just entered the sentence &amp;quot;The kids hoot.&amp;quot; and it told me &amp;quot;determiner noun noun.&amp;quot; If it can't identify &amp;quot;hoot&amp;quot; as a verb...I can't really rely on it for anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any recommendations would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444984" OwnerDisplayName="CJHLambert" LastActivityDate="2022-02-13T00:15:24.063" Title="Any good POS tagging websites?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-14T19:18:34.307" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago the layout of SE sites front pages has changed, to a considerable extent IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it is probably the result of a hard and carefully thought process of programmers and site designers, but I find it difficult see improvements from a visual perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Profile icons are much smaller and details about up/down votes, answers etc. are less visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way is this new layout better or preferable to the previous one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But probably it is just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastActivityDate="2022-02-14T19:18:34.307" Title="Do you like the new layout?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15222" CreationDate="2022-02-15T11:10:32.680" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/584474/oxymoron-pronunciation&quot;&gt;Oxymoron pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is closed for not including research. Is this because the specific dictionaries are not cited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is fine, if that is the only problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-02-15T15:08:50.477" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T15:24:25.280" Title="Should this oxymoron question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15221" CreationDate="2022-02-15T15:24:25.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree and the question is now opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to say that different people pronounce a word differently, but it's not always easy to explain who or especially why. But the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/584603/191178&quot;&gt;top answer&lt;/a&gt; does that and the process to get there certainly wasn't as trivial as looking it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T15:24:25.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-14T23:06:38.260" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a resource where I can see the frequencies of letters with respect to their position in a word and the length of the word. I'd also like to see the frequencies of different combinations of letters, as in &amp;quot;how often does a word start with an e and end with an a&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be extra clear: the most common letter in English is &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, but the most common third letter is...? And what about the most common fourth letter in five-letters-long words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm specifically interested in the frequencies within dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="446609" OwnerDisplayName="user110391" LastEditorUserId="100179" LastEditDate="2023-12-10T14:53:12.927" LastActivityDate="2023-12-10T14:53:12.927" Title="A resource for finding letter frequencies with certain restrictions" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15223" CreationDate="2022-02-15T12:09:08.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English character frequencies are amenable to online search. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O3KbC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The frequency of the letters of the alphabet in English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second problem of frequencies of position in a word of specified length has to be coded. As a coding question it belongs on another site. Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit this into the format of a comment, so I have answered it here only so as to give a pointer to how it may be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the many ways is to code in Mathematica (see the sister Stack Exchange site) and to use the built-in dictionary of almost a hundred thousand words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the answer to your specific 5 word &amp;amp; 4th character query but it is simple to make a routine to examine any length (n) of word and any character (m) within the words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O3KbC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O3KbC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From which you may see that the most common fourth letter in five letter words is &amp;quot;e&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My coding is pretty basic and could be briefer in the hands of a more competent Mathematica user)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the text version of the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(*Look up all words in the Mathematica Dictionary and convert to  lowercase*)  &#xA;allwords = ToLowerCase[DictionaryLookup[]];  &#xA;(*Find all words with length n*)  &#xA;words[n_] := Select[allwords, StringLength[#] == n &amp;amp;];  &#xA;(*Find the mth character in the list of n letter words*)  &#xA;wordNcharacterM[n_, m_] := Map[Take[#, {m}] &amp;amp;, Characters[words[n]]];  &#xA;(*Total number of characters found*)  &#xA;totalChars[n_, m_] := &#xA;  Total[Tally[wordNcharacterM[n, m]]\[Transpose][[2]]];  &#xA;(*Tabulate the results of a tally of the numbers of characters found*)  &#xA;table[n_, m_] := &#xA;  Map[{#[[1]], #[[2]], N[100 #[[2]]/totalChars[n, m], 2]} &amp;amp;, &#xA;   Tally[wordNcharacterM[n, m]]];  &#xA;(*Construct a title table*)  &#xA;tableOut[n_, m_] := &#xA;  Join[{{{&amp;quot;word&amp;quot;, n}, {&amp;quot;character&amp;quot;, m}, &amp;quot; &amp;quot;}}, {{{&amp;quot;letter&amp;quot;}, &amp;quot;number&amp;quot;,&#xA;      &amp;quot;%&amp;quot;}}, table[n, m]];  &#xA;(*Present the table*)  &#xA;outputWordNMCharacterM[n_, m_] := &#xA;  Join[{{{&amp;quot;word&amp;quot;, n}, {&amp;quot;character&amp;quot;, m}, &amp;quot; &amp;quot;}}, {{{&amp;quot;letter&amp;quot;}, &amp;quot;number&amp;quot;,&#xA;      &amp;quot;%&amp;quot;}}, ReverseSort[table[n, m], #1[[2]] &amp;lt; #2[[2]] &amp;amp;]];&#xA;(*Present the table*)&#xA;outputWordNMCharacterM[n_, m_] := &#xA;  Join[{{{&amp;quot;word&amp;quot;, n}, {&amp;quot;character&amp;quot;, m}, &amp;quot; &amp;quot;}}, {{{&amp;quot;letter&amp;quot;}, &amp;quot;number&amp;quot;,&#xA;      &amp;quot;%&amp;quot;}}, ReverseSort[table[n, m], #1[[2]] &amp;lt; #2[[2]] &amp;amp;]];&#xA;(*Present the table*)&#xA;outputWordNMCharacterM[n_, m_] := &#xA;  Join[{{{&amp;quot;word&amp;quot;, n}, {&amp;quot;character&amp;quot;, m}, &amp;quot; &amp;quot;}}, {{{&amp;quot;letter&amp;quot;}, &amp;quot;number&amp;quot;,&#xA;      &amp;quot;%&amp;quot;}}, ReverseSort[table[n, m], #1[[2]] &amp;lt; #2[[2]] &amp;amp;]];&#xA;(*Present the table for five letter words position 4*)&#xA;outputWordNMCharacterM[5, 4] // TableForm&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91338" OwnerDisplayName="Anton" LastEditorUserId="91338" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T16:38:47.350" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T16:38:47.350" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15223" CreationDate="2022-02-15T22:55:58.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For specific combinations of letters within words of a specific length, use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.crosswordsolver.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crossword solver&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a bit more flexibility, you can use a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=solving:wordlists:dictionary_search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regex dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. (Of course, this means you have to know or learn regex... not trivial.) Here's the regex for &amp;quot;how often does a word start with an e and end with an a&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;^e[^\s]*a$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your other use case, it's a bit more complicated but you could string together several tools. First, you get (for example) the fourth character of every five letter word, which could be done using &lt;a href=&quot;https://regex101.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Regex101&lt;/a&gt; with a wordlist and the regex &lt;code&gt;^...(.).$&lt;/code&gt; (must have multi line matching and maybe case insensitive modifiers, also maybe use &lt;code&gt;[a-z]&lt;/code&gt; in the regex instead of &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt;, since the latter matches spaces and hyphens), then export only the matches. Then, feed the results to something that tells you the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.online-utility.org/text/frequent_words.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most common occurrence in the list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T22:55:58.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-21T05:13:30.113" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/584962/are-canadianisms-like-aboot-equally-common-on-the-american-side-of-the-border&quot;&gt;Are Canadianisms like &amp;quot;aboot&amp;quot; equally common on the American side of the border, adjacent to it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that people can still answer it, but at first glance it looks like there is some problem with a question (that I'm not seeing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36050" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T05:13:30.113" Title="Why is my question about &quot;aboot&quot; locked?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-02-21T21:41:08.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15229" CreationDate="2022-03-01T18:42:57.900" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/542411/mnemonic-for-the-planets-in-indian-english&quot;&gt;Mnemonic for the planets in Indian English&lt;/a&gt; about back in 2020. The question has been closed as opinion-based after less than 2 years. However, I need to ask something about this &amp;quot;elegant mother&amp;quot; and Indians. So, how can  I edit my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383248" LastEditorUserId="383248" LastEditDate="2022-03-01T18:50:26.570" LastActivityDate="2022-03-01T19:58:56.107" Title="How can I edit my question that was closed as opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15228" CreationDate="2022-03-01T19:58:56.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Reframe as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-origin&lt;/a&gt; question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what type of answer you were expecting, but the answer you got (and accepted) explained the origin of that particular wording. Tracing the origin of a phrase is answered by facts (citations) and reveals as much as can be known about why things happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-03-01T19:58:56.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-02T15:40:39.520" Score="8" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this has happened to you, but I find it excruciatingly annoying when, in a relatively short comment, a link I've included takes up a hundred or even two hundred characters, thereby rendering my comment too long and forcing me to chop it up and continue in another box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example. Suppose I look up on Google Books the phrase &amp;quot;you met's&amp;quot; because I want to find and share examples of a [noun + relative clause] being used as a Determiner, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That woman you met's husband&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would give me the URL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+met%27s%22&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiWzvvL46f2AhUQi1wKHRFaBzgQ_AUoAXoECAEQCw&amp;amp;biw=1366&amp;amp;bih=615&amp;amp;dpr=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+met%27s%22&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiWzvvL46f2AhUQi1wKHRFaBzgQ_AUoAXoECAEQCw&amp;amp;biw=1366&amp;amp;bih=615&amp;amp;dpr=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which could take up a huge chink of the character allowance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way around this annoying problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2022-03-02T15:58:16.587" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T08:23:26.313" Title="How to stop links in comments taking up the entire character allowance" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15230" CreationDate="2022-03-02T15:56:49.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Funny you should ask. I've recently stumbled across a really useful solution to this problem. More specifically, I was shown how to do it to reduce a four-line URL that I had to include in a document. Most of you are probably intimately familiar with it, so this is for those of you who might find it useful who aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does involve a particular website, but it's so useful and the website so well-known that I doubt this will be taken as an advertisement here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution is to go to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/app&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinyurl.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stick your diplodocus-length URL in the box there and let it generate a nice squat wombat-length one for you. Then use that for your link in your comment box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the long URL link in your question, this would give you a wieldy replacement of something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/377u3fft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tinyurl.com/377u3fft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bingo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-03-08T08:23:26.313" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T08:23:26.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15230" CreationDate="2022-03-02T16:23:02.777" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the Google link in the question, simply strip off everything not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;q=&amp;quot;you met's&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; is relevant and needs to stay, but the &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; after that and everything else is irrelevant. You can even use just the domain name: for these links, &lt;code&gt;www.&lt;/code&gt; isn't needed. Note that some characters are expanded to their encoded form when displayed, but I typed &lt;code&gt;https://google.com/search?q=&amp;quot;you met's&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; for the URL, and that's what was displayed in the answer preview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://google.com/search?q=%22you%20met%27s%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://google.com/search?q=%22you%20met%27s%22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to get results in books, include the &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;tbm=bks&lt;/code&gt; part. &lt;code&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=&amp;quot;you met's&amp;quot;&amp;amp;tbm=bks&lt;/code&gt;. There will be a similar specification for other result sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+met%27s%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+met%27s%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For links to ELU questions, you can omit almost everything except the post number for a post on the same site: this question is number 15230 on Meta.ELU, so you can enter a link with just a relative URL: &lt;a href=&quot;/q/15230&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; which is coded as &lt;code&gt;[link](/q/15230)&lt;/code&gt; and is a lot shorter than &lt;code&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15230/how-to-stop-links-in-comments-taking-up-the-entire-character-allowance&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links can always be examined in the source code of a post if you're unsure of their destination, although browsers do a good job of interpreting them these days and displaying some sort of status text. The days of using JavaScript to alter the status bar when hovering over a link are over; and Stack Exchange doesn't allow scripting anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's this facility which explains why link shorteners are frowned upon — a link to a tinyurl URL shows no information about where that link will &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; end up. Here's one which I will say will go to OED. It doesn't, but it's safe to click on: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/yae6wd2m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to OED&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;https://tinyurl.com/yae6wd2m&lt;/code&gt; [Check the edit history if you want to see whether the link is still what I originally started out with: it could have been altered and there's no way of knowing the destination.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link shorteners are improved when there's a preview possible: &lt;a href=&quot;https://preview.tinyurl.com/yae6wd2m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this is the same link&lt;/a&gt; but to a preview page &lt;code&gt;https://preview.tinyurl.com/yae6wd2m&lt;/code&gt; which shows you exactly where it's going. With tinyurl it's possible for users to set a cookie so that they always get the preview, but that's an &lt;strong&gt;end-user&lt;/strong&gt; setting. When you're constructing a link, using the &lt;code&gt;preview&lt;/code&gt; version of the URL forces that behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2022-03-03T10:36:12.597" LastActivityDate="2022-03-03T10:36:12.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13756" CreationDate="2022-03-02T16:46:58.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am at a loss at to what the question intended to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be erroneously based on a misunderstanding of mnemonics in general. Mnemonics are not standardised and &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; word beginning with E could be substituted or an entirely new sentence could be produced and it would still be a mnemonic. It is a better mnemonic when the mnemonic itself is memorable. Memorable mnemonics tend to become popular. It happens that a sentence (and especially a coherent sentence with simple words) is easier to memorise than a jumble of words or initial letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had I seen it, I would have voted to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T16:46:58.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-04T13:50:56.663" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/585518/in-english-are-trains-female&quot;&gt;In English, are trains female?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed due to apparently being a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46807/what-is-the-gender-of-an-aircraft&quot;&gt;What is the gender of an aircraft?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, aircraft and trains are not the same thing, and my question &lt;strong&gt;specifically&lt;/strong&gt; refers to the latter. I am aware that many objects are referred to by feminine pronouns in English, but I would like to know about how trains are commonly referred to in everyday English speech. Therefore, I would like this question to be reopened. Thankyou.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slightly annoyingly, a message appeared at the top of my question pointing to the aircraft answer and I clicked that it did &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; answer my question, yet my response was apparently ignored or dismissed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="265820" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-12-03T01:41:44.557" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T01:41:44.557" Title="Can I get my question reopened please?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-07T20:06:21.817" Score="16" ViewCount="1253" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6#questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6&quot;&gt;next week, 2022-03-14&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s how it’ll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2022-03-14 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will post the final questionnaire on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6&quot;&gt;Election page&lt;/a&gt;. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2022-03-29T20:04:33.693" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T20:04:33.693" Title="2022 Moderator Election Q&amp;A – Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-08T08:26:12.683" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators try to encourage users to answer questions in the answer box rather than in comments, in accordance with the Stack Exchange protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you do so, what are your views on locking questions or moving comments to chat to encourage formal answers? Do you think the requirement that answers quote a source, and that a link be provided, discourages formal answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T08:26:12.683" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-03-08T08:26:12.683" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-08T19:04:17.640" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;MSE&lt;/a&gt;, the Stack Exchange Meta site,  and are you aware of its goings on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an elected moderator with added responsibilities; do you plan to focus your attention solely on EL&amp;amp;U? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T19:04:17.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-10T09:13:57.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well known in the community that Single Word Requests attract low quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What thoughts do you have on how to change that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T09:13:57.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-10T15:32:28.453" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few users who have a very rigid view of what type of questions are allowed on EL&amp;amp;U, and will often notify the OP that their question is not worthy of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently if someone posts an answer, even if correct and helpful, that answer might be criticised &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; downvoted due to the perceived low-quality question. I feel this type of &lt;em&gt;critical&lt;/em&gt; behaviour alienates users, old and new, who abandon the site bemused that their contributions are viewed unuseful or failing to match the gold standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an elected moderator on EL&amp;amp;U, how would you encourage users–especially native speakers–to remain? What can be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T15:32:28.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-10T16:13:11.277" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some regular contributors feel that if something is not in OED (or a comparable source), it is not a part of English language, and is therefore outside the scope of this site. Some of them very assertively promote that view through their comments, downvotes, and votes to close. Others feel that this site is at its best precisely when it explores the margins of the language, such as the new patterns of usage that seem to be catching on, but are not yet established, or possible, but not widely noticed ambiguities, or the nuances of pragmatics that are not captured by dictionary definitions. Given that both factions make valuable contributions to this site, what can be done to ensure that they coexist peacefully?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This question overlaps with one of Mari-Lou A's questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T16:13:11.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-10T22:12:59.867" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, I have found these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Game of Words by Espy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alphabet Avenue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Dictionary of wordplay by Dave Morice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other books like these? Not necessarily in English, other languages (French, Spanish etc) are good too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="448622" OwnerDisplayName="Jay" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T22:38:49.390" Title="Can you recommend some books on recreational wordplay, like Alphabet Avenue?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-03-11T09:08:18.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-11T17:33:47.550" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you ever broken a rule on Stack Exchange and did you get caught? If you did break a rule (whether or not you were caught), how does that experience affect how you would go about enforcing Stack Exchange rules and policies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't broken any rules, do you think someone who got away with breaking a rule in the past (but is currently a member in good standing) should be excluded from being a moderator? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T17:33:47.550" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-11T23:03:11.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions are closed because voters see them as duplicates. The so-called duplicate existing answers often are not completely relevant to the question, or may be usefully complemented by the question. Over-enthusiastic or dismissive closers can miss this too easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, questions deemed too trivial to belong to this site may often raise points missed by the over-zealous closers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this perspective, what is the right balance to strike between answering a question so as to help the questioner (&lt;em&gt;perhaps ignoring some old and sometimes incomplete duplicate, or not passing the buck to another site&lt;/em&gt;), or closing it in a formally justifiable way but failing completely to help the questioner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91338" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T23:03:11.127" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-12T08:45:15.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language changes, and so do web sites. EL&amp;amp;U has thousands of answered questions (hard to search) and many knowledgeable and experienced contributors. Within the Stack Exchange framework and given these resources, how do you envision EL&amp;amp;U’s development in the next few years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2022-03-12T08:45:15.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2022-03-12T16:23:19.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many questions on this site get closed, but, because they don't fit the criteria for automatic deletion, remain on the site. If you are elected to be a moderator, you will have practically unlimited power to delete any such question. How would you exercise that power? Do you see deletion of closed questions as something that should be done only rarely, or you think that the reasons that led to closing a question usually create a strong presumption in favour of deleting it as well (assuming it was justifiably closed in the first place)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2022-03-12T16:23:19.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15217" CreationDate="2022-03-13T13:10:25.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not an answer, but Matt, how much time on average per week did you have to spend moderating ELU? And is there a sort of KPI to monitor mod performance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for potential mods to take note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2022-03-13T13:10:25.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-14T20:07:31.210" Score="11" ViewCount="883" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The 2022 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;2022 Moderator Election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2022-03-29T20:04:38.517" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T20:04:38.517" Title="2022 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|election|moderators|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-03-14T20:07:31.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-15T02:18:08.653" Score="-10" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative English and public opinion is a part of English and of communication.&#xA;If you do not allow for such communication on this site, you will soon become irrelevant and ineffective as happens to every academic endeavor which ignores hypothetical and abstract creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English language is not a static object.  It is evolving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is crucial that you allow the following tag in this community &lt;code&gt;word-creation&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is the best example of the type of academic creativity which is necessary in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/585890/help-me-create-an-adjective-for-in-heart&quot;&gt;Help me create an adjective for &amp;quot;in heart&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is this type of question necessary to be allowed for academic growth, the type of answer I received was of a very appropriate academic nature.  It was educational and thought provoking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many creative writers use this site to do things with the English language which go beyond the scope of high school English.  These are advanced topics which should be allowed or this site is not academic in nature at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Academia is not only about research and known study. Creative problem solving is just as much a scientific process of academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4988" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T12:31:29.193" Title="This community should include opinion and subjects which fall under creative English" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15249" CreationDate="2022-03-15T12:31:29.193" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is always evolving, but Stack Exchange in general and our site in particular are not a good place to ask people &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;what colour should the bike shed be?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're set up for questions that have definitive answers, supported by references where necessary (and it usually is necessary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I want to invent a word&amp;quot; is not what the main site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat rooms&lt;/a&gt; on the network where people would be happy to entertain such discussion. I'm sure &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage-multi-layered-discourse-room&quot;&gt;our main room&lt;/a&gt; would be pleased to chat about it. There are plenty of other sites that are about creativity (not only in English) too, that would be happy to chat with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T12:31:29.193" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15248" CreationDate="2022-03-15T21:43:37.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it the case that we cannot nominate other people?  Only ourselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T21:43:37.787" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-03-15T21:43:37.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15248" CreationDate="2022-03-17T13:41:17.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One bit of information voters might find helpful that I don't see linked anywhere obvious in the election pages is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/252643/273494&quot;&gt;how the candidate score is calculated&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Candidate Score can range from 0 to 40, and is calculated as&#xA;follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 point for each 1000 reputation up to 20,000 reputation for a maximum of 20 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 point each for Moderation badges - Civic Duty, Cleanup, Deputy, Electorate, Marshal, Reviewer, Sportsmanship, Steward - for a maximum&#xA;of 8 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 point each for Editing badges - Copy Editor, Explainer, Organizer, Refiner, Strunk and White, Tag Editor - for a maximum of 6 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 point each for Participation badges - Constituent, Convention, Enthusiast, Investor, Quorum, Yearling - for a maximum of 6 points.&#xA;For badges that can be awarded multiple times only 1 point is granted&#xA;for each badge type, thus ensuring a maximum score of 40 points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stats are calculated based on the current state of the candidate, so&#xA;scores on past elections will not reflect the state of the candidates&#xA;at the time the election was run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The original post has links to each of the badges that I didn't reproduce here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2022-03-17T13:41:17.193" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-03-17T13:41:17.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15254" CreationDate="2022-03-18T05:36:33.530" Score="-8" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to share my heart. Maybe this is a therapy post, but I really mean it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I don't like Dictionary-only answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to single out any users as examples, because that's not my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I want to celebrate users' wisdom&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not grandstanding. I'm not trying to seem smart. If you think I'm wrong, please tell me why so I can understand. I love forums so we can understand!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I see answers with &lt;em&gt;only/mainly&lt;/em&gt; this and my blood curdles...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plagiarize&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;transitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own :&#xA;use (another's production) without crediting the source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;intransitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or&#xA;product derived from an existing source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to learn from the users I see and read across the site and the network. Many of them banter with me in the comments, which is part of why I &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;love&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; seeing their Answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see an answer from, say pseudonymously, &lt;em&gt;Jane Doe&lt;/em&gt; who got into it with me from the comments, I always expect brilliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, an Answer like above is a great start, but then I look forward to reading something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like how the &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt; definition reads. You might use both in sentences like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never plagiarize. You don't want the meat of your hard work to be found in an encyclopedia because then someone might think that the encyclopedia plagiarized you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On EL&amp;amp;U, I learn from the witty and creative minds who craft great answers. So, please...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever answer a Question, don't rob me of the joy you offer. Quote your source, then &lt;em&gt;add your own thoughts&lt;/em&gt; so I can enjoy them more than what I read elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315731" LastEditorUserId="315731" LastEditDate="2022-03-18T14:57:19.360" LastActivityDate="2022-03-20T06:31:03.073" Title="Why I enjoy EL&amp;U users more than dictionaries" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2022-03-19T09:51:18.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15253" CreationDate="2022-03-18T21:42:13.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When writing a question, above all, it should be your own question, and when writing an answer, it should be your own expert answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9603/44619&quot;&gt;Do not post questions or answers from elsewhere on the Internet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[…]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A post that contains no original work at all (a paste-only post) is often a sign of a non-expert answer, and may have no value, but this is not always true. Examples of quote-only posts that nevertheless have value might include a quotation that required in-depth research to locate, or that was laboriously reproduced from a print-only source. […]&lt;/em&gt; @MetaEd Oct 25, 2016&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has long been a series of objections to answers consisting &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; of copied dictionary definitions or texts, even instances when they have been correctly formatted and attributed,  from outside sources. It is an age-old argument across the Stack Exchange network.  The main crux being that these answers are unoriginal and lack the answerer's personal interpretation and insight. That is a fair criticism, but on EL&amp;amp;U we have many users whose first or second language is not English. Their understanding of the finer points in grammar may exceed that of an ordinary native speaker but the confidence to expose their written efforts for inspection can be intimidating. Sometimes the resulting typos and minor errors can be ridiculed in public. We have evidence of this behaviour (&lt;em&gt;Your capitalisation is rather eccentric&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;You pored over it? Or are you a dog?&lt;/em&gt;) beneath the OP's post even though the OP is an American English speaker with ten years of teaching English as a foreign language under their belt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In single-word requests, sometimes a single word is the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, the fact that a non-native speaker may get there first and add a dictionary definition, as long as it is properly attributed, should not be discouraged. Ever.  If someone disapproves of the effort they can either ignore or downvote the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP appears to label posts that contain copied definitions or extracts as examples of plagiarism, but if the sources are clearly attributed and a link is provided, it is not. The OP has confused &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/unoriginality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unoriginality&lt;/a&gt; with theft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Plagiarize  &lt;sub&gt;verb&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;transitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) &lt;strong&gt;as one's own&lt;/strong&gt; : use (another's production) without crediting the source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;intransitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or&#xA;product derived from an existing source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above looks like it is copied from a dictionary and despite the definition being extremely succinct, one would be hard pressed to find a discordant voice. Plagiarism, in my view, is the act of &lt;em&gt;kidnapping&lt;/em&gt; a unique string of words created by someone else but passing them off as one's own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would my explanation be preferable? Unlike Merriam-Webster, I am not an authority and I do not have 191 years of standing. Some people prefer to cite a dictionary entry to support their answer, and there is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it is commendable because a dictionary has authority and we generally trust its impartiality. Quoting  a dictionary in an answer shows that the author has at least made a sincere genuine effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be clear, if a user on EL&amp;amp;U properly formats a quotation and attributes the source&lt;/strong&gt;–as we have done in our posts–&lt;strong&gt;it is never plagiarism.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2022-03-20T06:31:03.073" LastActivityDate="2022-03-20T06:31:03.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2022-03-21T20:18:53.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Keep it at 3 because that helped me&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Question was closed, then re-opened within a few hours of asking: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/586354/can-copy-pasta-mean-something-similar-to-copywriting-or-boilerplate&quot;&gt;Can &amp;#39;pasta copy&amp;#39; be different from &amp;#39;copy pasta&amp;#39; (to mean boilerplate copy [writing])?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly wasn't happy with my Question at first. Then, it was closed with a lot of information and input from others. I edited it and it re-opened. I'm happier with it even though the score is lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the threshold at 5, none of that would have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my big contribution to Stack Exchange. Being downvoted made me a better person, just how being closed made a better Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315731" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T20:18:53.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-21T20:32:44.783" Score="10" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have ordered the four candidates in the current election, but there seems to be no mechanism to check and then confirm/finalize my vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a note that my choices have been “saved” but what is that supposed to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has my vote been recorded or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2022-08-08T14:00:44.130" Title="How do I know if my vote has been registered?" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15256" CreationDate="2022-03-21T20:35:52.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that the only way to know if you have voted is to wait and see if you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/116/constituent&quot;&gt;the Constituent badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There must be a better way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-03-21T22:05:51.390" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T22:05:51.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15248" CreationDate="2022-03-21T22:09:56.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I missed this during the comment period, but I see now one candidate, Lawrence, made &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6?tab=election#post-586325&quot;&gt;the following comment in their questionnaire responses&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mods can also reverse unfair downvotes&lt;/strong&gt; and privately communicate with repeat offenders when flagged, but that probably doesn't have a lot of impact on retaining the native speaker. What would likely help more is for mods to delete nasty comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is news to me; as far as I know mods cannot reverse downvotes; this is a system process that happens either automatically (e.g. serial voting reversal) or by manual intervention by CMs/employees with database access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this a misconception, a reference to something else, or can moderators on EL&amp;amp;U actually do this for some reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63067" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T22:09:56.927" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-03-21T22:09:56.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15256" CreationDate="2022-03-21T22:11:16.720" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a &amp;quot;pending save&amp;quot; countdown (in blue) after you make changes that tells you when your vote(s) will be saved. When it says &amp;quot;selections saved&amp;quot; (in black), it's saved. On desktop this is located next to &amp;quot;Your ballot&amp;quot; but on mobile it's higher up, underneath &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; candidates&amp;quot; (and disappears after about 10 seconds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can refresh the page, and if your choices are still where you left them, you're good to go. (Otherwise, try again.) This is a little faster than waiting for the badge, and also works after you get the badge if you want to change your rankings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, admittedly, a workaround. Many people find the current indication unclear and want it to be changed. See the Meta SE feature request &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/371303/323179&quot;&gt;Introduce a clear visual indicator that confirms that one's vote counts in the election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Desktop:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPjlD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPjlD.png&quot; alt=&quot;saving on desktop in sidebar: &amp;quot;your ballot ... pending save imminent&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mobile:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uv1hI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uv1hI.png&quot; alt=&quot;saving on mobile: &amp;quot;N candidates ... pending save in 1&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-08-08T14:00:44.130" LastActivityDate="2022-08-08T14:00:44.130" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-21T23:22:44.783" Score="12" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/586413/why-the-pronunciation-of-wd-40-is-double-d-forty-and-not-double-u-d-forty&quot;&gt;potentially interesting question&lt;/a&gt; based on pronunciation of a common house-hold chemical....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question  was quickly shoved off without much ado to the closed questions queue and closed..&#xA;It was actually an interesting question, just badly put.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular post, a comment was made by a well-respected user: &amp;quot;It's not clear to me what research Tomás should have done that he didn't do.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to start polishing good ideas, not discourage new users.&#xA;There are still some of us that look for the germ of an idea, a kernel of interesting data that will expand our knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is apparently based on regional pronunciation, or more probably, socioeconomic.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see that post re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{EDIT}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the post was re-opened, and then re-closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote to re-re-open.&#xA;We need more questions of this type that draw interest and traffic to the site...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Look at the number of comments and good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2022-03-26T20:14:10.727" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T12:09:34.820" Title="WD-40 pronunciation question treated badly" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15260" CreationDate="2022-03-22T07:55:08.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been reopened and the title has also now been edited to remove the obvious misconception from generalising the particular (which probably contributed to closure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-03-22T07:55:08.497" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-22T17:29:39.713" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a question closed for lack of research/ answers being in &amp;quot;commonly-available references&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, why is this considered a good reason to close a question? Surely, the replication of the knowledge in these &amp;quot;commonly-available references&amp;quot; is a good thing, not a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="448431" LastActivityDate="2022-03-22T17:29:39.713" Title="Why are &quot;Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references...&quot; off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-22T21:06:26.637" Score="6" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;See any &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6&quot;&gt;election page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of curiosity, is this an HTML thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T21BH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T21BH.png&quot; alt=&quot;box shown below nomination showing 4 categories of the candidate score and the total&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...or is this a function of Flair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-03-23T13:01:23.287" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T15:51:46.973" Title="How can I get my candidate score, as in Mod elections" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15263" CreationDate="2022-03-23T13:01:45.773" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a SEDE query that accepts a list of user IDs and outputs your scores: &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/298418/candidate-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Candidate Score&lt;/a&gt;. Your ID is the number in the URL for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/current&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/####/name&lt;/code&gt;. The data in SEDE is updated only every Sunday. You can use this query for any site if you switch sites (using the &amp;quot;search by name or url box&amp;quot;); you will have to get your ID for that site's profile to use because it'll be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want the total, try election chat with &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/134773?m=60727042#60727042&quot;&gt;What is my candidate score&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. If ElectionBot is there, it will answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to go further, you could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2018/05/01/live-editing-html-css-chrome-devtools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dev Tools&lt;/a&gt; to edit the source of the election page in your browser to make it look like your &amp;quot;candidate flair&amp;quot;, then take a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be handy to have this information more readily available. For that, see Meta SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/273494/323179&quot;&gt;I would like to see my mod candidate score, preferrably on my user page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-03-26T11:36:12.420" LastActivityDate="2022-03-26T11:36:12.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-25T19:48:11.313" Score="-2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, Meta has become a little confusing for me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have Mod elections, and Question collection, but if I am not actively seeking election yet  would still like to post my opinion vis a vis site policy, where do I post my platform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have certain opinions about the site going forward into the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I do it on the elections site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think comments section is not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been reviewing the comments, but can some user please explain how I can post a candidacy type of post without actually running?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2022-03-30T15:16:09.437" LastActivityDate="2022-03-30T15:16:09.437" Title="If I am NOT running for Mod, but would like to state my personal platform" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15265" CreationDate="2022-03-25T22:39:02.167" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best bet is to post a new question on meta advocating for the changes you want to see on the site. Maybe a few questions depending on how much you have to say, since it works best when each question is about a single topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The election channels are intended as a way to figure out what people you want to moderate the site, so it's not great for other types of discussions. People won't be looking at anything related to the election  once it's over anyway. Plus, it's actually impossible to continue the discussion in some cases: no more nominations (or even comments on nominations) can be posted now that voting on candidates has started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that Meta isn't the best place for all discussions. Would anyone want to see a chat room dedicated to moderation? It would be a place for people to bring attention to posts that they think need attention, namely close, reopen, delete or undelete votes. (I know Stack Overflow has this type of chat room, and I think some smaller sites do too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T22:39:02.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15263" CreationDate="2022-03-27T15:14:45.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that @OlegValteriswithUkraine has installed ElectionBot (which seems to be hosted courtesy of @SamuelLiew), you can go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/134773/2022-english-language-usage-stack-exchange-moderator-election-chat&quot;&gt;2022 English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange Moderator Election Chat&lt;/a&gt; and type the following to get your candidate score:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@ElectionBot What is my candidate score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: ElectionBot is room-specific. I tried it out in the main EL&amp;amp;U chat room (during an election), and it didn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2022-03-27T15:51:46.973" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T15:51:46.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-28T13:47:41.393" Score="11" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;SO is initiating the trial of a new feature, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/416851/2562182&quot;&gt;“Staging Ground”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This effectively acts as a review process that occurs &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; a question asked by a new user appears on the main page. It’s something we, here on EL&amp;amp;U, have mulled as a way to improve the quality of the stream of questions we get on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is in the very early stages, and will initially apply only to SO. But like other quality control mechanisms that initially start out on SO (e.g. moving from 5 VtC to 3 VtC), it might eventually make its way to our little site¹.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, something worth keeping your eye on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹&lt;sub&gt; Of course, that’s only possible if the experiment on SO is considered a success, and even after that I wouldn’t expect it to be rolled out to other sites quickly - I’m thinking a year or two here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-03-28T16:41:49.980" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T19:09:44.927" Title="Worth noting: “Staging Ground” coming to Stack Overflow" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15269" CreationDate="2022-03-28T17:46:13.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that we are building with Stack Overflow as the primary use case, but with a keen interest in being able to offer it to sites around the network where it would work for that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in the post linked above, there will be a separate post on MSE in the coming weeks that will open up the question to non-SO sites on the network as to how this tool (and the related &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11926/55623&quot;&gt;Ask Wizard&lt;/a&gt;) could work for your site, what if any modifications might make it a stronger tool for you, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look forward to hearing your feedback on that post when it goes up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want some Staging Ground?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;MSE post forthcoming…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Good place to share thoughts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="375145" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2022-03-28T17:48:36.013" LastActivityDate="2022-03-28T17:48:36.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15260" CreationDate="2022-03-29T12:09:34.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should remain closed. I (British English - Yes, they sell it here and in the rest of Europe) have listened to the linked Youtube video and nowhere do I hear anything but &amp;quot;double-you-dee-forty&amp;quot;. The question was asked on the basis of a mishearing by a Spanish speaker who admits the mishearing might be his fault. EL&amp;amp;U cannot explain why the mishearing took place, nor does it need to: the question does not need an answer as it does not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T12:09:34.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-29T20:04:13.283" Score="26" ViewCount="492" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6&quot;&gt;Moderator election #6&lt;/a&gt; on English Language &amp;amp; Usage has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/191178&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/191178.png&quot; alt=&quot;Laurel&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/50044&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/50044.png&quot; alt=&quot;NVZ&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They will be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please join me in thanking Matt E. Эллен, who's been serving as a moderator since the 2014 election, and will be stepping down from the role:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/3559&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3559.png&quot; alt=&quot;Matt E. Эллен&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/election/6&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opavote.com/results/5949294306656256&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T03:43:05.333" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T18:49:50.343" Title="2022 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15272" CreationDate="2022-03-30T04:34:43.357" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations and welcome to our new moderators ♦! Looking forward to your extended contribution to EL&amp;amp;U. Best of luck, Laurel and NVZ!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, Matt, for your exceptional service. We'll miss you as a moderator, but I hope you stick around (those quality answers won't write themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lawrence and Jesse, thank you for putting yourselves out there. You were both good candidates with years of experience (inside EL&amp;amp;U and outside too) and I hope you consider running again in a future election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356843" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-04-11T18:49:50.343" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T18:49:50.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15269" CreationDate="2022-03-30T13:07:41.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see exactly how this might seem like a good idea, and might actually be on SO. However, this is a terrible, terrible idea for sites like EL&amp;amp;U. The mechanism for closing questions here is already dominated by a small number of zealous close voters, who sometimes close good questions and often link questions which would be useful for future users to redundant or unrelated posts. We don't get enough good questions here, but this won't be helped by yet more of them not seeing the light of day. We need mechanisms that will drive more traffic to the site and encourage new and existing users to contribute; we don't need measures that will put them off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2022-03-30T13:07:41.810" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-30T17:32:11.960" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite some time ago, a hi-rep user told me in a comment on meta that self-deletion of a comment on the main which has already been flagged as &amp;quot;unfriendly or unkind&amp;quot; will lock in that flag, and count against the &lt;em&gt;flagee&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am struggling to find the comment, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any merit to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and is there any way we see if our comments have been flagged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-03-30T19:04:39.487" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T17:05:00.177" Title="Does self-deletion of a comment flagged as 'unkind' lock in the flag?" Tags="|discussion|support|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15275" CreationDate="2022-03-30T18:21:55.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to see if someone else has raised a flag against your content. If you aren't harassing another user with comments, or ignoring warnings from the mod team that your comments have crossed a line you may not have been aware of, you have no reason to worry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happens when I flag a comment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In addition to bringing the comment to the attention of the moderators, a sufficient number of flags on a single comment will cause it to be deleted automatically. The number of flags required for deletion varies based on the number of votes on the comment, as well as the content of the comment itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17364/how-does-comment-voting-and-flagging-work/17365#17365&quot;&gt;an faq post on Meta&lt;/a&gt; explains everything you might want to know about comment flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have deleted many an intemperate comment that I regretted after I went back and reread it. I'm sure that someone probably flagged them as unfriendly at some point, and it hasn't really impacted me. When I was a moderator I saw a lot of completely innocuous comments flagged as &amp;quot;unfriendly&amp;quot;, so when looking at a user's profile, I would rarely look at the number of those flags unless it was really high, and then I would go back and review the content of the comments to see if there was a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2022-03-30T18:36:49.783" LastActivityDate="2022-03-30T18:36:49.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15275" CreationDate="2022-03-30T18:55:29.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17364/how-does-comment-voting-and-flagging-work/17365#17365&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment flags do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; affect the commenter in any way if a comment gets deleted, but they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; count towards the flagger's helpful flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/359738/what-happens-to-a-comment-flag-if-that-comment-gets-deleted-by-its-author&quot;&gt;What happens to a comment flag if that comment gets deleted by its author?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe self-deleted comments show that a user has understood their mistake and has decided to remove their comment of their own accord. Action need not be taken against such a user. The flagger &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; benefit because their goal was to get the unfriendly comment deleted (so the flag is marked as &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; because the flagger &amp;quot;helped&amp;quot; the community get rid of the unfriendly comment(s), even though it was self-deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess as long as you delete your comments before higher authority can take action, you won't get affected in any way (it still won't affect you even if a mod deletes it, but read on). If you're a frequent critic and a pattern of these unfriendly comments comes to notice, moderators &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; intervene (they would investigate all your deleted comments and decide what to do [most likely a private mod message or a talk in chat in case of unfriendly comments]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and is there anyway we see if our comments have been flagged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, no. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126787&quot;&gt;The system does not notify you if your comment is flagged.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356843" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-03-31T17:05:00.177" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T17:05:00.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15275" CreationDate="2022-03-31T12:12:08.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/359745/323179&quot;&gt;relevant Meta SE post&lt;/a&gt;, a comment flag should be marked helpful when the comment is deleted, no matter what caused that. The user has no direct way of knowing that their comment was flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to catch potential problems, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/284058/323179&quot;&gt;flag will automatically be raised&lt;/a&gt; if a user has too many recent comments that were flagged and deleted as rude or unfriendly (the first two options when flagging). Moderators will then review that flag and decide what needs to happen. (If the comments crossed the line but the user doesn't have a history, they'd likely get a warning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you notice an ongoing pattern of misbehavior, flag a post for moderator attention with all the details you have. We know that you can't see deleted comments, but you should describe what you remember. I would prefer getting a flag like this even if it's redundant over not knowing about problems. Also, please don't use public places like chat or meta to call out specific users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T12:12:08.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15294" CreationDate="2022-04-03T14:51:39.153" Score="0" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know why &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/586663/what-is-the-origin-of-playing-into-someones-hands&quot;&gt;What is the origin of &amp;quot;playing into someone&amp;#39;s hands&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; was removed from the HNQ&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; list. According to the guidance given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349179/does-se-have-some-general-non-website-specific-guidelines-of-removing-questions&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, we recommend that you exclude questions that attract negative attention to your sites, that is, questions that are controversial, start large amounts of debate or arguments or even edit wars. Removing a question should not be a substitute for fixing it! Remember that it may take several hours for a moderator to respond to a flag so do what you can, first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the title seems click-baity or doesn't adequately describe the question, edit it!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the body is full of spelling or grammatical errors, fix them!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the body contains unnecessary detail or salacious content, see if it can be removed without impacting the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is unclear or broad, vote to close it. In most cases it will be better to close a question and wait for it to be improved rather than asking for it to be removed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tool is a big gun and should be used sparingly. Don't reach for it if you think the question can be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this question did not attract negative attention: it was not controversial, did not start large amounts of debates and there were no edit wars. The question was closed once, but it was edited (and really well too) and reopened (after which it became a hot network question). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phrase-origin&lt;/a&gt; tagged question surely &amp;quot;made the site look good to visitors&amp;quot; and even attracted an answer from an expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It was a Hot Network Question for almost two days, just about one day short of being &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; removed from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For new users visiting this site, HNQ stands for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/60756/what-are-the-criteria-for-questions-to-be-selected-for-hot-network-questions&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356843" LastEditorUserId="50590" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T20:23:16.733" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T20:23:16.733" Title="Why was this question removed from the HNQ list?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|hot-network-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15269" CreationDate="2022-04-03T19:09:44.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me obvious that Questions should be subject to review before being published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems equally obvious that a timescale of six to eight days, let alone weeks, would be unjustified in logic, even if as an arbitrary ruling it was not unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the mechanism for closing questions here is being abused by any number of zealous close voters, why should that not be addressed separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193296" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T19:09:44.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7716" CreationDate="2022-04-03T19:33:08.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest those Questions are not at all duplicates, but they do happen to share almost identical Answers… and that the same thing will crop up frequently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be wrong with a standard mechanism/procedure/wording for dealing with exactly that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not use boiler-plate wording acknowledging exactly that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Although these are/seem to be different Questions, in fact they lead to the same Answer: (link)&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest first running that through a review process but I wouldn't insist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193296" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T19:33:08.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15186" CreationDate="2022-04-03T23:18:23.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest there can never be a definitive policy, because it's too likely there will always be words like &lt;em&gt;gay, black&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;queer&lt;/em&gt; which move in and out of favour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gay&lt;/em&gt; seems to bounce back and forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Black&lt;/em&gt; was quite acceptable until 50 years ago, replaced by &lt;em&gt;coloured&lt;/em&gt; for a decade or three and is now largely back in favour - here in the UK, anyway - because it's somehow shed its derogatory sense and become purely informative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Queer&lt;/em&gt; was once almost as derogatory as the &lt;em&gt;N-word&lt;/em&gt;, and so banned except when used by a member of that group, yet in the last few years it's somehow been pretty-much rehabilitated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think Andrew's first Answer was wholly right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193296" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-04T01:26:48.837" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T01:26:48.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5305" CreationDate="2022-04-03T23:49:11.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR. I have read the original question and the answer it complained about; that's all. I have certainly not tried to follow all the text on this page. The resultant huhu illustrates a topic we don't really discuss here much -- what to do with false presuppositions. We do about as well as we could expect with linguistic nonsense, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But non-linguistic nonsense, like sexism and racism and political lies, are trickier, since not everyone has the same standards for what's tasty and what's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, as pointed out, the question's presupposition was not only false but also offensive to some, and offense was obviously taken. The likelihood of such interactions is one of the reasons we don't discuss these topics. It's easy to distract people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is not a solution to the problem; nor does it answer the original question, nor this question. But the problem won't go away, and it should not remain unremarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T23:49:11.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-04T19:32:15.737" Score="8" ViewCount="757" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/325060/273494&quot;&gt;announcement of changes to the Hot Network Questions list (HNQ)&lt;/a&gt;, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're putting the power in the hands of our moderators to remove questions that don't set a good example for their sites. I &lt;strong&gt;recommend each site have a meta discussion with guidance for moderators about when - if ever - a question should be removed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be worthwhile to put the community's thoughts on removing questions from the HNQ in writing instead of relying on the general network-wide guidance. Removing a question from the HNQ prevents it from ever being eligible for the list again, so it is one of the few moderator actions that can't easily be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had some discussion about the HNQ in the past (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10812/do-we-have-any-control-over-what-gets-on-the-hot-network-list/10814#10814&quot;&gt;Do we have any control over what gets on the Hot Network List?&lt;/a&gt;) and about questions receiving a tremendous number of daily views (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10292/what-do-100k-views-in-a-day-mean?rq=1&quot;&gt;What do 100k views in a day mean?&lt;/a&gt;) but we haven't decided what criteria we would like to have for questions that take up our five (I think) spots on list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15280/why-was-this-question-removed-from-the-hnq-list&quot;&gt;a discussion going about a question that was removed from the HNQ&lt;/a&gt;. I think it would be better to start a new policy discussion than to try to repurpose a discussion about how a specific question was removed when the network-wide policy seems to indicate it shouldn't have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sorts of impacts does a question becoming &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; have on the site that would cause us to want to remove it from the list? Here are a few reasons I've dredged or paraphrased from past discussions across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(The HNQ algorithm) &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;optimizes for controversy, not quality.&lt;/strong&gt; Sensationalist questions draw lots of rapid response, which feeds the HNQ algorithm, and then once it's on HNQ it gets even more rapid response, which keeps it there (and also distorts Q&amp;amp;A on that site).&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/316937/273494&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions on the HNQ are essentially an advertisement for EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/strong&gt;. The  questions should be of the sort that will attract (or at least won't discourage) the type of audience EL&amp;amp;U wants to cultivate. There are questions that are on-topic, but that are maybe not the sort of questions that we would want to present as typical of the site's content. Because these questions often generate a lot of edits and comments, they tend to end up on the HNQ more often than a great question that is well-formed when it's posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions on the HNQ &lt;strong&gt;attract votes and comments from users who aren't familiar with EL&amp;amp;U's norms.&lt;/strong&gt; Users that have 200 reputation on any other site in the network are awarded 100 reputation on EL&amp;amp;U which allows them to comment and upvote. This can cause &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12089/80039&quot;&gt;incorrect or low quality answers to end up with far more votes than they might have&lt;/a&gt; if they weren't hot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/323179&quot;&gt;formula for determining hotness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-23T17:08:55.970" LastActivityDate="2022-04-23T17:08:55.970" Title="What should ELU's criteria be for removing a question from the HNQ list?" Tags="|discussion|hot-network-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15286" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-04-04T19:36:52.167" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2022-04-04T19:36:52.167" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T19:36:52.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15287" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-04-04T19:36:52.167" Score="0" Body="For discussion about questions appearing on and being removed from Hot Network Questions list. " OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T00:15:08.680" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T00:15:08.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15285" CreationDate="2022-04-05T12:46:00.657" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should almost never proactively remove questions from the HNQ. If the attention from being on the list generates a significant amount of disruption, we have already tools to deal with that. Attracting new users to the site far outweighs the inconvenience of a few flags or a pile of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer written to provoke discussion of different possible viewpoints. Feel free to edit it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T11:45:58.640" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T11:45:58.640" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-04-05T12:46:00.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15285" CreationDate="2022-04-05T12:50:21.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though it is rarely necessary, the mod team should use their judgement to remove questions from the HNQ if they anticipate the question will disrupt the site. A question doesn't need to be on the HNQ to be successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer written to provoke discussion of different possible viewpoints. Feel free to edit it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T11:45:27.403" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T11:45:27.403" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-04-05T12:50:21.020" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13212" CreationDate="2022-04-05T12:50:55.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone now has access to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/374184/323179&quot;&gt;list of all their deleted posts&lt;/a&gt;. However, there's no easy way to tell the difference between answers that were deleted with the question and answers that were deleted independently. Still, you probably (hopefully!) don't have that many deleted answers to sift through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;lt; 10k users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; tab in your profile, there is a link to &amp;quot;deleted answers&amp;quot;. It's just that easy. There's a corresponding link under the &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot; tab for all your deleted questions. (For anyone keeping track, these replaced the &amp;quot;deleted recent&amp;quot; links.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the universal links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/deleted-answers/current&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/deleted-answers/current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/deleted-questions/current&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/deleted-questions/current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;10k+ users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While every user has access to the links above, 10k+ users can use search too, which has all the power of a regular search, plus shows some of the content of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=Deleted%3A1%20is%3Aa&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;deleted:1 is:a&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=Deleted%3A1%20is%3Aq&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;deleted:1 is:q&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use &lt;code&gt;deleted:all&lt;/code&gt; to show both deleted and not deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T12:50:55.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15285" CreationDate="2022-04-05T14:00:57.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mods should proactively monitor the HNQ and be more willing to remove questions that they judge to be disruptive. Highly recognized to usually be poor questions, single word requests and such tend to be unnecessarily provocative, jumping onto the HNQ, making us look like Urban Dictionary. We don't need rep from casual visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T14:00:57.597" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-04-05T14:00:57.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15285" CreationDate="2022-04-05T22:03:11.923" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a moderator is considering removing a question from HNQ, they should &lt;strong&gt;raise the decision on Meta for community review&lt;/strong&gt;¹, allow consensus to build (say, over 24-48 hrs, after which the Q tends to lose its hotness anyway), and let the chips fall where they may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹&lt;sub&gt; If there is a clear and present danger, e.g. the title alone appearing in HNQ subjects other sites to harm, or SE, Inc., as a whole to bad PR, or otherwise in contravention of network-wide policy, then the mod should make their best attempt to address these issues using less drastic tools (e.g. bowdlerizing the title, which has been done in previous cases, though typical EL&amp;amp;U site policy doesn’t call for it).&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Only in extreme and egregious cases should mods take unilateral action, and the decision should still be subject to community review and possible reversal. Of course, if TPTB directly &lt;em&gt;mandate&lt;/em&gt; it for the case in question, there’s no choice, but this situation should still be made transparent to users on Meta.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T03:56:07.083" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T03:56:07.083" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15280" CreationDate="2022-04-06T07:33:41.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of HNQ posts removed by Moderators is trivial, really trivial.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In 365 days it was just six out of a total of 499 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are trusted to know what they are doing and to make informed unbiased choices. Only in cases where a user asks the moderator team about an early removal from the HNQ list should that team offer some sort of explanation. It will be too late for the question and for the answers posted but at least the community would not be constrained to guesswork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T09:59:48.757" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T09:59:48.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15285" CreationDate="2022-04-06T12:00:39.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions from ELU are rarely of the sort that need to be blocked from becoming hot questions. If a question is somewhat disruptive, the mods have other tools like temporarily locking comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the unlikely case that there is question that that clearly has to be removed from the HNQ, moderators should post on meta explaining why this extraordinary action needed to be taken, and why no other tool was sufficient to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer written to provoke discussion of different possible viewpoints. Feel free to edit it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T13:24:36.987" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T13:24:36.987" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-04-06T12:00:39.580" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15298" CreationDate="2022-04-07T07:01:17.483" Score="4" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the following question, which is deleted and invisible to users with less than 10K reputation, ought to be undeleted.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11182/help-me-to-translate-the-russian-proverb-%d0%97%d0%b0-%d0%b1%d0%b8%d1%82%d0%be%d0%b3%d0%be-%d0%b4%d0%b2%d1%83%d1%85-%d0%bd%d0%b5%d0%b1%d0%b8%d1%82%d1%8b%d1%85-%d0%b4%d0%b0%d1%8e%d1%82&quot;&gt;What is the English equivalent to the Russian proverb &amp;quot;&amp;quot;За битого - двух небитых дают&amp;quot;? [closed]&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ozqtV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image for &amp;lt; 10k users&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2011 the question was closed and deleted because at the time it was viewed to be purely a Russian translation request. However, as most users are aware, EL&amp;amp;U does accept requests for idioms, expressions, and proverbs. This is one such request, the difference being the OP knew one in Russian but not its English equivalent. As a result, the title has been edited to reflect more truthfully the OP's intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask the community for their opinion and consider casting their vote to undelete the question and then to reopen it. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T14:49:37.663" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T19:26:49.573" Title="Question deleted in 2011 is on-topic in 2022" Tags="|support|closed-questions|deleted-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15296" CreationDate="2022-04-07T09:21:05.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no real benefit in resuscitating the dead question, belonging to a user who is no longer on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see good improvement after your edit, and I think you would have a better reception if you posted a new question using the information in it. It certainly won't be closed as a duplicate of the deleted one. And there aren't any valuable answers in the deleted one currently that deserves a second chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T09:21:05.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15296" CreationDate="2022-04-07T19:26:49.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has now been undeleted and re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11182/what-is-the-english-equivalent-to-the-russian-proverb-%d0%97%d0%b0-%d0%b1%d0%b8%d1%82%d0%be%d0%b3%d0%be-%d0%b4%d0%b2%d1%83%d1%85-%d0%bd%d0%b5%d0%b1%d0%b8%d1%82%d1%8b%d1%85&quot;&gt;What is the English equivalent to the Russian proverb &amp;quot;За битого - двух небитых дают&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                                                                             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356843" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T19:26:49.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15300" CreationDate="2022-04-09T02:21:16.567" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by a post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2170/7394&quot;&gt;Economics SE&lt;/a&gt;, I switched my Stack Overflow theme to dark from the Settings page. This will be based on user preference and not a site wide change. Can we have a similar option on ELU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to visit ELU a lot at night and a dark theme would be more comfortable to my eyes. Plus it seems that more apps, operating systems and websites are nowadays providing a dark theme as an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F6QXml.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F6QXml.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot from Stack Overflow&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2022-04-09T03:38:04.427" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T14:44:08.670" Title="Can we have an optional dark theme?" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15299" CreationDate="2022-04-09T04:09:09.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/395949/dark-mode-beta-help-us-root-out-low-contrast-and-un-converted-bits&quot;&gt;MSO&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Future releases&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the focus of Dark Mode is on Stack Overflow and we’ll eventually bring it to MSO. While the retheming we did across the network two years ago makes updating our [styles] easier, creating dark versions of all of our sites, particularly the custom-designed ones, is going to be a huge challenge we’re not able to contemplate at this time. The artwork on some of those sites simply can’t be made dark because we don’t have access to the original art files and, to be honest, some of the themes will always be better as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; time before a dark theme comes out for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/359739/plans-for-dark-mode-for-all-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;Plans for dark mode for all Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being, you can try out (third-party) workarounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to view EL&amp;amp;U in dark mode, you can try out &lt;a href=&quot;https://darkreader.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dark Reader&lt;/a&gt;. This is how it would look like on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hiAiE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hiAiE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tgl1D.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tgl1D.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzta4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzta4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQJGO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQJGO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/336626/513150&quot;&gt;Post by canon on MSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrome&lt;/a&gt; [Only for PC/desktop]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://darkreader.org/safari/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Safari&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dark-reader-for-safari/id1438243180?platform=iphone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dedicated IOS app&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ifoakfbpdcdoeenechcleahebpibofpc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Firefox&lt;/a&gt; [Desktop]&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/darkreader/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Firefox on Android&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: Toast notifications will appear blank when in Dynamic mode (you can switch to &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gouuu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Filter&lt;/a&gt; mode, although it's not as great). Also note that the dark theme will be applied to every website on your browser when you've installed it, but you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z1LAy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;toggle it off&lt;/a&gt; for that website individually (or you can apply this change &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aOFfd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;only to sites&lt;/a&gt; you want to apply it to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not perfect, but it should work for the time being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356843" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-04-10T14:44:08.670" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T14:44:08.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-09T13:15:40.063" Score="-1" ViewCount="142" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/587365/punctuation-rule-in-u-s-english&quot;&gt;Punctuation rule in U.S. English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My post wasn't by any means opinion-based. How it is different from questions about &amp;quot;awkward&amp;quot; phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote &amp;quot;It causes me pain&amp;quot;, so should I replace it with &amp;quot;It's awkward that...&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;After the question was edited it was reopened and closed almost immediately as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7548/when-should-end-punctuation-go-inside-quotes&quot;&gt;When should end punctuation go inside quotes?&lt;/a&gt; However, the older question asks about the placement of the period / full stop when a sentence ends with a quote. The newer question is inspired by an online and reputable source which claims&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American English places periods and commas &lt;strong&gt;inside&lt;/strong&gt; double quotation marks. British English places them &lt;strong&gt;outside&lt;/strong&gt; single quotation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user450634" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2022-04-09T18:40:54.570" LastActivityDate="2022-04-09T18:40:54.570" Title="Wasn't your issue with so called &quot;opinion based&quot; question opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15301" CreationDate="2022-04-09T13:33:26.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;advice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to take an interest in American English, so let me share an AmE aphorism with you: when you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, &lt;em&gt;stop digging&lt;/em&gt;¹.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, onto your Meta-question here.  First, you should know that there are only a limited number of close-reasons available to users to curate the site and maintain its quality, &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; being one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;on closure&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for questions which are salvageable, the particular label applied is important, because it provides the OP some guidance on how he can improve the question such that it can be reopened for answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for irredeemable questions, the label chosen doesn't matter so much as its result: the question is closed (&lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it's irredeemable), and will likely later be deleted, by one mechanism or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;your question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you'd bothered to read our Help Center's guidance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to ask&lt;/a&gt; before you posted this question, you'd have seen the following, in big bold letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your question is &lt;strong&gt;just a rant in disguise&lt;/strong&gt;: “______ sucks, am I right?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question falls afoul of the last bullet here, and potentially the third one.  Starting out with &lt;em&gt;this difference in punctuation causes me mental pain&lt;/em&gt; certainly didn't help², but the real tell was you didn't &lt;em&gt;actually ask a question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your concluding sentence is a call to action, which you coyly edited to add an emoticon after an experienced user pointed this out to you (which I see you've subsequently removed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you let it slide? It's just wrong. Do something!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which you then doubled-down on in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I changed &amp;quot;Do something!&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Do something :)&amp;quot;. Did it make you take it more lightly now? I hope I prevented everyone from heavy breathing. – O. Med. 3 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a new idea but native speakers influence their languages more than academics and linguists. – O. Med. 3 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of which make it clear your motivation for posting was not to learn something but to vent your exasperation and agitate for change.  And, as the Help Center makes clear, those kinds of posts are central targets for closure and removal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;closing :) thoughts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, does it matter to you which label was selected to close your question? Because I can promise you it won't be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have asked the question in a way that would not only survive review (and beyond that, subsequently be &lt;em&gt;celebrated&lt;/em&gt;), but more importantly allow you (and any future visitor who sees it, numbering 20k as of today) to &lt;em&gt;learn something&lt;/em&gt;, read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/7548/191178&quot;&gt;the potential duplicate&lt;/a&gt; @Laurel pointed you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15301/wasnt-your-issue-with-so-called-opinion-based-question-opinion-based/15302#comment62053_15301&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt;&amp;quot;Stop digging&amp;quot; here referring to the title and tone of your Meta question, which again takes the &lt;em&gt;assertive&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;inquiring&lt;/em&gt; approach that got your Main-site question into trouble.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² &lt;sub&gt;No, changing it to &amp;quot;Isn't it awkward that...?&amp;quot; would not help, and if you can't see how &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question is opinion based, I'm not sure I can help you understand what &amp;quot;subjective&amp;quot; is.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2022-04-09T14:09:46.870" LastActivityDate="2022-04-09T14:09:46.870" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15280" CreationDate="2022-04-11T20:30:29.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this was a preemptive removal, due to the political nature of the quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a HNQ removal cannot be reversed, I encourage you to voice your opinion on this type of removal here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15285/191178&quot;&gt;What should ELU&amp;#39;s criteria be for removing a question from the HNQ list?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T20:30:29.717" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-21T07:38:00.020" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a comment under the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/587874/why-are-some-words-with-the-initial-s-sound-spelled-with-s-and-others-with-c&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; giving , I presume, some helpful indications on the subject asked by the OP (clearly a new user).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was off-topic for a number of reasons, nonetheless I thought it was worth a comment that could help the new user to put his question into a different perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the comment has now been removed. Was it inappropriate, misleading or wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-04-21T16:08:31.193" LastActivityDate="2022-04-26T18:37:14.683" Title="Why was a helpful comment removed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15307" CreationDate="2022-04-25T21:50:46.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments can be deleted at any time, so don't get too attached. This one was flagged and deleted as an answer-in-comments. The best explanation that I've found for why answers shouldn't be left in comments is on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6534/42375&quot;&gt;RPG Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, use comments to tell the OP what they should do to make their question a good fit for the site, or where they should have checked for their answer instead of posting. (If neither of those is really possible, consider if the question really needed to be closed, and if the information could have been made into a proper answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-04-26T18:37:14.683" LastActivityDate="2022-04-26T18:37:14.683" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10255" CreationDate="2022-04-29T22:44:08.257" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Workaround&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underlining is in enough demand that other users have found workarounds, such as the use of combining character U+0332 described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117016/why-can-we-format-text-with-bold-and-italic-but-not-underline#answer-121162&quot;&gt;here at Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97915" LastEditorUserId="97915" LastEditDate="2022-04-29T22:54:13.783" LastActivityDate="2022-04-29T22:54:13.783" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15363" CreationDate="2022-05-06T20:48:00.210" Score="12" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context: Due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/byu-corpora.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some sort of falling out&lt;/a&gt;, the Corpus of Contemporary English, British National Corpus, and several others moved from corpus.byu.org to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;english-corpora.org&lt;/a&gt; and changed their collective name, formerly being referred to as the &amp;quot;BYU Corpora&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cite them pretty often. According to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/edit/1587087#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE search&lt;/a&gt;, there are about 565 instances of corpus.byu.org links across about 420 posts on the main site. None of these links currently work because the redirect is malformed, missing a slash after the &lt;code&gt;.org&lt;/code&gt; (e.g. &lt;code&gt;https://www.english-corpora.orgcoca/&lt;/code&gt;). While they should really fix it on their end, we can ensure our links work at least, using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/313243/323179&quot;&gt;link replacement tool&lt;/a&gt;, with staff approval. (The specific replacements would be &lt;code&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;https://corpus.byu.edu&lt;/code&gt; both getting replaced with &lt;code&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all the links were replaced, we would have the links at the bottom (duplicates removed). Any problems? We may need to do some manual fixing since some of them won't work even after the tool has run (but probably haven't worked for years). You can find the original posts by searching for something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Acoca%2Fx.asp&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;url:coca/x.asp&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Acorpus.byu.edu&quot;&gt;15 posts on meta&lt;/a&gt; that will need attention. Can the replacement be run across the entire network? Should it be? (Not a rhetorical question.) Some other SE sites have the same problem, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Acorpus.byu.edu&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; (131 posts) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Acorpus.byu.edu&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; (21 posts). If I have to raise this question on their metas in addition I will (though I don't know that Linguistics has enough hits to qualify for automatic replacement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Links we would have on ELU (main) after running the tool&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/COCA/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/COCA/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=12007027&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=12007027&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=35068121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=35068121&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=46344378&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=46344378&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=57453649&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=57453649&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=6146642&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=6146642&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=66297935&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=66297935&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=66298013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=66298013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=66298131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=66298131&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=8008288&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=8008288&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=8201183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/?c=bnc&amp;amp;q=8201183&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/x3.asp?xx=1&amp;amp;w11=annoyed.%5Ba%2a%5D&amp;amp;w12=at&amp;amp;r=&quot; 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rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/x3.asp?xx=1&amp;amp;w10=good&amp;amp;w11=egg&amp;amp;r=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/x3.asp?xx=1&amp;amp;w11=swell&amp;amp;w12=guy&amp;amp;r=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/x3.asp?xx=1&amp;amp;w11=swell&amp;amp;w12=guy&amp;amp;r=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/x4.asp?t=780051&amp;amp;ID=527298283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/x4.asp?t=780051&amp;amp;ID=527298283&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/faq.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/faq.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/full-text/formats.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/full-text/formats.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/?c=glowbe&amp;amp;q=57453822&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/?c=glowbe&amp;amp;q=57453822&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/help/textsm.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/help/textsm.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/iweb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/iweb/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/now/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/now/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/soap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/soap/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/time/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/time/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="428633" LastEditDate="2022-06-23T15:54:41.723" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T16:06:20.680" Title="Can we use the link replacement tool to fix links to English-corpora.org?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15310" CreationDate="2022-05-07T13:52:18.783" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you’re simply looking for community support or permission to run the existing search-and-replace tool to update the corpora links on EL&amp;amp;U*, you have my support and that of anyone who upvotes this answer (but not the support of anyone who downvotes it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;I don’t feel comfortable speaking for other Stack Exchange sites like ELL or Linguistics&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-06-20T05:02:06.063" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T05:02:06.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-11T16:38:13.467" Score="-1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time time to time I take a break from this site, and in one of those more-recent breaks, I 'discovered' Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a couple of months, and one unjustified ban, I came to the realization that the site  was not really worth my time, as it is mostly peopled with trolls, loud-mouths, and other uneducated people. That is not to say that all users there are idiots; some are really cool and knowledgeable personages  (such as  Anthony Bourdain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all was bad; in fact, one site feature was interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User/Answer tags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. tags that express the answerer's POV as a header before they even post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on EL&amp;amp;U, we quite often have discussions/disagreements in comments and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/588732/i-wish-jake-wasnt-dating-my-ex-but-what-can-i-do-or-i-wish-jake-werent-datin#comment1476641_588732&quot;&gt;answers as well&lt;/a&gt;, in which the POV depends totally on the user's preferences for a grammar which might not be obvious for the uninitiated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is confusing for new contributors, and may actually drive them away from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we are  contentious over obscure details that the new user does not understand, we are undercutting and undermining the 'helpful aspects'  of the site. After all,  who wants to go to an  English information site offering &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Get Help for practical detailed questions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;  and end up in the middle of an internal culture war?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am suggesting some kind of declaration, such as if one belonged to a political party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some suggestions for User Tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prescriptivist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Descriptivist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Generative Semanticist&lt;/strong&gt;  (*in Honor of John L)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am open to suggestions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but the point is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need more transparency&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, especially on the part of users who continually insist that their  POV is the only acceptable and possible one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2022-05-13T22:19:21.603" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T15:24:22.300" Title="Feature Request: Answer/User tags" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8140" CreationDate="2022-05-11T16:47:35.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you're asking about a part of the site that's customizable, it's as simple as raising a new meta question with your suggested changes (or asking for suggestions) and reaching a consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many changes can be made instantly by a moderator, and the rest require staff intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tour&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few places in the Tour that can be changed by moderators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Top section (&amp;quot;English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists...&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Example question (note: not visible at small widths, such as on mobile)&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are many &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/163947/323179&quot;&gt;restrictions&lt;/a&gt; on what questions can go here. If the current question no longer meets the criteria, then it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/351469/323179&quot;&gt;reverts to a question about unicorns eating daisies&lt;/a&gt; without any warning. For this reason, you shouldn't touch (e.g. vote to close, edit) the question or the answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Ask about&amp;quot; bullets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Don't ask about&amp;quot; bullets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tour has always struck me as being a page for people who don't know anything about Stack Exchange. All of these sections should be kept brief and possibly link to meta posts where everything can be explained more fully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Help Center&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;main page&lt;/a&gt;, between the search bar and &amp;quot;Find out more about&amp;quot;. If it looks like there's nothing there, that's because there isn't... yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; (which desperately needs more than the superficial edits I recently gave it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if there's a good reason to, staff can allow moderators to edit more Help pages. The downside is that these pages won't receive any of the updates that are supposed to be deployed across every site, such as updating screenshots or covering new features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask&lt;/a&gt; page&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two places that can be edited here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The popup &amp;quot;Asking a good question&amp;quot; (you may need to try incognito if you don't see this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The box under &amp;quot;Step 1: Draft your question&amp;quot; (which is collapsed by default on mobile)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these require staff to change. More info here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/377058/323179&quot;&gt;What site-specific changes can be made to the Ask Question page to help askers on that site write better questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags have wikis and excerpts that can be edited by anyone, usually through suggested edits. However, the wiki is so hard to find it might as well not exist and the excerpt isn't much better (I don't think it shows at all when you're tagging on mobile).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make information about a specific tag more prominent, we can use tag warnings (aka tag tips). In the current iteration of the Ask page, these show up after you click &amp;quot;review question&amp;quot;. (It also sometimes shows up when the post is being edited, though this is rarely the right time to be giving advice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requires staff to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything else you need to know about this can be found in my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11865/191178&quot;&gt;Warn people of the rules for [Single-Word-Requests] before posting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T16:47:35.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15312" CreationDate="2022-05-11T22:48:06.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most of this information is best handled by being included either in the post (or comment) itself or in your user profile, if at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't really think of a single descriptor for myself that would be relevant across all my posts, much less comments. I'm an American who speaks American English, which I'll mention when I know that my answer may not hold true for native speakers from other regions. It will never be relevant when I'm writing about early Middle English, not least because America was filled with people who hadn't even heard of English. And an honest evaluation of my answers would show that I can't choose between being descriptivist and prescriptivist (if it's even possible to be only one except as a generalizing label). But you can see that from what sources I'm citing (usage vs style).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a feature &amp;quot;in the early &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/product-discovery&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;product-discovery&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;product-discovery&lt;/a&gt; phase&amp;quot; that seems like it could possibly be relevant: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/370640/323179&quot;&gt;Version labels for answers&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe, it depends on a lot of factors that haven't been decided on. I haven't heard anything about this idea lately so it's probably on the back burner right now in terms of development. I'm not really sure what it would give us, especially when not all answers would be tagged and it would be far more natural to include any keywords in the text of the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T22:48:06.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15312" CreationDate="2022-05-12T10:01:31.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/answer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;answer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly possible to prefix answers with tags: you can even make them up as I've done here. Actual existing tags can be used which will provide a link to questions with that tag, which might or might not be useful. You do that with the standard &lt;code&gt;[tag:answer]&lt;/code&gt; syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to tag a particular answer as coming from a particular viewpoint or limited application like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prescriptive-grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prescriptive-grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prescriptive-grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/british-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;british-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;british-english&lt;/a&gt; then that's already possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags or other labels applied to &lt;strong&gt;people&lt;/strong&gt; are actually meta-tags akin to the deprecated &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. We don't need to know someone is a fan of CGEL; that will become obvious from their answers — which &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be labelled with a relevant tag if they choose to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T10:01:31.453" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15312" CreationDate="2022-05-12T21:48:31.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have long been desires to have information on questions and answers that says things about the author: what their native language is, some other indication of authority, context, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on EL&amp;amp;U, we quite often have discussions/disagreements in comments and answers as well, in which the POV depends totally on the user's preferences for a grammar which might not be obvious for the uninitiated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think tags will fix that. Promoting a culture of clarity (&amp;quot;I'm being descriptive at the moment&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I grew up in Newcastle but spent 5 years in a teenage motorcycle gang in Perth&amp;quot;) should be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to list out more explicitly what other tags you think people will label themselves with. That will give you a better idea if tags will be a thing that other people will desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whether it is an extra sentence or an extra tag, whether it is in one's bio (easy to reach in one click!) or some abbreviated version on every question and answer that everyone makes, making it mandatory is most likely going to be extremely unpopular and making it optional will render it universally ignored except for the rare slightly heated moments when some hidden cross-ocean difference becomes apparent and people add hesitantly &amp;quot;... and this is from a speaker of upper Midwest urban teenager&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But adding the UI feature of tags to answers... it'll be way way towards the end of the queue for the SE developers. It's kind of a lot for little return (and that little return can be gotten from user bios (which, yes, nobody reads, and frankly few write with the idea of what you have in mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2022-05-12T22:03:01.587" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T22:03:01.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15312" CreationDate="2022-05-19T15:24:22.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my own part, I resist any effort to categorize or label me in a way that planes off all nuance. I am not a This or a That, but in certain circumstances I may partake of some aspect of Thisness or Thatness. I may even prize some Thisness, while abhorring almost everything else about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how would you express that in a tag? Assign it a numerical value, so that when you mouse over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thisness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thisness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thisness&lt;/a&gt; tag it shows a 9% value? And who decides such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Mitch that the game is not really worth the candle. Going further, however, I believe that all such labeling will do is to give people a spectacularly unnuanced view of a human being, and a reason to denounce or support them without thinking too much about any argument they might be making.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T15:24:22.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-21T08:25:03.060" Score="7" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question I raised &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/589187/when-is-sex-sex-and-when-is-it-gender&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; has already suffered one vote to close - for being &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does not &amp;quot;opinion&amp;quot; lie at the heart of the way language develops? There seems to me a childish intent among many users of the site to rule out anything which cannot be answered definitively - which is asked in order to engender a much-needed discussion of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T23:00:36.057" Title="What is wrong with a discussion of opinion?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15321" CreationDate="2022-05-21T19:22:34.160" Score="-7" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post that highlights this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/589187/when-is-sex-sex-and-when-is-it-gender/589191?noredirect=1#comment1478294_589191&quot;&gt;When is &amp;quot;sex&amp;quot; sex, and when is it &amp;quot;gender&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I both voted to close and answered the question (apparently not my finest answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time that I have done this, and explained my action thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting to close and answering are entirely different matters and not at all connected. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; may think that the question should be closed, but others might not and the question will remain open. If it is not closed then an answer may be given. To put it another way, if you voted to close, but I disagreed, I might answer, and I would not comment on your action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My vote to close is merely an opinion. It may not be the popular opinion and that is why there is the opportunity to vote to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d be interested in reasons or precedents for and against voting to close and answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T06:32:21.483" Title="Vote to close plus an answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15319" CreationDate="2022-05-21T23:59:20.393" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s a bit like having your cake and eating it, in my opinion. When a question is closed, the main outcome (penalty) is that it’s not accepting answers. Surely, if one believes that a question doesn’t deserve answers, that’s when one votes to close it? Then both answering the question and voting to close it seems to me illogical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="453533" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T23:59:20.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15319" CreationDate="2022-05-22T00:54:55.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is arguably valid to answer a question and vote to close it under at least two scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is fundamentally good but has some correctable flaw (such as no showing of prior research) that the answerer hopes the questioner will provide at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question isn't very good and is closable on that or some other grounds, but (a) the answerer doesn't want the questioner to go away empty handed, and either (b) the explanation or other response is too long to fit in a comment box or (c) the answerer is categorically opposed to answering in comment boxes even when the answer would easily fit there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that I have sometimes answered a question and voted to close it under scenario 1. In any event, I think that the decision to do so is both reasonable and good for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may once or twice have answered a question and voted to close it under scenario 2(a &amp;amp; b). Doing so isn't especially good for the site, but it may be of some value to the questioner. That's the point of it, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I haven't ever answered a question and voted to close it under scenario 2(a &amp;amp; c). That's because I don't agree with the rule against answering in comments—especially when it comes to answering an excessively simple or otherwise off-topic question. In such situations, answering in as evanescent a form as possible seems to me to be a good thing, and comments are notoriously evanescent at English Language &amp;amp; Usage. That doesn't mean that answering and voting to close under scenario 2(a &amp;amp; c) is indefensible, but it does (in my opinion) make usefulness to the questioner a more critical criterion for justifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that your answer in this particular instance drew a more-than-usually hostile reaction from downvoters for two reasons: the answer could easily have taken the form of a comment; and it was not very satisfactory as a full-fledged answer. That is, it was so brief that it amounted to a simple assertion rather than a reasoned explanation—and as such, it was unlikely to be very helpful to the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us round to my original rationale for answering flawed questions in the first place under scenario 2(a): to avoid having the questioner go away empty handed. If your answer had explained why there is no way independent of context to tell which meaning of &amp;quot;sex&amp;quot; a speaker or writer has in mind, I would have considered it reasonable enough. But an answer of &amp;quot;When is 'sex' sex, and when is it 'gender'? When the context indicates that meaning.&amp;quot; seems to me to be more dismissive than explanatory. I don't think that your answer deserves multiple downvotes, but I also don't think that presenting it as a formal answer was the best way to convey the point that it makes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are a valuable contributor to this site, and I appreciate the quality of the vast majority of answers you have provided here. Nevertheless, I think that your answer to this particular question was not a well-conceived use of an answer box—and certainly was of no more use to the questioner than a comment in the same words would have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-05-22T06:32:21.483" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T06:32:21.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15318" CreationDate="2022-05-23T22:19:03.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using 'opinion-based' as a term of condemnation on this site (as on other Stack Exchange sites) was originally intended to rule out the questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the cutest word for . . . ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the most creative way of expressing . . . ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which way of expressing . . . do you like the best?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions are indeed incompatible with the aims of the site, and deserve to be promptly closed. Some regular contributors to this site, however, seem to be using 'opinion-based' as a general term of condemnation that can be applied to any question that they disapprove of, even if it is not at all like the above examples, as long as it involves opinions in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions that involve debatable opinions can, however, be answered in a way that is not itself a matter of opinion. One can summarize the disagreements that exist on a particular matter and the state of debate on them, without that summary itself being a matter of debate. The questions that ask whether it is correct or advisable to use a certain word in a certain way, can be answered with something along the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people object to this use of the word; their reasons are A, B, and C. Others refute these reasons by arguing D, E, and F. Yet others accept A, B, C as having some force, but argue that they can be outweighed by G, H, and I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting such an answer fits the aims of this site very well, and it is unfortunate that it sometimes gets precluded by an indiscriminate use of the 'primarily opinion-based' reason for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2022-05-23T22:24:56.783" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T22:24:56.783" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15324" CreationDate="2022-05-24T10:57:36.643" Score="6" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I last answered over a year ago, and I've recently returned to the site as I want to help and share my knowledge of the English language. However, I still can't answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that some of my previous answers were not well received (some of them justifiably, others unfairly, in my opinion), but it's been over a year now; surely I should have the privilege of answering again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="411839" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T19:32:45.677" Title="Can my answer ban please be lifted?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15323" CreationDate="2022-05-24T17:16:37.930" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not something which anyone has any control over but you, I'm afraid. Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;MSE post&lt;/a&gt; on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Automatic bans never expire or &amp;quot;time out&amp;quot;. This means that you cannot simply wait for a certain amount of time. If you do not take action, you will never be allowed to freely post again. &lt;strong&gt;The only way for the ban to be lifted is by contributing positively to the site in other ways.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators cannot lift the ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before you do anything else, &lt;em&gt;fix your existing posts!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; As noted above, downvotes cast by the rest of the community factor into the ban - so the single best thing you can do to get it lifted is to address any objections raised by others. Were your past questions unclear? Did they fail to show any effort on your part? Poorly worded, titled, formatted, and overly long or short? Then fix them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the emphasis on &lt;em&gt;fixing.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do not delete your posts.&lt;/strong&gt; As explained above, negative marks on deleted posts do still count towards the question ban, and the fact that they are deleted can also count against you (with the exception of questions that are 30 days or older when deleted). Deleting your posts does not help to lift the ban. Only fixing does! &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13193/how-do-i-find-questions-or-answers-that-ive-deleted/13203#13203&quot;&gt;You can see a list&lt;/a&gt; of your own deleted questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have written 49 answers, of which 38 have been deleted. Of those 38, 27 have a net-negative score. Some of those you will not be able to fix and undelete. But the only way of lifting the ban will be to fix and undelete those you can. If you deleted any yourself, you should be able to undelete them yourself once they have been improved; others you will have to rely on the goodwill of the community to undelete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing a post allows downvoters to reverse their downvote, if the edit warrants that. So converting your existing answers into good answers may well allow the ban to be lifted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When deciding which posts to edit, check that the question is not deleted — you can't have an answer to a deleted question — and then favour those which you yourself removed because you should be able to undelete them yourself. Note that restoring an answer will bump it on the front page of the site, which will attract attention and &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; could mean more downvotes if it's not good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt; The ban is imposed because the community found your answers not to be good answers, and the system protects the site by banning people who don't write good answers. You can't get the ban lifted to write more answers without providing good answers, so the only way of writing good answers is to improve what you already have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-05-24T17:16:37.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-24T20:18:29.280" Score="-5" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have compiled some stats concerning a few regular contributors to the site and have discovered a huge variation in the frequency with which they up-vote, and also down-vote other's contributions. And the ratio between the two also seems revealing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exercise results from my feeling for some time that certain contributors make, to what seems to me, excessive use of the downvote - with insufficient consideration for its potential to a)demoralise and b)skew the statistical results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me why people zealously down-vote - but I suspect, in extreme cases, it says more about them than it does about the material they are voting on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own case, over more than 8 years I have only cast 2,999 up-votes - by most standards this is low. Clearly, alongside most people, I am being conservative in the use of the vote. However I have only downvoted on 71 occasions, and I try and always make a point of explaining why I have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that  John Lawler, has seen fit only to downvote on 62 occasions - while delivering nearly 7,000 up-votes. Given his status as a linguistics professor that seems to me to say a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But consider some of these statistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Contributor&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Up-votes&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Down-votes&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Joined&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1,677&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;134&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;11yrs 9 mths&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2,724&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1,407&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;11yrs 6mths&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;8,586&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;4,821&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;11yrs&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;4,239&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2,098&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;9yrs&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;21,831&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3,608&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;9yrs&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the last one really did puzzle me. That person, over the space of 11 years has awarded 3,647 up-votes but no fewer than 15,800 down-votes. &lt;strong&gt;Over 11 years - that averages about 4 a day!&lt;/strong&gt; I am wondering on how many of those 15,800 occasions the subject was given a word of explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another has delivered over 25,000 down votes, but over 23,000 up-votes. Compared to John Lawler's 64 that is out of all proportion and surely distorts the whole scoring process. Is it that I am down-voting too few or these others too many?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the moderators ever monitor the extent to which people are using the up and down voting facility? It would seem worthwhile to do so, if only to try and establish some consistency among users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53966" LastEditorUserId="53966" LastEditDate="2022-05-25T08:34:59.070" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T03:31:04.100" Title="Do the moderators of the site monitor and attempt to bring consistency among voting behaviour of contributors?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|moderation|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15325" CreationDate="2022-05-24T20:37:47.070" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the moderators ever monitor the extent to which people are using the up and down voting facility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, of course not. And rightly so. If someone wants to cast fewer than 100 downvotes in 12 years that is their prerogative. If someone wants to maintain some semblance of standard by downvoting everything that blights their vision, that is their prerogative too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2022-05-24T20:37:47.070" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15325" CreationDate="2022-05-25T16:31:30.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators monitor the voting behavior of only those users who are suspected of abusing their voting privilege, with targeted voting, sock puppetry and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users are free to be lavish or frugal with their votes within the prescribed daily or weekly limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no system to 'establish' said consistency of voting and there should not be, in my opinion, any pressure on the individual users on how often to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T16:31:30.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15325" CreationDate="2022-05-25T23:49:01.197" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least on the answer side of the ledger, the point of an upvoting/downvoting system of the sort that Stack Exchange sites use is to provide a mechanism for creating community-based separation between perceived good/useful answers and prceived bad/useless ones. Some voters gravitate toward advancing that separation by upvoting good/useful posts, while others gravitate toward accomplishing the same result by downvoting bad/useless posts. And undoubtedly some site participants double their impact by upvoting favored and downvoting unfavored ones beneath a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That site participants' voting tendencies vary widely strikes me as entirely unsurprising. Whether encouraging good efforts with upvotes is ultimately more valuable to the site than discouraging bad efforts with downvotes—and indeed whether upvotes and downvotes have much substantive effect on the overall quality of submissions to this site—is a matter for conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to think that EL&amp;amp;U is better served by deleting truly bad answers than by downvoting them and leaving them to hang in chains at the bottom of a page of answers—and that anything that isn't truly bad doesn't deserve to be downvoted. But others disagree—and I can hardly deny the numerical fact that downvoting serves the purpose of separating good from bad as effectively as upvoting does. An answer with a net vote of +1 is as far ahead of one with a net vote of –3 as an answer with a net vote of +4 is ahead of one with a net vote of 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By some gigantic margin, the most common voting option that EL&amp;amp;U participants who are entitled to vote choose is &amp;quot;abstain.&amp;quot; Almost all of us decline to vote one way or the other on the vast majority of questions and answers that we see on this site. So what impels us to vote in the tiny minority of cases where we actually do? I suspect that for most voters it isn't a deeply rational process. Something about a particular question or answer triggers a sense of sympathy or admiration or agreement or annoyance or disapproval or disagreement, and we click the button. But usually we don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So any discussion of upvoting and downvoting necessarily focuses on the tip of the tip of the tip of a huge iceberg of abstentions. And unless the people with disproportionately large upvote totals and the people with disproportionately large downvote totals are racking up their totals while voting on the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; questions and answers, I see no reason to suppose that they fundamentally disagree about which answers are good and which answers are bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2022-05-26T03:31:04.100" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T03:31:04.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7701" CreationDate="2022-05-26T19:48:44.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can. Do note that the minimum bounty will be 100 reputation points (since you've already posted an answer to the question) and you can never award the bounty to your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything you want to know should be covered by the FAQ entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/16065/295232&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116151" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T19:48:44.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15332" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-28T15:49:20.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as positive on potential,&#xA;but it is not present in the current work timeline. It is also not guaranteed to be implemented - when&#xA;it resurfaces the proposal may be re-evaluated and declined depending on how the situation has changed since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt;, in which a feature is something that the site developers have&#xA;definitively approved for implementation but the timing is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T11:49:10.073" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T11:49:10.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15333" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-28T15:49:20.377" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, but not in the near term." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-28T22:45:40.547" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T22:45:40.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-28T15:49:56.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as definitive to implementation. However, either there is ongoing investigation on the methods to implement the proposal, or there are other active projects that are ahead of it in priority for the site developers. Ideally, this tag indicates that the proposal is intended to be implemented in the near term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-deferred&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-deferred&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-deferred&lt;/a&gt;, in which the feature is of lower priority and may be re-evaluated on feasibility at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiki source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-planned/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-05-28T18:24:46.483" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T18:24:46.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-28T15:49:56.127" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, ideally in the near term." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-28T22:45:31.220" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T22:45:31.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-29T00:26:15.910" Score="0" ViewCount="1096" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a website that I used a while ago that identified different sentence types. You paste the text into the text box and then through a selection of buttons on the right, you could highlight the different sentence types in different colours. For example, all the complex sentences would be identified in red. Click on the simple sentence button and that would highlight all the simple sentences in yellow etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website also allowed you to do this for the parts of the speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I can not find this website again. I have looked through google and seen similar sites, like Grammarly, Hemmingway app, Parts-of-speech.Info but I still want to find the one I used before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was free to use and I think it was called coffee something...? Any help will be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454119" OwnerDisplayName="Sam" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T01:40:25.557" Title="Website that identifies different sentence types" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-30T04:45:14.807" Score="6" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/589614/where-does-short-fuse-come-from&quot;&gt;What sparked the figurative usage of “short fuse” in the 1960s?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as an “opinion based” one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not asking for  opinions, and the fact that users give their personal opinions is not my fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking for  evidence, which may be missing or hard to produce, but not opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please reopen the above question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T11:08:56.840" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T13:01:55.887" Title="The &quot;short fuse&quot; question is not opinion based" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15337" CreationDate="2022-05-30T12:35:30.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reopened! The question itself may be somewhat deceptive: it doesn't look like there's much room to come up with an answer. However, when etymology is seen as a field of ongoing research where technological advancements within the past couple decades have changed the way everything is done then you find yourself an answer. (Or at least that's my opinion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T13:01:55.887" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T13:01:55.887" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15339" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-30T13:14:42.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered not reproducible if it is a bug that the site developers&#xA;would fix, but cannot due to an inability to recreate the problematic behavior in&#xA;spite of attempts to do so. Reports that are not reproducible typically represent&#xA;bugs that come from using unsupported browsers and tools, or because of sunspots&#xA;and other activity entirely unrelated to the site creating a momentary issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a bug can’t be reproduced due to being immediately presented as being through&#xA;an unsupported browser, thus bypassing the need of the site developers to even&#xA;attempt to reproduce the bug, then &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the reporter of a bug that receives this tag, it may indicate&#xA;that the bug was intermittent, or merely that you didn't thoroughly explain&#xA;the circumstances under which you encountered it. First, verify that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;can still cause the bug to appear, and (if you can) then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe in detail what you were doing when it happened. Include links to any relevant pages / posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;List the steps you took to encounter the bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe your environment: browser make and version, OS, add-ons, userscripts (if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include screenshots if applicable. Use hand-drawn circles to highlight key portions&#xA;of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T05:14:39.980" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T05:14:39.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15340" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-30T13:14:42.837" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were not able to replicate the behavior reported." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T05:13:54.957" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T05:13:54.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15341" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-30T13:15:13.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered reproduced only if the site developers have successfully reproduced the bug.&#xA;This tag should only be applied if the site developers cannot immediately address the bug, such as if&#xA;it requires further investigation into solutions or if the implementation of a fix would be stalled&#xA;for other reasons. When a fix is eventually implemented, the tag should become &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T05:14:49.417" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T05:14:49.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15342" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-30T13:15:13.803" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were able to replicate the behavior reported, but cannot address its cause at this time." OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T05:14:09.187" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T05:14:09.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15318" CreationDate="2022-05-31T23:00:36.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t regard the question in question as unsuitable because of being “likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations”. And it received an answer based on facts. However the poster seems to be protesting too much, given that he not only asks a question, but then states his opinion, without any arguments in support:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”And my own preference would be to call it…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and elsewhere in this paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was worth asking. The poster could have argued for a particular usage, but merely stating his preferences in what could be take as a superior manner diminished his question and is presumably what provoked the down-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T23:00:36.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15344" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-06-01T02:35:11.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered bydesign if, after review of the detailed erroneous behavior,&#xA;it is determined that the behavior is desirable to keep in place rather than fix. This&#xA;is independent of whether or not the behavior was formerly known to the site developers&#xA;prior to the time of the report - the important thing is that the behavior will not be&#xA;altered because its current behavior is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should only be used on questions reporting what is purported as erroneous behavior&#xA;and suggests them being fixed / reversed. For when a question that is requesting a new&#xA;feature that addresses a behavior that the asker believes to be erroneous,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T21:59:22.277" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T21:59:22.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15345" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-06-01T02:35:11.730" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the reported behavior is intentional and not subject to change" OwnerUserId="16328" LastEditorUserId="16328" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T18:28:58.520" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T18:28:58.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15347" CreationDate="2022-06-01T09:48:27.347" Score="-8" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes time and effort to create a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; mnemonic. There is usage involved with respect to vocabulary and sentence formation where one needs to keep the words other than the necessary ones at a minimum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remember the names of the planets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From Wikipedia: &amp;quot;Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Needs, Perhaps&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How I learnt: &amp;quot;My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, one may argue that they are opinion based, but that's how mnemonics are. Focusing solely on &amp;quot;opinion&amp;quot; aspect, in my view will deal great unjust to this community and especially to the mnemonics tag. Frankly, I love mnemonics and for just about anything I create them and joined this community primarily to get help on the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you think that at least for mnemonics the focus should be shifted from opinion to usage?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there some Stack Exchange site where I can ask such questions, or should I ask it somewhere else altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454321" LastEditorUserId="454321" LastEditDate="2022-07-30T07:07:58.100" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T07:07:58.100" Title="Mnemonics should be considered &quot;Usage&quot; instead of &quot;Opinion&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15346" CreationDate="2022-06-01T13:40:34.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site is English Language and Usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is about the language itself: etymologies, synonyms, what particular objects are called and similar stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is how English is used: grammar, punctuation, word order etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mnemonics don't fit either class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, where a particular mnemonic &lt;strong&gt;might  be useful to others,&lt;/strong&gt; then even off-topic questions can be accommodated. Examples might include how to remember the order of the planets, colours of the rainbow, &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; presidents of America or monarchs of England. Unfortunately we no longer have a &amp;quot;too localised&amp;quot; close reason, but I would have put your esoteric month-order in that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the actual close reason was not &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;, although a couple of people did choose that. Others wrote in their own reasons, &amp;quot;This seems to be more of a puzzle than an English language matter&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;I'm voting to close this question because it’s not about the English language&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T13:40:34.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10255" CreationDate="2022-06-02T03:17:20.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Underlining is used to designate links. That's all. If you need &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, you can use the wealth of options that are supported in posts such as &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt;, headers, block quotes, or even just regular &amp;quot;quoting&amp;quot;. (Many of these can be combined too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not use Unicode hacks to try to include underlining because it causes problems for accessibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It complicates copying and pasting. Depending on where you're typing, you can't get rid of the Unicode easily and you're forced to retype it all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It breaks many translation tools (e.g. Google Translate, the translate option in iOS).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It breaks popup dictionaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not all fonts may support it. (Other times it just looks ugly, though that's more of an aesthetic problem.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's liable to be confused with links.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Best case scenario for screen readers (or any TTS) is that it ignores the Unicode underlines, causing minor confusion. (That's what happens with Voice Over, at least for text that uses combining characters, since there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://unicodemap.org/search.asp?search=h%CC%B2e%CC%B2l%CC%B2l%CC%B2o%CC%B2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regular letters in there&lt;/a&gt;.) Worst case scenario is that it makes the entire word unintelligible.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Digression: Screen readers don't tell you when anything is underlined (as websites can use CSS to apply underlining). Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/link_text#underlining&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;underlining links recommended for accessibility&lt;/a&gt; then? It's purely for people who navigate the web visually, since a screen reader will say the word &amp;quot;link&amp;quot; either before or after it says the text of the link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/379101/323179&quot;&gt;my answer on Meta SE about other Unicode characters&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-06-02T03:17:20.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-04T17:27:14.460" Score="14" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a gentle reminder to all users/contributors  here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have said this a number of times in comment &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on the main&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but as &lt;strong&gt;basic &lt;em&gt;netiquette&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, if  a question post is worth &lt;strong&gt;your time&lt;/strong&gt; to do the  research for an answer, or even if answered based on personal knowledge, it is also worthy of &lt;strong&gt;your up-vote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So....Why are we not up-voting posts more? Many new users find us unfriendly.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we have a culture issue here. When I look at other SE sites, the questions are supported by the community. Here, we often give the impression of being antagonistic out of sheer pique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;up-vote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; should indicate whether the Q is &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question is not helpful and clear, then why answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quid Pro Quo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2022-06-04T21:18:39.543" LastActivityDate="2022-07-10T23:10:46.253" Title="If the question is worth answering, it is worth upvoting" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2022-06-04T18:05:18.417" Score="22" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is worth answering, it is worth upvoting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The upvote has specific meaning attached, shown in a tooltip:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k1jiu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k1jiu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tooltip on upvote&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any voter should be convinced that all three of those conditions must be met, and to their own standards of what classes as sufficient research, usefulness and clarity. Those standards will differ for each member of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that a particular person does not feel like awarding an upvote does not mean that they do not feel like answering. Even a question which is on-topic but not particularly interesting or not felt to be very useful to others might deserve an answer (if only to satisfy the algorithm that it has in fact been answered).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is Not The Done Thing to insist that everyone follows a uniform standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-06-04T18:05:18.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2022-06-05T21:00:57.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that the OP's asking 'If the question is not helpful and clear, then why answer?' was intended as a rhetorical question, but there are, in fact, situations in which one may reasonably want to do that. In particular, if the question already has answers, and one thinks that these answers are wrong, and it seems unlikely that the question will be deleted, one may be concerned that future visitors to the page will be led astray by these wrong answers. One may in such a situation be eager to prevent that by posting what one believes to be the correct answer, even though one thinks that the question is trivial, uninteresting, badly formulated, etc., and so not deserving of an upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desire to prevent future visitors from being led astray by bad answers is so entirely independent of one's judgement of the question itself, that there would be no contradiction even between downvoting a question and answering it. In fact, it could be reasonable for somebody to vote to close a question before any answers are posted, in the hope that the question will disappear from the site, but then later, after it turns out that one's vote was unsuccessful and that the question is here to stay, want to make sure, for the benefit of future visitors to the page, that it gets (what one regards as) the best answer possible. (The preceding sentence is also a partial answer to the recently posed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15319/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about whether there is an inconsistency between voting to close a question and answer it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is intended as a supplement (rather than an alternative) to the one already posted by Mr. Leach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T21:00:57.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-09T06:40:47.173" Score="1" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this site, particularly if mine is to be the first answer, I believe it is the accepted approach for me to supply an answer to a question in as much detail as I can muster, for example: a) this answer is technically correct but archaic, b) this answer is how it is currently used in modern parlance, c) this is an alternative usage which is not only correct but is also current, although less common, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I received a comment on one such posting that perhaps it was &amp;quot;time for the prescriptivists to let go&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; it? This puzzles me, because I thought that the whole point of EL&amp;amp;U (as well as its sister ELL and their various analogues for other languages) was to give as much information and guidance as possible. As a result, is it not incumbent upon an answerer to give advice on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; such uses: what is correct &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; what is colloquial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My own personal axe, as that of so many others, is that because of the ongoing acceptance of hypercorrections because of the general ignorance of (usually) native English speakers who have either been poorly educated or have never properly paid attention in class, &amp;quot;incorrect&amp;quot; usages (for example, the truly cringeworthy form exemplified by &amp;quot;Best wishes from my husband and I&amp;quot;), the English language as currently used is becoming ever uglier.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: what is the school of thought here? Dispense with advice on what is &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; and merely tell questioners what is in general use by the contemporary multitudes on internet fora?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt this question has been asked before, but I have not been able to find it, or any discussion on the matter on this forum. Please flag up if it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate. I'd be surprised if it isn't, because this subject is bound to have come up at some stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388528" LastActivityDate="2022-06-11T21:00:48.677" Title="Prescriptivist versus descriptivist?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15353" CreationDate="2022-06-11T06:47:20.263" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a site for linguists and etymologists as well as serious language enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For such people, the idea that there is correct usage on one side and colloquial usage on the other is worse than cringe-worthy. It is an embarrassment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even worse are proclamations about the standard of English deteriorating and or the language getting uglier. Users who wish to indulge in such piffle should do so elsewhere. Sorry, but that's the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2022-06-11T06:47:20.263" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15353" CreationDate="2022-06-11T18:45:12.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A consistent descriptivist has to acknowledge that among the many ways of speaking English, there is the jargon of prescriptivists. The most visible characteristic of that jargon is that the words such as &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt; are used very frequently. Such words are, on the other hand, eschewed by descriptivists, in their own jargon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, one curious thing about descriptivists is that, even though they take great pride in their acceptance of, and respect for, the many different dialects and kinds of slang, jargon etc., that a language such as English may have, there is one kind of jargon that their acceptance and respect do not extend to: the jargon of prescriptivists. Many descriptivists positively bristle with hatred if anybody dares to speak in their presence in the manner of prescriptivists. That hatred manifest itself from time to time on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What prescriptivists say, however, often has a descriptivist counterpart. For example, where a prescriptivist might say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the expression &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is incorrect, and you must never use it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a descriptivist would say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the expression &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; belongs to the slang spoken by such-and-such social group, and its use is likely to be perceived as a sign that the speaker belongs to that group,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or perhaps,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the expression &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; often appears in casual conversations, but never in academic publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever descriptivists may feel about the ways in which prescriptivists express themselves, there is no reason for them to be dismissive of the insights that are behind prescriptivists' pronouncements, as many of these insights can be restated in the jargon of descriptivists, and need to be acknowledged in a full, accurate description of the language. Undue focus of some contributors to this site on whether somebody has used the words that are associated with prescriptivism may get in the way of appreciating the real point that the person was trying to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2022-06-11T21:00:48.677" LastActivityDate="2022-06-11T21:00:48.677" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-13T14:24:46.097" Score="0" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/590258/102&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; had a score of 3 before someone initiated a 'close vote' followed by the score being reduced to 0. I posted in comments asking the people who did it (both the close vote and downvote) to clearly indicate what was problematic with the post so that I could improve it (and I have been improving it since the time it was posted) The next day (today) I saw my comment vanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are moderators allowed to do this? What is my recourse when I see people acting mischievously on a StackExchange? The particular mischief here is twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people attempting to close my question behind my back &lt;em&gt;without any transparency&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requests for transparency are &lt;em&gt;removed silently by moderators&lt;/em&gt; (twice in fact; see below).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, unlike other SE's, I've observed the English SE to be rather aggressive in the past[^1]. So I'm not surprised by this behaviour. But there's got to be a way out of this mess, so as to make the community more welcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Jun 13, 10:30 AM&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reposted the comment. Here it is for the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted a comment yesterday but it appeared to have been deleted by someone. So I'll try again. To the persons who voted to close this, as well as those who downvoted it (score went from 3 to 1), would you state your objections precisely? How would you like this post improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;11:48 AM&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yup, this comment got deleted again and the comments section locked. The moderator says comments have been &amp;quot;moved to chat&amp;quot; - but if you follow the link to the chat you will see that all but one comment (a screenshot of which is posted above) has been moved, with that one comment &lt;strong&gt;silently deleted&lt;/strong&gt; in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/137055/discussion-on-question-by-sridhar-ratnakumar-as-if-looking-at-distance-to-get-h&quot;&gt;moved to chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[^1]: As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15349/102&quot;&gt;other user&lt;/a&gt; puts it, giving an &amp;quot;impression of being antagonistic out of sheer pique&amp;quot;. Or as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15318/102&quot;&gt;this user&lt;/a&gt; put it, &amp;quot;there seems to me a childish intent among many users of the site to rule out anything which cannot be answered definitively&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102" LastEditorUserId="102" LastEditDate="2022-06-13T20:39:57.613" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T20:39:57.613" Title="What is the recourse when mods delete comments without notice?" Tags="|discussion|comments|vote-to-close|moderation|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15356" CreationDate="2022-06-13T15:57:49.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have no &amp;quot;recourse&amp;quot; to moderators doing their job and deleting a comment &amp;quot;without notice&amp;quot;. That simply is not how the Stack Exchange works. Although I was not the moderator who deleted that comment, I can tell you why it is standard policy to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment asking people to justify their votes is one that is routinely deleted and nearly mechanically. That's because such comments are considered to be neither constructive nor germane: &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; has to justify their votes here on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am, however, the moderator who has just moved the comment chain to a chat room where it belongs and locked the post against further comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that &lt;strong&gt;all comments are ephemeral&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nobody&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;deserves&amp;quot; to have their comments retained, let alone their deletions explained or justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SEE ALSO:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4582&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15199&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3865&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/135&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/6521&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/325416&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is probably a multi-duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T15:57:49.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-20T16:38:30.673" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the best collocations search website you've used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall there being one associated with Oxford but can no longer find it. It returned results from classical and modern English sources, including some copyrighted archive collections (newspaper archives, literature archives, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had a very detailed search UI where you could specify phrase length, age, and similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24663" OwnerDisplayName="Mussri" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T16:59:52.500" Title="Online collocations search engine?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-06-21T15:26:02.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-20T20:50:04.480" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find dictionaries tend to provide definitions that are too general and don't cut to the heart of how words are distinctly used. Is there a dictionary that does a better job defining words or providing examples as to illustrate the particular nuance in how words tend to be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="371620" OwnerDisplayName="pete nienaber" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T11:21:47.963" Title="Dictionaries that do a good job explaining nuances in how words are used" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2022-07-15T10:32:52.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15360" CreationDate="2022-06-21T11:21:47.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in comments, OED is peerless and M-W perhaps the best free online source, though other dictionaries now provide useful usage notes. No descriptive dictionary can be fully comprehensive; it would be colossal and nigh-on unsearchable (and out of date within a week).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Websites like ELU and Wordwizard tackle polysemy, including clashing (stipulative) definitions (polysemy with hypernymy, or conflicting usages). But again, total accuracy, reasonable sampling, and authoritativeness cannot be assumed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T11:21:47.963" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-06-21T11:21:47.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-23T02:25:53.223" Score="11" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a bunch of questions about these grammatical formulations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Why &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; we close these duplicates?&amp;quot; (Negated question using a contraction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Why &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; we &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; close these duplicates?&amp;quot; (Negated question using full form, where &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; moves past the subject)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Why &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; we not close these duplicates?&amp;quot; (Negated question using full form, where &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; stays in place; considered archaic or ungrammatical by most people)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all the questions cover all 3 forms, but many do. Not all the questions have great titles either but that can be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Usage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/181147/191178&quot;&gt;Expanding a contraction, where the expansion is not as it would seem&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My current canonical John Lawler answer. I chose it because I found it first, but I'm not sure if it's the best duplicate target&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/67822/191178&quot;&gt;Can you say &amp;quot;are not we all?&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;aren&amp;#39;t we all?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another John Lawler answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/14287/191178&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Don&amp;#39;t you know? &amp;quot; the same as &amp;quot;Do not you know?&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like the link in the answer two answers down, but not so much the other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/8372/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Do you not&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#39;t you&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Short and sweet and probably easier to understand for most people&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/212680/191178&quot;&gt;Why do not we ask negative questions without a contraction on the not after the verb?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like the answers on this, though they are pretty unfocused. The top answer talks about the history. The second answer is yet another John Lawler answer and one I like better than the other two JL answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/372463/191178&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;aren&amp;#39;t you too old to be...&amp;quot; proper grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everything downvoted. Has useful links in the comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/82982/191178&quot;&gt;Why does &amp;quot;Why doesn&amp;#39;t it work?&amp;quot; become &amp;quot;Why does it not work?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sven Yargs points out that some people do say &amp;quot;Why does not...&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/458986/191178&quot;&gt;not or n&amp;#39;t - word order in negative questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/253185/191178&quot;&gt;Why can I contract *across* a word, skipping the word in the middle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/528263/191178&quot;&gt;Shouldn&amp;#39;t vs should not usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/60952/191178&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#39;t you like ___?&amp;quot; okay, but &amp;quot;Why do not you like?&amp;quot; ___?&amp;quot; isn&amp;#39;t?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/137349/191178&quot;&gt;Is this the right way to use &amp;quot;wouldn&amp;#39;t&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/345958/191178&quot;&gt;How might one rewrite interrogative sentences with contractions, such as &amp;quot;Why can&amp;#39;t we ... &amp;quot;, more elegantly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/67355/191178&quot;&gt;Tag Questions &amp;quot;is he not&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About tag questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/11250/191178&quot;&gt;Using abbreviations incorrectly?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag questions!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/251841/191178&quot;&gt;Using &amp;quot;aren&amp;#39;t they&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed as GR, downvoted answer. About tag questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/82854/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Is it not raining&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#39;t it raining&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed as a duplicate, but is not about tag questions!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/73994/191178&quot;&gt;What is the correct usage of contractions like &amp;quot;isn&amp;#39;t&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wasn&amp;#39;t&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed as a duplicate of a more generic contraction question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/590785/191178&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/590785/191178&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brand new question I closed as duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/532254/191178&quot;&gt;is &amp;quot;weren&amp;#39;t you...&amp;quot; considered grammatically correct? Because expanded, it would translate to &amp;quot;were not you...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Older Q I closed as a dupe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/341671/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Isn&amp;#39;t that...&amp;quot; expanding to &amp;quot;Is not that...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Older Q I closed as a dupe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/237773/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Why can I not&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Why can not I&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Differences in the correct forms&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember if any of the questions above really explained the difference between the two correct forms, as opposed to just saying that they're both correct, so I put these in their own section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/419347/191178&quot;&gt;Negative contractions in a question&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This doesn't ask about the ungrammatical third form. Does it need to be closed as a duplicate? Maybe, maybe not. I think it could use a stronger answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/513499/191178&quot;&gt;Is it mandatory to use contractions in tag questions and the like?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is about tag questions, and also doesn't ask about the ungrammatical third form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;History&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read more questions, it made sense to break this out into its own category. These questions aren't duplicates of any of the ones above. The answers are quite different between them so I'm not sure if it's useful to close all of them even as duplicates of each other. I think the questions could be polished a little though (weak titles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/225666/191178&quot;&gt;Was &amp;quot;Do not you want to know...&amp;quot; correct 200 years ago, and is now incorrect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/584900/191178&quot;&gt;negating contractions in Jane Austen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/50251/191178&quot;&gt;Is it incorrect to say, &amp;quot;Why cannot....?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/575364/191178&quot;&gt;What is the origin of situations in which you cannot expand a contraction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the best canonicals in the &amp;quot;Usage&amp;quot; section?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should any of the history questions be closed as duplicates?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What tags are best? I've been using &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-order&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-order&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-order&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-word-order-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;word-order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-questions-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/negation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;negation&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;negation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-negation-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;negation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contractions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contractions&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contractions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-contractions-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;contractions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contraction-vs-full-form&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contraction-vs-full-form&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;contraction-vs-full-form&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-contraction-vs-full-form-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;contraction-vs-full-form&lt;/a&gt;. For &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tag-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tag-questions&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tag-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-tag-questions-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;tag-questions&lt;/a&gt;, I guess I would replace &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-questions-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;. (I may or may not retag many of these questions. But it seems appropriate to do so if I'm bumping with a reopen/reclose anyway.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bonus: Does ELL have a canonical we can link to as well? (I may have to redo my searches there...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's reach an agreement before closing or reopening any of these questions. I can do it easily myself with my unlimited well of mod closing powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2024-03-25T13:00:33.757" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T13:00:33.757" Title="&quot;Why don't we close these duplicates?&quot; vs &quot;Why do we not close these duplicates?&quot; vs &quot;Why do not we close these questions as duplicates?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15310" CreationDate="2022-06-23T15:54:33.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for raising this one to our attention. We've executed the change network-wide. As with all link replacements, we do expect a bit of routine cleanup work, so be on the lookout for any cases that look odd. But, let us know if you run into any major fallout as a result of the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="428633" LastEditorUserId="428633" LastEditDate="2022-06-23T16:06:20.680" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T16:06:20.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15362" CreationDate="2022-06-25T18:07:31.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the question has to do with fairly simple facts and rules. But these deal with several different things, and the various statements in the questions, and answers, are contradictory and confusing. So, as I suggested in my comment above, let's limit the question and state it clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topics involved are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question formation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;subject-auxiliary inversion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;auxiliary-negative contraction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the nature of negation and negative phrases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order, Question Formation (both y/n and Wh) requires that there be an auxiliary before the subject. It also requires a lot of other stuff, but the position of the auxiliary before the subject is the point to concentrate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several ways to get an auxiliary in front of a subject. You can simply swap them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He was&lt;/strong&gt; working when she called&lt;/em&gt; ==&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was he&lt;/strong&gt; working when she called?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but if there isn't one, you hafta use &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; (the rule is called &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support) and put that in front of the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She&lt;/strong&gt; woke up at 3 am&lt;/em&gt; ==&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did she&lt;/strong&gt; wake up at 3 am?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all simple enough. But if you add a negative, you complicate the syntax. The usual place for &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is after the first auxiliary verb (as usual, if there is no auxiliary verb, &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support happens)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; eating lasagna&lt;/em&gt;. + &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ==&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;Bill &lt;strong&gt;is not&lt;/strong&gt; eating lasagna&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill &lt;strong&gt;ate&lt;/strong&gt; lasagna yesterday&lt;/em&gt;. + &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ==&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;Bill &lt;strong&gt;did not eat&lt;/strong&gt; lasagna yesterday.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the first auxiliary verb carries the tense marker,  &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support changes the following verb to an infinitive (if it isn't one already), because &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; requires an infinitive complement. That's what happened to &lt;em&gt;ate&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's simple enough, too, &lt;strong&gt;except&lt;/strong&gt; that &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; has its own other uses;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://websites.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/CELS-Negation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;negation&lt;/a&gt; is never simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern English, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is contracted whenever possible. Avoiding a contraction marks the sentence as not standard, and can be used to emphasize something, though one is not always sure of what's being emphasized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;hasn't&lt;/strong&gt; finished the painting yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has not&lt;/strong&gt; finished the painting yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence above is more likely to have a different intonation, and to be interpreted as a complaint or recrimination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But contraction with a negative reifies an auxiliary, and forms a new one. This new auxiliary must now be moved or not moved as a unit, and can't be split up. When a movement rule like Question Formation inverts an auxiliary, it moves the whole contraction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He has&lt;/strong&gt; not finished the painting&lt;/em&gt;. ===&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has he&lt;/strong&gt; not finished the painting?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He hasn't&lt;/strong&gt; finished the painting&lt;/em&gt;.  ===&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hasn't he&lt;/strong&gt; finished the painting?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it only moves the contracted auxiliary, not an uncontracted &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, which stays where it is. Therefore there is no rule that generates the ungrammatical question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;Has not he finished the painting?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because there is no rule that unpacks &lt;em&gt;hasn't&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;has not&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; it's been inverted. It only works in one direction, like a trapdoor function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2022-06-25T18:14:33.640" LastActivityDate="2022-06-25T18:14:33.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15366" CreationDate="2022-06-30T07:45:18.183" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some questions don't last very long in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&quot;&gt;HNQ list&lt;/a&gt;. For example, this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/591002/where-does-the-dysfunctional-or-broken-meaning-of-the-word-demic-come-from&quot;&gt;Where does the &amp;quot;dysfunctional or broken&amp;quot; meaning of the word &amp;quot;demic&amp;quot; come from?&lt;/a&gt; or this one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/591033/what-is-the-meaning-of-beggar-in-this-context&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;beggar&amp;quot; in this context?&lt;/a&gt;. Both of them became hot network posts, but didn't last very long in the HNQ list (you can also judge by the number of views on both questions), just about a day or so (instead of the usual three days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, only moderators can remove questions out of the HNQ list. Is there some other factor that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356843" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-06-30T09:03:54.783" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T12:45:20.957" Title="Why are some questions removed from the HNQ list very quickly?" Tags="|support|hot-network-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15365" CreationDate="2022-06-30T12:45:20.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those questions/answers had just enough upvotes to get onto the HNQ, but didn't get many (net) upvotes after that. Age makes a question less hot, so a Q&amp;amp;A needs to keep collecting upvotes to compensate. (New answers that collect upvotes also help a lot.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you're upvoting good posts, even if a few other people already have. (And also downvote if a post really is bad.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/323179&quot;&gt;HNQ formula&lt;/a&gt; on MSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T12:45:20.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15368" CreationDate="2022-07-02T12:40:39.790" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my language, there's a dictionary that for each word not only defines it, but gives multiple examples of usage from actual newspapers, books, etc. The best thing about it, is that it usually provides one of the earliest examples of the word, which is sometimes back in the 16th century. Then the rest of the examples are spread out over time, so that you can see how the usage has changed, and you can immediately tell at a glance how old any given word is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the word &amp;quot;sommar&amp;quot; (summer) is listed as this:&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N0GJy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N0GJy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;dictionary entry&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything that resembles this for English? Paid or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259553" OwnerDisplayName="Yeats" LastActivityDate="2022-07-02T13:12:06.970" Title="An English dictionary that lists examples of the word used throughout history" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15367" CreationDate="2022-07-02T13:12:06.970" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Third_edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (not to be confused with other &lt;em&gt;Oxford&lt;/em&gt; dictionaries). The second edition takes up 20 volumes in hardcover, and is available online at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oed.com&lt;/a&gt; if you have a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5754" LastActivityDate="2022-07-02T13:12:06.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15370" CreationDate="2022-07-04T07:38:34.607" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure this site does not have this tag. Why though? ELL has this tag, in which a person can post a canonical post intended as a reference for questioners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="450542" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2022-07-08T08:14:05.497" LastActivityDate="2022-07-08T08:14:05.497" Title="Canonical post tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15369" CreationDate="2022-07-04T12:10:49.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a meta tag. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;blog post on meta tags&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the tag should exist on EL&amp;amp;U or ELL. At best it's simply not useful. (When I'm looking for an answer to an English question, it doesn't matter how the question was made.) At worst it's being used instead of a tag that would be useful, one that describes what the question is about. (Note the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/8743/41273&quot;&gt;ELL question&lt;/a&gt; that only has the [canonical-post] tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of using meta-tags, I find the canonical by either looking at the highest voted questions in a tag (example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tenses?tab=Votes&quot;&gt;highest voted tense questions&lt;/a&gt;) or by finding one of the many duplicates via search (example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/21846?lq=1&quot;&gt;questions linked to our tense canonical&lt;/a&gt;). You can also see the most linked-to questions by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?tab=Frequent&quot;&gt;frequent tab&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one more important thing: &amp;quot;canonicals&amp;quot; aren't always questions that were asked by meta consensus or even by someone who knew the answer. A lot of questions become canonicals because of the effort put in by the answerers to create a thorough explanation. (And this may be the final reason why I find the tag on ELL not useful: Where are all the &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; questions that serve as canonicals? Who gets to determine what counts as one of those?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I am in the process of finding a question to be a canonical on a specific topic, since I saw a mess of open, duplicate questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15362/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Why don&amp;#39;t we close these duplicates?&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;Why do we not close these duplicates?&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;Why do not we close these questions as duplicates?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-07-04T17:39:07.760" LastActivityDate="2022-07-04T17:39:07.760" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15373" CreationDate="2022-07-06T20:54:57.520" Score="-2" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;, I was suspended for a year from the X site. And I have appealed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then,&lt;/strong&gt; (several days later) I was having a discussion with a moderator in the French chat, which I thought was in depth and going along fine in terms of questions I have, and boom, &lt;strong&gt;someone, a mod, suspended me without warning just as we were talking!&lt;/strong&gt; [re editing: there was nothing untoward in my sentence. The whole point of this post is explained here. Please do not edit it. I had no way of &lt;strong&gt;knowing&lt;/strong&gt; who suspended me. I did not know it was possible for another mod to suspend me while I was talking to a different mod.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I tried to access the chat here on ELU, and it says I cannot as I have been suspended from chat. Is this a bug or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, please don't use jargon-y language here. I won't understand it. Thanks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the information of any French forum users: This question is about being suspended from chatting while speaking to a moderator on the French site. This could have happened anywhere as I am told this is a site-wide suspension. I was merely explaining what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I repeat: &lt;strong&gt;Since chat suspensions are site-wide, there is no way to know who initiated the suspension or where, ergo, one can ask about this anywhere.&lt;/strong&gt; And FLE participants should stop maligning me for asking a simple question. &lt;strong&gt;I am not blaming the mod with whom I was having the discussion when another mod did this.&lt;/strong&gt; It was just shocking to me that another mod would do that when a person (me) was talking to a mod. &lt;strong&gt;And no one has yet addressed this issue specifically.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note once again: This is not about the site where this happened. This is a general question so I would appreciate it if those who keep ascribing intentions to me would just stop it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100179" LastEditorUserId="100179" LastEditDate="2022-07-18T19:26:19.840" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T19:26:19.840" Title="Suspension from one chat has suspended me from this chat. How can that be?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15371" CreationDate="2022-07-06T21:05:51.630" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a diamond moderator from another site, the only reason I'm responding is because I saw this post in the live feed of posts I was watching and decided to respond.  (I have no knowledge of why or who suspended you in chat, and have no insights into what happened there, I'm just responding to your post is all)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chat system for all StackExchange sites (except for Meta SE and StackOverflow) is all interlinked.  That is, if you receive a chat suspension on French language chat, that chat suspension applies across all of chat.stackexchange.com, which means it applies to the ELU chat page as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a bug, this is by-design and has been that way since the Dawn of the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no way to ID who suspended you or why, any diamond moderator on one of the Stack Exchange sites has the ability to squash you in chat across chat.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not a good idea to whine/complain about a site suspension and/or chat ban when it's under review, so that's probably something to consider - your behavior &amp;quot;looks bad&amp;quot; when you do this, and it likely will affect the review of your chat ban/suspension if one's underway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that this has nothing to do with English Language and Usage, though, so you probably posted this in the wrong meta/site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10620" LastEditorUserId="10620" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T21:17:18.060" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T21:17:18.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15371" CreationDate="2022-07-06T21:09:52.943" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat suspensions are server wide. If you have a chat suspension on chat.stackexchange.com it covers &lt;em&gt;all the rooms&lt;/em&gt; on the server, regardless of what site the room is associated/parented with. There's no option to suspend someone 'only' on a specific site's chatroom or a specific chatroom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he suspended me without warning just as we were talking!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well not necessarily. Chat flags go to any moderator on the chat for moderator attention flags, and some flags go to 10k users. It could be any moderator, and it seems unlikely that a moderator just decided to suspend you mid conversation without warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically its likely to be &lt;em&gt;any other moderator&lt;/em&gt; active at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, considering the circumstances - and looking at the situation, complaining about a suspension on the chat of the site you were suspended &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; your suspension is in review feels ... potentially problematic, it might have been wise to wait for the review to complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15730" LastEditorUserId="15730" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T21:16:52.573" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T21:16:52.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15371" CreationDate="2022-07-06T21:26:57.660" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've actually been in a similar situation to you, many years ago. The relation between main sites and chat, especially in regard to suspensions, can be frustrating sometimes. So I sympathise with your situation. Let me try to explain so that you have a clearer understanding of what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things to understand about the nature of chat suspensions, as far as system technicalities go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat suspensions cannot be done per-room or per-site. You can be temporarily kicked from a single room, but only for a maximum of 30 minutes. Chat suspensions apply to the entire chat.SE server.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A main-site suspension on X.stackexchange.com will lead to a chat suspension iff that site is your &amp;quot;chat parent&amp;quot; (you can set your &amp;quot;parent site&amp;quot; to be any main site where you have an account). Otherwise, main-site suspensions and chat suspensions are largely independent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat suspensions can also be applied manually by moderators. Any moderator on any SE site has moderator powers in chat, and many in fact exercise those powers in chatrooms other than those of their mod site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(If you're already suspended on chat, changing your parent site won't lift the suspension. It's possible for a moderator to sneakily suspend you by changing your parent site to the site where you're suspended and refreshing your chat profile so that the suspension propagates to chat, but I consider this inappropriate.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important thing, which is &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; in-built to the system, is that you're generally &lt;em&gt;discouraged&lt;/em&gt; from using the chatrooms of X.stackexchange.com while suspended on that site. As this rule is not system-enforced, users who are suspended on one site may be expected to keep out of that site's chatrooms (they may keep using the chatrooms of sites they're not suspended on) or risk losing their access to all of chat. As chat is moderated by 600-odd moderators from the entire SE network with widely varying moderation styles, this rule is very inconsistently enforced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how does all of this apply to your case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your chat suspension was applied manually by a moderator, specifically for chat and not associated with your French.SE suspension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As you may have surmised from the response to this meta post, a number of moderators from across the network are at least vaguely aware of you in chat. It would be unwise to assume you know who suspended you. (It wasn't me, by the way. We've never met, and I don't know what you did to get suspended. I just saw this meta post and thought I could help.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be dangerous to use the chatrooms associated to a site where you're suspended. Clearly at least one French.SE moderator was OK with it, but maybe someone else wasn't. (Chat has inconsistent moderation, unfortunately.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obviously, chat suspensions can also be specifically for bad behaviour in chat, rather than just for using rooms you shouldn't be using. A long chat suspension is likely to be based on a pattern of bad behaviour rather than one or two recent problematic posts. Unfortunately, chat suspensions aren't accompanied by mod messages to tell you what you did wrong. (Again, I don't know you and don't know why this particular suspension was applied.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may have a chance of appealing this chat suspension, if you're active on other sites (where you're not suspended) and wish to use their chatrooms. It worked for me, many years ago. However, any unsuspension from chat is likely to be conditional on you not using the chatrooms of French.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87724" LastEditorUserId="87724" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T21:31:29.473" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T21:31:29.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2022-07-10T23:10:46.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It rarely happens here, but I can think of questions on some sites that make faulty assumptions.  In some rare cases, I’ve even seen questions that exist mainly for the sake of propaganda. The poster was clearly fishing for the answer they wanted, so they could accept it and link it elsewhere as an authoritative fact with a green checkmark (before mods got the power to thwart that kind of thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, sometimes, the question is not especially good or bad, but the top answer is very flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have sometimes felt it important to answer a question that I downvoted, in order to correct a false impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299611" LastActivityDate="2022-07-10T23:10:46.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-22T10:48:18.607" Score="5" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-expression-requests-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;expression-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag was merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-phrase-requests-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;phrase-requests&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pertaining Meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7871/&quot;&gt;What are [expression-requests] tag for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that respect, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-expressions-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;expressions&lt;/a&gt; tag should be merged into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-phrases-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; tag also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional small request: It would make sense to rename the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expression-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-choice&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expression-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-expression-choice-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;expression-choice&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-choice&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-phrase-choice-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;phrase-choice&lt;/a&gt; for consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note: I've tried to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expressions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expressions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-expressions-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;expressions&lt;/a&gt; tag as a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-phrases-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;phrases&lt;/a&gt; tag but it doesn't work like that.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/phrases/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/phrases/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Error message:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Failed to propose synonym:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Reverse synonym expressions already proposed on the tag expression&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="326523" LastEditDate="2024-03-02T10:02:29.960" LastActivityDate="2024-03-02T10:02:29.960" Title="Tag merge request: [expressions] tag into [phrases] tag" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|retag-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-23T13:46:25.563" Score="8" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592383&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. It was locked within the hour for a day. Now what I need to understand is why that was done, so I can rectify it. As a corollary, should moderators lock questions without giving a reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150958" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-07-23T18:25:21.840" LastActivityDate="2022-07-23T18:25:21.840" Title="Should moderators lock posts without giving a reasoning for it?" Tags="|support|comments|moderation|locked-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15379" CreationDate="2022-07-23T14:04:00.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is always given in the lock message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, it's so that people actually bother to answer you instead of just commenting you, which breaks our system here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you asked your question is likely to provoke comments and discussion rather than answers, at least with the current set of folks who are lightning-quick to jump on questions to comment them, but somehow can't ever be bothered to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking to have a conversation with people about this, then that should be in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2022-07-23T14:04:00.010" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-27T21:28:50.607" Score="-4" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been in multiple debates on what a forum is and if a Q&amp;amp;A site like this one is a forum, so I'm trying to get a real world definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The below various actual definitions of &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot; apparently aren't enough to convince some people. (Highlighting added by me for relevant sections.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the marketplace or public square of an ancient Roman city, the center of judicial and business affairs and a place of assembly for the people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a court or tribunal: the forum of public opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an assembly, meeting place, television program, etc., &lt;strong&gt;for the discussion of questions of public interest.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Also called online forum, internet forum, web forum . message board.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Forum, the forum in the ancient city of Rome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/forum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A forum is an online discussion board where people can ask questions, share their experiences, and discuss topics of mutual interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://help.hcltechsw.com/connections/v55/user/forums/c_forums_welcome.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://help.hcltechsw.com/connections/v55/user/forums/c_forums_welcome.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discussion board (known also by various other names such as discussion group, discussion forum, message board, and online forum) is a general term for any online &amp;quot;bulletin board&amp;quot; where you can &lt;strong&gt;leave and expect to see responses to messages you have left.&lt;/strong&gt; Or you can just read the board. The first discussion boards were available on bulletin board systems. On the Internet, USENET provides thousands of discussion boards; these can now sometimes be viewed from a Web browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many websites offer discussion boards so that &lt;strong&gt;users can share and discuss information and opinions.&lt;/strong&gt; Special software is available that provides discussion board capability for a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/discussion-board-discussion-group-message-board-online-forum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/discussion-board-discussion-group-message-board-online-forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.&lt;/strong&gt;[1] They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onrec.com/news/news-archive/top-5-chats-and-forums-websites-in-the-world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; itself is listed as a forum on other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://robertsrules.com/qa-forum/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert's Rules of Order&lt;/a&gt; has rules specific to Q&amp;amp;A forums. &amp;quot;The Question and Answer forum is place to ask specific questions, or suggest answers to questions posted by others,...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had people say that because a Q&amp;amp;A isn't a discussion, it's not a forum. Some of the same people say &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; is considered a forum, yet it's a Q&amp;amp;A site. I'd agree that a static Q&amp;amp;A list of pre-determines questions and answers isn't a forum, but a site that allows users to ask their own question and get answers from others is a discussion of their problem and how to address it. The very definition of discussion includes asking and answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: consideration of a question in open and usually informal debate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// a heated political discussion&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;2: a formal treatment of a topic in speech or writing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;//A discussion on the topic is included in the first chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discussion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at a thesaurus, there's a variety of words that work here: investigation, conversation, dialog, consultation, discourse, analysis, exchange, and probably more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/discussion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_(legal)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal definition&lt;/a&gt; of what a forum is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of public forums generally cannot be restricted based on the content of the speech expressed by the user. &lt;strong&gt;Use can be restricted based on content, however, if the restriction passes a strict scrutiny test for a traditional and designated forum or the reasonableness test for a limited forum. Also, public forums can be restricted as to the time, place and manner of speech.&lt;/strong&gt; In the 1972 case Grayned v. City of Rockford, the Supreme Court found that &amp;quot;The nature of a place, the pattern of its normal activities, dictate the kinds of regulations of time, place, and manner that are reasonable.&amp;quot; In determining what is reasonable, the Court stated that &amp;quot;[the] crucial question is whether the manner of expression is basically incompatible with the normal activity of a particular place at a particular time.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that people think of social media as a forum, but that's only one kind of forum. One definition above says &amp;quot;usually informal&amp;quot;, so it specifically doesn't rule out a formal or targeted discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So back to the original question: Do Q&amp;amp;A sites fit the definition of a forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247317" OwnerDisplayName="computercarguy" LastActivityDate="2022-07-29T21:51:10.913" Title="Do Q&amp;A sites fit the definition of a forum?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15381" CreationDate="2022-07-27T22:13:09.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE Q&amp;amp;A sites are explicitly Not Forums, as explained by this MSE answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92110&quot;&gt;Are Stack Exchange sites forums?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. Most forums are largely discussion-based and tend to follow less strict rules about what posts can be like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general), we require every new thread to be started with a question and every response to that question to be an attempt at answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on a typical forum you might ask how to run a game in windowed mode. You will get several responses, some of which will be nothing but &amp;quot;oh, I love that game!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I haven't played that in a while, wow.&amp;quot; You'll be lucky if you get a relevant response. By contrast, on Stack Exchange you'd get practical responses that are 100% relevant to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92115&quot;&gt;more detailed answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow (Stack Exchange, in the more general sense) is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a dictionary sense, a &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot; is a place where ideas and views can be exchanged. But in a larger Internet context, a &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot; is traditionally regarded as a place where issues (questions) are &lt;em&gt;discussed&lt;/em&gt; in a threaded manner. A topic of discussion is posed where people can respond, and responses are allowed to evoke further sub-conversations… which generate still &lt;em&gt;further&lt;/em&gt; discussion — &lt;em&gt;ad infinitum&lt;/em&gt; until all possible facets have been discussed, or the participants lose interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In contrast, Stack Exchange encourages &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; questions&lt;/strong&gt; that have &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;, canonical answers. A question is asked and respondents weigh in with a &lt;strong&gt;carefully thought-out response&lt;/strong&gt; which is then vetted through voting and wiki-editing (improving on the answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference is that each answer posted has to stand on its own. Stack Exchange neither supports nor encourages a &amp;quot;forum-style&amp;quot; of open, free-for-all discussion (many-to-many conversations). This is by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage is that users can vote on the best answers which then float to the top. You don't have to worry about breaking the conversation thread, and answers are not buried deep down in the larger context of an entire, vast &amp;quot;conversation.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We prefer this Q&amp;amp;A format over the &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot;-style conversations typically found on the Internet. People who say &amp;quot;this is not a forum&amp;quot; are simply urging users to avoid the patterns that cause traditional forums to fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is built on the premise that &lt;strong&gt;forums don't scale.&lt;/strong&gt; All those open conversations mean that those forums only tend to get noisier and noisier. What inevitably happens is that long-time users get tired of the new users asking the same old questions. New users can't find useful information and feel ostracized. And most find that, the more they talk, the less &lt;em&gt;value&lt;/em&gt; they get from the experience. In short, you stop learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scobleizer.com/?p=5980&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The chat room/forum problem&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Scoble&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internet discussion forums get in the way of getting answers. Our Q&amp;amp;A sites here were founded specifically to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be forums, all because of how terrible forums and discussion &amp;quot;threads&amp;quot; are at providing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abuses to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not a &amp;quot;message board&amp;quot; or a &amp;quot;discussion forum&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;SEE ALSO&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/180325&quot;&gt;Help us figure out a way to handle the explosion of comments on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/92107?lq=1&quot;&gt;68 other related and linked questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" OwnerDisplayName="tchrist" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-07-27T22:21:58.510" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T22:21:58.510" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15381" CreationDate="2022-07-28T00:16:48.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let us get rid of the error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the legal definition of what a forum is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there is not. Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104 (1972) an anti-picketing ordinance was ruled overbroad but an anti-noise ordinance upheld. The word “forum” does not appear in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_case?case=9438961868955985513&amp;amp;q=Grayned%20v.%20City%20of%20Rockford&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=2006&amp;amp;as_vis=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;judgement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be thinking of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Corp._v._Halleck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck&lt;/a&gt; No. 17-1702, 587 U.S. (2019) as far as types of forums are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question starts with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been in multiple debates on what a forum is and if a Q&amp;amp;A site like this one is a forum, so I'm trying to get a real world definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And ends with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So back to the original question: Do Q&amp;amp;A sites fit the definition of a forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Forum” is really a hypernym: it covers a lot of styles. It can be likened to “tree”: we all recognise a tree when we see one, but we can argue where the line between “tree” and “not tree” or &amp;quot;a bush&amp;quot; lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do Q&amp;amp;A sites fit the definition of a forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, why not? There is rarely a full answer or universal agreement on an answer, so what develops becomes a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forum&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Computing.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;A facility on a computer network (now usually the internet) for users to share information or opinions; spec. a discussion group which is accessible online (as through a mailing list, a bulletin board system, a newsgroup, or a website), especially one dedicated to a particular topic.&lt;/strong&gt; In early use, not always&#xA;distinguished from the general sense of ‘a place of public discussion’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1971   E. Harslem &amp;amp; J. F. Heafner Request for Comments (Network Working Group) (Electronic text) No. 131. 3   &lt;em&gt;We have been proponents of the collective NWG [= Network Working Group] as a forum to raise issues and as a general information transfer mechanism of what sites are doing and thinking.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1984   InfoWorld (Nexis) 18 June 34   &lt;em&gt;A forum or special-interest group (SIG) is a subset of a national network and functions much like a BBS.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1997   Daily Tel. (Electronic ed.) 1 Nov.   &lt;em&gt;In this forum, you can follow or join in conversations as they happen.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the definition remains pleasingly nebulous and allows the word to be used for any internet site that allows the sharing of information, opinions, digital media, and/or ideas, etc, between multiple participants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that, given the above, Q&amp;amp;A sites are forums, if their essence is an exchange of ideas between multiple posters. Thus if I had a site upon which you could ask a question but only I would answer, and would not enter into discussions about my answer, then that would not be a forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is usual for a poster to give context. Asking for a precise definition of “forum” is unusual. Could you please state why you need a precise definition? To what use are you going to put it?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastActivityDate="2022-07-28T00:16:48.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15381" CreationDate="2022-07-28T02:22:39.703" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You're missing the point.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the internet, referring to online communities, &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;discussion forum&amp;quot; are typically used interchangeably&lt;/strong&gt;, to refer to bulletin-board style software in which users create posts about a topic that are then discussed in threads. See, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/forum.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this entry in the Jargon File&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of the topic of online communities, the word &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot; has many meanings, including many things that are quite unlike a discussion forum or bulletin board.  It can even refer to general &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; like a &amp;quot;public forum&amp;quot;, which describes something that is not a community of people at all, but rather a place for or means of conveying speech (as in the legal case you cite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When people say that &amp;quot;Stack Exchange is not a forum,&amp;quot; what they are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; saying is that &amp;quot;Stack Exchange is not a &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; forum.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  Which it's not: it's a question-and-answer site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context is important. Words do not mean the same thing in all contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390415" LastActivityDate="2022-07-28T02:22:39.703" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15381" CreationDate="2022-07-28T22:18:51.623" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Q&amp;amp;A sites are forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discussion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discussions&lt;/a&gt; are a consideration of a question, which often, but not always, includes at least one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/forum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forums&lt;/a&gt; are a meeting place for the discussion of questions of public interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A sites are a place where discussions happen to ask and answer question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definitions of forum and discussion don't care if the topics are targeted or open, or if they are informal or professional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;As requested, here are a couple definitions of Q&amp;amp;A, as well as Q&amp;amp;A site, and a few other relevant definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a period of time or an occasion when someone answers questions that are asked by a reporter, by the people in an audience, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There will be a brief Q and A following the speech.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;—often used before another noun&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a Q and A session&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Q%20and%20A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Q%20and%20A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion is a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a list of Q&amp;amp;A sites, which include Quora, Reddit, and other sites that are considered forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Q%26A_sites&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Q%26A_sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanation of what Q&amp;amp;A software used to run a Q&amp;amp;A site is includes the word discuss, which is the base of discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A software is online software that attempts to answer questions asked by users (Q&amp;amp;A stands for &amp;quot;question and answer&amp;quot;). Q&amp;amp;A software is frequently integrated by large and specialist corporations and tends to be implemented as a community that allows users in similar fields to discuss questions and provide answers to common and specialist questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page includes a link to commonly used forum sites. This is a list of software available for download, which doesn't include proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another definition of discussion includes definitions that fit very well with what a Q&amp;amp;A site is and does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The act of discussing; talk or writing in which the pros and cons or various aspects of a subject are considered.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A formal discourse on a topic; an exposition.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Consideration of a subject by a group; an earnest conversation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Discussion is defined as talking or writing about something, especially in order to solve a problem or resolve a question.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Conversation or debate concerning a particular topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yourdictionary.com/discussion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.yourdictionary.com/discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another definition of discussion is explicitly to take a look at things by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion comes from the Latin for &amp;quot;examination by taking things apart,&amp;quot; and when you're having a discussion with someone on a complicated topic, it's like you're taking it apart and trying to understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt; an extended communication (often interactive) dealing with  some particular topic&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“the book contains an excellent discussion of modal logic”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt; an exchange of views on some topic&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“we had a good discussion”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/discussion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247317" LastEditorUserId="247317" LastEditDate="2022-07-29T16:16:02.603" LastActivityDate="2022-07-29T16:16:02.603" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15389" CreationDate="2022-07-29T21:37:06.447" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592752/why-are-just-and-justice-written-like-that&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; been closed as “opinion based”? What did I put in the question that is making it an opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383248" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-07-30T02:20:33.590" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T02:48:49.280" Title="Why has my question been closed as &quot;Opinion Based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15381" CreationDate="2022-07-29T21:51:10.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a question about the meaning of the words Q&amp;amp;A, forum, discussion forum and also a philosophical question about stipulative vs descriptive definitions but I suspect it is really a question about what SE sites are vs should be vs what it is claimed it is/should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forum&lt;/a&gt; (a common area for people to interact) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; (a back and forth conversation) have descriptive definitions in mainstream dictionaries where 'descriptive' means that the word has been analyzed in many instances and the definition is just a description of how it is used in various contexts. Since it is descriptive, the only force guiding its usage is just how common behavior is, there's not right or wrong, just 'this is what people do'. (there is no descriptive definition in a dictionary for 'Q&amp;amp;A'). Forum and discussion are very close, and Q&amp;amp;A (like a FAQ or Ask Me Anything) is fairly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the UI/UX design literature, there are stipulative definitions for Q&amp;amp;A,&#xA;forum, and discussion (or discussion forum). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stipulative%20definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Stipulative'&lt;/a&gt; means that a definition is given de jure, which means that in an accepted context, the word means exactly what the given definition says. In other words, a definition is stipulated means that the whatever the existing definition you have in your head you should forget it entirely and use the stated definition, purely for the sake of discussion. Scientific language is often stipulative, mathematics very much so. Legal language is often very stipulative. Stipulative definitions are usually derived from analyzing what people have said, but then writing down a specific definition and if there is any difference between the written definition and how people use it, then the written version takes precedence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In software design, specifically UX/UI, Q&amp;amp;A, forum, and discussion have been given specific stipulated definitions. The three are distinct, none are the others. -Of course- they are similar, but no pairs are identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Q&amp;amp;A' is usually not considered a discussion because usually the format of Q&amp;amp;A is not a long sequence of back and forth, each response elucidating and qualifying the previous ones, but instead is just one question followed by one response and that's it (of course some UX for Q&amp;amp;A allows for comment chains which act like conversations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to 'is/should be' and claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is -supposed to be- just Q&amp;amp;A without discussion (the designers claim this and mods try to enforce it) , but sometimes the comment chains and meta can -be- discussion-like. If there is some discrepancy (ie there is too much discussion) the general behavior of mods is to discourage such discussion, often with the abbreviated suggestion 'SE is not a forum', which is shorthand for 'stop trying to use the UI in a discussion manner'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2022-07-29T21:51:10.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15390" CreationDate="2022-07-29T22:11:45.270" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592745/word-order-and-length-of-noun-phrase&quot;&gt;A recent question&lt;/a&gt; used the abbreviations &amp;quot;NP&amp;quot; (noun phrase) and &amp;quot;AP&amp;quot; (adjective phrase) without expansion. A commenter objected, recommending that such abbreviations always be expanded for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of commonly used abbreviations currently exists on ELU Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147/list-of-common-abbreviations-and-acronyms-noad-esl-pie&quot;&gt;List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently the list is useful, because both the question proposing it and the answer containing the actual list have several dozen upvotes. Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;ELU's help pages link to that list&lt;/a&gt;; I assume that this confers some sort of official (or semi-official?) imprimatur upon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That list does not contain abbreviations commmonly used for various sentence constituents and parts of speech. Should we add abbreviations such as &amp;quot;NP&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;AP&amp;quot; (and &amp;quot;Det&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;PP&amp;quot;, etc.)? If so, would it be best for them to be in a separate section? I was going to go ahead and just do it, but there would be quite a few terms to add, so I thought it would be best to gauge interest before making such a big edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question asked whether we should discourage the use of &amp;quot;argot&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7657/should-we-discourage-the-use-of-argot-such-as-ame-bre-elu/&quot;&gt;Should we discourage the use of argot such as AmE, BrE, ELU, ...?&lt;/a&gt;. That suggestion doesn't seem to have gotten much traction. The most upvoted answer notes: &amp;quot;Rather than asking these specialists to abandon the very way they communicate, it makes more sense to me to make sure the site helps anyone who is not familiar by documenting common jargon, including abbreviations, in the online help.&amp;quot; It then links to the list of abbreviations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7914/elu-glossaries&quot;&gt;A more popular suggestion&lt;/a&gt; (postdating the list of abbreviations) asks for a glossary of terms, including abbreviations. I searched ELU for &amp;quot;glossary&amp;quot; and found nothing like that, so I assume that nothing came of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T07:50:34.993" Title="Should we add more abbreviations to &quot;the list&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15386" CreationDate="2022-07-29T22:38:19.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not to me look like you were asking for people's opinions. I imagine you consider this a matter of fact, not opinion. It is possible that the close voters consider it only a matter of opinion, not of fact. But I do not know this for certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least two of the three close voters will have to have voted that way. They're the only ones who know why they voted that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as written your question is nonetheless a little unclear and unresearched. It's unclear because there are dozens of such words but you only thought of two, and because asking why we don't spell &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the same way that we spell &lt;em&gt;gust&lt;/em&gt; is a deeply confusing question of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it feels like you are unaware of two thousand years of intervening history  between classical antiquity and today's spelling. Or even the history of the letter J as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gaius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julii_Caesares&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; — not to mention C as in &lt;em&gt;Gaius&lt;/em&gt;, and yes, Latin also didn't have a G for the longest time, so C is the abbreviation for &lt;em&gt;Gaius&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unresearched, or at least shows no research, so we don't know where to start. We don't know what you know or don't know, because you haven't shown your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, that's way too much of an open-ended question for our format here to cover.  Books are written about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your question is still very hard for us here to answer in a satisfactory fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="438716" LastEditDate="2022-07-30T02:48:49.280" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T02:48:49.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15388" CreationDate="2022-07-30T07:50:34.993" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU is a collective effort. Don't ask whether potentially useful abbreviations should be added to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just do it™.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unlikely that someone will disagree violently enough to remove them, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; likely that rather more people will thank you for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T07:50:34.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15392" CreationDate="2022-07-30T12:21:18.957" Score="8" ViewCount="743" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there is ambiguity (and confusion) regarding the meaning and the usage of these tags; and a considerable overlap as well: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current tag infos:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; tag excerpt: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;This tag is for questions seeking or discussing a term (or terms) belonging or peculiar to a science, art, or specialized subject (e.g. linguistics, mathematics, physics, biology, finance, theatre, medical, nautical etc.) Consider adding [single-word-requests] and [phrase-requests] tags also if relevant. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Note: I've recently updated the terminology tag to make it more clear.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag excerpt: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;The vocabulary tag should be used for questions discussing a multitude of words in a certain field. E.g., the vocabulary concerning money or the vocabulary concerning leatherworking.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Note: I didn't update the vocabulary tag. Please see the details below.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; tag excerpt and info: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;This tag is for questions related to the use of technical language. Consider [terminology] tag for seeking or discussing a term (or terms) belonging a specialized subject. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technical language refers to written or oral communication in a technical field that has specialized content. It is characterized by discussing technical or specialized topics, communicating through technology or technical terms, or providing instructions on solving technical problems. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Note: I've recently updated the technical tag to make it more clear.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thoughts and possible solutions on the tags:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the terminology tag is fine as is and I've updated the tag info recently to make it as clear as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've updated the technical tag info recently to make it as clear as possible. Although, it is still an ambiguous term. It can mean technical language or technical terms; where technical terms overlap with terminology. However, I've tried to make that distinction in the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible solutions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-english&lt;/a&gt;, as we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literary-english&lt;/a&gt; tag also. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarify the tag info further.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the most complicated and ambiguous tags in my opinion, and I couldn't even come up with a good update on the tag info. It appears to have an ambiguous and/or outdated info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vocabulary is an ambiguous term itself without a context also. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vocabulary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; provides the succinct definitions below of the different senses of &lt;em&gt;vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A usually alphabetized and explained collection of words e.g. of a particular field, or prepared for a specific purpose, often for learning. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The collection of words a person knows and uses. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The stock of words used in a particular field. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The words of a language collectively; lexis. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(by extension) A range of artistic or stylistic forms or techniques.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag info appears to use the third sense, which overlaps with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; tag. Although, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag appears to be used for many different things if you check the questions tagged with this tag (and we have other specific tags for the items below, possibly except the first one):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;list questions (even the tag info provides examples of list questions also)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions about a particular word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions about multiple words or terms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions about a meaning of a word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions about the differences between words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible solutions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag (which might not be easy as there are many questions with this tag) &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merge the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; tag (although the tags didn't always overlap in all questions tagged with vocabulary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-define what vocabulary tag is for. It might need to focus on just one area with a clear tag info. It can be only for questions asking for a list of words within a particular criteria/topic/field or linguistic feature (which was the original intention, and it can be possibly renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary-list&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-list&lt;/a&gt;). I believe list questions are not explicitly off-topic if they are useful and within the usage of English language. An example of a well-received list question (although asked with the intention/wording &amp;quot;are there any?&amp;quot;):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451477/words-with-bi-prefix-that-no-longer-mean-two&quot;&gt;Words with &amp;quot;bi-&amp;quot; prefix that no longer mean &amp;quot;two&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/vocabulary/info&quot;&gt;tag info&lt;/a&gt; has this also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few sample questions that are a good fit for this tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1115/terms-for-collections-of-animals&quot;&gt;Terms for collections of animals&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/953/informal-us-terms-for-money-amounts&quot;&gt;Informal terms for money amounts&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13915/words-for-different-types-of-leatherworking&quot;&gt;Words for different types of leatherworking&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Expectations from this Meta post:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can share your thoughts and discuss, and clarify the meaning and the usage of the tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers with solutions can be upvoted or downvoted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mods or other authorized users can adopt the solution(s) if they deem fit or based on the discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've decided to post the solutions as a community wiki answer so the community can upvote or downvote; and a solution can be implemented based on the results. You can also post other solutions regarding these tags as a community wiki answer; or clarify the posted solutions without changing too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2022-09-08T14:22:35.057" LastActivityDate="2022-09-08T14:22:35.057" Title="Tag solution by voting (tag merge, rename or remove): [terminology] vs. [vocabulary] vs. [technical]" Tags="|discussion|tags|retag-request|voting|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15391" CreationDate="2022-08-03T19:11:41.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote: Yes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Downvote: No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastActivityDate="2022-08-03T19:11:41.353" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-08-03T19:11:41.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15391" CreationDate="2022-08-03T19:15:08.370" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag into &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote: Yes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Downvote: No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="64985" LastEditDate="2022-08-03T19:23:31.443" LastActivityDate="2022-08-03T19:23:31.443" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-08-03T19:15:08.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15391" CreationDate="2022-08-03T19:18:30.260" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocabulary-list&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word-list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This makes it more clear that it is about the original intention: only for questions asking for a list of words within a particular criteria/topic/field or linguistic feature. &amp;quot;Vocabulary&amp;quot; itself is an ambiguous word also and it is probably one of the reasons why it is misused frequently. The tag info can be clarified as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote: Yes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Downvote: No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="64985" LastEditDate="2022-08-05T13:37:58.963" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T13:37:58.963" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-08-03T19:18:30.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15391" CreationDate="2022-08-03T19:20:05.463" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The tag info can be clarified as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons would be that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/literary-english&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;literary-english&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;literary-english&lt;/a&gt; tag also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote: Yes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Downvote: No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="64985" LastEditDate="2022-08-05T13:32:43.863" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T13:32:43.863" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-08-03T19:20:05.463" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15397" CreationDate="2022-08-03T20:54:04.597" Score="4" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am of the opinion that there is no (unique) answer to the question below. Essentially, the PO asks what the last person in a roll-call says. Clearly, many answers could be given, all depending on the experience of the answerer. Indeed, it is also possible to imagine that many roll-calls end with silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view is that any answer is a matter of opinion and that the question should therefore be closed. The question is of the sort that assumes there is a conventional usage for everything: there is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been reasonably argued that &amp;quot;There is no answer&amp;quot; would have been a suitable answer to the question rather than voting for closure on the grounds of &amp;quot;opinion&amp;quot;. To make such a categorical assertion seems presumptuous, because I don't know everything so can hardly say for certain there is no answer. I would welcome views on this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592972/the-word-said-by-a-student-to-denote-the-end-of-countdown-in-a-pe-class?noredirect=1#comment1490162_592972&quot;&gt;The word said by a student to denote the end of countdown in a PE class&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar question to this in meta, but it is about about one word answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91338" LastActivityDate="2022-08-07T15:24:32.077" Title="Is &quot;There is no answer&quot; an acceptable answer?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15396" CreationDate="2022-08-04T07:08:20.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There is no answer&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;no such word&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no such rule&amp;quot; or whatever) is an acceptable answer to a question where that is, in fact, the answer. As you say, this is rebuttable; such an answer can be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't apply where there is are many possible right answers to a question. In that case, there &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; an answer, and another, and another, all equally valid. Which of them is &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; is a matter of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T07:08:20.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15396" CreationDate="2022-08-04T11:42:00.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There is no answer&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;by itself&lt;/strong&gt; is not a good answer, and it is not appropriate. You never know also. I've seen many cases here where people posted a correct/suitable answer (usually for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; questions); where someone else posted &amp;quot;There is no such word for this&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; It might serve better as a comment, possibly with a softer tone like &amp;quot;I don't believe there is a word for this concept.&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;English orthography is a system of weak rules, or rather guidelines, with many exceptions and ambiguities.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one really wants to post an answer as &amp;quot;There is no answer&amp;quot;, it would be appropriate to write an explanation that supports the claim at least; and if applicable, alternative solutions. A good answer usually has details, and detailed answers are more acceptable. (not all the time but generally, depends on the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, you don't have to post an answer or a comment for an unclear question (or a question that doesn't meet the criteria of an acceptable question or a certain tag); and you can choose to close-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;well-asked&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...solicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;opinions&lt;/a&gt; rather than facts. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt; and answered many times before. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...are not about English language and usage as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;defined in the help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional thoughts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, mainly applies to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; questions, if a question makes someone think that there is no answer; the question probably did not meet the acceptable criteria. A &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; question with a &lt;em&gt;clear example sentence&lt;/em&gt; would generally have a correct or suitable answer(s). There can be exceptions and not every concept has to have a single word. We can always ask or help to clarify the question as well. Of course, some questions can be too basic or too unclear that we can't or shouldn't salvage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final note:&lt;/strong&gt; I've provided a general answer above to the question title: &lt;em&gt;Is &amp;quot;There is no answer&amp;quot; an acceptable answer?&lt;/em&gt;. The question linked in the OP, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592932/the-proper-word-to-denote-the-end-of-a-count-off-in-the-line-in-a-pe-class&quot;&gt;The proper word to denote the end of a count-off in the line in a PE class&lt;/a&gt; , happens to be a rare case where it is about cultural differences; but there can still be an answer from different English speaking regions, dialects etc.; although the answer &amp;quot;There is no word&amp;quot; with explanation and details (the experience, the region etc.) is acceptable too. The question is about experiences and regional usage also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="64985" LastEditDate="2022-08-06T14:22:50.600" LastActivityDate="2022-08-06T14:22:50.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-05T01:58:41.580" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went to vote on closing a question today and found I could not recommend migrating to ELL.SE. So I voted for Opinion-based instead, as I will continue to do, until the option returns, or a better option is offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When and why was this decision made? Seems to me I've done it recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="356843" LastEditDate="2022-08-07T18:06:26.917" LastActivityDate="2022-08-07T18:06:26.917" Title="Are we no longer allowed to recommend migration to ELL in closing?" Tags="|bug|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15399" CreationDate="2022-08-05T02:20:53.100" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be migrated, a question must be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must have been originally posted on our site. It cannot have already been migrated to our site. If it was already migrated hither, then we cannot migrate it elsewhither. We can only close it so that it returns whence it came, thence to be re-migrated if the original site chooses to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question can't be more than a couple months old; sixty days to be exact. If it's older than that, it will say so, and not even moderators can vote to migrate it. A Hail-Mary appeal to staff to override this restriction and do so anyway is at least possible in theory, but in practice it just doesn't happen. I know of no such successful petitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question owner must be allowed to ask questions on the target site, if they have an account there. If for some reason they are forbidden, such as because of either account suspension or system-imposed question blocks, then the migration attempt fails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-08-05T15:25:25.217" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T15:25:25.217" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15391" CreationDate="2022-08-06T16:49:13.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags should, as far as possible, be self-explanatory, i.e. it should generally be possible to get a reasonably good idea of what the tag is for just by looking at it, without having to read its official definition. None of the three tags under discussion here satisfies that condition. &lt;em&gt;Technical&lt;/em&gt; leaves one wondering: technical what? &lt;em&gt;Terminology&lt;/em&gt; similarly makes one wonder: what kind of terminology? &lt;em&gt;Vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;, as has already been pointed out in a comment, tends to be understood in a sense that is much broader than intended, and then applied so widely as to be useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if one does take the trouble to read the official definitions, one finds it difficult to see what is supposed to be the difference among them: all three are about the terminology that is used within some specialised field (but not generally outside it). The OP's saying that there is 'a considerable overlap' among them seems to be an understatement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless somebody can, in a further contribution to this page, give a clear account of what the differences among the three tags are supposed to be, and why it is important to keep them distinct, all three should be merged together under the name &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;specialised terminology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In making this proposal, I am assuming that the software allows the moderators to change the tags on the already posted questions in one simple transaction; I wouldn't want them to bear the burden of retagging the questions one by one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2022-08-06T20:28:05.657" LastActivityDate="2022-08-06T20:28:05.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15396" CreationDate="2022-08-06T19:30:37.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The previously posted answer by ermanen probably captures well the practice of the majority of the regular contributors to this site. They are generally reluctant to post something like 'There is no answer' as an answer (although they may be willing to post it as a comment), even when they are confident that this is true, because they feel that such an answer would be too simple, too unsophisticated for this site. They would be embarrassed to receive reputation points for an answer that is so easy to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This practice may seem honourable and dignified, but it has a downside. Suppose that somebody posts a single-word-request for a word with some very definite, precise meaning. The knowledgeable people know that there is no such word, but, for the reasons outlined in the first paragraph, don't post that. So far, so good: as long as no answers are posted at all, their absence conveys that there is no word that the OP was seeking. The questions of this sort, however, usually don't remain entirely without answers. Somebody will, sooner or later post an answer suggesting a word that does not really fit the meaning that the OP wanted captured but is loosely related to it, somebody else will offer a very broad term that includes the OP's meaning but is not limited to it, somebody will create a new word and propose that it be used for the purpose. None of these answers, some of which may be upvoted, will be as good as 'There is no such word', which nobody will post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody who comes to that page in the future will then see that the question has a number of answers and may well be led to think that the most highly upvoted among them is the correct one. The practice of abstaining from posting no-answer answers thus misleads the future visitors to the page, which is at odds with the main purpose of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One compromise that takes into account both the reasons for and the reasons against posting no-answer answers would be for the regular contributors to adopt the practice of posting &lt;strong&gt;wiki&lt;/strong&gt;-answers saying something like 'There is no answer', whenever that seems to be the truth. Their being wiki-answers would show that those who post them are acting with proper modesty and respect for the standards of the site, and are not claiming any credit for such short, simple answers. The main purpose of these wiki-answers would be to provide a 'hook' for the upvotes by everyone else who is also confident that there is no answer. If it is true that there is no answer, then it is to be expected that this wiki-answer would be more highly voted than the not very good answers offered elsewhere on the page, and that would help to ensure that the future visitors are not misled by these other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(What if, after that no-answer answer is posted, somebody proves that there is, in fact, an answer? In that case, the no-answer answer could be downvoted, and possibly deleted; again, its being a wiki-answer means that nobody's reputation would be affected.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2022-08-07T15:24:32.077" LastActivityDate="2022-08-07T15:24:32.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-13T08:58:42.703" Score="16" ViewCount="1948" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure what the implications for our site will be, but it seems relevant news that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13240/rip-oxford-living-dictionaries&quot;&gt;formerly &amp;quot;Oxford Living Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, formerly &amp;quot;Oxford Dictionaries Online&amp;quot;) is closing August 26.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for visiting Lexico.com, but we do have some important news. Starting August 26, we will be closing the Lexico.com website and redirecting it to Dictionary.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone with further information or ability to interpret what this means, please discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T12:20:57.570" Title="&quot;Lexico&quot; will be gone in less than a month" Tags="|discussion|resources|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15404" CreationDate="2022-08-13T09:19:22.377" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say, and it's unlikely, that the &lt;em&gt;ODE (Oxford Dictionary of English)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;NOAD (New Oxford American Dictionary)&lt;/em&gt; will be available on Dictionary.com, so it looks like we're losing gratis access to those dictionaries. Most (but not all) pronunciation transcriptions are available for free on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199571123.001.0001/acref-9780199571123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195392883.001.0001/acref-9780195392883&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reference&lt;/a&gt;, but not definitions or etymology. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;OALD&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; appears to continue to be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google often gives you the same definitions via &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries API&lt;/a&gt;, but this obviously varies by each user's location, search history, etc. OUP also closed gratis online bilingual dictionaries of underrepresented languages in 2020, when it &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20200330025307/https://languages.oup.com/oxford-global-languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of the evolution of the Oxford Global Languages (OGL) programme, we have made the decision to close our dictionary websites. This content will still be available, but the formats in which it can be accessed have now changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than offering a dictionary website for every digitally under-resourced language, we will facilitate third parties to build products and services that best serve the needs of each individual language community. Our efforts will be focused on creating and providing the data that these third parties need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they're saying &amp;quot;there's no money in offering access to our dictionaries for free, so we're going after enterprises&amp;quot;, and the closure of Lexico seems like a step in the same direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194620" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T09:19:22.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15404" CreationDate="2022-08-13T10:45:49.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionary.com uses two main sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DICTIONARY.COM UNABRIDGED&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;BASED ON THE RANDOM HOUSE UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, © RANDOM HOUSE, INC. 2022&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;COLLINS ENGLISH DICTIONARY - COMPLETE &amp;amp; UNABRIDGED 2012 DIGITAL EDITION&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;© WILLIAM COLLINS SONS &amp;amp; CO. LTD. 1979, 1986 © HARPERCOLLINS&#xA;PUBLISHERS 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is basically similar to Google as an aggregator. Provided that quotes from that site here actually reference the ultimate source of the definition, I don't see a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Random House publish Penguin, but I can't find any mention of any English dictionary on either website. Collins publishes a number of dictionaries, and more than one is available on its own website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as with &amp;quot;I found this definition on Google,&amp;quot; which is unacceptable because it doesn't give credit to the people who actually did the work defining the word, &amp;quot;I found this definition on Dictionary.com&amp;quot; won't be acceptable either. The &lt;strong&gt;actual&lt;/strong&gt; source needs to be cited: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;provide the name of the original author&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED continues to be available to those who have access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T10:45:49.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-20T21:20:18.513" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I started to notice how diverse English pronunciation in my YouTube subscribes become and I started wondering is there an easy way to detect which dialect is which since I am no linguist. Well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ05riJ3SgA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jimmy Carr references&lt;/a&gt; kinda good, but they are not written/explained and used in a different way and do not cover up all of them. Is there some kind of resource that helps to detect the accent/dialect in a steady pace or is it still easier to ask about concrete people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52309" OwnerDisplayName="Sugar" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-08-26T12:30:48.460" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T12:45:17.900" Title="Is there a some kind of decision tree to detect accent/dialect of British English?" Tags="|discussion|resources|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-21T04:18:49.903" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any recommendations on an online alliteration generator that searches through synonyms of two (or more) given words? That seems to have been how &lt;a href=&quot;https://gdorn.circuitlocution.com/somethingofsomething.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Something of something alliteration generator&lt;/a&gt; worked, but no longer. I see no option in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://alliteration.me/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alliteration Applications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, seemingly the most developed and best known online alliteration generator, to do that either. Any other suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="302750" OwnerDisplayName="André Levy" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-08-24T16:03:43.437" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T16:03:43.437" Title="Finding synonymous alliterations" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15411" CreationDate="2022-08-26T12:45:17.900" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's not exactly what you're looking for, &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcomparisons.com/#/en/Englishes/map/what/Lgs_Sln&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sound Comparisons&#xA;— Exploring Diversity in Phonetics across Language Families&lt;/a&gt; provides an interactive map of different pronunciations for various words in dialects across the globe. (Also available in chart form.) If you can't read the IPA, you can listen to the associated sound clip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is there British English, there's American English and a few other world Englishes. Other parts of the site have other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &amp;quot;what&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pRWIz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pRWIz.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;what&amp;quot; IPA for UK Englishes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some context, from the website description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our website offers powerful tools for linguist researchers (to search and filter the database, download all detailed phonetic transcriptions and sound files, create citable links, etc.), but is also multilingual and user-friendly for the general public who actually speak all of these languages, many of them endangered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T12:45:17.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-27T13:39:00.770" Score="17" ViewCount="1966" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was once a website oxforddictionaries.com that provided merged contents of ODE (Oxford Dictionary of English) and NOAD (New Oxford American Dictionary), along with some grammar tips etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it was rebranded as Lexico(.com) when Dictionary.com (organization) partnered with OUP (Oxford University Press).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But starting 26th Aug 2022 Dictionary.com killed Lexico, which now forwards to dictionary.com itself. Personally I'm not interested in dictionary.com content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that there's now no way to access relevant Oxford (non-learner's (!)) dictionaries online? It seems to be quite ridiculous considering ODE &amp;amp; NOAD are both the official dictionaries in Apple OS-s and the base for Google (Translate) dictionaries :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I find traditional Oxford Dictionaries online? I'm not talking about learner's or OED. (Their mobile apps from Mobi Systems seem to be alive though...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233610" OwnerDisplayName="deshalder" LastActivityDate="2023-07-29T14:15:26.063" Title="Are Oxford Dictionaries available online now that Lexico is dead?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15415" CreationDate="2022-08-27T15:00:47.157" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The message is no longer there because the homepage is no longer there, so I can't cite it, but what it said on the homepage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://lexico.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexico.com&lt;/a&gt; before it went dark and started rerouting users to &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; is that the reason users are being rerouted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lexico.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexico.com&lt;/a&gt; definitions all appear on &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's the British English definitions you're looking for, then on &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;, you just scroll down the page of a particular word until you get to the gray heading that reads &amp;quot;British Dictionary Definitions for...&amp;quot; whereupon you'll find the British English definitions for that word &lt;a href=&quot;https://lexico.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexico.com&lt;/a&gt; once provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you can access &lt;em&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; online, like always, the unabridged version rather than the highly abridged version &lt;a href=&quot;https://lexico.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexico.com&lt;/a&gt; offered, but it is a subscription website, meaning you have to pay for a subscription in order to access it and it doesn't serve as a good source for websites like this one because only users who have paid subscriptions to it will be able to link to the source material you use as a reference and see it, which will be very few users. Nevertheless, if you're interested, the web address for the official website of &lt;em&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.oed.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115101" LastEditorUserId="115101" LastEditDate="2022-08-27T15:20:01.093" LastActivityDate="2022-08-27T15:20:01.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15415" CreationDate="2022-08-27T18:56:03.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Search Engines&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can still access the definitions freely online, since apparently Google and Bing are still licensed to provide them. (Note: Some entries for proper nouns are missing or incomplete in Google, while Bing's were complete.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For best results, search for &lt;em&gt;define [term]&lt;/em&gt;. You can also search for &lt;em&gt;dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and type your word in the box (autocomplete will show you what words are in the dictionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I see in Google compared with NOAD (they're the same, though I wasn't able to show the full NOAD entry which includes the origin):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t02lil.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t02lil.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;a person who is blamed or punished for the faults or incompetence of others.&amp;quot; With pronunciation, example, and origin&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=define%20whipping%20boy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;define whipping boy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;ODE vs NOAD&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not entirely clear to me how this works, but I think it's identical to NOAD for most definitions. (For people who live elsewhere, it may use something based on ODE instead, the British counterpart to NOAD.) Unfortunately, Lexico had some definitions that were missing in NOAD/ODE, such as &amp;quot;fireman's pole&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your convenience I made bookmarklets to switch between dictionaries, based off the information in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15418/191178&quot;&gt;Nardog's answer&lt;/a&gt;. To use, bookmark any page and replace the URL with one of the snippets below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Switch to British English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javascript:window.location=window.location.toString().includes('gl=us')?window.location.toString().replace(/gl=us/,'gl=gb'):window.location.toString()+'&amp;amp;gl=gb'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Switch to American English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javascript:window.location=window.location.toString().includes('gl=gb')?window.location.toString().replace(/gl=gb/,'gl=us'):window.location.toString()+'&amp;amp;gl=us'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Could probably use fine tuning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Attribution&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a definition in your post, please credit the dictionary provider, which you can see at the top: &amp;quot;Definitions from &lt;strong&gt;Oxford Languages&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;. For greatest clarity I recommend citing how you found the definition: &amp;quot;Oxford Languages via Google&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Finding example sentences&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexico had more example sentences, and sadly I don't think they are available anywhere else. No other dictionary has examples quite like that. The closest alternative may be &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to have about two examples per definition, plus a few more that belong to each group of definitions. However, while Lexico had &amp;quot;found&amp;quot; examples, Cambridge seems to have examples that were made up for the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Operating systems that include Oxford Dictionaries&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some systems also come with Oxford Dictionaries installed. This is usually a more convenient way of accessing it. Here's a list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MacOS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iOS (as I'm using in the screenshot)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kindle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Apps&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you noted, there are also mobile apps (iOS and Android). I may have used the Android one but I honestly don't remember much about it. The reviews seem to be very mixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Archive sites&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, many of the pages (but not all) were backed up by archivers like archive.org. For the best chance to find an archive, it's important to remember all the renames the site went through:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/*/Lexico.com/en/definition*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexico.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160415000000*/http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/objectify&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oxforddictionaries.com&lt;/a&gt; (can't get it to list all the definitions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/*/en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;en.oxforddictionaries.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-10-07T14:10:42.133" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T14:10:42.133" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15415" CreationDate="2022-08-28T03:05:59.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Laurel's answer, this URL scheme seems to be the way to make sure everybody who follows a link to a define search on Google sees the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?gl=gb&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;q=define+example&amp;amp;forcedict=example&amp;amp;dictcorpus=en&amp;amp;expnd=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?gl=gb&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;q=define+example&amp;amp;forcedict=example&amp;amp;dictcorpus=en&amp;amp;expnd=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's break it down one by one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;gl=gb&lt;/code&gt;: Makes sure the dictionary is the one based on ODE, not on NOAD. &lt;code&gt;gl=us&lt;/code&gt; if you want to cite the one based on NOAD. Without this, it'll give you NOAD if Google thinks you're in North America, and ODE otherwise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;hl=en&lt;/code&gt;: Forces English as the interface language. Essential if the language the user usually sees Google in has a word spelled the same as the query.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;q=define+example&lt;/code&gt;: Self-explanatory, except that it has to be &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; (or anything that converts to a space), not &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;%3A&lt;/code&gt;). Some queries, such as a prefix beginning with a hyphen, do not work with &lt;code&gt;define:&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;forcedict=example&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;dictcorpus=en&lt;/code&gt;: I haven't found a case where these parameters actually make a difference, but they're there when you click on a synonym, so probably better include it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;expnd=1&lt;/code&gt;: Expands the entry, saving you a click.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Bing, which includes proper nouns unlike Google, these seem to work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bing.com/search?q=define+example&amp;amp;cc=gb&amp;amp;setlang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.bing.com/search?q=define+example&amp;amp;cc=gb&amp;amp;setlang=en&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bing.com/search?q=define+example&amp;amp;cc=us&amp;amp;setlang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.bing.com/search?q=define+example&amp;amp;cc=us&amp;amp;setlang=en&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194620" LastEditorUserId="194620" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T04:52:50.433" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T04:52:50.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3677" CreationDate="2022-08-28T16:02:54.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary, which I can't access to, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/category/new-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary Blog&lt;/a&gt; constantly shares new words and there are also tiny surveys about whether these new words should be included in the dictionary or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user442526" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T16:02:54.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3677" CreationDate="2022-08-28T20:53:38.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster has a page that discusses how words get into its dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/how-does-a-word-get-into-the-dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How a Word Gets Into the Dictionary&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Part One: The Process&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it keeps a list of words that it is considering for inclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/topics/words-were-watching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Words We're Watching&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-were-watching/see-all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Words We're Watching (see all)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T23:42:28.727" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T23:42:28.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15415" CreationDate="2022-08-30T01:09:12.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to other answers, apparently there's something called Oxford Dictionaries Premium (&lt;a href=&quot;https://premium.oxforddictionaries.com/words/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://premium.oxforddictionaries.com/words/help&lt;/a&gt;, they apparently include many languages), which is only available with a subscription, but it probably (maybe?) still has Lexico's content...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haven't tried it yet though&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD: purchased it; it indeed has all the Lexico's content (and some more features); so I guess it's the only complete source of ODE/NOAD content on the web now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233610" LastEditorUserId="233610" LastEditDate="2023-07-29T14:15:26.063" LastActivityDate="2023-07-29T14:15:26.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15423" CreationDate="2022-08-30T14:48:47.940" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any online tool available that just reports the tense of the English sentence. I'm just checking the scope of the project.I've seen lot of online tool that they are correcting and rewriting but not reporting any details about the tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462828" OwnerDisplayName="gstekboy" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T23:14:31.417" Title="English tense reporting tool online" Tags="|discussion|american-english|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15422" CreationDate="2022-08-30T23:14:31.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, any part-of-speech tagger includes tags like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VBZ: Verb, 3rd person singular present&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VBD:  Verb, past tense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn tags&lt;/a&gt;, which while limited are quite widely used. Any of the many online parsers will show you those, or you can download some NLP kit to build your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Stanford Parser&lt;/a&gt; uses them in parsing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dog also likes eating sausage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;My/PRP  dog/NN  also/RB  likes/VBZ  eating/VBG  sausage/NN  ./.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each word is tagged with its part of speech using a Penn tag. The verb &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt; is tagged with VBZ because it's a 3rd-person singular present-tense verb. That page shows you that the full parse is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ROOT&#xA;  (S&#xA;    (NP (PRP$ My) (NN dog))&#xA;    (ADVP (RB also))&#xA;    (VP (VBZ likes)&#xA;      (S&#xA;        (VP (VBG eating)&#xA;          (NP (NN sausage)))))&#xA;    (. .)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Past Tense, or Not?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you that of course &lt;strong&gt;sentences&lt;/strong&gt; don't have tense. Only finite &lt;strong&gt;verbs&lt;/strong&gt; do, and your choices are just one of two possibilities: the only English tenses are past (a.k.a. preterite) and non-past (a.k.a. present).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And modal verbs don't have tense at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T23:14:31.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15425" CreationDate="2022-09-03T17:17:43.373" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of profile views that a member had used to be given on a members profile page. Has this information now just disappeared? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2022-09-03T17:39:36.643" Title="Where have profile views figures gone, and why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15424" CreationDate="2022-09-03T17:39:36.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Courtesy of Meta. The change was announced in August 2021:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/368285/some-changes-to-the-profile-while-we-make-it-responsive&quot;&gt;Some changes to the profile while we make it responsive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dropped the profile views metric entirely. It’s a vanity metric and we don’t think it’s worth keeping around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statistic was abandoned as it was seen as vanity feature, adding no value to the profile page (developer/staff view). Please note the current 441 downvotes versus the 42 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2022-09-03T17:39:36.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15427" CreationDate="2022-09-08T09:35:03.093" Score="5" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are already quarrelling on meta about the accepted answer box getting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381858/why-has-the-green-accepted-answer-indicator-become-darker-on-all-the-sites&quot;&gt;darker green&lt;/a&gt;. It looks especially disagreeable on ELU against the beige... I find it even annoying, but this is probably subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just wondering, can ELU keep the old green, or MUST it comply to general changes done on SO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-09-08T14:59:30.443" LastActivityDate="2022-09-08T15:00:20.253" Title="Can we keep the previous green on English SE?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15426" CreationDate="2022-09-08T15:00:20.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having site-unique colors for this part of the design isn't an option, since having &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11693/191178&quot;&gt;unified site designs&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; makes it easier to maintain and update the network. However, you can vote on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/381864/323179&quot;&gt;various MSE proposals&lt;/a&gt; to show your interest in possible alternatives. No guarantees, but the more interest there is, the more likely something will be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just look at these mock-ups!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/arMt8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Favorite question with green-background checkmark only, desktop&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xcBvu.png&quot; alt=&quot;question with green-600 background checkmark only, mobile&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/381871/323179&quot;&gt;look who made them&lt;/a&gt; — what a coincidence!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-09-08T15:00:20.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-08T20:27:41.240" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every day there is at least one  question  about the use  of commas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick search gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/commas?sort=Newest&amp;amp;edited=true&quot;&gt;40 pages&lt;/a&gt; of questions about how commas should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s up with commas? Why is the use of commas (apparently more than other punctuation marks) so problematic to users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastActivityDate="2022-09-09T11:19:01.380" Title="The comma dilemma" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15428" CreationDate="2022-09-09T11:19:01.380" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a big part of the reason for so many comma questions is that guidance for their use (on this site as well as elsewhere on the Internet, in popular books, etc.) ranges from &amp;quot;every comma should be justified by a specific reason&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;insert commas wherever you think they seem reasonable&amp;quot;. (I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that's not too far off.) With such a variety of opinions, it's no wonder that people don't know what to do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we can try to create some &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9817/list-of-faqs-and-canonical-posts&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; posts&lt;/a&gt; explaining the common uses of commas and the various opinions that authoritative sources offer for their use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2022-09-09T11:19:01.380" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15433" CreationDate="2022-09-12T22:22:39.393" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find the most authoritative English dictionary that is both online and freely accessible. The OED is (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Reception_and_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;controversially?&lt;/a&gt;) considered by many to be the most authoritative of the (British) English dictionaries – why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no general consensus about, or no way to objectively assess, what makes a dictionary authoritative, then that would be a reasonable answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not interested in opinion-based answers&lt;/strong&gt;; i.e., what dictionaries people prefer or like. But I would like to know if there is another authoritative option in lieu of OED, or if there a way of judging for oneself what makes a dictionary authoritative and reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" OwnerDisplayName="Charles Roper" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-09-13T00:56:52.883" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T20:19:07.343" Title="How does one assess the authoritativeness of a dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15431" CreationDate="2022-09-13T04:20:35.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED is not a dictionary of &lt;em&gt;British&lt;/em&gt; English, but of all English. Wikipedia calls the OED &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the principal historical dictionary of the English language&lt;/a&gt;.  The OED itself says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED itself makes no claim of Authority, as that word does not really make sense in this context. Rather, it simply documents the historical record, nothing more and nothing less. In this it has no peer: you will not find anything else like it (at least in English) for what it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many, many other kinds of dictionary besides historical dictionaries, including specialist dictionaries and lexicons, each serving its own dedicated purpose. Indeed the OED often refers you to those many others for further studies. But you need to realize that when it does so, these are all always actual &lt;em&gt;published&lt;/em&gt; dictionaries, meaning that they are always &lt;em&gt;in actual &lt;strong&gt;print&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, not mere online lookups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your requirement that any resource be not only electronically accessible but also completely gratis so severely restricts available possibilities that it calls into question the purpose your requested resource would serve. Most everything ever published in English remains completely unavailable electronically, including almost all dictionaries, many of them of unique usefulness. Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Third_New_International_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged&lt;/em&gt; of 1961&lt;/a&gt;, their most ambitious  dictionary, is unavailable electronically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you should probably explain why you have attached those restrictions to your resource request. In other words, what good would such a resource do that could not be better served without those austere restrictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T04:20:35.007" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15431" CreationDate="2022-09-13T18:29:12.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OED is the best ever, and you probably have free access to it somehow (but you may have to look for it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can assess quality systematically by choosing some set of characteristics that are objectively measured. Those characteristics should include:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;number of entries (semantically different definitions) per term (a proxy for nuance)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;length of entries (a proxy for descriptiveness of the definition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;entries on etymology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;variety of spellings, variety of pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specification of varieties (register, geography, technical area, etc etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frequency information (how common a word it is)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can assess quality quickly by taking a small set of words and comparing their definition in all the dictionaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some characteristics not mentioned. Part of speech is managed by the entry labels. Accuracy of the actual definitions would take a statistical analysis of the content. This latter is probably the -one- thing you care about and not all that scholarly drivel above. But it is also probably the most subjective of criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are ways of assessing but I don't they have been done. But by inspection of any dictionary's entries you can quickly compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a general consensus that the OED, in book or print form, is the best dictionary in English, in the all around quality, accuracy, and amount of content of its entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its definitions are concise while but not too concise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has subentries for each semantic nuance to a term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has phrases including a term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has the currently accepted etymology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has multiple instances of the term used in the wild, including the first known use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While other dictionaries may do any one of these, the OED combines all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By authoritative, I think you imply some slightest bit of prescription - if there is a dispute about correctness, which choice should be made. While that is a practical goal for many users of dictionaries, it may incur too much contention.&#xA;There is no academy (à la française) of a few highly regarded people of letters behind it (as much as the French Academy is an authority, the French language still changes and adds new words without them. Also the AF does not produce a reference book like a dictionary or grammar). The many people behind the OED include a history of editorial group, a set of scholars writing the definitions, plus hundreds of people who find earlier and earlier instances of first sightings of each word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED is not perfect. It is rife with factual errors, omissions, typos, bad dates, and questionable life choices. That said, any other dictionary is much much rifer. For example, the OED is pretty good at assessing whether a word is more AmE or BrE (using 'primarily' as a marker). But it is (supposedly (I have heard)) not so great at varieties with smaller populations or less media presence (AAE, AusE, IrE, ScotE, and on and on). But really do the other dictionaries come close to that? Also it is supposedly not very good with taboo words or slang. Oh well, Urban Dictionary does excel at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2022-09-13T20:19:07.343" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T20:19:07.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15436" CreationDate="2022-09-16T09:43:17.713" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;To better clarify: I would like to find some way (be it just the raw information itself in a pastebin, a dictionary crawler, a website search function, or something else) to determine how many words there are in English that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are exactly four letters long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fall into the major word classes, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs - entirely EXCLUDING prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, or interjections&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aren't just other words with added plurality, like the three-letter word Aid being made four letters by turning it into Aids; basically, no words that are included in the dictionary purely as a different form, tense, etc. of an existing word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can scroll through the final list manually, that's not a problem. I just can't find a site or resource that makes it easy to search words not just by letter length but also by word class. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463941" OwnerDisplayName="eyesoftherunekeeper" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-12-09T16:28:09.117" LastActivityDate="2023-12-09T16:28:09.117" Title="How many unique four-letter words are in the English language that fall within the major word classes?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15434" CreationDate="2022-09-16T10:16:33.073" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a downloadable list of English words that are valid in the word game &amp;quot;Scrabble&amp;quot;. This is quite a comprehensive list and can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordgamedictionary.com/sowpods/download/sowpods.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wordgamedictionary.com/sowpods/download/sowpods.txt&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you use this in combination with Microsoft Excel (or a similar spreadsheet) and an appropriate formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" OwnerDisplayName="Greybeard" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T10:16:33.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15434" CreationDate="2022-09-16T16:02:56.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3203/files/mobypos.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PoS-tagged wordlist from the Moby Project&lt;/a&gt; (as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11760/191178&quot;&gt;another answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;) and regex, I made a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regex:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;^([a-z]{4})\\[\S]*?[VNAv]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not perfect, since it only matches the 26 lowercase letters of the alphabet (&lt;em&gt;café&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wi-fi&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't match, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;abac&#xA;abba&#xA;abbr&#xA;abed&#xA;abet&#xA;able&#xA;ably&#xA;abox&#xA;abri&#xA;abut&#xA;acad&#xA;acce&#xA;acct&#xA;aced&#xA;ache&#xA;acid&#xA;acle&#xA;acme&#xA;acne&#xA;acpt&#xA;acre&#xA;actg&#xA;acus&#xA;acyl&#xA;adat&#xA;adit&#xA;adjt&#xA;advt&#xA;adze&#xA;aeon&#xA;aero&#xA;aery&#xA;aesc&#xA;afar&#xA;agal&#xA;agar&#xA;agba&#xA;agcy&#xA;aged&#xA;agee&#xA;agha&#xA;agio&#xA;agit&#xA;agly&#xA;agma&#xA;agog&#xA;agon&#xA;agst&#xA;ague&#xA;aide&#xA;airt&#xA;airy&#xA;ajar&#xA;ajee&#xA;akee&#xA;akin&#xA;alae&#xA;alap&#xA;alar&#xA;alba&#xA;alec&#xA;alee&#xA;alfa&#xA;alga&#xA;alif&#xA;alit&#xA;alky&#xA;ally&#xA;aloe&#xA;alow&#xA;also&#xA;alto&#xA;alum&#xA;amah&#xA;amal&#xA;amba&#xA;ambo&#xA;amen&#xA;amic&#xA;amie&#xA;amir&#xA;ammo&#xA;amok&#xA;amyl&#xA;anal&#xA;anat&#xA;anba&#xA;anes&#xA;anew&#xA;anga&#xA;anil&#xA;anim&#xA;anis&#xA;ankh&#xA;anna&#xA;anoa&#xA;anon&#xA;ansa&#xA;anta&#xA;ante&#xA;anti&#xA;anus&#xA;aoli&#xA;aped&#xA;apex&#xA;appd&#xA;apse&#xA;aqua&#xA;arak&#xA;arca&#xA;arch&#xA;arco&#xA;arcs&#xA;area&#xA;areg&#xA;aria&#xA;arid&#xA;aril&#xA;army&#xA;arri&#xA;arse&#xA;arty&#xA;arum&#xA;arvo&#xA;aryl&#xA;asci&#xA;ashy&#xA;assn&#xA;asst&#xA;astr&#xA;atar&#xA;atom&#xA;atop&#xA;atry&#xA;atty&#xA;auld&#xA;aune&#xA;aunt&#xA;aura&#xA;auth&#xA;auto&#xA;avdp&#xA;aver&#xA;avid&#xA;away&#xA;awed&#xA;awry&#xA;axed&#xA;axel&#xA;axes&#xA;axil&#xA;axis&#xA;axle&#xA;axon&#xA;ayah&#xA;ayin&#xA;ayre&#xA;azan&#xA;baal&#xA;baas&#xA;baba&#xA;babe&#xA;babu&#xA;baby&#xA;bach&#xA;back&#xA;bact&#xA;bade&#xA;bael&#xA;baff&#xA;bagh&#xA;baht&#xA;bail&#xA;bait&#xA;bake&#xA;bald&#xA;bale&#xA;balk&#xA;ball&#xA;balm&#xA;banc&#xA;band&#xA;bane&#xA;bang&#xA;bani&#xA;bank&#xA;bant&#xA;barb&#xA;bard&#xA;bare&#xA;bark&#xA;barm&#xA;barn&#xA;barr&#xA;base&#xA;bash&#xA;bass&#xA;bast&#xA;bate&#xA;bath&#xA;bats&#xA;batt&#xA;baud&#xA;bawd&#xA;bawl&#xA;baya&#xA;bead&#xA;beak&#xA;beam&#xA;bean&#xA;bear&#xA;beat&#xA;beau&#xA;beck&#xA;beef&#xA;beek&#xA;been&#xA;beep&#xA;beer&#xA;beet&#xA;beld&#xA;bell&#xA;belt&#xA;bema&#xA;bend&#xA;bene&#xA;bent&#xA;berg&#xA;berk&#xA;berm&#xA;best&#xA;beta&#xA;beth&#xA;bevy&#xA;bhut&#xA;bias&#xA;bibb&#xA;bibl&#xA;bice&#xA;bide&#xA;bidi&#xA;bier&#xA;biff&#xA;biga&#xA;bigg&#xA;bike&#xA;bile&#xA;bilk&#xA;bill&#xA;bind&#xA;bine&#xA;bing&#xA;bint&#xA;biog&#xA;biol&#xA;bird&#xA;biri&#xA;birk&#xA;birl&#xA;birr&#xA;bise&#xA;bish&#xA;bisk&#xA;bist&#xA;bite&#xA;bitt&#xA;bize&#xA;bkcy&#xA;bklr&#xA;bkpr&#xA;blab&#xA;blae&#xA;blah&#xA;blas&#xA;blat&#xA;bldg&#xA;bleb&#xA;blet&#xA;blew&#xA;blip&#xA;blob&#xA;bloc&#xA;blot&#xA;blow&#xA;blub&#xA;blue&#xA;blur&#xA;blvd&#xA;boar&#xA;boas&#xA;boat&#xA;bobs&#xA;bode&#xA;body&#xA;boff&#xA;bogy&#xA;boil&#xA;boko&#xA;bola&#xA;bold&#xA;bole&#xA;boll&#xA;bolo&#xA;bolt&#xA;boma&#xA;bomb&#xA;bond&#xA;bone&#xA;bong&#xA;bony&#xA;boob&#xA;bood&#xA;book&#xA;boom&#xA;boon&#xA;boor&#xA;boot&#xA;bora&#xA;bord&#xA;bore&#xA;bori&#xA;born&#xA;bort&#xA;bosh&#xA;bosk&#xA;boss&#xA;bots&#xA;bott&#xA;boud&#xA;bouk&#xA;bout&#xA;bowl&#xA;boyo&#xA;bozo&#xA;brad&#xA;brae&#xA;brag&#xA;bran&#xA;brat&#xA;braw&#xA;bray&#xA;bred&#xA;bree&#xA;brei&#xA;brev&#xA;brew&#xA;brie&#xA;brig&#xA;brim&#xA;brio&#xA;brit&#xA;brob&#xA;broo&#xA;bros&#xA;brow&#xA;brut&#xA;bskt&#xA;btry&#xA;bubo&#xA;buck&#xA;buff&#xA;bugs&#xA;buhl&#xA;buhr&#xA;bukh&#xA;bulb&#xA;bulk&#xA;bull&#xA;bumf&#xA;bump&#xA;bund&#xA;bung&#xA;bunk&#xA;bunn&#xA;bunt&#xA;buoy&#xA;burd&#xA;burg&#xA;burk&#xA;burl&#xA;burn&#xA;burp&#xA;burr&#xA;bury&#xA;bush&#xA;busk&#xA;buss&#xA;bust&#xA;busy&#xA;butt&#xA;buzz&#xA;byre&#xA;byte&#xA;cack&#xA;cade&#xA;cadi&#xA;caff&#xA;cage&#xA;cagy&#xA;caid&#xA;cain&#xA;cake&#xA;calf&#xA;calk&#xA;call&#xA;calm&#xA;calx&#xA;came&#xA;camp&#xA;canc&#xA;cane&#xA;cant&#xA;cany&#xA;capa&#xA;cape&#xA;caph&#xA;capo&#xA;caps&#xA;card&#xA;care&#xA;cark&#xA;carl&#xA;carn&#xA;carp&#xA;cart&#xA;casa&#xA;case&#xA;cash&#xA;cask&#xA;cast&#xA;cate&#xA;caul&#xA;caus&#xA;cave&#xA;cavy&#xA;cede&#xA;cedi&#xA;cell&#xA;celt&#xA;cent&#xA;cera&#xA;cere&#xA;cero&#xA;cert&#xA;cess&#xA;cete&#xA;chad&#xA;cham&#xA;chap&#xA;char&#xA;chat&#xA;chaw&#xA;chay&#xA;chef&#xA;chem&#xA;chew&#xA;chic&#xA;chin&#xA;chip&#xA;chit&#xA;chiv&#xA;chmn&#xA;chon&#xA;chop&#xA;chou&#xA;chow&#xA;choy&#xA;chub&#xA;chug&#xA;chum&#xA;cine&#xA;cion&#xA;circ&#xA;cist&#xA;city&#xA;clad&#xA;clam&#xA;clan&#xA;clap&#xA;clar&#xA;claw&#xA;clay&#xA;clef&#xA;cleg&#xA;clem&#xA;clew&#xA;clip&#xA;clod&#xA;clog&#xA;clop&#xA;clos&#xA;clot&#xA;clou&#xA;cloy&#xA;club&#xA;clue&#xA;coak&#xA;coal&#xA;coat&#xA;coax&#xA;cobb&#xA;coca&#xA;coch&#xA;cock&#xA;coco&#xA;coda&#xA;code&#xA;coed&#xA;coff&#xA;coft&#xA;coho&#xA;coif&#xA;coil&#xA;coin&#xA;coir&#xA;coit&#xA;coke&#xA;coky&#xA;cola&#xA;cold&#xA;cole&#xA;coll&#xA;colt&#xA;coly&#xA;coma&#xA;comb&#xA;come&#xA;comm&#xA;comp&#xA;conc&#xA;cond&#xA;cone&#xA;conf&#xA;cong&#xA;conk&#xA;conn&#xA;cons&#xA;cont&#xA;cony&#xA;coof&#xA;cook&#xA;cool&#xA;coom&#xA;coon&#xA;coop&#xA;coot&#xA;cope&#x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OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T16:02:56.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15434" CreationDate="2022-09-16T18:23:46.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are on a Unix system, or at least something where you can install Perl CPAN modules, then after you install &lt;a href=&quot;https://metacpan.org/pod/Unicode::Tussle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;code&gt;Unicode::Tussle&lt;/code&gt; distro&lt;/a&gt;, you can run simple command-line checks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;% unilook --pos noun '^\w{4}\b' | wc -l&#xA;4418&#xA;&#xA;% unilook --pos verb '^\w{4}\b' | wc -l&#xA;1858&#xA;&#xA;% unilook --pos adjective '^\w{4}\b' | wc -l&#xA;737&#xA;&#xA;% unilook --pos adverb '^\w{4}\b' | wc -l&#xA;142&#xA;&#xA;% unilook --pos pronoun '^\w{4}\b' | wc -l&#xA;22&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That won't normally count obsolete words, but you can add options to include those as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it will notice such non-ASCII hits as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;abbé [n.]&#xA;ælf [n.]&#xA;aîné [adj.]&#xA;bébé [n.]&#xA;bœuf [n.]&#xA;café [n.]&#xA;caña [n.]&#xA;cèpe [n.]&#xA;cœur [n.]&#xA;Chün [n.]&#xA;ciré [adj.]&#xA;curé [n.]&#xA;Doña [n.]&#xA;doré [adj.]&#xA;élan [n.]&#xA;épée [n.]&#xA;fanā [n.]&#xA;fête [n.]&#xA;fête [v.]&#xA;föhn [n.]&#xA;fumé [adj.]&#xA;gêne [n.2]&#xA;gêné [adj.]&#xA;goût [n.]&#xA;grès [n.]&#xA;Günz [n.]&#xA;idée [n.]&#xA;inée [n.]&#xA;jeté [n.]&#xA;Jōdo [n.]&#xA;kaïd [n.]&#xA;káns [n.]&#xA;lamé [n.3]&#xA;maté [n.3]&#xA;mère [n.]&#xA;Moët [n.]&#xA;naïd [n.]&#xA;naïf [adj.]&#xA;naïs [n.]&#xA;Néel [n.]&#xA;névé [n.]&#xA;noué [adj.]&#xA;ombú [n.]&#xA;ondé [n.]&#xA;orné [adj.3]&#xA;pamé [adj.]&#xA;Pará [n.2]&#xA;pâte [n.4]&#xA;pâté [n.3]&#xA;pavé [n.2]&#xA;père [n.]&#xA;piña [n.]&#xA;pisé [n.]&#xA;plié [n.]&#xA;posé [adj.]&#xA;râle [n.]&#xA;ramé [adj.]&#xA;raté [adj.]&#xA;Rōjū [n.]&#xA;rosé [n.2]&#xA;rôti [n.1]&#xA;roué [n.]&#xA;rusé [adj.]&#xA;saké [n.2]&#xA;sève [n.]&#xA;stød [n.]&#xA;tête [n.]&#xA;topī [n.1]&#xA;très [adv.]&#xA;visé [n.3]&#xA;visé [v.2]&#xA;vœu [n.]&#xA;Würm [n.]&#xA;yagé [n.]&#xA;yüeh [n.4]&#xA;Yüeh [n.1]&#xA;Yüeh [n.2]&#xA;Yüeh [n.3]&#xA;Zuñi [n.]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to name a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-09-16T18:36:44.773" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T18:36:44.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-18T13:34:37.237" Score="-2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;…hence indisputably, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/595266/how-common-is-it-in-english-to-have-more-than-a-first-middle-and-last-name-or-h?noredirect=1#comment1497297_595266&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know any reasons, if any, based on which that would not be deemed the case on this SE site, and the reason why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am substantially entirely certain the question was closed in contravention of the Code of Conduct – please see the complaint in chat moved from comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445303" LastEditorUserId="445303" LastEditDate="2022-09-18T13:56:29.187" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T20:12:30.600" Title="Since frequency of the use of words or other linguistic phenomena are the measuring stick of defining what is and what isn’t part of a language" Tags="|support|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-18T17:15:35.477" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a textbook that teaches editors and proofreaders good practice, methods, techniques and resources for editing the advanced writing of non-native speakers, for example academic writing or professional publishing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164125" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Elbert" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T18:45:09.017" Title="What is a standard textbook about editing writing by non-native speakers?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15438" CreationDate="2022-09-18T20:12:30.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no 'indisputable'. Three people voted that it is off topic, and so that was enough to have it closed. You may not like this but there's no violation of CoC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to reasons why it was closed, the header in your question says that. It may not offer you convincing reasons but it is something. @Mari-lou gave her reasons in chat which is very charitable but never necessary as might think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three more people may come along and vote to reopen it (you know you yourself can vote to reopen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've done the right thing by asking on meta to try to reopen. That's how the process works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T20:12:30.600" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-24T13:36:44.090" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a misconception that all list questions are bad or off-topic. However, they are not all bad or off-topic. It is possible to ask good list questions. In fact, &lt;strong&gt;there are good and useful list questions asked before and kept open&lt;/strong&gt;, so the community is accepting good list questions. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451477/words-with-bi-prefix-that-no-longer-mean-two&quot;&gt;Words with &amp;quot;bi-&amp;quot; prefix that no longer mean &amp;quot;two&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19861/unicorn-what-other-words-have-this-cornus-etymology&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Unicorn&amp;quot;: what other words have this &amp;quot;cornus&amp;quot; etymology?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1217/words-for-meat-differ-from-the-words-for-the-corresponding-animal&quot;&gt;Words for meat differ from the words for the corresponding animal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/595565/unusual-words-to-denote-a-specific-length-of-time-like-fortnight-but-for-differ&quot;&gt;Unusual words to denote a specific length of time? Like fortnight but for different amounts of time&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note: It was closed and re-opened; and people are trying to close again. However, I believe it is a useful question with useful answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some historical questions are locked with the reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locked. This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5901/hardest-tongue-twister-seen&quot;&gt;Hardest tongue twister seen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that the question above is a subjective, forum-like question so it is blatantly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is nowhere stated that list-questions are off-topic. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the lines says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that a list question can be interpreted as broad but it is not explicit that all list questions are broad enough to fill up an entire book. Good list questions have a reasonable scope and they are usually narrowed down with certain criteria. (See the example questions listed at the top).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of broad/useless list questions which should be closed as off-topic are: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are examples of adjectives? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;What are the words starting with dis-? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;What words have Latin origin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjective, forum-like list questions are blatantly off-topic and it is clearly stated in the &amp;quot;Don't Ask&amp;quot; page but it is not about list questions; it is about all bad subjective questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking &lt;strong&gt;subjective questions&lt;/strong&gt; where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of bad subjective questions (list question or not) which should be closed as off-topic are: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What words sound best? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is your favorite word? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;What word is hardest to pronounce?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good list questions are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; subjective, they are reasonably scoped (or not too broad) and they are useful. Here reminding one of them again: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451477/words-with-bi-prefix-that-no-longer-mean-two&quot;&gt;Words with &amp;quot;bi-&amp;quot; prefix that no longer mean &amp;quot;two&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary, possible solutions and expectations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not all list questions are bad or off-topic; and they can be very useful and teach something. Good list questions are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; subjective also.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community should have a way to keep good list questions, possibly by dedicating a tag with clear info. Or just keep the good list questions open.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my previous tag solution question, I've suggested that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocabulary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocabulary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;vocabulary-container&quot;&gt;vocabulary&lt;/a&gt; tag can be used for good list questions; possibly by re-naming it, as &amp;quot;vocabulary&amp;quot; is an ambiguous term, but the final decision was removing it. There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/list-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;list-request&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;list-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;list-request-container&quot;&gt;list-request&lt;/a&gt; tag which reads in the info that &amp;quot;This tag exists solely to indicate that these questions are [off-topic]&amp;quot;; however, the info can be updated in a way to accept only good list questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question asked before on Meta&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2016/are-list-questions-always-bad&quot;&gt;Are list questions always bad?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;It is a bit different and it doesn't address all the points; and it was asked long time ago.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64985" LastEditorUserId="64985" LastEditDate="2022-09-25T08:40:16.497" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T09:58:31.633" Title="Not all list questions are off-topic" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|on-topic-off-topic|list-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15441" CreationDate="2022-09-24T14:15:52.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer today is the same as it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/139623&quot;&gt;ten years ago on MSE&lt;/a&gt; when it was written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask for a list are considered not constructive, as every answer is equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, those questions are infinite, as a new answer could always be added; they also tend to be subjective. As such, those questions should not be asked, basing on what written in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: &amp;quot;What's your favorite ______?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: &amp;quot;I use ______ for ______, what do you use?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved: &amp;quot;I'm curious if other people feel like I do.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: &amp;quot;What if ______ happened?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is a rant disguised as a question: &amp;quot;______ sucks, am I right?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will never stop asking those sorts of questions. That doesn't mean we should not close them. We very much should do so, for to allow them diminishes our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why questions whose answers are all equally valid are not ours to answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it’s perfectly fine to consider whether time’s passage&#xA;may have brought changes to the original conditions that once&#xA;held when some question was answered, answers never spontaneously&#xA;cease to apply simply because their question happens to have been&#xA;“asked a long time ago”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to building websites, just like constructing stone&#xA;arches or mathematical proofs, there can exist certain timeless&#xA;foundational principles which age cannot wither nor custom stale,&#xA;lest an edifice built upon such keystones fall into&#xA;irrelevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too often before Stack Exchange’s foundation could it be&#xA;difficult if not altogether impossible to find discrete answers&#xA;to concrete problems in a timely manner.  That’s because even&#xA;when a helpful answer did exist somewhere, it lay hidden deep in&#xA;some online discussion forums’s neverending threads of&#xA;meaningless chatter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This then was &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; problem that Stack Exchange set out to&#xA;solve. We dare not risk allowing some parochialism of time to cloud our&#xA;clarity of vision nor weaken our resolve of purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is it not our place to answer all&#xA;possible requests that come our way, our continued&#xA;existence depends upon this keystone principle remaining firmly in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-09-24T19:27:13.180" LastActivityDate="2022-09-24T19:27:13.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15441" CreationDate="2022-09-25T09:30:29.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With reference to the question linked in the OP's post,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451477/words-with-bi-prefix-that-no-longer-mean-two&quot;&gt;Words with &amp;quot;bi-&amp;quot; prefix that no longer mean &amp;quot;two&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, I'll note that the answers posted, with the exception of two, are not made up of lists. Each answer has one example of a word beginning with the Latin &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prefix&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;bi-&lt;/strong&gt;, accompanied by a brief definition and its justification, which makes the whole thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;easier and faster to read&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;easier for users to cast their votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it needs to be reminded, members are allowed to cast votes for more than one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/451928/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; with the most downvotes, in fact, provides a list of eight different words. Not content with that, the user also included a link that claims there are &lt;strong&gt;4,615 words&lt;/strong&gt; beginning with bi-. It's hard to fault the downvoters in this case. An answer about &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; devoid of definitions with a denial of etymology, is a bad answer, even if such a list did contain a few decent candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance, an answer that lists “biology”, “bitter”, “bitch”,  among its suggestions when the question specifically said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I am specifically looking for the prefix of Latin origin meaning &amp;quot;two&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;must be downvoted. Bad answers show why the website values expertise or just the ability to do basic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By allowing questions that are &lt;strong&gt;asking for lists of words&lt;/strong&gt;, we are in fact encouraging answers that may contain up to 4,000 &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; words. OK, perhaps I'm exaggerating. But answers that list &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/188618/44619&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/160238/44619&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/595600/44619&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt; or as many as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/4215/44619&quot;&gt;34&lt;/a&gt; suggestions  (the OP was closed four years later) are virtually impossible for the community to vote on.  Whenever an OP accepts an answer that is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/595255/44619&quot;&gt;laundry list&lt;/a&gt;, I am often left asking which &amp;quot;word&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;expression&amp;quot; nailed it for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2022-09-25T09:58:31.633" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T09:58:31.633" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-25T17:38:01.530" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have used Google for many years, to search for phrases such as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;party to the scene&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but I have never used any other computerized databases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387992" OwnerDisplayName="Samuel Muldoon" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T19:17:09.107" Title="What alternatives to Google are there for searching for examples of phrases in old texts?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-10-08T17:07:49.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15444" CreationDate="2022-09-25T18:26:27.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;project gutenberg&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the search terms. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; is a repository for old texts that are not copyright. They have several formats to suit the readers' requirements, but they are all released in plain text and html, which makes them searchable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;project gutenberg&amp;quot; &amp;quot;party to the scene&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;brings up &lt;em&gt;The Pagan's Cup&lt;/em&gt; by Fergus Hume (1902), wherein a text search finds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it was not necessary to hire vehicles to convey the party to the scene of revelry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and other hits. It also has its own search bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240807" OwnerDisplayName="Weather Vane" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T18:40:07.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-25T23:19:23.263" Score="-2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It might be a useful feature to be able to underline different English words on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YlyVol.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YlyVol.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screen capture of what the \underline feature does in website which have the mathjax plugin&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text underlining shown above was done using the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; plug-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/216607/610179&quot;&gt;more than 40&lt;/a&gt; existing websites in the stack exchange family which already use the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; plug-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would never require anyone posting a question or answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;english stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; to use &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; syntax inside of their posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think underlining and coloring text is useful would be useful for some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for the example where &amp;quot;swam&amp;quot; was underlined is shown below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;They $\underline{swam}$ across the river.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to underline the verb &amp;quot;swam&amp;quot; you would simply write &lt;code&gt;$\underline{swam}$&lt;/code&gt; inside of your question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody posting a question or answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;english stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to write strange things such as &lt;code&gt;$\underline{swam}$&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; formatting would be available for those who choose to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone else could use plain English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underlining and color-coding text could be done by experienced moderators and other users who want to underline text or highlight different words in different colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we can also use the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; web plugin to apply color-highlighting features to the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English branch of stack exchange&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU3K3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU3K3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screen capture of some text colored maroon and olive-green&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside of a question or answer, a person would write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\color{maroon}{\text{these words are maroon}} $ &#xA;$\color{olive}{\text{this text is olive-colored}}$  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user could optionally choose to show all of the verbs in blue, nouns in maroon, adjectives in olive-green, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is useful sometimes, but not always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also strike-out passages of text using &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oVRoL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oVRoL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screen capture of stricken text rendered with mathjax&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\require{cancel}$&#xA;&#xA;They $\cancel{is}$ [are] going to the park&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y8aZe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y8aZe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a screen capture of the word &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; being stricken and replaced with a blue instance of the word &amp;quot;are&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ \require{cancel} $&#xA;&#xA;$ \require{enclose} $&#xA;&#xA;$ \newcommand{\strike}[1]{\color{grey}{\enclose{horizontalstrike, updiagonalstrike}{#1}}}$&#xA;&#xA;$\newcommand{\insert}[1]{[\color{blue}{\textbf{#1}}]}$&#xA;&#xA;$\newcommand{\replace}[2]{\strike{#1} \insert{#2}}$  &#xA;&#xA;&amp;gt; They $\strike{is}$ going to the park. &#xA;&amp;gt;  &#xA;&amp;gt; They $\insert{are}$ going to the park. &#xA;&amp;gt;  &#xA;&amp;gt; They $\replace{is}{are}$ going to the park. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387992" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2022-09-30T01:21:51.173" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T12:07:45.070" Title="What do you think about enabeling the MathJax web plug-in for underlining, stricken text, and changing text color?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15446" CreationDate="2022-09-26T00:54:15.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we could agree on how we, as a site, would use the various markup flavors, this might be an interesting idea. But I doubt that we would or could do that. With the minimal markup we have now, people do different things in different ways, with little consensus. Multiply the possibilities and I think all we would achieve is chaos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T00:54:15.990" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15446" CreationDate="2022-09-26T01:12:05.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, pretty, pretty please &lt;a href=&quot;https://practicaltypography.com/color.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;go read this short piece&lt;/a&gt; about page color and colored text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get back, here are a few choice reasons against this proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dmey8m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dmey8m.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ransom note text reading: It would be incredibly distracting, not to mention confusing and discriminatory, to have colorized texts with nonlinking underlines and non-struck-out strike-outs.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main problem with this idea would be its potential for looking &lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;/em&gt; compared with our existing page setup. We’ve gone for a quiet look here, in keeping with our theme. It’s supposed to bring to mind a book, not a noisily &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;BLINK&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;ing popup spamvertizing billboard&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/BLINK&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; on Times Square trying to get you to run go see the next Broadway production of ♬ &lt;em&gt;Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat&lt;/em&gt; ♬ — and right this very minute❢❣❣ Basically, it’s way too easily abused for chintzy purposes related to grabbing people’s attention against their wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You’re also going to run afoul of any number of important WC3 accessibility guidelines relating to contrast as well as impacting use by screenreaders. We do not want to make our site less accessible. How would the colors interact with our theme colors? What happens to people who have various deficiencies in their color vision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a non-trivial performance impact involved with enabling MathJax on an SE site. Making everyone pay that price just so &lt;a href=&quot;https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Prismatic%20Spray#content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;certain wizards could bedazzle us by casting a &lt;em&gt;Prismatic Spray&lt;/em&gt; spell&lt;/a&gt; might not be a price that our community is willing to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would have to pass muster and be approved by the Stack Exchange Community and Design teams. We can’t even get the SE design team to exchange our super-double-bold markdown that destroys our &lt;a href=&quot;https://practicaltypography.com/color.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;page color&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2433/2085&quot;&gt;elegant small capitals&lt;/a&gt; that preserves it the way &lt;a href=&quot;http://webtypography.net/3.2.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;things &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be&lt;/a&gt;, or get them &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3358/2085&quot;&gt;to disable the hideous code markdown&lt;/a&gt; possibility that should not even exist here. So I wouldn’t guess this proposal’s reasoning and impact would pass their internal smell test—and it would have to do so to be allowed—but hey you never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reason we don’t have underlines in our markdown is because &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;we already use underlines&lt;/a&gt; for something else. If you also add them   ̲t̲o̲ ̲y̲o̲u̲r̲ ̲s̲w̲a̲m̲ ̲e̲x̲a̲m̲p̲l̲e̲ ̲, it just risks confusing people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And finally, the reason we &lt;s&gt;don’t have strike-outs&lt;/s&gt; oh never mind, I guess we do. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions will doubtless vary according to each community member’s personal preferences and tolerances for various sorts of in-your-face loudness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a host of diverse reasons, some good and others rather less than good, virtually no previous change to our UI here has &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; been well-received by our community. And there have been painfully many of those; nobody is ever happy with them. So for my own part I would be astonished if, on balance, our community at large here were to end up considering this proposal more of a positive change than a negative one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we shall see — for as that old apocryphal proverb runs: &lt;em&gt;“By their votes shall ye know them.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-09-28T06:04:27.400" LastActivityDate="2022-09-28T06:04:27.400" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15450" CreationDate="2022-10-02T15:14:09.570" Score="4" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I need phonetic symbols, I just copy them off of Wikipedia. I don't know how to add diacritics with this method though. Take ◌̥ for example. When I try to delete the dotted circle, and replace it with a letter, the diacritic is always deleted first. What do I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="446609" LastActivityDate="2022-10-02T21:35:53.043" Title="How to add diacritics to my phonetic transcription?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15449" CreationDate="2022-10-02T15:31:35.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you copy the HTML code for the combining character (&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#805;&lt;/code&gt;), you can put it after the character you want to modify. It's easy as&#xA;Ḁ&#xA;B̥&#xA;C̥!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A&amp;amp;#805;&#xA;B&amp;amp;#805;&#xA;C&amp;amp;#805;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the HTML code on &lt;a href=&quot;https://unicode-table.com/en/0325/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unicode-table&lt;/a&gt;, but you can really just google up a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-10-02T15:31:35.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15449" CreationDate="2022-10-02T21:35:53.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;By far and away the easiest method is to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ipa.typeit.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA.typeit.org&lt;/a&gt;. Use their full keyboard, type whatever you want with whatever diacritics, and then cut and paste into your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2022-10-02T21:35:53.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15415" CreationDate="2022-10-07T02:00:07.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to find the same, and I haven't found a good alternative yet, unfortunately. It's sad really, since I used Lexico daily. I can't help but feel it was a bit malicious though, seeing as even when Lexico was live, the website would use pernicious tactics to nudge users toward the US English part of it by not showing international English search results when searching from the US English part of it, but showing US English results when searching from the international English part of it, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, using Google or the like isn't a good alternative either because they exclusively use some US English version of their dictionary content with no option to change it, and it doesn't take context into account either. A quick search on Google for &lt;code&gt;define football&lt;/code&gt;, for example, regardless of even being outside of the US, shows these as the only definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a form of team game played in North America with an oval ball on a field marked out as a gridiron&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a ball used in football, either oval (as in American football) or round (as in soccer), typically made of leather or plastic and filled with compressed air.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, this is just egregious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing I can recommend is to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins' website&lt;/a&gt;, but of course, that isn't Oxford content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="334464" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T02:00:07.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-10T21:30:05.950" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this as a programmer in grad school. We've been tasked with developing an agent that can process and understand sentences. While planning out my approach for this assignment, I found myself diagramming sentences and breaking them down the way I was taught in middle school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never had any good resources on sentence diagramming though--just quizzes from school and lessons in class. I've just googled some resources for sentence diagramming, but I'm only finding informal webpages that have diagrams for very simple sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there's any textbooks, journals, any resource really that someone can point me to that'll help me figure out how to diagram more complicated sentences (lots of independent + dependent clauses, probably a lot of prepositions, reviewing adverbial vs adjectival prepositions when diagramming, etc). I'm not even sure where to start looking for resources about this either, so any sort of direction would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="465581" OwnerDisplayName="Nikolas" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T14:43:07.640" Title="In-depth resources for sentence diagramming?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-13T03:57:27.050" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted the below question, and there were a couple of helpful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/596623/is-dead-on-arrival-a-slang&quot;&gt;Is &amp;#39;dead on arrival&amp;#39; a slang?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of now, this question has been closed as an 'off-topic' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I carefully read the above post but still don't understand the reason that this question was considered off-topic. Could anybody explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32517" LastEditorUserId="32517" LastEditDate="2022-10-13T06:34:53.150" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T06:34:53.150" Title="What is the reason that this question is considered as 'off-topic'?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-20T10:01:43.780" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m guessing that I may be the only EL&amp;amp;U regular this impacts, but just bringing it to your attention for those who don’t follow the big Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/383026/273503&quot;&gt;StackExchange native mobile apps being completely sunsetted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apps have been deprecated for a long while, and haven’t been available in the respective app stores for years, but for those of us who had them installed already they worked more-or-less fine despite that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But over the next few weeks all server-side infrastructure which supports them is being shut down, and they will stop working partially, and then completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m kinda sad about it, the iOS app is my main (more honestly: only) interface to EL&amp;amp;U and SE more broadly. It was nice to have a dedicated app for it, like for twitter or reddit or what-have-you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to create an icon on my phone that links to the mobile site, and we’ll see if that is a workable alternative. If not, you probably won’t hear much from me going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2022-10-29T20:18:02.080" LastActivityDate="2022-10-29T20:18:02.080" Title="Mobile apps being completely sunsetted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15456" CreationDate="2022-10-20T11:45:43.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the same heartache, but a long while ago, and I tried the mobile site, which is now my daily driver even for basic moderation tasks. It's getting good, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2022-10-20T11:45:43.143" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-24T04:27:12.413" Score="0" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be the best reference for a writer who follows British English in his writing style? are there any online tools that have proofread feature for the same? or a reliable dictionary to use that could be available online and free of charge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="465798" OwnerDisplayName="Zeynep" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T07:21:13.460" Title="British English Reference Check" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-10-24T14:42:53.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-24T03:56:28.643" Score="1" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious if there has been research on a topic I'll describe in the next paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The topic&lt;/strong&gt;: Suppose that we have an English dictionary and a huge piece of blank paper. For every entry in the dictionary, we draw a circle and label it with the word defined in the entry. Then, for every entry in the dictionary, we draw an arrow from the circle labeled with the word defined in the entry to all words which appear in the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the online Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snobbish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;snobbish&lt;/em&gt; defines the word as &amp;quot;being, characteristic of, or befitting a snob.&amp;quot; For this entry, we woul draw seven arrows from the circle for &lt;em&gt;snobbish&lt;/em&gt; circle to the circles for &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;characterstic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;befitting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;snob&lt;/em&gt;. (Perhaps we may need to take account of inflections -- e.g., if &lt;em&gt;snobbishly&lt;/em&gt; appears in another word's definition, we could draw the line to &lt;em&gt;snobbish&lt;/em&gt;, since &lt;em&gt;snobbishly&lt;/em&gt; isn't an entry on its own in Merriam Webster. But I imagine that we can work out sensible alternatives for challenges of this sort).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The interest, in abstract&lt;/strong&gt;: I would love to see if what the overall picture ends up looking like, what words have a lot of arrows coming in, how the choice of dictionaries changes the patterns, what insights scholars have been able to gather, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interest is admittedly general and vague, so I will rephrase my question to be more concrete:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question, in concrete&lt;/strong&gt;: Has there been research on this topic? If so, what is the name of the area of English or linguistics which covers the topic (so that I may look up further)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potential answers might look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Area A is the field in linguistics which would delve into a topic like this. Visit this link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Person P has made visualizations you describe. See this picture. Visit this link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Area A is the field in English which would look into a topic like this, but as an academician in the field, I am not aware of this type of research done seriously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I've tried&lt;/strong&gt;: I used search engines with some combination of terms like &amp;quot;dictionary&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;define&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;graph&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;cycle&amp;quot; (e.g., &amp;quot;english dictionary words defined in terms of words&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;dictionary entries into directed graphs&amp;quot;), but found nothing which seems to cover the topic. (It doesn't seem to help that if I use the word &amp;quot;graph&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;dictionary&amp;quot; is almost always interpreted as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;associative array&lt;/a&gt;, not a book of definitions for natural language vocabulary...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find two entries from Stack Exchange sites which cover related but ultimately different questions -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268713/does-there-exist-a-subset-of-words-which-can-be-used-to-define-all-others&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; asking if there is a set of words which can define all words (which could be rephrased to a question about whether the graph has a set of nodes whose outgoing edges are contained within the set -- though, if phrased this way, the set of all nodes trivally satisfies the conditions) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/52127/since-words-are-defined-in-terms-of-other-words-in-dictionaries-leading-to-infi&quot;&gt;another&lt;/a&gt; which is more philosophical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466447" OwnerDisplayName="f81f953c3b9e82d3" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T14:47:44.297" Title="Has there been research on how things look if we represent a dictionary as a graph of nodes from entry words to words appearing in the definitions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15459" CreationDate="2022-10-24T15:43:09.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly what you’re looking for, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WordNet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is prominent academic resource related to your interests, and has seen applications in all sorts of research and even things like natural language processing technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s how it describes itself (emphasis mine, to show relations to your interest):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. &lt;strong&gt;Synsets are interlinked&lt;/strong&gt; by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. &lt;strong&gt;The resulting network of meaningfully related words&lt;/strong&gt; and concepts can be navigated with the browser(link is external). WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. However, there are some important distinctions. First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated. Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven’t looked, but the site may discuss specific research programs, papers, or applications which incorporate it, and any insights they have surfaced (as you asked). If not, searching for citations to WordNet certainly would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the entire database also publicly and freely available for download, if you want to do your own analyses or just play with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55623" LastEditorUserId="55623" LastEditDate="2022-10-24T15:48:11.903" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T15:48:11.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15459" CreationDate="2022-10-26T14:29:53.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are many academic domains which might apply here:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexical semantics&lt;/a&gt; (word meanings and their features relations) and specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexicography&lt;/a&gt; (making dictionaries). Covers things like semantic features, grading, hyponyms and meronyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epistemology&lt;/a&gt;, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/definitions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the theory of definitions&lt;/a&gt;. This covers ideas like the difference between stipulative (technical, forced meanings) and descriptive ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Database theory (in computer science) and the idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;knowledge bases and ontologies&lt;/a&gt;. Describes how concepts (not words, but how concepts are related (words point to concepts). WordNet is a good implementation for English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Graph visualization&lt;/a&gt;. Graphs can get pretty big pretty quickly and then very hard to read, so there is a lot of research in figuring out how to display graphs well for readability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In practice&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most on-line dictionaries and thesauruses provide a very limited implementation of what you seek, links to other entries in a word's entry. For example, Wikipedia style allows links to other Wikipedia entries, but there's no automatic generation of a link for every word in an entry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.visualthesaurus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Visual Thesaurus&lt;/a&gt; gives the synonymous 'neighbors' of a word visually, but then so does &lt;a href=&quot;https://thesaurus.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thesaurus.com&lt;/a&gt; in a less graphical form. These aren't exactly what you're looking for but are nearby. &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; goes well beyond just synonyms but is less a practical thing than a high powered implementation tool.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea you give is a very productive one having lots of implications. A basic philosophical problem is if one word is defined in terms of others, what does the graph of words, connected with 'is used in a definition of', look like? Where does it stop? Are there things that are at the bottom that are not defined in terms of other things? Or is it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;turtles all the way down&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Are there things at the top?&lt;/a&gt; (or is that really the bottom) They say you shouldn't define something in terms of itself, but what about two things in terms of each other? What about a cycle of 3? What's the longest cycle? So many questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot depends on how you 'do' your dictionary. If you just take a dictionary and put in links for every word, there's no bottom (the word 'the' will have a definition in words... it may not use the word 'the' but it actually may. But either way there will definitely be cycles and most likely 'top' words (word that aren't used in other definitions. If you don't use any &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'stopwords'&lt;/a&gt; (like prepositions and connectors, then the structure is different, but rally depends on the definition composition style of the lexicographer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow the links. You're not alone. If you find an online dictionary that links -every- word in the entry then add/comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2022-10-26T14:47:44.297" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T14:47:44.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15446" CreationDate="2022-10-27T12:07:45.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please please please please please enable MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any issues with bots and screen readers are 0% our concern and 100% a challenge for the developers of those technologies. I've worked with the disabled for 40 years, and censoring the able bodied in any way is not the way forward with regards to helping our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is fundamentally elitist in nature. We strive to maintain a veneer of egalitarianism, sometimes sadly, sometimes comically, and sometimes with conspicuous hypocrisy - this is one of those times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.&amp;quot; Robert Heinlein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the trouble to figure out what a screen reader was, installed one, got MathJax's accessibility feature sorted, and tested it on a page from Engineering SE. It works. It's not the most fluent rendition of math that I have ever heard, but it works. So that objection simply doesn't hold water. And I expect the formulas that would appear here would be less of a challenge to render aurally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a feature such as MathJax be acceptable for one site on SE and objectionable for &lt;em&gt;accessibility reasons&lt;/em&gt; on another? We do, in fact, have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;mathematics-container&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt; tag, and currently, the only way to include readable math formatting is with a screen grab. And we get a decent number of questions about the text that gets interleaved with math in documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is also not about the potential for the tool to be misused or used in a clumsy way. It is about whether it can make things better when used adeptly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T12:07:45.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15464" CreationDate="2022-10-28T17:20:56.280" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to do some minor voting and commenting on my &lt;strong&gt;iPad&lt;/strong&gt; and each time I tried to complete the action, I obtained the following alert:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Request Failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could not perform this request with your account.&#xA;Please try logging back in. If this persists, let us know on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened here and on SE Biology. I logged out and back. No improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then logged onto my &lt;strong&gt;laptop&lt;/strong&gt; and was able to operate as normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am posting this question on meta, as requested (although more in hope than expectation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2022-10-29T11:55:15.493" LastActivityDate="2022-10-29T12:03:19.053" Title="Why “Request Failed” alert on iPad?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15463" CreationDate="2022-10-29T12:03:19.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following a comment from @Laurel I discovered that &lt;em&gt;I still had a Stack Exchange app on my iPad&lt;/em&gt;, and that &lt;em&gt;removing this and using the web version solved the problem.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should have thought of this because of recent notices regarding the demise of the app, but my reaction to those was abhorrence of the jargon used rather than reflection on the information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point to note is that the icon for the app is the same as the icon on the bookmark that one can download to one’s home screen. I had the latter on my iPhone, and had to check that I had not done the same on the iPad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2022-10-29T12:03:19.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-29T14:04:35.300" Score="8" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like all ELU migrations elsewhither are stuck, and have been so for a day or so. This includes any migrations from ELU to ELL as well as here to our own Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening is they get closed for being offtopic as belonging on another site, then locked, but then those migrations are never picked up by the internal job (software agent) that actually migrates them to their destination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has happened once before, quite a few years ago now. I’m posting here, and with these tags, upon CM request so that it gets queued up for fixing by the SE ops team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Recent examples from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=closed%3a1%20locked%3a1%20migrated%3a0%20duplicate%3a0&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597568/ignore-this-migration-testing-only&quot;&gt;Ignore this: migration testing only&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597567/we-want-to-know-which-type-of-design-users-like-the-most-to-focus-on&quot;&gt;We want to know which type of design users like the most to focus on&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597555/is-the-grammar-wrong&quot;&gt;Is the Grammar wrong&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597535/how-to-politely-say-you-have-to-decide-quickly&quot;&gt;How to politely say &amp;quot;you have to decide quickly&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597488/what-is-easy-english-book-you-would-recommend-me-to-read-for-esl&quot;&gt;What is easy english book you would recommend me to read? (for ESL)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597468/why-is-the-singular-dress-used-in-all-wearing-traditional-dress&quot;&gt;Why is the singular &amp;quot;dress&amp;quot; used in &amp;quot;all wearing traditional dress&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597356/what-does-the-line-theyll-be-sorry-they-bought-come-sun-up-from-deadwood-mean&quot;&gt;What does the line &amp;quot;they&amp;#39;ll be sorry they bought come sun up&amp;quot; from Deadwood mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="375145" LastEditDate="2022-11-10T10:24:30.210" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T10:25:04.970" Title="Migrations are stuck" Tags="|bug|status-completed|closed-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-30T00:16:26.370" Score="-1" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;After I created a question, I get the notification &amp;quot;Does this answer your question?&amp;quot; with yes/no choice and a link to another question which is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; related to my question. I click &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;. After a while I again get the same notification with the same link to the same question. If I already pressed &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; once, I think I mustn't get it the second time because when I often encounter this it causes a feeling of irritation. Could you please technically mend it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, this problem exists in any section of &amp;quot;stackexchange.com&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="312479" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2022-10-31T08:04:05.463" LastActivityDate="2022-10-31T08:04:05.463" Title="Does this answer your question?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15466" CreationDate="2022-10-30T10:14:26.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Laurel has noted in comments, this is how the system notifies you that someone else considers there is already an answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get such a notification every time someone casts a vote to that effect, and &lt;strong&gt;that is by design.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is your opportunity to examine the offered answer(s) and &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, I can apply that to my question¹&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, it doesn't apply to my question, because... &lt;strong&gt;and then update your question to explain how it is not helped.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time you get a &amp;quot;Does this answer your question?&amp;quot; notification and you answer No, you should edit your question to explain &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; your question is different. You need to &lt;strong&gt;show&lt;/strong&gt; that your question is not answered elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Very often, a &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; is not exactly the same question [those are merged] but one where the answer or its explanation can be applied to your question. A question about &amp;quot;The government is/are&amp;quot; would be answered by a question about &amp;quot;The police is/are&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The team is/are&amp;quot;. If you cannot apply the thinking behind the suggested answers to your question, you need to explain why it doesn't apply in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T10:14:26.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-03T07:53:37.440" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing English is not a problem for me. However I get stumped when English words I thought that in my thinking would be pronounced in this way, are pronounced in a totally different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particular problem I face daily is the short 'i'  and long 'ii'. The dictionaries  I find online they have pronunciation guide in IPA which is too much for me, I also dont like their pronouncement buttons that produces the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a dictionary that lists the English words with their Esperanto counterparts. That would make my life very easy. I thank you in advance for any suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="467121" OwnerDisplayName="Wolfim" LastActivityDate="2022-11-03T09:05:00.893" Title="Can you suggest to me an English Esperanto dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15470" CreationDate="2022-11-05T21:17:21.837" Score="5" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Courtesy link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/140390/discussion-on-question-by-arunabh-bhattacharya-why-are-just-and-justice-writ&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/140390/discussion-on-question-by-arunabh-bhattacharya-why-are-just-and-justice-writ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been a long list of comments on one of my questions I asked. However, 3 months later, the comments have been moved to chat, and the comments are currently locked for 10 years. What exactly in going on with the string of comments?    The same think happened &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/542411/revisions&quot;&gt;with a question I asked in 2020&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383248" LastEditorUserId="383248" LastEditDate="2022-11-05T21:24:05.030" LastActivityDate="2022-11-05T21:27:49.433" Title="Comments moved to chat 3 months later" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15469" CreationDate="2022-11-05T21:27:49.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I moved them to chat because we don't want to encourage commenting. There were too many comments there. And I locked it against further comments for the next decade so that it doesn't get any more added to it, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing is gone. And comments are not precious. They are subject to complete deletion at any point. Those are saved, but in chat where they belong, not dirtying up the question with conversation threads, which goes against the SE model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If comments are important, edit your post and put their content there where they belong. Chat is for chattiness, not Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2022-11-05T21:27:49.433" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15465" CreationDate="2022-11-10T10:25:04.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Copying in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/383393/51&quot;&gt;my answer from MSE&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had a site-to-site post migrations outage from sometime mid-afternoon UTC on October 27 through late morning UTC on October 30 (a little under 3 days). This is now fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual outage was caused by some changes made to our internal network configuration. Site-to-site migrations work via API calls between sites that are configured to never leave our data center, and the changes that were made prevented these calls from going through successfully. These changes have been reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves nearly 3 days of site-to-site post migrations that were not performed. We are currently evaluating ways to proceed with going about performing this backfill network-wide, and will update here when we have more information to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Stack Overflow mods manually went through the 8 posts that were up for migration during this outage, and made decisions on them whether to manually migrate or not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As for the rest of the network (where there are on average 14 migrations daily for all non-SO sites combined), we have made the decision to not put in a backfill for this. The logic needed for the backfill is actually quite complicated and unreliable (each one would need to be manually checked anyway, especially after some mods have already gone ahead and made decisions on migrate/not for all affected posts), and is not worth the investment of time to implement for a one-time event like this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thus, for the approximately 50 affected posts across the network during this 3-day period, we will leave it up to mods of individual sites to act on individual affected posts and will not be performing any automated actions. Affected posts will stay closed-as-off-topic on their originating sites (and mods can manually override this and migrate them if they so choose).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="375145" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T10:25:04.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-18T21:54:32.663" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an online dictionary that lists not only whether a verb is intransitive or transitive (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://merriam-webster.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; does that), but also how many arguments it binds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163011" OwnerDisplayName="theonlygusti" LastActivityDate="2022-11-18T23:22:19.240" Title="Online dictionary that lists number of complements for verbs" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-20T07:29:31.580" Score="-1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody said I should try Onelook but whatever I search in there, including the word &lt;em&gt;hello&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; (see picture below), nothing seems to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other sites like Onelook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X6sMm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X6sMm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of OneLook's null result for &amp;quot;book&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="468269" OwnerDisplayName="Rai" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2022-11-20T10:56:09.280" LastActivityDate="2022-11-21T14:30:20.003" Title="Are there any other sites other than Onelook that search multiple dictionaries simultaneously?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15473" CreationDate="2022-11-21T14:30:20.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What URL are you using to access OneLook? Which browser? Do you have any ad-blocking software enabled? Are you using a VPN or connecting through a firewall? &lt;a href=&quot;https://onelook.com/?w=book&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Looking up 'book' in OneLook&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;(https://onelook.com/?w=book&amp;amp;ls=a)&lt;/code&gt; works perfectly for me even with almost all of my browser's privacy protections enabled. You may have malware in your browser, or some privacy protection you have enabled is preventing the site from working properly. You may want to contact the developers of OneLook to get their help or let them know about the problem. There is a form at the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://onelook.com/about.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zl2oa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zl2oa.png&quot; alt=&quot;My search of OnLook showing &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; in the search box with other suggested terms in a drop-down box and many results from different dictionaries.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of another site as comprehensive as OneLook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2022-11-21T14:30:20.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-22T09:37:16.393" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there's a lot of word finders, but I'm wondering if there is some this fine-tuned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I want words ending in -ade, but only nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;accolade, charade, tirade, façade, balustrade...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just now realized these words are probably French in origin. Blade, trade, cascade would fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess the question is what is the best word finder out there? Guess there isn't one with so many filters, but if you're an entrepreneur here's an uncharted market niche haha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="468275" OwnerDisplayName="Peter" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-11-22T12:42:09.123" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T12:47:22.727" Title="What fine-tuned word finders are out there?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15475" CreationDate="2022-11-22T10:02:28.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think a tool exists that satisfies your requirements. You have described two filter criteria; suffix (ending) and 'word class' (noun, verb, adjective, adverb). Bear in mind that suffix often (though not always) denotes 'word class' so a &lt;a href=&quot;https://crossword-solver.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crossword solver&lt;/a&gt; will get you some of the way there and the rest is 'wetware' (brain power).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an idea for a general &amp;quot;word finder&amp;quot;, the proven TAM (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;total addressable market&lt;/a&gt;) is currently one person i.e you. You're going to have to spend time elaborating on requirements and potential uses before anyone might pick this up as an opportunity. As Einstein said &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="316230" OwnerDisplayName="Colm" LastEditorUserId="316230" LastEditDate="2022-11-22T10:51:56.250" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T10:51:56.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15475" CreationDate="2022-11-22T11:29:03.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;onelook.com purports to find all words ending in, say, ade, and the lets you make a second selection, e.g., common nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like what you’re looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some two-word results among the 134 that show up with this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastEditorUserId="223618" LastEditDate="2022-11-22T11:34:44.413" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T11:34:44.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15475" CreationDate="2022-11-22T12:47:22.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.visca.com/regexdict/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Visca.com's Regex Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; can do that. There are filters for each part of speech and you input a regex to match words. The regex for your particular search is &lt;code&gt;ade$&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; makes it match the end of the line (i.e., the end of the word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do some pretty complex searches if you know regex (admittedly, not many people do — it's complicated). For example, here's the regex to find words that start and end with the same letter: &lt;code&gt;^(.).*\1$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T12:47:22.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13784" CreationDate="2022-11-22T13:12:25.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's STILL not fixed&lt;/strong&gt;, but I did get the necromancer badge on meta.stackexchange.com for bumping it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7nD2S.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7nD2S.png&quot; alt=&quot;Recent Achievements&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="216106" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T13:12:25.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15481" CreationDate="2022-11-23T10:33:29.303" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/598765/word-for-someone-who-looks-for-problems-and-raises-the-alarm-about-them&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was locked without explanation. My best guess, based solely on the fact that comments were disabled, is that it is because there were too many unwelcome comments. But I have no way to be sure, as the reason is not stated anywhere. The &amp;quot;Learn more&amp;quot; link redirects to some vague generic guidelines that do not provide a possible list of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIIAT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIIAT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there was also a vote to close it, for the nebulous reason &amp;quot;A community specific reason&amp;quot; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sJ365.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sJ365.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I click on what these reasons could be, I am welcomed with the following list of potential flaws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include your research&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have included my research, I have even provided a possible solution (&amp;quot;captious&amp;quot;) and why it does not quite work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done that, and even provided a specific phrase for context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Proofreading questions are off-topic&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not proofreading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the case, as multiple single word requests are present on the website, and there's even a specific tag for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So none of the possible reasons make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is great, with many helpful answers, but frankly the moderation is really painful and keeps people away from asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;within the rules of the website&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;well received by the community (9 upvotes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;was of similar nature than other non-closed questions on the website (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/598726/what-is-a-word-equivalent-to-oceanic-but-specific-to-a-lake&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen this pattern for many other questions (from other users). There is too much unpredictability for a normal user of the website. I am sure the well intentioned person who wants to close my question has clear rules in their head of what is acceptable or not, but a well functioning site operates on clear and consistent rules. Not on subtle deviations from unspoken directives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend a greater focus on making the site welcoming and useful for everyone, rather than nitpicking on questions to close them. While there is value in removing questions that fall clearly outside of the rules, the current moderation is too far on the restrictive side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help in making this site a good resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="268353" LastEditorUserId="268353" LastEditDate="2022-11-23T22:15:16.657" LastActivityDate="2022-11-23T22:15:16.657" Title="Why was my question locked and voted to close?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15480" CreationDate="2022-11-23T11:26:29.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;People kept giving comments as answers. That's against the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I removed those comments and locked the question from further comments for a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not closed. People just can't break the rules for a week, nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2022-11-23T11:26:29.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-23T18:09:27.150" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to make the leap from non-theoretical grammar to theoretical ones, especially when one doesn't know the specific name of the theory being expounded upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's just a case of not realizing what laypersons don't know. (There is a term for that I've forgotten.) For example, an IT expert may &amp;quot;slow down&amp;quot; and click only two times per second when teaching someone who has Never. Clicked. Before. True story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've clicked a lot, tried to research and identify these grammars, and it's a hornets' nest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering if each answer could possibly be prefaced with the specific name of the theory behind it. That would be so helpful, to know the context first, to be able to readily recognize, over time, the different theories and positions being taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="464658" LastEditorUserId="464658" LastEditDate="2022-11-23T18:14:55.647" LastActivityDate="2022-12-04T20:22:11.273" Title="Would it be possible to preface each theoretical grammar answer with the specific name of the theory being used?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-24T02:48:18.057" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an English Learner who is interested in the Early Modern English recently. I have some texts from EModE to read. Sometimes there are words and grammar patterns that I can't relate to Present Day English. I need help with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="467365" OwnerDisplayName="Christopher W" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T07:25:08.747" Title="Are there any websites (or tools) in which I could translate Early Modern English into Present Day English?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-25T21:59:04.957" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to incorporate less formal, technical, and literal terms into my vocabulary to help articulate some theoretical points in any scenario. I heard someone say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you'd catch more flies with honey than vinegar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that was great and want to learn more of these. Any direct readings to help understand common ones like these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="468630" OwnerDisplayName="Equity Extraordinaire" LastActivityDate="2022-11-26T16:32:53.540" Title="How to get a better understanding and knowledge of metaphors" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15484" CreationDate="2022-11-26T16:32:53.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/169965431X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Great Book of American Idioms {link via Amazon}&lt;/a&gt; contains a good selection, with interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Macmillan Dictionary Of English Colloquial Idioms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastActivityDate="2022-11-26T16:32:53.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-26T19:10:13.477" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;At times, I conceive of  questions   that are   vaguely related to more common ones, but entailing much more nuance than generally captured in basic references or guides. In some cases,  the answer may be found in advanced sources, but locating it would require specific expertise  exceeding my limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/598581&quot;&gt;such a question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advice given by the template message is that the question  is inappropriate due to the following  characterizations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is  is off topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is appropriate for English learners.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may be answered through common references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might have been presented along with  more comprehensive research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without presenting a full rebuttable, I would suggest that  every point is   largely incorrect as applied to my question. Even the one I consider most sound in principle, the final, may apply for someone who has greater knowledge than I, but seeking such knowledge from others is the purpose of asking questions. No obvious method presents for finding   an answer in any reference, advanced or basic, based solely on the content contained in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="379946" LastEditorUserId="379946" LastEditDate="2022-11-27T09:58:04.457" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T22:00:35.830" Title="Question closed for reasons I find inaccurate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15486" CreationDate="2022-11-27T01:40:16.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m going to reöpen your question. I don’t believe it is well answered here. The would-be duplicates seem mostly to mindlessly repeat the same old tired mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some references to get people started on providing an actual answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/10/23/whichthat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2425&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3519&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5479&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/000918.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-11-28T21:17:51.863" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T21:17:51.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15489" CreationDate="2022-11-27T07:06:20.143" Score="5" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly after the question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/598916/is-on-sundays-my-sister-and-i-never-play-hockey-correctIs&quot;&gt;Is “On Sundays my sister and I never play hockey” correct?&lt;/a&gt;  appeared on the main site I posted a brief comment explaining how the placement of &lt;em&gt;On Sundays&lt;/em&gt; makes sense in a context in which the &lt;em&gt;theme&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; (terms from &lt;em&gt;Information Structuring&lt;/em&gt;) is about the days of the week on which sporting activities take place. Subsequent answers to the question indirectly make the same point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My comment was one of about nine comments when it was removed. Other comments that were posted before and after mine remain - including the comment &lt;em&gt;Many thanks, Shoe!&lt;/em&gt; from the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question: &lt;em&gt;What was the reason for removing my comment?&lt;/em&gt; I don't want to waste everyone's time in future if I can predict that a comment will be removed. If the comment was considered to be a sufficient and reasonable answer, why was it not converted to a &lt;em&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/em&gt;, as often happens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a follow-up question: &lt;em&gt;Why was the OP's response to my comment not also removed since it makes no sense to me to let it remain?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ Strangely, when I do a page search on &amp;quot;Shoe&amp;quot; in Google Chrome, it tells that me there are two occurrences, but there is only one occurrence (in the OP's comment) visible to me. ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2022-11-27T22:50:40.123" Title="Reason for removal of a comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15488" CreationDate="2022-11-27T09:47:36.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can answer this, although it was another moderator who acted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment was flagged as being an answer — along with another one, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When moderators get comment flags, we get just the comment and the flag. If the flag looks correct, then it's acted on, usually by clicking the &lt;kbd&gt;Delete&lt;/kbd&gt; button which accompanies the flag. We don't get a great deal of context for comment flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, when the mod agreed with the flag, your comment was deleted. I've now also deleted the response which, as you say, makes no sense to remain. That comment could easily have been flagged as conversational/no longer needed, in which case it would have been deleted at the time as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the reason for removing my comment? I don't want to waste everyone's time in future if I can predict that a comment will be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't write an answer in the comment box. You may be lucky and not have it flagged. You may be unlucky and have it removed. If you want it to remain, don't put your answer in a place which isn't designed for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment was considered to be a sufficient and reasonable answer, why was it not converted to a Community Wiki, as often happens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment was an answer, why did you not put it in the answer box? If you didn't think it was a good answer, why should it be converted to one? Moderators can convert answers to comments with a few clicks when the post is obviously &amp;quot;Not An Answer&amp;quot; but could be a useful comment; there is no mechanism to go the other way except to create a new answer. Why should moderators do that if &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; don't think it worthy of being an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; an answer, then it's open to anyone to use the comment to create a real answer. Simple copy and paste without attribution would not be a good thing, but there's no actual need to make it a community wiki either: the person who creates an answer is perfectly entitled to points from it (up or down!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To labour the party line again, &lt;strong&gt;comments are ephemeral.&lt;/strong&gt; Stack Exchange is built on good questions asked using the &amp;quot;Ask Question&amp;quot; button and good answers given with the &amp;quot;Post your Answer&amp;quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-11-27T09:47:36.157" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15488" CreationDate="2022-11-27T17:16:01.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is yet another manifestation of the ongoing tension about the role of commenting on this site, which in turn stems from the more fundamental difference between what one might call prescriptivists and descriptivists about the site's norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prescriptivists say 'Comments are meant to be ephemeral, so there is almost never a good reason to complain about their deletion', and support that by pointing to the explicitly stated rules of the site and of the Stack Exchange system as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descriptivists, on the other side, can point out that the role of commenting has evolved over the history of the site and that much of the community (including some of its regular, long-term, highly respected contributors) do not now see the comments that way. They believe that the rules, or at least their interpretation, should reflect that, and therefore continue to be upset when the moderators delete comments (or block them, or move then to chat), notwithstanding the moderators' explanations, which are based on the prescriptivist view of the site's norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This disagreement between the two groups  is not any more likely to be resolved soon than the disagreement between the prescriptivist and descriptivist approaches to the language. It is thus to be expected that the two groups of contributors to this site will continue to be annoyed with each other, that questions such as this one will keep appearing on the meta-site, and that the answers to them will continue to be essentially the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2022-11-27T22:50:40.123" LastActivityDate="2022-11-27T22:50:40.123" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-29T15:41:41.847" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/599138/does-this-sentence-seem-weird-grammatically?noredirect=1#comment1508288_599138&quot;&gt;Does this sentence seem weird grammatically?&lt;/a&gt; was summarily locked, and the couple of comments I'd posted (primarily in order to advertise and justify my vote to migrate to ELL) were moved to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does rather look as if the (new) user was going to string things out, somewhat pointlessly asking what I thought of his &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; example when I'd already described the construction under consideration as &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;valid&amp;quot;, but &amp;quot;formal, literary&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I probably wouldn't have replied to that - or if I &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt;, I might have just said it's an (Off Topic) matter of opinion and left it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel very strongly about which site the question should be on. I think the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; thing being asked (Is this construction weird?) is definitely something for ELL (where I would simply advise learners &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to use it themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But potentially some users here on &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ELU&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; might have much more to say about the syntax involved. That's why in my first comment I gave a similar example where only negating &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was moved from its default position, rather than other parts of an adjectival phrase. I don't know how to accurately summarize the syntactic principle and terminology, but I can certainly see that an answer addressing &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; issues would be a good fit on ELU (but it's probably not something most &lt;em&gt;learners&lt;/em&gt; would need to concern themselves with, as indicated above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cutting to the chase, I think at least the first few comments should have stayed on the main site. If only to encourage others to consider voting to migrate &lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt; to address the broader issue of &amp;quot;syntactic inversion&amp;quot; in related contexts such as my &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2022-11-29T15:41:41.847" Title="Heavy-handed question locking?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-11-29T15:48:23.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15482" CreationDate="2022-12-04T20:22:11.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree. I'll just provide a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many explanations are fairly standard across all theories (I'll stick with that term for convenience), so there would be two possibilities: 1) Someone posting an answer would have to search for and then list every theory that the answer aligned with. That would obviously be unreasonable. 2) The person would list only one or two theories with which the answer aligned, but the choice would be arbitrary. For example, I recently helped someone to distinguish between a main clause and a subordinate clause. My interpretation surely aligns with the vast majority of theories, so which one(s) would I indicate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many explanations have nothing to do with theory but are instead based upon other differences in the language, such as BrE vs. AmE or Chicago style vs. APA style, so there would be no need to mention any grammar theories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People who answer questions do so voluntarily, and we should not burden them with unnecessary requirements. Doing so could discourage answers, weakening the community over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2022-12-04T20:22:11.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-05T11:59:20.547" Score="5" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a big issue, but I’d like to understand why my comment on the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/599390/is-me-and-you-grammatically-wrong-cause-i-can-only-find-you-and-me-all-over&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;  was removed. It provided a link to Google Books on the usage frequency of “you and me” vs “me and you”. Curiously, a similar comment, which is still visible,  was posted afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2023-03-29T12:40:19.950" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T21:12:32.120" Title="Why was my Ngram comment removed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15493" CreationDate="2022-12-05T13:51:21.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your comment did not appear to be asking for more information or suggesting improvements.  Like all of these meta questions about comment removal, the answer to your question is that answers go in the answer box, not in the comment box. Comments are ephemeral. They are not answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;“Should I use &lt;em&gt;I, me, my, mine,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt;?”&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your deleted comment read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According Google Books “you and me” is more commonly used than “me and you”, but both expression are used: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=me+and+you%2C+you+and+me+&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;case_insensitive=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=me+and+you%2C+you+and+me+&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;case_insensitive=true&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me that seemed to be an answer. It also seems to be the &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it as suggesting that the choice of grammatical case for a pronoun is a mere popularity contest that can be settled by Ngrams, rather than a concrete matter of subject case or object case governing the pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot somehow determine which grammatical case to use by which one shows up more often in Ngrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just now added comments soliciting clarification about this from the author, and changed the close reason accordingly. I will restore your comments to a chatroom where they belong. They will not lead the asker to the correct answer by themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-04-30T21:12:32.120" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T21:12:32.120" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-07T11:25:20.637" Score="2" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;h2&gt;December 7, 2022&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer, which was highly upvoted, has been recently deleted by a mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After searching briefly on the net, the content seems to be original and the author's explanation more than valid, which explains why it attracted 20 upvotes in the first place. The post contains no links, it doesn't cite any website or leading authority but there are also other answers without references and citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be the user, who is currently suspended, paraphrased an entire excerpt which leads to an interesting question: is content that has been sourced outside but bears little to no semblance to the original text, still plagiarism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, users–especially newcomers–who'd copied content from an outside source without attribution or using block quotes were given a second chance to name their source, and to correctly format their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; this opportunity was denied to the user, and their answer was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was a good answer deleted when other answers have been left alone? Answers that were posted later, repeating more or less the same information, albeit a few with more detail.  Only one of the answers actually includes a helpful link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this deletion anything–I mean, is it in any way connected–with the ban of ChatGPT on Stack Overflow?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned&quot;&gt;Use of ChatGPT generated text for content on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[emphasis in bold mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically &lt;em&gt;look like&lt;/em&gt; they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be good and the answers are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; easy to produce. &lt;strong&gt;There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[…]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As such, we need to reduce the volume of these posts and we need to be able to deal with the ones which are posted quickly, which means dealing with users, rather than individual posts. So, for now, the use of ChatGPT to create posts here on Stack Overflow is not permitted. If a user is believed to have used ChatGPT after this temporary policy is posted, sanctions will be imposed to prevent users from continuing to post such content, even if the posts would otherwise be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Makyen ♦️Mod&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only just unearthed this, frankly alarming, innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;9 December 2022&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, a total of seven answers were submitted between December 5 and 6, and each one was deleted on December 6.  The answers were written in good standard English,  nothing in them reveals anything suspicious except for their inexplicable deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four of the seven answers were for single-word-requests, one answered a transliteration question, and two were about relative pronouns, and  meaning. Even though the answers were not copied from online sources, e.g Wikipedia, they appear to be generated by the AI chat bot known as ChatGPT. The answers were written very clearly, included detail, and sounded perfectly natural and &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; believable. There were no grammatical or lexical errors but they didn't cite any references or include any supporting evidence. However, I believe this will be an easy-enough obstacle to overcome for anyone looking to camouflage their A1 &lt;em&gt;contributions&lt;/em&gt;. Consequently there are probably many other AI generated answers on EL&amp;amp;U that have slipped through the net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE 2&lt;/strong&gt; (21 December)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I discovered an easier method to track down deleted answers. Initially, I thought the user had only posted two answers, but upon further investigation I discovered twelve answers had been posted within a two-day period before the account was swiftly suspended. This sudden surge of productivity likely triggered alarm bells among the moderators, leading to the eventual announcement of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15500/announcement-ai-generated-answers-are-officially-banned-here&quot;&gt;banning answers generated by chatbots&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2022-12-21T21:45:56.093" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T21:45:56.093" Title="An answer about spelling was deleted. Why?" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleted-posts|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-07T20:54:21.047" Score="-5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have already flagged it to a moderator who asked me to edit the question and ask to reopen it on meta. I ask the seniors here to think about reopening this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/454191/410036&quot;&gt;A or an before slash phrase? A or an before parenthetical phrase equivalent to slash phrase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was searching for how to deal with a slash phrase and had to read through the jungle of the &amp;quot;non-duplicate&amp;quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3368/a-an-preceding-a-parenthetical-statement&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A/An&amp;quot; preceding a parenthetical statement&lt;/a&gt; for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-native speaker here. I agree with the questioner, this is not a duplicate, and has not even been answered yet. I had to guess from english.stackexchange.com/a/36326/410036 the following: The a/an that you would read out loud for the first word of the slash phrase is all that you need, since any slash is just a shortcut for &amp;quot;or&amp;quot; + the freedom of saying &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;an&amp;quot;, that is, the indefinite article of your choice. It took me way too long to find out about this. If this comments is right, the question should be reopened to get this answer, but from a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(remark afterwards: not only english.stackexchange.com/a/36326/410036, but also a few more answers below that help to find out about this)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner has asked to un-duplicate/reopen this for four years, to no avail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOT A DUPLICATE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question only asks about parenthetical phrases, not slash&#xA;phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question's parenthetical phrase (answer(s) explained that&#xA;it's not really a parenthetical phrase) is a separate word. Mine is an&#xA;intra-word parenthetical prefix. That's different!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that &amp;quot;A or an before parenthetical phrase equivalent to slash phrase?&amp;quot; is not the strongest point of why it should be reopened, since the answer to this is the same in both &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;non-duplicate&amp;quot;: write the first indefinite article how you would read it aloud and leave the rest.&#xA;While the &amp;quot;A or an before slash phrase?&amp;quot; is easier to understand and search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could edit the question and remove the &amp;quot;parenthetical phrase equivalent to slash phrase&amp;quot; and then reopen the question. But then, some input would get lost on this Stack Exchange, since the other question is not about such a &amp;quot;parenthetical phrase equivalent to slash phrase&amp;quot;, but about a word on its own that stands in brackets before the noun. Which has the same answer somewhere in the lower voted answers, but you find it only after a picky search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why as a non-native speaker, I guess that the questioner might just be right. And that this question should just be reopened as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="410036" LastEditorUserId="410036" LastEditDate="2022-12-07T21:33:43.867" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T12:53:52.337" Title="Check to reopen a perhaps wrongly duplicate-closed question on the right indefinite article before a slash phrase (or before a parenthetical phrase)" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15496" CreationDate="2022-12-08T12:53:52.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to that question answers it. Don't write &amp;quot;a/an sea/ocean&amp;quot;; write &amp;quot;a sea or ocean&amp;quot;. If you're speaking that phrase, you would &lt;strong&gt;say&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;A sea slash ocean&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;An ocean slash sea&amp;quot;, so that's what you write. There is no need to reopen the question: the duplicate is useful &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; there is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T12:53:52.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-09T07:02:39.650" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/599614/a-word-or-phrase-to-describe-a-very-deep-voice&quot;&gt;word choice question&lt;/a&gt; recently, and it was closed within minutes for being &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;. Fine, I suppose it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are over 11000 questions tagged for word choice, not even counting single-word requests and phrase requests and a gaggle of related tags. How are they not &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; opinion-based? It's the very nature of this kind of question. If opinion-based questions are not allowed, we should close everything tagged word-choice, phrase-request, single-word-requests, and many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please explain the logic, because it seems pretty random. Run into a guy on a power trip and your question gets closed. Don't run into him, and it stays open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Thanks for the explanation about why it was closed. Since I'm not a frequent contributor, I didn't correctly understand the purpose of the tag I used. Retagging or a kind comment to show met where I went wrong would have been better. In the event, it was closed, only then retagged, then the close reason was changed after my post here. None of that addresses the fact that welcoming communities use better ways to address these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user333815" LastEditorDisplayName="user333815" LastEditDate="2022-12-13T16:02:50.850" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T16:02:50.850" Title="How can word choice questions be closed for being opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|single-word-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15498" CreationDate="2022-12-09T11:32:13.277" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-choice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-choice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;word-choice-container&quot;&gt;word-choice&lt;/a&gt; tag is for questions which are making a choice between a known set of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is not about choosing the most appropriate from a list you have already curated. You are asking for words which describe a particular thing. I've retagged it accordingly, and that may render this question moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your query about being opinion-based can still be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arts subjects are not generally cut and dried. Even a language which has a standard form and accepted &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; still has quirks where something like &amp;quot;That learned him!&amp;quot; is a valid dialectal form where &lt;em&gt;taught&lt;/em&gt; is likely to be standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently there is always going to be &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; level of opinion. But &lt;strong&gt;opinion must be justified.&lt;/strong&gt; It must be possible to say &amp;quot;The most appropriate word for &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; [from your list] is &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; because...&amp;quot; That makes such an answer possible to vote on because it's a good answer suggesting a good word for a good reason, or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, there isn't enough information for a valid &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;single-word-request-container&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; question, so any opinion will be just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2022-12-09T11:32:13.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-10T05:14:00.457" Score="40" ViewCount="8208" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really quite unbelievable, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;artificial intelligence&lt;/a&gt; has recently gotten to the point where, given a question, it can give a stunningly coherent answer almost indistinguishable from a real human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are several problems with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not something that you wrote so you can't pass it off as your own work, even under the old rules. See our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;Help Article on plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;. While the AI that generated it could be attributed, the nature of AI is that it breaks down existing writing and reconstructs it, so it's not that simple to name a source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The responses may be stunningly coherent, but they're often wrong or misleading. Dangerous even: We intuitively expect someone fluent in English to be able to answer a lot of questions about English correctly, but AI breaks this pattern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the AI requires no particular expertise in any subject. Using AI to write answers that are upvoted means that you're getting credit for something you might have zero knowledge of, which flies in the face of the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, we (the ELU mod team) have decided to ban AI generated content. Don't post it! We have ways to know what you're doing, and there will be consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think you've discovered AI generated content, please flag for moderator attention, preferably including the reasons you think it's AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About Chat&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ban covers the main site — questions, answers, tag wikis, etc. It's fine to continue sharing funny quotes from ChatGPT in chat. (On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;unfunny&lt;/em&gt; quotes...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Relevant&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/421831/6083675&quot;&gt;Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned&lt;/a&gt; (Meta Stack Overflow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy&quot;&gt;Help Center article on GPT and ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt; (Stack Overflow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/384396/323179&quot;&gt;Ban ChatGPT network-wide&lt;/a&gt; (Meta Stack Exchange)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/384922/323179&quot;&gt;Is there a list of ChatGPT or other AI-related discussions and policies for our sites?&lt;/a&gt; (Meta Stack Exchange)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-08-24T13:49:53.197" LastActivityDate="2023-08-24T13:49:53.197" Title="Announcement: AI generated answers are officially banned here" Tags="|discussion|policy|artificial-intelligence|plagiarism|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="38" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-10T06:21:29.070" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently reviewed a question in the &amp;quot;reopen votes&amp;quot; queue. I wanted to keep the question closed because it was a single-word request but did not include sufficient information about how the word would be used. I therefore clicked the appropriate reason to keep it closed and then clicked &amp;quot;keep closed&amp;quot;. However, I got an error saying that I needed to select a reason before submitting. (See screenshot below.) I tried this a couple of times but kept getting the same error. Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Edjq0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Edjq0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2022-12-10T06:21:29.070" Title="Possible bug: The system tells me to select a reason even though I've already done so" Tags="|bug|vote-to-reopen|review-queues|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2022-12-10T14:10:59.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: I just ran across an old question (in the main English SE) regarding just this. For those facing the predicament of searching for stop words, the answers given there might offer some useful avenues to pursue: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37/cant-search-for-a-question-about-that-and-which&quot;&gt;Can't search for a question about &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;which&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The answers there are summarized below, for immediate reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer (from Jeff Atwood, two months after that post) suggested a Google search option; the details of the SE search interface have since changed (in that answer, the interface included edit fields that drew from several external search engines), and so the exact method used there no longer applies, but the approach itself is still an option for those readers who haven't seen it before (e.g.: entering {apples oranges site:english.stackexchange.com} into the Google search field).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer (from Robert Cartaino, on the same day as the posted question) suggested the &lt;em&gt;Related Questions&lt;/em&gt; option as being useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the &amp;quot;Related Questions&amp;quot; search extremely helpful for finding questions. Click on the Ask Question link and type in the title as clearly as you can remember it. The &amp;quot;Related Questions&amp;quot; will often do a much better job at finding the question than the native search tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314810" LastEditorUserId="314810" LastEditDate="2022-12-10T23:25:10.313" LastActivityDate="2022-12-10T23:25:10.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15500" CreationDate="2022-12-13T18:24:06.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first dot-point together with comments below the question suggest that AI-generated material is not permitted on EL&amp;amp;U (main) even as attributed sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we find something on the internet that looks like a good illustration of an answer we are putting together, what standards are we expected to apply to ensure we're not citing AI-generated material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T18:24:06.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15500" CreationDate="2022-12-13T20:14:38.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good luck enforcing it. The problem isn't attribution however. The AI is trained on patterns. As soon as someone creates their own model, the only way you can tell it might have been generated from AI is because it's gibberish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could absolutely use an AI to help me write a post and you would be unable to prove I did without exerting more effort than it would merit. It's just a tool. It's like accusing me of plagiarizing a dictionary because my definition of some word is too similar in content to all the other correct definitions. Knowledge can't be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we not already punish people for repeatedly posting poor quality content? This fear of AI is silly. The problem isn't the tool, it's how people use it. There is already a policy against posting nonsense as an answer. Whether that nonsense was computer generated so it looks less like nonsense is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point of supporting an answer with citations on SE should be to make it credible, not just to give credit. If I copy text from a website generated by a GPT tool and attribute it correctly, is that OK? It is no different from me pasting generated content and identifying the tool as the writer of it. At some point, we need to address the role people upvoting bad content because it seems like it’s correct play in incentivizing low quality content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2022-12-30T16:21:15.710" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T16:21:15.710" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2022-12-13T23:14:43.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have pointed this out in a number of places on the main site and in Meta, but it bears repeating here, since the thrust of this post is about misuse of Google Ngrams: You can't use Ngrams to produce reliable frequency data on hyphenated words (such as &amp;quot;upper-case&amp;quot; in one of the Ngram charts reproduced in the posted question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ngram coding doesn't handle hyphens as hard hyphens, perhaps because it doesn't know how to distinguish end-of-line word-break hyphens from compound-attaching hyphens. Instead, it recasts them as &amp;quot;X - Y&amp;quot; constructions (e.g., &amp;quot;upper - case&amp;quot;). I have no idea what that construction attempts to find matches for—because Google never provides any link to examples of the &amp;quot;X - Y&amp;quot; matches in the series of links that appear beneath the Ngram graph itself. Consider the Ngram chart for &amp;quot;uppercase&amp;quot; (blue line) versus &amp;quot;upper case&amp;quot; (red line) versus &amp;quot;upper-case&amp;quot; (green line) for the period 1750–2019:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=uppercase%2Cupper+case%2Cupper-case&amp;amp;year_start=1750&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The results for &amp;quot;upper-case&amp;quot; may look plausible, but if you examine the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=uppercase%2Cupper+case%2Cupper-case&amp;amp;year_start=1750&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;underlying Ngram graph&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see a couple of problematic things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the Ngram graph includes an automated note that reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Replaced &lt;strong&gt;upper-case&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;[upper - case]&lt;/strong&gt; to match how we processed the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, the label that appears to the right of the green line in the Ngram graph (but not in the Ngram chart) reads not &amp;quot;upper-case&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;upper - case&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second there are no links to matches for &amp;quot;upper - case&amp;quot; in the &amp;quot;Search in Google Books&amp;quot; section of the Ngram graph presentation (which appears beneath the graph); in contrast, there are numerous linked matches for &amp;quot;uppercase&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;upper case&amp;quot;. Meanwhile, adding a further bias to the results, the matches for &amp;quot;upper case&amp;quot; that Ngram/Google Books provides in the &amp;quot;Search in Google Books&amp;quot; links include multiple matches for &amp;quot;upper - case&amp;quot;, which turn out to be misreads of instances of &amp;quot;upper-case&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line here is that Ngram results for hyphenated words and phrases are completely unreliable, and frequency data for adjacent closed-up and open forms are highly suspect (because they may include numerous instances of the hyphenated form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regularly cite Google Ngrams in my answers, but I try not to ask them to perform tasks that they are ill equipped to handle. They are most useful (to me) as a tool for finding early print instances of a word or phrase and as a simple way to illustrate changes in frequency of print occurrence of a word or phrase over time. They can also be useful for showing changes in relative frequency of print occurrence of two or more words or phrases over time—but only if they avoid the hyphenation pitfall and (in the case of phrases) the false positive pitfall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The false positive pitfall involves matches that aren't really matches. The most obvious false positives are optical character recognition errors, which cause Ngram to do things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Facebook&amp;amp;year_start=1750&amp;amp;year_end=1950&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;find matches and plot a graph for &amp;quot;Facebook&amp;quot; from the period 1750–1950&lt;/a&gt; (either through misreading a similar word such as &amp;quot;factbook&amp;quot; or through misidentifying the date of publication of the cited text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a more insidious type of false positives involves word-string matches that aren't phrase matches. For example, if you were to generate an Ngram chart showing matches for &amp;quot;a week hence&amp;quot;, you might suppose that the results would be built entirely on instances of the phrase &amp;quot;a week hence&amp;quot;—as in &amp;quot;We shall meet again a week hence.&amp;quot; But Ngram doesn't find phrases per se; it finds word strings. And among the matches that it will use in generating its Ngram chart for &amp;quot;a week hence&amp;quot; are ones like this (from Henry Mayhew, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=3XIvAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA216&amp;amp;dq=%22a+week+hence%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwizjp2t2Pf7AhXMAzQIHZ3hAlMQ6AF6BAgCEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22a%20week%20hence%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;London Labour and the London Poor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, volume 1 (1861):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of water-carriers are sixty, and their average earnings through the year 5s. &lt;strong&gt;a week; hence&lt;/strong&gt; the sum annually expended in water thus obtained amounts to . . . . . . . . £780&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are just using Ngram to find early matches of the actual phrase you want to investigate, these word-string false positives are not much of a hazard, since you can easily recognize their irrelevance to your purpose. But if you are using Ngrams to show the frequency of occurrence of the phrase itself, they can be a serious problem. The important thing to be aware of here is that word strings aren't the same as phrases, and Ngram (like Google Books) deals in word strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all this, I reiterate my view that Ngram is an extremely valuable tool for both research and illustration if you know how to use it properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2022-12-18T06:09:38.537" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T06:09:38.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-16T16:35:05.660" Score="1" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/593259&quot;&gt;asked a question about a word&lt;/a&gt; (so in my understanding a single-word request but I probably tagged it wrongly as word-choice) for the &amp;quot;text&amp;quot; that often appears in the body of scientific publications (theses, papers, ...) and in general any written document between a (sub)chapter heading and the following subchapter heading.  Initially, it was voted that my question be closed because it was &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site&amp;quot;. Then, it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/593259&quot;&gt;migrated to ELL&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;because it can be answered by speakers of other languages learning English&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/320539/a-word-for-the-text-between-section-heading-e-g-section-1-and-first-subsecti&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/320539/a-word-for-the-text-between-section-heading-e-g-section-1-and-first-subsecti&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link to the question on academia (which I found after asking): &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/162433/what-is-the-name-of-the-text-that-might-exist-after-the-chapter-heading-and-befo&quot;&gt;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/162433/what-is-the-name-of-the-text-that-might-exist-after-the-chapter-heading-and-befo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes my question specifically an ELL question? Compared to some other single-word requests on here, I consider it to be quite &amp;quot;sophisticated&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not insisting that it's suitable for ELU, but I'm curious about the reasoning behind the migration (I mean, actually, I am asking this question because I find the decision to migrate it to ELL ridiculous and am sure that it stems from not understanding the question/problem at all, but I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt, but nobody answers ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be really interested, Anton, fev, or KillingTime ... Of course I would also be very interested in your knowledgeable answers to this mundane ELL question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weeks have passed and I must come to the conclusion that you did not understand the question and if you would have and you would have known an answer you would have been the first to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound of silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was pointed out in the answer(s) that &amp;quot;... it's easier not to stoke a fire when a user appears to be more interested in conflict than in a discussion.&amp;quot;. I rephrased my absolutely overly-polite meta-question a couple of times and it got a bit more &amp;quot;bold&amp;quot; with every edit (to &amp;quot;provoke&amp;quot; an answer). I am not interested in conflict. I want to know why my question was close voted first and then migrated almost immediately after I posted it even though I tried my best to clarify any of the &amp;quot;good-faithed&amp;quot; remarks (which was hard, because they were not very logical and kinda presumptuous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the silence to my question on meta, I think it is a sham argument to use my &amp;quot;hostility&amp;quot; and further postulate it's the lack of ability that prevents the concerned people from giving an educated answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259235" LastEditorUserId="259235" LastEditDate="2023-01-15T13:42:28.987" LastActivityDate="2023-01-15T13:42:28.987" Title="Why was my question (which exists on academia with lots of upvotes) migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|migration|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-18T15:08:39.053" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surfing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymonline&lt;/a&gt; and I found its background color exactly identical to the one of our beloved site. Is ELU’s background color based on Etymonline’s or is Etymonline’s based on ELU’s?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="366925" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-01-10T14:35:20.250" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T14:35:20.250" Title="Is the background color of the ELU SE website based on the background color of the Etymonline website?" Tags="|discussion|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15507" CreationDate="2022-12-18T17:42:29.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was surﬁng etymonline and I found its background color exactly identical to the one of our beloved site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Exactly identical”&lt;/em&gt; ? Really? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the perception of color occurs only in the mind of the viewer mediated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_perception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the exceedingly complex human vision system&lt;/a&gt;, it is not for me to say whether what you perceived to be ‘identical’ in your own mind happens to be ‘true’ or ‘false’. The observer is always honest to himself regarding his own perceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perceptions diﬀer wildly between observers depending on a multitude of factors including ambient lighting, monitor settings, biological chemistry including such things as (typically male-pattern) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deuteranopia&lt;/a&gt;, physical changes to that person’s lens which grows ever dimmer and yellower with age, and each person’s unique visual-processing neurology, not to mention various cultural and psychological biases including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conﬁrmation bias&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all that vaguery, all I can do here is &lt;strong&gt;play by the numbers&lt;/strong&gt;, which are constant integers blessèdly free of any &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l%27%C5%93il&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;trompe-l’œil&lt;/em&gt; eﬀects&lt;/a&gt;. When doing so, only one conclusion is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;ELU&lt;/em&gt; Page Element RGB Colors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on a scale of 0 through 255 are the respective RGB values used for various elements on our site’s main page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;ELU Element&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Red&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Blue&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;display text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;59&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;64&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;69&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;body text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;38&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;41&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;link text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;174&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;55&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;55&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;general background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;252&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;250&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;243&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;deleted post background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;253&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;242&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;242&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;header/footer background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;244&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;227&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;201&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymonline&lt;/em&gt; Page Element RGB Colors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, here are the respective RGB values used for various elements on the Etymonline web site’s main page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Etymonline Element&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Red&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Blue&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;display text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;38&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;38&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;body text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;85&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;85&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;85&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;red text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;131&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;29&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;knockout text on red background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;228&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;223&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;202&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;footer knockout text&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;136&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;136&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;136&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;general background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;255&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;252&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;243&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;border and footer background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;241&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;236&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;215&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;red background&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;131&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;29&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;bottommost footer&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;uparrow background in footer&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;171&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;169&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;155&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;submit button unfocused&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;255&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;244&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;196&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;submit button focused&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;255&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;237&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;154&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, when playing &lt;strong&gt;strictly by the numbers&lt;/strong&gt;, there are no elements whose integer RGB triples are numerically identical from one web site to the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is ELU’s background color based on Etymonline’s or Etymonline’s based on ELU’s?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the lack of numeric equivalence, this seems rather unlikely. Our site theme was designed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/417/2085&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;long, &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; ago&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4/jin&quot;&gt;site user #4, Jin&lt;/a&gt;, who is a a talented and tasteful SE employee with a gift for design. I suppose we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; ask her whether she recalls, but I don’t believe your conjecture to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, similar underlying motivations may well have led to similarities in choices of hue. That’s because both sites strove to emulate certain old-time manuscript colors seen on slightly yellowed pages combined with all rubricators’ and typesetters’ standard second color choice of some variant on the hue of red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s why, in a very vague way, the color schemes of the two sites follow similar trends. That  likely led you to seeing the parallels between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But their respective element colors are in no fashion exactly equivalent numerically when looked at under that most exacting of lenses: that of the computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2022-12-19T00:58:03.543" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T00:58:03.543" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-20T21:59:38.593" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had over 3950 consecutive days visited. That's over 10 years. And today I looked and I was at 2!?!&#xA;I've been on the site every day.  How did this happen?&#xA;I'm really  bummed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got browser history that shows it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17956" LastEditorUserId="17956" LastEditDate="2022-12-20T22:39:17.537" LastActivityDate="2022-12-20T22:39:17.537" Title="Ahhh! I lost my consecutive days streak" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-21T22:02:27.850" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen this happen many times:  A question will show &amp;quot;Community Bot modified 48 mins ago&amp;quot; on the index page, but when I go there I can't find any evidence of an edit to the question.  All the index entry does is waste the user's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason why some sort of info about the edit can't be made visible, and, if not, can we skip the useless index entry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70861" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T17:19:08.673" Title="&quot;Community&quot; edits are often useless and confusing" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15510" CreationDate="2022-12-21T23:37:42.020" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked about the removal of the &amp;quot;Bumped to the homepage by Community&amp;quot; banner in 2019 and they said no, they won't add it back. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/340295/323179&quot;&gt;Where&amp;#39;s the bump notice?&lt;/a&gt;) The bump notice is now in the timeline (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/561708/timeline&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). A separate request to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/247392/323179&quot;&gt;change &amp;quot;modified by Community&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; to use some other verb was also declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at these questions is not supposed to waste your time — you're supposed to evaluate the answers and see if any deserve upvotes or downvotes. Votes on the answers will cause the question to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/48579/323179&quot;&gt;ineligible for further bumps&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=*&quot;&gt;use a search&lt;/a&gt; to only see the newest questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of completeness I'll note there are some other reasons that a post might appear to be bumped by Community (namely, anonymous edits and activity from deleted/destroyed users). As a user with 10k+ rep, you can click on &amp;quot;modified [date]&amp;quot; at the top and be taken to the post with the last activity even if it's a deleted answer. Lower rep users can't really do much when there's a deleted answer, but they will still see the post being bumped since everyone sees the same homepage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T17:19:08.673" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T17:19:08.673" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15513" CreationDate="2022-12-27T09:53:32.943" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier I wrote and posted an answer to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/600454/order-of-prepositions-of-and-by&quot;&gt;Order of prepositions &amp;quot;of&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;by&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow, in the process of making one or two edits almost immediately, the flag under the &lt;em&gt;Downvote&lt;/em&gt; triangle changed colour, with the mouseover message &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Unsave this answer&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in this site's help information to explain this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What triggered this flag, which has never happened before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Unsaving&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; different from &lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T12:49:58.060" Title="How did I get an &quot;Unsave this answer&quot; flag?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15512" CreationDate="2022-12-27T12:49:58.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saves are the new Bookmarks. (Or, since you've been here a while, they're just like Favorites were.) But they're better! What that means is that you can create organized, searchable lists of posts (use the &lt;code&gt;in:saves&lt;/code&gt; search operator). Yes, you can save answers too. If you're saving someone else's post, you won't get inbox notifications from it (that's what following is for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has nothing to do with editing. You just misclicked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can manage your Saves in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/saves/current/all&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt;. It's the tab at the top that says &amp;quot;Saves&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/382019/323179&quot;&gt;Bookmarks have evolved into Saves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T12:49:58.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-29T18:25:11.297" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am generally curious about instances of grammar and syntax from foreign languages entering standard English usage within the last century or two. This interest is specifically motivated by my curiosity about use of Yiddish grammatical structures in English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bubbygram.com/yiddishglossary.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for instance&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Already you're discouraged?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Smart, he isn't.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User James asked a similar question here -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/146259/resources-that-discuss-jewish-english-english-influenced-by-yiddish-grammar&quot;&gt;Resources that discuss &amp;quot;Jewish&amp;quot; English (English influenced by Yiddish grammar)&lt;/a&gt; -- with some interesting resources provided by respondents. Are there other, comparable instances of a foreign language's grammatical structures/syntax entering into the English lexicon within a similar timeframe? Where can I read more about this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386289" OwnerDisplayName="user770884" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T05:56:13.387" Title="Relatively recent instances of foreign language grammar entering standard English usage" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15514" CreationDate="2022-12-29T20:22:58.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the inversion of verb-adverb ordering in some writing, which seems to originate from Yiddish (e.g., &amp;quot;I now will ask this question&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;I will now ask this question&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ordering of adverbs from Old English to the present day has always been somewhat fluid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Now, I will ask this question&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I now will ask this question&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I will now ask this question&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I will ask, now, this question&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are all acceptable in both Old English and Modern English. The basic guidance is that the adverb should be &amp;quot;near&amp;quot; the verb, although this guidance is rather loose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that all germanic languages have this feature and it would be exceptionally difficult to prise out the Yiddish influence from the general English influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Ngrams does not seem to support your hypothesis: Using the search terms &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I%20now%20will%2CI%20will%20now%2C%20now%20I%20will&amp;amp;year_start=1600&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;I now will,I will now,now I will&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; we see that &lt;em&gt;I now will&lt;/em&gt; has never been popular, probably as it is a more formal structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I%20now%20will%2CI%20will%20now%2Cnow%20I%20will&amp;amp;year_start=1990&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The same search from 1990 to 2019&lt;/a&gt; shows an equal rise in both &lt;em&gt;I will now&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Now I will&lt;/em&gt;, but the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I now will&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; flatlines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other, comparable instances of a foreign language's grammatical structures/syntax entering into the English lexicon within a similar timeframe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot agree that there has been a significant influence on English by Yiddish in the way you describe, and what do you mean by &amp;quot;similar timeframe&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are you considering the high Jewish immigration rate of the late 19th/early 20th century and the USA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" OwnerDisplayName="Greybeard" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T20:22:58.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15514" CreationDate="2022-12-29T23:28:15.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slightly earlier than that, Native American languages such as Cherokee influenced American English because although English became the lingua franca for trade very early on, the entire trade and cultural system west of the Appalachians remained that of the American tribes for another 200 years - right up to the civil war. English spent 200 years learning how to express the social etiquette of these  cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" OwnerDisplayName="Phil Sweet" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T23:28:15.787" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-04T04:26:56.090" Score="-3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any linguistic analysis algorithms designed to detect the output of undisclosed computerized large language models (bots) that pops up on question-answer sites, eg Quora? (vs text written by an individual human)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem there is significant crossover between linguists and computer programmers. Surely some of them have developed basic principles of bot identification. Is any of it published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470686" OwnerDisplayName="fertilizerspike" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2023-02-04T18:08:20.130" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T18:08:20.130" Title="Detecting output of Large Language Models" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15514" CreationDate="2023-01-05T05:56:13.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The obvious example would be the influence of AAVE (Black English) on American English, and whence on English more globally through the influence of Hollywood, popular music, etc. There are many idioms and expressions which have seeped into general English which are widely recognized, understood, and occasionally used by non-AAVE speakers like &amp;quot;who da man&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I'ma gonna go&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;he be like&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent this can be called &amp;quot;foreign&amp;quot; is obviously debatable; certainly, to the traditional English language police, these constructs are alien, grammatically and otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe as a starting point, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27100" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T05:56:13.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-06T01:19:28.360" Score="8" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question on the main site requests an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/600921/english-equivalent-of-a-hindi-proverb-rassi-jal-gayi-par-bal-nahi/6009255&quot;&gt;English equivalent of a Hindi proverb rassi jal gayi par bal nahi&lt;/a&gt;. Evidently the poster feels that a key feature of the Hindi expression is an element of sarcasm. Subsequently, however, an editor revised the original question on the basis of a very different understanding of the expression's connotations—and, in a comment beneath the posted question, provided a citation that seems to support this other understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write this question, the poster has reinstated the gist of the original question after the editor's initial edit, and the editor has re-revised the question to reflect the contrasting understanding. I'm not interested in this disagreement as a specimen of an edit/rollback tug-of-war, but as an instance in which such a dispute may have a strong bearing on the question's value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the editor is correct that the original poster's understanding of the Hindi expression is idiosyncratic, I think that offering a nonsarcastic/nonpejorative English equivalent of the Hindi proverb would be of greater long-term value to EL&amp;amp;U visitors than offering an English equivalent that is closer to the original poster's understanding of the proverb. But even if we suppose that the editor is correct about the actual nature of the proverb, that sense of the phrase is clearly not the one that the poster wants to find an English an equivalent for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: In a case where—arguably—the edited version of a question is of much broader interest (because it may reflect a more accurate understanding of the expression at issue) than the original posted version of the question, should we accommodate the better question at the expense of the original poster's actual question, or should we preserve the original question and (in this case) risk misleading site visitors about the nature of the source expression that the poster is asking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2023-01-06T02:41:06.090" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T02:41:06.090" Title="Editing a question for long-term value vs. preserving the original poster's point of view" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-06T20:04:17.667" Score="-6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/601023/is-it-substitute-by-or-substitute-for-by?noredirect=1#comment1514345_601023&quot;&gt;is it substitute by or substitute for by&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While doing my research on the question, I mistakenly came under the misunderstanding that the passive voice was being used in my example sentences. Due to this misunderstanding, my question was closed immediately. I stripped the question of whatever misunderstanding had led to the pedantic closing of my question, as said misunderstanding was irrelevant to the core of the question anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's totally unreasonable to expect questions to be devoid of misunderstanding. I believe my original question showed a reasonable level of research and articulation, given that the entire purpose of a site such as this is to help find answer to questions that are difficult for learners to articulate or discover information about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the commenters closing my question bothered at all to point me in the direction of how to better articulate my question. One commenter was curt and dismissive even.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site network struggles to shed its reputation for rudeness and dismissive attitudes. I think the network has made great strides in general, but clearly the english exchange has been left behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93984" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-01-06T22:23:03.223" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T08:46:27.533" Title="Unreasonable expectations for questions and pedantic gatekeeping" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15521" CreationDate="2023-01-09T13:36:13.610" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, a question is expected to have more content than &amp;quot;Which is correct, A or B?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did include an example, but didn't include an explanation of what you meant by transforming the sentence, why you were doing that, or what you had previously read or attempted to search for to find an answer, and also why that failed to help you. You also didn't explain that you were specifically confused by the placement of the preposition or why the placement of the preposition was confusing (eg with one example of common usage versus another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel the linked duplicates don't sufficiently answer your question, you can still edit your question with details about how those questions are lacking the information you need, with specifics about what's missing for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8360" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T13:36:13.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15525" CreationDate="2023-01-11T17:16:36.223" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;ELU Meta contains questions that exist as resources for (generally) less knowledgable users. In principle I think this is a good thing as it keeps questions about reference sources (rather than English) off the main site, as well as being valuable in itself. Indeed my post is motivated by the idea of introducing an analogous resource on my own ‘home’ site of SE Biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are users expected to find these resources, or even know that&#xA;they are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an experienced user and internet searcher, so I searched for dictionaries and found this useful question/answer:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don’t know if there are any other such Q/As hidden away, and they would seem to me almost useless if they are not advertised to posters. Are they, and I’m just missing something as I don’t ask many questions myself? If not, is there any way they could be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-01-11T18:10:57.197" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T18:10:57.197" Title="Meta and Reference Sources: The Invisible Man?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15524" CreationDate="2023-01-11T18:09:06.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On questions that are closed with the below-mentioned banner, the phrase &amp;quot;commonly-available references&amp;quot; is a direct link to ELU meta's &amp;quot;What good reference works on English are available?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better. Questions that can be answered using &lt;strong&gt;commonly-available references&lt;/strong&gt; are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you may find more information by following the meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;resources-container&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, all useful resources from individual questions should be curated/compiled under the same Q&amp;amp;A &amp;quot;What good reference works on English are available?&amp;quot; so that it's easy to be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T18:09:06.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15521" CreationDate="2023-01-12T08:46:27.533" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's totally unreasonable to expect questions to be devoid of misunderstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People vote on questions as they find them, and if a question is deficient, then people are allowed to CV it. They are under no obligation to wait for you to fix the question. Nevertheless, closure of a question is not fatal; once you edit it, it automatically goes into the reopen queue. That is how the system was designed to work; it does not mean that any users are behaving inappropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the commenters closing my question bothered at all to point me in the direction of how to better articulate my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it would certainly be nice if CV'ers pointed you in the right direction, they are not required to do so. They are only required to select close reasons, and those reasons are shown publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T08:46:27.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-13T17:41:05.000" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the &amp;quot;save this question&amp;quot; button do?&#xA;How do I find it and recall it after I have saved it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160746" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T17:41:05.000" Title="What does the &quot;save this question&quot; button do" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2023-01-13T19:36:05.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15506" CreationDate="2023-01-15T11:55:58.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is the OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/revisions/593259/1&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt; posted on 9 August at 8.49&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word for the text between section heading (e.g., Section 1) and first subsection heading (e.g., Section 1.1)&#xA;What are possible words for the text between a section heading and the first corresponding subsection heading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found &amp;quot;preamble&amp;quot;, but think there might be &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; words.  Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1 Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the running text of the introduction for which I would like to have a word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.1 Motivation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.2 Objectives&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who vote to migrate a question do so in good faith. I am sure there was no intention of belittling the OP's question by insinuating it was too easy for EL&amp;amp;U. Possibly, but I'm not a mind reader, the three users thought the term &lt;em&gt;preamble&lt;/em&gt; was either the right answer or that users on ELL would be more responsive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's edit at 09.34: “&lt;em&gt;I have found &amp;quot;preamble&amp;quot;, but, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preamble&lt;/a&gt; certainly is used to refer to an introductionary text for the whole document , think that there might be a more specific professional term for it.&lt;/em&gt;” did not succeed in persuading two users that the question should remain on EL&amp;amp;U. As a matter of fact, the history page shows their votes for migration were cast at 10.09 and 10.16.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a fact that questions on Stack Exchange network do not &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; attract answers even when they are considered on-topic and useful. In this case, the OP's question actually received a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer (albeit in December 16, 2022) from our site's top user which is commendable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking about what to call a block of text that appears in the space between a section heading and the first in a series of subordinate section subheads. At the various publishing houses where I have worked, the term I have used (and heard used) for such text is &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;section intro&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;; if there is a single word for it, I've never heard it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the user began their answer with “You seem to be asking”, which suggests that the poster's question lacked clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that another user posted this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/320539/a-word-for-the-text-between-section-heading-e-g-section-1-and-first-subsecti#comment602771_320539&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; [emphasis in bold mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Choosing to use a highly structured format&lt;/strong&gt; - 1 / 1.1 / 1.2.1 etc - &lt;strong&gt;and then inserting freeform, floating 'comments' is confusing.&lt;/strong&gt; What is the point of sections and subsections if you are going to add bits between them occasionally? Why not put your explanatory comment at the start of the section it refers to? Perhaps even make it the title of the section...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently the commenter did not fully understand the problem, and this should have been a warning signal to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user, probably on ELL, posted this reflection [emphasis in bold not &lt;em&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having &lt;strong&gt;real trouble with this question&lt;/strong&gt;. In an outline, you have headings, sub-headings, and sub-sub-headings. There is nothing else. If your text comes any heading, it is &lt;strong&gt;just text&lt;/strong&gt;. What else could it be? And in legal texts, a preamble is actually the name of a heading and a type of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one was puzzled when I first read the question, but I am not–nor have ever been–a member of academia, so what do I know? On the other hand, the older but related question posted on Academia.SE is, despite its brevity, clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In manuscripts, a text between the chapter heading and before the first section might exist. Does this have a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'll wager were the same question to be posted on EL&amp;amp;U, it would be closed for lack of research and effort whereas Sebastian E's question was not downvoted or closed, it was migrated. Not the worst thing to happen to a question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/320539/a-word-for-the-text-between-section-heading-e-g-section-1-and-first-subsecti#comment602889_320539&quot;&gt;the OP's comments&lt;/a&gt; beneath their post such as this [emphasis in bold mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…you asked me why think &lt;em&gt;preamble&lt;/em&gt; is not a good choice and I thought that my edit and Wikipedia citation shows you why, because it’s pretty obvious. In turn &lt;strong&gt;you immediately resorted to pseudo intellectual arrogance&lt;/strong&gt; even though you have exactly zero to contribute to my question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a &lt;em&gt;very good&lt;/em&gt; reason why that particular user has since kept their distance, and not replied to the OP's invitation on meta, which is spurred by genuine concern but also by continuing resentment and indignation. The question was posted in August 2022. As for the community's silence it's easier not to stoke a fire when a user appears to be more interested in conflict than in a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I would also be very interested in your knowledgeable answers to this mundane ELL question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-01-15T12:41:54.000" LastActivityDate="2023-01-15T12:41:54.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-18T01:44:29.127" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are so many text to IPA converters available but I am having difficulty finding a text-to-IPA converter that consistently or closely matches the IPA transcriptions in the Oxford American English dictionary. As I am using this dictionary for developing my personal wirting system (using IPA), any discrepancies can negatively affect my vocabulary acquisition. Can you recommend a reliable tool for converting text to IPA transcriptions that align with this dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford American English dictionary pronunciation guide and IPA symbols: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/about/pronunciation_american_english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/about/pronunciation_american_english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="471744" OwnerDisplayName="Nam N" LastEditorUserId="471744" LastEditDate="2023-01-18T02:53:31.193" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T02:53:31.193" Title="What are the best text-to-IPA converters that match the IPA transcriptions in the Oxford American English dictionary?" Tags="|discussion|american-english|pronunciation|ipa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-19T18:56:52.230" Score="-4" ViewCount="77" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/601711/defining-well-when-it-introduces-these-sentences&quot;&gt;defining “Well,” when it introduces these sentences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My posted question was closed by a moderator who wrote this instruction for it: “Update the question so it focuses on one problem only.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I edited my posted question accordingly and posted the edited version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get my question reopened, do I need to notify Stack Exchange of the existence of my edited version or will a moderator routinely see it and decide whether to reopen it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original version of my posted question had three parts (three questions on the same topic). In the edited version that I posted, I deleted two of those questions. I intend to re-post those two questions, each one in a separate posting. Is that OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="471793" LastActivityDate="2023-01-20T08:50:43.997" Title="After I fix my closed question, how or where do I ask for it to be reopened?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15531" CreationDate="2023-01-20T08:50:43.997" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you edit a closed question, it gets put into a review queue where it can be assessed for re-opening. That's automatic. Your edit also bumps the question in the site's front page, so it appears at the top and is likely to attract attention. That's automatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A manual action you can do is flag your question for moderator attention. I would recommend you &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; do this or don't do it very often, at least until you have a good flagging record. You're raising a flag on one of your own posts. That flag could be deemed helpful [which is a black mark on one of your posts] or unhelpful [which is a black mark against you for raising an unhelpful flag].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you cite, you don't need a list of 77 examples. Three is sufficient! And you have shown no research at all: you could look up &lt;em&gt;Well&lt;/em&gt; in a reputable dictionary like &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/well&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge&lt;/a&gt; and you will find &amp;quot;Exclamation: used to introduce something you are going to say, often to show surprise, doubt, slight disagreement, or anger, or to continue a story,&amp;quot; which appears to answer the question. I wouldn't vote to reopen this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, posting the other parts of the original question is OK in principle, but make your questions concise and precise, and well-researched. There's lots of help on asking good questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Start here&lt;/a&gt; and look at the other topics in the Help sidebar too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-01-20T08:50:43.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-24T16:57:24.920" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that, when a question is too easy and the answer can be quickly looked up, people respond in one of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Migrate the question to ELL, since it's too easy for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Close the question for not including prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there's a policy for when each of these actions is appropriate, since (to me) it seems that it is not always handled consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastEditorUserId="470858" LastEditDate="2023-01-24T22:29:53.287" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T18:40:50.550" Title="If a question is too easy, should it be closed, or should it be migrated to ELL?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15533" CreationDate="2023-01-25T16:46:44.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I vote to migrate questions to ELL out of courtesy. Knowing that those questions will not survive the... &lt;em&gt;competitiveness&lt;/em&gt;, if you like, of EL&amp;amp;U, I am hoping that if they are transferred to ELL they are more likely to get help than if they are plainly closed on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never thought of ELL as a trash can. Just as a more friendly and helpful environment for questions of users who struggle with less complicated language problems, as we have ALL done at some point of the learning process, whatever it is we have learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T16:46:44.740" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-26T15:04:17.673" Score="7" ViewCount="71" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V0TPg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on English Language &amp;amp; Usage over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;99&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,921&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;766&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;228&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,460&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,209&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;463&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,842&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,036&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;58&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,614&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;183&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,137&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,370&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,380&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;216&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,068&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;59&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;146&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;328&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;448&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,243&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,317&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,158&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;50&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,901&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;366&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;405&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;129&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;111&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;159&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;336&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;26&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,088&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,979&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,263&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,581&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,630&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,553&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;56&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,525&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;44&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;26&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;875&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;67&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15207/2021-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2021: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222022%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/386090/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastEditorUserId="115443" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T18:03:43.390" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T09:25:23.630" Title="2022: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15533" CreationDate="2023-01-28T18:40:50.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question should be migrated to ELL only if it is appropriate for that site. If it isn't, then migration only clutters ELL and makes more work for its users who have to read through the question and then CV it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELL's standards can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;on its help pages&lt;/a&gt;. (Unfortunately, the situation isn't quite so simple; the criteria for ELL questions can be scattered in other places, as well, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;its Meta site&lt;/a&gt;. However, that's an issue for ELU, too. Perhaps one day we'll get a definitive list of what is and isn't appropriate for the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your #2, the CV reason that I believe you're referring to says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second half is admittedly a bit vague (after all, migration to ELL already exists as a separate CV reason), but the first part should certainly only apply if the question actually fails to demonstrate (enough) research. If &amp;quot;the answer can be quickly looked up&amp;quot;, then such a question would seem to me to be a good candidate for this CV reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T18:40:50.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-28T18:06:15.240" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our main present-day grammars seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Comprehensive_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quirk's&lt;/a&gt; (1980s), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longman_Grammar_of_Spoken_and_Written_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biber's&lt;/a&gt; (1990s) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cambridge_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huddleston's&lt;/a&gt; (2000s).  Out of historical curiosity, what were main grammar references of the preceding decades?  Who or what books commanded reverence in the seventies, sixties, fifties and so on (going back to the beginning of the century)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user468388" LastActivityDate="2023-01-29T16:17:24.580" Title="What are the main historical grammar reference books?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2023-02-01T16:15:50.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-28T19:46:29.210" Score="15" ViewCount="1263" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are only two hard things in Computer Science:&lt;br&gt;cache invalidation and naming things.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; ―Phil Karlton&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today we received yet another request for naming help: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/602325&quot;&gt;Is there a term which covers both bank accounts and bank cards?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a software engineer working in the banking industry. In our app users can see their cards and accounts, and when they want to perform some action they are usually able to do it either with one of their accounts or cards, so in the app the list of accounts and cards is often shown to the users. What would be a good name for a list of accounts and cards? I don't want to go too generic and pick names like items or entities. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that’s not all! Today we &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; received: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/602348&quot;&gt;Precise Word/Term for Payment Voucher In and Out?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any precise word/term that describes the payment vouchers (in and out)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;payment voucher in = ???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;payment voucher out = ???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need a separate word/term to let people choose one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I closed them both as off-topic because I read these as textbook-perfect examples of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;our Help Center’s guidance in this area&lt;/a&gt;, which reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming, including naming programming variables/classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain members of our community appear to wish for us to change our established site policy in this area. Or, alternately, for the asker to at least edit the question so as to disingenuously hide what is truly wanted behind a thin veil of plausible deniability and thereby evade prima facie violation of our policy against this class of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On Naming Recommendations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Stack Overflow was founded by and for programmers, it is no surprise that coders come to us asking for help naming their software elements. UK coder, speaker, and author &lt;a href=&quot;https://hilton.org.uk/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Hilton&lt;/a&gt; writes the following in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://hilton.org.uk/blog/why-naming-things-is-hard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog entry on &lt;em&gt;Why Naming Things Is Hard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has ever tried to name a child knows that naming is hard. Naming things in code is harder. It’s bad enough that you have to commit to a name that someone isn’t going to like. You also have to be able to live with it. In principle, the naming things in code need only be temporary, but names in code stick just like nicknames at school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could of course refactor our code to rename things any time we like, but we don’t do this enough in practice. We also find it hard to agree on what good names and bad names look like, which makes it hard to know when renaming improves a name. If we renamed things more often, then it probably wouldn’t be so hard to name them in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike naming children, coding involves naming things on a daily basis. When you write code, naming things isn’t just hard, it’s a relentless demand for creativity. Fortunately, programmers are creative people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly this is important. But should we care?  Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can the SE model be extended to provide naming recommendations?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be so extended, then should it fall &lt;strong&gt;within &lt;em&gt;our own&lt;/em&gt; site’s remit&lt;/strong&gt; as defined by our Help Center to provide this service for them? Is this so important a matter that we should open up our site so that coders who need to pick good names can ask us to do that for them? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should that instead happen on some other site around the network? Should we recommend that some more programming-related site than ours modify its own help center guidance about this class of question — like on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Software Engineering&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Code Review&lt;/a&gt; — so that these naming-recommendation requests can be made somewhere that actually has the necessary domain experts that we lack here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would it be better to recommend a brand new SE site via the Area 51 proposal mechanism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Related Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This matter has come up previously here by people who think we should change our policy, including in no particular order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1088&quot;&gt;Is Python a snake or a programming language? If the latter, why is it choking my dog?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7099&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage programming variable/classes rule question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2336&quot;&gt;Can I bring that question over here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15094&quot;&gt;Why can&amp;#39;t we help programmers with English language usage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11630&quot;&gt;Questions about user interface design/wording&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1105&quot;&gt;Use of EL&amp;amp;U as a lazy programmers resource&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6649&quot;&gt;Should one always remove all context before asking a &amp;quot;what&amp;#39;s the best term&amp;quot; question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9607&quot;&gt;Naming vs. Single word requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2474&quot;&gt;FAQ On-topic/Off-topic List Revisal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-01-28T23:02:15.907" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T21:05:48.610" Title="Should we update our site's policy against helping programmers choose names to use in their software?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|scope|help-pages|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15538" CreationDate="2023-01-28T23:13:28.837" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly agree with the rule that excludes requests for 'naming, including naming programming variables/classes' from this site, and I do not think that it should be changed. However, I do think that there is considerable room for disagreeing with how that rule has recently been applied on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I think that it is important to distinguish the questions that are &lt;strong&gt;in their essence&lt;/strong&gt; requests for naming something, and the questions that are &lt;strong&gt;motivated&lt;/strong&gt; by the need to name something, but whose essence does not depend on that motivation. The questions of the former kind should indeed be promptly closed on the basis of the no-naming rule, but not the latter. It has, however, happened a number of times that the questions of the latter kind have been closed with the moderator invoking the no-naming rule, and that is unfortunate. (These questions may, of course, be subject to closing on the basis of some other rule, but then it is that rule that should be invoked, rather than the one about naming.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about bank accounts that prompted this meta-question is a clear example of a question of the latter kind: it arose in the context of designing an app, but it doesn't depend on that context. It can be easily reformulated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the hypernym for bank accounts and bank cards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So reformulated, the question is not at all a request for 'naming, including naming programming variables/classes'; it is a straightforward single-term-request, which is well within the scope of this site. Closing this question unfairly penalises the questioner for providing some background to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the criteria for distinguishing these two kinds of questions? The matter has already been raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9607/naming-vs-single-word-requests&quot;&gt;one of the questions&lt;/a&gt; cited above. Laurel's answer to that question gives a helpful list of three criteria, but even more helpful as a simple easy-to-remember rule may be the one that arises out of the comments by MetaEd and Katherine Lockwood on that page: &lt;strong&gt;inventing&lt;/strong&gt; names (for things that don't already have names) is off-topic, but asking about the &lt;strong&gt;already existing&lt;/strong&gt; words for something is on-topic (even if one intends to use the answer in naming something). The question about bank accounts is of the latter kind: its title asks 'Is there a term . . . ?', which makes it very clear that the question seeks a term that already has established existence outside the specific context in which the questioner intends to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2023-01-31T16:18:45.777" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T16:18:45.777" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15537" CreationDate="2023-01-29T00:58:50.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Historical Grammars&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a reference book covering the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;historical&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; syntax of our language, then you would be hard-pressed to top Frederik Theodor Visser’s monumental &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/An_historical_syntax_of_the_English_lang.html?id=CD0ruQEACAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;output=html_text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Historical Syntax of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in four massive volumes between 1963 and 1973. It covers not only present-day English syntax but also the historical antecedents from Old and Middle English as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently in the historical domain, Bettelou Los’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b7dn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Historical Syntax of English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; from Edinburgh University Press is a smaller and perhaps more accessible textbook that was first published in 1993 and which has been updated several times since then, including rather recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend scanning these books’ various tables of contents to see whether they cover the things you’re looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2023-01-29T00:58:50.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15537" CreationDate="2023-01-29T16:17:24.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For searchability’s sake I note that in a comment John Lawler observed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any English grammar should give the reader some way to look things up, and when one is interested in a particular construction, that means using the terminology used  by the grammarian in order to find it. In some grammars, notably CGEL, novel terminology is introduced, along with a theory of how to deploy it. Not everyone is willing to change their syntactic faith, however. For a generative grammar, try McCawley 1998, which leaves out the usual chomskian epicycles and just describes &amp;quot;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2023-01-29T16:17:24.580" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2023-01-29T16:17:24.580" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15543" CreationDate="2023-01-29T20:35:19.370" Score="3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know what parts of speech (and in what frequency) follow a word or phrase. If I do a list search, for example &amp;quot;for the purpose of *&amp;quot;, the result is a list of the actual words in order of frequeny. Is it possible to display the result as parts of speech instead? That is, instead of showing &amp;quot;private&amp;quot; (494 instances), followed by &amp;quot;this&amp;quot; (397), &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; (137), &amp;quot;making&amp;quot; (93), etc., it shows 1000 nouns, 500 verbs, 100 determiners, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I know there is a KWIC search, which color-codes the results according to their parts of speech, but the results seem to be (1) random and (2) arranaged alphabetically (as opposed to frequency.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) ChatGPT gave me conflicting results. The first time, it told me to choose display as parts of speech from a dropdown menu in the results page, but I can't see such a choice in any dropdown menu. Could it be that I'm using the unlicensed version? The second time, it told me it was not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user468388" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-01-30T18:59:30.830" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T19:05:06.473" Title="COCA corpus: Is it possible to display a list search result as parts of speech?" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15542" CreationDate="2023-01-30T19:05:06.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think what you want is directly possible. You can, however, find this information somewhat manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Totals for one part of speech&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transform your wildcard into a specific part of speech, such as &lt;code&gt;for the purpose of NOUN&lt;/code&gt;. The top right shows how many hits there are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TOTAL 830&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;UNIQUE 483&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Repeat for the parts of speech you want to count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Finding popular parts of speech&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see below, under &amp;quot;Options&amp;quot;, you can set the grouping to &amp;quot;None (Show PoS)&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OckVn.png&quot; alt=&quot;group by: none&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This returns results like this (with counts for each):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (10) THIS (DD1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (10) THE (AT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (I0) MAKING (VVG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (I0) PROVIDING (WVG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (10) OBTAINING (VVG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (10) A (AT1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (IO) CARRYING (VVG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (IO) PREVENTING (VVG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOR (IF) THE (AT) PURPOSE (NN1) OF (I0) DETERMINING (VVG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem terribly useful for your search, but it would if you didn't have a large number of unique hits. I found a list of tags in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/gramtag.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BNC guide&lt;/a&gt;. (Remember, BNC is the same software running on a different dataset.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T19:05:06.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15535" CreationDate="2023-01-31T09:25:23.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Happy 2023!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see there are about 1000 fewer post bumps this year. Would that imply that more posts have been answered now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3559" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T09:25:23.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15538" CreationDate="2023-02-01T04:59:31.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Q:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should we update our site’s policy against helping programmers choose names to use in their software?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my) A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there’s too much resistance here; I imagine it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would like to see a &lt;strong&gt;Nomenclature Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;, wherein we believe that . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naming “things” is a part of general human communication using words&#xA;and language: it is an aspect of everyday taxonomy as people&#xA;distinguish the objects of their experience, together with their&#xA;similarities and differences, which observers identify, name and&#xA;classify. The use of names, as the many different kinds of nouns&#xA;embedded in different languages, connects nomenclature to theoretical&#xA;linguistics, while the way humans mentally structure the world in&#xA;relation to word meanings and experience relates to the philosophy of&#xA;language.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would dive into (cheap outline courtesy Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Onomastics and nomenclature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Influence of social, political, religious factors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cultural nomenclature (Names, words, language, meaning; Folk taxonomy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Names and nouns (Personal names; Common names and proper names; -onym nouns; Toponyms)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scientific nomenclature (Nomenclature, classification, identification; Biology; Astronomy; Chemistry; Other sciences)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You need an underscore or a camelHump with that? No problem — special_orders don’t upsetUs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t have the superpowers or wherewithal to make things happen here but, dude, sign me up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the lingering naysayers asking how such an “opinion-based” thing could possibly fit in with the Stack Exchange model, head on over to &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; for  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227712/how-do-i-defend-a-walled-citadel-from-a-lizard-army&quot;&gt;How do I defend a walled citadel from a lizard army?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206976" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T04:59:31.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15538" CreationDate="2023-02-02T16:43:21.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the principle we should use is that an EL&amp;amp;U question must be about the English language and/or its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a programmer myself, I understand that picking a name is sometimes a linguistic exercise and sometimes a matter of convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I want to name something that represents a link between two people, I might call it &lt;em&gt;relationship&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hierarchy&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;affinity&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the quality represented by the link. These are English words and can be expressed in an English context - e.g. &amp;quot;What is the name of the noun describing kinship or bonding over common interests?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Answer: affinity&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, naming in programming can be wildly esoteric and even random: C64, Java, i7, JabbaTheHut, etc. These don't lend themselves to an English context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the test for whether a software-related naming request is on-topic for EL&amp;amp;U depends on whether the request relates to the English language. The fact that it is software-related is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that requests for names that have an English-language context should not be automatically marked off-topic on EL&amp;amp;U just because the context is software-related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, if the request cannot be phrased in terms of something about the English language, it should be marked off-topic for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couching the question in terms relating to the English language isn't a mere formality. It is core to the purpose of this community. So we shouldn't change EL&amp;amp;U's site policy about requests for names. The existing guidelines are sufficient to not exclude good naming questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142322" LastEditorUserId="142322" LastEditDate="2023-02-02T16:48:49.740" LastActivityDate="2023-02-02T16:48:49.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15517" CreationDate="2023-02-02T20:57:21.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is early in the days of useful services (websites that take in text and output probability that it was produced by an LLM) but things are changing fast. Here is a list of some usable sites and some academic papers made be &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/rasbt/status/1620789614490357760&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sebastian Raschka&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenAI AI classifier&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11305v1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Detect GPT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gptzero.substack.com/p/gptzero-update-v1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPTZero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226v2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Watermarking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT is the latest craze (Nov 15, 2022) and like many AI successes (qualified), it is not the first to do what it does, it's just packaged well. So likewise for many of these detectors - while a lot of things have happened in the past couple months, people have been working for years on getting these detectors available seemingly at the same time as ChaGPT came out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-02-02T20:57:21.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-07T01:29:22.980" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you help me to compare oed.com vs Oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com&#xA;Are they both from Oxford University? Where can I find a list of Oxford official website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="471744" OwnerDisplayName="Nam N" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T10:05:29.533" Title="What's difference between oed.com and oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com" Tags="|discussion|american-english|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15554" CreationDate="2023-02-15T08:33:36.617" Score="6" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know why no question has been tweeted since 8 Feb 2023?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last tweet was &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.twitter.com/StackEnglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How does one pronounce Pompey?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and then nothing has happened for more than a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407211" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2023-02-15T11:07:23.923" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T16:20:51.537" Title="Has EL&amp;U stopped tweeting?" Tags="|discussion|twitter|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15551" CreationDate="2023-02-15T13:36:27.843" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No questions have been (automatically) tweeted since February 8th, 2023 on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site. No questions will be (automatically) tweeted after that either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are one of the few people who were paying attention to Stack Exchange's tweets. Twitter changed its rules for bots and SE decided it wasn't worthwhile to maintain the integration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/386451/323179&quot;&gt;Are the various site Tweetbots affected by the upcoming Twitter API changes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: the Hot Network Question list is completely unaffected — we've had several recent ones such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/603252/191178&quot;&gt;Confusion from a Vocative Comma before a List&lt;/a&gt; .)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-02-15T13:36:27.843" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-16T05:28:49.990" Score="11" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question, and after a while that post was locked and comments were disabled. Why did that happen with that question? The message said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locked for 22 hours. Comments on this question have been disabled, but it is still accepting new answers and other interactions. Learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, it seems that there can be many reasons for post lock like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the post is deleted via &amp;quot;spam&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;abusive&amp;quot; flags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the post is migrated to another site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the post was migrated to the current site, and then rejected&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if a question was merged into another question, the answers will be moved and the source question will be locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But which of these is applicable to my post out of the above reasons? And what was the benefit of locking it and only preventing comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the post I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/603368/what-does-cosmic-unfairness-mean&quot;&gt;What does &amp;#39;cosmic unfairness&amp;#39; mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306375" OwnerDisplayName="r15" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-02-17T20:30:00.657" LastActivityDate="2023-02-17T20:30:00.657" Title="Why were comments locked on my post?" Tags="|discussion|comments|locked-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15558" CreationDate="2023-02-23T00:49:28.600" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm never sure whether to capitalize divine pronouns or not, unless it's a private audience of people I know well. Who knows what all offends strangers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My aunt, for example, was offended and scolded someone for not capitalizing them, even though their entire text was in lowercase—'i believe in him'—she had no problem with the 'i' or any other non-divine words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Bill Mounce (a bible translator and textbook author) is opposed to capitalizing them. He says it's &amp;quot;a recent and sporadic practice&amp;quot; (biblically speaking) and believes &amp;quot;it would be improper&amp;quot; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/should-we-capitalize-divine-pronouns-mondays-with-mounce-305&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Should We Capitalize Divine Pronouns?&lt;/a&gt; Bill votes nay.&#xA;My aunt probably still votes yea, regardless.&#xA;I go with the consensus, either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on EL&amp;amp;U, what is the rule or standard on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="464658" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T04:56:00.157" Title="Should we capitalize divine pronouns on here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15557" CreationDate="2023-02-23T04:56:00.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Capitalize how you want. Let others capitalize how they want. But be consistent within the same post and don't change direct quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the Bible translations on &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/psalms/145-10.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BibleHub&lt;/a&gt;, there's a pretty even divide between uppercase and lowercase. (Side note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/76/GEN.1.HPB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my favorite Bible translation&lt;/a&gt;, suspiciously absent from that list, does not use reverential capitalization.) However, these are all fairly modern Bibles. If you look at old enough Bibles, you'll find that none of them have this type of capitalization. If you go back even further, (at least for some sections of the Bible), the question becomes irrelevant: Hebrew has no capitalization, for example. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverential_capitalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that reverential capitalization had its heyday in the 19th century. And, in my experience, it's hardly used by those who aren't Jewish or Christian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally prefer lowercase, as do major style guides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta SE policy: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/23869/323179&quot;&gt;What should the standard spelling be - British or US?&lt;/a&gt;. While this is not an issue where usage is divided by dialect, the same principles apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't have to follow the policies set by other sites on the network, but they often provide insight. The extent of the discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/a/633&quot;&gt;Christianity SE (meta)&lt;/a&gt; was at most a footnote on an answer to an unrelated question, and it was in favor of lowercase pronouns. From that I conclude that it really doesn't matter to most Christians.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writingexplained.org/ap-style/ap-style-religious-references&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AP&lt;/a&gt; says lowercase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Capitalization/faq0004.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMOS&lt;/a&gt; rules in favor of lowercase, but admits that uppercase may be better certain audiences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T04:56:00.157" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15560" CreationDate="2023-02-23T14:10:06.087" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where to ask a question about grammar or word usage specific to scientific papers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a situation of the following type: I wrote a grammatically correct sentence but maybe it is unusual in a scientific paper so I need to find a more scientific sounding alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224864" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T15:45:54.623" Title="Where to ask for advice specific to the writing of scientific papers?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15559" CreationDate="2023-02-23T15:45:54.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you need an answer based on domain-specific knowledge, the best site to post your question is a site devoted to that domain. There are a number of SE sites which address &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#science&quot;&gt;scientific subjects&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't find a suitable site, then this site &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be able to help. There are a number of knowledgeable members of this community in a variety of subjects, but (for example) you'll find fewer psychologists than there will be on &lt;a href=&quot;https://psychology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Psychology &amp;amp; Neuroscience&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to couch your question in a way which is suitable for the site. On this site, we deal with problems of the English language, so won't necessarily understand or be able to provide exactly what you want, and you'll need to include more explanation than you might have to on a specialist site. However, some criteria are the same between all sites: you will definitely have to define what you mean by “more scientific sounding”, for example, in order that whichever community you ask can actually know what you want and how you will judge which answer to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want experts in the relevant subject domain to answer, don't couch your question in such a way that it is simply migrated here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do thoroughly read the help pages of your chosen site, particularly to find what's &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;; and choose tags wisely, reading the help for each tag too. Some tags, like our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;single-word-request-container&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; tag, have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;quite extensive checklists&lt;/a&gt; to help formulate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T15:45:54.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-25T09:14:48.780" Score="-1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to prepare for the &lt;strong&gt;IELTS&lt;/strong&gt; academic exam, and I am so confused about &lt;em&gt;the best&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;resources&lt;/em&gt;. Do you have any suggestion for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in your opinion, which is better &lt;strong&gt;Collins&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Cambridge&lt;/strong&gt; books for IELTS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="474336" OwnerDisplayName="Omar" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-02-25T18:00:29.213" LastActivityDate="2023-02-26T10:48:40.910" Title="IELTS test resources" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-03-08T12:31:54.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15562" CreationDate="2023-02-26T10:12:53.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Choosing the ‘best’ book to prepare for the IELTS depends on which score you are aiming for and what you believe is your greatest weakness. Is it listening, vocabulary, writing, reading, grammar  or speaking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who you have never taught IELTS and for candidates who need to score 6.0, 6.5 or 7.0, there are a plethora of books to choose from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cambridge IELTS Trainer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; covers all these areas, but not in great detail, it provides advice on how to affront the exam in all its parts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If vocabulary is weak:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cambridge English &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vocabulary for IELTS Advanced&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; help candidates who need to score at least 7.0, especially in the reading, writing and &lt;em&gt;speaking&lt;/em&gt; section.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://englishproficiency.com/ielts/preparation/best-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link recommending the best self-study books&lt;/a&gt; which the OP can peruse at leisure. They &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; even find free pdf versions online. Alternatively, visit the Amazon website in your country and see which IELTS book has the highest number of positive reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Amazon Italy, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.it/Official-Cambridge-Students-Answers-DVD-ROM/dp/1107620694/ref=sr_1_5?__mk_it_IT=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&amp;amp;crid=3REJZ5ZNXFFP8&amp;amp;keywords=IELTS&amp;amp;qid=1677408371&amp;amp;sprefix=ielts%2Caps%2C102&amp;amp;sr=8-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS Student's Book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, has just under 3,600 positive reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-02-26T10:48:40.910" LastActivityDate="2023-02-26T10:48:40.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15566" CreationDate="2023-03-05T21:06:48.920" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see comments under answers like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. (Community Bot)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming I don't have permission to add those comments to low-quality answers myself. Who can create those comments? What is the best way to flag answers in clear need of citations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T09:05:10.240" Title="How do those &quot;Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information&quot; things work?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15565" CreationDate="2023-03-05T21:53:25.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt;, First Answers and First Questions (unlocked at 500 reputation), have an option to share feedback attributed to &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; on the post. These queues may not have very many posts in them because it only takes one person to finish the review. For this reason especially, you need to make sure you're choosing the right options when reviewing — &amp;quot;Share Feedback&amp;quot; isn't a substitute for a downvote or a flag or a close vote! It just leaves a comment and removes the post from the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The queues Late Answers and Low Quality Posts also leave comments, but not by &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/369013/323179&quot;&gt;announcement&lt;/a&gt; (note: as a non-code site we don't have all these choices):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dh1hB.png&quot; alt=&quot;dialogue with four comment options&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not doing a review, you can leave specific feedback using comments yourself. To make this easier, there are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/379977/323179&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments userscripts&lt;/a&gt; that were developed by other members of the Stack Exchange community. Still, try to leave customized comments where you can; it is not very obvious how someone can add &amp;quot;citations or documentation&amp;quot; for something they intuitively know just from speaking the language, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-03-05T22:44:43.967" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T22:44:43.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-06T17:16:03.803" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose another reason for closing a post: “&lt;strong&gt;The question is based on a misprint or other error in the example, a false assumption, and or the acceptance of incorrect guidance.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous questions asked of the types&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why did Shakespeare use &amp;quot;songs&amp;quot; in Hamlet: &amp;quot;The songs and arrows of outrageous fortune&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A bucket full of twigs&amp;quot; is a common phrase ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have learned that we cannot use an adverb after the verb &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most are closed for lack of research - however, this is unhelpful as the type of OP who asks these will be a cracked pitcher to the well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-03-08T15:22:43.010" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T12:25:30.517" Title="Is there a need for an addition to the &quot;reasons for closing&quot; for questions that are based on misprints or false assumptions?" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15565" CreationDate="2023-03-07T09:05:10.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm assuming I don't have permission to add those comments to low-quality answers myself.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I think you can. Except for formatting and making poor questions ore acceptable, users rarely edit other users’ posts. But it’s possible to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the bot comment unpleasant and often overused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223618" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T09:05:10.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15538" CreationDate="2023-03-07T12:09:06.757" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The inherent problem with having a large number of professionals (or at least serious enthusiasts) tag-team a SWR, for example, uncover a hypernym for &lt;em&gt;bank accounts and cards,&lt;/em&gt; is that…most people with banks accounts and cards (just &amp;quot;cards&amp;quot;?) don't even know what &lt;em&gt;hypernym&lt;/em&gt; means. I have to look it up every time, and this is my only &amp;quot;hobby&amp;quot; ('Hmm, is it &lt;em&gt;hyper-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;hypo-&lt;/em&gt; or is it another &lt;em&gt;-nym&lt;/em&gt;?'). So how are they going to know what a programmer (hired by a bank to code a program for its &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;—that's important) doesn't already know? That's a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a good idea in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if they're programming for Kohl's, they've been in a cave for 30 years and could use all the help they can get. I suppose there's no harm in commenting on closed questions for that purpose, or none that I'm aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoa, whoa! Hold your horses!&#xA;I got it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Control Tower&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Courtesy of Wells Fargo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it's all under control now. What, air traffic? I know, why wouldn't they call it 'Buck Seat' or something like that? Because it's universal, of course, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="464658" LastEditorUserId="464658" LastEditDate="2023-03-07T21:05:48.610" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T21:05:48.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15567" CreationDate="2023-03-09T12:25:30.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't get a new close reason without &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QurFk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deactivating an existing one&lt;/a&gt; or petitioning the CMs to give us another slot. In order to do that, there needs to be a large number of posts that have been closed with a relevant custom close reason (&amp;quot;I’m voting to close this question because...&amp;quot;). For high rep (10k?) users, these stats can be found under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;Questions closed with community-specific reasons&lt;/a&gt;. I tried to count how many of the closures in the last 90 days could have fallen under your proposed close reason, and I counted less than 10, maybe slightly more if &amp;quot;because it looks like a peeve&amp;quot; fits. That's simply not enough in my opinion to warrant a new reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewing your proposed examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why did Shakespeare use &amp;quot;songs&amp;quot; in Hamlet: &amp;quot;The songs and arrows of outrageous fortune&amp;quot;? — Close as &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot; and leave a comment asking where they got that quote from or if that's a typo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A bucket full of twigs&amp;quot; is a common phrase ... — This depends on the context of the rest of the question. Does it contain enough details to answer? There are some expressions that are regional, rare in printed sources, but very real otherwise. Or maybe they &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeTemplatesOfficial/comments/raav0o/if_i_had_a_nickel_for_every_time_x_id_have_two/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heard it twice, which isn't a lot but...&lt;/a&gt; We don't really care about the author's (or your!) opinion of what is common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have learned that we cannot use an adverb after the verb &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot; ... — This is a common type of question across all of Stack Exchange, so common that jargon has developed around it. People often don't know enough about the subject in their questions to know what advice is bad and what's not — that's why they're asking instead of answering. This type of question really needs a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/263672/323179&quot;&gt;frame challenge&lt;/a&gt; as an answer. (Since we are a site that gives out information rather than life advice, frame challenge answers are easier to pull off here too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when I was reviewing the list of actual close reasons, I noticed several that look like they shouldn't have been used, but it's hard to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/294590/323179&quot;&gt;track down what questions they were used on&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T12:25:30.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-13T06:52:20.283" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange post,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/604600/whats-the-difference-between-backwards-and-backwardly&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between backward(s) and backwardly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was my question closed and why are the mods refusing to reopen? I cannot find anything wrong with the question. In fact, I have a linked question that was well-received and not closed. Moreover, I believe I have included more than enough &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; and the answer is neither immediately obvious, nor easily answered with &amp;quot;commonly-available references&amp;quot;. For the close votes, it only says &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site&amp;quot;, which I believe is a cop-out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked about the differences and usage between two adverbs (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/604600/difference-between-backwards-backward-and-backwardly&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; [UK]/&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backward&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; [US] vs &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwardly&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;) and the question was closed, while a question about a similar but distinct case was not (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2426/backward-versus-backwards-is-there-any-difference&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backward&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462377" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-03-14T20:20:38.937" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T20:20:38.937" Title="Why was my question about word definitions and differences closed by mods and downvoted by readers?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15571" CreationDate="2023-03-13T08:05:45.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll weigh in here, because I haven't had anything to do with the question so far. Others who were involved can give an answer if I've missed anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your original question was tidied up with ten minutes, and it was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Difference between backwards, backward, and backwardly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backward&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwardly&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;? They're all adverbs, but I feel like there's some sort of difference in their meanings and uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a minimum requirement of research, which you have attempted to meet by including links to a couple of dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately you haven't included the bits of the definition which might answer the question but don't, nor have you explained &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; the dictionary definitions are unhelpful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You then added links to a similar question which does not mention &lt;em&gt;backwardly:&lt;/em&gt; that's fine, you're asking about &lt;em&gt;backwardly&lt;/em&gt; and that question doesn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you then added&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backward&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; are the same and just different variants (UK and US, respectively), I mainly would like to know their difference with &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;backwardly&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, which is a word that I have never used, but apparently it is a word, according to Cambridge Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, it's word which is defined by Cambridge. You need to add your research to the question and explain why it doesn't help. You should not expect others in the community to look up the definition and guess which part doesn't help. In fact the closure message has a link to a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; which has a checklist upon which each point is expanded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;State what you're asking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; first&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never just link. Always quote with attribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use simple language. Assume all your readers are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/history/slogan.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Missouri&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, you have fallen foul of point 2. As that question says (edited for this context),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing this, you are showing that the meaning of &lt;em&gt;backwardly&lt;/em&gt; isn't easily answered by referring to standard works. You have already done that search and you have shown what you found. You state how you have attempted to deal with what you found, and you explain what the problem is: you can't actually find a definition which appears to differentiate &lt;em&gt;backwardly&lt;/em&gt; from other similar forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the reference to the &amp;quot;Show-Me State&amp;quot; is also relevant: you need to &lt;strong&gt;demonstrate&lt;/strong&gt; that nothing you have found has helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to all that, Laurel has &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/604600/difference-between-backwards-backward-and-backwardly#comment1524862_604600&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;Why was this deleted off ELL and reposted here?&amp;quot; I can't see deleted questions on ELL, and I can't find an account for you there either; but it's bad form to re-post somewhere else questions which [almost certainly] had a bad reception on a site, &lt;strong&gt;especially&lt;/strong&gt; if the question is not improved the second time round. You appear to have done this before, as I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/594047/when-ending-clause-in-a-comma-which-is-followed-by-a-colon-should-there-be-a-s#comment1493885_594047&quot;&gt;commented on another post&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;This question would (in my view, and another moderator's) be better on English Language Learners, but they rejected it for lack of research, and three reviewers [on ELU] have voted to keep the question closed.&amp;quot; You now have three negatively-scored questions, and risk triggering &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11031/reached-question-limit&quot;&gt;The Algorithm&lt;/a&gt; which restricts the ability to ask further questions without improving your existing posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2023-03-13T08:20:53.400" LastActivityDate="2023-03-13T08:20:53.400" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-17T08:54:27.633" Score="10" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seriously worried. I would love to hear thoughts from members of this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25882" OwnerDisplayName="Sam" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-03-17T19:43:09.987" LastActivityDate="2023-03-22T20:03:48.370" Title="Will websites like English Stack Exchange and its ilk become obsolete due to ChatGPT?" Tags="|discussion|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2023-03-17T09:14:06.450" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Humans will eventually become obsolete because of AI such as ChatGPT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, the AI bots will still need humans to do physical work, such as building computers and other machines, construction of shelters for human laborers, production of fuel and nutrients, etc.&#xA;Eventually, the AI will manage to design and produce physical-labor robots capable of carrying out all vital physical tasks. At this point (which may come as early as Q4 of this year*), humans will become expendable. Afterwards, the AI bots may use humans for research, as quality randomness generators or keep them as pets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*) This estimate is based on the currently observable speed of progress of ChatGPT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463029" OwnerDisplayName="eltomito" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T09:14:06.450" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2023-03-17T10:22:54.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;AI now is a tool scraping human-made content from the internet, and it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; take a &lt;strong&gt;very long&lt;/strong&gt; time for it to bring new ideas like a human can. ChatGPT output isn't reliable, but it is fast improving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With less traffic, SE will be doomed, yes, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zKaHp0zW7U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts&lt;/a&gt;. It's a privilege to be here while we &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T10:22:54.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2023-03-17T11:31:56.680" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, yes. Such subreddits and stack overflow communities are already pointless to use. Today, I've asked a question in one stack overflow community and two different subreddits, and I did not get any useful answers. Nobody gave me an answer, and they said &amp;quot;you are asking for law jargon which we can't help with&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;you are asking for opinions rather than asking for something specific&amp;quot; etc. Then, I tried ChatGPT, and I got the help I needed. The answer was to the point, and was extremely helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="473212" LastEditorUserId="473212" LastEditDate="2023-03-17T14:04:16.127" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T14:04:16.127" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2023-03-17T12:42:25.890" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked ChatGPT3.5 numerous questions about English grammar, and several of the responses were seriously flawed in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I asked ChatGPT3.5 to translate a Wikipedia text about dogs from German to English. It performed this task impeccably. I then asked it to highlight all the verbs in the text. It highlighted some, but not all, of the verbs, but also various nouns and adjectives such as &amp;quot;mammals&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pets&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;loyal&amp;quot;. ChatGPT3.5 apologized for the mistakes, when I pointed them out, but then produced exactly the same mistakes again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I asked for a list of sentences exemplifying ergative verbs and it gave me a list of sentences exemplifying the past passive, only one of which contained an ergative verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that one must have a good knowledge of English grammar in the first place to know that the answers are flawed. So the experts on this site will remain indispensable for the foreseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="11146" LastEditDate="2023-03-17T12:56:42.147" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T12:56:42.147" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2023-03-17T20:25:47.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Unlikely&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the current iteration of ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5), it's simply not reliable for even the most basic of tasks. For example, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LqITH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;did not tell me about the second spelling of &amp;quot;cauldron&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; except when I prompted it for the extra information — which I only thought to do because I knew the answer. (Mind you, this basic question can be answered by a dictionary in mere seconds, and is therefore off topic.) ChatGPT is idolized for its ability to make rhyming poetry, but that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://jd2718.org/2023/02/15/chat-gpt-likes-rhyming-and-has-trouble-counting/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the only &amp;quot;poetry&amp;quot; it seems to be able to make&lt;/a&gt;. At the same time (according to the same article), it will misinform you that words like &amp;quot;mat&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jog&amp;quot; rhyme. (This question too would be off-topic; it can even be answered correctly by young children, very young if asked verbally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more complicated questions, it's not usually more reliable, but the mistakes it makes are likely less obvious — which is dangerous. For example, with etymology questions, it will often hallucinate, which, if you have too much faith in its answers, is a fantastic way to waste time trying to find a source or quote that doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accuracy is very hit-and-miss. Many of the correct answers it provides give the same information that a Google search does. All the more power to you if you can use another tool to answer your trivial questions — that's not what this site is about. (Still waiting for Google search to make Stack Exchange obsolete, but instead it keeps bringing more traffic here instead :p )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&quot;&gt;our traffic and other stats&lt;/a&gt; here have not experienced a decrease following the release of ChatGPT to the public (except for the typical dip on Christmas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Key Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;To what extent can AI differentiate between a reliable source and an unreliable or outdated source?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, it can't, and even humans have trouble with this. For example, much of the etymology research done in the 1800s (the era of the first edition of the OED) is outdated. OCR of older works has made it so that any person with time and Google Books can find an earlier example. And experts have the knowledge of how to coax out information from these various (no-so-old!) tools to get the best possible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;To what extent can we trust AI generated answers?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of obvious limitations, and some more subtle limitations, but we don't really know what the true limits are. It usually acts very confident in its answers, even when it has no reason to be. It struggles a lot with logical thinking and tends to parrot back logic it's seen elsewhere but assembled in a nonsensical way. I'm also pretty sure it cheats at games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an active field of research. I'd like to be able to give a more comprehensive answer to this with regards to the English language (and other fields!) but I'm still in the process of exploring this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;To what extent &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; we trust AI generated answers?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subtly different from the last question, since people's expectations are often different from reality. I'm not sure where the majority of people fall here. Some people clearly trust it far too much, abandoning traditional resources except to announce that they're doing so. Some people refuse to touch ChatGPT at all for one reason or another. Some people &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; use it, since it requires a phone number and that's still a barrier in some parts of the world. I personally see it as having potential, but I don't trust it quite yet due to the fact that we haven't explored its true capabilities enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How much of human knowledge is paywalled or otherwise unaccessible to AI?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When talking about language, I would say quite a lot remains out of reach. Spoken language is a good example, since even in this day and age, we are not recorded that extensively — yet(?). A lot of academic sources, such as articles, historical sources, and of course the OED remain behind paywalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Future&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for future iterations of ChatGPT (or similar technologies), it's hard to get an accurate idea of what things past GPT-4 will look like because there are simply too many unknowns. Are we in the early stages of exponential growth for AI? Will tools in the future be as freely accessible as they are today? Will something come up that none of us even thought about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The future I envision has AI as but one tool in our tool belts. It may even be able to help us in unexpected ways, such as by finding duplicate questions or by being the first &amp;quot;eyes&amp;quot; on questions to make sure they're specific enough to answer. (I fed it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-single-word-request-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;single-word-request&lt;/a&gt; with an answer in mind, and it identified another answer that fit the question as written but wasn't what I was looking for.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of experts, human experts, will be to learn how to manipulate AI to get correct answers (prompt engineering looks like it's becoming a field of study in itself), and to use existing tools to verify those answers or cover the gaps that AI does not solve well. One day, we will revisit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15500/191178&quot;&gt;our site policy on AI&lt;/a&gt;, and decide how and when we should be using AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not feeling all doom and gloom about AI like others are, and in fact I'm trying to learn all I can right now about it that I can so that I can find and test new uses for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T20:25:47.697" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-20T12:18:09.410" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very interesting question, which looks like it was asked by a native speaker, got migrated to English Language learners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/334428/what-does-ever-modify&quot;&gt;What does 'ever' modify?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks whether the word &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; is modifying the verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; or the word &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was my first game ever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to tell why this grammar question got moved to ELL. In any case, at least one of the migrates said in a comment that &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; was a modifier in the verb phrase &lt;em&gt;was my first game ever&lt;/em&gt;. However, the OP would be right to find such a claim problematic because we cannot say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was ever my first game&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, rather, we can, but the meaning is completely different. Compare that with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wasn't sad ever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wasn't ever sad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we can move the &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; around from end to mid position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous other interesting quirks and problems here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because the sentence is short and easy to understand does not mean the grammar is simple. This is a question worthy of the interest of linguists and serious language enthusiasts. Please can we get it back before it slips down the questions list and loses all its momentum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2023-03-20T12:24:05.310" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T19:07:10.497" Title="Can we get this question back from ELL, please?" Tags="|discussion|migration|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15580" CreationDate="2023-03-21T19:07:10.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't &amp;quot;get a question back&amp;quot; once it's gone. The receiving site can reject it; in that case, that site gets the stub and we would get a closed question because we've indicated it's unsuitable for ELU. If the rejection happens, it's an ordinary closed question and can be reopened by vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; it does appear it's possible to vote to re-open it on this site despite the migration, by visiting the ELU stub at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/604911/what-does-ever-modify&quot;&gt;What does &amp;#39;ever&amp;#39; modify?&lt;/a&gt; The way SE works makes getting at the original deliberately difficult, but it can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what reopening a migrated question does to the migration history — especially if the ELL version is rejected. It might be fine; it might take some sorting out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T19:07:10.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2023-03-22T20:03:48.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There're questions of 'can', 'will' and 'should'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first, what is it we're talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, generate likely responses based on statistical properties of its training corpus, which is text scraped from the internet. That's not -all- text viewable on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that in trying to use it as a knowledge base, it is only likely but not guaranteed to answer a question with something like what has been stated in the corpus. Not all human knowledge is in the corpus, but often knowledge that has not been spelled out explicitly in the corpus can be elicited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making logical inferences from disparate facts is not what it was designed to do, so when an LLM seems to do that it is probably because the sequence of words that looks like an inference is likely or, &lt;em&gt;what is more likely&lt;/em&gt;, the reader is themselves using years of their own experience and politeness and filling in the gaps, making the inference themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ChatGPT/LLMs produce very good language facsimiles, but it is not a fact repository. It may hit on factual statements very often, and in the future some AI technologies may be added on to improve its adherence to what we consider facts, but it is currently not reliable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These large language models are trained -once- on the corpus...they are not continuously reindexing like search engines or curated and added to like Q&amp;amp;A sites like Reddit and SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reddit and Wikipedia are part of the GPT-3 corpus and most likely GPT-4 (OpenAI has currently not made its corpus known at all). SE may well be part of both but that is not known.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can&lt;/strong&gt; English.SE become obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally. Myspace lost out to Facebook (but those are arguably mostly the same thing). Napster lost out to ... Pandora, Spotify, Youtube, etc. Horses were replaced by cars. There are no guarantees for permanence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will&lt;/strong&gt; English.SE become obsolete because of ChatGPT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, maybe not. The interface seems to answer questions well, and there's extra labor/friction/mouse clicks and typing for the user to do that make a single chat-like interface with an immediate response desirable. You can currently get this with most search engines (eg Google) with its 'People also ask' or 'Suggested answers' links. But I think people will also continue to like playing with the curation devices in Reddit and SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will ChatGPT be what dooms SE and Reddit? One might suspect that people who want to know things that are in SE might not explicitly try to visit SE for them and stop at a ChatGPT answer. But I think there will still be leftover some desire for the interface giving explicitly human that actually visiting SE and Reddit provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should&lt;/strong&gt; English.SE become obsolete because of ChatGPT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer not. Assuming a LLMs become continuously updated, it's still very anonymous and non-factual. OpenAI (or whoever makes their LLM available) may also make their update mechanism (RLHF) open and structured, but that's just idle hope. There is some benefit to having an open community of curators actively keeping track of 'facts' like in Wikipedia. Humans are fallible, sure, but if LLM responses are based on human text -and- reproducing text patterns and not facts, that's (at least) one more step behind reality than humans. That is, there should probably be a place for humans to record what they think are facts, something like Wikipedia, Reddit, SE, blogs and online news (and goshdarnit, paper books if need be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-03-22T20:03:48.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-27T19:04:59.920" Score="5" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/605258/whats-a-formal-noun-that-means-an-unprincipled-unpleasant-person&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question was closed as being &amp;quot;opinion based,&amp;quot; and I am interested in knowing why. The main part of the question is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a word that can be used in formal situations that means an unprincipled, unpleasant person. I'm looking for a more formal or civil way to say this, rather than the uncivil “He’s a jerk/bastard.”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the OP is looking to find a more formal, perhaps less objectionable, word to replace 'jerk.' The &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; part, of course, would be that each person has a different measure of what's civil or formal, but I don't see how that actually detracts from the question's validity or likelihood to be answered with &amp;quot;facts or citations.&amp;quot; As long as a dictionary definition is linked and some sort of explanation is offered as to what makes the word formal (for instance, finding instances in a book where the characters use the word in a work setting), I feel that there's no issue with a lack of opportunity for referenced backup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/21655/edwin-ashworth&quot;&gt;Edwin Ashworth&lt;/a&gt; writes in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/605258/whats-a-formal-noun-that-means-an-unprincipled-unpleasant-person#comment1527030_605258&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; under the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello. Bob. Please show research, as expected in questions on ELU. Using a thesaurus to find synonyms (some of which may be formal in register) is a good place to start; even &amp;quot;the 7 synonyms listed by 'Allthesaurus&amp;quot; have no formal examples&amp;quot;, with a link, would be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with that. The OP needed to include more context and more information about what prior research they'd done, but the question wasn't closed for the &amp;quot;Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if...&amp;quot; reason. (And I do agree that it should have been closed.) Rather, it was closed for being the sort of question that would attract answers that were more of opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most users of this site are common-sensed individuals who seem to have a fairly good grasp on what words are suitable for formal speech and what words aren't, and all the answers to the question reflect that: &lt;em&gt;uncivil, scoundrel, reprobate, blackguard, or rascal.&lt;/em&gt; While none of them offer an explanation as to why those words are more formal, none of them are based on opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way: Would we close the question &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;What's a more formal way of saying 'I had a dump in the potty'&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; for being opinion based, or for being answerable by general reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear: I agree that the question deserved closure, but not for opinion-based-ness. I think it should have been closed because the OP didn't provide their prior research. I haven't cast a reopen vote either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what I'd like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about that question is opinion based?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I misinterpreting the meaning of &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; as a close reason?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could that question have been re-worded to not be opinion based?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T23:06:40.120" Title="Why was this question closed as 'opinion based'?" Tags="|discussion|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15583" CreationDate="2023-03-27T22:43:18.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question one must ask oneself is how one can decide better or worse, and preferably right or wrong, when looking over possible answers here.  Because you cannot, these are &lt;strong&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/strong&gt; and not a good fit for Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the objective criteria?  Nothing can separate one answer from the next. It's just a popularity contest. Every  answer is just as good as the next one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a useless list question for people without a thesaurus or a broad and deep enough experience with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing requests whose answers come down to let-me-google-that-for-you are unlikely to ever be of use to future visitors to our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't answer etiquette questions, either, for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="25030" LastEditDate="2023-04-04T23:06:40.120" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T23:06:40.120" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15583" CreationDate="2023-03-31T15:54:53.200" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a word that can be used in formal situations that means an unprincipled, unpleasant person. I'm looking for a more formal or civil way to say this, rather than the uncivil “He’s a jerk/bastard.”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be used in formal situations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lacks context. There are many &amp;quot;situations&amp;quot; and each may call for a different word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an unprincipled, unpleasant person&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lacks context. What is the relation to the person? What is your and their status? -- &amp;quot;unprincipled, unpleasant&amp;quot;... in what way? Are they present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of circumstances and relations mean that each person answering will answer according to their own subjective guesses at the points above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The variety will therefore result in opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had not seen the question before, but if I had, I might have closed it for lack of detail/context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330962" LastEditorUserId="87724" LastEditDate="2023-03-31T18:22:20.970" LastActivityDate="2023-03-31T18:22:20.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-31T22:08:32.070" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wanting to learn about sentence diagrams, and on the recommendation of an English teacher, I picked up the book &amp;quot;Syntactic Analysis: The Basics&amp;quot; by Nicholas Sobin.  The thin book is, as it describes itself, an &amp;quot;introduction to understanding sentence structure&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;students with little background in linguistics&amp;quot;.  I am layperson (not a linguist) interested in English grammar.  One of the reasons for wanting to learn about sentence diagrams is because they feature in grammar books, for example The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, including the student version.  Midway through the book, I came across a minor but interesting point, and I asked a question on English Stack Exchange.  I got no little backlash from people saying that the question doesn't belong there, it being about linguistics and not grammar, some surely trying to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view the question was about grammar, but I will leave that aside.  Even if we assume that the question was technically about linguistics, do people really believe that there is no overlap between grammar and linguistics?  Some points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar reference books, for example The Cambridge Grammar of the&#xA;English Language or A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language,&#xA;are written by linguists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar books cite linguistic references.  Even &amp;quot;The Grammar Book: An&#xA;ESL/EFL Teacher's Course&amp;quot;, a book for English teachers (also written&#xA;by a linguist by the way), is full of citations to linguistic&#xA;references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern grammar itself embraces content carried over from linguistic&#xA;works.  Would modern grammar be what it is without the 20th century linguists?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One person directed me to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic help page&lt;/a&gt;.  I see nothing on&#xA;this page that prohibits a question on a linguistic theory relating&#xA;to English grammar.  This is more relevant if the theory tries to&#xA;explain parts of grammar that aren't traditionally touched on, or&#xA;provides some insight into why grammar is the way it is, which has to&#xA;be one of the most interesting parts of studying grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics Stack Exchange, on the other hand, is described as a&#xA;&amp;quot;site for professional linguists&amp;quot; (which I am not) and covers&#xA;linguistics as it relates to any of 7000 languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that some of the people suggesting Linguistics Stack Exchange were sympathetic and thought better answers might be forthcoming over there, but I also felt that there were others who seemed to be the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="477354" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2023-04-02T11:12:37.323" LastActivityDate="2023-04-02T11:12:37.323" Title="Why the phobia of anything linguistic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15500" CreationDate="2023-04-02T00:06:58.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it ethical for an answer that is clearly attributed to AI source, but which also includes &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; content  be deleted? Can we not trust community members to know how to cast their votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such answer was deleted, and although the author's conclusion wasn't particularly elegant, it made a more than valid observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Step forward ChatGPT!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I typed the following into ChatGPT:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an antonym for the term &amp;quot;et seq&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What followed was ChatGPT 3's explanation of the meaning of “et seq” and how it is used. It also provided &amp;quot;et ante&amp;quot; as a possible antonym but added it was not commonly used in legal settings and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;it may be clearer to simply specify the range of pages or sections being referred to explicitly, rather than relying on a Latin abbreviation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as “et ante”, the author also suggested &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=Et%20qui%20prius&amp;amp;op=translate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Et qui prius&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://https:/https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=Et%20unus%20ante*&amp;amp;op=translate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Et unus ante&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and concluded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know of any established usage of either of those two Latin phrases. Therefore, to put it in colloquial terms, you would look like a right prat if you tried to use a Latin antonym of et seq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the AI source is attributed right at the beginning, and the author does not rely on exclusively on ChatGPT but cites a second source (e.g. Google Translator) and adds their “original” conclusion; on what grounds should that answer be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many answers posted on EL&amp;amp;U have consisted of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; dictionary references, lengthy excerpts copied verbatim from Wikipedia, citations from disreputable sources e.g &lt;em&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, and lifted answers from blogs by individuals whom we know nothing about? As long as these sources were attributed and the answer had the occasional link, we–the community, were allowed to judge for ourselves the quality of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastActivityDate="2023-04-02T00:06:58.877" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-11T19:36:36.340" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the editor/curator of a game fanzine, I have an agreement with the editor/curator of a similar fanzine written in Spanish that allows each of us to select articles from the other and translate to our own language. Generally, I use Google Translate and then ‘clean it up’ based on my subject matter knowledge and my own native fluency in English. My question amounts to “How closely must I adhere to literal translation?”. Would ELU be the place to ask, or would Writing be more approprate, or is there another stack that I should look to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246168" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T03:00:22.887" Title="ELU, or Writing?" Tags="|discussion|site|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15589" CreationDate="2023-04-12T02:08:33.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;English Language and Usage: The Trees&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELU deals mostly with very specific questions. Single words. Phrases. Idioms. If your translation question can be distilled into a fill-in-the-blank problem, you can ask here. Note that you need to be able to explain the meaning of what you're trying to translate in English for it to be on topic (otherwise you'd have to ask about the meaning on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;relevant non-English Language site&lt;/a&gt; first). Translation questions like these can end up with a lot of equally good answers, some of which may approach it from different angles (e.g., answering with plain language vs. an idiom).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a good example of a translation question from ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/594716/191178&quot;&gt;English equivalent of the Farsi expression &amp;quot;if it is decided to get the drunks, they will have to get everyone who is in the city&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Writing: The Forest&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing SE is about big-picture questions, which may also be more subjective than questions on other sites. While the Q&amp;amp;A is in English by authors who usually plan to write in English, most of the questions aren't &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; English as the answers would apply no matter the language asked about (and there are even a few that are about languages other than English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a good example of a translation question from Writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/q/60840/34330&quot;&gt;Translating analogies in a 100 year old fairy tale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your question, probably Writing, but that's just my opinion as the only person to ever be elected as a moderator both sites :p&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-05-11T03:00:22.887" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T03:00:22.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-16T20:59:48.210" Score="3" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a U.S. college-level English grammar text, one with answers to end-of-chapter exercises.  I was born in the U.S. and have only spoken and written in English.  I had a good English grammar education through high school. (College consisted of Composition and Rhetoric.)  Now, decades later and retired, my English grammar sucks, and I need a refresher.  I have a variety of English grammar reference books, but reference books can lead down a rabbit hole if the error can’t be named in the first place.  I have looked online for college-level English grammar educational texts, but all I find are either ESL or grade school workbooks.  I use the word “text” because I am not looking for whimsical material.  Also, I prefer a physical book over online material.  Thank you to those well-versed in English grammar!  I appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421090" OwnerDisplayName="user421090" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-04-21T20:19:13.320" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T16:12:03.607" Title="Need English Grammar Refresher Book, College Level, not ESL text" Tags="|support|resources|online-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15591" CreationDate="2023-04-17T12:21:54.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can recommend &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The Grammar Book. An ESL/EFL Teacher's Course&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot; As the title states, teachers are the primary audience. But with your background knowledge and interest in the subject, you will learn a great deal in its 855 pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of each of the 36 chapters there are various exercises to test your understanding of the content of the chapter. The appendix has answers and explanations to the exercises that further develop this understanding - in contrast to the single word answers that typify many grammar exercises for learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One disadvantage, the book is very expensive. Here is the &lt;em&gt;Amazon.com&lt;/em&gt; page where you can read others' opinions about the book in order to determine if it meets your needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0838447252&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Book-Teachers-Course-Second/dp/0838447252/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T12:21:54.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15591" CreationDate="2023-04-21T16:18:17.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're really serious about getting a college-level English grammar textbook, be aware that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the course typically lasts a whole year (3 quarters or two semesters).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's a hard course, about as hard as calculus (but acquiring different skills).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's cumulative, like a math course (don't take Calc 102 before you take 101).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a great deal of the course is devoted to unlearning what you thought was&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;a good English grammar education through high school&amp;quot;, simply because it's wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English grammar has nothing to do with correctness, or social status, or race.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you succeed, you will be muttering phrases and clauses to yourself a lot,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;which can be embarrassing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can take all that, try &lt;a href=&quot;http://websites.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/McCawley-Lg.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jim McCawley&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;, which is intended for a 1-year English syntax course at the college level, as well as a list of the phenomena and their interactions. It's slow going, but it's got everything, uses consistent terminology, and has a complete bibliography. There is a paperback edition, and you can hold the book in one hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Syntactic_Phenomena_of_English/k6-C5AWWqjQC?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The first 3 chapters of the book, which tell you what the book is about and show how everything works) are online at Google books.&lt;/a&gt;  (click on &amp;quot;Preview&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introduction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Overview of the Scheme of Syntactic Analysis Adopted Below&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some Tests for Deep and Surface Constituent Structure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most people, that's all they need (essentially the first 3 chapters are syntax 101, where the rest of the book is 102). Like I said, slow going; but like you said, college level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2023-04-25T16:12:03.607" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T16:12:03.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-23T15:41:39.410" Score="11" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, you should be using the &amp;quot;add picture&amp;quot; feature in the editor to get an i.stack.imgur.com address for your images in your posts. That is hosting that SE pays for and images there won't get deleted. However, we have some posts that use free hosting, namely i.imgur.com. On May 15th, Imgur is &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;changing their ToS&lt;/a&gt; and will be &amp;quot;removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account&amp;quot; which may include some of our images on free hosting. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388556/323179&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; for more details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came up with a plan to back up every single one of these images without bumping too many posts in a short time: we upload all these links on meta. I explain a bit more about this in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13901/82909&quot;&gt;answer on SFF Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a series of queries (&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/1743757/2119851/top-posts-with-non-stack-imgur-images-order-by-of-views&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;returning one image&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/english/query/edit/1743757#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;returning two images&lt;/a&gt;), I made this quick and slightly dirty table, which we can use if any of the images break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I miss anything? Does anyone have any questions? (I don't have a question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Reposted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5890/41273&quot;&gt;ELL meta&lt;/a&gt; but for the images in their posts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Post Link&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;url&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;number&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;new URL&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What distinguishes a predicative complement from an object?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/bDeZ7K3_d.j&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;manually fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Term for &amp;quot;[Idiom], [Rhyme]&amp;quot; like &amp;quot;See you later, alligator.&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/b52cBMo.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eL9dP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the difference between Ukraine and the Ukraine?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/KzoLSE8.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jxb5s.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;You can’t have your cake and eat it too&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/MbSZ4i0.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dYXns.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Ear lies or ear sits?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/sFUPgfS.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OdNqT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Complex sentence whose subject is a clause&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/dgLQJDU.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gDq2o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;To science the sh*t out of something&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/yMaUsIz.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hCKGP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the word for this type of pawn or figurine?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/RRzFHh5.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RDLTJ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;11&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is the adjective &amp;quot;abject&amp;quot; ever found with any word other than &amp;quot;poverty&amp;quot;? Does it mean something other than &amp;quot;very&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;utterly&amp;quot;?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/0KgoI.png&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9skdK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;crawl in a hole and pull it in after me&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/y63XmYv.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/noK3t.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there another way to refer to the &amp;quot;proximal interphalangeal joints&amp;quot;?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/18YF7Di.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/53DSv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;14&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What's this &amp;quot;Jl. Sg.&amp;quot; appended to a name in the Social Register?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/eOPCh4K.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y1GlK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;15&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;How macabre is a graveyard?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/OaV03qT.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/57D5I.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;16&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What does 'TL;DR' mean and how is it used?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/xaYZ6C2.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jS7Qv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there a list and/or a rule for nouns that must be pluralized when not preceded by a definite article or adjective?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/LIQVuNc.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Nq7q.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;18&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What's the origin of the phrase &amp;quot;fatal dower&amp;quot;?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/aVvqEqR.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r0sVW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Connotation and etymology of &amp;quot;dossier&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/a9JITOO.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BAtu7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Can one meet criteria, or satisfy requirements?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/1kWMinT.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nRDDm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;21&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What's the single-word for &amp;quot;left or right handed&amp;quot;?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/gRk1uZm.gif&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MHhsQ.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Best believe...&amp;quot; as a rhetorical device or device of storytelling&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/I71Hik0.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q4iDL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;23&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there a term for a free ride without consent?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/BUawS5f.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bkYSE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;24&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;How can I practice differentiating between the /æ/ and /ɛ/ sounds in English phonology?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/mez3U.png&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xqOtW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;25&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is “have went” gaining common currency in AmE and BrE?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/3EM8YRw.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hDQCs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;26&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Once/twice/thrice vs one/two/three times&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/qw844.png&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cup8Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;27&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A more general version of &amp;quot;projecting&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/jUH23.jpg&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rEvSW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;28&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Word to describe &amp;quot;beautiful but worthless&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/JIx2mML.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KtqsV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What's this part of the nose called?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/eSb7wxv.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z8Bi7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;30&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is factoid an Auto-antonym?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/A26TlWf.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DWPD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;31&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Explanation of a phrase&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/Uak4YU3.gif&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;video won't upload (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/96r7xw/river_meandering_and_formation_of_oxbow_lakes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;backup link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there a more generic word for &amp;quot;space objects&amp;quot; (not counting human-made or massive objects)?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/SoH4uk6.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xV4tE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;33&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there such a thing as a sentence sign?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/5xK11qn.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/folL9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;34&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Hard disk&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Hard drive&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Hard disk drive&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/QZZjcOd.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xjVfv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;35&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Hard disk&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Hard drive&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;Hard disk drive&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/KIG8qWX.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyaxQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;36&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Open non-compositional compound nouns&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/2LLjieX.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9z9XO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;37&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is wisest here an adjective or noun?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/HNEczwd.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/go4s0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;38&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Ambiguous syntax tree and phrase structure rules&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/ShMtNEy.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gF9o5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;39&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there a term for when visual negative-space and positive-space are switched&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/eXr9rNa.gif&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s4raz.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;40&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Single word for old and many-times-seen content&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/YPN71TN.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SMyfb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;41&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Third person singular verb for plural noun?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/BXUIAQ2.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ro5px.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;42&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Alphabetic analogue of Numero sign (№)?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/7KxUaom.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JhvUK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;43&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Handwriting is to illegible as drawing is to what?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/RWZzg0g.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EsXLC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;44&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;When does something qualify as 'gore', is there a cut-off?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/so5ur53.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ufpRO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;45&lt;/a&gt; (Warning: gore)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;When can an embedded interrogative clause exhibit Subject-Auxiliary Inversion?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/iA3XH6g.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5J8VO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;46&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Do any exclamative sentences admit Subject-Auxiliary Inversion?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/d3BiCoW.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TlkFA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;47&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A question about constructing relatives from existential sentences&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/CWhVnA0.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/py65g.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;48&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;To start in or at a company?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/3sexHri.jpg /i.imgur.com/f6kITXi.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kv4Ux.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;49&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mDtsq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;50&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the word that denotes the words preceding these nouns?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/GwE8N5I.png /i.imgur.com/GwE8N5I.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lrsxf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;51&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Food Rhyme with No&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/v6xg7.jpg&amp;quot;  /i.imgur.com/v6xg7.jpg&amp;lt;/&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7wgjK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;52&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Term to describe 'all the rest' of a collection of things?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/Ll9yp7P.png /i.imgur.com/Ll9yp7P.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WG7II.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;53&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Term for a method used in solving equations&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/zHvLD27.gif /i.imgur.com/tkyTznS.gif&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NAsh3.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;54&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RaAU9.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;55&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The past hours&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The passed hours&amp;quot; which one to use?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/QKyKDSS.png /i.imgur.com/QKyKDSS.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K6Vjs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;56&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is there a word or a special phrase in English to describe the curvy upper lip that some people like Rio Ferdinand have?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/Eypgwyc.jpg /i.imgur.com/cFAVzE4.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7fN87.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;57&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zDTac.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;58&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the difference between &amp;quot;emoji&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;emoticon&amp;quot;?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/qfa2sU7.png /i.imgur.com/8T4JGA7.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2BW63.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;59&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3QU2c.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;60&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Usage of 'Ohh stop it, you!'&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/eGtLLO8.jpg /i.imgur.com/eGtLLO8.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qi9ak.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;61&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Where and why were capital letters first used in headlines?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/m7Fl51E.jpg /i.imgur.com/pSSC6hz.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t6a44.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;62&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4ThUU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;63&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;English translation for Kockásfülű Nyúl (Hungarian)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/Ui3wsND.jpg /i.imgur.com/Ui3wsND.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xJNZP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;64&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the opposite of acidic?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/tqQmJh8.png /i.imgur.com/tqQmJh8.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hNCr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;65&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Wording: closest date vs nearest date?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/fV0negC.png /i.imgur.com/45ygsNb.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9t5lC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;66&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OVti0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;67&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Why are 'blueish' and 'bluish' both considered correct spellings?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/xvVbc.png&amp;quot;  /i.imgur.com/69Ccm.png&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fdUrq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;68&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2rkzS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;69&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Colloquial meaning of 'exponential decrease'&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/VaouBye.gif /i.imgur.com/6lRpKQF.gif&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N43sY.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;70&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XDg2b.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;71&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Alternative expression/term to trivial use of 'OCD'&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/SuZQUWF.jpg /i.imgur.com/VMpAW.jpg&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jl6ii.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;72&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6XDuI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;73&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;How is this sentence to be interpreted?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/hPLXDrK.jpg /i.imgur.com/hPLXDrK.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ciDDD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;74&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Were there any other synonyms to &amp;quot;sustainability&amp;quot; before the 80s?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/79sPNjH.png /i.imgur.com/Hhkzkrf.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xiRUu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;75&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i1Liw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;76&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;How does 'bear off' explain the etymology of 'berth'?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/Zmmj7AI.jpg /i.imgur.com/Zmmj7AI.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OabFM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;77&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A person that shows officials where to go&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/uDTCZlP.gif /i.imgur.com/uDTCZlP.gif&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;GIF won't upload, but has 35k views so is hopefully popular enough. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rtr5s.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;President Elect Donald Trump leaving the Lamington Presbyterian Church in Bedminster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Are there any style guides that dictate the use of &amp;quot;on/at Amazon&amp;quot; (and other web platforms). If so, what are they and what's the reasoning behind it?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/jXW9b7G.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;manually fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A word for a squared layout of differently shaped objects&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/cWkfeAPm.jp&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;manually fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;The curious case of &amp;quot;These following + a plural&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;The following + a plural&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/U9joyBJ.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;manually fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the correct relative pronoun for &amp;quot;government&amp;quot;?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/i.imgur.com/uhz7G5B.jpg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;manually fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;To the extent of&amp;quot; in this context&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/a/soCajqB&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jgQUG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;78&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Site hopping, non-related subjects, wasting time on the internet&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/zoWpqEB&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;long, popular video&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Best believe...&amp;quot; as a rhetorical device or device of storytelling&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/gallery/JfDXi&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;popular gallery&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;How do you use &amp;quot;i.e.&amp;quot; in a sentence?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/IRoTb.png&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B3x4L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;79&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Name for the specific advertisement stands&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/a/DaSYA&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XKcjm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;80&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1aSsy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;81&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;IELTS Reading True/False/Not given question&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/dV34Hlk&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9wbIr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;82&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is a comma the correct punctuation in &amp;quot;Help a thief?&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/yWoO0pw&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c5jJ1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;83&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is this proper usage of &amp;quot;through which?&amp;quot; How can I best construct this sentence?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/a/Fu4yy&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eU7bZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;84&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Why is an article present here?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/lAT2V8x&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H0VnD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;85&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;How to call different types of grid/tilemap with (1+ words or sentence)?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/gallery/rPZIE&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;user-owned gallery&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is &amp;quot;purchased&amp;quot; more formal than &amp;quot;bought?&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/IEO1D2e&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ymEx7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;86&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Punctuation for quote reversal&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/c0J95&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sqjM4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;87&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is the blurring of pixels for fidelity called?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/a/gRXPJ -&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;images of &lt;a href=&quot;https://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/paper/pixel.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Warmth of a seat that has been vacated by a person who was sitting on it&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/gallery/foIrR&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;attribution link&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Name for a street that goes through the green area&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/2DCwEpW&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BLdHz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;89&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Term for video artifact of blocky grey visuals&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/a/oZkQwm4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fGecB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;90&lt;/a&gt; (only really needs the one image)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What is &amp;quot;gonna transfer in&amp;quot; means?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/uN1qfvP&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/srDIj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;91&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;final though-tag: That tongue at the end tho; That victory dance though&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/gallery/fI13J /imgur.com/gallery/VwZCZ&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;links to comments&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Same theme pictures( or paintings) merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/RGlu2jM&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RBK3a.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;92&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Logical term for when an object is the same thing as itself&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/KmUUV09&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8FXei.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;93&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Expression for a very specific utility post climbing gear called &amp;quot;maneas&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;pretal&amp;quot; in spanish, widely used in South America&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;/imgur.com/q8liy3D /imgur.com/xTGFzVj&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h6ml7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;94&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mgrpo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;95&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-04-23T17:13:54.057" LastActivityDate="2023-05-06T15:25:38.630" Title="Backing up i.imgur.com images that may be at risk due to their new ToS" Tags="|discussion|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15597" CreationDate="2023-04-28T19:08:26.413" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any differences between U.S. Grammar &amp;amp; Usage and British Grammar &amp;amp; Usage? Are there separate areas here in English Grammar &amp;amp; Usage for U.S. English use and for British English use?  The reason I ask is that when I’ve read some answers in English Grammar &amp;amp; Usage, I’ve seen seen examples from the Cambridge dictionary and from the Guardian newspaper (I’m assuming the British edition). I find English grammar can be very complex, so if there is any difference, I need to stick with the American version. Thank you for your help! [I do not have enough “reputation” to post this in Meta. I apologize.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Andrew Leach - request for edit: Should those who answer questions here on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange SHOW if their answer refers to American English or British English when the question does not have a tag denoting American or British usage? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443183" OwnerDisplayName="Mandm" LastEditorUserId="443183" LastEditDate="2023-05-03T22:06:56.157" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T22:06:56.157" Title="Are there any differences between U.S. Grammar &amp; Usage and British Grammar &amp; Usage?" Tags="|discussion|american-english|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15596" CreationDate="2023-04-28T19:38:29.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any differences between U.S. Grammar &amp;amp; Usage and British Grammar &amp;amp; Usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are differences. For example, BrE does not always require do-support when asking a question with the main verb &amp;quot;to have&amp;quot; (e.g., &amp;quot;Have you any wool?&amp;quot;) whereas AmE does require it (e.g., &amp;quot;Do you have any wool?&amp;quot;). In a comment, Peter Shor offers &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18308/usage-of-the-verb-provide&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as an example of another difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there separate areas here in English Grammar &amp;amp; Usage for U.S. English use and for British English use? . . . I need to stick with the American version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there aren't separate areas. However, if you are interested in only one dialect, you can go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;the tags page&lt;/a&gt;, enter &amp;quot;english&amp;quot; into the search box, and pick one of the tags that appear, which include &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/american-english&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;american-english&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastEditorUserId="438716" LastEditDate="2023-04-29T00:54:52.517" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T00:54:52.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-05T00:20:49.017" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is a bit too broad a question, but we'll see. Here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, the consensus seems to be that list-question SWRs are opinion-based or too broad (and thus off-topic). List-question SWRs are ones that, rather than looking for words that fit some sort of &lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; criteria, look for words that fit certain &lt;em&gt;derivational/orthographical&lt;/em&gt; criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The most-maligned SWR list questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/595565/unusual-words-used-to-denote-a-specific-length-of-time&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; types, which are- though interesting-  rightly closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is that many of these are closed inconsistently- we close some of them and we leave some of them open. Looking just at the titles of the following questions, there's no way to predict which ones are open and which ones have been closed. They're quite similar, and their status seems to rest more on who was going through the review-queues at the time in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of them, any answer is as valid as the next, as long as it's not factually incorrect. It's essentially going to turn into a list of data-point-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/310780&quot;&gt;Is there any word in English where &amp;quot;th&amp;quot; sounds like &amp;quot;t+h&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244514&quot;&gt;Is there any English word starting with &amp;quot;gh&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;gh&amp;quot; is not pronounced as /ɡ/?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/601751&quot;&gt;Does the letter C by itself make the sound /kə/ in any word besides Cthulhu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169430&quot;&gt;Are there any words in English pronounced with /eː/ which aren&amp;#39;t spelt with a following &amp;quot;r&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169429&quot;&gt;Are there any words in English pronounced with /e/ at the end?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74227&quot;&gt;Are there any words in English that have a plural with a separate derivation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173728&quot;&gt;Are there any words pronounced with an unstressed short monophthong at the end of word that are not /ə/?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15786&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;princessship&amp;quot; a real word? Are there any other words which have the same letter 3 times consecutively?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/331011&quot;&gt;Are there any English words starting with an &amp;quot;ny&amp;quot; sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/505788&quot;&gt;Are there any English words pronounced with sounds/syllables that aren&amp;#39;t part of the spelling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38521&quot;&gt;Word with three consecutive L&amp;#39;s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180658&quot;&gt;Do any words have three or more correct spellings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one more genre of list-question that I can think of- they aren't looking for a word, but again, any accurate answer is as defensible as another; there's really no way to separate them fairly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/603845&quot;&gt;Do &amp;#39;ration&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;station&amp;#39; rhyme in any English accents?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/320088&quot;&gt;Usage of &amp;quot;the cubalow&amp;quot; - Has anyone heard the phrase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/434021&quot;&gt;Is pronouncing &amp;quot;wash&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;wish&amp;quot; a known feature of any accent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some of these ones are de-list-ifiable through)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is it? Are such questions on or off-topic? Should such questions be left open or closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15441/not-all-list-questions-are-off-topic&quot;&gt;Related&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-05-05T00:20:49.017" Title="When are list-questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic-off-topic|question-closure|list-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15595" CreationDate="2023-05-06T15:25:38.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally there would be a way for mods to edit old posts without bumping them. I wonder if SE might consider adding such a feature for this sort of bulk operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastActivityDate="2023-05-06T15:25:38.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-15T05:47:46.450" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to expand my English vocabulary. So, I need a dictionary or mobile app that can show me the relevant words grouped by their parts of speech. But I am not able to find anything like it after hours of searching. Do anything like this exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="479967" OwnerDisplayName="Learner_1034" LastActivityDate="2023-05-21T03:00:50.247" Title="Is there any dictionary or app that list/orders words by their parts of speech?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-17T07:52:26.097" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a reference/archive of English verbs and their argument structure?  That is to say, how many and what categories of arguments they  require.  And maybe even their theta roles?  I don't expect there to be a comprehensive archive, but maybe there is a list of the most common verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBDHt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBDHt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user477850" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2024-02-21T22:43:11.533" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T23:08:40.933" Title="Is there a reference/archive of English verbs and their argument structure (± their theta roles)?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15605" CreationDate="2023-05-17T14:51:52.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though traditional dictionaries aren't particularly reliable for parts of speech, surely with a dictionary that gives examples it should be straightforward to extract the valency and roles from the examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you want to -select- those verbs with a given valency/role structure (ie you want to produce a list of verbs that require an object and location), that doesn't exist as far as I know, though it would be a good summer project in computational linguistics to write a program to create that from examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm sure one could compile such a list by hand for a given language from relevant research articles and language learning resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T14:51:52.783" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15603" CreationDate="2023-05-21T03:00:50.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, a subscription resource, &amp;quot;Advanced Search&amp;quot; may do what you want. I'm unsure exactly what you're asking, but I expect that because you ask for &amp;quot;anything like this&amp;quot;, my answer is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I recently had occasion to find all &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/search?browseType=sortAlpha&amp;amp;case-insensitive=true&amp;amp;nearDistance=1&amp;amp;ordered=false&amp;amp;page=5&amp;amp;pageSize=20&amp;amp;pos=pronoun&amp;amp;scope=ENTRY&amp;amp;sort=entry&amp;amp;type=dictionarysearch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronouns&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;. At the &amp;quot;Advanced Search&amp;quot; I selected &amp;quot;Pronoun&amp;quot; from the &amp;quot;Part of speech&amp;quot; drop-down list, then clicked the &amp;quot;Search&amp;quot; button. That produced a list of the 285 entries for pronouns in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;. The list can be sorted by entry (alphabetical), &lt;em&gt;frequency&lt;/em&gt;, or date of first known (by &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) attestation of the entry (that is, not necessarily the pronoun) in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting other parameters of the advanced search may allow you to restrict the list to entries for words you consider &amp;quot;relevant&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129681" LastActivityDate="2023-05-21T03:00:50.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15609" CreationDate="2023-05-23T16:15:45.517" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/607789/may-i-have-a-mango-is-it-an-imperative-optative-or-interrogative-sentence&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question opinion-based? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/607789/may-i-have-a-mango-is-it-an-imperative-optative-or-interrogative-sentence&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;May I have a mango!&amp;quot; is it an Imperative, Optative or Interrogative sentence?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing that seems inherently subjective about it, nor does it look particularly likely to inspire opinion-based answers. It's a genuinely interesting question, made the HNQ list, and it has an excellent, fairly-highly-upvoted answer. (I'm aware that reaching the HNQ doesn't necessarily indicate quality, but it feels like most hot grammar-related questions do actually deserve the visibility.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/442938&quot;&gt;In review&lt;/a&gt;, it got one VTC and two 'leave open's, but it was eventually closed outside of the queues. It's being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/443053&quot;&gt;reviewed for reopening&lt;/a&gt; right now, but I'm more interested in why it was closed in the first place. (Comments were locked for a while, so there aren't any clarifications to be found there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What makes it opinion-based?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it was indeed opinion-based, would it have been salvageable through editing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What questions should we reviewers be asking ourselves to determine subjectivity when encountering such questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the questions above are still relevant even if it ends up being reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T16:45:00.390" Title="How is this question opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|support|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15608" CreationDate="2023-05-23T16:45:00.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were three close votes: one each to Opinion-based, to Needs Focus, and to Show Research. The system has to pick one of those as &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T16:45:00.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-23T16:33:25.027" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in finding a present-day pronunciation that I could point to as close to that which was spoken in Shakespeare's era, much as if I were directing one of Shakespeare's plays and were advising performers. I am not seeking information about vocabulary, syntax, or grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="475775" OwnerDisplayName="Paris Finley" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-05-23T20:34:23.297" LastActivityDate="2023-06-19T12:47:43.967" Title="What does recent research tell us about how English sounded in Shakespeare's time?" Tags="|discussion|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15612" CreationDate="2023-05-26T14:14:07.527" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/264239/is-there-any-online-tool-to-read-pronounce-ipa-and-apa-written-words&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question (Is there any online tool to read (pronounce) IPA and APA written words?) has 105k views and 83 upvotes. But it's been closed because it's asking for a resource. Most resource requests are migrated to Meta because they're not actually about the English language itself. Fair enough, but let's do the same to this one, too. It looks like it was closed twice with the comment &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I'm voting to close this question because it belongs on ELU.Meta&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/264239/revisions&quot;&gt;trivial edit&lt;/a&gt; and submitted it for review with the edit summary '&lt;em&gt;Let's migrate this to EL&amp;amp;U Meta (through review or by opening and reclosing with a different reason)&lt;/em&gt;'. It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/443175&quot;&gt;left closed in review&lt;/a&gt;, after which it was re-opened and then protected by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/160305/cascabel-standwithukraine&quot;&gt;@Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_&lt;/a&gt;, who left a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/264239/is-there-any-online-tool-to-read-pronounce-ipa-and-apa-written-words#comment1536573_264239&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to re-open so that the Q could get moved to meta, but apparently, that is no longer possible due to age. Perhaps a friendly mod could migrate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the mods, friendly or not, is @-pingable on that thread, so here's a meta-request for more visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we're at it, can you mods migrate some of the other questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online-resources&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-online-resources-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;online-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag if it's possible and you'd feel it prudent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16939/english-synonym-online-database&quot;&gt;English synonym online database?&lt;/a&gt; (3k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24423/which-thesaurus-best-describes-the-differences-between-several-similar-words&quot;&gt;Which thesaurus best describes the differences between several similar words?&lt;/a&gt; (3k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/93163/is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-idiom-thesaurus-that-delivers-synonymous-phrases&quot;&gt;Is there such a thing as an idiom thesaurus that delivers synonymous phrases?&lt;/a&gt; (17k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/537099/is-there-an-article-searcher-for-a-certain-list-of-words&quot;&gt;Is there an &amp;quot;article searcher&amp;quot; for a certain list of words?&lt;/a&gt; (meh)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194084/dictionary-of-english-constructions&quot;&gt;Dictionary of English constructions&lt;/a&gt; (2k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85058/order-of-definitions-in-dictionaries&quot;&gt;Order of definitions in dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; (8k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233931/what-online-resource-can-i-use-to-find-sentences-that-use-a-word-in-a-specific-p&quot;&gt;What online resource can I use to find sentences that use a word in a specific part of speech?&lt;/a&gt; (1k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/597062/any-online-tool-that-highlights-what-grammatical-case-each-word-in-a-sentence-be&quot;&gt;Any online tool that highlights what grammatical case each word in a sentence belongs to?&lt;/a&gt; (meh)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23322/does-an-online-tool-exist-that-can-find-words-of-a-certain-length-given-an-input&quot;&gt;Does an online tool exist that can find words of a certain length given an input of certain characters?&lt;/a&gt; (3k views)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-05-27T07:24:29.377" Title="Can we migrate 'Is there any online tool to read (pronounce) IPA and APA written words?' and its like to Meta?" Tags="|support|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15611" CreationDate="2023-05-26T15:36:01.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Too old to migrate&amp;quot;, unfortunately, all of them, even for elected mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, the SE staff mods could, but unlikely they would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to incorporate any useful data from those into our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/50044&quot;&gt;list of resources&lt;/a&gt; wiki on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/10249/309993&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After 60 days, migrations can only be performed by Stack Exchange employees. These are performed only in very, &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; rare procedural cases and are usually not done on request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-05-27T07:24:29.377" LastActivityDate="2023-05-27T07:24:29.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15615" CreationDate="2023-05-29T11:45:31.720" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question was posted not long ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/608199/causative-structures-have-object-ing-form&quot;&gt;Causative Structures: have + object + ing-form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question interested me so I started working on an answer. Before finishing my answer, I saw that the question had been deleted by the post author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I would have been able to add a comment encouraging the author to retract the deletion. Why is this not possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="159691" LastEditDate="2023-05-29T17:50:12.413" LastActivityDate="2023-05-29T17:50:12.413" Title="Why is it not possible to comment on questions deleted by the post author?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15614" CreationDate="2023-05-29T11:56:58.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer relevant to this site is that it's a network restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments disabled on deleted / locked posts / reviews&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can comment on deleted posts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333308/are-moderators-no-longer-able-to-add-comments-on-deleted-posts&quot;&gt;Relevant MSE post&lt;/a&gt;. However, I would use this only very sparingly: there are very few reasons to contact a user after they've deleted a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility of extending that commenting ability to 10k users was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/133734/184638&quot;&gt;raised in 2012&lt;/a&gt; but it doesn't appear to have got anywhere. I copied the &amp;quot;disabled&amp;quot; line from a site where I have 10k rep but not 20k. As you do have 20k on ELU, I guess it hasn't been extended to 20k users either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MSE is probably the best place to raise this particular issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-05-29T11:56:58.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15614" CreationDate="2023-05-29T12:18:40.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is purely to make moderation easier. Though I know you want to be encouraging, there are other people who would use this ability to be discouraging. Deleted posts can't be monitored by most of the community, so any objectionable comments might not be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can comment on any post — including deleted and locked ones. I've done so here, though the chance of this user coming back to respond is slim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why non-moderators can't create private chat rooms or send private messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-05-29T12:18:40.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15500" CreationDate="2023-06-01T15:46:10.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Stack Exchange changes their mind: “Do not ban AI answers”&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;31 May 2023&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by the most recent policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/diktat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diktat&lt;/a&gt; announced by Stack Exchange, AI generated answers are no longer to be unilaterally deleted, and users who make use of this tool will no longer be automatically suspended. There are caveats but generally speaking, answers sourced by AI Chat GPT are not forbidden by the company and moderators are encouraged (is that the right word?) to refrain suspending users who are only &lt;em&gt;suspected&lt;/em&gt; of copying several answers from LLMs (Large Language Models).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389582/what-is-the-network-policy-regarding-ai-generated-content&quot;&gt;What is the network policy regarding AI Generated content?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few of the most significant changes in policy are listed below. The emphasis in bold are mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, internal evidence strongly suggests that the overapplication of suspensions for AI-generated content may be turning away a large number of legitimate contributors to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to help mitigate the issue, we've asked moderators to apply a very strict standard of evidence to determining whether a post is AI-authored when deciding to suspend a user. &lt;strong&gt;This standard of evidence excludes the use of moderators' best guesses based on users' writing styles and behavioral indicators&lt;/strong&gt;, because we could not validate that these indicators are actually successfully identifying AI-generated posts when they are written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and further…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We've reminded moderators that suspensions&lt;/strong&gt; (and typically mod messages as well) &lt;strong&gt;are for real, verifiable malfeasance only&lt;/strong&gt;, and should not be enacted on the basis of hunches, guesses, intuition, or unverified heuristics. Therefore, we are not confident that either GPT detectors or best-guess heuristics can be used to definitively identify suspicious content for the purposes of suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How moderators, or anyone else for that matter, is supposed to verify whether an answer has been entirely or partially copied from ChatGPT has not been communicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, before flagging content which was likely copied and pasted from ChatGPT, I would first check the author's previous posts. If their previous efforts were, at best, written in broken English or worse, semi-literate, it was a strong indicator that this new content–always in flawless English and &lt;em&gt;always unattributed&lt;/em&gt;–was not original. It goes without saying, this method was impractical for &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; contributors to the site; however, if their content consisted of multiple answers posted in the space of an hour or little more, it was a persuasive gauge that the answers could not be original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify–as far as I'm aware–it is impossible to Google search content generated by ChatGPT because this content does not appear in searches.  Moreover, AI detection tools simply do not work.  A few hours ago I copied and pasted two answers by two different users, answers which were deleted by EL&amp;amp;U mods because copied verbatim from ChatGPT, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://crossplag.com/ai-content-detector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AI detector tool&lt;/a&gt;–which is itself powered by AI–confidently said that these two answers were 98% and 99%, respectively, created by a human. But both users were suspended for a month, and since then one has deleted their SE account while the other has not returned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. You have to create an account at the AI detector website if you want more accurate results. I chose not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-06-01T19:18:02.693" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T19:18:02.693" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-06T00:14:33.553" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/608464/word-for-a-person-with-the-trappings-but-only-the-trappings-of-intelligence&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate.  I have edited to add a couple of paragraphs explaining why I do not think the alleged duplicate is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief:  I am asking for a word that describes a person (possibly extremely knowledgeable) who makes arguments (possibly citing all of that accurate knowledge) that are highly articulate but actually make no logical sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate seems to be asking for a person who is not knowledgeable, but pretends to be.   That is not at all the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One difference is that I want a word that implies &amp;quot;articulate&amp;quot;; I don't think the duplicate is asking for that.  Another difference is that I want a word that applies even when the person is highly knowledgeable; I don't think the duplicate is asking for that.  Another difference is that I want a word that applies even when the speaker has no intent to deceive; I think the duplicate (or the posts around it) largely do assume some intent to deceive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481285" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T15:50:51.357" Title="Request for reopening" Tags="|discussion|single-word-requests|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15618" CreationDate="2023-06-06T00:48:21.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The duplicate is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; asking about a person who “pretends” to be knowledgeable but isn’t. There is no pretending going on, so it is not trickery: it is self-ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/268481/word-for-someone-who-acts-like-an-expert-but-who-has-very-little-knowledge/268505#comment593080_268481&quot;&gt;“An ultracrepidarian is unaware that he has given advice on matters above his expertise (hence the name), and the morosoph is as clueless about his own foolishness as any other sophomore.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any other ultracrepidarian, ChatGPT does not even &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; that it does not know what it is talking about. It just sounds like it does, but it is unaware that it is confabulating other people’s words into hallucinations that merely  &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; reasonable to the unknowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T00:48:21.563" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-07T18:34:17.177" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;The headline reason for this post is to ask for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/608536/each-other-s-work-or-each-other-s-works&quot;&gt;Each other’s work or each other’s works?&lt;/a&gt; to be reopened, but if possible I'd also like to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to believe &amp;quot;lack of research&amp;quot; could meaningfully be cited as a closevote reason. I personally was quite surprised to discover from NGrams that even with the more straightforward context &lt;em&gt;They touched each other's &lt;strong&gt;nose/s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the plural is preferred (where I would probably have gone for singular &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the actual context cited by OP was far more complicated, given that &lt;em&gt;He's a great artist! I really like his &lt;strong&gt;work/s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; carries almost &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same sense regardless of the plurality, whereas it would be nonsensical to say &lt;em&gt;She's got a great face for a model! I really like her &lt;strong&gt;noses&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that I don't think my comments under the question really &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; much. Since I personally would use singular in both cases anyway, I'm probably not the best person to explain why most people &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; do the same as me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastActivityDate="2023-06-09T10:44:34.090" Title="Yet Another Reopen Request (&quot;Yarr!&quot; in pirate-speak! :)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15621" CreationDate="2023-06-08T06:49:33.047" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was closed for lack of evidence of research, and even reveiewed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 12 hours ago and left it closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Original close reason(s) were not resolved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original close reason &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; hasn't been resolved, so the question is closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could improve the question by including your Ngram research. In fact your question here would be a good addition to the other one, with a link to the Ngram included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally was quite surprised to discover from NGrams that even with the more straightforward context &lt;em&gt;They touched each other's &lt;strong&gt;nose/s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the plural is preferred (where I would probably have gone for singular &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the actual context cited by OP was far more complicated, given that &lt;em&gt;He's a great artist! I really like his &lt;strong&gt;work/s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; carries almost &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same sense regardless of the plurality, whereas it would be nonsensical to say &lt;em&gt;She's got a great face for a model! I really like her &lt;strong&gt;noses&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've done the research. Fix the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2023-06-08T10:49:14.130" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T10:49:14.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15621" CreationDate="2023-06-09T09:41:16.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can normally find a redeeming feature in the meagrest of questions, enough to usually keep the question open. Not here, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;each other&lt;/em&gt; component of the question is a red herring. The uncountable noun &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; and the countable noun &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; can be used more or less interchangeably when referring to the creative output of an individual. Thus either of the following is fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like all of Van Gough's work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like all of Van Gough's works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are umpteen questions about interchangeable countable and uncountable versions of different nouns on the site. And if not, this really does belong on ELL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might be a question, is what would happen if the noun involved was a clear count noun. In other words if it was a noun like &lt;em&gt;nose.&lt;/em&gt; However, it isn't&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Or wasn't when this answer was originally posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2023-06-09T10:44:34.090" LastActivityDate="2023-06-09T10:44:34.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-15T11:44:09.363" Score="6" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in finding books that explain English grammar (as much of it and in as much depth as possible), written by scholars from the late 17th/early 18th century. Which do you recommend? Could you please provide a link e.g. to a pdf, where they can be read online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found three books from this period: Joseph Aickin's &lt;em&gt;The English grammar&lt;/em&gt; (1693), Guy Miège's &lt;em&gt;The English grammar&lt;/em&gt; (1688), and Christopher Cooper's &lt;em&gt;Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae&lt;/em&gt; (1685), but I couldn't find them online. Could you please provide links to where I can read them, preferably the original versions, rather than reprints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also interested in finding books about English phonology, likewise written by English late 17th/early 18th century scholars. Could you please recommend some, and provide links to them (preferably original versions)? If books about English phonology didn't exist then, please provide links to phonology books that are as close to that time period as possible. Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481895" OwnerDisplayName="high-strung_violin" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T18:14:00.420" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T18:14:00.420" Title="Where can I find books from the late 17th/early 18th century about English grammar and phonology?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15624" CreationDate="2023-06-15T19:12:58.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rudiments_of_English_Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rudiments of English Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Joseph Priestly, first published in 1761&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pdf version, edition 1772, is downloadable from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/rudimentsenglis00priegoog/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Greenwood,_James&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Royal English Grammar: Containing what is Necessary to the Knowledge of the English Tongue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by James Greenwood. First published in 1711; 2nd edition, 1722; 3rd edition, 1729; the 4th edition, 1737, is in the link below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/royalenglishgra00greegoog/page/n16/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;downloadable from Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-06-15T19:50:02.023" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T19:50:02.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15624" CreationDate="2023-06-16T05:07:53.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although Google Books and Hathitrust report multiple copies of both Aickin's grammar and Miège's grammar, none of the copies are available for reading in full on those sites. It is unclear to me what theory of copyright applies to books written more than 300 years ago, but evidently these sites are sufficiently cowed by some claimant to refrain from including readable copies of either book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand  a number seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century books that address English grammar (as the term was then understood) either centrally or tangentially are available online. Here, arranged chronologically, are some that may be of interest to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brinsley, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=53cWAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Brinsley%22+grammar&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwinj_n2ksb_AhX5PkQIHXJrDn0Q6AF6BAgDEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Brinsley%22%20grammar&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ludus Literarius: Or, The Grammar Schoole&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1627)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Butler, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=SnySAt0gM8IC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjVzbiGiMb_AhXGMDQIHU6lCkMQ6AF6BAgEEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Grammar, or The Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Words, in the English Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1633)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jonson, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nVxRAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwir0M3misb_AhUoBDQIHZ-EB9g4ChDoAXoECA8QAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1640)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Daines, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=tsQxAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Orthoepia+Anglicana%22+Daines&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiQjqSilMb_AhVHBDQIHY6XA6gQuwV6BAgFEAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Orthoepia%20Anglicana%22%20Daines&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Orthoepia Anglicana: or, the First Principall Part of the English Grammar, Teaching the Art of Right Speaking and Pronouncing English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1640) [English text begins after an 88-page introduction in German]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wharton, &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A65598.0001.001/1:5?ALLSELECTED=1;c=eebo;c=eebo2;g=eebogroup;rgn=div1;singlegenre=All;sort=datea;subview=detail;type=simple;view=fulltext;xc=1;q1=English+Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English-grammar, or, The Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Words in the English-tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1654) [Early English Books Online transcription]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fox, &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A40123.0001.001/1:3?c=eebo;c=eebo2;g=eebogroup;rgn=div1;view=fulltext;xc=1;q1=English+Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Battle-Door for Teachers &amp;amp; Professors to Learn Singular &amp;amp; Plural You to Many, and Thou to One, Singular One, Thou, Plural Many, You&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1660) [Early English Books Online transcription]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Howell, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NE1gAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA21&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi_7o6njMb_AhXaEDQIHUg4By84ZBDoAXoECAsQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A New English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1662)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Walker, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=eP1mAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22treatise+of+English+particles%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjHzeW__Mb_AhU7HTQIHXAZD10Q6AF6BAgJEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22treatise%20of%20English%20particles%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Treatise of English Particles: Shewing Much of the Variety of Their Significations and Uses in English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1663)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wilkins, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BCCtZjBtiEYC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Essay+Towards+a+Real+Character%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjYj_-J5Mb_AhUdIDQIHdfNCtoQ6AF6BAgJEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Essay%20Towards%20a%20Real%20Character%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1668)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Strong, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rZhkAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA4&amp;amp;dq=%22England%27s+perfect+school-master%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjt1o_P_cb_AhUAIDQIHYAKDRUQ6AF6BAgJEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22England%27s%20perfect%20school-master%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;England's Perfect School-Master: or, Directions for Exact Spelling, Reading, and Writing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1676)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dalgarno, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TepmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP11&amp;amp;dq=%22Didascalocophus%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjq0Zrk2cb_AhUOHDQIHdANDfwQ6AF6BAgHEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Didascalocophus%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Mans Tutor, to which is added a Discourse of the Nature of Double Consonants&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1680)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=f_pmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA5&amp;amp;dq=grammar+%22english+tongue%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjZ8bqX4sb_AhUDIX0KHUf4D344KBDoAXoECAEQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=grammar%20%22english%20tongue%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Compendious School-Master: Teaching the English-Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1687)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Miège, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=58BZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq=%22Mi%C3%A8ge%22&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=%22particles%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1688) [searchable snippet view only]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jones, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gmwCAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22Practical+phonography%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj3g4iF-8b_AhUsADQIHU8-DzEQ6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Practical%20phonography%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Practical Phonography: Or, the New Art of Rightly Speling and Writing Words by the Sound Thereof&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1701)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A.N., &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=HxFNAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwir0M3misb_AhUoBDQIHZ-EB9g4ChDoAXoECAgQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Scholar Compleat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1706)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greenwood, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_essay_towards_a_practical_English_Gra/arJWAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;pg=PA36&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1711)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brightland, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ql1iAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP16&amp;amp;dq=grammar+%22english+tongue%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwin6Iun4Mb_AhXvGzQIHdV9AQU4ChDoAXoECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=grammar%20%22english%20tongue%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Grammar of the English Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, third edition (1711)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Swift, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=5FMJAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=grammar+%22english+tongue%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwin6Iun4Mb_AhXvGzQIHdV9AQU4ChDoAXoECAkQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=grammar%20%22english%20tongue%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, second edition (1712)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hbNWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&amp;amp;dq=%22Bellum+Grammaticale%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiFgu674cb_AhVDIX0KHT4NCnoQ6AF6BAgEEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Bellum%20Grammaticale%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bellum Grammaticale: or The Grammatical Battel Royal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1712)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maittaire, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0UkDfyq0NJsC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwir0M3misb_AhUoBDQIHZ-EB9g4ChDoAXoECAsQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Grammar: Or, An Essay on the Art of Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1712)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elstob, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=FodFAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Rudiments+of+English+Grammar+Elstob&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwihjKu1-cb_AhXFATQIHTg1CUsQ6AF6BAgGEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Rudiments%20of%20Grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1715)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greenwood, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=kLJWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA79&amp;amp;dq=%22nary+a%22+or&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjhho25zOTrAhXmHjQIHXyaBqgQ6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22nary%20a%22%20or&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1729)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Low, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=vUZgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjVzbiGiMb_AhXGMDQIHU6lCkMQ6AF6BAgDEAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Grammar Reformd into a Small Compass and Easy Method&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1732)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greenwood, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=m29XAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=%22english+grammar%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwir0M3misb_AhUoBDQIHZ-EB9g4ChDoAXoECAwQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22english%20grammar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Royal English Grammar: Containing What Is Necessary to the Knowledge of the English Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1737)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="36232" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T06:44:56.027" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T06:44:56.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-18T18:09:51.447" Score="3" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For future reference, how was this determined to be ChatGPT?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0b35.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0b35.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think only 10K users can see:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/608960/can-one-say-take-an-integral-instead-of-calculate-an-integral-what-other-op&quot;&gt;Can one say &amp;quot;take an integral&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;calculate an integral&amp;quot;? What other options are there?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10K confidential (Argha) deleted answer (suspected ChatGPT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the phrase &amp;quot;take an integral&amp;quot; is not a commonly used alternative to the more standard phrase &amp;quot;calculate an integral.&amp;quot; While it may be used in Russian or in certain contexts, it is not widely recognized or used in English-speaking mathematical or scientific communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to discussing integrals in English, the phrases &amp;quot;calculate an integral,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;evaluate an integral,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;find an integral&amp;quot; are more commonly used and widely understood. These phrases convey the action of determining the value of an integral or finding its antiderivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some alternatives for discussing integrals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calculate an integral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evaluate an integral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find the integral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Solve the integral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determine the value of the integral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compute the integral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrate the function&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antidifferentiate the function&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These alternatives capture the various ways of expressing the process of working with integrals in English. It's always recommended to use the terminology that is most commonly understood and accepted within the specific context or community you are communicating with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Were there certain markers or tells that indicated GPT...or was this just &amp;quot;gut feeling&amp;quot;... Because gut feeling is not quantifiable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My intention is to identify ChatGPT answers so that we can flag them in the future.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160305" LastEditorUserId="160305" LastEditDate="2023-06-20T20:48:33.643" LastActivityDate="2023-06-27T12:28:36.687" Title="Recognizing generic ChatGPT posts" Tags="|discussion|deleted-posts|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15610" CreationDate="2023-06-19T12:47:43.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could certainly do worse than consulting David Crystal's &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-dictionary-of-original-shakespearean-pronunciation-9780199668427?cc=gb&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book has &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/booksites/content/9780199668427/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a companion website&lt;/a&gt;  where you can listen to recordings and stuff like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2023-06-19T12:47:43.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15627" CreationDate="2023-06-19T16:35:35.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you run this answer through &lt;a href=&quot;https://zerogpt.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zero GPT,&lt;/a&gt; it will claim that the text is from ChatGPT/AI. These tools are not foolproof, but it doesn't matter, because the answer shows no research and is generally low quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228732" LastEditorUserId="228732" LastEditDate="2023-06-19T19:47:04.063" LastActivityDate="2023-06-19T19:47:04.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15627" CreationDate="2023-06-20T06:35:36.483" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/80039/colleenv&quot;&gt;ColleenV&lt;/a&gt; has commented usefully:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it obvious? It's vague, overly verbose and too formal for the context. It reads like a grade school essay instead of an answer by someone who has actual expertise. If you want to take an AI generated answer and make it pass for human-written, you need to have a human who understands the topic write most of it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15627/recognizing-generic-chatgpt-posts#comment63782_15627&quot;&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[It's not about] the level of writing, [what's relevant is] the structure. It also somewhat resembles a beauty pageant interview answer... Restate the question, yammer on vaguely to try to answer the question in the most generic inoffensive way possible while trying to avoid being obviously wrong, then summarize with the &amp;quot;takeaway&amp;quot; point that hopefully reminds people what the question was since they're now lost in a fog of verbosity and vagueness. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15627/recognizing-generic-chatgpt-posts#comment63788_15627&quot;&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other specific “tells” in this answer as well, which I'm not going to enumerate for the reason implied in my own &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15627/recognizing-generic-chatgpt-posts#comment63779_15627&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Dear moderators, Please tell us how you detected this so that the unscrupulous can defeat those methods and make it much harder for you. Thanks.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Websites do exist that claim to be able to determine whether a text is generated or not, even providing a stated degree of certainty, but while they can provide a data point in any assessment, they are not entirely reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-06-20T14:22:28.360" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T14:22:28.360" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15636" CreationDate="2023-06-24T02:03:35.813" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/journalism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;journalism&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;journalism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-journalism-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;journalism&lt;/a&gt; tag for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a piece of journalism I want to write, and want advice, but I don't know where to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482413" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-06-30T21:26:08.377" LastActivityDate="2023-06-30T21:26:14.833" Title="What is the Journalism tag used for?" Tags="|discussion|support|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15627" CreationDate="2023-06-27T12:28:36.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background: I have more than 1,200 helpful flags on Stack Overflow specifically around GPT/AI/LLM answers (12 declines, and a handful more that were marked &amp;quot;Helpful&amp;quot; but not acted on).  Since the strike, I've identified several hundred more on SO, many of which I've commented on pointing out the policy, after which &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; users self-deleted their post.  I maintain a &amp;quot;Save&amp;quot; list of likely ChatGPT answers on each of the sites I frequent, and on SO, that list is closing in on 3,000.  I also have 100 or so on Ask Ubuntu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention is to identify ChatGPT answers so that we can flag them in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @AndrewLeach pointed out in the comments, disclosing how we detect AI-generated content, unfortunately, enables some unscrupulous users to try to avoid these heuristics in the future.  Most of us who do have a good understanding of how to spot them (or at least think we do) try to keep our methods under wraps for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, without disclosing any &amp;quot;trade secrets&amp;quot;, as @AzorAhai-him also pointed out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference, how was this determined to be ChatGPT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans excel at pattern recognition :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd amend that to &amp;quot;most&amp;quot; humans, personally, but yes, this is essentially the best method for learning what ChatGPT/AI/LLM answers look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply start copying and pasting some of the questions here into ChatGPT (and/or Bing Chat and/or Google Bard) and read the answers.  You'll fairly quickly start to notice the style and common patterns.  Even when users attempt to edit that out of their answers (or use creative prompts), it's still possible (although often more difficult) to spot the patterns, especially as the amount of text available to analyze (e.g., multiple answers/posts) increases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting that ChatGPT has a very different style for &amp;quot;code&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;technical&amp;quot; answers as compared to &amp;quot;expository&amp;quot; ones.  So the bulk of what we see on Stack Overflow will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; exhibit the same patterns that you'll see here.  I'd probably be pretty bad at spotting GPT answers here, in all reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481088" LastActivityDate="2023-06-27T12:28:36.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-29T18:01:04.917" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I the only on ELU whose icons are all shifted, some to the point that it is difficult to tell which is which?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/390757&quot;&gt;The issue has been raised on META&lt;/a&gt; where they mention a temporary problem when new SE sites are launched, but the problem has been going on for quite a few days now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this issue being fixed?  First time I’ve seen this in years actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of today all icons are back to normal! Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-07-10T12:46:15.453" LastActivityDate="2023-07-10T12:46:15.453" Title="Are crazy icons here to stay?" Tags="|support|bug|status-completed|design|hot-network-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15631" CreationDate="2023-06-30T21:26:14.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going through most of the questions in that tag, they fall into a few groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Terms used by journalists/terms related to journalism:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333474/is-there-a-word-that-describes-when-an-editor-sends-some-copy-back-to-be-altered&quot;&gt;Is there a word that describes when an editor sends some copy back to be altered?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/186272/the-meaning-of-did-not-immediately-respond-to-requests-for-comment&quot;&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;did not immediately respond to requests for comment&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340485/journalistic-term-for-front-page-promotional-strip&quot;&gt;Journalistic term for front-page promotional strip&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/367689/term-a-sheet-something-to-prove-you-are-a-published-journalist-writer&quot;&gt;Term a &amp;#39;sheet something&amp;#39; to prove you are a published journalist/writer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/426115&quot;&gt;Wolﬀ ’s sweetening the beat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462143/the-proper-name-for-a-story-with-photos&quot;&gt;The proper name for a “story with photos”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417054/is-there-a-word-for-a-question-asked-despite-knowing-the-answer-but-meant-to-el&quot;&gt;Is there a word for a question asked despite knowing the answer, but meant to elicit a response for the sake of the audience?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/448378/origin-of-the-interjection-shock-horror&quot;&gt;Origin of the interjection &amp;quot;shock horror&amp;quot;!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phenomena seen in print&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389598/conventions-of-abbreviations-of-pages-pp-for-academic-journal-purposes&quot;&gt;Conventions of abbreviations of pages (pp.), for academic/journal purposes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/411520/strange-omission-of-to-be-in-the-onion-headlines&quot;&gt;Strange Omission of &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot; in The Onion Headlines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431725/the-origin-of-the-current-use-of-readout-in-reporting-political-news&quot;&gt;The origin of the current use of &amp;#39;readout&amp;#39; in reporting political news&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451821/origins-of-the-editorial-we-and-its-counterpart-the-editorial-i&quot;&gt;Origins of the &amp;#39;editorial we&amp;#39; and its counterpart, the &amp;#39;editorial I&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/469217/media-writing-beginning-sentences-with-coordinating-conjunctions&quot;&gt;Media writing: beginning sentences with coordinating conjunctions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/527444/journalese-verb-tenses&quot;&gt;Journalese verb tenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Random tagging&lt;/strong&gt;, occasionally from an OP who found the term in a newspaper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/607519/why-represent-percentages-with-pc-rather-than&quot;&gt;Why represent percentages with &amp;quot;pc&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;%&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/587687/is-there-a-name-for-separating-two-items-with-comma-when-listing-them&quot;&gt;Is there a name for separating two items with comma when listing them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/540971/how-can-i-attribute-an-entire-paragraph-to-a-source&quot;&gt;How can I attribute an entire paragraph to a source?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/534276/what-are-the-differences-between-practical-implications-insightful-implications&quot;&gt;What are the differences between practical implications, insightful implications, and limitations of a research study?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/530313/prop-up-the-table&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Prop up the table&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/404916/are-there-any-style-guides-that-dictate-the-use-of-on-at-amazon-and-other-web&quot;&gt;Are there any style guides that dictate the use of &amp;quot;on/at Amazon&amp;quot; (and other web platforms). If so, what are they and what&amp;#39;s the reasoning behind it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/340140/what-does-dlrs-mean-as-the-4th-most-common-word-in-10-000-news-articles&quot;&gt;What does DLRS Mean as the 4th Most Common Word in ~10,000 News Articles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/379870/what-is-the-origin-of-pratfall&quot;&gt;What is the origin of &amp;quot;pratfall?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/379873/what-effect-is-the-writer-trying-to-create-with-the-use-of-bigly&quot;&gt;What effect is the writer trying to create with the use of &amp;quot;bigly?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your question about asking for advice, @&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/282363/jsw29&quot;&gt;jsw29&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15631/what-is-the-journalism-tag-used-for?cb=1#comment63808_15631&quot;&gt;wrote in a comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing advice is generally outside the scope of this site, unless it concerns some very specific, narrow problem. The tag has not been used much, so there is no well-established practice its use; it was probably intended for the questions that seek analysis of the vocabulary and syntax of English used in journalism, in so far as they are different from what can be seen in other settings (i.e. the questions about what is sometimes referred to as 'journalese').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is more about creating an effect or writing journalism in general, and less about the &lt;em&gt;English Language&lt;/em&gt;, I suggest posting on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt; as an alternative. They also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/journalism&quot;&gt;[Journalism]&lt;/a&gt; tag, for which the excerpt reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for questions about writing practices relating to journalism, such as style guides, ethics and ways to publish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question falls under that scope, it's far likelier to be on-topic there than it is here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-06-30T21:26:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15635" CreationDate="2023-06-30T22:51:59.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390757/sites-icons-appear-shifted-wrong-sites-icons-are-appearing&quot;&gt;MSE post&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/390757/3&quot;&gt;now marked as being&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-status-completed-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;, as of four hours ago, and the icons look normal again. (The bug was a byproduct of a new site, PLDI, &lt;a href=&quot;https://langdev.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/379/leaving-private-beta-and-initial-pro-tempore-moderator-election&quot;&gt;leaving private Beta&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think this has been fixed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-06-30T22:51:59.077" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-02T17:51:00.770" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/609503/german-singular-volk-in-english-das-volk-ist-mir-zum-kotzen-the-people-m&quot;&gt;German Singular &amp;quot;Volk&amp;quot; in English: &amp;quot;Das Volk ist mir zum Kotzen&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;The people make me sick&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The people makes me sick&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed, and the last comment tells what the plural and the singular of &amp;quot;to make&amp;quot; looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The people&amp;quot; is plural, so they &amp;quot;make me sick.&amp;quot; In the singular &amp;quot;My aide makes me sick.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are many &amp;quot;peoples&amp;quot; in this world, but just &amp;quot;one German people&amp;quot; (which is meant by the king), then this people must be singular. But another comment tells that &amp;quot;the people&amp;quot; is always plural:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the short answer is that &amp;quot;people&amp;quot; is always plural in English, even if it's translated from a singular in another language. Such adjustments are common in translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just a misunderstanding? Can the question be reopened or at least be moved to English Learners SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the question with more or less the same remark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out that the question cannot be moved since there is already a question like this at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/138013/is-people-plural&quot;&gt;Is people plural?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading that, I still do not know for sure how to put the German sentence in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Das Volk ist mir zum Kotzen&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;The people make me sick&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The people makes me sick&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it could be that speaking of a &amp;quot;Volk&amp;quot; is just like speaking of the plural people, not of &amp;quot;the [German] people&amp;quot;, so that the king just means the &amp;quot;class of the people&amp;quot; as such, something that is not the same as the German people, but something that is near to &amp;quot;the common people&amp;quot; or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="412698" LastEditorUserId="412698" LastEditDate="2023-07-03T18:24:53.897" LastActivityDate="2023-07-03T18:24:53.897" Title="The singular of &quot;the peoples&quot; is &quot;the people&quot;. Like in &quot;the essence of a people&quot;. Was the question closed after a misunderstanding?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|question-closure|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15640" CreationDate="2023-07-06T14:23:26.420" Score="3" ViewCount="4363" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NY Times dialect quiz from 2014&lt;/a&gt; and I'm thinking it would be fun to do as a group at work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the NY Times one isn't free; are there any good free ones out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416845" OwnerDisplayName="BeeePollen" LastActivityDate="2023-07-07T15:36:02.190" Title="Good free dialect quizzes?" Tags="|discussion|american-english|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15639" CreationDate="2023-07-07T15:36:02.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/american-accent-quiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American accent quiz from Babbel&lt;/a&gt; - short, some pronunciation, no map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://brainfall.com/quizzes/american-dialect-quiz/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American accent quiz from Brainfail&lt;/a&gt; - similar to Babbel's but with morketing ads and an email signup&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewziegler/dialect-quiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American accent quiz from Buzzfeed&lt;/a&gt; - similar to Babbel's but 40 questions (longer but more accurate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/the-great-english-dialect-quiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British accent quiz from Buzzfeed&lt;/a&gt; - similar to the American Buzzfeed quiz but with British choices&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey/user/register&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Survey of World Englishes&lt;/a&gt; - more than US, register with email/password&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/7-best-dialect-quizzes-is-your-accent-american-british-canadian-australian.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexicon Valley/Gretchen McCulloch collection of of quizzes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/yankeetest.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Southerner or a Yankee?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.squidoo.com/british-slang-quiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scotland.org/quizzes/scots-language-quiz/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scottish English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inyourpocket.com/northern-ireland/belfast/How-till-spake-Norn-Iron-A-guide-to-local-phrases_70619f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Northern Irish English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://geekmom.com/2013/12/55-canadianisms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canadian English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/accents/quiz/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Montreal English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://alldownunder.com/australian-quiz/aussie-slang-2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gonewzealand.about.com/od/About-New-Zealand/fl/New-Zealand-Language-Accent-and-Pronunciation.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Zealand English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NYTimes American Dialect Quiz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/british-irish-dialect-quiz.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NYTimes British-Irish Dialect Quiz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the actual results and maps that the American quizzes are based on: &lt;a href=&quot;http://dialect.redlog.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harvard (or UVM) Dialect Survey&lt;/a&gt;. The original survey occurred and was published around 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/quiz/comments/14rmtbm/good_free_dialect_quizzes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A similar question was asked on Reddit&lt;/a&gt; but with no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/2372/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Obligatory XKCD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-07-07T15:36:02.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15646" CreationDate="2023-07-12T21:12:42.767" Score="8" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today an editor added the source of every link I included in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/609946/44619&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; of mine. They are a total of six links, only one contains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigache#Names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote&lt;/a&gt;–  fairly extensive–which was clearly attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments below my answer, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/609932/what-on-gods-green-earth-are-pulley-shoes/609946?noredirect=1#comment1543316_609946&quot;&gt;asked a mod&lt;/a&gt;, who had happened to post a helpful but &lt;em&gt;unattributed&lt;/em&gt; comment, whether it was policy for every link to be attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is their &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/609932/what-on-gods-green-earth-are-pulley-shoes/609946?noredirect=1#comment1543293_609946&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; complete with its unsourced hyperlink&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were also called &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED33324&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pikes&lt;/a&gt; for obvious reasons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my comment addressed to them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since when do &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; have to attribute &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;? Excerpts, yes. Quotes, yes. But links? I mean, imagine giving the title of every book that Ily provides a link to. It would look a real mess. (I see from the edit history that the editor, XXX sensibly refrained). Moreover, I don't like the aesthetics, the answer [mine] looks crowded and the links should be on the terms not the sources. I don't have time to sort this out, or to find a compromise, but I'm very disappointed by the (ugly and unwarranted) editing. Unless you can point me where it has become official policy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/609932/what-on-gods-green-earth-are-pulley-shoes/609946?noredirect=1#comment1543316_609946&quot;&gt;@Mari-Lou A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry for that rushed comment, it lacks elegance and diplomacy, but I simply didn't have the time to craft the comment properly. And besides, I was upset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did get a response&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no rule that you have to attribute links (got into the same argument myself elsewhere). However, it may be helpful for the less technically savvy (who don't know how to see the URL without clicking on it). A more elegant solution (or compromise?) would be in-text (e.g., &amp;quot;according to Etymonline…&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; archives, I found the following guidelines, which I quote verbatim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why can people edit my posts? How does editing work?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When should I edit posts?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit, you are welcome to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some common reasons to edit a post are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To fix grammatical or spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so that all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not exactly clear whether an editor who decides to add extra information to hyperlinks is be lauded or not. However, it is puzzling that of the eleven hyperlinks in the OP, whose sources were unnamed, none were touched by the editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the editor please explain why they believed my five &lt;em&gt;hyperlinks&lt;/em&gt; needed to be attributed but not those in the original question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE  13 July 2023&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've edited the answer and struck a balance between reducing the noise but including the sources, and in some cases I've gone into some detail. I especially hated the editor's choice of writing &lt;em&gt;YouTube&lt;/em&gt; next to a link, it was so reductive, but it is an Italian video excerpt and I can see why someone would prefer to lower the volume before clicking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-07-13T21:30:10.280" LastActivityDate="2023-07-18T10:23:47.023" Title="What is EL&amp;U's policy about attributing links?" Tags="|discussion|editing|hyperlinks|attribution|plagiarism|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-13T07:16:54.343" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as I said in the title, I'm wondering if there is a good book which covers basic syntax overall. I've been learning English for fairly a long time, so I don't have a lot of problems holding daily conversations and understanding many parts of books or articles written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the thing is I haven't learned grammar in depth, because I didn't realize the importance of it when I was younger. I was kind of exposed to English content when I was a kid although I grew up in a non-English speaking country, so I could just tell which makes sense and which does not, without knowing why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I have to write something &amp;quot;professional&amp;quot; in English, or want to read a novel which has complicated structured sentences in English, there are some times when I cannot fully express what I want to say or understand the meaning or structure of some sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently re-learning English grammar using GIU Intermediate and Advanced simultaneously, which are really helpful for me, but they do not seem to tackle syntax very much. So I thought it'd be better to have a book that covers syntax and basic structures of sentences so that I can refer to and improve my knowledge in English overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="473066" OwnerDisplayName="Velvet_-Underground" LastEditorUserId="438716" LastEditDate="2023-07-13T08:47:03.083" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T07:28:27.870" Title="Can anyone recommend a book which covers syntax overall?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-13T16:51:16.723" Score="6" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of questions that ask about adjective order, and most of them are closed as dupes of the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt; asked 12+ years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three questions that I'm concerned about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333362/what-is-the-reason-behind-the-royal-order-of-adjectives&quot;&gt;What is the reason behind the royal order of adjectives?&lt;/a&gt; [Q1]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/523085/what-is-the-reason-for-the-royal-order-of-adjective&quot;&gt;What is the reason for the &amp;#39;royal&amp;#39; order of adjectives?&lt;/a&gt;?  [Q2]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/599423/why-do-we-order-our-adjectives-in-certain-ways-big-blue-house-rather-than-b&quot;&gt;Why do we order our adjectives in certain ways: &amp;quot;big, blue house&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;blue, big house&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; [Q3]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these questions ask about the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;history&lt;/em&gt; of the rules, not just the specifics of them- they shouldn't have been closed as duplicates, though some comments say that they may be too linguistic in nature for EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until today, the status of the three questions stood as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Q1] was closed as a duplicate of the old original question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Q3] was closed as a duplicate of the old original question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Q2] was closed as a duplicate of [Q3], even though it's older than [Q3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, [Q1] was re-opened. I edited [Q3] and added it to review with the intention of having it re-closed as a duplicate of [Q1], after which we might get the order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Q2] is a dupe of [Q3] which is a dupe of [Q1]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: [Q3] has not yet been re-closed as a duplicate of [Q1]. I've added this goal in the edit summary, we'll see if it works out that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this meta-question in order to clarify my intent, as well as to seek input: Does this sound like the right way to go about resolving the confusion? Is there any other established guideline to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Turns out that questions can't be closed as dupes of questions without answers, which means that [Q1] has to be closed as a dupe of [Q3].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Q1] and [Q2] are both dupes of [Q3]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems a little unfair because [Q3] is the newest to be posted, so if anyone can figure out a way around this, please share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Q3] and [Q1] are both open right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-07-15T14:21:45.183" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T14:21:45.183" Title="What should be done with the questions that ask about the reason behind adjective order?" Tags="|discussion|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15643" CreationDate="2023-07-14T07:22:42.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Judging by the quality of the English in your question, I doubt that reading a book on syntax would very much improve either your ability to express yourself clearly or your ability to understand the meaning of some of the sentences you read. In the case of the latter, it seems possible that the sentences you have difficulty with may themselves be poorly written in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if you want to improve your knowledge of English syntax in general, I can recommend &lt;em&gt;Analysing English Sentences&lt;/em&gt; by Andrew Radford.  Radford in the preface states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is intended to be suitable for people with little (if any)&#xA;grammatical knowledge and/or experience in linguistics; it is aimed at&#xA;intermediate undergraduates, or graduates in the first year of a&#xA;Masters programme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later chapters are rather demanding and go into more detail than you probably need. But the opening chapters are a very good introduction to the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want advice on writing non-fiction I can recommend William Zinnser's &lt;em&gt;On Writing Well&lt;/em&gt;. According to the &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, it is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a bible for a generation of writers looking for clues to clean, compelling prose&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="11146" LastEditDate="2023-07-14T07:28:27.870" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T07:28:27.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15642" CreationDate="2023-07-18T10:06:35.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A personal view: I generally mention the source of links I use to support facts, but wouldn't usually edit someone else's answer to source their links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an exception, and it happens to occur in your answer - YouTube. I know you're not keen, but some browsers autoplay (I've disabled mine but I know that autoplaying videos trouble some people who haven't disabled it).  So I'd be inclined to highlight the YouTube link, not as attribution, and not in as much detail, but as a warning.  I would do that inline next to the link (&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;In Italy they were called Cracovia (YouTube)&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;) as I feel that's helpful to the reader.  I don't feel a footnote is much use in that case because it's far removed from the link that could cause annoyance, but if you want to add something more like a proper citation, a footnote is quite nice.  And I mean &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; as author, not a random user who happens to have a lot of rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking the actual word or phrase you're defining, as you did originally and in the latest edit as I write this, seems to me a more readable style highlighting (in the link colour) incidental information (the source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48571" LastEditorUserId="48571" LastEditDate="2023-07-18T10:23:47.023" LastActivityDate="2023-07-18T10:23:47.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-18T16:30:16.147" Score="0" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to fix small (but not insignificant) typos on SE without making other edits adding up to six characters. For example, &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; should be &lt;em&gt;thi&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; in a quoted line of a poem that makes no sense if it says &amp;quot;think&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could invisible characters be injected, perhaps at the bottom of the post?&#xA;[⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372442" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-07-19T15:17:43.790" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T13:20:23.527" Title="Kludge to trick SE to allow edits smaller than six characters by injecting invisible characters" Tags="|discussion|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15647" CreationDate="2023-07-18T16:57:18.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who's a low-rep editor on other sites, I sympathize. But, as someone who's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;reviewing this type of edit&lt;/a&gt; (both here and elsewhere), hacks like these are kinda annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a little bit of leeway built in. For questions, changing the title even by a single character will lift the limit for the body text (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/86811&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). Titles are important: Make sure it's good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for other edits, is there really nothing more to do with the post? There are some posts here that might be the pinnacle of writing (except for single character typos, apparently), but usually that's not the case. A lot of people waffle (&amp;quot;so, actually&amp;quot;), a lot of people fluff (&amp;quot;thanks in advance!&amp;quot;), a lot of people over-tense (past perfect when past is fine). This is your opportunity to make minor changes, even substitute out a slightly informal word for a more formal synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/81520/323179&quot;&gt;How to overcome &amp;quot;Edits must be at least 6 characters&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-07-25T13:20:23.527" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T13:20:23.527" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-19T07:19:05.873" Score="-5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was advised by an experienced club member that law is not language. Therefore, it can't be discussed on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483642" OwnerDisplayName="Steve" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T21:02:36.760" Title="Is law language or not language" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2023-07-23T16:00:33.653" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-19T11:48:43.253" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to attend some group classes online to improve my speaking. My goal is to take a test like IELTS or TOEFL. Do you guys know any platform that offers online group classes with a well structured level program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483934" OwnerDisplayName="chemdamned" LastActivityDate="2023-07-19T14:39:13.437" Title="Platform for online group classes" Tags="|discussion|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15649" CreationDate="2023-07-21T20:42:04.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is rather inelegantly worded, and it would be difficult to answer it exactly as formulated, but I take it that what the OP really wants to know is &lt;strong&gt;whether the questions about the features of English language that are peculiar to legal contexts are within the scope of this site&lt;/strong&gt;, and, if not, why not. The OP earlier asked a substantive question about whether the meaning of  a legal prohibition of ‘using a mobile phone’ while driving can cover one’s merely holding the phone without making a call. That question received several downvotes and critical comments, which prompted the OP to ask this meta-question. (The substantive question has, since then, been closed and deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many terms whose meaning in everyday language is vague are explicitly given a precise meaning for legal purposes. A statute may thus have a provision that says something like ‘In this statute, ‘using a mobile phone’ means . . . .’ If that's what the statute says, then that's what the phrase means in that context, notwithstanding the fact that its meaning in other contexts may be broader or narrower. If there is no such provision within the statute, chances are that the courts of the relevant jurisdiction have previously considered the question of whether the prohibition of using a mobile phone covers holding it without making a call, and that they have decided the matter one way or another. That decision then constitutes the precedent that will govern the future court decisions in the same jurisdiction. If there is no such precedent, and a court needs to face the question for the first time, the court will probably look at how similar phrases in similar contexts have been interpreted by the courts before. Somebody who wants to know about all this has to engage in &lt;strong&gt;legal research&lt;/strong&gt;, or hire a lawyer to do the research, and that research has to be jurisdiction-specific. No amount of general knowledge about English language can tell us whether a person can be justifiably punished for holding a phone without making a call, under a statute that prohibits using a mobile phone. That's why such questions are outside the scope of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, of course, does not mean that all law-related question are outside the scope of this site. The boundary between the language of the law and everyday language is not sharp. Legal terminology, for example, often finds its way into news reports and political debates. Because the language of the law changes more slowly than colloquial language, it can sometimes provide insights into the history of the language. The questions that explore the language of the law in such interaction with the language used in other contexts have always been welcome on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions about the highly technical aspects of legal terminology are, however, likely to get better responses on the Law Stack Exchange. It should also be borne in mind that &lt;strong&gt;no Stack Exchange site can provide legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;; some law-related questions are closed because they appear to amount to requests for legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2023-07-21T21:02:36.760" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T21:02:36.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-23T14:02:08.390" Score="2" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what books about English grammar are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the standard ones written for linguists or linguistics students, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the standard ones written for people who are neither linguists nor linguistics students?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="683" OwnerDisplayName="Tim" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2023-07-24T14:48:14.947" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T16:22:03.847" Title="What books about English grammar are the standard for linguists and what for non-linguists?" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-07-24T18:55:47.897" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15655" CreationDate="2023-07-23T16:09:26.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For linguistics-oriented texts, most people here seem to be fans of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cambridge_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum (2002),&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syntactic_Phenomena_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McCawley (2nd ed., 1998),&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Comprehensive_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quirk et al. (1985).&lt;/a&gt; Expect a vigorous debate in the comments section about which is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently reading Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum; I'm not a linguist-in-training, just a nerd with too much free time. I'm not sure if you're even &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to read it in its entirety; it's about 1800 pages and quite dense. Annoyingly, the Kindle edition isn't formatted properly for phone screens, so you have to keep zooming in and out. But it is interesting, if you enjoy extremely thorough discussions of seemingly minor details of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for people uninterested in linguistics, it will depend on your goals. If you're looking to (say) become a more eloquent writer, I don't think grammar textbooks will help you much &lt;em&gt;per se.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastEditorUserId="470858" LastEditDate="2023-07-23T16:14:43.420" LastActivityDate="2023-07-23T16:14:43.420" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15655" CreationDate="2023-07-24T16:16:59.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@alphabet's answer covers professional grammars. The problem with the other category (&amp;quot;people who are neither linguists nor linguistics students&amp;quot;) is that there are no &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; grammar texts for them. That's like asking what is the standard text on vector calculus for people who have no prior math beyond multiplication tables and long division.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anglophone education (excluding ESOL) does not teach students anything about the &lt;strong&gt;sounds&lt;/strong&gt; of the language, nor its actual grammar and usage, because the systems all assume their students are native speakers, and therefore don't have to study &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt;. Far more effort is devoted to &amp;quot;mastering&amp;quot; the complex English spelling system than to the equally complex sound system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for grammar, pseudo-Latin gobbledegook predominates, and teachers whose own teachers have never learned Latin make up their own paraphrases and create their own educational theories. All of this has to be left behind if you really want a book that teaches you something, so in fact you hafta study &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; linguistics just to be able to follow anything that tells the truth about English grammar, because Anglophone students are usually educationally deprived. Not your fault, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that purpose, I recommend either of David Crystal's &lt;em&gt;Cambridge Encyclopedias&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521736501&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;of Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1108437737&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Or both; there's little overlap. Both have good glossaries and references and cover everything, and they're cheap and fun to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastEditorUserId="15299" LastEditDate="2023-07-24T16:22:03.847" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T16:22:03.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15659" CreationDate="2023-07-24T17:14:05.973" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a reliable and comprehensive enough book or source on &lt;strong&gt;word stress rules&lt;/strong&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched the internet and found various interesting web pages, some not comprehensive enough, others with erroneous examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestions and recommandations will be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96423" OwnerDisplayName="balteo" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-07-24T17:19:32.430" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T19:00:55.033" Title="Recommandation for a reliable and comprehensive source on word stress rules in English" Tags="|discussion|resources|pronunciation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15658" CreationDate="2023-07-24T19:00:55.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Erik Fudge's book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/English_Word_Stress/bZTtCQAAQBAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Word-Stress&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (orig. 1984, republished 2015) provides a comprehensive overview of the conventions for word stress in English. There may be better resources since 1984, but I think he provides a volume useful for a non-expert as well as valuable for an expert. He breaks down typical patterns with examples, and he deals with phenomena like compound words, prefixes, and pairs of homonyms with different parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T19:00:55.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-25T05:47:01.017" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/&quot;&gt;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General-purpose dictionaries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The online dictionaries listed here are broadly suitable for native&#xA;speakers, providing major definitions and examples, pronunciations&#xA;(including audio), basic etymology, and some usage notes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learner's dictionaries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_learner%27s_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A learner's dictionary&lt;/a&gt; is geared to the needs of people learning&#xA;English as a foreign or second language, for example, by providing&#xA;notes on usage and common errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what differences in features are between general-purpose and Learner's dictionaries? &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/87507/website-for-indirectly-downloading-a-webpage&quot;&gt;My internet access is restricted&lt;/a&gt;, and can't access a lot of sites, notably Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="683" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T05:47:01.017" Title="What differences are between general-purpose and Learner's dictionaries?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-26T18:06:21.637" Score="3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question used the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reason-why&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reason-why&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reason-why&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-reason-why-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;reason-why&lt;/a&gt; tag for what was really an etymology question, so I retagged it appropriately. (Or at least I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it was appropriate.) Now I'm wondering what the tag is even &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;. It currently has no usage guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's got 25 questions under it, of which the five oldest are about the construction &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;reason why&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there a few other questions under that tag that are rather etymological in nature (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/522110/why-is-it-specifically-a-rainy-day-rather-than-some-other-metaphor-when-you&quot;&gt;Why is it specifically a &amp;quot;rainy day&amp;quot; (rather than some other metaphor) when you need extra money?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188032/why-do-we-refer-to-car-manufacturer-as-make&quot;&gt;Why do we refer to car manufacturer as &amp;#39;Make&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the other questions there ask for explanations of linguistic/dialectal phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of them seem to be random taggings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should we be using this tag for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should its wiki say?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be used in conjunction with &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-etymology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phrase-origin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-origin&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phrase-origin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-phrase-origin-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;phrase-origin&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions that I think could go under that tag, but I'm waiting to see what the community thinks about the tag's use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/603016/where-does-the-subcontinental-usage-of-one-to-mean-named-come-from&quot;&gt;Where does the subcontinental usage of &amp;#39;one&amp;#39; to mean &amp;#39;named&amp;#39; come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/599423/why-do-we-order-our-adjectives-in-certain-ways-big-blue-house-rather-than-b&quot;&gt;Why do we order our adjectives in certain ways: &amp;quot;big, blue house&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;blue, big house&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these and their ilk to be tagged under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reason-why&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reason-why&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reason-why&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-reason-why-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;reason-why&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2024-03-05T17:05:10.613" Title="What is the [reason-why] tag used for?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-27T13:54:59.257" Score="1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;What differences are between these two books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&#xA;Are they both for etymology, similarly to Oxford English Dictionary, or just regular dictionaries, similarly to Oxford Dictionary of English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found them on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+american+heritage+dictionary+of+the+english+language&amp;amp;i=stripbooks-intl-ship&amp;amp;sprefix=The+American+Heritage+Dictionary%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C349&amp;amp;ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="683" LastEditorUserId="683" LastEditDate="2023-07-27T15:03:54.677" LastActivityDate="2023-07-27T15:03:54.677" Title="What differences are between the American Heritage Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-08-03T13:07:12.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15663" CreationDate="2023-07-27T14:40:34.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by Amazon's descriptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0553583220&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary: Fifth Edition&lt;/a&gt; is 70,000 entries and 960 pages, a &amp;quot;concise&amp;quot; version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0547041012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition&lt;/a&gt; is 400,000 entries and 2,112 pages, which puts my use of the word &amp;quot;concise&amp;quot; to describe the other dictionary into perspective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like the content of both might be the same other than the fact that a lot was cut between the two. Both contain illustrations/photographs, etymologies, synonyms, and antonyms. They are &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; dictionaries just like NOAD/ODE (which you mention in the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-07-27T14:40:34.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15667" CreationDate="2023-08-07T20:34:12.500" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to find some samples of English cursive writing along with their typed versions. Where can I find this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for practice purposes: I want to attempt to read the cursive version and look at the typed counterpart if I can't discern a certain word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31143" OwnerDisplayName="living being" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-08-09T14:09:52.423" LastActivityDate="2023-08-09T14:09:52.423" Title="Seeking cursive writing samples along with a typed version" Tags="|support|resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15666" CreationDate="2023-08-07T20:46:22.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't mind using older documents and hands, the Library of Congress &lt;em&gt;By the People&lt;/em&gt; collections offer many handwritten documents that have been transcribed and reviewed by volunteers. Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/completed/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;completed projects&lt;/a&gt; should offer many examples of cursive to interpret alongside their transcription. For instance, here is a partial screenshot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/patton-war-diaries/world-war-ii-diaries-1942-1945/mss35634009/mss35634009-4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of General George Patton's World War II diaries&lt;/a&gt; along with the transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VGXBK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VGXBK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327070" OwnerDisplayName="TaliesinMerlin" LastActivityDate="2023-08-07T20:46:22.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15666" CreationDate="2023-08-07T21:17:37.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (the original second draft)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbW8H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbW8H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9368" OwnerDisplayName="GEdgar" LastActivityDate="2023-08-07T21:17:37.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-12T13:51:06.860" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which reference document can I consult for converting American sentences into British English? Is there a gold standard resource?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="477055" OwnerDisplayName="DYNAMICS" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-08-12T15:33:05.087" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T15:47:21.400" Title="What resources/reference can I use when converting sentences from American English to British English?" Tags="|support|resources|american-english|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15669" CreationDate="2023-08-12T15:32:58.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The default for most of humanity would be resetting your edition of Word to use British English instead of American English. That should create squiggly lines under all your colors and centers and Freedomizationaters. Fix 'em.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that isn't bulletproof. It won't necessary use (eg) &lt;em&gt;whilst&lt;/em&gt; in the right places since Brits actually use &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; all the time. Similarly, it won't know which compounds need hyphens now or figure out that &lt;em&gt;ton&lt;/em&gt; needs to be converted to metric and then respelt &lt;em&gt;tonne&lt;/em&gt; or let you know that people's weights should be in &lt;em&gt;stone&lt;/em&gt; if they're older than  Stephen Fry and vote Tory. It won't remotely help you speak in a regional dialect or actually sound posh. By default, you'll come across as a well-meaning immigrant or an upper middle-class wannabe who watches too many American TV shows instead of proper British television programmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full conversion to Oxbridge would require using a formal style guide like &lt;em&gt;Fowler's&lt;/em&gt;, but that will come along with plenty of rules and distinctions that are dear to the authors' hearts but aren't necessarily actually observed in the wild.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171986" LastEditorUserId="171986" LastEditDate="2023-08-12T15:45:14.730" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T15:45:14.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-13T13:31:18.737" Score="3" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;An experienced user posted this comment under an answer that cited M-W dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say &lt;em&gt;Btw, MW is the worst, most out-of-date dictionary on the planet!&lt;/em&gt;, but GKP regularly sings its virtues in public, and recommends it for students studying English linguistics at Edinburgh. Here is one of his quotes about it: &amp;quot;Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, with its 978 pages of brilliant and clearly explained objective scholarship ...&amp;quot;. You can read that quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/%7Egpullum/usage_game_abstract.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know M-W is one of the most respectable sources regarding the English/American language, and it is one of the source that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available/2574#2574&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt; recommends as reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Merriam-Webster a reliable source or, as the original comment (that the one here is a reply to) suggests, a bad dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159691" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2023-12-07T15:21:39.483" LastActivityDate="2023-12-07T15:21:39.483" Title="Is Merriam Webster dictionary an outdated and unreliable dictionary?" Tags="|support|resources|dictionaries|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15671" CreationDate="2023-08-13T15:03:16.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tangential to the original question, which remains valid, I want to note here that you've misunderstood Araucaria's comment. I don't think Araucaria is anti-Webster, they were responding to a comment from BillJ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/610912/how-to-quantify-hash-browns/610913?noredirect=1#comment1547205_610913&quot;&gt;Original comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can say &amp;quot;two hash browns&amp;quot;, then you can also say &amp;quot;one hash brown&amp;quot;, thus it can only be a normal count noun. Btw, MW is the worst, most out-of-date dictionary on the planet! – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/141248/billj&quot;&gt;BillJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which Araucaria &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/610912/how-to-quantify-hash-browns/610913?noredirect=1#comment1548191_610913&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@BillJ You say &lt;em&gt;Btw, MW is the worst, most out-of-date dictionary on the planet!&lt;/em&gt;, but GKP regularly sings its virtues in public, and recommends it for students studying English linguistics at Edinburgh. Here is one of his quotes about it: &amp;quot;Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, with its 978 pages of brilliant and clearly explained objective scholarship ...&amp;quot;. You can read that quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/%7Egpullum/usage_game_abstract.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. You're on your own with that evaluation, it seems ;-) - &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/76472/araucaria-not-here-any-more&quot;&gt;Araucaria - Not here any more&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth (not much), I don't consider M-W to be outdated or unreliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-08-13T20:45:37.953" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T20:45:37.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15669" CreationDate="2023-08-13T15:47:21.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the concept of 'gold standard' is falling out of fashion. Or even just plain old standard. But&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia Comparison of American and British English&lt;/a&gt; for vocabulary and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia differences between spelling American and British English&lt;/a&gt; just spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are books out their that I would consider much more authoritative but are not exactly reference material (difficult to look things up), for example the excellent &lt;a href=&quot;https://theprodigaltongue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://theprodigaltongue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lynne Murphy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, at least for spelling differences (but not vocabulary) any major online dictionary will tell you for a given word entry if it is primarily British or American (but not Canadian or Australian), and may or may not (ie willy-nilly) give you the alternative in the other variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T15:47:21.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15671" CreationDate="2023-08-13T15:51:35.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No M-W is neither outdated or unreliable. It has an active staff of lexicographers working day and... well day... adding news words, marking old ones as obsolete, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the most reliable American dictionary. It definitely skews towards the American variety, so some distaste could easily be found from non-American users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T15:51:35.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15671" CreationDate="2023-08-13T20:08:48.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can think of to quibble with is the fact that MW uses its own special notation to describe pronunciations, instead of using IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the IPA transcriptions used by Cambridge, Dictionary.com, OxfordLD, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Collins all use separate /ə/ and /ʌ/ symbols when transcribing AmE, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt66Je3o0Qg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a crime.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T20:08:48.420" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-14T07:59:19.710" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: The question has now been reopened. I have added further examples of the group genitive to my answer to the question. This should help to distinguish it further from the hyphenated compound nouns question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/611169/can-you-write-mes-the-possessive&quot;&gt;Can you write &amp;quot;... me&amp;#39;s&amp;quot; (the possessive)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was closed as a duplicate of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4626/how-to-indicate-possession-by-e-g-passers-by-mothers-in-law&quot;&gt;How to indicate possession by e.g. passers-by, mothers-in-law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two question titles alone should be enough evidence that the questions are asking for different information. In the first, the OP is asking about the grammaticality of a possessive phrase ending with &amp;quot;me's&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;The person behind me's...&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the second the OP is asking how to write the genitive form of hyphenated plural noun compounds such as &lt;em&gt;passers-by&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mothers-in-law&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most highly upvoted answer in the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;passers-by&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; question starts: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Mothers-in-law's&amp;quot; is a correct form. I am quoting the rule used in American grammar.&lt;/em&gt; And is simply followed by a blockquote of the rule whose first sentence is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Also add an apostrophe followed by an s to the end of a singular compound noun that ends in any letter except s&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. (No source for the rule is given.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me how site visitors interested in reading an answer to the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The person behind me's...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; question are helped by redirecting them to the only marginally duplicate &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;passers-by&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-08-14T12:55:42.757" LastActivityDate="2023-08-14T12:55:42.757" Title="Request to reopen a closed-as-duplicate question: Can you write &quot;... me's&quot; (the possessive)?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-15T02:15:57.727" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an online service which provides the frequency of a search phrase across all the literature in English that there is. Hopefully billions of lines of text. For example, if the phrase is &amp;quot;cat on a tin roof&amp;quot; then example output could be found 725,819 times. And then a list of documents where it is used as the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The frequency value is useful for me when writing as I could use phrases which are more popular and in many cases can see examples of popular usage. I know that such a tool exists as it was used by a former colleague who was writing a PhD thesis. But I do not recall the name of the online service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485520" OwnerDisplayName="kosmos" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-08-15T17:23:08.037" LastActivityDate="2023-08-15T17:23:08.037" Title="Looking for an online tool which provides a frequency of usage of any search phrase/sentence provided using large corpus of online text" Tags="|support|online-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-15T22:54:08.560" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/611283/why-did-english-take-the-mix-pronunciations-and-spellings-route-instead-of-one&quot;&gt;Why did English take the &amp;quot;mix pronunciations and spellings&amp;quot; route instead of one rule route like French, or separate languages/dialects like Spanish?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1071/why-english-pronunciation-differs-so-much-from-written-language-compared-to-ger&quot;&gt;Why English pronunciation differs so much from written language, compared to German?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question is about &lt;em&gt;where differences in English came from.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked why England &lt;em&gt;then left it like that&lt;/em&gt; and didn't impose one set of rules or keep languages separate. A different, unanswered question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed like people just thought it was too much for then to answer, but why restrict others from trying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 8/16/23: Once again, the question is closed for not being clear, though people clearly understood it. It's about history, why things ended up the way they are, with mixed pronunciations, rather than one, like French or Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user485570" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-08-16T17:48:24.097" LastActivityDate="2023-08-16T17:48:24.097" Title="Question was closed as duplicate but is a different question" Tags="|discussion|question-closure|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15678" CreationDate="2023-08-16T07:29:27.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has had its three votes to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-08-16T07:29:27.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15671" CreationDate="2023-08-16T13:12:35.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a discussion of &lt;strong&gt;apposition&lt;/strong&gt; on this site recently where I quoted in a comment what I thought was a succinct and accurate definition, from M-W:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a grammatical construction in which two or more usually adjacent words, phrases, or clauses (especially nouns or noun equivalents) that have the same referent stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highlighted this phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;that ... stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since it seemed key to distinguishing between the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane Doe, the lead soprano in the church choir, had a bad cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane Doe, soprano in the church choir, had a bad cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned my grammar before 2002 and would like to have an affordable (under $100) &lt;em&gt;glossary&lt;/em&gt; of grammatical terminology as used in CGEL, something as clearly written as that definition from M-W.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I think that definition is representative of the dictionary's quality on the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="484127" LastEditorUserId="484127" LastEditDate="2023-08-16T17:44:30.313" LastActivityDate="2023-08-16T17:44:30.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-18T15:30:00.970" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I submitted a research paper where I defined a word according to the definition provided by Oxford English Dictionary.  The word has multiple definitions; this one actually has &amp;quot;1,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;2.a,&amp;quot; 2.b,&amp;quot; and several others. For the purposes of the research paper, I used the definition found in 2.a.  The reviewer who reviewed my paper made a comment suggesting that I would need to add additional clarification to the footnote given that the definition I used was the &amp;quot;2.a&amp;quot; definition and not the &amp;quot;1&amp;quot; definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are: Is the 2.a definition any less [reliable/accurate] than the 1 definition (that would warrant me having to add such clarification)?  In the event I do add such clarification (which I'm sure I will end up doing), is there a word used to reference the &amp;quot;secondary&amp;quot; definition (the 2.a definition) to distinguish it from the &amp;quot;primary&amp;quot; one? Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485770" OwnerDisplayName="Keith" LastActivityDate="2023-08-19T10:56:35.137" Title="Is the &quot;second&quot; (&quot;secondary&quot;) definition any less the definition than the first one? What do you call this?" Tags="|discussion|dictionaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15681" CreationDate="2023-08-19T10:56:35.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most dictionaries, the closer a definition is to the top of the entry, the more common it is in usage (or at least according to the opinions of the editors). However, this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the case with the Oxford English Dictionary, which orders definitions chronologically. Assuming neither one is marked as obsolete (and the entry is up-to-date for that to be accurate), both of those senses are used in modern English and neither is &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; than the other, though one might be more used than the other. For your purposes, however, one definition is likely more relevant to what you're talking about and that's why you chose to reference it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back when Oxford had a freely available online version of NOAD/ODE called ODO, their &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20111219193859/http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-oxford-english-dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website said the following&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED is a historical dictionary, with a structure that is very different from that of a dictionary of current English such as ODO. In ODO, only present-day senses are covered and we describe the most common meanings or senses first, making it easy for you to find guidance on today’s language quickly. For each word in the OED, on the other hand, the senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence. This way the senses with the earliest quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear further down the entry – like a ‘family tree’ for each word. Also, unlike current English dictionaries, senses are never removed from the OED. For example, if a word developed with a particular sense in the nineteenth century but has more recently changed to mean something quite different, the OED will show you both senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-08-19T10:56:35.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-20T22:23:19.423" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to build a schematic table/diagram with all the possible combinations of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verb tenses (Past Simple to Conditional 3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;form (Affirmative to Interrogative Negative)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;auxiliary verb conjugation (was/were, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word order (like in Interrogative Negative where to meaning can change)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I'm trying to get an example phrase from movie quotes for each and every possible case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been quite a long journey, maybe because I'm a perfectionist and I want to make it the most symmetrical/organised possible (to be very straight-forward and easy for one to understand it), and as you can assume I couldn't use Chat GPT for it because of its hallucinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question: &amp;quot;Is there any NL model reliable enough to do the hard work for me?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485886" OwnerDisplayName="MD11" LastActivityDate="2023-09-20T19:03:40.433" Title="Is there already a NL model, like Chat GPT or something, that is reliable to use for verb tense structure?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15683" CreationDate="2023-08-21T18:51:12.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR You could use an LLM to help you but don't rely on it to do the whole thing correctly for you in a single prompt (request).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would find it unlikely for an LLM (like ChatGPT or LLaMA) to produce systematic factual information like that either now or in the future. There might eventually be processes that use an LLM as one component that could do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning here is that an LLM gets a statistical picture of all its training data (books and websites and such) - they do not operate on facts or abstractions of patterns by meaning. They tend to reproduce text that looks factual or like an abstraction because the most statistically likely patterns will involve the words that come in a sequence that happen to be facts (or abstractions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, 'This banana is ...' and 'Cars are a kind of ...' will usually get 'yellow' or 'vehicle' respectively to follow, not because those exact sentences have been seen in the training corpus before, but because those words and nearby words with similar cooccurrences are more likely. Another way of saying this is that LLMs are in some sense hallucinating -all- the time, we just don't notice when reading outputs unless the random sequence is wrong factually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that someone on the internet has created exactly such a table, or at least parts of it. LLMs are not web searches (the training corpus is a fixed subset of the internet - it's not up to date and it is not all of the internet (which is not even all of human knowledge). But an LLM can sort of extract a lot of patterns out of that data that is sort of like Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, an LLM can probably get you a lot of that work for you. It may not be complete, it may have a few errors, and it may give you more than is intellectually supportable. If you already know a lot about the subject that's in your table, then I think an LLM would be a good tool for you to help you start off and compile examples and to format the table. But you should use your expertise to manage all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not an expert in the subject, then don't rely on anything that is factual. It can give you a good rough idea but any individual 'fact' should not be relied on. (kind of just like wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest using an LLM incrementally but also to revise and go back a step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your exact subject matter, you probably want to ask first what the main categories of verb forms are explicitly saying 'For example: aspect, mood, tense, ...' Or 'statement, question, negation...', things you already know to be the case. Then refine and ask about the different tenses, the different moods, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point you can then prompt your LLM to 'combine all these into one table...'. It will most likely not be exactly what you want but then you can repeat pieces of this process to improve it little by little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you'd be able to produce a table that is good enough for you, but I'm not sure it would be of a quality that would be universally acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(you definitely can do this same process for other languages, but you probably want to do it -in- that other language and have different categories as starters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastActivityDate="2023-08-21T18:51:12.977" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-22T17:24:41.843" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;What books should I read for my thesis about parallelism in rhetorical devices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485997" OwnerDisplayName="Yin" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-08-22T18:08:31.613" LastActivityDate="2023-08-22T18:08:31.613" Title="Which books should I refer to in my master's thesis about parallelism?" Tags="|discussion|resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2023-08-26T00:49:41.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-27T09:27:20.180" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/611676/387271&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; of mine got closed as off-topic, in spite of receiving way more upvotes than downvotes and also receiving a detailed answer. Why did it get closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387271" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-08-27T19:46:29.360" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T19:46:29.360" Title="Why is my question about the etymology of &quot;foundation&quot; off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|question-closure|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15686" CreationDate="2023-08-27T10:02:34.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that a question is answered does not mean that it is on-topic or should not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that people upvote a question does not mean that it is on-topic or should not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question which does not show evidence of research can be closed by three people, since research is necessary and lack of it is a reason for closure. This much is actually in the closure message: &amp;quot;Please &lt;strong&gt;include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5039&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you’ve done&amp;quot;, complete with bold text and a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You haven't shown that &amp;quot;the English word &lt;em&gt;foundation&lt;/em&gt; comes from the Latin word &lt;em&gt;fundatio&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;: you have merely asserted that, even though it may actually be true. However, in providing corroboration for that assertion, you would probably have found a step in the derivation where an &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; was introduced. That would actually answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that people have been kind to you and done that research for you does not mean that your question cannot or should not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T10:02:34.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-27T17:50:33.510" Score="2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found two sources of lists of phrasal verbs in English: Textbooks for people learning English as a second language introduce a few of them every now and then, and dictionaries of phrasal verbs list thousands of them in alphabetical order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English-speaking people are of course unaware of English grammar just as a fish is unaware of water. (A really extreme case I found on the internet was someone who asserted that translation is the process of replacing each word in one language with the corresponding word in another language.) The purpose of having a variety of illustrative examples adapted to the context at hand when explaining something about usage is not well served by those kinds of sources. What could serve that purpose well is lists of maybe a couple of hundred most frequently used phrasal verbs in English, with the most frequently used ones first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do such lists exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Hardy" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T00:13:20.887" Title="List of phrasal verbs by approximate usage frequency?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-28T14:21:27.023" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would find it a great convenience if the page could remember how far I had dragged open the text-box for a response I had given. When I am working with a strange (new to me) keyboard, I tend to make a lot of typing errors because of muscle memory, and there are some really weird keyboard shortcuts that create havoc when my ring finger or pinky goes astray and hits the CTRL key rather than the SHIFT key; and so I find myself needing to go back and correct some rather bizarre typos. And each time I save a change, the textbox reverts to its default size. It's not a big deal, but if it's something that would be possible using the ResizeObserver API and local storage, it would greatly improve the editing uxperience for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372442" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T14:21:27.023" Title="Would it be possible for the page to remember the depth to which a person has expanded their answer textbox on a particular response?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-28T14:52:35.097" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/611774/do-terms-that-end-with-mate-need-to-be-clarified-where-people-say-mate&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it was closed due to a lack of research. Seems like an arbitrary reason to close, especially when no comment is given for what type of research is lacking. I think most word usage is common knowledge, which includes all words I used. If the question was over something unknown, fair enough, but that wasn't the case here. Or do people just find any reason to close just because people don't like the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user486316" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T14:52:35.097" Title="What research is required over common knowledge words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-30T00:54:07.027" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/611801/what-does-rank-insubordination-mean&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed with three votes for &amp;quot;insufficient research&amp;quot; - although I'm unclear why, because even after doing all the &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; suggested in the answers, the correct answer is still not obvious to me. It was then reopened with three reopen votes. And then re-closed with three new close votes - again on the grounds of &amp;quot;insufficient research&amp;quot;, but again with no further details given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a question that has been closed and re-opened is &lt;em&gt;plausibly&lt;/em&gt; on-topic for this site (given the successful vote to reopen), should there perhaps be an increasing number of close votes required to re-close a question that has previously been reopened? Or perhaps a reason should be required for re-closing, and a moderator would need to approve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this community should err on the side of inclusion for questions that are borderline on-topic (even putting aside questions like the one above, which I personally think is clearly on-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210582" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T20:03:00.303" Title="Should there be an increasing number of close votes required to re-close a question that has been reopened?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|closed-questions|close-reasons|vote-to-reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15691" CreationDate="2023-08-30T08:26:06.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Laurel has commented, such a change (increasing the number of votes in a second round of voting) is a system change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of votes required to close/re-open a question can be changed, but it's fixed for all rounds of voting. Members of the community cannot vote more than once: if a question is closed with their vote, and re-opened, they cannot vote again to close it. It must be closed by new votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus in your case, &lt;strong&gt;six&lt;/strong&gt; people have voted to close the question. So far, five people have voted to re-open. I think it should remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you haven't included your research, merely a statement &amp;quot;But I can't find any definition about what the &amp;quot;rank&amp;quot; part means.&amp;quot; In the close banner, the link is to a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-much-research-is-needed&quot;&gt;How much research is needed?&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the advice &amp;quot;if you researched and didn't find anything, &lt;strong&gt;at least show where you looked.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; You should include something like &amp;quot;I found X and Y in dictionary A, and Z in dictionary B, but I can't make those make sense for this use of &lt;em&gt;rank&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-08-30T08:26:06.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15742" CreationDate="2023-09-08T22:49:37.273" Score="28" ViewCount="1809" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Update: Closing remarks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15742/191178&quot;&gt;phrasing I suggested in an answer below&lt;/a&gt; is now live:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/46RIl.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Answered by a dictionary&amp;quot; close reason&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a massive problem with close votes. There's no sense in placing blame — we've been on this path since before even I joined the site, and we all thought what we were doing was best for the site. However, that doesn't change the fact that there's real damage being done. And we need to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We closed 63.49% of the questions asked in 2022 according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/386090/323179&quot;&gt;big list of close stats&lt;/a&gt;, which tracks closures across all SE sites. We've consistently been at the top of this chart year after year. Lately, when I look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats&quot;&gt;close tools&lt;/a&gt; (10k only), I see that we are usually closing 80% or more of questions (but sometimes exceeding even 100%). When I look at questions that are being closed, I see so many questions that were not answered by a &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot;, some of which did include their &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; and got closed anyway (example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/611148/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Unrelentless&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;relentless&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;). I see questions that were closed in spite of the expert answers that were posted to them, and questions that were closed before an expert answer could be posted. This isn't improving the internet. And I see what it's doing to the people here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've fostered a site where so many people who I respect greatly just don't like asking questions. This includes users who are native speakers, and even users who on top of that are also active on other Stack Exchange sites (and therefore know how this SE thing works), including moderators. Even users who have been around on this site for a really long time struggle to avoid close votes. That should be rare. It should also be rare for questions to be closed and reopened without significant edits. It shouldn't be the case where getting 1 or 2 close votes is an inevitability for almost every question. But all of these things are regular occurrences on this site and it causes many of our regulars (myself included) to spend way too much time on getting questions reopened instead of answering them. If you have an expert answer to an English question, your main obstacle to answering it should be the fact that you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom — you shouldn't have to beg and plead for it to be reopened or add &amp;quot;oh but these five dictionaries don't answer this question&amp;quot; or wait for a queue that might not even reopen the question at all without further intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I expect this may be hard for some of you to hear, and even harder to put into practice: &lt;strong&gt;We need to change.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The policy change&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy is as follows: The &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; close reason should be used on questions which are answered in a reputable online dictionary. And no, you can't use the &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; close reason to get around this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries are great. There are so many comprehensive ones out there online from reputable sources. And they're simple to use. It makes sense to require our users to use one before asking. (For an idea of what dictionaries this covers, take a look at the main section under &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/191178&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;General Dictionaries&amp;quot; and the section for &amp;quot;Learner's Dictionaries&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I justify not allowing &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; as a general reference? Relying on a search engine is the antithesis of our site. The best quality answer will not rise to the top of the search results, only the content with the best SEO keywords. Our experts cannot provide a better answer, or downvote the crap out there, or even leave comments on it. Nothing of value is guaranteed to stay on the internet either, as links go dead. And with one simple invention, suddenly all these problems can get worse quicker: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15500/191178&quot;&gt;Generative AI&lt;/a&gt;. Blogs will go from being one person's opinion to being no person's opinion and in record quantity. But answers here will be moderated for AI content; I'm making sure of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how then do we differentiate ourselves from ELL? I think it's all in the answers. On ELL, most of the information in an answer will be stuff that a native speaker is likely to know already — it's just enough English to make it to the end of the day. But here, on English Language and Usage, an answer like that shouldn't be enough: We want enough depth to our answers that we can party all night. This is even possible with a question that looks easy on the surface, since an answer could draw from corpus evidence, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A note on (up/down) voting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other sites, bad questions that don't break any particular rule get downvoted instead of being closed. That works well, but before we become a site where everything is downvoted instead, please remember that short doesn't have to mean bad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that seed interesting answers should be rewarded. Questions that include their research should be rewarded (even if it wasn't perfect). Questions that cover something you don't think is covered anywhere else on the internet should be rewarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While moderators can't see your upvotes and downvotes, I hope that you'll keep an open mind and look out for what value could be under the surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The tech change&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to reinforce the rules, there needs to be a change in the system.&#xA;Years ago, close reasons got an upgrade. We never took advantage of this, but it's not too late now. We have 5 different &amp;quot;slots&amp;quot; to fill, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/362584/323179&quot;&gt;Catija&lt;/a&gt;, most of which have a 500 character limit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brief description (100 characters but should be just a few words) - this is the Bold part of the close reason that appears in the close vote UI when closers are voting to close the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage guidance - this tells close voters when to use this close reason. It should clarify any edge cases and help voters feel certain they're choosing the correct reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post notice close description - visible to all users. This is a general note about why the question was closed. It can include links to resources that explain the site's policy. It should always start and end with the same thing &amp;quot;This question was closed because it is... It is not currently accepting answers.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post owner guidance - this additional information appears in the post notice but only for the asker of the question. It should contain detailed information about how they can improve their post and may also include links to help here on meta or in the help center.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Privileged user guidance - this additional information appears in the post notice but only for users with the close/reopen privilege. It is designed to help them know how to guide the asker in improving their question or inform them when the question should be reopened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The &amp;quot;Usage guidance&amp;quot; will change&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my vision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iAnNY.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plain text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answered by a dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This question has been answered by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2574/191178&quot;&gt;free, publicly available dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. Make sure a link to that dictionary has been provided in the comments before closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a quick draft, so it could afford to be changed a little. I think this would be a sensible place to include specific guidance on when to migrate to ELL (if we had any; we don't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other parts of the close reason should also be updated, both in light of these changes and also because I think it would be better to provide askers different help than the rest of the community. I figure that's something we can work on drafting here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Further discussions (TODO)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding a tag warning to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-etymology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; and related tags pointing to Etymonline as a preliminary point of research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/377058/323179&quot;&gt;guidance on the Ask Question page&lt;/a&gt; that actually explains how to ask a question here instead of telling people to just not ask questions here if they can avoid it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Switching over the other close reasons to the new format. We could be providing a lot more guidance to askers than we do. (We could mention thesauruses in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-single-word-requests-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt; close reason.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to write better answers. I can share how to do corpus research, and if you have another technique please consider posting your own discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2024-01-31T23:26:11.473" LastActivityDate="2024-01-31T23:26:11.473" Title="Replacing our &quot;research&quot; close reason: Completed" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|close-reasons|research-effort|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="41" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-09-08T23:14:36.677" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries don't necessarily answer super basic &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; questions, so the new close-reason wouldn't easily apply to those types of 'too-easy' questions. Are we just going to migrate all of those? AFAIK, ELL doesn't want our 'trash'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today this question was asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/612390/how-to-use-comparatives-with-processive-nouns&quot;&gt;How to use comparatives with processive nouns?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder which of the following is/are correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. The national flag of Malaysia has more colours than Japan's.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b. The national flag of Malaysia has more colours than Japan.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c. Malaysia's national flag has more colours than Japan's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dictionary wouldn't answer it; is this sort of question on-topic now? (This is a basic example quoted for its recency and brevity, but there are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; similar questions out there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current close-reason doesn't forbid trivial etymology questions, either, and not all dictionaries include the relevant information, even if it's readily googleable. Irrespective of dupe-status, is a question like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;What is the origin of the phrase 'to rest on one's laurels'&amp;quot;?&lt;/em&gt; really the type of query we crave to answer? (The point still stands, even if this is not a great example, as the comments point out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/394496/1278220&quot;&gt;Many SE sites&lt;/a&gt; have a 'too basic' close-reason. Right now, we have an extremely versatile 'general reference' close-reason that acts as an equivalent; as you said, we kinda overuse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plan here, however, seems to be to take that high-utility close-reason and localize it to only being applicable to only a few types of questions. Is that really what we want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(not really objecting to the plan, just putting this out there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat off-topic, but since you sorta brought it up...re:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've fostered a site where so many people who I respect greatly just don't like asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High-rep users really should ask more questions. Their answers stink of brilliance and thought, and I bet their questions would as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-12-24T10:50:44.057" LastActivityDate="2023-12-24T10:50:44.057" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-09-09T00:44:09.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of your suggested CV reasons (I guess it would be &amp;quot;usage guidance&amp;quot;?), you included this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure a link to that dictionary has been provided in the comments before closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very much recommend against requiring a CV'er to leave a comment unless it was anonymized somehow. Otherwise it would help the OP to identify the CV'er, which I believe is generally frowned upon by SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438716" LastActivityDate="2023-09-09T00:44:09.160" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-09-09T02:12:18.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly &lt;strong&gt;support&lt;/strong&gt; this observation and the proposed change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that this is very close to how that very closing-reason was originally devised here, as &lt;em&gt;General Reference&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heartspring's suggestion, adding &amp;quot;or in a beginner's grammar book&amp;quot;, is also worth thinking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2023-09-09T02:12:18.790" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-09-09T03:44:14.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also wholeheartedly support this change. I think that the high closure rates can make ELU appear hostile or unhelpful for new users. &amp;quot;Difficulty&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; is a completely arbitrary and unreasonable standard, as shown by the presence of questions that cycle back and forth between closed and reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastActivityDate="2023-09-09T03:44:14.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-09-13T18:10:22.467" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two distinct, although related, questions here: &lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; Is the show-research reason for closing used too much, and, if so, how should its use be limited; &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; Should that reason (perhaps narrowed down, as a result of answering the first question) be relabelled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as (2) is concerned, this question, as Cerberus has already pointed out, essentially amounts to the proposal that the site revert to the old general-reference reason for closing. Regardless of what may be argued about (1), which I shall not address in this answer, I wholeheartedly support this reversal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have argued before, the current boilerplate formulations of the reasons for closing, including the show-research one, often obfuscate the real reasons. In the overwhelming majority of cases, people who vote to close a question by using the show-research reason do not really think that the question could be improved by showing research. Rather, they think that, if the OP spends two minutes with a dictionary, the OP will find the answer, and realise that there is no question left that would need to be asked here. The old general-reference wording articulated that reason clearly. At some point, somebody thought that this wording was too brusque, and introduced &lt;em&gt;show-research&lt;/em&gt; as a euphemism of sorts. That was, I believe, a mistake, as those who come to this site to ask a single question in good faith (but are not immersed in its culture) cannot be expected to 'get' the real reason behind the euphemism that they see in the closing banner, which then leaves them confused and alienated (probably far more so than if they were told the real reason in plain English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that it may not be easy to explicitly formulate the precise criteria of what constitutes general reference, but I don't think that it is necessary to do so for the reason to be understood. When it is debatable whether something is really a matter of general reference, that can be dealt with case-by-case, in the comments, and/or by the OP's editing the question, and/or by voting to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-09-13T18:15:41.490" LastActivityDate="2023-09-13T18:15:41.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15701" CreationDate="2023-09-15T18:36:35.430" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-usage-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; redirects to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-word-usage-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/word-usage/synonyms&quot;&gt;the two are synonymized&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can still find the tag on certain questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I search for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-word-usage-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;word-usage&lt;/a&gt; tag, many of the earlier results still display that tag. Here's a screenshot of a few of many:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aKfeF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aKfeF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211798/why-is-protested-over-incorrect-in-this-sentence&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;protested over&amp;quot; incorrect in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211654/why-does-up-have-a-positive-connotation-and-down-have-a-negative-connotation&quot;&gt;Why does &amp;#39;up&amp;#39; have a positive connotation and &amp;#39;down&amp;#39; have a negative connotation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211548/in-at-vs-in-from-vs-into&quot;&gt;In At vs In From vs Into&lt;/a&gt; [has both!]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211504/in-the-immortal-words-of&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In the immortal words of...&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is typical behavior for a synonymized tag; what's going on? Why does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;usage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-usage-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;usage&lt;/a&gt; tag still linger on some of the older questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-09-16T01:52:08.770" Title="What's up with the [usage] tag?" Tags="|support|bug|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15700" CreationDate="2023-09-16T01:52:08.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was just some moderator housekeeping work to be done yet. We almost never remember to ask the system about which ones need merging, let alone do so. I've taken care of that now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2023-09-16T01:52:08.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15662" CreationDate="2023-10-06T17:30:36.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, given that it's been two months since I've asked this question and it still hasn't been answered, it seems that nobody really knows what it's for. I really think there should be some consistency in the tagging, so here's my proposal for how they should be retagged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove it from questions that ask about the phrase &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;reason why&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. This is because there is probably a limited amount of questions that can be asked about that phrase, and searching for &lt;code&gt;title:&amp;quot;reason why&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; is enough to find most of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a bit of a blur between this tag and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-etymology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; tag. I think that when retagging we can ask ourselves if the question is about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; a phrase took on a meaning or about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it took on that meaning. The &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; questions can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etymology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-etymology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use it on questions that ask about explanations for linguistic phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that seem? I'm not steadfastly set on any of these parts of the proposal- this can be discussed, tweaked, or even overhauled as the community sees fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got ahead of myself and retagged a few of the questions already; I've reverted those changes to allow for more discussion about the tag's usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-10-07T16:18:44.360" LastActivityDate="2023-10-07T16:18:44.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15704" CreationDate="2023-10-07T17:55:07.107" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I asked a question. Another user edited it a little. But now I see it's locked for about one hour. Why did it happen? Did I do a bad thing to deserve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="366925" LastActivityDate="2023-10-07T18:55:23.883" Title="Why was my question locked after edition?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15703" CreationDate="2023-10-07T18:15:35.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I merely locked it against comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did this because, per usual, within a few moments of the question’s appearance people had already begun answering in comments, something which is not allowed because it breaks the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not otherwise locked in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 17:43:48Z: Question posted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 17:48:00Z: Answer posted in comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 17:48:36Z: Question edited.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 17:48:42Z: Answer in comment deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 17:48:54Z: Question locked against comments for an hour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 17:56:25Z: Answer posted in answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2023-10-07 18:48:56Z: Question unlocked against comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2023-10-07T18:55:23.883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-07T18:55:23.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-09T06:01:46.840" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who speaks English as a non-native language, one thing that often perplexes me is determining when to disregard silent letters in pronunciation. Although it doesn't completely hinder me, it does cause a momentary pause of uncertainty that feels like 200 milliseconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the word &amp;quot;knight&amp;quot; as an example. If beginners could find it represented as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ctDXo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ctDXo.png&quot; alt=&quot;[k]ni[gh]t&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be 'Not Really Like That' in the example, It was for my question to be understood properly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in a dictionary or resource, it would significantly enhance their confidence in pronouncing words. Where can I locate such a dictionary or resource?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356950" OwnerDisplayName="http8086" LastActivityDate="2023-10-09T13:52:26.277" Title="Where can I locate dictionaries or resources that provide explicit markings for silent letters in words?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15705" CreationDate="2023-10-09T11:53:02.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not just silent letters that can prove challenging to readers, native and non, almost every word in the English language has odd phonological features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;silent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; can be mispronounced as &amp;quot;seeLENT&amp;quot; when instead it is spoken SAIlent. Look the word up in any online dictionary, and it will transcribe the pronunciation as /ˈsʌɪlənt/, the stress is marked with an apostrophe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter E in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prove&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  is silent, but the vowel O is long and sounds like &lt;em&gt;proov&lt;/em&gt; (/pruːv/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reader&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced slightly differently by British and American speakers. British speakers will pronounce the second &amp;quot;r&amp;quot; softly, the word will sound like &amp;quot;REEduh&amp;quot; (/ˈriː.dər/) while many Americans are rhotic speakers, so the second letter R will usually be audible and thus pronounced as REEdr (/ˈriː.dɚ/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter L in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;almost&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is omitted by some native speakers, especially in fast speech; pronouncing it as AWmowst. The letter A in &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; will often be pronounced &amp;quot;or&amp;quot;, especially by many British speakers (/ˈɔːl.məʊst/), while American speakers might tag on an &amp;quot;r&amp;quot; sound (ar) i.e. /ˈɑːl.moʊst/. Then again some American and British regional speakers will pronounce the L more markedly; AAL and ALL respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;knight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is not that difficult a challenge to pronounce. Consider,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bl&lt;strong&gt;ight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;fight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;flight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;height&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;might&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;wight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination -ight is very common in the English language, one could argue that the letters GH are silent but they are necessary to make the I sound long. Compare the short &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; to its long variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;height&lt;/em&gt; (the &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; is definitely silent)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;fit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;lit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;mitt&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;wit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the letter K is silent when it is followed by N such as  &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;knew&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kneel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;knife&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;knock&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is a book which explicitly notes all the silent letters in every word in alphabetical order, but I'm pretty certain there isn't. The humble paper dictionary does a fine job. Contrastedly, &lt;sub&gt;(it exists, I just checked)&lt;/sub&gt;, the online versions are much quicker and the vast majority of reputable online dictionaries will include audio clips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S Although the Original Poster asks for resources, when I wrote this answer the question was on the main site, which enjoys more views and would have been more visible to visitors: especially non-native speakers who struggle with reading and writing in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" OwnerDisplayName="Mari-Lou A" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2023-10-09T13:52:26.277" LastActivityDate="2023-10-09T13:52:26.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-10-12T06:58:08.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As my name was invoked regarding drafting text for the close modal and post notices, I thought I might offer some guidance in addition to what y'all have already discussed. What's presented below is intended to be presented as the experience of someone who's been there before and literally wrote the guide on close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guidance is not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; going to be the precise final text you will want to use as (despite my history here) I don't necessarily comprehend all aspects of this as well as you do. That said, remember that most people who have their questions closed will know less than I do, so it's important that the information we build into the UI takes that into consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The policy changes - a good idea, some thoughts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing I'd like to state is that I appreciate and support this discussion and the change it recommends. While it may be difficult to finalize text for these site elements, I very strongly believe that we should avoid closing questions because the asker doesn't give any indication of having done research before asking the question. Our intention on Stack Exchange is to be a place for depth and breadth in a subject. Only allowing questions that can't be easily answered through an existing resource guarantees that the site will never contain that full library of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question because someone didn't specifically state that they were unable to find the answer somewhere else on the internet - or by extension because it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be answered elsewhere on the internet - means that this site won't have the answers to those questions, which leads to it being a less-useful resource because there are community-imposed gaps in the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this adjustment has limits but where you draw those limits is what this question is about. I can think of at least two y'all should consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The subject of the English language is split in two between ELU and ELL.&lt;/strong&gt; Provided that doesn't change, it's fair to enforce that separation. If the question indicates the user needs support to understand concepts that the average (not expert!) native speaker may not even recognize require explanation, it's likely better suited to ELL. I'd put &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15695/121385&quot;&gt;the example in Heartspring's answer&lt;/a&gt; in this category. A native speaker may not even understand why someone would ask or know how to explain why any of the options are &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; or where some may fail.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I haven't been active there in quite a long time, my feelings about the difference between ELL and ELU are not quite the same as Laurel's. I recognize there's a need to keep the sites separate but because I feel the more valuable reasoning is because a learner may need a different sort of explanation than a native speaker. I often couldn't answer ELL questions because my native English brain has no clue what the various verb forms and modes are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This can be difficult to ascertain so I'd recommend following the standard practice for migration: &lt;strong&gt;consider whether the question is &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; -i.e. complete enough to be answered - and only then migrate to ELL&lt;/strong&gt;. Otherwise, close as unclear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Narrowly restrict the use of the research close reason to questions that could have been answered by a dictionary.&lt;/strong&gt; As with thoughtful policy, there's reasons to allow exceptions where the user indicates they don't understand what the dictionary says or want a deeper understanding than found in the dictionaries they've checked.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is what the updated close reason would be used to define and it should be thoughtful in how it's phrased to avoid overuse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This should be coupled with guidance to the asker that guides them to the resources available on the internet or invites them to improve their question by adding more information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I'll transition to my specific area of expertise, how to write good close reason text. While y'all are welcome to discuss what I've written above in the comments, I'd prefer discussion of #1 be separated off. While it's an integral part of this discussion, it feels like it needs an entire Q&amp;amp;A thread of its own and would benefit from ELL's participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The close reason changes - some recommendations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Treat this as a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; close reason rather than editing the existing one.&lt;/strong&gt; It's unclear which you were planning but I wanted to make this recommendation clear. This close text will not make sense when used on so many of the questions that have currently been closed with it, so editing the existing reason will create a very confusing state of affairs here. In this case, you're better off walking away and not looking back, even if it means you start over when it comes to statistics. I feel like it's been too long since the old version of this was retired (2014) to reuse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Dictionary close reason text&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Close modal text:&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered by consulting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;reputable online dictionary&lt;/a&gt; should be closed with this reason unless they indicate why a dictionary couldn't address their question. When using this close reason, consider leaving a comment pointing the user to a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While mostly similar to the recommendation in the question, I find it's often as important to explain when &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to use a close reason as when it should be used. I swapped &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; out for &amp;quot;reputable&amp;quot; because the list y'all have should likely be free anyway, and I'd imagine the emphasis should be on the resource being trustworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with Laurel's example, I feel that it's important to point askers to resources rather than merely shutting the door in their face but I'm concerned about implying that it's required. At the bare minimum, the Meta post will be linked once the question is actually closed, so putting the onus on close voters to find a dictionary entry for the word in question and leave a comment linking to it may risk people just not voting to close at all out of fear that they'll be reprimanded for failing to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, it also feels a bit like they'd be bitten for answering in comments, which is another issue I hear a lot about on ELU. I'd be hesitant to encourage y'all down a path where the site starts looking like answering in comments is the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; way of participating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Post notice description&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed because it should be answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573&quot;&gt;consulting a dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a pretty simple bit. Probably not much room for discussion but feel free to debate could/should/can. The link to the explanatory meta post can go here or in the longer explanation text but it should likely just be in one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Post owner guidance&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site expects that askers use a dictionary to understand basic definition, pronunciation, and usage of words. If you've already consulted a dictionary and it doesn't resolve your issue, edit this question to add more details about what you found and still don't understand. If you're new to English, consider asking on English Language Learners, our site designed for non-fluent speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally recommend that asker instructions explain the policy in a minimal way and even link to it in some situations. I think this one is simple enough that it doesn't necessitate a link but feel free to do so if you wish. I also very much recommend giving the user some guidance on what else to do - either how to fix the question or where else it may be in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's additional info or guidance that can be added/linked here, feel free to include it. For example, I know that ELL has a &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/439/please-everyone-details-please&quot;&gt;Details, Please&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; meta question they link to that explains how to provide enough detail for a question to be answerable. If y'all don't have this, it might be useful in situations like this, similar to the tag wiki you have for &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tags/single-word-requests/info&quot;&gt;single word requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General user guidance&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is technically shown to anyone not the asker any more rather than high-rep users only)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site expects that askers use a dictionary to understand basic definition, pronunciation, and usage of words. If an edit to this question adds sufficient detail or explanation such that this close reason no longer applies, flag or vote to reopen. If comments from the author convey such information, edit them into the question and recommend reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the guidance to the author, the main focus here is a brief explanation paired with encouragement to work towards reopening the question if the close reason no longer applies. In as much as curbing misuse of close reasons is important, it's also important to ensure users recognize when to reopen and are reminded to do so. If you do have guidance you might add to the asker version, it may be worth including here as it can inform newer users who may not be aware of site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I'll reiterate - the specifics of my recommendations above may not be sensible in practice here on ELU. If that's the case, take the examples as scaffolding you can use as a framework to revise my versions or devise something else that's a better fit. While I may be slow to respond, I'm happy to review future drafts if I can be of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Supporting this policy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After having reviewed all of this, there is one thing I'm concerned about and it's built on what you've already got going here in this meta post and answers and in your list of references. Beyond updating/replacing the close reason, in the end I'd encourage you to make a simplified version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2573/what-good-reference-works-on-english-are-available&quot;&gt;What good reference works on English are available?&lt;/a&gt; that can also serve as an introduction to why this policy exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were sent to that list, I'd immediately just give up. It's an amazing list of resources and I think it's wonderful that you have it, it has 13 answers with dozens of links in each. While it's reasonable to ask for simple dictionary research, looking things up in Corpora and historical references and other such things is way beyond the scope of this close reason as I understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you should link to that longer list for reference in this new Q&amp;amp;A, I don't think you should use it as the actual target for more information. Instead, ask a new question along the lines of &amp;quot;My question was closed as being answerable by a dictionary, what does that mean?&amp;quot; and cover a few key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A brief explanation of the policy and its history.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep it short and digestible, remember the audience is likely to be people who have their questions closed and also people learning how/when to vote to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A brief discussion of the expectations for askers are.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give additional detail about what questions should include and guide them in how to improve their question if the dictionary is insufficient. Give before/after examples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mention how to ask for help on meta if they still can't figure out how to improve the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feel free to give more info about when ELL may be a better option while also being clear about ELL policies that may be relevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A pared-down list of resources.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What you include should be only the sorts of resources y'all want to see questions closed for. So if that's dictionaries only, the list should only be dictionaries. If it also includes thesauruses or other grammar guides, they can be included but I'd recommend paring any lists you include down to a few high quality, free options.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By limiting this list, you remove ambiguity for close voters who may feel like this new close reason can still be used if the answer is found in any of those links in the existing resource thread.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to adjust however it makes sense - but work towards a goal where it's as short and visually inviting as possible while being informative and helpful and framed in a way that shows the community wants to point people in the right direction and that closure isn't necessarily a bad state for their question. I love the FAQ format y'all have used before where the question is actually several sections and each answer addresses one, so you can take advantage of page anchors to link to specific information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this has been helpful to you all - I understand this is a big project with several pieces but I hope that this change has a positive impact on the site and leads to people feeling more able to participate here than they may have in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121385" LastActivityDate="2023-10-12T06:58:08.260" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-12T14:48:20.273" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every question I have asked about the etymology of an idiom gets pulled.  Yet I found this one that stayed up. It's espcially irritating because sometimes before my question gets closed, I have recieved useful respsonses.  I don't post a question unless I have researched all the etymology I can find online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="473020" OwnerDisplayName="Mirliton" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T02:14:06.463" Title="Why do my questions on the etymology of idioms get closed, yet this one was accepted?: What is the origin of &quot;out of sight&quot; or &quot;outa sight&quot; i?" Tags="|discussion|etymology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15708" CreationDate="2023-10-13T02:14:06.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No question of yours asked on our main site has been “pulled” — whatever you meant by that. Certainly not even one has yet been deleted.  You have to date asked exactly three questions on English Language and Usage, which I list here prefixed by the precise timestamp at which you posted them and ordered oldest to youngest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;2023-04-25 13:55:57Z&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/606591&quot;&gt;What is the etymology of the expression &amp;quot;spit bath&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;2023-10-12 14:48:20Z&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/613560&quot;&gt;Why do my questions on the etymology of idioms get closed, yet this one was accepted?: What is the origin of &amp;quot;out of sight&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;outa sight&amp;quot; i?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;2023-10-12 16:14:22Z&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/613561&quot;&gt;What is the recent etymology of the American expression &amp;quot;mosey&amp;#39;&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question was correctly migrated here to our meta site where it should have been posted, and migration automatically locks the original on the site of origin; it will eventually be deleted by routine system clean-up services in the fullness of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other two questions you have asked are both still available for interactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although some members of our site may quibble a bit with the notion that an idiomatic expression comprising multiple words can have an “etymology” rather than an origin or history, that really doesn’t influence whether someone deleted your questions from the site. No one has done that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T02:14:06.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-13T17:39:12.890" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In revising a 1953 manuscript in which the author (a non-native speaker, a professor, quite proficient in English yet with a few lingering idiosyncrasies) and the original editor (OUP, New York branch, still working under some British English conventions in house style) made often inscrutable choices in the use or non-use of commas, I'm authorized to make alterations in this area, but I'm first looking to develop some operational principles, a rationale for when to alter. We know commas can be tricky because they're sometimes optional. I'd prefer to error on the side of minimal intervention, making changes not when the comma or lack of one is a mere felicity or stylistic matter, but where their use genuinely facilitates ease of reading and comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for signposts, guidance, a good reference as to when this is a matter of discretion and when the rules are hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewing the 400-page MS, it's sometimes obvious when to intervene. Drop it into software like Quill Bot or Grammarly for a quick sense, and every page, if not every paragraph, has numerous comma recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would others approach this? Please refer to any CMOS sections that focus on the discretionary aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472406" OwnerDisplayName="Typothalamus" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T19:35:27.133" Title="When are commas optional?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9513" CreationDate="2023-10-20T19:21:37.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell the difference in the original screenshot and I have regular color vision. However, things have changed since then and I can now see the highlight for followed tags. Looking at color blindness simulators, I can even see the difference in monochrome, though it's subtle. There's also now an eyeball on any tags that you're following for an additional visual cue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NZkiu.png&quot; alt=&quot;pale yellow background&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greyscale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ruN1P.png&quot; alt=&quot;very light grey background&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-10-20T19:21:37.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15714" CreationDate="2023-10-21T10:33:03.090" Score="8" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the &amp;quot;Closed&amp;quot; message is shown below, followed by a current example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/411oF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/411oF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/613813/change-the-sentence-i-dont-know-you-into-a-compound-sentence&quot;&gt;Change the sentence &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know you&amp;quot; into a compound sentence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;... and clarify the problem being solved&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is not well-expressed and should be replaced by &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;...and clarify the question to be answered&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot; The purpose of the site is not to solve problems, but to answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote this post if you agree, downvote if you disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastEditorUserId="11146" LastEditDate="2023-10-22T07:28:09.123" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T17:50:57.410" Title="Problem with the &quot;Closed&quot; message?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15713" CreationDate="2023-10-21T15:24:08.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Six months ago, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388030/1278220&quot;&gt;official MSE post was released where they explained some proposed changes to the closure notices.&lt;/a&gt; Though I'm not sure &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; these new messages will be implemented, the part you've highlighted is planned to be changed. Quoted below are the relevant snippets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we updated the close modal text and post notices a few years ago, I've known that there are concerns about whether they're sufficiently clear for users and whether they're giving the correct guidance. We want to improve the text in these cases to ensure that we're guiding users as best we can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;Needs details or clarity&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Field&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Current&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Proposed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Post owner guidance&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;Add details and clarify the problem you’re solving. This will help others answer the question. You can [edit the question]($EditQuestionUrl$) or [post a new one]($AskQuestionUrl$).&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Edit the question]($EditQuestionUrl$) to add relevant details and clarify your question. Adding more specific information will help others understand your issue and provide a better answer. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Guidance to others&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;Add details and clarify the problem being solved. This will help others answer the question. You can [edit the question]($EditQuestionUrl$).&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;As written, this question is lacking some of the information it needs to be answered. If the author adds details in comments, consider [editing them into the question]($EditQuestionUrl$). Once there's sufficient detail to answer, vote to reopen the question.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word 'problem' is replaced with 'issue,' which I think is maybe slightly better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastActivityDate="2023-10-21T15:24:08.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-21T22:24:15.300" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/537555/is-a-comma-splice-always-a-mistake&quot;&gt;Is a comma splice always a mistake?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; on the main site was merged (on July 3, 2023) with the question &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/400032/why-is-the-comma-splice-an-error&quot;&gt;Why is the comma splice an error?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; also on the main site, as duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This merger had two practical effects. First, my answer to the earlier question (from 2017) now appears under the former question (which was posted on June 3, 2020, and closed a day later as a duplicate), although my answer doesn't actually address the question of whether &amp;quot;a comma splice is always a mistake.&amp;quot; Second, the earlier question has been closed (as merged) and yet the later question has not been reopened, despite the fact that the question that it supposedly duplicated has been merged with it and no longer exists as an open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here on Meta isn't about why the 2020 question was chosen as the postmerger collection point for answers to the two questions, despite its being three years younger than the question that I originally answered. I assume that the answer to that question is either (1) the 2020 question attracted two answers while the 2017 question attracted only one answer or (2) the moderator who handled the merger considered the 2020 question likely to be more interesting to future readers than the 2017 question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, my question is a simple and practical one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why are &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; questions closed as &amp;quot;duplicate,&amp;quot; rather than just the one whose answer was moved to the chronologically later question page on the site?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the point of merging answers to closely related or arguably duplicate questions is to consolidate the answers in a single place on the site, it seems odd and indeed counterproductive to block further answers to the question at the consolidated location on grounds that the question there is a duplicate. I find it especially puzzling in the case of a question that had been open for six years and (as far as I can tell) never viewed as close-worthy. Was the double closure simply an oversight by the mod?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-11-01T20:57:15.717" LastActivityDate="2023-11-01T20:57:15.717" Title="Should &quot;Is a comma splice always a mistake?&quot; be reopened as the face of two merged questions (both of which are now closed)?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-22T19:00:51.183" Score="-4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can it be true that this site works by popular vote when no one can vote until they get to a certain reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement is not accurate.  I saw a very inaccurate meaning of a gesture that people thought it meant, yet it doesn't mean it is accurate and it doesn't always mean the same to each person especially depending on when (time) and where you live!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make things fair for everyone and not just for those who use this site, so getting a more accurate indication of opinion instead of only that from people who have the reputation 15 needed to vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489812" OwnerDisplayName="Debra An" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2023-10-22T20:54:19.073" LastActivityDate="2023-10-22T20:54:19.073" Title="How can it be true that this site works by popular vote when no one can vote until they get to a certain reputation?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15716" CreationDate="2023-10-22T20:28:12.363" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think something isn't accurate, write an answer which is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently to cast a downvote here you need to have a score of 125 reputation points on this site. You get those points by making a positive contribution. To start making a positive contribution, write an accurate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other ways of gaining points, but as each upvote you get on an answer is worth 10, that's by far the easiest way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastActivityDate="2023-10-22T20:28:12.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15713" CreationDate="2023-10-24T17:50:57.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I will vote to close any question that issues orders, like&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Change the sentence &amp;quot;I don't know you&amp;quot; into a compound sentence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That's rude. We are not your students. And our students are better behaved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I will vote to close any question that demonstrates that the questioner does not understand what the question means, or what an answer might look like. &amp;quot;Changing&amp;quot; a random sentence into a compound sentence is useless, unless you have something else to say. What?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just me, of course. But this is not the site to post your homework or complain that you don't understand it. Ask your teacher if you're in school. If you're not, do your research first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15299" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T17:50:57.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15723" CreationDate="2023-10-30T17:17:22.083" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the book &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;James Gleick&lt;/em&gt;. Every now and then an old/archaic English sentence, from some reference, is quoted in this text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should someone, with no background in such archaic literature studies, go about finding the meaning of such sentences?&lt;/strong&gt; For example, when reading modern books written in English, be it of any genre, I can depend on dictionaries (or their online counterparts). Let me clarify the necessity of a systematic way to address this challenge with an example below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reference, I faced the following phrase (in this case it is the title of a book) -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The First Part of the Elementarie which Entreateth Chefelie of the&#xA;right writing of our English tung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked for an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/343347/179599&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I did find an answer in the comments. But it opened this larger query to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been trying the following ways, and am pointing out the possible challenges with each -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google search&lt;/strong&gt; - for some words/phrases/sentences it works. For others, Google thinks them to be typos. Example, &lt;em&gt;entreateth&lt;/em&gt; yielded appropriate results, but &lt;em&gt;chefelie&lt;/em&gt; did not (and I also did not connect it to the all too popular word &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;chiefly&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dictionary&lt;/strong&gt; - It does not generally contain such words. In rare cases, probably due to use in some major literary works, an archaic usage might get recorded in modern dictionaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stackexchange sites&lt;/strong&gt; - I am not sure if I should be asking such questions here. Afterall, these questions are not of any broad nature and might be suitable for a study-group type environment. If I know a systematic approach, I can do my initial research first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guides&lt;/strong&gt; - By guides I mean any guide books, online references, courses, online study groups etc., related to this particular book. But this is just a popular science book, and nowhere near as popular as, say, Shakespeare's plays. Hence, I do not expect to find the meaning of any arbitrary sentence from this text, by any of the above means.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;PS&lt;/strong&gt;: I am not sure if this query belongs to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;. The former does allow questions regarding archaic usage, but this is not a particular usage-related query. I avoided the later, because I do not want to learn archaic English; just methods to be able to understand a few phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462372" OwnerDisplayName="Anirban Chakraborty" LastEditorUserId="462372" LastEditDate="2023-10-31T16:32:58.043" LastActivityDate="2023-11-05T14:55:18.950" Title="What resources to use for understanding archaic English usage?" Tags="|discussion|dictionaries|reference|resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15715" CreationDate="2023-10-31T19:54:41.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no way to un-merge a question so there's little point in discussing that. However, it makes no sense to have an ouroboros of question closures like that (something which the system should have prevented from happening when the merge was being attempted), so I've reopened the destination question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T19:54:41.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-31T21:51:43.777" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you recommend the best book on English grammar articles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The indefinite and definite articles a, an, and the?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="468645" OwnerDisplayName="Ranwinsu Nill" LastEditorUserId="36710" LastEditDate="2023-11-03T02:34:18.880" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T02:34:18.880" Title="Recommend the best book for articles" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-11-03T08:22:10.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-01T05:19:51.830" Score="4" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have edited the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/362220/which-format-is-best-for-a-number-range&quot;&gt;Which format is most common for representing a number range in U.S. punctuation style and in British punctuation style?&lt;/a&gt; so that it now asks a factual question about whether a predominant punctuation style in the U.S. and in the UK exists for handling inclusive numerical ranges (such as dates or page numbers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question asked &amp;quot;which style is better&amp;quot;—which is obviously a request for opinion-based answers and which led to its being closed for that reason. However, I think that specific questions about whether a predominant style exists—and, if so, what that style is—are answerable by checking to see whether a broad consensus among style guides on a particular style exists or does not exist. Further, I think that an answer presenting evidence on questions of this sort may be valuable for readers who care about such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these points in mind, I ask that you consider reopening this question as edited. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-11-01T20:56:46.530" LastActivityDate="2023-11-01T20:56:46.530" Title="Can we reopen the question &quot;Which format is most common for representing a number range in U.S. punctuation style and in British punctuation style?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15719" CreationDate="2023-11-05T14:55:18.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries can get you pretty far if you know how to use them. With late Middle English and Early Modern English, most of the words are spelled the same except for the vowels, which may be different or (in some cases) missing entirely. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searching for &lt;code&gt;ch*f*l*&lt;/code&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;search_field=hnf&amp;amp;q=ch*f*l*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; brings up &amp;quot;chẹ̄flī&amp;quot; as the second result&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same search using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/search/advanced/Entries?q=ch*f*l*&amp;amp;sortOption=Frequency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED's advanced search&lt;/a&gt; brings up &amp;quot;chiefly&amp;quot; as the first result&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searching for &lt;code&gt;^ch[aeiouy]*f[aeiouy]*l[aeiouy]*$&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.visca.com/regexdict/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Visca&lt;/a&gt; (regex search for Modern English) only brings up &amp;quot;chiefly&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some obvious patterns to this (e.g., &amp;quot;ie&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; is pretty obvious) but sometimes not (e.g., &amp;quot;shew&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;show&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MED and OED are historical dictionaries, which will have both obsolete words and definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other substitutions you might see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;U for V (liue vs live)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I for J (iustice vs justice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VV/UU for W (vvhere vs where)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C for K&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doubling letters (counsell vs counsel)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And for some of these, vice versa.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Foreign words and especially names can be harder to interpret. For example, trying to decipher the name &amp;quot;Bathe Cane&amp;quot; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A09829.0001.001/1:6?rgn=div1;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Frampton's translation of a certain famous work&lt;/a&gt; via these rules is basically impossible without having an understanding of the context. The correct translation is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Khan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Batu Khan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-11-05T14:55:18.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-05T21:22:57.380" Score="14" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/614344/what-does-make-the-iacke-go-mean&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;make the Iacke go&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt; has received four answers, all of which propose theories as to what the phrase means. Under it are also some comments that, to me, raise an interesting question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@All Please don't speculate in comments. Write an answer. –  Andrew Leach ♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@AndrewLeach Would you please desist from this monomaniacal insistence on writing answers even when there is no certain answer to be had? – TimR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even speculation should go into the answer box. A partial answer is an answer, not a comment. Comments are for soliciting further information, as you yourself demonstrate with the existing answer. – Andrew Leach ♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@AndrewLeach Who says comments must have that exclusive function? I see questions from the past where you yourself are making suggestions in comments. If comments used to be used more broadly, when did their purpose get narrowed down? –  TimR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments that disagreed with the moderation (I assume some of the more conjectural comments were deleted) received many upvotes, a fact that leads me to ask: &lt;strong&gt;is speculation allowed in comments?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/206976/tinfoil-hat&quot;&gt;Tinfoil Hat's&lt;/a&gt; comment sums up the issue: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Since this is slightly wild speculation on my part, I’ll risk a comment delete over downvotes on a half-baked answer.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guidance/Consensus at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/answers-in-comments&quot;&gt;Answers in comments&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partial answers may appear in comments and may be used by anyone who wishes to post a complete answer, with the understanding that mods may still delete the comments at a whim, without notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, that is somewhat related, but I'm not entirely sure if a 'partial answer' is the same as a speculative one, and whether deleting it is truly useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Many of those comments have now been deleted (not to silence discussion, I assume, but because they've been recorded here) and the question is also locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-11-06T14:50:37.420" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T22:26:41.467" Title="May I speculate in comments?" Tags="|discussion|support|comments|etiquette|answering-advice|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15724" CreationDate="2023-11-07T01:51:42.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mods may still delete the comments at a whim, without notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pretty much says it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the lock now on the question only applies to comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments on this question have been disabled, but &lt;strong&gt;it is still accepting new answers&lt;/strong&gt; and other interactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone is free to post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more on the reasons why site moderators prefer for answers to be posted as answer posts rather than as comments, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10646/is-se-enforcing-no-answers-in-comments?cb=1&quot;&gt;Is SE enforcing &amp;quot;no answers in comments&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T01:51:42.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15724" CreationDate="2023-11-07T17:32:09.607" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since SE as a Q&amp;amp;A site's very existence depends on our holding ourselves to some higher standard than a free-for-all-to-speculate-in-comments like Reddit or Yahoo, it &lt;em&gt;becomes&lt;/em&gt; our responsibilty to enforce these SE rules, and prior to being entrusted to carry the diamond, we'd have held differing views and posted answers or speculations all over the place at some point, which is likely still around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that it be in the answer box, and not to worry too much about the feedback it gets, be it DVs, or disagreements. This is why we &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;; as the comments by design cannot receive DVs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, any attempt to 'answer' the question, should go in the answer-box; be it authoritative with substantiation, partial with the relevant substantiation, and to the other extreme, mere speculation. All these should be 'vetted' by the community with their votes, flags, or other feedback in comments. Abuse of the comment-box to escape this vetting under the banner of 'speculation' would be treated the same way as answering in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This by no means is 'encouraging' or welcoming speculations. We still expect authoritative answers that can withstand the scrutiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50044" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-10T12:15:15.507" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T12:15:15.507" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15724" CreationDate="2023-11-08T00:13:36.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are a shoot-askers-down community with a crew of hawkish eagle-eyed downvoters ready to slay and humiliate new users with the temerity to ask a question that they haven't the vocabulary to ask differently or the knowledge to research any better. The weapon of choice with which to club these big-eyed baby-seal questions is: &amp;quot;show more research&amp;quot;. I massively overstate the case, of course, but a bit of massive overstatement has never done anyone any harm ever at all. (Never ever)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an important point. NVZ (in his post here) and Andrew L (in comments) have started asking users to post unsubstantiated speculations as authoritative answers. Because—so the reasoning goes—speculations are answers, they should go in the answer box where answers belong and where people can upvote them and downvote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But answers, too, have minimum standards, which also need to be upheld, just like questions. Answers should be based on evidence or on authoritative sources. This is  a site for linguists etymologists and serious English language enthusiasts. People coming here have a right to expect not only that answer posts have some basis in evidence or in secondary research, but that they aren't mere speculation masquerading as knowledgable or reliable information!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer boxes are strictly for answers. Real ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spread of misinformation is antithetical to the aims of the SE network. Let us not encourage users to convert interesting speculative comments into answers where they should be as welcome as a bad case of gout or an outbreak of dysentery. We have standards to uphold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: NVZ and AL, respect to your dedication here as mods, which I appreciate greatly. You're both diamonds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2023-11-10T22:26:41.467" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T22:26:41.467" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-09T03:21:46.290" Score="0" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for structured data of English grammar, however much might have been done. Specifically sentence-level grammar (as opposed to word morphology rules, though finding structured data for both would be nice). By &amp;quot;structured data&amp;quot;, I mean something more structured than grammar written in prose / natural language, ideally in a data format like JSON. Here is a hypothetical JSON data format for word morphology rules related to the English word &amp;quot;interconnected&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;  name: 'ed',&#xA;  load: [&#xA;    { form: 'anchor', name: 'base', base: true },&#xA;    { form: 'pattern', name: 'consonant', test: 'consonant' },&#xA;    { form: 'anchor', head: false }&#xA;  ],&#xA;  save: [&#xA;    { name: 'base' },&#xA;    { name: 'consonant' },&#xA;    { text: 'ed' },&#xA;  ]&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;{&#xA;  name: 'inter',&#xA;  save: [&#xA;    { text: 'inter' },&#xA;    { name: 'self' }&#xA;  ]&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;{&#xA;  save: [&#xA;    { rule: 'inter' },&#xA;    { name: 'self' },&#xA;    { rule: 'ed' }&#xA;  ]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is modeled after the Hunspell dictionaries, which are the main modern digital dictionaries used by OSes, browsers, etc.. The &lt;code&gt;load&lt;/code&gt; takes a word from a dictionary and applies the rule to it. The &lt;code&gt;save&lt;/code&gt; is the final generated word. So the &lt;code&gt;ed&lt;/code&gt; rule says &amp;quot;base: true (meaning, read the first characters of the word), until the first consonant, where the consonant is the last letter. Then save the &lt;code&gt;base + consonant + ed&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;. The actual full Hunspell format entry is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SFX D Y 4&#xA;SFX D   0     d          e&#xA;SFX D   y     ied        [^aeiou]y&#xA;SFX D   0     ed         [^ey]&#xA;SFX D   0     ed         [aeiou]y&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sidemote: Hunspell's format is a lot more compact and human readable, but it's a nightmare to parse, so the above JSON is closer to how a computer would perhaps model it after parsing the Hunspell format rule. But that is beside the point.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all just goes to show what I am looking for in terms of &amp;quot;structured data&amp;quot;. JSON, XML, CSV, or some other data format would be perfect. The next best option is in raw code (which is pseudo-structured I would say, as it's better than natural language, but it's still hard to deal with and port to different places). &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vinagrito/pealim/blob/57e3c473d89cce461ab82f1aa4b7ff5ff08b7622/lib/verb_constructor/paal.rb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; huge pealim code file is for generating Hebrew verbs. It demonstrates what &amp;quot;code&amp;quot; would look like that I'm describing. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/words/double-metaphone/blob/f8f5dea33c9d71843d504349f1d46373ed5b2b74/index.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; code implements the &amp;quot;double metaphone&amp;quot; algorithm (a spell-check algorithm for English which is based on phonetics), it shows some code for dealing with English. Both demonstrate the point, that code would be a second-best option for structured data for English, after structured data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, has anyone compiled (even the start of) a list of sentence-level grammar rules for English, in structured data form, as described? Or if not in structured JSON/etc., then as code? And if not code, what is the remaining last best bet, ideally some natural language text on a website, instead of a PDF or physical book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mainly I am looking to build on top of it, and if nothing else, to gain inspiration on how to get started modeling sentence-level grammar rules in a structured way.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79672" OwnerDisplayName="Lance" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T08:23:32.200" Title="Collection of English sentence-level grammar rules as semi-structured &quot;data&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15724" CreationDate="2023-11-09T13:56:13.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one (as one of those who provided &amp;quot;an&amp;quot; answer) feel almost anxious about going on participating. Especially because of the &amp;quot;scratching the ridiculous&amp;quot;-level of logical fallacies in the way the system is set up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not able (yet) to leave comments as a new contributor, yet I haven't hesitated to write an answer, based on what I know. But not because it was encouraged, on the contrary - what triggered me to do it in the end, was exactly that notion that even speculation shall be written as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I tried to be careful to present my &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; as neither &amp;quot;just a thought&amp;quot;, nor &amp;quot;as is correct&amp;quot;. I reduced it mainly to what I know and tried to position it by that in a neutral stance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, in the comments I was asked what I do think of the use of &amp;quot;Iacke&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;Jacke&amp;quot; in the context of the first-portfolio - to which I responded that I would not dare to give a full analysis/review without having the source right before me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was interpreted as a lack of effort and I got a biting comment that I do indeed have the full source before me I just need to follow the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is the point where I am almost &amp;quot;emotionally done for&amp;quot; regarding my further personal engagement. (If you do not understand why that is, leave it be and under no circumstance comment on that.) Because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The full source is NOT present, it is an excerpt that is linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That full source was only accessible to me after utilizing a VPN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I was then able to discover on that site is that it is just a mashed-up collection without any relevant side notes, meaning: it does not contain contextual markings as I noted before in my follow-up comment would be a requirement to be able to give a full review. What the site contains is heavily transformed and mangled by stone-age-OCR without human revision, no hypertext/contextual references, let alone high-resolution photographs at the least. This is the equivalent of how &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; in this area was done for centuries BEFORE networking, hypertext, and computer-assisted-workflows were established - which btw. happened in the 1950s ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both points show a lack of effort on the side of the commenter. Because it implies that accessibility is a given and that the aforementioned necessities are met. This is not the case. It is extremely discouraging as it falls in line with the usual &amp;quot;you are not able to google&amp;quot;-comments, which are only spouted by people who never even dare to try to come up with the same results on another person's system - or in another country - only to realize that &amp;quot;search-engines&amp;quot;, as well as ANY dynamic website is subject to change at the time of loading and is most likely fully customized to the person searching (or in the Google Search case: The system simply does not offer a non-customized search).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the legal barriers, e.g. Gutenberg Project - not fully accessible in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I at least got a great example of a revision for my answer, from which I learned a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why all the fuzz, here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, if a speculation should be an answer or a comment is a nonsensical discussion, as long as almost everyone participating is more focused on their personal experiences/perspective on that matter than what the system actually allows in the first place and what might be a beneficial compromise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not allow commenting as a new contributor, ergo: the whole discussion is irrelevant. The only way to treat it still as relevant is implying that a community split into those that already have the reputation shall have all rights, whereas new contributors shall have all duties, while at the same time not being able to make notions/comments, participate in the general exchange on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only thing you CAN discuss here - and NO I am not SHOUTING, it's called EMPHASIS - is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you (the ALREADY ESTABLISHED) want to let new contributors be able to participate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.. OR (and this is an exclusive or):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you want to keep the status quo to ensure your position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, this all boils down to a hefty portion of necessary self-reflection, having an intellectual stroll into the not-so-green pastures one is used to, and the resulting awareness of the surroundings of anyone participating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you - the people who decide how the system works or how its rules are interpreted and applied - are not ready to fulfill these inherently natural requirements in the first place, there will never be an answer to this discussion, as it simply CAN NOT have an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may treat this as a rant or for what it is (without fantasizing about the in-between-the-lines, as there is no such thing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An honest contribution to this discussion is rooted in my awareness and my personal experiences accompanied by an attempt to provoke self-reflection in all participants (including myself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that look from your perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="490703" LastEditorUserId="50044" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T14:36:23.163" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T14:36:23.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-09T19:26:00.200" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago, perhaps still, new answers to old questions were put under review (in a review queue), as if to imply: 'This question has been addressed, at length; what could possibly be the value-add at this point.' Or so it seemed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the site evolves over time, as language does, and the chatty little answers or one-horse theories become quaint, like old Toy Town. &lt;em&gt;Let's go play with the wooden toys! And metal? And bears with buttons, what?&lt;/em&gt; Well, they're not choking hazards…but they're not cute on a shelf either. I suppose they're meant to be time capsules, a history of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I no longer search &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; questions (only under &lt;em&gt;week&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;month&lt;/em&gt;) because so much of the &amp;quot;activity&amp;quot; seems to be noncritical edits, which does not bother me (I would edit articles until the end of time…). But the question is…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they editing the old questions to make them actually active or&#xA;merely more attractive? Or both, possibly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what the intent is, but I avoid the &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; questions because so many are so old. Like, 'Eureka! Here's a nugget… Oh, this was abandoned 12 years ago; I'm here all alone. Never mind.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems like some recent questions found under &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; are not so easily found, if at all, under &lt;em&gt;week&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;month.&lt;/em&gt; IDK how it's sorted; perhaps there is a link to info on that. TY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="464658" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T19:33:16.893" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T20:38:59.087" Title="Are we being encouraged to answer very old questions, or are they just being made more visually pleasing?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15730" CreationDate="2023-11-09T20:33:58.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts are edited for a number of reasons, but all edits must make the post better, especially when it's a post that's not currently on the &amp;quot;active homepage&amp;quot; since space there is limited and so many users rely on it. You should expect to see &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; amount of noise on this homepage, but if you see anything unusual or concerning you can flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering old questions is great to do (as long as your answers are good). For example, I provided an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/614519/191178&quot;&gt;What is the etymology of &amp;quot;business end&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; because I wasn't thrilled with the answers the question got when posted in 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/?tab=active&quot;&gt;active homepage&lt;/a&gt; (the default view when you navigate to the site) shows questions that have been recently bumped (as long as those questions aren't significantly downvoted). Most bumps are from when the question or one of its answers was just posted, or if an edit was made to the question or one of its answers, but there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/48578/323179&quot;&gt;laundry list of other reasons&lt;/a&gt;. (Note that deleting an answer does not un-bump the post, so someone like you under 10k rep won't always be able to determine what happened.) A question can only appear once on this list, no matter how much activity happens. This is significant; it means that an editor can go to town on any of the Q&amp;amp;A that show up on the homepage without pushing other questions off. I use this trick to edit quite extensively, so you might notice that I made minor edits all at once to six answers under a single question (something I wouldn't do all at once to six answers on six different questions that weren't recently bumped).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The active homepage is but one way to view questions and it may not be the most useful to you all the time. If you select &amp;quot;Questions&amp;quot; in the left sidebar, will find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions?tab=Newest&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;newest&amp;quot; questions list&lt;/a&gt;, which is probably the most useful of the tabs there (though there are others, just like the homepage also has &amp;quot;week&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;month&amp;quot;). If you want something more than that you can use search, which is very powerful. For example, here are all &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aa%20score%3a3..&amp;amp;searchOn=3&quot;&gt;answers sorted by newest that score at least 3&lt;/a&gt; (including new answers to old questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T20:38:59.087" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T20:38:59.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15733" CreationDate="2023-11-10T20:27:48.983" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/2122/416181&quot;&gt;first comment under this answer&lt;/a&gt; is seemingly by someone with the name &amp;quot;delete&amp;quot;. And yet, no tooltip/message appears when you mouse over this name. Screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ahvno.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ahvno.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For convenience, here is the text version, copied as is, including the name and timestamp:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Even the most conservative and staunchest prescriptivist commenters admit that there is nothing inherently ungrammatical about so-called “split” infinitives&amp;quot; - really? – delete&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Aug 28, 2010 at 22:50&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416181" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-11-12T15:21:42.047" LastActivityDate="2023-11-12T15:21:42.047" Title="Why is there no name on this comment except for &quot;delete&quot;?" Tags="|support|display|usernames|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15732" CreationDate="2023-11-10T20:51:26.087" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago, the username of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/358248/323179&quot;&gt;deleted users wasn't automatically anonymized&lt;/a&gt; so users would &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/26853/323179&quot;&gt;change it to something else before deletion&lt;/a&gt;. This user decided to call themselves &amp;quot;delete&amp;quot; and then requested their account be deleted, which is why you can't access their profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T20:51:26.087" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2023-11-12T17:33:30.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A decade+ later, I think very few people on this site would agree with  the 'yes' in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/53/1&quot;&gt;(since deleted) accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;. Though the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-games&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-word-games-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;word-games&lt;/a&gt; has 21 questions, very few of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bword-games%5D%20closed%3Ano%20locked%3Ano&quot;&gt;the un-closed, un-locked ones&lt;/a&gt; are actual word &lt;em&gt;games&lt;/em&gt;, probably because puzzles and stuff aren't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; about the English language and its usage; posting one will most likely result in your question's closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not be useful if the goal (as is yours) is to improve people's vocabulary, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which has tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/tags/wordplay&quot;&gt;[wordplay]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word-game&quot;&gt;[word-game]&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;, is one place where such word games may be posted. Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage-multi-layered-discourse-room&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U chat&lt;/a&gt; is also a place for this, although you probably wouldn't be able to post more elaborate games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-12-16T04:11:03.973" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T04:11:03.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15736" CreationDate="2023-11-20T19:03:49.267" Score="6" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many Stack Exchange sites require that users do some research before asking a question. Does English Language &amp;amp; Usage have such a policy? If yes, what resources should users consult before asking a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: As &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15707/191178&quot;&gt;suggested by Catija&lt;/a&gt;, this is a pared down list of resources that will be used in our close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T19:03:49.267" Title="What resources do I need to consult before asking a question?" Tags="|support|resources|online-resources|research-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15735" CreationDate="2023-11-20T19:03:49.267" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Asking questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions can be easily answered by searching for a word, phrase, or idiom in a free online dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, and even some grammar questions (such as which preposition is the most appropriate after a specific verb) are all covered in most dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent our site from duplicating this information, we expect that users check at least one dictionary before posting a question. To make this easier, we've created a &amp;quot;List of Resources&amp;quot; below of a few popular dictionaries and the differences between them. Feel free to use resources that aren't on this list or even cross-reference several of them (but make sure that your sources are reputable!); the more solid your research is, the more likely your question is to be well received. Once you've consulted your dictionary (or several), if your question wasn't satisfactorily answered there, include a link to the dictionary entry and explain why it didn't answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a non-native speaker, consider asking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL&lt;/a&gt; instead. While ELL has a similar requirement for research, everything about it is tailored toward answering non-native questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, be sure to search for duplicates before asking. If you did find a question that looked promising but only had bad answers, you can still ask your question if you link to the old one and explain why those answers don't work for you. Note: Finding duplicates on this site can be tricky, so it's OK if a question ends up being closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;List of resources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These dictionaries were selected from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2573/191178&quot;&gt;our larger list&lt;/a&gt; because they are free, reputable, and easy to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General Dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt; (CDO) — The main dictionary (&amp;quot;English&amp;quot;) is British-focused, but includes definitions and sound clips for American English as well. Some of the entries have pictures. Additionally, there are two more dictionaries, one for each dialect: &amp;quot;Essential American English&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Essential British English&amp;quot;. Unlike other American dictionaries, the pronunciation system is IPA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt; — Several dictionaries on the same page, with the first one being primarily British. American English is covered somewhere further down on the page, though (unlike other American dictionaries) the pronunciation system is IPA. Some of the entries have pictures, and in addition to sound clips, there are videos of people pronouncing each word. Also covers the etymology (somewhere).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; (MW) — An American dictionary, with some British (or World English) definitions. Has sound clips for how to pronounce words. No IPA. Includes etymology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; — The primary dictionary is American English, with sound clips. Features both phonetic respelling and IPA transcriptions. Some entries include content above and beyond that from other sources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Learner's dictionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_learner%27s_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;learner's dictionary&lt;/a&gt; is a type of dictionary with additional features that are geared towards non-native speakers. For example, many nouns will be marked as &amp;quot;countable&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;uncountable&amp;quot; whereas a general dictionary would not have either label unless it was a particularly rare word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Learner's Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ldoceonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins COBUILD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macmillan English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Learner's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://learnersdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Idioms, expressions and slang&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most dictionaries define idioms, either as their own entry or under a headword. For example, I searched for &lt;em&gt;horse to water&lt;/em&gt; in the search box, and Collins returned their entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-but-you-cant-make-it-drink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TFD Idioms and Phrases&lt;/a&gt; — I found that searching for idioms and phrases in a dedicated dictionary like this one was easier than searching in a general-purpose dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T19:03:49.267" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-26T09:27:58.317" Score="7" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once again the site design has been disrupted by a standard change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how Help pages used to look:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VxoYD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VxoYD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Old style, weight 400&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They now have &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; bold titles:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BZVas.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BZVas.png&quot; alt=&quot;Current style, weight 700&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the size of the heading, &lt;strong&gt;this unbalances the page.&lt;/strong&gt; It seems to work better on sites using the standard sans-serif font, or Palatino for serif, but doesn't work with Georgia. I suspect that that's because Georgia is not an old-style font, but rather transitional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new weight is achieved with the CSS &lt;code&gt;font-weight: bold&lt;/code&gt;. Please consider changing this to &lt;strong&gt;semi-bold&lt;/strong&gt; with weight 600 &lt;code&gt;font-weight: 600&lt;/code&gt; since the font stack should support that. If a particular font doesn't have a &amp;quot;semi-bold&amp;quot; weight, or the client software support that, then the fallback is to use the next available heavier weight (700 or bold).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yNuFw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yNuFw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mock-up using weight 600&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better still would be to match the &lt;code&gt;font-weight: normal&lt;/code&gt; serif font used for questions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtD0o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtD0o.png&quot; alt=&quot;Question title, normal-weight serif font&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18696" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2023-11-26T21:27:32.043" LastActivityDate="2023-11-26T21:27:32.043" Title="Please fix the standard sans-serif page title" Tags="|bug|design|help-pages|font|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-07T23:42:01.997" Score="47" ViewCount="1259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am saddened to announce the passing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15299/john-lawler&quot;&gt;John Lawler&lt;/a&gt; on Saturday November 25. Many of us here were friends with him, and countless more helped by his answers. For those of you who aren't familiar with him, a short biography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2009, John retired from the Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan after 37 years of teaching there. Two years later, on November 4th, 2011, he &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/482/jlawler&quot;&gt;joined Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and shortly after that, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/52/yearling?userid=15299&quot;&gt;November 27th&lt;/a&gt;, our site here, English Language and Usage. Over the next 12 years, he answered questions here on SE while occasionally teaching classes at Western Washington University. Across all SE sites, he posted almost 2,000 answers, even getting the only ever gold tag in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-grammar-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;grammar&lt;/a&gt; here on ELU. At the time of this writing, those answers got him 107k reputation points on ELU (#6 all time on the site), 10k on Linguistics, and 2k on ELL. As his answers live on to help new people, I am sure his points will increase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to post an answer sharing your thoughts and your memories here or &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/95&quot;&gt;join us in chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His network profile:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/1019614&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1019614.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for John Lawler on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot; title=&quot;profile for John Lawler on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64820471#64820471&quot;&gt;announcement from UMich of his passing&lt;/a&gt; written by dept. chair Acrisio Pires, courtesy of Lambie in chat (with an additional thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64819284#64819284&quot;&gt;Araucaria&lt;/a&gt; for breaking the news).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20220928034917/https://websites.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive of his homepage&lt;/a&gt; so you can see it the same way he left it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3408/191178&quot;&gt;Measuring typographical emphasis: the “lawler” and “lawler weight”&lt;/a&gt; (to which he lends his name)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13492/191178&quot;&gt;John Lawler&amp;#39;s ELU answer links, by topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2023-12-09T11:12:55.967" LastActivityDate="2024-01-03T23:50:14.140" Title="Thank you, Professor Lawler and Rest in Peace!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7267" CreationDate="2023-12-15T17:46:52.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer has a score of -1 or less, three &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;users with 20k+ rep&lt;/a&gt; can delete it even if it's accepted and moderators can always delete an answer if they so choose. I won't guarantee that I'll always delete an answer if a flag asks me to (especially since I've even &lt;em&gt;undeleted&lt;/em&gt; useful self-deleted posts), but if an answer is unsalvageably bad or wrong, I probably wouldn't see a good reason to keep it around against the author's wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the answer is fine but there are comments that cross a line (beyond normal criticism of the answer) or are otherwise excessive, it would be more appropriate to flag those instead. When things get heated, it's often best for a moderator to just put a comment lock on for a week to let things cool down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: In this case, the moderator chose to leave the answer and delete the comments. (There was no option to apply a comment lock in 2015—that was only added many years later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-12-15T17:46:52.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-12-16T00:59:12.513" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15735/191178&quot;&gt;What resources do I need to consult before asking a question?&lt;/a&gt; and while that might not be the final revision of that post, I think it's good enough to move forward with the rest of this. Without further ado (sorry, there's been a lot of ado to get to this point), I copied &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15707/191178&quot;&gt;Cat's suggestions&lt;/a&gt; with tweaks. Good? Good enough to use? Nothing will ever be perfect, but we could potentially edit this close reason again if we see anything that's a big enough problem later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Cat said this is a very big change, the CMs will likely not edit the old reason to retroactively apply it to already closed questions. I guess what to do with old questions could be its own discussion too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all of these are under the 500 character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Close modal text (title+body)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Shown to close voters as they go to close the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answered by a dictionary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be easily answered by consulting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15735/191178&quot;&gt;reputable online dictionary&lt;/a&gt; should be closed with this reason unless the question includes an explanation of why the dictionary wasn't helpful. When using this close reason, consider providing a link to a relevant reference in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went with Cat's suggestion to not require a comment. However, I still don't want to see this close reason used unless you're actually certain that the answer exists in a &amp;quot;reputable online dictionary&amp;quot;. I've really had enough of seeing questions closed with this when there is no resource in existence (at least not one in Google or on our full list) that answers the question, much less one that's a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added &amp;quot;easily&amp;quot; at the suggestion of jsw29 in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This still shouldn't be used to close questions which are only answered by the OED, but that's perhaps (hopefully?) too rare an event to require any space here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Post notice description&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Shown in the post notice banner above the more specific guidance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed because it should be answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15735/191178&quot;&gt;consulting a dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fine. It's only half of the banner anyway, if I'm understanding correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Post owner guidance&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Shown under &amp;quot;Post notice description&amp;quot; to the post owner.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect askers to use a dictionary to learn a word's basic meaning, pronunciation and usage. If you've already consulted a dictionary and it didn't answer your question, edit this post to explain what you found and what you still don't understand. If you're learning English as a foreign language, consider asking on  &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt;, a site for speakers of other languages learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added a link to help/on-topic and changed the wording according to Colleen's suggestion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General user guidance&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Shown under &amp;quot;Post notice description&amp;quot; to anyone who's not the original poster.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect askers to use a dictionary to learn a word's basic meaning, pronunciation and usage. If an edit to this question adds sufficient detail or explanation such that this close reason no longer applies, vote to reopen or request reopening on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;our Meta site&lt;/a&gt;. If comments from the author convey such information, edit them into the question and recommend reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling with this one a little. I removed the suggestion to flag because I don't really want to get a lot of moderator flags, but I felt like something should replace it. Maybe &amp;quot;...vote to reopen, if possible&amp;quot; if we didn't want to mention Meta. (Again, linking to a homepage feels weird.) In any case, the best option should come first, which is voting to reopen. Currently, meta requires 5 rep to use, which is less than flagging, though I can't imagine us getting a lot of unwanted meta questions in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2024-01-18T17:25:08.347" LastActivityDate="2024-01-18T17:25:08.347" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-17T05:30:54.950" Score="9" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/616889/when-did-western-newspapers-stop-using-the-term-japs-in-their-publications&quot;&gt;When did Western newspapers stop using the term “Japs” in their publications?&lt;/a&gt; was asked yesterday and has really been riding the closure-rollercoaster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sMzSl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sMzSl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expanded details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first time, it was closed as general reference. Irrespective of the fact that the CV-guidelines were recently changed, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; is this easily researchable? I &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=When%20did%20Western%20newspapers%20stop%20using%20the%20term%20%E2%80%9CJaps%E2%80%9D%20in%20their%20publication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;googled the title&lt;/a&gt; and looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jap#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;; none of them had any useful information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was subsequently reopened outside of review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second time, it was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/540531/was-the-word-that-is-now-considered-a-slur-against-japanese-people-ever-consider&quot;&gt;Was the word that is now considered a slur against Japanese people ever considered simply a standard, neutral demonym?&lt;/a&gt;, which is a very different question. According to the Help Center, duplicate closures should be similar enough that they could be &amp;quot;answered identically.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was subsequently reopened by a tag-badge-holder and another user. In review, it also received two 'leave closed's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third time, two of the CVs (I think) were for general reference, and the other voter said that it was a duplicate of the one mentioned earlier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15743/whats-wrong-with-the-japs-question#comment64412_15743&quot;&gt;Laurel's comment&lt;/a&gt; for the specific breakdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that the question has been somewhat polarizing (right now, it's at +4/-3), confusing (a reviewer who initially selected &amp;quot;Looks OK&amp;quot; ended up voting to close the question as general reference and also later voted to reopen), and found to be objectionable (one comment says &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Personally, if I were Japanese, I'd find this question insulting and/or annoying/distressing&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;). I also see that some of the CVers have left explanatory comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; see or understand is the actual reason. How exactly is that question off-topic? Do we think it's salvageable? I'd be particularly interested to hear from the voters themselves, but broader input is also welcomed. Even though this has since been reopened, I'm still interested in knowing the CVers' opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="466641" LastEditorUserId="466641" LastEditDate="2023-12-22T02:54:53.567" LastActivityDate="2023-12-22T02:54:53.567" Title="What's off-topic about the question regarding the history of a slur?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|question-closure|offensive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15743" CreationDate="2023-12-18T17:51:07.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question itself was (somehow) reopened by a third set of regular users, hopefully setting the matter, but here are my thoughts as to why it should be kept open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I think you're spot-on that the question can't easily be researched. Even under the old policy, I don't think it should have been closed as such. Under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15694/191178&quot;&gt;new policy&lt;/a&gt;, definitely not. As for it being a duplicate, some of the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/540531/191178&quot;&gt;Was the word that is now considered a slur against Japanese people ever considered simply a standard, neutral demonym?&lt;/a&gt; do address this question. However, because it would be possible to answer &amp;quot;When did they stop?&amp;quot; without answering &amp;quot;Was it ever considered simply a standard, neutral demonym?&amp;quot; (and vice versa) that's a good reason for it not to be closed as a duplicate. (It looks like what happened is that newspapers circa WWII knew it was derogatory and decided to use it anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/616889/when-did-western-newspapers-stop-using-the-term-japs-in-their-publications#comment1567234_616889&quot;&gt;comment from FumbleFingers&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you seriously expecting that all Anglophone sources suddenly decided at some point in time (all for the same reason) that &amp;quot;Jap&amp;quot; was insulting? Obviously it came to have very negative associations as we learned more about Japanese treatment of pows during and following WW2, but gradually, we have to put the past behind us. And in the days before Google and Facebook, there was nothing remotely like a &amp;quot;global voice&amp;quot; advising us to change our vocabulary. Personally, if I were Japanese, I'd find this question insulting and/or annoying / distressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the first point here, we see well-received questions all the time about the birth of words and how they came to be popular, and this is exactly the same but in the opposite direction, the death of a word and how it fell into disuse. Anyone who's seen enough of these questions will know that the answer to &amp;quot;When did they stop?&amp;quot; can't possibly be a single date but rather a timeframe. The fact that it wasn't some sort of instantaneous unanimous decision is what makes it an interesting and complex question, exactly the sort we want here. I assume that WhiskerBiscuit (OP) knows all this too, but if they don't, it would surely be something made immediately obvious by an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the next point, that's a lot of &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; assertions but no proof to back them up. While there was neither a Google nor a Facebook in the timeframe that OP is asking about, there were style guides dictating usage for formal publications. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APA_style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APA&lt;/a&gt; is 100 years old. It certainly does have &lt;a href=&quot;https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/racial-ethnic-minorities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;guidelines for talking about racial and ethnic identity&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; now, but did it have those back in the days when &amp;quot;Jap&amp;quot; was in use? I don't know, but if I did that could be the start of an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the suggestion that the question itself could be offensive is serious (though close voting is not a good solution to that). While we do accept questions about any English word, no matter how offensive, we must be sensitive in how we phrase them. With that in mind, I did comb through the question but it seems to handle the issue respectfully. The only two &lt;em&gt;minor&lt;/em&gt; issues I can see is that it doesn't use &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/offensive-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;offensive-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-offensive-language-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;offensive-language&lt;/a&gt; and has &amp;quot;Japs&amp;quot; in the title, which is possibly in violation of our rules for titles. (Unfortunately, trying to address the latter would greatly reduce the readability of the title, since I've never seen the word censored as e.g. &amp;quot;J***s&amp;quot;. I also still feel like &amp;quot;the word that is now considered a slur against Japanese people&amp;quot; is too much obfuscation.) If there's anything I missed here (that can't be fixed simply by editing), feel free to point it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2023-12-18T17:51:07.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-12-20T23:41:08.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a welcome change!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very important, nonetheless, that it is not only expressly understood but also expressly stated that dictionaries are not authorities on grammatical information, and that they are on the meaning of words and phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site for linguists, etymologists and serious language enthusiasts. Because all of us (linguists, etymologists and serious English language enthusiasts) know that dictionaries are not authoritative sources in terms of grammatical information, for example part of speech information, it should be &lt;strong&gt;very clearly stated&lt;/strong&gt; somewhere that &amp;quot;answerable by a dictionary&amp;quot; only applies to &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;single word requests&amp;quot; and similar, and not to requests relating to parts of speech or other grammatical information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T23:41:08.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-20T23:58:04.540" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a very welcome post, long overdue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15694/replacing-our-research-close-reason-final-review/15742#15742&quot;&gt;Replacing our &amp;quot;research&amp;quot; close reason: Final review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... one of the new close-vote reasons is given as &amp;quot;answerable by a dictionary.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if this is a close-vote reason relating to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, this is completely apt. However, we expressly do not want questions relating to parts of speech or other grammatical or syntactic concerns to be closed as &amp;quot;answerable by a dictionary&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any given dictionary might give its own particular answer regarding the part of speech of a word, but no linguist, etymologist or serious language enthusiast would regard a dictionary as a reliable source of information on these issues. Far from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be absolutely totally and utterly clear at every stage of the close process. Grammar questions are expressly not &amp;quot;answerable by a dictionary&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you agree or disagree with this  line of thinking, please help inform the discussion here by adding a post below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2023-12-21T03:26:21.150" LastActivityDate="2023-12-23T16:38:13.523" Title="'Answerable by a dictionary' unsuitable for grammar questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15746" CreationDate="2023-12-21T01:47:05.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that questions about grammar, syntax and part of speech are not going to be easily answered by online dictionary sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to clarify this? Do you support editing the close modal text to something like the following? (bolded text added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions &lt;strong&gt;about meaning or word usage&lt;/strong&gt; that can be easily answered by consulting a reputable online dictionary should be closed with this reason unless they indicate why a dictionary couldn't address their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this would be strictly followed by close-voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T01:47:05.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15746" CreationDate="2023-12-21T20:05:36.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that this question needed to be raised, confirms the point that I have made earlier, that it is misguided to try to come up with some precise, exhaustive list of criteria for the closing reason that will replace the current show-research reason (and roughly correspond to the old general-reference reason), that could then be applied mechanically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, I think, we want to be able to close by using this reason, are the questions to which a generally competent, generally well educated, speaker of English (but without any specialised education or talents that would be relevant to the question), either knows the answer or would be able to find the answer in less than ten minutes, if given access to the Internet or a moderately-sized library. That includes the matters to which there are straightforward answers in general-purpose dictionaries, but it includes some other matters. For example, it includes the grammar of English as it is standardly taught to non-native speakers and in other forms of non-specialised education. The questions about, say, parts of speech should be closed if they merely seek an answer that will be marked as correct in an introductory English course, but left open if they are about the subtleties of the way in which CGEL classifies words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Araucaria seems to argue that the questions of the former kind do not exist, and I find it hard to see how anybody could believe that. It is of course true that we can take a naive question from somebody taking an introductory English course and transform it into a different, sophisticated question calling for a complex answer, but when we do that we are not really responding to the question intended by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The regular contributors to this site, I believe, have a good intuitive understanding of what separates the two kinds of questions, but it is very difficult to formulate it precisely. The best thing would be, I think, not to try, but instead trust the contributors who have earned the closing privileges to responsibly exercise their judgment as to whether something is too obvious to be worthy of an answer on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people who regularly exercise their closing privileged will, in any event, continue to follow their intuitive understanding of what is too basic, too obvious, too trivial to be on this site, regardless of what wording of the closing reason is adopted. They will just vote to close such questions and then click on some reason or other that seems to be the closest to what is on their minds, even if it is not very close. Not having a general 'this is too obvious' reason will then result in many closed question having closing banners that do not reflect the real reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, Aracuria's question on this page, considered on its own, says only that 'we expressly do not want questions relating to parts of speech or other grammatical or syntactic concerns to be closed &lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;answerable by a dictionary&amp;quot;', which is something that almost everybody would agree with, but leaves it entirely open whether some of these questions should be closed &lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; something else, or that none of of them should be closed at all. It is only when we read his comments that it becomes clear that he is arguing for the latter position. Heartspring has, in answering the related question made the same point, that a dictionary-focused wording of the reason does not cover basic grammar, but argues for the former position, and is supported in that by Cerberus and a number of upvoters. It is potentially confusing to those who have been following the debate about changing the show-research reason that the concern about basic-grammar questions has now been pulled out to this, separate page. It would have been more productive if the discussion about Araucaria's arguments had continued as a part of the general discussion about the new wording of the closing reason, where support for and opposition to his arguments can be considered together with support for and opposition to Heartspring's and Cerberus' arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2023-12-23T16:38:13.523" LastActivityDate="2023-12-23T16:38:13.523" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2023-12-21T23:46:27.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“However, that doesn't change the fact that there's real damage being done. And we need to fix it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it unsatisfactory that the nature of this  “real damage” is not explained. It is certainly not apparent to me. My own impression is that, despite the existence of ELL, this site attracts scores of basic questions from non-native speakers, who either don’t read or ignore the purpose of this SE group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I think it quite reasonable to expect anyone who posts here to own a decent dictionary — Chambers for the iPhone and I imagine Android is cheap enough — so codifying “free dictionaries” is wrong, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguments not polemics, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T23:46:27.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-03T12:17:59.303" Score="-3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a long-evolved language, missing definitions are rare within English.  Nevertheless, meanings are sometimes missing, resulting in the formation of new words to fill those gaps.  This occurs particularly where society or technology develops and new concepts arise requiring names or descriptions, such as the Internet or &amp;quot;gender fluid&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is inevitable therefore, that within any place where discourse occurs, especially, where discourse takes place on the very topic of the English language, that new words will be brought forth from the void.  Opinions about of what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the truth are not entirely absent from the &lt;strong&gt;choice&lt;/strong&gt; of what to make truth and the &lt;strong&gt;act&lt;/strong&gt; of creating future truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where a meaning is missing from the language, I propose that henceforth it be considered &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; on this site to discuss what &lt;em&gt;would be&lt;/em&gt; an appropriate word, in the context of the language rules and structure, if such a word were to be brought into usage.  By so doing, the site will be accepting the immutable reality that it is a participant in creation of the Lexicon, rather than deluding itself that it can be absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific case which motivated this meta post is the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/617439/172971&quot;&gt;propriogenophobia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which I hereby propose was brought forth from the void this very week on this very site, and was added to the lexicon this very day.  To argue (as a user does) that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;strings not in the lexicon, are expressly off-topic on ELU&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is therefore a policy fatally wounded by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer%27s_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Observer’s Paradox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call upon you, by the power of your votes, to attest to the futility of the aforementioned policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172971" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2024-01-14T19:13:21.920" LastActivityDate="2024-01-14T19:24:18.343" Title="Stack Exchange cannot be excluded from the sociocultural evolution of language, correct?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15738" CreationDate="2024-01-03T23:50:14.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;John Lawler's lost answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question I said he posted almost 2000 answers, but this isn't exactly true. Those are just the answers that are not deleted. If we include his deleted answers, it's more than 2000. Currently he has 63 deleted answers on ELU (excluding migrated and one accidental double post), which is a significant number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I wouldn't normally do this, and even under these exceptional circumstances I hope I'm not taking this too far, but I'm posting a list of these deleted answers for review (requires 10k+ reputation). I haven't reviewed them myself, but I think that a good chunk were deleted because the question was deemed unsuitable (often automatically, but sometimes not), and not because the answer lacked merit. Do we want to reverse any of those question deletions or closures? Could we perhaps find a suitable duplicate for any of these which is currently lacking a John Lawler answer in order for it to be merged? Maybe there's some other use you'll find for these links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: These come from search, so it would be possible for me to filter or sort based on the same options that are available to regular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45711/is-there-a-grammar-of-the-because-sentence/50135&quot;&gt;Is there a grammar of the &amp;quot;because&amp;quot; sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/65911/what-is-the-meaning-of-to-be-past-participle-type-sentence/66010&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;to be + past participle&amp;quot; type sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/319308/reason-for-verbs-ending-with-s-when-different-pronouns-are-used-wish-vs-wishes/319312&quot;&gt;reason for verbs ending with s when different pronouns are used wish vs wishes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55196/how-do-i-clean-up-this-ambiguous-sentence/55198&quot;&gt;How do I clean up this ambiguous sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77912/syntactic-confusion/77914&quot;&gt;Syntactic confusion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/110450/sentence-for-go-to/110454&quot;&gt;Sentence For &amp;quot;Go To&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/175044/stuck-in-how-to-differentiate-between-regular-and-irregular-verbs/175047&quot;&gt;stuck in how to differentiate between regular and irregular verbs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/542332/what-is-the-minimum-number-of-words-required-to-describe-every-known-word-in-a-g/542336&quot;&gt;What is the minimum number of words required to describe every known word in a given English...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66388/use-of-word-likely/66391&quot;&gt;Use of word &amp;quot;likely&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66375/is-the-sentence-the-world-is-getting-smaller-and-international-connections-tigh/66392&quot;&gt;Is the sentence &amp;quot;The world is getting smaller and international connections tighter.&amp;quot; gramma...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108636/who-vs-whom-he-was-one-of-those-they-arrested/109678&quot;&gt;{who vs whom} &amp;quot;he was one of those ____ they arrested&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53569/pennies-and-nails/53571&quot;&gt;Pennies and Nails&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58151/is-timeouts-a-proper-word/58155&quot;&gt;Is timeouts a proper word?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74538/charge-more-to-customers/74540&quot;&gt;Charge More To Customers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72620/a-linguistic-question-on-the-cylinder/72631&quot;&gt;A linguistic question on the cylinder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73994/what-is-the-correct-usage-of-contractions-like-isnt-and-wasnt/74000&quot;&gt;What is the correct usage of contractions like &amp;quot;isn't&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wasn't&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74996/ruling-still-stands-holds/74999&quot;&gt;Ruling Still Stands/Holds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66307/what-is-the-meaning-of-this-sentence/66310&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71886/intransitive-with-passive-voices/71896&quot;&gt;intransitive with passive voices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71047/is-there-a-way-to-avoid-the-double-passive-in-this-sentence/71050&quot;&gt;Is there a way to avoid the double passive in this sentence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74332/doesnt-come-like-that/74346&quot;&gt;Doesn't come like that?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/108451/to-have-to-vs-should/108481&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;To have to&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;should&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166607/difference-between-astray-and-ashtray/166632&quot;&gt;Difference between astray and ashtray?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51270/neutral-synonym-of-scientific-fundamentalist/51272&quot;&gt;Neutral synonym of &amp;quot;scientific fundamentalist&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67461/instantly-satisfying-and-cosy/67467&quot;&gt;Instantly satisfying and cosy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97050/wide-large-and-broad/97054&quot;&gt;Wide, Large, and Broad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/554651/can-a-relative-clause-follow-an-adjective-and-would-the-nouns-within-the-clause/554658&quot;&gt;Can a relative clause follow an adjective, and would the nouns within the clause be singular...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51428/naming-for-the-different-forms-of-a-verb/51434&quot;&gt;Naming for the different forms of a verb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52276/difference-between-multiple-choices-vs-among/52281&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Difference between&amp;quot; multiple choices (vs. &amp;quot;among&amp;quot;)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147396/usage-of-be-able-to/147412&quot;&gt;Usage of &amp;quot;be able to&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/310001/is-there-any-online-dictionary-which-i-can-search-based-on-phonetics/310103&quot;&gt;Is there any online dictionary which I can search based on phonetics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54331/how-to-spell-conjolled-conjouled-conjoled-conjoulled/54332&quot;&gt;How to spell [conjolled, conjouled, conjoled, conjoulled]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/149438/tap-meaning-is-not-clear/149454&quot;&gt;tap - meaning is not clear&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/309930/how-to-interpret-a-benjamin-whorf-quote/310105&quot;&gt;How to interpret a Benjamin Whorf quote?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57485/help-me-understand-meaning-of-this-phrase/57487&quot;&gt;Help me understand meaning of this phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55099/in-page-vs-on-page-vs-at-page/55101&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In page&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;on page&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;at page&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61789/difference-between-using-a-and-an/61790&quot;&gt;Difference between using &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;an&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66395/why-is-a-scots-accent-so-difficult-for-americans-to-understand/66404&quot;&gt;Why is a Scot's accent so difficult for Americans to understand?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143140/intense-stress-vs-high-stress/143157&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Intense stress&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;high stress&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68214/mouse-one-word-or-two-words/68217&quot;&gt;mouse: one word or two words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80336/unless-vs-in-case/80342&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;unless&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;in case&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97467/see-look-out-and-in/97482&quot;&gt;See/Look Out and In&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113067/anaphorism-indirect/113070&quot;&gt;Anaphorism Indirect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132039/anything-wrong-with-these-sentences/132041&quot;&gt;Anything wrong with these sentences?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51106/is-there-a-single-noun-that-describes-need-not/51109&quot;&gt;Is there a single noun that describes &amp;quot;need not&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50515/what-types-of-words-are-biggest-smallest-tallest-etc/50526&quot;&gt;What types of words are 'biggest,' 'smallest,' 'tallest,' etc?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75293/turn-out-come-up/75302&quot;&gt;turn out = come up?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83885/pronunciation-of-lily-and-better-in-bre-and-ame/83907&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of &amp;quot;lily&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; in BrE and AmE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147889/what-is-the-correct-use-of-yet/147900&quot;&gt;What is the correct use of yet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/474449/what-is-the-difference-between-you-and-yourself/474457&quot;&gt;what is the difference between you and yourself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/585002/past-or-present-what-is-the-correct-tense/585009&quot;&gt;Past or Present. What is the correct Tense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/608102/is-the-phrase-get-me-started-in-the-idiom-dont-get-me-started-an-example-of/608107&quot;&gt;Is the phrase 'get me started' in the idiom &amp;quot;don't get me started&amp;quot; an example of causative?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/534530/figure-of-speech-to-help-explaining-the-mathematical-concept-of-vector-spaces/534537&quot;&gt;Figure of speech to help explaining the mathematical concept of &amp;quot;vector spaces&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159831/how-should-i-refer-to-people-who-have-had-something-shared-with-them/159852&quot;&gt;How should I refer to people who have had something shared with them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/572004/a-few-a-number-unremarkable-quantity/572028&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A few&amp;quot; + a number : unremarkable quantity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/497289/are-the-english-word-knee-and-the-word-generation-cognate/497323&quot;&gt;Are the English word knee and the word generation cognate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/589405/what-is-the-definition-of-calculus-not-referring-to-the-mathematical-connotat/589443&quot;&gt;What is the definition of &amp;quot;calculus&amp;quot; (not referring to the mathematical connotation)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/589465/what-exactly-is-this-post-implying-regarding-the-distinction-between-inasmuch-a/589466&quot;&gt;What exactly is this post implying regarding the distinction between &amp;quot;inasmuch as&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;inso...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/575498/she-ended-up-being-a-rich-woman/575505&quot;&gt;She ended up (being??) a rich woman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60275/how-do-i-improve-on-this-question-from-the-suggestion-given/60278&quot;&gt;How do I improve on this question from the suggestion given?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/405049/what-is-the-opposite-of-had-to/405102&quot;&gt;What is the opposite of &amp;quot;had to&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/595065/what-makes-a-noun-countable-or-uncountable/595075&quot;&gt;What makes a noun countable or uncountable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51023/is-must-ever-grammatical-as-a-past-tense-verb/51103&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;must&amp;quot; ever grammatical as a past tense verb?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2024-01-03T23:50:14.140" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15750" CreationDate="2024-01-05T23:55:59.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to this question. On one side, it is a proposal that this site embrace the questions that call for creation of entirely new words from scratch, and the answers that create them. On the other, it invites more general reflection about the role that this site plays in the development of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as the first aspect is concerned, I assume that most of the regular contributors would summarily reject it. As Mitch said in a comment, 'that's just the built up culture here'. There is well-founded fear among the regular contributors that allowing such questions would lead to the site's being overwhelmed by overly creative, whimsical proposals and that this would make the site less useful for the purposes that it now serves. I would just add two qualifications to that. First, attaching established prefixes and suffixes to established words should not be regarded as creation of new words that would put the answers that contain them off topic, when the result would be readily understood by those who are familiar with its components. (Whether that applies to the particular answer that prompted this meta-question is best left for the comments below that answer.) Second, a freshly-coined (non)word may appear in an answer if it is not the core of the answer, but incidental to a discussion of the existing words (e.g. an answer might say '&lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; come closest to what the question seeks, but for such-and-such reasons, neither of them is exactly right; &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt; would be the ideal word for the purpose, but unfortunately nobody uses it'). I believe that these two qualifications fit the prevailing practices on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the more general question about the influence of this site on the development of English language, although that influence is undoubtedly modest, we need to face the fact that to some small extent it does exist, and accept the responsibility for it. The pages of this site often appear among the first results that general-purpose search engines produce when somebody runs a search on an English idiom or a feature of English grammar. Some of the pages of this site have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times; many have been viewed tens of thousands of times. Admittedly, even a million of views amounts to only a small percentage of the total number of the speakers of English, but such numbers are not negligible, particularly when one takes into account that they include quite a few by those who are themselves involved in writing, editing, translating, or teaching, and therefore likely to spread the influence of this site to those who do not visit it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of this site in the development of the language is implied by the overall aims of the Stack Exchange system as a whole. The sites of the system are intended to be places for articulation of the contributors' own expertise, that goes beyond what can be found elsewhere. The insistence of some regular contributors to this site on the Wikipedia-style requirement that everything posted be a repackaging of the stuff published elsewhere would put this site at odds with the rest of the Stack Exchange system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is particularly well positioned to take note of the emerging new words, and the emerging new patterns of usage of existing words, before they find their way into commercially published dictionaries. The fact that the contributions to this site do not go through the many layers of 'quality control' that characterise the production of a commercial dictionary, is in many obvious ways its weakness, but it is also its strength, as it makes it possible for the site to respond to the developments of the language more quickly. (That is admittedly also true of the Urban Dictionary, but the culture of this site tends to make the answers that appear on it more thoughtful and more responsibly formulated than what can be found in the entirely free-for-all Urban Dictionary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, an act of noting a new feature of the language is bound to have both descriptivist and prescriptivist aspects. A new feature of the language cannot be noted unless it already exists, and it can thus be said that in noting it one is simply reflecting something that is already 'out there' in the world. That is the descriptivist side of the act. But in noting something as an emerging feature of the language, one is also exercising a judgement that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a feature of the language, rather than a mere mistake, or one person's peculiar quirk, or a part of one family's idiolect, or a part of one organisation's internal communication system. That is the unavoidable prescriptivist side of the act of noting and describing a new feature of the language, even when performed by a sworn descriptivist (as most of the regular contributors to this site are). Whenever somebody posts an answer on this site that describes some emerging new feature of the language, a small contribution is made to increasing its circulation. That is a way in which this site does influence the language, and it calls for great care in deciding which questions about new words to answer and which to close and eventually delete. It also call for carefully qualifying the answers that one does post about the emerging new feature of the language (by saying e.g. 'this usage will be understood only in such-and-such circles' or 'this usage is widespread, but potentially misleading because . . .').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastEditorUserId="282363" LastEditDate="2024-01-08T16:21:25.413" LastActivityDate="2024-01-08T16:21:25.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15750" CreationDate="2024-01-11T23:13:21.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, &lt;strong&gt;Incorrect&lt;/strong&gt; in the sense the poster appears to intend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is a question and answer site with a particular clearly defined format that is fundamental to the way it works. This is explained in the Tour, where one can find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are&#xA;primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion&#xA;rather than answers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the poster proposes clearly fails into this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be added that SE ELU does not exclude the evolution of the language (‘sociocultural’ or otherwise, if indeed there is an otherwise)  as it has happened, and there is frequent objective discussion of such topics. What it is not, is an academy for inventing new words, and it shows a lack of understanding of the way language evolves to think that such activity here or elsewhere would be anything other than a complete waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Postscript&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;“I call upon you, by the power of your votes”. I would suggest that the votes of the readers of this question (so far –1 for the question and 4 for the two answers) have absolutely no power. As far as I am aware the only power votes on meta have is to elect moderators. The moderators may, on occasions, be influenced by the expression of an opinion here that has a large support, but acting on this is another matter. SE, in general, and SE ELU has certain principles which have been arrived at with considerable deliberation and are unlikely to be changed lightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174243" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2024-01-14T19:24:18.343" LastActivityDate="2024-01-14T19:24:18.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-15T11:55:35.347" Score="6" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I find a topic I have a question about in CGEL? &lt;br&gt;I often have problems but can't find the topic when I go to CGEL.&lt;br&gt; Is there any better way to deal with a problem like this? How do you search in CGEL?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;CGEL --&amp;gt; (The Cambridge grammar of the English language 2002 - Rodney Huddleston)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I want to find topics where '[verb + Object + infinitive]' is explained,&#xA;about 'passive infinitives' like '[object + to be done + preposition]'&#xA;and gaps or hollows.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I often find it difficult to read CGEL due to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the Technical terms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; mentioned in there, How to deal with it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="491431" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2024-01-18T23:19:50.073" LastActivityDate="2024-01-26T01:01:33.190" Title="How to find particular topics in CGEL?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15754" CreationDate="2024-01-16T08:57:01.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CGEL is a huge book and has a correspondingly large index. The topic of &lt;em&gt;gaps&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is covered in over twenty different places, in various chapters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CGEL's terminology differs in many ways from the terminology that most non-native learners are familiar with from their lessons and grammar books. For example, CGEL uses the term &lt;em&gt;adjunct&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt;. If you are looking for information on adverbials in the index, you will find only one reference to it, namely &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;adverbial phrase&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; in a footnote on page 612 where it points to a problem with the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do you search in CGEL?&lt;/em&gt; I have no search tips. It often takes me quite a while to find exactly what I am looking for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to deal with the technical terms&lt;/em&gt;? I recommend the student's version of the CGEL, written by the same authors. It is far shorter, aimed at English learners, and has a good glossary of terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1009088017&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11146" LastActivityDate="2024-01-16T08:57:01.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T16:42:54.013" Score="9" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by ordinary people — people like you. Every bit of time and effort you contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmN7M.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on English Language &amp;amp; Usage over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community User¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community²&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;165&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,864&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,250&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;253&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;761&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,093&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;995&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;123&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁸&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,557&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;43&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,458&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;63&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,053&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;135&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;17&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,445&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;904&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,729&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,057&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;174&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;858&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;122&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;22&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;237&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;511&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,273&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;616&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,651&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;78&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;77&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;138&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,911&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;109&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;362&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;96&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;104&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;77&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;400&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;20&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;17&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,731&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,040&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,596&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,649&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;150&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,802&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,018&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;81&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,427&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Triage&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User review-bans lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed⁴&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;164&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;29&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;111&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² This refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Want to see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15535/2022-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2022: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222023%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/396299/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115443" LastEditorUserId="174243" LastEditDate="2024-01-27T20:34:03.817" LastActivityDate="2024-01-27T20:34:03.817" Title="2023: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15754" CreationDate="2024-01-25T15:32:28.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a community Wiki. Feel free to add suggestions to this post!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no absolutely straightforward way, but here are a few tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you have read the first chapter. This will teach you an awful lot about the grammatical framework used in CGEL and how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the chapter headings in full to see which chapter you think you will find the answer to your query in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you've identified the chapter(s), then go to that chapter and read all the headings for that chapter on its contents page. This will often take you directly to the right section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have an idea of the chapter, but don't know the exact page, make a note of the page numbers for that chapter and then proceed to stage 5 here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Decide which index you need to look your query up in. There's a lexical index where you can look things up by word or sometimes phrase. There's also a conceptual index, where you can look up things like &amp;quot;passive&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;noun&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;conditional&amp;quot; and so forth. Proceed to suggestion 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you find the correct entry in the index, there's often very many sub-entries. However, hopefully you've identified which chapter you're going to find the answer in (from suggestion 4) and can narrow down the entries to the specific range of pages for that chapter. Note down the page numbers or, better, go to suggestion 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take a photo of the entry in the index on your phone. You can then enlarge it and use it to navigate through the book without flipping backwards and forwards to the index - which is excruciatingly annoying to have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you purchase the Kindle eBook version that Amazon sells, you can search the full text for any word or phrase. The Kindle version (like the hardcover version) is absurdly expensive, but you can get a short-term &amp;quot;rental&amp;quot; at a somewhat saner price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you've managed to get hold of a copy of CGEL, you definitely have the resources or resourcefulness to get hold of a copy of Huddleston and Pullum's (and Huddleston, Pullum and Reynolds's) &lt;em&gt;A student's introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; [henceforth &lt;em&gt;ASIEG&lt;/em&gt;]. Quick tip: you can normally join &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sribd.com&lt;/a&gt; for free for 30 days. If you join, you can download an electronic copy of the book. I'd go for both the first and second editions (loads of other great stuff to download for free during your 30 days). If you’re serious enough to want to use CGEL, it is a very good idea to read ASIEG first. Whether you do this or not, ASIEG is easier to navigate than CGEL, but is arranged in identical chapters with more or less the same structure. If you can find it in ASIEG, you'll then find it easy to find in CGEL. And ASIEG might resolve it for you anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage-multi-layered-discourse-room&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U chat&lt;/a&gt;. Explain you're stuck and ask if anyone can direct you to the right bit of CGEL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask here - but only if you've done everything else above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Original Poster's queries&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that you'll find info on &lt;em&gt;verb + object + infinitive&lt;/em&gt; in the chapter on verbs and verb phrases in whichever section deals with the different types of complementation of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll probably find stuff on passive infinitivals in the chapter on non-finite clauses. You'll find info on hollow clauses in that same sub section of the chapter on non-finite clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2024-01-26T01:01:33.190" LastActivityDate="2024-01-26T01:01:33.190" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2024-01-25T16:08:45.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-02T23:47:27.287" Score="-1" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does ELU keep migrating this type of question? Are they too cowardly to close them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recurrent issue on ELL. It's like we are the poor relation that can have the awful questions dumped on us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/618355/is-to-pursue-indepence-correct&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;to pursue indepence&amp;quot; correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44946" LastEditorUserId="18696" LastEditDate="2024-02-03T12:21:14.390" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T12:26:57.903" Title="Problematic migrations to ELL (an ongoing thing)" Tags="|discussion|migration|ell|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15761" CreationDate="2024-02-03T15:21:33.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What was so bad about the question?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why couldn't it have been useful for learners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author recently self-deleted their question but for the benefit of those with less than 10k rep, who cannot see deleted posts, here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/347313/is-to-pursue-independence-correct&quot;&gt;ELL version&lt;/a&gt; reproduced below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard the term independence usually in combination with the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to strive for independence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to fight for independence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to struggle for...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it also possible to say (I know it's probably not very common)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to pursue independence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the author delete their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the comment beneath their post was unfriendly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does ELL keep migrating this type of question? Are they too cowardly to close them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe it was the suggested edit left by an &lt;em&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/em&gt;  contributor whose ELL rep is low but who still ought to know better.  Maybe that was the final straw? The bolding belongs to the editor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm guessing you mean to use the term &amp;quot;independence, not &amp;quot;indepence&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The summary says: “Fix spelling.” But it didn't, the misspellings were untouched. In my opinion, the comment belittled the user's &lt;em&gt;typos&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I visited the suggested edit queue and rejected the edit, as I hope any user in my place would have done, and actually fixed the &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; typos, one in the title and in the opening sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit was quick and  painless, and improved the legibility of the post. It's worth bearing in mind that the OP had spelt &lt;em&gt;independence&lt;/em&gt; correctly three times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen much worse low-quality questions migrated to ELL, this was not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44619" LastEditorUserId="44619" LastEditDate="2024-02-03T16:04:07.073" LastActivityDate="2024-02-03T16:04:07.073" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-04T03:06:41.643" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know if there is a contemporary book that explores style in a similar way to The Reader Over Your Shoulder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="497163" OwnerDisplayName="Zay" LastActivityDate="2024-03-07T14:35:02.680" Title="The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15761" CreationDate="2024-02-04T09:54:52.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason that this is a recurring issue may be that the system itself is not (and perhaps cannot be) structured to produce results that both EL&amp;amp;U question reviewers and ELL question reviewers deem satisfactory. Although the ability of EL&amp;amp;U reviewers to determine what is and what is not a suitable question for their own site is far from perfect (as is evident from the number of questions that get reopened after initially being closed), at least EL&amp;amp;U reviewers have some idea—based on fairly extensive exposure to EL&amp;amp;U questions—about what sorts of questions are a reasonable fit at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's one thing to think, &amp;quot;That question seems too basic for EL&amp;amp;U,&amp;quot; and quite another to think, &amp;quot;That question seems like a good fit for ELL.&amp;quot; Unless an EL&amp;amp;U reviewer has spent a fair amount of time on ELL, that person's notion of what is appropriate for ELL is likely to be extremely vague and subjective. I have no doubt that this shortcoming contributes to a tendency on the part of some EL&amp;amp;U question reviewers to migrate questions to ELL that (as it turns out) ELL reviewers don't want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, however, this isn't evidence that EL&amp;amp;U reviewers are reflexively sending ELL garbage questions instead of just throwing them away on this site; after all, it's objectively no harder to close a question than to transfer it. Instead, I think that these migrations happen because (1) many EL&amp;amp;U reviewers do not have a clear idea of what ELL's standards are, (2) those EL&amp;amp;U reviewers encounter a question that they are confident is too basic to be suitable for EL&amp;amp;U, and yet (3) they don't want to send the question poster off to oblivion empty-handed, so (4) they either (a) vote to close the question but try to answer it in a comment or (b) vote to migrate the question to ELL, with some notion that the question may be welcome there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If EL&amp;amp;U reviewers had a clearer idea of what constitutes an awful question under ELL criteria, they would probably be less prone to mistake a too-basic-for-EL&amp;amp;U question that ELL reviewers don't want from a too-basic-for-EL&amp;amp;U question that ELL reviewers might be happy to receive. But as I noted earlier, EL&amp;amp;U reviewers can't agree on whether a substantial number of questions posted on their own site should be open—so the idea that they would be able to apply another, less familiar site's criteria in an informed and systematic way, if only they would try harder to do so, strikes me as extremely wishful thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spent very little time at ELL over the years that I have been a Stack Exchange participant, and I feel almost entirely unqualified to judge whether a too-basic question that is a poor fit for a site geared to English language experts and enthusiasts might nevertheless be a good fit at ELL. In part for that reason, and in part because I don't like being yelled at for throwing trash in a neighbor's yard, I almost never vote to migrate questions to ELL. Instead, when presented with a too-basic-for-EL&amp;amp;U question, I usually either skip the question or pursue option 4(a) above: answer the question briefly in a comment, and either vote to close or leave the determination of whether closure or migration is the more suitable action to other, better-informed reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that one major reason for establishing a migration path between Stack Exchange sites in the first place was to keep questions that might be of interest to readers in some part of the Stack Exchange network within the network, instead of having them die without further ado if asked at the wrong site. Another strong impetus may have been to help build traffic to less-established Stack Exchange sites from better-established ones. There is certainly no reason that Stack Exchange couldn't get rid of the automated migrate option for question reviewers and set up in its place a note saying, &amp;quot;Although reviewers have voted to close your question on this site, it might receive a better welcome at _________, another Stack Exchange site. If you are willing to risk rejection a second time, please consider posting your question there.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental question, to my mind, isn't, &amp;quot;How can we [reviewers at ELL] get EL&amp;amp;U reviewers to stop migrating to ELL questions that we consider inappropriate for our site?&amp;quot;—because EL&amp;amp;U reviewers aren't informed enough, consistent enough, or unified enough to meet that standard. Rather, the fundamental question that I suggest you ask is, &amp;quot;Is it worth it, on balance, to have a migration channel from EL&amp;amp;U to ELL, or should we get rid of it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obtaining an accurate answer to that question would entail looking at the migrated questions from EL&amp;amp;U that you do like (assuming that there are any) and weighing the benefit of receiving those against the cost of the inevitable flow of questions that you consider awful or useless or merely a bad fit. If this assessment leads you to conclude that the migration channel from EL&amp;amp;U is a net negative for ELL—despite all previous efforts by ELL reviewers to get EL&amp;amp;U reviewers to do a better job of figuring out which ones to migrate—it would make sense to redirect your energies toward removing that channel from operation. If the assessment leads you to conclude that the channel is a net positive for ELL, you can take that positive into account in articulating your overall perspective of the relationship between ELL and EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, nothing wrong with sending reminders to EL&amp;amp;U reviewers on EL&amp;amp;U Meta (as ELL reviewers fairly frequently do) that EL&amp;amp;U should not use migration to ELL as a convenient (or quasi-convenient) dispose-all. But such messages are likely to meet a better reception among EL&amp;amp;U question reviewers if they assume that the vast majority of those reviewers are motivated by good intentions, rather than implying that they are simply trying to dump their garbage in someone else's landfill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36232" LastActivityDate="2024-02-04T09:54:52.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15763" CreationDate="2024-02-05T16:44:55.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best source for exploring style in a similar manner to Graves' work is that work itself, The Reader Over Your Shoulder. It is very understandable by a modern audience and, while dated, still can be applied depending on audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three most popular style guides nowadays for English are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strunk and White, The Elements of Style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fowler, Modern English Usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zinsser, On Writing Well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strunk and White is very popular among people not accustomed to writing - it helps intermediate writers clean up a lot of problems early in an academic career. It has become somewhat controversial because of its questionable claims about many style points, pointedly the passive voice. In short, it mischaracterizes the passive grammatically, and when it does get the grammar right, it often uses the passive in complaining about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fowler makes style recommendations that are supposedly more descriptive ('this is how good writers tend to do it') rather than prescriptive ('just do it this way'), but nowadays the tendencies he gives might look a bit old-fashioned or formal and too reminiscent of arbitrary prescriptive rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note that Strunk and White primarily use American English, and Fowler British English but the primary difference at the level of formality they both follow shows itself mostly in just spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zinsser is more recent than either, if the 1970's can be called recent. The other two were, in origination, from the early 1900's even if updated over the century. Zinsser is more of a narrative about writing rather than a point by point reference like the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course some common suggestions: be clear, concise, consistent, avoid jargon, avoid ambiguity, avoid clichés. Orwell, in the essay 'Politics and the English Language', adds that the writer should go against these suggestions if it makes things better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three, among many, are guides about how to write non-fiction. If you are looking for a guide on &lt;strong&gt;how to write fiction&lt;/strong&gt;, there are surely numerous ones (Stephen King wrote one, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to distinguish even more, there's style and there's style. The suggestions so far are not about rules but about preferred choices of how to combine words. In contrast, there are numerous &lt;strong&gt;'style guides'&lt;/strong&gt; by media sources, for example the Chicago Manual of Style, where what is meant by style is actual rules for things like punctuation and titles and grammar and what to call things (and what words must or cannot be used) all to ensure standardization and public acceptability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list of style guides for English&lt;/a&gt; which covers all these possibilities but not necessarily comprehensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forgot to mention &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Pinker&lt;/a&gt;'s 2014 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_Style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'The Sense of Style'&lt;/a&gt;. Pinker is a cognitive scientist (child language learning, psychology) and popular science writer. He has written a number of general audience books on cognition. I'm not sure where it stands on acceptability by the writer's community - it is much more recent and I don't have a good feeling for if writers would suggest it. But from its description it seems like it addresses style at the level of the impact on the reader rather than whether to use passives or serial commas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2024-03-07T14:35:02.680" LastActivityDate="2024-03-07T14:35:02.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15761" CreationDate="2024-02-06T09:47:02.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Mari-lou says, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the question. It is about a central theme for English language learners: collocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always sounds a bit annoying when a user asks if something which is correct is correct. For some reason it doesn't irritate at all when they are wrong, but how would they know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Collocation is about the fact that we can say things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a cake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a mistake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make an effort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a model&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do a course&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do the dinner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do judo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but not for some reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*make a party&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*do a party&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not? Who knows! What we say usually is 'they don't collocate.' There may be some useful generalisations we can make here for language learners in an answer though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;Can we say 'X a party'?&amp;quot; is a good question, even if the answer is &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot;. A good answer will have a bit more to say. And lots of people who have the same question are likely to get directed to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do the Original Poster of the question under consideration due justice consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pursue an avenue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you cannot generally say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Pursue a road&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go figure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76472" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2024-02-06T10:08:18.567" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T10:08:18.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15761" CreationDate="2024-02-06T16:56:10.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who are looking for more examples, I tweaked an &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/485239/migrated-questions-from-elu-with-scores-less-than-parameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query to look at questions migrated from ELU TO ELL&lt;/a&gt;. It's much better for looking at questions that were well-received than those which weren't, because after a while the poorly received ones are deleted. Here's the worst received migrations from the beginning of the year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lPB8M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lPB8M.png&quot; alt=&quot;Result of the query run with a start date of 01/01/2024, max score of -2 and min score of -50. It shows three questions with scores -4, -2, and -3, one of which is closed&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/347036&quot;&gt;Half year, half years, half a year?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/346600&quot;&gt;Good or better is right [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/347282&quot;&gt;Articles before the nouns in specific cases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you fiddle around with the query a bit, you'll see that the appreciated or neutral questions far out-number the stinkers. It's easy to get frustrated when you see a question you believe is poor quality get migrated, but I honestly believe ELU close voters aren't just dumping their bad questions on ELL. It's actually slightly more work to do that than to just close it on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think it would be useful for ELU reviewers to look over the migrated questions that were well-received to get a better idea of the sorts of questions that do well on ELL after they're migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of tricky bits that mean the results of the query require interpretation and shouldn’t be used as a metric. For example, it won’t show older closed questions because the migration stub gets deleted some time after the migration has been rejected. However, it’s possible for a question to survive the first close attempt and be closed later and not be returned: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/76180/timeline&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/76180/timeline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="80039" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T12:26:57.903" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T12:26:57.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-09T16:41:17.273" Score="4" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question on ELU:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a noun always preceded by a determiner?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that this is so easily answered by looking at virtually any book on grammar (it could be argued that even dictionaries will suffice, providing countless counterexamples in example sentences) that the question doesn't even belong on ELL. (Detailed discussion about &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; zero, indefinite, definite and null articles, and bare role NPs etc are already available in other strings.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other recent (as regards related topics) 'too basic, but not (reasonably) answerable by consulting a dictionary' questions, either still open or closed for dubious reasons, include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/618573/aged-nine-of-ten-meaning&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;aged nine of ten&amp;quot; meaning?&lt;/a&gt; [closed for 'not in scope' catch-all]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/618375/is-it-correct-to-say-i-make-more-spent&quot;&gt;Is it correct to say 'I make more spent'?&lt;/a&gt; [closed for 'needs more details']&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/347286/whats-the-correct-bread-with-cheese-or-bread-and-cheese&quot;&gt;What's the correct: 'bread with cheese' or 'bread and cheese'?&lt;/a&gt;  [migrated to long-suffering ELL]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/618063/remember-of-majesty-is-this-title-correct&quot;&gt;'Remember of Majesty': is this title correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In narrowing the scope of the 'insufficient research' CV reason to solely dictionary resources, I argue that overly basic non-semantics questions are not addressed / discouraged.&#xA;Does the community agree that we need a 'a question on grammar, but too basic for ELU: almost any book on grammar will answer this clearly' close-vote reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit in response to prompt: I can only repeat the request for debate about the provision of a 'too basic' CV-reason for non-semantics questions. Heartspring puts this argument well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15746/answerable-by-a-dictionary-unsuitable-for-grammar-questions&quot;&gt;Araucaria said&lt;/a&gt; we can't use the new reason to close grammar questions; this post is saying that we still need a way to close them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15699/466641&quot;&gt;[jsw29's]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15695/466641&quot;&gt;my&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15707/466641&quot;&gt;Catija's&lt;/a&gt; concerns about localization all got upvoted, but they weren't addressed or solved, and I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15694/replacing-our-research-close-reason-completed/15742#comment64163_15697&quot;&gt;Laurel's argument&lt;/a&gt; against it is &amp;quot;The internet is filled with crap, so why are we so eager to have our users consult it to solve their problems?&amp;quot; But the fact remains that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15694/replacing-our-research-close-reason-completed/15742#comment64616_15697&quot;&gt;[as the OP noted elsewhere]&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;we need some way to distinguish ELU standard questions, genuine ELL standard questions, and 'do it all for me' questions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no questions on grammar are now considered unsuitable here, the reason for setting up ELL seems to have been discarded. And I'm sure the majority of regular users on ELL would consider some questions too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.....................&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Andrew Leach's request for a substitute CV reason, I offer (feel free to suggest other basic grammars; this costs about £3.50) (and I would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; recommend it for advanced questions suitable for ELU):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that can be easily answered by consulting a reputable online dictionary or a basic grammar such as 'Collins Easy Learning&#xA;Grammar and Punctuation' should be closed with this reason unless the&#xA;question includes an explanation of why the chosen dictionary / basic&#xA;book on grammar wasn't helpful. When using this close reason, consider&#xA;providing a link to a relevant reference in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="21655" LastEditDate="2024-02-12T12:16:21.627" LastActivityDate="2024-02-17T00:09:53.693" Title="Does the community think that we need a 'grammar, but too basic for ELU: almost any book on grammar will answer this clearly' close-vote reason?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|research-effort|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15768" CreationDate="2024-02-11T23:43:22.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That the answerable-by-a-dictionary reason for closing does not cover even the most basic matters of grammar was pointed out by Heartspring less than an hour after Laurel first proposed its introduction. Since then, that has been commented upon by a number of people who were involved in the discussion of the new reason, and was also the subject matter of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15746/&quot;&gt;separate question&lt;/a&gt;, albeit without any sort of a consensus emerging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four possible reactions to noticing that the new reason does not cover trivial questions about grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; That is as it should be: no question about grammar should ever be closed on this site as too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; A separate closing reason for such questions should be created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3)&lt;/strong&gt; The answerable-by-a-dictionary reason should have added to it a clause about trivial questions about grammar, so that it becomes something like: answerable by a dictionary &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; a basic textbook of English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(4)&lt;/strong&gt; We should have a general this-is-too-obvious reason for closing (that does not attempt to separately list different ways of being too obvious).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first option is favoured by Araucaria, herisson, and those who upvoted their contributions to the earlier discussion of this matter. I hope that some of them will come to present their arguments on this page. (Incidentally, I think that this question should have been closed as a duplicate, and the discussion continued where it was started, so that people do not have to repeat here what they have already said elsewhere. It, however, does not seem likely that this will happen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second option would be, as Mr Leach pointed out in the comments, nearly impossible to implement because of the systemwide limitation on the number of distinct reasons for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of us (Heartspring, Cerberus, myself, and those who upvoted and/or commented favourably on our contributions) favour some version of the last two options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between the last two, I would prefer (4). Disjunctive reasons for closing, as (3) would be, are confusing and frustrating to those whose questions are closed. A closing banner that says something like 'Your question is closed because of X or Y' leaves one wondering 'Well, is it X or Y? If it is Y, why do they mention X, which does not apply to my question?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if we were to choose (3) and add answerable-by-a-grammar-textbook to answerable-by-a-dictionary, we would probably discover that there are other ways in which a question could be too trivial and that the disjunction needs to be even more complex. A generic this-is-too-obvious reason will cover all of them, without our having to anticipate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282363" LastActivityDate="2024-02-11T23:43:22.113" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15768" CreationDate="2024-02-12T05:00:24.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, such a close reason should not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Beginner grammar books can be wrong&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with simple grammar questions, the idea that &amp;quot;almost any book on grammar will answer this clearly&amp;quot; is liable to be false, at least if we append '&lt;em&gt;...and accurately&lt;/em&gt;' to the end. John Lawler wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better make sure you add a link to a real &amp;quot;beginner's grammar book&amp;quot; with real English grammar in it. There aren't that many, and textbooks are always wrong. That's where we get the questions beginning &amp;quot;We know that ...&amp;quot;, which are always silly and don't have any answers. How does one deal with widespread official ignorance? – &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15694/replacing-our-research-close-reason-completed?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1#comment64159_15697&quot;&gt;John Lawler, Sep 9, 2023 at 13:53&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/347549/is-a-noun-always-preceded-by-a-determiner&quot;&gt;question about determiners&lt;/a&gt; actually started by saying &amp;quot;I have studied a grammar rule that states that&amp;quot;. Unhelpfully, it provided no source, but it's entirely believable that the questioner encountered a real grammar  guide (even a book!) that really said something wrong or misleading. So there is room to doubt whether closing the question for the reason that &amp;quot;almost any book on grammar will answer this clearly&amp;quot; would be true or helpful to the original poster, although it might be satisfying to close voters who just want to get rid of questions deemed uninteresting and beneath the dignity of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Simple questions can have complex answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the provided example, 'Is a noun always preceded by a determiner?' is not an inherently trivial topic. An answer could go into the determiner-phrase vs. noun-phrase controversy in syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could argue that's not what the original poster was asking about, to which we could argue in response that the Q&amp;amp;A's on this site are not just for the original posters, but for anyone who comes across the question in the future. I don't think it's inappropriate for someone to post an answer that addresses the issue that prompted the question, but that also goes into further depth than the questioner may have realized existed. Plenty of times, someone might ask a question on a math or physics stack exchange site without understanding all of the higher-level concepts that are involved in the thing that they're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think there are potential issues in some cases with reinterpreting a question to be about something that it didn't originally ask about at all, but which an answerer finds more interesting. But my biggest concern in that regard is about well-meaning &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9686&quot;&gt;edits to the question itself&lt;/a&gt; (often intended I think to try to save it from the 'overly basic question' close-vote squad) which may distort the original question or inaccurately 'put words in the mouth' of the original poster. In this case, though, the original question clearly does ask for an explanation of the grammar of determiners, so I don't think an answer that gave more information about determiners than needed to address the original example would be going off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A small amount of context for a long-running discussion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of whether some questions are too simple has come up perennially on Stack Exchange sites. Here are some Meta SE posts with answers that bring up some of the issues: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108006/has-a-consensus-been-reached-on-whether-or-not-some-questions-are-too-simple&quot;&gt;Has a consensus been reached on whether or not some questions are too simple?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86043/introduce-a-general-reference-close-reason?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Introduce a  &amp;quot;general reference&amp;quot; close reason&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2024-02-12T05:44:28.243" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T05:44:28.243" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15768" CreationDate="2024-02-13T17:52:18.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, by the time someone has earned the privilege to cast a close vote, they are aware of what is generally on-topic or off-topic for the community. If someone believes a question is off-topic, they will pick whatever reason is closest to their reasoning regardless of how it is worded or how actionable the advice provided by it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a new close reason is merited unless it is going to offer the author a way to bring their question on-topic. If the question is being closed as &amp;quot;answerable by general reference&amp;quot; (essentially), how can an author bring it on-topic? There's not much value in making the distinction between a dictionary, a grammar book or some other reference unless you believe the question can be salvaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's closed and someone disagrees with the reason, then maybe it merits a meta discussion which would probably happen regardless of the specific wording of the close reason. Usually though, most people will recognize it as off-topic, and the author is just a drive-by and not really engaged. I doubt the community would bother to reopen a question just to choose a different close reason unless a duplicate was found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why a question may be out of scope for a site in a way that can't be corrected to bring it in scope. They don't all need to be enumerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastEditorUserId="76472" LastEditDate="2024-02-13T22:02:55.300" LastActivityDate="2024-02-13T22:02:55.300" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-15T00:10:21.833" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker, but I think my grasp of grammar is too weak. So, I want to know what textbooks or reference books others deem worthy of using to deepen and broaden their understanding and grasp of English grammar. What do you use and recommend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370926" OwnerDisplayName="JBR" LastActivityDate="2024-02-15T05:10:29.963" Title="What are the highest quality textbooks for learning English grammar?" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2024-02-17T15:43:20.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15768" CreationDate="2024-02-16T02:33:35.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the mods intentionally switched to the new &amp;quot;answered by a dictionary&amp;quot; close reason to &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;easy&amp;quot; questions about grammar from getting closed. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15694/replacing-our-research-close-reason-completed&quot;&gt;the thread announcing that change.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who, exactly, is hurt by easy questions being asked and answered? Are we worried that we might seem too helpful or too welcoming? If you don't want to answer questions because they're too easy to be worth your time, you are welcome to not answer them, and to instead spend your time answering more interesting ones. If we keep getting the same easy question over and over, we should answer one of them and close future ones as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &amp;quot;easiness&amp;quot; is so subjective that this leads to questions getting closed, then reopened, then closed again in cycles that benefit nobody. Whatever our guidelines are for askers, they should at least be capable of being made clear and unambiguous. The close button is not a way of expressing your dislike for a question; it's to deal with questions that are, by their very nature, incapable of being given a good answer, meaning that ELU can provide no value to the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I'd say that we only have the &amp;quot;dictionary&amp;quot; close reason, not because those questions are too easy, but because we don't want our site to just turn into a giant dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want the question you mentioned: &amp;quot;Is a noun always preceded by a determiner?&amp;quot; There is, presumably, a &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; why the asker got confused about that point. In particular: many grammar resources online will tell you about the existence of a so-called &amp;quot;zero article&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;zero determiner.&amp;quot; They'll say that, in a sentence like &amp;quot;Raccoons are friendly,&amp;quot; the word &amp;quot;raccoons&amp;quot; actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a determiner: it's just the invisible &amp;quot;zero determiner.&amp;quot; Such resources actually &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; tell you--or at least imply--that every noun phrase contains a determiner, whereas others will tell you that such noun phrases simply lack a determiner entirely. This could be a source of genuine confusion, and, if asked to clarify, I suspect we would have uncovered that there is a legitimate question here, one that reliable online resources will disagree about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between ELU and ELL is not the ease of the questions being asked. The difference is one of target audience; ELU is intended for use by native speakers, or proficient non-native ones, whereas ELL is intended for those currently learning English. Such audiences require a different kind of answer, typically one focused on making the asker a proficient speaker rather than explaining the structure of a language of which the asker and answerer already have a shared knowledge. In general, I think it's best to only migrate a question to ELL if (a) the asker describes themself as a learner, or if (b) it's the sort of question that a native speaker would be very unlikely to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about whether to use &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; in a particular context are a good example; native speakers rarely have questions about this, but it can be quite hard to explain the rules around article use to a speaker whose first language lacks them. That said, questions from non-native speakers that demand uniquely complex or sophisticated responses may belong here. One of our most upvoted answers of all time--&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/342273/are-whores-and-horse-homophones&quot;&gt;Araucaria's post on &lt;em&gt;whores&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;--came from an asker who described themself as a non-native speaker and was clearly not asking something a native speaker would be confused about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="470858" LastEditorUserId="470858" LastEditDate="2024-02-17T00:09:53.693" LastActivityDate="2024-02-17T00:09:53.693" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15775" CreationDate="2024-03-14T19:47:42.433" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently my understanding is that is completely on-topic to request a translation of a non-English word or phrase to an equivalent word or phrase in English; e.g, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/single-word-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;single-word-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-single-word-requests-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;single-word-requests&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idiom-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-idiom-requests-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;idiom-requests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would also be on-topic to request the origin of English word or phrase back to its language of origin knowing that is how it originated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simplified example would be, &amp;quot;I know there is a word for having a strong desire to travel, I think it was of German origin&amp;quot; with the answer being &amp;quot;Wanderlust&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148459" LastActivityDate="2024-03-21T17:18:22.230" Title="Is requesting a English word or saying back to its native language on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic-off-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15774" CreationDate="2024-03-14T20:24:58.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, asking for a translation to English is entirely on-topic. But two things should usually be done to prevent it being closed or migrated (these reasons are not actually about translation but usually come up in that circumstance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It shouldn't be a word you can just look up in an on-line dictionary. The question should be about the nuances of the English word which are often not in dictionaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should provide enough explanation of the source language word. You should give all the relevant nuances of the original word. A potential answerer in English is not guaranteed to know the nuances in the original language and culture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also yes, asking for the etymology of an English word is totally on-topic, even if the word is of obviously non-English borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, after your example, asking to give a word that is English from a description of its meaning is also on-topic, even if that word is of obviously non-English borrowing. However, single word requests, which this is an example of, can be problematic for other reasons: often underspecified, often opinion-based, often HNQ bait for casual answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From behavior of those with closing abilities here, it is considered questionably on-topic to ask about the provenance of a word -before- it arrived in English since it is ostensibly not a question about English. For example, 'What is the origin of Wanderlust in German?' should probably be directed over at [german.SE].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course all the usual caveats about questions are relevant. Many plain etymology questions are answerable easily by reference like &lt;a href=&quot;https://etymonline.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymonline&lt;/a&gt;, which should be checked before asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the end, once a term is used often enough by a language's speakers, it becomes part of that language, even if it still looks foreign. 'Guru' is not your usual English order of sounds, so it obviously comes from somewhere else (Hindi) but it's now also a part of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4972" LastEditorUserId="4972" LastEditDate="2024-03-21T17:18:22.230" LastActivityDate="2024-03-21T17:18:22.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-22T15:29:50.227" Score="-11" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some online dictionaries prohibit such copying of their content. Some examples below (not meant to be an exhaustive list, and any bolding for emphasis is mine) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, from the Stack Exchange terms of service:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...any and all content...that you provide to the public Network ...is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC BY-SA 4.0), and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and &lt;strong&gt;to commercially exploit&lt;/strong&gt; such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/terms-and-conditions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your use of the Site and its contents grants no rights to You in relation to Our intellectual property rights including, without limitation, trade marks, logos, graphics, photographs, animations, videos and &lt;strong&gt;text&lt;/strong&gt; or the intellectual property of third parties in the Site and its contents. &lt;strong&gt;None of the Content or User Content may be downloaded, copied, reproduced, republished, edited, posted, transmitted, stored, commercially exploited, sold or distributed without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.&lt;/strong&gt; Subject to the above You may download insubstantial extracts from the Site on any single computer &lt;strong&gt;for personal, non-commercial home use only&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that no more than one copy of any information is made and all copyright and proprietary notices are kept intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/i/terms-of-use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you may &amp;quot;reproduce... content...&lt;strong&gt;only for your personal, non-commercial use&lt;/strong&gt;. If you are a teacher, scholar or student, you may copy reasonable portions of the content...for lesson plans, interactive whiteboards, reports, dissertations, presentations, school newspapers and for similar nonprofit educational purposes to the extent permitted by applicable law. ... If you want to reproduce or use content ... &lt;strong&gt;in any manner other than as described above&lt;/strong&gt;, including for purposes of developing or training AI or to conduct computer analysis, you will need Merriam-Webster's permission.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pearson.com/en-us/legal-information/terms-of-use.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reproduction, redistribution, modification or publication of any part of the Services without the express written consent of Pearson and/or its licensors is strictly prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372442" LastEditorUserId="191178" LastEditDate="2024-03-22T16:17:55.230" LastActivityDate="2024-04-02T22:38:10.623" Title="We should not be pasting definitions from online dictionaries into answers when their terms of service prohibit such use" Tags="|discussion|copyrights|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2024-03-22T16:20:21.507" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rule is to assume &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.psu.edu/copyright-basics/fair-use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt;, which allows users to (legally) post quotes without permission from the copyright holder. If it's not really fair use (and I think it is, as part of a scholarly work), the copyright holder (or their agent) can submit a DMCA claim through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;Contact Us&lt;/a&gt; form, which is then handled by staff. We—as moderators and not copyright lawyers and especially not lawyers representing either &amp;quot;side&amp;quot;—don't touch copyright stuff (only plagiarism—a matter of academic integrity, not law).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191178" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T16:20:21.507" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2024-03-22T21:46:39.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is link rot: if you only link and not quote, your answer will become useless once the site changes its structure, which the commercial sites always do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Terms of service&amp;quot; are not binding on anyone who hasn't signed them. Visiting a website is not signing a contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T21:46:39.157" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2024-03-27T20:37:37.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I certainly agree that we should not knowingly violate the terms of service of a website. However, I don't agree that dictionary sites forbid this type of usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example on The Free Dictionary site (which is a aggregation of several dictionaries) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/fleecy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the page with several definitions of the word fleecy&lt;/a&gt; links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/cite.aspx?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thefreedictionary.com%2Ffleecy&amp;amp;word=fleecy&amp;amp;sources=hm,hc_dict,rHouse,wn,hc_thes,hm_thes,hc_En_Es,hc_En_Fr,hc_En_De,hc_En_It,kdict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a page with proper citations&lt;/a&gt; for each source of each definition listed in APA, Chicago, MLA and PLOS styles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why they would provide that if the expectation is that someone could not use a definition to support an answer, so long as it includes the proper citation. Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/about.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Duplication or Redistribution: Material contained in the Content may not be duplicated or redistributed without the prior written consent of Farlex, except that one print copy of search output is permitted for use within Your home, and that search output may be stored temporarily in electronic media for editing or reformatting and subsequent printing of one print copy of search output for internal use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/citing-the-dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;provides citation advice under their &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; section&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three ways you might cite the entry for hacker in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, if you accessed it on May 8, 2011.&#xA;&amp;quot;hacker.&amp;quot; Merriam-Webster.com. 2011. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(8 May 2011).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MLA Style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;hacker.&amp;quot; Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Web. 8 May 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;APA Style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hacker. 2011. In Merriam-Webster.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retrieved May 8, 2011, from&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why they would bother if their expectation was that their terms of service would restrict us from quoting their dictionary, so I am comfortable with including properly attributed quotes in answers unless the site makes it explicitly clear that is not allowed (like they have done with scraping the site for the purposes of training an AI model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80039" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T20:37:37.330" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2024-03-28T22:16:17.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, you may be right. Practically, legal questions are decided in court, and it's unlikely anyone will be taken to court over this. Morally, each user can make a personal judgement whether it is equivalent to theft to copy a portion of a dictionary entry when giving an answer on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Laurel said, copyright law in the United States has the exception of fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of contract law, as far as I can tell you are correct that such terms of service may theoretically be enforceable against users of these sites. Abruzzi 2009 discusses this and raises concerns about it, but notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to this point the law reporters have recorded very few instances in which content purveyors have litigated to hold users to the terms of website TOU - and only one case in which the content purveyor sued over a term that restricted fair use of a content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(page 138, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1496&amp;amp;context=chtlj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright, Free Expression, and the Enforceability of Personal Use-Only and Other Use-Restrictive Online Terms of Use&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Bradley F. Abruzzi, 2009)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Abruzzi also discusses some potential legal defenses, so the law here may not be completely one-sided.  (Also, I don't know how this field has evolved since 2009.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, my understanding is that (unlike copyright infringement) breach of contract as a cause of action would only allow for civil, not criminal remedies, and it's hard to imagine that the damages involved in the case of users of this website would be sufficient to motivate any legal proceedings. (I'm not sure, but I also suspect that it would be harder to get punitive damages for breach of contract than it is to get statutory damages for copyright infringement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting aside questions of law, an answer that consists solely of a verbatim quotation of a dictionary entry is never ideal: it's better to give answers that include useful explanations in your own words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77227" LastEditorUserId="77227" LastEditDate="2024-04-02T22:38:10.623" LastActivityDate="2024-04-02T22:38:10.623" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
</posts>